Henry Kelly’s gold war

Produced by Aussie TV god Reg Grundy, who had just dropped Neighbours into our laps, Going For Gold did not fully embody a new Eurocentric consciousness. Beneath the forced smiles and jaunty music lay a decidedly unlevel playing field. Going For Gold was a pub pool table with a wonky leg that gifted a massive advantage to the locals.

Conducted entirely in English from studios in Elstree and Manchester, with Irishman Kelly hosting, and with many of the questions skewed towards US and English literature, music and film, Going For Gold was heavily weighted in favour of the Brits. Each home nation was given equal standing with our European cousins,  thus the first episode had Northern Ireland, Scotland and England making up three of the eight nations represented. Had Nigel Farage been allowed to remodel the EU, it would have played out like Going For Gold. 

Even the show’s logo – a clipart chocolate gold coin – could have been hatched by UKIP’s marketing department. Yet despite these advantages, players from home countries contrived to win only four of the initial 10 seasons on BBC.

Going For Gold was incredibly stilted. The contestants had all the chemistry of complete and utter strangers meeting up in the reception lounge at Dignitas, and  plucked from a Saga cruise, this lot had already had their go at ‘going for gold’ in life and had come up short.

To offset the language and cultural barriers, the show desperately needed high energy from the host. Instead, it had Kelly, who always looked like he knew exactly what he was selling.

Once a Belfast-based reporter during The Troubles, he had just finished a four-year run opposite Jeremy Beadle, Sarah Kennedy and Matthew Kelly on Game For A Laugh. “I thought Going For Gold was nonsense when it was first offered to me in 1987 and that it would only last for one series, but it lasted 10 years,” he once reflected.

Kelly had charm, but he was hardly the charismatic glue holding the disparate pieces together, standing to attention with his tiny Post-It-Note question cards and vicar-chic side-parted hair. “Now, you’re playing catch-up, Dieter!” Thankfully, each show was only 25 minutes long, including the insufferable theme tune. Altogether now:

“The heat is on, the time is right,
It’s time for you, for you to play the game.
‘Cause people are coming, everyone’s trying,
Trying to be the best that they can,
To reach for the sky ’cause the stakes are so high,
When they’re going for, going for gold!”

The music was an upbeat fire blanket to the senses that spoke of personal ambition and the sacrifices needed to achieve it. The song equated the lifetime of commitment and graft essential to competing in an Olympic Games with answering questions about spiders and cheese on daytime TV. It was ridiculous.

Anyone who has experienced the dark and brooding dystopian grunts of Blade Runner 2048 would be hard pressed to link that sound to Going For Gold. However, the composer of both was none other than Hollywood A-lister Hans Zimmer; remember that for future quiz shows, folks. 

When questioned about this skeleton rattling from his closet, Zimmer told the Guardian: “Going for Gold? I’m not ashamed of it! It paid the rent and opened up all sorts of doors. I will admit to it: we all have to have our guilty little things!”

It seems Zimmer knew only too well even then that, in the words of the title song’s little-heard second verse, “All we need is a little more sa-cr-i-fice… When we’re going for gold.”

Bearing in mind the rather delicate makeup of cold war-era Europe back then, Going For Gold didn’t exactly skirt around potentially sensitive topics. The answer to a question in episode one clearly invited the incorrect answer “Adolf Hitler”, while “the Red Baron” was the correct answer to another. Episode one also touched upon The Bible, Islam and tooth decay. 

Going For Gold had some strange categories of questions too. Hans from Austria – it had to be Hans, didn’t it? – had just two categories left to choose from in episode one: “art” and “creepy crawlies”. Hans went for creepy crawlies.

Kelly’s banter with our European friends could appear to have been hastily drafted by Boris Johnson on the back of a fag packet, Jacob from The Netherlands was asked by Kelly: “Do you wear clogs?” Jacob from The Netherlands admitted that he did, before going on to explain his clearly obscene behaviour to the English audience, by revealing that the clog is a most practical form of footwear for certain types of farm work. Kelly and the audience found this most amusing.

The round of questions most viewers will recall is the one where Kelly would invite answers as to “who or what” he was pretending to be. “What is my name? I am a beverage…”, “I am a large member of the cat family, known for my strength and beauty…”, “my delicate shoots are used in cooking…”. 

Truth be told, the answers from those watching at home were often not that respectful to Kelly.  “What is my name?” “Total bell-end” was the popular retort from my sixth-form common room.

Going For Gold was a ground-breaker in many respects. Its construct and concept were original at the time with losers invited back to fight another day, and winners going head-to-head in a novel game where each was allotted time – displayed on a changing barometer – to answer the question. The victor would then progress to the Grand Final at the end of the season – which saw Kelly decked out in a tux, with a slightly jazzier question card. 

The Grand Final of season one, dangled the rather juicy carrot of an all-expenses-paid trip to the Seoul Olympics, but in general, the show suffered from a lack of visible payola; the winners of each show pocketed only a grand.

Going For Gold is an amusing anachronistic watch, but it was rarely so enjoyable at the time. TV and indeed modern culture was changing rapidly back then, as satellite TV and its 24-hour schedules provided serious competition to the terrestrials, just as a diet suppressant that got the English to dance rendered UK culture dayglo. 

Things were getting postmodern, yet Going For Gold was just too cold, awkward and uncomfortable. Walls were tumbling down, yet GFG remained steadfastly East German. It could only have been more mundane with the introduction of interpreters.

The show stopped in 1997, just after things started kicking off for real in Brussels, before briefly returning to Channel 5 for two seasons in 2008. Kelly was not attached to the more recent iteration, instead spending several years with Classic FM, a pre-Farage and O’Brien LBC and then local radio. He died in February 2025.

Journalist and author John Suchet was the host for the short-lived Channel 5 version of Going For Gold, which differed from the original in one crucial sense: all the contestants were now from the UK and Ireland. “Let’s see Hans, Sven and Jacob win this one, yeah?” Brexit was then inevitable.