54. We would be the spoilsports

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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?

“It’s wallpaper TV,” claimed Daily Mail entertainment columnist, Baz Bamigboye in 2000. “But watching Cilla is like using an illegal substance. You know you shouldn’t but you like it.” “Strong format, fantastic engagement with the audience, broad age range, consummate professional presenting it,” says Noel Edmonds. “If you’re asking for a professional’s view, that would – for me – be the best Saturday night format.”

Blind Date owes its initial success – in part – to the demise of a similarly successful and ground-breaking series. It was John Birt’s decision to move the ailing Game For a Laugh to Sunday nights that opened up a prime slot on Saturday evenings. Game For a Laugh’s allure was its originality and inventiveness, and as the creative forces behind the show ran out of ideas, Birt ensured its successor in the Saturday evening slot required little in terms of sustained creative input, and relied instead on great casting and a highly successful, but unchanging format.

It is said that Cilla Black first became aware of the television series Perfect Match while on a concert tour of Australia in 1984. Recognising the show had popular appeal she asked her bosses at LWT why there was not a British version. LWT’s then head of light entertainment, Alan Boyd, had in fact already bought the format. Cilla had failed to hear about it because Boyd – recognising that Game For a Laugh and Surprise Surprise were already occupying the Saturday and Sunday night schedules – had sat on it, waiting for a suitable gap to appear. Perfect Match actually began life in America in Studio 55, ABC Television Center on 20 December 1965 as The Dating Game.

The series was the brainchild of Chuck Barris, an eccentric, but highly influential figure in US television who would later go on to create long-running game shows, The Newlywed Game (which would find its way onto British screen as Mr and Mrs) and How’s Your Mother-In-Law. The Dating Game owed much to Barris’ step father (who lent Chuck $20,000 to produce the show) and the willingness of ABC to broadcast the series in the face of strong criticism against the show’s often unambiguous exchanges (on one occasion a female contestant asked one male contestant “What would I like most about you?” to which he promptly replied, “My cock”). Such was the strength of feeling directed at The Dating Game that on the day it first went on air, the Chicago Tribune ran a story entitled “Daytime Television Hits All-Time Low”.

The series was a major success. Presented by Jim Lange, The Dating Game was also noteworthy for providing early television exposure for future stars Teri Garr, Tom Selleck, Arnold Schwarzenegger and Farrah Fawcett. In 1973 The Dating Game went into syndication, and then left the airwaves altogether, until Barris engineered a comeback four years later. This time the series was raunchier than before and consequently lasted only three years amidst a barrage of complaints from viewers and press alike. In 1984, Barris sold the world rights to Fremantle Corporation.

In 1985 the BBC was locked into a fierce internal and external struggle to strike the right balance between popularity and quality. However, this dilemma was not unique to the public service corporation. Birt, sensing that The Dating Game was a winning formula, wanted to get a British version of the show on air, but was conscious that a mid-term review of LWT’s licence was being conducted by the IBA. “Alan (Boyd) and I worked closely to sanitise the programme for a British audience,” explains Birt. “In the event, David Glencross at the IBA was even more nervous than I had predicted. Alan and I brainstormed about the rules. In LWT’s version, we would be the spoilsports: the winning couple would travel to and from their date in the span of a single day; and they would go their separate ways and return to their respective homes by nightfall. They would be chaperoned at all times by a stills photographer. In their debrief for the following week’s programme, they would be encouraged to talk about personality, we would steer well clear of sex.”

Even with a revised format, Boyd and Birt realised the pivotal element needed to ensure their version of The Dating Game (to be called It’s A Hoot) would obtain the approval of David Glencross was the choice of presenter. Boyd’s instinct was to follow, what he describes as the “Larry Grayson route”, and approached comedian Duncan Norvelle.

At the time, Norvelle was known as the “Chase me” comedian (thanks to his famous catchphrase). He had appeared on the BBC’s Saturday night entertainment series The Main Attraction (1983-1984) and Central Television’s midweek variety show Mike Reid’s Mates and Music (1984). Seemingly just another of the burgeoning number of mainstream comedians that blossomed on British television during the early and mid-1980s, Norvelle’s camp persona ensured he achieved a level of exposure that exceeded his peers. His act was, in fact, inoffensive and his material non-sexual in nature. However, given the opportunity to host LWT’s new dating game show, the comedian inexplicably turned on the innuendo. “Duncan would rush out from behind the screen and say, ‘If you don’t like him, I do!’” recalls Boyd. “(Norvelle)’s unprovoked stream of gay innuendo not only put sex centre-stage, but also got in the way of the strong, central message of Blind Date– heterosexual attraction,” adds Birt. Norvelle struggled too with the show’s format. “We couldn’t edit him because he didn’t get the logic right,” says Boyd.

Next Monday: The Most Sexless Person In Television