History Box: Anglia 1/7/78

ANGLIA: 1 JULy 1978

And now, from Norwich: it’s Anglia Television on July 1st, 1978. You’ll be pleased to hear that all programmes are in colour unless otherwise stated. It’s was a Saturday, so ITV actually opened in the morning for the kids, although all they had was The Undersea Adventures of Captain Nemo, so they might as well not have bothered. If you’re not familiar, and are picturing some kind of severe, humourless bearded Arab - or even just James Mason as a sort of young Captain Birdseye - then don’t. This is some five-minute Canadian bollocks made on a budget of about a quid (or loonie), in which the title character is a square-jawed Aryan with no personality whatsoever. Still, this takes up twenty minutes, so it’s presumably four episodes in row. Value for money.

Next, a sort of half-arsed attempt at a SatAM show from Anglia, hampered by being less than half an hour long and co-presented by Tolkeinesque continuity announcer and later cookery slot host Patrick Anthony. Oh well. It appears to be a “what’s on in East Anglia” show for kids, with music and competitions filling in for the fact that not a lot is on in East Anglia for anyone. Larry Grayson has a seaside residency, though, so there’s that.

The kiddie fun continues after that with Our Show, or rather Half Our Show. You know, the magazine and variety programme from LWT presented entirely by theatre kids like Pauline Quirke, Susan Tully, Tim Whitnall and Nicholas Lyndhurst (oddly enough including the episode where David Jason was the guest star). Today’s guests are Anna Ford, Bill Oddie and Gareth Hunt, and for some reason it’s cut in two (not quite halves) to fit an episode of The Monkees. The point of doing this escapes me.

That takes us to half past eleven and an episode of the bizarre science fiction serial Star Maidens - possibly the only West German-Scottish co-production in television history. Which was the problem, because the two sides had different ideas about where to take the creaky schlock premise (a Planet of the Women straight out of a 50s b-movie comes into conflict with the patriarchal old Earth). The Germans wanted to make a sex comedy. The Scots thought they were supposed to be taking this seriously. The result fell between two stools and ultimately landed on “camp”. It does have notable credits, though. Apart from Judy Geeson and Gareth Thomas, this episode is written by Doctor Who veteran Ian Stuart Black and directed by Freddie Francis, the veteran Brit-horror director (Torture Garden, Tales that Witness Madness, Mumsy, Nanny, Sonny and Girly) and legendary cinematographer who worked with the likes Karel Reisz, Martin Scorsese and (three times) David Lynch.

That takes us to midday, and we all know what midday on a Saturday on late-70s ITV means: World of Sport. In theory, the same basic format as Grandstand on BBC1 at the same time: whatever live sporting action ITV had the rights for and could get to, linked by the omnipotent Dickie Davies. Over the course of the next decade those rights would drain away from ITV, and at one point it was basically just an afternoon of wrestling, but there’s some genuinely impressive stuff here. The start of the Tour de France, Championship motor racing from Donington - Formula 2, but still - highlights of Steve Ovett winning the 1500m at the misspelled Bislett games, some golf and some horses. And the ITV equivalent Final Score, complete with Australian Pools because our football season’s over. And that’s the entire afternoon sorted.

After news and weather at 5 and a half - I’m sorry, I’ll read that again, 5.05 - it’s Celebrity Squares! What a highly 1978 panel we have: Francoise Pascal, Michele Dotrice, Larry Grayson and Mickey Dolenz returning from the morning, and fortunately only one horrible sexual monster.

At 6, Happy Days! First-run in the UK, even! Part one of a February sweeps two-parter in which the gang are forced to retake an exam in order to graduate and have to cram all night after the prom! Oh no!After that, the inevitable appearance of Sale of the Century. The TV Times helpfully explains the entire premise of the game, even though it’s been on since 1971 and this is the Anglia region, so if anyone knows it by heart it should be the readers here.

Next, The Life and Times of Grizzly Adams, the TV spin-off of the film about a framed woodsman with a face almost as fuzzy as that of his best friend, Ben the reasonably gentle bear. Today’s episode: The Fugitive (season one episode three), in which he meets another guy framed for a crime he didn’t commit and they swap hard luck stories I expect.

Your Saturday Night on Anglia is dominated by a feature film - although it’s almost pot luck throughout the nation, with other regions having the likes of Rising Damp, or McCloud, or even Susan Harris’ Soap. But here in East Anglia you have to content yourself with Henri Berneuil’s La Casse - known in the English-speaking world as The Burglars. A French-Italian co-production, despite the presence of Omar Sharif and Dyan Cannon alongside Belmondo, it was very popular in France and sniffed at by les Putains d’Amerique because they’re philistines.That takes us to the news and then The South Bank Show, about the making of a radio play by John Arden, and the guy who gave him and many others their break as head of the English Stage Company: George Devine, who’d died in 1966. One of those others was misanthropic John Osborne, so he’s interviewed here, and possibly doesn’t call everyone in the entire world a shit.

After that, the delayed final play in the Scorpion Tales series - six thrillers with a nasty twist at the end, hence the name. Most of them went out in May, but then there was a World Cup after five of them had been transmitted, and presumably it didn’t get the kind of ratings for them to consider the sixth particularly urgent. According to Wikipedia it was delayed until the 12th of August, and maybe it was in most regions, but here’s Anglia burning it off past midnight on July 1st. The plays were written by some solid TV playwrights like Ian Kennedy Martin, Bob Baker and Dave Martin and, here, Brian Phelan. The twist is that he was a ghost all along. In Virtual Reality. On Mars.

And that takes us to the end of the day, or technically past it. At the End of the Day is Anglia’s closedown “Pause for Thought for the Day” programme, with a local vicar or University Dean or Fred Dinenage for all the TV Times know. Go to bed.

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