The Why Don't YouTube? Catchup - October 21st-27th 2024

From the house of @whydontyoutube (on Bluesky as well as Now Known As X)

October 21st

50 YEARS AGO TODAY: Roobarb. It's called Roobarb. Not Roobarb & Custard, at least not officially. As with all fondly remembered cartoons of the 1970s there were a smaller amount of episodes than you remember because they were repeated so often - thirty, plus another 39 in a 2005 revival that like all children's show revivals nobody now remembers - the first of which, kindly Briers and Johnny Hawksworth's wah-wah pedal in place, was called When Roobarb Made A Spike. Spoilers!; here's a treat, of sorts - four full episodes, starting with the one from this date, of Call My Bluff in its Robert Robinson/Frank Muir/Patrick Campbell pomp, with guests including Peter Sallis, Francesca Annis (got to have a system!), Robert Powell, Madeline Smith, Michael Jayston and Robin Knox-Johnston.

40 YEARS AGO TODAY: the second series of Ever Decreasing Circles, in which Martin has the residents of a retirement home round for tea before, as ever, Paul intervenes.

30 YEARS AGO TODAY: the last in the series of Knowing Me Knowing You, though surely it'll be recommissioned unless Alan does something far beyond the pale. Anyway, restaurant critic Forbes McAllister is a guest with his newly bought duelling pistols.

20 YEARS AGO TODAY: calling all major London recording studios, we're heading towards Band Aid round number anniversary season and while it is indeed still October the actual news report is a couple of days away, hence now is the time for the Midge Ure-led, comprehensively talking headed The Record That Rocked The World.

October 22nd

50 YEARS AGO TODAY: ITV always loved a period mini-series and hit paydirt, including an Emmy win, with Jennie: Lady Randolph Churchill, starring Lee Remick as the socialite who would give birth to Winston, who later appears played by Warren Clarke. Except, for some reason, in the last few weeks the first episode and no other has been taken down from YouTube. Your guess is as good as ours.

40 YEARS AGO TODAY: the story so far… Thames staff went on strike between 27th August and 3rd September over cuts to technicians' overtime payments, then again from 17th October due to pay increases for film editors related to new video cameras. That was still going on when management took over operations with a lengthy fanfare and a make-do schedule including "Michael and his amazing car". To be continued; it's probable nobody expected the next move of Sapphire & Steel creator P.J. Hammond to be a sitcom; if you had, you'd be right in thinking it wouldn't be straightforward. Lame Ducks starred John Duttine, the Day of the Triffids star again not a man hitherto known for his comic touch, as a man forced to give up work who goes to get it together in the country with the likes of Lorraine Chase and Brian Murphy tagging along over two series; Fairly Secret Army is a Reggie Perrin spin-off in all but name, written by David Nobbs too, but the Beeb made a bit of a cock-up on the commissioning front so in stepped Channel 4 and Video Arts, whose proprietor John Cleese script edited the story of Geoffrey Palmer's renamed ex-army Make Britain Great Again saviour finally attempting to set up that clandestine paramilitary force. Shot on location and film with no audience reaction and a Michael Nyman score, it confused many at the time and might make more sense now.

30 YEARS AGO TODAY: Jimmy Tarbuck graduates to Audience With status. Billy Connolly threatens to steal the show from Toronto but nothing can get in the way of the logical ending, Jimmy singing Johnny B Goode with Hank Marvin, Rick Wakeman and Justin Hayward; a couple of hours after backing Tarby - which gets a reference in the opening monologue. Wakeman, in a slightly different frame of reference and dress code some of which surprises the host, then joins The Danny Baker Show, as do Leslie Nielsen, Rob Newman, a leftfield take on the Keanu Reeves hotel room press junket and Sinead O'Connor performing a gorgeous version of The House Of The Rising Sun.

20 YEARS AGO TODAY: BBC Midlands Today is the final programme to come from the Pebble Mill studios. Alan Towers is among those returning to commemorate it, the turncoat; Nas pulls out of Later With Jools Holland at short notice due to family illness, so obviously they call in a little known Scottish singer-songwriter with a loop pedal who the producer had recently seen at a private gig. KT Tunstall's performance goes whatever those days' equivalent of viral was, followed by a career rocket.

October 23rd

40 YEARS AGO TODAY: not only were Thames technicians still manning the picket line but ACTT staff joined them in protest at management corralling the latter's jobs. One of the programmes thus wiped out was TV Eye, whose reporter Peter Gill had filmed a report from the heart of the famine suffering in Ethiopia and then found there was nobody around to edit or broadcast it on the anticipated edition of the 18th. The BBC's Michael Buerk had been there at around the same time and as the Corporation now found it had exclusive graphic pictures that gave Buerk time to return to the UK, write his voiceover script at relative leisure and approve the final edit. That report went out on the Nine O'Clock News (and earlier bulletins), after which the Mirror, having been tipped off about the TV Eye story before it was forcibly scrapped, were running articles appealing for help from the next day and made it front page lead eight out of the ten days from the 27th (almost all written by Alistair Campbell). But nobody remembers that because Bob Geldof also caught the report by chance and the rest is history - a history first reported on November 24th by, yes, the Mirror.

30 YEARS AGO TODAY: Wax Meets Madonna seemed the most obvious thing possible, two talkative, thoroughly revealing New Yorkers colliding. Except, according to her own accounts Ruby lost her composure to stress and practically broke down letting a suspicious Madge essentially take over the room while constantly on the defensive expecting a different frame of questioning.

20 YEARS AGO TODAY: a historic Dick & Dom In Da Bungalow for two key reasons. One is the final Baby Race, encouraged by Melvin Odoom in an adult Babygro, ending with a child choosing to take his first steps on live TV. The other is the first regular appearance of Harry Batt with a jar of garlic mayonnaise, something that will haunt Dom for the rest of Da Bungalow's life; Harry Hill’s TV Burp moves to prime-time on Saturdays for its fourth series with precious little preparation for the unwary; Strictly Come Dancing's second in all and first autumn series. We'll come back to this when it ends; 34 years after the first time Lauren Bacall joins Parkinson in the wake of making a badly received film (Birth) and some badly received comments, so Parky quickly steers her onto Old Hollywood.

ALSO... last week we featured Rub-A-Dub-Dub; now we have Rub-A-Dub-Tub, the early morning weekend strand on TV-am. Ivor Cutler and Stratford Johns got involved with it at some point but today in 1983 pre-schoolers get amongst the storytelling and odd cartoon shorts Dick King-Smith hovering over a giant tortoise and donning a snake, Bonnie Langford dancing with Violet Bott-on-uppers energy, some prawns in a tank and a folk interlude.

October 24th

40 YEARS AGO TODAY: BBC Schools' long running job market survival guide Going To Work is in the middle of a three-episode drama about getting a job, the second about interview technique featuring Gorden Kaye, two days before the first series of 'Allo 'Allo! finishes, as the boss and a literally frightwigged Michelle Collins as one of the applicants; once Newsround is done Think Of A Number explains astronomy with a surprise behind ever door, including comedy Chinese (it was the 80s); a not entirely satisfying episode of Minder that gets distracted from the potential of Arthur taking over a carpet cleaning business just as he does by disreputable hypnotist Donald Sumpter, whose screen career goes from Softly Softly to The Cleaner, and his much younger partner Nicola Cowper of Dangerfield. Yet the actual legacy of the episode is a scene-stealing role as her mother for the already veteran June Brown, which she has said was what led Leslie Grantham to recommend her to Julia Smith and Tony Holland for a specific role in the new soap he'd just been cast in; In At The Deep End's Paul Heiney tries to learn acting so as to appear in Michael Caine flop Water. Along the way he takes a crash course at RADA, learns accents, fights with Pat Roach and takes advice from Caine, Billy Connolly and Oliver Reed, the latter of which goes much as (soberly) expected.

30 YEARS AGO TODAY: Sooty controversy! Well, Soo controversy to be exact as exposure to various babies in the Sooty & Co shop, including one whose mother is the actual voice of Soo Brenda Longman making this some kind of multiple identity horror parable, makes the panda broody. Many complaints reputedly followed. Matthew Corbett himself wrote the episode, inspired by seeing his own daughter pretending she was pregnant with a pillow up her jumper; load a fiver's worth of bags and get the pepper cards prepared as Ready Steady Cook begins. Antony Worrall Thompson and Brian Turner are first to stare hard and deliberate at root vegetables and supermarket packaged meat products; one of the pre-eminent EastEnders storylines for the ages, sparked more than two years earlier, comes to a head as Grant discovers a recording proving Phil and Sharon slept together and plays it to the packed Vic.

20 YEARS AGO TODAY: Top Gear returns with one of its strengths, The Trio Take Some Similar New Cars To A Place And Compare Them. In this case, Pendine Sands and some muscle cars. Meanwhile Bill Bailey is in the Reasonably Priced Car, an ice cream van jumps a bouncy castle and Jeremy eats his own hair.

October 25th

40 YEARS AGO TODAY: the union dispute with Thames was still ongoing and as it deprived some regions of adverts Channel 4 takes a train ride as an interlude, with music that sounds like Zack Laurence attempting electro-Krautrock; by now it was well known, not least to charities due partly to the immediate tabloid reaction to Michael Buerk's report two days previously, that TV Eye had a report from Ethiopia fronted by the experienced international reporter Peter Gill that they couldn't air. Oxfam and Save The Children made a direct appeal to the ACTT who volunteered staff unpaid, so as not to technically return to work, for one day "to show humanitarian support... as a special case", making two copies, one for the Thames management to run, one to ACTT members to transmit outside London so that the managers weren't seen to restore their service in full and not have to allow striking employees to transmit. Doubtless it had some effect but in common memory second turned out to be nowhere, and Geldof would have been busy most Thursdays at 8pm anyway; after Night Thoughts and with everything still being run at a pro-am level Thames announcer Tom Edwards accidentally lets his hair down.

30 YEARS AGO TODAY: Grant Mitchell continues to take direct action; in the week of Pulp Fiction's UK release Omnibus profiles Quentin Tarantino.

October 26th

30 YEARS AGO TODAY: the eleventh and antepenultimate instalment Back To School Mr Bean, the one with a Chieftan tank denouement, and also David Schneider as a judo instructor with pupils including Christopher Ryan.

20 YEARS AGO TODAY: John Peel's death is announced. The BBC bring in Andy Kershaw, which for all his subsequent actions was closer to him than ITV, who turn to Simon Bates and Mike Read. Meanwhile Newsnight discusses his with Michael Bradley of the Undertones, a good idea, and Mark E Smith late at night, less so.

ALSO... Des O'Connor Tonight today in 1981 starts with our host singing New York New York, which makes us see Eric Morecambe's point, before welcoming Terry Wogan with some of his listeners' correspondence, Cleo Laine and, roughly a year after being a hit on his first visit, Jay Leno.

October 27th

40 YEARS AGO TODAY: Duran Duran on the Late Late Breakfast Show, after which Noel reveals Simon's dad is in the front row and delights in having wrongfooted some Durannies; Rik Mayall does some in-character stand-up and then a rare out of character sit-down on the end of The Young Ones, the nature of modern comedy and touring America playing Shakespeare with Wogan.

30 YEARS AGO TODAY: Michael Schumacher drives the new convertible Ford Mustang round Silverstone for Top Gear with a suffering Clarkson in the passenger seat.

ALSO... Reporting London meets CB radio enthusiasts today in 1981.

The new daytime schedule that launched on BBC1 today in 1986 is most famous for bringing Neighbours to the country but it was also the opening of Children's BBC's birthday card slot and the introduction of a new presenter to go with it, once the set has been built. To tie in with the day's new children's output The Clothes Show runs a Kid's Stuff special today in 1986, including Mike Smith driving a caravanette in between trying on all his different outfits and Jane Lomas in Cliff favourite Milton Keynes shopping centre with a trolley full of eight year olds.

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