98. You’re BBC, you shouldn’t be here

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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?

ITV also came up with a new Saturday night banker in 1991. Michael Barrymore had already established himself a big success thanks to Thames game show Strike It Lucky, where he’d become noted for his ability to send up and insult members of the public without causing offence. However his other television ventures were less successful. During the 80s, he’d presented the BBC quiz Get Set Goand landed his own ITV sketch show, both of which flopped. Michael Barrymore’s Saturday Night Out had proven more successful, but Barrymore wasn’t able to do much with the format and the whole idea of seaside variety shows seemed to have gone out of fashion. LWT’s new show, however, had the man very much at the centre of events – as illustrated by the name, Barrymore. Drawing on his strengths interacting with ordinary people, the format, such as it was, saw Barrymore welcome members of the public who had interesting or unusual talents onto the set, introduce their acts and then engage them in brief, informal interviews. Of course, this was basically an excuse for more prancing about and rooting through old ladies’ handbags.

The programme’s pilot was scripted by Stewart Lee and Richard Herring. “Barrymore really liked (the scripts) as they were taking the piss a bit,” the double-act later claimed, “but all his court of advisors and hangers on dissuaded him from using any of it. He was a really good bloke though and very funny when left to his own devices, ad libbing.” According to John Kaye Cooper, LWT’s controller of entertainment, the pilot was a disaster, but the station decided to stick with their man. “We knew through Strike It Lucky and his abilities as a comedian, that he was very much a man of the people and we had to build a show that was probably one of the first real people shows,” remembers Kaye Cooper.

More established writers were hired to pen the transmitted programmes. The first instalment was a Christmas special broadcast on 21 December 1991, where the guests included The Rumburgers, a seventy-something married couple who travelled the nation’s working men’s clubs performing deadpan, slapstick dance routines. The first show was also notable for a bizarre opening where Barrymore spotted BBC Sport executive Brian Barwick in the audience and made great play of throwing him out of ITV premises (“You’re BBC, you shouldn’t be here”).

A regular insert was “My Kind Of People,” where the Barrymore roadshow would set up in a shopping centre and invite members of the public up on stage to sing songs, tell jokes or perform magic, as long as they didn’t mind the host messing about behind them, with the best (or worst) being invited onto the main show. “I knew from what I’d seen of him that Michael would even make the ones who weren’t particularly talented, entertaining on the stages around the shopping centres of Britain,” says Kaye Cooper.  “I knew instinctively that Michael would cotton onto the really talented ones and we would bring them back into the studio, it was clear that was part of the format.  But we of course got great fun and great entertainment out of the wonderful characters he found around the country – sometimes they just wandered on stage and he spoke to them, or he would do some of his outrageous routines with them and get great entertainment.”

The special pulled in 13.4 million viewers, and similar figures were achieved by the six-part series that followed in January. So pleased were LWT with the show it was repeated in full during the summer months – one of the few occasions when a light entertainment series has been shown again in its entirety.  But unlike Blind Date or Noel’s House Party, Barrymore didn’t really have a strong format at its heart, and the meant it was a risk. “Some of the problems I always used to say Michael Barrymore had, is actually there was no format and it was all on him,” says LWT’s Alan Boyd. “The pressure was on him nightly to achieve.”

By the end of 1991, then, both the BBC and ITV had found brand new bankers for their Saturday evening schedule, shows that would prove to be continually successful for most of the rest of the decade. But one show doesn’t make a schedule, and much needed to be done. Worse still, even though they’d managed to replace some long runners this time, it didn’t mean they could do it again.

Next Monday: If this doesn’t work out, we’re both snookered!