CREAMGUIDE: 1st-7th August 2026
Brewed with Czechoslovakian yeast for that extra Pilsner taste
Hullo there!
Welcome to another Creamguide, where the stupid weather seems to be over for at least a week or so and there’s a fair amount of items of interest to review. Don’t forget to get in touch from your holidays – maybe you watched a different regional news programme! – via creamguide@tvcream.co.uk.
SATURDAY 1st AUGUST
BBC2
21.10 Barbra Streisand: Becoming an Icon 1943-84
No Pops doc this week, but The Story of 2003 is already on iPlayer if you can brace yourselves for the Tim Kash Golden Age. In the meantime... “When you say the name Barbra Streisand, you introduce into your conversation a name that means a lot of talent!” Wise words there from Tommy Vance in 1980, and we’re celebrating Babs here because it’s fifty years since the release of her version of A Star is Born, which gets a rare telly outing tonight. Before that it’s this suitably grandiose doc from a few years ago, which gives up when she stops making pop records but does seemingly include a film we only really know about from the references in The Simpsons, Yentl.
BBC4
20.00 Monty Don Remembers... Geoff Hamilton
20.20 Gardeners’ World
20.50 Gardeners’ World
21.20 Geoff Hamilton: A Man and His Garden
TV’s Mr Polythene would have been ninety this month but died suddenly just a few days short of his sixtieth, much to everyone’s shock as he was such a familiar face on our screens. That wasn’t just to avid gardeners but also a generation of kids who would sit through Gardeners’ World until he said “and of course, there are plenty of jobs to be getting on with here at Barnsdale” and that meant alternative comedy from the likes of Red Dwarf or Bottom was about to start. The latest occupier of the post of Britain’s head gardener pays tribute to start, before an edition of Gardeners’ World from a decade ago where Adam Frost, who worked as his assistant for many years and considered him his mentor, returned to his old stomping ground in Rutland. Then it’s Geoff himself on a show from forty years ago to the day, a bit more rough and ready than today’s show but it should still feel pretty relevant as Geoff was miles ahead of his time in terms of things like organic gardening. Then it’s an episode of the tribute series while discusses the building of Barnsdale.
ITV4
10.30 The Big Match Revisited
Less than two weeks after the World Cup Final the new season has begun in Scotland, and after a short break we’ve got what we think is the final episode from this season. Been an interesting era to look back on, if a bit less fun than other runs not least as the letters spot has always been the first thing to go, but still absolutely fascinating for all that. Sadly we’re not getting the final episode of the season where England vs West Germany played second fiddle to Millwall vs Preston, as the national team played a vital Euros match on the Saturday night after a full fixture list that afternoon. Instead it’s the week before that, with Brian venturing into Southern territory for the main match from Brighton, action from the Amateur Cup Final and, topically, a Liverpool match with a pivotal role for the much-missed Kevin Keegan. As for another season, there are still a few more to go at, so hopefully we’ll get one soon.
BBC Radio 4
20.00 Sucking Up: A Guide to Sycophancy Through The Ages
Many things to despair about over AI, though one of its most irritating aspects is the chatbots’ relentlessly sycophantic tone, greeting every request with “great question!” and showering the user with praise when they spot every one of the ten trillion mistakes it makes. No wonder some people get obsessed with it, but as Matthew Gwyther will illustrate here, it’s always been the case as he examines famous moments of history that may have gone very differently if just one of an army of yes man had said no.
SUNDAY 2nd AUGUST
BBC4
22.00 Bill Paterson Remembers... The Cheviot, The Stag and The Black, Black Oil
22.15 The Cheviot, The Stag and The Black, Black Oil
23.45 7:84: Keep Right On?
Some fascinating items in this channel’s theatre season, tonight with a special focus on agitprop at its most prop-ular (sorry) thanks to the famous 7:84 theatre company that bought politics and protest to playhouse for many years. One of their most famous productions appeared as a Play for Today in 1974 which linked the then-topical North Sea oil boom to other pivotal moments in the history of the Highlands, starring a tyro Bill Paterson who reflects on it here. After that it’s a dash through the company’s legacy from BBC Scotland’s Ex-S arts strand in 1993.
BBC Radio 2
17.00 Pick of the Pops
“Hello, is that Top of the Pops? I wondered if you could help, I was interested in buying the Fame single but I was slightly confused about its relation to the television series and the person behind the counter at Woolworths suggested I contacted you.” Simon Bates’ links on that 1982 Pops the other day were dreadful even by his own low standards, but it was an ace show musically and we can enjoy some of it again here. Probably not The Brat, but if we ask nicely maybe Goodiebags will give Arthur Daley ‘E’s Alright a spin, alongside one of our favourite Macca tracks. Then it’s 1996 when we can ponder who was still buying Three Lions in August given it was still in the Top 20, although perhaps surprisingly that and the Manics are the only Britpop-adjacent items.
MONDAY 3rd AUGUST
BBC2
19.30 Mastermind
We must thank you for all your lovely letters regarding our summer special in recent weeks. Colin Daffern writes, “My abiding memory of summer mornings on BBC1 in the mid eighties is trying to turn on in time to watch The Pink Panther without having to watch the PIFs they invariably seemed to wheel out in the junction after Breakfast Time. Those shown were usually seasonally appropriate and light hearted - think Claude The Caravan, Alan Bennett on airbeds, and the one where the motorway sign turns into a rampaging monster - but as a safety-conscious child I even found these disconcerting!” Simon Proctor adds, “In NI, I can remember being furious about the schools programmes being on for our first few weeks off but then something exciting happened. BBC Scotland put on some morning kids shows for the first few weeks of July and we in NI got to share those AND we got to see the BBC Scotland globe which as a young telly nerd was very exciting. The start-up was around 9am and the BBC Scotland globe would appear ‘with a special welcome to our viewers in Northern Ireland’ and this was indeed a treat. Oh and a special thanks for the Belfast Why Don’t You gang - you on the Mainland may have been puzzled - we in NI were ‘scundered’, to this day I’ve never met anyone who spoke (read autocue) like that and we used to go around school (when the new term started in September) doing impressions of that awful singysongy affection the kids had and saying ‘here’s a fillum about it.’” Rounds here include one on Roger Moore’s James Bond fillums, and the black chair beckons elsewhere tonight...
BBC4
21.00 Sally Magnusson Remembers... Mastermind
21.20 Mastermind
21.50 Call My Bluff
Here’s your chance to work out if the questions really have got easier over the years with a repeat for the Mastermind final... of 1972! The first final ever, of course, back when it was an unassuming show that sneaked into the last night schedules. Actually while it may have been a tougher quiz in those days, it’s probably come on leaps and bounds as a piece of entertainment, as we remember this channel showing Fred Housego’s final a decade or so ago where the contestants did their general knowledge in the same order as their first round – so even if someone had no chance of catching the leader they still had to go through the motions – and then at the end Magnus said “And so Mr Housego is the winner, our congratulations to him, goodnight” and the credits rolled without Fred even getting to say a word. Magnus’ era still fondly remembered and they’ve rustled up the perfect person to reminisce, not least as she owns the chair itself. Indeed Sally’s career is as distinguished as her fathers’ with some forty years in TV news, despite her first big gig being the disastrous Sixty Minutes, and in 1984 she was on the ‘bluff panel, with some more repeats kicking off with her appearance alongside Peter Egan and Geoffrey Smith.
It’s a Nearly New Thrill in this feature! Every week we’re going to focus on a different year and recall the telly hits and headlines of those twelve months, a bit like the Golden Hour we suppose (“It was the year we lost Anwar Sadat and gained THIS from Spandau Ballet!”). Long-suffering subscribers may recall we did this about a decade or so ago, but whenever we did it, it’s on some documents in a long-forgotten folder on a long-forgotten computer so we can’t remember anything we featured and we’re starting completely from scratch, and also, there are some extra years in it. When the late and much-lamented TV Cream was still a going concern, after an embarrassingly long time of not having an answer whenever anyone asked us what years we covered, and we used to mumble “hmm, we dunno, the seventies and eighties we suppose”, we finally did come up with a definition of the Cream Era of 1967 (Radio 1, colour TV) to 1997 (Channel 5, digital TV and, er, TV Cream). But now in Creamguide we’re adding an extra decade onto the end and going up to 2007!
We know that feels like two minutes ago but telly has changed quite a bit in the meantime and that’s an era when we still just about had the ITV regions, just about had some curious experiments on digital TV and just about had shows with big budgets and big audiences, and we think there’ll be some interesting things to talk about. And also, with 41 to choose from (because we’re doing 1967 and 2007) we don’t have to think of another feature for this bit for nearly a year. We’re going to pick the years at random so hopefully we’ll get to everyone’s favourite era on a regular basis, and we hope you enjoy it. So, first out of the hat, the telly tales of...
1993
Many people would suggest that 1993 was the precise moment when British telly started to go down the toilet, based on the fact that at the stroke of midnight Thames gave way to Carlton. Certainly in the history of commercial television, Carlton remains a bit of a footnote, though it only lasted for under a decade before being subsumed by the single ITV, and maybe some of its early output was a bit ropey, but they were launching a lot of new programmes at once. Besides, LWT had an even worse start, and that did alright for itself. What we think possibly didn’t help Carlton was that many of its executives had huge experience in TV, but not mass market ITV, always a tough market to crack, and probably their output was a bit too arch – the ultimate Carlton show probably being Lose a Million which attempted to parody the conventions of light entertainment, while also trying to be light entertainment. Its host Chris Tarrant was chosen to spearhead the new station with A Carlton New Year, a bit of a ragbag of a variety show. We’re pretty sure other than Tarrant’s links at the start and end nothing else is live (the audience laughter during some of his gags certainly isn’t) given he travels several miles across London in the space of an ad break, and he interviews Roy Castle in front of a telly clearly showing Thames on air. This was the start of a new era of ITV in other ways as now the ITC were in charge with a much looser regulatory framework, although for those outside the South of England the most obvious changes outside breakfast time were bigger prizes on game shows and the God Slot being scrapped in favour of the ITV Diet Coke Family Movie.
Carlton’s struggles in the early days were at least overshadowed by the failings of another new franchise in GMTV, F-Factor and all. In fact it was perhaps doomed to fail thanks to another big change from the ITC, that being Channel Four were now required to sell their own adverts instead of the ITV companies doing it for them. That meant a slightly more populist approach and the stock market “activity” of The Channel Four Daily was clearly not going to pull in the advertisers, hence the requirement for a more engaging start to the day. Of course, by the time GMTV began every kid in Britain was obsessed with The Big Breakfast and it was number one by miles, and while it went spectacularly off the boil very quickly, in 1993 it was at the absolute peak of its powers, and Chris Evans was the biggest star in Britain. The Best of the Big Breakfast VHS includes all the brilliant moments that were the talk of the playground, including Agony Alien, International Bunsen Burner Day, Eddie Kidd’s stunt ride (“aargh, Sindy devastated!”), Invention Corner (“Invention COR-ner!”), Lenny Henry falling off a motorbike and, yes, the fossilised turds including the wonderfully named Lloyds Bank Turd. “What a cracking turd that is!”
One of Chris Evans’ other memorable TV moments that year was a surprise appearance on Noel’s House Party – no, he wasn’t doing that, that’s a joke that was taken literally – which was also at its peak, with Blobby-mania leading it all the way to Christmas number one. But the week before Evans’ appearance, it failed to make it on air at all thanks to a bomb scare, hence the hurried unspooling of a standby show which rather brilliantly for mid-March was Noel’s Christmas Presents, and from the Christmas before last to boot. We do remember various captions overlaid to suggest it might appear later, but it never did, and as Christmas Presents was slightly too short to fit the slot it meant Noel had to head off to the Broom Cupboard to apologise and introduce Tom and Jerry, which pretty much means we get a brief Swap Shop revival. You clearly never forget it, though, as he does it so brilliantly. In fact that was the second Saturday running BBC1 was massively disrupted as the previous week they got cold feet over Casualty and decided to abruptly shove it after the watershed due to its “scenes of power and impact”.
Saturdays seemed almost cursed on BBC1 in early 1993, as a few weeks later we got one of our favourite sporting events of the decade, when the Grand National went ever so slightly wrong due to some dozy bloke in a bowler hat failing to wave a flag properly. There was nobody more adept at dealing with the chaos that followed than Des Lynam, who interviewed everyone he could grab to try and work out what the hell had gone on, and just about managing to appear as both concerned at the shattering effect on those taking part – most obviously John White, who thought he’d won the thing – and also clearly relishing the absolute mayhem. Much more fun than the boringly professional races, anyway.
A few weeks later, 17th April was a black day for Creamguide as Going Live came to an end. Everyone who worked on that show said it was the most special experience of their life, and that couldn’t help but come across through the screen, as we absolutely loved it. It always felt like a show that mattered, not some piddly kids’ show, something you could never replicate now when you didn’t have a captive audience of adults as well, and its ability to flit between light and shade at the blink of an eye we don’t think has ever been bettered on kids’ or adult TV. Sadly Pip and Saz decided after six years to jack it in and we were absolutely glued to all three and a bit hours of the final show, ending with a mass pant swing.
It was great that Trevor and Simon were back for the final run, having missed the previous series. But the show they left to do, the teen-centric 100%, had its planned second series cancelled. This was due to a massive accounting cock-up at the BBC which had seen several million pounds in the programming budget counted twice, which meant swingeing cuts and lots of series axed, and one of the most threadbare summer schedules in the Corporation’s history with pretty much non-stop repeats from June to September. You can see a particularly pathetic Saturday night schedule up there, all bar MOTD a repeat, and we remember the Radio Times putting Dad’s Army on the cover of a nostalgia special and everyone thought they were absolutely taking the piss. Still, we quite enjoyed it as it meant the archives were thoroughly ransacked with series like Alas Smith and Jones and A Bit of Fry and Laurie getting reruns from the start, which were all new to us.
And fortunately this was the era when the first generation to have grown up with telly were now calling the shots, so nostalgia really was exploding and we couldn’t get enough of it. Some of the repackaging was an absolute eye-opener as well, especially the likes of the Bake’s TV Heroes which pretty much invented TV Cream. Pop nostalgia was a big deal as well, maybe thanks to the useless Top of the Pops format of the time doing bugger all to promote new music, and one of the archive-based shows that year that really stood out was A For ABBA. By this point we’d already had ABBA Gold and the Erasure record, but we think this did as much as anything to assist in their renaissance as it got a huge audience and featured loads of big and credible names like Elvis Costello and Ian McCullloch talking knowledgeably and enthusiastically about their musicianship. And also Lowri Turner slagging off their clothes and hair, but it was the nineties.
Some less credible music here, as we once more invite you to stand back in amazement at the fact that this was the theme tune to EastEnders for eleven months! Seemingly Simon May was about to release an album of his TV themes but thought the ring-a-ding ‘stEnders theme wasn’t grand enough to appear alongside his other, more pompous fare, hence this horrendous rearrangement that unforgivably buggers up the doof-doofs, and how it managed to get anywhere near the screen is beyond us. Also that year in the soaps, right at the end of it, was the Emmerdale plane crash, which symbolically marked its final transition from pensioner fodder to super-soap, though perhaps even more interesting is the previous episode where absolutely nothing happens and was seemingly added at the last minute to push the crash a bit further away from the Lockerbie anniversary.
The other big sporting headline of 1993 was all four home nations’ failure to qualify for the following year’s World Cup. Wales’ was the most heartbreaking, half an hour away from the USA before they missed a penalty that could have sealed the win and promptly lost, but England’s was the most embarrassing, right up to the final match against San Marino (“brewed with Czechoslovakian yeast for that extra Pilsner taste and England are one down!”). All the blame went to the hapless Graham Taylor as manager, though now in retrospect the general view is that Taylor, a lovely man, was a brilliant club manager unsuited to international management and desperately unlucky with injuries and poor refereeing decisions, while the FA was a bit of a shambles at the time, an amateurish organisation with a single PR man responsible for everything from the England team to the grassroots, so Taylor was totally hung out to dry. And of course a camera crew was there recording everything in pitiless detail, a must-watch documentary that portrayed Taylor in a pretty tragic light, though in the end at least it illustrated he cared, and it didn’t do his career as much harm as it did his sidekick Phil Neal, who came across as a pathetic yes-man.
The big telly defection this year was Reeves and Mortimer, who had grown a bit stale at Channel Four who just wanted more Big Night Out, and moved to the Beeb to do something new, Vic saying it was surely destiny given their head of light entertainment was also called Jim Moir. Easy to forget that people were a bit unsure about The Smell of Reeves and Mortimer, swapping the unique as-live stage show for a new format with a load of outdoor filming, though we think the first series is an absolute masterpiece, so crammed with ideas. It also brilliantly combined sparkling production values with the pair’s trademark mucking about with stupid props, such as Bob’s interview with Boit Reynolds. Indeed such was the care and attention lavished to it that the studio lighting went from sunrise to sunset during the episode, and when it was released on VHS (with massively extended edits, none of which made it to the DVD), they even read out the copyright warning.
Excitement abounded in November when the Beeb went 3D! Just the decade or so after ITV did it, but this was part of Children in Need with the glasses raising money for charity and a host of Beeb shows taking part including Take That performing on Top of the Pops in a third dimension. But the big attraction for many people was a new episode of Doctor Who to mark the show’s thirtieth anniversary! Well, that was how it was sold, but in fact it was just a bit of daft runaround on the EastEnders set. Had the series been a going concern at the time that might had been alright, but as it was the first bit of Who on the Beeb for four years, and promoted as a replacement for a potential feature length straight to video story that had got caught up in development hell, it was met with absolute derision, and a sad farewell to the series for so many of its most-loved stars. Sounds like it was an absolute nightmare to make as well, with the one silver lining being that they had to pull in so many favours contractually it will never be broadcast ever again. You will note that the trailer also reveals that at Christmas, BBC1 has got a lot of things on...
...and it did too (although quite a lot of shows in that trailer, like the Gen Game and Paul Daniels, were declining a bit). It was a hugely successful Christmas for BBC1 with stuff like One Foot In The Algarve (“we’ve gone on holiday with ten years’ worth of Access statements and a hundred copies of The Beezer!”) and premieres of Ghost pulling in bumper audiences. But you would have to say that some of these huge audiences were helped by ITV simply not bothering, with Christmas Day devoted to the usual Saturday line-up (including even Movies, Games and Videos) and then back-to-back films all night. It was probably fair enough given that Christmas itself is a commercially unattractive time, hence why ITV stuck all their really big shows earlier in December when there’s loads of festive advertising to be had, and the Beeb would always dominate, but there’s being sensible and being cynical, and that line-up was so poor even the apparently light touch ITC felt moved to criticise it for its low quality and lack of respect for the audience. Even so, when everyone anyone drags up the Beeb’s Christmas Day 1993 ratings to suggest it was a golden age, it’s worth remembering Birds of a Feather was opposite a boring film on ITV and programmes on BBC2 and Channel Four that were so esoteric they really did get officially zero viewers.
So, that was 1993, not a vintage year telly-wise and one that seems to have had more than its fair share of flops and disasters. A great way to kick off this feature then, and only forty more to go. Onwards!
TUESDAY 4th AUGUST
U&Gold
21.00 Joe and David’s Magical Sitcom Tour
This sounds like it should be good fun, not least as it sounds quite similar to an idea we had about a TV Cream TV show ages ago (not that we’re accusing them of plagiarism, it never got any further than the back of a beermat). Our titular hosts are Joe Wilkinson and David Earl, who are setting off on a series of sitcom pilgrimages, visiting locations, recreating famous moments and meeting some of the key names in front of and behind the camera. First up is Joe’s favourite sitcom Porridge, where en route to the actual Slade prison they meet up with Dick Clement and re-enact a scene with a surprise guest, and apparently Joe has so many happy memories of watching it with his family he gets quite emotional about the whole thing.
WEDNESDAY 5th AUGUST
Talking Pictures TV
20.35 An Englishman Abroad
The I Claudius repeats continue on BBC4 tonight and before that you can enjoy another classic Beeb drama, which got a Radio Times cover in 1983 on an issue that goes for a sizeable amount online because it had a very low print run because of a strike. The whole thing was absolutely showered with praise and won umpteen awards, with Coral Browne bagging the BAFTA for Best Actress, which is some going given she was playing herself.
THURSDAY 6th AUGUST
BBC4
20.00 Superman
22.15 Christopher Reeve: Keeping Hope in Motion
23.15 Parkinson
As we mentioned last week, the George Reeves Superman serial was a regular in the Beeb’s summer holiday schedule right up to the late eighties, and in the nineties Lois and Clark was a Saturday night (and Saturday morning) staple for many years, but we think this is the first time – well, second time, as it’s on BBC2 on Saturday – that the original Christopher Reeve film has been on the BBC. A couple of other shows to mark that occasion, with a doc from 2004 following Reeve through his treatment, and his appearance on Parky in January 1982 alongside Mel Smith, presumably promoting not just Not but also his fondly remembered Central drama Muck and Brass.
FRIDAY 7th AUGUST
BBC4
20.20 Top of the Pops
We’re plodding through 2000 a bit at the moment, and it’s just the one episode again tonight, and thanks to Puff Daddy it’s shorter than it used to be too. Even without him it’s a pretty international episode with most of the acts coming from the other side of the Atlantic, and we wouldn’t suggest it was especially a vintage edition, but we do have a Honeyz single that we were always very fond of.
20.45 Top of the Pops
Happily the archive episodes make up for it, with two interesting editions. Easy to forget now given how many shows BBC4 have screened that before the repeats began we were all flying a bit blind in terms of what still existed in the archives, and for a while there were suggestions that this edition from 1984 was wiped, because it never got repeated on UK Gold, they didn’t show any clips of it on TOTP2 and during the five minutes Infax was publicly accessible the information was fairly scant. But exist it does and we’re delighted about that because it includes the utterly brilliant Frankie performance where they take their leave from the top spot after weeks on end with an epic involving Holly traversing the entire studio. Some good stuff elsewhere as well, with John and Richard – during the period where Kid had just left and they were trying John out with a few new partners – introducing Blancmange and the last of a string of consistently entertaining performances by Tracey Ullman.
21.15 Top of the Pops
And then we’re live this week in 1988 with Goodiebags and the final appearance of Janice Long, though that’s obviously not the reason why this show has gone down in Pops history. Yes, it’s the All About Eve incident, anthologised to death of course but fascinating to see in its original context, Janice trying to plough on regardless but Goodiebags’ “whoops, we fucked that up” expression clearly giving it away. A fascinating show for all sorts of other reasons too, mind, an in hindsight overly ambitious live edition including the majestic You Came by Kim Wilde, Voice of The Beehive, Kylie’s first time in the studio and Yazz turning up at TV Centre in the same clothes she wore the previous week for ten seconds of screentime just to pretend her repeated performance was live. What a pro.
And that’s that!
But another Creamguide is planned for next week.