The Why Don't YouTube? Archive - September 16th-22nd 2024
From the house of @whydontyoutube
September 16th
1970: when rock'n'roll as social bellwether was young, cultural change was taken slowly and with great fear. So it was that when Led Zeppelin were named best band in the newly published Melody Maker poll ahead of the Beatles Bob Wellings hauled Robert Plant and John Bonham into the Nationwide studio to explain themselves. Maker editor Ray Coleman also contributes on his way to the All-England Eric Morecambe Lookalike Competition.
1978: Noel Edmonds' first prime-time vehicle, while still on Swap Shop, was Lucky Numbers, a two series long phone-in concept with various internal games, music, Adrian Hedley doing mime and guests like, in its second week, Mary Tamm.
September 17th
1972: when an Arsenal vs Liverpool game being filmed for The Big Match was halted by an injury to a linesman Jimmy Hill, never backwards in coming forwards, volunteered to run the line. He explained his working the next day.
1986: Granada's Jim Pope pays poignant personal tribute to Pat Phoenix’s passing at closedown.
September 18th
1977: Denis went dumpster diving and cutting room floor collecting for the first time with It'll Be Alright On The Night, likely the world's first television out-takes programme. Here in its edited down repeat form (note towards the end there's a still on the monitor behind Norden that hasn't appeared on the programme), there's already plenty of classics as repeated down the years not least on its own many, many compilations, from Yogs to sky walkers via Sellers, Mel Brooks and Strabane's fast talker George Cunningham. Funny how the tracking falters around that Little Nell clip, huh.
1978: Tommy Cooper's last solo series Cooper, Just Like That! cut the sketches and concentrated on stage work. It also had a variety guests element, which is how Bob Blackman got a showcase for his tray wizardry.
1981: inventing the satirical female-fronted sketch show actual decades before all the shows latterly claimed to have done likewise, Revolting Women ran for one BBC2 series with four women up front and a predominately female writing team, both contemporaneously used as sticks to beat it with because this was 1981. It did include this sketch, which wouldn't pass without comment even now (and not only because Tracey Ullman's Show included a very similar sketch in 2017)
1993: giving Danny Baker a chat show only seemed a bad idea at the time because it wasn't entirely clear whether he would leave time for the guests to talk, having become celebrated for his motormouth, knowledge of pop culture and his BBC Radio 5 show's wildly askew version of what a breakfast show should be. Danny Baker After All was, as expected, divisive but never dull with initial guests Peter Cook, who had also been on GMTV in the week to promote of all things a VHS re-release of Derek & Clive Get The Horn and as louche as he fancies here, Michael Winner, and Suggs singing the Beatles, as all musical guests did, and Morrissey.
September 19th
1981: The Hee Bee Gee Bees on Tiswas! Unfortunately Deayton, Pope and Fenton Stevens don't get to do anything else on the show, maybe because with Sting, Genesis and Hank Marvin also appearing there's too much danger in lurking potential victims. Mike Read, crossing future Saturday morning streams, also turns up. We've been down on the comedy stylings of Astley and Flax before, but they clearly influenced one viewer whose postcard Sally reads at 20:31. These days if you say you're the Phantom Flan Flinger you get arrested and thrown in jail.
1981: Lord Thames won't be happy, Cuddly Ken has migrated across to LWT and joined the big boxes of Punchlines where he's commanded to introduce Lennie Bennett himself. Unsurprisingly he's come with some of his own extra material amid a weird panel that includes June Whitfield, Sharron Davies, John Conteh, Jack Douglas and Patti Boulaye, not to mention contestant helpers Sandra Dickinson and Gareth Hunt.
1982: the titular host only did three series of Clive James On Television - Chris Tarrant fronted it for twelve - but it's his tenure that people remember, both for the erudite disembowelling of overseas TV tropes and for Endurance. None of the latter in the first episode - as with Margarita Pracatan, James seems fated for his onscreen work to be remembered for something he brought on himself far down the line - but plenty of the former as he dismantles American television. Obviously the tropes - cable access channels, televangelism, Richard Simmons, The People's Court - would be clichéd beyond redemption before too long but they were fresh meat in 1982, so much so a mention of the American Alf Garnett being called Archie Bunker gets a laugh, three years before the BBC started showing All In The Family. We should specify that the Admail advert for a Carpenters compilation setting the songs to random nature footage is not part of the programme.
1983: Boy George in a particularly stovepipe-like purple hat reviews the papers and makes an exceptionally unwise in retrospect comment on Cyril Smith for Breakfast Time. By the end he and Les Dawson have found common ground.
September 20th
1980: Brucie finally fulfils his Sammy Davis Jnr double act fantasies in the cunningly titled Sammy And Bruce.
1983: The Great Egg Race locates inside the enormous Birmingham NEC in order for three teams of engineers to build craft that achieve flight. The roof is very high, you see, and you can't trust the weather. Judging is a man Heinz Woolf introduces as someone "who will be known to many of you as the world's principal proponent of autogyros", which is not a sentence we suspect has ever been said on television again.
1991: Saturday Night Clive features possibly the most Clive James lineup possible - power (Imelda Marcos, a particular obsession of the decade), kitsch (William Shatner) and comic (Mel Brooks)
1991: Motormouth was comfortably settling into its fourth series, so re-enter Sidebottom left. "He's been on Top Of The Pops and you haven't" Gaby somewhat unkindly tells him in introducing guest Chesney Hawkes. Frank's on his usual barely controlled path, debuting his new shopping trolley-aided song Motormouth Is Really Fantastic, but whatever he does isn't as surreal as Lesley Garrett being introduced while leading a workout, like they'd booked Mad Lizzie and she pulled out at the last minute. The bit after that around 39:20 is quite something given her subsequent standing. Otherwise there's Fred Dinenage, wheelchair basketball, Roslin and Steve Johnson going parasailing, celebrity Finders Keepers with Frank Bruno and long lost teenage comic Alex Langdon, and a preview of the Eurovision Dog Contest. You heard.
1991: Blind Date, the period when they weren't sure how much of modernity to engage with so put a kind of burbling low in the theme mix. The reason we're especially interested in this one appears less than a minute in as it's the show with Amanda Holden's famous appearance, correctly guessing that emphasising 'London' will get cheers. Holden has been described as "unrecognisable" by a tabloid filler report. She very much isn't.
1993: Reeves and Mortimer provide This Morning with chat and general feature interference that ends with Susan Brookes crawling under a DIY table. Richard Madeley saying "I admire Gary Glitter" may not even be the moment that's aged worst.
September 21st
1973: something really from the back of a cupboard, gallery talkback on a sepia-toned episode of Magpie, where the main topics on the supposed working class alternative to Blue Peter are pebble polishing and showjumping.
September 22nd
1972: "You *would* play a silly game if Lionel Blair is there!" Another of the bits and pieces that still exist of Larry Grayson's ATV comedy chat breakthrough Shut That Door!, in which he meets Diana Dors to discuss Hollywood, which somehow degenerates into a film quiz. Dors gets a round of applause by intimating that Grayson may in fact not be entirely heterosexual.
1983: snooker was such big business that Channel 4 gave Steve Davis - not modern dry humoured, analogue synth touting Steve Davis, the quite dour winning machine version - his own light chat'n'baize show, A Frame With Davis. In the presence of Chris Serle and with a cue action that leaves room for improvement, Bernie Winters pulls off the shot of the series.
1991: fourteen year to the week after his first crawl round the cutting room floor Denis Norden opens his first Laughter File, an all-round term for out-takes that are not cock-ups - pranks, spoofs, crew gags, assorted goings-on. Rula Lenska appears, explaining how "who the hell is Rula Lenska?" became a catchphrase/pre-meme meme in turn of the 80s America - there were ironic fan clubs and suchlike for something that never travelled at all to this country, because we would have given them a straight answer - and how she eventually got even on Steve Allen.
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