Play-at-home surgical fun without the gore

Operation is an early and surprisingly durable example of that rare thing; a natural crossover between the worlds of board game and electronic game¹ (and delicate medical procedure). A pair of metal tweezers are used to remove comically-named plastic body parts (amongst them “wish bone”, “funny bone”, and “butterflies in stomach”²) from the prostrate form of a cartoonish man who looks not entirely unlike a well-groomed and marginally less uninteresting Fred Flintstone³.

If a player commits the error of touching the “sides” during the operating procedure, a buzzer sounds and the huge red bulb standing in for the cartoon man’s nose lights up. So far, so serial/parallel circuit physics lesson yawnsome. In fact, we’re simplifying. The game has ever more complex rules and levels of play, including various hostipal occupation cards (doctor, specialist, consultant paediatrician, cardio-thoracic surgeon, anaesthesiologist, to name but a few that might as well be included for all we ever understood) and a remuneration policy that presumably informed the career choices of your modern day BUPA staff.

For a Cream era kid, though, there were two small but crucial flaws in this otherwise perfectly intricate operation; firstly, the deliberately fiddly “charlie horse” would inevitably become wedged in its oddly shaped slot (a situation that was not exactly helped by the tendency of the flimsy plastic-and-card board to become worryingly and complicatingly concave after a couple of weeks’ use); secondly, and more significantly, the wires connecting the tweezers to the board would eventually develop a break and be rendered - a-ha ha ha - inoperable.

The question of what you were supposed to do if and when the bulb blew was also never really addressed. On top of this, younger siblings were wont to find the game inexplicably frightening. See also the somewhat sturdier relative, Purple People Eater, a huge rubber contraption akin to a melting Davros mask and actually quite repulsive to the touch, from the mouth of which players were supposed to retrieve small red plastic troll-like figures without touching those all-important “sides” lest they trigger its electronic “monster”’ noise. At least this latter game was promoted by a Tiswas-straddling telly ad utilising a cunning rewrite of the ancient novelty rock ‘n’ roll number of the same name. All we got for Operation was that posh mum saying “Can I have a go?”