Sponsored by
The Eddie Waring story: A knockout personality who helped spread league's gospel
In the final part of our serialisation of Being Eddie Waring, author Tony Hannan looks at how he forged a TV career on It's a Knockout
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 Frontires 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."
In 1969 Eddie was promoted to co-presenter following the departure of Katie Boyle, a move his son, Tony, remembers his father mulling long and hard over.
"He was conscious of a potential clash with his rugby league duties," says Tony. "In the end, though, he felt that his involvement in such a popular international programme provided further exposure for the game itself."
Whatever the circumstances, once up front and centre stage Eddie made an immediate impact on viewers and programme makers alike. And when It's a Knockout appeared in colour for the first time in 1970, Eddie Waring's passport to a still greater pitch of notoriety was assured.
"These days, you'd never get it through health and safety," chuckles Hall, perilously close to a trademark laugh that calls to mind an asthma-attack victim choking on a cough sweet.
"The contestants were always getting dislocated shoulders, broken ankles, head injuries and God knows what. But back then, people took responsibility for themselves."
Throw into that mix the added ingredient of Eddie Waring, whose contributions developed into a series of incoherent gurgles as the fever pitch rose, and how could it possibly fail?
"The problem for Eddie was that despite his brain whirling around, he could never quite formulate the words," says Hall. "He would start a sentence in the middle of the previous one, and then go off at a tangent saying something else. He had a unique way with language.
"When we were abroad, for example, he would never realise that girls' names ended with 'a' and boys' with 'o'.
"There was a lovely Italian girl presenter called Rosanna Vaudetti. She used to come to us for the English pronunciations. One week, we had a team playing from Thurrock in Essex.
"Rosanna came to our little cabin and asked how she should pronounce that. Eddie immediately turned around and said: "Therrrrock-ah!" So off she went and pronounced it like that herself."
While It's a Knockout enjoyed massive viewing figures, not everyone was a fan. Within rugby league, for instance, there was a collective sense-of-humour failure at how the show's pantomime image echoed the BBC's supposed treatment of the 13-a-side code.
And in the crustier corners of the media, the more highbrow critics did tend to condemn what was an essentially harmless piece of Friday-night froth in terms not altogether unfamiliar to rugby fans north of Doncaster.
One writer accused Waring of "gargling with tripe."
Given his lifelong theatrical inclinations, the lure of a parallel career in light entertainment was always going to prove irresistible to Eddie.
Thanks largely to the growing popularity of It's a Knockout, it wasn't long before shows unassociated with sport or physical endeavour began to covet this most idiosyncratic of personalities.
Eddie's first major break in that direction came with the Morecambe and Wise Christmas Show in 1971. In Eric and Ernie, the universal qualities of traditional northern English humour – an emphasis on the struggling little guy, the juxtaposition of the real and surreal, a recognition of the value of friendship in the face of the ultimate absurdity of human existence – were never better expressed.
Mainly, though, Morecambe and Wise were just profoundly silly. Whatever your age or geographical roots, they were there to be enjoyed. Eddie Waring slotted into the pair's zany world as if to the manner born.
In both that 1971 festive outing and the even more rapturously received 1977 Christmas show, which attracted a record British television audience of over 28m, Eddie's own roles could not have been smaller.
Even so, as part of the chorus in a pair of musical numbers choreographed by the great Ernest Maxin, like the trouper he was, Eddie all but stole the scenes.
In the first, a Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers parody, the actress Glenda Jackson appears at the top of a flight of stairs, resplendent in ginger wig and red ballgown.
Below her is a row of men, each with his back to the audience, dressed in top hat and tails. As Jackson descends, to a burst of the song You Were Never Lovelier, each of her suitors – Cliff Michelmore, Frank Bough, Eddie, Patrick Moore, Michael Parkinson and finally Robert Dougall – turns to the audience, miming the word 'lovelier' as he goes.
That done, arms akimbo, the dapper sextet advances towards the camera in single file, before floating individually off screen with a smile. At least, that's how most of them do it. When it comes to Eddie's turn, he can't resist dropping his arms and selling the cameraman a cheeky little dummy and sidestep.
Six years later, in one of the best-known Morecambe and Wise musical skits of them all, a parody of the musical South Pacific, Eddie and Frank Bough were back again, miming to There Is Nothing Like a Dame in a group of sailors played by well-known television faces Michael Aspel, Richard Baker, Richard Whitmore, Barry Norman, Philip Jenkinson and Peter Woods.
This time, there was rather more for Eddie to do. For not only did the sailors have to mime a particularly tricky set of lyrics, there was a dance routine to get through too.
Although by now getting on a bit, Eddie did his best to keep up and even got to show that he still had a bit of rhythm. Of all the sailors, though, apart from Woods, who came on at the end to add the booming final touches, Eddie was the only one not to be included in a series of spoof aerial acrobatics.
Even when it came to stunt doubles, there could only ever be one Eddie Waring.
Being Eddie Waring by Tony Hannan is published by Mainstream Publishing (Edinburgh) Ltd. Save 2 on published price of 14.99. Yorkshire Post Readers' price is 12.99 plus p&p 2.75. To order your copy ring 0800 0153232. To order by post send a cheque/ postal order made payable to Yorkshire Post Bookshop. Send to Yorkshire Books Ltd , 1 Castle Hill, Richmond DL10.
Email to a friend
Print this page- Three-inch blanket of snow heading our way today
- Alan Shearer in list of favourites for Leeds and England jobs: Latest odds
- Barnsley’s Keith Hill invokes Fawlty Towers over link with Leeds job
- McCormack feels United search can be narrowed down
- Redfearn throws down gauntlet as queue builds at Elland Road
- Rival chips in with £500,000 to restore the original Harry Ramsden’s
- Visit from Princess as Serbian culture celebrated
- SportsTalk: Leeds United’s manager search, Super League and Calcutta Cup
- Libraries aren’t like supermarkets, they are magical places where dreams begin
- Strategic review will lead to job losses at Yorkshire Bank
Looking for...
Featured advertisers
Jobs
Search for a job
Motors
Search for a car
Property
Search for a house
Weather for Yorkshire
Saturday 11 February 2012
Today
Cloudy
Temperature: -1 C to 1 C
Wind Speed: 9 mph
Wind direction: South east
Tomorrow
Light rain
Temperature: 1 C to 6 C
Wind Speed: 8 mph
Wind direction: North west
