Curious British Telly Enters the Betamax Age

Yes, the rumours are true, Curious British Telly has finally invested in a Betamax player. It's something I've wanted to get hold of for years, ever since I first started trawling through old VHS tapes. But the price of a fully functioning, excellent condition model had always been a little prohibitive. Okay, £175-ish wasn't exactly going to send me into a financial meltdown, but it was difficult to justify in the grand scheme of things. Luckily, the Substack I set up a while back has managed to secure a few paid subscribers and their funds have made this possible. Eternal thanks, once again, to them.

How I Wrote Lytton’s Diary: Writer Ray Connolly Tells All

Nearly four decades after its pilot episode aired, Lytton's Diary writer, Ray Connolly, remembers the series being a big hit with the very people it was profiling "All the journalists I knew loved it. We got Fleet Fleet as right as we could."

Curious British Telly Substack Subscription

Just a quick update to let you know that I’ve decided to try out the paid-subscription option on Substack to deliver exclusive Curious British Telly bits and pieces. You can find out more about the Substack here. There will, of course, continue to be free posts on the Substack and on here but I thought I’d see if anyone is willing to subscribe.

The articles behind the paywall will be similar to the articles featured in the now defunct Curious British Telly fanzine, and there will be at least one a week.

Any proceeds generated will go towards investing more money in the Substack and the main Curious British Telly e.g. trips to the BFI Archive and, as I’ve been threatening to for years, finally purchase a Betamax player and a mountain of old tapes to investigate.

However, there’s no pressure as I appreciate there’s a cost of living crisis hitting everyone and, well, archive television isn’t the most important thing in life. So, if you do want to subscribe - either to the free or paid version - then just click here.

The EastEnders Cook Book and Wicksy's Cocktails

It's debatable if EastEnders, despite running for 38 years now, is still considered a hot property. Nonetheless, when it launched in 1985, it was accompanied by a huge buzz of excitement which lasted for many, many years. Not surprisingly, this popularity quickly led to a nice line in merchandise to generate further revenue for the BBC.

And, in 1986, the first EastEnders annual appeared. I looked at this annual in an issue of the now defunct Curious British Telly fanzine, but I thought it would be fun to bring two of its more curious sections to a wider audience: The EastEnders Cook Book and Wicksy's Cocktails.

Looking at the Items in Brian Cant’s Bric-A-Brac Shop

As a preschooler, Bric-a-Brac was easily one of my favourite television programmes and it's a fact which remains true to this day. However, it's a programme which, despite being repeated for nearly a decade, has had very little of substance written about it. This isn't a surprise as, well, very little information is available and only a handful of episodes have ever surfaced on YouTube. But, luckily, a few years ago, I picked up a copy of the 1983 See-Saw annual, which contains the only official photos I've found. And it's going to help us look at the items in Brian Cant's Bric-a-Brac shop.

Dramarama: Snap

By Scampy Spiro

With folk horror having become the subject of increasing cultural fascination over the past decade (fuelled, in part, by the spotlight it received in Mark Gatiss’ 2010 documentary series A History of Horror), one candidate that still seems curiously overdue for rediscovery would be Snap, a 1987 installment from the ITV children’s anthology series Dramarama (1983-1989).

What Was It Like Presenting Why Don't You?

As a child, hearing the Why Don't You? theme tune meant two fantastic things: firstly, it was the school holidays and, secondly, that you were going to discover a whole new world of games, activities and crafts to get to grips with. Remember, this was in the days before YouTube and Fortnite (whatever that is), when television was the dominant source of information for children. Anyway, as we all know, the series was built around young presenters, all of whom had incredibly authentic regional accents. But what exactly was it like being a presenter on Why Don't You?

Regional Oddity: Sit Up & Listen

Much like the concept of ringing our friends on a landline for a chat, the TV closedown is another archaic reminder of a very different landscape where the rudimentary constraints of technology limited what was available to us. It was a world which, quite simply, went to bed when the evening’s programming finished.

This all started to change in the 1980s with LWT first pushing their closedown back to 2am in 1983 and then, in 1986, Yorkshire Television experimenting with 24-hour schedules. Before this, however, most channels went off the air around 12.30am.

The BBC would sign off in decidedly patriotic fashion by blasting out the national anthem as any remaining night owls shed a tear of unabashed pride. Meanwhile, many of the regional ITV networks followed a similar suit, often playing the music over a still of the Queen. There was also time, just before the closedown, for ITV regions to slip in a final scrap of programming. These were often peculiar, gloriously British and always low rent. An example which ticks all these boxes is Sit Up & Listen.

Book Review: Travel Without the Tardis

Before you read any further, please prepare yourself. A statement which can only be described as a bombshell of epic proportions is about to follow. And that jaw dropping revelation is thus: fans of Doctor Who are a curious bunch. It may come as a shock, but the truth is that spending your days dreaming about grappling with Zygons, heading off for a pint with Duggan and solving the puzzles of the Exillon city are niche aspirations.

To put a positive spin on such a state of affairs would be to point to the clear evidence of a fertile imagination but – to so called normal people – Whovians remain a peculiar crowd. And I can say this without prejudice as I’ve been a lifelong fan of the series since 1986. Little did I know, however, that as I was digesting Gallifrey’s finest for the first time in Trial of a Timelord, one of the most eccentric helpings of Doctor Who merchandise had recently been released. It was a book unlike any Doctor Who book before or since. And that book was Travel Without the Tardis.