51. Oh dear – Auntie’s playing bingo!

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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?

Another comedian hosting a primetime quiz show for the BBC in 1984 was Bob Monkhouse. From the 1980s onwards, Monkhouse would routinely flit from commercial television to the BBC and back again. He started 1984 as the figurehead of ITV game shows, enjoying an almost unbroken run of presenting stretching right back to 1967 when he took over from Jackie Rae as host of The Golden Shot.The series, described by critics as a “dead duck” prior to Monkhouse’s debut, was revitalised by the arrival of a slick, professional presenter, able to cope with the complexities of live television.

Throughout its eight-year run, Monkhouse distinguished himself as the only one of The Golden Shot’s five presenters actually able to make the show run smoothly. Charlie Williams, in particular (who took over after Monkhouse’s first tenure), was overwhelmed by the series’ complexity and proved unable to contend with the simplest of things – even on occasion the names of contestants. Conversely Monkhouse could include in his act jokes at the expense of contestant’s occupations, and even on one occasion the delivery of an ITN newsflash. On top of all of this came the weekly bomb threats (apparently de rigourfor live television programmes in the 1970s). All were grist to Monkhouse’s mill.

The Golden Shot was followed by four years of Celebrity Squares (1975-79), a series that failed to capture the public’s imagination to the same degree, but allowed Monkhouse to further hone his mastery. Celebrity Squares was similar to Blankety Blank (Terry Wogan appeared on the first episode of the former). Both involved a panel of celebrities aligned neither to one contestant the other, required to provide the “right” answer to questions posed by the host. With its top prize of a brand new car though, Celebrity Squares took itself altogether more seriously than the BBC show.

The final game show that Monkhouse would present for ITV in the 1970s was Family Fortunes. Based on the American series Family Feud,it was tailor-made for Monkhouse’s slick presentational style. However – as the comedian recalls in his autobiography Crying With Laughter – not everyone thought so at the time. “Michael Grade had bought another Californian game, Card Sharks, intended as a LWT vehicle for Bruce Forsyth,” remembers Monkhouse. “After studying his acquisition closer, Grade called (Francis) Essex (ATV’s head of light entertainment): ‘Have you still got Monkhouse under contract? My people have just picked up a show in the States that’d be perfect for Bob … Bruce Forsyth wants to do it but, to be frank, it’s not his style at all … Do you want to unload that Family Feud thing on me in exchange? I believe it’s very physical, much more Bruce’s kind of thing. We’ll do a straight swap, what do you say?’” Sensing that Card Sharks (later to be renamed Play Your Cards Right) to be the weaker format, and presumably mindful of the IBA’s insistence that the game had to be changed to ensure that an element of skill was required, Essex declined Grade’s approach, electing to stick rather than twist.

Both series would do well with Play Your Cards Right attracting a high of 15.8 million viewers during its first run, while Family Fortunes just pipped it with 15.9 million viewers tuning in to the 20 January 1980 edition. Monkhouse stuck with Family Fortunes for four series, bowing out in 1983, in part thanks to a change in personnel at ATV. Francis Essex, who had done much for Monkhouse’s career had been replaced by Jon Scoffield, a designer turned producer, who while attaining an excellent track record of successful musical showcases, had a reputation for being difficult to work with if he took against you. For whatever reason he failed to be in thrall to Monkhouse, and consequently the working relationship between the two led the comedian to look for new outlets for his presentational mastery.

“They wanted me to bring the show business element of my ITV shows together with a richness of wit that lives up to the BBC’s light entertainment output,” said Monkhouse in 1984, in an effort to explain his “defection” to the BBC. “ …the support they’ve given us has left my mouth open. In America, of course, they spend millions developing a show like this, but in all the years I’ve been doing them I can’t recall a British series getting the encouragement Bob’s Full House has had”. Based on an idea devised by Blankety Blank warm-up men, Bob’s Full House (or Top of The Shopas it was to be originally titled) looked to be an interesting proposition, yet one that provoked deep concern within some in the corporation who felt that a game show based around bingo was too downmarket for the BBC. “The BBC were nervous in advance,” confirms Monkhouse, “I think they anticipated getting murdered in the press. They fully expected to be hit with: ‘Oh dear – Auntie’s playing bingo!’” Consequently the format went through one year of development and 37 revisions before it was deemed acceptable. “We knew it had to be upbeat, healthy and in no way sleazy,” Monkhouse explains. “There also had to be a high level of intelligence – contestants had to be seen to deserve to win prizes”.

“We tried every possible variation – using six contestants, then three, settling on four; trying bingo cards with 60 numbers, then 30, finally only 15; making it from a single, continuous game into one that built in tempo through six rounds, then five, at last a mere three with a sudden death challenge for the two front-runners, a notion I disliked.” For a time there was even plans to broadcast the show live with viewers able to play along in a national bingo game courtesy of Radio Times. Further changes were requested after Bill Cotton (then managing director of television services) dismissed the pilot show. Marcus Plantin (who also served as a producer on Blankety Blank) devised a new end game for the second pilot – “the golden bingo card”. “The seed of this idea flowered at once,” recalls Monkhouse: “I’d stand by the winning player as we looked up at a display of numbers. For each correct answer to my simplest questions, the player could pick a number which would then light up as its own cash equivalent or change to a letter. Revealing seven letters amongst the 15 on display would spell out a ‘dream holiday destination’ like a Madeira, Florida or Bermuda”.

The series would form a staple part of the BBC’s Saturday evening line up for the remainder of the decade. For most of those years it would attract up to 13 million viewers (although its final series only peaked at 9.7 million), thus rewarding the BBC’s heavy investment in its development. The show – and the switch to BBC1 – worked in Monkhouse’s favour too: “People have stopped calling me ‘glib,’” he remarked in Christmas 1984 “- now they call me fluent … As a comedian you get used to being on a rollercoaster that takes you in and out of fashion. But people have been prompted to re-assess me. I read one critic who asked, ‘What has the BBC done for Bob?’ and then suggested it had somehow scrubbed me down and removed some of the artificial gloss. There’s probably a lot of truth in that.”

Bob’s Full House (which some contest to be the most perfect British game show of all time) allowed Monkhouse to show off what a virtuoso presenter he in fact was (although the legend that his cue cards often read simply “joke,” prompting the entertainer to produce an appropriate humorous comment on the hoof, was apparently untrue). With talent of the calibre of Monkhouse and Dawson, the BBC had game shows sewn up.

Next Monday: A Shrivelled Little Thing