I continued through my trawl through "Screen Burn" towards the end of last night where one of the parts the stood out was Charlie's take on what was to be the final series of Blind Date in 2002.
The programme was already tired as it was but in October 2002 they decided to give it yet another relaunch, this time with a new feature "Date Or Ditch" where the contestant choosing the date could dump their first choice if they weren't impressed.
The changes to format resulted in "Our Graham" Skidmore being sacked as the announcer and at the beginning of a live show in the new year, Cilla herself made a surprise announcement that this would be her last series of Blind Date.
A year later saw a disastrous replacement in the form of "Love On A Saturday Night" and having Davina McCall as the host was one indicator that I wouldn't be watching.
The series was split into two with Ant & Dec's Takeaway being shown for six weeks in between which was a much needed relief, but for what I can remember, one of the games in the mish-mash of of a format, involved a contest choosing from three people wearing what looked like gas masks so the audience couldn't see who they were.
I still haven't read Steve and Graham's book on Saturday Night Television yet and I must do so really soon as I'm sure it will have me groaning at some of the other Saturday night flops I thought I'd forgotten.
This also reminds of a show that used to go out on ITV Night Time in the late 90s called "The Haunted Fishtank" which was an irreverant TV review show hosted by Ed Hall.
I can remember one show from around early to mid 1999 when they looked at sitcoms and the BBC had recently had plenty of unsuccessful ones such as "Bloomin' Marvellous" with Clive Mantle, "Kiss Me Kate" starring Caroline Quentin, and Chris Barrie's disastrous "A Prince Among Men".
Ed went on to comment that the BBC used to be the leaders in the genre but they'd now forgotten that sitcom stood for "situation comedy"
and not "situation complete bollocks".
The show decided to do it's own spoof involving plenty of innuendos and an unfortunate scene where the Dad got a sausage stuck between his flies and the vicar caught the son trying to pull it out.
The review show overall was slightly funnier than TV Burp but nowhere near as coarse as Charlie Brooker's "Screen Wipe".
Overall it's a reminder of a time when ITV actually bothered
to make shows aimed specially for people watching at that time of night, with a more infamous example being Colin Bennett's "Night Shift".
Another moment I liked from the Fishtank was when they took the piss out of a headline where Corrie's Adam Rickett revealed in a tabloid newspaper that he hadn't had sex in 18 months but claimed he "wasn't gay".
This lead to a sketch taking the mickey out of him launching his pop career, where he walked into the record boss's office who gave him the lyrics to his new single, which Adam read out the following in a dry manner.
"It's fun to stay at the YMCA,
It's fun to stay at the YMCA,
They have everything there for young men to enjoy,
You can hang out with all... the.. boys?"
I thought that would be a good excuse to put up that rather off putting video for what was to be Adam's real debut single "I Breathe Again".
Back to Brooker, and whilst reading his book, to get over the disapointment of
the Lars Bartkuhn album I gave the Bennson album a spin and it's the first time
I've listened to it in full and am really impressed.
I hope it's only the beginning as they are up there with Incognito and
the Sunburst Band proving it is still possible to produce really good happy music.
I may play one of their's on the show tonight as well as a bit of Barry White for my Aunt who may be listening.
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