Bob Boden

A journey across Canada to find out more about Canada’s game shows and their impact, featuring interviews with the producers, hosts and broadcasters who pioneered them.

Alex Trebek hosts a documentary about television game shows featuring interviews with a number of game show hosts and producers.

On May 19, 1984, an out of work ice cream truck driver from Southwestern Ohio broke the bank on CBS' hit game show of the mid-1980's "Press Your Luck" and made TV history by setting a record for the most money won by a contestant in one appearance on a daytime game show; A record which may have been long been surpassed with the Big-Jackpot game shows of today, but still stands strong as the biggest win in "Press Your Luck's" history. Was it brilliance? Was it cheating? And how did he do it? "Press Your Luck's" host and crew, the family of Michael Larson - the man who walked away with $110,237 in cash and prizes - and Michael's opponents from that fateful day gathered in Hollywood 19 years later to relive the events of that remarkable event in TV history.

On a talkshow, actor and German TV ikon Joachim Fuchsberger recalls how the games for his show "Nur nicht nervös werden" (Don't Get Nervous), first broadcast on West German TV in 1960, were developed along the lines of American psychiatry. Asked "So how many crazy people watched you?", he responded: "A whole crazy, psychologically disturbed nation". Why were the Germans or to be more precise, the West Germans, a psychologically disturbed nation at that time? This is a film about cheerful and serious games, therapies for re-education and self-imposed re-education, as well as the history of the idea of permanent revolution. Those appearing include directors and producers of gameshows, psychiatrists, anthropologists, and the diversely paranoid.