739 Every Second Counts

First  viewed :  8  February  1986

Every  Second  Counts  was  the  new  year replacement  for  Bob's  Full  House  on  Saturday  evenings. As  Dale  were  playing  Preston  North  End  away  ( a 1-1  draw  in  PNE's  worst-ever  season ) there's  no  obvious  reason  why  I  wouldn't  have  seen  the  very  first  episode.

Like  The Generation  Game , the  contestants  played  as  couples  ( three  of  them )  and  played  against  each  other   in  a   number  of   general  knowledge  rounds  earning  seconds  rather  than  points  for  a  correct  answer. When  the  rounds  were  completed,  the  couple  with  the  most  seconds  took  them  into  the  second  stage  where, answering  in  turn ,  they  had  to  complete  four  more  rounds  of  escalating  difficulty  matched  by  an  increase  in  the  quality  of  the  prize  on  offer,  within  the  total  number  of  seconds  they  had  earned. The  host  was  diminutive  magician  Paul  Daniels.

I  never  liked  it  as  much  as  Bob's  Full  House   because  Daniels  was  an  irritant, never  as  funny  as  he  thought  he  was  but  the  quizzing  itself  was  OK.

It  ran  until  1993.