53. I shouldn’t have accepted it

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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?

LWT’s head of comedy, Humphrey Barclay was growing increasingly concerned. Much effort had been made in the late 1970s to sort out the station’s factual output, but as the purse strings tightened in the early 1980s, LWT focussed on light entertainment. Drama and comedy suffered, with the station’s sitcom output dropping from 23 hours per year in 1977 to just five by 1984. Barclay blamed Birt for this seeming dereliction comedy heritage, an accusation that Birt wouldn’t deny, commenting in later years that he was “less successful with LWT’s situation comedy” output than he might have hoped. Barclay resented Birt’s strong bureaucratic tendencies, and in particular the way he expected all business to be transacted via the appropriate hierarchical channels. For Barclay this meant having to go through David Bell (then controller of entertainment) to get to Birt.

For his part, Birt thought Barclay to be “intense and committed,” yet found his sitcoms to be lagging behind the rest of the station’s output. “Some of his comedies – like Hot Metal – played successfully for LWT … But most of Humphrey’s peak-time sitcoms had proved too delicate for the rough battlegrounds of the weekend schedule, and had been neither greatly watched nor – our research showed – much appreciated by their audiences … My relationship with Humphrey deteriorated as I rejected proposal after proposal from him as being insufficiently strong enough for peak time.”

So it was perhaps as a reaction to accusations of being too delicate that Barclay pitched an idea for a new sitcom that would – in effect – act as a continuation of the bawdy Confessions films of the 1970s. “I don’t think there’s enough money in the world to make me do another Confessions film,” remarked Robin Askwith in 1984. “I just don’t want to go stale. But when I was first offered the part in Confessions of a Window Cleaner, I turned it down because I really did think it was absolute rubbish. To be blunt, I think I was the major reason it was successful – because I really played my character as a wide-eyed innocent.” Bottle Boys– with its pedigree of Barclay and Powell – might be the perfect vehicle, Askwith thought, to take his career forward.

Penned by Powell, the premise was straightforward (and in many ways reminiscent of LWT’s earlier success On The Buses): Askwith’s Dave Deacon was the central character, described as “the accident-prone joker in a pack of manic milkmen who cause chaos on – and off – their rounds”. While there would be no nudity, the series would definitely evoke the knockabout humour so prevalent in the Confessions films. Over the course of filming, Askwith would find himself donning both a chicken’s suit and the front end of a pantomime cow. “It’s a dynamite series,” he commented. “It was just the formula I was looking for. Slapstick comedy is my strength, and this series gives me the opportunity to go around causing mayhem. And that is what I do best”.

Broadcast at 7.30 pm on Saturday evenings, Bottle Boys’ first series performed unremarkably – reaching 9.3 million viewers. Yet the critical reaction was remarkable. In an age when LWT was beginning to explore the importance of audience demographics, Bottle Boyswas designed to appeal to the lowest common denominator. “Out of a deteriorating relationship silly things happen,” reflected Birt. “Bottle Boys should not have been offered to me by Humphrey and I shouldn’t have accepted it”. He would later go on to add “this coarse, witless production about milkmen embarrassed both of us”. The series, while not as offensive as either Mind Your Language or Love Thy Neighbour, was still brimming with unpleasant racist and sexist stereotypes. Reputedly despised by ITV’s inner circle of executives, it seemed only to make it to a second run thanks to the fact that those episodes were filmed prior to the broadcast of series one. That Bottle Boys would face the axe was a crushing inevitability as soon as it aired.

It was the last straw for Barclay who promptly resigned from LWT. Askwith too, suffered by association, reinforcing the belief that the performer was a relic from a bygone age. Powell alone seemed initially unaffected by the vitriol that the television industry directed at the show. Perhaps immune to such reaction since his Mind Your Language days, he went on to pen some episodes of the moderately successful Thames sitcom Full House and later on Slinger’s Day (also for Thames). Eventually though, Powell did find himself out of favour with television executives commenting that “unlike any other specialisation within the industry, once a comedy writer reaches middle age, he or she is deemed to have lost the capability to amuse. Novelists, dramatists, composers, painters or dress designers, are never considered ‘too old’ to work, but in contrast once a comedy writer reaches middle age … that’s it: they’ve ‘lost it’; well, certainly, according to some of our new policy-makers, at the top.

“But this is nonsense. It is the TV executives, themselves who are out of touch. Viewers are no longer excited by cookery programmes, gardening, make-overs, reality programmes, and quiz shows. They want to be amused and entertained by programmes capable of tickling their laughter glands: hence the popularity of old sit-com repeats, on cable and satellite, and the big viewing figures they notch-up, in the ratings”. At the time of writing, Bottle Boys has still to find a home on any cable or satellite station. However, the series does live on – in a sense. Radio Times voted it the worst sit-com of all time, and Bottle Boys came in at number 97 in Channel 4’s 100 Greatest Moments From TV Hell.

Next Monday: We would be the spoilsports