Thursday, 25 October 2018

Christmas Crackers


Christmas Crackers

Interested parties may like to know that I've begun editing in earnest for Episode 27 of 'Round The Archives', having finally decided on the running order. It's not something we've talked about very much, but when you've got four or five items from a variety of contributors, we essentially have to construct a schedule just like you'd see in 'Radio Times'.


So one of my jobs is to try and arrange things in some sort of order so that each piece is different in style to the one before and the one after. That can be through contrasting subject matter, genre or simply whoever has worked on the piece. We try to operate on the magazine-show principle that even if one thing isn't to the taste of the individual listener, something should be along next that they'll like.
But last night's episode of 'Are You Being Served?' reminded me of this, as we took time to look at the entire BBC 1 schedule for 22nd December 1975.


We'd reached the first every Christmas Special, 'Christmas Crackers', which is one of the better ones, quite frankly, even if any trace of realism goes out of the window in the last few minutes. Written by Jeremy Lloyd and John Chapman, it's a simple enough affair, but none the worse for that, which demonstrates Frank Thornton's ability to make a pair of googly-eyed glasses really rather funny.



We won't pre-empt our video discussion (which can be seen here) too much, but it did wander up some interesting avenues as we thought about the Royal Institution Christmas Lectures  (Eric Laithwaite discusses gyroscopes in a repeat of his 1974 ones, which you can find here) and 'Blue Peter' sees Lesley Judd dressing up as 'Alice In Wonderland'.



That nice Mr Martin Holmes was able to supply some images of the 'Radio Times' listings (which got the thumbs-up from Peter Purves himself) and he's talked about this in more detail on his own blog, which can be found here.

But enough of this chatter, the end of October is looming, and we've got a podcast to finish by next week!

Best get a shift on, or it really will be Christmas!


(Written by Andrew Trowbridge)

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