TV Cream

It's the last part of our festive trilogy of podcasts. Today, Graham dials up Chris and Ian, as they watch one final selection from a Christmas TV past.

Today’s instalment includes: Wogan.

Day two sees Ian, Chris and Graham sit at the end of their various fat pipes to discuss another Christmas TV show of yore. 

Today’s instalment includes: A squashed pudding, VT vs film, Audrey's randy friends and the difference between pronouns and proverbs.

Today’s instalment includes: Cutting oneself a sandwich, chevron chat, concerns about spending an evening at Ronnie Scott's and - yes! - a stay under an assumed name at a posh hotel.

In the spring of 2016, TV Cream sat down with Johnny Ball to talk about his 50-year career in show business. We're making the podcast available again today in the hope it might provide some cheer.

In this one-off, Johnny Ball really does reveal all. Such as...

How Bob Monkhouse took umbrage when he thought Johnny was stealing his gags; how Johnny's big break on The Val Doonican Show went spectacularly wrong; why he originally balked at the idea of presenting Play School; how a dreadful experience on Yorkshire TV spawned the creation of Think of a Number; the reason why the scene dock doors in BBC Bristol have a chunk cut out of them; why Play Away became a more lucrative writing gig than anything the LE department had to offer; Johnny's ill-fated sojourn to Central Television; and - and! - what went wrong on The Terry & Gaby show!

In the final episode of this run - we'll be back for Lockdown II - Steven Moffat stays in his study and watches the penultimate episode of Patrick McGoohan's The Prisoner (titled 'Once Upon a Time', which you can see here) and then tells TV Cream all about it...

...and in this bumper-length goodbye edition, he also tells us about the advice he wishes he'd followed in writing for Doctor Who, how one goes about scripting a scene in which your hero averts a war by making an angry speech, and alights upon the handful of good things that have come out of these last, strange few months.

Be seeing you!

BONUS EPISODE (which won't appear on the TV Cream site)! This is the 'pilot' edition, recorded at the start of lockdown. And, in it, Jack Kibble-White stays indoors in Glasgow, watches the first episode of Phil Cool's 1985 debut comedy series, Cool It (https://bit.ly/TVCIndoors19a), and then tells TV Cream all about it.

This week, in our penultimate episode - two guests! Chris Hughes and Ian Jones - who you may have heard on TV Cream's What We Just Watched podcast - stay indoors in (respectively) Hampton Hill in TW12 and Harrow, north London, to revisit Trouble at the Top: Bucks Fizz: Making Your Mind Up. Then they tell us all about it. 

And, as an extra bit of business, there's a post now on TV Cream written by Chris, Ian and Graham detailing their favourite 15 Fizz tracks!

Puzzle author, games consultant and format developer David Bodycombe stays indoors in south west London and watches a playlist which gathers together instances where quiz shows are put under stress (you can see it here: https://bit.ly/2TVCIndoors18)... and then he talks to TV Cream about it.

Jill Phythian (this is she: @redfacts) stays indoors in Walthamstow, north London, to watch the feature-length pilot episode of Manimal (which you can view over two instalments here https://bit.ly/TVCIndoors17a and https://bit.ly/TVCIndoors17b) – and then tells TV Cream about it.

Nick Abadzis - writer and illustrator of the fantastic Laika, among other things - stays indoors in New Jersey, across the Hudson River from Manhattan - to watch a 1989 episode of the Channel 4 arts series Signals, entitled The Day Comics Grew Up (which you can view at https://bit.ly/TVCIndoors16) – and then tells TV Cream about it. This episode was recorded in May 2020.

You can find out more about Nick's work at his website.