★★
Dave Benson Phillips is best-known for hosting hit (and now cult) children’s TV show Get Your Own Back, which ran on CBBC for twelve years.
Get Your Own Back: Live! as the title would suggest is a live version of the hit children’s TV show Get Your Own Back, which saw children to get their own back on a grown-up. That grown up could be their mother, their father or even a teacher, and they’d get their revenge by dunking them head first into a paddling pool filled with gunge.
Twelve years on from the final episode, Dave is now inviting adults the chance to take part in their favourite TV show from when they were kids.
Growing up you were either a CBBC kid or a CITV kid, and I was very much a CBBC kid, and one of the programmes I remember most fondly is Get Your Own Back, and last year I even managed to interview Dave Benson Phillips alongside other childhood heroes of mine.
Get Your Own Back was a show I really wanted to be on when I was younger, so when I heard it was coming to Edinburgh as a live show, I had to go and watch, even if only for a bit of nostalgia, and sadly that's all it really was.
Aside from Dave's signature bellow and his famous laugh this show sadly resembled very little of what the made the main show great.
Billed as a 'celebrity special' version of the show, comedians Ed Byrne and Patrick Monahan took on Will Seaward and Stephen K Amos in what were quite frankly some very childish games.
The games included Games included eating raw baked beans, blowing up a balloon and making a balloon animal, quite frankly lacking any imagination the brilliant games from the TV series had.
As for the gunge. Yes, that was there. I would have been truly disappointed if it hadn't been. But the unique thing about Get Your Own Back, wasn't really the gunge itself, it was the way in which the adults went head first into a paddling pool full of gunge, whilst more gunge fell on top of them.
Why they couldn't recreate this on stage I'll never know, instead there was a traditional grunge tune which just about covered Ed and Patrick in gunge.
The entire show felt like the pilot for Get Your Own Back, Dave Benson Phillips could have made before the BBC offered him a series. Sadly, this show came twelve years after a very successful twelve-year fun, and looked more like a presenter's desire to keep his TV career alive.
Unfortunately, this wasn't the nostalgic trip down memory lane I was hoping for.
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