Phil Norman
The Year of Listing Dangerously: https://historyoftv.substack.com
- This list of overused words from 1974 is bizarrely strict in places, but a fair few are just as irritating, and even more prevalent, today.
- Apparently "wrongdoing" has just overtaken both "iconic" and "revellers" to become the most popular word used by journalists and nobody else.
- A passionate defence of ITV's early broadcasts of Sesame Street, from the producer of The Beast Must Die.
- Every so often I think there are no more full-on archive TV Proustian rushes to be had. Then something like this comes along. The theme tune and title sequence in particular are well Combray. www.youtube.com/watch?v=42Xk...
- I hope it doesn't sound like a hot take to say The Adventure Game was a better programme to anticipate watching, and to remember having watched, than to actually sit and watch, but that was my experience revisiting it in the late '90s. Print the legend, as they say. open.substack.com/pub/historyo...
- Oh Guardian, Never Change Dept.: I can just picture Lytton Strachey popping into Manze's for a cheeky "two and one" with liquor after a hard morning reading General Gordon to filth.
- Albion Market - Granada's short-lived attempt to expand its soap empire. On the plus side, it featured the most diverse cast of any soap this far. On the minus side, it was a bit dull, neither as amusing as Corrie or as dramatic as Brookside. open.substack.com/pub/historyo...
- Is there any truth in the bold assertion of the final sentence here? If not, what was the first?
- Dead Head - Howard Brenton's dense and wildly conspiratorial film noir pastiche, shot in as stylish a manner as a BBC2 videotaped production of the period could be, deserved better than to be chiefly remembered for a "kinky" S&M scene featuring Denis Lawson's arse. open.substack.com/pub/historyo...
- The Price Is Right - an attempt to import a US game show wholesale to the UK, with barely anything changed in terms of style, manner and format. Always too fundamentally American to really fit in over here, it lasted just four years before quietly naffing off. open.substack.com/pub/historyo...
- Hoping everyone has a safe and happy Barbara Dickson Weekend.
- February 1986: a time of un-British game shows, un-American sitcoms, underwhelming children's puzzle programmes and underpowered Salford soap operas. Thank heavens, then, for Denis Lawson's bare arse. open.substack.com/pub/historyo...
- God, I love the programme descriptions for Mike Yarwood in Persons. So perfectly of their time and on the nose.
- "My day passes between logic, whistling, going for walks, and being depressed." - Ludwig Wittgenstein.
- Fond memories of the right honourable member for Oldham West's guest spot on SNL.
- Current earworm: "Does anybody know how long till World War Three? I need to know, I've got to book me holi-dee, But I love her, I'm hoping that I'll never recover..."
- Separated at birth: La Serenissima by Rondo Veneziano and Diamonds & Pearls by Prince.
- Is Dee Hepburn's character in Gregory's Girl a manic Dixie Dean girl?
- Separated at birth: the "iconic" drum fill from In the Air Tonight by Phil Collins, and the bit in the theme tune from Never the Twain just as the camera pans over from the bust of Donald Sinden to the Windsor Davies Toby jug.
- Who's this iconoclastic, edgy comedian?
- Current earworm: the two bars of Listen to the Mockingbird, one played on woodwind, the second by a full orchestra, that accompany this scene from Tex Avery's King Size Canary.
- A rather worryingly comprehensive roundup of what today's kids are pleased to call the "lore" of Channel Four's Teletext cartoon The Adventures.of 4-T. More than you'll ever need to know about Vince the Valve.
- Subeditor is hoisted aloft by colleagues and ceremonially borne across the road to El Vino's.
