July 1st
50 YEARS AGO TODAY: a Whodunnit panel of Harry H Corbett, Sheila Hancock, Leslie Crowther and Richard O'Sullivan adjudge as a pre-Corrie Madge Hindle is poisoned on a train and pre-Yes Minister Jonathan Lynn is among Reginald Marsh's suspects.
30 YEARS AGO TODAY: after a trailer for Jonathan Ross' first BBC series, Danny Baker's nostalgia quiz show Bygones welcomes Colleen Nolan, Fred Dinenage, Denis Law, Casualty's Dona Croll and Rick Wakeman at the stylophone rig; after Thames lost their franchise ITV didn't want a third series of Men Behaving Badly, so Simon Nye and Beryl Vertue got the BBC involved instead, they took it post-watershed and the rest is history. The present is Gary inventing a romantic past; with the 25th anniversary of the first moon landing impending After One Small Step meets Buzz Aldrin and four other of the twelve people to have walked on its surface.
July 2nd
40 YEARS AGO TODAY: Points Of View deals with a bosun complaining about old films, too much kissing, sailing and anger that Manimal never turned into an English bull terrier, whilst Barry Took undermines a complaint against Carla Lane.
30 YEARS AGO TODAY: the high point of the Chris Tarrant-helmed Pop Quiz revival comes when the not yet national treasure Jarvis Cocker, expertly out of place and content to take a faux-mundane back seat for the first 25 minutes, storms the final quickfire round.
July 3rd
20 YEARS AGO TODAY: the first Strictly Come Dancing champions are crowned, over nine million viewers making it the BBC's biggest new entertainment hit for a decade; the last Fantasy Football League Euro 2004 special, and also Baddiel and Skinner's last one of all, with England squad member Ledley King.
July 4th
50 YEARS AGO TODAY: Alan Clarke's polemical streak on Play For Today dials back on the socio-political in A Follower For Emily, an ensemble piece about love inside an old people's home.
40 YEARS AGO TODAY: Angry miners and Ronnie Knight, the man who helped pioneer the concept of the retired criminal on the Costa del Sol, on the BBC Nine O'Clock News after an Olympics trail using exactly the song you'd think they would use.
30 YEARS AGO TODAY: the 1500th episode of Countdown deserves a special Whiteley introduction, two former contestants returning and Denis Norden in Dictionary Corner; Nick Hancock opens the doors of Room 101 for the first time on TV, into which an on-form Bob Monkhouse hopes to enter Cilla, Elvis, France, ventriloquists, Kumbaya, The Big Breakfast and, controversially, The Golden Shot.
20 YEARS AGO TODAY: as Greece celebrates its shock Euro 2004 victory Des Lynam retires (two years younger than Lineker is now, note) after 34 years in broadcasting, the last five misbegotten at ITV. Typically he alludes to it in passing.
ALSO... you wouldn't imagine Terry Wogan and Mis-Teeq would cross paths, but they did on The Terry & Gaby Show today in 2003. Did they cross paths comfortably? What do you think?
July 5th
70 YEARS AGO TODAY: the first daily news bulletin begins. 40 YEARS AGO TODAY: Richard Baker fronts BBC TV News: The First 30 Years (part two; part three)
50 YEARS AGO TODAY: The Sky's The Limit, a travel-themed Double Your Money variant hosted by Hughie Green, comes to an end after four years with a special from - but of course! - Jamaica, where the quiz element takes a back seat.
40 YEARS AGO TODAY: Stephen Boxer moves out of the shared home and opens a second hand shop with his Get Up And Go alien colleague in Mooncat & Co, once he's had to explain the basics of commerce in the presence of a story-touting Pat Coombs; Tony Bastable pays off his cheap gas bill on Database; Gabriel Byrne rents a remote cottage in Ireland to write his Isaac Newton biography and becomes involved in a love quadrangle with Fionnula Flanagan, Harriet Walter and Donal McCann in Channel 4 film Reflections.
30 YEARS AGO TODAY: seventy seconds, which is probably long enough, of He's Pasquale, I'm Walsh, a one-off ITV special in a style long since adjudged dying out that made Joe and Bradley a punchline for a while.
20 YEARS AGO TODAY: Rob Brydon took his Marion & Geoff character Keith Barret off to his own series about happy couples, logically The Keith Barret Show. His first guests are Richard and Judy, and Madeley is everything he goes viral for now.
20 YEARS AGO TODAY: after 47 unbroken years Patrick Moore misses The Sky At Night for the first (and only) time after being struck down with food poisoning from a duck egg, which seems a very Patrick Moore reason. Chris Lintott stands in to discuss an orbit of Saturn.
July 6th
20 YEARS AGO TODAY: ensemble sitcom The Smoking Room, featuring Robert Webb, Paula Wilcox and some people you might recognise from stuff, set in the titular rest area during the last days you could do that, contemplates mortality.
ALSO... Nick Knowles and Kate Thornton are among the team in LWT youth-oriented issues magazine Straight Up, with all the dutch angles, split shots and pretend casualness that implies. Today in 1997 they tackle drugs in sport, student drinking, Loaded, Bidisha and Thornton's "24 hours living as a crusty".
July 7th
40 YEARS AGO TODAY: No. 73 performs its own theme live, with Neil on rhythm guitar, Kim and Harry on backing vocals and for some reason Tom Robinson on overactive keyboards; week two of Ultra Quiz, where David Frost takes the remaining 28 contestants to Normandy and sees off eight of them by means of sand burial, smell tests, juggling and Willie Rushton leading an aerobics session; filmed before the miner's strike, Last Pit In The Rhondda talks to the men down the mineshafts in Mardy Colliery. Unexpected amount of nudity in the opening.
30 YEARS AGO TODAY: Love Is All Around is only six weeks into its fifteen at number one and Reg Presley, invited to introduce it on Top Of The Pops, is already intoxicated by it all; two weeks after losing his court case with Sony George Michael, in what was already a rare interview, gives his case to Sir David Frost.
20 YEARS AGO TODAY: Headjam is a very BBC Three kind of pop culture quiz, hosted by Vernon Kay with the contestants teamed with a very BBC Three-level celebrity, though in this case that means Joe Cornish and Claudia Winkelman; hugely successful as a producer he may have been but Ted Childs' creation Making Waves, charting in verite the personal and professional lives of the crew of a Royal Navy frigate with Alex Ferns, Lee Boardman and Joanna Page, was dropped after three episodes never to resurface; for a short while Supernanny was a controversy and a sensation, Jo Frost bringing the naughty step into the public conversation with her child-control methods. Yes, we've resorted to a tiny Internet Archive upload of the follow-up show.
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