Going Live!

GOING LIVE!
Made by: BBC
Shown on: BBC1
Years shown: 1987-93

Following in the footsteps of The Multi-Coloured Swapshop and Saturday Superstore, Going Live! was three or so hours of live, virtually un-scripted fun for children of all ages, and what it did it did well. It seems unlikely that it can be surpassed because, at the risk of sounding twice my age, they don’t make ‘em like that any more, however hard they try.

The show was presented by ex-broom cupboard boy, Philip Schofield, with Sarah Greene, formerly of Saturday Superstore, and also Blue Peter. Both were professionals who knew how to ‘do’ children’s TV well, kept cool in the many crises which arise with live television, and had the kind of chemistry you can’t be taught. Okay, so Gordon the Gopher was there as well, but you can’t have it all.

Going Live! was a jam-packed magazine show, with very few fillers. There was Double Dare, the game show where Peter Simon would end up covered in gunge (later replaced by the inferior Run the Risk, with the addition of loud-mouth Shane Richie) and kids would dare each other to play complicated relay-races. Agony-uncle Philip Hodson popped in every fortnight to offer advice, children had their say about burning issues (expensive trainers, the ozone layer) in ‘Soapbox’, and if they lived an unusual life, could show the nation in ‘All About Me.’ Cartoons, such as Thundercats, The Jetsons and, later, Teenage Mutant Hero Turtles separated the ‘serious’ bits, and then we would continue with Jonathan Porritt’s ‘Greenline’, or ‘Check it Out’, the consumer spot presented by Emma Freud. There was also a fashion slot, where Annabel Giles would chat about the latest fads with Sarah Greene, and I distinctly remember her once giving advice about how to customise your school uniform, in the unlikely event that you had to go to a party straight after school. There was also a cookery slot, presented by Emma Forbes (her mother, Nanette Newman, presumably did the washing up afterwards), where she would try and make a sponge cake, and Philip Schofield would botch it up.

One of the first items on the agenda on Going Live! was the supposedly interactive computer game, where a child rang up and could apparently be at the controls of a game in order to win prizes. There were loads of them, including a frog trying to catch flies in a lily pond, and a dog trying to catch sausages in a kitchen, or something, and the kid would shout “Left, catch! Right, right catch!” as the dog - clearly being controlled by someone on work experience in the production office - would leap jerkily back and forth. Prizes varied greatly: if you got 1-3 points (i.e. disgraced yourself), you got a ‘selection of pens’, but if you got the top prize, which was almost always never, you could earn yourself a CD player with the top 10 albums, or a top-of-the-range camera.

You were tripping over the celebrities though, and the children could put questions to stars as diverse as Bros and Paul Simon, or Terry Waite and Marky Mark, in ‘Press Conference’. It was always the first stop for any Aussie actor who’d just left Neighbours, and everyone from the Stock, Aitken and Waterman ‘Hit Factory’ eg. Sonia, Big Fun, Rick Astley, would be wheeled out to talk about their new single. Famously, when Five Star were on, some cheeky kid got past the call-monitors to ask why the band were so “f***ing crap”. I think we’re still waiting for a satisfactory answer on that one.

When Schofield took up a career in the West End, playing Joseph in the Andrew Lloyd-Webber musical, he wasn’t available for early Saturday mornings. He was briefly replaced by Kristian Schmid, who had played Todd Landers in Neighbours, but when Schmid wanted to join the staff full time, he fell foul of immigration, who refused to grant him a full work-permit. Heh heh.

Now Going Live! wouldn’t have been the success it was if it hadn’t been for comedy duo, Trevor Neal and Simon Hickson. They were genuinely laugh-out-loud funny, an unusual feat for kids’ comedy (see The Krankies, The Chuckle Brothers - or rather, don’t), and their trademark was definitely surrealism. One of their early successes was The Singing Corner, where they were dressed as hippies/Playschool presenters and encouraged everyone to “swing your pants” (they even made it into the charts as The Singing Corner meets Donovan, reaching the heady heights of 68 with ‘Jennifer Juniper’.) There was also The Laundrette (“We don’t do duvets!”), the time-saving aliens, and the bizarre rave duo, MC Mick McMax and Moon Monkey, which involved Hickson wearing a luminous yellow body-suit. Their last great creation on the show was The Celebrity Driving Test, where Trev was the instructor still haunted by his submarine days in World War II, and Simon was Mr Ribbon (“Don’t mind him, I’m dropping him off at the day centre”), a lunatic with exaggerated clapping motions. Absolute genius, and the celebrities taking the driving test rightly looked very frightened.

There had always been a Video Vote, where guest stars would form a panel to comment on the latest pop videos, but Trev and Simon took this over too, hosting the Video Garden (dressed as gnomes), The Video Galleon (pirates) and The Video Gold Mine (not sure, but prospectors, I suppose) over time. When they left the show in 1991, they were replaced by the lightweight act of Nick Ball and James Hickish, who, in all fairness, had a very tough act to follow, but were so unsuccessful that Trev and Simon were coaxed back to Saturday mornings the following year. Hurray!

Going Live! was eventually succeeded by Live and Kicking, an attempt to recreate the same formula, with another broom cupboard veteran, Andi Peters, plus Emma Forbes promoted out of the kitchen corner, and John Barrowman, a West End musical star who very clearly was not used to live TV. And it all went down hill from there…and of course I go older and stopped getting up at nine.

SQUARE EYES RATING: 9/10

(Thanks to www.tvradiobits.co.uk for the borrowed pic)