You know how there are some shows, from the deepest recesses of your childhood, that you spend your adult life longing for?

There's something semiotic about it: sometimes you don't even remember exactly what happened on the show, you just remember the context, like watching it on the black-and-white tele at your family's holiday house, or seeing a snippet of it when you were meant to be in bed.

They come to you as memory fragments, as though maybe they actually never were on TV, and instead existed solely in your mind.

Then, there are others that you remember as vividly as yesterday, and for me, that show was always It's A Knockout!

This is even more impressive because when It's A Knockout! originally screened, it was during the stretch of my young life when I was between three and five (1985 to 1987 for those of you with a less pointed interest in the ins and outs of my soon-to-go-Copperart autobiography, Do You Take Library Cards? A Derro's Memoir).

The funny thing about this scenario is that It's A Knockout! was already such a demented bit of television that remembering it feels like a fever dream. Fever dream or not, however, it stands as the single most cherished bit of my early childhood's TV viewing (it, and Secret Valley).

Then, it happened.

I loaded up TheVine yesterday for my daily read, and there it was:

"'It's A Knockout' is coming back to Ten"

Here it was, the TV event that I'd waited for my entire life, only what I felt wasn't the excitement I'd always assumed would accompany such an announcement.

Instead, I felt a deep sense of unease.

"How can they do this," my mind raced, "and not stuff it up?"

That may seem a little silly, considering that when it comes to televisual quality It's A Knockout! isn't exactly The Sopranos - where do you go when the show you're remaking/relaunching already featured, as Ariel so sagely noted yesterday, families dressed as giant peanuts running around a giant salt shaker? ("Assaulted Peanuts"! Take that, Aaron Sorkin!)

Ten have the reboot planned for summer TV, which means it won't have to worry about ratings (though if society's slow but steady slide into the intellectual doldrums is any indication, It's A Knockout! would probably push Two & A Half Men off the top of the ratings without trouble).

It'll be hosted, in part, by HG Nelson, so we can at least hope for commentry of the quality that characterised the best iterations of his and Roy Slaven's more-than-occasionally brilliant The Games:



We'll have to wait until the summer holidays to see if my long-held dream of watching true blue Aussie battlers pummel each other into a swimming pool (etc) turns out to be a dream come true, or a waking nightmare.

If it's the latter, I'll be taking challenging the Ten board to a few light-hearted games of Icebergs.

Don't worry, guys, it'll be "fun".