MICHAEL LEGGO
Michael Leggo began his television career in 1984, and has worked since at every major British broadcaster. In 1988, he co-created, produced and directed Noel’s Saturday Roadshow, and went on to do the same for Noel’s House Party, which was an immediate rating success, pulling in nearly 16 million viewers at its peak and winning a BAFTA in 1992. After House Party, Michael was appointed Head of Light Entertainment at the BBC, where he oversaw all primetime entertainment. Michael spoke to TANK about the changing face of British television, the nature of the broad appeal and a certain pink individual with yellow spots.
Interview by Nell WhittakerPortrait courtesy Michael Leggo
Nell Whittaker What is light entertainment?
Michael Leggo It’s evolved over the years but it strikes at one central precept, which is that as far as possible, you must try to hit a broad audience. The earliest light-entertainment shows were variety shows, like The Morecambe and Wise Show, or The Two Ronnies. You had musical numbers and sketches and things mixed together so that if you didn’t like one item, another one would be along in a minute. When it came to House Party, I followed that structure. On Saturday night, at early peak time, there’s a fair chance that a high proportion of the population is in and so if you’re going to attract them, you need lots of different things, which is why in the case of House Party I moved at a rapid pace. It was packed with – and this hardly sounds original now, but I promise you it was at the time – what I called internal ads, which were trailers for the upcoming segments – “We’ve got this great ‘Gotcha’ coming up, wait until ‘NTV’” – as slick as we could make them. Light entertainment, at its heart, is trying to provide a broad spectrum of appeal.
NW How do you provide a throughline for a programme that’s made of so many parts?
ML Rule one, the audience has got to care about it on some level, even if in some cases that looks like, “I hate it, but I love to watch it”. If they don’t care, there’s the remote. Rule two, it’s got to somehow surprise you, while fulfilling your hopes or expectations. If you’re watching a game show you might like this contestant and you want them to do well, or you don’t like this contestant, and you want the other woman to do better – you’ve got to be invested in the process. It’s also got to build. House Party was a multisegmented show, but you still had to build towards your best item, which in our case was usually a “Gotcha”. You have to have a small-J “journey” for the viewer.
NW What was a “Gotcha”?
ML “Gotcha” was an elaborate practical joke played on a famous person. When we started it was often hidden camera, because obviously you don’t want your celebrity to know that you’re filming them, unless it’s a fake video shoot or something like that. There was a difference between us and what was happening on ITV at the time, where there was a show [Beadle’s About] hosted by Jeremy Beadle who did a lot of hidden-camera stuff. I didn’t really like it, because I think they employed what I called the “moment of cruelty”, the point where your target sees death – not literally, but suddenly they’re experiencing that complete squirm. Our “Gotchas” were more like a best-man speech, which might embarrass you at times but at the end of the day, we’re all on the same side. When we did the Saturday Roadshow, its conceit was that one week we were under the Channel digging the tunnel; the next week we were in Tutankhamun’s tomb; the next week we were in Venice station. It had a comic plot, for instance, we’re going to send a man to the moon on a firework rocket fired from a giant milk bottle. For the first few minutes the audience is slightly confused – “What are they doing? Oh, I see, they’re sending this man to the moon.” So you have got to establish your comic plot, you’ve got to do something with it in the middle, and then you have your strongest item at the end. But then you’ve also got to resolve your silly comic plot. While Roadshow did good business, it didn’t do the stellar business of House Party, and after three years, I realised the comic plot was getting in the way. From there it was a fairly easy mental leap – just have one location where the fictitious setting becomes the backdrop to what’s going on. Noel is looking down the lens saying, “I’ve got this great NTV coming up”, and then there’s a ring on the blooming doorbell, he says, “Oh, I’ll just get rid of them”, he opens the door and there’s Roger Moore. Once we went from Roadshow to House Party, I made the bold mission statement, “We’re going to have a ‘Gotcha’ in every show”, which looking back on it was blooming brave because they were very, very difficult to do. I think the team’s hearts sank when I made that decision. That’s how I invented – not, as I joke, through a lot of bad drugs – Mr. Blobby. In Roadshow we’d done a “Gotcha” on Eamonn Holmes, which had been very successful. He thought he was doing a training video for car salesmen in a hatchback car where the client was represented by a Sugar Puffs Honey Monster-style figure – think big furry costume. In the rehearsal there was an actor wearing furry legs but not the top, and he went through the script loading the luggage in and out of the hatchback and showing all of its attributes. Then we went for the take. What the audience saw but Eamonn Holmes didn’t was Ben, the actor, swapping out, and Noel putting on the full furry costume. I loved those “Gotchas” where you could get Noel close to or in some sort of physical relationship with the target rather than Noel just walking in at the end and going, “Gotcha!” It’s much better, much more satisfying. So when we went to the take, the monster started behaving appallingly, trashing the luggage and jumping on the bonnet of the car and generally pissing Eamonn off. Then we said to Eamonn, “Do you want to ask Ben to take his head off?” And he said, “Yes, of course”, and the head came off and there was Noel. A fantastic moment of reveal. It’s the precept, whether it’s comedy or drama or whatever, of action and reaction: the action is taking off the head; the reaction is Eamonn’s face. Then I thought, now hang on, we can invent a children’s character, and then you could put Noel inside the suit. That for me was the important bit, not the doodling in mauve felt-tip pen on A5-lined pad that I gave to the costume designer and said, “Can you make up something like this?” I hugged myself at the time because we got eight “Gotchas” out of it. Little did I realise the monster I’d spawned.
NW I think we should address the blob in the room, or, as he’s been labelled, “a vile pink and yellow rubberised heap of boggle-eyed manic activity” and “a metaphor for a nation gone soft in the head”. Yet, Mr Blobby was one of the most popular characters ever to appear on British TV. I’m not the first to note this, but Mr Blobby is incredibly divisive.
ML Absolutely. It’s the product of what he is. For me, Blobby is a lovable anarchist. He says what he feels or he thinks, even though he can only say two words, “Blob” or “Blobby”. He’s huge! When he turns around, people duck, but not because he’s threatening. He’s like a toddler who has temper tantrums. Have you ever seen that clip where Noel tells Blobby that we’re taking the show to New York, but he’s not invited?
NW I watched it yesterday.
ML That’s Barry Killerby [inside the suit], the essence of Blobby, a six-year-old having a fit, a complete strop. He does these outrageous things, which some people will love and some people will hate, but that’s the nature of the character.
NW He’s a figure of contradiction. “Toddler” is exactly the word I thought when I was watching that clip, but then he has this incredible balletic quality.
ML Barry Killerby is a seriously trained actor. When I cast him he was performing in Measure for Measure. It’s his body language and his bravery, because he can hardly see out of the costume, and the rubber isn’t going to protect him much when he throws himself at a dining table.
NW In that clip, Noel says that Blobby can’t come to New York because he’d be representing Great Britain in a ridiculous way, which is funny because by that point he probably already was. I’m interested in what Blobby distils about a sense of national identity.
ML That certainly was something that the American press was trying to find out. I was interviewed by the New York Times and the Washington Post, who wanted to know, “Was Blobby coming to America?” At the time, Barney was huge. Could there be the Battle of Barney, the American icon, versus Blobby, the British icon? Could Blobby survive in America? My point at the time was that without the support mechanism and the infrastructure of a Saturday night show, it was never going to happen. It didn’t stop them asking.
NW Noel has described the show itself as a pantomime, another uniquely British phenomenon. Also, Blobby’s the colour of a rhubarb and custard and he lives in Crinkley Bottom. I’ve got a few theories as to why Blobby seems to speak to the soul of Britain.
ML Go ahead.
NW I think there’s something to be said for an emotionally retentive nation responding to a figure acting with complete abandon. He’s not exactly violent, but he will hurl himself at people and roll them onto the floor and bang his head on the walls. I think there’s the sense of the Rabelasian desire to participate in the slapstick feast, a flavour of a kind of medieval sociality.
ML I don’t disagree. He does things that we might like to do but wouldn’t be brave enough to do, like firing sponge cakes into the audience. There’s the sheer anarchy, the unpredictability – you knew it was going to be big, but you didn’t know exactly how big, or what was going to get trashed. It’s a bit like the appeal of a cartoon like Tom and Jerry; these characters end up in appallingly painful situations and then come out of it unscathed, or only temporarily scathed.
Mr Blobby had the number-one single at Christmas 1993 with “Mr Blobby”, beating Take That’s “Babe”. Mr Blobby and Take That’s Gary Barlow faced down in 2016 on Alan Carr’s show Chatty Man, during which an altercation broke out that resulted in Barlow pulling off one of Mr Blobby’s legs
NW Where is Blobby now?
ML I don’t know. There’s a chap called Paul Denson who I read has taken up the mantle of doing appearances, but I’m afraid I’m not in touch with Blobby. He never writes so much as a postcard.
NW Broadly, what is House Party’s legacy in popular culture?
ML It has a direct descendant in Ant and Dec, who have been quite open about wanting to emulate the format. Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery; I don’t really mind at all. You’ll see elements in I’m A Celebrity… with celebrity gunging turned into eating creepy-crawlies. How will it be viewed? I don’t know. I am constantly amazed that people are mostly very, very positive. I think we might have a long echo. I did try with Blobby a few years later to get an animation going, because I thought those people who were children when Blobby first hit the screens would be reaching the age where they might have young families of their own, and might remember him affectionately. It could also do something we could never do with the costume. Do you know what “squash and stretch” is? In animation, if a character jumps up and down, as they land, they bounce, and their body compresses and then squashes and stretches. Imagine that Blobby shape, jumping up and down. As he landed on the floor that big belly would wobble up and down, and squash and stretch, squash and stretch and animate, and that would be echt Blobby. But we didn’t get it made. ◉