Format for the 90s: BBC2 Junction, 27th September 1991
It's September the 27th 1991, it really is, and this is BBC2 in the earliest of evenings. Well, almost: it's ten to seven and we're coming out of Thunderbirds, early in its much-trumpeted BBC repeat season, which was the first time everyone in the country could watch the same episodes at the same time. Today's thrill: Pit of Peril, one of the episodes Lew Grade insisted the Andersons stretch out to a staggering 50 minutes, even though it didn't have anything like enough plot. It did have that Mole machine with the drill for a nose that I found impressive at the time for some reason, though.
After that, rather sad in retrospect: a promo for next week's relaunch of Top of the Pops which went down like a knee in a sandwich and was probably the beginning of the end, in many ways. Mark Goodier does his best with it, though (accompanied by the previous theme music rather than the new one, for whatever reason) and to be honest not all of Stanley Appel's big ideas were patently obviously bad and stupid and wrong. Involving the album chart at least makes sense on paper, although you then have to figure out how to do so and where to make space for it - in the course of which you're likely to decide it's not worth it after all, but for some reason that didn't happen. Same goes for the American chart, (albeit to a lesser extent because who really cares). Actually, come to think of it, even the good ideas were bad.
And then there were the unambiguously bad ideas, like hiring neophyte presenters who were like deer in the headlights, or the infamous mandate for everyone to play and sing live with no backing tapes. I dislike miming as well, but come on now. Not everyone's Deacon bloody Blue. Besides, this was the era of house and techno acts having hits; cue the likes of Snap and C+C Music Factory forced to play with live vocals from the model they hired to mime to Martha Wash, who inevitably had a voice like a shoe.
I always thought the look itself was underrated, though - people dancing in a steam factory is at least vaguely reminiscent of alfresco rave culture (despite the new format's inherent hostility towards it), and probably more contemporary by 1991 than the previous Galaxian aesthetic. The logo needed a few more passes, though. Again, I like the industrial aesthetic and the solid prop-based feel (even though it wasn't) but they seem to have got over-excited with the lettering and made it unreadable. It made for a fairly cool-looking top ten rundown, though.
So anyway that's Thursday at seven as (then) usual. Inevitably it crashed and burned, picked up again during Britpop with the help of Ric Blaxill and drifted into irrelevance at the turn of the century. I still miss it, but the failure of Sounds Like Friday Night suggests not enough other people do.
Anyway, Rik Mayall removes his trousers. Yes, it's Bottom. The first series reaches its midpoint on Tuesday - Friday night hasn't yet been identified as the obvious place for comedy - with "Contest", which is actually one of my favourite episodes despite it actually being the pilot and therefore kind of shonky and unformed. Eddie's not properly bald yet and is angrier and more articulate than usual, Richie's slightly camper and hasn't quite got the Hancock impression down yet, room is configured differently etc. None of that matters, though, because it's both genuinely funny and almost suffocatingly claustrophobic. There are several episodes set solely in the flat and/or featuring just the two main characters, but this one's practically in real time. There's a genuine sense of no escape. Even when Eddie is thrown out, he comes back because he has nowhere better to go. It's the clearest example of their original inspiration being Samuel Beckett. With knob gags. Not that Beckett didn't have knob gags.
In ten minutes on BBC1 it's time for Wogan! Still tranglin' along and with its own new industrial-style title sequence for the 1990s. Today's guests are Griff Rhys Jones and former butter salesman Gary Webster, who's just replaced Dennis Waterman on Minder. Plus music by Einstürzende Neubauten. Or not. Viewers in Scotland can see it in the middle of the night for no particular reason except to mess with them.
But now on BBC2: a repeat of the acclaimed nature documentary from the 1980s that didn't involve David Attenborough: Supersense. In which Andrew Sachs explains how animals use the five senses. This week: looking, in which some gorillas have cameras planted in their pen and attached to their bodies and are nosey.