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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The success of Game For A Laugh and the corresponding demise of The Generation Game meant that, by the start of 1982, the BBC and ITV were pretty much neck and neck in the ratings. As ever, there was considerable flux occurring in the industry, including the introduction of the new independent television franchises. Central, TSW and TVS revitalised ITV, with each of the new stations understanding the importance of impressing from day one (they all came on air on 1 January 1982). It was, therefore, not a surprise, although still quite an achievement, to see ITV secure the top 20 most watched programmes of the year.
The BBC had achieved similar success in 1979, due to the protracted strike that had kept ITV off screens for several weeks. For ITV, such ratings dominance represented a return to the network’s glory days of 1956-1961 where the BBC had been blotted out from the year’s top 20 programmes for an unprecedented six consecutive years. ITV’s overall supremacy was not reflected on Saturday nights however, where neither could exert control. Central looked to make an immediate impact with the introduction of their new Saturday night “splashstick” (according to the advanced publicity) programme, OTT. Once again though, the launch of the new TV station was threatened by union action before a single programme aired.
The arrival of Channel 4, ITN’s desire to move from film to electronic cameras, the requirement to capture the World Cup in Spain and the need to cover the Falklands conflict gave the ACTT enough leverage at the end of 1981 to make several demands. Central found itself caught up in a pay dispute with electricians at their temporary Nottingham studio, and when the company first went on air, it was unable to broadcast any programmes from that location. In fact, Central never managed a single broadcast from the makeshift studio (converted from an old sweet factory) – the dispute wasn’t settled until the permanent Nottingham facility had been opened in September 1983.
OTT was broadcast on only Central’s second day on air. Running for 13 weeks (with the final programme being a compilation of the series’ best bits) and scheduled usually just before 11pm on Saturday evenings, OTT was crafted on the back of the success of ATV’s Saturday morning children’s show Tiswas (which by that time had been running for eight years). It was the brainchild of presenter, Chris Tarrant.
Born on 10 October 1946 in Reading, Berkshire, the young Tarrant used to bunk off lessons from King’s School in Worcester to indulge in his favourite activities – fishing and trainspotting. A love of acting drew him in front of audiences and he appeared in a number of Shakespeare productions at university. Upon leaving he took on a number of different jobs (night security guard, lawnmower deliverer, bed salesman and teacher) before breaking into television by writing “hundreds of ridiculous letters” to various television stations. Tarrant worked for a time as a reporter and interviewer. “I started giggling at interviews,” he recalls “and it worked. They said ‘you’re young’, and put me on Tiswas.” Gradually able to carve out a degree of autonomy, by the early 1980s Tarrant was having a strong creative input into each programme. However, the IBA grew concerned about Tiswas’ more risqué material. Efforts were made to tone it down and Tarrant decided that instead of compromising he would find a more appropriate audience for his increasingly close-to-the-bone comedy.
With fellow presenters John Gorman, Lenny Henry, Sally James and Bob Carolgees in tow, Tarrant took the Tiswas format out on tour under the name of the Four Bucketeers. The predominantly nightclub audiences were highly appreciative of the mixture of comedy, abuse, gunge and water and on the back of this success, Gorman helped the group record a minor hit single (“The Bucket of Water Song” made it to number 26 in the charts on 3 May 1980) and an album. Realising the potential of a whole new adult audience, Tarrant, Carolgees, Gorman and Henry quit Tiswas on 28 March 1981. Sally James decided to stick with the Saturday morning show and presided over a final series, while Tarrant and company began work on their live, late night comedy offering – OTT.
With a budget of £250,000, Central was investing heavily in what looked to be a promising idea, but from day one there was a lack of order to the production. “The show is so up to date that the team is still working out the formula, if indeed it has one,” reported Alan Kennaugh in the pages of TV Times. “But it will definitely feature plenty of splash and splosh in the children’s tradition, with characters like Count Custard (its version of the Tiswas Phantom Flan Flinger) throwing his pies around. ‘We know it has enormous potential appeal for adults,’ added Tarrant.” But what that appeal actually was remained ill-defined. For example, Lenny Henry “doesn’t know what he will be doing in tonight’s OTT,” remarked Kennaugh on 23 January 1982. “But one thing is sure. When the show ends he’ll be standing under a hot shower – ‘just to recover’ … Henry loves the uncontrolled humour where even he never knows what is going to happen next. ‘Tiswas was marvellous to work on. It was a new style of lunatic humour, and we got away with murder. When I first started Tiswas, my nerves used to go before each show simply because it was live. But now, in OTT I just get on with it.’” Henry attempted to entice Dawn French into writing for the programme, however her response that there wasn’t enough time to write decent scripts seems, in retrospect, prescient.
ACTT, Alan Kennaugh, Bob Carolgees, Chris Tarrant, Frontpage!, It's Saturday Night, John Gorman, Lenny Henry, OTT, Sally James, Tiswas
Glenn A
January 14, 2018 at 10:20 pm
OTT was like a Channel 4 alternative comedy show from the mid eighties done in a rugby club. It wasn’t as bad as the critics thought, the balloon sketch and violent tennis were quite amusing, but a bit too risque for late night Saturday ITV, which tended to show films like Mc Q in this slot, and the IBA hated it. Also OTT came out the same time ITV bought in the dodgy adult American comedy show Bizarre for late night Thursdays.