The Why Don't YouTube? Archive - December 2nd-8th 2024

From the house of @whydontyoutube

December 2nd

1980: before donning the Frank Sidebottom papier mache head of career destiny Chris Sievey fronted the Freshies, whose one top 75 hit got them onto Granada pop show Get It Together.

1981: Southern’s afternoon middle aged housewife gathering Houseparty enters in medias res, looking at some pottery and wondering if they could install their own kiln at home, cooking souffles and operating a sewing machine. Remember, this is the programme ITV have recently been trying to reframe as "the original Loose Women".

1985: Spike Milligan's last significant comedy show was a strength through cheapness one-off for Channel 4, The Last Laugh Before TV-am, co-written with long-time collaborator John Antrobus with main foil roles for Chris Langham and experimental theatre name and future Olivier Award winner Emil Wolk, plus an interval slot for agit-prop circus theatre company Ra-Ra Zoo and Mark Steel getting one line right near the end.

1987: Points Of View leads with the decidedly odd decision for the day to hire tabloid fodder brothel madam Cynthia Payne for Blankety Blank, which Anne Robinson parries by comparing it to her own apparently poor appearance, which doesn't make a lot of logical sense but gets the Beeb out of that hole. (Obviously she wouldn't be on Blankety Blank now. She'd be on I'm A Celebrity.) A packed ten minutes also discusses the tumult left in Francesca Gonshaw's wake, Cagney & Lacey not changing its opening titles, genuine upset over Divided We Stand - a single series sitcom about a squabbling married couple by Carla Lane's former co-writer Myra Taylor - and big news of the upcoming move of the Neighbours repeat to 5.35pm due to complaints from schoolkids.

1991: it's a week after Freddie Mercury's passing and, starting where they've continued, Brian May and Roger Taylor carried the can for Queen, giving their first subsequent interview on TV-am. Their role is mostly to tell Mike Morris about how private a person Freddie was, though Taylor makes a point early on of condemning "some poor old sick devil" at the Mirror, which we assume would be haughty clip show regular Rick Sky. Then Paul Daniels joins in halfway through the second part and misjudges a zero-sum comparison of a question by Morris, something May and Taylor were still bristling about in interviews twenty years later.

1995: "I know you're going for it tonight..." It's the British Comedy Awards and Michael Barrymore is setting out to make Jonathan Ross' life difficult. This came fortunately after Ross had revealed a remarkable guest award presenter.

2000: it's rare you see the theory of Chaotic Neutral brought to life on television, but At The Drive-In managed it on Later With Jools Holland.

December 3rd

1980: Lynda Carter appears on The Dick Emery Hour and with the presumably heeled erstwhile Wonder Woman having at least four inches on him the only thing he can do is get into character.

1981: Tomorrow's World’s Kieran Prendiville shows off a new format that has "all the same songs but a fraction of the size". It's the introduction of the compact disc! Now, before we go any further it should be stated that contrary to common belief there is not a jam knife about Prendiville's person, though he does rub the label side with a tissue and call it scratching. "Whether there is a market for this kind of disc remains to be seen" he comments, because Mark Knopfler hadn't even started writing Brothers In Arms yet. Later on he demonstrated how viewers could record a signal off the telly, either via direct input to the cassette recorder or from microphone to C15, and run it on their system. Having made Kieran look like an idiot for a few seconds, Su and seemingly plenty of viewers did get it working as reported the following week. She can't say "successful", though.

1982: Dexys Midnight Runners rework There There My Dear at spectacular length on The Tube, in the middle of which Kevin Rowland drops and gives us twenty.

1995: that year's Smash Hits Poll Winners Party performers included Take That, who won practically everything, N-Trance, Pulp, Eternal, Shaggy, PJ & Duncan, Robson & Jerome, Backstreet Boys, MN8, Seal, Alex Party, Boyzone, M People, the Outhere Brothers… oh, and Reeves & Mortimer opening the whole show by covering Hawkwind's Silver Machine. No explanation, no lyrical changes unless a cameo by the riff from Day Tripper counts, never released, and they weren't hosting it. And that looks wholly explicable next to Radiohead. Radiohead! At the Smash Hits Poll Winners Party! Doing the not exactly party people-friendly My Iron Lung! With Andi Peters completely missing the point of the knowing joke written for his intro! Ed O'Brien: "We had to do that just because it was so bizarre... it was bedlam - all these girls just screaming and screaming and screaming. And then we went on, there was this awkward silence and then the screaming started again - for entirely different reasons. It seemed like the entire audience suddenly burst into tears, tugged at its mum's sleeve and demanded to be taken to the toilet."

December 4th

1975: Mary Whitehouse and Fiona Richmond argue the toss about censorship and freedom of expression on Thames current affairs magazine Take Two.

December 5th

1981: Griffiths! Hill! Philbin! Castle! 9! There *has* to be a longer version of this Stars Of Christmas On BBC1 trailer somewhere, doesn't there?

1982: 1953 western Fort Ti becomes the first 3D film to be shown on British TV, Michael Rodd taking us by the hand and gently leading us into the future where it was going to save the movie industry.

1991: bring out the huge ice cream cone suits! Bill Drummond and Jimmy Cauty pull out all the stops, or at least the stops that obliquely reference the Illuminatus Trilogy, for the last big KLF Top Of The Pops appearance, where even Tammy Wynette has to sing live albeit via video link. Did all those people really know what was going on?

1992: Macho Man Randy Savage spreads his unique hypercolour hyperactive presence to Going Live! and as much as he plays off with Sarah and some forward kids he's definitely spooked by Gordon. What in his paranoia-showman state he made of Trevor & Simon, with the much overlooked in their oeuvre art-oddness of Sofa For 2 With 3, is anyone's guess.

1992: last chance to dance with The Hit Man & Her, and if they're dancing to Tetris and Slam Jam it's not a moment too soon. Almost self-parodic to host it in somewhere called Discotheque Royale, wherein one of the dancers gets gunged and the whole thing draws towards its close with Pete, in an Elvis wig, and Michaela singing the Grease Megamix followed seamlessly by We'll Meet Again.

1993: there was a time when Will Smith would introduce Bad Boys Inc and be happy to do so. That was the tao of the Smash Hits Poll Winners Party, in which your Fresh Prince is a sideman to Andi Peters and emerges from a supposed active pizza parlour, saddlebag over shoulder. He not only introduces that year's sop to passing indie kids Bjork but namechecks the Sugarcubes in his introduction, so he's clearly game for it.

December 6th

1977: Star Wars would be released on 27th December in the UK so the promotional work had to be scheduled early to get out of the way of Christmas duties. Not that those doing the interview quite knew what to make of it, as a still only 21 Carrie Fisher on Nationwide demonstrates as John Stapleton tries to understand the concept of working with special effects.

1980: Chris Tarrant on Tiswas discovers the precise nature of Bobby Ball's magic braces.

1991: after The Word and TOTP, the triumvirate of Nirvana upsetting the carefully timed and honed balance of televisual performance, as having spent the day rehearsing Lithium for Tonight With Jonathan Ross they then go and do Territorial Pissings instead. Listen to how far Ross' mike has had to be turned down before someone turns off the amp. More live music came later as Jonathan joins Vic and Bob in a spirited rendition of Meals On Wheels.

1993: Mama's Back! was a one-off comedy of unabashed camp written by Ruby Wax with Jennifer Saunders script editing, starring Joan Collins as a London-raised Hollywood TV star - good and self-aware so far - whose tempestuous character gets the better of her when's she's sacked and run out of town to face the family she left behind. With another figure you wouldn’t associate with sitcom in Michael Gambon as her husband, Rupert Everett as her personal make-up artist and Clive James as Clive James hosting a chat show on which she appears alongside starlet post-Eurovision pre-Game On Samantha Janus, it had the personnel but many noted the lack of advance publicity given the names involved and this weird neither one thing nor the other scheduling. In fact it had been commissioned as a series called Next, in which Collins would struggle to find a job in order to maintain her lifestyle, but had been rejected after the pilot which was re-edited for broadcast to get something out of the endeavour.

1995: a mixed bag on Points Of View and one that often exhibits about as much leeway to subtlety as the average Russian Twitter bot, covering Arthur stealing yet more money in Eastenders, World Aids Day coverage, a vox pop with magic students on Paul Daniels' Secrets, a viewer calling for Anne Robinson to be sacked for making fun of Ian Beale's moustache and two separate dramas about which Anne makes a point of commenting how well they were received and then only features negative feedback.

2003: win Dick & Dom In Da Bungalow's Strangely Talented. You have about thirty seconds. Your time starts now.

December 7th

1971: working men's club comedian John Davidge might be slightly better known for his short-lived recording career as John Paul Joans - The Man From Nazareth, co-written by three of 10cc, got into the top 30 and onto Top Of The Pops - but he was ahead of his time, his anarchic politicised material and delivery leading Bob Monkhouse to label him "Britain's answer to Lenny Bruce". It would have been fascinating to see if and where he fit in with the upcoming alternative scene had severe injuries from a road accident not ended his career in 1977. Granada's club scene documentary There Was This Fella captured his work, and his stylistic clash with Bernard Manning.

1985: with the Broom Cupboard branding already established Philip Schofield came in to show Saturday Superstore what he was doing in there and then out into the gallery. "There are so many things that can go wrong" he comments, which is funny because later that same day he appeared on the Late Late Breakfast Show to accept a Golden Egg Award for his infamous breaking of BBC1 eight days earlier, probably his debut on prime-time TV.

1991: Saint & Greavsie, in New York for the USA 1994 World Cup qualifying draw, are required to carry out the draw for the quarter finals of the Rumbelows League Cup, which the show's producer thought would be fun to film within Trump Tower and ask the owner if he’d be keen to help out, which inevitably he was more than happy to do.

December 8th

1981: "You're exactly the sort of chap I'd have liked to meet on a snowy day" Afternoon Plus' Mavis Nicholson tells Tom Baker, plugging an appearance as Long John Silver in Treasure Island which must have been a treat, and who is absolutely on form in a wide ranging chat incorporating his relationship with money, whether he is a bohemian, reading, drinking, dreaming, aiding the biscuit trade, the sadness of not being legally able to hassle children, why driving a car is too "tedious" and a casual reference to Saul Bellow's Henderson the Rain King.

1982: Lewis Collins is the subject of This Is Your Life, where he gets a special message from his acknowledged TV hero, Gonzo.

1990: Going Live! reaches its hundredth programme and even the camera crew have dressed for the occasion. Along with a handful of clips, guests of honour are David Attenborough, Tony Robinson by a hedge - go straight to 32:36 for Robinson's Christmas single, because that was a thing that was allowed to exist - and Jonathan Ross interviewing Trevor & Simon and helping expose Brucie's lack of competition draw etiquette. However Technotronic can't help one of the Sister Brothers and neither can Gordon with his own camera.

1990: celebrated car enthusiast and HGV licence owner Rowan Atkinson gets to scratch his vehicular itch with The Driven Man.

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