Anglia: August 15th 1988

August! The thick of the summer holiday, although we’re looking at a day around the middle of it, where the month starts audibly ticking down. It’s 1988, it’s the 15th, we’re in the Anglia region, and ITV starts as usual with the Morning News for maniacs and other people awake at 5am.

Then TV-am starts up - freshly revived after the “strike” and back with an actual staff and real programming - with another hour of much the same thing, only in a cosier, more domestic setting as The Morning Programme. And probably slightly worse, because it’s made by TV-am News and not ITN. Never mind, there’s just under two hours of Good Morning Britain afterwards, for which Richard Keys sticks around in the Anne Diamond role alongside Mike Morris, which is faintly uncomfortable. Plus reports from the 1988 Republican Convention where George HW gets his nomination! Fun!

And then because it’s summer holidays GMB packs up early for Wacaday! When they were still spending money on it, so Timmy Mallett gets to jet off through Europe to teach kids about interesting things like (because he’s in Switzerland today) how watches are made and, because he’s not irritating enough, how to yodel. He did these grand tours every summer, before the cuts and the franchise loss reduced them to just splicing in the old VTs into increasingly threadbare new episodes and eventually stopping making new material altogether. As usual, it’s almost impossible to sit through if you’re over the age of 10, but genuinely good if you’re not.

TV-am bugger off at 9.25 as usual, which even then was becoming kind of an arbitrary and awkward time - it evolved from the earliest days when they had to wait for the national switchboard - so Anglia fill the gap with a five minute regional news and weather before today’s daytime gameshow: What’s My Line?. The eighties revival was originally led by Eamonn Andrews, until he dropped dead and was replaced, for some reason, by the late Penelope Keith, who wasn’t a presenter so for this second 1988 series until they stopped bothering in 1990 the host was Angela Rippon.

After that, it’s time for 90 minutes of Children’s ITV! With Mark Granger, the likeable local radio DJ type who takes over the main shift for a year once school’s back. He introduces the following: He-Man and the Masters of the Universe (today’s lesson: don’t lord it over your friends because you found a shiny thing, you dick); a prime Freleng Fudd/Bugs caper; an episode of Disney’s long-forgotten the Wuzzles (where the gimmick was that all the characters were cutesy chimerae, so you had a bear with butterfly wings called Butterbear, a hippo/rabbit called Hoppopotamus, a lion/bee called Bumbelion, a rat/coelacanth called Verminish who I just made up, and so on. Michael Eisner’s idea. Didn’t catch on); a rather alarming episode of Tony Ross’s Towser in which he apparently fails to escape a black hole; and for the very smalls (albeit an hour earlier than the usual Very Smalls slot) Let’s Pretend. Interrupted for five minutes after He-Man for the news.

At half eleven, after an update on all the goings-on in East Anglia, Miriam Stoppard shows up for anyone suffering from This Morning withdrawal. She’s at the head of Baby and Co - parenting tips with celebrity guests. This week it’s Bill Roache - trapped within Ken Barlow for 66 years - and his wife with their potentially alarming philosophy that discipline starts in the nursery, i.e. surely before the child has the capacity to actually understand it. Doesn’t seem to have done Linus any harm, to be fair.

More child-rearing half an hour later with Children First, which this week looks at children’s hospitals and the measures they take to not scare the shit out of the poor little sods. Probably quite cheap to make, because it’s at Queen’s Medical Centre Nottingham, literally a seven minute drive up the road from Central’s Lenton Lane Studios.

After that, Aussie soap time! This time it’s The Sullivans, very much the classiest-looking of the lot with its sumptuous production values and attention to detail. They even shot the Dutch scenes here in Amsterdam! Well, some of them. Damn this war, Grace. That takes us to the lunchtime news with Jon Snow, about whom the “you know nothing” jokes recently ceased to be amusing.

After that (and the Anglia update of course), it’s afternoon matinee time! It’s The First Men in the Moon, one of those lunar-expedition films rolled out at the last minute before we actually landed and spoiled everything by proving there was piss-all there. This is a Ray Harryhausen-enhanced adaptation of the HG Wells story, with a contemporary framing device where a notional Apollo crew land and discover a ruddy great Union Jack - Mark Gatiss bowdlerised it for Doctor Who once - proving that Edward Judd, Lionel Jeffries and Martha Hyer actually got there first. Not only that, they committed genocide (albeit by accident), which is why there’s piss-all there. That was an addition by scriptwriter Nigel Kneale. Thanks for that.

At 3.25, yet more news about Ipswich, followed by further Australian soap action with The Young Doctors. They’re young! They’re Doctors! They’re in Fraser-era Australia! Some stuff happens!

That takes us to 4:00 and Children’s ITV! Again! This time with the regular evening presenters Gary Terzza and Debbie Shore at Station Control, although Granger will replace them in a pokier set by the end of the year. Starting with Tickle on the Tum, which surprisingly was still being made. Ralph McTell’s gone, though, replaced with Jacqueline Reddin and Dexter the Cat (John Eccleston, rather cutely billed as Dexter’s “assistant”) and a new setup supposedly from the studios of the Tickle Broadcasting Company.

Next is Rub a Dub Dub, not to be confused with Rub a Dub Tub on TV-am. This is all about depicting nursery rhymes through interpretative dance. Today there’s the old woman who swallowed a fly, Mother Hubbard and extracts from Ted Hughes’ Crow. (Obviously not)

That sucks up another ten minutes before Young Krypton - the junior version of The Krypton Factor, the game show that attempted to find Britain’s greatest humans by testing every facet of themselves from general knowledge to physical prowess. This version didn’t really catch on, because kids don’t have the attention spans for the more abstract bits, but at least it got out before the main show ruined everything by introducing spotlights and crash mats.

Finally, Dramarama, and in a tragic and unplanned coincidence today’s play is co-written by (with his wife) and stars the late Bill Oddie. In typical Oddie fashion it’s very silly. “The Bubblegum Brigade” appears to be a sort of hi-tech junior Goodies - apart from Oddie himself - whose ranks include a tiny Ian Kirkby from Dick and Dom in Da Bungalow. There’s also a computer called W.A.L.L.I. and a villain called Auntie Doodah. It was all a backdoor pilot for a series, which actually succeeded, although it only got six episodes.

And that’s Children’s ITV. Not a very exciting day, Dramarama apart. It’s followed at 5:15 by some gameshow filler in Give Us a Clue. Celebrity charades, basically, but diverting enough once you get past the joy-dousing presence of Michael Parkinson. Lionel Blair and Lovely Liza Goddard are joined today by Jenny Hanley and Dave Lee Travis. Good news: Children’s BBC is still on. Bad news: it’s a programme where Mark Curry wanders about museums explaining the history of crown jewels. Go out and play.

The main evening news is at 5:45 as usual - ITN getting fifteen minutes head start on the BBC to little net effect - followed by the big regional newsmagazine About Anglia. I don’t know anyone who watched (in my case) TSW Today instead of Spotlight. We certainly didn’t. Probably largely because the ITV equivalents clashed with the Six O’Clock News, which were then followed by Spotlight or whatever.

At half past six, we’re almost explicitly filling time with a repeat of Anything Goes from a

week earlier. It’s still basically Wish You Were Here but called something else, and with a slightly magazinier feel. Today Pam Rhodes is reporting on Butlins’ relaunch and Paul Barnes is pottering about the Yorkshire Dales.

Dragging us toward primetime, In Search of Wildlife appears to be a strand of bought-in nature documentaries, a la The Natural World on the BBC. This one’s about and named after Operation Oryx, the attempt to save said antelope species - specifically the Arabian variety - from total extinction. They were already extinct in the wild from 1972, but Phoenix Zoo still had nine of them in captivity, and out of them successfully managed to breed almost a whole

new species' worth, to the extent that they’re now listed as “Vulnerable”, the lowest level of conservation concern before “Not Threatened”. Good going. Also of interest is the fact that this film was written and directed by Timothy Forder, who’s either the creator of Murun Buchstansangur or someone with the exact same name working in the same industry.

That brings us to half past seven and primetime’s official starting gun, Coronation Street. This week, a trip to Blackpool has repercussions, as such trips usually do. Your second chance of the day to see Bill Roache on ITV! Don’t pass it up!

After that at eight, run away from Home James!, Thames’ second sitcom vehicle for Jim Davidson, following up on Up the Elephant and Round the Castle as the same character gets a job as Harry Towb’s chauffeur. This is a repeat of the first series in anticipation of the second beginning on the 7th of September, as if it’ll be impossible for new viewers to follow without a refresh. In fact, it’ll be hard to watch

because of the lead actor, and repeats are just going to make that worse.

At half past eight, if you feel like turning back to ITV (it’s Ever Decreasing Circles on the other side, so you might not) you’ll be greeted with a documentary from Yorkshire Television. A series, apparently, called Power in the Land, which appears to be about the state of British agriculture. This week, why is dairy farming collapsing in Wales? I have no idea but I blame Thatcher.

From nine, an actual treat: the genuinely funny film Trading Places on a random Monday evening in low-ratings August for no apparent reason. Don’t knock it, it’s great (apart from the slapstick final stretch; the film deserved a better climax than gorilla-rape).

Annoyingly, but typically for evening films on ITV at the time, it’s interrupted for half an hour by the News at Ten. It was just a fact of life at the time, and people taping the film for future perusal of Jamie Lee Curtis’ mirror scene would just have to remember to stop the recording and come back, or risk half an hour’s wasted tape. It was one of the reasons they cancelled the News at Ten at the turn of the century, and although they brought it back (and cancelled it again and brought it back again) it never really regained its prestige.

Trading Places finally finishes at ten to midnight, and we’re taken over the lap by an episode of V - the Series. Really just wringing the last few drops out of Kenneth Johnson’s concept at this point - Johnson himself wasn’t involved - and they didn’t even bother to finish it, hence this going out here four years late in a graveyard slot.

Anglia didn’t really have a Night Time strand, just bleary-eyed announcers in front of an abstract nightscapey backdrop. We’re well into it by now, though, and a big hunk of post-midnight is taken up with Sportsworld Extra from a quarter to one. Basically a compilation of whatever minor sporting highlights ITV could get the rights to, often American, hosted by Tony Francis, who as the name suggests was a sort of hybrid of Trevor Francis and Tony Wilson, and continued to sport a tidy mullet as late as 1992. Today it’s tennis, and the US Hardcourt Championship from Indianapolis, featuring the likes of Becker, Agassi and McEnroe, so not completely without interest.

That’s followed at two by the ITN headlines and a late night horror film in what seems to be a strand called The Dead of Night. Tonight: The Legacy, directed by Return of the Jedi Richard Marquand (his first film), co-written by Hammer legend Jimmy Sangster and starring America’s Katherine Ross and Sam Elliott (who later got married as a result). By all accounts, a bit daft and creakingly slow, but mostly effective. It’s on at two o’clock in the morning for a reason.

That takes us to the witching hour of 4am, more bloodshot headlines, and a repeat of the classic sitcom Taxi. No particular reason, but then anything on at this time of night is basically on at random. I’d like to end there on “Night Mr Walters”, but there’s actually half an hour of Farming Diary before we roll back to the Morning News at five and Tuesday begins officially. Mrrmgmrr.

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