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AIUI The Mary Whitehouse Experience was fairly topical and wouldn't make sense to today's audience. But I guess that hasn't stopped repeats of Mock the Week and HIGNFY.

The radio version was topical, particularly the contributions by Mark Thomas and other guest performers.


The TV version was contemporary rather than topical so a some of the references are lost in time.

But as you say that doesn't stop other shows, and Radio 4 Extra has repeated the more topical radio version a lot

AIUI it was larger transmitters that could be received in Wales such as Sutton Coldfield and Winter Hill as well as Crystal Palace because there was no opt out facilities that could be used to blank it from there

It seems to be Wenvoe, Holme Moss and Sutton Coldfield, plus Welsh transmitters initially. Some suggestion in an old DS thread that Crystal Palace wouldn't didn't initially take it but later started to after repeated audience demand.

Not sure I buy that Crystal Palace couldn't opt out, surely they could generate a test card locally from the transmitter site?

That is a good point, they could if so needed. It's a possibility mentioned in this post from Tony Currie on the same subject of Digital Spy from a few years ago, which answers the CP question:
https://forums.digitalspy.com/discussion/comment/54958751#Comment_54958751

From 1996, Wow, CITV's short lived answer to Live and Kicking. The Maidstone Studios suffer a power cut half an hour before the programme is due on air. Luckily it's a nice sunny day outside

I've read about this before, interesting to finally see it! Looks like they got back in the studio eventually.

Apparently Wow actually did quite well in the ratings- the reason it didn't get recommissioned was because ITV spent a fortune on F1 rights, and one of the places the money came from was the Saturday Morning budget, so you just had Scratchy & Co, Tricky and Mashed after that which were a lot cheaper to make, they didn't have a full scale show again until SM:TV started.

End of an era in a way, as it was the end of the era stretching back to Number 73 when the Autumn/Winter Saturday show was made by the same TVS (and ex-TVS) team in Maidstone. Though they came back with MoM, though not until over 7 years after Wow ended.

Interesting to see (briefly) clips of what The Noise looked like too.

I remember catching bits of MoM and I think that was when I started to lose interest in Saturday morning shows - as did television by the looks of things. Now I'd love to find something other than cooking shows or BBC One's daytime weekday offerings when I turn on the TV on a Saturday morning.

Yes, I suspect Andi Peters was cursing his luck that it was Simeon who was getting to prat about and wing it - he'd have been in his element

Well, he should have stayed on at L&K if that's what he wanted to do!

Also if anyone's read, Simeon did actually consider being Andi's replacement on L&K around the time, but decided to take the Wow offer because he was told Rick Adams was a shoo in- then his screen test with Zoe Ball went dreadfully. And he joined the terrible Big Breakfast revamp instead.

I was meaning more on that occasion with the power cut and pretty much everything that was planned going out of the window