Team Captains: Ted Ray and Ted Rogers. Panellists: Ray Martine, Lennie Bennett, Les Dawson and Ken Earle.
The show is often compared to the stand-up series The Comedians (1971-1974 on initial run). However, it seems a somewhat broad comparison, especially as it implies there was a large crossover of acts between the two series, which there wasn't. The likes of Alfred Marks, Jon Pertwee, Warren Mitchell, Michael Aspel, John Cleese, Davy Kaye, Lonnie Donegan and Milo O'Shea wouldn't have appeared on The Comedians. And although it would have been fun to see Charlie Williams on Jokers Wild, he never crossed over, nor did George Roper or Bernard Manning.
In fact, there were just eleven acts that appeared in both series, the majority only a sizeable presence in one series, not both. Jimmy Marshall, Mike Burton and Bryn Phillips were regulars, or semi-regulars, in The Comedians, but appeared less than a handful of times in Jokers Wild. Frank Carson did appear 9 times on Jokers Wild between 1973-1974, but clocked up 47 appearances on The Comedians. Kenny Cantor, Mike Goddard, Paul Melba, Ray Fell, Tony Stewart and Stu Francis didn't appear much in either show, with just a few appearances in both.
Which brings us to Michael Berry. The only one of the eleven cross-over acts to appear more on Jokers Wild, he was a semi-regular, but made just a single appearance on The Comedians in 1971. Performing under his stage name of Lennie Bennett (or here as "Lenny"), his appearance here may be a surprise for those who only know him as a 1980s game show host with a bubble perm.
So, we get Lennie as a 1960s comedy panellist, although he was young. Episode Fourteen, recorded on the same day, has Barry Cryer announce that it's his birthday, which would mean he'd just turned 31. His youth does give him more of a vulnerability, whereas his appearances in the '70s and '80s would have a mock-egotistical/abrasive style.
As previously mentioned, the first series of Jokers Wild isn't well represented by autobiographical material, with most involved glossing over it in just a couple of sentences. (Les Dawson, A Clown Too Many, 1985: "Six top comics telling jokes and trying to outdo one another.... The show was a smash and I became even more well known through that series....") With this in mind, one of the more revelatory texts has to be Des O'Connor's 2001 autobiography Bananas can't fly!, which gave insight to Lennie.
Although Des didn't appear on the show, he described a complex relationship with Lennie, where Lennie had slated his act while working as a newspaper journalist in 1964. This led to a charity football match where they repeatedly fouled each other before calling a truce. Later Des would see Lennie performing stand-up comedy, using many of Des's jokes that he'd previously slated. "Lennie had the decency to blush. In fact, he went a dark shade of puce."
One thing to consider is that Des's recollections weren't always entirely accurate, as could be seen when watching his chat shows against his descriptions of the events - either Des's memory wasn't entirely reliable, or he exaggerated for comic effect. But Des also referred to Lennie as his "protégé" and claimed: "One evening he told me he wanted to be a professional comedian. I wasn’t going to try to talk him out of the idea, as he had a lot of confidence and his gags were funny in a glib, American style. So I decided to let bygones be bygones and agreed to try to help."
It's perhaps time to wrap this entry up, before we go down a "rabbit hole" that involves a story from the other side - Tarbuck on Showbiz (1986), with Jimmy Tarbuck describing being in hysterics after Lennie had encouraged Des to get a perm.
Team Captains: Ted Ray and Charlie Chester. Panellists: Ray Martine, Ken Earle, Les Dawson and Kenny Cantor.
Kenny Cantor is another name that may not be familiar to most. It's difficult to get a real "fix" on Kenny, as his personal website will obviously, with all due respect to him, "talk up" any achievements. Kenny did work a lot in panto, had TV work in Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) and hosted a version of Play Your Cards Right for New Zealand television in 1983. Does that make him an "international entertainer", or is that just slight hyperbole?
His first television appearance appears to have been an episode of a 1965 BBC show called Let's Laugh, followed in 1967 with an edition of The Good Old Days. As Kenny went on, his glasses became more outrageous, until he was eventually wearing a bright red bubble pair. A lot of it seems to be making the most of his appearance... he was already balding on this edition of Jokers Wild, and when he appeared on an edition of The Comedians two years later, he'd begun to grow his hair out as what was left on top was thinning even more. When he finally got to host Play Your Cards Right in New Zealand he was 44, but with long white hair at the sides and then completely bald on top, he looked older.
Kenny's two appearances on Jokers Wild are very highly ranked here, though that's not because of Kenny. In fairness, it's not despite him, either, though it's always awkward when someone does something like a glasses-waggling routine, pictured above, and a tumbleweed goes through the audience. Most of his gags just go over okay, though it would have been interesting to see him given another chance. He passed away in 2019 aged 80.
Team Captains: Ted Ray and Alfred Marks. Panellists: Ray Martine, Ray Cameron, John Junkin and Dave Allenby.
Although Les Dawson is fond of interrupting Ray Martine to wind him up, one thing that really shines through is the very obvious affection between the two of them. (Les, in 1985's A Clown Too Many, describes first seeing Ray in 1967 on a Blackpool theatre show: "I didn’t understand anything about [a singer], nor the other comic on the bill, Ray Martine, whose humour was acid and vulgar. (We went on to become firm friends, however.)")
This sense of care between the two really adds to most episodes, but with Les absent from this edition, the sense of love is also sadly absent here. While Alfred Marks's superior tone can be thought of as an affection, there's a savagely cutting put-down from John Junkin towards Ray: "What a shame you don't have Oscar Wilde's wit as well as his habits". Allusions to Ray's sexuality crop up in nearly every episode, many of them from himself, but none as mean-spirited as this. Doubtless both would say it was just jokes, but it lacks warmth from Junkin's side.
It's actually this slightly unpleasant undercurrent that helps this episode rank so high, as, perversely, it's one of the most watchable due to how unfriendly it can be. The other reason is Ray's rebelling against the entire spirit of the show by, as pictured, spreading pages out on his desk. For while the artifice of Jokers Wild is that comedians are given topics for which they must spontaneously come up with jokes, there is the strong suspicion that this isn't actually what takes place, and that many of them are actually scripted.
This would appear to be corroborated by Bob Monkhouse, although he wouldn't take part in the show until 1972, when things may have been different. In his 1994 autobiography Crying with Laughter Bob stated that the show was "a comedy panel game that was about as genuinely spontaneous as Big Ben". Such matters would seem to be reflected in Ray Martine's open disdain for a lot of the material he has to say, or the habit of guests seeming to glance down while delivering a joke.
Ted Ray goes in the opposite direction, repeating the subject title that Barry gives him and taking a moment to think, which could be a commendable attempt to disguise the planned material, while Les Dawson usually goes straight into a gag, and displays the wit to suggest that it genuinely could be off the top of his head.
Whatever the truth behind the set up of the show, it does somewhat detract knowing that what you're watching is essentially staged, and the core ethos of the programme completely illusory - or possibly the reality was somewhere in between the two? Yet we have a high ranking edition here due to Ray Martine's transparent rebellion against the show, taking the concept of "biting the hand that feeds" and elevating it to a high level.
Team Captains: Ted Ray and Roy Hudd. Panellists: Ray Martine, Don MacLean, Les Dawson and Paul Andrews.
From the most unpleasant atmosphere to one of the nicest, with Roy Hudd joining as a Team Captain and spreading a bit more love around the studios. While there's instances like Les Dawson and Roy crying hysterically with laughter at how old Ray Martine's jokes are, it's all in good spirit and comradery. In all, not an outstanding watch, but one of the most appealing.
While we're on the subject of Roy Hudd as the Team Captain, there might be those of you who are obsessed with nerd statting, and want to know the answer to that all-important question: Which opposition Team Captain was the most successful?
Well, technically Jimmy Edwards had the highest average, as he got a score of 70 and was only on one show, but as Ted Ray's team that week got 75, he only has a loss to his name. Charlie Chester had the next highest averages of the six opposing Team Captains in this run, getting an average of 67.5 points... unfortunately Ted Ray's team averaged 70 points during this period, and Charlie had two wins, two losses and a draw.
Roy came next, with an average of 62.5, one win and a draw (1-0-1). Next was Ted Rogers (58.75, 1-2-1), David Nixon (57.5, 1-0-1) and the least successful in terms of average points per game was Alfred Marks, averaging 55 points... fortunately for Alfred, Ted Ray averaged 51 during the same period making Alfred's record 2-1-2. All of which is a lot of information for a comedy game show where the points really meant nothing, and Barry Cryer was generally making the scores up as he went along.
Team Captains: Ted Ray and Charlie Chester. Panellists: Les Dawson, Bobby Pattinson, Ray Martine and Jimmy Marshall.
Shot at Leeds Television Centre on April 15th 1969, this unbroadcast pilot saw the show arrive pretty much fully-formed, and a series was commissioned off the back of it. It was eventually made available as part of the Series One DVD Boxset.
As previously mentioned, Barry gets two assistants who display the playing cards and themselves, but everything else is pretty much the same. Oddly, Les Dawson and Bobby Pattinson are on Ted Ray's team, while Ray Martine is with Charlie Chester, and Jimmy Marshall makes his only appearance in the show. There's also the matter of the "Joker" card in the show, which means the comedian in question can tell a joke on any subject if it comes out - in the pilot it's called "Free Choice".
It's more formal than the show would become, but then a lot of the earlier episodes have a slightly more "upmarket" quality to them. Ray Martine and Les Dawson start their rivalry early, with Ray refusing Les's interruption (by a flashing light, the buzzer noise not working) and insisting on continuing with his joke, causing Barry to bang a gavel to silence him.
If we're going to talk about shocking material, then Charlie Chester suddenly dropping into a routine about "illegal Pakistanis" and doing a "Pakistani" accent comes out of nowhere, and is one of the more surprising elements of the run - though of course, it was never shown. The rise in immigration saw Pakistanis overtake the Irish for source material in The Comedians, but does feel a little more startling in the more austere atmosphere of Jokers Wild. (Not a criticism of The Comedians, per se, but Jokers Wild had, for want of a better word, slightly more sophistication... or at least as sophisticated as a show can be when it's men smoking and telling jokes that are at least a decade old.)
The timing is slightly off in this one, in the sense that the televised episodes of the first series fell in the 24-25 minute range, whereas this one stretches to over 29. One last point of trivia - the scores Barry gives are far higher in this edition - not counted in the earlier scores list - and see Ted Ray winning with 125 points to 120. In the series proper the highest score achieved was 85 by Charlie Chester's team in Episode Five, whereas the lowest were two weeks of 40 points by Ted Ray's team in Episodes Nine and Ten.
Team Captains: Ted Ray and Charlie Chester. Panellists: Ray Martine, Ken Earle, Les Dawson and Kenny Cantor.
Malcolm Vaughan was a straight man in a double act with Ken Earle, and also had several hit singles in the 1950s as a fine tenor singer. The artifice of the show is flagged up here where Ken is picked to do the stand-up spot and Malcolm comes, uncredited, out of the studio audience to do a double act with him on the subject of "topical". Did Malcolm turn up to the recording on the off-chance? As this edition was also recorded on the same day as Episode Four, would he have done a routine on "sport" had Ken been chosen that time?
Of course, both episodes have a member of the studio audience picking the name of the performer from a card at random, but we only have Barry's word for it that the cards contain all six names, he never shows us... come to that, we only have Barry's word for it that it's a member of the studio audience and not a plant picking the card.
It doesn't really matter. It's a fun show, Les Dawson gets to do his "blowing the candle out" routine (as seen with the main image on this page), and Ray Martine is determined to disrupt events. Ray again points to the questionable set-up of the show when Les Dawson refuses to do backing vocals on one of his jokes, saying the gag is too awful - "You gave it to me in rehearsal". The sight of Les and Ray interrupting each other and insulting each other's jokes is a strong one, with the real affection coming through.
Team Captains: Ted Ray and Roy Hudd. Panellists: Ray Martine, Don MacLean, Les Dawson and Paul Andrews.
Usually shows which fall into disarray can be frustrating, as you're tuning in to hear gags, not people shouting over each other. But this fun edition not only has Ray Martine thrown off as usual, but even Les Dawson forgets a joke he's telling due to heckling and cracks up.
Is Jokers Wild funny in general? As I said at the start, such things are subjective, but the gags are pretty corny today. Some will make you laugh and groan, some you'll just sit through, and occasionally you might get a genuine belly laugh. But it's not the jokes, it's the telling, and the interaction between the panellists that make a show.
Ray Martine makes such a complete mess of a joke in this edition that even his own Team Captain Ted Ray turns on him with a "Would you like to carry on as a participant on the panel, or become a Jehovah's Witness?" It's all good-spirited stuff, with gags that flop, panellists going into hysterics, and even the solo stand-up spot - by Don MacLean - seeing him partially dying on stage before he wins the audience over. It's chaos, but it's fun chaos, with a good spirit behind it.
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