The Why Don't YouTube? Weekly Newsletter - January 22nd 2024
From the house of @whydontyoutube
January 22nd
40 YEARS AGO
Yet more heavy snow news via ITN, plus a tease involving people being burned at the stake by witch doctors as a punishment for lightning, and at 12:18 a trail for Gordon Honeycombe arriving at TV-am.
20 YEARS AGO
Jeremy Clarkson pitches himself a bit closer to Top Gear self and documentary self in Inventions That Changed The World, part two of six on the past, present and future - and yes, that means AI - of the computer. Warning: contains imagined and acted out historical conversations.
ALSO...
1983: Cilla Black's career revival is always said to have started with this Wogan appearance - reputedly LWT head of entertainment Alan Boyd phoned her the next morning - although she was there having released a Greatest Hits album that week which did pick up hefty chart business afterwards. And what made everyone think she had a relatable level of star quality to drive a prime-time LE show? Talking about hanging out with the Beatles early on, being overwhelmed by a telephone and as a big showstopper telling a Billy Butler Hold Your Plums story.
1983: Central had committed to two series of OTT but ten episodes was all it took for them and the IBA to tell Chris Tarrant and co they weren't going to be getting that level of freedom again. Instead it was reworked into Saturday Stayback, set in a pub but pre-recorded with a much smaller budget and more sketch based, with writing credits for Harry Enfield, Angus Deayton, Renwick & Marshall, Jack Docherty, Moray Hunter and Victoria Pile. The show, you may notice, was such a mess the full title is never actually used on screen. Bob Carolgees and Helen Atkinson-Wood came over from OTT, with John Gorman slipping round the back offscreen, and were joined by a sprawling cast including Phil Cool being Rolf Harris, of course, and Footlights Perrier winners escapee Tony Slattery, while Frank Carson still hangs around because when was he ever not. There are two post-credits sketches, including one about how awful Channel 4 is, because it takes one to know one.
1987: John Reid's hopes of making the Civil List were briefly boosted by Emlyn Hughes on A Question Of Sport. The Princess Royal herself would appear on the show two weeks later.
1991: as part of a series of special stories to commemorate Jackanory's 25th anniversary, Jackanory Silver Stories, Trevor & Simon's Holiday 66 is presented on location by The World Of The Strange, who unveil a mysterious tale of a travelling salesman forced into a break to somewhere he remembered from his youth.
January 23rd
40 YEARS AGO
One of the most famous editions of World In Action, Being For The Benefit Of Mr Parris, challenged the recently elected Conservative MP Matthew Parris, a firm believer in keeping benefits low to sharpen the unemployed for work, to live for a week on the unemployment benefit in a Newcastle bedsit. It doesn't move him much politically, but it was a generation previous precursor to When Michael Portillo Became A Single Parent and the like, not to mention sharpening Parris for work in the media after he resigned his seat two years later.
20 YEARS AGO
Britney Spears gives Blue Peter an exclusive performance of Toxic with a badge secreted somewhere about her costume. Matt Baker greets her wearing a kilt, presumably because of the upcoming Burns Night but we'd prefer to imagine he just fancied wearing one.
If you were casting a prime-time BBC1 sitcom, you'd bank on a reliable, experienced comic acting talent. Or you could just get Jamie Theakston instead. The Sam's Game vibes are strong in Mad About Alice (part two; part three) as he and Amanda Holden, who doesn't have a great sitcom pedigree herself, are a divorced couple forced by co-parenting to remain together. One series, obviously, and the stars singing the theme tune cannot have helped its cause.
ALSO...
1977: Sylvester Stallone tells Barry Norman on Film '77 why Rocky was a reaction to "anti-Christ, anti-government, anti-everything" cinema and his extra level of underdog battle to make and star in it.
1982: four weeks in, a self-captioning Neil Buchanan finally arrives at No.73, and he brought some of his art with him. This isn't one of those easy bantz nostalgia "look at his hair!!!!!"-type outlets, but...
1982: OK, yeah, but if you're doing a mainstream Top Of The Pops spoof in the early 1980s there's really only one presenter you can take off. Beyond that and the wayward accents associated, the Two Ronnies' Crop Of The Flops is worth the experience of seeing Barker as Bloodvessel, Corbett as Ant and both as Chas & Dave, who they'd only just had in person on their Christmas show. All that and a very familiar looking member of Celluloid Burp...
January 24th
50 YEARS AGO
Tony Buzan, the author and mental literacy expert who pioneered the idea of mind mapping, was given ten episodes to explain how the brain can be used to its fullest in Use Your Head. Once you get past the theme, which appears to have been the result of putting the Radiophonic Workshop through an MRI machine, Buzan's third part is about improving memory recall.
40 YEARS AGO
CBTV goes on Special Assignment - that sub-title for a magazine show feels familiar - to the Vatican and Paul Henley takes some children around Rome on the way to a special audience with the Pope.
30 YEARS AGO
If there's one edition of Cutting Edge that's gone down in folklore it's Graham Taylor: An Impossible Job, eavesdropping on the England manager throughout 1993. For everything that people remember about it today, whether the wild syntax - "can we not knock it?", "what sort of thing is happening here?", the infamous "do I not like that" - or the fact that Taylor actually comes out a lot more sympathetically than its reputation suggests, what actually dominated the headlines around its broadcast was something completely taken for granted now, the amount of swearing. Either 36 or 38 F's, depending on which outlet you believed, led to censure by the Broadcasting Standards Council and advance campaigns wanting the programme dropped by both Mary Whitehouse and Norris McWhirter, who attempted to get a High Court injunction against its broadcast on behalf of his Freedom Association. Should have been a metre.
20 YEARS AGO
Once voted upon, the top ten finalists for Britain's Best Sitcom got their own hour long celebrity pitch, as with the previous BBC2 Greatest British Thing contenders. One of them would go on to create a sitcom of its own, but not the sale for Fawlty Towers by Jack Dee, featuring central personnel (Cleese, Scales, Sachs), those also involved (Cribbins, Nicky Henson, Ken Campbell), personal associates (Tim Brooke-Taylor, Terry Jones, an employee of Gleneagles Hotel) and unnecessary others (Jeremy Vine)
ALSO...
1981: a strange episode of Play Away with Brian Cant entirely on farming location which leaves a full voiced, blue boiler suited Anita Dobson in charge of Delia Morgan, who at one point channels Tiswas' Matthew Butler, and, making his sole appearance, Vision On's Ben Benison doing some of his mimes. The gap where Cant-age would normally be seems to be filled by Jonathan Cohen and his men doing more work.
1982: Rik Mayall, still pretty much only known outside Comic Strip circles as Kevin Turvey, appears on Wood & Walters as self-styled feminist Mitch (Mayall later that year: "he isn't supposed to be very funny. I wasn't looking for a laugh but for people to react with 'yeuch'") Later on he lent a hand to a quickie sketch based on The Pyramid Game.
1983: The Comic Strip Presents a rock documentary - if you will, a rockumentary, Adrian Edmondson’s Bad News Tour. The coincidence of this appearing while This Is Spinal Tap - about a very established band whereas Bad News are playing their first gig - was being filmed, neither aware of the other, has often been commented on but not so much the additional parallel element that director Sandy Johnson is played by director Sandy Johnson.
1997: The Girlie Show was of its time in as many ways as you like, bridging the post-pub gap for Channel 4 between The Word and the turn of the 00s all-facile-all-the-time efforts while synthesising the "ladette" age in all its shouty, girls-can-drink-and-swear-now misfocusing that went down so badly Sara Cox has talked about having to sign on after it finished. The further good news from its second and last series is that it's rock night, with that notable feminist Lemmy and supermodel Rachel Williams in a bed with the Lemonheads' Evan Dando. Wanker Of The Week - it's Mick Hucknall - is covered in the first two minutes.
January 25th
50 YEARS AGO
John Cleese, demobbed from Python and at a loose end while waiting for Fawlty Towers to be commissioned, was an admirer of Les Dawson since they shared an episode of Jokers Wild, calling him "an autodidact, a very smart guy who was fascinated by words". Having already appeared in a few sketches earlier in Sez Les' lifespan Cleese joined his regular supporting sketch cast of Eli Woods and Gorden Kaye for the two series made in one year. The first episode of the eighth series features Lulu singing The Man Who Sold The World and the Irving Davies Dancers with not so much a dance routine as a piece of experimental theatre.
Maybe figuring one interviewer wasn't enough for the circumstances, Dick Cavett's ABC special with Muhammad Ali and Joe Frazier became a BBC co-production (aired here on this date, preceded by Parky sparring with Frazier) with Michael Parkinson also asking questions, as he explains to an audience gathered to watch nothing. If the intention was as calming presence, it failed.
40 YEARS AGO
Compare and contrast Breakfast Time and TV-am - Frank Bough nearly died on the way in, whilst Nick Owen gave himself a paper cut. Not often "accomplished!" is used as criticism.
ALSO...
1979: Mike Oldfield made a new arrangement of the Blue Peter theme and Simon Groom went to see him record it, providing extra percussion.
January 26th
50 YEARS AGO
A big old plot twist marks the latest Doctor Who story Invasion Of The Dinosaurs, as Captain Mike Yates betrays UNIT and is dismissed. It's also the debut of Pertwee's own Whomobile, which was only used twice in all. In between, in part three, Sarah Jane Smith puts her journalism training to use on one of a number of invading dinosaurs.
40 YEARS AGO
Sheelagh Gilbey and a embryonic Neil Buchanan make things, and not always just artistic, in the name of TVS' Do It!
Keytars and modular synths all round as Tomorrow's World ends by demonstrating a Spectrum-run sequencer, followed by a trail for Saturday Superstore and the start of Top Of The Pops where the lurking presence of Gaz Top gives away the first band on. Also lined up that week, Cyndi Lauper traverses the set, audience members in the gods seeming surprised to find her among them despite the presence of a cameraman already before some comedy percussion that may have influenced Vic and Bob. And then there's the small matter of another New Yorker from the dance clubs, the first of seven studio appearances by Madonna.
Here's a rarity, a co-production between HBO and HTV West. Mr Halpern And Mr Johnson is a two-hander between Laurence Olivier and Jackie Gleason, the former a recent widower, the latter meeting him at the funeral with the surprising revelation that he and the deceased had been "close friends" for forty years.
20 YEARS AGO
The Royal Signals White Helmets motorcycle display team drive, in pyramid formation, into the Blue Peter studio and will show us one of their ten-on-a-bike tricks once the engine gets going. Sure it will, here on live TV. Any time now.
The third series of I'm A Celebrity... Get Me Out Of Here! begins. Go on, who won? Kerry Katona, who got the Iceland gig out of it. But there were two other stories that echo down the kangaroo anus-spattered years. One was John Lydon, some say, Johnny Rotten, who in an eventful eight days got chased by ostriches, became camp leader, uttered the very worst word in the language on live TV at not being voted out and then walked out anyway. The other was Katie Price, likely the biggest name in terms of contemporary tabloid column inch filler they'd had to that point and everyone's guarantee to walk it right up until being eliminated two days early, but started on the road to somehow becoming an even bigger celebrity by distracting Peter Andre from teasing a comeback and starting to write songs to go with it by unsubtly embarking on pulling him. And we've never heard the last of it since.
Can you turn a series of paintings into a comedy series? No. Of course you can't, not even if they're as extroverted and comically redolent of life as Beryl Cook's, which became animated as Bosom Pals, featuring the voices of Dawn French, Rosemary Leach, Alison Steadman and Timothy Spall.
ALSO...
1978: Johnny Pearson's Top Of The Pops orchestra understandably make a better fist of backing Terry Wogan then they do Althea & Donna.
January 27th
40 YEARS AGO
Which microwave is right for you? TV-am, by way of Lynn Faulds Wood and home economist Jenny Webb, finds out.
Central's Linda Cunningham takes her dog to work with her before far too little of Derek Griffiths in the Children's ITV space capsule. Would that trailer convince you to watch The Zodiac Game? No, us neither.
FAC 104, The Tube came mostly from the Hacienda and somehow got away with putting Tony Wilson, Peter Hook and Paul Morley on TV all at once. Herbie Hancock within a recreation of the Rockit video, a quick word with Morrissey, an even quicker one with Pat Phoenix and Tony Booth, and a Factory Records supergroup featuring members of New Order, A Certain Ratio and future M People founder Mike Pickering all appear. What really put it at the front of the archive however was an outsider, though despite what’s widely claimed this wasn't Madonna's UK TV debut, as we saw above. Still, claiming it was at the Hacienda is much cooler than it being at Television Centre, and what was it Wilson said about printing the lie?
30 YEARS AGO
Absolutely Fabulous' second series starts with both Edina and Patsy admitted to hospital, involving an unsubtle cameo by producer Jon Plowman, a typically scene-stealing cameo from Kathy Burke and a spectacular dream sequence including amongst others the voice of Sylvia Anderson and Mandy Rice-Davies, who Jennifer clearly didn't have faith in people recognising given the Yarwoodesque line "you're Mandy Rice-Davies".
Four years after the first series, Ben Elton returned to The Man From Auntie, with the Farties' Guides and chinfaces left behind.
ALSO...
1982: Madabout, Michael Bentine's children's hobbies show by way of Tyne Tees - executive producer Andrea Wonfor was presumably already planning The Tube - features DIY robotics and electronics, made with a lot of Meccano along the way, visiting R2D2 and C3PO holograms and Stirling Moss' robotic house.
1986: Les Dawson performs for Bob Monkhouse, after which The Roly Polys come on for the encore with the show's other guest, Jim Carrey. He looks as bemused as you'd imagine.
January 28th
50 YEARS AGO
Nina Bawden's Carrie's War (part two) was only published the previous year when it was first turned into a BBC1 mini-series, filmed on location with practically nobody in the junior cast who went on to have an adult acting career.
40 YEARS AGO
A decent wodge of Saturday Superstore as Cheggers keeps on truckin' into a snowy Blackburn, braving the cold in a sweater and no coat while wisely guest Errol Brown has donned a hat. You do however feel sorry for the junior Morris men and disco dancers having to wear their usual gear while doing their routines, especially the latter in aquamarine Lycra, and those bouncy castles can't have lasted. Wonder what studio guest Cyndi Lauper made of it.
Play Away starts with Floella Benjamin hanging off the top of the set and later features her and Brian Cant channelling Crackerjack by way of the Thompson Twins.
Rod Hull had already done three series of salmon-hued blade rotation encased fun on Emu's World and would go All Live later in the year so you can forgive him for popping back to the Beeb when he wanted in on a more adult-friendly format. That however assumes someone had thought of a format first instead of Rod and Emu's Saturday Special, filmed at the Rhyl Sun Centre in front of a live audience and not giving Hull that much to actually do. Guests on this second in the second series are a dumper-residing Robin Gibb, Dave Dee Dozy Beaky Mick & Tich with THEIR NEW SINGLE, IN 1984, a mime and and Bobby George, while the pair wander around picturesque bits of Perth partly to set up a surprise for two audience members.
Gino: Full Story And Pics is not one of the better remembered Comic Strip Presents, maybe because the lead is Keith Allen, as a man running from the law - literally to begin with in an intro that weirdly predicts something he was later in, Trainspotting. That's unfair as it's a high quality instalment and Allen might never have been better, cast as the straight man and sucked into all kinds of unpleasant people's constellations as he hides in the house of writer Adrian Edmondson, fails to get away in 'special guest' Lionel Jeffries' cab, takes Jennifer Saunders as his Bonnie, cadges a lift from Robbie Coltrane who has a lot to get off his chest, accidentally provides cover for a murder at Dawn French and Rik Mayall's farm and holds up Arnold Brown's shop, leading up to an amoral closure reveal.
30 YEARS AGO
The ten minute filler programme up to the BBC Nine O'Clock News, once home merely to Points Of View but taken to new heights by TV Heroes, is the location for Drive, a series of comedically/forensically/straightforwardly presented driving tips from Alexei Sayle. Here's one of the ten, about going too fast.
20 YEARS AGO
Director's Commentary, Rob Brydon in voiceover as veteran, self-regarding and eclectic director Peter de Lane recalling some of his greatest work, is the kind of thing that could have worked out better as a ten minute frippery but BBC1 didn't have that any more (and the Beeb rejected it anyway) and ITV doesn't work like that.
One of the most infamous days in BBC and political history as the Hutton Inquiry is published in which it transpires everything was all their fault, leading to Greg Dyke's resignation as DG. Huw Edwards on the BBC Ten O'Clock News promises among many other things "the latest word on what's happening inside the BBC", the kind of sentence about its internal affairs that it's not difficult to parse with the response "well, you're best placed to find out".
ALSO...
1980: "the British School of Motoring are making hamburgers!" BBC Schools' Communicate, with the aid of journalist Brian Cook, heads round the back of Nationwide on November 15th 1979, where as always happens whenever an educational team go behind the scenes on a TV news operation a major story breaks during filming.
1986: by dint of its timing Newsround got to very occasionally break stories, none as major as being first to report the Challenger disaster 21 minutes after the explosion today, with BBC2 taking over pretty much at exactly the same time with Peter Snow in the Newsnight studio. A day later Craven was back in the hot seat for a special edition. ITV apparently ran a newsflash at around the same time too and did catch up further with a news update at 9pm, followed by a strange and pointed way to promote the film on Channel 4.
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