Another five-pack of fun for children of all ages. Especially with the first programme on the list.

---

85: ChuckleVision

(Shown 1055 times, 1987-2012)

Here’s an entry that took quite a lot of digging to get some accurate numbers on. But, given the importance and gravitas of the programme in question, I’m sure you’ll agree it was worth the time poring through Genome to pick out individual episodes buried within faux-programme listings for ‘Saturday Starts Here’, ‘Children’s BBC’ and ‘CBBC’, then checking everything against an episode guide for CV to ensure I’d not missed anything. I’m not kidding, either. This one took ages. And I’m not kidding about the importance of the programme, either. A cultural touchstone for entire generations of children (and adults) across a quarter-century on our screens, and two of the absolute nicest people in showbusiness.

Not that the Chuckle Brothers first arrived on our screens fully-formed. Their first appearances on TV in the early 1980s came when Paul and Barry were joined by older brothers Jimmy and Brian Patton to make up a four-man Chuckle Brothers outfit, as can be seen in programmes such as 3-2-1 and The Good Old Days, a bepermed Barry referred to as ‘Legs’ throughout and still the target for most of the slaps from their slapstick act. Despite putting together a thoroughly enjoyable variety turn, the quartet soon span off into a pair of double-acts, Jimmy and Brian becoming The Patton Brothers, Paul and Barry retaining the Chuckle Brothers name. Not that this was an acrimonious parting of the ways – Jimmy and Brian would regularly feature in their younger siblings’ future programmes.

Not that Barry and Paul went straight to the personas we now know them for. Their first programme as a double-act on Children’s BBC seems almost surreal when viewed now (and I recall, pretty weird even at the time). Following a few appearances on 1983’s Roger The Dog Show, The Chucklehounds (“featuring The Chucklehound Brothers”) earned a standalone episode for their antics, The Chucklehounds Christmas airing on Christmas Eve morning BBC1 in 1984. That was followed by a full series, starting in February 1986, with the lead actors now billed as ‘The Chuckle Brothers’.

The programme – a full episode here if you want to experience/re-live it – was pretty much a low-budget attempt at a live-action cartoon, with the pair wobbling about in dog costumes and getting up to all manner of slapstick shenanigans. No dialogue, but soundtracked with the zaniest sounds a Yamaha PSS-170 could muster. Problem is, while actual cartoons airing on BBC1 at the time were carefully choreographed chaos from the likes of Chuck Jones, here you had an undoubtedly talented variety act donning great big dog heads that limit mobility and visibility, with a modest budget likely offering little time for retakes. If you’re feeling charitable, it was okay for what it was, and they certainly had few qualms about what they got up to (the episode I’ve linked to includes a Chucklehound on a motorbike. Inside the studio. No, it probably wouldn’t happen nowadays) But they were capable of so much more.

And so, from the morning of Saturday 26 September 1987, Chucklevision first hit our screens as a weekly precursor to Going Live. And watching it now, it still holds up very well. Not that this should be any surprise – they are actual brothers, after all – but the rapport that we’re so familiar with is immediately obvious, you have to wonder why the blazes they’d just spent eighteen months wobbling about in dog costumes and not speaking to each other. Right from the opening episode, Chucklevision is so packed with Tim Vine-grade jokes, you can’t help but grin throughout.

PAUL: Let’s take a look at the latest videos.

[A GRINNING BARRY HOLDS UP SEVERAL VHS TAPES]

PAUL: Very nice, aren’t they?

The first ever ChuckleVision, BBC-1, TX: 08:40 Saturday 26 September 1987

As you can see there, the first couple of series combined studio-based humour with outdoor footage – a departure from what most Chucklefans would be used to, but their dynamic works every bit as well in that setup. I think it works so well because despite it being such a traditional double act – the idiot who knows nothing and the idiot who knows everything – they shun the traditional trope of having the Oliver Hardy/Bud Abbott/Tommy Cannon/Stewart Lee one regularly express anger or frustration at the foolery of his counterpart, Paul being (for the most part) relentlessly cheery throughout makes all the difference. And it was a formula that worked tremendously well – as the show’s run of 21 series suggests. TWENTY-ONE SERIES, with new episodes being produced from 1987 to 2009.

It took until 2008’s twentieth series before episodes of Chucklevision debuted anywhere but BBC One, but premiering on the CBBC channel was clearly no demotion. The opening episode of that series (‘Mind Your Manors’) took in guest turns from Harry Hill and Seinfeld’s Guy Siner (oh, okay: Allo Allo’s Guy Siner. He was in Seinfeld once, though), and was later repeated on BBC One.

In short, the brothers Chuckle were and are a true phenomenon in children’s television. At the time of writing, a BBC Programme Index search for ‘Chucklevision’ (it really helps that it has such a unique title) returns details of 2,976 broadcasts of the programme (many of which were on the CBBC channel). But perhaps the greatest legacy they’ve left the world can be found by going into a room containing anyone between the ages of 20 and 45 and saying “To me…”.

---

84: Murder, She Wrote

(Shown 1065 times, 2002-2011)

Well, let nobody pretend this isn’t a surprise. A US drama series that, depending on your age, you likely associate more With 1980s Sunday evening ITV or latter day Channel Five. Yet here it is, tied with Dad’s bloody Army on the list. What manner of chicanery is going on here, then?

It might also be a bit of a surprise to see that Ms Jessica Fletcher actually spent as long as ten whole years being broadcast on the Beeb. Possibly slightly under the radar as a daytime staple, which (not for the only time on this list) makes all the difference. But what is perhaps most surprising of all is how Murder, She Wrote appeared so many more times on the BBC than contemporary US shows like Columbo (225 times, 1988-2003, 485th place), Ironside (514 times, 1967-2003, 187th place), or even the always-bloody-on-when-I-was-a-kid Bonanza (somehow only 220 showings between 1978 and 1988, 497th place).

Admittedly, it certainly helps to reach that number of broadcast episodes when there are 264 recorded episodes to choose from (plus a further four TV movies). Seems strange now to see that, going by the TVTimes piece on the series before it debuted on ITV in May 1985, the then 59-year-old Angela Lansbury was unsure about continuing in the role after recording season three. Instead of calling it a day after March 1986, she went on to remain in the role until 2003.

And as that meant the world would go on to see Jessica Fletcher join the VR revolution (in the infamous 1993 episode ‘A Virtual Murder’), the whole of society definitely benefited from that decision.

---

83: Dad’s Army

(Shown 1069 times, 1968-2021)

Well. Here’s a programme that was always going to be On Ze List, but who would’ve thought it would be in as modest a position as joint-83rd?

Not that a sitcom that lasted for a total of 80 episodes (several of which were officially missing for much of the repeat run, though that number’s now down to three) being broadcast over a thousand times is anything to be sniffed at, you understand. But it’s kind of indicative that we’re not going to see Fawlty Towers or Blackadder in this hundred. (I may well compile a separate list of most-shown comedy programmes at some point soon.)

Anyway, onto the Warmington-on-Sea Home Guard. You already know what Dad’s Army is about if you’ve lived in the UK for more than seven minutes, but there are a few things worth considering when it comes to all these broadcasts. Bear in mind, I’ve not scoured the original listings to fully tot up broadcasts of each particular episode, that’s one for a future update. Perhaps. These observations are merely anecdotal.

THING ONE: Of those eighty episodes, the majority of repeat broadcasts for Dad’s Army are from series’ three to six. Series one and two were recorded in black and white, and as such only seem to get very occasional airings (and even then, only ever on BBC Two).

THING TWO: Similarly, series seven, eight and nine generally don’t reach the broadcast schedules quite as regularly, coming as they did after the early death of key cast member James Beck. That said, the Christmas 1974 episode ‘Turkey Dinner’ (s7e6) does seem to crop up quite a lot, due to it being ripe for those Christmas classics slots.

THING THREE: Episodes where Private Cheeseman (Talfryn Thomas) is a main part of the platoon certainly don’t seem to air as regularly. Probably because, let’s face it, he’s really quite annoying. The amount of reputational damage that character has done to the Welsh people is near incalculable. I’m saying it took until the rise of Gareth Bale to see us truly reintegrated into society.

It’s also interesting to see how, once new episodes had stopped being made in 1977, repeats of the series remained very much a BBC1 thing until the late 1990s, after which it became a nailed-on fixture of the BBC2 schedules. Look, here’s an illustrative chart.

Can’t believe I’ve waited this long to start chucking charts in. If I ever do manage to update this entire project in the future (all together now: “Do you think that’s wise, Mark?”), it’ll be interesting to see how far Dad’s Army climbs up the list. It’s such a safe pair of hands – it’s one of the few ‘grown-up’ non-animated programmes my seven-year-old son enjoys, as an illustrative example – one can easily imagine it retaining a place in the BBC2 schedules for years to come. Can’t see Murder, She Wrote clocking up many showings on the BBC any time soon.

FACTS AMAZING: The entirety of Dad’s Army is technically a flashback – the first episode opens with the old platoon reuniting as part of the then-contemporary ‘”I’m Backing Britain” campaign, before recalling their service years, at which point the series as we know it begins.

---

82: The Magic Roundabout

(Shown 1070 times, 1965-1985)

Without even bothering to check through the rest of the list, I’m just going to go out on a limb and state categorically that this is the highest-ranking French programme on the list.

Let’s get all the clichés out of the way first. Emma Thompson’s Dad (or, to be more accurate, actor, scriptwriter and stage director Eric Thompson), ‘Le Manège Enchanté’, not having the original script to work from so just riffing it, stockbrokers dashing home from the office to avoid missing it, hack 90s stand-ups claiming they were all on drugs except they obviously weren’t because there is such a thing as imagination. Oh, and a clip of The Massive Dougal from Goodies Rule OK. There. Got them all? Good. This kind of lore never built up around Henry’s Cat, did it?

When it came to kids’ programming on the BBC at the time, especially animated or stop-motion fare, it was generally the case that less is more. As mentioned previously, Bagpuss only clocked up thirteen episodes during its time on screen, and Postman Pat took nearly fifteen years to get beyond an initial baker’s dozen of episodes. Similarly, both Bod and The Flumps only ever had thirteen episodes each, while Mr Benn enjoyed a comparatively gargantuan total episode order of… fourteen episodes.

By comparison, as the adventures of Dougal, Florence and the Gang had been produced over the channel (for the ‘Office de Radiodiffusion-Télévision Française’, rather than ITV, obviously), there were a few more episodes to pick from. How many? 450 in total. Fortunately, Eric Thompson’s knack for warm and whimsical interpretation – a skill he’d previously displayed as a presenter on Play School, along with his wife Phyllida Law, which led to him being offered the Roundabout gig – was a more than suitable match. That, plus a peak slot in the schedules (bridging children’s programming and the early evening news) helped bring in a cross-generational audience, and ensured the Roundabout would be kept a-spinning on British screens throughout the 1970s.

But every imperial phase must end. On 19 May 1978, the Magic Roundabout aired in the pre-news slot for the last time, and it moved to a weekday morning slot for the remainder of the decade, after which the programme went back to bed for a few years. A Zebedee reference can go here if you like (in your mind, I’m not writing one). From January 1984, the Magic Roundabout returned to BBC1, this time in a 3.50pm slot to open up the Children’s BBC strand each day. It only stayed in that slot until the end of March that year, after which it only made occasional appearances in morning and lunchtime slots for pre-school tots.

After 1985, that was the end of The Magic Roundabout on the main BBC channels. It did however reappear on terrestrial TV (as a series of 52 purportedly ‘not previously broadcast’ episodes) in January 1992, as part of The Channel Four Daily’s initial push for viewers. Eric Thompson was no longer around to provide new narration, so the task was handed to Nigel Planer, who provided a tone not dissimilar to the Thompson original.

There was also a CGI-animated film made of the programme in 2005, featuring a very impressive voice cast (including Tom Baker, Jim Broadbent, Robbie Williams, Joanna Lumley, Ian McKellen and Kylie Minogue for the UK version, Jon Stewart, William H. Macy, Chevy Chase, Whoopi Goldberg, Jimmy Fallon and Judi Dench for the US release). That film isn’t included in the count, but for the curious: it was broadcast five times between 2008 and 2013, generally in the off-piste days of the Christmas schedules.

---

81: In the Night Garden

(Shown 1106 times, 2007-2012)

And so, direct from The Magic Roundabout to the closest thing there is to it in the modern era, and Russell Howard’s so-damn-lazy routine about this programme presumably exists purely to underline this statement.

For the benefit of readers without children, assuming they’re not too busy spending disposable income or enjoying full nights of sleep to read this, In the Night Garden involves boat-bound castaway Igglepiggle settling down for the night as his little sailboat drifts aimlessly on the ocean. As he sleeps, he dreams of his happy place: The Night Garden. A place where he frolics with friends Upsy Daisy, Makka Pakka and the Tombliboos. A place where the grass is the lushest green, and the Pinky Ponk floats freely in the sky. At the end of each episode, we fade back to Igglepiggle on his boat, still asleep, as his boat drifts into the aquatic wilderness as the end credits roll.

That might seem like a dark retelling of what’s going on, but it’s the actual plot that the narrator – Sir Derek Jacobi (yeah, look impressed) – reads at the start of every episode. I’m far from the only person to have thought about this – Google ‘in the night garden sailor theory’ to see how common it is.

Okay. In short, if you’re a parent who ends up having to watch this programme every evening because it’s more suitable than what you really want to watch at 6.30pm, your mind really can’t help but overanalyse every little facet of the programme. Like: how come the Pontipine children are never taken into care? And why does to relative size of the characters keep shifting around so much in each episode? But hey, there might be someone good on Bedtime Stories in a bit.

Anyway, plots for In the Night Garden rarely make much sense (a thought for the people working on iPlayer charged with summing up each episode in a few sentences, here). But then, it isn’t aimed at an audience expecting a traditional three-act narrative structure. It’s been a fixture in the lives of young children since it first aired in 2007, and there’d likely be a violent toddler uprising if CBeebies tried to shove Moon and Me into that peak 6:30pm slot.

The slightly odd thing is, In the Night Garden is very much an evening, pre-bedtime programme. It’s all about the act of going to bed and getting some shut-eye (and possibly also about Igglepiggle’s knack for lucid dreaming), so it’s a little strange that when it aired on BBC Two (so the show could be enjoyed by families yet to make the switch to digital TV) it was always in a morning slot. Not that these sheer numbers aren’t impressive. Just imagine if I’d added in all the CBeebies broadcasts of the series, where it has aired seven days a week pretty much since it first aired. As it is, a very respectable showing for an incredibly popular kids’ TV programme.

---

Right, that’s it for now. More soon! A bit more of a mixed bag next time, with at least one more “oh, I thought that would be much higher” entry: GUARANTEED.

Here are the next five entries from the rundown of Auntie’s All-Time Favourites. As ever, the usual things apply: everything is accurate to the best of my knowledge, but with over 800,000 broadcasts to sift through, I can’t guarantee some individual episodes may have slipped through my datanet. Also, and you’ll never have guessed this, I’ve not watched all hundred programmes on the list (in some cases due to the trifling matter of every episode being wiped long before I was born), so if you’re able to correct any of my glaring inaccuracies, please let me know. Thanks, lovelies.

Okay, into the next picks from the selection box. Oggy Oggy Oggy.

---

90: Strictly – It Takes Two

(Shown 1006 times, 2004-2021)

“Please, call me ‘It Takes Two’. ‘Strictly Come Dancing It Takes Two’ is my father’s name.”

Personally, I’m still surprised that Come Dancing (a) even made a comeback that would become so popular, it felt like like seeing a peak-time celebrity reboot of One Man and His Dog (b) it would be so damn popular the format would be sold around the world (under a more sensible name, admittedly), and (c) that it did all that with such an unwieldy title. Presumably a play on the firm Strictly Ballroom, it doesn’t even work as a pun. Rubbish!

Well, more fool me. And while the main Strictly series has proved to be incredibly popular, its BBC2 companion series It Takes Two is the one to make the cut here. Running from Monday to Friday on BBC2 during the run of the main show over on BBC1, this show-about-a-show actually started on BBC Three as (appropriately enough) Strictly Come Dancing: On Three. It proved to be popular enough to warrant a move to a 6.30pm slot following Beg, Borrow or Steal as BBC Two’s official alternative to the news. And luckily, the move also saw a change from original BBC Three presenter Justin Lee Collins to the less #problematic Claudia Winkleman. 

The format is simple enough. You can expect to see interviews and training footage of couples competing in the current Big Saturday Night series, along with input from the judges and chats with famous Strictly fans. The format even proved sturdy enough to warrant live hour-long episodes each Friday evening. 

As might be expected from the sheer longevity of the series – eighteen years and still running – it has retained a loyal audience throughout. With viewing figures north of three million on more than a couple of dozen occasions, it has made the BBC2’s BARB top ten on at least 273 occasions (I keep more than one pointlessly huge database of TV information, you know). And let’s face it, it’s not going to be stopping any time soon. 

As for the broadcast history of the programme – well, for anyone who loves uniformity this is a treat. Since 2013, it has been on precisely sixty times per year, aside from in 2020 (for blindingly obvious reasons), when it aired precisely forty times. And it has been on each weekday (or at least, been scheduled to be on each weekday) a tantalisingly almost-identical number of times. If you’re wondering, that rogue Friday gap came in 2006, where the eve of the big final saw the Friday evening BBC2 broadcast listed as just ‘Strictly Come Dancing’ without the ‘It Takes Two’ suffix. A mistake on part of the the RT editorial team? Perhaps, but that’s what it’s been added under in The Big List, resulting in the following table:

---

=87: The Simpsons

(Shown 1010 times, 1996-2004)

Two things pretty much led directly to the dominance of Sky in today’s television market. One is Premier League football, 104 years of tradition being tossed aside for a new money-led project that went on to dominate the sporting world, and Sky Sports will forever be irrevocably tied to it. The other key factor: a certain five-member family from Springfield. 

Now the series seems utterly ubiquitous, where you can easily watch at least four full episodes a day without even thinking about firing up a streaming service (or blowing the dust off your DVD player), it seems unlikely now that watching The Simpsons ever felt to be the sole preserve of a lucky few. While the family had originally been introduced to British audiences in screenings of The Tracey Ullman Show on BBC2 (which aired 46 times between 1988 and 1991, if you’re wondering, though not all episodes featured Homer et al), their spin-off series was Sky-exclusive. And Sky knew how to make the most of it. 

I mean, just look at that line-up. Alf had already been on ITV, In Living Color and Wings really weren’t going to convince anyone to bolt a binlid to their house, nor was a live two-hour Saturday night ‘entertainment extravaganza’ starring Matt Lorenzo, Neil “Heil Honey” McCaul, Jane Alexander and Mickey Hutton. No wonder all hopes for getting football refuseniks onto Sky were pinned on Bart Simpson (Homer being a much lesser beacon in those early years). And that was how it generally panned out. Unless you were willing to make do with buying three-episode VHS tapes of the series from John Menzies, or could convince a dish owner to record a few episodes for you, that was the only way you’d get to see The Simpsons during its Golden Age. 

Then in November 1996, everything changed. The programme everyone wanted to see was no longer going to be the exclusive preserve of Pay TV. It was going to be on BBC1. This was big news. They were on the cover of the Radio Times (along with several other magazines, even including Loaded). Saturday nights, kicking off the evening’s entertainment at 5.30pm each week. It couldn’t fail.

And then they used the slot to show early episodes of the series (starting with There’s No Disgrace Like Home, S1E4), from before the show had become the breathless cavalcade of comedy it was known for, and many viewers instead opted for Sabrina the Teenage Witch on ITV instead. By the end of February 1997, The Simpsons had been retired from the pre-6pm slot on Saturday night BBC1, and repeats of Dad’s Army were swiftly parachuted in. Mind Godfrey’s hip.

A piece in The Stage, dated 27 Feb 1997, covered the switch to Two:

SIMPSONS IN CHANNEL SWITCH

BBC Television has denied it is moving The Simpsons to BBC2 because of competition from ITV’s American import Sabrina, the Teenage Witch.

A Corporation spokesman claimed the cartoon as moved from its original Saturday timeslot because it came to the end of a 13 week run.

He said: “We always beat Sabrina in the ratings, but we came to the end of the run and were desperate for another slot. So we decided to capitalise on the show’s popularity by bringing it back twice a week on BBC2.”

However, ITV sources claim that although The Simpsons started off winning viewers from its rival, the tables soon turned and The Simpsons was beaten.

An ITV spokeswoman said: “Presumably the BBC found Sabrina too strong an opponent.”

The Stage, 27 February 1997

It seems the Beeb had expected The Simpsons to be facing a declining Baywatch, rather than an increasingly popular newcomer. And indeed, come Monday 10 March 1997, that was where they landed. The Simpsons would go out every Monday and Friday at 6pm, with The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air and Star Treks TNG and DS9 taking the slot on the other weekdays. 

And that’s what really made the show a bona BBC hit (averaging a decent 3.4m viewers), and it would stay in that 6pm slot for the rest of it’s stay at the Beeb. Initially going out every Monday and Friday, but rapidly filling in where other weekdays were going spare, and appearing on the channel nine times in the week leading up to Christmas 1998.

From 25 February 2002, Simpsons episodes each weekday on BBC2 finally became a regular occurrence, perhaps not coincidentally that being the week it was reported Channel Four had snaffled up The Simpsons at a cost of £700,000 per episode. This at least meant the BBC would retain the rights until 2004, and they were determined to make the most of them.

And that’s no surprise – the show would make BBC2’s ratings top ten on 669 occasions between 1998 and 2004, reaching a high of 6.42m viewers on 7 Dec 1998 .

That most popular episode? Lisa vs Malibu Stacey. Why? Don’t ask me, I’m just a girl. Tee-hee-hee.

---

=87: Nai Zindagi – Naya Jeevan

(Shown 1010 times, 1968-1982)

One thing that’s really noticeable with the BBC of the past, is that they really did make an effort to offer something for everyone, even if it wasn’t always during peak viewing hours. Whether the target audience sought religious programming, to improve their French- or Italian-language skill-set, adult literacy assistance, signed programming for the hard of hearing, or all the hot and steamy farming news. 

Much of this niche programming went out on Sunday morning BBC1, including the next entry in the rundown. Nai Zindagi – Naya Jeevan (‘New Life (in Urdu) – New Life (in Hindi)’, if you’re wondering) first featured in the Sunday morning schedule on 24 November 1968 . For the first time, there was programming on offer for Hindi- and Urdu-speaking viewers. 

With just thirty minutes each week, and quite a lot to cover (you know, music, interviews, a round-up of news from an entire sub-continent), one can only imagine how difficult it must have been to prepare for each show, not least given that the BBC’s previous attempts at catering for a British-Asian audience hadn’t lasted too long. 

1965’s ‘In Logon Se Miliye’ ran for just thirteen episodes, airing at 9am on Sunday mornings with a midweek early-afternoon repeat. This followed the weekly BBC Home Service radio programme ‘Apna Hi Ghar Samajhiye’ (‘Make Yourself at Home’), which included news reports from Britain and overseas, combined with “Gramophone records and music from India and Pakistan”, which aired at around 8am each Sunday morning. Indeed, the two programmes were so in tune with each other, the Radio Times listings for In Logon Se Miliye requested that any correspondence to the TV series be addressed to the radio programme. With the two so intertwined, it made sense for In Logon Se Miliye to be renamed ‘Apna Hi Ghar Samajhiye’ in January 1966, so that both programmes shared a name as well as a production team. 

The BBC’s official BBC100 pages contain a comprehensive write-up of Apna Hi Ghar Samajhiye by the University of Sussex’s Professor David Hendy, which also includes a variety of clips and interviews: https://www.bbc.com/historyofthebbc/100-voices/people-nation-empire/make-yourself-at-home/ – Well worth a look if you’re interested.

Nai Zindagi – Naya Jeevan wasn’t to be the sole offering aimed at a British-Asian audience during its time on air. 1977 saw the introduction of Gharbar, a companion programme catering for Asian women. Initially scheduled for a single 26-episode series, it would end up lasting until 1987. Indeed, Gharbar outlasted Nai Zindagi – Naya Jeevan, the latter being replaced in 1982 by a new, more news-based programme for Asian viewers, still broadcast in Urdu and Hindi. Asian Magazine first aired in April 1982, running until 1987, where (along with Gharbar) it would represent the BBC1’s final foray into Urdu- and Hindi-language programming.

---

=87: QI

(Shown 1010 times, 2003-2021)

By 2003, it was established fact that no matter where you were in London, you were never more than six feet away from someone recording a comedy panel show. In the same way that both Wales and New Zealand famously contain more sheep than human beings, there were actually more panel-based  wry sideways glances at things than scripted works on television and radio at the time.

Now, that’s not actually true, but it makes you think. After all, it was a time when ‘It’s Only TV…but I Like It’ got to four full series on primetime BBC One, despite only seventeen people remembering it nowadays. 

It was in that media landscape that John Lloyd, the seemingly unstoppable producer of TV comedy legends like Not the Nine O’Clock News, Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, Spitting Image and Blackadder, announced he’s devised a new panel show that everyone would just love. 

I must admit, at the time I was more than a little sceptical. By this point, the average flying time of a new panel-based comedy show was akin to a newbie WWI pilot, yet here was John Lloyd of all people with another one. One bullish enough to claim it had been devised for a very specific run of 26 series (VIDIPRINTER: TWENTY-SIX). Involvement of Stephen Fry or not, it seemed unfathomable that it could have such staying power. 

Yeah, you know the rest. It ended up proving a huge success. In fact, it’s been so successful, it’s now part of a very exclusive group of programmes to have aired on BBC One, BBC Two, BBC Three and BBC Four. The whole set. Admittedly, you’ll need to allow the QI segment of 2011’s Comic Relief special 24 Hour Panel People (highlights of which appeared on Three) to count, but still. Other than events like Eurovision or The African Nations’ Cup, very few actual programmes can claim to appearing on the full set of modern-day BBC channels, even with such an admittedly wobbly qualifier. 

So, once it was on air, QI quickly became a favourite of people seeking something a little more cerebral from their desk-based comedy. No getting big laughs from hilariously pointing out that Eric Pickles was a bit on the portly side, or that Daleks can’t go up stairs. Indeed, at least in the early years, QI actively docked points from participants who’d trot out an obvious gag in response to questions – though I’d say it’s quite notable that they halted that particular practice after certain panellists repeatedly triggered the hack klaxon. 

With early episodes debuting on BBC Four (mainly as a digital driver to draw an audience to the fledgling channel, each ep would arrive in a 10pm spot on BBC Two the following week), by January 2009 (Series F) it had proved popular enough to see a HIGNFY-style promotion to the big leagues – a 9pm Friday night slot on BBC One. It never quite felt quite at ease on the channel, and soon found itself being tried out in different places. November 2009’s Series G went out in a 9.30pm Thursday night slot, before switching to a surprising pre-watershed 8.30pm Friday home a few weeks later. That’s where it stayed until May 2011, before moving back to a more suitable home on BBC Two.

That certainly felt about right. While ‘Have I Got News For You’ seemed to readjust itself to a place on BBC One, it never felt quite right for QI. A bit like a Molly Ringwald character feeling pressured to plaster on make-up to fit in with the cool kids rather than just being true to herself. 

And so, from 2011 onwards, BBC Two has been the home of QI. Despite what some might see as a ‘relegation’ back to the second channel, it hasn’t hampered the programme one bit. Another format tweak also borrowed from HIGNFY – ‘enhanced’ same week repeats featuring a longer edit of each episode – would see QI XL (included in the figures here, as I’m counting repeats of everything else, it’s kind of the point) airing almost as regularly as the vanilla versions of QI. Even the 2015 announcement that host Stephen Fry was leaving the series didn’t dampen enthusiasm for the programme, with new host Sandi Toksvig proving a similarly capable foil for bouncy-haired troublemaker Alan Davies. 

Sure, it doesn’t seem quite as essential as it once did – the sheer volume of episodes, most of which seem to be continuously pouring from a tap onto the Dave scheduled, can account for that – but it would be a fool’s errand to suggest QI won’t meet its original mission statement: clocking up a series for each letter of the alphabet before the QI elves are finally released back into the wild.

---

86: Laurel and Hardy

(Shown 1046 times, 1948-2005)

Okay, here’s a thing. For the most part, if a programme is called something, it’s that something. In the case of beloved comedy duo Laurel and Hardy, it’s either one of their original films, or an episode of the 1966-1967 Hanna-Barbera cartoon of the same name. And quite frankly, one of these things is less than the other.

But I’m going to combine the two anyway, and that’s for a number of reasons. 1) Going into each listing and accurately differentiating the two would be tricky and time-consuming, 2) Even if the cartoon spin-off couldn’t hold a candle to the originals, their popularity on Children’s BBC only confirms how beloved the duo were (and indeed, still are) across generations of young comedy fans, and 3) having Laurel and Hardy in this list is definitely preferable to having Wanted Down Under on there.

Aside from that, there were the expected difficulties in piecing together instances where (live-action) Stan and Ollie were actually broadcast. In many cases, they were billed as ‘Laurel and Hardy in’, which is fine and dandy. But in some instances, that wasn’t the case – it’s only in doing some last-minute fact checking that revealed (for example) nine screenings of A Chump at Oxford (ranging from 1950 to 2002) slipping through the net. And in many cases in the RT listings, there are indistinct billings that may well contain some Laurel and Hardy gold, or may not. Quite a lot of ‘Comedy Classics Double Bill’ or ‘Film Matinee’ in there, let alone the ominous total of one easily-identified L&H film being aired between 1936 and 1964.

Plus, on top of all that, there’s an argument for the Laurel & Hardy cartoon being more of a ‘proper’ programme than the films. After all, the Laurel and Hardy films are… films. I’m not going to include The Marx Brothers in this rundown (their work is more routinely listed as individual film titles, for one thing), so why should Laurel and Hardy warrant inclusion?

So, in short: I’m very much including Laurel and Hardy in here. As you will have noticed. And I’ve tried to pick up all the films of their that aren’t explicitly listed as being Laurel and Hardy films.

They generally only ever played the characters of Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy in their films anyway, and I’m saying that’s enough to make their live-action antics a TV series that just happens to pre-date the medium of television. And the cartoon is just a continuation of that. Yeah, not an ideal situation, but to try and make up for it, I’ve done my best to put together broadcast histories for both live-action and animated Laurel and Hardy. Here you go! 309 animated episodes, 626 live-action. Try not to be too James Finlayson about it, eh?

If all that has put you in the mood for learning a little bit more about the pair German audiences knew as Dick and Dorf, I definitely recommend this 1974 episode of Omnibus. Intermingled with classic clips from their many films is rare archive footage and contributions from some truly A-List names – Jerry Lewis, Marcel Marceau, Spike Milligan, Bob Monkhouse, Dilys Powell, Hal Roach, Kenneth Tynan and Dick Van Dyke. Plus, on top of all that, it’s narrated by Eric Morecambe and Ernie Wise.

^{[UPDATE 3 AUG: With many thanks to Steve Arnold for bringing this to my attention, but the BBC showings of the L&H cartoons coincided with the L&H films being picked up by the ITV network. A quick peek at the superb TVRDB website confirms this, with at least 28 instances of Laurel and Hardy films appearing on Thames between 1982 and 1984, with at least three more on LWT during that same period.]}

---

So, there we go. Another five entries ticked off the list, with just the last… Bloody hell, 85 to go.

Come back soon for the next segment of the series, where you’ll get to see how much research I managed to do on a programme that was last broadcast seventy years ago. And a particular programme that will be very familiar to everyone.

Happy birthday, Auntie.

As you may have noticed this year  - or at least during the moments of it where you forget about the collapse of society, the evaporation of peace in Europe and basically everything being on fire  –  the BBC is (quite modestly) marking a hundred years of broadcasting to the nation. Since 1922 via the medium of radio, and since 1936 via Stooky Bill’s telly box. As everyone knows, that makes it the longest-running television service in the world. 

In all that time, they’ve put out a lot of programmes over Britain’s airwaves. How many? Well, by my reckoning, well over 855,000 of them. 

And how do I know that? 

Because dear reader, I’ve gone and counted the bloody things.

 Yes indeed. After extracting a frankly stupid and ill-advised amount of information from the BBC’s marvellous Genome website (and from the BBC website’s programme listings for anything since 2010), I’ve been able to calculate how many times every single(ish) programme has been broadcast since the launch of the BBC Television Service. And in all that time, one programme has been broadcast a lot more than any other. Do you want to know what it is? 

It’s ‘The News’. There. That was easy. 

Yeah, that was always going to be the case. So instead, I’ve put together a list of the hundred most frequently flung-out programmes between BBC-1, BBC-2 and the original BBC Television Service. And — crucially, to stop this all being an even more monumental waste of time — I’ve discarded a few things. 

• The News
• The Weather
• Closedown (It isn’t a programme. It’s the lack of one.)
• ‘The News’ masquerading under another programme title (such as ‘BBC Breakfast News’ or ‘Newyddion’)
• Strands comprised entirely of other individual programmes (such as ‘Children’s BBC’, ‘Children’s Television’ or ‘Watch With Mother’)
• ‘Open University’ or ‘BBC Learning Zone’ when listed as a programme, though individual programmes therein are included where listed in the RT.
• The thousand-plus entries listed as ‘Demonstration Film’ from the early days of the Beeb, which I was very, very close to including. Only on further investigation did I learn that much of each two-hour ‘episode’ was long stretches of the test card.

So, y’know, do your own damn list if you want to see these. It was a bit of a struggle to keep the whole list under a million records as it was.

I have, however, kept in things like sports coverage*, and some other things that might not easily fit into a particular pigeonhole, but deserve inclusion because they were hardy enough to warrant discussion. Not saying what they are yet, to add to the swirling excitement.

*That’s “Sports coverage where a programme is defined as being for a single sport, or under a specific branding” Which often wasn’t the case:

A few other things to note: 

• All information taken from the details published in the Radio Times, with occasional individual missing days filled in using TV listings from The British Newspaper Archive. There are some quite large gaps on Genome for listings pre-1960 — I’ve filled in gaps as best I can where it’s the odd day or two missing. I’m not bloody-minded enough to trawl through the British Newspaper Archive to fill in the April to August 1939 gap on Genome, however. That said, that is the only notable gap in the data set. I’ve even filled in missing data from weeks where the RT was sidelined by strike action. 
• As a result of this being a record of published listings, these figures are based on programmes that were scheduled to be shown. So there’s no need to let me know that the episode of Changing Rooms scheduled for 11 September 2001 didn’t actually go to air.
• Only items that got a billing in the Radio Times (or, post-2010, on the BBC website, or in newspaper TV listings for days missing from Genome) 
• Only items broadcast on the BBC Television Service (1936–1964), BBC-1 and BBC-2 (1964-) are accounted for. Don’t be expecting to see anything from BBC Choice, BBC Knowledge or CBeebies here. Unless they were also broadcast on one of the proper channels. 
• To be quite frank, this entire endeavour has been a colossally misjudged use of my resources and limited free time, thanks to the amount of data cleanse needed. Extracting all the data itself was relatively easy. Going through and tidying up loads of OCR glitches like ‘The Weakest Unk’ was the real time sink. But in many cases, I’ve corrected them on Genome for future generations to enjoy YOU’RE WELCOME. If any have slipped past my tired typo-spotting eyes, I humbly apologise. And I say all this without a drop of cynicism about The BBC Genome Project itself. Truly, it’s one of the best resources ever made available on the Internet. 
• I’ve also tried to differentiate between programmes where the same title has been used for more than one thing. For example, in addition to being an antipodean continuing drama, ‘Neighbours’ was also the title of a Anthony Merryn play broadcast in 1948 and 1949, plus a 1981 one-off drama by the Bristol Arts Unit. I’ve separated those entries as they were quite identifiably different. Where the distinction has been trickier, I’ll try to point that out in the listings. 
• Programmes included up to and including 31/12/2021. By default, BBC London listings have been used. So don’t expect Sportscene or Only An Excuse to feature heavily. 

Still here? Splendid. So, resisting the temptation to rig the data so broadcasts of BBC Select makes the list (FYI, it’s in 164th place, and I totally would have conjured up a rationale for including it), here we go: 

---

=99: Five to Eleven 

(Shown 883 times, 1986–1990)

Oh, of course our top hundred has to start with joint-ninety-ninth. Anyway, this is the content you’re all here for. Certainly something you wouldn’t expect to see on the BBC flagship TV channel nowadays, and even then it surely seemed a bit of an anachronism. The format saw various figures giving short readings or poems in a modest studio setting. And that was it —10.55am each weekday morning, just four minutes in length, a celebrity basically pops around to yours during your mid-morning tea break, does a poem and then totters off.

In the example up there, actor, writer and artist Edward Petherbridge reads Cecil Day-Lewis’s poem ‘The Newborn’. A world away from episode six billion of Homes Under the Hammer, I’m sure you’ll agree. The sort of thing seemingly more suited to Radio Four than BBC One, but then (non-schools) daytime broadcasting was still a new thing for the channel at the time, so they hardly had budget to burn. And hey, it’s really quite a nice thing to see.

---

99: Saturday Kitchen 

Shown 890 times, 2001–2021

If asked to name the second most frequently shown Open University programme of all time, you’d probably expect the answer to be ‘Geochemical Surveying’ or ‘Public Administration’ or something similarly dry. But nope, it’s Saturday Kitchen. Saturday. Kitchen. At least that’s how the full series was launched in 2002 following a pilot episode the previous year — as a BBC One/Open University co-production. Not that it came with any particularly lofty ideals, of course. If anything, it seems to have been little more than a linking strand, with the first outings containing full episodes of Two Fat Ladies and Australian cooking show Food Source amongst new bespoke recipes and food-based chat. That’s very nearly enough to see it barred from inclusion here, but as it would go on to become the Multi-Coloured Swap Shop for the gastro set we’re more familiar with, that’d be a bit harsh.

---

98: Final Score 

Shown 897 times, 1971–2021

Here’s one you’d expect to be ranking a lot higher up the chart. After all, the Saturday afternoon football results rundown is part of Britain’s modern cultural folklore. Len Martin or Tim Gudgin’s voice going up for the first bit when reading out a home win, the vidiprinter spelling out ‘(SEVEN)’ after a colossal win, an anxious wait for that elusive Forfar Five East Fife Four, being annoyed at not being told the latest score of matches still in progress (nope, ‘L-L’ is all you’re getting). So, shurely it’s been on much more often than this?

Well, dear reader. For most of Final Score’s long life — and it’s been going since 1958 — it was merely a single cog in Grandstand’s sporting charabanc, only picking up a Radio Times billing on occasions where there was no Grandstand for it to be a part of, such as Bank Holidays. Final Score has only been a regular to our EPGs since 2007, what with the BBC’s diminishing amount of sports rights blowing the final whistle for Grandstand as a concept. 

And it’s that regular scheduling that has earned it a place here, even if Final Score itself now feels a tad overshadowed by Sky’s Soccer Saturday in the eyes of many football fans. But in general, as is usually the case when it comes to football, The Football Results just seem to contain a little extra sense of gravitas when they’re on the BBC.

---

97: Put Your Money Where Your Mouth Is

(Shown 917 times, 2008-2021)

There are two ways to handle things when a new TV format doesn’t quite prove as popular as you’d hoped. The first and most obvious one: write it off as a bad lot and walk away from it hoping nobody noticed you’d been involved. The second: frantically retool everything and pray to the sun god that there’ll be a third series commission at the end of it.

The initial premise for Put Your Money Where Your Mouth Is saw some of television’s top consumer experts (either solo or working as a team) investing sums of their own hard-earned cash (generally investing in bricks and mortar, but occasionally in antiques) at the start of an episode, showing how their top consumer expertise can transform that initial outlay into a larger amount of money by the time the cameras stop rolling. On the one hand, that’s a format sure to work. On the other hand, that’s only because seventeen other programmes were doing practically the same thing.

So, after discovering that the Property Expert Earns A Lot Of Money pool was already full, PYMWYMI soon seemed to reinvent itself as… ripping off Bargain Hunt instead, with duelling experts each investing their own readies on a specified type of item, to see who can turn the quickest buck.

Was it a success? Yeah, you already know the answer to that, because it’s on this list. Despite adopting a fairly well-worn format, PYMWYMI swiftly became a hit with viewers, and the programme would soon see itself spread across the schedules like high-end marmalade.

---

96: Z Cars

(Shown 920 times, 1962-1998)

“I thought I was out. But then they dragged me back in” could be a line from any generic 80s cop film, where a grizzled LAPD Detective postpones his retirement to tackle one last case, just like he did in the previous four films in the series. The same could be said of Z Cars, had it been a sentient being capable of independent thought in addition to being a tremendously hardy continuing police procedural. 

An antidote to the corduroy constables from Dixon of Dock Green, Z Cars took a grittier, uncompromising look at life on the beat. Much against the norms for drama on the Beeb at the time, it was set in Northern England (more specifically the fictional Merseyside locale of Newtown), and therefore that bit grimier by default. It was a big success, so much so that lead characters Barlow, Watt and Blackitt had been afforded their own spin-off series, Softly, Softly. Z-Cars had enjoyed a good run, and it was time for something different.

In 1965, the BBC had tried to introduce some new continuing dramas to their flagship channel. After all, Coronation Street was doing tremendous business for That Lot Over There, so there was clearly demand. New-build housing estate drama The Newcomers arrived in a twice-weekly 7pm slot, running on Tuesdays and Fridays. Into the same slot each Monday and Wednesday came a new series set to appeal to all members of the family. United! was a drama following the fortunes of fictional second-tier football club Brentwich United, with lives of the players, management and their families all falling under the cathode ray microscope. It couldn’t fail to become a hit.

By 1967, it was abundantly clear that even England winning the World Cup a year earlier couldn’t help United! become a hit, it being considered too soapy for male viewers and not soapy enough for female viewers. Having seen such a gamble fail to come off, BBC bigwigs opted to put something a little more surefooted into the twice-weekly gap in the schedule. And that’s where Z-Cars came back into play. At the end of February 1967, the floodlights fared for Brentwich United, leaving the first week of March for Z-Cars to enjoy the start of a mammoth sixth series.

Not that it had been a short-run success before. Series one to four had each contained between 31 and 43 episodes, while the fifth and purportedly final series had a run of just twelve episodes. The production run for series six, with a new twice-weekly 25-minute episode structure (generally one story spread across two parts), clocked in at 416 episodes. For the record, on the Big BrokenTV List Of Every BBC Broadcast Ever, that alone would slot it in-between Knots Landing and The Travel Show.

Amongst Z Cars’ mammoth time on our screens, it underwent several changes – not just the transition from monochrome to colour, but from the initial standalone episode format, to the twice-weekly pseudo-soap format, through to single full-length episodes later in the run. It also gave roles to a number of names that would become a lot more familiar to the public. Along with the ever-present James Ellis and series regulars Stratford Johns, Frank Windsor and Brian Blessed, Newtown nick played host to the likes of Joss Ackland, Leonard Rossiter and a tyro John Thaw.

Thanks to the BBC’s Tape-wiping policy at the time, fewer than half of those episodes survive today. It certainly didn’t help that the cost of physical storage for those episodes came from the programme’s budget – meaning that budget could be employed elsewhere in production if the tapes were simply re-used. Given the sheer volume of content that needed to be produced, that’s hardly a surprise, but thankfully that does still leave a lot on the BBC Archive shelves, and it has seen the occasional airing since the series called in a day in 1978. Single episodes were aired in 1982 (to mark the 20^th anniversary of the programme’s debut), in 1986 (I think as part of the BBC’s TV50 season), in 1992 (as part of the Black and White in Colour season, looking at past attitudes towards race on TV), in 1993 (as part of a ‘Cops On The Box’ theme night) and in 1998 (as a tribute to the late writer John Hopkins). Some episodes were also shown as part of a season on police drama on BBC Four in 2008.

^{[NOTE: Updated this entry on 3 August to include of the one-off 1993 Cops On The Box showing of Z Cars that had slipped through the net, with thanks to Billy Smart. Also updated body of text to correct my error in conflating three-part documentary ‘The Newcomers’ (BBC2, 1964) and continuing drama ‘The Newcomers’ (BBC1, 1965-69) as being the same programme, with thanks to IanBeard on Roobarb’s.]}

---

Phew. Okay, that’s enough for the first proper post on here. The next part of the rundown will be revealed in a few days, if you can contain your unbridled excitement until then.