67. Well bottom’s not funny

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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?

Recognising that their best tactic was to live up to their promises, TVS invested a lot of time and money into quality drama series, such as The Ruth Rendell Mysteries, as well as avowedly popular programming. Series like Bobby Davro On the Box and Catchphrase signified TVS’ intent, while at the same time served to confirm that Birt’s manoeuvres to land Dyke the job at TVS had paid dividends to ITV’s Saturday night schedule as a whole (and therefore had benefited LWT exponentially).

“We were able to create, if you like, a kind of mini LWT on the south coast,” is how John Kaye Cooper remember it. “After a couple of years, this caused no amount of problems with the rest of the network who were very jealous of TVS’s position –almost like a sister company of LWT, even though it was a separate franchise.  It upset them that we were actually creating successful shows – Catchphrase being one, Bobby Davro On The Box, and then Bobby Davro’s TV Weekly, Summertime Special at Bournemouth. For little TVS it, was a bit of a shock to see a kind of Blackpool Night Outtype show coming from, from Bournemouth.  This really did upset the applecart in ITV. We were happy, we were delighted.”

As if to finally confirm that TVS sought to become a major player at the weekend, the station even produced its own Saturday evening sketch series. As with Copy Cats, Five Alive featured a fresh young crop of comedians. It first appeared as a one-off special in 1986. “There are not many laughs in creating a new TV comedy show with a fresh team of artists,” opined the TV Timesin its preview. “Most effort recently has gone into late-night adult shows and late-afternoon children’s shows, but Five Alive… is aimed at peak-time family audiences, the most difficult market.”

TVS went to great pains to bring together a collection of comedians that balanced the experienced-but not famous, with a few new bright hopes. The best-known face was probably Andrew Secombe, Rover the dog from the Channel 4 series Chips Comic and son of Sir Harry. Also appearing were out-and-out comic Peter Piper, Eve Ferrett (from Bottle Boys) and Sharon Maiden (who also featured that year in the John Cleese film Clockwise, and would later feature as Nola Duncan in Footballer’s Wives). However, the pilot edition’s greatest find was unarguably Brian Conley. At the time he was most famous for his stint as host on the “Kopy Kids” segment of TVS’ Summertime Special. This always-popular segment would see young children impersonating pop stars and gave Conley great scope for his comedy musings. Five Alive offered Conley the chance to try out a range of comedy characters, as well as develop his skills as a stand-up comedian.

“TVS were very new at all this,” says Brian, “and the great Paul Mayhew Archer, who writes Vicar of Dibley was brilliant and key in in creating for me Nick Frisbee and Dangerous Brian. Two characters that people will always remember. But Five Alive was a family fun sketch show, which was always very difficult, not very street-cred, but it pays the rent.

“What I really liked about it though was we used to get in the bar after recording and just all start to sing.  And we’d end up doing these little harmonies and at the end [the producer Alan Nixon] said ‘right I’m going to put this into the show’. But you know, it’s family time. I think we weren’t even allowed to say ‘bum’. I had a joke about my girlfriend – ‘she’s so big she used to rub her footprints out with her bum’ and was told I had to say ‘bottom’, and I said, ‘well bottom’s not funny’”.

Conley would go own to enjoy a profitable association with first TVS, and later LWT as his star continued on the ascendant throughout the 1980s and into the 1990s.

The pilot episode of Five Alive was deemed a success, and TVS commissioned a full series for the following year. A change in line-up took place, however and into the fold came Doon Mackichan. Given her subsequent appearances in numerous The Comic Strip Presents productions as well as roles in the BBC’s innovative comedy series The Day Today and I’m Alan Partridge, to find that Mackichan started out in an unashamed mainstream Saturday night sketch show is surprising indeed. That she should appear again in an ensemble sketch series such as Channel 4’s Smack The Pony makes the incongruity complete and provides a direct connection back to that earlier programme, confirming that television careers can evolve in the most unusual of ways.

Of course, in the litany of TVS productions designed to capture a sizeable Saturday night audience, one cannot ignore the aforementioned Summertime Special. Obviously based on the BBC series of the late 1970s, Seaside Special (which amongst other things cemented the fame of the piano playing Bobby Crush) as well as the corporation’s early 1980s variety show (also called Summertime Special), TVS’ own version adhered to the tried and tested template featuring a seaside resort (in this case the Bournemouth International Centre) and a dazzling, but relatively inexpensive line-up of acts.

The first edition on 19 July was unsurprisingly compèred by Bobby Davro, and featured acts such as Richard Digance, Five Star, the aforementioned Brian Conley as well as 1980 Search For A Star champion Dave Wolfe. Stu Francis figured too (then associated with TVS’ Ultra Quiz) making the first edition something of a “family affair” for the ITV station.

“Summertime Specials were a lot of fun,” remembers Conley.  “That Bournemouth International Centre Theatre is hot, but it worked because it was such a vast area.  I mean there’s 3,500 people in that room.  And I just remember, God bless him, David Bell, the producer, just wielding his power in the auditorium when we were rehearsing with his microphone.”

Michael Barrymore would host the 8 August edition, using it as a platform to fine-tune his increasingly anarchic stage routine. The following week (featuring Les Dennis) would include Jim Davison and Aiden J. Harvey (fresh from The Copy Cats) as well as the Nolan Sisters and would draw Summertime Special’s highest audience for that series (10 million viewers) comparing very favourably with the earlier BBC series (which attracted at its peak only 9.6 million viewers). The final edition of the first run retained the Copy Cats theme by allowing Gary Wilmot to host. This episode was deemed particularly notable at the time for its inclusion of Grace Kennedy, “the resident singer, who, following the failure of her marriage to a millionaire at the end of last year, has thrown herself into her work.”

Summertime Special returned for a second series the following year, this time with Lulu ensconced as the regular singing act. Similar in tone and style to that which had gone before, year two of Summertime Special saw the likes of Jim Davison, Kevin Devane (who also appeared in Five Alive), Nino Firetto, Five Star, Johnny Logan and Hazel O’Connor all appearing. Again broadcast from the Bournemouth International Centre, it fared even better than the previous series, finding itself the sixth most watched show of the week (with 10.6 million viewers) on 8 August 1987.

Next Monday: We are the funnymen