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Jimmy Saville really is one of the UK’s national treasures, and not just because he’s beginning to get on a bit now! Whether using eggs to demonstrate the perils of not using a seatbelt, hosting Top of the Pops or running the London Marathon whilst smoking a cigar, he is always supremely confident in anything he does.
Who better then to grant the young (and old) of the British Isles their deepest wishes? In the 1970’s and 1980’s Sir Jim could be found every Saturday evening “fixing it” for people so their dreams came true, and the wilder the better.
Want to meet your favourite pop star? OK, but be prepared to have to sing or dance with them on British TV. Fancied eating a cake which looked just like yourself? Cool, and you’d get to meet the chef and watch him make it too. Want to ride with the Red Arrows air display team? Yep, as long as you were the right size and fit enough Jim could probably even fix that.
The meet-the-pop-star-fix-its were probably the least interesting, but it meant the BBC could pad the show out a little with a song, and use the famous name as a lure to pull in the viewers, but what we really all tuned in to see was the group of boy scouts trying to eat their packed lunches whilst travelling on a roller coaster.
Most of the fix its were for kids, who would have to read their letter out before Jim granted their wish. It was mandatory to start the letter “Dear Jim”, and you had to finish with your age, preferably including a fractional part. Every so often an adult would write in to have some long standing wish revealed, so it always sounded funny when the age that was read out at the end was 88…
Jim always presided overly the show with a kingly air, which was aided by his generous amounts of jewellery (he can lay claim to be the first king of bling) and the massive chair which he sat in, which had all kinds of secret compartments from which he could pull little extra gifts for the fixees, as well as the all important Jim’ll Fix It badge.
The Jim’ll Fix It badge was the main reason many people wrote into the show, though it was more of a medal than a badge. Attached to a piece of red ribbon it was a big sparkly silver affair with the legend “JIM FIXED IT FOR ME” picked out in red. I dare say a few of those have been sold for a pretty penny on eBay since…
The show returned a little while ago under the slightly changed name of Jim’ll Fix It Strikes Again. This show was an interesting mix of new fix-its combined with getting some of the better remembered fix-its from the original shows remade with the people as they are now. Again, the boy scouts on the roller coaster was probably the best to be featured, as the scouts were now all fully grown, as the image above shows! The clip below shows the scouts on the coaster when they were both kids and grown up – plus you get a bit of Jimmy at the beginning too as a bonus.
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