A question about Swap Shop...

And for the some of the missing info in 1979 for Borders, grampain and TT you can see that here: http://www.tiswasonline.com/forums/viewtopic.php?f=1&t=927&p=16873#p16873

Will be hopeful added to that broad soon, saying that IF Anyone does have 1979 info about listing for Granada, HTV, Yorkshire and anglia it would be hopeful to plug in those gaps

This topic has been moved from Requests

I'm pretty sure that at the start Tiswas was just a series of links between programmes rather than programme itself. The name 'Tiswas' wasn't used from the start either

You may be right though.

I'm sure I read online somewhere, that at some point at least one region(LWT?) delayed transmission.

(Whether it was inter-company politics, I can't remember for sure, but don't forget when LWT started, some regions dropped their shows, probably for ratings reasons.

I believe there was a quote by Lew Grade about hating David Frost. I gather not all his shows were transmitted by ATV.

If this is the case, it seems reasonable that LWT delayed the 'Shot', maybe in retaliation?

Did the 'Shot' keep the same live format throughout it's run?)

It wasn't a case of 'hating' Frost, it was more due to the attitude of the new boys at LWT to the old guard of ITV. They were promising an upmarket schedule of programmes and were quite scathing about the showbiz fare served up by the likes of ATV and Granada, long before they came on air.

Other stations did drop at least one of the 3 Frost shows a week, IIRC ATV might have dropped 2 of the 3

Does anyone know which episodes was drop? also is it true Frost was also doing 3 live show a week in the us?

Yes, there was no way it could have been recorded, and I don't think it would work today with digital delays.

Bob Monkhouse used to tell a story about a contestant who tried to play The Golden Shot from a phone box by looking through the window of Rumbelows.

Let me guess, the caller missed, and hit Rumbelows window!

Not quite the same thing, but that didn't stop Richard and Judy having a crack at the live visual phone-in, and it was often amusing to watch Richard stare in silent frustration down the lens while he waited for Ethel in Droitwich to say what she saw.

David

IIRC they tried it during the Ant and Dec Gameshow Marathon strand, and it didn't work.

Well, Yes and No!

Originally Peter Tomlinson (who I interviewed for TiswasOnline and the ATV documentary that we're doing) was doing continuity in ATV Midlands at the weekends in the early 1970s. To cut a long story short, he had some time to fill between cartoons and episodes of Tarzan so he had the idea of running some small competitions and the response was unexpectedly large. They carried on with this idea over a few weeks and realised that if organised properly it had great potential. This was during the middle of 1973. I believe, from Peter, that he may have included the odd phone call within this sequence (unsurprisingly there were no examples of this period ever recorded).

When the decision was taken to make the Saturday Morning sequence into a 'stand alone' programme, Peter Harris (also extensively interviewed for our project!) was assigned to the project as Producer. Having next to no budget, they made use of Studio 3 at ATV in Birmingham, grabbed a desk and a few chairs from one of the offices (sometimes making use of parts of the ATV Today set if it was still standing in the studio) and from Jan 1974 launched it as a 'stand alone' programme billed as "Today Is Saturday or the Tis-was Show" (the title sequence showed both a "Today Is Saturday" caption and a chunky lettered "Tiswas" logo").

The show grew organically from then on, but never really had much of a budget to speak of until the so-called 'classic' period of 1979-80 onwards.

I guess you could compare it to the way that Philip Schofield's original Children's BBC links grew directly into "But First This" during the school holidays.

It was never a major 'phone-in' type of show, but it did do it before Swap Shop!

I've just looked at that chart. The closest Tiswas ever got to becoming networked was 5 Sep 1981 to 26 Dec 1981, during which time the only ITV region not showing it was Channel TV.