The Year Of Listing Dangerously

Considering that the now itself sadly defunct original and best online repository for defunct pop culture TV Cream once seemed excitingly technologically cutting edge and forward-looking with its table-embedded frameset, over-compressed jpegs and arkwel.html-level page naming protocol, it is a little odd to remember that when it was first launched back in 1997, pretty much nothing that it referenced, from Pickersgill People and Cloppa Castle to Lyons Maid Haunted House and Pigsticking: A Joy For Life - The Gentleman’s Guide To Sporting Pastimes by Willie Rushton, was online anywhere in any form. If you wanted to know more about even the more familiar corners of Cream-era nostalgia - even Bagpuss himself, once he was asleep or otherwise - you had to go rooting around paper-based resources, whether it was rifling through the misaligned bookshelves in charity shops or asking to have a look at the bound volumes of TV Times in your local library, which necessitated signing a very official looking slip and waiting for what seemed like eighteen million hours while the librarian disappeared and returned with a huge trolley containing two volumes that somehow acquired an annoying squeak as soon as you began to push it, causing brow-furrowed academics poring over their theses to throw you scowling sideways looks over the top of some papers. Part of the fun of TV Cream, of course, was that no such research was really involved and the entire ethos behind it was an amusing extrapolation of simultaneously shared and idiosyncratic memory, so once this sort of information did become more easily available and the I Think You’ll Find boys started to pipe up with their actually there were two Charles McHaltenwoods and the one you mentioned isn’t the one you mentioned tedium it never quite seemed as though people were taking it all in the spirit that it was intended again.

Now of course such reference resources are more easily available, but - as the presenters of BBC1’s Fax would discover to their peril - combining facts and frivolity is not exactly the easiest of arts to accomplish. Thankfully TV Cream’s original founder Phil Norman has stepped into the Bootle Saddles-baiting breach with The Year Of Listing Dangerously, a weekly newsletter in which he casts an amusingly underwhelmed eye across whatever was on television in a certain year on that week in history. As you might expect if you’re familiar with Phil’s work, it deftly straddles the fine line between excitement and exasperation at how they used to fill the schedules back when they did not really know any better even if the programmes themselves often actually were better, and although it would not be entirely accurate to say that he has watched these programmes so you don’t have to, it is also true to say that his wry observations give enough of a flavour of the assorted quirks and oddities of the blandest corners of BBC1, BBC2, ITV and a chronologically dependent Channel 4 for it to feel like you might as well have sat through them yourself. I mean it is entirely possible that some of you might well find yourselves feeling inspired to track down non-animated animated grashopper-hewn alleged comedy of manners Manfred - a show so obscure that I put the channel as ‘Fuck Knows’ in the entry I wrote on it for TV Cream - after reading Phil’s thoughts on it, but frankly that’s on you.

One of those newsletters that will make you involuntarily cheer every time it arrives in your inbox, The Year Of Listing Dangerously can be found here. Though sadly he hasn’t as yet covered Hey, It’s My Birthday Too!…

If you want to hear more of Phil’s thoughts on long-forgotten television programmes then you can find him on Looks Unfamiliar talking about Erasmus Microman, Leapfrog and Oscar The Rabbit In Rubbidge here and Over The Moon and Spy Trap here, and about his love of Pipkins on The Golden Age Of Children’s TV here. If you’re feeling generous, you can also buy me a coffee here.

What else I’ve been up to…

There’s a new Looks Unfamiliar with Joanne Sheppard here in which we cover such possibly best not revisited subjects as BBC early evening write-in trivia query answering magazine show Fax, terrifying battle re-enactment heavy schools television programme The History Trail, Angela Rippon’s bafflingly ubiquitous literary creation Victoria Plum, ITV’s attempt at turning Cluedo into a panel game and rival human-ape hybrid thrillers First Born and Chimera. Meanwhile The Golden Age Of Children’s TV - which includes a look at Fax and all of its equally odd contemporaries in that bizarre short-lived slot between the end of children’s television and the start of the news - is still very much available from here.

Want to read more? Head to timworthington.org!