The first week of October 1979 was a quiet one in terms of world events. Pope John Paul II was embarking on the US leg of his record-breaking Eras tour; Central Milton Keynes shopping centre opened its doors to a British public that was largely unimpressed, Wired for Sound video or no Wired for Sound video; and the Walt Disney Corporation lost its mad legal bid to ban the sale of video recorders, ha ha! Music wise, Message in a Bottle, the most boring Police song in a crowded field, languished at number one, while elsewhere Luton Airport by Cats UK began its own ramshackle bid for chart success by debuting at – oh, yes – number 69. All in all, humanity was going through one of its periodic "nothing doing" phases, a perfect time for television to step in and take up the entertaining slack. Did it rise to the challenge? Well...
Monday October 1st
BBC1
16:25 Jackanory 3000: The Hobbit
This is what they used to call a "cultural touchstone" for a lot of people, and how could it be otherwise, with Cribbins to the forefront? I never saw it at the time, which is a shame, as if this had been my first exposure to fantasy literature, as opposed to a well-meaning but bored primary school teacher reading it out monotonously in the twenty minutes before the bell went, I might not have been put off the stuff for life. Here Brother Bernard is augmented by Jan Francis and Maurice Denham, whose voice was all over that monumentally depressing Halas and Bachelor cartoon of Animal Farm.
BBC2
18:55 Time Out of Mind
One of those "writers talk at unedited length in their echoey front rooms on lovely old 16mm film" shows. Here Michael Moorcock (Tim Brooke-Taylor above the nose, Giant Haystacks beneath) slags off the philistine sci-fi establishment, slags off the philistine press, and slags off the philistine makers of the film of The Final Programme (which still gets heavily used throughout for illustrative purposes, of course). Best thing here is the opening title sequence, in which all manner of fantastic images are brought to life through the medium of the Kodalith, those photographically-reversed glowing neon line drawings which were all over adverts throughout the late '70s, and would reach their zenith as the only effect that properly worked on The Hitch-Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy. (Actually, that's unfair. Some of the matte paintings are gorgeous.)
Channel Television
17:00 Puffin's Birthday Greetings
We are, sadly, slap bang in the middle of the ITV strike this week, so it's going to be a Beeb-heavy roster. However, Channel, "that bustling stationette" as one newspaper waspishly called it, found a way to circumvent the industrial action as easily as most of its audience circumvented the Inland Revenue, and managed to keep going throughout the eleven-week hiatus, albeit with a drastically altered schedule. This week's union-dodging fare is a mixture of the thrillingly drab (French News, Fishing with Bernard); the drably thrilling (Target the Impossible, Days of Destruction) and the plain awkward (Bronk, Kax). And then there was this bit of continuity fun, in which Oscar the Puffin, either the second or third greatest ITV regional mascot depending on your allegiance, indulged in bouts of headwobbling anarchy while a hapless announcer read out birthday messages. Scholars will note this televisual cul-de-sac, in less straitened times, went by the unnecessarily over-punctuated moniker Puffin's Pla(i)ce. Presumably the temporary retitling was the result of some prolonged managerial bargaining. ("Clause 37a of the joint committee agreement clearly states that my members are not Fatima bloody Whitbread.")
Tuesday October 2nd
BBC1
18:45 Disco Champions
In which "Kid Jensen introduces the finalists of The British Boy-Girl Disco Dancing Championships from The Cats Whiskers, Streatham". NB: "boy-girl" isn't a clumsy attempt at trans inclusivity, it's just making clear that this disco dancing championship is a 100% heterosexual zone. Contests like these are a sign that by the end of the seventies disco had been comprehensively straightened out. Made respectable. Suburbanised. Slowly squeezed into the Come Dancing mould. If punk had hung around for a little longer than it did, it might well have suffered the same fate. Wogan introducing fresh-faced Dagenham wages clerks who've spent the past six months perfecting their gobbing technique in the local drill hall to the strains of the Joe Loss Orchestra belting out Banned from the Pubs. Teams of formation pogoers from Penge in matching bondage jackets with "GBH" written on the back in studs their mothers have painstakingly sewn on by hand. Oh, Sid. Look at what you could've won.
19:15 It's a Knockout
We won't dwell on Stuart Hall’s record as an inhumanitarian aid worker, but it's worth noting this is a Jeux Sans Frontiers heat broadcast from Chioggia, Italy, and as such would have felt so much grander and more momentous than the damp village fete affairs of the show's domestic incarnation. Maybe it was the endless title sequence, with those goofy little anthropomorphic erasers laboriously spelling out the title in every language in the EBU. Or perhaps it was the pre-ISDN audio link giving the commentary an authentic NASA crackle, as if Hall was broadcasting his maniacal laughter from the dark side of the moon. (If only.) Either way, you felt the sheer effort it took to transmit television from a foreign country. The scale of the task was brought home to you with every technical hiccup. Television felt so much bigger. And so did the world.
Weds October 3rd
BBC1
16:40 Think of a Number
Has he shut up about climate change yet? No matter, we're firmly in the Good Ball Era here, with an edition all about light which attempts to explain, predictably, the workings of colour separation, and, somewhat less predictably, the basics of relativity theory. Along the way there's the usual trick, the usual model of a technological marvel discussed in hushed tones (though sadly it isn't doesn't descend from the rafters to the strains of Vangelis's Chung Kuo), some vintage buffoonery ("There's a feller behind there pulling on the other end!") and Children's Television Title Sequence Gimmick 27b/6, in which the presenter "inspects" the programme's title card, nods to himself in a "yes, this all seems to be in order" fashion, and merrily strides off screen.
20:30 Rings on their Fingers
Not the first sitcom to incorporate a couple of bars of The Wedding March into its theme tune, and probably not the best, but certainly the most weddingy. Veteran writer Richard Waring, looming retirement in mind, dusts off his old Marriage Lines scripts, changes the references to Dansettes and Biba to digital watches and Habitat, and puts them in the capable hands of Diane Keen and Martin Jarvis. The result is a feast of very gentle innuendo. (And some not-so-gentle: Jarvis describes sex on honeymoon as being akin to "fish and chips tasting different out of a newspaper," which sounds like a Julian Clary ad-lib.) MVP is Barbara Lott as Keen's mum, switching codes on a dime from unctuous bonhomie with her daughter to steely disapproval with Jarvis. She would go on to play the disapproving mother of Ronnie Corbett in Sorry!, the disapproving mother of Julia Hills in 2.4 Children, and the disapproving mother of a naked Ewan MacGregor in Peter Greenaway's rudest film, The Pillow Book. That's range. Seriously.
BBC2
21:00 My Music
Classical music, along with ballet and (most of all) opera, took up a huge chunk of BBC2 screen time, and it loomed over the schedule without shame. No Dudley Moore as explanatory Everyman, no Proms in the Park populism, just unvarnished Shostakovitch for you to like or lump as you pleased. Nothing wrong with that of course, but it could make the genre seem aloof, forbidding, and not for the likes of you. It wasn't television’s job to make the stuff seem more approachable. But then there was My Music, a spotted bow tie of a panel game, which you could sort of half watch because it featured Frank Muir and Denis Norden, comforting and familiar presences among the Steve Race piano runs, wacky conductor anecdotes, and interminable Ian Wallace singing interludes. It was unlikely to convert you to the joys of the light classics, but it was less intimidating than its companion programme Face the Music (Sunday, 20:25), which was Robin Ray laughing in your face for not knowing every Mozart aria by heart.
Thursday October 4th
BBC1
19:20 Top of the Pops
Kid Jensen's clearly in his pomp, as here he is again, introducing Sad Cafe, the Jags, a very game XTC making merry with some oil drums, and Empire Road theme tunesters Matumbi, led by Tex Dixon with a rubber snake round his neck. Legs and Co dance to Them Heavy People, but miss the opportunity to Bush up their choreography, instead deploying the standard light entertainment palette of high kicks, shoulder jerks, and doing a sort of leaning-back strut while waggling one raised finger in a saucily admonitory manner.
BBC2
20:30 Empire Road
Speaking of which, here is that pioneering drama, often cited as the first black soap opera, though it only ran for two short series, and here we're halfway through the second. Cantankerous landlord Norman Beaton owns half the houses in the eponymous Birmingham street. To his consternation, his stammering brother-in-law (and future Fresh Prince butler) Joseph Marcell rents them out to – gasp! – Rastafarians, Asians and the like. Plus there's his wayward son Wayne 'Pipkins' Laryea to deal with. It's a rough and ready production from Pebble Mill, its street scenes often suffering from the same outside broadcast sound issues that plagued early episodes of Brookside, but it makes the most of its authentically claustrophobic sets with some experimental camerawork. Brian Mills was trying similar stuff out on Coronation Street around the same time, giving scenes like the historic Barlow-Baldwin showdown the atmosphere of early Godard. Who says only the modern single-camera technique can be "cinematic"?
Friday October 5th
BBC1
16:20 Maxidog
Orson Welles writes: "Ahhh, the Czechoslovakian cartoons!" From the moment a spiky, weird short named Ersatz beat Goofy and the Road Runner to the best cartoon Oscar, to the moment the Little Mole breathed his last and expired clutching a daisy and all the hedgehogs were sad, the West had a love/hate relationship with Zagreb's prolific animated output. This afternoon filler is the winning tale of a girl and her massive dog, directed by Jiri Salamoun (nine out of ten Czech animators are called Jiri, nobody knows why). It's less of a Worker and Parasite cubist nightmare and more a warm hug of childlike primitivism. (The way Salamoun animates rabbits in particular will remind you of the "Dreams/Reality" diagram from Father Ted.) Adapted for decadent British children by Jackanory alumna Daphne Jones, and narrated by the man with the nut-brown voice, Deryck Guyler.
BBC2
21:10 FILM: Gold Diggers of 1933
Yes, films are allowed, as long as they're representative of the typical TV fodder of the day. And what could be more late '70s than a fifty-year-old black-and-white musical on BBC2 during Friday night primetime? The plot here is not so much off the peg as flagged "lost in transit" on Vinted: plucky young theatricals try to put on a show in the face of financial setbacks and elder disapproval. But we're here for the Busby Berkeley dance numbers, and they don't disappoint. There's Shadow Waltz, with Busby's gals gliding around a gigantic Domino Rally Action Alley with neon-trimmed violins. There's the pathologically randy Pettin' in the Park, in which a phalanx of cops roller-skate over the head of a perpetually horny toddler. There's impassioned trenches-to-breadlines lament Remember My Forgotten Man, where German Expressionism meets Hollywood glitz and, miraculously, it works. And of course there's We're in the Money, performed by Ginger Rogers and the girls with huge cardboard coins covering their fannies, and featuring a genuinely disturbing shot where Ginger sings a couple of verses in pig Latin while the camera zooms in on her maniacally beaming face for an extreme close-up that lasts a whole minute. A lot of guff is talked about "Pre-Code Hollywood", as if everything shot before 1935 was OnlyFans with a trad jazz soundtrack, but with these last knockings of the free American cinema you do get the impression of directors and choreographers running the gamut of licentiousness in the knowledge that a posse of Christian Republicans were about to take it all away.
Saturday October 6th
BBC1
19:35 Secret Army
It's said that in Greek mythology Thalia, the muse of comedy, was desperately envious of her older sister Calliope, the muse of epic poetry, and her revenge was parody. In the 4th century BC, Nicochares of Athens wrote a scandalous parody of Homer's Iliad, called, brilliantly, the Diliad. Similarly, some 23 centuries later, Jeremy Lloyd and David Croft decided to tear French Resistance drama Secret Army a new one, and created 'Allo! 'Allo! The Diliad is now lost to history, while its po-faced original remains on school curricula worldwide. 'Allo! 'Allo!, on the other hand, has so comprehensively displaced Secret Army from cultural consciousness, it takes considerable effort to watch the original without constantly expecting Jack Haig to appear from under a counter and triumphantly raise his spectacles. Which is a terrific shame as, if you can muster the concentration to watch Jan Francis's Yvette without thinking of Vicki Michelle's Yvette, it's solid BBC period drama at its best. Although it does get weird at the very end, when General von Klinkerhoffen and one of the British airmen turn up. To say nothing of the unbroadcast coda, which reunites surviving characters for a present-day mock documentary, and ends on one of the most ill-advised bluescreen shots of the 1970s. What a mistake-a to make-a!
20:30 Mike Yarwood in Persons
The title of this programme used to lead me to wonder about the nature of the holy trinity, aka God in Three Persons. What were the three impressions God could do? Peter O’Toole seems a shoo-in. And most people can do a half-decent James Mason. But who was the, so to speak, holy ghost of his repertoire? After much scholarly thought I decided it was probably Harry Worth. He could do the floaty leg trick without the aid of a shop window.
BBC2
18:20 Something Else
"Oi dress this way because oi'm into poonk!" The second in a monthly series of yoof magazine shows from the utilitarian-sounding Community Programme Unit, this Brumcentric edition impressed Clive James, who reckoned it made "every other youth-slanted show on the air look like something Billy Cotton Jr dreamed up in a lukewarm bath". He was particularly taken with zany presenter Paul Kenna, of whom there is no trace on the internet outside James's review. Where is he now?
Sunday October 7th
BBC1
17:25 Star Turn Challenge
Ooh, the BBC's brand's in trouble these days, isn't it? Where now for Brand BBC? Wouldn't like to be the BBC's brand right now, etc. Well, perhaps. But before the current crisis, before the previous crisis, before anyone at the BBC thought about the BBC's brand as a distinct entity from the BBC's... well, BBC, and long before John Cleese ripped off his own Life of Brian bit and told a TV full of Wogan to shut up, the BBC was doing a perfectly good job of maintaining its brand, without giving it a second thought. It could do this because, to a great extent, all its programming was made in the same location, by an extended repertoire of creative individuals who formed a loose community among themselves, which in turn made programmes like Star Turn Challenge effortlessly possible, even inevitable. The premise is simple: two teams from other BBC programmes – in this case, Are You Being Served? and Crackerjack – come together for a series of improv-based games. It's a little Give Us a Clue, a little Whose Line, a little Babble. (Oh, you remember Babble. The Channel Four pun-based panel show! Purves! Rushton! Junkin!) It was put together by various Play School and Play Away folks, and it was just one of countless little contributions to the image of the BBC as a gigantic, joyous creative community. How truthful that image was is moot. We're talking about the brand, aren't we? Except, back then, we weren't.
18:00 The Legend of King Arthur
Not Arthur of the Britons, the early '70s adventure with Oliver Tobias handsome-bastarding across the Gloucestershire hills with a guest cast of just about every big name of the day, but the version Andrew Davies penned in between To Serve Them All My Days and Marmalade Atkins in Space, with no-one really famous, unless you count a teenage Patsy Kensit as Morgan Le Fay. Oh, and Arthur was Andrew Burt, previously Jack Sugden in Emmerdale Farm, latterly Gulliver in that overambitious BBC CSO-and-paintings production of the early '80s, and Frank 'Sweaty' Raphael in I'm Alan Partridge. Make a cinematic universe out of that lot, I dare you.
BBC2
21:00 The Diary of a Nobody
The Grossmith Brothers' immortal chronicle of Victorian mundanity has naturally been Beebed many times. Ken Russell did it in the sixties, Andrew Davies in the noughties. But this is the seventies, so who better to take the adaptational reins than former Punch assistant editor and safe pair of comedic hands Basil Boothroyd? Since the Diary was first published in the pages of Boothroyd's waiting-room-cluttering alma mater, it was a homecoming of sorts. Terrence Hardiman, last seen yesterday as a disillusioned Luftwaffe major in Secret Army, is the bootscraping, bath-painting clerk, Sheila Steafel his long-suffering wife, Richard Willis (the doomed Varsh in exciting Doctor Who Tom Baker adventure Full Circle) is their wayward son Lupin, and Ann 'Sonia' Beech their Woman Who Does. Much is made of the Diary's domestic whimsy as a precursor of the modern TV sitcom, and the class-bound critical slating it received on publication (journalists objected to the "vulgarity" of its depiction of a – yikes! – lower-middle-class milieu) still comes from certain pundits today, dished out to sitcoms that aren't made about (or for) doctors, dentists and architects, Reeves. Just like Varsh's Marshmen adversaries, we've unhappily come full circle.
NEXT WEEK: 1984