The Why Don't YouTube? Newsletter Friday Edition - 5th November 2021
From the houses of @whydontyoutube and @UKTVOnThisDay
The working week just gone
WDYT? over the last four days
1st November
20 YEARS AGO: these days of Heat and paps was the time when you could title a programme Jordan: Living Without Fame with no shred of irony. This was at the peak of the lad-centric part of Katie Price's celebrity, after Dwight Yorke but before Peter Andre, where the press release for the show breathlessly claims that in a recent survey 31% of 10,000 polled men wished they'd lost their virginity to her. Again, this was acceptable in the Noughties. The concept here is her going incognito as a trainee stable girl - the cashing in on her love of horses hadn't started yet - or as incognito as a blonde woman with a huge bust who, having been given a makeover that extends as far as a cap and baggy T-shirt, looks exactly like Jordan can. No wonder the editing of their own concept and Fiona Allen's weirdly pitched voiceover are unsympathetic.
20 YEARS AGO: TV Go Home is the Charlie Brooker online satire with a forgotten TV adaptation everyone knows about, but shortly afterwards he also developed Unnovations, which made the leap from Innovations catalogue ridicule to ersatz shopping channel for Play UK, with a creator cameo in voiceover. Additional material by Guardian TV bore Stuart Heritage, it says here.
30 YEARS AGO: whatever happened to Laurie Pike? She's a journalist, her pre-TV career, who's worked for Variety and the Hollywood Reporter and social media consultant. So there. But back around this time she was Channel 4's favourite kooky American, even more so than Katie Puckrick. The flame-haired, fast-talking, loud-dressed New York correspondent became semi-famous for drily linking cable access TV clips and then moved over to another World Of Wonder production Ring My Bell, a live phone-in in which famous people answered directly to you, the viewer. Our line-up tonight is Arthur Scargill, who Pike sounds intrinsically wrong in introducing, Val Lehman off Prisoner Cell Block H, Boy George, Barbara Windsor and Britain's first surrogate mother Kim Cotton.
30 YEARS AGO: The Word invite a fast rising and already notorious Manic Street Preachers onto the show. They spent the day rehearsing new single Love's Sweet Exile, but once put on live TV... Watch Amanda de Cadanet at the end coolly/blithely ignore what just happened. Later on Amanda (and a lovestruck camera follow Keanu Reeves on a trip round London where he’ll "prepare himself for playing an Englishman in Dracula". He should have stayed longer in that case.
30 YEARS AGO: Douglas Adams, promoting Last Chance To See, squares off with Clive Anderson on Talks Back.
40 YEARS AGO: starting a series with a shot of Susan Penhaligon in her underwear is an arresting image, especially for something so gentle as A Fine Romance, Judi Dench and Michael Williams starring in Bob Larbey's awkward adult romance sitcom.
1983: Rockschool, the BBC's interactive how-to guide to musical chops with the classic Deirdre Cartwright/Henry Thomas/Geoff Nicholls power trio, tackles the potentially thorny given the environment subject of reggae. Sly & Robbie and Dennis Bovell provide expert advice.
1986: obviously they weren't to know yet but this Late Late Breakfast Show would be its penultimate ever. Frank Bruno, and more importantly Tony Gubba, is involved with a fortunately studio based Give It A Whirl, Jackie Collins gets Hit Squadded very badly, Robert Maxwell reveals his favourite crustacean, Mike Smith is briefly in a celebrity disco plugging a record the identity of which is never made clear amid the gladhanding of Edwin Starr and Steve Walsh (no, the other one), three men make armpit farting noises and Tina Turner doesn't.
2nd November
20 YEARS AGO: if we must have pop-science, get yourself someone who can do both. Adam Hart-Davis, a kind of supercharged James Burke for the flashy graphics age, fronted Science Shack, home based in a flatpack shed erected near wherever their big test for the week was located. In this first episode that place is Magna Science Adventure Centre in Rotherham, where the question is whether walking on the ceiling can be achieved, which lends itself rather too well to Australia jokes. One of the team helping design the apparatus is Jeremy Stansfield, later of Bang Goes The Theory and last month recipient of £1.6m in damages from the BBC after suffering spine and brain injuries during a human crash test dummy stunt for the show, which is the kind of story you'd think would have been bigger than chancing across it in a minor science presenter's Wikipedia page.
20 YEARS AGO: because there clearly isn't enough extra material in these free newsletters we're going to start including one link that we didn't put on Twitter in each one. So let's remember how in the wake of 9/11 Shazia Mirza, less than a year into her career, suddenly got a lot of TV and media attention for being a headscarf wearing Muslim stand-up whose opening line was about having a pilot's licence, leading to an appearance on Have I Got News For You. Mirza has since commented on how nationalistic circumstances meant she was railroaded into a position above her ability. Also on the show was Boris Johnson.
20 YEARS AGO: so he began on a chat show, so from this day forward was Jonathan Ross doomed to spend the rest of his prime career, and also today, with a chair, table and appropriate sofa. The first Friday Night With Jonathan Ross booked a playfully combative John Lydon as the big guest, where he really lays into the common enemy... *checks notes* the drummer from Ash.
20 YEARS AGO: So Graham Norton welcomes one of those guests who you'd have thought would have been a prime candidate from the start of the series, Cher. Graham is flustered. It's a rare sight to see. There can't be many spaces where Cher and Jessie Wallace can co-exist, let alone the deviation into balloon fetishists.
30 YEARS AGO: whoever archived entire series of Motormouth is some kind of alternative genius. Bill Tidy, the cartoonist who seemed barely off kids' TV, is the main guest but we suspect wasn't meant to be. Jimmy White is in the TV listings, trailed in the introductory menu and listed in the credits clearly to help designer Archer Maclean promote Jimmy White's Whirlwind Snooker but he's evidently not turned up, leaving Andy Crane to take on a fast potting challenge for himself. You do kind of imagine expecting Jimmy White to get up early on a Saturday morning was a tall order. Also featuring 2 Unlimited, phone box art, kendo and Crane in a hotel room talking to Macauley Culkin and not asking him about the enormous flower in his lapel.
30 YEARS AGO: Caryl Churchill, in the running for the honor of the greatest living playwright, adapts her landmark examination of women in business and society Top Girls for BBC2's Performance, with the same director as the theatre production and Lesley Manville and Deborah Findlay from the original cast.
40 YEARS AGO: what's in Des O'Connor Tonight, er, tonight, and by extension the whole evening on BBC2? And what *are* the audience laughing at?
40 YEARS AGO: The Five Faces Of Doctor Who repeat run begins, as previewed by Blue Peter's beginner's guide to the series.
40 YEARS AGO: the second series of The Adventure Game begins with a lot of changes, not least moving from half an hour on Saturday morning BBC1 to its far more familiar home of BBC2 Monday evenings for 45 minutes. Creator Patrick Dowling reintroduces the whole high concept himself over a jaunty new brass band theme that sounds a lot like Hitchhikersy (in fact Dowling had approached Douglas Adams about writing the series but was turned down having presumably made the mistake of giving him a deadline), the running feature of the encaptured Lesley Judd as the mole embedded within is introduced, as is of the Vortex as the final test. Graeme Garden, who is very good at this until it rebounds upon him, "part time potterer" Carol Chell and "maestro of the magic cube" Nicolas Hammond are the initial visitors to Arg, which apparently can be accessed via a portal from Studio A.
40 YEARS AGO: The Innes Book Of Records finds welcome room for Neil's former colleague Vivian Stanshall.
50 YEARS AGO: Jack Charlton revisits and recalls his home town Ashington in Big Jack's Other World. Either Tyne Tees were still dealing in cliches or that's just what Jack's adolescence was as he attends a whippet race, plays bingo in a working men's club, visits a pigeon coop and watches a brass band performance.
WE'D LOVE TO HAVE BROUGHT YOU: 40 YEARS AGO we had our first exposure to the worst girl in the world in Marmalade Atkins In Space, initially only a one-off part of the Theatre Box series, written by Andrew Davies with John Bird, Dudley Sutton and Lynda Marchal/Le Plante caught in the whirlwind of thirteen year old Charlotte Coleman as Atkins. 20 YEARS AGO a very different type of child's storytelling started in Blue Peter's The Quest, a weekly bemusing adventure serial with a competition element exhibiting the pro-am abilities of the Huq/Baker/Barker/Thomas G.O.A.T. BP team. One episode involved Matt Baker's character having to catch sight of a secret code tattooed on Peter Duncan's arsecheek.
3rd November
20 YEARS AGO: we're not sure we've ever seen anyone get as increasingly visibly baffled with what's going on in front of them as wrestler Matt Hardy does throughout this SMTV Live. That said, if you were watching the, um, blowoff of clue-in-the-title recurring sketch F'Art Attack in which the actual Neil Buchanan appears and only helps completely unhook it from its moorings you might too. Lita is on with Hardy, as well as Steps and Westlife. A nearly uncut CD:UK follows featuring Britney, Geri, Cher, the Corrs, Jamiroquai and the Dandy Warhols.
20 YEARS AGO: Cliff Richard is Frank Skinner's guest. Confusingly, the closing song is based on a clip that's been cut out.
30 YEARS AGO: one of the early ways ITV filled night-time was Pick Of The Week, a compilation of And Finally stories from regional news shows (and the latest films) that had various hosts over the years, including a tyro Rob Brydon, and here is linked by Paperboy wrangler and latterday shopping channel maven Debbie Greenwood. The break is entirely taken up with PIFs, not least a reminder to dip, not dazzle.
40 YEARS AGO: Whitmore and Stuart are on News After Noon duty as British Leyland mostly come off strike for once, a nuclear submarine sinks off the coast of Sweden, new shuttle launches are still a huge deal enough to send Martin Bell to Cape Canaveral and John Sergeant, who had only earlier that year become a political correspondent, talks to Labour MP and Kinnock/Blair precursor Giles Radice.
40 YEARS AGO: Russell Harty becomes the first of many to underestimate Rik Mayall's capacity for misrule in inviting "phenomenon of the 625 line variety" Kevin Turvey onto his show. Elvis Costello is similarly bewildered. Costello, apparently unwilling to take his guitar off, was there to promote and play two songs from from his Nashville album Almost Blue.
1984: "I'll have a word with that David Icke for you!" A sentence that has a very different meaning these days, there. Simon Le Bon and Nick Rhodes visit Saturday Superstore and take part in the Pop Panel with Nik Kershaw, Derek Warwick and some women who aren't properly identified, one of whom has been carried there by Le Bon, her level of willingness unclear.
1990: is backing a BBC1 Saturday evening menu with Being Boring deliberate? Ahead of it all Stay Tooned explores cartoons' relationship with television itself. Tony Robinson has to explain that a Tom & Jerry short is spoofing The Man From UNCLE and wonders if a cartoon will eventually spoof The Young Ones, Neighbours or, er, Bergerac.
WE'D LOVE TO HAVE BROUGHT YOU: 20 YEARS AGO was an auspicious day for two TV hypes of the era, as The Premiership vacated the 7pm Saturday slot after ten game weeks, declining figures, the ire of Cilla Black and a permanent sign on the back to kick Andy Townsend by. Over on BBC2 the I Love franchise ended with I Love 1999, dangerously close to the I Love Last Tuesday hack joke of the day. Remember 23 months ago? Actually we'd be really keen to see that now just to know how that immediate nostalgia value squares against the actual nostalgia now whatever it covers is as old as I Love 1979 was then.
4th November
30 YEARS AGO: BBC Enterprises gets some prime BBC1 trailer time to exalt their international sales.
30 YEARS AGO: Cutting Edge's Volvo City meets the never before filmed, and largely by this never willingly filmed, 10,000 strong Orthodox Hasidic Jewish community of Stamford Hill, North London.
40 YEARS AGO: Gharbar was the BBC's weekly programme for the Asian community, running for a decade from 1977 until Network East took over in 1987, usually giving help for families. Lalita Ahmed, mother of Samira, talks to a home economist about saving on electricity bills.
40 YEARS AGO: the Crossroads Motel goes up in flames. What's left? What will happen? Who's responsible? Is Meg inside? And more importantly, why have all the uploads been taken down except this facile, wilf-voiced clip show bit that gets the year (and technically the channel) wrong?
1972: some second series Generation Game. Bruce suggests viewers send in their own game ideas and pronounces Michael Heseltine's surname "Hazeltine", there's a Guy Fawkes spin on the traditional celebrities in disguise opener which one team thinks Laurence Olivier would take part in, a Ronnie Hazlehurst namecheck gets knowing crew laughs, the sound of wellies being dropped is apparently very recognisable and the final game involves Mick McManus.
1989: it does *not* look an inviting day in Burnley for Pete and Michaela to be filming the intro to The Hit Man And Her outside today in 1989. Ruby Turner does a PA and there's a dance-off for which some competitors have come more prepared than others, and we can't let this pass without discussing Strachan's tiny captain's hat.
WE'D LOVE TO HAVE BROUGHT YOU: 30 YEARS AGO BBC2 gave sixteen daytime slots to the World Scrabble Championship, fronted by Alan Coren, which is fitting given you can just about imagine either of his children doing likewise, albeit in very different ways.
Today in TV history
Taking a random year and interrogating its schedules
This week: Sunday 5th November 1989
That RT cover has slightly baffled us, given the only new Jacobs series that week was Radio 2's Love's Old Sweet Song, a one-off on Saturday night, which seems to be David introducing covers of easy listening ballads. Was there literally nothing else new on? TV Times was promoting About Face, a kind of Six Dates With Lipman anthology of unconnected one-off sitcoms with scripts by Jack Rosenthal, Geoffrey Perkins and John Wells (who you'll be unsurprised to know played Denis Thatcher in it) among others.
BBC EVENING NEWS READER: Martyn Lewis
SMASH HITS COVER: Kylie and Jason
NO. 1 SINGLE: Lisa Stansfield - All Around The World
NO. 1 FILM: Shirley Valentine
FORGOTTEN PRIME-TIME SERIES: not many dramas written by Andrew Davies get forgotten but between A Very Peculiar Practice and House Of Cards fell Mother Love, a four part novel adaptation in which a jealous, controlling mother (Diana Rigg) interferes with her son's marriage and everyone's relationship with her ex-husband (David McCallum) Rigg actually won the Best Actress Bafta for her performance but everything Davies did around and after it has obscured it from view. Joan Bakewell appears in this episode as "television commentator". If the whole "acclaimed with awards" thing disqualifies it, ITV were halfway through the first of two series of Close To Home, the final sitcom by commercial channel writing stalwart Brian Cooke (Man About The House, George & Mildred, Robin's Nest, Father Dear Father) starring Paul Nicholas as a vet divorced from Angharad Rees with Lucy Benjamin as their daughter. If you know it, it might be for that out-take of an endlessly pissing pig.
IT WAS ONCE NEW: Bullseye, which appears in recent years to have gone from diverting Sunday afternoon quiz to the 1980s' equivalent of The World At War, was two shows into its ninth series. A big moment too as Mandy Solomons became the only woman to take home her own Bronze Bully after walking the charity 301 score challenge.
NONE MORE OF ITS TIME: from the days when the god slot was regularly preceded by something that had to have its own factsheet, Stepping Up was a five part series about the importance of communication and is surely the only programme to have had episodes hosted by both Alan Titchmarsh and Billy Bragg. For this fifth of eight instalments the indefatigable Beryl Reid refers to acting ability, with the vignette help of the original Aveline from Bread, Gilly Coman. Later on Joan Bakewell's moral maze series Heart Of The Matter is titled Cross-Channel Sex, about the much discussed and assumed at the time prospect of European porn reaching our televisions via that accursed satellite thing.
WAIT, WHAT?: Superdogs! Sounds like an ITV regional filler buy-in but is in fact Sunday afternoon BBC1 competition between gundogs, whippets and service dogs testing their agility, speed and obedience, all for the Winalot Challenge Trophy. Peter Purves commentates, because you'd expect nothing less. Elsewhere, how did Mark Curry get cast as a photographer on Bread?
WOULDN'T HAPPEN NOW: it's fascinating looking back at the pre-Simpsons days of Sky One how they expected to get by. Their prime-time line-up is Family Ties, 21 Jump Street and Bluegrass, a TV movie starring Cheryl Ladd as a woman involved in power games and underhanded dealings in the horse racing business, with weirdly strong support including Diane Ladd, Mickey Rooney and Anthony Andrews.
ON THE WAY UP: there was some kind of sea change with Carol Vorderman's prospects around the late 90s but before that all the work she had outside Countdown was in the weekday daytime and Sunday morning educational sphere, whether in science learning aids like Take Nobody's Word For It or more commonly attempting to defang the prospect of home computing, for BBC Schools' Micro Mindstretchers and then The Software Show, where this morning she explains word processing and, here's a phrase you won't have heard since the dawn of the internet, desk top publishing.
ON THE RADIO: Philip Schofield is still doing the afternoon Going Live On Radio 1 show before Mike Read enters his element with a pre-Top 40 series Chart Quiz, produced by Mark Radcliffe. Radio 2 are holding a Gilbert & Sullivan season with the sixth production being Princess Ida Or Castle Adamant, with later on a repeat of Radio 4's Stilgoe's Around, with Charles Collingwood, Belinda Lang and Northumbrian pipes maestro Kathryn Tickell in his supporting team. Czeslaw Milosz is Radio 3's Poet Of The Month. On Radio 4 Desert Island Discs welcomes Ian Botham, Clive Merrison is Sherlock Holmes in a new adaptation of A Study In Scarlet, telly's other favourite astronomer Heather Couper is in charge of Down Your Way, Victoria Wood and Willie Rushton are among the readers in children's half hour Cat's Whiskers and four days after airing there's a quick repeat for the fifth part of Douglas Adams' endangered species search Last Chance To See, in which he locates the Komodo dragon.
WHAT WOULD WE MOST LIKE TO SEE?: One Hour With Jonathan Ross was the series that fell between The Last Resort and Tonight, only lasting four months but giving Reeves, Mortimer, Whitehouse, Higson and Burke some vital work in the field of characters on television via the oddball quiz Knock Down Ginger. All of these appear in the trailer for this first show. While we're talking early Vic and Bob adopters, there's a handful of Jools Holland issue revival Juke Box Jury episodes around but this one, with a panel comprising David Essex, Rebel MC, Ade Edmondson and Antoine de Caunes, isn't one of them. Later on BBC2 The Magnum Story - no, stop it with your Selleck - tells the story of the hugely important photojournalism co-operative Magnum Photos. We'd also be keen on seeing that day's news bulletins and political shows just because this was four days away from the Berlin Wall opening.
WHAT CAN WE SEE?: that record breaking Bullseye is the first of the two shows in this video. Will the winning pair walk away with the chemistry set and ride-on toy plane? A nuclear leak ensues and a recruit is almost drowned in London's Burning. Slim Gaillard's Civilisation was a four part series in which the jazz great told his remarkable story, in this third party cooking dinner for and reminiscing with Dizzy Gillespie.
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