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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Central Television’s OTT was on the search for new, cutting-edge talent to augment the team of Tarrant, Gorman, Henry and Carolgees. Chris Tarrant came across comedian Helen Atkinson-Wood at the previous year’s Edinburgh Festival. “Although she is new to television,” he commented, “she is very expressive”. Actress Colette Hiller was Tarrant’s next inductee. Having previously appeared in small roles in 1979’s Birth of the Beatles (as a reporter) and 1981’s Ragtime (a female companion to a lawyer), OTT was her first significant television exposure. The final new piece of casting was alternative comedian Alexei Sayle – this was to be his first proper TV break. Chosen for of his “off-beat” humour, Sayle’s edge looked to be the perfect addition to OTT’s anarchic manifesto. However, his comedic targets (the ‘Habitat-bean-bag-hessian-wallpaper brigade’) were markedly different from those in the sights of the ex-Tiswas contingent.
Television’s “craziest show” didn’t pass muster with the critics. Sketches featured bikini-clad models and whipped cream; ill-treated rats (a routine with a man stuffing them down his trousers went frighteningly awry resulting in one of the escaped rodents being kicked on camera); gunge; an attractive girl who promised to remove her bra each week (but never actually did); the infamous “balloon dance”; and stand-up comedy made for patchy, downmarket television. While Tiswas had never been the most cohesive programme, OTT was downright shambolic and the paucity of the material (one sketch involved a husband trying to force feed his wife paracetamol, in an attempt to pre-empt her pat “I’ve got a headache” objections to his amorous advances) meant the programme had few redeeming features.
Alexei Sayle was first to jump ship. His replacement, Bernard Manning, let the show retain an artifice of “dangerous” comedy, while bringing OTT’s stand-up comedy into line with the rest of the programme’s seaside postcard milieu. Yet still the critics and the general public poured scorn. Lenny Henry recalls the mauling his own family gave the programme (overheard by him when taking a bath one evening) and the uniformity of negative criticism weighed heavily not only on the show’s performers, but on Central Television itself. For a new station looking to impress, this had been an inauspicious start. There was no chance of a second series, although OTT did return in a sense just one year later, when Tarrant launched Saturday Stayback. Similar in format to OTT, Saturday Stayback also accrued many of the earlier shows waifs and strays. Tarrant, Atkinson-Wood, Carolgees and Manning were all present and correct, but Lenny Henry, Collette Hiller and John Gorman were gone. In their place, Tarrant again looked to introduce talent new to television and Tony Slattery and Phil Cool were drafted in. Saturday Stayback lasted for only six episodes.
The failure of OTT had surprisingly little effect on its main performers. Chris Tarrant wisely diversified his broadcasting career and in the 1980s became an accomplished radio broadcaster. His persona on air was different to the one we saw on television, insulating him against the demise of any one television project. Alexei Sayle would find a more palatable fame later that year in The Young Ones and Lenny Henry ended up in a vehicle more attuned to his comedic sensibilities as the BBC’s own Saturday night sketch show Three Of A Kind returned for a second series that winter. Originally designed with a cast of six, Henry and David Copperfield were subsequently united with Tracey Ullman to create what Henry described as “the only show on television where you’ve got a woman, a black guy and a northerner and it really doesn’t matter!” Gorman and Carolgees remained stalwart entertainers without ever achieving the celebrity status of either Tarrant or Henry, and Atkinson-Wood gravitated towards the alternative comedy scene with memorable appearances in Blackadder and KYTV marking her out as one of the comedy faces of the 1980s. Colette Hiller, although not a household name, achieved some level of lasting fame by appearing as Corporal Ferro in the 1986 film Aliens.
In the history of Saturday night television, it is tempting to try and spot patterns and cycles. The demise of OTT bears many similarities to an ill-fated attempt 19 years later to transfer the popular Saturday morning children’s programme SM:TV to a wider, mainstream audience. Like Tiswas, SM:TV had developed a cult audience amongst adults, yet like OTT, Slap Bang (as the Saturday evening version of SM:TV was called) only lasted for one series. Context lies at the heart of the demise of both OTT and Slap Bang. Saturday morning innovation can feel old hat on Saturday evenings. Comedy that appears subversive in the morning becomes safe by teatime and post-modern asides to the clued-up morning viewer become explanations for the dozy evening watcher.
Alexei Sayle, Bernard Manning, Bob Carolgees, Chris Tarrant, Collette Hiller, Frontpage!, Helen Atkinson-Wood, It's Saturday Night, John Gorman, Lenny Henry, OTT, Phil Cool, Sally James, Saturday Stayback, Slap Bang, SM:TV, Tiswas, Tony Slattery
Glenn A
January 15, 2018 at 8:32 pm
I wouldn’t say OTT was Monty Python, but wasn’t the total disaster people make it out to be. It managed to get 8 million viewers in a late night slot and teenage boys like me always found the live rats being kicked around the stage and the well endowed woman in a bikini amusing. In parts awful, in parts like Tiswas would have been if it had been an adult late night show, but I’ve always believed OTT was a daring attempt to make ITV comedy more edgy. Also Alexei Sayle got his first big break.
George White
January 16, 2018 at 12:38 pm
Was Collette Hiller Mancunian?
I always presumed she was “North American”.
Applemask
January 16, 2018 at 3:27 pm
“Alexei Sayle was first to jump ship. His replacement, Bernard Manning,”
Pretty much sums OTT up really. And Colette Hiller is American, she just lives here.
Simon
January 17, 2018 at 10:16 am
Sayle says in his book that Tarrant hated alternative comedy but had basically been told by everyone that Alexei was the kind of near the knuckle comedian the concept demanded.
Hillier lasted one show and was supposedly told she was fired backstage that night. She’s now involved with the street pianos project and doesn’t mention OTT on her biography – something she has in common with the “attractive girl who promised to remove her bra each week”, Ellen Thomas, who became a proper actress and has latterly been in Eastenders, WHO and Waterloo Road.
TV Cream
January 25, 2018 at 4:35 pm
We have now removed the reference to “Mancunian” in relation to Collette Hiller. Thanks!
Glenn A
January 16, 2018 at 8:38 pm
I did catch a little of OTT when my parents backs were turned, like a few boys in the third form of our school, and we all found it quite amusing. Also time has been kinder to the reviled( well by television pundits and the IBA anyway, young men and teenage boys seemed to like the show) OTT, with IMDB’s reviwers giving OTT a reasonable score of 7.3 out of 10. Anyway can’t have been any worse than a BBC show about sins that popped up later in 1982 and was completely embarrassing.
Droogie
January 17, 2018 at 11:59 am
I was 12 when this aired. Despite being at the age where rude comedy and topless ladies would usually be incredibly appealing, I thought this show tacky and disappointing even back then. I even recall Michael Palin guesting and performing a dire sketch as a camp TV chef. The only thing I remember being remotely amusing was them screening the short adult cartoons of Bob Godfrey from the 70’s.
Glenn A
January 17, 2018 at 9:21 pm
Also at the same time as OTT was being screened, ITV was showing Bizarre on Thursday nights, a sort of Canadian OTT, but with even coarser humour and language that had to be bleeped out. I wonder if this was an attempt to get young men, who had the thrilling prospect of Newsnight or Question Time on the BBC, to tune in as the humour was distinctly locker room and not normally associated with ITV. Problem was Bizarre was too crude to be funny and was only shown for one series in Britain, although it lasted in North America until 1985.
Jeremy Panze
January 19, 2018 at 12:10 pm
I never totally understood why Ulster TV never screened Tiswas, OTT (and its follow-up Saturday Stayback). They *did* show the lame Saturday morning Granada-run Mersey Pirate and Fun Factory. I cheered when after the final episode of Fun Factory, they kept the network feed up which was showing a trailer for the new series of Tiswas (with Tarrant), but abruptly pulled it after about 5 seconds with no apology.
My conclusion was that the same prudes who ran the IBA were also in charge at Havelock House. I forgot about “Bizarre”, shown in the Thu 11pm slot (they also showed Soap at this time), so if this was the case then this was amazingly hypocritical. I now think they just hated Chris Tarrant, and eventually UTV showed the follow-up to Stayback – which was a pre-recorded Tarrant going round pubs getting MOTP to tell their favourite jokes. Maybe it was because Central gave him and Ulster money to do a celebrity fishing series which softened their view!