The Why Don't YouTube? Catchup - November 4th-10th 2024
From the house of @whydontyoutube
November 4th
60 YEARS AGO TODAY: as highfalutin as it aimed Jean-Paul Sartre, Philip Saville and Harold Pinter still seems a very overachieving cast of people to put together for a Wednesday Play, even if it was the second ever. In Camera was adapted by Saville from Sartre's Huis Clos, is obviously heavy on philosophical musings and meaningful glances and features an apparently legendary tracking shot (from 50:50) and male lead Pinter delivering Sartre's most famous line "Hell is other people", as many an actor and director tasked with interpreting his written work has declared since.
50 YEARS AGO TODAY: John Noakes sets fire to a longship and then has a ride on a crane camera in the name of Blue Peter. The gallery visit, the last refuge of the live children's magazine show that suddenly finds itself an item short. It's also Petra's twelfth birthday with all the, um, model making and free jazz that implies.
40 YEARS AGO TODAY: Clive James On Television starts with nudity, because even with the urbane antipodean wit rather than Tarrant-level shock doctrine the series essentially gave in for large parts to base level. This week's main subjects are the rest of the world learning English, dogs, egg abuse and, obviously, the newly introduced Japanese game show Endurance.
30 YEARS AGO TODAY: in Byker Grove's first but not last confrontation of the perils of electricity, Jemma Dobson is electrocuted; Perpetual Motion, a BBC2 series about vehicles that defied progress, looks back at the glamour of and forward at what even before the crash was uncertainty over Concorde; Harry Enfield And Chums - much the same as Harry Enfield's Television Programme except without Smashie & Nicey - begins with new character Kevin, who will be no trouble at all on his thirteenth birthday, and an appearance by Benny Elton.
ALSO... given its fame in context of the programme you'd have thought Beadle's About would have done the van being tipped into a quay stunt well before today in 1989, in a week that also includes a telephone tower on a driveway, a collapsing antique shop and Dainty Golighty - do you see what they've done there? - shops for a wedding dress. The hit squad includes 80s Davros Terry Molloy and ultra-regular character bit-parter (including several Whos) Cyril Shaps.
November 5th
40 YEARS AGO TODAY: Ralph McTell, a man who never seems comfortable addressing camera or indeed anyone, sets up in the General Store and Post Office in Tickle-on-the-Tum, his first client being Tim Healy as handyman Barney Bodger; a civil servant, teacher, doctor and student - yep, definitely a Krypton Factor lineup, and in fact so common that this is the final, where Viv Richards passes over the trophy to the year's 'Superperson'; on his regular trips to Birmingham urban street corners Russell Harty, in front of Chas & Dave and a bonfire that appears to be on the verge of spreading out of control, couldn't help but notice lots of what he calls "jumping up and down and banging around", so he's organised his own child breakdancing and bodypopping competition to be judged by number one B-girl Bonnie Langford.
30 YEARS AGO TODAY: the Generation Game contestants take on Polish dancing, napkin folding, making pancakes with Gary Rhodes, film miming and a French farce that might be The Pink Panther play for the final, judged by, of course, Ronnie Corbett; the first quarter-final of Gladiators brings one of its most infamous moments - genuinely, absolute caution advised before choosing to watch this one - as Panther goes literal A over T off Tilt, putting her merely out of the rest of the series when it could have been a lot worse. The show barely even seems bothered.
20 YEARS AGO TODAY: The Simpsons premieres on Channel 4, at 9pm, and invades the idents as it goes. To coincide there's a new documentary, The World According To The Simpsons (part two; three; four), and The Simpsons Quiz Show, Jamie Theakston escaping A Question Of Pop to ask thematic queries of the none more mid-00s line-up of Nick Frost, Krishnan Guru-Murthy, Iain Lee, Sara Cox, Ralf Little and Richard Bacon.
ALSO... Terry Wogan welcomes his guests Mel & Sue onto Light Lunch today in 1997. Mark Wogan is there as well, because he may as well, and Gina G too.
November 6th
50 YEARS AGO TODAY: the London to Brighton vintage car rally used to be manna for magazine shows. Thames' Drive In sends Shaw Taylor to address almost everyone by their initials.
40 YEARS AGO TODAY: after nine (!) series Rentaghost comes to an end with the invariable 'new inventions' episode, incorporating the invariable 'body swap' moment. Also enjoy Mrs Perkins not realising she's on screen for a second time during the credits; in a film shoot that has bred no end of salacious anecdotage of varying degrees of fact, Whistle Test's Mark Ellen finds Roy Harper and Jimmy Page halfway up Scafell Pike.
30 YEARS AGO TODAY: Equinox approaches rave culture from the technological angle including the neuroscience of Ecstasy. The voiceover presence of Tom Baker should make it manna for samples; it was an appearance by Joanna Lumley on a Ruby Wax show that gave Jennifer Saunders the inspiration for casting Ab Fab; by her third visit she was taking over The Full Wax itself, meaning Ruby has to interview Jamie Lee Curtis in make-up.
ALSO... Live & Kicking today in 1993 reveals how the UK top 40 is put together from shop to Bruno.
November 7th
40 YEARS AGO TODAY: "watch me on the video" the memorable theme to Fast Forward commanded, and so we did. Floella Benjamin, Nick Wilton, Joanna Munro and Andrew Secombe first enter very studio-bound restaurants, doctor's surgeries, Roman ruins and so forth in the name of children's sketch.
30 YEARS AGO TODAY: Phil Mitchell is still in hospital after Grant beat him up over Sharon, so enter a kind of caring Peggy (sort of, the character appeared in ten episodes in 1991 played by Jo Warne); Dickens' Martin Chuzzlewit (part two; three) is next for the prestige adaptation, by David Lodge with Paul Scofield, Pete Postlethwaite, Tom Wilkinson, Keith Allen, Philip Franks, John Mills, Maggie Steed, Julia Sawalha, Lynda Bellingham, Emma Chambers and in this episode an uncredited Charlie Condou.
20 YEARS AGO TODAY: Jon Ronson's The Men Who Stare At Goats, later made into a film, was actually the accompaniment to his three part Channel 4 documentary Crazy Rulers Of The World. Although the first part was actually entitled that.
ALSO... have we heard the fabulous theme to The Risk Business before? Somewhere there's a very confused US cop show production team. The product it's featuring is exciting too as today in 1979 Michael Rodd follows Quantel, the company behind the fully demonstrated visual effects, over the course of a year up to an international industry showcase.
November 8th
60 YEARS AGO TODAY: not very entertaining, but how often do you see BBC1 in-vision continuity from 1964?
50 YEARS AGO TODAY: a glimpse of ATV Today, a teetering on the edge of confusion Derek Hobson and its square clock.
40 YEARS AGO TODAY: Doris Stokes' name is known to a generation or two only as a Jasper Carrott punchline but she invented the celebrity medium well before UK Living was even possible, making her the subject of a 40 Minutes.
20 YEARS AGO TODAY: as if providing a proof of concept for their current cut-and-run documentary style, Channel 5 kicked the House Party's grave in The Curse Of Noel Edmonds, raking over the coals of a man who hadn't been on TV for four years but was, it was pitched, the true downfall of popular TV and was surely never coming back to the limelight, less than a year before he did. This is the one with Mike Reid made up as Noel for no good reason.
ALSO... we've seen some strange set-pieces in the name of ITV Schools' Good Health before - they were the home of Blockaboots and that song about hand washing - so when today in 1982 a module entitled Love Your Lungs has within a minute dressed children as Spiderman and a phone using Batman we know we're in clover. There's an Incredible Hulk and a Wonder Woman too, in aid of convincing children not to smoke, just like the ten foot long cigarette prop kids emerge from later to recite in collective rhyme.
Su Pollard, game show host? Isn't she overbearing enough? Take The Plunge, as seen today in 1989, was a word description contest in which the other team could interfere within certain limits. If it sounds too complicated for a prime-time series presented by Peggy Ollerenshaw… that's because it pretty much is, and didn't make it to a second series.
November 9th
50 YEARS AGO TODAY: Parkinson devotes an hour to Peter Sellers, who didn't give many lengthy interviews to anyone and famously, though not included here, walked out in a German WWII uniform. This was not only repeated after Sellers' death but later released on vinyl.
40 YEARS AGO TODAY: Rik Mayall performs live on The Tube, just as long as he's got a clear head. Also in Newcastle that week, Grandmaster Melle Mel and the Furious Five do White Lines; the second proper Micro Live opens with the news that all their floppy discs and backups had been stolen. Not sure even now that a technology show has been so fleabitten. Still, onwards they go with finally acknowledgement that home computers other than the BBC Micro exists, attempts to damage different floppy discs, puts Freff on the phones ahead of BT's privatisation and reveals Brian Jacks' preferences; over on LWT Kenny Everett helps you retune to Capital Radio, the Saturday night Entertainers include Floella Benjamin, Tommy Boyd and Bonnie Langford on Punchlines, Commodore have an elephant in the room and David Frost lends gravitas to Frankie Goes To Hollywood.
30 YEARS AGO TODAY: Lily Savage's first venture into actual TV presenting was Lifeswaps, of which if you've been paying any attention the concept, other than being for BBC2 rather than Channel 4 or 5, has already written itself as two people from differing parts of the social strata swap lives for a week, all watched over by Lily of loving grace; an Irish mechanic (Richard Hawley, the future Corrie one) falls in love with a middle class Englishwoman (Harriet Walter), who unhelpfully is also married to Peter Davison, to a soundtrack of Pogues songs (and a Shane McGowan cameo) in A Man You Don't Meet Everyday, written by Ronan Bennett who would in the far future create a very different social story with a specific musical soundtrack, Top Boy.
ALSO... the early series of The Krypton Factor are fascinating for how close they are to the version we all know but also how differently they saw what being a Superperson entailed exactly. Today in 1977 from the first series, as well as introducing the contestants in the style of the Six Million Dollar Man, the Personality round invites the contestants to write and deliver "short humorous speech". The round didn't make the second series. Of more consequence the Observation round is based on a clip from Star Wars, something the majority of people reading this can of course visualise every nanosecond of but not actually released for another seven weeks in the UK. Can they recognise the bar man in the Mos Eisley cantina from ten candidates? Yes, we know you can. But is that regular Granada extra two years away from fame Bill Tarmey as number three?
November 10th
40 YEARS AGO TODAY: a relaxed Wham! on Saturday Superstore, including Pop Panel business alongside Art Garfunkel, Joanna Monro and a man in an American football outfit. Andrew gives away a guitar in the competition, so obviously Mike takes and plays it.
30 YEARS AGO TODAY: a lot of the Whose Line Is It Anyway? cast got their own Channel 4 vehicle, sure, but we don't think could have foreseen Richard Vranch At The Piano's being Beat That Einstein, a single series scientific shindig pitching experts and ignoramuses together into complex problem solving with basic ingredients, in this episode's case transporting a letter between floors and building a treehouse that stays at a consistent temperature at all hours; does it surprise you to learn as much as it surprised us that The Vicar Of Dibley isn't on iPlayer? Anyway, you know how this first episode goes - the reveal of the dog collar under the yellow mac, the at a glance introduction to everyone's characters, the sweeping field shots. Producer Jon Plowman had to defend the series in advance from assumptions it would be an attack on C of E morality; Jimmy Nail fulfilled his wannabe country and western singer ambitions at a time when he had the power to get a series he created himself like Crocodile Shoes commissioned. There is a credit for 'Rave Band', which is where we meet the A&R man who takes an interest in the demo tape presumably demonstrating what Nail is not and currying Alex Kingston's favour in the meantime.
ALSO... only half of an episode of Remote Control from today in 1992 but any is far better than none of the UK version of the wildly postmodern MTV quiz, Anthony H Wilson Anthony H-ing it up as host with Frank Sidebottom, Phil Cornwell and on cheap keyboard current Master of the King’s Music Errollyn Wallen, whose Wikipedia page does not mention it. Boo.
Sally Gunnell, Steve Backley, Michael Atherton, Derek Redmond and Greg Rusedski are among the sportspeople who discuss persistence, adversity and the psychology of it all with Equinox today in 1996.
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