Tales of Television Centre

21.00, BBC4
We have no hesitation in suggesting that this will be the best programme about old telly for absolutely ages, maybe since TV Hell. For a start, it’s produced by former Blue Peter editor and all round top Creamer Richard Marson who absolutely loves old telly and has come up with hundreds of obscure and amazing clips. It’s a luxurious ninety minutes full of anecdotes and stories about the greatest building in Britain, and never mind the papers just picking out the rude bits, it’s going to be fantastically evocative and entertaining viewing. We can’t wait. It also makes up part of The Best Night Of Old Telly Ever with a double bill of Pops 77 at half seven and half eight (and back to back in extended form at 11.20), and at eight it’s a complete episode of Blue Peter from November 1974 marking Petra’s birthday and touring TV Centre. Brilliant!

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On Thursday, May 17, BBC4 brings us a superb, 90-minute documentary, Tales of Television Centre. Here are 20 brilliant things about it.

1) Joan Bakewell calls Television Centre a “jewel box of activity”

2) There’s a people-being-stopped-by-the-Television-Centre-commissioner montage

3) Esther Rantzen confiding “walking into Television Centre meant sparkle time!”

4) Philip Glenister recalling visiting the Dr Who studios when he was nine years old. “My abiding memory was, ‘My God, that’s cheap!’”

5) A clip of Sarah Greene’s mum in Z Cars

6) Judith Hann recalling the time she had to share her dressing room with an otter that was scheduled to appear on Blue Peter

7) Sarah Greene (again) revealing what she and Smitty did in Dressing Room 2.

8) John Craven: “I was told Television Centre was built in a circle so the buck couldn’t stop.”

9) Clive Dunn on It’s A Square World dressed up as Dr Who William Hartnell.

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10) The on-screen caption font is the old slopey BBC-tv typeface.

11) The brandishing of an ornate ‘TS’ card for recalcitrant production staff – the letters standing for ‘Tough Shit’.

12) Maggie Philbin’s revelation about what a BBC make-up girl did to her.

13) Behind the scenes footage from Eureka.

14) Katy Manning: “People were bonking all over the BBC!”

15) Eric ‘n’ Ern teasing Graeme Harper in a BBC lift and branding him ‘Choochie Face’.

16) Robert Powell inviting all of Pan’s People out for dinner – because he didn’t have the nerve to ask Babs alone.

17) “Merry Christmas VT!”

18) Johnny Ball’s revelation about Rick James and co.

19) How it was arranged for the BBC fountain to be switched on during the tap-dancing routine to raise money for Action Research For The Crippled Child.

20) A perfect choice of closing music.

The Unforgettable Noele Gordon

19.30, ITV1
It wasn’t all Meg for Nolly, as her TV career actually started before the war, and she even appeared in the early colour telly experiments mounted by John Logie Baird himself. Later she became “women’s programme adviser” at ATV which wasn’t the desk job it sounds but more or less a golden handcuffs contract that saw her present myriad chat shows and ad-mags in the early days of ITV, before 1964 saw her appear in some soap or other where we hear her schoolboy son wasn’t much use and she was expecting a Spanish cook. Here’s all of that, but mostly Crossroads, in 22 minutes.

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Family Fortunes

18.00, Challenge
Now, we’ve had trouble with this channel in the past not showing what’s been promised, but we can confirm that thee are indeed Lord Bob episodes, because they’ve just bought them again along with, of all things, Max episodes as well. They’ve shown the Monkhouse masterclass before on this channel, but that was ages ago, long before it was on Freeview, so here’s a rare chance to enjoy those wild violins, the pocket watch, the colour photo for the winner and the monochrome one for the losers, the questions on the screen “for the benefit of those who cannot hear my voice” and “Name It!” again. In fact this channel is really perking up at the moment with the new Blockbusters at eight and those rather strange early Bullseyes at half eight.

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56 Up

21.00, ITV1
One of the low points of the recent history of ITV was when they decided they didn’t want 42 Up and let the Beeb show it, but happily the series is now back safe and sound on the light channel and that’s great to know because it’s such a telly landmark. There are three parts this time, and we hear that Michael Apted and the team have brought together more of the original fourteen than ever before.

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The Lost World of the Seventies

22.00, BBC2
We heard about Sir Walter Walker on Dominic Sandbrook’s seventies series the other week, the paranoid right-winger who set up his own private army to take over the running of Britain if the balloon went up, and here he is again as Mike Cockerell takes a look at Walker and some other larger than life – ie, demented – people like Lord Longford and James Goldsmith who could be trusted to liven up an otherwise mundane episode of Nationwide with their barking mad opinions.

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Top of the Pops

22.00, BBC2
In lieu of any better ideas, BBC2 have gone off to BBC4 and asked to borrow one of their Pops 77 repeats, which is all very well but it seems BBC4 have just grabbed whichever one was nearest to hand as this is the Noel-fronted episode from mid-January with Slade doing a flop, Jesse Green dancing like Brucie, Noel staring intently at a video of 10cc and, yes, Gary Glitter. Great fun if you haven’t seen it but for those of us who have stuck with this repeat run week in week out, it’s not one of the best. Not just in terms of music, either, in terms of it being plain bonkers.

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Mastermind

19.30, BBC2
We’ve spent so long banging on about the scheduling of this show we’ve barely mentioned the fact there’s actually been a competition going on, and at last we’re at the final, where we think they bring back the chat so that’s all to the good. Tom Lehrer is the pop culture subject and the History of Azerbaijan is the comically obscure one.

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07.00, BBC Radio 2
For the second year running, it’s time for Radio 2 to shuffle the schedules and put different presenters in different combinations to illustrate the breadth of their output for a daytime audience. We’ve always been a sucker for this kind of thing, especially as it reminds us of how in the late eighties on Christmas Eve every single presenter on the network used to get half an hour to play their own choice of records. There’s some great pairings promised, starting in fine style at seven with Graham Norton and Nigel Ogden, followed by Zoe Ball with Dave Pearce and Dangerous David Jacobs. Later we’ve got Tony Blackburn and Mark Radcliffe, Trevor Nelson and Brian Matthew and the amazing combination of Vanessa Feltz and David Rodigan, and while some of it will doubtless sound a bit ropey, it’s a brilliant idea and should be good fun.

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Watching Ourselves

20.00, BBC1 Scotland
Last week we neglected to bill this in Creamguide for a second time, which just sums up the England-centric bollocks this proud nation has to put up with. It was a good one, too, well worth checking out on iPlayer, as it was about sport with some amusingly crap title sequences, a hilarious clip of Jock Wallace swearing and the utterly brilliant clip of Jim McLean punching a reporter in the face which you can’t see often enough. This one’s about Scotland out of doors.

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