Reading minds

A poster on the GSN board known as TheKid likes to dig up obscurities from YouTube. He found one of the few surviving episodes of Mindreaders, a short-lived Goodson-Todman effort from 1979.

Dick Martin hosted the show, which was vaguely inspired by the ESP craze of the seventies. Over the years the show has caught a lot of grief as one of G-T's worst productions ever. It's also supposedly one of the few formats personally created by Mark Goodson.

The show really had little to do with ESP. It was just a game of hunches about how a celeb (or, in the bonus round, ten people from the studio audience) would answer silly questions.

It's easy to understand why the show didn't last long, given the thinness of the premise and the goofiness of the queries. Dick Martin also looked semi-lost as the host, especially when he had to explain the rules. But it's hardly the worst thing I've seen, or even the second or third worst. You can judge for yourselves.