Courtesy of BBC

"Now then, now then, I have a letter here what says..." Silver-haired eccentric Jimmy Savile welcomed us to this fixture of Saturday evenings and Bank Holidays. Young viewers wrote in with wishes that Jim helped come true. Each lucky fixee also received a medallion token, the Jim'll Fix It Badge, inscribed 'Jim Fixed It For Me'. At its height, the show received a quarter of a million requests per year.

An early 'people' show before the genre existed, Jim outlined his code of conduct as: "No violence, no taking the mickey out of people, no exploiting or using people." The format at least was open to exploitation - the record industry enjoyed the promotional window it offered their acts, and companies were delighted to show children round their factories and plug products to huge family audiences (often number 1 in the ratings, with 12-16 million viewers, the series hit an all-time high of 19 million in 1980).

The show was not shy of eliciting emotional responses from viewers, often featuring disabled and disadvantaged children receiving dream rewards. Such features struck more cynical viewers as indeed being 'fixed' - a 1980 Radio Times article quietly admitted "some of the ideas for fixes originated in the production team", though the vast majority came from viewers' letters. A Christmas trip to the Holy Land for a boy from a children's home was later found to have been engineered by researchers.

Entertaining but increasingly contrived stunts prevailed into the '80s - a pantomime horse running in a race and cub scouts attempting to eat their packed lunches on Blackpool's Revolution rollercoaster. Filmed comedy vignettes (a child putting mum and dad to bed, a boy becoming a butler for a day) were heavily scripted and staged.

Likely influenced by Cilla Black's hit people show Surprise, Surprise (ITV, 1984-97), fix-its for adults became common and emphasis was placed on surprise. By 1985 it was not enough to meet pop star Simon le Bon in the studio - instead he dressed up as a knight in armour and rode on horseback to greet an unsuspecting fixee at her school.

Jim quit after a round twenty series: "The ratings are rock solid but I work by instinct and I feel that the time is right." It was - the last series struggled against ITV's Baywatch and the final episodes sneaked out on Sunday afternoons.

Alistair McGown

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