And welcome to Creamguide, on Thursday as usual because we got a fair wind and made it back from our holiday in good time. Yes, very nice, thank you. Send us your postcards too, to creamguide@tvcream.co.uk.
SATURDAY
14th AUGUST
BBC1
20.30 Only Fools and Horses: Britain’s Favourite Sitcom
That said, we have been a bit out of the loop this week, so apologies if some of this is a bit phoned in. Much like this, probably, a programme first shown at Christmas but now repeated, in the grand Channel Five style, with a different name. Twenty years ago, Only Fools seemed to be pretty much on a loop on BBC1, with repeats being parachuted into every single vacant slot on the channel, but we’ve not seen so much of it on free TV in recent years, as it’s been confined to and seemingly much prized by Gold. There isn’t seemingly any of the cast contributing to this, Paul Whitehouse is a sort-of cast member so he’ll do.
ITV4
10.30 The Big Match Revisited
Well, here’s excitement, as it’s a new run of this series, and we’re plunging into 1980/81. This should be absolutely fascinating, as following the aborted Snatch Of The Day business in 1978, the Beeb and ITV agreed to take it in turns in the prime slot, so for this season The Big Match was on Saturday nights. And that means a new look show, away from the cosy Sunday afternoon slot after twelve years and with a snazzy and fondly-remembered Jeff Wayne composition replacing the familiar theme. In addition, it had to take on Match of the Day’s duties with the news round-up, late results, the pools news and so on, hiring Jim Rosenthal especially for this role, and with this first episode at least in a 75 minute slot, hopefully we’ll see as much as that time capsule as possible. All very exciting, though all still proudly regional of course, though to illustrate its new newsier approach, the LWT cameras venture outside the region on the first day of the season to capture Kevin Keegan’s return to English football at Southampton.
Sky Arts
21.00 Suggs: My Life Story
Certainly up there when it comes to dishing out prizes for the Nicest Man In Rock (he can share it with Noddy Holder and Alice Cooper), this is a first TV outing of the stage show Suggs has been successfully touring over the past few years. There’s lots of songs, of course, both his own and those that have special resonance to him, but also plenty of jokes, anecdotes and clips from his life, painting a picture of both his childhood in particular and sixties and seventies London in general.
BBC Radio 2
13.00 Pick of the Pops
After some of the yawning gaps between years in recent weeks we’ve got two pretty close ones this time round, though none the worse for that. First up it’s 1984, just after the Frankie one-two but doubtless we’ll get to hear from them, and then 1990 with some of the tracks that so entertained us on BBC4 just a few months back, as well as another opportunity to marvel at the brilliantly banal lyric “They didn’t say they’d be there in half an hour/Cos they displayed Turtle Power”.
BBC2
20.00 Jonathan Miller - Lost Memories
Jonathan Miller has to be surely the polymath’s polymath, applying himself to so many disciplines over his career, and with great distinction in pretty much all of them as well. That made it doubly sad that he contracted Alzheimer’s disease, the producer of this programme likening the way it destroyed a great mind to burning down the National Library. Happily there are many recordings of the great man in action, and the memories of his friends and family, including his son William who’s presenting here.
SUNDAY
15th AUGUST
CHANNEL 4
20.00 The Secret World of Crisps
Seemingly the chocolate programme in this series last week was great fun, and this should be equally entertaining we’re sure. That’s not least because as well as concentrating on the likes of Walkers and Smiths, it’s also giving its due to the fondly remembered Tudor Crisps, who Canny Bag O’Tudor advert was a big favourite on Tyne Tees, and who actually kicked off a bit of a revolution with its Phileas Fogg crisps in the eighties which led to all the Kettle Chips and whatnot now crowding the crisps aisle.
BBC Radio 4
11.00 The Reunion
A lot of people on social media seemed to get a bit overexcited when they heard the words “The Day Today” and “reunion”, unaware it was actually an episode of this long-running series rather than them making a new episode - which, let’s face it, would probably be a bit rubbish. It’s actually thirty years to the week that On The Hour began, though it’s seemingly The Day Today we’re celebrating, which really is we think our favourite television programme of all time, an absolute masterpiece which was the cleverest and funniest thing we’d ever seen and, we think, one of the few pieces of satire - alongside Smashie and Nicey - that actually changed things because it did illustrate how pompous and indigestible news programmes had become and all the relentless Birtism did get toned down a bit. No Morris here, obviously, because he’s too busy being all mysterious, but we do hear from Armando, Coogan, Mackichan, Front and Schneider, which should be hugely entertaining and almost makes up for them not doing any commentaries on the DVD.
MONDAY
16th AUGUST
ITV4
17.40 The Big Match Revisited
We enjoyed Gabby Logan on Twitter the other day pouring cold water on a couple of people getting lost in a nostalgic reverie about bringing Grandstand back to feature all the minority sports we’ve been enjoying at the Olympics, by suggesting people say this after every Olympics and after two weeks of the football season everyone’s forgotten about them. And here we are straight after the Olympics and we’re billing a load of football, because as well as the “new” episodes from 1980 on Saturday mornings, at teatime we’re getting another run for 1974/75 - though actually we’re not sure if it’s been on this channel before, or just BT Sport. In any case, it’s a fascinating season where there was an eight-way title race, plus Carlisle United in Division One while Manchester United were in Division Two, a division that contributed an FA Cup finalist, both League Cup finalists, Player of the Year and Goal of the Season. Seems amazingly democratic from our perspective, though apparently at the time it was considered a dreadful season with the level playing field coming about as every team was uniformly bad. Worth a look, though.
This week we’ve got fun for young adults, entirely about young adults, written by, cough, young adults. Nozin’ aroun’ at teatime BBC2, it’s...
DEF II (1988-94)
The Beeb’s kids shows have always been rightly celebrated as among the best in the world, but what happened when they grew out of them? For ages the Beeb had terrible trouble working that out, but they kept on trying, and during the eighties launched the terribly earnest likes of Something Else, Oxford Road Show and Riverside, and the brainless No Limits. Most teens enjoyed the music but greeted the features with at best indifference and at worst total disdain. But then in 1987, Channel Four launched Network 7, which seemed to achieve the impossible and actually attract and retain a teenage audience. Rather than busy themselves with Network 7 knockoffs, Alan Yentob decided to poach its creator and Janet Street-Porter moved to the Beeb. At TV Centre she wouldn’t be making just one programme but a whole series of them, creating a channel within a channel on Monday and Wednesday teatimes on BBC2 from May 1988, with the suitably cryptic and fairly meaningless name of DEF II.
Janet pointed out that DEF II wasn’t going to be doing every type of programme, as teens already watched alternative comedy and the soaps, so those bases were covered elsewhere. DEF II’s aim was to revitalise factual programmes and make current affairs, politics and other apparently difficult issues palatable for a discerning audience. Unfortunately, thanks to it launching within six months of Janet’s arrival at the Beeb, it was a bit rushed on to the screen and the initial line-up was heavy on existing shows like Open To Question and leftover commissions that predated its conception like the music show FSd which was a blatant Network 7 rip-off. Babylon 2, meanwhile, invited celebs to take their picks from the archive, which was entertaining, though we can’t see many teens telling their friends about black and white clips of Billy Bunter.
Music was going to play a big part in DEF II, but there wasn’t going to be one single music show, Janet suggesting most teens were obsessed with one genre of music and completely hated all the others. So Behind The Beat specialised in soul and RnB, and seemed a pretty credible attempt, landing exclusives from the likes of Stevie Wonder. For those of a more indie persuasion, there was Snub TV, a fondly-remembered series which included, among other delights, the first ever TV appearance by the Manic Street Preachers.
Many of Janet’s proteges from Network 7 followed her over to the Beeb, with Magenta De Vine and Sankha Guha fronting probably DEF II’s most successful factual series, Rough Guide. This was an obvious sell - a holiday show aimed at the more independent traveller, which explored locations from the locals’ perspective rather than the televised brochures like Wish You Were Here. It was sometimes a bit limited in highlighting a city’s nightlife by its slot way before the watershed, while there was much internal debate over whether Magenta should wear her permanent shades while dealing with serious topics, a discussion solved by her switching to clear lenses for some bits. But it did its job and it ran for many years, even outliving DEF II itself.
In the autumn of 1988 came DEF II’s most ambitious series which aimed to interest young people in - yikes! - current affairs. Accompanied by a glossy title sequence which bravely tried to make the Palace of Glittering Delights at BBC Manchester look attractive, Reportage was DEF II’s equivalent of Panorama which dealt with the week’s big stories via reports, interviews and discussions. And it’s here that all the cliches of DEF II and youth TV in general could be found, with its mannered presenters, shakily-conceived outside broadcasts, flashy graphics, pointless phone polls, ill-at-ease experts and debates darted through at such speed they were often totally incoherent. This suitably frantic compilation, seemingly an editor’s showreel, is probably a pretty decent snapshot of it. Still, it always meant well and did certainly try to make some topics accessible to a young audience, however ill-equipped they were to cover them.
Rough Guide and Reportage, along with demented French rock show Rapido, were the stapes of DEF II over its life, providing some schedule staples around which were slotted a host of other series, some incredibly short-lived and others having fairly creditable runs. Our favourite DEF II series began in 1990, the much-missed Dance Energy. This was initially a pretty straightforward show with host Normski introducing rap and hip hop acts in the studio, but things got more interesting in 1992 when it was rebranded as Dance Energy House Party with the action relocating to Normski’s “house”, and Vas Blackwood arriving as his flatmate to participate in daft sketches and running gags between the tracks. The music policy was broadened as well with indie and pop acts added to the mix, and the whole thing was a million times more fun and entertaining than Top of the Pops was at the time, in its boring “real music” incarnation. Let ‘arf!
One problem with DEF II is that, despite arriving to much fanfare and aiming to be a fixture in viewers’ lives, it was quite often disrupted by sport and other events, and didn’t really have much of a budget and it could often be a struggle to fill up three hours a week. That meant it often had to “borrow” programmes from other parts of the Beeb, including from the regions, from primetime with repeats of comedy shows like The Real McCoy, from schools TV with several episodes of Scene and from CBBC with the likes of Degrassi Junior High (although it was able to show some episodes which were considered too rude for a kids’ slot). And there were plenty of imports, too, the most successful undoubtedly being The Fresh Prince of Bel Air.
Football initially seemed a bit of an unlikely subject for DEF II to cover, but in 1991 it was pretty successful in being the quickest to jump onto the bandwagon post-Italia 90 and reflect the changing face of football in the fanzine-style Standing Room Only. Hosted by Simon O’Brien, regular contributors including David Baddiel, Rob Newman and Alistair McGowan, and this part of an episode up there, which follows Sean Hughes and Bob Mortimer to a Middlesbrough match, is a pretty decent example of a likeable show that turned out to be welcomed by football fans and set the tone for the likes of Fantasy Football over the rest of the decade.
By the early nineties, though, much of the excitement of the early days of DEF II had dissipated a bit. Its figurehead Janet Street-Porter had moved up the corporate ladder at the Beeb which meant it didn’t have her obvious personality holding it all together, while many of its shows had been running for five years or so, an age in terms of youth programmes. Sadly it never quite managed to find any new shows to replace them, with some brave experiments that never really caught on. One great example is Cyberzone, promoted as the UK’s first ever virtual reality game show and produced by the makers of Knightmare, but it clearly was ahead of its time as the primitive technology rendered the whole thing pretty much unintelligible on screen. It did have one lasting legacy, mind, as guest John Fashanu nicked Craig Charles’ catchphrase “Awooga!” for his own personal use on Gladiators.
And in May 1994, as abruptly as it began, DEF II came to an end. There was no big goodbye, the brand was simply there one week and gone the next, and when a couple of its shows returned in the autumn like Rough Guide and the Fresh Prince, they were simply shown alongside all of the other shows on BBC2. The 6pm hour was still very much a teencentric zone, mind, with series like Heartbreak High, The O Zone, Robot Wars and The Big Trip running for several years, and when The Simpsons arrived in 1997, it became a must-watch for both the young and, with no off-putting branding, the young at heart. And the in-your-face presentation that DEF II pioneered was now pretty much part of the mainstream.
In the end it seems DEF II simply became obsolete, the branding probably turning off as many teens as it attracted, and it’s easy to snigger at some of its more embarrassing how-do-you-do-fellow-kids attempts to surf the zeitgeist. But it was certainly one of the more credible attempts to appeal to a famously tough audience to attract, and many of its shows are fondly-remembered to this day.
TUESDAY
17th AUGUST
BBC4
20.00, 20.30 The Good Life
So sad to hear this week of the death of Una Stubbs, along with June Whitfield one of the few veteran actresses who embraced the changing industry and continued to work with new writers and performers who grew up watching her on TV, most notably with several scene-stealing appearances in Sherlock. More fine comic performances here too, as we move on to the second series.
WEDNESDAY
18th AUGUST
CHANNEL 4
20.00 Changing Rooms
Well, here’s a show we didn’t expect to be billing again! Easy to forget what an absolute phenomenon Changing Rooms was when it began, 25 years ago now, swiftly moving from minor BBC2 show to BBC1 juggernaut, even going out on Saturday nights, and shamelessly ripped off by ITV as Better Homes (who even more shamelessly then ripped off Ground Force with Better Gardens), before like all of these shows it got overexposed and run into the ground. It was undoubtedly the casting that made it and you’ll be pleased to hear that Laurence Llewelyn-Bowen (who we know is one resident of TVC Towers’ favourite ever interviewees as he’s always such good value) is still involved, though there’s an all-new cast of bickering designers to get to know and love. Confusingly, too, while there’s no Anna Ryder Richardson there is, er, Anna Richardson who’s presenting.
BBC Scotland
20.30 Rewind 1988
Once more we’re expecting a snazzy soundtrack to this episode with top Scottish bands like Aztec Camera nestling near the top of the charts. It’s a particularly sombre episode otherwise, mind, with two terrible tragedies in Lockerbie and Piper Alpha.
THURSDAY
19th AUGUST
CBBC
17.00 Blue Peter
We’ve been enjoying the Strictly reveals this week, not least because so many of them have been complete surprises and not been spoilered in the papers for several weeks beforehand. We’re obviously going to be cheering on the great Dan Walker, while doubtless this show will be going into bat for CBBC’s own Rhys Stephenson, who was revealed on Newsround, and we love the idea of thousands of Strictly superfans watching that show for the one and only time in decades.
Sky Arts
21.00 Comedy Legends
Looks like this series is continuing to alternate between UK and US stars, and this week we head to the other side of the pond to celebrate Billy Crystal. No slouch comedically with his roles on Soap and Saturday Night Live, plus some decent film credits, in recent years his most famous and acclaimed role has almost certainly been as award show host, a role for which he has, perhaps remarkably, won several awards.
Sky Documentaries
21.00 The Story of Late Night
It seems that we’ve been forever trying to launch a late night show in the UK to have the same kind of stature and profile as the big US shows, but what everyone seems to forget is that the late night shows in the US are really, really late - ie, often well past midnight - and all the channels all show the same things every night so you can put them in your routine. They also have a budget that absolutely dwarves anything in the UK which is why Graham Norton and half a dozen writers could only do for about a year what the likes of Letterman and Leno and their hundred-strong team can do for decades. It’s a fascinating genre, mind, and this import will take a suitably studious look at the whole thing, heading right back to the pioneering days of Jake Paar and Faye Emerson who was - gasp! - a woman.
FRIDAY
20th AUGUST
BBC4
21.00 Top of the Pops
To think just four years ago they wouldn’t even say the title of I Want Your Sex, now we’re getting People Are Still Having Sex played in full, though the most exciting thing about that performance was the long shot of the green screen with Campbell stood in front of it so we could see where it was in the studio. Phwoar! That little experiment is over for now, we think, but the rest of the recent tweaks remain for the foreseeable, including the chart which, shock, we think we might actually prefer. Mind you, some familiar faces this week, with OMD, Billy Bragg and the last studio appearance of Bros, now in suitably “grown up”, ie, boring form. There’s also a new number one which is why it’s probably good news we only have one episode this week.
And that's that...
And we promise to give next week’s edition our full attention. See you then!
