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[Display newest blog entries first?] Fri 23 Mar 2007 (06:00) -Peter Thomas Sun 1 Apr 2007 (06:00) TiswasOnline and ITV have been running two application forms for Tiswas viewers to appear in Tiswas Reunited. One was for those of you lucky to have appeared on Tiswas as a child, as ITV wanted you in the audience to speak of your memories. The other application was open to any Tiswas fan aged between 18 and 50 who wanted to be locked up into the Cage and have pies, gunge and water thrown and dumped on them, which was surprisingly popular. Ten people will be picked to go into the Cage on Tiswas Reunited for a couple of hours, enduring some really messy treatment in front of a celeb-packed audience! Around 60 people each applied through these forms. The April 1st closing date did put some people off, but we can confirm it was certainly no joke. Those successful will hear from ITV's researcher shortly. For those of you who didn't/couldn't apply, watch this space, because as Kate Bush once said: "I just know that something good is going to happen". We're tight-lipped at the moment, but do return here later this week when we'll reveal all... -Peter Thomas Sun 8 Apr 2007 (13:34) Yes, this applies to anyone and everyone (er, over 18 that is). General audience tickets are now up for grabs for the recording of Tiswas Reunited at the London Studios on Monday 23rd April! You can get by reading the instructions on the main TiswasOnline website. Recording is from 6:30pm to 10pm. If you're a true Tiswas fan, you don't wanna miss this at all! -Peter Thomas Sun 8 Apr 2007 (14:24) It's all in the can! Well, if you can read this, Tiswas Reunited has been fully recorded and will be airing on ITV1 in a few week's time. And here I am writing this just two weeks before the show is going to be recorded! Surreal, eh? Consider this a backstage blog! So right now I can't tell if the show was brilliant or a disappointment. What I can now reveal under these circumstances is our involvement with the show. Ever since the Tiswas Reunited idea was brought up in the press earlier this year, cynics were pouring scorn on it, for being a copy of the BBC's It Started With Swap Shop idea. Not true though, because this reunion programme concept has been floating around for over two years. We know because when we met Bob Carolgees in the summer of 2005, he hinted at it, but never really revealed enough for us to know what was going to happen. Earlier on this year, I was contacted by Mike - Sally James' husband, a man who has a lot to do with Tiswas, having been the producer behind the Best Of The Bits/More The Best Bits/Comedy Capers compilations, and is still in touch with various Tiswas people. He needed our knowledge to help with this revival show, which didn't even have a title or a working format back then. Nor was it even a done deal with ITV. The way the press reacted, it was as if the show was a definite goer, although behind the scenes, there was rights negotiations still ongoing. Even after the show was green-lighted, a catastrophe involving lots of details being lost almost put Tiswas Reunited in jeopardy. We were called in to help trace a few Tiswas people, such as theme tune writer/singer Tom Bright, and the Phantom Flan Flinger himself, Benny Mills - which involved me calling round lots of B Mills in the West Midlands phone-book before realising he was ex-directory! When I finally found his number, Benny was quite stunned to hear that he'd be needed to don the black mask again, but was totally up for it! For our help with the show, Mike and ITV promised us five audience tickets for ourselves and a guest each, which pleased us enormously. We didn't expect that, and we're truly grateful. I never appeared on Tiswas as a child, despite having the opportunity to, so it's a lifelong ambition fulfilled, so just to be in the audience is good enough, but when we were given invites to the after-show party, we were gobsmacked! Only two of the TiswasOnline team appeared on Tiswas before. Obviously, Matthew Lewis (nee Butler) you know about, and then there's Andrew 'staplingmachine' Wooding, who through a family friend at ATV, got onto the set despite being two years older than the 14 years age limit for kids! I've only ever been inside the reception at the old Broad Street studio complex, and that was in 1983, after Tiswas sadly bit the dust and some forgettable programme called The Saturday Show took its place. My TiswasOnline colleague Lee Bannister had been in a studio there, but only to watch Blockbusters. Of course, when the TiswasOnline website launched, Central News West did a feature on us, and invited us all into the old Tiswas studio, but alas, I couldn't get the time off work. Lee and Matthew did however, for which I am eternally jealous. Enough about ourselves, the other good news we got from Mike was that he recognised our site as a haven for Tiswas fans, and obviously wanted to communicate with site visitors who had been on the show. An initial An Audience With... concept was the foundation for the show, so you'd have lots of celebrities in the audience. However, Mike also wanted people who appeared on Tiswas as a child, especially if they had an interesting story. So I wrote a webpage where such people could give feedback and in return, get VIP audience tickets! Around a third of the feedback we got were from people who never appeared on Tiswas, but just pleaded with ITV to give them tickets. Later on, Mike had mentioned something about a setting a competition on our site for 10 Tiswas fans to appear on the show, which we were excited about. At last, this could appease those people who banged on at us to give them tickets (something we're not in a position to do). Wondering if this competition would be a question-and-answer thing, I began researching ways to creating a fair online quiz, based on IP number recognition, dynamic sets of questions, etc, etc. It seemed it would require a lot of dedicated time spent on it. So I was well-chuffed when the ITV researcher said it was a competition to go into the Cage, and all they wanted to hear was WHY the applicant should go in the Cage! Ah, dead easy, a simple textbox-to-e-mail script... which I knocked up in minutes. Alas, things weren't that easy. The closing date of 1st April which we had to state, made people wonder if we were setting a hoax. Plus, for the first few days, we were just getting so many male applications. Not many girls seemed interested in it. But hey, judging by our website forum, most of our visitors are male anyway. In order to encourage some female participation, I popped over to Blather - a forum on Dominic Wood's official website, where I'm a regular poster (Dominic Wood being one half of the legendary Dick And Dom duo, and thus, Blather is the closest thing to an official Dick And Dom In Da Bungalow forum, an anarchic Saturday morning TV show that I rate almost as highly as Tiswas). Having met quite a few of the regulrs on Blather, who are mostly female, I knew some of them would be up for it. I've met a few of them in person when me and my girlfriend attended a live Dick And Dom theatre show in London last year (we are huge fans). Thanks to TiswasOnline's appearance on Dick And Dom In Da Bungalow when Matthew and the rest of us reprised the 'Bright Eyes' act, a lot of Bungalow fans are now aware of what Tiswas was about, and how Da Bungalow was a modern-day incarnation. There's even an 11 year old boy on that forum who worships Tiswas. Only a mere handful were actually born before Tiswas was axed! Plus, the rumour that Dick And Dom were going to be on Tiswas Reunited also helped matters. So, with a forum posting entitled Over 18's needed to be gunged on ITV1 (pretty much straight-to-the-point), we managed to recruit four women, two of whom got picked, with one selected on standby. Of course, that wasn't the only web forum notified of the campaign. Not instigated by us, we saw a rather 'specialist' website dedicated to 'self-gunging', where our page was publicised. That explained the odd entry we had from people who boasted about custard-pieing themselves, how they loved to get mucky, and even giving URLs of themselves covered in baked beans and stuff like that. To be frank, I didn't think these kind of people stood a chance - and I was right too! Especially the one guy giving out a website address that showed lots of transvestites being smeared with food in a paddling pool. I'm open minded, I have nothing against consenting adults into their harmless kinks, but there's some things I'd rather not know or see! Besides, if you were into a food fetish, and you wanted to go into the Tiswas Cage (which is obviously a magnet for people into that kinda thing), it would probably serve you better to not mention your rather fanatical love of all things messy. If you were a foot fetishist, you wouldn't mention that fact in a job interview at Freeman Hardy Willis! So why these people thought we wanted to see them half-naked and covered in chocolate sauce, I don't know! Up until about a month ago, a studio still hadn't been booked! But here I am typing this on Sunday the 8th April, we know that the largest studio in the London Studios is being used, with a capacity for over 500 people - the same place used for Ant And Dec's Saturday Night Takeaway and The British Comedy Awards. I never expected that! So this thing is going to be huge. -Peter Thomas Mon 9 Apr 2007 (19:02) If I told you that the guy making the custard pies for Tiswas Reunited was being flown in from Hollywood, you'd think I was pulling your leg. It sounds like a typical joke that you'd expect from Tiswas itself. Well, astonishing as it sounds, a professional set-designer - Andy Walmsley - has won the contract to design the Tiswas Reunited set, having worked on many iconic shows, such as Who Wants To Be A Millionaire and American Idol. Andy's a Brit now based in the USA, over on the west coast where most mainstream American television is made. Thanks to working on Who Wants To Be A Millionaire in this country some years back, he has become friends with Chris Tarrant. Most importantly, Andy is a huge Tiswas fan. So while he's designed the set, he's also begged to be the one making the custard pies. He won over the Tiswas team, and he will be making hundreds of pies for the show - all to the authentic recipe, using genuine 'ingredients', such as the correct shaving foam and food colouring. He's also been put in charge of the water and the gunge. It's not been too easy though - the London Studios are the most strictest in the UK for Health and Safety concerns. When you think about it, it was a weekly miracle that there were no electrocutions back on Tiswas, what with the water being hurled around in front of expensive and vulnerable studio equipment. To see some of Andy's work, he has his own personal website - http://www.andywalmsley.com. We've been told a few things - Tiswas Reunited will be emanating from Studio 1 - the largest studio in the complex, normally used for things such as Ant And Dec's Saturday Night Takeaway, An Audience With... and the British Comedy Awards. It's going to house over 500 audience members on the night! Incredible... -Peter Thomas Tue 10 Apr 2007 (12:28) When I was chatting to the ITV researcher who approached us to pick our brains for nuggets of Tiswas information, I got mentioning our credentials - the Central News West report, the newspaper stories, and the Dick And Dom In Da Bungalow re-enactment - to which I was informed that Dick and Dom would be on Tiswas Reunited, albeit as a pre-recorded insert. Then, more recently, Marc Neun heard from ITV that Dick and Dom would be in the audience. Hurrah! A small little reunion of Four Carrot Gold, with our friends from Da Bungalow! I fully appreciate Dick And Dom In Da Bungalow, for being the closest thing on a Saturday morning to Tiswas. Never mind all that SM:TV Live praise, Da Bungalow had the right blend of surreal comedy and slapstick humour. -Peter Thomas Wed 11 Apr 2007 (09:38) Following the news that Andy Walmsley has been given the task of designing the new Tiswas Reunited set, it probably won't surprise you to learn the the design closely matches the 'classic' design as seen in the 1980-81 series. You know, the one with the cartoons (baby in the pram flanning its Mum, the boy with the catapult) and the caracatures (CT, Sal, John, Bob & Spit). Oh and remember that the logo infront of the desk that had Sal & CT's heads the wrong way round... The idea was to use as much of the original elements as possible, and this meant getting hold of one very important person - Chris Wroe. Chris was ATV's Graphics Supremo and drew all of those familiar cartoons & caracatures that we know and love to this day (along with so many other symbols from ATV/Central programmes including Bully in Bullseye!) Chris still has much of his original artwork and he's very kindly allowed TiswasOnline and Andy Walmsley to borrow it. Plus we were able to provide Andy with numerous scans and reference pictures of the original set so that it all felt right. We'll have plenty of photos of the set from the design phase through to construction and filming (both flanned and unflanned!) plus Andy has promised to tell all about his involvement with this very special project through TiswasOnline. Stay tuned, or we'll flan you! -Lee Bannister Sun 15 Apr 2007 (10:35) If you really want to be in the audience for this show and display your true Tiswas credentials, it's time to stop dithering and apply for audience tickets via our main site, because they're fast running out! Also, we have tracked down the final ten Tiswas fans who are set to be going into the Cage on the show. We've written a piece about each of them on the Cage page here. -Peter Thomas Sun 15 Apr 2007 (14:49) Yesterday morning I hurried ran off DVD copies of various old Tiswas off-air recordings for the benefit of Tiswas Reunited, stuck them in a jiffy bag, and headed them off to the general direction of the south bank. The reason is that our Favourite Moments poll has well and truly finished, having generated a controversial top ten list of the favourite moments from our own recordings, as voted by TiswasOnline forum members. It's not our fault that Matthew Butler's debut for singing Bright Eyes got to such a high place, along with many of his other appearances. One rather narked forum member protested against the Bright Eyes clip, but at the end of the day, that's democracy - people liked it, it gets in. It's highly telling that the complainer didn't bother voting for the clips he liked! We're not sure whether the top ten clips will be aired, especially as #2 and #3 are both renditions of the Bucket Of Water Song, so it's up to the producers what they want to show. I expect just a mish-mash of clips if anything. It's also quite late in the day to do much (I only sent the clips yesterday because my job makes it impossible to attend a post office during a weekday). The poll data for every voted clip is off on its way to ITV. -Peter Thomas Mon 16 Apr 2007 (12:32) Well, this weekend I sent footage of Tiswas recordings over to the Tiswas Reunited for use in the show, and I just spoke to ITV, wondering at this stage in the game (a week to go) if our clips would be too late to use in the show. Not to worry, we were told, because any stuff not making it into the transmitted show is going to be in a Tiswas DVD! Yep, Tiswas Volume 2 - it's going to have Tiswas Reunited (probably in a longer format) plus extra bits! A shrewd move, I say! -Peter Thomas
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