SM:TV - Post(bag) Ant, Dec and Cat

MoM really was starting to get into its stride towards the end of 2005 too, then they did the budget cut and turned it into the awful Saturday Showdown. In particular getting rid of Mr Lee and The Doctor who were probably the most popular parts on MoM. Then a few months later the junk food ad ban came in and they decided cookery was better (and the last few episodes only went out on the CITV channel).

A couple of things I remember from Saturday Showdown, there was that game in the attic that was puportedly a phone in game- but if you paid attention they never gave out any information on how to enter, and one of the Hyenas, can't remember which, only appeared during that segment and nowhere else on many weeks, which makes it quite obvious the segment was pre-recorded, and most likely the "contestents" were friends and family of the crew.

Another thing I remember was a couple of weeks where Stephen was away they had Jack Osbourne who was meant to present with Holly both weeks, but at the end of the first show he said he wouldn't be coming back (clearly he hated it), and indeed he didn't.

Might be faulty memory but I think Make Dick Sick made it into the first few episodes of Series 3 and then disappeared.

Raja was the name of the kid.

When was this brought in?

That’s amazing. He sounds like a nice person, doesn’t he? What was he expecting?


When the CITV Channel launched they had a spinoff called Saturday Showdown Extra. I watched the first edition (I think it was the first one anyway) and they had a problem with the sound, so they had to go to an ad break while they fixed it (and pretended as a joke it was still broken when they came back)

They did show him up by showing the clip of him saying he wouldn't be back at the start of the following week's show.

Yeah, it was a regular feature in the first BBC1 series, in both Dick and Dom variations. They used to swap around the features quite a lot in those days, and there were plenty of messy and disgusting games in the BBC1 era. There was a great bit in 2004/05 (the BEST series) where a viewer on the phone would sneeze over all the presenters, I remember the first time they did it they didn't even bother introducing it or talking to the caller, it just happened, and after it Dick said "That wasn't even a game!".

One of the best things about the Bunaglow was how quick they were to introduce new games and abandon ones that weren't working. It was such a freewheeling show. That picture of the Ministry of Mayhem team reminds me that I always used to find the Doctor a bit unsettling, I think a lot of the performances by the characters were a bit too realistic and a bit too unsettling to be funny. Whereas on Dick and Dom, even the smallest child knew all the characters were either Dave Chapman, Melvin Odoom and Ian Kirkby in a wig and they never pretended otherwise.

The best Bungalow game was Spot The Difference where they would bring in two tableau (as they always referred to them) and the Bungalowheads had to, well, spot the differences. The tableau would be completely different - like a man and a gas oven - and the kids would spot about two differences. Brilliantly stupid stuff like that. They had ideas coming out of their ears.



Indeed, it didn't happen very often but occasionally there would be a kid who would play up a bit. Raja was a really horrible kid who wouldn't play any of the games properly and just ran about and got in the way, and not in a funny way but a really annoying and tiresome fashion, and eventually they had to remove him during a cartoon and banish him to the cage for the rest of the show. But when they did the compilations a few years back they got him back on, when he was about sixteen, and he seemed really nice and was clearly terribly embarrassed by how awful he was. Usually they vetted the kids really well but the odd one would act up.

There was a really bad thread the other day about how TV has changed, but these recent memories also show that they wouldn’t get away with half of this stuff today. There would be outrage about items like ‘make Dom vom’, locking kids in cages, the very concept of Ram Ray, and every adult joke that used to go over kids heads would be reported on with outrage.

Got even worse than that:



this channel has a good number of clips: https://www.youtube.com/user/mrwam54/videos

Here's a lovely moment...

I don't see 'Saturday Mash Up' getting away with that now.

True but Hacker does a lot of references for the grown ups to get

Meanwhile on the BBC, it wasn't all clean fun even if it wasn't intended

Ahh, the sadly short lived Leicester Square MTV studio. Briefly a Nickelodeon store, and now a Turkish bakery.