Guest Panellists: Lance Percival, Jean Rook, Bill Buckley, Fern Britton, Norman Vaughan and Lesley Judd.
It should perhaps be noted at this stage that none of the series nine episodes are actually bad. However, they can feel "samey", and none of them are particularly great either, the ones topping this ranking doing so because something has to. For the first time, the series does really feel "made to order", rather than the Wogan years, which carried at least the illusion of spontaneity.
In discussion of who was the best host out of Terry Wogan and Les, many different angles come into play. A significant element is that Les carries the show far more, building the quiz around his own jokes and persona. This is less of a risky strategy when faced with, as here, a panel of largely fresh faces. Here only Lesley Judd had appeared on the show before, and that was just the once, but as there's less onus on the panel to entertain, there's less chance of the episode floundering.
Among a panel of new faces, we get the debuts of Bill Buckley, Fern Britton and Jean Rook, along with the sole appearances of Lance Percival and Norman Vaughan. Having appeared on stage since the 1930s, Vaughan was perhaps less of a known face for the time period, though did cement himself fully to the 1980s by co-devising darts quiz Bullseye. As Les puts it: "He's been in the business so long he can remember when the Archers only had an allotment."
One piece of trivia mentioned in the article on series three was how certain colours and designs would cause distortion, or "Moiré" patterns on the cameras of the time, particularly on PAL video. Here Norman Vaughan wears a jacket with a close cross pattern that distorts throughout his appearance - the same effect can be seen in episode 9.6 with both Bill Pertwee and Frankie Vaughan.
Guest Panellists: Lionel Blair, June Whitfield, Don Estelle, Sharron Davies, Paul Shane and Jill Gascoine.
The panel debut of Lionel Blair, who would go on to be a Les semi-regular, with four return appearances over the next few series. However, the most unique face on this panel is Don Estelle, making his only Blank showing, and perhaps forever to be known as "Lofty from It Ain't Half Hot Mum!".
Estelle, real name Ronald Edwards, self-published a rare yet much-discussed autobiography in 1999, Sing Lofty: Thoughts of a Gemini. Widely derided for being a terrible book, it's a work of random events, bitterness, and the need to avoid discussing anything in detail. Despite the title, It Ain't Half Hot Mum! gets no real in-depth mention, and we learn such facts as Estelle getting divorced from an incompatible first marriage, despite it never being mentioned he'd got married in the first place. Another tale about living in Buckingham where Don alludes of a threat to the life of him and his second wife sees a potentially engaging anecdote shot down with the acknowledgement that it's a tale: "I don't want to repeat".
Yet such things were still to come - when Don made his Blankety Blank appearance, he was still well-known. It had been a decade since he'd had a No.1 single and top ten album with Windsor Davies, and Davies had moved on from their touring double-act in 1980 ("My own personal view is that Windsor missed the boat and an opportunity") but the army sitcom they appeared in together was still being repeated, and he had roles in the films A Private Function and Santa Claus: The Movie.
It was only as time moved on that Estelle began to get so obscure he'd end up self-publishing his autobiography and flogging copies in shopping centres while singing songs to a backing tape. It's a shame, because he was a genuinely talented singer, but being so well-known for one part and being a height that would limit potential roles (4'10 at his peak, the more-quoted 4'9 when he got older) meant that film and TV work dried up.
Don does briefly mention appearing on Blankety Blank in his autobiography, and describes Les Dawson as a "natural funny man". Fellow panellist Paul Shane also gets a mention as at the end of the year they appeared together in a pantomime of Sleeping Beauty: "he's no beauty!" However, with showier stars like Lionel Blair on the panel, the quiet Estelle seems lost in the mix, and the show is stolen by Jill Gascoigne being unable to get answers right. Perhaps the innate problem with Don trying to achieve any form of long-term fame is summed up by Les's introduction: "What can you say about our next celebrity? .... What can you say...?" As an episode of Blankety Blank it's a sufficiently entertaining one, and Les is in a buoyant mood, even if the jokes he cracks are ones you can hear in many other episodes. But in among it all, poor Don hardly makes an impact.
As he expresses more personality on the printed page, perhaps the final word in this summary should go to Don himself, giving his view on modern television: "The attitudes and change of the New Wave, brilliant one-day 'wonders', the tight-crutched, white-trousered morons who rule the roost at the moment, with no background or history, know as much about entertainment, and what the public like, as a visiting Martian. Hundreds of 'entertainers' look like they've come from space. They lack warmth and feeling. There are others who sound as if they are swinging from their genitals, if they have any sex gender at all."
Guest Panellists: Dave Lee Travis, Pat Coombs, David Jacobs, Bonnie Langford, Roy Kinnear and Aimi MacDonald.
The look at series eight had ended with Les hospitalised and the series cut short. For series nine there's a certain rejuvenated quality to him. In real life he now knew that his first wife's cancer was terminal, but kept the full truth from her and took her on holidays so that she could spend her final days not only in happiness but also ignorance. And with his own near-death experience earlier in the year, he has a more relaxed air.
With Les's return to health came an outpouring of love from the public, and he not only delights in it, but the viewing figures were restored, too. This opening episode made 12th place, with half of the series reaching the Top 15, and it saw 10.97 million tune in. Les's bouyant mood and delightfully corny gags do amuse, such as a routine about a town having a particularly cold sea: "I once had an oyster, they had to rub its chest with Vick before you could eat it."
Les noted that his mood had changed, stating in No Tears For The Clown that: "I begged my agents to get the BBC to restart the postponed series of Blankety Blank; apart from feeling the pinch I needed to get to grips with an audience again, and a month later I hosted the first show in the new series. It gave me the chance, although somewhat belatedly,
to thank all the thousands of people who had taken the trouble to write to me whilst I had been incarcerated in hospital."
However, while Les raises chuckles and the opening of the show is iconic as his first post-hospital appearance, the rest of the show isn't really able to back him up. The panellist trying the hardest to get a laugh is a beardless Dave Lee Travis, which should be self-explanatory as to how successful that attempt is, and most of the others (including a Roy Kinnear who appears to have a bloodshot eye) are somewhat low-key.
This wouldn't matter if the game itself was able to get some laughs, but the questions are flat, largely innuendo-free, and not really able to generate much in the way of comedy. Ultimately it's a lightly amusing half hour, where it feels like the quiz element gets in the way of a Les Dawson special.
Guest Panellists: Johnny Ball, Marian Montgomery, Simon Bates, Samantha Fox, Mike Newman, Anna Raeburn.
These Blankety Blank articles have looked at the events of the time and how some of them may seem strange when devoid of context and looked at today. Indeed, even in this run there are plenty of instances of Les making jokes around racial slurs for Chinese and Japanese people, along with making a Pot Black gag to Gary Wilmot.
Yet perhaps no event was stranger in hindsight than the concept of Page 3 girls. Samantha Fox makes her first of five appearances on Blankety Blank with this edition, and was massive (no pun intended) at the time. In 1986 she would achieve global fame with a record career, but at this point she was almost inarguably Britain's most famous topless model. We now live in a world where bare breasts can be accessed by the click of a mouse (so I've been told) but in the 1980s they were brought to the breakfast table in the pages of tabloids.
What's particularly curious in Samantha Fox's case is that the 2003 Sexual Offences Act made it illegal to photograph topless girls younger than 18, meaning that Fox's appearances without her top on for her first two professional years are now not only frowned upon by much of society, but would actually be a criminal offence in the present climate.
When this episode was recorded (21st September 1985) Fox was five months past her 19th birthday, so the "underage" thing had passed. Yet it's still somewhat eerie, looking back, that a teenage girl was being leered at by a man in his fifties, even for comic purposes.
The rest of the panel in this edition are made up of people who generally just appeared a couple of times, with Johnny Ball and Marian Montgomery making their sole showings. Simon Bates and Mike Newman debut and appeared again just once the following year.
Guest Panellists: John Junkin, Ruth Madoc, Henry Cooper, Madeline Smith, David Copperfield and Madeline Bell.
The last appearance of David Copperfield on the series. Clearly liked by producer Stanley Appel, he was one of the better acts on Appel's generally misfiring variety show The Main Attraction (1983-1984), appearing twice. Copperfield's career trajectory, as commented on in earlier appearances, was an odd one. Pushed into an unlikely trio as part of "Three Of A Kind", the day before this edition aired, 8.66 million had tuned in to watch his former TOAK co-star Lenny Henry in his own series.
Two months after this edition aired, Copperfield's other former "Of A Kind", Tracey Ullman, was being watched by over 12 million in the first series of Girls On Top, before ending the year by travelling to Hollywood, eventually getting her own US sketch show and considerable riches. Whereas David went into Lift Off with Coppers and Co.
It's difficult to glean much information about David, given that he shares a stagename with a more-famous magician from America, and an even more famous novel by Charles Dickens. But David - real name Stan Barlow - never seems bitter on the show, and it's not as if his career was a failure, more that his two co-stars rose to unexpected heights, stratospheric in Ullman's case. He remained supportive of his co-stars, noting that he'd worked with Lenny Henry on the club circuit before they did the show, and telling the Express & Echo in March 2009: "There was a black guy, a Jewish girl and a silly Yorkshireman ... how could that be three of a kind? But that's how it turned out to be because from the word go we just had great fun. We did a lot of writing and changing around sketches and it won the Silver Rose Award at Montreux."
In 2016 he spoke to The Irish Independent, stating: "I can't look back with any regrets at all, and success for me is nothing to do with fame, or money, in that respect. [...] I am retired, I have got a pension, but I still love the business." Yet despite all this, there is a tendency not to laugh when Les jibes "How's yer career gone, so far?", as it's a bit too near to the truth.
There's also the fact that David gets more laughs than Les in this edition, including a big response to one of the gags he'd earlier used in The Main Attraction about a stupid dog chewing a bone. ("And when it stood up, his back leg fell off.") Les's comeback of "What a way to lose an audience" is meaningless when said audience have just laughed and applauded.
Although one of the earliest episodes in the run, Les is clearly tired during the filming of this one, and his timing is noticeably "off". He flounders during his introduction of John Junkin, apparently momentarily forgetting a line, and other jokes fall flat. One particular sequence sees Les start off with his "corny puns" routine, which will see him add more puns and foot stamps to an ever-more groaning audience... yet one instance here sees Les start off with so few laughs he doesn't bother to continue.
The panel are lively and fun, so this one scores fairly highly, and it's not as if Les is dreadful. But his routines putting down the panel can seem a little nonsensical when they're getting more laughs than he is, and he's clearly just a little exhausted shooting his second show of the night.
Guest Panellists: Vince Hill, Barbara Windsor, Harry Carpenter, Liz Robertson, Rory Bremner and Marti Webb.
It's clear as the series draws on that Les is beginning to get tired. Although he stated in No Tears For The Clown that he was pleased to be back doing the series at the start, he also said in the same book that the schedule meant it wasn't something he'd miss towards the end of the run: "Going up and down the motorway every week was driving me nuts, and at the close of the season I wasn't sorry to see the back of Blankety Blank for a bit."
The average ratings for the ninth series had seen a huge increase to 11.91 million. This final episode had the lowest ratings of the run, charting at 26th place with 10.53 million tuning in. Perhaps this dip was due to someone's bright idea to presage the last episode with a months' worth of repeats, all of which got a slightly bigger audience, leaving viewers waiting five weeks to finish off the show. (Should you care, this was the aforementioned "series nine repeats within series nine", as episode 6 and episodes 9-11 got another outing.)
There's a collection of new faces on this edition, with only Barbara Windsor having appeared before. Marti Webb appeared just this once, whereas Harry Carpenter, Vince Hill and Liz Robertson would make five more appearances between the three of them. (Carpenter and Robinson on the same show, Episode 11.16, should you care for such coincidental trivia.)
Rory Bremner in the lower centre "maverick" chair may seem, from today's perspective, to be the most intriguing prospect, a slightly jarring mix of a more edgy, political voice suited to Channel 4. However, context is everything, and it must be remembered that this version of Rory Bremner was a man who got his big break appearing on editions of Wogan the previous year, making him, at this time, really no different from any of the other MOR impressionists that occupied a chair.
As discussed repeatedly, comedy is subjective, so no real view of Bremner will be given here. It's arguable that he lacked the warmth needed for the part of a mainstream impressionist comedian, and really came into his own by doing the more niche political stuff. But while some of his impressions could be decent enough, his take offs on this edition of Terry Wogan and Les himself are... woeful, really. Rory would only appear this once, earning the response from Les: "Just wave to your mother and get off."