The Why Don't YouTube? Archive - August 26th-September 1st 2024
From the house of @whydontyoutube
August 26th
1976: some time this month in 1986, fronting local postbag Your Say, HTV West's Richard Wyatt was sent the damaged wing spar from a light aircraft. That's because, as he explains, on this day his head damaged it.
1976: it's all very well being experimental and influential but no matter how kosmiche you are you've got to have a pop hit in you. Hence, Can on Top Of The Pops. Is that Richard Beckinsale at 2:48?
1983: At Home With Larry Grayson isn't from Larry Grayson's home, though we do go there for a bit. Neither it is about the seaside chalet we first see him emerge from. Instead it's a studio chat and old haunts - school, working men's club, local theatre - jaunt with Janet Street-Porter, days ahead of his sixtieth birthday. Bet you can't guess which soap actress is a guest. The actual main guest of honour, surprisingly, is Arthur Marshall.
1983: the Comic Roots series, taking comedians through their personal history in their own time and style, certainly didn't differentiate between styles, as Michael Palin was followed by Billy Dainty and in turn was followed by Alexei Sayle, who'd barely been on TV by then - Boom Boom Out Go The Lights, The Private Life Of The Ford Cortina, just over half of OTT and the first series of The Young Ones - but word had quickly got around. In response Sayle took the programme on a pub crawl.
1991: Lime Grove studios had been closed for two months when it was granted its own BBC2 theme night, the first they'd done not related to music or the natural world. Actually it was more of a theme day given it started at 11am and carried on past midnight - when Television Centre closed all they did was ninety minutes on BBC4! - featuring: The A-Z Of Light Entertainment, because what would a BBC2 theme night have been without an A-Z, which features a segue from Jose Feliciano to Stanley Unwin; The Staggering Story of Lime Grove, some revoiced clips from the team behind The Staggering Stories Of Ferdinand de Bargos; a history of Nationwide (contains Stuart Hall); Frank Muir's history of early panel games What's My Quiz?; a retrospective of early soap The Grove Family including scenes reconstructed with contemporary soap stars from across the channel divide; highlights from 50s and 60s This is Your Life episodes; and Ludovic Kennedy trawling through its TV archive in The Television Years.
1996: Noel returned to mornings, after a fashion, as about five weeks too early he celebrated the twentieth anniversary of Swap Shop's opening with the Saturday morning retrospective Multi Coloured Saturdays.
August 27th
1983: kids TV nostalgia was apparently active even then as John Noakes and Toni Arthur hosted Good Morning Britain with features on Dungeons & Dragons from an actual (mock) dungeon, hula hoops, UFOs and a big gig at Blenheim Palace by Arthur's heart-throb Barry Manilow, and also a preview of the Ultra Quiz final.
1983: The Main Attraction features Paul Daniels doing the chop cup and doing a very deliberate introduction to Kajagoogoo, Les Dennis & Dustin Gee going through all of their impressions, Max Wall, Tessie O'Shea with her banjolele, and - yes! - returning by popular demand, The Bubble Man Tom Noddy. One man, one vat of special mixture, several fags, one straw and endless globule-based entertainment. It's a shame to modern eyes that his big closing routines involve nothing more than those big hoops you see everywhere where bubble blowing takes place now.
1993: The Big Breakfast's swimming pool based game One Lump Or Two? ends with, evidently, Chris Evans getting wet, but also of note are Bob Monkhouse brandishing a polystyrene sugar lump and a less than game "somebody you don't know", Sebastian Scott.
August 28th
1976: Granada basically gave Tony Wilson his own late night programme, So It Goes, to shut his art credential posing up. That didn’t prove much help when he managed to get the Sex Pistols to make their TV debut on the last episode of the first series, alongside Clive James, who supplied a weekly monologue and casts an acerbic eye over the coverage the show itself had received and also interviews a passing Peter Cook, inhabited by the spirit of Clive.
1980: model making series Small World, presented by Eric Thompson, showcases the designs and effects of Mat Irvine.
1982: the BBC's sixtieth anniversary is marked with BBC 60, a series of repeats, graphics and interludes, including right at the start of this selection of continuity and suchlike a special clock that was as far as is known seen once. Look out for special trails for Blankety Blank and Points Of View, Radio Times previewing the new autumn series - so there'll be a lot more competition for featuring on WDYT? upcoming then there has been in the last few weeks - featuring Noel Edmonds in bed, Ned Sherrin putting TW3 into context and Frank Bough's uncalled for monologue about the new football season.
1989: That's Life got itself an August Bank Holiday Summer Special, featuring the New Jersey astrologer wars, a group of child Michael Jackson impersonators (say nothing) at least one of whom we're willing to lay money ended up in a boy band, Adrian Mills having an amusing foreign accent to declaim and Doc Cox with a song about comedic foreign food translations. The big news is Grant Baynham is leaving, with one last bucket of water to remember him by.
August 29th
1973: Crown Court (part two; part three) takes an unexpected turn into fantasy and hauntology in the case Destruct, Destruct, in which a thirteen year old is accused of killing a fellow pupil, and we know exactly what happened because unusually it's shown as a cold open. Even stranger, there's a second court building room shown so that the accused can be hypnotised. That’s before we get to his defence, that as the soundtrack helps make clear he believed he was under the control of killer robots he dreamt up and came to think were real - there's even a line in the script to establish their legal dissimilation from the Daleks. His form tutor Christopher Timothy cannot help him.
1982: the centrepiece of Auntie Beeb's diamond anniversary celebrations was Wogan's Guide To The BBC, in which Tel traversed and waxed as wry as he could/would on much of what the corporation was doing, from Test Match Special to Cleopatra's NSFW extras via wardrobe, weather and the bedroom of Radio 2's James Alexander Gordon.
August 30th
1975: the earliest known existing Tiswas, before Sally, John, Lenny, a sizeable studio, anyone outside ATV watching or the technical capability to show more than one host at once. Chris Tarrant isn't even on this one, the job left to Peter Tomlinson in his CAMRA T-shirt and regular co-host John Asher. Already being credited as "a Tiswas production", the end of that episode reveals ATV's Joan Palmer and Richard Barnes were drafted in too. Maybe that's where the idea for a large and undefined number of presenters came from.
1975: Seaside Special heads to Torbay today under the Blackburn watch, Tony somehow ending up in an inflatable dinghy being recovered by the air sea rescue. The actual linkman is Roy Hudd going full on seaside postcard, between the likes of "(the) president of the variety golfing society", Keith Harris and Cuddles and Lena Zavaroni with her bears.
1985: Joanna Lumley and Les Dawson were clearly meant to be launching Children In Need's Pudsey from Blackpool on Wogan but Lumley seems to forget despite holding the moth-eaten first version of the mascot and changes the subject when Terry prompts her.
1993: Phillippa Forrester has some trouble with But First This' postcard map while Toby Anstis is corralled into combining skittles and zorbing.
August 31st
1979: Kate Bush's Tour Of Life, a stage spectacle of dance, mime and magic necessitating the invention of the headset mike, put her off anything but one-offs for the next 25 years. Three months after it finished a Nationwide special told its story.
1991: Granada's Saturday early evening football service Goals Extra is left in the capable hands of Bob Greaves. We mean, you'd expect Greaves' to be capable hands, but things start heading south for him before long and, having similarly struggled in the previous weeks, this was the last of three Saturdays Greaves lasted in the role. Wait until he has to actually accompany some action instead of just introduce it.
1992: one of WDYT?’s foundation stones. TV Hell, the greatest theme night of all time, trawling what fashion then regarded and to many extents still does as the worst of everything broadcast. Preceded by The Greatest Show On Earth, followed by Diane Keaton directed documentary Heaven, a night of what was then deemed the worst of the worst. We'd love to link to it all but that many separate links covering all five hours would be a tester for you and us, so here linked above is a handy playlist we've curated.
1997: boy band with guitars Catch had a couple of small hits and one of them went on to become the Manic Street Preachers' touring extra guitarist but people only really remember them for what happened during their video exclusive on the overnight ITV Chart Show repeat.
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