19. They were big in the States and we noted that

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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?

It’ll Be Alright on the Night producer Paul Smith took the decision to introduce the format to American television, and while in the United States was able to lay his hands on a wealth of footage for the “farewell” Christmas show. “We have tapped a very rich vein,” he reported. Nonetheless the production team still ended up sitting through hours and hours of clips in search of suitable material. “I suppose the ratio of what we see to what we use is around 500 to 1”. The Christmas It’ll Be Alright on the Night pulled in a sizeable audience – large enough to persuade Norden that the venture was worth sticking with for a little longer. Subsequent editions were broadcast on a rough two-yearly basis thereafter and the programme has gone on to become one of LWT’s most consistent ratings performers. The 1985 edition captured 18.6 million viewers becoming LWT’s highest rated programme of the station’s first 20 years. The 1987 Christmas edition pulled in 18 million viewers, making that programme, LWT’s sixth most watched of its first two decades.

In the main, press reaction to It’ll Be Alright on the Night was surprisingly uncritical. Had it been fronted by a personality with qualities more closely associated with Saturday evening light entertainment, then the whole enterprise might have been perceived as an extremely dubious product, typical of the “down market” direction of LWT during the early and mid 1980s. As a result of the success of It’ll Be Alright on the Night, Norden’s affinity with archive television was unleashed and he subsequently hosted a number of “clipboard” shows for LWT, including Denis Norden’s World Of Television, In On The Act, Pick Of The Pilots and Denis Norden’s Laughter File.

The concept of It’ll Be Alright on the Night, although not in itself original (its two most obvious antecedents are the American series Bloopers and the Christmas collections of gaffes long since compiled for personal entertainment by editing room staff at TV organisations such as the BBC and Yorkshire Television), spawned a number of imitators. Noel Edmonds adapted the formula for his own 1982 Saturday night series, The Late Late Breakfast Show, using the conceit of awarding a “Golden Egg” to the week’s most entertaining blooper as a way in which to thread together a number of out-takes. “We were right at the very beginning of what’s now known as bloopers,” is how Edmonds remembers it. “They were big in the States and we noted that.” This take on the Norden formula proved so successful that a spin-off programme, The Golden Egg Awards, was commissioned. As if to support Norden’s own belief that the general public bestowed greater affection on those celebrities that were shown to be most fallible, The Golden Egg Awards turned the winner of the most awards – Murray Walker – into a household name.

More substantially, in 1991 the BBC produced the first in a long line of outtake programmes called Auntie’s Bloomers. Much like It’ll Be Alright on the Night, these were produced as specials only, with a similarly mature presenter (Terry Wogan) picked to link the footage. Derided at the time for its lack of originality, Auntie’s Bloomers nevertheless repeated the ratings success of its ITV counterpart (with a 1992 Christmas special attracting 18.5 million viewers, and the 1994 outing attaining a still impressive 17.9 million). Less successful has been the two station’s sports based spin-offs. Auntie’s Sporting Bloomers was, unlike its parent show, or its obvious forebear, produced as a series of 30-minute episodes, and ITV’s own Oddballs (made for Carlton by Trans World International and presented by Eamonn Holmes) were never able to attract as sizeable an audience. Nonetheless, both programmes still represented excellent value for money in terms of production cost versus ratings.

“We had created the original, the Rolls Royce, the Beatles, whatever you want, everything else were just pale imitations,” says Smith. “So I wasn’t concerned at all and after all, imitation is the sincerest form of flattery. In an extraordinary punctuation, the BBC eventually decided that maybe they should be doing their own version and Jim Moir, who was the head of entertainment at the BBC at the time called me at Celador and said, would we be interested in producing Auntie’s Bloomers for the BBC, because we understood the concept and how to apply it. And we said, ‘Yes of course’ The title, Auntie’s Bloomers,was created by Denis Norden, when we were shooting It’ll Be Alright on the Night. We paid him for the right to use it.”

Next: “I’m still aggressive and I’m still handing out the insults”