I got it wrong in the Grouchy Club podcast + Noel Edmonds killed a man

Kate Copstick with her mother at the podcast

Yesterday, comedy critic Kate Copstick and I recorded our weekly Grouchy Club podcast in her London flat because she was ill.

It was possibly a mistake on her part to ask me about my background – or possibly a clever ploy so she needed to talk less. This is an extract about me working on TV shows last century:

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JOHN
The first show I ever did (as a researcher) was Tiswas and that was 39 episodes in a row and I think they were a minimum of three hours long – I think they changed the duration. Basically, 39 weeks of 3-hour shows – live shows – tends to settle you in a bit

COPSTICK
Bloody hell. And was the finding of weird acts how you got to meet Malcolm Hardee?

JOHN
Yes. I did children’s shows – Tiswas and a few others less well known. I never really dealt with stars. I was never that interested.

COPSTICK
Lucky you.

JOHN
Indeed. What I tended to deal with was ‘real people’.

COPSTICK
They’re difficult to find in television.

JOHN
But real people who want to be on television shows tend to live in appalling places, so I never got to go anywhere glamorous… Never ever ever go to Barrow-in-Furness. It’s a nightmare. Don’t go. Three hours to travel one inch.

COPSTICK
Oh my God! The man who was the love of my life – at the time and for some time after – is a doctor in Barrow-in-Furness.

JOHN
Well, I’m very sorry for you.

COPSTICK
Isn’t it lovely? It’s Lake District.

JOHN
It’s awful. It was awful.

COPSTICK
I’d like to apologise to anyone listening who is on or around Barrow-in-Furness.

JOHN
I went to Barrow-in-Furness because a blind man wanted to parachute jump.

COPSTICK
Whoa!

JOHN
This was for Game For a Laugh because, after the children’s shows, I did ‘real people’ shows. So I did Game For a Laugh and Surprise! Surprise!

(AND THIS IS WHERE I MADE THE FIRST OF TWO FACTUAL MISTAKES IN THE PODCAST – I HAVE A NOTORIOUSLY BAD MEMORY – IN FACT, I WENT TO SEE THE BLIND WOULD-BE PARACHUTIST FOR CILLA BLACK’S SURPRISE! SURPRISE! NOT FOR GAME FOR A LAUGH. SO…)

Things like that: finding bizarre acts.

COPSTICK
Do you know my friend Matthew Kelly?

JOHN
I did the series after he left.

COPSTICK
Lovely, lovely, lovely Matthew Kelly. He’s a wonderful man.

JOHN
I did work with Matthew Kelly once, I did Children’s ITV. In my Promotion hat, I produced Children’s ITV because the BBC was destroying ITV’s ratings in children’s hour, so they thought up the idea of having a block of Children’s ITV presented by a famous person doing the links. So I recorded a month’s worth of links in an afternoon, I think.

(IN FACT, AGAIN, MY MEMORY LET ME DOWN. I RECORDED A MONTH OF LINKS IN TWO AFTERNOONS, A FORTNIGHT APART)

And one of the people who did it was Matthew Kelly. Terribly nice man, yes.

COPSTICK
Gorgeous man. Anyway, sorry I interrupted. You were talking about finding a blind man who wanted to parachute out of Barrow-in-Furness.

JOHN
And we would have done this, because it’s quite easy. You just attach the person to another person who really can parachute jump, throw them out of a plane and…

COPSTICK
Presumably it’s not like going along a road. Once you’ve jumped out of a plane, being sighted or non-sighted, there only is one route and that’s straight down.

JOHN
Yup. Much like my career.

COPSTICK
Only since you met me, John

JOHN
Again, as with most of my stories, there is a coda; there is a But…

COPSTICK
Mmm hmmm?

JOHN
We didn’t actually do this, because Noel Edmonds managed to kill someone on his show. (BBC TV’s The Late, Late Breakfast Show.)

COPSTICK
Yes! I remember that.

JOHN
There was a man suspended in a box and, for some extraordinary reason, you could open the box from the inside. He was suspended about 40ft up in the air and, for an unknown reason, he opened the box. He fell out – 40ft down or whatever – died. This happened (on BBC TV) and LWT, who were producing Game For a Laugh (ACTUALLY I MEANT SURPRISE! SURPRISE!) thought: Oooooooohhhhh. It’s very dodgy. We would never have let it happen (what happened on BBC TV) because we would have had 18 safety features.

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This week’s Grouchy Club Podcast lasts 31 minutes.

Jeremy Beadle, little pricks and cruel TV shows

I saw part of a TV show about the series Candid Camera last night, which brought to mind memories of the late, extremely talented, much underestimated and very amiable Jeremy Beadle.

I encountered him when he appeared as a guest a couple of times on the last series of the ITV kids’ show Tiswas and then worked with him as a researcher when he presented the hidden camera stunts on peaktime Saturday night ITV series Game For a Laugh. I was asked to work on his subsequent Beadle’s About series but turned it down because, much as I liked and greatly admired Jeremy, his new producer on Beadle’s About (now dead and extremely unlamented) was a devious little shit with a track record for stealing ideas and taking the credit for himself – a prime example of the old saying “Television is like a porcupine – full of little pricks”.

Alright, I made up that old saying and it has only ever been true a couple of times in my experience (I guess I’ve been lucky). But, in the case of this dead producer, it was true. (My parenthetic advice: never give cunts a namecheck.)

Anyway, Beadle’s About got big ratings, just as Game For a Laugh had, but in the course of its run it unjustly turned Beadle’s image from populist prankster to nasty practical joker. Beadle’s About was a cruel show. The public perception of him changed from smart-arse to out-and-out arse, the man you love to hate. I always thought this was probably the fault of the producer, but I never understood why Jeremy went along with the prick’s ideas; by this time, Jeremy had a lot of creative production clout.

While we were working on Game For a Laugh, Beadle once explained to me what he believed the perfect Candid Camera style stunt was: that you put someone in an extraordinary and embarrassing situation apparently of their own making (though set up by us) and they then have to try to dig themselves out of that embarrassing hole which they cannot explain. There is no cruelty. The audience knows it is a set-up and, when the punter realises a joke has been played on them, there is the laughter of relief. You laugh at the situation and with the punter; you do not laugh at the punter.

The epitome of this, to me, seems to be a stunt which copied a scene from the movie The Graduate.

In one scene, Dustin Hoffman takes his girlfriend Katharine Ross to a hotel in which he has previously had secret sexual assignations with her mother Mrs Robinson (played by Anne Bancroft). All the hotel staff recognise him and talk to him. It is obvious that he has been there before on more than one occasion despite the fact he claims he hasn’t. He has to try to dig himself out of the hole.

On Game For a Laugh, London Weekend Television had bought rights to some US Candid Camera type shows (though not Candid Camera itself). We rarely copied their stunts but we considered recreating one involving an engaged couple.

In the US TV version of the stunt, the woman knows about the gag and the man is the guy on whom the joke is played. Under some pretence, the couple have to go to a hotel for an event and, as in The Graduate, the staff seem to all know the guy, despite the fact he has never been there before. This makes it look like he has been secretly staying at the hotel with another woman, but the audience and his fiancee know it is a set-up. He has to explain to his seemingly worried/upset fiancee why everyone seems to know him, despite the fact he does not himself understand how they can… He has to dig himself out of an embarrassing hole not of his own making but, of course, it is an impossible hole which he cannot ever dig himself out of because it does not exist. When the stunt is revealed to be a hoax, there are laughs and great relief all round.

We did not copy this stunt on Game For a Laugh because, as far as I remember, we could not find the right couple to make it work. However Beadle’s About did later copy the same stunt. But they crucially changed the details.

In their version, it was the guy who knew about the set-up and it was the fiancee on whom the ‘joke’ was played. The result was that – as the stunt progressed and as it became more and more obvious that her lover had been unfaithful to her in this very hotel with another woman – you could see the anguish get worse and worse on her face, because she realised that her life had been destroyed, her relationship was a sham and was breaking up, her beloved was a shit and her marriage would have to be cancelled.

On Game For a Laugh, we would have played the joke on the poor man who had to explain an impossible situation to his knowing fiancee. Funny.

On Beadle’s About, the ‘joke’ was to pretend to the fiancee that her relationship was disintegrating. Not funny. Cruel.

It is the difference between aiming your camera at the face of a man who is apparently seeing his own car being destroyed (which Beadle’s About did) and aiming your camera (as Game For a Laugh did) at the face of a man who appears to have destroyed someone else’s car (which had been set up by us) and then has to explain to the apparently irate owner of the car (a Game For a Laugh performer) how and why he destroyed the car.

Game For a Laugh laughed at the situations and with the punters; Beadle’s About laughed at the punters. The result was the destruction of Jeremy Beadle’s public image.