Week 40: 2nd – 8th July, 1987
“Up the Argies! Up the Irish! Up yours!”
Richard Branson's Atlantic balloon crossing attempt ends with him falling in the water again. Oliver North is bullshitting in court. Klaus Barbie is sentenced to life in prison. These events may or may not be linked. It's a Sin continues its magisterial reign at the top of the charts. Terence Trent D'Arby is doing well with the least interesting of his great early singles – the whistley one – and A-Ha, commissioned to do a Bond theme, take the previous one by Duran Duran and trace over it with a bit of greaseproof paper that slips halfway through the process resulting in the eyes ending up about half a centimetre too high compared to the rest of the face but they don't realise until it's too late to do anything about it. Mel and Kim, already sadly facing the forced end of their joyful duoship, release “it actually stands for something quite rude” banger FLM, and the “mysterious” Boogie Box High are creeping up the charts with their cover of Jive Talking. Come come now, we all know it's you, George. Oh, and Mick Talbot.
Thursday July 2nd
BBC2
21:30 Boogie Outlaws
TV Drama Tries and Fails to Do Rock 'N' Roll, part 96. In a fascist Britain of the near future, populated by bedraggled hordes huddled round braziers as armoured cars full of rubberised riot police thunder along the overpass, a rag-tag rock band whose members are called things like Flash, Zoot and Boz tour the land in a big old bus. In a sense, it's the bastard grandad of Glam Metal Detectives. When the fash nick Zoot for curfew-breaking and cart him off, the band liberate him by ramming his prison escort with the bus, making them into terrorists on the run, hiding out in a dilapidated windmill-cum-recording-studio-cum-battery-hen-compound, while industry bigwig Ian Hogg plots to monetise their newfound infamy. This knowingly daft musical dramedy is directed by Keith Godman, graduate of the “Pick Up a Penguin” biscuit ads, and written by Leslie Stewart, author of 3 Minute Heroes, a slightly dodgy two-tone community theatre musical Play for Today and also, weirdly, co-writer of Cliff's mega-hit Mistletoe and Wine, along with one Keith Strachan, whose son Matthew provides the Outlaws with their boogie, via the sort of songs Jools Holland could happily join in on, but with awkwardly contemporary lyrics. “Sister's got a hook-up at the Fox & Hound/Bobby combs his hair at the waiting crowd/Johnny watches Captain Zep on the TV.” (Both father and son will go on to write the theme tune and music beds for Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?) Boogie Outlaws isn't the only dystopian rock 'n' roll epic we'll see this year. In December the Beeb will bring us Body Contact, a terminally adolescent live action cartoon boasting Timothy Spall as a Kalashnikov-toting gangster, Joely Richardson in ice-cool Euro-blonde mode and Jack Shepherd as a hang-gliding, rapping S&M priest. Postponed by several months in the wake of Hungerford, it eventually slinks onto the screen to widespread derision, despite the musical involvement of members of Heaven 17, Microdisney and The Human League. To make all this even more embarrassing, we already had Tutti Frutti, proof that you can do rock-related drama without falling on your arse, back in March.
ITV
10:00 Paper Dolls
A morning graveyard slot for a US modelling agency soap that wasn't even very popular in the US. The original TV movie cast Joan Collins as the head of Harper Worldwide (not to be confused with Harpers West One) the agency at the centre of the drama. In the series she's replaced by Morgan Fairchild, the if-wet Faye Dunaway, and augmented with Lloyd Bridges, Mimi Rogers, Brenda Vaccaro and, er, Paige off Knots Landing. It's all done in classic “upmarket US soap” style, with lavish split level apartments, offices that look like chat show sets and establishing shots zooming in on a random skyscraper window. There is, however, a rather higher preponderance of gay male characters in salmon pink knitwear, a regular supply of model shoot montages set to songs like Legs by ZZ Top, and a few decently waspish lines sprinkled amongst the tense emotional boilerplate dialogue. “If I put any more concealer on her, she'll be doing mime in Central Park.” Not amazing, but it'll do until Gems is revived next January.
Friday July 3rd
ITV
19:30 Valentine Park
Hardwicke House was a 1987 sitcom featuring Danny Peacock that countless people remember even though it was pulled after two episodes because it was unusually interesting. Valentine Park was a 1987 sitcom featuring Danny Peacock that no people remember even though it was commissioned for two series because it was unusually boring. Also in the cast are The Redoubtable Ken Jones, The Inimitable Liz Smith and, almost interestingly, David Thewlis as a pratty assistant park-keeper. It's a sitcom set in a park, you can guess the rest. Plots revolve around mistaken identities, huge piles of manure being dumped in the middle of football pitches, all that good stuff. This episode is brought to you by the bloke who edited that episode of Thriller from a couple of weeks back, and an additional material writer from The Upper Hand, should you have any reason to doubt its credentials.
Channel 4
17:30 The Chart Show
The ultra-slick candy-coloured video parade that boosted ITV's Saturday morning schedule is here still going through its formative period. It's the creation of Keith MacMillan who, as “Keef”, was a prolific video director, behind promos for Blondie and Kate Bush, Motorhead and McCartney. Babooshka was one of his, and so was Pipes of Peace. MacMillan was keen to cut out the dead weight of the pop music presenter. As he was fond of saying, “name one presenter doing pop music who doesn't sound like a babbling idiot.” Teaming up with Jill Sinclair, who you'll remember tangentially cropping up last week in relation to Lennie Bennett, he put together a fast-moving fifty-minute package of hits and obscurities, punctuated by some very blocky CGI headphones and dodgem cars. The show's aesthetic was a bit confused: all the flashy graphics suggested we were under the control of a mighty chart computer (“Stand By To Access Falco!”) but the main visual gimmick was having the tape pause and rewind to various songs in the chart for playing in full. Sorry, are you a computer or a video recorder? But it all flowed together nicely, taking you onto the next thing before you could muster such quibbles. Alongside the main top ten singles, there were charts for metal (how will they censor the title of WASP'S Animal (Fuck Like a Beast) this week?), dance and, best of all, indie, where you knew which songs would be played in full as they were the only two with proper videos, instead of a moody black and white still of the band looking at the floor. In the early days, these were augmented with more esoteric lists. There was a Euro chart. A reggae chart. A compact disc chart. A chart for sell-through longform music videos. (Will Queen's Live in Rio beat Phil Collins's No Ticket Required? It's the race that's gripping the nation.) And most esoteric of all, a chart of UK acts' US sales. Other features included The Chart Race (a competition call for viewers to send in their predictions for next week's top three) and the “rough cut”, which was just a pre-release video with half a dozen time-codes plastered over it. Extra information was given by plastering more graphics over the videos during the instrumental break. Initially, due to the insanely short lead times chart topicality demanded, these were mixed in live during transmission, and took the form of “HUD”, a sort of fighter-pilot's-view overlay of crosshairs, graphs and completely unreadable scrolling text. By 1987, though, they've upgraded to the Amiga Workbench, with fun facts revealed in a bunch of colourful desktop windows, which is still a headache to read on a normal telly but is at least halfway legible. And it's all gravy from here onwards – after another series in 1988, Four will tire of the format, but ITV will scoop it up, knock the rough edges off, and mould it into a national institution. But still one issue goes unaddressed: what's a “video reveal” when it's at home?
Saturday July 4th
BBC1
20:20 Les Dennis's Laughter Show
Les's first outing sans Dustin, so we can't be too rough here. It's a very old school sketch show template he's working to, complete with two formation dance numbers to the backing of hits of the day, performed by The Jeff Richer Dancers. Guests include Joe Longthorne and Richard Digance, there's a Moonlighting spoof, a bit about Yuppies, and an “I think it might go something... like this” routine involving Michael Crawford doing Phantom of the Opera as Frank Spencer. Would it be a tad insensitive to say it needs more Vera Duckworth?
ITV
11:30 The Roxy
A morning repeat for ITV's short-lived Top of the Pops spoiler, brainchild of Razzmatazz producer Alistair Pirrie. With a saxophone-heavy theme from sig tune guru of the moment Simon May, the show distances itself from potential “TOTP rip-off” allegations with some subtle alterations. It's set in a pretend dancehall, with bands performing on a proscenium stage and the audience whooping it up in the stalls, while presenters and dancers look down from the balcony. It goes out on Tuesdays, in order to get the jump on its BBC rival. Being on ITV, we're following the Network Chart (in association with Nescafe), justified by host Kid Jensen as “Britain's fastest-moving network survey”, as opposed to that slow old Gallup one everyone else seems so obsessed with. Kid, presenter of said chart on commercial radio, is the natural choice of host, aided by Boomtown Rats associate Kevin Sharkey. This week, we're Being Different to TOTP right off the bat, opening with The Kane Gang in the studio – sorry, dancehall – even though they're only at number 66. Tthere's also a very crackly telephone interview with Morton Harket, conducted by Kid on a white cordless handset with a big fuck-off aerial. Other “unique” features include extras indulging in some light petting behind Kid (subtext: we're sexier than TOTP); The Roxy Vault, ie. a random old rock 'n' roll number for the parents (subtext: we're more family-friendly than TOTP) and sporadic “You're watching the Roxy” soundbites from featured artists (subtext: we're more desperate than TOTP). After flailing about like this for the rest of 1987, it will be restyled as just “Roxy”, with Pat Sharpe brought in to present, the occasional fully live performance, and the dancehall conceit ditched entirely for a straightforward TOTP neon rip-off set, before closing shop entirely in April. ITV will never attempt to beat the Pops on its own turf again, instead concentrating its efforts on this new-fangled presenter-free video-only format they've acquired from Channel Four.
Sunday July 5th
ITV
19:15 Tarby's Frame Game
Game shows habitually start in America. Then the ones that get big enough are plucked by British TV companies, adapted to be less shiny and shouty, and bunged out just before prime time. This missing word effort conforms to the pattern, having started life as It, presented by Match Game (aka Blankety Blank) host Gene Rayburn on a massive flight of flashing golden steps, and featuring a demented cartoon bird in a propeller beanie cap that doesn't seem to have any real function other than to keep the kids interested when there's a load of boring old words on the screen. The thing is, It never got beyond pilot stage. Even ABC didn't want it. Yorkshire Television, however, spotting a bargain, swooped, scraped off all the spangles and yelps, and added the magic ingredient: Jimmy Tarbuck. With over a decade of experience injecting a bit of oomph into similarly dry quiz Winner Takes All, he was the life and soul of this otherwise threadbare format, often playing the game himself when faced with especially dim or wooden contestants, and was rewarded with his name above the title, and indeed his name above the prizes – losing contestants went home with a “Tarby's colour telly”. His chutzpah enabled Yorkshire to stretch this US offcut across three series, cementing Tarby's status as Game Show King, until he went to the Beeb for the forced abdication of disastrous golf-themed quiz Full Swing.
Channel 4
12:00 Network 7
“Television!” Imagine: you're young, trendy and hungover. You crawl out of bed around noon and, with little motivation to do anything more, vacantly turn on the TV. What is there to watch? On BBC1, there's Farming. Banging theme tune, but a twenty-two-minute interview with the boss of Ivomec about the pernicious spread of sarcoptic mange mite? No thanks. ITV goes with Jobwatch, a study of unemployment. Too close to the bone there. On BBC2, the Open University screens the exciting Mathematical Models and Methods, which involves two teams of Corbyn-bearded lecturers trying to scientifically determine the best place to put a headlamp on a bike. There's not enough amphetamine in the world to make that exciting. But wait – what's this on the fourth channel? A mammoth current affairs extravaganza, tailored exactly to the kind of hip, well-connected and smart young person you fondly imagine yourself to be? Bring it on! Janet Street-Porter and Jane Hewland had achieved a minor epiphany with 20th Century Box, a half-hour investigation into various pop music and youth issues presented by Danny Baker, combining fearless reportage with flashy, epilepsy-inducing graphic cutaways. It gained a small but significant reputation among those who managed to see it: you had to be watching TV at Sunday lunchtime in the London area, so the potential audience was understandably small. With the advent of the groovy new fourth channel, Janet and Jane concocted a pitch that would inflate 'Box's modest profile into a sprawling two-hour national behemoth, taking in current affairs and entertainment as a whole, and sexing it up for a notoriously uninterested youth demographic. From a disused banana warehouse in what is now the dead centre of Canary Wharf's financial district, Network 7's presenters, led by Murray Boland and Magenta Devine (née Kim Taylor, former PA to the Boomtown Rats), introduced roving reports, music news, interviews and assorted oddities in two subtly different moods: knowingly grave for serious items, and knowingly detached for cultural matters. The opening titles are achingly trendy: a cut-up audio collage in the manner of then-achingly-hip hip hop DJ collective Double Dee & Steinski, allied to found footage “scratch video” visuals modelled on the work of then-achingly-even-hipper video artists The Duvet Brothers. For about eighteen months two-thirds of the way through the eighties, this was the coolest thing you could put on a TV screen. And then, suddenly, it was embarrassingly old hat. The rest of the programme rides the trend wave just as precariously. The studio set is non-existent, just a bare warehouse the cameras wander through, with crew members and assorted hangers-on ligging about around the edges, That Was The Week That Was-style. Constant captions detailing everything from the next item's contents to the temperature in the studio flash and scroll and flicker around the perimeter, giving a giddy feeling of information overload while providing very little actual information. But that's the Network 7 ethos: vibes are paramount. The viewer needs to feel plugged into the zeitgeist, letting the multifarious events of the moment wash over them in a rush of adrenaline, an audio-visual deluge. If they happen upon the odd fact along the way, so much the better. Street-Porter dubbed it aspirational television, “the kind of show that shouldn't be too easy to understand: it ought to be television you can boast to your friends that you fully understood, even if you didn't.” Topics are modern and exciting: this week Magenta, Murray and co cover hacking, bugging and, er, sunbathing. Nobody sits behind a desk: reporters stroll about the bare studio as the swooping camera happens upon them and follows them about as they expound over their shoulder. It took a lot of preparation to make something that looked this idly tossed off, but it was worth it for the aura of authoritative cool. Regular features included Room 113, in which a celeb subjected themselves to the psychological probing of Oliver James, and the self-explanatory True or False. Perhaps the most interesting was the running fictional mini-series, where things got really experimental. First up was “Brute!'s Adventures of Sizzler”, a high-key piece of live-action graphic design detailing the titular character's exaggerated hard-boiled action escapades in a series of Chromakeyed tableaux. Think Sin City in the style of Captain Zep. Brute! was the umbrella name of Liverpudlian graphic artists Aidan Hughes and Malcolm Bennett, whose high-key retro aesthetic was all over the media at this time, from music papers and style mags to TV ads and album covers. (Bennett would go on to be the bloke who randomly fires a pistol during less-successful youth show Club X's infamous “futurist dinner party”.) When Sizzler finished, they serialised weirdo independent film The Grand Poseur, a rather lovely-looking self-funded labour of love by one Adam Dubov, telling a sort of anti-capitalist Scarlet Pimpernel fable with commedia dell'arte masks and outlandish papier mache sets and props in a black void. Then came Joanna Hogg's Flesh + Blood, a condensed version of Dynasty-type soaps, told in a series of elegant, high-key tableaux with appropriately intense acting. Last, and least bizarre, was Dick Spanner, Gerry Anderson's stop-motion take on those old Tex Avery cartoons where puns are acted out on screen at a spanking pace. The slow but steady de-wierding of the fiction segment mirrors the path of Network 7 itself. As the show progressed, technical issues were ironed out and things got more professional. When Janet took off for the Beeb to instigate the Def II umbrella brand, her re-imagining of this show, Reportage, was far more slick and sensible. Network 7's influence is undeniable: all news programming today carries an implicit undercurrent of “isn't it exciting, all this crazy news?”; news tickers are omnipresent; and every bloody newsreader stands up these days. But the charm of the original, its madly over-confident desire to grab any bizarre bit of culture and jam it into its capering narrative, sadly seems to have been abandoned.
Monday July 6th
BBC2
20:30 Star Cops
British TV science fiction is at a bit of a low point. With Doctor Who suspended between Baker and McCoy, and only a few scraps like the Max Headroom “movie” and future-medieval fable Knights of God to fill the gap, former Blake's 7 lieutenant Chris Boucher takes the hard sci-fi bull by the horns for this celestial police procedural. The year is 2027. David Calder is a maverick detective superintendent who's reluctantly put forward for a vacant post leading the International Space Police Force, notoriously hopeless off-world law enforcers who are screwing up an investigation into mysterious spacesuit malfunctions in and around a space station uneasily crewed by a multinational team. He doesn't want to go, but he's just too damn good at his job not to, guv. True to detective story form, everyone on the force is hard-boiled and cynical to varying degrees, resulting in a lot of deadpan quipping delivered with faces lowered and eyes raised. Justin Hayward, who sang that vaguely science-fiction-y lovelorn ballad for Jeff Wayne's War of the Worlds, provides the theme tune, a vaguely science-fiction-y lovelorn ballad with a tinge of cod reggae. This being the opening episode, we get to hear the thing in full over a montage of two murders, one Earthbound, one orbital. The model work is generally lovely, especially the lunar vehicles with full suspension that turn up in the next episode, but too often they're spoiled by ropey superimposition. Weightlessness (“courtesy Eugene's Flying Ballet”) is achieved through a mixture of Kirby wires, CSO and good old-fashioned turning the camera on its side. A mixed bag all round, then, and sadly not one that gained any traction. Not to worry, there's always First Born next year. That's sure to be good.
ITV
19:30 Coronation Street
It's been a while since we visited Weatherfield, and we pop in during a period of transition. The fancy neon sign outside Baldwin's Casuals is keeping Emily awake at night. Alec Gilroy's intensive management style drives Betty to hand in her notice. But the main story is Brian Tilsley's abduction of Nicky to his grotty caravan, leading to a tense confrontation with Gail and Alan Bradley on the forbidding concrete steps of Rivington Services. Once again, there's not nearly enough Vera Duckworth. Change is afoot across the board sur les pavés: the show is now in its final year under long-standing executive producer Bill “The Godfather” Podmore. Next year David “Tickle on the Tum” Liddiment takes over, ushering in the Curly 'n' Shirley, Derek 'n' Mavis, Don 'n' Ivy years. Watch out for that tram, Alan.
Tuesday July 7th
BBC1
16:35 Wizbit
With his magic show at the height of its popularity, Paul Daniels decided to broaden the brand and get into children's fantasy television. Well, it's more original than writing a children's picture book, you have to give him that. He teamed up with, of all people, the bloke who produced In the Summertime to craft a queasy HR Pufnstuff-type menagerie of whole-body costume characters and sub-Muppet creatures, romping in a standard-issue wonky fairytale environment, designed with the ever-so-slightly but still very noticeably wrong proportions that are the signature of second division children's fantasy. Eyes slightly too far apart, mouth creases slightly too sharp, heads either slightly too big or slightly too small, colours clashing all over the shop – you know it when you see it. The main character is a sentient wizard's hat which started life, as we learn from Paul's introductory rap, as “a little bit of magic in his daddy's eye,” an apparent allusion to sexual intercourse that the likes of Scrappy Doo had ruthlessly suppressed from their origin stories. This may have something to do with the theme song being a loose reworking of Ha-Ha This-a-way, an old Leadbelly number. What a pity Paul didn't plump for New Black Snake Moan.
21:30 Joe's Ark
Tuesday night is still, just about, quality drama night on BBC1, and in the summer hiatus between the end of a Screen One season and September's exciting new drama Truckers (a sort of The Brothers with the wheels coming off), the Corporation's main channel is given over to a season of Dennis Potter repeats. And not the obvious ones, either. We started off last week with Christian period meditation Where Adam Stood, and will continue with advertising satire Follow the Yellow Brick Road, John Le Mesurier spy study Traitor, and Forest of Dean sexual abuse allegory A Beast with Two Backs, before finishing off with the two Nigel Bartons. This week, it's claustrophobic apocalypse all round as pet shop owner Freddie Jones grieves for his dying upstairs daughter Angharad Rees. Then prodigal son Dennis Waterman turns up, and things get even grimmer. (Potter himself complained that the performers were missing the comedy of the play, but Never the Twain this isn't.) Enjoy this tranche of cutting edge prime time drama while it lasts, as next summer this slot will be filled with Murder One, a fancy umbrella title for a bunch of bought-in American TV movies.
Wednesday July 8th
BBC1
19:40 Music Match
A “light-hearted musical quiz” for the mature punter – think Pop Quiz goes to Radio Two – presented by Barry Cryer, and played by two teams of gender-matched ordinary folk captained by Liza Goddard and Willie Rushton. The music comes from Laurie Holloway and The Band (all clad in fetching mauve sweaters, and featuring a drummer the dead spit of Arthur Scargill) knocking out light orchestral versions of the usual wartime favourites, as well as more modern stuff. (They do a version of Light My Fire that out-kitsches Jose Feliciano.) There's also a visual round, which makes use of the skills of That's Life! cartoonist Rod Jordan. It's all deeply agreeable fluff, leavened by the odd bit of banter between Rushton and Cryer. Not to be confused with the old ITV Music Match, which was a noughts-and-crosses variant hosted by Muriel Young in a spangly leotard. Cryer favoured a smart sports jacket.
ITV
16:20 Video & Chips
By the latter years of the eighties, the home computer boom is running out of RAM, and TV shows for the digital hobbyist are becoming thin on the ground. Just a few years back, ITV could boast Adrian Headley piloting a pretend spaceship (complete with sassy backchatting computer) for Magic Micro Mission, getting Willie Rushton to road test Manic Miner. (“There was a level with sentient lavatories which I found rather jolly.”) For the more thoughtful punter, Fred Harris showed you how to program your very own game – the deathless Monsterzap – in Me and My Micro. If you couldn't be arsed with that, Tony Bastable broadcast the programs to you via a flickering dot in the corner of the screen on Database. A brave new world was yours for the taking, for a basic outlay of HOW BLOODY MUCH?!? By now, though, the first wave of micros has run out of steam, and the second, with their promise of more memory, peripherals up the wazoo and accountancy software that actually works, is failing to capture young minds to quite the same extent. Enter Capital Radio's Mick Brown, hosting a magazine programme with a very broad technological brief. Home computers are here, but so are general, Tomorrow's World-style items on digital applications in the real world, folk making stuff out of junk, and, er, kite flying. There was the odd relic of the Good Times – composer Jim Cuomo showed off the Son et Lumière program he'd written on his Oric Atmos – but the general picture was of entropy and diffusion. The junior hobbyist era was transforming into something more professional and, well, dull. Things went largely dormant for a few years, until games consoles experienced a boom of their own, and the screen filled with blokes in cheap cyberpunk costumes forever saying the word “Snezz”.
NEXT WEEK: 1982!