On the 20th of October 1983, Channel Four isn’t even a year old, it’s barely watched and its programmes can tend toward the ramshackle and visibly cheap - to such an extent that even something that tries to make a joke out of it, such as The Cut Price Comedy Show, doesn’t really work because even its exaggerated cheapness fails to really stand out. Still, with the first anniversary just over a month away, its feet are starting to reach solid ground.

Of course, it still only broadcasts barely seven hours a day, if that. Its day begins at five with Countdown. Still in its early phase with multiple ladies on letters and numbers and Carol Vorderman still unknown and nowhere to be seen in the listings. Second billing (behind Whiteley, of course) instead goes to professional twat Gyles Brandreth, very much a symbol of this era’s television.

At half past five, time for your piano lessons. Fanny Waterman was the Barbara Waterhouse of pianos, inventing the Leeds Piano Competition as a way of giving British ebony-and-ivory talent a leg-up, and having her own extensive series of instructional books entitled Piano Progress, adapted here by Yorkshire Television for Channel Four. Today’s episode is about rhythm, and dance rhythms in particular - from waltzes, represented by one written by Benjamin Britten at the age of eleven because he was a bloody showoff, to the zapateado styles of Isaac Albéniz.

After that, as an alternative to the six o’clock news, a repeat of The Addams Family. Less horrifying than the cadaverous, troll-like Thatcher government, and more entertaining. In today’s episode Lurch’s mother arrives (played by Grandma Walton), doesn’t know he’s the butler, and orders the Family to wait on him hand and foot for a change. Still as worth watching as ever, provided you can get used to Fester suddenly being Morticia’s uncle.

At half past six, Design Matters. No, really, it does. Honest. In today’s episode, Britain’s young fashion designers are facing the need to take their talents abroad because the people here JUST DON’T GET THEM AND THEIR VISION, MAN. Design Matters was one of the more successful magazine programmes on early Channel Four, running from shortly after the start of the station through to the dawn of the nineties. It wasn’t all about fashion, either, but aspects of design from album covers to motorbikes.

That takes us to the Channel Four News, hosted by the original lineup-of Peter Sissons, Trevor McDonald and

Channel Four: October 20th 1983

Sarah Hogg. Two of them went on to distinguished career in television news, but the other was judged to have too annoying a voice for broadcasting (it sounded like a nervous, upper-class theremin) and so went off to work for the Conservative Party alongside her husband (future Agriculture Minister Douglas Hogg) and eventually become Viscountess Halisham. So no need to feel sorry for her.

That’s followed again by the ten minute Comment slot. Today it’s highly Jewish journalist and author Chaim Bermant. No idea what he’s talking about, but it’s likely to involve Israel in some way. Bermant was a supporter of Israel - he even lived there for a bit in the 70s - but not above criticising it for doing stupid things sometimes, like occupying the Sinai and West Bank by force instead of bargaining with them for peace. If you’re looking for clues about the content of this Comment: at this time, Israel’s economy had just exploded and Yitzhak Shamir had just replaced the retired Menachem Begin as Prime Minister. Of course, it might have had nothing to do with the Middle East. Maybe he just wanted to share a recipe for lokshen kugel.

After that: dance! Come Dancing is still popular over on the BBC, although not as much as it used to be. In fact it’s well on the downswing, having skipped last year altogether. But there’s still a place for non-celebrity competitive dancing on television in 1983, and here’s Channel Four with the Malibu Disco Dancing World Championships! Neither an actual world event nor held in Malibu (it was sponsored by rum), this started out as part of Bruce Forsyth’s ill-fated and overambitious Big Night and has now outlived disco itself, which might be why it’s been dumped on Channel Four now it’s here, having been on ITV beforehand. The music leans toward electro and the dancing toward breakdance, but there’s still acres of lame and some genuinely impressive moves. There would only be one more, also televised on Channel Four.

At half-past eight, get your SDP mugs ready for some Alternative Comedy in The Entertainers - a no doubt ironically light-entertainment title for a showcase of the Comedy Store’s latest and most available. Which at this point means the ones who didn’t split off and form the Comic Strip. Specifically the following: Andy “Can we just concentrate on the bag?” De La Tour; Jim “Well, Mr Sambo Darkie Coon” Barclay; The Dialtones (Ronnie Golden, Mac McDonald and Ritchie Robertson performing surrealist acapella arrangements of pop songs); the ubiquitous Ben Elton possibly by sheer reflex on the part of the booking agent; Jenny Lecoat when she was a feminist standup instead of the author of ten thousand books about the Nazi occupation of Guernsey (which to be fair she was born in); Helen Lederer, presumably with her girl-at-the-bar character which she finally perfected in Naked Video; and Arnold Brown, why not?

More comedy at nine with Soap! Long since cancelled in the US, it was shown in some ITV regions after the News at Ten in the late seventies, but, like Hill Street Blues, it didn’t really make an impact here until Channel Four started repeating it in prime time. Suddenly everyone in the country was aware of one of the best and maddest US sitcoms of the seventies and eighties, Channel Four had a bona fide ratings hit - in fact, two, because they soon started showing the spinoff Benson as well - and most of Susan Harris’ later works ended up on Four as well, most notably The Golden Girls. In today’s episode, Dutch and Chester plan their escape from prison, Danny finds himself chained (not literally) to Elaine and Burt and Danny initiate a partnership. Confused? You will be.

All laughter ceases abruptly and violently at 9.30, though, with episode three of the hard-hitting drama-as-punch-in-the-face The Nation’s Health. A brutal, bleak expose of the declining NHS in four feature-length chapters, it’s often brilliant and definitely always angry, but can be a slog to sit through. It’s written by G.F. Newman, the legendarily two-fisted writer of social ills and corruption and bastards. Literally - his first novel, about bent coppers, was called Sir, You Bastard; shortly followed by the sequels You Nice Bastard and You Flash Bastard. All featuring his scowling face on the cover. He’s also a vegan and animal rights advocate so serious in his convictions that no-one working on anything he’s written is ever allowed to eat meat on or near the set. One gets the impression if someone did try to hide in the corner and sneak a Peperami, Newman would batter them to death with his bare hands. His moral outrage is palpable throughout The Nation’s Health, but it’s constant, endless, and never changes, like listening to the tone on a testcard for ninety minutes. Which might not be so bad, but the series doesn’t present any remedy, or even really the possibility of one; it just shakes its head in resigned horror. It’s like being yelled at by a monumentally depressed prophet of doom for ninety minutes at a time. Newman might be a writer of social ills, but he’s not the sort of writer who comes up with solutions; just charges at the problems, screaming. Which is useful, but not necessarily helpful, and certainly doesn’t make for an easy hour and a half of television. Of course, “easy” was absolutely the opposite of what he was going for anyway.

Your reward for making it through all that misery is What the Papers Say, another programme ITV didn’t want anymore and dumped on Channel Four with indecent haste once it arrived. Channel Four didn’t want it all that much either and it moved back to ITV momentarily when the rise of Night Time television gave it another dumping ground. (And dump it they did, at ten to five - the last programme of the day before the Morning News). Finally the BBC mounted a rescue mission and airlifted it onto early evening BBC2 in 1990. They kept it for eighteen years before the ratings finally failed them and it made its last move, to Radio Four. There it finally ended in 2016, probably because the news had become too unutterably depressing. Your host today is Lord Gnome himself, Richard Ingrams, then still editor of the Private Eye.

The day on Four ends with the kind of thing that probably would only be tried on Channel Four under Jeremy Isaacs, and probably only in year one. Snooker loopy nuts were we in the early 80s, and although Channel Four was unlikely to actually show any (just obscure and under-subscribed sports like basketball, sumo and lesbian lacrosse) they could still get on the bandwagon somehow. Specifically with downright Partridgian formats like this one: A Frame With Davis, in which the interesting Steve Davis hosts two guests for “an informal chat and a frame of snooker”. Between the guests, presumably. Obviously the famously personality-light Davis is a downright perverse choice for a chat-show host - although he’s actually a pretty decent guy with a good line in deadpan wit - and the old-fashioned light entertainment feel is only enhanced by the identities of the guests: Mike Reid and Duggie Brown, both veterans of workingman’s club writ large The Comedians (middle aged men cracking jokes down the lens about darkies and mothers in law). To be fair, it sounds better than Big Break for two reasons: no Jim Davidson, obviously, and no need to attempt to follow the game. An Anglia production from Norwich - maybe it was an Alan Partridge pitch after all. Monkey tennis?

And that takes us to ten to midnight and, with no pressing need to stay on any longer, closedown.

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