If history is written by the winners, then television history is written by the survivors. Survivors of magnetic tape or celluloid, that is. And The Golden Shot, which originally ran on ITV between 1967-75, has a frankly pitiful rate of survival.
Which means that sometimes, the only record of something you really, really want to see can be found in contemporary newspaper reports. Such as the following, published in the Daily Mirror on the 18th September 1972, under the headline “Golden Gatecrasher – Building worker takes over TV show for demo”:
“A building worker took over a top TV show yesterday.
He staged a one-man protest spectacular on ATVs “Golden Shot” while it was going out live from Birmingham.
He seized the microphone from compere Norman Vaughan just as the comedian was introducing the programme’s first contestant to the viewers.
Then the small, dark-haired gatecrasher, aged about twenty-four, shouted slogans and urged other building workers to continue their strike.
Cameras swung away from the scene, and screens were blacked out for about fifteen seconds as studio staff dashed out to hustle the unknown invader away.
Compere Vaughan quickly tried to laugh off the incident.
While the leather-jacketed protester was being led away, Vaughan joked that it must have been Jimmy Tarbuck or Charlie Drake.1
The protest is believed to have been linked to the hard line being taken by Midlands building workers opposing last Thursday’s pay settlement after the official national strike.
The gatecrasher made his entrance just two days after 100 Birmingham building workers seized control of the building employers’ headquarters in the city and occupied it for nearly two hours.
When they were finally persuaded to leave by police, the protesters promised that they had some more spectacular demonstrations planned to draw public attention to their grievances over the national pay settlement.
ATV’s general manager, Mr. Leonard Matthews, was in the studio audience yesterday.
Angrily, he ordered an investigation into how the building worker managed to get into the studio.”
One thing the above report misses out is exactly what the protester manages to say before he was taken off air; The Birmingham Post reported that he said something akin to: “Support the building workers. No work on Monday.”
The 1972 Building Workers’ Strike is far too complicated to get into here, but it’s worth pointing out that this is the strike that landed Ricky Tomlinson in jail for two years… a conviction for which he was eventually cleared in 2021. In a parallel universe, this clip from The Golden Shot is used as the introduction to every single retrospective documentary or news report about the case.
In ours, it merely exists as smudged ink, and pixellated representations of that smudged ink. And there are a million such moments.
I know Vaughan gets slated for his time on The Golden Shot, with Monkhouse memorably saying in his autobiography that he took to the show “like a cat to water”, but this sounds very funny. ↩
14 comments
Simon McLean on 10 November 2025 @ 5pm
Bob Langley recalled a protestor invading the foyer in series one of Pebble Mill At One, and he accidentally punched them in the face while trying to move them on – given the Birmingham location, and the fact Pebble Mill At One only started a couple of weeks after this incident, I wonder if there’s a connection?
Dave Espley on 10 November 2025 @ 6pm
I remember this happening. I’d’ve been 8 and have a distinct memory of the guy running on and, I think, pulling down an overhead mic to shout.
Absolutely loved the Golden Shot and your articles are fantastic – thanks!
John J. Hoare on 11 November 2025 @ 9am
Simon: It feels likely, doesn’t it? It also strikes me that TV these days rarely has these kinds of protests – the most obvious one I can think of is the Just Stop Oil snooker protest in 2023, and that feels different because the snooker isn’t strictly just a TV show.
Dave: Thanks for your kind words, and amazing that you remember this. It’s all very similar to when you hear people who remember seeing Doctor Who episodes which are now wiped. So much stuff locked away in people’s heads!
Leigh Graham on 11 November 2025 @ 10am
If ATV’s security was anything like that at BBC Television Centre in the 1980’s it was simply a case of walking round the back of the building and entering through the scene dock!
Bruce Dessau on 11 November 2025 @ 10am
I never missed an episode of The Golden Shot and there is one incident that sticks in my mind but I’ve never seen referred to. A contestant, who I would describe as middle aged, twin set and pearls, selected target 4 before giving Bernie the Bolt his instructions to fire. Except that she had maybe never seen the programme before because instead of aiming for the actual target she aimed for the number 4 on the board, which she hit.
Monkhouse, however, knew something was up and without too much explanation she was given another go. And she promptly did exactly the same and was eliminated, going back to the shires empty-handed. I’ve always assumed the programme was pre-recorded and wondered why they didn’t edit this out. However, by the sound of the gatecrasher incident above, maybe the programme went out live and that’s why they couldn’t tell her she was getting it wrong on air.
Anyway, maybe this is all false memory syndrome, but it’s something that has stuck in my head since I was around 9.
Paul Martin on 11 November 2025 @ 12pm
The programme was indeed live, as witnessed by Bob’s own anecdote about a contestant who’d phoned in. The contestant’s verbal directions were totally uncoordinated.
After several sequences of “up.. up… left.. left..” etc. instructions from the contestant which didn’t make any sense, Bob asked whether the guy could see his TV screen clearly.
The contestant then confessed that he was in a phone box outside a TV shop as his TV had been taken away earlier in the week, and unfortunately all the TVs in the shop window were tuned to the BBC.
(Bob told it better, of course.)
Steve Williams on 11 November 2025 @ 5pm
The Man from Wergs!
Bob’s book includes all kinds of stories about disasters on The Golden Shot, including a priest being invited into the studio after he had complained that they were celebrating weapons on the Lord’s Day and then when the show started loudly praying, only to be hit by an arrow ricocheting off one of the lights, and also a pair of contestants disappearing halfway through the show so they just plucked two other people from the audience to replace them, and nobody noticed. However, I would perhaps suggest that some of Bob’s anecdotes were possibly slightly embellished.
One thing I would love to see is an episode from the last few months in the ancient original ATV studios in Birmingham, which had been converted from a cinema and so the stalls had been ripped out for the cameras and so on, and the audience sat in the balcony so could barely see anything and their responses were inevitably disappointing. So Bob suggested they built a new set with a platform in front of the balcony so they could do all the comedy bits there, and a staircase leading down to the studio floor for the games, and Bob suggests that someone would be guaranteed to fall down the stairs every single week.
I must say, if I’d seen that protest at the time, it would have really terrified me because I was absolutely petrified at the concept of telly shows being invaded. I saw the Six O’Clock News invasion as it went out and it terrified me so much I refused to watch the Six for ages after, and even though I was old enough to know better I was a bit unsettled when the 1992 ITV Telethon was invaded as well (an event that later became the subject of a drama recently, of course). That kind of thing really used to put the willies up me.
James on 11 November 2025 @ 7pm
Even the Gameshow Marathon version was a bit of a mess, because digital TV has several seconds of delay, and whoever was calling was clearly watching on digital, the call in round was a complete disaster! Does say something how digital TV means we can’t have those sorts of live phone in interactive games any more.
I’m guessing being live has a fair bit to do with why so few episodes survive, they were never recorded in the first place. Not that ATV’s archive is great even with shows that weren’t live- look how few Crossroads episodes survive before mid-1978 for example, and there’s episodes missing right up until the end of the ATV run (which is why UK Gold’s run started in December 81).
James on 11 November 2025 @ 7pm
I did see one of those episodes from the last few months online a few years back though I don’t think it’s up any more (which is the way of the internet)- unless I’m mistaken the only reason any of them survive is because of Bob’s own recordings! I think when Challenge repeated 4 episodes back in 2002 (one from each presenter), that was pretty much all that survived in their archives, at least until Bob’s own recordings came to light.
James on 11 November 2025 @ 7pm
Also worth pointing out one of the episodes Challenge showed (and TV Ark has a clip of) was Norman Vaughn’s first episode- which the TV Brain link you post lists as missing! I’ve noticed their listings being wrong quite a fair bit, including episodes of Family Fortunes and Bullseye which have been in rotation on Challenge listed as wiped. The connected Missing Episodes forum is often a hive of misinformation as well with people (one poster especially) confidently declaring things as “wiped” that aren’t. I remember him one saying “even the BFI don’t have this, not even as an off air” about something, and a 20 second search on their website showed that they not only have it, they have the actual master tape!
Sorry I’ve made 3 posts in a row, I kept thinking of things to add and you can’t edit!
Simon McLean on 12 November 2025 @ 2pm
It’s worth mentioning at least some, if not all, of the Charlie Williams era Golden Shots were recorded rather than live, which I assume is at least partly down to the sheer volume of bomb threats ATV was getting at the time, rather than Williams’ hopelessness as host. It’s led to the happy accident that Williams is the best represented host in the archives, at least until Bob’s off-airs of his final series turned up.
What I am curious about is why those film recordings of other editions with ITC branding exist – they surely didn’t sell those abroad?
FabianD83 on 13 November 2025 @ 12pm
You’d be surprised. Forces telly in the 60s and 70s wasn’t all that highbrow.
James on 13 November 2025 @ 2pm
One of those episodes also has a very bizzare “Copyright 1970 ATV Network Limited” caption (that doesn’t fit on the screen) that appears after the (animated but silent) ITC endcap. Clearly added for the ITC/Export version for some reason (ATV shows didn’t even have copyright dates on them for years after this… in fact most ITV regions, and the BBC, didn’t).
Westy on 20 December 2025 @ 8pm
The Atv Network copyright caption after the Itc endcap does appear on a few shows from around that time, as Ive seen it on the Timeslip dvd & The Power Game dvd boxset I have access to.