Five: July 21st 2004

There aren’t going to be too many opportunities to tackle Channel 5, so I might as well take them when I get the chance. Welcome to July 21st, 2004, a largely unremarkable Wednesday (Euro 2004 having already ended) and the schedules largely low-key for the summer (prestige drama The Long Firm on BBC2 apart). Not that that really matters to Channel 5 - currently calling itself simply “Five” - anyway. They were always a case of British television spreading itself too thin, adopting the American style “stripped and stranded” structure partly to make up for the fact that there was already barely enough programming to go around and they were inevitably stuck with the dregs. Within three years they were already so unwatched they were practically a rumour, and almost all the original television they’d started with was dead or dying.

 

By 2004 they’re starting to pick up after the rebrand, but at this point that just means there’s less softcore pornography. Less, not none. None today, though. And certainly not at six o’clock in the morning, which is instead time for some breakfast news. But instead of getting their usual contracted news provider ITN to make it, they struck a deal in 2001 to simulcast the first half-hour of Sky News  Sunrise - the show that gave the world the name “GMTV”. Presented as usual by Anglia’s Greg Millam and Westcountry’s own Lorna Dunkley. This is foreshadowing - from the start of 2005, Sky News wins the seven-year contract to provide the station’s entire news service. ITN won it back the next time around in 2012 and has kept it ever since. The news equivalent of Children’s ITV briefly changing hands in 1989, except that sadly Scally the Dog didn’t work for Sky News.

 

If you want to keep watching after half-past six, switch to Sky News. If you have small children, you might as well keep it going because it’s time for three hours of Milkshake! The Channel 5 children’s slot that tends to skew toward the particularly smalls. I’m tempted to call this the station’s most successful strand. This is the home of Peppa Pig. I’d always assumed it was on the BBC. It was on Five. And it’s on today, as well, after a couple of imports in Rolie Polie Olie (French/Canadian) and Hi-5 (Australian). Then there’s fuzzy nightwear-based stop motion in PB Bear and Friends, CGI Blytonia with the immortal Noddy and cuddly preschool Disney with the equally immortal Pooh Bear. Then some repeats: first the then-decade old Dig and Dug - a primordial Bob the Builder originally shown on Channel Four - and then better still, Roobarb! Which apparently did so well that Five commissioned a whole new series from the original creator Grange Calverley, although Bob Godfrey stayed in retirement. It was also good! You can hardly even tell it was animated in Flash. The slot finally ends with Oswald the blue octopus and the homegrown Monkey Makes, a low-key Bitsa type thing with Naomi Wilkinson and a large puppet orangutan called noodle doing things like making wizard hats out of cardboard.

 

So now it’s 9.25 - the point where “breakfast television” traditionally ends, at least on the commercial networks, ever since the days of TV-am. There’s no reason not to round it up to half-past in this day and age, but it’s a habit at this point. Anyway the kids should be at school by now, so no more of their programming. The next half-hour (and a bit) is filled with The Gadget Show, all the latest technological bollocks. Ian Bentley’s looking at coffee machines, Jason Bradbury (not mentioned here) is checking out flight simulators and Suzi Perry’s exploring a Demon Seed house, which seems dangerous. This is repeated from Monday evening and gets repeated again on Friday morning, because Five still aren’t having much luck with programming.

 

That’s followed by their flagship morning show The Wright Stuff: topical chat with Matthew Wright and his guests the late John Stapleton, who probably thought he was doing The Time the Place the whole time, and Kate Silverton - Natasha Kaplinsky’s replacement as the Mail’s favourite BBC NewsMILF, which unnerved her so much she’s now a therapist.

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That only lasts an hour - for now - and is followed at eleven by Memory Bank, a good old-fashioned daytime gameshow hosted by adorably chirpy wood elf Rachel Pierman. As the title suggests it’s a basic pelmanism sort of premise, with general knowledge answers under the tiles instead of random images. Also one of those phone-in competitions so easy it seems to be aimed at the severely brain-damaged, because they’d rather just run it as a lottery but that’s illegal so they add the most rudimentary question imaginable so they can technically claim it as a competition. Memory Bank was more often a half-hour proposition but right now it’s a full hour because, again, Five have to fill the minutes somehow.

 

At noon, the news! With Rob Butler, future Tory MP who rose to be Parliamentary Private Secretary to the Prime Minister. Unfortunately that Prime Minister was Liz Truss. Backed the wrong horse there, Rob, have fun sodding off.

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After the news, an hour of soap. Starting in Australia with Home and Away. ITV had lost interest in it - probably circa 1994 when the Australian craze was thoroughly dead, to be honest, but it still got the ratings. They steadily dropped off, however, for the rest of the decade, until by 2000 they were sufficiently negligible that ITV let their contract with the Seven Network lapse. The then-Channel 5 immediately snapped it up like starving men, which metaphorically they were, and after a year’s grace period started running it under roughly the same lunchtime/evening schedule that ITV had copied from the BBC with Neighbours. Speaking of which, that show soon went the same way, and they ran together until the latter died. The first time. Home and Away is still running on both Seven and (as it’s now called) 5. Who expected Summer Bay to win against Ramsay Street?

That’s followed by Five’s own home-grown soap, Family Affairs. It launched with the station to indifference of such density and breadth that they eventually put the whole show on a boat and detonated it. That was five years before this listing - within the first two years of the show - and still no-one’s watching it. They finally give up and end the whole thing at the end of 2005. In today’s episode, almost anything could happen. Who would know?

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Into the mudge with a completely inexplicable repeat of Charlie’s Angels, which Five have been doing on a daily basis for a while now to fill the afternoon. They’re just about to reach the Shelley Hack era. And why not, really; BBC1’s been doing it with episodes of Shoestring and Bergerac before moving on to their own US imports like Murder She Wrote, Quincy and at the exact same time on this very day, Father Dowling. It’s either that or Flog It! Today’s episode: a clip show. Oh well.

 

After that, an afternoon TV movie. “Witch Hunt” stars Jacqueline Bisset as a woman whose granddaughter goes missing and is accused of the crime by her son-in-law, the kid’s dad, because she’s apparently a witch. She turns it around on him and accuses him of molesting her. With hilarious results. Made for Network Ten Australia towards the end of that period when they had no idea what they were doing.

 

The evening news  - hosted by Kirsty Young in her second stint on Five - is in the old ITN post-CITV slot, which is neat. After that is the near-prime time iteration of that soap double bill, and then the news again with Kirsty Young.

 

Just when you’re starting to feel like you’ve come unstuck in time, prime-time begins in earnest with a history documentary, Escape From…A Bridge Too Far, in which military historian Saul David goes to Arnhem and re-enacts that whole big giant mess. Fun.

 

At eight o’clock, SNAKE ATTACK! No, a documentary about them. For a full hour. “An insight into why and how snakes attack humans”, complete with testimony from victims presumably explaining what they did to piss the snake off.

 

We go beyond the watershed with Madonna. At this time she both still mostly looked like herself, and was in the middle of her biggest comeback, halfway between the Ray of Light and Music albums. So here’s a probably quickly assembled hour-long documentary about the men in her life, from Sean Penn beating the shit out of her to her then-husband Guy Ritchie somehow convincing her to go around speaking in a cod-English accent and making uncomprehending remakes of Italian art films.

 

It tails off from there. The next hour is given over to standard festival of rubbernecking Aircrash Investigations. To be fair, Big Brother is on in this slot on Channel Four, so anything’s basically on a hiding to nothing. BBC1 and ITV are probably glad of just having the news.

 

Then it’s the World’s Stupidest Criminals with Chris Ellison. Footage and reconstructions of idiots trying to burgle houses, pick pockets and rob liquor stores, and doing it so badly it makes the news, for another full, punishing hour. To be fair this sort of thing can sometimes be quite amusing.

 

Into night time. At five past midnight, the thuddingly ironically named Tasteful TV, originally broadcast on Bravo. Basically Eurotrash without the wit (or European premise) with items on things like Britain’s most tattooed women, bizarre sexual bylaws of other lands, and tonight a blistering expose on a foot fetishist.

 

That leads into the late-night obscure sport strand which used to be called Live and Dangerous but isn’t anymore because it’s clearly neither. Still, it does include an entire game of Major League Baseball presented by real live baseball fan Jonathan Gould.

 

That eats up three post-midnight hours (because baseball lasts as long as it damn well pleases) and the next fifty minutes is taken up with a classic boxing match from whatever archives Five had access to at the time. Azumah Nelson vs Jim McDonnell for the WBC super-featherweight title in 1989. Nelson won in twelve rounds, although I’m not sure how it took him that long as he had McDonnell on the canvas four times.

 

Finally, a showing in full of the Euro Under-21 championship semi-final between Italy and Portugal. Italy won 3-1 and went on to defeat Serbia and Montenegro 3-0 in the final. Good for them. More importantly for Five, it eats up the rest of the night until six when they can start all over again with Sunrise.