Tonight's Channel 4 Comic Relief special with Peter Kay's "Raiders Of The Pop Charts" was essentially a behind the scenes account of the making of his most popular video "Amarillo" and how it all started after being featured in that legendary Asian Elders scene in series 2 of Phoenix Nights all the way back in 2002.
It nearly didn't happen at all as they originally planned to use "Green Door" by Shakin' Steven's but Paddy McGuinness couldn't remember the words so they did the Tony Christie classic instead.
Rather ironically Shaky ended up appearing alongside Peter in the video.
It was good to see rare footage of Tony appearing on "Wheeltappers And Shunters" back in the mid 70s where even compere Bernard Manning appeared to be enjoying it.
However it almost never happened as when shooting the first few scenes in Manchester they were struggling to get celebrities to appear other than those lurking around Granada in Manchester and Paddy could be heard saying that they should try and get Jonathan King out of prison.
Even more ironically he ended up being released early a few months later.
This meant they had to move down to London and they ended up getting people such as Geoffrey from Rainbow, Heather Mills, Brian May and Roger Taylor, Michael Parkinson, and of course Ronnie Corbett.
Most of those who appeared in the video including Peter himself were interviewed, as well as other people such as director David Mallett, Richard Curtis and Pete Waterman.
Liza Tarbuck was the narrator and I liked some of the music they used in parts of the programme including "Wade In The Water" by Ramsey Lewis and "Time Is Tight" by Booker T and the MGs.
The latter record's rather significant for two reasons, the first being the fact that Johnnie Walker used to use it as his music for reading out the chart rundown on his Radio 1 show every Tuesday lunchtime in the early 70s.
The second being that Ant & Dec used an arrangement in a series of pre-title sketches for the first three episodes of SMTV where it would show two of the presenting trio waking up and then cutting to one of them waking up in a rather dodgy location and screaming.
This was in the days when the theme tune was similar to CD:UK where instead of going "#Countdown UK, Countdown UK" it would sing
"#Wake Up, It's Saturday".
However this was dropped from show 4 where the Steve Brown signature tune that was more familiar and matched with the titles was introduced.
On a similar note it's rumoured that Cat Deeley is to replace Angus Deayton as the host of Hell's Kitchen when it returns to our screens next month.
Whilst I doubt she'll have the wittiness of Angus it will be great to see her back on British Television as I still think she's one of the finest female presenters around who's never really been fully given the chance to succeed in a prime time slot in the long term.
As for Angus, things haven't been too good for him this week as not only did he utter a rather mild but innapropriate word during Comic Relief on Friday but he's also been dropped as the host of the panel show "Would I Lie To You" with Rob Brydon due to take his place when the series returns this summer.
Rob's no stranger to panel shows as he once guest hosted HIGNFY, and also did his own spoof show "Anually Retentive" on BBC Three which I thought was pretty amusing, with the highlight being his impression of David Mitchell who I hope will continue to appear on the accusation based panel show.
Finally, Dancing On Ice and at long last, Coleen has been eliminated.
This means that the grand final will see Donal McIntyre, Jessica Taylor and Ray Quinn competing although I doubt we'll see Donal make it into the big finale where the final two couples get the chance to skate the bolero.
However they all have to dress up in the costumes regardless before the votes are announced so it can be pretty discouraging.
I'm not sure if I'll even get to see the final live as I'll be doing my focus group with Mum, Dad and possibly Concha for my dissertation when I go back to Canterbury next weekend.
Although at this time I don't even know what questions I'll be asking in the focus group but one thing I've learnt in the assignment is not to give myself too much material to work with as it will just make a bloody great big mess of things.
Early start tomorrow as I need to get in the radio rooms to seperate and normalise some of the shows from the Marathon and do some iPlayer dubbing before the first years arrive, although to be fair not many of them have got as far as coming up with ideas for their 3 minute features.
This time three years ago I was in the same position, but it was Smoke Aid and the progression of the station that kept me going and gave me more confidence to get the feature completed to good results and I hope the first years have been given the same sort of boost from our marathon this weekend.
In the words of Peter Kay, we're at the top and we're going higher.
Good Night.
No comments:
Post a Comment