The first recording today starts with most of another episode of Batfink.
There’s a trail for Hider in the House.
Then, another episode of Secret Show – Wedgie Attack. The commander’s name today is Cheeky Chops.
Victor and Anita are on the run because while the World Leader was giving a speech on Kumquat production, they gave her husband a wedgie.
They’re chased through UZZ headquarters, during which chase we learn that Granny’s Fluffy Bunny show is very popular among UZZ personnel.
They avoid capture by using the UZZ Standard Issue Disguise Kits.
They hide out at Victor’s mum’s house. Her cake is very bad.
They watch TV, only to see Professor Professor also attack the World Leader’s husband with a wedgie.
Victor and Anita find Professor Professor and he hides with them.
Then they see Special Agent Ray and a lot of other UZZ agents do the same thing.
Professor Professor spots that they are imposters.
So more UZZ people are hiding out.
Eventually, the imposters even impersonate Cheeky Chops. He watches himself on TV. “It’s me! What have I done? What am I doing? How can I doing such a thing?”
Anita and Victor have a plan to stop the imposters, who have taken over the UZZ base.
Of course it involves giving a wedgie to the imposter leader.
They escape from the headquarters, which is then jettisoned into space.
Cheeky Chops has to give his final briefing at Victor’s mum’s house.
Media Centre Description: Comedy series for children about two agents in a top-secret organisation, the evil Doctor Doctor, the Impostors and a host of notorious villains intent on world domination. Victor and Anita are on the run for a crime they didn’t commit.
Recorded from CBBC Channel on Thursday 3rd January 2008 07:38
BBC Genome: CBBC Channel Thursday 3rd January 2008 07:40
After this, there’s a trail for Films at 4pm.
Then the recording stops after a few minutes of Bernard.
The next recording starts with the end of Smarteenies.
There’s a trail for Pingu. Then Sid has some advice about games for two people.
Then, an episode of Charlie and Lola – I Am Extremely Absolutely Boiling. It’s very hot, and I can sympathise as, it’s currently quite hot, even in the evening when it’s supposed to be cooler.
They try cooling down outside. Arnold Wolf joins them. He tries panting like a dog to cool himself down. But he starts annoying Lola. “He’s too buzzy.”
They get some ice cream. Lola says “I know, I’ll taste your ice cream and you can taste mine.” Arnold takes a huge bite out of hers, and then starts pulling at the cone until the rest of her ice cream fall onto the ground. Then when Charlie suggests that Arnold shares his ice cream with Lola, he just says no. I’m totally on Lola’s side here when she decides not to be friends with Arnold any more.
Later, Charlie and Lola make their own water park by filling various containers with water from the hosepipe, and have a great time.
But when they run out of water they find that Arnold is filling up a paddling pool with the hose. But Lola still won’t play with Arnold.
Lola eventually joins Arnold in the pool, but she’s still upset he never said sorry for dropping her ice cream.
But then Arnold does say sorry, and Lola is immediately friends again. Charlie brings some ice lollies over. They’ve both very excited – perhaps too excited as Lola knocks Arnold’s out of his hand and it falls into the pool. There’s a tense moment. Will Lola share her lolly? Yes she does, but then she drops hers into the water too. They both look over a Charlie with his lolly. “Charlie?”
Media Centre Description: Children’s animation. Join Lola and Charlie, a brother and sister, as they deal with topics that affect their everyday lives. Charlie loves his little sister, even if at times she can be infuriating. It’s extremely hot and Charlie and Lola are trying to stay cool. Lola falls out with Arnold, but they end up friends again.
Recorded from CBeebies on Thursday 3rd January 2008 16:13
BBC Genome: CBeebies Thursday 3rd January 2008 16:15
After this, there’s a trail for Underground Ernie. There’s something rather unnerving about the CGI they use in this show. It’s far too shiny.
Then there’s some advice on making snowflakes, and the recording stops with the start of Lunar Jim.
The next recording starts with the end of Never Mind The Buzzcocks.
There’s the first full trail for Torchwood that we’ve seen.
Plus a trail for The Graham Norton Show.
Then, another episode of Lead Balloon – Lucky. Rick and Marty are talking to the team from the supermarket Greenway, about a public speaking gig. Rick asks about “characters” who work there that he could talk about. “Angie Patel, facilities coordinator. Or as I like to call her, head of bog rolls. She loves karaoke. Any excuse? She’s up on the table dancing and singing.” His colleague stops him. “Angie’s just had a miscarriage.” “What do you think? Leave her alone?”
Mel has a crisis with a client. “You know, Pippa Coulson. She wrote all those working mother books. The working relationship, marriage and the city.” “She’s not getting divorced is she?” “It’s looking that way.”
Sam and Ben have decided to start a dog walking business.
Michael tells them about the Cuddle Party he goes to. “So what happens? You just go to one of the parties and you cuddle total strangers?” “In an entirely nonsexual way.” “Yeah, but you still cuddle them.” “Only if you want to. Cuddling’s not compulsory.” “You don’t have to cuddle at a cuddle party?” “No, no. In fact, as it happens, I haven’t actually given consent yet. I’m still just watching and working up to it.” “Good for you, Michael.” “Apparently, once you make that leap, it changes you forever.” Can I shock you? I know I usually say it’s all about the hugs, but the idea of hugging strangers definitely make me very uncomfortable.
Magda tells Rick about a telephone call. Something about a movie. He worries if the phone is working. When the call finally comes, it’s not for Rick, it’s for Marty. He’s been offered a writing gig by a friend from LA.
Rick is not taking this turn of events well. Michael isn’t helping. “Oh, Hollywood. You must be delighted for him.” “I am.” “That’s the sort of break the people in your business dream about, isn’t it?” “I personally don’t, but it’s good for Marty,”
Of course Sam and Ben’s dog walking is causing problems as she has to leave one of the dogs at the house while she goes to college.
Rick really doesn’t like hugs.
Five days after Marty left for LA, Rick is still fretting. Mel tries a hug. “Oh, God, you’re tense.” “I’m sorry. I can’t get the image of Michael lunging towards me out of my mind.” Then she tells him that her client Pippa has been given a huge advance to write a book about divorce, which makes him even more upset.
To his surprise, next day, Marty turns up. He tells Rick about the things he saw when he was out there, then says he got the job, but told them to stuff it. “What about your mate, Will Stacey?” “Oh, man, guy’s turned into a complete asshole, coked out of his brain. I knew if I stayed there, I’d start using again, and I’d be dead by the time I’m 30. Okay, 40. Must update my exaggerations.” “Well, glad you come to your senses.” “Yeah, that’s why I came here in the first place, to get away from jerks like that.” “That is precisely why I’ve never gone over there.” “It’s amazing how success changes people. That’s why I like being with you. I know that will never happen.”
Rick still manages to be awful in the end. When Marty is showing Magda all the pictures on his phone, when Rick gets it, he deletes all the pictures.
Media Centre Description: Sitcom about ex-celebrity comedian Rick Spleen. Rick is sick of doing endless corporate gigs and accuses his writer Marty of lacking ambition, but a call from Hollywood changes everything. One of Mel’s clients is going through a divorce, Ben and Sam start their own dog-walking business and Michael the café manager has started going to ‘cuddle parties’.
Recorded from BBC TWO on Thursday 3rd January 2008 21:30
BBC Genome: BBC TWO Thursday 3rd January 2008 21:30
After this, a trail for The Graham Norton Show and a trail for Little Miss Jocelyn.
Then the recording stops after a couple of minutes of The Graham Norton Show.
The next recording starts with the end of BBC Four Sessions.
There’s a trail for Five Years in Iraq.
Then, a documentary, The Fantasy Worlds of Irwin Allen. This is a great fun romp through an amazing career, and at least one TV programme that I loved dearly as a young boy. The intro is also delightful, introducing the hosts: June Lockhart
Bill Mumy
“And the Robot from Lost In Space”.
Steve Allen talks about his early career in journalism.
Paul Zastupnevich talks about how Irwin’s productions would often be based around stock footage from other films. “The Story of Mankind actually was a picture that was built on outtakes and stock footage. I had to match up costumes and tie in things so that they would carry on through. Wherever he could beg, borrow, or steal, he always did.”
Another old friend, Red Buttons, remembers working on The Big Circus. “That was my first encounter with Irwin The Big Circus. And he was kind of co-directing the picture and that kind of disturbed me a little bit. You know, having two directors going at the same time. The director’d say cut! print! and Irwin would get into his ear and then he had to do another shot. But that came out of Irwin’s enthusiasm.”
There’s an alarming frankness from some of the contributors about the quality of some of his productions. Here’s David Hedison: “I was working with Irwin Allen in a film called The Lost World. It was one of those pictures that the studio wanted me to do and I felt I had to do and I didn’t want to go on suspension. All that sort of thing. I didn’t like the script. I didn’t believe in the script and I’d get on the set and I’d see Jill St. John in Pink Tights holding a poodle, but the actors were just put together quite well. And all the monster stuff and the dinosaurs, all of that worked very, very well.”
Barbara Eden remembers Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea. “I like getting wet. I guess and getting bounced around. Maybe it’s a reason why I do these things. When I worked with him, Irwin would wear the boots, the riding boots and riding pants and he would have this gun and before every shot instead of saying action, each shoot has gone up in the air. That threw ’em a little.”
I like the behind the scenes stuff, like Allen presenting the sets to the TV Viewers.
Writer Shimon Wincelberg describes one of Allen’s cost-saving measures. “We needed a set that was the interior of a whale. There was no way the studio was going to spring for the money to build it. Irwin scouted around and he found out there was a set from Fantastic Voyage and he somehow got the key to the soundstage where that set was stored and he shot the episode inside that set that represented a human body and cost next to nothing.”
Moving on to Lost In Space, with Mark Goddard being initially skeptical about whether the show would be a success. “I just thought it was going to be like a kid’s cartoon show. You know, on Saturday mornings. At first I told my agent I didn’t want to do it. And he said, do it. I just do the pilot. Take the money and run. Nobody will ever see this show. It’ll never, never go on the air.”
Angela Cartwright remembers having fun on the pilot. “The chariot was a great scene. Bill and I were trying to get as wet as we possibly could. I mean, we were just kids. You know, we were teenagers. We wanted to get totally soaked, so when they would pour that water through the roof of the chariot, we tried to get as drenched as we could. We loved that. That was a lot of fun.”
Marta Kristen: “Well, Irwin, he was like a little boy, in a way, because he loved he loved the the explosions. He loved all of the special effects. He liked action.”
Jonathan Harris on his character: “I did not like that man, Dr. Smith, as written. Because of my expertise and my experience, which is of course vast, I knew that in four or five shows, he’d be killed off. And then I’d be jobless again, which is very boring. I played many villains in my time, and my most successful villains have been comedic villains. And I began to sneak it in. And I must say, Irwin not only allowed me to do that, but one day said ‘do more’. And I did. And the rest, as we say, is history.”
Director Harry Harris: “There were a lot of special effects on it. A lot of sets with all kinds of contraptions that had to work at certain times. His sets were big. He’d take up the whole stage with all this stuff, because that’s what he wanted. He wanted big, big, big scope.”
Dick Tufeld, and show’s announcer, also provided the voice for the robot.
Inside the Robot costume was Bob May.
Irwin’s wife, Sheila Mathews Allen, enjoyed playing Brunhilde in the episode Space Vikings, and getting to sing a bit of opera. “They would pop me in on a big white horse with wonderful white wings and there I am and I go… Ta-ya-tah! Ta-ya-tah! Ta-ha, ta-ha! Ta-ya-tah! Ta-ya-tah! Like I said, pure camp.”
Al Lewis, Grandpa from The Munsters, remembers having to fall back on old Burlesque techniques when an episode ran short, and they had to fill a scene between him and Jonathan Harris with a lot of business to stretch the running time. “And just before shooting it, Don Richardson, the director, came up and said, we’re short three minutes. So I said, Jonathan, come over here. I’ll tell you what we used to do in Burlesque called the Hesitation Waltz. It’s very easy. As I walk you up the gang plank, take the first step to go in, spin on that leg and turn and come back, walk to me. Well, we did this five, six, seven times and we had our three minutes. We used to do that in Burlesque. It’s an old bit and it worked, you know. And it’s on Lost in Space. Thank you, Gypsy Rose Lee.”
Next we move to The Time Tunnel. This is a show I adored as a child, probably 8 or 9. I used to play it with my friends, doing the slow motion tumbling as they’d appear in the new time zone. And I specifically remember that we were well aware of the show’s cliches. One of our running jokes was, no matter what the time zone, when we were imagining enemies attacking us, we’d always say “Quick, hide behind these boxes.”
James Darren was impressed by the scale of the production. “Irwin would go to any length to make it look exactly like what the storyboard was. So when I saw it, when I saw what Irwin had storyboarded and then eventually saw this incredible set, which was exactly like the storyboard, but grand, of course, it was breathtaking. It helped you in your character. You fantasized and you were there.”
Lee Meriwether was also impressed. “It was enormous. It took two sound stages. It had a hypnotic effect. And just as the characters were drawn into The Tunnel and taken back into time or forward into time, so was the audience.”
It’s great to see Whit Bissell interviewed, he seemed to be in everything.
Robert Colbert: “I mean, when you’re in Krakatoa one day, you’re on the moon the next. We had the finest stages, the finest sets, the finest location shots. And from our close-up vantage point, it was all so classy and so well done.”
Land of the Giants was a show that I never really watched. Stefan Arngrim was a child actor at the time.
Don Matheson on Irwin directing the first episode. “He knew exactly what he wanted. There was no vacillating. I mean, this is the shot for everybody. For the actors, for the camera, for the lighting, sound, for everybody. He knew everything.”
Deanna Lund: “When we shot the first episode before we ever saw how it was going to be put together, we felt so foolish, you know, standing there going, you know, looking up at the klieg light and pretending. But when it was all put together and we saw how Irwin was a magician, and he made it work.”
Don Marshall: “It was a little different for me, because I was more into concentrating and eyeballing somebody or getting into their head. And when you’re talking to a spotlight and there’s nobody there, it was a little different, that’s all.”
Gary Conway: “The most humorous moments would happen when you thought you were maybe talking to a giant, and that was what your whole emotional fabric would be all about. And then later on when they cut, you found that actually you were talking to a giant chicken.”
“There was one hand that was every giant’s hand. And after a while we swore it had life of its own, because it could be very mischievous. It’s constantly coming in and scooping us up and then flipping over, and we’d fall out the other side. It never quite worked. But Irwin loved that hand. That hand was very important to him.”
Movies beckon, with The Poseidon Adventure. Roddy McDowall on the budget: “The film cost so much money. And 20th were not the full investor, and he had to go outside for financing, and it took him a couple of years to get anybody to believe that this was what it was.”
We hear from the film’s director, Ronald Neame: “You’d be astonished at how much of the really, really tough work the stars have done themselves. I did give a solemn warning to every member of the cast. I said, now look, before the film is over, you’re all going to hate my guts, but I can’t help it.”
There’s film of Allen promoting his next film, The Towering Inferno. “This is the picture, ladies and gentlemen, that we here at 20th Century Fox believe will be the biggest grosser of next year.”
Robert Wagner: “I’ve never worked with anyone that has been more prepared than Irwin was. He really would come in in the morning and sit down and have meetings with different people and have it all laid out. I mean, he knew exactly what was going to happen. And that was very fortunate because no one was hurt on Towering Inferno. There wasn’t one accident on the picture.”
There’s a quite famous bit of behind the scenes of the filming of the climax of the movie, where all the stars are tied to bits of the scenery, and a huge tank of water is dumped on the set. I remember watching this at the time the film came out, I think. Steve McQueen cracks a joke. “If anything happens to me, Ali gets my pickup truck.” Ali being Ali McGraw, his girlfriend at the time.
He did a version of Swiss Family Robinson which featured a very young Helen Hunt.
Here’s an upload of what might be a longer version than the one I’ve got.
Media Centre Description: Documentary tracing the career of Irwin Allen, the man responsible for hit 1960s sci-fi TV series Lost in Space, The Time Tunnel, Land of the Giants and Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea, as well as blockbuster disaster films The Poseidon Adventure and The Towering Inferno. Lost in Space stars June Lockhart and Bill Mumy host generous servings of clips, behind-the-scenes footage, outtakes and cast reminiscences.
Recorded from BBC FOUR on Friday 4th January 2008 03:13
BBC Genome: BBC FOUR Friday 4th January 2008 03:15
After this, there’s a trail for Pop Britannia, then BBC Four closes down.
The final recording today starts with the end of The Shadow in the North. I wonder why I didn’t record this. Look! It’s a proto Doctor Who.
There’s a trail for Lark Rise to Candleford.
Then, we have Three Men in Another Boat. Griff Rhys Jones is taking his restored yacht Undina from London to the Isle of Wight with the help of Rory McGrath.
And Dara O’Briain.
Here’s a playlist of this episode and the second part (coming tomorrow).
Media Centre Description: First of a two part follow-up to the 2006 remake of the Jerome K. Jerome classic. Griff Rhys Jones, Dara O’Briain and Rory McGrath have set their ambitions much higher than their previous chortle along the Thames. This time, they are sailing from Tower Bridge to the Isle of Wight in Griff’s classic yacht. Dara and Rory have never sailed before, and it is Griff’s job to teach them. But unfortunately, though they excel in wisecracks, they struggle in getting off their lazy backsides.
Recorded from BBC ONE on Friday 4th January 2008 03:13
BBC Genome: BBC ONE Friday 4th January 2008 03:15
After this there’s a trail for Panorama – One Click From Danger and for Wonderland. Then the recording stops with the start of Rogue Traders.