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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1994 saw the end of a number of Saturday night fixtures. Most notably, in June came the final episodes of three programmes that in previous years had proven phenomenally popular – The Paul Daniels Magic Show was dropped after 15 years, Jim’ll Fix It after 19 (Savile claimed he felt the time was right to leave, even though “the ratings are rock solid” – an interesting reading of the facts, as the series had already been moved from the winter to the summer, and the final programmes were shoved out on Sunday afternoons) and That’s Life! after 21. Meanwhile the BBC had managed to save enough money to ensure there were at least some new programmes in the summer months in 1994.
Few caught on – especially the dire Hit The Road which was dropped mid-series – but one interesting show did launch. Pets Win Prizesfeatured members of the public, who brought their animals into the studio to participate in a number of games – snail races, cockerel crowing and, unforgettably, shire horses pulling pints of beer – to win prizes for both the humans and the pets. This could have been awful, and some may say it was, but for many it was rescued by the presence of host Danny Baker, who sent the whole thing up and gloried in the ridiculous nature of the games. Pets Win Prizes suffered, though, from more of the BBC’s erratic scheduling, which saw the show at 6pm one week and 7.30pm the next.
An answer to these scheduling woes came in November, and it was all thanks to the government. The go-ahead had been given for a National Lottery, and, as then-managing director of BBC Television Will Wyatt wrote, “Alan (Yentob, controller of BBC1), David (Liddiment, head of entertainment) and I reckoned that if it was the ‘national’ lottery, it ought to be on the BBC and that it would provide a reliable tent pole for Saturday evenings. We went to see the regulator to hear from his own lips how it would be decided. We engaged an industry consultant to map the competition and the criteria for winning. I wrote to all the bidding consortia and Alan followed up terrier-like.” Such lobbying proved successful, as the BBC signed a deal with Camelot – which, to the complaints of many other broadcasters and licence-payers, saw the Beeb pay for to cover the draw. It had been argued that for the amount of advertising Camelot were getting, they should have been paying the BBC. But for the viewing figures they were expecting to get, the Beeb weren’t complaining.
Despite rumours that the draw would be included as part of Noel’s House Party, it was decided to give its own dedicated programme. However, Edmonds did present the first ever draw in an hour-long programme broadcast on Saturday 19 November 1994. Of course, the draw only lasted a few minutes, so the rest of the show was padded out with games to decide who would have the ‘honour’ of starting said draw. It wasn’t particularly inspired, but the draw caught the nation’s attention and gave the BBC the nearest thing to a captive audience. To combat the draw, ITV scheduled their regular Saturday line-up of Gladiators and Blind Date, the latter directly opposite the draw, along with a new documentary on Princess Diana. The lottery result was to be flashed on the screen as soon as it was announced, and as an added incentive, ITV asked Cilla to link together all the evening’s programmes, in an attempt to keep viewers loyal to the commercial channel. In the event, Blind Date’s figures were about half the usual total. They’d now have to hope the novelty would soon wear off.
Regardless of the merits of the lottery show, the BBC finally had a Saturday night banker, 52 weeks of the year. Suddenly they were on the up.
Next Monday: It is in the cutlery drawer
Droogie
November 4, 2019 at 1:58 pm
I recall Hit The Road and it was indeed dire. Presented by The tedious Jonathan “Jono” Coleman who had a bafflingly long TV and Radio career and for a while was inescapable on British telly. I’ll never forgive BBC Radio London for letting this oaf replace Danny Baker on the breakfast show back in the Noughties.
Glenn Aylett
November 7, 2019 at 10:04 am
The BBC were in a ratings slump in 1994, with their drama and entertainment offerings being substandard. Winning the rights to the Lottery and having Bob Monkhouse present it was a masterstroke as BBC One was guaranteed over 10 million viewers every Saturday and it bolstered the rest of the schedule. Also the BBC using imports like The New Adventures of Superman and The Simpsons provided a decent sized audience wanting an alternative to ITV game shows.