Also:
- It's Saturday Night
- 2. An autograph before you go
- 3. A new kind of game show
- 4. A rising exasperation with the quantity of dirt
- 5. The whole thing suddenly fell apart
- 6. Synthetic propensity
- 7. It was destined to be an anti-climax
- 8. This is your show now
- 9. The awesome scale of our wastefulness
- 10. Hands up those who couldn't care less
- 11. Together We’ll Be Ok
- 12. Decide the shape of ITV in the 1980s
- 13. Alan is too commercial
- 14. It worked like a dream
- 15. Older men, doing school boy tricks
- 16. Killing the Golden Goose
- 17. People love us to be sexy
- 18. The manure is worth more than the cattle
- 19. They were big in the States and we noted that
- 20. I’m still aggressive and I’m still handing out the insults
- 21. A new style of lunatic humour
- 22. The Habitat-bean-bag-hessian-wallpaper brigade
- 23. Thoroughly sinful
- 24. All carrots should be scraped, sliced and cooked
- 25. Back then it was radical stuff
- 26. Whatever they do, we can do it better
- 27. You'll have to take us as you find us
- 28. Entertainment that keeps on the move
- 29. It's the public that has to pay
- 30. The last we saw of either of them was their sad faces
- 31. Just shoot the bastard
- 32. Britain could clearly be facing its darkest hour
- 33. Any enthusiasm we may have had for continuing discussions is waning
- 34. It was considered by LWT and then put in a bottom drawer
- 35. Watch the redoubtable Terry take off
- 36. I thought it might be terrible and I wouldn’t enjoy it at all
- 37. Kamikaze Mastermind
- 38. We haven’t moved into luxury
- 39. We are investing in people
- 40. Delivered impeccably
- 41. He has to allow you to do your bit
- 42. All the anticipation of the great emotive point
- 43. If you want Russ Abbot to do it, then you have to accept me and my ideas
- 44. Let’s get straight into this
- 45. Unedifying Greed
- 46. We’ve got the fucking lot!
- 47. Scope for humour and danger
- 48. Pure Megablast
- 49. There’s lots of killing, but not much else
- 50. I wanted to make sure it was going to be disastrous
- 51. Oh dear – Auntie’s playing bingo!
- 52. A Shrivelled Little Thing
- 53. I shouldn’t have accepted it
- 54. We would be the spoilsports
- 55. The Most Sexless Person In Television
- 56. They’d have strung me up if I hadn’t chosen him
- 57. Is there some way to play with the internal constituent parts?
- 58. The most important entertainment programme of my time
- 59. The plumply pretty female duo
- 60. The audience just sort of started to freeze on him
- 61. More pilots than British Airways
- 62. There's going to come a time when you'll have to go to the BBC
- 63. A slightly pretentious manifesto
- 64. Things Look Very Precarious
- 65. It’s no good doing all the same old people all the time
- 66. That’s just not funny Bobby, it's corny - just don’t do that
- 67. Well bottom’s not funny
- 68. We Are The Funnymen
- 69. The powers that be listened to Denis
- 70. Stretchers never go up stairs
- 71. I was in obscurity until this series
- 72. I don’t care if he doesn’t like me
- 73. There’s such a passion for nostalgia right now
- 74. I Heard A Seat In The Stalls Go ‘Gerdonk!'
- 75. This is your show, folks, and I do mean you
- 76. There’s good news for perplexed fans of 3-2-1!
- 77. Taking on Blind Date would be a real challenge
- 78. You wanna bet on it?
- 79. The yarns worked their tried and tested magic
- 80. The Charge-And-Shout Brigade
- 81. I sat for a moment in silence, then turned in my chair and left the stage
- 82. We just weren't allowed into UK terrestrial television
- 83. Beadle’s A Prick
- 84. The interviewer always has to know when it's best to keep his or her mouth shut
- 85. Can you come up with a good solution for the Murder Weekend mystery?
- 86. He's not a goody- goody hero
- 87. The Sexism, The Dolly Birds, The Catchphrases
- 88. The feel of Saturday night
- 89. 1990 Who would employ an ex-alky with lowered self-esteem
- 90. It were a right smack in the face
- 91. Look Straight Into My Eyes And Everything Will Be Alright, That's A Promise
- 92. That's the last thing I was expecting, Jim
- 93. The characters and situations are real
- 94. Oh Man, There Go All My Women Fans
- 95. A Double Order of Talent
- 96. If there is an air of spontaneity about it, it’ll be genuine
- 97. NTV brings you ... empty rooms!
- 98. You’re BBC, you shouldn’t be here
- 99. If this doesn’t work out, we’re both snookered!
- 100. The humour of Beadle comes through humiliating people!
- 101. To allow such bilge on TV is an insult to the audience
- 102. Like a cup of cold sick
- 103. A litre of gin, ecstasy and crack cocaine
- 104. A reliable tent pole for Saturday evenings
- 105. It is in the cutlery drawer
- 106. Welcome to the new Saturday night
- 107. Congratulations, you have got the fucking Gen Game
- 108. The programme has done extremely badly and will be dropped after this series
- 109. Building the excitement and tension to a crescendo
- 110. He gives us our spirit of unity; we’d all like to strangle him
- 111. The worst programme currently on terrestrial television
- 112. I award the city state of Milton Keynes 100 credits!
- 113. There’s nothing that makes people scream, ‘Did you see that?’
- 114. It was of a standard frankly well below what the public would want
- 115. Waxing An Ape Is My Ambition
- 116. Don’t Get Mad, Get Even
- 117. The penalty shoot-out is the greatest ever endgame
- 118. 200 black boxes are strapped to the back of a cross-section of the nation
- 119. Better For You, Better For All Of Us
- 120. I mean who on earth thought that was a good idea?
- 121. I’m sure the tune was in there somewhere
- 122. This Time, You Decide
- 123. King of trash, that’s me
- 124. It’s about rejection now
- 125. They lost what Popstars was all about
- 126. Win the ads
- 127. A name in search of a series
- 128. Getting grief from the papers
- 129. I’m so pleased to be back on television
- 130. Saturday nights haven't been this interesting for 10 years
- 131. It’s the Usual Nonsense
- 132. The trip of a lifetime
- Epilogue: Why Haven't You Written a Series of Articles on Tuesday Night Telly?
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While the acts breaking through to British television in 1980 were, in the main, well established live performers, their ascension to the arena of mass entertainment still represented an injection of new blood. Yet few were creating formats unique to the medium in which they were appearing. Conversely, the BBC’s Jim’ll Fix It was a kind of entertainment that could only exist on television. Beginning with a plea by Jimmy Savile for letters on a 1975 edition of Nationwide, 1980 was the heyday of one of the BBC’s most successful ever programmes, with over 19 million viewers tuning in to watch a collection of peculiar vignettes spun out week after week. Savile claimed the show’s popularity was down to his decision to limit the run of each series, thus leaving the public wanting more. Being scheduled just before The Generation Game would have helped too, but programmes such as Jim’ll Fix It and The Generation Game suggested a different kind of future for British Saturday night television, one in which format became king.
Born in Hackney on 12 April 1948, Jeremy Beadle was a “formats” person, and in 1980 he was working up an idea he had called The People Show. Partly based on the American series Candid Camera, Beadle had completed a pilot episode (under the title of Gotcha!) for the BBC featuring Paul Daniels, Pamela Stephenson and David Copperfield. However it was be rejected by head of light entertainment, Bill Cotton for being too “vulgar”. “Who knows?” reflects Beadle. “Had Bill Cotton said yes to Gotcha! I probably would have remained a writer and never have gone on to do Game For A Laugh.”
Working with Jeremy Fox (co-creator of The Krypton Factor), Beadle further refined The People Show format and looked around for prospective buyers at ITV. The end result was an 80-page document detailing exactly how ITV would finally break The Generation Game and the BBC’s hold over Saturday night television. Now LWT’s head of light entertainment, Alan Boyd responded positively to the proposal, and set about tweaking it further.
US TV producer Michael Hill was brought in to help Beadle and Boyd tap into a different kind of production sensibility. “We learnt how to dynamically package a show,” says Boyd. “The use of music. The use of the cut rate. That was American training. Those guys forced us to edit differently. They forced us to use music. They forced us to use a cut ratio. If we had a mistake they said take advantage of an error. We were slightly simple in those days, compared with them.”
At the end of this process all parties were happy, however two factors remained outstanding; first of all Boyd had strong reservations about the title – this was easily fixed. The second issue though, was one that had preoccupied LWT for much of the year –the renewal of their ITV franchise.
The 31 May 1980 edition of TV Times set the scene for the interested reader: “At six o’clock this Tuesday, June 3, at the Grand Hotel in St. Helner, Jersey, history will be made. That is when the first of a series of ‘final public meetings’ will be held by the Independent Broadcasting Authority, to help decide the shape of ITV in the 1980s. The contracts – licences to broadcast – of the present ITV regional companies run out next year. All of them have applied for a renewal, but they are being challenged by a number of new companies. For the London franchises, for instance, both London Weekend Television and Thames Television are being challenged by a consortium called London Independent Television, led by Hughie Green.”
Green’s consortium intended to match the entrepreneurial spirit of Frost’s bid of some 13 years earlier. It’s not difficult to imagine that a great deal of pomp would have accompanied his proposal. However, in truth there was an inherent lack of credibility or originality about the group of people gathered to form LIT. The IBA remarked that “LIT, on paper at least, hardly hangs together as a group with any clear identity, yet it is applying for the major franchises in the ITV system”. The proposed programme line-up was extremely dubious and suggested that LIT were pitching for a seven-day franchise (which, although considered by the IBA, was never actually on offer). In general, there was an air of improvisation, as if Green felt his own formidable personality would suffice in smoothing over the gaps.
Meanwhile, LWT and Jeremy Potter were ensuring no stone was left unturned in their effort to secure a successful second term. Treating the whole thing like a political election, they set about attempting to woo the audience. Eight meetings took place during 1979, with a final gathering in 1980. The events were designed to allow the general public to air their concerns or comments regarding the station’s output. Inevitably, criticisms were voiced, but by now the old guards of LWT, as well as the IBA, were aware that bringing together a cross section of the British television audience and to talk about the current state of the medium almost always resulted in negative comment. Cutting through the low-level criticism, it became clear that there would be no significant public objection should LWT’s contract be renewed. Indeed in the opinion of the IBA, LWT had developed “diverse good qualities over recent years,” and while Southern and Westward lost their franchises to TVS and TSW, LWT – with the award of this new contract – finally achieved legitimacy as an ITV company. Of course, the latest round of awards also saw the creation of a new breakfast franchise that was spectacularly won by old LWT stalwarts, Peter Jay and David Frost.
Glenn A
November 6, 2017 at 8:19 pm
Fair play to TV Cream for mentioning Jim’ll Fix It. Obviously the article was written before the Jimmy Savile scandal broke, but to try and pretend his show never existed would be like writing a history of the Second World War and ignoring the Holocaust. For all Savile was a vile monster and his shows will never see the light of day again, Jim’ll Fix It was a hugely popular show on Saturday nights and is much a part of this narrative as The Generation Game.
Glenn A
November 10, 2017 at 11:19 am
Hughie Green winning the London weekend franchise from LWT would probably have been a disaster. No doubt he would have revived all his old formats, ran LIT like a dictatorship, and probably had a staff revolt and LIT’s contract withdrawn by the IBA. LWT was probably the safest bet and after 1980, with new formats like Game For A Laugh and Dempsey and Makepeace, ended the BBC’s domination of Saturday nights forever. Even now, the Saturday night spoils seem evenly divided, with ITV’s schedule of talent shows( Hughie Green would have loved Britain’s Got Talent), singing/reality shows, talk shows and game shows proving popular, while the BBC’s mix of drama, dancing, intelligent game shows like Pointless and football still does well.