Phil Norman
@mrphilnorman.bsky.social
📤 878
📥 206
📝 1900
The Year of Listing Dangerously:
https://historyoftv.substack.com
A delightful trawl through the less-repeated end of Christmas television. I'll have to seek out that Shoestring episode now.
add a skeleton here at some point
10 minutes ago
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"I'm completely bloody sick of this!"
#UniversityChallenge
about 16 hours ago
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Count Dracula - the BBC gets Bram Stoker right for the first and only time, as the vanilla of writer Gerald Savory collides beautifully with the LSD and Daddies Sauce of director Philip Saville.
open.substack.com/pub/historyo...
about 18 hours ago
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Today at the Allied Carpets sale, I bought a cow that took up exactly the same amount of space as Michael Stipe, Peter Buck and Mike Mills combined. They had a great deal on REM-size ruminants.
1 day ago
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Persevering with Oppenheimer but Tom Conti as Einstein is throwing me. Although I'd love to see Alan Ayckbourn's The Einstein Conquests.
1 day ago
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Russel Harty Goes Upstairs, Downstairs (known colloquially as "Russell Harty Fucke Uppe An Interviewe"): a Boxing Day treat nobody asked for, as Harty attempts to chat to the UD cast both in and out of character at the same time. It gets confusing.
open.substack.com/pub/historyo...
1 day ago
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Finally got time to dig into
@whenisbirths.bsky.social
new book and it doesn't disappoint. I had absolutely no idea about the Eurythmics/Throbbing Gristle crossover.
2 days ago
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Breaking new ground in TV drama with the first ever unadapted adaptation.
2 days ago
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Listing Dangerously at Christmas 2: Eclectic Toodle-oo. Vaulting ambition from Tommy Steele, panto history from Ken Campbell, stern goodwill from Mr T, political insurrection from Gavin Richards and extreme awkwardness from Russell Harty. Oh, and Derek Griffiths.
open.substack.com/pub/historyo...
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The Year of Listing Dangerously Christmas Selection Box – Week 2
“This is commercial television in crisis!”
https://open.substack.com/pub/historyoftv/p/the-year-of-listing-dangerously-christmas-561?r=4ckna1&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web
3 days ago
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Nice to see Kazimir Malevich in gainful employment at the US Department of Justice.
3 days ago
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Today's upon-waking mash-up: Happy Xmas (War is Over) and Gordon Giltrap's Heartsong.
3 days ago
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One Chunk Leads To Another heralded as film of the year. A film I have absolutely no desire to see, despite it being "based on" the book that got me into Thomas Pynchon.
4 days ago
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Festive ready meals are starting to sound like 18th century book titles. "Beef & Turkey Wellington Goujons in Sourdough Breadcrumbs. To which is added, New England Cranberry Sauce, a Sage & Onion Poultice & Crispy Lardons. Together with, an assortment of Flaked Bread Sauce, Dutch Gravy Foams &c &c."
5 days ago
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Woke up with these lines in my head. "I'm dancing at this party, letting it all hang out. I'm looking for some peanuts but there's none about." Yeats. The master.
5 days ago
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Just realised that tonight marks the 45th anniversary of a particularly rain-sodden outdoor after-school carol concert where, in an awkward pause between Away in a Manger and In the Bleak Midwinter, a parent loudly admonished his child, "This is *much* more important than Battlestar Galactica!"
6 days ago
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Festive Watchdog on just now. Not a single soft toy whose head detaches to reveal a four inch metal spike. Is there any evidence that actually happened on the old show? I have memories, but I can't be sure they're not of parody sketches.
6 days ago
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The Other One - the brilliant but overlooked middle entry in the Esmonde/Larbey trilogy of sitcoms, between The Good Life and Ever Decreasing Circles, all starring Richard Briers as a dysfunctional character exhibiting varying degrees of chirpiness and arseholery.
open.substack.com/pub/historyo...
7 days ago
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Oh God, American reaction YouTubers have discovered the existence of Heil Honey, I'm Home!
7 days ago
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1981 - next week's big finale may go down in TV history, but penultimate Blake's 7 episode Warlord deserves to go down in production design history, thanks to the wardrobe department and some mad mise-en-scene from director's director Viktors Ritelis.
open.substack.com/pub/historyo...
8 days ago
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You wait three decades for a piece of online advertising to be even halfway relevant to you, and it turns out to be the most niche thing imaginable.
8 days ago
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Soap Aid - the last and, well, probably not the most of the big African charity concerts, with the casts of Brookside, Corrie, EastEnders, Emmerdale and, oh yes, Albion Market doing the now-standard stadium gig and single package.
open.substack.com/pub/historyo...
9 days ago
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Part One of the Christmas Listing Dangerously Selection Box is out, and we're hitting all the festive "B"s. Beckett! Blackeyes! Bolam! Briers! Burke! Brookside! Benji! Bob Monkhouse! Blake's 7! "What about Malcolm Bradbury?" "I'm aware of his work."
open.substack.com/pub/historyo...
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The Year of Listing Dangerously Christmas Selection Box – Week 1
“Meanwhile at the King’s palace, it was lead balloon time.”
https://open.substack.com/pub/historyoftv/p/the-year-of-listing-dangerously-christmas?r=4ckna1&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web
10 days ago
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1974: on the opening night of Lindsay Kemp's Flowers, one of the production's naked male dancers has an unplanned encounter with Blue Peter's Biddy Baxter.
12 days ago
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I see there's another production of Die Fledermaus opening soon. Which is all well and good, but it does contribute to the continuing marginalisation of all the other Flederbobs.
#JohannLiftsAFinger
12 days ago
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He's done it again: the birth of telecommunications, as told through the lens of everyone's favourite "sod this for a lark, when does Roseanne start?" sitcom.
www.youtube.com/watch?v=zmyB...
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The birth of the internet, according to Jon Bois
YouTube video by Secret Base
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zmyBSrQodnI
13 days ago
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That time in 1997 when Channel Four piloted five different late night topical discussion shows in consecutive weeks. The Will Self one was particularly embarrassing. Bragg won, of course. "Have you all got yer Sundays?"
13 days ago
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Mark E Smith: the Next Generation.
13 days ago
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By hiding his face behind the big yellow oval menu while ordering the mixed grill for 7/6?
14 days ago
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Glad to see the pushback on Christmas Wrapping gathering pace. When did it start becoming an annually recurring thing? I remember hearing it on Muzak rotation in Friars Square Shopping Centre in about 1991.
add a skeleton here at some point
14 days ago
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Delighted to discover the existence of a snooker player called Wu Yize. One to file alongside Ol' Dirty Charlton and Ray Reardon the Chef.
16 days ago
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Radio just played the once ubiquitous, now totally forgotten, I Love You Always Forever by Donna Lewis, and it's basically just a New Age cover of the theme from Pebble Mill.
16 days ago
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The most unChristmassy Christmas objects of all: those grey funnels used to wrap Christmas trees.
17 days ago
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Nancy Banks-Smith on the joy, or otherwise, of live TV.
19 days ago
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I'm not sure an instrumental cover of Katy Perry's I Kissed a Girl in the style of a coke-addled Paganini makes for the ideal lift repair report hold music.
20 days ago
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Hands up who's looking forward to next year's Fifty Years of Paaaahnk celebrations.
21 days ago
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Not to give the impression that me watching Say Nothing is a case of pearls before swine, but I couldn't help thinking how the bloke who plays the young Gerry Adams would make a cracking Ernie Bishop.
22 days ago
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While looking for something else entirely I came across a book I strangely don't remember buying, a German coffee-table book of Matta paintings. It's the most beautiful thing.
22 days ago
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I'd never have had Tom Stoppard down as a Zardoz fan.
22 days ago
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I remember making jokes about The Point being listed in the early nineties. Always a fan of their staff's obligingly lax attitude to age restriction.
22 days ago
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The new De La Soul album's a bit good, isn't it?
www.youtube.com/watch?v=qxK7...
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De La Soul - Just How It Is (Sometimes) featuring Jay Pharoah & Gareth Donkin (Official Audio)
YouTube video by WeAreDeLaSoul
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qxK78k37WJM
23 days ago
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That "introduce yourself with the first five gigs you saw" thing is just an excuse for people to show off how recently they became old enough to go to gigs, isn't it?
24 days ago
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El vino collapso, Getting out of the darkness, My light shines on, My light shines on, My light shines on.
24 days ago
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Jack Shepherd. Utterly magnificent in some of the best TV plays ever made. And, for that matter, pretty damn good in some of the very worst.
27 days ago
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Sudden memory of a Benny Hill Show where a lone audience member pissed themselves when Yaketty Sax got to the bit where it quotes Entrance of the Gladiators. Is that the lowbrow equivalent of slapping your thigh at a gag in As You Like It?
27 days ago
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If we're to have more of these dramatisations of Great Moments in Rock, there should be one of the weekend when Captain Sensible was radicalised in the Crass commune.
29 days ago
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The Galloping Gourmet - Graham Kerr triangulates a path between cosmopolitan sophisticate, down to earth bloke and "muggins here" culinary bluffer as he whips up full-fat continental treats and leaps over random bits of G-Plan.
open.substack.com/pub/historyo...
29 days ago
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Separated at birth: Peter Sellers' I Haven't Told Her, She Hasn't Told Me (But We Know it Just the Same) and Bankrobber by The Clash.
30 days ago
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I'm mildly obsessed with Venus Observed by Christopher Fry. Fry was the biggest name in British drama just after WWII, until John Osborne & the Royal Court tore theatre a new arsehole. So this is the Tales from Topographic Oceans to Osborne's Anarchy in the UK, to make a totally spurious comparison.
about 1 month ago
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It's farewell and adieu to you fair Spanish Blakeys for Week 55 of Listing Dangerously. Also, Bill Maynard's on a bus, Pete Postlethwaite's in a caravan, Anthony Valentine's in Sydney, Orson Welles is in Norwich, and Simon Callow's in the pub, beating up squaddies.
open.substack.com/pub/historyo...
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Week 55: 22nd – 28th November, 1975
“Another fast-moving, action-packed programme, including yoga and prize leeks.”
https://open.substack.com/pub/historyoftv/p/week-55-22nd-28th-november-1975?r=4ckna1&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web
about 1 month ago
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I was reminded today of Varoomshka, the Guardian's 1970s satirical newspaper comic strip in monumentally dubious taste.
about 1 month ago
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