Feel free to share anything about Hugo på Nye Eventyr (1994) here!

Not only that – at the time in Germany, many phone connections (even with non-rotary phones) would still use pulse dialling, but you needed touch tone to participate in this show (and similar ones). Even if you fulfilled these requirements, however, the reliability was notoriously bad.

I once read an article about another one of these shows (it was a big fad in the 90s), where they admitted that often, it would not work at all and so they had somebody sitting behind the scenes ready to take over and play "for" the phone candidate (trying to guess from the tones what the unfortunate kids were trying to do). Of course, they would never admit this at the time the shows were running

I only remember the buttons wouldn't always work