What went wrong with Shooting Stars?

Perhaps his remark was uttered safe in the belief that broadcasters would be bashing each other over the heads with massive frying pans in the race to snap up the show. News that Sky One has turned down the opportunity to revive Shooting Stars must be a dagger in the pair’s quasi-surreal hearts.

Sky TV chiefs had decided the show “never had a huge appeal to core Sky One viewers”. Judging by a quick scan at Sky One’s main line-up, those viewers are after the inevitable dance programme (Got To Dance), adrenaline-fuelled bloke dramas (Strike Back Project Dawn, Mad Dogs) and unit-shifting US hits (Glee, The Simpsons).

Perhaps they reckon they have their fill of silly with espionage comedy Spy and Karl Pilkington’s An Idiot Abroad while the panel show quotient may already be fulfilled with the James Corden-hosted A League Of Their Own.

The Beeb’s rationale that there is simply not enough room in the rehauled schedules to keep on their panel show must have felt like a real slap in the mouche given that virtually hours later it was leaked that Life’s Too Short star Warwick Davis was to record a pilot episode of, that’s right, his very own panel show.

So, what is the problem with Shooting Stars? On the face of it, as it veered closer to its 20th anniversary, perhaps it had simply ran its course. Set up as a panel show that subverted almost every rule in the book (questions that made no sense, a points system that swirled around its own non-logic), its celebs were often flung into proceedings seemingly against their will: Larry Hagman famously had little idea what was going on. In the contemporary PR-controlled world, that simply wouldn’t be allowed to happen again.

When it came to the regular panellists, where expectations were once wonderfully upturned now they simply play to type. At the very beginning, there was the spectacular reinvention of Ulrika Jonsson, and on its first comeback in 2002, replacing Mark Lamarr with Will Self was an utterly inspired choice (check out footage of Self as Crocodile Dundee or in the Britney Spears spoof for evidence). And Ulrika-ka-ka’s new vice-captain Johnny Vegas may have sat permanently welded to a pint of Guinness but the notoriously verbose St Helens chatterbox went practically Harpo Marx on Shooting Stars.

Now, we have the famously grumpy Jack Dee being, well, really grumpy. And scorekeeper Angelos Epithemiou with his rave-heavy machinery and awful chat-up patter is a very pale imitation of George Dawes and his drum kit.

As the show limped into its eighth series last August, Bob Mortimer believed that the show was relevant once again. So far, the key broadcasters have countered with a resounding ‘Uvavu!’

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