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Blind Date first hit the screens in the mid 1980’s and managed to stick around for almost 20 years, and was hosted by the UK’s favourite Liverpudlian, Cilla Black, for the entire duration. It marked the beginning of Saturday nights line-up of shows on ITV, and only came to an end when Cilla herself, realising the shows waning popularity, decided to announce on air that she was going to give up the show at the end of the current series, much to the surprise of the TV company!
The show centred around the idea of Cilla being a kind of match maker, sorting out blind dates for the contestants. Three contestants were sat on stools on one side of a movable wall. A single contestant of the opposite sex was then brought on to choose between the three potential dates, but they were only allowed to ask three questions to each of the contestants. These were normally laced with innuendo, and the reply was similarly full of double entendres. The Carry On team would have been proud! It would normally go something like this:-
Contestant: “I’m a bit of a whizz in the kitchen, but what kind of dish would you say you’re most like?”
Date 1: “I’d say I’m most like a curry, because I’m hot and spicy”
Date 2: “A jam doughnut, because I’m soft and cuddly with a sweet surprise in the middle”
Date 3: “I’m like a cheese burger, thick and meaty and fills the hole in your stomach”
Nowadays the morning television schedules for the UK terrestrial TV channels are awash with magazine style shows, and programmes about buying or selling houses or antiques, or at least that’s what it seems to be whenever I turn the TV on if I happen to be at home during a weekday.
Before The Crystal Maze (which narrowly misses out on being a show of the 1980’s since it first appeared in 1990) there was the fondly remembered The Adventure Game from the good old BBC. Instead of members of the public, The Adventure Game pitted teams of three celebrity guests against an array of fiendish puzzles, wrapped up in the concept of being an alien game show!
In terms of repeat viewings on TV, The sitcom Open All Hours is probably second only to Dad’s Army. Personally, I prefer Open All Hours to Dad’s Army, if only because I have more memories of watching it the first time around.
French and Saunders (pictured here pretending to be Amy Winehouse and Britney Spears) are a female comedy double act who first shot to fame in the 1980’s as part of the new wave of “alternative” comedians, a term used to distance the young up and coming comedians from the old guard like Jimmy Tarbuck, 
Airing for the first time last week, Ashes To Ashes is the much anticipated follow up to the excellent (if somewhat confusing at times) Life On Mars. Sam Tyler may have been replaced by female detective Alex Drake, a psychological profiler, but the important thing is that Gene Hunt returns (as politically uncorrect as ever) with his mostly incompetent sidekicks Chris Skelton and Ray Carling.
Following the news that Jeremy Beadle has just died from pneumonia at the age of 59, I thought it would be apt to mark his passing with the show that first brought him fame in the UK, Game For A Laugh, and paved the way for Beadle to become a household name when it came to anything to do with practical jokes.
With the plethora of digital TV channels available to us via satellite, cable or even Freeview TV, it seems strange to think that at the beginning of the 1980’s we only had three TV channels to choose from - BBC 1, BBC 2 and ITV. It also seems unthinkable that with such a small number of channels, at certain times of the day we didn’t even have programmes airing on all three. Early mornings and late nights were when TV stopped, and the test card took over.