99. If this doesn’t work out, we’re both snookered!

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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?

Since winning New Faces in 1976, Jim Davidson had been a constant staple of ITV’s light entertainment output. Almost immediately after his victory he’d signed a contract with Thames Television where, after appearances alongside William Franklyn, Barry Cryer, Bob Todd and others on What’s On Next?, he had graduated to his own series in 1979. Throughout the 1980s, he starred in sketch shows, variety specials and two sitcoms –Up The Elephant And Round The Castle and Home James. But come the 1990s, Davidson’s relationship with Thames had come to an end. After his final series for ITV, the adult-orientated Stand Up Jim Davidson in 1990, Jim accepted an offer from the BBC to relaunch his career as a game show host.

Game shows had made up a big part of the BBC’s entertainment output for many years, but the corporation often seemed to tolerate such programmes rather than encourage them. Shows like Every Second Counts and Bob’s Full House had been popular, but many critics asked what they were offered that couldn’t be supplied by ITV. The BBC faced a further game show shaped problem in that the licence fee prevented them from giving away huge prizes – something that Every Second Counts had got round by taking away the prizes that contestants had previously gained after they’d won the next, a quirk that confused almost everyone that watched. Against the more glamorous, expensive ITV opposition – witness The Price Is Right overloading its winners with cars, holidays and fitted kitchens, compared to Bob’s Full House’s carriage clocks and dried flowers, the BBC seemed a bit anaemic. Yet studio-based quiz shows were cost-effective (several could be filmed in one day), popular and an easy way to engage BBC-contracted celebs, hence their continued presence in the schedules. An inane, cheap BBC quiz, however, could get critics’ pens moving faster than virtually any other show. Not for nothing, then, did Jim Davidson open the first Big Break by announcing, “This is my first show for the BBC, and if this doesn’t work out, we’re both snookered!”

Big Break’s most obvious influence was the long-running ITV series Bullseye, where contestants had to exhibit both a general knowledge and some skill at darts to win big prizes, with guest professional players popping in to throw a few arrows and add a bit of credibility to proceedings. Despite, or perhaps because of, host Jim Bowen often appearing completely bewildered by everything that was going on around him, Bullseyehad become a huge hit. Much of the same was evident in Big Break– each week, three members of the public would be teamed up with professional snooker players. The punters would answer questions to win time for their team-mates to pot balls on the in-studio table. If they could do this successfully, cash sums and prizes would be on offer – but not very big ones. Davidson asked the questions, and bantered with the show’s “referee,” John Virgo, a professional player himself who’d garnered something of a reputation in the snooker world for his impressions of various players, and whose presence on the show clearly helped attract some big names (virtually every famous player appeared at least once during the run). Again, this was similar to Bullseye, where Jim had darts commentator Tony Green as his sidekick. And just at it did with Tony, Virgo’s role on Big Break expanded as time went on, regularly participating in daft sketches and routines.

With a loudmouth comedian in charge, a format based around a pub game, and a raucous stomp-a-long theme sung by Captain Sensible, Big Breakwas clearly not cerebral viewing. However, it was incredibly popular. The series debuted on Tuesday 30 April 1991, and was an instant success, pulling in 16.5 million viewers for its first episode, and not leaving the top 20 ratings for its entire run. A second series was duly commissioned, and began on Saturday evenings in January 1992, providing the BBC with another Saturday banker. If the show never lived up to the heights of its first run, it would go on to remain successful throughout the 1990s, still appearing on Saturday nights up until 2000.

Next Monday: The humour of Beadle comes through humiliating people