The Why Don't YouTube? Weekly Newsletter - January 2nd 2024
From the house of @whydontyoutube
January 2nd
50 YEARS AGO
Till Death Us Do Part's fifth series, which features some very topical episodes as we'll get back to in future weeks, begins with Alf Garnett refusing to pay his licence fee despite the attention of collector Gorden Kaye due to the lefties at the BBC. Warren Mitchell and Johnny Speight were both avowed socialists but as this feels like one of the many episodes in which the blowback isn't enough for the concept and this is an episode you'll be entirely unsurprised to find is eagerly clipped up and parroted as "proof" to this day by people who either choose to or more likely don't think about how the programme and character entirely exist because of it.
40 YEARS AGO
Amy was hardly the first or last biopic of Hull-born doomed solo flight trailblazer Amy Johnson - there was one in 1942, the year after she went missing, and Sally Wainwright has recently expressed an interest in dramatising her story once again - but it seems to have become the definitive take so far with Harriet Walter leading a cast featuring Patrick Troughton, Stephanie Cole, Clive Francis and George A Cooper.
30 YEARS AGO
A year and a day after taking to southern screens Fred Dinenage celebrates Meridian's story so far in, er, The First Year.
Ruth Rendell's A Dark-Adapted Eye is adapted, darkly, for eyes. Celia Imrie and Sophie Ward are the violently battling sisters, Helena Bonham Carter the exposition source (with Honeysuckle Weeks as her junior version) and Ciarán Hinds and Sarah Hadland are down the cast list.
ALSO...
1975: Ceefax began in September 1974. Four months later Lesley Judd went to find out what it was all about for Blue Peter, taking in all the breaking travel news.
1979: yes, it's Chicken Man, the Grange Hill theme. As always, glad we've got that out the way. Give Us A Clue's first edition, as yet only showing in London, and we suspect they had an eye on repeats out of order even then from how casual Aspel is introducing the show, concept and team captains. The guests are Liz Fraser, Judy Geeson, Kenneth Williams, David Wilkie and notably two members of the public.
1982: despite strong opposition, as we'll come back to below, Swap Shop was still master of its particular domain despite the way this one starts and Noel's trouble with his new dog. Noel has a new walkie-talkie, with the aid of professed CB expert Maggie Philbin, who is having quite the show herself as she tries to fit into a cardboard box, wrestles with a litter of puppies in front of the pet expert and spends a day with Adam Ant watching the making of the Prince Charming video, which is neatly synchronistic as the studio guest is Diana Dors, promoting - she's in good form so let's gloss over this bit - her new single. Sadly Noel's equipment can't get in contact Keith at a publicly closed Streatham ice rink by those means or, for starters, more regular methods in a problem that leads to some spectacular comic timing. Eventually Robin Cousins among other skaters are joined by the actual stars, the Snowmen doing Hokey Cokey. This carried out on skates, whether pro, child or member of Stiff Records backroom in a huge near-immobile costume, goes about as smoothly as you'd expect for all parties, especially when Keith is singing over it. The actual musical guest is glorious one hit wonder Susan Fassbender with her lace gloves.
1982: on the other side, TVS' second day brings with it what we technically suppose was its first big hit, bailing out of Tiswas with an unassuming meta Saturday morning show called No.73. Different theme, even a different front door, but Sandi/Ethel is present and correct even if her natural accent isn't. Dawn and Harry are in there too.
1982: stand by, everyone, it's the first of Tarrant's great folly, OTT. Going out in the prime slot of 11.10pm he, Henry, Carolgees and Gorman are all present and correct with Helen Atkinson-Wood as a sort of postmodern Sally James and a slot for Alexei Sayle, whom Tarrant hated, was talked into hiring so he could cream off the alternative comedy movement but got rid of before the end of the series in favour of Bernard Manning. But, alongside the infamous Greatest Show On Legs, let's not overlook the Pete Best of the whole exercise Colette Hiller, an American actress who was apparently fired backstage literally right after this show. OTT isn't mentioned on her official biography, though as she went on to be in Aliens (she's Ferro, the rescue pilot - "we're in the pipe, five by five", that's her) and then co-founded the organisation, SingLondon, that are responsible for putting pianos in public spaces she can get by without it. NSFW, also possibly NSFAnywhere.
1983: we've seen what Meridian did for their first anniversary; it seems that TVS marked the same milestone by airing their Christmas tape. Actually that might not be entirely true, there's no bare breasts or swearing, but with its set-pieces, VT filming and re-editing/redubbing that's what And Now A Change To Our Published Programmes most resembles.
1988: thanks to Alison Grade and her schoolfriends' annoyance that it was only being shown just as their lunchtime break ended, Neighbours moved to 5.35pm from the 4th. To prepare early evening viewers for the culture shock BBC1 took five minutes out of the previous Saturday's evening schedule between Paul Daniels and Bergerac to have Anne Charleston explain what was going on.
January 3rd
50 YEARS AGO
Jimmy Perry and David Croft had both been Royal Artillery members and taken part in concert parties during the war (Croft in India, Perry in Burma) and in what tiny amounts of rest time they surely had mid-Dad's Army put their experiences through their ensemble sitcom filter to produce the first of 56 episodes of It Ain't Half Hot Mum. Fresh from Last Of The Summer Wine Michael Bates - Indian born and fluent in Urdu, which puts him one above most if that's any kind of rationalisation - was promoted as the star but the reviews immediately picked up on Windsor Davies' bellow. Don't forget to cheer when Gunner Parkin drops the title.
40 YEARS AGO
He may have a book out but Michael Parkinson feels a weird guest for Des O'Connor Tonight - he's not a trained journalist, Michael! What's he doing with a chat show, eh? Des calls him "the thinking woman's crumpet", which if that makes him the male Joan Bakewell feels imbalanced, and Parky has his theory about Koo Stark.
A Kick Up The Eighties' second series had no Richard Stilgoe and Kevin Turvey only appeared this once but production changes and the arrival of Robbie Coltrane sharpened the satire and spoofery further, the highlight being a spectacular Breakfast Time spoof with Roger Sloman and the seemingly less used than before Tracey Ullman as Frank and Selina, Miriam Margolyes as Claire Rayner and Coltrane as Russell Grant.
ALSO...
1987: between World Of Sport ending and its axing three years later wrestling was cast adrift on ITV, its production changing hands from the promotional company run by Big Daddy's brother to the people that ran the holiday camp shows. You have to imagine it was under their brains trust that we had ideas like the Disco Ladder Match, wherein a re-masked Kendo Nagasaki and 'Ironfist' Clive Myers have to climb a painted B&Q stepladder to retrieve a gold painted 12" attached to the rafters by a strand of tinsel while accompanied by music that is definitely, defiantly not disco. No wonder WWF took over in short order.
1988: surely waiting a day or two too long, We Interrupt This Year was a comedy panel quiz, of the type that gets helmed by Ned Sherrin and co-written by Barry Cryer and Neil Shand, on the events of the previous year. Willie Rushton, Robert Kilroy-Silk and the Observer's Angela Gordon face Stephen Fry, Emma Freud and Jonathan Ross.
2003: CITV threw a clip laden 20th Birthday Bash, featuring... well, not everybody, evidently, but you probably weren't expecting Jeanne Downs and Scally to be treated like queen and king, or part of a trailer for Rowan's Report, nor that the twelve year olds of 2003 would be shown Gudrun Ure and Jerry Foulkes as if they should recognise them. That very first linkman Matthew Kelly is there, presumably because he was due next door anyway. Roland Rat appears despite never having had a CITV series, as do Grotbags, Elizabeth Estensen, Gary Terzza, and Andrea Green and Arthur Tom Darvill as the only representatives of recent CITV not in panto at the time. Although Neil Buchanan doesn't visit there is a montage of his haircuts which very weirdly doesn't include his early No.73 ubermullet despite a clip of that programme appearing in a Saturday morning tribute.
January 4th
50 YEARS AGO
Within These Walls was the first women's prison drama without being as panto-soapy as Prisoner Cell Block H and absolutely not like Bad Girls. As Michael Alexander St John famous put it there's a lot of danger and a lot of bother from the outset as Googie Withers as the governess has to deal with allegations of mistreatment.
40 YEARS AGO
Elsie Tanner moves to the Algarve with her new husband, ending Pat Phoenix's combined total of twenty years on Coronation Street as she felt she’d done everything she could, as she told Wogan ten days later. Tanner was second hand reported as having been killed in a car crash in 2004, eighteen years after Phoenix succumbed to lung cancer.
So You Think...? was the umbrella title for a series of one-off team quizzes overseen by Cliff Michelmore in the way only Cliff Michelmore can oversee something. They ran from 1965 until the final instalment So You Think... You're Switched On?, which pits Toyah Wilcox, Barry Cryer, Esther Rantzen and Lenny Henry into a test on telly, which ends with Cliff becoming the Phantom Flan Flinger.
And here we go with our first one series comedy of the year! Actually Cockles was a comedy-drama of near hour in length by The Fishing Party writer Douglas Livingstone, starring James Grout as a local boy made good attempting to resuscitate the run-down coastal resort of his childhood attempting to win the support of the locals. Livingstone also wrote the Cockney singalong closing song with bouncing ball. It doesn't appear to have had a single release.
Whicker's World went on the first of a four-part Fast Boat To China, the boat being the QE2 on a three month cruise around the Pacific, so very much within his milieu of high living. Harry Secombe turns up forty minutes in.
30 YEARS AGO
When Prince Charles wrote a children's book he read it on Jackanory. When Fergie wrote one it spawned three series of an animated adaptation. Now who's winning? Budgie The Little Helicopter by Sarah, Duchess of York - uploaded by herself, really, doubtless she did the encoding too - starts with Budgie's new rival Pippa arriving. Jeff Rawle is just about recognisable as the narrator but probably only if you know it's him.
The Culex Experiment? Somewhere in the middle of our Fall album rankings if we're honest. Ho-honly joking, it's the story that drives the second series of the revival of The Tomorrow People, Doctor Culex being responsible for a series of mysterious abductions that leave one of the People in a coma. No matter, because they've found a new psychic ally played by sixteen year old Simon And The Witch veteran Naomie Harris. The name recognition brings in a strong support cast of adults too including Jean Marsh as the Doctor, Denise Coffey as a wary aunt and Roger Sloman as the querying local inspector, plus Connie Booth later in the story - and our post-punk allusion comes full circle as it was co-directed by ex-Slit Viv Albertine. Or at least that's how it's credited as according to her autobiography the awkward producer took over co-direction, fired her after a week and took everything else over himself.
Two days late, Holiday celebrates 25 years with Michelmore aforefront and making a return visit to Torremolinos.
BBC1's night was given over to the thirtieth anniversary of Top Of The Pops, right from Alan Freeman taking over the broom cupboard. The main part of the night was Smashie & Nicey's Top Of The Pops Party, a collection of clips only now registering online because there's a joke about Jimmy Savile and everyone's all WHAT DID THEY KNOW. Then, the other side of the news, the first episode of All Quiet On The Preston Front and a Pop Quiz - POP QUIZ! - revival which presumably inspired the actual relaunch later in the year, came a tribute to Pan's People, Digging The Dancing Queens.
20 YEARS AGO
Dick & Dom In Da Bungalow’s Sunday finds itself a genuinely classic moment as somehow a caller gets through to the live Sunday round of Fish Faced Kipper Slapper (yes) who isn't watching the show, has no idea what the CBBC channel is - presumably the number was being shared by Smile on BBC2 - and has put his nan on the line who is just as confused. Dick's laughter speaks for us all.
If Big Brother wasn't going to be a supposed psychological experiment dressed in the language of event television any more then Channel 4 were just going to have to commission a new one from Endemol. Hence Shattered, a challenge for ten contestants to not sleep for seven days while taking on challenges, tests and monitoring, with a prize fund at the end that reduced every time someone fell asleep. Actually the contestants were allowed brief naps to ward off the potential of complete mental collapse with doctors and an ethics board on tap. Somehow, viewers decided the visual concept of watching people not sleep was not a go-er. At the end of the seven daily episodes the last three were challenged to fall asleep as quickly as possible. The winner had to receive producer intervention.
ALSO...
1993: GMTV gets underway properly with Fiona Armstrong and Michael Wilson in the pastel shaded parlour in front of a fake fire. Travel correspondent Amanda Redington explains how she's been flying around a lot, Simon Parkin butters bread with the McDonald twins from Corrie in a kids' slot that starts by talking about gun violence on Moss Side, and the big last hour guests are Michael Aspel and the then Mrs Aspel Elizabeth Power.
1993: everyone remembers Rik Mayall’s first Jackanory reading, but seven years later he returned to bring to life Kaye Umansky's fairytale princess inversion The Fwog Pwince - The Twuth!
2003: In an ongoing attempt to spruce up its rusting warship Blind Date with format and stylistic changes, ITV put on a live edition. In an attempt to show them what she thought of the alterations, and without telling anyone else involved in the production or broadcast beforehand, Cilla Black announces immediately after saying hello that she's leaving at the end of the series.
January 5th
50 YEARS AGO
Initially launched as a method of linking cartoons of a Saturday morning, Tiswas was created just for ATVland by continuity announcer Peter Tomlinson following a test period of him doing "daft stuff" and handed over to producer Peter Harris, who would soon be overseeing the Muppet Show, and presenters John Asher and ATV Today’s And Finally reporter Chris Tarrant at a single desk with a single camera in the continuity area. Cut short after nine episodes due to, yes, industrial action, it was soon renewed for the autumn for a run of a good fifteen months or so and given the bigger studio it stayed in for when the onslaught came. Obviously none of this was deemed important enough to record or hold on to but this is how it would have started.
40 YEARS AGO
The Silurians and the Sea Devils - together at last! Doctor Who moves on to Warriors Of The Deep, which everyone involved hated, especially as studio demand meant a lack of rehearsal time and some single take scenes - one moment was used as illustration on Michael Grade's Room 101 - and during production of which Peter Davison and Janet Fielding announced they were leaving.
Treasure Hunt's second series begins with the addition of the in-studio adjudicator - Annette Lynton, wife of Pin Floyd's Nick Mason - and by yet again heading off abroad and obvious instant communication issues be damned, to Burgundy, meaning the skyrunner Kenneth is still calling "Annie" should have just headed straight for the vineyards.
Top Of The Pops reaches its twentieth anniversary with a normal edition interspersed with old clips, but it accidentally causes its own moment of pop TV history as Frankie Goes To Hollywood's Relax snuck into the top 40 nearly three months after release and had the honour of opening the show, a week and a half before Mike Read got to hear of it. Status Quo were also there, because when were they ever not, but also they had a top five single. Hiring Slade's Jim Lea to stand in for Alan Lancaster, who had recently left the band and emigrated to Australia partly in protest at its single release, was one thing, but Rick Parfitt at the end nearly ensures they'd need a new drummer too. And in the midst of all such rock'n'roll chaos, Frank Kelly, who had unexpectedly reached number 26 with what here is an abbreviated version of his literal reading of the twelve days of Christmas. Yes, it's January. Still within Advent, though.
30 YEARS AGO
The fourth and final series of Maid Marian And Her Merry Men begins with Sherwood Forest in a RPG craze which leads Robin to become The Games Master and later allow Wayne Morris to do his Richard O'Brien impression in a remarkable sequence. As if that weren't over the kids' heads enough the B-plot is very light mockery of contemporary anti-road building protests.
20 YEARS AGO
Channel 4's immediate replacement for Fifteen To One was Beat The Nation, which was nearly hosted by Michael Grade but instead went to a two-thirds Goodies reunion of Tim Brooke-Taylor and Graeme Garden. Neither seems to have much in common with the concept, which is driven by YouGov polling of how much of the nation would have got a certain question right. It lasted six months, though trace elements could have made their way into executive producer Richard Osman's later work.
ALSO...
1992: The South Bank Show profiles Douglas Adams in an impressionistic way on the release of Mostly Harmless. Fry, Lloyd and Perkins are all present and correct slotted in with some computer graphical conceits and dramatisations of parts of Adams' back catalogue, with Paul Shearer as the Electric Monk alongside the meta return of Dent, Prefect, Book and Android.
January 6th
40 YEARS AGO
The Sooty Show household is having trouble with the pipes, which requires all concerned to help with the drainage, which seemingly a passing Duncan Goodhew is qualified to do. The epilogue entails Matthew both singing and demonstrating mime skills.
Is there some kind of emoji or flashing symbol we can use for a ONE SERIES SITCOM? Ah, that'll have to do, and it's worth flagging up as tower block flat odd couple based Dream Stuffing is quite an infamous case, not Channel 4's first failure but the first to be leapt upon as trying too hard to square with the channel's early right-on image while to 2024 eyes full of lines that wouldn't be allowed to make the third draft today. Kirsty Maccoll's theme tune is alright; the rest couldn't be more of-its-time in a way Stranger Things' graphic designers would never understand. Neither lead did anything other than bit parts again.
30 YEARS AGO
There was no real difference other than two and a half years' leeway between Alexei Sayle's Stuff and The All New Alexei Sayle Show, apart from the latter introducing the Mary Tyler Moore inspired titles and washed up warm-up man Bobby Chariot. The sketches certainly pull their weight in supporting cast again, boasting Jean Marsh and former Shane Ramsay Peter O'Brien in a soap spoof, Mike McShane, Terence Alexander, John Thomson, John Sparkes and a not inexperienced but certainly yet to claim anything but a passing appearance James Nesbitt, with Arabella Weir, Simon Day and Felicity Montagu appearing later in the series. No, Drunk In Time was in the 1995 run.
20 YEARS AGO
Grange Hill, into its Phil Redmond returned final few series, debuts new titles that are both very up to date and, in one specific moment, very nostalgic.
"Dark comedy" is a term that's been used to excuse all kinds of actually not funny material but rarely has it been as notorious while still critically acclaimed as with Julia Davis' sociopathic as all hell Nighty Night, a series that seems slightly lost to modern trends by association with the values of those around it.
ALSO...
1978: what part of the budget for Crackerjack went on taking everyone plus a guest star up the country for a brief cold open gag that doesn't really have a set-up or punchline? These are the days of Ed Stewart with Peter Glaze and Jan Hunt still leading the sketch elements alongside Bernie Clifton, though Rocking All Over The World seems a little underwhelming as the in-sketch song given what else they had a go at over the years. What else? Lots of origami, a small child at the piano singing When I Need You and someone called Rosetta Stone covering If Paradise Is Half As Nice.
1986: as alluded to up there somewhere, Rik Mayall's Jackanory reading of George's Marvellous Medicine led to a lot of frothing Points Of View correspondence at the time but everybody who saw it justly remembers it. Herewith a playlist of the whole story, plus Rik popping into the Broom Cupboard during its repeat run during the same week in 1994 to deliver a stark warning as only he could.
1993: Fame In The 20th Century was the kind of series Clive James had always been set for, an examination of how celebrity wormed into the birth of mass media, gradually sped up and increased its carbon footprint, unfortunately stopping by accident of broadcast date before it actually took over everything. Never repeated, according to James because "every inch of footage in the gigantic compilation belonged to some agency legally equipped to charge the Earth", it's all made its way onto YouTube regardless, in a reverse ordered playlist for some reason.
January 7th
50 YEARS AGO
Wish You Were Here? followed five years and a week in Holiday's footsteps with a bossa nova spring in its step. Judith Chalmers and Jim Lloyd meet us in Magaluf, where Lloyd asks the Brits about their impressions and their childcare.
40 YEARS AGO
Cannon & Ball, in the middle of featuring Roger Whittaker and some tribal bongos, Bobby making the Three Degrees corpse and Una Stubbs in a The African Queen spoof of loose sorts, present Tommy singing Send In The Clowns against a black backdrop, a set-up that post-Krusty Gets Kancelled cannot be taken unironically, though we're not sure what that writing team would have made of the inserts of Bobby messes with Pierrot makeup and having a fag.
A new run of six The Comic Strip Presents films begins with Dirty Movie, written by Rik and Ade and starring them as a cinema manager and a postman vying to watch something for themselves at the fleapit in a weirdly playful (and vocal) tribute to silent comedy, after a fashion. Mayall and Edmondson were of course drama students and as such the ending to the first thing they wrote together for television goes full Brechtian.
30 YEARS AGO
Channel 4 had shown Penn & Teller Go Public as early as December 1986 and Get Killed and Don't Try This At Home had been on in the interim; now the postmodern magic duo got their own vehicle just for us, The Unpleasant World of Penn & Teller going right in literally from the cold open with the unsettling and vaguely macabre side of their act. Six of them were made, and here they are.
ALSO...
1966: an infamous, partly impromptu and even more pissed round table on Late Night Line-Up about the nature of comedy, involving writers Marty Feldman, Ian La Frenais, Johnny Speight, John Chapman and Richard Waring, with producer Duncan Wood and a cameo by fellow writer John Antrobus, who hadn't been invited but was full of Dutch courage.
1970: The Max Bygraves Hour is a remarkable one-off variety tour de force, with guests George Burns, Jim Backus (the voice of Mr Magoo) and Judith Durham plus Geoff Love and the Mike Sammes Singers at the back. If that's not enough, Max narrates the credits!
1971: BBC2 picked out seven People For Tomorrow, "remarkable individuals who believe that in the 1970s they can achieve something that really matters to them". OAP campaigner Jack Dash, feminist Selma James, Anglican priest Richard Harries, psychiatrist Dr John Howells, ballet director Norman Morrice and sociologist Dr A.H. Halsey may have had exceptional decades, we don't know. We definitely know about their first subject, twenty year old Richard Branson, then running a magazine with a music mail order business on the side that would lead to him opening a record shop later that year and a label the next.
1983: "I've gotta give Roget's Thesaurus a licking" Sid Waddell takes a moment out of the world darts championship to talk about his favourite novels for Oxford Road Show, revealing a deep admiration for Stephen King.
1993: a season of BBC2 Thunderbirds repeats had begun in late 1991 but despite demand the merchandise rights were in flux and then Matchbox had design and corporate issues meaning there weren’t enough Tracy Island sets in the shops for Christmas. Just to rub it in, once the season was over Blue Peter showed how you could make your own convincing model Tracy Island and reportedly received a number of requests for factsheets that ran into six figures, leading BBC Video to put the demonstration out on VHS. Anthea Turner's DIY model building skills were more convincing than her Lady Penelope acting skills.
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