"Activate The Balls!"

This is something I've waited to find for quite a while,
the first ever National Lottery Draw from the 19th of November 1994.

The video contains Noel Edmonds introducing the show, the emerging of the draw machine and the draw itself, where after the titles Noel is more than happy to joke about not really driving through London before the show itself on the night.

It's worth mentioning the superb theme music by top TV composer Ed Welch and I felt a lot of his compositions for the show were wasted just for that programme as he composed several stings and variants of the theme used for the many games played in the first show to determine who would start the draw.

It's also worth noting the "dramatic" sting used to reveal the large than life draw machine was only used for that show then rested for about 20 weeks until they did the 20th draw at TV Centre after touring the country.

The week after, Anthea and Gordon presented the show in Thursford in Norfolk from the cinema where they got all the musical stings (including the ball stabs during the draw) to be played by resident Wurlitzer organist Robert Wolfe which was awful from my point of view at the time.

Returning to the first ever show and the fact that for that week it was in place of the House Party was rather awkward and consisted of several silly games to determine which lucky punter would start the first ever draw.

Whilst the majority of the games were similar to It's A Knockout and involved challenges such as scoring as many goals in a minute, the final round involved the two remaining contestants fighting it out on the buzzers answering questions for 60 seconds which was rather anti climatic.

If you're wondering what the "57" at the bottom left corner of the screen is during Gordon's opening link then that was probably the fault of a vision mixer pushing the wrong fader at the wrong time.

As you would expect I can even remember the noises that the buzzers made as they were from the BBC Electronic Sound Effects CD with one being
an electronic wail and the other being the infamous "Rapid Cyclicar Alarm"
which I have used on several occasions on Smoke over the years.

Bizarrely enough, none of the BBC Sound Effects CDs I own have the noise of Noel's gunge tank which is bizarre as I've rarely heard it being used on other channels and would love to have it in full as I've mentoned several times before.

That sound effect is like music, from my perspective.

OK, moving onto the draw itself and bizarrely enough the title of the post isn't actually said before the balls are dropped despite me recalling it so well for such a long time. However they abandoned the idea of the audience counting down to the draw after about 3 or 4 weeks since the first show.

They could never do the live draw like that now since the Fathers 4 Justice incident in 2006 which resulted in the live draws being done from "Lottery HQ" shortly after.

At least they still have Deadly announcing the Balls who as you will see from the clip above didn't actually start his role until draw 27 when Gordon Kennedy had left the programme and Anthea presented solo from Television Centre.

Prior to that it was the main presenter who announced the draw with Noel doing so in the above video, although Gordon tended to do so afterwards.
I'm pretty sure Anthea had a go at it once in one of the earlier shows done on location.

However apart from stand ins such as Charles Nove, it's always been Deadly as "the voice of the balls" with the only exception being the disastrous incident when darts commentator Sid Waddell was brought on to do the job on the first edition of "Red Alert" in November 1999.

Unsurprisingly that only lasted a week.

As for my favourite presenters of the original draw, they would have to be either Bob Monkhouse or Terry Wogan as they added plenty of wit to the proceedings and proved that the old pros are the best.

Bob's handling of the damaged draw machine in 1996 being a highlight.

Time for some further trawling.