Saturdays and kids TV in the UK

Over dinner this evening I was asked about kids TV in the UK, it turned into an interesting discussion.

It seems every generation has their Saturday morning ritual. For dad it meant a weekly walk to the cinema to enjoy serials like Flash Gordon, westerns and so on to go along with his cartoons. This weekend ritual lasted into the 60’s and perhaps early 70’s in the UK, slightly before my time.

My generation had three hours of live, “interactive” (for the time, using the very pre-internet phone in definition) TV on BBC1 fronted by Noel Edmonds (better known then as a creative radio DJ) on the Multi-Coloured Swap Shop. The show also had BBC stalwart John Craven and newcomers Keith Chegwin (height of his career) and Maggie Philbin (still with the BBC) involved.

Get up by 8.30, cornflakes in front of telly, sit and watch swap shop for 3 hours, remember no remote control to go channel hopping. Then go play footie on field all afternoon, then home for final score… That’s how I remember it anyway.

It was what would now be called a “magazine” style program aimed squarely at the kid audience. There were inevitably cartoons, but there was also something of an educational element designed to inform us about the world at the right level.

It was all done live, and I understand largely without a script beyond the morning running order. It became a program that had a huge cultural influence in the UK for people my age. One example of this influence was that Saturday afternoon was the time during the week that the most records were sold and went a significant way to dictating that weeks’ top 40. Getting a band onto Swap Shop on Saturday morning drove sales on Saturday afternoon.

It started at 9 and finished when Grandstand, the Saturday sports show, started at about midday. Grandstand then carried BBC1 until the final football results were in at about 5 in the evening (no live football then). Think about that for a moment, the BBC produced over 8 hours of live TV during the day every Saturday, that’s rather impressive.

The thing that separated Swap Shop from everything else was the promise of interactivity. The phone number was there across the front of the hosts’ desk, this was before premium rate phone lines and people were encouraged to call in and talk to Noel Edmonds or other guests live on TV. I don’t think that had ever been done before, certainly not in a kids format. Here is a live “interactive” interview with Adam Ant from 1981.

On the “other side” (there was only three channels at the time BBC1, BBC2 and ITV, with BBC1 and ITV being the two big ones) there was the Chris Tarrant led Tiswas. This introduced Spit the dog, Sally James and the Phantom Flan Flinger. It was very chaotic, more of a sketch show that the magazine format on the more conservative BBC1.

Swap Shop really defined the genre and the BBC used an almost identical format for the next 15 years in various guises. At its peek the Saturday morning kids show attracted up to six-million viewers, impressive numbers. Even the sitting Prime Minister at the time, Margaret Thatcher, made an appearance that’s become rather infamous.