Gunge - History of Gunge On Television - 2010

2010

Gunge continues to feature in 2010 on children's TV in the UK and continuing the trend of the latter half of the 2000s, not as much as it once did. Wait For It and Keep Your Enemies Close. Basil's Swap Shop returned minus the gunge gallery but introducing a new game with a western theme called Gold Rush. In this game, the two winning teams from the previous game (dunk beds) take part in the game set in a mine shaft where the aim is to fill up tubes with liquid sludge by tipping buckets with the slop into the tubes which are hidden (so the children do not know who is winning). At the end the four kids take cover in the now shuddering mine shaft. The winning team then receives gold (yellow gunge) while the losing team were initially covered in brown sludge however later episodes they remain dry. In New Zealand kids television, What Now introduced a new gungey game the big breakfast and Splat Cave. Fe Fi Fo Yum has a challenge which sees two children go barefoot into a bowl of gunge to collect objects for their team mates such as letters/numbers or other items. The final game also makes use of the gunge bowl, where the last part involves wading in the pool and up a ramp in order to release their captive team mates. A second series was launched in May 2011. In addition, the spin-off from Horrible Histories, Horrible Histories: Gory Games involved a physical challenge involving gunge. The three children in the quiz running barefoot across an inflatable collecting "poo" and depositing it in their tanks at the other end. Above the inflatable are three containers - one for each lane of the inflatable, storing gunge which is released at points in the game. A variation of this challenge sees the three contestants, in an all play game, throw pies into mouths attached to a bungee cord, in the second series, this has the added difficulty of "Garum sauce" falling on to the inflatable at a random point in the game causing the children to slip and slide thus increasing the difficulty of the challenge. The British version of the Nickelodeon's Camp Orange also features challenges which involve getting gunged. Slime was also featured heavily in the original Australian version of the show. Splatalot (in Dutch Spetterslot), a medieval themed game show, similar to Total Wipeout features gunge/slime is fired at the attackers by the defenders at random points in the challenges as a means to slow down the attackers.

In terms of prime time television, in the UK at least, gunge has made appearances in the ITV1 game show The Whole 19 Yards where two transparent spheres contained either pink or yellow gunge. In one of the many physical challenges, a contestant had to unscrew the bottom of the sphere of their colour resulting in the gunge falling onto them and the floor below in order to retrieve an key in the sphere which allowed them to complete the challenge. The Channel 5 version of Big Brother (both celebrity and normal version) features gunge in various tasks and as a way to nominate housemates.