The Why Don't YouTube? Archive - February 12th-18th 2024

From the house of @whydontyoutube

February 12th

1971: two years before writing Crash JG Ballard expanded on his ideas for a BBC film of the same title as part of Review, with the role of extended metaphor played by Gabrielle Drake.

1982: Points Of View, mostly from a disturbingly large number of people unaware that Sir Les Patterson was a basic comedy character construct. Barry Took doesn't seem to have a lot of time for them. Not The Nine O'Clock News also gets it in the neck but has its defenders, Took seemingly taken back by the weight of correspondence about its final series, and similarly the drama Life After Death is actively divisive rather than everyone hating it, which is good enough. The final letter meanwhile demands the cast of Angels be shot.

1992: the Brit Awards famed for the KLF's graceful exit from the music industry. Having considered cutting off his hand and throwing it into the audience, then buying a freshly slaughtered sleep en route with the intention of disembowelling it onstage and throwing the innards onto the hoi polloi, Bill Drummond settled for firing machine gun blanks at the gathered glitterati over the self-defined Extreme Noise Terror's version of 3am Eternal, leaving the carcass at the entrance to the post-show party. Three months later they deleted their entire back catalogue. Later on Freddie Mercury won a posthumous Outstanding Contribution award, which we note solely for BPI chair Maurice Oberstein cosplaying as a formal dinner Robin Hood.

1993: a blast of feedback noise and chaos from Riot Grrrl's British wing Huggy Bear on The Word. Wisely Terry doesn't top or tail it, but later on a feature with Katie Puckrick meeting Playboy cover girls the Barbi Twins leads to them and friends heckling Christian, being forcibly removed from the studio and a much quicker cut to the break than everyone must have been expecting.

February 13th

1986: everyone was going to have a videophone in their house within years, we were told for decades right up until technology skipped a few steps ahead and we casually had video calls added to mobile phones as if it was nothing unusual. Howard Stableford got to make the first official video call to Maggie Philbin in a hospital in Portsmouth on Tomorrow's World, apparently three or four years before everyone would be doing it. There's quite some picture lag.

1989: there were many cumulative reasons why the Brit Awards of Fox and Fleetwood fame were a disaster beyond mere presenter fluffs - the autocue didn't work, rehearsals were cut short because the cleaners wouldn't let anybody in for most of the allotted time, the volume of screaming from Brosettes meant the floor manager couldn't hear most of the stage sound, cue cards were supplied in the wrong order, video inserts went missing including a special message from Michael Jackson which meant the ceremony ended several minutes early and, according to Samantha's autobiography, Mick was heavily stoned. (Fleetwood didn't mention the ceremony in his own memoirs and has rarely discussed it at all) Also, this was the ceremony that ended with Randy Newman backed by "the Mark Knopfler supergroup". Here's a case in point as Bill Wyman, Ronnie Wood and an unintroduced Gary Davies present Best British Newcomer. Davies revealed not long ago that Wyman was going to be brought on in a wheelchair pushed by Wood with Fleetwood having scripted gags in response but the pair changed their mind without telling Mick. The silence is deafening, not helped when Davies tries to act on backstage instructions that everyone had to make sure the nominees were announced first only for his co-hosts to carry blithely on regardless.

February 14th

1987: "One of those ladies said something about a horse!" For Valentines Day, as recently featured on Would I Lie To You?, Gyles Brandreth and Cheryl Baker went for the longest screen kiss record on Good Morning Britain. We can't say who got the better part of this, not least as Gyles reveals in his intro that he attempted it on Anne Diamond three years earlier only to be cockblocked by Brezhnev.

2002: even besides it reputedly being Mark Burnett's inspiration to pitch The Apprentice, for a BBC Business Unit series mostly about workforce, business and ownership failings and machinations Trouble At The Top has a lot of well remembered programmes - Eldorado, L!VE TV, Gordon Ramsay, Michelle Mone, Jodie Kidd's polo venture, the radio station that hired Derek Hatton, the one that inspired the film Kinky Boots, not the Radio 1 one as that was Blood On The Carpet. Most of all however was this edition, on David Van Day's Bucks Fizz.

February 15th

1983: BBC Schools' Watch, under the eye of junior school power duo James Earl Adair and Louise Hall-Taylor, explains how a TV programme is put together, starting with their own plasticine titles before watching some children run around a playing field.

1986: all hands on deck for the sixth Saturday Live, hosted by Chris Barrie but Ben, Rik, Ade, Stephen and Hugh are all there, as are the Oblivion Boys, Helen Lederer, accordion-toting brazen American stand-up Judy Tenuta and Morwenna Banks somewhere. The big gag is a Blind Date spoof with Kate Robbins as Cilla, Barrie as Ronnie, John Bird as Gorbachev, John Wells as... well, guess, and Steve Nallon as... well, ditto. Plus music from "Belouis" "Some", Charlie Sexton whoever he was and Nils Lofgren, and a cameo by that eager follower of radical youth culture Nigel Dempster, who gets one of the biggest audience reactions of the show.

1995: Yentob and Lambie-Nairn on line one as How Do They Do That? explained how the BBC2 idents were made.

February 16th

1978: Kate Bush makes her eyecatching Top Of The Pops debut, which meant having to deal with the Top Of The Pops orchestra.

1990: for a while Open Air was split in half, fifteen minutes after Breakfast where the topics of the day would be set up in advance of the full hour later. A good example comes here, with issues as within ninety seconds there's been a cock-up as a link supposedly live to Jayne Irving at Emmerdale's indoor studio gets rewound on air, followed by the gallery somehow loses a still photo. Irving does eventually resurface to talk to Seth Armstrong and Mr Turner, while the main discussion topic is the England cricket rebel tour of South Africa, which doesn't seem to have much to do with your TV opinions but Michael Cockerill has been out to make a documentary about it. James Whale is promised/threatened for later on, but that's lost to the ether. Like what we do?

February 17th

1973: David Bowie's first full televised interview happened on Russell Harty Plus, where Bowie's mid-Ziggy insouciance parries Harty's baffled old lag.

1973: John Betjeman, Kenneth Williams and Maggie Smith make up a remarkable Parkinson line-up. Ken is on usual waspish form although after some chat about critics and what we might now call imposter syndrome his criticism of the unions and resultant heated socio-political exchange with Parky took all the attention at the time and led to the famous face-off with Jimmy Reid just three weeks later. Everyone eventually acknowledges the shadow of the Poet Laureate as Williams and Smith read his Death In Leamington.

1982: Dame Edna Everage gives lifestyle advice to and takes questions from Afternoon Plus viewers. Some good quality crew laughter here, not to mention something edited out at 7:34 which destroys any logic in Everage's answer.

1985: Children's ITV game show of pastel shaded drama, dance and mime improvisation The Wall Game, featuring a pre-fame Sinitta

1991: The Clive James Interview was a series of ten Sunday late afternoon longform interviews with fascinating people, including going to California to meet Carrie Fisher shortly after the UK release of the film version of Postcards From The Edge.

February 18th

1973: presented here in a later re-edited format for BBC Schools' Scene, Omnibus follows Morecambe and Wise through the entire script to screen process of the show that went out two days earlier, with input from and about Eddie Braben, John Ammonds and guest Anthony Sharp.

1979: at about 9.20pm you could have watched Lauren Bacall film Perfect Gentleman on BBC1, Measure For Measure on BBC2 or The Unrecorded Jasper Carrott on ITV. We know this exactly because, live on stage at the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane...

1983: sadly not here in full, Jubilee! was the centrepiece of the BBC children's programming sixtieth anniversary, Floella Benjamin, Keith Chegwin and Sarah Greene introducing clips from down the years a studio full of stars - Todd Carty between Brian Cant and Kenneth Williams! Mike Read being introduced to Children's Hour's original star Auntie Kathleen! - and special fireworks to finish.

1985: the BBC weather changed from the enormous maps and magnetic symbols to computerised backgrounds, which Blue Peter marks by sending Simon Groom, not a natural at a VDU, up to the office so Michael Fish and Bill Giles can help show him how the new look works.

1987: a couple of years after Q.E.D. featured Kenny Everett's experiments in Quantel they let him attempt to grow a human being. Unfortunately it works out a lot differently than expected in that he attracts the attention of a space-time controller with a resemblance to theatre and radio voice John Westbrook, and Cuddly Ken ends up being transported across galaxies and through time to demonstrate how homo sapiens was actually created.

1993: This Morning begins with the contemporary version of the "how do you do, fellow kids" meme as Pat Sharp and some kids explain various genres, mostly dance music but also grunge. This includes a fashion segment. John Inman and Dr Chris Steele are more Richard and Judy's level.

Like what we do? Why not support us? https://ko-fi.com/whydontyoutube