The Why Don't YouTube? Archive - June 17th-23rd 2024

From the house of @whydontyoutube

June 17th

1972: not content with the Young Generation, which would still be active into the late 70s, choreographer Dougie Squires not only launched a second song and dance troupe that were able to work outside the first team's BBC contract, the Second Generation, but got them a confusingly titled LWT vehicle, 2Gs and The Pop People. Their guests this week are Slade and, both unwisely singing, Tony Blackburn and Spike Milligan, who gets 2Gs to play to his tune at first and then goes the winsome ballad in half-shadow route.

1983: Noel Edmonds' historical re-enactment series Time Of Your Life meets Norman Wisdom, a man not shy about playing up for the camera or indeed any viewing audience at all. His chosen period is Christmas 1953 - Christmas in June, yes, and it ends with the Beverly Sisters singing I Saw Mommy Kissing Santa Claus - and the release of his first film Trouble In Store.

1992: the latest and by far most fondly remembered of Channel 4's Bunch Of Five sitcom pilots, Reeves and Mortimer's spectacularly silly The Weekenders. Featuring early instalment Paul Whitehouse, John Thomson and Simon Day, and also speciality meat vendor Phil Oakey, Channel 4 would only offer a full series alongside a third run at Big Night Out, a format neither man wanted to revisit, leading to their move to the BBC.

June 18th

1983: round at No. 73 Harry wants to take Kim to see The Hunger, which really isn't a film they should be plugging on kids' TV, but it's inspired Dawn to wear her Bowie T-shirt. Ethel can't join in as she's had a friend come round - the actual Elton John.

1988: boot up Eugene, it's a round of school representative 5.35pm game show First Class, the one which featured rounds involving video game play. One of the two everyone remembers from it, Paperboy, isn't featured. The other, Hypersport (or Track & Field, or Daley Thompson's Decathlon), fortunately is.

1992: ITN Lunchtime News chooses to mark Paul McCartney’s fiftieth birthday by revealing that that some singers who were famous in their 1960s and 1970s were still active despite being old and so set up a debate between David Jensen and the NME’s Terry Staunton as to whether all their work was now unnecessary and overrated, presumed to be flying in the face of the day's thrusting young stars like KWS and Kris Kross. Nicolas Owen can't think of a McCartney song about the weather to link to Martyn Davies, who suggests a Lennon song (not even Rain) and a Harrison song.

1992: on the basis that they didn't know how else to present a three minute edit of a 39 minute track, The Orb play chess, after a fashion, on Top Of The Pops.

June 19th

1976: Seaside Special's, um, summer begins with an all-star line-up of Ken Dodd, the Goodies, Charlie Cairoli, Showaddywaddy, the Are You Being Served? cast in lederhosen and Tom Baker AS THE DOCTOR.

1987: a legendary for all the wrong reasons moment in the shape and costumes of The Grand Knockout Tournament. Instantly rechristened It's A Royal Knockout by all and sundry, mostly due to Stuart Hall being the MC, it was a fundraiser for charities chosen by four royal family members - Andrew (OK, there seems to be a theme, but it ends here), Edward, Anne and Fergie - who acted as team captains in a series of wacky celebrity games held lakeside at Alton Towers, even if nearly all its detail was hidden by the size of the set. Edward came up with the idea against the Queen's advice and while it raised a seven figure sum nobody has ever let anyone involved forget it. Never repeated, of course, even in the days when the BBC could have done so, but any event the Wikipedia description of which features the line "Paul Daniels and Geoff Capes were timekeepers" has to be worth your while, surely?

1987: with the UK release of The Evil Dead 2 approaching Sam Raimi appears on Central Weekend to face an angry reception, including one man who compares him to Goebbels. Understandably bemused, Raimi deals with it very well, all told.

1996: a Big Breakfast cameraman falls off a building. We don't actually know how much of that footage went out live but we do know the aftermath, which is a lot better than it could have been apart from the apparent loss of all their OB equipment.

1999: eggy pumps all round on SMTV Live!

June 20th

1975: Salute To Sir Lew Grade was the kind of grand affair only he could get away with, featuring John Lennon's last public gig, Julie Andrews, Tom Jones, Dave Allen and the transatlantic exchange of Dougie Squires' Second Generation.

1980: throw your wilfs to the sky for some classic Runaround, during which Mike Reid comes out on the wrong end of a fight with an inflatable tube, falls head over heels backwards, has made up some appropriate rhyming slang by the time he sits up, chides the owner for getting the programme's name wrong, and then on its departure contrives a pratfall and emerges from under the construction. Music comes from Jona Lewie with mimed backing vocals and exciting addition of bass by Kirsty Maccoll, who at the end can be seen entering animated conversation with Reid, perhaps recognising his alpha male type from her own lyrics.

1981: the irresistible force met the immoveable object and one of them fell through a flower display at Wembley Arena. Big Daddy vs Giant Haystacks, both the apogee and nadir of wrestling on ITV.

1987: a Welsh piano and vocal duo legend is born in the Bob Says Opportunity Knocks final.

1990: ITV Sport's Tony Francis, out at the World Cup, has discovered a new foodstuff called "pasta".

1991: Granada showcase Stand Up had a very high hit rate for early exposure to future stars, on this occasion Steve Coogan, Jim Tavare, Hattie Hayridge, Craig Ferguson, Patrick Marber, Rob Newman and Bert Tyler-Moore, who went on to become a prolific sketch and sitcom writer and co-created The Windsors.

1993: Passport was what Anneka Rice did one year between Challenges as a kind of action game show/travel experience hybrid, flying two couples to a mystery exotic location for a series of locally themed games the loser of which would go straight home. This week the setting is the country in which Rice began her broadcasting career, Hong Kong, the, er, challenges Anneka sets out including dubbing and being foley artists for a martial arts film, for which their efforts are judged by Jackie Chan.

1993: although he didn't announce it as such until afterwards Aspel & Company came to an end with a heavy hitting line-up of Victoria Wood, Kate Bush, who performs Moments Of Pleasure at the end, and Lenny Henry.

June 21st

1979: at what point was Barry Humphries talked into Dame Edna doing a disco version of Waltzing Matilda, and what was that night's final bill? Whatever, it got onto Top Of The Pops.

1981: sadly the opening titles' promise of Stilgoe playing piano in a street isn't carried through as That's Life instead covers luxury baths, football pools - watch for an alarming photo of John McCririck - and novelty whistling.

1982: News At Ten brings news of a royal birth within the previous hour. Cries lustily, apparently. William, that is, not Alastair Burnet. ITN do correctly anticipate what name he would be given, though they do have seventeen guesses. Sarah Cullen tries to report the news without the aid of sound, which takes more than ten minutes to sort out, while a crowd outside Buckingham Palace chant "we want the Queen" because even then nobody was ever satisfied. Later on there's an Atari advert and if you don't know about Kuwait in the World Cup, prepare for a story and a half.

1992: Frankie Howerd's rediscovery by the student set led to a four part series, Frankie's On..., where he addressed a specific audience every week with his crowd work-heavy stand-up set, though sadly it ended up being shown posthumously as he died in April. For the first show he went out to Gibraltar and performed for the crew of HMS Ark Royal in Frankie's On... Board.

June 22nd

1982: Vincent Price and Terry Wogan have a whale of a back-and-forth.

1991: Derek Hatton felt that the northern Militant Labour leader in G.B.H. seemed a little too familiar and took his grievance to Right To Reply, during its phase hosted by man of broadcasting integrity Rory McGrath.

June 23rd

1983: every so often in the early Michael Hurll years Top Of The Pops would send John Peel onto the continent to report back on their chart action. This time he's in Amsterdam to sit around with the Dolly Dots. Need to know more about that Swiss number one.

1990: Martin Roberts off Homes Under The Hammer started out as a reporter for BBC Radio Manchester, which may explain why he showed up on The 8.15 From Manchester at NASA Space Camp, where he finds out among other things how they excrete.

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