Forgive my pedantry if I am misremembering, but I thought Violet only appeared in Micro Machines Turbo Tournament '96 - the Europe-only release. I recall watching the episode where they featured her. Still to this day my favourite MM game!
I found one, brand spanking at a car boot sale in the late 90's when I was a kid. I remembered it because of Bad Influence telling me it was bitchin. I begged my dad to grab it for me. Yeah. It was a piece of crap! The numbers never made sense, the pictures on the cards made no sense, the scanning barcodes off of cereal boxes made no sense...... fucking thing.
Wonder if Robbie's still any good at the Racers? Someone's gotta challenge Jack Black for the honour of Gaming musicians, and Justin Hawkins don't cut it!
The sheer beauty of Bad Influence was that it turned out the complete opposite of what they seemed to be going for. Instead of being the edgy, attitudinal yoof show they had obviously envisaged, it was real geeky and heavily factual. But that's what ended up making it so loved among us gamers. We may have aspired to be Dominik Diamond and his ear piercing, but we were Andy Crane and his sideways baseball cap.
My mate from school actually had a barcode battler. he was so spoiled though, kid had everything. I used to love going to his house for tea, it was like Aladdin's cave.
😂 I think I know that kid, we had one at my school, he too had a barcode battler, tbh I’d completely forgotten about it until I seen this footage, I’d even forgotten about this show 😆
What people don’t understand, now and back then, is that it was literally a children’s show on CITV… GM was aimed at teens and wanking. But the biggest difference is that every week BI absolutely trounced GM in ratings. It was voted Best Children’s TV show and got up to 6 million viewers a week. GMs best figures were about 300,000
The thing to remember is that to those kids (and presenters) all this tech was new, was exciting, was the future. Us miserable bastards living in our third rate Cybergammon future have lost that spark. We were the future, then we were the cautionary tale.
Interesting to see everyone's view on this show - especially as I was on the production team for series 2, working out of YTV in Leeds. The remit of the show was more than just talking about video games... we were kind of making Tomorrow's World (a popular BBC science and technology show at the time) but a kids version. Although it hasn't aged very well, Bad Influence! was extremely popular at the time - and it was a lot of fun to work on.
As an American, I never saw this show in it's prime. But a while back a friend of mine showed off some episodes in a Discord call and I was completely hooked. The presentation, the hosts, the raw honesty of it all. Captivating stuff and a neat look into the gaming scene of the UK.
I've never heard of it, and I was teen in the uk when this aired. I must've been out on my bike or playing football, lol. That GamesMaster though, I'd watch that religiously.
Ah, those were the days. They showed us an overdubbed version on TV in my country and it felt epic. I've never seen anything like it before or until RU-vid shows took off. Props to the creators.
I remember watching the episode the 'Barcode Battler'. A vivid little clip in my mind of Andy Crane talking about being able to use the bar code from a Mars Bar to create an action in a fighting game or something. Never heard about it again until today... which was just hearing the same thing I first heard. I also remember Violet Berlin destroying a pirated floppy disk by exposing the disk and scratching it with a screwdriver.
This video actually freaks me out. I haven't thought about or even remembered this show since the actual 1990s. A proper blast from the past. Violet Berlin! The nostalgia is so strong, thanks.
The one thing that stuck out for me with this programme was the time they messed up the level select cheat code for Sonic 2 on the mega drive to the point their switchboard got jammed with complaints. They had to eat a lot of humble pie the next episode…along with dishing out the correct cheat!
Whether it was by design or just serendipity the show’s presenting team was arguably its greatest strength. Indeed, Violet Berlin’s presenting skills were rather modest but mitigated by a genuine and infectious passion for gaming whilst Andy Crane was the precise opposite, later confirming that Bad Influence was just another presenting gig for him at the time. In other words each complimented the other by bringing to the show what the other lacked. (Even that obviously stage school-trained American kid (edit: ‘Z’ Wright) who did a segment in the U.S. each week wasn’t nearly as irritating as he could’ve been! 🙂)
Loooved this show back on the day it was fantastic ❤ Watched every episode there is a while back on RU-vid and didn’t catch Hacksaw. HOoOoOOooO! Great video btw ✌️
The Golden age of everything! I'm so glad I was part of this era, it truly was the best time to be young and alive. We still went outside, but had these shows and games to rush back home to. I bloody miss it! Does anyone the magazine that Andy worked called TOTAL!? I used to get it every month through my door. I repeat... I bloody miss it!
The description of Andy Crane was hilariously accurate 😂 They couldn’t fool us kids back then, we all knew Bad Influence was naff. We just watched it for clips of forthcoming games and hardware. Anyway, you’re funny as hell, just subscribed.
Your breakdowns of some truly awful British TV are made all the better by the odd sneaky Alan Partridge reference. Thank you for the laughs. Keep it up, please!
Loved it as a young teen but even then, you knew it wasn't going to age well. By the time it was 1996 (4 years after watching the episode for the first time) and we were playing with Pentium PC's with 3dfx graphics, games like Quake & Tombraider. It really did feel that shows like this were made 20 years earlier.
just discovered your channel, great stuff Stu, you should look into a show called 'Wogans Web' this was a shortlived daytime show where ultra boomer Terry wogan explored the exciting new phenomenon of the internet, this was during a lull in his career and he came across as quite bitter and uninterested in this televisual project. I was a raver back in the day and I remember watching it on a horrible comedown and feeling generally pessimistic about the future and what it may bring. (i'd be amazed if you manage to find footage of this series.
My only memory of this show was that they did a version of 12 days of Xmas and it ended on “and a cartridge in a tv” I actually sing that every Christmas instead of the proper words 😂😂
Continue: other shows including Countdown, Duty Free and through the keyhole was also recorded there to say I was an audience member for a recording of the popular guess the celebrity whose home belonged to. Carol Voorderman shared her frustration that channel four moving production of countdown from the Emmerdale studios to London many years ago a show that launched the channel in the early eighties.
@@bigbabatunde1218Oh wow...I had completely forgotten about Cybernet!! I used to watch that too!! Cyberzone was also a thing though...it was a shortlived virtual reality gameshow on the BBC, hosted by Craig Charles and created by Broadsword, who also made Knightmare.
Thought you were a bit harsh with the tech, yeah it looks naff now but they were testing things that were the foundations for things we use everyday now. Was exciting seeing these new gadgets back then
Exactly. Well put. It was very hard to make 8/16 bit tech interesting. It’s easy to take the mick out of the past, but Bad Influence was must watch TV for Kids who it was airbed at. GM was older and gor teens. Loved the features from abroad too and BI had sone amazing scoops. Location shoot and interview with Rare, who never allowed anyone else in. Earthworm Jim, N64, Killer Instinct… the furs Ply Station in the country. It went on and on. Films from George Lucas ranch. Pinewood Studios. Presenters were really good. Except Z lol.
Was Bits the one hosted by 3 girls, one of whom was Emily Booth? I also seem to remember a movie show that might have been called Vids around the same time. Late night Channel 4 in the late 90's was brilliant.
I'd struggle to explain to anyone why the Cannon and Ball info blast caused me to laugh myself to tears, but it's now locked away as some of the most profound absurdist humour I've ever borne witness to. I loved this show as a lad, and definitely freeze framed my way through the end credits once or twice. Andy was a sweetheart really and Violet was a definite early crush, but Dominic eventually led me to the dark side with his impressively long and thick catalogue of knob jokes.
Great video, the future entertainment show shown at earls court was the only one I went to, the arm of the person holding a pen and paper was the friend I went with, I didn't quite make it onto the camera.
Weird; yesterday I saw a retrospective video about knightmare, so recommended who I'm about to here, then this. Great video as always btw, and if anyone fancies an episode-by-episode break down of this series check out RoseTintedSpectrum's take on it (he also corrects Zee Wright to Zed Wright).
Bad influence told me how to find that last small key in bottle grotto - Zelda links awakening on game boy. Before Internet, I had been stuck on that puzzle for weeks.
@@skylined5534Their eldest son, is firmly in the music biz now, under his given name of Tycho Jones. Heard his stuff pop up in my Spotify feed the other day. By all accounts all three are still thoroughly decent people, so that's something.
This was excellent, lets have that Gamesmaster episode, there's so much ammo there it's ridiculous. Dave Perry chucking a strop is legendary. Also had no idea Violet was being poked by bloody Gaz Top the whole time, I'm gutted 💔
My mate had a barcode battler. Almost an early Pokémon Go 😂 He used to go to supermarkets to scan the codes as he thought that would give him an advantage over others. 😂
I got a proper drago cut, recently. Just bleached it a couple of days ago. What a coincidence! I wonder what retrospective my next haircut will channel?!
You started well and then got snarky! This was a simpler time with so much promise! All the Amiga stuff was great and found it's moment a decade later with Junior Senior's Move Your Feet music video animation and Calvin Harris' 1st album! Don't forget the Amiga was used for initial video edits on the visualisation of the computer controlled underwater model shots of the Titanic! This saved Spielberg a lot of time! No Spectrum had this effect on video and special effects. Dick Van Dyke did his own special effects for a motor bike explosion on his Amiga 4000T when Diagnosis Murder ran out of money!
Yep, like everyone now bashes the past as a troupe. Easy target, all this tech was exciting, fun and gave us hope for the future. I know it was cheesy, but I rather go back to cheesy, simpler, happier times and I’m 59 , I sometimes watched this when I had free time. But I did like the video apart from the above.
