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DEBUTS
JANUARY ...
Wise Up made its first appearance on
Sunday mornings ... Andrew Neil interviewed famous people including Fatima
Whitbread and Jimmy Savile in Is This Your Life? ... Frankie Howerd
was the first subject of Heroes of Comedy ... The 3000 Mile
Garden had the Atlantic Ocean in the middle and horticulturists from
the US and UK tending either end ... and would-be Prime Ministers announced
their manifestos in The Number 10 Show.
FEBRUARY ...
The pilot of ER launched the first series
of the ultra-successful drama ... Gaby Roslin introduced The Real Holiday
Show ... Jimmy McGovern's Hearts
and Minds began ... Secret Lives opened with the story
of Walt Disney ... while The Legend of the Tube was followed by
13 weeks of highlights from the music show.
MARCH ...
Party of Five was the latest American
import ... after the previous year's pilot, The White Room got
a full series on Saturday nights ... Ice T fronted Baadasss TV
... and Deadline looked behind the scenes of Yorkshire Television's
regional news programme, as part of the Whose News? season that also included
Naked News, looking at the cult of the anchor and the rise of CNN,
and The Daily Planet, a 90-minute programme made up of one day's
news bulletins from around the world.
APRIL ...
Dominik Diamond invited viewers to choose the
presenters for new youth show Watch This Space, but read the wrong
results out ... the current state of Israel and Palestine was examined
over three nights in The Holylands ... Greg Dyke looked behind
the scenes of sport in Fair Game ... while two sitcoms called Friends
and Father Ted sneaked quietly into the Friday night schedules.
MAY ...
Takeover TV discovered Adam and Joe
but was most famous for the talking bottom of Norman Sphincter ... Joanna
Trollope's The Politician's Wife starred Juliet Stevenson and Trevor
Eve ... centrepiece of the Century of Cinema season was the snappily-titled
A Personal Journey with Martin Scorsese Through America Movies
... Robert Llywellen passed on home movie tips in I Camcorder ...
and John Sparkes and Pete Baikie overdubbed natural history footage in
Sqwakietalkie.
JUNE ...
The World of Lee Evans began ... while
Edward Windsor (yes, that one) tried to get us all playing Real Tennis.
JULY ...
My So-Called Life began its first, and only, series.
AUGUST ...
Unedited Bird and Fortune monologues from Rory
Bremner ... Who Else? were shown as The Long Johns ... the
ragga star travelled to Bombay for Apache Goes Indian ... and Hugh
Fearnley-Whittingstall was the Chef on the Wild Side.
SEPTEMBER ...
Alan Davies starred as a disillusioned travel
agent in One For the Road, a curious sitcom that gathered dust
on a shelf for a year before being flung out opposite EastEnders
... while Dani Behr and Laurie Pike launched Absolutely Animals.
OCTOBER ...
Alan Bleasdale took Robert Lindsay and Julie
Walters from GBH and gave them their own series, Jake's Progress
... Antoine de Caunes, Carolyn Marshall and Maria McErlane dispensed Love
in the Afternoon ... money matters were dealt with in Dosh
... Street-Porter's Men saw Janet interview members of the opposite
sex she found "interesting" ... Pete McCarthy investigated alternative
beliefs in Desperately Seeking Something ... there was animated
comedy in Crapston Villas ... and Hollyoaks began..
NOVEMBER ...
Paul Watson examined industrial relations in
The Factory ... one of the most popular characters from Desmond's
got his own show in Porkpie ... Dressing for Breakfast was
a feminine counterpoint to a growing range of laddish sitcoms ... while
short films were showcased in Shooting Gallery.
FINALES
DON'T FORGET YOUR TOOTHBRUSH
Chris Evans' prime time debut was almost scuppered
before it appeared on screen, with an unusually high number of pilots,
and it wasn't until Fifteen-to-One legend William G Stewart was
drafted in that it started to gel. And how. Toothbrush won awards
both in Britain and around the world, Evans making millions from selling
the format to dozens of countries. But he always said that he felt uncomfortable
fronting the show, claiming his persona on screen was a million miles
away from what it was in real life. Hence after just two series, Evans
packed it in. The format went on to inspire many future light entertainment
shows, including C4's Last Chance Lottery, and the BBC even purchased
the rights in an attempt to re-launch it with MTV VJ Ray Cokes in charge
- however it never made it to the screen. The fact that Ant and Dec's
Saturday Night Takeaway in 2002 is still reminiscent of Toothbrush
shows the impact the series continues to have on TV producers, despite
the fact that only two dozen episodes were ever made.
MISC ...
Brookside ran daily for a week in January
and again in May, with the Jordache storyline picking up some of its biggest
audiences ... 4 March was Pot Night, with eight hours of programming
devoted to cannabis ... C4 got the rights to The Cheltenham Festival
from the BBC ... Red Light Zone devoted eight Saturday nights to matters
sexual ... while other channels were marking the 50th anniversary of VE
Day on 8 May, C4 celebrated Glam Rock, including the first ever Top
Ten ... a six-week season of Vintage Thames on Saturday nights included
The Kenny Everett Video Show, Man About the House, The
Sweeney and Rumpole of the Bailey while Auf Weidershen,
Pet also got a repeat run ... nine years after being filmed, chat
show Sex with Paula was finally screened ... 2 and 3 December was
Soap Weekend with documentaries and classic episodes of EastEnders,
Neighbours and Brookside ... and the festive season was
marked by Beastly Christmas.
ON SCREEN
PAULA YATES
Even by Paula's standards, this was a curious
year. In January she was still in charge of The Big Breakfast's
interview bed, but in February news of her relationship with Michael Hutchence
broke. Separation from her husband Bob Geldof followed, and so, obviously,
did her departure from The Big Breakfast in March. While all this
was going on, highlights from The Tube were rerun on Wednesday
evenings, and she joined Jools Holland back at the Newcastle studios where
once again they introduced acts in as unbriefed a manner as was possible.
Indeed, Paula began one edition complaining that she was hardly in it.
In December, Sex with Paula was finally transmitted - a programme
where she asked celebrities about their love lives. The show was originally
filmed in 1986, but with the rise of AIDS it was felt it encouraged promiscuity
and was unsuitable for screening at the time. With, perhaps, her new status
as a headline maker in mind, it was now considered acceptable.
HOLLYOAKS
Phil Redmond went back to the writing chair
to pen the first episode of C4's new teen soap, claiming that Brookside
was where he dealt with serious issues and here was where he was going
to have fun. Hence, the first few episodes of the Chester-based show contained
such memorable plotlines as "Louise can't decide what to do with
her hair", and Alvin Stardust was a regular. Perhaps unsurprisingly,
the intended audience was not particularly taken with the froth and demanded
issues, so the emphasis abruptly changed a few months in. Original lead
character Natasha was killed off at her birthday party, a storyline that
drew a line under the old series. Still cautious, C4 only commissioned
another 26 episodes rather than the lengthy run Mersey Television was
hoping for. Viewing figures eventually rose under the new approach, but
because of the commissioning procedure the series abruptly ended in June
1996. It returned in September, now twice a week, and proceeded to become
a teatime staple on Channel 4 - and never again would haircuts be the
main talking point.
OFF SCREEN
• Films grabbed the headlines this year, with
the premiere of The Last Temptation of Christ in June drawing C4's
highest number of complaints ever. November's premiere of the Four-financed
Four Weddings and a Funeral, meanwhile, saw the channel's highest
audience for a decade.
• From October, Fifteen-to-One was an unlikely pioneer as
it began broadcasting in widescreen.
• The Big Breakfast was extended by half an hour one morning
in September to allow it to raise money for breast cancer; a decision
approved by Michael Grade during an acupuncture session.
FOUR-WORDS
"I'm going to stick my neck out here
and suggest it will never replace Wimbledon in the hearts of the nation."
- Giles Smith in The Independent on Sunday on Real Tennis
"We spent about three or four hours very
late one night talking about how a programme can basically market itself.
The concept emerged of a word-of-mouth check on each show, the idea of
looking at a programme after you'd done it and saying not 'Was it a good
show?' but, 'Are there one, two, three, four things that people would
be talking about?' Since Don't Forget Your Toothbrush, every show
that Chris Evans has done has had those moments."
- Matthew Freud, Public Relations
Director
MY FAVOURITE CHANNEL 4 MOMENT ...
BROOKSIDE (1993)
There's a moment in an episode of Brookside
that I remember as the all time best soap opera cliff-hanger. Bear with
me because the details are sketchy. The Jordaches had not long since arrived
at the Close. The other residents found themselves intrigued by this intensely
insular and claustrophobic threesome; they seemed somehow oppressed and
broken, yet no one knew why. To the viewer it quickly became apparent
what was really happening, and the eventual arrival of Trevor Jordache
(much prefigured by the Press as well as our own expectations of how a
soap opera plotline should develop) signified that things were going to
get nasty.
At first, Trevor attempted to persuade his family
that his malevolent past was behind him, and for a time it seemed they
chose to believe him. Yet inevitably the violent tendencies began to re-surface.
The pivotal moment in the story occurred not when Mandy eventually plunged
the knife into Trevor, but some weeks earlier.
Trevor was out and about looking to socialise with
his new neighbours. The way I remember it is that David Crosby and somebody
else (it might have been Mick Johnson or Eddie Banks) were having a quiet
drink at the bar (was it La Luz back then?) when Trevor interrupted. On
the surface he seemed friendly enough, but there was something about his
demeanour that suggested he was becoming increasingly unhinged. The episode
concluded, with Trevor bidding his reluctant drinking companions farewell
and heading for home.
Somehow the direction and performance of this scene
managed to communicate two unspoken messages to the viewer. First of all,
we knew instinctively that Mandy, Beth and Rachael were heading for disaster;
and secondly, we could see that in the pits of their stomachs Bing and
Mick knew exactly what was going to happen but felt powerless to stop
it. People say that the suggestion of violence on television is often
more powerful then the actual portrayal. Here the cliché is shown
to be true.
In this short scene, Brookside effortlessly
portrays not only the terrible psychology of the abuser, but also the
way in which those on the periphery of domestic violence almost become
victims themselves, against their will becoming complicit in the act of
violence. In retrospect, the cliff-hanger worked so well because Trevor
showed us he was free to do whatever he wanted.
- Jack Kibble-White
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