26-11-2021, 10:05 AM
Steve in Pudsey post_id=55224 time= user_id=942 Wrote:Please tell me I'm not alone in having thought (assumed?) that the Saturday Roadshow was live
Well, they certainly didn't go out of their way to say it wasn't live, and as with all of Noel's work they were happy to leave in all the corpsing and cock-ups. I think you can see it as a bit of a reaction to how the Late Late ended, I know there was a Spitting Image sketch around the same time referring to it as The Safe Safe Breakfast Show, and to that end the show was relentlessly silly and didn't take anything seriously at all, and presumably being pre-recorded added an extra level of security.
In the Radio Times interview to promote the first series of the House Party, it emphasised that it was going to be live and Noel talked about how he preferred that. At the time the House Party felt a bigger thing to me partly because of that interview in the Radio Times, in that the Saturday Roadshow never got taken that seriously, I read far more about it in Fast Forward than I did in the Radio Times and it always felt like a bit of a kids' show.
Funnily enough I do remember reading earlier in 1991 an appeal in the Radio Times for people to take part in the next series of the Saturday Roadshow, I remember they were after people to take part in a feature called Icebreakers where they would help people who wanted to surprise their friends with proposals and so on. That never happened on the House Party, and I wonder how far along the line they got with a new series of the Saturday Roadshow before they decided to revamp it all.
Brekkie post_id=54859 time= user_id=976 Wrote:That said though as much as the show needed to end when it did, if not beforehand, for the next few years the BBC really did miss such a fixture in the Saturday night scheduled and even two decades on they may have Autumn sorted with Strictly but Q1 is still missing a reliable returnable format on the BBC.
Of course, the planned replacement for it was Red Alert, the lottery show with Lulu and Terry Alderton, which was commissioned with the idea of it being a show that could run for 26 weeks a year, but it was an enormous flop. And of course the week after the House Party finished they started the first series of Families at War with Reeves and Mortimer which everyone hoped would revitalise Saturday night shows like Shooting Stars revitalised panel shows, and it was very exciting at the time. But it wasn't quite as good as I think everyone had hoped, and the Beeb seemed to completely lose confidence in it and gave it a terrible teatime slot.
It's quite an interesting period, between 1999 and 2004, because there wasn't a long-running live show on Saturday night BBC1, and from 2001 there wasn't Match of the Day either, so the two big staples weren't there. They managed alright without them and there were some successful shows there, but there wasn't anything consistent there so the ratings would vary wildly from huge highs to incredible lows. Shades a bit of the late eighties, after the Late Late ended and there wasn't a regular MOTD either. Then of course in 2004 both things returned with Strictly and Match of the Day coming back, and remarkably both are still in place seventeen years later (which I think is particularly impressive for MOTD which is now enjoying its longest ever continuous run on Saturday nights, which I think is good going in an era when sporting rights switch channels at the drop of a hat).
You're probably right to say Q1 can be a bit inconsistent, but I reckon there were probably just as many bad shows and fillers on a Saturday night in the nineties as there are today, the difference is that in those days we had the House Party, and Blind Date on ITV, running six months of the year to disguise that a bit. The dates fell the same way as this year in 1993 and I'm not sure the schedules for the equivalent Saturday are all that - https://genome.ch.bbc.co.uk/schedules/se...7#at-17.30
Happy Families was a flop, they'd moved the Gen Game to Fridays to make way for it, and as you can see they've moved it much earlier than it was at the start of the run with Dad's Army filling the gap. You've got Big Break which people look back on fondly now but it was the worst example of pile-'em-high game shows recorded in bulk and dashed off quickly, and The Hit List, Blankety Blank and The Wheel do all that show did with higher production values and a bit more wit about them, I think. And then you've got the flop Michael Elphick drama Harry as well, I suppose you can say it's nice to have a bit of variety aside from non-stop shiny floor shows, but it wasn't very good or popular. But then you've got the House Party in the middle livening everything up.
I suppose it's the mantra now of fewer, bigger, better, because in terms of hours on air and budget Strictly is probably quite similar to the House Party, but there are fewer, but longer, episodes. And similarly, probably better to have ten episodes of The Hit List or The Wheel with high production values and decent prizes than three times as many episodes of Big Break for the same price. Blankety Blank is the obvious example, there were more episodes in the original run, but the new run puts more of the money on screen.