We were all Bullseye fans at Eton
William Sitwell explains why gameshow host Jim Bowen was a hero for him and his pals at boarding school
OK, so the great Stephen Hawking has died; a man who told us the history of time, who showed us a glimpse into black holes, who cast our minds and imaginations into the vast universe. But another great man also died this week. He was closer to home and significantly more down to earth. Hawking may have once said that: “The scientific account is complete. Theology is unnecessary.” But it was Jim Bowen who uttered the line: “Keep out of the black and in the red, nothing in this game for two in a bed.”
And if you missed it one week, he repeated it the next week, and the next, for 14 years throughout the Eighties and early Nineties. Bowen was the host of Bullseye, a particularly British institution – a darts-based game show hosted by a man who had none of the slick professionalism of someone like Bob Monkhouse. While Monkhouse had glamorous girls as his sidekicks, Jim Bowen had Tony Green, a chubby ex-darts player turned commentator and scorekeeper.
The contestants were largely
‘We once wrote to Central Television asking if we could be contestants’
northern working-class tradesmen. The audience was the same, but not entirely. For there was also me and plenty of my school friends at Eton who were Bullseye addicts. And not just in some ironic way. I loved Bullseye. As did my school pal (the actor) Dominic West. We once wrote to Central Television asking if we could be contestants. They wrote back declining but offering us places in the studio audience. We didn’t take up the offer, but I still sometimes imagine what that show might have been like if we’d managed to appear on it. I can’t recall whether it was I or Dom answering the questions or throwing the darts (the knower or the thrower, as it was called).
At school on a Sunday evening at 5pm I’d rush back to my room to watch the show on the secret little black and white TV I had hidden in my “boot box” beside my bed. At home I watched it – often with my sister Henrietta – religiously. James Tomkinson, an old friend of mine, and I still talk about it over lunch. Joyously you can still catch it on Challenge.
The shows have weathered well. The format was tweaked over the years but the mainstays were always there. There were the terrible jokes relating to people’s jobs, always (with no subtlety) referenced on Jim’s cue cards. “So, Mike, I hear you’re a drayman?” “That’s right, Jim.” “So it would be fair to say your drink problem is behind you…” (Actually, on that occasion he had to explain that a drayman drove booze to pubs.) Often he had no response planned at all, so just said, “That’s fine… Smashing… We move on…” “So, Wendy, I hear you’re a nurse.” “That’s right, Jim.” “Fine, we move on.” “So, Phil, what do you do for a living?” “I’ve been unemployed for two years, Jim.” “Smashing.” “Happily married man, Mike?” “I’m divorced, Jim.” “So, Trevor, you’re a fork-lift truck engineer?” “That’s right, Jim.” “You must have had some ups and downs…” “Where are you from?” “Barnsley.” “Oh, so this will be new for you, a bit of carpet and electricity.”
Then there were the questions. “What was TE Lawrence’s first name?” he once asked. “Tommy?” asked a bemused contestant, who wasn’t far wrong, in fact.
My favourite question incident was the time Jim inadvertently read out the answer. “What country produces the most coffee Brazil,” he called out.
And there was Bully’s prize board. How well I recall not just the terrible prizes, recycled the following week if no one won them, but the poetry that announced them: “In one: no more shirking, you’ll love working with this fabulous power toolkit. In two: stay cool and upright with this fabulous refrigerator. In three: what goes up, must come down. It’s a stylish umbrella.”
Of course, the denouement was the final 101 or more required with just six darts for the star prize, hiding behind Bully. There was all the bonkers chat by the oche. “Take your time and listen to Tony,” Jim would say. And Tony would say, “Settle in, take your time, best ‘o luck.” It was the only game show where losing contestants were told: “Come and look at what you could have won.” Actually, winning was sometimes worse. I won’t ever forget the couple who lived in a tower block in Leeds who won the speedboat.
My brother George once gave me Jim’s autobiography, From a Bundle of Rags, for Christmas. I learnt of his humble origins, his previous life as a deputy headmaster, the old train station he lived in, in Cumbria.
Having just finished a new biography of Charles I, I think I’ll get out Jim’s and have another read. Jim Bowen seemed a kind and selfeffacing man who once said of his hosting of Bullseye: “I think the early shows set the TV industry back 20 years.” I once managed to get my hands on a real Bendy Bully (given to all contestants along with a tankard for the boys or goblet for the ladies). With apologies to my wife, Emily, I feel a quadruple bill on Challenge coming on… “Let me count out the money, it’ll take me two minutes…”