I managed to stumble over an edition of "Turn On Terry", a short lived TV review show broadcast on ITV1 during the early hours for the latter half of 2003 presented by Terry Christian and two guests, all coming from the Satan's Hollow club in Manchester.
Ever irreverent as you'd expect and around 2003 was the only real example of an old style night time programme as ITV seemed to be cutting down on night time shows in favour of repeats of Trisha and other nonsense.
They'd even dropped special idents for night time and just broadcast there normal ones with celebrities cavorting about which by this time had been revised for the new Autumn season with new ones with Phillip Schofield,
Simon Cowell, and Melanie Sykes joining in with revised ones
starring Ant & Dec, Chris Tarrant, Frank Skinner and so on.
Anyway back to the programme in question and the theme tune and various stings were provided by Big Arm who had ex Happy Mondays performer Paul Ryder on vocals who by now was no longer speaking to his brother after the band's disastrous revival in 1999.
This particular show was broadcast the week I got back from Venice in 2003 where there had also been the Edinburgh Television Festival where one of the speakers was Sky TV's Tony Ball.
Terry compared Sky's technique of hiring stars for their programmes to that of Chelsea FC by grabbing talent and wasting it with recent examples in the last few years including Barry Norman, Jimmy Hill, and Harry Enfield.
Terry did point out that David Baddiel was already poor on terrestrial before starting his own sitcom on Sky One so the question in his case was
"how do you ruin shite?".
Later that month Tony ended up resigning from Sky although with the exception of Richard Keys on Sky Sports, I doubt there's been many people who have moved to Sky from terrestrial and have been successful.
On a more up to date note it appears that ITV boss Michael Grade is a bit pissed off with an article in the Times by Greg Dyke criticising his reign at the station suggesting that he is in "a lose lose situation".
As a result he may take the case to court if he doesn't get an apology from the former BBC director general, but to be honest I've been disapointed by Grade since he arrived at ITV as he hasn't really made changes that were needed around the time of his arrival.
Media Guardian Article
Back to Terry and I swear he's the dad of first year radio student Rob Crowther, despite Terry being from Manchester and Rob being from Yorkshire.
I'm having a listen now and it appears that Dan Roberts is absent from Preloaded this week and in his place are Matty ID and Nicola with Oli P making a guest appearance where he still appears to be bitter about losing the race against Dan on Saturday.
Oli's making another appearance this week as a guest on Jade's show and I reckon he's going to be the best one yet and as is normally the case, I wouldn't be suprised if he ends up stealing the show.
I've also found the first two editions of the Autumn 2003 series of Buzzcocks which provided a bit of amusement.
The first one had Huey from the Fun Lovin' Criminals and Dick Valentine from Electric 6 on Phill's team, whilst Bill's guests were Alexei Sayle and the delightful Louise Redknapp who Lamarr described as "a footballers wife who can actually sing".
Around this time Louise had a double A-side with the hip-hop influenced "Pandora's Kiss" and "Don't Give Up" which went to the tune of the ASDA theme partly because it was in aid of their "Tickled Pink" breast cancer charity.
This was around the time I'd reduced my shifts from three times to twice a week and on my first Thursday there it was the day itself where ASDA FM had a rare live broadcast from a store in Leyton near my hometown in East London where Louise would perform the song in an attempt to break the record for the biggest singalong which took place just as I was leaving at 5pm that afternoon.
As far as I can remember it was the last single released by Louise who's now living off her husband's success and I'd love her to start singing again as she was definitely one of the better female pop vocalists who had a great personality.
Back to Buzzcocks and the first round was "Sorry No Refunds" where Bill's team had to guess why VH1 cancelled an Osbournes style show with Liza Minelli.
The answer was because Liza's husband David Gest was being too much of a control freak and the VH1 people were having none of it.
By this time Liza and David had split up after being married for just 18 months.
To illustrate the question they played a bit of her 1989 video "Losing My Mind" as produced by the Pet Shop Boys and a song that I know Matthew Linfoot is a fan of unsurprisingly.
I thought Liza looked rather similar to Carol, one of my helpers at secondary school who I got on rather well with but I don't think she would have been happy about being compared to her.
By 2003 however they looked nothing like each other.
Phill's team had to guess why recent chart topper Beyonce called off a photo shoot and one of the possible answers was that the magazine had written a derogatory article about her heroine Diana Ross, to which Huey responded "Diana Ross is on heroin?".
The actual answer was because she didn't want to be smeared in honey as it was against her religious beliefs, or in Mark Lamarr's case "because of her recurring nightmare about being buggered by Winnie The Pooh. And Tigger too"
Alexei Sayle was on good form where he made jokes about him having to add "Azerbaijan" to make a joke funny, although he did well in the intros round correctly guessing the intro to Salt & Pepa's "Let's Talk About Sex".
I managed to recently find one of the songs sampled in that record which was "I'll Take You There" by the Staple Sisters, which was based around "Liquidator" by the Harry J Allstars.
One of the songs done by Phill's team was "In Da Club" by 50 Cent and Mark said that the only people with a higher insurance bracket than 50 Cent's death threats were "suicide bombers with a history of heart problems, before being a Saddam Hussein kissogram, before burgling Tony Martin's farm, before winning Fame Academy".
Another amusing moment came when Phill's team had to identify the keyboard player from late 90s band Republica but they messed it up because Huey knew him personally as they were on the same edition of Top Of The Pops.
Moving on to the second edition where the guests included Liz McClarnon from Atomic Kitten, Raul Malo from the Mavericks, and a half naked Har Mar Superstar.
The first round involved guessing whether either Michael Stipe or Moby had lent there name to a haircut in a woman's private area and the answer was Moby although Mark said that if the cut went wrong they would end up with a Bill Bailey, or a "Billy Goat Muff".
There was then a joke which went; "Moby was born on September the 11th. That'll teach him to ask for a big surprise on his birthday"
A rather risky joke considering the show was transmitted almost two years to the day.
Another joke I liked was about Coldplay having a no girlfriends rule on there tour. Although Mark suggested it wasn't a rule as opposed to a coincidence.
I liked it towards the end of the Next Lines round when Mark was reading a question when the music cut in and he then said
"I've started but I can't be bothered".
Moving up to date, tonight sees Stewart Lee returning to television with his new BBC 2 series which looks promising.
On a similar note they'll be showing the John Humphrys episode of
"I've Never Seen Star Wars" on BBC Four on Thursday so look out for me
in the various audience shots.
No comments:
Post a Comment