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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For all its attempts at breaking new ground, Bobby Davro On The Box appealed to a relatively conservative audience. Journalist Stewart Knowles attended a recording session and noted that “a mostly middle-aged studio audience” had turned up to watch Davro and comedy partner Jessica Martin run through “Total Relapse of The Throat” (a spoof of the Bonnie Tyler hit “Total Eclipse of the Heart”) and “Watch Your Vows” which Knowles reported as a “merciless spoof of TV game shows”. Neither sketch sounded as if it were subversive enough to appeal to a younger audience. Yet future Friday Night Live stalwarts Moray Hunter and Jack Docherty both wrote for the series.
“I remember one point I had a bet with Bobby,” says his producer Nigel Lythgoe. “He wanted to do this joke where he walked in to a bar and said, ‘have you got a packet of helicopter crisps, and the guy behind the bar said no we have only got plain’. And I said ‘that’s just not funny Bobby, it’s corny – just don’t do that, and he bet me £10 that he would get a big laugh out of this. So I got called out of the the gallery to listen to him tell this joke and he told it and the audience loved it, and I had to pay him £10. It was only two years later he admitted to me that he had wound the audience up to laugh at the joke. He never gave me the £10 back though.”
Bobby Davro On the Box pulled in a highly creditable 12.5 million viewers (just a shade below Copy Cats) and its title sequence (with Davro endlessly changing channels on a television which seemed to broadcast nothing but him mid-impression to a catchy but modern theme tune) was immeasurably less dated than Copy Cats. It put the comedian ahead of a chasing pack that included Gary Wilmot, Jessica Martin and Andrew O’Connor.
Davro and TVS’ success was largely down to director of programmes Greg Dyke’s plans for the station. Since his arrival in 1984, he had reconstructed TVS’ programme making culture, imbuing it with the kind of populism that had already propelled him to success at LWT and TV-am. In turning the station into the fiercely aggressive force that it became in the late 1980s, Dyke rebuilt almost the entirety of the company’s programme-making team. He brought in John Kaye Cooper (who had produced The Faith Brown Chat Showin 1980 and would go on to executive produce Gladiators in the 1990s), to handle light entertainment as well as Graham Benson for drama and Clive Jones for news.
“TVS was a real little hive of industry at that point,” says Nigel Lythgoe. He remembers that when he first joined “if you wanted overtime, you would have to consult the tidal chart to see if [the management] were going to be out boating or not. But after a couple of years, we were a little machine, and people loved being a part of it.”
If there was any doubt that ITV’s most lucrative station harboured big ambitions, Dyke and James Gatward (TVS’ founder)’s attempt in the mid years of the decade to attain proper major company status within the ITV network made their position clear (historically ITV had operated a two tier system, in which the larger companies – Granada, Central, Thames, LWT and Yorkshire -effectively controlled the ITV schedules, leaving remaining regions such as Grampian, Anglia, Tyne Tee etc with very little influence over ITV network issues). Beginning in 1985 with a presentation to John Whitney (Director General of the IBA), designed to win the IBA s support, Gatward and Dyke realised they needed to make the Authority understand the contribution that TVS was already making to the rest of the network, as well as outline the company’s potential to benefit ITV into the future.
“We believe the ITV structure is vulnerable, particularly at weekends,” so claimed their presentation. “There is an inherent structural weakness in the system because it relies so heavily on one major company – LWT – for both the quantity and quality of programmes for the weekend schedule. We are not saying that the three 7-day Majors do not produce programmes of sufficient quality and quantity, but that these companies traditionally prefer to see them used to maintain the strength of the weekday schedule. What is needed is an increase in the amount of domestic peak time quality available, not only to keep the weekday schedule fully competitive, but also and more importantly to improve the weekend offering”.
The prosperity of the South of England and TVS’ already burgeoning programming output, meant that the argument was put forward by the station that it should be awarded Major status for the weekends with immediate effect, and seek to go to seven-day Major status at the time of the next franchise renewals. For Gatward, admission to ITV’s top table would see TVS emerge from the current regional skirmishes in which ITV’s second tier companies found their networked offerings overly scrutinised in terms of price and quality. The way Gatward saw it, the major companies effectively controlled the schedules, exchanging programmes between them with little attempt to force down prices and generally behaving in the manner of an old boy’s club.
Given the similarities between the message that Gatward and Dyke had communicated to the IBA and Birt’s own attacks on ITV’s failure to properly support the weekend schedule, one would have thought that TVS would have found a vocal ally in LWT. However, both John Birt and (LWT Managing Director) Brian Tesler, while agreeing with many of the arguments outlined by the south coast company, believed that TVS would not be able to overcome the objections of mighty companies such as Granada and Central Television in advance of the next round of franchise awards.
Next Monday: Well bottom’s not funny
Glenn Aylett
February 9, 2019 at 12:03 pm
TVS was completely the opposite of the conservative Southern, who seemed content to run programmes with Jack Out of Town Hargreaves for years, make a few children’s shows like How and Runaround, and have a twee afternoon show featuring middle class housewives in a fake house called Houseparty. TVS really wanted to be one of the big boys and thanks to Greg Dyke and encouragement from John Birt at LWT made successful action series like CATS Eyes and big budget LE for Saturday nights.
richardpd
February 9, 2019 at 1:27 pm
TVS had some good programming while they held the South Of England franchise, their children’s output was impressive with Number 73, The anime like Tellybugs, the lighthouse sequences in Fraggle Rock, though it’s a shame they didn’t keep Wurzel Gummage going.
Later on they seemed to get ideas above their station (no pun intended) by teaming up with Mary Tyler Moore Productions & other over stretching ventures.
It’s a shame their archive seems to have been dispersed to the four winds, making DVD releases & repeats difficult.
Glenn Aylett
February 9, 2019 at 5:09 pm
@richardpd, TVS really did try hard to compete with the big five and even though John Birt is reviled for his BBC years, he really did help TVS become a major player at weekends by getting their shows networked. Also TVS served the affluent, mostly middle class area south of London to the south coast, so had high advertising revenues. One could say Southern served a similar area, but totally lacked ambition beyond its narrow range of weekday shows and would never be asked to make a networked show on Saturday nights.