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Your Friday Night In… February 1982


Friday, 5th February 1982

PICK OF THE DAY

7.00pm FAMILY FORTUNES, ITV
The mighty Monkhouse boots up Mr Babbage once more to pit the Jones clan against the Farestvedts in another bout of the carpet-lined ancestral throwdown. We asked 100 people (alright, we just scribbled down a list ourselves) for the best thing about this era of Fortunes, and the answers were: the frantic fiddles in the theme tune, “NAME IT!”, the questions appearing on screen “for the benefit of those who cannot hear my voice”, Bob consulting his fob watch with a concerned expression whenever a contestant was running out of time and, of course, the consolation prize of a framed family photo, with everyone lined up in their best (brown) suits and posh blouses.

ALSO SHOWING:

4.55pm GRANGE HILL, BBC1
“Settle down now, N1!” Enter the third intake of Grange Hill scholars – Zammo, Jonah, Fay, Annette, Ro-land et al, duelling with the likes of bohemian English tutor ‘Scruffy’ McGuffy, affable CDT supremo ‘Hoppy’ Hopwood and computer studies siren Miss ‘Sexy Lexi’ Lexington (until 1987, long-standing union regulations meant every teacher in the UK had to have their own nickname by law). In this episode, Annette and Belinda Zakowski (the rather irritating clarinet-playing Canadian) explore the service tunnels beneath the school, before discovering (spoiler alert) a gang of thieves intent on pilfering the glittering contents of the Grange Hill trophy cabinet on the instructions of… Gripper! (Insert THAT bit of the theme tune here.)

11.30pm FRIDAY NIGHT… SATURDAY MORNING, BBC2
“A way of ending the week,” proclaimed a nonplussed Radio Times in honour of BBC2’s last-orders talking shop, best remembered for the “sexy” titles (“Friday night, Saturday morning, five yesterdays gone, there’s a weekend dawning!”), in which a suburban commuter arrives home after a hard week at the office and dives beneath the continental quilt with his other half, before turning on the telly in possibly the first recorded example of that ‘pointing a remote control at the camera to start the show’ device in an opening title sequence… but sadly dropped by now in favour of a snazzy animated skyline. Professor Laurie Taylor’s guest list tonight (or tomorrow morning) includes playwright Trevor Griffiths, author Nell Dunn, Beryl Bainbridge and, best of all, Ray “As Usual A Bit Emotive” Gosling.

3 Comments

3 Comments

  1. David Smith

    February 3, 2017 at 7:33 am

    “Questions will appear on screen for the benefit of those who cannot hear my voice.” How were they to follow the rest of the show?

  2. Glenn A

    February 5, 2017 at 4:19 pm

    Immortal answer to a question on Family Fortunes in the imperial Bob era, ” name a dangerous race”. ” Arabs”. Show was never the same either when he left the following year and FF moved from Elstree and Max Bygraves took over with his irritating catchphrase.

  3. David Smith

    February 7, 2017 at 6:40 pm

    But what sort of answer to the “dangerous race” question would have been a sensible one? Makes me wonder if that one (and a few other “classic wrong FF answers) are somewhat apocryphal…

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