Week 6: November 5th – 12th, 1988

Birmingham... Birmingham... Birmingham... Walsall.

Four more years! Four more years! Of piss, as George HW Bush wipes the floor with Michael "A tank, you say?" Dukakis in yet another depressing US presidential election. A few days later Thatcher drops in for tea. That's nice. The SNP's Jim Sillars rips Labour's Bobby Gillespie (crivens!) a new one by winning the Glasgow Govan by-election. Thatch stays well away. Emma Stone and Tinie Tempah are born, and a government white paper starts the ball rolling on the creation of Channel 5. The charts? Well... Enya's at number one. I was doing work experience at a printers at this point – proper, old school, analogue printing, photographing artwork on massive rostrum cameras, chopping up text with scalpels and all that good stuff. The work radio was naturally welded to Wuneffem, so I got to know these charts rather better than I'd have liked. Smooth Criminal. Real Gone Kid. Let's Stick Together '88. 9AM (The Comfort Zone). She Makes My Sodding Day. These were on constant rotation for weeks on end. I didn't much care for any of them, and felt that the fun, weird pop charts I'd known nearly all my life, where mad stuff with no popular precedent could suddenly appear and get to number one, seemed to be calcifying into a boringly tasteful Bang & Olufsen monolith. Scritti Politti and The Real Roxanne have got singles out, and they can't even dent the top fifty! What country, friends, is this? It's not all Q magazine in a handcart, of course. Lower down the top forty, D-Mob and Jolly Roger point towards the mayhem to come. But right now, the unavoidable feel is of a chilly cultural waiting room, without even the distraction of an old copy of Punch. What's on the telly?

Saturday November 5th

BBC1

09:00 Going Live!

For the first time, The 'Live! is one big outside broadcast, presented entirely from the newly-opened Centre Parcs in Nottingham, so the usual busy studio décor of outsize desks and perspex tombolas gives way to ferns, chlorine and children's shrieks reverberating off the geodesic greenhousing. This is a proof of concept – in future years they will actually do something with this conceit, broadcasting whole editions from steam trains and cross-channel ferries, neatly showing parallels between the organisational tasks that get both ferry and telly operational. Here they're just sat by a cactus, but at least the subject's been broached. In all other respects it's a textbook edition. Squash players and swimmers are earnestly interviewed. Pip chats to Pia Zadora about her Jam & Lewis vanity record. Trev and Simon muck about with Robin Hood. Deacon Blue play Real Gone Kid. For the main phone-in, with New Doctor Who Sylvester McCoy, Sarah opens proceedings by bigging up Who's popularity. She chats a bit about her brief stint as a Cryon three years ago, and the welter of fan-mail that cameo brought her, in her trademark "it was all rather nice at the time but I'd quite like it to stop now, please" tone of voice. The first caller begins his question. "Er, John Nathan-Turner..." Sarah's face, crestfallen and full of concern for Sylv, is a picture. But McCoy copes, and with the next question we're home safe. "Is the TaRDiS really as big as it looks?" The Whovian menace is repelled... for now.

ITV

21:15 Bust

The comedy drama is ubiquitous these days. Cynics might say that's because it has to be neither too dramatic nor too funny, but I couldn't possibly comment. Thirty-odd years ago, though, it was a genre in its infancy. Minder had blazed a trail, but others were slow to follow. ITV made a move in the late eighties with a mini-wave of dramas, plus big-name comic talent and minus small-time laughter tracks. Penelope Keith had a problem daughter and Valium-addicted sister in Moving. And there was Bust, with Paul Nicholas and Belinda Lang as freshly bankrupt Yuppies trying to rebuild their status in the harshly competitive and fiercely judgemental City pecking order, personified in arrogant, maudlin trader Stephen "Little Armadillos" Frost. Nicholas, natch, sang the theme tune, Baby Don't You Cry No More, a honkingly "soulful" saxophone-and-Fairlight ballad from the pen of Rod Argent. It's exactly the sort of late '80s comedy-drama that would be made by a character in a comedy-drama about making comedy-dramas in the late '80s.

Sunday November 6th

BBC1

19:45 Howards' Way

It started in the sixties, when The Planemakers established the world of business as a legitimate dramatic arena. The boardroom drama! The industrial epic! Tough decisions at the top! High stakes slanging matches over tumblers of brandy with millions of pounds of engineering work in the balance! The BBC perfected the genre in the early seventies, as The Brothers, essentially King Lear Goes Haulage, kept millions glued to their screens for shouty meetings and men with variously receding hairlines working through the night on the Lorry Tender of a Lifetime. The people loved it. And it really went into top gear for the last couple of series, when Kate O'Mara turned up. A decade later the creators of that monolith stripped back the setting, added water, and launched arguably the biggest boardroom drama series in British television history. Howards' Way dominated eighties TV drama in precisely the way an old school, heartily theatrical actor will dominate a modern, naturalistic drama – it knows things are Done Differently Now to how they were in its day, and compensates for this by doing what it used to do in its day, only even more so. It's a Brian Blessed cameo in serial form, shamelessly operating to its own archaic standards. Business is conducted in great, Falstaffian booms for the men, icily wry epithets with optional raised eyebrow for the ladies. Romantic business is conducted in full Yuppese – that relentlessly arch and detached way of talking to the one you love, as exemplified by Rosalyn Landor in those Renault ads. ("That woman you had breakfast with – you'll be seeing a lot less of her in future.") Plotwise, it's the eternal tale, writ in fibreglass: someone wants to buy the boatyard. Or commission a new yacht off Tom. Someone else wants to stop it. Or do it before someone else does. There's a photography exhibition by the tampon-in-the-beer girl from The Young Ones. Ken Masters is up to no good. ("You always were so clever, Ken!") Dramatically, it's comfort food like mum used to make. Visually, they try to update things. Some gallant efforts are made to stitch filmed exterior shots to the studio interiors they bracket: several times Jack Rolfe walks into the Jolly Sailor in mid-sentence to show how naturally the two environments match up, but he just invokes the spectre of Python's "This building is surrounded by film!" It also makes use of the most 1980s techno-shot of them all: close-up of a flickering computer monitor with just-readable text on it; pull focus to reveal the typist reflected in the screen. As much a relic of the eighties as split-screen telephone conversations were of the fifties and sixties, or text messages popping up in little superimposed bubbles were of the early 2000s. But that's the continuing appeal of Howards' Way. Already something of a time capsule when it was broadcast, it's matured (doubtless in the same oaken casks as Glyn Owen's voice) into a potent blend of mundane familiarity and stylistic tics so archaic they might as well be from another planet. And it really goes into top gear for the last couple of series, when Kate O'Mara turns up.

ITV

19:15 Concentration

Topping up the eighties gameshow landfill this week is the revival of a format from the lawless wild west of the TV quiz, the late fifties. The game: well, it's Pelmanism on a low-res computerised board, the cards slowly revealing a Catchphrase-style rebus puzzle, which is thankfully drawn the old-fashioned way, in an appropriately retro graphic style. Set-wise, we're going for Late Eighties Gameshow Interior 13c, the Pink Neon Death Star look. Nick Jackson, who also did the announcements on Catchphrase, presents. His contestant banter is second to none. ("You're from St Albans? I know St Albans. I pass through it on the way to Dunstable now and again.") Next year he will be part-exchanged for Bob Carolgees.

Monday November 7th

BBC1

22:10 A Very Peculiar Practice

As screenwriter, Andrew Davies owned the eighties. He came in as a literary adaptor (To Serve Them All My Days) and kids' dramatist (Marmalade Atkins in Space, Dark Towers); and left them as a literary adaptor (House of Cards) and creator of one of the most original TV dramas of the eighties. Doctor Who Peter Davidson is David Daker, freshly appointed GP at low-ranking, cash-strapped Lowlands University, who promptly sticks his pleasant, open face into an already manic power struggle between a permanently sloshed Graham Crowden, David Troughton's sociopathic money grubber Bob Buzzard, and Barbara Flynn's lofty arch-feminist Rose Marie ("I'm not exactly into patronymics.") All neatly allegorical, but what sells it is the uncanny atmosphere. Due to its quick, production line nature, TV drama seldom gets to generate an atmosphere. Writer, producer and director need to be pointing in the same direction from the jump. St Elsewhere is a prime American example from around this period, but it's more than matched by Practice. The university, and its hermetic, lifeless concrete squares, becomes a character in itself, economically established with Daker's opening car journey into the heart of the beast, past endless bewildering road-signs. ("Caution: altered priorities ahead.") From then on, it's Gulliver's Travels in a Kafka sauce, every new encounter tinged with uncanny paranoia. In The History Man, the modernist college campus assumed the mantle of a prison. Here it's somewhere between an old-school "institution" and the headquarters of a very dodgy cult, a believably bizarre, self-contained world. It doesn't take much to achieve this, just a few well-chosen shots deftly edited, and a couple of nun costumes. You don't need a big screen to invoke a sense of place. Speaking of which...

BBC2

22:20 Building Sights

The nineties would establish Jonathan Meades' distinctive voice through Abroad In Britain and its two sequels: an erudite alien, a permanently displaced person in suit and shades, exploring outlandish, exotic environmental phenomena like caravans, cooling towers and car parks. John Betjeman coached by Chris Morris. (He was also a team captain, opposite Lesley Joseph, on Ps and Qs, an etiquette-based panel show hosted by Tony "Cue the Music" Slattery, with a "butler" played by Ian Richardson's son.) We're still fumbling towards the Imperial Phase in this ten-minute architectural essay, as Meades strolls through Lutyens' Marsh Court and points out its dreamlike incongruities. "The true and eternal function of this building is to promote aesthetic rapture and benign dreams." Takes one to know one.

Tuesday November 8th

BBC1

13:30 Neighbours

Angry Anderson's in the credits, so it must be Scott and Charlene's wedding. For orientation, we're a month after Mrs Mangel lost her memory after falling off a ladder and a month before Daphne gives birth at a picnic with her tights on. This episode is entirely dramatically inert, save for some pre-ceremony brouhaha. ("I'm gonna muck this up, mate!" "She's got a ladder in her panty hose!") Paul and Gail have had a row, Henry's pet mouse has escaped, and there's some top busy-bodying from Hilary, but otherwise it's twenty-one minutes of "these two characters you like are getting hitched". We're in that cultural sweet spot where it was considered not only acceptable but necessary to use a rock ballad to accompany a montage of people in formal attire all gazing misty-eyed in the same direction. Set decoration note: Scott's bedroom wall weirdly features posters for both sex comedy Porky's and Christopher Reeve Vatican flop Monsignor. A tortured soul.

BBC2

21:00 Colin's Sandwich

When Stephen Pile was organising the Nether Wallop Arts Festival, the impromptu cultural fundraiser that paved the way for Comic Relief, he sought to boost the performing ranks by offering to pair artists up with whoever they'd always wanted to work with. Bill Wyman chose Stanley Unwin. John Otway went for Rik Mayall. (Or maybe Rik Mayall went for John Otway.) And Peter Cook picked Mel Smith. They'd never worked together; this was on admiration alone. Does that make Mel Smith the comedian's comedian's comedian? He remains grossly underrated, as does this sitcom, television's 37th reboot of the Hancock's Half Hour format. Old Not the Nine O'clock News muckers Terry Kyan and Paul Smith cast Mel into a Lad Himself who's every bit as displaced and desperate as Hancock, but with a slightly bigger vocabulary and much swifter access to his inner rage. It's the classic "health drive" plot this week, Colin having to navigate a labyrinth of leaving dos, England matches and jazz brunches while avoiding the booze. (Leading to the vintage gag where an entire pub goes silent on the words "I want an orange and Perrier water!") The scenarios are off-the-peg, but they're employed in a lavishly-tooled setting of eighties class embarrassment. Colin's status as British Rail complaints officer is thrown into sharp relief by his girlfriend's circle of card-carrying members of the Proper Middle Class, whom Colin can barely tolerate drunk, let alone sober, and who have no interest in his writerly aspirations. It's not a party Colin wants to join, but if he doesn't, how can he get it to shut up? Picture a glass ceiling with a solitary broom handle impotently banging on it, forever.

Wednesday November 9th

BBC1

14:15 FILM: ????

Netflix? Piffle! Nearly two decades before the briefly mighty streaming service launched, the Beeb were offering their viewers an interactive choice of films. Of three films, to be precise, each of which you could vote for by calling a freephone number, as detailed by Bob Wellings during viewer feedback showcase Open Air at round about 11 o'clock this morning. They first did this in March, with three classic British comedies: Too Many Crooks, Passport to Pimlico and The Ghost of St Michael's. This time, you had a choice of three thrillers: Berlin Express with Merle Oberon, Hotel Reserve with James Mason or The Siege of Sydney Street with Donald Sinden and Peter Wyngarde. They did another in December, with three Glenn Ford westerns, and a few more the following spring. And then they never did it again. If you want to know which film was actually shown, you're more than welcome to book a trip to the BBC Written Archives Centre in Caversham and look it up.

BBC2

17:00 The Perfect Pickle Programme

In the latter half of the decade this liminal tea-time slot, neither daytime nor primetime, became a showroom for independent production companies. Here Third Eye, founded by various Timewatch alumni, present a series of "six encounters with the delights of home-made pickles and chutneys and the people who make them". Davilia David introduces the first edition, "Get Pickling!" Trev and Simon must surely have been watching this during a break from Going Live! rehearsals. "There's a superb recipe for sweet pickled onions, the basic principles of successful pickling and a tribute to the great picklers of the past." Also involved are the Cheshire Women's Institute and retro music hall duo Cosmotheka, of "Don't Do It Again, Matilda" fame. Surprisingly not produced by the woman Patricia Routledge shouts at in the Kitty monologues.

Thursday November 10th

BBC2

17:05 Grow Biz Quiz

It's still teatime on BBC2, I'm afraid. And the three words plucked from the light entertainment commissioning tombola today are: "comedy," "gardening," and "quiz". Alan Titchmarsh - of course - asked the questions, "24 contestants from BBC local radio stations" competed to win "the coveted Grow Biz trowel," and Trevor Harrison, "in the role of Eddie Grundy," generally pratted about in between rounds. "It is a hybrid of humour and humus - giggles and gardening." Eight episodes only, ending with a celebrity Christmas special involving Bill Oddie and the archbishop's wife.

Channel 4

14:00 Mighty Moments from World History

A wildcard afternoon repeat for this 1985 debut TV series for the National Theatre of Brent, ie. Desmond Olivier Dingle (Patrick Barlow) and Bernard (Robert Austin), with their oddly moving, if shakily researched, historical tableaux. Here we've reached Boadicea. (Or rather, "Boudicca!" To be fair, they were earlier than a few legit TV historians with that.) The legendary Queen of the Iceni (Bernard) faces down the might of the Roman Empire (Desmond) in a series of melodramatic two-handers on fundamentally wobbly sets. On one level, look at the funny men who aren't very good. On quite another, it's an extension of all the comedy before it where an inept dramatic production reveals more about its makers than they realise. (The collected works of Ernie Wise, the films of LF Dibley, Churchill's People.) The dramatic relationship between the characters gives way to the real relationship between actors at a moment's notice. Tensions flare when Desmond, the senior partner in this here endeavour, is forced to play roles deferring to Bernard. ("I'm not going to do that knee-acting, Bernard." "You've got to. 'Cos I've got to get the feeling of the pomp!") In lieu of a medieval blacksmith, Desmond hires a cake decorator, who naturally has to demonstrate his trade during the climactic scene. ("He's done Pebble Mill at One, Afternoon Plus, The Generation Game and he's available.") Desmond's gracious offer for Bernard to do his own spot comes unstuck when he decides to try and forecast tomorrow's weather. ("What's this got to do with Boadicea?" "You didn't say it had to be about Boadicea.") leading to a Bernard explosion and subsequent breakdown which Desmond deals with by temporarily turning the format into a fly-on-the-wall therapy session. ("We are in the process of watching Bernard actually having a crisis.") The NToB didn't start the format of accidental character revelation through professional ineptitude (the US had already had Fernwood 2 Night, while we'd previously enjoyed Bird and Wells' Leeds programmes), but its influence truly is mighty, running through everything from Knowing Me, Knowing You with Alan Partridge, through Larry Sanders to On Cinema.

Friday November 11th

BBC1

21:30 The Great Paper Chase

What's all this, then? It would appear to be a Mr Keith Waterhouse's adaptation of a Mr Anthony Delano's bestselling chronicle of the bungled attempt by Chief Superintendent Jack Slipper to apprehend Great Train Robber Ronnie Biggs. It was originally titled Slip-Up, after the book, and was due to be shown in December 1986 as part of BBC1's prestigious Christmas line-up. (The year the usual Christmas pudding BBC globe was replaced with a demented-looking cartoon Christmas tree plus anthropomorphic holly leaves.) It cost the best part of a cool million, with prestige TV director James Cellan Jones in charge, exotic locations aplenty and stars up the wazoo. Jeremy Kemp, from similarly seldom-seen Peter Sellers film The Blockhouse, played the divisional div with the footwear nomenclature. Larry Lamb was the man on the lam, living it up in Rio with wife Gwen Taylor, while Porridge's Mr Mackay edited the Daily Express. (No change there, then.) But as Christmas '86 approached, so did the solicitors. Waterhouse, picking through the trail of venality and incompetence, had bent the tale in the direction of farce, playing up the frothing mania of the Daily Express and the dimness of the coppers. ("You can see what we're up against. They only speak Brazilian down here.") Getting wind of all this, and somewhat miffed at having been "made out to be a right prat," the real Slipper started waving legal threats about. The Beeb panicked and scrapped the December broadcast while they took legal advice, replacing it with the safest of safe alternatives, a Noel Coward drama starring Judi Dench. Nearly two years, umpteen revisions and one less libellous title later, they felt legally watertight enough to broadcast. Slipper sued them anyway, with money put up by Good Old James Goldsmith, and won fifty grand in damages in 1990. This drama wouldn't be seen again until it was shown at the BFI as part of a James Cellan Jones season in 2010. Doesn't bode well for the outcome of Avanti West Coast vs Nightsleeper.

ITV

14:55 Home Cookery Club

What was their deal? What, exactly, was going on between Gary Watson, of narrating lurid communist dramatisations of European folk tales over the top of the acting fame, and Unidentified Penelope Wilton-esque Lady, in this three-minute-long, not-quite-a-programme, bit of recipe-reciting deluxe continuity? Who were they? Where did they live? Were they an item? Did they f- Look, let's just say the Home Cookery Universe had continuity issues. Sometimes Home Cookery Man and Home Cookery Woman were strangers, just capable professionals running through a Bakewell tart recipe together despite only just having met. ("Nice to see you!") The next week, he's clearly spent the night at her place. ("Can you remove those egg yolks from the fridge?" "Yes, I saw you put them in there overnight.") A week later, they display the easy familiarity of the long-term couple. ("I know you like flaked almonds! And so does Mrs Shepherd of Dorset!" "Ah, clever lady!") So what's the story? This is vital information we're missing. Without it, what are we to make of their many loaded exchanges? ("That looks exciting!" "This is an aubergine!") Are they purely innocent lines, delivered in the mock-conversational pantomime style of the daytime presenter? ("Should I make it all thick and creamy?" "Yes, and if it goes pale, don't be surprised, it's supposed to.") Or are we being co-opted into some kinky game of their own devising? ("Can you manage a few more courgettes? And a little more of that tasty juice?" "Rather!") Anyway, if you want the recipe for a Golden Country Casserole, send a large stamped, self-addressed envelope ("Very important, that!") to MJ Locke & Associates Ltd, Po Box 90, London SW1P 4AZ.

Saturday November 12th

[Editor's Note: if you're wondering why this week has eight days in it, it's because I dumbly miscounted dates for next week's edition, and now, having written about six more editions after that, I'm going back and filling in the space here, rather than laboriously redoing everything else. So, either sorry about that, or you're welcome, depending on your preference.]

BBC1

11:20 The Lord Mayor's Show

The annual outing for an age-old tradition, where everyone outside the M25 gets to turn on the TV and say “Sorry, why are you showing me this?” Actually, it should be everyone outside the Square Mile, as that's the Lord Mayor's bijou bailiwick. So everyone living west of the Cittie of Yorke and east of Dirty Dick's has the right to moan as well. Eric Robson off Brass Tacks and Andy Crane are your commentators as Sir Christopher Collett, Lord Mayor #661, reviews the procession of “eighteen marching bands, military detachments from all three services, and over 70 fun floats”. Will the Water Board have a giant tap on the back of their flatbed truck again? Tune in and find out!

ITV

17:45 New Faces of '88

Third and final series of the revived talent show, with Marti Caine as MC and migraine-inducing giant scoreboard Spaghetti Junction. (“Going once round the board for nothing!” Yes, but... why?) It didn't have a great track record, this incarnation, launching slapstick comic Duggie Small into an ill-fated Wogan appearance in the first year, and the year after that relegating Joe Pasquale (the thinking man's Duggie Small) to second place. This week the judges are Nina Myskow (“a self-made woman, unfortunately she had the plans upside-down”), Tony Blackburn and Jim Bowen. Contestants include classical guitarist David Jaggs (no chance); the obligatory musical group with a textbook chicken-in-a-basket-circuit name, Boys Next Door; and impressionist Stevie Riks, who (spoiler) wins, and goes on to compete in the grand final where all the ITV regions (plus the SSVC armed forces' channel in Germany) have a jury vote like it's Eurovision or something. He finishes fourth – showtune belter Stephen Lee Garden takes first prize – but will go on to appear in the '90s revival of Who Do You Do?, alongside Aiden J Harvey and Fogwell Flax. If opportunity comes your way – don't bother.

NEXT WEEK: 1981