A repeat of Innes Book of Records on BBC2 is a must-watch (although I’m having difficulty in pinpointing which episode it is – Genome doesn’t have any records of 1983 repeats).
ITV offers a couple of possibilities – Pig in the Middle and the first part of Death of an Expert Witness. I’ve had the Roy Marsden/Adam Dalgleish boxset sitting on the shelf for a while but I haven’t made a great deal of headway with it. I’ve no problem with drama series which take their time, but these P.D. James adaptations seem too leisurely even for me (DoaEW clocks in at an overgenerous seven episodes).
Still, this debut story does feature a vey watchable guest cast (Ray Brooks, Barry Foster and Geoffrey Palmer amongst others) so they might help me to make it through to the end (and after a few episodes I might even stop staring at Marsden’s very obvious hairpiece).
I’ll round off the evening with a piece of ephemera – The Very Hot Gossip Show – which the curious can find on YouTube.
Archive Television Musings 
The Friday after Good Friday and last day of the holiday programmes.
There are two notable changes. There are now four channels (although it would e another two years before we got Channel 4), and breakfast tv has started.
I probably wouldn’t have watched much tv that day, as I probably would have been working during the day, and ?Friday evening was Venture Scouts.
I do remember the Bernie Winters game show Make Me Laugh. It was based on the party game where one player has to keep a straight face while other players try to make them laugh. The stduio audience/contestants wore fancy dress, including a man in black and white minstrel make up, which you wouldn’t be allowed to do now, a woman dressed as Andy Pandy (or was that an episode of Hi De Hi), and a man dressed as the pervy businessman from The Kenny Everett Show.
My main memory of Make Me Laugh was not being able to watch John Craven’s Breakthrough (a documentary series about scientific discoveries) because my sister’s friend wanted to watch Make Me Laugh.
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My father’s diary for Wednesday 06 April includes the terrifying report that, “TV out of order – I think struck by lightening”, but I’m pretty sure that I watched The Railway Children for the first time that evening (followed by Points Of View). Not sure if I watched BBC1 or ITV programmes that teatime – I do remember watching both Freetime and Make Me Laugh at some point.
Thinking myself into what I might watch now if I was transported back into 1983, I reflect that this would be quite a good night to go out on. Although there’s plenty on that might be worth watching, there’s nothing to kick yourself about missing. I think I’d most likely take a punt on ‘Dancers: The Benefit’. A series of four single plays about the dance world sounds like quite an interesting project. I probably wouldn’t have the stamina to stay up till twenty past midnight watching A Flock Of Seagulls!
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1983 was the year that saw the ‘dawn’ of breakfast TV with both BBC1 & ITV launching their respective ‘wake up’ shows at the start of the year.
Good Morning Britain (aka TVam) was only two months old by April 1983, but poor viewing figures saw them revamp the show by dropping their original anchors David Frost and Anna Ford.
I believe a large part of TVam’s turn around success was down to the introduction of Roland Rat.
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