Worst to Best
Jokers Wild
Series One

Jokers Wild was a comedy gameshow hosted by Barry Cryer on ITV from 1969-1974. Featuring well-known names including John Cleese, Les Dawson, Clive Dunn, Jon Pertwee, Michael Aspel and Tim Brooke-Taylor, it ran at peaktime in some areas, before eventually being scheduled as a lunchtime show in 1972.


by
THE ANORAK
FEBRUARY
2025


The first series of Jokers Wild was broadcast between July-November 1969, and from the famous names mentioned above, featured just Les Dawson, along with a group of old school comics and some up-and-comers. You can order the Series One DVD Boxset online from Amazon, but in the meantime, please join me as I rank the first series from worst to best...

20 Episode Five

Team Captains: Ted Ray and Charlie Chester. Panellists: Ray Martine, Lennie Bennett, Les Dawson and Paul Andrews.

The basic concept of Jokers Wild is that it's a panel game show hosted by Barry Cryer, where two teams of three comedians try and tell jokes based upon a random subject Barry picks from a stack of oversized playing cards.
     Les Dawson is a regular, appearing in 15 of the episodes from this first run, but the only two constants, other than Barry, are Team Captain Ted Ray and his fellow panellist Ray Martine.
     Not much is going to be discussed about the humour of the show, which may seem counter-intuitive for an article about a comedy gameshow, but the reason is that humour is subjective. But Ted Ray is deceptive. Quite a verbose comedian when telling stories (he rarely does a quick gag), he uses his eloquent nature to tell what might seem very dry, "old school" stories, but uses subtle turns of phrase to deliver really quite risqué material, particularly for the time. Episode Fifteen, for example, sees Ted do a gag about necrophilia for a family audience in 1969, but it seems almost clean in his hands. It's as if words are a Trojan horse for Ted to slyly deliver... well, filth, basically.
     However, while Ted's style may be a little "staid" now, regardless of intent, the real one to watch is Ray Martine. The idea of the show being an old school "boy's club" is torn apart by having a dark-skinned Jewish homosexual as part of the crew, especially one as wilfully disruptive as Ray. There's an interesting article on the British Comedy Guide, explaining what a hot property Ray once was, and how Jokers Wild was towards the end of his career. Today he's largely forgotten, and derided, with his ability to fluff jokes constantly looked down upon by both critics of the show and his fellow panellists. Yet Ray received strong contemporary notices, and his "loose cannon" style can be mesmerising. Sometimes he'll try and take over an entire show, others he'll just be happy to yawn loudly when another comedian's gag is going on too long.
     Camp, waspish and bitchy, he'll often drop into Polari slang and has a regular rivalry with Les Dawson. With another rule of the game being that comedians can interrupt each other with a buzzer and take over the joke if they can guess what it is, Les concocts all manner of contrived reasons to interrupt Ray just to tease him. (Episode Fifteen has Les interrupt Ray telling a joke about Emperor Nero with: "Emperor Nero was the name of our dustman's cart".) Often it's the fun skirmishes between Les and Ray that make a show, or just Ray's open disdain for the whole thing.
     As for those contemporary reviews, then James Towler in The Stage (7th August 1969) stated that the idea of having all the comedians sitting down went against the nature of the role, but that: "the one man to stand out in this, and the two other shows I've seen, is undoubtedly Ray Martine".

19 Episode Ten

Team Captains: Ted Ray and Alfred Marks. Panellists: Ray Martine, Ray Cameron, John Junkin and Dave Allenby.

One of the in-built flaws with a show like Jokers Wild is that you are going to hear some gags more than once throughout the series. While there are some slightly more underhand possible reasons for this (which we'll look at in due course), one reason is that there wasn't "ownership" of jokes the way there is today. Obviously someone must have come up with the gags in the first place, but this wasn't an age of "sets" and "artistic expression", the jokes would just be passed around from comedian to comedian, with no real attempt to claim that it was self-written material.
     One of the biggest repeater of gags in this first series is John Junkin. Now, there's no clear way of knowing which episodes were made first in many instances, with ITV broadcasting this first series in a random order... another thing we'll get to later. So while Bobby Pattinson tells a gag about being punched in the face to cure hiccups in Episode 1 and Junkin tells the same (slightly less violent version) in Episode 11, it's possible the latter episode was taped first.
     But if you're paying attention you'll see Ted Ray do a gag about a bride, nervous to be seen naked on her wedding night, back in Episode 6, and here, in a colour episode, as opposed to the black-and-white of the other three mentioned, John Junkin tells the same story pretty much word-for-word.
     In the 1990s John would go on to be a "Programme Associate" for Gagtag, a BBC comedy panel game that... saw comedians sit around telling jokes based on given subjects.

18 Episode Three

Team Captains: Ted Ray and Charlie Chester. Panellists: Ray Martine, Lennie Bennett, Les Dawson and Paul Andrews.

There are a couple of elements to the game show beyond the "straight joke-telling from a random subject" bit. One is that every episode ends with a "quick-fire" round, which involves Barry Cryer saying a sentence, then going along all six panellists in turn as they provide the punchline. (This one is the uninspired "I wouldn't say she talks a lot, but...", with not really much in the way of great rejoinders.)
     But much more significant is that halfway through each edition a name is picked at random for someone to do a minute long stand-up spot. Thirteen separate comedians get picked for this challenge, with Ted Ray, Les Dawson, Lennie Bennett, Ray Martine, Ray Cameron and Don MacLean all doing two each. (Ted Ray also did it for the pilot.)
     This is Les's first solo spot, with him doing a better effort in Episode 19. Though while the audience only chuckle, rather than belly laugh, the reason why it isn't much of a viewing experience in 2025 is more due to the nature of time. This is younger Les, a 38-year-old who had only just broken through on television a couple of years earlier due to appearances on Opportunity Knocks. He was still ambitious, coming up with new material.
     Yet older Les was, by his own admission, notorious for re-using material. How bad did it get? Well his stand-up spot here opens with him listing three historical events ("It just shows how your mind wanders when you're worried")... a routine he did, practically word-for-word, in May 1984 when he recorded his first episode as host of Blankety Blank.
     The issue here isn't his stand-up, it's the fact that the following two decades (and maybe more) saw him reusing the same jokes. If you were watching at the time, you'd have seen a new young comedian coming out with gags that were a little bit different to the norm, albeit not his best. But watching from today's perspective, you realise how complacent he got, that he could be still telling the same jokes so many years later. It's not a great set, though. Barry Cryer counts up the laughs and gives them as a figure after the commercial break, but there's no accounting for what type of laughs they are. Hearing the audience giving belly laughs should be much more considered than the chuckles Les gets here.
     The entire stand-up element doesn't add anything to the game in terms of score... it would have been fun if the numbers of laughs had been added to the team total, with the random element adding that "pot luck" element. As it doesn't make a difference to the game, and is really just a way to segue into/out of the adverts, then you don't really need to hear stats about it.
     But if you did need to hear stats, then you'd learn that the average number of laughs across this first series was given by Barry Cryer as 10.53 (or 10.6 if you count the pilot), with the highest number being Ray Cameron and Les Dawson, who both achieved 14. (Ray Cameron also had the second biggest number, 13.) Lowest was three cases of 8, while here Les got a count of 9.
     There's not really much of a big difference between episodes in this run, with the "ranking" element pretty much arbitrary. The ones towards the top are a bit better, but even the episodes down this end of the ranking are pretty good fun. This one ranks low, because the prospect of Les Dawson doing a minute's stand-up is enticing and can't help but be a little disappointing in this instance.

17 Episode Twelve

Team Captains: Ted Ray and David Nixon. Panellists: Ray Martine, Don MacLean, Les Dawson and Bobby Pattinson.

For six episodes of this run (presumably the first six recorded, after the pilot) Barry Cryer had a female assistant helping him on the show. What this entailed was not a whole lot, just someone to help him pick out a card with a name on it for that week's stand-up spot.
     It was trialled in the unbroadcast pilot, with Ann Coates and Louisa Rabaiotti as two generally mute companions, whereas the series proper had Isabella Rye, a 34-year-old RADA graduate who was slumming it in a nothing role.
     There's very little for Rye to do, and some episodes she tries, others she doesn't. This is one where she tries, but saying odd things like asking Barry Cryer if he can speak Italian, or asking to see Don MacLean's teeth when he's trying to get ready to do the stand-up spot. It's awkward, but then 90% of the material centred around Rye is gags about her stature (which is a polite way of saying she's got big boobs, isn't it?), "jokes" that she does, in fairness, play up to.
     But the entire purpose of Barry needing an "assistant" seems like something that hasn't really been thought out, and after Isabella leaves, he gets members of the audience to come up and pick a card for the stand-up spot... this eventually changes to Barry asking a Team Captain to choose one of their own team, or sometimes one of the other team for the job.
     It feels very much like something they were working out as they went along, but, due to the episodes being shown in a jumbled order (which we'll look at in more detail soon) it appears to viewers as if Isabella was in the show for over three months and just took the occasional week off. The reality was that it never really "clicked", and she was either dropped or asked to leave.
     Incidentally, as the scoreboard is on the screenshot above, it seems an appropriate time to bring up the fact that the show is played as an actual competition, with Barry Cryer awarding either 5 or 10 points for gags, or occasionally no points for a dud. It doesn't really matter, no one wins anything, and it's all very arbitrary and just there for fun. You don't need to know anal stats about who got the most points and who won the most. (Though if you do, Ted Ray's team won 5, the opposing team with different Captains won 7, and 7 were draws. The opposition team had a total of 1145 points across the 19 broadcast episodes, with an average of 60.26 points per show, while Ted's team had a total of 1100 and an average of 57.89.)
     What is significant about the scoring in this edition is that Barry Cryer looks at a monitor on his desk to see the scores, as they're not in his view. But the monitor isn't working for him, and he ends this show with its 60-60 draw telling the audience he can't see the score but has to end it. The DVD release has some "fade to black" after the Yorkshire Television production logo has faded, during which you can hear Barry say: "I couldn't see the score. It was a draw, wasn't it, in the end? Sorry about that." It's not known if - but probably unlikely - viewers in 1969 would have heard this, and so it exists more as a DVD "bonus".

16 Episode One

Team Captains: Ted Ray and David Nixon. Panellists: Ray Martine, Don MacLean, Les Dawson and Bobby Pattinson.

There are just 22 separate comedians that appear on the shows in this run. (Or 24 if you count host Barry Cryer and Jimmy Marshall appearing in the unbroadcast pilot.) Naturally, being a show of vintage, the vast majority are no longer with us, with less than a handful still alive.
     Eleven episodes have whole panels that have passed away; three episodes (four including the pilot) feature a single living panellist on the show. This edition is one of five where there are two panellists still with us: in this case, Don MacLean and Bobby Pattinson.
     Bobby's a likeable enough comic, with gurning powers to rival Les Dawson's, as seen from the screenshot above. He still continued to work in comedy until 2015, and had acting work, including roles in Coronation Street and When The Boat Comes In. Don MacLean also did acting work, and mainly variety shows, including a couple of appearances in Les Dawson's first series of Blankety Blank. He was on TV as recently as 2020, with an appearance on The One Show.
     So, what of the other two? It's often difficult to track down comedians when their peak years were the 1960s and 1970s, with even obituary columns often not interested in the acts of yesterday. This is particularly difficult if they're no longer active, and have relatively common names, such as Mike Burton, Tony Stewart and Paul Andrews. Mike Burton is apparently no longer active in the business, but is still around today.
     Then there's Scottish comedian Tony Stewart, who unusually achieved fame in South Africa, where he appeared on a series which was similar in concept to Jokers Wild: Biltong and Potroast. (In an interview on So Suter Bill, Tony talks about his career, and also states that a fellow comedian, Paul Andrews, has passed away - almost certainly the Paul Andrews of Jokers Wild, who would have otherwise taken the total of living panellists from series one up to five.)
     Let's move on from this incredibly bleak entry...

15 Episode Eight

Team Captains: Ted Ray and Alfred Marks. Panellists: Ray Martine, Mike Burton, John Junkin and Tony Stewart.

Jokers Wild isn't really something discussed in the autobiographies of the participants, usually just ignored or skipped over in a couple of sentences. Barry Cryer, the quick-witted host who demonstrably wasn't always white-haired, briefly mentioned the concept of the show in 2010's Butterfly Brain.
     Among Barry's recollections were: "I met Ray Cameron when I hosted a show for Yorkshire Television that Ray and Mike King devised called 'Jokers Wild', which ran from 1969 to 1973 (sic). It was freely based on an American radio show called 'Can You Top This?'. Ray and Mike tweaked the format from three to six comedians and added a host. I had this little machine that showed a subject category every time I pressed a button, and whoever's turn it was would tell a joke. The point of the game was that the other panellists could interrupt with a joke on the same subject. It didn’t always work that way, and there was a lot of fun based around completely irrelevant interruptions. As a format for a game show, it worked a treat and we used a good mixture of the old heavyweights, including Ted Ray, Les Dawson and Arthur Askey, and younger comedians."
     A second book by Barry, 2003's Pigs Can Fly, did go into slightly more specifics, but as it centred on a particular episode from series two, we'll look at it if/when we tackle that run. A third, 1999's You Won't Believe This But... also goes into discussing post-series one episodes, and his admiration for Les Dawson. However, it does contain this: "I was recently sent a video of some of the early shows and was surprised by two things. First, I had black hair; and second, everybody seemed to be smoking. I had an ashtray in front of me and the whole show was wreathed in smoke. Now, of course, smokers are social lepers and I deeply resent being asked to go outside if I want a cigarette. Whatever the pilot says".
     Incidentally, one of the most terrifying things about the black-and-white episodes is the rapid physical camera movement towards Barry at the start of each show, as if you're about to crash into him... something the smaller studio of most of the colour episodes didn't seem to have room for.

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