The Why Don't YouTube? Newsletter Friday Edition - 24th December 2021
From the houses of @whydontyoutube and @UKTVOnThisDay
The working week just gone
WDYT? over the last four days
20th December
30 YEARS AGO: nearly three months before its actual release, indeed before they'd even recorded it, Blur took the single that nearly fell through the cracks, Popscene, onto The Word. The director really doesn't want to feature Damon more than necessary.
40 YEARS AGO: the Penlee lifeboat disaster, in which sixteen people were killed after both a freighter and an RNLI vessel capsized in gales the previous night, leads News On 2. That follows a The World About Us about a Leeds student revisiting his family home on the flood plains of the Nile which ends with a marvellous Peter Brook-voiced postscript.
40 YEARS AGO: The Borgias finally comes to an end, the TV premiere of The Man Who Fell To Earth is neatly skipped and BBC2 closes down with a seasonal clock, even though the special idents haven't kicked in yet, and a highly festive montage.
50 YEARS AGO: Opportunity Knocks' big discoveries in 1971 were Little & Large, but despite making the All Winners Show they weren't in contention for the Variety Club of Great Britain trophy. The gold here is at the end of the show, as after "the fellow with the mellow bellow" Stuart Gillies - stop shouting "encore", audience, you know how the show works - Hughie introduces the two people working the two big Christmas shows in Birmingham that year, "Frank O'Carson" and Les Dawson. There's a third guest, not that one of them knows it until Eamonn Andrews, for it was he, appears with a special present.
1985: some early morning content in the form of Ceefax AM, the On View roundel that went out before Breakfast Time. Robert Powell was doing TV previews on the show, apparently. He was clearly no Greavsie.
1996: James Dean Bradfield covers Last Christmas in the TFI Friday bar.
1997: deep breath, everybody, it's Boris Johnson fronting What The Papers Say, though the worst thing about it is the new synth-guitar arrangement of the theme. The subjects are Geoffrey Robinson, the latest beef ban and Alan Clark taking the Evening Standard to court, and eventually winning, over a spoof diary (so the Independent ran one instead)
21st December
20 YEARS AGO: Pop Goes Christmas - a familiar title, as Granada regionistas will agree - was one of those much of a muchness shows that happened around then where a familiar face, here Ian Wright in his turn of the century jester guise, welcomes a bunch of famous people and pop acts into a faux-palatial living room setting. What that meant in this case was Atomic Kitten covering Last Christmas. Does this count towards Whamageddon?
30 YEARS AGO: Jason Donovan, despite having two Joseph shows later that day and being manflu-ridden, still shows up at Going Live! with one of his prizes being an E180 of the show, or "a 12 inch version of the video" as Jason puts it. Hope he pulled the tabs out. Philip is of course cheeked about his own imminent takeover of the role and whether he's taking tips from Jason's answers, or whether Jason is going to be there to see if those tips have been taken in, or less likely whether Jason is taking Saturday morning tips from Philip's demeanour. The show plays out with a choir singing Winter Wonderland joined by Jason, his brothers and sundry other people including Emma Forbes and an uncredited Mike Smith. By contrast, Motormouth plays out for the holidays with Slade miming to Merry Xmas Everybody. Before then Neil Buchanan invents Damien Hirst spot painting with just his fingers.
30 YEARS AGO: entirely unsurprised to learn that Jimmy Greaves has a bonsai Christmas tree and a flashing novelty bow tie as his festive dress-up. An incomplete Saint & Greavsie, which means we don't get to see why "Ebenezer Scrooge could easily be adopted as (Northampton Town)'s new mascot" but Clive Tyldesley acting as the go-between betwixt hosts and Stan Boardman is present and correct, and Jimmy's trademark reference to "chilly Jockoland" is less than two and a half minutes in. You, meanwhile, can enter a competition based on heat-enabled magic mugs to win a book Greaves isn't keen on. Plus, we get to see Jimmy's hat being blown off in New York! And what Ian describes as "some of the dafter moments we've featured this season". If anyone can explain what the hell is going on at 16:42 we'd be glad to know. Where's everybody else? Why does neither other player involved react? Why does nobody move a muscle on the terrace behind the goal?
30 YEARS AGO: the Generation Game is partly an exercise in "tell me it's 1991 without telling me it's 1991", what with the Chippendales featuring and Bruce's opening joke being about Nigel Kennedy. Admittedly the final game, the lambada, is a couple of years out of date but the show wasn't around in 1989 and the aim of the game, thus life, is more likely putting Rosemarie Ford in a short skirt, and there's the "stick out your bum!" bit that everybody seems to remember. And to judge, who evokes Latin "forbidden dance" sensuality more than Bob Holness? Being pre-Christmas but not the Christmas show there's a special theme of "contestants playing some of your favourite games", which as well as the lambada includes making glue, yodelling and clay modelling. Notice Bruce was still trying to get "be there!" going as a closing catchphrase, just as he would two years later when called upon to demonstrate the lotta fings BBC1 had got on.
30 YEARS AGO: BBC2 put on A Classic Christmas, a marathon of festive programming starting with the Flowerpot Men at 12.10pm and ending in the early hours with The Big Sleep. In between were Dr Finlay's Casebook, the divorce papers Eastenders, the 1973 Christmas Top Of The Pops, a Queen's speech, It's A Wonderful Life, the 1974 Christmas Steptoe & Son, 1964 Christmas Night With The Stars, a festive edition of the fly on the wall documentary Strangeways, Jack Rosenthal's Evacuees, a Morecambe & Wise compilation, the first airing of a 1958 Hancock's Half Hour since original broadcast and a 1976 dramatisation of Dickens' The Signalman. The one entirely new offering, as such, was A Stocking Full Of Christmas Cliches, a clip show linked by, but of course, talking animals. Francis Wilson and the Three Bears did not take off.
40 YEARS AGO: following a preview of ITV's comedy offerings ahead, almost entirely of people who'd been better on the BBC, we make one of the final calls to Southern's Houseparty, where we find them playing with a novelty frog toy. Standard. After what appears to be a range of executive stress toys, as they used to be known and therefore are surely out of place here even with the one that knows who Adam & the Ants are, half the women arrive with a huge cracker so the other half unpack a huge wooden hamper. A big unboxing video sensation is for the offing here. Everyone comes back together for a chat about family dynamics at Christmas and equality in general that actually approaches that "Loose Women of its day" line recently affixed to it in a very, very tiny way.
40 YEARS AGO: the Christmas Grange Hill - which this isn't because we can't find it and it wasn't shown until the 28th in any case - was put open to Blue Peter viewers and 16 year old Paul Manning came up with a tale of an end of term disco run on equipment supplied through Tucker's brother and under threat of being half-inched by the bigger boys from Brookdale. Part of Manning's prize was to be one of those boys and Sarah Greene plus cameras went to follow him. Sarah also talks to some of the crew and actors before Manning gets his moment, with Simon Groom quickly around to reassure us.
40 YEARS AGO: just in time for the season of goodwill to all men, the happy feelgood reunion closing episode of Blake's 7.
1987: didn't have room for this on Twitter but it's worth a look (and as it's on the BBC Archive it'll more than likely still be there next year) - Open Air goes to Belfast, as BBC Northern Ireland were running the whole morning, and Susan Rae takes Phillip Schofield to field questions from local kids, who never saw the last minute of the broom cupboard daily anyway. Andy Crane in the birthday card corner in London takes some additional queries from viewers and introduces us to Simon Parkin, who is literally larking.
WE'D LOVE TO HAVE BROUGHT YOU: plenty to go at here. 40 YEARS AGO saw not just one of the occasional Bruce Forsyth LWT specials they ran to make use of the big contract after Big Night had been such an ignominious failure - Nice To See You, also featuring Harry H Corbett, Faith Brown, Marti Webb, Lionel Blair and apparently Jane Leeves, with script by Barry Cryer, Dick Hills and Marshall & Renwick - but also 20 Years Of Westward, a self-explanatory celebration by a company fully aware they had ten more days to go. More glaring, though, is I Have A Dream Today, part of the Watch It! strand, which was (and we quote verbatim from TV Times here) "the musical story of Martin Luther King enacted by the pupils of Queensbridge School, Moseley, Birmingham. The words are by headmaster Keith Dennis." What's more it was filmed in Blackpool, including erecting crosses to set alight on the beach, and was made because the policeman at ATV studios' daughter was in the cast when it was the school play and he suggested a producer see the production. Here's a tonal shift - 30 YEARS AGO was the first episode of Barrymore, not online as he's not as popular as he used to be, and it's this first show where he finds then head of BBC Sport Brian Barwick in the audience and ushers him out. 20 YEARS AGO meanwhile was Blue Peter Rock & Roll Christmas, which can only be another of Richard Marson's big set-piece ideas.
22nd December
20 YEARS AGO: the pre-Christmas SMTV Live, albeit with barely any Christmas content, comes in odd circumstances what with 66.67% of the people who presented it for the whole rest of the year having just left, so Cat and Louise are joined by Patsy Palmer, Blue, Hear'Say and, much more interestingly, Brian Dowling and Tess Daly. ITV were advertising the new show as a Deeley/Redmond ticket alone right up to the day before the first of the revamped shows went live so we can but speculate what's happened here.
20 YEARS AGO: maybe the strangest thing in retrospect about Harry Hill’s TV Burp is that the pilot (and the series from its fourth run onwards) was shown on Saturday prime-time ITV, bearing in mind the last episode of his last Channel 4 series the previous spring had gone out at 11.30pm on a Bank Holiday Monday. With I'm Sorry I Haven't A Clue penman Iain Pattinson among the writers it has the feel of something trying to find its feet and work out what works rather than a one-off. An extended interview with Wellard, who has the voice of Simon Day, doesn't really work and Harry taking a horse to Coronation Street is the kind of thing you can do best when not attached to a series budget. The fight into the break is a work in progress, someone from The Farmer Wants A Wife coming on gets no reaction whatsoever which shows how many people watched that and the intro suggests, in the clearest continuity to the previous series, that Harry would be coming on dressed as a different character at the start of each episode.
50 YEARS AGO: two days ago we saw Les Dawson being surprised with the big red book on the set of the Opportunity Knocks All Winners Show. Well, ITV didn't just throw these things together as two days later - and bear in mind both were only recorded on the 17th - Eamonn Andrews completed his This Is Your Life duty. Given this was still early in his unfolding TV career it's a maybe surprisingly thin guest list and one of them, Hughie Green was already there, joined by Dickie Henderson, Norman Collier with a working mike, Dora Bryan and the Syd Lawrence orchestra.
1982: not quite in full, Barry Took takes on more Points Of View dealing with angry buzzard experts, inventive signoffs and general "won't somebody think of the children", Peter Duncan's cooking skills inclusive.
1983: Barry Norman's in one of his moods on Film '83 where Trading Places gets a mixed reaction - although he is keen to introduce us to Eddie Murphy's talent - and he likes Krull more than most. The same does not apply to Jaws 3D or Natalie Wood's last film Brainstorm. Seemingly apropos of nothing Barry gives a plug to the Universal Studios Tour and praises Cary Grant with his eightieth birthday upcoming ("you know the secret, don't you? He's been married five times")
1984: after a preview of BBC1's Christmas - wait, did the Late Late Breakfast Show get dropped again? - Grandstand starts with Football Focus and its big tree that gets in Archie Macpherson's way. Brian Clough has plenty to say in front of his wall of cards. Also, if you haven't seen the Saturday Superstore directly before this, you should.
23rd December
20 YEARS AGO: Andrew Davies' modern interpretation of Othello, based around endemic racism and violence in the Met Police, because current affairs is cyclical. Eamonn Walker is newly promoted commissioner John Othello, Christopher Eccleston jealous second in command/narrator Ben Jago, while Othello's wife Dessie Brabant - OK, that's stretching it a bit - is Keeley Hawes, who Davies and director Geoffrey Sax would use alongside ersatz Emilia Rachael Stirling in Tipping The Velvet a year later.
30 YEARS AGO: seems to have been a lot of Lenworth around in this period and none more apparent than in Bernard And The Genie, a Richard Curtis fantasy comedy-drama starring Alan Cumming, who hadn't done a lot on screen before this, as a fired art dealer who accidentally unleashes the titular spirit who grants him magnificent wishes, when he can, in return for an introduction to the modern world. Rowan Atkinson's in there as an evil boss, while Melvyn Bragg, Bob Geldof, Gary Lineker (director Paul Weiland, who also oversaw the early Mr Beans, did his imperial phase Walkers ads) and Trevor McDonald play themselves. Curtis has intimated that it was this achievement on a BBC budget that made him realise how far he could stretch, which led to his stepping up his attempt to get his recent script Four Weddings And A Funeral made, and there have been reports of him having a Hollywood version in limbo (partly because the Weinstein Corporation held the rights for a while, we suspect)
30 YEARS AGO: you suspect Des O'Connor Tonight would be the last show standing to replace its theme with an orchestral version of Have Yourself A Merry Little Christmas. Des' guests are Bernard Manning, who must have been very late in his televisual window by now and who makes a very curious televisual sofa bedfellow with Jackie Mason. In fact it's weird to think that Manning and Mariah Carey were once in the same entertainment bathysphere, O'Connor promoting how her first five singles went to number one in the US in introducing the first not to. That said, Des doesn't interact directly with her, unlike with Cathy Dennis and Barry Manilow, who gets the entire last part, sings Jingle Bells to a jaunty glockenspiel and closes with a syrupy duet with our host on White Christmas. It seems fitting in a way it would have with practically nobody else.
40 YEARS AGO: Grapevine, "The Self-Help Show" with a BBC Community Programming Unit Meets Rockers Uptown theme, lets its hair down as much as something set in a dark corner studio with occasional mumbling can. Jeni Barnett's idea of fun is a screenprinting demonstration, a film made by an animation workshop for kids, a very short piece of juggling and, good god, Doc Cox as Ivor Biggun. Shame we can't yet find the equivalent for 1982, in which it says here "David Rappaport has a close encounter with three shocking pink dancing girls, two performing seals, and a headmaster in a Christmas tree."
40 YEARS AGO: Eamonn Andrews enlists a panto'd up Norman Vaughan, Windsor Davies and Melvyn Hayes to surprise Peter Adamson, Len Fairclough, as he gets the festive This Is Your Life treatment. Plenty of the Corrie cast are there to see him - Johnny Briggs waves to the audience as he comes out, which is wrong - while Leonard Rossiter is on tape.
40 YEARS AGO: the 25th fell on a Friday that year, which meant that for the first time in their TV career Thames property Morecambe and Wise's Christmas special was relegated from the big night. In fact they even refer to it in one sketch. The guest list includes Ralph Richardson, Ian Ogilvy in a production of Julius Caesar, Susannah York, Steve Davis, Alvin Stardust, yet more Suzanne Danielle dancing, and here Robert Hardy with an award and a dance routine.
1986: the BBC marked 64 years of radio - don't ask - with Twist The Cat's Whisker (starts at 6:30), in which Tom O'Connor tells the story of how broadcasting moved north with the aid of Ken Dodd, Alan Freeman, Matthew Corbett and Sooty, Ray Alan and Lord Charles, Harry Worth and the Spinners (and Stuart Hall) That's followed by the news headlines, Michael Fish's decorated weather bureau and Caroline Righton on the local news.
1996: we've referred in the past to the traditional Blue Peter pre-Christmas show and here, give or take Katy Hill visiting Ethiopia to find out what frankincense and myrrh are, is a perfect example, from viewers' drawings replacing the titles to the silver ship and crib close-up at the end.
WDYT? Advent Calendar recap
1st: a primer on Christmas traditions thanks to Toni and Dave Arthur on Seeing And Doing in 1980.
2nd: more for young kids, Canadian seasonal animations and small children singing making up ITV Schools story time My World.
3rd: Play School on Christmas morning 1985, with a donkey in the studio.
4th: almost half an hour in total of 80s and 90s Christmas advertising. Paul Henry is in Plymouth!
5th: Cliff Richard invites you to his 1988 Christmas Celebration, with Thora Hird, Ian McCaskill, Wendy Craig and John Wells doing his Denis Thatcher.
6th: a new maze master takes over for The Crystal Maze Children's Special 1993.
7th: cockernee knees-up ow's-yer-father music hall favourite *checks notes* Edward Woodward stars in the 1974 special of The Good Old Days.
8th: Basil Brush visits a living waxworks museum in his 1974 Christmas Fantasy.
9th: Robert Maxwell oversees the disappearance of a million pounds. No, no, this time it's on the 1984 Paul Daniels Magic Christmas Show.
10th: featuring the cream of the then current Central Junior Television Workshop intake, including Mark Dexter and Alison Hammond, Palace Hill.
11th: Going Live!'s first Christmas and they're actually live for once, with Bros, several Bread cast members, Ian McCaskill and Colin Moynihan MP.
12th: Noel gives out his Christmas Presents for the first time.
13th: Bullseye outdoes itself in 1984 with Kathy Staff, Tommy Boyd, Rod Hull, Alvin Stardust, Anne Aston and the recent Mastermind winner.
14th: Cannon and Ball in 1980, featuring Faith Brown singing and Duelling Banjos with one banjo.
15th: Des O'Connor Tonight, which starts with the inevitable Freddie Starr and ends with a man from Northampton crooning We'll Keep A Welcome In The Hillside.
16th: William Russell is murdered at a Christmas party in a special episode of Jon Pertwee fronted mystery game Whodunnit? Hughie Green and Eamonn Andrews are not direct suspects.
17th: Blue Peter go nuts, with the aid of several former presenters and some judicious musical numbers, in 1998's Back In Time For Christmas.
18th: a packed last Saturday Superstore before Christmas 1984 with a packed last Saturday Superstore before Christmas 1984 with Geldof, Slade, Neil, Basil Brush, Roy Wood, Bill Giles, Tom O'Connor, Natalie Casey and the video to the Superstore single that was never released.
19th: Jimmy Tarbuck and all his celebrity friends recall 1983. Lionel Blair gets covered in paint and Bruce Forsyth duets with a harpist.
20th: Brucie's final Generation Game. One of the claimed reasons he left was because the previous year's special had gone out on Christmas Eve... so this one did too.
21st: Orville's throwing a party and you're all invited, if you can cope with Stu Francis in a tutu. Cuddles has legs!
22nd: P-L-A-Y, Play Away from Christmas Day 1975. Party hats! Tinsel! Hokey Cokey! Coin games? Jousting? Toni Arthur and Lionel Morton singing Your Song??
23rd: Granada's 1982 festive covers fantasia Pop Goes Christmas. Toto Coelo doing Step Into Christmas? Dexys covering Slade? A Musical Youth reggaefied Rudolf The Red Nose Reindeer? Step right this way.
24th: Steve Nallon was very famous in the 80s for his Mrs Thatcher impression. John Wells was very famous in the 80s for his Denis Thatcher impression. How come their only work together was in ITV's 1986 pantomime Cinderella? Plenty of LE’s finest are also there.
Have a happy and peaceful Christmas, and see you on the other side - the 27th, in fact, with the tweets from the bank holiday weekend and this year's In Memoriam list.
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