The Why Don't YouTube? Archive - October 21st-27th 2024

From the house of @whydontyoutube

Firstly, thanks to @scarymole for pointing out that when we wrote in last week’s newsletter that the first Blind Date couple were still together last we heard, they did in fact renew their vows over the weekend.

October 21st

1973: Brian Clough had taken up a weekly punditry and sounding off role on The Big Match from the start of the season but it became another in a long line of issues with his chairman at Derby County. Sam Longson had the previous week demanded Clough leave that role; instead Clough resigned on 15th October. Two days later he helped the Polish goalkeeper into folklore; two days after that he appeared on Parkinson; the next afternoon he turned up for his usual Sunday job to be presented with some special cards and an even more special video message from an American, er, admirer.

1980: but actually it's 1999 and Britain's newest network opens in Here Comes Channel 8, a very odd one-off ITV variety spectacular featuring among others Spike Milligan, Nicholas Parsons, Russ Abbot, Frank Carson, Reginald Bosanquet, Michael Bentine, Alan Freeman, Rula Lenska, Dustin Gee, Charlie Williams, Sandy Powell, Rusty Goffe, the Dooleys and Hot Gossip. Some of it - a diverse Mancunian community, the Sex Pistols as beloved entertainers - came true. Some of it - Bosanquet, Bentine and Gee being alive in 1999 - didn't. Ironically, by the implied year director David Liddiment was actual head of ITV. If the whole of this ever emerges...

October 22nd

1990: BBC Midlands Today are at an early Doctor Who convention. Pertwee, McCoy and John Nathan-Turner are on hand but you already know already how it will end.

1983: journalist Michael Medved had become a cause celebre in Britain after co-authoring The Golden Turkey Awards, a pre-Razzies tome on the worst films of all time. Channel 4 were won over enough to give him his own late night series, The Worst Of Hollywood, introducing the cream (crud?) of the crop to an audience at the Scala cinema. The selection began big with the film the book, and popular opinion, had named as the all-time lowlight, Plan 9 From Outer Space.

October 23rd

1982: there was a time when The Bubble Man Tom Noddy was unknown. That state ended when one man, several cigarettes, one straw and a whole load of special mixture appeared on the Paul Daniels Magic Show and created a legend.

1983: after setting its stall out in the previous autumn's series Clive James On Television returns to loquaciously slice and dice foreign telly, though sadly we can only find two from the series. James now has the more familiar set of big LWT desk next to a CRT set to talk us through American product placement, sexual frankness - so, yes, a string of women with no tops on, obviously - an advert for Anusol that assumes it could never be in a British commercial (which it has been since 2018) and, yes, a Japanese game show.

1992: Victor & Hugo: Bunglers In Crime is the forgotten third part of the Cosgrove Hall David Jason trilogy, starring him and Brian Trueman as clumsy French petty thieves derived from a Count Duckula episode. Their legacy and lineage is made more apparent in an episode where the pair are hired by Baron Greenback to steal the Mark III, one by replacing Penfold's temporary replacement. So yes, technically this is the final original style Danger Mouse episode.

October 24th

1973: Twinkle Twinkle Little Star, an infamous episode of Man Alive anchored by the reassuring voice of John Pitman, dealt with the music industry's attempt to find a British pre-teen star to rival the Osmond/Jackson invasion. Although Ricky Wilde, later younger sister Kim's co-writer and producer, is among those featured the centrepiece is eleven year old Darren Burn, an ex-choirboy signed by EMI where his dad just happened to be a promoter, and as such got an enormous publicity push. His only single peaked at number 60 and he fell into depression and drug addiction before committing suicide aged 30. When did NME editors stop looking like Willie Rushton?

1980: with the news having broken that he was leaving Who earlier in the day, and possibly having partaken of a pre-show cocktail as a result, Tom Baker popped by Nationwide to lay out his exit plans.

1981: INTERNATIONAL SMITHY'S KAFF DAY! Once seen, perhaps literally, on Anglia and never forgotten.

1996: An Audience With Sooty? Is this canon? Actually yes, as all the celebrities have brought their children. Matthew necessarily leading the banter and working the crowd somehow leads to the line "Geraldine James, you're experienced in kissing", which is diplomatic given she was in Band Of Gold at the time. But let's admit, there's something very weird about hearing Soo namecheck Helen Lederer and admitting to fancying Sean Blowers.

October 26th

1989: Nigel Lawson resigned as Chancellor of the Exchequer. By coincidence a team from Open Air were filming in the newsroom on what was looking like a slow news day until the story broke nine minutes before the Six O'Clock News. Followers of the Corporation's latterday behind the scenes goings on may recognise a few names working the floor here.

October 27th

1972: Magpie is undergoing a regeneration as Tony Bastable is moving upstairs to become producer and being replaced by someone who "looks a little bit like Marc Bolan", Thames researcher Mick Robertson. His first task is to launch some special new trainers by having a kickabout with their sponsor, Leeds and England's Terry Cooper, who concludes by falling over. Magpie was of course the hip populist working class answer to Blue Peter, which is why Susan Stranks delivers a five minute monologue as a Civil War Royalist and Robertson demonstrates his skill at horse-drawn ploughing. Then they must have run short on features as we're treated to a guide to TV cameras, which Susan reveals the traditional limitations of by jogging round it.

1991: if the Smash Hits Poll Winners Party had a version of the many Brits incidents that get obligingly listed every year then it's Carter USM's appearance, where on having After The Watershed - a brave song lyrically to be doing for a screaming child-heavy audience for starters - cut short as the show was overrunning a well refreshed Fruitbat does some light auto-destruction to the equipment they were miming on and then fulfils the wishes of a great many in future years by taking out the mocking host Philip Schofield, who later said he reacted in the way he did as he’d seen a mike stand thrown into the crowd. It also means nobody mentions Ken from New Kids On The Block starting a live Sunday afternoon TV performance to an audience of children with a very deliberate “awww shit!”

2002: with the national branding "coming atcha" - thanks, Trish - the following morning, regional continuity came to an end and LWT go spectacularly out of their way to make a special day of it.

Like what we do? Why not support us? https://ko-fi.com/whydontyoutube