Cluedo is an Australian whodunnit game show based on the British series of the same name and inspired by the 1949 board game Cluedo. It was produced by Crawford Action Time (a collaboration of Crawford Productions and Action Time) in conjunction with Nine Network. The show saw a studio audience view a dramatised scenario, then complete rounds of interrogating the six suspects on stage in character and viewing further evidence through a pre-recorded criminal investigation. Players then deduced the solution to the murder case using a trio of computer-linked electronic dials (whodunnit, whatdunnit, and wheredunnit), and after the solution was revealed the first person who had locked-in this combination won a prize.

Cluedo lasted two series from 1992 to 1993 and was presented by Ian McFadyen. It aired on the Nine Network and WIN Television network. No DVD or digital release has been made and only bootleg copies are known to exist, however, televised episodes and scripts are housed at National Film and Sound Archive (NFSA) in Canberra, while other Cluedo materials including press clippings have been gifted to the Australian Film Institute (AFI) Research Collection in Melbourne.

In 1991, Australian media company Crawford Productions partnered with British quiz-and-gameshow production company Action Time in conjunction with Channel Nine to produce an Australian televisualisation of the Cluedo franchise. Cluedo was "loosely based" on the board game and adapted from the British TV game show Cluedo (1990-3). There were many predecessors to its creation.

The original 1949 board game, invented by Anthony E. Pratt and simultaneously manufactured by Waddington Games (UK) and Parker Brothers (US), saw players control six guests with colour-based names who move through Tudor Close country house, making suggestions to deduce who murdered host Dr. Black or Mr. Boddy respectively, in which room, and with which weapon. By the 1990s, it was described as "ever-popular" and "famous", and The Age noted it was "the world's second most popular board game". Liverpool Echo described it as a "tried-and-tested...brilliant old Christmas stand-by game", while Aberdeen Press and Journal described it as "addictive". The first real-life Cluedo characters were the 1963 Swiss and 1972 US board game editions, which featured actors on the box and cards, replacing earlier editions which had only shown graphic depictions of the suspects.

The concept of a whodunnit gameshow was arguably first developed by writer Kit Denton for Australian production company NLT Productions in the late 1960s, though the project called Whodunnit never made it beyond the outline and script stages. In 1972, Jeremy Lloyd and Lance Percival created another program called Whodunnit?, which saw a panel collect clues and guess the identity of culprits after viewing prerecorded footage and interrogating suspects. An "obvious forerunner" to Cluedo, the show was hosted by Jon Pertwee for most of its run and lasted six series.

A live action adaptation of Cluedo was first attempted in 1985 with the US theatrical film Clue, which had since become a cult film despite initial mixed reviews and poor box office performance. One of the "earliest post-literary adaptations", according to Thomas Leitch in Post Script journal, the film both "omit[ted] several distinctive features of the game" such as the cards, the interactive pursuit, and questioning, and "specif[ied] many details the game leaves blank" including characterisation and a definitive solution.

That year, US manufacturer Parker Brothers brought the characters to life in the interactive movie Clue VCR Mystery Game, played in conjunction with the board game, which sold several hundred thousand copies and was possibly the first VCR game. In 1989, Michael Aspel hosted a five-episode televised interactive murder mystery set at a wedding called Murder Weekend, which invited viewers to solve a whodunnit to win a prize; The Times identified it as a direct ancestor of Cluedo.

In the late 1980s and early 1990s, a "minor spate" of game shows were created as conversions of popular puzzle and board games, a trend spurred by the success of new works like Trivial Pursuit. Both the Trivial Pursuit and Cluedo television adaptations would be the brainchild of independent production company Action Time's founder and managing director Stephen Leahy. Leahy had previously spent 16 years at ITV franchisee Granada Television, where according to Head of Entertainment David Liddiment he "built some of the finest quiz and game shows" internally like The Krypton Factor (1977) and Busman's Holiday (1985) rather than the norm of "pinch[ing] American shows". In January 1988, Leahy left to become managing director of Action Time which at the time had just a few commissions and UK game show rights; over the next two years he oversaw a growth period resulting in ownership of rights to 103 games shows worldwide including 27 in the UK, and producing over 20 series for ITV by May 1990. In 1991, Birmingham Mail would describe Action Time as "one of the big export successes in British TV", thanks to Leahy having spotted a gap in the game show market in the 1980s and built an empire. The newspaper believed that Leahy's success since working on The Krypton Factor meant he was "naturally first in the queue on the day Waddingtons released the [television] rights to Cluedo".