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An evening with Vernon Kay's All Star Family Fortunes

Vernon Kay's All Star Family Fortunes isn't something you can just watch on the telly. I


Vernon Kay's All Star Family Fortunes isn't something you can just watch on the telly. It loses so much of its visceral impact, filtered and mediated through the tube, plasticised via ITV's televisual cartoonifier. No, to truly enjoy Vernon Kay's All Star Family Fortunes, you've got to watch it in person, while it's being recorded, because it is a piece of theatre. It's basically Godot with fabulous prizes.

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Sure, TV gives you unnatural close-ups, but you've got to troop down to the South Bank and queue up with your fellow aesthetes if you want to see Vernon tripping over his autocue, or Duncan Bannatyne's wife tripping A-over-T down a flight of stairs, and the producers arguing over which of the

's crass sexual euphemisms are potentially allowable.

I did, so there I went on Tuesday to see Vern do his thing.

All of us 200-odd, the seat-meat, were hustled into our individual pens. I was initially sat next to a boy with Down's Syndrome, but he soon changed places with his mum. What can I say? My presence is deeply upsetting to the handicapped. Photography was strictly verboten, so I had to splay the camera between my fingers to get even the most basic of shots, which is why all of these look like they were taken by a stupid dog.


Vernon bounded on. The place went genuinely wild. He looked a million dollars. He had skin like a baby's perma-tanned ass. He provided a dapper focal point for the hopes and dreams of his audience, who ate continually and greedily from his palm.

They recorded two episodes back-to-back. The first was Loose Women vs the cast of Heartbeat. The Loose Women were hilariously, insanely crap. Not long after they'd touched down, their old friend innuendo duly arrived. They were asked about “things which have spots.” One of the blonder ones said "dick" (as in spotted dick).

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At this point, the audience pissed, shat and hosed themselves.

Then, they got the question, “Name something that women lie to men about.” They were desperately trying to blurt out virginity/orgasms/fucky-fucky, but obviously none of these terms is suitable for early evening TV, which resulted in many retakes, as they were gradually coaxed back within the swearometer's very sensitive range. I have every confidence that when they left, they went down to the local bar and fellated the nearest man, a bottle of cherry Lambrini still gripped in their manicured fingers.

Halfway into episode one, the producers decided that the crowd shouldn't "ooo" when Vernon Kay revealed the sound that contestants would hear if they got a question wrong. So we had to re-take the opening sequence, and instead do a cheer. Except that this instruction came across somewhat ambiguously, and so what emerged was a genuinely unsettling noise halfway between "ooo" and "yay" – the sort of mournful sound you'd hear if you were killing a dog with a bucket. We were also directed to “laugh more” on a re-take of Vernon's opening joke, and to “clap from side to side” at the opening and closing. The whole thing was about as spontaneous a show of support as a Kim Jong-il birthday party.

For unfathomable reasons, “spotted dick” came up again in the second game, when some little blonde lass from The Bill played grumpy entrepreneur Duncan Bannatyne. The Bill lassie's team were asked to “name a famous dick”. It's not as though ITV deliberately attempt to crowbar as much innuendo into pre-watershed telly as humanly possible, is it?

The Bill lass also seemed to think it was "un-PC" to refer to dwarves as dwarves (even when talking about Snow White and the…). She tried to call them "the seven vertically-challenged", and kept asking the floor team whether this was an appropriate thing to say or not. The audience simply didn't know how to react to someone who was thicker than them. More re-takes followed.

Duncan Bannatyne's family were streets ahead. They were a ruthless our-survey-said killing machine led by a patriarch with the will of a Spartan Nazi. On her entrance, Duncan Bannatyne's wife stumbled on the stairs, tripping and falling fairly hard facewards into the glamorous stage. Bannatyne, at once both chivalrous and financially astute, offered them a thousand quid to delete the tapes. Vernon fucked up the last round – Bannatyne passed one of the questions, but Vernon forgot that he had, and so stood around dawdling, before finally re-asking it just out-of-time. The warm-up comedian then came on and said that this would all be made ethical in the edit suite.

Insider fact: there is actually no "silent booth". While a contestant is answering, they simply take the one who isn't backstage. Then, they mock up a pretend-booth by filming them onstage wearing a pair of headphones that do absolutely nothing. Trickery, trickery, trickery…

Can't say I walked away hating Vernon Kay, which is exactly how I'd expected to walk away. Him and that dead-eyed bitch wife of his, maybe they're just ordinary people trying to make it in a crazy mixed-up world?