Campaign to launch live event version of Fun House featuring Margate born twins Melanie and Martina
Published: 00:01, 08 July 2017
A campaign to run a live event version of the popular TV show Fun House has been launched.
The CITV show ran for 10 years from 1989 until 1999, and was presented by Pat Sharp and twins Melanie and Martina Grant from Margate.
The twin cheerleaders supported the two competing teams - Melanie on red and Martina on yellow.
Martina, now Martina Freebury, said: “Getting the job when we were 16 was a dream.
"You know you leave school and all our friends go I want to get married, I’m going to do this, I’m going to do that - and we were going off to do Fun House.
"We had that job already lined up so that was really cool.
"So we went straight from school into doing Fun House. It was amazing, what an opportunity."
The idea to re-run the fun came from so called Fun House mega-fan Glen Middleham and his friends and colleagues.
They have since been working with the original creative team to design an authentic experience.
The only place to get hold of tickets is on the IndieGoGo campaign page, where different perks are rewarded for pledges of support.
This includes a ball signed by Pat Sharp for £10, which will be put in the ball pit and if found can be taken home, to a £300 pledge which will give you a standard team ticket for six players.
Martina said: “We are so excited. We got a call from Pat saying some fans had got together and wanted to bring it back.
"So we were like yeah, definitely!
"We had a meeting in London and they had a massive folder of all this history of research that they’d done and drawings and layouts of how it’s going to be if we’d like to jump on board and we were like yes absolutely."
In true Fun House style, teams of six red vs six yellow will play wacky games, race Fun Karts, tackle the ball pit and take on Fun House itself in an experience which is planned to last more than an hour and a half.
If successful, the campaign will see the event version of Fun House open in London early in 2018.
But this time it’s not for kids - it will be open just for adults age 16 and over.
Martina said: “It’s an opportunity to have a bit of fun, bring a bit of Fun House in your life if maybe you were too young to go on before or didn’t have the opportunity to go on.”
The initial plan means it’ll only be open as long as it takes to service all of the tickets made available via the campaign page.
If fully funded, those who pledged for VIP rewards will have their experience hosted by the original crew - Pat Sharp and the twins.
Melanie said: "“It’s amazing that we still do get quite a lot of work from the show even though it actually end. It is repeated every now and again on Challenge.
"Since we did this launch though I have gained a lot more followers on Twitter like even Rick Astley”
The target is £650,000, and if the project is not fully funded people will get their money back according to the campaign page.
So far, more than £48,000 has been raised by more than 560 backers.
Melanie said: "“We’ve done well considering of the time scale it’s been already, I do check it regularly.
"It’d be great to do it."
Both twins, 45, still live in Kent with Melanie in Ramsgate and Martina in Folkestone.
Martina, who lives with her husband and two children Stanley, 5, and Mabel, 2, said: “My husband used to watch it and he still now sometimes says to me ‘I can’t believe I’m married to a Fun House twin and have kids with them’.
"It still surprises myself and Mel quite a lot how much everyone remembers it and how much everyone loved it.
"We still do coperate gigs with Pat, we do universities, we’ve done Butlins a couple of times at Bognor.
"The popularity of it still stuns me, it does take me back. We are that little bit older, we never took anything for granted.
"But even now as we’re older, with children ourselves, we’re like oh my god, it is still so popular.
"It’s nice to be part of something that still is popular."
After Fun House finished, the twins had a hit album in Japan called ATT - A Twin Thing.
The twins said: "We did the recording here in London but everything else over there.
"When we finished that, we were getting a little bit older and we left our management company. Although our album was in Japan we had management in London.
"We couldn’t get a contract here unfortunately in the UK so we went and recorded an album that was released in Japan."
#BringBackFunHouse by placing a pledge here.
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Katie Davis