Jeux Sans Frontieres Tesserete (CH) English Commentary Full Show

An old episode of Jeux Sans Frontieres [International It's a Knockout] from 1982.

Teams: Turnhout (B) v. Tesserete (CH) v. Vendôme (F) v. Lochgilphead (GB) v.
Garda (I) v. Caldas da Rainha (P) v. Umag (YU)

Games: Tossing the Baton, Tiling the Roof, Nuts and Spoons, Articles on the Island, Nests on Chimneys, Pudding Bowl, Chickens on Carpets and Blasting the Granite;
Fil Rouge: The Drunken Husbands;
Jokers: Bunches of Grapes.

Following two nights of clear weather for the rehearsals, the weather changed dramatically and torrential rain poured down during the recording. Lightning could clearly be seen and thunder heard during the TV transmission.

After a good start (1st place on Game 1, 2nd place on Game 2), things went sour for British team Lochgilphead. On Game 3, team member Alistair Dewar did not comply with the rules and was placed last, a placing they repeated on Game 4. The team was not able to recover and continued this downward trend.

Game 4 - 'Articles on the Island' - involved a boy from each team standing on a floating podium in the pool, and he had to hold sixteen larger-than-life items (without any of them touching the podium) which were given to him by his team-mates. These items included a beach ball, a bottle of wine, a box of chocolates, a bunch of grapes, a carpet, a cigarette packet, a framed picture, a roll of cloth, a shoe, a smoker's pipe, a straw hat, a string of sausages, a suitcase, a vase, a watch and a wedge of cheese.

Due to the inclement weather it was decided that at the start of Fil Rouge 2, to remove the large shoes on the feet of the 'Drunken Husbands', because the teams had had a hard time negotiating the course. This of course created faster times to complete the course, but hindered those teams that had scored good times on the first round, one of which was the British team!

Belgian town Turnhout was the centre of the playing card manufacturing industry in Europe at the time, with six major factories producing playing cards. All around the arena there were strewn hundreds of playing cards.

More bloopers galore in this heat! Once again, the BBC had failed to re-edit the commentary and screen displays. At the end of the programme, Swiss team Tesserete and Portuguese team Caldas da Rainha were both asterisked to show they were at the time qualifying for the International Final. However, the previous week, the BBC had already transmitted the recorded Heat 6, wherein Swiss team Versoix and Portuguese team Vila Real-Mateus had both achieved better positions and were currently the qualifying teams. Even Stuart Hall stated that no other team had bettered Tesserete's score, and there had been four different winning countries from the first four heats, whereas in reality this was the fifth heat the BBC had transmitted. Oops again!

Although not officially celebrated, this was the 200th programme staged under the Jeux Sans Frontières name. This comprised 44 Winter programmes (35 Heats and 9 Finals), 144 Summer programmes (123 Heats, 4 Semi-Finals and 17 Finals) and 12 Christmas programmes. [description thanks to http://www.jsfnet.co.uk/]