The Why Don't YouTube? Catchup - June 10th-16th 2024
From the house of @whydontyoutube
June 10th
40 YEARS AGO TODAY: ITV delay live coverage of Brazil vs England until Surprise Surprise had finished, finding on arrival that thanks to John Barnes' famous goal the unexpected had hit them between the eyes.
30 YEARS AGO TODAY: Have I Got News For You had been trailing a return for the tub of lard as an end of series treat, then without warning pulled out Salman Rushdie, still under constant armed guard and making his first public appearance in some time. He even makes a joke about a religious fatwa.
ALSO... the day before the 1987 general election a new popular leader makes its candidacy known via the broom cupboard; high level hauntology potential as Children's ITV's Docurama investigates puppetry today in 1991, with both Roger Law and Brian Henson.
June 11th
40 YEARS AGO TODAY: Annette Crosbie stars as a tea leaves reader in a possibly haunted arcade in Que Sera, a disturbing arm of Children's ITV anthology Dramarama co-written by alternative comedy pioneer Tony Allen.
30 YEARS AGO TODAY: GMTV's Saturday Disney, hosted by Carmen Ejogo - who has a proper acting career now, she was in True Detective and Alien Covenant - followed by Gimme 5. Dannii Minogue is booked for both, which is unnecessary; twelve years after his way with bubble solution, hoops and fags first became a sensation Bubble Man Tom Noddy brings the greatest hits to his third visit to what would be the penultimate Paul Daniels Magic Show (35 minutes in); the 442nd and final regular That's Life!, weirdly going out at 8pm on Saturday and with June Whitfield guesting in misprints corner, features toe wrestling, Gavin Campbell singing the strawberry additives and errant policing; tied in with the upcoming tournament, Fair Game is set with a backdrop of the 1970 World Cup for all the easy visual signifiers that entails as a love triangle with Lena Headey at its centre journeys across the Pennines. (NSFW)
ALSO... seventeen minutes of BBC1 Saturday morning sketch and "stuff" show On The Waterfront from today in 1988, in which Bernadette Nolan demonstrate noodle making, Kate Copstick impersonates Janet Street-Porter after a fashion, Terry Randall dresses as Postman Pat and Andrew O'Connor does a tight five.
June 12th
40 YEARS AGO TODAY: The Great Egg Race's contestants engineer a network of burglar alarms - and test them, evidently - a theme that sends Heinz Wolff into spy mode; actor and theatre director Maria Aitken talks to the unlikely but talkative duo of Kenneth Williams and Germaine Greer about their backgrounds and experiences on Private Lives, replete with bespoke Peter Skellern theme; The Young Ones house is sick in, er, Sick, leading to a riot that draws in Madness and a visit by Neil's parents and their The Good Life ideal.
30 YEARS AGO TODAY: acclaimed 1950s civil servant in the country and in love comic novel Love On A Branch Line is adapted into an amiable four parter for prime Sunday BBC1 with Michael Maloney, Leslie Phillips, Abigail Cruttenden and, her again, Maria Aitken.
20 YEARS AGO TODAY: The Sky At Night monitors the rare transit of Venus across the face of the Sun four days earlier from Patrick Moore's garden for which he's had a lot of people round including Brian May.
June 13th
60 YEARS AGO TODAY: Kathy Burke is born. In 1989, then still best known as Tina Bishop and as a French & Saunders sidewoman, she told BBC Schools' Scene about typecasting, looks and acceptance.
50 YEARS AGO TODAY: you'd never guess from the start of ITV's coverage that Scotland were the UK's only representatives at the 1974 World Cup, would you? Brian Moore introduces some vox popping; Nationwide meets both of the pupils at a Highlands school. It's less endearing once it's dropped in that is on the grounds of the estate where their father is the gamekeeper, but John Swinfield doesn't state where the teacher comes from.
40 YEARS AGO TODAY: after the TV-am Famous Five debacle Angela Rippon went to work for WNEV-TV in Boston for a year, which is where Entertainment USA caught up with her.
30 YEARS AGO TODAY: BBC Scotland's Hogmanay tradition football sketch show Only An Excuse? went national, and at 8.30pm at that, for a World Cup special partly recorded on location. You wonder what the English audience made of most of it.
20 YEARS AGO TODAY: Fantasy Football League returned after six years with a live series reacting to Euro 2004. The second programme followed England's defeat to France and has immediate responses to clips from the match alongside Ronnie O'Sullivan, Joanna Taylor and a nightmare-inducing cold open; as part of BBC4's Sixties series Round The Horne... Revisited revisits Round The Horne, adapting a selection of its scripts and attempting in the process to turn it into a TV format.
June 14th
40 YEARS AGO TODAY: Mavis Nicholson leads a Channel 4 debate into video nasties in Suitable For Viewing In The Home? Mary Whitehouse and Simon Hughes are among the people shouting over each other in an orderly fashion; Thames ask a group of children on a council estate off the end of the King's Road about their lives in Kids From The Flats, finding the results so outrageous - women playing football! Bodypopping! A girls' swimwear pageant! - they air it at 11.30pm.
30 YEARS AGO TODAY: yet another World Cup tie-in, as Arthur Smith and Chris England's West End hit An Evening With Gary Lineker is adapted by Granada with Clive Owen, Paul Merton, Caroline Quentin, Martin Clunes and a fantasy cameo from the titular star.
June 15th
40 YEARS AGO TODAY: Madness and Ben Elton collaborate twice in a week, as three days after their second The Young Ones appearance Elton chats to and watches them make a video on South Of Watford (part two; part three)
ALSO... Sky One helped bring the camcorder cock-up genre to Britain with The Secret Video Show, so it's interesting that a decade later they'd help tramp it back down with Kirsty's Home Videos, as seen today in 2002.
June 16th
70 YEARS AGO TODAY: France vs Yugoslavia is the first ever football World Cup match to be broadcast live.
50 YEARS AGO TODAY: the last in the current series of John Pilger's documentary series for ATV, One British Family - deliberately echoing the ongoing The Family? - tackles race stereotypes with a Trinidadian immigrant family in Newcastle.
40 YEARS AGO TODAY: "We're all going mad!" Morrissey, Johnny Marr and by extension Sandie Shaw board TV-am's S.P.L.A.T.'s outward bound feature Charlie's Bus; Stevie Wonder tells Ear-Say about his earliest musical experiences, being an eleven year old hitmaker and learning to play'; Jane Asher, Patrick Mower and Jim Norton star in Tales Of The Unexpected: The Last Of The Midnight Gardeners, involving fixing a murder mystery competition, a wife and mistress meeting at a dinner party and the most convincing beach set Anglia could manage; Charlotte Rampling is having no more than she has to of Michael's coyness questioning on Aspel & Company.
30 YEARS AGO TODAY: Kieran Prendiville's predecessor as writer to Ballykissangel was really quite different, Roughnecks set among the internal politics of a North Sea oil rig with Bruce Jones, Ricky Tomlinson, Ashley Jensen and a Mike Post theme tune.
ALSO... Barry Norman wraps up Film 92 for the summer in LA, topics ranging from Batman Forever via the post-riots race landscape to asking why everything is a sequel or remake. Oh, if only he'd lived to know these days.
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