Jeremy Beadle

The story behind Jeremy Beadle's finest prank

The prank to end all pranks began as a bit of office banter. It was early 1996 and Jeremy Beadle was undisputed king of British light entertainment, with his riotous practical joke show Beadle's About regularly attracting 15 million viewers.

The words "Paddy McGuinness" send shivers down your spine - and not in a good way. McGuinness made his TV debut on Phoenix Nights, if you recall, and his career has been going from bad to worse ever since in the eyes of just about every reviewer and critic around.

Paddy's TV Guide follows a spate of cheap clip shows, with McGuinness presenting clips from TV shows (old and new) using a weekly theme. The first episode focused on health and fitness, with shows recorded on his "Paddy Player".

The clips themselves are mildly amusing, from an old exercise show featuring a woman dancing with candles to a tough American fitness instructor shouting at just about any mode of transport. But this programme, along with others like it (BBC One's Animal Antics for example) illustrate what I think is the main problem with clip shows; the way they're presented.

If you have a show which is just about clips, from TV shows, the internet, or recorded by members of the public, then what you want to see is just those clips. You don't want to see Paddy McGuinness doing some small routine in-between them, or Matthew Crosby dressed up as a dog in the case of Animal Antics. All you need's a voice-over.

Harry Hill made You've Been Framed watchable. We all know it's the cheesiest programme around, but because Hill's contribution is minimal, the viewers get to see more of what they want, rather than putting up with Jeremy Beadle and Lisa Riley trying to be funny between the clips.

Of course, it could just be the fact that Hill's funnier than any of those people, and that's probably Paddy McGuinness' biggest flaw too; he's not much cop.

Kayvan Novak returns for a second series of dogged prankstering with Facejacker, much like his breakthrough show Fonejacker but with clammy prosthetics. Car dealer Terry Tibbs is back with a bang, travelling to the US to judge a beauty pageant in his own inimitably inappropriate style, while highly sexed minicab test examiner Augustine also returns. A sketch involving a faulty self-service check out perilously approaches Jeremy Beadle territory, but thankfully skirts around it.

What links Salvador Dali, Bugs Bunny and Jeremy Beadle? They were all tricksters - characters who revelled in subverting other people's perceptions of reality. This unusual broadcast, which features pre-recorded material with live links from an April Fool's Day festival in New York, is the work of Toby Amies, himself a winner of the Dali Award at the 1999 International Surrealist Film Festival. He asks why it is so pleasurable to watch some hapless member of the public caught out on camera by an elaborate and, in most cases, totally illogical and unbelievable prank. But he also visits the dark side of media mischief with the woman who phoned her husband while live on US radio to "reveal" that he was not the father of their son (ha, ha, what a jape) - only for the angered man to declare that he'd been sleeping with her sister for the last year. When pranks go bad...

If the names Captain Kremmen, Marcel Wave, Sid Snot and Cupid Stunt mean anything to you, then it's a safe bet that you're familiar with the work of the late Kenny Everett. Jeremy Beadle, Barry Cryer, Barry Took, and Steve Wright celebrate the work of a comedian who was always in the best possible taste.

I was never a fan of the practical jokes of The Unforgettable Jeremy Beadle - in fact, I think I had forgotten him until this tribute - but it certainly did its job in changing my opinion of the man himself. Frankly, it's almost impossible for me to dislike someone who loved books so much that he had an extension built onto his house to hold his library of 30,000 - that's living the dream! He was even buried under a gravestone representing books, with the epitaph "Ask my friends" and that's what this show did, eliciting what seemed to be genuinely heartfelt memories of a decent chap.

As well as being an apparently good father, stepfather, husband and friend, he relentlessly raised money for charity through marathon quiz sessions and auctions - around £100 million. "Oh, that's just showing off," said his former Game For A Laugh co-star Matthew Kelly, in awe.

But he still became something of a hate figure, once coming second to Saddam Hussein in an unpopularity poll, and a by-word for a type of trashy telly which, nevertheless, flourished even after he was dumped from his prime time slots. His family said he was hurt by the reversal of fortunes and, as fellow quasi-hate figure Chris Tarrant pointed out, it was strange how he went from being over-exposed to being a TV pariah for years, only able to appear in panto villain roles like Ant & Dec's Banged up with Beadle slot.

Ironically, he'd have probably fared better in today's celeb-crazy television environment; he could have made a good guest on Who Do You Think You Are, fronted a documentary on disability or just gone round the country on a spacehopper or something. And yet, there's a lesson there: Jeremy Beadle's fall wasn't due to his own failings or a sudden turn against cheesy pranks (still going strong on John Barrowman's excruciating Tonight's The Night). People just got sick of the sight of him - and today's actors, presenters and rent-a-guests should probably take note.

When TV prankster Jeremy Beadle died in 2008, at the age of just 59, the obituary in this newspaper observed that he had the "paradoxical double distinction of being voted the second most hated man in Britain (after Saddam Hussein) and of being the most avidly watched presenter on television." This biographical compilation is affectionate in tone, but the Beadle Quandary endures: was he able to redeem his cruelty - he had a vicious tongue in an argument - with the kindness that saw him raise £13million for charity?

If you missed last week's episode I urge you to check it out on the BBC's iPlayer. In it we saw documentary-maker Brendan (one of the three deluded wannabes all played by Marc Wootton) pitch his idea for a climbing disaster documentary to a Hollywood producer. "Right, it'll look like an accident. Boom, this is what just happened to happen and, boom, then you're filming it... That could work. Absolutely..."

In practice, Wootton earns himself a lifelong pedestal in the pranksters' hall of fame, right next to Borat.

This week, Brendan's big idea is to release a condor into the wild. And he has persuaded a passer-by to pretend to be an ecology expert. Also tonight, aspiring actor Gary Garner films his show-reel and fake psychic Shirley Ghostman drugs the competition at an audition for a new show called Spirited.

If there are TVs in the afterlife, you can bet Jeremy Beadle will have La La Land on series link.

The dead-fly garnish on this week's bucket of swill was Anonymous, the new celebrity prank-show on ITV1.

"What happens when celebrities want a day off?" the introduction ran - to the immediate, incredulous answer from the viewer, "Take the day off?"

But this was not the full question Anonymous was asking. The full inquiry was, "What happens when celebrities want a day off - and cause havoc with dozens of cameras, ingeniously hidden from view?"

Well then, in that case, the answer is obviously, "Fill up 45 minutes of prime-time on a Saturday night and, technically, not really have a day off at all."

The "killer" idea of Anonymous is that it gives celebrities "the biggest makeover - a new face". Thanks to a much-mentioned "five hours in prosthetics", Fiz from Coronation Street got rigged up as a blonde Essex girl, the X Factor judge Louis Walsh got disguised as an old man, and the former rugby player Matt Dawson was transformed into a camp West End choreographer. Thus disguised, the celebrities then pranked their celebrity friends - usually by behaving with intolerable wackiness, while their friends acted with bemused good grace.

The essential problem with Anonymous - and it became obvious in minutes - was the disguises themselves. While the stars certainly weren't recognisable as themselves, they also weren't necessarily recognisable as normal human beings, either. Frankly, those prosthetics were poor. Fiz's chin looked like it was constructed of three pieces of pre-sliced turkey breast. Matt Dawson's face had the alarming unyieldingness of a Bakelite death mask and Louis Walsh looked like a statue of Freddie Boswell from Bread, as sculpted by the blind woman in the video to Hello. Even in a post-Simon Weston world, you would momentarily break stride on sighting them in the street. And in every single prank, the victims commented on how alarmingly awful the prankers' prosthetics were.

"As soon as I saw him, I thought, 'He's had loads of plastic surgery,'" Austin Healey said of Dawson's wonky-Spam head.

"I just thought you'd had really bad plastic surgery!" Fiz's Corrie colleague Michelle Keegan howled at Fiz, who looked like Nikki Chapman wearing Craig David's Bo' Selecta! chin.

You do have to wonder if the muchvaunted Anonymous "Four hours in prosthetics!" is strictly necessary. After all, Jeremy Beadle regularly managed to get people's houses knocked down while wearing disguises no more audacious than "a hat".