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Your Friday Night In...

Your Friday Night In… November 1985


Friday, 15th November 1985

PICK OF THE DAY

7pm WOGAN, BBC1
According to Radio Times, the most appropriate way to promote this edition of BBC1’s flagship chat show was with the following bit of bafflement: “Greek newspapers and magazines have called it Nagon and Logon. A rose by any other name… ?” Despite the first of those three being listed as a ‘contributor’ by Genome, we’ve not been able to find out who actually was on, though we do know that only a couple of weeks beforehand, the primary guest was Pretender To The Bin Prince Andrew, being grilled by an Old Tel-covering Selina Scott. No doubt he was there to ‘laugh off’ press reports ‘linking’ him to Sarah Ferguson, though if Selina is to be believed, he asked for her phone number regardless. Also crammed onto the sofa that evening were the ‘that’s more like it’ line-up of Russell Grant, Jonathan Pryce, Natasha Richardson, Steve Steen & Jim Sweeney and, inevitably, BA Robertson, with music from Robert Plant.

ALSO SHOWING:

9pm TELL THE TRUTH, CHANNEL 4
A surprisingly late timeslot for the surprisingly long-running Graeme Garden-helmed spot the imposter quiz, perhaps hinting at its imminent cancellation. Lynda Bellingham, Brian Hayes, Robin Ray and Claire Rayner were on hand to see if they could suss out the non-ringers, though if any of them claimed to have invented a system for smoking drugs through a dog is sadly not recorded. What’s remarkable about Tell The Truth, though, is that it’s one of those shows (see also Whatever Next!) that anyone who watched it can remember every note of the theme music of, despite not having seen it from that day to this.


7.30pm MICRO LIVE, BBC2
All your R Tape Loading Error updates in one handy weekly update! This week there’s a report from the Computer Animation Awards – which seemed to be on every bloody week, to be honest – while there’s also an investigation into ‘the shady world of the cowboy computer maintenance companies’, who no doubt enjoyed a good game of High Noon, while in the studio Fred Harris demonstrates the very latest in speech synthesiser technology. If memory serves, he was slightly taken aback when the robot voice read out the punctuation marks like some zany additional sidekick in an American reboot of The Singing Detective. it didn’t say “++CALCULATING CALCULATING”, though, so it doesn’t really count.

2 Comments

2 Comments

  1. Glenn A

    November 10, 2017 at 11:06 am

    It shows how good Wogan was in those days when someone like Prince Andrew and Robert Plant could appear on the same show. I do remember Wogan being quite adventurous with his musical guests, Kate Bush, normally someone not keen on live performances in the eighties, being a regular. Maybe the prospect of 10 million people watching your new single being performed tempted her to make the trip to Wood Lane.

  2. Richard16378

    April 25, 2018 at 1:27 pm

    Kate seemed to give up touring after her lighting director died in an accident & felt she was jinxed.

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