by Louis Barfe
Stunts and banter apart, the show’s main selling point was the panoply of A-list guests it attracted, just as Dee Time had twenty years earlier. When Paul McCartney and Michael Jackson wanted to launch a new single in October 1983, McCartney put in a personal appearance with wife Linda on the Late Late Breakfast Show. The following week, Billy Joel was in town with product to shift, so he dropped in. With the stars of the day and physical stunts vying for airtime, this was a variety show in a sense that would have been recognizable to music hall audiences in the twenties.
The show would doubtless have continued if not for the tragic accident involving ‘Whirly Wheeler’ Michael Lush during rehearsals. On Thursday 13 November 1986, while preparing a trick in which he was to escape, Houdini-style, from a box suspended 120 feet above the ground, the 25-year-old Southampton builder fell to his death. The elasticated rope intended to break his fall had become detached, and a faulty clip was to blame. At first the BBC announced that the next edition of the show would be cancelled as an inquiry got underway, and that all future dangerous stunts would be dropped. On the Saturday, however, it was announced that the show would not return at all. The decision had been taken by Bill Cotton, by now managing director of BBC Television. Jim Moir, head of variety and just two months away from becoming BBC TV’s last head of light entertainment group, remembers the meeting all too well:
I can recall sitting with Bill Cotton, waiting for Noel to come in for the meeting, and Bill said ‘The show will have to stop.’ For ten seconds, I thought ‘What?’ and on the eleventh second, I realized he was absolutely right. You can’t pick up a jolly entertainment – oops, sorry – as if nothing has happened. It has to be, when a human life is involved, complete and profound respect, so the show had to stop. It’s as simple as that. It’s irrelevant how well it was doing. It came to an end because it had to. There was no alternative. It was a very, very tragic thing to happen indeed. I can’t look at anybody doing bungee jumping now. I can’t do it. Whatever extenuating circumstances there may or may not have been, the fact [was] that a human being had perished, a family had lost a loved one. The rest is silence.28
Had Michael Hurll, the great risk-taker and showman, finally taken a risk too far? Lush had been thought ideal for a high-altitude stunt, because he had worked as a hod carrier on high-rise building sites. Nonetheless, there would be enough risks involved if a professional attempted the same stunt as Lush. Press reports hinted that corners had been cut, but the Health and Safety Executive official who investigated the accident, Maurice Pallister, said that, in designing the box, the BBC’s visual effects designers ‘had taken a high standard of safety and doubled that to ensure it was doubly safe’.29 The weak link was the carabiner clip that had been meant to keep the elasticated rope attached, but which sprang loose. The HSE’s senior scientific officer Graham Games had shown video evidence of twenty experiments involving a comparable clip and an elastic rope. The clip worked loose fourteen times out of twenty. A representative from the Dangerous Sports Club explained that they had eschewed clips in favour of shackles – always used in multiples for security – when attempting similar stunts. Other mistakes included the failure to check on the competence of the stunt arranger, who was an escapologist but not an acrobatics expert, and the failure to provide an airbag in case anything went wrong. The BBC was fined £2,000 for failing to take adequate safety provisions, and gave an ex gratia payment of £100,000 to Lush’s family, but no one was judged to be responsible for the terrible outcome. More than twenty years on, Edmonds ‘still find[s] it very difficult to talk about it’:
I think that the way the media dealt with it was understandable, because actually no one was really found guilty. That was one of the extraordinary things. I was so stunned that somebody could lose their life in the name of light entertainment. Is television safer because of what happened? Procedures? Undoubtedly. It was a terrible, terrible accident, which shouldn’t have happened, but it wasn’t because there was a cavalier attitude to safety or that any of the experts involved were being reckless. I wasn’t involved at all and I always said that, ignoring the obvious sensitivities, there’s a big difference between something being someone’s fault and their responsibility. If you’ve got your name up there on the show, I think it would have been totally inappropriate and monstrously callous for me to have almost shrugged my shoulders. I did, at the time, seriously think about stopping.30
The following winter, the BBC1 Saturday night schedules opened without a big variety-based show, but not without Edmonds, as his quiz Telly Addicts moved from a midweek slot. Russ Abbot, recently poached from LWT, took up the slack later in the evening with a sketch show similar to his LWT Madhouse. In 1988, however, Edmonds returned with a show that was recognizably related to the Late Late Breakfast Show, but different in several important details. Main among these was that Noel Edmonds’ Saturday Roadshow was not live, but recorded. Michael Leggo remembers being informed that he was taking the project on – and being made responsible for defining the project:
Jim Moir gave me a call, may even have sent me a memo saying ‘You’re producing and directing sixteen shows with Noel in the autumn, go away and think about something.’ Shit. Noel and I sat down with literally a blank sheet of paper between us. One of the first things I wrote on the piece of paper was ‘Live’, and actually it ended up being one of the first things on the paper that I crossed off, because ‘Why live?’ unless you’ve got a reason to be live, if you can do it better, and give it better production values and choose the best bits if you record it.31
Leggo was nervous at the challenge, being still a fairly junior producer. ‘You could count the number of things I’d produced on one hand,’ he admits. However, he knew Edmonds from directing inserts for the Late Late Breakfast Show and a shared interest in fast cars. Their original plan was for a show in the mould of US chat king David Letterman’s, but it mutated, and as it did, the outside broadcast element was sidelined, despite the show’s title implying a certain amount of movement. Instead, a different, themed set based on a different location every week was built in the studio. For the first show, on 3 September 1988, the location was the Channel Tunnel, while later shows came from an ice station, a Bedouin tent and the Kremlin, without ever leaving Shepherd’s Bush. Doing it this way was almost as expensive and arduous as decamping to the real locations, as Leggo explains, recalling the now almost-unthinkable cost. ‘That was in the days when you could do that. We did have a modular set – the doors and the chat areas and the performing areas were common – but everything else around it changed.’32
The Roadshow was a respectable performer, ratings-wise, but it seems doomed to be forgotten, primarily because of what came immediately before and after it – overshadowed at the start by the Michael Lush tragedy and at the other end by the runaway success of Edmonds’ Saturday night warhorse Noel’s House Party. Nonetheless, elements of the Roadshow presaged the winning House Party formula. The idea of pretending the programme came from somewhere other than a television studio had been present in the earlier series. The ‘Gotcha Oscars’, in which hidden camera stunts were performed not on members of the public, but on celebrities, who were judged to be fair game, began as part of the Roadshow. Noel’s House Party was to be set in a fictitious stately home in the hamlet of Crinkley Bottom, with the show’s guests turning up at the door and being either invited in to do their turn or sent away by the host.
The main differences were that in Noel’s House Party, the set did not change on a weekly basis, and that both producer and presenter had realized the value of doing the show live:
Mike Leggo and I reckoned we could add 2 million to Saturday evening and get back to those great big audience figures that the Late Late Breakfast Show had, if it was live. And so, together, we created House Party. It cost a fortune in bottles of Chardonnay, but we got there. We had it on a single sheet of A4, and we went to Jim Moir, who was then head of entertainment, and we said this is what we want to do, and i
t’s live, and we guarantee that we’ll put 2 million on what we were doing with Roadshow. Jim said ‘What’s it going to cost me?’ For a non-transmission pilot, I think the figure was £350,000. He said ‘Can it be a transmittable pilot?’ We said ‘No, because it’s got to be live.’ Jim said ‘So, I’m going to give you £350,000 in order to make a pilot, and I’m never going to see that money again?’ We said ‘No, we’ll get a hit show out of it.’ And I remember it was like something out of one of those bad films where you know the person behind the desk is going to stop the person walking out of the door with one more line. And as we got to the door, he just said ‘Guys.’ We said ‘Yes, Jim?’ He said ‘Don’t fuck up.’33
Moir disputes the figure. ‘It might have added up to that, but it wouldn’t have been that in cash,’ he observes. ‘It makes for a good story, but it probably was far less than that in truth.’ He also stresses that the whole process was far less cavalier than it sounds, being based on mutual trust and knowledge. ‘You weren’t investing in the unknown. Edmonds was extremely successful in those early evening slots. I had brought Edmonds into LE, it was me that promoted him. It wasn’t some distant exec. saying “What are you chaps thinking of doing?” We were conspirators together and I wanted it to succeed. I would only have given it because I had it to give, and it would have been very carefully thought through and every penny accounted for by a chap called Tony James. He never gave anything away if we didn’t have to.’34
The then BBC1 controller Jonathan Powell was from a drama background, and so he was largely happy to leave the LE experts to it, trusting them to deliver the hits, judging them only on results. Leggo recalls the lack of interference:
Almost as a courtesy, I said to Jonathan Powell ‘Would you like to come and see what we’re doing?’ because we did a whole big non-transmission pilot with all the bells and whistles. Jonathan said ‘Oh that would be very nice.’ The afternoon of the recording he came down, I walked him round the set for about ten to fifteen minutes, he said ‘Thanks very much,’ went back to his office and the next thing we knew we did the series. It was all quite laid-back.35
Without a focus group or a demographic survey in sight, Noel’s House Party took to the air on 23 November 1991. Edmonds and Leggo had been slightly out in their ratings estimates. Instead of the hoped-for 2 million ‘we actually put 4 million on. It happened very quickly. I remember Mike coming down from the gallery after that first show, which for me was like a car crash, it was over so bloody fast, wow, what happened there? We’re not really that tactile, but we both hugged each other, looked at each other and said “Whew, we got away with that, didn’t we?” Within four weeks we had a hit. There are very, very few shows that are a hit out of the box and we were.’36
At its peak in 1993, Noel’s House Party was regularly pulling in audiences of 15 million. When the National Lottery was launched the following year, the BBC won the contract to televise the Saturday night draws, and Edmonds was the natural choice for the gig, being Mr Saturday Night and highly adept at live television. The live element was a large part of House Party’s appeal, with the potential for things to go awry. Edmonds and Leggo weren’t above rigging the odds on occasion:
It was live and things went wrong. Occasionally they went wrong deliberately [admits Edmunds]. On one occasion, the front door fell off its hinges. Why would a front door fall off its hinges? I just said to one of the scene shifters in the afternoon, ‘Do you fancy taking the top hinge off this door, so that the first time we open it, it’ll fall off?’ And it got such a bloody laugh. I can’t remember who was at the door. I said ‘Don’t tell whoever’s at the door.’ I told Mike, obviously, so he could shoot it. The audience loved it, and we probably got a minute of complete mayhem while I and whoever it was at the door – I don’t know why, but Russ Abbot comes to mind. I’d chosen the right person, I know that. It took us forever to put this bloody door back.
The audience really felt they owned House Party. If the ding dong came in the wrong point, I got to the stage where I could look at the audience and say ‘That’s not meant to happen.’ You’d get another laugh. Or they would miss the cue because I’d said something completely different, and I’d say ‘The doorbell’s going to ring in a minute.’ It was pantomime.37
One of the elements that would not have been possible in a recorded show was NTV, where a secret camera was installed in a viewer’s home, ready to display them, unwittingly, as they sat in front of the set. Technology had made the camera small enough to be hidden, but the concept was not a million miles from Cilla Black sending OB units to viewers’ homes twenty-five years earlier. Unfortunately, not everyone realized the significance of NTV. ‘One of my least favourite parts of the season was having to meet the press before we started,’ Edmonds reveals. ‘There were people like Charlie Catchpole, who were very nice to your face, but who absolutely hated the show. So, the moment the first show went out, they slashed it. There was a wonderful TV critic, Pat Codd, who used to work for the Daily Star, and Pat would always interview me and finish off by saying “Which night do you record it? I’d love to come along to a recording,” and you go “Pat, it’s live. It’s been live for the last eighty performances. How do you think we do NTV?” “Oh yes.” And you think, Oh God, your career’s in the hands of people like that.’38
The Gotchas gave birth to the show’s most infamous creation, a vile pink-and-yellow rubberized heap of boggle-eyed manic activity. Originally conceived as a throwaway device to allow Edmonds to be present at each Gotcha while remaining undetected until the very end when he removed the head of the costume, it soon became clear that Mr Blobby had legs, even if half the audience wanted them broken. Michael Leggo is perfectly willing to admit responsibility for being the terrible creature’s father:
With the Gotchas the difficult bit always was getting Noel next to the subject rather than just at the end: ‘Da da! Gotcha!’ He’s got a beard, it’s blooming tricky. We once spent three hours in make-up with him, walked out and a friend of mine said ‘Hello Mike, Hello Noel.’ On the Roadshow, we’d done a Gotcha on Eamonn Holmes. It was supposed to be a training video for car salesmen and the customer was represented by this thing that looked a bit like the Sugar Puffs’ Honey Monster. What Eamonn didn’t know was that we were recording the rehearsals, where we had an actor, with just the furry brown trousers on. Then we went to the take, in which the actor puts on the top, and we substitute Noel. Now, the Honey Monster thing is being an arsehole, but it’s Noel, and the audience know it is and it’s a fantastic device. Dramatic irony, the audience is in on something that Eamonn isn’t. It worked very well. Because the House Party was a very voracious machine, series two, I’m thinking what can I do that can get Noel into the Gotchas. So I started thinking about a character from a children’s programme and I remembered this Eamonn Holmes thing. So, a lot of cheap alcohol and five minutes’ doodling, and I came up with this thing in mauve felt-tip that was Mr Blobby. I was delighted at the time that I got eight Gotchas out of it, including Will Carling, Wayne Sleep, Val Singleton. Once they’d been transmitted, in terms of Gotchas, that’s it, but it spawned a monster.39
A monster with numerous merchandizing opportunities, including a Christmas number one single, and theme parks at various sites around the UK, including one at Morecambe, which folded amid recriminations and legal action between Lancaster City Council and Edmonds’ company Unique.
Noel’s House Party is a good litmus test for the way the broadcasting environment changed during the nineties. At the time the show started in 1991, satellite television was in its infancy, with only 11.8 per cent of the UK’s television-owning households having BSkyB or cable. By the time it finished in 1999, that figure was 25 per cent, and the average audience of Noel’s House Party had dropped to 6.6 million, just over 8 million down on six years before. There had been a natural decline in the show’s popularity, but the fragmentation of the audience caused by the take-up of multi-channel television must also bear partial responsi
bility. There was suddenly a lot more to compete with. Even though the dip had long been obvious to those most closely involved, the show had been too successful to kill off. Edmonds wishes it had gone out on a high:
In my ideal world, I wished it had ended after the fifth series in 1995/6. The components were still fresh. Certainly they’d matured, but they weren’t getting stale. There was a ready supply of those running gags, the two guys from The Bill came to the door and all that sort of thing, and we were still able to get real stars to appear on the show. Now, when people say to me ‘I’d love to have House Party on again’, I want to say to them ‘Ah, but who would you have coming to the door, that would make 350 people in the audience roar and make the viewer go “Who’s that? Bloody hell, it’s Dudley Moore.” Who would you have now? Someone off Big Brother coming to the door? Or another tired soap performer?’ I wouldn’t want to be rude to any artists that appeared on it, but by the time that it finished in 1999, by then we were really scrabbling around to have people on the show that were a draw, and so I do remember that first five years with great affection and great gratitude. I got the opportunity to play around on the telly with some pretty impressive people. Working with Spike Milligan, Ken Dodd and people like this. Am I a grateful bunny? Yes.40
The show’s demise was also marked by an acrimonious and very public dispute between Edmonds and BBC1 controller Peter Salmon, who had been, in Edmonds’ view, less than robust with the press when they decided that the House Party fun had run its course: