Every good gameshow needs a catchphrase; darts-themed classic Bullseye had enough for several. Add a genial host, the legendary Jim Bowen, an animated bull in a striped darts shirt, “Bully”, and, hey presto, ITV had a Sunday afternoon staple attracting up to 20 million viewers in the 1980s.

“Super, smashing, great!”, said Jim, when he wasn’t saying, “You can’t beat a bit of Bully!” or explaining the rules of the gameshow: “Stay out of the black and into the red, nothing in this game for two in a bed.”

Contestants who gambled and lost got nowt but their “BFH – bus fare home” and “a look at what you could have won”.

Like all the best gameshows, Bullseye can be explained on the back of a fag packet: contestants play in pairs – an amateur darts player, the “thrower”, and a quizzer, the “knower”, working together to win pounds and prizes.

The prizes – sheepskin coats, carriage clocks, Scalextric – were cheap out of necessity. Independent Broadcasting Authority rules limited prizes to a total of £6,000 a week – and the money had to stretch to “Bully’s Star Prize”.

Contrary to TV legend, the famed Bullseye speedboat was not up for grabs every week (and, while we’re on the subject of telly myths, neither did Captain Pugwash boast characters called Master Bates and Seaman Staines). Prizes did include caravans, holidays, fitted kitchens and the dubious pleasure of a rust-bucket “British-made car” (second prize, two Austin Metros).

Bullseye was proudly northern and working-class. Jim once claimed: “I still can’t believe we had speedboats as prizes. The only contestants who ever won them lived in top-floor flats in Coventry.” A local paper tried to find the lucky winners – unsurprisingly, to no avail.

Jim was a primary school deputy headteacher in Lancashire who moonlighted as a comic on the club circuit. He broke into TV on ITV’s The Comedians, but Bullseye made him famous enough to be sent up on Spitting Image.

His presenting was, at best, haphazard; Jim frequently put his foot in it. Possibly apocryphal, though entirely believable, was the following exchange. Jim: “What do you do for a living?” Contestant: “I’m unemployed, Jim.” Jim: “Super, smashing, great.”

He peppered shows with groan-­inducing jokes: for Jim, the Sorbonne was not a university but “something you got riding the Tour de France”.

Jim was voted the nation’s favourite TV gameshow host shortly before his death in 2018. He explained the show’s enduring appeal to the Daily Mirror: “It was downmarket, but accessible. Joe Public could identify with my fallibilities. Gameshows today are too high-tech with a £1m prize. The nice thing about us was they were excited if they won a toaster.”

After 14 series, Bullseye bowed out in 1995, returning briefly on gameshow channel Challenge in 2006, with Phoenix Nights actor/writer and stand-up Dave Spikey as host. The Jim-era show continues to air multiple times a day on Challenge.

Over three series on ITV from 2020, Alan Carr’s Epic Gameshow reworked the genre’s classics, including Bullseye, The Price Is Right (“It’s Saturday night! So come on down!”) and Play Your Cards Right (“What do points make? Prizes!”).

Bizarrely, a year later, Bullseye featured in the key scene of an ITV factual drama about Welsh serial killer John Cooper, played by Keith Allen. The Pembrokeshire Murders included a 1989 Bullseye episode featuring Cooper as a contestant – with Allen digitally inserted into the episode – in which the killer’s resemblance to a police sketch of a suspect led to his capture.

The final word, though, must go to uber-fan Peter Kay, who lovingly lampooned the gameshow in his stand-up: “It were weird, Bullseye – ’cos it were shit and it were good.” Nailed it.

Bullseye is on Freeview channel Challenge.