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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But back in 1983 Russ Abbot’s Madhouse was a lynchpin in ITV’s Saturday night schedules. Meanwhile Abbot’s old mentor, Freddie Starr was finding things a little harder going. Having turned to the BBC after walking out on Madhouse, he was given an eight-part Tuesday night series. Freddie Starr Showcase, whichwas meant to be a platform for new talent. However, Starr was well aware that the most significant exposure on the show would be for him. “I really think my career is on the line here,” he commented. “Everybody is going to be watching me to see what happens. If it goes right they’ll be telling each other how they always knew I’d do well in the end, but if it goes wrong they’ll all be saying: ‘I told you so!’” Starr saw taking Showcase over from David Essex, as the first part in a process of repairing his public image. “[Starr] has attracted a reputation as something of a liability,” explained journalist Michael Cable in 1983. “Now with a completely new management team behind him, and with the support and encouragement of old friends like fellow comedian Lennie Bennett, he has set about the task of re-establishing himself.”
“It’s nice to be wanted again,” Starr ruminated, recalling the bitterness of his experience at LWT. “I went through a terrible stage, three years of murder. I’m just very grateful to the people who had enough confidence in me to give me this chance. When it was announced I would be doing the show, people said that the BBC were taking a gamble – but the first thing I told the producer was that he need not be afraid of me. There really is nothing to be afraid of. The reputation I have got is mostly bar talk. Stories get exaggerated.
“People say I’m unpredictable – but that’s where that little bit of Chaplin genius that they also talk about comes from. It would be boring if I was totally predictable all the time. I’m happy to do exactly as I’m told – and then I’ll throw in the unpredictable bit as a bonus.”
The show itself failed to uncover any major new talent. Irish singer / songwriter Gerry Brown appeared on one episode and went on to sustain a career, and Simon Eyre of series winners, Second Image, (“North London’s answer to Kool And The Gang”) went on to gig as a guitarist. Starr fared little better, even though he described himself at the time as “one of a handful of stars who can actually put bums on seats”. His assertion that he hadn’t “even scratched the surface of the talent yet” would not get put to the test anytime soon.
Carving a career off the back of a talent show is not easy. Yet in 1983, it looked as if Paul Squire was about to become the exception to the rule. Success on talent shows Search For A Star and Starburst had led to an appearance for the young comedian on the 1980 Royal Variety Show and two series for ATV in 1981 and 1982 of The Paul Squire Show. By the beginning of 1983, the BBC had tempted him to switch sides, offering him his own Saturday night primetime show, Paul Squire, Esq in which he could sing a couple of songs, tell some jokes and do some impressions. “Mike Yarwood is the best,” Squire said of his contemporaries, “but I class him as an impersonator because he does everything to perfection. I class myself as an impressionist – that means I do a rough likeness”.
Paul Squire, Esq was standard Saturday night, consisting of sketches in which Squire would take off Frank Spencer or Doctor Who and two songs per episode. “I’m always messing around with my tape recorders, guitars and electric pianos even when at home,” he happily confessed. Squire found himself returning to ITV as Central Television offered him the chance to make his second new series of 1983. PS It’s Paul Squire was broadcast on Monday nights and featured much the same kind of material. Running through to August of that year, it was to be his last primetime television series to date. For someone who had received such sustained exposure over a short period of time, his subsequent absence from television remains a mystery, especially when he was considered good enough to be awarded comedian of the year at the Club Mirror Awards.
Squire continued to make a living, as many entertainers with some level of television exposure do, on the after-dinner circuit. “With a showbiz career stretching back to the age of five, there is little wonder that the highly talented Paul performs with such consummate ease and panache,” reads the hyperbole from his agents. “His comedy, uniquely his own and littered with hilarious impressions, is delivered impeccably”.
Next Monday: He has to allow you to do your bit
Ian Brant
June 4, 2018 at 7:34 am
Richard Herring on Paul Squire: http://www.richardherring.com/warmingup/27/6/2011/index.html
Richard16378
June 4, 2018 at 2:02 pm
No mention of Paul Squire as the butt of a joke on The Young Ones?
Freddie Starr always seemed to be too much of a maverick for a mainstream audience.
Glenn Aylett
June 4, 2018 at 6:27 pm
Paul Squire was a nearly man of eighties comedy, by the time he landed his BBC 1 show on Saturday nights, he must have thought he was the new Mike Yarwood. However, the show was OK, one sketch I do remember is the one with the drunk Geordies guarding Hadrian’s Wall, but nothing outstanding and his impressions weren’t quite in Yarwood’s league. Also it was sad in a way to say him more or less vanish after 1983 as he thought he was going to be as big as Benny Hill and his career dried up as quickly as it began.
richardpd
July 18, 2020 at 11:50 pm
It seems being an impressionist is a tricky area for a comedian, often because people in the public eye change quickly and if your act is based around them it could make it out of date fast.
JFK impersonater Vaughn Meader found out the hard way.
Spitting Image also made things hard, though Rory Bremner managed to start his own successful impressionist act after supplying voices to it. He seemed to be flexible enough to incorporate new impressions into his act and kept going for many years.
While not just an impressionist, Phil Cool was another 1980s comedian who had a brief but deserved run of success.
Glenn Aylett
May 19, 2024 at 3:47 pm
Paul Squire was the only Geordie comedian to make it into peak time television that I can remember before Sarah Millican. Others tended to be staples of working men’s clubs or, like Bobby Thompson, who had a huge live following but very rarely appeared on television, the humour was too parochial to work outside the North East.
George White
May 19, 2024 at 4:18 pm
The North East had this very unique and isolated club scene of its own that seemed in many ways separate from the club scenes elsewhere.
Where you get things like Jarra Elvis.
Glenn Aylett
May 19, 2024 at 6:08 pm
I can remember Spike Rawlings as well who was very popular in the North East in the seventies, but little known elsewhere. There is, of course, the infamous Roy Chubby Brown from Middlesbrough whose act makes Bernard Manning look like a liberal and who is permanently banned from television, but is a huge draw on the live circuit and has sold hundreds of thousands of CDs and DVDs of his shows.
Richardpd
May 19, 2024 at 10:02 pm
I remember one of my friends was really into Roy Chubby Brown in the mid 1990s, often playing his Take Fat & Party CD until I started to quote some of the more repeatable lyrics!
Richardpd
May 19, 2024 at 4:56 pm
Reeves & Mortimer crossed my mind, though they were both in London when they met.
Droogie
May 20, 2024 at 11:47 am
Reading the Freddie Starr piece, it’s strange to see Lennie Bennett described as his “ friend”. There was a series on Channel 5 years ago about controversial old school comedians – Manning, Davidson etc. Starr featured on one show and Lennie Bennett appeared as a talking head who did nothing but slag him off. He accused Starr of never changing his stage act, especially still dressing up as Elvis which Bennett described as sad for a man Starr’s age. I’m not sure what bad blood went on between them, but it was unusual to see one old school comic diss another like that as they usually band together.
Glenn Aylett
May 20, 2024 at 9:08 pm
Can’t remember anything Lennie Bennett did comedy wise except his unsuccessful pairing with Jerry Stevens, and was more known as a game show host. Freddie Starr was actually quite talented, I can remember him taking straight acting roles and being quite a good singer, as well as his manic stage act that could be quite amusing.
Droogie
May 22, 2024 at 6:33 pm
Yeah – Bennett’s stand up stylings are difficult to remember. Did he tell old pub jokes or do gentle observational stuff like Tom O’Connor? Probably a mix of both. He did actually redeem himself on an episode of Blankety Blank way back. One of the contestants was a black lad with a moustache and a flat top haircut. Host Les Dawson kept haranguing the poor guy thet he looked like Little Richard, accompanied with dubious African American accent. This went on for ages until Lennie Bennett spoke up and said it was unfair and that the black lad should do an impression of Humpty Dumpty to Dawson to see how he liked it. Apart from the Freddie Starr doc the only other thing I saw Bennett on in later years was an episode of Fantasy Football when briefly he came on in a Leeds strip to show his resemblance to player Gary McAllister.
Glenn Aylett
May 22, 2024 at 7:42 pm
I can only really remember Lennie Bennett as an amusing contestant on Blankety Blank and a competent game show host, and his ill fated partnership with Jerry Stevens, which sent the Sheffield comedian and compere’s career into an early grave, as it didn’t work. Later on, Stevens made a steady living promoting pro celebrity golf tournaments and charity events, but was rarely seen on television after 1980.