Noel on Strike

That BT engineer clip is very odd indeed and clearly not even the production team were responsible given how they are telling him to hang up.

There's a great clip here of Noel ringing the wrong person for Grab a Grand who it turns out is watching Baywatch on ITV! (33.33 if it doesn't start in the right place).



Always surprised me for the first 5 series that Noel actually dialled the Grab a Grand numbers live, which inevitably often went wrong. They went with 6 pre-selected lines for Cash For Questions in series 6.

I think that's why he dialled them live, when something goes wrong it's great TV. The same thing happened on an episode of Late Late Breakfast, but I don't think that is online

On the first episode of Going Live Phillip Schofield spectacularly fails to do a phone out, not even a wrong number just nothing at all. He's similar to Noel in that he can make light of it and make it entertaining

There's a clip from Live and Kicking with Jamie Theakston and Mr Blobby where Jamie does the same- calls out but keeps reaching the wrong number- including the previous week's contestant.

RE that NHP clip - why is there a BASIC / DOS prompt on the screen behind the Gunge Tank vote results, and what does it say?

Which clip and how soon in can you see it?

Buster's post, and literally a couple of minutes after the wrong number incident.

Going by the style of that graphic it looks like its either coming from an Archimedes or an Amiga

Probably an Acorn Archimedes. The BBC used them quite a lot behind-the-scenes (just as they did BBC Micros before them). The Mastermind score graphics were done by an Archimedes in the latter part of the OB era. They used one of the RGB outputs as a key - so it was nicely anti-aliased (as they didn't need full RGB colour)

The BBC OB RF camera tally and colour balance system also ran on Archimedes computers.

Doctor Who used BBC Micros and then Archimedes for in-vision screens (and in Silver Nemesis you actually see an Archimedes in shot generating the landing position for the Cybermen...)

In the last series of the Late Late, of which the penultimate episode is on YouTube, there was actually a regular feature where Noel would just dial a number at random in the hope that they'd be watching and give out the password he mentioned, with the prize rolling over every week until someone finally did it.

There was a great bit in Don't Forget Your Toothbrush where Evans phoned up the viewer at home when the couple in the studio didn't win the holiday, and they were watching The Fly on ITV instead. But that was quite big news, that premiere.

Aha, that was what I was thinking of. That is such a risky thing to do on air, but right up Noel's street. You probably couldn't do that now

Toothbrush is one of the great but mostly forgotten Saturday night shows. Everyone says how Takeaway is based on NHP, but it is much more similar in format to Toothbrush.

The scale of some of the set ups was incredible, bringing the contents of entire rooms of peoples houses into the studio for a game for example. And bizarre stuff like sending audience members down the road to a chippy where they got their shoes deep-fried in batter.

My favourite game was where they asked everyone to flash their house lights and then cut to a camera on a crane overlooking a residential area to see who was flashing them. They would then zoom in on a house and get them to play a game involving throwing things out of windows. A great idea and in a similar way to NTV, a viewer was suddenly taking part in the programme

Yes, a great item, Will McDonald said they introduced it as a way to prove to the audience that they were live - and certainly it always used to be incredibly exciting to see it, you used to get entire streets joining in. Such a great series - the episode where the entire audience win a holiday is on YouTube and it was absolutely phenomenal at the time. One member of the audience is so overwhelmed she runs on stage to kiss Evans.

Of course that, and many other items, were then rehashed for Red Alert, the series Ginger made for BBC1, but it was a complete disaster and it all totally flopped. I was thinking about that series the other day, because we know Rob Beckett is now moving from the stand-up circuit to primetime BBC1, but twenty years ago it was Terry Alderton doing the same kind of thing, as he had been on the circuit and done the panel shows and so on, and he was considered to have a lot of mainstream potential, so he was then picked to co-host Red Alert which was a massive break for him. Unfortunately for Alderton the show was very bad - not his fault, but it was very badly produced which didn't give him many opportunities to shine - and it set his career back a bit, alas.

Happily he's since reinvented himself and now he's one of the most successful acts on the circuit doing very interesting and creative things, so well done to him.

The episode they gave away the holiday to everyone came from Teddington rather than the South Bank, I never worked out if that was just a studio booking issue or whether they had more space for the coaches

Incidently just looking at a few YouTube clips of Toothbrush and I noticed this: