There was one morning a week where nine-year-old me would willingly leap out of bed, and it certainly wasn’t a school day. Saturday. Down the stairs while the rest of thew house slumbered, a bowl of Rice Krispies, the TV warming up with that faint electrical hum sets used to emit. You had a few hours, and then it was gone. Not paused. Gone, until the same slot rolled around the following weekend.
Saturday morning TV was the one appointment a child never missed, largely because missing it wasn’t an option you could buy your way out of. No catch-up. No little progress bar to drag backwards. If your mum sent you to fetch the milk during the good bit, the good bit happened without you, and you spent Monday’s playtime having it described by someone who’d seen it.
Two tribes: the calm shop and the anarchy
For a good stretch of my childhood, Saturday split the nation’s children into two camps, and you were loyal to one the way you were loyal to a football club.
On BBC1 there was Multi-Coloured Swap Shop, which ran from October 1976 to March 1982. Noel Edmonds presiding over the whole show like a mildly amused headmaster, with Keith Chegwin sent out into the rain to broadcast from car parks, John Craven doing the news for people not yet old enough for the proper news, and Maggie Philbin from 1978. It ran live for the best part of three hours and pioneered the phone-in, letting children ring in to swap a Kerplunk for a Spirograph over the airwaves. Overseeing the whole production was Posh Paws, a stuffed dinosaur whose name, if you held it up to a mirror, spelled Swap Shop… almost. This information was considered thrilling at the time. It still holds up, frankly.
Over on ITV lurked the other option: Tiswas, broadcast from Birmingham between January 1974 and April 1982. Swap Shop was the sensible A-grade cousin. Tiswas was the younger sibling expelled from school at thirteen. Chris Tarrant fronted it until 1981, Sally James joined in 1977, and a young Lenny Henry, John Gorman, and Bob Carolgees with his puppet Spit the Dog rounded out a cast that appeared to be operating without much of a plan. Its most feared regular was the Phantom Flan Flinger, a silent man in a black mask and cape whose entire professional remit was throwing custard pies at people. A career, of sorts.
Then there was the Cage, in which grown adults from the audience were penned in and repeatedly drenched with buckets of water, and Compost Corner, a pretend gardening slot that also, somehow, ended with everyone wet. By 1979 the show had become popular enough that four of its stars toured the country as the Four Bucketeers and released a single called The Bucket of Water Song. I want you to sit with the fact that this song reached the actual charts.
The cartoons in between
The studio bits were the frame. Wedged between the phone-ins and the flans came the cartoons and serials, and for a lot of us the cartoons were the real reason to be up at eight. The presenters would cut to a cartoon, vanish for ten blessed minutes, and come back slightly damper than before.
This is where you caught Battle of the Planets, Danger Mouse, and, in time, Bananaman, the tale of a boy who ate a banana and became a hero of remarkable strength and negligible intelligence. British children’s television has produced a great many things it can be proud of. A muscular idiot powered by fruit is not, on reflection, the one they put in the brochure, and yet I would not change a frame of it.
Going Live, and the second golden age
The originals both bowed out in 1982. BBC1 filled the hole with Saturday Superstore from 1982 to 1987, Mike Read at the helm, before the format hit its second peak with Going Live! in 1987.
Phillip Schofield and Sarah Greene ran that one for six years, three live hours every week, with Gordon the Gopher squeaking away at Schofield’s elbow and the comedy double act Trevor and Simon punctuating proceedings with sketches. It handed the baton to Live & Kicking with Zoe Ball in 1993, and ITV eventually came roaring back with SMTV Live in 1998, where a pre-everything Ant and Dec and Cat Deeley reminded the nation that Saturday morning could still be genuinely, helplessly funny. SMTV finally switched off the lights in December 2003.
Neither of my children, both grown now, has the faintest memory of the golden stuff their dad guarded so fiercely. To them it’s a man getting misty over a puppet gopher, which, I accept, is a fair summary.
What we quietly lost when the schedule died
It’s easy to be soppy about old TV , and I’ve done my share of it in a full week of 1988 telly and again on the adverts every 80s child can still recite. So let me be careful here. The programmes were often ropey. The picture quality would horrify a child today, and the jokes weren’t exactly sophisticated.
But the thing worth missing isn’t really the shows. It’s the appointment. A generation of children shared one clock, watched the same thing at the same moment, and turned up at school on Monday able to quote it back at one another. Today, younglings can summon any cartoon ever animated at any hour of any day, so there’s precisely no reason to leap out of bed at eight for anything. You can’t miss what you can always have. You also can’t quite look forward to it. The morning I set my whole week’s clock by has become just another thing on a menu, available forever, watched by everyone alone.
Where my books come in
If a warm bath of period detail is what you’re after, this is more or less the water I write in. The ’86 Fix drops a fed-up fortysomething back into 1986, a world of Space Invaders, Texan bars, and telly you had to be present for. And No Easy Deeds plants you in 1990 Britain alongside Danny Monk, a newly jobless bloke stumbling into estate agency and a house on Echo Lane with a secret. Both are the kind of thing you might once have settled down to watch after the cartoons finished, only longer, and with fewer buckets of water.
Frequently Asked Questions
What years did Tiswas and Swap Shop run?
Tiswas ran on ITV from January 1974 to April 1982, and Multi-Coloured Swap Shop ran on BBC1 from October 1976 to March 1982. For a stretch of the late 1970s and early 1980s they went head to head on Saturday mornings, giving British children a weekly choice between the calm of Swap Shop and the chaos of Tiswas.
What did TISWAS stand for?
The name was said to stand for “Today Is Saturday, Watch And Smile,” though the show played fast and loose with it and nobody involved ever seemed entirely committed to a single version. In practice it stood for a man in a cape throwing custard pies while adults in a cage received buckets of water, which no acronym could ever quite capture.
What replaced Going Live!?
Going Live! ran on BBC1 from 1987 to 1993 with Phillip Schofield and Sarah Greene, and was succeeded by Live & Kicking, presented initially by Zoe Ball. On ITV, SMTV Live launched in 1998 with Ant and Dec and Cat Deeley and became the most successful children’s magazine show since Tiswas before ending in December 2003.
Why did Saturday morning kids’ TV disappear?
The live Saturday morning format faded as viewing habits changed. Dedicated children’s channels, on-demand services, and later streaming meant children no longer needed a single weekly slot to see their favourite cartoons. When you can watch anything at any time, the shared national appointment that made those shows special simply stops making sense, and the ratings drifted away with it.
Which of Keith A Pearson’s novels are best for 1980s nostalgia?
The ’86 Fix is the obvious starting point, sending its hero back to 1986 with all the period detail that entails. Readers who enjoy that era of British life also tend to like No Easy Deeds, set in 1990, and A Page in Your Diary, which reaches back to the late 1980s. All are available in ebook, paperback, and audiobook, and on Kindle Unlimited.