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Tiswas

“THIS IS WHAT THEY WANT!”

6 Comments

6 Comments

  1. Joanne Gray

    February 27, 2017 at 12:39 pm

    It’s also what we Tyne Tees kids wanted, but we had to put up with either Swap Shop or a cheap and nasty locally produced load of codswallop. That was, until the very last series of Tiswas when Central killed it off, so it was a Pyrrhic victory.

  2. Palimpsest

    May 21, 2023 at 3:13 pm

    I was always jealous of the kid down the road who had a midland receiver aerial, particularly as my dad wouldn’t buy one. “You have to move the aerial around in the loft until you get a clear picture”, “I’m not bothering with that!”. Did finally get to see it from 1980 onwards via the YTV transmitter. Revelled in the onscreen lunacy; David Rappaport attacking a giant haystack (not the wrestler as was implied earlier in the show) and Lenny Henry eating condensed milk sandwiches at sixty frames per second. Whilst I didn’t pick up on some of the subversive dialogue it did register on a subconscious level which added to the overall anarchy. Once in a lifetime as some might say.

    • Glenn Aylett

      May 25, 2023 at 8:39 pm

      It came to Border in the autumn of 1977 and for all people were a bit confused by Tiswas at first and continued with Swap Shop, it gradually grew in popularity and by Tiswas’s return in the autumn of 1978, it had really overtaken Swap Shop. Yes you’d watch the first hour of Swap Shop, but come 1030, the majority of kids were switching over.

      • Palimpsest

        May 26, 2023 at 3:34 am

        The earliest recollection I have of this is Charlie the Monkey skiing down a dry ski slope somewhere; I saw this at the previously mentioned kids house who had the ATV reception. Perhaps somebody might have an idea which series this was from?
        The frustration increased when I discovered that our regional provider Anglia was screening this and after some persuasion my dad set up an aerial. Through some freak of geography my home town couldn’t get a decent reception, the picture and sound was at best like a washed-out black and white image with highly distorted sound, which seemed to my seven year old self so strange as Anglia could be picked up perfectly just thirteen miles away at my grand parents house.
        My dad refused to get an ATV aerial.
        According to online sources it started broadcasting from Yorkshire in November 1979. I can only assume that this is correct, certainly my recollections are of watching this during the early 1980s, and despite living in East Anglia we had no problem receiving Yorkshire transmissions.
        After this I just couldn’t watch Swap Shop any more; it seemed by comparison too mundane!
        The late arrival of this in Tyne Tees seems to me to be very grim.

  3. Glenn Aylett

    May 26, 2023 at 7:48 pm

    Tyne Tees had some cartoons and pop show that was so lame I’ve forgotten its name. All I can remember is they did a home made pop video of a Rezillos song called Motorbike Beat where two men on motorbikes rode around Tynemouth trying to look tough. Time to switch over to Swap Shop or wish I they had Tiswas.

  4. Droogie

    May 27, 2023 at 3:22 pm

    HTV West had a rubbish Saturday morning show called One! Two! Tree! Presented by an old bald bespectacled guy called Alan Taylor from Paint Along With Nancy. It was set in a pretend treehouse and may have involved a puppet squirrel. What was frustrating was HTV had already shown the far superior Tiswas, but in a frustrating way where they’d only screen half an hour as part of their Saturday mornings in between old cartoons and repeats of the Lone Ranger.

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