The earliest surviving example of It's A Knockout hails from the 1967 series, a 23-minute sequence of the third heat of that year's domestic competition. Broadcast on 28th May from Galashiels in Scotland, the event featured two teams, Galashiels and Hawick and it's a very strange curio. Knockout fans used to the presentation style of Stuart Hall would undoubtedly find the stilted, "very BBC" MacDonald Hobley to be quite out of place in the role of host. David Vine and dear Eddie Waring are more 'in the mode', but it's clear that the production tone is based more on 'competition' than 'fun' at this stage. You could be forgiven for thinking, if you closed your eyes, that you were listening to a sports event.

At this point, the series seems to have settled down and features a very good mix of games, though there is, at this stage, no hint of them running to a theme. The main arena was in parkland amid Scotland's "churches and rolling hills" (Hobley's description, not mine!), while a special event involving Minis was staged in a nearby tarmac-surfaced car park. This particular game involved the two teams taking it in turns to drive the cars around an obstacle course. The It's A Knockout twist to the game was that the Minis were packed to the nines with young girls carrying jellies on plates! Remarkably, not a single jelly was damaged by either team, and the times were highly impressive. This game may be familiar as excerpts from it have featured on television nostalgia programmes from time to time, most notably in Frank Muir's TV Heaven: 1967 (Channel 4, 1992).

The event featured the almost obligatory water game, whereby two girls had to lasso wooden poles with hoops while standing on a floating dais. Naturally, this regularly capsized and the poor girls would take a sub-zero dip in true Knockout style. Meanwhile, the marathon event was running constantly in the background. Whereas in later series it would be staged in between the ordinary games, here, we find the cameras cutting back to it from time to time to make a note of progress. The marathon game in the Galashiels heat involved bicycles, cycling "on the spot" on rollers which recorded the distance pedalled during the duration of the programme. The only things holding each bicycle and cyclist up were the strong arms of a team mate. How charmingly low tech... It was strange to see a marathon not commented upon by Eddie Waring (Hobley did the honours in this instance), but one also had to question the thinking behind letting one team ride a geared bike and the others an ungeared one! Needless to say Hawick, the team with the geared cycle, won the marathon by several miles and consequently this won them the event as a whole. Their prize was to be one of the first British teams to take part in Jeux Sans Frontières, competing in Italy two months later.

The final game bar the conclusion of the Marathon was something of an eye-opener for me. Having been brought up on the Seventies and Eighties It's A Knockout fare, it was quite a shock to see live animals involved in a game, this one involving the rescue of a princess from a castle. After bashing down the gates of the castle, a knight in full armour guides his galloping steed towards the tower where the princess is imprisoned. He climbs a ladder, releases and rescues the princess, carries her back down the ladder (a heart in the mouth moment for all competitors involved, no doubt!) before finally leading the horse across the finish line, with the princess safely in the saddle. For someone more used to seeing the antics of competitors in pantomime horse outfits, this was quite astounding.

Overall, it's clear that at this point, the series hadn't quite found the magic formula. MacDonald Hobley, resplendent in his singularly unflattering cardigan, tries his best and holds things together perfectly competently, but he's clearly not the right man to front the series. His style is outmoded and if someone told you the programme you'd just watched was a repeat from the early 1950s, you'd probably accept it without question. David Vine and Eddie Waring are obviously pretenders to the throne and their time would indeed come. Vine's presentation style is slick, pacy and fresh and Waring is plainly enjoying himself, which is nice to see.

The games themselves were generally challenging and varied, but the television coverage was pretty primitive and often did not show the games off to their best advantage. This is not necessarily a criticism, as obviously these shows were transmitted live and equipment was decidedly less portable in 1967 than it was even five or six years later. Staging an It's A Knockout today would be an organisational nightmare, but back in the mid-Sixties, it was nigh on attempting the impossible, so a certain amount of leeway should be allowed. The lack of close-ups, however, is unusual - MacDonald Hobley doesn't get a single one, for instance, and the lack of such shots in the games does distance the television audience.

It's fascinating to see It's A Knockout finding its way in its early days. While not yet the finished product, it's still a considerable achievement for the time in which it was made. The live audience in Galashiels seemed to have had a whale of a time on that day back in late May 1967, and I must confess to having greatly enjoyed my partial look back at the programme in early 2003. 

by Alan Hayes