The Why Don't YouTube? Catchup - October 14th-20th 2024

From the house of @whydontyoutube

October 14th

50 YEARS AGO TODAY: clearly using the maxim "if in doubt laugh", hints of the famously poor Charlie Williams era of The Golden Shot.

40 YEARS AGO TODAY: Surprise Surprise! returns for its second series, Christopher Biggins now in place as second banana and also Toni Arthur as third string bursting in on someone's house to no great end. Feels like they're short of material too given the time spent on a surprise involving an old Corn Flakes commercial leading into a Battleships-style game that can't have lasted long, Norman Collier with assorted mikes, and Biggins in clown make-up with an elephant leading into Cilla taking up vital time singing Me And The Elephant, not to mention a big name who appears only in the final minute; Paul McCartney gets a South Bank Show to promote Give My Regards To Broad Street, wisely concentrating mostly on the recording of the score.

30 YEARS AGO TODAY: Zoe Ball, sporting her Ecky Thump hat, corners Liam and Noel Gallagher in a hotel room for The O Zone; Knowing Me Knowing You, by way of a boxing promoter and Miss Anglia, eventually becomes Partridge Over Britain. This is the episode with the most main actors outside the core cast, featuring as it does Felix Dexter, Alan Ford, Barbara Durkin and Linda Broughton, that not a name you'll necessarily know but a face you might as she was one of the people interviewed by Craig Charles during Ghostwatch.

20 YEARS AGO TODAY: Time Shift recalls the days when all TV drama was broadcast live, including Brian Blessed recalling Z Cars while sitting on a kerb, and the period when broadcasters were keen on bringing it back for special occasions.

ALSO... LWT come out of The Muppet Show today in 1977 trying to sell you their album and then the concept of Our Show, where we imagine Susan Tully, "Nicky" Lyndhurst, Melissa 'Grand Pricks' Wilkes and co had great difficulty keeping Hughie Green on the straight and narrow, let alone Yes and Phil Daniels.

October 15th

50 YEARS AGO TODAY: Lift Off With Ayshea, seen as Granada's junior Pops challenger and making Ayshea Brough a big name for a short while, was in the last of its eight series, featuring the Bay City Rollers at a funfair not too long before Shang-A-Lang replaced Lift Off, co-host Barry Blue, Jigsaw, Ayshea singing herself as she tended to do and the remarkable Eli Culbertson, a man dressed as and looking like Vegas Elvis singing a Vegas Elvis standard in the style of Vegas Elvis while Elvis was still in Vegas.

40 YEARS AGO TODAY: unless there was something to cover live Channel 4 wouldn't get out of bed until 5pm for nearly its first two years. As of now it deigned to start up at 2.30pm, starting with a reminder of its launch montage; as part of its first afternoon of broadcasting, and by coincidence three days after the Brighton bomb, A Plus 4 - the former Afternoon Plus moved over lock, stock and barrel - sends Gill Nevill to meet Thatcher at 10 Downing Street; the final episode of Kelly Monteith's series, of "remember Kelly Monteith?" fame, had already over the course of six series made the fourth wall fully porous, but at the end it gets blown up with cartoon dynamite as producer Enn Reitel chooses to bring in conflict, which Monteith has issues with whilst he provides advice to an inexperienced and nervous Brian Capron who's supposed to be playing his partner Trudie Styler's other man.

20 YEARS AGO TODAY: U2 take over the concrete doughnut for Top Of The Pops. Says something that nobody commented at the time on Bono's choice of ad-libbed coda, though he does get cut off very quickly.

ALSO... in a classic case of people you wouldn't expect to ever see share the same space, Siouxsie Sioux meets Gloria Hunniford on Good Evening Ulster today in 1980.

October 16th

50 YEARS AGO TODAY: Pobol y Cwm begins (as investigated in twentieth anniversary documentary People Of The Valley), on the BBC until S4C launched. All the flowers to Lisabeth Miles, who appeared in the first episode as Megan Harries (nee Owen) and, allowing for two breaks totalling fourteen years, is still in it today.

40 YEARS AGO TODAY: Funny Ol' Business - Cops And Robbers is the strange title given to the first of 2,424 (discounting the Storyboard pilot) of The Bill, shifting the focus away from Carver as per Woodentop and changing the name of (from Wilding) and recasting Cryer, as Peter Dean had taken the role that would make him famous the following year. In this episode Burnside arrives and Galloway goes after a breaker and enterer; in the latest Play At Home edition (part two; part three) XTC lead us on an occasionally impressionistic tour of inner Swindon.

30 YEARS AGO TODAY: Screen One presents Doggin' Around, Alan Plater's tale of an ageing American jazz musician played by Elliott Gould who finds his past catching up on a northern English tour, as well as no-nonsense minder Geraldine James and a cast including Ewan McGregor on double bass, Liz Smith, Larry Lamb and Ronnie Scott as himself.

20 YEARS AGO TODAY: Stouffer goes prime-time! An Audience With Harry Hill, a greatest hits of his live shows which Harry says he hated recording and felt the audience did too, though that might be his perception or possibly an excellent edit/laughter thickening job; Julian Fellowes Investigates: A Most Mysterious Murder: The Case Of Charles Bravo. God, that's a convoluted title. In fact it's the first in a loose series of docu-dramas with Fellowes narration interruptions, the first on the notorious 1876 poisoning of a lawyer, represented by a pre-much at all Michael Fassbender.

October 17th

40 YEARS AGO TODAY: the Vauxhall Astra is launched; the Pigeon Street team turn their attention to anthropomorphised animals in Rub-A-Dub-Dub. Twenty-five five minute episodes in all, and here's practically the whole thing.

30 YEARS AGO TODAY: a new morning line-up begins on BBC1, which allows Good Morning with Anne & Nick, still hanging on in there, to prove from 2:22 that This Morning didn't have a mid-morning monopoly on faintly embarrassing first links; sixteen months after his death BBC1 got round to a series of tribute programmes to Les Dawson, The Entertainer.

20 YEARS AGO TODAY: catching up with Dick & Dom In Da Bungalow on a Sunday, featuring the launch of Don't Go Daddy, the purpose of which appears to have been to attempt to pull the regular support cast and parts of the set apart, a cracking game of Eeny Meeny Mackeracka Raridominacka Shickapappa Dickywhopper Rom Pom Stick (we double checked that spelling) incorporating a crossing of outside world game streams, and Dom gets his limbs taped together.

October 18th

40 YEARS AGO TODAY: ragged familial ties abound in Don't Wait Up, starting the first of six series as both newly separated father and son Tony Britton and Nigel Havers are forced to move in together.

30 YEARS AGO TODAY: taking up an awkward ten minutes after Neighbours, Mary Berry's Ultimate Cakes. Chocolate today; for its tenth anniversary The Bill expands to a full hour to conclude a plotline as DI Johnson goes on trial for the manslaughter of a suspected drug dealer during a raid. Danny John-Jules is involved, peripherally but as it turns out crucially; do you like cheese?

20 YEARS AGO TODAY: Jack Dee stars in Simon Nye-penned one-off Tunnel Of Love as a fairground owner trying to manage rides and love life with equal success, not least with Mark Heap around claiming severe injury.

ALSO... eventually ITV realised Jonathan Ross, who they had under contract with very little for him to actually do, had been quite good at the whole offbeat chat show thing, so gave him late night LWT effort The Late Jonathan Ross. On its second of six outings today in 1996, on a set that looks not unlike his current one, he hosts a topical round table with Richard Herring, columnist Mary Kenny, Morwenna Banks and AA Gill. A lot of time and cheap gags are dedicated to the superannuated, pensionable age of Mick Jagger, who was the same age Gary Barlow is now without comment.

Britain's Worst Driver, created and fronted by Quentin Willson, cashed in on both comical reality shows and an expected post-Top Gear motoring on telly boom. Starting today in 2002 it wouldn't be near our radar but for the fact that one of the contestants (from 13:49) is 'Timid' Tim Key, newly graduated from Footlights and in it for the money, successfully winning the series and a Ford Ka that he sold a week later.

October 19th

40 YEARS AGO TODAY: ahead of a Saturday night BBC1 rundown Ian McCaskill has a little trouble with his magnets.

20 YEARS AGO TODAY: Who Do You Think You Are? helps Amanda Redman throw a family reunion party; the second series of Little Britain introduces Computer Says No, Bubbles DeVere, "bitty" and the vomiting WI members. Sophisticated, see; TV really struggled to find Kris Marshall something to do outside My Family, BBC Three's attempt being the one series of My Life In Film, transposing iconography from films into real life and Marshall's character's interactions with Andrew Scott and Alice Lowe.

October 20th

40 YEARS AGO TODAY: Terry Jones tells Wogan about the importance of dental hygiene accuracy to Holy Grail, progress being overrated and home brewing. Later on Sophia Loren flirts in her own time and reveals how her nose might have held her back.

30 YEARS AGO TODAY: Zak Dingle arrives in Emmerdale and instantly gets into a fight.

20 YEARS AGO TODAY: Adam Curtis' documentarian cut-up style might have become parodic by now but it was mightily effective in radical Islamist/US neocon comparative The Power Of Nightmares, albeit Curtis has since suggested some of it doesn't hold up to subsequent events.

ALSO… Gilbert's Fridge was what the Phil Cornwell-voiced, Fluck and Law-designed, irreverent at speed, permanently congested alien did next, a Children's ITV congealment of sketch show, pop star interview and plain oddness that only lasted one run of ten programmes. The first today in 1988 features Yazz, the further adventures of Charlotte Hindle, a manic Pogues theme tune and the moment of levity that is POW drama How Far To Hitchin?, starring Gilbert alongside Clive Mantle, Neil Mullarkey and John Sparkes.

Like what we do? Why not support us? https://ko-fi.com/whydontyoutube