It's A Miners Knockout 1978
British Domestic Series

Presenters: Stuart Hall and Eddie Waring

Referees:
Arthur Ellis
Mike Swann
Debra Windass

Scoregirls:
Dinah May
Pam Nolan
Debra Windass

Production Credits:

Production Team: Alan Walsh, Alan Wright; Engineering Manager: Geoff Lomas; Sound: John Drake; Games Deviser and Designer: Stuart Furber; Producer: Cecil Korer; Director: Geoff Wilson

A BBC Manchester Production

Key: Domestic Special ● = Winner of Special   ▲ = Promoted to Position / ▼ = Demoted to Position

GB

It's A Miners Knockout 1978

Spring Special

Event Staged: Wednesday 29th March 1978
Venue: The Tower Circus, The Tower, Blackpool, Lancashire, England

Transmission:
BBC1 (GB): Friday 14th April 1978, 8.15-9.00pm

Weather Conditions: Not applicable as event was staged indoor

Winners' Trophy presented by: Keith Chegwin, of The Multi-Coloured Swap Shop

Teams: England v. Scotland v. Wales

Team Members included:
England (E): Arthur Gore;
Scotland (S): Minnie Gilphinnan, Ian Morton, David Whiteman;
Wales (W): Roy Philpott, Glyn Shaw, Christine Thomas.

Games: The Giants' Tag Race, The Horseman on the Flying Trapeze, The Coal Trucks, Water Carrying Apes, Building and Floating Rafts, The Human Pyramid (on a raft) and Barrel Boats and Rope Ladders;
Marathon: Bringing in the Coal;
Jokers: Shields on Poles.

Game Results and Standings

Result

 Team

Points

Final Scoreboard

1st
1st
3rd

 E • England ●
 W • Wales ●
 S • Scotland

23
23
15

There was a scoreboard error at this heat after the final game had been played. Despite being disqualified on the game, Scotland were awarded 1pt but this was not added to the scoreboard. We have adjusted the scores and Final Scoreboard image to reflect the correct final score.

The Host Town

Blackpool, Lancashire

Blackpool is a seaside town with 7 miles (11km) of sandy beach and a population of around 144,000 inhabitants in the county of Lancashire. It is located on the Irish Sea coast between the Ribble and Wyre river estuaries, 12 miles (19km) north of Southport, 14 miles (22km) north-west of Preston, 20 miles (32km) south-west of Morecambe and 61 miles (98km) west of Leeds.

In medieval times Blackpool emerged as a few farmsteads on the coast, the name coming from "le pull", a stream that drained Marton Mere and Marton Moss into the sea close to what is now Manchester Square. The stream ran through peat bogs that discoloured the water, so the name for the area became "Black Poole". The first house of any substance, Foxhall, was built toward the end of the 17th century by Edward Tyldesley (1635-1685), the Squire of Myerscough and son of royalist Sir Thomas Tyldesley (1612-1651).

Until the middle of the 18th century, Blackpool was simply a coastal hamlet, but the practice of sea bathing to cure diseases was becoming fashionable among the wealthier classes, and visitors began making the arduous trek to Blackpool for that purpose. In 1781, Thomas Clifton (1727-1783) and Sir Henry Hoghton (1728-1795) built a private road to Blackpool and a regular stagecoach service from Manchester and Halifax was established. A few amenities, including four hotels, an archery stall and bowling greens, were developed, and the town grew slowly. The 1801 census records the town's population at 473 inhabitants.

The most significant event in the early growth of the town occurred in 1846, with the completion of a branch line to Blackpool from Poulton on the main Preston and Wyre Joint Railway line from Preston to Fleetwood. Around this time, Fleetwood declined as a resort, as its founder and principal financial backer, Peter Hesketh-Fleetwood (1801-1866), went bankrupt. In contrast, Blackpool boomed. A sudden influx of visitors, arriving by rail, provided the motivation for entrepreneurs to build accommodation and create new attractions, leading to more visitors and a rapid cycle of growth throughout the 1850s and 1860s. By 1851, the town's population had risen to over 2,500.

The growth was intensified by the practice among the Lancashire cotton mill owners of closing the factories for a week every year to service and repair machinery. These became known as ‘wakes weeks’. Each town's mills would close for a different week, allowing Blackpool to manage a steady and reliable stream of visitors over a prolonged period in the summer.

In 1863, the North Pier was completed, rapidly becoming a centre of attraction for elite visitors. Central Pier was completed in 1868, with a theatre and a large open-air dance floor. The town expanded southward beyond what is today known as the Golden Mile, towards South Shore, and South Pier was completed in 1893, making Blackpool the only town in the United Kingdom with three piers. In 1878, the Winter Gardens complex opened, incorporating ten years later the Opera House, said to be the largest in Britain outside London.

Much of Blackpool's growth and character from the 1870s was due to the town's pioneering use of electrical power. In 1879, it became the first municipality in the world to have electric street lighting, as large parts of the promenade were wired. The lighting and its accompanying pageants reinforced Blackpool's status as the North of England's most prominent holiday resort, and its specifically working class character. It was the forerunner of the present-day Blackpool Illuminations. In 1885, one of the world's first electric tramways was laid down as a conduit line running from Cocker Street to Dean Street on the Promenade. The line was operated by the Blackpool Electric Tramway Company until 1892 when their lease expired and Blackpool Corporation took over running the line. A further line was added in 1895, from Manchester Square along Lytham Road to South Shore, and the line was extended north to Fleetwood. In 1899, the conduit system was replaced by overhead wires. The tramway has remained in continuous service to this day and is the United Kingdom’s only surviving first generation tramway stretching 11 miles (18km) from the airport at Squires Gate all the way to Fleetwood.

By the 1890s, the town had a permanent population of 35,000 but could accommodate 250,000 holidaymakers. The number of annual visitors, many staying for a week, was estimated at three million. The decade also saw the opening of two of the town's most prominent buildings, the Grand Theatre on Church Street, and Blackpool Tower on the Promenade.

Documents have been found to suggest that the reason Blackpool escaped heavy damage in World War II (1939-1945) was that Adolf Hitler (1889-1945) had earmarked the town to remain a place of leisure after his planned invasion. Despite this, on 11th September 1940, German bombs fell near Blackpool North railway station and eight people were killed in nearby houses in Seed Street. This site today is occupied by the new Town Hall offices and a Sainsbury's supermarket. No plaque has ever been erected to remember the injured or dead.

The rise of package holidays in the late 1960s and 1970s took many of Blackpool's traditional visitors abroad, where the weather was more reliably warm and dry, and improved road communications, epitomised by the construction of the M55 motorway in 1975, made Blackpool more feasible as a day trip rather than an overnight stay. Despite this, the town’s economy, however, flourishes relatively undiversified and firmly rooted in the tourism sector and remains the most popular seaside resort in the country. However, the town has suffered a serious drop in numbers of visitors which have fallen from 17 million in 1992 to 10 million today.

The three main tourist hotspots in Blackpool originally appeared as part of the flourishing tourist industry. The first is Blackpool Tower which opened in 1894 and has been a dominant landmark of the Blackpool skyline since that time. Inspired by the Eiffel Tower in Paris, France, it is 518ft 4in (158m) in height (roughly half the size of its more famous original) and houses a complex of leisure facilities, entertainment venues and restaurants, including the world-famous Tower Ballroom and Tower Circus, at its base.

The second, Pleasure Beach Blackpool, originates back to around 1910 and boasts rides including the Pepsi Max Big One which, between 1994 and 1996, was the world's fastest and tallest complete circuit rollercoaster. It was the country's most popular free attraction with 6 million visitors a year but has lost over a million visitors since 1998 and has recently introduced a £5 entrance fee.

The third is the North Pier, the northern-most of Blackpool's three piers, which includes a small shopping arcade, a small tramway and the North Pier Theatre. The pier end also used to have a helicopter pad, but this was damaged in a Christmas storm in 1997 and collapsed into the sea.

The Venue

The Tower Circus Ring

The games were played in The Tower Circus Ring at the base of the world famous Blackpool Tower, nestled between its four legs. The circus is lavishly decorated, in common with similar Victorian era attractions, and opened to the public on 14th May 1894. The circus has run there ever since, even surviving a potential closure in 1990 thanks to a surge of public support in favour of its continuation. The space is not a particularly large one, certainly not by IAK or JSF standards, and for this reason, the games played were generally very simple and only involved a small number of players at a time. Occasionally, the games even spilled over into the public seating area in the auditorium, but this simply added to the fun. The arena at The Tower Circus had a surprise in store for the audience and teams. During Games 1-4 it was as you would expect, a circus ring, but from Game 5 onwards, the ring descended and water poured in from a hidden 35,000 imperial gallon tank, turning it into a pool with a depth of 4 foot 6 inches. The Tower Circus is one of only four circus rings remaining in the world that has this remarkable facility. Without a doubt it was one of the most technically sophisticated venues ever used for It's A Knockout. It would later be employed as the regular venue for It's A Knockout spin-off series Anything Goes in 1984 and 1985.

Memories of It's A Miners Knockout

This special It's A Knockout event was organised as a result of an approach by T. Leslie Jackson, an ex-BBC producer who was in the late 1970s running The National Union of Mineworkers' headquarters. Producer Cecil Korer remembers: "Jackson had approached me a couple of times to use miners just as we had used the firemen from Bridlington in the early days. The trouble was that it would have to be all-male teams, so no way could we do that." Korer struck upon the idea of a miners' special when Jackson approached him in 1977, striking the deal that while all the male team members would be miners, the female competitors could either be workers in Coal Board administration or be miners' relations.

Presenters, Officials and Production Team

The presentation of the trophy to the two winning teams was made by the then 21-year old Keith Chegwin from BBC TV’s The Multi-Coloured Swap Shop. Unfortunately, the BBC only had one trophy, though Chegwin promised another one would be organised so the teams didn't have to fight over it. Keith had previously featured as a celebrity participant in It's A Celebrity Knockout in 1977 and would return in 1982 as a guest presenter of It's A Knockout Heat 2 from Cockermouth. He would also go on to present the Knockout spin-off series Anything Goes in 1984-85, staged entirely in the same Tower Circus location as It's A Miners Knockout, before inheriting the presenter's role of It's A Knockout itself in 1999 when he fronted the revamped Channel 5 series of the programme.

Additional Information

Rather than opening with the regular It's A Knockout theme, Bean Bag by Herb Alpert, this It's A Miners Knockout special started with the song Heigh-Ho from Walt Disney's 1937 animated film, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs.

The majority of the team members were miners, but some (particularly the women competitors) were not associated with The National Coal Board other than by being related to miners.

The somewhat cramped circus ring location caused something of a logistical problem with the Marathon, which involved three team members (two male, one female) wearing vacuum-formed miner's heads in pith helmets and oversized foam boots. Each competitor had to carry a sack of coal across from the base of one set of auditorium stairs to the next, where the male team members had to climb up a metal-framed colliery construction and bring the coal sacks to the 'surface'. To reach the colliery, team members had to clamber in their big boots with one foot on the raised ring surround and the other at ground level. The trouble was (or wasn't, depending upon your point of view!) that this meant that team members would regular tread on or fall into audience members in the front row. Presenter Stuart Hall suggested that the audience should know better than to sit at the front at It's A Knockout!

Audience members included Joe Gormley (1917-1993), then the President of the National Union of Mineworkers. He had the good sense not to sit in the front row!

The Marathon also introduced a 'mobile scoreboard', which in reality was scoregirl Pam Nolan wearing the scoreboard in the style of a sandwich board. Never has an It's A Knockout scoreboard looked so delectable!

Each team played their Joker strategically on the games with two teams, meaning they were guaranteed 4pts for a 2nd place finish rather than 2pts for a 3rd. Unusually, all three teams won their Joker games.

The final result of this competition was a draw. The English team would have won outright were the Scottish team not disqualified on the final game. England had won the game, guaranteeing the 3pts they needed to win. This meant the Welsh had to finish 2nd to draw level in the competition, but they were pipped at the post by the Scots. When Arthur Ellis announced the points, he surprised everyone by saying that as the girl at the top of the ladder had reached down to be touched by her male partner, rather than waiting for him to reach to touch her, before they descended the rope ladder, the team was disqualified and relegated to 3rd place. This promoted the Welsh to 2nd place and a joint competiton win along with their English counterparts.

Another issue arising from the final game disqualification for Scotland was that Arthur Ellis awarded Scotland 1pt for 3rd place but this was not added to the scoreboard. Scotland's final points tally was 15pts and not the 14pts shown on-screen. We have adjusted our scores and scoreboard to reflect this.

The end credit sequence for this programme was changed before broadcast. On the day of recording, a caption roller was utilised to run the credits against scenes of the circus ring location, but the roller mechanism kept sticking and wouldn't roll smoothly. A post-production edit session was booked and a fresh set of titles were added over the new background of a saucy seaside postcard.

Made in Colour • This programme exists in the BBC Archives

JSFnetGB Series Guide pages researched by
Neil Storer and Alan Hayes
with Ischa Bijl, Julien Dessy, Sébastien Dias, David Hamilton, Denis Kirsanov, Paul Leaver, Philippe Minet,
Christos Moustakas, David Laich Ruiz, Marko Voštan and JSFnet Websites