The Generation Game (1971)

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Why is the BBC filling Saturday night summer schedules with TV that feels seedy and outdated - not nostalgic.

100 BBC TV gamechangers

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History of the BBC: Saturday Night

Memories of Saturday night viewing - particularly in the 1960s and 1970s - can evoke a keen sense of nostalgia amongst viewers of a certain age. The schedule tended to follow a pattern, one which was carefully constructed and had something for the whole family.

Forsyth ignored Davidson after Generation Game snub

Sir Bruce Forsyth refused to speak Jim Davidson "ever again" after he took over as host of The Generation Game in 1995.

I'm here at work, snowed under with things I need to get done, when I discover I've got a copy of The Generation Game: Now and Then - which starts on UKTV Gold Thursday 22 November - tucked under a load of other stuff. Well, that's it, I'm screwed, because I have to watch this. And from the off, my colleagues are interested too, keen to check out the reworked theme song which, I have to say, is ace. Bruce trilling away over an amped-up version of that familar theme. In short, they haven't ruined it. (Shame about the boring ITV1-style logo and set, though).

It takes an awful lot to make you pine for Jim Davidson, but Graham Norton damn near managed it with The Generation Game: Now and Then. Perhaps the most frustrating thing about this whole dismal exercise was that you knew exactly what it was going to be like beforehand, and yet the The Generation Game: Now and Then still had enough goodwill in the tank to make you give it a go.

Many, many things go clean over my head. But Jim Davidson's Generation Game (BBC1) is the first thing that's ever gone under it. As a child, I watched Larry Grayson's tenure, and found the programme dull but easy to follow. Now it's transformed into something I simply don't understand.