Thursday, 31 August 2017
779 The Trial of Lee Harvey Oswald
First viewed : 22 November 1986
Channel Four broadcast this legal marathon on the 23rd anniversary of the Kennedy assassination. It was as realistic as it could be given that the defendant had been dead for over 20 years. It was conducted by a genuine judge and the cases were argued by two high-powered lawyers, Manson-prosecutor Vincent Bugliosi for the prosecution and Gerry Spence, who won compensation for the family of nuclear whistle-blower Karen Silkwood, for the defence. The jury was selected according to normal Texan procedure. The witnesses were all genuine but it didn't tell you how many had declined to participate.
In the end Bugliosi was triumphant against the over-emotional Spence and got a guilty verdict.
Wednesday, 30 August 2017
778 Strike It Lucky
First viewed : Uncertain
This started at the end of October 1986 but I've absolutely no idea of when I first caught an episode. Based on a US game show Strike It Rich ,it was re-named here to avoid confusion with a recent BBC1 drama with that title. Strike It Lucky was a game show which tested general knowledge but also had elements of gambling and snakes and ladders as contestants risked landing on Hot Spots .
It was hosted by comedian Michael Barrymore who'd won New Faces in 1979 and been a regular on Royal Variety Performances but hadn't yet found the right TV vehicle. Strike It Lucky made him a household name and deservedly so for his manic energy and genuine interest in the contestants, the pre-game chat often lasting for well over 5 minutes.
The show ran for thirteen years before Barrymore wanted to pursue other projects. Alas for him that only lasted for a couple of years before the death of a young man in his swimming pool in 2001 and the prolonged uncertainty over what charges he would face in relation to it utterly destroyed his TV career. His sporadic appearances as a clearly reluctant participant in reality shows only underline his fall from grace.
Tuesday, 29 August 2017
777 Lost Empires
First viewed : 24 October 1986
This was another golden Granada adaptation , this time of JB Priestley's novel of music hall life just before the cataclysm of the First World War. David Plowright again called in family favours to get his brother-in-law Sir Laurence Olivier to appear in the series. I watched this one on my own ; I never understood why my mum, usually a sucker for period drama, wasn't interested.
The seven part serial is often remembered as providing the first leading role on TV for the 26-year old Colin Firth as the orphaned young man Richard Herncastle who goes to work for his uncle Nick ( John Castle ) , an icy, cynical, illusionist in a travelling music hall company. It's through Richard's eyes that we see a colourful world teetering on the brink of catastrophe. As well as learning stage craft, Richard also works his way through the female cast from true love, naive Nancy ( Beatie Edney ) to a dangerous liaison with older woman Julie ( Carmen du Sautoy ) plus casual encounters with Nonie ( Francesca McGregor ) , a saucy French acrobat and Lily ( Pamela Stephenson ) a sweet English rose on stage but a debauched voyeur in private.
Olivier played Harry Burrard in the first episode , a hopelessly out of date comedian with nowhere to go who interprets the merciless heckling as a political plot against him. Brian Glover played Julie's partner, Tommy Beamish a bullying boorish comedian. The notorious Christopher Rozycki popped in for one scene as a drunken Russian and chewed the scenery in fine style; he had a glass of whiskey in one hand and there wasn't much left by the end of the scene even though he hadn't drunk any of it.
Though somewhat bleak in tone, I really enjoyed it and am disappointed it's not more celebrated.
Monday, 28 August 2017
776 General Studies Art And Upheaval Songs of Protest
First viewed : October 1986
This was broadcast a few times so I can't be certain of the date. I am pretty certain it's the very last schools programme to feature here. It just caught my eye during a flick through the Radio Times. It was narrated by Mel Smith but also had an on-screen presenter Edward Hayward who produced many of the BBC's schools programming in the seventies and eighties. As the title suggests, it provided a brief look at the history of the protest song, zeroing in on Billie Holliday's anti-lynching protest Strange Fruit and finishing with Billy Bragg championing Jerusalem ( which I'd say was anticipatory rather than a protest but whatever ).
I note that the programme that preceded one of its broadcasts was "Media Studies - Inside Television Making News" which surprises me. I hadn't realised that the "subject" had become embedded that early.
Sunday, 27 August 2017
775 The Late Late Show
First viewed : Autumn 1986
This show is of course an institution in Ireland and the second longest-running talk show in the world after The Tonight Show in the US. For 37 years it was presented by Gay Byrne , in latter years also the show's producer, who retired just before the millennium and was responsible for breaking the taboo on public discussion of a number of controversial subjects in Catholic Ireland.
Channel Four used it to fill up their afternoon schedules in the second half of the eighties which was when I caught the odd episode but other than that . I don't think it's been regularly broadcast here. Byrne was perhaps a little too unctuous for Anglo-Saxon tastes.
One or two of its incidents have crossed over into the UK consciousness though. In 1992, it ended the ministerial career of Northern Ireland Secretary Peter Brooke who was prodded into giving a rendition of Oh My Darling Clementine on the same day as an IRA atrocity in Ulster. Not long after that, the nascent Boyzone appeared on the show and a nakedly hostile Byrne persuaded them to do their dance routine without the benefit of a backing track, a clip that's been much repeated since. Sadly, it did not kill their career off as he intended but full marks for trying Gay !
Friday, 25 August 2017
774 The Life and Loves of a She-Devil
First viewed : 8 October 1986
This is one of those where I can't quite put my finger on why I stuck with it - apart from the boredom of being on the dole of course - despite finding much of it unpleasant and distasteful. It was a four part adaptation of a Fay Weldon novel about a large, unattractive woman who executes a long and elaborate revenge plan against her husband and the woman for whom he abandoned her . I haven't read the novel so I don't know if its clearer there whether she actually makes a Satanic pact to achieve her ends as suggested by the series or merely takes on a new personality.
Newcomer Julie T Wallace played Ruth with Patricia Hodge as the scarlet woman, romantic novelist Mary Fisher. The husband Bobo was played by Dennis Waterman with such a lack of charm or personality that you couldn't understand why either of them wanted him . It was hard to know where your sympathies were supposed to lie in the series. Ruth's revenge plan involved such cruelty to innocents. including abandoning her own children and making Mary's mother ( Liz Smith ) appear incontinent in order to ruin Mary's idyll, that the latter seemed sympathetic by comparison. The plan also involved extreme personal degradation including a naked beating from a kinky judge ( Bernard Hepton ) in order to get Bobo a lengthy sentence after she frames him and then bonking with a priest ( Tom Baker, someone I never wanted to see naked ) before sending him on to Mary. In the final act she has extensive plastic surgery to look exactly like the now deceased Mary and moves back in with Bobo prompting the obvious question, what was it all for ? The series was also entirely filmed on VT giving it a suitably harsh look.
I did like the theme song, Warm Love Gone Cold by Christine Collister and took an interest in her career for some time afterwards. The series went down well both here and in America and there was a considerably bowdlerised film version starring Roseanne Barr and Meryl Streep in 1989.
Thursday, 24 August 2017
773 The Theban Plays
First viewed : 16 September 1986
Having completed the Shakespeare plays the year before, the BBC Two drama department turned their attention to the Greek playwrights with the three tragic plays by Sophocles broadcast on consecutive nights. I was interested because I'd studied the first one Oedipus Rex for A Levels three years earlier and I'd read the following two because they'd also been in the textbook we were given.
I think the story in the first one is pretty well known. Oedipus the king of Thebes is visited by a prophet bearing the exceedingly unwelcome news that the man he slew to get the throne and his bride was actually his father and his wife and mother to his four kids is actually his own mother. She tops herself and he is banished from the city by his brother-in-law Creon who then takes the throne himself. The second one Oedipus at Colonus isn't a barrel of laughs either with the blind Oedipus wandering the wastes as a beggar accompanied by loyal daughter Antigone and then plagued by unwelcome visitors including estranged son Polynices who receives only a curse for his trouble. The last one Antigone is more political in tone with a battle of wills between the titular heroine and the now tyrannical Creon over the burial of Polynices's body.
The plays were presented on a stark minimalist set with mix and match anachronistic clothing, Creon's final costume looking like it was on loan from General Pinochet. Anthony Quayle played Oedipus, something of a departure from his usual bluff and genial screen persona . John Shrapnel played the bullheaded Creon and Juliet Stevenson was the predictable choice for Antigone. The Chorus included such familiar faces as Ian Hogg, Peter Jeffrey and Bernard Hill.
It hasn't been repeated to date.
Wednesday, 23 August 2017
772 Paradise Postponed
First viewed : 15 September 1986
This was a flawed but interesting ten part serial which my mother enjoyed more than I did although I stuck with it. It was written by John Mortimer. Mortimer was a genuine polymath, a prominent barrister who also wrote copiously after working in a wartime propaganda unit and achieved success in both fields. As a lawyer he achieved prominence in a number of obscenity trials such as the Oz trial and then the Never Mind The Bollocks Case. As a writer he came to the fore through TV in the late seventies as the creator of Rumpole of the Bailey. In the eighties, he took on a third role as an arch-critic of the Thatcher government, using his public profile to hector the electorate about the iniquities of Tory policies . These harangues, not helped by his personal likeness to a supercilious toad, did the socialist cause more harm than good.
Paradise Postponed was a lament for the decline of post-war idealism which demonstrated a degree of self-knowledge not immediately apparent in his public appearances. Like Bleak House , the story rested on an inheritance issue. Why did Simeon Simcox ( Michael Hordern ) a socialist vicar in East Anglia but cushioned by the wealth from shares in a family brewery leave those shares to a locally-born Tory Cabinet minister Leslie Titmus ( David Threlfall ) ? Most interested in solving that mystery are his disinherited sons , Henry ( Peter Egan ) , a self-interested writer long since moved to the right and Fred ( Paul Shelley ) a liberal but rather indolent doctor. The story unfolds mainly in flashbacks illustrating the changes in social attitudes since the days of Attlee.
The main flaws were twofold. Firstly, a rather mechanical plot relying too much on Arthur Nubble ( Kenny Ireland ) , Fred's entrepreneurial old schoolfriend periodically popping up with a revelation to move it forward. The great secret becomes obvious well before the final episode. The other was that Mortimer tried to cram in too much social commentary so that characters often became mouthpieces for his themes. I still cringe at the memory of Henry's scene with his daughter Francesca ( Leonie Mellinger ) where she goes into a rant about how unidealistic she is, concluding with "And I don't give a damn about great stinking whales !"
Threlfall had already caught the eye in Nicholas Nickleby and The Gathering Seed but it was Titmus that made his name as an actor, transforming from a gauche provincial nobody to a smooth-talking ,high-ranking politician with the aid of the Radio 3 cricket commentary. There was much interested speculation in the papers about who Titmus might be based on. Norman Tebbit was an obvious candidate but Peter Walker was also mentioned a lot. Mortimer was pretty fair to Titmus. He gets where he is by hard work and determination and though his marriage to volatile Charlie ( Zoe Wanamaker ) is politically advantageous , he does treat her with genuine care and affection. He is clearly morally superior to the local Tory old guard that despise him.
Mortimer went on to write a sequel, Titmus Regained , a less ambitious three parter in 1991 which I didn't see. Apart from Threlfall, I think only Paul Shelley returned from the original cast. It didn't have anything like the same impact. Rumpole of the Bailey finished on TV in the following year ( although he was resurrected on radio in the noughties ). Mortimer's star then dimmed, particularly after the death of Labour leader John Smith in 1994. His successor Tony Blair regarded the "Labour luvvies " in the entertainment industry as an electoral embarrassment and froze them out. Mortimer continued to write, mainly about Rumpole, until his death in 2009.
Tuesday, 22 August 2017
771 The Making of Aliens
First viewed : 9 September 1986
This was a late night programme on ITV which was effectively an extended advert for the film with director James Cameron being careful not to give too much away. It did whet my appetite for the movie - I'd enjoyed the first one - but I didn't go to see it because I still owed my Mum some money from my last university term and thought it would be self-indulgent to go to the cinema or buy records while that was the case. It was one of the first videos I took out when we got a VCR player at the end of 1989 and I wasn't disappointed.
Monday, 21 August 2017
770 Casualty
First viewed : Autumn 1986
This TV phenomenon began life as a replacement for Juliet Bravo on a Saturday evening and has never relinquished its spot since. The genius of the show is that the setting lets the writers get away with melodrama every week and allows a regular parade of guest stars to check in and out ( sometimes permanently ). As well as their coping with each medical crisis the writers throw their way, the programme looks at the personal lives of the staff with story arcs developing over the course of a season. Both its creators, Jeremy Brock and Paul Unwin, were passionate left wing champions of the NHS but with The Monocled Mutineer drawing away most of the Tory fire , the launch of Casualty was uncontroversial.
I don't have a fascination with medical matters and didn't watch the opening episode but did catch at least one from the first series in order to see the lunatic over-acting of Christopher Rozycki as the Polish porter Kuba which seemed to be the main talking point. I became a more regular viewer in the second season when Kate Hardie joined the cast as a student nurse who had an affair with Charlie ( Derek Thompson ) although she wasn't in it for long and I dropped out again once she'd gone.
I became a regular viewer at the start of the nineties when Nigel Le Vaillant was the star as passionate registrar Julian Chapman. His interaction with the steadier Charlie was one of the highpoints of the series. Another favourite character from this time was Kelly Liddle ( Adie Allen ) a student nurse that couldn't hack it. Sadly Le Vaillant decided to quit in Season 7 and although I eventually warmed to his successor Mike Barrett ( Clive Mantle ) it wasn't quite the same without Julian.
The show's writers responded to the criticism of left wing bias in Season 8 by introducing a character , Rachel Longworth ( Jane Gurnett ) a nurse who actually supported the market-led reforms to the NHS. At first she was a bit of a joke, just an unlikely mouthpiece, but eventually they let her become a real character who had a fling with Barrett . That series also saw Tara Moran from recently deceased soap Families join as a nurse but she turned out to be a fly by night. Another favourite of mine Suzanna Hamilton came in as a young doctor with no bedside manner but she too departed before the end of the season, a great shame as her character could have been developed a lot more. Long servng nurse Duffy ( Cathy Shipton ) left towards the end of the series leaving Charlie as the only survivor from the original cast.
Season 9 introduced one of the most irritating characters in bolshie, stud-in-the-nose nurse Jude Kocarnik ( Lisa Coleman ) while Baz ( Julia Watson ) returned from the first series and became embroiled in a long running affair with Charlie.
I think I lost interest some time in Season 10 ( 1995-96 ). I came back to it briefly after I got married ( December 1997 ) noting lad's mag favourite Claire Goose in the cast but my interest was finally killed off by the scene at the end of Season 12 ( 1998 ) when the cast broke out into a version of "Everlasting Love" which was then released as a single. I just thought that was so naff and unworthy of the series.
Inevitably, it's been on in the living room since then and I've caught odd snatches but never been tempted to re-engage with the series.
Sunday, 20 August 2017
769 Call Me Mister
First viewed : Autumn 1986
After four seasons of Bergerac , John Nettles wanted a break so there was only a Christmas special in 1986. Creator Robert Banks Stewart and the crew came up with this one to fill the gap in the autumn schedule. With Crocodile Dundee riding high in the cinemas, this series looked to tap into the vogue for bluff Aussie guys by casting Steve Bisley as Sir Jack Bartholomew , a former Australian police officer who inherits a title and estate in England to the dismay of his posh relatives played by Haydn Gwynne and Rupert Frazer. He prefers to set up as a private detective instead with the help of much-younger girlfriend and part-time singer Julie ( Dulice Leicier from Grange Hill ).
Unsurprisingly, it was fairly similar to Bergerac but a bit lighter in tone. As with Brush Strokes , I gave it a try for one episode . I thought it was passable but not good enough to become appointment TV.
When Bergerac returned the following year, Call Me Mister slipped quietly out of memory.
Saturday, 19 August 2017
768 Brush Strokes
First viewed : 1 September 1986
This was the latest comedy from the Esmonde and Larbey writing team ( Please Sir, The Good Life, Ever Decreasing Circles ) and starred Karl Howman , a familiar face playing Cockney villains in The Sweeney, Minder and The Professionals, as Jacko, a womanising painter. The producers seemed to know they might have a problem with the material from the start; I remember Howman in The Radio Times giving a defensive interview insisting that the series celebrated women rather than demeaned them and that was before the first episode was even broadcast !
I only watched that first episode which introduced Jacko and his boss ( Gary Waldhorn ) and saw Jacko trying to date two girls at once in different parts of the same pub. I thought it was crap and saw no more of the Dulux-coated lothario's adventures. However it was popular and ran for 5 series until 1991.
As with Carla Lane and Bread , Brush Strokes was the last major success for the Esmonde-Larbey team, their nineties efforts such as Mulberry which also starred Howman, leaving little impression.
Friday, 18 August 2017
767 The Monocled Mutineer
First viewed : 31 August 1986
This series seems half-forgotten now but in 1986 it was deeply controversial. It was based on a book of the same name by William Allison and John Fairley published in 1978 adapted for the screen by Alan Bleasdale. It traced the career of a criminal called Percy Toplis who had spells in the army and was shot dead by police near Penrith in 1920 while on the run for the murder of a taxi driver . While in the army, he sometimes posed as an officer, with a monocle as part of his disguise, to pull girls or impress friends . That much is undisputed. However the book alleged that Toplis was the ringleader of the Etaples mutiny of 1917 and that he was pursued after the war by the Secret Service who arranged the ambush leading to his death. Historians with no axe to grind pointed out that the records showed that Toplis's regiment was on its way to India at the time of the mutiny, an event that the authors had greatly exaggerated. This led Tory politicians and the Daily Mail to excoriate the BBC for supposed left wing bias for advertising the drama as "a true-life story".
I missed nearly all of it first time round because I had become reconciled with my old friends Michael and Sean and went to the pub with them on a Sunday night instead. I did see a small part of the first episode in The Red Lion, Littleborough with them, showing the horrendously botched execution of a young deserter. When the series was repeated in 1988, I watched it right through and it was an impressive piece of drama with Paul McGann furthering his reputation in the main role.
At the time of the broadcast , a witness to Toplis's death was still alive, a man called De Courcey Parry who did not enter the controversy. When I used to attend slide shows at Kewsick's Moot Hall in the early nineties ,the host Ray McHaffie would always point him out as an old man attending a summer fete on one of his slides.
Thursday, 17 August 2017
766 Three Sovereigns for Sarah
First viewed : 28 August 1986
This US mini-series took on the task of presenting a more factual account of the Salem Witch Trials of 1692 than Arthur Miller's The Crucible . It told the story from the point of view of Sarah Cloyce ( Vanessa Redgrave ) , the survivor of three sisters accused of witchcraft who spent the next decade fighting to clear her executed sisters' names. Sarah does not appear in The Crucible , a victim of Miller's compositing but one of her sisters, Rebecca Nurse, does.
After ten years, Sarah gets a hearing from an examining magistrate ( Patrick McGoohan ) and points out the social tensions in the village that led to the accusations. He eventually decides that he cannot establish the full facts a decade later but grants Sarah three sovereigns as symbolic compensation for the three damaged lives hence the title.
Wednesday, 16 August 2017
765 Baby, Baby
First viewed : Summer 1986
This was a late night Channel 4 show taking a light-hearted look at the joys of early parenthood. As both of the main The Tube presenters had recently become parents, they were the obvious choices to host it As it would be another 21 years before I became really interested in the subject, I think I only caught one episode. I remember a feature calculating the opportunity cost of having a sprog with yobbish chants of "We still want the baby!" after every item. There was also a female celeb - I can't recall who - telling how desperate she was for a drink of Perrier Water while she was giving birth. In addition, think this was where I came across Rowland Rivron for the first time
Tuesday, 15 August 2017
764 Blockbusters
First viewed : Uncertain
I've no idea when I first caught this but the "dole period" would be the best guess.
Blockbusters had been running since 1983, an early evening general knowledge quiz with A Level students as contestants and the nicest guy on TV as quizmaster. Bob Holness had spent much of his previous career on radio but became a much-loved TV personality through the show.
The programme had a rather strange format with the built-in unfairness of having two contestants against one although the solo performer had to answer one less question to make a line.
I liked it but , once I started work, it was on a bit too early to catch. However it did become a part of my holiday routine in Keswick in the early nineties. I'd come back from my walk around 4-5 pm and then have a couple of hours or so to recuperate before going out for something to eat and watching Blockbusters was one of the things that filled the gap. It was then that I first caught the famous hand jive sequence where all that week's contestants ran on to the stage and did a dance with glimpses of Bob himself having a bop in the background.
The show was initially cancelled in 1993 but has had no less than four separate revivals, mostly on satellite channels. Bob hosted the first one on Sky in 1994 . Sadly he died in 2012 after a decade of ill health.
Monday, 14 August 2017
763 No One Speaks for the Dead
First viewed : 19 August 1986
This was a one-off documentary on ITV highlighting the fact that men who killed their partners could get away with impugning their characters to claim provocation and get a reduction to manslaughter . This was because the law forbade their friends speaking up for them as that would amount to hearsay evidence. The film-maker Judy Lever produced a score of witnesses in three such cases who could not be heard.
I don't know if it's been rectified since or the problem still remains.
Sunday, 13 August 2017
762 The Way They Were
First viewed : 4 August 1986
Neatly timed to follow Tony Wilson's Festival of The Tenth Summer in Manchester which had climaxed a fortnight earlier , Channel 4 broadcast this compilation of clips from his groundbreaking So It Goes and What's On on Granada in the late seventies, programmes that completely passed me by at the time. It was fantastic of course with almost every performance worthy of comment. Some of the tapes had perished a bit over the intervening decade and were broadcast with an apology. Included were :
- The Sex Pistols with Glen Matlock doing Anarchy in the UK
- A damaged recording of Elvis Costello's Alison
- Pete Shelley 's hopeless plea of "Don't gob on me" before What Do I Get
- Iggy Pop doing The Passenger with that horse's tail protruding from his arse
- XTC ( Neon Shuffle ) and The Tom Robinson Band ( Glad To Be Gay ) , two acts normally excised from this sort of thing
- The early Fall line up doing Industrial Estate with keyboard player Una Baines looking like she;s dropped by from the local library
- Joy Division, saved to the end with Shadowplay . Ian Curtis was in restrained form compared to their performance on Something Else a year later ( their only other TV appearance ) and the director decided to compensate for their lack of stage presence with primitive graphical overlays which the band hated
By what I assume was a fantastic coincidence, the first ad break featured that Roger Daltrey ad for American Express , you know the one where he boasts about his trout farm that has dogged him ever since. The irony was exquisite.
Saturday, 12 August 2017
761 Fighting Back
First viewed : 4 August 1986
This was a five-part Monday night serial, a sort of Cathy Come Home for the eighties although rather more optimistic in tone. Faded pop singer Hazel O' Connor returned to acting as Viv Sharpe a feisty single mother fighting the system in multicultural Bristol . Viv has two kids, Neil ( Tony Carney ) by feckless Scouse boyfriend Bruce ( Derek Thompson again ) and Yvonne ( Cheryl Maiker ) by black drug dealer Danny ( Malcolm Frederick ). She later completes the sexual hat-trick by sleeping with slippery Asian lawyer Eddy ( Madhav Sharma ). Before that though, Viv has her kids taken away but fights back from squat-land getting involved in local politics with the aid of a lesbian couple.
It was OK although some of the characters veered towards stereotypes. It wasn't really my mum's thing at all so I watched it on and off, the first and final episodes and perhaps one in between.
Despite a strong performance as Viv, there were no more TV roles for Hazel who divided her time thereafter between stage roles and trying to resurrect her singing career. She still tours regularly from her base in Ireland. As we'll soon see, Thompson hung around in Bristol for his next TV role.
Friday, 11 August 2017
760 The Price
First viewed : July 1986
I missed this when first broadcast at the beginning of 1985 and didn't catch the first episode when it was repeated over consecutive nights the following year. However, once in I was gripped.
Peter Barkworth, in the middle of a real hot streak playing troubled middle aged men on TV, was Geoffrey Carr, head of a large computer firm whose wife Frances ( Harriet Walter ) and daughter Kate ( Aingeal Grehan ) are kidnapped by a pair of IRA renegades ( one of them , Frank played by Derek Thompson ) and held for ransom. While Geoffrey starts vacillating, looking for a way to pay without losing his grip on the company, Frances begins a relationship with Frank. I remember a scene of them screwing in full view of Kate, the latter unconvinced by Mum's explanation that she's only doing it to ensure their survival. They do survive but there's a little sting in the tail for Geoffrey.
The series is now hard to obtain which is a pity.
Thursday, 10 August 2017
759 Rewind
First viewed : Summer 1986
Rewind was a stopgap emergency programme that filled the gap in the Friday evening schedule when The Chart Show was taken off air due to a dispute with The Musician's Union. It simply consisted of live performances from the channel's still-young music archive ( i.e first broadcast on The Tube, Switch , Whatever You Want etc ) . Of course I'd seen most of them before and the interruption to The Chart Show was a considerable irritation to me. The dispute was resolved at the end of August.
Wednesday, 9 August 2017
758 Screenplay
First viewed : 23 July 1986
Screenplay was the latest umbrella brand for single feature length dramas on BBC Two. It started in July 1986
Brick Is Beautiful ( 23 July 1986 )
This was the third play broadcast and was the tale of a young unemployed Mancunian, Steve ( Christopher Wild ) who takes advantage of Thatcher's controversial Enterprise Allowance Scheme and starts selling old bricks from derelict industrial sites. He is successful but finds he has to jettison his girlfriend ( Caroline Milmoe ) and old mates ( including Grange Hill's Terry Sue Patt ) in the process. This was hammered home in the final scene where he has to clear them off one of his sites - "You're standing in money - my money".
Tuesday, 8 August 2017
757 No Place To Rest
First viewed : 14 July 1986
This was a one-off documentary on BBC1 produced by BBC TV Wales. It reported on the scandal of Cefn Coed Cemetery in Wales which the local authority were not managing with due care and attention to say the least. They seemed intent on turning it into a Hammer Horror set with broken stones and scattered body parts strewn around the place. The council stayed tight-lipped and didn't participate in the programme. Merthyr is a Labour rotten borough and I suspect heads stayed in place.
Monday, 7 August 2017
756 Under Fire
First viewed : July 1986
This was a political interview programme broadcast in the Granada region and presented by Tony Wilson ( of course ) in which he interrogated a prominent politician ( not necessarily from the north west ) aided by one of their political opponents.
I'm more sure of the dating because when Roy Hattersley appeared on the programme, his co-inquisitor was Cyril Smith who was teasing about whether he would stand again in Rochdale, a position he qualified at the Liberal Assembly that September.
The other two episodes I remember had the Liberal MP David Alton and SDP leader David Owen in the chair . The latter had Jack Straw as his co-inquisitor who completely lost it at the end. Straw claimed to have worked for Owen in the past although, looking at his c.v ,.I'm not sure when that would have been because he was a researcher for World in Action when Owen was Foreign Secretary. anyhow the exchange went :
STRAW : Politicians have to be strong and I know you're weak
OWEN : You didn't think so at the time
STRAW : Yes I did
OWEN : I don't come on television programmes just to rubbish other politicians
STRAW : You betrayed the Labour party and I can never forgive you for that !
OWEN : The Labour party betrayed me
It ran for just one series.
Sunday, 6 August 2017
755 Return To Eden
First viewed : 30 June 1986
Here's a clean break and the start of one of the densest parts of this blog. My university days came to a close at the end of June 1986. I had the offer of a place on an M.A. course at Leeds but my efforts to secure funding for it were unsuccessful and deservedly so - it would have been generous to call my application letter half-hearted. I kept the option open as long as possible and attended a three day training course for Executive members of the Union in July but eventually I had to decline the offer and resign my post as Communications Officer.
I had no real option but to return home and start looking for work. I'd not prepared for this. I'd had one desultory careers interview at Leeds but not acted on any of the advice received. I was reliant on looking through the newspapers and sending applications off and was kept to the task by my mother who was old-school Tory in her attitude to unemployment benefit and thought it scandalous that I was "on the dole". I didn't have a moment's peace during the day but she did at least allow me to watch the TV in an evening.
On the first Monday back home Return To Eden started. It followed an Australian mini-series of the same title which had been screened here in 1984. I didn't see that but it concerned a plain heiress Stephanie Harper ( Rebecca Gilling ) whose young husband Greg throws her to a crocodile aided by her treacherous best friend Jilly. Stephanie survives the mauling and is taken by a bushman to a brilliant plastic surgeon Dan Marshall ( James Smillie ) who turns her into a supermodel and marries her. Her new wealth and identity enables her to turn the tables on her foes and at the end Greg is killed ( but see below ) and Jilly imprisoned.
The mini-series was so successful that for the follow-up it was turned into a 22-part glossy soap opera to compete with the American giants. The British critics absolutely eviscerated it , the Daily Telegraph accusing it of "plumbing new depths" in lowbrow entertainment but I think they missed the point. Return To Eden was trashy but knowingly so and gloriously entertaining. It was Dynasty taken a few notches further with each plot twist more ridiculously over the top than the one before and dialogue so bad that each line was a test of the actor's ability to keep a straight face.
It started seven years on with Jilly's release from prison and the revelation that she was actually Stephanie's half-sister. The original actress Wendy Hughes was replaced by the gorgeous Austro-Italian actress Peta Toppano who I was instantly smitten with despite the fact that she was playing an insanely jealous, scheming superbitch. Stephanie was remarkably slow to realise that the revelation of their sisterhood had made Jilly worse not better and fell prey to her alliance with business rival Jake Sanders ( Daniel Abineri ) who turned out to be Greg's half-brother seeking revenge on both of them ( no explanation of why Stephanie hadn't met him before of course ). They knock Stephanie off her perch and she has to come back once more - this time in disguise as an Arab princess - in order to wreak her revenge. That was the main plot but there were many sub-plots involving Stephanie's children as diversions.
In the suitably ludicrous final episode Stephanie, having lured Jilly into a ruinous business hoax and revealed herself , offers to put her entire fortune on the outcome of a horse race , her's against Jake's. enabling all the cast to gather for the finale including Jilly's unseen caller who is obviously going to be Greg back from the dead. Stephanie wins the race but magnanimously lets Jake and Jilly attend her party. Jilly is now pregnant and pretends to faint but pulls a gun on Stephanie when the trio are upstairs. Jake intervenes and gets shot in the struggle. He then has an extravagant death scene, staggering around then falling down the stairs in front of the party guests, some of whom are clearly amused, before conking out with a blood-spattered Stephanie, having wrested the gun from Jilly stood at the top of the stairs with it. Jilly then appears accusing Stephanie of the deed.
It was a suitable cliffhanger for a second season that was never made, ratings in Australia not being good enough to justify the expense. The main players were subsequently re-hired to shoot ten more minutes to be tacked on to repeat showings resolving some of the threads though not all; the return of Greg storyline was left hanging. The series had a late night repeat here in 1990 and has since been shown on satellite channels.
Saturday, 5 August 2017
754 Naked Video
First viewed : 2 June 1986
I remember seeing this at the "Cardboard House ". That was a house in Headingley occupied by four friends of mine from the first year at the hall of residence. I had wanted to go with them but it wasn't to be ; now I lived very close to them and was often round in those last weeks. The "Cardboard " epithet was pejorative ; one of the occupants , a Geordie guy called Andy, had acquired the nickname "Cardboard Man" i.e. thin and "stiff" ( the ultimate insult ) during that first year , after protesting at the drunken rampage of a gang of morons when everyone else was keeping their heads down , and it followed him into the shared house .
On Monday 2.6.86 . I was watching World Cup Grandstand there and when it finished at 9pm we switched over to The Fall and Rise of Reginald Perrin. Unfortunately for Naked Video . it was the classic episode where Jimmy announces his secret army so the show which followed it had its work cut out to keep us laughing.
We gave Naked Video a fair chance but were soon picking holes in it. Naked Video derived from a BBC Scotland radio show Naked Radio that had been running since 1981 with an emphasis on topical satire. When it came to TV, Gregor Fisher and Elaine C Smith crossed over but were balanced out by the English Helen Lederer and Welsh John Sparkes so the show was less overtly Scottish in nature.
It came across as a pale imitation of Not The Nine O Clock News . I remember us ( a group of either Alliance or soft Tory supporters ) protesting at how many of the sketches had an anti-nuclear theme.
I should mention that the show did launch three notable comic creations in Rab C Nesbitt and The Baldy Man ( both Fisher ) and Welsh nerd Shadwell ( Sparkes ). It ran for five seasons, finishing in 1991.
Friday, 4 August 2017
753 World Cup 1986
First viewed : 31 May 1986
While not being terribly enamoured of the winners, I think I'd have to nominate this as my favourite of all the World Cups I've seen, the main reason being that it coincided with the end of my university days, a time remembered with great fondness. Many of the games were watched in friends' houses which considerably enhanced the experience.
The tournament was originally handed to Colombia but by 1982 it was clear they weren't ready and it went to Mexico instead. After the Germany-Austria stitch-up in 1982, the final games in the group stages had to be played simultaneously and after the first group stage, every match was played on a knockout basis.
England qualified fairly comfortably and got a pretty easy group but went into the tournament with a problem. Captain Bryan Robson injured his shoulder in a warm-up game. My friend Sean put it succintly "every time he falls over his arm comes off". England's first game was against Portugal which presented me with a dilemma as my first exam was the next day. Eventually I made a deal with myself that I'd just watch the first half then go to bed. Mercifully I missed the worst of it. An inhibited Robson had to come off just after Portugal scored the only goal of the game and England were in trouble .
The discussion of England's difficulties before someone else's game gave rise to one of my favourite punditry moments. Trevor Francis hadn't been selected for the squad but was on a satellite link from Spain so he could be part of ITV's World Cup team. Brian Moore asked the panel what could be done to improve England's chances and Kevin Keegan took the opportunity to laud his ex-team mate at Newcastle , Peter Beardsley. He went into a long promotion of Beardsley's abilities then realised they hadn't brought Francis in for a while and suddenly said "I don't know what you think Trev ?"
FRANCIS : ( taken by surprise ) Wha-oh. Are you asking me Kev ?
BRIAN MOORE : ( cutting in ) Very briefly Trevor, the teams are coming out !
FRANCIS : ( totally deadpan ) Well very briefly Brian , I've never seen Beardsley play
( Sounds of corpsing in the studio as they cut to the start of the game )
I saw England's next game against the mighty Morocco in the Student Union with some mates. Things went to pieces after 42 minutes when Robson's arm duly fell out again and he'd hardly left the pitch before Ray Wilkins joined him in the dressing room for throwing the ball at the referee. England held on for a 0-0 draw to ever louder shouts of abuse from the student hordes.
That meant it was all or nothing against already-qualified Poland. Robson was forced to bring in the in-form Everton duo of Peter Reid and Trevor Steven and selected Beardsley instead of useless Mark Hateley, surely one of England's worst ever players. England duly saw off Poland 3-0 , a hat-trick turning Gary Lineker into a superstar. England then beat Paraguay by the same scoreline with Lineker scoring twice. I don't think I really need to say how the next game against Argentina panned out.
ITV definitely had the best team of pundits with Brian Clough regularly locking horns with the outspoken Mick Channon especially when the latter suggested that Germany deliberately lost their fixture against Denmark in order to play Morocco in the next round - "You'd better watch what you say young man !" Channon was also noted for his persistent mispronunciation of "Lineker " as "Lin-acre". Rather sadly, it turned out to be Channon's swansong as a pundit. He had just been given a free transfer by Portsmouth and , despite rumours that he was on his way to Spotland at one point, the World Cup proved to be the end of his connection with football as he built up a successful business as a racehorse trainer.
Denmark were something of a surprise package at the Finals. They came through their group winning all three games including a 6-1 demolition of a Uruguay team whose sole aim appeared to be the maiming of their opponents and former Liverpool target Michael Laudrup looked set to be a superstar. Unfortunately, they came a real cropper in the next game against Spain who exposed all their defensive frailties and thrashed them 5-1. I remember watching that one in someone's loft-bedroom and trying an onion bhaji for the first time.
Other memorable games were Pat Jennings's swansong for Northern Ireland against Brazil, Scotland failing to beat Uruguay despite their opponents picking up a red card in the first minute, Belgium coming good at the right time to beat the fancied Soviets 4-3 and France edging out Brazil on penalties after Zico had missed one during the game having just come on.
The last games were played after I'd left university and I watched the Argies beat the Germans in the Final back at home.
Other memorable games were Pat Jennings's swansong for Northern Ireland against Brazil, Scotland failing to beat Uruguay despite their opponents picking up a red card in the first minute, Belgium coming good at the right time to beat the fancied Soviets 4-3 and France edging out Brazil on penalties after Zico had missed one during the game having just come on.
The last games were played after I'd left university and I watched the Argies beat the Germans in the Final back at home.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)