TV Cream is now on Twitter. So far the updates mostly comprise drink-soused dispatches from The Phoenix on Charing Cross Road in London.
Archive for January, 2009
It’s July 1966, and ATV decides to throw a lunch for the England football team at its Borehamwood studios. Bill Ward is your master of ceremonies; seated around the giant trestle table are Bobby Charlton, Mrs Charlton, Bobby Moore, Mrs Moore, Miss Tonia Ramsey daughter of Sir Alf, Sir Alf Ramsey, Mrs Ramsey, Mrs Geoff Hurst and Geoff Hurst.
It’s the couplet that’s sending the most search queries to this blog. It’s the neologism that’s very very very very slowly gaining a bit of a toehold in the national consciousness. Recent aural sightings -- if such things are semantically possible -- include a Ben Folds gig, a screening of Blade Runner at the IMAX in London, and a New York museum. It’s even being written about in Word magazine, for heaven’s sake.
The thing started almost eight months ago (note how the call-and-responses have already undergone a pith-inspired contraction). It’s high time, i.e. past the point when it could have been genuinely original, to think of how TV Cream can properly join in. We’ve been banging a drum for Adam and Joe’s 6 Music efforts for ages. Might their be a way to take this one step further and stage some kind of Cream-esque STEPHEN! intervention, nay happening?
This isn’t a plea for a kind of joyless Chris Morris/Victor Lewis-Smith hijacking of another TV or radio programme; rather, an imaginative and witty STEPHEN! stunt that could cap the ones essayed to date. Something outside Broadcasting House one Saturday morning? A pre-arranged communal STEPHEN! in one of the nation’s great outdoor spaces? A bit of original video or tunesmithery? Any and all suggestions -- and perhaps more importantly participants -- welcome.
Anyway, in case you’re still wondering, here’s how it all started.
1) SATIRICAL FROST (1962-3)
Rushton, Percival, Martin, Frost and Kernan bring down the establishment with a long-player and cardboard cut-out versions of their heads.
2) SCHMOOZER FROST (1964-7)
If it’s Tuesday it must be “open-mouth” practice and champagne breakfast with Macca.
3) SERIOUS FROST (1968-9)
A side-parting, a smile and a trimphone send Enoch Powell sprawling.
4) SEVENTIES FROST (1970-4)
Passing through Heathrow with fiancee Diahann Carroll and Duke Ellington; sideburn outlook: fair to changeable.
5) SEVENTIES FROST II (1975-9)
Just time for a snifter in the Playboy Club; sideburn outlook: severe.
6) SUNRISE FROST (1980-4)
Our hero suddenly ages 30 years. Note Parky and Kee struggling – and failing – to adopt “relaxed man of the people” pose; Frostie can’t be arsed.
7) SERVILE FROST (1985-DATE)
Sir David is no longer one of us.
An ex-KGB spy has bought the Evening Standard. If only this were 1969, not 2009…
[AFTERNOON. INTERIOR. A CAVERNOUS OFFICE LINED WITH GIANT PORTRAITS, MURALS AND LANDSCAPES; A CHANDELIER HANGS FROM THE CEILING. AT ONE END, A HUGE MAHOGANY DESK. TO ONE SIDE, A FIREPLACE BLAZES. BAY WINDOWS OVERLOOK LONDON'S SKYLINE. THERE IS FADED CARPET ON THE FLOOR. A GRANDFATHER CLOCK TICKS. A MAN SITS SILENTLY IN A SWIVEL CHAIR BEHIND THE DESK, HIS FACE OBSCURED.]
[THERE IS A KNOCK ON THE DOOR]
PATRICK WYMARK: Enter!
[THE DOOR SWINGS OPEN. AN ENORMOUS MAN IN A FUR COAT AND TALL HAT STEPS INSIDE, WAITS, THEN WALKS VERY SLOWLY INTO THE ROOM. HE STOPS IN THE CENTRE. HE CRACKS HIS KNUCKLES, THEN CLEARS HIS THROAT]
PATRICK: Can I…help you?
PETER USTINOV: That…depends.
[PAUSE]
PATRICK: Yes?
PETER: Excuse me, may I have the pleasure of knowing to whom I am speaking?
PATRICK: For now it is enough that you know I am who you believe I am.
PETER: Then let me extend the same courtesy to you.
PATRICK: [SWINGING ROUND IN HIS CHAIR TO FACE HIS VISITOR] That will…not be necessary.
[PETER SHUFFLES OVER TO THE WINDOW]
PETER: Oi-yoi-yoi. London in January is so beautifully decadent, my Western comrade. Why, I think I can ever see from here the, how do you say, the dolly bird?
PATRICK: Come come, I never put your sort down for coyness. Why start now?
PETER: Things…are different now…
PATRICK: Yes…Yes…
[HE PICKS UP A FRAMED PHOTOGRAPH AND, SIGHING, PLACES IT FACE DOWN ON HIS DESK. HE SHAKES HIS HEAD]
PATRICK: The days of the true imperialist are, I fear, long gone.
PETER: [LIGHTING A CIGAR] But I think you will agree that some imperial habits die hard, comrade? [CHUCKLES]
[PATRICK RISES FROM HIS CHAIR AND WALKS TO THE FIREPLACE, WHERE HE POKES AT THE EMBERS DISCONSOLATELY]
PATRICK: My dear fellow, there comes a point in any man’s life when even the most imperial of habits have to be broken…
PETER: …Yes, yes…
PATRICK: …If only to…
[HE PAUSES]
PETER: See what is left amongst the pieces? [HE SETTLES INTO A HUGE ARMCHAIR AND DRUMS HIS FINGERS ON THE ARMREST]
PATRICK: I believe you have a proposition, and I would be grateful if you would state it, then get out.
[A KNOCK ON THE DOOR. A WOMAN ENTERS]
BARBARA MURRAY: It is customary the world over to stand upon the entrance of a lady.
[PETER RISES, SHEEPISHLY]
PETER: Madam. One hundred apologies.
BARBARA: For your remiss etiquette or for your country’s outdated cultural barbarism?
PETER: What creature is this, that doth have such a barbed tongue?
PATRICK: The one who fixed up this whole damn deal. Now let’s get to business -- the Secretary of State is keen to have this settled before the US market opens.
PETER: Ever the kindly thought for our American cousins.
BARBARA: A few more kindly thoughts from your country, sir, and they would be your cousins too.
PATRICK: Steady!
PETER: What…are your terms?
[PATRICK PACES AROUND THE ENTIRE ROOM, HANDS BEHIND HIS BACK, CHIN SUNK INTO HIS STOMACH, BEFORE SUDDENLY STOPPING AND POINTING AT PETER]
PATRICK: The whole operation. Every last printing press and stencil. Yours to do what you like with.
BARBARA: But…
PATRICK: No! Hear me out! My mind is made up.
BARBARA: Surely you…
PETER: Control yourself my dear. You heard the man!
BARBARA: I just don’t think…
PATRICK: No. No, no, no. I’ve decided. There’s just too much to lose, what with the Congo, American Tobacco, that ghastly foul-up in Laos…
BARBARA: But yesterday you…
PATRICK: Heavens woman, yesterday was 24 hours ago!
PETER: I congratulate you on your grasp of metaphysics, if not your sense of realpolitik.
BARBARA [FALLING TO HER KNEES, SOBBING] I beg of you…please…think of…
PATRICK: Think of what? Think of Oxford after the war? Think of the Isis in the moonlight, lying in each other’s arms while discussing the putative decline and fall of neo-fascist totalitarianism?
PETER: You have to admit, my lady, he does make a powerful case.
PATRICK: Please believe me. I have no choice. It’s just…it’s just…a matter of expediency…
[THE DOOR FLIES OPEN]
MICHAEL JAYSTON: Stop! Don’t sign! You mustn’t! I’ve…
[A SHOT RINGS OUT]
PETER: Expediency, you say?
[MICHAEL COLLAPSES ON THE FLOOR]
PETER: Hurry now. Name your price.
[PATRICK WALKS BEHIND HIS DESK, OPENS A DRAWER AND PULLS OUT A PIECE OF PAPER. HE SCRIBBLES SOMETHING ON IT, THEN WALKS OVER TO PETER AND HANDS HIM THE DOCUMENT]
PATRICK: My final offer. And believe me, I’ve sacrificed far more for far less.
PETER: I…I…
BARBARA: [HYSTERICAL] What’s the matter? Lost for words, you filthy man?
PETER: One English pound sterling?
PATRICK: Hand it over!
PETER: You will not regret this, comrade.
[HE HANDS OVER ONE POUND NOTE, THEN, CASTING ONE LAST GLANCE AT BARBARA, HURRIES OUT OF THE DOOR]
[INSTANTLY, ANOTHER MAN RACES IN]
PETER BARKWORTH: [PANTING] Was that who I think it was?
PATRICK: Alas, yes. That was the new owner of…the London Evening Standard.
CLIFFORD EVANS [STEPPING OUT FROM BEHIND A PILLAR, WHERE HAS BEEN SECRETLY WATCHING THE ENTIRE SCENE]: And may God have mercy on our capitalist souls.
[CUT TO BLACK]
Play for Today was a strand of single dramas on BBC1 which, even now, remains a byword for ‘serious television’. It grew out of the Beeb’s great dramatic success of the 1960s (and Sidney Newman’s rival to his own Armchair Theatre on ITV), The Wednesday Play. The two current series producers on the strand – Irene Shubik and Graeme MacDonald – were carried over, along with many of the same writers. The change was down to a practical scheduling matter – he schedules needed freeing up in the late evenings, most significantly for Sportsnight, so the day-independent monicker was adopted and for the rest of its run, with a few exceptions due to special events, strikes, last-minute cancellations and the like, the strand went out on either Mondays, Tuesdays or Thursdays. Critics baulked at the move at first – did a lack of commitment to a regular slot imply an ebbing away of support for the strand in general? Fortunately, the next fourteen years of the new series would render these worries largely unfounded. If anything, the new name reaffirmed Newman’s initial commitment to providing uncompromising new works of drama addressing modern issues.
Play for Today was in no danger of flagging. Wednesday Plays like Cathy Come Home and Dennis Potter’s various works had set the agenda so quickly that by 1967 the Guardian could define that, while BBC2′s Theatre 625 strand was largely concerned with adaptations of the classics, The Wednesday Play “is for beating the bourge
oisie around the head and shoulders.” The bourgeoisie evidently lapped it up, though – figures for the early years averaged out at a shade under four million, and remained respectable through the first seasons of Play for Today. Edna, the Inebriate Woman, for instance, attracted an audience of 9 1/4 million – not the kind of figure you’d expect today for an uncompromising look at down-and-outs in darkest Hackney.
The vices of Play for Today were in abundance too, however. Think of the cliches people were associating, almost automatically, with the strand by the late ’70s – a single mother bawling her eyes out in the dingy corner of a council flat; a bunch of earnest young Trotskyites with bushy moustaches and even bushier girlfriends gathering on picket lines; a middle aged man clutching his head and screaming like a dying cat in his recently-destroyed front room as the screen goes all wobbly; a family huddling together in a makeshift nuclear bunker as The Big One finally goes off overhead; a silver suited, colour separation-saturated imaginary future where nobody works, eats real food or speaks with apostrophes. All really did happen, though often (but by no means always) with a twist, a new angle, or at least some underlying intelligence that populates the old scenario with real people. “Themed” runs were instigated too, like executive producer Margaret Matheson’s 1978 series of plays based round public issues, which sounds stifling, but with plays as varied as including The Spongers, The After Dinner Joke, A Touch of the Tiny Hacketts, The Legion Hall Bombing and Victims of Apartheid among the results, the strength of the writing more than justified it.
Left-wing political stances were dominant of course, and with it came a rather odd and stuffy argument about technique. The ‘naturalist’ style, commentators argued, with its desire to present fiction as documentary fact, was in danger of stymying awareness of the possibility of social change by presenting, say, the plight of single mothers in The Spongers as a fait accompli, a state of affairs set in stone and therefore not worth questioning or acting against. Of course, a random sample of realism from this strand should be enough to repudiate this hopelessly detached bit of theory, but it’s also worth noting that the ideas over-theoretical academics like Raymond Williams proposed to remedy this situation – Brechtian fourth wall-breaking, “showing the frame” and suchlike – could often lead to cloistered, hopelessly self-indulgent pieces of work that bore little of no relation to the world they were supposed to be drawing from. In the hands of someone like John McGrath, non-naturalism can be a powerful tool. But then McGrath cut his televisual teeth on the staunchly realistic Z-Cars. The ‘naturalism’ debate was a theoretical cul-de-sac that fortunately TV strands like Play for Today managed to resist somewhat better than the theatre world.
Among the big names, Dennis Potter made possibly the biggest impact, with Double Dare, Brimstone and Treacle (even though it wasn’t shown at the time) and the brilliant Colin Welland-in-shorts childhood reminiscence Blue Remembered Hills, which was to be his last Play for Today as serials (beginning with Pennies from Heaven) be
ckoned. Mike Leigh made good with Nuts in May and Abigail’s Party, but it would take a few more years before their cult status really took off. Elsewhere Jack Rosenthal and John Mortimer were waxing wry, and Roy Minton, Jim Allen, Barrie Keeffe and Alan Bleasdale were going for the jugular. Most importantly perhaps, the strand was continuing to provide exposure for first time and amateur writers such as Peter McDougall, who chanced upon his first commission while painting Colin Welland’s house. The writer/director/producer team as a creative unit was in full force here, and with directors of the calibre of Loach, Clarke and John MacKenzie on the books, quality was pretty much guaranteed along with experiment and innovation.
With the 1980s came two factors that were to aid the slow death of the strand. Visually, things were slipping. In many late plays – the science-fiction plays, of which there were more in the ’80s than ever before, being the prime examples – the old low-budget techniques were beginning to look tacky and dated, especially when, as was often the case by 1982, the strand was interrupted for runs of lavish mini-series like Shogun. Cost was another factor. The BBC’s accountants begin to take a closer interest in the contents of plays, especially before commissioning them. Room for experiment in the script, and exploration of themes not likely to attract a mass audience, or a respectable one – the key tenets of Play for Today – become much harder to get through the system. Other factors, like the birth of Channel Four, also took their toll, though Play for Today was already breathing its last by the time Four’s drama output got into its stride.
While it lasted, the final phase of the strand put out some excellent stuff. The Black Stuff is undoubtedly the most well-known, mainly through the spin-off series (if you’re wondering why 1983′s output seems especially impoverished, that year also took in Bleasdale’s mini-series). Sci-fi plays like The Flipside of Dominick Hide and Z for Zachariah were massively popular with a young audience, as, to a lesser extent, were the Plays for Tomorrow. Respected hits included The Imitation Game and Country. More bizarre fare scored in the shape of The Adventures of Frank, The Kamikaze Ground Staff Reunion Dinner, and A Brush with Mr Porter on the Road to Eldorado. Thatcher’s activities in the economy, Northern Ireland and, latterly, the Falklands, provided more political subject matter, as did the preoccupation with the Thames flooding.
It didn’t look like Play for Today was in any real danger of running out of ideas or subjects, but an increasingly lacklustre performance in the schedules, combined with poor treatment by schedulers and the economic concerns mentioned above, finally did for it, and at the end of August ’84 the strand was quietly wound up (the week after saw the celebrated dramatisation of The Invisible Man in its place). Stranded drama was reborn on the ‘minority’ channel in ’85 with Screen Two, with a mainstream counterpart Screen One arriving in 1989. (Note the change of emphasis from plays to films in the title.)
From its roots in the very beginnings of television drama, when producers pulled new talent (literally) off the streets and a playwright could live quite comfortably producing two works for television every year, Play for Today had succeeded in uniting (or at least brigning together) the popular with the experimental, the respectable with the wayward, the underground with the drawing-room. A prime evening slot on the country’s most-watched channel was privy to drama more daring and amazing than most stuff on today’s limited release arthouse circuit. When Geoffrey Palmer’s hidebound military fantasist Jimmy listed Play for Today alongside Wedgewood-Benn and ‘keg bitter’ in his demented hit-list in The Fall and Rise of Reginald Perrin, it was a sign of the slot’s stature in national consciousness – many became converts to the slot, many more most likely switched off in bewilderment, but the figures show a majority of the viewing public must have at least ‘given it a try’ at some time or other.
When management curtailed the ‘right to fail’ of TV drama, they clipped its wings to an extent – with one eye perpetually on phantom overnight ratings, the heights that Play for Today and its fellow (and indeed rival) strands had reached would seem even further away. At the risk of romanticising old telly (perish the thought!) serials – the backbone of ‘serious’ TV drama more so than ever now – just don’t have that unique, hermetic, often slightly skewed aura of the single play, the great joy of which is seeing it introduce its entire world, run the c
haracters through their paces, and bring itself to a conclusion – then disappear, never (in most cases) to be revisited, continued or recycled. ‘Bubbles’ of drama that are gone almost as soon as they arrive aren’t good business, but for our money they make the best telly.
Great drama is still being made, of course, but the rigmarole of production now irons out every potential crease or kink, and the ad hoc variety that had been, despite the stereotypes of lefty propaganda still parroted by bottom-feeding broadsheet hacks, Play for Today‘s real hallmark, may never be recaptured on TV to such an extent again.
Here, in chronological order, including those ‘unofficial’ entries in the canon that vex the pedants so inexplicably, are all three-hundred-plus entries in the greatest drama series known to mankind.
No more, please. Too many chunks of childhood have already been lost this year to warrant such a rate of expiry persisting any longer.
It’s not fair. January is a barren enough month as it is. To have four masters of the crystal bucket vanish in a mere seven days…it’s just not on. This virtual black armband is starting to lose resonance. How can you celebrate the way things were if you’re stuck only ever having to commemorate it instead?
Of the latest casualty, despite no longer here in any physical sense, the very least you can say is that Tony Hart’s spirit lives on. It lives on in anyone who ever used a wooden stick to carve a giant face on a sandy beach; anyone who ever added a pair of eyes, hands and feet to that superfluous blob of plasticine in the school artroom; anyone who ever borrowed the family Pritt Stick, Copydex or Gloy Gum to doodle the outline of something on a bit of paper, shower the paper with glitter, then tip the paper on its side to reveal…a glittery doodle; anyone who ever filled a used washing-up bottle with paint, suspended it upside down by string, pricked a tiny hole in the lid then let it swing back and forth all over the back of an old bit of wallpaper; anyone who ever covered a sheet of paper with a rainbow of Crayola, then covered that with a layer of black crayon, then used a toothpick to scrape through the black residue and create magical multi-coloured houses, clouds and animals; and anyone who saw other people, people like them, getting their drawings shown on national television and felt moved to try and do the same.
Everyone, basically. His spirit lives on in every single one of us.
| Here’s a clip of the great man on the ace VISION ON from 1975, effortlessly snipping a parrot out of some orange cardboard, sketching a dog-cum-strongman and, for some reason, duelling with an oversize rubber ball. |
It’s high time to see how TV Cream’s predictions for 2009 turned out. Who’d have thought that, as Big Ben chimed midnight back on New Year’s Eve, time would race so stoically yet falteringly onwards to 12.01am. Yet it did, and if ever there was a moment for looking back in a context not involving a BBC4 theme night rooted in a grim 60-minute Mark Lawson-piloted interview, now might well be it.
What, then, in our poll of likely events for 2009, proved to be on the money?
FORECAST: After spending much of 2008 trying to end Jonathan Ross’s career, journalists at the Media Guardian will spend much of 2009 trying to avoid losing theirs by generating copy based on numerous stories about Jonathan Ross.
TV CREAM 2009 MATRIX DATABANK SAYS: Ding!
FORECAST: The Dr Who fan community will accuse the programme’s makers of “breaking” the franchise by choosing a new Dr Who who isn’t a) older than them like David Tennant b) a Shakespearean actor like David Tennant c) in possession of bug eyes like David Tennant d) David Tenannt
TV CREAM 2009 MATRIX DATABANK SAYS: Ding!
FORECAST: Radio Times will run a billing on its ‘Today’s Choices’ page which ends by saying, with brazen laziness, ‘DVDs were unavailable but expect x, y and z’.
TV CREAM 2009 MATRIX DATABANK SAYS: Ding!
The City Uncovered with Evan Davis, Wednesday 14 January, 9pm BBC2
‘…DVDs were unavailable but expect hand-waving, twinkling smiles and lucid analysis.’
FORECAST: Patrick McGoohan will die, and someone will try and claim he invented the TV series Lost.
TV CREAM 2009 MATRIX DATABANK SAYS: Ding!
FORECAST: The Daily Mail goes fucking mental.
TV CREAM 2009 MATRIX DATABANK SAYS: Ding!
FORECAST: TV Cream Towers will compose a blog post on the premise that the year is over when it’s only half-way through January.
TV CREAM 2009 MATRIX DATABANK SAYS: Zero points. ‘Compose’ implies some thought goes into this thing.
| In tribute to the Guv’nor, here’s the BBC’s much-loved The Way We Were montage featuring the face of snooker through the years, plus a host of other cue-related memories. Stand by to get misty-eyed by those clips of Higgins, Reardon, Thorburn and the rest. |
Along with deelyboppers, the epitome of ghastly-but-fun fashion nonsensista that the 1980s retched out, with high street clothiers quickly noticing the potential of these pop star endorsed bits of garish towelling fabric and stocking (arf) them in large baskets with big arrowed signs above. Possibly the first time socks were ever cool, children everywhere insisted on owning a pair of pink, yellow, green and orange and then, in a further innovation, wearing a different colour on each foot every day. The material wore out at the heel very swiftly and was at the total mercy of the unpedicured, while the non-towelling type preferred by teenagers proved slightly more durable, but still looked hideous (and, as a quick experiment involving a cancelled lightswitch attested, were not actually luminous). Schools went so far as to ban them, even in primary establishments where uniform wasn’t compulsory, and the craze had mercifully bitten the dust by 1986.
Farewell to the guv’nor.
Superstars, July 1983: the man grills Brian Hooper while Stuart Matthews, David Wilkie, Lynn Davies and Conrad Bartelski look on.
Taking a cue from Five-Centres’s speculation on the likelihood of a docudrama about the Marchioness, it’s time for another bout of fantasy casting – specifically, the identity of those gracing this year’s slew of anniversary programming.
Where There Is Discord…
A 90-minute drama marking the 30th anniversary of the election of Britain’s first female prime minister.
When Jim Callaghan’s Labour government loses a vote of confidence in the House of Commons, the country goes to the polls. The choice: Uncle Jim’s battle-worn administration, recently buffeted by headlines accusing them of leaving the entire nation’s dead unburied on street corners; or a woman from Grantham willing to be photographed holding a baby cow.
Starring Alun Armstrong (Jim Callaghan), Richard Briers (Michael Foot), Penelope Wilton (Margaret Thatcher), Peter Egan (Denis Healey), Caroline Quentin (Shirley Williams), David Mitchell (Roy Hattersley), Richard Wilson (Willie Whitelaw) and David Tennant (David Steel). With guest appearances by Ralf Little (striking binman), Ruth Jones (steel worker’s wife) and Les Dennis (man who designs Labour Isn’t Working poster); and Tony Blackburn, Rik Mayall and David Dimbleby as themselves.
(BBC4)
Marchioness! The Day Thatcher’s Children Died
30-minute dramatisation of the sinking of the pleasure boat Marchioness by the dredger Bowbelle in August 1989.
A star-encrusted cast recreate a night of tragedy. Starring Jessie Wallace, Christopher Ellison, Kate Copstick, Tony Slattery, Melinda Messenger, Leslie Grantham and Colin Baker. Featuring a guest appearance by Norman St John Stevas.
(Five)*
It’s Good To Squawk: Busby, BT and The Great British Sell-Off
Raucous 60-minute comedy drama revisiting the background to the privatisation of British Telecom 25 years ago: an emblematic moment in Thatcher’s Britain and the first of many denationalisations of publicly-owned utilities.
It’s 1980: British Telecom is born, and two hassled advertising executives (Mark Gatiss and Paul Shane) struggle to come up with a gimmick to promote the new brand. Little do they know that four years later their client will be forced to sell itself back to the country and our heroes will be landed with a wave of come-and-get-it national campaigns. Also starring Stephen Merchant as Norman Tebbit, Rob Brydon as Neil Kinnock, Catherine Tate as Margaret Thatcher and Simon Bates as himself.
(Channel 4)
*Actually, according to Wikipedia a dramatisation has already been made and was scheduled for transmission in 2007, but ITV pulled it.
Forget your Specials, Police, Blur, Carter the Unstoppable Sex Machine and whoever is reforming (again) in the next 12 months. Now that The Beautiful South is no more, it must be only a Humber-spanning period of time before the second best band of the 80s, the third best ever songwriting partnership in Britain and the fourth best band from Hull get back together.
They’re all still on good terms. There wasn’t any bad blood at the time, even when they swapped drummers between albums. Indeed such was their nonimosity they used this changing of the skins (usually that most bitter of musical machinations) into a conceit for the following, irrefutably* one of the finest singles of the decade:
*The evidence being the fact the final score is, still, London 0, Hull 4.
What’s to look forward to this year on a notable numerological bent?
For starters there’s a slew of TV stations-cum-channels who are chalking up significant birthdays. Sky is 20 years old on the 5th February, the date when it launched its original four channel package in the UK on the Astra 1A satellite: Sky Movies, Sky News, Eurosport and the flagship Sky Channel with glittering new fare such as Joanie Loves Chachi, the Nescafe UK Network Top 50 and – still going strong today – The Hour Of Power. Will there be a lavish retrospective brimming with finely-chosen archivery topped off with clips personally selected by Rupert Murdoch himself? No.
More promising, perhaps, are the 50th birthdays of, respectively, Tyne Tees (15th January – that’s next week!) Anglia (27th October) and Ulster (31st October). There’s got to be some potential for nostalgia programming here, not least with Ulster, who usually seize any opportunity to poke the rest of ITV in the eye with a independent-sized finger. But is there anything scheduled for transmission next Thursday, when TTTV notches up five decades of broadcasting? An evening of fun, laughter and surprises live from a boat on the Tyne with Mike Neville? At the moment, no.
How about a few individual programmes being honoured with a coming-of-age season/remake/talking headathon on BBC4? It’s 50 years since the first Juke Box Jury, since Quatermass and The Pit, and – above all – the first proper TV general election coverage. That last one clearly merits plenty of hat-doffing, preferably in the shape of a complete repeat run of all election night programmes on BBC Parliament, including every single by-election, local election and European election to boot. Well, they’ve got three months’ airtime to fill in the summer, for heaven’s sake!
Other anniversaries include Monty Python (40 years: what’ll we get this time? A DVD entitled ‘The 40 Most Repeated Yet Undeniably Amusing In A Faintly Uncomfortable British Kind Of Way Great Big Monty Python Sketches’? Or, what we really want, a DVD of the fucking series with a load of decent fucking extras for once?), To The Manor Born, Shelley and Not The Nine O’Clock News (30 years) and Seinfeld (20 years).
Plus there are all the pop cultural milestones, like it being 25 years since York Minster was struck by lightning, the Liverpool Garden Festival and British Telecom being privatised; and 20 years since the Exxon Valdez burped all over the coast of Alaska and the Berlin Wall fell down.
Any sign of any of these being given a theme night on BBC2? A Radio 4 documentary? No. Granted, it is only 5th January. But those all-important contextualising clips of Busby, Michael Heseltine planting a tree in Toxteth and Arthur Scargill wagging a finger won’t clear themselves.
Gazing into the TV Cream crystal ball, bought from the boot of James Burke’s car one foggy afternoon in 1996, what does 2009 hold in store? One word: revivals.
With it being the age of make do and mend – itself a hand-me-down maxim from former times – the next 12 months are likely to be peppered with them. Comebacks. Resurgences. ‘Welcome returns’ (a phrase nobody ever uses in everyday speech ever: “What’s on telly tonight?” “Well, there’s a welcome return for The Krypton Factor, dear!”)
Here are 20 things that could possibly reappear at some point in 2009. And look: you can vote for the ones you think (not hope) will actually happen!
A few notes. Mr and Mrs would be hosted by Alan Carr, and would be a proper ‘ordinary people’ affair. The Yeti is next in line for a wacky encounter with wacky Dr Who David Tennant. Michael Grade is surely tempted to bring back rubbed-faced funnymen and women in primetime. ‘Five pounds in notes’ was once, and could be again, the amount you’d be able to take out of the country when going on holiday. Prefab Sprout, one of the greatest bands ever, are tipped to release a new album.
ACAS is in there because there’ll be strikes (cue talk of ‘a spring/summer/autumn/winter of discontent’). Strike It Lucky would be hosted by Joe Swash and would be a flop. Gallifrey has already been mooted wisely by Stuart over on Feeling Listless. Clive James might need the money. Danny Baker seems destined to become a full-on BBC ‘face’ once more. There’ll be a general election in the autumn and nobody will win a majority. Shooting Stars would be a series. Phoenix Nights would be a one-off, called Peter Kay’s Phoenix Nights For One Night Only. And December will be the 25th anniversary of Do They Know It’s Christmas. A remake will come out on SyCo records.
[polldaddy poll=1237670]
