The Why Don't YouTube? Archive - April 22nd-28th 2024

From the house of @whydontyoutube

April 22nd

1993: Joanna Lumley's first appearance on The Full Wax had inspired Jennifer Saunders to contact her about a sitcom role she'd written, which to make it easier she already knew Ruby Wax would be script editing. Returning to the show the attempted rehabilitation continued, as long as you ignored that Ab Fab had already aired its first series.

April 23rd

1979: David Bowie has a run-in with Mr Angry of Mayfair.

1986: presumably Paul Coia is already feeling discombobulated given he's presenting Pebble Mill At One while wearing a neck brace, but then the surrounding oddness rifles up several notches with a performance from and subsequent laconic-overdrive interview with Ted Chippington. The small audience laughs obligingly, let's say.

1986: as previously mentioned Kenneth Williams did a week "in" for Wogan and in a classic passing of the torch met Stephen Fry, promoting Comic Relief and Me And My Girl's Broadway opening.

April 24th

1985: Peter Duncan gets to live out his Bond fantasies as part of becoming a stuntman on the first Duncan Dares.

1988: Paul Gambaccini tells the story of Jonathan Ross' influential history in music in Phew! Rock n' Roll!! The Last Resort Years, doubling as a collection of performances from its first two series from, in chronological order, Terence Trent D'Arby, Mick Hucknall, Sting, Chris Isaak, Roy Orbison, Billy Bragg and Hank Wangford, Paul McCartney, Alexander O'Neal, brief critical darling soul singer Paul Johnson, Paul Young and Tom Jones, amid comment from George Martin, Steve Nieve and *sucks air through teeth* Gary Glitter.

1992: Albert Finney appears on Wogan and having unwisely revealed himself to be a Coronation Street fan gets a quick quiz with limited success, but a question on Rita does get the next guest Barbara Knox on.

April 25th

1982: Toyah Wilcox stars in Tales Of The Unexpected in an accent that wanders between her own, Cockney and West Country, ironically as a successful advert model whose life collapses as she loses her mystique upon speaking. Based on a story by a TV Times competition winner, maybe the most interesting thing beyond Wilcox acting opposite Ralph Bates is we've seen it speculated that the uncredited advert actor who appears in the opening seconds is Sean Bean, who had started treading the boards by then and would make his official TV debut a year later in a Barbican advert. Actually, no, by far the most interesting thing is the spoken disclaimer over the credits.

1987: Amoebas To Zebras, a title which doesn't work in RP, was a natural history quiz fronted by Gyles Brandreth’s non-union Mexican graffiti’d wall equivalent Nigel Rees for TSW with a scoreboard based on the tree of evolution ranging from primeval ooze to homo sapiens. They must have been running really short of specialist contenders as the contestants include Survival producer Mike Lindley and, well now, Ken Livingstone.

1992: Saint & Greavsie is onto its penultimate show and tie person of the year nominee Jimmy is in demob happy mode, especially after the feature on celebrities writing newspaper match reports from 26:56.

April 26th

1987: Sky celebrate their fifth birthday. Amid surprising amounts of corporate bumf and some dancers the highlight is surely Pat Sharp feigning shock at their presenting a clip of him with an "embarrassing" old haircut while sporting his far more notoriously embarrassing old haircut.

1990: IBA Engineering Announcements on tour! With BSB's launch approaching, the radio and television trade are invited into Marcopolo House.

1992: Manchester United lose at Liverpool live on The Match, meaning Leeds United win the final pre-Premier League title. ITV have a camera at the suburban front room where some of their players, including Eric Cantona, have gathered and are as you can see from 7:54 on overcome with emotion. In typical ITV Sport form, an interview with anointed manager Howard Wilkinson is then cut off after 45 seconds.

1992: a rare Mike Leigh television outing for the time, A Sense Of History is written by and stars Jim Broadbent as landed gentry taking a documentary film crew on a tour of his estate telling the family history resentfully.

April 27th

1972: Sly and the Family Stone's Runnin' Away is a dark and paranoid summation of attempting to escape the chaos of the end of the Sixties dream. So obviously Pan's People danced to it in a deserted Selfridges. The uploader claiming the clip has been officially wiped from the BBC archive when it has TOTP2 captions on it is some special doublethink.

1982: "Afghanistan?" "No, it's the Thames Barrier, Ed." "Oh lord..." ITV Schools' Middle English visits Thames' news desk.

April 28th

1977: one of the great discoveries of the BBC4 Top Of The Pops run, a song that until its reshowing had ended up so obscure there was almost nothing about it online before the repeat, Money Is A Girl's Best Friends by Contempt.

1990: on the same day Stephen Hendry won the world snooker championship he was taking part in the final of the Clydeside Classic, shown unbilled on Channel 4 as part of a series of Television Interventions, this by visual artist David Mach. Keep watching through.

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