The Why Don't YouTube? Catchup - August 5th-11th 2024

From the house of @whydontyoutube

We have no idea why but without pushing it we’ve had a lot of new followers to our Bluesky account this week, which leads us to remind you that we’ve got a Bluesky account.

August 5th

50 YEARS AGO TODAY: if you know anything about the transition from Inigo Pipkin to Pipkins it's that the death of George Woodbridge during filming of the second series was not only mirrored in the series but was uniquely dealt with at the start of the third series - indeed, the very first sentence, after which the focus almost too quickly shifts to his assistant Johnny permanently moving in, breaking his record player and, finding themselves broke, having to set up as a shop once finding out about the world of actual work.

30 YEARS AGO TODAY: for the summer What The Papers say became What The Magazines Say, for which Tony Parsons evaluated the teen mag market. Some of the usual reader cast doing their best youth voices is a treat; Michael Moore's TV Nation correspondent Louis Theroux, in his first appearance in the BBC versions (but not the NBC running order), travels to Bill Clinton's home town.

ALSO... Hold Tight! with its Alton Towers setting must have been a dream for the B-52's' sense of kitsch, especially as they're promoting Wig today in 1987.

August 6th

40 YEARS AGO TODAY: Zoë Nathenson (Mona Lisa), Deborah Findlay (Cranford, The Split, Olivier Award winner) and Gwyneth Strong (Cassandra in Only Fools) appear in hospital set Dramarama standalone Rachel And Rosie; Miles Kington turned his Punch column Let's Parlez Franglais into a niche sketch show for Channel 4. Well, we say niche, but if you can write a Eurovision sketch that interests Angela Rippon, Cliff Richard and Petula Clark enough...

20 YEARS AGO TODAY: Big Brother's Little Brother approaches the fifth series finale, and after a turbulent few weeks for all Nadia essentially walks it.

August 7th

40 YEARS AGO TODAY: News At Ten spend the first eight minutes with Steve Ovett being out of the Olympics - he wasn't - and covers how badly Great Britain are doing before mentioning Tessa Sanderson's gold.

30 YEARS AGO TODAY: Alex Cox introduces Rope for Moviedrome and explains why it's the series' first Hitchcock and the power of a long take.

August 8th

30 YEARS AGO TODAY: Room 101 puts out its pilot, as you can tell from the comparative cheapness of the props. Tony Slattery nominates Our Tune, Odor Eaters, chain hotels, The Lady In Red, Snoopy, spacehoppers, his own role in Gems and William Hague, post-teenage conference speech and pre-cabinet membership.

ALSO... Andi Peters' Newsround, the sliding doors moment of your nightmares. His takeover is part of summer morning menagerie But First This today in 1989.

August 9th

40 YEARS AGO TODAY: Mooncat & Co gets a lesson in telling the truth from Pam Ayres, after a fashion; one of the great Top Of The Pops performances, Two Tribes in week eight of its nine at number one, with flags, white suits and Holly Johnson on walkabout. The Sun that Holly is reading at the start carries the front page headline 'STREET STAR VERA FACES SACK', and indeed just 24 years later...

30 YEARS AGO TODAY: Billy Connolly's World Tour of Scotland finds him on an extraordinarily windswept and sodden north-eastern cliff top.

August 10th

50 YEARS AGO TODAY: Wheeltapper’s And Shunters Social Club features the only recorded interaction between Roy Orbison and Colin Crompton.

40 YEARS AGO TODAY: Emu's All Live Pink Windmill Show is cancelled because Grotbags "bizazzed" the Windmill (or Central technicians had gone on strike, one or the other), as Rod explains to viewers; Jesse Birdsall's first notable role is as an Isle of Wight deckchair attendant who meets a Swedish student, Annika. Christina Rigner had never acted professionally before, never did (at least on screen) again and barely does in this; Yorkshire closes down for the night with a Saturday preview - another dead end career choice for Kenneth Williams there - and a warm goodnight from lord in perpetuity of all he voiced, Redvers Kyle.

30 YEARS AGO TODAY: the Royal Navy were getting uppity about fishing nets on the ITN lunchtime news; Minister Of New Super Heavy Funk, Soul Brother Number One James Brown duets with Michael Ball, who... gives it a go.

20 YEARS AGO TODAY: the mid-00s were the piss-easiest time in media history to become famous. Because British people love a toff and also swearing, Cutting Edge: The F***king Fulfords (part two; three; four; five, please refer to previous “you can upload these in one video now so please do so” appeals) made the profligate yet living in run-down circumstances family the aristocrats du jour for a good decade.

August 11th

40 YEARS AGO TODAY: The Saturday Picture Show was taking part in BBC1's regular repeats of the same increasingly worn prints of a few Monkees episodes when Davy Jones joined Mark Curry. At the end, a clip of Jones on the same year's last series of Puzzle Trail; David Frost meets KITT as Ultra Quiz's final seven heads to Universal Studios for a shootout and lots of multiple choice quizzes.

30 YEARS AGO TODAY: after spending the first eleven years on the farm and then returning for another eight, Joe Sugden quietly leaves Emmerdale.

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