Subscribe via RSS IconRSS or e-mail About this Site Legal Stuff Privacy Policy
Link To Us Sites We Like

Archive for the ‘TV - Miscellaneous’ Category

category icon

Blind Date

Posted by Big Boo on June 19th, 2008

Blind DateBlind Date first hit the screens in the mid 1980’s and managed to stick around for almost 20 years, and was hosted by the UK’s favourite Liverpudlian, Cilla Black, for the entire duration. It marked the beginning of Saturday nights line-up of shows on ITV, and only came to an end when Cilla herself, realising the shows waning popularity, decided to announce on air that she was going to give up the show at the end of the current series, much to the surprise of the TV company!

The show centred around the idea of Cilla being a kind of match maker, sorting out blind dates for the contestants. Three contestants were sat on stools on one side of a movable wall. A single contestant of the opposite sex was then brought on to choose between the three potential dates, but they were only allowed to ask three questions to each of the contestants. These were normally laced with innuendo, and the reply was similarly full of double entendres. The Carry On team would have been proud! It would normally go something like this:-

Contestant: “I’m a bit of a whizz in the kitchen, but what kind of dish would you say you’re most like?
Date 1: “I’d say I’m most like a curry, because I’m hot and spicy
Date 2: “A jam doughnut, because I’m soft and cuddly with a sweet surprise in the middle
Date 3: “I’m like a cheese burger, thick and meaty and fills the hole in your stomach

Read more…

category icon

Programmes For Schools And Colleges

Posted by Big Boo on April 30th, 2008

Programmes for Schools and CollegesNowadays the morning television schedules for the UK terrestrial TV channels are awash with magazine style shows, and programmes about buying or selling houses or antiques, or at least that’s what it seems to be whenever I turn the TV on if I happen to be at home during a weekday.

Back in the 1980’s though, watching daytime TV outside of the summer holidays meant you might actually learn something useful, rather than the value of some old plate or a recipe for something you’ll never actually get round to making. Back then, daytime TV meant Programmes for Schools and Colleges.

ITV and BBC2 both showed a range of educational TV programmes for all ages, from simple English and Mathematics lessons for the primary schools right up to programmes detailing Science topics for secondary schools. One thing all these shows had in common was that before they started there was a countdown clock on screen. This was a series of dots or dashes marking out a clock face, which would disappear one by one until there were none left, and the next programme would start.

Obviously the idea of these programmes was for schools around the country to videotape them to show their pupils at a time suitable to the teachers. When you were at school you always knew you were going to be lucky enough to watch something when the schools big TV was wheeled into the classroom. Every school in the country must have been issued with one of these TV sets - a big wooden surrounded TV with two doors that closed in front of the screen, all sat upon a massive metal stand with castors on.

Read more…

category icon

The Adventure Game

Posted by Big Boo on April 2nd, 2008

The Adventure GameBefore The Crystal Maze (which narrowly misses out on being a show of the 1980’s since it first appeared in 1990) there was the fondly remembered The Adventure Game from the good old BBC. Instead of members of the public, The Adventure Game pitted teams of three celebrity guests against an array of fiendish puzzles, wrapped up in the concept of being an alien game show!

Presented in a similar style to The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy (indeed, Douglas Adams was asked to write the series, but was busy with Hitchhikers) the show is set on the otherwise insignificant planet of Arg, which is populated by a race of dragon like creatures with shape shifting abilities called the Argonds. Anagrams of the word DRAGON played a large part in the show, with the customary Argond greeting being Gronda Gronda, the planets currency being the Drogna, and characters in the show being called Dorgan, Gandor, Dagnor and of course the great Rangdo. The latter was the ruler of Arg, who didn’t like taking human form like the rest of the Argonds, instead choosing to appear as an Aspidistra pot plant, or possibly a Teapot.

So, groups of three celebrities of the day such as Johnny Ball, Lesley Judd, Graeme Garden and Keith “Cheggars” Chegwin would try to solve various puzzles in order to escape back to Earth. Most of these problems could be solved logically, even if deriving that logical solution was sometimes a bit twisted. Some challenges were different each week, but there were some staples such as sending a robot dog through a maze, or the celebrities having to guide one of their number through a pitch black maze, which they could view using an infra-red camera.

Read more…

category icon

Open All Hours

Posted by Big Boo on March 19th, 2008

Open All Hours - Ronnie Barker, David Jason, Lynda BaronIn terms of repeat viewings on TV, The sitcom Open All Hours is probably second only to Dad’s Army. Personally, I prefer Open All Hours to Dad’s Army, if only because I have more memories of watching it the first time around.

Open All Hours was created by Roy Clarke, who was also responsible for the long running Last of the Summer Wine (longest running sitcom in the world no less, about to enter it’s 29th series!). It is set in a corner shop in Yorkshire that is run by Albert Arkwright (played by the late great Ronnie Barker). Arkwright is a bit of a penny pincher, and is immediately recognisable by his trademark brown shop keeper’s coat, and his comedy stutter.

Whilst some people did find his stammering a bit insulting, it was never done maliciously and was purely there to add comedy to the show. I especially liked the times where Arkwright would continuously trip over his words to the extent that even he got fed up and then said whatever he was trying to say in a completely different way. I recall an episode where he tried to sell a “Jamaican Ginger Cake” to a wary customer which came out as something like “Ja-ja-ja-ja-ja-jamaican ger-ger-ger-ger Jamaican ger-ger-ger-ger Ja-ja-jamaican ger-ger… oh, just take it”, Arkwright then stuffing the cake into the customers hand and ushering them away.

Read more…

category icon

French and Saunders

Posted by Big Boo on February 29th, 2008

French and SaundersFrench and Saunders (pictured here pretending to be Amy Winehouse and Britney Spears) are a female comedy double act who first shot to fame in the 1980’s as part of the new wave of “alternative” comedians, a term used to distance the young up and coming comedians from the old guard like Jimmy Tarbuck, Jim Bowen and Bernard Manning etc.. Good comediennes are few and far between, comedy being an often male dominated territory for some reason, but Dawn French and Jennifer Saunders are both great performers with a large number of successful comedy programmes under their belts.

They first appeared in some of the early Comic Strip films, but their big break was as the comedy relief on Channel 4’s music show The Tube in 1984. In 1985 they wrote and starred in Girls On Top, with Ruby Wax and Tracey Ullman. This was kind of like a female version of The Young Ones, about four very different female flatmates. In 1986 they moved to the BBC for the first series of their highly popular sketch show.

French and Saunders sketch shows were always a lot of fun. They had some wonderful recurring characters, such as the fat old country ladies who were somewhat trigger happy, the sleazy old men who would usually utter “give ‘er one” type comments when watching TV, and of course their celebrity impersonations. They were also accompanied by their house band Raw Sex (a balding old man who played the keyboards and an overweight, sleazy bongo drummer played by Roland Rivron), who also sang the theme tune to the show, for some comedy musical numbers, and the odd appearance in some of the sketches too.

Read more…

category icon

Ashes To Ashes

Posted by Big Boo on February 11th, 2008

Ashes To AshesAiring for the first time last week, Ashes To Ashes is the much anticipated follow up to the excellent (if somewhat confusing at times) Life On Mars. Sam Tyler may have been replaced by female detective Alex Drake, a psychological profiler, but the important thing is that Gene Hunt returns (as politically uncorrect as ever) with his mostly incompetent sidekicks Chris Skelton and Ray Carling.

The opening episode of Ashes To Ashes sees Alex Drake shot by a criminal who has gone a little mad and is blaming her for the downfall of his criminal empire. He also seems to know something about the death of her parents. Upon being shot Alex wakes up dressed as a hooker amidst a party on a boat, with the strains of Ultravox’s Vienna ringing in her ears, marking the year as 1981. Not knowing quite what’s going on she leaves the boat as police storm it, still believing she has been shot. This is where she meets Gene and his gang for the first time.

As the episode progresses Alex realises that what is happening to her must be the same as what happened to Sam Tyler, who’s case she was following after he came out of his coma and then commited suicide at the end of Life On Mars.

Read more…

category icon

Game For A Laugh

Posted by Big Boo on January 31st, 2008

Game For A LaughFollowing the news that Jeremy Beadle has just died from pneumonia at the age of 59, I thought it would be apt to mark his passing with the show that first brought him fame in the UK, Game For A Laugh, and paved the way for Beadle to become a household name when it came to anything to do with practical jokes.

Game For A Laugh first hit our screens in 1981, and was hosted by Jeremy Beadle, Sarah Kennedy, Henry Kelly and Matthew Kelly (the latter two of course not being related to each other). The show was a mixture of practical jokes, quizzes, games and stunts that involved members of the general public. As Beadle was always keen on reminding us it was the show where “The People Are The Stars” and the closing catchphrase of the show was “Watching Us Watching You, Watching Us Watching You” which was delivered by each member of the team saying a quarter of it each.

The featured practical jokes usually involved some hapless person had being set up by their spouse, family or work colleagues to be made a fool of, normally by having something nasty happen to them like their car being crushed in front of their eyes (of course, it wasn’t really their car). These were normally prefilmed segments where the person being humilated and the person who set them up were invited to sit and watch the mayhem commence.

Read more…

category icon

TV Test Cards

Posted by Big Boo on January 24th, 2008

TV Test CardsWith the plethora of digital TV channels available to us via satellite, cable or even Freeview TV, it seems strange to think that at the beginning of the 1980’s we only had three TV channels to choose from - BBC 1, BBC 2 and ITV. It also seems unthinkable that with such a small number of channels, at certain times of the day we didn’t even have programmes airing on all three. Early mornings and late nights were when TV stopped, and the test card took over.

The test card had several purposes, but the reason it was original conceived was to allow you to check that your TV was tuned in correctly. To this end the average TV test card consisted of a number of bars and boxes drawn in various shades of grey or primary colours. You could use this image to ensure that not only was your TV tuned to the correct frequency for a particular channel, but also that your brightness and contrast settings were correct.

Pictured is probably the best loved test card from British TV. It’s official name is the rather uninspiring Test Card “F”, but for most of us it will always be known as “the girl playing noughts and crosses one”. Many is the time that I would switch the TV on around 8am, put on BBC 2, and be greeted with the little girl (Carole Hersee was her real name fact fans!) and her oddly shaped clown toy playing a game together on a little blackboard. Some people found this image creepy as a kid, and many still do in fact. The recent TV series Life On Mars used this fact to great effect, where Sam Tyler was living a life back in time (the 1970’s as it happens) and was haunted by this little girl on his TV set. Of course, for poor Sam she came out of the TV set too at times…

For a stack of technical details about these test cards, including the newer ones that were created for the BBC’s first widescreen broadcasts, check out Barney Wol’s in depth website. It even points out where you can find mistakes in the construction of the test card itself!