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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In the early to mid 1980s, the US drama Knight Rider tapped into a period in which adventure series featuring high tec vehicles were popular. Streethawk (a souped up motorbike) Blue Thunder and Airwolf (both souped up helicopters) had played well enough, but Knight Rider had attained a popularity (peaking at 13.1 million viewers) and longevity that the other series never attained. By 1990, Knight Rider was perceived as faintly ridiculous, and its star, outdated. However Knight Rider‘s Michael Knight (alias actor David Hasselhoff) had for the last few years been carving out a singing career in mainland Europe. After taking his act (David Hasselhoff and The Knight Rockers) on the road in Austria, he was signed by a German producer and in 1989 recorded Germany’s best-selling single for that year, “Looking For Freedom”.
Television stardom beckoned once again. “Knight Rider, which is still syndicated in 62 countries, has netted millions of dollars in merchandising and I made nothing,” he reflected in March 1990. “But that has all changed. Now I’ve arranged my affairs to reap the reward of the merchandising that I lost out on that show.” Lesson learned, Hasselhoff would assume increasing control over his new series. Baywatch, the sun-kissed tale of a group of Southern Californian lifeguards looked an enticing prospect to ITV. The series was about daring escapades and saving lives, but there was little violence and almost no guns. What there was though would prove in time to be no less contentious.
“My problem is, unless my double looks better than me, I won’t let him do it,” mused Hasselhoff. “You know, I’ve got an image to think of. If the guy is built like a brick outhouse I say, ‘Let him go’, because it makes me look good. But sometimes I get this other stand-in who’s a little bit bigger than me, and when he runs in the water he’s got this big butt and I go, ‘Oh man, there go all my women fans’. So I say, ‘Come on here, let me do it.'” The IBA was not blind to the fact that Baywatch’s appeal was largely predicated on the sex appeal of its main characters. In its Annual Report, the organisation remarked “The content of the Baywatch series was at time questionable in the earlier part of Saturday evening. Its image of buxom female life-guards and sun lovers on Malibu Beach attracted both a large following amongst younger viewers and criticism from others who found its fleshy emphasis sometime gratuitous”.
Yet, Hasselhoff at least felt the series had much more to offer. “The show started off doing great,” he explained. “It looked as if we were going to get personalised stories, emotional stories, real stories. Then they got into sensationalism as opposed to realism. There’s so much happening in real life on our beaches. Last year lifeguards rescued 15,000 people – think of the stories there. It’s all about getting better, doing good work. It’s a constant battle. It’s not so much fighting my looks, it’s fighting the material that comes my way. With Knight Rider I just settled into going to work, doing my lines, hitting my mark, being charming. I really couldn’t do any heavier acting on that show … I love to work, I’ve got a lot to offer. I don’t want to just go to the beach and collect a pay cheque. And I don’t want to come out of this in five or six years and have people say, well, he talked to a car and then ran down the beach. I need to move on. I want to go for it.”
Baywatch was a big hit for ITV, with 13 million people tuning in to the first series. In fact such was its popularity that when NBC decided to cancel it after poor ratings in America, ITV organised a consortium of contented buyers to pre-finance another series. This ingenious piece of business led to Baywatch becoming the much-vaunted (but one suspects never fully proven) “most popular television series in the world” and provided ITV with six years of decent ratings in one of the most important slots in the schedule.
Next Monday: A Double Order of Talent
Glenn Aylett
July 8, 2019 at 8:53 am
Unlike the start of the eighties, when ITV was beaten completely by BBC1 and had nothing decent to show on Saturday nights, ITV was much more bullish in 1990. Apart from Baywatch, there was Blind Date and Beadle’s About to pull in 16 million viewers, and these would soon be joined by The Gladiators and Stars In Their Eyes to ensure ITV had hits most of the year round. BBC1 could still hit back with Noel’s House Party and Casualty, but it wasn’t until they won the rights to show the Lottery results that they could gain anything like their old dominance.
richardpd
July 8, 2019 at 5:34 pm
The revived Generation Game & Challenge Anneka were other strings to the BBC’s bow in the early 1990s.
Beadle’s About was later moved to Sundays, probably when the ratings started to slide.
Glenn Aylett
July 9, 2019 at 5:35 pm
On balance, though, I’d say ITV had more hit shows on Saturdays than the BBC for most of the nineties. Yet the BBC did seem to hit back in the middle of the decade by acting like ITV by using imports to open the evening schedule. The New Adventures of Superman proved to be a decent sized hit, and using The Simpsons after the sport and news attracted a large audience of younger viewers. However, the BBC had some real stinkers as well such as Danny Baker’s Bygones and Pets Win Prizes.
richardpd
July 9, 2019 at 10:42 pm
I remember the family of one of my school friends used to video the Saturday night offerings of one of the main channels & watch the other as there were so many programmes they wanted to see.
Harry & Bugs were other BBC1 decent Saturday night dramas, which hopefully be covered in a future instalments.
Bygones wasn’t bad but Pets Win Prizes was definitely was, a typical 1990s “ITV show on BBC 1” (as my Dad would say about independent programming bought in by the BBC), along with Caught In The Act & Joker In The Pack.
Glenn Aylett
July 10, 2019 at 9:42 am
As has been pointed out in earlier articles, the BBC had ditched many of its old school entertainers like Little and Large and Paul Daniels and struggled to find replacements. Getting Bruce Forsyth back for The Generation Game was a quick win, but he fell out with the Corporation in 1994 and went back to ITV. Danny Baker was very much the great white hope of the Birt era, he replaced DLT on Radio 1 with a Bannisterised morning show and was seen as a new school LE presenter. However, his material was below par and he went back to radio again.
richardpd
July 11, 2019 at 1:36 pm
The problem with a lot of 1980s – 90s comedians was that most of their shows tended to be post-watershed, & suddenly having to present something in prime time meant a lot of their usual material was off-limits.
Glenn Aylett
July 11, 2019 at 5:58 pm
The new wave tended to be quite political and they weren’t considered suitable for peak time on the two main channels. Also Danny Baker’s knowing, ironic approach to life didn’t quite work on Pets Win Prizes as you could tell he saw it as a load of rubbish and he was replaced by the more suitable Dale Winton, who was more mainstream and more suited to such a cheap show( Supermarket Sweep was his other big venture at the time).
There still were large numbers of middle of the road, traditional presenters around for Saturday nights. The BBC’s Lottery show probably was such a big success because of Bob Monkhouse and Bruce Forsyth was still considered a big hitter wherever he worked.