Guest Panellists: John Junkin, Fenella Fielding, Mike Smith, Sarah Greene, Roy Hudd and Moyra Bremner.
Sarah Greene's fourth and final appearance in the original run of Blankety Blank, though she did return for a couple of the Lily Savage revival episodes. It's also the only time Mike Smith appeared in the original run, though he again came back for a Lily Savage edition.
What's most significant though is that this is their only time on the show together. Smith refers to her as "my girlfriend" during the episode, putting to rest any speculation as to whether they were a couple at this time. The two would be involved in a serious helicopter crash on 10th September 1988, which saw Greene reportedly break both legs and an arm, while Smith broke his back and ankle. Both recovered and got engaged shortly afterwards, almost as if it was some aviation calamity mating ritual. They married and were together until Smith's death in 2014.
Speculation as to how Terry Wogan and Les would have fitted into each others' eras is brought to the fore here with an appearance by Fenella Fielding, who is the recipient of several allusions towards her wig. It can only be imagined the carnage that Les would have wrought in Terry's syrup-heavy time on the show. With a series of generally quite terrible prizes, even by Blankety Blank standards, this one also gets a few laughs by celebrating the centenary year of aluminium, with a selection that are all aluminium-based.
Yet perhaps the most significant element of a pretty lively edition is Les enjoying the vocal input of Roy Hudd and John Junkin. Although both men don't exactly set the place alight, their noisy contribution really flags up just how subdued the panels have become during Les's time on the show. While Terry would elicit a panel's involvement, Les frequently supresses them, but not so here.
Les accepts barbs from them both, including Junkin's "If you wanted to pick something low, you could have picked Les's act", but doesn't try and trade with them like he normally does other comics. On a purely surface reading, it could be seen to be a bad look for Les, in that he effectively swerves any verbal battle with two experienced comics when he's known for going after up-and-comers quite savagely. Yet the reality was bleaker than that: this edition was, along with episode five, the last one Les recorded before the death of his first wife. By this stage he'd known her illness was terminal, and she died just ten days later.
Guest Panellists: Eddie Large, Lynda Baron, Syd Little, Samantha Fox, Frank Carson and Wendy Richard.
A Christmas special that saw Frank Carson, daft costumes and the set bedecked in red, along with the return of Little and Large. This was some way past their peak of popularity (1980 had seen their show become a Top 5 attraction), but by this time their show had been on for eight years running, so viewer complacency was inevitable. Their new series began two months after this episode was broadcast, and averaged at 36th place in the charts, with 9.55 million viewers still tuning in.
Syd actually wrote about Les in his second (!) autobiography, 2004's Little By Little. He cited Les as a comedy hero, noting: "with his craggy and grave-looking face, would crack jokes one minute and be serious the next in such a way that I never knew which was which." Les wasn't quite as complementary in this episode, getting a somewhat forced smile off Eddie when he introduces the double act as being the only one to get arrested on stage for loitering. Then there's Frank insisting he was laughing at Eddie - "Don't be silly, who's ever done that?" (As a point of complete trivia, Les also jokes that Eddie's agent must be "Greenpeace" - Eddie, Syd and Les actually shared the same agent.)
Syd and Eddie had known Frank Carson a long time on the club circuit, and by this stage Frank had completed his first of three appearances on their Saturday night show. In 1999's Little Goes A Long Way, Syd wrote that "Frank is still our big buddy to this day, but he can't half talk!" Eddie also praised Frank in 2005's Larger Than Life: "He's a naturally funny man. [...] The jokes might be familiar but then so are the smiles. If there were more people like Frank around, the world would be a happier place."
Samantha Fox also appears, and locating her professional status at this time is somewhat harder. She was a legitimate pop star by this point, with "Touch Me" a Top 3 hit in the UK, and No.1 in many countries around the world - so much so that Wikipedia would have you believe that she'd retired from topless modelling. Yet in summer 1987 she was being photographed and interviewed for an edition of Penthouse.
Fox's recording career didn't particularly have legs, though she did manage to rack up three Top 10 hits. When this particular edition aired, one of her less successful singles, "I'm All You Need", had dropped to 51st place after stalling outside the Top 40. It's not actually clear what Fox brings to the table as a panellist other than her looks, and after several failed attempts at getting a laugh, Les is reduced to telling her: "You've had us in fits... of depression."
With Lynda Baron and Wendy Richard in plunging necklines, then Fox is actually the most covered of the female panellists, and there are multiple references to their breasts, something that may make you cringe a little when watched today. There's also, via reactions, cuts and a slight disjointed feel, the very real impression that bits were cut out as inappropriate to air, but the resulting laughter was still left in the show.
The average overall chart placing for the tenth series was 32nd. However, while this special had a reasonable 9.58 million tuning in on Boxing Day, the competitive Christmas market did, as with series nine, see it become the lowest-charting of the run, dropping to 55th place. Yet in among all the chart stats and autobiography quotes is a pretty good, albeit unremarkable, Christmas Special.
Guest Panellists: Joe Brown, Lynda Baron, Chris Serle, Cheryl Baker, Norman Collier and Belinda Lang.
This edition was the highest-rated of the run... and also one of the lowest.
The ratings for series ten were split very much in "two halves", with the 1986 episodes averaging 9.18m/35th place, and all of the 1987 ones 11m/27th place. This edition aired on the 17th October 1986 where 9.32 million viewers saw it stall outside the Top 30 at 32nd place. However, as with the previous year, the BBC had the odd idea to place three repeats before the final episode.
When this one got reshown on March 13th 1987, not only had Blankety Blank's ratings improved, but ITV were also showing athletics at the same time, a largely unpopular scheduling choice which saw Blankety Blank rise to 7th place in the charts with 14.1 million tuning in. (Should you care, the other two episodes chosen to be reshown were 10.3 and 10.10.)
Belinda Lang is the new face on the panel here, an actress perhaps now best known for her role in sitcom 2point4 Children (1991-1999), or, as those of a crueller disposition might remember it, 2point4 Laughs. However, at the time Lang was associated with her role as one of a number of divorcees in John Sullivan sitcom Dear John..... The first series had finished in March 1986, with an average of 13.15 million viewers, and four of its seven episodes in the Top 10. Dear John.... would return in September 1987, where - while three editions suffered from heavy competition from ITV - it generally returned to its previous high standing.
What's significant about Dear John.... is how much it tells us about society of the time, even for those of us who lived through it. While in 2022 there's speculation as to how some illicit events of the past could ever have occurred, an episode of Dear John.... that aired almost exactly a year after this edition of Blankety Blank saw the lead character unknowingly dating a 17-year-old schoolgirl. For a joke, one of his colleagues makes it even worse by telling John that she's "12", just as a prank. This is not to suggest that Dear John.... enabled such behaviour, but instead to note that jokes about sleeping with 12-year-old schoolgirls were deemed acceptable material for mainstream sitcoms of 1987 vintage. This was also, of course, the era of Bill Wyman and Mandy Smith.
Away from such dubious matters, then this is a pretty fun episode, with Les in a shouty mood and bringing the panel - particularly Norman Collier - more into events than usual. Only the mix of canned laughter with the real thing detracts. Lastly, as a point of trivia, then clips of Les talking to contestants from this episode (and Episode 11.21) were shown as part of BBC's Breakfast on August 16th 2022. With Jon Culshaw beginning a stage show based on Les's life, these and other clips were used to remind viewers of what Les used to be like - with thanks to friend of the site and hardcore Blanker Rick McWhirter for spotting that one.
Guest Panellists: Roy Barraclough, Rustie Lee, Jeff Stevenson, Linda Nolan, Paul Shane and Jan Leeming.
The panel debut of Rustie Lee, who would return for each of Les's series thereafter. A Jamaican-born cook, she grew up in Birmingham from a very young age, giving audiences a distinctive Brummie accent and an infectious booming laugh. She perhaps wouldn't be your first choice of person to invite to a funeral, but if you want some easy, good-natured laughs, Rustie is an ideal candidate.
A full discussion of the many things Rustie has done would run for pages, but include recording music and acting. One notable, and perhaps surprising, career choice was that in the early 2000s she stood as a UKIP candidate. What makes this particularly strange is that on this edition of Blankety Blank she writes down "politician" as the answer to a question about the ideal job for someone who is obnoxious.
In compiling these articles I sometimes use that site of nuanced, balanced discussion that always steers away from polemic views: Twitter. As many of the panellists have their own accounts on there, it's a direct way to ask them for their Blankety Blank memories, and, if it's not bad form to quote a tweet, then Rustie responded: "I would have to watch the show again. I certainly have great memories of the wonderful Les Dawson. I was at his wedding to the lovely Tracey xx".
The bottom ten episodes and the top five are probably the legitimate worst and best here, yet many of the episodes in the middle could have been slotted in almost any order, as the quality is consistent. If you think that this one charted a bit higher because I got a couple of virtual kisses from Rustie while writing it, then... you may be right.
Guest Panellists: Peter Stringfellow, Jean Rook, Deryck Guyler, Cherry Gillespie, Charlie Williams and Aimi MacDonald.
The first of three BB appearances for Charlie Williams, a man who unwittingly had a large effect on Les's decision to take on the show. A professional footballer from the age of 19, Williams had taken to earning a living in working men's clubs after his retirement from the sport. By the early 1970s he was a highly popular stand-up comedian thanks to his performances on The Comedians, and also got his own series and specials. There were also a few pretty good novelty singles, such as "That's What I Should've Said", though chart success didn't reach Charlie.
Today a lot of Charlie's material is looked down upon as being inappropriately race-based, but such a surface reading may be forgetting the culture of the times. During Charlie's peak years the increase in immigration was still a relatively new element of British society - an edition of ITV's People in Trouble from as late as 1958 cited the number of "coloured" people in the UK as just 190,000. Charlie, one of a very small number of black comedians, was pitching his remarks about foreigners "coming over here" to a society that wasn't, as we understand it today, multicultural, and it could, given his own racial identity, be regarded as satirical, flower.
What stalled Charlie's career at his peak was hosting the quiz show The Golden Shot. Originally hosted by Bob Monkhouse, the show was taken on by Norman Vaughan, who almost immediately decided it wasn't for him and wanted out. Vaughan handed over to Williams in September 1973, who found himself floundering quite desperately in a live quiz show format. Charlie's rise was bought to an abrupt end, and his star fizzled out. By the time of his Blankety Blank appearances, he was getting gigs by doing guest spots on Pob's Playtime.
Such a disastrous career decision wasn't lost on Les, who strongly considered turning down Blankety Blank as a result, recalling in A Clown Too Many: "It was also a dangerous thing to do, taking over from an established host of a popular show; years before a good coloured comedian called Charlie Williams, had taken over a programme called The Golden Shot from Bob Monkhouse (sic), and it had virtually killed off Charlie's career."
Guest Panellists: Richard Gibson, Carmen Silvera, Guy Siner, Vicki Michelle, Gorden Kaye and Francesca Gonshaw.
An 'Allo 'Allo special (or "Hello 'Ello" as Les calls it), with Carmen Silvera returning and joined by five of her co-stars. Vicki Michelle had worked with Les in The Dawson Watch (1979), and would return three more times - but for the rest of the panel, it was their sole appearance.
'Allo 'Allo was a very mainstream sitcom, and also very popular. Retrospective shows like to highlight cult favourites and more highbrow fare, which perhaps gives the wrong impression of these somewhat "please all" sitcoms. So while there's unlikely to ever be a TV retrospective looking back on the days of, say, Three Up Two Down, such shows were a hit with viewers if not with critics. ITV's much-maligned Fresh Fields, for one more example, was very successful in the ratings battle, even topping the charts on one occasion - it only met its end during its final year, when ITV had the not-so-great idea of scheduling it directly opposite EastEnders.
'Allo 'Allo was actually a contemporary of Les's version of Blankety Blank. A pilot version of 'Allo 'Allo aired during the Wogan era, but the first episode of 'Allo 'Allo as an ongoing series aired immediately after Les's first episode as host. The sitcom eventually ended less than three years after Les's final episode of the quiz.
So, what of the sitcom itself? Well, such loitering around the point is to disguise the fact that 'Allo 'Allo was never really watched here at The Anorak Zone, though I do understand there was once a funny episode where someone did a bad French accent and someone else said "big boobies". Yet such matters aren't really material, as these aren't the characters appearing on the show, but the actors and actresses who play them.
This comes to the fore with Gorden Kaye, a self-confessed shy man who was the star of 'Allo 'Allo, but on Blankety Blank hardly says a word. Kaye admitted to being a nervous performer in his 1989 autobiography René and Me, but noted of Les that: "Les Dawson is one of the most relaxed performers I have ever seen - at least if he isn't, he puts on the best act I have ever seen. Maybe what he does is switch off and simply not think about what is happening until he is before the camera, but it is very impressive whatever the secret."
With quiet guests and contestants that do so badly the games are over quickly, this edition has the distinction of being the shortest episode of the original run of Blankety Blank. With a duration of just 25'27m, it comes in five seconds shorter than Episode 13.8, the next contender for the title.
So, if it's a short episode, the quiz element is a dud and the panellists are quiet, then why does it comfortably slot into the Top 10 here? Well, it's just small things, like Les's line to Richard Gibson, previously mentioned in the Series Sixteen article, where Gibson says of his answer on a card: "I couldn't quite get it all in"; "I'd 'eard about that". Sometimes it's just the little things in life. Or, if Les is to be believed, the big things...