Light entertainment is a term used to describe a broad range of usually televisual performances.

Light entertainment in Britain

In the early days of the BBC virtually all broadcast entertainment would be considered light by today's standards, as great pains were taken not to offend audiences—which is not to say that they always succeeded in this. Corporate logo of the British Broadcasting Corporation. ...

Singers, magicians and comedians were drafted from the music hall circuit to fill the schedules. Stage acts were transferred directly to screen and in the case of productions such as Sunday Night at the London Palladium the broadcasts actually came from large theatres. Many future household names, including The Beatles, were given their first public airings during these programmes which attempted to cater for varying tastes through staging variety acts. Bruce Forsyth was one of several hosts for the show and went on himself to present the studio-based Generation Game which remains a landmark in the light entertainment genre. The Generation Game revolved around the now-common television standby of getting members of the public to provide the entertainment themselves by doing silly things for prizes. As with many popular light entertainment shows, the rather tiresome premise was elevated to greatness through the skill and wit of the presenters and contestants. The show's format was somewhere between the old variety programmes and the increasingly ubiquitous quiz shows and it and its descendants still appear in the television schedules. Music Hall is a form of British theatrical entertainment which reached its peak of popularity between 1850 and 1960. ... The London Palladium in 2004 The London Palladium is one of the most famous of Londons West End theatres. ... The Beatles were a pop and rock music group from Liverpool, England, who continue to be held in the very highest regard for their artistic achievements, their huge commercial success and their groundbreaking role in the history of popular music. ... A variety show is a show with a variety of acts, often including music and comedy skits, especially on television. ... TV presenter Bruce Forsyth CBE relaxes with a drink Bruce Joseph Forsyth, CBE (affectionately called Brucie) (born 22 February 1928) is a British entertainer and showman who achieved celebrity on the show Sunday Night at the London Palladium (1958-1960 and 1961), and has since presented game shows such as... The Generation Game was a British game show produced by the BBC in which four teams of two (usually people from the same family, but different generations) compete to win prizes. ...

The 1970s continued the move away from the music hall format to studio based shows with the greater technical freedom that they afforded. Staged concert acts lived on through television magicians such as Paul Daniels and Royal Variety Shows. The Comedians was another programme which at the same time looked back at the live entertainment of the music halls and was also a prototype of many later stand-up comedy series. It employed a number of comics from the working men's club circuit to do their routines to camera. Although their choice of material would get them ostracised from today's television, many of The Comedians themselves went on to have lucrative careers hosting game shows or appearing in soap operas. The 1970s decade refers to the years from 1970 to 1979, inclusive. ... Standing at just under seven feet tall, Paul Daniels (born 6 April 1938 in Southbank, Middlesbrough) is a television magician in the United Kingdom. ... The Royal Variety Performance is a gala evening held in London once each year, usually in a theatre in the West End. ... NOTE: This article does not refer to the Graham Greene novel The Comedians. The Comedians is a British television show from the 1970s (later reprised in the 1980s) which gave a stage to nightclub and working mens club comedians of the era, including Stan Boardman, Frank Carson, and Bernard...

In the 1980s the budgets available for light entertainment increased and shows became much brighter, with dazzling sets and expensive prizes. The 1980s decade refers to the years from 1980 to 1989, inclusive. ...

However, with the simultaneous ascendancy of alternative comedy—anarchic, disrespectful, brash—many of the younger generation grew up to be disdainful of these bloated, uninspiring formats. They were critical of the complete lack of intellectual stimuli offered by light entertainment shows which seemed to have a vice like grip on peak time schedules, particularly on Saturday and Sunday evenings. There can be no more powerful illustration of this than the name of a lesser-known panel show: Bring Me the Head of Light Entertainment (which is also a pun on a broadcasting job description). Alternative comedy is a style of comedy that originated in the United Kingdom in the late 1970s and 1980s which would eventually go on to become mainstream in the 1990s and up to the present day. ...

Part of the complaint was that light entertainment sought to amuse, yet those raised on stronger stuff found the attempts at humour weak and watery. For critics of the genre, Noel's House Party was often cited as the nadir. It was necessarily broad humour, frequently involving pranks like covering people in brightly coloured gunge (a lumpy, special effects liquid), or successions of people in silly costumes falling over. A genre is a division of a particular form of art according to criteria particular to that form. ... Noel Edmonds (born December 22, 1948 in Ilford, Essex) is a popular British DJ and television presenter who made his name on BBC Radio 1 in the UK. Television series presented by him include: Top of the Pops Noels House Party Multi-coloured Swap Shop Telly Addicts Top Gear... College pranks Practical jokes, such as Cow tipping (which is in actuality a myth) April Fools Day pranks (see examples in April 1, 2002) Candid Camera pranks Student Liberation Front pranks World Wide Web pranks Related topics Myth Joke Humour This is a disambiguation page — a navigational aid which...

In spite of this, light entertainment continues to be hugely popular with audiences - perhaps because it provokes no awkward questions when the viewing is shared by different generations of the same family. Some of the irony from the alternative set has crept into the programmes as have, indeed, some of the personnel. Success in the field reaps rich rewards, light entertainers become huge, genuine "household names". Current light entertainment icons are Ant and Dec but have included Bruce Forsyth and Cilla Black. Irony is best known as a figure of speech (more precisely called verbal irony) in which there is a gap or incongruity between what a speaker or a writer says, and what is understood. ... Ant and Dec appearing in an ITV 1 ident. ... TV presenter Bruce Forsyth CBE relaxes with a drink Bruce Joseph Forsyth, CBE (affectionately called Brucie) (born 22 February 1928) is a British entertainer and showman who achieved celebrity on the show Sunday Night at the London Palladium (1958-1960 and 1961), and has since presented game shows such as... Cilla Black, in a still from an interview done in 2000. ...