​The Quiet Joy of Challenge TV, and the Lost World of the Pre-2000s British Gameshow

"Matthew Westley from North Devon is the manager of a petrol station who's hoping for a four star performance. Nicola Gill is from Newcastle and she loves shopping, but today to open the chequebook she'll just need answers. And David Gallacher lives in Paisley, he enjoys driving, but can he accelerate towards a victory today?"

Many people rely on ambient music. They are pulled into deep pools, submerged in floating auras for hours on end. For others it's reading, sewing or solitaire, and for my parents – during a strange patch just after we moved house – it was entering competitions on the back of postcards. These vaguely sensory, non-demanding experiences offer a basic function: engaging the brain to the tipping point between distraction and concentration. Offering just enough in the way of interest to keep the mind occupied, without ever pushing it into the realms of effort. For me, it is watching British gameshows dated anywhere between 1985 and 2005. For me, it is watching Challenge TV.

If you're not familiar with Challenge, it's a television channel that's existed for nearly 20 years, dedicated almost entirely to running repeats of gameshows. In their prime-time evening slots they show relatively dull re-runs of recent acquisitions like Pointless or The Chase, but catch the channel on an early Saturday morning, or during a Tuesday afternoon away from work, and it's a different picture entirely. In these graveyard slots, the channel replays the deep cuts. Wheel of Fortune, Nick Weir-era Catchphrase, The Price is Right – the gameshows that dominated living rooms until Simon Cowell's empire rose and the people demanded more than a Blankety Blank chequebook and pen.

I'm not sure exactly why, but there's something about old episodes of Blockbusters or Strike It Rich that I find hugely comforting. The soft crackle of a synthesised saxophone, the purple velvet scenery studded with bright blonde bulbs, the shiny suits of presenters who are no longer allowed on television following sexual assault charges. The gameshows of the 1990s and early 2000s were a strange blend of the sleek and the schlocky – old formats in new studios – and Challenge TV is a unending reel of this recent past, a time capsule buried deep on the digital television schedule, cataloguing an era when watching people running around around a mock-supermarket in a sweatshirt constituted entertainment.

You can deduce the state of our nation from its game shows. What we desire, what we understand as glamorous, what we wear, what we find funny, what we find sad. They are a strange barometer; a flashing, neon sign of the time. The shows of the late 20th century speak of an era where £2,000 was considered a "huge cash prize", when men wore clip-on ties and women wore blouses, when Carol Smilie was considered "eye-candy". The pre-millennial British gameshow is a relic of a time when the future had arrived but the past was still rotting around it.

They were programmes presented by men from another age, too. Men like Nick Weir, Les Dennis, John Leslie, Michael Barrymore and Dale Winton. Men who – in a couple of instances due to court cases – unceremoniously disappeared from television only to be replaced by Keith Lemon, Tess Daly and ex-soap stars eating kangaroo dicks. They were a strange breed of host. Almost exclusively thin, wiry males, lost under over-sized suits and garish neckties. They cut largely tragic figures, desperately pandering for applause under hot studio lights. Watching them now feels a bit like watching videos of your divorced dad performing manic, drunken karaoke at your older sister's wedding, a last ditch attempt at approval failing in motion. A species of entertainer totally dependent on adulation, now lost to a world that's forgotten about them completely. Do you ever wake up in the middle of the night and think: Matthew Kelly, where are you now?

Then there were the contestants.

When you watch television that involves members of the public today, it almost feels as though they've had media training. Perhaps we're all just more used to being in front of cameras all the time, but these days average Joes are polished: they have great hair and even better comebacks, and are often so entertaining they have rendered the presenter totally redundant. Challenge is there to remind us of a time before, a time gone by.

There is no accounting for just how strange the contestants of old British game shows were. The erratic, the elderly, the unfortunate looking, collected under bright studio lights, forced to chatter with Roy Walker.

Just consider the following exhibits:

a) Every grandad who's ever existed in the same place at the same time.

b) Noshed off a pasta penis at a hen-do in Skegness.

c) Never the bridesmaid, never the bride.

d) Tells people he left university with a 1st in improv comedy

I'm not being funny, but they don't make people like this any more. Obviously fashion changes, hairstyles go in and out of trend, but faces are more normal now. The shapes of people's heads and bodies are more conventional. See a married couple on television today and they look like they've been cast for a mortgage advert. Contestants on the gameshows of old were plucked from a time when everybody looked like a weirdo. A time of colossal glasses and even more colossal teeth, of husbands and wives who look eerily identical, of women called Pam and men called Lance, and of woolly jumpers so garish no amount of vintage re-appropriation could ever bring them full circle.

The gameshows of our youth weren't populated by everyday people desperate to get on TV. No, for better or worse, they were populated by people who were desperate to win a fishing holiday to Anglesey.

Nostalgia is a less than productive sentiment, but there is something to be said for the version of the past Challenge's old gameshows present. Typically when we look back on our shared history it's with a selective memory. We recall the 80s as Rubix cubes and Thatcher, the 90s as Blur and Blair, the 2000s as 9/11 and Facebook. We remember the good, the bad and the ugly, but tend to forget the bits in between. What the tacky displays repeated by Challenge offer are visions of the past we all too often forget. Yes, the production values are terrible, the rudimentary-CGI opening credits are clunky and the jokes are shit, but they are a window into the normal hum of suburban weekends. Fish fingers and peas spilt into laps. Life in the slow-lane; extra-large shoulder-pads and medium-sized aspirations.

Watching these shows doesn't make me long for any specific memory in my own life. Rather, they are the ghosts of a million TV dinners forgotten even by those who ate them. The voice of Les Dennis echoing deep into the night.

"This is Greg Saunders from West Bromwich, he loves brass bands and is hoping to blow his own trumpet tonight."

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