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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ITV in 1986 was not just about straight comedy series. Another force for light entertainment was burgeoning too. With Game For A Laugh drawing its dying breath, presenter and co-devisor Jeremy Beadle was considering his next move. In January, came his first new series, People Do The Funniest Things. Ostensibly a clip show, it featured an array of footage, including animals acting in amusing or endearing ways, outtakes and practical jokes. “Introducing the clips, I would play various tricks on the audience,” recalls Beadle. “Instead of just delivering a link, I would involve the audience in some kind of scam, such as blowing up air pipes, producing snakes, or collapsing sets.” Clearly there was an attempt to replicate some of the interaction that had proven so popular on Game For A Laugh, yet here it seemed out of place, leaving the television viewer wishing Beadle would dispense with the preamble and cut to the clips. The series was an instant and phenomenal success though, with the first edition securing an audience of 17.8 million, making it the 9thmost watched programme that year (and this was the year that EastEnders attracted a monumental 30.2 million viewers)
A second series followed in 1987 (this time peaking at a reduced, but still excellent, 13.7 million viewers) but there was trouble afoot. The inclusion of outtakes as part of the make-up of People Do The Funniest Things drew comparisons between Beadle and Denis Norden’s It’ll Be Alright on the Night. “His show was extremely popular, and also a worldwide seller” recalls Beadle, “and he objected to People Do The Funniest Things on the grounds that it was eating into material that he considered exclusively his. Although only about 20 per cent of our clips were outtakes, the powers that be listened to Denis and it was decided that our series would be dropped. I could see Denis’ argument, although I think he was being a little precious, I accepted the decision.”
This set-back was undoubtedly made more palatable for Beadle by the arrival later that year of his, and LWT’s, next hit series. “Originally we didn’t know what to call it,” says LWT’s Alan Boyd. “We had a lot of names, one of them was ‘Watch Out Beadle’s About’. I think I remember sitting at a table once in Montreux with a dozen of us round a table including the press saying, ‘come on, what’s the title gonna be for this new Beadle show?’ Someone suggested, ‘Gotcha’, but we said ‘no’ because of the famous headline in The Sun around the Falklands war, so the word had bad connotations.”
Beadle’s About remains the programme that Beadle is perhaps most closely associated with today. Almost universally derided later on it is life, the series was – from the start at the very least – undeniably a slick operation (including on average four or five hidden camera stunts per episode). As Beadle himself noted, while hidden camera show series such as Candid Camera (to which Beadle’s About was often unfavourably compared) had “a shooting ratio of about 25 to 30 attempts in order to film one take for transmission, on Beadle’s About (given that stunts were performed on specific “victims” chosen by their loved-ones or friends) we had one go. It was all or nothing. The risk factor was incredibly high, and it’s a huge credit to my team that we achieved so many successes”.
“It became a much harder show to make because to be able get the scams delivered, you had to be devious and complicated,” says Boyd. “I think after my time they became slightly crueller. I’ve always wanted television to make me laugh and I felt that the programme twisted and I said to the producers, many a time, I said ‘I think you’re just running it too hard’”.
Achieving ratings of 14.8 million viewers for its first series alone, Beadle’s About provided its creator with a vehicle to keep him at the nerve centre of Saturday night television right into the next decade. For Beadle, like many others at LWT and TVS, 1986 had been a good year. With the BBC suffering at the hands of an unsympathetic government and a major dose of ill fortune, there was little doubt that the last 12 months had belonged to ITV. However, a diet of Conley, Davro, Beadle and Wilmot (not forgetting Cilla Black and Leslie Crowther) was – for many – the worst possible end result of a ratings conscious, profit-focussed commercial television network. What’s more there was little sign that things were going to improve. Yet for those who railed against such fare, 1987 would at least bring them one sizeable scalp.
Next Monday: 1987: Stretchers never go upstairs
Droogie
January 8, 2019 at 1:12 pm
I was always baffled by the choice of Dennis Norden to present IBAOTN. He seemed an affable bloke, but his whimsical humour and low energy made him a strange pick for this show. My dad found him very irritating indeed and was always moaning about the clipboard Norden always had that he didn’t actually need.
Glenn Aylett
January 12, 2019 at 4:01 pm
Yet Norden could point to the enormous success he had with It’ll Be Alright On The Night, which ran for decades, and limiting the show to a couple of shows a year never made it boring.
richardpd
January 12, 2019 at 7:42 pm
The BBC followed with the Auntie’s Bloomers, which also did well when it was an occasional showing.
As for Beadle’s About I remember reading that not all the censor beeps were for swear words, but just to spice things up.
The woman who found her husband was nude modelling almost wore the beeper out.
Glenn Aylett
January 13, 2019 at 10:03 am
I remember Aunbie’s Bloomers being a staple of BBC 1 on Christmas Day and bank holidays all through the nineties.
1987 was a watershed year for BBC 1 as well, as the article points out. Michael Grade quit later in the year to run Channel 4 and John Birt came in as deputy DG. It has to be said a lot of Grade’s good work in entertainment and drama would say BBC 1 remain successful for the rest of the eighties, but his successors never seemed to have the right touch and by the early nineties BBC 1 was falling behind ITV again.
richardpd
January 13, 2019 at 11:02 am
The 1991 Franchise rounds blunted ITV’s efforts somewhat, losing TVS & reducing Thames to being just a producer.
By the second half of the 1990s the BBC were back on top again.
Glenn Aylett
January 13, 2019 at 1:28 pm
@ richard pd, the BBC always had Noel’s House Party as their big Saturday night hit in the nineties, but seemed wanting against ITV’s big hitters like The Gladiators, Stars In Their Eyes, Baywatch and Beadle’s About. Things did perk up for Auntie when Casualty was moved to Saturdays permanently, and they won the rights to the National Lottery Draw in 1994, but a lot of the time they seemed all over the place on Saturdays and Danny Baker, the supposed next big thing in the mid nineties, wasn’t with the woeful Bygones and Pets Win Prizes.
I generally see the Birt years as being bad for the BBC. Yes they still had some decent comedies like Men Behaving Badly and occasional massive drama hits like Pride and Prejudice, but there were a massive amount of formulaic single series dramas that are almost forgotten, some awful entertainment shows, and an overkill with DIY, gardening, pets and vets and makeover shows as Birt probably saw them as dirt cheap to make.