TV Pop Diaries
Pop Music on British Television 1955 - 1999

"This is what they want."

History now insists that Tiswas was the first decent Saturday morning show, and although it predates Swap Shop the honour would actually go to Ed and Zed or Zokko on the BBC.

ITV had an obvious gaping hole in their Saturday morning schedule, and had done so for years, but despite potential for the sale of advertising space it took until autumn 1973 for the schedulers to come up with a decent plan. London Weekend's Saturday Scene began in October, while on January 4th 1974 at 10.00 am on ATV 'Today Is Saturday or The Tiswas Show' debuted.

Until Tiswas came along, we all had a lie-in until about 11.00 am and then we would be treated to Gerry Anderson repeats, sports tuition shows, DIY demonstrations, RAC road reports, Junior Police Five and Sesame Street. London Weekend were the first to really take the plunge with Saturday Scene in which Sally James interviewed glam rockers in-between other shows and features. At the end of 1973 ATV had an idea to do something similar, a show which linked cartoons, pop promo clips and interviews.

Things started well for Today Is Saturday with a 7% share in the ATV area, quickly increasing to 23%. Talking to the Birmingham Mail in June 1974 Francis Essex of ATV expressed surprise at the initial success "... pretty remarkable going, by any standards." Essex claimed "We started off exploring this idea of a variation on the old Saturday morning children's cinema." Explaining the title he said "The title we decided on was Today Is Saturday. That started appearing on our typed schedules as 'T.I.S. was presented by...' 'T.I.S. featured...' and so on. One day Peter Harris, producing the show, had a brainwave 'Let's call the show Tis Was'." The show was billed as Today is Saturday in TV Times, but the staff referred to it as Tiswas.

But after eleven shows in March 1974 the show was dropped for unexplained "internal difficulties." It would be back after the summer school holiday, starting with a thirty-five minute Tiswas Trailer Time on 7th September 1974 with the show proper starting again the following week. Co-hosted by news and schools' presenter Chris Tarrant and fellow presenter John Asher it started with a single continuity desk, later expanding to the larger studio 3 at ATV in Birmingham.

Talking to TV Times in February 1975 about its unexpected success Chris Tarrant claimed "Great hairy lads in pubs would come up to me and say 'never miss Tiswas'." The article also mentioned "Union troubles temporarily ousted it after only ten weeks. Yet it was talked about as if it had been running for years." The said article was actually about the London Weekend show Saturday Scene, hosted by Sally James.

Expanding his horizons beyond news, schools programmes and Tiswas in 1976 Chris Tarrant co-hosts the Miss ATV beauty pageant, along with Willie Rushton. Their ribald behaviour led to complaints from several of the contestants, and they were replaced the following year by Shaw Taylor.

Talking to the Birmingham Evening Mail in April 1977 producer Sid Kilbey claimed " We don't patronise kids. We entertain them. There's no rehearsal. There are lots of ideas and plans but about 80 percent of the talking is ad-libbed. It's almost like theatre in some ways. If there is a mistake then there is no cover up, we admit it. It all goes out live." By this time HTV would be taking a 25 minute sampler to show, while the show was also getting noticed in the north-west.

Other ATV presentation regulars would come and go over the next two years until Sally James, from the recently departed Saturday Scene, joined in September 1977 along with Jim Davidson who appears to have only been a presenter for a few weeks. Tarrant was initially unhappy with James' inclusion, but soon changed his mind when he recognised a kindred spirit. The two new faces will join Chris Tarrant and Trevor East, together with new producer Glyn Edwards, whose intention was to make the show "informative as well as entertaining."

In February 1978 the show tells the press that Princess Ann and her then husband Mark were in receipt of two Tiswas T-shirts, as a montage of photos of wedding couples were shown and t-shirts promised to each couple, with Anne and Mark among them.

In spring 1978 Chris Tarrant put out a request for anyone to come onto the show and stand in their newly constructed cage in a corner of the studio and have things thrown at them. They received eleven thousand letters. The cage, and the grunge tank above it, became a show regular until the end, with the cage sometimes containing the great and good of pop.

John Gorman from The Scaffold became a regular from September 1978, playing various characters including The Masked Poet, Smello, Cabbage Face and the studio janitor. Later Bob Carolgees joined with notorious punk glove puppet Spit The Dog, and Lenny Henry, fresh from summer season, who brought bad jokes and dodgy impressions. This, indeed, is what they want.

Regular items included Creature Feature in which animals were brought into the studio which was fine if they took the Blue Peter line and had just kept it to hamsters and gerbils, but this being Tiswas, tigers, apes and bears were not out of the question. Another regular was Flan Your Folks in which kids get to win prizes much to their parents' physical distress. Sally James had her own Almost Legendary World Exclusive In Depth Pop Profiles and Almost Legendary Pop Interviews, similar to her role on Saturday Scene, while Compost Corner gave Lenny Henry the chance to do his David Bellamy impression. There were other regular characters like the dreadful Phantom Flan Flinger and the even more mysterious piano-playing pig. Actually it was Johnny Patrick.

There was no mystery that the cast wrote their own scripts, but on occasion others would contribute, Jasper Carrott among them.

Various theme tunes would used over the years, with the version of Tiger Rag replaced by a specially commissioned song in September 1980, 'Saturday is Tiswas day'. Although it never relied on pop music the show had two hit singles of its own. The Four Bucketeers' Bucket Of Water Song produced by Neil Innes and a frightening version of Bright Eyes by the then five year old Matthew Butler.

The mixture of Saturday morning pictures misbehaviour and pop clips soon made it a necessity to watch. The series was finally networked in 1979 and now attracted names like Paul and Linda McCartney, Elvis Costello, the Two-Tone brigade, Genesis, Status Quo, members of Led Zeppelin, among others. Many pop stars even volunteered for the cage where they would be drenched with water and gunge by Tarrant.

The letters that make up the title were meant to spell "Today Is Saturday, Watch And Smile", an idea suggested by a viewer, but as a placard on a later show claimed more realistically "This Is Saturday, Watch And Suffer."

The unpredictable nature of the children-only audience mixed with Gorman's adult off-camera comments made this a must-see, first attracting a college audience who would go on to make up the inmates of the cage, then adults. Realising the potential for an adult version of the show Tarrant decided to leave after the 1980-81 series, taking Gorman, Carolgees and Henry with him for the poorly received OTT. Self-awareness that Tiswas was actually an adults' show masquerading as a kids' show was a mistake, leading only to its demise. Tiswas continued for a further series, beginning September 1981 with Sally James and new co-hosts, including Den Heggarty from Darts, children's entertainer Fogwell Flax and Gordon Astley, but its fate was not dissimilar to OTT and Tiswas was put to sleep. The new co-presenters didn't have the sense of adventure, malice and sarcasm that the Tarrant era had. The original show had evolved from merely a linking device to deservedly becoming a show in itself, but now it was returning to a mere linking device again. The original was inspired, the new version was contrived, like a step-father desperately trying to please his new wife's kids. The fans slowly walked away, just leaving the show with it actual intended audience.

Undoubtedly Tiswas attracted the same fanbase and respect that Monty Python had, the show even played host to Pythons' Michael Palin and Terry Jones. At its best it almost looked as though the TV station that made it had thankfully never checked to see what they were doing, which is always for the best.

It's sad to report that very few of the original shows as broadcast exist, but Network came to the rescue and released a DVD compilation of the three VHS titles released in the early 1990s. However, many shows seem to have been recorded by the parents of kids appearing on the show and some can be found online.

For the whole sordid story go to Tiswas OnLine.

If you want to enter any of the competitions (underates and overates) then write to Tiswas, ATVLand, Birmingham, B1 2JP.

TISWAS

ATV

4th January 1974 - 8th March 1974, 7th September 1974 (Tiswas Trailer Time), 14th September 1974 to 3rd April 1982