The Mausoleum Club Forum

The other thing I've noticed is that there are no longer announcements for individual programmes - there are just generic ones for "an hour of comedy" or whatever. Which don't always work: I've just heard an announcement for "an hour of the very best vintage comedy from the 50s, 60s and 70s" - foll...

I don't know exactly - I think they're calling it a "simplified" schedule. They've changed the timings of some programmes, but it doesn't seem any simpler than the old one to me. I may investigate. The other thing I've noticed is that there are no longer announcements for individual programmes - the...

Mark wrote: ↑

Sat May 30, 2020 10:44 pm

Very sad news, great Actor...and to another generation...Lucien and his Rabbits in "The Liver Birds".

That's how I remember him. I was actually quite thrown when I originally heard the announcement that the Thomas the Tank Engine narrator had died, as I'm sure Ringo Starr is still alive...

Just discovered via Radio 4's Last Word that John Langdon died in March. Writer on many of the radio comedy programmes I grew up with, like Week Ending and The News Quiz (which he wrote single-handedly for years) as well as TV programmes like Bremner, Bird and Fortune . Guardian article by Rory Brem...

Fascinating. Lots of recordings 'pre-date the BBC', so I assume this one has some broadcasting relevance. Is it Peter Eckersley's famous Station Identification for Two Emma Toc? No, it's a recording of Florence Nightingale from 1890. It was chosen because it was her 200th anniversary this week.

Don't think I've mentioned Rewinder here before. It's a series that comes round from time to time on Radio 4 on Saturday mornings, delving into the BBC Sound Archives and coming up with some surprising discoveries. Some of you may remember a similar Monday-morning series many years ago, presented by...

Here's a rarity - a brand new series for Radio 4 Extra, and one that may be of particular interest to this forum. It's about the making of Britain's biggest TV comedy hits, starting with The Vicar of Dibley this Wednesday at 10.30pm:

https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m000j35w

Oh I see - were there two separate bomb scares then, one on 23rd Dec and one on 6th Jan?

I remember that incident - I thought transmission was stopped in the middle of the programme Indeed it was. Thanks for that. It seems unlikely that they would have continued recording the programme in the middle of a bomb scare but not transmitted it! I was not quite eight at the time but it was on...

Tonight's "Sunday Night At The London Palladium" (Sunday 3rd May 2020) on TPtv gets its first showing. It was due to go out on 6th January 1974 but was never broadcast due to a bomb scare. I remember that incident - I thought transmission was stopped in the middle of the programme, but maybe my mem...

I follow a travelog on You Tube called Itchyboots, this woman travels all around the world on a motorbike Not any more! "I decided that I had to grab the opportunity to fly back to the Netherlands on one of the last repatriate flights from Peru." https://www.itchyboots.com/motorcycle-stories-blog/m...

Fair enough then! One of the more confusing examples comes from Radio 4. In 1988 Stephen Fry starred in a brilliantly funny sketch show called Saturday Night Fry , which sadly only ran for one series. Ten years later he popped up again hosting a chat show called Saturday Night Fry , which also only ...

It seems not - an archive episode from 2005 is scheduled for 4th May: https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m000hvbk Another schedule change - the above episode will be broadcast on 11th May. On 4th May, next Monday, there will be a special tribute programme presented by Graeme Garden: https://www.bbc.c...

Not quite the same, but there was an episode of Citizen Smith entitled Only Fools and Horses. They were both written by John Sullivan, though - you can hardly blame him for re-using his own title! If we're going down that road, every single episode of Birds of a Feather series 7 was named after a s...

Usually there's substantial gap when a title is re-used, but The New Statesman , a 1985 BBC2 sitcom starring Windsor Davies as a man who unexpectedly inherits an aristocratic title, was followed only a couple of years later by the much better-known YTV sitcom starring Rik Mayall as a ruthless Tory M...

particularly when you cross genres (e.g. a documentary strand and a drama) That reminds me of when I first joined this forum and wondered why so many people were talking about Public Eye , the BBC2 investigative series from the 90s. At the time I had no idea of the earlier ITV drama of the same name.

I saw a reference to In For a Penny today and thought they were talking about the 1972 Bob Todd sitcom set in a public convenience. It's actually a current show where Stephen Mulhern invites members of the public to take part in silly games.

Any similar examples?

When you think about it, what a concept! "let's broadcast from a boat outside territorial waters" It ought to be said that O'Rahilly didn't come up with the idea himself. The Dutch station Radio Veronica had been broadcasting since 1960. (Wikipedia says that the first stations in the North Sea appe...

I missed this when it was first broadcast in 2018 - a dramatization of the story of Ray Galton and Alan Simpson's comedy writing partnership, on Radio 4 at 11.30am today. Looks as though it could be good.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m0001mv2

You mean they weren't really speaking French in 'Allo 'Allo?

"Ronan O'Rahilly comes 2nd after only Reith in UK Radio History" according to one poster on a forum I'm involved in. I wouldn't go quite that far, but he was certainly very influential over the development of radio broadcasting in the UK. Radio Caroline was the first of the pirate radio stations and...

It seems not - an archive episode from 2005 is scheduled for 4th May:

https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m000hvbk

Could be a bit of a tear-jerker with Humph, TBT and Jeremy Hardy all involved.

Covid-19 has intervened in this series in quite a dramatic way. The presenter of the series, Kevin Fong, is also a consultant anaesthetist in the NHS, and anaesthetic lead for Major Incident Planning. Consequently the final episode has had to be postponed to later in the year - with the crew about t...

We may not quite have heard the last of TBT. The recording of Clue in Huddersfield on 15th March went ahead and it appears that he was on the panel (though the other two recordings were cancelled). The two programmes are scheduled for 4th and 11th May, so I'm hoping that they can go ahead as planned.

A few credits apart from the obvious ones: for seven series he chaired a Radio 4 panel game called Hoax! , a sort of forerunner to Would I Lie to You? . Three celebrity guests told anecdotes, one of which was a lie, but the catch was that the panellists had to question each other about whose story w...

Another Covid-19 victim, sadly: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-52262490 Best known of course for The Goodies and as one of the regular panellists on I'm Sorry I Haven't a Clue , which he appeared in from 1972 right up to the end of last year (missing only one series). He never stopped making me laugh.

Coming back to this, does anyone remember the Ronnie Barker monologue where he posed as a spokesman for an independent Ruislip?

Surprised by the lack of comments on this one. I didn't comment originally because I'm a little too young to remember her in The Avengers - in fact I remember first seeing her in an edition of Call My Bluff in 1971 and wondering who she was. But there's no doubt about her huge influence on British f...

Jules63 wrote: ↑

Sun Apr 05, 2020 8:30 am

There was no "crown" coin by 1972, only half-crown anyway

There was no half-crown either, because Britain adopted decimal currency in 1971! (The half-crown was actually withdrawn at the start of 1970.)

Brock wrote: ↑

Mon May 20, 2019 6:25 am

There's a particularly good one called "Horne of Plenty", on Beyond Our Ken and Round the Horne, which comes round from time to time (it was last broadcast in December 2017).

It came round again today:

https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/b007k2b6