Wacaday
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Wacaday was a children's television series in the UK that ran in TV-am's school-holidays slot from 1985 until 1992 and was hosted by Timmy Mallett.
Wacaday was introduced because Roland Rat, the puppet host of TV-am's previous holidays slot, had been sold to the BBC to ease the troubled station's financial difficulties. With only one week until the new show was due to start, it was decided to produce a spin-off of the already successful Saturday morning programme, Wide Awake Club. Timmy Mallett, the best-known presenter of Wide Awake Club, was chosen to front the new show.
The programme was similar in style to Wide Awake Club, being live and featuring items such as the word-association game 'Mallett's Mallet' and 'Drop Your Toast', where Timmy would read out a viewer's name in the hope that they would be so shocked that they would drop their toast. Every series (there were six a year - one for each school holiday) would be themed around a different country that Timmy had visited. Pre-recorded reports from these countries would educate viewers about the country's culture, customs and history (though in a humorous way, including Timmy often acting out famous scenes from that country's past). Each day, Timmy would be joined by two children in the studio, who would compete in Mallett's Mallet and help throughout the show.
The self-proclaimed 'show your telly was made for' was even more successful than Wide Awake Club and is the programme for which Timmy Mallett is best remembered. In fact, many of Timmy's trademarks, such as his giant pink mallet, Pinky Punky, Magic the cockatiel and his 'bleugh!' catchphrase originated on Wacaday.
Michaela Strachan co-presented the show with Timmy for two spells in the late 1980s / early 1990s.
Late on in Wacadays run, Mallett's infamous routine of hitting people over the head with his giant foam mallet was changed slightly, particularly in the Mallett's Mallet game, where he would instead hit large buttons on a machine to keep score, as the producers feared that young viewers at home might try and copy the routine by hitting people over the head with heavy objects.
The programme outlived its parent by two years, but ended in 1992 when TV-am lost its franchise.
The 2007 debut release by British trio Scouting For Girls contains a tribute to Michaela Strachan and Wacaday in a hidden track 11. In the printed lyrics on many websites "Wacaday" is incorrectly written as "Why Good Day"
