Not at all like the way Chris Evans used to spend every edition of TFI Friday reviewing what the press had been saying about him that week like some East European dictator, here comes some TV Cream self-acclamation.
It’s in Broadcast magazine, in the wretched diary column on the back page. Except alongside the usual 100{30e2395aaf6397fd02d2c79d91a1fe7cbb73158454674890018aee9c53a0cb96} wretchedly unfunny media in-jokes is this:
AN AGE OF INNOCENCE
Nostalgia TV website TV cream (sic) has launched its own YouTube channel and Off Cuts’ attention has been drawn to a clip from an ITV schedulers’ meeting from 1984 in which a young John Birt, then controller of LWT, and his colleagues debate the appropriateness of airing “racy” new medical drama The Practice in a 7.15pm slot. There are concerns about putting the drama in the early slot because of its references to a vasectomy. But in the end, those liberal-minded ITV execs dismiss their “Nervous Nelly feelings about sex” and schedule the programme against the BBC’s new Wogan chat show, a decision which the narrator gravely sums up as “Sex against chat, a new front is opening in the ratings war”. Could this be video evidence of the end of television’s age of innocence?
What and who could have possibly drawn their attention to that particular clip?
