The Why Don't YouTube? Weekly Newsletter - October 23rd 2023
From the house of @whydontyoutube
October 23rd
50 YEARS AGO
The warhorse of independent television playlets Armchair Theatre was into its penultimate year by now and pushing outwards from what might have been expected of it. Verite is about an actorly minded middle-class couple whose life is invaded by an American underground film-maker - Tim Curry headhunted from the Rocky Horror Show which began earlier in the year, given his first significant screen role and sporting just as outrageously awry an American accent - and his partner, a memorable turn from proto-Sandra Dickinson Beth Porter. The wife of the couple is Annabel Leventon, who Curry recommended to the production as a colleague in that original Rocky Horror cast. Writer Howard Schuman went on to pen Rock Follies which Porter and briefly Curry appeared in, having as acknowledged through legal action ripped off the idea from Rock Bottom, an actual cabaret rock trio who had pitched their own series to ITV and featured, um, Annabel Leventon. Warning: features entirely unnecessary N-word in the first minute.
40 YEARS AGO
After setting its stall out in the previous autumn's series Clive James On Television returned to loquaciously slice and dice foreign telly, though sadly we can only find two from the series. James now has the more familiar set of big LWT desk next to a CRT set to talk us through American product placement, sexual frankness - so, yes, a string of women with no tops on, obviously - an advert for Anusol that assumes it could never be in a British commercial (which it has been since 2018) and, yes, a Japanese game show.
30 YEARS AGO
Rory Bremner - Who Else? was the start of the impressionist's Channel 4 years, bringing John Bird and John Fortune with him if not putting their names in the title to complement their George Parr interviews. With what would be Radio 5 Live just announced he can't wait to get his commentator impressions in.
October 24th
50 YEARS AGO
Twinkle Twinkle Little Star, an infamous episode of Man Alive anchored by the reassuring voice of John Pitman, dealt with the music industry's attempt to find a British pre-teen star to rival the Osmond/Jackson invasion. Although Ricky Wilde, later younger sister Kim's co-writer and producer, is among those featured the centrepiece is eleven year old Darren Burn, an ex-choirboy signed by EMI where his dad just happened to be a promoter, and as such got an enormous publicity push. His only single peaked at number 60 and he fell into depression and drug addiction before committing suicide aged 30. When did NME editors stop looking like Willie Rushton?
40 YEARS AGO
BBC1's big replacement for Nationwide was the harder edged Sixty Minutes, which apparently required five presenter-reporter-newsreaders in the studio. It's not especially joyous the day after 307 people were killed in a bombing of the peacekeeping force barracks in Beirut, despite Nick Ross' promise of "the donkey that's about to give birth to the zebra". Desmond Wilcox makes a point of including the end of the programme in listing the highlights. We're not entirely sure about this given it's not trailed and the news agenda is busy but the BBC itself list this as the date of broadcast for their feature at home with Captain Sensible and his rabbit.
Craig Charles goes all Luddite for his poetry reading TV debut on Riverside. The programme clearly had a few days' rental of that gasworks as they placed Cure/Banshees side project The Glove there, while also popping up to Liverpool for a feature that tries very hard to make connections between gaming and pop on Imagine Software, the media poster boys of the home computing boom who had Bandersnatch in their back pocket which was bound to be an enormous hit. Right?
It was on this day 70 YEARS AGO that a variety show hosted by Max Bygraves and featuring Morecambe & Wise became the first programme to be broadcast from the BBC Television Theatre in Shepherd's Bush. Thirty years later The Bob Monkhouse Show developed its variety tradition by means of the host, tempted over from ITV as he refers to in his opening monologue, providing a feed for his favourite comedians. First time out these are impressionist Rich Little, who of course ends up conversing with Janet Brown, and, getting a notable reaction from the audience just for a namecheck, Bob Hope. Singing as a means of ending conversation takes place throughout.
30 YEARS AGO
The last of the year's new Screen Ones, The Bullion Boys won the International Emmy Award for Drama, which is weird as it’s essentially an Ealing caper. Produced and directed by Christopher Morahan, former BBC head of plays who co-created and co-directed The Jewel In The Crown, David Jason is a Scouse docker's leader in an evocatively detailed 1940, having a brave tilt at the accent but an experienced natural at the dodgy dealing and streetwise elements, who tries to cash in upon learning the nation's gold reserves are to be partially stored in a local bank and his team are due to unload it all. Gorden Kaye is the bank manager, Tim Pigott-Smith the shady agent who makes the deal for the bars, Brenda Blethyn and Geoffrey Hutchings the Ministry of Defence employees for whom the heist is mere supposition.
20 YEARS AGO
Concorde made its final flight, or really final three flights. Working Lunch had been building up to it throughout the week, with Adrian Chiles being shown round the plane by its chief pilot three days earlier; as for the last landing BBC2 were in position all afternoon, joined by Raymond Baxter in the makeshift studio. For brevity, the Six O'Clock News report with Jeremy Bowen having arrived with everyone else at Heathrow and comment from Duke of Edinburgh and Richard Branson is a neat summation, the One O'Clock News preview with people on board from holidaymakers to David Frost, and the Ten O'Clock News gets together its footage talking to famous people on board and Bowen delivering a piece to camera at Mach 2.
October 25th
40 YEARS AGO
Oh my, those Harty titles. Would that we ever saw the like. A Venice residing Meg Mortimer had literally just returned to Jill and Adam's life in Crossroads for two episodes so Harty used the opportunity to catch up with Noele Gordon after her tearful appearance on being fired two years earlier, and then abuses his position to organise a duet to close.
Don't Wait Up was one of those stealth prime-time sitcom successes that tend to only get noticed once people spot they're continually being renewed, as George Layton's amenable story of Tony Britton and Nigel Havers as a doctor father and son forced to move in together was for a total of six series, 32 of the 39 episodes contained herein.
20 YEARS AGO
Michael Parkinson was not without his faults. Well, evidently, everyone knew that while he was active, but he really couldn't cope when someone obviously not being funny couldn't go along with his line of questioning. This is a roundabout way of saying it's the Meg Ryan interview. Parkinson blamed her "unforgivable" behaviour though did admit many years later he'd got it wrong, Ryan called him a "disapproving father". For some reason the BBC have uploaded three minutes of themselves, maybe to locate the core awkwardness.
October 26th
40 YEARS AGO
Noele Gordon went on Good Morning Britain too to talk to Anne Diamond in her bright yellow sweater about people who think the Motel is real. What she made of Roland Rat is left opaque, though he's more interested in talking to Steve Steen and Jim Sweeney, who we think would have been promoting long forgotten Channel 4 stand-up showcase Interference, while Anne, who has changed her jumper to something almost as distracting, has "Britain's most eatable apples".
A small nugget of Behind The Bike Sheds, Yorkshire's Children's ITV sketch and song show depicting the pupils of Fulley Comprehensive school - yes, we see, very good - and their cartoonish teachers. Unfortunately what we have comes under the song portion, a touching duet between Lee Whitlock, latterly of Shine on Harvey Moon, and Jenny Jay, who would go on to be Carmen in Bread but if you've been around here long enough you will remember best for inventing the Chas-Di dance. (Oh, go and look in the archive)
30 YEARS AGO
A Without Walls documentary about A Clockwork Orange ran into an immediate foreseeable difficulty, namely that the film was still banned on Stanley Kubrick's orders and its international distributors Time Warner filed an injunction preventing Channel 4 from screening any of it. The Court of Appeal ruled against them on the basis that their argument, that the documentary could not exercise free use rules for the purposes of criticism because it hadn't been shown anywhere, didn't make sense, and so after a three week delay Forbidden Fruit used just under ten minutes in total to illustrate the power of a film then banned in Britain for twenty years (and for six more until after Kubrick's death), discussed by that arbiter of freedom of thought Tony Parsons.
October 27th
40 YEARS AGO
In a bravura move TV Eye builds its own cruise missile launcher to the exact specifics and has it convoyed across the road network to Greenham Common as actual missiles were about to arrive there, to demonstrate what might happen should launch be required. Frankly they're just holding up village traffic for their own sake.
30 YEARS AGO
You wouldn't have thought a comedy written by David Nobbs and starring Stephen Fry, Nicholas Lyndhurst, Geoffrey Palmer and Hugh Bonneville could be immediately forgotten but such was the fate, if likely given a push in the direction of the obscurity file by it being on ITV, of Stalag Luft, in which Fry is a RAF POW making the latest of a number of escape attempts, the latest leading to all the German staff, led by Palmer, escaping. Actually it feels like a sitcom pilot or sketch series that has far outstayed its welcome, flirting with undermining British war film cliches and grinding up against the boundaries of keeping a silly idea going. Sam Kelly plays Hitler.
John Byrne cast his old Tutti Frutti star and man with a history of playing the character in a comedic historical context Robbie Coltrane as Dr Samuel Johnson in his Screenplay effort Boswell And Johnson's Tour Of The Western Isles, with John Sessions as his companion and biographer, with both men's diaries used as seen fit within the bounds of deliberately anachronistic liberty. Among those chanced across en route are Celia Imrie and an instantly recognisable Ian Dury.
20 YEARS AGO
The Frank Skinner Show welcomes Helen Mirren and Matthew Kelly. Ah, it's that one. See, that January Kelly had been arrested over allegations of child sex abuse and then cleared of all charges a month later, between which times Frank had made jokes about it because pre-Savile that's what you could do on television. Kelly bringing it up and Skinner attempting vainly to squirm out of it is a fascinating moment, and so is that it actually took place after the interview portion had finished and Skinner insisted it be included in the edit.
October 28th
40 YEARS AGO
The Tube returns for its second series, with Leslie Ash covering for Paula Yates who was on maternity leave, French & Saunders in the pub throughout and sets from Eurythmics, Annie Lennox, Dave Stewart, Public Image Ltd slipping in Anarchy In The UK and amusing the two overkeen gents at the front and a single song and gone appearance by Billy Bragg. Elsewhere on Channel 4 that night Tefal heads, the opportunity to buy your own snooker table, an advert for office LAN systems and CU Jimmy recommending the Russ Abbot's Madhouse album personally.
Family Fortunes may be most famous for two incidents, the "name a famous Irishman" round that threatens never to stop or land on a right answer, and of course Bob Johnson answering "turkey" to the first three questions in the Big Money Round, later claiming to his family that he had overheard one question to which it was a viable answer and out of caution used it for all the preceding questions to save time. Remarkably, they were in the same episode - Max Bygraves’ third ever, at that, and Bob ("I like him, he's got a good laugh" says Max unaware of what's to come) is one of those initial Gaelic knownothings on the buzzer. To compound matters when someone does actually think of a famous Irishman, the then Taoiseach Garret FitzGerald, it's not among the top eight answers. No wonder before getting there Bygraves mishears the answer of Shughie McFee. And he wasn't Irish either. *And* after all that turkey was only worth 21 points despite surely being the most immediately obvious answer to the question.
30 YEARS AGO
Channel 4's self-explanatory Slattery-helmed The Music Game invites in the spectacular booking triumvirate of Neil Innes, Betty Boo and Nicholas Parsons, who begins the show in full voice accompanied by Richard Vranch.
20 YEARS AGO
It's tempting to say you don't see a full episode of RI:SE every day but people as a rule didn't see a full episode of RI:SE while it was going out. Smarm, overmanning and video walls long since passed, it's not too far off its death throes as it ended the week before Christmas, which may explain the heavy reliance on reality shows and film premieres, Dougie Anderson and Kate Lawler presenting as a wish.com Johnny and Denise act without the chemistry. Actually Anderson does get to do a presser with Meg Ryan, which obviously Lawler trails with "she was horrible to Parky". The actual best moment is a Daily Mail cutting about modern schoolyard language in which practically everything is obviously made up.
October 29th
50 YEARS AGO
Alison Steadman, in her second credit, appeared in two episodes of Z Cars as young WPC Baylis. Although her central part in the episode, as one of two officers investigating an apparently paranoid woman, gives her something to work with she didn't enjoy working on the programme, believing she had been miscast and later claiming she was bullied so much by the female director that she nearly quit acting altogether. Notably the director credited on this episode is Julia Smith, the future Eastenders co-creator. Among fellow residents of Newtown are Barrie 'hi, I'm Barrie Gosney' Gosney and Patsy Byrne.
40 YEARS AGO
After a spat involving upholding Top Of The Pops' great tradition of not playing records falling down the chart that at one point led to him threatening to withdraw the right to play any of his music from the BBC, Paul and Linda McCartney debut the Say Say Say video under protest on The Late Late Breakfast Show, their fifteen minute slot in turn reducing Give It A Whirl significantly and upsetting billed main guest Olivia Newton-John, who also has a video to show us. Actually performing in the studio are Madness, after which Noel has some pictures of them in which they look slightly different (in Japan)
We're rocking and we're rolling and we're tuning into a new series of Russ Abbot's Madhouse with all the gang supporting - Les, Dustin, Bella, Jeffrey, the one people forget Sherrie Hewson and the one people really forget Susie Blake, who gets to use her As Seen On TV continuity voice. There are teddy boys. And blacking up.
30 YEARS AGO
It's remarkable to think Good Morning With Anne & Nick lasted until summer 1996 given most abandoned it before it was out of its first few months, by now a year past. Tammy Wynette is in all morning among the usual morning magazine fare - visiting some expats, Stefan Buczacki looking like a professional Richard Stilgoe lookalike in their own garden, an ongoing human interest story (Ben Needham, still unsolved but probably killed in an accident), showbiz "goss" with the unlikely sentence "it's rumoured Mr Blobby is the man behind George Michael's career" and the belief David Hasselhoff could be a new Doctor Who - and some unique content, not least the video multi-part picture casebook A Touch Of Love and two Wrens being taken to Blackpool and meeting Little & Large. Please be aware there's Bonfire Night content but not Halloween despite being the last weekday of October, and the invariable chef is notable in its own way as it was the now David Hudson-Halls' first TV cooking appearance (he'd appeared on Noel's House Party earlier in the year as the pair had been Gotcha'd) since Peter Hudson died more than a year earlier and his only one, as he would be found dead of a deliberate overdose on 24th November.
Pebble Mill welcomes Max Bygraves, but when was he ever not welcome in Birmingham studios, and Craig Charles to promote, er, The Cat's single, and to make the trip allegedly worthwhile he's written a love poem for Judi Spiers. Ross King goes behind the scenes at a typical Jean-Michelle Jarre ubergig while in the studio are "a group who are sure to be a hit", The Affair. Afterwards King returns to update matters from earlier, so clearly Anne and Nick couldn't be arsed to hang around as Buczacki has to trail and coda the whole show.
The 142nd and last edition of Every Second Counts, and not a moment too soon if that contestant impersonating Bruce Forsyth is anything to go by.
Another new series of Beadle's About begins, the eighth in fact, and despite the reputation Jeremy had as Britain's most hated man just listen to the volume of that crowd, loud by even LWT LE standards of the day. Our patsies are confronted with a Chinese soup factory - you know, one of those things that exists - the kind of face exercises for healthy skin that are now likely being offered at forty quid a session by influencers and animals in a dematerialising transporter, which though it goes unsaid would only surely catch out the genuinely thick, and given she continues after a man in a gorilla suit - go on, guess - appears.
To tie in with Thatcher: The Downing Street Years BBC2 had been running a week of Maggiecentric programming both analytical and comedic, including Thatcherworld, a Spitting Image production based in a historical theme park starring Gary Olsen and Frances Barber which we'd love to see. The season ended with Have I Got News For You: The Downing Street Years, with guests Derek Hatton and Edwina Currie sniping at each other throughout and having their jokes and anecdotes fall flat. Both Ian and Paul have said this is the worst episode they ever did.
A fast paced sketch show primarily starring Caroline Aherne and John Thomson, well before their more famous fast paced sketch show, featuring appearances by among others Bill Bailey, Simon Day, Sean Lock, David Schneider, Felix Dexter, Brenda Gilhooly, Malcolm Hardee, Stephen Frost, Mark Arden and Charlie Chuck plus Judge James Pickles, Basil Brush and - apologies - Stuart Hall? You wonder how exactly you've never heard of 11pm Granada-only series The Full Monty, and then you watch it. Eleven people are credited with the script and none of them are listed above, and it shows. What may be worthwhile are a showcase Lee Evans set, a beta version of Roy and Renée, an attempted Laugh-In Cocktail Party (they’d already reused the Joke Wall) where the execution is more Tiswas Disco and a reminder of Woody Bop Muddy's Record Graveyard.
When BBC2 began showing The Larry Sanders Show Jonathan Ross was sent to New York to introduce the first episodes. As illustration of the form Garry Shandling was taking on he also introduced the first Late Night With Conan O'Brien from six weeks earlier and filled in the background.
20 YEARS AGO
Ian Duncan-Smith is ousted as Conservative leader, as previewed over two hours of The Daily Politics including Prime Minister's Questions and Tim Rice, and reviewed on the BBC Ten O'Clock News. Ann Widdecombe is very available for both, obviously.
FROM THE ARCHIVE
October 23rd
1982: there was a time when The Bubble Man Tom Noddy was unknown. That state ended when one man, several cigarettes, one straw and a whole load of special mixture appeared on the Paul Daniels Magic Show and created a legend.
1988: The Media Show predicts what television will be like come the turn of the century with a motley crew of guests ranging from Esther Rantzen to PJ O'Rourke via Kate Adie, Greg Dyke, Griff Rhys Jones and Michael Fish.
1992: Victor & Hugo: Bunglers In Crime is the forgotten third part of the Cosgrove Hall David Jason trilogy, starring him and Brian Trueman as clumsy French petty thieves derived from a Count Duckula episode. Their legacy and lineage is made more apparent in an episode where the pair are hired by Baron Greenback to steal the Mark III, one by replacing Penfold's temporary replacement. So yes, technically this is the final original style Danger Mouse episode.
October 24th
1980: with the news having broken that he was leaving Who earlier in the day, and possibly having partaken of a pre-show cocktail as a result, Tom Baker popped by Nationwide to lay out his exit plans.
1981: INTERNATIONAL SMITHY'S KAFF DAY! Once seen, perhaps literally, on Anglia and never forgotten.
1996: An Audience With Sooty? Is this canon? Actually yes, as all the celebrities have brought their children. Matthew necessarily leading the banter and working the crowd somehow leads to the line "Geraldine James, you're experienced in kissing", which is diplomatic given she was in Band Of Gold at the time. But let's admit, there's something very weird about hearing Soo namecheck Helen Lederer and admitting to fancying Sean Blowers.
October 26th
1989: Nigel Lawson resigned as Chancellor of the Exchequer. By coincidence a team from Open Air were filming in the newsroom on what was looking like a slow news day until the story broke nine minutes before the Six O'Clock News. Followers of the Corporation's latterday behind the scenes goings on may recognise a few names working the floor here.
October 27th
1972: Magpie is undergoing a regeneration as Tony Bastable is moving upstairs to become producer and being replaced by someone who "looks a little bit like Marc Bolan", Thames researcher Mick Robertson. His first task is to launch some special new trainers by having a kickabout with their sponsor, Leeds and England's Terry Cooper, who concludes by falling over. Magpie was of course the hip populist working class answer to Blue Peter, which is why Susan Stranks delivers a five minute monologue as a Civil War Royalist and Robertson demonstrates his skill at horse-drawn ploughing. Then they must have run short on features as we're treated to a guide to TV cameras, which Susan reveals the traditional limitations of by jogging round it.
1984: Rik Mayall does some in-character stand-up and then some rare in itself out of character sit down with Wogan.
1988: This Week becomes one of many shows to consider the present and deregulated future of television, concerned with the forthcoming Astra satellite launch bringing such horrors as children's shows featuring puppets. Rupert Murdoch says some things after being doorstepped outside a conference centre, Kay Burley walks round a building site and Sir William, then Lord, Rees-Mogg talks about standards. For the more direct view of what the public think, the programme invents Gogglebox.
1991: if the Smash Hits Poll Winners Party had a version of the many Brits incidents that get obligingly listed every year then it's Carter USM's appearance, where on having After The Watershed - a brave song lyrically to be doing for a screaming child-heavy audience for starters - cut short as the show was overrunning a well refreshed Fruitbat does some light auto-destruction to the equipment they were miming on and then fulfils the wishes of many in future years by taking out the mocking host Schofield, who had seen a mike stand head into the crowd.
2002: with the national branding "coming atcha" - thanks, Trish - the following morning, regional continuity came to an end and LWT go spectacularly out of their way to make a special day of it.
October 29th
1975: it's become a post-boomer truism that Halloween is a very recent American import that wasn't acknowledged as a thing when they were growing up. Well, here's Words And Pictures' Halloween special, with a scary pumpkin and an equally scary Henry Woolf.
1990: one of Sky's first homegrown hits was Tarrant-fronted home video howlers compendium The Secret Video Show, which started a month after the You've Been Framed pilot but made it to series earlier. This was the somehow competitive series climax.
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