Worst to Best
Blankety Blank
Series Eleven

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18 Episode Fifteen

Guest Panellists: Ian McCaskill, Kathy Staff, Ken Bruce, Bonnie Langford, Bernie Clifton and Aimi MacDonald.

The ratings for series eleven dropped, but were generally reasonably strong. None of the episodes broke the Top 20, and it got off to a slow start, but the series broke nine million with the fifth episode and generally carried on strongly thereafter. In fact, if you take away the ratings for the first four episodes and this edition, the average for the remaining 17 episodes was 9.95 million and 34th place in the charts.
      So, why take away the ratings for this edition? Well, airing on New Year's Day 1988, this one had the unfortunate fate of being scheduled opposite ITV's New Year movie, a broadcast of Superman II... which is great entertainment, to be fair. As the comic book campery of Terence Stamp made 8th place in the charts with 13.6 million tuning in, Blankety Blank was massacred in the ratings, dropping to 86th place with just 6.6 million, a drop of five million from the previous week.
      By the end of series eleven, 91 Les Dawson episodes were in the can, and the ratings for 86 of them are available in the newspaper archives. So while it can't be absolutely confirmed, it would have to be heavily assumed that this ratings dive - which was, to be fair, an aberration - was the lowest point that the Dawson run had reached to this date. It would be far from the lowest when Series 13 came around, but that's another story.
      Featuring the last appearance of Ian McCaskill and the sole guest spot of DJ Ken Bruce, perhaps the most curious element is the last name of one of the contestants. Not one with the surname "Bent", which brings the house down (it was the '80s) but one with the fairly unique name of "Simmonite". The surname was, of course, the unusual last name of "Compo" from Last of the Summer Wine - and, by quite an extraordinary coincidence, LOSTW star Kathy Staff is on the panel, yet it never gets mentioned.

17 Episode
Twenty-Two

Guest Panellists: Lionel Blair, Bertice Reading, Duncan Norvelle, Debbie Greenwood, Danny La Rue and Aimi MacDonald.

Despite being a Les regular, this was the only appearance from Bertice Reading in the run, and she wouldn't be back until the thirteenth series. However, this may have been due to the twelfth series being cut short - a story for next time. Les has some fun with Bertice, and always raises a smile when doing his impression of Danny La Rue actually to Danny, and there's a 6'9 contestant he likens to Lurch. Having tall contestants was a bit of a theme during this run, with episodes 4 and 6 making the most of a size difference, though none so great as this.
      Yet there is a feeling, perhaps quite naturally, that the show has run out of steam a little after 22 episodes. Filling over 11 hours of television a year isn't easy, and here Les opens with his old gag about reflecting on the infinity of the universe while sat at the bottom of his garden. ("I must put a roof on this lavatory.")
      While it was an old part of Les's routine elsewhere, used at least as far back as a 1983 episode of The Good Old Days (and probably much, much earlier), this time it had also been heard on Blankety Blank before, being used as the opening monologue to 8.6. This doesn't mean it can't be used again, or that viewers would remember that he'd used the same routine almost exactly three years earlier. But it is a sign that the material was perhaps getting stretched towards the end of the run - again, no bad thing, such elements are only to be expected for such a large number of episodes.

16 Episode Nine

Guest Panellists: Roy Walker, Barbara Windsor, Mark Curry, Cheryl Baker, Bernard Cribbins and Jean Fergusson.

The return of Bernard Cribbins to the panel after an appearance in an unscreened pilot and two of the 1980 episodes. It's also the first of three appearances from Mark Curry, the amusingly clumsy Blue Peter host who gets some good-natured digs from Les. Lastly, it's the sole appearance on the original run for Jean Fergusson (spelt Ferguson in the credits) who performed pretty much the exact same script in over 200 episodes of Last of the Summer Wine as Marina, and came back to Blankety Blank for the Lily Savage revival version.
      As with the previous entry, this is, in many ways, the show on autopilot, with Les performing jokes that he'd not only done many times in the past on other shows, but even jokes he'd done before on Blankety Blank. Yet while it's one of the less inspired shows from the run, it's no chore to sit through, and definitely puts a smile on your face, even if said smile is familiar.
      You may be shocked when Les does a pun on curtains, telling people he feels like he's been "draped", and you may have a childish chuckle when Bernard Cribbins reveals an answer with "Mine's bigger than a trumpet...", acting as a perfect lead-in to Les. There's a bit where Les and Roy Walker joke about the difference in prizes between the show and Catch Phrase, which does have the unfortunate air of feeling pre-rehearsed like the Roy Castle stuff, and there's an opportunity to see a member of the crew peeping out from behind the set during the revolve for the first Supermatch.
      Speaking of the Supermatch, there's also a nice trip back in time when Cheryl Baker is laughed at for her suggestion to the question of "Cash [BLANK]" with "dispenser". Although the UK got its first cash machine back in 1967, it was a far cry from the world we live in today, where people were still paying for things by writing out a cheque, and debit cards had only been introduced in the UK during the year this episode went out. Ironically enough, the UK's first drive-through cash machine is said to be at Hatton Cross, and was opened in May 1998 by... Cheryl Baker.

15 Episode Eighteen

Guest Panellists: Vince Hill, Wendy Richard, Joe Longthorne, Tessa Sanderson, Norman Collier and Anne Robinson.

A decision was made fairly early on with these Blankety Blank articles to never do post-scripts or amendments. There may have been the odd piece of ratings information that has been discovered and added, but generally it's an ongoing journey where things are discovered as we go along. As a result, some conflicting information may arise. The panellists involved appeared on all sorts of regional and late-night shows, and not every appearance can be tracked down indefinitely.
      Take, for example, the series eight article that tried to find context for a feud between Les and Bernard Manning that really broke out in late 1991. Although it appeared that Les may have "fired the first shots", as the modern terminology has it, it's since been found that a performance by Bernard on The James Whale Radio Show in February 1991 was already slating Les, starting his act with: "Could be worse, you could have Les Dawson stood here, couldn't yer? Eh? He's about as a funny as rabies in a guide dog's home, that fella. I'd sooner walk round Leeds with a six inch nail in me shoe than pay to watch him." Quite what started off the spat still requires further investigation, illustrating that there's always more to be uncovered when it comes to the serious subject that is Blankety Blank.
      With this in mind, then some tomes that haven't been able to be obtained for research are Ee - I've Had Some Laughs by Charlie Williams and Just A Job by Norman Collier. Collier's is still within the bounds of affordability, though the cost of living crisis and having spent a lot of money on autobiographies already this year has put a temporary stop on things. (Syd Little's life story cost me more money on postage than the book itself, bless him.) However, Charlie's really is the Holy Grail, where over £60 is needed to find out those all-important details of his early life.
      So, here we have the final appearance on the show of Norman, sans information from his memoirs, joining in with the fun with Les, though never really able to do his own thing like he did under Wogan - even his microphone is always fixed by the sound manager. However, Les and Norman working together does produce some dodgy moments - rare in this eleventh series after a mass of them in the tenth - with Japanese accents and "piano lid" remarks to Tessa Sanderson.
      This episode also features the sole appearance of Joe Longthorne, and the only appearance in the original run of Anne Robinson. Anne was still at the start of her mammoth run as presenter of Points of View (1987-1996), still a few years off her "mean" persona, and a benign presence. When this episode was recorded, she'd completed just 18 out of over 400 episodes as a regular host, as well as 3 guest spots for former host Barry Took the previous year. By the time the episode was broadcast, she'd been in the chair for over a year. In terms of Blankety Blank, then Anne would come back for two revival versions of the show: in 1998 with the misguided Lily Savage version, and, even worse, in 2016 with a horrifically misfiring Christmas Special with David Walliams.
      Lastly, in terms of trivia, then the "correct match" flaps that the contestants flip over have numbers written on the back in what looks like marker pen. With both this and Episode 11.20 recorded together on the 9th May 1987, it's a curious production development that stretches across both editions, and can be seen in the screenshot above.

14 Episode Five

Guest Panellists: Barry Cryer, Nina Myskow, Christian Dion, Su Ingle, Frank Carson and Beverley Adams.

The panel debut of former Tomorrow's World presenter Su Ingle, and the sole appearances of journalist Nina Myskow, actress Beverley Adams and Christian Dion. Nina was big at the time as a "nasty" judge on a revival of New Faces, and, if the criticism she got did seem out of proportion, it was a reputation she stoked, with a TV review column calling herself the "bitch" on the box. It was the 1980s.
      Beverley Adams was one of the stars of No Place Like Home, a sitcom so middle class it could be a quinoa-eating cardigan called Julian. Featuring the likes of William Gaunt and Martin Clunes, popular myth would have it that it was a smash hit until some of the characters got recast, then it started to bomb. However, the ratings actually went up after the recasting, and No Place Like Home was never actually more than moderately popular. Exactly how popular can be found by placing your mouse on the image above for the hidden image text. Adams appears to have spent her time post-Place on the stage, with it and this episode of Blankety Blank seemingly her sole TV work.
      However, the guest that caused me to spend the most time searching through newspaper archives is Christian Dion. A "clairvoyant" from Wakefield, his first television appearance appears to have been almost exactly two years before this episode was broadcast, featuring as a guest on an 11th October 1985 edition of Good Morning Britain. He's since relocated to California to continue his psychic work over there, but not before he became a "household name" in the UK - so his personal website says.
      Even with a sore throat, Frank Carson manages to say more than all of them combined, though his joke that "It's not a great show tonight, is it, Les?" is off the mark. A show where the atmosphere doesn't quite gel, the game barely hangs together and a lot of the new panellists don't really work (Dion particularly, though Les doesn't make much effort to involve him) is a perverse delight. Les makes constant sarcastic reference to it being a "fun" show, and elements not going to plan - there are several moments which appear edited out - and talks about it being "fast-moving".
      One last piece of trivia is that Les discards the "viewer from Cheltenham" routine for this series (though does bring it back in series twelve) instead opting for more generic goodbyes, and God blesses in most of the editions. Only six editions get a reference to a "viewer", though of no specified area or name, with this one ending with "Our viewer at home". Les does seem like he can't wait to get the show over with in this one, and most of his series eleven sign-offs have a similarly "through the motions" feel, but the idea of him signing off on what appears to be a behind-the-scenes disaster only adds to the fun for the viewers.

13 Episode Seven

Guest Panellists: Dennis Waterman, Bella Emberg, Geoff Capes, Rula Lenska, Norman Collier and Dinah Sheridan.

This journey through a light entertainment quiz show of questionable cultural merit has, on occasion, led to some dark paths. There's the shadow of Yewtree with some of the panellists, or Les's depression, ill health and the death of his wife. This edition features the final appearances of Dennis Waterman and Rula Lenska, together on the show for the first time, a married couple with a destructive relationship that would go on to involve domestic violence.
      Such unsavoury issues aren't really things to linger on in discussing a family quiz show, though there is a brief mock flare up during the show when Dennis writes down a very schoolboyish answer of "chastity belts", crossing out the "chastity" as if it was a mistake and then completing his real answer of "safety". It's juvenile, nonsensical stuff, which causes Rula to say "That's not funny", with Waterman countering: "How would you know?" When Les jokingly encourages them to "have a row", Rula picks up her thick marker pen and throws it at Dennis, hitting him in the shoulder.
      This is not to make light in any way of domestic violence, or to suggest that their serious relationship issues were as a result of Dennis being hit with a Blankety Blank highlighter pen. But the darker side of their relationship, some years after this appearance, was admitted by Waterman in his 2000 autobiography ReMinder. A book where Dennis described Les Dawson as "My old mate", Waterman stated: "One night the jibes got more than I could bear. It's true, I'd been drinking, but I was at the end of my tether. I snapped and lashed out. It's no defence I know, but it was the only time I ever hurt her. [...] I am desperately ashamed. I had raised my hand to a woman."
      (This quote was transcribed from the audio book, read by Dennis himself, so the punctuation may differ to the print version. Strangely Dennis also says that no one had ever driven him to violence before, woman or man - despite earlier talking about punching tabloid cameramen. He also talks about having "lashed out" at Rula on three occasions, which does seem to conflict with, if not downright contradict, his earlier statements.)
      In 2013's Rula: My Colourful Life, Lenska claimed it was on more than one occasion, but also strangely gave him an unusual "excuse" for such behaviour, claiming: "Dennis was never violent when he was sober. It was not part of his character. It was only the drink that created it." Waterman's excessive drinking is actually alluded to by Les in this edition, who claims: "We caught him in a good mood between burps."
      Violence does actually permeate the episode, albeit comic violence: Geoff Capes grabs Les twice, while Bella Emberg also stands up to him, and Dennis bops him with a question card, before Les slaps his face. Although the dynamic between Les and Geoff is good, there's always a slightly worrying air, given that Capes is so good at being deadpan.