Those were all block recorded, so its perhaps hardly surprising it was the same audience (although you often had the other running joke, so much better than last year's audience at the start of a series). Bruce said years later they could knock the gameshows out pretty quickly and it would only take two weeks a series, but while it was good steady work (and we all loved him), I believe he later regretted being pigeon-holed as it were.
Yes, Brucie said he found the Gen Game was becoming a bit of a slog and on ITV he was given the "luxury", as he put it, of a fixed-format show where everything ran like clockwork and he would get the same amount of exposure for much less work. But I think he was disappointed that ITV didn't seem particularly interested in giving him anything else to do with all this spare time he had.
I know Brucie's last series of the Gen Game in 1994 didn't run entirely smoothly, as well as the week when he was ill and Jim Davidson stood in, there was also one week which was a compilation, with new links from Brucie, and I remember reading in the papers at the time that was a very last minute replacement for a proper episode which Brucie was too ill to do, and they were getting a bit concerned that he was getting so old and ill and on the brink of retirement. Of course, over a decade later he was working harder than ever.
I am pleased that when Brucie died, it was when he was as famous and popular as he'd ever been, and he was doing exactly what he loved to do on TV. He really went out on a high.
Wouldn't be suprised if it was screened alongside the filming of another episode. Would seem a lot of effort to get the cast and crew in just to perform that opening scene and a disapointment for the audience to only see that one scene actually performed and the rest on a screen.
I know in the 70s there's an episode of Dad's Army which was nearly all on location apart from one brief scene, and that's what they did.
Yeah, there's an episode of series 2 of Python which is pretty much entirely made up of sketches filmed on location, and the paperwork revealed that the brief studio sequences were recorded in the same session as another episode, it's a fairly standard procedure to make the most of studio time. Similarly the sketches for Christmas Night with the Stars would always be filmed alongside another episode.
8 shows a day sounds gruelling, I think over here the maximum they film in a day for a gameshow is 4-5 a day.
In the One Day In The Life Of Television book from 1988, Richard Whiteley says they recorded seven episodes of Countdown that day, and they could have done more, but they ran out of contestants. He then went on to present that night's Calendar.
In his autobiography, Cheggers talks about filming Sky Star Search, the talent show that was famous for the low quality of its acts (as it was on five days a week, so pretty much anyone who wanted to get on got on), saying that they recorded it at LWT and they broke the record for the most television produced from that studio in a day, they recorded all five hour-long programmes for the week in a single session. Cheggers lavishes praise on the crew, and he says he prided himself on never having to stop the recording, they'd do it as-live and Cheggers would ad-lib or come up with bits of business to cover scene changes so they didn't have to stop. Obviously, such high intensity production didn't do much to showcase the "talent". That wasn't with an audience, mind, might have been a bit too much if it was.
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