Creamguide

PICK OF THE DAY

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BBC4Top of the Pops
Thursday, 19.30, 01.05, BBC4

For the first time in a while, two consecutive episodes, so it’s a completely different line-up to the last time and some belated debuts for Ian Dury and Sham 69 who we’d have otherwise seen two weeks ago, in a classic Pops juxtaposition with another Cilla flop and the first appearance of a record that, even skipping all the Savile and Travis episodes, you’re going to hear a hell of lot over the next few months.

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BBC Radio 2The People’s Songs
Wednesday, 22.00, BBC Radio 2

I Bet You Look Good On The Dancefloor tonight, which allows us to mention that when it got to number one, Calendar showed a clip from its Whistle Test-inspired video and captioned it “amateur video”. In fact that video was the first we’d heard of them or it, when it was shown on Popworld in fact, and we never thought the record version was quite as good because it was a bit overproduced. Anyway, it’s included here because it started bands being broken via the internet and that rather than the major labels and Top of the Pops.

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"...and Walt disnae"

Sky Arts 2The Legendary Bing Crosby
Tuesday, 23.00, Sky Arts 2

Doubtless Sky Arts have shown this a thousand times, and probably another channel before that, but we’re a bit quiet this week so it gets in. It’s Bing with all his mates, including Dino and Frank and Bob and of course Dame David, suitably seasonal for this time of year. We don’t know if it’s got him being impressed by Pan’s People, though.

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"However hard it seems"

BBC Radio 2Electric Dreams – The Giorgio Moroder Story
Monday, 22.00, BBC Radio 2

Second part of this, where our hero moves slightly more towards the mainstream and starts penning film soundtracks, including the likes of Flashdance and Top Gun, plus of course The Never Ending Story which means we get to enjoy Limahl nestling alongside the rest of the heavyweight contributors, plus another film where his soundtrack is probably about a hundred times more famous now than the actual film. It’s the title of this programme, for a start.

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BBC1Points of View
Sunday, 15.15, BBC1

A full house for your PoV bingo card last week with this series’ first suggestion of launching a BBC sport channel, yet again failing to explain why they wouldn’t then launch a BBC soap channel, comedy channel and everything else, and then just have a blank screen on BBC1 for most of the day. Now we’ve covered the bases, not sure where this run has left to go.

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BBC1The Eurovision Song Contest
Saturday, 20.00, BBC1

Jess Cully writes, “Nicki French was certainly our singer the last time the Contest was held in Sweden, but the host city then was Stockholm. The Contest is huge in Sweden and none of its major cities would be allowed to hog the Contest by hosting it twice in a row, hence the choice of Malmo this year. If Sweden wins it again in the near future, expect us to be either back in Stockholm or in Gothenburg.” Indeed, but even though we’ve not enjoyed it quite so much since the Beeb stopped making the scoreboard and got its logo on it every few minutes, we’re still there ready to enjoy the spectacle, and it seems like Graham Norton, for our money probably the best light entertainment presenter on TV at the moment, has been doing this forever.

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BBC4Rock’n'Roll Britannia
Friday, 21.00, BBC4

We moan when Pick of the Pops fritters away a valuable hour on pre-Beatles pop but we’re fine with it in its place, as is the case in this new documentary which looks at the halcyon days when British artists like Cliff and Marty Wilde nicked this all-American form of music, knocked all the rough edges off it and added a bit of music hall and skiffle to create a uniquely Anglicised product. And if it’s all a bit too square for you, after it is a repeat of a documentary from a while back about the real thing as provided by Little Richard and Chuck Berry.

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BBC4Top of the Pops
Thursday, 19.30, 01.30, BBC4

We’ve skipped another episode since we were last here, which means we’ve missed the debut of Ian Dury, we’ve got a bit more repetition, there’s a number one we’ve not heard at all before it gets to the top spot and it’s a very swift return to hosting duties for Peter Powell, though with Plastic Bertrand and X-Ray Spex the show certainly isn’t too shabby.

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BBC Radio 2The People’s Songs
Wednesday, 22.00, BBC Radio 2

This week it’s Are Friends Electric, which was highly influential, especially to The Human League who at that point snootily assumed their music was too exciting for the general public to take and then saw Numan get to number one in the charts with the same kind of thing and realised they should actually be having some hits.

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BBC3The Eurovision Song Contest Semi-Finals
Tuesday, 20.00, BBC3

The fun fact about Eurovision this year is that the last time it was held in Sweden, we sent Nicki French, whose biggest hit was a cover of Total Eclipse of the Heart, and now we’re back there and sending the other person who had a hit with it. To be honest, much as we enjoy the night itself, we’re never excited enough to sit through both of these as well, with the other on Thursday, but here’s some contractually-obliged fun anyway.

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BBC4Frost on Sketch Shows
Monday, 21.00, BBC4

We’ve now had three of these documentaries, where it turns out Dave invented the whole genre and was responsible for all its finest moments, but with a contacts book like his, we’re not moaning, as it means the likes of Michael Palin turn up to mull over the art of the comic sketch. Of course we saw plenty of The Frost Report with that one-off a few years back, though the vintage episode they showed made Frost seem a rather smug and resistible figure, a kind of sixties Jimmy Carr.

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BBC4Wings Over The World
Sunday, 21.00, BBC4

Not sure where this has come from, but apparently this film documenting Wings’ 1975 tour is all new, to BBC4 anyway. This is after the university tour where they just turned up and asked to play and when they were a bloody massive band playing to packed houses. And pointing out the grammatical error in Live And Let Die wasn’t very interesting the first time, before you start.

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BBC2The Many Faces of Robbie Coltrane
Saturday, 21.00, BBC2

Robbie Coltrane more or less got co-opted into the alternative comedy scene as while never a stand-up he appeared in all the big shows of the genre, from The Young Ones to, as we see at ten, Blackadder, via stints on the likes of Alfresco and A Kick Up The Eighties, though by the end of the eighties he’d more or less given that up to concentrate on his serious acting in which he was equally acclaimed. His biggest cock-up, no doubt, was when he was asked to do some stand-up at Glasgow’s Hogmanay celebrations for 1989-to-90 and wrote a ten minute routine but went on too late and was still doing it at midnight, ensuring the Beeb missed the whole point of the programme, but you’d think he’d have had the wit to look at the great big huge clock he was standing next to. Apart from that it’s been a triumphant career as this show will illustrate.

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ChallengeFun House and Knightmare
Friday, 22.00 and 22.30, Challenge

The Children’s ITV anniversary weekend back in January was seemingly enough of a talking point for Challenge to snap up the rights to two of the Twitter hits, schedule them in suitable post-pub timeslots and apparently they’ve even engaged Pat Sharp and Hugo Myatt to knock off a few new links for them as well. But never mind that, the answer to the question you’re all asking is… yes, we do believe the mullet is present and correct.

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BBC4Brushing Up On…
Thursday, 20.30, BBC4

“That’s a terrible question, Pete!” Sadly the episode on bridges ended up giving us nightmares, not just for that bizarre Joan Bakewell-fronted schools programme but also Toni Arthur’s rather unsettling stare down the camera while Brian Cant did his London Bridge song. Brrr. This is about factories and it’s the last in the series, but let’s hope for a second run as soon as is humanly possible from Dan, who incidentally also started following TV Cream on Twitter this week and therefore made us admire him even more, and we already admired him enormously.

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BBC Radio 2The People’s Songs
Wednesday, 22.00, BBC Radio 2

Thatcher’s death has doubtless spurred many people to read again the late and much lamented Tom Hibbert’s interview with her for Smash Hits in 1987, where along with her enthusiastic patronage of the day’s modern pop stars (“My goodness ME, we’ve got some smart ones!”), she was also invited to select her favourite pop songs and rather oddly expressed a liking for Telstar by The Tornadoes. That’s the subject of this show but it’s less about its appeal to Thatcher and more to do with how in 1962, at the height of the space race, it sounded like it came from another planet.

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BBC4I Claudius
Tuesday, 22.00, BBC4

You can of course see Derek Jacobi on your screens on Monday nights on ITV with Vicious, although we’re afraid we didn’t like it at all, not least because the plot, if you can call it that, made no sense whatsoever (if you’re looking for the house next door, why don’t you use that toilet?), and it was hardly a great step forward in sexual explicitness when Gimme Gimme Gimme was far more explicit, and far funnier, on BBC1 over a decade ago. Much of the fun appeared to come from the idea that Derek Jacobi was delivering crude jokes, and to be honest, distinguished actor though he is, we’re not sure sitcom is his forte. Remember him this way, we’re saying.

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BBC4The Joy of Country
Monday, 21.00, BBC4

A bit of Friday on a Monday as BBC4 mark the Bank Holiday with a trio of repeats recalling the days when the genre always had the words “and Western” affixed and when Sing Country was a fixture in the BBC2 schedules, featuring highlights from the Wembley Festival of Country Music which gains extra Cream points by being sponsored by Silk Cut.

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BBC2Dave Allen – God’s Own Comedian
Sunday, 23.00, BBC2

If you wasted your time on Monday night watching a not very good ITV sitcom rather than watch this, you’re in luck, although obviously this start time is subject to wild fluctuations if the snooker overruns. If we do get it, here’s your chance to spot the cue card reminding Dave to do “SCROTUM RESTAURANT”, which sounds a hell of a routine.

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BBC Radio 4Britain in a Box
Saturday, 10.30, BBC Radio 4

“We should have provided chairs, we didn’t!” The return of the series where Paul Jackson tells the story of a classic TV series, and this week it’s the story of Nationwide, the epitome of doing-the-pots accessible current affairs for over a decade, and initially so unwieldy it had to be “co-ordinated” rather than presented. Then David Dimbleby ruined it, of course, but here’s Michael Barratt and Sue Lawley to reminisce about those freewheeling early days.

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