Guest Panellists: Roy Kinnear, Patricia Hayes, Larry Grayson, Jan Leeming, Bernie Winters and Sandra Dickinson.
The first appearance on the show of Patricia Hayes and Jan Leeming. Hayes would put in another couple of appearances, while newsreader Leeming would show up five times in the Les Dawson era. Perhaps most significantly, it's the tenth and last appearance of Larry Grayson on the show (not counting his "surprise" cameo in the second series where he didn't take part in the quiz). Larry shows more enthusiasm than he did in his other series six appearance, but the injection of fresh energy from Hayes and, surprisingly, Leeming, shows not just a certain kind of complacency from the old hands, but even an explicit tiredness.
Such matters are to be expected, even from the viewers. Because the series hasn't changed to any great degree in nearly five years of being on air, it's only natural that a certain stagnation would begin to set in, when this is the 87th episode of what is essentially the exact same thing. Yet there's fun from Bernie Winters, who Terry calls "the greatest crawler in the history of the show", and some laughs with Terry forgetting the questions. In fact, it's one of the better episodes from the sixth series, but no programme can live on forever without change.
So, what did Terry Wogan do after he left Blankety Blank? In Is it me? he expanded on his reasons for leaving, stating of the show that: "I gave it up because other things were in the pipeline, and although Jimmy Moir, Head of Light Entertainment, did not agree at the time, it was the right decision." During this final run there was already an attempt by the BBC to push him to the status of a premiere presenter: April 1983 had seen 9.4 million tune in to a special called Wogan on the Orient Express, and in 1984 his weekly Saturday night chat show was shown on Christmas Day.
By February 1985 Terry's chat show had gone three nights a week, primetime, all year round, and that was perhaps where his problems began. Possibly as a result of the constant tabloid attacks, the fun went out of poor Terry on the screen, and he gradually turned into something of a blowhard, there to bore the life out of viewers each Children In Need day, or to provide the occasional wry remark on Eurovision. But he was scarcely recognisable as the man with a genuine sense of fun on Blankety Blank, and his moments of humour often became painful dead laugh areas. Most sadly of all, the child inside him went away, and he finished Wogan in 1992 looking like a much older man than he does in his final run of Blankety Blank, despite the fact that it was less than nine years later.
As referenced in the article on series two, he added fresh links to repeats of old episodes for 23 editions of Wogan's Best of Blankety Blank (1997-1998). Then in 2004 he returned to host a 17-minute Blankety Blank special as part of Children In Need. Interestingly, Maureen Lipman was one of the panellists, despite her misgivings about the show, joined on the panel by Barbara Windsor, Donny Osmond, Jamie Cullum, David Coulthard and Simon Cowell. While it's generally quite an awful event, with a screaming audience drowning everything out, a poignant moment comes when Maureen Lipman asks Terry if he's Les Dawson, causing Terry to say the nonsensical "I wish I was", before adding "Oh, but I miss him, yeah." Later Terry talks about the show featuring "assorted stars who've since passed away." (A number which, since the last article, now sadly includes Dilys Watling and Tony Selby.)
Terry's last outing for Blankety Blank came with a 2006 DVD game. As it's a relatively old game, then there's no option to put in a random text entry for your answers to the "blank", you just have to select from a pre-chosen range of options. And there's no interaction or fun with any panellist, it's just six boxes with names written on them, like "Fat Tony", "Julius" and "Champagne". (I don't remember any of them appearing on the show.) It takes the fun of Blankety Blank and... completely discards it.
Presented by the version of Terry that would crack jokes that would die in the air, it's not the same as if he'd made it in his pomp (when it would have been a text game on a BBC Micro) and it even has the horrific ITV version of the theme. While buying any of the books and minor merchandise through the links on this site is greatly appreciated to help its running costs, it's not essential, and it's only fair to confess that while I hadn't played the game when I first started these articles, I now have, and it's not a game I can much recommend. It stays on the links for the first six series, but won't appear again as we move into the Les Dawson era.
Guest Panellists: Paul Shane, Noele Gordon, Patrick Moore, Cleo Rocos, Kenny Everett and Lorraine Chase.
The two new panellists here are Paul Shane, who would become a Les Dawson regular, with seven return appearances, and Kenny Everett's sidekick, Cleo Rocos. Cleo would only make one more appearance after this, ominously in the last-ever episode of the original run. It's a lively episode, with Terry in a randy mood, leering over Cleo and a policewoman contestant, Patrick Moore throwing his water again (over Terry, this time) and Cleo writing down "herpes" as an answer. There's also some fun with Terry getting everything confused, including being insistent that Paul Shane had done the show before.
Kenny Everett is one of the few long-term regulars that benefits from toning it down a little, and while his coloured wigs and E.T. masks are very much more of the "embarrassing uncle at a joke shop" stuff, he's on decent form. With this episode recorded on the 22nd May, the most notable event of the year for Kenny occurred exactly two weeks afterwards when he decided to attend a Conservative party conference wearing his enormous "Brother Lee Love" hands. A number of Blankety Blank panellists were there, which is maybe forgotten, including Lynsey de Paul. However, the likes of Lynsey, "Tarby" and Freddie Trueman didn't make headlines by shouting out "Let's bomb Russia!"
There's really no telling what effect this had on Kenny, though he's notably a little quieter still in Episode 6.6, which was shot two months after the incident, the only BB episode he recorded post-Conference. The whole situation was naive stuff on Kenny's part, and he would appear on an episode of Wogan four months after the broadcast of this edition to discuss it. Again, Kenny's show is much-loved here at the Anorak Zone, and the onscreen "Cuddly Persona" is a great one, but doesn't seem to translate outside of his own series. While Kenny basically said he's apolitical and just fancied a free party and a laugh, an anecdote about how he stuck his hand out and asked the waitress at No.10 to pass him a drink - before turning and realising it was Margaret Thatcher - doesn't particularly paint him in a good light. It's an amusing tale, but who doesn't look at a waitress when they're asking for a drink, but instead just sticks their hand out like they're a serving wench?
Generally, though, politics won't be discussed too much in regards Blankety Blank. It's widely supposed that both main hosts voted Conservative, although neither of them appeared to express any deeply-held political views, and it's a side of the '80s that wasn't as pleasant as the light-hearted face of coral colours and cheap innuendo that Blankety Blank represents. High unemployment, street violence, strikes, protests... it wasn't a particularly happy time.
As for Les Dawson's political stance, he discussed his philosophy in his 1985 autobiography A Clown Too Many: "Not so long ago, at a big charity luncheon, with expensive cigar smoke wreathed above sleek heads, I overheard a heavily jowled man with a large brandy in his well manicured hand, say, 'Damned strikers, ought to shoot a few of the buggers, hey?' His companion, of the same ilk, snorted, 'Too many bloody foreigners as well.' I turned and repeated those words from the echo of time: 'Be kind.' One glared at me and muttered something about 'bloody show business people'. But isn't that the key? Be kind."
Guest Panellists: Norman Collier, Gloria Hunniford, Danny La Rue, Lynsey de Paul, Joe Brown and Wendy Richard.
The first appearance of Joe Brown, a musician who would go on to be another Les Dawson regular, with nine return appearances. Joe was also the father of Sam Brown, a name that is perhaps more lost to time than his own, but Sam was a decent performer in her own right, with late '80s hits. Her very decent cover version of "Can I Get A Witness?" saw Joe play a court judge in the official video.
The days when Terry would conceal the question cards are now long gone, and in pretty much every episode of this run you get at least a glance of the writing on them, particularly as the writing seems a lot bigger than it used to be. But when Gloria Hunniford gives Terry a present of an "Irish computer" - it lists your fingers - the viewers get a full close up like never before. Hard core Blankety Blank purists, or Militant Blankers, may find that it's like revealing the Ark of the Covenant in many ways, almost light entertainment sacrilege.
Yet speaking of the questions, for this series regular question writer Mike Radford is joined by Neville Gurnhill and Norman Beedle, the extra two pairs of hands really seeming to help. It must be a difficult job thinking up the various "blanks", and, truth be told, they've been almost an afterthought for at least a couple of series now. Yet series six produces some quite chucklesome moments, even if it's just childish things like Pinocchio fed up of the woodpecker pecking at his [BLANK]. Here a big laugh is caused by Terry having to read out a question that his wife has put him on a diet, and for the first time in a while, the questions become a real cornerstone of the show.
Guest Panellists: Barry Cryer, Patricia Hayes, Patrick Moore, Sabina Franklyn, Roger Kitter and Floella Benjamin.
Two new panellists appear on this episode, along with the new-to-series-six Patricia Hayes. It's the debut of Roger Kitter, an impressionist who had worked on TV shows including 'Allo 'Allo as Captain Alberto Bertorelli. However, he was probably most famous for a parody single in summer 1982, performing a rapping John McEnroe for the track "Chalk Dust – The Umpire Strikes Back". Released under the group name "The Brat", with Kaplan Kaye playing the umpire, it reached No.19 in the charts and was the sort of thing that seemed quite amusing at the time.
Also putting in her first turn is Sabina Franklyn. While Kitter appeared just this once, Sabina Franklyn became something of a regular, appearing eight times in total, albeit four of those times being this year. As one of the main cast members on reasonable ITV sitcoms Keep It In The Family (1981-1983) and Full House (1985-1986) Sabina was something of a crush for younger viewers of the '80s. And, almost certainly, older viewers too. Perhaps in hindsight she has too much of a "wholesome" image, the kind of girl you wanted to marry when you were nine and were viewing her through a mindset of pure innocence.
One notable thing about Sabina is her, to put it politely, modest figure. This isn't a coarse reference for the sake of it, as it does actually come into play when Terry jokingly mispronounces her name as "Sabrina". Franklyn says "Thank you" and puts her hands on her breasts, pushing them up, as pictured above. Such a reaction would perhaps be confusing today (and, I confess, I had to resort to Google here) but it was a reference to minor actress Norma Ann Sykes, who went under the stage name of Sabrina.
Perhaps more known for references to her chest in things like The Goon Show rather than the small parts she had in movies, Sykes was so undeniably endowed that even an official website dedicated to her describes her as the "impossibly-proportioned darling of Britain". When Terry does it a second time, Sabina says the grammatically confusing "She was a little bigger than I was" (sic) before a randy Terry says "Oh, I dunno..."
One last point of trivia is that this episode was one of seven from this run that got a repeat on the BBC between May and June 1984. None of them made the BBC1 Top 10, which is perfectly understandable, as what kind of idiot would want to sit and watch episodes of Blankety Blank that they've already seen? (Wait, what...?) So while Les Dawson's assertion in A Clown Too Many that "the viewing figures went from five million to ten million [...] The first person to congratulate me on the success was Terry Wogan himself" may possibly have been technically accurate, it's a bit of a disingenuous claim that doesn't really tell the whole story. (Should you care, the six other episodes chosen to fill a summer schedule were: 6.1, 6.2, 6.3, 6.7, 6.10 and 6.11)
Guest Panellists: Lenny Henry, June Whitfield, Henry Cooper, Sabina Franklyn, Orville, Keith Harris and Cilla Black.
Lenny Henry's fifth and final appearance on Blankety Blank, which coincidentally aired just over a month after the final episode of Three of a Kind. The following year Lenny would step out as a solo act with his own BBC1 sketch show. Although fondly remembered, especially by those who were waiting an eternity for it, it was never actually a ratings smash, usually staying outside the top 40 and being beneath the ratings of other Blank luminaries like Paul Daniels magic shows, 3-2-1, various Jim Davidson sitcoms and Terry's Wogan chat show, back when it was still popular.
This episode also features the sole appearance of Cilla Black, and her '80s career resurrection is generally blamed on regarded as being thanks to Terry. Earlier in the year she had appeared on a January edition of Wogan, which eventually led to twin maelstroms of inanity two highly popular entertainment shows, Blind Date and Surprise Surprise.
Cilla is credited with presenting over 500 episodes of the shows, and while Blind Date is the more remembered, Surprise Surprise actually aired first. The notion that Blind Date was her breakthrough was something presented by Terry himself in Is it me? when he wrote about the situation: "Cilla Black had been in the shadows for a few years when she came on Wogan and awoke the nation anew to her talents with a hilarious routine about a Liverpool radio phone-in show. On the other side of the Thames, Alan Boyd spotted her and knew immediately who he wanted to front a new people-show he was planning - Blind Date."
It may seem odd to trash shows as the bottom of the barrel when you're doing it in an article about Blankety Blank, but there was a certain kind of crass, vacuous quality to Cilla's long-running ITV shows that seemed to act almost as a gateway to further televisual inanity. Saturday night television was never the intellectual end of the TV week, but the witless whooping and elevation of reality show contestants to "stars" had its DNA in the heart of Cilla's excursions of easy dross produced by LWT. Yet despite her undeniable talent for self-promotion, Cilla does thankfully tend to be more of a benign presence on this edition.
Returning to the show for the first time since series two is Keith Harris. While Orville wasn't a new act - there are TV credits for the duck back in the early 1970s - Keith had really hit his peak around this time, with December 1982 producing the No.4 hit single "Orville's Song". Keith (and Orville) would release another single the month after this edition aired, though "Come To My Party" only managed to reach No.44. The relentlessness of Orville, carrying on when no one else cares, may amuse more than he did in his own show, coupled with his smack talk to Terry Wogan.
There's fun in this edition, with the show reaching arguably peak '80s-ness, and for those looking for Blankety Blank's customary "dodgy" bits, there's Terry doing various accents, and trying to get a laugh out of a contestant whose Swedish husband's name is "Bent". But the real shocker comes when Lenny Henry flirts with a black contestant. "I had a terrible feeling," says Terry, "it was gonna get ethnic."
Guest Panellists: Roy Kinnear, Beryl Reid, Patrick Moore, Sabina Franklyn, Freddie Starr and Ruth Madoc.
Through a series of unlikely events and coincidences, last year this became the most famous episode of Blankety Blank. The first male contestant on the show is a sweet 63-year-old man who went by the name of Tom Moore. A World War II veteran, when a worldwide pandemic broke out in 2020, he was 99, and decided to raise £1000 for the underfunded National Health Service by doing a charity walk of his garden on his walking frame.
By the time Moore had finished his charity walk he'd celebrated his 100th birthday and news of his efforts had spread so far and wide that the total raised for his walk had exceeded £30 million. He was knighted, but in a cruel twist of fate died through illness, with his contraction of COVID being the one thing he couldn't recover from.
During all this it was noted that he'd appeared on Blankety Blank, and a clip from this edition was played on various TV shows. Truth be told, Tom doesn't play a major role in proceedings, as - spoiler - he loses the game and doesn't go onto the Supermatch. But his kindness shines through, and it's an odd, almost eerie, twist of fate that saw this episode get a retroactive spotlight placed upon it. The various events making up this tale are our accepted reality, but if it was a film script, it'd be regarded as too far-fetched on so many levels.
Yet while attention has been given to the episode since, on the day it wasn't the case. Although it went out after the Queen's speech, ITV also showed the speech, and followed it up with a flashy, new-ish movie called Superman. The BBC's film of the night was a version of Treasure Island which was, although making its UK TV premiere, over thirty years old. This turn of events meant that it was the only series six episode to not make the BBC1 Top Ten (Top of the Pops was 10th with, appropriately enough, 10 million viewers) and so the exact figures it received can't be traced.
While most of the series was shot with the customary lengthy gap between recording and broadcast, this edition was actually shot much nearer to the air date. Going before cameras on the 11th of December, it makes Terry's pretence that it's being recorded on Chrismas Day less of an exaggeration than usual. Lastly, the trivia for this edition is that Beryl Reid is asked to take part in the Head To Head, and after she (spoilers ahead) does so successfully, it means that all three of her series six appearances saw her get the correct answer. Beryl appeared once more on the series, but didn't take part in the Head To Head after this. All of which means her total record for the entire series was 17 Head To Heads, with 14 of them correct - an 82.35% success rate.
Guest Panellists: Roy Hudd, Pat Coombs, Derek Nimmo, Sandra Dickinson, John Inman and Lorraine Chase.
Despite talk of the show starting to have less life in it, there are 21 panellists new to the show during series six, spread out so that if you picked an episode at random, you'd be seeing, on average, 2 panellists you hadn't seen in the first five series. (Or, okay, if we really need to get that anal, 1.93 recurring). Episode 6.10 is the sole exception, the only one not to feature a new face, which makes it quite odd that it comes top here. Though in all honesty, most of the top five or six could have gone in any order here, really, they're all a decent enough quality, and there's no real "standout".
Despite the lack of any new faces, it's still fairly fresh - Nimmo, Inman and Coombs had all appeared just five times or less - and there's an interesting development for hardcore Blankers where Sandra Dickinson is relegated to the "dolly bird" chair in deference to Lorraine Chase keeping the "airhead" seat. It's a lively edition, with the panel cheating and arguing amongst themselves, and one of Blankety Blank's rudest moments (in its original run, at least) when a question about a vacuum cleaner that can suck gets more laughs than it should do.
As mentioned under entry No.9, this episode features Roy Hudd making a reference to another episode, where he jokes about Terry giving a losing contestant an "answering machine", but it's not clear what he's referring to. As Terry jokingly says, "If you don't see it on your screen, it never happened." Piecing the clues together it becomes easier to make sense of the situation. Roy says of the losing contestant who got an answering machine that "she's a copper an' all." The only episodes this series to have an answering machine as a prize were 6.11 and 6.14, with 6.14 the episode that had a policewoman as a contestant. This also fits in with Roy's joking request for "another tiebreaker!"
So on one hand, this does give a fairly interesting insight into the way the recordings went for any Blankologists out there. Although we'd already learned that two episodes were recorded on the same day, what wasn't known is that the panellists from the other show would go to the trouble of watching it, or at least being aware of what took place in them. That's the positive uptake on the situation. The negative is that I've had to go through an even more anal study of events than normal to work out what was being referenced - and that's the job of the show. Instead, Blankety Blank becomes indulgent once more, and homework is required to get all the "in the know" quips, rather than something presented for a mainstream audience.
So, there we have it. The Terry Wogan run of Blankety Blank comes to an end. 95 episodes shown over a five year period, along with two unscreened pilots. Or, if you want one last anal statistic, it was 4 years, 11 months and 7 days. The last of the Terry Wogan era of Blankety Blank. But a new one was waiting...