68. We Are The Funnymen

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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?

Between them it might have seemed that TVS and LWT had the monopoly on mainstream Saturday evening comedy series, yet this was not entirely the case. In Leeds in 1962, Robin Colvill and Graham Walker had got together to form a band. Turning professional in 1967, they endured an ill-fated appearance on Opportunity Knocks (where they reputedly received the most cursory of applauses from the studio audience), and determined that a career as a “straight” musical group was evidently not for them. Introducing comedy performances into their act, the group (with their numbers now swelled thanks to the addition of Maurice Lee and Carl and Albert Sutcliffe) changed their name to the Grumbleweeds, found success on Max Bygrave Meets New Faces and began a long association with Granada Television’s talent spotter extraordinaire Johnny Hamp.

The group secured a children’s series on the BBC in 1973 (The Coal Hole Club) and returned the following year under the simpler name of Grumbleweeds.This was followed with further success on Radio 2 with their The Grumbleweeds comedy series (1979 – 1988). Once again, though Hamp intervened and was instrumental in bringing the troupe back to television in 1983, offering them their own Granada Television one-off special. This led to the establishment of a full series the following year, and by 1986 the Grumbleweeds were embarking on the series number three of The Grumbleweeds Radio Show.Anarchic and diverse, The Grumbleweeds Radio Showwas highly distinctive, not least for the brevity of the sketches. In a typical 30-minute edition the Grumbleweeds were able to include as many as 40 separate skits. “If one joke doesn’t appeal, the next one, delivered a few seconds later, probably will,” explained Hamp, who was instrumental in shaping the series. Indeed, The Grumbleweeds Radio Show was – in respect to pacing – most reminiscent of the earlier Granada comedy series, The Comedians (another programme that Hamp had worked on).

Music too played an important part in shaping The Grumbleweeds Radio Show’s. In fact, all of the group’s songs were recorded in advance of the production of each episode. “These are long days” remarked the Grumbleweeds nominal straight-man Maurice Lee, “some times 12 hours but good fun.” Typical of the complexity of the group’s compositions was the song “We Are The Funnymen” which featured 25 different impressions. While most of these were recorded by founder members Robin Colville and Graham Walker, for the recording of the episode itself it was not uncommon for other members of the band to mime along to the duo’s performances. “We just use each other’s talents” explained Lee. “If I can look like Rolf Harris, and Robin can sound like him, that’s the best way to do it.”

In many respects The Grumbleweeds Radio Show was a Northern version of Russ Abbot’s Madhouse, combining zany humour with quick-fire sketches in a manner similar to the LWT series. Both also offered the audience a litany of characters to latch on to (the Grumbleweeds gave us Wilf “Gasmask” Grimshaw and “the Milky Bar Kid”) as well as impressions of well-known celebrities such as Jimmy Savile. But perhaps the greatest similarity between the two series was their enduring popularity with the audience (The Grumbleweeds Radio Show attracted up to 11.8 million viewers) and in particular, younger viewers.

Unlike Abbot and his fellow inhabitants of the Madhouse though, the Grumbleweeds influence on Saturday night television was to be less pronounced. Their ITV series ran until 1988 (by which time Carl and Albert Sutcliffe had left) and afterwards the group returned to radio with Someone and the Grumbleweeds running from 1989 until 1991. They continued as a three-piece touring clubs and theatres up and down the land until 1998, when (according to their official website) in an attempt to “anticipate future trends and remain one step ahead of the pack, by making exactly the right move at exactly the right time,” the Grumbleweeds reverted back to the original twosome of Colvill and Walker and changed their name to the rather cumbersome but informative “Walker and Colvill from the Grumbleweeds”. “Drawing on all their years of experience and know how, they developed, up dated, and introduced a sparkling new, fast moving act” revealed their website, “embracing the entire spectrum of entertainment, to take them into the millennium with a vengeance. Yet despite the change, the emphasis has remained very firmly placed on music, comedy and impressions. The Grumbleweeds are featuring a much wider range of impersonations in their act, all current favourites and bang up to the minute. New trends are anticipated and new stars put into the act as soon as they achieve success. The act is continually updating its material.”

Next Monday: The powers that be listened to Denis