Friday, December 05, 2008

Day 5, and we whisk you back to 1977 for a recording of It's Patently Obvious, a panel game best described as a cross between Going for a Song and Animal, Vegetable, Mineral. In it, experts like Professor Eric Laithwaite and laymen like William Woollard competed to identify weird and wonderful objects that had, at some stage in history, been patented by their inventors. All of this was achieved under the avuncular bespectacled eyes of Ian Macnaught-Davis, paying the rent in the days before he invented computers. In the late 1980s, with daytime schedulers requiring the odd diversion to stop Anne Diamond and Nick Owen (to say nothing of Ross King) dying from overwork, BBC1 dug out and repeated all of the surviving editions of IPO. Cheeseford believes that it's time for another run, if only to get Lorne Spicer off the bloody screen for a bit.

3 comments:

Phil Norman said...

I doubt MacNaughty would have spent the takings on rent. He'd have pissed it away on climbing ropes and train fares to take Joe Brown up the Old Man of Hoy. A shockingly irresponsible man. The things he did to Chris Serle's sweater.

Brian Rowland said...

Ah, It's Patently Obvious. I can tell you the exact months of those (1976) repeats in the late 80s - May and June 1989, when I would be nervously eating late breakfast while watching it, and readying myself for afternoon A-level papers at sixth form college. An option far preferable to Lucky Ladders over on ITV.

Am I right in saying Colin Godman produced it?

Louis Barfe said...

Yes, Colin Godman produced it, although I have a dim recollection that John 'father of Simon' King was involved too. When I saw some of the repeats on tape a few years back, I was able to carbon-date them to the same period by the presence of trailers for a BBC1 documentary about Paul McCartney's first world tour since the demise of Wings.