The Fight for Saturday Night

By saying this, you have just proved you know absolutely nothing about television. Congratulations, go and have a biscuit. You deserve it.

Or perhaps you should go and look and IMDB and come back when you've learnt something.

Oh please, either you are Mr Jackson or you worked for him and have learned his awful mentality, Alarm bells should be ringing here: "Carlton Television career" You ask anyone if the company commissioned any good programme and there say no, as soon as Central come along he left. Just because he directed a number of high profile shows does not make him the bee's knees, oh know what everyone wants on TV channel.

Most of ITV success were done by his team of people. Also if he was that great why was he only ITV for 3 years before going back to producing?

Busted, I'm Paul Jackson. Many apologies for my career.

You are one of my favourite people on the internet. I love how you systematically get every single thing you're talking about wrong. I love you to bits.

(shakes head in bewilderment)
I'll tell you why they never mentioned The Gen Game came back in the 90's. That would be a total and utter irrelevance.

This was a programme about Saturday night television - the relaunch was broadcast on Friday nights. A quick check on Genome would have told you that..
http://genome.ch.bbc.co.uk/schedules/bbcone/london/1993-09-10

Having said it was surprising certain bits weren't mentioned such as the Blind Date pilot, I loved seeing the behind the scenes footage of the night Cilla quit live on air.

It's amazing to see the turnaround of Saturday nights since the last major documentary "Who Killed Saturday Night TV" from 10 years ago.

True it started out on Friday night's but for most of it's run it 90's/00's Generation Game aired on Saturday nights. For the best part of a decade Jim Davidson was BBC1's "Mr Saturday Night". That's a rarely told story and would've been more interesting than the same old-same old this show served up.

But what you're missing is that Gen Game second time round wasn't a massive innovation in the schedules and didn't involve a big cross-channel transfer.

It wasn't meant to be a chronology of every vaguely popular Saturday Night show

Funnily enough I was watching the repeat of The Young Ones on BBC 2 last night and thought to myself 'Paul Jackson clearly does not have a graps about proper content'

To imply Paul Jackson knows nothing about television is foolish. He has an incredible pedigree of television, most recently helping turn around ITV with entertainment commissions such as Britain's Got Talent, Benidorm and TV Burp.

I have a feeling he may not be the easiest to get along with but he does know his stuff.

One thing I thought odd was that they omitted Noel's Saturday Roadshow, wasn't that basically the forerunner to House Party, but it was suggested House Party was developed from scratch.

Interesting to see clips of Friends like These where Ant and Dec were less polished than they are now and Ant's forehead was much bigger.

Lorraine Heggasey came across a bit cold and on the defensive and not the old boys chummy banter that Michael Grade shared with everyone else.

What I liked about this programme is that it was the first time it actually pointed out that his speech was actually prompted by a member of the audience (in his book he says it was totally unplanned as well), as opposed to Brucie just cracking and doing it out of the blue. Fascinating to hear Paul Smith say for three months before transmission he thought about nothing else but when they got on air they had absolutely no idea what they were doing. The first episode is on YouTube and it is such a shambles, it does look as if they're making it up as they go along. It also looks amazingly cheap.

As for Saturday Roadshow, the difference between that and House Party is that the Roadshow was, I think, pre-recorded and also a much smaller show, whereas House Party was live and on a much bigger scale. It also got substantially more promotion as well, Saturday Roadshow would be around 6pm and never really got much in the way of publicity. So it was a pretty big deal, I think, the House Party. Course, that clip of the Late Late with the Liverpool team was actually from the last ever episode. Think most of the other clips in the show would have come from that as well, so well done whoever managed to get that out of the archives.

Just to add, Paul Jackson was on point with his summary of Edmonds' attitude towards the end of the House Party. Somewhere I have a VHS with a dress rehearsal of the show towards the end of its run and he was unbelievably fed up and obstructive.