ON THE ROPES (3)

But that's because it was a different sort of programme by then anyway wasn't it?

606 wasn't and I used to be on Wednesday night. 606 never was. I left 606……..I did it for nearly two years and then left it because I'd been offered a fortune to go to television and do loads of television programmes and did I want to do them and work on Saturday? No! Again it's this disclaiming of something you do best. Yes it happens because I can always go back and do that which I can. So do you want to do Game shows mate? Yeah, why not or do you want to…..? I used to do seven game shows a day in Scotland. We used to do Win, Lose or Draw in Scotland….that was actually a very good show, but the rest of them didn't turn out like that. Went off did three years of telly and in the meantime, was fitting in all this stuff. You wouldn't believe the amount of work I did in that four years….probably scared by that bailiff's face still.

So what went wrong, because here you are at one stage doing absolutely everything, some of which is not exactly mainstream broadcasting?

You see I suggest, I think the problem…….I suggest very populist programmes. Big ol' Danny Baker off the Daz adverts, you know the cockney fella and yet I'm not that….hopefully there's one or two pointers, it's not quite core love or duck stuff and that was always the problem. I don't mind doing it, I'm not doing that, but the thing is they say, "Marry up the game shows, but I remember doing the , God be praised show, Pets Win Prizes, which I loved and could have been a big hit, but as I saw a big dumb show called Pets Win Prizes was to open it up every week, going up to the camera and saying "It's your license fee at work, welcome to the most entertaining half-hour of your life!". Then could you just say, "It's Pets Win Prizes …." And all literative games, and there was a game Pavarotti Pooches you know and I said, "No, call it I guarantee my dog will sing". Hit it head on, defy people to say this you know…..It's no great mind game, but I think if you're going to do a show called Pets Win Prizes look in the camera and say "Yeah, yeah.." and it went very well, but the Beeb were very unhappy with it because they'd rather I was less mmm….I don't know if it was post-modern or just of a nuisance, but I could not agree with them on stuff like that and neither could the public, so I fell between two stools. Here you've got someone who looks like a baggy-pants style, latter-day Monty Modlan, who likes to play around with the format. Now I'm not saying who's right and who's wrong there…..plainly I was wrong 'cause the shows didn't do any good, but I've never been very good at towing a straight line, always a little kink in it is always the way I……..

But more than a little kink in some respects wouldn't you agree?

Oh, plain old-fashioned lousy in many respects

No, no, I wasn't going to get into the quality or otherwise of the programmes, that's entirely subjective.

I think the jury have returned on that.

Well, in some cases they gave it a big thumbs down, in other cases they didn't. In your early days.

The natural thing is to be defensive, but the fact is the shows did neither better nor worse than , I don't know, I suspect Frank Skinner's Show did, but at the time I was everywhere and believe me I was as sick of the sound of my own voice, if you can imagine such a thing as everyone else; but it happens and it's not what you are but what you do. I'd probably make exactly the same mistakes again, but as long as you know you can fall back on something which has a grain of quality in it, which is some of the stuff I do, that's all right.

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