74 Opportunity Knocks

First  watched  : December  1971  or  January  1972

I  can  be  more  precise  about  when  I  first  watched  this  because  it  was  one  Monday  night  when  I  had  already  been  put  to  bed  but  my  mother  called  me  down  to  watch  this  little  lad  ( Neil  Reid  above ) perform  on  Opportunity  Knocks. The  exact  reason  why  is  less  easy  to  determine. Perhaps  I  had  evinced  some  ambition  to  perform  or  she  just  felt  he  might  be  a  good  role  model  at  a  time  when  I  was  in   a  lot  of  conflict  with  my  sister  fuelled  by  "Why  can't  you  be  more  like  your  sister ?"  criticism  at  school. Neil  was  actually   a  poor  fit  for  this; he  was  nearly  twice  as  old  as  me  and   an  experienced  performer  in  the  Scottish  clubs  when  he  first  appeared  on  the  show  on  13th  December  1971  and  won  for  six  weeks  in  a  row.

 I  began  watching  it  regularly  some  time  in  1973  when  bedtime  had  been  pushed  back  to  8pm   as  I  remember   Peters  and  Lee  winning  it. Others  I  remember  on  the  show  include   the  singing  miners  Millican  and  Nesbitt, still  one  of  the  most  unlikely  acts  ever  to  make  the  charts,  Candlewick  Green  and  the  ghastly  Lena  Zavaroni  whose  tragic  end  tends  to  suppress  mention  of  how  awful  she  was.

I  don't  remember  anyone  past  Pam  Ayres  in  1975; perhaps  none  of  the  subsequent   winners  were  able  to  capitalise on  it  . Nor  do  I  remember  the  right  wing  rants  by  oily  Candaian  host  Hughie  Green  that  caused  , or  at  least  gave  an  excuse  for,  the  cancellation  of  the  show  in  1978. It's  said  that  Hughie  was  preparing  a  broadcast  in  which  he  would   propose  himself  a  la  Geoffrey  Palmer  in  Reginald  Perrin  as  the  head  of  an  alternative  government.

Poor  Hughie  never  got  back  on  TV  on  a  regular  basis ,  a  fact  he  predictably  blamed  on  left  wing  blacklisting,  and  wasted  much  of  his  fortune  on  foolhardy  lawsuits  despite  already  having  experienced  bankruptcy  in  the  fifties  from  a  failed  attempt  to  sue  the  BBC. His  one  small  victory  was  a  credit  as  "Programme  Consultant"  when  the  BBC  revived  the  show  under  Bob  Monkhouse  in  1987  (  I  never  bothered  to watch  that ).  He  died  of  lung  cancer  in  1997  and  would  be  largely  forgotten  now  were  it  not  for  the  revelation  that  he  was  Paula  Yates's  dad  and  therefore  caught  up  in  the  ongoing   real - life  soap  opera  surrounding  the  late  presenter  and her  family.

As  numerous  nostalgia  shows  and  newspaper  articles  have  pointed  out  in  recent  years, Neil's  time  in  the  spotlight  was  very  brief  and  he  soon  found  himself  marooned  in  Blackpool  doing  cabaret. In  his  mid-thirties  he  quit , re-trained  in  finance  and  is  now  a  management  consultant  though  still  based  in  Blackpool  where  he  sometimes  performs  at  the  independent  Oasis  church.