Part Four: People Shows
By Jack Kibble-White and Steve Williams
First published August 2007
So what’s the difference between a people show and a game show? Sadly, there’s no Beadle-style definition easily to hand here, so let’s try and utilise our own. If the difference between a game show and a quiz show is that on a game show, the contestants are standing up, on a people show, the contestants are dancing, singing, juggling and almost everything else you can think of.
Unlike other genres, the people show has not been constant throughout the entire history of Saturday night television, and there are some that would contest it only became a regular fixture in recent decades. Before that, the entertaining was left very much to the professionals. Sure, members of the public were regular fixtures on the screen, but more or less only as contestants, there to answer questions or play a game. Indeed, the regulations that demanded contestants were accepted at random meant most of the people who appeared had no interest or ability in upstaging the host in any case.
The first real people shows were probably the talent programmes Opportunity Knocks and New Faces, where the job of entertaining the nation was given to semi-professionals. Yet even here, the members of the public were simply attempting to ape the standards of those who had already made it.
1970s
The big changes came in the late 1970s. One suggestion for the rise of the people show comes from the television establishment at the time. Previously, ITV had been crated by men with backgrounds in show business – the likes of Sidney Bernstein at Granada and Lew Grade at ATV. They were immersed in the culture of the music halls and the variety theatres and therefore specialised in light entertainment. However they were now being replaced by people coming from a journalistic background, such as Jeremy Isaacs at Thames and John Birt at LWT. This meant they brought with them a new way of working and a new way of looking at entertainment.
The new breed of people shows looked towards the likes of That’s Life! and Nationwide, which would regularly bring on members of the public with strange talents (walking on eggs, owning dogs who said “sausages” and so forth) to show them off. These were not light entertainment programmes, but realised the general public could, at times, provide moments that were just as amusing as those professional entertainers had spent ages crafting.
Probably the first people show to succeed on a Saturday night was Jim’ll Fix It. Here, members of the public were now the star attraction, showing off their talents or doing extraordinary things. Although much of the programme was recorded in the BBC Television Theatre in front of a studio audience, other aspects took their cue from documentary programming, being filmed on location without any presenter involved – simply allowing the “fixee” to entertain.
Not every attempt to get the general public to entertain was that successful. Back in 1975, LWT had abandoned A Joke’s a Joke – a series where members of the public told their favourite gags. Actors union Equity claimed that, “They are not only an inferior substitute from professional light entertainment programmes but, because much of the material is that which has been written by and for the use of professional comedians, they gravely damage the interest of Equity performers in every field in which they work.” The threat of a strike was enough to get the series cancelled.
1980s
The biggest step forward, however, came in 1981, when ITV launched Game for a Laugh. This series, too, used the public to provide the lion’s share of the entertainment, and such was its make-up, the programme’s producer, Alan Boyd, seemed to spend more time explaining what the programme wasn’t than what it actually was.
It involved ordinary folk, but it wasn’t a game show as the prizes were worthless. Celebrities appeared, but it wasn’t a variety show as they weren’t doing what they were most famous for. It featured reports on real people, but it wasn’t a magazine programme as there was a studio audience laughing along. It took aspects from almost every genre of television and mixed them up into something strikingly different. Better still, the fact everything was done by non-professionals meant it made for hugely cost-effective production.
The other lasting legacy of Game for a Laugh was its presenting team. Previously Saturday night entertainment was always in the hands of professional entertainers – your Brucies, your Cillas, maybe even your Rolfs. Here, a motley collection of researchers, news readers and actors took charge. This ensured that the hosts didn’t come to dominate the show – a Game for a Laugh presented by Bruce Forsyth probably wouldn’t have worked, because he would have had to get more involved with proceedings and ensure he was the star; simply because that’s what he did. Instead the team used their skills to interact with the public and simply prompt them into doing what they did best.
Game for a Laugh was a huge and immediate success, and it’s not perhaps too much of an exaggeration to suggest it completely changed the way Saturday night entertainment was produced. Certainly, the BBC, having been thrashed in the ratings throughout GFAL‘s first run, immediately looked for a similar series to rival it. The result was The Late Late Breakfast Show, which again was hosted by someone with no background in light entertainment. However, Noel Edmonds had, over six years on The Multi-Coloured Swap Shop, demonstrated his absolute ease with live television and his ability to encourage real people to show off their talents. Despite a notoriously shaky start, its mix of hidden camera pieces, silly film clips and big showpiece stunts became a big hit.
Back at ITV, meanwhile, various frantic attempts were made to find similarly popular (and cheap) people shows to fill the rest of the year. The likes of Just Amazing! from Yorkshire TV and Some You Win from Granada followed the template set up by Beadle and friends to the letter – a number of hosts drawn from different backgrounds who could banter with each other (Some You Win offered up Lulu, Kenneth Williams and Ted Robbins, together at last), some filmed footage of stunts and various in-studio capers. Each had a basic theme (Just Amazing! concentrated on people who took behaviour to extremes, while Some You Win featured people who were tremendously lucky or unlucky) but all seemed to take up a similar format.
1990s and 2000s
However, it soon became obvious that what the TV company saved on prizes or entertainers, it had to spend on finding ever stranger people or more outrageous stunts to fill the time. An entertainment show could always latch upon another song to sing, and a game show could find new contestants. On a people show, once you’d seen one rabbit on a skateboard, you really had seen them all, and many of the programmes found themselves running out of ideas all too quickly.
In addition, simply putting members of the public in front of the cameras was not always a success in itself. Despite the furore over A Joke’s a Joke in the 1970s, the idea was considered worth a revival in less unionised times. ITV’s Only Joking in 1992, however – which consisted more or less entirely of the public telling gags – was a huge flop, not least because the BBC were running an identical series, Joker in the Pack, at the same time. The problem here was that, in some aspects, punters were simply no match for the professionals. You wouldn’t allow anyone off the street to fix your boiler or service your car, however enthusiastic they were, so why would you let anyone who fancied it provide your Saturday night entertainment?
However, for good or ill, the people show had changed the perception of what a Saturday night programme could be. The general public were now trusted to be just as entertaining as professional entertainers, and Saturday nights were no longer simply the domain of those who had spent many years treading the boards.
In recent years, the people show has undergone a new lease of life thanks to the rise and rise of reality TV. The success of Big Brother has been cited by many as the end of light entertainment, given viewers seem happier to watch people sit around gossiping on sofas than actually doing anything that involves any talent. This is something of an exaggeration, but it’s certainly true that it has helped to strip much artifice from Saturday night TV. Popstars, for example, was not simply an unchallenging piece of fluff that simply wanted to find some good singers, but instead a warts-and-all portrayal of the music business, with all the cynicism and hard-heartedness that this entails.
Yet any aspiring Bruce Forsyths who feel there’s no market for old-school entertainment anymore should not be too downhearted, as many recent series have proven that not everything “normal” can be nicely transferred to Saturday night telly. In 2005, BBC1′s He’s Having a Baby took a bunch of hapless dads-to-be and followed them about as they experienced fatherhood for the first time, giving them various challenges along the way. Yet appalling viewing figures meant it suffered the indignity of ending two weeks earlier than planned as “it had achieved all it set out to do”. It seems that there is, after all, a fine line between exciting reality TV and humdrum real life.
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