Blind Date to return

I seem to recall in an interview she said that the first ITV (and possibly even the show's producers) knew that it would be Cilla's last series was when she announced it during a live edition of the show.

Her anniversary show is being filmed this evening at ITV and hosted by Paul O'Grady. I have got myself a ticket.

Yes, she mentioned on Loose Women the other day that it was a special programme hosted by Paul, with the Blind Date segment being a small feature within the programme. She also mentioned that it was being recorded 'as-live'.

She came across rather differently than normal in the LW show.

That's right. Nobody has prior knowledge bar Cilla, and the producers didn't like the idea of replacing her after so many years, so they threw in the towel.

SRO audiences only released these tickets as "short notice tickets" late yesterday afternoon via e-mail. I assume they only had a certain amount to give out.

That's not quite true, and the story behind her quitting live is quite interesting. Before Cilla quit, LWT were sounding out new possible hosts for the next series of Blind Date behind her back, and an approach was made to another famous female presenter. Disgusted at the thought of going behind Cilla's back back, the presenter contacted her and told her all about the approach.

And the rest is history!

Possibly it's one of those An Audience With-style celebrity audience

The show tonight was quite enjoyable! The recording lasted for three hours and they did indeed do it as live, except for the ending for some reason which featured Cilla (I won't spoil it)

It was like "An Audience with" meets "Surprise Surprise" meets "Blind Date"

The Blind Date one off worked very well and Cilla got in to it straight away. They did talk about her quitting and according to her she had made the decision to quit the show as soon as she heard the theme music play on the live show and that's all that's mentioned about her quitting.

Apparently according to the warm up man, the screen they used tonight was the original but looked it had been remade for tonight. The backdrop graphics behind the screen were a re-creation of this set: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x6qlAG_Jty4 on a large LED screen.

There's some good video manipulation of mixing old footage with current footage. There's some VT's of current Cilla walking past and down roads that were in the 1960's which i thought was very impressive!

The main set had images of Cilla through the years blown up in large photo frames.

important question: was Our Graham back?

Paul did the Blind Date voice overs as he did with the rest of the show.