Phil Norman
@MrPhilNorman
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Angry bloke outside Betfred this afternoon loudly calling his malfunctioning iPhone an "oblong shithouse".
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The original series of The Krypton Factor featured a "Personality" round, which tested the participants' wit and creativity.
This was summarily scrapped after the first series.
We may never know why.
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Digging out that picture of Dickie Davies serving his family a roast dinner last week reminded me of one of TV Times's most endearing traits - photographing the stars (often with their families) stuffing their faces. So here's a few, starting with Rodney Bewes.
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Sesame Street. Still, to my knowledge, the only TV programme for preschoolers to attempt a Samuel Beckett parody.
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In 1934 the Guardian ran a competition to devise a fantasy schedule for this new-fangled thing called "tele-vision". This was the winning entry.
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"Oh, and by the way, if you see your mom this weekend, will you be sure and tell her-"
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All critics fear making factual howlers, but take heart - you're unlikely to make a mistake as massive as Kenneth Tynan once did.
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This will mean nothing to anyone, but I was delighted this week to finally locate a copy of "Oi! 'Ave you sussed/New Windolene Plus?" Very much the Carnival of Light of the cockney stompalong ads of the mid-1980s.
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This just came up as one of those unbidden "memories curated for you" and I have absolutely no memory of it whatsoever. My Station to Station, if you will.
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Super excited for this, the first film to come out of Disney/Pixar's purchase of the Dennis Potter Estate.
#PotterCinematicUniverse
#Disney
#Pixar
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Happy 75th to The Man, Derek Griffiths. Toast his name with an appropriate beverage.
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Dreamt a whole Kate Bush Glastonbury set. She opened by apologetically announcing she wouldn't be doing Running Up That Hill as it was "too complicated," then launched into a medley of Not the Nine O'Clock News parody songs.
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Contrary to popular belief, only a handful of middle class metropolitan households in the 1980s owned a television set but never watched it. But every single one of those families produced a child who went on to work for the Guardian Arts & Media department.
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While we're on the subject of chips, here's that Eartha Kitt picture we all know and love.
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Funds are tight, so I'm biting the bullet and finally putting my old Fall board game collection up for auction. Just got them out of storage. Not seen this one for a while.
#ebay
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Heads up: a hen party is currently heading west into Bishopsgate which just went from an ensemble acapella rendition of Single Ladies into an ensemble acapella rendition of Rapper's Delight, and got *16* lines in before losing their place. These women are capable of anything.
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The TV Times's response to this eminently reasonable letter is quite something.
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I think it's time for that picture of Eartha Kitt scoffing chips outside the Co-op again.
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This title sequence is constructed from the four elements that made up the late 1970s: orange, brown, Hessian, and reggae.
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People saying "Ooh, you've all been played, that Dettol ad's a deliberate parody of bad copy to get people talking." No. I've been in countless meetings with ad producers and their humour really does operate on that stultifying level. And they all think they're hilarious.
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Series 1 of Make It Count (1977). If you saw this as a pastiche today, you'd go, "No no, that's too much".
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Joe Brown's ma gives her son's digestive tract a good workout with a tempting blend of shepherd's pie and pickled onions.
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The pilot of Are You Being Served? was broadcast on 8 September 1972, roughly halfway through the recording of Pink Floyd's Dark Side of the Moon. Is there any evidence the show's distinctive cash register-sampling theme tune influenced the composition of Money during that time?
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Be alert. Trad jazz gasfitters are operating in your area.
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Not sure this caption's much better, but a grand picture of Bob amongst the Schrieber.
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Dominic Cummings' cleverness is the kind of cleverness that reads nothing except those big blockbuster pop science books called things like "Guns, Napoleon and Chaos Theory", memorises one point from each one, and effortfully bends every discussion round to get to that point.
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Edward Woodward, Venetia Barrett, daughter Sarah, and a subeditor in need of a holiday.
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From 1975, the first documented case of Saturday night scheduler's ennui.
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All the fuss about Disney+ just reminds me that I'm from the "Disneyless generation". As children after the original golden age and before the late '80s Renaissance, Disney to us just meant Bank Holiday clipshow purgatory and shabby, overcast live-action adventures with Jim Dale.
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It's the weekend. Looks like I'll have to get these out of storage.
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Lots excitable headlines about Mickey Mouse coming out of copyright soon, but remember that only applies to the original, less appealing design.
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I can't see an athlete and a Swedish flag in the same shot without hearing Michael Jayston saying, "A buttery taste. With less than half the fat."
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Things We Can Look Forward To When All This Is All Over Number 5983: Fishcakes on a speedboat with Wendy Craig.
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Some enterprising confectioner should set up a Kickstarter to manufacture limited editions of discontinued chocolate selections. This would be an obvious first choice.
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Occasionally, when it all gets a bit much, I briefly consider putting my Jan Harvey DVDs in the dustbin. But then I tell myself that would be taking the Howards' Way out.
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Your regular reminder that Netflix wouldn't give Michaela Coel full creative control on I May Destroy You, so she went to the BBC, who did.
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In 1979 Danny Baker reviewed Risque by Chic, & went off on a massive tangent that's as true today as it was then:
http://t.co/hbZC59fJIQ
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Is anyone else nonplussed at the way Ghostbusters has been retrospectively promoted from fun, well-made action comedy film to generation-defining cultural milestone? You don't get this fuss over Spies Like Us.
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Apropos nothing, and bearing in mind this is the sort of personal Top Ten that changes from hour to hour, here (in chronological order) are ten TV experiments that (I reckon, at least) were more than worth the risk.
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The National's Antony & Cleopatra was as great as expected, but myyyyyyyyyyyy God I was distracted at times.
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1956, and a very young Rodney Bewes climbs up Big Ben for kicks. (And, Telly Addicts: is that Anthony 'Chocky/Horns of Nimon' Read he's spending a night in the cells with?)
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Just a couple of hours to go till Andrew Neil launches Spectator TV, lads.
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What's the most forgettable sitcom you unaccountably remember? I've got inexplicable memories of Blind Men, a Jesse Birdsall vehicle about a group of Venetian blind salesmen. The various salesmen approached their sales talks in wildly varying manners and this resulted in humour.
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Interesting how terrestrial channels' early years seal their reputation. No matter what they do, Channel 5 will always be the down-market joke. And whatever depths they plumb, Channel 4 will always get a free pass 'cos of Bandung File and Murun Buchstansangur.
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Well, I'm pleased to report that Brookside (STV Player) doesn't disappoint in the slightest. I wasn't prepared for how very, *very* slow the pace is, but it works brilliantly. Every shot takes its sweet, somnolent time. It pre-empts Twin Peaks in many ways.
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I've laid into Alan Coren of late, but on form he was great, as in this 1973 review of Emmerdale Farm.
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Yeah yeah, so Strictly's the apotheosis of post-war Saturday night light entertainment, fair enough. But Hughie Green once got a horse pissed.
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I'm fascinated by the way TV programmes, once they get on air, have a tendency to warp into weird new forms. Little Big Time started in 1968 as a straightforward kids' variety show hosted by Freddie Garrity. Three years later, it looked like this:
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Like a decades-old Woolies tinsel tree, out comes the festive archive material for another year. Here's an old favourite from 1972, when ITV's Christmas schedule was scrapped for being "too entertaining".
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"Referring to 'the historian David Irving' is like referring to 'the metallurgist Uri Geller'." - Clive James.
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Items we've substituted.
YOU ORDERED: Great British Bake Off.
WE DELIVERED: Fat Man in the Kitchen.
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If anyone's thinking of forming an Andrews Sisters of the pandemic I've got some prospective song titles.
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That Unman, Wittering & Zigo DVD release got me thinking about those bizarre, cultish films that were deployed to fill gaps in the post-midnight TV schedules, which I always seemed to catch arriving home, usually twenty minutes in, and settled down to watch, woozily mesmerised.
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I'm making a list of sitcoms that, while not classics, or even particularly well-remembered, were Of Their Time to an almost absurd degree.
Let's kick things off with Sorry, I'm a Stranger Here Myself (Thames, 1981).
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My favourite piece of TV viewer pedantry: the scandal of Annie Walker's driving licence.
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You know one bit of archive TV that's undercelebrated? The product breakdown in the 1980s Trio adverts. It took dozens of takes to get that right.
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BBC Four are repeating No Place Like Home from episode one. An ideal opportunity to:
a) see if it deserves its abysmal reputation,
b) compile an episode-by-episode graph of the changing volume & hysteria of the audience response to the picture falling off the wall at the start.
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System Haddock. Can't Wait Another Fillet. Stay Trout of My Life. The Slightest Tench. Etc.
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Just recalled a quality gag from Radio Active, all components of which are now culturally long defunct. "Happiness is a magazine called Mayfair. The mild pornography. Found under benches and hedges."
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Fifteen years ago I became obsessed with this beautiful artifact. It was the sort of thing that seemed too good to be true. The grey, dreary face of modern pop culture wasn't supposed to permit such riches to exist. And now, once more, it doesn't.
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Happy 50th birthday, Sesame Street. "We are all born mad. Some remain so." - Samuel Beckett.
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I know I trot this out every year, and it's clearly a massive exaggeration of a small and quickly resolved internal dispute, but there's no better demonstration of how television then was on another planet to television now.
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Just seen a Prince song described as having a "textbook reggae beat". I loved my reggae textbooks at school, especially the story of Gregory Isaacs the Green Pirate.
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WH Smith used to be a shop that got ever posher the further in you went. Mags and comics at the front, then books and records, then at the back the intimidating area that sold classical music and typewriters and insanely expensive fountain pens where you DID NOT BELONG.
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For reasons best left unexplored, I'm currently heavily obsessed by Handel och Vandel, the short-lived Norwegian reboot of Open All Hours.
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Alarming reader questionnaire from a 1973 TV Times. What they planned to do with this information God knows.
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👀👀👀LOOK! RARE!!!!👁️LOOK 😍🍴🀄️↕️🔂🇦🇼🏴🇵🇸🇵🇷🇳🇺🇳🇿🇩🇿🔮🗺️
#ebay
#wheresthecomputer
#wherestheeraser
#GOHOHOIO
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Just watched the film Sixteen Candles. How typical of Hollywood to take a perfectly good Two Ronnies sketch and ruin it completely with a needlessly inflated budget.
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In early 1983, Coronation Street starts going a bit weird. A director starts experimenting with rakish camera angles, particularly a weird top-down shot which is very unlike the usual studio blocking, giving tense scenes like this the feel of a French New Wave film.
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