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  • ARCHIVE TV ADVENT CALENDAR DAY ONE: 1st December 1969

    The first episode of Broaden Your Mind’s (BBC2) second series, the sketch-based encyclopaedia of the air by The Goodies before they became The Goodies. Wiped after original broadcast, but here’s a full audio-only recording of the episode.

    UPDATE 2 DECEMBER: Spotter’s badge to Daniel James Webb for noting that the episode I’d posted was from… not the date I’d meant. Thanks to me rushing to put the Archive TV Advent Calendar into action before I got distracted by an interesting stain on the ceiling or something, I failed to notice the great big “1969-11-17” on the video. The correct video now just up there. If you want to see the episode I’d originally linked to (s2e1), it’s here. And, as a bonus, here’s the original RT listing for that:

    And, because it’s nearly Christmas, here’s a summary of the broadcast history. That BBC1 showing: at 17:25 on Mon 25 May 1970.

  • Twelve Surprising Windows 95/98 Desktop Themes for British TV Programmes

    Twelve Surprising Windows 95/98 Desktop Themes for British TV Programmes

    YES. Back in the dial-up days of technology, there was Windows 95 and a bit later, there was Windows 98. Groundbreaking at the time, nowadays a curious glimpse into the technological past. People used to survive using a 800×600 resolution? But one of the best things about Windows 95 (and a bit later, Windows 98) was a hitherto unimaginable level of customisation. You could have great big BMP files as your Windows background. You could change icons. You could even change your startup music (and I know, I briefly changed mine to the entirety of Kandy Pop by Bis). And, if you couldn’t be bothered changing all those things by yourself, you could just ‘down’ ‘load’ custom themes someone else had made, using the ‘inter’ ‘net’. For free!*

    (*£14.99 per month to an ISP for net access, a further 1p to your ISP for each minute you’re online, and the cost of the phone calls. So, not free. But it was the future.)

    When it came to user-made desktop themes, there were lots to pick from if you knew where to look. And, looking at them now, it’s interesting how much of a mid-to-late-90s snapshot they really are. You could find desktop themes based on the cool new music acts of the day (and previous days), the latest hip films, the coolest new videogames, and obviously the happening-est US TV series. But you could also get desktop themes inspired by parts of the British TV landscape at the time. Some of them will be wholly expected. Some others, not so much.

    Join me now, as I squeeze myself through the fibre pipes of today’s internet and crawl back to a more innocent age. An age of paid-for web browsers, of USRobotics 14400 modems and your mum shouting at you for hogging the phone line. It’s time for Twelve Surprising Windows 95/98 Desktop Themes For British TV Programmes.

    Bob and Margaret (originally uploaded March 1999)

    An incredibly rare example of an animated British sitcom (for grown-ups) that actually lasted more than a couple of series. A few things were in its favour here. Firstly, it was good (that’s the trick Stressed Eric missed). Secondly, it was based on the Academy Award-winning short film Bob’s Birthday. Thirdly, and possibly most crucially, it was partly a Canadian production, with the latter two of the programme’s four series going as far as to be set in Toronto. In both phases of the show’s run, the premise of the show highlighted the mundane as much as high farce, as the titular twosome coped with topics from dinner party etiquette to a patient dropping dead in Bob’s dentist’s chair.

    I’ll grant you, very little of this comes across in this Windows theme.

    Hustle (July 2006)

    I’m probably on my own here, but when BBC One – especially early noughties BBC One – goes out of their way to tell you their new drama series is cool, it basically comes across like your mum or dad telling you about this cool new band you really should check out. “Well, now I’m not going to like it on principle.”

    That’s how I always felt about this series, which seemed to come with a hastily-applied level of gloss that the content beneath really didn’t deserve. A by-product of those early days of Telly Trying To Be More Like Film, perhaps, or maybe just that everyone seems so bloody smug. Anyway, if you’re less cynical than me, here’s a theme you might like. With it arriving in 2006, well into the Windows XP era upon release, but each to their own.

    (Postscript: the BBC Three pseudo-spinoff programme The Real Hustle, where undercover con artists showed common tactics used by real-life scammers, was much better. Even if they really phoned in the content by the end – such as in the episode where Jess goes into PC World with an external hard drive up her sleeve, with which to connect to a laptop’s USB port and ‘steal’ all the software on it. Oh no, that poor 90-day trial of Norton Antivirus, ripped from the teat like that.)

    Fireball XL-5 (January 2005)

    That font. Ouch. I assume the hands controlling the mouse that selected the font were being controlled by strings.

    Yes, Minister (August 1999)

    I mean, I’m 99% sure either the upload or the title is wrong on this one, but I can’t discount the possibility all of the above actually happened in one of the later Yes, Prime Minister episodes. A misplaced memo means Bernard has to get involved in a clinical trial of hallucinogenic drugs, perhaps?

    Rab C Nesbitt (August 1998)

    Govan’s foremost street philosopher may have sent middle-England scrabbling for their writing sets to inform Anne Robinson that they need to page 888 when watching it, but that definitely didn’t hamper the sitcom’s longevity. Running as a standalone sitcom from 1988 to 2014 (and as a recurring character in sketch comedy Naked Video from 1986), this must surely take the crown of BBC2’s longest-running sitcom from a certain space-based sitcom. Mark the occasion with this background featuring not one, but two screencaps from a .mov clip of the series.

    Black Books (March 2003)

    How black? None more black. A decidedly low-energy effort by this fan of the Dylan Moran bookcom.

    Rex the Runt (August 2002)

    Aardman’s forgotten project. Rex the Runt – along with Big Bob, Wendy and Vince – was a frequent visitor to BBC2 between 1998 and 2001, and with good cause – Rex’s short episodes were packed with winsome whimsy, great gags and captivating cameos (ranging from Bob Holness to Eddie Izzard). I seem to recall they were even used as promotional mascots for Rowntree sweets for a spell. Beyond that, a future of increasingly sporadic repeats on digital channels beckoned, but at least there’s the opportunity to relive the series with this Windows 98 theme.

    Coronation Street (August 1998)

    Granada’s main export. And bravely, the person behind this particular theme held no truck with (then-) modern day Corrie. Snubbing the likes of Bettabuys (or even The Kabin), Nick Tilsley secretly marrying Leanne Battersby or the endless bickering of the McDonald clan, this theme went with the classics: a cat in a nook, and Hilda Ogden guarding the Network Neighbourhood. 10/10, no notes.

    Waiting for God (September 1998)

    This pre-watershed old-age sitcom, where Graham Crowden and (a 48-year old) Stephanie Cole play a pair of elderly residents of a care home, having as much fun as they can before being summoned to the choir invisible, isn’t the most likely to choices for a Windows backdrop. But hey, it was a primetime BBC1 hit that appealed to generations across the age spectrum, so who are we to judge?

    Robin of Sherwood (October 1999)

    Again, that font. Good lord.

    Tweenies (April 2002)

    One for anyone fitting into both of two categories.

    • CATEGORY ONE: You like the CBeebies television programme Tweenies.
    • CATEGORY TWO: You hate your eyes.

    As Time Goes By (November 2000)

    You can keep your Stargate, your Sliders, your Ally McBeal and your Buffy. If I’m having any TV programme greeting me each time I power up my Gateway Performance 600 it’s the autumnal romantic comedy starring pre-Dame Judi Dench and Geoffrey Palmer. Whose heart wouldn’t soar like an eagle being greeted by the above each boot? Each BSOD would make you chuckle on this inside, knowing you’re about to get an extra added glimpse of the above. Perfect.

    And there we go. Thanks to Ben Baker for putting the idea for an update in my head with a Discord post about the Windows theme for One Foot in the Grave. If you like this update (or my other, better updates), you’ll almost certainly enjoy Ben’s latest Live Repeat on Noisebox Radio looking at the forty best TV themes of ALL TIME.

    ,

  • BBC100: The 100 Most-Broadcast BBC Programmes Of All Time (45-41)

    BBC100: The 100 Most-Broadcast BBC Programmes Of All Time (45-41)

    Hello, everybody. Sorry it’s been a while since the last update to this list, but (amongst ploughing through forty years of Channel 4 viewing figures), this selection has required a little more research than most.

    Before hitting the list, a two bits of minor admin. Firstly: most people seem to be coming to the site via my Tweets on The Twitter. That’s good. Except Musky Burns seems determined to pull all of the Kerplunk straws from Twitter’s infrastructure (for the lulz, I assume), so it’s hard to gauge how long it’ll last in its current state. That’s bad. So there are a couple of alternative ways to get updates.

    WAY ONE: I’m on the Mastodon. I’ll be posting each time there’s a new update on there as well as Twitter. Follows and boosts appreciated (say hi if you’re there from this blog so I can follow back, as a lot of people seem to be doing mass-follows to inflate their numbers at present).

    WAY TWO: At the bottom of the screen, you should see a ‘follow’ button. If you click it and enter your email address, you’ll get each update automatically emailed to you. In full, not just the first bit and ‘Click here’, the full lovely update. Which is nice.

    Okay, second bit of admin. Unless you’ve got an adblocker, you may well be seeing banner ads on the site. They… aren’t meant to be there. I’m paying for WordPress hosting, meaning the site shouldn’t have them. All being well, they’ll be disappearing soon. (That makes a nice change from sites saying ‘your Adblocker is killing my children’, doesn’t it?)

    Okay. Admin done. Let’s crack on with…

    45: Question Time

    (Shown 1910 times, 1979-2021)

    Here’s one that was a safe bet for inclusion. But firstly, a few things that aren’t Question Time. Starting with…

    QUESTION TIME (2 October 1952)

    Not the version we know and… love(?), but rather a one-off discussion programme where Young Adults of the era discuss topics raised by viewers of the same age. So, an early proto version of Twitter (except, as I say, populated by young adults). Despite the appeal in the Radio Times at the time to send in questions (“on postcards, please”), this doesn’t seem to have returned to the Television Service, at least not under the same name.

    SCAN: Radio Times listing for the 1952 Question Time

    GARDENERS’ QUESTION TIME (4 June 1955)

    “This is the first time that this popular programme from the North of England has been televised”, proclaimed the Radio Times listing. And indeed it was, a rare audiovisual outing for the Home Service mainstay. For whatever reason, the experiment wasn’t repeated, and it has remained an audio-only endeavour ever since. At least nationally – the RT listings for 1973 include three episodes of regional TV programme ‘Northern Gardeners Question Time’, because Northern Gardeners don’t want to share any of their secrets with those soft southern shandy-drinking bastard gardeners.

    SCAN: Radio Times listing for Gardeners' Question Time

    QUESTION TIME (11 Feb 1958, 6 May 1968)
    QUESTION TIME FOR YOUTH (5 March 1960)

    To think, certain corners of the internet get all het up about rampant BBC lefty bias if a QT panel somehow contains participants from Labour, the Greens AND a fashionable stand-up comedian. These two offerings would likely have them putting their foot through the screen and sending the bill to the remains of Harold Wilson.

    Firstly, in 1958, an event that certainly has all the hallmarks of QT as we know it. A politician is asked to face a series of questions from an invited audience. The politician in question: the sainted Nye Bevan. The audience in question: “a group of young Socialists”. The reason? This is actually a Party Political Broadcast on behalf of the Labour Party.

    SCAN: Radio Times listing for the 1958 Question Time

    Then, just over ten years later, almost exactly the same thing again. This time, it’s much larger in scale, with Labour MPs Barbara Castle, William Ross and George Thomas in the hot seats, and questions coming from audiences in Glasgow, Manchester and Cardiff. Simulcast on BBC-1 and BBC-2 at 9pm, just in case you thought you could escape it.

    In between those two, 1960 saw Question Time for Youth, though this seems to have been on a much smaller scale – only on BBC1, shoved out just before closedown at 11pm, and the Radio Times couldn’t even be bothered listing the names of the MP questionees.

    Did the tactics work? Well, the closest political poll to the 1958 broadcast was the Rochdale By-Election, called following the death on 16 December 1957 of the sitting Conservative Member of Parliament, Wentworth Schofield, and if that’s any metric it was a big success. Labour’s Jack McCann won the seat, beating Liberal candidate (and at the time, writer and radio presenter) Ludovic Kennedy and Conservative candidate John E. Parkinson.

    No big national election in 1968 either, but there were by-elections in Nelson and Colne, Oldham West and Sheffield Brightside the following month. Not quite as successful this time, with results respectively being CON GAIN, CON GAIN and LAB HOLD. Thus the Question Time moniker was relinquished by the party, and never used again. As for the 1960 Youth effort – the closest contests to the transmission date were the Harrow West by-election and the Brighouse and Spenborough by-election the following month. The results? CON HOLD and NATIONAL LIBERAL GAIN. So, yeah. Not a huge success.

    QUESTION TIME! (5 March 1960)

    At least, something different. No politics, but at least there’s a sense of urgency to the programme title as anyone still up at 10.55pm tuned in to see… “a talk by the Rev. W. D. Cattanach.”

    ELECTION 70: QUESTION TIME (9 Jun 1970, 11 Jun 1970)

    This time a more open-ended political discussion, and one with a real General Election set to happen the following week. Harold Wilson’s Labour up against Ted Heath’s Tories. Bob Wellings chaired a debate between a group of journalists and representatives of the main political parties on the issues surrounding the election. Getting closer to the canon, but not quite there.

    COMMON MARKET QUESTION TIME (2 Sept 1971-23 Sept 1971)

    So close to the real thing now. This was a series of four programmes from regional centres where questions from members of the public regarding Britain’s membership of the Common Market could be addressed by policy-makers of the day. This ticks off quite a few of the key criteria: each episode from a different town? TICK (County Durham, Port Talbot, Glasgow and Coventry). Members of the public? TICK. A round table of political thinkers expected to provide answers? TICK. And crucially, Robin Day as chairman? TICK. In fact, it’s only the fact these went out under the umbrella of news magazine show 24 Hours that prevents me from including these in the overall total. Similarly, in 1974 Nationwide included an Election Question Time strand that followed much the same format, minus the future Sir Robin.

    QUESTION TIME (25 September 1979)

    At last, the real deal. The Beeb finally offers us a whole hour to question the ideas and decisions of today. Robin Day takes the chair on stage at the Greenwood Theatre, South London, as public personalities face questions and reactions from the general public. With him tonight: The Rt Hon Michael Foot, MP, Edna O’Brien, Teddy Taylor, The Most Rev Derek Worlock, Archbishop of Liverpool.

    FINALLY. But… you know what Question Time is. An excuse for all of Twitter to get really angry at each other. Well, not all of Twitter.

    44: A Question of Sport

    (Shown 1933 times, 1970-2021)

    SCREENCAP: Question of Sport logo, circa late-80s

    So, from Question Time to a Question of Sport. For some of the quiz programmes in this list there’s a feeling they’re pretty much a constant. Mastermind has remained largely the same, no matter who the questionmaster might be. Ditto University Challenge, ditto Call My Bluff. However, when it comes to QoS, it feels (at least to me) that there are decidedly distinct eras, immediately identifiable from each other

    Those of a certain age will instantly think of the Coleman-era, with faux-stadium trimmings, small-firstname-BIG-LASTNAME nameplates, all that. It’s okay, people who remember that, we’re not old. We liked the Wet Leg album, so we can’t be.

    SCREENCAP: A team on a Question of Sport, Charlie Nicolas, Bill Beaumont and Peter Scudamore
    “Actually David, I feel that their promise dropped off substantially following Wet Dream.”

    Those of a more recent generation may find their minds immediately drift to the latter-era, the Sue Barker years, the larger set, the audience sat behind the participants (which is great if you want spend an evening looking at the back of Ally McCoist’s head, I guess), the bantz-heavy dialogue, the desperate need to be more like They Think It’s All Over.

    SCREENCAP: Team line-up in a later QoS episode, Seb Coe, Ally McCoist, Will Carling.

    Each generational grouping thinks theirs is the ‘correct’ QoS epoch, and that all members of the other are nought but fooles. Apart from a tiny, embittered third grouping that thought Sporting Triangles was best. The two larger generation groups decide to join forces, take on that third generation, and beat them up. With good cause. And now, nobody ever mentions Sporting Triangles. Until me, just then. But anyway.

    SCAN: Radio Times listing for an early episode of A Question of Sport.

    My meanderings do, of course, wholly discount a whole period of the show from before I started watching it. Hey, I’ve spent ages researching hosts of a programme I can’t even settle on a consistent naming convention for, cut me some slack. The series proper began (following a BBC North-only pilot in 1968) as a Monday teatime offering in 1970, with viewers settling down to their sausage, spuds and sport greeted by original host David Vine, along with team captains ‘Enry Cooper and Cliff Morgan. The first ever episode came with a suitable special line-up: ‘Enry joined by footballer George Best (at least according to the RT listing – I assume he turned up) and cricketer Ray Illingworth, while Cliff teamed up with athlete Lillian Board and footballer-of-a-very-different-generation Tom Finney.

    Monday evenings was where the programme would stay until 1981, save for a special Sunday World Cup edition at the end of May 1970, featuring captain Bobby Moore, Geoff Hurst and Alan Mullery versus captain Johnny Haynes, Tom Finney and Stan Mortensen, and a brief flirtation with Thursday evenings in 1975.

    By the time of 1981’s new Friday night peak 7pm slot, David Coleman had taken on hosting duties, with Emlyn Hughes and Gareth Edwards serving as team captains (and future captain Bill Beaumont in a guest spot in the first episode of the series). It then spent the next few years being booted about the schedules wherever there was a spare pre-watershed spot to fill, the programme appearing in Tuesdays in 1982, Wednesdays in 1983, back to Tuesdays in 1984, before landing in a regular Thursday night home from 1985 for a few years. From 1988, it was back to Tuesday nights, where it would stay until the mid-90s.

    There’s a case for arguing that the 1980s marked the height of the series’ popularity (and not just because it was popular enough to be lampooned by A Bit of Fry & Laurie). From 1983, one-off Christmas specials of the series started to appear, starting with a tantalising line-up on 29 December that year: original captains ‘Enry Cooper and Cliff Morgan made a return, with showbiz guests Max Boyce, Georgie Fame, Lennie Bennett and Anita Harris.

    SCAN: Radio Times listing for A Question of Sport

    The 1984 Christmas Radio Times marked an episode of the series going out on New Year’s Eve, tucked into the early evening schedules between Blue Peter Review of the Year and film Treasure of the Yankee Zephyr, though it seems this may well have been closer to a regular episode, with the series returning less than two weeks into the new year. QoS had a higher profile the following Christmas, airing in a peak 8:30pm slot on Christmas Eve, sandwiched between Kenny Everett’s Christmas Carol and a festive episode of Terry and June. On top of the prime scheduling, celeb guests reappeared on the programme, with actors John Nettles and Ray Brooks joined by comedian Eddie Large and ‘comedian’ Stan Boardman.

    SCAN: Radio Times listing for A Question of Sport Christmas special

    Another celebrity line-up appeared in 1986’s Christmas special (between peak-era ‘Stenders and another new Kenny Everett special), with Les Dawson, Leo Sayer, Su Pollard and Leslie Grantham, who I really hope walked on set in the same outfit he’d just been wearing behind the bar in the Queen Vic. You know, for continuity purposes.

    That’s certainly a much better line-up than the one that appeared in 1987’s Christmas Special. In descending order of merit, Roy Castle, Peter Howitt, ‘controversial cricket writer’ Frances Edmonds, every single speck of dirt in the studio, and Bernard Manning. I know, bloody hell, eh? You’d think they’d learn, wouldn’t you? And yet, in 1988 – on Boxing Day, no less – Manning returned to the QoS studio, along with Tim Rice, Frank Carson and Bread’s Gilly Coman.

    And with that line-up, Celebrity Christmas editions of A Question of Sport would be no more, until quite a few years into the 21st Century. Which is probably for the best. But hey, at least it means that incoming new QoS host Paddy McGuinness won’t be the worst comedian to appear on the series, so that’s something.

    BROADCAST HISTORY GRID: A Question of Sport

    43: Late Night Line-Up

    (Shown 1992 times, 1964-1989)

    PHOTO: Joan Bakewell conducting a Late Night Line-Up interview

    Right from BBC-2’s (slightly belated) launch night in April 1964, the decision was made to open each evening with broadcaster Denis Tuohy offering those awaiting a televisual feast a ten minute glimpse at that night’s BBC-2 menu. This strand would be known by the gently unassuming title of ‘Line-Up’.

    The intent was to showcase the rich variety of original programming on offer by the new channel. After all, this was an age where you’d have to get up, walk across the room and change the channel on the TV itself, meaning that many viewers just sat back and let a single channel entertain them for the evening. The actual effect was that viewers may realise there’s nothing they liked the look of until later on, and took the trouble to get up and change to another channel. And so, not for the first time, the lofty ideals of a new channel were to be cast aside for something less highbrow but more popular. It’s like ITV4’s launch including a full repeat run of The Larry Sanders Show.

    But that wasn’t the end for Line-Up. Add a more intellectual edge to it, change it from a glorified programme menu to a discussion programme, and put it out live. Of course, this would need to go out after the 9pm watershed, in case discussions got a bit too feisty for tea time. And not just bang on 9pm, where the runway would need to be kept clear for big flagship programmes. Late at night, that’s best. Who doesn’t like seeing a great big argument while supping up your Horlicks and getting into your 1960s pyjamas?

    Plus, with nothing following it in the schedule, if a discussion was getting really riveting, the channel could stick with it until it wraps up naturally. Within the confines of Postmaster General’s broadcasting regulations, anyway – BBC2 was only permitted a certain total amount of airtime per day, but it seems there weren’t any instances of the Late Night Line-Up plug being yanked out of the socket by a furious Postmaster General in dressing gown and curlers at 1.29am. Which is a bit of a pity, frankly.

    SCREENCAP: A BBC2 programme slide for Late Night Line-Up

    This had the added benefit of letting BBC2 stay up later than both BBC1 and ITV, who generally went to bed at about 11.45pm. 100% audience share of 2,076 viewers is still 100% audience share, after all. And so, from Saturday 12 September 1964, late night viewers were invited to “Round off the day with Denis Tuohy and Michael Dean” for the first time. As time went on, Joan Bakewell and Tony Bilbow would also go on to be key hosts of the programme.

    Initially, discussion focused on one or two interviewees, but that remit soon drifted. Wikipedia has a splendidly comprehensive list of topics and interviewees featured on the programme year-by-year, and dipping into episode descriptions for those first few years highlights how Late Night Line-Up soon evolved:

    In 1965, a chat with an individual figure appears to have been the norm, such as Robert Morley (18 March), Douglas Bader (17 September) and Tony Hancock (5 October). By 1966, the remit had opened up to take in particular topics alongside guests of interest. Episodes included: Line Up Rugby / Yugoslav TV Film / Shirley Abicair (1 January), Ivor Cutler / Clifford Davis Conjuring Tricks / TV Critics (13 January), and N. F. Simpson Interview / Jimmy Edwards’s Moustache / Breakfast TV / Donald Campbell Interview / Tonia Bern Interview (7 May)

    When 1967 came along, the toe-tippingly popular music of the day became too big for the programme to ignore, though there was still room for discussion on other topics. So, episodes covered things such as: Discussion on building industry / Gladys Aylward (1 February), Jimi Hendrix Experience / Psychedelic Happening / Pierre Schoendoerffer (17 May) or Electronics And TV / The Rolling Stones / Discussion on the Canadian Film Industry (24 August)

    By 1968, the theme seems to have navigated back toward single interviewees, though not exclusively. Episodes included: Lotte Reiniger / girls from Hammersmith County School give their views on public schools (9 March), John Peel (18 September) and Alfred Hitchcock (27 September)

    SCREENCAP: John Peel being interviewed on Late Night Line-Up

    By 1969, Line-Up episodes airing on Sundays offered “Late Night Line-Up’s weekly look at the cinema”, airing (and billed) under the banner Film Night, and featured stars of the screen such as Vincent Price (23 March) or Peter Finch (30 March), or individual films of interest, such as The Illustrated Man (22 June) or topical Hammer flick Moon Zero Two (13 July).

    1970 saw an interesting mix of topics and interviewees, one standout in particular showing how daring this live, late-night programme could be. Episodes including Playgrounds (25 September), The Man Who Almost Won The National (29 October) and (yes, this is the standout one) Lenny Bruce Stand Up Routine (18 December). 1971 saw Saturday nights handed over to individual contributors in episodes branded One Man’s Week (or, much less often, One Woman’s Week). Weekday editions still found time to discuss other matters of the day, such as 22 October’s discussion regarding “A 4th TV Channel”.

    SCAN: TV listing for 10.35 Late Night Line-Up. With Kenny Everett.
    The tape of that’s not going to survive, is it? Boo.

    1972 saw the (regular) series draw to a close, but not without packing a lot into those final months. Including: Welcome Little Kangaroo – Eight Years of BBC2 (21 April), Cable Vision (9 August) and Sir Hugh Carleton Greene (18 October). Plus, as a grand finale on 14 December, a discussion of BBC2 in general, with Michael Dean, Tony Bilbow, Sheridan Morley And David Attenborough

    SCREENCAP: Paul Jones and Spencer Davies being interviewed on Late Night Line-Up

    As might be expected from a live, late-night, free-range discussion show from the late 1960s/early 70s, not much of it still exists in the BBC’s library, and even less of it is available to view. A few clips are up on iPlayer, but it’s YouTube that really delivers, offering several entire episodes. For instance, here’s an interview with Paul Jones of Manfred Mann and Spencer Davis (19 Jan 1966), an interview with Magic Roundabout creator Serge Danot (13 Dec 1966), a discussion about the two-part ‘Man Alive’ report on homosexuality in Britain (14 Jun 1967).

    Arguably the most infamous Late Night Line-Up discussion of all, A Serious Talk About Comedy (7 Jan 1966) is also on YouTube, thanks to the ever-excellent BBC Archive account. The panel includes comedy writers Marty Feldman, Ian La Frenais, Johnny Speight, John Chapman, Richard Waring and comedy producer Duncan Wood. The clip however starts with an intervention by comedy writer and playwright John Antrobus, who… clearly wasn’t invited. But that wasn’t about to stop the writer of the The Bed-Sitting Room having a good old go at getting involved. The remainder of the discussion is no less spirited, aided by it being a noticeably smoke-filled and drink-fuelled one.

    SCREENCAP: John Antrobus being led off the set of Late Night Line-Up

    That wasn’t the end of the Line-Up, however. A new live episode of the programme aired as part of the Festival 77 season on 1 August 1977, with guests David Frost, Dennis Potter and Christopher Morahan. The programme returned for a full week as part of BBC TV’s 50th anniversary celebrations in 1986, with Michael Dean, Tony Bilbow, Joan Bakewell and Sheridan Morley as guests. In 1989, a package of series highlights was screened as part of BBC2’s 25th anniversary hullabaloo*. Finally, and not qualifying for the total here, BBC Parliament’s Permissive Night (26 May 2008) included a one-off comeback episode, with Margaret Drabble, Peter Hitchens, Michael Howard MP and Lord Robert Winston discussing the liberalising legislation of the 1960s.

    (*First person to leave a comment saying “no, that’s the other kangaroo” wins a shiny shilling.)

    42: See Hear!

    (Shown 2014 times, 1981-2021)

    Right at the start of the Moving Pictures era of the entertainment industry, deaf people were on an even footing with everybody else. Picture houses showing the latest flicks by Chaplin, Keaton or Lloyd could be enjoyed by hearing and hard-of-hearing alike, with inter-title caption cards explaining dialogue to the entire audience.

    Then, The Jazz Singer came along. Al Jolson’s “You ain’t heard nothing yet” signalled the start of the end of that equal footing, where deaf audiences would start to need a strong lip-reading game to enjoy the latest cinematic hits.

    The situation for deaf people hoping to take part in popular culture didn’t improve with the advent of television. For those early pioneers of the tube, it was enough of a challenge throwing hours of live content into thousands of cathode-ray tubes each day, providing verbiage to match would have proved an insurmountable task. And, for the most part, it would continue that way for several decades.

    Not that there was nothing. Starting in 1952, Jasmine Bligh introduced For Deaf Children, where sign language was used to include deaf children in the fun and games. But, it was hardly a regular helping of fun, totalling just a single twenty-minute programme per month. In January 1955, monthly children’s programme Monday Magazine launched, with the RT listing highlighting the programme’s suitability for deaf children. That at least meant there was now only a two-week gap between programmes for deaf children, but still very little for them once they left childhood.

    There were also occasional one-off or short run programmes catering for deaf viewers. January 1963 saw a production of The Magic Shoes featuring members of the Royal National Institute for the Deaf Mime Group, a programme arranged in co-operation with the Royal National Institute for the Deaf. Later that year, a couple of multi-part Sunday Stories included “interpretations for the deaf” by Joan Turner as Cyril Fletcher read for viewers – ‘The Childhood of Helen Keller’ ran from 17 March until 14 April 1963, while ‘Ambassador in Bonds’, a story of blind missionary to Burma William Jackson, ran from 24 November to 8 December of the same year.

    For Deaf Children certainly had a good innings, running until 7 February 1964, but a month later came a key change in the way programming for deaf children was presented. Vision On arrived in the slot vacated by For Deaf Children – 5.35pm on Fridays – but now aired fortnightly. And that wasn’t the only change. Surveys had shown that one of the favourite BBC-tv programmes for deaf viewers was Top of the Pops. Pops’ fast-moving format made it feel like viewers were part of the coolest party in town, and deaf viewers were still able to enjoy the lower frequency notes of those swinging sounds of the sixties. That livelier approach was at odds with the sedate pace used in For Deaf Children, and producers Ursula Eason and Patrick Dowling set about making things a bit livelier with Vision On.

    The new programme’s remit was entertainment over education – hey, it’s Friday evening, after all – and the need for subtitles or sign language was drastically reduced by making the action within the new programme almost entirely visual. Noises were, to all intents and purposes, off. The new programme would encourage viewers to dive into their imagination by serving up sequences both sensible and silly, and while the approach was likely to attract the attention of a wider audience, the goal was always to serve deaf viewers.

    The programme was a major success, running until 1976, hoovering up awards, and helping introduce a number of names that would become key to children’s television over the next few decades, such as Tony Hart, eccentric inventor Wilf Lunn, Silvester (then ‘Silveste’) McCoy and the work of a certain company later known as Aardman Animations.

    And yet – despite the wider (and likely more cross-generational) appeal of Vision On, deaf adults were left wanting (aside from Saturday evening News Reviews on BBC2, which “for the deaf and hard of hearing” were afforded “a commentary [that] appears visually”. Y’know, subtitles.

    For those with deep enough pockets to procure an early teletext-capable set, subtitles were already a common option for deaf viewers. The birth of Ceefax in 1974 allowed for text-based accompaniment alongside TV programmes, though it took until 1975 for the first Ceefax-subtitled programme to appear. Appropriately enough, that first-ever subtitled programme was This is Ceefax, a late-night documentary presented by Angela Rippon, looking into the new service that remains an amazing innovation for the time.

    Initial audiences for Ceefax subtitles were limited. Indeed, that initial audience for those inaugural subtitles: one household. Specifically the household of Ceefax editor Colin McIntyre, location of the country’s only privately-owned teletext set at the time. That kind of limited launch may well have been for the best – at this early stage, subtitles had to be keyed in live, transmitted at each punch of the enter key, which combined with the far-from-comfortable keyboards at Ceefax HQ, made for very hard, unforgiving work. Much more information about those early days in this entertaining post by Adrian Robson, part of the initial editorial team of Ceefax, and the person who’d put out those first ever subtitles.

    Then, eventually, 1981 happened. And so did See Hear!, a new weekly (weekly!) programme for people with hearing issues. And it was set to run for at least twenty weeks. No wonder the programme’s title felt the need to append itself with an exclamation mark – this was big news for the underserved community.

    From this point on, while there’s certainly no real scope for criticising the BBC’s earlier output for people with hearing problems (save for their lack of frequency), See Hear! really did offer a fresh perspective. Broadcast with open subtitles and in BSL (by Martin Colville), and hosted by deaf presenter Maggie Woolley, promising to cover news, views and entertainment, and generally cramming in as many genres as the budget would permit. Well, to be fair, the team behind the programme had a lot of time to make up for.

    The format proved to be a success, leading to special editions of the show coming from the nations and regions, plus topical specials themed around the 1983 General Election, technology and education. In 1984, the line-up was bolstered by the introduction of Clive Mason, who would go on to be the programme’s longer-serving presenter, and who would become a major part of the programme’s regular Christmas and pantomime specials.

    By 1990, the brand had even grown beyond the main programme, with each morning’s signed-and-subbed BBC2 rebroadcast of the previous hour’s BBC1 Breakfast News bulletin going out under the title See Hear Breakfast News. This also proved a success, with the practice becoming a true simulcast of the BBC1 7am bulletin from 1995.

    In later years, the provision of programming for people with hearing problems was greatly expanded, providing viewers were willing to record overnight Sign Zone broadcasts. However, that did little to dampen the success of See Hear!, with the programme currently (at the time of writing) in its 42nd series. That said, perhaps as a result of Sign Zone’s longevity (plus iPlayer allowing for more user-friendly scheduling of signed content), See Hear! output has fallen since 2013, and the series is now back to going out on a monthly basis. That’s a shame, but See Hear! really did so much show how much more television can do to help keep the hard-of-hearing community informed, entertained and included. Long may it continue.

    41: Town and Around

    (Shown 2044 times, 1960-1969)

    Nominally “a daily presentation of news and views from London and the South-East”, but this was more than just local news. Thankfully, or I’d have to remove it and renumber the entire list. This is more of a magazine programme, and therefore CAN be included in the rundown. Phew.

    So, what was Town and Around? Well, other than the standard write-up in the Radio Times – “a news magazine for South-East England” – it’s not especially easy to find out. In fact, of all the programmes I’ve covered so far, it’s been the hardest to find any information on. It doesn’t help that the cruel hand of fate placed my birth several years after the programme finished, so I’ve no personal memory to draw on.

    Here’s what I have been able to find out, accompanied by some best-guesses that will be disproved in the comments within an hour of this post going live.

    What with it going out in the regional news slot in London and the South-East (it making the list because, at the time of pulling all the data, that was the region used for the listings in Genome), it makes a kind-of sense that it would be less newsy than the regional news in other parts of the UK. After all, with That London being the focal point of the majority of current events going on in the UK, all of the capital’s newsworthy events had just been covered in the national news bulletin. And so, despite only needing to full a short ten- or fifteen- minute slot, it seems there was room for other non-news content.

    What sort of content? Well…

    PHOTO: Front cover of the book Town and Around Recipes (BBC Publications, 3 shillings)

    Cooking was certainly one of the topics covered. Enough cooking to generate not just one cookbook containing 100 recipes, but a follow-up containing a further hundred. And it wasn’t even billed as a cookery programme.

    PHOTO: Front cover of the book 100 More Town and Around Recipes (BBC Publications, 4 shillings)

    When it comes to compiling these entries, there are a few sources I consult for some added information. No, not Wikipedia. Only sometimes Wikipedia. The obvious starting point is the BBC Genome website. But also, the scans I’ve accumulated of elderly Radio Times issues, a variety of books on television history, several newspaper archives and a collection of BBC Yearbooks. Here’s the net sum of what I’ve gleaned from those sources for Town and Around:

    SCAN: Front cover of the BBC Handbook 1960

    From the BBC Yearbook 1960: “The year saw two notable developments in regional broadcasting – the introduction of Television News for north-east England from the Newcastle studio and ‘Town and Around’ the magazine programme for London and south-east England.”

    A good start in a section on regional broadcasting. With it being a daily programme focused on the capital of Britain, it’ll surely get regular mentions each year, right? Right?

    Yes. By which I mean: no. The next reference to it comes in the BBC Yearbook 1965.

    SCAN: Front cover of the BBC Handbook 1965
    Scan of page listing some BBC Books : "IN PREPARATION, TO BE PUBLISHED SHORTLY, PRICE TO BE ANNOUNCED:Recipes from 'Town and Around' by Zena Skinner. A collection of recipes, some old, some new, but all with a difference, from home and abroad."

    And again in the 1966 yearbook:

    SCAN: Front cover of the BBC Handbook 1966
    Scan from BBC Yearbook 1966: "`Home Cooking' (2s 6d); `Town and Around Recipes' (3s); `Everyday Cookery' (ls), and 100 More Town and Around Recipes (4s) are booklets which offer a wide variety of menus from traditional English dishes to Continental cookery."

    But, in the 1968 yearbook – a reference to the series isn’t about cooking!

    SCAN: Front cover of the BBC Handbook 1968
    Scanned page text: "The outlets served by these resources make a sustained demand throughout the twenty-four hours. In television they include all the scheduled news bulletins, `Town and Around' and equivalent magazine programmes of the other regions on BBC-1, together with `Made In Britain', a weekly programme reflecting Britain's export effort."

    …admittedly, it’s not about much at all. But wait, in the BBC Yearbook 1969, a bit of a revelation:

    SCAN: Front cover of the BBC Handbook 1969
    Text from book page: "ZENA SKINNER'S FIFTH BOOK OF RECIPES - A further hundred recipes from `Town and Around' on BBC-1. 4s."

    A fifth book containing a hundred recipes by Zena Skinner? Fair dues, she was carrying that show.

    Other than that, there’s very little out there. My hopes were raised when a Google search threw up an article in America’s Journal of Marketing Research (Vol 6 No 2, May, 1969). Sure, I needed to register with ‘digital library for the intellectually curious’ JSTOR to take a peek, but this would be worth the trouble.

    Here you go, stats fans.

    A printed table marking "Observed and Predicted Duplication Between Monday and Tuesday BBC Programs". It's some programme titles and bunch of numbers that really don't explain a lot.
    Yeah, good luck picking the bones out of that.

    So, what have we learned? Well, for one thing, I really should have tried to claim this programme was too news-adjacent to include in the rundown. That would have saved me a lot of trouble. But mainly, an appreciation for the work ethic of Zena Skinner.

    PHOTO: Zena Skinner pictured with Leslie Crowther and Peter Glaze in a promotional picture from Crackerjack

    Well done, that lady.

    Oh, also Nigel Kennedy appeared on it when he was seven. Thanks, Radio Times 16-22 July 2022.

    SCAN: Programme listing for Nigel Kennedy at the BBC on BBC Four.

    And – here’s one out of left field – thanks to the Mustard Project website, a “TELLEX Transcript of interview with Pro-Vice-Chancellor, ‘TOWN & AROUND’ Monday 20 May 1968: 5.55pm”. So, one extreme to another. Starting with photos of some cookbooks from eBay, ending up with actual internal BBC documents. Full document here if you’re curious.

    So, in short – nobody reading this is about to pick Town and Around as their specialist subject on Mastermind, but at least you got to see some covers of BBC Yearbooks. So, that’s not nothing.

    Phew, that took a long time to research and write. Hope you enjoyed it, and let’s hope the next bunch of programmes don’t include any that haven’t aired within the last fifty years. Toodles!

    Until that next update, if you want to take a peek at some BBC Yearbooks, the World Radio History website has got you thoroughly covered.

    , ,

  • Forty/Four: Channel Four’s 40 Most-Watched (Part Four)

    Forty/Four: Channel Four’s 40 Most-Watched (Part Four)

    Onto the last leg of our list. Which, for the record, doesn’t include The Last Leg.

    Lots of big programmes we’ve not seen yet on the list, and with only a few places remaining there’s not enough room for all of them. I’m starting to think we won’t see Murun Buchstansangur on this list at all.

    The list thus far:

    • 40: THE NICK (21:00 Monday 3 Oct 1994, 6.5m viewers)
    • 39: FILM: BRIDGET JONES’S DIARY (21:25 Saturday 13 Nov 2004, 6.54m viewers)
    • 38: IT’LL BE ALRIGHT LATE AT NIGHT (23:10 Thursday 11 Jul 1985, 6.55m viewers)
    • 37: FILM: STAND BY YOUR MAN (21:00 Tuesday 14 May 1985, 6.6m viewers)
    • 36: FILM: CASTAWAY (21:00 Monday 26 Nov 1990, 6.63m viewers)
    • 35: FILM: COAST TO COAST (21:00 Tuesday 5 Feb 1985, 6.65m viewers)
    • 34: FILM: WISH YOU WERE HERE (21:30 Thursday 15 Feb 1990, 6.67m viewers)
    • 33: GOGGLEBOX (22:00 Friday 12 Mar 2021, 6.74m viewers)
    • 31: FILM: GOOD MORNING VIETNAM (21:00 Sunday 25 Apr 1993, 6.75m viewers)
    • 31: LOST (20:30 Wednesday 10 Aug 2005, 6.75m viewers)
    • 30: FILM: NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET (22:00 Tuesday 31 Mar 1992, 6.8m viewers)
    • 29: WIFE SWAP (21:00 Tuesday 21 Oct 2003, 6.9m viewers)
    • 28: FILM: NOWHERE TO RUN (21:00 Tuesday 9 Apr 1985, 6.95m viewers)
    • 27: FILM: THE ABYSS (21:00 Sunday 24 Jan 1993, 7.01m viewers)
    • =25: FILM: MOTHER, JUGS AND SPEED (21:00 Tuesday 12 Mar 1985, 7.05m viewers)
    • =25: ATHLETICS: THE KODAK CLASSIC (21:00 Friday 9 Aug 1985, 7.05m viewers)
    • 24: FEMALE PARTS: RUDE WOMAN (21:00 Monday 11 May 1992, 7.06m viewers)
    • 23: PETER KAY LIVE (21:30 Wednesday 4 Aug 2004, 7.197m viewers)
    • 22: IT’S NEVER TOO LATE (20:30 Monday 3 Dec 1984, 7.2m viewers)
    • 21: FILM: BILL AND TED’S EXCELLENT ADVENTURE (21:00 Sunday 11 Apr 1993, 7.29m viewers)
    • 20: SHE’LL BE WEARING PINK PYJAMAS (21:00 Thursday 12 Mar 1987, 7.6m viewers)
    • 19: RELATIVE STRANGERS (20:30 Monday 28 Jan 1985, 7.75m viewers)
    • 18: PARALYMPICS 2012: OPENING CEREMONY (20:00 Wednesday 29 Aug 2012, 7.78m viewers)
    • 17: FILM: MONA LISA (21:30 Thursday 23 Feb 1989, 7.82m viewers)
    • 16: TREASURE HUNT (20:30 Thursday 24 Mar 1988, 7.85m viewers)
    • =14: INTERNATIONAL SNOOKER (21:45 Sunday 16 Dec 1984, 8.25m viewers)
    • =14: FILM: DARK NIGHT OF THE SCARECROW (21:00 Tuesday 21 May 1985, 8.25m viewers)
    • 13: BROOKSIDE (20:00 Wednesday 3 Nov 1993, 8.27m viewers)
    • 12: THE MIRACLE OF KATHY MILLER (21:00 Tuesday 21 Apr 1987, 8.3m viewers)

    Anyway, here they are, that final, um, eleven. Yes, eleven. Definitely didn’t uncover another high-rating broadcast at the last minute, no. Starting with…

    11: CELEBRITY BIG BROTHER
    (20:30 Friday 19 Jan 2007, 8.78m viewers)

    A franchise always likely to feature here, the question is… which series attracted the highest viewing figures? Here’s a clue: it was the one where the phrase “the values of the Carphone Warehouse” entered the public lexicon. The one that led to a diplomatic row between the UK and India. The one that led to a Prime Ministerial statement. And it wasn’t just to point out that Donny Tourette was a bit of a bellend.

    Given how easily ignored Celebrity Big Brother was during those final years on Channel Five (if you have to explain in an intro video what you’re “most famous for”, you’re not famous), it’s remarkable how high the calibre of guests was during this period of the show’s history. For the series in question here, you had Leo Sayer, Ken Russell, Cleo Rocos, Dirk Benedict and actual bloody Jackson Five member Jermaine Jackson. And yes, the laws of the universe also dictate that you’d get some stunt casting to offset that, people whose lofty level of celebrity status existed only within their egos, but it was part of the formula. Rough with the smooth. And at least Donny Tourette’s presence was enlivened by his introductory encounter with a butter-smooth Dirk Benedict (“Oh my God, it’s Dirk fucking Benedict!” “Well, I don’t normally use my middle name, but hi.”).

    Anyway, I’m pretty sure you all know the details of The Event here, even if it’s only from the Stewart Lee routine. Bollywood star Shilpa Shetty was one of the celebrity housemates, and arrived with a clear air of Girl Awkwardly Trying To Fit In At A New School. A group of the other participants – glamour model Danielle Lloyd, pop star Jo O’Meara, previous Big Brother contestant Jade Goody, along with boyfriend Jack Tweed and mother Jackiey Budden – decided they didn’t like her (for… whatever reason), and the end result was one of the most unedifying weeks in the history of television. Unedifying for the individuals involved, for the production company, for the channel that gleefully pumped it out night after night, and ultimately (hands held up here) for the viewers who may have been disgusted, but who weren’t about to switch off.

    There was a lot to unpack from the whole affair. The most overt display of racism coming from the mouth of Danielle Lloyd, followed by an “ooh, aren’t I naughty” giggle, was probably to go-to example, but there were several more distasteful moments of note. The one that springs to mine for me was the programme producers Endemol addressing rumours that Jack Tweed had used the word P*** to refer to the (perfectly pleasant) Shetty, by releasing (partly) unbleeped audio confirming it was fine, he was just referring to her with the word c***. So, um, that’s still not exactly great, is it?

    Ultimately, Endemol seemed to realise that throwing more kindling on their bonfire of dignity wasn’t helping anyone – not least when lead sponsor Carphone Warehouse demanded to be disassociated with the show, and agents of the main culprits saw lucrative contracts suddenly cancelled – and Jade Goody was duly evicted. The usual eviction night crowd may have been absent, but the TV audience were certainly present, in huge numbers. But, from this point on, the Celebrity Big Brother brand was irrevocably tainted, and I’m saying the affair definitely directly resulted in a ‘Leave’ vote in the EU referendum. Still, maybe next year’s ITV2 reboot will undo all that? Yeah, I know.

    WHAT WAS ON THE OTHER SIDE?

    Nothing else stood a chance, really. BBC1 offered sitcom After You’ve Gone followed by WWI-era drama Lilies. BBC2 dug up an episode of Grow Your Own Veg, followed by Timewatch episode Killer Cloud. ITV threw on a Midsomer Murders and went to the pub, while Five followed Nick Baker’s Weird Creatures with an NCIS off the shelf.

    10: BIG FAT GYPSY WEDDINGS
    (21:00 Tuesday 8 Feb 2011, 8.8m viewers)

    Span out of warmly-received 2010 Cutting Edge episode My Big Fat Gypsy Wedding, this series dipped into the lives and traditions of families from the Traveller community as preparations were made for a family wedding. While the original was awarded ‘Most Groundbreaking Show’ in the ‘Cultural Diversity Awards’ (which were possibly invented specifically to annoy your uncle on Facebook), the full series was criticised by many from Britain’s Traveller and Romani community for playing up the quirkiest, most outrageous examples of life within the featured families.

    This highest-rating episode came from the first series, with an episode looking into the community’s weddings and christenings from a purely male perspective, but most episodes from that opening series rated north of eight million viewers. It’s only in later series where the programme’s popularity began to slide, with many of the standalone ‘event’ episodes from 2013 falling outside BARB’s published ratings, putting their figures below two million viewers.

    WHAT WAS ON THE OTHER SIDE?

    BBC1 broadcast poorly-received sci-fi drama Outcasts, while BBC2‘s The Chinese are Coming explored China’s role as an emerging economic superpower. ITV were still pushing out episodes of Taggart, with tonight’s tale tackling the world of cage fighting. Five threw on a bunch of CSI episodes for the night and went to bed early. The Viacom takeover couldn’t happen soon enough.

    9: THE PRICE
    (21:30 Thursday 14 Feb 1985, 8.9m viewers)

    COME ON DOWoh wait, it’s not that. But rather the concluding episode of a tense six-part thriller starring Peter Barkworth and Harriet Walter. The tale of Geoffrey, a millionaire trapped in an unhappy marriage to a wife twenty years his junior, but his devotion to his wife and her mardy-arse daughter is soon tested as they’re kidnapped by the IRA. With his assets far from liquid, he struggles to raise the required ransom, and his attempts to free capital cause the share price of his firm to tumble. Ah, the priorities of television characters from the eighties.

    In this final episode, “Geoffrey enlists the aid of computers to track down his wife and step-daughter. But the police close in while the gang still hold his family”. Given the computers of that era, fingers crossed for no R:Tape Loading Errors, eh?

    WHAT WAS ON THE OTHER SIDE?

    Final episode of amateur sleuth-em-up Charters and Caldicott on BBC1, followed by Question Time. ITV had an episode of TV Eye looking at the rise of lawlessness on the New York subway systems, and the groups of vigilantes who formed to tackle them. Over on BBC2, a Forty Minutes episode looking at two stories of young love (Feb 14th, of course) followed by The Rockford Files. Meanwhile, later the same night on Channel Four, an episode of Cinemax-C4 collaboration Assaulted Nuts, a pretty much made-for-export sketch comedy series starring Tim Brooke-Taylor, Barry Cryer and Cleo Rocos. It’s worth looking up details on that series, as it’s a deliciously off-piste piece of British comedy history. Even if it’s not exactly brilliant.

    8: NUNS ON THE RUN (1990)
    (21:00 Sunday 18 Apr 1993, 9.2m viewers)

    There have been quite a lot of films on this list, haven’t there? Some big budget American ones (The Abyss, Good Morning Vietnam), some more modestly-budgeted but well-reviewed homegrown movies (Wish You Were Here, Mona Lisa). And, besting all of them in the ratings battle… this.

    Eric Idle and the late Robbie Coltrane play inept gangsters Brian and Charlie, whose attempt to rob a gang of Triads results in them ripping off the rest of their gang to escape to a life of Brazilian bliss. Things don’t quite go to plan during their getaway, meaning the duo are forced to flee and seek refuge at a nearby nunnery. Brian’s love interest Faith (Doctor Who’s Camille Coduri) spots the cackhanded crims attempt to flee, and also joins the nunnery posing as a student.

    Cruelly overlooked by the Academy Awards judging panel, the whole affair was a diverting enough romp if you ask me. Yeah, there was no intellectual nourishment on offer here, but sometimes you just feel like a tube of Pringles, yeah? Mind you, Roger Ebert stated that when it comes to Nuns on the Run, “your laughter may reveal more about you than about this particularly dreary film.” It’s still better than Splitting Heirs, I counter.

    WHAT WAS ON THE OTHER SIDE?

    Sunday night treats on offer elsewhere were an episode of A Year in Provence followed by Mastermind on BBC1 (PD James, the Napoleonic Wars, the Cornish clay industry and medieval castles on the latter, the Mayles have a go at French sport in the former). BBC2 dealt out an Arena special on the career of South African pop megastar Brenda Fassie followed by Peggy Sue Got Married (1986). ITV finished off a Maigret before welcoming a textbook Aspel & Company line-up (Mary Tyler Moore, Brian Conley and Sting) and News from ITN.

    7: FRIENDS
    (21:00 Friday 28 May 2004, 9.64m viewers)

    Ah, here it is.

    One the one hand, Friends was always bound to appear on this list. But on the other hand, you’d have thought the same about Cheers, Frasier, Ugly Betty, The Cosby Show, Ellen, The Golden Girls, Desperate Housewives, A Handmaid’s Tale or Will & Grace, and you’ll notice there’s not enough room left for many of them. Or possibly any of them.

    After the reliably popular Cheers came to an end in May 1993, it left a big hole in Four’s Friday night schedule. While the channel had seen quite a few similarly well-received Friday night comedy imports – The Golden Girls enjoyed a lengthy run on the channel, but that had already run its course, and spin-off The Golden Palace had been and gone by the time Cheers came to a close. What was the channel to do? Other options such as Roseanne weren’t as popular as they had been, and new acquisitions such as Susan Harris’ post-Golden Palace project Nurses or HBO sexcom Dream On had failed to draw much attention.

    On 28 April 1995, their prayers were answered, with a programme debuting – as it happens – just after the second ever episode of Father Ted. Nestled between the latest from Craggy Island and one-off spoof Jack and Jeremy’s Police 4 (or pilot for Jack and Jeremy’s Real Lives, if you prefer) came the first episode of NBC’s hot new sitcom hope, starring (as The Times had it at the time) “NYPD Blue’s David Schwimmer” in (as The Mirror had it) “half a dozen single twentysomethings fighting on the battlefield known as life”.

    You know the rest, I’m sure. This high point of the series viewing figures comes for the final episode, at a point where Channel Four had expensively wrangled the rights back from Sky, and where it served as a lead-in to a brand new series of Big Brother.

    WHAT WAS ON THE OTHER SIDE?

    BBC1 fought comedy with comedy, offering an episode of The Lenny Henry Show featuring guest star Harry Enfield. BBC2 offered a clear alternative with Art of the Garden, while a bullish ITV went big with a heady mixture of celebrities, kitchens and bollockings with a ninety-minute episode of Gordon Ramsey’s Hell’s Kitchen. Five merely admitted defeat and farted out a showing of Jean-Claude Van Damme’s Double Impact.

    6: CUTTING EDGE
    (21:00 Monday 14 Feb 1994, 9.78m viewers)

    Here’s one out of left-field.

    Not necessarily that Cutting Edge would make an appearance in this top ten – it’s a very long-running topical documentary strand, basically the channel’s answer to Panorama. But rather the episode that happens to have been the most-watched of them all.

    It could have been 1994’s Graham Taylor: An Impossible Job, a groundbreaking sports documentary where the levels of access granted to the film crew capturing the working life of beleaguered England manager Taylor was rivalled only by the levels of swearing throughout. After all, I can’t think of any Panorama episodes that led to a phrase that would capture the imagination of a nation like “Do I not like that?” did.

    It could have been Bafta-nominated episode Katie: My Beautiful Face from 2009, which followed the recovery of ex-model Katie Piper following a malicious acid attack. Or even 2010 episode My Big Fat Gypsy Wedding, which span-off into a full, very popular series of its own.

    Instead, it was 1994 episode Shops and Robbers that drew the largest audience. Far from a scintillating takedown of a notorious figure, or capturing a slice of life that simultaneously captured the nation’s hearts, it investigated the battle between Marks & Spencer and shoplifters. On the part of M&S, there’s a look at the company’s security hub, and at their futile attempt to nab a gang of professional pilferers. On the part of shoplifters, there’s an encounter with a serial shoplifter who routinely lifts clothes from the store, deliberately damages them, and then attempts to return them for a no-quibble refund. No wonder they subsequently changed that policy.

    WHAT WAS ON THE OTHER SIDE?

    Speaking of Panorama, that was BBC1‘s alternate offering following the Nine O’Clock News that night, with reporter Roger Harrabin investigating the claim that air pollution was causing a rise in the rates of asthma. BBC2 also offered up a documentary alternative, with a Horizon episode dissecting the aftermath of the 1992 Columbia air crash. Lighter fare on ITV, with Under the Hammer, an episode of the Richard Wilson/Jan Francis comedy drama featuring a guest turn by Thora Hird. Not a lot of light relief for anyone under thirty finding themselves dateless at home that particular Valentine’s Night, really.

    5: GREGORY’S GIRL (1980)
    (21:00 Tuesday 8 Jan 1985, 10.75m viewers)

    Bill Forsyth’s film takes a look at adolescent sexuality through the filter of life in early 1980s Cumbernauld. Gawky teen Gregory Underwood is the hapless striker of his hopeless school football team, until the team manager takes a gamble on keenly talented but controversially female Dorothy in his place. Gregory couldn’t care less about regaining his place up front, of course. He’d much prefer to form a striking relationship with Dorothy off the pitch.

    A brilliantly funny film that’s no less enjoyable in a world where girls playing football is the norm, and I say that as someone made to cringe myself inside out appearing in a GCSE English dramatic performance of it (I was brought up not to swear in front of adults, so having to joyfully utter the word “tits” in front of a bunch of them failed to provide the subversive thrill you’d expect).

    A British film that still makes best-of lists now – even Entertainment Weekly placed it in their ‘50 Best High School Movies‘ list some 34 years after initial release.

    WHAT ELSE WAS ON?

    The News followed by play The Last Evensong on BBC1, an gritty-era episode of The Bill (“Det Insp Galloway on the trail of a pornographer”) followed by News at Ten on ITV, and a niche triumvirate on BBC2: Pot Black ’85, followed by Doctor’s Dilemmas (“exploring the ethical dilemmas facing doctors”, reasonably enough) and World Darts.

    4: THE GREAT BRITISH BAKE OFF
    (21:00 Tuesday 24 Nov 2020, 11.74m viewers)

    Often when popular programmes get gazumped by other channels, it doesn’t work as well as hoped. Sky One did this quite a lot, snatching the rights to Friends, Lost, The X-Files, 24 and sundry others, the net result generally being each show immediately lost about 70% of its audience. Thames famously coaxed Morecambe and Wise over to ITV in the late 1970s, and their magic soon began to fade – ditto after The Goodies decamped to LWT. In fact, it’s harder to think of success stories: Men Behaving Badly became huge after being picked up by the BBC, but that mainly happened because ITV had given up on it. So, we’re left with a list that has the name ‘Kenny Everett’ on it and little else.

    Aside, that is, from Bake-Off. The odds seemed stacked against it – one of the BBC’s biggest shows being seized by a smaller channel, three of the four main hosts declining to make the move, a programme everyone was used to viewing without interruption suddenly having to make room for ad breaks. It doesn’t stand a chance.

    And yet… all of those obstacles did the series very little harm at all. At the programme’s high point on BBC1, it drew a total of 15.9m viewers. That fell by a relatively minor amount following the channel switch, with 11.74 million viewers tuning in for the pox-era finale. Yes, the C4 figure is smaller than the BBC1 figure, but that still made it a sixth-most watched programme of the year for any channel. And in a year when we were legally forced to remain indoors, that’s pretty good.

    WHAT WAS ON THE OTHER SIDE?

    It was 2020, so a perpetual chronicle of doom on The News, or – as before – Netflix.

    3: FOUR WEDDINGS AND A FUNERAL (1994)

    (21:00 Monday 28 Apr 1997, 12.38m viewers)

    In 1994, director Mike Newell single-handedly (okay, Richard Curtis helped) gave the British romantic comedy genre the firm, hard boot up the arse it sorely needed.

    Not that the genre hadn’t existed before then, nor that Curtis hadn’t previously had a hand in it. Indeed, Richard Curtis’ previous film for cinemas, The Tall Guy (starring Jeff Goldblum, Emma Thompson and Rowan Atkinson) was a firmly enjoyable romp, but it seemed destined for little more than limited domestic success, maybe a weekend showing or two at 10pm on ITV, and little else. Having enjoyed his directorial work on Jack Rosenthal’s Ready When You Are, Mr. McGill (Granada, 1976), Curtis picked Newell to work with on his next project, and it’s fair to say it was quite a success: Four Weddings became the (then) top-grossing British film in history at that time, Hugh Grant was catapulted to superstardom, Curtis was nominated for a Best Screenplay Oscar and Wet Wet Wet clamped themselves to the top of the pop charts on the back of the soundtrack single.

    WHAT WAS ON THE OTHER SIDE?

    An extended Nine O’Clock News, followed by a Labour Party Election Broadcast and ‘scientific thriller’ Breakout on BBC1, the reboot of The Outer Limits and This Life on BBC2, while ITV plumped for an episode of Bramwell and News at Ten.

    2: BIG BROTHER
    (22:30 Friday 27 Jul 2001, 13.74m viewers)

    Another inevitable entry near the top of the list. Despite the format fizzling out by the time it’d moved to Five (and a certain amount of eye rolling when news broke ITV2 are reviving it next year), there was a time when the vanilla version of Big Brother was a national talking point.

    One slightly curious thing about that original series of Big Brother UK – while several routes were used to try and attract participants, the main televised call for contestants that I remember went out immediately after a repeat of BrassEye (with some online commentators subsequently assuming the whole premise was a Chris Morris spoof). As a result, those involved in that original series seemed far less like those in later series, they were more akin what might be considered a set of stereotypical don’t-just-watch-the-sitcoms Channel Four viewers. As it was, the initial series seemed more like an Orwellian social experiment than an easy route to fame (or at least short-term notoriety). Indeed, the BBC News story for that early casting call mentioned how “a nominal fee, equivalent to the amount paid for jury service” was on offer. Nobody was about to put a down-payment on a Mercedes with that line in the contract.

    As time would soon tell, not least to the antics of Nasty Nick, it quickly became a national talking point, and the show’s success was sealed. (Aside: from that first series finale, when winner Craig Phillips – who had only entered to try and win some money for a charity – was briefly reunited with Nasty Nick, the latter joking-not-jokingly uttered “Let’s go halves! Let’s go halves!”)

    This ratings high arrived at the conclusion of the second series, where the audience that grew as the first series progressed were on board from the start. As it turned out, it was a relatively controversy-free series (certainly no overt racism from someone who’d scored themselves 10 out of 10 for intelligence), and not too many of the participants rekindle memories now – aside from the series winner, the only one I remember is Bubble, and that’s partly because he cropped up in the finale of The Office. Basically, it’s quite nice that a series that didn’t generate any heated headlines or controversy turned out to be most popular, and in series winner (and future BB host) Brian Dowling, one of the people to have justifiably left the house with an elevated reputation to boot.

    WHAT WAS ON THE OTHER SIDE?

    In contrast to the unfolding reality show drama on Four, BBC1 offered actual drama with a repeat of Casualty and a new episode of The Cazalets. BBC2 dug in with Gardener’s World followed by a repeat of WWII documentary The War Behind the Wire, while ITV foisted forth Family Fortunes followed by a repeat of Taggart. Channel Five offered up an episode of Fort Boyard followed by movie choice Pink Cadillac, neither of which were repeats, so credit to them for that.

    So, what’s at number one? After all, this is the channel that brought us Creature Comforts, The Snowman and was the first channel to broadcast Wallace and Gromit in A Grand Day Out. It served us a Big Breakfast and a Friday Night Dinner. It made us laugh with comedy from Cheers to Chelmsford 123, from Absolutely to Adam and Joe, from Phoenix Nights to Frasier. It brought us Traffik, Black Mirror, The Manageress and GBH. It took us from Countdown to the Crystal Maze, from Gamesmaster to the Girlie Show, from Richard & Judy to Rude Tube, from The Tube to TFI Friday, from Max Headroom to Married at First Sight. Surely one of those will be in the top spot? Surely?

    Well, nope. Surprisingly, it’s this:

    1: A WOMAN OF SUBSTANCE
    (21:00 Friday 4 Jan 1985, 13.85m viewers)

    Yep. I would have said at this point “I bet you weren’t expecting that”, but given someone else has tweeted this bit of information out today, there’s a good chance you were. But for those who are a bit surprised by this turn of events: blimey, eh?

    This series was a three-part adaptation of the 800-page novel by Barbara Taylor Bradford, originally published in 1979. The story opens with a battle for control of a vast business empire controlled by seventysomething Business Woman (of Substance) Emma Harte, who discovers that her duplicitous offspring are scheming to carve it up for themselves. A far cry from Emma’s own upbringing, as a downtrodden servant girl.

    The focus of the three-parter falls on Emma’s modest rise to power, a Yorkshire village girl taking a job at the local squire’s home, Fairley Hall. From there, a tale unfolds of her rise to power, but no material gains can ever dilute her burning hatred and lust to to enact vengeance on the Fairley family that treated her so unfairly in those formative years.

    Jenny Seagrove played the younger Emma Harte, with Deborah Kerr tackling the character’s modern-day persona. And with a decidedly weighty novel to cover, a similarly solid heft of airtime was needed to tell the tale – three consecutive nights, with a two-hour runtime on each.

    It was a lengthy yarn that entangled a sizeable audience, with this 13m+ high coming for the conclusion of the initial story. But that wasn’t the end of the tale – May 1987 saw a sequel miniseries, Hold the Dream, which saw Jenny Seagrove and Deborah Kerr return as respective Emma Hartes. While not as colossal a smash at the original, it still attracted a high of 8.1 million viewers. Not too shabby.

    WHAT WAS ON THE OTHER SIDE?

    News, spy drama Wynne & Penkovsky and cop actioner Starsky & Hutch entertained any viewers left watching BBC1, while Shirley MacLaine and Michael Caine (you gotta have a system) starred in film Gambit (1966) on BBC2. ITV showed the end of Superman II, followed by US not-as-good-as-Alright-on-the-Night cockup compilation Bloopers, hosted by Dick “Not as good as our Denis” Clark.

    –

    So, There you go. A few things to unpack from that entire list.

    • Nuns on the Run was the third-most popular film ever shown on Four.
    • The most-watched sitcom in the channel’s history wasn’t Father Ted, The IT Crowd or Phoenix Nights, but a mostly-forgotten Matthew Kelly vehicle.
    • There was no room in the list for any Jamie Oliver or Gordon Ramsey vehicles, no Supernanny, Grand Designs, or England matches. All popular, just not popular enough to make this final forty.
    • But a repeat of Man About the House came closer to final forty than any of them.

    Anyway, thanks for everything, Channel Four. Long may you continue, hopefully free from privatisation, free to entertain or annoy us as you see fit for a long time to come.

    , ,

  • Forty/Four: Channel Four’s 40 Most-Watched (Part Three)

    Forty/Four: Channel Four’s 40 Most-Watched (Part Three)

    Into the top half we tumble. But first, here’s a rundown of the list so far:

    • 41: AUF WIEDERSEHEN, PET (21:00 Saturday 11 Mar 1995, 6.44m viewers)
    • 41: THE SNOWMAN AND THE SNOWDOG (20:00 Monday 24 Dec 2012, 6.44m viewers)
    • 40: THE NICK (21:00 Monday 3 Oct 1994, 6.5m viewers)
    • 39: FILM: BRIDGET JONES’S DIARY (21:25 Saturday 13 Nov 2004, 6.54m viewers)
    • 38: IT’LL BE ALRIGHT LATE AT NIGHT (23:10 Thursday 11 Jul 1985, 6.55m viewers)
    • 37: FILM: STAND BY YOUR MAN (21:00 Tuesday 14 May 1985, 6.6m viewers)
    • 36: FILM: CASTAWAY (21:00 Monday 26 Nov 1990, 6.63m viewers)
    • 35: FILM: COAST TO COAST (21:00 Tuesday 5 Feb 1985, 6.65m viewers)
    • 34: FILM: WISH YOU WERE HERE (21:30 Thursday 15 Feb 1990, 6.67m viewers)
    • 33: GOGGLEBOX (22:00 Friday 12 Mar 2021, 6.74m viewers)
    • 31: FILM: GOOD MORNING VIETNAM (21:00 Sunday 25 Apr 1993, 6.75m viewers)
    • 31: LOST (20:30 Wednesday 10 Aug 2005, 6.75m viewers)
    • 30: FILM: NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET (22:00 Tuesday 31 Mar 1992, 6.8m viewers)
    • 29: WIFE SWAP (21:00 Tuesday 21 Oct 2003, 6.9m viewers)
    • 28: FILM: NOWHERE TO RUN (21:00 Tuesday 9 Apr 1985, 6.95m viewers)
    • 27: FILM: THE ABYSS (21:00 Sunday 24 Jan 1993, 7.01m viewers)
    • 25: FILM: MOTHER, JUGS AND SPEED (21:00 Tuesday 12 Mar 1985, 7.05m viewers)
    • 25: ATHLETICS: THE KODAK CLASSIC (21:00 Friday 9 Aug 1985, 7.05m viewers)
    • 24: FEMALE PARTS: RUDE WOMAN (21:00 Monday 11 May 1992, 7.06m viewers)
    • 23: PETER KAY LIVE (21:30 Wednesday 4 Aug 2004, 7.197m viewers)
    • 22: IT’S NEVER TOO LATE (20:30 Monday 3 Dec 1984, 7.2m viewers)

    Right, into that top twenty-one. Dudes.

    21: BILL AND TED’S EXCELLENT ADVENTURE (1989)
    (21:00 Sunday 11 Apr 1993, 7.29m viewers)

    Photo: Bill and Ted (Alex Winter, Keanu Reeves)

    To be fair, any film that includes George “Seven Words” Carlin, Tony “Wolfie Smith’s Dad-in-Law After Peter Vaughan” Steedman and Jane “Rush Hour” Wiedlin is automatically great, and it’d be frankly stupid not to watch it. SAN DIMAS HIGH SCHOOL FOOTBALL RULES.

    WHAT ELSE WAS ON?

    Final episode of Andrew Payne’s conception-themed drama series You, Me and It on BBC1, followed by Mastermind and religious documentary strand Everyman. On BBC2 there’s live coverage of US Masters Golf from Augusta. ITV offer up an episode of Gambon-era Maigret followed by Aspel & Company, said company being, as The Times’ weekend TV guide had it “former hostage John McCarthy and his girlfriend Jill Morrell, who just happen to have written a book”. Yeah, bloody former hostages, always banging on about it.

    20: SHE’LL BE WEARING PINK PYJAMAS (1985)
    (21:00 Thursday 12 Mar 1987, 7.6m viewers)

    Photo: Image from the film, Julie Walters' character in a life vest having a bad time in a river.

    A Film on Four offering directed by John Goldschmidt starring Britfilm perennial Julie Walters as one of eight women attending a week-long Outward Bound course. Along the way they’ll learn secrets about each other… and themselves. Yeah, you know the drill.

    WHAT ELSE WAS ON?

    It’s 1987, so obviously LA Law was on ITV, followed by News at Ten. Over on BBC1, it’s the Nine O’Clock News followed by middle-classcom Life Without George and Question Time. Over on Two, the second part of Foreign Bodies, a Belfast-set series exploring the romantic relationship between a Roman Catholic nurse and a Protestant car mechanic, followed by 40 Minutes: The Quest for Sergeant Miller and a surprisingly pre-Newsnight airing for The Phil Silvers Show.

    19: RELATIVE STRANGERS
    (20:30 Monday 28 Jan 1985, 7.75m viewers)

    Photo: Main characters Fitz and John standing outside a shop.

    For anyone wondering where all the classic Channel Four sitcoms are on this list, here’s one. Well, I liked it when I was 10 anyway. The premise behind Relative Strangers was that happy-go-lucky thritysomething Fitz (Matthew Kelly) was happy with his bachelor’s lot in life. Free to do as he pleased, go where he wants and with whom he chooses. That’s until John (Mark Farmer) – the end product of a dimly-remembered dalliance seventeen years earlier – arrives at his front door, seeking to connect with a father who hadn’t known he existed.

    Written by Maurice Gran and Laurence Marks, this was a perfect vehicle for Channel Four – a premise maybe a bit too grown-up for pre-watershed ITV, but suited perfectly to such a slot on Four. And better still, it was a perfect fit for the Mondays-opposite-Panorama-and-World-in-Action slot – easily the peak audience slot for BBC2 and C4 at the time, where viewers seeking entertainment flocked away from the main two channels. And given the bulk of his appearances on TV have been as a presenter, it’s a good opportunity to remember how good a sitcom actor Matthew Kelly was.

    WHAT ELSE WAS ON?

    As mentioned, Panorama on BBC1 (“Richard Lindlay examines the financial cuts leading to reduced student numbers in universities”) and World in Action on ITV (“a documentary illustrating the impact of the miners’ strike to a community in Northumbria”). Much lighter fare on BBC2, with The Bob Monkhouse Show welcoming completely uncontroversial comedians Michael Barrymore, Peter Cook and Bill Maher to his big sofa.

    18: PARALYMPICS 2012: OPENING CEREMONY
    (20:00 Wednesday 29 Aug 2012, 7.78m viewers)

    Photo: Promo image for C4's Paralympic coverage. Several Paralympians are posing, with the caption MEET THE SUPERHUMANS.

    So far on this list, we’ve seen a lot of films, programmes and events that were very popular, but not too much that could be deemed Important Television. This is where that changes. Prior to 2012, coverage of Paralympic Games’ had been on the BBC. Usually at this stage, BBC Sport would be at the point where they’d just exhausted themselves covering the preceding Olympic Games, and seemed to have little energy (or schedule space) left to cover the Paralympics.

    For an international event borne out of the International Stoke Mandeville Games in the 1950s, it’s on a scale somewhere between ‘a pity’ and ‘downright insulting’ that so little attention was historically afforded the event in the UK, not least because Great Britain performed brilliantly in those early games. In 1960, 1964 and 1968 Great Britain finished second in the medals table, as did the British team in 1984 and 2000, with third-place finishes coming in 1972, 1988 and 1992. And yet – kind of hoping someone proves me wrong here – it took until 1984 for any television coverage of note to appear, with Channel 4 broadcasting hour-long highlight packages of the 1984 Games, albeit several weeks after the actual conclusion of the event.

    SCAN: TV Times listing for highlights of Paralympics 1984. "Some 1200 athletes from 40 countries met to compete in the VII World Wheelchair Olympics in July. The build-up of training and techniques since the last games four years ago provides a climax for competition and new world records."

    The earliest instance I can find of the BBC dipping into the Paralympic pool came in 1988, with similar highlight packages from Seoul ’88, again only appearing a couple of months after the conclusion of the Games. For some reason, the highlights were given the weird title of The ‘Olympic’ Challenge (with inverted commas right there, see?), as opposed to the more correct Paralympic Challenge.

    SCAN: Radio Times listing: "6.00pm The 'Olympic' Challenge.

    The level of coverage improved for the 1992 Winter Paralympics, with BBC2 hosting a pair of highlight programmes from Tignes in the French Alps, just a few weeks after the conclusion of the Games. That was followed by the Barcelona Summer Paralympics being covered, this time while the event was in progress, as part of Grandstand and Sunday Grandstand.

    By 1996, Paralympic coverage on the BBC expanded into a series of ten standalone highlight packages. A further improvement in the level of coverage, but still restricted to forty-minute highlight packages going out on BBC2, in a slot opposite Neighbours. The practice was repeated for the 2000 Sydney Games, with daily highlight programmes, but seemingly still no live coverage. For 2004, BBC2’s daily Paralympics coverage was extended to ninety minutes, but it was the Beijing Games in 2008 that saw Paralympic coverage finally breaking onto BBC1. Here, it seemed the Corporation might finally go all-in on their treatment, with the opening ceremony broadcast live in a four-and-a-half hour programme on the flagship channel. Sadly, it wasn’t to last, with main channel coverage restricted to nightly highlight shows and live coverage hidden under the red button (or on the BBC HD channel if your telly was so endowed).

    Photo: Two competitors playing wheelchair rugby clash.

    For the 2012 London Paralympics, things would be different. Very different. Channel Four had been awarded the rights to broadcast the games, and set about promoting the event in a way that would reshape the public’s perception of the Paralympics. Preceding the games with an all-out marketing blitz, adverts cheekily and brilliantly nodded toward the preceding London 2012 Olympics with “Thanks for the warm-up”, while Tom Tagholm’s two-minute-long ‘Meet the Superhumans’ trailer (screenshot above) was as captivating an advert as any pre-World Cup sportswear promo. And to make absolutely sure as many people were aware of the coverage as possible, on on 17 July 2012 Meet the Superhumans aired simultaneously on 78 different TV channels around Britain’s digital diaspora.

    All of which would count for nought if Four’s coverage was restricted to the same highlights hell. Far from it. Unencumbered by not having just covered an entire Olympic fortnight, Channel Four had boundless energy to pull out all the proverbials. A Paralympic Games Breakfast Show at 7am kicked things off each day, with live coverage dominating each day’s schedule (pausing only for News and a few immovable feasts like Hollyoaks and The Simpsons). Live coverage continued right through primetime, with each day’s events summarised during nightly comedy discussion show The Last Leg.

    Did it work? Hugely, as the viewing figures for a wonderful opening ceremony proved.

    SCAN: Front page of The Independent newspaper, with a photo from the Opening Ceremony. Several people holding umbrellas are suspended mid-air.

    Things were finally different. How different? Well, some parts of the British press now felt comfortable in attacking US broadcasters for not showing enough of it. Plus ça change, eh?

    SCAN: Front page of The Times. Headline - Outrage over American blackout of the Games.

    WHAT ELSE WAS ON?

    Loads of things – it was a three-hour-plus programme – but most notably: Patrick Stewart on Who Do You Think You Are? on BBC1, not-as-good-after-Lucy-Punch-left comedy cop drama Vexed on BBC2, Britain Then and Now on ITV, and zombie Big Brother on Five.

    17: MONA LISA (1986)
    (21:30 Thursday 23 Feb 1989, 7.82m viewers)

    Photo: Cathy Tyson, Michael Caine and Bob Hoskins post as their characters from the film

    On getting released from prison, it can be hard to find yourself gainful employment. Good news for paroled low-level hoodlum George, then – he’s just landed a job working for underworld boss Denny Mortwell, and all he’d needed to do was take the rap (and prison term) on his behalf. Now he’s working at a driver-slash-minder for high-class call girl Simone. Not that Mortwell is especially keen to make amends with George – he also wants him to extract some handy blackmail fuel from one of Simone’s clients. George’s attention is torn between carrying out his mission and his feelings for Simone, who wants his help to find her missing friend Cathy.

    Definitely from the grittier end of the Handmade Films stable, powerful performances from Bob Hoskins, Cathy Tyson and Michael Caine help make this a compelling if not always comfortable feature.

    WHAT ELSE WAS ON?

    Another outing for Life Without George at 9.30pm on BBC1, followed by Sir Robin-era Question Time. BBC2 offered up splendidly-titled 40 Minutes documentary Knickerbockers in Knightsbridge (except it seems to be breathlessly celebrating a high-end prep school, so knickers to that), followed by an episode of The Tracey Ullman show with The Simpsons surgically removed (d’oh, indeed) and Newsnight. ITV dished up an episode of imported cop show In the Heat of the Night to take viewers to News at Ten, before some Regional News-Based Programming. And, just for a change, Sky Channel offered drama series The Paper Chase, followed by WWF Main Event.

    16: TREASURE HUNT
    (20:30 Thursday 24 Mar 1988, 7.85m viewers)

    Photo: Anneka Rice poses alongside her cameraman and sound engineer.

    One of the big hits for the channel in its first decade on air, it’s a bit of a surprise that Treasure Hunt is one the classic C4 properties never to have received the reboot treatment*. For anyone too young to be aware of the premise, this was a game show basically aimed at people with leather-bound encyclopedias in their living room. Two contestants take part in a command centre alongside host Kenneth Kendall and guide Wincey Willis, who together must solve a series of geographical clues to determine the location of further clues and ultimately, the titular treasure.

    [EDIT: *Reboot treatment… by Channel Four. With thanks to @ChinnyVision and @Simon_Tyers on Twitter plus James in the comments for highlighting this, it did receive a reboot on BBC2 following the departure of The Simpsons to C4. It went out on weekdays at 6pm in December 2002 (for a week), before returning for a second series (again, on each weekday evening for a week) starting in April 2003. It didn’t fare too well – not least because they decided to set each Hunt in places like Tucson or Mexico City, which must have cost a fortune. And as such, the final six episodes of the second series were shoved into a Saturday teatime on BBC2 slot, with almost a month between airings of the last few episodes.]

    But that’s not the exciting part. The main participant in all this, and the undoubted star of the series, was Anneka Rice – the person tasked with physically uncovering each clue at the actual locations portrayed on Wincey’s map. To get from place to place, she had a helicopter, and the whole thing had to be done and dusted within 45 minutes, broadcast in real-time.

    Basically, it was speed geocaching.

    This particular episode came from the Chilterns, with contestants Robin Strand and Ian Taylor hoping to win big. And if you wanted to play along at home, the TV Times kindly provided you with an OS Map reference.

    Scan: TV Times listing, 8.30 to 9.30pm Treasure Hunt. Details as per the previous paragraph.

    See?

    WHAT ELSE WAS ON?

    Mastermind (the history of English costume 1789-1945, Portuguese explorations and discoveries 1415-1815, the history of mathematics, the films of Laurel & Hardy) followed by the News on BBC1. BBC2 had Nature (an examination of the latest developments in genetics) followed by Blackadder II (the executioner one). ITV had This Week: Private Health – Too High a Price? followed by LA Law.

    =14: INTERNATIONAL SNOOKER
    (21:45 Sunday 16 Dec 1984, 8.25m viewers)

    Siri, name a sport that doesn’t belong on Channel Four.

    Might just be me, but… snooker’s very much a BBC2 thing, isn’t it? I know it’s been on BBC1 quite a lot, and at the peak of the snooker craze in the 1980s even ITV made a regular go of it, but the closest you’d expect the sport to get to Channel Four is a screening of Billy the Kid and the Green Baize Vampire. And yet, here it is.

    Four being Four, it’s not quite your usual Fagbrand World Matchplay tournament, however. This was the final of the Hofmeister World Doubles Championships (coverage Four actually shared with ITV, as was the style at the time) a tournament that in theory should have provided double the fun for snooker fans, with greats of the game teaming up to do battle. In practice however, it wasn’t quite the draw organisers had hoped – the tournament only ran from 1982 to 1987. That said, if any doubles match was going to draw an audience, it was this final: Alex “Hurricane” Higgins and Jimmy “Whirlwind” White against Cliff “Magnum PI” Thorburn and Willie “Best of Friends” Thorne.

    WHAT ELSE WAS ON?

    The News, followed by Perry Como’s Christmas in Paris on BBC1, Harold Pinter play A Kind of Alaska was on BBC Tw… wait, ITV (yeah, look impressed – it wasn’t superseded in the regional variations, either) and Hinge/Brackett sitcom Dear Ladies on actual BBC2.

    =14: DARK NIGHT OF THE SCARECROW (1981)
    (21:00 Tuesday 21 May 1985, 8.25m viewers)

    Photo: Title card from Dark Night of the Scarecrow.

    Despite the TV Movie genre being as unstoppable as ever – just look at the Movie Channels You Don’t Have To Pay Extra For section on Sky – I’m pretty sure nobody bothers making TV Horror Movies any more. It certainly used to be a thing, the original version of Stephen King’s It was made for TV, but nowadays it’s all variations of (to badly paraphrase TV Go Home) ‘The Courts Are Letting My Ex-Husband Attack My Children With Hammers’ or Christmas films.

    Back when Horror TVMs were a thing, very likely with one eye on the blossoming video retail market, fare such as Dark Night of the Scarecrow could be seen. It’s hardly the most edifying fare, going by the plot synopsis on IMDB: “In a small Southern town, four vigilantes wrongfully execute a mentally-challenged man, but after the court sets them free mysterious ‘accidents’ begin to kill them off one by one.” And yet, commissioned and brought to television by CBS.

    SCAN: TV Times listing - 9.00 Dark Night of the Scarecrow

    Must admit, I’m a bit mystified why this picked up such a colossal audience, but I do note that the full movie is available on YouTube for free (in HD, and seemingly legally to boot), so if you’re curious enough to want to see it, fill your boots.

    WHAT ELSE WAS ON?

    News and Miami Vice on BBC1, Francis Ford Coppola flick The Escape Artist (1982) on BBC2, and Mr Palfrey of Westminster followed by News at Ten on ITV.

    13: BROOKSIDE
    (20:00 Wednesday 3 Nov 1993, 8.27m viewers)

    Photo: A wedding scene from Brookside

    Let’s face it, it was a matter of when not if this was going to show up. The only question was which era of the programme would be represented here? The Damon and Debbie years? The kiss between Beth Jordache and Margaret Clemence? The body under the patio? Sinbad’s lodger turning out not to be a serial killer but a Wrexham supporter?

    Not quite that, no. How about “Frank and Lyn’s wedding“? Yep. That was the episode that outranked all those other famous Brookie moments. Of course, this being soapland, it wasn’t as straightforward as that – look away now if you’re working your way through a box of Brookside offairs – a drug-fuelled Jimmy Corkhill led to Frank’s car crashing en route to the wedding reception, meaning he didn’t survive to taste the wedding cake.

    But why that particular episode? What tipped the viewing figures for that episode above all the others? I should point out that viewing figures were generally hovering around 8m for this spell of the programme’s run, but it must have taken something for this episode to have nudged just above the others. What could it have been?

    WHAT ELSE WAS ON?

    The answer is very likely located here. BBC2 were showing Bookmark: The Quest for A.J., where crime writer Julian Symons investigates the life of his elder brother (the titular AJ), who died in 1941. ITV had live football, with Arsenal taking a 3-0 first leg lead to Standard Liege in the UEFA Cup Winners’ Cup. Meanwhile BBC1 had… live football, this time coverage of Norwich City attempting to protect their shock 2-1 UEFA Cup away lead as they hosted Bayern Munich. Both good matches – Arsenal notched up a 7-0 away win en route to a win over Parma in the final of the tournament, while Norwich clung onto that lead and ensured Jeremy Goss will never need to pay for another drink within North Norfolk – but for people who don’t like football, there really wasn’t too much else on.

    12: THE MIRACLE OF KATHY MILLER (1981)
    (21:00 Tuesday 21 Apr 1987, 8.3m viewers)

    Photo: Title card for The Miracle of Kathy Miller.

    Nowdays, you’d have to suspect this would be getting pumped out to 3000 viewers during one of the few months Movies 24 aren’t pretending it’s Christmas, but in 1987 imported TV Movies could still draw a big crowd. And few bigger than for The Miracle of Kathy Miller, starring big TV name Sharon Gless and a tyro Helen Hunt. The story here focused on the true tale of an Arizona teen (Hunt) who overcame disabilities to be awarded the title of the World’s Most Courageous Athlete. Sounds a lot like a parody to cynical modern eyes, but this was a much-acclaimed movie at the time. And, of course, the 11th most popular thing on Channel Four ever. So, you know, stick that in your VHS broadcast copy of Brass Eye.

    WHAT ELSE WAS ON?

    ITV offered up Lost Belongings, looking at the attempt of IRA wrongun Hugh MacBraill to escape from The Maze. BBC2 offered up Live Snooker and The World of UB40, while their big brother offered up The Nine O’Clock News, drama Strike It Rich and broadcasting discussion show Network, where presumably hosts Anna Ford and David Jessel were mad as hell about, dunno, Pages from Ceefax?

    Screencapture: An engineering announcement caption card for Channel 4: "Carnmoney Hill, Keighley - Due in about a fortnight".

    That’s it for another instalment. A lot of big C4 programmes we’ve not seen yet, and there probably isn’t room in that final Top Eleven for all of them. Which will make the cut? Tune in tomorrow to find out. On Four’s actual fortieth birthday! I don’t just throw this together, you know. (Aside: no, I do.)

    , ,

  • Forty/Four: Channel Four’s 40 Most-Watched (Part Two)

    Forty/Four: Channel Four’s 40 Most-Watched (Part Two)

    More Four. Here’s the next tranche, starting with two entries at joint-30th.

    =31: GOOD MORNING VIETNAM (1987)
    (21:00 Sunday 25 Apr 1993, 6.75m viewers)

    Kicking off a Robin Williams season on Four, this well-received comedy drama about a boisterous US Forces Jock who eschews the anodyne in favour of the raucous, much to the delight of troops stationed in Saigon, and to the dismay of their higher-ups.

    WHAT WAS ON THE OTHER SIDE?

    Offering the polar opposite to Robin Williams at his Robin Williamsest on Four, BBC1 served up A Year In Provence, followed by News and Mastermind (the fall of the Western Roman Empire, the Manhatten Project, Damon Runyon and Joseph Chamberlain). BBC2 countered that with coverage of the World Snooker Championships in Sheffield, followed by feature-length LA riot documentary LA: Stories from the Eye of the Storm. A new thriller by Lynda La Plante – who briefly passive-aggressive followed me on Twitter after I’d criticised her provably wrong opinions on the BBC’s equalities policy (also Killer Net), rubbish showbiz anecdote fans – on ITV, with Seekers following the fortunes of two women finding they’re both married to the same man.

    =31: LOST
    (20:30 Wednesday 10 Aug 2005, 6.75m viewers)

    Forget about the disappointing ending, Lost was good when it first arrived. Really good. And that was reflected in those initial audience figures.

    An expensive promotional push for the imported series by Channel Four certainly didn’t hurt matters – the channel spent a cool million pounds just promoting the series via everything from cinema advertising to in-game adverts within Anarchy Online. They didn’t even use a standard trailer-of-clips-from-the-thing advert either, but had a specially-shot and hugely expensive scene featuring the entire cast dancing next to the flaming wreckage of Oceanic Flight 815 to a background voiceover of enigmatic statements about their identities (“One of us is a killer, one of us is an addict, one of us used to be in Hetty Wainthrop Investigates” etc). The whole thing resembled a Calvin Klein One advert more than a promo for a new drama series, but it undoubtedly piqued the interest of many viewers, leading to a colossal audience for the series opener.

    The viewing figures may well have been higher as the series progressed, were it not for first runs of each episode going out on E4 to promote the new digital service, alongside a flurry of impatient torrenters streaming episodes instead of waiting for them. Either way, Lost was a huge hit for the channel, right until the point Sky One threw a big bag of money at the producers to nab the rights to it.

    WHAT WAS ON THE OTHER SIDE?

    Second half of Holby City and the first half of Silent Witness on BBC1, Britain’s Best Buildings followed by docudrama The Slavery Business on BBC2, back end of The Bill followed by The Mummy Returns (2001) on ITV, and the last half-hour of Killer Swarms followed by the start of Steven Seagal ‘thriller’ Belly of the Beast (2003) on Five. Interesting to note that C4 scheduled Lost to start partway through three of those four programmes, very much anticipating the bulk of the audience to come from their own preceding programme (an episode of Big Brother) rather than rival broadcasters.

    30: A NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET (1984)
    (22:00 Tuesday 31 Mar 1992, 6.8m viewers)

    Remember the 1980s? Where a fictional child murderer became a cult hero, and ended up plastered all over t-shirts, magazines, posters et al? That was a bit weird, wasn’t it? Even when the Saw films were huge (and they were very much the FIFA franchise of the horror genre), nobody was walking around in a T-shirt with a picture of Ian Jigsaw on it. Anyway.

    Here’s the film that kicked it all off, starting the cult of (arguably) the only one of the Big Franchise Horror Stars of the 1980s to genuinely become a household name. Robert Englund dons the mask and gloves of F Krueger Esquire, and sets about haunting/hunting teens in their dreams. Would go on to spawn a raft of identikit sequels, and was certainly a big enough draw to get an audience worthy of inclusion here, despite being eight years old at the time.

    WHAT WAS ON THE OTHER SIDE?

    Tom Wilkinson played unconventional (he really likes jazz and sandwiches) detective Charlie Resnick in the first of a three-part adaptation of the John Harvey novel, Resnick: Lonely Hearts on BBC1 at 10, followed by a Liberal Democrats Party Election Broadcast and Film 92. BBC2 served up 40 Minutes: Soldier’s Diary, the story of Yishai Shuster, an Israeli reservist reluctantly policing the Palestinian border. That’s followed by a Conservative Party Election Broadcast and Newsnight. ITV being ITV, had News at Ten, followed by (at least in That London) episode of Extraordinary People: Across the Jade Divide, looking at the life of Keith Huxley as he follows in the footsteps of his father who’d been sentenced to a Shanghai internment camp fifty years earlier.

    In short: that the horror film about the child murderer murdering some children? Probably the lightest relief on offer here.

    29: WIFE SWAP
    (21:00 Tuesday 21 Oct 2003, 6.9m viewers)

    A format big enough at the time to have been used as the basis of a Simpsons episode (not a good one, the Gervais one), it’s no surprise to see Wife Swap here. This was in the original phase of the series, so there’s no danger of having to see John McCririck in his pants. This particular episode saw a fastidious husband temporary change his similarly pernickety partner for a free-spirited wife, and vice versa. Must admit, I’d have spent that whole hour thinking about the scene in The Simpsons where jury duty results in Homer sharing a hotel room with Seymour Skinner.

    “We’re kind of like the original Odd Couple. You’re the messy one, and I’m–“
    “Shut up! “
    “Oh, yes. Very well.”

    WHAT WAS ON THE OTHER SIDE?

    BBC1‘s The Secret Policeman peeked into the findings of undercover journalist Mark Daly during his stint as a trainee policeman in Manchester, while BBC2 examined the Mind of a Millionaire (and also, for some reason, the story of B&Q). ITV took us all back to the time when live Champions League football could be watched for free (no, legally) with the group B tussle betwixt Dynamo Kiev and Arsenal, while Five scooped a spoonful of CSI: Miami out of their Dick Wolf Economy Bucket.

    28: NOWHERE TO RUN (1978)
    (21:00 Tuesday 9 Apr 1985, 6.95m viewers)

    Not to be confused with any of the other films sharing the title, this particular Nowhere is based on the 1976 novel The Blackjack Hijack by Charles Einstein, and sees San Francisco engineer Harry Adams pottering about New York at the time of the Kennedy assassination. Seeing the uncaring reaction of his wife (Stefanie Powers, yes it’s a made-for-TV movie) to the news, he decides to do what anyone would… design an entirely new life for himself using a system to predict the outcome of blackjack hands. It’s a tale as old as time.

    WHAT WAS ON THE OTHER SIDE?

    The News and Miami Vice on BBC1, an episode of superb documentary series Television on ITV (this one tracking the growth of gameshows), and Pot Black 85 followed by Amazing Bass on BBC2. That latter one is a profile of bassist Gary Karr rather than some really, really brilliant fish, slightly disappointingly.

    27: THE ABYSS (1989)
    (21:00 Sunday 24 Jan 1993, 7.01m viewers)

    The James Cameron Film Where Something Sinks That People Don’t Mention As Much. This time it’s an American submarine that sinks (sinks… more?) in the Caribbean, leading a US search and recovery team to embark on a rescue mission. Working with a team of oil rig roughnecks, they’re busily racing against a team of pesky Russkies to be first to reach the stricken sub, when they encounter something unexpected.

    This showing coming in the lengthy wake of Terminator 2, interest was high in anything bearing the Cameron stamp of approval, and The Abyss also featuring T2-esque special effect trickery by Industrial Light & Magic certainly helped it stick in the minds of anyone seeing the trailers. Hey, all that was impressive at the time.

    WHAT WAS ON THE OTHER SIDE?

    A Sunday night, so it’s a textbook lineup on ITV, with Poirot followed by Hale & Pace and The South Bank Show. BBC2 picked out documentary Dancing: Lord of the Dance followed by Did You See… and a Derek Jarman production of Edward II. Over on One, it’s the final part of Ruth Rendell’s Gallowglass, followed by Mastermind and Heart of the Matter.

    =25: MOTHER, JUGS AND SPEED (1976)
    (21:00 Tuesday 12 Mar 1985, 7.05m viewers)

    There’s a film title that sticks in the memory. 1976 black comedy fillum MJ&S starred Bill Cosby (Mother), Raquel Welch (Jugs), Harvey Keitel (Speed), and Larry Hagman (And) (oh, okay: John) as employees of an independent ambulance service trying to survive in Los Angeles. Also home to one of the great Someone Who’d Later Become More Famous In A Minor Early Role credits in cinema history: “Toni Basil as Junkie Who Kills Leroy”. Oops, spoilers.

    WHAT ELSE WAS ON?

    Causing a conflict for high-energy US crime action, the News on BBC1 was followed by an episode of imperial phase Miami Vice, followed by Film 85 (reviews of 2010, Wetherby and A Soldier’s Story). ITV had (just after a repeat of ace C4 sitcom Chance in a Million at 8.30pm) an episode of documentary series Television looking at history of TV’s news coverage. Viewers of BBC2 could expect to see Inside Out (“Two female ex-convicts try to set up an employment agency”, co-starring Only Fools’ Gwyneth Strong as scatty Polish prostitute Beverly Grabowski), Pot Black 85 and a Maestro episode looking at the career (and presumably downfall) of George Best.

    =25: ATHLETICS: THE KODAK CLASSIC
    (21:00 Friday 9 Aug 1985, 7.05m viewers)

    Long before Channel Four was rightly lauded for their coverage of the 2012 Paralympics, the channel would often cover athletic events, but mainly when ITV had been in the middle of showing something and they needed to start showing something else. BBC1 had BBC2 for those very occasions, but what did ITV have? No ITVs 2, 3 or 4 in those days, but at least they had Channel Four, pretty much a smaller sibling of the two in those days, rather than the wholly independent media group it would later become.

    And so, on occasions such as the one on 9 August 1985, ITV’s willingness to hand airtime over to athletics only went so far. I mean, they did have an episode of Shine On Harvey Moon that couldn’t wait a week. And so, at 9pm, the action immediately shifted over to Channel Four, even if it did mean that week’s episode of Cheers got bumped back to 10pm.

    It wasn’t all bad. As proved here, a sizeable chunk of an ITV Friday Night audience immediately decamped to Four to see the continuation of the action from Gateshead. So, that’s nice.

    WHAT WAS ON THE OTHER SIDE?

    As mentioned, ITV had Shine on Harvey Moon (the one where Frieda has to come with a sudden death in the family). BBC1 have News followed by snooker management drama Give Us a Break, while BBC2 run with lighthearted music panel show My Music, followed by an episode of Commercial Breaks (not the Imagine Software one, sadly. This one’s about a shoe-making business).

    24: FEMALE PARTS: RUDE WOMEN
    (21:00 Monday 11 May 1992, 7.06m viewers)

    First of a six-part documentary series promising to reflect the disparate lives of contemporary women (well, six of them, presumably), starting with a film by Anne Parisio. The focus falls on a series of women of all ages who refuse to be timorous when it comes to sexual activity. Jo Brand is on hand to chat with a grandmother as she prepares an aphrodisiac for her younger lover, and there’s a look at the launch of a new magazine aimed to redress the gender balance when it comes to nudity.

    The write-up in The Times warns that “viewers who find frank studies on the nude male off-putting are hereby warned”, but that doesn’t seem to have dented the viewing figures too much.

    WHAT WAS ON THE OTHER SIDE?

    The News and a Panorama about house prices on BBC1, while John Lithgow flick Resting Place (1986) entertained BBC2 viewers (presumably). ITV also took a trip to the movies, with (pre-Sir) Tom Courtenay and Brigitte Fossey starring in WWII drama The Last Butterfly (1989).

    23: PETER KAY LIVE
    (21:30 Wednesday 4 Aug 2004, 7.2m viewers)

    One thing you can definitely say about Peter Kay – he certainly knows how to maximise a revenue stream from his audience.

    In November 2003, he released a DVD of a performance from his Mum Wants a New Bungalow Tour, recorded at The Bolton Albert Halls. It sold in huge numbers, as might be expected, given he was hugely popular at the time, and it was arguably the strongest stand-up set he ever did.

    And then, the following year, a recording of the same set – this time performed at Manchester Arena – was aired on Channel Four. Arena comedy never works as well as a theatre setting, so it all felt a little soulless compared to the Bolton gig, but y’know, it was on telly. For free. And all his fans had already seen the DVD of the Bolton gig, so it’s good that there was something slightly different, even if all the jokes were the same.

    And then that got released on DVD anyway, billed as “a special farewell performance” of his Bungalow set. Oh, Peter.

    WHAT WAS ON THE OTHER SIDE?

    Back end of a Panorama (investigating the antics of the IoC in advance of the 2012 Olympic decision) and the 10 O’Clock News on BBC1, sixtysomething drama When I’m 64 on BBC2. ITV had job-swap reality show Poor Little Rich Girls at 9pm, and documentary Dirtbusters at 10pm, while Five served up Samuel L Jackson teach-em-up 187 (1997).

    22: IT’S NEVER TOO LATE
    (20:30 Monday 3 Dec 1984, 7.2m viewers)

    For a channel so well known for commissioning sitcoms so beloved of comedy fans – Father Ted, Stath Lets Flats, Friday Night Dinner, Spaced, Derry Girls, take your pick (as long as you don’t pick Derek) – it’s a shame they all failed to reach truly large audiences. But here’s one that did, and it’s one that isn’t likely to get a repeat on E4 any time soon.

    Two pairs of pensioners – Win and May, Jimmy and Geoffrey – all belong to the same bowling club, but neither pair had ever met – until one fateful evening at the Social Club. From that point on, following initial mutual distrust, they soon realise that they can achieve far more as a team. And that’s pretty much it – a slow-burn pre-watershed sitcom from the mind and biro of Ian Masters.

    I can’t vouch for the quality of the programme, as I’ve no recollection of it, though it seems to be Masters’ only writing credit, his main calling coming as jobbing actor in series such as Terry and June, Hale and Pace, and The Piglet Files. One main draw of the programme may well have been the supergroup of actors therein – Peggy Mount, Pat Coombs, Hugh Lloyd and Harold Goodwin. Whatever the case, it was part of a pilot season for the channel (handily placed in the schedules as you’ll see in a moment) and never progressed to a full series.

    WHAT WAS ON THE OTHER SIDE?

    BBC1 had Panorama, while ITV had World in Action (ah, there’s your inflated audience figure), while BBC2 had ‘The New Statesman’ (not that one – a sitcom about a museum curator unexpectedly inheriting land and a title, starring Colin Blakely and Gwen Taylor).

    That’s it for now. Tune in tomorrow to see which Four morsels have made the Top Twenty. Going by what we’ve seen here, it could contain anything.

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  • Forty/Four: Channel Four’s 40 Most-Watched (Part One)

    Forty/Four: Channel Four’s 40 Most-Watched (Part One)

    Yes, I know I’m only just over halfway through the list of the 100 Most-Shown Programmes On The BBC, but Channel Four is forty years old on Wednesday 2 November, and that’s an anniversary well worth marking. So, here we go with another ill-considered datagasm.

    Like in an instalment of the Terminator franchise directed by John Birt, I’ve used my non-giving-up-guy powers to trek through yet more numbers. This time, picking through BARB’s website, plus online archives of Television Today and The Times, to look at the highest viewing figures ever gleaned by Jeremy Isaac’s controversy machine. All the way from launch day on 1 November 1982, right through to last week. And do I have a list packed with surprises for you? Yes. Yes, I do. At least five of them.

    A few quick notes before I start the rundown:

    • I’d originally planned to release the whole list in one go, but (a) it’s not quick writing all this, at least not if you’re me, and (b) breaking it up into four parts is quite fitting. Don’t worry, there won’t be long between them:
      • Part One: today, i.e. now, i.e. you’re reading it
      • Part Two: Monday 31 October
      • Part Three: Tuesday 1 November
      • Part Four: Wednesday 2 November, which also happens to be Channel 4’s 40th birthday
    • Only one entry per programme on the list (the highest-rating episode, obviously), otherwise you’d just be trudging through loads of Brooksides and Bakes Off.
    • I’m including airdates, broadcast times, and (because I’m lovely) a peek at what each programme was up against in the listings. Partly because, hey, who doesn’t love more data that they’d been promised? But mainly because seeing the ‘opposition’ sometimes helps confirm why audiences may have been inflated.
    • Pretty much every week has been accounted for, but between various archive sources there were still a few I couldn’t source data for. The records given are as complete as possible (seriously, a lot of legwork went into this one), if you know of something that should’ve made the list, and you’ve details of a BARB Top Ten to back it up, let me know (don’t trust any quoted viewing figures in news stories or biographies, as they’re frequently apocryphal).
    • I was in two minds whether to include films and sport in the list. After all, a list of The 40 Most Something Programmes Ever is a bit of a misnomer if nineteen of them aren’t actually programmes. In the end, I’ve decided to include both. Channel 4 has done brilliantly in introducing British audiences to sporting events like American Football, Kabaddi and Sumo, and even moved into major sports like F1 and Horse Racing in more recent years. As for films, when it’s a channel that happens to have made some of the best and most successful British films in history, it’d be stupid not to include them. Plus, it’ll be interesting to see whether it’s mass market Hollywood films or homegrown fare that proved a bigger draw.

    Okay, all ready? Here we go!

    =41: AUF WIEDERSEHEN, PET
    (21:00 Saturday 11 Mar 1995, 6.44m viewers)

    Off to a roaring start with a repeat of an old ITV programme. And that’s more representative than you might think – the first decade of Four saw classic repeat runs employed as a draw quite frequently. Whole new audiences were able to discover past hits like The Prisoner and The Avengers via repeats on Four – heck, in the early stages of compiling this chart it looked like a repeat of Man About The House was going to take a place in the top twenty.

    For this particular repeat run, the primo 9pm Saturday night slot was used for a full repeat run of Clement and Le Frenais’ (based on an idea by Franc Roddam) building-site comedy drama. And as repeat runs go, it was a definite success – certainly more successful than ITV’s late-80s repeats that saw hour-long post-watershed episodes chopped in half and put out at 7pm.

    This peak audience figure arrived for the repeat of the first episode, where Oz, Dennis and Neville first arrive in Dusseldorf.

    WHAT WAS ON THE OTHER SIDE?

    BBC1 had the end of the News followed by Saturday night thrills in the shape of Screen One: Down Among the Big Boys, a Glasgow crim-thriller starring Billy Connolly, Douglas Henshall and Maggie Bell. A repeat of The Buccaneers was on BBC2, while ITV offered up Impulse (1990), a cop film that I suspect even stars Theresa Russell and Jeff Fahey have forgotten about.

    =41: THE SNOWMAN AND THE SNOWDOG
    (20:00 Monday 24 Dec 2012, 6.44m viewers)

    Much more traditional Four fare in co-fortieth place. Indeed, its a sequel to one of the channel’s most famous offerings of all-time, with The Snowman and the Snowdog released to mark the 30th anniversary of Dianne Jackson’s animated retelling of the 1978 Raymond Briggs book. The 1982 original has become every bit a Christmas TV staple as Dinner For One on German TV, and in latter years the 2012 sequel has become a similar institution on Christmas Eve telly. It’s the original screening of One Snowman and His Dog that saw the biggest audience.

    WHAT WAS ON THE OTHER SIDE?

    Last in the then-current series of Merlin on BBC1, a Song and Dance compilation of Morecambe & Wise on BBC2, second-half of an hour-long Corrie on ITV, and A Right Royal Year on Five. That was followed by ‘Eddie Stobart’s Christmas Cracker‘, which would have made this section a bit more interesting.

    40: THE NICK
    (21:00 Monday 3 Oct 1994, 6.5m viewers)

    While fly on the wall documentaries were hardly a new thing in 1994, Paul Berriff’s series chronicling events at Gipton Police Station at least achieved the feat of bagsying one of prime titles for such a programme. And that premise was enough to attract a sizeable Monday night audience for this first of five episodes.

    WHAT WAS ON THE OTHER SIDE?

    BBC1 had the Nine O’Clock News followed by Panorama: Blair’s Britain (“Tony Blair discusses his visions for the future”). BBC2 had the unlikely double-act of Rab C Nesbitt and The X-Files (a crossover we’d all like to see, I’m sure), plus Harry Hill’s Fruit Fancies at 10.15pm. ITV had thrown on a film, but sadly for fans of Young Guns II: Blaze of Glory (1990) the channel was still in the habit of slicing films in two to cram News at Ten in the middle.

    39: BRIDGET JONES’S DIARY (2001)
    (21:25 Saturday 13 Nov 2004, 6.54m viewers)

    Romantic cinematic retelling of Helen Fielding’s singleton journals, starring Renee Zellweger, Hugh Grant and Colin Firth. I think the time is right for a shot-for-shot remake that remains utterly faithful to the original save for Hugh Grant’s playing his character from Paddington 2.

    WHAT WAS ON THE OTHER SIDE?

    Peak “aw mam, can’t we have something else on” viewing on BBC1, with The Royal British Legion Festival of Remembrance. Things start off a little more rosily on BBC2, with an hour of Magic (that’s the programme’s name, just to ruin the day of anyone trying to Google it) that promised “some of the world’s most dangerous stunts”. Any excitement would soon evacuate your body on discovering it being followed by The 38th Country Music Association Awards at 10.25pm. ITV offered up The X Factor Result Show between 9pm and 9.45pm, followed by The Great British Pop Test. See, at least ITV realised it was a Saturday night.

    38: IT’LL BE ALRIGHT LATE AT NIGHT
    (23:10 Thursday 11 Jul 1985, 6.55m viewers)

    Look at that – one of the most-watched programmes in the channel’s history, and it aired in a post-11pm slot. On a school night! It’s Four’s equivalent of the Black Ball Final.

    Looking into this one, I felt sure there had been a mistake. It seemed like the sort of ITV repeat that would often get an airing on C4, but getting such a large audience this late at night? Turns out, this was the first run of this particular ‘Alright’ episode, and despite that ‘Late at Night’ tag, there was little to separate it from your regular primetime LWT version (well, aside from a slightly naughtier feel to some of the outtakes, such as a bed collapsing during a sex scene, or the occasional boob making an appearance). They didn’t even give in to the temptation of having Denis sitting in his pyjamas by a log fire, or tucked up in a comedy bed, or in tuxedoed up a faux-nightclub. Just your regular mid-80s LWT studio, replete with a mid-80s LWT studio audience.

    Not that this would forever be exclusive to Channel Four. The first repeat of the episode arrived on ITV on 28 June 1986, in a plum 9.15pm slot, right after the Maradona versus West Germany World Cup Final. Alright Late at Night did very well there too, picking up 12.35m viewers – a figure higher than ITV’s coverage of the World Cup final itself (a mere 10.75m, though 11.75m watched it on BBC1 – a near-miss ITV Sport would throttle their grandmother for nowadays).

    [EDIT] It also made an ITV appearance on Sunday 18 Jan 1992, in a 9.45pm slot, where it picked up a much bigger audience of 16.74m viewers. Not bad for a seven-year-old repeat.

    [With thanks to Steve Williams for the heads-up on that broadcast]

    WHAT WAS ON THE OTHER SIDE?

    On BBC1, a Forty Minutes documentary about Victorian toilets (no, really) followed by Crimewatch Update. BBC2 offers Newsnight followed by Cricket: Third Test Highlights. We’re into the post-News regionalia zone on ITV, but Thames are offering up an episode of Hammer House of Mystery and Suspense called “Last Video and Testament”. In that – because with an episode title like that you’ll be wanting to know – an electronics expert fakes his own death and makes his unfaithful wife believe he’s visiting her from beyond the grave, presumably via VHS.

    37: STAND BY YOUR MAN (1981)
    (21:00 Tuesday 14 May 1985, 6.6m viewers)

    A TVM tracking the rise of Tammy Wynette, starring Annette O’Toole as the famed country chanteuse. Sadly, it being from 1981, suggesting a limited presence at best for the KLF.

    WHAT WAS ON THE OTHER SIDE?

    BBC2 viewers were treated to a very different piece of Americana in Wim Wenders’ and Francis Ford Coppola’s depression-era neo-noir Hammett (1982). John Humphrys reads the News on BBC1, followed by Crockett and Tubbs reading the Miranda Rights to some hapless perp in Miami Vice. Leslie Philips Spy drama Mr Palfrey of Westminster was entertaining ITV audiences.

    36: CASTAWAY (1986)
    (21:00 Monday 26 Nov 1990, 6.63m viewers)

    Amanda Donohoe and Oliver Reed star in Nicolas Roeg’s loose adaptation of Lucy Irvine’s autobiographical book of the same name. In the film (as in the book), a middle-aged writer places an advert for a volunteer to live with him for a year on a tropical island, a calling answered by then-25 year old Lucy. The tropical paradise was, as you may expect, far from the promised idyll. Meanwhile, back in Britain, a teenager who’d grow up to become Channel Four’s Head of Reality Programming furiously scribbles down notes.

    WHAT WAS ON THE OTHER SIDE?

    News and Panorama (“Who Will the Tories Choose?”) on One, Kiwi road movie Shaker Run (1986) on Two, while landmark World in Action Special: Why Lockerbie? aired on ITV. Later that same night on ITV – World Chess Highlights. The past truly was a different country.

    35: COAST TO COAST (1980)
    (21:00 Tuesday 5 Feb 1985, 6.65m viewers)

    Romantic comedy about madcap couple Madie Levrington and Charles Callahan, who accidentally find themselves in a truckin’ road movie. Madie is on the run after her scheming wealthy scoundrel of a husband had her committed to an New York mental institution to prevent her divorcing him and taking some of his previous, precious Reaganite cash. Charles is on the run from the repo man who wants to seize his previous truck. Will they team up and achieve their real goal? Which is getting rented by people at the video shop who’d found Smokey and the Bandit is already out on loan.

    WHAT WAS ON THE OTHER SIDE?

    The News followed by Spanish Civil War drama Brigadista on BBC1, Pot Black 85 and Doctor’s Dilemmas on BBC2, and a repeat of the Sweeney on ITV. Not a huge surprise Four’s amiable truckin’ caper comedy attracted such an audience, really.

    34: WISH YOU WERE HERE (1987)
    (21:30 Thursday 15 Feb 1990, 6.67m viewers)

    Not to be confused with, a-ha-ha, the ITV holiday show off the same name. In fact, this premiere airing of David Leland’s comedy-drama film went out on the same day as an episode of the Judith Chalmers sunstravaganza. Wouldn’t be allowed nowadays, Sky Q boxes would go haywire.

    See? Not at the same time, thankfully.

    WHAT WAS ON THE OTHER SIDE?

    Topically enough, given his presence in the anniversary special Friday Night Live the other evening, Ben Elton – The Man From Auntie was going out on BBC1 at the start of the film, followed by Crimewatch and Question Time. ITV offered Regional Programming (such as ’01 for London’, ‘Central Lobby’ and ‘Calendar Commentary’ in ITV franchises you can probably work out from those programme titles, TSW just went straight to Prisoner Cell Block H). BBC2 served up a 40 Minutes film on the lives of exiled black South African musicians living in the UK, followed by a Late Show short and Newsnight.

    33: GOGGLEBOX
    (22:00 Friday 12 Mar 2021, 6.74m viewers)

    Ever been wrong in a very public way? For a spell in the 2010s, I found myself writing programme previews for The Guardian Guide. Look, I’m as surprised as you, it was probably part of some Trading Places-style bet. Anyway, while I was dutifully providing copy for the publication, I generally steered clear of pouring too much scorn on programmes I wasn’t keen on. Someone loves them, a lot of people went to the trouble of making them, and who was I to pass haughty judgement on their efforts? I was just some twonk staying up late to scribble tosh before getting up early the next morning to shovel spreadsheets for The Man.

    But, on being given a copy of the non-broadcast pilot of a new programme called Gogglebox, here was something I could safely have an opinion on. It’s just footage of people watching telly, saying stuff about the things that are on. “Aah, we’re holding up a mirror to the audience!”, the producers were probably thinking, but if I wanted to sit and look at a mirror for an hour I’d sell my telly and buy a bloody mirror. So, I wrote up my true feelings on the programme (either referring to it as “a disappointingly crowdsourced reimagining of TV Burp”, or just wishing I had two hours past the submission deadline. Probably the second one), confidently predicting it won’t be a success.

    Gogglebox is currently on its 25th series, and many of the participants have gone on to become celebrities in their own right. I’m at home, writing this when I should probably be popping to Screwfix to buy a new flush mechanism for my toilet.

    You win this round, Gogglebox.

    WHAT WAS ON THE OTHER SIDE?

    The top-rating episode is from 2021, so the answer here is ‘Netflix‘.

    And that’s it for now. Two entries share the Number 31 slot, so you’ll get to see those on SUNDAY, when the next part ‘drops’.

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  • BBC100: The 100 Most-Broadcast BBC Programmes Of All Time (50-46)

    BBC100: The 100 Most-Broadcast BBC Programmes Of All Time (50-46)

    Into the fifty! And on the BBC’s actual 100th birthday too. Would’ve been nice to have wrapped up the whole list by this point, admittedly. But at least we’re in the top half of the table now. And into the next section of the list we go.

    50: Racing

    (Shown 1741 times, 1946-2014)

    Here’s something that’s easy to sum up in a few paragraphs: all of horse racing on the BBC since 1946.

    It’s certainly a little curious that, of all the different types of racing that have been televised since that inaugural broadcast from Ally Pally, it’s horse racing that has become synonymous with the phrase ‘Racing’ on TV. Not motor racing, cycle racing or greyhound racing. It’s the equine kind that the phrase has been reserved for. And this makes it slightly surprising that it took quite a while for horse racing – literally the sport of kings – to start making any appearance within the BBC-tv schedules.

    The first programme covering any kind of racing seems to have come on 9 October 1937, with ‘Road Race for the Imperial Trophy’, billed as “the first International Road Race in London (by courtesy of the Road Racing Club), on the Crystal Palace Road Racing Circuit (conditions permitting)”. Such was the clamour for the live news of the motoring event, it resulted in the Television Service opening up earlier than usual, at a still-leisurely 2.25pm rather than the usual 3pm. Britain’s sole TV channel kept tabs on the race through to 5pm that Saturday, occasionally opting out for key programmes such as ‘In Our Garden’, ‘First Time Here’ and ‘Punch and Judy with P. F. Tickner’. One can only hope the conditions were indeed permitting, because any postponement would have required a lot of filling for the nascent service.

    The next instance I can find of televised racing of any kind came almost a year later, on 8 October 1938, this time under the more helpful billing of “Motor Racing” (so I don’t have to look up details of an event from 85 years ago to check whether it’s cycles or cars, unlike with the previous paragraph). This came with the promise of getting to see a thrilling encounter between Arthur Dobson and the presumably pseudonymous “B.Bira” in an event big enough to be advertised in national newspapers.

    [UPDATE 20 OCT: Reader Jamie Bird adds some more exciting context to the above: “‘B.Bira’ who raced in the 8th October 1938 motor race, was the Prince of Siam, his full name being Prince Birabongse Bhanudej Bhanubandh (no wonder RT used his pseudonym). He raced all the way up to Grand Prix and Le Mans level and after retiring in the mid-fifties, took up competitive sailing, competing in four summer Olympics up to Munich ’72.”. That immediately makes this update at least 17% more interesting, so cheers Jamie!]

    (Daily Mirror, 7 Oct 1938)

    And, at least as far as I’ve been able to find, if you wanted to see any kind of racing action on your screens, motor racing was largely all you were going to see until the post-war years. Not that horse racing wasn’t covered at all, mind. It was, just in a slightly unusual way.

    The Television Service listings for 2 June 1937 show The Derby being covered, but the limitations of camera technology at the time certainly wouldn’t have permitting a cameraman to scoot along after the action. So instead, viewers would hear audio-only coverage of the race, as broadcast on the National programme. On top of that, a plan of the racecourse was shown on-screen, along with “still photographs of scenes connected to the race will be accompanied with a commentary”. Lovely stuff. Curiously though, the Radio Times listing for the event claims this approach was “a repetition of the successful experiment carried out on the occasion of the Grand National”, but looking at the Radio Times schedule on the day of that year’s National, there was no such billing. So, presumably, any such coverage was done ‘off the hoof’ (horse reference).

    Anyway, fast forward to 1946, and the reopened Television Service is now in a position to start covering horse racing properly. Television had certainly picked a suitably special occasion to cover. The two-mile King George VI Stakes is a racing event at Ascot that continues to this day, and BBC cameras were present for the very first ‘Stakes race in 1946. Or rather, ‘BBC Camera’ – the practice of mounting a camera to a vehicle capable of keeping up with racehorses still hadn’t come to fruition, and so a single BBC camera was affixed to the roof of the main stand, just to the right of the clock tower.

    See?

    With this new practice proving a success, horse racing returned the following spring, with two days of live coverage of the National Hunt at Sandown Park. By 1948, it was a regular practice, offering home viewers a chance to roar on their favourite from the comfort of their own home without needing to decipher the rantings of a radio commentator (though I’ll wager the picture quality on those early sets didn’t make it abundantly clear which horse was which).

    As the broadcast history table below confirms, horse racing would become an absolute mainstay of BBC Sport coverage for several more decades, but the frequency of races covered would fall as the nation entered the second decade of the 21st century. This decline in coverage came to a (horse’s) head in January 2013, when an exclusive contract between Channel 4 and the Racecourse Media Group started, resulting in all terrestrial British horse racing coverage moving to Four.

    Radio Times listings, 29 April 1966

    The table below doesn’t quite accurately convey the true extent of racing coverage on the Beeb – for many years, a large amount of the BBC’s racing coverage found itself covered within the Grandstand umbrella, and at other times racing shared a billing with up to three other sports in the TV listings. I’ve not included such instances in the totals, as that would only complicate matters. I make it about 237 instances of ‘Racing’ sharing a billing with other sports like this, if you want to amend the total yourself.

    49: Points of View

    (Shown 1753 times, 1961-2021)

    Dear Sir, I object strongly to the letters on your programme. They are clearly not written by the general public and are merely included for a cheap laugh. Yours sincerely etc., William Knickers.

    Monty Python’s Flying Circus, episode 1.11 “The Royal Philharmonic Orchestra Goes to the Bathroom”, TX: 28 December 1969

    A long-running ten-minute (or thereabouts) programme that has managed to clock up a surprising number of tropes for a show situated (for the most part) in a small presentation suite and shown after the end of Something American. If anyone from Panini is reading this and wants to put together a sticker collection of Points Of View tropes, start with the following:

    • Why oh why oh why oh why oh*
    • Them Upstairs
    • Mrs Edna Surname of Dorset Writes
    • Terry’s Bulge That Time

    Okay, there aren’t that many. Let’s do this properly (unless anyone wants to add any more in the comments).

    (*Spells, of course, yoyoyoyo)

    In the early days of broadcasting, if you wanted to get your opinion heard about a television programme, your main outlet for viewer dissent (or heck, praise) would be the Radio Times letters page. But wouldn’t it be better if you could have your letter read out loud by a voiceover artiste in the gap between Dynasty and The News? More importantly, wouldn’t it be handy if there was a cheap programme that could be slotted into the ten-minute gap between Dynasty and The News?

    That’s where Points of View came in. Offering a voice to the viewer, and holding the Beeb to at least a little bit of account. Originally hosted by Robert Robinson in 1961, going out in the teatime gap between the end of the regional news and the start of the evening’s entertainment programming.

    From there, the programme rapidly became a schedule staple, to the extent that it actually aired twice per week from 1962 – once at teatime on Mondays, then again just before 10pm on Wednesdays. The latter seems to have been at least occasionally billed as “a further look at points from this week’s post”, so it’s tempting to assume that this post-watershed slot contained pure unfettered vitriol about the scheduling of last week’s episode of Play Your Hunch, rather than a straight repeat.

    By the early 1970s, either the programme proved much less popular, or there was a national drought of opinion about television (or more likely the schedules threw up fewer likely spots for the series), meaning Points Of View entered an eight-year hiatus. On it’s return however, we definitely entered the imperial phase of Points of View, with comedian, writer and presenter Barry Took taking the hot seat.

    The quietly wry Took was no stranger to squeezing the most out of raw materials, having spent much of the 60s and 70s helping shape the British comedy industry having worked closely with Marty Feldman, brought together the Monty Python team, helped set up The Goodies, and became Head of Light Entertainment for LWT. And it was his winsome charm that helped make Points of View something I seldom missed as a child with a fascination of all things television.

    Following Took’s departure in 1986 (and PoV having a brief flirtation with guest presenters), Anne Robinson took the reins. Then a world away from the fairly annoying Ice Maiden character she’d adopt for The Weakest Link, Robinson took on the role of people’s champion as host of the programme, on the side of the viewers against those fusty suits upstairs who just didn’t realise what the people truly wanted to see. Robinson certainly made sense in that role, her early appearances on the Beeb had been as occasional TV reviewer for Breakfast Time, and during her earlier career at the Daily Mirror she’s developed a knack of expressing relatable points in a succinct manner.

    Following Anne Robinson’s departure from the series, there were short-term tenures in the presenter’s chair for Carol Vorderman and Des Lynam before Lord Terence of Woganshire took on the role of Viewer’s Champion. By this point, the programme was coming from a much less pokey environment, now in a plusher place replete with flowers and a writing desk.

    Amongst other things.

    Following Tel’s departure, Jeremy Vine took over from 2008 to 2018, with Tina Daheley currently hosting the series, but let’s be honest. With a multitude of other ways to express opinions on #CurrentTelly it’s a programme that seems incredibly anachronistic in this day and age. Sure, you could argue that at least having your views expressed on air (not least now the format is closer to Channel 4’s old Right To Reply) adds legitimacy to the series, but I’m going to counter with the fact that, around the end of the noughties, in an effect to move with the digital cyber-times, the series accepted comments submitted via the programme’s online messageboard. Where, instead of square old ‘names’ and ‘locations’, people could express comments under their wacky online handles, like ‘Pancho Wilkins’, ‘Colonel Geewhizz’ or ‘Alan997’.

    I’m not even making those up.

    So much for legitimacy, eh?

    48: Antiques Roadshow

    (Shown 1762 times, 1979-2021)

    As we’ve seen at several points on the list thus far, some formats – as popular as they might be – have a very definitive shelf-life. Call My Bluff had a hardy premise, but despite the occasional revamp and recasting, came to a natural end in 2005. Sportsnight seemed to be a never-ending format, midweek sport wasn’t about to go away, but the Beeb’s capacity to cover it faded and it came to an end in 1997. And yet, a similarly simple premise, people bringing antiques to a venue where an expert tells them how much they’re worth, is one that – at least at the time of writing – seems utterly inexhaustible.

    It’s a format that has proved hardy enough for a number of slightly surprising pop-culture references. The Smell of Reeves and Mortimer did a memorable pastiche of the series, with experts passing judgement on Prince’s wardrobe, booze f’ baby and host ‘Hugh Scully’ gradually getting nudged out of frame by stuffed monkeys during his links. The Royle Family centred an entire episode on the titular family using a broadcast of ‘Roadshow to place bets on the values of each antique. And, perhaps not quite as fondly remembered, the film adaptation of Tom Clancy novel The Sum of All Fears saw arms dealer and main baddy Olsen (Colm Feore) enjoy some downtime from his nuke-procuring day job by watching the series.

    With such a gentle format, it’s slightly surprising to realise that the series didn’t start until as late as 1979. I’d certainly assumed it was something that had been around since much earlier, at least the early 1970s, but no. Arriving in Spring 1979 for a run of eight episodes on early Sunday evenings, it now seems a little odd that the premise even needs to be explained to viewers, such is the familiarity it now has. But, readers of the Radio Times were coaxed toward the new series with the following:

    Arthur Negus goes on the road with a team of experts from Britain’s leading auction houses. They meet the public informally and discuss the treasured possessions brought along for their assessment. The result is a programme filled with surprises and excitement as people discover the truth about objects that have, sometimes, been gathering dust for years. Perhaps the biggest surprise is that there are more finds than disappointments.

    – Listing for the first episode, Radio Times Issue 2884, 17 February 1979

    From there, it went on to conquer the world, or at least Sunday evenings on BBC1. The presenters may have changed since those early days – Bruce Parker and Angela Rippon (1979), Arthur Negus (1979–1983), Hugh Scully (1981–2000), Michael Aspel (2000–2007) and Fiona Bruce (since 2008) – but the premise remains as resolute as ever. And to be fair, even for those who couldn’t give a jot about antiques, the Roadshow at least offers up to opportunity to share in the delight of attendees learning the trinkets from their attic are unexpectedly worth a five-figure sum, or even offering a chance to enjoy the schadenfreude of someone learning that Great Uncle Albert’s Victorian military figurines were actually cheap post-war replicas.

    The programme would even lead to a number of spin-offs and specials, including the following:

    Antiques Roadshow Gems (broadcast 1990-1992), More Antiques Roadshow Gems (1996-1997)

    Hugh Scully introduces repackaged highlights from the programme, each fifteen-minute episode focusing on a particular type of antique.

    Priceless Antiques Roadshow (2009-2017)

    While the former highlights packages were fairly lightweight daytime filler, Priceless took things to the [puts on Oakley shades and backwards Limp Bizkit hat] extreme. Going out at 6.30pm weeknights on BBC Two, Fiona Bruce recalls some of the most memorable moments from past editions of the show, initially joined by former host Hugh Scully to look at some of the most expensive objects ever seen by the experts.

    Antiques Roadshow Detectives (2015)

    To the slight disappointment of anyone hoping for a Baywatch Nights-style spin-off, Detectives saw Fiona Bruce join AR experts to explore the oft-interesting backstories behind heirlooms valued by the Roadshow.

    Antiques Roadshow Going Live! (1991)

    A perhaps unlikely addition to the BBC1 Boxing Day schedule for 1991, this was breathlessly billed as “the first Antiques Roadshow for youngsters”, with Hugh Scully joined by Phillip Schofield, Sarah Greene and (of course) Gordon the Gopher. In this special, the AR experts assembled at Bristol’s Temple Meads Station to pass their judgemental eye over trinkets from train sets to Thunderbirds toys.

    The whole affair came after a surprisingly popular appearance on Going Live! by Scully and expert Hilary Kay, with series producer Cathy Gilbey remarking on the deluge of phone calls from viewers asking if their belongings might be worth much.

    Antiikkia, Antiikkia (1997-)

    Because Britain isn’t the only country containing old things, the Antiques Roadshow format has been adapted around the world. Versions of the series have appeared in Australia, Belgium, Canada, Germany, Netherlands, Sweden and the USA. And also Finland, where YLE TV1’s Antiikkia, Antiikkia has been running since 1997. That version was such an instant success, within a year comedy series Komediateatteri Arenan (Comedy Theatre Arena) was putting out a parody of the series where worthless tat was brought in for valuation, and the sole item of value met a sticky end.

    47: Arthur

    (Shown 1777 times, 1997-2012)

    Well, after four not-a-surprise-to-see-that-here entries, one that’s very much out of left-field. On seeing this name burble out of the BrokenTV dot matrix after barking ‘print results’ into the attached microphone, I genuinely expected it to belong to a number of distinctly different shows. A series of one-man playlets starring Arthur Lowe? Maybe. A long-running CBS sitcom vehicle for Bea Arthur? Very likely. A long-running Saturday evening dance extravaganza in the Wayne Sleep mould starring Arthur Negus? As good a premise as any. I mean, no way on earth can this solely refer to that American-Canadian cartoon about an anthropomorphic aardvark that doesn’t look like an aardvark.

    Reader, it does solely refer to that American-Canadian cartoon about an anthropomorphic aardvark that doesn’t look like an aardvark.

    Maybe I’m just out of touch, or from the wrong generation, because while I was aware of the animated series Arthur, mainly from adverts for the show on Nickelodeon in the days of pre-digital Sky. In fact, it’s so far off my radar that when it recently started airing on CBeebies, I just assumed it was a rebooted series. It’s only in looking at an episode guide to write this that I learn no, Arthur has been running continuously for 25 years. That’s 253 episodes in total. And, as fate would have it, it has only just wrapped up for good, with the final episode debuting on PBS Kids on 21 February 2022. That’s long enough for the title character to have been voiced by as many as nine different actors, and by the time of that final episode it was considered the longest-running children’s animated show in US TV history.

    In short: yes, I am out of touch.

    The series itself is based on the ‘Arthur’ series of books by Marc Brown, first published in 1976, and (along with the TV adaptation) helps a young audience understand issues they may experience in their formative years, including weightier topics like dyslexia, cancer, diabetes and autism. The action centres on 8-year-old Elwood City resident Arthur Timothy Read as he makes his way through family life as the oldest of three siblings in the Read household, and through school life as part of Mr Ratburn’s third grade class. Given the sheer number of episodes, it’s not a huge surprise there are practically hundreds of supporting characters, but stand-out regulars include Arthur’s younger sisters DW and Kate, plus pals Buster (a white asthmatic rabbit and Arthur’s bestie), Francine (a sports-obsessed monkey schoolgirl) and Alan (a bear schoolboy of Senegalese descent).

    The pilot episode of Arthur, broadcast in 1993, seems to take a decidedly different take on the original books, mind you. In these, the action focuses on what seems to be a much older version of Arthur, he’s suddenly a human being rather than an anthropomorphic aardvark, he’s battling alcoholism and he’s being played by, of all people, Dudley Moore. Oh, hang on. Damn. [SOUND OF FRANTIC DATABASE EDITING]

    Right, that’s five ‘episodes’ chopped off the total, then. That’ll save people having to tweet me. The real first episode of Arthur to air on British screens arrived in 1997, with the decidedly modest RT summary of “Adventures of a young aardvark”. Initially serving as the buffer between pre-school Playdays at 3:35pm and the not-quite-as-preschool comedy drama ‘Julia Jekyll and Harriet Hyde’ at 4:20pm, Arthur went out each Tuesday at 3:55pm from April to June that year, before returning to the same slot between September and December the same year. And that’s the position it held, with the occasional morning appearance during Christmas holidays. That’s until 2005, when it became a key part of BBC2’s early morning CBBC strand. Indeed, that’s where the bulk of Arthur’s appearances have been between then and CBBC’s big move away from BBCs One and Two in 2012 – accounting for 756 episodes of the show’s total. That’s a very impressive run, but will any other children’s programmes from that spell make it to our list? You’ll have to wait and see.

    Personally, I’m just glad I realised in time that Arthur (the film) and Arthur (the series) are two very distinctly different properties.

    46: Film [xx] (The Film Programme)

    (Shown 1873 times, 1971-2018)

    SCREENCAP: Barry Norman hosting Film 86

    You know, as in Film 88, Film 89, Film 90… I mean, I could go on.

    So, who was the first host of Film XX? A few things to note: the programme was originally only shown in the London region, it started in 1971, and if it was the person in the photo above this text it wouldn’t be much of a question.

    Indeed, the inaugural host of what would become the BBC’s flagship film programme, was actually journalist-turned-novelist Jacky Gillott. 

    SCREENCAP: Jacky Gillott hosting Film 71

    Jacky Gillott’s career started in newspaper journalism, but soon moved toward broadcast journalism, becoming ITN’s first female reporter.

    She’d later give up reporting to concentrate on a literary career, with ‘Salvage’, the first of thirty novels to be written by her, published in 1968. Aside from novels, she’d continue to contribute written work to publications such as the Sunday Telegraph, Cosmopolitan and a role as regular book reviewer for The Times. With this in mind, she was chosen to cast her critical eye on cinema for the initial six-episode run of the BBC’s new series, and she would go on to return as host several times throughout the next few years.

    In addition to fronting each episode of Film 71, she was a regular on Radio 4 art programme Kaleidoscope, as well as the station’s Any Questions? and Woman’s Hour. She’d also go on to make several appearances in Call My Bluff and book discussion programme Read All About It. Sadly, Gillott’s storied career was offset by back pain, insomnia and deep depression. She went on to take her own life in September 1980, a few days shy of her 41st birthday. After her passing, her former newspapers The Times and Telegraph printed thoughtful eulogies celebrating her warm, thoughtful and witty personality. A story sadly ending many chapters too soon.

    SCREENCAP: The Film 72 logo

    Following the programme’s initial run, Film 71 returned in January 1972 (craftily retitled ‘Film 72’), with initial episodes hosted by a rotating line-up of hosts, starting with (a theme developing here) journalist-turned-writer (and subsequent long-time Cosmo agony aunt) Irma Kurtz.

    From the sixth episode of the series, a new host took to the Film 72 chair: the one who would be most closely associated with the role for the next 27 years. That episode of the series saw Barry Norman (for it is he) carry out an interview with Peter Bogdanovich, director of the Last Picture Show, and cast his critical eye over Elizabeth Taylor and Michael Caine film Zee and Co. Still only airing in That London, the host’s seat for Film 72 was very much a hot one, with other hosts such as Joan Bakewell and Frederic Raphael also taking a turn, but it was Barry Norman who’d get to host the first edition of the show following an Oscar night, and get to chat with some of the lucky winners.

    Before his stint as the BBC’s one-man Rotten Tomatoes, Norman had embarked on a journalism career that led him from The Kensington News through jobs at The Star in South Africa and Rhodesia’s Herald, then back to the UK for roles as gossip columnist for the Daily Sketch, showbusiness editor for the Daily Mail, and penning columns for The Observer and Guardian.

    SCAN: Newspaper article on Barry Cryer, headlined "The Man Who Warmed Up David Frost", written by Barry Norman.
    Daily Mail, Friday 17 Feb 1967

    Our Barry didn’t just express himself journalistically. In amongst his newspaper endeavours, he found time to write a number of novels, including his third, ‘End Product’, set in a grotesque future dystopia where apartheid spread far beyond South Africa, and where new depths of inhuman cruelty become commonplace. A satire so biting readers should probably check it hasn’t drawn blood, it clearly being inspired by Norman’s spell covering events in South Africa and Rhodesia. More information on the book can be found at Ransom Note. Not a piece to be read while eating lunch, mind.

    PHOTO: The front cover of Barry Norman's novel End Product.
    End Product by Barry Norman, Quartet Books (published June 26, 1975)

    So, having proved himself to be something of the critical polyglot, Barry Norman joined the rotating line-up for the BBC’s new film review series. It was a good fit. Norman’s father Leslie Norman had worked as a film director, with an oeuvre stretching from social drama (1961’s ‘Spare the Rod’) to B-movie sci-fi (1956’s ‘X the Unknown’) and several points in between. Barry himself had taken to television with appearances on Late Night Line-Up, and proved to be every bit as pithy in person as in print.

    Not that he’d be restricted to covering cinema once his feet were under the metaphorical Film XX desk (unless in some years they actually had a literal desk, I’ve not checked). Barry Norman would go on to present episodes of Omnibus, several one-off documentary series for the BBC and ITV, and along with Elton Welsby, serve as main anchor for Channel 4’s coverage of the 1988 Summer Olympic Games.

    SCREENCAP: Barry Norman hosting C4's Olympic coverage on a very TVam-ish sofa.
    I know that’s a sentence that seems surprising now, but yes, really.

    Aside from TV work, Norman could also be heard regularly on Radio 4, presenting Today, being the original chairman of The News Quiz, hosting travel series Going Places and even fronting early 1980s home computer series The Chip Shop. But, Film XX would be the programme most closely-associated with him. He would go on to host the series until 1998, when the big bucks of BSkyB finally coaxed him away from the BBC.

    As a result, from Film ’99 onwards, Jonathan Ross held the presenting baton. Having previously helmed a number of shows on cult cinema for Channel 4 (including The Incredibly Strange Film Show, Jonathan Ross Presents for One Week Only and Mondo Rosso), having mainstream TV presenter Ross take up the gig was much more sensible than it may initially have seemed. He’d go on to hold the role until 2010.

    SCAN: Photo of Jonathan Ross behind a director's chair

    From 2010 onwards, the hosting gig passed to Claudia Winkleman, who had hosted Sky’s live coverage of the Academy Awards for the previous few years. Flanked by film journalist Danny Leigh, Winkleman’s tenure lasted until 2016, after which hosting duties went back to the Film ’72 standard, with a rotating line-up of hosts.

    A variety of faces would go on to front the programme during that final flourish (such as Zoe Ball, Edith Bowman, Charlie Brooker and Clara Amfo), but by now the annual helping of episodes had been reduced from the doughy dollops of years past, to mere fun-sized episode orders in the early parts of 2017 and 2018. The final episode saw Al Murray hosting alongside critic Ellen E Jones and writer Deborah Frances-White, as Ready Player One, Isle of Dogs, Journeyman were the final films served up for their consideration.

    GRID: Film XX broadcast history

    Phew, another update in the bag. I can’t help but wonder which centennial milestone everyone will be marking by the time we reach the top spot on the list. My guess: the hundredth anniversary of me starting this list. Anyway. See you next time, pop pickers!

    , ,

  • BBC100: The 100 Most-Broadcast BBC Programmes Of All Time (55-51)

    BBC100: The 100 Most-Broadcast BBC Programmes Of All Time (55-51)

    So close to the half-century. And it only took me re-extracting ten years’ worth of data to correct a piddling technicality for one of the entries. But more of that later. On we go!

    55: Animal Park

    (Shown 1639 times, 2000-2021)

    If you want an animal-based programme that seems as unstoppable as a rhino-led restaging of the rollerskating scene from Some Mothers Do ‘Ave ‘Em, then Animal Park is the show for you. Running for seventeen series and a total of 221 episodes, this series following the fortunes of keepers and animals at Longleat Safari Park is a definite stayer. Certainly enough for each episode to have been broadcast an average of 7.44 times.

    Originally broadcast on weekday summer mornings on BBC One, running from Monday to Friday during the Julys of 2000 and 2001, it also found an appreciative audience for afternoon repeats on BBC Two. And so, from 2004’s fourth series onwards, first-run episodes of the series moved to Two’s afternoon schedule, with repeat showings going out in post-Breakfast slots on BBC One.

    The primary phase of Animal Park lasted for a full ten years and nine series before production of new episodes halted in 2009. Not that the programme was particularly cancelled in any way – indeed, the volume of episodes in the BBC’s Tape Vault (sub: check the BBC still has a tape vault) meant it could be stuffed into any wildlife-sized gap in the daytime schedules.

    Indeed, it was popular enough to warrant a pair of spin-off series. Animal Park: Wild in Africa saw focus shifted from Longleat to the endeavours of wildlife conservationists in Namibia, airing on BBC Two in 2005. A couple of years later, that was followed by Animal Park: Wild on the West Coast, where the action shifted to California. And with broadcasts of the series proving to be such a mainstay of the daytime schedule, 2016 saw a tenth series, commissioned to mark the 50th anniversary of Longleat Safari Park, and from there, further new series continued to be produced. As they are to this very day.

    Indeed, such was the appeal of the series that it moved away from mornings and early afternoons, and became a bit of a fixture in the 6.30pm slot on BBC Two during the lockdown spring and summer months of 2020 and 2021.

    54: Coast

    (Shown 1644 times, 2005-2021)

    Coast arrived on our screens in 2005 with a simple premise. You know the wiggly bit that runs around the periphery of the UK? Let’s look at that! Picking the most famous bit of Britain’s coastline as the starting square (the White Cliffs of Dover, as well you know), each new episode covered subsequent stretches of coastline in a clockwise manner. So, Dover to Exmouth, Exmouth to Bristol, Bristol to Cardigan Bay, Cardigan Bay to the hip bone, and so on. Innovative, but a formula that you’d expect to have a limited lifespan. Not least as the circuit of mainland Britain, Northern Ireland and Scotland’s Western Isles was completed by the end of the twelfth episode.

    Luckily though, there’s so much going on within each stretch of coastline that the programme couldn’t hope to have covered it all in twelve hour-long episodes. And so, for the second series, viewers were off on another journey, this time with the route set to ‘shuffle’. Freed from the clockwise route, there was now scope to take in some new seaside scenarios, including within the Republic of Ireland and the Outer Hebrides. And that formula was repeated for subsequent series, picking out a particularly alluring section of the British Isles’ edge bits and see what was going on there.

    By the fourth series, the remit of the series had extended beyond the British Isles, taking in the stretch of France running from Cap Gris-Nez to Mont-Saint-Michel, the far northern waters running from the Inner Hebrides to the Faroe Islands, and from Norway’s Lillesand to Svalbard. With the popularity of the programme showing no sign of slowing, by 2014’s ninth series of the programme, coastlines as far afield as Canada were being explored, but such excursions only lasted a single episode – the main focus was always the coastal regions of the UK.

    The soon changed with the launch of spinoff series Coast Australia. Commissioned by Aussie broadcaster Foxtel in co-operation with the BBC, which looked at, well, duh. That also proved to be a success, initially running on Australia’s History Channel in the Antipodes before appearing on BBC Two, and clocking up three series so far. Similarly, TVNZ would go on to commission Coast New Zealand, which has also run for three series thus far.

    After all of which, it’s safe to say the programme has been A Success, with full repeats reaching an appreciative audience, and truncated repeats being BBC Two’s go to filler programme for any 10- or 15- minute gaps in the schedule, along with the show being on perma-standby in case of any channel breakdowns. Indeed, the series even generated a set of BBC-sponsored walks along locales visited by the series. I’ve not checked, but I’m sure that’s not something you’ll find with, say, Holby City. Despite the last new episodes being produced in 2015, it has been a regular on our screens ever since.

    There were just 75 episodes in total, and yet the series has clocked up an astonishing 1,644 showings on BBCs One and Two. Surely at this point regular viewers will have a familiarity with Britain’s coastline to rival Google Street View.

    Phew. Got through all that without mentioning the main presenter’s Weird Facebook Uncle opinions on vaccines. Oops.

    53: Twenty-Four Hours / 24 Hours

    (Shown 1684 times, 1965-1972)

    “I’m Federal Agent Cliff Michelmore, and today is the longest day of my life.”

    Okay, while it’s tempting to imagine the avuncular Holiday presenter recast as lead of the real-time CTU drama (just me then?), this was in fact the BBC’s late evening news magazine. Much higher of brow than its teatime counterpart – more ‘a report on the Ulster Defence Regiment’, less ‘man says he can jump on eggs’ – it come with a suitably sober roster of anchors. Initially Cliff Michelmore, but subsequently Kenneth Allsop, Michael Barratt, Robert McKenzie and a tyro David Dimbleby.

    Initially starting whenever the schedule had room for it, the success of ITV’s flagship bulletin News at Ten led to 24 Hours going out in a spoiler 9.55pm slot for most of the week (save for Wednesdays, where the space was needed for The Wednesday Play).

    Given its penchant for discussions in front of expert-packed studio audiences, confrontational interviews with key policy makers and reports from the likes of Fyfe Robertson, Robin Day and David Jessel, it’s hardly ripe for a runout on UKTV channels any time soon, and there’s very little out there to watch on demand. The episode ‘Yesterday’s Men’, looking at how Harold Wilson’s shadow cabinet were coping with being in opposition after their 1970 election defeat, did appear on BBC Parliament in 2013, but other than a few clips on the BBC’s website (such as ‘Gerry Fitt on the Widgery Tribunal’), this is for the most part a historical resource set to remain in the BBC vaults.

    There is however one full episode on the BBC website, and it offers what seems to be a perfect summation of the series. Dating from September 1966, a special episode looks at the shock assassination of South African Prime Minister Hendrik Verwoerd, and is so thoroughly archived you even get a glimpse of the preceding BBC-1 ident and continuity announcement. From Blackpool, there’s also a report from the second day of the TUC Congress and an interview with the Minister of Labour. The way each item is previewed to the sound of a strident brass fanfare is especially notable. The main bulk of the programme gives a great sense of how breaking news was covered at the time – lengthy shots of a studio reporter on a crackly phone line to a journalist at the scene of the event, the on-screen anchor taking a phone call from a producer on-air,

    While some very archaic viewpoints are being expressed by participants of the programme, the BBC’s sense of fairness is very much present: Robin Day follows a quoted reference to ‘the coloureds’ by reinterpreting the phrase for less bigoted viewers, and views on the event are sought from various parts of the political spectrum. An instance where an architect of Apartheid is assassinated by a white supremacist’s bullet isn’t the most straightforward of stories, and Twenty-Four Hours does a magnificent job of covering such a breaking international story – it’s worth remembering that at this point, the entire medium of television is only thirty years old.

    52: Holby City

    (Shown 1701 times, 1999-2021)

    We’ve already seen sister show Casualty on the list, so here’s Casualty’s soapier sister programme. Several spaces higher in the list, despite the original having a thirteen year head start and the benefit of not having been cancelled. Also, I’ve never watched a single second of Holby City, so this might not be a very long entry.

    There were even a number of opportunities for Casualty and Holby City to cross over, not least in several episodes specifically titled Casualty@Holby City (which just reminds me of h&p@bbc, if I’m honest). The first of those episodes were in 2004, so it’s hardly as if making programme titles sound like email addresses was fresh and new at the time. They should’ve just gone with ‘Casuolby’ instead. (For the record, there were nine episodes of Casuolby, and I’m not awarding them to either programme in these counts.)

    Back to the plot. Holby City was created by Tony McHale and Mal Young as a spin-off from its more established BBC brethren, making its debut appearance on 12 January 1999, and would go on until 29 March 2022 (though, for the purposes of this list, we’re only counting broadcasts up to 31/12/21). The action follows the medical and ancillary staff working at the fictional Holby City Hospital, which also serves as the host location for Casualty, resulting in occasional crossover potential with that programme plus mostly-forgotten police procedural spin-off HolbyBlue.

    Casuolby, yesterday.

    Holby City began with a core cast of main characters that would – as might be expected given its continuing drama remit – be replaced as needed, clocking up a number of memorable names within that time. Indeed, previous cast members include Patsy Kensit, Jane Asher, Robert Powell, Ade Edmondson and Graeme Garden. Beyond that core cast, a number of the show’s guest appearances are equally notable: Leslie Phillips, Anita Dobson, Peter Bowles, Susannah York, Ron Moody, soap royalty Johnny Briggs, Lionel Jeffries, Eric Sykes, plus Antonio Fargas and David Soul from Starsky and Hutch (sadly not in the same episode).

    It’s perhaps notable that, despite the series being a soap opera (sorry, continuing drama). Holby City dealt purely in hour-long episodes, clocking up over 1000 episodes in its time. Indeed, that stack-em-high approach led to criticism, with Broadcasting Standards Commission director Paul Bolt accusing the BBC of squandering the television licence fee on the programme.

    There’s another notable thing about Holby City too, but possibly only if you’ve tasked yourself with putting together full broadcast histories of a hundred long-running television programmes. And who’d be daft enough to do (etc). A short while after pulling all the data, I noticed a curious thing. Several clearly post-watershed shows were being reported as having early morning repeats. As in, episodes of Twenty-Twelve going out at 7.20am, things like that. It’s not wholly unheard of, of course. One of my favourite pieces of stupid scheduling was when UK Drama (as was) decided to repeat Alan Bleasdale’s GBH on Saturday mornings at 7am. Cut to absolute ribbons, making one wonder if it was worth that time in the edit suite for the sake of surely just a few thousand viewers. But BBC2 doing something similar seemed odd.

    A few quick checks revealed something curious: while most programme listings were completely correct, anything airing between midnight and 6am (between 2010 and 2021, the post-Genome era) had the wrong time listed, showing up as anything from 7am to 9am. And that poses a problem for all those Sign Zone repeats of major programmes, which I am counting because standards. The few times this has come up so far, there has been a simple (if inconvenient) solution. Go through the online listing for each programme broadcast date, and fix the times on my list manually. And then I arrived at Holby City. Which has enjoyed overnight signed repeats 617 times. Sigh.

    So, I’ve re-pulled all the programme data, so that it’s correct. Meaning the table below is correct, even though it’s staggeringly unlikely anyone but me will care. Oh well, at least it’s inflated the word count for the entry of a programme I’ve never ever watched.

    51: Breakfast Time

    (Shown 1727 times, 1983-1989)

    It feels very strange to think that there was once a time when a nation was gripped by the notion of getting up at 6.30am to watch telly. And yet, there was such a time. From its inauguration in 1936 right until the 1980s, television was something that – thanks to a succession of Postmaster Generals – was rationed out. Fine if you’re someone who has a daily schedule that matches the consensus, not so much if you’re a night owl, early riser, new parent or shift worker. But, if television was by law restricted to just fifty hours per week of airtime, it made sense to use those hours where the most potential viewers were.

    Overnight television as standard wouldn’t come to the UK until the late 1980s, where a diet of Prisoner Cell Block H, Married… With Children and Night Network would sate the needs of people who didn’t need to get up early the next day. And preceding that, what would become known as breakfast television arrived on British screens all the way back in 1977, with Yorkshire’s Good Morning Calendar and Tyne Tees’ Good Morning North. Both were only on air for a short trial run, and going by the footage online of Good Morning Calendar, were cheaper than own-brand chips – the budget didn’t even seem to stretch to a pair of scissors for mounting newspaper front pages.

    With the lack of a true morning show, British TV was being left behind by international counterparts. Australia had been enjoying full-time breakfast TV since 1978 (10’s Good Morning Sydney), Canada since 1972 (CBC’s Canada AM) and the US since a surprisingly early 1950 (WPTZ’s Three To Get Ready, an entertainment show starring Ernie Kovacs, no less).

    The first ‘proper’ attempt at breakfast TV came a few years later, with Breakfast Time opening up BBC1 each morning from Monday 17 January 1983. Beating ITV’s TV-am to the punch by a couple of weeks, it seems BT’s launch was expedited with that very goal in mind. And, let me tell you, for a telly-obsessed youngster, it felt like a huge occasion. While I only troubled myself to wake up at 6.25am to catch the start of it on the first morning (having asked my mum to wake me up especially, as I was still very young at the time. Thanks, Mum!), it would go on to become a key part of my pre-school routine. So much so, I probably spent too much time in early-morning lessons trying to draw the programme’s stylised sun logo in the margins of exercise books (see also: the ==2== BBC2 ident, the Granada logo and using three different colour pens held together to do the LWT logo).

    No child would have bothered to attempt the logo for Sixty Minutes, mind. And that’s why it failed.

    Luckily for a nation of early risers, the new breakfast show gravitated much closer to the orbit of Nationwide than Newsnight. A pastel coloured set strewn with sofas, a breezy theme tune and a bejumpered presenting team headed by Frank Bough, Selina Scott and Nick Ross eased Britain into each new morning, with a warming mixture of chat, interviews, horoscopes and advice. Supplementary fixtures on the show included weatherman Francis Wilson, keep fit guru Diana Moran (aka The Green Goddess) and astrologist Russell Grant, each quickly becoming household names, even amongst those who still preferred radio with their cornflakes.

    And yet, trope-laden ITV rivals TV-am would overcome early obstacles to do everything Breakfast Time had been doing but in a much more memorable way (all together now: David Frost, Most Profitable TV Franchise In The World, Strikes, Bingo, Rooftop Eggcups, Rat Joining A Sinking Ship, Rustie Lee, Faith Brown And Rustie Lee, Timmy Mallett, “Ran The Tape Backwards And Drowned The Bugger”). And if you want to doubt that, I challenge you to come up with ten equally memorable aspects of Breakfast Time within a minute. And so, in 1986, Breakfast Time ditched the jumpers and sofas in favour of suits and desks. Bye-bye Nationwide AM, hello Morning Newsnight.

    On Friday 15 September 1989, the jig was well and truly up. The last edition of Breakfast Time went to air, with it being replaced the following Monday by BBC Breakfast News. The suits had truly won. (But also lost: I’m not including BBC Breakfast News in this list because it’s primarily a news show. So, yeah. Take that, John Birt.)

    Oh, how classy. Well done, you. No child is going to be trying to sketch this in the back of their physics exercise book.

    BREAKFAST PRE-HISTORY TIME

    It wasn’t the first time the BBC had opened up early, of course. Occasionally, major events would necessitate the transmitters fizzling into life hours earlier than normal. Here are some of the occasions where BBC Television got out of bed before 7am.

    06:00 Friday 27 May 1955: The General Election

    The BBC’s first big tilt at covering a general election saw the transmitters splutter into life at an unearthly hour for the first time. The 1950 General Election (23 February 1950, five seat Labour majority) had merely seen a modest fifteen-minute bulletin at 8:15pm, albeit with the promise of “maps and animated diagrams”. The following year’s election (25 October 1951, 17 seat Conservative majority) saw BBCtv stay up later than ever before, with live Thursday night coverage continuing until 4am, though the results team were then given six hours’ sleep before coverage resumed at 10am.

    It was the 1955 General Election that saw the Television Service really throw everything at the wall, with coverage beginning on 9.30pm on Election Day and continuing until 4am. After several gallons of strong coffee were fed to the production team, they’d be back on air at 6am, for all the latest results – for eleven solid hours, with an additional caveat that they’ll barge into the 5pm children’s programming if necessary.

    From that point on, General Election coverage would go on to be the main reason for the BBC to ‘wake up’ (or even ‘stay up’) at a scheduled time that early.

    06:30 Wednesday 9 Nov 1960: The New President

    With Nixon taking on JFK for the presidency, BBC-tv were up nice and early (along with ITV) for the latest transatlantic news. Quite the epic morning broadcast it seemed, too. Richard Dimbleby introduced affairs, with Christopher Serpeu reporting from London and Douglas Stuart from New York. Robin Day embarked on the West End, where he chatted to American correspondents, Ludovic Kennedy talked to the man (and presumably woman) in the street, while John Tidmarsh spoke to Americans flying into London Airport.

    Best of all, between election developments David Jacobs presented “music from the current American hit parade”. That’s the kind of multimedia experience we want with our Rice Krispies.

    06:00 Friday 16 October 1964: General Election Results AND The 1964 Tokyo Olympics (BBC-tv)

    Siri, show me an utter headache for a 1960s television backroom staff. Everyone involved must have been sorely wishing more than 376 people had access to BBC-2 at the time, so they could just put one of the programmes on there without interruption.

    06:00 Monday 21 July 1969: Apollo 11 (BBC1)

    Five years on, and for sports and politics haters a much more thrilling reason for the channel to wake up early: MEN ON THE ACTUAL BLOODY MOON. Big news, as all the newspapers reported:

    06:30 Thursday 20 November 1969: Apollo 12 (BBC1)

    Man sets foot on the actual bloody moon for only the second time in history. Big news, as all the newspapers reported:

    The Moon? Again? Done that. Give us a ring when you’re lolloping around on Mars, yeah? (No wonder they stopped bothering a few years later.)

    06:40 Wed 30 January 1974: Open University (BBC2)

    Daily Mirror, Monday 4 Jan 1971

    Now the UK’s most-populated university, but back in 1971 the OU was a brave new venture. The brainchild of Harold Wilson’s Labour Government, it set out to widen access to the highest standards of scholarship in higher education, and the most efficient way to do that was by employing television to deliver lectures.

    Initially going out in any spare off-piste part of the television schedules from 1971, OU programming primarily went out at 11am on weekday morning BBC2. As popularity increased, as possibly did the need to provide a place in the schedules for students juggling a 9-to-5 job alongside studies, early morning TV provided a handy home for Encouraging Regional Development, The Joule-Kelvin Effect and Neural Modelling.

    First arriving in a pre-7am slot in January 1974, the Open University (scary ident and all) was the first regularly-scheduled ‘breakfast’ TV in the UK.

    06:45 Thursday 7 October 1982: Breakfast with Brisbane (BBC1)

    The 1982 Commonwealth Games provided early morning BBC1 viewers with a welcome alternative to the likes of Political Stability in Sweden. While the games started on 30 September, it wasn’t until a week later when sports fans could tune in at 6.45am to see Des Lynam introduce coverage of the 30km Road Walk, Men’s Long Jump, Men’s 5,000m, Women’s Javelin, Women’s 800m and something Genome lists as “10-mile Individual Shooting”, but which I can find no evidence of elsewhere. It’s probably the 10 Metre Individual Shooting, and the Radio Times simply weren’t having any of that metric nonsense.

    Once Breakfast Time was in place, any such sporting events were to be incorporated into the BT brand, with the show appearing as ‘Olympic Breakfast Time’ during the 1984 and 1988 Olympiads. While there’s a case for arguing such spells weren’t ‘proper’ Breakfast Time (for sone thing, they represent the only times ‘Breakfast Time’ was scheduled to be broadcast at weekends), it’s the branding that matters. After all, I’ve counted episodes of Sportsnight Special when they’ve been live primetime football matches rather than roundups, and the same applies here.

    If you’re wondering about those time-of-day outliers:

    The first 6am start was on 10 Jun 1983, and was an Election Special, the 6.15am start on 13 Oct 1986 was to provide coverage of The Queen’s visit to China, and the second 6am start came on 9 Nov 1988, which offered live coverage of the Bush Versus Dukakis Presidential Election.

    Those 9am ‘starts’ came during a spell in November and December 1986, where Breakfast Time was listed as running from 7-8.40am, before Watchdog operated as a standalone show at 8.40am (at least as far as the Radio Times were concerned), before Breakfast Time ‘returned’ at 9am to wrap things up.

    Barely seems worth the bother, but hey.

    Lastly, that 10.50am billing for Breakfast Time was from 8 May 1985, as part of a special episode where “Frank Bough, Selina Scott, Nick Ross and Sue Cook present[ed] a special programme to mark the 40th anniversary of the Victory in Europe”. That ran all the way to 11.15am, but with the 10.30am slot reserved for Play School, meaning there was a fresh listing for Breakfast Time at 10.50am. Best bit must surely have been at 9.05am, with the ‘Breakfast Time Street Party’, not least as it was billed as including “Humphrey Lyttelton and his Band bring[ing] back memories of that day”.

    That’s another one wrapped up. Yes, a few shorter write-ups this time, but shush. We’re at the half-way stage, and my original plan of getting the whole thing wrapped up before the actual centenary itself arrives in… [looks at calendar] oh. Ah. Um.

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  • I Challenged Six AI Image Bots To Generate Images For Newspaper Headlines from The Day Today. Here Are The Results (Part Two)

    I Challenged Six AI Image Bots To Generate Images For Newspaper Headlines from The Day Today. Here Are The Results (Part Two)

    Continuing this occasional series, this time with added Dall-E, which no longer requires people to sit in a waitlist for months before getting access. Hooray! My prediction is that it’s absolutely going to storm it, going by how good the Outpainting feature is. That was able to turn this classic photo:

    Into this:

    Bodes pretty well, I’m sure you’ll agree. Oh, and I’ll use Dall-E instead of Computer Vision, which was quick to generate images, but… well, here’s ‘Russia Elects Cobweb’.

    Bye, Computer Vision. UNLEASH THE NEWSGASM.

    EPISODE TWO: The Big Report

    “Arafat ablaze in kerosene oyster hell” — The Daily Telegraph

    1st Place: Craiyon

    Yep, looks like something from that actual news story, can’t fault their work there.

    2nd place: Hotpot

    A bit like something from a post-apocalyptic film from 1997, but certainly a worthy second place.

    3rd place: Nightcafe

    Partly because I’ve used up the last of my free credits making this, so this is the last chance it gets to appear here.

    “Peter Collins is not a man.” — Today

    1st place: Dall-E

    Not sure if there is a famous rugby league player of that name, but if there is, they certainly ain’t a human man.

    2nd place: HOTPOT

    Not sure what’s going on here, either. But the Eastern-Bloc-Propaganda poster look is a welcome interpretation.

    3rd place: CRAIYON

    Nope, no idea. Not a man, because he’s an effigy stuffed with newspaper, perhaps? It’s certainly a quietly unsettling image.

    “‘Eating turkey at Christmas is like nailing an egg to the cross’ says Bishop.” — The Catholic Herald.

    1st place: DALL-E

    A very strong effort from the newcomer. If that had been mooted as a topical cartoon of the news story in a foreign-language newspaper, I’d easily believe it. Top marks.

    2nd place: HOTPOT

    Another strong one, after I’d used the ‘Comic Book’ setting on Hotpot. A very close run thing between the top two. Would work as cover art for a KMFDM album, too.

    3rd place: DEEP.AI

    A strong showing from the three main contenders for this headline. Well done, all.

    “Russia elects Cobweb.” — The New Zealand Prendergast

    One of the most memorable headlines, and something that we can but wish were true MYNAMESMATTFORDEGOODNIGHT.

    1st place: PIXRAY

    Dall-E cocks up the land here by generating pictures of cobwebs. Possibly overtly political cobwebs with a plan for ousting Putin, but that doesn’t come across in the picture. So, it’s up for grabs and Pixray takes the prize for this image.

    2nd place: HOTPOT

    Other results were only on nodding terms with the remit, and best of those was another Comic Book one from Hotpot.

    3rd place: NIGHTCAFE

    Even less on topic, but a nice piece of art from the Nightcafe crew. And I’ve now got a few more credits now, so I might as well publish the results of them.

    Okay, time for a look at that old League Table.

    HotPot making up a lot of ground on Pixray, but now Dall-E is part of this, it’ll be interesting to see how it fares after everyone else had a head start. It’s just like the new version of Ninja Warrior, basically. But with a news spoof that basically will never grow tired.

    “I see Brant’s nailed it again.”
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