There is a new TV game show that is going to be run in South Africa
where the contestants are placed in a remote location without anything
except the clothes on their backs, their drivers license and R30,000
(about $3,000) in cash. There are a number of rules but basically the
contestants can do anything they want with the money (but it has to
cover all their expenses e.g. travel, food etc.) and the contestatns
have to end at a pre-determined destination after a 60 hour period. 
The winner of the game is the one that can turn the R30,000 into the
most profit during the 60 hour period. See
http://www.sanlam.co.za/moneygame/ for more information.

My question is does anyone know of other similiar game shows that have
been conducted in other countries and if so is there any information
available on specific ideas that contestants did that were
particularly successful?

There was recently a show in the UK which ran on Channel4 which im
pretty sure ran by the name of "Lost".

3 sets of two friends were all dropped somewhere in Europe (all three
teams a couple of miles apart from each other) with just £200 and the
clothes on their backs. They may also have been allowed a rucksack or
something.

The first thing the contestants had to do was to find out exactly
where they were, and 99 times out of 100 it was a remote, obscure
location, (one show for instance, they were left on a small sub-island
off the coast of a small island which was off the coast of an unknown
and remote coastal village in Northern Russia. How on earth do you get
to london from ther with just £200?

The teams were given as long as possible, and by any means, whether it
be hitch hiking, blagging their way onto a bus or clinging onto the
landing gear of a charter flight(!), and the first team to reach
picadilly circus in London won.


The only thing is.......I cant remember what the winners actually
got!!!!!!!

In British "Lost", the winners got GBP 5,000 and the chance to play
the game all over again as returning champions. From memory, one team
managed to win two games in a row but lost third time round.
(Incidentally, there was also a short-lived version of "Lost" in the
USA and there may have been one in other countries, too.)

I'm not an accredited Researcher, but have written some of the reviews
for the UK Game Show Page ( http://www.qwertyuiop.co.uk/gs/ ) and am
happy to tell you what I know for free to thank you for bringing the
Sanlam Money Game to my attention. (I'll be sharing news of it with
the alt.tv.game-shows newsgroup! They would probably also be
interested in your question.) :-)

Somewhat closer to the original principle is "Wheeler Dealers", which
had four episodes on the UK's "BBC 2" channel in 1998-9. This didn't
include the "you don't know where you are" and "you've got to get to a
specific place by a specific time" aspects of the game and furthermore
limited the contestants to trading in one specific type of commodity
(fish one show, antiques the other). From memory, the technique with
antiques seemed to be to buy things in a part of the country where
people are relatively poor and so prices are low and then sell them in
a part of the country where people are relatively rich. Fish proved
harder to make money from, but the tactic seemed to be to buy them
from fish markets in the morning and then to try to sell them to
restaurants later. (Or to buy salmon and sell salmon sandwiches.) You
can get more information about the show at
http://www.qwertyuiop.co.uk/gs/atoz/programmes/w/wheeler_dealers/index.htm
.

A little more freeform was the first episode of "The Wager", a
short-lived series on Channel 4 in which a team of teenagers were
challenged to turn GBP 100 into GBP 1000 in a short period of time.
The show was IMHO disinteresting because the teenagers were unable to
come up with any particularly interesting plans to achieve this - most
of their plans seemed to revolve around getting their friends to pay
them sums of money in return for doing embarrassing things on TV. I
can drag my tape of this episode out and go through it in detail if
you insist, but I'd rather not :-)

There are buy-it-cheap-sell-it-expensive antiques shows from time to
time in the UK ("Bargain Hunt", "Car Boot Challenge" and so on). I'm
not sure whether they exist in other countries or not but would
suspect so. I believe the US has a version of "The Great Antiques
Hunt" along these lines but nothing else similar. Certainly there have
been no major shows run on these lines (source: Encyclopedia of TV
Game Shows vol. 2 plus paying attention to alt.tv.game-shows for
years).

A quick look at the Australian Game Show Homepage reveals nothing like
that, but it's hardly comprehensive.

Interesting topic! I look forward to comments from people from other
countries, particularly those with non-English-language game shows.

Thanks for the comments, dickoon and johnrobbo. Much appreciated.