The Why Don't YouTube? Catchup - March 4th-10th 2024

From the house of @whydontyoutube

March 4th

40 YEARS AGO TODAY: Spitting Image lampshades its own reception by starting with 'Mary Whitehouse' as overseer. The final song is about "a prince who can't say no" Andrew's love life, which now reads very, very differently to how it was intended.

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Titanic of course made an international superstar of Kate Winslet, so she could afford to make just one promotional TV appearance around it today in 1998. It is, naturally, on Ready Steady Cook, with Ainsley Harriot and opposite Casualty's Gray O'Brien. (part two)

March 5th

30 YEARS AGO TODAY: Derek Jarman's posthumous final work was Glitterbug, an impressionistic compilation of Super-8 footage he shot of his cultural life and work soundtracked by Brian Eno for Arena.

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Another look behind the scenes of a news programme, another late breaking huge story. This one, News Power looking around the world's bulletins today in 1985, is part of Granada's history of the medium Television.

The final News At Ten (for two years - it's a long and quite stupid story) went out today in 1999. Top story is Bill Clinton "breaking his silence" over Monica Lewinsky, saying nothing of note.

March 6th

60 YEARS AGO TODAY: the first episode out of 168 of Vision On, an attempt to provide fast-paced entertainment as that was apparently what deaf kids gravitated towards. Pat Keysell and Tony Hart are there from the start, as is a first request for The Gallery, complete with Left Bank Two.

40 YEARS AGO TODAY: ice cream man, upon Chris Tarrant's street. ITV Schools' Stop Look Listen shows how it's made; the last in the first series of Alas Smith And Jones brings Mike Leigh and war documentary spoofs and cameos by Tony Robinson, Brenda Blethyn, Pete McCarthy, uncredited Arthur Smith and, we're led to believe, uncredited Joanna Lumley; Play For Today Moving On The Edge by novelist Dame Rose Tremain stars Eleanor Bron in an existential case of nervous breakdown.

30 YEARS AGO TODAY: Sunday Night Clive, wherein James' usual deliberately overwrought introductions are for David Attenborough, Billy Connolly and Paul Merton, and by extension Dionne Warwick's work on the Psychic Friends Network.

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BBC2's review show of the air Did You See? asks Marti Caine, Robbie Coltrane and journalist Michael O'Donnell to discuss Neighbours, a Horizon about cancer drug tests and ITV criminal gang drama The Fear today in 1988, while Mark Tully explores the world of Indian soap operas.

March 7th

40 YEARS AGO TODAY: sitcomland really loved its middle-class suburban micro-crises bases, and none more so than Fresh Fields, which lasted four series of bored housewife weekly new interests, starting, it being the 80s, with haute cuisine; again, it's the 80s, so Arthur Daley has opened a health club, with Janet Fielding (not the only Who connection, Patrick Troughton's here too) and Catherine Rabett as instructors until business partner Stephen Rea disappears, which lands Terry in trouble with Tony Anholt; all expense spared on Central's late regional headlines where Tony Francis in front of a curtain leads on the dawning of the miner's strike, after which the midweek film is interrupted by a caption for itself.

20 YEARS AGO TODAY: 2DTV, one of the many New Spitting Images that came and went - a list that now of course includes Spitting Image itself - opens its fourth series with several jokes about things you won't remember and someone other than John Culshaw doing Tom Baker; The South Bank Show profiles visual artists Jane and Louise Wilson, which wouldn't normally concern us except Melvyn must have felt out of his depth as it's presented by Justine Frischmann (part two; three)

March 8th

40 YEARS AGO TODAY: part one of The Caves Of Androzani, once voted the greatest story of all by Doctor Who Magazine readers (in 2009; it was fourth five years later)

30 YEARS AGO TODAY: Phil Mitchell torches the car lot at Frank's instigation for the insurance, both unaware that a local vagrant had camped down in it for the night.

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Wide Awake Club, with Tommy Boyd and the lesser spotted James Baker and Arabella Warner, celebrates Mothering Sunday in advance today in 1986. "No innuendos here, this is children's TV!" says juggling expert Tim Batt, so clearly there was no other side at all to spelling game Bonk 'N' Boob.

Television didn't really know how to approach Julian Clary in 1989, which may explain how n this day he and Fanny the Wonderdog took their place on The Pyramid Game.

March 9th

40 YEARS AGO TODAY: sci-fi orange jumpsuited part drama/part quiz casebook of 2000 AD-esque intergalactic crimes Captain Zep - Space Detective (created by former Morecambe & Wise writer Dick Hills!) returns, now written by Colin 'Mr' Bennett, whose death a fortnight earlier was announced on Friday; The Tube goes to Berlin, Muriel Gray largely wandering around with musician, Paul van Dyk mentor and former Mick Hucknall bandmate Mark Reeder apart from bumping into Elvis Costello. They took Mark Miwurdz with them too.

30 YEARS AGO TODAY: Screen Two adapts the novel Skallagrigg, in which a child with cerebral palsy believes in the protective titular empathetic being. A variety of disabled actors, including Ian Dury and Nabil Shaban, fit in alongside Bernard Hill, Richard Briers, Billie Whitelaw, John McArdle and Kevin Whately.

March 10th

40 YEARS AGO TODAY: Martin Shaw shows off his new haircut and some viewers' drawings on Saturday Superstore. He later joins in with the Pop Panel, also featuring Todd Carty, Delia Smith, Nik Kershaw, Brian Hooper and Tony Blackburn; Wogan meets French & Saunders to discuss what alternative comedy is and their forthcoming sitcom. What's with the reference to, and audience reaction to, the Wood & Walters mention?

30 YEARS AGO TODAY: the 107th and final episode of Minder - we do not discuss Richie in this house - in which Arthur gets what's been coming to him in a very roundabout fashion amid precarious Italian accents. Matthew Scurfield plays a crazed gunman, just as he did in the final Sweeney.

20 YEARS AGO TODAY: the later series of Through The Keyhole on daytime BBC1 are so obscure Catherine Gee, who replaced Loyd Grossman, isn't even mentioned on the show's Wikipedia page. Even so you'll know the first inhabitant and maybe learn a few things about them; If..., a speculative drama-documentary series projecting potential future social catastrophes, ponders what happens If... The Lights Go Out (part two) by means of a terrorist attack on a gas pipeline in 2010. (NB. this did not happen)

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An Arena special on video art today in 1976 opens with This Is A Television Receiver, a work by David Hall featuring a repeatedly filmed Richard Baker.

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