The Why Don't YouTube? Catchup - April 15th-21st 2024
From the house of @whydontyoutube
April 15th
50 YEARS AGO TODAY: Tom Jones On Happiness Island is precisely what you'd expect a Tom Jones special to be called. If the prospect of a cabaret rock'n'roll medley doesn't appeal, at least watch him go from 2:57.
40 YEARS AGO TODAY: Tommy Cooper dies on stage during Live At Her Majesty's. Yes, we know it is. No, we aren't. The following day Ernie Wise paid tribute on ITN News at One. Famously Les Dennis and Dustin Gee had to go on next, as Dennis much later recalled. You imagine it can't have been easy for headliner Donny Osmond either (especially as he later erroneously claimed in his autobiography not only that he was actually next on but had to step over the body on the way to the stage), though the crowd appear appreciative regardless when he goes into an old one of his.
20 YEARS AGO TODAY: Martin finds out that Mark Fowler has died and has to tell Pauline in Bognor Regis.
ALSO... Top Gear's Chris Goffey introduces the future of computerised road navigation in 1986. It is, of course, via CD.
April 16th
40 YEARS AGO TODAY: BBC news with John Humphrys, wherein Geoffrey goes to China, Princess Diana confirms she isn't a musician and Torvill & Dean owe it all to the local council; The Master Of Ballantrae, based on a Robert Louis Stevenson novel, follows a member of the Jacobite rebellion after its quashing, starring Michael York with Richard Thomas (John Boy Walton), John Gielgud, Timothy Dalton and Ian Richardson.
30 YEARS AGO TODAY: the first series of Live & Kicking ends with Take That, Eternal, Ken Livingstone fan Lesley Joseph, rollercoasters, Lenny Henry's advice, Shane Richie doorstepping Keith Chegwin and three surprise guests joining Trevor & Simon; Bombay Chat attempted to bring a flavour of Indian culture and society to Saturday morning Channel 4 by means of pro-am vox pops from a tyro Nikki Bedi, now of Radio 4; BBC2's thirtieth birthday theme night curated by David Attenborough includes a for now one-off revival of Call My Bluff, Robert Robinson returning to oversee Frank Muir, Peter Cook and Celia Imrie against Joanna Lumley, Jonathan Pryce and John Gordon Sinclair.
April 17th
50 YEARS AGO TODAY: Carla Lane wrote Keith Barron/Rita Tushingham flatshare sitcom No Strings for Comedy Playhouse as her first solo venture without Myra Taylor - come October it would become a series, but just the one; Pan's People In Concert, down in folklore as One For The Dads but a remarkable dance showcase set to everything from Duke Ellington and Buddy Miles to Tibetan bells and experimental musique concrete.
40 YEARS AGO TODAY: the shooting of PC Yvonne Fletcher outside the the Libyan embassy is the subject of a BBC newsflash.
30 YEARS AGO TODAY: Surf Potatoes, Planet 24's not so much sideways as mildly askew postmodern view of the week's telly with Dani Behr and in a shortlived presenting career Max Beesley, though Ross Lee hoaxing his way onto shows is the only bit anyone remembers; Surprise Surprise, where the unexpected hitting people between the eyes includes the Bee Gees, Johnny Logan, Dale Winton, child violininsts some scouts and Richard Digance inventing Peter Kay's schtick.
ALSO... Bruce Forsyth claimed 1992’s Bruce's Guest Night was "the programme I've been waiting twenty years to do", even though it's the same kind of chat and variety he did on Big Night. Its second week's guests include Ronnie Corbett, Marc Almond and Dudley Moore who gets his own surprise.
April 18th
60 YEARS AGO TODAY: hello, Bonzo! The line between culture-changing rock'n'roll and theatrical variety didn't happen overnight, as the Beatles' appearance on Morecambe & Wise's ATV series Two Of A Kind ultimately proves.
50 YEARS AGO TODAY: Edgar Wright is born. As a keen short film director, having won a camcorder in a Going Live! competition, Wright made quite a few appearances on kids' TV in his late teens, returning to Gimme 5 in 1993.
30 YEARS AGO TODAY: television really is slacking, it's now five full years since the last attempt at rebooting Blockbusters. The first of five relaunches after ITV dropped it was by Sky One, and they're excited by the prospect; Carlton and Doug Naylor got two series out of theatrical agency office sitcom The 10%ers, which can't decide whether to be edgy or trad family focused.
April 19th
60 YEARS AGO TODAY: Hamlet At Elsinore not only commemorates 400 years since Shakespeare’s birth but is the first major TV drama to be filmed entirely on location. Christopher Plummer, Georg von Trapp in The Sound of Music, is lead, with little known Michael Caine, Donald Sutherland and Steven Berkoff in the cast.
40 YEARS AGO TODAY: The Special AKA's politi-party once again opens Top Of The Pops, ten years and a week before their subject became president.
ALSO... Arthur Lowe, Noele Gordon and Bob Monkhouse take Denis Norden's questions and anecdote cues on Looks Familiar in 1982.
April 20th
60 YEARS AGO TODAY: the launch of BBC2 at 7.20pm is famously halted by a west London-wide power cut making broadcasts from Television Centre impossible. Alexandra Palace picks up with a news summary, connecting sound at precisely the wrong moment. Twenty years later 20 Years Ago Today..., a title that now isn't confusing in the slightest, marks BBC2's china anniversary with people who were there; twenty years to the day after that, for what it’s worth, Happy Birthday BBC Two marked the fortieth birthday with a three hour run-through of its greatest hits and familiar faces. Puts “a few sitcom episode repeats” in the shade, doesn’t it?
60 YEARS AGO TODAY: as part of a series of Panorama reports about Liverpool, reporter John Morgan visits Anfield and finds the Kop in full topical voice.
50 YEARS AGO TODAY: the cross-cultural exchange in action as the Three Degrees, by now regulars on Soul Train, pitch up at the second meeting of the Wheeltappers & Shunters Social Club next to Bill Haley, Ronnie Hilton and 'Scotty', whose act is disrupted by a familiar schoolboy.
40 YEARS AGO TODAY: pro-celebrity driving makes its way to telly in Driving Force, invariably hosted by Mike Smith. Nigel Mansell is among the pros, Rowan Atkinson, Anneka Rice, Murray Walker and footballer Malcolm Macdonald the ams partly in a tank.
ALSO... Top Gear's Vicki Butler-Henderson, herself a former racer, does the time-honoured motor racing show tradition of declaring a kid in a kart is bound to be Formula 1's next huge star in 2000. Admittedly she's right as this one is a fifteen year old Lewis Hamilton.
April 21st
60 YEARS AGO TODAY: with electricity restored, about which Dennis Tuohy has had an idea, BBC2 actually launches slightly late. Actually, as Tuohy mentions, the vagaries of the schedule and delay meant the actual first programme on the second channel was the first ever Play School, the introductory kindly aunties and uncles being Virginia Stride, Gordon Rollings, Humpty and storyteller Athene Seyler.
50 YEARS AGO TODAY: Richard Gordon's Doctor cannot be stopped! His fourth iteration is Doctor At Sea, as the name suggests sending Dr Duncan Waring onto a cruise liner that, wouldn't you know it, is commanded by the twin brother of their old professor.
30 YEARS AGO TODAY: Jed Mercurio was still working in a hospital physician when he wrote Cardiac Arrest and initially used the name John MacUre to avoid connection with its cynical depiction of junior doctors and the state of the NHS. All of series 1 in one go? Gladly.
20 YEARS AGO TODAY: middle aged family sitcom Shane was Frank Skinner's attempt at a near enough family audience show. The theme tune made it a hostage to fortune; a second series was filmed but has never been broadcast.
ALSO... The Lowdown, Children's BBC's post-Newsround documentary series about children with a story to tell, today in 1992 meets Polly Cottle, fifteen year old daughter of circus impresario Gerry, accomplished aerialist and go-between with guest ringmaster Jeremy Beadle, who "appears by kind permission of London Weekend Television".
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