Frame The Family – A Mostly Forgotten But Rather Important Show?

Sometimes, when browsing through old copies of newspapers, you see something that makes your brow knit. This happened to me the other day when I saw this.

The Stage, 17th September 1992

What on Earth is that?

Frame The Family? Sounds a lot like a gameshow that’s fallen off the radar. Maybe it’s something like You Bet!, but with sort of set ups on family members.

Nope.

Salford Advertiser, 6th February 1992

So it’s more like You’ve Been Framed as a proto-Big Brother.

We know it did okay in the ratings, but there was only one special episode by the looks of it.

There’s a mention of the show in this write-up about Sylvania Waters, a remarkable documentary that I watched with wide eyes and mouth agape.

The Stage, 29th October 1992

That article rather neatly predicts the rise of docu-soaps in the mid-1990s.

Frame The Family gets one last mention in the round up of the year.

So there we have it. Frame The Family, an important show in the development of modern reality television, but one long since forgotten in the wider scheme of things.

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