The Why Don't YouTube? Whatever You Call This Bit Of The Year Newsletter - December 29th 2023
From the house of @whydontyoutube
December 29th
40 YEARS AGO
Sooty was created in 1948, made its TV debut in 1952 and was given its own series in 1955, so where The Sooty Story - The First Thirty Years took its workings from we can but speculate. Regardless this is a fun 25 minutes of history and production footage featuring lots of people in flat caps and the puppets playing along with everything, not to mention Matthew Corbett in his home recording studio.
Peter in a kilt, Janet and Simon look back at the best Blue Peter moments of the year, including Simon dubbing one of his own films, Pele and Elton in the studio, a surprise for Percy Thrower and Sarah Greene's departure.
This is very late in the period to be putting on The Snowman, but it came with a different introduction to the previous year's Raymond Briggs winter walk. This is of course the much more famous David Bowie monologue-ette, Bowie being a Briggs aficionado - though the feeling wasn't entirely mutual, Briggs claiming "he got it all wrong, terribly. Hopeless" - and knowing composer Howard Blake through his work on The Hunger. (By the way, in case anyone wants to point to that Guardian piece or the official The Snowman site which both refer to it first being seen in 1984, it was covered in the press in advance of this repeat and the animation wasn’t shown at all on Channel 4 in ‘84 for some reason)
The second Top Of The Pops year in round-up special pulled double duty on Robert Smith, firstly on The Cure’s The Love Cats, then with Siouxsie & the Banshees, and he barely touches his guitar on either job. Elsewhere Howard Jones' special friend Jed tried to throw off his mental tinsel whilst Culture Club baited George's future and called the cop(s).
After TV-am have previewed Jeremy Beadle's history strand, Pat Phoenix on "the week as she sees it" and "the weird creatures of Fraggle Rock" Anglia's three religious advisers compare Christmas cards and a hatred of robins before closedown.
30 YEARS AGO
Sean's Show comes to an end with a series of personal cataclysms as Hughes has lost his girlfriend and his new job, he discovers he was adopted and his mother isn't actually Robert Smith, God's not interested and to top it all Gareth Southgate crushes his pet spider.
20 YEARS AGO
Bob Monkhouse died. ITV News' obituary came with comment from the desk of Jeremy Beadle.
Simon Dee's story of rags to riches to rags has been told many times and left an imprint on a couple of generations of stars and TV aficionados like Victor Lewis-Smith, who made a documentary about him for Channel 4 and then produced a one-off live Dee Time revival with guests Jerry Sadowitz, so obviously the whole show isn't available, Brian Sewell, Cleo Rocos and Helen Shapiro.
BBC4 put on a night of recently rediscovered comedy, starting it with an appropriate Time Shift, Missing Believed Wiped.
December 30th
40 YEARS AGO
The A Kick Up The Eighties team were mostly responsible for A Clip Round The Year, in which John Sessions links and revoices news clips from throughout 1983 for the ever popular "comic effect". NSFW and occasionally dubious, because 1983.
The last Carrott's Lib, strangely nearly four years before he got another series, is an end of the year show, so remember to have Wikipedia open for the references. The audience's reaction to a mention of Roland Rat suggests his gags weren't on the national wavelength, and who called the pop star "Boy Marilyn"? Also, while both of these steer far clear of what a much lesser comedian and set of writers would hone in on, probably didn't have to do the AIDS gags even/especially if none of them are actually about AIDS, and the one in Chris Barrie's Barry Norman impression about how we'd never hear from Peter Tatchell again even more so. Also can't imagine a modern satirical show making jokes about two planes colliding at Madrid Airport with 93 killed three weeks earlier.
Rare of David Frost to volunteer to do things in the televisual shadows but here he is turning up for a quick chat at Channel 4 closedown to promote his second annual new year show.
30 YEARS AGO
Earlier in the year, seeking a fully effective revamp from the Farm of old with ratings falling, Emmerdale brought in Phil Redmond as a story adviser and gave him a million pound budget. He wasn't there for long as development of Hollyoaks took precedence but his big idea did come to spectacular, forever memorable and standout fruition, namely dropping a plane on Beckindale. A Niklovic 745X travelling from Canada to somewhere unspecified in Eastern Europe before suffering structural failure, to be exact, killing all on board, either 138 or 250 depending on who's counting, and nine on the ground, though only four apparently mattered, none having been in the show for more than five years but including Annie Sugden's new husband and step-grandson - she was left in a coma for several months - and Eric Pollard's wife who had split from him over fraud and theft discovery. Contrary to the 18+ million viewers figure bandied about it actually drew 13.3 million according to contemporary BARB figures (nearly two and a half million less than the Strike It Lucky children's special and only just above Big Break) and was twelfth in that week's viewing chart, and it came with no small amount of controversy coming a week after the fifth anniversary of Lockerbie, but essentially destroying the village so much it was renamed reinvented the show thoroughly into a prime-time tentpole.
Andrew Marshall's solo TV writing career away from David Renwick still loved bringing a dark undertow to prime-time sitcom, as seen on 2point4 Children, Dad or in this case Health And Efficiency. Essentially a workplace sitcom set in an underfunded NHS ward, it spiritually spun off from 2point4 Children in that Victor McGuire had played the same doctor role in an episode, but Gary Olsen was lead as registrar having to work around his ex Felicity Montagu, not to mention Roger Lloyd-Pack as a failure surgeon, Deborah Norton as management, Adjoa Andoh and Samantha Janus. Here's the whole first series.
The Railway Station Man was presented as a Screen One but was actually shown at European film festivals and on US TV in 1992. Still, it was a BBC Studios production and there's no record of it being shown in the UK anywhere before this so let's claim it for our purposes. Don't Look Now's Julie Christie and Donald Sutherland are reunited in Shelagh Delaney's dramatisation of a Jennifer Johnston novel in which a painter and her son who fled to the coast after her husband was killed by the IRA falls in love with a mysterious American who restores abandoned railway stations until paramilitaries arrive on the scene.
BBC news' Review Of The Year looks back in anguish.
FROM THE ARCHIVE
1981: every so often Jackanory would get Instant Sunshine to close harmonise, bom-bom-bom and be generally wry over a self-penned whimsical story, such as Miles Kington's own The Discovery Of The Source Of The M1.
1984: Barry Norman had a good line in sub-Clive James occasional documentaries throughout the Eighties, and as such in Come On Down! went to investigate the world of American game shows, talking to contestants and producers at a time when their volume, glitz and high stakes were still alien to Brits until that same year's controversial launch of the British Price Is Right. There's also a strip game show on what was presumably a tiny local access channel knowing what we do about the FCC, because throughout the 1980s British TV was obsessed with them. And in the end the Naked Attraction call was coming from within ourselves.
1986: "I haven't got any scripts, Mike! How am I supposed to run a show?" A favourite, this - Philip Hayton's first solo BBC One O'Clock News with the gallery talkback, which is in full turmoil.
December 30th
1982: the BBC1 rotating world ident's gone all weird! And no, it's not a natural mental reaction to Keith Harris singing Can You Feel It in the preceding trailer. In fact it's Tomorrow's World pissing about with Quantel, two and a bit years before the COW emerged.
1984: The First Nether Wallop International Arts Festival was an initiative from the Book Of Heroic Failures author Stephen Pile to bring arts and culture to the Hampshire village in the name of the charity that would eventually reform into Comic Relief. Weekend In Wallop, filmed by Channel 4, brought a remarkable line-up including Billy Connolly, Rik Mayall, Peter Cook, Mel Smith, Rowan Atkinson, Fry & Laurie, Jenny Agutter, Michael Hordern, Stanley Unwin with assistant Bill Wyman, Jools Holland, Wayne Sleep, John Wells, Roger McGough, Brian Patten, John Otway, Arthur Smith, Norman Lovett... you get the picture.
1985: an aunt's Christmas present brought into the broom cupboard by Phillip to liven up a dead day, Gordon the Gopher was quickly housetrained. We're not sure his interaction with Hogan The Gorilla is meant to be as... graphic as it looks.
1987: in the second of two specials Wogan's Radio Fun celebrated wireless comedy with Milligan and Secombe, Williams and Paddick, Bill Cotton, Eric Sykes, Beryl Reid and a cast of thousands. 'Special Material: Bob Monkhouse, Barry Took' Uh?
2001: Central News celebrates its twentieth birthday - two days early, but we'll let them off - with a glorious tribute involving former reporters Chris Tarrant, Anne Diamond, Nick Owen and Gary Newbon, plus the iron horse of Midlands reportage Bob Warman. Part two covers the launch of Central News South which took after Jonathan Dimbleby on Panorama, that is to say they lost all their film and all their VT, while part three gets the heavy stuff out of the way so it can pay tribute to king of the And Finally, John Swallow. "Who's going to be presenting in twenty years' time? It may not be Bob, it may not be me..." muses contemporary co-anchor Joanne Malin, and she was half right, Warman retiring in mid-2022 while Malin jumped ship to the Beeb in 2008 and is still on Midlands Today.
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