The Wheeltappers and Shunters Social Club

The Wheeltappers and Shunters Social Club
Genre	Variety/Cabaret
Presented by	Bernard Manning Colin Crompton
Country of origin	United Kingdom
Original language(s)	English
No. of episodes	48 (6 Series)
Distributor	ITV Granada
Release
Original release	1974 – 1977

The Wheeltappers and Shunters Social Club was a British television variety show produced by Granada Television from 1974 to 1977. It was set in a fictional working men's club in the North of England and was hosted by comedian Colin Crompton as the club's Chairman. The show's compere was usually Bernard Manning, who as well as telling jokes and introducing acts often finished the show with a song. Crompton was frequently the butt of his jokes, acting as Manning's stooge.

The set was arranged like a club, so that rather than members of the studio audience being in arranged terraced seating they would be seated around tables and be served beer and snacks, generally join in a singalong and otherwise engage in audience participation.

Crompton as Chairman of the club would sit at a small table in the corner watching proceedings with apparent lack of interest. He had a large manual fire bell which he would wind and sound purportedly to attract the audience's attention after an act, with various notices from "the Committee" (that is, the officials of the social club of which he was chairman), usually misdemeanours by the club's members or the committee itself:

On behalf of the Committee, I should like to tell you we made a mistake in offering the raffle prize of a diving suit. It is in fact a divan suite.

On New Year's Eve a special episode of Wheeltappers and Shunters New Year's Eve would be broadcast.

The show featured acts regularly seen on the Northern club circuits and often well-established performers who did well in theatres and clubs but not succeed so well on British television, such as 1950s crooner Johnnie Ray. But it also gave newer acts their first television exposure, such as Cannon & Ball, The Grumbleweeds, The Dooleys and Paul Daniels. Even successful stage variety acts such as Morecambe and Wise also failed in their first attempt to break into television at the BBC. From the 1950s until 1982 with the arrival of Channel 4, British television was a duopoly between the publicly funded British Broadcasting Corporation and the commercially funded franchises of Independent Television; (at its outset in 1956 the impresario Lew Grade, who held the franchise for ATV, called commercial television "a licence to print money").

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