The Why Don't YouTube? Catchup - August 26th-September 1st 2024

From the house of @whydontyoutube

August 26th

40 YEARS AGO TODAY: night shift workers on a steel production line in Dundee bemoan to A Moment To Talk that their prospects are ending; once Robert Maxwell has invited you to trust his financial acumen, Coral Atkins nearly drowns and Charlotte Coleman unicycles in a tantalising first half of generational action game show TV Times Star Family Challenge; Clive James And The Great American Beauty Pageant prods at one of those gatherings of children and young women dressed as older glamorous women.

30 YEARS AGO TODAY: Alf and Audrey Roberts bring a successful entrant in a black pudding contest back to the Rovers Return, because that's what you do apparently, and so the tao of Fred Elliott is born.

ALSO... Seaside Special today in 1978 starts with Geoff Richer's First Edition literally dancing on the Sealink. Jersey is their destination for Battle Of The Flowers, the hook being their screening in colour for the first time, and, in wonderful news Terry Wogan is on land and immediately meets a monkey. Delights include the Wurzels, the Krankies with Jimmy singing, Jackie Trent with Tony Hatch and the bikini'd final of Miss Jersey Variety Sunshine.

August 27th

50 YEARS AGO TODAY: broadcast only in the Midlands at the time - though he is from there, we suppose - David Attenborough talks through his career to date on Personal Account.

30 YEARS AGO TODAY: a cracker of a BBC2 theme evening - ATV Night! All linked from the briefly reopened Crossroads Motel with a self-aware Jill, Adam and Shughie McFee to boot, and being the time starting with an A-Z. None of this would have been possible without Lord Lew Grade himself, interviewed by his nephew - encircled in cigar smoke, obviously - in The Persuader. Then Craig Ferguson pitches The Last Action Series, and while, say, Tiswas content appears to have been thin on the ground there's a tribute to The Golden Shot before the story of the Motel is wrapped up neatly.

ALSO... The Millennium Dustbin docked for the final time today in 1988, the last Get Fresh (unless you count the next day's Get Fresh Sunday) landing in a very wet Margam Country Park and losing the technology at least once, accompanied amongst others by the Proclaimers, Jellybean, Jermaine Stewart meeting Gilbert, Morris Minor and the Majors, bog snorkellers, David Grant as the face of Sport Aid with an apparently live link to Sri Lanka, and Adrian Hedley in a maze thinking he's Timothy Claypole. Gilbert gets the final word. It is "George Cohen".

Cue George was TV-am's early Sunday pre-school melange fronted by researcher turned presenter since turned radio freelancer Georgey Spanswick. Lots of storytelling, some with a religious bent, today in 1989, plus forgotten cartoon Wimpole Village.

August 28th

40 YEARS AGO TODAY: Level 42 begin their contribution to Play At Home by covering the Hawaii Five-O theme in a cabaret setting, because why not. They return to the Isle of Wight for the occasion and discuss the state of music tuition, which is nice but it's not, let's be frank here, Tony Wilson's penis; the final original Play For Today, The Amazing Miss Stella Estelle stars future EastEnder Elaine Lordan as a fourteen year old ingenue singer forced onto the cabaret circuit by ambitious parents.

30 YEARS AGO TODAY: Equinox - yes, you're doing the voice, we know - heralds the coming of toll roads to Britain.

20 YEARS AGO TODAY: Tony Robinson, TV's Mr History (pending), begins his self-explanatory overview of The Worst Jobs In History, out of which he dragged twelve programmes in all, the lot of which are like thus.

ALSO... after today in 1982 No. 73 would no longer be just TVS' little secret, and they've invited everyone round for a lot of singing. No big names in this one but a feature about chalk pavement art gives us our last chance to luxuriate in Neil Buchanan's huge early head of hair. "I do a bit of drawing" he slips in, and Tim Edmunds mentally files away an idea.

August 29th

40 YEARS AGO TODAY: Peter Macann's go on summer special series Tomorrow's World At Large, in which he travels to Houston to investigate the health risks of weightlessness, or what's referred to in Radio Times as "the sinister side of space travel", which sounds like he was pitching to take Sigourney Weaver's role.

30 YEARS AGO TODAY: in what's neither a normal Bank Holiday Monday or a theme night, BBC2 slaps two new documentaries and one old one together and calls it Blackpool Night Out. The first of the new works has locally born and bred David Thewlis revisit his childhood haunts in A Brief Anatomy Of Blackpool. The second has an unexpectedly long tail - remarkable tragicomic observational hairdressing clientele documentary Three Salons At The Seaside has been cited by Craig Cash as a major influence on The Royle Family, while Cate Blanchett and Seth Meyers co-conceived and Blanchett starred in an affectionate homage for the spoof series Documentary Now! Director Philippa Lowthorpe, whose second TV credit this was, went on to oversee Three Girls, Five Daughters, The Other Boleyn Girl and episodes of Call The Midwife, The Crown and the Willow series, and is still the only woman to win the directing BAFTA.

ALSO... SM:TV Live had a famously ragged start, produced by Ric Blaxill as a kind of holding pattern of cartoons and crumbs of charm in place of content to last up to CD:UK, and it wasn’t until he left a few months in that Ant, Dec and Cat, all of whom thought there was a good chance of it being cancelled by Christmas, and the rest of the team got to show what they could actually do with the format. The first programme, today in 1998, has the feel of people unsure what the actual point is (Ant: "about halfway through [rehearsal] I had a moment of clarity. I thought "There's nothing in this show"), with Cat not even appearing until the end of the opening link, while the first CD:UK throws in another sidekick in chart expert Dr Pop, actually Popmaster/Pick Of The Pops overlord Phil ’The Collector’ Swern (who died yesterday), who was dropped by week three.

August 30th

40 YEARS AGO TODAY: Morrissey makes a personal entreaty on Top Of The Pops. Mike Smith responds in kind.

August 31st

40 YEARS AGO TODAY: Channel 4 saw the BMX craze, attempted to one-up it, got distracted and ended up with Pontins-set thrill contest Trak Trix, featuring not just the bikes but go-karts, rollerskates, scrambling motorbikes, er, an race across an adventure playground version of the Krypton Factor assault course, and of course the white knuckle thrills of boules. Vince Clarke was responsible for the plinky theme, Jonathan Ross was a credited researcher; the first episode of widowed father/daughter sitcom Me And My Girl, and we bet that a good proportion of you remember that Richard O'Sullivan's advertising agency was called Eyecatchers.

30 YEARS AGO TODAY: a BBC newsflash as the IRA announce a ceasefire, seen as the first big step towards the Good Friday Agreement four years later. Jeremy Vine takes his position outside 10 Downing Street.

20 YEARS AGO TODAY: GMTV launches a new set. Installing a huge window behind them just as the summer ends is brave; just as an American spinoff sitcom can get an easy cheer out of a star from the original, so Paul Whitehouse visits Swiss Toni's as an inventor with the broadest of northern accents. Things however go downhill when a crazed Mark Heap appears.

ALSO... you wouldn't think we could still be finding bits of telly flotsam from around Princess Diana's death - today in 1997, in case you're eight years old - but it's quite the development to have confirmed that CNN chose to simulcast GMTV's coverage. A few hours later Straight Up, LWT's modernist current affairs magazine show, suddenly finds it has a very serious breaking story to deal with and does so by sending Nick Knowles, with his very Nineties floppy hair, to Buckingham Palace. This is only the first five of its fifty minutes so we can't confirm Kate Thornton's claim that they played out with Candle In The Wind and that might have given Elton the idea.

September 1st

40 YEARS AGO TODAY: not every day that members of Queen show up on Saturday morning TV, but such is the pull of Tommy Boyd and the new Saturday morning show Saturday Starship. Actually, it's not the Brian May connection that swung it, is it?; the first Saturday of September means the autumn season has begun and the big LE can return to Saturday nights, or in some cases arrive there. Yes, in bingo lingo it's clickety-clicks, the first time to take your pick of the six as Bob's Full House begins with a full selection of Monkhouse intro gags; 3-2-1 returns with a Victorian music hall theme, which obviously means Chris Emmett as the My Mum's Leonard Sachs, Sheila Steafal as Miss Popsy Wopsy left on a radiator overnight and your own, your very own Ken Dodd.

30 YEARS AGO TODAY: The Big Breakfast is visited apparently surprisingly by Barbara Windsor. This is Gaby's cue to mention that for the previous few days the show had been campaigning to get her into the Queen Vic, which apparently had come out of a Question Of The Day seeking suggestions for how EastEnders could be made better. What makes that suspicious in hindsight is that her casting as Peggy Mitchell was announced the very next day, but nobody is letting on even when Grant is mentioned. We're told Windsor revealed years later that the show had got wind of the signing and tried to earn some publicity for itself, which her and the BBC press office rolled with as it was beneficial to all, but as she couldn't make anything public yet she had to sit there uncomfortably.

20 YEARS AGO TODAY: Patrick Harbinson went on to write episodes of ER, 24 and Homeland but his creation for ITV Steel River Blues was doomed to fail after one series once it became known that the Middlesbrough-based firefighting team at its centre would be known as Blue Watch, just like the one in London's Burning.

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