Game of chance

Many years ago Nicky Campbell hosted the TV game show Wheel Of Fortune. These days, as well as being a Radio Five Live Breakfast Show presenter, he's fronting ITV1's latest attempt to find something to rival Deal Or No Deal.

The people behind that one are also behind For The Rest Of Your Life. And it shows.

TV game shows were a different beast when Campbell set the Wheel Of Fortune in motion. That was very low-tech. Contestants had to manually spin the wheel while the smiling hostess - Carol Smillie was the first - turned round the letters on the board.

The success of Deal Or No Deal means that contestants don't even have to answer questions, either general knowledge or specialist ones. Anyone can play as long they can either lift the lid of a box or, in the case of Campbell's show, pull a light rod from the ground.

The gimmick with For The Rest Of Your Life is that contestants can not only win money, but also the chance for a monthly cheque for the rest of their life.

All they have to do is find the white lights and avoid the red ones. This seems a flimsy excuse for a game show to me. But I'd have said that people opening boxes and being offered insulting sums by an unseen person called The Banker wouldn't be a hit either.

Ann Marie and Luke were the couple I witnessed hoping to spare the red rod which, unlike white ones, aren't worth cash.

Globe-trotting Ann Marie admitted to being accident prone, boasting she'd injured herself in every continent in the world. If they won, she said she'd like to go travelling, which was at odds with a previous statement that she wanted to spend more time with their eight-month-old daughter.

When they got back from travelling, Luke added, he wanted to move to the country and have lots more children. Presumably with Ann Marie, presumably provided she hadn't been eaten by cannibals or squashed by stampeding elephants on their world trip.

Campbell is a former Radio One DJ, just like Noel Edmonds whose career has been boosted by the success of Deal Or No Deal. Like Edmonds, Campbell paces the set talking rubbish in a bid to crank up the tension. Instead, he just irritates the hell out of me. I'd happily crack him over the head with one of those rods, red or white, that Ann Marie and Luke pluck from the floor.

When Ann Marie rushes over to hug her husband after a successful rod extraction, Campbell ticks her off, saying that "unseemly displays of emotion are uncalled for".

He makes amends by declaring that their risk-taking was "daring-do at its very best". What a very unexciting life he must lead if he thinks people picking up rods beats watching an Indiana Jones adventure movie.

The final round, where they play for how long they'll receive the money, has one of them shut up in an isolation pod, which is where you may wish yourself after watching this show.

"He could turn you from a loser into a winner, or from a winner into a much smaller winner," warned Campbell in a clear-as-mud turn of phrase.

Ann Marie and Luke, I must report, won a big fat nothing. No pounds at all - just the pleasure of pulling out a few rods and hearing Campbell waffling on.

Any programme that opens with the star explaining what's going to happen is shooting itself in the foot.

Ronni Ancona feels the need to tell us at the start of Ronni Ancona & Co that she won't just be doing impressions but characters as well. "If you see one you don't recognise, don't think they are rubbish, they are new characters," she explains.

Doing characters earmarks Ancona, previously best known for impressions, as the new Catherine Tate rather than the new Mike Yarwood.

Alas an early joke - "I was going to do six specials but at the last moment Jonathan Ross wanted a new tie" - made such a bad impression on me that the show never recovered.