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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As the new age of ITV co-operation started to bear fruit in 1984, further promises were made. Granada, still resistant to Birt’s demands to move an episode of Coronation Street to Friday nights, did at least pledge to produce a new soap opera that could be used to kickstart the weekend schedules. Albion Market was slated to appear in 1985 and to Birt sounded like the perfect solution; playing on Fridays and Sundays all the signs were that the series would be a ratings tonic for ITV’s weekend schedules.
The follow through of new programmes, and in particular dramas offered up some intriguing new Saturday night offerings, as well as the return of some old favourites. The final series of LWT’sThe Gentle Touch was keen to retain the toughness that won the programme much acclaim. “There is a new hard edge to The Gentle Touch when it returns to ITV this Saturday,” reported the TV Times in 1984. “Jill Gascoigne back on duty for her fifth year as Det Insp Maggie Forbes, says the series ‘has got tougher, and so has Maggie’”. The previous run had concluded with Forbes being caught up in a grenade explosion. As a result, this new series intended to focus on how the experience had impacted the DI, making her an even more brittle character. On the face of it, such a tough drama seemed out of place on television’s most frivolous night of the week.
Yet it wasn’t only the series’ hard demeanour that set it aside from the norm, its willingness to tackle important contemporary issues endeared it to a wide audience. One reviewer was moved to comment, “intriguingly, it is what feminist critic B. Ruby Rich would have called ‘projectile’: A male writer, Terence Feely, develops a female character, Maggie Forbes, thus spreading false concepts on the nature of womanhood and confirming male prejudices of women”. It is difficult to think of many other contemporary, popular Saturday night dramas that would draw such an observation from a critic. Nonetheless, the popularity of The Gentle Touch continued unabated throughout its fifth year with crowds of people turning up to location shoots to chant “Maggie, Maggie” at Gascoigne, while 14.1 million viewers tuned in to watch ‘Exit Laughing’ (the final episode of the series), making The Gentle Touch the second most watched programme of the week. This wasn’t entirely unprecedented. In 1982 it had secured the second highest ratings ever achieved for an LWT drama with 18.1 million viewers.
Given such success, it is strange that LWT chose to abandon the format and allow TVS the opportunity to include the character of Maggie Forbes in their new action show, CATS Eyes. Perhaps, Forbes’ fate was entwined within the new relationship fostering between the two companies.
Meanwhile, in the same week the final series of The Gentle Touch started broadcasting, the BBC’s own female cop show Juliet Bravo found its way back to Saturday night television screens, also for a fifth time. With Anna Carteret now assuming the lead role, it performed admirably, surpassing even The Gentle Touch’s own efforts by achieving 14.2 million viewers for the 24 November episode, ‘Resolution’. Buoyed by the fact drama still seemed to have a place on Saturday nights, and perhaps attempting to find an elusive mainstream hit that would not attract the ire of politicians and critics, the BBC produced a number of new Saturday evening dramas in 1984.
Driving Ambition came from the pen of Juliet Bravo writer Paula Milne. She would later go on to produce a number of respected television dramas such as Die Kinder (1990), The Politician’s Wife (1995)and The Fragile Heart (1996), and would in 2001 be described by critic Mark Lawson as “one of the best television dramatists”. In 1984 though, Milne was known as the creator of the BBC’s twice-weekly hospital drama series Angels. Running from 1976 to 1983, the hospital soap opera had attracted at its peak 20.9 million viewers in October 1979 (although this figure was undoubtedly inflated due to the ITV strike that ran throughout the autumn of that year). Angels had covered a number of interesting and provocative issues but was still most often regarded as a cosily familiar television programme. However, Milne had established a reputation as the writer “who’d proved against all viewing odds that a mass audience really could be gripped and moved by such harrowing topics as infertility and infant handicap”.
Her latest drama concerned a middle-aged housewife’s attempt to make it in the world of saloon car racing. “The stress of my series title … properly belongs not on the Driving, but on Ambition,” explained Milne. “ … I chose saloon car racing partly because it offered scope for humour and danger, but mainly because I knew about it.” Here was another Saturday night drama with much to say about the changing role of women in modern society. “If she is ever to achievein her own right, then now must be the moment,” explained Milne of her character’s plight – “wait any longer and it may be too late … If a pretty 20-year-old tires and fails, people react by saying, ‘Never mind, there’s always next year’. If you’re older and female, and lose, you stand to look extra foolish”.
Driving Ambition performed well enough for the BBC (9.4 million curious viewers tuned in for the first of its eight episodes). It is in many ways a prototype for later popular dramas such as Playing The Field, establishing a sub-genre for dramas portraying mature women rebelling against domesticity and misogyny.
Next Monday: Scope for humour and danger
Anna Carteret, Driving Ambition, Frontpage!, It's Saturday Night, Jill Gascoigne, John Birt, Juliet Bravo, LWT, Paula Milne, The Gentle Touch, TVS
Glenn Aylett
July 28, 2018 at 4:28 pm
CATS Eyes was excellent fun. It was like a cross between The Avengers and Charlie’s Angels, and featured Don Warrington as their boss. Typically you’d have shadowy organisations in places like Gravesend trying to bring down the government, or a war veteran from Plumstead plotting to kill the Japanese ambassador. I really wish something like ITV 3 or 4 would repeat the show.
Richard16378
July 28, 2018 at 7:24 pm
It’s a shame the rights for CATS Eyes are confused by the takeover of the TVS archive & the loss of their paperwork.
Glenn Aylett
July 29, 2018 at 10:47 am
@ Richard 16378, I haven’t seen CATS Eyes repeated since the eighties, but this explains why. It’s a shame as it was quite a unique series, female secret agents thwarting master criminals and terrorists in Kent and South East London, and often very amusing. Also Tracey Ward was like an Avengers girl for the eighties, while Leslie Ash played her more working class, hard bitten colleague, and Gill Gascoigne was excellent as the more mature ex cop.