After a rocky start with an experimental run at the start of 1974 from a cramped presentation studio that ended up prematurely cut short, Tiswas returned to the airwaves later that year. This time it would have an increased budget, more presenters, a proper production crew and feel more like a show in its right.
This was down to industrial action, instigated by unions upset that ATV tried to pass off the earlier incarnation as just a presentation strand. Children and parents in the midlands were furious that the show came off the air, and their written and phoned complaints were a big factor in ATV trying to work out a way for Tiswas to return.
ATV had to run a trailer in the few weeks before the show’s return. At the time, John Asher was still working on stage for the summer season in Morecambe, so literally phoned in his link to the station. His wage was around £35-£40 per show, a large part of the show’s budget.
Clocking up 93 editions, this series would become the longest ever for Tiswas. It ran from 14th September 1974 to 26th June 1976, picking up an increasing number of viewers.
The second series would feel a lot more evolved from what went before. Here are some of the notable changes:
Promoted to an average-sized studio, the Tiswas team could now get up to all kinds of antics. Peter Tomlinson, clad in a leopard-print leotard, regularly swung by on a rope to introduce Tarzan.
Despite getting to share the part of Studio 3 that ATV Today didn’t inhabit, it was still very spartan. Much of it was completely bare. Most of the area had no flats to hide the raw studio walls, cables, switches and scene dock. It really looked like a low-budget rehearsal going out straight to air.
There’d be a dedicated flat for the Joke Of The Week segment where a child delivered their one-liner, but other than that, set decoration was very thin on the ground. A bank of monitors were situated behind the desk and would reside there until about 1980.
The presenters still had a desk to anchor the show from, and there’d be a couple of components familiar to the show’s near-networked heyday:
The Tiswas team knew the show had been a local success, when in early 1975, the Birmingham Evening Mail decided to run a one-off special about the show, and every copy sold out.
At points, some of the production crew got to be somewhat involved in the show. A very tall floor manager, Peter Hall, was sometimes seen on screen, especially as he would rush on to help with props that failed during a live sketch. Viewers were invited to give him a nickname. The winning choice was definitely ironic – Ivan The Dwarf.
The low budget and the chaotic live nature of this show meant that producer Peter Harris would occasionally be heard from the control room via the studio speaker system. This disembodied voice would be referred to as Telecine Three. (For the uninitiated, telecine a is way for film to be outputted to television and we’re fairly sure ‘three’ refers to the fact they’re in Studio 3.)
Another key figure in the show’s production was the compiler, Peter Matthews (you’ll notice there’s an extraordinary abundance of Peters involved in Tiswas). The very mention of his name from one of the cast would have the others respond in unison with “not THE Peter Matthews!?” in mock adulation.
The job of Peter Matthews was to put the components of the show together, typically film and video clips. In many ways he was the backbone of the show, and stayed with it for many more series.
A common viewer request was the ‘dancing footballers’ montage, achieved by a videotape of certain action shots being played/rewound in time to some music. This was actually something brought in from London Weekend Television, created by ‘backroom boys’ on World Of Sport as a bit of fun. An informal arrangement with the London-based broadcaster meant Tiswas could show it and Peter Harris viewed it as a handy time filler.
Half of Studio 3 was already allocated to the station’s regional news programme ATV Today. That set would sometimes be borrowed on rare occasions by Tiswas. Jenny Mooney, the show secretary at this time, would have to deal with huge sacks of mail, even though the show was only airing in the ATV region.
Having been given the shooting script for Saturday’s show, Chris Tarrant and Peter Tomlinson would have long meetings on Thursday evenings to come up with ideas. These creative get-togethers would of course be livened up by alcoholic beverages. The running order would be refined on the Friday before the show.
Much of this era of Tiswas starkly contrasts with the television juggernaut it became from late 1979 when it was on in nearly every ITV region. It was quite a homely show, with much of it based on viewer correspondence via post and live phone-ins. To those unfamiliar with these early series, they felt like an edition of Magpie with some cheeky humour.
The usual line-up of Asher, Tarrant, Tomlinson and East wasn’t always guaranteed, especially around the summer of 1975, where Chris took a break. Relief presenters – usually television announcers or reporters from ATV’s roster could help fill the gaps. Joan Palmer and Helen Piddock could usually be called upon. A freelancing Richard Barnes crops up in one of the surviving episodes, having made the trip over the M6 from his usual job as an announcer at Anglia Television.
A template for the end credits was to feature the presenters, either in a live shot or caricatured by the cartoonist, as a member of the cast took turns to narrate what each star was up to. As an example:
“Richard Barnes will shortly be sent back to Dudley Zoo, because it’s time for his din-dins!”
Incidentally, the Tiswas logo from this time, preceding the more familiar orange-and-yellow zig-zag one, was a cartoon scrawl from Penny, the wife of Trevor East.
With a bigger studio, Tiswas could now bring in guests from the world of music, comedy and television.
Pop stars who visited ATV in this series were Slade; The Rubettes; Bungo (from The Wombles); Brotherhood Of Man; Stevenson’s Rocket and Slik. Other guests included Mick Robertson from Magpie; Terry Hall and Lenny The Lion; cricketer/actor Alan Curtis; sculptor John Cooper; conjuror Tony Shelley and The Chinese Circus of Taiwan.
As for the show’s trademark pie-in-the-face humour, this wasn’t so prolific at the time. Rather than the familiar messy scenes in Tiswas’s later era where pies and water appeared to thrown in a scattershot fashion towards the studio audience and guests, this era pretty much kept the mess mostly confined to the presenting team.
One semi-regular exception was Tiswas Torrential Time, a segment where a viewer could appear on-screen with the proviso that they will get soaked with buckets of water. I suppose you could regard this as the spiritual predecessor of The Hopefuls segment on Channel 4’s The Word. There’d be something messier in the subsequent series though.
At TiswasOnline, we’re still trying to establish exactly when the Phantom Flan Flinger was introduced. We don’t think it was in this series and we know the character never appeared during John Asher’s time on the show. We also know that for the early appearances, ‘he’ was played by ATV’s Helen Piddock. It seems likely it was in the third series. That’s something we’ll look into, in later blogs.
Even though the level of mess wasn’t much more than what you’d see at a local pantomime, Peter Tomlinson’s role as a target didn’t go down too well with someone close to him.
“My then-wife wouldn’t allow my two daughters to watch the programme because she thought it was really a bit silly,” said Peter. “Seeing a sensible well-educated man getting buckets of water thrown over him and custard pies pushed in his face in the interests of children’s humour! She found that terribly odd!”
The very first show of this series wasn’t exactly a full joy-packed thrill ride for its child audience, as at 11:15am it had to come to a juddering halt so ITV could network the Liberal Party Assembly live across all of the UK, which also disrupted LWT’s Saturday Scene and other regional schedules. BBC 2 was also showing live coverage of this event at roughly the same time. Remember that when people insist “just having only three channels was a great time”.
Thankfully, Tiswas and its London-based counterpart both returned at 12noon for another thirty minutes of fun just before World Of Sport kicked off at 12:30.
It seems strange that the Saturday morning timeslot, a rather disparate territory where ITV companies would show their own offerings in this era, could be dominated by a political party’s coverage. However, this was in the wake of the February election which resulted in the UK having a hung parliament (the UK’s first since 1929), and the Liberal Party held the balance of power, having taken a lot of votes (its highest ever in electoral history) away from Labour and the Conservatives.
Sorry for the tedious explanation there, but there’d be some strong interests from your parents at this time, as another general election was planned for October to solve the issue of the hung parliament. Also, on a note of possible foreshadowing, presenter John Asher is now a member of the Liberal Democrats and has helped out the party in Buckinghamshire and has even stood for election.
Also, it wouldn’t be the last time the Liberal Party Assembly cut into a chunk of Tiswas’s airtime. 1976’s event would cut forty-five minutes out of the third show of series 3.
Nevertheless, the first show did set out its stand, with the core presenters assigned to specific duties, as detailed in the TV Times billing:
“Featuring Trevor East with Tiswas Sportstime, Peter Tomlinson with Tiswas Trailertime, the Who, Which, What, Where Contest, Under 8’s competition, and surprises and prizes.”
Cartoons were served, giving viewers a look at Daffy Duck, Woody Woodpecker and Betty Boop. Peter Matthews served up film clips from Live And Let Die and Disney’s Song Of The South.
Just a little over halfway through this series, John Asher departed the show in early September 1975. Speaking to us a few years ago, we learnt it wasn’t a mutual decision. He had enjoyed the fun of the show but was informed his contract wouldn’t be renewed.
As a showman, particularly skilled as a singer, John decided to head for the pop charts, with a cover of Chubby Checker’s Let’s Twist Again. This hit number 14 in November of that year, giving him a top twenty hit! Chubby’s music publishers caught wind of this and gave it a spoiler by reissuing the original song, which went to number five.
He also got married that year and then decided to put the showbiz ambitions aside for a straighter career as a salesman at IBM from 1976. Of course, the performing side never truly left him as he still remained connected to the theatre and juggled those ambitions with working in business IT.
Most television historians are very kind to Tiswas. The show gets cited as an enormous influence on all subsequent Saturday morning children’s television shows. It’s portrayed as the mischievous and cool choice to whatever the BBC was putting out. (Swap Shop wouldn’t begin until after Tiswas’s third series had started, in late 1976.)
However, at the start of the second series, the show was still rather sedate and despite the series being the longest, it didn’t have influence on any similar shows elsewhere on the network. LWT’s Saturday Scene continued with an almost-uninterrupted run up until September 1977. HTV’s Orbit ceased its run at the end of 1975. Grampian had ended Ron & Friends by the end of June 1974 and would just show the usual miscellany of adult education, cartoons and imported serials.
It’s safe to say that the rest of the ITV network and the BBC were barely even aware of Tiswas. However, it was having an impact on the cinema business in the midlands. Some venues which put on a schedule of cheap Saturday matinees for a child audience, noticed a drop off in footfall.
In the upper echelons of ATV, a station that was laser-focused on hugely popular prime time hits on ITV and a keen eye for selling shows to big US networks, they began to take notice of their Saturday morning output gaining considerable traction.
Just before the second series closed, there’d be another departure for a stalwart presenter. Peter Tomlinson was told by ATV management that his tenure on the show would be coming to an end.
“In a sense, I think they wanted it to go network,” explained Peter. The idea of spreading the show to other regions was quite bold. At this time, no ITV franchise’s purpose-made Saturday morning children’s TV show had been simulcast in a region other than its own.
The closest was LWT’s Supersonic, their attempt to give ITV Top Of The Pops. This pre-recorded show would be shown in other regions but rarely, if ever, at the same time as London Weekend’s screening. The regions that decided to give it a pre-World-Of-Sport airing on Saturdays were Anglia; Southern; Granada; HTV; Scottish; Westward and Ulster.
However, things would certainly change in the future. For now though, we’re sticking with a dive into the second series over the next few blogs before we visit series 3!
