97. NTV brings you … empty rooms!

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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?

With a number of veteran series ending, what would take their place in the Saturday night schedules? Ironically, their initial replacement was Bruce Forsyth’s Generation Game which, after a successful run on Friday evenings in 1990 was brought back to its famous Saturday slot from September 1991 onwards. Another ratings banker came in the form of Challenge Anneka. This was a departure for Saturday night television, in that it was made entirely out of the studio and used the techniques of factual programming – though given the rise of “reality entertainment” in later years, it looks less unusual. It had many of the familiar aspects of Saturday night entertainment, though – a race against time, some spectacular transformations, and a human interest angle through the good causes that Anneka would help out along the way.

The biggest light entertainment hit of 1991, however, also had its roots in previous programmes. The Noel Edmonds Saturday Roadshow had run for three successful, if unspectacular series. However it seemed as if inspiration for the show’s weekly “locations” was wearing thin, and the concept limited what could be done within the show. So in November 1991 came Noel’s House Party. The new show had a permanent set, memorably in the picturesque village of Crinkley Bottom, and more scope for running jokes – notably the recurring spot when Noel read spoof news stories from the “Crinkly Bottom Observer”. It also meant, though, that the comedic concepts didn’t have to be set up from scratch every week. Many aspects of the Saturday Roadshow were carried over, such as the Gotchas, the celebrity Lyric Game, and the gleeful dispensing of gunge onto the heads of celebrities and members of the public. Celebrities also appeared, with Ronnie Corbett on the first show as Edmonds’ “butler,” and Leslie Nielsen appearing as an eccentric villager indulging in some comedy crosstalk with Noel. Some of these guests were billed in advance, while others were complete surprises – the idea being that viewers would never know who would be coming through the on-stage door. The programmes were always broadcast live, and there was always a frisson of excitement that there could be major problems (this really happened only once in the early days, when an episode in March 1993 had to be cancelled due to a bomb scare at Television Centre).

New aspects include the Money Box game, where each week viewers at home could win up to £1,000 if a celebrity could grab it in a wind tunnel. However one aspect that set the House Partyapart from its predecessor was, apparently, kept a secret even from members of the production team. NTV (apparently standing for “Now … The Viewer”) saw Noel click his fingers and an unsuspecting viewer find themselves live on television while sitting in their own armchairs. Tiny cameras had been installed in their sitting room while they were out, and the production team had spent several weeks raking up all sorts of embarrassing moments from their past which Noel would reveal on air.

The central idea – a viewer sitting down watching the show suddenly finds themselves on TV – guaranteed genuinely spontaneous and amusing reactions. But the production team had to ensure the victims would take the sting in good heart. Sometimes this didn’t matter – on one of the very early episodes, the subject fled from the living room immediately after realising she was on air and refused to come back for the entire show. However the fact the feature had gone spectacularly wrong was just as amusing as if it had gone right, with Noel constantly cutting back to the deserted sofa for the rest of the show (“NTV brings you … empty rooms!”). NTV became a major talking point and probably contributed to the show beating the formidable Blind Date in the ratings for the first time.

Perhaps the most notable NTV in the first series, however, came in the last programme. Dave Lee Travis had been set up by Noel for a Gotcha earlier in the run, and Travis’ enraged response became one of the most famous moments in the show’s history (and a full version became – at the time – one of the most downloaded MP3s in the history of the web). The joke on the final show was that Travis would get his own back on Noel, and NTV proceeded as usual until DLT walked into the “victim’s” house – revealing it was in fact in the studio next door, and Noel had been talking, not to a member of the public, but Bobby Davro in disguise. If it all seems a bit contrived, this “anything goes” format was a big departure, and established a tradition of the production team getting their own back on Noel once a series.

Next Monday: You’re BBC, you shouldn’t be here