It’s Channel Four again, and right in the early days. It’s 1984 again, this time March 5th. Channel Four has spent a mere 17 months on air and is still only broadcasting for half the day. If that. Starting at five in the evening, yet! With a bit of original programming from estranged half-sister station S4C. Night Beat News isn’t the latest in the world of entertainment that the title suggests, it’s a sort of Welsh Drop the Dead Donkey six years early. And probably a lot siller and less topically cutting, given the time slot. Featuring a lot of Welsh people, including the inevitable William “But Doctor, what about your - ” Thomas, and John Pierce “how much do you charge for a good hard shag” Jones. Playing a large man.

 

And after that native sitcommery - depending on how you define native - an hour of the classic American stuff. First, it’s the hat-discarding styles of Mary Tyler Moore. An early episode, but then it was always going to be - we only ever got the first 34 episodes on BBC1 on first broadcast in 1971 and 72 before they got bored and dropped it. This mid-eighties repeat run on Channel Four only got five episodes further along before it also stopped. Various ITV regions took it on at different times and different paces in between, but we in the UK only got to see the full seven-season 168-episode behemoth from start to finish when our branch of The Family Channel ran the whole thing over the course of three years, and almost no-one will have seen or noticed it, on an obscure satellite channel with a lame logo and a connection to literally one of the worst people in the world. So anyway this is the sixth episode in the series and the one that first introduces Ida Morgenstern, Rhoda’s mother and co-star once she gets a spinoff. So sitcom history, I suppose.

 

Next, an older vintage, but only slightly: Here’s Lucy, the third iteration of Lucille Ball’s ongoing, ever-evolving meta-series that originally ran from 1968-1974. With (failed) revolution in the air and both Lucie and Desi Jr teenagers, this one was a tiny bit edgier than the rest. A tiny bit. I doubt the word “Vietnam” ever made an appearance, but it didn’t ignore things like civil rights and the sexual revolution. This episode guest stars the great Jack Benny, so not particularly forward looking, but probably quite funny.

After that, aids to numeracy in Make It Count. This week: the number seven. No, not really. It’s about encountering sums in everyday life, or something like that. Carol Vorderman had only just been invented, so cuddly-sweatered Fred Harris is your host here. Vorderman would take on the snack-

education role for the BBC before long though. Speaking of which, no, there’s no Countdown. It wasn’t yet the near year-round proposition it is now, just a series in the spring and one in the autumn. Vorderman wasn’t even the main lady yet.

 

Anyway, after this of course it’s seven PM and therefore time for the Channel Four News, with Peter Sissons. There’s actually an entire article/interview with him in this week’s TV Times, which I’ve uploaded here, if only so you don’t call me a liar when I say it claims Sissons to have been a “housewives heart-throb” on the ITV lunchtime bulletin. Housewives must have been really hungry for choice back then. I suppose he had that sensual mouth.

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Let’s move on quickly. The news is followed by Comment, which is what it sounds like: a ten minute gap for someone to deliver a quick rant down the lens. Today it’s Gordon McLennan, General Secretary of the Communist Party. Fun! And someone only Channel Four would broadcast for as much as ten minutes, even with the disclaimer in the TV Times (and I daresay onscreen as well) that he’s speaking in a strictly “personal capacity”.

 

After the weather, some live sport! Something you don’t associate with Channel Four, even now, after their times showing England cricket and football. In the early days it was strictly “obscure” or “minority” interests like sumo or American sports, which fortunately for them were then downright up-and-coming as football descended near collapse. Gridiron, and their coverage thereof, was briefly quite popular here in the UK, although we never managed to make a go of it ourselves. However, we did and do play basketball over here, so Channel Four jumped on that and tried to make that into a popular televised sport with coverage of the British NBL, then sponsored by Wimpey Concrete Proleboxes. Might have helped if they’d shown the entire match, mind, and not just the second half, but the listing promises that the all-important playoffs would be covered in full on Channel Four. Who knows, with regular TV coverage basketball might have caught on in the UK if the IBA hadn’t suddenly banned shirt sponsorships from appearing onscreen, scaring half the investment away.

 

At nine o’clock, heavy documentary time with The Heart of the Dragon, a rather dramatic title for a twelve-part series on “the New China”, in which western documentarians wander about the country mostly filming people’s ordinary lives in the newly open and quasi-capitalistic People’s Republic of Deng Xiaoping. How much of it is propaganda is open to question - CCTV are “thanked” but not directly credited as having worked on it. Either way, today’s episode is about the criminal justice system and involves a cat-burglar who nicked a television and, randomly, several items of clothing. With non-hilarious results.

 

That takes us all the way to a quarter past ten - probably because of PBS’ involvement, making it run a full hour without commercials - and an episode of St. Elsewhere. This was a real coup for Channel Four, a major US hit series running exclusively and for the first time on their little station, without being tried and discarded by ITV first like Hill Street Blues. Today Ed Begley Jr and David Morse have to deal with a patient whose symptoms don’t match his condition. Inside an autistic boy’s head.

 

The day ends with The Eleventh Hour, Channel Four’s equivalent of the BBC’s Open Space - a place where any old munchkin with a camera can make whatever they like, send it in and get televised. It’s obviously in a graveyard slot compared to Open Space (which tended to go out in the early evenings between seven and eight PM), but against that it doesn’t seem as though length was a factor - as with After Dark, there was only closedown afterwards so it could go on as long as necessary. This one seems to have been another full hour without commercial interruption, judging by the timings. As for the subject matter, it’s not without edge - it follows a martial flute band based in Govan who are extremely Catholic, not to mention poor and working class. Most of their music, however, is Irish Republican in outlook. They’re named after James Connolly, pioneering Irish Socialist and one of the executed figureheads of the Easter Rising, so you get the idea. Anyway the film has them actually visit Northern Ireland, where their music has the most resonance, intercut with the bandmembers explaining the history and their ideologies down the lens. You can watch it here, and the band is still going strong today.

 

And that takes us to closedown at a healthy half past midnight. Go to sleep.

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