In this week's archive newsletter: John Nott walks, Granada's failed Anglican Church soap of all the talents, Brucie gets the network together, Sarah Greene gets a hospital visit, The Clangers get political and Napalm Death are for the children. whydontyoutube.substack.com/p/the-why-do...

50 YEARS AGO TODAY: the original Poldark begins, Robin Ellis as the protagonist of the milestone in populist historical fiction adaptation. www.youtube.com/watch?v=B4dV...

Once Afternoon Plus or A+ or whatever it was called by the end was disposed of Mavis Nicholson was logically given her own programme, Mavis On 4. Today in 1987 Nicholson kicked it off by expressing her excitement at meeting Bette Davis.

30 YEARS AGO TODAY: Pet Shop Boys' Chris Lowe is a passing visitor to Ramsey Street.

60 YEARS AGO TODAY: Out Of The Unknown, the BBC's first go at a sci-fi anthology series, starts with No Place Like Earth a handyman settled on Mars rejects the offer of a wife (TV debutant Hannah Gordon) in favour of setting up a new Earth on Venus.

30 YEARS AGO TODAY: after no fewer than three pilots look-at-this-idiot cop cam video compilation Police Camera Action! graduates to a full series, the first of - get this - fourteen.

When an enterprising former label put a spanner in the Ziggy works by reissuing David Bowie's The Laughing Gnome #totp got out the stop-motion cameras and made a video for it themselves to show on their 500th episode today in 1973.

30 YEARS AGO TODAY: the fifth series of Get Your Own Back introduces the Forfeit Furnace, where the loser (pretends to) have a precious item burned, which got Points Of View interested and the feature dropped.

20 YEARS AGO TODAY: post-WWII diarist docu-drama Our Hidden Lives features as one of its main subjects Ian McDiarmid as a closeted man whose objects of affection include soldier Mathew Horne and POW Michael Fassbender.

50 YEARS AGO TODAY: Fawlty Towers episode three, The Wedding Party. Basil might want to take a moment to look at that wall's rigidity at 14:03. And what's with the very un-Fawlty Towers fourth wall break - in close-up, too - at 15:54?

40 YEARS AGO TODAY: there wouldn't be a soap form breaking EastEnders two-hander for nearly a year yet but they were edging their way there given the amount of time Michelle and Den get to reveal who the former's baby's father is (clue: it's the latter)

30 YEARS AGO TODAY: the OJ Simpson trial verdict is announced at this exact moment. ITN deals with it by extending the news. Whoever the person sitting next to John Suchet for the overrun is, there isn't time to talk to them.

20 YEARS AGO TODAY: BBC One O'Clock News leads on Ronnie Barker's death the previous night, with Jimmy Tarbuck on the phone and Barry Cryer in the studio to tell the old "we were invited to meet Gerald Wiley in a Chinese restaurant" favourite.

RIP Dame Patricia Routledge. www.youtube.com/watch?v=T-iD...

Another run through the last week: whydontyoutube.substack.com/p/the-why-do...

30 YEARS AGO TODAY: renaissance man, and renaissance art critic, John Berger takes the Jeremy Isaacs inquisition Face To Face close-ups. www.youtube.com/watc...

30 YEARS AGO TODAY: Michael Moore's TV Nation bites the hand that feeds, investigating licence fee evasion. He thinks we're all obsessed with the Royals, of course. Janeane Garofalo surveys confession punishment and Louis Theroux meets his school bully.

30 YEARS AGO TODAY: Alan Davies' spoof travelogue One For The Road has gone quite some way off the original concept as he's in Monte Carlo and Cannes trying to sell a script, relating his adventures via VHS to Willie Rushton, Alfred Marks and Peter Jones.

30 YEARS AGO TODAY: Sweep is left in charge of a pneumatic drill, Sooty and Scampi get lost trying to solve a treasure hunt and Larry Dann from The Bill gets multiple cakes in the face in Sooty & Co.

40 YEARS AGO TODAY: Phil Silvers appears on Pebble Mill At One as part of a celebration for Bilko's thirtieth anniversary, but only by phone to Magnus Magnusson so he didn't have to see Paul Coia impersonating him.

New show, Live & Kicking, renewed Trevor & Simon today in 1993 as the latter enlists Michelle Gayle to introduce his new feature, Meet Someone. As long as nobody interferes!

50 YEARS AGO TODAY: Joseph Conrad's The Secret Agent, a double-crossing plot that draws in Robert Hardy, Anton Rodgers, Peter Sallis, Michael Gambon and Peppa Pig's grandma Frances White.

20 YEARS AGO TODAY: the ITV 50th anniversary celebration continues in its own lane as Ant & Dec's Gameshow Marathon moves on to The Golden Shot. Spoiler: the contestant most likely to have watched it at the time wins.

30 YEARS AGO TODAY: turning a crisis into a prime-time drama, Challenge Anneka tries to find thousands of new blood donors, despite setting the Jaws music to Anneka's own donation. A wild selection of celebrities, from Patricia Brake to Suggs, help out.

40 YEARS AGO TODAY: 25th century spaceship Children's BBC sitcom Galloping Galaxies! confirms broad comedy still exists long into the future, especially when the starship's computer S.I.D. has the voice of Kenneth Williams in his final TV role.

50 YEARS AGO TODAY (I know Ian's already specified that but we have a house style to keep to, dammit)

20 YEARS AGO TODAY: Simon Farnaby, Kerry Godliman, Kevin Bishop, Tom Goodman-Hill and Josie d'Arby are some of the ensemble making up Spoons, a wildly variable in quality sketch show co-written by Charlie Brooker themed around twentysomething dating.

40 YEARS AGO TODAY: easy to forget Meera Syal's TV career goes back this far, her first credit being as the mother (at 24) of Adrian Mole's new neighbours.

30 YEARS AGO TODAY: what are you doing, Steve Wright (not "Steven", Deadly, he's someone very different) and Anthea Turner? What ARE you doing?

40 YEARS AGO TODAY: days after Mail On Sunday journalist Nicola Scicluna fooled a Sunday Times interviewer into believing she was Meryl Streep, Terry Wogan invited her onto his show and his then researcher, future Late Show host Tracy MacLeod, plays along.

60 YEARS AGO TODAY: inspired by a news story about trapped miners not receiving a quick enough response, Thunderbirds starts with The Hood planting a bomb on a new airliner that will go off when it lands and ends with a car being shot off the M1 by Parker.

40 YEARS AGO TODAY: Peter gets a new haircut that's nothing like those viewers proposed for him, Janet tells us who Lord Shaftesbury was and Simon prepares for Radio 2 early breakfast by meeting "the king of radio himself" Mike Read on Blue Peter.

30 YEARS AGO TODAY: Pulp appear on Live & Kicking, but not before Jarvis has told of his bike wheel woe and not after a Trevor & Simon sketch which is enlivened by Frank Bruno repeating "Kajagoogoo" to himself.

20 YEARS AGO TODAY: joining the long undistinguished list of popular films becoming unpopular TV series, Mike Bassett: Manager brings back Ricky Tomlinson's blunderingly straightforward football manager to take over his home League Two team. www.youtube.com/watc...

20 YEARS AGO TODAY: Rik Mayall's final lead role was among his most forgettable, All About George, a comedy-drama from Cold Feet's Mike Bullen in which Mayall is tremendously miscast as an optimistic family man handling whatever life can throw at him.

50 YEARS AGO TODAY: Carter's wife is mistakenly killed - he was married? Really? - so after Regan's bought him a medicinal whisky The Sweeney are on the hunt to protect the intended target from wannabe Cockney gangster leader Patrick Troughton.

40 YEARS AGO TODAY: however successful or gentlemanly a Sherlock Holmes is, at some point he's going over Reichenbach Falls. The original story doesn't give any reason for the showdown so it's added that it's because Moriarty has stolen the Mona Lisa.

40 YEARS AGO TODAY: The Money Programme profiles the rise of 2000 AD and the status of comics in general, in case you ever wanted to hear Valerie Singleton describe Judge Dredd. Tharg was presumably on holiday.

30 YEARS AGO TODAY: Olivia Hallinan starred in Lark Rise To Candleford in adulthood but at nine she was Julia Jekyll And Harriet Hyde, after a science school experiment is sabotaged in the first episode of the Children's BBC skew-wiff comedy. www.youtube.com/watc...

In this week's archive newsletter: Corrie meets Cheers, Kermit turns continuity announcer, Glenn Medeiros is embarrassed, the fall of Agnetha, Natasha Kaplinsky kisses a dog, Micro Live is hacked, Paxman fights fireworks and Richard & Judy go nationwide. whydontyoutube.substack.com/p/the-why-do...

40 YEARS AGO TODAY: news of riots in Brixton mildly delay a Barry Norman introduction to Brighton Rock.

20 YEARS AGO TODAY: Terry Jones unites his humour and history sides to explain The Story Of One, explaining how the concepts of numbers developed. Warning: uncredited recreative acting happens.

60 YEARS AGO TODAY: Emma Peel joins The Avengers for the fourth series, after Honor Blackman got the Goldfinger gig. Laurie Johnston's theme fanfare and the artistically posed titles shots arrive with her as she and Steed investigate a Norfolk village.

30 YEARS AGO TODAY: Jeremy Clarkson's most infamous report on the original Top Gear, in which he finds nothing to say about the Vauxhall Vectra.

40 YEARS AGO TODAY: Paul Daniels is in a helicopter over Glastonbury Tor while Anneka Rice is down Wookey Hole with a mayor for some card transference.

40 YEARS AGO TODAY: World Of Sport ends after twenty years with some light boasting and clips from throughout its past. Surprisingly NSFW, and we don't mean Freddie Starr for once. The team behind aren't even acknowledging the end.

Radio 1 celebrates its twentieth birthday today in 1987 and finds Open Air challenging its usefulness, with Dave Cash in dinner suit and Johnny Beerling being regularly told it's all shit.

The Money Programme looks forward to the digital TV revolution, with Sky Digital and OnDigital weeks away, today in 1998.

50 YEARS AGO TODAY: Doctor Who does a Forbidden Planet, in the redesigned, anti-matter awash shape of Planet Of Evil.

Arnold Schwarzenegger gives Tommy Boyd some tips about getting on the weights on Magpie today in 1977.