Blankety Blanks

The first Australian version of the popular American game show Match Game (1973). The game is played by two contestants, a champion and a challenger, who were always of opposite genders (one man and one woman). They played two rounds of the main game. The first round began with the challenger selecting between two statements identified as A and B. After they made their choice, host Graham Kennedy would pull out the card from the corresponding pocket and read out the statement that was written on it. The statement would always have one word replaced with 'blank' or an extension thereof, for example "Mary, Mary Quite Contrary couldn't make her garden grow with water, so she used 'blank' instead". The six celebrities would then try to fill in the 'blank' by writing their answer on a card and then locking it in (when they had done so, a bell would sound and their name would light up). After they had put their answers in, the statement would be read out to the challenger who would then give their answer. Kennedy would then get the celebrities to reveal their answers in turn, starting in the top row and going from left to right, then doing the same in the bottom row. For each celebrity whose answer matched that given by the challenger, the challenger would score one point. If it wasn't clear whether a celebrity's answer was a match or not, then producer Tony Connelly, dubbed "Tony the Moustache Twirler" by Kennedy, would have the final say on this matter. After all of the answers had been revealed, Kennedy would take the card not selected by the challenger, and the champion would play in the same way with that card's statement. Two new statements would appear in the pockets for round 2, and unless the challenger matched all six celebrities, they would again choose between the two statements. This time, only the celebrities who had not matched the challenger in round 1 would play. If the champion had more matches than the challenger in round 1 and the deficit became greater than the number of celebrities remaining, the champion would win the game at that point, otherwise they would receive the other statement and play in a similar way with only the celebrities they didn't match playing. If the champion scored enough matches to pass the challenger's round 2 total or their deficit became greater than the number of celebrities remaining, then the contestant with the greater score either became or remained the champion, but if both contestants ended the round with t