You’ve washed your Crispy Pancakes down with a large Kia-Ora and you’re sucking the last of the Butterscotch Angel Delight through your teeth when the theme tune to The Generation Game chirrups from the sitting room. Find your favourite spot on the floral-patterned sofa because an evening of brightly coloured celebrity-strewn pleasure awaits. Or does it?
The BBC has announced a classic entertainment season on BBC Four, stripped across three consecutive Saturday nights this summer, to recreate the weekend television of yesteryear. The line-up features shiny floor greats including Parkinson, Bob’s Full House and Noel’s House Party. A buffet of Brucies and Wogans is set to fill the vacant air as an alternative to BBC One’s wall-to-wall Olympic coverage and I’m struggling to feel anything but despair.
I love nostalgia as much as the next person. I host a podcast, Box of Delights (new episodes coming soon) featuring favourite TV moments from the history of the medium. But even I’m unsure whether this particular kind of schedule-filling is the right way to go. Something about revisiting antique entertainment shows sends a chill down my spine.
Light entertainment is transient, designed to float away on a slight breeze and always of its time. What will this stuff look like to us now we are used to hi-tech formats, visual sophistication and HD make-up? I’m picturing something like Mitchell & Webb’s After the Event sketches.
Audiences will be able to journey back in time through three incarnations of Blankety Blank – Wogan, Dawson and Savage – while the current manifestation (Walsh) continues in the present day. The Generation Game pops up, twice fronted by Bruce Forsyth and once by Larry Grayson and – say it with me – the lovely Isla St Clair. Plus Michael Parkinson interviews Les Dawson, Miranda Hart interviews Bruce Forsyth and there’s a re-showing of 2014’s The Fight for Saturday Night in which Michael Grade tells the story of the scrap for Saturday night ratings between ITV and BBC. And we are promised a chance to view the first-ever episode of Strictly Come Dancing from 2004 in a bid to distract us from the show’s current woes around unethical training methods and ousted dance pros.
We’ve been forced to view the British entertainment industry’s 20th-century past with different eyes since Jimmy Savile and Operation Yewtree. Those orange sets that once seemed so glamorous and reassuring have taken on a more sinister air now we know what some of the stars of the 70s, 80s and 90s were up to behind the scenes.
And even the shows left untainted by scandal will play very differently now we’re used to considerably more sophistication in our weekend prime time entertainment. Are we in danger of spoiling the few precious memories we do have by blowing the dust off programmes which were meant for their times?
Shows that shone brightly in our young eyes might now seem grey, dull and moss-covered alongside the vast lighting rigs and revolving stages of Michael McIntyre’s The Wheel or Ant and Dec’s Saturday Night Takeaway. Isn’t it better to remember them how they were, half-glimpsed through old YouTube clips?
Wheeling out whole episodes of shows meant to be throwaway seems like a wild, high-risk strategy. I imagine an archive researcher has had to trawl through hours of these shows, making sure that none of the culturally dodgy attitudes of yore leak through to the present day, never mind the culturally dodgy celebrities. Think of the outcry.
Television is going through a particular fetish for modern re-boots of ancient shows at the moment. Thrusting the yellowing originals at us when we can turn on the box any day of the week and see Wheel of Fortune with Graham Norton (ITV) and Gladiators with Bradley Walsh (BBC One), not to mention Blankety Blank with Bradley Walsh (BBC One) seems wilfully perverse.
It especially seems strange given that game shows have got so much better since Bullseye and 3-2-1, however beloved they were back then. Modern formats – The Wheel, The Wall, The 1% Club – have had to innovate to keep audiences tuning in when viewers have considerably more than just four channels, and several streaming platforms, competing for their attention.
An audience spoiled by the sophistication of, say, The Traitors, is unlikely to find much satisfaction in someone winning a Teasmade on Blankety Blank. The stakes are higher now, the cash prizes comparatively enormous. People’s lives are changed on the spin of a wheel. Caravans and sets of luggage won’t cut it with avaricious modern audiences.
Yes, nostalgia is popular and entirely called for in times of trouble. It’s a safe place to suck your thumb and remember when someone else would carry you to bed when you were sleepy instead of waking up on the sofa at 2am with a stiff neck. But this dusty old content belongs at the back of the loft behind the Christmas decorations and old copies of the Radio Times.
The Classic Entertainment Season will run every Saturday night on BBC Four and iPlayer throughout the BBC’s Olympics coverage