Week 43: 23rd – 29th July, 1975

“My name is Johnson. I seem to have been bungled.”

There's a big old general malaise to the headlines, with unemployment topping a million – the highest since the war – MPs voting to give themselves a pay rise up to a whopping eleven grand a year, and ex-PM Ted Heath laying into new Tory leader Margaret Thatcher's monetary policies, in a move judged by some observers as “spiteful”. You ain't seen nothing yet. Give a Little Love is the current number one, followed closely by Barbados, a song which, with its central conceit of two white men putting on funny Caribbean accents to big up the concept of voluntary repatriation, would be considered a bit on-the-nose even at Reform HQ. Further down the top ten is Judge Dread, with a trans panic version of Je T'Aime that's aged, if anything, even less well. Only Adrian Baker can offer some cod reggae that isn't grossly offensive, with a harmless cover of the Four Seasons' Sherry. Elsewhere it's disco as far as the eye can see. Jive Talkin', The Hustle, Blow Your Whistle by The Rimshots, and no fewer than two songs by Hamilton Bohannon with “stomp” in the title. Oh, and Wigan's Ovation are here to represent cod northern soul with Personally, the best thing you can say about which is that it isn't Skiing In the Snow.

Wednesday July 23rd

BBC1

16:50 Z-Shed

The nightmare begins. Noel Edmonds, two years into his stint on the Radio 1 breakfast show, decides to expand into television by hosting this cheap and cheerful teenage problem phone-in. Lines open at a quarter past four for any viewers who want to offload to Noel about their issues with parents, or pocket money, or fashion, or, this week, brothers and sisters. Noel lends a sympathetic ear when necessary, makes daddish quips when appropriate, and all the while plots his next move.

ITV

20:00 Down the Gate

In which Reg Varney, now pushing sixty, forcibly detaches himself from the On the Buses behemoth and strikes out in a bold new direction. This fresh vehicle is “based on an idea by Reg Varney”, no less. The idea being “Can we do On the Buses but without all the other popular characters so everyone's just looking at me all the time?” The action takes place mainly in Billingsgate Fish Market, signified by a bare studio piled with boxes of fish, where Varney works as a porter, wearing one of those funny-looking reinforced leather hats and forever getting one over on Percy Herbert, who plays the, er, fish inspector. It's loud, it's inept, it's under-rehearsed, and every character follows up every gag by laughing hysterically at it for four whole seconds. He's an extraordinarily good pianist, though, you have to give him that.

Thursday July 24th

BBC1

22:45 Apollo/Soyuz

The Space Age comes to a definite end with this downbeat post-mortem on the final Apollo mission, its “historic” docking with the Soviet Soyuz module, and the literal incineration of $240 million. Veteran moon landing reporters Michael Charlton and, natch, James Burke weigh up the significance of the final mission. Seeing as Burke would later go on record dismissing the Soyuz link-up as “one big yawn”, it's likely he's making the argument against here.

ITV

21:00 Moody and Pegg

“Comedy drama” is a term fraught with vagueness and suspicion. Exactly which genre, the enquiring punter wonders, is dominant? Are we watching a drama which just happens to be funnier than usual, or a sitcom sans wisecracks? It's often deployed as a euphemism for “light drama”, as if the makers are somehow embarrassed at their creation's lack of grit, and are deftly nudging the genre goalposts over into sexier territory. It's also frequently used to describe a long sitcom that forsakes gags in favour of wry character vignettes. What we have here is the latter. I think. Smarmy Roland Moody (Derek “Z Cars” Waring) and meek Daphne Pegg (Judy “Keeping Up Appearances” Cornwell) find themselves reluctantly sharing a London flat due to an improbable leaseholding mix-up. He's a divorced Lothario, she's a spinsterish civil servant. They're legally distinct from your original Odd Couple! It's all pleasantly wry stuff, with some neat lines from writers Donald Churchill and Julia Jones. Just don't expect Alan Bennett-style phrase-coining at every turn. This is the start of the second series, where the leads have to deal with the troublesome presence of Daphne's matriarchal aunt Sheila Keith, then doing a roaring trade as a domineering hag in horror films like Frightmare and House of Whipcord. It all flows along quite dreamily, in part thanks to regular bursts of lovely theme tune The Free Life by library music supremo Alan Parker, all jangly acoustic guitar and wheezy synth. It's the one that did double duty as the opening music for schools' programme My World. And the one Madonna ripped off for Don't Tell Me. Parker was behind a fine and disparate range of theme tunes including Angels, Gideon, Dempsey & Makepeace and Sir Prancelot, of whom more later.

Friday July 25th

ITV

10:20 Bertrand Russell Speaks His Mind

All together now: “Not exactly Ben Shephard, is it? Not exactly Andi Peters! Oh, how far we have fallen, and so forth.” Ten black-and-white minutes of the shagabout logician holding forth on the subject of power, filmed in the early sixties and punted out here to open the weekday schedule, an intellectual palate-cleanser for a busy morning of Wildlife Theatre and an old Ben Travers farce with Richard Briers. Not once does Bertie rustle up some tasty treats for summer picnics, big up the Omaze Prize Draw, or lift a tin of beans with his genitals. (Although by all accounts, he could if he wanted to.)

19:00 Husband of the Year

There's an argument that, while society has progressed in many ways over the last half century, in other ways things used to be... nicer. There was a greater sense of community, people say, things were less atomised and alienating. People were less motivated by self-interest. This thesis seems, at first glance, to be borne out by following the evolution of one very specific strand of programming: the great big season-long talent contest. These days, it's all about “making it” as some kind of entertainer, usually a singer. Fifty years ago, though... well, it was much the same, as Opportunity Knocks and New Faces tore great swathes from the evening schedules year after year. But there was another, altogether more socially responsible, variation on the format. For several years, Leslie Crowther fronted Nurse of the Year, ITV's nationwide search for the NHS staff member who scored highest for kindliness, efficiency, ambition, appearance and “general disposition”, according to a panel of doctors, matrons and nursing officers. The winner was sent on holiday, and their hospital received a colour telly. Not much, but better than standing in your front garden clapping like a seal. And then we have this, a fifteen-week quest to discover the British man who's the best at being married. It's the creation of Brad Ashton, jobbing comedy writer for Dick Emery, Tommy Cooper, and, soon, Lennie & Jerry. It began last year on, of all places, Radio Two, before upgrading – or downgrading, depending on your point of view – to the other side, and vision. Pete Murray anchors proceedings in his reliably frowny way. There's a celebrity panel, headed by agony aunt Marjorie Proops and actor Leslie Randall, who starred with his wife in much-loved sitcom Joan & Leslie a couple of decades ago but bloody well needs the work now. Each week we also have a guest married couple, like Leonard Rossiter and Gillian Raine, or Jon and Ingeborg Pertwee. The panel quiz the contestants on their fidelity, talents, personality, wardrobe-assembling skills and what they'd do in the event of a burst boiler. Then comes the “fun” bit. Norma Ronald, star of sixties boardroom drama The Plane Makers, plays the contestants' fictional live-in mother-in-law, improvising her way through various domestic arguments to test the hubbies' calmness and diplomacy. Tonight's the grand final, with Murray presiding over a “courtroom” as Proops and Randall plead the various finalists' cases in front of a bumper celeb jury featuring Les Dawson, Thora Hird, Anthony “Raffles” Valentine and Pete Murray's wife. The winning couple will get a “second honeymoon” holiday worth £500. (The runners-up will get a £250 trip, tellingly not billed as a “second honeymoon”.) The critics were, of course, unkind. Alan Coren averred “embarrassment is a pastime which should be restricted to consenting adults in private and not be flaunted publicly to infect anyone unlucky enough to be caught within range”. This year's winner is one Terry Wadkin. Nancy Banks-Smith took solace in the fact that Wadkin – aside from the fact he “cheered up” his family by performing a clog dance in the kitchen every morning – appeared to be genuinely likeable, but “that human beings can rise above the bloody awfulness of things like the blitz and Husband of the Year is no credit to either”.

Saturday July 26th

BBC1

23:05 Eleventh Hour

There was just so much single drama slopping around the BBC in the 1970s. Rentokill had to be called into Television Centre at one point to eliminate an infestation of teenage unemployment studies that threatened to overwhelm TC3. With so many plays in the schedules, weird little novelty experiments like this inevitably cropped up. Two or three top UK playwrights – Trevor Griffiths, John Bowen, Fay Weldon, Snoo Wilson, that sort of calibre – would get together with the show's production team in Lime Grove at 9:30 sharp on Monday morning and rifle through the current news headlines for material from which to write an original half-hour drama, which had to be cast, designed and rehearsed for live transmission at eleven at night the following Saturday. The most renowned of the results went out last week. The Boundary, by Clive "The Rainbirds" Exton and Tom Stoppard, mashed the Apollo/Soyuz link-up together with the test match final to create an oblique farce about a ménage a trois between rival lexicographers in an Oxford University library, with a mysterious lone cricketer looming outside. (Exton called it "one of the most enjoyable experiences of my working life", so quite unlike The Rainbirds, then.) This week it's the ladies' turn, as Caryl Churchill joins forces with Mary "Once a Catholic" O'Malley and Cherry "Angels" Potter. Piers Haggard directs.

23:35 Ghost Story

An American horror anthology assembled under the aegis of William Castle, the lovable old fraud who used to park ambulances outside premieres of his films and refuse to shut up about it. It's topped and tailed, in the grand old manner, by Sebastian Cabot, smoking a cigar in the palatial “Mansfield House”, in reality that fancy Californian hotel they use as a location in Peter O'Toole classic The Stunt Man. The episode itself is well-chewed corn. (Patricia Neal is stuck in a sinister plush hotel which, wouldn't you know it, turns out to be purgatory.) But the retro-plush fixtures and fittings are fun, as are a sinister bingo caller and a musique concrete soundtrack that's refreshingly far out for US television.

Sunday July 27th

BBC2

20:15 Something to Sing About

A musical-comedic jamboree from BBC Scotland's Queen Margaret Drive. Future SNP activist Annie Lorne Gillies and “singing lawyer” Peter Morrison belt out a bunch of standards on a given theme (travel this week), while Chic Murray performs bits of comic business, aided by Patrick Malahide and Clatty Bella off Just a Boys' Game. It was almost unanimously judged a diabastric disaster, uselessly suspended halfway between Stars On Sunday and Play Away, and a waste of the great Chic Murray's gifts. It's neither here nor there, so as the man himself said: where the hell is it?

ITV

11:00 Here's Good Health

ATV, pleased as punch with their new schools' programme encouraging kids to adopt healthy habits and lifestyles, invite parents, teachers and education officers to preview and discuss one of the episodes under the watchful eye of Trevor Williams, director of the Schools Council Health Education Project. Everyone knows Good Health for the Talking Feet edition, with its lovably ramshackle primary school am-dram skits and the immortal Block-A-Boots song, but that's still over a year away. The first series is altogether more stentorian and public information film-esque. Take White Ivory, the programme under discussion here, which consists mainly of Derek Hobson laying down the law about tooth decay in voice-over, while kids in overcast parks eat sweets and basic diagrams of teeth crumble into dust. It does, however, end with a bit of interpretative dance on a school stage, in which children dressed in different coloured sheets mime the ongoing fight between plaque and fluoride while some particularly harsh and abstract Delia Darbyshire music beeps away in the background. The theme tune to the show itself, however, is an altogether more groovy little instrumental number composed by that man again, Alan Parker.

Monday July 28th

BBC1

17:40 Sir Prancelot

Speaking of groovy little instrumental numbers composed by that man again, Alan Parker, the closing theme of this feudal follow-up to Mary, Mungo & Midge and Captain Pugwash, a jangly, jaunty duel between a Dinosaur Jr-style fuzz guitar and an electric sitar – think Dancing With the Moonlit Knight by Genesis, if it's not too early in the morning – is one of those theme tunes that far outweighs its parent programme in the scales of cultural immortality. It was even covered by that favourite band of UX designers the world over, Boards of Canada. Although they took as a template not the raw, minimalist TV version but the LP incarnation, complete with entirely unnecessary organ and rhythm section. (See also the Crossroads theme, in which the LP version, with fuller orchestration and a piano where the harp part used to be, has all but supplanted the more skeletal TV original in the collective memory.) The show itself is just dandy. As with Pugwash, it's a quick five minute rush of period tomfoolery peppered with fun anachronisms, with Peter Hawkins doing all the voices, and Trumpton titans Bob Bura and John Hardwick operating the little levers that move the mouths and arms. Producer John Ryan missed a trick by not giving this animation system a quirky name, like Gerry Anderson's Supermarionation, or Aniform, the sort of stick-puppetry technique which gave us the bendy, bow-tied Charlie in Words & Pictures. A shame, as pretty much every bit of Flash animation made between 2005 and 2015 laboured in Pugwash and pals' technical shadow. And while Pugwash was the victim of untrue rumours about the filthy names of its characters, Prancelot really does feature a squire named Master Girth.

ITV

16:50 The Tomorrow People

Roger Price was a kids' TV producer who “got” it. No talking down, no creepy attempts to second guess what those modern young people of the seventies are all about, no lazy rebadging of boomer-era childhood touchstones, just the ability to listen to what kids told him they found entertaining, and put it, to varying degrees, on screen. Inevitably, what kids found entertaining didn't always line up with what adults thought kids ought to find entertaining, leading to a showdown with the common decency industrial complex over one of his comedy showcases, the infamous Pauline's Quirkes. (See Week 11.) The problem in a nutshell: teenagers are, by and large, obsessed with one thing. Said “one thing” is the one thing you're really not allowed to show them on TV. With this science fiction series, Price solved the problem through sublimation. Adolescence is now, for a chosen few adepts, a process of “breaking out”: discovering you have strange new abilities like telepathy, teleportation and telekinesis. You're one of the select, a Bowie-style Homo Superior. Thus elevated, you team up with other superior homos and their camp computer guardian, to keep Earth safe from interdimensional evil. Adolescent angst as a superpower! It's a brilliant concept: the desperately confused, perpetually randy fourteen-year-old boys of Basingstoke who lie awake at night worrying they might be Jesus Christ have a drama series precisely tailored to their needs. (And boy, are the parallels made clear: when, early on in this story, Peter Vaughan-Clarke's teacher walks in on him when he's “halfway through a jaunt” to the embarrassment of both... well, the metaphor speaks for itself.) The show is at its peak of popularity right now, so to tide the fans over in the gap between the third and fourth series, here's a repeat of the second. We've reached the final episode of The Blue and the Green, a complex allegory involving kids' paintings of alien landscapes getting printed in the Observer colour supplement and triggering worldwide riots, chiefly represented by stock footage of picket line punch-ups. New Tomorrow Person Elizabeth Adare is recruited along the way, a black female lead character in a medium still shamefully bereft of much outside the white bread norm. It's shot in an actual comprehensive school with a borrowed OB unit for added realism, but otherwise the production values are inevitably the weak link – we rely far too much on stock footage, and action is severely rationed, meaning long scenes of child actors delivering reams of exposition to each other – but there's enough imagination and progressive gumption knocking about to give Tom Baker a run for his money.

Tuesday July 29th

BBC1

17:15 Brainchild

Yet another children's general knowledge quiz, but with a gimmick: questions were derived from the "memory banks" of BERYL, "Brainchild's Electronic Random Year and Letter indicator". The dodginess of that acronym might lead you to suspect this computer is in fact just a handful of visual effects and a caption generator operated by a bloke in the gallery – it is somewhat tellingly introduced as "a brand new computer-style quiz" – but quizmaster John Craven plays it entirely straight, as do the assorted two-person teams of pencil-sucking pre-teens – this week, from Derry and Barnstaple – hoping to win the coveted title of Brainchild 1975.

BBC2

22:25 A Set of Slides

A quainter programme you could not wish for. It's exactly what the title says: historical documentarian and found footage collagist Peter Baylis has disinterred a bunch of Victorian magic lantern slides containing images of various town and country locations from their musty teak carrying cases, and strung them together with gentle musical accompaniment. Nothing more, nothing less. It makes Country File look like The Young Ones. It brightened up a winter's afternoon last year, and now it does the same for a balmy summer night. It's probably the purest form of what we would these days call Lovely Old Telly: your Antiques Roadshows, your Repair Shops, anything made for Channel 5 in Yorkshire. Bucolic nostalgia for that ever-growing demographic who've long abandoned their hedonistic youth; swapped joints for joint life annuities, Ketamine for critical illness cover plans, etc. An audience that still watches linear television in large amounts. An audience that swells in number with each passing year. If terrestrial broadcasting ever really does finally collapse into the abyss, this genre of programming will be the last to go, so any budding young directors or producers would be well advised to familiarise themselves with it. You might personally find it all hopelessly staid and bland and cosy, but you'll have a large and loyal audience at your disposal. And, because it's dirt cheap to make, it's one of the few areas of TV programming where you can truly innovate, without the execs peering over your shoulder. Admittedly, it's not easy to forge a new audiovisual aesthetic when you brief is a year in the life of a Pennine smallholding, but it's not impossible. An injection of new creative life is at least as, and possibly more than, likely to come from here as from the drama or current affairs departments. Think of it: The Victorian Kitchen Garden guest-edited by Adam Curtis! The Repair Shop starring Jonathan Meades! The Great Dennis Pottery Throwdown! The forces of corporate blandness are so busy guarding the front door, they've completely forgotten about that cobbled little alley round the back, and they've left it wide open to a crafty assault. Might have to take out Jeremy Clarkson to get in, though.

NEXT WEEK: 1986!