the golden shot – Dirty Feed

Poor Old Jackie Rae

Published 24th November 2025

The Golden Shot logo

Researching a programme like The Golden Shot (1967-75) is a nightmare. As I pointed out last time, for a show which ran for hundreds of editions, vanishingly few of them actually survive. Even fewer are generally available to view. You’re left scrabbling for what you can find in old newspapers and magazines… and the odd autobiography.

Such as Bob Monkhouse’s incredible Crying With Laughter (Century, 1993), often regarded as the gold standard in celebrity memoirs. And one of the most arresting sequences in the whole book is the section where he details his thrilling takeover of The Golden Shot from first host, Jackie Rae.

“Having concluded that I was lucky not to be presenting this calamity and so suffering condemnation by press and public alike, I was puzzled when Peter¹ phoned to say I was wanted as the guest star for the tenth week. The fee was insignificant and the inconvenience considerable as it meant travelling from Liverpool to Elstree and back again for my midnight jobs at Jack Murphy’s Cabaret Club in Duke Street. And who was watching ‘The Golden Shot’ now anyway? Its Saturday ratings had plunged. ‘I know, love, but it’s a chance for you to show ’em a thing or two on that set.’

I got the message.

Having made sure the set was standing, I drove out to the studio and looked it over. The guest had to fire the bow using a joystick in a glass booth. The booth looked like the one featured in a frequently seen soap commercial of the day where a man went into a phone kiosk which turned into a bathroom shower. I sought out my pals in special effects and had the booth rigged to do the same. Next, I consulted the props men and they agreed to build what I’d drawn.”

According to Bob, his guest performance went spectacularly well.

“Half an hour of the usual stuff, tedious as ever, with no audience reaction other than cued applause where required. Then I was announced and my first appearance brought a crack of laughter that registered on the Richter scale. I was dressed as a big target, the golden bullseye over my middle. The absurdity of anyone showing up at an archery contest in such an idiotic costume delighted the previously bored crowd. A fusillade of gags followed as I removed my outer costume to reveal a Tyrolean outfit in the style of William Tell, put an apple on my head and did some comic business with a curved crossbow that could shoot round corners. Then I announced that I had my own private armourer, ‘Heinz the dolt!’ A four-foot tin of Heinz Potted Shrimp was wheeled on and tiny Johnny Vyvyan climbed out, dressed as a stormtrooper with a spiked Prussian helmet and carrying a gigantic door bolt. We plunged into a fast and crazy routine in which I fired at various objects he was holding up, each of them rigged to explode when hit and shower the stone-faced little man with their contents. The laughter was just as explosive, roars of hysterical mirth and applause bursting from two hundred and fifty people who had been spending an evening starved of any semblance of fun.

When I started stuffing Johnny feet first into a large cannon, Jackie Rae must have been wondering what had hit him. Unrehearsed, he was rooted to the spot by his need to read his lines off idiot boards.

I ran into the glass booth to fire the cannon and rattled off a few funny lines while Johnny was secretly replaced by a dummy. On a signal that Johnny was out and clear, I pressed the firing button. There was a hell of a bang with confetti and red smoke, the dummy soared fifteen feet in the air and its spiked helmet stuck firmly in the bullseye.

The crowd went wild and Jack Parnell, watching the show on the screen of a TV monitor in the bandroom, waited for the din to diminish before giving his orchestra the downbeat. Precious seconds were ticking by.

Then the music from the then famous soap advert filled the air and, just as in the familiar commercial, the lighting changed to make a silhouette of me as my firing booth became a shower stall. A cascade of water hit me from above and I washed myself, working up a lather with the detergent already in my clothing.² If an audience ever howled with laughter any longer and louder, it could only have been in comedy heaven.”

The inevitable then happened:

“On the Thursday of that week Lew [Grade] sent for Peter. ATV’s light entertainment booker Alec Fine joined the meeting and Lew told them to do a deal for me to take over as host on ‘The Golden Shot’ as soon as possible.”

All very nice. The question is: how much of it is true?

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Peter Prichard, Bob’s agent. ↩
With many thanks to Simon McLean, the advert Bob is referencing here must be this one for Lifebuoy soap, or a similar one in the same series. ↩

That Which Survives

Published 10th November 2025

TV Gameshows

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. ↩

“What Can They Do, Fire Me?”

Published 8th November 2025

TV Gameshows

If you’re the kind of person who reads this site, it’s very likely that you have childhood memories of Bob Monkhouse. Mine? Definitely his Central game shows of the 1990s, such as The $64,000 Question and the revival of Celebrity Squares.¹ Oh, and my Mum ringing up the BBC after an appearance on Have I Got News For You, to complain he had been racist against the French.

As I got older, I followed the general trend of many comedy fans, in my reassessment of Bob from “that nice man on the telly”, to “one of the funniest men who ever lived”. And once you heard about his vast film and television archive and realise he was one of us into the bargain – except also doing that better and more comprehensively than virtually anybody else as well – that’s when the awe really began to set in. I choose to believe he might even have enjoyed reading Dirty Feed, and you can’t prove otherwise, leave me alone.

It was apparent years before if you were paying attention, but I can trace my realisation of Bob as an archive fiend to the documentary The Secret Life of Bob Monkhouse, first broadcast on BBC Four on 3rd January 2011. And one of the most fascinating parts of that documentary was the section on Bob’s sacking from The Golden Shot in 1972, including clips of his final show², from a copy taken from Bob’s archive. I could watch it endlessly.

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Years which were unfairly and pointlessly maligned in the 2015 Gold documentary Bob Monkhouse: Million Joke Man. ↩
Before his return in 1974, of course. ↩