My time with It’s A Knockout began with Cheltenham Spa in 1968, but it should have started with them a year earlier. In 1967, Cheltenham qualified for the British Jeux Sans Frontières heat in Blackpool and were looking to strengthen their team. Most of the organising of the team was done through the City Council and Young Conservatives. One of the Councillors, Bill Spragg, worked with my father and knew that I was involved in Boxing and suggested I would be ideal for the Cheltenham team. Unfortunately, I had gone to France for a month on vacation and so was not available. I didn’t find out about it until I came back, by which time it was too late. It was a pity as Cheltenham did very well and went to the Final in Kohlshied, Germany, where they finished in a creditable third place. The Cheltenham team were famous then for one of the games which involved smashing up a piano and pushing it through a letter box. We had two brothers, Peter and Ron Tapsell, who were really good at it, destroying the piano in record time!

The following year, Cheltenham Spa were once more involved in the It’s A Knockout series - and this time, Bill Spragg got his man! I was pretty much a novice being only 20 years old, but I enjoyed trying out for the games. I don't remember too many people being involved in the training sessions and the team selection again seemed to revolve around membership of the Young Conservatives in Cheltenham. However, we had a fairly inauspicious start, as Cheltenham lost their It’s A Knockout heat to Worthing. Luckily, we got a second chance, since we were one of the two highest scoring losing teams. This meant that we had to go into a tie-breaker game with the other highest-scoring team, Torbay, that was held at Wimbledon Park, Merton. Anyway, we won the tie-breaker and went off to our international heat in Siegen, Germany.

What I remember from that match was the sheer professionalism of the German team, who reputedly even had some Olympic athletes among their number. I particularly remember one game, where there was a one-foot thick greasy pole at about 30 degrees to the ground, which you had to climb up carrying something, water maybe. Well, everybody else used to sit on the pole and try to shimmy up, while this German guy repeatedly ran up the thing! We were all convinced he had some kind of special shoes. Anyway, on the night, the Germans put their joker on this guy. He ran up with no problem the first time and ran back down while everybody else was still trying to shimmy up the first time. The second time he went up he slipped and fell, knocking himself out... All of a sudden he was not so invincible!

I was in some sort of penguin game hopping across ice floes in full penguin suits. Every now and then, you would fall in the water and the suits would get heavier and heavier. I was exhausted at the end, though we managed to get third place. My strong points were speed and agility, not strength.

After Seigen, we were the top British team with only one heat to go and were all lined up to take our place in the International Final in Brussels. We had an anxious one week wait, to see if Worthing could beat our points haul in the final heat. Unfortunately, this is exactly what happened, and we ended up second best to Worthing for the second time in 1968! We missed out on the Final by a whisker, sadly.

Click here to read Ian's memories of Tewkesbury, 1971

by Ian Rodger