For we know we should be gay
Hullo again!
And welcome to the second part of your Christmas Creamguide – although we can’t promise you much that’s especially festive as we’re going until 6th January. But that does mean we won’t bother you again until 2023. Onwards!
NEW YEAR’S EVE
BBC2
13.05 The Remains Of The Day
Merchant Ivory-forged adaptation of that book that that kid in the year above was always waving around as if intending to read but never actually reading as though he hadn’t been holding a copy of Secrets From The School Underground like some teacher-defying grub-merchant aloft in the playground only eighteen months previously, with Anthony Hopkins and Emma Thompson as chaste courtly would-be lovers exchanging glances via dumb waiter across a 1930s ancestral home while proto-fascists demand to know what they think of ‘our colonial chums’ like a slightly less odiferous version of Nigel Farage. In other words, still stinking like your swimming kit did when you left it in your bag over the summer holidays without realising it had also been used to story some rotting fish and rancid germolene and pressed into service as emergency liner for the cat’s OTHER litter tray, but ever so moderately less so. “That censored word there is ‘winking'”.
15.10 West Side Story
“Pneaow! Pneaow!” “Wacko! Jacko!” The Jets and The Sharks take to the streets – none of which have a painted cyclorama backdrop, honest – for a song and dance-fuelled territory war replete with bizarre Children’s BBC links. First there’s the nagglingly vivid yet factually indeterminate use of the yappy I-will-hire-purchase-hair-dry-yi-yer bits from America as an interstitial in – we *think* – Record Breakers, and then there’s the indisputable appearance of the Round Window from Play School during Tony and Anita’s One Hand One Heart-accompanied mock-wedding churchy bit, which when you think about it could also potentially be the Farthing family pottery’s window from Chigley. There’s also a bit where you can just about see a cat on a bin introducing scraggledy comedy clips, Bill Pertwee barking at A-Rab and Baby John to do twenty star jumps, and The One They Called The Bishop off of Play Chess leaning into frame giving a double thumbs-up and exclaiming “Hi Pals, I’m up next!”. So iconic that Liz Truss slunk into the ‘boy, boy, cray-zee boy’ pose on being introduced to HRH Sir Prince Charles, shortly before she got taken down like the old TV Cream Themes page.
21.15 The Morecambe and Wise Show 1970: The Lost Tape
Looks like those rediscovered monochrome episodes have fallen off the repeat rota, which isn’t that great a tragedy as they were worth more of a look for novelty’s sakes rather than a piece of comedy (‘right, we’ll do the IRA sketch!’). This is a rather more exciting discovery, because it’s from 1970, it’s in colour and it’s written by Eddie Braben, with all the familiar bits of business present and correct. It got its first outing last Christmas, and here it is again.
CHANNEL 5
16.35 Escape To Victory
“There’s only one thing for it Syd – we’ll have to escape… to victory!” Sylvester Stallone and Michael Caine join footballing forces with a host of real-life soccer superstars including Pele, Bobby Moore, Osvaldo Ardiles and Mike Summerbee of Antchester United for a very very very very very very very loosely real event-inspired tale of World War II prisoners of war sporting some conspicuously mid-seventies fashions even though it was 1981 staging an escape bid under cover of a kickabout against the Germans. Pretty much the dictionary definition of a film where nobody can ever really decide whether it’s any good or not. “In an ironic echo of his musical career, Mick Hucknall out of Simply Red has followed up early promise with a series of lacklustre disappointments”.
Sky Documentaries
21.00 Who Killed The KLF?
If you’re after something exciting to see out the year, here’s a welcome repeat. For about eighteen months at the start of the nineties The KLF were the biggest band in the world, their unique brand of stadium house, which gleefully ripped off anything and everything, from obvious white labels to novelty records, being hugely critically acclaimed and also selling by the truckload. This doc is as fascinating, funny and bemusing as the band themselves, a film that was a long time in the making, mostly thanks to the director Chris Atkins being sentenced to five years in prison during its production. Atkins approached Jimmy and Bill about being in it, but they refused and wouldn’t let them use their music, and Atkins decided that if The KLF came up with a problem like that they’d just blag it and do it anyway, so he did, and seemingly that kind of spirit won them over and they liked the finished result, so this is probably as near as you can get to the full story.
Talking Pictures TV
00.35 Confessions from a Holiday Camp
This is most notorious for the windswept, bleaker-than-bleak Hayling Island locations having to be explained away by Askwith as ‘Sid’s bright idea to re-open a holiday camp in March’. Contrary to popular myth, this film does not end with a sub-Carry On Loving custard pie fight. The sub-Carry On Loving custard pie fight turns into a sub-Benny Hill chase across Hayling Island, which ends when Askwith and Booth crash their tricycle into the ornamental fishpond. [Musical note: the title song, in which The Wurzels systematically dismiss the holiday potential of various European countries in favour of the ‘birds and the booze’ of a traditional English summer, was written by Ed Welch, composer of the signature tunes for both Thomas the Tank Engine and Gus Honeybun. And, indeed, Give Me England Every Time My Dear is pretty much a musical halfway house between the mellow charm of Gus’s theme and Thomas’s off-key henk-honk.]
04.15 What a Whopper!
One of many early ’60s Britcoms that get tagged as “unofficial Carry Ons” due to a slew of familiar cast members, in this case Sid James as a salmon poacher, Charles Hawtrey as a West End Jackson Pollock and Terence Longdon as a Maida Vale Ron Grainer. Adam Faith is a Hampstead Arthur C Clarke, drumming up business for a Loch Ness Monster book by building a Nessie from junk and taking it over the border. Along the way, Spike Milligan is a demented tramp, Wilfrid Brambell a verbose postie, Freddie Frinton a top-hatted version of the pisshead character he’d perfected over the last three decades, Clive Dunn an embryonic version of the ageing caretaker he’d perfect over the next three decades (he’s only just hit his forties at this point) and Terry Scott and Gordon Rollings are the two diametrically opposed breeds of flustered local bobby you’ve come to know and love. The script is a Terry Nation joint, from an original idea by Jeremy Lloyd, plus tartings-up courtesy Trevor Peacock. The whole thing, though, is a little too arriviste middle class to be a true Carry On. Faith’s Chelsea-dwelling, trilby-sporting, King’s Road-sauntering hero just would not wash in a true Carry On, where even the vaguest notion of ‘cool’ is an alien concept at best, and a social menace at worst. (Remember how those hippies ended up in Camping.) The opening shot of Faith flaneuring his way past The World’s End pub to the sound of his own voice singing the theme tune would not have washed with Gerald Thomas. (Even though said theme tune does turn out to be a cut-‘n’-shut pairing of What Do You Want if You Don’t Want Money and Carry On musical touchstone Oh Dear What Can the Matter Be?) [Musical note: the Radiophonic dirge Terence Longdon’s character plays to Clive Dunn in the opening scenes was actually composed by Desmond Leslie, soon to become nationally infamous for punching Bernard Levin in the face live on *that* edition of TW3.]
BBC Radio 2
13.00 Pick of the Pops
1976 first up here, which is a bit of an odd one because we only had it last month and some of the records they featured are still in the charts, but any opportunity to hear the delightful Fairytale by Dana can’t be passed up we think. Actually if they’d gone one year earlier we could have had two charts with the same record at number one, as the second hour is 1991, just a few months after the big Pops revamp and with one of the most bizarre Top 10s of all we think, a demented mix of re-releases, novelty records, veteran acts and dance tracks that is so diverse it’s no wonder Pops was struggling to make a coherent programme out of it.
NEW YEAR’S DAY
BBC2
12.45 Cleopatra
Random Cleo production chaos fact: at various points, the script was being written by Nigel ‘How to Run a Bassoon Factory’ Balchin, Dale ‘One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest’ Wasserman and Lawrence ‘Tunc’ Durrell. Which is why the finished film was a psychological sado-masochistic satire of pre-war British business practices.
16.45 Planet Of The Apes
The original – and not Tim Burton’s Hail To The Chimp!-esque reboot which apparently existed in a bid to prove that if an infinite amount of monkeys were given an infinite amount of typewriters they’d eventually accidentally rewrite that bit in Mysterious Cities Of Gold where they met The Olmecs, only without Esteban’s shoe annoyingly flying off in the opening titles – and in fact the original quintolgy used to regularly appear on a nightly basis around Christmas in a sort of Galen-skewed variant of the Michael Caine Appears In Pulp On Tuesday phenomenon, and they also used to do the rounds a lot at your father’s work’s Christmas party where one of those bloke that used to hire themselves out with a 16mm projector would show Escape or Conquest before you inevitably got given a heavily discounted discontinued Dr Cornelius figure wrapped in red cellophane by the weirdly almost ninety three percent convincing Santa. Or at least if you were a boy you did – girls just seethed in envy with their Spinning Jennys. Whither The Contrabulous Fabtraption Of Professor Horatio Hufnagel?
21.00 Motown Master: Lamont Dozier at the BBC
22.00 When Motown Came To Britain
23.00 Marvin Gaye: Live at Montreux
Before Now That’s What I Call Music, the top compilation album was absolutely Motown Chartbusters, with pretty much every home in Britain having at least one of them, and indeed in Creamguide’s case all of them (number seven our favourite, with the fruit machine cover). While the British Invasion was dominating the US charts in the mid-sixties, in return they sent us the Motown sound and we absolutely lapped it up with loads of their artists becoming household names. In fact there were periods where the classic Motown era was a bit forgotten in the States, the soundtrack to The Big Chill in the mid-eighties bringing them back to public attention, whereas in the UK we never stopped loving them, with generations of artists coming back to those famous old songs to cover them, and so engrained in the public consciousness that even John Major picked The Supremes among his Desert Island Discs. So this should be a highly entertaining evening, starting with a tribute to a third of the Holland-Dozier-Holland triumvirate responsible for some of the most cherished pop songs ever written. Then it’s a fascinating sounding documentary looking at why they struck such a chord in mid-sixties Britain and what impact it had on the artists themselves, before a concert from 1980 featuring perhaps the label’s favourite son.
CHANNEL 5
15.25 Footloose
Earth’s Mightiest Hero saves the universe with a dance-off, leading in to a writeup which has now been pretty much rendered null and void by Kevin Bacon’s bravura performance as himself in the frankly rather splendid Guardians Of The Galaxy Holiday Special and so instead let’s have a laugh at the expense of all of the Radio 2 presenters who still can’t see the sudden ending of Kenny Loggins’ theme song coming and get audibly surprise-caught flustered on air while unconvincingly pretending that they planned it all along as a lead-in to the latest news about today’s roads. They only had twenty seven million listens to The Hits Album to get used to it! Or did they think Apollo 9 by Adam Ant was actually the same song??
17.40 Dirty Dancing
Another outing for Bill Medley’s Heavy Concept Album as Patrick Swizzle and his pause button-friendly facial expressions scandalise early sixties smalltown America by doing the Side Shoe Shuffle Hop or something, which we’re always being a bit flippant about around these parts so we’d like to take this opportunity to give a quick shout out for I Carried A Watermelon, Katy Brand’s fab book about her ongoing obsession with Dirty Dancing, which will do until HarperCollins finally commission us to write I’m Twirlin’ A Cane Made Of Peppermint – My Cinematic Journey With The Magic Garden Of Stanley Sweetheart. Or Toby Hadoke does Looking For The Park With Derek Griffiths on a Heads And Tails Bluray. Actually, that’s not a bad idea.
BBC4
19.00 Come Dancing
Wow! When this first appeared in the schedules we assumed it was a one-off repeat as a novelty but, remarkably, it looks like we’re getting a whole series of it. Everyone has fond memories of Come Dancing, although nobody seems to be exactly sure as to when it actually started, and even in its prime it was never a primetime proposition, spending most of the seventies and eighties in a late night slot and almost never broadcast before ten o’clock. That was the case here in 1979, where Tel was in charge, although he never enjoyed it that much and always said that when he announced he was leaving, the biggest reaction came from people saying they’d forgotten he was even doing it in the first place, failing to stamp much of his personality on proceedings despite his old mate Ray Moore on commentary duties. This series offers a bit of excitement as it’s the first to include a disco round, while the competition between the Midlands and West vs that classic Come Dancing conurbation Home Counties North has a Strictly connection with members of the Clifton dynasty competing.
Talking Pictures TV
22.00 The Boston Strangler
Split screen, eh? Nothing dates a film to that late-’60s, early-’70s corridor as easily as the moment when the image splits into a smorgasbord of little stamps containing different bits of the scene. ‘But it’s like cubist Hitchcock!’ ‘It’s incredibly difficult to plan and shoot and edit!’ ‘It harks back to the golden age of silent cinema!’ Well, maybe. But unless you’re Brian De Palma, and quite often even if you are, you’re dooming your film to the ranks of historical curiosity if you overdo it. Any more modern examples – 24, Crank, that overlong Tarantino one where Uma Thurman works for Kwik Fit – are doing it at such an ironic remove you expect their multi-image compositions to have some inverted commas slide in from either side. Mind you, there’s an alternative world somewhere where it’s split screen, and not 3D, that James Cameron has committed untold billions of studio money to desperately try and revive. And that’s an Avatar sequel we’d actually watch.
BBC Radio 2
13.00 The Ultimate Take That Song
15.00 Take That at the BBC
Even despite all the tax business and everything we still think Take That are a great band. You could have almost heard the mass sigh of relief on Pops on BBC4 about eighteen months ago when they finally became famous, because what with Bros going down the dumper and the New Kids finally imploding the music industry were absolutely desperate for some new teen idols to fill the void, and there was so much goodwill surrounding an act who were British and personable and who would happily go on all the Saturday morning shows and join in with everything. We’ll hear some of that in the second programme, and before that it’s Cat Deeley counting down the nation’s favourite. Hard to pick the best, we think, as they have a pretty great back catalogue with their post-reunion stuff perhaps even better than their original collection with bangers like These Days and The Flood, so it should all be great fun.
19.00 The Victoria Wood Songbook
Victoria Wood has actually had a number one single, of course, with The Smile Song technically a double A side with The Stonk in 1991, although it seems to have been a bit forgotten, alas. Like many comedians who started their careers in the seventies, Victoria’s act was initially songs interspersed with short comic interludes before those bits got longer and longer, but she never gave up on the music and most of her shows included some wonderful original comic songs that managed to achieve the impossible by being both funny and musical, and here are her greatest hits.
MONDAY 2nd JANUARY
BBC2
12.40 The Man Who Never Was
A new telling of the old ‘false documents on corpse washed up to put off the Hun’ chestnut surfaced in cinemas this year, and the sheer amount of articles going ‘wow, why hasn’t this story been told on celluloid before?’ took even our jaded arses back a bit. The Jeeves button’s right there, for God’s sake. Anyway, this is the only version you’ll need, scripted by Nigel ‘Bassoon’ Balchin. Lawrence Durrell did rewrite a couple of scenes, but since they involved Michael Hordern’s character taking the corpse to Alexandria and doing unspeakable things with it, he was paid off early.
19.30 Mastermind
Still a Bank Holiday today, but most channels are resuming normal service (a bit of a pain, as we have most of the week still to cover here) with the various daytime shows all back and the Monday night quizzes continuing as regular as clockwork. We’re sorry we haven’t been able to do the traditional Mastermind joke in this Christmas Creamguide as the only one is a normal human edition, though still good fun with rounds on Christopher Guest and Succession.
22.00 William Shakespeare’s Romeo And Juliet
Essentially Virgin Cola in movie form as indie filmmaking, indie pop and indie-ambic pentameter combine in a pager-age retelling of the time-honoured tale of star-crossed lovers, starring Claire Danes and Leonardo Dicaprio alongside TV’s Harold Perrineau, thankfully dancing to Young Heart Run Free rather than shouting WU-HA-HA-HAAAA-AAAAAULT for about twenty eight minutes where they could have put in some explanations for stuff. You can’t keep a good story down, though – well, unless you’re that remake of The Prisoner – and thanks to the evolution of fashion slash technology this actually looks a lot more interesting and less irritating than it did at the time. They should have let Richard Herring direct his version, mind.
ITV
12.05 Death Becomes Her
Rubber-faced ribaldry aplenty in the surprisingly little-seen comic face-off involving actual face-offs between Meryl Streep’s ageless witchy Broadway type and Goldie Hawn’s ageless witchy Broadway type as they compete for the affections of Bruce Willis in a deliciously heavy-handed satire about plastic surgery and the rejuvenation industry. The sort of movie that should by logic and law of averages have had episodes of Frasier (‘Chef Becomes Her’), The Simpsons (‘Selma Becomes Her’) and Seinfeld (‘The Cosmetic Surgery’) semi-sending it up while also doing entirely their own thing but never actually did.
21.00 Stonehouse
There have been quite a few dramas in recent years delving into some of the most famous political scandals of the sixties and seventies, including Profumo and Jeremy Thorpe, even though these days they can almost feel pretty quaint compared to some of the stuff we see in the news most days. Here’s another one, this time from the pen of John Preston who wrote the book which the Thorpe drama was based on, recalling one of the most eye-opening stories of the seventies, where John Stonehouse MP apparently died in mysterious circumstances, only to turn up in Australia a few weeks later having faked his own death. Matthew Macfadyen plays the lead and seemingly it’s a great performance, and the whole series illustrates the pretty farcical circumstances that make it such a rattling good yarn nearly fifty years on.
CHANNEL 5
15.50 The Goonies
“G! You need a bunch of kids – O! To find some treasure hid – O! On an old pirate ship, acting on a crime lord’s tip – A-GOONIE-GOONIE-GOONIE N! We’ll show you who’s the boss – I! With Short Round and Thanos – E! A Corey and Sam Gamgee, and Pam from Gray’s Anatomy.”
BBC4
22.00 Michael Jayston Remembers… Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy
22.10 Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy
Bit of a shame that Jonathan Powell’s Wikipedia entry spends so much time on his role in the axing of Doctor Who, and how it’s that and a not entirely successful spell as Controller of BBC1 that seems to define his career, when before that he had one of the most distinguished BBC careers of all, producing some of the most acclaimed dramas in the history of the Corporation. This is almost certainly his masterpiece, still cited as one of the greatest TV shows ever made and with Alec Guinness providing an acting masterclass in the lead role. Sadly not many of the cast are still with us, but Michael Jayston is and he reflects on its success before we see it all again over the next three nights.
Drama
14.00 Howards’ Way
‘Howards’ Way, it’s bloody Howards’ Way!’ Nice to see this again, a proper Sunday night institution in the eighties to the extent Bruno Brookes used to dart home after doing the Top 40 to watch it. Another production by Gerard Glaister, who seemed to single-handedly keep BBC drama going in the eighties as his shows were among the few that actually engaged a wider audience, this retread of The Brothers at sea can look pretty ridiculous now thanks to those scenes of, of course, middle-aged men in open-necked shirts chinking ice cubes in huge glasses of Scotch, but it should make for entertaining viewing every afternoon from today.
Talking Pictures TV
00.35 The Bed-Sitting Room
02.20 Water
The two pillars of British film comedy, here, as relevant today as they’ve always… no, sorry, even we can’t go that far. But the first remains fantastic, and we’re sure all our thoughts were with Mrs Ethel Shroake of 393A High Street, Leytonstone on September the 8th this year. And as for the second film… well, British justice is still a farce and a sham as far as we can see. Makes you think. Hey, this is easy, what’s the Guardian’s phone number again?
BBC Radio 2
12.00 Tony Blackburn, Your Soul Mate
We were reflecting on Motown’s success in the UK yesterday, and here’s a man who did as much as anyone to make that possible, as Tony absolutely loved it all and championed it with great enthusiasm, famously making I’m Still Waiting a hit after he said it was the greatest record he’d ever heard and demanded Motown release it as a single, as he might possibly have mentioned on one or two occasions. This should be an entertaining show where he brings us masses of Motown, as well as stacks of Stax and piles of Philly, for our delectation.
TUESDAY 3rd JANUARY
BBC2
14.15 Carousel
Gaudy as it gets Singing Ringing Tree-adjacent adaptation of the supernaturally tinged smash stage musical, home to such standards as The Stonecutters’ Song, Donald Where’s Your Troosers? and You’re A Mean One Mr Grinch, not to mention THAT number made even more famous by Gerry And The Pacemakers, The Kop Choir and Cannon And Ball doing a bit about Tommy being interrupted by Bobby in ‘football’ attire – i.e. a generic woolly hat and scarf and a styrofoam cup of beef and tomato soup – trying to work a rattle into the arrangement.
BBC4
20.30 Sykes
21.00 Hattie
We’re not getting a whole series of Sykes repeats, but after the Christmas one the other week we have another from 1974, which is a bit of a bonus as unlike that one it’s from before the death of the much-missed Richard Wattis. Seemingly it’s here to preface another screening for the biopic, which brings back happy memories not just of a much-loved actress but also the days when BBC4 had a budget for original drama. Actually it remains one of the most-watched things in the channel’s history, and unlike some of the other sadness-behind-the-smiles dramas we’ve had along similar lines, this is a pretty likeable affair with a lovely performance by Ruth Jones.
Talking Pictures TV
00.05 The Mutations
Ah, Jack Cardiff. Cinematographer sans pareil, but when it came to directing… well, he picked some rum ‘uns. There was the series of overwrought thrillers starring Rod Taylor, culminating in the madly violent Dark of the Sun, infamous for an especially bloody chainsaw battle, and scripted by unorthodox pseudonym ‘Quentin Werty’. The Long Ships, a Viking adventure shot in Technirama (a sort of halfway house between Cinemascope and Vistavision, for those of you who can’t walk past an opening garage door without being reminded of aspect ratios) and partly funded by Marshal Tito. And, of course, Girl On a Motorcycle, a plotless excuse to mix psychedelic effects with Marianne Faithfull in a leather jumpsuit. Last, and by all means least, was this rehash of the old Freaks premise, with Tom Baker as a mad scientist in sub-Merrick prosthetics, people with genuine disabilities used as grotesque come-ons tut tut, and some repulsive stop motion set to a dissonant Basil ‘Phibes’ Kirchin soundtrack. It’s enough to make you wish he’d actually made The Jade of Destiny, the cod-Elizabethan romp about ‘Dinwiddie, master swordsman’ that he briefly drafted Clive James in to write.
WEDNESDAY 4th JANUARY
More4
21.00 Best Year Ever
Another edition of this so far rather mysterious series, this time reflecting on 1982. A big year for this channel, of course, and we’re promised some reflections on that, but whether it’ll be discussion of its programme policy or just the first few minutes of Countdown nicked off YouTube, or somewhere in between, we’re not sure at this stage. An item on legwarmers suggests this may be one to file under easy, uncritical nostalgia, but let’s wait and see.
THURSDAY 5th JANUARY
BBC1
23.40 Weird Science
Not exactly cancelled but certainly on the cinematic naughty step for a good while now, but there’s still a good deal to enjoy in John Hughes’ decidedly odd mutant biker-interrupted teen comedy about two science geeks who make the most significant technological breakthrough since the invention of steam power and ruin it all thanks to their obsession with ever more gigantic knockers, which never seems to quite decide which side of the right-on fence it falls on and consistently berates itself for attitudes it then goes on to shamelessly display three minutes later. Still, let us be grateful for small mercies. At least it isn’t Soul Man.
ITV
21.00 The Real Stonehouse
One other aspect of the Stonehouse case is that it provided quite a lot of publicity for The Fall and Rise of Reginald Perrin which everyone assumed was inspired by the case, but which in fact was written before it ever happened. The fact that comparisons could be made with a sitcom illustrates the rather farcical nature of the whole case, as we’ll hear more of in this documentary speaking to the people we’ve just seen portrayed in the drama. We’re presuming we won’t get Stonehouse’s later appearance on Sin on Saturday, alas (‘Bernard here’s got a great idea for a programme!’), but it should all be fascinating, not least because there are currently three books about the case vying for attention on the shop shelves, including two from members of his family.
Talking Pictures TV
16.55 The London Nobody Knows
James Mason takes his brolly for a thoughtful potter around the crumbliest, flakiest boroughs, majoring in knackered old music halls, knackered old buskers in knackered old caps, eels accompanied by abstract electronica, and piss-adjacent goldfish. Easily the best source from which to perfect your Mason impersonation. It’s all here: the breathy strain, the high-flown mumble, lazily chewing on the fatter consonants, absent-mindedly jumbling all the vowels about before spitting them out in whichever order he sees fit. This film also contained the minor revelation for us that Play School musical favourite We All Walk the Wibbly-Wobbly Walk is in fact a cockney folk ditty from time immemorial. Now if you’ll excuse us, we’re off to thumb through Beowulf for references to Little Ted Bear (From Nowhere In Particular).
BBC Radio 6 Music
07.30 6 Music Goes Back to the 80s
For no particular reason, 6 Music are spending the entire day playing eighties music, but we can absolutely get on board with that. Throughout the day there’ll be plenty of tracks familiar and forgotten, including a sprinkling of archive sessions, while all the shows will also feature a mix from some of the decade’s leading names, including Jeremy Healy and Coldcut.
FRIDAY 6th JANUARY
BBC2
23.05 Manhunter
Haven’t we finished yet? Not even the Time Lords came this far. We should go. We should really really go… or we could stick around and see out the overextended festive season with this decidedly unfestive Silence Of The Lambs ancestor starring Brian Cox as a misspelt pre-F-F-F-F-FFFF Hannibal Lecter helping William PETERSEN As Pat Garrett track down a madman who apparently loses it when he hears In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida by Iron Butterfly, which you have to concede is probably fair enough. What’s more, it’s back where it belongs at sneaking black and white portable to your bedroom o’clock on BBC2.
BBC4
19.00 Smashie and Nicey’s Top of the Pops Party
For a while, it used to be the last thing in the Christmas Creamguide was always the curtain raiser to the next Pops year, but we had all the docs for the rest of the nineties about six months ago. But 1994 does get underway here, and we start the Pops year with an apology as we were pretty much certain we wouldn’t get this programme, as it’s not an ‘official’ episode of Pops, but here we are. The show celebrated its thirtieth anniversary in January 1994 though it wasn’t an especially happy birthday as the show was in a bit of a bad way and there were regular reports in the papers that it was on the way out. As we’ll see over the next few months, they managed to turn that around, but at the time it felt like these celebrations were something of a final goodbye, BBC1 devoting much of an evening to the show, including a Pop Quiz revival and the Pan’s People doc that was then repeated about a million times. Centrepiece was this show, though, which at the time was great fun but we think it’ll be a bit less interesting now because in those days we didn’t see the clips every five minutes. As you might expect, watch out for some pretty abrupt edits as well. But Smashie and Nicey are great, of course, so it’s worth a look before 1994 proper begins this time next week.
19.50 Top of the Pops
If you’re after more interesting archivery, though, the good news is that the additional repeats from this week in history we got accompanying 1993 at the end of last year look to be continuing for the foreseeable. This is a right oddity of an episode, mind, from January 1985 where Richard Skinner announces that audience research has come up with the shock revelation we want ‘more top hits’ which leads to the rest of the year including the rather tedious Top 10 Videos format with umpteen clips of videos rather than proper performances. This first go at it, mind, is pretty unique with the top ten covered in extreme detail, and most of them in the studio as well, hence why we always get it in its full forty minute duration.
20.30 Top of the Pops
And after the thirtieth anniversary celebrations earlier, here’s how it celebrated fifteen years on air in January 1979 – er, not really very much, other than Mike Read offering up a few pop facts, as is his wont, and a crude edit at the end to remove a clip of someone obvious. Racey are on as well, as they were in the episode from late 1978 we got the other week, but we can live with that, while elsewhere Generation X illustrate that Sir Billiam Idol, with his pathetic bleat and fluffy hair, must be the least threatening punk of all.
And that’s that!
As it should be, given we’re already on 6th January. That’s it for Creamguide in 2022, with special thanks to everyone who’s read it and contributed, and get well soon to Chris Diamond who we hope will be able to join us again next year. We’ll be back on Thursday 5th January to kick off another twelve months of this kind of thing if you’re into it, but in the meantime, a happy Christmas to all of you at home!
By the way…
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Sidney Balmoral James
December 23, 2022 at 6:33 pm
Freddie Frinton, despite specialising in comic drunks, was teetotal fact fans.