It’s the third of TV Cream’s election-themed weekly podcasts – and it’s three in a row for Maggie as well.

Aside from our usual inspection of the Beeb’s results night coverage, this week’s effort offers you a landslide-sized poll-defying deluge of content, including:

- a stand-up routine about proportional representation courtesy of SDP/Liberal Alliance advocate John Cleese;

- David Butler remembering Robin Day and discussing what he hopes to be up to for this election;

- more from our dossier of Election Essentials, this week concentrating on upsets;

- a profile of that short-trousered shibboleth of Thatcherism, Colin Moynihan;

- and a rubber-faced tribute to the finest satire of 1987, Spitting Image.

As usual, there are three ways to hear the podcast:

You can download it from TV Cream (72MB); you can subscribe to it via iTunes; or you can listen to it right here:

(PS: Thanks to Chris Oakley for a very generous write-up on iTunes!)

HERE WAS a prime cut of your actual Public Service Broadcasting with a capital “p”, illuminated in red with a filigreed gold border on the finest vellum WH Smith’s could supply. All 37 of Big Willie’s plays were to be filmed (actually, taped in the studio for the most part), largely uncut, with the best actors the Corporation could lay their hands on, forming an authoritative record of the finest English drama and preserving the classic canon for the ages. Cedric Messina, the bumptious producer-at-large who helmed the Beeb’s Chekhov-by-the-yard heritage drama stalwart Play of the Month, was the man in charge. Monetary support came courtesy of several American institutions, including Exxon and Time-Life (who’d helped the Beeb out with previous heritage drama flagship Churchill’s People, although they didn’t like to talk about it). But the cash came with strings attached. The Yanks, typically, took our historic literature very seriously (possibly due to not having much of their own), so they wanted this series done properly. And properly meant as trad-as-you-please. So, right, no setting the plays in the future, or in space, or on trapezes, or in modern day Lebanon, or in the mind of a mentally challenged eight year old homeless girl on the Fall’s Road. We want spears, we want castles, we want codpieces. And we want them Tuesday.

And this was what BBC2 and PBS viewers got. At least, initially. Wisely deciding not to screen the plays in chonological order (which would have meant opening with limb-hacking miseryfest Titus Andronicus, not a very good gambit for a Sunday evening prestige drama), they kicked off with a nice, traditional, mild cheddar adaptation of Romeo and Juliet. Some of what followed was better, some worse, a fair bit just as dull. The whole affair looked like it was going to play out in this respectful but unremarkable fashion, and critics cocked a snook (the best snook, as ever, belonged to Clive James, who dubbed the whole hubristic enterprise the ‘Bardathon’). But two years in, the creaking vessel was shaken up as Messina was replaced on the bridge by everyone’s favourite magpie intellectual, Jonathan Miller. Getting in a fresh load of directors and technical types, as well as getting his hands dirty himself, Miller pushed the ‘trad’ stipulations as far as was humanly possible. Recreating old masters in televisual form was a favourite game, and the plays started to look fantastic, as opposed to just very bright and rather cheap. (Any dullard who reckons videotape is doomed to look shoddy next to film should be shut in a room with the beautifully lit All’s Well That Ends Well and told to shut up.)

On the less famous productions, mucking about was the order of the day. Stylised minimalist sets came into force, leading Clive James to waspishly express his concern for the actor’s welfare in The Winter’s Tale, fearing that if one of them “sat on a cone instead of a cube, the blank verse would suffer”. (Admittedly, it didn’t completely work – that production’s brave attempt to realise the infamous stage direction “Exit, pursued by a bear” owed a lot to the set dresser of Steptoe and Son.) Popular parallels with the tragic milieu were drawn out: in particular medieval royal courts were shot like scenes from Dallas (which, ironically, was what most people were watching instead, over on BBC1). Elsewhere Miller busied himself with recreating tricky perspectives in that oft-neglected sixteenth century building medium, untreated plywood, and turned Trojan war epic Troilus and Cressida into a tunics-’n'-togas version of M*A*S*H, complete with saucy pin-up etchings and an antiquarian Corporal Klinger. (He even, in a manic on-set bout of sub-Python whimsy, envisioned the prologue being spoken by Richard Baker, in full Renaissance garb, wandering around Troy with a BBC microphone in hand, until a passing Trojan points out that microphones haven’t been invented yet, and Baker stomps off in a huff. Sadly, somewhere along the line common sense prevailed.) Best of all, director Jane Howell, faced with presenting the titanic three-part Henry VI, shot the whole thing in a brightly-coloured recreation of a children’s adventure playground. Combine this with an electronic soundtrack by ‘Deadly’ Dudley Sutton, a swathe of randomly-applied regional accents, weird It’s a Knockout suits of armour looking like a cross between an American football quarterback and a DFS sofa, loads of really really long one-camera shots, a host of knowing looks to camera and a swordfighting Brenda Blethyn and the ten-odd hours practically flew by. And hardly anyone could moan about playing fast and loose with the Bard as the usual pernickety whingeing types knew damn all about the more obscure plays anyway.

As ever with these massive period pantechnicons, the casting was a source of endless off-topic fascination. You couldn’t chuck a halberd in most of the plays without clobbering a brace of famous names, and some came from well off the RSC-approved beaten track. Miller’s decision to cast John Cleese as an uptight puritanical Petruchio in The Taming of the Shrew proved to be comedy gold, and Leonard Rossiter, sporting exactly the same beard as Cleese, was the only great thing in the otherwise rather flimsy Life and Death of King John. Further down the list, Johns Birds and Fortune were arch artisans in Timon of Athens, Rikki Fulton was a Scotch and wry pedlar in Winter’s Tale, and Phil Daniels did a punked-up Puck for A Midsummer Night’s Dream. (The choice for Bottom was less unexpected – yep, Brian Glover.) Other experiments weren’t so successful. Again, the opening Romeo and Juliet stank the place out with much of its acting, especially the stilted turn from Anthony ‘Oh then. I see. Queen Mab. Hath been. With you.’ Andrews, and while it must have seemed like a wheeze to get Roger Daltrey in to play both Dromios (with a little Colour Separation trickery) in The Comedy of Errors, the results squeaked for themselves. Actually, perhaps the most unusual aspect of the productions was an inexplicable casting anomaly: 37 plays. Almost 150 hours of solid period television drama. Number of appearances by Brian Blessed: zero. What giveth?

Well, we may josh, but the best of the plays did live on, through the cheerfully ramshackle medium of the educational VHS cassette, which ensured that English students for the next decade would be all over the madly varying tones and production values, albeit increasingly wondering, as telly advanced in technique, why the camera never cut away, why they were always indoors even when they said they weren’t, and why Hannibal Lecter is being so easily duped by that bloke off the British Gas ads. Which was, perhaps, not the sort of grand immortality the BBC governors had envisaged for the series, but it’s a legacy nonetheless. “If I should die, think only this of me: that there’s a dusty old VHS in some corner of an English Lit resources cupboard that is forever Sunday night on BBC2 circa 1980.”

OBSERVERITE daughter of Liberal gourmet and cat food salesman Clement installed by The Bannister on lunchtime show, main running feature researchers attempting to answer obscure questions sent in by listeners – eg how much does TV ad airtime cost? – with comic interjections from a verge-of-Hollywood Craig Ferguson and a nascent Andy Davies doing the weather with sound effects. Shown the door after mass unpopularity with listeners (and Chris Morris), which doesn’t explain why she was then replaced by the hopeless Lisa I’Anson.

FLUFF-FRONTED mockery of all things History Of Rock-slanted, retelling The Rock’n’Roll years to incorporate James Brown building the Forth Bridge, Jimi Hendrix playing the theme from Coronation Street, and the radio edit of a half-hour Meatloaf song about making a cup of tea. Celebrated its third week on air with a special ‘retrospective’ show Solid Gold Knowledge, complete with congratulatory messages from Take That. Veritable parade of Before They Were Famousness included impersonated voices courtesy of Peter Serafinowicz, and scarily convincing approximations of The Clash covering Boney M by future volume-crazed Doctor Who scene-spoiler Murray Gold.

TYPICALLY futile mid-eighties attempt at luring the school holidaying kids away from Why Don’t You? and back towards the radio, albeit with a more culturally appealing agenda than usual. Steve Blacknell presided over the proto-Radio 5 potpourri, notably incorporating new Adrian Mole monologues, specially written by Sue Townsend and performed by original radio Mole Nicholas Barnes, and the six-part hiatus-plugging original-cast-recorded Douglas Adams-aping Doctor Who serial Slipback, notorious for its vast superiority to anything seen on television during the Colin Baker era.

How the mighty do fall. Julie Covington last appeared on TV as a member of the identity line-up on Never Mind the Buzzcocks. A depressing thought when you consider her career consists of being one of the first women in Cambridge Footlights and she performed in an early production of Carroll Churchill’s Cloud 9 (1973) but in 1976 she played Dee (Devonia Rhoades) in Howard Schuman (words) and Andy Mackay’s (music) Rock Follies, which earned her a BAFTA nomination.

This six part series documents the varying fortunes of The Little Ladies and the not-so-unwavering support of their manager. This is basically a six-part mini-series filmed as a stage play (taking its cue from fringe theatre), it was a radical idea at the time and an exotic draw to American audiences where became something of a cult hit on public service television (Schuman actually turned down an offer of £250,000 to Americanise the drama). Despite Schuman’s and Mackay’s dedication to keep the production British, Rock Follies was a difficult drama series to execute. Music wasn’t seen as a comfortable medium for drama , so they had their work cut out selling the series. Fortunes changed when Verity Lambert was made Head of Drama at Thames Television. After clarification that the series would emphasise character relationships over music industry satire, she commissioned Rock Follies with enthusiasm.

Covington’s Dee, the strongest singer and feistiest Little Lady, is the show’s focus, supported by Nancy ‘Q’ Cunard De Longchamps (Rula Lenska) and Anna Ward (Charlotte Cornwell). Dee’s a decent, energetic and ambitious performer with a wee tendency to over-sing. Being a spunkily attractive member of a band, Dee isn’t short of male attention and doesn’t have much problem balancing her open relationship with Spike (Bill Murray) with a newer liaison with groupie David (Chris Neal, an uncanny doppelgänger for Richard Beckinsale). Spike, who does have a problem with it, shows up the double standards of communal living and the wobbly ambitions of ’60s Bohemia. For one, there’s too much sickly group hugging and intrusive bundling into each other’s rooms.

Rula Lenska’s ‘Q’ is a slender part, but she has some degree of character development based on her gullible nature, dating a music columnist in a rough game plan for furthering the band’s public profile. He’s about as much use as a chocolate tea pot., but he is responsible for the series’ killer quote. “There are three types of women: birds, chicks and heavy chicks”. Anna is perhaps the least explored Little Lady: a long-suffering daughter of a rather priggish mother who disapproves of their modern, flagrant and meandering lifestyle who nevertheless does actually come along to her daughter’s gigs. Mainly to criticise, but still, she comes. She’s the post-war generation who tries but doesn’t get it. She’s not in the movement.

Schuman wanted to reflect Britain’s economic collapse, but it had to be fun first and foremost. The economic crisis caused problems in keeping the series on time and within budget. Only the first three episodes had been penned when the shows were commissioned. Schuman was agitated to the point of nausea trying to finish the script in time without incurring huge costs (a four week strike saved his bacon there).

The girls find themselves up against copious obstacles to their artistic integrity, mainly due to insolvency: whether or not they’re prepared to sell out to sell a few tickets down the pub. At one point they’re hoodwinked to appear in a soft core film, but decide enough is enough when it transpires the director has harder ambitions.

The appeal of Rock Follies is its sense of absurdity and elements of grit in equal measure. Roxy Music’s Andy Mackay created a surprise number one album with the soundtrack (with lyrics by Schuman). The series contains lots of attitude, Quatro-style leather and glam-flash costumes while managing to be worthy of celebration in its ability to make a mockery of largely unworkable 60s ideals.

It’s the second of TV Cream’s election-themed weekly podcasts, and we’ve moved forward 15 years to 1979.

Change is afoot, both in the corridors of power and Television Centre. Familiar faces are taking their leave and new faces are settling in for the next decade. And is that Richard Stilgoe’s piano being wheeled into the BBC election studio?

Alongside a look at how the Beeb covered the result on air, this podcast also:

- prays for a moment of hush amidst the hurly-burly of 1979′s party political broadcasts;

- considers what Not The Nine O’clock News news was almost not;

- hears from Dr David Butler who shares his memories of the 1979 election;

-  continues to compile an inventory of TV Election Essentials, this week concentrating on whimsy;

- and extends a welcome to planet girth for Cyril Smith.

As usual, there are three ways to hear the podcast:

You can download it from TV Cream (a Cyril-sized 77MB); you can subscribe to it via iTunes; or you can listen to it right here:

BILL-BAITING FRIDAY night coppering, focusing on seven wet-behind-the-ears trainee detectives, taken “under the wing” of textbook world weary hard-but-fair copper Rockliffe, played by moody IAN HOGG in a maroon anorak. Chanty nursery rhyme type theme song, with lots of tower blocks in the title sequence to denote grit, before Rockliffe and charges stood moodily in front of a van with show’s title written on the side in the grime as a blue light flashed. Practically every episode set on some council estate or other, and plenty of hot-headed mistakes from the decidedly rash Babies to raise the ire of the beleaguered Rockliffe. At least one McGann brother well to the fore, but stars of the show were reformed crim Steve Hood (BRETT FANCY), charismatic Welsh lardbucket Paul “Get us a pork pie, will you, and a sachet of brown sauce” Georgiou (MARTYN ELLIS), and not-at-all-unattractive Karen Walsh (SUSANNA SHELLING), forced on one occasion to pose as a nurse in order to catch a rapist: “Are those tights or stockings?” demanded a lustful McGann, and indeed the entire fourth form. Slightly annoying stylistic gimmick of constantly circling cameras detracted slightly from the action.

CHEAPO HIPPY puppetahon courtesy of one-man creative maelstrom (see MAELSTROM) RICK JONES, aka Yoffy. Our host would sit a trestle table in grey poloneck in front of minimalist blue background and proceed to converse with various characters he’d devised from gloves and pieces of card and ping-pong balls. In other words, Yoffy lifted a finger, and a mouse (Fingermouse – rapid, self-absorbed grey upstart – “Fingermouse/Fingermouse/I am a sort of wondermouse/A hit, a miss/A blundermouse/Fingermouse, that’s me/I am a mouse called Fingermouse/A mouse with guts and nerve/I get past cats so easily with my famous body swerve”) was there. Put his hands together, and a seagull (Gulliver – tuneless singer, least popular character – “I like to flyyyy/And spread my wiiiiings/Above the rooves and trees/And then to gliiiide down/Down onto the sea/Fold my wings behind my back/And float just like a boooooat…” or something) took the air. Yoffy lifted another finger, and a scampi darted about (“My name is Scampi/Scampi that’s me/I live in a hole in the sand/By the sea-eeee!” – constantly cooing to its five camp and glittery cohorts “Oh girrr-rrlls!” played by the five fingers of Jones’ spare hand). Yoffy bent another, and a tortoise head peeped out (Flash – “Slowly/Steadily/Moving at my own pace/They call me Flash/Though I don’t dash/Who wants to run a race?/As long as I get theeeeere/Why worry?/What’s the hurry?/Uuuuuuuuuuhhhh….”), a narcoleptic version of Magic Roundabout’s Dylan, “special shell” detatched for carrying stuff. Then they all went off to collect stuff for use in the story at the end. As usual, the journey was better than the arrival. Cost an average of fifty pounds an episode. Recession-beating genius!

Welcome to the first of TV Cream’s election podcasts.

Each week between now and polling day we’ll be hastening through telly hustings of the recent past.

We’re beginning in 1964 with Harold Wilson’s attempt to turf Sir Alec Douglas-Homeowner out of Downing Street using a pipe, some HP Sauce and the white heat of technology.

But besides looking back at what went on in BBC Television Centre on that nerve-jangling night of 15th October (and much of the 16th), the podcast also lifts its eyes from a list of the latest gains and losses to:

- pay tribute to former Foreign Secretary and professional pisshead George Brown;

- hear from Dr David Butler, who talks exclusively to TV Cream about his decades of TV electioneering;

- pause for a partly political broadcast about party political broadcasts;

- draw up our first list of TV Election Essentials, this week focusing on the role of the presenter;

- and find out what was, or rather what wasn’t, the big TV satire show of 1964.

Along the way there’s clippage from the likes of Alan Whicker, Raymond Baxter, Ken Dodd, David Frost, Tony Benn, Milicent Martin, Roy Kinnear, Cliff Michelmore, The Beatles and a man getting very cross with a crowd of people in Smethwick.

But enough of that. How can you hear the podcast? Let us count the ways. There are three:

You can download it from TV Cream (a landslide-sized 81MB); you can subscribe to it via iTunes; or you can listen to it right here:

Enjoy! And remember: listen early and often.

THE FLUFFMEISTER’S loveable, never-changing, Brentford Nylons-flogging patter reverberated through vehicles as diverse as the Saturday Rock Show and the Pick Of The Pops countdown, counting down the hits over the majestic At The Sound Of The Swinging Cymbal, not to mention the first ever Roadshow. Brought back in late eighties to plug Savile-sized gap in weekend schedules, reviving Pick Of The Pops as scratched 7″-prone oldies showcase, replete with those catchphrases: “Greetings pop pickers!”, “All right? Stay bright!”, “Not ‘arf!”. By dint of his apparent lack of ego, a genuine love of music and his eagerness to send himself and the whole thing up, a national treasure.

And here’s how we paid tribute to Fluff back in 2006…

AUDACIOUSLY fancying himself as the network’s answer to Alistair Cooke, gurning baseball-capped Genesis-discovering and all-purpose self-appointed ‘music industry expert’ Jonathan King filed regular five-minute reports from the Big Apple on many an early eighties Saturday afternoon, later translated to BBC2 for the long-running Entertainment USA. Heavy on breathless introductions of ‘the latest craze’ which invariably failed to catch on.

WRITING POWERHOUSE who filled Radio 4′s schedules virtually single-handed for decades on end, primarily with the spun-off from TV’s I Didn’t Know You Cared rambling travelogues of Uncle Mort, also somehow finding time to pen the equally numerous cricketing memoirs of The Brigadier, and absolutely gazillions of forgotten one-shot efforts like A Touch Of Daniel, Stoker Leishman’s Diaries, Visiting Julia and A Conspiracy Of Parrots. The very definition of the sort of idiosyncratic maverick talent that Radio 4 was made to support, and radio is a slightly less droll place without him.

THE ORIGINAL – and best – Zany Bearded Funster, Kenny Everett’s radio days have been not unreasonably overshadowed by his TV work, but the wireless was his first love and boy did it show. Starting off as a bedroom tape-maker obsessed with the strange noises boinging out of his wireless courtesy of The Goon Show, continuity announcers, tape-fiddler extraordinaire Jack Jackson and cutting-edge pop discs overseen by the likes of Joe Meek and George Martin, more through naivety than nerve he sent a tape of his ‘Quarter Of An Hour Show’ to the Beeb (a nickname he invented – FACT!), and ended up being interviewed on-air and offered an audition for the hip swingin’ Light Programme. Ultimately he got turned down out of an anecdote-friendly fear of having too many of those blasted ‘young people’ on the station, but wound up literally all at sea when he was eagerly snapped up by offshore Exclusion Zone-evading boat-based ‘pirate’ concern Radio London.

In between bouts of throwing up into the North Sea, Cuddly Ken perfected his unique brand of sonic tomfoolery with a mixture of offbeat gags, ‘talking back’ to pre-recorded tapes, larking around with studio technology, making up jingles over bits of the latest pop waxings, surreal overexcitement about all things Beatle (famously, he was sent to America with the ‘Fabs’ to chronicle their last big tour down a crackly Transatlantic phone line) and, well, silly voices, most productively in the company of like-minded Yank-accented cohort Dave Cash. He also perfected an unanticipated skill at getting in hot water with the ‘authorities’ through his liking for provocative yet innocent off-colour remarks, eventually getting the boot after ridiculing the fire and brimstone pronouncements of Big L-sponsoring religious loon Garner Ted Armstrong on air.

By this time, though, he’d become a minor sensation and more importantly had caught the ear of up and coming Light Programme producer Johnny Beerling, who bailed him out with a usually Beatle-centric slot on ‘pop magazine’ slot Where It’s At!, and a combination of audience popularity, behind-the-scenes popularity and general I-read-the-news-today-oh-boy shenanigans made him a shoo-in for the Radio 1-ushering group photo on the steps outside Broadcasting House. Initially he wasn’t given much elbow room in the schedules, but that all changed when a panicky reshuffle designed to get rid of the original intakees who weren’t ‘working’ saw him make Weekend Breakfasts his own, working his Wireless Workshop to within an inch of its technological life to create a lunatic vision of life at the Beeb involving much verbal sparring with such characters as Granny, Crisp The Butler, and an endless procession of doddery old BBC ‘suits’.

But it was this at-oddsness with said ‘suits’ that would prove to be his undoing, when a series of frown-causing instances of anarchic free-spiritedness (most infamously his all-too-vocal battering of the BBC’s Musicians’ Union-placating insistence on limiting the number of bona fide ‘pop discs’ that DJs were permitted to play) culminated an ill-judged joke about the Minister For Transport’s wife passing her driving test with the aid of a monetary bribe. Cue complaints, sacking, and hasty replacement with Zany Bearded Funster in waiting Noel Edmonds. Driven by the need to keep up the mortgage payments, not to mention the spiralling cost of Wireless Workshop upkeep, it was at this point that Ev started to become a Light Entertainment-friendly familiar TV face, though he kept one foot securely in the radio world courtesy of sketch comedy for Radio 4 (most famously the celebrated school holiday oddity If It’s Wednesday, It Must Be…) and a series of slots for BBC Local Radio stations, at least one of which – you guessed it – fired him for being a little too enthusiastic about plans to introduce a commercial radio service for the UK. He was allowed back onto Radio 1 for a short spell in 1973, but Beeb-demanding pre-recording took some of the fun out of it for him, and as soon as the much-bigged-up UK commercial radio became a reality, he hightailed it in the direction of Capital Radio, where he was reunited with his former Radio London paymasters, Dave Cash, and more importantly his top-of-the-game creative impulse, grabbing national headlines on a local station with both his ‘Bottom Thirty’ rundown of the worst records ever made, and the spoof serial adventures of the intrepid Captain Elvis Brandenburg Kremmen.

This fresh burst of popularity led of course to a call from Lord Thames and the ratings-topping Video Show, after which his radio work fell by the wayside a bit, though after switching his TV efforts back to the Beeb he did enjoy a stretch on Radio 2, with a show that changed its title in ever more ridiculous ways every week and a renewedly controversy-courting gag about ‘Thatcher’, and after bowing out from TV work he returned to Capital Gold, where he still found time to do some edge-cutting in and around the ‘ golden oldies’, including pretty much inventing modern media by broadcasting an entire show live over a mobile phone while stuck in a traffic jam. Kenny Everett kept broadcasting right through his terminal illness, including a moving yet hilarious appearance on Desert Island Discs (“now Kenny, you’re HIV positive…” – “yes, and hello Sue, by the way”), and the across-the-board sadness that followed his death proved just how pivotal he was to everyone from those pioneering authority-defying pop fans to youngsters who’d marvelled at the animated Captain Kremmen. It’s all too easy to describe Cream-Era figures as ‘one-offs’, but Kenny Everett really was, not just because of his persona but because in many ways he was the first, and everyone from Adrian Juste to Chris Morris has been only too happy to anckowledge his significant – if diffuse – influence. So keep an ear out the next time on your radio again, come the strains of Cuddly Ken…

13 EPISODES of sepia soft toy sophistry from the late mind of cardboard scissor-whizz turned latterday environmental doommonger OLIVER POSTGATE. Desperately slow plots always began the same way – with a desperately slow rundown of precisely what was about to happen, depicted in faded prints of the kind they used as props in NEVER THE TWAIN. A girl, Emily, then appeared dressed as if it were the 1840s, who for some reason “owned” a shop that sold nothing. Everything – here comes the hook – on display in the window was lost property, watched over by the store’s resident custodian and “old fat furry catpuss”. Said feline – baggy and a bit loose at the seams – was then called upon by Emily in textbook 70s hippy chanting, to “wake up and look at this thing I bring; wake up, be bright, be golden and light!” Bagpuss responded with a huge yawn (securing plus points ad infinitum from bored teenage/student viewers) and the episode proper began. Those shop “assistants” in full: a toad with a banjo (Gabriel – “Oh, look!”); a load of mice on their “marvellous mechanical” mouse-organ; can’t-be-arsed rag doll Madeline; and, hero of the hour, woodpecker bookend Professor Yaffle, whose advanced years meant ambling down a pile of books to examine this week’s curio was hard going. Yaffle’s addled brain would then mistake a pin cushion for an earless elephant, while the mice would turn a doll’s house into a mill for making chocolate biscuits out of breadcrumbs and butterbeans, only to be exposed as a fraud. Such hysteria was interspersed with even more desperately slow songs and stories, before the mice did some genuine “fixing” and restored the piece of junk to its former glory, at which point its actual purpose was revealed and everyone went back to sleep. Show’s legacy far outweighs actual merits of each episode, but “when I produce Bagpuss at my student lectures, everyone cheers!” insisted Oliver, so that’s OK.

TYRE-SOME IMPORT (do you see?) drawn in that crappy style of the time whereby everyone had massive eyeballs, triangular mouths and “moved” by virtue of standing still while the background maniacally juddered out of focus. Laughably based on the popular Atari game effort. Two crimefighting siblings utilised their racing cars to, er, “fight crime”. Tess and Dan adopted the titular responsibilities, while typical big-pupilled cute girl, Daisy, daughter of their “chief” (whoever he was) got kidnapped at least once an episode. Plus, in yet another mid-80s giveaway, there was a crappy animal comedy sidekick, in this case a monkey thing calle Kuma.

FLOWER IN THE DIRT of much that was daytime. Pictionary rip-off for celebs in a notional “front room” set with sofa (for the men) and floor cushions (for the women) plus drawing board, but all of that was secondary to the genuinely entertaining vim, whimsy and patter purveyed by our hosts. Best was DANNY BAKER, who explained the rules in typical manner (“It could be a very simple title like Kickboxer II, or it could be something very complicated, like ‘Mother of mercy! The squid! She no longer responds to mind control!’”) while dishing out yellow “sticks” as warnings for using hands and mugs of pretend money for whoever correctly guessed a demented trivia question. Second best was BOB “WAISTCOAT WEDNESDAY” MILLS. A member of the public bolstered each team and provided source for regional quips. Worth remembering for latent speed-drawing genius lurking within TOMMY BOYD. Worth forgetting is wretched “late and lewd” revival in 2004.

ACCLAIMED docusoap send-up with investigative reporter Roy Mallard (Chris Langham) shadowing representatives of particular professions as they went about their working day with a mixture of gross stupidity and gross incompetence. Went on to do quite well in a TV version too but was cancelled in favour of The Office, and then… well, you don’t see so much of it any more, do you?

DEEPLY ODD show in which the titular ivory-tickler, who was regularly to be found cavorting on the fringes of comedy shows around then, overdubbed his favourite beat-jazz waxings with a ridiculous story about he and regular comedy mucker Rowland Rivron getting involved in an Ealing Comedy-style police chase across several continents after innocently setting out to discover the meaning of some lyrics indecipherably growled by grizzled old bluesman ‘Archibald’. Friendship with Vic Reeves may not have been coincidental.

In the words of that bloke who always closes the Olympic Games, and of Russell T Davies whenever he was asked to describe the latest Dr Who Christmas special, it’s the biggest and best yet.

TV Cream is taking its case to the country in the shape of a quartet of hustings-themed podcasts.

Starting next week there’ll be one to download every week until polling day, each focusing on a memorable year for election watchers – and, perhaps more importantly, for TV election watchers.

There’ll be various features, probes and Stilgoe-sized slices of whimsy contained therein, but there’ll also be a bit of grit in the shape of exclusive contributions from the great David Butler himself, the brainiest man in this or any electorate.

And here, by way of a taste of the podcast proper, is Dr Butler reflecting on the subject of the first podcast: the general election of 1964.

Download our podcast preview.

INITIALLY AFFABLE inventive bloke in oddly-named Sunday lunchtime slot Too Much Gravy, revolving around such offbeat gambits as Mind The Gap, basically phoning an unsuspecting celebrity during a brief bit of silence in a pop record. Then he had a couple of big TV hits, and was duly repositioned as a Britpop-toting ‘Zoo Radio’ Breakfast host intended to increase Radio 1′s listenership tenfold. It worked for a bit, but then he got obnoxious, then arrogant (especially about his friendship with the Brothers Gallagher and the incredible feat of being more popular than a local radio DJ in a remote part of Scotland), then unlistenably vitriolic about individual Radio 1 ‘suits’, and finally tired and emotional before sidling out through the back door to concentrate on TFI Friday.

ANNUAL RESURRECTION ROUND ROBIN from His Holiness, piped live into living rooms at 11am sharp on Easter Day. Important enough for whatever would normally go out mid-morning on BBC1 to get temporarily ex-communicated and forced to take sanctuary on BBC2 (even if it’s the Grand Prix). Beatific enough to go out without a translation. C of E types regularly unsettled by double whammy of a) something on telly in a foreign language and b) something on telly in a foreign language to do with a religion that’s not theirs. Granted, Urbi et Orbi (or ‘This and That’) is not really designed for television, consisting as it does of a static shot of an old man reciting a lot of Latin in front of a million people in Rome. Nonetheless when the Beeb dropped it temporarily a few years back, a rift in the space-time continuum opened up in Cardiff Bay, thereby answering Stalin’s question: how many divisions does the Pope have?

STRICTLY RATIONED pre-home entertainment system helpings of Walt’s supposedly greatest hits, reserved initially for Christmas but later to become a schmaltzy schedule punctuation point at Easter and other holidays. Format never wavered. Miserly mouse uber-lord tosses the Beeb 40 minutes or so of gruel (two or three “much-loved” moments – a jungle creature singing jazz, Mary Poppins talking to a bird with grotesque over-sized human features – leavened with a load of rubbishy live action shit and stuff from The Aristocats) which are then linked by a celebrity from, depending on the economic climate of the time, the car park of Television Centre or sun-kissed Florida. Celeb would talk loyally of how they’d “always loved this sequence, where the dog and the cat kiss for the first time” and how we should “admire these fantastic real life shots of a snow leopard stalking its prey”. Somehow the trick worked and you felt privileged for getting served up tiny peeps inside Disney’s commonwealth of animi-nations instead of waiting for your local picture palace to put on a half-price half-term matinee.

But as the shows became more ubiquitous, so the quality threshold of celebrity dropped. The star-encrusted 70s had the likes of HARRY WORTH, PAUL and LINDA MCCARTNEY, Dr Who, BING CROSBY and THE GOODIES (from, er, Selfridges in London) doing the talky bits. DAVID JACOBS did a 50th birthday special in 1977. Then in 1979 the show broke free of its festive berth, with JOHN NOAKES hamming and hawing his way through Easter Disney Time and ISLA ST CLAIR fronting the liturgically-correct Whitsun Disney Time. As the recession bit, Hollywood was out and homespun faces were in: WINDSOR DAVIES, LENWORTH HENRY, CILLA and TARBY were conscripted for early 80s efforts, while PENELOPE KEITH did a special one for the wedding of Charles and Di.

Matters weren’t helped by the crappy stuff the studio was now charmlessly churning out, and by the end of the 80s things had slumped still further, with Sir Jim’ll and the BP team gamely introducing “highlights” from The Fox and the Hound and The Journey of Natty Gann. SARAH GREENE and PHILIP SCHOFIELD did their best when asked to front these slim pickings, but by now most of us could see that bit from Herbie Goes to Monte Carlo whenever we wanted and didn’t give a toss about waiting for the next bank holiday. The franchise limped on into the 90s as increasingly pre-packaged homogenised gunk, offering “tantalising” “glimpses” of Cool Runnings and D2: The Mighty Ducks. At some point ITV bought it off a ready-to-sell BBC, presumably just in the time for equally “tantalising” “glimpses” of D3: The Mighty Ducks. We’re not sure when the whole kaboodle ended for good and disappeared, literally, into The Black Hole.

GOSPEL ACCORDING To Lord Lew. ROBERT POWELL played Him in Sunday-night multi-buck epic, born out of word-in-your-ear “exchange” twixt Pope Paul and Grade over tea in the Vatican. ANTHONY BURGESS and FRANCO ZEFFIRELLI were on scripture duties, while predictably stellar cast reeled in OLIVIA HUSSEY (Mary), ANNE BANCROFT (other Mary), IAN MCSHANE (Judas), MICHAEL YORK (John the Baptist), LAURENCE OLIVIER (Nicodemus – who?), RALPH RICHARDSON (Simeon), JAMES EARL JONES (King #1), DONALD PLEASANCE (King #2), FERNANDO REY (third King), JAMES MASON (Joseph – not that one), PETER USTINOV (baby-eating Herod), CHRISTOPHER PLUMMER (another Herod), ROD STEIGER (Pilate), STACY KEACH (Barrabus), CYRIL CUSACK (Yehuda), IAN BANNEN (Amos), OLIVER TOBIAS (Joel) and legions more. Three-year shoot based in Italy and Tunisia. Cigar-chomper reputedly arrived at million-pound selling price in above-Atlantic aircraft “daydream”.

PARISHONAL POW-WOW showcasing abnormally packed congregations doled up to the nines singing in an exaggerated fashion, interspersed with reflections on the locality from the likes of civic dignitaries, community leaders and the world’s oldest lollipop lady. Format barely touched since day one. Famous face (CLIFF MICHELMORE, PAM RHODES, MICHAEL BARRATT, DEBBIE THROWER) welcomes you to “the beautiful county town of…” while loitering in a churchyard. Then it’s inside for the first hymn (the words on the screen so you can sing along). Then it’s back outside for a nose around the vicinity. If it’s a fishing town, there’s always a shot of locals bringing in the first catch of the day at 5.30am. If it’s in a city, there’s a shot of a workman in an orange bib climbing onto a bus at 5.00am. More hymnnage follows. A celebrity born in the area will show up for some reminiscing (“I remember the Harvest Festival of 1957 when I dressed up as a wheat sheaf and forgot the words to the second verse of All Things Bright And Beautiful!”). A local sob story is told. Prayers will be read. During the final hymn the camera will pick out people in the congregation who were featured in the programme earlier. Then it’s a dutiful farewell from our host and that strident organ theme to send us on our way feeling suitably wretched. An immovable feast at 6.40pm on Sunday teatimes for decades, even turning up on Christmas Day, though latterly its timeslot has crept back to 5.30pm. Hosts now include JONATHAN EDWARDS and also DIANE LOUISE JORDAN who lied about being a Christian when applying for the job, only for prolonged exposure to the book of Jobe and all 3,781 verses of Guide Me Oh Thou Great Redeemer to convert her on the spot.

IT ALL STARTED when scarily young radio producer Armando Iannucci got fed up with a Capital Radio ‘news’ show that seemed to be about 3% speech, and 97% jingles telling you that you were listening to the news. In came controversial local radio DJ Chris Morris, who’d already got himself into the odd bit of trouble with invented news stories, and writers Stewart Lee and Richard Herring, who’d been trying and failing to get similar material onto Week Ending, and they came up with an all-too-plausible mockery of the pomposity of modern hi-tech news broadcasting. Joining Morris in the guise of regular characters like Alan Partridge, Monsignor Treeb-Lopez and Rosy May were Steve Coogan, Doon Mackichan, Patrick Marber, David Schneider and Rebecca Front, with moonlighting NME pisstakers David Quantick and Steven Wells throwing a couple of invented headlines into the mix. Show got very big very quickly, especially when a moaning journalist complained that he’d been late for work because of a story about tube stations slipping loose, leading to equally high watermark-setting TV adapation The Day Today, and numerous often equally strong spinoffs for a solo Alan Partridge. Also begat in various roundabout fashions The Saturday/Friday Night Armistice, Fist Of Fun, Brass Eye and Chris Morris’ Radio 1 show, and by virtue of influence The 11 O’Clock Show, The Office and Fonejacker. Yeah, thanks for that, Armando. Still blows virtually all other comedy shows ever made out of the water, as recent long overdue CD releases have proved, and invariably false rumours still circulate about one-off reunion specials.