Never mind Blur and Oasis – the real first full-scale hotly contested race for the top spot chart battle was in the early eighties and between, well, Water and Sauce. Even though in actuality most viewers just switched between the two as and when the adverts slash the ‘serious’ bits slash The Oddball Couple arose, the BBC and ITV’s phenomenally popular Saturday Morning children’s shows Noel Edmonds’ Multicoloured Swap Shop and Tiswas were nonetheless considered by all and sundry to be the bitterest of Blondie-interviewing rivals. To be fair, the contrast between the two – which incidentally you can find much more about in The Golden Age Of Children’s TV here – could not have been more marked. If you favoured Noel Edmonds and company, then you were in for a heavily interactive phone-in based morning of what was essentially a radio show live on air, complete with location link-ups, a huge number of guests dropping by for a chat, quirky animated inserts, sophisticated pop numbers and even a novelty mascot in the form of anagrammatical sort-of animatronic mistimed roar-prone purple dinosaur Posh Paws, and genuinely thrilling moments where Noel wandered off around Television Centre to take a look at how the ‘backroom boys’ made the BBC Globe rotate. On ITV, on the other hand, Chris Tarrant and company threw buckets of Wunda Gloo around without a single thought for form, structure or any kind of good example set in accordance with the strictures imposed by the IBA, forever on the lookout for surprise attacks by the Phantom Phlan Phlinger and generally freely encouraging proceedings to collapse into unpredictable custard pie-swamped chaos with the enthusiastic assistance of pop stars of the Madness and Bad Manners persuasion. It was perhaps fitting, then, that outside of the occasional respectively polite and not so polite on-air dig at each other, the real rivalry between Swap Shop and Tiswas took place in the top forty.

Boasting a genuine former pop star and several others who had at least tried their hand at becoming one amongst the regular team, it was perhaps inevitable that the Tiswas mob would find their way into the recording studio before long, and in the days before home video, the riotous song-and-sketch and often both at the same time collection Tiswas Presents The Four Bucketeers was the closest that you could get to reliving the noisy anarchic fun of the show outside of those handful of frequently ‘big shop’-interrupted hours on a Saturday morning. With production from former Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band member and current Rutle Neil Innes and accompanied by a nationwide tour that sold out way in advance, the album was a huge seller and even took them on to Top Of The Pops with the drenchtastic lead single The Bucket Of Water Song.

Perhaps more stung by this incursion onto his own channel than anything else, Noel Edmonds also corralled his visibly less chart-enthusiastic co-hosts into recording a noticeably slicker and rockier novelty song of their own. They didn’t just stop at I Wanna Be A Winner and The Bucket Of Water Song, though, and there were more long-forgotten Tiswas and Swap Shop spinoff singles that anyone seems to realise – and here they all are. Are they worth bothering to track down, let alone phoning in offering to swap one for Turn The Terrible Tank? You’re about to find out…

Sal, Chris ‘N Trev With The Betty Gribbit Massed Ensemble – The Dying Fly/Grab A Granny (1978)

Chris Tarrant has often recalled how many of the greatest Tiswas ideas were originally scribbled down on beermats during boozy ‘meetings’ with his ‘programme associates’, culminating with him simultaneously thinking how hilarious they would be in the show and also that the show was due to start in about four hours. This was almost certainly the genesis of ‘The Dying Fly’, a putative and surprisingly enduring dance craze – reputedly genuinely adopted in some of the less Studio 54-aspirant discotheques – involving lying on your back and waving your arms frantically to the accompaniment of Leroy Anderson’s The News Quiz-soundtracking clacktastic showtune The Typewriter. Tiswas itself had of course begun when ATV announcer Peter Tomlinson got a bit bored with his links between ancient Johnny Weissmuller Tarzan films and Warner Bros. animated shorts and decided to have a bit of offbeat fun with the camera and the audience instead, and the original presentation team was mainly made up of his similarly voiceover-friendly associates including Chris Tarrant and sports reporter Trevor East, who would jump ship in a hail of custard pies just before the show hit the big time, but was still just about around when they recorded the first ever Tiswas single alongside significantly more with-it new recruit Sally James. To the accompaniment of a bunch of session musicians hurtling through a Moog-doodling rendition of The Typewriter – the ‘we’re all doing The Dying Fly’ chorus had yet to be added, thereby denying poor old Trev a co-writing credit – the trio contribute a running commentary on the national Dying Fly finals at the Southend Pier View Fish Bar, with contestants including the Queen Mother, Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Jasper Carrott, assorted sundry topical international political figures and only the one subsequently discredited celebrity. On the b-side, the band just change a couple of notes of The Typewriter so nobody would ever notice while the gang comment instead on the prowess of the Over Eighties Dying Fly Dancers, with some suitably lewd suggestions that Tarrant is having a ‘thing’ with one of them over a fish supper. It was a different time. Speaking of which, at this point Tiswas was still only being shown in a handful of ITV regions and some of them infrequently at that, so well done on getting a nationally available pop single on a major label!

The Four Bucketeers – The Bucket Of Water Song/Smello (The Incredible Stinking Man) (1980)

Not long after the departing Trev was encouraging the nation’s nightclubbers to scuff their clothes for the sake of a dance craze that was neither a craze nor particularly any kind of actual dance as such, the Tiswas team were joined by ventriloquist Bob Carolgees and his antisocial mutt Spit The Dog and humourist John Gorman, formerly of sixties satirical silliness hitmakers The Scaffold. Gorman brought with him the ability to transform the nonsensical song motifs that were a staple spontaneous feature of Tiswas into actual proper tunes with structures and hooks and melodies, so much so in fact that he was able to attract the attention of CBS, leading to Tiswas Presents The Four Bucketeers – with a completely re-recorded and musically punchier The Dying Fly featuring updated celebrity references – and this accompanying ode to the joys of drenching the audience boo and hiss-inviting inmates of ‘The Cage’ in the studio corner only apparently with added marching in formation while doing so, not to mention the fairly impractical flourish of crashing a cymbal to accompany bucket-hurlage. His input evidently had the required effect, as pub rock chuck-along The Bucket Of Water Song climbed to number twenty six and bagged the Bucketeers a gatecrashing slot on Top Of The Pops, where they were prevailed upon to chuck buckets of glitter over themselves and the audience in a reasonable and understandable concession to not wanting huge quantities of water flying around in a studio full of electrical equipment and overexcitable boogieing teenagers, which is inevitably now ascribed to bores on forums as a shameful instance of ‘PC’ gone ‘mad’. The non-album b-side, incidentally, was an in-character celebration of Gorman’s string vest-favouring bath-dwelling chip-scoffer and his jubilant disdain for hygiene, vigorously confirming for the benefit of any uncertain parties that ‘soap is just for softies’ along with all manner of odiferous tips on stuffing rotting fish into your pockets et al. Where, you may be wondering, is the conspicuously absent Fifth Bucketeer, though? Well, it turns out he was in an entirely different recording studio…

Lenny Henry – Mole In The Hole/The (Algernon Wants You To Say) Okay Song (1981)

Unique amongst comedians in that he has made loads of novelty comedy singles and they are all uniformly actually really good, Lenny Henry was already something of a rising star and a semi-familiar face on television when he joined the Tiswas roster late in 1978, but it was Chris Tarrant’s active encouragement to try out some of his wilder impressions and more outlandish and idiosyncratic character ideas live on air that really unleashed his comic potential. Such was his grounding in the traditional showbiz circuit, however, that a wodge of existing contractual commitments prevented him from taking full tie-in advantage of his overnight Saturday Morning stardom, and while he does show up on Tiswas Presents The Four Bucketeers, primarily performing Wuwal Wetweats in character as a Wobin Wedbweast-fixated David Bellamy, he was unable to appear on any of the accompanying singles. Instead, fans of Lenny’s own distinctive brand of indefatigable early morning mayhem got this effort somewhat incongruously released on Jet Records, home to ELO, Lynsey De Paul and Magnum and bankrolled by notorious rock impresario Don Arden. The a-side is essentially an excuse for ‘David Bellamy’ and toweringly-hatted Condensed Milk-scoffer Algernon Razzmatazz to trade zoological puns with added jokes about reggae and disco over the top of The Southlanders’ mole-centric 1958 hit, while the genuinely brilliant b-side captures Algernon alone on a dub excursion on Michael Row The Boat Ashore with retooled lyrics about spreading happiness and joy everywhere you go and, of course, regular confirmation of feeling ‘ooookaaaaaay’. Doubtless it is not quite so positively received, however, by all of those men who at the merest hint of a mention of his name will go out of their way to inform you at considerable length that they just don’t find him funny and have never found him funny and it’s not because of any reason or anything they just don’t find him funny and are allowed to not find him funny. Next time that we heard from Lenny on 7″, possibly much to the dismay of said gentlemen, it was in the much more sophisticated and sharply satirical guise of pirate radio DJ Delbert Wilkins. The Tiswas gang, however, had quite a few more singles to get through first…

Matthew Butler And The Four Bucketeers – Bright Eyes/We Are The Four Bucketeers (1981)

Discovered amongst a dispiriting sea of precocious brats at a Tiswas talent contest, five-year-old Matthew Butler’s off-key rendition of Art Garfunkel’s chart-topping theme from Watership Down while wearing a ludicrously oversized rabbit costume and gnawing on a similarly disproportionate prop carrot certainly struck a chord with viewers, who wrote in by the mailbagful demanding his appearance on a pretty much weekly basis. Naturally, this was a shoo-in for inclusion on Tiswas Presents The Four Bucketeers, but while you might well assume that the fairly straight and faithful rendition loses the joke without the visuals, Matthew’s misplaced emphases, general unfamiliarity with meaning of the words and overall unfailing ability to just miss the note he was aiming for never fail to amuse. Over on the other side, The Four Bucketeers presented their fanfare-driven and not especially different to The Bucket Of Water Song manifesto that was wisely swerved as a potential a-side in favour of…

The Four Bucketeers – Water Is Wonderful/Raspberry Rock (1981)

Noticeably re-recorded from the album version – both to reduce Lenny’s contributions including Trevor McDoughnut’s opening ‘News Splash’ to a handful of blink and you’ll miss them ooookaaaaaays and to give it a little more musical, well, welly – the rousing football chant-styled singalong asserting that ‘water is best, when you can chuck it, over yourself, out of a bucket’ and positing some variety of longstanding regional feud between Liverpudlians and Scots over whether water should be poured down trousers or up kilts was never quite likely to scale the same heights of chart success, and the four quietly hung up their buckets shortly afterwards. Over on the b-side, Gorman’s pop star character ‘Jet Lag’ snarled through a punk parody extolling the virtues of sticking your tongue out, and other than a non-Spit accompanied children’s choir-festooned Bob Carolgees existential ‘weepie’ called Do Animals Dream on an obscure label that seemed to release about twenty thousand singles in 1980 and then vanish, that was it for The Four Bucketeers on record. Well, for three of them at least…

The Pie ‘N’ Ears – (It’s The) Year Of The Pie/The Custard Pie Song (1981)

In 1981, Chris Tarrant, John Gorman, Bob Carolgees and Lenny Henry were offered the chance to launch a late-night ‘adult’ version of Tiswas – and you can hear much more about why O.T.T. infuriated the tabloids and the IBA and overall just didn’t work but still kept a generation of very confused youngsters who quite liked one or two bits of it devotedly sneakily staying up to watch it on the black and white portable in Looks Unfamiliar with Mitch Benn here – leaving Sally James to helm what turned out to be the final run of Tiswas alongside aspirant New Tarrant Gordon Astley, ‘funny one’ out of comically-inclined doo-wop revivalists Darts Den Hegarty, serious actor turned Tizer-plugging zany sunglasses sporter David Rappaport and up-and-coming impressionist Fogwell Flax. The results were not as disastrously uninteresting as legend would have it – for a start, all of the new team had previously frequently appeared on Tiswas in varying capacities so at the very least knew what they were doing – but ironically for a show whose unofficial slogan was ‘this is what they want’ it was not what the audience wanted at all and Tiswas would not return in 1983. The new team would nonetheless still make it in to the recording studio as ‘The Pie ‘N’ Ears’, with a song that was essentially a flimsy excuse for Fogwell Flax to do his Prince Charles impression over huge swathes of a ragtime number with a sort of spoof astrological slant – at least we can only hope it was in reference to The Year Of The Rooster; otherwise 1981 was also officially International Year Of Disabled Persons – and a rare single-side appearance by The Phantom Phlan Phlinger, although Margaret Thatcher does get involved at some point. On the b-side, they basically just tongue-twistingly list essentially everyone in the known universe as nominal willing recipients of a shaving foam and paper plate projectile, and that was – perhaps thankfully – pretty much that. What were they up to over on the other side during Telly Selly Time, though…?

Brown Sauce – I Wanna Be A Winner/Hello Hello (BBC Records And Tapes, 1981)

In addition to his love of new technology, flashy cars and for some reason driving milk floats around race tracks, Swap Shop anchor and simultaneous Radio 1 DJ slash Top Of The Pops presenter Noel Edmonds had never made any particular secret of how much he enjoyed being part of the rock star set without having to do anything so mundane as actually being a proper actual rock star. No doubt his nose was put out of joint slightly when The Four Bucketeers commenced their chart ascent, and he duly teamed up with wordplay-favouring New Wave singer-songwriter with aspirations towards a parallel career in comedy, arts punditry and chat show hosting B.A. Robertson – then enjoying a string of hits not just in his own right but in songwriting cahoots with Cliff Richard, and a frequent and popular visitor to the Swap Shop studio – to secure a hit of his own. Cryptically credited to ‘Brown Sauce’, the bulk of the vocals on I Just Wanna Be A Winner – a scarcely Posh Paws-aligned lament for how difficult it is to bag a BAFTA nomination, with a suitably wink-to-camera nod towards Swap Shop‘s own viewer-voted awards The ERICs – were handled by Maggie Philbin and Keith Chegwin with Noel fairly unconvincingly miming on drums in the video; John Craven was presumably outside looking at some of Britain’s disappearing wildlife. With the might of BBC Records And Tapes behind them, which at least guaranteed blanket television and radio exposure on at least one side of the broadcasting divide, Brown Sauce even managed to trounce The Four Bucketeers by reaching number fifteen. The b-side – which it is difficult to believe Kurt Cobain never heard – was B.A.’s vocoder-heavy Mike Batt-usurping new synthpop Swap Shop theme, albeit minus the opening ‘S-W-A-P-S-H-O-P, it’s a Swaaaaaap Shoppppppp!’, which heralded the last couple of runs of Saturday morning telephonic discarded board game exchange. Crucially, they would not only retain the full original successful team right through to the very last edition but also were notably less reliant on Prince Charles impressions. Apart from when Mike Yarwood was on the show, which was admittedly often. Incidentally there’s much more about Swap Shop and B.A. Robertson’s surprisingly lengthy association with BBC Records And Tapes in Top Of The Box, a guide to every single released by the label, here.

The Saucers – Spring Has Sprung/Major Breakthrough (BBC Records And Tapes, 1982)

Unsurprisingly, Brown Sauce were keen to have a second shot at top twenty stardom, but their first misjudgement was rebranding the now Noel-deficient duo as ‘The Saucers’ as if everyone was supposed to automatically realise who they were, and the second was to trade in the slick riff-rocking fun of I Wanna Be A Winner for a fairly straight Dollar-soundalike post-New Romantic pop number that in all honesty did not sound any different from the dozens of other Dollar-soundalike post-New Romantic pop numbers dominating the airwaves at the time. A plus point on an artistic level, but not especially quite so much from a commercial perspective. Meanwhile the flipside was a song that B.A. had clearly originally earmarked for himself, presenting the possibly too pun-heavy arguments put forward by a couple pleading with a gruff military patriarch for permission to marry, complete with comedy-voiced ‘LEFT! RIGHT! LEFT! RIGHT!’ interludes. Other than a rumoured but elusive single with John Craven pretending to be Mr. Spock or something, the chart rivalry ended right there, as indeed shortly afterwards did the shows themselves, with Tiswas and Swap Shop calling it a day in anticipation of the varying attractions of The Saturday Show and Buzzfax within days of each other. But you can read much more about all of that here…

Buy A Book!

There’s tons more about the Tiswas and Multicoloured Swap Shop rivalry and tons of other Saturday Morning shows in The Golden Age Of Children’s TV, available in all good bookshops and from Waterstones here, Amazon here, from the Kindle Store here and directly from Black And White Publishing here.

Alternately, if you’re just feeling generous, you can buy me a coffee here. Actually, just heat up those buckets of water and add some caffeine. It’s a much more sensible option.

Further Reading

How did the Swap Shop board game actually work in any practical or meaningful sense? Find out in A Fast Exciting All-Action Game here. There’s also a look at Tiswas‘s famously disastrous seabound holiday stand-in The Mersey Pirate in Ferry Cross The Mersey (Unless It’s Raining) here and the BBC’s far-out first ever Saturday Morning show Zokko! in BWAMmM It’s Zokko! here.

Further Listening

You can find more about what the Tiswas gang did next in Looks Unfamiliar with Mitch Benn on O.T.T. here and Pete Prodge on How Dare You! here.

© Tim Worthington.
Please don’t copy this only with more italics and exclamation marks.