Customary bluster is such a hallmark of Donald Trump that extravagant claims and melodramatic threats are often to be taken with a pinch of salt; the President’s grandiose announcement that he intends to sue the BBC for every penny that organisation has managed to claw from the Great British Public may or may not come to pass; but we all know by now that any financial crisis at the Beeb always provokes an axe that tends to fall on the few good things the Corporation still does, and keeps all the crap that leaves viewers and listeners feeling they’re not exactly getting value for the money prised out of them every month. The BBC iPlayer is a case in point; a few years ago, the then-Director General Tony Hall (I think it was him, though it’s hard to remember now, with the revolving door at Broadcasting House) announced the BBC’s undeniably rich archive would be made available to the public via the iPlayer, and while scraps of it are hidden away on there, one usually has to embark on an extended search through the site to locate them, bypassing the endless contemporary series and movies that clog up what seems a wasted opportunity of a platform. The BBC iPlayer should be closer to the BBC Archive channel on YT, which is a far superior window into what the BBC used to be so good at.
Initially peppered with clip videos usually running no longer than five minutes, the BBC Archive channel has expanded to include full-length programmes upwards of 50 minutes in duration and can serve as a sometimes poignant alternative to present day fare. I recently watched a documentary from 1969 on there, lifted from a series that was new to me called ‘Gone Tomorrow’; it apparently covered aspects of the British way of life that were disappearing, and this particular edition dealt with the dying days of a railway branch line in the wake of the Beeching cuts. The line between King’s Lynn and Dereham in rural Norfolk had run for over 120 years before British Rail decided it was surplus to requirements, and the programme radiated a quiet and dignified, elegiac atmosphere enhanced by melancholy shots of a once-prosperous station along the route in the process of being wound-down, no longer maintained and slowly rotting away. It’s a touching and compassionate slice of vanished life, the kind of programme commissioning editors at the BBC would once sanction without a moment’s thought, lacking visual gimmicks, loud music, a preachy narrative scripted by a diversity committee, and a celebrity presenter – because none of them were needed. Confident such unassuming little documentaries of the sort only Radio 4 occasionally produces these days would find their audience, programmes of this ilk were regularly launched by the BBC from TV Centre 50 or 60 years ago and they routinely found that audience because viewers responded to not being treated like retarded, illiterate idiots; and the BBC Archive channel reminds you of this fact.
Many of the documentary strands that used to personify a certain BBC ethos are present and correct on this channel – the likes of ‘40 Minutes’, ‘Man Alive’, ‘Open Door’, and ‘Look Stranger’ – as well as those more personal vehicles fronted by wry, eloquent commentators on their times such as Fyfe Robertson. But there are also enlightening short reports on there for those with just five minutes to spare, particularly those from the fondly-recalled 70s teatime institution, ‘Nationwide’. Anyone watching these alone may well conclude that Britain was once a country consisting solely of loveable eccentrics, and to be fair, we did used to specialise in a species that now appears to be on the verge of extinction as conformity and uniformity proliferate. If you happened to be in Hartlepool in 1973 and dialled 68136, for example, you’d be through to the Missing Budgerigar Bureau. The nation as seen through the ‘Nationwide’ lens was one where cats had bank accounts, horses resided in bungalows masquerading as stables, gypsy mystics lived on farms in Shepherd’s Bush, and haunted chairs had to be locked away in pub cellars due to the fact anyone who sat on them died within hours of resting their brains. When viewed back-to-back, these entertaining vignettes do somewhat disrupt the lingering narrative that 1970s Britain was a drab, monochrome cycle of strikes, power-cuts and bomb blasts – and nothing else. If anything, they remind you that while we’re still stuck with many of the elements that hog the headlines when some ill-informed Millennial pens an article on times before his times, we’ve undoubtedly lost so many of the things that made life bearable back then. The people profiled on these ‘Nationwide’ shorts always come across as irredeemably optimistic and capable of laughing in the face of adversity, a far cry from the browbeaten and demoralised populace that successive governments have ground down this century.
When Halloween came around this year, the BBC Archive channel uploaded a light-hearted late 60s documentary presented by Alan Whicker, reminding the viewer – or making the viewer aware – that before he became known as TV’s most celebrated globe-trotter, Whicker could also host programmes that took internal journeys, such as one into the primal fear of being scared and enjoying it. Whicker interviews Christopher Lee, Dalek creator Terry Nation, stop-motion animator Ray Harryhausen, and pioneering shock-rocker Screaming Lord Sutch, as well as the owner of a bookstore specialising in horror magazines, one Whicker leaves baffled when he airs a theory that some of the shop’s patrons are clearly ‘turned on’ by his stock in the same way they’re turned on by Soho bookstores with a different kind of niche publishing on display. This programme has the same amusingly eccentric vibe as the ‘Nationwide’ reports and can’t help but make the viewer aware of what a bleak, humourless and hopelessly miserable nation we’ve become in the intervening years. The well-spoken (not to say well-dressed) members of the public asked for their opinions on camera from half-a-century ago or more exude a natural, unaffected charm that contrasts sharply with the narcissism and artifice of the tech-savvy generations accustomed to recording and sharing their every intimate moment with the rest of the world today. Moreover, the presenters of the programmes are intelligent, articulate, and – more than anything – grownup. They don’t make you want to switch off the moment they appear on screen because they’re not barking at you like a hyperactive imbecile in search of a slap.
The BBC Archive channel largely deals with the Corporation’s factual output; if you’re looking for the other outlet that earned the BBC a worldwide reputation it now seems intent on destroying – drama – there are numerous other ‘unofficial’ YT channels showcasing endless forgotten gems. Due to their unofficial status, these channels have a habit of abruptly vanishing before resurfacing under a new name minus some of the videos that incurred the copyright police of an organisation that won’t put the same programmes on their own iPlayer whilst simultaneously not allowing anyone else to post them. However, some vintage BBC drama productions remain on YT for years, probably because the BBC has forgotten all about them. I recently viewed an obscure BBC2 drama series from 1974 called ‘Microbes and Men’, linking the lives of 19th century men of science whose breakthroughs in the field of disease helped shape modern medicine; on paper, it doesn’t sound especially enthralling, but Arthur Lowe demonstrated his underrated versatility as an actor by playing Louis Pasteur, and the whole serial managed to uphold the Reithian principles that have been all-but discarded of late.
I hadn’t intended to pen two successive posts on the same subject – and, as a rule, I try to avoid doing so; but today is a Sunday and I often attempt to touch on lighter topics this day of the week. And recalling a golden age of British broadcasting isn’t quite the same as shining an unflattering light on the present day excuse for the BBC, after all. The fact is that the BBC we used to know and love is still out there; it’s just residing on YouTube these days.
© The Editor
Website: https://www.johnnymonroe.co.uk/
It could be anthropomorphic chimps drinking cups of PG Tips or Valerie Leon pursuing the petrified individual who’d doused his weedy frame in Hai Karate; it could be a pretty girl with an impossibly bouncy barnet prompting observers to wonder aloud as to whether or not she was wearing Harmony Hairspray; or it could be the Bond-esque daredevil risking life and limb to simply leave a box of Milk Tray on a bedside table all because the lady loved them. Each, of course, was an incredibly successful TV commercial that everyone of a certain age can recall as easily as the programmes those ads bridged. I was saying to a friend the other day that if such ads were still running on television, I’d probably watch more live TV and wouldn’t simply record anything I wanted to watch in order to skim through the piss-poor excuse for commercials today. But, as I’ve touched upon many times before, my TV viewing in the past few years has been largely superseded by online viewing, specifically YouTube. For the best part of a decade, this viewing experience has been largely uninterrupted by the unwelcome intrusion of ads into videos due to an extremely handy ad-blocker that means I’ve been spared the gate-crashing garbage that prompts angry comments on YT channels. And you get so used to this that you only realise what those without ad-blockers have to put up with when you visit a friend belonging to that unfortunate camp and they stick a video on; before the video airs, your senses are assaulted by…well, there’s no other word for it but shite.
A man should take time to unwind, and downtime for me generally tends to be the last two or three hours of the day before reluctantly retiring to bed; and this twilight zone is the one in which the majority of my leisure viewing takes place. As I’ve written on numerous occasions over the past few years, YouTube has superseded television as a source of original entertainment where I’m personally concerned, with the plethora of vintage rarities it routinely excavates complemented by an abundance of fresh talent that doesn’t have to crawl cap-in-hand to clueless TV execs to reach an audience; indeed, many of the YT channels I follow can already boast far bigger audiences than a sizeable amount of programmes receive on mainstream TV channels today. Those who have turned niche interests into cult viewing on YT with a refreshing blend of charm, wit, and an infectious enthusiasm for their particular passion have underlined the redundancy of the focus groups, committees and DEI agendas that have given the last rites to the old living room medium. These online presenters are unfiltered auteurs who don’t need television anymore than today’s best writers don’t need the publishing industry and today’s best musicians don’t need the music business. Why would any successful host of a YT channel sell their unique brand to television, only to see its guts ripped out and everything that made it special stripped away as their baby is sent through the bland blender and dumped out the other end before a bewildered audience of a few thousand pensioners?
‘I like Christmas telly; all them stars giving up their Christmases, just to entertain us’ – so spoke Albert Steptoe in the 1974 festive episode of ‘Steptoe and Son’, unaware (as son Harold informs him) that ‘All them programmes is recorded in October; when it comes to Christmas, they’re all away, sunning themselves in the South of France. It’s just us lot sat here in the freezing cold watching ’em’. But old Albert’s naive faith in the selfless dedication of TV stars to the duty of entertaining the viewers is symptomatic of an era when the first generation of household names to make their mark via television as opposed to radio were received with a kind of blind reverence by some telly addicts. There was a distinct difference between Us and Them that made the idea of ordinary mortals being given a platform on the gogglebox unthinkable; the nearest they got was being contestants on game shows or being asked to air an opinion when sat in the audience on early incarnations of the ‘Question Time’ format, such as the BBC’s ‘Talk Back’ series. The idea of them fronting a show without a bona-fide ‘proper’ star to mentor them was as inconceivable as calling out a firm to remove one’s gas cooker and having Tommy Cooper turning up at the door in a boiler suit. The two lived in different worlds – or at least they did until the intervention of David Attenborough.
The late, great Fred Dibnah is largely remembered – and mainly known by those too young to have seen his TV series at the time – as the man who climbed tall chimneys with nothing in the way of a harness. In an age before precautionary health & safety regulation, Fred Dibnah was a fearless, no-nonsense artisan who got on with his job without making a fuss; and it’s hard not to admire his spirit even as one’s palms are sweating when watching him scale another tower. The plain-speaking Lancastrian steeplejack who became an unlikely household name over 40 years ago died in 2004, but has enjoyed a posthumous life as a YouTube sensation, with the most memorable scenes from his old shows continuing to provoke gasps of astonishment in viewers. However, if one can get beyond the understandable queasiness when watching his death-defying ascents, it’s always worth listening to Fred’s mixed feelings about his job and his melancholy musings on finding himself as the unwilling priest summoned to read the last rites to the industrial heritage he acutely felt the passing of. If not demolishing chimneys with little more than a hammer and chisel from the top on down, Fred is doing it the old-fashioned way from the bottom up, starting a fire in the belly of the edifice and biding his time until it eventually collapses precisely in the direction he knew it would do. Many of the abandoned chimneys he brings down had once stood beside a factory that has already vanished from the landscape, but the homes that had grown around the industrial complex to house its employees remain, so Fred’s traditional method of demolition is a safer option than explosives.
Keen to avoid ‘riot fatigue’, the other night I found myself skimming through a few of those multiple YT channels in which dedicated vinyl junkies either slightly older or slightly younger than me review classic or overlooked albums released decades ago – the kind of channels that depend on the charisma of the presenter as to whether the viewer watches the full video or skips to the next after a couple of minutes. Like ‘reaction videos’, YT has an abundance of these guys sat in front of their record collections and, if one watches any at all, one tends to watch the same select few and rarely pay much attention to the ‘related videos’ sidebar. However, upon seeing a thumbnail of a hirsute chap in said sidebar with the title ‘Have I Lost My Enthusiasm?’ my curiosity was a little piqued and I decided to click on it; I knew I could instantly move on to another if that curiosity wasn’t sufficiently rewarded. The channel was named ‘TJR’ – not one I think I’ve watched a video on before, but it’s hard to remember sometimes, what with there being so many of this ilk. Anyway, the host was a bespectacled American geezer in a Jimi Hendrix T-shirt, boasting flowing grey locks and a silver beard; he didn’t actually have the obligatory row-upon-row of LPs behind him, but did at least have an electric guitar pinned to the wall to emphasise his ‘Rawk’ credentials. I figured I knew what I was going to get.
Way back when it was still worth watching – around 15 years ago – I remember writing and sending a script to ‘Doctor Who’; I’ve often said I received it back so quickly that it was practically returned to me before I’d even posted it. But as demoralising as that happened to be, there was nothing especially unique about it as experiences go. Like every other writer, I gradually amassed enough rejection letters to wallpaper the proverbial spare bedroom; most authors of renown can tell you a similar story. One had to simply keep repeating the process, hoping that somewhere out there there’d be an agent or an employee of a publishing house whose tastes would chime with my own and would therefore take a chance on signing me up. That’s the way it had always been done, and one had to play the game to achieve one’s objective. Had I been born half-a-century or a full 100 years earlier, the cycle would’ve been the same, and my ability to string a sentence together would probably have led me elsewhere. Perhaps I’d have been a columnist or critic on a newspaper, having progressed from the hotbed of the local press to Fleet Street, for there would’ve been no internet to provide me with a platform. Of course, that world no longer exists; but the world of the Winegum does – and the destiny of that is entirely in my hands.
Another YouTube channel that has provoked a fair deal of binge-watching of late is one that goes by the name of Vacant Haven. Although I first watched a video on this channel around a year ago, it’s only recently that it’s become one I routinely turn to when seeking the kind of interesting entertainment television rarely bothers with these days. Vacant Haven consists of three – sometimes four – ‘urban explorers’; to their detractors, urban explorers are little more than glorified trespassers, though the guys from Vacant Haven specialise in discovering abandoned properties that the landowners seemingly couldn’t care less about. Houses are their speciality subject, mostly large residences once home to the moneyed classes who evidently ran out of money – or in many sad cases, met their makers without any heirs to bequeath their homes to. These particular urban explorers only enter a property if there’s already a way in; they never break a lock or smash a window; if there’s no entry, they don’t force one. Should they manage to get indoors, they leave everything as they found it, even if that means the items left behind are then destined to be collected by less respectful intruders. They never give away the location of the houses in question (to deter such intruders) and never reveal the name of the last resident, even if stumbling across documents and other personal possessions, such as photographs.
At one time (like most), I would have favourite TV shows – programmes that aired at a set time on a set day of the week that I would look forward to. The addition of the VCR to the electronic household furniture partially shattered the appointment-to-view aspect and enabled such shows to be recorded and watched at the viewer’s leisure, and as many times as the viewer liked; this is why numerous TV series (and movies) recorded back then can often be recited word-for-word even now, countless years later. In more recent times, the gradual diminishing of television’s appeal in the face of online challenges has led to the streaming revolution, whereby a new series is ‘released’ and then receives a binge-watch that was previously the province of the DVD box-set. I personally don’t subscribe to Netflix or any other channel of that ilk forever unleashing these shows on a seemingly daily basis, finding much more entertainment of an original – and admittedly niche – nature on YouTube. Regardless of my own battles with that corporate monolith – and my expulsion as a creator from it – I nevertheless still enjoy more of its output than that which emerges from traditional (and in my opinion, redundant) broadcast mediums.
‘I pms at these,’ is not perhaps a statement that will be forever enshrined in the annals of great quotes. The person who said it went by the name of shazza, whoever shazza may be. But shazza is nevertheless a notable figure to me, for his/her comment was the last to ever grace a video on my YouTube channel, the final person provoked into saying something after enjoying one of my offerings on a platform that had twelve long years of providing satirical and/or bawdy entertainment for the masses who were incapable of raising even a moderate titter at the woeful excuse for comedy that television serves-up these days. Unfortunately, the history that shazza made with this brief comment on the most recent instalment of ‘Buggernation Street’ is a history that has been erased from the books, for Sillycunt Valley’s very own Ministry of Truth has excised yours truly from the platform as of late Wednesday evening. I’m not playing the victim here, btw; I just figured you might find this story interesting.
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