"Well worth a watch." - Tom Scott, this one time
BOB THE FISH PRODUCTIONS
ENTERTAINMENT ON TOAST
TVS: 31 May 1985
ITV starts its day as usual with TV-am, currently beginning at 6:15 as they start to round the corner towards actual solvency. The only actual programme is Good Morning Britain, with its various slots delineated here, albeit roughly as dependent on circumstances and/or competence. Notice that Roland Rat is still at Eggcup House; he defects to the BBC in five months. This half-term filler is his last show for TV-am.
After the copyright eggcups, TVS gets started with its usual opening salvo Outlook, basically just the opening continuity announcement with a fancy title sequence. It’s listed as being a mere two minutes long, giving rise to an unusual timestamp of 9.27 for Sesame Street! Channel Four don’t finally start giving it the respect it deserves until 1987. After that there’s a generic “cartoon” - I’m assuming Priit Parn’s “Breakfast on the Grass” - followed by Matt and Jenny in Barnabas Bletcher. Which is a sentence I just typed. Today they meet some bloke who convinces them to wrestle a bear. Sadly this isn’t, as it first appeared to me, some sort of Magpie equivalent of Go With Noakes or Duncan Dares, where Matthew Kelly and Jenny Hanley travel around meeting interesting people and doing odd things. No, it’s an earnest Canadian kid’s show about two kids orphaned on the way from Bristol scouring Ontario for their long-lost uncle. Which is the boy and which is the girl? Does it matter?
After that, something called Crazy World of Sport. A just-short-of-half-hour look at sports that are foreign and obscure in the UK, and therefore wacky and crazy I expect. Snooks are probably cocked. Possibly bought-in from US syndication, definitely daytime filler either way. Today it’s Thai Boxing, more accurately known as Muay Thai in this day and age, and stick and sword fighting from the Philippines, otherwise known as Eskrima.
At half eleven, ITV network follies with About Britain, the regular weekday slot where the regions got to make documentaries about their neck of the woods. Current goings-on, historical interest or just local picturesquities. Today it’s the turn of UTV, who appear to have what amounts of a half-hour travel promo for Fermanagh.
At noon, back to the kids’ programmes! The first half-hour of the afternoon was, throughout my childhood, the province of all the classic pre-schooler programming of the era. Puddle Lane, Tickle on the Tum, Our Backyard…at this point, preceded by a ten-minuter to bring the slot up to half an hour. In this case it’s the hallucinatory Jamie and the Magic Torch, leading into the legendary Rainbow. Is it acceptable to admit Rainbow was good again yet? Well, it was.
After Rainbow, something notably more grown-up, apparently - The Questors. Some sort of snack-science show, like a diet QED. Today they’re doing an observation test thing on the set of Corrie, which sounds like one of those “did you spot the dancing bear” things.
At one o’clock there’s the news, soon to be moved to 12.30 so as not to clash with the BBC. Afterwards, another chance to see a fairly random TV play from earlier that year: Dear Box Number by journeyman scriptwriter Alan Clews. A two-header with Julia MacKenzie and Bernard Hepton that’s probably quite good. I dunno. I haven’t checked, but it’s on YouTube if you want to.
After that, The Better Half with Chrissie Pollard, in which she interviews the spouses of the famous about their marriages. This format could have gone in multiple directions - it could have been a light-hearted gigglesome exercise in foibles, but as far as I can tell it’s not. Pollard is a serious news type and her interviews were largely straight-faced affairs with the likes of Glenys Kinnock and Margaret Aldiss. That’s Brian W.’s wife.
At three PM, a more or less discarded slot for an episode of US sitcom Diff’rent Strokes! We had plenty of sitcoms of our own, we didn’t give major primetime slots to just any old import. Today’s episode: Undercover Lover, in which Willis hits on the new girl at school who’s obsessed with drugs - because she’s an undercover narc! By this point it seems like the “very special episodes” were the rule rather than the exception, which ironically would make the episodes not about some social ill or other the special ones.
After a quick regional news, it’s then time for - no, not Children’s ITV yet, but it might as well be because it’s Captain Scarlet. “Captain Scarlet has to put his invincibility to the test when the Mysterons try to kill him.” That’s basically the plot summary for every episode, thanks.
Children’s ITV actually starts right after that, presented this month by Supergran! Great! Starting with that same episode of Rainbow from three hours ago! Little kids don’t care. And some of them would have been at school. If it wasn’t half-term. Anyway, today the cast are having a jumble sale in their garden and some stuff happens.
That’s followed by Crystal Tits and Alistair, originally made for the BBC ten years earlier and now being repeated on Children’s ITV for reasons beyond the realm of normal human understanding. Nice to see it anyway, if only because at a mere five minutes it doesn’t outstay its welcome.
Then Emu’s All Live Pink Windmill Show, the apotheosis of Rod Hull. A massive weekly event programme - forty minutes long, which is epic by Children’s TV standards - broadcast, as the title promises, entirely live, with phone-ins, games, and pantomime shenanigans with Grotbags and company. Just look at the listing: “The Pink Windmill kids learn to ski to music and you can see how King Boggle's army tries to rescue Princess Hortensia, who has been kidnapped by the Chinese spies”. What the hell? So unashamedly big that the only thing it could do was eventually burst. No wonder Rod got sick of the damn bird.
That takes up the rest of the day’s Children’s ITV on its own, whereupon there’s more TVS news followed by Connections. No, not James Burke being enigmatic. Sue Robbie presenting a “quiz show for schools”, a sort of primeval soup version of Only Connect for kids. In this slot, it’s something of a dangling tagnut from Children’s ITV.
That leads into the usual evening news slot: the ITN bulletin at 5.45, the one with the cool shrinking morphing logo, and the regional news magazine. For me it was TSW Today, here it’s Coast to Coast.
The march to primetime begins in earnest with back-to-back gameshows. First, Pop the Question. Not a slick 80s take on Mr and Mrs, it’s basically A Question of Pop, hosted by Lee Peck - the Jonathan Wilkes of the 80s, in that ITV tried their best to make him happen and failed - with Diddy David Hamilton and Chris Tarrant as team captains. This week we’ve got Lyn Paul, Steve Bracknell, the legendary Annie Nightingale and Neil Innes, who TV Times couldn’t even be bothered to spell correctly.
That’s followed by Family Fortunes! Still feeling its way, really: Bob Monkhouse brought it here (and changed the name) but soon tired of it, and Max Bygraves was just not a game show host, so he only lasted a couple of years. This is his last series, in fact. Finally someone rings up Les Dennis and it goes stratospheric.
Next, it’s moidah with Hart to Hart! Why not show it at half past seven? American network television’s puritanical rules mean almost everything is suitable for pre-watershed, even a supposed action thriller like this. Today’s episode: the Shooting. Which seems to me to be code for “too generic for a title”.
Sitcommery after that with Home to Roost. Eric Chappell was hit-or-miss, no question - he created Duty Free, but also Rising Damp. And Only When I Laugh. And Home to Roost had its moments as well. He wasn’t Vince Powell, is what I’m saying. Today’s episode is the last of series one, and the plot is that John Thaw is miserable and Reece Dinsdale is irresponsible I imagine.
9:00 is the peakest of prime time, especially for ITV at this point because the BBC are showing the news. Today we have more thriller action of a highly British, and notably post-watershed bend, in the shape of CATS Eyes. The spinoff from the Gentle Touch, taking Jill Gascoigne from gritty police procedural to glossy techno-espionage and surprisingly still working, despite the stupid title. Alongside Jill are Leslie Ash (whose character’s tomboy nature is signalled by giving her a male name, in classic Enid Blyton fashion) and because this is the first series Rosalyn Landor, gorgeous but so posh as to be ultimately unknowable, hence her replacement with the even posher but warmer Tracy Louise Ward, who would become the Duchess of Beaufort a week after the show ended.
That takes us up to the News at Ten, and that’s followed by The Friday Night Fright. By which they mean a late-night horror film. A classy one, this time: Roman Polanski’s Repulsion, starring Catherine Deneuve as a lady having a massive psychotic breakdown. That’s pretty much the entire film, really, at least plotwise, but as with all the best horror the plot really isn’t the important part. You have to love that lurid write-up, as well. Kudos to TV Times’ copywriter.
That film takes us all the way into June, ie past midnight, and up to closedown. It was still traditional in those days for stations to end with some sort of religious epilogue. TVS’s was called “Company” and consisted of three or more spiritual types of various denominations, usually sounding like the opening to a joke - a priest, a vicar and a rabbi, for instance - sitting around a table having an earnest unscripted chat for five minutes. Weirdly, the format seems to have them already well in conversation when we join them, and then we leave after five minutes while they’re still chatting away. It’s basically eavesdropping, especially since they never acknowledge there’s a camera in the room. It’s genuinely eerie. So here we’ve got the priest and the rabbi, plus two other people and a former Hell’s Angel as a special guest. After which we can go to bed, wondering what the point was.
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