15. Older men, doing school boy tricks

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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?

“Nothing on television so exercises the critics as the game shows,” wrote Laurie Taylor and Bob Mullan in their book Uninvited Guests: Intimate Secrets of Television and Radio, and Game For A Laugh exercised its fair share of critics from day one. Much of the censure took the show to task for its exploitation of people’s emotional frailty or for the programme’s perceived irresponsibility. One item, in which members of the audience were invited to inhale nitrous oxide, came under criticism for encouraging viewers to partake in dangerous activities. In addition, the IBA was called in to investigate complaints that on one show, a six-year old girl told an “offensive” story. However, in the main Game For A Laugh was well received by its audience. It had a particular appeal to youngsters (with Peter Fiddick identifying it in 1982 as one of the 10 most watched programmes by children) and informed much of the Monday morning playground debate in schools around the country.

Game For A Laugh appealed to the Saturday evening television viewer. Issues of taste, decency and intellectual content (that were to prove more contentious when the show was moved to Sunday nights) seemed to matter less in the middle of TV’s glitziest night of the week.

However, this very particular relationship between viewer and programme and schedule, didn’t prevent some of the audience building up a strong reaction to Jeremy Beadle. Previously best known for innocuous BBC children’s factual programmes Eureka and The Deceivers, Beadle quickly became the most popular presenter on Game For A Laugh. However, in time, and particularly as the public grew more and more disaffected with the programme, Beadle provoked an increasingly negative response. “I attracted personal abuse,” he recalled. “I’m not all that thick-skinned and I can be bruised and battered like the next person … I’m not a particularly vain person … but they called me fat and bulgy-eyed and deformed”. While his subsequent programmes, such as Beadle’s About and People Do the Funniest Things would reinforce Beadle’s status as a reviled public figure, there is no doubt that this persona was forged on the back of Game For A Laugh.

Anti-Beadle sentiment reached its zenith in the mid-late 1990s, during which time he became the very epitome of all that the public purported to despise. In one poll, the lover of facts and practical jokes found himself second only to Saddam Hussein as Britain’s most hated man. Happily, in later years the public’s antipathy dissolved. There appears to have been little about Beadle the man to actually dislike. We are left then, to consider the strange relationship between the viewer and those who front popular Saturday night television programmes. “I think we do live in an envy society, fuelled by the press that wants to sell papers,” reflected Beadle some years later. “It’s very easy to give people labels and good news labels doesn’t sell papers. Noel Edmonds, for example is a formidable presenter. There were years when I was on for 52 weeks a year and Noel was on for 26. Well, you know, I wouldn’t watch Elvis Presley for 52 weeks a year.”

But apart from their ubiquity, was there something else about the role of Beadle and Noel Edmonds – and others of their kind – that set them up for hatred? Was Beadle a manifestation of our own self-loathing at finding ourselves enjoying what we were consistently reminded by the critics to be mindless, and “cruel” television? For Beadle, the most plausible theory was that viewers would feel guilty for laughing at other people’s misfortunes and rather than blame themselves, they’d pour scorn on the perpetrators. For producer Michael Hurll though, there was a shift in public opinion that took place. “Before, the general view was, ‘oh that’s funny, they’ve just caught someone out’, but that changed [to a resentment that Beadle and Edmonds] were making a living out of making fun of people,” he says. Hurll also believes that Edmonds and Beadle continuing to ply their trade, while getting older, didn’t help. “They were older men, doing school boy tricks. Perhaps the public thought they should have grown up.”

Although he claimed the negative view of him was largely created by the press and not shared by the general audience, it is difficult not to feel some sympathy for the position Beadle found himself in. “I hated it, and felt for him when he was described as the most loathed man on television,” says Noel Edmonds. “That was so unfair and he dealt with it with great dignity.”

Game For A Laugh’s first series concluded in 1981 with a spectacular achievement. “By 5 December, Larry Grayson and … Isla St Clair, who had had a good run hosting The Generation Game, had announced that the time had come when they both felt they needed to do something else, and they were quitting the programme,” recalls original Generation Game host Bruce Forsyth. “Their last edition was to be recorded on 17 December … The Gen Game’s ratings had recently slumped against Game For A Laugh”. For Beadle, this represented mission accomplished, for Boyd – validation of his principles of popular television; and for LWT – the realisation they could survive the financial turbulence of the early 1980s by applying the Game For A Laugh formula to other slots in the weekend schedules. This philosophy would prove instrumental in shaping popular modern Saturday night television, as well as providing LWT with a reputation for “low quality” entertainment that it would never quite manage to shake.

Next: “Killing the Golden Goose”