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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Over the years, Blind Date changed very little. Filmed inserts superseded the photographic montages originally used to represent Blinders’ dates. Meanwhile, Cilla’s ex-Surprise Surprise sidekick Christopher Biggins tried to get a version of the series, featuring gay and lesbian contestants, off the ground, but it came to nothing. Blind Date was one of LWT’s most popular shows throughout the 1980s and 1990s, consistently attracting audiences of 14 million or above and so there was no reason to mess with a winning format.
“In the 1980s, where the commercial pressures were really becoming quite intense, once you had got something that worked, you wanted to have it there for a long, long time, and with a game show or a people show you could do that,” says TV executive David Docherty. “If you have got Game For a Laugh in your schedule or Blind Date and it [runs for] 20 or 24 weeks you breathe a huge sigh of relief.”
For much of the 1990s, Blind Date found itself in competition with the BBC’s Noel’s House Party, yet while the ITV show marched on, effectively unchanged, Noel’s House Partywould constantly introduce new features and gimmicks in an attempt to retain its audience. “You couldn’t beat [Blind Date] and I was there trying,” says Noel Edmonds. “Strong format, fantastic engagement with the audience, broad age range, consummate professional presenting it.”
The arrival of The National Lottery Live on BBC1 on 19 November 1994 looked to be a major cause for concern. Scheduled directly against Blind Date, the first few draws achieved stellar ratings. However it wasn’t to last: “By the end of 1995, The National Lottery Live viewing figures had tailed off to about 15 million,” recalls original presenter Anthea Turner. “The drop-off had always been expected – no one could keep pulling in 23 million viewers every week – and the audience was still high when you consider that nobody had to tune in to get the lottery numbers as soon as they were drawn: if people wanted to, they could just watch Blind Date on ITV and wait for them to pop up on the screen.”
Although Blind Date resisted the challenge of the Lottery, by 1998 audiences for terrestrial television were on the decline and Blind Date wasn’t immune – average ratings were four million down on the series’ heyday. ITV boss Richard Eyre determined that to survive, the network had to maximise the appeal of their most popular programmes and Blind Date was given an increased budget, new scriptwriters and new producers. Discussions began in earnest to revamp the show.
Initially it was decided that contestants would be picked “randomly” from the studio audience. This was discarded in preference of the tried and tested format, but Blind Date entered a period of decline as the production team apparently lost faith in their product. At the same time, Cilla was also deployed to front another LWT game show – Moment Of Truth. While this series was unable to replicate the success of Blind Date, it did appear for a time as if LWT was attempting to line it up as a successor to the aging dating show.
1998 also saw the first concerted rumours emerge that Cilla Black could be heading for pastures new. As the story began to circulate around the media it was speculated that Zoe Ball or Kirsty Young were being lined up to replace her – apparently Cilla’s own choice for a successor was GMTV’s Eamonn Holmes – a figure deemed as “sexually unthreatening” as Cilla herself. Change did eventually arrive in 2002, but it was to the show’s format and not the presenter. “Dating shows – they have to move on,” explained Paul Jackson, then Granada’s director of entertainments and formats at LWT. “We’re trying to encourage people to be more real. Blind Date began in the days of innocence, when people were not so upfront. Kids today are much more prepared to say what they think, to dish the dirt.”
“You face that dilemma,” he reveals some years later, “is there some way to internally improve the show? Because the brand name is still valuable, the host still carries tremendous loyalty and affection. Is there some way to play with the internal constituent parts? … That wasn’t easy with Blind Datebecause I think one of the reasons why it was so successful for 18 years was it’s got a very simple through line – boy meets three girls, picks one, goes on a date – do they get on? It’s a very simple construction, and you play with it at your peril.”
Next Monday: The most important entertainment programme of my time