Anything Goes 1985
British Domestic Series

Presenter:
Keith Chegwin

Referee:
Suzanne Dando

Ringmaster:
Norman Barrett

Comedy Performer:
Tommy Fossett (as Grimble)

Big Top Girls:
Debbi Wain
Karen Wragg

Music:
The Michael Fontaine Show Band

Production Credits:

Designer: David Wilson; Producer: Geoff Wilson; Director: Keith Mackenzie

A BBC Manchester Production

Key: Domestic Heats ● = Heat Winner (No Final)  ▲ = Promoted to Position / ▼ = Demoted to Position

GB

Anything Goes 1985

Heat 1

Event Staged: Unknown
Venue: The Tower Circus, The Tower, Blackpool, Lancashire, England

Transmission:
BBC1: Saturday 27th July 1985, 6.05-6.50pm

Special Guests: Tommy Fossett (as Grimble), Buby and Jule (clowns from East Germany),
and Los Alamos (a knife throwing act)

Teams: The Barker Family (Skegness) v. The Swann Family (Banbury)
v. The Wood Family (Burnley)
 

Games included: There's a Plaice for Us.

Game Results and Standings

Result

 Team

Points

Final Scoreboard

1st
2nd
3rd

The Swann Family (Banbury)
The Wood Family (Burnley)
The Barker Family (Skegness)

15
11
9

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 recording venue of the entire series of Anything Goes was the Tower Circus Ring at the base of the world famous Blackpool Tower, between its four legs. This space had previously been used as a location for an It's A Knockout special entitled It's A Miners Knockout in 1978. 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. Where the Tower Circus scored over other venues was in its hidden 35,000 imperial gallon water tank beneath the ring (incorrectly reported in the programme by Keith Chegwin as having a capacity of 70,000 gallons!), which would flood the arena to a depth of 4 foot 6 inches when the floor was lowered. At least one game in each programme was played on water, usually the last one, for obvious reasons! The Tower Circus is one of only four circus rings remaining in the world that has this remarkable facility.

Returning Teams and Competitors

The Swanns from Banbury were none other than It's A Knockout and Jeux Sans Frontières referee Mike Swann and his family. Before his refereeing days, Mike had previously been involved in the series as team manager to the IAK 1972 Banbury team and acted as advisor to the IAK / JSF 1973 Bicester team. After becoming an It's A Knockout referee in 1977, he featured as a competitor in the 1978 It's A Celebrity Knockout.

Additional Information

Teams in the second year of Anything Goes were composed of families representing their towns. The format also changed to incorporate three teams each week rather than two (as seen in the first series of Anything Goes). This was because it was thought that with three teams it was more likely that the competition would be close, whereas with two it was possible to have one team dominate. Typically, in the first contest of Anything Goes 1985 the Swann Family did exactly that!

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