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French 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.
Airing 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 Sam Tyler may have been replaced by female detective Alex Drake, a psychological profiler, but the important thing is that Gene Hunt returns (as politically uncorrect as ever) with his mostly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.
Following 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.
With 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.
“Super, smashing, great!”
This post is particularly relevant today as it marks the 25th anniversary of the first airing of Countdown on Channel 4. Countdown first aired on November 2nd 1982, and coincidentally since it was also the first programme aired on Channel 4 today must therefore also mark the 25th anniversary of Channel 4. Interestingly it appears to be Countdown that has been chosen to be celebrated by the UK’s media rather than Channel 4 itself, which I guess goes to show just how loved Countdown is by so many people young and old.
The BBC’s Great Egg Race was a precursor to todays Scrapheap Challenge, but on a slightly smaller scale. Three teams of university boffins would be challenged to solve a particular problem in as ingenious a way as possible. The kind of problems the team had to solve were usually of the “useless” variety. In early series the challenge was to get an egg from point A to point B without breaking, but in later series they deviated into a much wider variety such as creating a device capable of generating electricity by flapping your arms, or something equally stupid.
The Saturday evening family game show has always been a popular choice for TV schedulers, and one of the most remembered game shows has to be 321. Hosted by the genial Ted Rogers, the show started with a quiz to find out which couple would get to play the game proper. The main part of the show was then a series of sketches and musical numbers featuring “famous” star guests of the day, who would then come over to the contestants with a particularly obscure clue to one of the prizes available to be won.