Clive James has died

My main memory was of him doing the New Year’s Eve shows on BBC One, taking a look back at the past year.

I would have said he did that show for years but apparently he only did it for 4 years.

According to Genome, he did it for seven years, 1988–1994, before Angus Deayton took over in 1995.

A sad loss of Clive whose later series I remember from itv in the late 90s. And sad to hear of the passing of Gary Rhodes also who brought entertainment through food on tv to many.

That's right. In fact for all the cliches about New Year's Eve telly, with Andy Stewart and that, up until the concert and fireworks we have now there wasn't really ever a consistent New Year's Eve show, outside of Scotland anyway, that lasted for a significant period of time, and in the seventies and eighties anything went. Clive's was probably the longest running New Year's Eve show, as you say running for seven years.

It got a sort of revival in 1999 when he did the Night of a Thousand Years for ITV which went out on 30th December, which was actually his last TV comedy show. Andrew Collins was one of the writers on it and he says in his book that during its production Clive said to them this would be his last show because he thought he was too old to do it anymore and wanted to go back to writing.

I tend to put Clive alongside Denis Norden in that, for me, they were the first exponents of "clever", grown-up comedy I remember watching and liking. Saturday Night Clive was a big show in its day, I remember when it moved to BBC1 in 1991, on the night of the first show Clive and Mel Brooks popped up between all the other programmes on BBC1, Mel asking Clive if it was time for the show yet. And of course he was one of the few who managed to move from the Beeb to ITV with no obvious problems, helped of course by the fact he took his entire production team with him.



This is a pleasingly efficient catch-all death thread. I remember Hot Chefs very well, it was part of a not very successful BBC1 daytime revamp in 1991, and of course in those days one of the treats of half term was getting to see daytime telly, so I watched it every day for a week - https://genome.ch.bbc.co.uk/schedules/bbcone/london/1991-10-14#at-9.50

I vividly remember it, because he had a sous chef with him called Vince, and I remember people complaining to Points of View saying Gary bossed Vince around too much. And whenever I saw Gary Rhodes after that, I always wondered what happened to Vince.

I was in the audience for the episode of Shooting Stars he was on, and he was very nice to the audience and happily signed autographs and let people touch his hair.



It did differ quite a lot, actually, as UK Gameshows points out. It was starting to decline a bit on BBC1, I remember it being moved earlier and earlier in the afternoon, and the move to BBC2 was to put it alongside the other cookery shows and emphasise it was all about food - so they got rid of the celebrity judge and just had chefs judging it, and they also changed the format so rather than cooking whatever you liked, all the chefs had to use the same ingredient. But seemingly the format was too associated with Loyd and it didn't catch on, so that was the end of it.

Gary Rhodes fell and hit his head apparently. I'm sure we all know how nasty that can be.

Looking through Genome, Masterchef actually had quite a few spinoffs in the year 2000 (for a show that would end a year later!). There was a tenth anniversary special, a celebrity special, and a ten-part series of highlights from previous years called Tales from the Masterchef Kitchen which seemingly also featured new interviews by Loyd Grossman of previous contestants.

Surprisingly though this went out Sundays at 6:20am at the earliest and 7:10am the latest, wonder if it was commissioned and then someone decided they didn't want it? Thought it may have been Lorraine Heggessey not being a fan, though Wikipedia says she only became controller on 1 November, well after it was shown.

I wonder if it was made before they decided to get rid of lloyd?

This article reads as though he left because he objected to the revamp rather than him being sacked.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/entertainment/976107.stm

That reminds me of something we've mentioned before, how they showed a couple of Noel's House Party compilations on Sunday mornings in 2000, and it was speculated on here that they showed them then to get them out before Noel's contract expired. Sunday mornings used to be a right dumping ground in those days.

I think they'd rather flogged MasterChef a bit too much in previous years, of course when the main show wasn't on there was often Junior MasterChef instead. I know it's on a lot these days but obviously these days they show a couple of episodes a week so it's over with quite quickly, in those days series would go on for months.

Modern Masterchef is basically a totally different show to the original one, in all honest. Masterchef in name only. It's run longer than the original did though.

One thing I've noticed is the screenshots of the original Masterchef on UKGameshows has the 1998-2001 Sky One DOG in the corner, seems a very unusual show for them to have repeated.

Sky One used to show anything and everything, including Friends, they could get their hands on, it was wider variety then, but of course since they've launched copious other channels to shift most of that sort of imported content onto and Sky One had a load of money thrown at it.

After looking up more articles about turn-of-the-century Masterchef, turns out Gary Rhodes' tenure on the show was when he decided to get rid of (most of) his spiky hairstyle - the producer Melanie Jappy (who was a former contestant) didn't like it and thought he would be taken more seriously without it. From a 2002 article in the Guardian.


Thanks Steve, not just this but for all your posts in this thread. Yes I suspect it was partly overexposure and also partly the show just feeling a bit out of date by that point. Looking at what's available of clips over the years, it didn't really change in terms of look and feel. The set with the black backdrop would have seemed really out of fashion by 2000. The 2001 set, though very early 2000s in design as you'd expect, was much brighter even judging from tiny JPEGs from the BBC website on the Wayback Machine. The changes seem to have been critically successful at the time from what I've read, but it was a seemingly just a few years too late for the viewers to care.

James, although as you say the current MasterChef (note the capitalised 'C'!) is an entirely different format, just be glad that, as the UKGameshows page points out, we haven't fully adopted the Australian format which seems to take the Pop Idol/X Factor audition format and apply it to cooking.

Anyway, sorry for taking this thread off topic from Clive James and boring anyone with posts about 1990s Masterchef. The rise and fall of different TV shows and their formats just really interests me.