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PICK OF THE DAY
Posted in: From Creamguide
Top of the Pops
19.30, 00.55, BBC4
So a momentous show last time with The Jam arriving, and there’s an equally effervescent 45 from this new rock phenomenon called the new wave in this edition as The Stranglers make their debut. The quality of the disco had also skyrocketed from the previous week too, with Martyn Ford and Honky being replaced by Heatwave and The Jacksons. We also very much enjoyed Kid doing a link while riding on a camera because it reminded us of him in his floating armchair on Worldwise. Can anyone put any record of that on YouTube?
PICK OF THE DAY
Posted in: From Creamguide
Sounds of the Seventies
22.00, BBC2
“We went to a few dis-cos to ask some young people what they thought!” That was brilliant, as was the bizarre opening titles to the Nationwide Pigeonhole item which involved a pigeon being glassed, and we’ve always loved that clip of McFadden and Whitehead performing Ain’t No Stopping Us Now, what with the Pops Orchestra in vision, The Ladybirds, the bloke who strides into shot then immediately realises he’s on camera, McFadden/Whitehead’s pirouettes and Whitehead/McFadden looking as if he’s about to have a heart attack, especially when he hollers “Movin’, groovin’, movin’, groovin’!” We wouldn’t mind seeing the whole of that Jacksons show either, it looks ace. A great choice of topic tonight – the fifties! By which of course it means those bands like ELO and 10cc that were inspired by the rock’n'roll and doo-wop of their youth.
PICK OF THE DAY
Posted in: From Creamguide
An Audience with Billy Connolly
21.00, ITV4
This show has become probably the most-repeated bit of eighties comedy ever, which is remarkable when you think that its first screening was actually on Channel Four rather than ITV, and at eleven o’clock at night to boot. We remember ITV putting it in an alternative schedule during Euro 2000 as well, making it surely one of the oldest programmes ever shown on primetime ITV1, but these days it’s confined to its digital offshoot.
PICK OF THE DAY
Posted in: From Creamguide
England’s Still Dreaming
22.00, BBC Radio 2
The best ever way to explain exactly what the impact of punk was has come from BBC4 as after sitting through thirteen months of Top of the Pops, The Jam seemed to have arrived from another planet. What with CBBC taking punk in its stride it’s all very much part of the furniture these days, hence its appearance on Radio 2, with this documentary from six years ago getting another airing.
PICK OF THE DAY
Posted in: From Creamguide
The Royal History of Pop
22.00, Channel 4
We were just thrilled Cliff did Wired for Sound. In fact we recorded the NBC News off CNBC on Tuesday night to see how American telly covered the festivities, though we should have done it on Monday if only to see how they explained Rolf to their audience. This clip show is about the links between the monarchy and pop, and it’s not just going to say “they don’t like it” and bugger off but also discuss the when-worlds-collide encounters of the Royal Variety and other shows, and inevitably speak to The Three Degrees.
PICK OF THE DAY
Posted in: From Creamguide
Election 87
10.00, BBC Parliament
“I’m not asleep, I’m not asleep, I’m waiting for you to finish rabbiting on!” Hooray, another Dimbleby Day to be had and this one hasn’t been on for ages either. It’s slightly underwhelming, most obviously because they’re in a tiny set with all the backstage boys, er, backstage, but there’s plenty to enjoy, obviously including the Mars bar and the brown shoes, but also a spectacularly inaccurate exit poll, the results of the Newsround election, David’s repeated demands to look at pictures from an airship, a declaration in front of a branch of Supercigs and, of course, Robin Day falling asleep. “I’m sorry, it’s back to 1964!”
PICK OF THE DAY
Posted in: From Creamguide
Punk Britannia
21.00, BBC4
Not seen the first part of this yet, but after the run through pub rock we get the start of the youth explosion as we know it, undoubtedly with another outing for Bill Grundy (which was all his fault) but almost certainly with some more unfamiliar stuff too. Then at ten it’s ninety minutes of punk and punk-related clippage, including Dr Feelgood in what might be that utterly terrifying performance we saw on Pops the other week, and happily it packs up at the start of the eighties so we don’t get the appalling likes of Green Day.
PICK OF THE DAY
Posted in: From Creamguide
The House The Fifties Built
21.00, Channel 4
The second social history series this week shares a similar premise to the Electric Dreams series on BBC4 a year or so ago, in that a modern house is kitted out with the kind of thing you’d be using in the past. This one goes further back, though, and while the fifties is out of TVC’s usual jurisdiction it’ll probably be a lot of fun, starting off with the kitchen where the housewife was now finally unchained from the mangle.
PICK OF THE DAY
Posted in: From Creamguide
The Secret History of Our Streets
21.00, BBC2
Two new social history series this week, both of which examine how domestic life has changed over the past century. The Beeb’s starting point is a survey Charles Booth did over a hundred years ago of the highways and byways of the British Isles, and we’re going to revisit six of those roads to see what’s happened since, starting off in Deptford High Street. Well, it got a Blue Peter Old People’s Centre, that’s some progress.
Schedules revisited: silver jubilee
Posted in: Cream over Britain
Susan Hampshire and Peter Wyngarde treat pensioners to a slap-up silver jubilee meal at Annabelle's Cafe in Fulham Road - what's not to like?
Tuesday 7 June 1977
BBC1
6.40am Open University
Well, you didn’t think this was going to take a day off, did you? Then a blank screen from 7.55 until…
8.40 Mary, Mungo And Midge
8.55 Boss Cat
9.20 Babar
Printed in the tiniest typeface possible in the Radio Times, back in the days when every big occasion had to be preceded by cartoons while BBC1 cleared its throat. At least one paper will have referred to this as “breakfast television.”
9.44 Weatherman
Keith Best spends 55 seconds on the weather for The Mall, then five seconds on the rest of the country.
9.45 Nationwide Special
“Raising the curtain on jubilee day”, says the RT, but it neglects to mention what they actually did or who did it. Tch.
10.10 Silver Jubilee: a Day of Celebration
Tom Fleming dons his cravat and settles down for the main shift. Each moment on the day was timed to the second and noted down in the RT. They all left the Palace at 10.25 and were driven around London for an hour, with a quick excursion at 11.10 for the Queen to touch the hilt of the Pearl Sword offered by the Lord Mayor. Then they were all in their seats in time for…
GLC Chairman Lord Ponsonby is flanked by models Lina Hooks, left, and Jan Emery - both dressed in the attire of 1952 - as he introduces the first of 50 silver buses celebrating the silver jubilee
11.30 A Service of Thanksgiving
A load of hymns from St. Paul’s Cathedral.
12.25pm The Queen Meets the People
As she walked through London on her way to a luncheon at the Guildhall. But enough of that, because up next it’s…
12.55 Nationwide Jubilee Fair
While the Queen had her dinner, we had Michael Barratt and Frank Bough in shirt sleeves toasting the entire country, and Valerie Singleton on CakeWatch. This was an actual real fair in the studio, with a huge merry-go-round in the middle of the floor, and Mike linked into all the reports via – can you guess? – a Venetian-blind styled Jubilee Scanner. They were also joined by the winners of their Song For A Jubilee competition. “Ba-bumba-ba-bumba-ba-bumba! It’s the jubilee rhumba!”
2.25 The Queen Speaks to the Commonwealth
Via the Beeb, ITV and all radio stations except for Radio 3.
2.50 The Return Procession
There wasn’t much to jubilee day, was there? After the lunch, there was another procession through London in a horse-drawn carriage, before the whole family appeared on the balcony of Buckingham Palace at 3.25. Then that was it until Thursday when the Queen and Prince Philip went up the Thames on a boat, a bit like Michael Jackson and those fake Olympic rings.
3.35 Black Beauty
Time to switch over to the racing on ITV.
5.20 Jubilee Jackanory
For shame, no Jubilee Blue Peter, or even John Craven’s Jubilee Newsround. Instead all you got was Penelope Keith reading a story by Helen Creswell about Posy Bates taking part in her school’s jubilee presentation.
5.35 News
A pre-moustachioed Richard Whitmore spends eight minutes talking about the jubilee, then two minutes on war and famine.
5.45 Regionalia!
Basically, regional news everywhere except for London, who got Tom and Jerry. Well, it’s not as if anything happened there today, did it?
5.50 Nationwide Special
Hopefully Mike and Frank put suits on for this one because it was official Nationwide time. And because they’d been on so much today, tomorrow the programme was just 20 minutes long so they could cram in One Million Years BC starring Racquel Welch.
6.20 The Women Superstars
“Since today was all about celebrating a strong woman, here are some more,” was presumably the idea behind this scheduling. Pickering and Vine are in Cambridge as Britain’s top sportswomen – Rachel Heyhoe-Flint, Anne Packer and some others we’ve never heard of – battle it out for the Diet Pepsi Trophy.
7.30 My Fair Lady
“A special BBC1 holiday presentation” is the way they always explained away the lazy option of just bunging on a really long film to fill up the evening.
10.20 News
We always associate Richard Whitmore with being on before the See-Saw programme, so this late night placing is all wrong.
10.40 The Good Old Days
Textbook stuff, this line-up, isn’t it? Max Bygraves was top of the bill, and also appearing were Millicent Martin, Julia McKenzie, Sheila Staefel and, er, The Hot Dogs.
11.40 Weather, Close
Not heard the national anthem enough today? Here it is again.
The Queen, yesterday - or indeed any day from the last 60 years
BBC2
6.40am Open University
An all-morning session, though with a 50-minute gap at 7.55 for the hell of it.
10.50 Interval
A quick burst of Walk The Talk until…
11.00 Play School
Julie Stevens and Brian Cant raise the flag for jubilee day and open up their Royal Scrapbook. No teatime repeat, alas.
Understated commemorations in Prothero Road, Fulham
11.25 Closedown
Bad luck, republicans.
4.25pm Goodies Rule – OK?
If this had been on an hour later, Michael Barratt would have been on two channels at once.
5.15 The Secret Life of Walter Mitty
They could easily have swapped it with this.
7.00 News on 2 Headlines
Followed by Weather on 2 – a more challenging, arty look at the weather, perhaps.
7.05 Conversazioni
BBC2 made a day of it, didn’t they? Part nine of the series on learning Italian.
7.30 News on 2
What, again?
7.40 The Magic Show
From the splendour of Caesar’s Palace in Luton (yes, really), Neville “This is not a stage name” King introduces a bunch of “top international magicians”, none of whom we’ve ever head of. Still “Los Magicos” is a great name, isn’t it?
8.30 The Old Grey Whistle Test
Eric Clapton performs at the BBC Television Theatre. Our uncle has a video on his shelf called Eric Clapton on Whistle Test, and one day we’re going to ask him if we could watch it, just in case Bob Harris is at the start. And then we’ll immediately turn it off.
9.30 Late News on 2
Bloody hell!
9.40 Silver Jubilee: a Day of Celebration
The minority channel oddly takes on the task of showing the highlights of the day. Given that this week’s Radio Times features a letter asking for consideration to be taken into account by the commentators for those still watching in black and white, it’s a shame those watching on 405 lines were left out once again.
10.40 Laurence Olivier in Love Among the Ruins
Back when you used to have seasons devoted to living actors.
12.20am-12.25 Music at Night
Fall asleep to the soothing sounds of John Williams on the guitar. And from all of them at Television Centre, goodnight.
Hazel Grove station gets a last-minute sweep ahead of a "right royal" visitation
ITV
9.30am Rainbow
Back in the golden years when it was on every day.
9.45 Royal Wedding
A film of the Queen and Prince Philip getting married in 1947. Zzzzz.
10.15 Er…
Alistair Burnet had sorted through all his 365 crevats in preparation, but to no avail. An industrial dispute meant all ITV viewers got was a documentary about Coventry Cathedral, an unspecified film, plus any old rubbish they could find on the shelves.
Bet, Annie and Fred supply ITV's sole jubilee festivities
12.50pm Jubilee Holiday Sport
This seemed to go out, though, with Dickie Davies introducing an afternoon of “all-round sporting entertainment”. Basically this was Roses Cricket, with commentary by Gerald Sinstadt (and Granada and Yorkshire were still showing that as recently as 1991, even though they showed no other cricket at any time and they could only fit in an hour or so a day), and The ITV Seven from Sandown and Redcar. At 1.25 there was the mysteriously-named Sports Special, which appears to be just some wrestling, and Dickie also had to introduce the Queen’s Speech to the Commonwealth and the News at One.
5.00 News
You knew it was a big day when Alistair Burnet was on at teatime.
5.20 Regionalia!
Some regions got Jubilee Mr and Mrs, but others, bizarrely, decided to show it the following day and tonight screened a bog standard episode of Sale of the Century. Perhaps they thought only Nicholas Parsons had the required gravitas for this special day. ATV had all the fun and excitement of, er, University Challenge, Anglia had Jubilee About Anglia, Southern had Jubilee Day by Day and Granada just flung on The Beverly Hillbillies.
5.50 The King’s Troop
Michael “London Bridge” Wale takes “a colourful and light-hearted look at this famous ceremonial horse artillery unit.” Mmm.
6.35 Crossroads
But they weren’t holding their own jubilee party in the motel, which is just not on.
7.00 Make ‘em Laugh
Not the crappy Saturday afternoon time-filler of clips from British films, instead a sort of proto-Video Entertainers – The Eight-Track Entertainers, maybe. All of them had appeared on New Faces, so we got Michael Barrymore, Jim Davidson and Roger De Courcey, but we also had Al Dean, Simone and the excitingly-named Monopoly.
7.45 Topaz
Opposite the Beeb’s long film, a long film. But at least this was a Hitchcock.
10.00 News at Ten
Including highlights of the day’s events if they’d grabbed some pictures off the Beeb.
10.50 The Malvern Enigma
You wouldn’t get a recreation of how Elgar wrote the Enigma Variations on ITV now.
11.35 Regionalia Epilogues!
A vicar from your region sends you off to bed.
PICK OF THE DAY
Posted in: From Creamguide
The Diamond Jubilee
09.15, BBC1
You can relive the coverage of the Golden Jubilee here, though this year we’re not getting David Dimbleby to announce how she’s already opened a library and rededicated the bridge because Huw Edwards has ascended to the top table at the Beeb. It’ll be much the same, though, but hopefully Alan Titchmarsh won’t be involved now he’s on ITV, and presumably we won’t have anything like the newsflash that interrupted the World Cup highlights show which scared us to death but turned out to be about a piddly little fire at Buckingham Palace. “If you say St John’s Ambulance you get five hundred letters!”
PICK OF THE DAY
Posted in: From Creamguide
Family Fortunes
18.00, Challenge
And as promised/threatened, it’s MAX in charge now, getting off to a bad start by not even wearing a tie. He’s as slow and lumbering as you remember, in Big Money the other day only managing to give the second contestant three questions, and forgetting to ask them for an alternative for a duplicate answer to boot. Worth watching once, but probably only once. We think this is the last week of the ‘busters, while Bullseye last week went back to 1983 and the original Jim’s garage set, including an episode they skipped the other week as the tape went wrong. We’re so glad they made the effort to get that sorted. We also hear that this channel has now bought the rights to Bob’s Full House, and if that’s true that’s fantastic because it’s an absolute masterclass in the art of the quiz. And let’s hope the Bygraves household tunes in so he can see how he should have done it.
PICK OF THE DAY
Posted in: From Creamguide
The Diamond Jubilee Thames Pageant
13.30, BBC1
This is undoubtedly going to be the best bit of the weekend, not just because there’s the biggest potential for stuff to go wrong but because it’s going to be anchored by Uncle Matt Baker. Let’s hope for a shower so he can recycle the winning gag he came up with for the last Jubilee (“It’s raining here in Birmingham, but the Queen’s been reigning for fifty years!”). It’s on Sky as well but it’s bound to be more entertaining here as Eamonn Holmes isn’t on it and the Beeb have chartered their own boat which Frank Skinner’s going to be on, for some reason. Wonder if he’ll do his Queen’s knickers joke.
PICK OF THE DAY
Posted in: From Creamguide
12 Again
10.00, CBBC
With half term upon us it’s a new run of this series – for the next seven days – where celebrities talk about their childhood, which is engaging enough especially as a lot of them are in their thirties or older so they end up discussing Cream era TV shows and they have to explain things like the Munich air disaster and the fall of the Berlin Wall, which is quite intriguing. And top Creamers Dick and Dom are among the contributors today.
PICK OF THE DAY
Posted in: From Creamguide
Punk Britannia
21.00, BBC4
Well, what better time to launch a season of programming on this subject than Jubilee weekend? We know what we’re getting with this strand – plenty of fascinating archive clips and talking heads, though we’re very much proto-punk in this episode, looking at the likes of Kilburn and The High Roads. It’s followed by a splurge of related programming including the Pops 77 documentary again, a new documentary on The Adverts, Ian Dury and Dr Feelgood in concert and at one the brilliant Stuff at the BBC featuring clips of Tracey Ullman, Rachel Sweet, Lene Lovitch and other signings of the ever-eclectic label.
PICK OF THE DAY
Posted in: From Creamguide
Top of the Pops
19.30, 00.55, BBC4
And like last week, it’s a Pops double with TOTP2 preceding it on BBC2. A big one here, not least because fourteen months on, and with the likes of Eddie and The Hot Rods, Dr Feelgood and Heavy Metal Kids (plus that Slik song with the word “punk” in the title) warming us up, punk finally does happen on this show with an official punk band in the line-up. Actually, they might be more new wave, but it counts. There’s also a very, very, very famous star in the studio, but never mind all that, because the really big news is that Joy Sarney’s on again.
PICK OF THE DAY
Posted in: From Creamguide
Evidently… John Cooper Clarke
22.00, BBC4
Like most kids, Creamguide first became aware of John Cooper Clarke thanks to his Sugar Puffs adverts, and it was only in later years that we realised his iconic role in the history of punk, making this new documentary the ideal curtain-raiser to BBC4′s punk season. Apparently there are some fabulous clips in it – like John on Pop Quiz! – and it’s followed at eleven by The Old Grey Whistle Test, which is particularly exciting because rather than a documentary or a concert, this is a fully-fledged studio-based edition of the ‘Test with live bands and interviews and films, which will doubtless make an interesting counterpoint to the Pops repeats. It’ll be a bit livelier than the last one they showed, with Richard Williams in charge, as this is from the Annie Nightingale era, and as well as John performing, so are Siouxsie and The Banshees.
PICK OF THE DAY
Posted in: From Creamguide
Family Fortunes
18.00, Challenge
We’ve just got the hundredth Family Fortunes, the beginning of the end as far as Bob was concerned, including the ace bit where he suggested he could have some champagne and caviar during the break, and was handed a butty and a mug of tea with “BOB” written on it. Elsewhere on this channel Bully and the ‘busters are continuing on their amiable way and we’re particularly enjoying the Reverend Mayo’s show because the questions are easy enough for us to know all the answers.
PICK OF THE DAY
Posted in: From Creamguide
TOTP2
18.30, BBC2
Another week of these, which we’ve been thoroughly enjoying, and even when they bollocksed up the aspect ratio for the first ten minutes of Monday’s show they fixed it before the interesting stuff came on, and we love the fact that where last week we had Antiques Road Trip, we now had Jonathan Richman and XTC. We particularly like that XTC clip in fact because it came from during the ITV strike and we love the idea of about eighteen million people hearing Making Plans For Nigel. Sounds of the Seventies at ten as well, this week on soul and seemingly promising the disappearing Tam.
PICK OF THE DAY
Posted in: From Creamguide
The British Academy Television Awards
20.00, BBC1
We always like the BAFTAs for the opportunity to see some of our late night favourites get an outing on primetime BBC1, though this year we’re not very sure at all about the presence of a new category for Constructed Reality, which isn’t even a genre, it’s four shows, only one of which anyone even watches, and even then in tiny numbers. Seemingly they’ve only done it because Martin Freeman’s face last year when Sherlock lost to The Only Way Is Essex was so amusing.