The Why Don't YouTube? Weekly Newsletter - January 29th 2024
From the house of @whydontyoutube
January 29th
40 YEARS AGO
People didn't know what to make of Ever Decreasing Circles for years, often dismissing it as another facile middle class suburban prime-time sitcom - sharing writers, Esmonde & Larbey, and star with The Good Life may not have helped in this regard. Over time however insiders and influential writers, most famously Ricky Gervais, began pointing out its subtleties and heart of darkness, Briers rating Martin Brice as his own favourite character for getting to dig into an unsympathetically officious, self-absorbed obsessive who cannot cope with Peter Egan's charm and love of life, who arrives in the first of 24 episodes.
20 YEARS AGO
As it went out in a Friday late night slot, refused to drop character until too late and picked up online word of mouth of the kind where any statement can be believed because nobody with a voice can be arsed to bury the self-regarding legend (see under 'The Office had no prior publicity and all critics hated it'), sometimes it feels like the American wing of the internet thinks British comedy was invented by Garth Marenghi's Darkplace - and by the way, it's MArenghi, not MErenghi, see also Mary Hopkin, she must despair - as the Edinburgh hit moved from spoof of overwrought student play to spoof of overwrought 80s horror drama without giving time to allow the viewer to remember that stage and television never actually did those. Low-budget shows didn't even look like that on early Channel 4, as the most casual glance at Dream Stuffing or Struggle will prove, while contemporary ITV's Hammer Horrors and Tales Of The Unexpected had full grip of atmosphere and basic broadcast production values. What it actually resembles is the kind of thing made somewhere in eastern Europe or India that you only ever see in YouTube visual essays about bad genre films, but that's not post-modern.
ALSO...
1968: Nice Time was a Granada series produced by John Birt which was Cuddly Ken's TV breakthrough. Also featuring Germaine Greer and Candid Camera's Jonathan Routh, it’s pitched somewhere between offbeat magazine and leftfield sketch show, featuring singing into bananas, an orchestra of saws, an electric shock doll and an actual window cleaner. Of course Everett always refers to it as 'Granada Telly'.
1982: bringing a whole new meaning to Television Simply Wonderful, 29 men in their Speedos compete to be named Mr TSW 1982, one of the prizes being a holiday in Austria. Wonder if this is still on Judi Spiers' CV.
1986: "Women playing football? Probably something you've never seen on television before." Ah, the passage of time. BBC Schools' Scene asks how women's sport in general can be promoted, following a Welsh rugby club whose players get pissed and sing just as much as them boys do.
1990: in a clip that demonstrates the old Television Centre/Children’s BBC family in action, Andy Crane gets a personal carrot cake delivery from Yvette Fielding.
January 30th
50 YEARS AGO
Happy 50th (today, not then) to Olivia Colman. Her AA advert you probably know about. Her National Lottery advert three years earlier probably less so.
In Till Death Us Do Part Else responds to the three day week by starting one of her own and forcing Alf to cook his own dinner. So far so inevitable, you may think, but the three day week had been in force since start of year, and the previous episode touched on the ongoing miners strike and blackouts. How close to transmission were these episodes being written, Johnny?
40 YEARS AGO
Words And Pictures HQ is having noise problems. Some talk about Who Framed Roger Rabbit? as a breakthrough in combining live action and animation, but...
30 YEARS AGO
Paul Whitehouse and Charlie Higson contributed The Honeymoon's Over as the last of the sitcom pilot series Comic Asides, starring Alex Lowe and Angela Clarke as a bickering couple along with the recently deceased Georgina Hale. With Not The Nine O'Clock News co-creator Sean Hardie script editing and Smell Of Reeves & Mortimer and Harry Enfield producer John Birkin on board, not to mention roles for Whitehouse, Mark Williams and an almost realism-breaking Vic Reeves, it's surprising it didn't get more of a look but Whitehouse and Higson would have another series to take up their time soon enough.
20 YEARS AGO
Peter Kay made two appearances on Coronation Street, one in 1997 as a corner shop shopfitter with two lines, the second getting the A-plot as a Newton & Ridley drayman who took Shelley Unwin, old friend Sally Lindsay, out on a date until she discovered he lived with his mother (Janice Connolly, Holy Mary in Phoenix Nights)
ALSO...
1973: Yorkshire documentary Too Long A Winter, tracing those making a living off Pennine farmland during the harsh winter months, made a star of Hannah Hauxwell, somehow only 46, who lived alone in a dilapidated farmhouse without electricity or running water on poverty line annual income. She doesn't even appear until sixteen minutes in and that spotlight seems very vaguely unfair on the Rainbridge couple, who are the first people we meet as they have to move back and end up having to dig out trapped sheep from a blizzard.
1975: Footsee by Wigan's Chosen Few was both one of the first big Northern Soul hits and a shameless, much hated cash-in on the Northern Soul scene (Wigan's choosing one Stuart Maconie described it as an "embarrassing novelty"), DJ Dave McAleer remixing and speeding up an obscure Canadian single's B-side and claiming it for himself. Such was his influence that he convinced a group of Wigan Casino dancers to show off their moves in the Top Of The Pops studio in lieu of anyone to pretend to play the thing.
1993: Channel 4 had already aired Don't Try This At Home but Penn & Teller's first appearance actually on UK TV was on Saturday Zoo, playing roulette with rat traps. You'll notice from the subsequent link into the break that Mike Smash, who had appeared in chrysalis form back on One Hour With Jonathan Ross, was also a guest, though only for this moment and shot in a way that suggests he wasn't there at the same time as everyone else.
1995: Champion Telly Addicts celebrated a decade of hoofer-doofering by putting the previous champions into a tournament. Fair warning that this is during the period Charles Collingwood was humiliating himself as comedy scorer, but at least it's not the revamped version of the show.
January 31st
40 YEARS AGO
Mel Smith and Griff Rhys Jones had already formed Talkback together for a series of radio commercials but with Rowan Atkinson clearly going on to bigger things and Pamela Stephenson going on to things they were left spare to form an on-air partnership, firstly for a sketch as part of 1982's The Funny Side Of Christmas, then as Alas Smith And Jones, a clever title but one that confused a generation of young people when the series whose title it was riffing on was ever shown. Very much still in the Not The Nine sketch mould right down to a specific music spoof - Griff as Cher, come on now - the head to heads, inspired by those radio spots and the Dagenham Dialogues, start here.
ALSO...
1980: Tomorrow's World's Michael Rodd reports on ongoing developments in the video recorder market - you can pre-programme them now! - and the potential gamechanger of the Phillips LaserDisc.
1982: the pop artist Peter Blake once confessed that his fantasy was to become a masked wrestler. Arena couldn't arrange that but the cleverly titled Masters Of The Canvas did allow the next big thing, Blake painting Kendo Nagasaki's portrait while the producer attempts to cut through the mystique and gain a few words with the notoriously silent and anonymous grappler.
February 1st
30 YEARS AGO
Sporting a title that looks like it's ridden with typos but it's how it reads in the opening graphic, Whicker's World Abroad The Real Oriental Express, presumably as opposed to all those bootleg Oriental Expresses, is almost a parody of a Whicker film, travelling in great comfort and ridiculous opulence across far-flung outposts (Bangkok, Singapore, Kuala Lumpur) on the first journey of a new train amid royalty, namely Prince and Princess Michael of Kent and the Earl of Snowden.
20 YEARS AGO
After 33 years the grand buildings of Pebble Mill had fallen into disrepair due to issues with the BBC's lease, production values and the concrete, so the Beeb were in the process of moving everything to The Mailbox - they eventually taped off the hulking embers and left its corridors to its ghosts of Kenny Ball's Jazzmen and Five Star routines in October - and memorialising it all in Goodbye Pebble Mill. Toyah Wilcox does the location walkaround as memories are shared by Christopher Timothy, John Craven, Warren Clarke, Cliff Richard, Anne & Nick, and most importantly Bob Langley and Marian Foster. All that and a fantastic clip of a pissed Molly Parkin (still alive! Turns 92 on the 3rd!) live on Pebble Mill At One.
ALSO...
1979: Belgian disco/samba/flailing-hairy-man-with-congas outfit Two Man Sound, featuring the people who had both written and secretly sang Plastic Bertrand's Ca Plane Pour Moi, give the kind of Top Of The Pops performance that leaves lots of questions unanswered.
1983: the first morning of breakfast television on ITV and, with Channel 4's best wishes behind them, the start of surprisingly only nine years of trying to work out whether to refer to it as TV-am or Good Morning Britain. Our big name hosts are all in place to take us through and David Frost has his first words absolutely worked out. Our favourite part of this first link is by some distance Angela making a point of telling us all proceeds from the first advert break would be going to "a charity for the mentally handicapped", followed by an advert break that due to disputes with Equity comprises one commercial. The Daybreak hour with Robert Kee, the Horst Buchholz of the Famous Five, starts us off with Nick Owen on sport duty and Commander Philpott at his stentorian best; once the meat of the morning gets going there's, as David Frost puts it, "some surprises - one of the surprises is John Cleese". That said it's no secret that TV-am had prepared for any BBC incursion on their territory by foregrounding a hard news agenda only to find pastel sofas and Frank in jumpers, and this is before they worked out that Frost conducting hard news interviews isn't what anyone wants at 7.10am. It's not until 8.20am that a recently woken Cleese appears for the first truly light item of the entire morning, and their ideas of levity are live comic strip The World of Melanie Parker imported from LBC, Lynn Faulds Wood as "consumer sleuth" and Through The Keyhole with the house owner introduced before Loyd Grossman but him still having to guess whose house it was which takes the point out of it. The last minute is weirdly airless for the end of a groundbreaking show, but god forbid they seem inviting.
1985: two years to the day later TV-am has sorted the work/life balance out a bit and celebrates its second birthday by having Frost pop by like a ghost of beige sets past. An accompanying behind the scenes feature starts with Nick Owen having his morning wash before showing everyone arriving and preparing - spot the dig at the opposition - though how Anne Diamond chose that day's bright yellow and brown jumpsuit with matching headband remains untold. Later on Willis and Rat are united in meeting the winner of a birthday card competition. Are they sure they've got enough people on the couches?
1985: ORS 85 is invaded by the Fink Brothers. Who they? They Suggs and Chas Smash of Madness, who reached number 50 with hip hop inspired 2000AD tribute single Mutants In Mega City One. For the occasion they dressed as favoured characters. Just to check, Worzel Gummidge was in the comic, wasn't he?
1986: Lenny Henry, who as a mainstream star on the periphery of the alternative scene had fronted the pilot of Saturday Live, came back to host its second proper edition in his jacket made from Rupert The Bear's trousers and brought some of his usual characters - David Bellamy, Delbert Wilkins, a current black singer (Sade) - with him. Although there's a surprising amount of Pete McCarthy involved Ben Elton, Fry & Laurie and The Dangerous Brothers of the classic line-up are already involved, the latter being answerable to John Bird, and as it's the mid-80s The Oblivion Boys show up amidst American stand-up Carrie Snow, music from The Damned, Level 42, the Mint Juleps, and Notting Hills Cop, a Henry pre-filmed parody with the impressive support of Timothy Spall, Hugh Laurie, Morwenna Banks and perennial comedy policeman David Lodge. Lenny ends by singing Sam Cooke songs with the Mint Juleps and whatever form Darts were taking by then.
February 2nd
40 YEARS AGO
Matthew Wilder gets in and amongst his Top Of The Pops people. Actually it's probably just Zoo members, isn't it.
30 YEARS AGO
Robin Williams visits Des O'Connor Tonight for the release of Mrs Doubtfire and, confronted by Des' tea tray welcome, is in a lively mood.
Back in the days when everything was dial-up and people barely knew what the World Wide Web was "teenagers on the edge of acceptable behaviour" documentary series Walk On The Wild Side watched two Hackers And Phreakers, appropriately, "surf in cyberspace".
20 YEARS AGO
On the same day that ITV plc was formed as a result of the Carlton/Granada merger, the hulking independent broadcasting monolith buying up GMTV while they were at it, the late news moved back half an hour and ITV were proud about it. This was the prime News At When? era, as it had only been back at ten for two years after the ill-fated 11pm experiment and went back there from January 2008.
February 3rd
40 YEARS AGO
The Tube hosts a Scouse rentagob-off with the coming bitchy force of Pete Burns at one end claiming to have come back off strike in protest at Boy George's success and Holly Johnson, with Relax still at number one and earning itself a special disc, interviewed by Leslie Ash at the other. Interestingly he claims the second single, while having the video concept worked out, was possibly going to Slave To The Rhythm , and they did record a demo before it was given to Grace Jones.
The climax of Doctor Who story Frontios, a particular favourite of Peter Davison's, features evil of the week the Gravis has somehow got into the TARDIS, which had previously been destroyed at the end of part one and embedded within rock walls. All the Doctor has to do is convince it to help them...
Brigit Forsyth's main sitcom work between The Likely Ladsverse and Still Open All Hours was co-starring with Janette Beverley, who didn't do anything else of note bar three months on Corrie, in office and class based Sharon And Elsie, which ACTUALLY got TWO series SO THERE. Talking of the Street, Maggie Jones gets in some busybody practice as the tea lady.
30 YEARS AGO
Michael Palin's travel credentials were long since established when Great Railway Journeys sent him from Derry To Kerry, far less far than usual but with sectarianism, his own family roots near Cork and his love of rail travel to the fore.
ALSO...
1982: Rod Hull gets the This Is Your Life big red book, featuring a set-up that not content with Eamonn's greatest disguise yet brings together Sally James and Keith Chegwin in a hands across the Saturday morning airwaves moment through the medium of CB-TV. Warren Mitchell sends a message with his top off while Michael Parkinson keeps himself to the other end of a pre-recorded video, not unreasonably given the audience reaction when the clip is introduced.
1993: Chris Evans' mum is in for The Big Breakfast, which must have led to quiet conversations once Zag has demonstrated his "self peeling banana".
1995: an infamous if now forgotten moment when ITV's morning talk-in The Time The Place was dragged off air eight minutes or so early after a Black model had been shown walking around Nottingham wearing a skirt and onlookers accused the programme of racism in a direct way. John Stapleton's entreaties are ineffective, Richard Madeley's bemusement at being brought on early is palpable.
2001: Caprice and that perennial kids' favourite Mark Lamarr appear in SMTV Live’s Chums, which seems for the most part to be entertainingly hanging on by a thread, especially when the guests absolutely lose it at a big reveal. Lamarr's reaction to having to deliver a remarkable double entrende is about right.
February 4th
40 YEARS AGO
An Audience With Mel Brooks is the fourth in the Q&A series, promoting To Be Or Not To Be and enlivened by a cold open in which Brooks affects to recognise Duncan Goodhew and Derek Nimmo. Once in front of the audience he's on hot biographical and one-liner form, challenging Jonathan Pryce to a Hamlet-off at Helen Mirren's urging, Ronny Graham - Brooks' co-writer on the film (and later Spaceballs) - at the piano allowing Mel to show his pleasing baritone, and a big finish with 'er indoors Anne Bancroft doing a lot better than she would with Wogan. This is also, we believe, the only time Brooks and Bernie Winters interacted publicly.
Christopher Reeve tells Wogan about why he might do Superman IV, machismo and flying solo across the Atlantic to the wrong place.
The Comic Strip Presents: Eddie Monsoon – A Life?, which initially began as Back To Normal With Eddie Monsoon, a Derek & Clive-indebted, mostly Ade Edmondson scripted spoof chat show intended to have gone out a year earlier in the first series but so gross and libellous that Channel 4's lawyers prevented it from being filmed. The whole story was regrounded possibly as therapy into a fake documentary, having proved a successful format for Edmondson with Bad News Tour, Late Night Line-Up veteran Tony Bilbow profiling the unsympathetic, incompetent arsehole who, you feel, would have made a hugely successful YouTuber these days. Is Eddie related to Edina? Has anyone ever asked Jennifer?
30 YEARS AGO
Home Truths was a shortlived Steve Wright game show, and that's "shortlived" as with every Steve Wright TV vehicle, in which celebrities answer questions on themselves and each other, those here being Tim Rice, Carol Thatcher and Clive Mantle.
We were tempted to include this just for BBC Wales' politics trailer but the main event is Tomorrow's World, featuring the Winter Olympics, cochlear implants - with operation close-ups - Channel Tunnel holdups, and lager heads.
Jonathan Meades ends his Further Abroad series in Belgium, where he finds plenty of oddness, architecture and chips, and that penguin suit bloke Eurotrash later got obsessed about.
20 YEARS AGO
As part of a series on comic influences, a superior form of clip show as Ronnie Barker introduces his own Comedy Heroes.
ALSO...
1983: hope you like OMD's new direction. The Tube's audience are a notable split second slow to respond.
1995: The Danny Baker Show, his second go at a Lettermanic BBC1 late Saturday night chat show, welcomes William Shatner in a hotel room answering questions about British telly, Nichelle Nichols, and then completely off any thematic link Mark Lamarr, Adam Ant and Suede. "Heavy metal magazine Loaded"?
GREAT NEWS INSIDE FOR ALL READERS!
Due to workload and spare time constraints, not least as we're attempting to finally cash in on this thing and get a WDYT?-related book done this year (and if you know a good interested publisher...), we're going to be paring down the Newsletter for a good while. That means, some might say counterintuitively, splitting it in half - you'll be receiving the best of our ten years of archive covering the week ahead on a Monday morning and then a straight digest of social media posts from the preceding week after the last one has gone out on Sunday evening, so those will start from the 11th. As that suggests, we'll still maintain the regular posting service on X-formerly-known-as-Twitter and Bluesky-always-known-as-Bluesky because we've done all this research now.
Like what we do? Why not support us? https://ko-fi.com/whydontyoutube
