Awesome pseudo-Shadows theme tune though.
What happened in the finale? I can’t seem to find info anywhere.
Pretty much anything featuring Messrs Ant & Dec (who were apparently superglued together in Byker Grove and no one bothered to untear them), Dale Winton or Vernon Kaye is guaranteed to be bad. Much of their output is unoriginal repackaged gameshow material or reality/talent, so a touch out of what you’re after.
I still shudder at a mid 80s adaptation of Brat Farrar which pretty much no-one remembers now as it was so bad. It did however have a theme tune that both me and my brother occasionally get as an earworm.
Craig Charles of Red Dwarf fame featured in an early 90s virtual reality gameshow called Cyberzone which was pretty bad, cobbled together with ideas out of the Krypton Factor and Knightmare but with graphics straight out of the Money for Nothing video and a desperate hope that the so-called coolness of virtual reality would see it through. It didn’t.
I’ll put in a feeble defence of El Dorado with a comment that once they realised it was getting cut, the writing and acting vastly improved.
I can’t remember its name, but there was a Saturday evening series on the BBC about 10 years ago that was almost unspeakably awful. It was about a detective and a lady scientist who’d invented a time machine which they then used to solve crimes. Which would have been OK, but for the fact that the crimes were hardly-changed-at-all-but-always-simplified versions of Sherlock Holmes cases and as such could have easily been solved without the use of the time machine. Throw in some desperately hammy false sense of urgency because you’ve got a time machine acting and you’ve got yourself something that isn’t getting recommissioned.
I think the winners have been identified here: Triangle, Crossroads are definitely at the top of the list. Crossroads had a cracking theme tune though.
From the game show genre, how about 3-2-1? Ted Rogers and Dusty Bin… a great way to know that you are wasting your life in front of the telly on a weekend. There’s also Bullseye, a dart game show that is as dreadful as it sounds.
How about The Sweeney? Hated this as a kid, though it might have been more of the grittiness of the show than the actual content.
I’m not spoilering this but here you go:
3-2-1 is a good one. Unlikeable host, cheesy Z-list entertainment acts that you’d never heard of, and the clues… I used to think when I watched it originally that one day, when I was older and wiser, I would be able to grasp the logic of the clues. But now that they repeat 3-2-1 on digital channels, I have watched a couple of episodes anew and it confirms what I probably suspected all along - the clues make almost no sense, and were quite possibly so deliberately vague that the producers could decide on the fly who got which prize.
Celebrity’s clue*: “Bin’s the name, and with this prize you’ll be in the game”*
Ted Rogers: Could “bin” mean that this is Dusty Bin [the show’s booby prize]? Perhaps. But it could also mean “binary”. “You’ll be in the game…” - a computer vidoe game, maybe? Or could it mean a game reserve? And a pair of BINoculars!? [drum roll] Yes, that’s right, you’ve won a set of golf clubs!
I remember Saturday evening programming and wishing I was old enough to go to the pub. It was bad. Blankety Blank, It’s a Knockout, Surprise Surprise… Of course American kids were probably stuck watching Lawrence Welk and Hee Haw so I suppose we all suffered. 
But I recall we also got Clive James and Paul Hogan, so the Aussies saved us from complete dreck in the early 80s.
I loved 3-2-1 as a kid - it had Dusty Bin as a ‘prize.’ 
El Dorado and Crossroads are the only ones that make sense for a comedian to joke about. All the others are a matter of opinion (or, like Triangle, really obscure), but those two were the butt of loads of jokes for how bad they were. I actually kinda liked both of them, esp. El Dorado, which was never as bad as its reputation and improved a lot over its short broadcast time. But still, a line like ‘such a bad actor that the El Dorado cast were laughing at him’ would work.
Though I have to admit I have a real fondness for this comedy, I’m not really suprised it’s not as well received as some. It was a bit out there.
Crime Traveller? Starring the bloke out of Eastenders? That was rubbish.
There was also ‘mind your language’ that was set in a night school class teaching English to foreign students. Every race and nationality was ridiculed.
On August 31, 1992, BBC2 showed a program called TV Hell. Actually, it was an evening-long program. It was about the worse British TV shows and British TV moments up to that point, with short segments of the programs and comments about how the shows happened to end up so bad. I happened to be visiting the U.K. then, so I watched much of it. Unfortunately, I can’t find a list of all the programs that this program considered to be the worse British TV shows. It appears that you can watch all of TV Hell on YouTube, but it’s cut up into ten-minute pieces.
Here’s somebody’s list of bad British TV:
Woah! Settle down! Little Britain wasn’t great, but it had some redeeming moments. Like when that selfish woman tells her hospitalised elderly mother that she’s putting her into a home:
Mother: “But what about my flat?”
Selfish woman: [offhand] “Oh, I rented it to some gays.”
Anyway, I’ll throw 2.4 Children in there. Terrible, canned laughter, BBC1 garbage.
I’m not from the UK, but if I may offers one based on hearsay, I have never heard one positive word said about Bonekickers. A lot of horrible ones though…
Triangle is famous on “worst of” clip shows for the beginning of the first episode featuring a topless Kate O’Mara.
Nobody has mentioned ‘Bo Selecta’ yet?
Appalling ‘comedy’ based around the idea that a bloke puts on a fat suit, says, ‘I’m Michael Jackson’ in a yorkshire accent and then, well, thats it isn’t it?
I am from the UK and I have never heard any word said about Bonekickers. What on earth is it?
Oh God yes. I had a friend who swore to me as someone who loved Brass Eye and The Ali G Show (original) that I would love Bo Selecta. What a load of shit. I still haven’t forgiven him. No, putting on a rubber mask and pretending to be Craig David is not even remotely funny.
Damn. Now I want to kick a puppy.
This actually makes me happy, I’ve heard a lot of shit about it online and the curiosity view made me understand why.
2008 BBC show involving shitty archeologists doing fake science destroying artifacts and being horrible people. With weird connections and magic religious crap. It has elements of Indiana Jones and CSI only, you know… crap. It is apparently bad enough that BBC let ITV release the dvd, and I’m led to believe those networks are in direct competition with each other.
Cheers (sorry for the delay in thanking you).