It's Academic (Australian game show)
It's Academic is an Australian children's game show which is based on the long-running American version of It's Academic, and pits students from different schools against each other in a test of knowledge covering a number of diverse subjects including English, mathematics, science, geography, sport, music and popular culture.The early incarnation of It's Academic was the basis for a series of sketches from The Late Show in which Santo Cilauro, Rob Sitch and Tom Gleisner, who all claimed to have gone to the same school, competed on the program with incredible but humorous incompetence.The 1960s–70s version of It's Academic was conducted on a per-state basis, with episodes featuring on-air contestants in teams of three, with an official fourth as a reserve, each from one of three different high schools from that state.Shows were recorded with large live audiences on Saturdays with school staff representatives supervising the contest.State contestants usually received Sheaffer or Parker pen sets as mementos, with additional prizes (often dictionaries or encyclopedias) awarded to the winning school.The pilot and first two years of the Australian series were recorded by Network Ten, on Saturdays, at the North Ryde TEN-10 studios in Sydney NSW and also in Victoria.The first two NSW seasons 1968 and 1969 were hosted by John Bailey, and both series finals were won by Marist Brothers, Eastwood.The show moved to the Seven Network in 1970 and was recorded at the ATN 7 Mobbs Lane studios at Epping, New South Wales, with a new host, Andrew Harwood.Each individual episode features five teams (green, red, blue, yellow and purple), each made up of six members from each school.The team who answers the Unscramble this Picture Puzzle question on the buzzer has the right to choose one of three topics for Fact or Fiction, a new round in 2006, and get five seconds to make that decision.