The first recording today starts with the end of Richard and Judy talking to Bill Oddie about urban foxes.
Then, another episode of The Simpsons – Homie the Clown. It’s another one on my tapes. “You’ve got to stop blowing your money like this, Krusty.”
I like the reference to Close Encounters, as Homer is being subliminally affected by an advert for Krusty Klown Kollege.
Media Centre Description: Homer enrols in a clown college franchised by Krusty the Clown.
Recorded from Channel 4 on Friday 11th January 2008 17:58
After this, you guessed it, the start of Hollyoaks.
The next recording is the second episode of Moving Wallpaper now in its regular Friday slot.
The writers are discussing whether their heartthrob Jimmy or his marginally more nerdish friend Charlie should go out with Marrack’s daughter Abi (“takes her up the beach hut” as revolting writer Tom would have it). I’m glad to see Gillian say exactly what I was thinking yesterday: “She’s not a piece of meat. Abi does have a say in who she’s with.”
There’s a brief appearance from cast member Jason Donovan, dropping off a birthday gift for producer Jonathan Pope.
Jonathan is mulling weightier matters. “This looks like he’s growing an arse on his chin. Tell him to lose it.”
“I’m still not sure about this Ross Kemp cameo.” “What’s the problem?” “He’s expensive and he’s bald. Don’t really see this as a bald show.” “Will he wig up?”
He screams at his assistant Kelly when he finds out she’s circulated the payroll list to everyone on staff, so everyone knows what everyone else earns.
Sam complains to Jonathan that she gets paid less than Jonathan’s assistant, and threatens to quit if he doesn’t raise her pay.
The actor who’s asked to shave his facial hair throws a wobbly. Later, Mel discusses it with the writers. “He says the facial hair is an integral part of his character, and he’ll only shave it off if it’s part of a storyline.” “He wants a storyline about his facial hair?”
Mell is outside the actor’s trailer, trying to persuade him to shave, holding shaving foam and a razor. “But everyone really respects you as an actor. And the writers love you, they’re Christian this, Christian that, isn’t he great? They’re saying you could be the next Clive Owen.” She pauses. “They’re going to give you a love interest.” He takes the shaving stuff.
One of the other writers, Dave, complains to Jonathan about being paid less than Tom, and threatens to leave and go and work for Casualty. Jonathan does a whole thing about how Casualty isn’t the high art of Echo Beach. “Look at these mint imperials scattered on the floor. Oh, that’s dangerous. I wonder if someone will slip on them sometime in the next 49 minutes. And what’s this? Oh, it’s a fork. Yeah? Sticking out of a lump of Blu-Tac. And here I am, a shy, prepubescent, 13-year -old boy. Oh, no. I’m walking towards the mint imperials, and I haven’t seen them. Huh? Ah, ah, ah, I’ve got a fork stuck in my head.”
Sam sees the envelope for Jonathan’s collection on Kelly’s desk and has a look. She’s amazed to find a couple of hundred pounds in it, not knowing that Jonathan himself put it in there because he was upset that his collection was so small. Before she can put it back, Kelly arrives to take the envelope and buy a present, so she leaves it on the desk.
As a result, his present is quite unimpressive.
Jonathan has another “meeting” with actress Suzie Amy. It hasn’t gone well for him. “Sorry, it’s not happening. It’s not you. It’s, you know, I’ve had a lot of them in my mind.” She asks “Does my character still get her name?”
Next day, Sam gets a letter informing her about a pay rise. She talked to Jonathan the previous day, and he was upset that someone had stolen his birthday money. So she took the money she left on the desk and bought him a present. “Oh, I wanted one of these.” “Good.” “Portable DVD player.” “I thought you could watch the rushes in the car. Or porn, up to you.” Did portable DVD players really still cost £200 in 2008? I guess maybe they did.
He goes back into his office. Nobody has tidied up the mint imperials on the floor. He gets a faceful of fork.
Media Centre Description: Companion show to ITV’s new soap Echo Beach, following the fictional crew behind the scenes as they endeavour to create a hit show. Jonathan is immensely proud of episode one, but he is left with no time to relax on his birthday when the payroll gets sent round to everyone and Nancy makes it clear that she wants him to fail. Meanwhile, the writers try to decide how the storylines will pan out.
Recorded from ITV1 on Friday 11th January 2008 20:58
The next recording is the next episode of Echo Beach. I think this is where I gave up on this one as this is the last episode I kept. The only real points of interest are spotting the things in the show that call back to Moving Wallpaper, most notably Suzie Amy’s character getting a name. “I’m Angela by the way.”
Media Centre Description: Soap starring Jason Donovan and Martine McCutcheon. Mark makes it clear to a terrified Susan that he will do whatever it takes to get Dan out of his life, even if it means revealing secrets from their past. While the Marracks try to settle in and Jimmy and Brae shake hands, Mark’s threats are realised when Dan finds his surf cafe under attack.
Recorded from ITV1 on Friday 11th January 2008 21:30
The next recording is Pop Britannia – A Well Respected Man. The only part of this series that I seem to have recorded, and it’s all about the managers in the 60s.
Some of the young people at the time remember when there was no real British pop music. Like Lulu: “anything other than American music to me was rubbish.”
Cilla Black: “I wasn’t a fan of British pop music at all. No, we all loved American music.”
Robin Gibb: “Britain, as a pop music country, didn’t have really much going for it internationally before ’63. I mean, alright, when you had Cliff Richard, he was probably the one artist that was doing well.”
There’s archive footage of Brian Epstein. “The Beatles were then just four lads on that rather dimly lit stage, somewhat ill-clad, and the presentation was, well, left a little to be desired as far as I was concerned.”
Epstein had got rejections from almost all the record companies. His last chance was Parlophone, best known for comedy records. Producer George Martin: “Brian knew he’d hit rock bottom. He’d been everywhere, and now he’d suddenly found himself with a comedy producer, and he was very inwardly depressed, and I listened to them, and they were raucous, not very in tune. They weren’t very good. And I said to him, I’m sorry, Mr. Epstein, on the strength of this evidence, I’m afraid, I have to turn you down. And he looked so crestfallen. I said, but if you’d like to bring these fellers down from Liverpool, I’ll give them an hour in the studio and see if there’s anything there.”
Larry Page: “Brian was a lovely guy, right? And he took a band, and he knew nothing about music. I mean, he got them a deal. I mean, if you could get somebody a record deal, it was magic. It really was. It was not that easy to get record deals.”
Donovan talks about hearing The Beatles for the first time, but more importantly, reveals that his father worked in Hatfield.
Gary Brooker: “Love Me Do, I mean, there was something, there was something about that. It was just very, very well done.”
Pete Waterman: “Love Me Do by the Beatles. That’s probably the first time I became aware of a real British record, and I mean by that, I always knew the Beatles wrote it.”
Frank Allen: “Music had been controlled by the old guard. You were brought in to perform, and told to be grateful for what you’d been given, and apart from a few little exceptions where someone had just come up with a little song they’d written themselves, there were writers to give you your songs, and that was the established order of things. Well, of course, the Beatles came in, and they insisted on using their own songs, and quite rightly, because their own songs were brilliant, and suddenly they changed it for all of us. It was such a gift to the rest of the young music industry.”
Norman Smith was baffled by the Beatles. “So I set these mics up, and by this time they had put the lyric on the music stand, so I thought, that’d be interesting, see what we’re going to record. So I went up to it, and I read it, and it said, she loves you, yeah, yeah, yeah, she loves you, yeah, yeah, yeah, she loves you, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. That’s all it said, and I thought, this is gonna be a funny song.”
Pete Townshend: “Anybody that was older than us, you know, had been in the army. The Navy, the Air Force, you know, they’d had a war to fight. They’d had a reason to be, and worst of all, for us, they’d fucking won. We were grateful to be free, but what were we supposed to do? You know, really, what were we supposed to do?”
Andrew Luke Oldham managed the Rolling Stones.
Noddy Holder: “We all thought the Beatles had long hair. When the Stones came out, they had longer hair, but nowhere near what you would call long hair by today’s standards or what came a few years later. But when the Stones first appeared, everybody was scared to death of them.”
Kenneth Pitt: “Andrew was a likable person, and he did amazing things for the Rolling Stones. But he wasn’t a manager. He was an extra Rolling Stone all the time. He wanted to live their lifestyle, he wanted to be a Rolling Stone, and he was very, very good at it.”
Gerry Marsden: “Well, Liverpool wasn’t the favourite place in the world down South. So if you went to London and they said where you’re from, you said Liverpool. Oh, yeah, oh, yeah. Go back home, type of thing. Especially if you were trying to get a record thing going. And suddenly after the Beatles, Liverpool then became, oh, Liverpool, oh, come here. I mean, they brought a million groups from Liverpool down to London to record.”
Sandie Shaw: “There was no songwriter the stature of Bacharach and Hal David here in this country at that time. That tradition of great songwriting hadn’t quite hit here.”
Chris Stamp: “Well, we found The Who in West London. You know, they were like a Shepherd’s Bush band, and they played a stint at a place called The Goldhorn Club, you know, like a serious mod club, right? And at that time they were going under this name The High Numbers. We saw them, and they were, you know, they were everything we wanted. You know, they were like fucked up, and they were like angry, and they were very pissed off.” He also describes a posh restaurant as “Sprauncy” which is a word I’ve never heard before, but which means “smart or showy in appearance”.
Dave Davies on the Kinks’ song “A Well Respected Man”: “I always thought Ray wrote that song about Robert, our manager. Very sophisticated. He always wore the correct clothing would order really expensive dinners and lunches. It was great, really, because that combination of Robert and Grenville being coming from old money and us scrappy kids coming from basic working-class environment. There was a camaraderie because they were rebelling against their heritage in the same way, in a similar way, that we were rebelling against our confined upbringing.”
Eric Burdon about the Animals’ big hit House of the Rising Sun: “Nobody would touch it. The record producer didn’t like it, Micky Most hated it. Wrong subject matter, too long. You’ll never get it on the radio. And then Vicky Wickham said, come on Ready, Steady, Go. And we’ll give you a whole five and a half minutes, which was the longest single ever recorded at the time. It was summer. And I just remember being in Brighton on the day off on one of our tours. I could hear House of the Rising Sun coming from about, you know, 500 transistor radios up and down the beach, you know.”
Archive footage of Mickie Most, who I mostly know from New Faces, I think. “My financial success came as a byproduct. It wasn’t the intention. I didn’t make gramophone records like, hey, I might get rich. You understand? I only make gramophone records because I like doing it. I get more pleasure out of receiving a gold record than ever a check.”
Kenney Jones on Don Arden: “It was a good impression, the first impression. It was great fun, and he had a big smile on his face. I think he wore a sandy coloured mohair suit. Later on in the conversation, he said that he was an opera singer or something like that, so we instantly identified with him as being a musician, too. We got along really well with him. He was like a big teddy bear.”
Arden had a gangster reputation, but his son defends him: “It was the movies, as far as he was concerned, and he was living a part, and nobody died at his hands, although there were rumours of it. There was no broken legs. I don’t think anybody got a broken anything, but, yeah, they got a smack, and they certainly got scared.” He describes what happened when a rival manager tried to steal the Small Faces. “So my dad goes round to his office, which I believe was in Hanover Square. It was the first floor where it had a balcony. And, as always with my dad, everything was a production. In his usual fashion he burst in there, grabbed hold of him, he dragged him to the balcony, pushed his head over the balcony and said, “the next time you try and steal from me or my family, that’s where you’re going to wind up.”
Reg Presley talks about his manager, Larry Page. “Larry Page was great. I had a sort of love-hate thing with him, because he was… an egomaniac.”
Geoff Emerick talks about working on Sgt Pepper. “We knew they were perfect tracks. There was nothing wrong with them, and we knew that everyone was going to be blown away when they heard it, and they always were. There was this look of just amazement on their faces. I mean, it was just incredible to see that. I mean, a big example of that. I mean, Day in the Life was like, all the music up until that time had been square, black and white, and suddenly you’ve got cinema-scoped colour.”
Brian Southall talks about the descent from power of Brian Epstein: “Certainly, people that I met and knew from EMI who were there in 1967, they were certainly of the view that his days as the manager of the Beatles would end before the end of 1967. And they’re of the view that he probably knew that. Hence, the speculation about his death and whether it was suicide or accidental or whatever. Because, you know, this was a man who, if he lost the Beatles, what effect would it have on his life?”
Mike Chapman talks about the time following the Beatles splitting up: “Once the Beatles were all over, there certainly was, in the pure pop world, there was a void. We were treading water, I think, waiting for something to happen.”
Now it’s time for Glam Rock with Marc Bolan, here singing Get It On with Elton John on keyboards, I think from Top of the Pops.
Bryan Ferry: “I remember overnight in Kings Road, where we, in Chelsea, where we had our office, the record store was full of the first album image. You know, lots of these 12-inch square, Carrie Anne and her outfit And it just looked so great. I thought, oh, this is better than having a picture in a gallery. This is fabulous.”
Media Centre Description: Three-part documentary series telling the story of British popular music and its place in British culture since the 1950s. In the 60s Britain went pop mad. The architects were a group of artists and entrepreneurs who would prise pop out of the grasp of showbiz interests to create a truly authentic British sound of the Beatles, Stones and Who and at the same time prepared the way for a new, more corporate pop business. With Pete Townsend, Sir George Martin, Bryan Ferry, Sandie Shaw and Lulu.
Recorded from BBC FOUR on Friday 11th January 2008 22:00
BBC Genome: BBC FOUR Friday 11th January 2008 22:00
After this, yet another outing for the Mad Men promo. Then the recording stops with the start of Storyville: Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars.
The next recording today is Bill Bailey Live: Part Troll. “As you can see, I’m wearing the Britney style mic tonight. I say Britney. It makes me look more like a wizard in a call centre. A Klingon motivational speaker.”
Nice to see Kevin Eldon in the Kraftwerk version of the Hokey Cokey.
There’s a typo in the Next caption – 4Muisc.
Media Centre Description: A performance by acclaimed comedian and star of Black Books and Never Mind the Buzzcocks, Bill Bailey, filmed at the Hammersmith Apollo. His Part Troll tour was one of the highlights of 2004 and played to packed houses all over the country.
Recorded from Channel 4+1 on Friday 11th January 2008 23:33
The next recording starts with the end of some Darts.
There’s a trail for Louis Theroux Behind Bars.
Then, an episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation – Devil’s Due which I’ve already looked at on a tape.
Media Centre Description: Sci-fi drama series about the crew of the USS Enterprise. A mythical figure returns to the planet Ventax to fulfil a 1,000-year-old contract of enslavement.
Recorded from BBC TWO on Saturday 12th January 2008 01:58
BBC Genome: BBC TWO Saturday 12th January 2008 02:00
After this, there’s another trailer for Torchwood.
There’s also a trail for Louis Theroux Behind Bars.
Then the recording stops as the next episode starts.
The final recording today overlaps and starts with the end of the previous episode.
Then, another episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation – Clues. It’s another repeat from one of my tapes.
Media Centre Description: Sci-fi drama series set aboard the USS Enterprise. Picard and the crew are shocked to discover that Data is lying to them.
Recorded from BBC TWO on Saturday 12th January 2008 02:43
BBC Genome: BBC TWO Saturday 12th January 2008 02:45
After this, there’s a Torchwood trailer we’ve seen before. And a trail for Wonderland.
Then BBC 2 closes down with Pages from Ceefax.
Lots of ad breaks today, starting with The Simpsons.
Here’s the ad breaks from Moving Wallpaper and Echo Beach.
Adverts:
- Halifax
- 007 Spy Cards
- Rave Nation The Anthems
- Muller
- Sunday Times
- The Golden Compass in cinemas
- Bird’s Eye Fish Fingers – Suggs
- trail: Jamie’s Fowl Dinners
- Teaching
- Maybelline Dream Matte
- Herbal Essences
- Take A Break – Kim and Aggie
- Asda
- Dentyl
- trail: Shameless
- L’Oreal Infallible
- Virgin Holidays
- McDonalds
- Asda
- Land of Leather
- Direct Line
- Digital Switchover
- trail: Al Murray’s Happy Hour
- Diet Coke
- Dominos Pizza
- LG Viewty
- Charlie Wilson’s War in cinemas
- Harveys
- Night Nurse
- Crunchy Nut Cornflakes
- match.com
- Bird’s Eye Fish Fingers – Suggs
- Arm & Hammer Enamel Care
- trail: Echo Beach
- trail: Dancing on Ice
- Norwich Union DIrect
- Halifax
- Nicorette
- Orange
- Specsavers
- 118 118
- Nicorette
- Vaseline
- trail: Trial & Retribution
- Tic Tac
- Benylin Chesty Coughs
- Asda
- Ford Fiesta Zetec
- Thomas Cook
- Walk Hard The Dewey Cox Story in cinemas
- Maybelline Dream Matte
- Benylin Children’s Chesty Cough
- Digital Switchover
- trail: Al Murray’s Happy Hour
- trail: The Palace
- trail: Honest
- Walk Hard The Dewey Cox Story in cinemas
- Shrek’s Quests