TV Cream

CREAMGUIDE: 1st-7th January 2011

With Baltimora and the big one for 85

Hello, and we’d sorry to announce that the holidays are nearly over as we’ve arrived with another edition of Creamguide. Just the one this time, though, you’ll doubtless be thrilled to know. And there are a few festive days in it anyway, so it’s not that depressing, honest. We hope you all had a lovely Christmas and if you’d like to offer your opinions on the festive fare then creamguide@tvcreamtest.co.uk will happily solicit those.

NEW YEAR'S DAY

BBC1

12.40 Doctor Who
And let’s start 2011 as we mean to go on, with a correction. Not our fault, this one, though, because they decided to whack Planet of the Dead in this repeat run at the last minute, so we’re a day behind and this is part one of The End Of Time. Given nobody would have got that far in the last Creamguide, we may as well just say again that we thought this one was a bit too complex for Christmas Day, although quite how it’ll be any better with most of the audience battling hangovers, we don’t know.

BBC2

19.25 Dad’s Army
The best thing on over Christmas, we reckon, was the Two Ronnies Studio Recordings, an absolutely fascinating selection of out-takes from Ronnies recordings, with the pair of them chatting with Paul Jackson in a horrible suit and doing bits of business to entertain the audience, while the unseen sketches were of the highest standards. Where’s this been for the past thirty years? We wonder if there are enough off-cuts like this to do a whole series of the hidden history of light entertainment? That’d be sweet.

19.55 The Morecambe and Wise Christmas Show
And for previously unseen light entertainment to… well, there’s an obvious reason why we’re getting this, and people would only complain if we didn’t. It’s 1976, which we don’t think was actually written by Eddie Braben, which rather belies the fact it was entirely his non-appearance the ITV stuff was rubbish, because we’ve got The Sweeney and Angela Rippon. And if anyone’s at a loose end before they go back to work, can we recommend they have a go at sorting out the Morecambe and Wise Show pages on Wikipedia, especially the ITV era one, because they’re full of opinion and uncited references and look a mess.

21.00 Eric and Ernie
It’s an Eric and Ern night, the centrepiece invariably being this new drama, devised by and co-starring Victoria Wood, about their early days, and apparently it’s all jolly good with some ace acting and some lovely scenes. And then…

22.30 Eric and Ernie – Behind The Scenes
…it’s the same story again, only this time with the real people involved. In fact when they were at Thames, in between their shows the company, always eager to get them on camera even when they had nothing to offer, would often run various interview specials where the likes of Alan Whicker or Mike Aspel would chat to the pair about their heroes or the music hall, and this is very much the same, only with the views of Lee Mack, Cilla Black and, for some reason, Andrew Marr.

23.30 Rising Damp
The most obvious British comedy films to show after all that would be That Riviera Touch or The Intelligence Men, but instead it’s this, where Eric Chappell sticks together about twenty old scripts together and replaces Richard Beckinsale with Christopher Strauli, as well as the familiar house with a gleaming palace.

CHANNEL 4

21.05 Unintelligent Design
Another comedy theme night here, about Father Ted, which is always worth revisiting. As well as the repeats there are two documentaries, the first of which features Graham Linehan and Arthur Mathews talk about their inspirations, which given the pair of them do great DVD commentaries should make for fascinating viewing.

22.05 Small, Far Away – The World of Father Ted
One of the best comedy books of all is Linehan and Mathews’ Ted script book, as the duo annotate the scripts with umpteen footnotes about how the episodes made it from script to screen, which doesn’t happen enough in this kind of thing. Ted is one of the silliest and funniest sitcoms ever made and deserves all the praise it got, and it’s a crying shame Graham and Arthur don’t work together anymore, especially given the praise Graham lavished on Arthur when he won the Writers Award at the Comedy Awards last year. Although it did mean people just thought Arthur was dead.

BBC3

22.30 Almost Famous
Just as Before They Were Famous was a staple of a late nineties BBC1 Christmas Night, so this son-of-BTWF is a staple of BBC3 New Year’s Day. As ever, you lose the quality of the Bake and Deayton’s beautiful scripts in favour of some shouted ramblings from a BBC3-friendly “comedian”, but the quality of clippage is about the same, and there’s normally something you won’t have seen before, if only because the subject has just become famous.

BBC Radio 2

13.00 Pick of the Pops
Says here this is only an hour, despite two years being billed, which we assume is a mistake, although they could certainly zip through 1962 as records didn’t last very long in those days. In any case let’s hope for as much time as possible for 1983, which we assume will be the beginning of, rather than the end of, although the number one is no good either way.

SUNDAY 2ndJANUARY

BBC1

12.20 Doctor Who
So, 365 and a half days after his original farewell, here’s Dave taking his leave from the role again. Since then, of course, we’ve been completely smitten with Matt to the extent that we can’t really remember the appeal of Dave in the first place, but this seemed significant at the time, we’re sure. Oh, and the Christmas show this year was ace, not least the brilliant bit where he walked straight out of the room and into the background of the film, which is the sort of whimsy that Matt does so well.

BBC2

18.50 The Morecambe and Wise Christmas Show
Looks like poor old Mike Yarwood is going to have to die before we’re going to get to see his 1977 Christmas show again, the most watched light entertainment show of the seventies no less, which got a hundred thousand more viewers than this, half an hour later. It’s still iconic, natch, and we’ve said it before but we would like to see BBC4 next Christmas show this, Mike and the Generation Game from that night in one go, as a tribute to the greatest ever light entertainment line-up. And you can be sure that in 1977 nobody was writing sneery articles about BBC1’s line-up being “predictable” or “boring”, even though they’d all been on Christmas Day way more times than Strictly or Who.

23.30 The Man Who Made Eric and Ernie
Also, great though Bill Cotton was, you’d think he would have made a better fist against Morecambe and Wise’s first ITV Christmas show in 1978 than flinging on True Grit – A Further Adventure, which was so flimsy the Radio Times didn’t even put it in their film guide. Other than that, Bill was an ace BBC1 controller and an even better Head of Light Entertainment, as this documentary from two years ago celebrates.

BBC Radio 4

19.00 The Archers
It’s a soap anniversary that doesn’t involve a live episode, which is news in itself. But we are getting half an hour of it tonight to mark the sixtieth anniversary, and apparently the events contained within it will Shock Ambridge To The Core.

MONDAY  3rd JANUARY

BBC1

20.30 Celebrity Mastermind
Been a good series, this, so far, once again because it gives us the chance to see the other side of well-known figures, most obviously the comic stylings of Frank Gardner the other night, as he doesn’t get the chance to crack many gags on the news. And he stormed it on general knowledge. A great line-up tonight, too, with Helen off Blue Peter – doing Debbie Harry! – and Robert Webb joined by Stephen Mangan, who’s always likeable on this kind of thing, and Sir Clive Sinclair.

BBC4

21.00 The Secret Life of Bob Monkhouse
Always great to see Lord Bob on the box, and this new documentary is particularly welcome, because the main attraction is going to be a root through Bob’s amazing archive, which he famously compiled by faithfully recording every comedy programme ever broadcast. You may recall that Creamguide was fortunate enough to view some of the fascinating – and, of course, mostly long wiped – material that was contained within when we attended the Kaleidoscope event at BAFTA just over a year ago, and we can confirm it’s well worth a look. We’re not sure how many of the newsflashes and links into The Kids Of 47A we were shown are going to appear, but it’s all ace.

22.30 The Story of Light Entertainment
Surely the worst documentary this Christmas, purely in terms of talking heads, had to be the Candid Camera show on ITV, which was almost a parody of hopeless pundits with the likes of Jeremy Kyle, Stephen Mulhern and Michael Underwood, to the extent Paul Ross was virtually the voice of reason. Sad to report, too, that Konnie Huq’s contributions could probably have been swapped word-for-word with those of Barry Shitpeas’ on her hubby’s show the previous night. Some people you’ve heard of appear here, in this episode of the series from a few years back. It’s the one about all-round entertainers, which of course Bob’s in.

Sky Sports 1

08.00 The Sky Sports Years
When Sky and BSB merged twenty years ago, virtually everything from the latter organisation, like Jupiter Moon and Now Sir Robin, was chucked in a skip outside Marcopolo House, but BSB did have one useful asset in the Sports Channel, which two decades on has become undoubtedly their biggest success story, and still employs many of the personnel – like Richard Keys, Martin Tyler and Andy Gray – from those BSB days. Frankly its obvious enthusiasm and dedication to high standards make it the only part of the empire we have any respect for, and on umpteen occasions today we can check out the time when, despite the fact it was Brentford vs Gillingham rather than Manchester United vs Chelsea, they were still giving it plenty.

The Creamguide Review of the Year

Long-term Creamguide subscribers may recall that a few years back, the week between Christmas and New Year would be accompanied by the Creamguide Review of the Year, an extra mail-out with various lists that were just an excuse to slag off everyone we hadn’t liked in the previous twelve months, and some jokes that we couldn’t fit in the normal weekly Creamguide. These days, though, we never have any jokes left over so the Review stopped happening. However we thought we’d take this opportunity to take a look back at some of the highs and lows of the Creamguide year, or at least recycle bits that amused us, if nobody else.

JANUARY

2010 began very much how the year ended, with comical weather conditions, although of course it only became top story on the news when it reached London. Creamguide was ten years old in January, having begun on the old TV Cream mailing list in January 2000, and to mark it we did exactly what we did in the first one and bill a Newsnight anniversary show. This month we were a bit concerned that Harry Hill was going to go to Sky, which he didn’t, although in retrospect we sometimes wish he had as we wouldn’t have had the awful disappointment of his most recent series, while Media Guardian hilariously linked him with BBC1’s Friday night chat show now Jonathan Ross was leaving, even though he’d clearly rather speak to Wendy Craig than Sarah Jessica Parker. The Guardian this month also made the stupidest mistake in the history of newspapers when they called Coronation Street “the Yorkshire soap”. The Manchester Guardian, there. We watched So You Think You Can Dance and quite liked it, partly as David and Carrie Grant weren’t on it, before it featured a dance “representing cancer” which was horrible self-important emotional grandstanding so it could piss off. We also started Saturday Seen, our feature reviewing every Saturday morning show ever, but couldn’t decide whether Swap Shop was better than Tiswas. Neither was as good as Dick and Dom anyway.

FEBRUARY

The big news in February as far as we were concerned was the new look Creamguide, with colour and graphics and everything, and now sent out via the site rather than Yahoo Groups. The first new look issues appeared this month and for the next few months we published Creamguide in both formats until everyone moved over to the new one. We don’t know if Marsha Wallace moved over, given we received an out-of-office from her every week for about three years. On the telly, the best thing this month was Helen off Blue Peter embarking on her Atlantic challenge, which was one of the best things this show has ever done and puts Helen up there with the greats. In America, NBC were cocking it up massively by dumping Conan O’Brien from The Tonight Show six months after he started, and six years after they announced it, which makes us wonder why American telly makes such long term commitments and then axes stuff after one episode. BBC2 sitcom The Persuasionists was flop of the month, being rescheduled to midnight after stinking ratings, and not even Andrew Collins’ script doctoring could help this one out, as the characters were just so bloody unlikeable. This month we also billed a Ray Gosling documentary for BBC East Midlands in a rather off-hand fashion, only for the man himself to get arrested after transmission, while we also saw the launch of our favourite ever media enterprise, The London Weekly, a “newspaper” entirely made up of cut-and-paste bits from the web, written by illiterates, distributed to nobody (despite boasts in their press pack which they’d just copied off the Metro) and the worst publication in publishing history. Three issues, was it?

MARCH

This month we learnt that the most famous and popular Saturday morning show of all time was, er, TX, the 1985 ITV effort, if only because we got more e-mails about it than everything else we featured in Saturday Seen put together. Sue Robbie has one hell of a fanbase. We Are The Champions came back, and became the one programme that would have been improved by a bunch of screaming children as there was no audience and so had all the atmosphere of a morgue. On the other hand, Ant and Dec’s Push The Button may well have been filmed in a lunatic asylum, such was the audience baying like a pack of wolves and the general sense of overblown hysteria. It was quite a month for crap light entertainment with a hugely ropey Eurovision selection process, with a song at the end so unmemorable one of the contestants forgot it while they were singing it. March also saw the announcement that 6 Music was closing down, which led to a gratifying response from the public, as well as a load of boring idiots saying they should close down BBC3 because they show Snog Marry Avoid, which is like saying they should close down BBC1 because they show Total Wipeout.

APRIL

The Easter weekend saw a brilliant BBC1 line-up of Ashes To Ashes, Doctor Who and Jonathan Creek, even if the latter was a bit shit, and we dunno why they didn’t do a big trailer promoting all three together. What is for certain is that Matt Smith is the best Doctor for ages and this was the best series for ages, although we’re not sure about the next series having “more events” as we like Who best when it’s low-key and whimsical. We had to abandon the Matrix Databank, though, as it was becoming too famous in Who circles and we couldn’t hack the pressure of becoming a proper news source. The big news was the Election Debates which we thought nobody would watch but the first is still in the chart of the twenty most watched shows of the year, and got lots of shots of Granada Studios on the telly which is always good (before they took the letters off the side a bit later, the bastards). Villain of the Year was the absolute idiot who decided no Doctor Who fan would mind a massive garish animated banner appearing on screen during the show, and it wasn’t just the timing of the thing, but the fact it was virtually unreadable and if you’d done that as a mock on YouTube, even cwilliams1976 would laugh at you. Which was a shame as that whole package of idents based around TV Centre were really nice. In other news, Charlie Brooker got a really odd haircut.

MAY

The big story this month was of course the Election, which if it wasn’t a vintage Election night (no Tony King didn’t help) did come up with some memorable moments including Dave Dimbleby delightfully allowing an Electoral Commission bod to dig their own grave when they tried to talk tough but failed to disguise the fact they couldn’t actually do anything, Dave carrying on after 6am because it was so important, Kate Silverton doing nothing but run after a fleeing Jacqui Smith, an interview with Brucie and the triumphant return of David Butler. In other news, Chris Moyles did a boring documentary about the Radio 1 Breakfast Show but it was OK because alongside BBC2 repeated the brilliant Smashie and Nicey special and a demented episode of Wogan from 1987 which mostly involved Stewpot and Pete Murray libelling former colleagues and promoting their current ILR stations. Ashes to Ashes finished but we couldn’t say much about how it ended as US-based Creamguide subscriber Tony Hughes was getting it a few weeks later, while Who got its lowest audience ever on the hottest day of the year and Whovians assumed it would be instantly axed.

JUNE

This month saw the end of an era as the dual-standard Creamguide finally ended and it only available in this format rather than Yahoo Groups, after nearly ten years, and we said goodbye to all our friends at the Do More For Cats Group and, er, the Do More For Dogs Group. It was also the World Cup, natch, with Adrian Chiles poached by ITV at huge expense only to die on his arse doing his MOTD2-esque shtick in front of a bemused Patrick Vieira and Edgar Davids. We liked the Beeb’s coverage for its extended post-match odds’n’sods sequences, one night including a review of the 1990 World Cup for no real reason, with Gary Lineker captioned “GARY LINEKER” and an extended chat with Gazza which must have ensured some people tuning in late must have thought he’d died. Remarkably Charlie Brooker, the paedophile walrus himself, ended up on the cover of the Radio Times this month, although the last You Have Been Watching was cancelled and ended up at midnight on E4 two months later. We finally completed our quest to review every Saturday morning show ever, much to the relief of Tim Bowling who complained we spent too long on hopeless mid-nineties ITV chancers, but when we put our mind to something, we see it out.

JULY

This month we resurrected the old Creamup feature Why Don’t YouTube where we just, well, linked to some YouTube clips, which was by far the most popular middle bit we’ve run but which didn’t last long as there wasn’t enough of us banging on for our liking. Jonathan Ross left the Beeb to much rejoicing because the simple fact is he is a crap interviewer, and not in a Parky sense but because he simply asks his guests questions they can’t answer and makes them look stupid, and Friday Night had always been a bloody boring show. Sherlock, one of the best telly shows of the year, began in July, while we said goodbye to Working Lunch, thanks to a hopeless revamp, and TV Quick, though we very much enjoyed the last issue as dashing editor and Friend of Creamguide Jon Peake requested its readers put TV Choice on their shopping list instead, and not enough magazines refer to shopping lists these days. And they put “Special Issue” rather than “Last Issue” on the front, like comics announcing Exciting News For All Readers Inside.

AUGUST

In August we were thrilled to see the great Ian Kirkby get a role in a primetime sitcom, although sadly Pete vs Life turned out ot be pretty rank, not least because it was the same as every other Channel Four sitcom these days and revolved around a hapless unlikeable bloke being mistaken for a paedophile every five minutes. Also, the female lead had really distracting teeth. At least Ian has the new Dick and Dom series to give him funnier dialogue. Way funnier was this remarkable sequence from the excellent Would I Lie To You. Ending this month were Last of the Summer Wine and The Bill, but we’re not that bothered about the latter going as it lasted way longer than Z Cars and Nock Green Dick and they were complete anachronisms when they finished. Heartbeat finished the following month but we, er, forgot to bill that. Also this month we confirmed that Starland Vocal Band do indeed suck.

SEPTEMBER

Why oh why oh why did they decide to call it bloody Daybreak? Who calls it daybreak, let alone the fact it was also the name of TV-am’s ill-fated “serious” bit and the unsuccessful bidder for GMTV’s franchise. The name is plagued, and unsurprisingly it flopped big time, because who wants to watch Howard Marks at breakfast time? The big problem, though, is that no GMTV viewer knew watching it was a bad thing so didn’t want a revamp, although we’re thrilled Breakfast is thrashing them because Bill and Sian are both utterly unstarry, having worked their way up the ranks, and they’re an ace team. The Pope came to Britain so we got a couple of marathon live broadcasts, which are always fascinating, while CBBC was 25 and actually did commemorate it with various montages and Toby Anstis turning up in the son-of-Broom-Cupboard, which amazed us as surely no child gives a toss.

OCTOBER

October saw TV Cream enjoy a new look, and with it a new look for Creamguide, although our first attempt went a bit wrong and ended up being aligned a bit too far right. Never mind, at least it’s on the site as well now. We also launched The Time Tunnel, marking the official launch of the new Cream era (1967-97), even though our random draw seemed to strand us in the early seventies. With the Spending Review we had three Budgets in a year, although none of them were at teatime so we weren’t that bothered, while TV Burp returned and featured a rather depressing amount of smut, while Harry’s awful album lost him a lot of goodwill. Sort it out, Haz! Throughout the year Scottish Television confirmed themselves as the world’s most useless organisation, dropping all ITV’s drama and pretending it wasn’t anything to do with them being cheapskates (including the hilarious Q and A in the Radio Times where the answer to every question was “We show Taggart”) but they did at least put every episode of Win Lose or Draw on YouTube. The fact they’re trading off a fifteen year old daytime quiz, mind, is less impressive.

NOVEMBER

At the beginning of the month the Beeb went on strike and we were horrified with the comments on Media Guardian, of all places (presumably the moderators on Have Your Say were on strike and the nutters had to go elsewhere) which were mostly of the Sack Em All/Close It Down variety. The BBC going on strike is heartbreaking and it’s a tragedy when it has to happen! We were shocked this month too that Joel announced his departure from Blue Peter, not least as we’d heard it a few days before and dismissed it as the ramblings of an overexcited child, more fool us. We particularly enjoyed watching The Trip, a brilliant show, particularly because for all its cinematic approach, it was just Coogan and Brydon doing impressions and riffing hilariously. “For we rise at 8.30… for nine!”

DECEMBER

December started, for Creamguide, with the most remarkable amount of snow they’d ever seen in their lifetime, although unsurprisingly it didn’t become top story on the news until it reached London two weeks later. While we were snowed in we watched the result of the World Cup bid and rejoiced at the fact we didn’t have to schmutter up to Sepp Blatter and Jack Warner, two of the most unpleasant and corrupt individuals on the planet, for eight years. Most of the telly before Christmas was about Corrie and Lennon, before Christmas arrived and you won’t need to be reminded about what happened then. Convenient, as we’re writing this before Christmas. But that was 2010, and we’re sure you’re looking forward to more of this in 2011. Yes, the unsubscription details are at the bottom of the e-mail.

TUESDAY  4th JANUARY

BBC1

16.30 Blue Peter
Many thanks to the Blue Peter team for our Christmas present this year, which was the most traditional Christmas show they’ve done for many years, ending with, yes, the Chalk Farm branch of the Salvation Army band and a choir of children performing a carol, right down to the closing shot of the crib and the shiny Blue Peter ship with the copyright logo. So they do listen if we keep on moaning. It’s the Review of the Year today, but it appears to concentrate solely on matters musical.

19.00 Celebrity Mastermind
As ever we are indebted to Celebrity Mastermind for running for the rest of the week and making it feel like it’s still Christmas even though we’re back into boring workaday programming elsewhere. Michael Buerk’s on this today, as is Cerrie Burnell off Cbeebies who in a rather cliched fashion is doing a boring grown-up arty specialist subject. We get it, you’re a trained actress!

CHANNEL 4

21.35 David Walliams’ Awfully Good
What this is, basically, is another go at TV Hell, which is always welcome as far as we’re concerned because we always enjoy amusing odds and sods being exhumed for the archives. There’s three of these, each two hours long, to come over the next few months, and we’re hopeful the quality of the clips will be particularly high because a couple of inmates of TVC Towers were very briefly involved in their selection. In that, basically, they asked us to email them a few YouTube clips six months ago, and we’re intrigued to see if they bothered using any of them.

WEDNESDAY  5th JANUARY

BBC1

16.30 Blue Peter
The last show before Christmas was of course also Joel’s last show, which was a suitably moving farewell, right down to his special surprise guest being Alf off Home and Away because Joel thinks he’s great. He’s not getting a special show of clips all to himself, alas, but today we do have another outing for this series from last year where he and Andy took part in various winter sports, basically to keep them occupied while Helen schlepped up the Amazon.

19.00 Celebrity Mastermind
For what it’s worth, Channel Five didn’t bother to edit Jonathan King out of the 1985 Christmas Top of the Pops, and they could have done as well, because he only linked into a video montage then introduced Paul Young, and they stuck an ad break straight before that bit so they could easily have chopped that out and faded it up again during Paul Young’s intro. But they didn’t, so fair play to them for allowing us to see the show as it was intended. Although it was more likely they couldn’t be arsed doing anything but the bare minimum of work on it. In other news, Simon O’Brien and Terry Christian are on this.

ITV

20.00 The Unforgettable Bob Monkhouse
More Bob here, although you’ll have seen this before, not just because it was on six months ago but also because we think it was on one morning last week. Still, any excuse to glory in his brilliance again, and it’s full of people saying how ace he is which is all you want. Incidentally, before Christmas we got a letter from John Philips, who says, “Bit of a shame everyone skips over the Bygraves era of Family Fortunes. Sure, he was rubbish, but in a wonderfully watchable way. I used to love the contestant intros, where Max would hear what the player did for a living, stare into space for a bit, mumble ‘right’ and move on to the sound of clunking silence. Also, Biiiiig Moooooney! was such an obviously forced catchphrase. I’d much rather have a hilariously bad Max than a boringly competent Les Dennis. At least Max’s shows kept the great theme tune of the Bob years.”

BBC4

21.00 The Golden Age of Coach Travel
There’s an early episode of Corrie based around a holiday to Blackpool available on a DVD of Jack Rosenthal’s work, which while hilariously stagey (the whole of Blackpool being represented by a 6×4 painted backdrop, with the cast literally queuing up to deliver their lines) does serve as a reminder of the era in which entire streets did indeed go on holiday together on a coach. Here’s a documentary about those days of thermos flasks and singalongs.

BBC Radio 2

22.00 The Story of Funk
“On Isaac Hayes’ first day in prison he was taken to the vegetable patch and asked ‘can you dig it?'”. It’s everyone’s favourite bit of Creamguide, where we have to write about black music without sounding like a bunch of high court judges. Far better that we just mention the likes of James Brown and Sly Stone are included in this first instalment.

THURSDAY  6th JANUARY

BBC1

19.00 Celebrity Mastermind
The other thing we like about Celebrity Mastermind is that the general knowledge questions are that much easier than the civilian version and we can answer almost all of them. We’re just pleased these are the only episodes broadcast at holiday times where we’re watching with our parents, so they don’t see the mess we make of it usually. Arthur Smith among the contestants tonight.

FRIDAY  7th JANUARY

BBC1

19.00 Celebrity Mastermind
At half past seven tonight Christmas is officially over as this series ends. Although it is the weekend, so not all bad news. Scraping the barrel for the final show we’ve got Martin “8.15 From Manchester” Roberts and Kristina Rhianoff from Strictly, doing Patrick Swizzle.

20.30 QI
Hasn’t finished yet, then. Back now to the issue that everyone was talking about before Christmas intervened – is ABBA an acronym? Chris Orton says, “If we are talking pedantry, isn’t ABBA/Abba an intialism rather than an acronym? If it is the former then it should be upper case. I could be entirely wrong, but I just wanted to contribute to the debate/muddy the waters.” Well, since the last time we discussed this, we wonder what this all means for TARDIS, which definitely is all in upper case. Do let’s keep this fascinating debate going.

BBC2

20.00 Mastermind
And with barely a gap to sweep away the glitter, Joe Public returns to the big chair. We’re sad to say that we’re going to have to start mentioning the subjects again in lieu of anything more interesting to say, albeit this week just to tut at someone answering questions on Harry Potter. That said, though, we notice Kings Cross, while its current redevelopment is going on, now has a Platform 0, but surely it would have been more appropriate to number that extra platform 9 3/4? What kid wouldn’t want to get on a train there? Although it might screw up the display screens a bit, we suppose.

BBC4

21.00 Classic Albums
22.00 Rock Goes To College
22.45 Tom Petty and The Heartbreakers – Runnin’ Down A Dream

All these programmes are about Tom Petty, the latter that four-hour thing they’ve shown before, so let’s instead here from Victor Field, who refers to our suggestion in the Christmas Creamguide that Monte Carlo Or Bust was “like if Ruby-Spears had ripped off Wacky Races, only worse.” Victor says, “In a sense, Joseph and Kenneth really did. Witness the end credits of DePatie-Freleng cartoon Bailey’s Comets – check out the worryingly Filmation-esque design of the characters and the presence of Eric “Carry On” Rogers conducting Doug Goodwin’s music, what with the scores for this and other DFE cartoons (The Houndcats, Baggy Pants and the Nitwits and so on) being recorded in London for some reason, presumably financial. And heresy though this might be (especially in light of Blake Edwards’ passing), I’ve always kind of liked Goodwin’s Pink Panther theme songs more than the Mancini one…”

So that’s it for both the last Creamguide of 2010 and the first of 2011, but don’t worry as there are still several days to go left before you have to worry about normal real life. And we’re not sending you two other even longer emails in the next few minutes. Happy new year! And if your resolution is to read Creamguide the second it’s published, subscribe here

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