The Why Don't YouTube? Catchup - September 16th-22nd 2024
From the house of @whydontyoutube
September 16th
50 YEARS AGO TODAY: David Frost was given his own series of long-form interviews, not unreasonably entitled The Frost Interview, and again not without reason took Muhammad Ali as a subject not too long before the Rumble In The Jungle.
40 YEARS AGO TODAY: architectural historian Alec Clifton-Taylor followed 1978's Six English Towns and 1981's Six More English Towns with Another Six English Towns, and then presumably couldn't think of a suitable title for a fourth series. Clifton-Taylor wanders round the towers, ruins and porticos of Whitby.
30 YEARS AGO TODAY: the real achievement in some ways is that Knowing Me Knowing You With Alan Partridge made the move from radio to TV without reusing any guests. The first show is the one with showjumper Sue Lewis and her overactive horse, Roger Moore (pending) and Doon Mackichan as PJ Harvey (apparently, Armando says so on the DVD commentary)
September 17th
40 YEARS AGO TODAY: "Do you walk to school?" asks Jonathan Cohen before evoking the sounds of the streets for BBC Schools' Music Time. The sounds are augmented by the many faces of percussion, from beaters to Jonathan's nice new drum machine; Michael Sundin's second Blue Peter and already he's a colleague down as, with Janet Ellis laid up by her freefall accident, Sarah Greene returns to interview Janet’s dad. Luckily Janet’s dad is Mike Ellis of the BBC Special Effects department and he's just helped out on visual effects on The Tripods.
30 YEARS AGO TODAY: with neither Kate Lonergan nor Peter Cocks from the What's Up Doc? glory days being able to help save it after three series, Parallel 9 packs up both the space outpost and earth caravan, and its impact is proven by a caller not knowing Lucinda Cowden's name. You've rarely seen a show fall so raggedly into its own end, but at least the Little Green Man, having been left by everyone else, gets a poignant ending; Danny Baker After All is reworked into the notably far less Lettermanic The Danny Baker Show. If anyone can work out what those titles are meant to represent you're better than us, and maybe Baker too as he talks to Keith Chegwin, a bearded Paul Merton, a herpetologist and hears from Bryan Ferry; BBC series of self-portraits The Director's Place presents Is That All There Is?, Lindsay Anderson's dizzyingly subverting autobiographical mockumentary, intended to ultimately act as a final tribute to late actress friends Jill Bennett and Rachel Roberts but ending up as his own last film as he died three weeks earlier.
20 YEARS AGO TODAY: Blue Peter, all kilted up, takes on the Highland Games. Matt Baker tosses a caber, just as you'd hoped.
ALSO... when 7T3 sunk the No. 73 ship most of the cast and crew, including Neil Buchanan and a now reunited with her real name Andrea Arnold, moved on to Motormouth. Dropping in on the first series today in 1988 we find all kinds of gimmicks getting in the way including a massive inflatable mouth, the audience on huge moveable compartments pushed around by forklifts, Network 7-style big flashing graphics and Richard Waites (Hamilton from No. 73, and also we've just seen on Parallel 9) corralled into the one part that remained, integrated backstage sketch series Spin Off with Roger Sloman and Spatz' Joe Greco. Supersleuth Colin Daly is also back from the big house guest list in a programme that also includes a minute of Hazell Dean, a live haircut, and for some reason a lengthy straight discussion on drugs in sport with Roger Black's involvement, which is timely as it's ten days before Ben Johnson's positive drugs test was revealed. Eighth Wonder are there too! Surely they could have had a word with Patsy or something given how they have to fill time with the writer of their own theme tune playing a MIDI keyboard?
September 18th
40 YEARS AGO TODAY: before all those adaptations Andrew Davies wrote a couple of Look And Read stories, the famous Dark Towers and this one, Badger Girl, in which three holidaying children on Dartmoor foil pony rustlers. In that link you can watch the story edited together as one whole, or you can watch the series as it went out with Wordy’s bits; the Special AKA take up the Play At Home baton. Jerry Dammers has got no better at public speaking, but never mind tht, a rehearsal of the long since passed out of the charts Nelson Mandela with everyone reading the lyrics off A4!
30 YEARS AGO TODAY: the seventh (!) series of Hale & Pace, having changed the theme to the stars singing I Got You in a very LE arrangement. For all its mainstream aims, there's a really quite unexpected double cameo to deliver the punchline, such as it is one, in a sketch about comedy props in part one; the "elfin witchcraft" - thanks, Melv - of Kenneth Williams is unravelled in his own South Bank Show (part two, three, four, five), with lots of Barbara Windsor, Robert Stephens reading from his diaries and an unexpected cameo from John Sessions as Joe Orton.
September 19th
50 YEARS AGO TODAY: A Night In, Porridge's famous bottle episode in which Godber moves in with Fletcher, and there was enough confidence in the show to make it only its third episode. Ian Le Frenais: "Very early on, we said we’ve got to face the reality of prison. Let’s start off by writing the most restricting episode of all."
40 YEARS AGO TODAY: Patrick Mower makes his inevitable Minder guest appearance as he asks Arthur to give the bride away and Terry to be his best man at his upcoming wedding, which turns out not to be his first. Sue Holderness, Gary Holton from Auf Weidersehen Pet, Kate Williams from Love Thy Neighbour and Jonathan Kydd show up along the way.
30 YEARS AGO TODAY: The X Files makes its premiere on BBC2; whatever BBC2 expected from commissioning Harry Hill's Fruit Fancies, was it a series of ten minute surreal black and white silents? Quite possibly, who knows.
20 YEARS AGO TODAY: BBC3 were going through a phase of spoof celebrity documentaries, promoted as genuine, that try to keep a straight face but fall apart at the merest touch. Their last one, possibly because it was so transparent, was David Ginola: Secrets And Lies, in which the footballer and common fascination for British TV bookers pretended to be running a celebrity enlightenment camp.
September 20th
50 YEARS AGO TODAY: Robert Wyatt and a prog murderer's row appear on Top Of The Pops. The producer told Wyatt he was "embarrassed" by his wheelchair and offered a wicker chair instead, leading to Wyatt threatening to leave or the whole band to adopt wheelchairs until the show backed down.
30 YEARS AGO TODAY: Gamesmaster is back, Dominik Diamond is back, McDonalds sponsorship is despite that back, and we're in Hell. The big return challenge based on an early prototype version of Earthworm Jim that was stolen from the set and bootlegged, with a prize of a special one-off Jim maquette that got damaged before filming. Starting as they meant to go on.
20 YEARS AGO TODAY: whatever you might have expected from a CBBC series called Shoebox Zoo, it probably isn't a Canadian co-produced fantasy series invoking Celtic mythology starring Jason Connery, Peter Mullan and the voices of Rik Mayall, Alan Cumming, Simon Callow, Siobhan Redmond and Bill Paterson. The titular shoebox is found by an eleven year old who finds the carved animals within springing to CGI life.
ALSO... Late Late Breakfast Shows have a habit of disappearing from YouTube so keep an eye on this one from today in 1986, a Whirly Wheel special with a couple of live challenge go-overs and footage of not just the best so far but "the challenge that went wrong" and Noel mocking those who saw one stunt as too dangerous. While he wouldn't be chosen for another seven weeks, that week's Wheel has Michael Lush's name on it.
September 21st
60 YEARS AGO TODAY: as part of a Horizon on the speed of scientific learning, Arthur C Clarke predicts the future.
30 YEARS AGO TODAY: black community interest magazine All Black finds out what jungle is; New Order's Gillian Gilbert and Stephen Morris appear on Points Of View, and not as a delayed reaction to that Blue Monday TOTP performance. More urgently, Casualty has been filmised! There’s much love for Pat & Margaret, apart from a Canadian émigré - that's not the case for Knowing Me Knowing You, and just as the correspondent hoped nobody involved with it was ever heard of again.
ALSO... "We usually like to bring something cuddly for you to look at" avers Johnny Morris at the start of Animal Magic today in 1982, acknowledging at the same time that he's failed as he hovers over a crab. "I like music" says Terry Nutkins, who has more hair than you'd expect, which is how he ends up playing Dollar’s Videotheque to some dolphins to see how they react. Back in the studio Morris challenges Nutkins to spread some butter, which leads to penguin and hippo feeding, and then Johnny voicing a llama.
September 22nd
40 YEARS AGO TODAY: Max Maven, a hugely influential mentalist and a man who certainly knew his way with a distinctive appearance, guests on the Paul Daniels Magic Show; David Jason tells Wogan about his character inspiration for Del Boy. Tel saying "Danger Mouse" should have been made into a ringtone. ITV had garden parties?
30 YEARS AGO TODAY: nobody now remembers Naomi Campbell's shot at a pop career, but it got her as far as Top Of The Pops (and number 40); the "silent twins" June and Jennifer Gibbons were remarkable international cause celebres (and still are to some extent, one of Jennifer's books has just been widely published for the first time); eighteen months after Jennifer's death June gave her first ever television interview to Inside Story.
20 YEARS AGO TODAY: you can see 19 Productions' working. The various S Club 7 in America series had worked, so why not just do the same kind of S Club Somewhere Hot But As Fish Out Of Water concept again? That's how things led to I Dream, in which S Club Juniors/8 are enrolled in a performing arts college in Barcelona, shades of Fame all over the place, and with Christopher Lloyd to bring a Hollywood angle (and pre-'Enders Matt Di Angelo too - pre-Loose Women Frankie Bridge and pre-Ninja Warrior Rochelle Humes as well, if we're being scrupulous) Only trouble was it was rubbish and unpopular, the soundtrack album peaking at 133 and the band over pretty much the second the series ended.
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