EDDIE WARING once said that his job on television was "to be there, keep it friendly, never let it get out of proportion" before adding less than convincingly that rugby league was "only a game."

As Eddie Waring knew better than anyone, in reality, it was anything but.

Most definitely only a game was the classic BBC TV series It's a Knockout, which began, with Eddie Waring as referee, in 1966.

As a mainstay of Friday night viewing over three decades, It's a Knockout and its European counterpart Jeux Sans Frontières were without doubt the shows that gained Eddie his biggest regular television audience, attracting numbers that dwarfed those tuned to his rugby league commentaries.

Described in some quarters as the 'Idiot Olympics', It's a Knockout was a madcap riot of sports day-style mayhem, characterised by surreal costumes, bizarre missile attacks, lunatic physical risks and the deliberate whipping up of long-standing domestic and international rivalries.

At its height, it proved hugely popular not only with some 19.4m British viewers, but with another 180m right across Europe.

In its glory years, the programme's star turn was the Manchester-based news presenter-cum-sports journalist Stuart Hall, who, clad more often than not in striped blazer and straw boater, spent much of the show convulsed in fits of highly infectious laughter.

The sight of a refuse collector from Skegness struggling to fill a bucket with water on a slippery rotating turntable while clad in an outsized penguin suit was guaranteed to amuse. Having handed over the refereeing duties to the retired FIFA official Arthur Ellis, meanwhile, the occasionally unintelligible Eddie's main responsibility was for the marathon, or fil rouge as it was known in Europe, where Belgium ("Ha ha ha – here come the Belgians – ha ha ha!") always seemed to finish last and those pesky Germans would stop at nothing to secure victory.

It all added up to an anarchic, light-hearted mix of rabid nationalism, civic pride and good clean family fun that all but the most pompous could enjoy.

Waring's involvement with It's a Knockout owed much to his friendship with the BBC producer Barney Colehan and the fact that, in its original form, the show was based exclusively in the north of England.

"During the war, along with managing Dewsbury, Eddie organised Sunday-night concerts at the town's Empire and Playhouse music halls," remembers Eddie's nephew, Harry Waring. "I think that's where he first met Barney Colehan. Barney would produce the shows and Eddie would organise, manage and direct them.

"So he was getting into a bit of show business even back then."

When Colehan, educated at St Bede's Grammar School in Bradford, came up with the idea of It's a Knockout, he knew exactly who he wanted as referee.

The venue for the first It's a Knockout, broadcast live on Sunday, August 7, 1966, was the beach and promenade at Morecambe, where the home town, in tandem with neighbour Heysham, took on the might of fellow west-coast resort Blackpool.

Alas, this debut outing ended in disarray. No one, it seems, had allowed for the tide coming in and swamping the three-legged football. The cameras had a lucky escape too.

As he told the Radio Times in 1976, however, Eddie's most vivid early memories were of the following week's contest, a face-off between Scarborough and Bridlington in Peasholm Park.

Eddie explained: "In this particular week, the idea was to build a pontoon bridge out of pit props across a lake, and then run backwards and forwards across it with balloons. It so happens that most of the contestants were paratroopers, but, let me tell you, I've never seen men so exhausted.

"They were literally throwing up every few minutes on the bank. It was tremendous."