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Have your apocalypse now, don’t be a procrastinator

23rd-29th October 2021

Hullo there!

And welcome to another edition of Creamguide for your delight and delectation. As ever we couldn’t do it without you – well, we could, for our own amusement, but it’s nice to know people actually look it, so get in touch via creamguide@tvcream.co.uk.

SATURDAY

23rd OCTOBER

BBC2

18.30 Dad’s Army
We start in the postbag and Eddie Hutchinson writes, “Great read as always, but somewhat surprised there was no mention of the big TV news this week, namely that Fred Dinenage, surely the longest running artiste on commercial television, had announced his retirement after hosting the same ITV region's news programme for 38 years. Even my 89 year old mum mentioned it to me, and we've both lived in the Rediffusion region all our lives. I have this theory that if ever there's a nuclear war, the only things that will survive are cockroaches and The Dinenage.”

20.55 The 80s: Music’s Greatest Decade?
Everyone knows pop achieved perfection in 1982, it’s a scientific fact! This is a new series presented by Dylan Jones, the former GQ editor who we’ve always found something of an acquired taste, but we’re absolutely with him when he’s arguing that the eighties is our finest musical decade. His argument is that while there may have been some notable genres and movements in the seventies, what was special about the eighties is that they all happened at the same time and all spilled into each other, hence ace acts like The Human League wanting to sound like Kraftwerk and ABBA at the same time. Sounds like the other three parts of this series are going to be mostly clip shows, but this one is based around interviews with the likes of Mark Moore, Trevor Horn and the ‘rams. And then...

22.40 Trevor Horn at the BBC
Well, we’re very excited about this, because we saw Trevor and his band perform a few years ago and it was an absolutely cracking night, such is his bulging back catalogue that he could play for two hours and still not fit in all his greatest hits. Sadly on that occasion he didn’t play any of his Dollar stuff, though we do hope we get some of that here because it is fabulous, and alongside Howard Goodall he actually appeared with them on Pops. But whatever they play we’ll get an hour of some of the most famous and popular songs ever recorded.

BBC Scotland

22.00 Music Vault
Any show that raids the archives for clips from The Untied Shoelaces Show is going to get the thumbs up from Creamguide, and Fiction Factory’s performance on that series was one of the highlights of the opening episode, alongside The Communards performing on The Garden Party to what must be one of the least enthralled audiences ever assembled, though it might have helped if they were actually facing them. Hopefully there’ll be more of that kind of thing this week, and it looks like every episode is being followed by an archive music doc as well, this week featuring Annie Lennox in conversation in 1992.

ITV4

10.30 The Big Match Revisited
A particularly savage edit last week when Jim was halfway through telling us that Brian Kidd had scored a hat-trick when we cut to Brian without even hearing who he’d scored it against, but if they needed the time to it in Ron Saunders complaining to Nick Owen regarding his line of questioning about the Villa players’ win bonuses, it’s fair enough. We’ve reached November 1980 now and we always think there’s something especially nostalgic about football played in the winter where you can almost smell the Bovril, and this episode looks like a right goalfest to boot.

BBC Radio 2

13.00 Pick of the Pops
Turns out 2005 was pretty good fun, especially as they played the brilliant I Said Never Again by Rachel Stevens, and it’s probably about as late as this show can go as far as we’re concerned because within nine months both Top of the Pops and CDUK were axed and we began to drift away from pop music. There’s seemingly more Rachel Stevens in the pipeline this week as we’re in 2004, though via a much less interesting record, and with Cliff, Morrissey and Duran Duran in the charts there’ll be some familiar names to hold on to. Before that it’s the music the nation cleared up after the hurricane to from October 1987.

BBC Radio 4

19.15 This Cultural Life
Well, John Wilson’s not messing around in terms of getting big names for his new programme, as this week he chats to Macca in an interview that’s already got in the papers as he discusses the Beatles’ split more candidly than seemingly he’s ever done before. Much more to hear as well, though, with the great man not just talking about his own work but also those artists he rates himself.

SUNDAY

24th OCTOBER

ITV

22.45 Standing Firm: Football’s Windrush Story
We were mentioning last week how much we enjoyed BT Sport’s football documentaries so we’re pleased to see that a steady stream of them now look to be enjoying a wider airing via ITV, in this case as part of a fascinating season of programmes they’re running for Black History Month. This one is presented by Benjamin Zephaniah and looks at the influence that players with Caribbean roots have had on the game, speaking to the likes of Brendon Batson and John Barnes about their pioneering roles in the face of relentless abuse, and also some of today’s players who, sadly, have to put up with less audible but still depressingly regular rubbish.

MONDAY

25th OCTOBER

BBC2

19.30 Mastermind
Hard to remember now that Noel Fielding is now a family-friendly telly favourite that The Mighty Boosh were absolutely at the cutting edge when they began, with Stewart Lee directing their shows and the critics falling over themselves to shower them with praise. Julian Barratt’s always been our favourite, though, if only for all those documentaries about transport infrastructure that he narrates. Someone’s answering questions on them tonight, while there’s also a round on the Champions League.

CHANNEL 4

23.10 Graham Taylor: An Impossible Job
Not entirely sure why we’re getting this again – there doesn’t seem to be any kind of anniversary to hang it around – but it’s always worth seeing this fascinating documentary, even though there are doubtless many football fans who can recite every single word of it, whether that’s Taylor swapping tasteless jokes with Will Hanrahan behind the scenes at Anne and Nick or berating the journalist Rob Shepherd. We remember reading at the time that this was initially conceived as one of a series of films about the worst jobs in Britain, though it’s hard to see how they could have topped this one. In fact while it was a huge talking point at the time, in hindsight the general view seems to be that Taylor seems to come out of it alright, saying that while he was disappointed with how much he swore he thought it illustrated how much he cared, with the rather amateurish set-up at the FA at least partly to blame for many of the problems, and with so many people quick to cite him as the nicest man in football it’s pleasing he went on to further success after it. The same wasn’t the case for his assistant Phil Neal, who comes across particularly badly and struggled to get any coaching work after it, given all he seems to do is just parrot everything Taylor says.

This week we’re looking at what used to be called alternative comedy, and a show we have fond memories of as one of the first grown-up comedy programmes we were allowed to stay up to watch. After the pubs have closed, it’s...

ALAS SMITH AND JONES (1984-98)

Unfortunately we can’t bring you any clips of Smith and Goody, the fondly-remembered Thames show from 1980 where Mel Smith worked alongside his old mate Bob Goody to encourage kids to read, but Mel did end up in a rather longer-lasting double-act. The two first met, of course, on Not The Nine O’Clock News, Griff becoming a full-time cast member in series two after Chris Langham dropped out. But while Griff came from a traditional comedy background – Footlights, jobbing sketch writer, BBC radio producer – Mel had studied experimental psychology at Oxford and was more interested in directing than appearing on stage, including spells at the Royal Court and the Crucible. Mel brought a distinctive, natural style to Not, in his words “roughening up” the sketches so they seemed far more realistic than your usual broad comic performances, and you could argue that Mel developed the style of natural, understated acting which, thanks to the likes of The Office, is now seen on pretty much every comedy show on TV. Here’s the perfect example, the ever-popular origami sketch.

Mel and Griff were considered to have particular chemistry so when Rowan and Pam got far too famous and Not ended in 1982, they were happy to continue working together- initially going into business to make radio adverts, and then with their own show on the Beeb which went under the punning title of Alas Smith and Jones, spoofing the famous Western series of almost the same name. Many of the Not writers came with them, though unlike that show Alas was contemporary rather than topical, filmed months in advance. And although they’d famously parodied the Two Ronnies on Not, if the act resembled anything it was them, in that Mel and Griff would start the show as “themselves” but then play any role depending on the sketch, talking it in turns to be comic and straightman. And like the Rons, they also maintained hugely successful solo careers throughout.

The initial suggestion was that Alas might have a different theme every week, but they decided that would be too limiting and so anything went. There was one running theme, however – the show took the piss out of everything, whether that was the show itself (as the name suggests), every other show on TV and even BBC2, with endless Python-style false endings and irrelevant Radio Times billings. And that meant brilliantly inspired sketches like the fourth division football results and the News For The Elderly.

Alas Smith and Jones ran for four series on BBC2, and in the mid-eighties it was one of the most garlanded comedy shows of its day, winning numerous awards including an International Emmy, enjoying extremely high production values and welcoming scripts from the top comedy writers of the day, with many budding writers getting their first TV credits on the show. Here’s the first episode of the second series in 1985, which includes the debut of the COW globe-inspired title sequence, which is great fun, although we always thought the mellow jazz-funk theme tune was a bit low-key for a comedy show.

The signature Smith and Jones sketches were the Head to Heads, where Mel, an idiot who thought he knew everything, passed on his advice to Griff, an idiot who knew nothing. Usually written by Clive Anderson, they owed quite a bit to Pete and Dud, but were still excellent pieces of comedy in their own right, at their peak a wonderfully scripted tour de force of misconceptions and misunderstandings piled on top of each other to produce a brilliantly logical but illogical dialogue. Mel and Griff had first used the concept in some radio adverts and they quickly became what they were best known for and no show in the eighties was complete without their own version of it.

One other way in which Smith and Jones were miles ahead of their time came with the regular sketches spoofing home videos, and for Christmas 1987 these span off into an entire show, The Home Made Xmas Video. A fascinating piece it is too, wonderfully performed and, you’d have to say, incredibly and realistically grotty in a way no TV show would ever look these days. We think that can make it a bit too unpleasant to watch in places, but it was hugely well-remembered and did the rounds of the tape trading circuit for years (in even worse quality) before BBC4 finally repeated it the other year for the first time in three decades.

Around the same time Mel and Griff were also on ITV with the series The World According to Smith and Jones, which unfortunately we’ve been unable to find any footage of. No great loss, mind, as the series saw the pair add comic voice-overs to old stock film footage and was a bit uninspired, and it was parodied as A Load Of Old Jokes According to Smith and Jones on, er... Alas Smith and Jones. But the Beeb forgave them and in 1989 the show moved over to BBC1. Although the mix was generally the same, it lost the Alas from the title, and was now produced by Mel and Griff’s Talkback Productions, making it one of the first independent productions on primetime BBC1. One new idea this time round was a regular parody of the then-topical After Dark, with Chris Langham showing there were no hard feelings after his departure from Not by appearing as the hapless host. A relentlessly silly new theme tune and title sequence was introduced as well.

One major achievement from Smith and Jones was that the programme contained some comedy songs that were actually funny. Normally composed by Peter Brewis, they were often just as adept musically as the songs and artists they were parodying, while the visuals were great as well. Here’s one of the best, the majestic Brogues.

Smith and Jones became a bit more sporadic in the nineties, thanks in part to the pair’s numerous extra-curricular activities, with Mel looking towards Hollywood and directing a couple of films, and Griff becoming for a time the friendly face of literature on TV with his series The Bookworm lasting a couple of years which makes it a pretty long runner by that genre’s standards. But they still worked together when they could and were still interested in working with new people. In 1992 they received a couple of sketches from two Irish music journalists which showed enough promise for them to invite them over to London and, in the end, co-write most of the series. No doubt about their most famous submission, the Gregorio sketch, which was the first success by Graham Linehan and Arthur Mathews and is quite clearly a Big Train sketch six years early.

But by the mid-nineties, Smith and Jones were starting to look a bit out of date. The performances and sketches were still good but they were now one of umpteen sketch shows on TV and there was nothing that really set them apart from the rest. And while the joke on screen had always been that Griff did all the work and Mel swanned in at the last minute, it started to feel a bit like that in reality, with Griff writing most of the sketches and Mel rather phoning it in. So while there were three more series, in 1995, 1997 and 1998, the days when a new run of Smith and Jones was a big event were rather over and the last two series were shoved in post-10pm slots, and met with not so much a bad response as simply a non-existent one, and that was that.

Happily there was one final production from the pair, as after The Two Ronnies Sketchbook, a year later in 2006 Mel and Griff got back together to link favourite sketches with new material. Great fun it was too, and that episode up there is particularly great with all kinds of classic sketches, including In At The Deep End, Good Old Yellow Pages, Moggy Cat (“a snip at £4.50!”) and the fantastic Stanley Rogers (“feeling a little bit... randy!”). Sadly despite The Two Ronnies Sketchbook being repeated ten thousand times, to this day, this series was never seen again, while a promised DVD was delayed umpteen times, released and then immediately deleted again, apparently being put on sale by accident when it was decided that it would be completely unprofitable and would actually lose more money being available in the shops than it would being made and never released. The rubbish they do sell on DVD as well. Unfortunately that means that pretty much all of this much-loved series only lives on via dodgy VHS copies uploaded to YouTube.

As we say, we have fond memories of Smith and Jones, along with Jasper Carrott the first “grown-up” comedians we were able to stay up to watch, and certainly in the eighties and early nineties it was one of the cleverest and funniest shows on the box.

TUESDAY

26th OCTOBER

BBC4

22.15 The Last Goon Show Of All
We know Christmas TV these days seems to be an endless stream of reunions and last-ever-episodes, seemingly as an admission that there aren’t many new ideas about, but it was ever thus, really, given one of the highlights of the Beeb’s Christmas schedules back in 1972 was a Goons reunion. This was part of the Beeb’s fiftieth anniversary celebrations that year, recorded in front of a celebrity audience, including several royals, in October, and this is very much a case of the cameras pointing at a radio recording rather than anything made specially for the small screen. But other than the Telegoons previous attempts to televise their unique humour always rather fell flat, so it’s for the best, probably.

WEDNESDAY

27th OCTOBER

BBC Radio 4

11.30 What’s Funny About...
We had The Goon Show last night recorded in front of a royal audience, and the final episode of this series looks at The Good Life, another show that had a Royal Command Performance, which allows us to yet again continue our campaign to get The Queen in the audience for a telly show, which needs to happen. Never mind that bloke from the Telegraph droning on about the Royal Yacht, the public want to see Strictly Royal Dancing. Anyway, it is indeed The Good Life in this episode, though sadly many of those who made it such a special series both in front of and behind the camera are no longer with us. But Felicity Kendal still is, and will join Jon and Peter to reminisce.

THURSDAY

28th OCTOBER

CBBC

17.00 Blue Peter
Simon Farquhar writes, “Enjoyed the piece on The Late Show. For me its two elements, live telly and sneering, came together best when Madonna released her Sex book. The panel sat bullshitting until a dispatch rider arrived with the first hot-off-the-press copies which they hadn’t even all finished opening before it was being bemoaned in that unmistakeable pained fashion. I mean, they were never going to like it were they? To be fair though, it did look rubbish.”

Talking Pictures TV

21.00 Justice
This has been on for weeks but because we’re such a useless TV guide we keep forgetting to mention it. Bit of a shame, as it was a popular series in its day, starring the great Margaret Lockwood and spun off from the ITV Playhouse production Justice Is A Woman, which broke new ground by featuring Lockwood as a judge... who was also a woman!? A slightly more dignified name for the three series that followed, which reached its peak in 1974 when it made it to number one in the ratings. And more fun than Judge John Deed, no doubt.

FRIDAY

29th OCTOBER

CHANNEL 5

22.00 1971: Britain’s Biggest 70s Hits
23.30 The 70s’ Greatest Novelty Records
While we’ve been droning on about all our pet obsessions this week, here’s a programme that will presumably feature another one, because one of the number one singles in 1971 was Baby Jump by Mungo Jerry, the least memorable number one of the entire decade and a record we have never heard in our lives. We know we could probably just find it on YouTube or Spotify, but it’s taken on a bit of mythical status for us as it’s never ever played on radio or TV and nobody seems to even remember it existing, and we’re going to wait for it to come to us. Maybe it’ll be on here. Then it’s an hour that will certainly be an experience for the ears and the eyes.

BBC4

20.00 TOTP2
“On Top of the Pops we can now play records from the US top ten even if they’re not in the UK chart! Here’s Belinda Carlisle with a record that isn’t in the US top ten but is in the UK chart!” Yes, the new Pops is a bit of an experience, but there isn’t any this week. No, it’s not because BBC4 think the new show is rubbish – well, maybe they do – and it’ll be back next week, but because the calendar demands it’s time instead for the ten trillionth screening of the Halloween special from 2007. Despite the presence of Steve Wright – yes, that’s how old it is – it’s entertaining enough, not least for The Witch by The Rattles which must be one of the most frantic records ever made.

23.00 The Old Grey Whistle Test
Some less familiar archivery here with The Kinks in concert at the TV Theatre in 1977. Actually The Kinks did two concerts for Whistle Test that year, and we think the more famous one was on Christmas Eve, but this one’s the earlier one. We’re also promised a song that wasn’t in the original broadcast, but whether it’s been shown since, we’re not sure. And, er, that’s it.

And that's that...

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