Wednesday, 29th November 1967
PICK OF THE DAY
8pm MAN IN A SUITCASE, ITV
Evans-nabbed reverb-drenched piano and Ipcress File-riffing graphics of psychedelic luggage to the fore as rogue CIA man turned cut-price Simon Templar with a right face on him McGill goes in search of an MP’s illegitimate son kidnapped by hard-of thinking ruralist types in All That Glitters, a definite contender for the definitive ITC episode title. Massive in its day but letter-to-Fax-invitingly forgotten afterwards, to the extent that, along with The Protectors, The Adventurer and Whatever Them Two In From A Bird’s Eye View Were Called, Richard Bradford’s defining role now forms part of a sort of second division ITC League Of Extraordinary Gentlemen. Actually, someone should definitely make that.
ALSO SHOWING:
10.00pm LATE NIGHT EXTRA, Radio 2
Proving that the more things change, the more they stayed the same, Old Tel is ‘on the beat with music and news’ and ‘off the record with pop on the spot’, missing only a Janet And John story, and, well, the invention of a TOG-strewn World Wide Web, but doubtless fully equipped with speculative conversations with ‘The D.G.’ and endless ‘what’s that? – you say – Wogan’s gone potty?!’-type interjections. Along for the Night Ride-rivalling ride tonight are sleeve note typo-prone jazz warbler Marian Montgomery, TV Theme composer types Brian Fahey and Laurie Holloway with their respective big bands in tow, and washed-up beat boom hitmakers Unit Four Plus Two, doubtless plugging their unbelievably drippy single Loving Takes A Little Understanding, a song that doesn’t so much suggest that they hadn’t moved with the time as that they’d purposefully shifted backwards away from it.
10.20pm TONIGHT IN PERSON, BBC2
The series presenting ‘music in the folk idiom from many parts of the world’ alights in Scotland, where singer-songwriter and The Boys From Lisbon sort-of hitmaker Matt McGinn performs a couple of his numbers in suitably picturesque and chilly-looking locations, accompanied on banjo and autoharp by a young scruffbag by the name of Billy Connolly. Whether or not he threw in the odd observational gag is unclear, but we’re guessing there were waves of sycophantic guffaws emenating from the Parkinson household regardless.
THX 1139
November 28, 2018 at 10:58 am
Brilliant theme tune, but it really should have been called Man Carrying a Suitcase, because he never climbed into it.
Glenn Aylett
November 30, 2018 at 11:28 am
Late Night Extra was one of those shows in the pre John Peel era that Radio 1 carried at night from Radio 2. Little remembered now, but it established Wogan in Britain and he was offered an afternoon show on Radios 1 and 2 in 1970, where his idiosyncratic style reached an audience of over 10 million.