Bad Influence!: 1992 - 1996

Appearing nine months after GamesMaster on rival channel ITV, Bad Influence (we're going to drop the explamation mark as it looks damn silly in the middle of a sentence) tried to grab a chunk of the audience that Channel 4's show was eating up. Unfortunately, it went about things all wrong.

Showing in a mid-afternoon slot, BI was very much a kids' show with occasional aspirations to be something greater. The focus was on hardware, software and industry news, but while there was a watchable and relevent programme trying to break out, things were generally just too simplistic for older gamers to take seriously. For every appearance by Peter Molyneaux in the show there was a crap cartoon dinosaur in the opening titles. For every well-made report from the Tokyo Game Show or feature on pirate hardware there was a 'zany' cheats expert or an amateurish 'review' by a mumbling ten-year old.

Those reviews in particularly were legendary in their mind-devouring badness. Usually delivered by pre-pubescents who seemed to have seen the game seven minutes before the cameras started rolling - and not another game before of after in their entire lives - they generally went as in-depth as "It's not got a lot of playability, but the graphics have good pictures and they move. Five out of five".

And it was a real shame, as BI had some decent on-screen talent who could have done a decent job themselves. In particular, presenter Violet Berlin had been a gamer since the days of the NES, and actually went for the job as a way to get free games. Thankfully though, as the series went on she was entrusted with more high-profile outside reporting and industry coverage than straight presenting work. But still, the show could have been a whole lot better than it was...