INVENTED, IT says here, by EAMONN ANDREWS. Who promptly – and sensibly – washed his hands of the whole affair. Epitome of how-to-fill-half-an-hour-of-TV before home video cameras were born: E-list celebrities turn up, get shown a blurry photo of a screaming brat, try to guess who the “celebrity” parent/s is/are, before said celebrity walks on and coos chummily. DAVID NIXON, ROY CASTLE and LESLIE CROWTHER all hosted pilots in the 1970s but it was BERNIE “MAKE ME LAUGH” WINTERS who went the distance through those long, desperate early evenings of the 1980s.
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Top of the Pops
Thursday, 19.30, 01.05, BBC4For the first time in a while, two consecutive episodes, so it’s a completely different line-up to the last time and some belated debuts for Ian Dury and Sham 69 who we’d have otherwise seen two weeks ago, in a classic Pops juxtaposition with another Cilla flop and the first appearance of a record that, even skipping all the Savile and Travis episodes, you’re going to hear a hell of lot over the next few months.
Eventually they graduated from photos to real life offspring, demonstrating the skill – or lack thereof – possessed by the panel of celebrities when it came to dealing with children who were too young to be culpable for anything that went wrong.
Highlights included someone (I *think* it was Barbara Windsor) telling Duncan Goodhew’s mother that “you look exactly like him except for the hair” and panel chairman Alfred Marks “pretending” not to recognise his own daughter in order to “fool” the two dippy celebrity women on the panel either side of him (“I think it’s you!”). The audience gave away what could have been a semi-interesting innovation by tittering the moment he started a question with “Is your father…..?”
It wasn’t just kids, of course. Younger celebs were represented by their parents or siblings, even cousins were allowed on.
I could swear it was Miriam Stoppard who kept the tatty flag flying.