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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