The Why Don't YouTube? Archive - July 29th-August 4th 2024

From the house of @whydontyoutube

July 29th

1968: Yorkshire TV launched with the self-explanatory First Night, promising to put the region first by way of a formal dinner at Leeds University refectory compered, in full song, by Bromley's Bob Monkhouse with a bill topped by Liverpool's Frankie Vaughan.

1981: Charles and Diana's wedding is followed by Nationwide turning its studio into a street party, with the many guests including Michael Bentine, Paul Daniels, two of the Three Degrees and the Joe Loss Orchestra. Actually, the real highlight is about 24 minutes in with the introduction of a thirteen year old with her own song and attempted invention of a royal dance craze. We say all this, Jenny Jay, and we appreciate you would go on to appear in Dodger, Bonzo And The Rest and Behind The Bike Sheds, then as Jack's partner Carmen in Bread, and sing on the Ferry Aid cover of Let It Be, but your song both has no reference to the happy couple outside the title, as if you shoehorned it in to get TV exposure, and also it's the tune of Winter Wonderland so we hope your parents had deep pockets and/or good legal representation.

1982: The Firm's Minder tribute storms Top Of The Pops with a full production number. The people sitting on the lip of the stage with their back to them don't know what they're missing. Pound to a penny that they don't get paid on account of the recession in the used car motor trade, more like.

1983: a day after the news broke Peter Davison and John Nathan-Turner are hauled onto South East At 6 to explain why the former was leaving Doctor Who and whther - gasp! - the next Doctor could ever be a woman.

1985: Sparks make a low budget visit to Camden Lock and TV-am, with appropriate prop.

1995: Trevor & Simon make a one-off break for prime-time with a Summer Special, though Simon Hickson later claimed the production ran into such difficulties with a recalcitrant BBC they actually had another script on standby, and that forcing her to wear an aubergine costume accidentally made Letitia Dean cry.

July 30th

1983: No. 73 surprisingly turns into a musical to relay the story of their neighbours' disastrous holiday, future Kenneth Branagh musical collaborator Patrick Doyle putting his Royal Scottish Academy of Music graduate credentials to good use.

July 31st

1977: as part of Jubilee tie-in series Festival 77, Thanks For The Memory asked a cross-section of the public what they thought of telly across two and a half hours. This section is, loosely, about images of sex and violence.

1978: Justin Heyward does Forever Autumn on The Kenny Everett Video Show, filmed on Pett Level beach near Rye, which director David Mallet returned to a couple of years later for the not stylistically dissimilar video for Bowie's Ashes To Ashes.

1990: with the authority in its death throes, transmitter tower radio signals were at half mast for the final set of IBA Engineering Announcements.

August 1st

1978: You Can't Be Serious was a children's sketch show for Thames created by Roger Price, who had devised The Tomorrow People and wrecker of civilisation Pauline's Quirkes, and in its pro-very-am kid acting, comically obvious punchlines and loose use of mess was essentially an Anglo dry run for his later creation, iconic-in-North America Nickelodeon show You Can't Do That On Television. Quirke pops in to see the sole series underway and give a serious interview to the stars, an all-new set of kids, next to none of whom went on to do anything of note. Speak up, you lot! And stop covering Denis!

1982: LWT somehow play out the wrong edit of Elaine Stritch sitcom Nobody's Perfect, leading to actual chaos.

1983: Nationwide starts its final week, from the days when a British holidaymaker abroad's main risk was typhoid and brutalism hit the Look North set. As you'd expect though it's mostly Hugh Scully, Glyn Worsnip and Michael Barratt looking back at itself through the international language of clips. One day we'll get the whole of Statutory Right Of Entry To Your Home. ONE DAY.

2002: MTV Europe launching fifteen years earlier to the day was commemorated by, er, MTV: 15 Years In Europe. A small army of musicians and its pan-Continental accented presenters show up amid the clips in this edited down and subtitled version, including a remarkable - and seemingly completely unacknowledged outside this documentary - night when a heavily drunk and sweary Rik and Ade fronted their live 1987 Christmas party. Davina McCall is involved, revealing she was the on-board entertainment on the transcontinental train trip that launched the broadcast six years before becoming an actual VJ with a Caryn Franklin/Caitlin Moran blonde patch, and then a weird part regarding Most Wanted where she and Ray Cokes detail why they didn't like each other in a way that leaves hanging whether it was genuine or "a bit", though Cokes has since suggested it was the latter out of job security fear. (And yes, the X-Ray Vision Hamburg catastrophe is covered)

August 2nd

1979: Peter Cook talks to David Dimbleby on the latter’s profile series Person To Person, revisiting his Cambridge digs in the course of trying to draw where the comedy line lies, having to defend Derek & Clive again and generally discussing why he's so lazy when everybody else is more famous than him.

1988: Points Of View's correspondents are in a crotchety mood, straight off the bat describing the doyennes of Top Of The Pops as talentless mimers that proper talented pop stars in the old days never did, even though they did all the time and early TOTP even made a virtue of it. Also, look two days ahead. Then there’s complains about the camerawork at the Royal Tournament, the news sting, the new weather map, Tom O'Connor misidentifying a Thunderbirds character and and the idea that visceral war footage might be demeaning, while a reverend suggests numbering soap opera episodes and the usual complaints about repeats - it's high summer and most of those you've listed are cartoons - are offset by many people watching a repeat of Bread and suggesting the episode should come to be regarded as an all time classic.

1998: nowhere near as good as the commemorations they did for their tenth (lost to copyright, sadly) or 21st (last Archive) birthdays, but LWT turned thirty with Simply The Best!, a big old "best bits" compilation fronted by Brian Conley and featuring some unconvincing vox-pops.

August 3rd

1977: ever wondered where that "punk rock is a bigger threat to our way of life than communism or hyperinflation" clip that turns up in documentaries on the movement comes from? BBC Manchester current affairs show Brass Tacks, in fact, where Buzzcocks' Pete Shelley and John Peel were part of the case for the defence against the clergy and councillors from four different cities, the tone of which suggests that not only is punk not to be condoned but we should cheer on the Teddy Boys giving them what for.

1983: "May I offer you half an egg?" Soon to be freed from the tyrannical yoke of Whodom, Peter Davison and 'er indoors Sandra Dickinson are guests of Breakfast Time where the former reveals his musical sideline - still waiting - and defends Selina who responds with some very telling body language towards Frank.

1983: television was starting to realise there was something in this whole home computer boom, an early showcase being Granada's Chip In, trying to fit too many things into twenty minutes so Mark Gorton visits a a haunted house with an electronic paranormal testing kit providing "cast iron evidence" of ghosts - has this been peer reviewed? - after he's pitted two families against each other in a patched version of Atari shooter Xenon Raid in which the controlled spaceship is the Granada logo shooting down mutant Liver birds from space that have turned against the Liverpool landscape, which is bemusing enough without Gorton throwing in a topical joke about it. Then an eleven year old reviews a Vic-20 lightpen from a company in Bootle.

1991: instead of getting a band to schlep up to Manchester in the early hours of a Saturday morning, best for The 8:15 From Manchester to book one already based there. Hence, Take That's Saturday morning debut, promoting Do What U Like. Robbie is already proving an irritant, Gary claims to be a teetotaller by choice in a morality play feature and caller Steven Justice has a brilliant name. Later on the dam breaks as Robbie is provoked into doing his Frank Spencer and Cliff Richard impressions, once Howard has not only done the splits but unveiled his niche impression of a cow crying. It's edited here for the usual reason but we want to know what edit of the infamous video was shown - and it didn't even make the top 100 so this was all in vain.

August 4th

1973: That's Life may be undergoing a sea change, going heavily on viewer's letters which not just leads to the discovery of stock photography, which is used to entrap Woman's Own, but a number of amusing newspaper clippings. Somewhere a distinguished radio presenter and comic gent is plumping up an ornate seat cushion, possibly the same one West End star and this week's Millicent Martinalike Judith Bruce delivers her topical song about Sir Alec Douglas-Home from. Otherwise, while the main investigations concern a mail order company that keeps collapsing and reforming and the relative national sizes of scampi - ah, the glamour of fine dining of the era - watch out for an incredible still of a couple being surprised by a Kodak negative as part of a story which involves the suggestion of sexualising a photo of a two year old. Not before time, the programme ends with a television set being shot.

1983: Tomorrow's World At Large was another programme doing something else for the summer, going on its own Special Assignment-style sidelines. A Lady In Drag put Maggie Philbin behind the wheel of a 200mph top fuel dragster car, which meant taking part in all its building too. In fact she pulls out of the climactic race itself, which turns out to be a stroke of luck.

1988: fun with Top Of The Pops playback, and doubtless confusing those Points Of View correspondents, as onstage monitor technology fails All About Eve.

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