The Why Don't YouTube? Weekly Newsletter - July 24th 2023
From the house of @whydontyoutube - and welcome to our 300th subscriber! Yes, it's always like this, sorry.
July 24th
30 YEARS AGO
Matthew Kelly gets his bow tie on for his first Stars In Their Eyes live final, doing the old Jasper Carrott gag of flicking round the channels on a spare set to prove it. The winner is still at it around the clubs and functions, and according to their agent's site they not only perform their tribute set but also "45/60 Minutes performance singing covers from 80s 90s and/or 00s depending on what the client wants... Almost anything (covered) depending on what the audience want on the night." That sounds open to abuse to us.
20 YEARS AGO
James Hewitt is a relatively interesting sidenote in the Princess Diana story, referred to after news came out of their affair exclusively in upper class terms, then mostly known as "Harry's real father" (he isn't, all sides say the affair began two years later) and now hardly mentioned at all compared to Paul Burrell or Dodi Fayed. All the same, nearly a decade after the story broke he was still enough of a public figure of interest to tell his side, again, in Confessions Of A Cad (see what we mean about the descriptive language?), in which he attempts to turn on the self-deprecating charm and leave himself open to exposure and still manages to fail on every front.
July 25th
30 YEARS AGO
Alex Cox in an old Cadillac for Moviedrome tackles a big one, Rebel Without A Cause.
20 YEARS AGO
Big Brother 4, which has gone down as "the boring one", reaches its final and Davina has her difficult second glam pregnancy T-shirt on. To explain the intro, Jon Tickle of subsequent brief brainbox fame was voted back into the house for its last two weeks but could not win, nominate or be nominated. Just when they thought they were out, two days later Big Brother's Little Brother threw a Big Reunion.
July 26th
50 YEARS AGO
Blue Peter Flies The World travels to Iceland on the journey to the Arctic. John, Pete and Val in their swimming cossies is unexpected. John being attacked by huge skuas, somehow less so.
20 YEARS AGO
In many ways Fame Academy 2 was the interesting one - the format went increasingly Pop Idol and sidelined the learning and development angle that was the original USP, Robin Gibb joined the judges and had nothing to say, "nasty" head judge Richard Park had an actual falling-out on air with Patrick Kielty which completely destabilised the second half of the series, the finalists included pointedly out of place Libertines fanboy Peter Brame, runner-up Alistair Griffin's song Just Drive was BBC and then Sky Sports' Formula 1 theme for years, and Alex Parks was a unique and at the time hugely popular winner even beyond the confines of reality pop show who Polydor had no idea what to do with as a result and has rarely even been seen publicly since being dropped. The series highlights DVD, cleaned up for consumption, lasts two and a half hours and probably didn't sell two and a half copies.
As part of BBC2's The Big Read season Larkin: Love Again was a biopic on, because why wouldn't you, the poet's love life, with Hugh Bonneville as Philip, plus Eileen Atkins, Tara Fitzgerald, Sarah Smart and Amanda Root.
July 27th
40 YEARS AGO
Film Buff Of The Year, a self-defining knockout quiz show under patrician quizmaster Robin Ray, reached the semi-final stage. More immediate questions could be asked about Derek Creedon's beard and hair difference.
July 28th
50 YEARS AGO
Series seven of Sez Les - Dawson made eleven in all - was the only one on which Roy Barraclough was the only other regular cast member (though not as Cissie in this episode) and it shows given the 38 minutes are liberally interspersed with guest Olivia Newton-John, the Syd Lawrence Orchestra, the Irving Davies Dancers and a very long physical comedy sketch with straight man Eli Woods, who you probably only know from that one Roy Castle sketch. Les does do the candle routine about a decade and a half before its more famous Blankety Blank outing and introduces what seems like it might be the debut of Cosmo Smallpiece, Les' set-up framing the character as exactly what we now know as an incel.
40 YEARS AGO
Children's ITV's Freetime demonstrates how to make your own "electronic quiz box".
As Malcolm McLaren's Double Dutch climbs the charts Top Of The Pops brings in an actual skipping team, international ambassadors of jump-rope the Dynamos in fact, and then spends parts of the song ignoring their efforts to show members of nuisance in-house dancers Zoo doing regular workouts instead.
20 YEARS AGO
It's funny how certain stories are seemingly paradigm shifting huge in their day and completely forgotten about soon after. Tony Martin was one, a farmer who shot dead an intruder and was sentenced to jail for murder, later commuted to manslaughter on grounds of diminished responsibility. His freedom after three of the five years he was sent down for leads News At Ten, on a wave of public sympathy that oddly enough soon stopped being reflected a year later when he endorsed the BNP and National Front. In other news Bob Hope is dead and some photos have been taken of Cherie Blair. Right at the end of this clip is an advert for a Real Madrid friendly being shown live on ITV2 for its David Beckham content, and if you think its overblown nature is ironic that's exactly how ITV, and indeed most of television, were treating him at the time.
July 29th
40 YEARS AGO
David Niven died. Sheridan Morley paid tribute on Nationwide.
A day after the news broke Peter Davison and John Nathan-Turner were hauled onto South East At 6 to explain why the former was leaving Doctor Who.
30 YEARS AGO
The Christchurch by-election is one of the most notable and notorious of all, the Liberal Democrats turning a 23,000 Conservative majority into nearly 16,500 for them, still to this day the joint second biggest majority overturned, the largest ever by-election swing against the Tories in which the MP lost their seat (though they won it back in 1997 and their current majority is even bigger) and the biggest ever drop in share of the party's vote. The result is finally called nearly two and a quarter hours into the BBC live coverage, the preponderance of fringe candidates meaning David Dimbleby having to read out 'Highlander IV Wednesday Promotion Night Party' (and gloss over that Sack Graham Taylor and Buy The Daily Sport both won more votes than Save The National Health Service)
July 30th
40 YEARS AGO
No. 73 surprisingly turns into a musical to relay the story of their neighbours' disastrous holiday, Patrick Doyle putting his Royal Scottish Academy of Music graduate credentials to good use.
30 YEARS AGO
A second week into her TV career Naked City's Caitlin Moran arrives at one of her ultimate destinations, interviewing Courtney Love.
FROM THE ARCHIVE
July 24th
1980: Thames change the schedules to pay tribute to Peter Sellers, who had died in the early hours. A day later Alan Whicker paid his own tribute.
1986: "Cue the piper! Play, you bastard!" The Edinburgh Commonwealth Games opening ceremony via another bravura directorial talkback performance from Stewart 'roller' Morris.
1989: Dramarama's Rosie The Great is about a tiny island discovering they are actually a sovereign nation. All very Passport To Pimlico, of course, but also notable not only as still uncommon early TV work for Peter Capaldi but also as the first drama directorial credit for Michael Winterbottom.
1991: Wogan is the appropriately forelock tugging last programme to come from the BBC Television Theatre at Shepherd's Bush, which then reverted to being the Empire.
1992: Frank Sidebottom's Fantastic Shed Show began its series - you know it did, it really did - with an Olympics special, because they are of course really fantastic. Unfortunately his attempt to persuade the mayor of Manchester that Timperley could co-host the Games with Barcelona falls on deaf ears but he does get Lee Chapman and Dennis Taylor interested in his particular sporting ideas, with music from Londonbeat and accompaniment from shopkeeper/keyboardist Emerson Lake, who bears a strong resemblance to Mark Radcliffe.
July 25th
1981: after a summer off from the big top's travels BBC1 rebranded Seaside Special as Summertime Special, now stationed entirely in Brighton with new and named ahead of their time dance troupe The A-Team. Lena Zavaroni is the brave choice of compere given her autocue skills, introducing Bucks Fizz, Faith Brown, old school comedian Lenny Windsor, Argentinian jugglers Victor Ponche and Sylvia (as billed, but Sylvia doesn't really do a lot) and a well out of place Randy Crawford.
1988: the first Roland Rat - The Series went out on Saturdays at 5.20pm but did so badly the second came more than eighteen months later at 4.30pm on Mondays, by which time he'd already had Roland's Rat Race go out in the not so prime pre-Going Live! slot. That said David Claridge must have still had some sway by the time the Children's BBC run came to an end given the musical guests were Pere Ubu.
1988: Calendar's Richard Whiteley and Alan Hardwick, for no given reason, ride a pink Cadillac into Chesterfield for its 21st Anniversary Roadshow, meeting Bob Wilson and Kes' David Bradley there.
1996: we suspect the start of The Big Breakfast isn't live given it involves Zoe Ball and Keith Chegwin - Mark Little had unexpectedly been spirited away a fortnight earlier and Ball left at the end of August after eight months in the job ahead of the ill-fated Sharron Davies/Rick Adams revamp - parachuting out of plane, seemingly for real, and then are back on earth and entirely recovered when driven to the house in a jeep three minutes later. This is for the thousandth show, clip laden as you'd hope, and while the big launch detail of giving away a thousand cameras seems underwhelming they soon drown us in celebrities, chiefly Baywatch's Alexandra Paul, for whom they set up a big embarrassing surprise that doesn't quite work as intended, and Jason Simmons. Gillian Taylforth, doing something notably phallic, and Julia 'tell me it's the mid-90s without telling me it's the mid-90s' Carling (who was wrongly reported as the show's new host that weekend) get into a ball pool, Richard Orford and Dannii Minogue are at someone's house taking Frank Bruno and Gabrielle with them, East 17 play live and Bob Geldof, keeping his shades on, has come to survey what wreckage hath been brought in his name.
July 26th
1988: separated by four years they may be but in the first of two straight very off-brand seeming episodes of Rainbow some disturbing cross-Children's ITV synergy goes on as Zippy develops a crush on Debbie Shore.
July 27th
1984: for some reason Rainbow starts with a completely unrelated sketch involving a knockoff RD2D and C3PO. Geoffrey later dressing as a "robot" in cardboard boxes barely helps.
1988: Kellyvision, the Children's ITV series peering round the back of television, spends a day at ITN both in the office and on location. The director chooses to introduce the kids to the Iranian embassy siege, and while there's no filming going on as the story emerges as with all programmes going behind the scenes of a TV news organisation a big story breaks while they're there, the King's Cross fire, which reporter Anne Leuchars admits almost missing as she was in a wine bar.
July 28th
1975: before there was Cluedo there was Whodunnit?, a murder mystery celebrity panel series fronted by Jon Pertwee. Here Richard O'Sullivan and Paula Wilcox are among those trying to work out who offed a singer of a band with Robert Lindsay on drums.
1989: as the nearest weekend to LWT's 21st birthday, the party started under the weekend-long banner of 21 Live, Gloria Hunniford linking a variety of guests from Frost to Carolgees alongside Joanna Kay trying to launch some kind of competition. Wonder at an On The Buses reunion! See Cilla Black iron! Watch Danny Baker burst out of a painting of himself!
1998: today is the 25th anniversary of the launch of digital terrestrial in the shape of OnDigital, which became ITV Digital and then nothing. The night before Katie Derham nipped over to Paris to explain for News At Ten how it might all work.
July 29th
1968: Yorkshire TV launched with the self-explanatory First Night, promising to put the region first by way of a formal dinner at Leeds University refectory compered, in full song, by Bromley's Bob Monkhouse with a bill topped by Liverpool's Frankie Vaughan.
1981: Charles and Diana's wedding is followed by Nationwide turning its studio into a street party, with the many guests including Michael Bentine, Paul Daniels, two of the Three Degrees and the Joe Loss Orchestra. Actually, the real highlight is about 24 minutes in with the introduction of a thirteen year old with her own song and attempted invention of a royal dance craze. We say all this, Jenny Jay, and we appreciate you would go on to appear in Dodger, Bonzo And The Rest and Behind The Bike Sheds, then as Jack's partner Carmen in Bread, and sing on the Ferry Aid cover of Let It Be, but your song both has no reference to the happy couple outside the title, as if you shoehorned it in to get TV exposure, and also it's the tune of Winter Wonderland so we hope your parents had deep pockets and/or good legal representation.
1982: The Firm's Minder tribute storms Top Of The Pops with a full production number. The people sitting on the lip of the stage with their back to them don't know what they're missing. Pound to a penny that they don't get paid on account of the recession in the used car motor trade, more like.
1995: for that summer What The Papers Say turned into What The Magazines Say, allowing John Peel to observe the monthly music press and the voiceover team to essay some inaccurate impressions.
1995: Trevor & Simon made a one-off break for prime-time with a Summer Special, though Simon Hickson later wrote that the production ran into such difficulties with a recalcitrant BBC they actually had another script on standby, and that forcing her to wear an aubergine costume accidentally made Letitia Dean cry.
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