114. It was of a standard frankly well below what the public would want

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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?

The 1997-98 series of Noel’s House Party offered the BBC no respite from its recent run of bad form on Saturday nights.  It included half-hearted new items, such as the terminally unfunny Crinkley Bottom ‘soap’, and in November, another trip across the pond with a show from Universal Studios in Florida. However it was obvious that something was going seriously wrong as, shortly after the American trip, it was announced that producer Guy Freeman was leaving the programme – cue another round of newspaper sniping. Things bumped along until Christmas, and then on Saturday 3 January 1998, the situation reached rock bottom as it was announced that there would be no programme as scheduled that evening.

It turned out that Noel had refused to appear because, in his words, “It was of a standard frankly well below what the public would want”. Instead a compilation was hastily substituted in the slot and frantic negotiations began between Edmonds and the BBC. Later in the week it was announced that there had been a truce and, after an interim programme consisting of mostly old material with live links, the series was back. Yet clearly, when the presenter announces that their show is no good, you begin to wonder why you should watch. While it made it to the end of the series intact, the problems resurfaced when the Daily Mirror published the contents of a leaked memo from Edmonds airing his grievances about the show – summarised by the paper as “Noel blames ex-staff for show’s ratings slump … He brands guests as C- and D-list celebs … Bosses have no feel for comedy, except him”.

“As damage limitation goes, it was as pathetic as it gets,” claimed Noel. “It gave everyone the opportunity to have a pop at me personally, at the entertainment department and at the BBC generally”. Yet despite this, Noel continued to complain about how bad things had got. Picking over the bones of the last run, he said “We’d made some basic mistakes. There was Crinkley Bottom: The Soap, expensive and not funny; we did daft things like going over to Florida, which strained the budget and was, well, embarrassing”. That was certainly the case, but it perhaps wasn’t the sort of thing you wanted the host of a show to be saying when they were supposed to be enticing you to watch. However the next run was going to be different, claimed Noel, with items “others would stretch out over whole programmes”.

Some years later Noel would reflect that “in the final years of House Party, I remember people starting to say, ‘Oh the Gotchas aren’t quite so good’.  And they were absolutely right in most cases.  And what was the reason?  We didn’t have the budget.  These were hugely expensive things to do.  And when people watch television today, particularly Saturday night television, they should just bear in mind the budgets aren’t there.  You know, the budgets that were there for The Two Ronnies are the equivalent of a whole series of Changing Rooms.”

The promised new items in the next series of House Party failed to hit the mark, with games like ‘Sofa Soccer’, going under the same name and the same sort of format as featured on Bruce Forsyth’s ill-fated Big Night 20 years earlier. Meanwhile NTV was reformatted to become ‘You’re On Your Own’, sending its hapless victims to Alcatraz or the Antarctic for a week, which was just nasty. What really hurt the programme, though, was Noel himself. We now all knew there was a barely-disguised loathing between Noel and the Beeb, and the awful publicity made the excitement and entertainment ring completely hollow. There was an air of desperation and unpleasantness about the whole thing. Viewing figures dipped still further, and eventually it was felt things couldn’t carry on. Eventually in February 1999, an announcement was finally made.

And so, at 7.50pm on Saturday 21 March 1999, came this … “It’s an overworked expression when people say it’s the end of an era, but for BBC television, for the entertainment department, for me, and possibly you, it really is the end of an era. I hope your memory will be very kind to us – after 169 – bye”.

“I always say the first five years were the happiest,” said Edmonds in 2004, “because by and large the identity didn’t change.  And then we started to tinker with it and play around.  But the reality, and now we can see it 10 years on, is that in ’95 television was changing very rapidly indeed.  And if I could live my life again, yeah I’d like to have ended House Party then.  Could it have come back after a rest?  Who knows?  But that  first five years of about a 100 show was jolly good television, you know.  It was jolly good family entertainment … I tell you, the buzz of walking out when House Party was at the height of its popularity, you couldn’t get tickets for it – all the tickets went for the whole year in one block.  To walk out there and know that we had the most successful entertainment show on television was just unbelievable.  You know, I’ll never walk out into a cup final, but that was my cup final, every Saturday.  It was very exciting.”

After filling six months a year, for eight years, Noel’s House Party was gone and in its place there was a gaping chasm. So what now.

Next Monday: Waxing an ape is my ambition