Ho ho! Tarby started out in the business as a redcoat, as so many others did, and found himself making early appearances on telly at the start of the 1960s, regularly getting booked on variety shows like COMEDY BANDBOX and, most famously, SUNDAY NIGHT AT THE LONDON PALLADIUM. So successful was he on this that he eventually took over from Brucie as the show's compere, and hence became one of the most famous people in the country - he was fortunate enough to make it when Merseybeat was at its height and get lumped in with acts like The Beatles; and people think 'comedy is the new rock'n'roll' was a 90s thing. He also made an appearance on TILL DEATH US DO PART, and so impressed Johnny Speight that he wrote a one-off sitcom for him (TO LUCIFER - A SON, in which he played the devil's offspring), which in turn led to numerous sketch shows and quasi-sitcoms. His most famous vehicle was probably TARBUCK'S LUCK, his BBC 1972 series, where all the guests were women - this being the "luck" of the title.

Another successful sideline for Tarby was WINNER TAKES ALL, which he hosted on Friday nights for eleven years. It was a big hit in its day, though Challenge? repeats have shown that it is in fact the dullest quiz ever produced. The best bit, of course, is the fact that the contestants didn't have 'Phil' or whatever in front of them on their desks, but instead 'P. Hardingham'. Which is fun. In any case, Tarby did bugger all on the show, simply sitting on his arse while Geoffrey Wheeler asked and answered all the questions. At some point in the late 1970s he also grew a horrible beard, but he was clean-shaven by 1983 when he fronted LIVE AT THE PICADILLY, the first in a decade-spanning series of Sunday night variety spectaculars. Sadly, the most famous episode came in 1984 when Tommy Cooper died live on air, and Tarby had to try and hold the show together throughout escalating panic backstage.

In 1987 he gave up Winner Takes All to move onto another quiz, TARBY'S FRAME GAME, but this failed to be such a success and lasted just two series. He also fronted the Saturday night chatfest TARBY AND FRIENDS, which was basically just Des O'Connor Tonight with a different chortling host. And for a time, he was ITV's face of football, running a bar at Wembley on most Cup Final days, and in 1987 turning out as player-manager for Tarby's Sky Blues against Tottenham Frost-spurs (but Dave's supposed to be an Arsenal fan!). Indeed in 1988 he was even employed by TV Times to write a regular football column, basically consisting of 'I was playing golf with Kenny Dalglish...'-style anecdotes. In later years he fell out of favour somewhat, but made something of a comeback in 1995 with late-night Granada and LWT-only chat show TARBUCK LATE, which was full of Tarby's mates (all subjected to hideous 'I know him as a great sportsman, and as a friend' intros), and in 1996 came the appalling golf quiz FULL SWING. More recently still was the appalling BBC1 pilot LIFE'S A PITCH, which was a comedy sports show 'in the style of' Larry Sanders, if you can imagine such a thing. Still, he was good in LINDA GREEN, so he's OK by us.

Chris famously started his working life as a teacher who slept in a van parked outside the school gates. Tiring of this, he wrote letters informing broadcasters that "I am the face of the seventies and this is your last chance to snap me up" - which ATV did, hiring him as a reporter for their regional news show. One Saturday in January 1974, he was involved in an experimental (and cheap) attempt to do something new for kids - joining John Asher on TODAY IS SATURDAY. Chris claims that the budget was so low they could only afford one chair and thus the two could never appear on screen together. But something was there, and after three months, the title had been shortened to TISWAS, Asher quit (and hence became the Pete Best of television) and Tarrant started to play a more active role in it. It ran every single week for two years in the Midlands, and by the time it started to be screened in other regions from 1977, Chris had already done over a hundred shows. Later regulars like Sally James, Lenny Henry and John Gorman joined, and Chris took over as producer, writing most of the show with Gorman while downing pints on a Friday night, and often going straight from the pub to the studio. Famously Chris fronted one edition with a bucket under the desk so he could vomit mid-show.

In 1981, with the show now screened nationwide, Chris got tired of the various complaints about unsuitable content, and left to invent OTT, the same sort of thing but now late in the evening and with more breasts. This was something of, shall we say, a curate's egg, but Chris was still invited back the following year for a similar series, SATURDAY STAYBACK. After that, though, he never really seemed to find the right vehicle, and spent the next decade or so fronting an array of useless LE shows. The worst was perhaps HOTLINE, the Surprise Surprise-style series he did with Mary Parkinson for BBC1 in 1984, which lasted about five minutes. In 1987, though, he was asked to front Capital Radio's breakfast show, which he turned out to be really good at, and he soon became The Most Important Man In Commercial Radio (copyright all newspapers). He's still there to this day, unless he's on another of his umpteen holidays. It wasn't until 1998 he found a TV show with the same sort of influence as the 'was - and WHO WANTS TO BE A MILLIONNAIRE has made him one of the highest paid people on telly. We always thought EVERYBODY'S EQUAL was the better show, though.

Trained as a gardener (at Kew, no less), Alan's first steps into the media were as an expert in all things botanical, contributing to NATIONWIDE and also providing gardening advice to Andy Peebles' demented morning show on Radio 1 in 1980, during the mental period when Simon Bates' programme was cut into two halves, one at 9am and one at 2pm (must have been some sort of row). Later too he was responsible forr tending to the BREAKFAST TIME allotment. Yet for a time Alan left that sort of thing behind and set out as a mainstream presenter. If you were being unkind you may say that he'd gone from generating one type of shite to another. For a while he was Mr Daytime, hosting the lunchtime chat show from Pebble Mill in all its various incarnations over a decade - DAYTIME LIVE, SCENE TODAY and eventually (when they realised everyone just called it that anyway) PEBBLE MILL. Here he was normally alongside Judi Spiers, asking soft questions to people from The Bill and introducing performances from Paul Jones and his Blues Band.

Of course, Alan's performance on these shows were the inspiration for Alan Partridge, and we're slightly disappointed that his recent autobiography seems to gallop through this part of his career in as brief a way as possible. True, it hardly did him any favours, but it was probably better than his awful attempts at novel-writing. The big revitalisation in his career came in 1996, thanks to two big shake-ups. Firstly BBC1 decided to change daytime after umpteen years of failure, and finally axed the lunchtime plugfest (although there were still programmes from Pebble Mill, we really must emphasise that), then Geoff Hamilton sadly died and a vacancy came up as presenter of GARDENERS' WORLD. Alan took it over and re-established his green-fingered credentials, which were further confirmed when GROUND FORCE began a year later. However he packed both of them in last year to move onto 'other projects', whatever they might be. Let's hope they don't involve another lunchtime chat show.

Anthea was so convinced that her career has been the stuff of legend that she published an autobiography a few years back. However anecdotes about Signal Radio are not really that much of a page-turner (she spells Tony Dortie's name wrong too) and, as such, TV Cream bought the book for two quid from a remainder shop about five minutes after it was published. And we kept the price label on as well, to avoid embarrassment. In any case, Anthea really has done the rounds, starting off at Signal in her home town of Stoke before moving into telly, first off on the embryonic Sky service in 1986 linking pop videos (which was more or less the entire output at that time). Her first terrestrial outing was as one of the presenters of BUT FIRST THIS in 1987, alongside Andy Crane, Simon Potter et al, but she failed to get the Broom Cupboard job and instead got the presenting gig on the mediocre Saturday morning show UP2U, with Jenny Powell and Tony Dortie. This was most notable in TV Cream's eyes for the mental set in the first series, simply consisting of a huge desk in a completely bare studio. Of course, Anthea's encounter with a motorcycle on that show has done the rounds of the web millions of times, so we'll gloss over that.

Anthea was also a regular presenter of TOP OF THE POPS for three years - when the producers needed a woman, any woman, to present - despite never being any good at it ("Can you party! Woargh!"). Yet then her career fell into something of a dead end, and it looked as if she'd spend the rest of her career fronting daytime fillers and corporate videos. In 1992, though, she passed the audition to become a BLUE PETER presenter. This was much more her sort of thing and she stayed for two years - most famously being responsible for the Tracey Island make. Then in 1994 she quit to join Eamonn Holmes on the GMTV sofa, for a double act that generated thousands of column inches in the press for their legendary frostiness, but seemed to work on screen.

In November 1994 she got the job of lottery presenter, thanks to a BBC decision that the draw should be the star, not the presenters. However this seemed to be forgotten after six months when, because the show was pulling in fifteen million viewers a week, she was mistakenly thought to be a big star. At that time, this automatically meant a contract with ITV, at the height of it's 'Star first, format later' phase. So here came the clunkers - aborted pilot ALL YOU NEED IS LOVE (famously the subject of the following morning's Radio 1 Breakfast Show), useless 'people show' PET POWER, dull phone-in quiz TURNER ROUND THE WORLD, and Andy Coulson-devised one-off CHANGE YOUR LIFE FOREVER. Obviously this sort of overexposure couldn't last forever, and after some awful PR - marriage-wrecker, commercial sell-out, crap author et al - it all seemed to go a bit wrong. A return to the lottry didn't help, as THE BIG TICKET was even worse than the old shows. A ropey Saturday night show with her sister - YOUR KIDS ARE IN CHARGE - was another flop, and she then went back to her roots on little-watched satellite channels by doing a show on Taste CFN, which closed down. At the moment, we have no idea what she's doing - it might say in the book, but we can't bear to read that far.