With a very high quality sausage Hullo and welcome to Creamguide, which for many of our readers this week includes a Bank Holiday weekend, and for the luckless Scots doesn’t, but don’t worry, we’re not billing much outside office hours, and if you’re unfortunate enough to be stuck inside a workplace when everyone else is having fun, don’t forget the new look www.tvcream.co.uk is the perfect distraction.

BBC2

19.30 Dad’s Army
So this week we’ve been mostly watching Channel Four’s comedy season which has presented some fascinating stuff, not least giving us the first chance to see the mythical Weekenders. Popadoodledandy was also particularly eye-opening, clearly never intended for broadcast with the shoddy edits, the ambient noise and the massive swearword we’re pretty sure you wouldn’t have been able to include on telly at all in 1993, Channel Four or no. Even musically it was worth seeing for a seemingly rare telly appearance by Denim. Shame Milan didn’t do Affectionately Mine, we used to love that one.

22.30 TOTP2
Last of this series of repeats, we think, so hurry back with some new ones soon. We had so much fun identifying a telly show the other week we thought we’d do it again, and while he overuses the smileys a bit, we’ll help out Stewart Young. So, “You could be my saviours! For years I’ve been dogged by this memory of a show that scared me, er, witless. I’m on a swear jar. I think it was some kind of horror show from the seventies that was on Sunday afternoons. The opening involved a girl combing her hair in front of a mirror, her back to the viewer but her face reflected in the mirror. She turns round and has no face! Please someone put me out of my misery and tell me what this show was!” If you’d like to give your answer, send it to creamguide@tvcream.co.uk. If lines are busy, call later. But DO call.

CHANNEL 4

19.30 Whatever Happened To Harry Hill?
20.30 Harry Hill
Looks like Four are aiming for the TV Burp audience with the repeat of the latter, though we’re not sure what they’ll make of it. We’ve not seen it yet, natch. We don’t know if the latter is a different episode or the same one they showed last week, but for what it’s worth it was the last show of series one, which was good fun but a bit of a stupid one to show on its own given it mostly subverted all the usual jokes, including an actual badger parade. Oh, just show them all!

21.00 Channel 4′s 30 Greatest Comedy Shows
The channel that doesn’t do list shows, there, doing a list show. But it depends what they’re about and this should be entertaining enough with the various participants all turning up to reminisce and the fact that at least some of them are among the funniest shows ever made, and the bonus that The Mad Bad Ad Show won’t be included. And then…

23.05 Channel 4′s Greatest Comedy
Dunno what this is going to be, but we’re promised a full hour-long episode followed by two documentaries about it. We can certainly have a guess, though, because there’s been one really big Channel Four comedy that’s surprisingly not been in this season so far, featured an hour-long episode and has been the subject of two documentaries which you’ll assume would be repeats given it’s midnight, so… “Ted! Ted! You’re not going to believe this! Clint Eastwood’s been convicted for a crime he didn’t commit… oh wait, it’s a film.” Er, unless it’s The Inbetweeners, of course.

01.10 The Comic Strip Presents… Bad News Tour
It’s not going to be this, anyway, but kudos to C4 for not opting for the obvious and showing this fondly-remembered but rarely-repeated episode that had the misfortune to be completely overshadowed by Spinal Tap but is still fun.

ITV4

08.25 The Big Match Revisited
The EPG description for this suggests one of the most exciting things about the main match in this show is that it’s played with an orange ball, although we suppose that is quite nostalgic. But they’re wrong, of course, because the most exciting thing is that Gerald Sinstadt wears an absolutely spectacular cardigan.

BBC Radio 2

13.00 Pick of the Pops
1966 and 1989. Jonathan Haw is back, this time saying, “I happened across this the other day and thought you might be interested if you’ve not already seen it. It’s a website put together by ex-VT people at Television Centre. The Confessions page is particularly worth a look – despite only understanding about one word in three, it confirms my opinion that TVC in the 70s and 80s was the best place in the world to work. ‘And that’s how the scene featuring Gemma’s nipples got on the screen uncut and at its full length’.”

BBC Radio 4

10.30 In Praise of the Lido
How come Boz Scaggs pronounces it “leee-do” when everyone else calls it a “lie-do”? Unless he’s talking about something else, natch. We’ve always found the idea of a lido extremely pleasing in any case and we do intend one day to live nearby one so we can jump out of bed and go, feel sickeningly pleased with ourselves – for the first week, anyway. Here’s are some more committed swimmers talking about why it’s so much better than your council baths.

20.00 Your Starter For Ten – 50 Years of University Challenge
If this anniversary is commemorated on television, they’ll probably wheel out the documentary they’ve shown umpteen times before, but this is all new. It’s probably at the height of its popularity these days, in terms of raw numbers it doubtlessly got more under Bamber but it was punted around the scheduled willy nilly whereas nowadays it’s in the middle of primetime and is often one of BBC2′s most watched shows of the week. But they still need to bring back the old theme tune.

BBC2

18.00 TOTP2
Before the nights start drawing in, a repeat of the summer special first shown a few weeks back, and that’s good because of course the original showing started ten minutes early on a night when we were all a bit distracted by the likes of Jessica Ennis, so everyone ended up with recording missing the first three songs. So don’t be late this time, not least as The Undertones are up first and it’s only eighty seconds long.

CHANNEL 4

01.55 The Mark Thomas Comedy Product
Bit of a quiet night in terms of Creamy interest in Funny Fortnight, though we’ve got Black Books and the precise moment Peter Kay went crap. There’s also this which we can definitely say came from series one in 1996 because they took the “comedy” out of the name for subsequent series, and it seemed terribly exciting at the time. Let’s see how it stands up now, shall we?

Sky 1

21.00 A Touch of Cloth
Looks like they’ve had to re-edit the trailers to point out this is actually a comedy, thanks to a host of stupid people tweeting that they can’t believe that they’re the only people who’d noticed the name sounded a bit rude. Why would they have called it that if they were being serious? Engage brains, people! What it is, natch, is the latest production from Charlie Brooker which takes the piss out of everything in an Airplane-esque fashion, and to really hammer the point home, tomorrow’s second episode is followed by Airplane itself. Should be ace anyway.

BBC1

18.00 Edinburgh Military Tattoo
The August Bank Holiday staple and this time Scotland get it at the same time instead of having to shift it to fit in a full-length Reporting Scotland because it’s a working day up there – and no, STV aren’t doing that, they’re just doing the bare minimum ten minutes. Scotland is also the only place it’s not going up against a documentary on World War II, which doesn’t seem very clever. Anyway, we’re not sure why we still bill this, especially as Tom Fleming’s not around to do it anymore. But here it is.

CHANNEL 4

23.40 Norbert Smith – A Life
Last night of this season and the last really interesting repeat, because like The Weekenders this has been an extremely rare sight on our screens in the past decade or so, while the long-deleted VHS has, like much of Harry Enfield’s work, failed to make it to DVD. Basically it’s a pilot for the Television Programme with loads of absolutely fantastic parodies of the entire history of British film and it’s well worth another look.

01.15 Smack The Pony
This was a consistently entertaining series where even if the scripts weren’t always up to scratch the performances were generally brilliant and it had such a likeable approach. And everyone used to slag off the songs but we always thought they were terribly clever, parodying whole genres and imitating the general style instead of just substituting funny lyrics, though we doubt this is the episode with the parody of I Will Fix You by Kenickie which is our favourite ever sketch because it’s such a ridiculously obscure song to parody, and it’s terribly accurate to boot so all of three people would have got the joke.

01.40 Bill Hicks Live – Revelations
And the last thing in the entire season is probably the most influential show of all they’re showing. Indeed C4′s showing of Hicks’ shows gave him some of his greatest exposure and before he died he was developing a series for them. Even if you’ve not seen this you’ll have heard half the lines from it, but here they are delivered rather better than in sneery posts on internet forums.

Sky Atlantic

21.30 Adam Buxton’s Bug
Last of this series which we’ve not seen any of, alas, though if it gets a repeat on another channel we’ll highlight it again and watch it there, no doubt. We’re pretty sure we’re safe in saying it would have better with Joe in.

BBC Radio 2

16.00 The Elton John Show
22.00 Bernie Taupin – A Conversation with the Brown Dirt Cowboy
23.00 Johnnie Walker’s Long Players
It’s EJ the DJ, as Radio 1 used to say in the seventies, as Reg is going to play some of his favourite records in a show presumably pre-recorded so he doesn’t swear. Later it’s a chat with the only man who’s ever tried to write a romantic ballad about Grimsby and then Johnnie digs out a copy of Goodbye Yellow Brick Road. And In between all that at eight it’s another edition of Annie “…………………………hi” Nightingale’s born-again Request Show.

7th-13th April 1973 ON THE COVER: Bit radical for the Radio Times in 1973, this, it’s Mick Jagger to coincide with Radio 1′s new documentary about the Stones. To this end, RT interviews Mick’s dad Joe, who presumably much to Mick’s embarrassment points out “In the holidays after he took A-levels he had an ice cream tricycle to earn pocket money”. He also recalls the time in 1960 that Alexis Korner, who presents the series, invited Mick to sing at The Marquee. “Alex phoned my wife several times to say we should go along and see him, but we never got round to it. Then Mick joined another group, and I went along to help buy the instruments – or at least stand in the background with the money. I didn’t realise how well he was getting on til he started using the phone a great deal. It was only when they grew their hair long that a change came about. At first he and his group were just the sort of youngsters any parent could be proud of.” ON OTHER PAGES: It’s a big week for Radio 1 as Cuddly Kenny Everett is back after a break when he had to, er, go away. Radio Times catches up with Ken and Lee in their new house on their farm in Wales, where “from this spot Kenny will do his DJ shows, put them on tape, get some of his old mates down for interviews and songs and send the recordings off to London. Is that so they can edit his comments? Kenny doesn’t know about that.” At the same time on Sunday afternoons that Ken is wreaking havoc on Radio 1, on Radio 2 it’s Family Favourites, this week with Mike Aspel giving way to Sandi Jones, whoever she is. She’s “a tall, vivacious, former meteorological Wren”, apparently, “just back from a three month stint on the Gibraltar end of the programme”. A new face to BBC1, meanwhile, is Film 73′s Barry Norman. “A natural for the job, he’s the son of film director Leslie Norman, and confesses he’s been known to view six films in a day and rush home to watch the late night movie on television.” RADIO TIMES PEOPLE: As RT points out, “it’s a big week for popular music on the BBC”, including Eurovision for which they take last year’s winner Vicky Leandros around London. The opening spread of features, meanwhile, interviews Paul Jones, who says, “When people in pop ask me where I’ve been and I tell them the West End and Broadway, to them I might just as well have been in prison”, and Roger McGough, appearing in The Liver Birds, who says, “It’s nice to be back with a group again. Before, people used to come up to you in the streets, just because you’d done beer ads, and you sort of belonged to everyone.” FIRST IN A NEW SERIES: Not quite a new series, but a new thing for Saturday afternoon is the Tote Roll-Up, as explained by Julian Wilson. “Tote Roll-Up presents the challenge of naming the first six horses to finish in a specially selected race each Saturday, and no organisation needs the Roll-Up to succeed more than the near-bankrupt Tote. If no all-correct entry comes through, the bulk of the pool ‘rolls up’ to a colossal must-be-won pool on the third Saturday. It could add up to a £250,000 payout for some inspired clairvoyant.” David Frost is back at the Beeb with A Degree of Frost, BBC2′s Show of the Week on Monday, appearing in sketches with the likes of Jake Thackray and the aforementioned Paul Jones, while the new season on Radio 1 also brings us My Top 12 with Brian Matthew on Sunday mornings. “My Top 12 would include Cliff’s Looking Out The Window. He sang it when I first introduced him on television. As we listened to the playback, he blew a great raspberry. That endeared him to me.” NOT A REPEAT: Seven of One, the series of Ronnie Barker one-offs, is currently running on Sunday nights on BBC2, but they can’t all be Porridge and Open All Hours so this week we get My Old Man, which the Beeb didn’t want to turn into a series but the writer Gerald Frow took to ITV and they did it with Clive Dunn. Later that night is Up Sunday, in which “Keith Dewhurst, William Rushton and John Wells invite you to stay up late”. Also currently running on Wednesday at 7.30 is the first series of Are You Being Served. And on Thursday it’s Election 73! The local elections, natch, billed as “Battle for London – and the New Counties” from 10.40 to one in the morning. Burnet and Day were in the studio, Michael Barratt was at the GLC and viewers were on the phone via 01 288 8055. TANTALISING-SOUNDING PROGRAMME WE’LL NEVER SEE: It’s on Saturday, it starts at 9.30, it’s a live miscellany and it goes on for ages. No, it’s not Swap Shop, because it’s 9.30pm and it’s Full House on BBC2, “a live entertainment for Saturday”. It’s a hundred minutes of the arts, including a play, the pleasingly-titled Blue Bitch, an appearance by WH Auden (“After a long voluntary exile in America, Auden is now once more living in England and tonight will be reading some of his work”), a performance by Matrix, “equally at home with plainsong or pop”, and Roger Ruskin Spear showcasing some of his robots, where “the mechanical and electrical humanoids will include a police who blows his mind as well as an erratic stripper”. Heaven knows what this all looked like on the screen. ROB BARKER’S ADVERT SPOT: Times were hard in those days and we needed to look after our money, so a host of financial institutions were after our cash. The National Savings Bank say “There aren’t many places where you can get 8% interest and where your money is as safe as the Bank of England. And there are more than 21,000 branches at Post Offices all over the country. Branches which stay open during shopping hours, and also do business on Saturdays.” They’re also plugging their Ordinary Account, which we like because you don’t get stuff called “ordinary” anymore. Of if it’s too ordinary for you, why not try the Hastings and Thanet Building Society – it’s growing fast. “So fast that they now have over 70 branches in Britain’s towns and cities as well as over 400 agencies. But they’re more than just branch offices and agencies – think of them as Money Centres.” THE SO-CALLED GOLDEN AGE:Black and white in primetime! Yes, BBC1 give us Chaplin SuperClown on Thursdays at eight, “new versions of his outstanding comedies”, this week The Bank. Loads of films as well on BBC1, with A Farewell to Arms taking up two and a half hours of Sunday, Flame of the Barbary Coast at 7pm on Tuesday (as part of “Wayne in Action”) and “tonight’s Western film” Hostile Guns on Friday at 6.45. If you think there’s too much soapy drama on BBC1 now, we get the latest in the million-part runs of Barlow at Large on Wednesday at eight and Z Cars on Thursday at 7.15 (shoving Pops to 6.45 and Tomorrow’s World to Wednesday which is all wrong), while Party Political Broadcasts are shown at 10pm on both channels on Tuesday and Wednesday, the former requiring BBC2 to shuffle everything around and put Whistle Test at 9.25 and the latter chopping Sportsnight in half. WOULDN’T HAPPEN NOW DEPARTMENT: It might surprise you that BBC1 were showing programmes all afternoon from Pebble Mill at One to the kids’ shows, although in eighteen months’ time they’d all be dropped for financial reasons. Very high faluting they are too, with Slow Centuries of Stone on Tuesday at 2.25 – “What is the meaning of the circles and alignments of stones that we find in the countryside?” – and Portrait of a Musician on Friday at 2.05. Livening it up a bit is Fanny and Johnnie Cradock Invite You To A Cheese And Wine Party on Wednesday at 1.45 (Book, 12p). And on Radio 2, not only is a tyro Des Lynam filling in at teatime but it’s also still the home of Woman’s Hour. HOUSEKEEPING: On Saturday night BBC1 it’s 6.10 Doctor Who (Planet of the Daleks!), 6.35 High Adventure: Mogambo, 8.30 A Man Called Ironside, 9.20 News with Peter Woods, 9.30 Eurovision Song Contest from the New Theatre, Luxembourg (with Tel doing his first TV commentary), 11.10 Match of the Day. Radio 1 daytime is 7.00 Tony Blackburn, 9.00 Jimmy Young, 11.00 Dave Lee Travis, 1.00 Johnnie Walker, 3.00 Alan Freeman, 5.00 Radio 1 Club with anchors including Noel and Rosko, 7.00 As Radio 2, 10.00 Sounds of the 70s including Bon Harris on Monday and Peel on Tuesday and Thursday. John, Pete and Les are on Blue Peter and Cuddly Ken would have been making his return to the Pops but it was cancelled because of a strike. THEY’VE HAD LOTS OF LETTERS: “Pot Black has proved a popular item on BBC2,” says WS Bragg of Pinner. “Has a similar programme showing the experts playing the mother game of billiards ever been considered? This lovely game of infinite variety would hold viewers enthralled. Instead of the pot, pot, pot of snooker, one could see the delicate cannons, long and short jennies and myriad strokes beautifully produced by the world’s best. As the old professionals used to say when a frame of snooker was suggested after a session of billiard, ‘wait until I put my clogs on’. But please, I implore you not to call it Pot White.” Over to Pot Black producer Reg Perrin, who says, “Public demand could create a television programme devoted entirely to billiards. I think that billiards on the television screen would to be a long drawn out affair and would certainly not easily fall into a time slot.” PETRIL?: John Little of Glasgow says, “Tomorrow’s World showed us a serve-yourself petrol pump that gives instructions to the customer by means of a tape-recorded voice. Thus was said to be intended to be used by, say, late night drivers who cannot follow printed instructions at the pump, and the example was mentioned of a motorist found trying to stuff his pound note into the nozzle of the filler pipe. I cannot help wondering whether a driver, late night or other, who, but for this new machine, would have lost his money up the nozzle is perhaps not a very suitable person to be in charge of a car filled with a pound’s worth of petrol.” Michael Rodd replies, “Perhaps your correspondent has overlooked the cunning failsafe system in the process. Anyone guilty of pushing pound notes up the pump gets no petrol.” Radio Times would like to point out another item on talking petrol pumps can be seen on Tuesday’s Wheelbase. Why are you wasting your time with talking petrol pumps, invent the internet!

Sky Arts 1

22.00 The Moody Blues Live at the Isle of Wight
No, we’re not absolutely stuck for a programme to bill today, oh no. And we’re certainly not billing it so we can link again to the politest wig-out ever. Oh alright, we are. Never mind Ray Thomas, look at the drummer go!

ITV

19.30 The Corrie Years
Turns out they are doing a new series of this after all, but they may as well get their money’s worth out of the old ones. And however threadbare this is, 24 hours earlier ITV have had to show a non-British Champions League qualifier featuring the most unglamorous teams imaginable – we’re holding out for Hapoel Kiryat Shmona vs BATE Borisov – which we’re expecting to get this channel’s lowest ever audience.

21.00 Britain Then and Now
Mind you, this line-up isn’t much better. Turn Back Time on BBC1 just the other week invited streets to live like they did in the past, and ITV have seemingly decided just to rip it off completely by hosting a Jubilee street party – just the two and a half months too late – and compare it to what it would have been like in 1953. Which we probably know thanks to various identical programmes.

CHANNEL 4

20.00 Paralympic Games Opening Ceremony
First things first, it’s not called the Para-Olympics! It doesn’t have an O in it! C4 take up residence at the Olympic Stadium for the next two weeks, and while it’s not non-stop with various points where it moves over to More4, which at least gives that channel a point, it’s certainly getting more coverage than it ever has before. That said, it’s unfair to say the Beeb couldn’t previously be arsed as we’re one of the few countries who actually give it extensive coverage at all – NBC famously show next to nothing – and so there hasn’t been the facilities to actually film everything. The Olympic closing ceremony actually got more ratings than the opening ceremony so clearly we were absolutely smitten with them, and this is highly likely to be the most watched Paralympics event possibly in the entire world.

CHANNEL 5

22.00 John Barrowman’s Dallas
Five’s promotional department have certainly got their arse in gear with the new series of Dallas which even got on the BBC News the other day. And they’ve sent Barrowman off to report from behind the scenes, which he could do thanks to there being no series of Tonight’s The Night, which he was quick to point out was because BBC1 had “no room” for it with the Olympics. The same BBC1 that’s being showing Indiana Jones films on Saturday night for several weeks, natch.

BBC4

19.30, 02.50 Top of the Pops
Last week’s was the only episode that started in that rather unusual fashion, though at least John Miles got a very prominent slot, as that track has certainly grown on us during its chart run, even if John’s miming hasn’t improved. Noel’s in charge here and over the next few weeks we’ll enjoy seeing Legs and Co think of umpteen different ways to dance to I Feel Love, a slog that only ended when they hard to start thinking of umpteen different ways to dance to Way Down instead. Sort out the repeat slot!

21.00 Jet! When Britain Ruled The Skies
Oh, there’s two of these, this time concentrating on the sixties and the start of the British airline industry, which ended up with a million different airlines with terrible names you never knew existed until they went bust. But there’s more interesting stuff before we get there.

BBC4

22.20 Modern Times
Tomorrow is the fifteenth anniversary of a website that isn’t a million miles away from here, and which Charlie Brooker looked at a few times. But something had to die for it to exist, and it was quite a big death as well (we weren’t driving the Uno, by the way, just in case you thought we were implying that). Certainly one of the strangest weeks in British history, this documentary from Christmas of that year looks at the ad hoc shrine that turned up in Kensington Gardens.

CBBC

17.45 Blue Peter
Last week’s show ended up with Olympic Gold medallist Jade Jones (with a great North Wales accent which you don’t hear on telly very much) and Jacqueline Wilson both sat on the sofa answering questions from viewers on the phone. If you’d got them reviewing a few pop videos as well it would have been like Saturday SuperStore all over again and that’s exactly what we want to see. This week, Damien Hirst is on, though we don’t think you can phone him up.

BBC Radio 2

22.00 Brian Johnson’s Rockers and Rollers
Oh, do stop it, Aggers… oh, no, it’s Johnson, not Johnston. And here’s the AC/DC frontman with the platters that matter, playing and talking about his kind of rock in the first of this new series.

BBC2

20.00 Mastermind
It was a bit depressing when you realised that Warren Cuccorillo had been in Duran Duran longer than some of the Taylors, and like The Rolling Stones we’d rather they’d split up a while ago, but someone’s answering questions on them tonight, while someone else is discussing, brilliantly, the shipping forecast.

BBC4

21.30 Paul Simon’s Graceland – Under African Skies
23.00 Paul Simon Live at Webster Hall, New York
00.00 BBC1 Sessions
BBC4′s regular dadrock night is full of repeats again, but they’re all classy enough, the middle concert coming from last year and the last show from about 2006 we think.

That’s it for this week, and next week in the past would have been the start of the new season, but with the Beeb being Olympics-crazy and everyone else getting out of the way of the Olympics, we’ve had a huge splurge of new shows in mid-August which doesn’t seem right. So if you’re not disappointed we won’t be able to give you a New Season Special next week but just the same old same old, subscribe here