Take this with a bit of caution but The Mirror is reporting that Chris Evans is in talks to revive Don’t Forget Your Toothbrush either for Channel 4 or 5 promising Beyonce and the biggest cash giveaway ever seen on British television.
We loved Toothbrush in the 90s, it probably still stands as the height of the late ‘n’ loud entertainment pile, something it basically invented. And really it’s influenced so much television, particularly Friday and Saturday night entertainment, since.
But Toothbrush was almost 25-years ago. Are the kids going to be able to take a 51-year-old Radio 2 presenter (and one with some baggage) doing this sort of thing very seriously? He’d probably do it very well and I’d tune in to find out but…
His Radio 2 Breakfast Show draws a large audience but it’s aimed at people right at the top end of the demographic. The TFI Friday one-off did very well as a bit of nostalgia – better than The Crystal Maze one-off even, but the series that followed tanked rather.
In other news it sounds like series five of Taskmaster will be starting in September.
I wouldn’t say the TFI Friday series tanked it floated along, and if it hadn’t been for the Top Gear mistake I think they’d have done another one.
I don’t really remember Don’t Forget Your Toothbrush apart from the fact it was a thing but never really was old enough to appriciate it.
As come backs go if it does come, it must be some kind of record for something to do come back when the original was so short, I’m sure others can provide some examples.
If you gave something a series on the basis of a one-off that got over 4m, and you put it on as the centerpiece on Friday nights, and it consolidates to well under 1.5m, yes it tanked.
I fear TCM will go in the same direction albeit a bit slower.
A wonderful show, Toothbrush, as you say highly influential as well. I think the reason those who weren’t around at the time might find it a bit less phenomenal is because so much of it has been seen since in later shows, but Toothbrush did it all first. And that episode up there is the show at its absolute pinnacle, at the time this felt like the most amazing hour of television ever made. I especially love the bit where one member of the audience is so overwhelmed she runs on stage to kiss him. And the bit at the end where they’re all in Wallace Arnold coaches is fantastic as well, I just could not believe it at the time. It’s up there with Going Live On A Cross-Channel Ferry as a TV show that absolutely blew me away with its logistical brilliance.
I dunno if Toothbrush was ever aimed at the kids, though, I mean I was all over it as a teenager because I thought Evans was the best person at the time, but it was surely aimed at a much older audience – certainly given the guests they booked, and the fact it was originally shown at 10pm. It was a thirtysomething affair, I always felt (and that made me feel quite cool watching it).
As we can see, that one is from Teddington and that’s because, of course, the whole series was delayed by four weeks because the pilot was famously a disaster and it wasn’t ready, so they couldn’t use LWT for the last few shows. For one of those weeks they showed the final pilot, which was a bit unusual. I remember the one difference with that and the proper show was that the viewers at home joined in by all phoning a number that went directly to a phone on set, which presumably would have been totally unworkable on an actual show.
Would love to see again also the episodes where the viewer at home didn’t know he’d won because he was watching The Fly on ITV, and also one in the second series where they massively overran and had to do Light Your Lemon in about two minutes flat, I remember they finished it with about ten seconds to go. Love that kind of thing.
As I always say, I vividly remember reading that the BBC had bought the rights to Toothbrush after it ended and were going to revive it themselves – this was just a year or two later – with Ray Cokes as host. I wonder whatever happened to that. Of course, we had two virtual Toothbrush revivals, including Red Alert which was a disaster. That was basically a whole series of this EuroDisney episode but they could never make it as good as it was here. And there was Last Chance Lottery which was THE most derivate programme ever made, the most blatant attempt to replicate the success of Toothbrush, to the extent I’m surprised Evans didn’t sue. That came right at the end of Michael Grade’s spell in charge at C4 and I remember a lot of people citing that as evidence he’d been there too long and the channel was running out of ideas and getting too mainstream.
So, yeah, Toothbrush, bring it on. For one show, anyway.
I’m using The Kids in the vernacular there. I would have been 13-14 at the time and similarly loved Chris Evans at the time.
I think it’s desperately sad that digital delay means we can never really have the throw things out your windows game again.
Light Your Lemon was doing the whole “Are you SURE that’s your final answer?” thing years before Millionaire.
Was the whole of the show broadcast live? I get the impression that it might have been recorded and broadcast as if live, with only the final segment being truly live in case of viewer interaction. (Compare with Talking Telephone Numbers, which would have got away with it flawlessly if it hadn’t been for those meddling people in the control booth.)
If the whole thing was live, then getting the whole of the audience out of their seats and into the coaches over the course of a commercial break is even more impressive. OK, perhaps only the first coach-load had to be in the coach just over the commercial break, and the second coachload onwards had a little more time, but that still takes some serious co-ordination.
Skeptically, consider the possibility that that audience member had been briefed to go on-stage and kiss Chris at the appropriate moment in advance, though possibly not being told the precise reason why; one would have thought that security would be ready to step in and tackle anyone who got out of the audience and showed any signs of making for the host on a truly live show…
That’s actually a great question knowing what we know now.
Flash Your Living Room Lights had to be live and that would have been around the middle of the show of DFYT2. What I would suggest is DFYT doesn’t have many obvious cutaways they could drop things in.
My favourite other Toothbrush memory: when they did the Stingray (?) drum beats alternating between two different shots of Chris wearing different jackets. At a guess, were they live for the start and end of the sequence, have the middle part as a pre-record and have Chris change jacket while they played the pre-record rather than the live show?
The drumbeats were from ‘Joe 90’ – a nod to the black thick rimmed glasses.
I remember listening to his Radio One breakfast show one morning, where the previous night before, a show had done (it may have been Top Of The Pops) had done a simliar rapid picture cut in time to the music beat – a track he then played on the breakfast show the following morning.
Back annoucing it, he said it was a great live perfomance on ToTP the previous evening, mentioned the camera cut sequence, and then something along the lines of ‘that was brave doing it live, two people with the fingers on the vision mixer desk to pull that off. Not something we’d dream of doing on Toothbrush’
So, you may be right – first and last turn of the head live, the rest played off tape.
I remember reading that the flashy lights game was only invented because they wanted to prove the show was live. I’m pretty sure the whole show was live, at least most weeks, because as I say there was one episode where they spectacularly overran and had to dart through Light Your Lemon. Also, I don’t recall many opportunities for pre-recording any of it. I’m sure at that point Evans had no fear of doing the whole thing live.
Also, there’s a bit on SOTCAA which said that one week he went up to a member of the audience, asked them about their mum and was told she was dead, and then he realised he’d gone to the wrong seat, and that was cut out for the repeat.
I think the kissing thing is 100% genuine. They were simpler times (the lotto invaders got nearer the set and that was over a decade later in a far more security-conscious show) and if it was staged it would have looked much more artificial I’m sure.
I still find it mindblowing after reading Evans’ autobiography that loads of the Big Breakfast was pre-recorded.
Indeed, including almost all of The Crunch – but as he mentions, Zig and Zag still managed to convince Planet 24 to rent an incredibly swanky flat for them despite the fact they’d only be there for one day every fortnight. Nowadays I think it would probably be quite obvious, but they were more innocent times.
http://www.chortle.co.uk/news/2017/07/07/36999/jason_byrne_to_host_new_gameshow
Jason Byrne will host ‘Don’t Say It, Bring It’ for Dave.
I’ve always liked these types of game shows, there’s something refreshing about them for some reason.
We’ve had something like this in Germany, but imho it tanked. The host was terrible and nobody seemed to like it. Tthe ratings didn’t really matter because it was a cheap filler for a tiny digital public broadcaster (einsplus), so they did oneseason with twenty episodes and played it on repeat.
I think on Dave with a good host it could be very entertaining though!
Wowsers, this has been knocking around for *years*.
My gut is not doing cartwheels over it, vox pop style shows have to work incredibly hard to avoid coming across a bit naff – the only one that really worked is Billy On The Street and that’s increasingly pre-written.
Edit: Actually Cash Cab is a fair shout as well.
Also I think quite interesting is that in the original format you were given questions and the idea was you literally found and brought the item – hence the show’s title, as written they seemed to have pitched this more as a scavenger hunt.
Freddie Flintoff’s hosting water park based show Cannonball:
http://www.tvtonight.com.au/2017/07/freddie-flintoff-hosting-cannonball-uk.html
And here’s the ITV press release. Also features Radzi from Blue Peter!
http://www.itv.com/presscentre/press-releases/freddie-flintoff-host-itvs-brand-new-gameshow-cannonball
It basically hasn’t done very well anywhere it’s been on but Potato are behind this so who knows if they can pull anything out of the bag.