Hullo there!
Welcome to another Creamguide, with another Bank Holiday weekend to kick us off, though the day itself has got one of the dullest schedules we can remember. More items of interest elsewhere this week, and if you’ve got a bit more time on your hands then why not get in touch via creamguide@tvcream.co.uk?
SATURDAY 24th MAY
BBC1
18.50 Doctor Who
Good to see Palace do the business in normal time so Who could take its rightful place on last week’s super Saturday. Sadly Ncuti pulled out of announcing the UK jury votes (and Christian Fraser let us down by not saying good morning on the news after it), but it was a fun evening, even if the difference between the songs from the nations apparently “taking it seriously” and the UK seems to be somewhat imperceptible to the naked eye. Anyway, we reckon this has been one of the best series of Who for ages, with a great run of episodes, although Belinda doesn’t seem to have had much to do in recent weeks. We’re sure she will this week, though, as they finally get back to Earth on 24th May 2025, when it will be destroyed. Hang on, that’s today!
BBC2
21.00 Liza: A Truly Terrific Absolutely True Story
Liza Minnelli has had a bit of a chequered career, in recent times more famous for what she’s been doing off screen rather than on it, and maybe that was the case in the sixties as well as she was perhaps seen as something of a novelty act, or at last Judy Garland’s Daughter rather than a performer in her own right. But it was after her mother’s death that she became a star, hooking up with the likes of Bob Fosse and Charles Aznavour and picking up increasingly credible work, the high spot doubtless being Cabaret for which she was showered with praise and garlanded with several awards. Here’s how she did it, including contributions from Liza herself.
ITV4
10.30 The Big Match Revisited
So that was 1985, but we’re immediately starting another series, and it’s from a very different era indeed as we leap back a decade to cover 1975/76, one of the few seasons this show has yet to go at. No doubt it’ll hit the nostalgic sweet spot for many viewers, as opposed to the depressed state of the game in the mid-eighties, this is football in its mid-seventies pomp with loads of famous names playing in front of big crowds. It’s also a return to the familiar Big Match format, the cosy Sunday afternoon show with letters and special guests and Crazy Corner, all very London-centric of course but with the likes of Hugh Johns and Gerald Sinstadt looking in from the regions. That said, it’s a bit of a strange season for London football with Arsenal and West Ham both almost being relegated and Chelsea stuck in mid-table in Division Two, with the capital’s premier club being QPR who were 45 minutes away from winning the league. It’s White Hart Lane we visit first, though, with a classic Middlesbrough side featuring the ugliest names in football – Craggs, Boam, Alf Wood - in town.
BBC Radio 4
20.00 The Braveheart Effect
It’s thirty years since Braveheart was released, a film that was shot in Ireland and starred an Australian, but which has come to be one of the most famous representations of Scotland on screen. But the nation itself seems to have a bit of a love-hate relationship with it, half the country suggesting it’s a ridiculous film that’s totally inaccurate and presents a cliched and patronising view of Scotland, while the other half think it’s brilliant and it’s done more to promote Scotland and Scottish culture to the wider world than anything else. Susan Morrison attempts to get to the bottom of it all here.
SUNDAY 25th MAY
BBC4
19.00 Showstoppers
20.40 An Evening with Ethel Merman
21.30 Songs from My Fair Lady
22.30 Song by Song: Ira Gershwin
23.30 Who Could Ask For Anything More? A Celebration of Ira Gershwin
BBC4’s musicals season seems to have been running for weeks – and we’re sure everyone who tunes in for Pops every Friday can recite the trailer off by heart – but they’re still voyaging into the bowels of the back catalogue for some intriguing programmes celebrating songs from the shows. Two more episodes of Gary Wilmot’s mid-nineties series, with an eclectic guest list spanning Luther Vandross and John Nettles, is followed by a rarely seen show from 1964 with the queen of Broadway wowing a London audience. Then it’s Jeremy’s Iron, Kiri Te Kanawa and Warren Mitchell at the Albert Hall in 1987, a celebration of the Great American Songbook from 1977 with a cast including Derek Griffiths, and then back to the Albert Hall for a gala presented by Charles Dance and David Soul in 1996.
BBC Radio 2
17.00 Pick of the Pops
Johnny Logan and Zodiac Mindwarp together at last in the first hour as we get the hits from 1987, before a jaunt to 1999. We were staggered the other week when the final of Pointless was about solo Spice Girls songs and pretty much all of them were pointless, including a couple of Mel C number ones, and more or less the only ones that scored points were some of Geri’s terrible solo hits, one of which we’ll hear in this show. We’ve also got the first ever UK garage number one and also Hepburn, a band forever fated to be mixed up with the Thunderbugs who were around at the same time and offered an identical brand of female-fronted power pop, and who also had a song called Bugs to add to the confusion.
MONDAY 26th MAY
BBC Radio 2
14.00 Mark Goodier’s Most Played: The Billion Streamers
Nice to hear this week from our old friend Damon Rose, who regarding last week’s appreciation of Maggie Philbin writes, “Maggie Philbin seventy? That actually really hurts. I don’t want to get all maudlin but life is ebbing away now, isn’t it. Be honest. Surely now is the time to bring Tomorrow’s World back. 6G phones round the corner, bio, Crispr, vaccines, renewable energy, AI, quantum computing, semiconductors, hacking, commercial space flights, data banks under the arctic sea, manufacturing up in space, mining asteroids on the agenda, a permanent base on the moon... c’mon!!! this is the era for those science shows yet TW is no more and even Horizon seems to have bitten the dust in the most part. Aren’t we supposed to be trying to big up the UK as a centre of scientific excellence like with the Oxford Cambridge London triangle? And that new science innovation Aria centre sponsored by government? If the kids had something sciency on each Thursday, live, it would inspire them! That said, I’d rather see Swap Shop back.” As we mentioned, not much in the way of Bank Holiday fun today, seemingly so soon after the last lot it’s taken everyone by surprise, but Goodiebags is here with another instalment of the modern-day equivalent of Simon Bates Solid Gold, with a playlist made entirely of record-breaking records, some of which will surprise you.
Look at each other and go bleurgh this week as we pay tribute to a man who made a little go a very long way, as he starred in some of the cheapest, most low-concept TV shows ever made, but just about managed to make them shine. Some kids loved him and some kids couldn’t bear him, but for a while, albeit helped the fact he had no competition for a lot of the time, he was one of the biggest names on children’s TV. You mustn’t pause and you mustn’t hesitate as we celebrate...
TIMMY MALLETT
Seventy this year, Timmy Mallett (yes, it is his real name) was born in Marple in Cheshire, and could have had a respectable career as he graduated with a history degree from the University of Warwick. But while he was there he also got involved in the university radio station and got the broadcasting bug. He started on the wireless on BBC Radio Oxford in the late seventies, with a suitably manic, kid-friendly delivery that was a pleasing diversion from the usual staid BBC local radio, branding his show as Timmy On The Tranny, with a cast of characters often played by his future Wide Awake colleague Arabella Warner. In 1981 he was lured to Leicester to launch Centre Radio, presenting its opening show, though he didn’t stay very long there, which is for the best as it was the first ILR station to go bust and fell off the air within two years.
By 1983 he was back on his home turf and presenting the evening show on Piccadilly Radio, and given his reputation later, this was Timmy as the acme of cool. Timmy On The Tranny was required listening for every kid in Greater Manchester in the early eighties, a fast, frantic and funny show with gags and games and loads of pop, with Timmy the quick-witted MC holding court over a cast of characters in the studio, big stars and listeners on the phone. Whenever the big names were in the North West they were on the show, hence the encounter with George Michael up there, and such was its loyal listenership that Timmy would frequently appear in the Best DJ category of the Smash Hits Readers Poll, ahead of several national jocks. Back in Warrington a teenage Chris Evans thought it was brilliant and after he passed his driving test the first thing he did was follow Timmy home, eventually ending up as his helper and occasional on-air sidekick. Evans still says it’s the best radio show he’s ever heard and he learned absolutely loads, and 35 years later they reminisced.
Timmy’s first TV appearance, we reckon, was in the audience for Top of the Pops in 1981, but it was in 1983 when his antics on the radio in Manchester started to attract the attention of telly bosses in That London, as he joined the nascent TV-am as pop correspondent. It’s a rather different Timmy we see here, just the glasses a sign of the neon wardrobe that would become his trademark and here uncharacteristically done up in a series of flashy suits, and also a rather more credible one, interrogating the big stars of the day including here Heaven 17, in one of the few bits of those early days of the ‘vam that were actually entertaining. It turned out that alongside David Frost and Mike Morris he was one of the few people who lasted the distance on that grand folly of a station.
Timmy would come to dominate TV-am’s kids output, although in the earliest days it was a bit different from the low budget, low concept live stuff he shouted his way through. Under the auspices of Anne “Teletubbies” Wood the early TV-am kids shows were pre-recorded and often intended to, yikes, mix entertainment with education. The first was Data Run with Edwina Lawrie, but later in 1983 it made way for the imaginatively-titled Summer Run with Timmy in charge. We’re not actually sure what the difference was, to be honest, but Summer Run had a pretty unique look, Timmy serving up fun and facts in front of some eye-straining CSO backdrops, and this interview with Paul Weller certainly illustrates they embraced the new technology with gusto.
Timmy did a second Summer Run in 1984 and carried on filing pop news for TV-am, while still doing his radio show up in Manchester, and before he threw his lot in with breakfast telly completely he headed back up north to do his only fully-fledged series for the Beeb. He replaced Peter Powell as host of the Oxford Road Show, now rebranded as – ooh! – ORS 85, the teen magazine on screen. This was a slightly poppier take on the show which in previous years had consisted pretty much entirely of earnest debates on unemployment, and Timmy was joined every week by a guest presenter which meant he was obviously charged with steering things back on track quite a lot as the guest host went off on tangents and missed endless cues. The episode above has been preserved on a thousand VHSs as The Smiths were on it, though the whole thing spluttered to a halt after Timmy’s one and only series. But he had plenty more irons in the fire.
Despite TV-am being in an absolute state financially, its kids output, helped by a captive audience most weeks with BBC1 still sound asleep, was enjoying some success. It wasn’t immune to the need to cut costs, though, and in 1984 Saturday SuperStore producer Nick Wilson joined as the new head of kids shows, and promptly ditched the patchwork of pre-recorded commissions for a live and lively new show that had a bit more energy, as well as costing next to nothing to make. This turned out to be an inspired idea and The Wide Awake Club became TV-am’s flagship for many years. Timmy was the first host, alongside his old mate Arabella Warner and James “son of Richard” Baker, although we don’t remember him appearing on Saturday mornings much and within a few months Tommy Boyd arrived as main anchor and Timmy took on something of a roving brief, though he’d make regular returns throughout the show’s entire life, sitting in for Tommy here and interrogating late-period Madness.
While WAC was running on Saturday mornings, Roland Rat was still at TV-am entertaining in the school holidays, but when he defected to the Beeb in 1985, Timmy and Nick Wilson were charged with coming up with a replacement at short notice, and invented Wacaday in about five seconds. This is how everyone remembers Timmy, wearing a lurid outfit, shouting at the top of his voice and helming the self-styled show your telly was made for. Half an hour of daft games, cartoons and phone calls were the perfect way to start the day for kids for years, and although Timmy was absolutely an acquired taste, lots of kids clearly did acquire it. All the features are present and correct up there, including several rounds of Mallett’s Mallett and a record from the charts accompanied by stills because TV-am were too tight to pay for pop videos. The whole shebang ran for six series a year every year, and just about managed to keep going during the never-ending TV-am strike, which had seemingly little effect as the show looked so shambolic even with a full technical crew.
Here’s something we’re pleased to see again, because we had this and watched it loads of times. This is Timmy Mallett’s Utterly Brilliant Magic Box, a kids’ instructional video that came with props attached so you could mount your own magic shows for fun and profit. Sad to say we were too dull to ever do that, but we enjoyed watching it. One thing that we remember finding fascinating at the time was that it’s filmed at the Gate Theatre in Notting Hill and you can hear loads of ambient noise, including passing traffic, which was a bit surprising as we were so used to proper TV shows recorded in proper TV studios. We were a great kid.
As well as shouting “bleurgh” at a million miles an hour every morning, there was another, slightly more subdued side – we mean, it’s a sliding scale – to Timmy, as he had a parallel career introducing schools programmes, presumably much to the bemusement of kids who found themselves watching them. During the eighties he presented series like Walrus and Wondermaths, plus multi-faith series Questions which aimed to get primary school kids thinking about religion. Actually Timmy is seemingly a much more thoughtful character than you might think and has spoken about his faith in the past, but we’re not sure anyone’s that interested in that part of the act.
Timmy had been playing pop on TV for most of the eighties, and in 1990 he went to the other side of the microphone and promptly had a big pop hit himself. Inevitably it was one of the most annoying pop hits you’d ever heard, Timmy finding himself fronting novelty band Bombalurina with Andrew Lloyd-Webber and Nigel “Jack Mix” Wright pulling the strings behind the scenes, and later it was suggested he didn’t even sing on the record. But no doubt thanks to constant exposure on Wacaday that summer, it went to number one and was the sixteenth biggest selling single of the year. Happily, the nation weren’t falling for it a second time and the many, many follow-ups Timmy flung out didn’t have the same reign of terror, mostly failing to chart. Must have made Michaela sick, mind, as she made proper records at the same time that got nowhere near the top forty.
In the early nineties Timmy sprung out of his breakfast time spot to front Yorkshire TV-produced hobbies show Utterly Brilliant, one of a number of series that aimed to make kids just switch off the television sets and go out and do something less boring instead. Each week Timmy compelled the nation to learn a new skill or find a new obsession, and the most famous episode involved getting the youth of the nineties to rediscover the glory of skiffle. Well, it was cheap to get involved with, we suppose, and helping Timmy to spread the good word were the Railtown Bottlers, fronted by Mark Kermode.
The early nineties were a rather frantic period for TV-am’s kids output as the station looked towards franchise renewal by diversifying, which involved contracting it all out to indie Clear Idea. It wasn’t the biggest upheaval, given it was run by TV-am’s Nick Wilson, but after several revamps in quick succession the Wide Awake Club disappeared in 1990. Though despite its parent show ending, Wacaday continued along its merry way, the biggest change coming from the new sanitised Mallett’s Mallett after they got fed up of complaints about encouraging kids to smack their siblings about the head. But then in 1991 the unthinkable happened and TV-am lost their franchise. Most of the kids output was immediately jettisoned to make way for non-stop cartoons but Wacaday continued, albeit in slightly more sporadic form, until the final episode in December 1992.
Having been there pretty much since day one, Timmy was hugely associated with TV-am, so it was a bit of a surprise a few years later when he turned up on its successor GMTV. No Hits 6 LPs to give away or toast-dropping here, though, but instead he was out on the road contributing inserts on the UK’s best tourist attractions, not just presenting them but also producing them through his own company Brilliant TV.
And Timmy wasn’t downhearted, because he’s never downhearted, and took his Timmy Towers show to the nation’s theatres and holiday camps for many years. He took it to telly as well, again presenting and producing panto-style shows alongside Adrian “Jigsaw” Hedley for Children’s ITV throughout the nineties, that episode up there from 1998 featuring what must be one of the last ever TV appearances of Rod Hull and Emu.
Chris Evans always said he was disappointed that Timmy stopped being on the radio, but that he once told him that while you might fall out of fashion as a performer for adults, there would always be kids that needed entertaining and if you could get them there they’d always remember you, and it’s fair to say that a generation of kids do look back fondly on his frantic but always friendly presentational style. And for all his constantly wired persona, he’s clearly a properly thoughtful and intelligent bloke and he’s a consistently engaging presence on social media, cycling around the country meeting people and creating acclaimed artwork, which sounds a pretty sweet life to us.
TUESDAY 27th MAY
Rewind TV
19.00 Brass
The Beeb announced some interesting new sitcoms this week, with some impressive talent attached including Rob Brydon and Diane Morgan, though perhaps the most intriguing is the new one written by and starring Mackenzie Crook, which not only features Michael Palin but also included animated sequences created and directed by Ainslie Henderson - from Fame Academy! Ainslie was the best thing about that series, actually, and we’re thrilled that he’s now enjoying a hugely successful career as an animator and film director, winning numerous awards including a BAFTA. That’s one to look out for, and meanwhile this channel continues to pump out some fondly remembered sitcoms of the past, including this amusingly straight-faced spoof of every cliched Northern family saga ever made that did good business for Granada in the mid-eighties.
WEDNESDAY 28th MAY
BBC4
22.00 Sense and Sensibility
BBC4 is getting lost in Austen over the next few weeks to coincide with the new documentary on her life. One thing the series reflects is the sheer number of adaptations of her work there’s been over the years. The nineties version of Pride and Prejudice is the most famous, but there’s been plenty of others before and since and in this spot for much of the spring, and on iPlayer right now, we’ll see not just those big ones but some lesser-spotted dramas getting their first TV screening for decades. Here’s one of them, as we had a prestige production of it a decade or so ago, but this is the 1971 adaptation, very much of its time seemingly but with a scene-stealing performance by Patricia Routledge and lots of familiar faces in the cast including the great Milton Johns.
Sky Documentaries
21.00 David Frost vs...
This series is proving as eclectic as Frost himself in the way it bounds between light entertainment and far weightier matters, as after last week’s show was a pleasing jaunt through the life of Elton John, this one’s on the Middle East. The fact that the subject was a regular talking point for Frost over his entire TV career perhaps says much about what a complicated issue it’s always been, though he tried to find common ground and make it comprehensible to a wider audience, and among those suggesting he did a fine job are a former Prime Minister and a former President. A Channel 5-style clip show this isn’t.
THURSDAY 29th MAY
BBC4
21.30 Arena: Clint Eastwood
You’d have to say that BBC4 are trying their level best to revive the classic theme night, as so often these days what’s billed as a theme night is often just two programmes shown one after the other, and done and dusted in little over an hour, whereas this celebration of Clint on the occasion of his 95th birthday runs from 7pm right through til 2am. Mind you, that does involve two bloody long films, and in between that is this prestige documentary that was a landmark of BBC2’s Christmas schedules in 2000, and features a stellar cast paying tributes. It’s in two parts, though the second one is at ten to one in the morning.
BBC Radio 4
12.30 Toast
The return of the series that takes a fascinating look at defunct businesses, and it’s perhaps surprising it’s taken so long to get to one of the biggest things to go bust in recent memory – Woolies! You might suggest that the British high street has never quite recovered from its closure in 2008, not least as so many of the stores were so big they dominated the town centre – certainly the case where Creamguide grew up, a three storey building albeit one where the lower ground floor had been closed since the early seventies when they stopped selling fish. Until then everyone had fond memories of it, so often where people bought their first records, their first school uniforms and their first home furnishings, and this programme will examine whether it could still have been going today with a bit of spit and polish.
FRIDAY 30th MAY
BBC4
19.00 Top of the Pops
And so we reach the end of 1997, one of those years where the show feels very different in December than it did in January, though your mileage may vary as to whether that’s for the better or not. Certainly we now rarely leave the studio, which is all very commendable and you can see why Chris Cowey wanted to prioritise unique performances you couldn’t see anywhere else over videos you could see all over the place, but it does mean some big hits don’t appear at all, something that will become even more apparent as we move into 1998. Before that it’s the Christmas show, an episode that BBC4 have screened before, but way back in 2007 as part of a week marking the tenth anniversary of 1997. Bit more nostalgic now, perhaps. Unlike in recent years there’s no stunt casting but the regular hosts of Jayne, Jo and Zoe in charge, while the month-by-month format is replaced by a bit of a free-for-all ostensibly counting down the biggest selling singles of the year. And such is the supermarket effect on singles sales in the aftermath of Candle in the Wind, four of the records featured had sold umpteen copies but were still in that week’s top ten.
20.00 Top of the Pops
Then we’re back in 1988 for a very strange show indeed, as it’s from the week asbestos was uncovered in TV Centre and the studios were out of bounds, so most of the Beeb’s output had to find new surroundings, including famously Doctor Who decamping to a tent in the car park at Elstree. Sadly we missed all this fun at the time as we were on holiday in Majorca, but we’ve got to see this weird old episode of Pops since, where Pete and Campbell find themselves in the production gallery linking repeats and videos. It just about works on screen, though unfortunately for them it was the week Rod Stewart was booked to make his first appearance in the studio since 1972, and he never came back. Good they got the show on, though when you hear Tiffany murder one of the worst covers of all time, you may wish they’d not bothered.
20.30 Top of the Pops
Then it’s back to 1977 which means a laughably varied line-up and some suitably cryptic links from Noel. Rod famously appears in this episode as well, of course, as it’s the week before the Jubilee, and certainly punk hasn’t made it as far as TV Centre, but we do get the last knockings of prog with Genesis and even The Strawbs.
21.10 Top of the Pops
Two more jaunts to 1985 to round things off, though this one’s from two weeks after the February episode we saw the other week and so there’s some pretty familiar fare from Bryan Adams and Howard Jones. A few more interesting bits alongside it, mind, including we think the only time the Top 40 Breakers had to venture outside the Top 40 (with suitably altered name) and an early appearance by Bruno Brookes on presenting duties.
21.40 Top of the Pops
And after reassessing the work of Paul Jordan the other week, here’s a couple of quid in repeat fees for Dixie Peach, though we join their first link in progress after editing out a regrettable introduction from Gaz. We’re in July for this one, and as with many episodes this year there’s probably too much stopping and starting and too many slick and forgettable records. But we’ve got a right novelty from Trans-X and a forgotten Feargal Sharkey track with The Human League’s Jo Callis backing him, illustrating that Phil Oakey didn’t monopolise weird haircuts in that outfit, and which we think might be the most recent chart hit not to be available in digital form.
00.30 Young Guns Go For It
We enjoyed seeing the Bananarama episode of this series last week, not just because they were great value in the interviews but also because in one of the sequences shot in 1999 they walked past an advert for the late, great Deluxe magazine. Last two of the first series here, first of all with the Human League, another band of great talkers and the new bits are also fascinating as they travel around late nineties Sheffield, picking up both incarnations on the way. Then it’s The Smiths, though unlike other episodes not all the band take part. You can probably guess who doesn’t.
And that’s that!
But Creamguide is back, back, back next week.