For the past 30 years or so I've had a memory of watching a TV show in my head - Namely the characters of a show getting trapped inside a TV set at the end of the show, and asking viewers for ideas on how they could get out of it.
That implied two things that are kind of mutually contradictory - One that it was a Saturday Morning magazine show because that's where - for the most part - that style of interactivity lived. And two that it was a fictional sci-fi/fantasy show. So I put it aside as likely conflating a couple of things in my head, because, you know. Surely a magazine show - a format that exists to showcase cartoons while doing interviews with celebs and playing pop music - isn't going to be sufficiently fantastical to trap its cast in a television?
Reading a television production blog I was linked to another blog, with a deep dive on the show Parallel 9 - This blog - and at the end, sure enough, right at the end of the first part of this deep dive:
"The final sketch appears to be heading for the usual humourous resolution until all of the cast in turn lose the 72 Zillion Zradoc Question. After failing a question about Mercator's sentence Spam explains that the next two Saturdays are cancelled due to maintenance work on the Stargate (which by pure coincidence coincides with BBC1's coverage of the Barcelona Olympics). Mercator, Skyn and Steyl are sent to languish in "Nether Space" though Spam states he can only send Cal back to Earth, confirming a clear creative decision to ensure the viewer's representative on the show can no longer come to harm. The Tope upon realising the predicament appeals to "Earth elders" for help in quite an unexpected ending."
And the author of the blog was obsessed enough with the show that for many of the episodes, he has tapes. And uploaded them to youtube. And that's one of the tapes uploaded. The actual image that was kind of stuck in my head is 1:09:29.
Watching the sketch again I now recall my response to the request for help that I never got around to sending in was that since a gameshow got them into the situation, a gameshow should get them out.
Funny what sticks with you and what comes back when prompted. And, mostly, how much better I feel about that memory now that I have a name for the show that it was from.
(The aspect ratio of the show is pretty wild, too - 1992 so pretty much every TV set was 4:3, the show was made for television, about half the show's widescreen and about half is 4:3. I don't know if this is the first TV show made (in part) in widescreen in the UK broadcasting, but it has to come close, surely?)