It's a Raabout!

Remember It's a Knockout? That ridiculous gameshow from the 80s or so which seemed (in my memory at least) to involve people dressing up in ridiculous (often heavily padded) outfits and hitting each other with inflatable hammers and so on*? There's something on on telly here (well, in Germany, but close enough) that seems to be It's a Knockout's new-century relative. Possibly it's been going on for ages, actually, so it might not actually be a new-century relative, but that's not important.

It's called Schlag den Raab, and it's a gameshow that's on every now and then, and it involves a contestant playing assorted games against this dude Stefan Raab (who may possibly be the Eddie McGuire of German telly. Or maybe the Eddie McGuire back in the days when he was on every TV show in sight, before he turned into a semi-absentee Serious Businessman Type). Anyway, there is a member-of-the-public type contestant and Stefan Raab, and they play 15 different games of varying ludicrousness (such as answering general knowledge type questions, identifying celebrities, balancing on the end of a 10m pole, memory and reaction time type tests, this weird game involving hitting a nail with a hammer, playing soccer only while driving cars and using a ginormous ball, and playing pingpong on a tiny tiny table) and it goes on and on and on and on for hours (apparently it is show kinda live on TV and it always starts late and it's not unusual for it to finish at 1am or something) and if Stefan Raab wins he doesn't get anything, and if the other person wins, they get some relatively vast amount of money.

It's kind of crap, but it's good to see that people's silly talents from the olden days (by which I mean the It's a Knockout-type years) are still appreciated. It's like seeing people breakdancing, which I approve of enormously.






* Did you know that the Australian version of It's a Knockout was axed because people living near the oval in which it was filmed complained so much? Huh.