Wide Awake Club started on Saturday 13 October 1984, broadcasting for an hour each Saturday morning at 8.30 am as TV-am's flagship kids series. It replaced two separate shows,
Data Run and
SPLAT which had been created by
Ragdoll's Anne Wood then as Head of Children's Programmes. The change to
Wide Awake Club was part of cost cutting by management and was devised by producer Nick Wilson.
WAC was presented by
Timmy Mallett, Arabella Warner and James Baker, with
Tommy Boyd joining in February 1985 and
Michaela Strachan in August 1986 – all newcomers to television, except Boyd who had previously presented
Magpie and Mallett who had presented the
Oxford Road Show. The live programme combined comedy, games, celebrity guests, competitions and viewer interaction. There were also more educational features, including visiting experts such as
Carol Vorderman for the science slot, and attempts to explain historical and contemporary events like the
Cold War. A spelling contest, 'Bonk’n’Boob' was praised by teachers for encouraging children to learn to spell properly. The show also launched the career of
Mike Myers, later a major Hollywood star, who made guest appearances with
Neil Mullarkey on the show for a brief time, parodying the show's title in his segment "Sound Asleep Club", in which he sported
pyjamas and a "bed-head" hairstyle. His roles included making earrings out of spoons, tape and string, as well as making a glass of water in a cookery section. When
Wide Awake Club returned after its summer break on Saturday, 14 September 1985, the series was extended to broadcast for almost two hours from 7.30 am until 9.25 am. The programme was so successful that it launched two spin-offs:
Wacaday, a programme for holiday mornings presented solely by Timmy Mallett (joined by Terry a puppet during its first series and Michaela Strachan for later editions) that became even more successful than its parent, and
WAC Extra, a Sunday morning version of the show. Both
Wide Awake Club and
Wacaday introduced the
Wacawave, done by making a 'w', by putting one's thumbs together, and waving. Meanwhile,
Wide Awake Club continued for many years with only minor changes to the format until 9 September 1989 when it was relaunched as ''WAC '90'', broadcast from
Granada's studios in
Manchester (as opposed to TV-am's in
London). However, the
Wide Awake Club franchise continued as
Wacaday until TV-am lost its franchise in 1992. == Programming ==