It has been reported that You’ve Been Framed has been axed by ITV after 33 years. The news will no doubt come as an almighty shock to millions of households, who assumed that it had already been cancelled several years ago.
For almost as long as anyone can remember, You’ve Been Framed has been a fusty old relic of a distant age. It is a memento of a time that no longer exists. A time when the format was new and exciting. A time when video equipment was rare, cumbersome and expensive. A time when our viewing options were so limited that TV channels could get away with running half an hour of primetime telly on a non-stop loop of old ladies falling over at weddings.
But what a time that was. You’ve Been Framed was originally based on a segment of the 1980s Japanese show Fun TV with Kato-chan and Ken-chan, before a US producer bought the rights and sold it around the world. And when it landed in the UK, it was an immediate hit. Of course it was. Public appetite for this sort of thing was insatiable back then. So much so, in fact, that an episode of It’ll Be Alright on the Night – a compilation of television and film blooper reels – was the fourth most watched television programme of 1990, bringing in almost a million and a half more viewers than the England v West Germany World Cup semi-final.
The very first episode of You’ve Been Framed is on YouTube, and it is an extraordinary time capsule. Rather than the endless montage of recent years, it was filmed in front of an absolutely delighted studio audience. Host Jeremy Beadle bounds out at the start, picks up a camera and looks at it dismissively. “This is yesterday,” he sniffs, before dumping it on the ground and picking up a shiny new camcorder, beaming: “This is today.” He patiently explains what a video camera is, then shows the audience an example of what they can do. It’s a shot of a bikini-clad woman posing on a rock by the sea. A wave comes and knocks her over. The audience explodes. The clip literally gets a round of applause. Later, Beadle interviews someone who sent in a clip of an amusing skydiving accident, handing him back his brick-sized VHS tape by way of a reward. At the end, Beadle promises us that nobody actually got hurt in the making of the videos.
Beadle left You’ve Been Framed in 1997, and the show immediately started to wobble. Emmerdale’s Lisa Riley took over presenting duties the following year, but lacked Beadle’s flair for introducing clips of people accidentally hurting themselves, and left in 2002. She was replaced by Jonathan Wilkes, then primarily known for being friends with Robbie Williams, but he lasted just a single series.
A comeback, of sorts, took place the following year when Harry Hill took over. This time there were no studio segments, just endless narration. And even though he often seemed bored by the gig, riffing about celebrity lookalikes and the Norfolk town of Swaffham rather than any of the actual footage, he undoubtedly helped to steady the ship. Hill hosted You’ve Been Framed for close to 20 years, and while it lost status during his tenure – lurching from primetime to Saturday afternoon filler slots – it was still apparently popular. As recently as 2016, a producer claimed that 3,000 clips were being submitted every week.
But not even Hill could halt the march of progress. Increasingly, it became harder and harder for You’ve Been Framed to find a place for itself in a world stuffed with wall-to-wall fail videos on every conceivable social media platform. Could You’ve Been Framed have survived longer if it had increased its £250 reward in line with inflation, even once, in the last three decades? Maybe, but probably not. We now live in a glittering future where almost everyone on the planet has near-constant access to footage of old ladies falling over at weddings. How could television ever hope to keep pace with progress like that?
