Game For A Laugh

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Game For A Laugh was a derivatives-based British TV gameshow in the 1980s hosted by Jeremy Beadle, then chair of ISDA’s crack drafting squad™. The show’s format revolved around a variety of elaborate practical jokes inflicted on unsuspecting subject matter experts in the financial services community. Studio games included the “NAV Tank”, “Due Dilly Dally”, “Secret Co-Calculation Agent” in which varying amounts of mess were dealt out. Upon being let in on the joke by a member of ISDA’s crack drafting squad™, who would then announce that negotiator had proved to be “game for a laugh!”

The most popular segment of the show was “Comprehend the ISDA”, where a hapless negotiator was tied to a chair and suspended upside-down over a tank of custard, and required to interpret a short extract from the 2018 English law IM CSD while a ticking clock counted down 4 hours. When the clock ran down a hooter would blare, a trapdoor would open, and the negotiator would be dunked in the custard.

Derivatives gameshows were very popular in Britain in the 1970s and 1980s, Noel Edmonds forging his 50-year career with the Noel Edmonds’ Multi-Coloured Swap Shop and the late Keith Chegwin’s similar Cheggers Plays Swap.

See also

• 2018 English law IM CSD, and the most famously tortured provision in that famously tortured document, Margin Amount (IA).