March 25th
40 YEARS AGO TODAY: Julie Walters wins a film BAFTA for Educating Rita and gets magnificently flustered.
30 YEARS AGO TODAY: Fantasy Football League features Bob Mortimer, Sue Johnston, Clive Allen in Phoenix From The Flames, Statto singing and a special welcome for The Word viewers.
20 YEARS AGO TODAY: the one and maybe only time a crass attention grabbing title has paid off, the unflinching and remarkable The Boy Whose Skin Fell Off.
MEANWHILE... Blue Peter goes behind its own scenes today in 1968, Peter playing with the lighting and John on a camera crane while Valerie just has to stand there and describe her studio surroundings.
For a LWT Saturday prime-time people show Trick Or Treat was quite controversial in its day, not for Mike Smith or for its games/pranks within the audience mechanic but for sidekick Julian Clary in his campest finery, both on full display in its final show today in 1989.
March 26th
40 YEARS AGO TODAY: yet more Radiophonic goodness as BBC Schools' General Studies drops in on Eleanor Parker creating cues for The Living Planet.
30 YEARS AGO TODAY: we haven't checked out What's Up Doc? since the lunatic half of the team left at the end of 1993 and it became a standard ITV Saturday morning show, just one with the Wolves (until the summer) and bloody Baljit, but this one has Craig Charles, Jeremy Beadle and David Seaman on; Noel's House Party had been trailing Lionel Blair's Gotcha all series for its last show, but really it's just a bit... irritating? Especially as it's affected the entertainment of everyone else in the audience; finally we find a full Don't Forget Your Toothbrush, halfway through the first series and already au fait with the big set-pieces, which being an Evans show obviously involves nudity. Paul Young is the musical guest.
20 YEARS AGO TODAY: Mark and Lard did their final Radio 1 show, as reported on for BBC North West arts magazine Powerhouse.
ALSO... it's like Krakatoa meeting Vesuvius, were they to be embodied by omnipresent 70s child stars. Yes, it's The Lena And Bonnie Show today in 1978, Zavaroni being 14, Langford 13, both full of song and dance. Isn't that the Bruce's Big Night set?
March 27th
50 YEARS AGO TODAY: Nationwide talks to Star Trek fans, who seem to want there to be more made nearly five years after its NBC cancellation. There is, of course, a special set and effects. Bob Wellings has looked more comfortable; Linda Blair came to Britain on a press junket for The Exorcist and Midweek's David Jessel reveals that she was in fact a normal girl.
40 YEARS AGO TODAY: some patented messing about by Kenny Everett on Harty, who seems very easily hurt in both physical and emotional senses; Play For Today Under The Hammer, in which calamity befalls an auctioned painting that may or may not be a genuine Van Gogh, is directed by Richard Wilson, yet is not to be confused with the ITV sitcom from a decade later of the same name starring him.
20 YEARS AGO TODAY: we've been keeping an eye on Dick & Dom and this is the week when Creamy Muck Muck finally comes into its spectacularly messy own; Don't Forget Your Toothbrush and its love of background work and big set-piece games feels like a spiritual godfather to Ant & Dec's Saturday Night Takeaway when it does things like restage Blockbusters.
March 28th
40 YEARS AGO TODAY: Q.E.D. demonstrates how things are tested, from milk bottles to aircraft via checking whether a spoonful of Bird's Custard Powder can blow up a factory.
30 YEARS AGO TODAY: The Easter Stories were a series of seven separate monologues from the viewpoints of different people involved in the seasonal events. A man who knows a thing or two about recontextualising Bible stories, Tony Robinson, imagines Peter in his cell; Pete McCarthy for Without Walls pops over to Europe to ask how they saw us, without necessitating the involvement of Derek Jameson, in the pointedly titled Cultural Rabies.
20 YEARS AGO TODAY: Peter Ustinov dies. Both BBC and ITN News get Michael Winner live on the line. The power of availability right there.
ALSO...
Frankie Howerd and Kenny Everett, two different approaches to the same core personality, meet and rub up not always well against each other on Afternoon Plus today in 1980, with Mavis Nicholson and Simon Reed attempting to keep order.
March 29th
40 YEARS AGO TODAY: Europe's first 24 hour music channel and later Yorkshire overnight service Music Box began. Here comes just over two hours from that first year, including unexpected Cocteau Twins mumbling; The Special AKA open Top Of The Pops; three and a half weeks into the miner's strike Arthur Scargill gives his side to Alistair Burnet on TV Eye.
30 YEARS AGO TODAY: The Easter Stories pitches Helen Lederer as Mary Magdalene on the kiss'n'tell book promotion chat show circuit.
March 30th
40 YEARS AGO TODAY: merry Christmas! At least it is in Emu's World, where Grotbags is attempting to fool the Pink Windmill kids into visiting her special Santa's grotto out of season; Holly Johnson joins ORS 84 to explain to Peter Powell among other things why Frankie have copped out and made a second video for Relax. Powell has brought his Radio 1 producer with him so he and Johnson can argue about the ban; David Byrne, asked to produce a Talking Heads special for Channel 4, intercut live footage with quick cut news clips, commercials and found footage under the title Once In A Lifetime, since retitled Talking Heads vs Television.
30 YEARS AGO TODAY: The Easter Stories series reaches the big one, Judas Iscariot, and gives his tale to Craig Charles; three young Dubliners (one Titanic's Jason Barry) seek a future, and then just survival, in Screen Two’s O Mary, This London, with new songs by Sinead O'Connor and the Dubliners' Ronnie Drew. Also, Frank Kelly as a priest.
March 31st
50 YEARS AGO TODAY: "a pop group, a real youthful happening if ever there was one!" Charlie Williams' faltering, shall we say, career as The Golden Shot host is over, Lena Zavaroni among the turns, and even the final prize misses its cue.
40 YEARS AGO TODAY: Matt Bianco take a phone call; you may know that when Walt Disney ate the entire TVS archive one of the shows lost was the UK version of Fraggle Rock with Fulton Mackay as the lighthouse keeper. VHS however bows to nobody; Channel 4's latest music magazine Ear Say features Sandie Shaw with the Smiths, Paul Weller, ZTT, Marilyn and a fantastic fake set of Oracle pages for the midweek top ten. Also, "what's been happening with Bob Geldof?" Oh, you just wait; Cliff Richard goes through his workout routine with Wogan and is more forthcoming, relatively, about Sue Barker than usual. He also manages to get a laughing audience on Boy George's side, which is nice of him.
30 YEARS AGO TODAY: Valerie Singleton, newly awarded the OBE, celebrated it with the then-current Blue Peter gang. Stay tuned for Trevor and Simon's L&K trailer; the fifth of The Easter Stories, in which Robert Duncan is Pontius Pilate as a smooth executive organising a reception for the world's great and good until it turns out he has a job to do.
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