GREAT NEWS FOR ALL READERS!
Of course we had to say that. But, yes, this really is happening. Not a hoax! Not a What If! Not an Imaginary Story! On its 27th birthday (that’s today) we have to tell you that TV Cream is closing down. It will cease to be from 19th September, 2024. Gone. Let’s FAQ this…
Why?
A few reasons. The main being that, in truth, we’ve done nothing with the site for a couple of years now, other than at Christmas. Of we few who still orbit TVC, we’re all too busy, or have moved on to other projects that are now more fulfilling – as much as we love the old place. Maybe it’s even that our passion for nostalgia, and The Right Kind Of, has waned. We’re perhaps all talked out on eating Marmite on toast in front of Five To Eleven.
You said “cease to be” from the 19th – what do you mean?
Yes, the site will actually be deleted. We’re sorry about that. The ideal would have been to just let it linger (which, let’s face it, we have been for years), however, that would require paying out for ongoing hosting costs. But there are other, trickier issues too, which we won’t go into detail about here, suffice to say: “The Man”. So there you have it.
I only care about Creamguide anyway – don’t tell me that’s stopping too?
Shouldn’t be. Our Creamguide Editor seems happy to keep that going, and that works for us, because it’s still great. He might make some changes to the, erm, distribution model, but let’s wait and see.
So is this really The End?
Guess so. We’re backing up the site, and will maintain an offline copy of – hopefully – everything on here (including Off The Telly) and if there’s a way of making that more widely available without invoking any of the issues we alluded to above, then we’ll do that. We’ll keep hold of the various TV Cream domain names too, just in case. And, in as much as we’ve tweeted of late, we’ll maintain the various TVC social media accounts.
And so it really now falls upon us to say thanks to everyone who’s contributed to the site since 1997. All your comments, queries and unidentified theme tunes have fuelled us through nearly three decades of “good, great memories” and various spin-off books, podcasts etc. We’re sorry if this news disappoints you.
Now, let’s leave you on a song.
Jack
August 31, 2024 at 10:33 am
Sad news. Goodbye TV Cream. Thanks for the good great memories.
George White
August 31, 2024 at 10:35 am
Goodbye, thanks for helping shape me.
Jack
August 31, 2024 at 11:04 am
You are more than welcome George!
TV Cream
August 31, 2024 at 12:35 pm
An honour and a privilege.
Paul Gatenby
August 31, 2024 at 11:02 am
Thank you. From reading the old site in the university computer centre 20 years ago to skiving off work for 10 minutes and reading Creamguide on my phone, you’ve been a great companion. And that’s the right kind of nostalgia. Bye pals!
Applemask
August 31, 2024 at 2:21 pm
I first discovered you in 2002 as an alternative to working on a slide database for a charity that you have outlived. You’ve made me laugh and you’ve made me angry and now you’ve made me very sad.
Whichever incarnation of The Man is responsible for the site’s deletion, I will find him and I will fucking kill him. It deeply offends my sensibilities that the site should not only stop but be destroyed, unpreserved, unhappened. Not only that, it goes against the spirit of the site itself. It shouldn’t be allowed.
Danforth
September 1, 2024 at 1:50 pm
Hoping to see a print encyclopedia of TV Creams’s complete works one day, maybe a crowdfund.
Been a reader since the start. Thanks for the memories!
John
September 5, 2024 at 7:59 pm
Seconded, absolutely. bought the cream book and was (slightly) disappointed it had odd and obscure stuff in it rather than a lot of my favourite summaries from this site. There’s a big Lulu book from all this content, and likely a large amount of people who’d like a physical version of it all. Please think about it!
David Smith
August 31, 2024 at 2:29 pm
Answer your moby cock piece 😝
..And thanks, TV Cream, for all the fun.
Droogie
August 31, 2024 at 5:51 pm
Very sad to see you go. I discovered TVC in the early Noughties and it made the long days working in a very dull legal bookshop more tolerable.I particularly liked when there was a message board that featured a What Was That Show bit that was invaluable for finding out the name of dimly remembered TV programmes from the TVC Hivemind when Google proved fruitless. Thanks for all the nostalgic fun.
David Smith
August 31, 2024 at 5:57 pm
Yes, the Long Shots…?
Hope I can find The Advent Crowd buried deep in the cache before TVC shuts up shop.
Richardpd
August 31, 2024 at 10:55 pm
I’ve sorry to hear of the site is closing down, I discovered the original version of site around the turn of the millennium when I was getting into TV nostalgia & never really looked back.
Certainly in recent years I’ve noticed the amount of new features had been on the wane, but always looked for the pick of the day, especially for the BBC4 Top Of The Pops Repeats to know what was going to be shown.
When TVC launched it’s range of books I was pleased to see I was credited in the Toys book based on posts I made!
Dominic Small
August 31, 2024 at 11:23 pm
I could – should – have been a bigger ‘part’ of the TVC community, rather than just burping up a couple of articles for OTT about 15 years ago and then wandering off, but I remained a regular ‘consumer’ of ver Cream, simply because I’ve long loved its style, informative with a big streak of cheerful British humour, a long chalk from the dour pettiness seen elsewhere on t’web. TVC was a big inspiration to me, and likely others, to write enthusiastically about the ephemera we loved.
Glad Creamguide, which has in fairness been the home of much of TVC’s “material” of late, will carry on, and hope the “original writing” features can survive somewhere, in some way, at some point, as they’ve brought a lot of joy, but I guess that – with social media and YouTube having made simple nostalgia a heck of a lot easier to access than it was in ’97 – the days of a site like this were always numbered. “Doesn’t bode well for the revival with him out of ‘Let Him Have It’ and Lolly, does it?”
Auds Violet
September 1, 2024 at 10:24 am
I’m so sad to read this; oh, the wildly obvious irony that I’m suffering painful nostalgia about coaxing a dialup connection to work in 1999, and finally learning what those vague dreamlike 70s memories were actually all about. All those old bits of lost and fragmentary pop culture were as far away from me then as 1999 is from today, which is another unsayably obvious comment, but hey. And the old email list, where I learned that I’m terrible on email lists, so it’s probably a good job that they aren’t a thing anymore.
I’m at the risk of doing WrongNostalgia, but this daft and brilliant site has been a little bit of comfort through a all sorts of deeply odd and horrid life stuff (oh, and in the wonderful bits as well, of course). So I will leave it on a thank you and goodnight. In my head, this place is a regional BBC in-vision continuity booth, c1979. With that in mind, I won’t forget to turn off my set.
Dan Pearce
September 1, 2024 at 11:05 am
This is really sad news. For me, TVCream was the whole point of the internet and the launch page is still at the top of my bookmarks. No more excitedly looking to see if there was snow on the logo come December. No more scouring its furthest reaches to try to find the SoundCloud link to NativityScene so I can wrap the presents to it (TVCream is not just for Christmas, I know). I have spent so much time on your site since my first search for A Hippo Called Hubert umpty-thrumpty years ago, this truly is the end of an era. Thanks for all the hard work over the years!
Glenn Aylett
September 1, 2024 at 1:51 pm
I discovered TV Cream when I first went online 23 years ago and have been a huge fan ever since. However, I knew in the past few years, something was up when the only thing that was updated was the Christmas log and the review. You’ll be a huge miss to the fans who have loved discussing their favourite Grange Hill character, Christmas Day television in 1978, and companies like Ronco. Thankyou very much for the last 23 years.
Palimpsest
September 2, 2024 at 12:35 am
Accidentally came across your site in 2001 after trying to find information on Quatro soft drink via Google; some thing you used to feature called the Cresta Run.
Very sad to see that you’ll soon be gone; but voluminous thanks for lighting the dimmer recollections of my childhood.
Still I’ll now never know what that foreign film was I saw on Channel 4 back in 1987 or what that Pingu like short they used to show on Pebble Mill at One in 1975 was…
FishyFish
September 4, 2024 at 1:33 pm
I’m so very sad to hear that the site will be leaving us. Now I will have to be be nostalgic about a nostalgia site! Thank you so much for all the wonderful content though. I hope it might re-surface in some form, it will be missed otherwise. This is worse than when the BBC put the Domesday Book on Laserdisc!
And you never added Yok Yok to the Telly section, despite me mentioning it at least once in the feedback donkey’s years ago :). Does no-one remember episodes of this occasionally propping up a few spare minutes on the Channel 4 schedules in the early 80s except me?! I can’t remember what I had for tea last night, but still somehow recall the continuity announcer asking if “that is his hair, or a demented mushroom” one time forty odd years ago!
https://youtu.be/t_oFnmt1580?si=NkkKk8mLuWBzyvRO
Tom Layton
September 5, 2024 at 10:23 pm
I think you should leave behind a placeholder webpage that’s just a big picture of Roy Jay with the caption ‘FOR THE LAST BLOODY TIME, IT WAS ROY JAY WHO SAID SPOOK, SLITHER!’
Neil Stacey
September 6, 2024 at 5:32 pm
Bye Bye to ‘breastage’
Damien Ashley
September 6, 2024 at 7:48 pm
Such sad news. TVC was one of the absolute first websites I ever discovered in the distant past of 1997. I used to cache pages of the A-Z and read them offline because it was costing me a penny a minute with my ISP as my best friend on Friends & Family don’t you know.
I remember the sweets pages, and the old theme tunes before they all got taken down.
Mostly I’d just like to say thanks for confirming for me that the Burning Swedish Doll Horror that was Maelstrom did indeed exist and I hadn’t made it up in my head.
Glenn Aylett
September 8, 2024 at 3:28 pm
Maelstrom was set in Norway, but yes it was a strange and disturbing drama that just wouldn’t get made now. Also while I went online after the penny a minute era( £ 15.99 a month for AOL 6), these are things we remember when we first discovered TVC. No smart phones, tablets, SMART TVs, a hefty desktop that cost over £1000, a none too reliable dial up connection and the ever present threat of viruses was how I first went online.
Neil
September 7, 2024 at 1:01 pm
A fond farewell to TV Cream. Many hours happily spent scrolling through article after article, when I only intended to look for a few minutes. Nostalgia’s ain’t what it used to be!
Agnetha
September 9, 2024 at 7:22 pm
So sorry to hear this. It was funny and entertaining. Take care, all and thank you.