TISWAS

Hi, I'm the webmaster and a researcher at TiswasOnline, and what you're saying about us is simply not true.

Having ploughed through literally thousands of TV listings pages to put together a definitive Tiswas edition guide - which is still not finished - we're doing all we can to be as accurate as possible.

Nowhere on the site have we said "Tiswas was shown everywhere by 1979", we've never said that.

If anything, the later half of 1981 is when Tiswas (series 8 - the final series) would have been shown "everywhere" - well, except for Channel Television, which never aired it at all. That marked the point when Tiswas was at its most widespread. 1982 brought a few new regions in, such as TSW and TVS who didn't show Tiswas (although TVS relented after six weeks).

I'm still trawling through information, composing an online TV listings guide for EVERY SINGLE SATURDAY MORNING schedule on EVERY ITV REGION between Jan 1974 (when Tiswas began) to April 1982 (when Tiswas finished). We even include the Saturday mornings when Tiswas was off-air.

Of course, that job is still not yet complete. We've filled the database with a lot of stuff, and I'm personally interested in the regional spread of the show.

HTV were the first (outside of ATV Land) to show Tiswas, albeit partially, in a simulcast segment. Anglia and Border were the first non-ATV regions to show Tiswas fully, although Anglia would go on to drop Tiswas, and then pick it up again (more than once, sadly).

It's taken around two years to get the job 75% done, which is where we are now. I'm even thinking of adding on BBC1 listings as well, just for the hell of it.

If you'd like to see some of the efforts in beta form, read the TiswasOnline thread Pain Of Regional Variations here...
http://www.tiswasonline.com/forums/viewtopic.php?t=927

There's a fairly good (but not recently updated) list
here

Well, nearly all. A few have gone walkies from Birmingham Central Library. But TV Times as a source is sometimes unreliable and inaccurate, thankfully Dave Clark put us straight, and the Times Digital Archive is filling in lots of gaps, region-wise.



Oh, that's EVERY show - Dave's seen them all. But not detailed every item though. Not that I'm ungrateful!



As viewable on our site!

The Times in 1981 erroneously listed it as "Watch It!" (the name of the predatng-CITV kids' strand that ATV developed for the network), and claimed it was the new name for Tiswas. It was soon fixed the following week.

Tyne Tees showed at least 11 of those shows. And produced three of them. Tyne Tees also made its own Saturday morning show (Lynn's Look-In) during Tiswas' peak, except for the final series - the only one that Tyne Tees (and Ulster) broadcast. Meaning no Geordie (or Ulsterman) ever got to see Chris Tarrant/Lenny Henry/John Gorman on Tiswas. They had the Gordon Astley/Den Hegarty/Fogwell Flax hosted shows.

Top Banana, hosted by Aussie Mike Brosnan.

It was nothing like Southern's Saturday Banana. I've got a DVD of a Saturday Banana recording, and it's really dull to watch. No commercial breaks in it either, which says something about the show!

I remember watching it back in the day, as Anglia opted for it over Tiswas (the fools), but boy, it really is almost as dull and boring as Sw*p Sh*p.

What about the ones before Tiswas? It's a popular misconception that "Tiswas was the first Saturday morning show" (still, at least it's more accurate than attributing it the atrocity that is Sw*p Sh*p).

There's LWT's Saturday Scene which began in December 1973, exactly one week before Tiswas started. It was hosted by an unknown Sally James for a few years, then she took up a job offer by ATV in 1977 to co-host Tiswas - meaning LWT had to come up with a new Saturday morning show - Our Show.

And HTV's Orbit pre-dates even Saturday Scene. In fact, HTV did some kind of Saturday morning children's show output prior to that.



It was brilliant in the It's Torture days. Recently, a group of people in India burned effigies of a MotorMouth presenter and it was screened on the news here. (Erm, that means to say, Tony Gregory's a producer of Big Brother.)



Ah, Ministry Of Mayhem. The poor man's SM:TV. Produced by ex-BBC stalwart Chris Bellinger, who had worked on Sw*p Sh*p, Saturday SuperStore, Going Live and Live And Kicking. He also was a consultant on It Started With The Inaccuracy Of Attributing Sw*p Sh*p As The First Saturday Morning Show.



A Tesco Value Ministry Of Mayhem, when ITV thought it could blatantly copy BBC's Saturday morning output, by having a "flat" owned by the two presenters, in no way similar to a long-established (and vastly superior) BBC show featuring a "bungalow" owned by the two presenters.

Actually, it was down to budget cuts that Ministry Of Mayhem was re-formatted and rebranded as Holly And Stephen's Saturday Showdown, which was set in motion by the fears of a junk food ad ban. MoM used to take up a large part of CITV budget, so they slashed it in 2006, resulting in one of the most unatmospheric Saturday morning shows of all time. The six month contracts for the staff weren't renewed by July, as ITV wanted to try the really-original-and-not-copying-the-BBC idea of having Anthony Worrall-Tosspot fronting a cookery show on a Saturday morning.

Saturday Cooks (or, more accurately, Saturday Cocks) actually sank lower in the ratings than the previous kids' fare. In fact, not only were both BBC1 (cookery) and 2 (kids) beating it, Channel Four were there, as most editions clocked in around the same ratings as Five. It was culled recently in favour of children's programmes again. Imported cartoons though, nothing creative or original, I'm afraid. Typical modern-day ITV mentality.



TX
TSW's Saturday Show (aka Freeze Frame)
Mashed



That was Tricky. Absolutely and completely the worst Saturday Morning Show of all time. Even BBC2's The Pod and ITV's Saturday Showdown outperformed this. I'm quoted for my opinion about Tricky on the SatKids website.

I'm pretty sure Mashed was the show before SM:TV came along and revived ITV's Saturday morning fortunes.

Cat Deeley, Ant & Dec, Lenny Henry, Chris Tarrant... so why did ITV cull proper Saturday mornings last year? Tsk...

so who killed of most of the Saturday morning cinemas in the local area?

chirs T say in ATV area most where shut within a year of them starting, what was it link in the rest of the UK?

I'm still trawling through the listings for Tyne Tees - very very tricky to do. Their Saturday mornings were filled with an assortment of cartoons, drama series and other odd stuff, just like many regions - but Tyne Tees liked to put them on at different times nearly every week, making it a total pain for me to transcribe. (It's nice to cut-and-paste where possible).



Eh? If anything, we're contributing to that. We're in contact with the producer, and we're providing a fair bit of research to those helping out on the show. There's a fair few things going on that we can't publicly talk about at the moment. We don't know much of how it will turn out, but we're proud of what we've done for the show so far.

Yeah, one of Chris' friends was in the cinema business, that's how he learnt about the Tiswas effect.



The idea of proper dedicated children's entertainment on a Saturday morning was not fully realised by ATV until announcer Peter Tomlinson decided to have a viewers' competition in his links between cartoons and serials one morning in 1973. Got a sackload of mail. Did another one the next week. Got two sackloads of mail. Did another one the next week... got four sackloads of mail. You can see where this is going.

ATV management got their heads together, and realised there was money in this. Up until that point, NO ITV region had bothered with commercials on a Saturday morning because the ratings were so low. Within a while, ATV could justify chasing advertisers. And thus, Tiswas was born.

So, Saturday morning cinemas... that term sounds like it's almost a building set up just for that purpose! Cinemas have been dying out gradually anyway. Saturday matinees were a good revenue stream, but not totally essential.

You have to factor in the success of Sw*p Sh*p from October 1976 onwards. That was a national kids' Saturday morning show for the first time. So that rapidly brought about the decline.

Also, don't go thinking Tiswas was the only ITV Saturday morning show of its day. Tiswas never went fully national until late in the day (still excluding Channel though), because other regions were either:
1) trying out their own Saturday morning shows (eg: LWT and Southern)
2) networking other regions' Saturday morning shows (eg: Anglia showing Southern's Saturday Banana)
3) not even aware of Tiswas' success, so carried on with dull boring films and cartoons (eg: Granada)
4) refused to pick up Tiswas because someone in management found it disgusting and too anarchic (eg: Tyne Tees)

John Gorman says that when Tiswas entered LWT's footprint, that's when they got the most complaints!

Peter, does any of your BBC WM contacts have access to Ed Doolan's series 'The Other Side Of''?

The odd ATV/Central/Tiswas person is occasionally interviewed.(Sally, Chris, Lenny & Peter Tomlinson for instance)

This week's should've been Peter Harris(ATV/Central producer), but it was bumped due to a rolling weather service on WM.

I'd come on either Tiswas Online or ATV forums, but I don't think I'd have much else to contribute, plus could I use 'Westy' as a username, because I boycott sites that don't let me use that!

No.You're entitled to your own opinion but it was good.It went through a few bad patches[January-March 2004,whenever they brought Spelling Smackdown back,the terrible relaunch with no titles and whenever they got rid of good things] but March-July 2004 was fantastic.And so were the christmas ones.At least.

I like the 2005 July - dec 2005 shows I thourgh there were the best