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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“I’m sick and tired of those same old prizes,” bemoans Peter Holmans. “We’ve got to think of something new”. Self-criticism and angst typified British television in 1981. The industry’s old guard seemed to believe the medium was either becoming too tawdry, too banal or too boring.
Holmans, a freelance quiz show expert, studied Law at Cambridge, wrote the first 125 episodes of Emmerdale Farm, worked on Double Your Money and would later become one of the producers of the innovative Treasure Hunt. However in 1981, he was fighting the quiz show cause on a number of fronts. As the man behind Scottish Television’s Now You See It (with prizes ranging from £70 of Caithness glass to £300 worth of crystal), he was ready to tell anyone who would listen all about the inadequacies of the British quiz show. “We really must get away from prizes like TV sets and holidays for two in Majorca,” he complained. “In America it’s easy. Give them 25,000 dollars and they’re happy. In Britain there’s a feeling we ought to give physical prizes. But how do we make them less boring?
“I’m dead against Sale Of The Century because they’re entirely dismissive of their contestants,” he continued. “We get to know nothing about them. I have the same objection to Blankety Blank … some respect is owed to people who come into television studios to entertain us, often for nothing”. Holmans also had a word to say on question difficulty levels. “I want to test the limits of questions and answers. These shows have been rubbish for far too long – ever since a contestant was asked: ‘Where is the English Channel?’”
In response to his generally critical evaluation, Holmans found himself the recipient of a number of quiz show formats sent in by the readers of TV Times. Their ideas were not particularly helpful in finding a way forward for the genre, but revealed that viewers in 1981 held rather old-fashioned preconceptions when it came to quizzing. In particular, there was a strong sense that the prize awarded to the contestant should in some way be related to the nature of the game. One dubious suggestion was to broadcast a quiz for handicapped people in which contestants would compete to win an electric chair “or other items not available on the NHS”. Regardless of the feasibility of this specific suggestion, there was a sense that prizes should be properly earned. Of course, at the time the IBA would not allow quiz shows to give away prizes with a value in excess of £1,750 (except for on an occasional basis defined as not more often than every four weeks, in which case the prize value could be as high as £3,250).
Quiz shows have remained a staple part of British television and regularly ignite debate concerning issues such as avarice and intellectual content. One of 1981’s other raging television arguments though, tackled a subject that is in itself now almost completely marginalised. “There was a time in the not-too-distant past,” recalled director Richard Afton, “when to earn a living as an entertainer, at least a modicum of talent and a presentable appearance were essential requirements, Dancers for example could dance. Then along came television, and entertainment was turned upside down. Now the extraordinary bodily contortions that masquerade as dancing … are purely an invention; a result of a lack of training, talent or enterprise.” At the time groups such as Hot Gossip, Legs and Co, and Foxy Feeling were finding regular work on television and were well known to most viewers. In particular, Hot Gossip were creating a reputation for themselves due to so-called “steamy” routines on ITV’s The Kenny Everett Video Cassette. The ensuing debate playing out in the pages of TV Times, pitted Afton (creator of TV’s first permanent dance troupe the Television Toppers) against Arlene Phillips, the leader of Hot Gossip.
Popular television was trying to come to terms with a period of modernisation brought about by ITV’s desire to intensify their focus on attaining the highest ratings for the least cost. This shift was leaving purveyors of older entertainment traditions, people such as Afton, left in the cold. “I put the blame squarely on TV producers who can’t see higher than their navels,” Afton would claim before going on to add that a “similar situation developed in pop music after the success of the Beatles – and we all know what that led to”. In reply, Phillips invoked her perception of the general change in the orientation of the British public towards a more open society, or to put it her way: “People love us to be sexy. That is what the world is about today. You can turn to page three in a national newspaper now and see more than Hot Gossip show.”