Thank Your Lucky Stars

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Planned as ITV's answer to Juke Box Jury, which had been running on BBC television since 1959, Thank Your Lucky Stars arrived on British TV screens in April 1961 and soon became an instant hit with the nations teenagers. Along the way it set a number of notable firsts, the most famous being the professional debut television performance of The Beatles.

The man behind the shows initial success was producer Philip Jones, who had previously been a program assistant on Radio Luxembourg. In six years at the popular music station he had worked his way up to Program Controller before switching to television for Granada and Tyne Tees and producing 'specials' for Frank Sinatra, Peggy Lee and Bing Crosby.

It was Jones who booked The Beatles to appear on January 19th 1963 to mime to From Me To You, and Jones too who realised early on the impact that the Merseybeat sound was to have on Britain's youth, enabling him to put on a show in June of that year featuring Liverpool's finest, accompanied by The Searchers, Lee Curtis, The Big Three, Kenneth Cope and the Breakaways, Billy J. Kramer and the Dakotas, The Vernon Girls and Gerry and the Pacemakers. That show alone pulled in over 6 million viewers.

The shows original presenter was Keith Fordyce who later moved on to front Ready Steady Go, and other DJ's appeared with varying degrees of regularity. Amongst these were Jimmy Saville, Pete Murray, Alan Dell, Sam Costa, Barry Alldis, Kent Walton, Jimmy Young and Don Moss. It was Moss who first cornered a weekly panel of youngsters in a segment of the show called 'Spin a Disc', a shameless copy of the Juke Box Jury format where the latest singles were played and the panel then passed judgement on the records, giving marks out of five.

This particular part of the show created its own star in the form of 16 year-old Janice Nicholls from Wednesbury, Staffordshire. Her broad Black Country accent made her comment "Oi'll give it foive" something of a national catchphrase, and the youngster, who had planned to become a telephonist at a light-engineering company in the same street where she lived, soon found herself in demand on television, in national newspapers and charity events. At the same time she was given a permanent place on the panel at Birmingham's Alpha Studio, where the weekly show was filmed on Sunday night's in front of a live audience, before going out the following Saturday.

Of all the shows presenters though, the one who is most closely associated with Thank Your Lucky Stars is Brian Matthew, who over the years not only introduced some of the best British acts but some of the best from the USA too, including The Ronettes, Brenda Lee, and The Supremes. Matthew, also a successful radio DJ with the popular Saturday Club, had originally trained to be a serious actor before becoming a respected authority on pop music.

In 1964 ABC commissioned Lucky Stars Summer Spin as a mid-year replacement and in 1965 Jim Dale took over as presenter. However, with the British beat boom losing a little of its impetus TYLS was cancelled a year later.