Tuesday 13 December 2016

558 Sin On Saturday



First  viewed :  7  August  1982

The  night  after  Bill  Grundy's  quietly  valedictory  series  commenced, another  TV  career  crashed  in  a  blaze  of  hubris  and  incompetence  that  is  still  talked  about  today.

This  was  the  second  attempt, after  Saturday  Live , to  fill  the  post-Parkinson  void  and  it   crashed  spectacularly. Bernard  Falk  was  a  respected  journalist  who  effectively  reported  on election  nights  in  the  seventies  and  regularly  fronted  items  on  Nationwide.  He  was   selected to  host  a  live  music, comedy  and  chat  show  which  would  last  eight  weeks  and  cover  each of the  Seven  Deadly  Sins   before  a  final  show  about  "Getting  Caught". The  opening  titles  had  him  mugging  to  illustrate  the  various  Sins  in  a  frankly  rather  disturbing  manner. "Lust"  was  the  subject  of  the  first  episode ( the  only  one  I  saw).

Ironically  this  would  have  been  meat  and  drink  to  Grundy  in  his  prime  who  made  his  reputation  on  being  able  to  control   a  discussion  in  the  studio. Falk  on  the  other  hand  proved  to  be  completely  inept. Despite  clutching  a  wad  of  papers,  he  seemed  to  have  no  idea  of  where  he  wanted  the  discussion  to  go  and  his  consistently  ill-judged  questions  produced  some  buttock-clenching  moments. A  group  of  bathing  beauties  had  been  brought  in   as  eye  candy  and  could  only   giggle  in  embarrassment   when  Falk  blundered  up  to  them  and  asked   how  they  would  define  lust. A  Salvation  Army  officer  answered  no  he  didn't  think  there  was  a  place  for  lust.  in  a  Christian  marriage  and  then  declined  to  elaborate. Even  when,  by  chance, Falk  landed  on  something  interesting,  he  failed  to  recognise  it . He  had  Karen  Armstrong,  a  former  nun,  in   the  studio  and,  in  the  middle  of  her  riveting  account  of  flagellating  herself,  he  got  out  of  his  chair  and  ran  up  to  rugby  stripper  Erica  Roe   for  a  monosyllabic  reply  to  his  enquiry, did  she  do it  to  provoke  lust ?

The  comedy  and  music  fell  flat  as  the   audience, disproportionately  made  up  of  religious  people, refused  to  applaud  the  risque  material. It's  remarkable  how  much  hanging  rope  they  managed  to  pack  into  just  35  minutes.

The  show  is  also  often  cited  as  the  beginning  of  Oliver  Reed's  latter  day  career  as  a  drunken  saboteur  of  chat  shows  but  I'm  not  sure  he  was  that  drunk  here. Novelist  Charlotte  Lamb , who  came  on  with  him,  said  that,  backstage,  Ollie   recognised  that   he  had  boarded  the  Titanic  straight  away  and   tried  to  scarper  before  she  grabbed  his  hand  and  led  him  to  the  chairs. His  clearly  on-the-hoof   contribution - "  I  love  to  look  at  ladies  that   take  their  clothes  off . I  don't  even  care  a  jot  whether  fellows   take  their  clothes  off   and  jump  upon  them. I  think  that  if  that  is  lust  then  that's  jolly  good  too" -  didn't  add  much  to  the  sum  of  human  knowledge  but  at  least  he  was  trying.

The  wretched  farrago  was  universally  eviscerated  in  the  Monday  papers  and  apparently  some  BBC  execs  wanted  to  chop  it  there  and  then  but  Falk  was  able  to  make  two  more  programmes  on  "Covetousness"  ( which  at  least  scored  a  point  for  presience  by  having  Gary  Glitter  on )  and  "Envy"  before  the  Beeb   axed  it  to  save  further  embarrassment . Falk  was  allowed  to  continue  as  presenter  of  the  escapology  challenge  series  Now  Get  Out  Of  That   which  ran  for  a  couple  more  years   and  he  wrote  and  produced  three  documentaries  on  The  Walton  Sextuplets  in  the  eighties  but  was  certainly  never  considered  as  a  chat  show  host  again. He  died  of  a  heart  condition  in  1990  aged  47. The  show's  creator  Sean  Hardie  resigned  his  post  as  head  of  light  entertainment  at  BBC  Scotland  who  produced  the  show.

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