The final leg of the It's A Knockout story - for the time being at least - saw an unexpected return of the domestic competition to British television. In an era of television where original ideas were thin on the ground and there were nostalgia shows proliferating - I Love the 70s, 100 Greatest TV Moments, I'm Mad About June 1981 Particularly Late Friday Afternoons When It Wasn't Raining (OK, so that last one was made up, but give it six months and it'll be on Channel Four on a Saturday night!) - I suppose it was inevitable that someone would try to resuscitate It's A Knockout, and it finally happened in 1999 under the auspices of Channel 5 and Ronin Entertainment.

Pre-recorded around Britain during Summer 1999, the series debuted on 3rd September that year in a Friday night one-hour slot starting at 8.00pm. The first edition, boosted by good publicity and natural curiosity from the viewing public drew in an audience of 2.5 million viewers - quite respectable for Channel Five at the time. However, audiences dwindled quickly, and by the Final on Saturday 6th November 1999, there were barely 500,000 viewers still tuning in. So what went wrong?

The Channel Five It's A Knockout was fronted by a recognisable team, comprising livewire presenting veteran, Keith Chegwin (late of fondly remembered cult programmes such as Multi-Coloured Swap Shop and Cheggers Plays Pop, but more recently employed as a roving reporter-cum-mischief maker on The Big Breakfast), popular British ex-World Champion boxer Frank Bruno, former Playboy cover star, Nell McAndrew, sports presenter Lucy Alexander and a Course Referee, Tony Smith, who had previously competed in It's A Knockout and Jeux Sans Frontières. They were a good team, but had a mountain to climb to replace the memory of the BBC presentation team of Stuart Hall, Eddie Waring and Arthur Ellis, not to mention the much loved international referees Gennaro and Guido. The original show, seen through nostalgic eyes with all its associations and highlights, would always be a high water mark to reach. The original show could of course look cheap and cheerful sometimes, but in those days it didn't really matter. As the millennium drew to a close, TV productions standards in general had risen, competition had increased in the multi-channel age and games which saw people running up and down a muddy field carrying coloured water to a measuring cylinder would have many viewers reaching for the television remote in a dreadful hurry.

The first series was ultimately not really that exciting and sadly, despite a makeover for the second series, which saw the incorporation of much more imaginative and enjoyable games, the damage had been done and It's A Knockout limped to a conclusion once more on Saturday 6th January 2001. It had never lived up to its illustrious predecessor, and even though the second series was critically better received than the first, the audiences were still not enticed into watching in great numbers.

It could be said that television audiences had moved on and the type of entertainment that It's A Knockout embodied was entirely of another time: lighthearted fun where no one pranced around naked to get on the front pages, where violence was not on the menu and wherethe whole point of the show was to have fun rather than to humiliate the losers. All told, it's depressing that there is no place for a Knockout in the 21st Century, and that each new game show that borrows from the IAK format is progressively less and less well meaning and more and more just there to be an excuse to set up a for-profit telephone/text vote. Television has left It's A Knockout behind, but it's not the better for it.