Here - TV Cream

DEREK GRIFFITHS’
HOD OF VIMTO
By way of an introduction
Here is the most inglorious starting point possible for any book. An explanation that what
you are about to read - unless this following clause puts you off completely - is a compilation
of emails sent out by website TV Cream (tvcream.co.uk) between 2001 and 2008.
Thank you for staying with us, at least up to this second paragraph.
The TV Cream Update, which in another pedestrian detail, became known as
Creamup, was a semi-regular potpourri of list-based features about various (usually) defunct,
pop cultural items. This vanity-press book collects, not necessarily the best bits from the 92
issues - we call them ‘progs’ - but some of the articles that can most stand the strain of
being removed from the context of a chatty, over-long ‘e-mag’ and hopefully bear re-reading
a few years on.
As Creamup was the work of many hands, all of whom contributed freely and
sometimes not all that grumpily, this book is being offered on a not-for-profit basis as either
a free PDF download or at the lowest price possible (with no skimmed-off-the-top revenue
for us) as an actual paper tome you can purchase from lulu.com. Search for it by title, it
should pop up.
Man, this introduction is turning into thick work. We did tweet Danny Baker to
see if he’d do something for this bit, but he didn’t reply. And Paul Ross was busy. So let’s end,
instead, with a probably incomplete list of those without whom...
Chris Barbour
Louis Barfe
Steve Berry
David J Bodycombe
Matthew Bullen
Stuart Ian Burns
Robin Carmody
Stuart Clary
Chris Diamond
PJ Edwards
Pete Fenlon
Martin Fenton
Gary Gillatt
Iain Griffiths
Michael Hoskins
Chris Hughes
Ian Jones
Mark Jones
Matthew Jones
Graham Kibble-White
Jack Kibble-White
Alex Loh
James Masterton
Steve McGhee
Robin Morley
Phil Norman
Jon Peake
Nick Peers
Jill Phythian
Jason Priestly
Gareth Randall
Simon Reuben
Rose Ruane
Matthew Rudd
Ken Shinn
Ian Sparham
Steven Stones
Peter Thomas
Daniel Thornton
Ian Tomkinson
Jennifer Turner
Simon Tyers
Darren Whittaker
Steve Williams
TJ Worthington
(Message over 64 KB, truncated)
“A helpful cartoon avian voice by Bernard Cribbins”
The Rabbit Phone Network
A ‘revolutionary’ cordless (never ‘mobile’)
phone system introduced by Hutchison
Telecommunications (geddit?) in the early
‘90s, which relied on the user being in close
proximity to a ‘Rabbit point’ for the phone
to be useable. Died out quickly, but the
stickers (upside-down capital ‘R’ made to
look like a rabbit’s head) can still be spotted
on the doors of shops who have forgotten to
take them down.
Prog 1, 31 May 2001
DID SOMEONE SAY ‘Q
CHARTS’?
To mark the news BT are ditching that
ill-received series of ET-starring
advertisements, we look back on happier
telephonic times with 10 Lost Phone
Experiences...
Dial-a-Disc
Short of the 45p (plus the bus fare into
town, of course) to buy the latest hit
parade hot favourite? No matter, just
phone up this super service to hear a
crackly version of it, for the price of a
phone call! A tad more limited in scope
than Napster, perhaps, but a darn sight
more rewarding.
The satisfying ‘click click whirr’ of
mechanical exchanges
Slow maybe, but you could hear your call
travelling the length and breadth of the
country as you tapped your fingers, allowing you to really appreciate technology in
action.
Dial-a-Bedtime-Story
As above, but hear a celebrity (usually
Johnny Morris) tell a five-minute story
on an infinite loop. The fact that you
were almost certain to phone up in the
middle of the story, thus having to listen
to the end before you got the beginning,
enhanced the experience tenfold.
Trimphone impersonators
You can still get the stylish phones themselves from various specialist outlets, but not
so those middle-aged men and women who
appeared on the likes of Nationwide and
That’s Life! to demonstrate how to imitate
that distinctive ring. It’s a combination of
whistling through your teeth and blowing a
raspberry, should you care to give it a go.
Dialling 01 if you’re outside London
Now the code changes every 10 minutes.
Is nothing sacred? The same goes for being able to answer the phone with a snappy recitation of your number phrased as
an inquiry, eg. “Haslingden 271?”
Prestel
Teletext-resembling ‘viewdata’ internet forerunner developed in the ‘70s by the GPO
which failed to catch on here, despite the
French equivalent being enormously
successful, an anomaly the UKIP have no
doubt taken on board.
Button B
What to press in event of an unanswered
call in those phoneboxes that you now
only see in very exclusive neighbourhoods, or the back gardens of very rich
Americans. Look closely and you may
also spot the dots-and-dashes ‘telephone
wire’ British Telecom logo, a loose
telephone directory on a little shelf, a
smiling police constable, and a whole
street of people with keys to each other’s
houses.
Buzby
The original Telecom mascot, a helpful
yellow cartoon avian voiced by Bernard
Cribbins who had no qualms about plugging a monopolised service at the public’s
expense. Was replaced by, in descending
order of lovableness, Quasimodo, Maureen
Lipman, Bob Hoskins, and that Spielberg
homunculus.
7
The Burst of Creamup
The Custard Stops at Hatfield by Kenny
Everett
Enormously enjoyable account of Ev’s early
life and career, containing reminiscences
of tripping on a golf course with Freddie
Mercury, a Cadbury’s Picnic commercial
doomed to failure by gravity, the titular
musing on the north-south pudding sauce
divide, and, if you come across the hardback edition, a different illustrator for every
chapter.
Karaoke Challenge
The introduction of moneyraking 0898
numbers in the late ‘80s wasn’t entirely
restricted to shabby chatlines at the outset
- this service offered callers the chance to
sing badly into the receiver so that others
may call up, listen, and titter aimlessly. But
then again it was, as the blanket Channel 4
advertising unimpressively claimed, “your
chance to be... famous on the phone!”
Prog 2, 13 June 2001
Watch Out by Jeremy Beadle
Beadle-bum recalls his days spent bagsnatching across Germany (“It’s not something I’m proud of ”), berating the Rusty
Lee-era Game For A Laugh production team
(“You’re killing the fucking golden goose!”)
and creating the “best” comedy ever (“You’ve
Been Framed!”). And - yes - he does describe
himself as a “crazy kinda guy”.
BOOKS AND BOOKMEN
Our very own literary festival, presenting
twenty vintage memoirs from the faces in,
on and behind Cream-era TV and radio. No
Bill Clinton, but perhaps Jimmy Carter will
pop by for a self-help lecture and a peanut.
Is It Me? by Terry Wogan
Reproduced diary entries of the 12-year old
subbuteo-playing Wogan are a highlight,
side-swipes at the Beeb are not. The word
“eejit” appears 352 times. [Terry’s thriceweekly soirees on Shepherd’s Bush Green
were once the subject of an entire volume,
titled with some nerve,Wogan On Wogan
(Robson Books, 1987). Inside, Lord Terence wanders through some BBC archive
tapes especially laid on for the afternoon,
recollecting his favourite (and worst)
guests that have shown up for his weekday
conversations. It’s hugely self-indulgent, of
course, with a grisly picture of Tel on the
front sporting a red tie over a blue shirt
with white collar, but it’s a fine reminder
of BBC1’s schedule “staple”, and helps to
remedy the fact Wogan himself nowadays
only seems to remember George Best and
Anne Bancroft. Thrill to the man’s bruising
encounter with Robin Day (Sir Rob: “You
have a vote in this country?” Tel: “Certainly
- you’ve been very kind to aliens over the
years...”) then thumb hastily through the
endless parade of Dallas and Dynasty bods
that were indeed on every other week. ]
Himoff! by Richard Whiteley
The Mayor Of Wetwang’s amiable autobiog,
written with genuine wit. Of course, you’re
going to flick to the Countdown section
immediately wherein you’ll find the reason
why the clock is equipped for 60 seconds.
Alongside this, read about Richard’s brush
with redundancy (“I saw the memo ‘New
Presenter’ on the producer’s desk and
thought, ‘Oh, poor Carol’”), Countdown’s
beano to France (“Monsieur Twatly”), Richard’s homemade ITN car-sticker ... and that
ferret. Best anecdote: Richard finds himself
guest-speaker at a WI coffee-morning. After
hearing the women speak of the charity
they support he is so moved he waives his
fee. With great excitement the organisers
rally the women together: “Mr Whiteley has
kindly declined his fee. This means we can
afford David Jacobs after all!”
Cue Frank! by Frank Bough
The best autobiography ever? Boffy takes us
behind the scenes of Nationwide and Grandstand and then appears to have a nervous
8
“The channel’s second-best chief executive reveals all”
breakdown at the end - ‘Is it too late? What
should we all do next?’ Prose style suggests that he dictated it to somebody who
couldn’t be bothered transcribing it into
full sentences (‘1968. Grandstand. Saturday
afternoon. Five hours a week.’).
(‘Has Francis Wilson got nits? Is that why he
is always scratching his head?’) and breakfast recipes from the team - Debbie Rix’s
Special Brunch is highly recommended.
The Jim’ll Fix It Story by Roger Ordish
The bloke who had his name at the end of
every single episode (and was also producing A Bit of Fry and Laurie at the same time)
spends a hundred pages telling us all about
the programe. He looks behind the scenes
(“Jimmy insists on cucumber sandwiches
and a pot of tea on a silver salver”), picks
his favourite fix-its (“Dear Jim, please can
you fix it for us to make faces behind the
windows at Pebble Mill”) and provides the
answers to a series of FAQs (“Do you give
your postage stamps to charity?” “No.”).
In and Out of the Box by Robert Dougall
The life story of a man who worked at the
BBC so long he doesn’t even start on television until page 200, and colour TV until
page 300. Best anecdote is from his radio
career, when the shift pattern meant he had
to do bulletins at 12am and 7am, and they
had a bed in the office for him to sleep in
between them.
Shaken But Not Stirred by Keith Chegwin
Mostly concerned with Cheggers’ alcoholism, but most of his TV work’s touched on,
and it’s an illuminating insight into the real
dregs of showbiz. The section where he’s
hired to do a weekend in a holiday camp in
Torquay at the height of his drink problem,
and was advised to leave half way through
for reasons he was unable to remember,
makes pretty dismal reading.
Storm Over Four by Jeremy Isaacs
The channel’s second-best chief executive reveals all in this book; there’s lots of interesting sections on notable cases of censorship
and politicial problems, but alas Minipops
isn’t included at all. He does refer to The Cut
Price Comedy Show and The Gong Show as
‘bloody awful’, mind.
My Tune by Simon Bates
Written in the same ‘I don’t know what I’m
doing, loves, I just fell into this sort of thing’
style that made much of his radio work
unlistenable, although there is a nice picture
of him with a perm.
Crying With Laughter by Bob Monkhouse
Read how the orange-hued one went to a
hypnotist to give up smoking, only to be
mesmerised into a partnership with the
practioner and investment in a night-club.
Bob says: Genuinely one of the greatest ever
biogs.
Frank Bough’s Breakfast Book by Frank
Bough
Another marvellous tome from the bejumpered one, this time telling us about how
Breakfast Time began, how he met Selina,
and how they were responsible for altering
the presentation style of every programme
on television (“I knew we were on to something when The Big Match started being
presented from a sofa!”). There’s also a load
of ‘will this do?’-ery to fill up the rest of the
book, including extracts from his postbag
A Liar’s Autobiography by Graham Chapman
By turns hilarious, frustrating and very
moving, this is possibly the greatest solo
achievement of any of the five ‘proper’ exPythons. A glorious mish-mash of alcoholism, mountaineering, Keith Moon, wanton
confrontation of John Cleese’s middle class
prejudice, on-page bickering with coauthors and unrestrained pauntliness.
9
The Burst of Creamup
Polly Wants a Zebra by Michael Aspel
A volume in the best tradition of old-school
showbiz autobiography, where everyone
(dear, dear Richard Baker, etc.) is a darling
and amusing things happen but the author’s
torrid sex life is left completely unmentioned. He wore a tie knitted by a BBC
colleague when he went to lunch with the
Queen, you know.
A late ‘70s musical satire show, taking a sideways look at the week’s events, but without
any of those serious or troubling stories.
Hence, while strikes, power cuts and Cold
War tension raged, Dicky did a wry song
about the Tyrannosaurus Rex skeleton in
the British Museum being moved to another
building. “I’m gonna miss you, T-Rex...”
Towels
More satire, this time a lengthy musical
romp around that old chestnut - why, apparently, do holidaying Germans always
colonise the hotel sunbeds in the small
hours by putting their towels on them? Possibly the inspiration for David Baddiel’s Why
Does Everyone Leave The Top Of The Toothpaste Off? (by Richard Sillnotdead), Dicky
concluded with the conspiracy theory that
it was the Germans and not the USA who
were first to the moon: “Deutches towels
uber alles/Germany got there first!” Indeed.
Under No Illusion by Paul Daniels
This book is a welcome right to reply for
old fashioned entertainer Paul Daniels. At
last keen purveyors of right will see the
record put straight as Paul reveals the truth
behind his “sacking” from the Beeb, and his
oft misquoted comment about the Labour
Party. No one will leave this book with the
impression that Daniels is a bitter old has
been. But that’s not all that’s on offer here!
Paul regales us with his best put down lines,
cleverest schemes and offers up many of his
common sense ideas to improve this great
country of ours. And of course - for the dads
- there’s plenty of Debbie!
How to tie a tie
At the climax of his almost paralytically
quaint ‘things to do on rainy days’ mid-’80s
kids’ show Stilgoe’s On, Richard demonstrated, at length and in front of the most
bored- looking youth audience ever seen
on TV until Andi Peters’ L&K goodbye
address, how to lace up said silk garment.
Always fascinated by the mundanities of life,
Stilgoe had previously fronted a Nationwide
campaign helpfully informing the adult
populace how to locate their electricity
meters in a power cut.
A Statutory Right of Entry To Your Home
A Nationwide ditty sparked by the consumer issue of how many governmentrelated agency officials you were obliged
by law to allow into your house. Stilgoe
performed all the parts himself (“I am a
po-lice-maaaaan...”) with the aid of multiple
takes and good old ‘70s chromakey. For the
record, they were the police, gas, water and
electricity boards, and HM customs and
Prog 2, 13 June 2001
10 GREAT THINGS ABOUT
RICHARD STILGOE
Last week, while you were out voting (or
watching Big Brother on E4), This Is Your Life
‘booked’ comedy singer-songwriter Richard
Stilgoe, making much of his musical work
with Andrew Lloyd-Webber, Peter Skellern,
etc. You didn’t miss much, to be honest,
but here are 10 better reasons to praise the
word-muddling tunesmith...
The Richard Stilgoe Letters
A book in which Stilgy constructs anagrams
of his own name (Giscard O’Hitler, Archie
Slogdirt) and writes whimsical stories, songs
and poems about them and their adventures.
Tune in to Countdown on a weekday evening and odds are he’ll be doing similar stuff
just before and after the ads.
…And Now The Good News
10
“A Netto Gail Porteralike”
excise (“Where have you stashed the stolen
jewels?/Do you take us all for fools?”). A
technical tour de force.
being flung out of a yellow convertible car
into a hospital bed. Surreal yet reassuring.
FirstPlus
Life’s not easy with all those bills, says millionaire Carol Vorderman, as she takes one
from the top row, two from the middle and
three from the bottom and calculates your
repayments.
I’ll Have to Stop You There
Another Nationwide number from the run
up to the ‘79 general election, making light
fun of the catchphrase used by The ‘Wide’s
interviewers to silence an overunning
politician in mid-flow. Presentational gimmick - Stilgoe sang each verse from behind
piano about a different regional anchor, who
chipped in via TV link with the titular sentence at the end of their stanza. “But Stuart
Hall in Manchester, he gets the whole thing
wrong. He just says...” “Shut up minister,
you’ve gone on far too long!” You didn’t get
that with Paxman on Thursday. Well, you
did, but not set to music.
Claims Direct
The hapless Carl Scaife follows in the footsteps of Carrie Gillis and Declan Swann as
the face of the relentless compo monolith.
But whither Will Hanrahan?
Ocean Finance
Frazer Hines is trapped in a mysterious hotel
where you can’t enter your room if you’ve
got a bad financial record. Look, it says so
on the door! Debate rages about how it fits
into the Second Doctor’s mythos.
Prog 5, 26 July 2001
“OH, BUT I CAN’T GET TO
THE BANK!”
Direct Car Finance
Can’t afford a mo’ahh? Never mind, Jim
Davidson’s on your side, and he never backs
a loser. Plus there’s the chance of a faahsand
paahnd in fanned-out tenners, and best of
all, no sign of Jess Conrad.
Top 10 daytime satellite “financial services”
adverts
Cornhill Direct
Christopher Timothy isn’t getting any
younger. And he isn’t getting any better
parts, either. Still, premiums cost less than
a Sunday lunch. Meanwhile, Sue Robbie
reckons it would be nice to see tomorrow’s
headlines. Especially if they read “ITV axe
Connections”. She’s just filmed a new one
of these spots in Birmingham, you’ll be
delighted to know. Keep ‘em peeled!
Direct Line
That bloke who used to be in Emmerdale
flings away tenners to a grateful public,
while Henry Naylor gets attacked by a giant
animated light bulb. But what we want to
know is, when did that red Direct Line 4x4
telephone thing change its jingle?
Yes Car Credit
A Netto Gail Porteralike in a green sleeveless
quilted rally jacket fixes it for an entire street
to trade in their rusting Talbot Sunbeams for
a gleaming new(ish) Ford Focus. Result!
The Loan Company
Bad credit rating? Self-employed? Banking
on a second series of Me, You and Him? Let
the reassuring Staffordshire tones of Nick
Hancock guide you through the financial
maze - no interviews, no fees and Rory
McGrath will not call.
The Accident Group
A badly-animated red T trips over a pavement, finds himself crushed by a crate before
11
The Burst of Creamup
GE Life
It’s the triumphant return of Fresh Fields!
Julia McKenzie and Anton Rodgers natter
off screen about cashing in their mortgage - presumably so they can go and live
in France with an accordion-led version of
their theme tune.
drawing the pics to his stories of caveboy
Littlenose live in the studio as he told them.
The stories that Quentin Blake used to draw
“live” were called The Adventures of Lester.
7) Comedy medical musical quartet Instant
Sunshine also jigged with the format by telling their own whimsical stories (The Don’t
Know Weather Forecaster, The Search For
The Source of the M1) on location in an adhoc semi-dramatised fashion. With singing,
of course.
Prog 7, 6 September 2001
UNTIL TOMORROW...
B’BYE!
10 Jackanory factlets
8) What links Alan Bennett, Judi Dench,
James Bolam and Mai “Scandinavian Angst”
Zetterling? They’ve all read books from the
Moomins series by Tove Janssen. James
Bolam!?
1) The first ever Jackanory was Lee Montague reading a selection of fairytales (starting with “Cap of Rushes”) in 1965.
2) The last one made in 1996 was Alan
Bennett’s rendition of The House At Pooh
Corner.
9) One of the most left-field combinations
ever was George “Jazz goes on and on” Melly
reading Tales From Beatrix Potter in 1967.
3) The king of Jackanory, at least in quantity
terms, is Bernard Cribbins, with over 17 different books to his name. His nearest rival is
the legendary Kenneth Williams on 12.
10) A really good ‘un: Spike Milligan with
Help! I Am A Prisoner In A Toothpaste Factory. A really bad ‘un : Martin Jarvis with
The Bionic Moles, which was actually written by a viewer, the winner of one of their
regular story competitions. But the title says
it all, really.
4) Being a Doctor Who was a good way to
get on: Patrick Troughton, Jon Pertwee, Tom
Baker, Peter Davison, Sylvester McCoy and
Paul McGann have all appeared.
5) Apart from the venerable Dame Judis
and Maggies we all recall, future Hollywood
names that appeared include Jeremy “Play
Away” Irons (various stories by Paul Gallico,
1982), Patrick Stewart (Annerton Pit, 1977),
Ian McKellen (The Moon in the Cloud, 1978)
and Helena Bonham Carter (The Way To
Sattin Shore, 1991). For some reason, Alan
Rickman never made it, which seems like
a grievous omission. Better change agents,
Alan...
Prog 21, 28 March 2002
6) Scots artist John Grant spiced up the
unchanging narrator’s face dissolving in and
out of watercolour illustrations’ format by
The furthest we’ve ever been
This brilliant seven o’clock feature (all the
‘experimental’ stuff was on at seven o’clock,
JUST HAD THE NOD FROM
PLANET 24
Good Friday marks the end of The Big Breakfast, which these days counts as legalised
euthanasia, but at the risk of bucking the
temporal flow of TV Cream and attracting
widespread and hostile derision, we’re prepared to stand up and say, “The Big Breakfast
actually used to be quite good, y’know.” And
so we present, in no particular order, our 20
favourite BB moments...
12
“That was funnier than you’ll ever know”
because, as Chris never tired of reminding us, hardly anybody was watching then)
saw all the camera and microphone leads
extended as far as possible just so they could
see how far away they could get from the
house. They had another camera on the roof
to demonstrate exactly how far away from
the house they were. The best item they ever
did, unfortunately it lasted just one edition but we’ll never forget it.
with chocolate icing. “No, wait!”
Christmas khazis
Zig and Zag marked the festive season in
1993 by inviting viewers to send in toilet
seats that they’d decorated in a Christmassy fashion. This is most memorable
for being shown when Bob Monkhouse
later attempted to put his stint presenting
the programme into Room 101, and Nick
Hancock remarked, “I suppose it must be
hard to keep control of an item when Zig’s
putting his head through a toilet seat and
going ‘Grooargh!’”
Russell Grant’s All Star Show
In the summer of 1994, Chris started
becoming obsessed with ITV’s Tuesday
afternoon astrology-based chat show. Said
show was broadcast live, and was riddled
with fluffs by Grant, and after a few weeks
of references to it in the paper review, Chris
went on to present a 10-minute item about
the programme, choosing his favourite
moments, linking into clips to illustrate his
points, and later chatting to Russell on the
phone and asking him questions about it.
The massive breakfast
In the very early days of the programme,
a running joke involved Chris lying about
how many viewers the programme had.
This reached a peak when Chris produced
a mock-up copy of Broadcast that “scientifically proved” that it was getting 19
million viewers and was the most popular
programme on television. And at least one
person here believed him.
That’s Strife!
The only Johnny and Denise item in this
chart is the That’s Life! parody they did in
1998. As you may expect, the feature simply
consisted of rude-shaped vegetables and
misprints, but, best of all, featured Denise as
Esther, Johnny as Cyril Fletcher and a load
of mannequins as Esther’s nancies. And at
the end, cartoons of the crew scrolled along
the screen, which absolutely nobody would
have got.
The mini motorbikes
On Burns Night 1993 (we presume, as all the
crew were wearing kilts), Chris and Lenny
Henry had a race down the towpath on
mini-motorbikes, the latest craze from Japan
(“So, a design for a small race, by a small
race”). Lenny managed to career arse over
tit off his bike within about 10 seconds, and
later appeared showing off his broken arm,
while Chris kept a steady pace, won the race,
shouted, “I can’t stop!” and disappeared off
into the distance.
The chocolate cake
Chris, Zig and Zag instructed viewers on
how to make a chocolate cake. The item
began with Zag showing off his “self-peeling
banana”, by holding it upright and repeatedly jerking his hand up and down, to which
Chris remarked: “That was funnier than
you’ll ever know.” Chris then decided to
fling the top layer of the cake down on the
bottom layer with rather too much force,
leading to the bathroom getting covered
The morning they had the power cut
On St Patrick’s Day 1993 the show fell off the
air for 15 minutes because of a power cut,
and when they returned to the house, Chris
was seen sticking a plug back into the wall
and blaming it on leprechauns. Two years
later, another power cut threw the house off
the air for 45 minutes, and Peter Smith had
13
The Burst of Creamup
One Lump or Two?
Aquatic-themed inflatable palaver of a
competition launched in summer 1993. The
rules took forever to explain, and involved
plenty of guests forced to run about in an
undignified way, which was always a good
thing, while every Friday members of the
production team were up for a soaking.
Absolute highlight was the very first day,
when Chris was so relieved to have got it
out the way that he dived into the speciallyconstructed swimming pool prop fully
clothed, ruining assorted sound equipment,
and which Paula Yates missed because, “I
was sitting on the toilet.”
to front virtually everything himself, introducing cartoons and, at one point, listening
to Gaby screaming the running order down
his earpiece.
Roll over Beethoven
Danny Baker’s short-lived but ace stint
presenting the show saw this regular feature
where viewers were invited to suggest what
items they’d like to see crushed under the
wheels of a steamroller. Said items were then
crushed under the wheels of a steamroller.
This one could have run and run!
Whose shoes?
Write-in competition where each Thursday
a celebrity’s footwear would be paraded
on screen, and Dominic Dazzle-Drawers
from the crew would read out three “shoe
clues”, before the subject would appear in
the house the following week to pick the
winner. One week, the first “shoe clue” was
“This ‘hairy cornflake’ is usually known by
his initials alone”, and a clearly uninformed
Chris could be heard shouting, “Oh no!”
before announcing that he was taking next
Thursday off.
Down Your Doorstep with Mark Lamaar
In the few short months he fronted the
staple crack-of-dawn OB runaround Mark
packed in more cracking items and stunts
than any number of lame successors (and
we’re looking very hard at you Richard Orford). No man stood on more freezing cold
motorway verges in the pitch black than he.
He was fed up from day one, and made sure
everyone knew about it, but he took a camel
onto a housing estate in Glasgow, tried to
break into Fiona Armstrong’s house just
after she’d quit GMTV, and threatened witless commuters just outside our hometown.
Hooray!
Guitar Workshop
For a few brilliant weeks all Chris, Zig and
Zag did in their slot was piss around with an
acoustic guitar. The choice of material was
totally dependant on what chord Chris had
mastered the night before, and as such the
performances were liable to break down in
spectacular fashion, hastened by a prolonged bout of corpsing usually started by
Chris himself. Choice repertoire included a
unique version of Mull Of Kintyre played at
twice the normal speed, plus songs blatantly
knocked up five minutes beforehand including The Girl With The Flute (which Zag
suddenly decided to extend by another verse
to Chris’ visible bemusement) and Only
Five Days Left, a poignant tribute to it being
February 23rd.
Invention Corner
“I don’t know about you but...” Chris wandering round the house in a ginger wig and
white coat testing out absurd and pointless
gadgets designed and built by concerned
viewers desperate for a patent and a fortune
in cash. A suitably needling jingle (“Invention Cor-ner, Invention Cor-ner”) was later
remixed to accompany another “invention”,
a dolphin-shaped purse for wearing in
nightclubs that neither looked like a dolphin
or worked as a purse. “In-in, in-in-in-in,
Invention Cor-ner...”
14
“If you’re a monk, get your junk!”
Chicken run
Despite being officially blessed by a visiting
vicar while Chris sang a jazz version of
All Things Bright And Beautiful, two of the
show’s pet chickens went on to be senselessly murdered by a visiting fox. Celebrity
tributes poured in and an inquest was held
to identify the killer. Nonetheless Chris got
increasingly agitated at the way the poultry
would wander in and out the house totally
upstaging him and Gaby, so when a runaway
bird turned up, which the team dubbed
Lucky, Chris organised a high profile phonein to see whether they should “Keep It, Or
Eat It?” Perhaps predictably viewers opted
for the former, much to Chris’ chagrin.
of one morning’s show up in a stunt helicopter. Fortunately there was someone inside
the chopper to film proceedings; unfortunately this job fell to Rob, aka Psychocam, a
nickname whose full irony was about to be
confirmed as Rob had enjoyed a full breakfast earlier on, and was not in possession
of a stout pair of air legs. As the helicopter
went into a particularly steep nosedive, the
aforementioned breakfast made a timely
re-appearance in a cacophonous retching
that went on for about 15 seconds. The fact
we didn’t actually see any of this vomit, only
heard the sound of its expulsion, just made
it all the more spectacular.
Beasley
Meaningless noun that, during Dan’s apprenticeship on “the best TV job I’ve ever
had”, he laboured to convince Zig and Zag
was in fact a missing 13th calendar month.
In between encouraging the pair of aliens
to join him by the roadside to watch out for
a strange vehicle that’d been spotted with
the words ‘Zig and Zag’ on - “Who knows,
whoever’s inside, we can wave hello to them
- hello Zig, hello Zag, hello RuPaul...”
The first birthday
Back when The Big Breakfast had reason
to celebrate becoming another year older.
Take That in a giant wooden gift box, Mark
Lamarr back Down Your Doorstep organising a street party in Rochdale, Bob Geldof
shouting at the gallery, “It’s time up when
I say it’s time up!”, Michael Grade doing
Superhints, everyone joining in singing One
Ton Of Fun. The show at the height of its
brilliance.
A load of rubbish
“If you’re a monk, get your junk!” Some of
the best moments with Zig and Zag involved
garbage - whether in Zig’s patented “make
and do” slot, where he rummaged through
his rubbish and proudly converted some
melon rind, a bag of frozen peas, onion tops
and a toilet roll into an astrological mobile;
or in the celebrated riddle-me-ree quiz,
What’s At The End Of The Bin, Jim? when
Zig challenged Chris and Zag to identify a
mystery object sequestered at the base of
his waste basket. Sadly this latter item was
rather unceremoniously revived for a lame
viewer phone-in feature during the Big
Breakfast’s final month, and was unfunny,
embarrassing and generally crap. Pretty
much like everything on the show since
1994 really. But then you knew that.
The fossilised turds
When a seminal “wacky” patches-onelbows expert was invited on to exhibit his
collection of prehistoric excreta, there was
obviously no way of knowing whether said
deposits were the real thing or merely cheap
pre-fabricated replicas. So it was handy that
Chris felt moved enough to grab one of the
antique turds from whence it was nestling
under a shiny serving dish and gamely
attempt to bite into it. Both Chris and the
archaeologist’s reaction confirmed that this
was indeed a reassuringly solid, er, solid.
The helicopter hurl
Anything that got Chris out of the house the
better it seemed, certainly towards the end
of his stint, hence his keenness to spend part
15
The Burst of Creamup
27th April 1985
COVER: Anxious Neil Kinnock anticipates “Lovely lovely lovely” byline
“Young, Gifted & Left,” screams the text,
“But What Can He Do For You?” Hewitt
interviews the pretender to Maggie’s throne,
donning a tie for the occasion. Philip Bailey
is single of the week, Absolute Beginners is
given a massive plug, and then-editor Neil
Spencer remembers: “People used to buy
and still always buy the NME for the news,
the charts, and the gig guide. That was all.
But the writers could never get that into
their thick skulls.”
Prog 23, 29 April 2002
WHERE IS BEATLES
BAND?
So enquired one Samuel K. Amphong, aka
D. Baker Esq, from within the letters page of
the New Musical Express some point in the
late 1970s. It was obvious even then that a
still-more dazzling future lay ahead for such
verve, wit and hully-gully. Sure enough,
though shoe-gazing, fraggle, Camden Lurch,
shambling, positive punk, C86, cowpunk,
vegcore and New Cool Rock all came and
mercifully went, said shameless in-joke was
triumphantly being hustled out decades
later.
10th January 1987
COVER: The Style Council pose artlessly
in shoes and no socks
From the Stuart Cosgrove era - coincidentally also when mysterious “Ian Pye Must
Die” slogans were being scrawled on the new
editor’s office door. Tributes to Russian filmmaker Tarkovksy, an interview with Bernie
Grant, a thinkpiece on right-wing media
and an earnest deconstruction of A Certain
Ratio are all present. Humour is not.
So the wheel turns yet again, and “rock’s
biggest-selling weekly” is about to notch up
its first half-century. The NME’s never as
good as it used to be, of course, and there’s
not much to celebrate about its recent
parade of micro-relaunches, mergers and
mirthless copy. Instead we’re proposing a
salute to the semiotics and smoking jackets
of the ‘80s and early ‘90s, when we grew up
with the paper and when we had our letters
ripped the piss out of by obscure staffers
from Northampton and Wigan. Besides,
this week is the proper 50th birthday, not
last fortnight, dammit. A shiny, fresh-faced
top 10 stand-out issues thus follows - FACT.
Steve Sutherland - who he?
15th October 1988
COVER: Imperial era PSBs announce:
“We’re The Smiths you can dance to.”
Quantick-inspired headline heralds NME’s
new love-in with the Pets. Ex-Sounds ed
Alan Lewis helps James Brown and Danny
Kelly open window to let fresh air into
Kings Reach Tower. Baby chucked out with
the Barthes water. Van Morrison Interview
Shocker.
23rd August 1984
COVER: Scary close-up of Robert Elms’
missus
The first issue we ever read, bought for
us when we were off school with earache.
Beneath the huge picture of Sade was a trail
for Paolo “Prop. Of P. Weller” Hewitt jawing
earnestly with Working Week. Tony Parsons
was also invited back to do the singles
review, but had just broken up with Julie
Burchill, and so ended up moaning about
how much of a bitch she was. The stage
was set.
11th November 1989
COVER: Desperate Peter Hook flogs
Revenge; public winces
The occasion of Andrew Collins & Stuart
Maconie’s six-day voyage round Britain
roadtesting their employer’s titular Gig
Guide. “The Kate Adie and Judith Chalmers
of Rock” sleep in a hired Fiesta 950 Popular
from Balham between checking out Bolt
16
“Why don’t you just change your name to the New Morrissey Express?”
Thrower, Les Thugs and Clive Allen & His
Music; and clocking important nature spots
(“The Flimby to Whitehaven road is a must
for petro-chemical industry enthusiasts”).
Also the first outing for the ever-reliable
NME “ideas session” comedy-posing-withissue-of-Sounds photo.
14 scrawled captions totalling 95 words. A
Collins quoth: “People who didn’t think he
was relevant anymore must have felt that
there was a mafia, a Morrissey mafia, running the paper.”
9th May 1992: Fortieth Birthday Edition
COVER: Obscure Manchester singer poses
with vintage music magazine
A lesson in how to do a proper anniversary
number. The profusion of print - masterminded, let the record state, by Messrs
Collins and Maconie pretty much singlehandedly - opened with a “not as important
as what we do next week” missive from Danny Kelly. Lavish official “history” ensued,
replete with another return for “NME ideas
session” pic. Top interviews with proper veterans - Baker and Parsons - were followed
by, well, loads and loads of ace lists: the 40
defining records, films, recording whatchamacallits and TV shows of the previous four
decades, plus the classic and worst covers
(disgracefully ripped off for the 50th birthday issue). Best of all was the paper’s own
list of Top TV Bastards, including Chris Tarrant (“He laughs and laughs and laughs. We
don’t”); All Nescafé Actors; Jeremy Beadle;
and, of course, Fred Dinenage (“How? Why,
more like.”)
19th May 1990
COVER: John Barnes and Barney Sumner
pissing about
NME comes out as football-conscious
constituency with Maconie hanging with
New Order, Tony Wilson, Barnes et al on
the shoot of World in Motion. Also vintage
“humour” era edition: Thrills pages boast
“The Changing Face Of Miles Hunt” and
“Ask Birdland”, while “Those Rejected World
Cup Songs In Full” (‘Spank Me Mr Shankly’)
confirms Morrissey-love in at full height.
And the following week Vic Reeves was on
the cover in a “Comedy Special”. Yikes.
20th July 1991
COVER: Crappy Polaroid of Blur falling
over on stage
The strike-busting edition. Lewis and Kelly
were trapped inside Kings Reach while the
rest of the staff picketed outside in protest at
IPC’s corporate crimes. The fun and games
- “A farce” (Maconie) “A toytown strike, we
were sort of sitting there on our own feeling
like the sort of Tolpuddle martyrs of music,
and it was really kind of pathetic” (Barbara Ellen) - lasted a week because James
Brown rang up weeping in his bath cos he
couldn’t go on a free junket to America. So
we believe. Issue itself is notable for visible
Pritt-stick marks on the straplines.
22nd August 1992
COVER: Moz confirms UN Ambassador
role is non-starter
Gladioli at dawn: the NME rounds on
Morrissey for waving the Union Jack at
Madstock. The sound of a thousand Moz
acolytes’ teeth gnashing distracts attention
from subsequent “coup” at Kings Reach
Tower Central with Kelly replaced with
Melody Maker bald bastard Steve Sutherland. Collins, Maconie, Brown, Lamacq walk
out; the smoking jackets are hung up for
good. A nation shrugs. The NME: remember
it this way, folks.
19th October 1991
COVER: Classic reverse pose “Morrissey’s
Back” pun palaver
“Why don’t you just change your name
to the New Morrissey Express?” Moz wins
the front cover promoting a feature that
consisted of 11 black and white photos and
17
The Burst of Creamup
Prog 23, 29 April 2002
Prog 24, 13 May 2002
100 GREAT TV MOMENTS
“IT GETS A LITTLE HAIRY
UP AT THE OLD
SCOREBOARD”
Creamup’s new cut-out-and-keep assembly
of definitive telly turning-points
Nul points! And all the songs are called Ding
Ding Dong! And Norway are rubbish, aren’t
they? Ho ho. It’s almost time for Eurovision
once more, as the pan-continental search
for Europe’s songatheyear comes round
again. We like to eschew the hateful “Hey,
it’s so bad it’s good” approach to the whole
shebang, and for a start, we’d like to point
out that they never say “nul points”, because
the points system goes down from 12 to
one. And people are still somehow wringing comedic mileage out of the mere words
Katie Boyle! Grrr.
#1: December 1983 - Desmond Wilcox is
fired from Sixty Minutes
With its half-arsed structure (meriting a
lengthy explanation in Radio Times) and
crappy logo, Sixty Minutes was bound to
fail thanks above all to two factors - it did
the same as its predecessor Nationwide but
without any humour, charm or interest;
and had Desmond Wilcox as “shifty” titular
anchorman. Co-ordinating between the
regional opt-outs was helpfully summed up
by Mr Esther Rantzen as “noisily shunting
milk trains at Crewe in the middle of the
night,” while sharing a studio with Breakfast
Time didn’t exactly give the show a distinctive character. Talking of which, Sarah
Kennedy was poached from Game For A
Laugh to do stuff about cats, there was no
charisma between other “team” members
Sally Magnusson, Nick Ross and Beverley
Anderson, and ratings collapsed against ITV
regional offerings. So when editor David
Lloyd announced he was “fairly happy with
the way things are” at the start of December
‘83 the writing was on the wall. Sure enough,
just seven weeks after its launch, Wilcox was
kicked out of the Sixty Minutes swivel chair
and palmed off with a deal from BBC Scotland to produce more of his dull documentaries. The show never recovered, was axed
in June ‘84 (the production team blacking
out the last episode in protest) and your fine
tradition for current affairs of an early evening on the Beeb died. Hard news courtesy of
Sue and Nick was round the corner.
We blame Wogan. Don’t get us wrong,
nobody is finer at waxing a little wry over
those taped pre-song vignettes featuring
Austria’s entry larking about stagily on an
Alpen mountainside, but he does seem to
be responsible for more than a few of these
Eurocliches.
But it wasn’t ever thus. In 1967,
it was Rolf Harris on the BBC lipmic in Vienna, which seems a bit of a waste. In 1970,
it was David Gell, whoever the hell he was,
the following year it was Dave Lee Travis,
and in 1972 - Tom Fleming! Bet that was a
rocking show. In 1973 it was Terry for the
first time, with Pete Murray on the wireless,
and in 1974 it was, of course, David Vine
(“My goodness she sold that well!”)
In 1975 it was the exact opposite
to 1973, as Tel was relegated to the radio,
so he must have made a mess of it before,
and Pete Murray was on the telly. In 1976
it was Michael Aspel, and Pete was back in
1977, before Tel made a triumphant return
in 1978. John Dunn did it in 1979, bizarrely,
and Tel wasn’t involved at all, cos Ray Moore
was on the radio.
But, in true Creamup fashion, we
simply cannot finish without a big long list,
so here’s our patented guide to 10 Great British Eurovision Failures...
FACTS AMAZING: Wasn’t even 60 minutes
long, either
18
“And every day is a compromise for a grain of corn”
1969 - Congratulations by Cliff Richard
Ah, Cliff, forever wriggling around in figurehugging blue crushed regency velvet in front
of that big gold ‘E-U-R-O-V-I-S-I-O-N’
tableau. Penned by Coulter and Martin,
responsible for Puppet On A String and,
er, Back Home, but pipped into second by
Spain’s La La La.
all ribbons and polka dots and miniskirts.
Booed off stage. And seventh yet again.
Sweden take the crown.
1990 - Give a Little Love Back to the World
by Emma
Emma! She was Welsh! She looked a bit
like Sonia! She sang a song about world
peace and ending starvation! She finished
sixth! Italy won with a song about European
integration!
1974 - Long Live Love by Olivia NewtonJohn
To Brighton for 1974’s extravaganza, into
which these isles pitched Olivia toothily into
the fray, in naught but a blue nightie. But we
were betting without Abba, and ONJ could
only finish a meagre fourth. Pah.
1991 - Message to Your Heart by
Samantha Janus
It’s Britain’s great Eurovision maxim, never
learn from the previous year’s failure. Hence
the succession of overwrought pastel-suited
male balladeer flops from the ‘80s. Another
song about starvation (“And every day is a
compromise for a grain of corn”) and hence
Game On was seen as a step up. Came 10th.
1977 - Rock Bottom by Lyndsey De Paul
and Mike Moran
Come on, with a title like that, it was asking
for it. Basically all we can remember about
this was that they sang at it grand pianos
facing one another. Europe remained unimpressed. Seventh. France won.
1992 - One Step Out of Time by
Michael Ball
“One step out of time! (doof doof) One reason to put this love on the line!” Fresh-faced
and clean-cut, Michael was nothing if not
Cliff ’s spiritual heir, and thus emulated him
by finishing second. Punched the air in time
with the doof doof bit.
1978 - Bad Old Days by Coco
Despite featuring a nascent Cheryl Baker
among their number, they could only
muster an appalling 11th with their tribute
to Leonard Sachs. Truly the dog days for
Blighty, these. Prima Donna, anyone? Black
Lace doing legit?
1996 - Ooh Aah... Just a Little Bit by
Gina G
Into the Jonathan King years and hence the
Ireland Forever Winning years, as satirised
by Father Ted. The last Eurovisioner to make
number one in Britain, fact fans, although
Gina limped to eighth on the night.
1982 - One Step Further by Bardo
The ‘Do featured Sally-Ann Triplett off of
Stu Francis-era Crackerjack, and were endorsed by none other than Neil Tennant in
Smash Hits. None of which could help them
in the heat of, ahem, Harrogate, and were
swept aside by Nicole’s anthemic A Little
Peace, which our headmaster used to like to
play in assemblies. Seventh again.
Prog 27, 7 August 2002
“NO, THIS ISN’T A
REPEAT!”
Creamup’s guide to TV’s top cross-channel
defectors
1984 - Love Games by Belle and the
Devotions
Now we really are getting desperate. Imagine
a sort of Dorothy Perkins Bananarama,
It’s always a truly great television moment
when someone quits X to join Y. Back in the
19
The Burst of Creamup
Roland Rat
Post-”rat joining sinking ship” frenzy,
Roland, Kevin, Errol and co lorded it over
Eggcup Towers for a couple of years until
the Beeb came knocking in October 1985.
A year later, and after one-off appearances
at Christmas and Easter, Roland Rat: The
Series somewhat overlooked the fact that,
outside of breakfast telly, the concept of an
ego-obsessed short-tempered rodent puppet
talking back to celebrities was not enough
to hang a whole programme on. Success was
further limited by a) shoving it out on Saturday evenings ahead of Colin Baker gurning
b) the appearance of real “people” (Darcey
DeFarcey, Maureen McConkey etc) and c)
an over-produced Stock/Aitken/Waterman
acid house shuffle (“I-I-I-I-I-I-I-I-I-I-I-I-II-I-I’m back!”) as theme tune. Last seen on
The Big Breakfast for more tired “sinking
ship” palaver.
day, it was earth-shattering stuff, like when
The Goodies joined ITV, or when Eric and
Ernie packed in at the Beeb in 1978, a move
presaged, reckons at least one comedy historian, by Eric appearing on World Of Sport on
Christmas Eve, although how him larking
about with Dickie Davies amongst the LWT
tinsel could have led to the duo inking in a
lucrative deal with Thames, we dunno.
Certainly, we’ll never forget the
moment on ITV’s Telethon 90, when Andy
Crane announced he was joining Motormouth, or indeed when Stuart Hall forsook
Oxford Road for Quay Street, to link up with
Bob Greaves on Granada Tonight in a creative collaboration that the trailers intimated
was on a par with Lennon and Jagger joining
forces. But what of television’s serial defectors? We’ve compiled the top 10…
Michael Parkinson
Turncoat par excellence. Remarkable how
he’s squared those much-lauded “journalist” principles with a lifetime’s hasty transfer
action. Once he’d engineered that oh-so-accidental move from behind the cameras into
“presentation”, Parky exercised his faculties
to the full working for Granada on Cinema
and, obviously, What The Papers Say. But
then he hoofed it to LWT, in the belief he
was getting his own sports investigative
series. And a lot of money. No such series
ever materialised, so after an attempt to
become rector of Glasgow University was
declared void (“Whoever is now elected will
just be a paper figure”) came the long Beeb
years and life as Kenny Everett’s cardboard
cut-out. But that wasn’t enough: Parky was
on a mission to explain, which involved buying into and then quitting TV-am, chairing
All-Star Secrets for LWT, and Give Us A Clue
at Thames, then failing miserably as host of
Desert Island Discs, before winding his way
back to Television Centre, where he remains
“a journalist” first, a grouchy serial defector
second.
Phillip Schofield
Highly regrettable inclusion, but necessary
if only for place on Beaufort-scale register of
end-of-innocence shocks; plus how the felony in question was compounded tenfold by
Pip’s ill-conceived foray into follicle-orientated symbolism. Phil minus hair dye proved
nothing, and still didn’t distract attention
from his subsequent jumping-throughhoops-for-money behaviour. Obligatory
name-in-the-title clunkers ensued (Schofield’s TV Gold, Schofield’s Quest, Schofield’s
Tenball). Back home at the Beeb again now,
and on prime time, and he’s stopped messing with facial embellishments - all three of
which cannot be applied to Andy Crane.
Anneka Rice
Quit most popular programme on C4 to realise “own idea” on Saturday night BBC1. In
retrospect the final ‘treasure’ on her last ever
‘hunt’ probably helped Annie make up her
mind - being hit in the face by a beer-soaked
rag. Following trial one-off Children in Need
stunt - organising a performance of the 1812
20
“If we transmit this interview we will gravely damage Anglo-Japanese relations”
Morecambe and Wise
Familiar revolving-door behaviour dragged
out in rather undignified fashion over three
decades: Eric ’n’ Ern dying on their arses
at the Beeb, shining on ATV, peaking back
at the Beeb, then dying on their arses back
at Thames. Where they couldn’t appear on
Christmas Day, which you’d have thought
they’d have made a point of asking about
first. Lose points for breaking news of
Thames-defection to Bill Cotton while he
was “coughing and shivering in bed” with
Asian Flu.
Overture on the River Thames - numerous
recipe books and Romanian orphanages
followed. Subject then opted out of TV for
motherhood and painting classes. Stop the
clock!
Robin Day
The original sourface. Began as sulky
BBC producer. Then, pissed off that the
Home Service were dragging their heels
over launching a new weekday breakfast
programme, which he later claimed was
his idea, nonchalantly legged it to ITN in
1955 on the promise of instant “newscaster”
fame. Quickly made sure he upset everyone,
including boss Geoffrey “If we transmit this
interview we will gravely damage Anglo-Japanese relations” Cox. Then, furious at having
to read from a teleprompter (“A phoney and
a fraud”), quit in time to be conveniently
accepted as Liberal General Election candidate for Hereford. Lost, naturally, but with
uncanny timing another offer from the Beeb
had him indecently running back to whence
he first started, to front Panorama. Had a
massive sulk over the next 30 years, mostly
because of not being given the best gigs, and
Bill Cotton had to invent Question Time to
shut him up.
Caroline Righton
Merits inclusion for casual, serene drift
through incredible smorgasbord of channels
throughout the 1980s and ‘90s. Caroline
carried her flag across a welter of territories
including Thames, TV-am, the Beeb, BSB,
Sky News, ITN, LWT, and was even present
to join in the ceremonial script-throwing
that brought the curtain down on the Channel Four Daily. Now represents cunninglytitled “regional programme development” at
Westcountry Television.
David Frost
Another serial defectee, lurching from the
Beeb to A-R to LWT to TV-am to the Beeb
again. You may have thought this feature
was carefully mapped out and developed
so as to reference some of the key movers
and shakers who’ve worked in the television
industry over the last 40 years, defining and
shaping the nature of British broadcasting
for several generations...
Bruce Forsyth
Famously hotfooted it from the Beeb to
LWT in 1978 for Bruce’s Big Night (“No dear,
it’s not Saturday Night Fever. No, I’m not
John Travolta”). Equally famous was its subsequent decline and fall, despite impressiveish ratings, so card playing shenanigans
followed. Jim “One more year” Moir then
lured him back to the Beeb for Takeover Bid/
ace Gen Game revival; only for Bruce to piss
off yet again for reheated Play Your Cards/
Price Is Right schedule shunting until David
Liddiment stood him up for a drink in the
bar afterwards. “I’ve crossed more channels
than P&O!”
Hale and Pace
...But in reality it was cooked up so we could
end with yet another mention of this pair’s
amusingly disastrous move to the BBC in
the mid-’90s, and the incomprehensible
unwatchable self-indulgent shite that was
h&p@bbc which followed.
21
The Burst of Creamup
bearing a “time-travelling” cheque.
But it was Mike down at LWT
who had the toughest gig, looking rough
after just 60 minutes and a tussle with bewigged Su Pollard. A much-vaunted Tiswas
reunion in the small hours went to pieces,
and later, in place of the unrest-plagued
TV-am, a “special” edition of Joke Machine
proved to be no different from any of the
others, ie bollocks.
Despairing, Asp slipped into a
comfy cardigan, then donned a bizarre
cardboard dinner jacket, before winding up
in full top hat and tails for the chaotic grand
finale including Denis Norden’s Telethon
Bloopers and much mawkish most-of-all-I’dlike-to-thank-you weeping. Prince Charles,
Telethon patron, looked winded. The country shrugged. Two years later it happened all
over again.
Prog 27, 7 August 2002
100 GREAT TV MOMENTS
Creamup’s panoply of pixellated venerable
visuals
#5: May 1988 - The first networked
ITV Telethon
“I’m a bag of nerves,” croaked Michael
Aspel, “but they’re well concealed. The edge
of danger will contribute to the occasion.”
It’d been eight years since Britain’s first
telethon, confined to the Thames region
on 2nd October 1980 and fronted by the
memorable team of Jimmy Young, Joan
Shenton and Rolf Harris. £1.25m had been
raised; other subsequent mini-thons scraped
together similar amounts. The inevitable,
though, arrived at 7pm on Sunday 28th May
1988, as a tuxedo-ed Aspel cued in a suitably
half-arsed hey-look-at-this song and dance
number to kick off the UK’s debut nationwide effort.
From the off the co-ordination
‘twixt LWT (where main man Alan Boyd
was pulling the strings) and the regions was
rough. Local franchises were supposed to
opt-out every single hour, but early items,
including - predictably - a “wacky” Blind
Date special and a ropey Treasure Hunt
hook-up over-ran spectacularly, cockingup the carefully annotated timetable big
style. London viewers had the misfortune of
discovering no less than Jim Davidson and
Emma Freud in charge of their segments,
overseeing the world’s largest Lego tower,
a tug of war between the cast of The Bill
and City of London police forces, plus the
execrable Big Song by Mike Batt in Battersea
Park.
Other regionalia included a man
walking backwards for 65 miles (TVS), a
fork-lift truck race (Ulster), a sponsored
giant bed push in Grangemouth (Scottish),
a “Crazy Grand National” ending in Border
Television’s car park, and the Liverpool
branch of the Doctor Who Appreciation Society turning up - fully attired - at Granada
FACTS AMAZING: A ‘limited edition’
Telethon ‘88 furry bug was spotted in Oxfam
in 1997
Prog 28, 2 September 2002
“A COUPLE MORE
RETARDS SENT UP FROM
THE JOB CENTRE”
This Friday apparently sees the 2000th edition of Top of the Pops, although according
to the Silvine exercise book in which the
Creamup staff carefully annotate these
things, it’s about the 2010th. But no matter,
any excuse to look back on the Pops...
Therefore, in honour of TOTP’s second
millennium, we trace The Seven Ages of Top
of the Pops Presenters...
“I’d like to present you with the records...”
In the beginning, the pre-R1 formula TOTP
was fronted from Manchester by Light
Programme stalwarts of the calibre of David
Jacobs, Peter Murray and Jimmy Savile, with
occasional interjections from Dave ‘Stattus
Quo’ Cash. Occasionally things might be
22
“Can you party?! Wooarghh!”
enlivened by a guest appearance from Davy
Jones, or perhaps Arsenal heart-throb Peter
Marinello judging a dancing contest. And
unashamedly chatting up the winning dollybird: “Your eyes are beautiful.”
two jocks, not one. Enter the Rhythm Pals,
John Peel and David Jensen, raiding the
BBC wardrobe, pissing about and generally
sending the whole thing up (Peel - “Here’s
a band who put the tree back into country,
Big Country!”) although J&K incurred the
wrath of George Cole and Dennis Waterman when they dared mock their Minder
spin-off seasonal single. Bizarrely, Garth
Crooks was allowed to co-present in 1982,
making him the only man to have presented
TOTP and Despatch Box, until Andrew Neil
bigs up Sugababes, at least. Bruno Brookes,
Janice Long and Mike Smith also joined the
troupe, Smitty hosting the show even after
quitting R1. Jimmy Savile bowed out at the
same time, his swansong being the memorable Top of the Pops on a Train special in
1984, wherein the newly-christened Pops
Inter City raced from Bristol to Paddington,
while Howard Jones serenaded bored commuters at Temple Meads station.
“And now for something big in Greece...
BBC potatoes!”
Into colour, into the ‘70s, and for sure, Topulars of the Populars was now a Thursdaynight televisual behemoth, with Raymond
Baxter and William Woollard the improbable support act. Throughout glam, punk
and disco presided a gladiatorial roster of
spangly frontmen - Noel Edmonds, Jimmy
Savile, David Hamilton, DLT and Tony
Blackburn (“Now let’s have a nice half-pint
of the scrumpy they call cider with The
Wurzels!”) with Ed Stewart and Emperor
Rosko occasionally called from the subs
bench. In 1977, Elton John guest hosted, although sadly rumours that Uriah Heep also
presented that year turned out to be untrue.
“Can you party?! Wooarghh!”
Things continued in much the same vein
through the mid-’80s. Travis bowed out,
Skinner and Jensen pissed off to commercial
radio, while Dixie Peach and a pasty-faced
Simon Mayo pitched up, later followed by
Mark Goodier and Nicky Campbell in a
blazer. But by 1988 the whole thing was beginning to flag. Hell, even Adrian John was
allowed to present one week, so clearly new
blood was called for, or as an embittered
Mike Read had it, “They wanted to make it
a bit more ‘street’.” In reality, making it more
‘street’ involved hiring a flotilla of Children’s
BBC faces - Andy Crane, Anthea Turner and
Blue Peter’s Caron Keating, whose introduction of We Call It Acieed sent Open Air into
meltdown. So desperate were the Beeb for
female presenters they even hired GMR’s
Susie Mathis for a couple of shows.
“Do you like disco, Roger? I hate it!”
By the turn of the decade, the lustre of Tone
and Noel’s comedy stylings was starting to
pall, so after a summer of discontent in W12
which saw the show blacked out for much
of 1980, new producer Michael Hurll briefly
embarked on a new policy of teaming young
turks like Steve Wright and Kid Jensen with
guest stars like Roger Daltrey - turning up
his nose at the Village People - Cliff Richard,
Kevin Keegan and BA Robertson. It also saw
the memorable pairing of Mike Read with
Russ Abbot, and most bizarrely of all, Peter
Powell with nocturnal R2 codger Colin
Berry.
“Last time I was on this programme I
forgot the name of the Amen Corner!”
Undeterred, Hurll continued modernising, with Richard Skinner and Simon Bates
(“Over my shoulder, two guys from Leeds,
call themselves Soft Cell”) now on the rota,
and by 1983, the programme was hosted by
“Laters!”
By 1991, things looked bleak. Two words:
Simon Parkin. So the entire R1 crew were
23
The Burst of Creamup
axed, Funky Si wondering aloud on the
Breakfast Show who’d replace him, Jakki
Brambles, Gary Davies and co. The answer,
in descending level of impact - Tony Dortie,
Mark Franklin, Femi Oke, Steve Anderson,
Claudia Simon, Elayne Smith and Adrian
Rose. Most lasted but a few dull shows
involving Neil Diamond and Altern-8 shouting over their record, before the roster was
streamlined to Dortie and Franklin, who between them presented every single show in
1993, yet neither of whom would be recalled
by a single punter nine years on. Bob Geldof
co-hosted in June 1992, for reasons we can’t
quite recall.
Prog 29, 1 October 2002
GRADE EXPECTATIONS
The accepted feeling in Creamup is that
telly’s never quite been the same since the
last whiff of cigar smoke vanished from the
chimneys of Charlotte Street and Horseferry
Road...
That’s why it’s been with a fairly unrestrained
“hooray” we’ve welcomed Michael Grade’s
recent foray back into the media pulpits and
gossip columns. Whether a dark horse for
the poisonous chalice of ITV boss, nonchalantly voting Channel 5 the best TV station
of the year, or fashioning a prospective
career as quiz show host (he’d piss on your
Elgin Marbles, Bill), it feels like Mike’s back
doing what he does best. So in tribute to one
of our genuine behind-the-lens “heroes”, we
present in a very particular order a rundown
of Grade’s finest hours.
“It’s still number one...”
Relative sanity was restored in 1994 with
the appointment of Ric Blaxill as producer,
and symbolically, the first face of the new
regime was the Rev Mayo himself. But this
year also saw the introduction of regular
guest presenters - a neat idea, perhaps, but
what were the kids meant to make of Angus
Deayton in a suit? Or Jack Dee and Jeremy
Hardy for fuck’s sake? Inspired choices like
Jarvis Cocker were few and far between,
while the hopeless Peter Cunnah gurned at
the camera for 30 minutes and Frankie Dettori introduced “Craaaaaaazy Moby!” And
who now remembers Bear Van Beers, eh?
Mark and Lard pitched up a couple of times,
the hapless one clad in ‘Sarah Brightman’s #1
Fan’ T-shirt’, but by now the powers-that-be
didn’t want ‘ugly blokes’, so goodbye humour
and personality, hello a tight-knit rota of
telegenic FHM babes - Ball, Middlemiss,
er, Whiley and the man Theakston. Which
brings us more or less up to date, and leaves
us only to don the tinsel, flutter our TOTP
paper flags and wish the show a...
King cone
It’s Channel 4’s seventh birthday, and Grade
decides to shun the usual raising-a-toast
palaver for something far more practical,
useful and above all fun. Hence he dresses
up as an ice-cream salesman, erects a stall
in the C4 entrance lobby, and hands out
fresh Cornettos to bemused commissioning executives passing by. The results: a bit
more easy publicity, a suitably refreshed staff
- plus it pisses off Jeremy Isaacs, which is
always a good thing.
“Motor cars were funny things frightening!”
Without Michael Grade there might not
have been a plethora of worthy stuff including Edge of Darkness, The Singing Detective,
GBH and A Very British Coup - but there
definitely wouldn’t have been arch-blatherer
Corporal Jones. Sir Clive Dunn was on
Grade’s books back when Mike was but a
rumpled, green-about-the-gills theatrical
agent - and it was Grade that pushed for and
///h A p P y B i R t H d A y///
Oh, and quick, turn over, Coronation Street’s
starting...
24
“The acknowledged all-time genius of ‘smelling’ a Sunday night hit”
ultimately won Clive the plum role in Dad’s
Army. Stardom and “silently falling about”
were only a rocking chair away.
Bruce Forsyth’s Big Night.”
Earl E Bird
No fan of breakfast telly, Grade nonetheless realised the need to bring forward C4’s
opening hours before the IBA sold them
off. So was born the fantastic Channel Four
Daily: Carol Barnes, a pair of legs suggestively opening a roller blind, James Mates in
a poky box room - er, “bureaux” - in Tokyo,
Countdown Masters, Kim Newman’s sarky
film reviews, and the titular fowl hosting
quizzes for kids to appear on The Crystal
Maze. Frustrating, addictive, surreal, it was
one of those shows you stumbled on by
accident then never missed another edition.
Perhaps the daftest and therefore most compelling breakfast TV ever, within three years
the C4 Daily was gone - but that’s another
story.
Miserama
Up till Grade’s arrival at the Beeb in 1984
Panorama sulked slap bang in the middle of
prime time Monday nights, scaring off viewers for the whole of the evening, and behaving as if it had the status of a listed building.
It still does the latter two of course, but the
former was successfully neutered when
Grade kicked it the other side of the Nine
O’Clock News, which was great, and in the
process conveniently annoyed arch-nemesis
David Dimbleby, which was even better.
Humble pie in the Sky
There are plentiful tales of Grade’s run-ins
with the ubiquitous British Sky Broadcasting Company - swiping the first few series
of Friends and ER from under their noses
for starters. Best of all, though, was Mike’s
derisory dismissal of Murdoch’s bombastic
attempt to bid for Channel Four News - a
final costed proposal that totalled the sum of
“a single sheet of plain A4 paper.”
“We fucked Dimbleby!”
Aka Grade’s response on learning the
sandwich-munching flapper had once again
failed to become Director General.
Ten more years!
Every good channel controller should
make it their business to appear on their
own network as often as possible (and not
simply beam out of the pages of Radio Times
wrapped in a sequinned safety blanket).
Grade proved himself a master of this - by
starring on the Telly Addicts Christmas Special, thereby establishing both exceptional
raconteur and TV trivia credentials in one
effortless swoop.
He’ll meet you for a drink in the bar
afterwards
Credit must go to Grade for valiantly trying
to give Brucie a debut show with LWT that
had to instantly overshadow everything the
man had done with the Beeb. But for all the
bluster and expense, what Bruce Forsyth’s
Big Night actually ended up most notable for
was a demented write-up in TV Times that
to this day is pinned dead centre in the middle of the Creamup office notice board, and
which ends: “You’re going to do well, every
Saturday night - no dear, it’s not Saturday
Night Fever. No, I’m not John Travolta. It’s
The black art of scheduling
The acknowledged all-time genius of the
‘hammock’ and of “smelling” a Sunday night
hit, Grade wrought a killer BBC1 line-up
out of the mess it had become by 1984. But
while making sure programmes began on
the hour and half hour rather than 6.55pm
or 8.10pm, and shunting Wogan and EastEnders into their rightful hallowed places,
Grade’s greatest achievement will forever
be moving the repeat of Neighbours from
mid-morning to teatime. Supposedly on the
behest of his daughter, the switch also signalled the end of the 5.35pm wasteland - no
25
The Burst of Creamup
more Masterteam (boo!) but also no more
Fax (wahey!).
London stage schools to people Murphy’s
Mob. It became a more permanent set-up
when Rudd, having found the necessary
funds, enlisted drama teacher Sue Nott
as supervisor and marshalled the first 50
recruits.
Within months Workshop alumni
were cropping up in (admittedly lame)
Michael Elphick sitcom Pull The Other One
and, inevitably, Dramarama. But soon came
more high-profile assignments: The Secret
Diary of Adrian Mole (Chris Gascoyne as
Barry Kent), Look At Me (Ben Mark), and
the big one, Your Mother Wouldn’t Like It,
in November 1985. Rudd, meanwhile, was
so impressed with these results he opened
a second Workshop in Birmingham, chiefly
notable for throwing up the estimable Steven
Ryde - aka the “voice” of CITV when it went
through its lunatic non-vision continuity
phase from 1993-8. The original’s still going,
albeit re-branded the Carlton Junior Television Workshop and mostly flinging out
extras for Footballers Wives. But when we
were kids there was no place else we wanted
to be.
The axeman cometh
Ranking at the top of our chart has to be
perhaps the most controversial act Michael
Grade has ever committed. During his time
at the Beeb he axed numerous shows - all of
which deserved to go, naturally - but there
was one that provoked a now legendary
outcry. The programme in question? Well, it
had run for bloody ages, had gone through
various changes in personnel, was aimed at
kids but adults perversely appeared to enjoy
it too, and had come to lose all its charm by
ending up overtly-violent and in supremely
bad taste. Suffice to say it was a huge waste
of licence payers money, and had to go.
And suffice to say Stu Francis’
career thankfully never recovered.
Prog 30, 22 November 2002
100 GREAT TV MOMENTS
Creamup’s flotsam of fully-fledged verdant
viewings
#8: February 1983 - The Junior Television
Workshop opens
Back where Creamup went to school,
everybody who mattered wanted to join the
mysterious organisation credited as being
responsible for genius sketch effort Your
Mother Wouldn’t Like It. Something about
having the words “television” and “workshop” in the same sentence was one in the
eye for boring staff room (and playground)
charlatans who eyed with suspicion anyone’s
predilection for cutting up and re-assembling the Radio Times or staging shoestring
versions of Pebble Mill at One in their back
garden.
It was the great Lewis Rudd who
acknowledged “not all kids on television
have to have Cockney accents” and consequently, as head of kids output at Central
TV, conceived of the Junior Television
Workshop as a way round having to rely on
FACTS AMAZING: Capital Radio’s unrelated
Your Mother Wouldn’t Like It show was
hosted by Nicky Horne
Prog 33, 19 January 2003
“FOUR SKY DIVERS, 6,000
NOBLE CITIZENS OF
BRISTOL AND 917
PIGEONS”
It’s 20 summers since Creamup hauled itself
from beneath its Bulldog Bobby duvet to
pad downstairs and watch the sun rise over
Tower Bridge, as Frank Bough in a brown
pullover welcomed us to Breakfast Time,
the premiere daily wake-up programme on
British television.
And that means it’s not so long until the
20th anniversary of the shambolic launch of
TV-am, too. Sadly, it’s a beano that’s largely
26
“What will breakfast television be like?”
the Commonwealth Games in Breakfast
With Brisbane, which had a fantastic clock
on the wall. Oh, and we haven’t forgotten
about Yorkshire’s regional experiment Good
Morning Calendar, although cartoons and
reruns of Peyton Place are not the stuff of
legend, nor was BBC Scotland’s short-lived
Radiovision, basically a TV simulcast of
Radio Scotland’s morning show - now that’s
something we’d like brought back...
been ignored - bar a few clips on the big
day’s Breakfast and some ill-informed bloke
talking on Radio 4 the other night. Dunno
where he got his information from. So in the
spirit of Creamup’s trademark impenetrable
obscure-reference-fuelled televisual compendia, here’s our idiosyncratic pre-history
of breakfast television...
“Now what on earth are you doing there at
this hour?”
Until 1983, breakfast television was a rarity
in Britain, confined to royal marriages,
sporting events, moonshots and elections.
Frank Bough made his first boiled-egg time
appearances in 1968, fronting the BBC’s
Good Morning Mexico in jet-lagged fashion
from the Olympics, while the following year
man landed on the moon, with a scintillating choice of Alistair Burnett on ITV or
the Beeb’s James Burke who was “ready to
broadcast at a moment’s notice” averred
Radio Times. In 1970, ...Mexico came back
for the World Cup, possibly just because
it’d be fun to have the same name again.
Throughout the ‘70s came more infrequent
outings, like jaunty Cliff Michelmore and
Fyfe Robertson whimsically pipe-opening
the BBC’s coverage of Anne’n’Mark’s
nuptials in 1973, and ITV’s uncomfortably
cosily-titled Good Morning Prime Minister
for the 1979 election, up against sketches
and song from Richard Stilgoe on the Beeb.
In the ‘80s, ITV laid the groundwork for
the ‘Vam by deploying Anna Ford to front
early-morning coverage of the American
elections with “specially-prepared weather
maps”, while future Famous Fiver Angela
Rippon got in some practice with the Beeb
for Charles and Di’s wedding, although their
plans were undermined by being scheduled
to start later than ITV, because BBC1 had
to “clear its throat” with an old Bugs Bunny
Valentine Special. And just months before
Breakfast Time kicked off, BBC1 put in
some dry runs with a pre-imperial phase
Desmond Lynam waxing a little wry about
“How would you like to watch television
at 7am?”
Of course, the 20th anniversary of breakfast
television is also the 20th anniversary of the
end of people going, “What will breakfast
television be like?” all the time. Practically
every comedy show around then had a
sketch with newsreaders in pyjamas - ah, the
skilful satire of Not The Nine O’Clock News
- while newspaper cartoons depicted blearyeyed viewers at a breakfast table eating cornflakes looking at a badly-drawn caricature
of Michael Parkinson on a Hitachi portable.
In fact, Swap Shop devoted an entire show to
the pressing question, “What will breakfast
television be like?” with Noel at a breakfast
table eating cornflakes and fronting a mockup breakfast show entitled AM-UK.
“It’s Frosties for breakfast!”
In December 1980, the IBA awarded the
franchise for breakfast television to TV-am,
who not only beat AM-TV, but also rival
bidders AMT, Daybreak TV, Daytime TV,
Morning TV, Good Morning TV and, er,
ITN - clearly minutes had gone into devising
imaginative, distinctive names. Looking
back, some of the bid documents feature
proposals every bit as demented as Peter
Jay’s Mission To Explain. For instance, ITN
planned “computerized news”, which we like
to imagine was just the news but written on
screen in Six Million Dollar Man font. Meanwhile Good Morning pitched “a Saturday
show presented by an exuberant character
emphasising the richness of life”, but then
27
The Burst of Creamup
that’s what you get for letting Ned Sherrin and Tim Rice on the board. They also
planned a kids phone-in called Have You
Done Your Homework?, which doesn’t sound
as much fun as the Go-Bots. AMT proposed
a syrupy Martyn Lewis-style “good news”
slot, as well as “humour columnists” and
“guest cartoonists”, which conjures up horrific images of some cravatted wit perched
on a chrome stool at an easel doodling David Owen and David Steel pedalling an ‘Alliance tandem’ live at half past seven in the
morning. They also insisted “on AMT, viewers will not be told about ‘the unemployment situation’, but that 1,390,000 people are
out of work.” Yeah, cheers for that. Perhaps
the worst idea belonged to Morning TV, ie.
lining up David Dimbleby as compere. Then
again, one of Peter “Cleverest Young Man
In Great Britain” Jay’s brainwaves was for
TV-am’s presenters to remind watching kids
not to forget their PE pumps and dinner
money...
about breakfast.”) before Selina Scott was
poached from News at 10 to join Frank on a
set described as resembling “a Tokyo airport
departure lounge” in a variety of what can
only described as “nanny dresses”. So it was
on 17th January 1983, Breakfast Time was
launched, and the rest, of course, is history.
You know, someone should write a book
about all this...
Prog 34, 28 January 2003
100 GREAT TV MOMENTS
Creamup’s inventory of isolated small screen
significances
#12: January 1988 - Grange Hill’s opening
titles are changed
Overhauling any aspect of a long-running
TV programme, no matter how trivial, only
ever works when it’s done with plenty of
panache. There’s also got to be a point to it,
and one that’s overwhelmingly obvious to
viewers. But cut-out kids jerking their way
across a piece of graph paper in hot pursuit
of a curvy bouncing bus while quadratic
equations burst like half-arsed fireworks
around them - what the hell was this?
The ditching of the original
Grange Hill titles seemed to fail on every
count. It wasn’t just the iconic stuff that was
binned off; somewhere along the way charm
and wit seemed to get lost too. So no flying
sausage or exciting spinning comic-strips
anymore; now there were to be butterflies
flapping across the principles of photosynthesis, gargantuan fish blowing black and
white bubbles, and snapshots of “rubberfaced” Phil Cool being suitably “ribald”.
A tokenistic nod in the direction
of what had gone before came in the form of
a kid squeezing tomato sauce out of a bottle,
only for his plate to explode in a carnival
of ketchup wreckage. But it wasn’t just the
pictures. The theme tune itself - Chicken
Man - was given a woeful makeover. First
it was speeded up, thereby losing the rather
cocky, lolloping flair of the original. Then
“Boffy, we know your style”
Meanwhile, over at Lime Grove, the BBC
decided to respond in a dignified and
measured manner to the announcement that
breakfast television was coming to ITV - by
saying “we’re doing it too!” the next day. But
who would be presenting? Perhaps a peakof-his-powers Terry Wogan could swap
Radio 2 for BBC1 and lull the nation every
morning with trademark blarney about
contraflows and Ken Kercheval? Bizarrely,
sour old Jimmy Young was mooted for the
gig, as were sleepy old Barry Norman, Russell Harty who might have been fun, Sue
Lawley and Esther Rantzen, who’d briefly
been affiliated with the Frost Force Five.
But everyone was betting without the great
Frank Bough, who’d tired of the ‘Wide and
the ‘Stand, and pitched himself for the job
over a plate of spaghetti with editor Ron
Neil, who promptly wrote Frank an enigmatic BBC haiku in response (“Last time we
had dinner. Can we now have lunch? To talk
28
“Factory closure in Bootle”
there was that oh-so-’80s treble-heavy lead
guitar mixed up way too high in the production. But worst of all, the all-important guiro
was dropped in lieu of some self-conscious,
look-at-me drumming, way, way too slick
and professional for a kids show. Certainly
when Zammo appeared on Going Live! that
year, he was non-plussed at the whole thing,
speculating that ‘the kids’ probably liked the
new titles but they weren’t for him.
It all portended the wrong kind of
change, which seemed depressingly borne
out seconds into the first episode of the ‘88
series when the dopey knock-kneed antics
of Matthew Pearson and “wacky” tearaway
Tegs Ratcliffe tumbled onto the screen. Trevor and his rubber ring were still to come,
but 1988 was the first time ver Hill - and its
audience - really began feeling their age.
and pastel-coloured trellis backdrop at your
local BBC outpost. To that end, we’ve compiled this region-by-region guide to 40 years
of local heroes...
NORTH WEST
And at 5.55... Look North/Look North West/
Northwest Tonight
With... Jovial Stuart Hall cut a Falstaffian
figure at the head of the news banqueting
table, augmented by bouffant second-incommand John Mundy, scary infodominatrix Felicity Goodey plus beige linkman and
future FA spinmeister David Davies, whose
marriage to Mr & Mrs hostess Susan Cuff
was big news on the programme, let us tell
you. These days, after the dog days of Philip
Hayton and Merryn Myatt, it’s the mighty
Gordon Burns in charge.
Top story tonight... Factory closure in
Bootle. Industrial action in Salford. Hard
times, for sure, which is why Stu liked to
lighten the mood with a cookery spot or a
spin round a Cheshire manor in a vintage
car. St Winifred’s Choir virtually colonised
the airwaves in 1980.
Which presenter would open your garden
fete? Undoubtedly Stuart Hall. With his
medallion, stripy blazers and flowery patter,
saucy Stu would have the WI ladies a-flutter
with a randy remark or two.
FACTS AMAZING: Chicken Man features
Herbie “Grandad” Flowers on bass
Prog 35, 24 February 2003
“AND IN YOUR REGION
TONIGHT...”
The BBC recently realised that it had been
running regional news magazines for 40
years, a momentous occasion they marked
with the aptly-named Ruby Awards, celebrating the best programmes, presenters
and reporters. If only Nationwide had still
been running, they could have pretended to
have passed a lavish birthday cake around
the regions in the grand tradition.
YORKSHIRE
And at 5.55... Look North
With... Throughout the ‘70s a succession of
capable frontmen like Tim Ewart and Mike
Smart passed through on the way to bigger
things, before the ‘80s when Harry Gration
arrived to impart the day’s events over the
spaghetti hoops, riffing with co-presenters
like Judith Stamper and Khalid Aziz, giving
rise to the great joke: What time does Harry
Gration has his tea? When Khalid Aziz!
Please yourselves...
Top story tonight... The miners’ strike
or the latest Geoffrey Boycott rumpus at
Headingley.
The Beeb’s regional bulletins have always
been the poor relation of network programmes, the irritating bit that got in the
way between the end of the news and Top
of the Pops or Tel’s chat show. Yet there was
always a chance, as The Mary Whitehouse
Experience once pointed out, that you
could shout “that’s my bus!” during a report
on a road widening scheme. And some of
television’s most enduring characters have
emerged from between the oversized desk
29
The Burst of Creamup
Which presenter would open your garden
fete? That’d be Harry Gration, then. Avuncular yet authoritive, Harry’s survived stints
on South Today and helping to administrate
rugby league, and even had a brief stint
depping for Des on Grandstand in the ‘80s.
Perfectly qualified to umpire the tug-of-war,
then.
Teatime, aka Alan Towers, who anchored
Midlands Today year in, year out, before
bowing out with a bitter farewell speech that
put Dave Lee Travis and Jimmy Young to
shame. “This is my last programme for the
BBC after 25 years. When I first joined the
corporation it was led by giants. Now it’s being led by pygmies wearing blindfolds. How
sad.” Bye, then. Down the years, colleagues
included Tom Coyne, Kathy Rochford and
that man David Davies again.
Top story tonight... Shop steward at a Coventry car plant sacked. Kidderminster carpet
firm in danger of closure. Earth tremor
reported in Stoke-on-Trent.
Which presenter would open your garden
fete? Nobody in their right mind would
want Towers casting a cloud over their
festivities, so we’re plumping for present
compere Nick Owen, even if his opening
speech would consist entirely of vaguely
wry asides and grim puns. He’d take a keen
interest in the knitwear stall, mind, and be
perfect for reading out the winning tombola
numbers.
NORTH EAST
And at 5.55... Home At Six/Look North
With... In the ‘60s (“In the North East and
Cumberland”) it was anchored by a tyro
Frank Bough, who’d open the show by
hanging a trilby, Patrick McNee-style, on
a hat-stand alongside the headgear of the
guest, like a mayor or a sailor. When Frank
legged it to Grandstand, he was replaced by
horn-rimmed-bespectacled legend Mike
Neville, whose finest hour came when the
director screwed up the timings when Mike
was supposed to throw to Nationwide, leaving him to fill for two minutes. “They’ve left
me stranded! Don’t go away. See the weather
forecast’s no good. What are Newcastle
United doing? Are you still there? Won’t be
half a minute!”
Top story tonight... In Frank’s day, some
kind of Our Friends in the North-style
skulduggery involving T Dan Smith. In
later years, that miners’ strike again. Kevin
Keegan flouncing out of St James Park in a
helicopter.
Which presenter would open your garden
fete? Has to be Mike Neville, who presided
gloriously over the region long before
Anthony Gormley put Rotring to drawing board. Forever getting burgled because
Newcastle’s villains knew exactly where he
was at six o’clock every night. Always ace
during the Nationwide cake routine, thus a
natural to man the Guess The Weight Of The
Cake stand.
EAST
And at 5.55... Look East
With... Rather a rum assortment of talent
has graced the Look East desk, including
forbidding Judi Lines, Stewart White and
Michele Newman. But the top man was Ian
Masters, whose finest moment came in 1976
when Michael Barrett and Bob Wellings
arrived to broadcast Nationwide from East
Anglia for a week. Masters and co were
piped aboard the Nationwide Boat, which
they intended to chug down the Broads.
With hilarious consequences, as Masters officiously ordered the hapless Mike and Bob
around. “Listen, we’re catching some wind.
Bob, where are you? Bob, come on, give us a
hand. What are you doing down... Bob, will
you put that main sheet on the cleet?” Eighties theme music composed by London Plus
anchor Guy Michelmore.
Top story tonight... Council tax hike in
MIDLANDS
And at 5.55...Midlands Today
With... Key figure here is Pebble Mill’s Mr
30
“It’s got to be the ever-affable Rob Curling”
SOUTH
And at 5.55... South Today
With... Kicked off in the early ‘60s with
Martin Muncaster, but from the ‘70s
onwards smooth Bruce Parker has been the
grand vizier of BBC South, with occasional
forays into network schedules, fronting the
first series of Antiques Roadshow as well as
BBC1’s thin-shelled egg low-budget arts
revue Mainstream (“You could say we’re
whizzing around the country with the arts!”)
Colleagues have included Debbie “Fax!”
Thrower, Jenny “Do That” Hull, Roger
“Shuttle” Finn and Paddy “Waiter, another
white wine” Haycocks.
Top story tonight... Falklands task force sets
sail from Portsmouth. Brighton pier goes
on fire.
Which presenter would open your garden
fete? Still there after three decades or more,
it’s got to be Bruce Parker, who’d be able to
purse his lips and look knowledgeably at the
knick-knacks on the antiques stall, as well
as bringing a touch of that Mainstream class
to proceedings (“Now, even if you don’t go
near a theatre yourself, you’ll know many
of the RSC’s actors from their television appearances - Othello, for instance, is Donald
Sinden of Two’s Company”).
Saxmundham. Rare bird’s nest in Bury St
Edmunds.
Which presenter would open your garden
fete? It’s got to be Ian Masters, just on the
off-chance he’d roll up in the Look East Traction Engine or drop by in the Nationwide
Balloon. “That’s the railing. No, that’s the
gibsheet. Were you listening to what I was
saying?”
LONDON
And at 5.55... South East at Six/London
Plus/Newsroom South East/London News
With... For ages, they didn’t bother with a
proper service for London - at teatime, you
got a perfunctory bulletin from a corner
of the Nationwide or Sixty Minutes studio
with Sue Cook or Laurie Meyer, while at
lunchtimes, instead of news, London got the
FTSE prices, like we were all international
financiers played by Peter Barkworth. In
1984, London Plus began, with the nautically
challenged Bob Wellings, Sue Carpenter,
regional news’ Mr Music Guy Michelmore
and for a time, Jeremy Paxman gurning
over the fish cakes. Five years on, it became
Newsroom South East, the province of Rob
Curling. In later years, he was augmented by
no-nonsense Mike Embley and the subject
of the Creamup Ed’s secret fetish, Gwenan
Edwards.
Top story tonight... Opening of Thames
Flood Barrier. Fare’s Fair. Peter Davidson
takes over as Dr Who. If it was to do with
London, though, someone would moan
to Points of View: “Too much London, not
enough Plus!”
Which presenter would open your garden
fete? No debate, it’s got to be the ever-affable
Rob Curling, who also fronted early ‘90s
afternoon conversational jousting game
Turnabout, as devised by Clive Doig, plus
BBC2 daytime filler Noticeboard, where Rob
sat in a director’s chair and explained how
to obtain Bazaar factsheet 18. Rob’s also narrated Driver’s Eye View videos for London
Underground enthusiasts.
SOUTH WEST
And at 5.55... Spotlight
With... Rather varied assortment of presenters have bestrode the airwaves of Cornwall
and Devon, including Susan “Horses Galore”
King, Juliet “Newsround” Morris, Christopher Slade and Chris Denham. Not forgetting the moustachioed self-confessed “bit
of a dinosaur” veteran announcer Donald
Heighway, who was on duty on the morning
of the 1987 Great Storm, when the BBC
was in utter chaos. “Well, good morning, I
expect you’re wondering what’s happening?
There will be a news at seven o’clock, but it
all depends on when they get the volts back.”
Top story tonight... Hospital bed crisis in
Exeter. Hedgehog conservation initiative in
31
The Burst of Creamup
Hoey, John Darran, David Parry-Jones and
Creamup favourite, the lettuce-freshness
obsessed hard-hitting interviewer Vincent
Kane (“Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen, this is Vincent Kane inviting you to
Meet For Lunch”). Into the ‘80s and the arrival of blow-dried smoothie Chris Morgan,
newsdesk mother hen Noreen Bray and
the alluring Sara Edwards, as well as affable
rotund sports guy and brother of John, Bob
Humphrys.
Top story tonight... Rugby in turmoil.
Flooding in Towyn. New chimps arrive at
Welsh Mountain Zoo.
Which presenter would open your garden
fete? The thought of Vincent Kane commandeering the megaphone and barking at
everyone is not a pleasant one, so we’ll opt
for the fragrant Sara Edwards, who arrived
on Wales Today in the late ‘80s all padded
shoulders and frosted lipstick, and has been
a soothing presence ever since.
St Ives.
Which presenter would open your garden
fete? We’re biased, but it’s got to be Donald
Heighway. He’d be a natural to man the merchandise stall, judging by his performance
during the great Spotlight car visor frenzy
of 1981. (“Simply send one pound to BBC,
PO Box 9, Plymouth. In return you’ll get
Spotlight and Morning Sou’West stickers, and
Spotlight car visor, key ring and badge.”)
WEST
And at 5.55... Points West/News West/Points
West
With... Impressive assortment of characters
down the years, headed by the great Graham
Purches, who’d interview the many local
eccentrics in his Purches’ People slot, and
could always be relied upon to don a comedy outsized bowtie in the name of teatime
entertainment. Other familiar names have
included John Craven, Vivien Creegor and
Andrew Harvey plus more recent favourites
Susan Osman and Chris Vacher, seemingly
the product of some kind of gene-splice
twixt Ray Reardon and Lennie Bennett.
Once valiantly presented a makeshift programme from BBC Bristol’s comms room
during a studio power cut, instead of bunging on Newsroom Southeast.
Top story tonight... Council expenses
wrangle in Chard. Here in the West it’s, er,
autumn - here’s some footage of leaves we
took earlier.
Which presenter would open your garden
fete? Here we’re opting for legendary Points
West weatherman Tony Targett, a pleasingly
eccentric bespectacled meteorological guru
of the McCaskill old school, who’d no doubt
conjure up some sunshine for the afternoon.
SCOTLAND
And at 5.55... Reporting Scotland
With... Originally the programme had three
presenters in a complex valves-switching
arrangement - one in Glasgow, one in
Edinburgh and one in Aberdeen. The most
famous of these was Mary Marquis, who
could always be relied upon to bring a touch
of schoolmarm glamour to St Margaret’s
Drive. Latter faces included Viv Lumsden,
who infamously legged it to STV in 1989,
while the current roster includes ex-London
Plus presenter Sally “Daughter of Magnus”
Magnusson.
Top story tonight... Poll Tax demo in
Dundee. International Garden Festival
opens in Glasgow.
Which presenter would open your garden
fete? We’ll plump for Mary Marquis, but
there was every chance she’d be off having
her photo taken for yet another Scottish
Radio Times cover, so instead we’ll ask along
ex-BBC Scotland football commentator
Archie Macpherson, “a man with hair re-
WALES
And at 5.55...Wales Today
With... BBC Wales’ first newsreader was,
famously, jobbing actor Mike Aspel, but
after Wales Today hit the screens in 1962,
the team consisted at various times of Brian
32
“Let’s see if it’s up there!”
sembling rusty steel wool” according to the
Match of the Day Annual 1979. He presented
The World’s Strongest Man for a bit, so he can
man the Test Your Strength stall.
both at home and abroad, down the years.
But these all pale into insignificance when
they fall beneath the mighty shadow of the
great Game Show Props. Epic in scope often vast in size - limitless in their ingenuity, simple in their wiring and truly awesome
in their conception, the great Game Show
Props were the real stars of their shows. We
don’t have room for ‘em all, so here’s a few
picked from our own personal pocket.
NORTHERN IRELAND
And at 5.55... Scene Around Six/Inside
Ulster/Newsline
With... In the late ‘60s, the news team was
headed up by the considerable presence
of Michael Baguley, replete with Jimmy
Edwards-style handlebar moustache. He
was assisted by political editor WD Flackes,
whose suitably impressive nomenclature was
slightly deflated when David Dimbleby referred to him as “Billy” on election night. In
later years, the big swivel chair was handed
to Barry Cowan, smooth Sean Rafferty now
on Radio 3, and Diane Harran. Erstwhile
science teacher Jim Neilly arrived to do the
sport, and Five Live moaner-in-chief Alan
Green did a stint too. Latterly the friendly
Noel Thompson, who filled in on Breakfast
News on Fridays for a bit, became the face of
Newsline.
Top story tonight... For obvious reasons, this would inevitably be a bit grim.
Uniquely, regional telly in Northern Ireland
frequently featured ‘Police Messages’ superimposed over regular programming, giving
notice of security alerts.
Which presenter would open your garden
fete? These days it’d be Noel guessing the
number of sweets in the jar, or perhaps
long-serving sportscaster Jackie Fullerton.
Exactly how many aunties would have
been enticed out on a windswept afternoon
enticed by WD Flackes cutting a ribbon
remains, sadly, a mystery.
Prog 26, 23 March 2003
“Let’s see if it’s up there!” - Mr Babbage
The Family Fortunes board is surely the
granddaddy of them all, encapsulating as
it does the best attributes of the truly great
prop - huge and unwieldy with that touch of
raw functionalism that permits it to operate,
only the game show format would allow for
a programme’s central prop - which features
in almost every shot - to be so large that
it can’t fit into frame with the host except
when the camera is drawn back to the car
park. Distinct from other game shows
where the programme makers had foolishly
centred their attention on the contestants,
Family Fortunes was entirely driven by
Mr Babbage with our genial host - from
the greatness of Lord Bob of Monkhouse
through the amiable hopelessness of Max
Bygraves to the long-term blandness of Les
Dennis (and that bloke that does it now) all just providing the wrapping to the Board
of Boards. Always just slightly tinkered with
to fit the changing decor it was foolishly
abandoned for a short period during Dennis’ reign for a more modern (ie rubbish)
version, all coloured graphics and incomprehensible logo. Babbage was soon restored
when the management realised it was more
than half of the attraction of the show.
Catchphrases, host, format, contestants,
glamorous assistants, prizes - these have all
contributed to the greatness of game shows,
“Go Cots-wild in the Cotswolds.” - Bully’s
prize board
The Prize Board almost has the edge over
Mr Babbage though, in that it was capable
of that singularly great manoeuvre - the
“YOU’VE GOT THE TIME
IT TAKES THE BOARD TO
REVOLVE...”
33
The Burst of Creamup
ability to revolve (not necessarily under its
own steam). Not alone on Bullseye in the
giant prop stakes, rubbing shoulders as it
did with the first round categories board “That’s Spelling for 50” - and the pro-charity
board - “Cliff Lazarenko scores 191 - just
shows the people at home how hard this
game is” - it swivelled to reveal the dread
final board where the prizes gathered would
be lost (or won, occasionally) “at the throw
of a dart”. The Prize Board was probably
unique though in that it managed to attract
to itself a catchphrase, the eternal “Stay out
of the black and into the red, nothing in this
game for two in a bed” referring to the oftforgotten fact that if a prize was won it could
be lost if a dart hit that segment again. No
one, as far as we recall, ever tried to find out
what would have happened if they had hit it
with three. Once in a blue moon the players
would garner enough of the hostess trolleys,
Thomas the Tank Engine train sets, tumble
driers and scooters to make the question of
whether to gamble a serious consideration.
More often than not, of course, the toss was
what was behind Bully against a workbench
and spice rack, and since the money was safe
it didn’t usually take as long as it took the
board to revolve to decide to gamble. Sometimes though, the contestants erroneously
concluded that they had thoroughly enjoyed
their day and went home with their loot,
leaving the awesome spectacle of the great
flashing behemoth behind them. F-A-N-TA-S-T-I-C
anti - the question being the challenge, on
hearing Maggie Moone or forgotten easy listening trio (Sheeba! - Name That Tune-loving ed) sing a song to, well, Name That Tune.
The inside wheel had the amounts available
on their own, £10 up to £50, but behind
that was the second wheel which offered the
opportunity, if the light fell at the top, of the
win being doubled up by the position of the
less-than-cryptic red ‘DOUBLE’. Each question required a spin of the wheel by the host
- glamorous assistants not being Name That
Tune’s milieu - accompanied by the almost
unbearable tension that came with the eking
towards a ‘DOUBLE’, heightened by the
gasping “ooooh!” and “aaaah!” of the audience, accompanied by the toothsome grin of
Tom O’Connor. Spice was added by the fact
that this almost never happened. Name That
Tune had a variety of other props on offer,
like the soundproof booth at the finale, but
the great silver, spinning wheel was the star
of the show.
“It’s a good answer, but it’s not right” - the
Catchphrase board
For a prop so massive and unchanging until the recent unmentionable reprise of
the format - the Catchphrase board attracted
little attention to itself per se, all available
plaudits puzzlingly directed at the tiresome Mr Chips. What made it distinctive of
course was the fact that it was one of a select
few great props (we’re thinking of Blankety
Blank here) to which the positions of the
contestants were attached. At the outset of
the quiz, the competitors would hove into
view as the great bulk of the screen came
to rest, all neon and chrome brilliance, attached to the two playing spots festooned
with their blue and red lights spawning no
end of arguments as to whether one was at a
disadvantage by being that bit further away.
At the first appearance of Catchphrase in its
Saturday night glory, the board was quite
the most amazing game show prop yet seen,
and remained so for many years before be-
“Double! Double!” - The Name That Tune
wheel
Perhaps the Norma Desmond of the prop
world, this is one great to whom time has
not been kind. Yet some of us will never
forget that eerie Quatermass-esque pulsating
noise which accompanied the spinning of
the Name That Tune wheel. The opening
round entailed the cash amount awarded for
each question being decided by two wheels
spun against each other, one clockwise, one
34
“What is the name of Glen Michael’s talking lamp?”
“Higher for the game!” - The Play Your
Cards Right cards
Probably the most straightforward of the
lot, this was basically just a wall segmented
up in order so the giant cards could be dealt
along them and turned in response to the
considered musings of the contestants, the
frenzied screaming of the audience and the
heightened commentary of Brucie, “Higher
than a six it’s a nine!” Straightforward perhaps, but made special by the stripy sliding
‘Freeze’ markers whenever a lame couple
got the aforementioned nine but were too
limp to gamble to win, that rather being the
reason they were there. It nonetheless demonstrates that given a great game and host,
and even with perennially useless contestants, the simplest of props can provide the
maximum entertainment. And who didn’t
want a giant deck of cards like Brucie’s? He’s
such a lucky Jack.
ing scrapped for a younger, less impressive
replacement, just like Roy Walker was. Does
the programme now look crap? Riiiiiiiiight!
“But just how far out are you?” - The Price
is Right’s Cliffhanger
The entire purpose of The Price is Right
would, on first examination, be the exposition of the prop maker’s art, not the dash for
cash and prizes which the untutored might
expect. Each contestant required their own
prop for the game they would be invited to
take part in, and while these were often no
more than boards with prices and flashing
lights on them, sometimes these were transcended by masterpieces such as Plinko or,
best of all, Cliffhanger. A large wedge shaped
lump marked with numbers from one at
the bottom upwards to 25, this scale was
climbed by a little Alpine gent, replete with
bobble hat, knapsack and walking staff all
framed by a towering mountain backdrop.
The contestant would be shown a prize,
the price of which he had to guess, natch.
When they had made their guess they would
be directed to follow their counterpart on
the mountain who would then scale the
gradient marking off the amount which they
were out by. The piece de resistance was the
glorious yodel that would accompany the
climb until the Ping! which denoted that the
correct price had been matched - hopefully
not too long a climb. Of course, this was not
always the case and the generous sprinkling
of idiots who would take their place by the
mountain having mysteriously managed
to graduate from Contestants Row seemed
all too often to come perilously close to the
top with their unfathomable guesses. And
when they reached the summit there would
come, matched by the climbing clamour of
the audience, the scream, as our little Hillary
tumbled off the edge. Such drama was never
seen on a game show so far from the final
either before, or since.
“Now you don’t!” - The Now You See It
board
Regionalia creeps in with this entry from
the wilds of Cowcaddens and STV. Now You
See It was, basically, a televised wordsearch
presented by the ever-living Johnnie Beattie,
who would direct ours and the contestant’s
attention to the mammoth grey Babbagestyle contraption, where the grid of squares
was numbered, showing the words to be
found in that game. Ergo the “now you see
it” scramble of words.“Now you don’t!” and
they were all jumbled up. Players were then
asked a question for which the jumbled
words were the answer. So in response to
“What is the name of Glen Michael’s talking
lamp?” the answer would come, “two-across,
Paladin.” And that was about it. What made
this special, though, was just how massive
the board was, and by jove, it revolved too,
performing its turns at the end of the show
for the final prize game... another wordsearch. The cost involved in this monstrosity
was highlighted by the fact that by the time
they had built it, the producers clearly didn’t
35
The Burst of Creamup
Programme Ever, Bob’s Full House was just,
just brilliant. From the moment Bob came
bounding on saluting everything left, right
and centre, to the rallying cries of “Shirley
neeeeeeds six, Roy neeeeeeeds four!” and the
sublime concept of ‘being wallied’, there
wasn’t anything about the House that wasn’t
perfect. Chief among its glories was its titanic board. Having got the contestant-bound
Four Corners out of the way, the game
would take flight as the eternal joy that was
the Monkhouse Mastercard hoved into view.
Showing the categories for the numbers on
the contestants’ card it didn’t just appear.
Oh no, it revolved. Back to the contestants
again for Full House, but this was a device
by which to segue into the further revolving
glories of the Golden Bingo Card. Answer
a question, pick a number, behind it was
the letter of a holiday destination or that
amount of cash (the drama being sharpened
by the fact that bingo numbers don’t add
up to much). Bob’s Full House lasted for six
years, the only reason for its demise being
Lord Bob of Monkhouse’s move back to ITV.
Bob neeeeeeeds to come back!
have any money left, so besides the contestants and their little desks and Johnnie standing out on his own, there was no other set
on view other than the board. Nevertheless
it was truly three-across: impressive.
“Keep thinking, keep thinking!” - The Gen
Game conveyor belt
Back in the day there were props ahoy, as
potter’s wheels, cake-icing sets and ting were
rolled on and abused by hopeless, hapless
contestants. All good fun. But these were
merely building to the climactic tension
of the Conveyor Belt. We would contend
in any case that Brucie’s finale plays were a
little wearing and full of forced pratfalls and
misread lines and that they sought to claim
the summit of the show for themselves. The
heyday (or gay-day, arf!) of the Gen Game,
as it has become rather disrespectfully
known, was that fitfully flighty time under
the tutelage of dear Larry Grayson. No
upstaging of the Conveyor Belt for him, he
had enough trouble just trying to stand next
to it and point in the right direction. In later
years though, the Belt was no more than a
farce, as the prizes paraded before the contestants were patently all that there was to be
had and the doors closed when they were all
done. In the days when the game worked as
it should, the doors would slam shut as the
next yoghurt maker or fondue set was just
about to come into range. Then Larry would
lead the contestant to the chair chanting
the mantra, “keep thinking”, until they were
settled and remembered what they could
(and weren’t always just given everything
anyway). The Conveyor Belt may not be the
grandest or most central prop listed here but
it is surely the most memorable and, for its
time, most innovative. Sadly of course, it’s
now left to once again moulder. “Look at the
muck on that!”
“Gold to gold in 60 seconds” - the
Blockbusters board
Even though it always seemed so miserably
unfair that in the ordinary rounds of Blockbusters there were two playing one, all the
possible advantages of the duos and their assorted gonks would evaporate as they came
before the mighty flashing leviathan that was
the Blockbusters board. Not merely a plastic
grid with a bloke flashing a torch behind
each segment - as we were assured during
a ‘making of ’ documentary - this was a
mighty hi-tech construction with glass slides
with numbers on them and everything. It
reached its zenith of course with the Gold
Run, when the aforementioned Charlies
would be landed, alone, in front of the hive
of acronyms and dared to go “from gold to
gold in 60 seconds or less”. Of course, none
of this mattered much in that if they failed
“You’re wallied!” - The Monkhouse
Mastercard
A real contender for the prize of Best
36
“‘Eureka,’ or ‘I have found it’”
to get across in 60 seconds they just carried
on but if they hit the top with their fifth
Gold Run they would win something actually worth having, before being bundled off
home. Bob “not Baker Street” Holness would
constantly direct our attention to the great
stone (or Styrofoam, whatever) carvings
above the set festooned with the ever present
Zeus and ranging to anyone from Einstein
to, memorably, Tina Turner, but that was
just additional flummery. The star of the
show was the board and it has remained so
through the programme’s subsequent, worrying reincarnations.
notable for another appearance from the
Beadle repertory, newly enlarged to include
Bernard Holley and Pascal King; a preposterous prank involving a duck-billed
platypus; and the debut of the Beadle beard
which was grown solely so its owner could
shave it off at the end of the series while delivering the line “Oh by the way, there’s been
somebody else deceiving you all this time.”
But it was the pair’s final collaboration that turned out to be Beadle’s finest
hour: Eureka, which began on Thursday
4th November 1982 at 6.05pm on BBC2.
Promising to provide viewers with “an
uncommon history of the common”, its host
reminded anyone who’d been so careless as
to forget that he’d always been “fascinated”
by inventions “and the people behind them.”
Sure, it was exactly the same format as both
April Fool and Deceivers, but that was all for
the good. And it had one of the greatest TV
themes ever.
The eight-part series kicked off
with a typically Beadle-esque topic - everyday crap you found in your kitchen drawer.
“‘Eureka’, or ‘I have found it’,” the man
boomed as he nonchalantly strolled onto the
studio set. “Ever since dear old Archimedes
first used that Greek word while sitting in
the bath, that’s become the classic cry of
inventors throughout history!” Whether
jousting with his be-wigged supporting cast,
standing just a little too close to Wilf Lunn,
or emphasising each new astonishing fact
with a defiant brief raise of the eyebrows,
Beadle was the master of all he surveyed.
After which he ungraciously pissed off to
Fun Factory. Everything that followed has
been secondary, and when he goes back to
doing what he does best we’ll start watching
him again. “Until then, bye!”
Prog 37, 8 May 2003
100 GREAT TV MOMENTS
Creamup’s atrium of acknowledged media
milestones
#15: April 1978 - Jeremy Beadle teams up
with Clive Doig
“I have a fascination with, and experience of,
practical jokes,” declared Jeremy Beadle, yesterday, and quite probably every day since
the mid-1970s. It was off the back of such
hyperbole, however, that the Beeb paired
him up with in-house producer Clive Doig
in 1978 to rustle up something special for
transmission on April 1. Luckily for Beadle,
Doig was not only a “zany guy” but was
also “fascinated” by practical jokes. The end
product was a show called, boringly, April
Fool, which kind of gave the game away, but
was hosted by DLT and peopled with what
Beadle dubbed his “miniature rep company”: Mike Savage, Madeline Smith et al
who acted out the entire history of the world
against a piece of cardboard.
The BBC wanted more, so Doig
persuaded Beadle to step into the Hairy
Cornflake’s shoes for the follow-up show,
The Deceivers, profiling famous practical
jokers. “I had already appeared on screen
on a couple of shows as a guest, like on
Noel Edmonds Saturday Superstore”, Beadle
wrongly remembered. The Deceivers was
FACTS AMAZING: Jeremy Beadle invented
people standing up on quiz shows
37
The Burst of Creamup
mornings at about 2am, but now seems to
have been replaced with News 24. You can
still watch the pages cycling on Ceefax page
152. No cactuses now, though.
Prog 40, 21 September 2003
TODAY’S TV FOLLOWS IN
A MOMENT
There are many great things about digital
television - better picture quality, interactive
capabilities, a greater choice of channels
and repeats of Knightmare on Challenge
TV. Yet, for many of us, there’s one crucial
aspect missing - proper teletext. Sure, you’ve
got your fancy BBCi services, but they take
an age to work through and fail to have the
special charm of the blocky graphics and
blue and black colour scheme of the oldfashioned analogue variety.
4-Tel on view
The commercial equivalent of the above,
this was rather more flimsy (no news, sport
or anything of much significance) but much
more stylish. Crucially, it was animated
(well, sort of), with the text pages linked
by such delights as a workman climbing a
ladder and sticking up a poster that said
“COMPETITION”. There was also the regular 4-Tel comic strip, devoted to The Adventures Of 4-T The Dog. Sadly, with the launch
of The Channel Four Daily, it was relegated
to 5.30am, and then dropped altogether.
Intelfax are now responsible for ITV Nightscreen, but that doesn’t count as it appears to
be produced entirely on Powerpoint.
Recently it’s been announced that 4-Tel,
Channel 4’s long-serving programme support service currently sitting on page 300,
is to be replaced by a new service from the
all-powerful Teletext behemoth - a further
blow to those of us who still spend Saturday
afternoons flicking between Ceefax pages
303, 305, 307 and 308 watching the football
scores change. So before it’s too late, press
reveal for Creamup’s Top 10 Teletext Moments. Best appreciated with A Walk in the
Black Forest playing in the background...
High-definition Ceefax
Around the early ‘90s, the technical boffins
at TV Centre seemed to decide that your
humble old Ceefax was a bit outdated, so
the regular in-vision service was replaced
by a new all-colour variant - basically, the
same old Ceefax, but on a grey and white
background and with a more garish colour
scheme. However after a while, everyone
seemed to wonder why they were bothering,
and the ‘classic’ colour scheme returned. The
BBC logo looked quite good on it, though.
Pages from Ceefax/Ceefax AM
The original and best, of course, and in the
days before Kilroy and The Weakest Link, this
took up most of the daylight hours on BBC1
and BBC2. Basically this was a potpourri of
30 pages from the service endlessly cycled,
interspersed with ‘title’ pages, most famously
the blocky graphic of a telly showing a cactus that illustrated “Today’s TV Follows In A
Moment”. For hours at a time, stories of war,
famine and natural disasters were backed
with a chirpy light music backing, and it
was all loads more fun than House Invaders. The high point, of course, was on Bank
Holidays when it was on before children’s
programmes, and the last frame would
always be “The Pink Panther Follows In A
Moment”, accompanied by a blocky graphic
of a pink cat drinking from a bowl of milk.
This was still running on BBC2 on weekend
Televox
Wow! Interactive television! A decade before
the red button came into its own, Televox
offered up teletext you control via Oracle.
Viewers who had tired of keying in page
numbers and waiting for them to cycle
round could instead call up a page with their
voice. To do this you had to go to page 777,
fiddle around with your “TP” button (also
used for the Oracle alarm clock) and then
call an 0898 number. What anticipation
there was when Creamup’s parents finally
38
“THICKIES LIVE HERE”
Sam Brady
One of the few to make the leap from
Oracle to its successors Teletext, Morrissey fan and Wiganer (as he always pointed
out) Sam compiled TV reviews that made
Garry Bushell look like the voice of sanity
by comparison. High point was when for no
explicable reason Sam launched into a diatribe against satellite viewers, calling houses
with dishes outside “dog doo areas... they
might as well put a sign up reading ‘THICKIES LIVE HERE’”. A few months later, he
began reviewing Sky One programmes. We
remember seeing Sam on Right To Reply
once, where he looked nothing like his
blocky caricature. Nowadays TV reviews
are supplied by Ceefax’s Caroline Jack and
Teletext’s Stafford Hildred, who we like as
we have a spread bet on the number of times
each week he refers to Coronation Street as
“our senior soap” and Emmerdale as “the
countryside soap”, and we’re coining it in.
allowed us to phone (“Just once, though”).
The proto-The Box novelty of seeing something you’ve entered appear on TV was dead
exciting, but the rest of it was just a bunch of
pointless quizzes, alas. The “star, hash, zero,
one, two” voice recognition rigmarole at the
start was quite good fun, mind.
Fun and Games
In the ‘80s, the only people Creamup knew
with a Teletext telly were our grandparents,
so visits to their house invariably involved
a look at the Ceefax Fun and Games section
on BBC2, a selection of puzzles and jokes
that involved judicious use of the reveal button, which at the time blew us away. Sadly,
when Ceefax was incorporated into BBC
News, all the fripperies were ditched, and
we only had Teletext’s Bamboozle for our
entertainment.
Park Avenue
The Oracle soap, detailing the antics of the
residents of the titular road in text-only
instalments updated every day at five o’clock.
Once referred to by Victor Lewis-Smith as
“resembling a novel the author has sent to
their publisher entirely by telegram”, the
finest hour was probably the storyline about
buying a racehorse after a Premium Bonds
win, which coincided with Oracle buying an
actual horse called Park Avenue and writing
about its genuine (losing) runs. Occasionally
there’d be pictures of some of the characters,
all of whom appeared to be based on ‘70s
pop stars. The 1445th and final instalment
on 31st December 1992 saw the cast assemble at a New Year’s Eve party where one
of the regulars announced that they’d been
making notes on everything that had happened, and they’d been commissioned by a
teletext company to write a daily serial based
on it. Unsurprisingly, that one was written
by a viewer who’d won a competition. You
may laugh, but it had a more loyal audience
than Family Affairs.
Debbie’s Diary/Josh’s Diary
Part of the Buzz teenage section on Oracle,
these two alternating regulars claimed to be
real-life diary extracts from two teenagers,
though were clearly written by some luckless
thirtysomething hack at Oracle. In fact, that
was probably the main appeal. A regular
favourite, along with the music section’s
fantastically-titled letters page, Blue Suede
Views.
After Hours
One of the big new ideas of Oracle’s replacement Teletext, this was, fantastically, “adult”
teletext, only available after 10 o’clock at
night. Such excitement when the young
viewer finally got to see it, only to discover
that, due to the service’s rather limited
graphic capabilities, it consisted only of
boring “sexscopes” and the like. After a few
months Teletext announced that After Hours
was being rested for a while, but would return shortly. Ten years on, we’re still waiting.
39
The Burst of Creamup
Digitiser
Paul Rose was working as a graphic designer
at the newly-launched Teletext in 1993 when
he was roped into helping to write their
video games section. Rose was instantly
rechristened Mr Biffo, and for the next
decade was in charge of the funniest and
most inventive teletext service ever, which
gained a hugely loyal audience (despite the
page number changing on an almost weekly
basis). Regular features included The Man
With A Long Chin’s Diary (and when he was
away, The Man’s Daddy’s Diary), endless
reveal pictures of snakes, columns from the
likes of Stuart Campbell, prank phone calls,
and a non-stop war of words with EMAP,
at one point leading to a 10-page critique
of the current issue of Computer & Video
Games magazine. Oh, and there was some
stuff about games as well, with reviews that
managed to piss off virtually every software
publisher in Britain. Alex Garland was a fan,
so much so he named one of the characters
in The Beach after a Digi regular (though
The Man failed to make it into the film,
alas). Alas, after a few years of this, Teletext
suits decided that rather than their games
section being full of jokes about hens, they
wanted it full of boring games reviews
instead. After much protest, they relented
and it returned to full strength until Biffo
called it a day in March 2003. Rose set up
digiworld.tv, but this unfortunately went
pop recently - nice Teletext-style graphics,
though. The final section included a special
thanks to Teletext’s current sub-editors “for
being the most lenient we’ve ever had and
allowing us to get away with murder”, as well
as a reveal picture of a great big spunking
cock.
Prog 43, December 21 2003
100 GREAT TV MOMENTS
Creamup’s monograph of minted
cathode-ray cavalcades
#21: December 1977 - Mike Yarwood wins
the biggest Christmas Day TV audience
ever
Many years before Kelvin McKenzie’s ratings
wristwatches were in the habit of conveniently discovering millions of hitherto
undocumented Talk Sport listeners, the
business of compiling audience figures was
a defiantly dignified, if rather creaky, affair.
Statistics were pieced together through
various methods, one of which involved
the BBC simply stopping random people
in the street and asking them what they
watched the night before. Trouble was, this
admittedly lunatic practice led to all sorts
of over-inflated estimates being chewed
over, including the claim that the 1977
Morecambe & Wise Christmas Show pulled
in 28.7m - a figure breathlessly reproduced
by a clearly somewhat emotional TV Times
12 months later (“Christmas wouldn’t be
the same without Eric and Ernie!”) still
dewy-eyed at the duo’s recent defection from
Shepherd’s Bush to the verdant surroundings of Euston Road.
Such highly-publicised numbertoting fostered Morecambe and Wise’s image
as kings of the seasonal TV special, until
somebody with a keen eye and a sharp grasp
of the Fact decided to step in. That man was,
of course, Sir Paul Gambaccini. He made a
point of analysing the ratings data gathered by independent company JICTAR to
correctly reveal how Eric’n’Ern only wooed
21.3m at Xmas 1977 itself 100,000 behind
that secured by, yes, The Mike Yarwood
Christmas Show. This was, of course, the
year of the Best Christmas Telly Line-Up
Ever, with BBC1 running The Generation Game at 7.15pm, Mike at 8.20pm and
Morecambe and Wise at 8.55pm. But despite
the latter boasting guests including Penelope
40
“If you’ve got Sky, can I come ‘round and watch the fight? Good luck Frank!”
Keith, Elton John and Francis “Riviera
Touch” Matthews, the statistics showed that
a stammering monobrowed Denis Healey
and “with their hit single, Mull Of Kintyre,
would you please welcome Wings!” won
the day.
Down the years Mike’s recordbreaking effort seems to have been forgotten
about, which is a shame as throughout the
‘70s he was just as much a part of Christmas
as his feted fellow hoofers, and his 1977
spectacular was just as consummate and entertaining as anything else the Beeb rustled
up for that hallowed early evening mince
pie time. Indeed, he went on to hold his
own against Den showing Angie the door in
1986’s Xmas EastEnders, which actually only
got 19m (the oft-quoted “30m” figure being
cooked up by the Beeb adding in the Sunday
omnibus ratings). If that wasn’t enough,
he’s even seen off three challenges from
Only Fools: in 1996 (Del Boy and co only
managing 21.3m), 2001 (20.3m,) and 2002
(16.3m). Not bad for an erstwhile travelling
salesman, a rumpled suit and a dozen odd
funny voices.
enough for her, she has to have 10 or 12!”)
and a ‘celebrity’ launch party (here’s Norman
Tebbit!) Sky television began transmitting
to the UK. And it was, as News Corp kept
reminding us, the biggest shake up of British
television for 30 years.
To mark this anniversary, we
here at Creamup have done our usual and
knocked up a heavily annotated list detailing
some of the essentially ace things about the
weird world of satellite telly. We invite you,
then, to look back at the television of the
future...
We’re the One!
For the last 15 years, Sky One (or Sky Channel as it was originally known) has been the
flagship of the Murdoch flotilla, but for most
of that time, it’s been a channel in search
of an identity. Beginning in 1989 with a
threadbare schedule consisting of reruns of
Family Ties, The Young Doctors, The Dolly
Parton Show and a dubious revival of The
Price is Right compered by Central News
anchor Bob Warman, its real coups were the
first Bruno vs Tyson fight (which at the time
was the basis for a classic “only three people
will be watching!” routine by Jasper Carrott,
before he signed off with a whinging, “If
you’ve got Sky, can I come ‘round and watch
the fight? Good luck Frank!”), and Bros’
post-Ken triumphalist gig at a tumbleweedstrewn Wembley Stadium. In a hint of things
to come, highlights of both shipped up on
the Beeb in short time.
The merger with BSB’s halfdecent Galaxy Channel in 1990 brought
Teenage Mutant Hero Turtles (never Ninja,
remember) alongside the newly-launched
The Simpsons, allowing Sky One to briefly
surf the zeitgeist - if you ignored a dubious
revival of Sale of the Century compered by
Thames smoothie linkman Peter Marshall.
One of the few other shows to make this
trip from Marcopolo to Astra (about which,
more below) was Wife of the Week, a Yorkshire-produced Mr and Mrs-esque vehicle
FACTS AMAZING: Mike Yarwood’s X-mas
1977 show is also the 11th most watched
programme in British history, just seven
places behind the TV premiere of The Spy
Who Loved Me
Prog 45, 22 February 2004
THE FUTURE OF
TELEVISION!
Creamup commemorates 15 years of
satellite telly
On February 5 1989, the future of television arrived. With much hand-wringing
elsewhere about the fate of ‘quality television’ (Peter Sissons: “The fear that more may
mean worse”), a snobbish mistrust of those
who’d actually be willing to pay for more
telly (nosy neighbour in reverse-psychology
Sky advert: “Four channels aren’t good
41
The Burst of Creamup
presented by Christopher Biggins, which
Sky One flung out in the afternoons - daily,
despite the name - before The Brady Bunch
most of the way through 1991. It’s not that
Sky themselves couldn’t do rotten shows off
their own back, though - so homesick was
Creamup during a holiday in Spain in 1992,
we went into the hotel’s TV room virtually
every single night to watch Bruno Brookes’
sub-Blind Date knock-off Love at First Sight.
And of course there was the legendary Sky
Star Search, a thousand-part series (so it
seemed) with Cheggers and two luckless
pundits like Rustie Lee and Jim Bowen
(who wore headphones, thus allowing
them to appreciate the acts in crystal-clear
sound) laughing uproariously at the sort of
fame-hungry wannabes who show up in the
auditions for Pop Idol. Somewhere, a young
Simon Fuller was taking notes.
Around the time of our summer
with Bruno, Sky One’s main attraction was
Studs, heavily promoted as “the raunchiest show on television’” and screened every
night at 10 o’clock. In fact, anyone who ever
got to see it found an American import with
three blokes and three women sitting on
sofas, having been on dates with each other,
with an irritating host between them, who’d
whoop whenever the girls mentioned how
small the blokes’ dicks were. And that was
it. These days, Five Go Dating goes further
at eight in the morning and nobody bats an
eyelid.
Perhaps the face of Sky One’s buccaneering years was DJ Kat, a rather mangy
looking feline puppet who linked hours and
hours and hours of cheap cartoons and pop
videos morning, noon and night. During the
summer, the Kat was followed by dreary animation Mrs Pepperpot, and then a triple bill
of American quizzes like Hollywood Squares,
going under the brilliant name of Panel Pot
Pourri. Meanwhile Sunday mornings at 6am
saw the imported gospel bonanza Hour of
Power (originally simulcast on Eurosport,
for some reason) which is still there to this
day, apparently as Rupert Murdoch likes it,
surely the only show to have lasted the entire
15 years of the channel. At least it wasn’t The
Coca-Cola Eurochart with Pat Sharp.
The Sky One strategy wasn’t
exactly complicated - just try and nick
anything off any other channel. ITV lost
Sharon Gless legal drama The Trials of Rosie
O’Neill, although nobody noticed, and
Beverly Hills 90210, while Channel 4 had to
wave goodbye to Oprah Winfrey. And when
ITV axed Blockbusters in the mid 1990s,
Sky were immediately on the phone to Bob
Holness’s agent. This carried on for some
time - in 1999, when the Beeb ‘axed’ One
Man and His Dog, Sky announced that they
were to poach the series, and run it under
the brilliant title of Sky One Man and His
Dog - a name we’ve only just spotted the pun
in. As it turned out, this never happened,
although it did allow the Sun to do articles
about shepherds whose dogs were mesmerised by the show, with the shepherd ‘saying’
things like “I’m going to have to subscribe
to Sky to keep him happy!” Perhaps that was
the entire point of the exercise.
Sheep-worrying aside, The XFiles in 1994 finally brought Sky One some
grudging credibility - hard to imagine now
that distant historical period when everyone
was going mad about that show - although it
didn’t help when most of Sky’s other output,
shipped in a wooden crate direct from the
Fox network in the US, was mercilessly
mocked in its best ever show (“Look at
Santa’s Little Helper, he wants to be one of
the Models Inc!”).
Every now and again, Sky One
tried to pretend to be a proper channel and
make proper programmes that didn’t involve
lunkheaded wrestlers, most of them dying
on their arse. Like TFI Friday knock-off The
Live Six Show (do you see?) presented from a
Soho pub by Gideon Coe and Jenny Powell,
and This Morning knock-off One to Three
with Paul Ross and Sarah Greene.
September 1996 brought Sky Two
42
“It may be a lousy channel, but The Simpsons are on TV!”
(“Two! Two! Two!”) which rightly started
as all new channels should, with a big clock
counting down, but with a schedule seemingly based on some old Border TV overnight listings (Renegade! Hercules!) it barely
lasted a year. The bad ideas kept coming.
Creamup has a battered old VHS we kept
cos it has the MOTD where Wrexham beat
West Ham in the snow and Trevor Brooking moaned, but it also features a lengthy
Sky One trailer starring Leslie Ash as a
Kenco-esque Sky boss (“I’m bored with the
Beeb, fed up with three and want more from
Four!”) from a bizarre period where every
night was themed, so all the crappy police
shows went on Saturday nights (Arresting
Television), comedy shows on Thursday
nights (Seinfeld at nine o’clock! Hooray! The
Nanny at half past eight! Boo!) and so on. It
lasted about a month before they went back
to having all the crappy police shows on
every night. Sky One has since brought us
trashy proto-’Wives football drama Dream
Team, starring at various points, Big Ron Atkinson, Eddie Royle off of EastEnders, Stefan
“Feel Good” Dennis off of Neighbours and
Ferdy off of This Life, and the hateful Ibiza
Uncovered, but there’s still only one reason
to give thanks to “billionaire tyrant Rupert
Murdoch” for Sky One. “It may be a lousy
channel, but The Simpsons are on TV!”
things pre-dated the Yentob-lead overhaul of
BBC2 by almost a year.
The kit that came with BSB was
further cause for excitement. Most iconic
was the squarial - it was like an aerial, only
it was square! It was also a fantastic sop to
the middle-classes. The white giants were
scummy Sky subscribers, the discreet black
squares were cappuccino-sipping BSB-ites.
Then there were the sleek decoder boxes.
Getting one of these was like signing up to
the future, and Creamup seems to remember much talk of being able to send TV text
messages to other people via the 31 degrees
west fantasy factory.
But what of the service itself?
Fantastically, BSB went all out to cover all
the bases, trying to provide a fully-rounded
television service that meant you’d have no
further need of boring old terrestrial. The
bedrock of it all was Galaxy, the entertainment channel. With a plush string musicalsting and that autumnal ident - you were
in safe hands. Creamup has many happy
memories of discovering a lot of The Goodies’ stuff hadn’t really aged that well (bar
The Goodies Rule OK, obviously), reliving
the Tucker vs Benny floating bench race in
Grange Hill, learning word-for-word Robby
Box’s “you drink too much, you smoke too
much and you always go gunning for one
man” put-down from a rerun of Big Deal,
avoiding the repeats of Steptoe and Son
which went out under the banner The Best
of Steptoe and Son (as though it was Wilfrid
Brambell going “’Ere ‘Arold, remember
when I dropped pickled onions in the
bath?”) and checking out the daily entertainment gossip in the grand-daddy of Liquid
News, 31 West (the bolt-hole for the Broom
Cupboard’s Debbie Flint, in case you were
wondering). But, of course, the flagship for
BSB was the thrice-weekly sci-fi soap Jupiter
Moon. Referred to at the time as “Crossroads
in space” 150 episodes were made, but only
108 were shown in the UK thanks to the
BSB/Sky ‘merger’ in December 1990. Grey,
From the Marcopolo satellite...
The coming of BSB and “five channel
television” was the most exciting thing ever.
Loads better, in fact, than Sky (which was
sign-posted up as being shoddy miles in advance), BSB almost had a BBC ethos about
it. A quality service, delivering a top quality
picture (thanks to D-MAC, which we’re
calling digital telly 10 years before Sky +)
and - crucially - sporting quality on-screen
idents. In fact, it was these idents that really
marked out BSB as the pay-per-view Beeb.
Five bog-standard but stylish bits of LambieNairnalia essaying his early 1990s obsession
with shafts of light and billowing silk, these
43
The Burst of Creamup
drab stuff all in all. Creamup, however, has
far fonder - if fuzzier - memories of Galaxy’s
weekend afternoon Chris Bellinger-baiting
Cool Cube. With band-in-residence Take
That (and indeed, Gary Barlow penned
future B-side Waiting Around specifically for
the show) Cool Cube was a live two-hour-orso programme with that features/fun/facts
mixture that Going Live! was then plying
on BBC1. It also boasted a first TV appearance for Violet Berlin, and, thanks to her
predilection for Castlevania, button-holed
her as ‘lady computer games expert’ for the
rest of her career. We also seem to recall
the show featured a space-age Knightmarestyle gameshow that heavily featured kids
in space-ships zipping up and down tubes
or something - and if any Creamup readers
can shed any further light on this then, the
usual address please. At the other end of the
scale, alas, came Nick Hancock’s rubbish
La Triviata; loud and unfunny trivia-based
musings which we’re sure he’s hoping only
we remember.
To be honest, Creamup never
really ventured much onto BSB’s four other
channels, but here a quick rundown as to
what they were all about. So there was The
Movie Channel which seemed to show
nothing but Scandal. Then there was The
Sports Channel which bagged the first two
rounds of the FA Cup live. The Now channel
self-consciously covered lifestyle, politics,
arts etc and boasted shows for Nina Myskow
and Sir Robin Day (fantastically titled Now,
Sir Robin). It was also the place where you
could find loads of syndicated stuff like
Creme De La Creme River Journeys - The Mekong, the kind of programming that might
be screened on a loop in a Lufthansa club
class departure lounge TV, we’re saying. Best
of the rest, though, was The Power Station.
A big favourite with Creamup’s sister, who
was at the time embarking on an ill-advised
effort to fill up as many videos with The
Wonder Stuff, The Claytown Troupe and
The Telescopes (who they?) as possible,
she spent many hours in front of the Power
Station ready to record. So keen was she, in
fact, to bag some of the more obscure tunes
that she wrote into the viewers’ request show
- hosted by Carmen ‘Carmen Ejogo Nude
Pics Carmen Ejogo Naked Videos’ Ejogo in an effort to get her chosen songs on the
telly. In an incident that could have come
straight out of David Frost’s autobiography,
Ms Ejogo read out the effusive praise our
sister had felt obliged to include with her
request, but then went on to reveal: “Well,
I’m afraid some of these videos you want
are quite obscure - so here’s some Faith No
More instead!” Now, that’s hardly how these
things are supposed to work, is it? Of course,
if The Power Station is to remembered for
anything it’s in giving Chris Evans his first
on screen gig (along with Sonia Saul, looking rather too much like Moira Stuart it had
to be said). And so repellent was he in this
capacity (“Me one! Me two! Me three!”)
that the Creamup editor has to admit he subsequently shied away from The Big Breakfast
for many months before he could finally
come around to the idea of it actually being
any good.
The most well-preserved part of
BSB’s entire output, however, went out on
Saturday 22nd and Sunday 23rd September as the Galaxy channel gave over the
whole weekend’s telly to Doctor Who, thus
prompting fans countrywide to nip down
to Curry’s and pickup a six-pack of 180s.
The best thing about this was seeing 31 West
renamed 31 Who in honour of the occasion,
and Debbie Flint’s convincing portrayal of
puzzlement at this re-badging: “It said ‘31
Who’!... The titles!” There was also the great
competition wherein a viewer could have
their face appear in the 31 Who titles, and
best of all, John Nathan-Turner was on-hand
as a special co-presenter in a definitively repulsive shirt. His involvement was revealed
to the nation as the presenters stumbled
into the TARDIS console room wondering
whether “a Time Lord or even Doctor Who”
44
“He scored a goal, got sent off, and we don’t even know who he is!”
could perhaps be inside. Instead they found
JNT with his back turned. Whirling around
when cued he revealed all: “Oh no it’s not
Doctor Who, it’s not even a hideous alien
monster. I’m John Nathan-Turner and I was
the producer of Doctor Who”. Copious “Stay
tuned”s thusly followed.
But the good times were to be
short and sweet, and 2 December 1990 at
2am, a scant five months after launch, BSB
‘merged’ with Sky and from hereon in it was
WWF, ALF and 21 Jump Street all the way. It
was like ITV had eaten the BBC.
sainted Peter Brackley commentating on a
match between Venezuela and Brazil from
a sound studio in Soho, with nothing but a
faxed list of players numbered 1-22 to guide
him. Inevitably, a substitute numbered 23
entered the field of play, and inevitably got
booked, scored the winning goal and got
sent off, leaving Brackers forced to utter the
immortal line: “He’s scored a goal, got sent
off, and we don’t even know who he is!”
Coming soon
If satellite television had a graveyard, it
would be packed to capacity yet tangled with
weeds. In the 1980s, most of us had only
ever seen the launch of one television channel, and truth be told, we’d switched back to
Screen Test pretty quick. But with satellite,
new channels seemed to be springing up
practically every week, regardless of whether
anyone actually wanted to watch them.
For instance, the demented Sky Scottish,
broadcasting for two hours a night, beaming
Scotland Today and Take The High Road to
an audience, according to BARB of, give or
take a few, and this is just a bit of fun, zero.
Similarly, there was also Sky Soap, which
had Emmerdale on up to six times a day and
also ran with High Road and Families, but
only broadcast up to mid-afternoon, because
of course housewives don’t watch TV after
4pm.
Mention also here to Granada
Sky Broadcasting, which launched to a
grand fanfare in 1996. Granada promised a
“bouquet” of seven channels, but this was
a lie. For a start, four of them occupied
the same transponder, under the heading
Granada Good Life, split into Granada
High Street (programmes about shopping),
Granada Health and Beauty, Granada Food
and Wine, and Granada House and Garden,
all broadcasting for three hours a day, as did
late night service Granada Men and Motors. Then there was Granada Talk TV, the
pointless televised all-day phone-in fronted
by Roy Greenslade and later, groo, Paul
It was never like this at Halifax Town,
Richard
For most people, it was probably Sky’s
Dyke-baiting heist of the Premiership rights
in 1992 that finally persuaded them to get
a dish, encouraged by that Simple Mindsbacked Whole New Ball Game commercial
featuring the creme de la creme of British
football - John Wark! Andy Ritchie! - arseing around in a gym and running down
a tunnel with a transparent floor, while
Paul Stewart drove around in a Porsche,
Vinny Jones had a shower and Peter Reid
imparted tactical instructions as only he
can. But in its early days, Sky Sports had
a rather more eclectic schedule, featuring
gems such as ZDS Cup Football (which did
bring us Tranmere 6, Newcastle 6), Tuesday
night talking shop The Footballer’s Football
Show, Italian Football with a moonlighting
John Inverdale, and Netbusters, a musical
round-up of goals which Sky seems to axe
and revive every couple of years. And of
course in 1992 there was the Cricket World
Cup (Danny Baker: “Getting to know that
man in the Gillette commercial very well”),
when England reached the final. That night,
when Des Lynam had to grudgingly thank
Sky for letting Sportsnight show half an hour
of highlights, a little bit of all of us died. Sky
Sports eventually killed off prototype rival
Screensport, of which Creamup remembers
little, except a fantastic story about the
45
The Burst of Creamup
Ross assisted by Natasha Kaplinsky on work
experience. Creamup did like Sportstalk, the
lunchtime kick-about with Jeremy Nicholas
and Jonathan Pearce. There was also F2F, a
hopeless look at “youth issues” fronted by a
tyro Sacha Baron Cohen arsing about with
a clipboard. On weekends, Talk TV did roll
out some old classic David Frost interviews
(“It’s so childish, and pathetic, and we’ll be
right back!”). It lasted a year, but they didn’t
even get to say goodbye, as its final day
coincided with the death of Princess Diana
and they showed Sky News instead. Best of
the lot was Granada Plus, especially in its
early days, when they just flung on anything
Granada had ever made in any old order,
so on the first night, Creamup watched The
Grumbleweeds Radio Show followed by an
old What the Papers Say followed by flop
Australia surfie/Cheshire horsey set afternoon soaper Families, followed by Corrie
from 1978, followed by The Army Game.
In black and white. Two things: a) fantastic! and b) a channel heavily based around
repeats of Albion Market is clearly going
to lose millions and millions of pounds.
Granada Plus also showed Lord Melv’s spinoff cultural talking shop South Bank Live on
Sunday nights at eight o’clock. This did
not last.
Creamup was sad to lose the
short-lived Sky Sports Gold, which showed
ancient editions of Superstars and Bobby
Charlton’s Football Scrapbook (But Actually Presented By Dickie Davies). In 1996,
we were promised the WB channel, which
even had listings in the Radio Times and
everything - Friends and Lois & Clark were
the big guns - but just didn’t turn up, and
nobody mentioned it again.
And then there was The Family
Channel, built around welcome repeats of
Treasure Hunt (altogether now: “Hello”) and
the much-flogged TVS/MTM archive. And
let’s face it, when he devised the concept of
the geo-stationary orbit, access to complete
reruns of David Hamilton’s All Clued Up
were exactly what Arthur C Clarke had
in mind. For its sheer legendary status we
should mention here that when The Family
Channel closed down for the evening it
linked up with a German station that basically offered a video jukebox of soft porn
pop songs. On offer were such dubious
delights as Hello by Twinkle (two blonde
twins frolic in a pool), We Cheer You Up by
The Pin-Up Club (lots of half-naked models
prance around singing something about
“sitting back in a lazy chair” - later used as
the backing music for Wow! FM in On The
Hour), Have You Got Your Stockings On by
some Roxette resembling band that we can’t
remember the name of (a woman sings
with strange merriment about a telephone
stalker), and, erm, Massive Attack’s Be
Thankful (featuring a skanky pole-dancer
as some sort of ironic statement on cheap
glossy pop video titilation). Oh, and for no
obvious reason, New Kids On The Block’s
Games.
Into the digital age, and another
short-lived venture proved to be the [.tv]
channel. With a name like that, how could
it fail? Devoted to computers and general
techie stuff, here was the place where you
could find Ross King and several bald
journalists in short-sleeved shirts musing over - er, we dunno - Tamagotchi key
rings or something, in the rather static and
uninvolving consumer test programme,
Buyer’s Guide. Then there was the chirpy
Kate Russell and further sweaty journos
answering viewers’ PC problems (“Hi Kate,
love the show... my PC keeps giving me a
‘runtime error’”) in the inevitably named
Chips With Everything. Closer to home as
far as Creamup is concerned, however, was
the ‘How to’ guide, Masterclass, hosted by
Simon Topping. Basically an idiot’s guide to
using your computer, it has a special place
in the annals because Mr Topping himself
once emailed TV Cream a huge mp3 of the
Charlie’s Angels theme and it clogged up the
TVC fat pipe for a good few hours.
46
“No Germany’s Top 10 or, ahem, The Hitman and Herr”
Channel 47 and nothing on
Before the advent of Sky Digital brought us
an infinite number of television stations,
all of them featuring Paul Lavers, back in
the 1990s the restricted capacity of the first
Astra satellite meant lots of networks had to
squeeze onto the same transponder for a few
hours each day. Perhaps the most extreme
example was the magical Transponder 47,
which depending on the time you tuned in,
broadcast imported televangelism, rolling
weather forecasts, reruns of Take the High
Road, hours and hours of extended adverts
for holidays, documentaries about Nazis,
reruns of Land of the Giants and ancient
football. Creamup also used to love Transponder 59, which showed a rolling promo
about the Astra satellite itself, with loads of
footage of rockets taking off and stuff. But
that’s just us.
toon titles were rendered in the ‘classic’ style,
although perhaps in homage to its origins,
the producers gave Gottschalk an English
butler. There was also an unashamed knockoff of David Letterman, Die Harald Schmidt
Show, with a host who waggled pencils and
brandished guests’ CDs in exactly the same
irritating manner as Dave.
Nighttime viewing also brought
much excitement, as Teutonic insomniacs
had a slightly more eclectic selection of
programming than their British counterparts. No Germany’s Top 10 or, ahem, The
Hitman and Herr for the shiftworkers and
students of Deutschland. Instead, after the
programmes had finished, the German networks kept the Astra satellite in action with
some strange time-fillers. Perhaps the best
remembered was the nonstop footage of a
fire burning in a hearth, presumably nicked
from the kind of yuppie joke video that the
Innovations catalogue flogged in 1988, while
another channel just stuck a camera on the
front of a car, drove around a bit, and then
broadcast the results, a bit like the closing
credits of early Sesame Street. More recently
they’ve taken to laying on a spot the difference phone-in competition which involved
sticking two virtually identical pictures on
screen and then doing nothing else for about
half an hour. Then there was the channel
which bunged a camera into the studio of
a late night talk radio studio and streamed
the footage on television. One network
broadcast primitive interactive computer
games like noughts and crosses, strangely
compelling at 3am. And then there was the
fantastic Space Night, which consisted of
hours and hours of slow-motion footage of
NASA space missions cut to ambient music.
Brilliant.
Five hours of mantra-filled oompah
Perhaps the most exciting thing about getting plugged into satellite, after the initial
thrills of non-stop football, The Simpsons
and reruns of The Fall Guy had worn off,
was the availability of German channels
on Astra, providing non-stop football, The
Simpsons and reruns of The Fall Guy in
German. But so much more besides. Every
Saturday afternoon, one channel broadcast
a live show from a massive bierkeller with
the audience seated at big tables eagerly
drinking huge foaming steins of beer, as
they watched the traditional entertainment
of lederhosen-clad accordion players and
thigh-slapping dancers. Now, we don’t want
to resort to outdated national stereotypes
here, but this was very, very funny. Especially as it seemed to go on for about five
hours. It also seems relevant to mention the
German remake of Noel’s House Party, aka
Gottschalk’s Hausparty, hosted by a bloke
with a perm called Thomas Gottschalk, who
looked a bit like 1980s goalkeeper Harald
Schumacher. Hausparty was remarkably
faithful to the source material, even the car-
“What is Hot Metal I only know MTV
Headbangers Ball”
One of the most publicised USPs of getting
satellite for anyone too young for cynicism
about the type of channel that plays Take
47
The Burst of Creamup
Dear Ed...
Perhaps the most obscure television cult
of all time. Mention Paramount Channel
Text to satellite subscribers of a certain age,
and they’ll waft into a misty-eyed reverie,
recalling the fantastic Mailbox page, which
became an obsession of Creamup’s in 1996,
and we used to literally sit there some night
waiting for Ed to update it. It consisted of
20 to 30 pages of viewers’ opinions, jokes,
moans, suggestions for programming
(which the channel actually listened to) and
was truly brilliant. It was also carried on two
pages - 720 and 820, one “flipping” faster
than the other for “speed readers”. Paramount also ran “repeats” of defunct Oracle
“soaps” Park Avenue and Debbie’s Diary. If
Creamup ever got to run its own teletext service (we tried for a bit but the closest we got
was actually sneaking the phrase, “Where
are the quizzes?” onto Channel 4 one day),
Paramount Text was something akin to what
it would be like.
That and Clawfinger on equal levels was the
availability of MTV Europe. Their parade of
English-as-second-language presenters was
much parodied, not least on The Day Today,
and remains something of a touchstone to
those who think Dave Berry and Tim Kash
are really any kind of step forward. Enrico,
Eden, Hugo, Camilla, Simone, Kimsy, Marijne who went on to front Britpop also-rans
Salad, Carolyn Lillipaly at the news desk...
they may have been relatively interchangeable style-wise, but at least you knew who
they were. A tyro Davina McCall was in
there, of course, mostly looking alternately
overexcited and bemused on teatime flashing lightathon Hanging Out, occasionally
alongside one Crispin Somerville, who in
an odd moment of life imitating art was
actually on The Day Today (the one on
Sorted! who’s not Graham Linehan). Some
of Creamup still hold a candle for BSB
Power Station graduate Toby Amies, the Jon
Spencer Blues Explosion-loving Alternative Nation presenter who should have been
huge. The big internal star, though, was Ray
Cokes, whose nightly show Most Wanted
mixed live music, crash zooms, caller baiting and knowingly terrible jokes. Chris
Evans almost certainly remembers it, not
least as Wiiiiiiiill MacDonald was producer
(Stuart ‘murphyisamuppet’ Murphy was
also involved) This was followed in 1996
by X-Ray Vision, a massive scale version of
the same which was already faltering badly
by six weeks into the run when an outside
broadcast in Hamburg ended with the
crowd and Cokes exchanging pleasantries.
His last show for the station went out a
week later. In 1997 it all went regionalised,
launched a whole host of TV careers and
became no fun. At least we had VH-1, playing The Corrs endlessly before they had hits
and renaming Julia Carling, Jules, as if we
wouldn’t notice.
Gold!
The voyage of UK Gold from a homely squat
for genuinely unusual bits of old tat from
the Beeb and Thames archives to The Maisie
Raine Channel is the subject of perennial grumblings across numerous online
TV-related enclaves. UK Gold launched on
November 1 1992, prefigured by a series of
baffling trailers showing 1) dogs as miners (as in ‘coal’, rather than underagers),
2) a ticking clock, 3) a gold-painted man
wistfully thinking back to his beach holiday
on the west coast of America (seemingly),
and 4) those dogs again, but now got up as
EastEnders characters (“Bitch, bitch, bitch,
bitch...”). The station’s initial on-screen
identity centred around a Golden Retriever
called Goldie (and we’re thinking that if
Noakes was banned from using Shep in ads,
then a certain Derbyshire farmer wasn’t
coining it in here) dragging the UK Gold
logo onto screen, to the strains of a cheerily
whistled tune. Rather excellently on launch
48
“Watch out for an early appearance by Dempsey & Makepiece’s Glynis Barber!”
night this was followed by the channel’s first
ever ads, and all six were for suitably ‘gold’
themed products - that’s Gold Blend, Kellog’s Golden Crisp, St Ivel Gold, Lakha Gold
jewelry and, er, Lucozade (which, although
sort of golden in colour, was still letting the
side down we feel).
A typical evening’s viewing during
the early days of UK Gold went something
like this: 6pm Blake’s 7, 7pm A Tribute To
Tommy Cooper (that’s three hours!), 10pm
KYTV, 10.40pm Something for the Weekend, 11.20pm In Concert: Duran Duran and
12.30am The UK Gold Movie: In Which We
Serve. Other Programmes floating around
the schedules at the time give a fair indication of UK Gold’s breadth: Bergerac, It Ain’t
Half Hot Mum, The Fall and Rise of Reginald
Perrin, The Day of the Triffids, Just Good
Friends, The Innes Book of Records, Hilary
(the scatty Marti Caine-com!), Eldorado,
Laugh?... I Nearly Paid My Licence Fee, Naked Video, The Mad Death, Doomwatch and
Going Straight. In short, some top stuff.
Over the years, UK Gold sported
more logo redesigns than even Bravo, ranging from that dog, to a slab that whirled into
shot like the Breakfast Time titles, to a gold
nugget, to a BBC-friendly Gill Sans effort, to
the current day incarnation which just looks
all unbalanced to us. Naturally, whilst the
logo changed, the on-screen presentation
did likewise including a phase when their
off-screen announcer went all fact-amazing
(“...watch out for an early appearance by
Dempsey & Makepiece’s Glynis Barber!”)
and - best of all - a shortlived and surely
retro-fuelled experimentation with in-vision
continuity around about 1996.
Now we don’t claim to have the
facts to hand here, but we’re going to say that
it was five years into UK Gold’s life that the
channel began to go a bit rubbish. Instead of
sticking with the goodies and also The Goodies from the BBC archive, it became more
of a ‘second chance to see’ channel, running
present day BBC hits mere weeks after they’d
finished their original terrestrial outing. Coincidentally (or perhaps not, eh readers?!),
November 1 1997 was also when UKTV
(the company behind UK Gold) launched
their new family of associated channels; UK
Horizons, UK Style and UK Arena. A year
later UK Play also arrived, although this one
was only available on digital or cable. For a
time, UK Arena pulled in the slack genuinely interesting archive telly-wise (we saw
The War Game on there and Sounds of the
‘70s too) but to be honest, the last thing we
can remember getting excited about on any
of the UK channels was Chef for a Night, and
that was on UK Food (which came along in
2001).
Nevertheless, Creamup still has
fond memories of UK Gold, which in its
prime seemed to have been allocated the
crappiest signal available on the Astra satellite. As a result, most of their programmes
arrived behind a veritable blizzard. Luckily,
it wasn’t long before we discovered that permanently holding down the channel number
on the remote-control actually boosted
the reception. The result was a slightly less
speckled off-air of Day of the Triffids, and a
hard patch on the thumb.
“You’re listening to Asda FM”
Everyone goes on about how listening to the
radio via the telly is some kind of new thing,
but we were doing it a decade ago, although
it did require a lot of fiddling around with
the remote control. But if you knew where
to look, you could listen to Asda FM in
the comfort of your own home (“Why not
visit our in-store bakery?”). Creamup also
went through a phase of listening to the
Supergold sustaining service carried on
Astra, principally to hear the feeds being
beamed out to Chiltern’s Hot FM network
on the same frequency, with all manner of
news updates, travel news for Bedfordshire
commuters and Saturday afternoon football
reports, interspersed with exciting “secret”
backstage repartee between the feeds. If
49
The Burst of Creamup
Creamup ever went speed dating, we’d keep
quiet about this sort of thing, believe us.
Prog 47, 18 April 2004
RADIO 1 - AS IT WAS
As Kevin Greening pointed out, prior to
1993, BBC Radio 1 was the only place you
could hear new music and cutting-edge
comedy, thanks to the likes of Mark Goodier’s Evening Session, Out On Blue Six with
Mark Radcliffe, and The Mary Whitehouse
Experience.
“Salman Rushdie’s got a new job where
nobody’ll find him...”
...he’s got his own show on Sky! Ah, satire.
If it did nothing else, the launch of satellite
television managed to keep British comedy
alive for a surprisingly long period in the
late-’80s and early-’90s, with every sketch
show worth it’s salt realising that a reference
to Sky guaranteed a belly laugh from the
audience. KYTV seemed the most obvious offender, but in fact most of the jokes
there were aimed squarely at terrestrial
output, Angus Deayton saying that he’d only
watched satellite telly occasionally in hotels
(surprised he found the time, eh, readers?).
However the likes of Jasper Carrott (“And
now a message for everyone who’s bought
a BSB dish - Hello, Mr Wiggins!”), Clive
James and Smith and Jones couldn’t resist a
regular smirk at the shoddy, unwatched output beamed down from space, chuckling at
the endless episodes of The Price is Right and
the non-stop appearances of Derek Jameson
and Frank Bough.
By the end of the 1990s, though,
many of those who sneered were telling
anyone who’d listen that terrestrial telly
was a dead duck - not at all connected with
the fact they couldn’t get any shows on terrestrial channels anymore - and that without
Sky they wouldn’t have the telly on at all.
Still, some kept the faith - and in 1999, Hale
and Pace, on their legendary series h&p@
bbc, were seen telling guest Keith Chegwin
that “You’ve suffered a lot in recent years,
Keith, as you’ve presented programmes on
Sky!” It must have been a full five years since
that gag had previously got an outing on
television.
However during the day you still had Simon
Bates, Gary Davies and Bruno Brookes
talking rubbish, with the average age of the
Radio 1 DJ being about 50, and the listeners not much younger. Matthew Bannister
arrived in the autumn of 1993 to change
things around, though it’s worth pointing
out that DLT had already resigned before
the new boss even arrived at the station.
Bannister’s first changes were
actually fairly subtle. Simon Bates quit and
was replaced by Simon Mayo, with Mark
Goodier at breakfast. Mark Radcliffe arrived on weeknights and Steve Lamacq and
Jo Whiley presented the Evening Session
full-time. It was the weekends that saw the
most changes, though, with Danny Baker on
Saturday and Sunday mornings, plus John
Peel and The Rock Show in the afternoons.
The most obvious problem here was that
there wasn’t any chart music after 10am. Yet
a lot of the old guard still hung around, with
Jakki Brambles and Steve Wright still In The
Afternoon, and Adrian Juste sandwiched
between the Bake and Andy Kershaw. This
led to a weird hybrid of a station, which
nobody enjoyed very much. Unsurprisingly,
then, within weeks another revamp was announced for the start of 1994.
“My record collection is 90 percent R&B
and... Nicky Campbell’s taking his trousers
off!”
This new line-up saw Gary Davies bugger off, finishing his last show with the full
version of Layla (followed by Danny Baker
saying “If you want to hear that record again
50
“He’s stuck at nine, he’s Stuck With You, he’s Huey Lewis and the News!”
Better still was Radio Tip Top, with
Kid Tempo and The Ginger Prince helming
an hour of music via the magic of Lunewyre
Technology, spinning the latest discs in the
chart (“He’s stuck at nine, he’s Stuck With
You, he’s Huey Lewis and the News!”) and
introducing live sets from the covers band
Blinder, all linked by the greatest jingles in
radio history, none of which anyone seems
to have on tape or indeed even remember
(if you do, please set up a website, we’ll visit
it). There were some shit comedy shows in
this slot - like Bits from Last Week’s Radio, a
sketch show with Greg Proops that ran for
months - but for the most part, you could
normally count on something entertaining, as you could with Collins and Maconie’s
Hit Parade and the investigative Soundbite.
Following this with Scrawn and Lard meant
three hours of the most inventive and intelligent music programming around. Was any
commercial radio station doing anything
like this? Were they balls!
and again, listen to Virgin!”) and
being replaced by the great Kevin Greening, Steve Wright move to breakfasts, and
Mark Goodier relegated to the afternoon.
The two biggest changes were Emma Freud’s
news-based lunchtime show and Nicky
Campbell mixing music with long, long
interviews at Drivetime. These actually came
up with some interesting pieces of radio, but
inevitably the general audience didn’t take to
them, and within a year both were changed
- Emma was replaced by the hopeless Lisa
I’Anson, with her “Where’s The Party At?”
slot (as parodied by Mark Radcliffe’s “What
Are You Having For Your Dinner Then?”)
and Nicky Campbell swapped slots with
Mark Goodier, who just played a load of records. Sadly too, Danny Baker was cut down
from six to two hours a week, with Simon
Mayo’s Golden Hour spin-off Classic Years
replacing him on Sundays.
However Radio 1 was clearly
sorting itself out. Comedy and documentaries had been part of the schedules for
many years, but Bannister gave them better,
more regular slots, with the hour from
9-10pm devoted to feature programmes.
Comedy normally appeared on Mondays
and Wednesdays, most notably in The Chris
Morris Music Show, which is documented
in immense detail on the web. But there was
also other great stuff like Lee and Herring,
broadcasting live (as could be heard when
the word “wanking” was bleeped out of a
sketch, only for Richard to immediately announce “It was funnier when it said wanking!”) and generating a massive following
with their sketches - this is where Rod Hull
first appeared - and pointless campaigns,
such as inviting listeners to write to hapless
Radio Cambridgeshire presenter Christopher South to demand signed photos. There
was also the short-lived Shuttleworth’s Showtime, a variety show presented from John’s
front room, most notable for it’s fantastic
jingles (“Time to get up off the sofa, John
your Brief Sitdown is over!”).
“Saturday is less chatter day, 97 to 99
percent music!”
More important than any other changes,
though, were those involving the music
policy. Trevor Dann arrived at the station
in late-1994 as Head of Production, with a
brief to sort out the station’s sound. One of
Dann’s first ideas was to announce that they
would no longer play records from before
1990 - a controversial move at the time, but
with hindsight the most obvious idea in the
world. No longer would you hear Herman’s Hermits on the breakfast show. Dann
restructured the playlist, and was much
braver than anyone else, sticking acts like
The Prodigy and Oasis straight on the A-list
and not bothering with the “new” Beatles
single, correctly assuming that none of the
target audience really cared. With the likes
of Pete Tong and the Evening Session playing
hundreds of new records a week, Radio 1
had become a truly exciting, dynamic station, like nothing else in Britain. The arrival
51
The Burst of Creamup
of one Chris Evans in April 1995 pointed out
to everyone that here was a station that was
on the up.
For a while, then, everything was
fantastic. Everyone was battling to get their
singles on the playlist, every newspaper was
writing pages and pages about Chris Evans,
and everyone knew exactly what Radio 1
stood for - especially when Status Quo sued
them for not playing their records, and were
laughed out of court. Now you could listen
to the station all day and not want to throw
the radio out of the window at the annoying
presenters and ancient “quality pop”. Instead,
you were excited by the fantastic array of
brand new music they were playing. It hadn’t
been easy, but just two years since Bates
was kicked out, you could stand up and announce you were a Radio 1 listener without
any shame whatsoever. The most obvious
demonstration of this came in February
1996 when, to herald the Brit Awards, for a
week the station only played records by British artists - of whom about 99 percent had
received their first play on the station.
weekends, and Mary Anne Hobbs would cohost the Evening Session. Sadly, the feature
slot was to be dropped, so there was to be no
more comedy, but it was replaced by John
Peel in a convenient slot three nights a week
so it wasn’t all bad, and a line-up majoring on Evans and Radcliffe sounded very
promising. Sadly, Evans’ departure messed
all this up. Mark and Lard were parachuted
in on breakfasts, so Kevin Greening was
allocated afternoons, and Mary Anne Hobbs
did late nights. Inevitably, all of Chris Evans’
listeners decided they hated Mark and Lard,
and promptly stopped tuning in. Ratings
plummeted at a massive rate, and eventually Radio 1 lost its nerve and moved them
to the afternoons, with Kevin Greening and
Zoe Ball at breakfast instead.
While the line-up, and the music
policy, was still pretty good, ultimately it lost
its edge, not helped by the departure of Matthew Bannister. By the end of 1998, Kevin
Greening, a fantastic and much-underrated
DJ, had been dumped from the breakfast
show and relegated to a shitty “best of ” show
on Sunday mornings, while the unimpressive Dave Pearce and Chris Moyles arrived
in daytime. To cram in Moyles, all the other
shows were pushed back in the schedules,
meaning much of the specialist output
ended up late at night. Finally in 1999
came the moment we knew it was all over
- Martine McCutcheon got on the playlist.
However, we must point out that even today
it’s a hundred times better than Virgin.
“We unreservedly loathe the man”
Sadly, it couldn’t last. Chris Evans selfdestructed after about a year, firstly going up
to Scotland for a week to booze heavily and
insult on air everyone he didn’t like. Then
in November 1996, Evans slagged off Trevor
Dann on the show, like anyone outside Radio 1 gave a toss. Eventually he packed it in
for good after holding Bannister for ransom
and then refusing to work his notice period,
sticking two fingers up at the listeners he
was supposed to be so loyal to. This all led to
something of a problem for Bannister, who
was about to launch a new schedule revamp.
Mark and Lard decided that, after
three years working nights, they’d like to
do something new at a more sociable hour,
so they were pencilled in to do the afternoons. Kevin Greening was to replace them
in the evenings, Jo Whiley would replace
Lisa I’Anson who’d been shunted off to the
Prog 48, 16 May 2004
GREAT NEWS INSIDE!
Creamup’s compendium of failed magazines
“We would like to take this opportunity
to thank everyone that has contributed to
Internet Magazine over the years, and to also
thank our readers - just a shame that there
weren’t more of you!”
And so another glossy heads for
the pulping machine as this month Emap
52
“Mega Machines is entirely unconnected from Mean Machines”
announced it was pulling the plug on its
big internet organ. OK, so we can’t actually
claim that we know anyone who ever read it
or had much regard for the publication, but
it does make a useful springboard for our
Big Feature. Yes, Creamup is leafing through
the back catalogue of heroic publishing
failures, and listing those bright and pert
periodicals that just couldn’t go the distance.
identical. It was pretty honest, too - a regular
feature where they interviewed the staff of
a games company about what they did and
how they got there was dropped after two
outings, with an admission that it was a crap
idea and they should never have launched
it in the first place. Suddenly Impact had a
distinctive publication in their portfolio.
The content: The usual games reviews, previews and tips, but in a rather more scurrilous style than usual. The first issue included
the publication of the CV of a budding
writer who was turned down and had gone
off to work for Future, which much sniggering over the announcement that he was “a
modern ‘concept’ artist”. The final page of
each issue was devoted to quotes from other
magazines and PR people trying to hype up
shit games (“Yes, but don’t the graphics and
sound make up for it?”) which generated no
end of complaints. A regular photo-story
feature saw the team dressed in balaclavas
breaking into a software manufacturer’s
offices to steal prizes, which sums the whole
magazine up. And there was tons of swearing, which a juvenile Creamup thoroughly
enjoyed.
What went wrong: The quotes page had
already pissed off the entire games industry, and then Impact, who had previously
bought out the stinking carcass of Newsfield
a few years earlier, went bust themselves. So
after five issues, the magazine, and its more
straight-laced stablemates, simply disappeared.
The big finish: No big farewell here, just
a huge collapse, which in a way was quite
fitting. And at least it wasn’t as embarrassing as the final issue of Commodore Force,
published at the same time, where the entire
editorial was about how the C64 still had a
bright future and how they’d still be going
strong to cover it. Oh dear.
Mega Machines, Impact Magazines
Price: £2.50
On the shelves: November 1993 - March
1994
The team: The great Al Needham wrote
loads, and in between this and Deluxe (see
below), he spent some time, along with
Mega Machines editor Steve Shields, working on porn mags. Now he writes for When
Saturday Comes, fact fans. The rest of the
team were the same people who’d previously
worked for Impact’s boring games mags like
Sega Force, to little acclaim.
The look: Mega Machines tried to look
rather different to the other games magazines around, and as such tried for a design
that can only be described as “rag mag”. So
we had pictures at weird angles, puke-coloured backdrops, horrible illustrations, and
the whole magazine in landscape format so
you had to turn it on its side to read it. The
charts page simply involved the faxes from
Gallup being stuck in, complete with “Dear
Steve, Please find enclosed the Mega Drive
chart as requested. PS Fancy a drink soon?”
covering letter. You get the general idea.
The mission: Seemingly the purpose of
Mega Machines was to be an alternative
to the rather straight-laced, pleased-withthemselves games magazines from other
publishers (indeed, from issue two it had to
put “Mega Machines is entirely unconnected
from Mean Machines, which is published
by Emap” in it). It was certainly radically
different from the stuff the usually bland-ashell Impact normally put in their magazines,
and amazing given the staff was more or less
Scapegoat, David McGillivray
Price: £2.95
On the shelves: November 1994, although
53
The Burst of Creamup
nobody actually saw a copy on sale anywhere until January 1995
The team: Edited by longtime anti-censorship activist David McGillivray (also author
of the UK porn film industry history Doing
Rude Things), with contributors including
Kim Newman, Stefan Jaworzyn, Julian Petley and the inevitable Mark Kermode.
The look: A weird sub-fetishistic drawing on
the cover, which certainly looked distinctive
but was probably more than enough reason
to prevent the high street stores from stocking it. The inside contents were a different
kettle of fish altogether - page after page
after page of dense black text and small illustrations on a plain white page. Almost like
a student union magazine with something
actually worth reading in it.
The mission: Actually quite laudable; as the
editorial spelt out in no uncertain terms, its
existence was a reaction not only to recent
‘moral panics’ over the effects of media
violence, but also to a tragic accident at an
unlicensed gay cinema which because of its
secretive existence had never had a safety
inspection, noting that thanks to intolerance and associated censorship “men died
in [that] fire who might otherwise have been
alive today”.
The content: Well, there were too many
pages to fill really, and it all came a bit unstuck. There were some tremendous pieces
on, among others, a Hammer Films enthusiast who had been suspended from his job in
a nursery when his ‘disturbing’ hobby came
to light, the psychology of sensitivity to
supposedly offensive language, Julian Clary’s
attitude to obscenity, and a comparison
of standards of state censorship across the
globe, while Mark Kermode gave another
outing for his trusty ‘Case For Uncensored
Cinema’. On the other hand, it also featured
some borderline hysterical ranting, a profile
of The Adult Channel that was more boring
than anything else, an interview with David
Irving, and what amounted to near-character assassinations of David Alton and Mary
Whitehouse, alongside passionate defences
of some things that weren’t really worth the
effort of defending on an artistic level. The
best moment, however, was one contributor’s biography that stated that when not
writing, he liked to relax by spending several
hours detained at customs on suspicion of
importing obscene material.
What went wrong: The distribution
problems that delayed its launch (even the
‘official’ release date was not until several
months after Kermode had waxed lyrical
about the launch party on Mark Radcliffe’s
Radio 1 show), presumably, although the
slightly indistinct legal position of some of
its content - the David Alton piece was actually edited before publication on legal advice
- may not have helped.
The big finish: There wasn’t one. A second
issue was hinted at, but as far as is known it
never actually arrived.
Playback, Marvel Magazines
Price: £2.99
On the shelves: Autumn 1995 - and that
was it.
The team: A Doctor Who Superfriends
line-up of stars, pretty much all plucked
from Doctor Who Magazine, including Gary
‘Dick!’ Russell (Group Editor), Gary ‘From
A-Z’ Gillatt (Editor), Alan ‘Drokk!’ Barnes,
Mark ‘any old fucker with an equity card’
Gatiss, Marcus ‘Reynolds &’ Hearn, Chris
‘Co-writes episode guides and funny Doctor
Who books’ Howarth, Steve ‘see Chris Howarth’ Lyons, David ‘lists Star Trek: Voyager
on his CV apparently’ McIntee and Andrew
‘I’m just off to the Written Archives’ Pixley.
The look: Just pre-Photoshop we’re saying,
with a cornucopia of hard-edged picture
cut-outs. Italicised drop text intros and
here-are-the-facts box-outs also proliferate, and that old stand-by, jauntily angled
photos. The front cover is an unprepossessing montage of programme stills, majoring
on a familiar Fawlty Towers snap. That said,
it did auger good things for the magazine,
54
“Brookside (‘The blackest of British soaps’)”
bigging up Cracker, The Avengers, The Magic
Roundabout and EastEnders which is an
alright selection in anyone’s book.
The mission: This was to be Marvel’s “essential guide” to the “best of television past
and present”, a remit that incredibly allowed
for scope beyond Doctor Who and Blake’s 7.
“Television has long been seen as the poorer
cousin of cinema,” intoned the editorial.
“Playback is designed to redress this balance.”
The content: Presented as a “Collector’s Special”, the one and only issue of Playback (in
fact a pre-launch, put out to test the market)
was designed to provide an overview of the
area it was set to ring fence, chatting about
50 ‘key’ programmes. There were no real
surprises here, to be honest, although when
you remember that this was back in the mid
1990s, the breadth of stuff they were willing
to talk about was pretty commendable. Thus
among the 50 we had: The Young Ones (“A
phenomenon in its time, The Young Ones’
brand of deconstruction is all the rarer for
providing an enduring legacy”), The Good
Life (“Often dismissed as nothing more than
an archetypal ‘Honey I’m home’ sitcom”),
The Adventures of Robin Hood (“A measure of the series’ runaway success was the
million-selling recording of the signature
turn by Dick James entering the charts on
20th January 1956”), A Very Peculiar Practice (“A fine example of the post-Thatcher
comic allegory”), Brookside (“The blackest
of British soaps”) and Crackerjack (“Taped
at the BBC Television Theatre at Shepherd’s
Bush Green in London, it was originally
screened fortnightly”). Okay, sometimes the
accompanying write-ups were putting the
‘funct’ in perfunctory - GBH, for example,
gets just two paragraphs, one of those being
just a guessing-game as to what the initials
stood for - but with a lot of this stuff just not
in the public domain, we were grateful for
what we could get.
What went wrong: In short - Marvel Comics. With the company in financial dire
straits, its Marvel UK offshoot was placed
under the control of sticker magnates Panini
UK, because - as our Marvel UK insider
tells us - they knew how to run a profitable company, unlike Marvel whose launch
decisions were based on the tastes of the
MD’s 12-year-old son. Alas, Panini couldn’t
be bothered with new ventures such as Playback and so the axe fell, while - no! - summer special editions of regular magazines
were banned altogether.
The big finish: Unfortunately there was no
time for a final valedictory editorial, with
the magazine instead perkily trailing all
the exciting things set to appear in “issue
one proper” (as Henry Kelly might say),
which would have consisted of: Interviews
with Andrew Davies, Robbie Coltrane and
Patrick Stewart, a feature on Edge of Darkness by Mat “Hairdryers” Irvine, and a ‘How
to look like Livia’ make-and-do feature with
the make-up artists from I, Claudius.
Bizarre, Marvel Magazines
Price: £2.99
On the shelves: Autumn 1995 - and that
was it.
The team: Marcus Hearn and Alan Barnes,
bolstered by contributions from plenty of
mysterious individuals with very unlikely
sounding names.
The look: Two-page spreads of denselytyped text on differently-hued backgrounds
with subtle photographic illustrations
(which lost all of their subtlety by virtue
of capturing some of the oddest and most
inexplicable images ever witnessed in a mere
magazine). The cover, meanwhile, featured a
series of stills from a number of fascinatinglooking scenarios, which somewhat frustratingly were not clearly identified inside.
The mission: Accompanying its close
contemporary Playback into the uncharted
waters of cult journalism, the focus here was
on suitably bizarre motion pictures from all
corners of the globe (but predominantly the
USA), existing in a strange parallel world
55
The Burst of Creamup
The big finish: As with Playback, Bizarre
promised much for forthcoming issues that
would never ultimately appear. A sad and
truly unfitting end for a magazine that revelled in the idea of multiple sequels.
where the likes of Mothra, The House By The
Cemetery, Adventures of a Plumber’s Mate,
Come and Play with Me and Chained Heat
are regarded as true classics of the cinema.
The content: Where Playback had merely
tested the water of classic television by offering its own list of 50 key programmes,
Bizarre sought to provide a rudimentary
overview of the entire exotic cinematic universe, dividing its main subject areas up into
26 alphabetically arranged groupings. Many
of these made perfect sense, such as Japanese monster movies, British sex comedies,
Italian zombie epics, risible superhero efforts
and teen rebel flicks. Others, such as a rather
credulity-stretching attempt to identify
Linda Blair as a ‘genre’, did not. Nonetheless, this was for the most part wonderfully
researched and passionately written stuff,
giving a real sense of someone who had seen
all these films and could barely even believe
their eyes, let alone put it into words.
What went wrong: The same Marvel Comics upheaval story as Playback, although in
retrospect it’s also safe to say that Bizarre
probably arrived too early. At the time, most
of the films it intended to cover were virtually inaccessible to the average punter unless
you knew someone with a friend who could
get hold of ‘pirates’, or were prepared to sit
up watching BBC2 until 2am only to find
that the film you wanted to see had been
first delayed and then cancelled because of
exciting prolonged snooker highlights. The
novelty of reading about a vast gallery of
films that you’d never even imagined existed
would have worn off after about three issues
if there was no way of actually seeing any of
them. On top of that, similar features usually
appeared in Empire sandwiched between
acres of movie news and reviews, which arguably served the casually interested punter
perfectly well as it was. In these DVDcentric times, however, such a magazine
would make much more sense. In fact, it’s
surprising that no one has had the idea of
launching a similar title yet.
Comedy Review, Future Publishing
Price: £3.00
On The Shelves: February - June 1996
The team: Andy Lowe, fresh from turning
Sega Power from a games magazine into a
Chris Morris fanzine, was editor. Staff writer
was future bestselling author and internet
hate figure Danny Wallace. Peter Baynham,
Mark Radcliffe and Louis Theroux had
regular columns (the latter a “letter from
America”-kind of thing) and other writers
included Dave Green and, in one issue, Matthew “Bullen’s Eye” Bullen.
The look: Pretty classy, with a spine, lots of
white space, lots of big photos, and a series
of quotes from the various features along
the tops of the pages. First cover star was
Stephen Fry, followed by Felix Dexter, Eddie
Izzard, Lee Evans and Steve Coogan - basically all you could expect in 1996.
The mission: “The Comedy Magazine” was
the no-nonsense slogan, leading to much
confusion in the letters pages over whether
it was supposed to actually be funny in itself,
or just be about funny things. In any case,
the aim was to write about all types of funny
stuff, from stand-up to books to telly to
theatre (although they dropped the theatre
section after two months ‘cos it was boring).
The content: Well, we enjoyed it, at least.
What you’d get in a normal issue was some
quickie interviews with stand-ups, an episode guide to something like The Day Today,
a guide to the comedy circuit in a city, family trees for the Footlights or the Iannucci
mafia, and transcripts of classic comedy
moments (and they were good choices,
notably picking the fire drill sequence off
Fawlty Towers rather than the more famous
bit of that episode). The big features would
be lengthy interviews or retrospectives, plus
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“The final issue included Peter Baynham saying Richard Jobson was a genius”
stuff about comedy films or records, investigations into the likes of after-dinner speaking and comedians in adverts, and, best of
all, an interview with Mykola Pawluk as part
of an attempt to meet people who are always
in the credits. The back section was devoted
to previews of new TV, radio and live shows,
and always managed to find somewhere to
put an interview with Lee and Herring. And
rightly so.
What went wrong: It’s all rather obvious
when you look at an issue - of the 92 pages,
a whopping nine are adverts, mostly for
videos. A rather idiosyncratic writing style
meant it was all a bit impenetrable, let alone
a rather unnecessary feud with, of all people,
Andrew Collins. Towards the end it seemed
as if the covers were chosen regardless of
whether there were any features to go with
them, as the Evans and Coogan pieces were
both fairly unenlightening cuts jobs. The
penultimate issue included a four-page
feature on European surrealist cabaret by
Stewart Lee - interesting, but it didn’t get
the magazine flying off the shelves at WH
Smiths. A free comedy audiotape with each
issue didn’t help either.
The big finish: Sadly, Comedy Review was
there one month and gone the next - issue
five promised a big Edinburgh Festival
guide, but instead subscribers just got an
apologetic letter and a refund. Still, the final
page of the final issue included Peter Baynham saying Richard Jobson was a genius,
and a better way to end a magazine we can’t
think of.
Timmins.
The look: “From the makers of Loaded” you
pretty much knew what you were going to
get here. A swingingly designed magazine,
boasting loads of pie-charts and their ilk,
big gaunt black and white pictures of ‘iconic’
boy’s stars (hello, Michael Caine), huuuge
drop caps, crazy collages, loads of content,
loads of maps, some cannibals and a smattering of women nearly getting their jugs
out. All in a pretty swish looking package.
The mission: “Too much of a good thing
can be wonderful” sayeth the strapline, and
to be fair to Eat Soup, it did actually have
quite an interesting and unusual mandate:
to cover food, drink and travel from a
‘bloke’s perspective. Shame about the awful
beer-swilling, ‘we’re just back from the pub’
sentiment that kicked off the first ever editorial, though. So who was Eat Soup for? “For
people who loved the best things in life, but
didn’t hate themselves for it. Who’d rather
spend £100 on a meal cooked by Marco
Pierre White than on a new lawnmower.” Oh
right. Them.
The content: Well, we’re going to extrapolate
from the one issue we have to hand here, but
on this evidence it was a pretty stacked publication. The Out To Lunch feature nabbed
some starlet or other for some grub, then
there was a kind of proto-Nuts/Zoo ‘aren’t
they freakish?’ feature (this time on those
aforementioned cannibals, because that’s
all about eating, right?), a safe Loaded-style
banker (here in the form of an interview
with Michael Caine chatting about, um,
food), numerous actually-quite-useful
guides for eating and drinking out, a woeful
Waitress of the Month pin-up (“It was a
slightly nervous Natalie Dimant who joined
us to be the first Eat Soup Waitress of the
Month”), a reportage-style feature trying to
recreate the lifestyle and culinary accomplishments of 007, a US road trip in search
of the country’s best burger, rather brilliantly: recipes (“Spanakopitta - filo pastry
with spinach and cheese”), consumer tests
Eat Soup, IPC Magazines Ltd
Price: £1.00 for the first issue, after that
we’re just not sure.
On the shelves: October/November 1996 August 1997
The team: A ‘who they?’ line-up of talent
here: David Lancaster (editor), the reasonably legendary Loaded art editor Stephen
Read, Bill Knot (“London’s most literate
chef ”, apparently), David Vincent and Orla
57
The Burst of Creamup
on stuff like kitchen knives and hangover
cures and a huge The Guide-style checklist of
restaurants.
What went wrong: Early prospects looked
bright with an initial bi-monthly print run
of 70,000, but less than a year later it was last
orders (ho ho!) for Eat Soup. Perhaps the
same blokes who’d rather spend £100 on a
meal cooked by Marco Pierre White than on
a new lawnmower also decided they’d rather
GQ than Eat Soup.
The big finish: We just don’t know. We’re
taking it on good faith there was more
than just the one issue of Eat Soup - all the
evidence out there points to it - but we never
saw any of them. So how the magazine
bowed out must remain a secret. That is, unless you know different...
to be as honest as possible in its celebration
and summation of telly. “We represent you,
not the broadcaster,” said that first ever editorial. “We’ll never sit on the fence. You may
not always agree with our view (it would be
deeply disappointing if you did) but you’ll
always know what it is.” Coming up with a
checklist of promises, The Box claimed: “We
will never call BBC Auntie... We will never
criticise Valerie Singleton... We will never
look down on cable and satellite...” A fine
mandate for a magazine if ever there was
one. And they were as good as their word
too, with issue one refreshingly carrying a
preview of C4 yawn-fest Family Money that
went: “Family Money is one of those dreary
slow-moving capital D Dramas that professes an intellectual and emotional depth
that it doesn’t actually possess”. And that’s
right, you know.
The content: Interesting stuff, this.
A mainstream magazine that was interested
in mainstream telly - but really interested. So
every bi-month it would kick off with a ream
of previews, either slagging off or praising
upcoming stuff. As per its soon to be rival
Cult TV (see below), those list-based articles
were present and correct (“Five shows we
really love to hate - Russ Abbott: ‘CU Jimmy
said Russ,’ only until I can find the remote
control”), and then we’d have The Buzz news and stuff about telly, formatted as a
tabloid newspaper (no, it was actually quite
good!). But even better than that, we then
had a kind of Time Tunnel Buzz, as the magazine would jump back to a suitably Creamy
year and document old schedules and so
forth, detailing which shows premiered and
which ones got the chop that year. Career
Clinic was a so-so look at how an aging star
could revitalise themselves (Ted Danson
should “lighten his hair to soften the lines as
he gets older”, apparently), while TV Heroes
was great fun. Here celebs would dress
up like their - well - TV hero. So we had
Richard Whiteley as Tony Hancock, Jonathan Coleman as Xena and, best of all, Bob
The Box, Haymarket Magazines
Price: A very reasonable £1.95
On the shelves: April/May August/September 1997
The team: That one-man writing machine,
Paul Simpson, was your editor while assistant editor Dave Butcher was best known
for the time he once ran repeatedly up and
down the stairs on press day in order to
increase his heart rate so he could tackle the
workload (to the total bemusement of one of
the Haymarket directors who was on a visit).
The rest of the team, alas, we don’t have stories about but we’re sure Sue Weekes, Dave
Butcher Bob Murray, Steve Moore et al were
a great laugh.
The look: A rather glossy production that
belied the price tag. In fact, this thing had
an actual spine, across which various pithy
quotes were run (“Terrorists have taken
over my stomach and are demanding beer”).
Okay, so the logo was woeful (and, let’s face
it, ‘The Box’ isn’t the greatest name either),
but throughout the design ethic was quite
nice. No heroics here, but loads of nice pictures and that Haymarket staple, big fuck-off
screengrabs.
The mission: Admirably, The Box set out
58
“With fontage that screamed Bauhaus”
‘grist to the’ Mills as Homer Simpson. Our
spies tell us that apparently Lorraine Kelly
volunteered to dress up as Mr Spock, but on
the morning of the photo shoot her agent
phoned up to say she was too busy to do
it - so busy, in fact, that she would never be
able to do it. After TV Heroes we’d be into
myriad features land, which would include
stuff like interviews (they bagged Frank
Kelly, Phil Redmond, Paul Whitehouse,
amongst others), misc stuff like an ace look
at the LA pilot season, an A-Z of quiz shows,
what it’s like to be an audience member on
various programmes, banned TV moments
and so on. Really this stuff was the meat of
the magazine, and it was all pretty good.
Then there would be profiles of up and coming stars, a big - yup! - screengrab splash
to recreate a favourite advert, reviews and
finally another big screengrab of a favourite
TV moment to end with (“Don’t tell him,
Pike!” somewhat inevitably).
What went wrong: There were only ever
three issues before the plug was pulled - Paul
Simpson says it was simply because it was a
bi-monthly, it just failed to take off, and that
was a shame.
The big finish: There was some work done
on the never-seen issue four - including an
interview with Michael Palin and a location
report on The Lakes. But like every other
publication in this list, when the end came
it was too sudden to be remarked upon.
Dunno why we put this category in, really.
The Box did (kind of, slightly) live on in the
shape of The Rough Guide to Cult TV which
Haymarket prepared for Rough Guides, but
it wasn’t the same, not in the least because it
didn’t have reviews of other TV magazines
around the world in it (“Tydenik Ceskoslovenske Televise - crazy name but a very
uncrazy magazine”).
ing’ Aldred was listed in both the first and
last issues as a contributor is a bad news in
anyone’s book. Alongside her, presumably
having a “really ace time” we had some of
the old reliables such as Anthony Brown,
Ian Levy, Peter Linford, BBC Books’ Jac
‘Jammy’ Rayner, T3’s Cavan Scott, a nascent
‘Clay’ Hickman, Stephen O’ Brien and Joe
Nazzaro. The editors were Karen Levell, and
then taking over with the penultimate issue,
Steve Jarratt. Dunno who he was, but he
later went on to invent the posh computer
mag, The Edge.
The look: With fontage that screamed
Bahaus (because by law anything about old
telly must use Bauhaus fonts) Cult TV was
certainly easy on the eye, a self-consciously
stylish magazine (“For a cool kind of couch
potato”), there was all sorts going on here.
Mock Top Trumps cards, stacks of screen
grabs, repros of “legendary logos”, loads of
little cut-outs, nifty isometric maps of things
like The Village and Twin Peaks and a bit
of an over-reliance on vortex-y backdrops
which at times veered a little too much into
Sci-Fi Channel territory. But all in all, a very
handsome package.
The mission: “No soaps, no dry documentaries and definitely no daytime drivel - just 84
pages of the shows that TV connoisseurs really care about,” boasted the 28-page sample
issue given away free with SFX. All that, over
a washed out picture of Sally James in a vest.
Let’s not beat about the bush, here, Cult TV
was in essence the nearest thing there’s been
to a TV Cream magazine
The content: We’re on a steep learning curve
here with a publication that initially started
off nursing an ugly X Files and Babylon 5
obsession. And, lest we forget, issue one had
four - that’s four - pages devoted to Space
Cadets (“A sort of Never Mind-Meld The
Buzzcocks”). But there were good things
a-foot, such as loads of list-based features
covering things like title sequences and
school holiday TV shows (“Skippy - crappy
kangaroo show” - you can’t argue with that).
Cult TV, Future Publishing
Price: £2.75, rising to £2.95
On the shelves: August 1997 - June 1998.
The team: That Sophie ‘Tiny’s bag is flash-
59
The Burst of Creamup
The centre pages would be taken up with a
big A-Z feature about a specific programme,
and at the back of each number you could
find the to-be expected reviews section, plus
a TV guide pointing out what culty-type
programmes were on telly that month. As
time passed things picked up even more,
with the definition of cult broadening to
encompass more than just ponderous imports with “season arcs”. Features on Grange
Hill, The Wombles, The Goodies and Hawaii
Five-O were much nearer the mark, and Cult
TV was starting to grow into a nifty little
publication, that’s even allowing for the dull
‘will this do?’ Friends publicity pic slung
on front of the April edition. In fact, by its
last issue Cult TV was firing on all cylinders
with a nice feature about TV-related board
games, a pin-up of Dusty Bin, a ‘Deja View’
of television from June 1980, a rundown of
the 50 best TV moments (including Homer
Simpson turning up on LA Law, Nicholas
Witchell and the les-be-friends, John Noakes
on Fax, Marc Bolan falling off the stage
and - at number one - “Nothing. A rude
word. Next question”), an overview of The
Magic Roundabout, an interview with Lionel
Fanthorpe (okay, so it wasn’t all plain sailing), a round-up of the best TV cars, a huge
overview about the treatment of football on
TV and a transcript from that Father Ted
Eurovision episode. A veritable potpourri
indeed.
What went wrong: “I freely admit that my
time on Cult TV was a struggle. We didn’t
have enough staff to cover the workload,
and regularly worked 60+ hours on deadline
week to get the magazine out. Also, because
the magazine tried to distance itself from the
usual sci-fi magazines (including our own
sister title SFX), the quality of work submitted by regular SF writers wasn’t considered
consistent with the tone of the magazine,
which meant I found myself rewriting huge
swathes of the content - often two or three
times before it was considered acceptable.”
So says Cult TV’s Production Editor Nick
Peers today. Unfortunately, while it’s now
blindingly obvious what Cult TV’s remit
was, the audience just couldn’t differentiate
between sci-fi bollocks and proper good
old telly - or as we say here, the ‘right’ and
‘wrong’ type of nostalgia. The equation was
obvious for all to see, a mixture of low sales
and high production values that could only
equate to one thing.
The big finish: “We discovered the magazine
was closing the night before final deadline,
which is why we weren’t able to say goodbye
properly,” says that man Nick again, and as
such that last issue went out still trying to
drum up subscriber business by dangling Z
Cars videos in the air.
Deluxe, Wagadon
Price: £2.50
On the shelves: April - December 1998
The team: Imperial phase Select editor Andrew Harrison was in charge, marshalling
a dream team of writers including Andrew
Collins, Stuart Maconie, Sylvia Patterson,
Sian Pattenden, Simon Armitage, Al Needham, William Shaw and Chris Heath. Oh,
and Vernon Kay was a model in a few of the
fashion shoots.
The look: Stapled, not bound, and with a
lovely matt cover that was nice to touch.
Mostly men on the cover, starting off with
Jarvis Cocker, and then Ardal O’Hanlon,
David Duchovny and Matt Le Blanc. And
Mel B, who was good at the time, honest.
The mission: It’s perhaps odd for a new
men’s magazine to start by announcing
“men’s magazines are everywhere”, but the
idea was that Deluxe would be a halfway
house between the depressing FHM and
Loaded, and the snoozesome GQ and Esquire, promising “real journalism, practical
fashion and more music than all the other
men’s magazines put together”.
The content: Deluxe actually delivered on
its promises and we reckon it’s still the best
men’s magazine ever. It had well-written
features on television, new bands and film;
60
“Margaret Thatcher, Adolf Hitler, ITV and Vanilla Ice”
alright, so it said that Babes in the Wood
was going to be a hit, but at least the feature
was about how it was written and produced
and illustrated with drawings rather than
just being about Samantha Janus’ tits. Then
there was stuff on the history of swearing,
how new beers were launched and exclusive
extracts from Simon Garfield’s fantastic
Radio 1 book The Nation’s Favourite. The
most memorable feature has to be The Real
Top 100 Albums, an anonymous (though
the shadow of Maconie could be detected)
listing of the albums people really liked,
as opposed to “Pet Sounds, a record few
people have heard and would despise if
they did”, and with Saturday Night Fever at
number one. This was followed up by the
157 Commandements For Modern Living
(“Thou shalt never admit thy bought a
copy of Tubthumping”) and then Maconie’s
regular etiquette column, dispatching advice
for modern living (“When dining, always
make at least a half-hearted attempt to pay
for the ‘ladies’ unless you are with Andrea
Dworkin”). Oh, and there were girls, too, but
fully-clothed.
What went wrong: The people that liked
Deluxe liked it a lot, but sadly there weren’t
enough of us. With sales figures much less
than Wagadon’s expectations, changes were
made, introducing a spine, cover-mounting
CDs and putting the likes of Davinia Murphy on the cover. While it was still a cut
above everything else on the shelves, a bit
of the old magic had gone. With its female
equivalent Frank also struggling, in the end
Wagadon cut their losses and closed them
both down. The ethos lived on in Word
magazine, though we still prefer Deluxe,
mostly because iPods hadn’t been invented
at the time.
The big finish: No special final edition
again, just a bog-standard issue eight. This
included a massive interview with Dominic
Mohan from the Sun, but on the plus side it
also had The Worst of the Twentieth Century, a definitive guide to every bad thing that
had happened over the previous hundred
years (including Margaret Thatcher, Adolf
Hitler, ITV and Vanilla Ice). Plus there was
Andrew Collins moaning about the size of
the Sunday Times and Stuart Maconie telling
us how to use a bus - “On disembarking, it
is considered polite to say, ‘Thanks mate’ or
something equally chummy to the driver,
despite the fact he has done the bare minimum specified in his job description.”
Mondo, Cabal
Price: £1.50 for the first issue, rising to £3.
On the shelves: November 2000 - May 2001
The team: Founded by former IPC Editorial
Director Sally O’Sullivan (who had featured
in a BBC2 series the previous year), the editor was the dementedly named ‘Push’, while
the deputy ed was Melody Maker’s Mark
Wernham. Other than that we’re looking at a
list of trades people here.
The look: The whole thing reeked of ‘We
know best’ with understated text, low fi
arrows pointing all over the shop and crucially - swathes of white space. A very
stark magazine that, to be fair, was probably
more interested in showcasing its very posh
photography. That said, you can only be so
classy when you’re snapping a middle-aged
woman with mouth agog and gusset in full
shot. Meanwhile, the cover had some bits
in glossy and some bits in matt, which you
can’t deny is quite good.
The mission: Gnngh! If the editor’s name
wasn’t off-putting enough, there was the
self-satisfied patter: “We’re making an assumption in all of this - that you know how
to tie your own shoelaces. Mondo doesn’t
give advice on furthering your career or improving your sex life. It’s not an instruction
manual. We just want to get on with enjoying life.” Yeah, whatever. Come back with
assumptions about us once you’ve rustled up
a surname, please.
The content: All things to all men, really. The strapline went: “FAST TRAVEL,
RUDE SEX, SHARP STYLE, GREAT
61
The Burst of Creamup
years since the revolutionary Manic Miner
first appeared on a C15 tape passed around
every respectable schoolyard, heralding
the true golden era of the 8-Bit computer.
Never again would the letters Q,Z,I and P be
remembered simply for almost spelling the
word ‘quiz’ or ‘quip’.
Yes computer games and general
computer related shenanigans have formed
the backdrop to a number of key moments
in Creamup’s life, and have been just as
important to us as the ATV logo or Fred
Dinenage. As such, with a tear of nostalgia
welling in our eye for evenings spent with
other boys in bedrooms playing computer games and in the process making that
bedroom smell of boys, here is Creamup’s
Amble Through the History of the Golden
Age of the Personal Computer
PEOPLE: HAVING A GOOD TIME. ALL
THE TIME.” In paper form that equated to
random photo features (hey, women wearing bowler hats!), travel items, vicarious
life style investigations (“When the animal
is being penetrated, that’s not right, that’s
animal abuse. But if they’re talking about a
dog licking their genitals, I don’t think that’s
a horrible thing. Although it is laughable.”),
the usual load of pages dedicated to fashion
shots of men in suits speaking to winsome
looking women in 1950s-style restaurants
and a pretty extensive reviews section covering music, computer games and The Best of
the Net (“TV Go Home is like the bastard
offspring of the Radio Times”). Oh, and
there was a back page moan piece too.
What went wrong: The magazine “for the
sharper man”, rather ironically, couldn’t cut
it. And after just five issues, Push and company were invited to have a good time all the
time in someone else’s premises.
The big finish: Mondo, happily, limped
off from whence it came, while a couple of
years later Cabal were eaten up by Highbury
House Communications.
10 PRINT “I’ve got a computer . . . in my
house!”
20 GOTO 10
RUN (1980)
Who gave a stuff about RAM and ROM
when here was a computer with touch
sensitive buttons? A bit like escalators or
electric toothbrushes. Of course for many it
was the ZX81 that really launched the era of
the home computer, but Creamup reserves
a special place in its heart for Sinclair’s (not
quite) first foray into the home computer
market back in 1980. Ridiculed for looking
like a bit of cheese and featuring a clunky
computer language, the ZX80 was by no
means a computing powerhouse. For example whenever you typed on the keyboard,
the screen image would momentarily disappear as it didn’t have the necessary computational power to both process what you were
typing and display the screen at the same
time. Yet these subtle nuances mattered
little when you stacked it up against the fact
that “I’ve got a computer . . . in my house!”
Besides, Sinclair had the greatest logo in the
world - a bit computery, but rather elegant
and streamlined at the same time. In fact it
Prog 49, June 20 2004
ONE DAY TICKER TAPE
WILL BE THE
DOMINANT FORM OF
COMMUNICATION
Creamup’s history of the home computer
golden age
Of course, as Creamup is typing these
words in green text onto a black screen, the
computer is making bleep noises for each
letter to signify that - yes indeed - this is
a computer. In a moment we expect a big
message to appear proclaiming ‘New Emails’,
but until then we have just enough time to
pause and reflect on the fact that it’s now 20
years since the arrival of the ultimate computer nerd’s game Elite. In fact (and rather
closer to home for Creamup) it’s also 21
62
“Colours that included the never before heard of ‘cyan’ and ‘magenta’”
looks ace even today.
The other thing about owning a
ZX80 was that it allowed you to buy serious
looking books (usually held together by
black spiral ring binders) that were more
often than not written by Tim Hartnell
and featured long torturous programs with
tantalising names such as Play Your Cards
Right for you to type in that never worked.
For those who couldn’t be bothered though,
you were able to buy tapes with programs on
them (including somewhat incredibly Football Manager). In this age of DVD drives
and the like it is incredible to think that you
used to import data into your PC by playing
funny sounds into it. It’s rather like plugging
your Casio into the back of your PC and uploading the latest Hungry Horace by playing
a little tune provided on some sheet music
by the games manufacturer.
We have some memories of a
ZX80 printer that our dad borrowed from
work, which after seemingly hours of fannying around (during which time everyone got
very cross in a way that only electronic machines can make you cross) finally produced
some kind of representation of what had
been typed on screen onto the most bizarre
silver coated paper. Yet as quaint as these
things now appear, at the time you couldn’t
help feel the exhilarating gust of wind as
the present raced by and you found yourself
tumbling head long into the future.
By the time the ZX81 hit the market we’d long since grown tired of POKEing
and REMing (sounds a bit like something
you’d get on Queer as Folk, eh readers?)
and were not impressed by the advertising
material claiming that the ZX81 was powerful enough to run a nuclear power station
(yes, but very, very sloooowly). However, if
Sinclair could just come up with something
that offered us very quiet, tinny noises
and colours that included the never before
heard of ‘cyan’ and ‘magenta’ then we knew
we might possibly give computers another
chance. In the meantime it was back to the
wind-up tennis game...
20 PRINT “Are you a blancmange?”
30 GOTO 20
RUN (1982)
If ever there was a finer Christmas present
than the Sinclair ZX Spectrum then we’ve
yet to hear of it. From its creepy flesh-like
keys, daring shock of colour and casing that
pretty much came straight off, the Speccy
was where it was at circa 1982 - 1983.
Given our technical naiveté,
games that required you to use up and down
as well as left and right buttons required two
players in our family. However, we felt at
least we could master the art of typing-up
the computer programs that appeared in
each month’s Sinclair User (the hobbyists
magazine of choice). We liked to pretend
that in doing this we were learning BASIC,
but in truth it could have been any old shit
we were keying in and we wouldn’t have
known it (as routinely proved by our total
inability to debug the programs when they
inevitably failed to work). However, that said
we did once manage to write our own exciting adventure for all the family to play that
was set in the thrilling location of our dad’s
local club.
Of course it’s easy to forget in this
day and age (when ver kids are the acknowledged computer experts), that back in 1982,
computers were thought of as a logical
extension of steam engines and desktop
office toys like Newton’s cradles, and as such
all dads believed that they were the rightful
family experts on the subject.
Now, during one half-term holiday, Creamup patiently input and re-input
the program for Pangolins into our 16K
Speccy. It was a simple computer game
that attempted to guess what animal you
were thinking of by asking you a series of
‘yes’ and ‘no’ questions. If it failed to guess
the animal correctly it would then ask you
63
The Burst of Creamup
RUN (1983)
While today you get books that list all of the
Easter eggs on DVDs and there is a widespread acceptance that teletext is a public
service and not just some strange communication between television engineers and
a select few viewers who happen to stumble
onto it; back then it was possible to come
across all manner of idiosyncratic and bizarre elements in computer games. Creamup
remembers playing the stunt bike classic
Wheelie for literally hours and hours (such
that our Speccy became satisfyingly hot),
only finally to come to the end of the whole
game and be greeted by the terrifying visage
of Marvel Comic’s Ghost Rider, who then
proceeded to chase us back along the whole
course. We were convinced that this only
happened in our version of the game.
Similarly in the Atari ST adventure game Legends of The Sword, if you
typed in, “I want to fart” it responded with
the message: “You spread your legs apart
and fart lustily”. And in the same game you
could actually command your character to
go and have a wee. How do we know? Well
because of course writing in rude words is
the first thing you do in all text-based computer adventure games (after having picked
the least likely object from those on offer
to you on the table). For us, this unending
quest for the hidden bit in computer games
started with The Hobbit on the ZX Spectrum
in which we routinely attempted to beat
up Gandalf and select “West” when it was
clearly not possible to go there.
The best kind of surprises though
occurred when scouring through your
C15 tape that you got off the boy at school
you were only friends with because he had
connections. Creamup recalls one glorious
occasion in particular when having feigned
illness to get a day off school we alighted
upon a tape in our shoe box that we were
certain we hadn’t thoroughly checked, and
proceeded to load up a mysterious computer
game that we had never heard of. It was
to type in a question that would mean it
could identify or discount it the next time.
As such, the more you played it, the more
‘intelligent’ it got. Giddy with the thrill of it,
Creamup and its siblings played Pangolins all
day, until by teatime we had in our possession a super intelligent computer program
that possessed information on an entire
menagerie of creatures both fantastical (we
were obsessed with griffins back then)
and real.
What we failed to reckon with
though, was our dad bringing back a suitably techie friend from work to show him
the Spectrum. Having (unbeknownst to us)
stumbled upon our session of Pangolins,
our dad thought up an animal and began
answering the program’s questions - all the
while impressing upon his friend the computational brilliance of it all. We stumbled
upon this activity just at the point where
the program had completed asking my dad
whether the animal in question had ever
become mixed up with three pirates called
Roderick the Red, Gregory the Green and
Benjamin the Blue, and had moved on to
quizzing him and his friend whether the
animal in question was “a stupid smelly
shitbag who is a spaz and can’t wipe her
bum properly without Mum’s help”. Had our
dad answered “yes” then he would have been
informed that the animal he was thinking of
was most likely Creamup’s sister. However,
just to prolong the embarrassment he
selected “no” and proceeded to select “no”
to a whole range of frankly offensive questions related to other members of Creamup’s
family, friends, neighbours, distant relatives
and - for some reason - Dickie Davies. The
whole terrible ordeal only came to an end
when Creamup managed to orchestrate a
moment during which to accidentally pull
out the (admittedly never very secure)
power lead from the back of the computer.
30 PRINT “Op Do”
40 GOTO 30
64
“What the hell were you meant to do in the Minder game?”
brill, and we couldn’t wait for our siblings to
return home that evening so we could show
them our amazing discovery. “It’s great,” we
proclaimed, “they’ve misspelled ‘maniac’
on the title screen, but on level five there’s a
character called Eugene”. A couple of years
later we were to develop an unhealthy obsession with the phrase “The Banyan Tree” - we
still to this day don’t know why.
64 version actually sounded quite good, but
the real game on the Spectrum version was
trying to discern what the hell the characters
were meant to be saying. We believe that:
“Rikk-rrroaw-rrooow” was “He slimed me”,
but we are blowed if we could ever work out
what the rest of it was supposed to be. That
the Spectrum’s sound was generated from a
tiny little speaker in the computer itself and
not from the telly was probably a significant
barrier for any would be computer samplers
to navigate.
Yet Mastertronic managed to
shift over 250,000 copies of Ghostbusters.
And with this the floodgate for tie-ins well
and truly opened. Looking back on it, some
of the titles that were released seem truly
bizarre. We could see the appeal of a Doctor
Who game (released we think for the Acorn
only) in which you basically guided the
doctor through a series of platform levels,
regenerating every time you lost a life; however what the hell were you meant to do in
the Minder game, not to mention The Young
Ones? The “player chooses which of the four
characters he wants to be, and from then on
all you have to do is collect that character’s
belongings, selecting commands from a list
of choices such as ‘walk’ and ‘talk’”, apparently.
It is to our eternal chagrin though
that it was only in researching this article
that Creamup became aware of the existence
of a Grange Hill game.
40 PRINT “Rikk-rrroaw-rrooow”
50 GOTO 40
RUN (1984)
Computer game tie-ins are always useless.
It’s one of nature’s immutable laws a bit like
“thou shalt be crap when you go to ITV”.
However, when the first computer game
tie-ins started appearing back in 1984, it was
difficult not to feel a frisson of excitement
about the fact that your latest hobby was
becoming aligned with a hit American television series such as Blue Thunder. After all,
they never released a Starsky & Hutch tie-in
train, or a spin-off collection of Sweeney
stamps, did they?
Indeed, Blue Thunder was the first
official tie-in computer game back in 1984.
While Crash magazine awarded it a blistering 90% our very vague memories of it were
that it was difficult to understand and not
much happened (oh no that was an actual
episode, wasn’t it readers?)
Next out the bag was Blockbusters,
and then there was a veritable eruption of
tie-ins to flood the Christmas 1984 market.
We don’t remember much about The Fall
Guy game but reckon it was probably great,
or indeed Airwolf, however we have yet
to successfully block from our memory
Mastertronic’s Ghostbusters. Now what
set this game apart from the rest was not
its tedious and frankly incomprehensible
levels (which involved you travelling up and
down some city streets trying to ensnare a
ghostie), but its much vaunted use of speech.
We are led to believe that the Commodore
50 PRINT “The most incredible thing ever
to happen to computer games”
60 GOTO 50
RUN (1984)
As the thrill of computing and home
computers began to grip the over-intelligent
youth of Britain, what we needed was one
man to act as a figurehead and show us
the way forward. What we got was the
superb Fred Harris, the archetypal “silly
jolly daddy”, who only later besmirched his
65
The Burst of Creamup
otherwise faultless copybook by growing a
scary beard.
For a period of time in the earlymid 1980s he would turn up on Saturday
Superstore to discuss and review the latest
computer games. On one edition he began
to rave in an enthusiastic manner about
Mirrosoft Ltd’s Game Creator. Basically this
was a piece of software for the Commodore
64 that allowed you to make your own - well
- games. “It’s the most incredible thing ever
to happen to computer games!” impressed
Fred with the enthusiasm of a modern day
charity mugger. However, the catch was
that Games Creator was also about the most
expensive thing ever to happen to computer
games, and so it remained out of Creamup’s
reach - but there was a yearning that had
been awakened within us.
It was some years later when having long since lost our original Commodore
64 in a break-in, we found one for sale in
“the snips”. As with any second-hand home
computer sale at that time it was accompanied by a mass of pirated stuff. However
amidst mountains of hastily labelled C90s
(the sign of a serious pirate), there was one
original piece of software. Lo and behold it
was the much lusted after Games Creator.
The program itself was somewhat
less expansive and revolutionary then we
had at first been led to believe. In essence
what you got was a standard platform game,
but you could change the graphics of the
characters and build your own levels. Most
excitingly of all, though, was the ability to
create your own tunes. Having created our
magnum opus (which consisted of a rather
smudged looking main character with a giant hat who spewed giant fireballs) we struggled for an age to create a suitably dramatic
score. Games Creator allowed you to compose music through the eminently sensible
device of inputting your musical score using
standard musical notation. After seemingly
an age of attempting to capture on computer
our self-penned (self-whistled) overtures, we
resorted to trying to track down a musical
score - any musical score. Unfortunately we
had but one music book in our house. As
such, our first (and only) computer game
consisted of a smudgy character jumping
around to the sound of a rather piss-weak
rendition of Go Tell it on the Mountain. Not
really one to get the pulse racing.
60 PRINT “Note: No mention of crap VR
games”
70 GOTO 60
RUN (1986)
Let’s face it, amusement arcades were exciting, despite a sneaking suspicion that they
might be in fact a little bit common.
They were full of frightening boys
who looked like they should work on the
Waltzers and might beat you up at a minute’s
notice for being a nerdy, Speccy brainiac.
Indeed there can be few things more
frightening then pumping your 50ps in for a
peaceable game of Ridge Racer, only to find
yourself suddenly and unspokenly challenged to a two-player race by a strange lad
wearing grubby leisurewear. Generally their
approach would be systematic, ruthless and
joyless, disposing of you much like the purse
now stripped of cash that they had thrown
over a wall after having nicked it from some
unsuspecting granny just 10 minutes earlier.
Amusement arcades started out
as relatively benign places where one could
imagine a film crew from John Craven’s
Newsround regularly pitching up to do a
piece on the latest “electronic craze” to grip
the nation. However, by the time games such
as Outrun were doing the rounds, the clientele had taken a notable nose-dive. Whereas
we would turn up to admire the awesome
scaling of the sprites in said car-chaser or
the parallax scrolling in Space Harrier, these
types were there on the off-chance that
Zammo might pop in with a bit of blow. Indeed, we reckon that scene from Grange Hill
did more to condemn amusement arcades
then any other single incident in history.
66
“The game was simply a jumped-up DVD menu”
Yet in the 1980s and some of the
‘90s amusement arcades were undeniably
the place to be if you wanted to check out
the cutting edge of computer technology;
from curved screens for a game of soupedup asteroids, to the jaw-dropping visuals
of games such as Dragon’s Lair (we were on
holiday in Great Yarmouth when we first
came across this artefact which at the time
looked as if it had been beamed in from 20
years in the future. Of course it had - the
game was simply a jumped-up DVD menu).
Not to mention, Double Dragon, Pole Position and After Burner. However, sad as it
is to report the last time an arcade game
managed to take our breath away was way
back in 1993 with the release of Sega’s Virtua
Fighter. Those 180,00 polygons whirling
around every second was genuinely thrilling
stuff, and Creamup didn’t even care that it
cost a whole pound to play. What’s more on
our first attempt we managed to beat one
of the aforementioned callow youths and
escape an “actua” kicking in the process.
Although for the sake of completeness we have to mention being on the
receiving end of a caning at computer table
tennis last year, dished out by a four-year
old girl (nothing sinister - we were at a computer games exhibition, alright?)
16-bit future.
And it came courtesy of one of
Creamup’s schoolmates who in 1986 invited
us round to his house to check out his new
computer - an Atari ST. Now to us, Atari was
synonymous with simple games machines,
and so we were a mite bit curious. Having
navigated his over-friendly and extremely
welcoming parents (a reception that raised
the suspicion in our mind that our new
associate perhaps brought back few visitors
to the house and so was not over-endowed
with friends), we settled down in his bedroom to take a look at the “next big thing”.
As a side note, although we have
long since disengaged any form of communication with the chap in question we still
look back and admire his coolness under
fire. This is almost completely due to the
fact that during that first visit his annoying
younger brother kept hassling us (which
resulted in our associate duffing him up).
However, when the younger sibling attempted to attract the attention of his parents by
crying very loudly and profusely, our associate calmly retrieved the vacuum cleaner
from the landing cupboard and switched it
on, thus drowning out the wailings of his
younger brother. Genius, we thought.
Anyway, our first recollection of
the Atari ST proper was of a demo showing
an eagle flying across the computer screen.
What made this particularly impressive
was that it was an actual proper film (albeit
rendered in 16 colours). Next was an even
greater thrill, as up came StarGlider a vector
based shoot ’em-up, but more importantly
one that contained actual sampled music
at the beginning (albeit it cut off after just a
few seconds). That a home computer could
look and sound a bit like your actual telly
was an earth-shattering awakening; and for
Creamup (whose prior computing experiences had been predominantly with the ZX
Spectrum) the fact that the ST’s sound actually came out through the telly’s speakers
was the clincher.
70 PRINT “The software is making the
hardware light go on - this is physically
impossible”
80 GOTO 70
RUN (1986)
Of course it’s very easy to go all dewy-eyed
and proclaim that computer games stopped
being any good the moment the 16-bit
powerhouses such as the Amiga, Atari ST
and QL (only kidding!) arrived on the scene.
However for expediency sake and, because
frankly we’ve wittered on for long enough
we are in fact going to make that very claim.
But let’s leave these rambling, and at times,
overtly middle class and offensive recollections with Creamup’s first glimpse of the
67
The Burst of Creamup
In time we would get our own
Atari ST and find ourselves the recipients
and dealers of cracked and hacked games, as
well as virtuosos at Degas Elite and dervishes of First Word Plus. Yet these very acts
would be our undoing - the simple fact that
we now used our computer for something
other than playing games on it, or typing in
programs of games to play on it, signified in
some small, and - yes we concede - arbitrary
way that for us the Golden Age of computers
was at an end.
Perhaps one Atari ST-related
incident above all signalled the game was
up; namely, having worked out how to make
a scrolling marquee message appear across
a loading screen, we decide to augment
all of one of our friend’s discs (that he had
kindly lent to us) with the most foul and
abusive accusations about him. We thought
it a highly amusing wheeze, until we found
out that - as with Pangolins way back when
- our dad copied the contents of the discs
(unviewed) and gave it to a work friend of
his who had just bought an Atari ST for his
young family. Although we have to date
received no comeback for this heinous act,
quite frankly Creamup is still waiting for that
particular bomb to drop.
Menzies in the early ‘90s. Having long
since relinquished our original Commodore 64 (with 64k RAM booster pack!), ZX
Spectrum and Atari ST by a combination of
our aspiration to move on to something a
little more sophisticated and, in the case of
the Commodore 64, it having been nicked
from the house, we found ourselves in early
student days in possession of a mysterious
second-hand Commodore 64 with a phalanx
of copied games, all of which were rubbish.
Rather put out that we would not have the
opportunity to recreate the days when we
would spend periods not unadjacent to the
completion time of a costumed marathon
runner bent over Ghosts’n’Goblins or Gauntlet, we set the machine to one side and tried
to forget about it. So imagine our joy when
we discovered that, for reasons best known
to themselves, John Menzies had decided
to stock a huge range of such games and at
knockdown prices! Presumably this was as a
result of no one wanting them anymore and
the licences being worth next to nothing.
But that mattered to us not one tittle as we
went into our local massive Menzies.
Essentially what was on offer was
a service by which a huge array of empty
games boxes were displayed and, having
made your selection, the mystified staff
would take a master-tape (or what might be
technically referred to as ‘a proper copy’)
and do what everyone else with a Commodore had been doing illicitly for years
in bedrooms anyway. No, not that - they
copied it on a tape recorder for you. Then
they stuffed the copy into a cassette with a
photocopy of the original sleeve cover and
took somewhere in the region of three quid
from you for it. As we recall the only game
we actually bought was the fantastic Wizball
(voted Best Game Of All Time by Zzap!
magazine in Issue 44, fact fans) which not
only satisfied our nostalgia pangs but - due
to the copy crashing while loading an awful
lot - convinced even us of the desirability
of cartridge-based games consoles. Amaz-
80 PRINT “Postscript: The last
hurrah! (1993)”
90 GOTO 80
RUN
With yer Megadrives and yer Nintendos
(and indeed yer actual Super Nintendos)
already well ensconced in the bedrooms of
the land - having convincingly consigned
the Spectrum and C64s of yore to the
Recycle Bin of popular culture - it is difficult
to see why a major high street store would
have embarked on a costly and sizable
campaign to corner the market in cassette
type computer games. But this was indeed
the strategy decided upon by the now sadly
(but probably not surprisingly) defunct
stationery-to-Star Wars-toys combine John
68
“But I did get to see Charlie Higson naked”
B is for Bang Bang it’s Reeves and
Mortimer, Blind Date, Blockbusters, Bob’s
Full House and Bodymatters
“I was really excited about going to see Vic
and Bob and it was alright, but we saw hardly any of them on stage and instead watched
The Club on monitors - every single freaking
episode of it. And the bit where they are in a
car and can’t open the doors. We also had to
sit while they did a really long-winded visual
gag on the stage which in the end was not
in the finished programme. But I did get to
see Charlie Higson naked, make of that what
you will.” - Simon from Bucks, (friend of TJ
Hooker-loving Peter Laws)
ingly neither this service, nor indeed John
Menzies, lasted terribly long and - finally
- cassette games disappeared from the commercial world to live on only in the ethereal
worlds of eBay.
Prog 50, July 18 2004
MICROPHONES CAN’T
PICK UP SMILES
Creamup’s Studio Audience Line
Going to watch a TV programme actually
being recorded is surely going to rank as
one of the best moments of your life, right?
Forget rites-of-passage nonsense such as
graduation, marriage, children; life is at its
keenest when you’re participating in something which is going to be put out on the
telly. Oh yes, betwixt the busload of befuddled pensioners and the heckling students,
among the spaghetti-junction of cables and
officious 17-year-old runners with their
slogan t-shirts and London hairstyles, there’s
you being a part of it all. Television!
This month, as a service to everyone, Creamup hopes to recreate some of
that heady brew. With reminiscences about
sitting in the studio audience on Blind Date,
to snubbing Saracen off of Gladiators following a recording of Win, Lose or Draw, here’s
our alphabetically arranged guide to the live
experience across a number of favourite TV
shows. Memories come courtesy of Creamup
staffers and readers alike.
So, settle down now, and get ready
to laugh really loud - because microphones
can’t pick up smiles - and if you can’t get a
clear view of the stage there’s a monitor just
above you and - oh hello! You were in last
night, weren’t you missus? She’s a bit of a
handful - oh, and I don’t think you want to
put your finger up there sir. But, seriously,
everyone now just give a massive welcome
to your host for this evening, go wild for ...
Creamup’s Studio Audience Line!
“Blind Date was perhaps one of the longest, dullest evenings of my life. Actually
filming the thing took over five hours. I’ve
seen technical rehearsals involving snow
machines and pyrotechnics that took less
time; and not being used to how filming
a ‘non-live’ show worked, it was a very
disjointed experience. Contestants would
repeat their ‘ad-libs’ several times for each
camera, and - Blind Date In Not Spontaneous Shocker! - the first for one round kept
getting her line wrong, stopping the filming
while she received prompts. What felt odd
was how ordinary the contestants looked
on stage, as though they’d wandered up by
accident. Even the ‘what we did on our date’
videos, which were played to us on overhead
monitors, felt like watching a stranger’s
home movie.
“Having said that, even the cynical
couldn’t fail to be dazzled by the sight of The
Actual Cilla Black. It was more than an hour
and a half into filming before we heard the
voice of Our Graham (sadly we didn’t see
him) and saw her make her appearance...
rather like a performing dog that could
only appear on stage for a short time before
chewing the set, she appeared exactly and
only when called for. It made me wonder
what she was doing backstage. She was
professional and as you may expect from the
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The Burst of Creamup
telly, but didn’t chat with her public much
- no singing either, but she did have an ace
black glittery jacket. In between we were
kept entertained by the warm-up, Ted Robbins. Now, Ted is okay in small doses, but
he just wasn’t my cup of tea. Well, to be fair
he probably wasn’t truly terrible, but I do
remember saying to friends after we escaped
“God, wasn’t that warm-up dreadful?” and
being shocked when everyone thought he
was funny. Perhaps I Just Didn’t Get It.”
- Gillian Kirby
and had to repeat the answers to some of
his questions again so they could insert it
into the edited programme. And so this
poor man had to sit there and say, ‘Yes, yes,
no’ over and over again in front of a restless
crowd.” - Simon from Bucks, (friend of TJ
Hooker-loving Peter Laws)
“There were four of us from college who
attended a five-show recording of Liza Tarbuck’s Blockbusters. The rest of the audience
was OAPs, who kept whispering the answers
out loud meaning we had at least two Gold
Runs re-recorded.” - Rick
C is for Call My Bluff and Countdown
“I went to see Call My Bluff being recorded
(about four years ago) with uncle Bob Holness in the chair. They film two episodes
back to back with the same set of ‘celebrities’. Halfway through the second I felt quite
hot and sick - whether I was over-excited
at seeing Bob, blasted by the heat and light
reflected from Alan Coren’s head, or just
feeling the effects of the five pints we’d had
in the pub round the corner from Pebble
Mill before the recording - I had to get out.
“About to throw-up, I dashed out
of the studio mid-bluff, where a nice security guard let me sit down on a sofa in the
downstairs window (with that famous view
behind me, I felt a bit like Alan Titchmarsh)
and gave me a glass of water.
“Once I had changed back to a
normal colour, he escorted me back in to the
studio - although I had to wait in the wings
until that ‘round’ had finished - apparently I
was right in Sandi Totsvig’s eyeline - and any
distraction might have ruined her bluffing
attempts.
“We were also in the audience
for Countdown for episode 4999 - although
they told us it was really the 5000th episode,
since they hadn’t counted the pilot.
“A contestant (who was a retired
Merchant Navy officer) was doing quite well
until he got the seven-letter word ‘bummers’.
Quick witted Dicky Whitely quipped, ‘You’ll
know all about that, being in the Navy’. The
“My Grandma was in the audience on Bodymatters, so we taped it and kept pointing her
out when we could see her, almost as if she
was a TV star to our young eyes.” - Rick
“My girlfriend at the time saw that you
could send off to be in the audience at TV
shows (I was about 17) and so we thought it
would be terribly exciting to see what programme we would get. And to be honest I
was very disappointed at the time to receive
tickets for Bob’s Full House, especially when
we were in the queue at Television Centre
waiting to go in, and the one next to us was
full of people waiting to see Blackadder Goes
Forth. However, in we went and we had a
lovely time.
“The main thing I noticed (which
I am sure everyone will say) is just how
small the set was. Felix Bowness did the
warm-up which was a real treat, and yes, he
did the thing where he straddled a chair and
whipped his backside, giving the impression
that he was riding a hilarious horse. The
other thing I noticed a lot though, during
the recording, is just how much Bob Monkhouse swore - he had a filthy mouth from
start to finish. I also remember seeing one
of the men who were draped over the prizes
trip on a piece of concealed set. The funniest
thing though was at the end of the recording
- one of the contestants had a speech defect
70
“My dad got to the last two, but lost on a question about church architecture”
nately the tape got wiped by accident.” - Ben
Thompson
studio erupted in laughter (from the student
50 percent of the audience, anyway - don’t
think the pensioner half got it). Amazingly it
wasn’t edited out (although the laughter was
shortened dramatically) - unfortunately it
put the contestant off so much I don’t think
he scored another point in the whole show.”
- Nick
“I have very little memory of Every Second
Counts, only that Paul Daniels behaved like
an arse throughout and, even though I was
only there for the night and could not know
for sure, I got the impression everyone else
working on the show absolutely loathed
him.
“He also gave us the standard
lecture on how their audio equipment could
not pick up smiles, and so could we all
please laugh really loud and heartily. We saw
two episodes being filmed and we were there
for ages. We had to sit very quietly at the
end while Daniels read out a question for
the viewers at home, and the address, and
then break into massive applause when he
finished. Nice touch.” - Simon from Bucks,
(friend of TJ Hooker-loving Peter Laws)
E is for Eightiesmania, Emu’s Pink Windmill Show and Every Second Counts
“LWT was your host for Eightiesmania, a
shocking trashfest designed to fill a gap in
the summer schedules, which it did - three
years later. ‘Come in ‘80s clothes,’ trilled
the PR. ‘Everyone else is.’ So we did and
they didn’t, meaning we were on camera
most of the time. My Frankie Says ‘war hide
yourself ’ t-shirt was older than most of the
shipped-in studio audience - Pat and Margaret-style outings from insurance companies
and meat packing factories and the like.
“The warm up man was the usual
Ted Robbins, who treats everyone like
they’re a bunch of peasants who either have
never been to London before or have no
clue about how TV works - or both. And he
encourages audience participation, which I
loathe. But we did get drinks afterwards with
Hear’say and Leslie Grantham.” - Jon Peake
F is for 15-1, Fist of Fun, Flying Start and
Fun House
“My brother and my dad were on 15-1 as
contestants in about 1996. (I refused because
I didn’t want it brought up if I became famous later, a la Collins/Telly Addicts. Stupid,
but there you go). The Action Time studio
was in an obscure part of London, and very
poky. The make-up artists had trouble with
my brother’s fishy paleness under the lights
and kept saying how Irish he looked. We
then found the Fantasy Football set next
door. Since we were both City fans, we
liberated the inflatable banana from on top
of a wardrobe and gave it a more deserving
home. My dad got to the last two, but lost
on a question about church architecture.” Heather F
“When I was a kid I sat in the audience
for the legendary Emu’s Pink Windmill
Show. My dad used to work for Central and
he got me and my brother tickets for the
programme shot in Nottingham. It was the
format where Grotbag did games and stuff,
not the singing/dancing version.
“The thing was shot as-live
because one of the young cast members had
to do a link at the end but she kept cracking
up in fits of laughter. The crew were getting
quite angry with her, but she eventually
gathered herself to say her line.
“My mum taped the programme
and I managed to get in shot when the camera panned across the audience, unfortu-
“I dragged my parents to all of Fist of Fun,
and they’d only seen the show for the first
time a week previously. We always used to
travel down from Wrexham, park the car in
West Ruislip and then get the tube into Central London, to make a day of it. Here, we
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The Burst of Creamup
were actually in the front row, and as such I
got in shot for about five seconds at the start.
“I was thrilled to see Lee and
Herring in the flesh, as at the time I was
obsessed with them, and this was great fun.
Sadly there was no proper Peter routine in
this show, Baynham only appearing for a
walk-on at the end, but the high point for
me was watching them having to record a
dozen trailers for BBC Prime, where Stew
said, ‘Fist of Fun tonight/tomorrow/Friday/
next week/etc’ and Rich said, ‘On BBC
Prime!’ Over and over again.
“I should also mention the time
my cousin was interrogated by Anthony H
Wilson on Flying Start, and my auntie sat in
the audience wearing a fluorescent orange
dress, and as such you could see her clearly
in every single audience shot, much to our
amusement.” - Steve Williams
Fun House for a bit while they cleaned up
(totally disappointing it was too!) then we
were given a mini-tour of STV encompassing the Scotland Today studio next door
where I may or may not have buggered up
the autocue by running it backwards and
forwards until it wouldn’t work any more,
up the stairs past the continuity suite, where
I was most excited to see the STV clock and
thistle on monitors ready to be cued up, and
then to the canteen for some chips.” - Former Creamguide ‘Reader of the Week’ Paul
Moore
H is for Harry Hill’s TV Burp and Have I
Got News For You
“Harry Hill’s TV Burp was recorded down
at Teddington Lock where I’d actually never
been before. I was mentally tracing the path
of the Magpie appeal line when we were
walking to the studio. We had good seats
and the warm-up man was quite funny for
a change - a young newish comedian whose
name I cannot recall. We sat with the man
from Avalon while Harry did his thing. I
know he’s not everyone’s cup of tea but he
was hilarious. Afterwards we met him - he’s
so quiet, normal shirt, different glasses, usual battery acid wine, but he did want to hear
bad things about EastEnders and laughed at
my jokes. I think.” - Jon Peake
“Studio audience-wise, I was at an afternoon’s recording of STV’s Fun House. I’d
love to be able to give you some hot insider
gossip on the man behind the mullet, but
Pat Sharpe doesn’t seem to have left any
impression whatsoever on my younger self.
He didn’t come up and have a word with the
audience or anything like that, and kept the
wackiness for when they were going for a
take. One of the twins (Martina and Melanie
wasn’t it?) asked us all sorts of probing questions, like who we were and what school did
we go to, which was most exciting for us
young lads.
“We were told that at the end we’d
be able to get up from our seats and storm
the set as the show finished in a blaze of
glory and excitement, but as it transpired
they simply stopped the recording for a bit,
we sloped on to the floor and half-heartedly
cheered the programme out when they
started again.
“I was there because my mate
Gareth’s dad was a cameraman at STV, so
me, him and another mate got to hang
around afterwards and jump around the
“Teddington, 2004, and I was there for two
recordings of brilliant visual gags about
Emmerdale and Club Reps, Harry Hill’s TV
Burp. But first time round, I witnessed a
rare misfire, the first of a proposed series of
sketches with Sian Lloyd. The premise was
that as the only contestant not to cash in on
I’m A Celebrity, every week Harry would
find her a new ITV vehicle. Cut to VT of
Sian jumping out of a van onto a street (“It’s
me, Sian Lloyd!”) to comedic disinterest. But
due to the leaden presence of Sian Lloyd,
nobody in the audience laughed, and Harry
announced ‘and we’ll be looking for a new
show for Sian next week... or maybe not’.
72
“Tonight I’m doing a recipe for Ski yoghurts, Nan!”
“I was at the recording of the Have I Got
News For You that went out the day after
the ‘97 election, which was a weird experience as they were pretty sure Labour would
win, but couldn’t be certain. It amazed me
how much of Paul Merton’s ramblings got
cut - there was some great surreal stuff about
Mickey Mouse as a gangster which didn’t
make the final show. The guests were, I
think, Richard Wilson (who was pretty good
value, and took a lot of stick about Kinnock
at the infamous Sheffield rally) and Nick
Ross who was unsurprisingly very dull.
“Did Angus do the, ‘On behalf of
the BBC I’d like to welcome you to ITV studios’ shtick every time then?” - Ian Sparham
“One thing that amused us was
that after the clip, Harry got handed a spoof
letter of rejection from ITV, which we’d seen
on the props table beforehand, and it wasn’t
just a blank piece of paper, it was actually a
letter with ‘I.T.V.’ written on the top.
“Harry was fantastic throughout - every time he messed up, he did a gag
to ensure the new take would come in on
a laugh, which was often funnier than the
scripted joke (‘You know that white plastic
doll’s house garden furniture you get free
with pizza deliveries - why do I keep getting
the table?’). And he almost drifted out of
character when discussing Safe as Houses
(‘Did you see this? It was crap!’). Then, after
the second recording a few weeks later,
Harry chatted to the audience before sidling
up alongside me, declaring that he was
about to present his signed script to ‘the person in the audience who laughed the most’.
The great man dangled it before my eyes for
a few seconds before announcing, ‘It’s not
you!’ and giving it to the girl next to me. But
I love him all the same.
“‘Tonight I’m doing a recipe for
Ski yoghurts, Nan!’” - Chris Hughes
“When I saw Have I Got News For You Paul
Daniels was on Ian Hislop’s team, so a lot
of flak got thrown his way, most of which
he deserved because he was being a tedious
arse throughout. Ian’s increasing state of
despair was highly amusing, though.
“A few months later, I came
into work on a Monday morning and was
informed to my surprise that there’d been a
clip of me and my flatmate Steve laughing
uproariously on the previous night’s South
Bank Show - it was because it had been
about Paul Merton, and had included some
studio footage from that very episode. So,
notable then for the fact that’s this was as
close to Melvyn Bragg as I have ever been
(or indeed would ever want to be).” - Jill
Phythian
“Have I Got News For You was recorded at
the London Studios, of course, and as ever
we were the first people there, by hours, so
we got to sit in LWT reception next to that
trophy cabinet with Dame Edna glasses in,
and then sat in the LWT staff bar! Not the
one Brucie took his Play Your Cards Right
contestants to, I’m sure, as it was quite
grotty. We were thrilled when we found out
Martin Clunes was one of the guests, as we
thought he was great at the time, less thrilled
when we found out Parky was the other one,
and he was a right old bore. And we had to
watch the Emu clip again, and laugh at it. I
recall much banter at the end over whether
Paul McCartney was going to be on the
show next week, as billed (he wasn’t).”- Steve
Williams
I is for I’m Alan Partridge and I’ve Got A
Secret
“Going to see I’m Alan Partridge in 1997
was surely my family’s finest hour, right
down to the fact that when we were queueing up outside Studio 1 - Studio 1! - at Television Centre, we looked out the window
and saw Anna Ford getting into a car.
“The tickets said Knowing Me
Knowing You Series 2’, and they started the
evening by showing us some KMKYWAP
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The Burst of Creamup
to refresh our memories - or in my parents’
case, show them who it was - and then some
location stuff - the bit from episode two
at the owl sanctuary, fact fans - to audible
gasps, such was the change in Partridge’s
appearance.
“Coogan compered the whole
recording in character, and as we all know
it was all closed sets so we watched most of
it on monitors, but we could see through
into the Travel Tavern reception and Alan’s
bedroom. It was Watership Alan we saw
being recorded, hence Chris Morris was in
attendance, and ‘Partridge’ brought him out
and said: ‘This is Chris Morris, a very mysterious man, you’re not going to say much,
are you?’, and Chris said, ‘No’. When the cow
was dropped on Alan’s head, we laughed
non-stop for absolutely ages. And as I always
say, there was a brilliant bit with a Mike
Oldfield CD that got cut out of the finished
episode and, presumably for PRS reasons,
never appeared on the videos. Which was
the best bit. The day before Diana’s funeral,
you note, and at the end Coogan/Partridge
thanked us for coming ‘in a week nobody
feels like laughing’, to laughter from some of
the audience.” - Steve Williams
a guess. When the studio audience took
their places, we all found party hats and
blowers under our seats, and the warm-up
guy told us that one of the celebrity guests
on the panel was celebrating their birthday,
and on a signal, we would all be required to
put our hats on and toot our party blowers.
Given that we’re British, dagnammit, this
was about as much audience participation as
most of us were prepared for...
“The point of the programme
was that a guest would be questioned as to
their bizarre/scandalous secret by a panel of
celebrities, using yes/no answers only. The
only panel member I can recall was Henry
Kelly, so you imagine how obscure the rest
of them must have been. A rather smug gentleman took his place next to Tom O’Connor
and proceeded to yes/no his way through
his answers. Eventually, Tom O’Connor declared that he’d defeated the panel and that
this chappie’s secret was that he’d composed
The Birdie Song - ‘which our audience is going to perform for us now!’ Bugger...
“So the cameras all swivel round,
my mum turns a horrible shade of grey and
my dad, the treacherous git, plonks hats on
me and my sister and gleefully joins the rest
of the audience in a jaw-grindingly, soulcrushingly long performance of said pop
classic... I mean, the whole song, not just a
chorus for the cameras. I don’t know how
long it is, but suffice to say, it’s too bloody
long. Not only does Dad somehow know all
the ‘dance moves’, he improvises a few of his
own, mostly consisting of twirling his two by
now slightly nauseated daughters round and
round as if auditioning for Come Dancing.
And yes, we did make the final cut.
“In the intervening years, I’ve
considered applying for tickets to Question
Time, among other things, but I’m scared to,
just in case. The horror, the horror...” - Becky
Garrett
“When I went to see I’m Alan Partridge being recorded, Steve Coogan brilliantly stayed
in character throughout. It was the one with
the cracking owl sanctuary, and the finished
show left out a scene where Alan tries to get
him and his saucy secretary in the mood by
playing an audiobook of Bravo Two Zero.” Sarah Peacock
“I’ve embarrassed myself on national TV, although, to be fair, it was on Tom O’Connor’s
I’ve Got a Secret, so chances are no-one saw
it apart from Mrs O’Connor. My family applied for audience tickets via the BBC - you
couldn’t be specific, you just got what you
were given (see how I’m trying to distance
myself from the whole shameful episode?).
This must be around 18 or so years ago, at
J is for Johnny Vaughan Tonight
“Sid Owen, Patsy Palmer and the tallest
74
“Before the sainted Chris Needham turned the town into his fluffy-lipped fiefdom”
man in the world made Johnny Vaughan
work hard for his money on this particular
instance, when Johnny Vaughan Tonight was
on BBC1. Nice short show, which managed
to avoid the audience participation (though
I still suffered the warm-up man). There was
a lot redoing clapping and laughing, which
is just sick really. After a while you’re just
silently shrugging your shoulders and ‘hehhehing’ like you would if someone makes a
crack at the bus stop. But, there were good
green room drinks afterwards with Johnny
who told some hilarious stories about Jimmy
Tarbuck Jr’s wedding and dogs. He kept
looking at my hair, but hey, I thought we’d
make great friends in real life. Never clapped
eyes on him since though. And there was
food.” - Jon Peake
Simon (who were really nice and funny)
opened the door to their little set. I got to
chat briefly with Zoë Ball (who was lovely)
and she was showing off her engagement
ring to some of us girls in the audience,
but I didn’t have any contact with Jamie
Theakston. I stood near one of the guests,
Tatanya M Ali (from The Fresh Prince of Bel
Air) and got to lounge around on various
parts of the set, and hung out backstage with
Vanessa Feltz’s young daughter, who latched
onto me for some reason.” - Tania
M is for Mastermind, Men Behaving Badly
and The Mersey Pirate
“Before the sainted Chris Needham turned
the town into his fluffy-lipped fiefdom, the
most you could hope for celebrity-wise
in Loughborough was a Showaddywaddy
homecoming gig at the Town Hall, a fleeting
glimpse of Bill Tidy in the shopping precinct
buying some inks for his next zany cartoon,
or, if you were desperate, an afternoon spent
hanging around what was rumoured to be
David Gower’s house on Beacon Road.
“Imagine the mild hysteria, then,
when it was announced an edition of none
other than Mastermind was to be filmed
at Loughborough University. Now I hadn’t
even left primary school at the time, and was
still not quite sure when the grand day took
place (I’m guessing ‘83), but naturally my
telly obsession was already advanced enough
for me to demand attendance at the court
of Sir Magnusson. Well, it wasn’t every day
a real programme came to town (it wasn’t
even every year), and the last time anyone
had seen a genuine TV camera in Loughborough was when Princess Diana had visited
to open a new wing of the Ashmount school
for kids with learning difficulties, and everyone had been given a half-day off lessons to
go and wave plastic flags.
“I was naively taken aback,
on arriving at the designated venue, to
discover hardly anyone else about (least of
all children) and then to find the record-
L is for The Lily Savage Show and Live &
Kicking
“A Friday night at LWT in 2001, and a recording of The Lily Savage Show. The main
guest was billed as someone quite famous I
recall, but we ended with Cilla Black. There
were drinks upstairs at the top of the LWT
tower afterwards, with Paul O and Cilla and
various other hangers on. Cheap white wine,
lots of it - bit of a hangover. But it’s always
so much nicer when you get shown to your
seats by a PR while the rest of the audience
queues outside (Sorry Steve Williams!).” Jon Peake
“When I was 15, in early 1999, I was lucky
enough to go into the Live & Kicking
studio and be in the audience. I had got in
by phoning up the BBC and requesting a
ticket, and I had a really fun day (although
discovering almost all of the rest of the audience was made up of stage school kids, kids
with agents, or competition winners was a
bit disheartening). I got to take part in a few
things; one was sitting on the stairs and doing ‘boo’ and ‘aw’ noises for a skit featuring
Vanessa Feltz, the other was being one of
the fans who’d scream every time Trev and
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The Burst of Creamup
ing was taking place within a horrible tatty
examinations hall. It was also a baking hot
day, and when a surly security guard tried
to throw my family out claiming he didn’t
‘have a bleeding clue’ what Mastermind was,
the temptation to pack it all in and trudge
back home was understandably immense.
But eventually we got inside and discovered
the only seats available to those who weren’t
university staff or students were up in a poky
balcony. Amusingly this was positioned directly above Magnus’ big head, so it actually
meant we ended up with a nice view onto
his desk, and could see him get his cards all
jumbled up and also some bits of paper with
the BBC logo on.
“This, obviously, made it all
worthwhile, despite the fact the recording lasted almost two hours, the heat was
unbearable and Magnus behaved like a
dickhead. Suffice to say we didn’t get in shot
once, and when the show was eventually
transmitted on BBC1 it was the most boring
thing we’d ever seen. No TV programme
ever returned to film in Loughborough ever
again until Emma Kennedy-fronted Channel 4 flop Flatmates in 2000.” - Ian Jones
(ie. the ferry) in groups of about 15 or so
while broadcasting was actually in progress.
I should point out that it was in fact stationary throughout, rather than actually traversing the Mersey. I’ve no idea whether or not
this was the case during the regular editions,
although now that I come to think of it, the
duration of the ferry ride is suspiciously
short when compared to that of the average
edition of a Saturday morning TV show. To
be honest, it was all very mundane really, as
the tourists were kept at an understandable
distance from the ‘action’. I do recall Billy
Butler (sans Wally) being present for some
reason, although he didn’t appear to actually
be involved with the show, and for reasons
that totally baffle me the requisite number
of regular ferry-travelling pensioners, sitting
completely still on a motionless boat and
seemingly completely oblivious to everything that went on around them. And yes, it
was raining.” - TJ Worthington
O is for Oddballs and One Foot in the
Grave
“In recording the Eamonn Holmes fronted
sports outtake programme, Oddballs, they
filmed all the audience cutaways beforehand
and being on the end of the aisle I featured
quite heavily. This is particularly memorable
in my mind because it got repeated mid
afternoon during the 1998 World Cup - June
15 in fact, my then-girlfriend’s birthday.
Imagine my surprise just after a moment of
passion we turned the TV on and I appeared
on screen.” - Stuart Clary
“In 1997 my family travelled to Teddington
Studios to watch a recording of Men Behaving Badly, and as such we spent a nice sunny
Sunday exploring the Lock, then got to sit
in their reception watching the telly. The
episode we saw being recorded was a fairly
nondescript final series episode, the one
where they look after a small child, although
there was one moment which I thought
was so funny I applauded, and nobody else
did. Ted Robbins was the warm-up man
here, and he was fantastic and a really lovely
bloke. Funnier than the show, to be honest,
but we did love it at the time.” - Steve
Williams
“Going to see a recording of One Foot in the
Grave was a strange evening. We got to TV
Centre dead early, me and two friends from
work, and had to queue for ages. However,
when we got to the head of the queue we
were told that another show had been
cancelled, and that they were combining the
audiences together and there weren’t enough
seats - and so some of us would have to sit in
an overspill room. The only good part of all
“They held some sort of an ‘open day’ during
the making of The Mersey Pirate where the
public were given tours around the ‘studio’
76
“Hot white wine afterwards among braying short girls in midriff tops”
this was that we got some vouchers for the
BBC canteen as compensation, so we got to
go upstairs and get a sandwich, crisps and a
coke on the licence fee payers.
“So me and about 20 others
watched the recording as you would watch
a TV programme in the school library crammed round a normal size TV in a big
room. But with a sandwich, crisps and a
drink of course. We could see what the TV
cameras could see, so when they were not
recording we couldn’t see a thing, but we
could still hear the audio.
“For the first half an hour or
so we had a blank screen but could only
hear an enthusiastic warm-up man hyping
the crowd, cheering Richard Wilson and
Annette Crosbie, and then eventually the
opening titles came up in much the same
way as they did on my TV at home. So that
was basically what it was like - watching the
show, in my living room, but punctuated
by long breaks and occasionally seeing the
same scene again but slightly differently. I
never got to see the set, or the actors, just a
BBC conference room and one of the canteens. Not a great night out really.” - Simon
from Bucks, (friend of TJ Hooker-loving
Peter Laws)
help me Trinny), so my waving arms could
be distinguished from the bopping masses.
Unfortunately, this meant that I spent a lot
of time waving my arms pointlessly and
doing hands-in-the-air clapping to Dodgy
and the Boo Radleys, and therefore feeling
extremely stupid. There’s a lesson to be
learned here, but I’m not sure what it is.” Jill Phythian
“The Priory, that forgotten Jamie and Zoe
vehicle filmed in a tramshed in north London, even made its press guests sit on very
uncomfortable beanbags, and because my
boss was in a suit, we were hidden behind
a pillar. No one went to The Priory in a
suit. Guests were a pre-Little Britain David
Walliams (so tall) and Hollywood’s Minnie
Driver, and there was the usual rubbishy live
location japes. Hot white wine afterwards
for about 10 minutes among braying short
girls in midriff tops until we were forced
into ‘cars’. A bore.” - Jon Peake
Q is for Question Time
“About 11 years ago I sat in the audience
for Question Time when it was recorded at
HTV, Cardiff. The chairman then was Peter
Sissons and the guests were David Hunt,
Secretary of State for Wales; Sir John Harvey
Jones the Troubleshooter; someone from
Plaid Cymru (can’t remember); and Gordon
Brown, Shadow Chancellor.
“I never realised that all the questions were screened before the recording
began so the panellists knew full well what
they were going to be asked.
“It was recorded at 6pm ready
for air at 10pm-ish. It was all very middleclass with posh PR announcers coming on
saying, ‘And now we will hear the 6 o’clock
news on BBC Radio 4.’ The audience hushed
and I don’t think I’ve ever seen so much
attention paid to a radio news bulletin. The
recording itself was pretty uneventful apart
from the end, when the credits didn’t appear on screen. ‘Ah,’ said Peter Sissons, ‘the
P is for Pennis Pops Out and The Priory
“Pennis Pops Out was the pointless and
forgotten ITV Nighttime music show, which
some mate of my brother’s got us tickets for.
The best part was getting into Granada studios, whoop-di-doo! However, the entire audience experience involved standing around
in a rather chilly sub-TOTP nightclub-withthe-lights-on set, attempting to look as if
we were having a good time (which was
surprisingly difficult, because we weren’t).
Paul Kay was smuggled out of a back room
to do one link at a time and smuggled away
again very fast, so we barely glimpsed him.
I am just about visible in a few crowd scenes
because I had made a ‘strategic’ fashion
choice of wearing fuschia-pink gloves (so
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The Burst of Creamup
breakdown of the credits machine - every
Chancellor’s nightmare,’ and winked at
Gordon Brown. Sadly, that bit didn’t make it
to broadcast.” - Chris Kinsella
then-new tumbleweed routine. We also got
the best final game ever, where Ulrika had
to clean dandruff off a car windscreen with
her arse. What I most remember about this,
though, is a few months later when my mate
Adam Samuels said, ‘I see your episode of
Shooting Stars is on tonight, with Richard E
Grant’, and I said, ‘No, it was Russell Grant!’”
- Steve Williams
R is for Ready, Steady, Cook and
Runaround
“I went to see the episode of Ready, Steady,
Cook that went out on February 29, 1996.
I held up a red pepper. The studios were so
small that the washing-up was done in the
car park.” - Stuart Clary
“I recently headed for Teddington for an
intriguing remake of ITV’s hit-and-miss The
Sketch Show in pilot form for Stateside-only
consumption. The cast included Mary Lou
off of The Larry Sanders Show and Cheryl’s
sister off of Curb Your Enthusiasm, which
certainly impressed me, plus British original
and Lee Mack. But for shame, no Tim Vine!
Surely his slick patter would go down a treat
in the USA? The key factor here is that the
show was being ‘championed’ by - blimey
- Kelsey Grammer, who introduced it to
American audiences and appeared in a few
sketches. During the recording, Kelsey sat
a couple of feet away from us, in a battered
leather armchair at a picnic table, with a bottle of mineral water and a box of tissues on
it. It was a mite distracting to hear the voice
of Dr Frasier Crane going, ‘heh heh heh’
during every sketch, and he rather shamelessly schmuttered up to a bunch of attractive female American exchange students
sitting in front of us during the warm-up.
And he kept on messing up a sketch where
he had to storm out through a door, and
couldn’t open it.” - Chris Hughes
“I was selected to appear when our school
(Fairfields, Basingstoke) went on Runaround but missed out because I was ill when
they did some sort of ‘trial run’ in the lower
hall and had to be content with spotting myself in the audience fiddling with the school
tie I’d put round my teddy’s neck.” - Sarah
Peacock
S is for Saturday Banana, Shooting Stars,
The Sketch Show USA, Stars Reunited and
Star Secrets
“My brother had a pal whose dad worked at
Southern, so we got to go the Bill Oddiefronted long forgotten Saturday morning
fest Saturday Banana, at Southern TV’s
Southampton studios in 1979. How exciting
was it? Really exciting, until we got there. I
remember not much more than everyone in
the audience being given a copy of the Three
Degrees single Givin’ Up, Givin’ In which
they performed on the show.” - Jon Peake
“Probably the worst of all the recordings
my family went to, alas, was Shooting Stars,
if only because of the regulars only Lamarr
bothered to say even a word to the audience. Still, in the front row again, and Gary
Rhodes and Carol Smillie gave my sister autographs and said hello, which was exciting.
There was a good bit where we had to watch
them set up a huge boulder to swing in and
smash in Vic and Bob’s faces, and the floor
manager had to tell us not to respond to the
“The Creamup team attended three recordings of BBC daytime fandango Stars
Reunited at the Riverside Studios in 2003,
attracted by the prospect of seeing Dale
Winton reunite team members from That’s
Life, Nationwide and Blue Peter. First off, we
went Nationwide, greeted by warm-up man
Miles Crawford (‘That was me, that was!’)
having some ‘fun’ with an audience member
called Mrs Clark, a West Indian lady who
78
“Yes, I want you to come and get aggressive with me!”
is Dale’s biggest fan. Then Dale bounded
on and we gazed in awe as grumpy Michael
Barrett, John Stapleton, Sue Cook and
Valerie Singleton trooped down the steps
to hug self-consciously on set. But the best
bit came when Dale had to do his retakes at
the end. Firstly, he mentioned to Val about
how young she was looking, and when she
demurred he exclaimed, ‘I’d give you one,
Val!’ Then he started telling us what he was
going to watch on telly that night. ‘Do you
like Cutting It? You’ll be watching the porn
channel all night, Val. Think about me, with
my Pot Noodle and glass of milk.’
“Then, a couple of weeks later,
Creamup headed back to Hammersmith to
spend the afternoon watching Esther, Doc,
Adrian and Chris ‘Hello’ Serle reminisce,
welcome surprise guest Mollie Sugden and
reveal what they were up to now (Adrian:
‘Actually Dale, I’m working with Robbie
Williams!’).
“In the evening, it was the muchanticipated reunion of Blue Peter’s ‘80s
imperial phase team of Groom, Greene and
Duncan. Creamup found itself sitting across
the aisle from cravatted BP editorial stalwart
Edward Barnes, and thus got to follow Ed in
one of Miles’s ‘fun’ warm-up Mexican waves.
“The big thrill here was that the
production team had asked one us to pose
a question to Sarah Greene on screen. Everything went okay until the time came for
Dale to do the retakes. It was agreed to tidy
up our section, and while everyone waited
for the cameras to roll, Dale explained
to Saz that they’d pick up from the question asked by ‘the gentleman in the cheap
white t-shirt’ aka the Creamup staffer. At
this slight, our man took comedy umbrage
and pretended to start to storm out. Dale
retorted, ‘Yes, I want you to come and get
aggressive with me!’ Then Dale asked him
if he was ‘with’ the man sitting next to him,
aka the Creamup ed, although Dale didn’t
listen to the unnecessarily taut response that
it wasn’t ‘in that sense’. ‘It’s just like Trisha
in the morning, isn’t it?’ said Dale. Then the
‘vision of shy loveliness’ herself got involved
and asked if we were brothers, because they
allegedly looked so alike. The staffer pointed
out to her that while the Creamup ed did
have a twin, it wasn’t him. ‘Ooh, spooky,’
said Sarah, who’d already invoked the spirit
of Ghostwatch earlier in the recording when
a microphone broke. Then, slightly emboldened by all this showbiz sparring, our
man asked Dale if our question was being
cut out, and he replied, ‘No, I’m making my
bit smaller now so yours will look longer!’
Thankfully by now it was time to roll.
“The one thing that struck
Creamup during all this bawdy badinage was
that surprise guest Biddy Baxter was enjoying it hugely. If only she was still in charge,
we could still have got on the sofa units
between Liz and Matt.” - Chris Hughes
“Once I attended a recording of Carol Smillie’s Star Secrets in Studio 1 of TV Centre.
They recorded segments from several
episodes each evening so there were long
pauses while Carol went off to get changed.
After a couple of hours everyone was so
bored rigid and hungry that when we were
allowed out for a loo break most of the audience kept walking through the doors down
the stairs and out the building.” - Stuart
Clary
T is for TFI Friday and Tiswas
“A pretty boring day, on a very hot summers
evening, me and a gang of about 10 mates
went along to TFI Friday and got herded
into a series of tiny rooms which made us all
very sweaty until we got to stand around a
stage and moved about a lot to make it look
like there were more of us. A crap evening
out, but my friend Lester got selected to
shake hands with Ringo Starr, so it wasn’t
all bad.” - Simon from Bucks, (friend of TJ
Hooker-loving Peter Laws)
“I was a competition winner on Tiswas, an
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The Burst of Creamup
experience that I will never forget and am
very proud of. It should be noted that the
esteemed Mr Tarrant was highly hungover
and, although he was a perfectly nice fella,
seemed decidedly under par. I remember
his dismay at having to sit through The Doolies’ new single Love Patrol, a fact that he
made no attempt to hide. Sally James’ child
handling skills were questionable - while
delivering the latest music news she dealt
with an unruly and overly talkative child,
who was standing behind her, by giving
them a sneaky and sharp elbow straight in
the ribs. It was a unique experience, if not a
little strange.” - Actionfish
memorising telephone directories - such
were the quality of guests on Vanessa that
there was an actual record-breaker on there
who attempted to memorise every phone
book in the country. It involved an intimidating walk to the microphone at the side of
the rows of chairs with everybody’s eyes on
me, and I still didn’t get the damned wine.”
- Gillian Kirby
W is for Waiting for God, Win, Lose or
Draw, Win, Lose or Draw Late! and Wogan
“I was in the audience for a recording of
Waiting for God sometime around 1994. I
remember being terrified I was going to be
hurled out because there were official signs
everywhere indicating that ‘YOU MUST BE
15 OR OVER TO BE IN THE AUDIENCE’.
I guess my dad must’ve slipped the security a
bunch of used fivers though, as I was able to
sit untroubled for the whole recording.
“As you can imagine, it was pretty
forgettable (it’s not exactly the edgiest show,
is it?) but I do remember Stephanie Cole
mucking up her lines and saying, ‘Bollocks’
a hell of a lot. Which was pretty edgy for the
13-year-old me. The old fellow playing Tom
looked like he was on his way out, and was
essentially reading his lines off the script
whilst comatose. The biggest laugh came
when we all had to chortle at a pre-recorded
scene of the resort manager’s arse being hilariously exposed. Unfortunately, we had to
do this over and over again, as the director
wasn’t happy with our laughing the first time
round. I thought my mum was going to piss
herself.” - Skippa
V is for The Vanessa Show
“While on an A-Level media course, our
college took a jaunt to London for the annual ‘work shadowing’ trip, part of which
involved seeing TV shows being filmed.
Previous years experienced the delights of
Top of the Pops and various unmemorable
sitcoms... in 1999, we had The Vanessa
Show. So, we turned up at Television Centre
one morning to be filmed with the legend
that was Vanessa (and take photos of me
excitedly going ‘Wow! It looks like the
beginning of Live & Kicking!!!’ before going
inside). We each got a cup of tea from the
nice researcher-person and an ace purple
pen with ‘The Vanessa Show’ on it that went
all pink with heat - I still have mine.
“As it was the first time I’d been
on a set, it was a surprise to realise that what
looked like plush soft-furnishings from
outside the screen actually looked like some
sort of MDF dolls’ house. I could only be
glad that it wasn’t a favourite show of mine
because it was oddly distressing to see that,
well, it wasn’t real. As it was live, it felt pretty
much the way it did when seen on TV, and
Vanessa was actually quite attractive in real
life, if a little patronising. I also remember
there was a prize of a bottle of wine for the
‘best audience comment’, spurring me to
make a bon mot about the hilariousness of
“During my student days, I spent an
afternoon at STV’s studios in Cowcaddens,
Glasgow watching a friend of a friend (to
be honest, I didn’t really like him - he wore
pretentious hats and had a goatee) prove
himself ‘quick on the draw’, or otherwise,
in the presence of Bob Mills, Joe Pasquale,
Saracen from Gladiators, Anna Walker and er - another female celeb I can no longer re-
80
“Joe Pasquale was baited by the crowd to talk in his ‘real voice’”
call. Yep, attending a recording of Win, Lose
or Draw was certainly an experience - from
the over-anxious warm-up woman jumping
into the crowd asking, ‘Who remembers old
sweeties?’ every time there was a lull in the
proceedings, to the unfortunate audience
member who was rugby tackled halfway
across the rug in Bob’s faux apartment as he
tried to make his way to Ms Walker for an
autograph, to the security guards placed on
the exits so that no-one could sneak out of
the studio during the toilet-break in between
the recording of the two episodes.
“Throughout the recording Joe
Pasquale was baited by the crowd to talk
in his ‘real voice’, while the female MOTP
drew coos from everyone around for being
so loveable and confident on camera. When
the show was over (the twat in the hat lost,
thankfully) I hung back in one of the corridors waiting for this friend of a friend to
emerge with his miniature easel. Obviously,
I wanted to see that. In doing so, I encountered Saracen in a corridor, who thought I
was loitering in the hope of getting his autograph. ‘Hi,’ he said to me uncomfortably,
prompting me to turn my back on him and
effectively snub him. It was all I could think
to do.” - Graham Kibble-White
“The rest of the ‘celebrity’ panel’
then proceeded to do impressions of Nicky
Campbell, to varying degrees of success. The
consensus from the ‘celebs’ seemed to be
that Campbell was a twat - it was the only
time all day that the studio audience clapped
without prompting, as if to agree in some
strange way. Tarbuck suggested ‘phoning
Watchdog to complain about Campbell ‘every call is logged.’
“Richard Arnold from GMTV
also managed five glasses of red wine in 30
minutes, while they were filming, as well as
a few jokes about anal sex and waxing all his
pubes. Presumably he doesn’t use this material in the mornings.
“I’ve only seen a couple of the
episodes of the show go out, so I don’t know
if I’m in shot. What you’re looking for is
the lone moron laughing when ‘LATE!’ is
slapped on the screen in the opening credits.
“STV served us up with unlimited
supplies of warm beer and wine, as well as
a warm-up man whose jokes were about
abortion, disability and rape. These didn’t
go down too well with anyone and probably
didn’t help STV sell ad-space to members
of the audience who were in the building to
find out about buying adverts on the channel and getting a special treat by seeing a
studio in action.
“Much of the audience appeared
to be STV staff, mainly from the subtitling
department.
“Lisa Tarbuck suggested the spirit
of Bob Mills was in the studio. If he was
then he was hanging from a noose attached
to lighting.” - Andrew Shuards Brown
“For some reason I don’t know, I went to
a recording of five shows of Win, Lose or
Draw Late! at STV in Glasgow back in April.
“The highlight of the day was,
strangely, Jenny Powell being on the panel.
Her remarks on Nicky Campbell were most
enlightening: “Nicky Campbell doesn’t have
any private parts - just a large flat, smooth
flap of skin... He tried to stick the tongue in
me once when we were drunk - he’s disgusting - I hate him.’
“Her other gems were: ‘People
come up to me and say, “Spin the wheel”.
I say, “Fuck off - I never span the wheel in
seven years. I turned around the letters”. I’ve
worked with Jonathan King, John Leslie and
Nicky Campbell in my career...’
“In 1990 it was off to the Shepherd’s Bush
Empire with my friend Linda whose boyfriend Pete co-managed Seal at the time.
Would we like to go to Wogan where he was
doing Killer follow-up Future Love Paradise? Of course we would. My first trip to a
TV studio in 11 years. The warm-up man
was the bloke who used to do all this stuff,
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The Burst of Creamup
Quentin someone, who’s pleasant. So there
we were, in the tiny audience amid a coachload of septuagenarians from Bedford who,
exactly at the halfway mark of the show,
unwrapped sandwiches from foil in unison.
It’s just an excuse to have tea out really.
Guests included Jodi Foster (on film) and
Oliver Stone (filmed the week before and inserted into the show), a woman who walked
Hadrian’s Wall on stilts in order to publicise
War On Want (or something similar) and
someone else we can’t remember.
“When Seal came on, a pensioner
was heard to ask who he was. Her companion told her it was someone called Sealion.
Terry did come to speak to the audience first
and was a thoroughly nice what-you-see-iswhat-you-get man. Exciting.”- Jon Peake
and London doesn’t know what is going
on anywhere,” it was the moment to move
on. But how best to mark the departure
of the man who’d helmed over a thousand
teatime trysts? It had to be something befitting Barratt’s status, and also something
that would prove equally as memorable as
Nationwide’s Jubilee celebrations (involving
indoor merry-go-rounds and Venetian blind
scanners). So it was that for the week beginning Monday 11 July, an entire British Rail
exhibition train, most recently used by Rank
Xerox, was commandeered to allow Mike to
embark on nothing less than a “grand tour”
around the regions. The premise was to visit
a sequence of locations that held some kind
of resonance for Barratt. The reality was one
long utterly shameless personal appearance.
The regal journey kicked off in
Bournemouth, where the man had started
his journalistic career working on local
paper The Bournemouth Times, and where
Mike and his legion of assistants now
decamped to the end of the Pier for the
duration of that night’s show. Somewhat
shambolic scenes followed, as Barratt spent
almost the entire programme wandering
around talking to kids on amusement rides,
before turning his attention to a line of
hastily assembled locals with a Story To Tell,
whom he quizzed with a huge microphone
before adjourning to a local hotel.
And so it went on through the
week. The train wound its way through
Maidenhead, Stratford-Upon-Avon and
Leeds, crowds constantly thronging the
carriages desperate for a glimpse of their
hero. Inside, centre of operations was the
on-board conference suite, conveniently
next to the bar, where Mike held court with
programme editor John Gau while receiving
streams of starry-eyed supplicants like a pair
of colonial viceroys.
Nothing like it had ever been
seen on TV before, but the distant sound
of gnashing teeth from the perennial angry
licence fee payer meant it couldn’t go on for
Prog 49, 22 June 2004
100 GREAT TV MOMENTS
Creamup’s pageant of paramount 625-line
scene-stealers
#26: July 1977 - Michael Barratt leaves
Nationwide
For nigh on eight years the country had
made room at its dinner table for the finest
purveyor of avuncular anecdotage on the
topical magazine beat. He’d first interrupted
your beans and toast back in September
1969 wielding the ace-if-confusing moniker
“co-ordinator”. Very quickly, however, with
the aid of a bank of shimmering screens,
a spinning mandala, a few Cook of the
Realm competitions and one of the best TV
themes ever, canal-boat connoisseur and
Loughborough’s greatest son Michael Barratt
had turned Nationwide - and by obvious
extension himself - into must-see mince and
potatoes viewing.
Yet summer 1977 found Mike
preparing to take receipt of his very last
comedy chocolate cake down the line
from Stuart Hall. Having done his best to
solve the eternal dilemma that “Scotland
isn’t being told what is going on in Wales,
82
“Yes sir it’s all brand new, and funnier too!”
long. End of the line was Saltburn By The
Sea, where an extremely emotional Barratt
signed off for the very last time. Though the
‘Wide would continue to play host to the
genteel antics of Messrs Bough, Wellings,
Stilgoe and co for a few more years, the fine
art of de-mystifying everything from ironing
boards to the IMF or holding forth on the
dependably relevant topic of the price of
stamps would never entertain such a grand
master again.
to see the entire run of anything. So let’s take
this opportunity to recall 26 things that we
sat through while trying to put off getting
dressed until after lunchtime...
A is for... Aardvark
That’s The Blue Aardvark, star of the supporting feature in The New Pink Panther
Show (“Yes sir it’s all brand new, and funnier
too!”) flung out on BBC1 in the summer
of 1985. Doing battle with a ‘laidback’ ant
called Charlie, confusion seemed to reign at
the DePatie-Freleng clubhouse over whether
he was meant to be an aardvark or an
anteater. The fact that he wore a t-shirt and
sounded like Jackie Mason made him even
trickier to pin down anthropologically, but
at least he wasn’t Crazylegs Crane, for which
we must be grateful.
FACTS AMAZING: Barratt’s self-penned
publications include The Down to Earth
Gardening Book, Golf With Tony Jacklin and,
quite simply, Michael Barratt
Prog 51, 22 August 2004
THE PINK PANTHER
FOLLOWS IN A MOMENT
B is for... But First This
The BBC’s first attempt at ‘stranded’ summer
holiday schedules from 1987, fronted in turn
by Andy Crane, Simon Potter, Tracy ‘Tricia
Armstrong’ Brabin and Siobhan River City
People’ Maher. The usual repeats, cartoons
and imports ensued, including some dusty
old Superman live action shorts from the
1950s, but there was always the morning
repeat of Shane Ramsay-era Neighbours to
pass the time.
Creamup’s guide to summer holiday
morning telly
One of the great things about the summer holidays was that there was more or
less double the amount of kids’ TV than
usual. Of course, nowadays you can watch
children’s telly 12 hours a day every day,
but in the past the school holidays were the
only times they broke out of the usual 4 to
5.30pm slot. The problem was there was absolutely no money for any new programmes
in the mornings at all, and as such BBC1
and ITV churned out some of the most
incredible toss in the name of a ‘bonus’ for
bored kids unable to play in a rain-lashed
garden.
Holiday mornings were home
to a different type of telly. They usually
saw much more stripping and stranding
- obvious when they had six weeks to kill
on a budget of 2p. Hence, many of the
programmes stuck in viewers’ minds as they
would be bunged out every morning for a
month and a half, and then again the following year. Yet with trips to the zoo and the local museum to fit in, nobody ever managed
C is for... Caption slides
One of the real joys of summer holiday
mornings, now sadly eradicated by the
march of technological progress and the
arrival of breakfast TV, was the ability to get
up ‘before’ television. If you timed switching the set on just right, it was possible to
hear an announcer bid a fond welcome
to “the younger viewers who have joined
us today”, and spend the three minutes or
so before the start of the first programme
gazing at a poorly-cropped photograph
of The McWomble or Roobarb in a pirate
hat slapped crudely across the BBC1 logo,
accompanied by a lousy light orchestral
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The Burst of Creamup
cover version of Baby Elephant Walk (or, in
the rare event that the first programme was
Bagpuss, a ‘singing dogs’ record that allowed
said announcer to make a dull joke about
hoping that Bagpuss wouldn’t be frightened
away). Once Roland Rat started showing up
alongside his barely more eloquent human
co-stars on TV-am, however, the caption
slide’s days as a viable contender in the ratings war were over.
recall that compilations of his work were at
least on in the mornings, and even that they
were introduced by a tinkly rendition of
Chopsticks, but nobody can say for certain
whether they actually sat through an entire
edition or not.
F is for... Fairbanks Jnr
Sometimes, the ropey imports wouldn’t in
fact be quite so ancient after all. Presented
on the most crackly, blotch-covered, piercingly-hued colour film imaginable, the exceptionally lengthy series tracing the history
of The Golden Age of Cinema was presented
to young BBC viewers courtesy of Douglas
Fairbanks Jnr, who opened each edition by
climbing up the bejewelled and ornate steps
of a suspicious palatial ‘picture house’ and
settling down in the empty auditorium to
begin his narration of endless clips of people
being either dramatic or funny in biplanes.
Sadly, much was lost in the transatlantic
translation, and the only real appeal for
viewers came in wonderment at the fact that
as Fairbanks Jnr was so old, Fairbanks Snr
must be even older still.
D is for... Dick Tracy
Zoot-suited cartoon ‘teccery from the neverpopular UPA studios that frequently filled
a five-minute gap in regional ITV morning schedules. Best remembered for that
overhead shot of downtown NYC gridlock,
and Tracy himself talking into his two-way
wrist radio to contact his assistant gumshoes (“This is Dick Tracy calling Go Go
Gomez!”) who also included The Retouchables, Jo Jitsu and Hemlock Holmes, a dog
in a police helmet who sounded like Cary
Grant, hotfoot on the trail of such villains as
Pruneface and Itchy. “Over and out!”
E is for... Edgar Kennedy
Never allow The Wrong Kind Of Nostalgia™
to fool you into looking back at summer
holiday morning television and thinking
that it was some kind of blissful nirvana. For
every programme that it was worth avoiding
having to go outside for, there were three
or four tedious old monochrome imports
that massed viewing audiences had rejected
as antiquated boring money for old rope
decades ago. Never mind hearing about
Champion the Wonderhorse everywhere you
went, it was impossible to avoid hearing
about him even if you sat still in front of a
television with your fingers wedged firmly in
your ears. There were many, many offenders,
notably ‘repackagings’ of old silent comedians’ shorts that put many viewers off them
for good, but the most notorious individual
was one Edgar Kennedy. Notorious in that
most people of a certain age can instantly
G is for... The Groovie Ghoulies
“It’s time for the Ghoulies get together!” Er,
if you say so. Disappointing spooky cartoon
from the Filmation stable, interspersed with
bubblegum pop interludes and a Laugh-In
style ‘weird windows’ sequence, that only
ever seemed to get flung out on ITV during
the holidays. It starred Drac, Wolfie and
Frankie (“I needed that!”) it says here.
H is for... Half-Price Heroes
For some reason, back in 1981, execs at NBC
remained unconvinced that Spider-man had
the necessary curb appeal to lure in a prepube audience on a Saturday morning, and
so insisted that in his new series he be accompanied by a couple of ‘amazing friends’
and, lest we forget, a comedy dog. And thus
was created what turned into a British holiday morning staple as Spidey (check), Ice-
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“Lord of the Jungle, the hero who stalks...”
man (okay, he’s one of the X-men, we know
who he is) and Firestar (Er ..?) fought crime
from their hi-tech lab situated in Aunt May’s
back room in Spider-Man and his Amazing
Friends. Of course, for comics fans Firestar’s
appearance was a continual niggle, a character created especially for the show (apparently the Human Torch was earmarked for
the gig, before execs decided his appearance
might tempt kids into playing with matches), effectively snubbing Marvel’s impressive
itinerary of lady crimefighters (so that’ll be
Black Canary, Wasp and, er, Spiderwoman,
then) and presumably (we say this with
not a shred of evidence, mind) avoiding a
further royalty going into the back pocket of
Stan Lee’s slacks. For completists, however,
there was good news, as flamed-haired
Angelica Jones did finally make it into the
funny pages, showing up in Uncanny X-Men
#193. However, when it comes to the crappiest fighting force ever wheeled out during
the June-August lie-in, then the Rich Tea
was well and truly taken by Defenders of the
Earth. A collection of copyright-lapsed (and
do bear in mind all conclusions are offered
here baselessly) characters that were so far
off the radar, the theme tune had to provide
each of them with a little character biog
(“Lord of the Jungle, the hero who stalks the
beast call him brother, the ghost who walks.
Phantom”). The team in full, then - Flash
Gordon (famed for his ubiquitous rotoscoped ‘come get me’ gesture), The Phantom
(domino-masked and purple jumpsuited
newspaper-strip character), Mandrake the
Magician (frankly, we’re not sure where he
came from) and Lothar (the ‘Ken’ in this
line-up) accompanied by their assorted
kids... and a fluffy alien. Of course.
comedy series across the pond. Of course,
this couldn’t possibly be true, as all the business about sliding down dinosaurs’ necks
and Fred’s feet making that patented Hanna
Barbera twangy-whizz-bang sound whenever he ran was strictly juvenilia, right? But
Wait Till Your Father Gets Home? That was a
different proposition altogether, with its animated depiction of a typical ‘70s American
household. So ‘adult’, in fact, was the show
that it even dared to give the titular parent a
dull workaday occupation, with Harry Boyle
(voiced by Tom “Sunday, Monday” Bosley)
shlepping out of the house every day to run
his restaurant supply business. Alongside
that, there was more than a whiff of pubescence about offspring Chet, Alice, and Jamie,
the former being far more of a potential
dopehead than Shaggy off of Scooby Doo.
And better yet, there was baffling and scary
American politics as McCarthy-ite next
door neighbour Ralph and his Company B
anti-communist force regularly went about
their business persecuting hippies. Heady
stuff indeed, and the fact it was normally
mired in the No Man’s Land that bridged
the end of children’s telly and the onset of
Martyn Lewis just added to its lustre.
J is for... John Kettley is a Weatherman
The best band to come from Sunderland
(until Kenickie) got their big break in 1988
when they sent a tape to Andy Crane, who
enjoyed their song - surely the only pop
record to namecheck Bernard Davey - so
much that he got But First This to make
them a video, even roping in Kettley himself
to appear startled when the boys burst
through his map. The track enjoyed heavy
rotation that summer - alongside a clip
of Kim Wilde performing You Came in a
bandstand, which has stuck in Creamup’s
mind for some reason - but wasn’t actually
released until December, where it got to
number 21. The band claimed it would have
been an even bigger hit but it charted in
Christmas week so they couldn’t go on Top
I is for... “I love my mom and dad and my
brothers too, and the groovy way we get
along”
For years, British kids were assured that The
Flintstones, that bedrock of barely amusing buffoonery, actually played as an adult
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The Burst of Creamup
M is for... Mallett’s Mallet
Quack-quack-boom-doiiinggggg! That
was the theme tune to the never-ending
wordassociationgamewhereyoumusn’tpause
mustn’thesitateoryougetabangontheheadlike
this! as part of TV-am’s After Nine replacement Wacaday. ‘Course, it was a spin-off
from the Wide Awake Club (with the word
‘Saturday’ cunningly replaced by ‘Wacaday’
in the theme tune), but while that included
a decent amount of ‘infotainment’, Wacaday
was simply half an hour of Timmy Mallett shouting, incredibly cheap games and
Gobots cartoons in five-minute chunks. Also
worth noting is the programme’s thrifty
approach to musical items, not bothering
to pay for pop videos and instead playing
records over stills of the artist for a bit. No
doubt Mallett’s number one hit in 1990 was
in part helped by him performing it on the
programme every single day for a month.
When TV-am lost their franchise to GMTV,
Simon Parkin was hired as Tim’s replacement, proving that it was in fact possible to
go downmarket after all.
of the Pops, although our attempts to help
out were foiled when we asked for it in WH
Smith, and they claimed they’d never heard
of it. We did eventually buy it for 10p in a
car boot sale eight years later, but by then,
alas, the group had split.
K is for... Kick Start
The biking competition originally started
at half past six as a Nationwide summer
replacement, when it was presented by
Dave Lee Travis, but most people will
remember it from its regular outings on
weekday mornings, with Peter Purves on the
lip-mic alongside expert summariser John
Lambkin. Sponsored by Norwich Union,
and always taking place in the pouring
rain in an already mud-splattered field, the
competitors would negotiate an obstacle
course, involving lots of bunny hops and
riding their bikes along planks over ditches,
inspiring everyone watching to set up their
own home-made version in the back garden
to test out their Raleighs. The fairground
organ-style theme was called Be My Boogie
Woogie Baby, fact fans. Its stablemate at
White Rabbit Productions was the canoeing
competition Paddles Up, which was similarly
stripped over Christmas, but chances of
audience participation here were low.
N is for... Newsround Special Delivery
1986 was a curious summer on the BBC,
with the normal afternoon output being completely dropped, and replaced by
stripped repeats of The Roman Holidays,
Heidi and Fame. Meanwhile Andy Crane
pitched up in the Broom Cupboard in the
mornings, and Newsround spun off into this
summer special. Every day at 9.50am Roger
Finn - and later, Phil Schofield, ‘cos he was
quite popular at the time - would present
the programme from the Radio 1 Roadshow stage, and introduce a report about
something that was going on in that town.
And that was it. Surely, for a mild-mannered
reporter like Roger Finn, working a roadshow crowd was even more terrifying than
announcing the space shuttle had blown up.
L is for... Le Chevalier Tempête
...or The Flashing Blade as it was more
generally known over here. This dubbed
holiday staple from France featured bearded,
big-shirted blokes doing horse riding, sword
fighting, and that, in a genuinely thrilling
zillion-part series. For Ribena-ed-up kids
who were getting off on The Four Musketeers
bit in The Banana Splits, this was heady stuff.
Live action derring-do, impressively put together and bookended by that theme which
claimed “life and love and happiness, are
well worth fighting for”, it served as inspiration for diminutive D’Artagnans to get out
into the sunshine and whack hell out of their
siblings. En guarde!
O is for... Once Upon a Time... Man
Majestically overambitious French animated
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“Greg Dyke is in the mire up to his shirt-sleeves”
history of mankind presented in unremitting detail (‘Episode 17: The Golden Age of
The Low Countries’) featuring a cast headed
by a long-bearded guru named Maestro,
and The Clock, er, a clock with arms and
legs. The opening titles, depicting man’s
evolution from the primordial soup to the
space age, climaxing in an astronaut being
pursued across a launchpad by a baying mob
as he tried to flee the planet earth seconds
before it exploded, is perhaps the scariest
thing ever screened in the name of children’s
television.
that still managed to look more impressive
than Monkey Dust. The storylines, for want
of a better word, revolved around their subClangers discovery of some item of junk or
other on the planet, and speculation on its
possible use. Whoopee. Has Bits and Pieces
been on yet?
R is for... Rat on the Road
Camden Lock, 1983 and Greg Dyke is in the
mire up to his shirt-sleeves, attempting to
hoist Good Morning Britain’s dismal ratings
above the terminal “two old ladies” level
before he is forced to make a swift exit and
chug off down the Grand Union Canal in
the TV-am barge. Desperately scouring Eggcup House for anything remotely entertaining, his eyes alight on Roland Rat’s cartoon
slot, presented “in shedvision” from the
TV-am roof. Digging down the side of the
TV-am sofa, Greg finds a few quid to despatch the “fast-talking rodent” and sidekick
Kevin The Gerbil off on tour around Britain
in a gleaming pink vintage Ratmobile, which
ended up on an AA truck in the opening
titles. The twosome’s adventures were interspersed with Pac-Man cartoons transmitted
by the as-yet-unseen Errol The Hamster
(“Run VT Errol!”), games and competitions
(one Creamup staffer winning a “ratbag” and
getting his name read out by Nick Owen
in the process). The ratings shoot up, and a
Number One Superstar is born, along with a
thousand rubbish Private Eye cartoons.
P is for... Public Information Films
The unapologetically haphazard nature of
ITV holiday morning schedules meant there
was invariably room to fling on a Public
Information Film or three for the kids. This
explains why the “breaststroke, backstroke,
butterfly or crawl” learn to swim song has
been scorched into the memories of a generation, along with the adventures of Joe and
Petunia, the world’s oldest cyclist Augustus
Windsock, and the sheer terror of the Dark
and Lonely Water.
Q is for... (CP and) Qwikstitch
The bitter conclusion of the holiday morning
schedules was always home to some dim uninteresting filler or other, presumably aimed
at driving the child viewers away from the
weightier midday current affairs programming that they had no business poking their
noses into. Seen by few - as most people had
indeed switched off their television set and
gone out and done something less boring
instead by that point - but remembered by
many, CP and Qwickstich was a particularly
‘lo-fi’ British animated series, depicting the
somewhat static adventures of two suspiciously R2D2 and C3P0 inspired ‘droids’
(one, as his name implies, basically a sewing
machine; the other some sort of dimly remembered bipedal kettle) who had minimal
adventures on the planet Junkus Minor,
rendered in barely-moving cutout animation
S is for... Sport Billy
Cartoon adventures of an irritating goodytwo-shoes kid from the “planet Olympus”
who travelled to Earth in a yellow spaceship
shaped like an alarm clock, to promote fair
play or something, defeating his enemy
Queen Vanda using sports equipment pulled
from a minature-yet-infinite sports holdall.
Perhaps you needed to be there. Flung out
on ITV in the early 1980s, Sport Billy was
massive for a bit, becoming FIFA’s mascot
and starring in his own Subbuteo game.
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The Burst of Creamup
Another Filmation production, predictably.
ed to make a sojourn north of the border
to, in his own words, “find out all about this
Untied Shoelaces Show I’ve been hearing so
much about.” His fact-finding tour brought
him to BBC Scotland and the country’s most
ambitious ever opt-out of holiday mornings
with its own kids’ magazine programme
which prompted children to “wake up, you
sleepy head, it’s time for you to get out of
bed”. Hosted by ‘Tiger’ (and that’s surely a
protestant-baiting Celtic reference there,
right?) Tim, Tony Hollis and children’s
author Joe Austen, the show majored on
screaming oh-so-Scottish kids and the
only item anyone can now remember from
the whole affair, a game wherein children
phoned up to shout directions at a kind of
electronic eraser on screen, in an effort to
uncover a famous personality’s face and win
a hat with a foot on it.
Creamup’s own Chris Diamond
even had a bash: “Tiger Tim was on the
phone and I found it incredibly difficult to
get used to listening to him on while watching him on the telly. To further add to the
awkwardness of the whole experience, our
phone was in the kitchen so my Dad had
to bring our big hired DER telly in where it
could only get a pretty ropey picture. Neither did it help that I had almost my entire
family ranged around me to a) support me
and/or b) laugh uproariously when I made
an arse of it. Anyway, I got 30 seconds to direct the eraser and after that time had managed to reveal, ooooh, around five percent of
the screen. Without clues I could only have
named the star had they been either Barry
White or Orson Welles. So, I got a hint and
another 10 seconds to guess. Tiger Tim said
it was someone who used to sing with their
brothers at which my Dad started shouting,
‘Michael Jackson! Michael Jackson!’ and
my Gran bellowed, ‘Andy Williams! Andy
Williams!’ Thankfully I went for the former
and received my novelty hat about eight
weeks later at which time I found it a place
of prominence at the bottom of my chest of
T is for... Tarzan
Once a near-permanent fixture at the end
of ITV’s holiday morning schedules, where
it was never entirely clear whether said final
programme was actually supposed to be part
of children’s television or not, the recycled
1960s action series with its metal-wastepaper-basket-pattern title sequence graphics
and guest appearance by the Supremes ensured that entire generations grew up associating the character exclusively with Ron Ely
and never quite understanding why adults
would instantly mention Johnny Weismuller
and ‘Cheetah’ on catching sight of it. If that
wasn’t enough, the BBC were also prone to
running Filmation’s 1970s animated version
- complete with much-imitated operatic
‘Tarzan yell’, ludicrous storylines about
ice monsters and missing scientists, and
copyright-free simian chum Nukima - in
the same schedules. Never let it be said that
young fans of Edgar Rice Burroughs’ creation were not adequately catered for.
U is for... Unicorn Tales
Weird, seemingly contextless American
collection of ‘zany’ short stories always built
around the same youngsters, introduced
by a book-wielding man who looked like
Matthew Waterhouse in a frilly shirt, which
was syndicated around the ITV regions in
the early 1980s and quite possibly got lost
en route with nobody either noticing nor
caring. One episode concerned the kids
being sold a ‘magic’ hat by a conman (“It’s
some kind of hat! It’s some som-brero!” they
announced in a jubilant song and dance routine in celebration of its acquisition), which
fell apart when they leaned too heavily on its
capacity to make them into likeable people.
Not in the The Paper Lads mould, as they
say.
V is for... Viewers in Scotland
In the early 1980s, John Craven was prompt-
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“BMX wars are a lot of fun, riding a bike out in the sun”
drawers under an old Scotland strip.”
Special mention must also go
to Kevin Robertson from Creamup’s old
school, who similarly had a bash, and succeeded only in revealing he didn’t know his
right from his left, rather pathetically having
to shout “across!” instead when he got in a
muddle. That, and he failed to recognise the
picture he was trying to uncover was one of
the Tiger himself.
that clip of young researcher Jonathan Ross
failing to do any stunts whatsoever as part of
an end of series joke, but more subtly etched
on the memory of those who witnessed it is
one-summer-only holiday mainstay BMX
Beat.
Introduced by gritty slow-motion
footage of a pair of BMX riders in full stunt
gear skidding all over the place to the accompaniment of a growled Chris Speddingalike song that proclaimed “BMX wars are
a lot of fun, riding a bike out in the sun”
(which was memorable enough to ensure
that many now insist on believing, in true
Dodger, Bonzo and the Rest/Our Housestyle, that the series was in fact called ‘BMX
Wars’), the show offered up a regular dose
of sub-Junior Kick Start antics involving
suspiciously safe-looking stunts. Hardly
what could be described as ‘memorable’, the
only specific detail that anyone seems to
be able to recall about it was that the show
was once plugged on another Children’s ITV
programme by a bunch of kids on BMXes,
singing the theme song (which they had
clearly never heard) in an entirely different
melody. In later years, long after the BMX
craze had subsided and streets were safe
from wheelie-attempting youngsters once
more, that awkward gap in the summer
holiday morning schedules was plugged by
the itself-hardly-made-at-the-height-of-thephenomenon Australian film BMX Bandits,
a typical slab of bank-robbery-foiling mediocrity notable only for the fact that the lead
role was taken by a young Nicole Kidman.
W is for... Why Don’t You...?
“Go... go... go!” Eternal pillar of the BBC’s
summer schedules, the ‘You began with the
Bristol Gang, originally ‘squatting’ over Tony
Hart’s studio for neat BBC Bristol crossover
potential, with some business involving
invisible nemesis ‘The Dorris’ who could be
repelled by stripy socks lodging hazily in our
minds. See also hand puppets flipping out of
boxes telling jokes and those annoying big
name badges. Newcastle, Liverpool, Belfast
and Cardiff gangs followed, while editions
devised by Russell T Davies are about to
become prized bounty in Doctor Who trading circles.
X is for... (BM)X
Wacky irony-laden overviews of ‘the ‘80s’
might well have you believe that Bicycle
Moto-Cross was a huge phenomenon
among the youth of the nation. To an extent
it was, but for those who were too young/
fragile/terrified to be allowed to go to ‘the
track’ and watch prematurely bestubbled
15-year-olds doing semi-successful stunts
whilst swapping stories about a bike made
out of aluminium that was so light you could
lift it with your little finger, BMX biking was
a phenomenon that was largely confined
to television. Fortunately, they were well
catered for in this regard, as a whole host
of short-lived BMX-related programmes
sprang up all at once on ITV and Channel
4. The most infamous of these is Trak Trix,
which has lodged itself in the public consciousness by virtue of the endless replays of
Y is for... Yorkshire vs Lancashire
It was more or less a given that at some
point each summer the holiday programmes
would be interrupted for sport, whether it
was the Olympic Games or the Open Golf.
This was especially the case in the North
West, as Granada often screened regional
sporting events over the summer. Despite
not showing a single second of cricket for
the rest of the year, Granada and Yorkshire
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The Burst of Creamup
would continue to show the Roses match
between Lancashire and Yorkshire every
year until the mid-‘90s, despite the fact they
have to cram it in between the news and the
daytime soaps so you got about 10 minutes
of play an hour. Still, Clive Tyldsley used to
commentate on it, so it was quite glamorous. There was also the Crown Green Bowls
tournament on the first weekend of August,
with eightysomething Hugh Johns on the
lip-mic, and in 1986, even International
Croquet. Please note, though, that if you’re
thinking of hiring Elton Welsby for anything, that Superbowl on his CV is not the
massive world-famous sporting event, but of
the Crown Green variety.
Prog 53, 17 October 2004
10 GREAT NEIGHBOURS
MOMENTS
1) Dr Clive Gibbons performs a
tracheotomy
It was the Montague and Capulet romantic sparring betwixt Scott Robinson and
Charlene ‘Lenny’ Ramsay that, according to
received wisdom, propelled Neighbours into
the hearts of a nation’s teens and caused Alison Grade to miss double biology. But this
unforgivable piece of Stalinist revisionism
shamefully erases the unparalleled contribution of Dr Clive Gibbons. Thanks to his
freewheeling attitude and Simon Parkin hair,
it was Clive who the kids tuned in to see,
long before Scott fretted about flunking his
HSC. He called his car Bertha. He raised the
ire of Max Ramsay with his zany gorillagram
agency (although practically everything
somehow aggravated Max, whose contract
specified he had to storm around in a vest at
least once in every episode). He organised a
pancake contest at the coffee shop. And he
joined forces with Max’s son Shane to form
RAGGS - the Ramsay And Gibbons Gardening Service. They didn’t just fling these
scripts together, you know. But Clive’s finest
25 minutes arrived when Lucy got stung by
a wasp and couldn’t breathe. Armed with
just a ballpoint pen, Clive performed an
emergency tracheotomy on the Robinson
kitchen table to save her life. Don’t hold it
against him.
Z is for... The O Zone
“Europe’s first daily pop show”, claimed a
leather-jacketed Andy Crane in 1989. MTV
may have disagreed, but this seemingly
ambitious commission basically consisted of
Crane sitting in front of a picture of a record
in a tiny studio, linking pop videos and interviews from press junkets for 10 minutes.
The following year it was cut down to a
whopping five minutes and was presenterless, normally just a few videos with some
captions to link them, like an even lower
budget version of The Chart Show. Over the
years, the programme shuffled around the
schedules at a rate of knots, and even made
it into peak time BBC2 in the late 1990s,
before Jamie Theakston took up permanent
residence on the front page of the News
of the World. Indeed, pop videos were an
easy way to kill time between Play School
and Henry’s Cat in the rest of the morning.
Creamup vividly remembers the time in
1989 when BFT presenters Simon Parkin,
Andi Peters and Stephanie Lowe each ‘chose’
a video and viewers decided which was to be
shown in full - Peters championing Pure by
the Lightning Seeds, while Parkin went into
bat for, of all things, Something’s Jumping In
Your Shirt by Malcolm McLaren. It didn’t
win.
2) Lucy Robinson falls down a drain
The original Kylie Flinker-issue Lucy clearly
endured numerous scrapes in the early days,
not least when she plunged down a sewer in
pursuit of her missing terrier Basil. Robinson jnr remained trapped in this chasm for
days, the outside world oblivious to her adenoidal pleas for help. Eventually freed, Lucy
nevertheless temporarily lost her sight as a
result of her subterranean ordeal. However,
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“I love you, Clarkie”
once it returned, Lucy duplicitously pretended to still be blind, as a ruse to distract
father Jim from a blossoming relationship
with one of his many ‘lady friends’. Lucy’s
comeuppance came when the unfortunate
Basil later drowned at the beach, despite
Mike’s best efforts to rescue him. She was
later packed off on some kind of finishing school grand tour of Europe while the
character was being recast, an event that
provided plentiful ammunition for the likes
of Tina Baker and Alison Graham to make
endless remarks about “but why hasn’t anyone noticed her face has changed?”
that one of them involves a plain, bespectacled, bookish female removing her spectacles to be transformed, swan-like, into a ravishing beauty. Right from the moment Plain
Jane Superbrain moved into Ramsay Street
to lodge with interfering nan Mrs Mangel,
we could see that at some point this plain,
bespectacled, bookish figure would, at some
point, be removing her spectacles and, well,
you get the picture. So it transpired that,
with her heart set on a tryst with “spunk”
Mike at the annual Erinsborough High shindig, the neighbourhood “dag” underwent a
makeover at the deft hands of Daphne and
Helen and, yes, took off her glasses. From
that moment there was no stopping Jane, as
the blonde temptress embarked on a career
with the Daniels Corporation and even had
a brief fling with Scott, the minx. The quiet
ones are always the worst.
3) Daphne Clarke breathes her last
First spied cavorting in her scanties as a
stripper at a Ramsay Street “bucks party”,
Daphne Lawrence soon became a reformed
character and flitted between the duelling
lotharios, Des and Shane. Ensnaring the affable bank manager with her patented recipe
for lemon chicken, she agreed to marry Des,
only for their nuptials to be halted as a bank
robber hijacked her car. Fortunately, the
couple did belatedly make it down the aisle,
only for Des to strain his back carrying her
over the threshold. She ran the coffee shop at
Lassiter’s, became a mother figure to brooding leather-jacketed pin-up Mike and even
befriended Des’ scatterbrained mother and
all-time greatest Neighbours character Eileen
Clarke. But the tao of Grundy ensures that
no character can be afforded prolonged happiness before the melodramatic incidental
music kicks in sooner or later. Left in a coma
after a car crash, Daphne opened her eyes
one final time to utter a final, “I love you,
Clarkie” to Des, before suffering a cardiac
arrest and dying. The nation wept over its
Crispy Pancakes.
5) Henry Ramsay falls in the
swimming pool
Every Neighbours obsessive knows that the
show began on Channel Seven in Australia
before being axed, only to be audaciously revived by the Ten network a few months later,
prompting a whole new set of opening titles.
The original sequence had been a primitive reel of footage featuring Max looking
over his fence and Paul Robinson dressed
as a baby. The new era brought a complete
overhaul, each episode now heralded by
a whimsical tableau involving a Robinson
family cricket match that ended in Paul hitting the ball through Madge’s window. Now,
as characters came and went, they re-edited
the titles to keep pace with the cast, even
Bouncer getting in on the act eventually. But
the best was yet to come when the cricket
was replaced by a pool-side Ramsay Street
barbecue. Scott and Charlene now hurled
a beach ball at shaggy loafer and resident
comic foil Henry Ramsay, who promptly
fell backwards into the pool. The combination of Andy Crane’s teatime introductions
(“Now it’s time to meet those antipodean...
4) Jane Harris takes off her glasses
One of the great legends of celluloid states
that there are only seven stories, told and retold through the generations. Nobody’s quite
sure what the other six are, but we do know
91
The Burst of Creamup
Neeeeeigh-bours!”) and this iconic image
came to somehow represent imperial phase
Neighbours. It even survived the departures
of Minogue and Donovan, the beach ball
lobbing duties now falling to Bronwyn and
the annoying Sharon. But shamefully, when
Craig McLachlan jumped ship for Summer
Bay, they kept the falling in the pool bit,
but now with Matt Robinson. Things, it was
clear, would never be the same again.
plenty of storylines in the early years of
Neighbours, the infuriatingly righteous
Jim Robinson clashing frequently with the
laidback Max Ramsay and his clan. The feud
ignited once more when Scott discovered
that it wasn’t Erinsborough pioneer ‘Black’
Jack Ramsay after whom the street should
have been named, but Jim’s grandfather, who
had been cheated out of the honour in a card
game. Todd and Katie escalated the hostilities by changing the street sign to ‘Robinson
Street’. Scott and Henry resolved to settle
the dispute in another game of cards, Henry
upholding the Ramsay family’s honour by
winning, thanks mainly to Charlene fiddling
the deck.
6) Paul Robinson marries Gail to impress
Mr Udagawa
The hub of the Erinsborough business community was the shadowy Daniels Corporation, a blue-chip international conglomerate
boasting financial interests in Hong Kong,
New York and a small-scale chauffeur operation, operating from a cramped office in a
suburb of Melbourne. Led by the thrusting, unscrupulous, double-dealing tycoon
Paul Robinson, it had frequent dealings
with mysterious Japanese businessman Mr
Udagawa. They used to go on about him
a lot. It seemed that, with a crucial deal
hanging in the balance, Mr Udagawa prized
family values and favoured doing business with married men. Enter Gail Lewis,
secretary and old flame of Paul, who married him in a shock ceremony that amazed
their unsuspecting friends and family, not
least Gail’s dad Rob Lewis, Erinsborough’s
leading jalopy-racing mechanic. Impressed
by Paul and Gail’s charade, Mr Udagawa
signed on the dotted line and inevitably Paul
and Gail’s marriage of convenience became
the real thing. Perhaps the couple’s finest
moment came during the cast’s ensemble
performance at the 1988 Royal Variety Show,
where Paul greeted Gail’s entrance with the
immortal line, “I didn’t hear a Gail warning!” Oh, and Fiona Corke’s wardrobe was
by Kamizole. That’s very important, that.
8) Mrs Mangel murders Len
Mrs Mangel’s husband Len was one of
the great unseen characters of soap, until
Neighbours ruined everything and he turned
up during the 1990s. But on one occasion,
a bizarre chain of events led to the Erinsborough super snoop mistakenly believing
that he had died, resulting in her attempting
to commune with him via a rosebush, as a
rumour swept Ramsay Street that she had
killed him. Mrs Mangel had fallen off a ladder and lost her memory, forgetting that she
had been divorced from Len. Jane tried to
avoid upsetting her nan and told her he had
gone away on business, but things got out of
hand when Mrs Mangel noticed all of Len’s
clothes had gone and insisted he must have
died. Meanwhile, Bouncer had unearthed a
bone at Lassiter’s, prompting the residents to
suspect her of murder. Mrs Mangel then said
she had to see Len’s grave, so Jane continued
to play along and told her that he’d been
cremated and his ashes scattered under
the rosebush in the garden. Inevitably, Mrs
Mangel started chatting to the plant, to the
bemusement of her suspicious neighbours.
7) The families feud over the street’s name
The eternal jousting between the ancestral
houses of Robinson and Ramsay fuelled
9) Bouncer Has A Dream
Neighbours has a rich tradition of dream
sequences. The first was the surreal Christ-
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“Some band from England, er, the Pet People”
mas fantasy that Clive envisaged after he
was accidentally knocked unconscious while
refereeing a boxing match between Mike
and Shane, in which Charlene became some
kind of clockwork doll, Paul was an evil
moustache-twirling baddie and Mike and
Shane became Tweedledum and Tweedledee, while Clive himself was Santa Claus.
But nothing before or since could quite
match the genius of the episode when the
screen gradually dissolved into Bouncer’s
dream, in which Ramsay Street’s super intelligent mascot hound imagined himself in a
bow-tie marrying Rosie, the dog owned by
Dorothy Burke’s alcoholic father, before the
happy couple were depicted in a kennel surrounded by lots of little Bouncers.
Prog 53, 17 October 2004
“BUT IT’S GOT PIPES
IN IT!”
Creamup’s own Marshell Cavendish-style
collection of the curious world of once-only
or never-seen-at-all telly.
#2 Neighbours - The ‘incest’ storyline (The
Grundy Organisation/Network Ten, 1991)
What was it?: An uncharacteristic attempt
at whipping up a storm of controversy and
publicity over one of television’s more sedate
soap operas. In 1991, because there weren’t
quite enough distant semi-members of
the Robinson family already, the producers introduced Glenn Donnelly. Played by
Richard Huggett, owner of a remarkable
hairstyle that bore an uncanny resemblance
to a chef ’s hat, Glenn had been unknowingly
fathered by Jim Robinson during a fling with
a nurse who had swapped her name badge
or something while he was on active service
in Vietnam. Now in his late teens, Glenn
descended on Ramsay Street in search of his
long-lost father. The upshot of which was a
bitter feud with the never less than vindictive half-brother Paul Robinson, and - more
dodgily - a full blown physical relationship
with his half-sister Lucy Robinson, then
recently returned to the soap in her third regeneration courtesy of former beauty queen
Melissa Bell.
Who didn’t like it?: Well, Jim Robinson for
a start. In the real world, the tabloids didn’t
even have time to whip up a frenzy, as the
BBC intercepted the storyline before the
tapes had even arrived. Instead they were
forced to change tack, and ran features about
the BBC chickening out of showing the
‘shocker’ storyline, invariably accompanied
by half-page photos of Melissa Bell attempting to wear a crop top.
Why didn’t they like it?: Unlike in Australia, where Neighbours has always been very
much an ‘early evening’ soap, the show’s
positioning at the unofficial tail-end of the
BBC’s afternoon children’s schedules made
10) Chris Lowe asks for directions
The tradition of pop star cameos in soaps
is not a glorious one. The omens then were
not auspicious when Sir Chris Lowe of the
Pet Shop Boys agreed to appear in Neighbours in 1995. Essaying the natural brand of
acting he’d exhibited in It Couldn’t Happen
Here, Chris screeched into Ramsay Street
in a white Porsche convertible, perhaps in
homage to the BBC video for I Should Be So
Lucky he’d enthusiastically endorsed years
before. “I’m a little lost,” he informed Helen
Daniels and Marlene Kratz. “I’m looking
for a recording studio which is round here
somewhere.” Exactly why Neil hadn’t told
him where it was isn’t clear, but Marlene
soon put him right, not before Helen had
perceptively deduced he was from England
and in a band. “Yeah, the Pet Shop Boys.”
“I’m sure you’re destined for big things
one of these days,” replied Marlene. Chris
drove off in search of the studio, as Annalise
scampered into the street to discover the
identity of their star visitor. “Some band
from England, er, the Pet People,” replied
Marlene, obeying the law of soap which
decrees that anyone over the age of about 30
must be totally confused by pop culture to
“humorous” effect.
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Will we see it again?: Not likely. Unless
the words ‘Kylie’ or ‘Jason’ are involved, the
world at large likes to pretend that Neighbours didn’t even exist more than six months
ago.
Would we want to?: From a soap addict’s
point of view, the early 1990s was something
of a golden age for Neighbours, eschewing
the generally twee implausibility that came
before and after in favour of genuinely gripping storylines about Paul Robinson getting
mixed up with gangsters, Todd Landers
running away and working as a cleaner, and
something about Matt Robinson meeting
a girl in shabby clothes who squatted in a
haunted house and took a lot of showers
(no, us neither), and it would be nice to
have some kind of a reminder of those days.
Anyone else up for a DVD of Neighbours:
The Incest Years, with extras including the
video for Mark Stevens’ single, an Ashley
Paske hair-length-ometer and that BBC1
trailer with the bloke who played Wayne
Duncan trying to turn ‘our advantage’ into a
single word?
Forbidden fact: In an interview with Big!
magazine in 1993, Melissa Bell revealed that
she slept in a 7-Up t-shirt that had been accidentally left at her flat by co-star Kristian
Schmid.
it virtually impossible for them to show
it without provoking a barrage of furious
complaints. So they didn’t.
When was it ‘retired’?: Before it could even
make it to the nation’s screens. In a break
from their normal duties of tightening up
visual glitches, those responsible for the
‘BBC Presentation’ were awarded the unenviable task of excising even the most vague
allusion to the dodgy sexual shenanigans
between the semi-siblings. Although nothing explicit was ever shown on screen, entire
swathes of dialogue had to be cut from the
middle of sequences, and on occasion even
entire scenes hit the cutting room floor.
Hence the viewers were treated to eight or so
weeks’ worth of wildly fluctuating running
times (normally plugged with a suspicious
amount of post-programme trailers), bizarre
arguments between Lucy Robinson and
similarly Glenn-flinging obscure member
of the Ramsay family Gemma that seemed
to have no beginning, end or logical point,
surreal appearances and disappearances by
Josh Anderson in the middle of disjointed
conversations, and most memorably of all
virtually no sight of Lucy’s cousin and confidante Todd Landers for weeks on end. At its
most ridiculous, this saw a lengthy scene at
the swimming baths reduced to a couple of
seconds of Jim sitting down next to Lucy at
the poolside and saying absolutely nothing
whatsoever. To the frustration of a thousand
adolescent boys, footage of her swimming
underwater was also excised.
Did it come back?: Well, the BBC did let an
equally dubious storyline in which Lucy was
held prisoner and forced to wear a wedding
dress by a deranged jilted groom, with a lot
of unusually uncomfortable scenes of forcefeeding, go through a couple of months
later and nobody seemed to care that much.
Some years later, UK Gold ran the uncut
episodes in a late afternoon slot and nobody
even noticed. Apart from those who’d been
clinging to the hope of one day seeing
Melissa Bell swimming underwater.
Prog 57, 27 February 2005
100 GREAT TV MOMENTS
Creamup’s monograph of minted cathoderay cavalcades
#34: June 1987 - The first edition of
The Roxy
“There can be no better way to launch my
career in England.” So spoke Kevin Sharkey,
an erstwhile janitor hailing from the tiny
fishing village of Killybegs in County
Donegal, but now one of the faces chosen to
front ITV’s latest answer to Top of the Pops.
“The Roxy is a fantastic break for me,” Kevin
enthused breathlessly. Well, it was certainly
a step up from mopping floors in the city of
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“We’ve created a pop paradise, a place where viewers are welcome”
London. It was also a somewhat bewildering
promotion from his current employment
working on Irish television music showcase
Megamix. At least he would have one of the
finest tutors in the business: David ‘Kid’
Jensen, sometime BBC mainstay and man
of a thousand fancy dress costumes while
co-helming TOTP with John Peel.
The Roxy arrived on screen
boasting undeniably impressive credentials.
There was Dave for a start, just voted ILR
disc jockey of the year and always ready
with a snappy if preposterous soundbite
(“We’ve created a pop paradise, a place
where viewers are welcome - a show where
they really feel at home!”). The producer was
Alastair Pirrie, who’d overseen 150 editions
of another of ITV’s attempts at a chart show,
Razzmatazz. Tyne Tees, the company behind
The Roxy, had an impeccable live music
pedigree courtesy of The Tube. The show was
slated to go out on a Tuesday night, giving
it a two-day lead on TOTP. The studio - the
work of “skilled craftsmen” - comprised a
demented but undeniably exciting assortment of 1940s dance hall junk and ubiquitous 1980s steel girders. Finally the whole
thing would be based on the Network Chart,
“the fastest-moving singles survey in Britain” - an utterly meaningless description but
one that sounded thrilling all the same.
Despite the presence of the
Network Chart, however, The Roxy wasn’t to
be graced with the presence of the network.
The ITV mafia, resentful at being lumbered
with a prime time offering from one of the
regional minnows, proceeded to schedule
it all over the shop. Come Tuesday 9 June,
the date of The Roxy’s launch, some places
you could see it at 6.30pm (too early – you
were still finishing your tea), some at 7pm,
and some at 7.30pm (up against EastEnders
- certain death). Any sense of occasion was
further hampered by a guest list comprising only those who’d be bothered to journey
all the way up to Newcastle. So while the
first few weeks of The Roxy offered viewers
Curiosity Killed the Cat and Siouxsie and
the Banshees, there was also Cliff Richard,
Kenny G and, “making their first TV appearance in three years,” Def Leppard. Exclusive interviews with “actor/singer” Bruce
Willis and “live from Japan” A-ha didn’t add
much either. “We are bang up to date with
today’s pop charts,” Alastair Pirrie pleaded,
“but our eye is always fixed on tomorrow” presumably to see if The Roxy was actually
still on ITV.
FACTS AMAZING: Come April 1988, it wasn’t
Prog 59, 1 May 2005
“IF YOU’RE THINKING
OF SWITCHING TO
INDEPENDENT
TELEVISION, THEY’VE
GONE TO BED!”
Creamup’s guide to the best of election
night television
Let’s face it, there is no finer TV spectacle
than the BBC’s election night results programmes. Presented from massive studios
packed with quirkily-acronymic Doctor
Who-style megalomaniac supercomputers,
an enormous Grandstand-esque typing pool
and a gallery of bar charts, maps and impenetrable graphs (The Liberal Take-Off Graph,
anyone?). For some reason, no matter how
much ITN claim their programme is “faster”
or “more friendly”, it always seems somehow
more official on the Beeb.
It’s incredible to think that only
four people have ever presented BBC1’s psephological compendium - Richard Dimbleby was first in the chair, generally inventing
the job of live television presenter as he went
along, followed by housewives’ choice Cliff
Michelmore, Alastair Burnett and, turning
full circle, David Dimbleby for the last 25
years or so. Bob McKenzie and Peter Snow
have filled the role of mad professor spanning the eras from cardboard to CGI, while
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The Burst of Creamup
Robin Day barked, grumbled and interrogated manifold hapless politicians, all while
effortlessly wearing a flamboyant bow-tie.
Best of all, the programmes go on all night
and all day, a fantastically thrilling televisual
happening in a time when BBC1 regularly
stirred its Horlicks at 11.30pm, even if they
did sometimes shunt Rentaghost to BBC2.
So as the hustings die down and
everyone bustles off to their nearest church
hall or primary school to do their constitutional duty, Creamup reflects on seven
classic election nights. Cue Rick Wakeman’s
Legends Of King Arthur...
busy thinking about the Beatles, I expect,”
while the night shift ended at 4.10am with A
Hard Day’s Night played over shots of empty
chairs, empty glasses and coffee mugs, and
bins full of crumpled bits of paper and old
newspapers.
Just a bit of fun: David Frost in a bow-tie,
cast as “our man about town”, is notionally
there to add a satirical edge to the BBC results programme, and waspishly mingle with
guests at illustrious soirees, but what we got
was a predictable monologue that his joke
writers had obviously compiled days before
Labour’s narrow win.
Snackometer: “Somebody’s just rung up to
say, what are you eating? It’s a BBC sandwich, it’s cheese and... salmon. And I’ve got a
bit of pizza which is Italian as well.”
We’re sorry but: “I understand we’ve been
receiving some telephone calls saying why
are people missing Watch With Mother? I’m
afraid that today, you’ll just have to watch
with Dad! I apologise to all juniors who
aren’t interested in what we’re doing.”
Over on ITV: Interspersed with coverage of
‘The XVIII Olympiad’, ITN’s Election 64 is
fronted by Robert Kee and Alastair Burnett:
“This is the programme with the miracle
new ingredient - KDF9! KDF9 is a giant
computer at Kidsgrove in Staffordshire.
Within seconds it will predict off-the-cuff,
or as much off-the-cuff as a computer can,
what the final result of this general election
is going to be.”
1964: “Too busy thinking about the
Beatles, I expect”
The team: In his last election night sortie
before he died in 1965, Richard Dimbleby
anchors proceedings in trademark avuncular statesman fashion, alongside Robin Day,
jousting with Labour home secretary George
Brown (“May I call you brother?”), while
future director- general (and Wogan stooge)
Ian Trethowan fills the role of whimsical
gossip.
The results: The BBC coverage is launched
by a fantastic sequence (“The count... is...
on!”) involving the entire production team
milling around the studio in circles for no
particular reason. Richard responded to one
dispatch from a youthful David Dimbleby
with: “Thank you, son!” One woman phones
in to insist she’d seen a mouse running along
David Butler’s State Of The Parties board,
and another reckons Richard is wearing pyjama bottoms beneath the desk, so he stood
up to prove he wasn’t - but he was wearing
slippers. Not forgetting the brilliant section
when, by popular demand, we had a pan
round at “some of the girls” working in the
background, Richard explaining that their
BBC uniform was “a salmon pink - or more
a terracotta colour.” Being 1964, it seemed
the entire nation was obsessed by the Fabs,
Richard commenting on a reduced turnout
in Liverpool by speculating, “They’re too
1970: “Sorry I missed that, someone
opened a door in the studio”
The team: Having taken over as the BBC’s
number one linkman in 1966, Cliff Michelmore returned four years later, flanked by
avuncular parliamentary factman Alan
Watson (“Kenneth Baker, now he’s the bestdressed man in the Commons”) and Robin
Day, while Loughborough’s own Michael
Barratt and his monitors served up Friday’s
breakfast time ‘Morning Round-Up Nationwide’ between 6am and 9am.
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“We should have checked the price of strawberries at Barnstaple”
The results: The BBC’s centre of operations
is a cavernous Bond-villain lair referred to as
‘BBC Election Studio One’, featuring panels
of boffins seated at high-rise desks labelled
‘INDUSTRIAL’, ‘CITY’ and ‘FOREIGN’ etc.
Indeed, so huge was the set that Radio Times
provided an annotated map (‘5 - News Input
Area) and it had a built-in door. Desmond
Wilcox interrogated the masses about “prices” at Trafalgar Square while Bernard Falk
reported from an “Election Night Discotheque”. Everyone blithely smokes on screen
and answers the phone mid-broadcast,
including Cliff, whom one caller mistakes
for an estate agent (“I assure you it wasn’t
Mrs Wilson!”). Dapper Michael Charlton
is assigned to the home of incoming PM
Ted Heath (“It consists of 65 chambers,
or apartments, or flats as we might know
them”). Best of all, Cliff demonstrates his
whimsical streak, waxing lyrical about Great
Yarmouth’s herring industry following the
results from East Anglia, and declaring “We
should have checked the price of strawberries at Barnstaple, at Exeter they’re 2/3, and
they look delicious!” Meanwhile Robin
found himself chatting up future Tory grand
dame Janet Fookes (“You’re 34? You don’t
look anything like that!”), after which Cliff
frothed, “She’s the most gorgeous redhead,
if you’re watching in black and white!”, and
Bob McKenzie has to have extra numbers
painted on his swingometer live on air, so
unexpected is the result.
Just a bit of fun: “The first return of the
night,” as Cliff introduced Alf Garnett,
the star of BBC1’s The Campaign’s Over!,
20 minutes of trademark Johnny Speight
squabbling at 10.05pm, also featuring Eric
Sykes as ‘The Foreman’ and Spike Milligan
as ‘Paki- Paddy’.
Snackometer: “Caught! Caught, caught!
There’s a little whisky in there,” admitted
Cliff mid-slurp at 1.30am, only to be seen
chomping on a sandwich an hour later.
We’re sorry but: “We won’t antagonise the
children like we do on Apollo and other
occasions, we’ll be back at 5.15.” Not even
the election can deprive the nation of The
Banana Splits.
Over on ITV: The Nation Decides with
David Frost and Alastair Burnett from
10pm-4am, and back again next morning
from seven o’clock, no doubt giving Dave
one or two ideas.
February 1974: “If I can come in here Mr
Interviewer, you’re quite wrong”
The team: In the chair is Alastair Burnett,
during his brief interregnum at the Beeb,
and he’s perfectly slick amid the chaos, but a
bit inhuman and emotionless. And he never
got caught eating a sandwich either. David
Butler, Bob McKenzie and Robin Day are
back for the election night talk-in too, as is
computerman Graham Pyatt and his sliding
totaliser.
The results: The BBC’s coverage of “this
razor’s edge Election 74” begins in bombastic fashion, playing Fanfare For The Common
Man over panoramic images of the studio,
with Give Us a Clue-style scoreboards
scrolling round (‘555 666 777’), while ‘CON
LAB LIB? CON LAB LIB?’ appeared on
screen in progressively smaller type. The
annotated RT studio diagram is back (“Fast
noiseless paper tape printer”) and Robin
has his own customised desk replete with a
small row of books, decanter, two telephones
and a personalised bank of monitors. Each
element of the BBC coverage has its own
subtitle, so Michael Barrett’s bacon-andeggs sequence is called ‘Who’s Happy Now?’
and the daytime shift is ‘The New Prime
Minister Is...’ Bob McKenzie’s swingometer
is perched on his desk like a paperweight,
and Esther Rantzen is in Covent Garden
for That’s Life-style voxpops (“Do you have
a message for Robin Day?” “Not really.” “Do
you have a message for Alastair Burnet?”
“Not really.”) while her other half Desmond
Wilcox is back with the “traditional throng”
in Trafalgar Square (“I’ve handled more
people tonight than Bruce Forsyth!”). Robin
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The Burst of Creamup
is the Result with images of Alastair, David,
Robin, Bob and Sue too all looking businesslike. There’s a Warhol-esque results board,
with six rotating faces of Heath, Wilson and
Thorpe, although the highlight is the BBC
supercomputer ERIC - The Electronic Results Instant Computer (“He’s very fussy”),
introduced during a film in which Sue
explains how results are phoned in (“There’s
no time for ‘hullos’”) and fed on screen
by results editor Tam Fry, backed by the
“groovy, doomy music”. Bob attempted to
demonstrate the make-up of the new House
of Commons, with a model parliament
with removable roof, fiddling around with
miniature MPs, while Robin, perched above
everyone else in his election pod, sparked
a big row about opinion polls, saying they
shouldn’t be allowed. Bizarrely, astrologer
Katina is recruited to proffer some predictions, and explain how Jeremy Thorpe’s star
chart means he “likes the ladies so much”.
The breakfast show (‘Where Are We Now?’)
ended rather untidily with Alistair loitering behind Mike’s desk as he tidied up his
papers. And throughout the night of a narrow Labour win, manifold references to “the
biggest crisis since the war”, with suggestions
we might have “a government of national
unity”, with, at one point, the idea it might
include Enoch Powell, seen at one point
shouting at Robin.
Just a bit of fun: Steptoe and Son provided
the warm-up for the main event at 9.30pm,
and during the breakfast show, a wry, musical “sideways look” at proceedings came
from Richard Stilgoe, seated regally at a
white grand piano.
Snackometer: Bob McKenzie gnawing on a
chicken drumstick, no less.
We’re sorry but: “If the outcome of the General Election is not clear by 4.25, children’s
programmes at this time will be transferred
to BBC2,” declared Radio Times, and pillocks
to Deputy Dawg.
Over on ITV: The Nation Decides anchored
by Robert Kee with Peter Snow, Andrew
meets cartoonist Jak, who has been sketching the party leaders as boxers in a ring
being refereed by Alastair, depicting all three
knocked out with huge studio laughter at
the punchline: “We must stop meeting like
this”. But the atmosphere is grim, with Tom
Mangold in a social club tangling with “the
most militant and bloody-minded miners
in the country”, and bickering in the studio
over the significance of Labour’s narrow win
and the fuel crisis, David Butler announcing
he didn’t want it dragging on “as there’s only
enough coal left for two weeks.” Brrr...
Just a bit of fun: Till Death Us Do Part provided the pre-results comedy at 9.30pm, and
Mike Yarwood joined Burnett at the Election 74 desk (“Ahoy there me shipmates!”),
‘doing’ Ted and Harold live to laughter from
the crew (“Rather fond of pilchards!”), the
cameras cutting at one point to Alastair relaxing in his chair, chuckling at Mike’s quips
about ‘The Six’ and Cyril Smith.
We’re sorry but: ‘CHILDREN’S PROGRAMMES NORMALLY ON BBC-1 ON
BBC-2 NOW’ declared the computerised
caption, forcing Peter Glaze and that kid
who drove the Pink Panther roadster to
decamp to the second channel.
Over on ITV: The light channel rolls out
The Nation Decides at 10pm, only to bugger
off at 10.15pm for half an hour to make way
for This Is Your Life - Extra. Next morning
sees a mix of network and regional coverage,
including Thames’s dementedly-titled Good
Morning, Today.
October 1974: “There will be a Liberal
government by 1980, if not before”
The team: The team from February reassembles eight months on, augmented this
time by “a welcome addition to our election
team” Sue Lawley, clearly having been
instructed to show a bit of leg in the titles,
with Michael Barrett and Brian Widlake
compering the breakfast programme.
The results: Heralded by “groovy, doomy
music”, the BBC opened Election 74: Here
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“The sniffer dogs... all that has now gone for a burton”
Gardner and Peter Jay plus the VT30, a
machine normally used for devising knitting
patterns (or, as TV Times branded it, “the
knit-one-purl-one computer”).
the campaign, which you may feel we could
all do with, I certainly do, a little mild fun at
the expense of politicians.” Yes, at 10.10pm
it’s Mike Yarwood’s ‘The Show We Couldn’t
Show’.
Snackometer: “Caught me with a sandwich!” David exclaims at one point during
the night, while, as the Stilgmeister sang,
“Robin Day took the interviewer’s roll”.
We’re sorry but: No apologies in 1979 - as
Maggie rolled up at No 10, the kids could
enjoy Heyyy, It’s The King, Lassie and The
Perishers uninterrupted.
Over on ITV: Alastair Burnett, Peter
Snow, Leonard Parkin and Martyn Lewis
anchored The Nation Decides from 10.45pm,
followed by the fantastically-named Good
Morning Prime Minister from 7am with
Peter Sissons.
1979: “The man who voted don’t know in
the election”
The team: For the first time, a bouffant
David Dimbleby pilots the BBC crew, with
Angela Rippon reading the news bulletins,
Sue Lawley helming the ‘Breakfast Special’,
alongside Day and Butler and, in his final
appearance, Bob McKenzie.
The results: Heralded for the first time by a
rousing chorus of Rick Wakeman bombast, the BBC’s coverage is based around a
computer called Rover (“Can draw pictures
never seen on screen before”), although it’s
no match for Robin smoking a huge cigar
(“I shall be performing my usual humble
function”) or indeed Michael Charlton bantering with a bobby outside Mrs Thatcher’s
house (“Are you alert, constable?”), although
most of his reports seem to feature more of
ITN counterpart Anna Ford (“There’s a lady
from a television channel I won’t mention”).
Frank Bough, “recovered from his appendicitis”, reports from Guildford in a “raspberry
fool” tie, while Michael Cockerell tried in
vain to interview the defeated Jim Callaghan
(“The sniffer dogs... all that has now gone for
a burton”). The Friday coverage, as ever, is
split into intriguingly-titled segments, with
‘Election Question Time’ at 9am (“If you
have a question, send it on a postcard please
to David Dimbleby, BBC”) and ‘Decision
for the ‘80s’ at 10am. And while, no, the
BBC couldn’t be bothered showing Mrs T
arriving in Downing Street, we did at least
get “our resident songster” Richard Stilgoe
essaying some Noel Cowardesque ditties at
the piano (“We took the results down from
ITV’s show and wrote them out and showed
them to yooooou... Oh, the night took a terrible toll!”)
Just a bit of fun: “So for 45 minutes we can
enjoy something that’s been taboo during
1983: “There’s Mrs Finchley”
The team: Peter Snow takes over the
McKenzie mantle, although there was no
swingometer this time round, alongside
Dimbleby and Day plus pundits Tony King,
Ivor Crewe and John Cole. Breakfast Time
fielded its entire A-team of Frank Bough,
Selina Scott and Nick Ross on Friday morning.
The results: David gets a bit confused about
the triumphant Mrs Thatcher’s name in the
early hours, referring to her at one point
as “Mrs Finchley” after her constituency.
Meanwhile Esther Rantzen is dispatched to
10 Downing Street, knocking on the door
at one point to prompt flights of whimsy as
it opens to reveal an enormous cat called
Wilberforce. The BBC’s beige and brown
studio with its multiple screens looks a bit
like the original Family Fortunes set, while
Peter’s results graphics are likened to a stick
of rock, although the Target Board is too
confusing for many, including a baffled
Breakfast Time compere Frank Bough.
Robin spars with studio pundit Norman
St John-Stevas and Neil Kinnock (“Discord, which I know fascinates you Robin”),
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The Burst of Creamup
although the Beeb has nothing to compare
with ITN’s spat between Peregrine Worsthorne and Gerald Kaufman (“You’re a silly
little journalist making trivial puns”).
Just a bit of fun: It’s 1983, so please welcome Carrott’s Lib Election Special from
10-10.40pm, with Jasp no doubt essaying a
few gags about Michael Foot’s hair and Roy
Jenkins’ speech impediment in among Dave
The Cardboard Box and the Robin Reliant
jokes. This was also the first election where
they bunged on a film after the results, so
insomniacs could watch Crooks Anonymous
on BBC1, while on ITV, announced TV
Times: “By 4am the chase for No 10 could be
tense. Join another chase - momentarily - in
San Francisco: watch Bullitt!”
Over on ITV: Burnett, with Sissons and
Lewis are back for The Nation Decides from
10pm-4am, then TV-am’s first ever election Breakfast Special with Robert Kee and
Martyn Lewis from 6am, and the ITN team
returns between 10am-3.30pm.
1987: “I’m not asleep, I’m waiting until
you’ve finished rabbiting on”
The team: Messrs Dimbleby, Snow and Day
man the overnight and daytime shifts, while
Frank Bough, Sally Magnusson and Jeremy
Paxman oversee three hours of Breakfast
Time coverage between 6am and 9am.
The results: The BBC’s titles feature a superb
spinning CGI model Palace of Westminster,
while Rick Wakeman’s election symphonia
has now acquired a choir. The set is decked
in designer tones of 1980s silver and grey,
housing an impressively coiffured David
Dimbleby and the now beknighted Sir
Robin, who finds events less than gripping,
even enjoying a little snooze as David attempted to wrap things up (“From all of us
here, from Sir Robin Day over there, who’s
already sound asleep...” “I’m not asleep,
I’m not asleep, I’m just waiting until you’ve
finished rabbiting on!”). The luckless John
Simpson trails the victorious Thatcher,
while Neil Kinnock has to endure a hectoring Vincent Hanna. Julia Somerville adds a
touch of glamour interviewing politicians at
Westminster and Esther Rantzen maintains
the matrimonial tradition of assailing revellers at Trafalgar Square. Radio Times has a
mini fill-in results chart, like the World Cup.
The coverage goes through to 4pm on Friday
afternoon, as is only right, to be followed by
Phillip Schofield and Gordon The Gopher
in suits.
Just a bit of fun: The Two Ronnies provide
the chuckles at 9.15pm after a fun-size Nine
O’Clock News, Jasper Carrott’s Election Confidential is on BBC2 at 10pm, followed by a
repeat of Omnibus’ epic six-and-a-half-hour
history of the pop promo, Video Jukebox,
with election results superimposed over
Peter Gabriel’s face. The Malcolm McDowell
and, er, Henry Cooper romp Royal Flash
is on BBC1 at 4am, while ITV has Spitting
Image at 10pm with the scary Thatcher
‘Tomorrow Belongs To Me’ finale and sticks
on Sean Connery in Five Days One Summer
when it goes to bed.
Snackometer: “I’m eating a Mars bar!” cried
a mortified David Dimbleby as the director
threw to him prematurely in the early hours
of Friday morning.
Over on ITV: The snappily-titled Vote 87
with Alastair Burnett in whimsical form
(“That’s the leafy part of Sheffield... The
workers on the nuclear submarines have
voted Tory”) alongside Peter Sissons and
Alastair Stewart, while Anne Diamond and
Martyn Lewis team up for a TV-am-ITN
special from six.
Prog 60, 5 June 2005
DAYS OF FUTURE PAST
Sci-fi on the telly’s in increasingly rude
health these days, that much is obvious...
But still, among the Bad Wolves and the jugeared grins, we’ve noticed a gap that’s been
vacant for a while now and still demands
filling - the po-faced, doom-mongering
100
“The Bazalgette cometh”
depiction of future societies. As far as we
know, kids still covet lavishly-illustrated
tomes detailing soon-to-come worlds of
technological wonder to be phased in by
2020, but the ‘adult’ world of telly drama
seems to have swept the tradition of predictive programming under the carpet, or
consigned it to rubbishy sub-disaster-movie
pseudo-docs. Not so long ago, of course,
it was all different, so we’ve rummaged
through the data banks to bring you this
snapshot of TV’s changing face of the future.
1968: The Year of the Sex Olympics
In short: The Bazalgette cometh.
The prediction: Society has been split in
two - the hapless Low Drives, thick as pigdribble and sedated by endless porn on the
telly, and the ratings-happy High Drives,
who make that porn. Derek Fowlds pisses
about with a custard pie. Then Leonard
Rossiter discovers reality TV. Things get a
bit sticky.
Accuracy rating: Pretty good, actually. It
may be a coincidental by-product of Nigel
Kneale’s main intent, but the whole reality
game show idea is laid out plain and simple,
some 30 years before it actually kicked into
gear.
‘Of its time’ rating: Immense. Paisley
kaftans, gold body paint, lashings of colour
separation and huge cardboard TV consoles
root this impoverished production firmly in
its era. Then there’s the irritating made-up
language the characters tend to speak in,
which is meant to sound juvenile and crass,
but it becomes tedious long after the point
is made.
Fear factor: Accidental prescience aside,
not much. Kneale had ‘moved on’ from
the shock horror of Quatermass, and this
is much more cerebral stuff, as befitted the
fledgling BBC2. The production does retain
some creepiness, however, mainly due to
surviving copies being black and white,
rather than the “Look! Colour telly!” gaudiness of the original transmissions.
1971: The Guardians
In short: The fascists are at the gates.
The prediction: Near-future Britain comes
increasingly under the rule of riot-helmeted
military police known as The Guardians,
and their mysterious “general”. The PM’s
hands are tied. The Queen is told to piss off.
A ramshackle alliance of terrorists under
the name Quarmby put up resistance. The
death penalty makes a comeback as public
entertainment. The PM’s son is arrested for
smoking pot.
Accuracy rating: Well, depends on your
political inclinations, eh, kids? Terrorism,
Britain being a pariah in Europe and cabinet
minister’s sons getting stoned all arguably as
much a part of the present as the past.
‘Of its time’ rating: One of the first of
the ‘70s police state dystopias, with mass
unemployment, food shortages, strikes and
galloping inflation all present and correct.
Famously not shown in Northern Ireland,
as the terrorist sub-plot was deemed “not
appropriate at this time”, so they bunged The
Comedians on instead.
Fear factor: Moderate, mainly due to the
rather sedate and talky nature of this lowbudget, ideas-driven series, which admirably
tried to look at the situation from all sides,
rather than just go for a scaremongering bit
of polemic. Very much a portent of sci-fi
series to come, though.
1971: Wine of India
In short: Life’s great! See Brian Blessed for
details.
The prediction: 2050, and organ transplants
and the like give humankind almost limitless
lifespan. To cut down the numbers, people
agree to compulsory euthanasia at the age of
100. One couple start to have doubts when
their time comes.
Accuracy rating: Well, it’s Kneale again, and
as usual he tends to know the right bits of
the present to extrapolate and what to leave
out.
‘Of its time’ rating: The odd costume aside,
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The Burst of Creamup
not much, really. By largely avoiding technological trappings, it’s quite a timeless piece.
Blessed hams it up as ever, though.
Fear factor: More unsettling than frightening, really. The scene where an 80-year-old
woman - who has opted out of the euthanasia scheme and the associated advanced
medicine, and thus looks her age - enters the
ceremony is effective. But again, it’s Kneale
in brow-furrowing rather than brow-raising
mode.
‘Of its time’ rating: Platform boots, chiffon for all, and that rather nifty split-level
underground city set gave the show a Space
1999-cum-Election Special feel. With Gareth
Thomas as Cliff Michelmore.
Fear factor: ITV bosses at the time might
have had cause for alarm, but this endearingly daffy Anglo-German co-production
wouldn’t give anyone else any sleepless
nights, apart from the odd adolescent male
viewer perhaps. But that’s another story.
1975: Survivors
In short: We’re all going to die! Oh, except
this lot.
The prediction: A flu epidemic knocks the
world’s population on the head. Pockets of
survivors must learn to recreate a pastoral
existence from scratch. Even the posh ones.
Even Peter Duncan.
Accuracy rating: SARS, bird flu, ricin...
some panics never go out of fashion.
‘Of its time’ rating: Not too mired in its era,
this one, considering most contemporary
trappings (pulse-dial telephones, British
Rail, Peter Bowles) are thrown out the window by the end of the first episode.
Fear factor: That title sequence with the
smashing flask - massive. The excellent
opening episode, where society falls apart,
with lots of eerie shot of deserted streets and
empty schools - very great indeed. The later
episodes, when the surviving characters get
down to the business of making candles and
salting bacon... not so great, really.
1977: 1990
In short: “1984 plus six.”
The prediction: Those totalitarians are at
it again. The Department of Public Control
has the country locked down. Rationing
makes a comeback. There are only three
newspapers left. Edward Woodward smuggles dons out of the country in a caravan.
Beige is in.
Accuracy rating: Electronic surveillance,
strict border controls, fair enough. And
creator Wilfred Greatorex was allegedly inspired by his tussle with the Inland Revenue.
‘Of its time’ rating: The border controls
were to keep people in, not out. And the fear
of mass food shortages was definitely a ‘70s
thing.
Fear factor: An amplification of more or
less what was going on at the time, this
worked a treat, and both series scared the
pants off BBC viewers. And that minimalist
title sequence with little people boxed into a
perpetually shrinking room was pretty chilling in its own right, too.
1976: Star Maidens
In short: Women’s Libbers from outer space.
The prediction: A far-off planet is ruled by
women. Some harassed blokes escape to
Earth. The authorities follow. Big trub all
round.
Accuracy rating: Er, well, Mrs Thatcher,
perhaps. Oh, and one story was about acid
rain. Other than that, it’s no more prognosticatory than The Two Ronnies’ The Worm
That Turned. Care for a Pa’s bar?
1978: Logan’s Run
In short: Club 0-30.
The prediction: Post-apocalyptic domed
civilisation knocks citizens on the head
when they become too old to appreciate
BBC3 programming. Bloke and girl go on
the run in a hovercraft. Other civilisations
crop up, all handily encapsulating a basic
moral theme, eg. separating people’s personalities into good and bad halves (the bad one
102
“Shillingbury Tales, plus calculators”
resembling Kim Cattrall). Short skirts to be
worn at all times.
Accuracy rating: Have a guess.
‘Of its time’ rating: Jumpsuits, Farrah flicks,
flashing lights and shiny robots. We’re going
to have to paint some extra numbers onto
the swingometer for this one.
Fear factor: Zero. When you look this good,
who needs Sanctuary?
1979: Stargazy on Zummerdown
In short: “The Anglo-Saxon constitution,
plus industrialisation,” according to writer
John Fletcher. “Shillingbury Tales, plus calculators,” according to everyone else.
The prediction: About 200 years hence,
Britain has turned its back on galloping
urbanisation and reverted to a pre-Industrial
Revolution harmony between “Aggros”
(farm labourers) and “Toonies” (workers
in small industrial towns). The two tribes
of this pleasant Commonwealth of New
Harmony gather yearly at the titular festival
for some amiable, church-approved ritual
abuse, exchange of goods, country dancing
and onion tasting. Thus is this Countryside
Alliance activist’s wet dream somehow kept
in healthy equilibrium.
Accuracy rating: Thus far, not a lot, really. A
branch of PC World opening in Taunton is
about as close as you’re going to get.
‘Of its time’ rating: Again, very little.
Among the burgeoning concrete dystopias
and sterile Bacofoil bunkers that were the
stocks-in-trade of its contemporaries, Stargazy was, at the very least, going out of its
way to be original.
Fear factor: A scholar of Merrie England,
Fletcher intended his bucolic future vision
as an optimistic one, though a strangely
retarded future where rival populations vent
their frustrations by throwing vegetables at
each other and holding twee swearing contests is not one we’re in too much of a hurry
to see, the prospect of Toni Arthur in regulation ‘buxom wench’ gear notwithstanding.
1980: The Flipside of Dominick Hide
In short: Post-apocalyptic future generations spy on our era for nostalgic purposes,
mainly to do with London Transport timetables. While wearing very big hats.
The prediction: Basically that civilisation
will become so bland and anaesthetised
that Portobello Road circa 1979 looks like
a Breughel painting mixed with Dante’s
Inferno by comparison. Still, at least they’ll
have sorted the Tube out.
Accuracy rating: Doesn’t look like things
are going in that direction thus far to be
honest, given that Portobello Road as
depicted in the play is a very jolly looking
place, where everyone has a cheery word to
say, policemen are abundant and warmhearted, and only the likes of Karl Howman
debase themselves by shagging on a bit of
waste ground.
‘Of its time’ rating: Future societies tended
to be, as we’ve seen, either war-torn crumbling nightmares or sterile, emotionless
warrens full of holograms, voice-controlled
lights and sliding doors that all make
the same “brrrrrr” sound when opening.
Flipside boasts an archetypal example of the
latter.
Fear factor: Absolutely zero, but delightfully so.
1981: Sin With Our Permission
In short: The Prisoner does Milton Keynes.
The prediction: Big Brother is watching
you via constant closed-circuit TV. He’s also
controlling your behaviour via a bizarre
soap opera which subconsciously dictates
your actions. Oh, and he’ll probably want to
bump you off when you stop being useful
to him.
Accuracy rating: Well, the CCTV bit was
quite prescient for 1981, and the soulless
prison of a new town is well depicted...
‘Of its time’ rating: ...but everything else totalitarian mind control, faceless bureaucracy, telly being generally a Bad Thing - are
very much the preoccupations du jour of
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The Burst of Creamup
‘Of its time’ rating: Roger Limb-esque
synth noises throughout. Robots all over the
place. That Common Market-ese chatter.
Aaron Brown.
Fear factor: Having to sit through old gags
about The Human League being regarded
as “classical music” aside, very little. We’d
quite like our own automatic Colin Bennett,
actually.
the era.
Fear factor: This being an ITV Playhouse
episode rather than a full-blown sci-’n’-fi
epic, it’s played more realistically than the
usual tinfoil and pink fringe aesthetic, and
is all the better for that. The new town is
convincingly bleak, Paul Eddington is a
reliable choice for the town development
company’s head of information, and if there
really was a daily soap that had Robin Bailey
in a lead role, we think we’d copy everything
he did, too.
1982: Crimes
In short: We’re all guilty.
The prediction: Nukes on the horizon,
mind control in the home, prisons full to
bursting. yep, it’s another off-the-peg totalitarian state.
Accuracy rating: Set in 2002, so we can
be fairly confident in saying that, a general
obsession with crime and prisons aside, it
hasn’t really come to pass.
‘Of its time’ rating: When a programme
features a parodic Public Information Film
called Select and Survive, it can only come
from one era.
Fear factor: Fairly high, but perhaps not too
much higher than there was to be had from
what was going on in the world at the time.
1983: Luna
In short: If Patsy Kensit didn’t exist, you’d
have to grow her in a petri dish.
The prediction: Wouldn’t you know it, the
world gets so polluted we have to live in
sealed-off cities. Robots replace pets and
Colin Bennett. Children are grown from
“prime slime” in batches. Everyone talks in a
bizarre bureaucratic lingo full of words like
“bureaubureau”, “habiviron” and “diminibeing”.
Accuracy rating: Well, there are plenty of
ageing punks about if you know where to
look. And David Blunkett was probably
quite taken with the idea of Egothenticity
cards.
1983: Face Lift
In short: Martin P Daniels gets his oats.
The prediction: In 2074, we’re all going to
be idle proles (Names), apart from those of
us who happen to be among the technologically-literate elite (Numbers), searching for
a scientific proof of mankind`s soul, and
never the twain shall meet. Oh, and we’ll
burst into song at the merest opportunity.
Accuracy rating: The idea that only stage
magician Zax (Martin Shaw in a blonde
wig) will be able to break down the barriers
between Names and Numbers by romancing
a cold-hearted scientist. Hmm. Unless Derren Brown runs off with Adam Hart-Davies’
wife or something, nowt.
‘Of its time’ rating: Oh, where to begin?
Shaw’s hair, everyone else’s hair, the all-white
costumes, the rock opera lyrics about soul,
love and test tubes, the laser light tunnels
and the clomping choreography. If Central
didn’t bury a tape of this in a time capsule,
we want to know why.
Fear factor: Aside from the prospect of a
magician being the saviour of society, not
a lot.
1984: The Tripods
In short: Spindly metallic three-leggers turn
Britain into one big Country Life butter ad.
The prediction: Alien race The Masters
enslave the world’s population with their
titular walking vehicles, lobotomising the
youth with a grisly “capping” ceremony. It
doesn’t look good for Paris.
Accuracy rating: Not, when all’s said and
done, applicable. The chances of anything
104
“Use of chisels should be supervised by a parent or guardian”
coming from Mars, and all that.
‘Of its time’ rating: Lots of prog rock-type
hand-painted backdrops. The Tripods
themselves, while sterling bits of BBC model
work, are colour separated to buggery.
Fear factor: At the (tea)time quite a bit. The
opening scenes with the first appearance of
the Tripes, the capping scene etc, were as
heady an accompaniment to fish and chips
from the van as anything. But then... well,
it didn’t half go on. Yes, we know epics is as
epics does, but the sheer tape-filling lengthy
aimlessness of the thing took the lion’s
share of the shine off what was a promising
premise.
1984: Stars of the Roller State Disco
In short: The YTS meets Starlight Express.
The prediction: Unemployment rockets. Ver
kids are forced into a concrete roller disco
where they skate gormlessly about while receiving vocational instruction on big tellies.
Craftsmanship is out. Use of chisels should
be supervised by a parent or guardian.
Accuracy rating: Youthful prospects aren’t
getting much better, it’s true. And there was
an item on the local news last year about
roller discos making a comeback.
‘Of its time’ rating: Thatcher’s Britain
unbound! Harsh Top of the Pops lighting and
big hair, plus the whole proto-yoof aesthetic
tie this up inextricably in the early ‘80s.
Fear factor: More a gloom factor with this
one, and a high one at that. The queasy set
design and constantly roaming camera (the
cameraman spends a lot of the programme
on skates too) make for an effectively grim
atmosphere. Any budding carpenters watching must have felt well out of it.
1985: Max Headroom
In short: Supercilious stuttering stand-up
saves society.
The prediction: Those TV companies are at
it again. Junk food and junk telly suppress
the proletariat. Ratings are all-important.
Adverts cause the fatter consumer to ex-
plode. Canadian reporter gets knocked out
and is reborn as a slightly camp, rubberheaded wisecracking virtual smoothie
against a background of wobbly lines.
Accuracy rating: Pretty wide of the mark.
In-vision announcers are still very much a
dying breed.
‘Of its time’ rating: The effects have actually
aged rather well, though we never believed
the stories of people thinking Headroom
was really computer generated, even at the
time. Elsewhere, that boring blue backlight
look abounds, as do dry ice, mohicans and
dodgy body kits.
Fear factor: None, really. Max himself was
too much fun, in both original and spin-off
incarnations (“On drums - the Pope!”) We
did see a copy of tie-in paperback Max
Headroom’s Guide to Life going for 20 quid
on Amazon a while back, mind - that’s truly
scary.
1985: Threads
In short: We’re buggered.
The prediction: Russia invades Iran. War
breaks out. Sheffield’s milk bottles evaporate.
Society collapses. Reece Dinsdale’s wedding
is put on hold. Radioactive sheep are back
on the menu. It gets chilly. A new generation
of illiterate freaks try to re-invent the steam
engine. The human race seems unlikely to
recover. On the plus side, archive tapes of
Words and Pictures are in healthy circulation.
Accuracy rating: Well, it could easily have
happened, of course. Of all these programmes, Barry Hines’ epic is by far the
most sober, responsible and well-researched.
‘Of its time’ rating: Superpower nuclear
conflict is still - just about - low in the
current agenda of global worries. Oh, and
Lesley Judd doesn’t do telly anymore.
Fear factor: Three thousand megatons
worth. If we’re being especially flippant with
this summation, it’s to hide the fact that the
thought of this programme still gives us the
yellow creeps. The sheer authority of the
105
The Burst of Creamup
research, and the perfectly-judged pseudodoc filming, made this a drama you couldn’t
ignore. Brrr.
1986: Overdrawn at the Memory Bank
In short: Making a monkey of the micro.
The prediction: Sitting down? Good. Nearfuture America, and society is controlled by
- wait for it - huge, sinister global corporations. Lowly worker Raul Julia gets fed-up
of processing abstract “compustats” on his
plywood-encased terminal, and spends the
day watching Casablanca on an endless loop.
Caught by his employers, he’s sentenced to
be “doppled” - have his personality removed
in a little cube which is then injected into
the brain of a baboon. When this goes
wrong, he’s stuck in a blue screen virtual
world of low-res wireframe graphics and
Quantel Paintbox effects, during which he
corners the corporation chief in a cheap
Casablanca parody and blows him into a
myriad floaty triangles. Corporate society
reels!
Accuracy rating: Well, the skiving off work
bit rings true.
‘Of its time’ rating: Seldom is the screen
free of wonderful ‘80s “videographics”.
When it’s not, velour jumpsuits and neon
fittings vie with stock footage of wildlife arsing about. People eat green wafers out of foil
packets. Fittingly, this teleplay was yours to
own on LaserDisc.
Fear factor: Way below zero, thanks to the
legendary ineptitude of this PBS (PBS!) production. The brain operation scene is meant
to be gruesome, but blows it by featuring the
exact same screwtop entry method as The
Man With Two Brains, and a small, hot-dog
eating girl being told “You’ll get mustard all
over his brain!” This sort of stuff was a staple
of Isaacs-era Channel 4, dumbing-down
fans.
1987: Knights of God
In short: They’ve got the jobs, but we’ve got
Gareth Thomas on our side.
The prediction: The North/South divide
goes bananas. After the requisite civil war,
John Woodvine’s Christian fascists rule the
land from Winchester with natty leather
outfits and blocky swastika logo. Celtic
insurgents led by Thomas take Arthurian inspiration from a bearded Patrick Troughton
and blow up a Land Rover.
Accuracy rating: North/South divide still
firmly in place. Religious fundamentalism,
however, unlikely to take over in the foreseeable future. Winchester still far too lovely to
be a seat of fascism.
‘Of its time’ rating: Not so much of its time
as out of time, really, as this was practically
the last gasp of big budget British telly sci-fi
for a long time.
Fear factor: Considering this was parachuted into a Sunday teatime slot more used
to the likes of Supergran, rather high. The
riot gear and those black helicopters sent a
pre-Highway chill down many a homeworkdodging spine.
1993: Wild Palms
In short: Virtual Reality will kill us all!
The prediction: Evil Scientologist-style telly
companies offer up the ultimate in entertainment. Confusion between reality and
corporate-controlled fantasy becomes increasingly great. James Belushi to the rescue!
Or maybe not.
Accuracy rating: Virtual Reality remains
firmly in the Trocadero, thank God. But
daft religious cults do proliferate, it has to
be said.
‘Of its time’ rating: Well, it’s ‘cyberpunk’,
isn’t it? Now as dated a sub-genre as Restoration comedy, occasionally insightful stuff but
often so in love with its small set of generic
ideas and visual references as to be stiflingly
self-satisfied. And with Oliver Stone’s name
slapped on it, Wild Palms was all this times
10.
Fear factor: Beyond a sort of sub-Twin
Peaks weird-out contest, not much. It looks
like Miami Vice throughout, which is a step
106
“Commander Boaks got 20 votes/There were more for Hatters-ley”
up from the usual midnight-plus-blue-light
look, we suppose. And the gallumphing
attempts at Saying Something smother any
potential the idea had as a thriller from the
off. Broadcast magazine rated this the fourth
worst American programme of all time. For
once we agree with them.
1996: Cold Lazarus
In short: Murdoch the evil memory-yoinker.
The prediction: Frozen head of writer is
resuscitated by scientists. A futuristic Rupert
Murdoch-alike controls the world’s media
with a cynical contempt. Frances De La Tour
glides about in a nifty mobile bath chair.
Accuracy rating: Anti-corporate terrorists,
heartless global media moguls, an increasingly bland media plundering nostalgia - not
doing too bad so far.
‘Of its time’ rating: Bloody VR again.
Fear factor: Albert Finney’s blue severed
head aside, very little. This mini-series
plays more like an indignant rant against
the modern world than a fully immersive
drama. And while we’re always keen to see
this sort of sci-fi on telly rather than your
Star Trek/Buffy fantasy folderol, it has to be
said that, with the best will in the world,
Potter didn’t really add much to the genre
with this. Still, the final scene is poignant
stuff, and Henry Goodman’s fun as the
media slimeball.
Prog 61, 3 July 2005
What happened to the comedy song? We
don’t mean the two-a-penny pop parodies
that ailing sketch shows knock out with
dreary regularity, but the fully-paid-up,
bow-tie-wearing, whimsical ditty slotted
into That’s Life! or a great big national event
special. As a craft it was unfairly maligned
even while it was still a going concern, and
now it’s all but died out in the mainstream,
we think a reappraisal is long overdue. So
come with us, as we challenge the mighty
titan (Miles Kington) and his troubadours
(Instant Sunshine), and with a smile, we’ll
take you to...
THE SEVEN Cs OF WRY
1) Cleverness
As Pete Baikie pointed out, whatever the
ostensible subject of a wry comedy song, the
over-arching message is, more often than
not, a slightly self-satisfied: “Clever/I’m very
clever!” on the part of the singer-songwriter.
Composing whimsical ditties on scientific
subjects was a good wheeze for Tom Lehrer
(The Elements) and Flanders and Swann
(The First and Second Law of Thermodynamics - “Oh, I’m hot!/That’s because you’ve
been working!/Oh, Beatles, nothing!”) to
playfully show off their intellects. Stilgoe,
of course, on top of his anagrammatic
expertise, was a hire-a-wit par excellence,
often called upon to compose an on-thespot ode at major events, none more notable
than his break-neck summary of Decision
‘79, The Man Who Voted Don’t Know in the
Election, a rhyming catalogue of the night’s
gains and losses (“Commander Boaks got 20
votes/There were more for Hatters-ley/And
Tam Dalyell did awfully well/So he can’t
blame that on me!”) after which Sue Lawley
marvelled “I don’t know how he manages to
get his tongue round it!”
2) Comment
Well, you’ve got to earn a living, and
what better way of keeping your oar in
the public’s boat race than scoring a nice,
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The Burst of Creamup
airplay- garnering topical tune or two? It’s a
grand tradition, from Flanders and Swann
(“There’s a hole in my budget, dear Harold,
dear Harold...”) through Cy Grant and Lance
Percival’s topical calypsos for Tonight and
TW3, to that man Stilgoe again. From musical musings on politics and consumer affairs
on Nationwide to his own “musical satire
without the nasty bits” series And Now the
Good News (sample song/sketch - The Stilg
as Natural History Museum attendant sings
a tearful goodbye to the Tyrannosaurus
skeleton - represented by a Doctor Who and
the Loch Ness Monster-style blue-screened
glove puppet - due to be moved into storage). He even dipped a tentative toe into
post- modern media analysis in the famed
‘Wide slot where he itemised the foibles of
the various regions’ political interviewers,
who, arranged on a bank of monitors, joined
in live with their collective catchphrase - I’ll
Have to Stop You There (“But Stuart Hall in
Manchester, he gets the whole thing wrong/
He just says “Shut up minister, you’ve gone
on far too long!”)
3) Circumlocution
It’s a golden rule - never use one syllable
where 10 will do. The very presence in a wry
song of the sort of vocabulary usually given
a wide berth by ‘proper’ songwriters provides - or at least ought to provide - a chuckle or two, so bizarre linguistic constructions
abound. This may help contrive a tricky
rhyme (Stilgoe’s Towels - “The Americans
made explorations lunar/And they prayed
the Russians wouldn’t get there sooner”), or
create comic confusion (First and Second
Law - “That you can’t pass heat from the
cooler to the hotter/Try it if you like but you
far better notter/’Cos the cold in the cooler
will get hotter as a ruler/’Cos the hotter
body’s heat will pass to the cooler”). But
mostly it’s just the love of language for its
own sake. Jake Thackray liberally anointed
his earthy tunes with this sort of vocal relish
(“Country bus, north country bus/Clumsy
and cumbersome, rumbustious...”) and
knew just when to drop the right word in for
comic effect (a copulatory description in the
excellent On Again, On Again - “Not even
stopping while we go hammer and tongs towards the peak/Except maybe for a sigh and
a groan and one perfunctory shriek”). Now,
that’s verbal engineering of Kingdom Brunel
proportions. Where’s Thackray’s Revolution
in the Head, then?
4) Cheek
Since George Formby elbowed Frank Randle
out of the limelight and shoved his little
banjulele in the nation’s chops, the cheeky
chappie persona has been a staple of that
sector of the whimsical song contingent that
doesn’t hail from within the M25 or have access to a piano stool. Formby begat, by some
tortuous conjugal process, Doc Cox, but
never mind him, Mike Harding’s our main
candidate for this category. Stripy, stripy
blazer, funny face, funny face, big glasses.
And, unlike Simon Fanshawe, some laughs
into the bargain. Okay, haunted curry house
humour like the accordion-backed Ghost of
the Cafe Gunga Din may not cause the shade
of Noel Coward much concern, but sheer
jauntiness makes up for the comparative
lack of sophistication. And when he delivers the line about King’s Cross’s “street of a
thousand norks” in Aussie expat picaresque
She’ll Be Right, Mate... well, you’ll have to
trust us that it’s with the ultimate “Ooh,
crikey!” expression all over his silly old face.
Moving up the taste ladder, the
sainted Jake Thackray wasn’t above some superbly stylish sauce. Sister Josephine detailed
the life of a big burly crim hiding out in a
convent (“Oh, Sister Josephine/Founder of
the convent pontoon team/They’re looking
through your bundles of rare magazines...”)
while North Country Bus was sung with a
crafty emphasis on, well, certain syllables.
And Bantam Cock is a great album title.
Lest we give the impression this is
a purely male ballpark, there were also Fas-
108
“Where’ve you stashed the stolen jewels?/Do you take us all for fools?”
cinating Aida (and, er, Hinge and Brackett)
and of course Victoria Wood, whose “beat
me on the bottom with a Woman’s Weekly!”
shtick may have been dulled by over-familiarity, but still, we love it.
5) Conservatism
With a small ‘c’, we hasten to add. While
Stilgoe visibly grinned when crooning of
Callaghan’s defeat, he also trilled with some
relish - “One more thing to add - what was
it?/Oh, the National Front lost its deposit”.
Then again, any hoary old observational
cliché was grist to his mill - Towels was a
tower of fancy built on the ancient madeup phenomenon of Germans colonising
sun-loungers, which he was still doing in the
late ‘80s. Similarly, a wistful air of longing
for a more innocent past informed Richard
Digance’s infamous Spangle-mentioning
verse list of lost ephemera. And with its
roots in folk and/or Noel Coward’s tinklings,
the musical accompaniment of choice for all
our acts is unashamedly old hat. We’ve no
idea why this should be the rule, but there it
is. However, if anyone knows of a whimsical
Trotskyite songwriter who had a stint on The
Braden Beat or some such, do let us know.
6) Close harmony
We never understood why The Simpsons
writers thought the idea of a wave of topical
barbershop quartets in the late ‘80s was so
hilarious. Over here we’d already had over a
decade of Instant Sunshine, the medicallyqualified purveyors of harmonious sideways
looks. Even solo performers managed to
double up via studio trickery. Peter Skellern’s
wry lovelorn paeans often found him accompanying himself on the multitrack in a
1920s crooner style, none more liltingly than
on his Me and My Girl theme. But top of the
tree is, yet again, Stilgoe, for his superlative
performance of Statutory Right of Entry to
Your Home, a song composed in honour of
a Nationwide consumer unit viewer who
enquired after which authorities possessed
the titular trespass entitlement. Not only
did Dickie act out the part of his astonished
self returning home from work to find his
domicile infiltrated by an ever-increasing
mob of state-sponsored snoopers, he used
the wonders of colour separation to impersonate each of the unwelcome governmental
gatecrashers (the Customs and Excise clerk,
for instance - “Where’ve you stashed the
stolen jewels?/Do you take us all for fools?”
- was appropriately rendered in piratical cod
Cornish). Truly, this was the apotheosis of
the genre. And all to placate some miserable
old sod who objected to his gas meter being
read. That’s value for money!
7) Conviviality
Whether in concert, in the Nationwide
studio or (in Instant Sunshine’s case) on the
hard shoulder of the M1, it’s the mirthful minstrel’s job to inject an atmosphere
of classy bonhomie, as if a well-appointed
cocktail party or cabaret evening were just
getting underway. The ironic donning of
the dinner jacket (The Sunshine, Stilgoe),
the bow-tie (Stilgoe again) or the straw
boater (Sunshine, Mike Harding) was the
first step. Second, jolly musical syncopation
- the chirpily-strummed banjo, the hoppity
squeezebox refrain, the bouncy “ba-dumbum-bum” of the Sunshine’s double bass.
Or a bit of dainty ivory tinkling, utilising
the full range of the keyboard for comic
effect, punctuating the gaps between each
jokey line while the audience takes it in with
a brisk plonk-plink, and of course, augmenting the final punch line with a showy
glissando up the keyboard, ending with the
right hand pertly raised above the head in a
fey lampoon of the concert virtuoso. Thirdly,
the vocal delivery should feel free to waver
in between ‘proper’ singing and, when the
comedic moment arises, a sort of staccato
spoken delivery accompanied by a sly twinkle in the eye. In fact, Keith Michell went the
whole hog and delivered the Captain Beaky
songs - surely the very definition of whimsy
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- entirely in this manner, archly twisting his
tongue round that final line about “a flying
um-ba-rella” while the brass band backing
came to a respectful halt. That’s the classic
whimsical song payoff - never knowingly
undersold.
Prog 62, 7 August 2005
100 GREAT TV MOMENTS
Creamup’s docket of distinguished smallscreen sorbets
#39: July 1985 - Watchdog gets its own slot
on BBC1
Teatime suburban snoopery had been a
staple feature of the Beeb for years before
anybody thought to give it a programme
all to itself. Watchdog had an elephantine
gestation period going right back to 1977
and the formation of Nationwide’s earnestlynamed Public Eye Unit, under the frankly
bonkers stewardship of John Stapleton and
Mrs Michael Barratt (aka Dilys Morgan).
Itself a son of the ‘Wide’s imperial Stilgoe
and Singleton-piloted Consumer Unit, this
avowedly charmless custodian of complainants regenerated in 1980 into the Hugh
Scully-helmed Watchdog (replete with a
spin-off column in Radio Times), which then
survived all the way through to 1984 and
an unhappy final nine months as part of the
doomed Sixty Minutes.
Yet thanks to “consumer groups” whatever they are - its nosey nabobs weren’t
off screen for long. When it returned to
BBC1 Watchdog had won not only new
status in a slot of its own but also a new
presenter: Nick Ross, no less, who’d swapped
Breakfast Time’s red leather upholstery for a
big chrome chair and the job of making a hit
out of middle class people moaning about
the quality of sand on British beaches and
the tenor of voice used by dirty-finger nailed
door-to-door salesmen. And what enthusiastic thoughts did he have on taking over a
new patch? “Ah! Another pile of letters has
arrived. It is beginning to look as though we
will fill 13 programmes after all.”
Such modesty proved wise. The
programme ran every Sunday from 14 July
and was bundled out at 6pm, a time when,
in the opinion of its editor Lino Ferrari, “a
fair sprinkling of viewers are liable to be
widowed women”. Consequently the show
ended up more stuffed full of net curtaintwitcher nitpicking than ever before. A
strand entitled ‘Watch Out’ was billed as
a “short nugget of goodness” and featured
miserly malcontents getting one over on
those “evil” traders out (gasp!) to make a
living. Fran Morrison moped about outside
solicitors’ offices trying to get an appointment to discuss her pension plan. Even Lynn
Faulds Wood couldn’t lighten the mood and
lower the average viewing age, relegated
to explaining the need to keep the tops of
medicine bottles screwed on. Why? In case
they came off, of course.
Nick was back on Frank Bough’s
sofa by Christmas. The lesson seemed clear:
Watchdog only worked on weekdays, and at
teatimes. Hence it was brought back a year
later on weekdays. At 8.40am.
FACTS AMAZING: Nick Ross once quipped
that after Crimewatch and Drugwatch his
next show should be called ‘Please Watch’
Prog 68, 5 February 2006
WHEN IT COMES TO THE
CRUNCH
So Britain’s Noisiest Crisps are going to be a
little bit quieter...
Like us, you no doubt felt a tinge of sadness at the demise of that most esoterically
named of crisp manufacturers, Golden
Wonder. Although unlike us, you probably
didn’t chortle to yourself on learning that
the receivership-bound brand was being
handled by ‘Kroll’; whether Doctor Who
Tom Baker will duly come to its rescue
remains to be seen. Nowadays Creamup
may prefer pondering on whether all those
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“Oh the wonderful thing about Wickers, is Wickers are wonderful things”
esoteric flavours listed on the back of the
peerless, Radcliffe-endorsed Seakbrook’s
Crisps actually exist, but those sporadic
pangs of longing for Crisps We Have Loved
just won’t go away. It’s always a shame to see
a perfectly good crisp disappear from the
shelves while blander alternatives thrive, and
given the general fervour for The Apprentice and its ilk, it’s only right that Creamup
should take this opportunity to present a
10-point business plan for dodging the alltoo-common pitfalls of potato-based snack
food marketing.
into how to replicate the real flavour followed, which frankly we’d rather not know
any details of, leading to a relaunch with a
determinedly eco-friendly slant. Hedgehog
Crisps were given a new taste and slightly
different packaging, accompanied by diversification into early incarnations of earthy
organic flavours like sea salt, but by then the
damage had been done and urban mythfuelled consumer wariness saw to it that
their days were numbered. Which is a pity
as they were quite nice, even the original
herb’n’pork fat variety.
1) Avoid courting controversy
Cautionary tale: Hedgehog Crisps (Philip
Lewis Foods)
Never mind all those five-minute ‘Lottery
Love Rat, 28, In EastEnders Star Asylum
Seeker House Price Plot’ tabloid frenzies
of today. They are but a muted pin drop
compared to the ferocious non-news ‘campaigns’ of the 1980s, and one of the most
splenetic concerned a certain crisp maker.
In 1981, pub chain Philip Lewis launched
Hedgehog Crisps, which they ambiguously
suggested replicated the genuine taste of
good old-fashioned clay-baked spiny rodent.
Animal rights protesters were up in arms,
demanding to know whether or not any
Bits Off Mr Mars’ Cock-style fragments of
actual hedgehog had found their way into
the flavouring, forcing the manufacturers to
admit that it was merely a random blend of
seasoning and pork fat.
The nation’s hedgehogs could once
again breathe easily and get on with getting
run over by Mel Smith whilst making their
way to a circus tent in the company of ‘Mo’,
but that didn’t prevent a rash of crackpots
from appearing on local news programmes
to dribble on about how they ate hedgehog
before all this PC nonsense started and it
never did them any harm etc. Nor did it
prevent the Office of Fair Trading from stepping in and pointing out that the brand was
essentially false advertising. Some research
2) Offer some variety
Cautionary tale: Wickers (KP)
“Oh the wonderful thing about Wickers,
is Wickers are wonderful things” ran the
D*sney-pastiching song in the energetic
television advert, which for some difficultto-fathom reason took place in a jesterfestooned medieval throne room. It was no
word of a lie - Wickers genuinely were wonderful things, namely thin and crispy wicker
basket-shaped reformed potato snacks that
were not only ever so slightly on the tasty
side, but also challenged the consumer to
come up with as many ‘different’ ways of
eating them as possible.
Their one flaw was that they were
only available in Roast Chicken flavour (do
you see what they did there?), and were
prominently identified as such on the unusual green and red-liveried packaging. Unlike, say, Frazzles, which are simply known
to the public as being ‘Frazzle flavour’, the
implication was that further varieties would
be forthcoming but in fact they never were.
If ever a crisp was crying out
to be experienced in alternate varieties it
was this one, and the lack of choice led to
Wickers-related ennui on a grand scale. Not
to be confused with the similarly ill-fated
KP Griddles, the Whizzer & Chips couponpromoted maize-heavy inexplicably-manin-tricorn-hat-promoted effort that was only
available in that long-outlawed chemical
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warfare-grade pickled onion flavour, or Piglets, the elaborate miniature hollowed-out
potato sculptures of pigs that only came in
the far too esoteric for its own good ‘baked
bean’ variety.
3) Keep ahead of sociocultural shifts
Cautionary tale: Football Crazy (Smith’s)
Like some nightmarish vision of On the
Hour-era Alan Partridge made flesh, the
1970s were a time when people were fans of
‘sport’ as a concept as opposed to individual
‘sports’. Even when ‘sport’ was broken down
into its broadest subdivisions this remained
true, and never was it any truer than for
football in the days when people actually
literally said “football’s the winner” and
meant it.
Team merchandise and memorabilia had yet to really take off, with the
consequence that any old piece of junk
with ‘football’ written on it, and optional
artwork featuring a nondescript generic
John Craven-esque player, would be eagerly
snapped up by any passing fan, regardless of
their denomination. For an example look no
further than Football Crazy, an ostensibly
football-shaped (i.e. spherical) crisp in a
football pattern-replicating packet, which
was no doubt consumed in huge volumes by
rattle and scarf-sporting fans as they waited
for the Football Special while listening to
Adrian Juste on a transistor radio.
By the early 1980s, things were
changing as big business and government
regulation moved in, and by the end of the
decade the game and its fans had changed
almost beyond all recognition. What hope
then for a humble snack food whose entire
existence hinged on fans adhering to the lyrics of Rolf Harris’ Football Crazy’ as though
they were religious doctrine? The fact that
the nearest equivalent in recent times has
been that Salt’n’Lineker/Cheese’n’Owen
business says it all really. See also two further culturally adrift Smith’s efforts - Horror
Bags, bat/ghost/fang etc. shaped efforts that
were pretty much done for by the knock-on
effects of the early 1980s video nasties panic,
and Twists, exquisite mono-flavoured twirly
things in an outsize blue and white bag,
that came unstuck when other manufacturers cracked their secret and started to do
the same thing with more variety and less
expense.
4) Don’t try too hard
Cautionary tale: Ruffles (Walkers)
The sight of Tara Palmer-Tomkinson in a
bath singing in Japanese may be enough to
convince some to rush straight out and buy
an overpriced packet of Mild Sweet Chilli &
Coconut Tapioca Jalfrezi flavoured ‘crackers’,
but this is a specialised area that the humble
catch-all crisp should never be permitted to
stray into. Consider the fate of Ruffles, an
early 1990s attempt by Walkers to muscle in
on the crinkle-cut territory and turn it into
some sort of upmarket sophistocrisp.
Quite aside from the problem that
they had been beaten to the punch some
years previously by KP, whose Frisps did
much the same but still managed to court
the populist joke even despite their impenetrable 1920s-hued ad campaign silliness,
the main stumbling block was that they were
pitched somewhere above the intellectual
level of the common or garden crisp-eating
masses. Steve Coogan was roped in to give
the corporate promotional video a touch of
New Wave of New Wave Comedy vigour,
while the television ads were handled
(no doubt at great expense) by intellectual televisual hot property of the day Kyle
McLachlan, vaguely in character as Agent
Dale Cooper as he delivered a somewhat
bowdlerised eulogy to this “darn fine crisp”.
Some were put off by this pretentiousness, others just didn’t know whether
they were allowed to eat them or not, and
Ruffles’ stay in the marketplace was a decidedly short one. Much the same is also true
of the numerous attempts over the years to
launch a wholesome pseudo-‘organic’ crisp
112
“Farmer Brown, you’ve got a crunchy snack there”
- among them KP Good’n’Crunchy, Walkers
Golden Skins and Smith’s Jackets - which
seemingly concentrated more on the branding than they did on ensuring edibility.
Although Jackets were promoted with a
fantastically dismal variant on the successful
‘singing potatoes’ campaign (“We want to
be... Ja-a-ckets!”), and should be celebrated
for that alone.
5) Avoid avant-gardism
Cautionary tale: Tubes & Loops (Smith’s)
Although they broke a great many of the
rules listed here, Smith’s Crispy Tubes were
for a time something of a runaway success.
They gave a little variety to the staid and
unexciting taste of Ready Salted, afforded
ample opportunity to be fashioned into
rudimentary ‘fangs’ and inserted beneath
the top lip, and once caused Creamup’s mate
to be landed with a detention for remarking a little too loudly on the fact that “you
can only get them in one flavour”. A decade
or so later they were on the wane, but in
their place came one of the most perplexing
concepts ever to emerge from Ashby De La
Zouch - Tubes & Loops. This truly baffling
combination of what were effectively Crispy
Tubes and Hula Hoops in the one bag was
more Nuts’n’Gum (“Together At Last!”) than
it was Jagger-Meets-Lennon, and even an
elaborate animated ad campaign featuring
a bowler hat-sporting ‘Tube’ and ‘Loop’
strolling around a natural history museum
(“Tubealoopasaurus? No, but he heard us!”)
couldn’t drum up much interest. Like those
other notable inexplicable team ups of the
day, Greaves-Meets-Hall and The Christmas
Tree stop from Playbus, Tubes & Loops were
quietly shelved not long afterwards.
here is that strange period when, for no
readily obvious reason, crisp manufacturers
seemed to home in on the ‘beat boom’ in
particular.
Everyone remembers the Susan
Maughan-rewriting, “We want to be... Smiiths Crisps!” as performed by the aforementioned singing potatoes, but fewer recall the
punk Humpty Dumpty bawling, “If I don’t
get Walkers, I’m a hard-boiled head case!”
to the tune of The Dave Clark 5 for the
purposes of plugging the decidedly unpizzatasting Bitza Pizza, or the campaign that
accompanied the short shelf life of Farmer
Brown’s. In a deeply flawed move, this collection of maize-induced farmyard animal
shapes was promoted by a bunch of cartoon
animals singing “Farmer Brown, you’ve
got a crunchy snack there” to the tune of
Herman’s Hermits’ Mrs Brown, You’ve Got a
Lovely Daughter’ It’s highly unlikely that one
of the least-heard hits of the 1960s would
have meant anything of significance to
crisp-guzzling youngsters, especially when
even the film it came from had long since
relinquished its Bank Holiday standby status. Retro fiends still were too busy forcing
their Wrong Kind Of Nostalgia attentions
on the 1950s at that point, and even those
who lived through the Swinging Sixties
(who, because they were actually there, can’t
remember anything about it apart from,
erm, where they were when they heard that
Kennedy had died) were unlikely to want to
relive those heady days on Carnaby Street
through the medium of a bag of crisps.
So those “bags of moo, weigh,
woof, baa and cock-a-doodle doo” didn’t
really catch on. Farmer Brown, you’ve got a
remaindered snack there.
6) Remember that ‘crisps=1960s’ is a myth
Cautionary Tale: Farmer Brown’s (Smith’s)
The unashamed bastardisation of old pop
songs for ads has a long history, and is
something Creamup may well return to in
the coming months, but our main concern
7) Try to avoid being too cheap’n’cheerful
Cautionary tale: Thing-A-Me-Jigs/ThingA-Me-Bobs (Lord Knows)
There isn’t too much that can be said about
these possibly regionally exclusive Wotsit
emulators. This much is known - Thing-
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The Burst of Creamup
A-Me-Jigs were cheese flavoured, ThingA-Me-Bobs were sausage flavoured, they
came in a miniscule bag (think the A5 paper
of the crisp packet world), the excessively
mouth-drying contents would become all
but crushed into powdery crumbs in transit,
and most importantly of all they cost a mere
five pence. For the financially challenged
they acted as a fairly effective substitute for
Premier League crisps, but that was just it occupying a lower rung on the luxury goods
ladder and without any marketplace clout to
speak of (even their close evolutionary relative, Krunch-I-Puffs, at least had a larger bag
and a cartoon of an elephant with a knotted
trunk on the packet), they were never going
to achieve any higher status.
Their legacy lives on in the form
of the many and varied bags of pasty airfilled corn snacks currently available at a
mini-mart near you , but who really remembers these economic corner-cutting pioneers
now?
8) Beware the legacy of Fatcher’s Britain
Cautionary tale: Burton’s XL (Burton’s)
Burton’s Foods may continue to thrive in
the less unpredictable arena of cake and
biscuit manufacture, but time was when
they commanded a hefty slice of the action
in the crisp world too. For a long while the
average punter was as likely to alight on a
packet of their strangely named XL brand
(which confusingly was neither particularly
large in packet size or crisp size) as anything
by Golden Wonder or KP, and if evidence
was ever needed of their former market
share, look no further than the many classic
football clips that captured a prominent
pitch-side Burton’s XL billboard ad, most
notably Steve Coppell’s famous chipped
(boom boom) goal for Manchester United
against Manchester City in 1979.
Their stoically-maintained ‘just
the facts, ma’am’ approach to flavour and
packaging could never hope to flourish
in harsher and more competitive climes,
though, and by the late 1980s they had all
but disappeared from view, along with those
canny bags of Tudor and virtually every
other no frills effort that effectively played
The Lambrettas to Walkers’ The Jam.
9) Go easy on the additives
Cautionary tale: Sky Divers (KP)
Of course, we have no reason to believe that
the disappearance of this once-ubiquitous
cut-price market leader at the same time as
new regulations were introduced to curb
the amount of permitted ‘E-numbers’ in
the average crisp was anything more than
a coincidence, but history records that a
great many concerned parents banned their
offspring from eating any sort of crisps
that looked as though their excess of heavy
flavouring might be prone to gathering in
the bottom left corner of the packet in a sort
of congealed lump.
See also the strange saga of the
turn-of-the-eighties DC and Marvel Comics crisps - originally these took the form
of huge and surprisingly greasy Monster
Munch-esque representations of Spider-man
(i.e. a circle with slanty gaps in it to represent the eyeholes of his mask) and Captain
America (a circle with a star missing in the
middle to represent something that looked
absolutely nothing like his shield whatsoever), but no doubt amid much furrowing
of brows they were overhauled to become a
marginally healthier alternative. Now taking
a smaller, crunchier form with a texture
akin to burnt toast, Spidey’s crisp of choice
became a spindly web, whereas Cap was
replaced by Superman and an invariably
warped rendition of his ‘S’ logo. Now there’s
a routine Jerry Seinfeld missed.
10) If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it
Cautionary tale: Flavour’n’Shake (Smith’s)
Nobody could ever make head nor tail of
that peculiar blurb on the back about how
the little blue bag of salt was once a financial
and technological necessity but had now
114
“Acrobats, like costumed horse-vaulters the Dingbats”
been brought back by popular demand, nor
indeed the equally peculiar TV ads with presumably mocked-up archive footage covering much the same ground, but Salt’n’Shake
were and remain an uncommonly appealing
prospect.
There’s nothing out of the ordinary about the combination of plain crisps
and salt, but some sort of alchemy occurs
between blue bag and thinly sliced fried
potato that makes them so much more than
mere ‘Ready Salted flavour’.
Some time in the mid-1980s,
Smith’s came to the conclusion that electricity could indeed be invented twice, and that
similar culinary miracles would be effected
by the introduction of Flavour’n’Shake. This
variation on a theme was exactly what the
slightly modified name implies - the unflavoured crisps came with a colour-coded
flavouring sachet, not entirely unlike those
that could be found in the average packet
of cheapo supermarket own brand noodles.
And, surprise surprise, the effect was much
the same as that of cheapo supermarket own
brand noodles. Unlike salt, which was able
to distribute itself evenly around the entire
crisp packet with ease, the clumping-prone
additive was barely capable of distributing
itself evenly around a single crisp. It was a
bold experiment, but one that was never to
be repeated.
Meanwhile, a dishonourable mention for Ringos, which may still be available
but have gone through so many needless
changes of shape, texture and recipe that
nobody’s sure what they’re like right now.
Prog 70, 2 April 2006
WHATEVER HAPPENED
TO... PERFORMING
TROUPES?
Creamup remembers 10 light entertainment
leviathans now sadly left at the side of the
Saturday night telly road
Nobody watching could ever quite understand why, but it used to be a matter of
law that any light entertainment show had
to be bisected by the appearance of some
upmarket cabaret act or other. If you were
expecting a full 45 minutes of laughs from
Corbett and Barker, Eric and Ern or even
Little and Large, it was tough luck. Mainly
because Little and Large were barely capable
of delivering 45 seconds of laughs, but also
because countless hours had to be given
over to Elaine Paige, Barbara Dickson, the
Betty Fox Babes, the Mike Sammes Singers,
or whoever had been block-booked for that
run.
In fact, there appeared to be an
entire industry that grew up around this
mandatory slot, composed of acts whose
sole reason for existence was to perform
in the middle of someone else’s show. They
were many and varied in their style and
composition - gimmicky dancers like the
Roly Polys and the Brian Rogers Connection, acrobats, like costumed horse-vaulters
the Dingbats (and indeed the mysterious
‘Acromaniacs’, who appeared to be some
sort of blackleg Dingbat spin-off that carbon
copied their act right down to choice of costumes), ‘sophisticated’ melody makers like
Swingle II, post-break-up former-Bonzosfor-hire combos like Vernon’s Banjo Boys
and Roger Ruskin Spear & His Giant Kinetic
Wardrobe, wittily-named duos like the
Brother Lees and the Fairer Sax, the pianoless Chas’n’Dave that were Cosmotheka,
Those Girls We Can’t Remember the Name
of Who Sang Top of the Pops Album-Like
Chart Hits Atop a Speedboat in the Middle
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of The Paul Daniels Magic Show, and the
frankly inexplicable likes of the Amazing Bavarian Stompers; basically a load of
bierkeller Bill Bailey-alikes who came on
and stomped and shouted in cod German
like some great lost act from Vic Reeves’
Novelty Island. Not to mention all manner
of paper ladder-making, spiral-ascending,
bowler hat-assisted mock-drunken-juggling,
Phil Cool-presaging ‘specialty acts’ such as
crackshot playing card-flinger Ricky Jay,
the paper bag-sporting Unknown Comic,
Cousin Balki-alike juggler Yakov Smirnoff,
That Bloke Who Pretended to Cut His
Fingers Off and Nothing Else, Alfredo (who
basically just spat table tennis balls across
the stage during early editions of The Two
Ronnies), and perhaps most famously the
perpetually Paul Daniels-bothering ‘Bubble
Man’ Tom Noddy.
One subsector was bigger than
any other, though, and that was the dedicated vocal troupe. Normally equipped with
a part-‘classy’, part-punning moniker and
an average of four members, they would
steadfastly take to the stage to trot out either
a pedestrian rendition of a popular standard
or else try out one of their self-penned witticisms, and make constant vague allusions
to commercially available long players that
never actually seemed to be commercially
available anywhere. And so we hereby present a quick guide to the best, blandest and
most indistinguishable of these crooning
collaborations.
Manhattan Transfer
With their classic genre-defining four-piece
line-up consisting of a brace of Rita Rudneresque ‘ditzy heiress’ types, hunky John
Barrowman-resembling bequiffed male to
handle the baritone bits, and an additional
decidedly unshowbizzy bloke who looked
like he belonged to another outfit altogether,
Manhattan Transfer set the high watermark
for years to come.
Originally drawn from the cast-
lists of various stage musicals devoted to
reviving the great songs of yesteryear, they
have spent nigh on three decades trading in
close-harmony reinterpretations of songs
that really should have stayed in there.
Although American, they seemed to spend
most of their professional lives over here and
on television, normally either surrounded
by cardboard cut-out ‘jazz musician’ figures
that bore a close resemblance to the title
sequence of Jeeves and Wooster (and, let’s
be honest about it, looked more interesting
than La Transfer themselves), or - when a
little touch of élan was required - wearing
black polo necks in Bohemian Rhapsody
close-up.
So definitive in their genre were
‘Ver Transfer that they even spawned a
legion of similarly retro-themed close
harmony-crooning imitators, chief among
them Wall Street Crash, Harvey and the
Wallbangers, and the virtual carbon copy
that was Stutz Bear Cats.
The Mans even scored some
minor chart action with their oft-parodied
rendition of Chanson D’Amour (although
we preferred the version performed by the
staff of Grace Bros.), and later with the r’n’b
flavoured Spice Of Life. The latter boasted
a harmonica solo from a guesting Stevie
Wonder, which really sets it apart from the
80 million other 1980s pop singles that did
likewise. The inventors, perfectors and all
but trademark holder of a style that countless others would try and fail to emulate.
Not that it ever stopped any of
them, but there you go.
The King’s Singers
Cut from slightly more highbrow cloth than
many others on this list, as was evidenced by
their luxuriant colour-coded ‘singing jackets’, The King’s Singers chirruped their first
six-part fa-la-faddle-faddle-fah within the
decidedly un-showbizzy confines of King’s
College Cambridge. Like the decidedly less
stuffily-attired Vanessa Mae and Nigel “Pa-
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“A group of zany big hat-favouring busker types”
ter, Pater, please will you see me orf to the
Yehudi Menuin school” Kennedy after them,
their aim was to take classical music to the
masses, and this naturally meant appearing
on numerous television shows, to the eternal
chagrin of classical buffs. Operatic, choral
and medieval pieces formed a large part of
their repertoire, but they were every bit as
likely to be seen and heard harmonising
their way through the greatest hits of the
Beatles, the Beach Boys, David Bowie and
so on, or even trilling one of their witty selfpenned Stilgoesque numbers about the trials
of parking in a multi-storey car park.
Generally more at home on radio,
where they once famously recorded a bizarre
single explaining how to tune to the new
BBC frequencies, it was nonetheless a fair
bet that in any given week they could show
up on anything from those stilted attempts
at BBC2 variety shows to Tarby After Ten.
The Spinners
Anyone who grew up involuntarily listening
to Radio Merseyside and being forced to sit
through Brian Jakes’ interminable monologues about running away to sea will have
wondered if there was even a sufficient gap
in the market for Liverpool to throw up yet
another folk act. But throw up it did and for
decades the Spinners were nigh on inescapable.
One of those “sing along, everybody!” crowd-frenzy-whipping-up type
of acts fond of knocking on nearby tables
and wooden pillars for percussive effect,
the Spinners were famed for their haunting
interpretations of traditional laments and
their self-penned landmark-referencing
anthem In My Liverpool Home, but they’re
perhaps better remembered nowadays for
winning legal action against their slightly
more epochal Stateside namesakes, and for
being fronted by a ‘Tom O’Connor one’.
The sort of thickly-sweatered
perma-winking acoustic outfit who would
be quite happy to show up anywhere if they
were asked nicely enough, the chat show
interlude was like a second home to them,
and Creamup has a particularly troubling
memory of seeing them on Harty singing a
song that apparently went: “Bogey bogey spit
in a cup, spit in a cup, spit in a cup, bogey
bogey spit in a cup, and wipe your nose on
a mop-stick”, while the audience had undue
hysterics in the background. Your guess is as
good as ours.
Pookiesnackenburger
A group of zany big hat-favouring busker
types with about eight million members basically how the Polyphonic Spree would
have ended up if they had raided a charity
shop and listened to Instant Sunshine rather
than Jimmy Webb - Pookiesnackenburger
were unique among their peers in that they
interspersed their wry musical pastiches
and parodies with full-on ensemble comedy
sketches.
Very much the sort whose act
revolved around the practice of putting humorous new lyrics to the ‘Just One Cornetto...’ song (which was itself, erm, humorous
new lyrics set to an existing song, a paradox
that is right this second probably causing
some 1920s-styled headgear to explode in a
shower of existential bewilderment), the big
problem with the size of their line-up was
that there was never really sufficient time to
get them on and off stage, and as such they
seemed to exist in some bizarre showbiz
limbo where they were forever being interviewed by local news reporters outside a
gig venue, invariably with all 1,600 of them
lined up along the fire escape.
Early Channel 4 needed all the
overcrowded stages it could get, though, and
as such they took every available opportunity to book the oddly monikered ones
(the name, apparently, being taken from the
trademark ‘patter’ of one of those gibberishspouting rock’n’roll era Jibberin’ Jackie
Jabberwock-style American DJs), and even
gave them their own short-lived music and
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comedy series at one point, which ran to the
somewhat odd total of five editions.
Pookiesnackenburger ceased trading some time in the late 1980s, but several
of their number resurfaced in the dustbinclattering Blue Peter-favoured Yes No
People, and in turn went on to create the hit
West End musical Stomp, thereby enjoying a
sort of latter-day post-modern equivalent of
their original variety show ubiquity.
Rondo Veneziano
The odd men (and women) out here, as they
were neither British nor a vocal group as
such, but they were so regularly sighted on
the same circuit that it would be churlish not
to mention them here.
Following the humans-pretending-to-be-scary-robots template set by
Kraftwerk and Gary Numan, this bunch
of classical musicians assembled by Italian
Jeff Wayne wannabe Gian Piero Reverbi,
cranked it up a notch and decided to go the
whole hog by actually dressing as blankfaced cello-playing automatons in powdered
wigs and regency togs. Confusingly, there
was another outfit on the chat show circuit
at the time doing much the same shtick but
with a ballroom dancing twist, and nobody
seemed to be quite sure how - if at all - the
two were related.
Although initially conceived as
an album-chart straddling behemoth fusing
classical influences and AOR, over here they
never quite managed to break beyond the
boundaries of variety guest slots, although
stardom of a different kind beckoned as
ITV engineers were wont to use the weird
animated video for their biggest number La Serenissima (space-suited alien observes
Rondo Veneziano on a monitor before abducting several landmarks and ancient ruins
with the help of a tractor beam) - whenever
there was an inconvenient three-minute gap
in the schedules and they didn’t have Robert
Plant’s Big Log or that equally weird Butterfly
Ball thing to hand.
The Barron Knights
Creamup feels the need to confess it was
actually only last year that we spotted the
pun in the name of this particular bunch of
comical troubadours. In fact, in our younger
days we genuinely believed that the Barron
Knights were so-called because they were
fronted by Keith Barron (c’mon you have to
admit that lead Knight Pete Langford does
look a bit like him). As you can imagine, we
kept expecting the troupe to appear on an
episode of Duty Free, perhaps as part of a
cunning ploy by David to keep Amy amused
while he went and had his way with Linda.
You can imagine it, can’t you: “Hey lads help
me out won’t you? I’m on a promise with
that Linda one!”
Anyway the Barron Knights were
actually formed in 1960 in Leighton Buzzard
and started off as a proper band. However,
they hit comedy pay dirt in 1964 with Call
Up the Groups - one of those comedy records
that attempts to court popularity by simply
mentioning as many ‘trendy’ things as possible. After that, they appointed themselves
the nation’s self-styled wry commentators
on any and all matters worthy of public
discussion. If they weren’t waxing lyrical
about Michael Jackson’s plastic surgery, then
you just knew they were preparing a fresh
insight on the subject of the Rubik’s Cube.
Most of their comic cuts were
accompanied by an irritating laughter track,
and over the years, the musical parody
became their stock-in-trade. If it wasn’t
a version of Air on a G String all through
which the Knights relentlessly coughed because “hey - it’s used in that cigar ad isn’t it?”
then it was the Knights’ take on Bohemian
Rhapsody; to whit: “Is this your real wife? /
She’s very fat you see / look at her corsets /
they’re filled to capacity”.
On the occasion when The BKs
could be arsed to actually write their own
tunes rather than ripping off somebody else,
they generally ended up with a dull alternating bassline chug-a-long. Not very inspiring,
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“G’dang g’dang dig-dig it! G’dang g’dang dig-dig it!”
but this style is most famously essayed on
the track that brought the Barron Knights
to our attention in the first place, namely
Get Down Shep - in itself not half as sharp
a parody of the source material as you may
have thought back when you first heard it
and were three years old.
After selling over a million records
with A Taste of Aggro in 1978, the Barron
Knights sort of fell off our radar. Although
pretty rubbish, we reckon they could have
made a lot of sense out of that maelstrom
we now all to refer to as “the 1980s”. Given
Creamup’s schoolmate, Bobby Wallace, was
able to make a decent fist of devising amusing alternative lyrics for Joe Fagin’s Livin’
Alright in the back of his English exercise
book over the course of one morning’s lesson, then surely there remains raw materials
aplenty for the songsmiths of the calibre of
the Barron Knights.
And we never could work out
whether the video for that medley parodying Wired For Sound, I’m Only A Poor Little
Sparrow and ‘Day Trip to Bangor merely
guest-starred the Tiswas gang or had in
fact been some sort of ‘was item in the first
place.
The Flying Pickets
“G’dang g’dang dig-dig it! G’dang g’dang digdig it!” Yes it’s the opening bar of Smells Like
Teen Spirit from the Flying Pickets - surely
the quintessential “some bastard gave me a
shove” pop act. Notable for being perhaps
the ugliest band in Christendom (oh and
the fact they didn’t use any instruments),
the Pickets’ main crime was to perpetuate
the myth that “Mister Bass man” characters
are inherently funny, witness: camera pans
across troupe and settles on bass singer
just in time to capture the crucial “B’bom
bom bom” moment delivered with a look to
camera that is a hybrid of mad-eye stare and
mock seduction (preferably with a ‘I might
be mad, but I’m not really dangerous’ wink
thrown in just in time to accompany the last
“bom.”).
They reportedly started out on
the frontline of miner-supporting Thatcherbaiting protest pop alongside the Style
Council and Paolo Hewitt (whatever it is
that he does, exactly), but within a year or
so of their formation they were busily tastetesting Easter Eggs with Anne Diamond on
the TV-am sofa, and it was all thanks to one
particular single. The Flying Pickets first
ba-da-da-dah-ed their way into our hearts
back in 1983 with their plinky plonky cover
of the Yazoo hit Only You. Their success in
securing the Christmas number one slot was
seen by some as a victory for ‘real’ music in
an age when electronic instruments were
supposedly taking over. The irony of course
was that most of the Picks’ tracks sounded
like they had been recorded with judicious
use of the ‘chorus’ effect off of a high street
keyboard.
Lest we forget, the group consisted
of the scary chap with massive sideburns
who always seemed to be sniffing round
Margi “Give it some wellie” Clarke, the bald
bloke who wore eyeliner... and some other
people.
Today Creamup remembers them
best for appearing on Saturday Starship,
whereupon they were presented with a gold
disc for sales of the aforementioned Only
You. Their follow up single, When You’re
Young and in Love, featured not nearly
enough plaintive looks into the camera from
the bewhiskered Brian Hibbard and consequently peaked at a lowly number seven in
the charts. By the time they released their
gender busting reading of the Eurythmics’
Who’s That Girl, the general public had forgiven all those other bands with instruments
and the single stiffed.
Thenceforth Mr Hibbard tried
his hand at acting, his most notable roles
being a long stay in Coronation Street and,
of course, exclaiming, “What an unexpected
bonus - you’re the traveller in time they call
the Doctor,” in Doctor Who. An attempted
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comeback (which we are sure has since
been filed under ‘ill’ in the advisement
in-tray) saw the Flying Pickets hope to take
on grunge. The sad fact is that try as you
might you just can’t communicate a sense of
disenfranchisement, anger and rage via the
medium of a cappella.
The Grumbleweeds
Logic should dictate that Robin, Albert,
Carl, Maurice (who looked even more like
a Bee Gee than his namesake) and Graham
should have had no need for guest slots on
other people’s shows. After all, following a
shaky start in the 1960s when they had tried
their hand as hard core folk troubadours and
cut a reportedly demented psychedelic long
player (which we’d love to hear if anyone out
there can oblige), and hefting the Patrick
Troughton-troubling Gravitron across the
moon’s surface (it’s a long story...), they’d
been catapulted straight out of the club circuit into the Sort Of Big League, with their
insanely long-running Radio 2 show enjoying massive popularity for years on end, and
even spending several years as regular prime
time Saturday night fixtures.
However, behind all the comedy
songs, comedy patter, comedy Noel Edmonds impersonations, comedy gasmasks
and something about shouting “great flapping bosoms” (we hesitate to use the word
‘comedy’ there), lurked a nagging desire
to be taken seriously as serious musicians.
It clearly wasn’t enough for them that the
“woah woah we are the Grumbleweeds” was
enjoying permanent unshakeable residency
in the subconscious of an entire nation, and
in particular those sitting vital exams; they
yearned for Brit-award inviting acceptance
into the rock aristocracy. So whereas the
previously-mentioned theme song would
probably have dented the top 10 if released
as a single, they insisted on putting out
drippy ballads like A Woman’s Intuition that
went nowhere despite endless plugs on talk
shows where they also took to the sofa to
chat very meaningfully about their ‘new
direction’.
After the demise of their TV
series, of course, the guest slot world was
their oyster, and one of their most notable
engagements - for all the wrong reasons being Bobby Davro’s Rock With Laughter.
Don’t splash little Maurice-y!
The Black Abbots
If there’s a lesson to be learned from the
legacy of these performing troupes, it’s that
absolute democracy must be imposed at all
times and no one member should have a
greater level of ‘star quality’ than the others.
Consider the Black Abbots - Clive, Lenny,
Bobby and Russ - who originally formed
as a run-of-the-mill post-New Faces Paper
Lace-style pop group before realising that
inter-band wisecracks and comedy character
songs were their forte.
Their first big breaks were actually
in radio, giving DLT ample opportunity to
do that thing where he hid the fact that he
hadn’t prepared a link by pretending that a
sentence had broken down in laughter and
saying, “I can’t... I can’t go on, put another
record on! Ha ha ha!”, but television soon
beckoned and the smartly besuited Abbots
were a regular guest slot sight for several
years.
In time they graduated to a couple
of standalone headlining specials for ITV,
but that wasn’t enough for ambitious stickbeater Russ, who clearly wanted to turn
the whole situation on its head and have
other musical turns guesting on his show. A
supporting role on Freddie Starr’s Saturday
Madhouse turned into a starring role when
Starr did his customary bunk, and Russ sans Black Abbots - took the helm. Thus
began well over a decade’s worth of sketch
shows featuring CU Jimmy, Basildon Bond,
and unswerving devotion to the religiously
maintained formula of exchanging six lines
of comic dialogue with Les Dennis in Teddy
Boy costumes until Bella Emberg came in
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“TV can be awkward - it’s the mountains, see”
through the door, before Russ jacked it all
in to concentrate on a successful career as a
‘straight’ theatre actor.
The Black Abbots themselves are
in fact still going, although all mentions of
their errant drummer have seemingly been
airbrushed from their online biography.
Prog 72, 2 July 2006
“HAVE YOU MADE SURE
YOUR SET’S SET YET?”
The great Creamup tune-in
Cantabile
One Aled Jones was quite enough as it was.
The public tried to make this clear when attempts were made to foist his close contemporary and singer of a ridiculously posh rendition of Wham!’s Freedom on John Craven’s
Newsround, Paul Miles-Kingston, on them
as the next big choral thing, but the protests
fell on unheeding ears and before long there
came four of them in the one group. And
what’s more, they were equipped with a wry,
Stilgoesque line in humour, effectively the
missing link between the King’s Singers and
Instant Sunshine.
Although a successful theatre
career was theirs for the taking, their quickwitted repartee and willingness to ‘dress
down’ in casual chunky pullovers also endeared them to many a television producer,
and for a time they were regularly on hand
to enliven the occasional edition of Going
Live with a quick burst of One Man Went
to Mow translated into Swahili, or their
uniquely ‘wacky’ rendition of The Twelve
Days of Christmas (“Four calling OI!, Three
French CLUCK!” etc).
Sadly they haven’t been seen on
the small screen very much for quite some
time now, but according to their website
they have spent the intervening years serenading Michael Douglas, greeting the new
millennium in a crater, and undressing for
Tim Rice and Cliff Richard. We dearly hope
that this is just another example of their
trademark humour at work.
Digital switchover is coming, and Creamup
is highly excited about it, not just because
it’ll mean free access to repeats of Minder
on Men & Motors for all. Because, if past
broadcasting shake-ups are anything to go
by, the process of switching off our analogue transmitters and explaining how to
go digital will mean an endless stream of
public information films, BBC hotlines, and
pamphlets through the nation’s letterboxes,
all things that Creamup really loves.
Of course, we’ve been here before.
For instance, the launch of BBC Wales in
1964 brought forth an animated symposium
on the intricate relationship between television signals and topography (“TV can be
awkward - it’s the mountains, see”) by a man
with a television aerial sticking out of his hat
(“In the south, some of you will be needing
me, your local TV man. Your set will need
a simple adjustment to receive the new programme, or perhaps a new tuning coil - only
costs a few shillings!”).
So to get in the mood for the great
digital tune-in, Creamup looks back at five
big telly and radio switches of the past. Find
a spare button, adjust your aerial and affix
your sticker now...
BBC Radio, 1978
Due to a reallocation of international
medium wave frequencies, in November
1978 the BBC had to reorganise its radio
transmissions, prompting a frenzy of activity
to alert listeners to the big change.
Radio 1 had a promotional song
(“Woke up one morning turned my radio
on/Didn’t know where DLT or Simon
had gone/Later tried for Paul, Tony, Kid
and John/Was there no one left to put the
records on?”) by, ahem, ‘Jock Swan and the
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Metres’, aka Showaddywaddy, while Andy
Peebles motored from Scotland to London
“in the Radio 1 Range Rover”. Over on
Radio 2, David Hamilton and Pete Murray
sang a ditty about retuning to the tune of
Hello Muddah, and Frank Muir looked in
“with a vital announcement”.
But the most brilliant part of the
preliminaries was a sequence in which a
Radio 3 smoothie announcer linked up
with Radio 1, to help the classical network’s
listeners move from 1215kHz (“Heh, the
date of Magna Carta!”) and locate its new
frequency, which was being vacated by
Wonderful 247. It entailed Tony Blackburn’s
show briefly being simulcast on Radio 3,
with Tone booming out the instructions
(“Hello Radio 3! This is Radio 1 here! This is
the place to put your sticker for Radio 3!”)
over blaring disco music (“We’re going to be
on 275 and 285 if you’d like to join us!”).
If that wasn’t enough, those
inimitable King’s Singers crooned their way
through a canticle explaining the changes
(“From the 23 November 1978/A new international frequency agreement comes into
effect/And many of the frequencies used
for the BBC will be chang-ed at that time”),
which included a joke about The Third Programme being renamed Wonderful Radio 3.
It wasn’t, alas, but that didn’t stop
announcer Cormac Rigby opening the station in whimsical style on the big day (“The
lovely princess Radio 3 has been asleep
awaiting the prince who will come through
the thickets of frequencies and wavelengths.
And now the lilac fairy has done her stuff
and guided you through all the obstacles
put in your way by the wicked Albanian
karabos”).
Even Radio 4, which moved to
Long Wave, joined in the fun, hailing the
might of its new international-strength
transmitter (“Welcome, gentlemen sailing
the high seas!”). And everybody got a sheet
of stickers through their letterbox to stick on
their wireless to mark the new frequency of
their favourite station, ensuring you never
missed Waggoners Walk again.
Channel 4, 1982
Britain’s fourth television network promised
to be a radical, free- thinking, intellectual
kind of channel, so naturally they recruited
some radical, free-thinking intellectuals to
publicise it. Like Liza Goddard, Adam Faith
and Lance Percival, for instance.
For some reason, the trailers
broadcast in the run-up to the launch of
Channel 4 in November 1982 featured the
sort of personality unlikely to be appearing
on The Friday Alternative or Union World
at any point. “D’you know,” pondered Goddard, “I’ve often wondered why the TV had
all those spare buttons,” before Percy Lancival chimed in with, “’Course, number four
was spare ‘till we tuned it in.” It all seemed
slightly incongruous for a channel where
Ted Moult represented the acme of showbiz
glitter.
“Actually,” purred Fenella Fielding,
“this awfully nice TV man did ours for us.”
And Petula Clark let us know about the “sort
of sneak previews of what’s coming” being
transmitted on C4’s frequencies during the
day. Oh look, Peter Firth. On a horse. Again.
Best of all, as Alan Freeman marvelled,
“One of the good things aboud id is all the
music they play over the test card.” And
what more incentive did we need to tune in
that mysterious IBA2 button than that? “For
most of the country, it all starts on the 2nd
of November ... all right?”
If viewers were confused, at least
they could always turn to the TV Times,
which printed some helpful information
(“The picture you receive should be just as
good as the pictures you get now from ITV
and BBC programmes”) and advice (“If you
are in any doubt, get in touch with the shop
where you bought your set, an aerial erector
or your rental company”).
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“Meanwhile, a miniaturised Derek Jameson appeared in a TV campaign”
Radio 1 changes wavelengths, 1989
It’s December 1989 and Radio 1 has been
forced to shift up the FM dial in London
from 104.8 to 98.8. And, naturally, there is
only one man to act as master of ceremonies
for an occasion of such magnitude. Fresh
from circumnavigating the globe, Lord
Simon of Bates, for it is he, has commandeered the foyer of Broadcasting House
for this auspicious event, enabling him to
shamelessly grovel to Marmaduke Hussey
(“Excuse me for a second, audience, there
may be nine million of you out there but the
guv’nor’s arrived”) and fruitlessly attempt to
get the BBC chairman to throw the switch
(Hussey: “I’m the most unmechanical man
in the whole of the BBC!” Bates: “Hahahahahahahaha!”).
In between blasting out Rock Aid
Armenia, another of those charity records
he organised on a fortnightly basis, Bates
cranked up the melodrama (“We have liderally 35 seconds to go”) and prattled endlessly
about how “15 million” people would now
be able to hear The Golden Hour in glorious
stereo. Remarkably, the occasion did not
involve Concorde or the Red Arrows, but
for all its faults, Old Testament R1 still knew
how to do this sort of thing properly, ie nonstop bombastic jingles (“One million watts
of music power!”), Mark Goodier shouting
(“Standby all systems!”) over The Eve of the
War ‘89, and Phillip Schofield traversing the
Home Counties meeting his people.
Radio 2 moves to FM, 1990
In 1990, Radio 2 had to surrender its medium wave frequencies to make way for Radio 5, prompting the Beeb to explain to the
Light Programme’s legion of David Jacobs
devotees what was happening through a
series of trailers (“If you’re wondering where
all your regular Radio 2 programmes and
pals have gone to, well, they’re all over on
the FM waveband, where it’s business as
usual”) and special 30-minute phone-ins.
Half an hour after their normal
show had finished, Ken, Gloria or JY would
return on medium wave only, accompanied
by an avuncular BBC engineer who would
field enquiries from listeners. But there were
only ever two helpful responses: a) “Retune
to 88-91 FM - that’s at the very left of the
dial. It might be marked VHF or U.” or b)
“Oh dear, I’m afraid you’re going to need to
buy a new radio.”
So confusing were the changes to
listeners, many of them fearing an imminent
dearth of Hubert Gregg Says Thanks For The
Memories, that a special announcement
had be broadcast, sternly declaring, “Our
helpline has been receiving many calls from
listeners who think they’re already listening
to FM. However, if you can hear me now,
you’re tuned to medium wave, I promise
you.”
Meanwhile, a miniaturised Derek
Jameson appeared in a TV campaign, striding across a giant breakfast table and tuning
in an oversized Make It Count-style wireless, and also recorded a series of trailers
broadcast over Radio 1’s FM output (“What’s
all this racket? If you’re looking for Radio 2,
it’s on 88-91!”) for those desperately tuning
around in search of Del’s plain-speaking patter.
Channel 5, 1997
Everybody remembers the moment they
first stumbled across those colour bars
heralding the imminent launch of Britain’s
fifth terrestrial network - Creamup was trying to tune in its telly to BBC Wales to watch
Chesterfield vs Wrexham - usually through a
snowstorm of interference.
Channel 5 had been forced to
recruit an army of “retuners” who travelled
the length and breadth of the land fiddling
with our video recorders and any other
equipment suffering interference from the
new transmissions, in a campaign dubbed
a “burglar’s charter” by Greg Dyke. On
their arrival at TV Cream Towers, they gave
us a filter which bore the original logo for
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Channel 5 - with the ‘5’ made up of lines,
you know, like the logo for Channel 5 Video.
We’ve still got it somewhere.
For the first weeks, that test card
was accompanied by a recorded announcement (“In the meantime, we need your help.
We’d like you to play any video, or watch any
cable or satellite channel before eight o’clock
tonight. If your picture isn’t the same as
normal, call us free”).
But later the colour bars were
replaced by a tantalising promotional
sequence (“Give me... the facts!”) featuring
the forthcoming highlights, such as Kirsty
Young (“the news happens out on the street,
I mean, that’s the whole point”), Dominik
Diamond playing Scalextric, and Jack Docherty (“He’s set to make a splash in ‘97!”),
all leading up to that exciting moment at six
o’clock on Easter Sunday, when the Spice
Girls (“Take it from us, it’s girl power/Take it
from us, it’s the power of 5!”) smashed down
the test card.
Prog 72, 2 July 2006
THE SMELL OF A 2AM
OMNIBUS REPEAT
ITV’s all-time scheduling blunders
It’s a given that fiftysomethings, sooner or
later, as much as they try to hide it, start to
show their age. But at least most give the appearance of trying to grow old gracefully.
Such a compliment cannot be
extended to ITV. Once the most watched
channel in the land, since turning 50 last
year the network seems to have almost literally fallen to pieces. It’s as if ITV has skipped
middle age entirely and opted straight for an
addled, antiquated existence in a pebbledash
retirement bungalow.
It forgets where to put things. It’s
constantly changing its mind. It frequently
has trouble remembering what to do and
when. And it develops demented new obsessions with alarming frequency only to dump
them with even greater gusto.
Take what to put on at teatime.
You think it’d be simple: Children’s programmes until round about 5pm, then a
light quiz or some topical chat before the
main evening news. Instead, since Christmas what we’ve had is scheduling by tombola: you never know what you’re going to
get each time, but it’s usually a letdown and
invariably covered in sawdust.
All of which is the perfect excuse
for Creamup to conduct an avuncular
autopsy into the corpulent chaos that comprises ITV’s 10 most transparent scheduling
blunders. With a little help, that is, from
those two enduring barometers of popular
taste: Greg Dyke’s mum and Michael Grade’s
nose.
1) Survivor (2001/2)
It really took a bloody age for ITV to work
out the right way to do reality television,
screwing up not just the first but, even more
spectacularly, the second series of that supposed game show of game shows, Survivor.
The first one was just all over the place,
boasting pointless John Leslie interviews
with losing contestants nobody cared about
at 8.30pm and challenges which involved
people standing on a log for 15 minutes. The
second, though, was flung out at 9.45pm
on Wednesdays after Champions League
matches, followed by the news, and then the
interview with the evictee at 11.05pm. But
there was also Survivor Raw on ITV2 both
in the gaps between the two shows for 20
minutes, and also again at 11.35pm - for 90
minutes! Which all meant that if you liked
Survivor, you were expected to sit through
over three consecutive hours of it until gone
1am... and that was it for the rest of the
week. So while the big problem with the first
series was that it was on too often, for the
second ITV seemed so nervous it just put
everything on in one go. Why, you wonder,
make the blasted show at all. Oh yeah, because every other channel was doing one.
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“Aka, News at When?”
Greg Dyke’s mum says: “I could do that log
thing”
Michael Grade’s nose sniffs: 2/10 - “When I
hear the word ‘reality’ I reach for my gun”
2) The A-Team/Game For A Laugh (1985)
Aka, What Not To Run On A Sunday
Evening. Hysterical shoot-outs, hammy
catchphrases and over-the-top characters
leaping about do not make for an agreeable
pre-school night. The same goes for The ATeam. Both shows, however, were rolled out
on Sundays for a time during the mid-1980s
by an ITV curiously indifferent to the conventions of telly law: that Sunday evenings
should be reserved for competent if not
particularly memorable, easy-on-the-ear
entertainment. Neither programme, predictably, stirred up enough of a fuss to have vicars worrying about empty pews at evensong.
The only person who was really pissed off,
it seems, was Beadle, incensed that such
scheduling roulette was “fucking killing the
golden goose”, though in retrospect the hiring of Martin P Daniels and Rustie Lee may
have had something of a part to play.
Greg Dyke’s mum says: “When’s Tenko
coming back?”
Michael Grade’s nose sniffs: 3/10 - the
advancing whiff of Debbie Rix
3) The Premiership (2001)
It’s the start of the new football season, ITV
have decided to show the highlights when
the nation’s washing the pots, and it’s over
to Lord Lynam for some suitably apposite
words to sum up the occasion. “It’s my business doing pleasure with you.” Come again?
Such was the stuff that, along with expensively irrelevant clutter like a Tactics Truck,
the Prozone and digs at Ally McCoist’s
dresswear, was supposed to “revolutionise” the whole notion of Saturday evening
television. Except The Premiership rather
spectacularly rustled up too little football
to please the avid fan and too much for the
casual viewer, while pissing off what seemed
to be about 30 million fans of Blind Date.
Having moaned about the way Match of the
Day was on too late, Des tucked into the
largest helping of humble pie going when,
a couple of months later, The Premiership
ended up in the arse-end of beyond and was
soon running well past midnight.
Greg Dyke’s mum says: “Where’s Cilla?”
Michael Grade’s nose sniffs: 0/10 - a stinker
from the first whistle
4) News at 10 (1999)
Aka, News at When? As soon as ITV started
to meddle with one of their most well
known brands, it was almost a national sport
waiting for all the pre-makeover mithering and doom-laden declamations to come
woefully true. Sure enough, the minute the
regulators gave permission to shunt it from
its 10pm playground, News at 10 became a
joke. It was first kicked into the long grass
of 11pm, in theory to make way for longer
drama and late night entertainment, but
none of this actually showed up, rendering
the entire upheaval irrelevant - much like
how the programme had, by now, become.
So then it was moved back to 10pm - but
only for three nights a week. And not the
same nights each week. And not, given ITV’s
legendary habit for running late, even 10pm.
So then it was moved to 10.30pm in a ‘fixed’
slot which, with dictionary-defying alacrity,
continues to arrive on air at 10.40pm,
10.45pm, or even not at all.
Greg Dyke’s mum says: “Bring back Reggie”
Michael Grade’s nose sniffs: 1/10 - you
don’t mess with a winner
5) Shelley (1979)
Sporting the greatest whistling theme tune
ever and textbook watch-while-we-drawthem titles, the escapades of the titular
slugabed and PhD graduate fell afoul of no
less a beast than the Sun newspaper - not
for being amoral or any of that business,
but for being shuttled back after the News
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The Burst of Creamup
at Ten midway through the first series as if
ITV didn’t know what to make of it. This,
despite several million knowing full well
what to make of it, and enjoying it. Meanwhile whole aeroplane hangars have had to
be built to accommodate comedies ITV has
“left on the shelf ” down the years, including
series two of Shane which has been ready
to screen for months and months and still
hasn’t shown up; series two of The Sketch
Show which was shoved away for a year, the
reason being ITV didn’t want to stick anything long- running in the 10.30pm slot because they knew the Gulf War was coming;
and High Stakes, which had a full second
series filmed in 2002 which still hasn’t been
shown. Although that should never have
even got a first series, especially at 10pm, as
it was the crappiest, most middle class Radio
4-style sitcom ever. But there again, this is
the channel that a) gives airtime to Melvyn
Bragg saying things like “comedy works
better post-watershed”, as if to explain away
all of the above, and b) just gives airtime to
Melvyn Bragg.
Greg Dyke’s mum says: “I’m waiting for the
funnies”
Michael Grade’s nose sniffs: 3/10 - collapsing parasols are only amusing at 7.30pm
6) Night and Day (2001)
Or rather, Night Anday, as the opening titles
would have you believe, but which actually
turned out to be the least self-conscious
aspect to this somewhat deranged predinner divertissement. A 240-part soap
“but not a soap”, and hailing once more
from ITV’s latest annus horribilis (the latest
since the last one), Night and Day launched
in the Home and Away berth along with a
primetime version of, erm, the very same
episode entitled Night and Day: The Remix.
Neither made much sense in their respective
slots, or indeed any slot, and within weeks
the former was axed and the latter shunted
to 11pm, then 11.30pm, then 12am, then
12.30am and finally - hooray! - 1.15am,
where it was still going out three years later,
though that was probably because nobody at
ITV had noticed.
Greg Dyke’s mum says: “Theme tune by
Kylie? I want the real thing!”
Michael Grade’s nose sniffs: 2/10 - too
strong for a teatime tonic, too weak for a
bedtime nightcap
7) Monarchy: The Nation Decides (1997)
This was ITV’s big idea for the future of current affairs television: book the National Exhibition Centre in Birmingham and cram it
with 3,000 frenzied ultra-partisan members
of the public who’ve each got coloured voting cards to hold up like on Ready, Steady,
Cook, throw in a huge panel of mouthy
experts chaired by Roger Cook, play in
vox pops from the likes of Wendy Richard,
Lesley Joseph and Henry Cooper, and make
the whole thing almost three hours long
and completely live. A horrendous piece
of scheduling that made one night feel like
one century, Monarchy: The Nation Decides
purported to settle the future of the crown
once and for all but instead offered up
Trevor McDonald saying “you’re watching
the world’s biggest live current affairs event”
every 10 minutes, John Stapleton quizzing
self-dubbed “international businessman”
Peter Stringfellow, and Frederick Forsyth in
a velvet jacket yapping at everyone to “shut
up” in between referring to other panellists
as “rats” and jabbing his pencil at the crowd
bawling that the royals “keep you in jobs”.
After having gobbled up the entire evening’s
viewing, 66 percent of viewers voted to keep
the monarchy, but by that point all anyone
was interested in was who was going to
throw the first punch.
Greg Dyke’s mum says: “I want ‘red tomatoes’ to win”
Michael Grade’s nose sniffs: 2/10 - did
Bruce’s Big Night fail for nothing?
8) Morecambe & Wise (1978)
Famously remembering to read only one
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“Radio Rentals video recorders: can take 16 episodes of Crossroads... if you can!”
clause of their new ITV contract - the one
about the money - Eric’n’Ern washed up at
Thames only to be told that, thanks to the
company not owning the licence to broadcast at the weekend, there was no guarantee
they’d be going out on Christmas Day. This
indeed proved to be the case after 1980,
when there was no new Morecambe & Wise
on 25th December ever again. You’d really
think someone in the ITV Mafia would’ve
been able to get special dispensation from
LWT to get the pair their rightful festive slot
no matter what. Perhaps Brucie could’ve
played honest broker. There again, given
how most of what Morecambe and Wise
did when they half-inched it to Thames was
crap, perhaps it was just as well.
Greg Dyke’s mum says: “It’s not the same
without Richard Baker”
Michael Grade’s nose sniffs: 2/10 - they
would’ve got a better home at LWT, which
incidentally I was running at the time.
9) Crossroads (1964, 1969, 1972, 1979,
1987, 1988, 2001, 2002, 2003)
“Radio Rentals video recorders: can take 16
episodes of Crossroads... if you can!” One
thing you can always guarantee of ITV, and
probably always will, is that they sure know
how to fuck up a good brand. Throughout
its life as one of the nation’s most-watched
programmes, Crossroads was subject to a
deluge of demented scheduling decisions,
counter-decisions, reverse-decisions and,
above all, indecisive decisions. It was axed
because ITV couldn’t think of anything
better to do, which was precisely the same
reason why it was revived 13 years later,
and again why it was dumped then revived
13 months after that. Creamup’s been here
before, but it’s worth mentioning again the
way interest was whipped up by news that
the likes Jane Rossington and Doris Luke
would be making a return only for them
all to be cynically killed off mere weeks
after the relaunch, and how, come summer
2002, ITV had spent so long dithering over
whether to recommission it, all the cast’s
contracts had expired and they had to start
again from scratch. Which they did, marketing it as a “gay pantomime”, which is of
course precisely the kind of thing a nation of
housewives wants to see at teatime.
Greg Dyke’s mum says: “Why are those
two men kissing?”
Michael Grade’s nose sniffs: 1/10 - what is
this, Channel 4?
10) The (old) Paul O’Grady Show (2006)
This sums it all up really, which is convenient, it being the 10th of a top 10. To recap,
having finally got a new teatime hit on its
hands, ITV spent too long tinkering with
the contract to notice O’Grady nipping out
the back and scooting over to C4 to sign
on a very different dotted line. Not to be
outdone, ITV then decided it’d be a wheeze
to spoil the launch of C4’s The Paul O’Grady
Show by showing old episodes of ITV’s Paul
O’Grady Show, snappily titled The Old Paul
O’Grady. Naturally it was a flop and the
repeats were dropped after three days. What
could possibly fill the gap, the discussion
must have gone in ITV Towers, left by a
fresh, topical and lively show? Of course:
repeats of Rising Damp! Or, if we decide to
pull them after showing nearly all the series
bar six episodes (which duly happened),
repeats of Airline? Come to think of it, why
not bin off Children’s ITV from 4.30pm
(which duly happened) to give us even more
airtime to piss about with and randomly
fill with different programmes every week?
Then bring back Rising Damp after all
(which duly happened)? And do a remake
of The Price Is Right with the most annoying
presenter in the world (ditto)? And move
Loose Women to 5.30pm but make it so it’s
not all women and call it Loose at 5.30 (yes,
you guessed it)?
Greg Dyke’s mum says: *click*
Michael Grade’s nose sniffs: 0/10 - it
seemed like a shit idea at the time
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Prog 74, 28 January 2007
THE TVC15
Fifteen things we really loved about... ITN
1) The green typing hands at the start of
News at One
2) Leonard Parkin
3) The theme tune to News at 5.45
4) The cardboard graphics (‘CRIME’, ‘EURO
SOCCER’) behind the newsreader on News
at 5.45
5) The week’s job gains and losses on part
two of Friday night’s News at 10
6) The Tokyo bureau on the Channel Four
Daily
7) The rotating football that revealed ‘Canon
League Division 1’ on the football results
graphics
8) The rotating Christmas pudding that
revealed ‘Canon League Division 1’ on the
Christmas football results graphics
9) Alastair Burnett’s asides (“Played in a
mudbath”) while reading the football results
10) Endless tabloid obsessions over Anna
Ford/Selina Scott/Pamela Armstrong
11) Martyn Lewis in a jumper doing ‘And
Finally’ specials on Good Friday afternoon
12) The shot of the Embankment by night at
the end of Saturday night bulletins
13) Sandy Gall
14) Phil Roman doing news summaries on
ITV at 4am before Donahue
15) “Norman Rees, News at 10, Dagenham”
Prog 75, 25 February 2007
100 GREAT TV MOMENTS
#52: August 1983 - ITV pulls out the stops
for the launch of its new season
It was the kind of event TV Times would
have described as “star-encrusted”. To promote the start of its autumn season of programmes, ITV had rounded up every single
one of its big names for a publicity shoot in
that most glamorous of locations, Regent’s
Park. Well, almost everyone. Des O’Connor
couldn’t make it, so a life-size cardboard cutout was used instead, perhaps inspired by
the time the BBC had to promote The Five
Doctors with a waxwork dummy standing
in for Tom Baker. Only because it was ITV,
something cheaper had to be got instead.
So it was that on 21st August
1983, north London provincial park goers
would have been struck by a veritable caucus
of celebrities clustered in rows on a flight of
stone steps. Along the back were arranged
what might be called the elder statesman
of the third channel: Max Bygraves (currently floundering on Family Fortunes); Eric
Morecambe (just floundering); Ted Rogers
(midway through a 1000-episode run of 3-21); Glynn Houston (fulfilling the bluff cove
quota in Keep it in the Family); Matthew
Kelly (be-jumpered, naturally) and Jeremy
Beadle, obscured but for his beard (which
was really all that mattered).
In front of them loitered what
might be called the bland hands: Lionel Blair
(shirt unbuttoned to the navel); Ian Krankie
(looking uneasily like Lionel Blair); Robert
Gillespie (they were really pushing Keep it in
the Family this year); Henry Kelly (dapper as
ever), Sarah Kennedy (dopey as ever) and,
exuding the most charisma of the whole
bunch, that cardboard Des.
Finally down the front were the
short-arses: Wee Jimmy Krankie (them
upstairs clearly considered Saturday teatime
toss The Krankies Klub a big deal) Ernie
Wise (jovially giving the camera a thumbs
up) and, in lieu of Messrs Sinden and
Davies, the dog from Never the Twain. All in
all a fearsome cabal, clubbing together like
they had something in common and were
the best of friends. Presumably Parky was
too much of a snob to attend. And Aspel was
too busy. While Brucie was meeting them all
for a drink in the bar afterwards.
FACTS AMAZING: Max Bygraves recorded 10
albums called Singalongamax
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“The work to rule is over!”
Colin’s crib sheet: The largest concentration
of mature elm trees remaining in Britain is
found in Brighton, where 15,000 still stand.
Ridge’s recommendations: Stone me! A
tree-eating fungus? That would be disastrous
if it got loose on board an aeroplane... made
of wood. Damn these so-called powers-thatbe!
Prog 77, 29 April 2007
WATCH DOOM WATCH!
Dr John Ridge with the 10 best national
crises ever...
Hullo darlings! I’m John Ridge, from the
government’s Department of Observation
and Measurement of Scientific Work. Got a
light? Hmm? Well, no matter... I’ve tasked
Colin with a bit of computer work to see
if the cantankerous old croak can’t come
up with a list of the UK’s 10 best national
crises - what with this month being the 25th
anniversary of the Falklands conflict, and 21
years since Chernobyl. Stone me! Where’s
the time gone, eh? So, let’s have a look at
what the old dear’s come up with...
Dutch elm disease (1973)
Don’t die of ignorance: “Where is beetles,
banned?” screamed - well - no one, really, as
the UK embarked on a quest to stamp out
the pesky elm bark beetle. Originally native
to Asia, the critter had been accidentally
introduced to Europe where, in the 1920s,
it became infamous for spreading a fungal
disease among the elm trees of Holland. Yes,
its bark was worse than its bite! Cut to 1967,
and there was a right old flap when a new,
far more virulent strain of the tree-eating
gunk arrived in Britain courtesy of a shipment of Rock Elm logs from North America.
Stay alert!: By the early 1970s, 30 million
trees were under siege, and the Forestry
Commission rarely off Nationwide - particularly in 1973, when the nearest elm to
Buckingham Palace was afforded special
treatment to protect it from the onslaught.
That was also the year Animal Magic sequenced a film on the disease after an item
about blue footed boobies from Ascension
Island (honestly, it says here: “Len Hill in
studio talks to Johnny about boobies”).
Meanwhile, big scary posters of big scary
beetles festooned woodland walks, which
is very well... but what were we supposed to
do? Batter them with sauce pans?
The three-day week (1974)
Don’t die of ignorance: Lord Bob of Monkhouse might have proclaimed, “The work to
rule is over!” in 1970, but - alas - the trade
unions weren’t done yet. In 1973, high rates
of inflation were crippling the British economy, prompting Ted Heath to cap pay rises...
and the National Union of Mineworkers got
annoyed. With shop stewards up in arms,
they instigated a work to rule policy that
depleted Britain’s coal stocks. Throw in the
1973 oil crisis, and Teddy bleated, “State of
Emergency!” before introducing the “ThreeDay Work Order”, which came into force at
midnight on 31 December, 1973. One failed
re-election bid later, and with Ted out and
Harold in (but without a significant majority), the lights came back on on 8 March,
1974.
Stay alert!: “It’ll be a shock to the workforce,” says one toff to another as they gaze
at a poster announcing the arrival of the
three-day week. “They only work two days
a week!” What we needed now - after a bath
with the family and just before the 10.30pm
TV closedown, of course - was a damn good
PIF. “Industry needs power. So do hospitals.
So do essential services. At home you could
get by with less. So switch off some power,
now.”
Colin’s crib sheet: Still in crisis, by December 1975, unemployment figures in the UK
were the worst since records began in 1948.
But our miners were well paid.
Ridge’s recommendations: Fossil fuels?!
Pah! The only sustainable fossils seem to be
that shower running Whitehall!
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The Burst of Creamup
Save it! (1975)
Don’t die of ignorance: An all-in-one and
rather nebulous campaign to - well - just
do less is always going to win points with
Creamup... even if it is clearly a close cousin
of the three-day week’s Switch Something
Off initiative. Mr Eric Varley is the one to
thank, with the Energy Secretary announcing he aimed to cut Britain’s power consumption by three to four percent in 1975,
mainly through exhorting people to ‘Save
it!’ Alas, voluntary savings only ultimately
accounted for a two percent reduction.
Come 1977, with fuel consumption still an
issue, there was only one option left. They
launched another ‘Save it’ campaign...
Stay alert!: It was all very well Delia showing us how to cook everything in one pot,
but, really, something like this was absolutely the business of Nationwide. On April
1 1975, the show tackled the issue in song.
Details are scant, but we’re guessing Richard
Stilgoe was on duty: “The energy secretary
announced to-day/A spate of new cuts,
coming our way/So thanks to Mr Varely/It’s
lights off and up to bed ear-ly!” or something.
Colin’s crib sheet: Varley hated Neil Kinnock, and resigned from the Labour Party
shortly after his enemy became leader. In
the event, he was appointed Chairman of
Coalite PLC, a private coalmining company.
Ridge’s recommendations: Stewth! More of
the same! Hold the fort, Col, I’m off to stock
up me garage with paint pots...
The drought (1976)
Don’t die of ignorance: Rain, like everything else in the mid-’70s, was in short
supply. Between October ‘75 and August ‘76
the total rainfall at Kew in London was 43
percent of the long-term average. Absence
of wet stuff in the air meant stocks on the
ground started going down, and when a
scorching heatwave decided to show up,
there was hell to pay.
Stay alert!: The end of June was when the
trouble really began, as for 14 consecutive
days the temperature topped 32 degrees
in southern England. In parts of the West
Country it declined to rain for 45 days.
Meanwhile 15-metre high walls of flame
roamed through forests, and a battery of
Green Goddesses were called out to help
keep a lethargic nation trim and tidy. And to
fight petulant fires. BBC weathermen, daily
bearers of baking bulletins, were nonetheless refused permission to take off their
ties. British Rail stopped washing its trains.
Standpipes were introduced. The National
Water Council launched a campaign urging,
“Think before you turn the tap on”. Finally
a Minister of Drought was appointed, in the
shape of Denis Howell... and the titular meteorological monstrosity promptly vanished.
Colin’s crib sheet: Not even Kenneth Williams’s diary was immune: “To the theatre through sweltering streets, everyone
standing outside pubs holding beers in their
hands. In Titchfield Street they shouted
‘Don’t go in tonight, Kenny! There’ll be no
bugger there!’ I smiled sickly.”
Ridge’s recommendations: Water palaver,
eh?
Aids (1986)
Don’t die of ignorance: Well, yes. Acquired
immune deficiency syndrome (or acquired
immunodeficiency syndrome - whichever),
is a collection of symptoms and infections resulting from the specific damage to
the immune system caused by the human
immunodeficiency virus (HIV). And, apparently it first infected humans after David
Attenborough was kissing and a-cuddling
with those monkeys.
Stay alert!: And so it all kicked off in 1986,
with a special Cabinet committee set up to
co-ordinate Government action against the
growing crisis, helmed - hooray - by Willie
Whitelaw. Meanwhile the church weighed
in with ‘Aids - Some Guidelines for Pastoral
Care’, while leaflets were sent to 23 million
homes, and warnings attached to icebergs
130
“This episode is set in 1939 and features the wearing of gas masks”
Man, earning himself (even greater) immortality as the inspiration for the “hang the
DJ” refrain in Panic. And then? Step forward
Frank Bough, who reassuringly helmed BBC
TV discussion show After Chernobyl, Our
Nuclear Future on 27 May. The way ahead
was now clear for sixth-formers to make
‘glowing sheep’ gags...
Colin’s crib sheet: Moscow radio and television waited for almost four days after the
explosion - or to be precise 92 hours and
seven minutes - before confirming something was up.
Ridge’s recommendations: The ruddy nuclear power race! If only Quist was alive now
to see how his part in it all has played out.
The old bastard would turn in his grave!
plus John Hurt glared out of TV and cinema
screens. Mr Fred Brewster strapped on his
wartime condom, Geronimo, while Mike
Smith sheathed a banana. The Geordies of
Auf Wiedersehen, Pet knocked out a sketch
with Dennis and Oz preparing to give a talk
to migrant labourers on the importance of
using condoms, Nick Berry advised youngsters: “Condom - don’t be afraid of it”, and
Rik Mayall contributed a pre-recorded bit
to the discussion show First Aids, resting a
johnny on his groin.
Colin’s crib sheet: Mr Michael Meacher,
opposition health spokesman at the time,
denounced the Government’s “footling and
paltry” spending on Aids, saying that some
£50 to £100 million should be set aside for
this purpose.
Ridge’s recommendations: Stone me, Col!
So it’s not just queers who can get it, you
say?
Chernobyl (1986)
Don’t die of ignorance: Why should you
always wear pants in Russia? Because
otherwise Chernobyl fall-out! The first we
knew of it was on 28 April 1986, when Roger
Wallis reported from Stockholm on Radio
4 about the discovery of raised radiation
levels by scientists in Sweden and Finland.
The USSR was suspected as the origin of the
leak, but there were no firm reports yet...
An explosion at the Chernobyl Nuclear
Power Plant had resulted in the radioactive
contamination of the surrounding area, and
created a plume of radioactive fallout which
thoughtfully drifted over parts of the Western Soviet Union, Eastern Europe, Western
Europe, Northern Europe and Eastern
North America. In the UK, fathers gathered
their families together over the Frosties to
tell them we were all fucked.
Stay alert!: Thankfully, two of Britain’s most
upright figures were on hand to lead us
through the nuclear winter. First up, Steve
Wright, who responded to a Radio 1 Newsbeat newsflash by playing Wham!’s I’m Your
The first Gulf War (1991)
Don’t die of ignorance: “Help Bush to see,
that the Iraqi folk are like you and me”. Five
days after Iraq invaded Kuwait (for cheekily
slanting their drilling works to nick oil from
Iraqi soil - what sort of flatmates they’d
make is something that terrifies us), the US
was flexing its muscles. Come the big push
in 1991, everyone was in on the action, and
Baghdad was pretty soon lit up like a festive
fern adorned with luminescent decorations.
We were at war! Again!
Stay alert!: We’ve always been fond of the
way the war cut across programming on
ITV when it kicked off, meaning middling
Kirk Douglas/Burt Lancaster potboiler
Tough Guys served as the UK’s intro to Desert Storm. It also meant the disaster caption
cards came out for The Bill, featuring Bob
Cryer in front of rolling clouds. See also the
Monty Python episode with the ‘Ypres 1914’
sketch being dropped by BBC2 and replaced
with the time-honoured One They Always
Show series one, episode three (“How to
recognise different types of trees from quite
a long way away”). Worse still, an episode
of Poirot started with an ITV caption and
a voice-over saying: “This episode is set in
1939 and features the wearing of gas masks”.
131
The Burst of Creamup
Thankfully, Peter Snow and his sandpit kept
us safe, while Radio 1 ordered a draconian
culling of its playlist (Massive Attack!)... or
maybe didn’t, depending on which way the
apocryphal wind is blowing.
Colin’s crib sheet: Reports that an Iraqi
government propaganda broadcaster
nicknamed ‘Baghdad Betty’ had warned
American soldiers: “Bart Simpson is making
love to your wife” were actually erroneous.
It had just been a joke cracked by Johnny
Carson on The Tonight Show.
Ridge’s recommendations: Yank me
mutton-chops! When will they get it into
their tiny, bureaucratic minds that blood
is thicker than oil?! I’m off back out to the
garage to stir me paint pots. Make with the
next disaster scenario would you, old fruit?
Wright and the Posse. When the pound fell
out of the ERM and there was nothing left in
the national penny jar, the Chancellor gave
up and went home to sing Non, je ne regrette
rien in the bath.
Colin’s crib sheet: In 1994 Lamont threatened to sue Denis Healey after the latter
starred in a credit card TV advert featuring a
Thresher’s shopfront.
Ridge’s recommendations: That Miss
Whiplash sounds smashing!
Black Wednesday (1992)
Don’t die of ignorance: Ah, the halcyon
days of the Ecu and hard currencies. The
early ‘90s found sterling fighting to stay
afloat in the European Exchange Rate
Mechanism. Thatcher had taken us in, pegging the value of the pound in your pocket
with that of the German mark. Now it was
the whiskery black-eyed Thresher’s-diddling
Norman Lamont fighting to stop us being
kicked out, as sterling began to be sold by
the industrial bucketload around the world
and a good old-fashioned run on the pound
began.
Stay alert!: Wednesday 16 September was
meltdown. Lamont spent billions trying
to buy up the sterling being binned off by
the currency markets. It didn’t help that
Downing Street was closed for repairs, it was
snowing, John Major had a cold and Lamont
was busy leasing the basement of one of
his flats to Miss Whiplash. Interest rates
were raised from 10 percent to 12 percent.
Then to 15 percent. Bankers across London
performed traditional scenes of sweaty
fat-faced shouting in front of the assembled
TV cameras. The likely long-term economic
consequences were discussed by Steve
The Millennium Bug (1999)
Don’t die of ignorance: As the clocks
rolled round to midnight on 31 December
1999, and the world - minus a few of those
stubborn ‘week starts on a Sunday’ types
- counted in the new millennium, it was
curtains for early laptops and ancient digital
watches with built-in Space Invaders as the
dreaded ‘counting chip’ opted to join the
ranks of non-celebrants. Many years ago, it
seems, a bunch of computer programmers
citing the need to save memory (although
sceptics suspect a desire to knock off early
for a swift half and a quick flick through the
latest issue of Amazing Stories) decided that
processors and subroutines should only go
up to 99 before heading straight back for
00. Which is all very well and good, except
that years tend to have four figures in them,
and if computers across the world started
assuming it was 1900 then trouble was sure
to follow.
Stay alert!: Although muttered phrases like
“too little too late” and “blackout or at best
brownout” abounded within the computer
industry, once it became apparent a seriously serious problem was on the horizon the
government really did pull out all the stops
in trying to locate and correct any Non-Y2K
Compliant infrastructures, urging private
business and domestic users to do likewise
with the aid of an eye-catching insectoid
silicon chip inside a ‘hazard’ triangle. Also
doing their bit were Teletext, who ran a daily
Millennium Bug update throughout 1999,
132
“We don’t have any petrol so please don’t ask”
papering over the fact that they had very
little real news and not even much speculation to cover by filling the gaps with ‘...and
finally’ type stories about talented goats
being chosen to open Exeter’s Millennium
celebrations and what have you. Meanwhile
Douglas Adams penned an advert to highlight that Apple users (who, let’s face it, do
not seem to need additional reasons to feel
smug) should not feel the effects of the bug,
as the company had thought ahead when it
came to the Y2K problem.
Colin’s crib sheet: There was a minor flap
over nuclear monitoring equipment in Japan, the US Naval Observatory experienced
some problems with their big scary clock
that keeps the country’s official time, and
the French meteorology agency’s webpage
showed the wrong year, but otherwise there
was very little disruption and especially not
in Britain, and so S Club 7 got to make their
appearance on Live and Kicking the following morning after all.
Ridge’s recommendations: These ruddy
thinking machines! Are we so reliant on
ticker-tape-spouting gizmos that we can no
longer live without them? Is this the brave
new world we were promised? Chicken
heads on monkeys?
The petrol blockade (2000)
Don’t die of ignorance: When the price of
crude oil rose significantly in early September 2000, the petrol companies responded
with a corresponding rise (or ‘hike’, as the
newspapers routinely had it) in their prices.
The only problem was that many saw this as
a ‘hike’ too far, and a large number of lorry
drivers opted to make their feelings known
by mounting ‘go slow’ convoys and blockading the entrances and exits of refineries,
literally cutting off the supply to the rest of
the nation. Hence lengthy queues of cars at
some garages, handwritten cardboard signs
saying, ‘We don’t have any petrol so please
don’t ask’ at others, and most commuters left
with little option but to, erm, hike to work
instead. Possibly the most mundane set of
causes on this list, but equally possibly also
the one that had the most direct effect on
the population.
Stay alert!: As matters were resolved before
it became a really serious problem, there
wasn’t much the hapless general public
could do or even be asked to do on this
occasion, and it was largely left to Jeremies
Vine, Bowen, Paxman and Clarkson to chew
over while posing wearily sarcastic-sounding questions to representatives of both parties. Although there was the odd whimsical
local news story about commuters finding
zany alternative modes of transport, and it’s
more than likely that The 11 O’Clock Show
had a good new sneering swipes at those
tight-fisted lefty truckers, but nobody was
left watching it by then so we can’t really say
for certain.
Colin’s crib sheet: Erm, um... there’s not
really that much to say about this one... although Tony Blair drew criticism for the fact
that when he drove back to London from
Newcastle to tackle the mounting chaos, he
did so in a fuel-guzzling Jaguar.
Ridge’s recommendations: Right, enough’s
enough! Col, what say we nip off to the
boozer and get thoroughly stoned, before
holding the world’s authorities to ransom as
we demand a better, crisis-free future? Meet
me at the Jag!... Er, did you see where I put
my phial of anthrax?
Prog 83, 4 November 2007
IF YOU’RE WATCHING,
DON’T WORRY, I DIDN’T
A special Creamup investigation into a
20-year meteorological mystery
October’s 20th anniversary of the ‘storm of
the century’, during which 18 people died
and millions of pounds worth of damage
was caused across the south east of England,
prompted the expected rash of retrospective
articles and documentaries. Attention of
course turned to one of the most iconic im-
133
The Burst of Creamup
ages of the storm - the weather forecast the
day before in which Michael Fish famously
dismissed any suggestion that a hurricane
was about to strike.
Or did he? The 20th anniversary
of the storm prompted the legendary weatherman to come out of retirement on a tour
to yes, promote his new book, but also to try
to set the record straight about what actually
happened on October 15th 1987.
“It is very irritating indeed,
because I had nothing to do with it whatsoever” he told the Telegraph, “But that’s
the press - never let facts get in the way of
a good story. The newspapers were told
quite categorically in 1987, then on the 10th
anniversary in 1997 and again now that the
remarks I made referred to Florida, and
were edited and taken out of context. Bill
Giles was the duty weatherman that night. I
wasn’t involved in the slightest.”
This however set Creamup wondering. Could it really be that the circumstances behind the most famously incorrect
weather forecast in living memory are not
what they seem? Could those constant
joking references to the famous hurricane
denials actually be a slight on the professionalism of a man who was in fact bang
on the money and whose comments have
in fact been taken out of context for the last
two decades? Well let’s take a look.
A lifelong fan of meteorology, Michael Fish joined the Met Office soon after
graduating from City University in London.
In 1974 he was selected to join the elite band
of TV weather forecasters, seconded from
the Met Office to front the BBC television
bulletins. He joined alongside Barbara
Edwards in a televisual changing of the
guard. Familiar faces Graham Parker and
Bert Foord had just been promoted to other
duties and by the time Jack Scott retired in
1983, Fish was the longest serving weatherman on TV. In the early part of his career he
was notorious for his dress sense - or rather
lack of it, one critic unkindly suggesting he
aimed to get all the colours of the rainbow
on-screen at once.
By October 1987, he had become
a venerable TV institution. Then, of course,
came the remark which would go on to
haunt him for the rest of his career: “Earlier
on today apparently a woman rang the BBC
and said she’d heard that there was a Hurricane on the way. Well if you’re watching,
don’t worry, there isn’t, but having said that
actually the weather will become very windy
but most of the strong winds incidentally
will be down over Spain and across into
France.”
The occasion of the bulletin is
not in doubt. Michael Fish was the duty
forecaster for the daytime bulletins on the
day in question, his famous forecast given
in front of the computer map following the
One O’Clock News that day. Maybe there was
an item during the bulletin about potential storms in Florida, but his insistence
that this was the storm he was referring to
rings a little hollow when he follows up the
famous “don’t worry, there isn’t” comment
by pointing to a depression hovering over
the Spanish coast, a storm system which he,
along with just about every other forecaster
in the Met Office, believed would pass far to
the south of the British isles. Indeed the final
BBC bulletin that evening came from Ian
McCaskill who warned of “a rather windy,
showery air flow with blustering bursts of
showery rain”.
The morning after the storm, news
bulletins focused on just why no warning had come from the forecasters. On the
following day’s One O’Clock News, Michael
Buerk gave an extensive grilling to a dishevelled and sweating McCaskill who repeated
the “storm swung north and took us by
surprise, we told everyone we could when
we knew but by then it was midnight” line.
Meanwhile the tabloid press had discovered
the Fish broadcast and were having a field
day.
‘Why Didn’t They Know?’
134
“Tip the weather? He couldn’t tip rubbish!”
screamed the headline in the Sun on Saturday 17 October, complete with a library
shot of Michael Fish and verbatim quotes
from the now notorious bulletin, the leading
article taking pains to pour the proverbial
‘bucket of shit’ over the TV presenter, the
newspaper finally switching its attention
in the days following to Met Office head
Professor John Houghton who was by then
facing calls from MPs to step down.
Meanwhile stand-up comedians
were quick to jump on the bandwagon.
“Tip the weather? He couldn’t tip rubbish!”
opined Jimmy Tarbuck on Live at the Palladium that weekend. “He said it’s going to
snow tomorrow, so get your bikinis out.”
By the end of the following week,
Fish was hitting back. He told the Sun: “We
don’t get hurricanes in this country. They
happen in Florida and places like that. I
predicted it was going to be very windy and
I was right. I am fed up with being made
the scapegoat for something I got right.
I’ve received hundreds of letters in the last
week and every single one of them has been
supportive and sympathetic - I’ve never
received a rude letter.”
Just how the lunchtime weather
forecast came to be in such wide circulation
is a curiosity in itself. “The tape of me is not
a BBC tape. I don’t know where it’s come
from. The BBC did not keep a copy in those
days. It’s from some private VHS and is not
complete,” complained Fish on his recent
publicity tour.
In a sense he is correct, weather
forecasts in 1987 were not routinely archived
and so no master copy should exist. Legend
has it than an enterprising engineer in the
BBC spotted the relevance of the bulletin
and quickly dubbed a VHS copy from the
logging tapes, this copy being quickly leaked
to the press. It remains in wide circulation to
this day:
“The BBC drama series Our
Friends In The North came to its conclusion
on Monday night, but mystery still sur-
rounds the origins of a shot in its penultimate episode - namely a clip of the famous
1987 weather forecast in which Michael Fish
predicted, erroneously, that a hurricane was
not on its way,” reported the Independent in
March 1996.
“The strange thing about the
clip is that in the early 1990s the BBC
weather centre banned its further release (...
executives there got fed up with its repeated
lampooning). Even newspapers who have
wanted to run a still photograph of Fish at
that moment have been refused.
“So how come OFITN got hold of
it? The weather centre is adamant they did
not give permission for their embarrassing
footage to be used. OFITN say they got it
from the Beeb’s news department but the
news department says it does not have it to
give. A spokeswoman in the press office confided that it looked to her like it was taken
from a home video... stranger and stranger.
Can anybody help?”
Michael Fish appeared to have
recovered his sense of humour about the
incident by the mid-’90s and had developed
a handy sideline of after dinner speaking,
making reference to his glossy book What I
Know About Hurricane Forecasting which of
course consists of blank pages.
But what of the “lady [who] called
the BBC” and did she ever exist? No, says
Fish, explaining that this was his way of
protecting a colleague whose friends were
concerned about the potential Florida hurricane and who had been making personal
calls in breach of the rules.
The press beg to differ. The Independent claimed to have tracked her down
(or at least her son) in 1997: “The woman
who made the call is Anita Hart, 46, from
north-west London. It was her son, Gaon,
who, while doing meteorology as part of a
geography degree, compiled the weather
forecast that prompted Mrs Hart’s call.
“In a ‘join-the-dots’ weather
prediction, of a kind he often made for his
135
The Burst of Creamup
parents, he had warned them not to go on
a planned caravan trip to Wales after seeing
what looked like a severe storm approaching. They reacted with disbelief, thinking
that anything so serious would surely have
been noted elsewhere, and decided to call
the BBC. Hence the fateful call, he says, to
Michael Fish.
“Mrs Hart is currently travelling
and could not comment yesterday. But Gaon
Hart, now a lawyer, said the pair were astonished to hear of Mr Fish’s denial.
“‘My mother actually spoke to Michael Fish because she called the BBC and
was accidentally put through to him. She
never mentioned anything about Florida,
and nor did he when the forecast went out,’
Mr Hart said.
“‘It’s coincidental indeed that he
happens to get a phone call about one hurricane and another in Florida on the same
day,’ he observed. ‘It just doesn’t add up.’ His
mother, he said, had even become an answer
to a Trivial Pursuit question, in an American
version of the game. All things considered,
he could find little explanation for why Mr
Fish had suddenly decided to speak out.
“‘I think he’s realised that it’s going
to haunt him for the rest of his days. I don’t
want to be nasty - perhaps he legitimately
doesn’t remember... But it’s on the record
and it did happen.’”
Fish even has a counter to this
though, in October this year telling the Telegraph: “One newspaper carried an interview
with the woman who ‘made’ the phone call
about the hurricane. The person was named
and photographed. The paper ran it as an
exclusive. Well, of course it was exclusive
because the person did not exist.” Although
his denial was slightly undermined the same
day by the Daily Mirror which carried a further interview with Mrs Hart herself where
she expressed surprise at people continually
insisting that she did not exist and restated
her “caravanning holiday in Wales” story.
“All I did was make a phone call”,
she told the paper. “For Michael Fish to say
I don’t exist and I never made the phone
call doesn’t make any sense, but I feel sorry
for him. It was just unfortunate. It was just
a flippant remark that he made but it will
haunt him for the rest of his life.”
So who do you believe? What is
certain is that the notoriety of the lunchtime
bulletin was not something that emerged
long after the fact, the scapegoat-loving
press having held it up as a talisman of forecasting incompetence within 24 hours of the
storm passing. Maybe Fish’s remarks were
indeed taken out of context, or maybe the
back pedalling is the sign of a man obsessed
with the need to erase the one unsightly
blemish on his lifetime of professionalism.
Creamup would suggest that
Michael Fish would be better off embracing
his brush with notoriety. From John ‘Tribe
of Toffs’ Kettley, Ian ‘HELLO!’ McCaskill
through to Suzanne ‘Eat! Eat some food!’
Charlton, it seems as if all his colleagues
from the 1980s have their own place in the
popular culture of the time. Better that he
is remembered for the one forecast he “got
wrong” than for a naff taste in ties or for the
extra marital activities that propelled him
back onto the front pages in the late 1990s.
And at least he’s not been labelled a right
mean old git and bully (which was the fate
that befell Bill Giles, apparently the Met Office’s very own Booger Benson).
In a nation that cares obsessively
about the weather, it is only right and proper
that the longest serving forecaster in television history (he retired in 2004 after 30 years
on screen) leaves behind an enduring legacy,
even if he himself remains the only one
convinced that on the day in question he did
absolutely nothing wrong.
136
“No grappling or groping”
as interesting.”).
15) “Renton Laidlaw is Golf Correspondent
of the London Standard”.
Prog 91, 23 November 2008
THE TVC 15
Fifteen things we loved about... Radio Times
1) John Craven’s Back Pages, except when
it banged on about some dull Wednesday
5.10pm drama.
2) Trackword (“Brainbox: 32 words. Average: 18”).
3) The ‘(e)’ symbol that denoted: “This
programme may be recorded for educational purposes”, because of course we didn’t
record anything else without the BBC’s
permission.
4) Stars of radio plays having to don some
unconvincing costumes for a photo.
5) The standard disclaimer: “All programmes
on BBCtv are in colour and, apart from
feature films originally made for the cinema,
shown for the first time unless stated.”
6) Endless promotion for Harry Carpenter’s
Videobook of Sport.
7) Extremely detailed credits (“Videotape
editor Mykowla Pawluk”).
8) The Yours Locally pages.
9) Woddis On...
10) The detailed Grandstand timetable,
especially in the 1980s when they just took
the piss (“Bob Wilson has a bigger postbag
than Madonna”).
11) Every picture to illustrate a film having a
‘film strip’ border.
12) EastEnders billings that were just a quote
from the episode (“They want to bring back
hanging for people like Den Watts...”).
13) Advance warning the price was going
up, plus assurance it was “Cleared by the
Price Commission”.
14) Comedy shows having fun writing their
own billings (“Tonight Spike Milligan will be
talking frankly to two ravishingly beautiful
women - a nude model, a stripper, a rugby
supporter and a bus conductress - about
their attitudes to the opposite sex in this
permissive society, and asking the question,
‘Does age matter?’ He will definitely not be
watching this programme which is not half
Prog 92, 21 December 2008
100 GREAT TV MOMENTS
#65: December 1967 - the Beatles try to
turn on the entire country
“I went down to see Paul Fox at the Beeb.
We talked and he seemed to want to show it,
such was our popularity and so on. He said,
‘Pretty strange film’, and I said, ‘Well, it is,
but you know, people like that’.”
And with that, £9,000 changed
hands and the main prime time slot in
BBC1’s Boxing Day schedule was filled.
Doing the huckstering was the by now selfappointed keeper of the Beatles flame, James
Paul McCartney. Having corralled the other
Fabs into spending most of the autumn filming and singing about a charabanc trip-cumfreak out-cum- seaside jolly-cum-vaudeville
piss-take, our man was not impressed with
the BBC’s parsimony. They were the Beatles,
for heaven’s sake! Bigger than the bloke who
got an entire national holiday the day before
their show was being transmitted!
“I said, ‘Well, that’s not an awful
lot. I think you’ll probably get more viewers
than will warrant that as a fee.’” But this was
1967, where, since devaluation, Love and
Peace were the main currency recognised by
the Bank of England, not pounds sterling.
“So I thought, well, sod it, that’s not really
the important thing.” Paul Fox did have
one request. Macca steeled himself: what
had the old bugalugs taken offence at? A
slightly loud guitar riff? Someone smoking a
cigarette? Nope. It was two old biddies kissing on a beach. “No grappling or groping,”
insisted Paul, but Fox considered it insulting
to old people, so out it came.
Boxing Day arrived, and Magical
Mystery Tour flopped. Paul later reasoned
people were expecting to see “comedy, a
few girls kicking their legs up”; not John
137
The Burst of Creamup
Lennon shovelling spaghetti with a spade
and George Harrison looking bozz-eyed on
a rug. “If they were not the Beatles, the BBC
would not have fallen for it,” boomed the
Daily Mirror. “Blatant rubbish,” screamed
the Daily Express. The Guardian were alone
in trumpeting its “freewheeling achievements…I Am The Walrus has a desperate
poetry by which we will be remembered,
just as an earlier desperation is remembered
through Chaplin.” By now Macca was more
concerned with his earlier desperation at his
other half Jane Asher not doing the dishes,
and instead got stuck into writing another
song the money from which would allow
him to buy Hampshire.
FACTS AMAZING: Magical Mystery Tour is
not available to buy on DVD because you
can see a lady’s knickers in it
Prog 71, 7 May 2006
THE TOP 10 ABANDONED
CREAMUP TOP 10s
10) Top 10 TV series spun-off from
advertising campaigns: Superted (Electricity Board), The Other ‘Alf (Campari),
Sixthirtysomething (the Philadelphia Girls),
The Munch Bunch (er, Munch Bunch)... er,
The Baldy Man...
9) Top 10 TV themes that will never be
turned into ringtones: Life on Earth, Near
and Far, any BBC1 evening news theme,
Bottom (opening theme), Porridge (opening
theme), Experiment... er, the 1983 SDP Party
Election broadcast...
8 Top 10 Melvyn Bragg catchphrases: “Tonight on The South Bank Show...”, “Joining us
for this edition of Start the Week...”, “It was
here, in the Lake District...”, “Ken Russell
focuses his unique eye on the composer’s life
and work”, “The BBC’s recent track record
on arts programming has been abysmal,
to say the least”... er, “Have you all got yer
Sundays?”...
7) Top 10 comedy moments from the
1980s sitcom Lame Ducks: The postman
complaining about his giant ball being
punctured, the pyromaniac looking like he
might set fire to something, Lorraine Chase
saying something that might be open to
interpretation in a less than innocent way...
er, John Duttine looking put-upon...
6) Top 10 famous people whose names
look like typos but aren’t: Gorden Kaye,
Lennard Pearce, Frankie Howerd, Leee
John... er, Mykola Pawluk...
5) Top 10 famous people with the same
names as Creamup staff: That motorbike
bloke off of Top Gear, the drummer off of
Adam and the Ants, that bloke who won
Gladiators once, the bloke who sits next to
Geoffrey Durham on Puzzle Panel... er, the
singer off the White Stripes...
4) Top 10 reasons for bringing back children’s programme Doctor Who: Fantasy is
dead popular at the moment isn’t it, there’s a
petition on the internet with a lot of names
on it, the ‘Turlough question’ was never
satisfactorily resolved, Sylvester McCoy is
reported to be still ‘up for it’... er, it can’t possibly be as bad as Neverwhere...
3) Top 10 contributions Andi Peters made
to children’s continuity presentation:
Using the word “showbiz” twice every sentence, using the word “I” three times every
sentence, failing to judge the amount of
time he’s got left before a programme begins
even though the countdown appears in large
numbers on a monitor right next to him,
going, “Oh noooooooo!!” and burying his
face in his hands like a small child during
insignificant technical hiccups... er, rapping
along to the Bucky O’Hare theme...
2) Top 10 things Larry could do better
than Brucie on The Generation Game:
Wear glasses on a chain around his neck,
comment on the “muck” in the studio,
look around in a distracted manner while
contestants were talking to him, fail to hit a
series of pots and pans in the right order...
er, think up suggestive nicknames for imaginary postmen...
138
“Er...”
1) Top 10 endearing Michael Parkinson
personality quirks: Er...
139