In the UK, Live & Kicking is the Saturday Morning Kids’ Show. Even today, nearly twenty years after its last Saturday morning, it's often considered as the most well known out of all the Saturday morning shows. Of those who knew the days of Saturday mornings, Live & Kicking is right up at the top end with the likes of Tiswas in popularity terms.
Indeed, Live & Kicking had the longest run of any Saturday morning show in the UK at an unprecedented eight years (or over 250 episodes; though this isn't counting the earlier and later episodes of Tiswas before that show went nationwide) between 1993 and 2001, so it's bound to be stored in the public consciousness a lot better than others.
Incarnation number four of the BBC's history of Saturday morning shows ran for the bulk of The '90s, hence why popular culture associates it with that decade. The format was give or take the same as that of Going Live! (even the name was a nod) - a "hot seat" which was a Q&A session for that week's guest(s), music performances, comedy sketches, games and all the others, just without that show's presenters. With a few tweaks, the show became so successful, it launched the careers of several of its major presenters (among them Zoe Ball, Jamie Theakston, Andi Peters and many others), many of which still have their careers properly live and kicking today, with the show itself effectively becoming the Trope Codifier for Saturday morning shows.
Tropes associated with Live & Kicking include:
- 20 Minutes into the Future: One sketch which involved Andi Peters and Emma Forbes entering a time machine, where they would each be transformed into what it predicted they would be like in the year 2016. Of course, that year's long gone and neither of them have really changed too much. Hell, Andi Peters was apparently going to be a Trevor McDonald style newsreader by then!
- Catchphrase: There were a few, the most obvious being "miss it, miss out" and "the only way to start your weekend". That second one wasn't a lie.
- Crossover: Mr. Blobby, straight out of Noel's House Party. Ironically, this resulted in his image transforming from being that of a parody of children's characters to actually being a children's character. Whoops.
- Distaff Counterpart: Mr Onion was "swept down the plughole" when puppeteer John Eccleston was filming Farscape and replaced with a female leprechaun named Shamrock. When Eccleston returned, all three leprechauns were in the show together.
- Fun with Acronyms: The promotions would often come with a funky-designed 'MIMO', which stood for "miss it, miss out" - one of the show's most recognised catchphrases.
- Leprechaun: Replacing Ratz the CGI cat as the obligitory puppet mascots from the third season were two leprechauns named Mr Sage and Mr Onion. (Later three leprechauns including Shamrock.)
- Saturday-Morning Cartoon: This show would, as others did, dish them out. Among the most notable were Rugrats and Spider-Man: The Animated Series
- The Show Must Go On: Unlike the other Saturday morning shows at the time, this one wasn't made to regenerate whenever its presenters left. And it worked - in its eight year run, there were four batches of presenters. Twelve individuals in total, to be precise.
