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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Born in Bermondsey on May 4, 1952, the young Michael Barrymore fell in love with Norman Wisdom films and, from the age of eight, set his heart on making people laugh. An appearance on New Faces in the mid-1970s confirmed his burgeoning talent (he won it with a score of 95 out of 100). Central to his act was a series of impressions that he performed upside down. “It started when I began taking off the Australians,” he explains. Such humour lent itself well to the zany ITV comedy series Russ Abbot’s Saturday Madhouse and in 1981 Barrymore became part of the team bringing to the mix of eclectic characters his own two creations: Gordon Bluey and The Weathermen.
“As a virtually inexperienced performer, I thought it was fantastic that I was asked to join the team,” he says. “It certainly helped me to develop, to relate to an audience and learn about the workings of television. Russ Abbot was marvellous, too, and very generous in letting me and the other ‘inmates’ of the Madhouse have a fair share of the limelight”. Growing in confidence, it was around this time that Barrymore’s stage act became more anarchic and spontaneous. It was not unusual for him to stop a performance if he saw a member of the audience heading for the bathroom, and cajole them into coming up on stage instead.
Appearances during 1982 on Blankety Blank, Give Us a Clue and The Little and Large Show further bolstered his confidence and profile. Increasingly, Barrymore was creating a name for himself out with the Madhouse fold (a feat that would repeated two years later by fellow inmates Dustin Gee and Les Dennis) and by November 1982, Barrymore was offered his own series. Thames Television’s Philip Jones had been impressed by the comedian’s performances and saw within him an entertainer in the mould of Bruce Forsyth (who also enjoyed humorous, albeit slightly barbed exchanges with members of his audience). “I really believe in him as a face of the future,” he confided and offered Barrymore his own series.
Michael Barrymore began on 28 April 1983. The six-parter consisted mainly of comedy sketches featuring Barrymore and co-star Nicholas Lyndhurst. While Barrymore’s biographers Phil Taylor and Paul Nicholas claimed the series was a success, this wasn’t true – on television at least – Barrymore worked best when appearing on game shows or other essentially non-comedic formats (he would not get another chance at his own comedy show for four years). Programmes such as Blankety Blank or Give Us a Clue were prime fodder for Barrymore’s particular brand of humorous subversion. It seemed inevitable that at some point he be put at the helm of a game show of his very own.
Not all Saturday night television hosts have lasted the course since 1983 and some of the celebrities occupying prime positions in that year’s Saturday night schedule, seem in retrospect, unusual. Yorkshire Television’s Just Amazing! was originally broadcast on Saturday nights, before later moving to Sundays. The show was a hybrid of the BBC’s Record Breakers and LWT’s Game For A Laugh(although it was nominally based on an American series). The original presenting trio of Barry Sheene, Jan Ravens and Kenny Lynch, made for an odd combination, with Ravens in particular, lacking the cheery disposition required to present Saturday night light entertainment on ITV (she was later replaced by Suzanne Danielle). The inclusion of Sheene, had little to do with his presenting ability. “When they asked me to do Just Amazing!, I wasn’t sure,” recalls the motor cyclist. “I thought it might be terrible and I wouldn’t enjoy it at all. But we all ended up having lots of laughs.”
The series stuck close to the mould established by Game For A Laugh,with each presenter getting to preside over a studio-based or pre-filmed item. Unlike Game For A Laugh though (which generated all of its own material) Just Amazing! also featured archive or foreign footage of stunts and daring activities. “There are only two rules in Just Amazing!,” commented series producer John Fanshawe. “All the stunts have to be genuine, and we don’t feature anything where people could get killed. Or at least we do on only one occasion but it happened so long ago – in 1912 – that we don’t feel it will offend viewers.”
The first episode featured a surfing rabbit, a regurgitator (apparently the first genuine one since 1946), a man who attempted to fly across the river in a rocket-fuelled car; and a skydiver who filmed his own descent, including the moment when both of his parachutes failed to deploy. The series was popular without ever becoming a proper hit. It lacked Game For A Laugh’s ability to combine comic and exciting items, and the chemistry between the presenters never quite worked. Just Amazing! proved that without the magic touch of an Alan Boyd, or Jeremy Beadle, a potentially promising programme format could never fulfil its true potential.
Next Monday: Kamikaze Mastermind
Barry Sheene, Frontpage!, It's Saturday Night, Jan Ravens, John Fanshawe, Just Amazing!, Kenny Lynch, Michael Barrymore, Nicholas Lyndhurst, Philip Jones, Russ Abbot, Suzanne Danielle
Glenn Aylett
May 7, 2018 at 3:28 pm
I notice Barrymore and Lyndhurst dressed like mods in their fishtail parkas and narrow ties. In the early 80s, this was the biggest youth cult where I lived and until The Jam split up and the fad fizzled out, Whitehaven town centre was like the crowd scene from Quadrophenia.
Richard16378
May 8, 2018 at 6:13 pm
I remember those parkas were popular at my primary school until the mid 1980s, when they became “nerd clothes” & haven’t really come back into fashion.
Droogie
May 10, 2018 at 1:03 am
Parkas are a classic piece of design cool and have never gone out of fashion ( ask Liam Gallagher who sells ridiculously overpriced ones at his Pretty Green chain of clothes shops. ) Maybe you’re getting confused instead with Snorkel jackets as “nerd clothes”?
Richard16378
May 11, 2018 at 9:50 pm
Yes you’re probably right.
There a few mods in & around Stockport, including one who has painted his scooter in the Gulf Oil livery of Steve McQueen’s Porsche 917 from Le Mans.
Glenn Aylett
May 12, 2018 at 3:01 pm
Richard 16378, the mod scene was a big deal in the North West in the early 80s, as well as its traditional London and Essex heartland, and like everything else, some people never grow out of it, in the same way you see men who are nearly 60 with long hair, wearing Motorhead T shirts. Mind you, heavy metal fans always seemed to be a bigger butt of jokes in the eighties than mods, as the trend lasted the whole decade and there were more of them, nationally, and a certain band called Bad News nearly became as popular as some of the real bands.
Glenn Aylett
May 11, 2018 at 6:24 pm
The mod scene never quite died and there are still a few 50 something mods locally and even a few teenagers who have ditched sportswear and the alternative look to dress like mods from nearly 40 years ago.