The Why Don't YouTube? Catchup - October 28th-November 3rd 2024

From the house of @whydontyoutube

October 28th

40 YEARS AGO TODAY: Clive James On Television begins its third series. No American cable oddness, lewd European adverts or even The Japanese Game Show Endurance this week as Clive considers the careers of Hollywood sex symbols, including Elizabeth Taylor singing, Roger Moore playing James Bond ten years before he actually did and Michael Caine as Arthur Haynes' sidekick.

20 YEARS AGO TODAY: Trouble At The Top is on hand as John Gurney takes over Luton Town and makes big promises while being shady about the money's source and essentially stripping the club bare, incorporating organising a premium line phone vote for the new manager and then ignoring it because only one of the three candidates actually agreed to join, before being forcibly deposed within a year by a fan group. Tom Baker's voiceover is appropriately doomy.

October 29th

40 YEARS AGO TODAY: Gallery, George Melly's Channel 4 painting appreciation panel show, features Joanna Lumley. Maggi Hambling would be a cult hero by now were anyone watching; Ken Hom's Chinese Cookery introduces the techniques of, well, Chinese cooking to a British audience, beginning with Peking duck; Laugh??? I Nearly Paid My Licence Fee was BBC Scotland's spiritual successor to A Kick Up The Eighties but with longer character pieces instead of random sketches and quickies, retaining Robbie Coltrane - who the show is essentially built around and launches the one bit people remember, Mason Boyne - and Ron Bain and bringing in John Sessions and puppeteering viscountess Louise Gold, with Elaine C Smith among the regular support actors; the true suspense in Hammer House Of Mystery And Suspense, might be in where Neil Morrissey gets the accent he reveals at 35:33 in his second ever TV appearance. Paint Me A Murder stars regular TV bad guy James Laurenson as an artist who fakes his death in the ultimate act of self-promotion at the encouragement of his wife, Michelle Phillips from The Mamas and the Papas. Things then turn pretty Shakespearian with a love triangle and attempted murders.

30 YEARS AGO TODAY: the second in the fourth series of Noel's House Party features Andy Crane Gotcha'd by Mark Heap among others, Caroline Langrishe as this week's classily attractive Noel object, Leslie Nielsen the evidently pre-recorded star guest in a script not exactly of ZAZ origin, NTV stealing a car and an early visual reminder that the National Lottery is only three weeks away; one of Dennis Potter's first plays Message For Posterity is revived with John Neville, soon to become The X-Files' Well-Manicured Man, as a former Prime Minister in conflict with the artist painting his official portrait. Stephen Moore, Ronald Pickup, Annette Crosbie, Tony Haygarth and Sophie Thompson cross the benches, Brian Walden introduces with context.

20 YEARS AGO TODAY: Robin Cook hosts Have I Got News For You with guests PJ O'Rourke and Dr Phil Hammond, and that clip of Robert Kilroy-Silk on Shafted. (It's a prisoner's dilemma principle! It's basically the same as that Golden Balls moment you all love!)

ALSO… Tommy Boyd and Isla St Clair are frantic to tell you what's happening on the second Saturday Show today in 1982. This is one of genuinely countless uploads we’ve featured over the last however many years from the ADC TV channel, the seemingly tirelessly prolific and invaluable VHS archiving work of Oliver Ashmole-Day, who sadly died this week after a battle with renal cell carcinoma.

October 30th

50 YEARS AGO TODAY: the Rumble In The Jungle is shown as live on prime time BBC1. Twenty and a bit years later the Beeb produced an anniversary documentary. "He's won the title back at 32!" Anthony Joshua just turned 35, for context; speaking of boxing, unlike many of his commentary contemporaries John Motson specialised in football but that's not to say he didn't try other things soon after moving into telly, covering Olympic Greco-Roman wrestling twice. He also had a few goes at the sweet science for the radio - a few weeks after this sharing a mike with Muhammad Ali, who'd turned up to watch a Joe Bugner fight at the Albert Hall - and with Harry Carpenter in Zaire he had a rare telly ringside seat on behalf of Sportsnight for a bout between future middleweight world champion Alan Minter and Jan Magdziarz. Well, we say bout...

40 YEARS AGO TODAY: BBC Schools' primary age pupils miscellany Let's See follows a traditional Scottish Halloween celebration, apparently being unnecessarily Americanised despite being not dissimilar; Adam Curtis' first strictly political documentary The Cost Of Treachery, while not full of seemingly disjointed archive clips and voiced by someone else (Ian Holm), develops his overarching theme of Western political control using the story of how MI5 and the CIA attempted to destabilise Albania in 1949 as a way of subverting the Soviet Union.

20 YEARS AGO TODAY: Halloween is grist to Da Bungalow’s mill, but well before pumpkin heads meet the Muck Muck Harry Batt and an experimental haircut chases Dom up again but he's too busy dressing as Elvis, and a tremendous surprise celebrity to oversee Drop Your Guts in the attic no doubt giving the Bungalowhead an extra fright just before Dom's tragic near-death.

ALSO... Not often you see a Live & Kicking from the Steve Wilson and Emma Ledden year, a statement that also applies to children up early on a Saturday during that period. Today in 1999 the Neighbours intro spoof is well done given they have Kym Valentine and Dan Paris in, along with Another Level, A1 and Catatonia. Obviously Sage & Onion are the best bit.

October 31st

50 YEARS AGO TODAY: Leeds United! is one of the most firebrand-friendly of all Play For Todays, Colin Welland and Dennis Potter's producer of choice Kenith Trodd retelling the story behind an unofficial strike among female textile workers demanding equal pay in Leeds four years earlier. It had already taken two and a half years from script to screen due to legal concerns, having already been rejected by Granada on political grounds, and indeed unions and employers kicked up a fuss in its immediate aftermath. Of course, it might be most jarring now that the lead actress is Lynne Perrie, already occasionally popping up in the Street as Ivy Tilsley, and the eagle eyed might spot Liz Dawn who had been in the soap for three months by then; the newly Cleeseless Monty Python's Flying Circus set off on a fourth and final series that's half the length of the first three. As if to demonstrate the refreshed approach The Golden Age Of Ballooning is one long sketch arc. Sorry about the zoom.

40 YEARS AGO TODAY: as reported on the BBC Nine O'Clock News, Indira Gandhi is assassinated.

30 YEARS AGO TODAY: Halloween on The Big Breakfast - well, Halloween everywhere, but specific time and place - so Gaby is introduced to a bat and Cheggers gets a daughter to custard pie her mother, which we suppose counts. And yet the most unpleasant outcome is only just beginning as this is the morning which features what Paul Ross introduces as "Paula goes over the top with INXS love god Michael Hutchence", and the interview hasn't even taken place yet. Imagine how lives and culture might have been different if the day’s other house guest, purposefully unpleasant WWF wrestler Bastion Booger, been booked for the bed instead; Granada talk to Noel Gallagher at length and Liam in brief in With Oasis.

ALSO... Rik Mayall, "currently seen in cabaret in The Comic Strip", had made his TV debut as "himself" only a couple of weeks earlier when he appeared on Friday Night... Saturday Morning today in 1980 as his Vegas entertainer character Dicky Gurgenstein, as would later cameo in The Young Ones. Even the crew don't know what to make of it.

The great meetings of history: Lennon and McCarthy, Marx and Engels, MacArthur and Hirohito, Reagan and Gorbachev, Warman and Neville. Central News is the crucible today in 2002 as Bob and Mike argue the toss about whether Birmingham or Newcastle should be European Capital of Culture 2008 (it was Liverpool)

November 1st

40 YEARS AGO TODAY: Walter 'Snowy' Farr was your classic old school English eccentric, a charity fundraiser from Cambridgeshire who wore military gear and extraordinary headwear and surrounded himself with animals, some of whom were trained to sit on his hat. This whole thing was turned into Buttercup Buskers, the kind of gentle storytelling still just about redolent of the age in which Snowy and his menagerie told tales to children - yes, the animals did some of the telling, with the aid of Percy Edwards - as part of a travelling show. This week one of the mice goes missing, possibly under a combine harvester. Don't worry, Snowy hasn't gone all Apaches on his audience; It's Andy Cameron was Scottish's attempt to get back in the comedy sketch game with still Scotland's major force in something that accents aside couldn't have looked more LWT if it tried, Stutz Bear Cats and all.

30 YEARS AGO TODAY: the last in the first series of The Fast Show attempts to unlock the latent comic talent of Julia Fordham.

20 YEARS AGO TODAY: by now we've come to expect the hoopla surrounding a new channel launch. So, having closed Granada Plus down without warning at 2.30pm halfway through a programme, what fireworks would 9pm bring with the launch of ITV3? A continuity announcement and an episode of Rebus shown on STV (but not networked) three years earlier, though with guest actors Michelle Gomez having become famous in the interim and Ashley Jensen about to do likewise.

ALSO... less than a minute into Tiswas today in 1980 and Sally James is on fire. A full strength team, Clive Webb and all, are joined by Legs & Co, with inevitable specific fetish results, and Dennis Waterman promoting I Could Be So Good For You and suggesting the actual activity took place with John Gorman the previous night. Amid the nonsense there's the ITC-adjusting serious bits, namely lots of nature features and Tarrant recalling his ATV Today days with a serious voiced fireworks warning. In more on-brand news, Chris makes a child cry.

The UKTV channel umbrella launches today in 1997 with a specific star-studded hype package. Shauna Lowry, Spike Milligan and Jonathan Meades, together at last!

November 2nd

60 YEARS AGO TODAY: the first of 4,510 episodes of Crossroads - the revival doesn’t exist - on ATV only for the time being but uniquely for the time five days a week, if originally only planned for a six week run, such is the way of all origin stories of long-running series. Officially it was Britain’s first soap opera, as in the first to be tagged as that rather than ‘continuous drama’, inspired by the US broadcasters the Grade brains trust had been working alongside for the past decade, a scheme which led to Noele Gordon spending the year up to ATV’s 1955 launch in New York learning production techniques. In fact Crossroads was built around the RADA-trained stage rep actress turned linkwoman's fame, as her daily afternoon show Lunch Box had attracted 27,000 to an outside broadcast and Lew realised she had a following of her own. The exact impetus came from a Birmingham Mail reporter who submitted a spec script set in a Birmingham boarding house. Nobody liked that idea but it gave Grade and Lunch Box producer Reg Watson the key to revive the thought of a daily serial, bringing in Hazel Adair and Peter Ling from BBC drama Compact, whose own pitch was set in a village around its shop and a motel on the outskirts, later trimmed down due to technical limitations. Maybe giving away the transatlantic origins a little too much, the first scene had to explain what a motel was.

40 YEARS AGO TODAY: a mostly out of character Rik Mayall, Ben Elton and Lise Mayer promote the Young One book Bachelor Boys and actually talk about the writing process on Breakfast Time. Beautiful change of tone right at the end; Jon Pertwee, fresh from being Worzel at the International Garden Festival, and Barbara Windsor are in half term mood on Good Morning Britain. Roland turns up eventually; a rare chance to hear the full Thames theme at start-up. After sixteen days of strike action ACTT technical staff voted to accept a new pay offer and so the management-run broadcast service - is it that which causes Ronald Allison to miss his cue or himself? - was into its last day, albeit leaving a backlog that left Coronation Street running extra editions for the next five weeks, with the rest of the country not caught up with Thames programming fully until the end of January and the network premiere of The Long Good Friday postponed from August Bank Holiday Monday to Easter Monday; The Tube celebrates both its fiftieth show and Channel 4's second birthday with guests including Trevor Horn, setting Frankie and Art Of Noise stories straight and pining for Dollar, and Ultravox. In fact, it was backstage here that Bob Geldof, through phoning Paula, got to pitch his new song idea to Midge Ure; Ray Davies writes and directs Return To Waterloo, a feature-length film based on songs from his new album of the same title, starring Kenneth 'Piett' Colley, a passing Gretchen Franklin, Michael Fish and Claire Rayner as themselves, and Tim Roth as 'Punk'.

30 YEARS AGO TODAY: after 24 years on ITV This Is Your Life returns to BBC1 with an extra long episode devoted to Andrew Lloyd Webber, his second big red book. Lots of singing takes place, including his ex Sarah Brightman; Shakespeare: The Animated Tales returns with a paint on glass representation of Richard III, voiced by Antony Sher, Alec McCowen, Eleanor Bron, Tom Wilkinson as Buckingham, Sorcha Cusack and James Grout.

November 3rd

40 YEARS AGO TODAY: noisy lot outside the Concrete Doughnut for Saturday Superstore, presumably waiting for Formula 1 driver Derek Warwick. Or Simon Le Bon and Nick Rhodes, one of the two. Also in are Nik Kershaw, Mat Irvine demonstrating fireworks, birdwatcher Tony Soper in from a tin shack near Exmouth, a live haircut and an unrelated barbershop 53-piece; Huey Lewis thinks he's popping by The Late Late Breakfast Show for some light promo, only to find he's been got by The Hit Squad with special guest Sarah Greene. Well, Huey's not going to recognise her; Paul Jackson had just finished producing The Young Ones by the time of the sixth series of Cannon & Ball, which is how they got a temporary new foil pushing Bobby into new slapstick heights for the last sketch 29 minutes in. This comes after the West Side Story sketch, a brave move for LWT Saturday evening, and a Bobby Richard IIIrd costume that Tommy clearly hadn't seen before; mid-80s Channel 4, where there's always room for one more sketch show. Pushing Up Daisies, another Paul Jackson joint, features Hale & Pace, Chris Barrie doing his David Coleman and Carla Mendonca; Keith Allen and Peter Richardson live out their Professionals fantasies as The Bullshitters, actually titled Roll Out The Gunbarrel and despite retroactive inclusion not an official Comic Strip Presents (only three of the regular cast are in it), the homoerotic crimefighting duo reunited to rescue DI5 head Robbie Coltrane's kidnapped daughter, with a detour involving Scully's Elvis Costello being punched. Stephen Frears' direction follows in kind.

30 YEARS AGO TODAY: Bad Influence! has gone and got itself a Compuserve email account, which means Andy Crane having to carefully read out all those numbers. "The Michelle Pfeiffer of weather forecasting" Sian Lloyd explains weather satellites, Z Wright lies in a bedroom set and explains how you can go shopping and watch films online, albeit in a far more complicated method than would become popular, and outside fighting against the noise of fireworks is "top band ASF". That's Alien Sex Fiend to you!

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