The hit revival of Anything Goes had its final date in Bristol on Saturday, but hundreds opted instead for a more homegrown kind of euphoria: a roistering homage to Tiswas, the Saturday morning children’s programme that ran from 1974 to 1982, where anything went.
The dutiful Reithian notion that kids’s TV should be “improving”, exemplified on the BBC by Blue Peter, was ground-breakingly binned by the ITV studio show – the title of which stood for Today Is Saturday: Watch and Smile. Defined by its downpours of flung gunge and pelting frenzy of custard-pies, it was a national phenomenon by the time it concluded, 40 years ago this month. Pre health and safety, pop stars galore proved willing and eager to face its drenching humiliations.
Presiding over the series’ mayhem, and making his name as a presenter in the process, was Chris Tarrant. He was, duly, the first to be invited on stage at yesterday’s reunion, wearing a “Compost Corner” T-shirt, which caused mass regression in the audience. Some couldn’t resist calling out the titular phrase of Tiswas’s pseudo-gardening section at every turn, to be met with Tarrant’s weary smiles.
Still, Tiswas was a decisive turning point in Tarrant’s career; he happily swapped safely respectable news reporting for the risky ephemera of larking about on camera – “bus-crashes or buckets” as he put it. He saw no competition, either, in the Beeb’s rival Multi-Coloured Swap Shop, hosted by Noel Edmonds, with what Tarrant called “his division four footballer’s haircut”.
Tarrant was the “big name” of the reunion but he was upstaged in the glamour stakes by an impossibly youthful looking Sally James – who divulged irksome incidents of infantility on set, involving her being sploshed out of the blue, one of the hazards of the job.
Completing the main line-up – the “four bucketeers” – were comedian Bob Carolgees, 73, who treated us to a rare, putatively final sighting of his puppet sidekick Spit the Dog, and John Gorman, 86, who oversaw a reprise of the notorious “water diagram” skit, each round accompanied by showering the front rows with water. Tiswas-istas were further delighted by the appearance of Matthew Butler, who sang Bright Eyes in a rabbit costume, as he had done on the show as a kid, and the caped “Phantom Flan Flinger”.
Aside from recorded comments from sometime Tiswas guest Michael Palin – “Those were the days when you could do anything” – the show’s cultural impact wasn’t much probed, although it was an influential bridge between Python, old-school light ents and alternative comedy. Yet the fact that it remains warmly remembered attests to its legacy. Yes, you could watch most of the clips on YouTube, but this was a misty-eyed collective nostalgia trip; a la recherche du gunge perdu.
