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It is a Sunday as I am writing this and it made me think of Sunday nights in the late 1980s and early 1990s which to millions of people, reeked in a stale way of "school in the morning" in which no other weekday would do so; one had to rely on the television to take our mind off what was to happen in around ten hours' time and enjoy our final moments of freedom before going back to the classroom after two precious days' away. That's Life! was on BBC 1 at that moment, but on ITV the slot in which News at Ten would be occupied on weekdays, there was some delightful comedy shows. For starters, it's nice that both Spitting Image and Hale and Pace both had Number One hits in the British charts in 1986 and 1991 respectively; the former was The Chicken Song and the latter was for Comic Relief with The Stonk.
My favourite show was Hale and Pace, especially the Billy and Johnny sketches - remember that 1989 episode with the hospital sketch with Johnny unzipping a banana? "One skin, two skin..." Yes, I did have "that" operation just a year before it was transmitted and I found it so satirical as to what happened to me personally back in June 1988 - no surprise then that the episode, if not the whole 1989 series, had actually won the Golden Rose of Montreux in the same year. I actually thought that the Two Rons sounded too similar to the Two Ronnies, but The Management really upheld their own "use a..." "rubber chicken!" Also, the cat-in-the-microwave sketch was a bit controversial "IBA quaking in their boots" style, but as long as it was funny, that was all that mattered. Series two, episode three was my favourite ever episode, which contained the Billy and Johnny hospital sketch, as well as the Coca-Cola advert parody which can still be understood today; the golf sketch with a rude word as its name; the newspaper vendor who was invited to "represent Turkey in the Eurovision Song Contest" after singing tunelessly, and the "little Joshie did a poo-poo and a pee-pee all on his own" one when dinner was served and they were at the kitchen table. I was still laughing on Monday morning and did forget for a moment that I had school in the morning. I saw Norman Pace performing at the Liverpool Empire in Hairspray the musical on my birthday in 2021 and he had performed with a great American accent which he sometimes used in some of the sketches - I wrote to the cast saying how much I enjoyed Hale and Pace when I was younger.
I also loved Spitting Image during the latter Thatcher and Major years; the latter Prime Minister was going grey before our very eyes; Major himself proclaimed Spitting Image as being "cheap and insulting" at the time because of this. Around the death of Labour leader John Smith in 1994, Tony Blair's puppet looked younger than in real life. The song "Whoops, Sorry, I've Cocked It Up Again" which was a song about like in general - Pot Noodles had got an honourable mention in the song. So many sketches to mention, but one of them was from around the time when Robert Runcie was to retire as Archbishop of Canterbury and George Carey was to take over from him - cue the puppets of Runcie; Cliff Richard; Mary Whitehouse and amazingly, Julian Clary (because his surname sounded like Carey) in the same sketch. Clary also appeared in the sketch where he was singing "it wasn't the grass that tickled your ar..." to the tune of Perry Como's Magic Moments. There was the sketch prior to a commercial break where the music ran backwards and even the Spitting Image logo was back to front. Another sketch was where the puppets had got the wrong voices; cue Terry Wogan having Michael Caine's voice. The late Roy Hattesley put the spitting into Spitting Image. There were some sketches that had no puppets in them at all, as a way of making a serious point about something. The song Walk on By which was about homeless people was one such example. Bruce Forsyth appeared in a couple of them; one of them was the airport "wig error" one from 1986, and another was a golfing one with Jimmy Tarbuck.
The ...On TV series which was started by Clive James (although Denis Norden did a World of Television special a couple of years just before that) allowed to explore obscure TV programmes and commercials from around the world, as well as the Japanese game show Endurance; reality TV before we even knew it existed. Cue Swedish adverts for condoms which looked as if they were made back in 1973. The Happy Fun Ball advert (which looks identical to Action GT's Impossiball) and its two-minute proclaimer about the Health and Safety aspects of the product. The Booby-Chew advert from around 1981 in which women could get a bit extra in front if one consumed the product. I also remember the American advert where a man carried a condom in his wallet, and one could see the round shape of it on the outside, so he changed to the brand being advertised and it worked; no round shape on the front of the wallet "smooth as a baby's bottom" someone said. The late Clive James moved to BBC 2 in 1988 with his Postcards, and Keith Floyd was parachuted in a year later; one of the very few shows on TV where he didn't have a glass of claret in his hand. One assumes that Floyd thought that it wasn't quite his thing and so Chris Tarrant took over in 1990. I stopped watching when: A) The show started to show clips of The Jerry Springer Show on there; and: B) They showed a clip of someone eating something that they should have used a pooper-scooper to get rid of. When the show changed its theme tune and used the 1960s Penthouse Suite theme, I knew that it was an indication of dumbing down.
Other shows in that precious Sunday 10.00 pm slot included The New Statesman starring Rik Mayall as Alan B'Stard, a Conservative MP whose constituency was identical to David Davis' own back then. Watching turned up here with the annoying Emma Wray and the slight irritating older sister Liza Tarbuck where the episode title had ...ing on the end of it. Not With a Bang was a sitcom in that slot in around 1990, while Running Wild, a sitcom starring Ray Brooks of advert voiceovers and Mr Benn fame, was in the same slot, around a year before. One almost forgotten series (apart from YouTube) was TV Squash which ran for six weeks for just one series during the summer of 1992 and parodied programme on each terrestrial TV channel at the time, with two more episodes looking at Saturday and Sunday TV schedules. I suppose that in a way it was similar to the Fred Harris and Denise Coffey series End of Part One from over a decade before. It was a great series, and I can understand why it didn't graduate to a second one, probably because: A) All the ideas and talent would have been used up in the first series; and: B) The ITV franchise changeover meant that a second series was unlikely. Just a few months prior to the Squash, Frankie Howerd had one of his very last TV series: Frankie's On in that slot. Howerd visited places in the Midlands as the series was made by Central such as a hospital and a fire station. Six programmes were originally planned but only four of them were made before his death.
I suppose that I was forgiven to stay up for those shows but by the time The South Bank Show and Prisoner: Cell Block H (or indeed Heart of the Matter of Everyman on the other side) was on later, I should have made my way upstairs to the bedroom. No wonder I was a lot more tired and had difficulty waking up on Monday mornings rather than other weekdays.
My favourite show was Hale and Pace, especially the Billy and Johnny sketches - remember that 1989 episode with the hospital sketch with Johnny unzipping a banana? "One skin, two skin..." Yes, I did have "that" operation just a year before it was transmitted and I found it so satirical as to what happened to me personally back in June 1988 - no surprise then that the episode, if not the whole 1989 series, had actually won the Golden Rose of Montreux in the same year. I actually thought that the Two Rons sounded too similar to the Two Ronnies, but The Management really upheld their own "use a..." "rubber chicken!" Also, the cat-in-the-microwave sketch was a bit controversial "IBA quaking in their boots" style, but as long as it was funny, that was all that mattered. Series two, episode three was my favourite ever episode, which contained the Billy and Johnny hospital sketch, as well as the Coca-Cola advert parody which can still be understood today; the golf sketch with a rude word as its name; the newspaper vendor who was invited to "represent Turkey in the Eurovision Song Contest" after singing tunelessly, and the "little Joshie did a poo-poo and a pee-pee all on his own" one when dinner was served and they were at the kitchen table. I was still laughing on Monday morning and did forget for a moment that I had school in the morning. I saw Norman Pace performing at the Liverpool Empire in Hairspray the musical on my birthday in 2021 and he had performed with a great American accent which he sometimes used in some of the sketches - I wrote to the cast saying how much I enjoyed Hale and Pace when I was younger.
I also loved Spitting Image during the latter Thatcher and Major years; the latter Prime Minister was going grey before our very eyes; Major himself proclaimed Spitting Image as being "cheap and insulting" at the time because of this. Around the death of Labour leader John Smith in 1994, Tony Blair's puppet looked younger than in real life. The song "Whoops, Sorry, I've Cocked It Up Again" which was a song about like in general - Pot Noodles had got an honourable mention in the song. So many sketches to mention, but one of them was from around the time when Robert Runcie was to retire as Archbishop of Canterbury and George Carey was to take over from him - cue the puppets of Runcie; Cliff Richard; Mary Whitehouse and amazingly, Julian Clary (because his surname sounded like Carey) in the same sketch. Clary also appeared in the sketch where he was singing "it wasn't the grass that tickled your ar..." to the tune of Perry Como's Magic Moments. There was the sketch prior to a commercial break where the music ran backwards and even the Spitting Image logo was back to front. Another sketch was where the puppets had got the wrong voices; cue Terry Wogan having Michael Caine's voice. The late Roy Hattesley put the spitting into Spitting Image. There were some sketches that had no puppets in them at all, as a way of making a serious point about something. The song Walk on By which was about homeless people was one such example. Bruce Forsyth appeared in a couple of them; one of them was the airport "wig error" one from 1986, and another was a golfing one with Jimmy Tarbuck.
The ...On TV series which was started by Clive James (although Denis Norden did a World of Television special a couple of years just before that) allowed to explore obscure TV programmes and commercials from around the world, as well as the Japanese game show Endurance; reality TV before we even knew it existed. Cue Swedish adverts for condoms which looked as if they were made back in 1973. The Happy Fun Ball advert (which looks identical to Action GT's Impossiball) and its two-minute proclaimer about the Health and Safety aspects of the product. The Booby-Chew advert from around 1981 in which women could get a bit extra in front if one consumed the product. I also remember the American advert where a man carried a condom in his wallet, and one could see the round shape of it on the outside, so he changed to the brand being advertised and it worked; no round shape on the front of the wallet "smooth as a baby's bottom" someone said. The late Clive James moved to BBC 2 in 1988 with his Postcards, and Keith Floyd was parachuted in a year later; one of the very few shows on TV where he didn't have a glass of claret in his hand. One assumes that Floyd thought that it wasn't quite his thing and so Chris Tarrant took over in 1990. I stopped watching when: A) The show started to show clips of The Jerry Springer Show on there; and: B) They showed a clip of someone eating something that they should have used a pooper-scooper to get rid of. When the show changed its theme tune and used the 1960s Penthouse Suite theme, I knew that it was an indication of dumbing down.
Other shows in that precious Sunday 10.00 pm slot included The New Statesman starring Rik Mayall as Alan B'Stard, a Conservative MP whose constituency was identical to David Davis' own back then. Watching turned up here with the annoying Emma Wray and the slight irritating older sister Liza Tarbuck where the episode title had ...ing on the end of it. Not With a Bang was a sitcom in that slot in around 1990, while Running Wild, a sitcom starring Ray Brooks of advert voiceovers and Mr Benn fame, was in the same slot, around a year before. One almost forgotten series (apart from YouTube) was TV Squash which ran for six weeks for just one series during the summer of 1992 and parodied programme on each terrestrial TV channel at the time, with two more episodes looking at Saturday and Sunday TV schedules. I suppose that in a way it was similar to the Fred Harris and Denise Coffey series End of Part One from over a decade before. It was a great series, and I can understand why it didn't graduate to a second one, probably because: A) All the ideas and talent would have been used up in the first series; and: B) The ITV franchise changeover meant that a second series was unlikely. Just a few months prior to the Squash, Frankie Howerd had one of his very last TV series: Frankie's On in that slot. Howerd visited places in the Midlands as the series was made by Central such as a hospital and a fire station. Six programmes were originally planned but only four of them were made before his death.
I suppose that I was forgiven to stay up for those shows but by the time The South Bank Show and Prisoner: Cell Block H (or indeed Heart of the Matter of Everyman on the other side) was on later, I should have made my way upstairs to the bedroom. No wonder I was a lot more tired and had difficulty waking up on Monday mornings rather than other weekdays.