When Told By An Idiot
director Paul Hunter told writer Carl Grose that he'd appeared on
1970s Saturday morning TV madhouse Tiswas when he was eight years
old, Grose thought he'd struck gold. The pair had decided to do a
show based around the curious phenomenon of shows such as Tiswas
which, while ostensibly made for children, were steeped in some very
grown-up shades of anarchy in a way that made them cult viewing for
students even as some parents changed channels to the BBC's
altogether safer world of Noel Edmonds and Swap Shop. Hunter, alas,
had come out of the experience unscarred.
“I thought initially
we were going to making a show about our director exorcising his
demons,” says Grose, “but as it turned out, he was mates with
someone who's dad was a cameraman or something like that, and he said
he remembers being in the cage and having water thrown over him, but
after that it all gets a bit hazy, which was really rather
frustrating for me.”
There is an exorcism of
sorts in Never Try This At Home, the show that resulted from Grose
and Hunter's line of inquiry, which tours to the Traverse Theatre in
Edinburgh this week. In the show, the purging is more to do with the
presenters of fictional programme, Shushi, who reunite to take part
in a Jeremy Kyle style programme years after an on-air incident
forces the show to be cancelled forever.
“What fired us up
about Tiswas,” says Grose, “was that it went out live on ITV, it
was very much made up on the spot and it was quite anarchic. But we
also looked at a lot of other things, like Martin Scorsese's film,
The King of Comedy, and Network, all these darkly humorous things
about the media and celebrity. Never Try This At Home isn't a
nostalgia show. It may be about children's TV, but it's for adults,
and it's really quite dark.”
Most people of a
certain age will have memories of Saturday morning TV, whether it was
the caller telling 1980s band Matt Bianco exactly what they thought
of them on Swap Shop, or else the little boy bellowing a wildly
off-key rendition of Art Garfunkel's Watership Down theme song,
Bright Eyes, while dressed in a rabbit suit on Tiswas. Other famous
clips from Tiswas include a small boy asking Chris Tarrant if he can
go to the toilet, and Sally James innocently asking Kevin Rowland
where the name of his band Dexy's Midnight Runners came from.
Tiswas hosts Chris
Tarrant and Sally James led a regular line-up of John Gorman,
formerly of 1960s Liverpool poetry troupe turned chart stars The
Scaffold, a young Lenny Henry doing impressions of TV botanist David
Bellamy and a Rastafarian character with a fetish for condensed milk,
and Bob Carolgees with his punk puppet, Spit The Dog. Tiswas also
gave air-time to The Phantom Flan Flinger, and the phenomenon of the
Dying Fly.
With guests including
comedians Bernard Manning and Frank Carson, Led Zeppelin's Robert
Plant and assorted members of Electric Light Orchestra, Michael
Palin, future Dr Who and former Ken Campbell associate Sylvester
McCoy, the anything goes approach of Tiswas fell somewhere between a
working man's club, a performance art happening and a fringe theatre
show.
“Just to have
Sylvester McCoy on it being interviewed while pretending to be a car,
there's something very punk about that, and there's a variety sort of
feel to it as well.”
Under the name The Four
Bucketeers, the Tiswas presenters had a hit record with The Bucket of
Water Song, and so successful was the show that it spawned a late
night show called. O.T.T. Despite similarly anarchic intentions, the
show's adults only format never really took off, although it did find
infamy when it featured comedy troupe The Greatest Show on Legs,
whose numbers included the late comedian Malcolm Hardee, performing a
naked balloon dance.
Given how much 1970s
celebrities have come under scrutiny over the last couple of years
since the late Jimmy Savile was exposed as a serial paedophile on a
grand scale, much of the era's mix of innuendo and apparent innocence
has been tainted. While not overtly referenced in Never Try This At
Home, neither was this something that could be ignored.
“When we started
working on the show, nothing had happened,” Grose explains. “Then
everything exploded , and although we didn't want to make it about
what happened with Jimmy Savile and so on, we had to include it
somewhere. You can't help but look back at all that stuff that was on
TV with tarnished eyes now, and you get a sense that during that
period of history things were out of control to some extent. With all
the Jimmy Savile stuff, the lack of responsibility was outstanding.”
Without Tiswas,
however, television would have been a lot duller, and the spirit of
its barely controlled chaos has arguably trickled down into the
alternative comedy boom as well as theatre companies such as Told By
An Idiot themselves.
For a hint of what
audiences should expect from Never Try This At Home, Grose points to
a letter the company received from Chris Tarrant.
“He's found out about
the show, and we thought he was going to sue us,” Grose says. “As
it was, he said that he hoped that we didn't stick to the script
much, and that no audience member went home dry.”
Never Try This At Home,
Traverse Theatre, Edinburgh, March 26-29
ends
Waking up to Saturday
morning TV
Tiswas – Tiswas began
life as a links strand for the Midlands based ATV region, before
becoming a fully-fledged programme in its own right in 1974. As other
regions picked it up, the programme's anarchic reputation grew. Chris
Tarrant co-presented the programme from early on, with Sally James
joining the team in 1977. The programme ended in 1982, as senior
management tried to re-focus what had become a cult programme for
adults back onto children.
Multi-Coloured Swap
Shop – The BBC's infinitely tamer response to Tiswas was hosted by
Noel Edmonds with Maggie Philbin and John Craven, while Keith Chegwin
acted as a roving reporter. The show's mix of celebrity phone-ins,
quizzes and pop music was bolstered by Chegwin travelling the country
to conduct a 'Swaporama', whereby viewers could meet to exchange
items. Swap Shop
ran over six series
between 1976 and 1982, and was replaced in turn by Saturday
Superstore, Going Live! and Live & Kicking.
There were numerous
other ITV Saturday morning shows across the regions in the 1970s.
These included The Saturday Banana, presented by former Goodie Bill
Oddie, and The Mersey Pirate, which was filmed on a boat as it sailed
the River Mersey. Items included appearances by Andrew Schofield as
Scully, Boys From The Blackstuff writer Alan Bleasdale's archetypal
Scouse scally.
In the 1990s, other
Saturday morning TV programmes showed Tiswas's clear influence.
Between 1998 and 2002, SM TV Live was presented by Ant and Dec with
Cat Deeley, while from 2002 to 2006, Holly Willoughby and Stephen
Mulhern presented Ministry of Mayhem, which was later rebranded as
Holly & Stephen's Saturday Showdown.
The Herald, March 25th 2014
ends
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