Former news journalist who found TV fame in the 1980s as presenter of Game for a Laugh and Going for Gold

Henry Kelly, who has died aged 78, was a hard-nosed Irish journalist who reported on the Troubles in Northern Ireland before finding television fame as a presenter of ITV’s Saturday evening light-entertainment programme Game for a Laugh, which fashioned itself as a “people show”.

Viewers and the studio audience were declared to be the stars – game for a laugh and at the centre of the action, which included challenges and pranks. A regular game had an audience member sitting in the “pie chair” and given an almost impossible task – if they failed, they would be on the receiving end of extra-foamy custard pies delivered by extendable mechanical arms with hands on the end.