58. The most important entertainment programme of my time

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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?

Saturday night television in the 1970s and 1980s belonged jointly to BBC1 and ITV. These two goliaths slugged it out, ensuring BBC2 and, later, Channel 4 never got a look in. Entertainers such as Bruce Forsyth and Bob Monkhouse might flit from BBC1 to ITV and back again, but this only served to further demonstrate the strength of the two channels’ duopoly on Saturday nights. Most weeks, the other two completely opted out of the ratings battle.

For example, a typical Saturday evening on BBC2 in 1984 would begin with a 25-minute documentary on a respected artist, followed by a 55-minute rock concert, perhaps presented by Steve Blacknell. This would then be followed by a long documentary (in the case of BBC2’s schedule on 3 March 1984 a 110-minute Arena: Special on Sunset Boulevard) taking us through to late evening and a foreign, or black-and-white film. Channel 4’s schedule was equally as inhospitable to the casual viewer looking for a dose of light relief.

In fact, during Channel 4’s early years its only concession to populist entertainment on a Saturday evening was the inclusion of an omnibus edition of Brookside (its flagship soap opera) usually at around 5pm. Although this broadcasting decision was revolutionary (marking the first regular same week repeat of a popular drama and flouting the perceived wisdom that British soap operas should not be scheduled on a Saturday night), the impact upon the viewing habits of the Saturday night television audience was insignificant. However, in 1985 Channel 4 almost unexpectedly found itself with a programme that, while only ever attaining around 10{30e2395aaf6397fd02d2c79d91a1fe7cbb73158454674890018aee9c53a0cb96} of Blind Date’s average audience, would prove itself to be influential in the development of Saturday night television.

Ever since 1980, alternative comedians had been creeping onto our screens. This was in part thanks to the tenacity of Paul Jackson, then a producer at the BBC. His seminal two 30-minute episodes of Boom Boom … Out Go The Lights (1980 and 1981), weren’t greatly received at the time (the audience appreciation index for the first show was just 33{30e2395aaf6397fd02d2c79d91a1fe7cbb73158454674890018aee9c53a0cb96}), but gave early television exposure to (amongst others) Rik Mayall, Nigel Planer, Adrian Edmondson, Alexei Sayle and Peter Richardson. Jackson had previously worked on mainstream series such as Cannon and Ball and The Two Ronnies, but throughout the 1980s he would be responsible for not only bringing important new comedy talent to our screens, but for legitimising and updating existing mainstream comedians, including Jasper Carrott (Jackson oversaw the comedian’s reinvention as a relevant and – at times – political comedian on the 1982 series Carrott’s Lib) and Lenny Henry (whose career was effectively re-launched with 1981’s Three Of A Kind).

It was in the pursuit of bringing new comedy to the masses that Jackson really excelled. The Young Ones broadcast in 1982 established a serious appetite for alternative comedy on British television and Jackson followed it up in 1983 with Channel 4’s The Entertainers. This seven-part series was similar in scope to Boom Boom … Out Go The Lights presenting live performances of up and coming alternative comedians. Ben Elton, Chris Barrie, Paul Merton and French and Saunders all appeared (although the episode featuring Dawn and Jennifer had to be transmitted at 11.25pm instead of the usual 8.30pm thanks to the inclusion of the word “clitoris”).

By this time alternative comedians were also gaining exposure on mainstream Saturday evening television. In 1982 Alexei Sayle had enjoyed a short-lived regular slot on Central Television’s OTT while the following year Tony Slattery appeared on Saturday Stayback. In 1984, Hale and Pace appeared regularly on BBC1’s The Laughter Show and featured in Paul Jackson’s next programme for up and coming alternative comedians – Pushing Up Daisies. There was a groundswell of interest in what seemed to be an endless supply of exciting new comedians and they were encroaching upon mainstream areas of television.

Central Television’s Girls On Top was a watershed. Broadcast on ITV in 1985, it represented the first truly post-Young Ones comedy series to appear on Britain’s most mainstream, populist channel. However, earlier in the year another – even more important step in the evolution of alternative comedy had taken place. “The most thrilling, most sublime and important entertainment programme of my time as director of programmes at LWT was Saturday Live,” recalls John Birt. The series owed its genesis to Birt’s desire to attract new and different audiences to LWT (perhaps in a bid to impress the IBA who were then in the middle of their mid-term review of the station’s franchise). To this end he recruited Marcus Plantin from the BBC and asked him to come up with some new programme ideas. Plantin had directed and produced some of the BBC’s most popular series such as Wogan, The Two Ronnies and more, recently,Bob’s Full House. He might have seemed an unusual candidate to foster cutting edge talent, but there was certainly no doubt that Plantin had the experience and talent to handle a live Saturday night television series.

Birt’s desire to innovate appealed to Paul Jackson who pitched an idea for a new live show that would bring the best of the burgeoning London comedy scene to our television screens to form a selection of acts that would be “the best comedy since Beyond The Fringe”. It would also owe more than a little to the hit US series Saturday Night Live. Having proven himself with Carrott’s Lib (which many people in the industry could not believe was broadcast live such was its slickness) there was a confluence of desire and talent at LWT that made Saturday Live inevitable. Birt obviously excited by the idea agreed to a one-off special that would be shown in January 1985 and would serve as a pilot for a potential series proper.

Next Monday: The most important entertainment programme of my time