The Why Don't YouTube? Catchup - April 8th-14th 2024

From the house of @whydontyoutube

April 8th

40 YEARS AGO TODAY: Tracey Ullman takes her overnight bag with her onto Gloria Hunniford's Sunday Sunday, talking about giving up on auditions and meeting Toyah stans; Tarby's Live At Her Majesty's opening monologue is full of "attitudes of the time", so it's a relief when Russ Abbot wanders on as a Teddy boy and his Madhouse gang take over most of the show, with room for Glen Campbell, Lulu, Barbara Dickson and Jeff Stevenson; having come under tabloid attack for making puppets of the Royal Family at all, Spitting Image devotes its fifth episode almost entirely to them; Ken Russell, who made his name in the 1960s with biopic documentaries about composers, returns to the well on behalf of The South Bank Show with Vaughan Williams: A Symphonic Portrait, linked by his widow Ursula.

30 YEARS AGO TODAY: Eurotrash's second series is where the sexual content ramps up and the comedy voiceovers and love of a naked performance artist come into their own. Helena Christiansen and Stakka Bo fit in along the way; the first full series of Bob Mills’ old telly dissection In Bed With MeDinner begins with Paul Sykes, 'fuckin' ear 'ole', Nigel Dempster's halting reporting style from A Carlton New Year and music from the Damned.

April 9th

70 YEARS AGO TODAY: The Grove Family, a slice of lower middle-class family life written by Jon Pertwee's dad and brother and running for 148 episodes over three years, is regarded as British TV's first soap opera (part two; part three)

50 YEARS AGO TODAY: the final Whatever Happened To The Likely Lads?, Christmas special aside, sees the Lads come to terms with both mortality and, with Bob unable to shake Terry off, their likely future.

40 YEARS AGO TODAY: Robin Day interviews the Prime Minister as-live in Downing Street on Panorama.

30 YEARS AGO TODAY: PJ and Duncan off Byker Grove have started a pop career and have Live & Kicking viewers to answer to about it; Arena profiles Philip K Dick.

April 10th

40 YEARS AGO TODAY: worm and bird adventures in the basic lunchtime Briers-vocalled Orm And Cheep. Look, here's most of the whole first series; a WWII officer is sent to investigate a village where German spies might be hiding out and finds something different in Play For Today Rainy Day Women, starring Charles Dance with Lindsay Duncan, Cyril Cusack, Gwyneth Strong and Gorden Kaye as a vicar.

30 YEARS AGO TODAY: there had only been eight proper It'll Be Alright On The Nights but already four compilations, the latest the stars' supposed own choices making up The Utterly Worst Of Alright On The Night; Clive James finds out if Stephen Fry can whistle and what he makes of Margarita Pracatan, who James had come across for the first time in that week's Sunday Night Clive.

20 YEARS AGO TODAY: the last in the first BBC1 series of Dick & Dom In Da Bungalow features Bogies ending with security throwing them out of a museum in Rome and the series climax This Is Your Muck Muck, with their actual families (and Pat Sharp) encreamed; Dave Chapman's second appearance of the morning as one of the special handlers behind Tiny and Mr Duk's Huge Show, essentially a Shooting Stars for CBBC kids, pitting Joe Pasquale and Christopher Parker against Kirsten O'Brien and John Fashanu.

April 11th

50 YEARS AGO TODAY: wearing a shirt open to the navel and making an impenetrable joke about Diana Dors, Noel introduces the Top Of The Pops audience to Abba five days after their Eurovision triumph. The programme is of course intended to capture all that's hot and up to the minute in pop. So, Bill Haley and the Comets. Imagine the green room looks exchanged between them when they saw the Wombles, introduced by Noel and his egg collection. (Or just watch the whole thing here)

30 YEARS AGO TODAY: Jeremy Brett's last case as Sherlock Holmes before bad health overtook, and the series being retired by ITV as a result, The Cardboard Box features Ciaran Hinds as the suspect behind the postal arrival of two severed ears.

20 YEARS AGO TODAY: Benedict Cumberbatch makes his second appearance in Heartbeat as an arrogant clay pigeon shooting, petrol stealing snob who might have shot his nearest rival.

April 12th

40 YEARS AGO TODAY: all hist to The Electronic Office, wherein our man with the floppy disk Ian McNaught Davis explains how new technology is changing the world of work over six weeks lovingly preserved by the BBC Computer Literacy Project; David Attenborough's second Life cycle The Living Planet ends by examining artifically created environments and a resultant early outlaying of his environmental future concerns.

30 YEARS AGO TODAY: in common with practically every long running soap character, Betty Eagleton was intended to last for three episodes in Emmerdale as she tracks down Seth Armstrong and instead stayed for 21 years; Eastenders' move to three episodes a week is marked by a siege of the Queen Vic by a psychotic former friend of Grant's, which culminates in Michelle Fowler being accidentally shot and forms part of the long road to Sharongate.

20 YEARS AGO TODAY: the great Duncan Newmarch does his first BBC continuity announcement.

April 13th

50 YEARS AGO TODAY: give order as The Wheeltappers & Shunters Social Club opens its doors for the first time, the main attractions being Freddy Garrity, Tessie O'Shea and the Ukranian Cossack Brotherhood. Bernard Manning gets knives thrown at him.

40 YEARS AGO TODAY: Sue Robbie has your entertainment guide as part of Granada's Weekend, with a lurking Frankie Howerd and the promise of future Debbie Greenwood.

30 YEARS AGO TODAY: Aspel goes Stateside for This Is Your Life and has to explain what he's doing to Charlton Heston. Messages come from Ronald Reagan, George HW Bush, Janet Leigh and James Stewart, which makes up for the biggest name present being Stephanie Beacham; MTV's Most Wanted is a preference for the habitual voyeur of what is known as acoustic Blur.

20 YEARS AGO TODAY: Caron Keating dies, as reported the next day; no more Heartbeat bit-parts for Benedict Cumberbatch from now on as his lead role in the biopic Hawking chronicling Stephen's PhD years earns him critical acclaim and sets him on the fast track to stardom.

ALSO... emotional awkwardness aforefront on the Children's BBC documentary series The Lowdown in 1993 as it documents a night at an under-18s club night in Southend.

April 14th

40 YEARS AGO TODAY: "I thought he was Siouxsie!" Boy George must have been busy with... something as Jon Moss is sent to take questions from the kids on Data Run.

20 YEARS AGO TODAY: Blue Peter sends Konnie Huq and Liz Barker on a Marine training course, and in their very first challenge Konnie falls off a zipline. But while momentous that's no good for the SEO, so we must add they get covered in mud and are showered.

ALSO... Adrian Munsey is a composer, producer, film distributor and founder of the True Movies channels stable. He also learned to bleat like a sheep in time to music. This is the kind of thing The Russell Harty Show adored and exhibited today in 1979.

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