The Why Don't YouTube? Catchup - May 6th-12th 2024
From the house of @whydontyoutube
May 6th
60 YEARS AGO TODAY: the Fab Four get their own TV special, Around The Beatles, which starts in the only logical way possible - a recitation of Pyramus & Thisbe from A Midsummer Night's Dream.
40 YEARS AGO TODAY: Grampian previews among other things the first Surprise Surprise! before ITN reports on a passport crackdown.
30 YEARS AGO TODAY: Bob Monkhouse's comedy career revival really kicks off on Have I Got News For You, with Francis Wheen on the other team; a week after the Liverpool Kop farewell Fantasy Football League do likewise to their kitchen area before bringing in Karren Brady and Bob Mortimer.
ALSO... Nationwide meets king whistler - face facts, Whittaker - and bird mimic Ronnie Ronalde today in 1975.
May 7th
60 YEARS AGO TODAY: Granada converts an abandoned train station into the deep South terminus of the Blues And Gospel Train, a landmark event playing host to Muddy Waters, Sister Rosetta Tharpe taking advantage of the rain, Cousin Joe and Sonny Terry & Brownie McGhee.
50 YEARS AGO TODAY: Terry Scott and June Whitfield are... nope, the Fletchers of Happy Ever After, a Comedy Playhouse pilot even though it must have been commissioned as the series began in July.
40 YEARS AGO TODAY: Beryl Bainbridge's series retracing the steps of J.B. Priestley's English Journey alights in the north-east, from a shopping centre to the shipyards, in the midst of which she does what Priestley couldn't and appears on Look North.
30 YEARS AGO TODAY: The Brian Conley Show makes it to a third series, the only bit people remember being Nick Frisbee and Larry the Loafer, with a new friend very much taken after a character on the other side; the last day of the Premier League season so Des Lynam got to do the BBC Sport equivalent of bringing games in to Match Of The Day, namely Baddiel and Skinner as actual pundits, sort of.
May 8th
50 YEARS AGO TODAY: the 26th and final (of the original version) part of The World At War acts as remembrance.
40 YEARS AGO TODAY: Thames covers the Queen opening the, er, Thames Barrier, with overlapping gallery talkback; The Young Ones' second series begins with Bambi, in its head-losing, oik-smashing, Motorhead-featuring, Alexei Sayle anecdote-spawning glory.
May 9th
40 YEARS AGO TODAY: Michael Winslow, fresh from the first Police Academy, takes his vocal talents to the streets for 60 Minutes.
30 YEARS AGO TODAY: Children's ITV explanatory series Brill deals with film special effects and general splattiness with expert tutelage by and gamely taking part from CITV favourite Edgar Wright; That's Football! follows Swindon Town for a season, intended as a look beyond Premier League glamour, only to end with the club getting promoted there. Weirdly, it went out on Channel 4 at 11pm.
20 YEARS AGO TODAY: nu-Top Gear's fourth series features an Apache helicopter but that's not the bit it became famous for, rather the first of their epic races, to the south of France via train or Aston Martin DB9; a twelve year old is accused of murder in Alan Davies legal vehicle The Brief - played, in her first acting (or really public) credit, by thirteen year old Rita Ora, who portrays quiet evil disturbingly well.
May 10th
60 YEARS AGO TODAY: Spike Milligan, armed with a guitar, a jar, a wig and only one moment of "attitudes of the time", upstages the Billy Cotton Band Show.
20 YEARS AGO TODAY: Sadie King makes a spectacular show of her arrival in Emmerdale, and you would hire a helicopter when Patsy Kensit has agreed to take a role in your Dales soap; Steve Coogan, Simon Pegg, Julia Davis, Kevin Eldon and Amelia Bullmore provide voices for offputtingly animated black comedy I Am Not An Animal.
ALSO... Patrick Moore assumes authored documentary series One Pair Of Eyes today in 1969 to talk to, well ahead of their time, "people of independent thought" and their own theories on space, culminating with a lesson in Venusian; it was Sally James' birthday in 1975, so she was given the bumps in front a live Saturday Scene audience by a group including Mike Mansfield and a Womble; Sean Connery talks about his career and through his films in Mark Cousins' occasional series Scene By Scene today in 1997.
May 11th
30 YEARS AGO TODAY: the recently deceased dramatist Trevor Griffiths returns to telly and Screen Two with French Revolution drama Hope In The Year Two, as previewed on The Late Show.
20 YEARS AGO TODAY: Sadie King has been within Emmerdale for literally no time at all and she's already chosen an enemy, acting upon it directly with Charity; Ramsay's Kitchen Nightmares alights on Walnut Tree Inn in Abergavenny, run by an old restaurant friend who then fell out with him. It went under in 2007, reopened under new management a year later and is nowregarded as one of the best in the UK.
May 12th
50 YEARS AGO TODAY: Oscar winner, later Roger Rabbit father and general drawing great Richard Williams joins Bob Godfrey with his cels and flickbook on The Do-It-Yourself Film Animation Show. The host drops in a preview of Roobarb, which began that October.
40 YEARS AGO TODAY: Tom Robinson, Imagination - who collaborate more than once - and Brian Cant have never seen nothing no not like this place as they get down to No. 73; a touching duet between emotive equals Val Doonican and Orville The Duck; in the midst of A-Team mania George Peppard sidles across Saturday night ITV to Tales Of The Unexpected, playing an army sergeant reunited with damaged former Vietnam charge Kevin Dobson (Crocker from Kojak); Channel 4 tries to pioneer post-pub comedy in sketch show Who Dares Wins, with Jimmy Mulville, Rory McGrath, Philip Pope, Julia Hills and Tony Robinson.
30 YEARS AGO TODAY: Labour leader John Smith dies suddenly. News At Ten leads with an angle of "yeah, but who's taking over, then?" before Neil Kinnock joins Trevor; Richard O'Brien signs off from The Crystal Maze, literally.
20 YEARS AGO TODAY: the first ever Eurovision semi-final featured as its interval film ABBA's Last Video Ever (it wasn't), featuring a Cher cameo, some disturbing Henson Creature Shop puppets and a barely less disturbing Rik Mayall.
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