Hello. Welcome to my blog about British archive television. This will highlight programmes I’ve been watching whilst my Twitter feed – embedded in the blog and also directly accessable via @archivetvmus71 – contains many more archive treats.
The posts are broken up into categories (by decade and type – comedy, drama, etc). You can also explore via the tags lower down the page. Many of the programmes which have multiple posts can also be accessed via the top of the main menu (BBC/ITV/Christmas TV/Doctor Who/Grange Hill).
These top menu options have the posts re-arranged from oldest to newest (WordPress blogs display the newest posts by default). So if you’re looking to read about, say, The Day of the Triffids episode by episode, then selecting it via the BBC button next to the Home button is the best option – since the posts will be in the correct order!
If you notice any broken links or have any comments or suggestions then please leave a message on the relevant post or drop me an email at archivetvmusings@gmail.com
I also have a theatre related blog at Theatre Musings.
Archive Television Musings 
I’ve said a lot about Inferno already. Saturday morning children’s tv was non-existent on BBC at that point. There was another chance to see Jimmy Perry’s favourite episode of Dad’s Army, Branded. Chronicle looked at the SS Great Britain, and Disco 2 featured Bobby Darin and Free.
The Liberal Party lost half of the seats in the general election, but it was the first election since before the war when they had a candidate in every constituency.
The Omega Factor should not be confused with The Odessa File which featured Mary Tamm, whereas the former featured Louise Jameson. Nor should it be confused with the Aphrodite Inheritance which was completely different. Radio Times spelt Omega with the Greek letter omega instead of a capital O. And it’s got nothing to do with the Time Lord Omega.
But the most interesting post today was the cutting about Jackanory.
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I liked Tim Dickson’s selection of photographs. Who was the lady in the picture with Barry Letts and Terrance Dicks. I recognized Douglas Camfield. Barry Letts later grew a beard, and Terrance Dicks shaved off his moustache, but later grew a beard.
Don Houghton’s other Doctor Who story was The Mind of Evil which featured his wife Pik-Sen Lim as the Chinese Ambassador. It was one of three Doctor Who serials to feature subtitles, the others being the Christmas episode of Daleks’ Masterplan and Curse of Fenric.
I had a friend who was a Doctor Who fan and a science teacher, and she said her local newsagent had never heard of Doctor Who Magazine or New Scientist.
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Glenda Jackson’s best remembered tv appearance was probably her guest appearance on The Morcambe and Wise Show, but her greatest contribution to television was Elizabeth R, which coincidentally was one of the programmes in today’s archive tv listing.
Another BBC2 programme getting a repeat on BBC1 was The Goodies: Kitten Kong.
Children’s tv was good that day. The Adventure’s of Parsley, Magic Rounabout, and Hector’s Hosuse, two out of three isn’t bad. But there was an outcry from adults who watched Magic Roundabout. Also Top Cat and regular Children’s BBC staples Play School, Jackanory and Blue Peter (with new presenter Lesley Judd).
Top of the Pops’ line-up was:
Nut Rocker by B Bumble and the Stingers played over the charts
Take Me Back ‘Ome by Slade
Supersonic Rocket Ship by the Kinks
Pan’s People dancing to Rockin’ Robin by the Jackson Five
Oh Girl by the Chi-Lites
Ooh-wakka-doo-wakka-day by Gilbert O’Sullivan
Circles by the New Seekers
Little Willy by the Sweet
The number one Vincent by Don Mclean
Rock n Roll by Gary Glitter played over the closing titles.
YZIYZIZ UFIMVFC DZH Z XSROW ZYFHVI DSLHV IRTSGUFO KOZXV DZH Z KIRHLM MLG Z HXSLLO
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The Green Death was one of the more memorable stories from the penultimate Jon Pertwee series. If someone sat on the grass for a while, and when they got up their skin was stained green other people would say “You’ve got the green death!”
It was the first Jon Pertwee story to get an archive feature in Doctor Who Magazine. It was in one of the early monthly issues and took the form off a UNIT File.
The Doctor wore the checked overcoat which he later wore in The Five Doctors.
There wasn’t much in the way of Saturday morning children’s tv, although it was the summer. BBC1 just had a Watch With Mother Programme and a couple of other repeats.
I was going to say that Jim’ll Fix It was a spin-ff from Clunk Click, but it’s not quite true. Clunk Click was the first programme to feature the Magic Chair. But originally Bill Cotten offered the Fix It programme to Harry Secombe who turned it down. But then he thought of Jimmy Saville, because they’d decided not to continue with Clunk Click which lacked a proper focus, so he gave Jimmy Saville a show with a definite focus.
Doctor Who’s granddaughter was born on Stan Larel’s fiftieth birthday. That clip from Way Out West was used in the first scene of Ken Russell’s play about Frederick Delius where Eric Fenby was working as a cinema pianist. But Way Out West was made three years after Delius died and isn’t a silent film.
Victoria’s father was in Hancock: The Lift, while the headmaster from Please Sir played a vicar. The Lift was later remade with Paul Merton, but this time shot inside a real lift.
In the documentary Thirty Years in the Tardis Terry Nation said that the Daleks were based on the Nazis, and Ben Aaronovitch adds that it’s not a subtle thing, it’s really obvious. And likewise if you’ve watched an episode of Hancock or listened to the radio shows, and then you watch an episode of Magic Roundabout it’s really obvious that Dougal was based on Tony Hancock.
YLD GRVH ZIV XLLO
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Wow! And episode of Top of the Pops from 1976 that still exists!
By 1976 Marc Bolan had moved away from glam rock and gone back to basic rock n roll. The band look more like proto-type new wave than glam rock.
One of your correspondents asked what sort of music he would have made if he’d ;lived. In 1977 he hosted his own tv show on ITV, and the show was running when he died. The programmes were recorded and the last two episodes were broadcast after his death. Guests on his show included new wave acts such as the Jam, the Boomtown Rats, and Generation X. So while some glam rock stars shied away from punk, Marc Bolan embraced it.
T-Rex were the first act on that week’s Top of the Pops. (I think at that stage the charts were played over the Top of the Pops theme tune.) The rest of the line-up was:
Heart on My Sleeve by Gallagher and Lyle
Sold My Rock ‘n’ Roll (Gave It For Funky Soul) by Linda ans the Funky Boys
Show Me the Way by Peter Frampton
My Sweet Rosalie by Brotherhood of Man
Jolene by Dolly Parton
Shake It Down by Mud
Someone’s Rocking My Dreamboat by Murray Head
The Boys Are Back inn Town by Thin Lizzy
Ruby Flipper dancing to Young Hearts Free by Candi Station
You Are My Love by Liverpool Express
The number one I’ve Got a Brand New Combine Harvester by the Wurzels
Tonight’s the Night by Rod Stewart
I don’t remember Ruby Flipper. (At that stage I was usually doing mu homework when Top of the Pops was On as I usually watched children’s tv and did my homework after tea._
Peter Frampton did the voices of the adults in the Charlie Brown cartoons.
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Correction:
I don’t remember Ruby Flipper. (At that stage I was usually doing mu homework when Top of the Pops was On as I usually watched children’s tv and did my homework after tea.) I just remem,ber watching Top of the Pops during the autumn of 1976 and finding out that instead of Pan’s People they had a new dance troupe called Lags and Co.
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47 years and 1 day ago it was Saturday. Doctor Who had finished for the summer, but he came back for Seaside Special. You showed that clip about a year ago. Bruce Forsyth’s wife was in the parade. The programme also featured Ken Dodd, Charlie Cairoli and the Goodies.
On Saturday morning children’s tv on BBC1 consisted of three repeats, while ITV had a longer selection of programmes under the umbrella title Saturday Scene. (Saturday Scene was ahead of its time, it was a forerunner of ITV’s Watch It and BBC’s broom cupboard.) It was the summer when children should be out playing, but would Saturday morning children’s telly improve in the autumn.
For some reason I thought Little House on the Prairie was on ITV. (BBC has The Waltons.)
In 1976 the Viking probe landed on Mars. They didn’t find ant life on Mars, but a nine year old boy wrote to Radio Times suggesting that little green men held up photographs of a barren Martian surface to fool NASA. The same issue printed a letter from a retired postman who watched Camberwick Green with his grandson and pinted out some of the regulations that Peter the postman made such as handing out letters in the street and leaving his mailbag unattended.
A year later ITV showed Alternative 3. It was broadcast in June but they showed the date April the 1st on screen several times. It was probably the third most famous tv hoax after the Panorama spaghetti hoax and Ghostwatch, and a latter day Mercury Theatre War of the Worlds.
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54 years today it was the end of an era for Doctor Who. It was the end of the Troughton era and the last story in black and white. And a controversial change of direction for the series’ format.
I never was happy about Zoe and Jamie, particularly Jamie, having their memories of their time with the Doctor erased. Later on when Donna lost her memories of her adventures with the Doctor it was shown as a tragedy. (And Jamie could well have been killed by the redcoats.)
The best bit of The War Games was when the Doctor shows the Time Lords some of the monsters he’d fought. They showed that clip on Blue Peter when they celebrated Doctor Who’s 10th and 15th anniversaries, but they stopped just before he showed them the Daleks.
The three Tim,e Lords played Time Lords later on in Doctor Who. Clyde Pollitt played as Time Lord (possibly the same Time Lord) in The Three Doctors. Bernard Horsfall played Chancellor Goth in The Deadly Assassin. He also played Gulliver in The Mind Robber, broadcast earlier in the last Patrick Troughton series, and played a Thal in Planet of the Daleks. And Trevor Martin played the Doctor in the astage play The Seven Keys to Doomsday, with Wendy Padbury as his assistant.
45 years ago today Doctor Who special effects man was providing the models for a science fact programme Spaceships of the Mind. He later became a judge on the cult game shoe Robot Wars.
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44 years ago the cover star of Radio Times was Michael Palin as the Its.. man.
On the Tuesday night they showed a documentary The Pythons made on the set of Life of Brian, and on the Friday they showed And Now For Something Completely Different. Two weeks later Michael Palin was the guest on Ask Aspel.
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Photographs and clips from the first and last stories from the penultimate Jon Pertwee series.
Patrick Troughton and Jon Pertwee had both worked with William Hartnell in films. But the only time the first three Doctors met at the same time was when they went to William Hartnell’s house for the Radio Times photo sessions. I like his smile as well, especially considering his state of health at the time.
At Panopticon 93 the last panel was Jon Pertwee, Peter Davison, Colin Baker and Sylvester McCoy. Someone asked the actors for their memories of working with William Hartnell and Patrick Troughton. Peter Davison and Colin Baker had worked with Patrick Troughton, but Jon Pertwee was the only one who had worked with William Hartnell. So when Jon Pertwee died we lost a link with the past.
Benton dances with Mary. The Green Death was the last story to feature the original Pertwee era title sequence. In the next series there would be a new title sequence with a new logo (which they’re bringing back for the new series). And Sarah Jane Smith.
Virgin or BBC Books should have done a story set in between The Green Death and The Time Warrior with just the Doctor and the UNIT regulars. If Jon Pertwee had been alive when Big Finish was going they probably would have introduced a companion the Doctor travelled with after Jo and before Sarah.
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Which two actors were in A Hard Day’s Night and Whatever Happend to the Likely Lads: Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner?
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The cuttings of Elisabeth Sladen appeared only days after the last part of The Green Death was broadcast.
When she left Doctor Who it was considered worthy enough for an item to appear on John Craven’s Newsround. (She said that she was leaving Doctor Who on the first Swap Shop, which I missed so her departure at the end of The Hand of Fear was a surprise.) And they announced that her replacement would be Leela who will be joining the Doctor in the New Year, and they showed a clip of The Face of Evil.
Where were they then? Before he appeared in Doctor Who Matthew Waterhouse was in the drama series To Serve Them All My Days which got a repeat screening forty years and one day ago today. Alternatively on BBC1there was The Hot Shoe Show with future Doctor Who assistant Bonnie Langford, who I believe is making a guest appearance in Doctor Who next year. Where were they now? Former Pan’s Person Cherry Gillespie was also in The Hot Shoe Show.
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ps The BBC repeated a Doctor Who serial and all some people could do was moan about it.
I trust not tv critics.
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I didn’t know that banks had hole-in-the-wall cash dispensers in 1967. They didn’t become commonplace until over a decade later.
My godmother went to America in 1981 and saw one of these cash dispensers outside a bank and thought that was novel . It wasn’t long after that she saw one in Britain.
The Barclaycard credit cards were introduced in 1968. The debit card replaced the cash withdrawl card in 1987.
And now the banks have closed most of the local branches which is a blasted nuisance.
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Where were they then? Lalla Ward later became a published illustrator. When she was a guest on Ask Aspel she showed some of the pictures she drew for a book on astrology for dogs.
The two pictures of Romana are from City of Death and Horns of Nimon. Lalla Ward’s Romana never wore the same outfit twice. A good game to play at a Doctor Who convention would be to get several fans who’ve come dressed as Romana, and the contestants have to arrange them in the correct order.
Box of Delights was not only Patrick Troughton’s second greatest contribution to television. It was the best children’s tv drama serial ever.
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I liked Graeme Wood’s Radio Times cuttings as usual. Z Cars wasn’t on the cover of Radio Times that week. What was?
Frank Windsor and John Phillips reprised their roles for the last Z-Cars, while Joseph Brady, Jeremy Kemp, Brian Blessed and Colin Welland made cameos. Stratford Johns wasn’t in the last series of Z Cars. When he auditioned for Annie he was told he’d have to get his hair cut for the role, but it wasn’t until after he’d accepted the part that he found out that he’d have to get his head shaved.
The interview with Adam West in Look In was interesting. He was 47 at the time, not 42. It was not long after this interview that he and Burt Ward reprised their roles as Batman and Robin for the cartoon series The New Adventures of Batman.
In 1988 Adam West made a guest appearance on Wide Awake Club (most patronozing children’s tv show of the late eighties). They were showing episodes of Batman, and he was in Britain to open the new branch of Forbidden Planet in New Oxford Street. (The original Forbidden Planet opened ten years earlier in Denmark, selling comics, with another shop opening a few years later round the corner, selling film and tv merchandise. They then moved to a larger shop selling comics and film and tv merchhandise in New Oxford Street. Later that branch closed and they moved to the current location in Shasftsbury Avenue.) Someone told me that he went to the official opening of the New Oxford Street branch of Forbidden Planet, and he was disappointed because Adam West opened the shop and then batted off.
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Bjorn Borg was on the cover of Radio Times for 24th-30th June 1978.
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Happy Birthday to Maureen O’Brien.
Where do the pictures of Maureen with Leonard Rossiter and Donald Pleasance come from?
The Doctor Who pic is from The Time Meddler, and the colour photograph is her as Morgan La Fay in The Legend off King Arthur. I remember watching The Legend of King Arthur during the autumn of 1979, and a couple of months later I found out that the actress who played Morgan used to be a Doctor Who assistant.
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I’ve been having trouble downloading you twitter posts lately.
But Happy Birthday to Jean Marsh. The two missing episodes of The Crusade are high up on my list of Doctor Who episodes I’d like to see returned to the archive. John Wiles said he was breaking new ground with historical stories with The Myth Makers, which introduced more humour into the historicals, and The Massacre, a more serious story. But Verity Lambert was already doing this with The Romans and The Crusades. (An d for a long time The Crusades was the only purely historical story to be novelised.)
You also included a picture of Jean Marsh as Sara Kingdom. However her favourite role in Doctor Who was as Morgaine in the underrated Battlefield.
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What else can I add to the review of the last episode of The Chase? A review written by a genuine Doctor Who fan and not a pretentious media hack.
I had a record of the last episode of The Chase. It was issued by TV21 records. Most of the records were from Gerry Anderson series.
The Mechanoids were intended to be long running enemies of the Daleks, but they only appeared in the one serial, although they did make several appearances in the Daleks comic strip in TV21.
Ian and Barbara were two of the best assistants the series ever had. Jacqueline Hill made one more appearance in Doctor Who, as Lexa in Meglos, fifteen years after The Chase. William Russell made a cameo appearance as Ian in Jodie Whitaker’s last story. Apparently they were considering bringing back Ian for Mawdryn Undead rather than the Brigadier.
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> I’ve been having trouble downloading you twitter posts lately.
Likewise. I think this may have something to do with Elon Musk’s block on non-members.
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It’s getting worse. I can’t even see what’s on Twitter
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>It’s getting worse. I can’t even see what’s on Twitter
It seems all non-members are blocked. Graeme Wood’s Twitter page is the same. The semi-good news is that, if you have a gmail account, you can log in with that and see the posts.
Time for archivemusings to switch to Threads?
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That’s a bit of a shame. Still, I’m sticking with Twitter for the moment, but long term we’ll see …
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Hooray! You’ve finally downloaded a tv listing for a Sunday in the summer of 1988 or 1989.
Moviedrome was the most important season of films shown on tv. 34 years ago today it was Woody Allen’s film Stardust Memories. I can’t remember if I managed to stay up to see the whole film that night. (I didn’t have a video recorder at the time.) I think I saw it later at the Everyman Cinema.
(I could have had a record of every film I’ve seen at the cinema since Batman, but that’s a whole other story.)
You can find a complete list of films shown on Moviedrome in Wikipedia, and you can download Alex Cox’s introduction to Stardust Memories on YouTube.
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Any chance of putting the link to your Twitter page back on the side bar again? It’s still a useful shortcut. Thanks!
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Today is the 40th anniversary of Ultra Quiz.
In the autumn of 1982 Clive James on Television had a look at game shows from various countries, and they had a look at a Japanese game show called Ultra Quiz. They started with a thousand contestants, and they narrow it down to a few hundred, than just a hundred, and then they eliminate tens of contestants, and then start eliminating them one by one, until it’s just a face off between the last two contestants. And the winner of the original thousand contestants is the only one who wings a prize.
Ultra Quiz is not to be confused with Endurance which is a completely different programme. Ultra Quiz.
The first British edition of Ultra Quiz was broadcast on the 9th of July 1983. It was hosted by Michael Aspel in the studio, with Sally James and Jonathan King on location asking the questions. Michael Aspel was assisted, or hindered, by astrologer Russell Grant and computer expert David Manuel.
The first programme was shot in Brighton. They did things like get a man to parachute out of an aeroplane and contestants had to guess whether or not he would land in the target, and some people smashed up a piano and the contestants had to guess if they would do it in the time limit. It would have been annoying for anyone who got eliminated after the first question because they failed to predict if the paratrooper would land in the target, but then found they knew all the answers to the general knowledge questions.
For the second programme they went to the Watercress Steam Railway in Hampshire. Arnold Ridley made a cameo appearance. It was possibly his last tv appearance. In one round contestants had to answer ten questions, and each person was given a coloured ticket where the colour denoted their score. They needed a hundred people for the next programme. I think it was fewer than a hundred people got seven out of ten or more, and more than a hundred people got six out of ten or more. So anyone who got seven out of ten or more was automatically in the next programme, anyone who got five out of ten or fewer was out, and the people who got six out of ten had to play in the tie break round to see who would make up the remainder of the last hundred.
To be continued.
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The next two programme were made in France. They played games on the ferry, and the people who got the lowest scores had to go back to Britain as soon as the ferry reached France.
The fourth programme was in the wine region of France. One contestant was forced to drop out after he twisted his ankle during a game of football between Ultra Quiz contestants and hotel staff. That programme included a team round, and the losing team had to do one of two tie-breakers as it would be unfair for someone to go out if the rest of their team weren’t very good. The tie-breakers had numerical answers and the people with the closest to correct answers went through. At the end of the programme there was a lottery to decide which half of the remaining contestants would be taking part in the next programme in Amsterdam, and who would be in the following week’s programme in Bahrain.
There was a bit of a running joke in Ultra Quiz. In one of the French programmes there was a set of questions on cookery. One of the questions was “Who wrote the famous nineteenth century recipe book The Book of Household Management?”. The correct answer was Mrs Beaton, but one contestant said it was Charles Dickens. In the Amsterdam programme Jonathan King felt sorry for the contestant who go eliminated because they didn’t know the answer to a question about Max Bygraves, while the person who thought Charles Dickens wrote The Book of Household Management was still in. One of the contestants (the eventual winner) had a tee-shirt printed with “Charles Dickens Scool of Cookety” written on it.
In each of the programmes made in Amsterdam and Bahrain all but four of the contestants were eliminated. The last eight went to Hong Kong for the penultimate programme in Hong Kong. As with the France programme they were given some questions to answer on the plane, and the person who came last had to go back on the plane as soon as they landed in Hong Kong. During the Hong Kong programme a further three contestants were eliminated, the person who came fifth went back home in a war canoe, and the last four went through to the final.
The final came from the tv studio. The contestants who made it to the later rounds of Ultra Quiz got on well with each other , and most of them came back to the studio to watch the final. Halfway through the first half of the programme the person in fourth place was eliminated, and the person who came third went out at the end of part one. After the commercial break it was a play-off between the last two contestants with a quick fire round at the end.
The prize of ten thousand pounds was won by forty-one (now eighty-one) year old Clive Scott. Jonathan King had one more trick to play and he brought in the prize money in the form of ten thousand pound coins. (But apparently Clive Scott actually took a cheque home with him.)
Shortly after the final of Ultra Quiz Clive Scott appeared on another tv quiz show. But then I saw an item on quiz shows on Right To Reply, and the quiz show veteran presenting the item said that if you want to go on a tv quiz show you should apply for several shows.
The second series of Ultra Quiz was broadcast in 1984, and was hosted by David Frost with help from Willie Rushton. They visited France, Belgium and the USA. But in the first programme they started with a thousand conterstants and narrowed it down to just thirty, and after that they only eliminated two or four contestants in each programme. So that format wasn’t nearly as good.
The third and last series was broadcast in 1985, and was hosted by Stu Francis and Sara Hollamby from the by then defunct Crackerjack. This series was made entirely in Britain, and the games were rather rubbish.
All of the second and third series of Ultra Quiz are available on YouTube. The only edition of the first, and best, series of Ultra Quiz on You Tube is the Hong Kong programme, and the soun’s abysmal. There’s no justice.
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I must pay tribute to Michael Parkinson.
When Doctor Who returned for its eleventh series Jon Pertwee appeared on the cover of Radio Times along with celebrity fans Michael Parkinson, fashion designer Vanessa Miles, and singer Paul Jones and his son Matthew. Michael Parkinson described Doctor Who as “well made hokum”.
His chat show has rightly been regarded ass the best British chat show. Some people said anyone could do Michael Parkinson’s job, but to be a good chat show host you have to be a good listener. Talking Pictures often showed clips of Parkinson. In their profile of Alec Guinness they showed him on Parkinson, and he asked Michael Parkinson if he wanted to hear his anecdote about a working elephant, to which the host replied “Please do.”.
Clips of Parkinson often appeared on BBC TV News obituaries.
His favourite guests included Muhammed Ali and Billy Connolly. David Niven told some funny stories, a lot of which were in his books The Moon’s a Balloon and Bring on the Empty Horses.
When Orson Welles was on Parkinson he said the best screen actor in his opinion was James Cagney. Michael Parkinson admitted that James Cagney was top of his lists of people he’d like to have on the programme. Orson Welles said he wouldn’t do it, but later James Cagney did appear on Parkinson.
But when Channel 4 contacted Michael Parkinson to ask if he wanted to contribute to The 100 Greates TV moments he said “It’s that bloody bird, isn’t it?”.
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One achievement Michael Parkinson was proud of was getting Yehudi Menuhin and Stephane Grappelli to play together for the first time on one of his shows.
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