Guest Panellists: Arthur English, Liz Fraser, Peter Powell, Shirley Anne Field, Rolf Harris and Sue Lloyd.
One thing not really discussed before in these articles is the link between the series and Children In Need. The BBC's annual charity, while it debuted as a telethon in 1980, appeals for the charity began much earlier, dating back to 1927 on radio. With the telethons being a live event and Blankety Blank being pre-recorded, sometimes even months in advance, it would seem an impossible task to marry the two.
Yet with Blankety Blank also being scheduled in advance, it's possible to get round this simply by pretending. The first "crossover" was slight, with series seven just having Les referencing the event and claiming to be part of the night. As it was the first time Blankety Blank had been scheduled on a telethon night, it was first steps.
Yet 1985 - incidentally the first year they introduced Pudsey Bear - saw a bit more of a mix between the two. Terry Wogan's chat show had seen the event being plugged on the 30th August, with Les joining Joanna Lumley for a satellite interview. Good-natured ribbing between the two saw Terry talk about Blankety Blank with Les, suggesting: "You're gradually beginning to master it, aren't you?". Les, for his part, claimed: "Since you've been on that chat show, so many television sets have been sold. I've sold mine."
However, the most significant cross-over occurs on the actual night, with Les reputedly appearing on a link to Terry, telling him that they're a panellist short for the episode, and Terry promising to send someone over. The word "reputedly" is used here, because footage of the telethon hasn't been able to be obtained, and online reports may be mistaken.
What can't be mistaken is that the episode itself features an empty desk, with DJ Peter Powell running down from the top of the audience offering to fill in and do the job for free... before tripping on the steps on the way up to the desk and falling flat on his face. You'd almost assume it was set up, were it not for the fact that Peter isn't a professional stuntman.
There's not really anything else in the show that can live up to such a moment, though it remains lively throughout. The connection with the night's telethon was good for the ratings, too, as it was one of just two episodes from the run to see the show get back into the Top 10. The 13.02 million that tuned in was enough to see it reach 10th place on the TV chart.
Guest Panellists: Roy Barraclough, Bertice Reading, Peter Alliss, Debbie Arnold, Mike Reid and Janice Long.
In terms of any changes between this and the previous run, then it's been mentioned in an earlier entry that the likeable cheese of the panellists being introduced in the opening credits has now been discarded. So too has the opening bit of the music (the "cascade"?). There's also a new set and new logo which would happen for every one of Les's series from this point onwards. So while the panel are now sitting in a neon pink set, perhaps the most striking change is that the Supermatch Gameboard has changed to Chock-A-Block style "revolving blocks" rather than pull-back panels, meaning nearly every time an answer is rotated, you can see the crew member turning it round in the gap.
This particular edition features the sole appearances of golfer Peter Alliss and actress Debbie Arnold. However, the most notable panellist is the most obvious choice for a Les Dawson show: Roy Barraclough. The following year Roy would join Coronation Street as the long-running character Alec Gilroy (one of four initially one-off characters he'd played in the show during the '60s and '70s) but at this stage was most well-known as Les's comic partner in drag, the northern gossip "Cissie" against Les's Ada. In A Clown Too Many Les wrote that Roy was "a fine, sensitive actor. We hit a rapport straight away."
With Bertice Reading and Mike Reid also on the panel, it's a show full of "Les's Mates", and accordingly the atmosphere is jovial throughout. It might not put you into hysterics, but should probably succeed in keeping a smile on your face for half an hour. As a point of trivia, then Mike and Bertice get credited with Mike appearing first - despite the fact that Bertice's last name comes before Mike's in alphabetical order.
Sticking with trivia for a moment, then this is one of three episodes from this run (along with 9.11 and 9.20) where only a single panellist remains with us - in this case, Debbie Arnold. This somewhat morbid look at a quiz show of yesteryear must be met with the sad news that since the last article, back in May 2022, another three panellists have passed away. Both Patricia Brake and Dennis Waterman died just days after the series eight article was published, and Bernard Cribbins passed away in July.
Guest Panellists: Roland Rat Superstar, Anita Harris, Freddie Trueman, Cherry Gillespie, Ken Dodd and Wendy Richard.
While the panel had previously been visited by Lord Charles, Cuddles the Monkey, Orville the Duck and Lenny the Lion, having a puppet appear by itself might seem a stretch too far, even for a quiz show as silly as this one. Yet while Roland Rat's abusive personality - "Shut it, Fatso!" - may seem out of place, it does produce some sparks. Roland was credited with increasing the TV-AM audience to 18 times its level when he was first introduced on the ITV breakfast show in 1983. Hugely popular at the time, with minor hit singles and stacks of merchandise, by the time he came over to the BBC in October 1985, the joke had perhaps started to wear a little thin.
Yet whereas for a lot of this run it can seem like the panel are there only to act as feeds for Les, all of the panel get involved in this one, including Freddie Trueman, who abuses Les throughout after Les introduces him with gags about his face looking "lived in". There's also Ken Dodd who, whatever one may think of him, always has personality, and Wendy Richard, making her first post-Eastenders appearance.
Eastenders is actually vital to this run of Blankety Blank because, regardless of its inherent qualities or lack thereof, then or now, it has to be acknowledged that it was instrumental in the BBC being able to break down the stranglehold that ITV had on the ratings for the whole of the 1980s up to this point. Of the 22 shows in the run, 17 of them made the Top 20, with 11 in the Top 15. This particular edition stumbled slightly in the pre-Christmas TV landscape, with 11.11 million viewers seeing it make 19th place (after the previous week had made 8th) but it was still a strong showing.
Les's gag about an "oriental" carpet ("You'll have to have curtains with a chink in 'em") is an '80s artefact, but generally a very lively episode, where the only real sour point is the obvious use of canned laughter to paper over some of the cracks. As a fairly amusing instalment it seems more like an audience not really warmed up rather than any inherent problem with the show.
Big laughs over a Supermatch game with the word "Rubber" are another 80s artefact, as does anyone really say "rubber johnny" for condom these days? It's also a series of final appearances - Ken Dodd didn't come back to the show, and while Anita Harris was a regular during series 4-5, this is her only appearance during the Les Dawson era. Lastly, Roland didn't come back.
Guest Panellists: Barry Cryer, Georgia Brown, Bobby Knutt, Sarah Payne, Orville, Keith Harris and Dinah Sheridan.
Les has an energy about him in this one, and the panel are very much involved in the show. It's clear he's tired at points - he screws up both his opening gag and his introduction of Barry Cryer, fluffing his lines - but the enthusiasm is there, even if he's facing exhaustion at filming the second show of the night.
The prizes get savaged even more than usual, as do the panel, with Les noting of Bobby Knutt: "Whenever he appears in a northern club, the audience sit there ready for a good laugh, but still he goes on and does his act." This was the final appearance of Keith Harris, Bobby Knutt and Orville on the show, along with the sole showings for actresses Sarah Payne and Georgia Brown. As all work well with Les, it's a shame they never returned. Much more could have been said about Bobby Knutt, such as his appearances in Play For Today or his being married to a female bodybuilder, but sometimes there's just not enough space to list every point of trivia about each guest, no matter how potentially intriguing.
Barry Cryer had positive words for Les on TV, but in print did have misgivings about his continuing role in the show. In 1998's You Won't Believe This But..., Barry wrote: "A portent of Kenny Everett, years later: the BBC never knew what to do with Les. They didn’t even trust him to star in his own show, teaming him with Lulu. After various experiments, he took over from Terry Wogan on Blankety Blank. That was as near as his employers ever got to the real Les. Terry had cheerfully offered himself up as a butt for the panel’s jokes — the selfless straight man; but Les went in, all guns blazing, insulting panellists, prizes and the producer relentlessly. It worked, but it still wasn’t, in a true sense, the Les Dawson show. I never cease to marvel at people who sign artists because of their success elsewhere and then have no idea what to do with them."
Lastly, there is a hint of canned laughter in this one, where the old standby of "elderly lady laughing with a slight hoot" kicks in. It's not one of the more overt "stock laughs" that the BBC uses, so it's passable, but it's notable that there's supposedly a lady who apparently laughs the same way and for the exact same duration in many BBC productions. The following video gives an illustration of this, with a lady laughing twice - these "laughs" occur around two minutes apart in the actual show, see what you think:
Research into such vitally important, world-changing matters is still ongoing, with the exact origin of such "laughs" still yet to be ascertained. Yet the aforementioned Play For Today may be key here - in the October 1977 episode Come the Revolution, all of the canned laughs that are heard in Blankety Blank and many other light entertainment BBC shows of the 1980s are heard during a theatre play, possibly in an ironic, "meta" way. Were they invented especially for Play For Today and then reused? The quest to find out continues, though now we know that the laughs - including the hooting lady - pre-dated the quiz.
Guest Panellists: David Hamilton, Mary Parkinson, Geoff Capes, Karen Barber, Ted Rogers and Helen Shapiro.
The world had changed, and so while Blankety Blank would never again be the chart-topper it had inexplicably become during the early Wogan years, series nine saw it rise in popularity once again. This edition was the highest-charting, and one of two from the run to break into the Top 10. While the 12.65 million that tuned in weren't the highest amount of viewers this run received - six episodes had a bigger audience, in fact - it was enough that week to see it reach No.8 in the national charts, a height it hadn't reached since way back in the third series.
Coincidentally enough, Les has a routine at the start of the show where he claims there's a monitor that is able to tell how many people are watching and when they switch off. The "monitor" isn't shown on screen, though there appears to be something offscreen for the studio audience to look at... which would explain why a crew member can be seen walking off to the right of the set at the start of the episode when Les first comes out. (A list of all the various mistakes in each episode would make any article three times the size, but should you care, the IMDb entries get them all thanks to some anonymous nerd, along with the individual ratings for each episode.)
This is a pretty lively edition, with strongman Geoff Capes mock-threatening Les, and David Hamilton's dead laughs proving an ideal foil for Dawson. Sadly, despite the two working quite well together, this was David's only appearance with Les, after a dozen showings in the Wogan era. There's also ice skater Karen Barber, plus singer Helen Shapiro making her sole appearance on the show, though at this point in time Helen is bizarrely there as a star of generally forgotten ITV soap Albion Market. Les has a rare serious introduction for Helen, noting that she's "had her shares of ups and downs, but she's battled back."
One very striking thing about the ninth series in general is that the contestants don't seem as relaxed as they normally are, with Les often telling them to "relax" and that he "knows you're nervous". It possibly doesn't help that he doesn't bring them into the show as much as before, instead just using them as recipients for his "corny puns" routines. As a result most of them merge into one, generally faceless members of the public there to simply take part in the quiz element. However, there's a bit more life to the four in this edition, with them interacting a little more with Les and seeming more relaxed.
The particular stand out is the second male contestant, Steve Owen, who is arguably a little socially awkward, producing some moderately uncomfortable moments. One comes when Les asks him about his international penfriends, asking Steve "Like to tell us something about it?" Steve, who has been giving largely monosyllabic responses to this point, answers back "Will you?", only for Les to say "Say something, Steve, for God's sake." Later, when Steve - spoiler - goes on to the Supermatch, Les roughly grabs him by his suit lapels for a joke. Steve doesn't particularly seem to find it funny, lightly slapping Les's hands off and yanking his jacket back into place with a a slightly miffed expression. If you'd like to see these two awkward moments to make up your own mind, then the following video contains two separate clips...
Guest Panellists: Joe Brown, Kathy Staff, Chris Tarrant, Tessa Sanderson, Billy Dainty and Dana.
For a lot of series nine Les goes through the motions, and does the same routines almost on autopilot. With a ridiculously high amount of episodes for any series, he can't really be blamed for phoning it in some weeks. Anyone would.
But while this edition sees him do the same kind of corny gags as in many others, there's a genuine verve to it, helped by a vibrant panel who are clearly enjoying being part of it. There's also far ruder gags than the show normally goes in for, with the audience laughing when Les talks about a contestant liking sheep, causing Les to tell them to cut it out - "Just because his aftershave's mint sauce!". Then there's Les talking about a cycling holiday abroad - "I had a terrible ache in the Balkans."
Billy Dainty makes a return to the show and is drowned out by Les, but clearly enjoys the experience. Sadly this was his last appearance, as he would die from stomach cancer in November 1986. Also making his final appearance is Chris Tarrant, who usually provides some of the old school feel of Blankety Blank by interrupting proceedings - it's possible that this was a reason he wasn't asked back, but he works well with Les.
There's also Kathy Staff, making her second appearance on Blankety Blank, but her first with Les. In her 1997 autobiography My Story - Wrinkles And All, Kathy looked back on Les, fondly noting: "Les Dawson was another hero of mine, and it was wonderful working with him. [...] But it’s quite frightening how many old friends have died, people in their prime, who you wouldn’t expect, people like Les Dawson, Eric Morecambe, Tommy Cooper—brilliant stars, and not old men. I suppose they gave it their all, and literally burnt themselves out."
One trivia point is that the new-look set for the series has a round plaque above the desks of the panellists displaying a "BB". All, that is, except for these first two episodes where it appears as a blank glowing circle. It's unclear whether or not they'd forgotten to add it for this first run, or thought of it later. A minor mystery for another time...