Week 41: 9th – 15th July, 1982
“Popeye Coney Island Shirley Temple RIP.”
Plane crashes and strikes. Plane crashes and strikes. For God's sake, do we have anything – oh, someone's broken into Buckingham Palace? Fantastic! Michael Fagan, not in his right mind and with little else to do, somehow gets into the Queen's bedroom and has a long, earnest chat with her, the contents of which we can only speculate on, endlessly. Or, more likely, the conversation is rather more curt and goes something like: “Guards!” “Uh-oh.” Fagan becomes enough of a celebrity to record a cover of God Save the Queen with “punk's not dead” band The Bollock Brothers. Needless to say, he finds the top forty rather harder to broach than the Palace. Speaking of which, Fame is at number one – see below – and slightly further down we have a pile-up of post-disco acts demonstrating three very different aesthetics in their Top of the Pops appearances. Odyssey have updated their sound very slightly, but visually they go with the same look – glittery dresses for the ladies, smart weskit for the gent – they were rocking in 1979. Imagination are very much of the moment, as Leee John sports a sort of American footballer's corset fashioned from an old duvet. But Shalamar, hastily improvising due to personnel logistics issues, show us a glimpse of the future, as Jeffrey Daniel exhibits his body-popping skills. The very next morning the nation's playgrounds are full of inexpert attempts at The Glass Wall, The Rope Pull, The Drinky-Drinky, and of course The Backslide (not called The Moonwalk yet, note). Oh, and there's also John McEnroe parody single Chalk Dust by The Brat, which nobody copies in the playground, if they've got any sense.
Friday July 9th
BBC1
22:15 Leap in the Dark
The wayward trajectory of this programme is possibly unique in all of television. It began in 1973 as a sort of paranormal Tomorrow's World. In a spooky scaffolding-festooned studio, male and female presenters (in smart double-breasted suit and floaty white dress respectively) introduced filmed items on ESP, dowsing, telekinesis and all the good supernatural stuff that went over particularly well at the time. It turned out the audience for this was limited, but rather than just scrap the brand entirely, they retooled it two years later as an anthology of dramatised real life spooky incidents, introduced by famed occult author Colin Wilson. In 1980 it was altered again, this time as a purely fictional strand of supernatural dramas from the likes of Fay Weldon and David Rudkin, a repeat of the last of which is here tonight. And it's a doozy, written by Alan Garner, and mostly filmed in his remote Cheshire farmhouse. Anthony Bate is a poet with writer's block who's suddenly visited by the muse in the middle of the night. But the poem he writes down turns to shit on the page. The next morning his agent is mystified at his new “The Fall meets The Macc Lads” direction. Then Bate gets a migraine, and things get really weird. A grand little slice of rural unease, preserved – altogether now – on lovely old Eastmancolor film.
ITV
21:00 On the Line
Central Television, fresh out of the box and eager to establish itself as a dramatic player on the revamped ITV network, offers up this corporate drama suspended somewhere between the old-school boardroom harrumphery of The Brothers and the knowing, high-class sexiness of Howards' Way. The industrial action takes place at troubled Midland car manufacturer Associated British Motors, a Not-Leyland conglomerate run by Amanda Redman and Claire Skinner's dad off Outnumbered. The script's eager to leapfrog the old boardroom cliches, but in the process perpetrates a few of the posher banalities. Characters show this isn't your old-school staid corporate drama by saying things like “bastard” and “shite”. There's a lot of emotional tell-don't-show dressed up as arch self-awareness. (“Sorry, I'm feeling guilty and it comes out as angry.”) Lots of irate shouting into telephones turns into lots of exasperated ignoring the telephones. The workers, under a querulous Welsh convener, stage a lightning strike, which means a lot of standing about warming hands on a brazier even though it's the middle of a sunny, and not particularly cold-looking, day. It's not the slickest of productions all round. Hand-held tracking shots through busy offices induce motion sickness. A would-be thrilling road chase involving a prototype car and some industrial rivals makes your average public information film look like Bullitt. Beer mats stick to beer glasses and fall off with an audible “donk”, and nobody calls for a retake. Finely-wrought earthy aphorisms are stepped on by supporting actors. “Quiet jazz is like sex in the dark. Nice now and then, but-” “All right, ladies and gentlemen...” The result is the unmistakeable whiff of a drama series punching above its weight just as much as its fictional subject. It's not quite Triangle on four wheels, but by so palpably reaching for CEO glamour – and we haven't even mentioned the long, lingering close-ups of painfully slow CAD engine diagrams or the theme tune blatantly nicked from the old Martini ads – it invites the viewer to scoff at it from the outset. You need to either hermetically seal in that high corporate seriousness (The Brothers) or tip the audience the odd louche wink (Howards' Way). And you really, really need to nail your beer mats to the table.
Saturday July 10th
BBC2
19:30 Dick Deadeye
Imagine: you're the head of an archetypal BBC2 household. Middle class to a fault, you know doctors, dentists and architects, laugh knowingly at Robin Ray's quips about Sibelius on Face the Music, and were first in line at M&S last year when they started selling prawn sandwiches. You're lord and master of your suburban Surrey fastness. But lately your youngest, Adrian, has been giving you cause for concern. He's been hanging out with the son of a builder. That Observer Book of British Birds poster has come down from his bedroom wall, to be replaced by a group of unsavoury looking men called “Madness”. And several times this week, you've gone to turn on the television set in the early evening only to find the ITV button depressed. Clearly the lad needs taking in hand. But how? And then you see this listed in the Radio Times. “A feature-length cartoon film adapted from the works of Gilbert and Sullivan.” Just the ticket! So you take command, forswearing the alternative delights of the Callan movie and David Essex live from Harrogate, and plonk the family in front of this musical feast – with characters designed by Ronald Searle, no less – to see if you can't begin to surreptitiously nudge the young boy away from the fleshpots of OTT and back onto John Craven's shining path. When the first number kicks in, you find yourself involuntarily gripping the armrests of your Parker Knoll. It's Here's A How-De-Do from The Mikado, but with a wah-wah guitar backing that's straight out of Shaft. Then we move on – immediately, there's no gap – to Modern Major General a la James Brown, and you feel one of your heads coming on. It carries on in this vein: a non-stop, impenetrable mish-mash of three or four different operettas, all with vaguely contemporary orchestration, with racial caricature and female nudity thrown in for spice. It's inexplicable and relentless. Eventually you admit defeat and switch to BBC1, just in time to see David Essex introduce Talk Talk. It looks like young Adrian will be swept away on the rising tide of low culture no matter what you do. But all is not lost: some years from now you can call in a few favours and find him a post on The Guardian, writing excitable live blogs about Game of Thrones.
ITV
18:45 Funnybone
Summer's here and everyone's on holiday, so to hold the fort let's have a basic bitch stand-up showcase. A stage, a mic stand, a lurid backcloth, and a roster of hopeful funny folk choppily edited together. Yes, I know The Comedians is still going, this is different somehow. Up-and-coming acts featured include Cheese & Onion, the notorious sub-Little-&-Large comic duo who became a signifier of old-school showbiz doom (real names: Barry Neal and, wonderfully, Michael Knight); Malc Stent, a Brummie comic folk singer in the Jasper Carrott mould; Sonny Hayes & Sally Windross, a sort of mime/prop comedy/conjuring double act who make good use of false limbs and maniacal grins in painfully awkward positions; and Nina Finburgh, who will soon quit the circuit to go and teach drama at RADA. A diverse legacy, let's say.
Sunday July 11th
ITV
13:30 Jangles
A post-Breaking Glass showcase for Hazel O'Connor, cast as an aspiring young singer hanging about on the dole with her mates (including Jesse Birdsall) in the eponymous nightclub, in which she performs an assortment of original songs and covers in minimalist settings involving tailor's dummies and open-reel tape recorders, to a lo-fi synth backing reminiscent of The Normal's Warm Leatherette. Sue Nicholls, always a delight, is her concerned mum. What little plot there is gets explicated by a full-on Brechtian ringmaster narrator swathed in vocoder and video feedback. With all this in mind, Who-heads will be unsurprised to find Bob “Mutants” Baker among the writing team.
15:05 The Cuckoo Waltz
This episode of the Diane Keen sitcom is being screened under the often-used umbrella title “Best of British”, here signalling “a special season of world class entertainment”. That is to say, a bunch of one-off repeats of slightly old comedies and dramas of particular cultural significance. So we get another chance to see such artistic touchstones as the Upstairs, Downstairs episode “Guest of Honour”; the Persuaders episode “Greensleeves”; and the On the Buses episode “The Cistern”. This particular repeat has in itself been doubly displaced from the 19th of June, due to a combination of World Cup shenanigans and that Vatican banker being found dangling under Blackfriars Bridge. It's the creation of Geoffrey Lancashire, Coronation Street graduate with a particular affinity for weddings – he wrote Elsie's wedding to Steve Tanner and Albert Tatlock's near-miss with Alice Pickins. The premise: Diane Keen and husband David Roper are happily married with a baby and a new house, but strapped for cash. Lewis Collins has a good job on the airlines and a Lotus Europa, but has just been chucked out by his wife. Cue an indefinitely temporary lodging situation as Collins packs out the spare room with a stereo, cocktail cabinet and Scalextric set, living the bachelor life under his hosts' knackered, envious noses. Throw in Keen's meddling mother Clare Kelly (Val Barlow's mum in Corrie) and you have a class-reversed take on Whatever Happened to the Likely Lads? that's not too shabby as it goes, though the final series does fall off slightly when Collins is replaced by Lalla Ward's boyfriend off The Armageddon Factor.
Monday July 12th
BBC1
16:45 The Space Sentinels
After Hanna-Barbera, the cartoon studio that most defined how TV animation looked during the '70s and '80s was Filmation. Founded by some refugees from the cursed domain of Larry Harmon, it cornered the market in episodic animated spin-offs of live-action intellectual properties – Tarzan, Star Trek and the like – churned out at a frightening rate. Every shortcut in the cartoon book was taken: long introductory pans across motionless backplates, sideways-on run cycles traced from old Eadweard Muybridge photos, lots of standing about delivering long speeches with just the mouths moving, and extreme facial close-ups when you least expected it. Add to this two or three genuinely well-animated motions liberally repeated throughout the show, an insistent funk soundtrack, and an ingenious spinning circular credit for the company's two CEOs so that neither technically received top billing, and you had an instantly recognisable house style that didn't break the bank. This is one of their original ideas, a half-baked trio of vaguely Greek deity-ish superkids who solve spacey mysteries with the help of a big computer and a comedy robot sidekick. It's summat o' nowt plot-wise, but flying, kicking and punching will assuredly ensue, so the less demanding child will be reliably rooted to the spot by the magical parade of colours and shapes.
21:25 Dinner with Auntie: A Celebration of 60 Years
In October it'll be six decades since a bunch of WWI veterans purchased office space on Savoy Hill and started the British radio ball rolling, so the Beeb has been in celebratory retrospective mood all year. (Earlier this evening we've already had a condensed version of The Curse of Peladon as part of an old Doctor Who mini-season.) This black tie dinner is at the Dorchester – but of course – and is organised by the ever-present Variety Club of Great Britain, so there's lots of needlessly cod-formal business with the Chief Barker. Executives, stars and Willie Whitelaw speak with varying degrees of boredom and inebriation. Robin Day leavens the endless self-congratulatory toasting by indulging in a bit of business with a straw boater and cane, and gives Whitelaw a very gentle roasting. When this is your highlight, you're in trouble. In a few years' time, self-indulgence will finally give way to practicality, and these viewer-alienating jollies will stop being televised. When ITV can trounce you with a repeat of an old Quincy, the prospect of sixty more years suddenly starts looking remote.
Tuesday July 13th
ITV
17:15 The Real World
Michael Rodd, blow-dried fixture of Tomorrow's World, was a canny operator. Not content with merely standing in front of the nation while an industrial robot fell over every Thursday evening, he set up his own media company and, when TVS, ITV's south coast franchise, came knocking with the offer of more money to do much the same thing for them, jumped over to the third button without a second thought. Unfortunately his new vehicle, a dry exploration of an individual science-y topic each week, lacked the live sense of peril that made Tomorrow's World into a household name. The opening edition, a dry look into computers in schools, generated a modicum of interest. (Computers will soon be “as much a part of the classroom as the powder paints and the chicken feed,” apparently, which raises questions about what exactly goes on in Kent's primary schools.) An equally dry look into artificial insemination for racehorses, considerably less. In December they'll experience a rare uptick in viewers by giving away some 3D glasses in the TV Times, and broadcasting clips of ancient 3D films, plus a bunch of ultra-cheap “things flying at the camera” tableaux, including a rubber bat, a very bored girl on a swing, and a sort of bull on wheels knocking over some plates to a porn film soundtrack. They'll do a Smell-O-Vision gimmick shortly after, to considerably less interest. (Sadly they don't see fit to include any clips from John Waters' Polyester.) This is the era of daft technological showbiz mash-ups: next year will see a Patti Boulaye special that opens with her singing Wishing On a Star while piloting a flight simulator. To the future!
19:30 The Video Entertainers
The very doldrums of TV's summer break here, as light entertainment guru Johnnie Hamp dons a light blue summer suit, sits at a desk in front of two Ferguson TX televisions piled on top of each other, and links a bunch of clips of singers and comedians from Granada Television's extensive entertainment back catalogue. Special attention is given to old black and white clips of The Searchers on Scene at 6.30 (prod: J Hamp) for the burgeoning sixties nostalgia market, and colour clips of Aiden J Harvey on the Comedians (prod: J Hamp) for the burgeoning Aiden J Harvey market. Everyone watching is effortlessly brought thirty minutes closer to their respective graves with minimum expenditure. Good job.
Wednesday July 14th
ITV
10:30 Jason of Star Command
Oh look, more Filmation product. Live action this time, in a sort of Buck Rogers-ish, Flash Gordon-esque space battle-y homage to the cinema serials of old. (Episodes of this were originally twelve minutes apiece, but here they've been stapled together into a proper length programme after they realised what a stupid idea that was for television.) It looks like everything else of this ilk did back then: our heroes have teeth and novelty pyjamas, the villain has a beard and one eye, comedy robots make funny chirruping sounds, stop-motion monsters ration their appearances, Scotty off Star Trek sports a fetching powder-blue cape, and Filmation's usual wah-wah guitar runs underneath the action. Business, with a capital B, as usual.
16:20 Storybook International
Mention of this will conjure an immediate image of its title sequence: a rotoscoped Bristolian lute player boasting in song to a flummoxed fox of his worldwide incognito narratorial excursions. But it's worth looking at the show itself, as the format is so smartly thrifty it verges on genius. Take an "ageless series of folktales gathered from around the globe", collected and published in one handy tie-in volume by Victor Gollancz. Send a film crew and a few extras to some remote woodland glade, or cottage, or sufficiently rustic village square, whack some panto costumes over them, and get them to act out the tales while you shoot them on lovely, rich 16mm film. Lovely, rich 16mm film costs, though, so you do without certain things, the main one being sound. Just don't bother to record any sound. At all. Less equipment, less crew, a lot less time expended on location. Don't worry, a couple of coconut-wielding foley artists and Isla Blair will provide noises and narration in a cupboard back home. And this sonic separation also means dubbing the thing for foreign markets is simplicity itself. You've cannily cut corners and broadened your market at a stroke. Nice one, "John".
Thursday July 15th
BBC1
20:10 Fame
Episode five, and we're already well into the formula, opening on an extended sequence of leg-warmers prancing about as Irene Cara bangs her stick. “I want a word with you after class.” A toothsome dancer Bruno fancies falls over in a series of still images because the stunt looked unconvincing on the day. Turns out she has MS and will never be a pro dancer. Bruno dedicates the last and worst song on the Kids from Fame LP to her. We all go home having learned something. Even Mr Shorofsky.
ITV
19:20 The Paul Squire Show
You couldn't wish for a more trad comic than Paul Squire. Background: the club circuit, then panto, then the Royal Variety. The shtick: gags, songs and impressions, nothing more fancy than that. He's straight up-and-down. He's family-friendly. He's Pasquale. I'm Walsh. He's the last person you'd expect to make their debut ITV comedy sketch show a postmodern affair about the making of an ITV comedy sketch show, in which he plays “The Star”, desperately busking ideas in his penthouse flat and riding out pre-production issues with the help of “The Producer” (Anna “Steam Video Company” Dawson) and “The Scriptwriter” (Bobby “Price of Coal” Knutt). But before we excitedly dust off our AA Book of Baudrillard and start drafting a 10,000-word piece titled “Sunday Night at the London Paradigm: Towards a Post-Structural Hermeneutics of Post-War Light Entertainment”, recall that, even within the narrow confines of this weekly trawl, we've been here many times before. We've seen Kelly Monteith weave a fictionalised personal life into a making-the-show narrative, with everyone becoming hopelessly confused as to which level of reality they're supposed to be inhabiting. We've seen Cleo Laine and Johnny Dankworth do kind of the same in And Now, abetted by John Bird and Willie Rushton. Hell, we've even seen it, all the way back in 1970, in, of all things, Mike and Bernie's Special. “Foucault! There's two of 'em!” All we've really stumbled on here is yet another instance of “low culture” instinctively breaking down barriers its supposed intellectual superiors took bags of unnecessary effort to circumvent the long way round. Is Charlie Kaufman doing anything Eddie Braben, in the Plays What Ernie Wrote, hadn't already, and with a lot less self-congratulation? When The Grumbleweeds suddenly go off-script in the middle of Dick Whittington at Darlington Civic Centre and start lobbing sweets into the stalls, did anyone watching get on the blower to Umberto Eco? Does the inherent “cleverness” of meddling with the fourth wall rise with the likelihood of your audience owning a MacBook Pro? No.
NEXT WEEK: 1993!