16. Killing the Golden Goose

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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?

“The nation talked about it,” says Boyd of Game For A Laugh. “’Did you see that daft story?’” “We did three series, then Matthew declared he had had enough,” remembers Beadle. Sarah Kennedy recalls she and Matthew went out for lunch, and over a plate of spaghetti decided it was time to go. “I don’t think Alan Boyd has ever spoken to me since,” she says. “He cut me dead once, but it was time to move on.” Beadle rationalised their decision as follows: “By this time (Matthew) and Sarah had developed a very close double act, with Sarah playing Miss Prissy and Matthew, in his camp way, being the naughty little boy, so Matthew’s departure made Sarah question whether her role would be the same. Furthermore it was a problem to define Henry’s role in their absence”.

The author of Arrow Publication’s 1982 Game For A Laugh book, Brian Wesley, was assigned as the show’s new producer. He started to play around with the format. “It was there for all to see, it changed,” says Kennedy. “I think it’s very difficult to – how shall I put it? – be the second wife or the second husband.” Meanwhile, the importance of the show was becoming apparent to the upper echelons at LWT. Beadle was featured prominently in the station’s 1983 publicity campaign – “the Entertainers”, and the programme’s ability to generate ratings was coming under the scrutiny of programme controller, John Birt. His predecessor, Michael Grade, had positioned Game For A Laugh right at the heart of the Saturday night schedule, but Birt saw an opportunity to use the show to address a weakness in ITV’s Sunday night schedule. Suddenly everyone wanted to tinker with a hit.

Beadle, ever protective of what he saw as his “baby” grew exasperated as the show moved further and further away from his original vision. The replacements for the two Kellys and Kennedy were unable to recreate the same formula and the audience’s affection suffered. Of the new team, Debbie Rix, drafted in as a deliberate attempt to reconstitute Kennedy’s school matronly charms, and Lee Peck, a “hipper” version of Henry Kelly, had very little impact. Martin Daniels’ two series with the programme were more successful, with the son of the famous magician able to craft himself a decent television career off the back of this exposure.

The press launch for the first series to feature the new line up was held at the Dorchester Hotel in London. For Daniels, it was a baptism of fire. “I felt like the President of the United States,” he says. “There were all of these reporters sitting in rows and we were paraded onto a stage and they fired questions at us. One of the first ones for me was, ‘Have you got this job because you’re Paul Daniels’ son?’. Alan Boyd stood up and said, ‘No. We picked him because we think he can do it.’ So I felt vindicated.” Conversely, Game For A Laugh signalled the death knell for Rusty Lee’s television career. Unfortunately, she was not a skilled enough presenter to be able to deal with the demands of a show as complicated as Game For A Laugh.

All of these deficiencies weighed heavily on Beadle. “We were in rehearsals one day,” he recalls, “and I was becoming more and more upset. I was decidedly grumpy as I strode about, saying, ‘This isn’t going to work. This isn’t going to work. It’s all wrong.’ It wasn’t even my routine and in the end, Brian (Wesley) got fed up with me and snapped. ‘Look I’m producing this show and you aren’t … ’ Although all the crew were around, out of sheer frustration I screamed back at him, ‘You are fucking killing the Golden Goose. You are killing this show. You’re not listening to the public. You’re not treating it right,’ I really let rip and then stormed out. I’d had it”.

Birt’s decision to move the programme to Sunday nights looked at first to be an inspired move and a welcome chance for the show to regroup. On 20 January 1985, the final series of Game For A Laugh began, and the switch to Sundays brought an immediate increase in viewers, numbers rising from 11 to 14 million. However, the programme was running out of steam, and at its time of weakness it had been brought in front of an altogether more discerning viewer, conditioned to expect television of a more substantial nature (such as LWT’s own The South Bank Show).

Boyd complained bitterly. “I said Sunday night is not the night for this type of show and John Birt wasn’t listening. You make a different type of show for Sunday. That was a piece of bad scheduling. I don’t think it was malicious, it was just wrong. We still have a culture that Sunday is The Antiques Roadshow and gentler programmes, whereas Saturday night is funnier and edgier. You don’t put a show like Game for a Laugh on a Sunday night. You just don’t do it. They did it. They killed it.”

The press was ever more vitriolic. The Daily Star claimed the programme had sunk to “even murkier depths. New presenter, Martin Daniels, screwing himself up to do his masters’ dreadful bidding, was required to ask a young girl from the audience to place star stickers on the parts of a man’s body beginning with the letter B. The man with the body (in a little yellow costume) twitched his muscles and hid his face while Martin goaded and badgered the girl with cries of: ‘You must be able to think of a couple of things!’ … This degrading spectacle … must make Game For A Laugh the most grotesque TV show of all time”. Audiences fell away and the programme was cancelled. Beadle conceded it “had probably run its course,” while Alan Boyd blamed Birt’s decision on the move away from Saturday early evening. Birt in turn accepted this had been a strong contributory factor (it was difficult for him not to, as Boyd’s sentiments were echoed very vocally by the other ITV controllers), but also pointed the finger at changes to the production team and presenters.

In truth, all of these factors contributed, as did the simple fact that such a programme could only remain innovative and original for so long. Game For A Laugh was the first in a long line of Saturday night shows that initially delight, but ultimately repel, their fickle audience. “We had run out of the mad people,” believes Boyd. “The people that walked horses backwards, or the people that raced cars backwards. We’d eaten all these. We had done enough twin switches and silly things and potters wheels and mouse in the boxes. You get to the point where you’ve lost, not the creativity, but that inventiveness.”

“Game For A Laugh proved to be a hole in one,” reflects Beadle. “One of those shows that revolutionised a pattern of British television viewing. I think that when the history books come to tell the story of British TV, it will be recognised as a show that changed the public’s viewing habits. It helped ITV finally emerge victorious in the weekend ratings battle, out-gunning the BBC in the prized Saturday evening slot”. Beadle would do much in the wake of, and because of, Game For A Laugh, but the programme’s single greatest legacy would live on through Alan Boyd. As Game For A Laugh was going through its death throes, the talented producer was taking all he had learned from the experience and applying it across LWT’s schedules in a manner that would ensure that Saturday night television would remain altered irrevocably.

Next: “People love us to be sexy”