Well, here’s the finished thing, performed by assorted contributors including a Zulu choir, the TV Cream Symphony Orchestra and Chorus, and a Boorish Group of Football Supporters.

It contains most of the suggestions left by TVC readers, the one missing ingredient being a bit that slows down then speeds up again. Which was too difficult. But it does feature:

- Tribal chanting
- Tribal drums
- A football crowd cheering
- A referee blowing a whistle
- Clippage of commentators roaring
- A bubbly bassline like the one off Diamonds On The Soles Of Her Shoes
- A tin whistle like the one off You Can Call Me Al
- A bit for viewers to sing along with at home
- And a bit for viewers to clap along with at home

…which hopefully will suffice.

Imagine then, if you will, a BBC continuity announcer stepping up to the microphone and saying:

“So now on BBC1, live and uninterrupted, we join Gary Lineker in South Africa for the opening match of World Cup 2010!”

And cue this:

You can, should you wish, download it here.

“THE SHIRTS to watch,” boasted the endless ITV trailers. Larcernous Larsonery with sleazy wretch Thomas Sullivan Magnum (TOM SELLECK) mooching around hundreds of Hawaii islands which all looked the same in order to protect the estate of writer Robin Masters, aka The Voice Of ORSON WELLES. Hi-hi-hilarity ensues when Masters employes a stuck-up English manservant, Higgins (JOHN HILLERMAN), with whom Magnum ha-ha-has nothing in common. Numerous nubile assistants showed up along the way, and the whole thing ended with Selleck being killed and sent to heaven. But then it got recommissioned and Tom’s death became “a dream”, before second finale found Tom back in the navy and Higgins apparently the real Robin Masters. Utter preposterousness.

AN OFFICE, somewhere in Television Centre in the early 1980s. “We need something cheap to fill that pesky half hour slot between SIXTY MINUTES and TERRY AND JUNE,” moans one executive. “How about showing pop videos?” suggests another. “But not any ordinary pop videos. How about getting someone to make new pop videos for old songs?” “What, like those by The Beatles?” “That’s right, and The Rolling Stones, and all those other obscure 60s acts who would really benefit from some contemporary exposure on the BBC.” “Sounds interesting.” “Yes, and to introduce them, we can get a really big name from the world of music who’s got their finger on the pulse of popular culture.” “What, like DAVE LEE TRAVIS?” “Perfect!” “And we need a really glittering, eye-catching set, something that sums up the whole old-meets-new theme of the programme.” “What, like a fireplace?” “Spot on!” Gggnnn.

The first Wednesday Play to be banned (famously decried by the then Home Secretary as a danger to the mentally unstable), Peter Watkins’s perfectly-crafted piece of pseudo documentary covering the aftermath of a nuclear attack on London was still affecting on its eventual transmission in 1985. Use of handheld cameras, a carefully-paced ‘timeline’, and the familiar tones of Michael Aspel all helped shift the notion of televisual realism up several gears. Watkins, who also directed, had previously turned the same  documentary eye on the battle of Culloden.

James O’Connor ends the strand’s first full year with a raucous and touching comedy set around a London family’s Christmas. With George Sewell, Wally Patch and Carol White.

Two outings in two weeks for Dennis Potter’s semi-autobiographical hero. Upwardly mobile Keith Barron goes to Oxford and is disowned by his humble mining home town, yet looked down upon by the university grandees. Charles Collingwood is briefly seen. In the ‘sequel’ (actually written and produced first), Barton stands as a Labour MP (as Potter once did), but is again caught in the middle of contradictions, this time political. Full of witty exchanges and memorable scenes, particularly, in Vote…, an embarrassing canvassing trip to an old peoples’ home and a showdown with the Tory candidate at the council dinner. Arnold Ridley also stars.

By Terry Wale and Dawn Pavitt. Portrait of a superficially perfect marriage between young couple Barry Lowe and Hannah Gordon.

James Chase is a factory-working teenager in desperate love with Janina Faye. Tony Selby, Charles Lamb and Joss Ackland feature. Words by Fred Watson.

Director Ken Loach made a rare foray into the territory of the musical by directing this script from future Cavatina composer Stanley Myers and Private Eye writer Christopher Logue, in which Ken Jones is the estranged lead, breaking free of the worries of his old life with the help of his daughter.

Jack Hawkins is the eponymous Old Tory bigwig whose bluff, traditional values are brought crashing round him one fateful night. With Ian McKellen. Written by Alan Seymour.

Possibly the most celebrated of the strand’s early successes, Nell Dunn’s slice of the  highs and lows of working class Battersea life, ending with a then-controversial  pro-choice message, firmly established the Wednesday Play strand. Starred Carol White, Tony Selby. Ably directed by Ken Loach. Later reworked into a film.

More tragicomedy of manners from Julia Jones. Lancashire housewife Rhoda Lewis’ obsession strains relationships with family, friends and husband Reginald Marsh.

Peter Everett’s near-future take on the film noir genre, with a detective on the trail of an embittered former astronaut for the murder of a nightclub singer.

The Wednesday Play wasn’t afraid to approach the same source material from different directions, as here, with Dennis Potter’s exploration of the undertones of the Lewis Carroll books scheduled a year before Jonathan Miller’s famous adaptation in the same strand. An elderly Carroll is accosted on a train by a grown-up Alice, prompting flashbacks to his time writing Alice in Wonderland and his time spent with the young girl, to the consternation of her mother and his Dean. The subject of child abuse is present as an undercurrent, but never openly acknowledged. Scenes from the books are played out in front of John Tenniel-esque line-drawn backdrops. Heavily reworked some twenty years later as the film Dreamchild.

Peter Jeffrey’s marriage to Zena Walker comes under strain as he eyes friend Nigel Stock’s carefree bachelor lifestyle with mounting envy. Written by David Stone.

Troy Kennedy Martin’s adaptation of From Here to Eternity author James Jones’ novel in which a platoon of US Army officers find themselves at each others’ throats while holed up in a remote Hawaiian stockade during the attack on Pearl
Harbour.

Study of an American beatnik (Benito Carruthers) from the creator of Z-Cars, Troy Kennedy Martin. Bob Dylan supplies the songs, garage band The Seeds play.

Maverick writer David Mercer’s first play for the strand departs from much of his previous work, and in the process goes further down the road of experimentation than just about any previous television drama. Told in a series of skits, visual gags, dream sequences and bits of stock footage, with an arch linking voice-over, halfway between a Man Alive commentary and Lewis Carroll’s narrative voice in Alice in Wonderland, the play tells of the fight between cantankerous, aging aristocrat Lord Fountain (Patrick Troughton) and his illegitimate twin sons, the skinny Timothy (David Markham) and corpulent Bernard (Willoughby Goddard).

Being illegitimate, via Fountain’s cockney servant Maggie (Diana Coupland), the twins serve no purpose to Fountain for furthering his dynasty, and, on Maggie’s departure to live with brash, didactic artist Towser Griddle, who takes to keeping her in a cage while he paints her, Fountain tries various ways of sending the hapless pair off into obscurity. A stint at Oxford, where they prove less than successful with the girls via an alienating lack of small talk, is followed by a period in the army during WWII, which they spend in the Burmese jungle, befriending the local wildlife, and a lost Japanese soldier, Ishaki, who plays the flute while they sing twee and forlorn Carollian nonsense songs.

On return, the boys take jobs as junior zookeepers and hook up with two working class girls, Poppy and Laura, though the latter fell increasingly frustrated by the brothers’ emotionally retarded whimsical conversation and lack of sexual potency (as the recently-certified-virile Lord Fountain frustratedly bounds from one barren wife to the next). Lord F’s involvement in a dog food  company leads the brothers, in a state of panic, to unlock the zoo’s cages, leaving gorillas and wombats to charge about the Home Counties. Their borderline schizophrenic condition is not helped by any of this (Timothy: ‘Every morning when I open my eyes, I feel as if I’ve just arrived [...] and everything’s new and mysterious. At one time it was very serious. I had to go round at bedtime putting cards on things with their names on. Chair, bed, lamp, Bernard. Bernard looked quite odd with a card pinned to his pyjamas with “Bernard” written on it.’)

Poppy and Laura connive with lord Fountain to sue the brothers for breach of promise, an act which sends Bernard into a porpoise-filled coma. Ever more egocentric, Lord F dreams a conversation with God, who unsurprisingly backs him all the way (Lord F: ‘You’ll forgive me if I grin.’ God: ‘Why not? It’s your dream.’) The brothers move into their new womblike sanctuary – a condemned swimming baths which they decorate with candles and inflatable animals, and swing from two trapezes while singing nonsense to each other. Poppy and Laura turn up to voice their disgust at this further dereliction of duty (‘You’ve had all the advantages. You should be helping to run the country.’)

A game of Russian roulette goes nowhere (‘Did you put the bullet in?’ ‘No [...] it makes me too nervous.’) Finally, at a dinner party thrown by Lord F in ‘honour’ of his sons, set somewhere in limbo and with all the play’s characters, including Ishaki, attending, the pair are humiliatingly denounced by all in turn, before receiving a gift of a female mannequin each, and exiting dolefully to derisive laughter. Their swimming pool sanctuary destroyed by Fountain to make way for a supermarket, the boys flee, and are last seen in the company of Ishaki, piloting a canoe up the Amazon jungle.

Even from this outline the manic scope and absurdity of the play is obvious, but there’s a lot more here than bizarre satire at the expense of a crumbling post-war social order. After the brothers purchase their swimming pool, the pace and tone shift from quickfire farce to a more introspective, melancholy style, which mainly springs from the childlike questioning moroseness of the brothers themselves – a hauntingly real-sounding voice of madness in amongst the intentionally cut-out appearance of the play’s world. While it’s pointless to speculate on the mental make-up of the fictional twins (a doctor cautions Timothy: ‘Look old man, don’t let’s go careering down one of those Freudian side-tracks, eh?’) there is much here that tallies with Mercer’s fascination with schizophrenia, and their alienation from society, combined with their proto-hippie love of animals and desire to just ‘be’, makes a canny, and not overstated, link between the fragmentation of the boys’ egos and that of post-war society in general.

It’s perhaps fitting, then, that the play meanders to a close, but this is the nature of practically all of Mercer’s work from 1962 (when he wrote the groundbreaking A Suitable Case for Treatment) onwards. From then on, he claimed he never planned a play before he began writing, and so in the process it took him in directions as surprising to him as to the first-time viewer. A brave and foolish strategy – some times – as here and in his fine Robert Kelvin plays (see below) he gets away with it in style; at others (the fragmented Play for Today The Bankrupt) he loses his way utterly and no amount of melodrama can bring him back.

Here, though, Mercer is triumphant, as is director Don Taylor, managing his way through uncharted directorial territory with aplomb, coping with an ambitious and expensive shoot (the swimming pool scenes took two weeks after hours in bent ford Baths, with the crew working flat-out overnight in electrically-hazardous conditions) and handling the disparate elements (filmed scenes, silent inserts, limbo vignettes and stock footage) with obvious relish, taking care to steer the play away from the, as he put it, ‘twee’ abyss it constantly teeters over. Predating the anarchic cut-up comedy of Monty Python et al, while giving vent to a truly affecting voice of inner sadness that hasn’t surfaced in quite this way since, rarely was television drama to get this ahead of the game as Mercer did here.

Highly controversial offering from Michael Hastings. The story of the Belgian Congo massacres, given a necessarily bloody production which caused much consternation, helping, however inadvertently, to set the popular reputation of the strand as being a haven for sensationalism and violence.

By Alan Sharp. Bored teenager Paul Young fantasises his way through an impoverished Scottish adolesence.

Sectarian divisions in Ulster – a long-running source of material for The Wednesday Play – gets its first treatment here, in an indictment of Northern Irish “democracy” during a general election. Anton Rodgers and the writer himself (Sam Thompson) feature.

Jean Benedetti’s dramatisation of the famous trial of Italian anarchists Sacco and Vanzetti in ’20s Massachusetts, accused of murder during a payroll robbery on the flimsiest of evidence as a pretext for punishing them for their dissenting voice.

David Hemmings is a young man hitching his way across Europe to Athens, accumulating a string of casual relationships on the way. By Alan Seymour.

Millionaire Michael Finlayson buys and furnishes a sumptuous Georgian townhouse with help from master decorator Barry Foster. As Foster shows Finlayson’s wife Jane Arden around her new home, however, she begins to get designs of her own on him. Script by Jack Russell.

Second go-round for ex-con turned writer James O’Connor. Tony Selby plays a convicted murderer reflecting on his life and circumstances in his cell, in a story inspired by O’Connor’s ten year stint at Her Majesty’s pleasure in Dartmoor. Rita Webb, Wally Patch and Ken Jones feature.

Hugo Chateris’s tale of retired couple Leo Genn and Barbara Murray moving out from town into a country cottage, but coming up against less than friendly locals, just as their pampered cat comes into contact with the feral variety next door.

During the Korean War, Welsh MO David Collings is courtmartialed for accidentally killing a fellow soldier. Bill Meilen writes, Jack Watson, Eric Thompson and Peter Jeffrey co-star.

Ageing poet Denholm Elliot leaves his wife for single mother Barbara Jefford, but her daughter’s antipathy and the attentions of Jefford’s housemate Caroline Mortimer turn the affair into a tricky situation. Written by Thomas Clarke.

More from John Hopkins. Couple Glenda Jackson and Alfred Lynch’s quiet London lives are disrupted by the arrival of old art college friend Nicol Williamson, resulting in homosexual tendencies rising to the surface, and suicide.

Tense drama during a space mission when astronaut Barry Foster loses his grip on reality while in orbit. Jeremy Kemp is Ground Control trying to talk him down in the strand’s first shot at straight sci-fi by Marielaine Douglas and Anthony Church.

Dennis Price’s US-style assertiveness training weekend in a conference centre humiliates such needy participants as Yootha Joyce and Joan Sanderson with various memory/personality games until it is ripped apart by Stanley Baxter (in his only straight role), outwardly a shabby man in a mac but supposedly the reincarnation of 19th century essayist William Hazlitt (“1778-1965″). Dennis Potter’s first Wednesday outing, based on journalistic research he did into the then-popular Dale Carnegie and Pelmanism self-improvement courses, but a play he later appeared to disown.

Written by Eric Coltart. A young woman’s audacious choice of headgear leads to social unpleasantness on a night out in Liverpool.

An effective genre thriller by Marc Brandel with Scott Forbes playing an intimidating game of cat and mouse with Toby Robins in a remote Cornish cottage.

Misfortunes of a comical door-to-door pedler (Barry Foster) told in the humorous cut-and-paste style of films like A Hard Day’s Night, with plenty of vignettes and speeded-up chase scenes. Script by Hugh Whitemore.

Polemical fantasy by John Hopkins in which Britain is depicted under the rule of apartheid – but with the whites as the oppressed race. Eileen Atkins and Ronald Lacey find themselves in the ghetto, with Rudolph Walker and Carmen Munroe on the other side of the fence.

The first appearance of the wry and touching Julia Jones in the strand was this highly popular working class romance centring around two navvies.

Simon Raven’s dramatisation of the political machinations among university grandees debating whether a prestigious new college building should be a traditional chapel or modern lecture theatre.

1965: the strand sheds its adaptation-heavy beginnings and really gets into its stride. James O’Connor’s story of a gangster’s meteoric rise through the underworld to a position of wealth and power was one of the first Wednesday Plays to cause a media furore, primarily because its author had been convicted for murder in the past. An early directorial outing for master of the polemic, Ken Loach.

Another Canadian production, of Ivan Turgenev’s tale of a young boy’s naive infatuation with an older girl.

Roger Manvell’s dramatisation of the infamous assasination attempt on Hitler, carried out by Colonel von Stauffenberg.

Adapted by Rosemary Hill from the story by Henry de Montherlant. Patrick Wymark is the titular malevolent Renaissance man, a patron of the arts and mercenary in equal measure.

Michael Goodliffe is the titular ageing, embittered Scot who descends upon London during George III’s coronation – and reveals himself to be none other than former pretender to the throne Bonnie Prince Charlie. Based largely on real events by John Prebble, the scriptwriter of Zulu.

Rupert ‘Maigret’ Davies is a scheming Welsh councillor going after Daphne Slater, the infirm wife of his nephew (Nigel Stock). Alun Richards’ study of council corruption and small-town ennui was the first completely contemporary drama in the strand.

Wednesday Play instigator Sydney Newman bought some productions from the Canadian Broadcasting Company to the strand, a tradition which lived on into the early years of Play for Today. This adaptation by Fletcher Markle of a story by Katherine Anne Porter set during the 1918 Spanish Influenza epidemic was the first.

Harold Pinter, Jane Arden and Catherine Woodville find themselves pay for their various sins by finding themselves trapped together in hell – which turns out to be an overlit, modernist waiting room. Visual effects, courtesy the ever-experimental Philip Saville, add to the growing sense of nausea in this production of Jean-Paul Sartre’s classic Huis Clos.

Dramatisation of Nikolai Leskov’s short story The Sentry, about a private in the nineteenth century Russian army who rescues a drowning man.

The stand-alone TV play, though long superceded by the series and serial (and often, subsequently and wrongly, seen as old-fashioned for that very reason), has been a fair guarantee of bold, disturbing, thoughtful and plain weird entertainment for as long as TV has been around, and the most well-known ‘strand’ of new TV plays must be the BBC’s The Wednesday Play (or Play for Today as it was renamed when the transmission day was changed from its reliable midweek slot to become a movable feast).

The Wednesday Play was started by incoming BBC Head of Drama Sydney Newman in 1964. Newman, a brusque,  combative refugee from Canadian television, had joined the fledgling ITV company ABC’s much-feted Armchair Theatre strand early on and revolutionised the play anthology with two important additions – the introduction of a story editor, whose job it was to oversee the season and commission scripts from new, untested writers; and the advent of “social realism” – plays about “ordinary” (ie. non-upper-middle-class) folk, often “hailing from the provinces”, exploring social and political issues through personal stories, which came to garner the mildly derisory (and rather misleading) tag of “kitchen sink” drama

The Wednesday Play was conceived as a replacement for the station’s two extant play strands, First Night (‘controversial’ new plays) and Festival (new productions of established works – Beckett, Brecht etc.) and initially overseen by producer James MacTaggart, whose Teletales series of experimental dramatic adaptations had recently aired, the initial brief was to get away from the ‘kitchen sink’ cliche that had dogged First Night‘s output, and produce more new scripts from new writers, using more innovative production techniques and ideas

The Wednesday Play‘s first transmission on 28th September 1964 was Richard Eyre’s adaptation of Nikolai Leskov’s A Crack In The Ice, and in the early days the strand bore little resemblance to what it would later become most known for – the first series of eight plays, billed as “a stimulating season of international drama”, was mainly made up of Festival‘s cast-offs, and only two were entirely original scripts and only one of those, Alun Richards’ The Big Breaker, about the tribulations of a Welsh small-town councillor, recognisably contemporary in setting.

However, by the advent of the second series in January 1965, the strand had really found its feet, and the strand continued to run the gamut of drama, from the old-school of ’60s realism given a new documentary edge (Up the Junction, Cathy Come Home) to experimental, often mind-boggling productions (House of Character, The Parachute), launching and abetting the careers of writers as diverse as Dennis Potter, Jim Allen, Mike Leigh and David Rudkin, and directors and producers such as Ken Loach, Peter Watkins and Tony Garnett.

There are, undoubtedly, a number of stereotypes with which the strand became associated. The political slant of the more overtly agitprop plays (writers like Alan Bleasdale, Jim Allen, Roy Minton) was almost invariably to the left, but even so there’s a far greater variety of viewpoints and styles on offer than the “gritty” council estate/picket line polemic of popular myth (though there was some of that too).

The second stereotypical trait of The Wednesday Play that springs to mind is the Whitehouse-agitating desire to shock a notional provincial, middle-aged middle class out of their supposed complacency. Actually, this is a pretty prevalent theme when you take a look through the canon, though again it’s embodied in a bewildering variety of styles and subjects. Then there are the numerous (and often deeply personal) Ulster-themed plays, real-life stories dramatised in many different ways, a slew of mid-life crisis and marriage break-up character studies, a smattering of science fiction, the odd musical, and stuff like House of Character that truly defies categorisation – there was much, much more to the strand than sordid sex ‘n’ striking dockers.

When it comes to a lot of these plays you could argue the popular drama vs. intellectual self-interest card indefinitely, but the ratio of intelligently popular hits to obtusely indulgent misses was respectably high, and most viewers have memories, whether fond, disturbing, or just plain bewildered, of at least one. Here we present a complete-as-we-can-make-it guide to the the 170-odd plays produced for The Wednesday Play strand, from the landmark plays to obscure, semi-forgotten oddities. Taken together with Play for Today, it’s an anthology of the finest quality and broadest range ever seen on British television. Yes, the plays could be bleak, they could be obscure, they could be demanding, but not as a rule. And while dramatic failures were not uncommon, potboilers – schedule-filling slices of say-nothing telly cut to length and served up with a dramatic shrug – were few and far between.

Perhaps more than anything it’s that characteristic that makes them stand out from today’s risk-averse dramatic landscape. These days, the drama that aims high and crash lands is marked on first sight as ratings Kryptonite, and seldom gets past the lengthy commissioning process. Sound business practice perhaps, but how many ambitious potential successes are smothered at birth along with them? An all-comers anthology strand, with just one (or sometimes two) committed individuals with broad taste and a spirit of adventure manning the gates, has never been bettered as a means to get original, groundbreaking and supremely watchable drama on the small screen. Now, with the tradition long gone, it’s regarded as too financially risky to bring back. Drama still continues to surprise and delight, but original voices are fighting a much tougher, more prolonged battle to reach the screen. The days when a chance meeting in a bar, a conversation with a decorator or an unsolicited script in the post from a British Rail employee could lead to a prime-time classic are, sadly, gone for good. Here are umpteen reasons to mourn that passing.

Nul points! All the songs are called Ding Ding Dong! And Norway are rubbish, aren’t they? Ho fucking ho.

It’s time for Eurovision once more, as the pan-continental search for Europe’s songatheyear comes round again. TV Cream likes to eschew the hateful “hey, it’s so bad it’s good” approach to the whole shebang, and for a start, we’d like to point out that they never say “nul points”, because the points system goes down from twelve to one, so no “nul points” are ever actually allocated or referred to. And people are still somehow wringing comedic mileage out of the mere words Katie Boyle! Grrr.

Anyway, now we’re post-Wogan, and hence – in theory – post a few of these Eurocliches. And although Tel’s shadow looms large (as it does whenever the sun comes out), let’s not forget that back in 1967, it was Rolf Harris on the BBC lipmic in Vienna, which seems a bit of a waste.

In 1970, it was David Gell, whoever the hell he was, the following year it was Dave Lee Travis, and in 1972 – Tom Fleming! Bet that was a rocking show. In 1973 it was Terry for the first time, with Pete Murray on the wireless, and in 1974 it was, of course, David Vine (“My goodness she sold that well!”)

In 1975 it was the exact opposite that it had been in 1973, as Tel was relegated to the radio, so he must have made a mess of it before, and Pete Murray was on the telly. In 1976 it was Michael Aspel, and Pete was back in 1977, before Tel made a triumphant return in 1978. John Dunn did it in 1979, bizarrely, and Tel wasn’t involved at all, cos Ray Moore was on the radio.

But enough of that, because here’s a long list, in the shape of TV Cream’s guide to Ten Great British Eurovision
Failures:

1969 CONGRATULATIONS – CLIFF RICHARD
Ah, Cliff, forever wriggling around in figure-hugging blue crushed regency velvet in front of that big gold ‘E-U-R-O-V-I-S-I-O-N’ tableau. Penned by Coulter and Martin, responsible for Puppet On A String and, er, Back Home, but pipped into second by Spain’s La La La.

1974 LONG LIVE LOVE – OLIVIA NEWTON-JOHN
To Brighton for 1974′s extravaganza, into which these isles pitched Olivia toothily into the fray, in naught but a blue nightie. But we were betting without Abba, and ONJ could only finish a meagre fourth. Pah.

1977 ROCK BOTTOM – LYNDSEY DE PAUL AND MIKE MORAN
Come on, with a title like that, it was asking for it. Our plucky participants sang at it grand pianos facing one another. Europe remained unimpressed. Seventh. France won.

1978 BAD OLD DAYS – COCO
Despite featuring a nascent Cheryl Baker amongst their number, they could only muster an appalling eleventh with their tribute to Leonard Sachs. Truly the dog days for Blighty, these. Prima Donna, anyone? Black Lace doing legit?

1982 ONE STEP FURTHER – BARDO
The ‘Do featured Sally-Ann Triplett off of Stu Francis-era Crackerjack, and were endorsed by none other than Neil Tennant in Smash Hits. None of which could help them in the heat of, ahem, Harrogate, and were swept aside by
Nicole’s anthemic A Little Peace, which the headmaster of one of the residents of TV Cream Towers used to like to play in assemblies. Seventh again.

1984 LOVE GAMES – BELLE AND THE DEVOTIONS
Now we really are getting desperate. Imagine a sort of Dorothy Perkins Bananarama, all ribbons and polka dots and miniskirts. Booed off stage. And seventh yet again. Sweden take the crown.

1990 GIVE A LITTLE LOVE BACK TO THE WORLD – EMMA
Emma! She was Welsh! She looked a bit like Sonia! She sang a song about world peace and ending starvation! She finished sixth! Italy won with a song about European integration!

1991 MESSAGE TO YOUR HEART – SAMANTHA JANUS
It’s Britain’s great Eurovision maxim: never learn from the previous year’s failure. Hence the succession of overwrought pastel-suited male balladeer flops from the 80s. Another song about starvation (“and every day is a compromise for a grain of corn”) and hence Game On was seen as a step *up*. Tenth.

1992 ONE STEP OUT OF TIME – MICHAEL BALL
One step out of time! (doof doof) One reason to put this love on the line! Fresh-faced and clean-cut, Michael was nothing if not Cliff’s spiritual heir, and thus emulated him by finishing second. Punched the air in time with the doof doof bit.

1996 OOH AAH JUST A LITTLE BIT – GINA G
Into the Jonathan King years and hence the Ireland Forever Winning years, as satirised by Father Ted. The last Eurovisioner to make No. 1 in Britain, fact fans, although Gina limped to eighth on the night. Better than Love City
Groove, at least.

“IN FIVE MINUTES, Pete and Kathy are in for a shock when they return to Albert Square. But first…”

From 1986, the BBC’s original full-length trailer for CASUALTY, featuring consultant EWART PLIMMER introducing us to some of the people we’d soon be getting to know and love at Holby City Hospital. Here’s DUFFY, KUBA and BAZ… and “one of the most aggressive, irritating, natural nurses it’s ever been my good fortune to argue with!” It’s CHARLIE FAIRHEAD!

Once upon a time, this sort of thing was a regular sight on British television. EASTENDERS arrived on our screens with the residents of Albert Square introducing themselves in a series of vignettes (“They call me Lofty -- I think it’s cos I live up ‘ere!”), and when NEIGHBOURS moved to the 5.35pm slot in 1988, the BBC enlisted Madge to front a five-minute guide to the good folk of Ramsay Street.

If it were up to us, every new TV drama would be heralded by a lengthy trailer like this, featuring a member of the cast, in character, stopping for a chat (“Oh, hello. Welcome to Cranford!”) and introducing us to the rest of the characters (“and then there’s DC Chris Skelton -- ‘e’s a bit dim but his heart’s in the right place!”), before imploring us to tune in each week (“so don’t forget, make a reservation for Hotel Babylon!”).

OK, so a few turns on Celebrity Squares and 3-2-1 would allow for the usual brilliant schtick. But Give Us A Clue? How did that work?

TIME-MEDDLING POLICE-THEMED one-off BBC play by Arthur Ellis (not the It’s a Knockout scoremaster, sadly) with a premise you may have seen elsewhere. The scene opens in black-and-white on a technically nifty recreation of the finale of 1950 black-and-white “just good coppering” celluloid chestnut The Blue Lamp (the one which ushered George “Evening all” Dixon into the world – and promptly killed him off); but then, after a few minutes, the action switches mid-sentence to colour and the present day, with both Dixon’s murderer and his by-the-book escorting constable somehow transported forward in time into Bill-style 1980s cop drama ‘The Filth’, replete with bent pigs, foul mouths and knuckle sandwiches. Much confusion ensues, understandably. Someone, somewhere, may have been taking notes.

One of the best of the Beeb’s Screenplay offerings, not least for how, after roughing up a suspect using items of office equipment, one proto-Burnside detective delivers the immortal line: “Wipe that in-tray off your face”. Comic coda shows the time travellers’ ’80s counterparts likewise thrown back into a lovely old ’50s tea-and-jam-buns-in-the-cells cop shop, culminating in the vintage final exchange: “The DCI’ll want to give you a grilling!” “What does he think I am, a fackin’ sausage?”

IN THE SUMMER of 1990, there was but one question on the nation’s lips. Not ‘can England win the World Cup?’ Not even ‘will Robson go with three at the back against Belgium, Emlyn?’ No, during that year’s footballing fiesta, one single conundrum echoed across England (and Wales). Where did the power that was working our TV actually come from?

Fortunately, one man had the answer. And that man was PETER PURVES. In a prime piece of pre-privatisation propaganda, the newly-formed National Power conscripted the amiable frontman from Blue Peter, Kickstart and the darts to reassure a restless people fallen to wondering just who was responsible for generating electricity for England (and Wales).

Striding out beneath the Twin Towers as stirring music swelled, Pete commandeered the Wembley floodlights to reveal the answer. If you tot up the electricity produced by everybody else, it comes to a derisory 56%, explained Pete, leaving the famous pitch in semi-darkness. So who was responsible for the rest, he asked rhetorically, before lighting up half of the London Borough of Brent to demonstrate the current-generating majesty of National Power. And just in time to get the thoughts of Graham Taylor before the second half of Cameroon v Romania.

OH LOOK, there’s a retarded man hanging over a cliff. Let’s hope he doesn’t fall off, because next week he’s due to be rollerskating under a lorry.

COMIC SHOWCASE at name-donating London nightspot which gave valuable Saturday night airtime to some particularly brilliant new comedians from either side of the Atlantic and, of course, some indefatigably awful ones. Series one was hosted by the craggy face and craggier jokes (“I’m writing a book about trousers, and yours are interesting sir – they are definitely a turn-up for the book”) of ARTHUR SMITH, introducing brilliant five minute sets from MARK STEEL, JACK DEE, and proving, for the first of many times, that PAUL MERTON is largely terrible when stifled by a script. Music came from the B52S (“it’s the Lancaster Brothers – oh hang on…”) in full Love Shack mode. Series two, now themed by C&C Music Factory’s “Things That Make You Go Hmmm” and on a cartooned set, relied more heavily on American performers, with BILL HICKS and PAUL PROVENZA on fire and DENIS LEARY getting his sickest gags repeated on POINTS OF VIEW (“My father died of throat cancer, and I was so upset…”). Impossibly awful Brixton double act CURTIS & ISHMAEL (“Rankin’ John Major Hi-Fi International!”) were hosts, with their own “How To Chill With The Bro’s” shtick providing semi-tolerable intermission material (“I waan it fi boss out me eardrum, riiiiiiiight?”) while STEPHANIE HODGE or RONDELL SHERIDAN (“who makes this decision if you’re obese or not?”) got ready. Among the British comics, even SHANE RICHIE got on, talking about pubic hair and Freeman’s catalogues, while SIMON DAY got residency status as TOMMY COCKLES (“and I was born and raised in the music halls!”). Music came from RICK ASTLEY, whose iconic appearance helped Never Knew Love shoot to No.70 in the charts, and BROS, performing dimly-remembered and universally-disliked comeback single Are You Mine?. If that wasn’t bad enough, the programme also handed DAVID BOWIE his first appearance with TIN MACHINE, and from then onwards we knew the end was nigh.

A GREAT big, sprawling, ill-disciplined countercultural satire adapted by Terry Southern and Joe McGrath from Southern’s own novel, this is possibly the prime exponent of that genre’s disjointed vignette approach to storytelling. The high concept is got over in the opening minutes – cynical millionaire Guy Grand (Peter Sellers) and his young cohort (Ringo Starr) set out to mock various areas of society by using Grand’s vast wealth to bribe individuals into willfully belittling their own roles in life. And that’s it. Thus the film wavers between sketches on this slender theme which deliver (an on-train board meeting with Dennis Price, the amputation of the nose from a priceless painting as a mortified John Cleese looks on) and those that don‘t (the phrase ‘Laurence Harvey strips while reciting Hamlet’ is about as entertaining as the sketch it describes). By the time Yul Brynner and Christopher Lee are wheeled on for arbitrary cameos aboard a luxury liner that symbolises Britain (somehow) the air of self-importance is stifling. Nearly all the big, sprawling countercultural satires of the ’60s (see also Candy, How I Won the War, If…) punched above their weight to some degree, but The Magic Christian‘s episodic pomp, coupled with the predictability of its disparate scenes and its tendency to coast along on a wave of borrowed countercultural trappings, make it an easy film to watch, but a hard film to like.

GHASTLY ATTEMPT to introduce family comedy to a peaktime Saturday audience mainly through the imposition of SHANE RICHIE wearing striped dungarees and telling jokes about MPs tucking their shirts into their underpants. Richie was joined by watered-down adult comic BILLY PEARCE, as both his camp gagteller and as the pointless Panto Man, and future XYZ host GEORGE MARSHALL for the bleakest impressions routines (Arnold Schwarzenegger, Clive Anderson). Better fare came from the two women involved, mimic singer MADDI CRYER (whose take on Karen Carpenter needed to be heard to be believed) and ANNETTE LAW, impersonator of Penelope Keith and, er, other people. Episodes began with each cast member sliding down a fireman’s pole to tell a reassuringly clean joke (“What do you call a fight in an Indian restaurant? An onion argy-bhaji!”) or deliver a useless bon mot (“I went to see my optician yesterday – what a waste of time. If you can see your optician, you don’t need to see your optician…”). Then, aside from the dodgy stand-up, we got juvenile, punchlineless sketches and songs (“we don’t mind personal stereos and we don’t mind if you smoke!”) plus sub-NTNO’CN news bulletins (Marshall as Trevor McDonald, Law as Anna Ford) and the forgettable synopsis sumups entitled “Ten Second Cinema Presents…”. Dated for its time although anyone who had seen Pearce’s immense live show knew straightaway he did it purely for money and exposure. Ended each show with a celebrity (JASON DONOVAN, JAMES WHALE) saying “You gotta be jokin’!” in a totally unironic manner. Richie’s performances and apparent status as unofficial “leader” (always first down the pole, first to do his stand-up, first on the credits), got him CAUGHT IN THE ACT and trapped us all, although the striped dungarees were chucked out.

Specifically, musical ones.

TV Cream is preparing its own attempt at a signature tune for the BBC’s World Cup coverage, in much the same way as it did two years ago for the Olympics (with, presumably, much the same results).

However, apart from the fact the tournament is happening in Africa, the resident musician in TV Cream Towers has next to no knowledge about this feted occasion.

So he’s asking for suggestions as to what should he should include as regards both lyrical and musical content. Motifs, sound effects, bits of business, all that sort of thing. What, in short, are the key ingredients to a successful World Cup TV theme?

Seeing as it’s in Africa, there’s presumably an expectation for liberal (in all senses) use of that black male voice choir close-harmony singing off of Graceland.

Other than that… tribal drums? Jive talking? Patois? How politically incorrect does this have to be, dammit?!

All suggestions gratefully received. By way of inspiration, this, presumably, is still considered to be the best BBC World Cup theme to date. With added Jimmy Hill and Christmas tree!

LONG-SERVING horticultural hoedown expertly nailing that weird stepped-into-another-universe vibe you get from entering your common or – ho ho – garden Garden Centre, often opting for unusual presentational venue gambit of the presenters’ own garden. Seedling Tips Ahoy content of little use to younger viewers, yet they still had no choice but to sit through it, as BBC2′s notorious predeliction for overrunning early evening sport invariably caused either it or close pal Victorian Kitchen Garden to eat into the timeslot of your favourite psuedo-alternative comedy show by upwards of seven minutes. A special word also for the quite startling theme music employed in its heyday, in which a deafening volley of sweeping strings spiralled upwards through a wonky melody to an agogness-occasioning crescendo.

Thanks to that unexpected repeat of a 1987-vintage episode of Wogan the other night, it was possible to take a good, hard look at the armoury Tel deployed on telly to such effect for so long.

And what an armoury. Many were on display during that episode, as indeed they seemed to be during every episode. There always was a lot more to old Wogan’s act than merely the “I don’t know what’s going on here but I wish it would stop” stuff.

Anyway, TV Cream has sallied forth, as the great man himself would say, unto the technological interface that is the screengrab in order to assemble an anatomy of a Wogan.

First, the opening gambit:

Note how our host doesn’t simply walk on set; rather he engages in some visual badinage with his first musical guests, simultaneously acknowledging and patronising them with a mock-bow. Cheeky, but charming. Then instead of walking to the front of the stage, our man gambols and skips into position, gently tickling the conventions of chat. Once in place, the gurning can begin:

Two examples of how to pull off the tricky task of engaging with the camera, yet not actually looking into it. Tel looks a little undignified to begin with, but soon finds his poise, hands clasped in front, ready to discharge another peroration. Time to look the viewer straight in the eye:

Now we’ve stepped up a gear and are witnessing Wogan’s wheezes at full pelt. First we have the nonplussed shrug of the shoulders, deflating whatever pomposity was evident in tonight’s line-up. Note the slight tilt of the head – we’ll see more of this shortly. Second, the wide-eyed stare of delightful desperation. Old Tel’s up to his old tricks again! But wait, there’s more:

Wogan cranks up the corn still further, essaying first a worried glance to the heavens, then a toothy explosion of hilarity. Phew! Now that the climax has been reached, our man can move to the conversation area and deploy his next battery of whimsy…

…whoa! Wogan goes for not simply a tilt of the head but an entire body swerve. This is masterful stuff, coupled as it is with feigned gestures of falling asleep at the prospect of meeting tonight’s guests. Speaking of which, let’s introduce the first batch, with a little kick of the leg to reassure viewers that he is actually enjoying things after all. Tch! Once the music is done with, it’s time for the chat. Let’s examine two examples of the Wogan-as-questioner pose:

First, a tightly-framed shot of the man at ease with his surroundings and supplicants. His interlocked hands rest on crossed legs, to help put his guests entirely in a state of good grace. In the wide shot we see Tel is resting his hands on the arm of his swivel chair, legs splayed in front in a manner that seems to have disarmed Messrs Peel and Blackburn completely. Note the shiny shoes – every inch of Wogan seems perfectly groomed for early-evening telly. Finally, two examples of Wogan testing the BBC Television Theatre to destruction by virtue of a bit of multi-media magic and some good old-fashioned prop silliness:

Smitty and Bungalow are totally upstaged by our man, even though he’s barely a couple of inches high. Then, for good measure, Tel pretends an ordinary garden rose is some kind of joke flora that is about to emit a stream of water. The ideal note upon which to bid viewers farewell.

And there you have it: an anatomy of a Wogan, where all aspects of the man – expression, appearance, pose (both standing and sitting) and presence both alone and in company – are functioning in harmony.

Hope you were taking notes, DG.

Next week: Anatomy of a Jameson*.

*No it isn’t.

SHORT-LIVED attempt at courting LBGT listenership to audible MP consternation, somewhat shooting itself in the foot by employing future Word-botherer Huffty as frontswoman, which at least succeeded in uniting everyone across the sexuality spectrum in embarrassment. Renaming of Christmas Special as ‘Loud And Proud On Ice’ says it all about attitude towards progressive politics, though balance was restored the following year by Kevin Greening’s controversy-free coverage of the Gay Pride festival.

THE MAN, or so the jingles had it, Who’s Got The Best Music, inevitably rechristened Mark Goodybags for assorted stints in various timeslots – including Saturday night’s Club 2200 – which led to early-evening Teatime Show, with features such as the Music Jam (teatime = jam, see?), before unexpected relocation to The Evening Session, where he was heard to vociferously champion the likes of Carter USM, Gary Clail, Nirvana, Teenage Fanclub, Primal Scream and those ones that did that Pattern 26 thing, along with introduction of the Collins & Maconie double-act with their Back To The Planet-mocking ‘Eyewitness Reports’. Also helmed the inexcusable six o’clock chartfest Megahits, of Alan McGee Ride-hyping phone-rigging scandal infamy, and the full-blown Top Forty show.

CELEBRATED spoof of local commercial radio’s tendency towards miserly banality, with the funnies provided by Angus Deayton, Geoffrey Perkins, Helen Atkinson-Wood, Michael Fenton Stevens and Phil Pope in the guise of Mike Channel, Mike Flex, Anna Daptor, Martin Brown, Nigel Pry, Oijvind Viinstra, Sir Norman Tonsil, ‘Uncle’ Mike Stand, Dr Philip Persigo, Anna Rabies, Honest Ron and his team of out of work jockeys, The Radio Active Repertory Company (“So what? Do we have to go on?”), The Right Reverend Reverend Wright et al. Fantastic stuff even without the spot-on post-HeeBeeGeeBees weekly pop parodies (even the three or four that weren’t Bob Dylan), and the tendency to get up the noses of stuffier listeners with outrageously vulgar puns and less than reverent attitude to royalty. Later became the nearly as good satellite TV satire KYTV for BBC2.

TIME-HONOURED SMUGATHON in which Nigel Rees invites celeb guest panelists to guffaw at their own cleverness in recognising highbrow literary quotes (usually that “The boy stood on the burning deck” thing), and bring along some Countdown Dictionary Corner-esque favoured ‘humorous’ quotations of their own. Constant anti-Quote jibes on I’m Sorry I Haven’t A Clue usually funnier than the show itself.

Posing for this world exclusive shot in the gardens behind Downing Street are the individuals who are to comprise the senior ministers in the first coalition government this country has had for almost 70 years.

We’re sure you’ll agree this is a historic photograph.

But just who are these noble practitioners of statescraft, hoping to guide Britain into a brave new world of cross-party huckstering?

A gonk personally signed by Ramsay MacDonald to the first person who can successfully name all (or as many as possible) of the figures featured in the picture.

And for the second person… a gonk personally signed by Ramsay MacDonald to share for five years with someone of diametrically opposed political opinions to yourself! (SATIRE)

LATE-NIGHT satire and politicised monologuery which, by our reckoning, marked the last knockings of old school ‘but seriously now, unemployment eh?’ Channel Four post-pub entertainment before THE WORD and its blowsy mates took over for good. In the frame were DAVID BADDIEL, The Late Show’s TRACEY “Amateurs!” MACLEOD and top future government wonk MICHAEL GOVE, all delivering their self-consciously controversial pieces to camera in the same hands-behind-back, head-down, gazing-up-through-heavy-lidded eyes pose which screamed “the opinion I am about to glibly vouchsafe will probably blow your drab little mind, even though it’s something I idly tossed off before breakfast this morning”. This unendearing smuggery took place in front of a minuscule studio audience in a decidedly odd set – a sort of half-arsed reconstruction of the Acropolis inside a disused, unlit warehouse, augmented by a series of unexplained white staircases which led, tellingly, to nowhere. Tricksy camerawork was in: all the low angles and wobbly zooms you’d expect, plus a weird vogue for standing each presenter on a turntable which rotated slowly with the camera to add threadbare visual spice to their wordy diatribes.

Needless to say, fearlessly challenging safe, liberal received opinion was the order of the day. (Yes, there was once a time when this counted as some kind of fresh and interesting angle for a television programme to take.) Taboos were broken (or at least slightly bent). Convicted felons were interviewed by Gove with much “Woah! Dangerous!” hype. Jerry Hayes was interviewed with a more muted introduction. Amongst others, LEE & HERRING featured on writing duties, although they’d rather not go into it nowadays. Adding to the uneasy studio atmosphere was the barely-concealed contempt each presenter clearly held (and often slyly voiced during links) for the other two. Baddiel was, unsurprisingly, the most successful pundit, musing on broadcasting embargoes of the c-word, correctly predicting the early demise of the then-nascent ELDORADO, and holding a, er, memorable phone interview with a Danish official asking what he considered was so unique about the culture of Denmark (who had just voted “nej!” to the Euro-referendum) – “Well, I think the most distinctive thing is that we voted no in the referendum…” Actually, perhaps history will remember this programme for juxtaposing the future education secretary with one of Baddiel’s schoolkid vox pops. Asked to tell a real, unsanitised playground gag, one chippy eight-year-old offered: “Q: Why did the man tell the other man to fuck off? A: Because the other man said he was a pissflapper!” Cue Gove. Wonder how memories of that’ll affect key policy decisions?

Ever felt this country was a bit like a big, knackered, corrupt old NHS hospital? Top left-wing master of despair Lindsay Anderson has! Britain’s king of the shrill satirical scream had put Malcolm MacDowell through his paces in the school revolution of If… (1968) and the rambling picaresque O Lucky Man! (1970), and finally dismembered him in this medical farce in which Britain becomes a crumbling, strike-hit state health establishment, coping with terrorist bombs, a workers’ walkout and anti-capitalist demonstrations on the day of a royal visit. This much-derided comedy gleefully nicks the mantle of just about every popular British film genre from Carry On rudery to Hammer horror (the latter complete with spooky wibbly sounds straight from the school percussion cupboard).

MacDowell, admittedly, doesn’t get to do much aside from snoop about in a window cleaner’s cradle (oh, and get bodily torn limb from limb), but the choicest satirical morsels are shared out among a reliably burgeoning all-star cast: Leonard Rossiter’s harassed financial director; Joan Plowright’s confident NUPE chief; the ever-brilliant Graham Crowden’s maniacally amoral, brain-liquidising research scientist, complete with documentary film crew in permanent tow; Robin Askwith’s bolshy but easily-bought kitchen staff head (“that’s a gesture my lads and lasses would easily appreciate!”); Richard Griffiths’s anodyne DJ Cheerful Bernie (“those naughty bombers ‘ave just blown a fuse in the toaster!”); a stoned Mark Hamill laughing hysterically at film of battery hens; Brian Glover and Mike ‘Larry carries ladders round with ease’ Grady as neverending decorators and countless others including Robbie Coltrane, John  Gordon Sinclair, Dandy Nichols, Alan Bates, Marsha Hunt, Arthur Lowe and good old Liz Smith.

Fittingly, it ends with staff and visiting dignitaries witnessing the unveiling of Crowden’s latest wheeze – a super-computer poised to take over from the worn-out human race – either the logical conclusion of the snowballing satirical shenanigans or a bit of a ‘couldn’t think of an ending’ cop-out, depending on your viewpoint. Whatever you think of the shape of the thing, it’s one of the most memorable cinematic messes ever vomited onto the screen. Delicate it ain’t. Anderson’s an angry old man, and he determinedly plays every symbolic character up for all they’re worth, and often a bit extra: he’ll make you see what he did there if it’s the last thing he does. But for those with a taste for the excessively overwrought state-of-the-nation film satire will find that, as a full-stop to that most wayward of film genres, it’s pretty hard to beat.

Psst! Want a lovingly crafted, font-perfect collection of printed parodies? This stoutly-bound spinoff from Eric Idle’s recession-beating Rutland Weekend Television series is the book for you. Just as the TV original served up warped copies of Heath-era telly tropes via ‘the country’s smallest independent TV station’, so this tome collates facsimiles of books and magazines of the period: your sex manuals, Who’s Who, the TV Times, Rolling Stone, even a school exam paper.

It’s all beautifully done. Thanks to Derek Birdsall, designer extraordinaire, the man behind the Python books and, most practically, director of the company which did the printing, each section looks uncannily like the thing its parodying, right down to the paper it’s printed on. ‘Rutland Stone’ comes on exactly the same pulpy, yellowing newsprint with the ragged edges and the two-colour red-on-black print as its American counterpart. The ‘Rutland TV Times’ showcases screengrabs from the series on precisely the sort of lightweight, slightly shiny, slightly anaemic paper stock used for vintage era TV Times. It’s not all about parchmental verisimilitude: the Who’s Who section turns up on stout brown Post Office issue wrapping paper. And the Monty Python Bok cover wrapper gag is reversed: this time a ‘bottom inspecting’ wraparound jacket conceals the anodyne ‘Wonderful World of Prince Charles’. This is one comedy book that genuinely deserves the epithet ‘lavishly tooled’. (Ironically, while the TV series was famously cheap to produce, even with strings pulled, the book remains the most expensive comedy spin-off ever printed).

Is it a triumph of style over substance? Very nearly. Idle writes the whole thing himself, and things do get repetitive in places. One or two mock Who’s Who entries in prime Idle-ese for the likes of Janet Rabbit-Endorsement and Alice B Topless are fine, but the gag starts to wear thin over seven pages. On the other hand, it’s great to see a TV listings parody go all the way from front to back cover, taking in Badedas ads, Army Recruitment tests and the holiday section on the way. In a nutshell, it’s the best of Eric Idle (four-star wordplay, extreme seediness, microscopic attention to detail), it’s the worst of Eric Idle (one idea stretched beyond breaking point, bitchy in-jokes about celeb chums, a slightly off-putting halfway-to-LA sense of louche superiority about the whole deal). But at least it’s a special washable edition.

FETED – AND ultimately fated – come-and-have-a-go drop-in centre for viewers seeking to take programme-makers “to task”. Licensed whingeathon and nit-pickery that squatted on Saturday nights for ages until being shoved up against CORONATION STREET by way of a death sentence. Notoriously predicated towards featuring shouty point-scoring campaigners or camera-shy housewives, it didn’t really take off in the national psyche until the arrival of the Video Box in the mid-80s: passport photo-esque booths with cameras inside dotted around the country, which you could pop into and leave your comments for the TV suits. Cue hesitant pleas from gawky loners, protracted rants from pensioners, swearing and pretend rapping from kids, and “humorous” celebrity cameos from the likes of ALEXEI SAYLE and, er, JEREMY ISAACS. GUS MACDONALD was your first and most boring host, later succeeded by BRIAN HAYES (avuncular), SHEENA MACDONALD (blousy) and ROGER BOLTON (pompous). In its dying days it became a dreadful stamping ground for media student wannabes fronting WATCHDOG-esque “exposes” on the inadequacies of Avid edit suites and such like. Cursed by a stream of inconsistent theme tunes, including one sounding like a man with a suitcase full of bricks tumbling slowly down a staircase. Famously the only programme ever produced by Channel 4 itself. Then they axed it. Boo!

ANTISOCIALLY-TIMED SATURDAY morning child rambunctions and the first proper “hit” kids show to come out of Eggcup Towers. TOMMY BOYD, JAMES BAKER and ARABELLA WARNER were your initial hosts, latterly joined by the delightful MICHAELA STRACHAN and the hateful TIMMY MALLETT. Features included the News In 90 Seconds, recipes from viewers in WAC Snax, historical tales re-enacted with knowing amateurishness in Ghosts, Monsters and Legends, and Talent on the Telly giving airtime to attention-seeking adolescents. MIKE MYERS showed up towards the end to do the Sound Asleep Club. Weekday school holiday spin-off WACADAY was Mallett’s fiefdom, graced by such compulsively awful addictive shlock as Mallett’s Mallet and also Bonk’n'Boob, surely the only kids game show in history to boast not one but two suggestive words in the title. Whole franchise somehow got sunk during TV-am’s industrial strife of 1988, with a couple of subsequent “relaunches” under suspiciously contract-dodging names (WIDE AWAKE, WAC ’90) a poor epilogue.

OH DEAR GOD. Fucking awful dairy-com with cheeky-arsed twat ROBIN ASKWITH as a milkman with only one thing on his mind. The answer not being to deliver a quality comedy show. Usual LWT cliche bollocks on display (token Scotsman, token black, token dopey woman, token punk). One episode involved Robin meeting Mrs T. Remarkably, it made you feel sorry for Thatcher.

Here’s what we hope you’ll consider a post-election podcast treat: 30 minutes of David Butler reminiscing about 60 years of election-watching.

TV Cream had the pleasure of meeting the great man a couple of months ago, and these are the highlights from our interview.

There are also clips from the general elections of 1955, 1959, 1964, 1970, February 1974, 1979 and 1987.

You can download the podcast from TV Cream; you can subscribe to it via iTunes; or you can listen to it right here:

COMPREHENSIVE PRANKERY starring a mob of tousled twenty- (in some cases thirty-) somethings squeezing behind desks pretending to be rowdy teens and giving the run around to dapper but dithering JOHN ALDERTON. Fenn Street Secondary Modern was the location, seemingly built just behind the world’s largest power station. Antique establishment populated by dusty relics JOAN SANDERSON, DERYCK “WHERE’S ME WASHBOARD?” GUYLER and NOEL HOWLETT, all of whom regularly professed to being completely bemused by “young people today”. Close to 568,399,035 episodes made. Stop-start bell-ringy theme in the top ten sitcom openers of all time.

IF YOU’RE concerned about potential Rick Wakeman withdrawal symptoms tonight, be sure to play this clip of The Official Proper BBC Election Theme at five to ten precisely, before settling down to discover who will be the “true born king of all England” for the next five years.

It’s the last of TV Cream’s election-themed weekly podcasts, and we’re concluding with a journey back just 13 years to 1997.

It was the election that saw Paxman proffering hemlock, an asteroid hitting the earth and Edwina Currie being buried under several hundredweight of shingle.

Aside from our usual eye over the Beeb’s election night coverage, we:

- salute the many and varied on-screen election commentariat, otherwise known as humble spear-carriers, in Election Essentials;

- catalogue the calumnies of Lembit “Lembit Opik MP!” Opik;

- rifle amongst the party political broadcasts of 1997, with a quick detour back to Brixton market in 1992;

- once again try to put our finger on the big TV satire show of the year;

- and hear what David Butler thinks will be the result of this year’s general election.

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

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

Happy listening – and voting!

With special thanks to David Butler and Brian Lindsay.

HIGH-CONCEPT Iannucci-instigated ‘Political Comedians Do Question Time’ gambit (i.e. Frank Skinner and Linda Smith chuckle at headlines about the European Monetary Union), jointly fronted by heavyweight preventers-of-words-from-getting-in-edgeways Mark Thomas and Kevin Day, started off well but over the years degenerated into laddish babbling just in time for post-Loadedness to come along.

YANK SMOOTH TALKING Peel/Walters protege and memory machine who was Ver One’s trivia expert throughout his tenure on the station; if you wanted to know how many number two hits The Animals had in Malaysia, Paul was your man, with unsurprising end result of co-scribbling the Guinness Book Of British Hit Singles with Tim Rice. Always had too many syllables in surname to allow the stereotypical Radio 1 jingle to scan (“De-da-do doooooooo/Paul Gam-ba-cci-ni!”). Forever ready with a heavyweight yet diplomatic opinion on whatever newsworthy rock story was troubling the headline writers, a role that he continues to fulfil to this day.

EARLY evening news roundup grim-athon much given to despair-inducing frowning over successive bleak major issues (the three day week, the miners’ strike, the Cold War, Tianneman Square… you name it, and PM fretted over it for days on end), oddly juxtaposed with often jovial-for-Radio-4 presenters such as William Hardcastle, Derek Cooper, Steve Race, Chris Lowe, Joan Bakewell and most incongruously Valerie Singleton. Special mention also for the various Radiophonic Workshop-derived theme tunes, which can still induce bleakness flashbacks to this day.

They may be full of identikit wisecracking unicyclists these days, but not so long ago the streets, precincts and school halls of the nation thrilled to the shoutily earnest strains of agitprop theatre. A spate of (relatively) massive Arts Council subsidy, a post-sixties revolutionary hangover and, most importantly, an abundance of out-of-work actors combined to produce a rich and decidedly nutty tradition of energetically hectoring, unashamedly didactic, and often willfully obscure “happenings” in public places orchestrated by a generation of young optimists who made it their mission to raise collective consciousness, spread the socialist gospel, agitate the complacent youth and – let’s face it, this was what it was mainly about – dress up stupidly and draw attention to themselves at the drop of a hat.

This wasn’t just some rarefied by-product of the nation’s underground arts labs. It’s instructive to note how many latterday stars of children’s telly began on the fringe. Colin Bennett, for instance, used the ’70s avant-garde circuit as the perfect training ground for playing accident-prone caretakers the following decade. Then there was Ken Campbell, the charismatic Dickensian uber-loon of the alternative fringe who, when he wasn’t staging seven-hour sci-fi epics in dingy rooms above pubs starring Bill Nighy and Chris Langham with sets painted by Bill Drummond, took his Roadshow around the country’s grottiest venues, combining re-enactments of unlikely urban myths with crowd-pleasing stunts, usually involving a hapless Sylvester ‘Sylveste’ McCoy (in the days when his hair, coincidentally, made him look a bit like Paul McGann) having ferrets stuffed down his trousers or a nine-inch nail hammered up his nose. And the number of mid-period Play School presenters who were strangers to a Brechtian matinee could be counted in the fingers of one hand. Agitprop was, in its own perverse way, the National Service of television presenting – the moment it was disbanded, you got the likes of Andi Peters clogging up the screen. Get some in!

This subsidised mucking about was a thing of infinite variety, but you could fairly reliably boil it down into four types.

Workers’ Theatre: Troupe of bright young types roll up to a factory cafeteria, bash out a play about the dignity of labour for the edification of the workforce, often with someone in a cardboard top hat and pig mask playing “The Chairman” for a few easy cheers from the ranks (this sort of stuff worked on a level of subtlety and nuance that would make Steve Bell blush). Lots of characters carrying conveniently explanatory placards. No-one mislays their trousers,  unless it’s to make a point about the moral bankruptcy of the bourgeoisie.

Community theatre: As above but in a temporarily disused gas showroom plus stacking chairs, and with less fat cat baiting. Worthy explorations of pressing local matters with a Q&A group session afterwards. Weak tea on tap. No canapes.

Educational theatre: A Volkswagen bus full of extremely eager young folk arrives, Godspell-style, at the school gates to captivate the upper second with a riot of sub-panto songs and Why Don’t You..? method acting. Prepare for an enchanting afternoon as our merry band weave loud but reasonably straightforward stories with a vague and uncontentious moral (“don’t be racist”, “drugs: hmm”, etc). Or failing that, get the whole class involved in some group workshoppery (nine times out of ten this will involve the mass recreation of a Victorian coal mine). If you’re extremely lucky, you might get a visit from Ken Campbell in his Paraphernalia phase. If you’re not so lucky, it’ll be three sociology postgrads in head-to-toe denim who’ve read far too much Edward De Bono.

Performance art: Oh, here we go. Who’s the in the park/town square/bit of wasteground opposite the Co-op? Why, ’tis your friendly neighborhood performance art troupe, either calling themselves something earnestly descriptive like Inter-Action or summat zanily anarchic like John Bull Puncture Repair Kit, in their white boiler suits, army surplus gas masks, comedy rolled-up shirt fronts and rainbow braces, lugging their step-ladders/birdcages/megaphones into view for another post-literate assault on the daily grind of urban reality. There’ll be gibberish, mock violence and plenty of hand-held percussion. The best bit will come when some bemused old dear wanders obliviously through the action on her way back home with half a pound of brisket. You’re not shattering her entrenched preconceptions of bourgeois society that easily, sonny.

And then… yes, of course, Mrs Thatch went and took it all away again. After Mary Whitehouse got wind of what two skyclad actors were getting up to on stage in The Romans in Britain at the National Theatre in 1980, the harrumphing cry of “buggery on the rates!” went round the nation’s Con clubs, and subsidised theatre found itself exiting stage left, to make way for a resurgent West End courtesy of that nice Mr Lloyd Webber. While it’s easy to roll a retrospective eye at the self-absorbed optimism of it all from this distance (and, admittedly, a lot of this stuff caused eyes to roll en masse even back then), only the most hard-hearted We Will Rock You disciple can fail to shed a tear for the passing of the agit, and indeed the prop. Where today could you nip into a dingy basement in your lunch break, watch half an hour of a bloke in German army regalia with a toy pig on a skewer shout impenetrable stuff about the crimes of Rio Tinto while people dressed as chairs skip about in an endearingly uncoordinated manner, and come away with fifty pence change? Unless you’re in Edinburgh in August. And that doesn’t count.

The last knockings of the Not the Nine O’Clock News literary franchise and, by its creators’ own admission, the least. Whereas the calendars of previous years were packed with gags from a platoon of writers, here John Lloyd and Sean Hardie did most of the work themselves, finding out along the way that the 1983 campaign wasn’t quite the non-stop laugh riot it might have been. Add to that increasing disenchantment from the TV series mainstays (you’ll search in vain for any evidence of Rowan, Mel or Griff) and it looks like an ignominious end to a mighty comedy book empire.

Well, maybe a bit, but there’s still a selection of good stuff in this slim volume: comedy graphs; comedy pie charts; Denis Thatcher in abundance; “How the Cartoonists See It” (containing parodies of Tim Hunkin and Mordillo, yet!); plenty of photos of Roy Jenkins looking like Arthur Askey, or Martin Webster looking like the scum of the Earth; a parliamentary version of The Meaning of Liff (“Boyson (v.): to verbally obstruct the passage of one smaller than oneself”); the inevitable election day Radio Times listings (“11.45 Moomins in Voterland”); a list of MPs privileges (“the right to decline to taste anything offered to them in the street by Esther Rantzen”); an election coverage I-Spy checklist (“An ITV reporter interviewing a politician on BBC TV: 5 points, Robin Day eating: 2 points”); an impassioned plea for Weekending to stop doing jokes about Shirley Williams’s hair; plenty of all-round SDP-baiting and that picture of Cyril Smith rubbing his eye. All this and Lord Hailsham too! A valuable historical record.

1970, and voters face an unedifying choice between a tired old Labour government and a slightly prannyish Tory challenger in a political climate that’s fast becoming 99% froth. The time seems right for Peter Cook, John Cleese, Graham Chapman and director Kevin Billington to lift the British political satire out of its comfy old constituencies of class war and union bashing and cock a snook at the emerging cult of the opinion pollster.

Cook, as the titular mercurial time and motion man, enters the ineptly run Fairbairn advertising agency literally from nowhere, and starts shaking up the complacent staff by standing about in the gents with a clipboard. The slug-abed likes of John Cleese and Arthur Lowe don’t take well to their comfy routine of in-office ballroom dancing and test match viewing being interrupted by pesky efficiency, but when the company starts actually showing some signs of success (through a pornographic TV campaign for Olde English humbugs) Rimmer leapfrogs them with ease and sets about establishing opinion poll dominance for the firm by nobbling Denholm Elliott’s rival firm as they survey the religious propensities of the folk of Nuneaton. (Result: 42% Buddhist.)

From then it’s a small matter to nobble politics itself, manipulating both Labour and Conservatives from the sidelines, joining the latter himself and rising through the ranks to high office. There, Rimmer unveils his masterstroke: the introduction of hourly compulsory electronic voting for the populace on every single policy issue, after which he just sits back and waits for the people, sick of their lives being interrupted by the flashing red light on the front room voting terminal, to beg him to form a dictatorship and make all the pesky democracy stop.

As a Well Made Film it stinks – sketch follows sketch with little regard for shape, characters are paper-thin and drop out of the action as soon as their satirical point’s been made – but for sheer prescience (not least predicting the surprise 1970 Tory election victory – sadly the distributors got cold feet and held off releasing it until after the poll) it’s in a class of its own. Bits of business come thick and fast, and some are great: the slapstick sabotaging of a live Party Political broadcast, some overexcited ‘big desk’ election night coverage, and a high tech defence system straight out of Thunderbirds. As you’d expect, an endless succession of acting stalwarts parade before the camera, many of them great fun. Arthur Lowe’s bumbling advertising placeman and Denholm Elliott’s unscrupulous Peter Niss are excellent, as are Ronald Fraser, channeling Ted Heath via Harold MacMillan as the easily-led over-emotional ‘compassionate’ conservative leader and George A Cooper as the Wilsonian pipe-smoking, fireside-chatting, smugly insincere Labour chief.

Elsewhere, topical cameos about: Graham Crowden’s agnostic bishop is a take on the infamously doubting Bishop of Woolwich; Jerry Ram’s bent far-left activist Ranjit X takes the piss out of Tariq Ali; Ronald Culver’s fuming racist (“Are we mad??”) is Enoch Powell to a tee, and Harold Pinter’s supercilious chat show host Steven Hench could be taken for a David Frost parody, if Rimmer himself wasn’t so clearly an embodiment of Frostie’s rise-without-trace, from Cook’s blank-eyed offensive charm, through a decidedly Frostesque VIP breakfast party at London Zoo, right up to an uncannily accurate recreation of his modish front room (brave stuff, considering Frost’s Paradine Films initiated the project in the first place).

It’s very much one of those bitty, slightly flaky 1970s British comedy films, to be sure, but unlike, say, Rentadick, there are some sharp ideas and great lines among the shapeless mass of random incidents and cameoing comedians. And it’s the only film where Cook’s much debated acting ability is matched to his role: he glides through the film as if on castors, while everyone around him knocks themselves out. Just like Rimmer himself, he bakes his own cake and eats it, backed by a brilliantly swinging theme tune from John ‘Psychomania‘ Cameron. Super!