The Why Don't YouTube? Archive - November 11th-17th 2024

From the house of @whydontyoutube

November 11th

1972: Morecambe and Wise join Parkinson to talk about their earliest stage days, dying at the Glasgow Empire and Eric almost literally dying.

1973: Russell Harty, Salvador Dali - you've got to have a system! LWT's arts show Aquarius sent one to meet the other in the splendidly titled Hello Dali!, directed by Bruce Gowers who went on to do the Bohemian Rhapsody video and came to specialise in huge US event television.

1978: Southern's Bill Oddie-fronted Saturday Banana, an enjoyably ragged and eccentric idea of a Saturday morning kids show with a young Susan Tully and a nascent Metal Mickey co-hosting, Streetband as the musical guests apparently after Bill saw them on Top Of The Pops, an early version of Runaround, a visit to a farmland museum and one Bill Gamon moderating an entirely straight studio discussion on blood sports featuring an alarming looking and quite angry early TV appearance by... no, won’t spoil it. Then a series of JCBs take a large banana apart. Yes, of course Oddie wrote the theme tune.

1979: the first verse of the Roy vocal Record Breakers theme! Good start. Roy shows off to Norris that he's been to Death Valley, who responds by destroying a dock leaf. No time to hang around and watch The McWhirter Sub-Zero Variety Hour, though, as Castle's been to visit Dutch windmills before returning to sing about a worm while sitting on a girl's lap. A feature on snooker has Roy emphasising that a 147 break has never been achieved on television, two months to the day before it first happened, so lucky they got current highest break maker Doug Mountjoy just in time as special guest to do the all-the-balls-potted-before-the-white trick shot that every single player was obliged to do when presented with a table.

1983: Barry Took begins Points Of View, by now using the electronic panpipe When I'm 64 of destiny, by promising "anger and abuse", which reaches an apogee when a correspondent accuses the BBC of portraying women as "always exploiting men" per Don't Wait Up, before the programme itself is accused of suppressing criticism of Sixty Minutes, the only reaction to which is of course to unleash a whole load of it. In other news, Timothy Dalton "sounds like Russell Harty". Afterwards the Nine O'Clock News leads on Land Rover factory closures but we're more interested in the start of activity of video nasties, backed by David Mellor and reported on by John Sergeant, not to mention how both John Humphrys and the tennis reporter are on the verge of outrage that John McEnroe and his asthmatic opponent dare complain about cigar smoke drifting across an arena in a tournament sponsored by Benson & Hedges.

November 12th

1976: the Sex Pistols make their national TV debut on Nationwide, Malcolm McLaren tagging along (as are most of the Bromley Contingent, Sid and Siouxise inclusive) to discuss what they thought they were doing. Thames should have taken notes.

1986: that Gorden Kaye and Vicki Michelle covered Je T'aime is one thing, but their performing it on Wogan is quite another.

2002: Dermot's Sporting Buddies, the BBC Choice series in which Dermot O'Leary does a sporting thing with a person, features Adam and Joe, who as they're not into sport are taken go-karting in Skegness via service station erotic fiction reading, amusement arcade fun and overnight camping. Buxton: "We had a good time, though I don't know how Dermot didn't just punch us on several occasions."

November 13th

1972: Thank You BBC was a pan-European celebration of the Beeb's fiftieth birthday, presented by Peter Ustinov for the EBU, which opened with a glorious CSO frenzy involving Vicky Leandros and Demis Roussos among others. If you ask us this fever dream psych-bouzouki-Those Were The Days is unforgettable. And it was released as a single!

November 14th

1983: The Bob Monkhouse Show ensures we'd all be doing it tomorrow by inviting on and essentially launching the career, after more than a decade of doing the clubs trying to find his thing, of Roy Jay.

1987: Sylvester McCoy appears on Going Live!, when he isn't being eaten by a bin. The good thing about McCoy on Saturday morning shows is he was bred within absurdity and then children's TV - he was on Tiswas occasionally, after all - so he knows how to pitch it. Additionally his Press Conference features the always pleasing experience of someone being unable to tell an anecdote about Ken Campbell without lapsing into an impression.

2003: What's This Channel 4? is probably a question we should be more readily asking more recently, but around its 21st anniversary it was the title for three schools-aimed programmes that sought to demonstrate how an active channel operates. On this occasion they're behind the scenes on 27th June, amid popping into presentation, at four live or same-day taped programmes - RI:SE, The Big Dig (which was still editing part two as part one was on air), Big Brother and Channel 4 News. As often seems to be the way educationally minded filming at the operations of a news programme is derailed by unexpected events, as this was the day Alastair Campbell showed up at the studio to confront Jon Snow on air.

November 15th

1983: Nick Owen, a vision in peach, meets a wetsuited John Prescott on Good Morning Britain to discuss his plan to to swim from Chelsea Bridge to Westminster - and he did, we've checked - as a protest against dumping nuclear waste. The plan for a spectacular arrival is stymied by the environment around Camden Lock.

1990: Paul Morley for The Late Show tries to work out who and what overnight television is for, involving visits to James Whale's studio and, in surely the only space Morley and Michaela Strachan ever shared, a Hit Man & Her event.

1992: two weeks after Ghostwatch its producer and executive producer bypass Points Of View to face a largely hostile audience on the BBC's actual series feedback show Bite Back and try to tell them they were all stupid for letting their kids watch it without actually saying so.

2002: the Children In Need performing newsreaders moment by which all other Children In Need performing newsreaders moments are judged, the Rocky Horror dress-up. Remember when Jeremy Vine had a sense of humour?

November 16th

1979: the first of two appearances by the Cambridge Footlights crew on Friday Night Saturday Morning. Hugh Laurie, Emma Thompson, Robert Bathurst and a clean shaven Rory McGrath make their TV debuts, with words from Clive Anderson, Andy Hamilton and "Sandy Tocsvig", and contemporary turned frontman Martin Bergman interviewing Peter Cook.

November 17th

1981: Roy North and Ollie Beak enthusiastically sing Gertcha on Get It Together, very much not in the original accent, the cowson.

1986: performance artist, outré fashion designer and general outlandish man about town Leigh Bowery was thrust upon an unlikely to be prepared prime-time TV nation via The Clothes Show.

1990: Match Of The Day, at this point only showing FA Cup games as ITV had the then-First Division rights, returns with a new theme arrangement. It reverted back by the start of 1991.

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