And you just lap it up Hullo again and welcome to this week’s edition of Creamguide, as usual under the auspices of www.tvcream.co.uk which again is serialising the Nationwide memories of Michael Barratt, and fascinating they are too. Our lawyers are watching. We have our next Past Times later and on that subject, a man called Dave has written in regarding last week’s jaunt to 1969, saying, “Lads, fascinated by Radio 3 carrying sports. I was born in 1967 so can only recall these being on Radio 2, which meant loads of VHF for Radio 1 of course! What station carried Test cricket in those days?” Well, we think that was Radio 3 as well, but we think the reason it was on Radio 3 is because the Third Programme only opened up in the evening so it had a spare frequency in the day doing next to nothing, so it made sense to put it on there. In that week in 1969, though, Radio 4 has the “rugby football” commentary while Radio 3 has the football – and of course it sometimes does that now when Sports Extra is all filled up. Radio 4 also had Sports Session at 6.30 on a Saturday which is famous for the moment when Christopher Martin-Jenkins misread the clock, said “that’s the end of Sports Session” ten minutes early and then, after a long pause and some shuffling of papers, came back on and said, “I’m afraid that wasn’t the end of Sports Session”. Anyway, we assume it all moved over to Radio 2, apart from the cricket, when they revamped the stations in 1970 and finally got rid of the Third, but if anyone knows better, let us know at creamguide@tvcream.co.uk.

BBC1

19.30 Doctor Who
Been a great series so far, we reckon, full of short but perfectly-formed one-offs that make for cracking Saturday night entertainment. We’re particularly looking forward to this one too because we like Who best of all when it’s domestic, with pedal bins coming to life and that, and this week is resolutely earthbound.

BBC2

17.10 One Man And His Dog
A change to the schedules here as last Sunday’s live affair ended up not going out because the golf overran quite spectacularly. Monitoring the schedules during the evening, it looked like there were plans to show it a bit later, presumably pre-recorded before it got too dark, but the golf ran so late they never had chance. Here it is now, and while we lose the frisson of excitement of it being live, we doubt anyone’s tuning into One Man And His Dog for edge-of-the-seat excitement. Wonder if anyone’s leaked the results?

19.40 Dad’s Army
It’s a bit of a shame we don’t have any more sixties issues of the Radio Times given last week’s seemed to generate quite a healthy postbag. Tim Worthington, whose new book we’ll doubtless be plugging in due course if he wants to send us some blurb about it, says, “As you suggested, that edition of Colour Me Pop featuring The Toast is long gone, but there is actually an off-air photo in existence and bizarrely, it turns out that frontman Henry Marsh later wrote some of the music for Cream-inspiring mid-eighties Children’s BBC oddity The Album!” Indeed, and better still he was in Sailor, among the stars of Pops 76.

21.55 The Thick Of It
“Human inter-railers? That’s inter-railers!” We’d happily watch a whole half hour of crap brainstorming on this show, though we hear from Armando’s recent lecture that might be based on an actual brainstorming session he witnessed at Talkback where they were desperately trying to find variations on the House Doctor format and someone suggested Body Doctor before they realised that’s what a doctor is. Anyway, wherever it came from, this was great, and we like how everyone and everything looked so drab and depressed, right up to Ollie looking about fifty.

ITV4

07.15 The Big Match Revisited
Great fun, this one, as we’ve seen by now that 1979 was one of the coldest winters of all time and this was the week it was at its height as the whole of the ITV network could only come up with one English match between them, Leicester vs Newcastle, and it’s not particularly interesting either, though at least we get extended Hugh Johns. Then enjoy half an hour of desperate filling, including a snatch of Morton vs Partick Thistle (“Morton in the hoops, like QPR!”, says Mooro, trying to make it sound relevant) and then a good ten minutes of the final of Euro 76 for the hell of it, between two countries that no longer exist, in a country that no longer exists.

BBC Radio 2

13.00 Pick of the Pops
1973 and 1980, the latter coinciding with surely the most bizarre Top of the Pops ever due to, as Bates suggests, “our small problems at the BBC”, ie a strike, though Tone’s able to just play records and not have to pad our proceedings with a long interview with Olivia Newton-John. Meanwhile, in response to last week’s poser, David Pascoe says, “I can tell Arthur Saldanha that the Hellfire sketch comes from the 1985 series of the Two Ronnies, though I don’t know which episode. It’s from the time when they used to do a musical number in the middle of the show and usually at standard sketch length, while they finished the shows with their film parodies. If Arthur’s trying to learn the words to the sketch, I remember one bit went ‘And what about meanness?/Have you seen the collection plate today?/Two washers, a fly button, an Irish penny and a half sucked mint with a hole/Last week when a woman was asked to contribute to a home for old inebriates/She gave her husband/Well bless my soul’.” And the mention of the Rons is a suitable time to mention our sadness at the passing of Michael Hurll, not only the Ronnies’ long time boss but also the best producer of Top of the Pops ever.

BBC Radio 4

20.00 The Debate Of Our Times
This programme asks whether political debate on telly has descended into relentless rabble-rousing and evading questions these days, or if it was ever thus, doing so by browsing through the archives at dozens of episodes of Any Questions over the years, with the help of Tony Benn, who should know given he’s been on it regularly since the year dot.

BBC1

16.00 Points of View
A suitably dynamic opening last week as a man was allowed to discuss, at great length, his view that these days TV presenters are purposefully miked up so you can’t hear them properly to make things sound more exciting than they actually are. After devoting several minutes to him saying the same thing over and over again, do you think they bothered asking anyone at the BBC if he was right or what they might do to change it? Did they balls. Also going unchallenged was the bloke who complained Dinosaurs on a Spaceship was a rip-off of Jurassic Park. Where’s the SPACESHIP in Jurassic Park, you DICK! Sorry, it does wind us up, this show.

CHANNEL 4

21.00 The Big Fat Quiz Of The Nineties
Not that anyone did last week, but please don’t bother with Comedy World Cup, another dull Channel Four panel game that actually turns out to be a remake of That’s Showbusiness only not as good, and is so derivative and unoriginal Jason Manford – of course he was on it – got to do exactly the same jokes he’d done on Rob Brydon’s show a week ago. This is a bit more interesting, though only just.

BBC4

21.00 Let’s Have A Party! The Piano Genius of Mrs Mills
Mrs Mills was such an unglamorous pop star she didn’t even get introduced by her full name, which was far too elaborate for her unassuming air. Despite her performance style being absolutely terrifying, and everything she played sounding more or less exactly the same, she was quite the record-selling phenomenon in the sixties, and here are the likes of Rick Wakeman, Chas Hodges and Bobby Eighteen Year Old Office Boy Crush to pay tribute.

BBC1

14.10 Only Fools and Horses
One of the reasons why this show used to be such a valuable repeat a decade or so ago is that the various durations of the episodes made it suitable to fit more or less every available slot. Not so useful when you’re trying to run them in the same slot every day, though, so it’s double bills today and tomorrow, the last half hour on its own on Wednesday with a ham-fisted filler to plug the gap before CBBC and then onto the fifty minuters on Thursday. And if you get confused by any of that, don’t worry, they’ll all be on again in three months.

ITV4

21.00 World of Sport – The 90s
“The Princess of York”, Ned? A bit more interesting stuff last week including a host of demented variations on stock car racing, involving caravans and double decker buses, amusing all held in Ipswich, plus darts from the most eighties venue imaginable, the Fulcrum Centre, Slough. We’re still not convinced of the Rock’N'Roll Years-esque approach, though, and from now on ITV Sport gets all boringly professional and this’ll be mostly football, boxing and Formula One.

BBC Radio 2

22.00 Beach Boys at 50
The Beach Boys are back, or at least Brian, Mike and Al are, and earlier this evening you can hear them in concert recorded just the other week, but if you think they’ve lost it, don’t worry because here’s the first of a two-part documentary about their imperial phase, presented by Harry Shearer for some reason.

18th-24th November 1978 ON THE COVER: No, we haven’t cocked up the picture, due to some “printing difficulties” the Radio Times was reduced to coming out only in monochrome for a couple of weeks, although this cover would hardly have benefitted from colour. It’s marking a pretty momentous week from the Beeb when on Wednesday night all the AM frequencies swapped around. Radio 2 moved from long to medium wave, Radio 4 went in the opposite direction, Radio 1 got some new frequencies and Radio 3 got their hopeless old one as nobody listened to it on AM. Of course Radio Times, ever helpful, provide a number of maps to tell you where to tune in and flog sliderules for 25p, and Radio 1 mark the occasion on Wednesday with a giant balloon release with all the presenters across the UK and then on Thursday Noel drives from Glasgow to London, “calling up his colleagues with reports of the reception”. In the lead-up to the change, Radio 3 also broadcast short five minute programmes, including one at 3.15pm on Tuesday which we’ve heard and involved them having to simulcast Tony Blackburn’s show so listeners could dart along the dial and stick their sticker there. ON OTHER PAGES: The other radio change that should have happened this week was Radio 2 broadcasting 24 hours a day, but this ended up being postponed until January because of a strike. They still plugged it, though, and asked Bill Norsworthy, a long distance lorry driver, as to what he’d like to hear in the small hours. “I’d really like question and answer programmes. They tend to wake you up a bit, keep you active. I’d like them, say, to give out three questions, play some music while you work them out, then go into the answers. It could be general knowledge, or even go into motorway affairs or the Highway Code. Remember, they’re talking to the professional lorry driver who is out at night.” Among the overnight presenters is Chris Aldred, who says, “I love stuff from Evita – anything by Webber and Rice, in fact, and groups like Showaddywaddy. The fifties is my era – I don’t like punk. I’d like some interesting information but not silly things just for the sake of having something.” With radio under the spotlight they also take the opportunity to profile some of Radio 4′s most familiar voices, including newsreader Colin Doran, who’d been there since 1950 but, compared to the old days, “Nobody laughs anymore if you make a mistake. I don’t think anybody has missed a programme in years. In a way it’s less enjoyable. There aren’t so many amusing incidents.” BRAW LAFFS:We’ve got the Scottish edition here, and the big news about the frequency changes there was that Radio Scotland stopped being a simulcast of Radio 4 with the odd opt-out but a fully-fledged station in its own right. Edwin Morgan, author of RT’s Scottish column, sounds a note of caution, reporting, “Alistair Hetherington, the Controller of BBC Scotland, has said in an interview that it must become more popular, will include more music and will take about a quarter of its items from Radio 2, which is scarcely an encouraging prospect. If the only way to get a Scottish radio service is through something so diluted, then the BBC really must think again.” As well as pondering when people stopped calling things on the radio “items”, Morgan ended up being proven right because this incarnation of Radio Scotland was a complete disaster with everyone getting sacked, including the Head for the station almost announcing the Queen was dead. If you call your drivetime programme Rhythm and News, though, you deserve all you get. Still, among the new presenters featured in this issue, the new 10pm host did alright for himself. “You’d think the presenter of a late night music programme would fall into the usual dress pattern of most DJs – open shirts or T-shirts, leather jackets, boots, dark glasses. Ken Bruce looks more like a librarian. He wears a tie and mid-dark blue jacket and trousers, a dark beard framing a studious aquiline face. He surprises you at every turn.” FIRST IN A NEW SERIES: Onto the telly, then. The Liver Birds are back for their final series on Friday at 8.30 on BBC1, while BBC2 are celebrating the 150th anniversary of Schubert’s death with a season of programmes, though we’re not sure how many of those went out at a lot of them were at six o’clock in the new expanded BBC2 teatime schedules but, like 24 hour Radio 2, that was delayed for weeks while industrial difficulties were straightened out. Most of the kids’ line-up had been settled but at Monday at 4.20 we welcomed “a new seven part cartoon series from Czechoslovakia”, the unappealing description of the Deryck Guyler-narrated Maxidog. NOT A REPEAT: BBC1 are currently shitting all over Brucie’s Big Night with a formidable Saturday line-up of Larry’s Gen Game, All Creatures Great and Small (which was the show that really did for Brucie, the Gen Game was on earlier) and the final series of Some Mothers Do ‘Ave ‘Em. On Monday at 9.30 on BBC2 is the first run of Jonathan Miller’s masterpiece The Body In Question, while James Burke is also bringing science to the masses with his Connections on Tuesday at 7.20pm on BBC1. On Wednesday at eight it’s Secret Army and after the news a repeat of the last in the previous series of Reggie Perrin gets us in the mood for the third series starting next week, marked by another monochrome cover featuring a black smudge which was apparently Leonard Rossiter. TANTALISING-SOUNDING PROGRAMME WE’LL NEVER SEE: Well, Thursday’s Nationwide is certainly required viewing as it promises “a historic link-up between TV and radio services” to mark the big switch. Shame we never got anything like this to mark us all going digital. Playaway’s not on at the moment but Cynthia Felgate and the team are producing an intriguing replacement in the Saturday teatime spot, Now and Then, which includes “Hoxton, East London, past and present, seen through the eyes of one of its older inhabitants and some of its younger ones. Children from Shoreditch School talk to Mrs Rose Lowe and visit Hoxton Hall to see a Music Hall”. BBC4, dig that out and do a follow-up. Panorama on Monday looks at the chaos at The Times, a week before it closes down for a year due, and you can probably spot a theme here, to a huge strike. And any show with Robert Robinson talking about something or other is ace, and on Monday at 10.20 on BBC2 we get Word For Word, where “Robert Robinson looks at books, talks to bookmen and examines the use and abuse of the English language”. ROB BARKER’S ADVERT SPOT: Can’t find your favourite station on the dial? Awake at 3am and fed up they’re not broadcasting round the clock yet? Don’t worry, why not get a TV game, with three advertised this issue. “Only Binatone gives you so many action-packed TV games (at such low prices). Hours of fun with all the family as you work towards becoming the neighbourhood’s football champion, tennis pro, or even professional sharp-shooter!” Don’t want to buy one? RENTASET from RUMBELOWS and get one free. “With four super games, it promises loads of fun for the entire family. There’s squash, tennis football plus a practice game. There’s an extra offer with one of Rumbelows new remote control sets. A free TV gun which gives you two extra games, target and shooting.” Or win one with Ritter Sport (“Ignore the name… enjoy the chocolate”). “Comparing a Grandstand Video Entertainment Computer to an ordinary TV game is like comparing a space shuttle to a horse and cart. It’s a mini-computer made possible by modern micro-chip technology.” THE SO-CALLED GOLDEN AGE: The usual stack of repeats, including Star Trek at 7.10pm on Friday on BBC1, and even though it didn’t do much earlier in the year, Going Straight’s already getting a repeat run straight after it. Even Target, which everyone hated, is being repeated. And it’s sometimes dragged out to embarrass Tel but we doubt you’d like to sit through a whole episode of Star Town, which they’re flinging out at 4.45 on Sunday afternoon. “A search for the most entertaining and talented town or city in Great Britain”, it’s “presented before 25 judges in BBC studios throughout the British Isles”, and in this first semi-final Eddie Waring is Leeds’ champion while Thora Hird roots for Morecambe. WOULDN’T HAPPEN NOW DEPARTMENT: It’s remarkable how much new stuff is flung out so early in the evening, when these days we’re still not even starting the washing up. New episodes of It Ain’t Half Hot Mum are going out at 6.50pm on Mondays, and Are You Being Served at the same time on Wednesday. The same is true for drama with the long-forgotten Tycoon going out on Monday at 7.20 – though clearly they had high hopes, the theme music was available on BBC Records – while on Tuesday at 6.50 on BBC2 is the pioneering black drama Empire Road. Meanwhile Lord Rothschild gives The Richard Dimbleby Lecture at the prime slot of half nine on Thursday on BBC1. HOUSEKEEPING: The Saturday night schedule in full, then, is 5.50 The Basil Brush Show, 6.20 Doctor Who (The Stones of Blood, if you care), 6.45 Larry Grayson’s Generation Game, 7.40 All Creatures Great and Small, 8.30 Some Mothers Do ‘Ave Em, 9.05 Starsky and Hutch, 9.55 News with Richard Whitmore, 10.05 Match of the Day (though in Scotland it’s Sportscene followed by Sing Along With Sunshine), 11.05 Parkinson. The Radio 1 schedule was supposed to have just been extended but that strike action meant the evening line-up wasn’t happening yet. It was supposed to be 6.00 Dave Lee Travis, 9.00 Simon Bates, 11.30 Paul Burnett, 2.00 Tony Blackburn, 4.30 Kid Jensen, 7.00 Feature shows including on Thursday Noel Edmonds’ Talk-About, 8.00 Andy Peebles, 9.50 Newsbeat, 10.00 John Peel. Mike Read therefore did that week’s Pops before his Saturday night show had even begun, while it’s Les, Si and rubbishy Chris Wenner on Blue Peter. THEY’VE HAD LOTS OF LETTERS: Of course everyone’s talking about those radio changes. B Thorpe of Cheadle says, “I am rather tired of reading complaints about the proposed radio frequency changes. Most of these people do not seem to be able to cope with technological innovation, the life blood of modern society. VHF has been with us for only twenty years or so. Most of these objections would disappear if a decent VHF radio were bought.” D Rogers of Llandinam, Powys, is all for it. “Over the years the reception of all medium wavelength programmes on my portable transistor receiver has convinced me that a pan of sausages is kept frying away merrily by all the microphones. Sometimes an old sock is placed over each microphone too. The long wave is loud and clear so if radio entertainment is needed to assist the creosoting of the garden shed, I am forced to depend on an endless stream of adolescent voices, each offering preceded by inane chirpings from a faithful band of elderly teenagers. Roll on 23rd November!” BIDDY KNOWS BEST: Monica Everett of Worthing writes, “In the Blue Peter programme of 23rd October I was distressed to see the tortoise being shut up in a box filled with straw for its winter hibernation. Distressed, because the tortoise was obviously not at all sleepy, and therefore, buried in all that warm straw this mild weather, will be quite unable to hibernate. The problem in keeping tortoises alive in this country is that our summers are hardly ever warm enough for them to eat well, not the winters cold enough for them to hibernate properly.” Biddy says, “Miss Everett can rest assured that Freda is alive and well and hibernating, just as she had been for the last fifteen autumns. We have always followed the same pattern with great success.” And it was more fool Miss Everett because the winter was certainly cold enough, and the only reason she died during it was because she was so old, so ner.

BBC4

20.30 British Passions on Film
Well, pardon us all over the place because this isn’t, in fact, one of the familiar BBC4 On Film shows with the narration-free presentation and the plinky plonky theme tune, but instead a proper documentary with a voice-over, a theory, clips of things other than documentaries and some talking heads, one of whom on the first show completely undermined all their arguments by referring to “Saturday Swap Shop”. That needed a retake, surely. Last one anyway, looking at transport.

21.00 Love and Marriage – A 20th Century Marriage
This actually started last week but we’re only billing it now because it’s arriving into the Cream era and a look at how and where we wed in the sixties and seventies. Only one way to do it in those days, of course, and among the people we’ll be meeting tonight are a couple whose trip down the aisle was recorded for Man Alive in 1965.

BBC Radio 2

22.00 Shout to The Top
Brace yourselves everyone, Radio 2 is doing a drama! And potentially it could become a fully-fledged series if it works out, though don’t expect the return of Waggoner’s Walk. It’s about an aspiring pop group, in fact, with Shane Richie as their manager and a host of original songs, and we mention it not just for the novelty factor but because it’s written by two pop stars-turned-scribes in The Farm’s Roy Boulter and Louise Sleeper off of Sleeper.

BBC4

21.00 Room at the Top
This new dramatisation of the novel wouldn’t normally catch our attention but it’s worth noting because we were supposed to see it eighteen months ago but, just hours before it was supposed to go out, there was a dispute as to whether the Beeb actually owned the rights to the book, so it had to go back on the shelf. Several long and boring meetings later, it turns out they do, so here it is at last, and in the meantime star Jenna-Louise Coleman has become a bit more famous so this’ll probably be of interest to a few more people than it would have been had it gone out when it was supposed to.

ITV

20.30 The Corrie Years
Kids on Corrie haven’t always been the most vibrant of characters, most notoriously Tracy Barlow forever clomping upstairs to listen to tapes, though Steve McDonald arrived just after growing out of short trousers and is now the best character in it. We don’t suppose this will mention the time during the actor’s strike in 1961 when they weren’t able to hire any members of Equity for six months so started to use children to appear as postmen and policemen, because they weren’t covered, but soon stopped when they decided that, whatever point it was proving, it looked bloody stupid.

BBC4

19.30, 02.15 Top of the Pops
Last time round we didn’t just get the unofficial seventh member of Legs and Co with the umpteenth return of Floyd, but also the eighth with Kid strutting his stuff to I Feel Love. Or signing for the deaf, hard to tell. Noel would never do anything so vulgar though he does get to introduce Eddie and The Hot Rods again, playing one of the best rhtyhm’n'rock records around. Which isn’t much of a complement, as we can’t think of any others.

CBBC

17.45 Blue Peter
There was a round on Blue Peter on Pointless the other day and when one of the contestants said he’d never watched it we were desperate for him to lose, which he promptly did. Hooray. Freda the Frog, for heaven’s sake. Here last week Helen went behind the scenes of Dragon’s Den, convenient as it’s filmed down the corridor, though we’re not sure about that as it’s a post-watershed show, with no pre-watershed repeats.

BBC2

20.00 Mastermind
A pleasing bit of One BBC, albeit probably unconscious, tonight, as somebody here is answering questions on The Lovable One of The Wackers. Bear that in mind. If you remember which one that is in our unintelligible Wackers naming system based on a joke from several years ago, natch.

BBC4

20.30 Sounds of the Seventies
When 6 Music take a break from playing Superfreak by Rick James – why do they play that song so much, it gets at least one airing a week – they do play a lot of reggae, and much of it we’d grown up with, not because we grew up in Kingston or anything but because our parents had The Wonderful World of Reggae on the Music for Pleasure label, which promised twelve great tracks for only 14/6. And they were great tracks too, making it surely the best 72 1/2p our parents ever spent. That’s about a day’s licence fee, we think, so this reggae-tinged episode offers the same value.

21.00 George Harrison – Living In The Material World
00.30 Sings The Beatles
Just to make it clear, then, Paul is The Bonny One, Ringo is The Shaggy One, George is The Lovable One and John is The Aggressive Lovable One. That’s how the Sunday Mirror remembered them in 1965, and that’s how we remember them. You’ve got to have a system. You’ve probably seen these, but here they are again.

CBBC

17.00 12 Again
We must apologise that this started a new series two weeks ago and we completely failed to notice. It’s the show where celebrities talked about what they liked to watch and listen to when they were kids, and it’s great to hear CBBC have to explain it all, and do try and catch the episode of Friday 21st as John Humphrys is on it, we think the oldest participant they’ve ever had and someone who should be on kids’ telly more. Susanna Reid’s on this one.

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