The Why Don't YouTube? Archive - October 28th-November 3rd 2024

From the house of @whydontyoutube (on Bluesky as well as Now Known As X)

October 28th

1983: Family Fortunes may be most famous for two incidents, the "name a famous Irishman" round that threatens never to stop or land on a right answer, and of course Bob Johnson answering "turkey" to the first three questions in the Big Money Round, later claiming to his family that he had overheard one question to which it was a viable answer and out of caution used it for all the preceding questions to save time. Remarkably, they were in the same episode - Max Bygraves’ third ever, at that - and Bob is one of those initial Gaelic knownothings on the buzzer. To compound matters when someone does actually think of a famous Irishman, the then Taoiseach Garret FitzGerald, it's not among the top eight answers. No wonder before getting there Bygraves mishears the answer of Shughie McFee. And he wasn't Irish either. And after all that ‘turkey’ was only worth 21 points despite surely being the most immediately obvious answer to the question.

October 29th

1975: it's become a post-boomer truism that Halloween is a very recent American import that wasn't acknowledged as a thing when they were growing up. Well, here's Words And Pictures' Halloween special, with a scary pumpkin and an equally scary Henry Woolf.

1983: after a spat involving upholding Top Of The Pops' great tradition of not playing records falling down the chart that at one point led to him threatening to withdraw the right to play any of his music from the BBC, Paul and Linda McCartney debut the Say Say Say video under protest on The Late Late Breakfast Show

1990: one of Sky's first homegrown hits was Tarrant-fronted home video howlers compendium The Secret Video Show, which started a month after the You've Been Framed pilot but made it to series earlier. This was the somehow competitive series climax.

1993: to tie in with Margaret Thatcher’s memoirs BBC2 ran a week of Maggiecentric programming both analytical and comedic, climaxing with Have I Got News For You: The Downing Street Years, with guests Derek Hatton and Edwina Currie sniping at each other throughout and having their jokes and anecdotes fall flat. Both Ian and Paul have said this is the worst episode they ever did.

1993: a fast paced sketch show primarily starring Caroline Aherne and John Thomson, well before their more famous fast paced sketch show, featuring appearances by among others Bill Bailey, Simon Day, Sean Lock, David Schneider, Felix Dexter, Brenda Gilhooly, Malcolm Hardee, Stephen Frost, Mark Arden and Charlie Chuck plus Judge James Pickles, Basil Brush and - apologies - Stuart Hall? You wonder how exactly you've never heard of 11pm Granada-only series The Full Monty (long before the film), and then you watch it. Eleven people are credited with the script and none of them are listed above, and it shows. What may be worthwhile are a showcase Lee Evans set, a beta version of Roy and Renée, an attempted Laugh-In Cocktail Party (they’d already reused the Joke Wall) where the execution is more Tiswas Disco and a reminder of Woody Bop Muddy's Record Graveyard.

October 30th

1976: Saturday Scene, which had just had Supersonic folded into it hence the name, was where Sally James cut her teeth before they were filled with flan, doing extended continuity by means of an umbrella title for LWT's Saturday morning offerings. For her troubles James, who really should get some sleep, gets a nice cuddle from Wellington Womble and enough space kept by half of Guys'n'Dolls, half of post-hits 5000 Volts, Dana singing and Mike Holoway of Flintlock with firework safety tips, because according to Sal the band founded the British Safety Council.

1982: you get the sense throughout that Carrott's Lib has been getting some complaints lately. The most interesting routine in this fifth show of the first series is inspired by the start of Channel 4 and its lack of original series - like the one Carrott would be making for them three years later - which leads to a routine about B-movies that serves as an introduction to an extended trailer spoof with two people who didn't appear on the series at any other time, “two friends of mine” Robbie Coltrane and co-star of a new comedy that started a week and a half later Christopher Ryan. Country and western maverick Hank Wangford is this week's featured performer, the sense that Debby Bishop and Kay Stonham should have had their own series grows (though Stonham would become a prolific writer), and if anyone has any clue what the Pamela Stephenson jokes specifically refer to do let us know.

1988: while it contains no violence this Smash Hits Poll Winners Party is an entertaining one, as something hosted by live prime and comfortably pre-”everything” Schofield with Danny Baker as "script associate" would be, especially when Phillip, well ahead of time, manages to persuade the entire Royal Albert Hall audience that he should be shot. Amid the vague "under the sea" theme Salt'n'Pepa become number one in a hot party show with unashamed grooving cutaways to the box full of the magazine's journos. Also performing are the Pasadenas, Yazz, Climie Fisher, Rick Astley, Bananarama, Jane Wiedlin and Brother Beyond, Steve Nallon and less expectedly Danny John-Jules make appearances in character and despite (yet more CW) a cameo by Gary Glitter (and passing Savile and Harris references), spiders retain Most Very Horrible Thing, which even Philip is making jokes about the category domination of.

October 31st

1973: one of the interesting things about Tommy Cooper was his huge TV reputation doesn't come from a single series, instead a series of fifteen irregular showcases (only two of which lasted beyond one series) for various franchises over the course of 32 years. The Tommy Cooper Hour is the umbrella name Thames gave to a series of one-offs starting here, splendidly opening with a series of Cooper impersonators followed by near enough twenty minutes of unadulterated one-liners and tricks before dissolving into musical spots and sketches featuring regular sideman Allan Cuthbertson and a brief early appearance by Bella Emberg.

1982: the first series of Clive James On Television ends with a warning of our multichannel future, as everyone panicked about until it actually happened and people realised it was just the same but lesser or more specialised. American public access TV is the topic of the first part, with a subplot involving a voice activated set that apparently only brings up idents, before part two is entirely covered by syndicated advice game show So You Think You Got Troubles?! At the end, and during the battle of wits with the set, a reminder of what's coming.

1987: Paul Daniels takes the Magic Show to Clandon Park House, a stately home in Kent that he claims is very well haunted, though probably not any more given most of it burned down in 2015. It's there he seeks to produce the paranormal, introduces close-up magic legend Eugene Burger in front of a celebrity audience, and closes the programme by being killed in an iron maiden, something he later defended in a letter to the Times.

1992: Screen One production Ghostwatch was a faux-live investigative show about the paranormal, starring Michae... wait, why are we explaining this? You follow us! You know what Ghostwatch was already! You've counted out every Pipes appearance, take part in every tweetalong and can reel off every inspiration it took from the Enfield Poltergeist and all the reports of complaints and connected horrible reactions. And now because of Mike Smith's intransigence it doubly won't be shown on TV ever again anyway. From 4:53 is how it was topped and tailed by continuity, and we suspect continuity wasn't expecting the ending either, the visage of Dr Walpurgis (the frontman of BBC2 theme night The Vault Of Horror, styled after those American localised B-movie linkbeings and designed by the man who created Hellraiser) not helping matters. Tens of thousands of phoned in complaints later...

November 1st

1982: pen-blwydd hapus, S4C! The channel's first chief executive Owen Edwards is the first face on the channel and proves liberally bilingual, doing just as good a job at previewing the Saesneg fourth channel as they had done themselves in their home land. The first programme, not included here, is Superted (and you thought Countdown wrongfooted people), followed by Sian Thomas, eventually Rowena Griffin and limited in expression cartoon sidekick Ianto, who was barely ever seen again. They introduce a series of real joys including Jeremy Isaacs speaking pidgin Cymru, a dubbed documentary about, but of course, Bjorn Borg, an advert for discount store Hypervalue that may prove unforgettable, a choir wrestling with goats, the lights dimming for a reading of the channel's horoscope and a sea shanty song and dance routine on a ship about its kids' output. Michael Buerk at his patronising height has been to Cardiff for BBC News to see what the Welsh had done to deserve a fourth channel ahead of the rest of Britain. The highlighting of Superted and wrestling as examples of its programming, among other lines, seems to suggest an agenda.

1985: Mark Dexter (Tony Benn in The Crown, Charles Babbage in Doctor Who) is the biggest contemporary name in an episode of lively Central Junior Television Workshop sketch show Your Mother Wouldn't Like It. The roots of Da Bungalow are in here, in a way, with its producer Steve Ryde and Harry Batt/Ian Kirkby involved, and note that it has a character who talks about bogies...

1986: Television Comes To Bradford - not a fact by itself, but an exhibition at the National Museum of Photography, Film and Television to mark telly’s fiftieth anniversary, once more proving that letting John Walters wander around and extemporise never failed.

1986: back in the present day, obviously they weren't to know yet but this Late Late Breakfast Show would be its penultimate ever. Frank Bruno, and more importantly Tony Gubba, is involved with a fortunately studio based Give It A Whirl, Jackie Collins gets Hit Squadded very badly, Robert Maxwell reveals his favourite crustacean, Mike Smith is briefly in a celebrity disco plugging a record the identity of which is never made clear amid the gladhanding of Edwin Starr and Steve Walsh (no, the other one), three men make armpit farting noises and Tina Turner... doesn't.

1988: the date of the BFI's One Day In The Life Of Television project, encouraging viewers to keep diaries of what they watched that day. An ITV documentary behind the scenes of the day's activity across the board was broadcast exactly a year later, an early credit for future film and prestige drama director Peter Kosminsky.

1989: With acid house as the moral panic du jour Kilroy decided to work out what it was for the benefit of BBC1 daytime viewers, starting with the question "what happens at these acid house parties?" Research, Robert, research. The audience includes not just legal enforcers and moral guardians but promoters including the infamous Tony Colston-Hayter, DJs including Judge Jules and at 19:10, surely undermining the moral greater good by questioning the police's stance, lawyer who had represented rave organisers in court Keir Starmer. We wonder if this is his first ever TV appearance, he doesn’t have a BBC listing for another twenty years.

1991: The Word invite a fast rising and already notorious Manic Street Preachers onto the show. They spent the day rehearsing new single Love's Sweet Exile, but once put on live TV...

2003: Dick & Dom In Da Bungalow's next door neighbour’s cat has been out and about this week, to one place in particular.

November 2nd

1968: when you dig down into the history of popular chat telly you tend to hear and read a lot about Dee Time, television chat's primary contribution to Swinging London, but not a lot of it still exists so you don't see it a lot. This episode features Susannah York, Lionel Jeffries promoting Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, the Equals and Wayne Fontana.

1982: Channel 4? Certainly. Mr Coia, if you would. The countdown to a brand new channel ends... with a weird blue and light brown set and an avuncular local newscaster. Many were underwhelmed, the Guardian unkindly calling it "abstruse", and that's why it was quickly axed and has rarely been heard of since. The channel was affected by an industrial dispute with Equity making it unable to feature actors on their books in their commercials for months after it began. The first advert break is therefore heavy on models and graphics, including a foretaste of the future with a woman in her bra. Channel 4 News' analytical approach was in place from the start, though Peter Sissons seems to be working without an autocue or desk so looks underprepared. Brookside was the most watched of the first night's offerings, though the Times declared “it was unlikely still to be on the air in a year's time"; the best remembered was The Comic Strip Presents: Five Go Mad In Dorset. Coia returned at closedown to preview the 3rd and then joining us in vision with what we suspect is a deliberate BBC2 launch reference. The new network gets its due in John Craven's Newsround and they've already managed to licence those opening words, but it’s not as big as a British Safety Council fire safety campaign that takes an unorthodox topical approach. News At Ten, one of Selina Scott's last before jumping ship to the other end of the day, has its report interrupted when the director thinks cutting to their ident is a breakdown and brings us an unprepared Martyn Lewis but recovers in time for the Financial Times' reviewer Chris Dunkley confidently stating that Brookside is indistinguishable and Countdown is disappointing. Musical Youth returning to school is their And Finally story, Lewis having to read Pass The Dutchie as if it's something he cannot contemplate, which is probably correct.

2001: Victoria Wood’s Sketch Show Story brings back Acorn Antiques.

November 3rd

1981: Russell Harty becomes the first of many to underestimate Rik Mayall's capacity for misrule in inviting "phenomenon of the 625 line variety" Kevin Turvey onto his show. Elvis Costello is similarly bewildered.

1996: Auntie's All Time Greats, marking television’s sixtieth anniversary, brings back Acorn Antiques. You know, just like yesterday.

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