Matt Allwright's always on our side

Consumer programmes have been around longer than I can remember. From Braden and Rantzen issuing advice with a Saturday night entertainment spin to folksy egomaniac Martin Lewis promoting his financial website, I’ve probably dipped into most of them at some time or other. Presentation is key, and trust is pretty much top of the priority list for the host’s attributes. For me, John Stapleton was too earnest, Nicky Campbell too pompous, Hugh Scully too nice and Anne Robinson too snarlingly rude..

Watchdog has been the top brand, on our screens in various formats for four decades. It’s usually an easy watch without being ‘appointment to view’, a harmless blend of entertainment and information which might just be useful. However it can also set pulses racing and spirits rising when the series goes after criminals ripping us off in everyday situations and confronts the bastards. Cue applause and shouts of “Lock ‘em up!” from sofas nationwide. Some such scenarios warrant a programme or series to themselves and are the showcases for first-class investigative journalism. 

Donal McIntyre would risk his life going undercover, Dom LIttlewood’s Essex geezer schtick goes down well reporting on dodgy used car salesmen and purveyors of fake goods and then there’s the legendary Roger Cook. After years of presenting the excellent Checkpoint on Radio 4, the burly journalist switched to ITV for The Cook Report, doorstepping the villains in their own backyard and scaring them shitless. You didn’t mess with Roger! However, his was not a face which lends itself to the lighter side of current affairs. Matt Allwright’s, on the other hand, does, and he combines the best qualities of previous and contemporary hosts of TV consumer shows in one single package.

While he has branched out into other types of broadcasting, I most readily associate him with Rogue Traders, which has existed as a stand-alone programme and, most often, a feature within Watchdog and now The One Show.  I probably first saw him in the mid-Noughties, wearing biker’s leathers and riding pillion behind sidekick Dan Panteado These black-clad lone rangers would swoop around the country in pursuit of incompetent electricians, overcharging plumbers, illegal fly-tippers and builders hell-bent on stealing thousands from unsuspecting home-owners just like us. There but for the grace of God…. Sometimes Matt resorts to a disguise and on occasions he ends up in a Benny Hill-style comedy chase. I love those!

In the past decade the Beeb has found plenty of other work for him to do. There was more of a feelgood consumerism factor in Keeping Britain Safe 24/7, then in 2019 he was championing the return to use of derelict houses in Britain’s Housing Scandal, although I confess I find Homes Under the Hammer more entertaining. In 2016 Matt reached the final of a ‘law and order’ Pointless Celebrities show and ten years previously had even been considered to possess enough street cred to present an edition of Top of the Pops, albeit in its dying days. 

With Angie hooked on Emmerdale, I haven’t seen any of Allwright’s stints presenting BBC’s The One Show, scheduled opposite each other, and am unlikely to witness the Watchdog slot in the programme in the future. However, during last summer’s Covid first wave shielding period, it was a pleasure to be distracted by his typically laconic but professional presentation of BBC1’s live consumer morning show, Your Money and Your Life. His ex-soap star co-host Kym Marsh may have nabbed most of the headlines but their seemingly off-the-cuff banter was always engaging, and we were left in no doubt about where his football loyalties lay (Liverpool). 

There have been other ventures, too, which I haven’t watched, but it’s the live consumer programmes and interaction with real people which are his specialities. It’s a genre which, like cooking and property-hunting, has burgeoned in recent years and coronavirus times in particular. For all the impeccable journalistic credentials of Nikki Fox et al, it’s Matt Allwright’s laidback personality and dogged determination out in the field which stands out. He looks and sounds so ordinary, decked out in casual clothes and a quick wit. You’d probably have a lovely chat with him in the pub, at a bus stop or queuing for a supermarket till. Whatever his role on TV you just know Matt is going to be more than merely all right.

Dervla Kirwan - Versatility Personified

In 1994 I accompanied Mum and Dad on the train up to London’s Globe (now Gielgud) Theatre to see a top-notch cast in the Feydeau farce An Absolute Turkey. Griff Rhys Jones and Felicity Kendal topped the bill but amongst the supporting cast stood the diminutive frame and beguiling half-moon eyes of Dervla Kirwan. She was only 22 but was already familiar from TV and would continue to grace our screens right up to the present day.

She has somehow escaped the fate of so many Irish actors doomed for eternity to play IRA terrorists, fiddle-players or downtrodden farm girls struggling to survive the Potato Famine. Instead she has enjoyed a full range of roles across stage and screen. I didn’t see her performance in Troubles but almost certainly did catch a glimpse in a 1990 episode of Casualty. I say glimpse because, like so many young actors in the long-running drama, she spent much of it swathed in bandages, wires and tubes. I forget whether her character survived the emergency tracheotomy! 

She was still a teenager when she achieved a degree of notoriety in Melvyn Bragg’s A Time to Dance in ’92. She played the object of a much older Ronald Pickup’s lust in a series which had the Daily Mail green ink brigade choking in outrage over the sex scenes which they presumably just had to video and replay continuously just to remind themselves how disgusting it was. Dervla was enchanting but it was at times rather uncomfortable viewing. 

Then in 1993 she moved into the mainstream playing Nicholas Lyndhurst’s wartime Cockney sparrow girlfriend in the contrived but engaging Marks and Gran time-transfer sitcom Goodnight Sweetheart. She left after three series, which was a wise move because I felt it had run out of steam. I’m guessing she quit to become a leading character in the Beeb’s new Sunday night drama series Ballykissangel. For all its huge ratings, I was never seduced by all the blarney, beer and probably leaping leprechauns, let alone Kirwan’s burgeoning romance both on and off screen with Stephen Tompkinson. Again she departed after three successful series. 

On the other hand I did catch her in a Minette Walters two-part thriller The Dark Room, and it was a very different Dervla Kirwan on show. With close-shaven head following her character’s brain surgery, the mystery focussed on whether she had murdered her ex-fiance, best friend and former husband to boot. Did she? Can’t remember. But Dervla was utterly credible as a potential killer, a far cry from pulling pints of Guinness in a fictional County Wicklow village. 

In 2000 she joined a fine ensemble cast including Sarah Parish and Damien Lewis for Hearts and Bones. This was a reasonably diverting drama series about a bunch of twenty/thirty-something friends moving to London. Though it had a couple of runs, this was no This Life. 

The Noughties saw Kirwan in several series, plus a few guest appearances. In 2001 she was an extremely alluring mystery woman in Randall and Hopkirk (Deceased) and four years later she was more than merely flirtatious as Casanova’s mother, abandoning the future David Tennant for a career of sex and singing. From eighteenth century Venice to Victorian London, Dervla was back on period costume in a 2008 Doctor Who Christmas Day story. No sex, of course, but her Miss Hartigan was far too close to the Cybermen than Mr Tennant would tolerate. 

Since then, Dervla Kirwan has featured in numerous thrillers, not all of which I have seen. ITV’s Injustice was stripped across a whole week, demanding a commitment I couldn’t fulfil at the time, and only last year The Stranger proved a Netflix lockdown serial too far. However, I know she was very good in 2010’s The Silence, protecting a deaf girl who has witnessed a crime while trying to keep her own family going, and with Christopher Eccleston and Andrew Scott in 2012’s claustrophobic slice of noir, Blackout. Her role in the 2018 Hong Kong-set Strangers was short on screen time, given that she was apparently killed in a car crash right at the start, but crucial to the story. Her fair-haired character in a 2019 Silent Witness two-parter was also on a hiding to nothing: a pathologist brought in to challenge findings made by the saintly Nikki. 

However one of my favourite Dervla Kirwan parts came in another crime-related series, 55 Degrees North. She played a no-nonsense but grounded CPS lawyer crossing swords and emotions with Don Gilet’s London cop exiled to Newcastle night shifts. I enjoyed the series but we’ll never know if they got it together because it was axed after only two runs. At least that enabled the viewing public to see the Dubliner in a broader range of roles to keep us entertained.

Bob Monkhouse - Game Show host with the Golden Touch

Thirty years ago any thought of Bob Monkhouse being a TV Treasure would have been anathema to me, absolutely laughable. He’d have been a more appropriate candidate for room 101, followed by burial in a deep pit and capped with concrete. He was a notable Tory party and Thatcher supporter, too. But even a veteran game show host is entitled to re-evaluation and by the time he died in 2003 I realised there had been more to him than a fake tan and well-rehearsed salute. It took quite a while. 

Like most of his generation of entertainers, Monkhouse cut his teeth in radio both as performer and gag-writer. Like Bruce Forsyth he was a skilled and lively comic host of TV variety shows in the Fifties and Sixties and I remember in 1973 watching  Carry On Sergeant and being surprised to see the owner of that distinctive ‘beauty spot’ co-starring in the very first ‘Carry On’ film alongside the likes of Charles Hawtrey, Terry Scott and Kenneths Connor and Williams. 

By that time, Bob was very familiar to me. We weren’t big on game shows in our household but the exception was ITV’s The Golden Shot.  Almost from as long as I can remember it formed part of our regular Sunday afternoon viewing, following The Big Match football and the escapist adventure slot featuring the likes of The Persuaders or Department S. I believe it was broadcast live – it certainly looked like it! – but Monkhouse was always the unflappably professional and genial host amidst the guests, ‘Bernie the Bolt’ and the mini-skirted assistant, Anne Aston. The best shots were rewarded and luckily no humans were harmed during the making of this programme. 

By the mid-Seventies, Sunday afternoons were more the preserve of pesky English essays and French vocab learning but I did occasionally watch Bob’s next venture, Celebrity Squares although the teenage Mike found it all tediously self-congratulatory. I’ve never been into Family Fortunes, another one of Bob’s, but when the Beeb lured him away from his old commercial stomping ground, we did make a weekly date with his bingo-based show Bob’s Full House. The presenter wasn’t the main attraction. Indeed I would happily have strapped him to the set of The Golden Shot and let the crossbow-firers do their worst. He was also the target of many Eighties comedians and young impressionists like Rory Bremner, quick to lampoon the smarmy smile and dubious sincerity of Monkhouse and his ilk. 

But things were changing. I paid little attention to his BBC revival of Opportunity Knocks but did tune in to a few of his chat shows with fellow comics, old and new, on The Bob Monkhouse Show. Then in the Nineties, old-school variety entertainers became cool again. It was now OK to laugh with, not at, comedians like Benny Hill and Frankie Howerd (who died within a day of each other in ’92) and even Ben Elton handed Ronnie Corbett a regular slot on his eponymous show. 

Bob was suddenly everywhere on the TV. In 1993 he appeared on the late-night chat show trying to get a word in edgeways against the host of Danny Baker After All which Dad and I quite enjoyed, then was the very first guest on Room 101 and granted An Audience With Bob Monkhouse by ITV. With his quick wit and ear for a one-liner, he was also a perfect team captain and host for BBC2’s new comedy panel show Gag Tag which was usually a good source of laughs for me. The BBC also milked the comedian’s well-deserved reputation for ad-libs in 1995’s Saturday night series Bob Monkhouse on the Spot, in which audience members supposedly provided subject matter from which the star could dish up the humour. 

There were guest appearances on existing shows, too. Like Brucie, Bob won new fans thanks to a few stints on Have I Got News For You?  His apparent right-wing tendencies might have jarred with the likes of Ian Hislop and Ken Livingstone but you wouldn’t have known, old pro that he was. Monkhouse couldn’t completely escape his gameshow past, either. His primetime CV was further expanded by presenting National Lottery Live. As stated earlier, I’ve never been a fan of his ‘shiny floor’ persona but the ten-minute slots were easier to digest, despite the contrived catchphrase, “I may be a sinner but make me a winner”. 

Bob was finding a new lease of broadcasting life into his seventies when diagnosed with prostate cancer. To his credit, he spoke widely about the condition which two years later claimed his life. Indeed he apparently spoke about it four years after his death. Like many, I marvelled at what I thought was Monkhouse’s pre-recorded prostate cancer charity advert in 2007. In fact, it was only the product of technical wizardry and a ‘soundalike’ actor but it actually served as a reminder of what an entertaining trooper Bob Monkhouse had been.

Bill Paterson - Scientist or Psycho, but always Scottish

For four decades, Bill Paterson has been one of the most comforting faces and voices on the box. Whether playing kindly gents or psychopaths, doing little cameos or narrating documentaries, the veteran Glaswegian is always a welcome visitor to the corner of our living room or my laptop screen. For many years he plied his trade in theatres across Europe before branching out into television and cinema. Even his films (Richard III, Comfort and Joy, etc) were the kind I’d happily watch. 

Paterson’s distinctive high sloping forehead and Concorde nose were visible on BBC series Telford’s Change and Smiley’s People without drawing my attention but it was in the second series of Auf Wiedersehen Pet that he made a greater impact. Away from the German setting, there was something missing but Bill’s character Ally Fraser brought a different dimension. He was a corrupt businessman to whom Denis was indebted, leading to the tradesman crew decamping to Marbella to repair his villa and, in theory, repay the debt. He was a no-nonsense Scot, duplicitous villain and oily host, making a formidable employer and adversary. 

Also in 1986 he appeared as Michael Gambon’s doctor in Dennis Potter’s weird but creepy The Singing Detective, which I saw only because it was Dad’s favourite programme, but I infinitely preferred the 1989 Channel 4 thriller Traffik. This time Bill Paterson took the starring role as a politician challenging the international heroin trade and father of an addicted daughter. It was hard-hitting stuff, focussing not just on the smuggling bad guys but also the poor Middle Eastern poppy growers sucked into the industry. It deservedly won a host of awards and was eventually adapted for cinema by Steven Soderbergh (set in Mexico) and US mini-series, but there wasn’t really a place for the original Scottish lead. 

In the Nineties, Bill portrayed the estranged father of Joe McFadden’s principal character in BBC2’s The Crow Road. It was a multi-layered drama series, like the Banks book and, while much of the spotlight fell on the young star, the real highlight must surely have been Peter Capaldi’s crown of flamboyant curls! 

Advance several years and I must have seen Bill Paterson in Little Dorrit and a few forgotten series Swallow (pharmaceutical conspiracy) and Trust (legal drama) but he then seemed to specialise as academics. In Sea of Souls, his Dr Monoghan ran a university unit investigating paranormal activities and apparent psychics. It ran for four series and, whilst running out of steam towards the end and requiring a certain degree of belief suspension, made for enjoyable and absorbing viewing. Thankfully it didn’t try to emulate The X-Files; the Glasgow locations and Paterson’s skilled acting made it feel more real. 

In 2010, he was back in professorial mode in another sci-fi series Doctor Who. He appeared in a couple of historical stories featuring Matt Smith’s Time Lord but, having been created as an undercover android to scupper Churchill’s war effort by those pesky Daleks, for all his good intentions he was destined to meet a sticky end. Bill was another credible ‘prof’ in an eccentric Dirk Gently mystery, which I felt merited more than a slot on BBC4. 

It was quite light fare but in the past few years the seventy-something Bill Paterson has provided some delightful performances in a few dark comedies. He was amongst the ensemble cast, with a pair of Rory Kinnears, in an Inside No.9 farce, but he also portrayed Phoebe Waller-Bridge’s ageing dad in Fleabag. In two superb series he was a beacon of sincerity and sanity amidst the bunch of oddballs. Whilst experiencing an uneasy relationship with his wilful daughter, and allowing himself to become engaged to the young control freak (Olivia Colman), he almost had me in tears during my lockdown viewing talking to ‘Fleabag’ after an awkward family meal out. 

Bill was also involved in some emotional family scenes in the second series of Shetland, once again playing the main character’s father. I suspect that had he been thirty years younger, Paterson would have been a shoo-in for the lead role bagged by Douglas Henshall, or at least his brother-in-law, played by Mark Bonnar who I reckon has assumed Paterson’s mantle of top Scottish TV actor. In 2019 they were reunited in BBC Scotland’s priceless black comedy thriller Guilt. The elder statesman was back in Ally Fraser territory as a ruthless Glasgow gangster, and very chilling he was, too. Goodie or baddie, on screen or narrating documentaries, even at 75 Bill Paterson remains one of the best in the business.