Presenters now and then: McDonald Hobley, Charlie Chester, Eddie Wring, David Vine, Stuart Hall
EDDIE WARING
'THE GREATEST SHOTS I'VE SEEN ON TELEVISION'
`EASY,' Eddie Waring said, clearly relishing the opportun¬ity of giving an airing to his all but encyclopedic knowledge of the show he's been associated with since the very beginning, ten years ago. And, as good as his word, he tripped out stories of limbo dancers in Blackpool and penguin-men in Essen, and fancy-dress duckings the length and breadth of Europe.
In common with McDonald
Hobley and Charlie Chester, he recalled the near-fiasco of the first programme from More¬cambe, when the in-coming tide swamped the three-legged foot¬ball and very nearly washed the rostrum camera out to sea. There was also the small prob¬lem of the beach roundabout man who refused to move.
But it was to an early match between Bridlington and Scar¬borough that Eddie turned for one of his most vivid memories. 'In those days,' he said, 'we had a marathon event running through each programme, and this particular week the idea was to build a pontoon bridge out of pit props across a lake, and then run backwards and forwards across it with balloons. It so happens that most of the contestants were paratroopers but, let me tell you, I've never seen men so exhausted. They were literally throwing up every few minutes on the bank. It was tremendous. Some of the greatest shots I've seen on TV.'
There can be no doubt but that the years have seen the equipment used in It's a Knock¬out becoming steadily more so¬phisticated, and the attitude of those taking part in it more (Eddie Waring, having con¬sidered it at length, thought it was a fair word) professional. Time was when British teams took bottles of Scotch as pres¬ents for their opponents abroad. Now, it's sticks of lettered seaside rock. 'I'll never forget,' he said, 'watching an English girl trying to explain to an Italian boy that what he was supposed to do was suck it.'
CHARLIE CHESTER
`I'M AN IDEAS MAN, Y' SEE. I STARTED ALL THESE THINGS'
TELL us about your time with It's a Knockout, Charlie, we said. ` Ah,' said Charlie, 'in a second. First let me tell you about Cheerful Charlie Chester's own programme, Take Pot Luck, that ran for years back in the 50s. It was the first programme ever, if you don't mind me saying so, the first programme ever based on competitive fun. Fun and gimmicks. We had loads of 'em. The old girl who had to pick up a turkey in boxing gloves, the feller who had to eat his way through a mountain of potato crisps ... I had give¬away girls, dancing girls, Eric Robinson and the orchestra, running jokes, star prizes. That programme had everything. Years before The Generation Game and Knockout. I'm an ideas man, y'see. I started all these things.
` I devised dozens of the first games in Knockout, did you know that? Before they started getting cleverer. Before all the Continental things. It was me and Ted Ray at the beginning, you'll remember. But we got the chop in favour, so they said, of multi-lingual comperes. So we missed out on all those trips abroad. We would've loved that.'
DAVID VINE
`OH, YES, THE GIRLS ARE MUCH FUNNIER THAN THE MEN'
FOR FIVE YEARS Up to 1972 David Vine compered It's a Knockout, but says he was con¬vinced that his first programme was going to be his last. ` I worked on the very first Euro¬pean one at Vincennes, outside Paris, and I'll be quite honest, we didn't give Jeux Sans Frontieres a couple of programmes, let alone a season, the complica¬tions seemed so immense. I remember at one point during the dress rehearsal, the French crew just pulled the plugs out on the French director, who was directing at the time through a hand megaphone from the floor. I'll always see this poor man spotlighted in the middle of this vast arena, bellowing, not realising that everybody else had gone home.. It was chaos, absolutely.
Vine says he's always had his own title for it, The Olympic Custard Pie, and that he's con¬vinced it would be fatal should the belly-laugh element ever be seriously diluted. `It's got to be funny, that's a vital part of the formula: competition, plus a lot of spectacle, plus a damn good laugh. I remember one game that involved four people under a massive great cone negotiating their way through an obstacle course that the Germans, in practice, cleared in seconds. It was discovered later that they'd been hiding a walkie-talkie under there, and were being guided by somebody in the crowd. 'No,' he said, 'it's got to be fun. Girls falling into water will always get a laugh.' Girls? ` Oh, yes, the girls are always much funnier than the men.'
MCDONALD HOBLEY
`SOME GAMES ARE BRILLIANT OTHERS RATHER PUERILE'
A VETERAN of seaside competitions long before he joined It's a Knockout at the beginning of its run, McDonald Hobley also thinks he knows the secret behind the programme's pull. ` It's the English,' he said. 'Have you noticed? They're mad about towns. Put a sash saying `Southport' around some ugly bird and you'll have the whole place rooting for her in no time.'
The enthusiasm of audiences at the Knockout locations is something, he says, that will linger with him for always. 'It was the first time I encountered face-to-face the sort of unruly element you read about among football supporters. The red light on the camera only had to click for old women and children to be immediately knocked to the ground and trampled on. Quite terrifying.
'Piano bashing,' he said, 'is my other vivid memory. Every week for the first year we in¬corporated a piano-smashing competition, but in the end it had to be dropped because so many elderly couples found it distressing. And it's true, I sup¬pose, that while some of the games could be, and still are, brilliant and marvellous, others are fatuous and rather puerile.'
McDonald Hobley, too, rem¬embered that first broadcast in 1966, the day that the tide came in. But it was the incident involving the roundabout man that had particularly stuck in his mind. ` I can see his face now, looking down on us from the promenade, laughing. We'd paid him 50 quid in the end to move his roundabout, only to find that the whole thing was bedded in concrete. "Now," he said, “go on, let me see you shift it." It was glorious.'
STUART HALL
`EVERYBODY IS NOW TRYING TO DO A STUART HALL'
STUART HALL is the one who was scared to join Knockout in case it discredited him as a newsman, and ended up being famous for his giggle. Five years later, he is one of the most successful presenters ever. Presenter, it will be noticed, not commentator. Hall baulks at that. 'This was a commentator's job,' he said flatly. 'The pro¬gramme now bears no resem¬blance to the early days. It's my function to get hold of the programme and put it over to 15 million viewers as a piece of television. I've got to generate excitement, atmosphere and response in the stadium as well, which makes me a bit like a Wembley referee who simultaneously has to feed commentary to the live specta¬tors. I know my characters in advance, who's going to do something for me, and I actually talk to them while they're at it. I make it 3-D. Everybody is now trying to do a Stuart Hall,' Stuart Hall said. 'We are the acknowledged best at the job, and I don't think we make nearly enough noise about it.'
It came as some surprise that his outstanding recollection was a sober one, of an international heat in Arnhem. 'We were to compete in the town square where so many of our para¬troopers in the war had been left hanging from the church tower by their harnesses. It was a very troubled occasion, very sad, knowing that thou¬sands of families at home would still be feeling the loss of their husbands and sons. Luckily, the home team, from Ely, was a nice extrovert one and I think that night It's a Knockout laid the ghost of Arnhem.'
Visit more knockout pages here:
Other Nostalgic Forums
Music 
