First Drafts - The Prospect magazine blog

Today Bruce Forsyth is eighty. He started in showbusiness during the second world war with a song and dance act and has reinvented himself countless times. What is interesting about his career is the way it reflects shifts in British showbusiness through the mid- and late-20th century.

Forsyth belongs to that generation born in the 1920s and early 1930s (Dickie Henderson, Morecambe and Wise, the two Ronnies, Roy Castle and Des O’Connor) who started out in variety and burst into television in the late 1950s and early ’60s. His big break came, inevitably, presenting the great TV variety show, ‘Sunday Night at the London Palladium’ (ITV). Except for Morecambe and Wise, none of these personalities were great comedians, singers or dancers. They could do a bit of everything and had enough personality to feed the growing TV entertainment shows of the 1960s and ’70s (’Sunday Night…’, ‘The Generation Game’, The Golden Shot’). Family shows, put out at peak time on Saturdays and Sundays, these were a strange hybrid of game shows, with enough comedy and music to please the 10 million+ viewers.

The heyday of this kind of performer, complete with catchphrase (’Nice to see you…’, ‘Didn’t they do well?’, ‘Good game, good game’, ‘Bernie, the bolt’, ‘What do you think of it so far?’, ‘You can’t see the join’), was from the late 1950s to the late ’70s. It’s no coincidence that Forsyth left ‘The Generation Game’ in 1977, a year after Morecambe and Wise left the BBC for ITV. TV executives wanted something new and different. The old entertainers came under fierce attack from alternative comedians. Forsyth himself was the subject of a particularly nasty and unfunny onslaught by Peter Cook on the 1978 Derek and Clive album, ‘Ad Nauseam’ andanother from ‘Not The Nine ‘Clock News’. Forsyth continued presenting game shows on ITV through the `1980s and ’90s, and even returned to ‘The Generation Game’ for a second stint (1990-94) and then made it back to the big-time with ‘Strictly Come Dancing’ on BBC 1 (2004-), enough of a celebrity to be the subject of gags from a new generation of TV stars like Jonathan Ross.

Just as Variety gave way to TV, so song ‘n’ dance entertainers gave way to comedy. Just as the old entertainers took over TV shows in the Sixties, so comedians have taken over all kinds of factual genres in the 1990s and 2000s: travel programmes (Michael Palin and Victoria Wood), wildlife shows (Bill Oddie), drama (Lenny Henry in ‘Hope and Glory’, Dawn French in ‘Lark Rise to Candleford’), arts programmes (Griff Rhys Jones, an Omnibus on ballet presented by Jennifer Saunders), countless quiz and game shows.

Once reviled for their cosy, safe humour, love of golf and bright pullovers, Forsyth has been rediscovered by a new generation for his ability to give huge TV audiences a good time. Like Des O’Connor (now presenting ‘Countdown’), he’s still there, the last of a great generation of British entertainers, who made the transition from vaudeville and variety to TV.