The Why Don't YouTube? Catchup - October 7th-13th 2024

From the house of @whydontyoutube

October 7th

40 YEARS AGO TODAY: Thameside TV launches. This comes from a fascinating short phase of pirate television kicked off by Birmingham's Telstar TV earlier in the year, taking over transmitters overnight broadcasting mainly pop videos and arts stuff. Thameside lasted just into January before the authorities descended, and these are its first and among the last nights plus one that didn't get to be aired before the enforced end. Ironically it was perhaps more reliable than strike-ridden Thames TV during this period; series three of Tenko, several prisoners have died offscreen and the rest are in another new camp. Also, it's July 1945.

30 YEARS AGO TODAY: Tom Vernon's latest food travelogue Fat Man In France ends in the south-west and on to Catalonia, sampling its vineyards, meatballs and small pies; Alan Partridge is in Paris, with Rebecca Front playing Vivienne Westwood in that Wogan-with-Lawley appearance. Is one of the models an uncredited Chris Morris? Who can say for sure. (Actually Iannucci can - cheers for flagging this up, Doc Wallace - and he says it isn’t but can see why people think otherwise)

ALSO... daytime BBC was about to get a Titchmarsh-flavoured revamp, as their trailer revealed today in 1987. Going For Gold is coming!

October 8th

50 YEARS AGO TODAY: while still At Large over on the BBC Dave Allen made a number of investigative documentaries for ATV. In Search Of The Great English Eccentric sees him meet railway enthusiasts, a Lancaster bomber "flyer", cowboys, Sioux and the not English Ivor Cutler.

40 YEARS AGO TODAY: Christopher Biggins standing in a river dressed as a clown? That's our scene! Sadly we'll never see the context as this is continuity from LWT. In the adverts before the weekend night news, why everybody should move to Telford.

30 YEARS AGO TODAY: while he was remembered as someone who never wanted to be anywhere other than the radio, there were a good few attempts in the Nineties to make Steve Wright into a TV face. The only one that really leant entirely on his personality and surroundings was BBC1 Saturday prime-time pot pourri Steve Wright's People Show, featuring Take That, Vic and Bob attacking Steve with food and a lurking William Roache and Garry Bushell; Anneka gets her Challenge in the middle of the Notting Hill Carnival, which must have given editors and sound recordists kittens. Her task is to create a fully functioning community television studio, which nobody seems to have realised in advance might be affected at outset by the bank holiday. Things pick up to the extent that Greg Dyke turns up.

20 YEARS AGO TODAY: QI gets onto the B's and Stephen makes an unwise comment; "alternative comedy? Alternative *to* comedy, more like!" was still a thing then, hence Kings Of Comedy, in which four old school names - Stan Boardman, David Copperfield, Mick Miller and the not old school at all Scott Capurro - and four newer stand-ups shared bills in front of deciding audiences. Unfortunately this was by Endemol for Channel 4 in 2004 so they had to live together and be constantly filmed doing so too, with evictions based on nominations and phone votes and things weren't helped when the lines broke down on day one and the resultant studio vote led to the inhabitants threatening to walk out. Andrew Maxwell won, nobody watched; Top Buzzer was billed as TV's first "dope opera", as in a sitcom about weed dealer life. Less than a year later Ideal was making much the same claim, the difference being that was written by a Steve Coogan protégé for the BBC and this was written by Johnny Vaughan (?!) for MTV (!?) Still, the casting director did their job as it stars Stephen Graham, James Lance and Daniel Mays, while these first five episodes include cameos from Ashley Walters and David Furnish, if not the later episodes that feature Mackenzie Crook and, hold on to your hats, Kanye West..

ALSO... novelist and for a couple of years New Statesman TV critic William Boyd explains his problem with drama on videotape to Did You See...? today in 1982.

October 9th

40 YEARS AGO TODAY: Thomas The Tank Engine & Friends, a programme with a fulsome and often quite disturbing online lore, begins merrily chuffing through Sodor for 78 episodes in the initial ITV Ringo-voiced run (except he only did two thirds of those before Michael Angelis took over), and since then another 506 as they keep uselessly rebooting it. Bet the most recent ones don't even have that bit in between the two stories where they show stills of all the engines; a very lively Pop Quiz audience go nuts for Elvis Costello, Huey Lewis and Phil Collins against Midge Ure, Nick Lowe and John Martyn. John Martyn?!

30 YEARS AGO TODAY: Pam Rhodes goes stadium sized as Songs Of Praise hosts 45,000 singers within Old Trafford. Can't be regulars, they willingly join in on Liverpool's You'll Never Walk Alone.

ALSO… we could try to describe Flux, as seen here late tonight in 1996, but we're not sure we can beyond “it was late night ITV in the mid-90s, the heyday of just a lot of stuff happening to pass the time before Nightscreen, ideally to be watched while out of it having just crashed back into the house on drink and/or drugs.” Post-Get Stuffed! comedy, in other words. Sketches, rave visuals, public pranks with a judging panel, a scrappy interview with Death In Vegas' Richard Fearless… we know that the 'presenters' are double act Chapman & Kennedy, who would later write for Dick & Dom, but this cuts off before the credits so it's possible everyone involved is now at management level for Channel 4.

October 10th

50 YEARS AGO TODAY (GENERAL ELECTION): the year's second, of course, and while the polls were still open Oliver Postgate got to work. Grandson of a 1930s Labour Party leader and son of an early women's rights activist who helped Sylvia Pankhurst evade arrest (not to mention cousin of Angela Lansbury), he was worried about voter apathy and the state of the economy so shattered the fourth wall but failed to convince The Clangers of the importance of democracy in the never repeated episode Vote For Froglet. As for the election, if you don’t want to know the result look away now as David Butler and Alastair Burnet, during a just two year spell at the BBC that still gave him two general elections, summarise. For the full picture look instead towards all six hours of the evening's poll counting, as preserved by BBC Parliament a few years ago. That's one tremendous opening sequence, backed by what Clive James called "groovy, doomy music". Those who followed our 1970 General Election thread four and a bit years ago may remember Robert McKenzie railing against the very idea of opinion polls - well, by now Robin Day was not only concurring but doing it directly to the BBC's own exit poll compiler.

50 YEARS AGO TODAY (OTHER): the first series of Porridge ends with Men Without Women, the one in which Fletch becomes agony aunt for the wing and a visit from Ingrid leading to a quick trip home. Unusually, Godber isn't in either this or the previous episode; the final regular episode of Steptoe And Son, with only a Christmas special and second film to come, in which Albert has fallen in love, a course that leads to him calling in clairvoyant Patricia Routledge.

20 YEARS AGO TODAY: Michael Palin's Himalaya trip takes him across the mountains of the Indian sub-continent and into the Golden Temple and an interview with the Dalai Lama.

ALSO... how many copies did Radio Times expect to sell by putting Adrian Mills on the cover? Following that, Points Of View's cubbyhole today in 1990 tackles Howard's Way, the TV version of Trivial Pursuit, Newsnight at the Brandenburg Gate, Peter Sissons not swearing, making "entertainment" (hard hitting drama) out of schizophrenia and the perennial complaints that nobody could ever possibly understand Rab C Nesbitt without universal subtitles.

October 11th

50 YEARS AGO TODAY: the neatly nameplated Richard Baker and Kenneth Kendall front the BBC Nine O'Clock News the day after the year's second General Election.

40 YEARS AGO TODAY: Checkpoint, the Radio 4 consumer series where Roger Cook made his name, had a short TV run during which it tackled deaths in motorcycle racing; CQ, by screenwriter Paula Milne who devised Angels, is a strange one-off starring Michael Elphick as a radio ham getting into contact with a round the world yachtsman. He has a mohicaned punk son. In 1984. TV drama newsreader for hire Gordon Honeycombe and, albeit unrecognisably, legendary reggae DJ David Rodigan make cameos; Gareth Thomas is the titular Morgan's Boy, a solitary Welsh hill farmer whose Mancunian teenager (Martyn Hesford, latterly an acclaimed TV writer who did the Kenneth Williams biopic Fantabulosa!) comes to stay, separated from his friends Gary Oldman and Michelle Collins.

20 YEARS AGO TODAY: Paul O'Grady begins his dog-appreciating, plain-speaking live 5pm daily Paul O'Grady Show, instantly laying into the make-up team and the Express. Being ITV, Simon Cowell is the inaugural guest.

ALSO... Saturday Superstore this morning in 1986, wherein Cheggers takes to the ice, teachers showing off is positively encouraged, Mike catches the craze of Rubik's, um, Magic and a Video Vote panel including Cliff Richard, Sarah Brightman and Nik Kershaw judges one of humanity's greatest achievements, Ba-Ba-Bankrobbery by EAV. Then John Craven brings the mood down hosting a phone-in on nuclear arsenals.

Record Breakers today in 1991 features a mile on a treadmill with a backpack, narrowboat speed, a bottle blowing duo and a report on University College Dublin students forming "the world's longest human centipede", an image made much more disturbing by time and culture's progress and made much odder by one of the interested students being Dara O Briain (at 12:26)

October 12th

40 YEARS AGO TODAY: the morning of the Brighton bombing, a moment that had a profound effect on politics and Ireland but also breakfast television. TV-am under Bruce Gyngell had been indulging in many rounds of cost-cutting and after the penultimate day of the Conservative party conference had sent nearly all its staff and equipment either to cover a fatal train crash in Wembley the previous afternoon or back home/to base for budgetary reasons. With ITN having fallen out with TV-am over previous conflicts and TVS bound by union agreements over not sharing staff with another commercial franchise, their only means of covering the story was by John Stapleton calling in from his hotel room having taken notes from the BBC live footage, none of which they could supply until a crew was scrambled to effect much later. The IBA gave TV-am a severe reprimand over the affair, telling it to shape up its news coverage or have its licence withdrawn; in things we can actually provide, Zippy has his posher cousin Zippo clandestinely visit the Rainbow house. You can see the difference, Zippo has a bow tie on; The Special AKA, as they were back to being by then, made their last TV appearance on Crackerjack, which seems very unlike them. Clock Rhoda Dakar on bongos duty.

20 YEARS AGO TODAY: Bill Oddie is the first subject of Who Do You Think You Are? Oddly the earlier editions of the series aren't box setted on iPlayer but instead split across many separate YouTube uploads. Must be some rhyme or reason to it.

ALSO... an Omnibus edition going behind the scenes of pop music today in 1978 asks the Mekons, Sham 69, ATV, the Slits and UK Subs, with a cameo from John Peel, about where punk fits into the capitalist industry.

October 13th

40 YEARS AGO TODAY: John Lowe delivers the first televised nine dart finish. And the graphics go wild; Jeff Stevenson's keenness on uploading everything he appeared in, a godsend to us at times, leads us to Punchlines, where fellow panellists include Gary Wilmot, Pattie Coldwell, Madeline Smith, Bobby Davro in a sleeveless jerkin and Lynda Bellingham with a rictus grin; Cannon & Ball return, having sold out to big business. The slapstick hasn't dulled over the time between series and likewise the variety light entertainment quotient is high with guests Engelbert Humperdinck, the Beverley Sisters, the Beverley Sisters' daughters who were a vocal trio themselves for a while as the Little Foxes, and an actively disturbing final sketch involving Bobby as a hula dancer accompanied by the winning pairing of Mick McManus and Stuart McGugan; Paul Daniels resorts to a camera trick; see, if Russell had been facing Grace Jones maybe she'd have had this connection with him rather than with Wogan.

20 YEARS AGO TODAY: Sky One had rather hoped Tim Lovejoy And The Allstars would be the next big entertainment form, a kind of TFI for the Noughties, but the only bit anyone knows about from its single series was Martin Freeman's challenge.

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