Anneka: Show is more of a challenge now
THE blue buggy, brass neck and impossible deadlines are back as she prepares to return to our screens after nearly 30 years.
Presenter Anneka Rice, 64, will be reprising the BBC One show Challenge Anneka, which ran from 1989 to 1995, in a four-part series for Channel Five next year.
But she said trying to complete heartwarming tasks on a tight budget and cheekily persuading people and firms to help was a much bigger ask in a 21st-century cost-of-living crisis.
She said: “They are going on a bit. It’s difficult doing it in a recession.
Exciting
“It’s quite humbling and touching to see the sort of issues we’re dealing with. You did not think you’d be dealing with them 30 years ago.”
Anneka added: “I think people like to help. It’s often very difficult to know how to help because the issues we’re dealing with now are just so big.
“But coming to volunteer on a challenge is like running away to the circus. It’s fun, it’s exciting.”
Anneka said she had been reunited with children helped by the original challenges, who have come back to offer their aid.
She told Richard Herring’s RHLSTP Podcast: “Someone will come up and go, ‘Can I just say that when I was five, you came to our village and I met you and you showed me around your truck. And now I’m the architect on this project’.”
Meanwhile, Anneka is setting her sons Thomas, Joshua and Sam their own task... making a Challenge Anneka truck coffin for her final send-off.
She said: “I’m leaving my children with a bit of a challenge because they’ve got to create the truck and place my body in it.”