May 20th
30 YEARS AGO TODAY: the second edition of Bygones, the nostalgia panel show fronted by Danny Baker that didn't even make it to the end of its run, welcomes Melvyn Hayes, Captain Sensible, Lynsey De Paul and Philip Pope with team captains Rick Wakeman and Craig Ferguson.
ALSO... product placement wasn't even considered in 1977, so how did Tyne Tees get away with calling an ITV-centric game show Those Wonderful TV Times? Barry Cryer asks amiable questions of Fenella Fielding, Robin Nedwell and Tessa Wyatt; putting badinage front and centre, Saturday early evening quiz That's Showbusiness begins today in 1989 with team captains Gloria Hunniford and Kenny Everett and guests Su Pollard, Richard O'Sullivan, Tim Brooke-Taylor and Nerys Hughes (and not only is it co-devised by Popmaster general Philip Swern but, as writer Justin Lewis pointed out, check who’s in the production team); Bob Says... Opportunity Knocks today in 1989 to a Spanish guitar player, a violin and piano duo, a whole choir, an accordionist singing The Laughing Policeman, three middle-aged white man rapping in comedic verse and eventual series winner Brenda Cochrane.
May 21st
40 YEARS AGO TODAY: along with more Liverpool player cameos the second episode of Scully introduces his mother Jean Boht and brother, an almost unrecognisable Elvis Costello; following a lesser seen Young Ones trailer comes Call My Bluff, Frank Muir as fruity as you'd hope for.
30 YEARS AGO TODAY: coincidentally a couple of weeks after his starring on Have I Got News For You re-established his credentials, a storming An Audience With Bob Monkhouse; Erasure with a choir and then a guitarist, of all things, on Later With Jools Holland.
20 YEARS AGO TODAY: the Beastie Boys make their only Top Of The Pops studio appearance; Mark Thompson becomes BBC director-general. Newsnight applauds his shirking away from shows about "Victorian orchid collectors" ahead of the first reports of Iraq torture.
May 22nd
40 YEARS AGO TODAY: Bobby Ewing has been shot! No, not that storyline, that one was the following year's cliffhanger. In case you missed it BBC1 has an action replay by means of trailing Breakfast Time; Sam the Signwriter and Duncan the Dragon help children learn about the concepts of up and down on You & Me; John Pilger is the unlikely documentarian behind Burp!, the story of the Coca-Cola and Pepsi battle. Being his work it's not as straightforward as sales/pop cultural analysis, the only film on the subject to interview the presidents of both companies.
20 YEARS AGO TODAY: five days before the final episode Channel 4 go all in with How Friends Changed The World, by which we mean it makes a case for it literally changing all of pop and youth culture.
May 23rd
40 YEARS AGO TODAY: Take Two viewers feed back on whether Doctor Who scares them too much. Yes, sofas get mentioned in the introduction.
20 YEARS AGO TODAY: ten years (and two months) after his first TV series Cardiac Arrest began Jed Mercurio was back with another darkly cynical medical drama, not to mention a graphic one, Bodies.
May 24th
40 YEARS AGO TODAY: Play School alumni Carol Chell and Don Spencer front Hokey Cokey, escaping the See-Saw umbrella with its collage of singing and puppeteering for very young children; an English teacher on a field trip falls in love with his writing hero's daughter in Sharma And Beyond. Tom Wilkinson supports, Hugh Quarshie plays "man on stairs".
May 25th
40 YEARS AGO TODAY: Geoffrey might have overslept, worries Bungle, though as the title of this (Hayes-written) Rainbow is The Weekend you can guess that punchline; Morrissey, George Michael and Tony Blackburn argue over Everything But The Girl, Joy Division, the film Breakdance (or Breakin') and Atlantic Records reissues on pop culture review show Eight Days A Week; gay men and women talk in detail about their lives and expectations in Channel 4 series Sex Matters.
30 YEARS AGO TODAY: Sharpe's Company, the third in the Napoleonic Sean Bean series. As usual you'll need to scrape Pete Postlethwaite off the walls.
May 26th
40 YEARS AGO TODAY: Pop Quiz - "POP QUIZ!" - pits Phil Lynott, Nick Beggs and Simple Minds' Derek Forbes against Alvin Stardust, Kim Wilde and Morrissey ("it was unbearable. I realised it was a terrible mistake the moment the cameras began to roll"); a very relaxed looking Wham! join Gary Crowley on Ear-Say for George's second televised chat about music in two days. His reaction to Gary's question about calypso is, well, unfortunate.
30 YEARS AGO TODAY: an hour with Children's BBC, chiefly involving Dizzy Heights spinoff The House Of Gristle, Newsround, Blue Peter at the Chelsea flower show and a broom cupboard visit by Neighbours' Sarah Vandenbergh; Jack Rosenthal spun off his 1984 removal men film The Chain into Carlton comedy-drama Moving Story, starring Warren Clarke, Phil Davis and Con O'Neill with an unreleased Kirsty Maccoll closing theme; Danny Baker's latest TV Heroes inductee is Whispering Bob Harris, "voice like a vibrator in six feet of sand".
20 YEARS AGO TODAY: it was the early 00s, we knew no better than to build series around mates of Jamie Oliver's. Hence, Jimmy's Farm, following a keen but clueless start-up of a working rare breed farm near Ipswich; despite Liza Tarbuck presenting Win, Lose Or Draw Late (part two) was an affront to the glory of the original, let's get that straight from the start. Sara Cawood, Gail Porter and Sue Perkins face off with Terry Christian, Mark Owen and Ed Hall.
ALSO... it's Patsy Palmer's birthday. Of course you'll best know her from her mute role in a Crimestoppers advert.
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