Noel's House Party

Why is it ironic?
TVRecordings.com states: "For the vast majority of our shows audience members have to be aged 16 and over." That's today, twenty odd years on from NHP.
You're thinking of admission to the audience, as opposed to being a participant in the insert. If there was a minimum age for appearing on TV at all there would be no demand for child actors or anybody on TV under the age of 18.

I'm sure I remember reading somewhere that on The Big Breakfast, Johnny Vaughan had open talkback, meaning he could hear everything, whereas Liza Tarbuck insisted on switched talkback, whereby the editor would have to press a button to speak to her.

It's safe to say that Holly and Phil are on open talkback

No. I was merely musing aloud that for a insert which featured children (mostly) of primary school age, you needed to be well over that age to be allowed in.

I have seen tickets for shows where there are younger children taking part, and similar aged children are invited as long as they are with a parent/guardian.
It's that extra caviat that I would have expected to see on the ticket stub for WTIGYH.

Possibly because TV recordings can be long drawn out affairs and you don't want bored, grumpy kids interrupting things

Stuff like that makes me wish Fern would come back. I miss when they genuinely crippled each other with laughter. When Holly's there it feels forced. But that's another topic for another thread.

The cellar set for WTIGYH was quite a big size actually. It's an obvious bit to prerecord too thinking about it as it gets around all sorts of issues about having really young children on live TV! Although I'm quite impressed they managed to match up Noel's outfits for a whole series up to 6 months in advance.

Part 3 is interesting as one of of the stars of NTV featured is Chris Evans, and includes a few photo of him (one of which arguably comes with a health warning)...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MU6xmQuSbUA

I'd have thought they'd have done several recording sessions throughout the series.

Famous for the story which is mostly urban myth about the NTV cameras catching him having a private moment on the sofa beforehand.

The story I think is based on a comment by his then wife Carol Mcgiffin on their next show on GLR. She said something along the lines of the crew phoned her to say they were switching the cameras on and her reply was 'you can't turn them on yet - he's watching Baywatch!'

This is going off the point a bit but in the seventies, when Frank Bough did both Grandstand and Nationwide, he had open talkback on Grandstand and switched talkback on Nationwide. On his first night on Nationwide he was supposed to interview someone down the line and after introducing them he turned to the monitor and saw nothing, and only then did the talkback come on and say "Sorry Frank, they're not there yet". And after the show, he complained loudly and said if he'd had open talkback he would have known they weren't there and covered it a bit better, saying it wasn't that he looked stupid, but the programme looked unprofessional, and he wanted open talkback from now on.

To go back to the House Party, although when the lottery arrived in 1994 it was stuck at 7pm, the first few series shuffled around a lot (I remember for a bit they used to put "NEXT WEEK - 6.30pm" or whatever in the credits) and there was one week where apparently Noel and the floor manager couldn't agree on when the programme was actually supposed to start and had a long argument, and in the end they actually had to go and look in the Radio Times to prove it one way or the other.

I think BBC would be smarter if there could bring back NHP format back to our screens and also have the lotto draws included. Hopeful then there get rid of the nasty lotto gameshows and try a proper gameshow format

Surely you don't get rid of "nasty lotto gameshows" by making another Lotto gameshow?