What’s My Line? without Jilly Cooper

The reason nobody can ever take a police photofit seriously, MB’s Guess Who? attempted to test children’s powers of observation via some of the strangest-looking people you will ever see.

Two players sat at either end of the board, facing a rogues’ gallery of forty faces attached via bits of plastic. Each would pick a card at random featuring one of the faces and place it in the slot in front of them. You’d then take it in turns ask yes or no questions to deduce which person your opposite number had picked. With each answer, you pushed those not applicable down, so eventually you would be left with just one person still staring at you, and say “Is this person David?” or whoever, which would win you the game. Er, if you were right, of course.

Obviously, each of them had to have an easily definable aspect of their appearance, hence a huge number of hats, glasses and, on numerous people, very ruddy cheeks, clearly having been captured on a cold day. We suspect the current incarnation includes a rather larger ethnic mix than was the case in the original version, which was more or less entirely white¹.

As with all games, you would always find a new way to play it that wasn’t in the rules and, as such, occasionally you wouldn’t bother with the cards and just pick your favourite drawing on the board. This was sadly flawed by the fact that absolutely everyone would always pick Philip, thanks to his uncanny resemblance to Kenny Everett. After each game you could turn the board upside down, so every face would stand up again and you’d be ready for another round straight away, but after a few plays this would lead to a bit of a gap while you picked all the bits of plastic off the floor where they’d fallen out.

The TV advert (“Guess Who? His eyes are blue, now that’s a clue!”) was notable for the fact that the boy playing the game was clearly cheating by asking all his questions in one go. Of course he was going to win by doing that!

¹Can you fuel kids’ early prejudices of racial stereotypes with the latest retail edition of Guess Who?. Or should you let ‘em watch Little Britain instead? Seriously, though, it’s astonishing to note that even as late as 1987 there was nary a black face to be found on the Guess Who? playing board. 1987! The year of Acid House! We reckon it’s safe to assume, therefore, that MB doesn’t stand for “multicultural buy-in”.