The Why Don't YouTube? Archive - September 23rd-29th 2024

From the house of @whydontyoutube

September 23rd

1971: Blue Peter's new border collie puppy gets its name from over 17,000 suggestions. It nearly gets called Nipper because it took a nip out of John's ear. Man and dog would luckily go on to forge a much more amenable working relationship. Elsewhere John and Peter meet the Lapps, some kids have found buried treasure, the team enjoy a good limerick - imagine if Simon Groom had had that feature - and as a remarkable close to the show Peter's pneumatic nail gun demonstration turns into a competitive sport.

1976: A peak of humanity as Top Of The Pops' short stay mixed gender troupe Ruby Flipper dance to Disco Duck. Never pause on the final image of this video.

1982: the Eighties equivalent of a culture war kicks off with Culture Club's Top Of The Pops debut, called up at short notice as Shakin' Stevens was ill, though Boy George says public reaction was much different to that in the tabloids.

1983: HTV West's Peter Marshall seems overcome by having to follow a Clive James documentary on the Pirelli calendar.

1998: BBC Choice launches to maybe hundreds of eager viewers with quick cuts of forthcoming programmes and Clive Anderson wearing some wigs.

September 24th

1978: Bernard Cribbins leads Kenneth Williams, Kenneth Connor and a corpsing Barbara Windsor against Angela Rippon, Richard Baker and Peter Woods in child-friendly performance on Star Turn Challenge. Yes, this does pre-date Give Us A Clue.

1983: Never short of a needlessly big idea - and, lest we forget, only two weeks after the car jump accident - The Late Late Breakfast Show devoted practically the entire programme to an attempt to break the London to Paris air speed record. Plenty of famous/available people are dragged into affairs - Niki Lauda, Leo Sayer, Heaven 17's Glenn Gregory, a quickly knackered Suzanne Dando, of course Norris McWhirter - but the duality of the show's remit can be best exhibited in that the two on-site reporters are Cliff Michelmore and Sandra Dickinson, who can be heard telling Sayer "I think they might have gone away" right at the end. The only deviations are Give It A Whirl, a failed attempt at an America's Cup update and a performance from Rose Laurens with the as worrying as it sounds Africa (Voodoo Master), a huge European hit that did the square root of bugger all here.

1987: Mick Jagger, given the run of the whole studio and all the stage school kids in the world, brings his Tebbitrock anthem Let's Work to Top Of The Pops, despite it only being at number 41 at the time.

1992: TVS’ daytime Anne Diamond-fronted preview magazine TV Weekly looks ahead to the Big Breakfast four days before it opens for business with an exclusive tour of Lock Keeper's Cottages, followed by Greg Dyke, then chief executive of LWT, explaining what breakfast TV should be. Amanda Ross interviews her brother Paul straight as Crime Monthly goes national, Samantha Beckinsale and Sean Blowers of London's Burning are in the studio. Afterwards Richard Madeley trails a 25 years of Radio 1 special of This Morning the next day. Who's taped over that in the last three decades, then?

September 25th

1975: Kraftwerk made their sole British TV appearance in person on Tomorrow's World. Shame about the musical lapels never coming off, unless as we suspect that was Ralf and/or Florian taking the piss.

1992: the ill-starred Channel 4 Daily ends, Dermot Murnaghan and team demob happy ahead of an enormous long illustrated list of everyone who ever worked on the programme. To stop you wondering, yes, the Chris Grayling and Damian Green listed are the former ministers, who were both editors of the business section - in fact Green presented lunchtime round-up Business Daily occasionally. Seems it's not that Sally Lindsay, though. Also, that's not how you spell Krizanovich. Or Vorderman. Afterwards you're guided towards its replacement on the grounds that, er, it features the Banana Splits.

1993: Harry was Michael Elphick's final lead role, nine years before his death, as a Fleet Street big name reduced to ruthlessly running a picture agency in Darlington, whose staff include a young Tom Hollander. In the second episode Harry and his men get involved with traffic police on patrol Steve Coogan and John Thomson.

1995: Barry Norman tails a Film 95 report on anti-video piracy advertising with an alarming final thought.

September 26th

1981: the first opportunity to watch them watch us watch them watch us. Having already been rejected by the BBC after a pilot, Game For A Laugh wasn't supposed to work - none of its presenters had much if any light entertainment presenting background, Jeremy Beadle had to be convinced he was the missing on air ingredient after Wogan turned it down, and it was downplayed even in ITV's new season previews, described as "people in unusual, humorous and often crazy situations". Famously Matthew Kelly began the show in plaster after a practice parachute jump accident, which isn't even featured on this debut. What is is comedy shaving, experimental powerboating, alleged mice, public CB radio, shin kicking, an unexpected amount of nudity and the very first Beadle hidden camera prank.

1983: "Somebody might die of a heroin overdose on stage!" ITV Schools' The English Programme continued its Understanding Television module by going behind the scenes of June's A Midsummer Night's Tube. So that's what Malcolm Gerrie and Andrea Wonfor look like.

September 27th

1970: as a World Cup pundit over the summer for ITV's famously combustible/half-cut panel Malcolm Allison had constantly criticised Alan Mullery's place in the England team. A month into the following season Jimmy Hill refereed as the pair had a full and frank exchange of views live on The Big Match.

1973: Monster Mash was in the charts a month before Halloween so when it caught Top Of The Pops' attention Flick Colby fought fire with fire and got the dressing up box down for Pan's People. Ruth very much draws the short straw here.

1993: having completely sat out the TVS era Houseparty, the Southern originating housewife make, do and chat that has been called "the Loose Women of its day", which is like calling Give Us A Clue the Celebrity Juice of its day, was revived after twelve years by and solely on Meridian with several of the original ladies and the doorbell in place of a theme tune.

September 28th

1981: in a feature that a lot of people seem to remember for some reason Blue Peter showcases the development of corsetry through demonstration wear by Janet Ellis, Sarah Greene, Maggie Philbin, Isla St Clair, Tina Heath and a child, Greene's niece. We get the feeling that not all of them had thought through what this would entail once on live television, and Peter Duncan's reactions don't help.

1985: World Of Sport ended its 25 year run with a (briefly NSFW) look back, from Seb Coe to Freddie Starr.

1987: Wogan celebrated twenty years of Radio 1 with Blackburn, Peel, Murray, Smitty visiting Bruno and Janice, and a phalanx of near-original DJs none too subtly promoting their then-current independent homes.

1989: The Late Show gathers a group of experts, some from the cast of Absolutely and the rest looking suspiciously like the others (apart from John Sparkes, replaced by Ian Hislop's writing partner Nick Newman), to discuss the first British TV airing of Police Squad.

1992: to Lockkeeper’s Cottages! A lot of Channel 4's upper floors didn't want The Big Breakfast because the current affairs and factual departments washed their hands of something that wasn't a Channel 4 Daily rework but Michael Grade was insistent Planet 24 be given their head so here we were, though you probably wouldn't have foreseen it given their big day one attraction was Bob Geldof meeting Paul Keating. A lot of the more famous elements are in place from the start and you can see how they're trying to make it different from the pastel shaded current affairs breakfast TV standard from Evans giving us a quick guided tour at the start and going "wahey!" at most given opportunities, though the crew getting involved zoo-style is much more muted than it would shortly become. There's much self-awareness at a Sun front page about Paula Yates not having a TV licence - not planted, but everyone still took the "all publicity" approach - and a couple of critical messages are read out just so Evans can respond to them in the conciliatory, happy-go-lucky way we've come to know him for. Yates' first bed sharer is Joanna Lumley, reticent Mark Lamarr on Down Your Doorstep is interfering with people's cars in a traffic jam in Leeds which ends with him running into moving traffic, there's a love story feature called Cupid's Arrow that we'd be surprised if it made it into week three, and a doctor viewer delivers an almost entirely straight-faced report about the hardness of toilet paper.

September 29th

1985: The Money Programme profiles the rise of 2000 AD and the status of comics in general, in case you ever wanted to hear Valerie Singleton describe Judge Dredd. Tharg was presumably on holiday.

1988: Donahue, the US talk show that invented the audience participation format so prising open the gap for Oprah, Jerry and everyone else to race through guns blazing, came over for of a week of British shows, topics including Boy George, Clause 28 with Ian McKellen, Michael Cashman and Sir Rhodes Boyson, and love with Anna Raeburn. One day however Phil Donahue went to Manchester and introduced Cheers' George Wendt, Woody Harrelson and Kelsey Grammar to Corrie's William Roache, Lynne Perrie and Sally Whittaker.

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