CREAMGUIDE: 2nd-8th August 2025
In an ever-expanding media universe
Hullo there!
Welcome to Creamguide, back on a Thursday. Yes, it was a very nice break, thank you – you know you’re getting old when you go away to somewhere without a telly – but we’re back raring to go to guide you through another week’s viewing and listening. Keep in touch via creamguide@tvcream.co.uk.
SATURDAY 2nd AUGUST
BBC2
21.10 Dexys at the BBC
We’re certainly enjoying the Beeb’s apparent ambition to make a compilation of every single act in the history of the charts, and this should be pretty good fun. Always Dexys, of course, never Dexy’s. Kevin Rowland has always been a fascinating character, obsessed with the idea of a band being a gang which everyone committed to 24/7, which explains the frantic turnover of band members over the years as they baulked at his fitness regimes. He was also desperate never to make the same record twice so consistently changed style, and in that regard was possibly a victim of his own success because Geno and especially Come On Eileen were such smash hits everyone was clamouring for similar follow-ups and were utterly bemused by what they opted for instead. Kevin’s also had a pretty chequered career since the early eighties, but he seems to be in pretty good shape these days, especially as even their less successful LPs have since enjoyed a critical reappraisal and he’s been able to revisit some of their material he’s never been happy with to create versions more to his liking. And despite always being keen to move forward he’s happy enough to look back to introduce this programme, where we’re promised he'll set the record straight about some famous incidents, which must surely mean we get chapter and verse on The Jocky Wilson Incident from the horse’s mouth.
BBC4
23.25 Parkinson
Looks like we’re getting a few more vintage Parkys after a short break, this one from 1975 being shown as a tribute to Frederick Forsyth as he died recently. As ever it’s perhaps the supporting acts who are more interesting as a snapshot of the time as we’ve also got a chat with Pete Murray, who in a few weeks’ time will turn a hundred. He was a giant figure in broadcasting in his day, though even by the early eighties the Beeb considered his style too old-fashioned even for Radio 2, though he continued broadcasting for many years after that on LBC. Still the housewives’ favourite at this point, though, welcoming them to his Open House every day.
ITV4
10.30 The Big Match Revisited
Always a treat to get an interview with Alec “Mmm, isn’t it?” Stock, though it was a little different to his usual jumpers-for-goalposts persona, Brian talking it up as especially explosive – or as explosive as the avuncular Stock can get, criticising his misfiring strikers and appearing totally exasperated, despite the fact they were third in the league and that 1-0 loss was their first defeat in five. After a few weeks in the lower leagues we’re back at the very top of the first division here, with Man U travelling to a pretty boisterous West Ham, while we’ve also got our first look this season at the eventual champions.
SUNDAY 3rd AUGUST
BBC4
20.00 Oscar Peterson: Words and Music
20.50 In Concert: Oscar Peterson
21.20 Omnibus: Oscar Peterson and Andre Previn
22.25 Oscar Peterson: Words and Music
23.15 Oscar Peterson: Jazz 625
Tributes to Cleo Laine to follow over the next few weeks, but more jazz tonight on this channel to mark the centenary of one of the all-time greats, who as you can see was no stranger to the Beeb’s cameras over the years. The two episodes of his 1980 series that top and almost tail the evening see him joined by fellow jazz royalty is Elephants Gerald and Count Basie respectively, while the highlights would seem to be the middle show where he joined Andre Previn in 197 to take us on a toe-tapping trip through every single one of jazz’s 88 keys.
BBC Radio 2
17.00 Pick of the Pops
It’s eighties month on this station, though we’re not sure how that really differs from any other month to be honest. There are a few special programmes in any case and this show playing two eighties charts is apparently part of it as well, but again, we’re not sure how that differs from most weeks. Far enough apart to make it varied enough, in any case, starting off in 1980 which is a memorable week as the chart that heralded the return of Top of the Pops after the extended strike and the start of its neon and streamers golden age, which you might suggest is the official beginning of the decade. Then it’s a chart from another memorable Pops week, the All About Eve disaster of 1988, which Goodiebags actually presented, and maybe they’ll dip out of the Top 20 to play it so he can share his memories. Either way we’ll get a corker from Luscious, Pouting Kim Wilde.
MONDAY 4th AUGUST
Rewind TV
07.00 Jack Hargreaves’ Old Country
Out of Town is not currently on Talking Pictures, much to Creamguide’s dad’s dismay, but a few channels along is the lookalike series he made for Channel Four after Southern went pop, where he was an unlikely stablemate of the likes of The Friday Alternative and The Eleventh Hour. Though in fact the new channel made a special point of catering for older viewers and the likes of Years Ahead were also schedule staples for a while, and for Jack it was absolutely business as usual. This is being shown on Sunday teatimes but if you’re busy enjoying the current country at that point you can also see it just before your commute on a Monday morning, which is convenient for us as it fills up a Monday without Mastermind.
Well, the other week we featured one of the smartarse Clives with no hair and no neck who was responsible for arch travelogues, comedy chat shows and droll newspaper columns, so we thought we’d take the opportunity to feature the other one as well. A big favourite of ours, in fact, as one of the first “grown-up” humourists we really liked, and in many ways the man who invented TV Cream. It’s...
CLIVE JAMES
Born Vivian James (he changed it when Gone With The Wind made it absolutely a girl’s name) in Sydney, Clive came to Britain aged 22 in 1961, one of many Aussies to take the trip and do big things culturally in that decade, like Barry Humphries and Germaine Greer. He went to Cambridge where he was in Footlights, appeared on University Challenge and purposefully read everything but the books he was told to read, and after graduating he wrote, wrote and wrote. In 1972 he became The Observer’s TV critic and for the next decade his column was absolutely required reading by everyone with a passing interest in telly. He could write seriously about serious things but he was the first person to realise that popular telly could just as well reflect the spirit of the age, and that Frank Bough was as compelling a television presence as the finest actors, and overnight revolutionised TV criticism with everyone who’s written about it since, even the useless ones like us, owing him a debt of gratitude. Not surprisingly given everyone in the industry was an avid reader of his column, he soon got invites to appear on television as well as write about it, appearing here with a surprising amount of hair on What The Papers Say.
Other television work followed, and Clive found that despite his interest in the fine arts, he actually quite enjoyed mucking about on telly. In the early seventies he contributed to Line-Up’s satire series Up Sunday where he’d regularly dress up in daft costumes, which backfired on him when one week he decided to wear a full suit of armour and the crew stitched him up by rehearsing his bit first and recording it last. He was also a regular presence on Granada’s seminal rock show So It Goes, taking a suitably sardonic look at the music business and on one memorable episode being assigned to “look after” The Sex Pistols. And at the end of the decade he became one of the trio of hosts on LWT’s grand folly Saturday Night People, the gossip column of the air which we’ve featured in these pages before while paying tribute to the other two. Clive enjoyed it, though Russell Harty apparently got a bit exasperated with Clive’s attitude to scripting involving scribbling a few notes on the back of his hand. One day we’ll find out what Janet said about Francis Wilson.
In 1982 Clive gave up his column given that when he turned on the TV, “increasingly I find my own face looking back at me”, and promptly signed a deal with LWT for some suitably arch and literate shows reflecting his catholic tastes. As a man who’d spent the past decade skewering TV, it was no surprise his most regular show did just that, in the shape of the long-running and hugely popular Clive James On Television. Based on a one-off Denis Norden had done a year earlier, in later years sneering at TV clips from other countries wasn’t especially edifying, but Clive kept it all just about tasteful with his amusing, literate links. His big favourites were always the more bizarre offerings from the Far East, best of all Endurance which he would come back to time and time again. After Clive left the series carried on for years as well, although his immediate replacement Keith Floyd was less successful and was swiftly replaced by Chris Tarrant who made it his own and it was, for a bit, still quite amusing until ten million other shows started fishing in the same pond. And under Clive we never had that terrible tonal shift before the break where they’d show a public information film and Tarrant would put on a glum expression and say “but seriously, 163 people last year were seriously injured inserting firecrackers up their anus”.
As well as his TV criticism, Clive was also a travel writer of some renown, penning vivid portraits of his adventures, and he also brought that to telly with a series of arch travelogues, where he’d take a trip to a suitably exotic location to wax a little wry on its people and places, often with the help of some strategically-placed celebrities. In the wrong hands this could be a bit tedious and self-indulgent, but once more Clive’s wonderful way with words meant there have been few people who have been better able to describe the indescribable essence of a city. His first jaunt for television was a trip to Vegas in 1982 and there’d be many more to come over the next decade. He was happy closer to home as well, mind, with The Late Clive James running for a few series on Channel Four where he got to talk to friends old and new.
Clive was by now a familiar and popular face on TV, and in 1988 he defected to the Beeb, a pretty successful move not least because he brought most of his production team, including his long-time associate Richard Drewett, along with him. The prolific Clive had his own department at the Beeb and across two channels was able to indulge in his interests in both high and low culture. The first fruit of this deal is a bit of an odd one, as it’s The Late Show, but not, er, The Late Show, as it started six months before that daily show and continued to run alongside it. The Late Show with Clive James, to give it its full name, ran on Friday nights on BBC2 for half the year and was a suitably highbrow round table discussion on a topical theme with lots of Clive’s clever mates joining in, though philistine that Creamguide is we only really remember the episode that went out on Red Nose Day which was invaded by Lenny Henry jumping over from BBC1. In the same ilk he also carried out conversations with cultural movers and shakers under the banner of The Clive James Interview.
In 1988 Clive also took up what would be a regular gig as our man at the gate of the year, and before the fireworks became a thing Clive’s show was one of the longest-running fixtures on New Year’s Eve, Clive ringing out the old (albeit clearly on tape) for seven successive years. His rancorous review of the year mixed witty remarks with amusingly out-of-context news clips, and while some of the gags came round so regularly they were like an old friend (“Yasmin Arafat wins Best Supporting Tea Towel!”), he delivered them so well. In 1989 he got twice as long with a whole decade to go at.
That same year he also began the ultimate manifestation of Clive on TV in Saturday Night Clive. Clive sold this series as making sense of a new and deregulated universe of ever-expanding media, but what it actually meant was him taking the piss out of the news and about weird foreign telly with the help of his comedy mates. Some old favourites turned up again and again in the studio and via satellite, like PJ O’Rourke and Vitali Vitaliev, and the whole thing could have been relentlessly smug and unwatchable if Clive wasn’t so charming and funny. The mix was popular enough to get it promoted from BBC2 to BBC1 in 1991, with ever bigger names making an appearance, followed by a move to become Sunday Night Clive in 1994. What with that and more Postcards, the early nineties really were the high water mark of Clive on the box.
One other enterprise in this period was something that Clive suggested was the most unrepeatable television programme ever made, as it made use of hundreds and hundreds of hours of archive footage. This was Fame In The 20th Century, a meditation on the concept of celebrity, with Clive musing on what it actually meant to be famous in the television age – basically a televised essay in the style of Civilisation or The Ascent of Man, maybe on a slightly less important subject that those two but Clive’s arguments were just as intellectually rigorous and challenging, and he was doing it all on primetime BBC1 to boot. And if you weren’t convinced you could at least enjoy some wonderful old clips, the series also being shown on PBS on America with suitably effusive introduction.
In 1994 Clive told the Beeb he was interested in setting up an indie to make his shows, which they were happy to help him with, though they were less amused when straight after doing so he announced he was defecting back to ITV. This did mean another pretty seamless transition, and his new show on ITV was pretty much exactly the same as the old show on the Beeb, although while it was still on Sunday nights it was now just The Clive James Show. And by this point he’d long since stopped pretending that it had anything to do with media analysis and was just a chat show with jokes, celebrities and funny TV clips. A very entertaining chat show, mind, and we certainly enjoyed rounding off the weekend with it, especially as you had to get your archive kicks where you could in those days. This one includes a brief revisit of Doomwatch and yes, it’s the one with the rats. We do always feel compelled to point out regarding this scene that most people at the time would have been watching on 405 line black and white and therefore the limitations of the special effects would not have been so apparent. However, it is also very, very funny.
One regular bit of Clive’s show was the opening sequence where he’d review the news with a guest commentator – ie, get a stand-up to do some topical gags. You wouldn’t normally compare Clive to Des O’Connor, but this spot, like an appearance on Des O’Connor Tonight, was a hugely valuable showcase for new comedians who had ten minutes on ITV to do their material. Like Des, Clive was a really generous straightman who would always feed them the lines and laugh loudly at their stuff, and lots of stand-ups, like Dominic Holland here, got a decent leg-up from it. And the other performer who obviously benefited from Clive’s patronage was the unforgettable Margarita Pracatan, discovered by Clive in the US and brought over to introduce the show (“Meester Clibe Javes!”) and then sing it out with an extraordinary rendition of an appropriate song.
Here’s an interesting show, which often (including on Wikipedia) gets lumped in with Clive James on Television but which is a totally different series in its own right. Not hard to see the confusion, mind, it had the familiar name of Clive James on TV, but rather than laughing at foreign shows, Clive romped through a different genre of British TV each week, laughing at and with their various tropes in the company of an audience made up of familiar faces and a guest to add their own memories. With only half an hour to play with it could only scratch the surface, but the clips were great fun, many of which we’d never seen before, Clive’s links were always amusing and that episode up there with Clive and Victoria Wood celebrating soaps is a really lovely bit of telly. There were two series, one in 1997 pre-watershed and a second in 1998 oddly dumped in a late night slot, and in the days before we could see all these shows we lapped it up. Around this time too Clive, who was mad on motor racing, got to launch ITV’s F1 coverage with a gala show featuring all the big names.
In 1999, with ITV having axed News at Ten (the first time), there was a requirement for some shows to fill the gap at 10pm, so Clive’s chat show moved from weekends to weeknights and took on the somewhat familiar name of Monday Night Clive. The other difference this time was the very distinctive set, which loses something in a low-res VHS dub but was a bit of an eye-strainer on proper telly. Sadly by this point we’d lost the news review (and also Margarita Pracatan, although we had pretty much got the idea by then) and it became even more a straight chat show, and it felt like Clive was going through the motions a bit.
But little did anyone know that he’d decided that the millennium was the ideal moment for him to make a fresh start, and give up the telly. So what turned out to be his last ever show for ITV – which he knew, but nobody else did – was his Night of 1000 Years, a revival of his old New Year’s Eve show but this time on New Year’s Eve Eve and with a whole thousand years to play with. Co-writing the show were Collins and Maconie, Andrew Collins saying he was a joy to work with but it was clear he was getting a bit less interested in pop culture and didn’t get half the references they were using, but it was all entertaining enough in the end. And then Clive took his leave at the same time as the 20th Century.
But for Clive, it was only the beginning, and now he had the time to concentrate on what he really wanted to do – reading, writing and more writing. He was also one of the first famous people to really embrace the internet, once linking to TV Cream from his website, which we were thrilled about, and also producing one of the first attempts at a fully-fledged online show, Talking In The Library, where he and a famous mate would, er, talk. In Clive’s library.
Sadly Clive suffered from ill health in later life, though he was still a prolific writer and at one point apologised for still being alive long after he’d suggested he was on his way out. Happily that meant we got plenty more Clive, including for a couple of years a return to his TV critic days with a regular and entertaining column in the Telegraph. Clive died in 2019 and there really will never be anyone else who wrote so entertainingly about television, only half-arsed copycats like us.
TUESDAY 5th AUGUST
BBC4
21.30 Caroline Aherne at the BBC
22.00 Caroline Aherne: Queen of Comedy
No particular reason for these two programmes to get an outing again, seemingly – it’s not the anniversary of her birth or death, or any of her programmes – but they’re always worth seeing again regardless. The first programme is an entertaining compilation with er old mate John Thomson including some well-chosen clips, including her rare appearance as herself on The Stand Up Show in 1995 where her routine has clearly not been changed a word since she did it in the pub for her mates, which makes it all the funnier. The second show is somewhat more self-consciously serious, but still good, and neither include any of Mrs Merton and Malcolm which really is a completely buried series.
WEDNESDAY 6th AUGUST
Talking Pictures TV
18.25 Strange But True
We saw Asp last week introducing The War Game, still in fine form at the ripe old age of 92, and we can still see him on this channel when he was still a young buck who’d just turned sixty. This could be carbon dated to the mid-nineties, where at the height of X Files mania all channels went made about sci-fi and the paranormal, a craze that ended when ITV spent millions of pounds on Chris Carter’s Millennium in the assumption it would be The X Files II, only to find it the most miserable programme ever made and so bleak they couldn’t even show it in primetime. They managed to get a couple of series out of this, though, an enjoyable bit of hokum which attempted to “investigate” strange phenomena, with smoothie Asp adding a touch of class and a suitably raised eyebrow to proceedings.
THURSDAY 7th AUGUST
BBC Radio 4
09.00 What Happened to Counterculture?
The nineties us would be absolutely staggered to learn that while Melvyn Bragg is on his summer holidays, his fill-in is Stewart Lee. This should be a fascinating series, though, as over the next six weeks Stew examines how the underground almost imperceptibly became the overground, from the fifties to the present day, in suitably academic fashion. He’s invited a heavyweight list of contributors to discuss this with him, from Brian Eno to Simon Heffer.
FRIDAY 8th AUGUST
BBC4
19.00 Top of the Pops
We wonder if The Lilys had the shortest Top of the Pops career ever, their one and only appearance in the studio done and dusted in under two minutes. Probably two minutes too long, to be honest, a song we remember quite enjoying on record but that live version was an absolute racket. Seems to be quite a few seventies acts enjoying something of a renaissance in recent weeks, and after Errol Brown we’ve got the return of Mad Mike Bonkers Batt to celebrate a Wombles greatest hits LP. Almost as much if a veteran is Kylie and we’ve got the final knockings of the IndieKylie era, which is a shame because we really like it.
19.30 Top of the Pops
One of the best bits of the last few months has been the return of some unique sets – not least because it allows us to work out when the performances have been pre-recorded by seeing glimpses of the other stages in the background – though it’ll go for a burton in a few weeks when the show gets a revamp. There’s also been some pretty interesting attempts at staging too, we think, and this one includes what we think is one of the most distinctive and memorable performances of this era from Sheffield’s wonky pop specialists The All Seeing I. Their fellow Sheffielder and future collaborator Jarvis is in the studio as well, and while we’ve finally seen the back of Never Ever we’ve got a few more songs that hang around for months.
21.45 Top of the Pops
After the Prommage we’re late and lewd with the archive shows, and another visit to 1985. Not the most thrilling show of the year, this one, the most interesting aspect of it being that it was unexpectedly live after the previous day’s recording was cancelled due to the strike caused by the banning of Real Lives, Simes obviously emphasising that by announcing the time every five seconds and Richard Skinner, in his last show for three and a half years, doing so by his microphone failing, though last time we got this episode they cut that bit out, but left in the back reference, making it a rare example of a Simes joke not making sense for reasons beyond his control. And despite the liveness it’s a pretty dull show with the centrepiece being a pre-record of a crushingly dull Go West ballad that’s crawled to number 30. Next!
22.15 Top of the Pops
A bit more fun here as we’re back in 1978 and the 750th episode of the Pops, a momentous occasion marked by, er, the show being cut down to 25 minutes because of the Commonwealth Games, making it one of the shortest shows of the decade. Luckily Pete’s in charge so he rattles through his links at a rate of knots, regardless of whether they make any sense, and they manage to squeeze in some top Look-In Pop from the likes of Hi-Tension, Renaissance and Jilted John, plus The Rezillos have even written a song for the occasion.
And that’s that!
But there’ll be another Creamguide next week.