[Neil Jones]

Thinking of contestants who became a problem for winning too much - Michael Larson who memorised patterns from the board on Press Your Luck in the US - what about that show over here? HTV West had it for two series 1991-92 but it's not something with a lot of history in the UK and part of the reason it was cancelled was because of budget cuts.

We didn't really have gameshows that rolled over from episode to episode, most of them were either self contained or it was the jackpot that rolled over (Twenty One had a "returning champion" system in the 1950s, though that format had other issues in the US anyway which had a knock-on effect over here). A handful of other shows did over the years but that was the exception to the rule with a few variations... Krypton Factor for example

It was probably Blockbusters (and Countdown before it) that encompassed a full roll-over format, and many other shows since then have continued it. There are probably other examples.

Anyway the point to this ramble is before 1993 I think it was, the most you could win on a gameshow was typically £3k, later rising to about £6k, before being dropped altogether. So the Michael Larson thing couldn't really happen over here if you were taking home more than the price, so the game would be designed in a way not to breach that (Wheel of Fortune is the obvious example here, as the wheel was purely points and anything actually worth anything like the car was capped value-wise). The Press Your Luck example for HTV only (according to Ukgameshows) only gave away £200 which defeated the whole point of the format, and it was later shifted to some graveyard slot somewhere and never seen again.