Give Us a Clue

Give Us a Clue is a British televised game show version of charades which was broadcast on ITV from 1979 to 1992. The original host was Michael Aspel from 1979 to 1984, followed by Michael Parkinson from 1984 to 1992. The show featured two teams, one captained by Lionel Blair and the other by Una Stubbs. Later editions of the programme had Liza Goddard as captain of the women's team. Norman Vaughan stood in for Blair for four episodes in the second series and Joyce Blair stood in for Stubbs for the 1981 Royal Wedding special.

Originally, each team consisted of the captain, two fellow celebrities and one non-celebrity, but the non-celebrity participants were soon dropped, another celebrity being added in their place. In the second episode of Series 2 (broadcast on 5 November 1979), the non-celebrity contestant, London fashion designer Leslie Dean, read the wrong side of the card handed to him and as a result started miming his own name rather than the specified film. In his autobiography, Lionel Blair stated that it was this incident that led to the dropping of non-celebrity participants.

A revived version was broadcast by BBC One in 1997 over 30 episodes, hosted by Tim Clark. Teams were captained by Christopher Blake and Julie Peasgood and the show introduced a lateral thinking puzzle (which the host could "give clues to"). Give Us a Clue returned for a special Comic Relief episode in March 2011 with Sara Cox, Christopher Biggins, Lionel Blair, Una Stubbs, Holly Walsh, Jenni Falconer and David Walliams.

Format
The game is based on charades, a party game where players used mime rather than speaking to demonstrate a name, phrase, book, play, film or TV programme. Each player was given roughly two minutes to act out their given subject in front of his/her team, and if the others were unsuccessful in guessing correctly, the opposing team would have a chance to answer for a bonus point.

DVD release
The first six series of Give Us a Clue have been released on DVD by Network, but only 98 out of the first 106 episodes were included. The eight episodes that are not in the collection had appearances of three celebrities with sexual abuse offences that were investigated in Operation Yewtree.