The Why Don't YouTube? Archive - June 10th-16th 2024
From the house of @whydontyoutube
June 10th
1981: Did You See..? goes round the back of BBC continuity.
1983: the morning after the General Election night before, where among the BBC reporters Bob Wellings has been sent to the middle of a Greenham Common peace camp in full song and gets on well with the women until he tells them their campaign is pointless, Michael Cole’s cameraman falls over David Steel’s dog just after all have realised ITN’s Alastair Stewart got there first and Nicholas Witchell has to physically manhandle his cameraman in Downing Street after they run out of cable.
June 11th
1982: uploads of Film Fun are necessarily short on their meat thanks to copyright strikes but are therefore thick on prime Derek Griffiths. He even gets his acoustic out in this one, which is ostensibly about three ages of Bugs.
1992: panic in Granadaland, as after the thorough story about a weepy Princess Diana local visit and lots of Olympians at a garden fete comes a very scrappy report about 17 minutes in from the Liverpool Festival of Comedy. If nearly missing the cue on Margi Clarke being crowned a fairy queen, having been tapped in in a way that's supposed to impress us, isn't odd enough, our Granada Tonight reporter bumps into Alan Bleasdale and Willy Russell, who were clearly in no mood to be interviewed right there and then. Apologies for who follows that report.
June 12th
1995: while you still wouldn’t confuse it for Ken Loach, L!VE TV wasn't what it would become at retina searing launch.
June 13th
1977: Thames' educational show Finding Out found out how Magpie worked, including a very fed up looking Mick Robertson in rehearsals.
1986: Scotland tumbled out of the World Cup after drawing with Uruguay. ITV's Ian St John takes the defeat with Zen grace and equanimity.
1991: The Late Show is the last BBC TV programme to be made in Lime Grove studios, ending with a symbolic unplugging of the cameras by an oversized switch by Cliff Michelmore. The studios were closed for good at the end of July and is now the site of a housing estate.
1992: a legend is born at 11.25pm via the Video Diaries of a self-unaware 17 year old metalhead from Loughborough, In Bed With Chris Needham. He's still at it and supposedly making a follow-up film of his own volition...
2003: Bruce Forsyth resurrects a drifting ITV career - a week before the last Play Your Cards Right - on the BBC, namely through Have I Got News For You, with colleague in a year’s time Natasha Kaplinsky, Marcus Brigstocke, Play Your Iraqi Cards Right, Ian gradually dying inside and Paul, who had brought it about after Brucie had contacted him asking if he could have a go, openly loving it all.
June 14th
1986: Cheryl Baker hosts a backdoor pilot for Eggs'n'Baker on The Saturday Picture Show as she demonstrates how to cook blue string pudding from The Clangers, which doesn't exist but that's not going to stop her, and neither is the audible consternation from the children watching even though they knew all along what the end product was going to look like. The pouring cheese sauce on top goes down equally badly, as does Mark Curry tasting it, so much so you feel giving out the ingredients at the end is a pointless gesture.
1996: OJ Simpson confesses to the Friday Night Armistice. Armando Iannucci corpses at that in what we suspect wasn't the first take. Meanwhile Sue Perkins and Al Murray are your on the spot reporters.
June 15th
1978: not even Legs & Co's most humiliating costume, but certainly getting there.
1989: The Late Show marked the release of the first Batman film - which wasn't actually out here until August, but let's not question that now - by tracing the character's history with a linking device involving John Bird as a doctor.
1989: with its hegemony over drunk hen nights long since confirmed it's hard to remember that in the late 80s karaoke was only a couple of steps of respectability up from The Japanese Game Show Endurance in terms of what those funny far eastern foreigners got up to. That's how Channel 4 came to commission Kazuko's Karaoke Klub, in which Kazuko Hohki of London-based Japanese cult Peel-favoured performance art/musical act Frank Chickens fronted a combined bewildering chat show and vocal variety performance concept, especially so when Frank Sidebottom appears, and listen to that audience reaction when Hohki mentions Timperley in her introduction. The other guest is John Cooper Clarke, with an impression that was fine at the time and an excursion into haiku.
June 16th
1971: current affairs strand 24 Hours ran daily for six and a half years under Cliff Michelmore's stewardship but is pretty much only remembered for Yesterday's Men, a documentary about Harold Wilson's first year as opposition leader that was the idea and reporting work of David Dimbleby but according to editor Anthony Smith led to "the biggest and most furious row that a television programme in the English language has ever provoked." Labour Party participants weren't told the title or that the Scaffold had contributed a jaunty theme song, trying unsuccessfully to get a legal injunction or intervention by the BBC governors, who didn't do so immediately but did issue an apology, the programme not being repeated until after Wilson's death. Dimbleby had his name removed from the credits after a question about payment for Wilson's memoirs was cut and disliked how it went on to affect political questioning.
1983: notorious eyeball-masked avant-garde band The Residents have a relaxing game of "snuckers", as commentated on by their then spokesman Penn Jillette, for Channel 4's experimental arts magazine series Alter Image.
1989: Police Academy’s Michael Winslow vocally augments the weather forecast on TV-am. He is eventually sent to help out Rusty Lee with migraine-baiting consequences.
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