The Why Don't YouTube? Weekly Newsletter - January 8th 2024

From the house of @whydontyoutube

January 8th

40 YEARS AGO

The Thorn Birds was an enormous deal in its day, the US' second highest rated miniseries of all time when aired the previous March, so naturally BBC1 went heavy on the promotion, especially as they were in a ratings rut outside Christmas season at the time, and were rewarded handsomely, the second episode in particular being one of the first programmes to lead to stories about a National Grid surge straight afterwards.

30 YEARS AGO

And while we're talking much hyped BBC1 US imports, The New Adventures Of Superman bulleted into Saturday prime-time with a special message from Dean Cain and... shots from a photoshoot? Stylised to look like an expensive perfume commercial? Whatever, you know best.

ALSO...

1972: Sale Of The Century started on Anglia alone three months earlier but this was the first time viewers in ATV, Westward, Southern and HTV saw it too. Nicholas Parsons walking the winner through the prizes is unmissable.

1977: not enough themes feature a kazoo solo these days. Nanette Newman makes baking fun for kids at the Fun Food Factory, and stay tuned for a surprise guest from the next LWT office along at the end.

1989: See For Yourself was a kind of annual BBC1 shareholders' report (as Radio Times described it) of the air, running for four years from 1988. This examination of where your licence fees were going - which, for what it's worth, went out directly after Del fell through the bar - is introduced by Sue Lawley, who takes the opportunity for a bit of a wander. The subsequent live Q&A with Marmaduke Hussey and Michael Checkland was unfortunately interrupted by a newsflash.

1993: June Brown, fag on the go, straw in her drink, everywoman wryness in her heart, pops by Meridian Night Time for no good reason.

1996: after a failed first revamp we'll come back to, the newly retitled Rainbow Days pretended Bungle had been in the shower all along or something and returned to the original format in a bigger house and not with Geoffrey, one Dale Superville taking over. It lasted about as long and with as much success as the first reboot did, the newly redesigned Bungle looking more like an actual teddy bear and thus perhaps even more wrong than Original Bungle. And then there was Mole In The Hole, but let's not get bogged down too much.

January 9th

40 YEARS AGO

Based on a John Wyndham novel, Chocky, with perhaps the most disturbing children’s show theme this side of Near And Far, brought another dose of approachable sci-fi to children's telly through the titular extra-terrestrial visitor with the voice of Glynis Barber inhabiting a twelve year old, to the concern of parents James Hazeldine and Carol Drinkwater. Andrew Ellams, who plays the young vessel, quit acting, went to Oxford and became an economics teacher.

Roy Clarke had a higher sitcom hit rate than most; even the mostly forgotten and quite trad Rosie, about a young police officer in North Yorkshire and spun off from 1975's sole series The Growing Pains Of PC Penrose, got four series.

There was something about days-of-the-Raj reckoning in culture at the time, between Gandhi and A Passage To India, and independent TV had already exploited it once this year with mini-series The Far Pavilions, co-produced by Channel 4 and running to great length from the 3rd onwards. The Jewel In The Crown didn't cost as much, although its £5 million figure was certainly touted around a lot at the time, and was expected to underperform, the Mirror dubbing it 'Curry Nation Street' in advance because that's what they did then. Instead The Far Pavilions lost money for its production company and seems mostly forgotten while Granada's fourteen part epic became the talk of the nation, not to mention finishing 22nd in the BFI's industry poll for the greatest ever British series and contemporaneously claiming RTS writing and performance awards and BAFTAs for actor, actress and drama series, though the first two weren't exactly unexpected as it had three out of four of the actor nominees and all four for the women, Tim Pigott-Smith and Peggy Ashcroft doubtless getting glares across the table.

30 YEARS AGO

Comic Asides, a new run of pilot sitcoms, features the first sighting of Victor & Barry as Steve McCracken and Sebastian Flight in The High Life, a show with such a cult following despite its sole series (due to Alan Cumming's Hollywood career) that you'd have thought there'd be more archived online than just a trailer.

20 YEARS AGO

Robert Kilroy-Silk had been such an immoveable object in the 9am BBC1 slot since beginning in late 1986 that there was no envisaging him leaving before his time... before a Sunday Express column attacking the Islamic contribution to the world, apparently left over from a previous column that had been judiciously edited, left him facing a critical Commons motion, censure by the Arab League and investigation by Scotland Yard. With the BBC already pressured by the ongoing Hutton Inquiry over conflicts between newspaper columns and onscreen impartiality, Kilroy was suspended, followed by his resignation on the 16th (the last recorded show was broadcast on the 29th) In between events he tried to dig his way out on ITV's Tonight With Trevor McDonald.

ALSO...

1976: Jackanory, which really was repeating these episodes two decades later, hires Arthur Lowe to read cautionary fad tale The Emperor's Oblong Pancake with the unmistakeable illustrations of Quentin Blake.

1982: there's been a bit of snow about, as reported by BBC news. The last Labour government had a Weather Minister?

1986: ahead of the start of Yes, Prime Minister came a preview on Breakfast Time but before Selina Scott can talk to co-writer Jonathan Lynn he has to watch various politicians, including Tony Benn, Cecil Parkinson and Roy Hattersley, give their views.

1989: the first day of Central News South was going to be difficult anyway as the Kegworth air crash had happened nearby the previous day but then they did a Panorama, that is to say lost all their film and all their VT. At least they had Eddie Edwards on standby.

1995: Peter Cook died, bringing tributes from Newsnight, with Jonathan Miller and John Bird, and the following night’s Late Show, for whom Stephen Fry also critiqued the media coverage.

January 10th

50 YEARS AGO

Chris Tarrant and his senior as ATV Today's And Finally resident John Swallow take to a tandem for japes, with a closing shot cut off here but if you know Tiswas' classic titles you'll have already seen it.

30 YEARS AGO

When Rainbow finished with Thames' loss of franchise the gang went straight on the mid-90s post-ironic nostalgia/student circuit - there were at least two dance versions of the theme released as singles that they promoted - and returned but with a big change of format. Geoffrey had gone and the other three, now operated and voiced by different people and Bungle looking like something from a 1930s annual, were running a toy shop with a blue female rabbit called Cleo. Notably the first episode was called New Friends. The backlash to it led to a rethink, as detailed above.

Do-It-Yourself Mr Bean, the ninth story, is the one in which he drives the Mini from the roof, although - and this scheduling can only have been the result benefitting nobody of arguments within Thames, Central and network ITV - it's actually set over New Year's Eve, the first half being his attempt at a party, and New Year's Day.

20 YEARS AGO

ITV's challenge to follow SMTV Live, a show that got by on rejecting a lot of what Saturday morning TV had been known for up to then but had latterly been overtaken by chaotic neutral BBC1, was answered by Ministry Of Mayhem. The combination of a two man/one woman presenting combination, lots of self-aware dancing and getting pop guests involved in games, just like prime SMTV, but also gunge like Dick & Dom - actually nothing like them as for now it's a very conservative amount of mess but the first foam flies within two and a half minutes - and random side characters like What's Up Doc? is the sign of a show that hadn't worked out a unique USP and it barely approached Da Bungalow for viewers, going through three revisions in its two and a half years on air. (Alright, shut up about Holly and gunging. You're an adult.) Funnily enough kids didn't really go for a programme that foregrounded invitations for junior anglers to show off their catches or the big climax of the morning being a spelling bee. That said, how the hell did Bum Board pass a CITV production meeting? (It's probable it didn't, we know.)

ALSO...

1981: C-3PO and Anthony Daniels both appear on Swap Shop.

1983: look lively, ITV Schools has gone conceptual. Good Health episode Watch Out! starts with Also Sprach Zarathustra and a spacecraft launch only undermined when we see the occupant is what would have been the result if Metal Mickey's storage unit was partially burnt down. This is Zaab, who visits Earth on a research trip and lands in a chippie, where he is taken in by some children who unwittingly introduce him to life's common hazards, oddly disbelieving mother inclusive.

1992: the start of one of the most fascinating BBC1 shows of the era. It needed a big prime-time hit with the Beeb’s charter renewal approaching (let's not discuss the rest of its year just yet) and with You've Been Framed doing huge business for ITV - 19.3 million one week the following month - the quick and easy answer was to pretty much copy it, with flimsy shiny floor and "foreign correspondent" elements added. Caught In The Act, fronted by Shane Richie who starts with his British Rail material, became the channel's most watched non-soap, the first programme getting 13.3 million viewers and it only just falling below eight figures by series end, but wasn't recommissioned and is rumoured to have been wiped.

1992: direct from Timperley, the pilot for Frank Sidebottom's Fantastic Shed Show, at 12.35am on Granada alone. Featuring a game Sharyn Hodgson from Home And Away, David Hamilton and James Whale, who is not part of the show amid Frank's tips on satellite dishes, his sci-fi film and recreation of the Spanish Armada, it's as odd and freewheeling as you'd hope. You know it is. It really is. Thank you.

January 11th

70 YEARS AGO

The first televised weather forecast was given by George Cowling, standing in front of the map with a pencil and rubber in a Lime Grove studio at 7.55pm, forecasting "a good day to hang out the washing". Bear in mind newsreaders weren't allowed to appear in vision yet. The ruby anniversary was commemorated by Cowling and many others in Sunny Spells: 40 Years Of The Weather.

30 YEARS AGO

40 Minutes broadcast the powerful and genuinely harrowing (all kinds of TW for this) Caraline's Story, about a chronic anorexic and bulimic who weighed three and a half stone and knew she was condemned to death. A story unfolds of her daily routine, the physical toll and of the background of horrendous child abuse. Caraline Neville-Lister died that July; a charity was set up in her name a month later providing confidential counselling and support services for people living with eating disorders.

ALSO...

1986: Jeremy Beadle had led plenty of ensemble casts on shows like Eureka! and The Deceivers, not to mention his key role in the studio play of Game For A Laugh, but his first solo show, preceding Beadle's About by a few months, was People Do The Funniest Things, an irregularly scheduled melange of bought-in hidden camera pranks, sweeping from the Denis Norden office floor and the odd prank with the studio audience, one of which is quite uncomfortable, another of which involves a woman who's already wearing David Byrne's big white jacket. Then Bobby Davro arrives with some pictures of Jeremy in which he looked slightly different.

1987: in between series of Alas Smith And Jones, Mel and Griff popped over to LWT for The World According To Smith And Jones, a supposed historical investigation which was actually the pair behind Two Ronnies desks linking clips from mostly obscure films in a pseudo-sociological style but with gags and rude bits.

1995: Talking Telephone Numbers is going smoothly until it turns out not to entirely be as live as thought. Even better, the clip is followed by a repeat (from 14:59) but with panicking gallery talkback, and listen carefully right through the following trailers for some Schofield swearing, something we suspect comes across very differently now to how it did when we first linked to this a few years ago.

January 12th

90 YEARS AGO

Michael Aspel was born. The kind of people we write about so rarely make it to ninety years old that it seems fair to make a fuss when one does, even in the case of a quiet man launched out of newsreading and onto assorted LWT shiny floors, seemingly destined to be remembered mostly for the Aspel & Company Planet Hollywood farrago. In tribute, here's his own 1980 This Is Your Life, which starts at a recording of Give Us A Clue and ends with walk-ons by the entirety of showbusiness, including at least one person who hasn't been introduced and may not be connected to him at all.

30 YEARS AGO

The Andrew Davies adaptation of George Eliot's Middlemarch started here and was the quality drama event of the season, maybe the year, briefly making a star of Juliet Aubrey who won the best actress BAFTA and helping set off a trend for Victorian fiction which would reach its peak with a wet Colin Firth a year or so later.

Just as classy and exalted a series, Terror Towers was a Children's ITV comedy horror game show co-devised by Neil Buchanan and presented by a man who could boggle eye with the best of them, Steve Johnson. Jacques Antoine's lawyers may have been taking notes at certain stages at the challenges the kid teams took on.

ALSO...

1985: the on-air pilot for Saturday Live introduces the Dangerous Brothers to not so much an unsuspecting public as an unsuspecting absolutely everybody else, and not even themselves when it came to their recreation of Dante's Towering Inferno.

1986: Windmill, one of those series that bred a generation fascinated by what was in television's archives, examines childhood, children's television and children's fascinations. Only half the programme is represented here but it retains guest Richard Stilgoe, sporting his Finders Keepers sweatshirt.

January 13th

40 YEARS AGO

It's Father's Day in The Sooty Show household, which raises all sorts of biological questions when Sooty, Sweep and Soo are making him breakfast in bed to celebrate. Sweep has a shower and then rejoins him, which doesn't help. If anything might improve his mood it's a visit from his own father, the last appearance on the show of Harry Corbett coming with some historical cross-references.

Television's attempts to make the most of the micro were really keen on exploring the connection between computers and music, so Chris Sievey with his home programmed games and ZX81 video B-sides was bound to earn plenty of inquisitive visual space. He and Kevin Smith, who had coincidentally also created a music management game for the Spectrum, explained their work to music journalist and hesitant screen presence Tony Fletcher, who supposedly had never seen a computer game until the previous day, on The Tube.

20 YEARS AGO

Boss Swap. No, it wasn't known in America as Top Swap. In fact it was like Wife Swap, but with bosses, which might make it worse on a macro level as instead of domestic drama it's people with no industry knowledge telling everyone else how wrong things are and destroying motivation. For the outsider the proximity to The Office can't have helped the image either. In the first episode the head of an industrial door manufacturer and a scaffolding part wholesaler change places.

"The fraught relationship between two orthopaedic surgeons, set in a hospital on the Isle of Wight" is an astonishing premise for a sitcom in this post-audience day and age, even if one of them is Adrian Edmondson. And so Doctors And Nurses, despite the potential of having things to say about the NHS, sank after one series despite being co-written by media favourite Dr Phil Hammond and the presence of David Mitchell (who had just done the first series of Peep Show), Mina Anwar, Joanna Scanlan and Not Going Out's Abigail Cruttenden.

Off the back of Cracker, Clocking Off and State Of Play Paul Abbott's world was his oyster and he could get whatever he wanted commissioned next. Fortunately, that thing, inspired by his own direful upbringing, was Shameless, instantly making David Threlfall as council estate monologist Frank Gallagher an anti-hero for the age and winning the drama BAFTA and comedy-drama British Comedy Award straight off.

ALSO...

1983: Russell Harty meets celebrity couple Pat Phoenix, into her last year on Corrie, and for the considerable most part Tony Booth, as the interview is pretty much entirely about an incident in late 1979 when, trying to get into a flat he'd locked himself out of, he contrived to set himself on fire and then fall into a drum of paraffin, spending six months recuperating in hospital.

January 14th

40 YEARS AGO

Jim Henson joins The Saturday Show to promote Fraggle Rock, provide the Kermit half of a new double act with a puppeteer viewer, read the address out and at the end interact with Musical Youth and Rustie Lee. Tommy Boyd and Isla St Clair sitting above him for the interview looks very weird, unless they thought that would put them in Kermit's eyeline.

Children saying the funniest things about concepts game show Child's Play was another US import given the very British idea of glamming up for the shiny floor, with the uncrowned master of making a shiny floor almost intimate Michael Aspel in charge. The guest guessers are Jon Pertwee and Isla Blair, talking ruefully about her son's wish to become an actor - and he is, as he's Waterloo Road's deputy headmaster, Jamie Glover.

The Comic Strip Presents: Susie, wherein free-spirited teacher and mother Dawn French, already married to Adrian Edmondson, is having an affair with Nigel Planer when fading, self-obsessed pop star Peter Richardson, who co-wrote it, buys a local farm and also attracts her attention, in a very loose take on Far From The Madding Crowd.

30 YEARS AGO

The Brookside lesbian kiss, a moment the show's reputation almost pivots on and Anna Friel's likewise for a long time, was neither the first soap lesbian moment - Emmerdale's Zoe Tate came out the previous year - nor the first same sex kiss on the lips, Eastenders' Colin and Guido having done that a full five years earlier. Still, it was the first between women pre-watershed, but although the episode was written by future Jimmy McGovern collaborator Shaun Duggan ("Phil initially wasn't keen on the idea, but I hadn't been out very long myself and was desperate to get that kind of representation on screen"), instigators Phil Redmond and Mal Young were concerned about backlash from lesbian groups and "others" and had it removed from the teatime omnibus, only for there to be more complaints about that editing than the actuality.

Also on this night, the first edition of Fantasy Football League, something we'll have to come back to next week as we don't have it to hand with unbeatable combination of guests Peter Cook, Mandy Smith and by phone Basil Brush.

ALSO...

1972: Today takes a heat check on the state of British cooking and whether "the British housewife is the worst cook in the world". Eamonn Andrews hosts a round table featuring among others Claire Rayner and Vincent Price.

1983: TV-am was two weeks away from launching when an unbilled preview run-through was broadcast with the intention of selling the Famous Five's grand plan to potential advertisers. Frost's flat attempts at humour include a terrible telling of the "who reads the papers" gag that Yes Prime Minister would make famous (and was a decade or so old even at this point) Seeing Frost, Robert Kee and Commander Philpott, all in grey against grey and/or cream, you can see what the reluctance was all round despite hopeful signs and statements. Essentially, the Daily Star's horoscope got it right, and not just that but a dispute with Equity meant that it couldn't actually broadcast any adverts with its members involved anyway until September 1984. Meanwhile with Breakfast Time gazumping them three days away from launch Pebble Mill At One went to see how newsroom preparations were getting on.

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