Obscure forgotten moments from telly history that maybe only you remember

Every so often over the years my parents kept mentioning this puppet  thing with great clacking wooden jaws that I was supposedly terrified of as a child. I had no memory of this. They said he was called Duncan the Dragon and was on kids tv. When he appeared I’d run for cover. I must have been very young. 

Anyway, every few years I’d go looking to see if this terrifying thing actually existed but no trace on YouTube or online generally existed. But then, not too long ago, I had another look on a rainy day and what do you know? There he was: and something of a repressed memory did indeed resurface. Oddly it was from a show called You and Me, which I hadn’t forgotten. But I’d erased Duncan from my memory of it! Must have been the trauma. Here he is, the swine…https://youtu.be/wkEj5RWUTkc

Awesome, and subversive as always:

m.youtube.com/watch

There was this too: what memories, what a theme tune https://youtu.be/2AJm5bozpgA

‘Don’t go into the cellar!’ Rentaghost’s heyday  was so early in my childhood that it was part funny and part nightmarish too me. Dobbin creeped me out a little and the cellar business was rather scary even though played for laughs. The robot thing was unsettling too. 

One cool thing about Why Don’t You? - in its final season, it was the Cardiff Gang. A very young Russell T Davies was basically given his first writing gig on that last year, and since nobody was keeping an eye on it while they wound it up, he just decided to steadily transform it from a ‘make and do’ show into something with a high stakes sci fi plot, a mad inventor, and an end of the world finale. Clearly trying to sneak a bit methodone into a world that had had Doctor Who ripped from it not long before and where scifi had become a dirty word in the telly landscape. Thankfully those days are gone. But RTD kept the flag flying as best he could, by stealth. Dark Season was another good effort to do something Who-like too. It’s back this year by the way, on audio. New stories with the grown up characters. Kate Winslet has returned to it and everything! 

Aye he did come over that way a bit. A cousin of mine used to do an impersonation of him that seemed to mainly consist of pretending to hold a question card in an odd undulating way and swallowing hard mid sentence. 

One nice thing about Bob was that after he died his home was found to be a treasure trove of carefully curated film cans and programme recordings going back decades, all meticulously archived and catalogued. His ‘special interest’ as it were. i think some gaps were filled for things thought lost. 

The best History Today sketches were like that too. The ones where some degree of actual scholarly conduct was sustained for a good while before the first ‘oh dear’ 

My favourite one of those was the Chess episode. I liked that attempt at a sophisticated cultural evening being almost successfully sustained for about ten minutes before the steady slide towards utter carnage. 

He was a smarmy one, Monkhouse, my mother loathed him. 

A childhood time I did love was a Saturday morning, Tiswas, it was just bonkers. Late on a Saturday night I would stay up late, my father would be at work and my mother was normally under the influence of mogadon. It was just me and a colour tv, 10.30pm was O.T.T,   ("Over the Top") The phantom flan flinger and the balloon dancers. 
The BBC on a Saturday morning had the Multi-Coloured Swap Shop, a forerunner to eBay, hosted by Noel Edmunds. A young girl one morning was from a program called, ‘ Why don’t you?’ ( I still can still sing the theme tune)  She read a news story about that days Grand Prix, she didn’t read the word prix out in the  French way! Obviously red faces at the Beeb. Another great program was, ‘The Double Deckers’ followed by The Monkees tv show. Just remembered, Rentaghost, I can give trivia on this!  Sorry tv in the 70’s and 80’s was a lovely special interest and still is.

Good old Crackerjack. I’m old enough to have caught it’s last couple of seasons of the OG run. Stew ‘I could crush a grape’ Francis is the main guy who sticks in the memory from that.

He did this sketch one time where it was his morning routine. I think he woke up I. Bed already in a tracksuit because he was going to work out. Said workout was press-ups. The twist was that these press ups were just him still sat in bed, then pushing his left hand up and down on the bedside cabinet. I legit thought this was comedy genius. I was young to be fair. 

interesting you mentioning the magician. One lost tv moment that still gets quoted occasionally in our family is a Bob Monkhouse off the cuff remark. It was during a thing called ‘opportunity knocks’ around 1987 and he was reminding everyone of the acts and getting a reaction on the clapometer. Anyway, after one of these scores he goes ‘Very good… for a magician’ He’d let slip his opinion that magicians  were the dregs of the entertainment world - even below people impersonating Michael Crawford in a beret or whatever. 

I once remember a magic show in which a man crawled I to a box and then disappeared. I wanted to k ow who the man was, and whether he was still.around, but my parents misunderstood me, and thought I was talking about the magician, who by the way was Rolf Harris, and I did get to see more of the so-called magic man, never the one whom the magic man made disappear though. 

Could be a lot of TV memories may be tarnished now, here and there. 

Similarly I remember not quite understanding why the Tardis was bigger on the inside than the outside. My mother used to get excited when Dr Who came on, saying 'Daleks!' and me not knowing what a dalek was - well, I found out.

There is history too - Dad showing us the funeral of Winston Churchill, and why he had been so very important. On the other hand, my parents didn't want us (the kids) to watch local news once, as a Dr King had been invited to come and talk to our school, and it had been televised, they thought that might be upsetting for us. Martin Luther King did look a little like our visitor, and he did attend the uni of the the city we lived in at the time. The headmistress certainly seemed to hold this Dr King in high esteem, anyway.

Later there were the moon landings and that iconic music. 

Crackerjack featured Lesley Crowther and Peter Glaze dancing to 'even the bad times are good' in what looked like black rubber diapers - well, well!  It always sounded like 'bed times' not 'bad times', anyway. 

I remember in one of the very early challenge anneka  shows she wore a spandex / Lycra jump suit thing that was skin tight. And they basically had a section where they said this suit has literally bonded to her skin with sweat and she couldn’t get her out of it. So they asked someone to cut her out of it. Initially at the arms to help her cool but one presumes eventually off screen all of it. We never saw that jump suit again.

I love the Young Ones. I was only five when it first aired but might have watched the second series live. The one I always remember is where Neil is sneezing and put in a bag to be contained and cured with acupuncture to the head. I don’t like talking about bodily functions etc generally but have a strange attraction to this humour and enjoyed ‘Bottom’ too. That sounds wrong but it’s a TV programme if anyone didn’t know!

Shardovan said:

‘that’s not a live picture, it’s in the machine’

At the risk of reliving my own trauma, I might need to look this up as I can’t remember that bit. 

I like the Camberwick Green segment from Life on Mars. XD
(I'm not old enough to remember the original but the plasticine pre-cgi animation ran all the way through my childhood years too so it's a fantastic skit on those sorts of kids shows.)

Oh another one (that may not be obscure now, but will be more so as time goes on) is when Vivian sticks his head out of the window on the train ( I saw that as a re-run though, I was too young to have seen The Young Ones when it first aired, I remember being uncomfortably equal parts disgusted and enamoured with Adrian Edmondson's character following that. XD

Bbc1, late 80s. One of those live awards shows like the Smash Hits Poll Winners Party. Sydney Youngblood is going to ‘sing’ his big hit ‘if only I could’ but mistimes his run to the microphone and is still several steps away when his voice comes in. He has to just start miming as soon as he can make it seem realistic but the damage is done. Suspension of disbelief has gone out the window. Life will never be the same again. Ok I went too far with that last sentence 

https://youtu.be/RefR4LCRZzQ

Found an ep of it. Just utter thrown together madness. A time capsule of 1993 in the form of a randomly targeted chip shop queue. Why not I suppose! 

Oh no it's fine, you just reminded me that's all.

Oh for sure, I was just quoting in recognition not condemnation