Team Captains: Ted Ray and Ted Rogers. Panellists: Ray Martine, Lennie Bennett, Les Dawson and Ken Earle.
Although two colour episodes had been tried on the old set, this is the first broadcast edition where things change. There's a new title sequence, not just the black-and-white one tinted pink, and the series has shifted to the City Varieties Music Hall in Leeds. A change that prompts Les Dawson to say "May I say what a pleasure it is to be appearing in this theatrical cupboard".
The new location seems cramped, with the two teams practically on top of each other; you can see a crewmember encouraging the audience to clap; and the sound seems "off". Yet it does appear that while there's less room for the cast to shine, there's more room for an audience, with what looks like a much larger crowd watching. This is reflected in the sound, with the laughter amped up considerably.
Does this make it funnier? Not really, at least not in this instance. There's too much squabbling among the panel and talking over each other, as they play up to this new, very audible, intake. While the panel rowing is nearly always amusing, the concept of the show - they're there to tell jokes - does get a little lost in the mix.
Team Captains: Ted Ray and Charlie Chester. Panellists: Ray Martine, Lennie Bennett, Les Dawson and Paul Andrews.
A pretty fun edition, with Team Captain Ted Ray turning against his own team member in Ray Martine. On the opposite side as Team Captain is Cecil Victor Manser, performing under his stage name Charlie Chester. Charlie was a big hit on radio, particularly during the 1940s-1960s, while he was also one of the early team involved with the start of It's A Knockout in 1966.
Reviews of Jokers Wild seem to have a mandatory requirement to mention the fact that there's a lot of smoking on the show, and it appears that only seven of the comedians from this first run didn't smoke (unless I blinked and missed them doing it): Kenny Cantor, Norman Collier, Bobby Dennis, Jimmy Edwards, Don MacLean, Bobby Pattinson and Tony Stewart.
This edition sees a fully tobacco-puffing panel, with only Isabella Rye not partaking. It was a situation remarked upon in Channel 4's 2014 It Was Alright in the 1970s: Pleasure, with Barry Cryer noting: "Oh, there's ashtrays in shot, errrrm, smoke drifting across the screen, you cannot believe what you are watching. [...] Something you can do wIth the hand, It's qulte dramatlc, you can punctuate dialogue with a cigarette and everything. And that has... that has gone."
Team Captains: Ted Ray and Ted Rogers. Panellists: Ray Martine, Ray Cameron, Les Dawson and Norman Collier.
A chucklesome final episode from the run, with some nice banter between the group and Barry Cryer getting the great putdown of Ray Martine: "Ray makes Jewish people anti-Semitic". Such gags, and Ray ending the show by doing a Nazi salute, aren't things that would go over all that well today, but we'll talk about that kind of thing when we look at Episode Eleven. (Incidentally, in case you're wondering, then Norman Collier doesn't really tell any killer gags in this first series, but is a likeable presence, and his microphone constantly works.)
So, a key text in looking at Jokers Wild is actually Life & Laughing: My Story, a 2011 autobiography by harmlessly bland "your gran would like him" comedian Michael McIntyre. The reason for this is that Michael's father was Thomas Cameron McIntyre, who co-created and appeared on Jokers Wild under his professional name of Ray Cameron.
In Michael McIntyre's book he describes Ray working on bringing back Jokers Wild years later for the BBC under the name "The Hecklers", with Tony Slattery as host. Michael describes the panel as the then-unknown Mark Steel, Steve Coogan and Richard Morton, which suggests that the six-comedian set-up was being jettisoned, at least for the pilot stage. While the show wasn't taken up, 1994 saw the BBC launch the... similar... Gagtag.
However, while waiting for the BBC's decision on whether to commission the pilot, Ray committed suicide two days after Christmas in 1993. One of the tragic parts of Michael's autobiography is that his step-mother had tried to shield him from the truth by telling him Ray had died of a heart attack - a fabrication he unwittingly prints. (His 2022 follow-up book, A Funny Life, studied for this article as an audiobook, appears to avoid the subject entirely.)
Michael claims that while Ray received praise as a stand-up, including from Dave Allen, it wasn't entirely his thing: "I don’t think his vocation was to perform, and his move behind the camera began when he devised the comedy panel show Jokers Wild for Yorkshire Television".
As a comedian, then Ray gets loud cheers on this edition, and is proficient at comedy, but as a Canadian you always sense that there's a slight resistance to him from the elderly audience who are there to watch old school UK comics. He was also young, just 31, though even Barry Cryer, who had always seemed to be eternally a white-haired elderly man to those of us born in the '70s and '80s, was just 34. It was with Barry that Ray Cameron went on to become a comedy writer, most successfully with Kenny Everett. Ray's later lack of success and resulting financial strain contributing towards to him taking his own life.
Team Captains: Ted Ray and Ted Rogers. Panellists: Ray Martine, Ray Cameron, Les Dawson and Norman Collier.
The audience making up Jokers Wild is very much the "blue rinse" set, where you practically had to hand over your pension book just to get into the studio. And that's not a bad thing. The older members of society have a right to be entertained, and are more likely to be indoors watching television, but over time commercial channels have shifted more towards a youth-orientated demographic, largely due to them having more disposable income and being more likely to buy stuff they see in the adverts. The BBC, while not selling stuff (at least officially), have followed the same model, so most television today is aimed at the iPhone set rather than your gran.
If you look at the population data from the Office for National Statistics (What's that? Who's a massive geek?) then they don't go as far back as 1969, but do have the stats for 1971. Those stats would declare a population for England and Wales of just under 56 million, of which, just over 17 million (or 30.93%) were aged 50 or above. (65 or above and it's still a healthy 13.25%). Forward to mid-2023 and this figure rises to over 38%... with people living longer in general, 65 or over in 2023 was 18.84%, the best part of a fifth of the population. Yet this sizeable part of the population seems to be getting increasingly ignored by television.
All of which statistical rambling brings us back to an audience that was being catered for at this time, and even all the way up to the 1980s, but then gradually fell out of favour with programmers. And it brings us back to the poor guy, pictured. In one of the cruellest directorial decisions, the camera goes to an audience shot, focussing on him.... when Ted Rogers is doing a routine about going bald and buying wigs. Bless him.
Team Captains: Ted Ray and Jimmy Edwards. Panellists: Ray Martine, Bobby Dennis, Les Dawson and Bobby Pattinson.
One of the charms of watching Jokers Wild is discovering comedians you may not have been aware of. While the series often featured "up and comers", it also featured established comedians, which, if they were very much "before your time", would be just as unknown to you.
An example here is Robert Gomersall, performing under his stage name "Bobby Dennis". Gomersall was only in his early forties - not a great age for a comedian - and has a youthful appearance that meant he could have passed for younger. The perhaps natural assumption is that he was one of the new breed, but he'd actually been appearing on stage as a small boy since 1939. With Gomersall more known for his work on stage, then this is one of his later performances after he'd been in the business for around three decades, though he did later have small parts in It Ain't Half Hot Mum and Hi-de-Hi!.
What's fascinating about Gomersall is that while he must have been successful elsewhere, his sole appearance on Jokers Wild is a bit of a flop. His first chance to tell a joke tanks, with him not only having to explain he's reached the punchline, but with Barry Cryer asking the audience if he deserves any points for it, and getting a resounding "no".
His second chance sees him give up on the chosen subject ("Hollywood") entirely, and pass it along to Ted Ray. Only during the final two "quick-fire" rounds does he get a couple of moderate laughs from the audience. (Yes, they play two rounds of quick-fire in this edition, possibly because of time... in other "unusual occurrence" news, Les Dawson doesn't interrupt Ray Martine in this edition.)
Another performer who only appeared once is Jimmy Edwards, though his involvement is solid albeit unremarkable. Playing one of the "opposition Team Captains" to the team of Ted Ray, he produces moderate yet forgettable amusement. Possibly out of his depth, admitting he doesn't know any jokes, Edwards didn't return, though there's the suspicion that, unlike another "one shot" contestant on the show, Jimmy may have been asked.
Team Captains: Ted Ray and Alfred Marks. Panellists: Ray Martine, Mike Burton, John Junkin and Tony Stewart.
So, why do the episodes keep flitting from black-and-white to colour throughout this first series? A dozen (including the unaired pilot) were recorded in black-and-white, followed by eight in colour. But the confusion comes because the first thirteen (including two colour ones) were mixed around in order by ITV, shown completely out of sequence.
The last six in the run had a more logical order, with teams returning, but for the opening 13 weeks the only real way you could work out which episodes were recorded on the same day (if not the order in which they were recorded) is to spend about an hour studying the audience shots on freeze frame and working out which episodes had the same studio audience - something only a complete nerd would waste time doing.
This edition, however, clearly follows Episode Eleven, with new Team Captain Alfred Marks pretending to have a letter from a viewer complaining about the way Ray Martine made fun of his bald head "last week". Such a remark is made nonsensical by this episode being broadcast first, so that not only have you got Marks referring to events that haven't been seen yet, you've got him talking about being on the show before when this was his first televised appearance.
Those episodes recorded on the same day with the same studio audience, then:
1.1/1.12
1.2/1.3*/1.5
1.4/1.6
1.7/1.8/1.11
1.9/1.10
* This one is particularly complicated, as some of the front row members have been changed, but it is the same audience overall.
Intriguingly, 1.13 appears to have been recorded by itself, with no matching audience members. Yet it's to be assumed that it was one of the first six filmed (not including the pilot) as it includes Isabella Rye.
Team Captains: Ted Ray and Alfred Marks. Panellists: Ray Martine, Mike Burton, John Junkin and Tony Stewart.
It's pointless getting into the discussion of whether the show meets modern standards when it comes to comedy. It's 1969. If you're watching a show over 55 years old and wondering if it's politically correct decades before the term "political correctness" entered the mainstream, then it's a lost cause. The show is what it is. You'll have to go forward to series eight before you get a female comedian on the panel, "stoned" is slang for drunk, and there'll be a few gags about mother-in-laws.
Yet having said all this, the show really isn't all that bad for the time, should it matter. It doesn't really bother The Anorak Zone, because you're watching an "historical document", with all that it entails... you've made the conscious choice to watch it. But out of all of the first series, this is the one with the most race-orientated gags, with Ray Martine bristling at a harsh Jew gag, and some Chinese gags, as well as loads of Irish routines.
This last one is particularly significant, as the show was most popular in the Ulster ITV region, where at least 6 out of the 17 episodes shown there (one week is unavailable) made the Top 10. This is better than the show's own Yorkshire region, where it only charted once. (Again, pending one unavailable week for ratings.) So you've essentially got a show that's mocking its biggest audience.
This first series was actually given little chance in the ratings, with various different ITV regions showing it at different times - ATV and Southern not showing it at all. It had a primetime 7pm Wednesday slot in the Yorkshire region, but while Channel, Grampian and Westward all placed it on Saturday night, all three did so in a post-watershed timeslot, sometimes approaching midnight. Border was a little more generous, placing it around 8pm on Sunday nights.
There were also two regions that broadcast the episodes after the series had finished elsewhere. STV broadcast nine episodes from this first series months after the fact in 1970, while Tyne Tees showed just four editions in an 11pm slot from 27th November-18th December 1969. (Due to the repeats of panel members, there are twelve separate possible contenders for those particular four, though the only one that can be confirmed is the edition with Jimmy Edwards, which Newcastle viewers would have got to see on 11th December.)
The only two regions to show this first series in the same 7pm timeslot as Yorkshire were Ulster and Anglia, with both showing the series from the third episode onwards. Perhaps the most significant scheduling choice was the Harlech ITV region showing it post-11pm, but on Tuesday nights before the Yorkshire primetime slot... meaning the premiere date of each episode was technically a Tuesday.
Such TV minutiae does come with the caveat that this information has been sourced by myself spending hours poring through archive newspapers, so if there's a mistake - I don't believe there is - I apologise. Also, you may notice that several pieces of information in this article also appear on the show's IMDb entry, and wonder if I've ripped them off, or vice versa. Come on, now... who do you think is a big enough nerd to sit there updating Jokers Wild on the IMDb?