TV Cream

Your Friday Night In...

Your Friday Night In… May 1991


Friday, 17th May 1991

PICK OF THE DAY

6.30pm TONIGHT WITH JONATHAN ROSS, CHANNEL 4
It seems so long ago now, but there was a time before Jonathan Ross bollocksed everything up for everyone for the sake of a piss-poor joke about nothing, and was something of a broadcasting force to be reckoned with. True, he always seemed to trade in nostalgia that just slightly pre-dated the Cream Era, but his shows were once compulsive viewing and that included this bizarre Wogan-rivalling early evening chat hoedown in which big names rubbed sofas with his own angular obsessions like Corky and the Juice Pigs and Nirvana. This week he’s live from Cannes, and tonight’s guests include Jungle Fever star and director Wesley Snipes and Spike Lee, and Brigitte Nielsen. We’ve scoured IMDB and can’t work out what she can possibly have been promoting. Insert your own punchline here.

ALSO SHOWING:

8.00pm FAST FRIENDS, BBC1
Baffling mob-handed cast-of-thousands game show in which a contestant-swamped Les Dawson attempted to pose posers while team captains solicited potential answers from approximately seventeen million of their ‘friends’. It’s easy to shake your head at how controlled and tightly formatted game shows are today, but the exact opposite was this, where anarchy reigned supreme and pretty much nobody seemed to care.

8.30 THE PIGLET FILES, ITV
Nicholas Lyndhurst’s oft-overlooked second post-Rodney sitcom escapade, which is a tad unfortunate as while it was no classic, it was certainly more enjoyable than The Two Of Us. In this week’s instalment, Piglet In A Trough, lecturer-turned-Soviet-tailer Peter ‘Piglet’ Chapman does an additonal act as a hard-drinking gambler in an effort to determine whether his immediate superior Major Maxwell is actually secretly a KGB operative. They don’t write them like that any more. Or maybe that’s what they want you to think.

4 Comments

4 Comments

  1. Richard16378

    May 19, 2017 at 2:28 pm

    3 shows I don’t remember at all!

  2. Barbersmith

    May 19, 2017 at 7:15 pm

    The Piglet Files was shit of the highest order. OFAH had become unwatchable by now, and Lyndhurst was doomed to appear in utter toss for the rest of his life.

  3. Paul Bovey

    May 19, 2017 at 8:17 pm

    The Two of Us and The Piglet Files both had theme tunes by Rod ‘Aztec Gold’ Argent.

    • Glenn A

      May 20, 2017 at 10:03 pm

      Rod Argent is an interesting figure. He formed the fairly successful prog rock act Argent( best known for the top ten hit Hold Your Head Up in 1972), then after Argent fizzled out, became best known for writing theme music for the BBC and ITV’s World Cup coverage, as well as a variety of television shows. Rather like his contemporary Lynsey De Paul, who had a modest run of hits at the same time and then switched to television themes, it was a steady income.
      However, can’t agree that The Piglet Files was that bad, I did find Nicholas Lyndhurst as a useless member of MI5 quite like how you’d imagine Rodney Trotter in this role and raised a couple of laughs.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

To Top