Bruce Forsyth's Big Night
1978 was not Bruce Forsyth's year. Since 1971 he had dominated
popular television in The Generation Game which he'd made a
Saturday night institution.
But he made the mistake of thinking that he was bigger than the
game and believed that his West End production The Travelling
Music Show would take him triumphantly to Broadway. It folded
in just four months.
When Michael Grade at LWT offered Bruce £15,000 a week for two
hours of peak viewing-time on Saturday nights in a show whose
budgets would be a massive £250,000, he needed little persuasion.
But Bruce Forsyth's Big Night turned out to be Bruce
Forsyth's Big Nightmare.
Despite a decent new game, 'The Pyramid Game' hosted by
Grade look-alike Steve Jones, despite the presence of Bruce's
sidekick Anthea Redfern, despite the revival of Jimmy Edwards'
brilliant comic family The Glums and Charlie Drake's The
Worker, and despite the fact that Cannon and Ball recorded six
sketches, were billed but didn't appear - the big audiences shrank
fast.
The press attacked the formerly bumptious Bruce for the show's
failure. Bruce bit back, claiming it was everyone else's fault
and, anyway, the only thing you can believe in the newspapers is
the date.
By 1980 he had moved on to Play Your Cards Right. He had
kept his big chin up and had some new ginger hair on. And didn't
he do well.
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