It’s A Knockout – Wanted Ideas for Games promo

Director of this trailer Maurice Kanareck says, “I got to know Barney Colehan, the producer of Knockout, quite well and after series two or three, I forget which, they said that they were getting a bit short of ideas for the games. So he asked me if I could do an onscreen promotion asking the public to submit ideas, and this was the result – all under the aegis of the executive producer, who was Robin Scott, later to become head of BBC2. What director hasn’t wanted to make a Western? It was my big chance, and so I wrote and devised it to be shot with a BBC crew from Ealing up at the, then, permanant Western set at Elstree film studios. As an aside, it was also the one used in the Western episode of The Prisoner. David Vine and Eddie Waring, the presenters, were given full cowboy rig as was Rita (the scorer of Knockout then) Then guns were hired from Baptys (the well known theatrical armourers) and then they were 5/- a week, rifles were 7/6d! Supervising the shooting was Jack, one of the BBC’s permanent armourers, and it was his close-up of the pistol spinning back into the holster that was used in the film. It was actually Take 16 – the other 15 were unusable as he kept missing! The reason the weather looks so different in the shots of David Vine and Rita is that on the morning of the shoot there was thick fog, and Eddie Waring, who was coming down from the Midlands, didn’t make it until after lunch, when out came the sun, which was fortunate for the shoot-out sequence. The music used was from Aaron Copeland’s Billt the Kid suite, and the gunshots were actually from a BBC sound effects disc of ‘gunshots in the canyon’ They sounded much better than the blanks that we used! As for the clips, they were from telerecordings from the earlier series, with ‘starburst’ effects from commercials. You can see, from those clips, how primitive those first Knockouts were, with the Heath Robinson game contraptions, and weird costumes. I believe the promotion went out on BBC1 sometime in 1968. I don’t know whether it actually produced any new ideas, or not!”