Giant TV.

Building the TV screen

First up, I bought a gazebo (which was an adventure in itself getting it home on the bus, as it came in a massive box and weighed 20Kg) and pilfered some empty cardboard boxes from work.

In a brief respite from the rain, I mapped out all the pieces of cardboard onto one panel of the frame to make the front of the TV.



I drew on TV features that I remembered from the TV I had as a kid, a big on/off switch, volume and brightness control sliders and that old chestnut of buttons on the actual TV itself (anyone else hankering for the old days...)



We took the TV to a friend's festival in Somerset called Farmfest. Unfortunately, it was still raining - in fact half the country had become flooded. This did not bode well for a structure made of cardboard.



We arrived at midnight and the place was already a mudbath, the car had to be towed into the carpark backwards by a tractor!

Saturday Morning


The rain stopped! Hoorah! We assembled the gazebo and attached the 'screen' using cable ties.

The TV Programmes

Antiques Roadshow

The Antiques Roadshow is a popular TV programme in Britain (in a postmodern sardonic culty way, that is). Traditionally, a punter brings a treasured family heirloom along for an expert to appraise - for insurance purposes only of course, could never part with it... They tell the expert the history of how the artifact came into their possession and then the expert tells them where the thing was made and how that is important, then tells them how much it is worth.

In our version, after the stories had been told the expert (Mouse) said "So do you want to know how much it is worth?" at which point its value in thousands of pounds is indicated to the audience out of sight of the expert. The Audience then had to decide if the expert would go under, go over, or guess the value correctly by sitting either on the left, right or in the middle. The expert then gave his appraisal and everyone sat in the right place won sweets.



Who Wants a bit'o Millionaire's Shortbread?

Exactly like Who Wants to be a Millionaire? except that instead of winning money the contestant wins biscuits. The easy questions were crappy biscuits with the biscuits getting better as the questions got harder, with the top prize being a slab of millionaire's shortbread (or caramel slice as its also known).

e.g. first round = an rough oat cake, second round = a rich tea biscuit, third round = a 'nice' biscuit, fourth round = a digestive, fifth round a chocolate digestive, through hobknobs, cookies, kitkats, Viennese Whirls, then the mighty MSB!

Also like the original show, the contestant could use three life lines - 50:50, ask the audience and phone a friend. 50:50 is self explanatory, ask the audience was a show of hands and general yelling and phone a friend involved throwing a cardboard cut out of a phone into the audience with whoever catching it answering the question as their 'friend'.

By the time we played out this show the heavens had opened again so we had to pick up the TV and move it over to the acoustic tent so that there was a shelter for the audience to be able to watch from! The gazebo wasn't rainproof and the rain started to come in through the roof onto Earl Barry as he asked the contestants if they were sure that was their final answer.




As the mud came pouring in, we were as happy as the winning contestant when he won!