Part One: Comedy
By Jack Kibble-White and Steve Williams
First published May 2007
From All Creatures Great and Small to You Bet!, Saturday night television has provided a home to some of the biggest, boldest and most brilliant programmes ever to grace our screens. And with those programmes have come star names that have unarguably forged their stellar careers off the back of TV’s best night of the week. Where would Cilla, Beadle, Noel or Brucie be if it wasn’t for Saturday?
On 24 September 2007, Allison & Busby publish The Encyclopedia of Classic Saturday Night Telly. The book covers in detail 127 of the most important, entertaining or downright terrible television series to grace Saturday nights and exposes a wealth of previously unpublished facts along the way.
Although publication is still some months off, the authors have compiled a series of appropriately themed articles to get you in the mood. Over the next five months OTT will present a serialized examination of the history of Saturday night television with each edition focusing on a different genre. In the months to come we will take a look at entertainment programmes, dramas, game shows and people shows, but we begin our exploration with a look at a breed of Saturday night television that, until Harry Hill, washed up outside ITV’s offices, looked to have been banished from Saturday nights for good.
Comedy
For most of us looking for laughs on a Saturday night in recent years we’ve had to seek out ridiculous X-Factor auditions or You’ve Been Framed! home movies. Of course sitcoms and stand-up comedy have declined in prime time television in the last decade or so, but Saturday nights in particular have really felt their loss.
The Early Years
Way back in the early days of television, getting laughs was a pretty straightforward business. Stage and radio stars such as Claude Dampier, Charles Heslop, Leonard Henry, Reginald Purdell and Gillie Potter would run through their repertoire, spouting forth a silly lecture here, a comic monologue there and a few sketches and comic songs in between – usually all in the space of 10 minutes.
Each of these acts graced BBC Saturday nights at some point or other during the 1930s, but there was little or nothing about their performances that seemed particularly customised to take advantage of the medium, and of course, very few people in possession of a television set to actually watch them.
Post-war, the BBC demonstrated a greater willingness to experiment; Family Affairs in 1949 for one, brought an intriguing mix of comedy and soap opera to Saturday nights. However in the main, straight translations of already successful BBC radio shows proved to be the most prolific source of new material. In fact if you were a “name” radio comedian, then a television transferral was almost a given.
The Charlie Chester Show is a prime example, as well as being one of the first long-running Saturday night comedy shows in television (from 1949 to 1960). Although Chester’s series was usually transmitted in the middle of the evening, the BBC recognised comedy was a perfect way to kick off the Saturday night line-up. The Great Detective was one of the first to occupy the teatime slot back in 1953; while Billy Bunter of Greyfriars Schools found itself perched at 5pm or 5.30pm on Saturday from 1953 to 1961. In fact a slew of comedies aimed at kids, and set in or around educational establishments followed in Bunter’s rotund wake, including Jennings at School in 1958 William from 1962 and even one series of Whack-O. Each one instilled humour and jolly japes into the start of the evening schedule.
And when it wasn’t a schoolboy such as Bunter or Jennings getting up to some wheeze or other, it was the pleasingly dotty Mr Pastry (Richard Hearne) with his numerous early 1960s series such as Ask Mr Pastry, Mr Pastry Hooks a Spook and Mr Pastry’s Pet Shop – commencing proceedings for the BBC.
ITV’s approach was different – and a whole lot more glamorous. Early show such as Saturday Spectacular and Saturday Showtime were showcases that allowed individual acts to broadcast their own programme for several weeks at a time. Saturday Showtime actually began transmission on ITV’s opening weekend and with its glittering parade of big comedy stars set the tone for much of the rest of the decade.
Meanwhile, for the later evening, the BBC stuck pretty rigidly to its diet of established comedy acts with music hall and radio star Ted Ray offering a mixture of variety, stand up and sketch comedy in The Ted Ray Show. A far more effective weapon in the battle for television comedy supremacy (although ultimately not for the BBC, nor for Saturday nights) arrived in 1955 in the form of The Benny Hill Show. Originally screened monthly on Saturday nights, the series showed its star to be a consummate performer, as well as one of the first comedians to recognise television itself was a legitimate target for humorous attention.
Not content with just one series, Hill secured himself a Saturday night comedy programme on ITV that was broadcast in between runs of his BBC series. This version of The Benny Hill Show featured more of the same; and like the BBC programme, was broadcast live with some pre-recorded inserts. It wasn’t until yet another The Benny Hill Show surfaced in 1969 that the star established himself as one of the world’s most famous comedians. Hill may have spent the remainder of his career cut adrift from his original home on Saturday nights, but he nonetheless achieved a level of popularity arguably disproportionate to his talent.
Without a doubt, one of the biggest names in television comedy in the late 1950s and early 1960s was funny man Arthur Haynes. Having worked successfully as a comedy foil for Charlie Chester, his own series, The Arthur Haynes Show, turned him into ITV’s first true comic star. The series’ infatuation with pricking the pomposity of the establishment struck a chord with the audience, particularly Saturday night viewers who were able to enjoy him in all his belligerent glory from 1961 onwards. Much of the show’s success can be attributed to the talent of the eponymous star and his supporting team (including future Till Death Us Do Part creator Johnny Speight and soon-to-be Sale of the Century host Nicholas Parsons). However it’s clear that the theme of class divide – which featured prominently in a number of memorable sketches – was one that resonated with the ITV viewer. In fact, over the years ITV comedy would become synonymous with the working class, with series such as The Worker and On the Buses placing the struggle of the ordinary working man centre stage.
1960s
By the early 1960s, the BBC were at last winning back some of the audience they had lost to ITV’s unceasing diet of light entertainment. But while the brash tragicomedy of Steptoe and Son kept the midweek audience entertained and tuned in, something even more innovative was reserved to entertain viewers on a Saturday night.
Perched at the end of the schedules, That Was The Week That Was proved a bold experiment in politically charged comedy which introduced us to three faces who would have a profound effect on the future of Saturday nights: Ronnie Barker, Ronnie Corbett and David Frost.
Although just a few years earlier Arthur Haynes may have proven there existed a strong appetite to see the establishment taken down a peg or two, TW3 took this approach one step further by abandoning attacks at archetypes in favour of focussing on real-life people. Politicians, religious leaders and the Royal Family were all put to the show’s satirical sword, in a display of humour that single-handedly broadened the boundaries of what was considered acceptable topics for television comedy. The show was prematurely curtailed when it was decided it should remain off our screens during 1964 (an election year). But the blue touch paper had been lit.
ITV’s attempt at a retaliation relied on what was to become a familiar tactic – they pinched one of the BBC’s stars. In this case it was Millicent Martin, whose cacophonous vocals had signalled the start of each week’s TW3. Of the three series of Mainly Millicent, only the middle one was screened on Saturdays, and then at the time of 8.25pm, meaning there was little or no scope for the show to flex its satirical muscles. Ironically, Martin was soon to appear on the sixth series of ITV’s The Morecambe and Wise Show – featuring an act who would go on to become arguably the best-loved British comedy duo of all time … but only after a well-timed defection to the BBC.
The ’60s were good years for the BBC’s Saturday night comedy output. For a time, Comedy Playhouse occupied the post-watershed slot and brought to the viewer a cornucopia of new and interesting sitcoms, many of which would establish themselves as series in their own right. Now it was ITV’s turn to look anachronistic. Fire Crackers (which ran from 1964 to 1965) featured a quaint bunch of firemen, whose antics deliberately invited comparison with the silent movies of yore. Meanwhile Just Jimmy cast diminutive comedian Jimmy Clitheroe in the role of a naughty schoolboy. Compare this with the BBC’s Not Only … But Also, and an obvious chasm in sensibility and sophistication exists. Comedy Bandbox did make some effort to uncover new Saturday night stars for ITV, but although Mike and Bernie Winters and Dick Emery have much to thank the series for, the programme was never screened in the London area.
1968 was to prove a crucial year in the history of ITV’s Saturday night comedy, as the regional franchises that made the network came up for renewal. In stepped the fresh-faced and newly formed London Weekend Television (LWT) and with it came the aforementioned Ronnie Barker, Ronnie Corbett and David Frost who collectively swamped the new station with programmes such as Six Dates with Barker, The Corbett Follies and both Frost on Saturday and Frost on Sunday.
Initially the station held lofty ideals for its programming (earning the nickname “BBC3″ from others in the business) and plans were hatched to bring exotic fare to Saturday nights such as a comedy play penned by a Russian screenwriter that dealt with a priest, a science master and a shining halo. However, as the harsh financial realities of commercial television began to bite, LWT looked to more traditional sources for their comedic output.
1970s
Both On The Buses and Please Sir! proved to be phenomenally successful for the station, however less than half the total number of episodes of each show were screened on a Saturday night. Crowther’s in Town was a Saturday night-only offering from LWT, but apart from the distinction of being the first signature show for the future The Price is Right presenter, it was a pretty unremarkable collection of sketches and songs. In fact, if you wanted laughs on a Saturday night in the early 1970s then in the main you had to make do with these sorts of shows. It’s Tarbuck!, Tommy Cooper and The Reg Varney Revue all focussed on a single act.
Meanwhile Ronnies Barker and Corbett darted back over to the BBC in 1971 to embark on their definitive double-act show The Two Ronnies. Just a couple of weeks after the end of their first series, ITV came forth with The Comedians and never before had the differing styles of the two channel’s comedy output been so starkly characterised – the Rons relied on verbal interplay and gentle innuendo, while The Comedians gave us a parade of earthy comics from Britain’s working men’s clubs complete with their arsenal of devastating, and often morally dubious one-liners.
Fitting somewhere in the space between the two in 1971 came Look – Mike Yarwood! – another banker for the BBC’s Saturday night schedule and the perfect platform for the northern comic. Next, the BBC’s long-running The Dick Emery Show moved to Saturday nights in 1972, and became part of what was now shaping up to be a seriously impressive roster of comic acts over at the Beeb.
The ’70s represented perhaps the golden age of British television comedy – ITV transmitted a plethora of popular sitcoms (reaching its Saturday night zenith in 1977 with Mind Your Language), while the BBC seemed to effortlessly perfect a formula for great signature shows, in the process turning Emery, Yarwood, Barker, Corbett, and of course Morecambe and Wise (although their Saturday night appearances for the BBC were actually a lot less frequent then most people realise) into huge stars.
Even the less well remembered programmes of the time were of high calibre. The Les Dawson Show was notable for its cross-dressing and fabulously entertaining inept piano playing, while Scotch and Wry entertained Scottish viewers for two Saturday night series shown at the end of the decade before finding a permanent home as the New Year’s Eve entertainment of choice for those north of the border.
1980s
However as the ’70s were giving way to the ’80s, it became increasingly clear the phenomenal burden of Saturday night success was being borne by an aging population of artistes. Yarwood’s battle with alcoholism, and Eric Morecambe’s declining health were symptoms that the television landscape desperately needed renewal. Arguably, in the event of a dearth of new acts of a similarly high quality, television professionals determined to make do with the best that was on offer.
The Little and Large Show perhaps represented a turning point in Saturday night television comedy. Here was a twosome inescapably inferior to their predecessors, but, nonetheless able to enjoy both longevity and popularity. Their ITV counterparts, Cannon and Ball, were perhaps more accomplished, but they too lacked the sparkle and easy charm of The Two Ronnies or Morecambe and Wise.
Although audience research in 1979 and 1980 concluded viewers preferred ITV’s comedy to BBC, in truth the channel’s greatest years as a laughter-maker were now behind it. That’s not to say it was no longer capable of knocking out some entertaining and popular shows. From the ashes of Freddie Starr’s Variety Madhouse in 1979 came the series that would best define Saturday night television comedy in the first half of the 1980s.
Russ Abbot’s Madhouse symbolized a move away from sitcoms and traditional double-acts, replacing both with a gang of artistes performing quick-fire sketches with a veneer of dangerous zaniness. The show was massively popular and Abbot was feted as a comedy performer of comparable ability to Peter Sellers. More importantly though, Madhouse inmates began to take over the Saturday night schedules as Michael Barrymore, Dustin Gee and Les Dennis all established their own successful shows on both BBC1 and ITV. The surreal edge of Russ Abbot’s Madhouse even seeped into the usually traditional format of the sitcom; with most notably Metal Mickey turning out to be one of the strangest to occupy that coveted early Saturday evening slot. What would Mr Pastry have made of the titular character’s “boogie boogie”s?
The BBC proved a little slow to respond to ITV’s brash new comedians, but when their rebuttal came, it demonstrated that rather than simply try and “out-zany” the competition, their Saturday night offerings would instead look to the then burgeoning groundswell of cutting-edge humour that would in time become dubbed “alternative comedy”.
Three of a Kind expertly mimicked the look and feel of Not the Nine O’Clock News but excised the controversial content in favour of material more palatable to a weekend audience. Carrott’s Lib followed, and was rather more full-blooded, earning the description “unique and challenging” – surely words seldom used in a billing for a Saturday night comedy series.
ITV couldn’t remain immune from the growth of alternative comedy for long – OTT featured one of the most extreme exponents of the new generation of stand-ups, Alexei Sayle, in a marginalised role that saw his explicitly political tirades bewilder a studio audience expecting seaside humour and custard pies.
Meanwhile, fellow comic Robbie Coltrane turned up on BBC1′s 1982 late-night discussion show Sin On Saturday. Although, again, in a minor role, it seemed as if alternative comedy was ring-fencing Saturday night telly in preparation for a long-term stealth assault.
Perhaps the moment the movement finally broke cover can be pinpointed to the evening of 12 January 1985 – the date of the first edition of Channel 4′s Saturday Live. Although never watched by a massive audience, there was an undeniable sense that its roster of acts plucked from the fashionable comedy clubs of London represented the future.
However, in the middle years of the 1980s, it was still the impressionists and comedy teams who ruled the roost. Paul Squire, Esq, The Laughter Show, Copy Cats, Five Alive, The Saturday Gang and Bobby Davro on the Box were all pretty interchangeable, each one featuring a deluge of “quicky” sketches and rather feeble impersonations (usually of people who were easy to do such as Margaret Thatcher or Janet Street Porter). The series were lightweight and disposable, and perhaps crucially in terms of real longevity, didn’t really allow the audience to build up any genuine affection for the performers. This lack of connection was reflected in the generally negative reaction that such programmes induced in critics. True, Davro may well have been popular, but he was never afforded the respect of his predecessors.
Sitcoms too, were getting a hard press. In the case of Bottle Boys this was completely deserved, as the cheap and tawdry retread of the worst of the British sex films of the previous decade (minus the sex) proved to be an embarrassment to its makers LWT. In fact, the company’s sitcom output greatly reduced during the ’80s, perhaps an indication it knew the form’s days were numbered.
From ITV’s perspective though, there was another, even more serious problem with its mid-’80s comedy line-up – namely, by and large it appealed to the less affluent members of the audience. Conversely, alternative comedy was attracting younger viewers with greater disposable income. With advertisers demanding not only volume, but quality in their viewing public, the likes of Cannon and Ball and Russ Abbot fell out of favour, as ITV turned instead to new comedians such as Hale and Pace to pull in the “right” kind of demographic. The BBC seemed to reflect this trend, and with Ben Elton and his colleagues so obviously in the ascendant, series such as The Little and Large Show were looking intolerably anachronistic.
1990s
1991 would prove to be Saturday night comedy’s year zero with Little and Large axed and Cannon and Ball (who had already disappeared from Saturdays the previous year) booted off our screens for good. Russ Abbot too (by now one of the BBC’s star turns) found his series curtailed, as did Les Dennis and Bobby Davro. Some of the performers were able to find solace in the form of fronting game shows, but for those who had given their respective channels years of high ratings, the culling of them and their kind must have seemed brutal, even if few members of the audience cared.
The 1990s were to prove a tough decade for Saturday night comedy. The BBC’s Paramount City reminded viewers of Saturday Live, but without that series’ crucial sense of energy. The Stand Up Show fared a little better but it never threatened to become a prime time proposition. However ITV’s attempted revival of Saturday Live was a horribly diluted take on the original, mercifully put to the sword after just one series. Comedians such as Richard Digance, Phil Cool and Dave Allen managed to come up with the odd series here or there, but more and more, comedy became subsumed into other series, such as Barrymore.
A few performers were able to buck the trend: Brian Conley’s run of four series during the decade was definitely a commendable feat, meanwhile Bob Monkhouse On the Spot not only managed to make it to a second series, but was extremely funny to boot. However, in the main, comedians found themselves having to make do with the occasional one-off special. Sitcoms such as ‘Allo ‘Allo and Birds of a Feather came and went from Saturday nights without really convincing that day of the week was their natural home, and viewers happy with their diet of Blind Date and Noel’s House Party showed little sign of missing their traditional laughter-makers.
2000s
The first years of this decade witnessed a continuation of the downward trend. 2DTV was a bold attempt to bring animation and satire to Saturday nights, but it only lasted one series before being shifted out to Wednesday evenings. The ghost of Saturday Live was invoked again with Live Floor Show, a programme that at least seemed to possess bags of energy, if not any acts of sufficient quality to make it must-see television.
Those series aside, there was precious little to make us laugh on Saturday nights in the early years of the 21st century that didn’t involve members of the public making fools of themselves on programmes like Pop Idol or Blind Date.
Thank heavens, then, for Harry Hill, who in recent years has been leading a one-man attack against the decline of Saturday night comedy. In 2004 not only did he take over the helm of You’ve Been Framed! but on 23 October that year he brought his idiosyncratic comedy series, Harry Hill’s TV Burp to early Saturday evenings. Since then the show and his popularity have grown steadily until today Hill can declare himself a genuine big-player at the weekend. With the BBC offering up only tepid hidden camera stunts in Just For Laughs by way of retaliation, for the foreseeable future it looks as if Harry’s role as Saturday night’s number one funny man will remain undisputed.
For connoisseurs of Saturday night television, it’s slim pickings, but although today’s schedule cannot boast a wide selection of comedy series, ITV at least can be proud their output is of a high quality – and that’s not a proclamation the channel has been able to make many times in its history.
