HTV (Wales and West: June 22 1990

This month’s entry is a bit of an indulgence. It’s the same issue of the TV Times as the last Hard Sell episode, obviously, and that’s because it has my birthday in it. Which is the day I’m looking at. Shut up, you paid.

So that day is 22nd of June, a Friday in 1990. We happen to be in the HTV region, as well. Obviously that’s a region of two halves and technically the issue covers both - only the regional news programmes are different and we’ll get to that later - but since the other column is Channel Four and not S4C it wouldn’t be much use in the HTV Wales region. That’s what Sbec was for.

There’s no World Cup matches, with the first round having come to an end the previous day, so there’s now a couple of days off. ITV’s day starts as usual with TV-am, then at the height of their powers. Good Morning Britain has the usual bollocks, with a couple of World Cup Updates (probably from Greavesie), Dr Boyish-Goodlooks with his Doc Spot, another terrifying recipe from Rustie Lee, the end of a weekly-stripped interview with Barry Manilow and, to distract the kids from getting dressed for school, Beany and Cecil. Presumably from John K’s New Adventures Of series from 1988, but this being TV-am I honestly wouldn’t be surprised if it’s the 1959 originals. Then After Nine, ostensibly the more “grown up” slot, just has more of the same, with Breakfast Time transplant Russell Grant “analysing” “your” “stars”. Today: Cancer! No, the sign. 22nd of June is when it rolls over, you see, meaning I’m on the cusp, a Cancer by a mere 23 minutes.

Anyway, who cares, it’s all a load of bollocks. Here’s Chain Letters! The Lewis Carroll-derived word game that helpfully explained its mechanics right there in the theme tune. Right now it should be ending with “HEEEERES ALLAN”, although having already gone through two presenters in as many series they might have stopped bothering with that. Ironic if they did as Allan Stewart was the first and only presenter to do more than one series.

After some local news, a slot that brings back warm memories of not being at school for some reason: the ten am C-list American sitcom import. Because ITV bought a bunch of them, and most of them weren’t very good. And the one that was, Married With Children, didn’t catch on and ended up on Night Time. Fortunately, there was a half-hour slot during the early summer when The Time The Place was on holiday but the kids weren’t, and more importantly neither were Richard and Judy and their lynchpin juggernaut of a morning programme around which the whole period between TV-am and lunch had to be carefully arranged. So that did the trick. Over the course of several years, this slot was home to Step by Step, Hope and Gloria and particularly Out of this World, which somehow got four seasons despite being regularly described, then and now, as possibly the worst sitcom ever made. It made regular mid-morning appearances on ITV until 1995, though.

And then it’s Richard and Judy, relatively early in their reign of terror but already the twin monarchs of daytime. Today is a beauty and fitness day, with fashion and makeup tips and some sort of exercise routine probably. Plus, with the Poll Tax biting hard and recession looming, there’s advice on how to have a family day out for pennies, and a gardening slot with Monty Don. It keeps the housebound from contemplating suicide.

After that, the usual lunchtime pre-schoolers slot. Today it’s Rainbow! Yay! Today we’re learning the difference between same and different, which seems paradoxical but that’s 3-year olds for you, they’re dumb. Anyway it’s illustrated by a visit from Zippy’s cousin Zippo, who is played by a spare Zippy puppet, and everyone struggles to tell them apart. Thus are your children taught basic observational skills. At this point the lunchtime little’ee’s slot has been cut to just the one programme, and it’s not repeated at the start of Children’s ITV either.

After that, it’s Home and Away! Still relatively new, especially to us. After ITV seethed enviously as the Neighbours took over the country on the BBC - and the much older and browner Aussie soaps to which they held the rights, like The Young Doctors and Sons and Daughters, failed to provide competition - they snapped up Home and Away like starving men. (It had a similar origin story in Australia; the Seven Network made the first series of Neighbours, sniffily dismissed it, and got absolutely schooled when 10 picked it up and it became a phenomenon). They even copied the BBC’s broadcasting strategy for it, showing episodes at lunchtime and then again early evening immediately after the children’s slot. In today’s episode, Celia becomes unreasonably distraught.

Next, lunchtime news time. Because the shortness of Rainbow has caused a five minute gap, the local bulletin goes out before the main one - News at One, ostentatiously moved from 12.30 eight months earlier to directly compete with the BBC. It’ll be back at 12.30 by January.

After that, we’re in the thick of the afternoon slot we call the Mudge. First it brings forth the young Anthea Turner alongside Paul Barnes. Places to visit, people to meet and things to do. A lightweight travel show, in other words. Highlights today include the Mrs Queen Lady reopening the Kennet and Avon canal. I’ve been down that. It’s quite pleasant, especially if you like lock gates because it has thousands of the fuckers. Including one bit (which I managed to avoid) that involves a hill with 28 of the bastard things in a row. Or 56 if you’re going there and back, which you usually are. So if you’re planning to chug down it, remember to either stop before you get there or budget two full days of lock opening.

At ten to two, one of those Aussie soaps that ITV seemingly bought in bulk in the eighties to fill up the daytime hours. At the regions’ discretion, of course. The ostensible “networked” version was curated by Thames, with five regions signing up for that, but it ran on all of them one way or another and in various (though always deep Mudge) timeslots and paces all over the country, with most regions finishing in 1998.

As for HTV, they’re currently five years behind and keep tinkering with the slot and pace (even switching to half-hour episodes occasionally) with the result that they don’t finally reach the damn place burning to the ground, ending the series, until 1999, the last ITV region to finish the thing. (The tagnut revival season on Network Ten doesn’t count, and no-one showed it anyway. Except Central and Meridian for some reason).

More gameshow fun an hour later with Connections. A sort of much easier and lower-brow Only Connect, originally hosted by Sue Robbie but here (in its last series) by third-string Broom Cupboard jockey Simon Potter. It could be worse: when it went primetime a couple of years earlier they gave it to Richard Madeley. The contestants’ profiles (retired teacher from Stratford-upon-Avon, manager from Leeds and computer operator from Rochdale) seem to sum up the average daytime gameshow contestant of the time.

After ten more minutes of news, another of those bought-in Aussie soaps - our third and last of the day, and by far the oldest. And the brownest. Sons and Daughters! God knows what it was about; you have to play Six Degrees of Separation to find anyone who even watched it. Again, it played out in different timeslots at different rates throughout the country, and again HTV were one of the last to complete the set. Most regions polished it off in 1989, but HTV started later and weren’t done until 1991. They weren’t the last, however; UTV finally finished it in 1994 and Scottish managed to squeeze it out inch by inch like water torture until 1995. In this week’s episode, who cares.

And that takes us to five to four and Children’s ITV! I’m constantly surprised by the fact that there were only three shows a day in these olden times. Probably why I watched the Broom Cupboard more. Still, it was a pretty even split, and I’m pretty sure that I would have been watching ITV with my birthday cake that day - partly because Children’s BBC started even later because of Royal Ascot, and partly because all it had was Paw Paws (racially insensitive quasi-Native American bears created by a visibly rotting Hanna-Barbera) and sodding Gentle Ben. Whereas here we have Art Attack followed by Garfield and Friends. No contest. Although I have no memories whatsoever of I Can Do That! - I’ll have turned over to Round the Twist. This is the Stonewall era of Children’s ITV, of course, so lots of avant garde near-undreadable fonts and synth-pop jingles accompanying Jeanne Downes and Scally delivering links in random corners of the Lenton Lane studios.

That’s followed by the evening reprise of Home and Away, copying the BBC’s pattern for Neighbours - although not the timeslots, they weren’t daft enough to try competing directly. Mind you, there is five minutes overlap at the end, so Aussie soap devotees would still need to use the VCR. Or watch one of them in the afternoon.

Then, after the main evening news, it’s Regional Time and the listing splits for the two ends of HTV. In the west, the functionally named HTV News with Bruce Hockin and Patricia Yorkston. This is a full hour long, including a consumer affairs slot with Bryan Beckett and the late Annie St John, just four months before she took her own life.

Whereas in Wales we have Wales at Six, which is just half an hour long (presumably it seemed a bit redundant now S4C was a thing) and apparently presented by no-one. The remaining half hour is taken up with a Welsh sport roundup called Stopwatch, because apparently all the good titular sporting metaphors are taken.

The two halves join up again at seven for Bob Monkouse in The $64,000 Question, although of course they can’t give away that much and it’s not in dollars, but that’s the title of the show they bought, and besides, The £6400 Question just sounds lame. Didn’t last long anyway; its main legacy is one of the great outtakes.

That is of course followed by Coronation Street. It seems to be a relatively quiet period: Vera’s planning an engagement party, Andy’s in trouble at school, Ken Barlow’s a councillor for some reason.

After that at eight: SPORT! No, not the World Cup, International Athletics. The McVities Challenge! In those days they still had a biscuit called “Sports”, you see. It was basically a Penguin with the serial numbers sanded off and fake chocolate instead of the real stuff, so unsurprisingly it was dead by the end of the year. But they still sponsored this meet in the late eighties (and early nineties, I guess) between Great Britain, the USA, and latterly Kenya. And ITV have the rights, so they’re showing it for sports-starved viewers during the World Cup pause. This first hour is on ITV, then the second hour moves to Channel Four, because they’re still under the same IBA umbrella so they do that sort of thing sometimes.

Mind you, I’m not sure why, because the second hour is moved for the sake of an episode of Island Son, the long forgotten Richard Chamberlain vehicle that marked his return to ongoing television after a decade in every other miniseries ever made. Mind you, it might as well have been a miniseries as well, lasting only a single season before disappearing down the memory hole. It was basically Dr Kildare again, only set in Hawaii. Didn’t catch on, either in the US or here, despite the TV Times billing Chamberlain above the title.

That takes us to the News at Ten and another hour’s regional split. The West gets The West This Week, an end-of-week round up of all the goings on in Wiltshire, Avon, Gloucester and environs over the past seven days and a look ahead to the next one. You know the drill. Wales gets the harder-edged Wales and Westminster, analysing the week’s Wales-related events in Parliament.

Again, that’s only half an hour to The West This Week’s forty-five minutes, so the time is filled with a repeat of Survival in which John Shrapnel explains genetics, while The West This Week is followed by The West Weekend Outlook in which Annie St John (again ) - this time accompanied by Mike Bibb - preview the weekend’s treats in the region.

And then it’s time to draw the curtains for Night Time.

Or, as it’s HTV, Night Club! Which had in-vision continuity, but it’s not credited here. The programming starts in a world of olive drab with the mud-smeared, teeth-gritted, flint-hard Vietnam drama Tour of Duty. Today’s episode: someone gets shot. Tomorrow’s episode: someone else gets shot.

At half-past midnight, CinemAttractions, the terribly-titled out-of-vision-hosted guide to the latest films heading for your local omniplex. Basically clips from trailers playing out while some American DJ reads from the press release. The Movies, Games and Videos format. I always found it strangely alienating.

At one o’clock, as if to convince you to go to bed, it’s the James Whale Radio Show, in which the late bell-end discusses something or other with God knows who and then a lady comes on in just her bra and he smiles. There is almost literally nothing else on: just a Czech film about an elderly cellist on BBC2 and a discussion on censorship on Channel Four.

The dead racist buggers off at two in favour of “The Late Horror Film”. Which happens to be Fiend Without a Face. A superior B-movie, and highly British, that starts out surprisingly classy and almost Quatermass-ish, but ends up being about flying brains strangling people with their spinal cords. Good fun for what it is though.

And then the rest of Night Time is cancelled in favour of some rugby! Hooray! Scotland won the Grand Slam in that year’s Five Nations, so they were on a high as they went to New Zealand for a summer tour. And (barring a single draw) they won all their games there, too! Except the ones actually against the All Blacks, obviously. This one was close, though, an 18-21 defeat, which is definitely impressive considering this is the team of Zinzan Brooke, Sean Fitzpatrick and Joe Stanley. Anyway, that takes us from 3.25 all the way to five in the morning and the ITN morning news, which is where for scheduling purposes Friday becomes Saturday. Good night.

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