Game For A Laugh

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 industry.

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Studio games included the “NAV Tank”, “Due Dilly Dally”, “Secret Co-Calculation Agent” in which unwitting stooges were placed on an enormous hamster wheel and forced by “credit officers” (usually Beadle himself, disguised in an implausible wig) to argue pointless commercial terms while members of the studio audience dressed as salespeople threw various vegetables at them.

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 the 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 from 4 hours. When the clock finally ran down — with the negotiator inevitably none the wiser about the clause — a hooter would blare, the studio would explode with confetti, a trapdoor would open, and the negotiator would be dunked bodily in the custard. A ghastly accident during this segment, when a School Leaver from Bucharest was tragically drowned trying to parse the quintuple negative in the definition of Indemnifiable Tax eventually led to the show’s cancellation.

It seems odd nowadays, but in the heyday of financial products innovation in the 1970s and 1980s, TV game shows themed on exotic financial instruments were very popular with middle-brow audiences in the UK. Noel Edmonds forged a 50-year career with the Noel Edmonds’ Multi-Coloured Swap Shop, of course, and there was the late Keith Chegwin’s spin-off, Cheggers Writes Puts.

See also

• Cartesian theatre
• Custard
• The fatal Indemnifiable Tax provision
• 2018 English law IM CSD, and the most famously tortured provision in that famously tortured document, Margin Amount (IA).