This is someone whose long TV hosting career has included plenty of game shows. Phillip Schofield began his TV hosting career in the early-80s in New Zealand, but he came back to England just in time to get the job as the host of CBBC’s newly-launched Broom Cupboard, when they were at the point of considering various cast members of Grange Hill as hosts.
After a couple of years, he went on to host various other CBBC shows, including Going Live! and The Movie Game. By the time he left in the early-90s, he had proven himself to be an adept host of live TV, managing to deal with anything that came his way. He then made an attempt to break into primetime TV shows aimed at older viewers, and he succeeded where others didn’t.
He then joined ITV, where he has hosted several shows, most of the early ones weren’t too memorable really, including Schofield’s TV Gold (looking back at very old clips, and interviewing a few people in them, which was almost a continuation of the similar TV’s Greatest Hits that he hosted on BBC1), and Schofield’s Quest, where he tried to help people track down various things.
As for game shows, in the mid-90s he hosted Talking Telephone Numbers (originally alongside Emma Forbes, who he worked with on Going Live!), and this was one of the first British game shows where the star prize was a five-figure sum, not that many people gambled for it. And there was also Tenball, which was a fast-paced variation on snooker, but as this wasn’t shown at all in some ITV regions, and the final was shown on LWT at 5:30, this actually wasn’t going to be the future at all.
He did briefly return to the BBC to host more game shows, including Winning Lines (a format that he was comfortable with as this was almost identical to Talking Telephone Numbers), and Test The Nation, another live show where he always cheerily moved things along, and proved that he could even tolerate working alongside Anne Robinson.
In more recent years, his ITV game show work has included Five Gold Rings (and doing adverts flogging gin on the sly), but the most popular show must be The Cube, where if people can complete the challenges, they can win really big money, and many feel that this one has succeeded as there is lots of genuine tension. Let’s hope that he will be on TV for years to come yet.
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