Week 42: 17th – 22nd July, 1993
“Let me persuade you to come to the place where tomorrow meets today.”
Surprise! MI5 exists! The government says so! Bet you weren't expecting that. Less surprisingly, John Major's having a shit time as his own backbenchers get their collective arses out over Maastricht. Only a couple of years to go, and Prime Minister John Smith will sort all this out, just you wait and see. The chart (Take That at number one) is one of those line-ups that could easily stand in for the decade as a whole. What Is Love! One Night In Heaven! All That She Wants! The Key The Secret! It's like we're in the opening sequence of a second-string Netflix period drama that otherwise makes no concessions to the era other than remembering not to give any of the characters mobile phones or facial hair.
Friday July 16th
BBC2
22:00 The Brain Drain
The most obscure of the little flurry of panel shows that launched in the wake of HIGNFY. Billed as “an antidote to Question Time”, it's really yet another iteration of Jimmy Edwards's ancient “antidote to Any Questions”, Does the Team Think? It's also a sit-down extension of the Whose Line? Empire, also being a creation of Dan Patterson. Jimmy Mulville presides, slightly awkwardly it must be said, forever interrupting, repeating himself and apologising, and generally showing by negative example how hard it is to compère a panel show. The rotating contestants include Jo Brand, Tony Hawks, Steven Frost, Andy Hamilton and Clive Anderson, responding to topical questions from the audience and the odd planted celebrity. The first series went out, loud and proud, last autumn. This one squeaks onto screens in midsummer. Unsurprisingly, there are no more.
Channel 4
01:50 Electric Ballroom
Golden rule: the later the hour, the more indie the music magazine show. This is imported from Ireland's RTÉ2, a stitched-together assemblage of live performances from Dublin's Clarence Hotel and stilted interview snippets recorded elsewhere in the building (directed by future Father Ted DoP Eugene O'Connor), with those ever-reliable on-screen text boxes filling in the duller details. It's an even more meat-and-potatoes version of Snub TV, but interestingly, alongside your expected Inspirals and L7s, you get local kids like Fatima Mansions, A House, Cranberries and, er, Bumble.
Saturday July 17th
BBC2
21:10 Hope I Die Before I Get Old
A modish study of destitute kids on the lam in the countryside, in the manner of Willy Russell's One Summer from a decade ago, filmed in all-natural light with consumer-grade camcorders for that of-the-moment Video nation look. Three cockney kids – Zadock off Jupiter Moon, Thynkso off Parallel 9 and Scratchy off Rastamouse – nick a car and naff off to Norfolk. What follows is, of course, no rural idyll. Written by Emmerdale Farm alumnus Michael Russell, and directed by Bob Blagden, who did the logo for Blake's 7, no less. Oh, and it's got a soundtrack by some bloke called Carl Davis.
ITV
17:30 What You Lookin' At?
Trix Worrell, creator of Desmond's, conjures up a Battersea-bound Fresh Prince rival for the main commercial channel, and comes a bit of a cropper. Aiming for the Tucker's Luck/Murphy's Mob demographic, it's set mainly in a youth club, with misunderstood wastrel Trevor getting into trouble with the middle-aged, lapdog-toting caretaker, and having a burgeoning romance with an on-site youth worker from the Home Counties. The gags fall over each other in reliable fashion, but Worrell, director as well as writer, is less accomplished at stuff like blocking, and it shows. Characters march carefully into the appropriate groupings to deliver their bit of back-and-forth, then swan out of frame to make way for the next exchange, after an often slightly too long pause. The seamless back-and-forth quip tennis of Desmond's isn't quite in the room. A second series might have ironed out these issues, but ITV isn't the Arts Council, kid, and seven episodes is all you get, after which it's back, with no little executive relief, to Beadle's About.
Sunday July 18th
BBC2
20:45 A Night on the Tyne
The themed television evening was a BBC2 mainstay for a good chunk of the eighties and nineties. One of the first was Rock Around the Clock, a mammoth thirteen-hour assembly of musical programming linked by the Whistle Test crew. Blues Night followed a couple of years later, under the aegis of arts strand Arena, which took the formula and ran with it over the next decade, culminating in the multimedia Radio Night this coming December. For now, though, we have this rather half-arsed affair, the main draw of which is Off the Wall, giving residents of the Byker Estate the chance to liberate various artworks from the nation's museums and install them locally. A more on-the-nose example of “civilising the masses” would be hard to cook up, but the intent's good. Then we get the Likely Lads with the dinner party reminiscences of Deirdre Birchwood, followed by Get Carter, and... oh. That's it. Channel Four are doing theme weekends these days, you know. You want to buck your ideas up.
Channel 4
10:45 Land of the Giants
One of the defining features of what we might try getting away with calling Channel Four's Jonathan Ross Era (which has really already come to an end at this point, to be replaced by the much less edifying Paul Ross Era) was its insatiable appetite for 1960s US pulp TV from the stable of Irwin Allen. Within a year of The Last Resort starting up, Sunday lunchtimes were being augmented with repeats of Lost In Space. When they ran out, they served up some Basehart for your face with the solemn submarine silliness of Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea. (“Quick! Prepare the wet mattresses!”) After that hit the buffers, it was out with this extremely repetitive romp where a bunch of jet-setting young folk (plus swarthy, untrustworthy middle-aged crook) go through an unspecified dimensional warpy thing and find themselves functionally six inches high, having to endlessly navigate massive prop furniture and the same oversize telephones, cotton reels and safety pins every week. The giant hands that pick them up aren't a patch on the ones in the film Dr Cyclops from some three decades earlier, and the shrunken slapstick antics are about as entertaining as the ones in 1970s Charlie Drake vehicle Professor Popper's Problems. Allen's other series, The Time Tunnel, was for some reason granted a fancy-shmancy teatime slot.
Monday July 19th
BBC1
15:40 Turnabout
The fourth year of Rob Curling's inoffensive mid-afternoon time-passer, but only the second year in which the studio floor was, for reasons never referred to and never explained, flooded with six inches of water. This wasn't some frou-frou afterthought, either – at strategic points, usually between rounds of this interminable word quiz, a union member was employed to agitate the surface of the water, so that the set's neon strip lights might make playful caustic patterns on the lower thirds of TV screens in care homes from Dundee to Devises. Such extravagance for an often borderline imperceptible effect in, of all things, a daytime game show, would be unthinkable now, and probably caused a few accounting headaches back then. At least the uppity-downity thing in Doctor Who's Tardis console had a narrative function. If you happen to know that this issue is dealt with in any online Turnabout fan fiction, keep it to yourself.
20:00 So Haunt Me
Maureen Lipman's British Telecom ads were, for the last couple of years of the eighties, a cultural behemoth. The commercials featuring an interfering Jewish granny who never leaves her knackered-looking son and his family alone became a national institution by decree, to the extent that somebody thought a spin-off collection of the scripts would be a worthy stocking filler publication, and was proved right. By now, though, everyone's heartily sick of the campaign, and BT are already lining up Bob Hoskins for their next marketing trick. So, with the impeccable timing their light entertainment department will be exhibiting a lot this week, the BBC decide now's the right time to launch a legally distinct sitcom rip-off. Miriam Karlin is the if-wet Lipman, portraying a kvetching ghost doomed to haunt the suburban semi newly occupied by Raquel off Fools & Horses and Bob off of Rita, Sue and Bob Too. Cue lots of unsolicited matriarchal advice, and the odd bit of poltergeist activity to scare off random wrong 'uns. Despite a capable cast, it plays very flatly, coming across as more of a broad exchange of gags than the character study the adverts aspired to. (In a kind of knowing admission, the husband of the family is an advertising copywriter by trade.) It's the work of May to December creator Paul A Mendelson, who would indulge his taste for sitcom fantasy yet further with the bewilderingly successful My Hero. Sadly his planned series about a bumptious cockney who suddenly materialises in phone boxes and can shoot blue flames from his thumb was never commissioned.
Tuesday July 20th
BBC1
19:00 Bobby Davro: Rock with Laughter
During the nineties the BBC had an unhappy knack of poaching big name old-school ITV comics for a considerable fiscal outlay, just as their star was beginning to wane. At the end of the decade we'll have the necrophagous madhouse of h&p@bbc. This is smaller and simpler, but in the end no better. Bobby Davro, the comic jewel in TVS's Diamonique crown, is scooped up by light ent. head honcho Jim Moir for a rock-'n'-rolling variety spectacular that's equally at home to The Grumbleweeds and Barbara Dickson. A young Bob Mills is among the jobbing writers. A technically quite impressive Thomas the Tank Engine parody, in which – sigh – all the trains are pissed because Ringo, will make it into clip show rotation, but otherwise this footnote will be all but erased from the zeitgeist when its six weeks are up.
Channel 4
23:45 Dream On
HBO had existed as a cable channel in the US since the early seventies, but it was only around this time that British audiences got to sample some of its wares in any significant way. Four had snapped up demented Canadian sketch show The Kids in the Hall (Chicken Lady, I'm Crushing Your Head, Thirty Helens, etc.) but passed on Not Necessarily the News, John Lloyd's Stateside translation of the British satire, with Rich Hall playing the part of Mel Smith. But this lavishly shot sitcom about a sarkily witty divorced bloke and his sarkily witty ex-wife, was the first HBO import to really represent the station's manner. Single camera, audience-free, and with loads of grown-up things like swearing and sex, this wasn't your grandma's Charles In Charge. A slightly contrived gimmick involved the interpolation of old black-and-white TV clips, supposedly commenting on the action, like a Greek chorus owned by Ted Turner. Nowadays this sort of thing is only attempted by downmarket YouTubers and the sort of nostalgia clip show you're constantly surprised still gets made, but this was fresh, exciting and classy at the time. It's mainly notable for being an early brainchild of crack showrunning team Marta Kaufmann and David Crane, also responsible this decade for Kirstie Alley underwear lady boss comedy Veronica's Closet, short-lived John Forsythe senatorial satire The Powers That Be, and something or other called “The Friends”.
Wednesday July 21st
ITV
19:00 Fantastic Facts!
Carlton Television's reverse Midas touch is once again in evidence for this mish-mash of nothing pitched somewhere between Fax! and Just Amazing! And probably several other programmes that deploy an exclamation mark in the title in an attempt to generate the excitement the content fails to. Jonathan Ross, contractually obliged to present, once described it as “a sort of trivia-based entertainment show that I’ve almost completely forgotten”. That “almost” implies a concerted effort on his part. Carlton's innate knack of hiring top talent and making them turn out unvarnished shite is operating in full effect here: Anne Dudley, former member of Art of Noise and ace composer for everything from The Crying Game to Jeeves & Wooster, is hired to do the theme tune and turns in, possibly under protest, a sort of wacky carnival version of the “wah, wah, waaaah” trumpet fanfare that traditionally accompanies a particularly corny joke. Which is, if nothing else, appropriate.
Channel 4
22:30 Sean's Show
As we established last week, there's nothing big or clever about TV comedy breaking the fourth wall. You can be small and clever while doing it, though, and Sean Hughes's debut sitcom was both. It's broadly based on It's Garry Shandling's Show, a gentle satire of the entrenched rituals of the US family sitcom, with Shandling continually appealing directly to the audience as stock characters and situations were flung at him from all sides. (Kelly Monteith had, as we've seen, done something very similar for the BBC a couple of years before that, but then the pomo sitcom business goes right back to George Burns and Gracie Allen in 1950.) Hughes's version, inevitably, is more down-at-heel. A bedsit instead of a lush condo; Victor Maguire, the eternal best mate, as his best mate; and a grotty pub and corner shop reached by means of walking out of the bedsit set and across the plywood no-man's-land in one unbroken shot. Reading ahead in the script, telephone messages from God and Samuel Beckett, and never-drying socks spice up the oddness, but it's Hughes's personality that holds these mad elements together. So many of the second wave alternative comics had an underlying precocity that would make them unfit for the role of lovable sitcom protagonist. (Imagine if David Baddiel had his own sitcom, on Sky One or something. It'd be rubbish.) Hughes, utilising his trademark “startled bunny” look, commands both intellectual and emotional respect, rattling through each densely-plotted episode at breakneck speed yet never losing the viewer's empathy. Here we're halfway through a repeat of the first series to whet appetites for a second in the autumn. This week Sean gets depressed, vows to kill himself and writes a 2,000-page suicide note which becomes a bestseller, is interviewed about it by Tracey MacLeod, gets dumped by his agent (voice of Steve Coogan) and frantically tries to come up with an American style wholesome moral before the credits roll. Along the way there's a fully-choreographed dance number, some musical Morrissey boxer shorts, and a £20 tin of cling peaches. Incidentally, this show has a rare-for-the-time mostly female production crew, including producer Katie Lander and director Sylvie Boden, who also called the shots for, er, So Haunt Me.
Thursday July 22nd
BBC2
21:30 Pandora's Box
The first of Adam Curtis's signature documentaries, covering the mid-twentieth century rush for atomic power. All the man's trademarks are in place: a wide range of archive clips, often sarcastically deployed; stentorian narration with purposefully over-simplified sentences and sudden narrative rug-pulls all appear fully-formed. It's a lot slower in pace than his 2010s High Style period, and it has a solid story to tell, unlike some of his more nebulous twenty-first century affairs, but in general he's starting as he means to go on: The Rock 'N' Roll Years edited by Thomas Pynchon. Incidentally, the mad musical clip that opens the title sequence is taken from Design for Dreaming, a superlatively camp promotional film from General Motors designed to sell cars and gadgets to housewives, that's worth checking out in full. “Girls don't go to motoramas/Dressed in a pair of pink pyjamas!”
Channel 4
18:00 Hypnosis
Another day, another presenter-less music magazine show cobbled together from cheaply-shot interviews and deadpan captions. This one covers the dance scene, and manages to make it look unbearably drab and dreary. Golden rule: dance acts do not great interviewees make. The graphics department pull out every trick in the book – sped-up footage of streets, video dropout, flashy-flashy multiple images, Designers' Republic typefaces, acid house solarisation – to generate some kind of visual interest, and a constant musical backing is provided each week by a “guest DJ” of the calibre of Danny Rampling or (cough) Judge Jules, but something's gone wrong in the editing. Images flash across the screen every second on the second, yet the whole thing seems incredibly dull and sluggish. There's just nothing to it. It probably looked better at 3AM than it does in this slot, but then so did Walker: Texas Ranger.
NEXT WEEK: 1975!