Tuesday, April 22, 2008


You can't keep a good title down, as I discovered when I chanced upon a March 1982 edition of the Radio Times (East region, 6-12 March 1982, to be precise - printed on that rarse clart that RT devotees of a certain age will remember only too well) during a recent stocktake at Schloss Cheeseford. Just over 26 years ago, BBC2 viewers were watching something called The Apprentice.

However, in place of ritual humiliation by misanthropes with a line in lo-fi hi-fi, those pre-Falklands War viewers were treated to a gentle explanation of what it meant to be a 16 year-old trainee undertaker. The trouble with leafing through old TV listings is that I now want, rather desperately, to see the programme. Of course, there's an outside chance it's in the clump of Betamax tapes I bought off eBay ages ago. I've already found an obscure and rather lovely Peter Greenaway documentary about lightning strike survivors, made for Thames in 1980. If nothing else, it illustrated how the broadcasting landscape has changed. Complete with Michael Nyman score and clever, clever captions and editing, it screams early Channel 4 or current BBC4, but it went out on ITV.
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6 comments:

  1. Robin Carmody22 April 2008 at 23:02

    I want a copy of this :).

    (you make a valuable point: the Falklands changed *everything*, and without them we may not have quite what we have now. I recall someone saying that Haircut 100's debut album, released around this point, seemed sadly outdated "within weeks". Even though I was a toddler at the time, I know he's right.)

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  2. Tim Worthington23 April 2008 at 09:28

    I'd rather see that edition of Pro-Celebrity Golf, to be honest!

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  3. Sylva23 April 2008 at 11:47

    Oh, I wish I could see that Peter Greenaway offering (hint).

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  4. Louis Barfe23 April 2008 at 13:34

    If you're a member of certain BitTorrent sites, it's out there already. I don't hang about.

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  5. Robin Carmody23 April 2008 at 17:52

    Perhaps that Pro-Celebrity Golf prog might turn up on ESPN Classic - quite a lot of that series has (I know this will be meaningless if feedbackreport isn't a Sky subscriber).

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  6. Matthew Rudd24 April 2008 at 03:23

    I caught some of that the other day - Bing Crosby asking Burt Lancaster about his swing etc. Golf is hard enough to watch as it is without having to watch people who aren't as good at it as deserves television coverage.

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