Computers with Horns: BBC2 Junction, 16th June 1997
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- Опубліковано 29 сер 2024
- More BBC2. Six years after last week's upload and it's a completely different world. No gnomic animated landscapes, no classicist logo, no near-confrontationally abstruse aesthetic at all. Just a crispy numeral and a comedic character actor goofing around. And, to begin with, Carol Vorderman and Adrian Chiles - looking much the same as he does now, something which Carol has put a lot more effort to achieve than he has without really managing it - talking about computers. I refuse to provide any more context than that.
This would appear to be June 16th, 1997 - very close to the date of upload by sheer coincidence - and the end of the BBC's preparing-for-the-future Computers Don't Bite season. This is, or has been, The Beginner's Guide, in which the likes of Tony Blackburn and Anne McKevitt tried to get their heads around Windows 95. The initial campaign ends here but as Adrian says the BBC will keep bothering the nation about computer literacy for some time - there's a "Computers STILL Don't Bite" campaign two years later, for instance. Enjoy a half-arsed parody of a Guinness advert in the credits.
And now, Tony Hawks' Pro Standing Around Pretending To Play The Trumpet. Or prune a rose, or head a football, in a prop comedy sequence that's harder than it looks. He's promoting the BBC Learning Zone, then two years old and a mere late-night programming strand rather than the quasi-station in its own right that it was run as after the big rebrand a couple of months later. Specifically, Hawks is hawking (sorry) their summer season of programming, with the imaginative title of "summer nights", consisting of various educational shows that I'm honestly not sure how they differ from the regular programming, nor why you need to call a telephone number about it when it's on unscrambled BBC2 and as Hawks says all you need is a VCR and some blank tapes.
Over on BBC1 shortly it's your actual EastEnders, and as you can see it's the height of the Tiffany era. She managed to drop her chavvy - have it cut out, to be more precise - and now it's getting christened. Yay. She goes under that lorry in another eighteen months. Not the baby, Tiffany.
Here on BBC2, Home Front: In the Garden, the venn-diagram friendly DIY spin-off gardening show. Because it's 1997. The Radio Times listing that week thought it was only a one-off, but that was clearly only going to be the case if no-one watched it. Which was never going to happen.
Talking of spinoffs, now on BBC2, "another fuel injected edition" of Top Gear Motorsport. Which is what it says it is: the sportier members of the team from the show's original incarnation presenting news, updates and vaguely interesting stories from the various worlds of competitive internal combustion engine-having. Headed by Tiff "Tiffany Dell" Needell, who lest we forget used to do Formula One. This week, in what's also the last of the series (Wimbledon is on next week), Tiffany visits Brands Hatch for what must be the 193459th time in his life, in this case to cover a saloon car competition (and challenge the drivers to a race, possibly out of obligation). Sadly no Allman Brothers theme tune, just some vaguely flatulent generic library "rawk" called "Out of Control", apparently composed by Ian Anderson. Not that one.
Idk, in another lifetime, I could hear flute over that theme song.
I think the Motorsport theme was also used for a weekend show on STV earlier in the 90s called Skoosh.
Lots of Tiffs here. Well, two, and that's more than the average
Wow, Tony hawks actually had hair.
Tiffany (not the Top Gear one) didn't end up under the wheels of a truck - more like knocked down by Frank Butcher's Ford Mondeo and cracking her head on the snowy tarmac.
Martine McCutcheon didn't want to leave the soap opera, yet still wanted her Perfect Moment and all that so asked if she could leave but come back when she wasn't being a pop star, and the producers said no, so Tiffany had to die.
I imagine if you called the number, you got a printed booklet with extra material on the programmes you'd taped. Perhaps even a guide for when to program the VCR for, though of course most homes would have a TV Guide or Radio Times.
When it comes to that irritating trend of "[Celebrity and/or Star who was but no longer is famous] looks UNRECOGNISABLE now", they've almost predictably never cited Vorderman, who actually does fit that description. This being the time, when she would be on 3 or 4 times a day, as opposed to Twice Nightly Whiteley.
That track features on the 1995 F1 Season Review. The sheer amount of stock music those reviews used is astounding.
1:24 That face tho :-P