The Why Don't YouTube? Archive - May 6th-12th 2024
From the house of @whydontyoutube
May 6th
1981: it didn't end up challenging VHS but videodiscs were meant to be the big market battleground when Tomorrow's World spinoff The Risk Business investigated. This is illustrated with visits to the shoot for Adam & the Ants' Stand And Deliver video and, um, a porn set.
May 7th
1968: a rare chance to see an advert break from the Rediffusion days, featuring cheap cookers, Lyons cakes, thin girdles and paint with no turps. Afterwards, an apology for getting a presenter’s identity so completely wrong they didn't even get the gender right .
1977: France win the London-hosted Eurovision Song Contest, which means a closing reprise of their victorious song. It's enlivened greatly when experienced through the gallery talkback helmed by the legendary director Stewart Morris, for whom everything will be fine as long as the OB caption roller appears in time.
1989: Murray Walker sets up James Hunt during the Monaco Grand Prix only to find Hunt maybe too obliging.
May 8th
1982: U2 make one of their first UK TV appearances on Get Set for Summer. Bono goes into the crowd to pull a young woman out, not for the last time, and then leaves his mark on Peter Powell's proffered pullover.
1988: Moviedrome launched its twelve year, 207 movie authored run of cult films, most with a new introduction written and delivered by director Alex Cox. His first case study is The Wicker Man.
May 9th
1982: Bob Hoskins, starring at the National Theatre at the time, takes Omnibus' Barry Norman for a wander round the South Bank and bemoans its redevelopment.
1983: "Arena takes an extraordinary journey through the video age" in It's All True, Julien Temple directing a wild selection of setups, advances and theories which encompass appearances by Orson Welles, Stephen Berkoff, Mel Brooks, Grace Jones, Boy George, Ray Davies and Mari Wilson as a modernist couple, Koo Stark, Leonard Sachs, Sharron Davies and It's A Knockout's Arthur Ellis, with "ordinary couple" Sir Michael Hordern and Dandy Nichols providing Greek chorus throughout. Not only has this remarkable drama/doc/whatever of over an hour and a half in length never been repeated since but Temple claims not to have a copy of his own.
1986: As was always bound to happen with the already ageing reels, a Children's BBC cartoon goes awry leaving broom cupboard supply presenter Debbie Flint briefly flummoxed.
1986: one of the BBC's first major theme nights, Omnibus special Video Jukebox charted the history of the pop video over four and a half hours. The videos would doubtless be copyright hit there and back, but at least we have most of the links from John Peel and John Walters.
1986: South Of Watford, the LWT arts series that employed comedians as its presenters, sends Hugh Laurie to meet Ivor Cutler.
1996: a live televised catastrophe unravels in real time as Ray Cokes, of MTV Most Wanted fame, takes his follow-up show X-Ray Vision to a live outside broadcast at the Reeperbahn in Hamburg, in front of a crowd erroneously expecting to see the big name German rock band Die Toten Hosen. Having had two days notice to prepare the whole OB, and it's been hinted with political manoeuvring around him at the station, Cokes and crew were abused and had bottles thrown at them, whereupon having worked out goading them back wasn't going to work he lost composure and decided to end the broadcast early. The programme, and Cokes' long tenure at the station, suddenly ended a week later.
May 10th
1967: Man Alive uses Sandie Shaw, Twiggy, Johnny Speight and graphic designer Alan Aldridge as examples of the working class getting ideas and celebrity above their station.
1976: following a previous expedition to theirs, Otto Frank visits Blue Peter with his daughter Anne's actual diary.
1983: in the run-up to the general election Channel 4's A Partly Satirical Broadcast, aimed as an explainer for young voters, had sideways profiled all the main parties in turn. Now it was time to file through 'The Others', a term applied equally to anarchists and the SNP, via Young Communists, Screaming Lord Sutch, the National Front, the SWP, the pre-Green Ecology Party who get less time than anyone and the never knowingly self-undervalued Jonathan King, all introduced by Stanley Unwin.
1992: Video Fantasies was a Channel 4 strand in which new directors were encouraged to use modish CGI and similar visual effects. Rachel's Dream was set in a world taken over by technology and pollution in which the titular character brings to life the image on an anti-pollution poster who helps her fend off the attentions of a millionaire toxic waste magnate who is in cahoots with her marketing executive sister. It's as sledgehammer in its messaging as it sounds, but what brings it specifically to our attention is that the lead is the first TV role (bar an appearance as a baby with her mother) by Kate Beckinsale and the hero is Christopher Eccleston, post Let Him Have It but pre Cracker. Also, it's directed by Viv Albertine from the Slits.
May 11th
1979: the as always well prepared Mavis Nicholson quizzes Helen Mirren on Good Afternoon on why "modern plays are destructive to the human spirit", whether she's a "vagabond", the effect of her graphic sex education and a surprising request for the props department.
1983: What's Happening was a Children's ITV topical quiz show about the news of the previous week fronted by Tommy Boyd in which, excitingly, the two teams were divided and recognised by their local ILR station, so this isn't just Reading versus Peterborough but Radio 210 against Hereward. One regular round had Leonard Parkin reading a fake news bulletin with deliberate mistakes for the kids to spot. We're not sure adults today would get as high marks as the kids here.
1985: stare in wonder, or similar, at The Keith Harris Show, in which Orville barely appears, Keith dresses as a "punk" and wears a massive dog head, some baby... puppet... things appear, but it's Strawberry Switchblade performing their third single that finally causes VT to give in.
1989: Open Air interrogates Crimewatch with the always available John Stalker. Halfway through it goes missing and nobody seems to have noticed when it returns. Later on Roland Rat phones in and there's a tantalising clip of a previous visit by Julian Clary.
1992: Tom Baker was this series’ Professor Plum on Cluedo and treated his role with the respect it deserved.
2002: all ITV Digital's other services had closed at the start of the month but ITV Sport Channel remained open for long enough to finish its football season commitments and then after the season highlights, apparently including a kid being mugged for his skateboard, ended with the most apposite closing montage backing song ever.
May 12th
1968: ITV one-off variety sketch show Howerd's Hour, penned by Eric Sykes, featured not only Hattie Jacques but the comedy sketch stylings of Frankie with Sandie Shaw and Scott Walker.
1977: if you'll excuse the host, for us one of the most remarkable performances in Top Of The Pops history came from the Martyn Ford Orchestra and their number 38 smash Let Your Body Go Downtown. At 1:35 is the greatest point in televisual history.
1988: a novelty-off in the Top Of The Pops studio, with Harry Enfield having TV fame - and more literally his soon famous themselves colleagues and the track's producer future Madonna collaborator William Orbit - behind him, while Star Turn On 45 (Pints) get by on ingenuity and dubiousness alone.
1993: when Vic Reeves' Big Night Out ended he and Bob had no more use for Fred Aylward, something that caused chives between them for quite some time. For his part Les continued under his own steam independently for a short while, taking his Bontempi onto Channel 4's late night Viva Cabaret.
1996: Surprise Surprise gives a girl an opportunity to become a radio DJ alongside Steve Penk, then of Piccadilly 103. More to the point, it's built around giving a hopeful new pop band called the Spice Girls an opportunity to make their TV debut.
2001: Ant and Dec don’t look fondly back on their first Saturday night ITV spectacular Slap Bang, claiming "it ended up being the show we've spent the rest of our presenting lives trying to forget". It can basically be summed up as SMTV Live but for adults, hence the weekly sketch centrepiece that starts here was Beers, a loose comedic riff on an American sitcom like Chums was, see.
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