Game For A Laugh
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Negotiation Anatomy™
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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 from 4 hours. When the clock ran down a hooter would blare the studio would explode with confetti, a trapdoor would open, and the negotiator would be dunked in the custard. This segment eventually led to the show’s cancellation when a School Leaver from Bucharest was tragically killed by the quintuple negative in the definition of Indemnifiable Tax.
It seems odd nowadays, but in the heyday of financial products innovation in the 1970s and 1980s, TV gameshows themed on exotic financial instruments were very popular. 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 similar Cheggers Writes Puts.
See also
- 2018 English law IM CSD, and the most famously tortured provision in that famously tortured document, Margin Amount (IA).