If you’re under sixteen years old and not native to Britain, you might never have heard of teletext before. Teletext was, as it sounds, a text service you used to get through your television back before the wifi existed and when dial-up internet was more trouble than it was worth. You used it to check things like the weather, the traffic, news, cinema listings and to play Bamboozle.
Bamboozle was a quiz game where you pressed the coloured buttons on your remote to answer the questions and then move onto the next one. My mum loved it and if we were in, got us all around the telly to play it with her. When they took teletext off the air and Bamboozle along with it, it was a sad day in the Overend household.
To commemorate, I wrote a poem about it as a reminder of simpler times.
Bamboozle by Liam Overend
My mum used to cheat at Bamboozle
That quiz you could play on Teletext
She found out a way you could rig it
To see what was coming up next
Yeah, my mum used to cheat at Bamboozle
But the answers she already knew
“I’m just checking I’m right” she would say
And use the controller to give her a clue
My mum used to cheat at Bamboozle
She’d press all the buttons in the range
Red, yellow, green and then blue
And watch the top corner for change
For the wrong answers had the same number
And the right one, you can probably guess
Was different to all the other three
And this is how she’d progress
So my mum used to cheat at Bamboozle
Top marks she would always get
And Mr Bamboozle and Teletext
Still haven’t caught her out yet
So there you have it.
Did you ever cheat at Bamboozle? Are you going to admit being old enough to even remember it? If you do, drop us a comment starting ‘I used to love playing Bamboozle whilst eating…’
Thanks for reading.
The picture I used for this piece was taken from http://www.ukgameshows.com/ukgs/Bamboozle!
