"Well worth a watch." - Tom Scott, this one time
BOB THE FISH PRODUCTIONS
ENTERTAINMENT ON TOAST
TSW: FeBRUARY 6th 1984
February 1984. It was cold and dark and probably wet and everyone was miserable, even Thatcher, and she was near the peak of her powers. Never mind, there’s always the telly. Here’s what was on ITV on Monday the 6th, here in TSW-land.
The day begins with TV-am, having just celebrated its first anniversary. Given how that first year went, it’s an achievement to have made it, but they’re still far from out of the woods, as you can tell from the 6.25 start time - not to mention the fact that the name “TV-am” isn’t even mentioned here. They’re still barely able to scrape together a single programme - Good Morning Britain - so that’s what it’s listed as. At least it contains a basic itinerary of things you might want to look at instead of Frank and Selina on the other side. TV highlights with Jimmy Greaves! On This Day with Beadle! Wincey Willis! The Guest of the Day, who could be practically anyone at time of publishing, down to and including a random passerby at Camden they’ve hit on the head and kidnapped out of desperation!
They manage to stretch that out for the full three hours - or at least TV Times expects them to - until Schools programmes come on. (Actually, there’d have been at least five, maybe ten minutes’ gap in between, but that’s not exactly worth listing). A typically eclectic mix, starting with the long-running Picture Box with Alan Rothwell - a showcase for foreign-type short films with the vague purpose of keeping the kids’ imaginations from atrophying completely. Recent BBC defectee Basil Brush finds himself hosting a knockoff of Jackanory outside normal broadcasting hours; Stop Look Listen slaps some narration on footage of a quarry and calls that education; Fred Harris and Mary Waterhouse futilely expend a lot of energy trying to make Basic Maths fun to learn about; the English Programme has a play about a disabled baby; there’s a documentary about living in extreme poverty in Lincoln; a look at the life-cycles of frogs and insects, which is probably the only programme here any kids would actually pay attention to; and another documentary about ordinary things happening, in this case a wedding. That’s morning television in 1984 for you. You’ll have to wait a couple of years for proper daytime TV to be invented.
At noon, the then-usual and immutable lunchtime tiny kids slot. As usual it starts with the show due to open the full Children’s ITV slot at four - in this case Alphabet Zoo, in which Nerys Hughes reads an original story about an animal whose name starts with the same letter as his species - today it’s Robert the Reindeer, very appropriately timed - and Ralph McTell sings a song about it. Solid but unremarkable, I understand.
That’s followed by Let’s Pretend, the school-assembly improv show where three otherwise unemployed actors are given a bucket full of props and commanded to create a skit around them. These rarely made sense, but it was entertaining enough, if like me you were a toddler. Also there was some kind of multicoloured caterpillar thing on strings. Not sure what that had to do with anything.
The kiddie slot finishes - here in the South West at least - with the legendary Gus Honeybun’s Magic Birthdays. (“No, she’s getting three, I’m not Fatima bloody Whitbread”) What this spurious three minutes is filled with in other regions I don’t know. Their own sad, Gus-less birthday slots I suppose. At least Anglia had BC and Channel had Oscar Puffin.
At half twelve, A Bit on the Side. Oo-er and such. Actually it’s a factual miniseries aimed fairly and squarely at the Three Million Unemployed about making a bit of extra cash working from home. Like you see in Google ads alongside weird tricks discovered by a “mom” suspiciously living in your postcode area. Or you do if you’re not smart enough to run an adblocker. This episode addresses the question of benefits and how they’re affected by any extra income you make by working from home. This being the Thatcher era I assume you’ll be executed.
That takes us to the News at One with Leonard Parkin, which will be moved up half an hour in a couple of years when Pebble Mill at One goes away and the BBC puts their own lunchtime bulletin there instead. It was always my favourite of the separate-but-equal BBC News programmes of the late eighties, partly because if I was watching it it meant I wasn’t at school, but also because of the crisp white-and-blue aesthetic and the bit where Philip Hayton read out the 100 Share Index, which was completely meaningless but oddly soothing in the same way as the Shipping Forecast. Anyway, this is much the same but grey and with Leonard Parkin. Followed by the regional news, of course.
After that, a New Series: My Life, a serious and sobering real-life doc in which Colin Morris talks to people with Problems. Possibly better known as a playwright and utility TV writer, best known for the play and movie Reluctant Heroes, he was also a volunteer social worker. Several of his plays for the likes of the BBC’s Theatre 625 had drawn on this experience, and now he was televising it for Yorkshire Television, starting with the heartwarming story of a formerly glue-sniffing teen. Fun.
At two o’clock, your afternoon matinee is Nickel Queen, starring Googie Withers. An Australian film, how fancy. The Aussie boom was just rearing its head in this country, mostly in the form of various soapies showing up in the afternoon. Neighbours hasn’t been invented yet, but just this week ITV - or TSW at least - are showing episodes of The Young Doctors, Sons and Daughters and The Sullivans. This film - the only directorial effort from character actor John McCallum, who happened to be Googie Withers’ husband - is a light comedy about Googie getting rich off the nickel bubble that had just come and gone in reality.
After that at half-three, a real “yes, this existed” programme: Miracles Take Longer. One of Thames Television’s greatest unfulfilled ambitions (other than existing through the 1990s) was to have their own networked soap opera. Granada had one. Central had one (though they dearly wished otherwise by this point). Even Yorkshire had one. Out of the Big Four franchise areas (LWT as a weekend franchise weren’t really in the race), it seemed crazy that London - the capital - was unrepresented in soapy terms. Opportunity knocked when afternoon television became more of a thing and a swathe of new daytime soaps were commissioned from practically every region. Hey, Emmerdale Farm had started there. Thames’ first attempt was Miracles Take Longer, set in a Citizen’s Advice Bureau and about as exciting as that sounded. It was watched by almost no-one and had disappeared by May. Thames made a second and more successful attempt with Gems, set in a Covent Garden fashion house - much more in tune with the 80s - but didn’t get much of a following either, and besides the London-shaped hole in the soap opera landscape, assuming it exist in the first place, had been thoroughly filled by then, which might be why Thames never bothered again. They had The Bill, they were fine. The one memorable thing about Miracles Take Longer is that it provided employment for various Doctor Who writers. Today’s episode is by Johnny Byrne, who wrote three Who stories which together add up to about one good one. This week’s other episode, though, is by the legendary Robert Holmes, one of the show’s greatest writers (and showrunners). In that episode, Barry helps a hippy with a smell problem. The Caves of Androzani can’t come soon enough.
Once that’s out of the way it’s Children’s ITV time! Presented this month by “the CBTV team”, which means improv comedy duo Jim Sweeney and Steve Steen. CBTV was one of those shows that pretended to be hijacking the signal for the sake of seeming vaguely anarchic, although ultimately it was just an energetic magazine show. It also helped launch the careers of Anneka Rice and Mike Smith, so there’s that.
After that same episode of Alphabet Zoo, it’s five-minute filler supreme Batfink! Not exactly a classic of animation, but I always quite liked it for how it leaned into how cheap and ultimately pointless it was. For a five-minute long programme, only about one minute of every episode consisted of newly animated footage, if that. They never made any meta references whatsoever, though - it had a surprisingly sturdy fourth wall - because that would have been so obvious even a five year old would cringe. Instead there was just a general sense of unspoken self-awareness, like everyone knew which beats to inevitably hit (“my wings are like a shield of steel!”) and no-one was taking it particularly seriously. Like pantomime, except with a fourth wall and none of the audience participation that triggers my social anxiety. And funnier.
Next is more poorly animated action, only this time taking itself much more seriously, with He-Man and the Masters of the Universe. Never got into He-Man. He was much too shouty. She-Ra seemed to try much harder, maybe because girls were considered more thoughtful. There’s a new movie coming out, apparently; the trailer isn’t very promising; it looks both better and worse than the Dolph Lundgren one.
And that’s it for Children’s ITV. You get an hour and a quarter, go play outside. One of the reasons I tended to watch Children’s BBC more (when it came along, which it hadn’t yet) is that it started earlier and ended later. Anyway, the CBTV team sign off and dump us straight on Emmerdale Farm. It’s just over a decade old at this point and still a few years away from going fully prime-time. Plots are still largely silage-related. Today miserable bastard Alan Turner is in court, probably for being a miserable bastard.
After the evening national news, it’s Today South West with Kenneth McLeod! All the latest on petty crime in Okehampton and farmers demanding compensation when a dog looks at them or something. Plus a chance to beat Noel Know-all. Say it in a Plymouth accent.
We traipse toward prime-time with an episode of Private Benjamin, the sitcom spin-off from the Goldie Hawn film. It may have been inevitable, but that doesn’t make it a good idea. Having said that, it won an Emmy and a Golden Globe. Well, technically Eileen Brennan did. In fact she seemed to keep the whole thing afloat - it was cancelled after three series after Brennan was hit by a car and the ratings plummeted without her.
Next is Wish You Were Here…? (remembering the-all important ellipsis and question mark) with the classic mid-eighties Nice Entertainment lineup of Judith Chalmers, Chris Kelly and Ed Stewart. Chris is in Cyprus, Ed (and family) are in Monterey, Judith has to settle for Chester. Hard cheese.
It’s Monday, so Corrie is up at 7.30. Fred Gee pesters Percy Sugden for his pub back while Mike Baldwin acts a bell-end as usual. After that, the last in the present series of In Loving Memory, the sitcom about undertakers that wasn’t as bad as that other one and had Thora Hird in it.
That’s followed by World in Action, although the subject matter hadn’t been finalised as the TV Times went to press. Further research reveals that it was called “From Rags to Riches” and was a bleak expose of the sweatshops of Bangkok and the 10-year olds who make cheap clothing for the likes of C&A and Littlewoods.
That bundle of laughs is followed by the notably less harrowing Hawaii Five-O. In today’s episode: who cares. Some sort of complicated revenge scheme against the police chief; presumably Danno is asked to book someone at or near the end.
That takes us up to the News at Ten, which is followed by a Postscript - the kind of thing you’d expect to see at closedown but instead occupies these five minutes instead. Today’s
episode, or more accurately the listing for it, offers the information that the second weekend in February is designated as Married Couples Weekend by the evangelical organisation Good News Crusade. Do what you will with that information.
After that, the late night film is Code Name Diamond Head, as seen on MST3K! A failed pilot for a spy thriller starring Roy “Grytpype” Thinnes, France Nguyen and Ian McShane as the traitorous bad guy. I mostly remember from the MST3K version being surprised that the Americans had heard of Lovejoy. A Quinn Martin production. (The film, not Lovejoy).
That takes us up past midnight and time for the late night weather and - because it’s the peninsula - the aforementioned Shipping Forecast to help tuck us in. Night night.
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