Sky’s The Limit, The

1 9 7 0 – 1 9 7 4 (UK)

Debuting on Saturday 11 July 1970, this travel-based quiz game from Yorkshire Television was hosted by “Flight Controller” Hughie Green and offered up to 21,000 miles of travel and up to £600 spending money as prizes.

Contestants were called “passengers” and competed for trips to Capri, Rome, the Orient, Africa, Asia and Australia. Questions and answers were “verified by Encyclopaedia Britannica”.

Singing Sheffield housewife Audrey Graham – who was discovered on Hughie’s long-running talent-seeking TV programme Opportunity Knocks – joined the show as a “stewardess”, along with chirpy Cockney Monica Rose, who returned from Hughie’s previous game show, Double Your Money.

Sick of being thought of as a mindless TV hostess, Monica ploughed her savings into a play in a theatre in Morecambe when the TV show ended – but lost it when the show went bust.

By 1980 she was in hospital suffering from nervous exhaustion. She managed to find a nice husband and become a born-again Christian but sadly had to have a hysterectomy and could not have children. Never fully recovering, sad and working in a supermarket in Leicester, Monica took her own life on 8 February 1994. She was 45.

Hughie Green
Monica Rose
Maxine Turner
Audrey Graham