The Why Don't YouTube? Newsletter - April 6th 2023

From the house of @whydontyoutube

50 YEARS AGO

Sandie Shaw gets at very close quarters to one patron on The Good Old Days, also featuring Bernard Cribbins, a trapeze act which can't have helped the fittings at the City Varieties, and Leonard Sachs losing the run of himself at one point.

40 YEARS AGO

Although he had already been featured in a photo-free Guardian piece, Falklands victim Simon Weston really came to the nation's attention since being photographed during an official medal ceremony and splashed all over the papers the previous December but a Q.E.D. team had been following him since the moment he returned to Britain that June with 46% burns. Simon's War, the first of three documentaries over the next few years, charted in graphic detail from the very start the initial months of operations and skin grafts.

20 YEARS AGO

Honda's celebrated Cog advert, the Rube Goldberg sequence (though the agency had Mouse Trap in mind, as well as a Swiss art film) of parts from a new Accord, is broadcast for the first time in its afterwards only seen on ten occasions two minute fullness. It took seven months to finalise the concept and was shot over four days and 606 takes in two eventual interrupted sections (the cut and paste is during the exhaust rolling)

You wouldn't think it possible to have a classic Boat Race, well before bringing class into it, but it's worth hearing Barry Davies in his late career element in a race that already had brothers on opposing sides.

ALSO...

1980: see one, feel one, touch one, as it's Swap Shop Star Awards time, and before we start, yes, we know a clip of Savile is in it. As always the Star Awards are both glamorous and notably low budget, and as always the company burst into song at one stage, Cheggers leading a version of Under The Moon Of Love with backing singers including Delia Smith. A wide selection of kid-friendly stars feeling an Eric would serve them well appear, from Esther Rantzen to the Boomtown Rats via Richard Whitmore, Dick Emery, Josette Simon, Lorraine Chase in a dress she plainly hadn't worn before, Marti Webb, Suzi Quatro who we're very pleased to find gets played on by Johnny Pearson's boys with a bespoke version of He's A Sports PA, Sharron Davies sporting very silver possibly spray-on trousers and a motorised Posh Paws. "It looks like the restaurant in Secret Army!"

1985: we move on five years to find Noel in prime-time and the award ceremony becoming rather less open to public nomination as his special gift to us all for the bank holiday weekend is the Golden Easter Egg Awards. "Founded by Dame Helen Fielding" - yes, the same one, this never gets mentioned in her biographies - this wasa way of putting together the best of Late Late's regular out-takes spot, a young Mark Austin and Jenni Murray among the "nominees", and you'll never guess who gets the lifetime achievement award.

1988: Take Two, the Children's BBC television feedback programme, was by now led by Phillip Schofield who for a special first edition of a new series took their cameras and the schoolkids' feedback to his other workplace Going Live!

1988: the most ambitious crossover event in history etc etc as The Clothes Show not only puts on a live edition but takes over Open Air's studio, resources and Eamonn Holmes to do so, Selina Scott and Jeff Banks taking calls for snap advice and pitting challenges to the makeover team.

1994: Late Media was an occasional, though not for very long at all, specialist reshaping of The Late Show. Joanna Coles introduces features on George Michael's legal battle against Sony, advertising demographics and a gallery of LWT's big hitters - Frost, Grade, Dyke, Birt, Bragg, Street-Porter, Black - on its history and recent slow decline leading to its Granada takeover.

FROM THE ARCHIVE

1985: Theme Dreaming, an extraordinary one-off hour from Central comprising covers of and Brian Rogers' unit dancing to TV and film themes.

1988: Anne Robinson flavour Points Of View, and amid Song For Europe voting complaints and feedback about too much feedback we've at last found one featuring the interminable "bring back Blake's 7" campaign.

2002: Cat Deeley's final SMTV Live, apart from the last one, and you'll never guess who appears to surprise her. It feels like everyone in production had given up post-Ant & Dec (oh yeah, it's them, but also Cilla Black) given Brian's Brain, which is literally Challenge Ant with a marker pen through the title, and the apparent necessity to write Cat out of a Casualty spoof that logically can't have been going for more than twelve weeks and in which Edith Bowman, who currently appears to have found a way to monetise being Cat's Best Mate but at the time was unknown outside MTV, makes an unannounced cameo. Awkwardly she didn't leave CD:UK for another three years (!) so has to cap her emotional farewell by introducing that as if nothing untoward had just taken place.

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