Hullo there!
Creamguide’s back, all present and correct, this week containing several hundred words about Anne Diamond, and if that’s not enjoy to keep you on the edge of your seat and tell all your friends, we don’t know what would. No eggcups to give away but we’d still like to hear your views at creamguide@tvcream.co.uk.
SATURDAY 22nd FEBRUARY
BBC2
20.25 Fleetwood Mac at the BBC
21.25 Fleetwood Mac’s Songbird: Christine McVie
22.55 Fleetwood Mac: The Dance
00.40 Fleetwood Mac: A Musical History
Easy to forget what a terrible name Fleetwood Mac have, joining Kool and the Gang in being named after their bassists, even though it’s a scientific fact that bassists are officially the most boring members of any band. In fact John McVie wasn’t even in the band when they came up with it, Peter Green naming them after him to try and convince him to join, and initially he turned it down so it could have been an even worse name. There’s seemingly no particular reason to see all these programmes again, apart from it being 36 years ago last week since Mick’s memorable presentation of the Brits. It’s probably not because of that, though.
ITV4
10.30 The Big Match Revisited
Pitchside hoardings for Ghostbusters and the GLC, could anything more effectively sum up 1984? Even with football at its lowest ebb we still got some Christmas cheer with Brian’s featureless backdrop augmented by a tree and him pointing out the old ladies at the front of the Upton Park terrace in suitably festive outfits, though he didn’t point out them flicking the Vs at Joe Jordan when he scored. As a Christmas treat for Brian he’s not been required to traipse up and down the country for two weeks and for the last show of the year he’s in London again, and specifically at Chelsea which is always fascinating to see on this show as up until the nineties Stamford Bridge was such an eccentric ground, although we’re not sure if this is before or after the electric fence that was briefly installed this season.
BBC Radio 2
13.00 Pick of the Pops
All change at the weekends on this station and in the spring this show is moving to Sunday teatimes, which will be pretty nostalgic for many listeners we’re sure as the official time for chart rundowns, so get your tape recorders dusted off as soon as you can. Still another three months or so on Saturday lunchtimes, kicking off in 1988 with a chart almost carbon-dated to the week with Kylie, Dick Spatsley and Bros alongside Morrissey and loads of ace house music. Another huge pop princess makes their debut at number one in the second hour as it’s 1999, which to us brings back memories of the great Kevin Greening’s final flowering on Radio 1 when he covered Jo Whiley’s maternity leave, a period Kevin fans like ourselves would come to know as The Tilly Era. Wonder where she is now.
SUNDAY 23rd FEBRUARY
Sky Documentaries
21.00 David Frost vs...
“Bhoutros Bhoutros, always a pleasure!” One of the great things about David Frost was that you could see him at the weekend interviewing world leaders and then in the week hosting a daft panel show or some bollocks with Uri Geller, and he would treat both of them as if they were the most important thing on the planet and with boundless enthusiasm. He might have lost his edge a bit towards the end but in the sixties especially he was a great interviewer, his encounter with Emil Savundra still probably the nearest we’ve got to a host decking their guest, such was his obvious contempt for him, while the fact he was still only in his twenties (even in that encounter with the Yippies he’d only just turned thirty) meant he was more at ease with the big pop stars of the day than most of his contemporaries. We’ll see plenty of that in this series which has been a labour of love for his son Wilfred, now building a reputation as a fine journalist and broadcaster in his own right, and which promises loads of footage unseen for decades. First of all we get to see his encounters with sundry Beatles, together and solo.
MONDAY 24th FEBRUARY
BBC2
19.00 Legends of Welsh Sport
This recent BBC Wales series is getting a run-out on the network, and there are some intriguing subjects under the spotlight as well, not just featuring the big names but also telling fascinating and often moving stories about some now forgotten personalities. It is a big name in this one, mind, Mark Hughes. He’s still involved in football, of course, having just been appointed manager of Carlisle, though this programme is obviously not really about his somewhat chequered managerial career in recent times, but his wonderful playing career at the highest level for many years, scoring hugely important and impressive goals for both club and country, although it took a long time for his individual brilliance to be rewarded with team trophies.
19.30 Mastermind
If you’ve been watching this channel at all in the past three months or so you’ll have heard plenty about Wham!, so now’s the time to test your knowledge on them on a round here. As we’ve mentioned before, they don’t have a particularly large back catalogue, two studio albums and a greatest hits meaning you can pretty much run through their discography in an afternoon, but plenty of superlatives to be challenged on no doubt. In other news there’s also a round on Derek Jarman.
BBC Radio 4
11.00 Roleplay
This is the series where actors reflect on the various challenges involved in interpreting some of the most famous roles of all time, especially those where there’s a seemingly definitive performance. Certainly the case with this one as it’s Cleopatra, and one thread in this programme will be the parallels between her life and that of the ultimate Cleo in Liz Taylor. Among those taking part are some other noted thesps including Judi Dench, Janet Suzman and Dona Croll.
We briefly ventured into the weird world of TV-am the other week but, not least because it gives us another opportunity to flick through the fantastic Morning Glory by Ian Jones, we’re heading there again, as it really was the most bizarre and idiosyncratic broadcaster we’ve probably ever had. And nobody did more to become the face of the station than...
ANNE DIAMOND
Born in Birmingham and brought up in Worcestershire, Anne spent her early life as a Butlins Redcoat and a journalist on local papers, and she was able to use both those talents throughout her career on some of the odder shows she ended up fronting. At the end of the seventies she joined her local TV station ATV as a reporter and newsreader, for the first time meeting her future telly husband Nick Owen. You can see her up there reading the news alongside Midlands royalty Bob Warman during the last few weeks of ATV in 1981, with an absolute banger of a theme tune.
When ATV became Central in January 1982, the big news was that the mammoth region was to be split up with separate news programmes for both the East and West Midlands, and sent off to Nottingham to launch the new Central News East were Anne and, funnily enough, Nick Owen. But an industrial dispute meant Anne and Nick presented the first programme only to Central staff rather than any viewers, as reported by, er, Central News, rather putting the dampeners on their first night celebrations. Still, they make the best of it and it’s quite something to hear a news bulletin being presented from the middle of a massive piss-up, though they manage to keep it down to a dull roar at some points.
It wasn’t just the first night that was affected either as the dispute plodded on for ages, and Anne and Nick both realised they probably wouldn’t be presenting the programme any time soon – indeed, it was over eighteen months before transmissions from Nottingham finally began – and started looking elsewhere. Nick defected to the soon-to-launch TV-am while Anne went off to the BBC. For a while she was in line to become one of the presenters on the new Breakfast Time, which would have meant the next few years of morning telly would have been very different, but instead she was assigned to the reporting team of Nationwide, coming towards the end of its marathon run. Thanks to this show from BBC ALBA a few years ago delving through the ‘wide archives we can join her examining the rise and rise of ice hockey in Dundee.
Introduced her by Richard Kershaw as “a new face to Nationwide”, Anne was still in her twenties at the time and very much the baby of the team, so she seemed the ideal candidate to become the face of the 1983 British Rock and Pop Awards. Organised by Nationwide in conjunction with Radio 1 and the Daily Mirror, with the Brits still an industry-only untelevised affair, in the early eighties these were the highest profile music awards in the UK, thanks to their broadcast on primetime BBC1. That said, we’re not sure either the industry or pop kids took them especially seriously, the ‘wide’s involvement meaning the winners, chosen by the public, rarely ventured away from the middle of the road, most obviously those receiving the Nationwide Special Award for the act with “most all-round family appeal”. Anne appeared alongside Kid Jensen to review the runners and riders in the build-up and then presented the ceremony itself alongside the likeable Canadian.
Despite that, Anne didn’t particularly enjoy her time at Nationwide, disappointed to mostly be stuck out in the field with fewer opportunities to present than she was expecting, while she was presumably wondering how secure it was given the show was facing the axe. After other opportunities, she found herself reading the news, co-presenting News After Noon with Richard Whitmore during the election campaign. She was starting to regret moving to the Beeb, although she’d probably fared a bit better than her old colleague Nick at TV-am who arrived as sports correspondent and realised the station was in an absolute state. Such was the chaos and the revolving door of personnel that within a few months Nick ended up holding the fort as main anchor, and when new boss Greg Dyke arrived he asked Nick if he had any ideas about who might be a good co-presenter for him.
Nick recommended his old mate Anne, and not enjoying her time at the Beeb, who didn’t seem to particularly rate her anyway, she was promptly poached and joined TV-am in May 1983. Of course TV-am was a complete basket case financially so it was potentially a bit of a risk, but she had little to lose and had a great relationship with Nick, and it turned out to be an absolutely inspired move. It was quite a shift to go from the Famous Five to a pair who, if you weren’t from the Midlands, were pretty much completely unknown and who would later revel in being referred to as Mr and Mrs Ordinary. But they clearly had chemistry and Nick would later say that he thought they’d completely relaxed the style of TV presentation in the UK, an unaffected and appealing couple who were pleasing company first thing in the morning.
And under Anne and Nick, TV-am put its appalling early days behind it and, while still completely skint, enjoyed considerable success, with Greg Dyke pulling the strings behind the scenes and Anne and Nick just about holding it all together in front of the camera. Nick’s droll and slightly cheeky persona was a great foil for Anne’s sometimes more highly strung approach and they both had the good humour to paper over the many, many cracks. By the time of its second birthday in February 1985, all signs of the mission to explain had gone out of the window but it was a genuinely popular programme and the anniversary was marked by a look behind the scenes. Amusing to see Anne seemingly embarrassed by some of the clips of her in make-up, while wearing that outfit.
Likeable though they were, some of TV-am’s output was not especially of the highest standard and quite often it seemed like much of the morning was devoted to aimless chit-chat and, especially, pointing at pictures of Princess Diana in the papers. As Anne became more famous, these paper “reviews” increasingly had to avoid the endless stories about Anne herself, as she was increasingly one of the most famous women on screen and became something of a tabloid staple, especially when she started a relationship with former TV-am editor Mike Hollingsworth. An era ended in 1986 when Nick left to join ITV Sport, though Anne soldiered on for another few years, usually paired up with Mike Morris or the awful Richard Keys.
They couldn’t stay apart for too long, though, and on New Year’s Day 1988 they were back together presenting this seasonal oddity, Make a Date. This is one of the many, many shows on ITV in the mid-eighties inspired by the success of Game for a Laugh, the kind of show that was always billed as “a light-hearted look” at something or other, a la Just Amazing, The Funny Side and many many more, where a couple of presenters met celebs and Members Of The Great British Public With A Story To Tell, with various bits of business in the studio and on film. This one was produced by Yorkshire and had an on-this-day-in-history concept where everything had a tenuous connection to something that happened on 1st January. It seemed to go well enough to get a whole series out of it, but Nick bailed out and Anne presented the renamed Birthday Show with Paul Coia, where everyone involved was celebrating their birthday on the day the show went out. We don’t miss shows like this, really.
Anne was still getting up first thing in the morning to do TV-am five days a week, but things came to an abrupt halt in November 1987 when Anne once more found herself caught up in a long and bitter industrial dispute, when a planned 24 hour strike escalated into an indefinite stand-off. After a few weeks of nothing but imports and repeats, live broadcasting resumed and Anne was the first familiar face to appear, staying overnight at the studios to present, initially, a rough and ready half hour. Not a clue what that gurning is all about. Over the weeks and months that followed there were plenty of cock-ups and embarrassing moments but they just about got through it, Anne having plenty of experience in dealing with the more shambolic side of television.
Anne finally gave up the daily grind in November 1988, seemingly much to the dismay of the tabloids who now had to write about someone else for a change, the latest hoo-ha coming when she announced she was pregnant again but – gasp! – not married. Her departure was a bit of a blow for TV-am and they took a long time to find someone as popular to replace her, but she hadn’t gone completely and for a couple of years she alternated with David Frost on Sunday mornings, where the station featured more self-consciously serious programming, and in that role was TV-am’s representative at the fall of the Berlin Wall.
Anne wasn’t giving up daytime TV completely, though, and around the turn of the nineties she was the presenter of TVS’s telly talking shop TV Weekly. This was actually a bit of a treat for the skiving schoolkid, certainly as far as the juvenile Creamguide was concerned, very much a televised TV Times with news, previews and interviews about the week’s big shows. Barry Took had a regular spot delving into the archives and it was all a bit more informative and engaging than it had any right to be really. Here’s an episode from 1992 where the big story is something Anne knows very well, breakfast TV, with a trip to the newly-built Big Breakfast house and a chat about the upcoming GMTV with Anne’s old mate Greg Dyke. The show actually outlived TVS itself and Anne carried on presenting it even after she’d launched her big new show on the Beeb, and we honestly don’t know how she managed to get from Birmingham to Southampton every week to do it.
That’s because in October 1992 she was reunited with Nick again to present the Beeb’s huge new daytime commission, Good Morning with Anne and Nick. The pair were delighted to be back together for this new series, running two hours a day five days a week, though the elephant in the room was that since they last worked together, another couple – both on and off-screen – had become established as the faces of morning telly. Indeed, Good Morning was the most shameless copycat of This Morning, a desperate last throw of the dice from the Beeb, and Richard Madeley said it was all very strange, as if the next door neighbours had started to decorate their house the same as yours and drive the same car. The editor Mike Hollingsworth – Mr Anne Diamond, of course – said it was going to be a very different show, newsier than This Morning and that it was a benefit that Anne and Nick weren’t married as it meant that they could draw their experiences from more than one household. But it didn’t look very different, apart from the opening titles memorably featuring Anne smiling at a traffic warden.
Anne and Nick could at least potentially claim a much bigger audience, as the show was also broadcast on BBC World Service Television, as you can see here. But in the UK it was absolutely second best to This Morning (not helped by the party conferences and schools programmes meaning it couldn’t start until October and so gave ITV a massive head start) and it just felt like the most shameless and pointless bit of copycat programming. The Beeb were committed to it though and stuck with it, which in many ways was to its detriment as every autumn there’d be a grand unveiling of “a new look to daytime BBC1” which would just be the same three programmes – Kilroy, Good Morning and Pebble Mill – in the same order but with some new graphics or Mo Dutta doing phone-in quizzes in between, all accompanied by endless plays of the unforgettable “ner-ner-ner-Ross-King!” jingle.
Still it carried on, though, with various bits of tinkering – including palming Playbus off to BBC2 so it could get a head start on This Morning – and new theme tunes and graphics every so often, but everyone knew it was always going to stumble along in second place and nobody seemed willing to do much about it. Even Anne seemed to have lost interest in it, going down to four days a week, Chris Evans-style. But then in 1996 they fell foul of, of all people, Polly Toynbee who devoted her Radio Times column to suggest, basically, “daytime BBC1 is a load of crap, isn’t it?”. Much to her surprise, this suddenly became a national talking point for a few days (although it was a particularly quiet Bank Holiday Monday when it kicked off) and the rest of the media all piled in to discuss the state of daytime, though Toynbee declined to debate the issue with Anne Diamond on Newsnight. But seemingly the debate was enough to spur the Beeb on to do something about it and in May 1996, after four pretty unsuccessful years, Good Morning was axed, and Anne and Nick finally went their separate ways.
After that high profile failure, Anne kept herself busy for the next few years with motherhood, newspaper columns and radio shows, while she also devoted much of her time campaigning against cot death, a subject she tragically had experience of. Indeed this will doubtless be her lasting legacy as her writing and broadcasting on the subject led to much publicity on what you should do and her interventions have genuinely saved thousands of lives. In 2002 she made a surprising comeback on our screens on Celebrity Big Brother, back when it was still a bit of a novelty and celebs mostly considered it a bit of fun, not quite the case these days.
Anne is still broadcasting these days but sadly it’s on GB News where like Angela Rippon she is giving that channel a level of professionalism and credibility it probably doesn’t deserve. But few other broadcasters have helmed so much live television with so few resources, and her charity work has absolutely made a difference, so fair play to her.
TUESDAY 25th FEBRUARY
BBC4
20.30 Steptoe and Son
21.00 Harry H Corbett: Acting in the Sixties
Harry H Corbett was born a hundred years ago this week, hence this double bill. Corbett was pretty brave to take on the role of Harold Steptoe because at the time he was a serious actor and they didn’t do sitcoms in those days, as they were very much a vehicle for comedians to essay their comic personas. You could certainly argue that he did as much as anyone to establish comic acting could be just as engaging, as subtle and as bittersweet as anything you’d see in “proper” drama, though he famously didn’t reap the rewards for that as he was hopelessly typecast after it. But after the episode you always liked the best when you were a kid – ie, the one with the house divided in half – is an episode from a fascinating series from 1967 where Clive Goodwin interrogated noted performers about their art.
WEDNESDAY 26th FEBRUARY
BBC4
22.00 Vivien Heilbron Remembers... Grey Granite
22.15 Grey Granite
Last part of the Scots Quair trilogy here, with Vivien Heilbron back to introduce it again. Unlike last week’s, there wasn’t a long gap between the second and third instalments, a bit like Back to the Future we suppose, with just twelve months having elapsed since the previous series when it was broadcast in 1983. Like the other series it’s big on mood and atmosphere and perhaps not so much on action, but with most of Scottish Equity in the supporting cast and some excellent photography showing off some handsome scenery indeed, we can live with that.
THURSDAY 27th FEBRUARY
BBC4
21.40 Robert Redford Talks To Melvyn Bragg
00.25 Film 93: Robert Redford
Sandwiching All The President’s Men are two interviews with a Hollywood great. First of all we’re in 1976, when Melvyn was still the face of arts on the Beeb and was fronting 2nd House, which was certainly a lively attempt to bring art to the masses with its magazine format that made it look a bit like a Saturday morning programme, a sort of Multi-Disciplinary Swap Shop, and where Redford visited the studio to talk about his role as Bob Woodward. Then two and a bit hours (and seventeen years) later he’s speaking to Barry Norman in an interview which was a big enough deal at the time to land the cover of the Radio Times, while on the publicity trail for A River Runs Through It.
U&Drama
21.00 Bergerac
Well, much excitement over the latest reboot, such are the fond memories of the original series, not least because during the eighties it was pretty much always on. Some good people involved in this new one as well, the man behind it being Toby Whithouse who brought us Being Human and some fine episodes of Doctor Who. It’s still set in Jersey and there’s still a Charlie Hungerford – although this time it’s Jim’s mother-in-law – but we’re not sure how many other nods there are to the original series. Indeed in the end it might just turn out to be a straightforward police procedural that just happens to be set on Jersey with some familiarly-named characters, though seemingly it’s a pretty engaging and enjoyable one, so that’s alright.
FRIDAY 28th FEBRUARY
BBC4
19.00 Top of the Pops
We enjoyed the episode from the day after the election, though we wonder if they’d have featured Things Can Only Get Better had it still been on Thursday when the polls would have been open. After three months (in 1997 time, in 2025 we’ve flown through it in four weeks) this is the last edition produced by Mark Wells, who despite being an interim appointment has ended up making some pretty fundamental changes to the programme, most obviously with the booking policy which is clearly taking weeks on chart as the ultimate arbiter of a hit rather than its actual chart position. It’s logical enough when you see how fast the chart was moving at the time, though it’s made some of the episodes a bit repetitive. Many more changes to come but we mark the end of this short but eventful chapter in the show’s history with what’s pretty much the last hurrah for the celebrity hosts with the Spice Girls.
19.30 Top of the Pops
And with Chris Cowey on his way, here’s a bit of an odd episode, the one and only edition produced by Radio 1’s Chris Whatmough, apparently achieving a life’s ambition to do the job. Unfortunately three of the songs on it we’ve just had in the previous one, one of which is very boring, and we also get pretty much the entirety of Paranoid Android by Radiohead which is a pretty brave choice for primetime BBC1 we suppose, but something of an acquired taste. Still, it’s also a debut for Jayne Middlemiss as host, who we’ve always liked and who should be on telly more these days. And in a way she will be, because we’ll see her a lot over the next year or so.
20.00 Top of the Pops
If that last episode was a bit too experimental for you, here’s some imperial phase light cascades and Rhythm Pals action for you from 1983. Actually even this one’s a bit of an unusual one as we’ve got the Top Ten Videos taking up a huge chunk of the programme, but that does at least mean John and Kid getting to do some more of their winning comic crosstalk, so swings and roundabouts. The songs we get to hear in full are quite interesting too, including Icehouse and OMD hoping you like their new direction.
20.35 Top of the Pops
And if even that had a bit too much talking for you, we then head into 1989 in the period where Paul Ciani was cramming in as many records into the half hour as he could, which was not an entirely popular policy given the abrupt fade-outs and some songs getting the shortest shrift imaginable, but Belfast Child is number one here so we’re all for it. No chance of any involved chat either with Gaz and Anth in charge.
22.05 Nile Rodgers: This Cultural Life
Surely Nile Rodgers must be one of the most influential pop stars of all time, not least given how many times his records have been sampled, but now he’s telling John Wilson about his own influences in the newest edition of his visualised radio show. Up there alongside Noddy Holder at the top of the list of Nicest Men In Rock, this should be a pretty entertaining and candid interview, with the great man revealing some surprising favourites it seems.
And that’s that!
More Creamguide next week though, so that’s OK.