10th
Meryl Streep was never on You Bet…
…this is a message for people of the future, a public service announcement for people who, like @mrsthief and I, may find themselves tuning in to a repeat of 90’s charity challenge fest You Bet!, missing the start of the show to find someone called “Meryl Streep” appearing as a guest. Someone who looks nothing like Meryl Streep. And who is English. But who everyone keeps calling “Meryl Streep”.
Thinking this was a bit odd, we went to Wikipedia for clarification - only to find the listing for that episode as containing “Meryl Streep (Susan Elvy)” amongst the guests. A quick Google* for “Susan Elvy” brought up nothing but that article, and only unrelated sites for people with similar names.
Now, at this point our brains EXPLODED: the internet didn’t have the answer to something. Surely that’s got to be a rarer thing than a Googlewhack these days - I mean, the internet knows what colour pants I’m wearing** so how can it not know who a person on the television is?
30 minutes or so of Googling, Tweeting, phoning our parents, and generally doubting the very fabric of reality, and Matthew Kelly wraps up by thanking the panelists including “Meryl Streep………Susan from Tunbridge Wells!”. The mystery thickened, and it seemed as if we would never know the answer; we would be wheeled off to padded cells where we would spend the rest of our days rocking back and forth gibbering “Meryl Streep…Susan Elvy…MERYL…SUSAN…THE INTERNET DIDN’T KNOW” until our next dose of sedation.
Then, from out of nowhere came a possible route to salvation: we have access to the glorious option of watching the start of the show on Challenge+1.
We flicked through the channels and waited with baited breath to see if all would be explained, or whether the madness would continue……………….and it kind of did both; camp acquittee Matthew Kelly telling some rambling story about booking Meryl Streep for the show, but her getting all diva-esque and not turning up so instead he chose a random woman from the audience to stand in for her.
Really? Really? What on earth kind of world does that even begin to make sense? I know it was the early 90s, and the You Bet “celebrity” panel probably invented the concept of “D List” but that’s just plain mental right?
So, this blog post is for fellow confused souls in the hope that if they Google* “Susan Elvy” that they can find clarification a little quicker and with less existential angst than we had to suffer; she was just some random from the audience that they pretended was Meryl Streep. It was all just pretend.
I’m off for a pint, possibly of whisky.
OT
*other search engines are available, but nowhere near as good
**or at least it does now: grey
