They haven't aged well (picture from Pinterest)

Friends was seen at the time as a genuinely funny sitcom that for my generation became must see viewing on a Friday night before going out. During the original run I did for a time actually watch it with a group of friends (with a small f) which I think is how it should have been watched. How many people remember doing the clap-clap-clap-clap during the opening credits? What ruined the show for me was overkill, one week after Channel 4 showed the final episode for the first time, they broadcast the very first episode and started the loop again. When Channel 4 had grown tired of it they showed it on E4 every day of the week, several times a day so that eventually the ten year lifespan seemed to come around so much quicker and we saw the six characters walk off into the sunset and by the time we had partaken of the ad-break making of a cup of tea we were back at the beginning with different hair. Despite the endless repeats on television we bought the full DVD box set a few years ago and demolished that at a rate of three or four episodes a day. Now I wouldn't care if I never saw an episode of Friends again.

Looking at the series in retrospect and checking out a myriad of fan theory articles, you realise what an unpleasant bunch of people they were. Selfish, egomaniac, faux-neurotic arseholes who you wouldn't want to spend a second of your time with. Perhaps the person who dreamed up the plot finale in which the whole thing was Phoebe's crystal meth induced imagination had the best idea but of course fan theories are easy to find which attempt to explain away the behavioural traits of the cast. 

A new generation of viewers are discovering Friends for the first time thanks to the entire series being made available on Netflix. I wasn't expecting to read about this, but it appears that the 'millennial' generation (which I assume is everybody born after January 1st 2000) are finding Friends offensive. On the whole it shouldn't surprise me because these days people seem to enjoy finding things to get offended by, but how offensive was Friends? Accusations of homophobia, transphobia (which I wasn't even aware of at the time), fat-shaming (it wasn't an expression back then) and racism have been thrown at what at the time seemed fairly harmless. It is worth noting that the first episode aired in the UK in 1995, 23 years ago, and two decades is a long time in terms of what was once acceptable in entertainment and what isn't anymore. I suppose the surprise to me is that something has changed in relation to standards within my lifetime. Obviously there are a lot of sitcoms from the 1970s that won't get shown now, and I don't just mean the racist offenders such as Love Thy Neighbour, Curry and Chips or It Ain't Half Hot Mum. Fawlty Towers would have parts of it cut out now, in the episode The Germans everyone remembers the Hitler-walk performed by John Cleese but within that episode Basil Fawlty recoils in shock when he is greeted by a black doctor. Open All Hours once included a joke about a black man 'looking pale' and the veritable national treasure that is Only Fools and Horses had content that now get edited out of repeat showings. 

Randomly watching a handful of scenes and episodes on YouTube to see what the fuss was about, I couldn't find anything terrible yet I can see how today's sensitive generation would take umbrage. Okay so it wasn't ethnically diverse but no sitcom is really, the homophobic accusation comes from Chandler's dad being a drag artist in a Las Vegas revue, which is where the transphobia came from too. However the humour was a defence because Chandler had hang ups about relationships stemmed from his parents splitting up when he was a young child. The story line involving Ross and Rachel hiring a male nanny would have to be handled slightly differently now but shouldn't they claw back some points for having a same-sex marriage in the first series?

The solution is pretty obvious, don't watch it if you find it offensive. Is that too easy? Perhaps that was the Millennium Bug that everybody was worried about. It wasn't ever going to mess with our computers, it was a curse that meant that newborn babies would grow up being offended by everything.

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Picture from BBC

Obviously today felt like a Monday didn't it? Hello? Is this thing on?

I'll be glad when this week is over so the confusion can cease. I know there's no real confusion, in fact I quite like the fact that there are two four day working weeks lined up together. If I wasn't also a self-employed writer and Jack-of-all-media then I would have probably enjoyed it more because I wouldn't have anything to do apart from eat chocolate and watch James Bond. On the other hand, if I wasn't a writer/broadcaster/journalist/everything else then I wouldn't be inclined to write a daily blog so we'd all be better off. One thing I have noticed is that now I don't see so much of my daughter Emily I get to appreciate Bank Holidays such as Easter; parents miss out on Bank Holidays because they generally happen during school holidays when they are already off school with their children.

Talking of work, the interview I did with Georgie Rose is now on the Nottingham Post website, a shorter version will appear in Friday's newspaper for those who live in Nottingham and surrounding areas. If anyone is able to get to Bodega on Friday 17th then I highly recommend you attend.

I feel as if I am back in the swing of things work wise, at the moment I am putting the finishing touches to Saturday Breakfast and preparing for a meeting on Friday regarding the making of a fully blown grown up documentary film. To be perfectly honest I don't have a great deal to write about in this blog but that isn't going to stop me, it never has before. After the anarchy and violence of Bottom we have moved on to another sitcom boxset with a slightly slower pace. My Easter present to Mandi was the complete Keeping Up Appearances, a show that I didn't watch properly when it was first broadcast. I don't personally understand why she is such a big fan of this programme; together we have watched Spaced, The Mighty Boosh, and Big Train alongside the American sitcoms Friends and Frasier so for Mandi to be so keen on such a traditional show is bizarre. What makes it stranger is that Keeping Up Appearances is such a traditional 'darling I'm home' sitcom (the British equivalent of the American 'Hi honey I'm home') and yet she does not share, in fact she cannot stand, my enjoyment of On The Buses, Bless This House, Terry and June and the like. 

Keeping Up Appearances is cut from the same cloth as the domestic sitcoms of the 1970s and 1980s. It astounds me that such a programme was commissioned in the first place given that it ran between 1990 and 1995, it's as if The Young Ones made no difference. Hyacinth Bucket (sorry Bouquet) is a character out of the sitcom wife template that began with Lucille Ball and carried on through the Whitehall farce style of sitcom in which the husband goes to work in an office and leaves his wife at home to cause the sort of chaos that results in a lot of running in and out of doors and hiding in wardrobes. I've watched a couple of episodes so far and am waiting for the one where the boss comes round for dinner.

This week's edition of The Sunday Alternative can be heard here.

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April housekeeping

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Photo from Celebrity Watchdog

I had a meeting this evening with a friend who runs a production company with regards to some of the filming projects I have in the pipeline and it all went swimmingly. Dates have been sorted and it looks (fingers crossed) as if at least a couple of ideas will come to fruition at long last. We had a moan about the Nottingham music scene and the idiots who seem to be held in high regard for their armchair commentary and absence at gigs unless it's a big one with media coverage, and then I went home. My task now is to knock the final draft of a script into shape and very quickly scout for a handful of locations. The whole thing can be filmed in one day, stretching to a weekend if necessary, so time is very much of the essence.

After what seems like years, we watched the last ever episode of Frasier tonight. I am glad this is out of the way now so I am free to crack on with the Bottom box set (crack, Bottom - that wasn't even intentional, sometimes the puns write themselves) when I get the chance to watch it.

It would seem that American sitcoms have a better thought out game plan than British ones when it comes to delivering a finale. Only Ricky Gervais seems able to write a series with a beginning, middle, and end as seen in the Christmas specials of his sitcoms. Everything just seems to stop or get axed without a goodbye, only The Young Ones managed to finish in style by killing the main characters. Even the beloved Only Fools and Horses fucked it up by wrapping up with Del and Rodney becoming millionaires at last and walking off into the sunset only to go and make three more extended episodes with the 'sit' being the loss of their fortune resulting in a return to the flat they conveniently didn't get rid of, sadly there was very little in the way of 'com'.

The final episode of Frasier was the best sitcom finale since Friends came to an end. A clever touch was that the whole thing was staged as a flashback told by Frasier Crane to a fellow passenger on an aeroplane bound for a new life with all the loose ends being tied up; Martin got married, Niles and Daphne had their baby, Roz was promoted to boss of the radio station, and Frasier realised that the peace and quiet he had spent eleven years comically yearning for was in fact too lonely, and decided to relocate once again to San Francisco to work for another radio station. I personally would have liked to have known what happened to Daphne's mother (played brilliantly by British comedy veteran Millicent Martin), even if to explain exactly what part of Manchester her family hailed from considering her three sons were cockney (Australian actor Anthony LaPaglia), Scottish (Robbie Coltrane) and posh (Richard E Grant). 

Listen to this week's edition of The Sunday Alternative here.

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March housekeeping 

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Today was never going to be the day of action that so many people claim the first day of the year to be. We didn’t wake up until around noon, although I could have quite happily stayed in bed all day. Last night was a family New Year’s Eve party at my cousin Pat’s house, where I finally lost my Jagerbomb virginity and found that it actually tastes like cough medicine that you’d give a child (although best not to get the two confused, they are probably equally as effective for a child’s cough). I was drinking John Smith’s too, and despite the mixtures I didn’t feel especially drunk. Obviously the Red Bull was helping to balance the alcohol intake, (a lot like an alco-pop I remember from the early 2000s called Red Square, basically a bottle of vodka and Red Bull that due to the combination of its sweetness and ease of drinking, and the fact that most places sold it for a pound, you didn’t get falling down drunk but did spend a lot of time once you’d got home wondering what the hell was happening to your body when half of it was pissed and the other half wanted to stay awake), so it wasn’t until we were walking home that I realised that I couldn’t walk in a straight line. According to Mandi I was slurring my words, but I do that after a wine gum to be honest so that isn’t a reliable indicator of my sobriety or lack of.

So that we didn’t spend the whole day eating the Christmas party food, Mandi cooked a shepherd’s pie while I took Jack for his belated morning walk. We ate watching Friends for the millionth time. This is a programme that we have the DVD box set of, so there is no excuse for getting so engrossed in it, but for some reason we do. I don’t know if the show has this hold over everybody, but we can’t leave it alone. It can’t possibly still have the viewing figures that it once enjoyed, but Comedy Central (and E4 before it in this country) surely wouldn’t persist with it if it wasn’t popular. Even now, I still do the handclap during the opening theme tune as we all did in the old days.

Friends finished at the right time, sometimes there will be an episode shown from about halfway through its life when the show took a real nosedive in terms of quality and relied on big name guest stars to prop it up. The best example of them getting it so horribly wrong was the pointless pre-title sequence with Robin Williams and Billy Crystal. Towards the end of the ten years they had pulled their socks up and thankfully ended the show with a respectable legacy. It’s weird now when you watch it because you just know that it is frozen in time, and as soon as they all leave the apartment for the final time to go their separate ways you just know that the next day they are all going to be ten years younger again and Rachael will be entering Central Perk in her rain soaked wedding dress. There was talk of a reunion episode/film, but the cast rather sensibly refuted this story. Everyone who watched the show can now have their own idea and opinion of what became of the six of them, (seven if you include Phoebe’s husband Mike), that doesn’t involve appearing in shit romantic comedy films.

The time freeze becomes even weirder when you consider the ages everyone would be now, with Ross and Phoebe being the oldest at roughly (depending on a rather shaky continuity) 47 years old. Monica and Chandler’s twins would be 10 this year, Emma 12, and Ben 19.

I remember learning from an interview with a cast member that even nowadays, the six principal actors receive ten thousand pounds every time an episode is repeated. From the UK alone that’s got to be around fifty grand a day, (assuming that +1 channels don’t count). They can certainly afford to be choosy, which doesn’t explain Jennifer Aniston’s film roles.

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Monday 9th December

It has been a while since we had the luxury of multi-channel television due to Virgin Media being a huge pile of shit with no regard for customers and a startling inability to understand specific instructions. I refused to set up a direct debit to pay the bill, as I don’t trust the direct debit system and I don’t trust Virgin Media to not fuck things up. When I left my wife I briefly (not briefly enough) worked in a call centre for BT and found out about how the customer is royally conned by the direct debit billing system. They say that you are rewarded with a discount if you pay in this way, but the reality is that you are in fact being punished if you don’t. There was a court case in Nottingham a few years ago involving an old man who paid his bill by post but deducted the fine for not paying by direct debit, and BT (who are the most unfeeling, don’t-give-a-shit-about-the-customers-or-staff, corrupt bunch of shit eating fucking cunts imaginable) sued him for those payments stating that he wasn’t paying the full bill. He was paying exactly the right bill, but for some reason he lost the court case and had to pay up. I suspect that the judge left the courtroom with a brown envelope in his jacket pocket thanks to BT, and that is only my opinion so I am not committing libel. For the record, the unfeeling shit eating fucking cunts bit isn’t libellous either because it is true.

Virgin Media used to send us the bill in the middle of the month and then cut off our service almost immediately. Every single time we told them that we would pay them at the end of the month, which we did and then had to wait up to twenty four hours to be reconnected. If it wasn’t for the WiFi in the student accommodation a few doors down, then I would have been stuck for a way to send the American show over. Eventually we both decided that we had had enough of this slapdash service and I phoned them (once we were reconnected) and asked the operative to put a note in the system saying that we regularly pay at the end of the month and that there is no need to cut us off mid-month. I also said that if it happened one more time then our contract would be void and that we would owe nothing. They ignored it obviously.

They provided us (occasionally) with television, Internet, and telephone for a monthly fee, but we were actually only paying for half a month. I am waiting for the first reminder to come in so that I can do a full breakdown of the times they cut us off and see how much we really owe them. Technically speaking, they owe us for the last two weeks of every month which means that if we don’t pay our last bill then we are actually massively in credit. We only didn’t pay our last bill but they owe us twenty five pound a month for the best part of the last year. Every letter I receive from them will be politely replied to with these facts stated, as they have fucked with the wrong person this time as I cannot abide bad service and make it my business to complain every time until something is done.

Now we have Sky and we are back to watching back-to-back episodes of Friends despite having the complete box set in our house, just like everyone else.

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Weird fact: The cast of Happy Days would technically now be too young to do a reunion episode set in the present day. Think about it.
— Steve Oliver(@SteveOliver76) May 8, 2013

Nobody got it. I thought at least one person would have worked this out, it's not a puzzle but just a statement of fact. It was partly inspired by several people informing their followers that Will Smith* is now the same age that Uncle Phil was in the first series of The Fresh Prince Of Bel Air.

*Not the English comedian who acts in The Thick Of It, the less famous Will Smith is an American rapper/actor/comedian, most famous for being one half of DJ Jazzy Jeff and The Fresh Prince**.

**Haha, see what I did there? Nobody needed an explanation of Will Smith, and now I've just confused everyone into trying to picture the other Will Smith.

Anyway, it was recently the time of year when the rumours (bullshit) of a Friends reunion episode once again does the rounds. This coincided with a picture circulating on Facebook (how very retro, although it seems to be making a comeback) detailing what the ages of the children in Friends would be now. I suggested to someone that there should be a spin-off called Ben, starring both Cole and Dylan Sprouse, (the child actors who together played the kid in Big Daddy, Ben in Friends, and had their own Disney Channel series The Suite Life Of Zac And Cody), who must need the work. A reunion episode or film wouldn't work as the characters are (to us the viewer) locked in time, nobody would believe a group of forty somethings living in that close a proximity. It got me thinking about other sitcoms that could pull of a feasible reunion episode, and I couldn't think of a single one that would be a good idea. The Young Ones perhaps? Vyvian was training to be a doctor after all, would he have qualified? Will Neil still be a hippy or would he have a high-powered job in the world of finance? Would Rik still be calling himself a poet? What about Mike?

Would Tom and Barbara Good still be living the self-sufficient life, or would she have finally left him for being, deep down, a total cock? Would Bob Ferris and Terry Collier, now roughly in their seventies, still be knocking about together? What would Stan Butler make of today's bus drivers? I'm sure as a skiver he would approve of NCT (Nottingham bus company) and their method to speed up the working day by driving around aimlessly with SORRY NOT IN SERVICE written where the destination should be. Eric and Hattie would be in their eighties now, so would they still be living together? Constable 'Corky' Turnbull would be retired now, and maybe he would have moved in as their lodger.

Over the bank holiday, the TV channel GOLD showed some episodes of Only Fools And Horses, (for a change). They have an annoying habit of showing them in random order, so that in one episode they live in the 1980s, single and with their Grandad, and the next episode sees Del's son Damien as a toddler. No sense of order. The episode in which they finally became millionaires should really have been the very last time we saw the Trotter family, as they walked into the sunset. Sadly a few years later, along came three very weak episodes. The three comeback episodes weren't as bad as we remember them, but they should never have been made. To get the dynamic back, they had to have lost all their money and move back into the famous flat that they conveniently hadn't sold. Although their were some good moments, (the graveside scene with Rodney and his new baby daughter brought tears), the whole enterprise came across as laboured and phoned in. If it taught us anything at all, it was to leave situation comedy alone.

To get back to the Happy Days tweet, a reunion episode wouldn't be possible as the cast are too young. The reason, if anyone was struggling to make sense of it, is age. The series was set in the 1950s, but of course it was filmed in the 1970s. That twenty years has to come from somewhere, so they are technically twenty years too young to play the same characters in 2013, as they all look twenty nine years older than they did when the series ended in 1984. To make it realistic, (not that Happy Days bothered too much with realism towards the end, almost showing the same lack of respect for period authenticity that the British soap Heartbeat showed, in that the series ran for fifteen years and always remained 'the 60s'), the actors would have to have aged roughly forty nine years, so even though Ron Howard and Henry Winkler look considerably older than how we remember Ritchie Cunningham and The Fonz, the characters would look twenty years older than that. Say for the sake of argument that the first series of Happy Days was set in 1954, it was filmed in 1974. It would be 1964 when it ended, and the ending was filmed in 1984. So the only way to make it totally realistic for a reunion episode, given that twenty nine years have passed since we last saw them, would be to set the story in 1993, twenty nine years after 1964. Otherwise, they all look too young.

Today, as you might have already gathered, wasn't totally eventful. Apart from doing a radio show. We did NottinghamLIVE as usual, and our studio session guests were The Fade. They were brilliant, we were less so.

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When the news came through that Blockbuster Video was the latest High Street casualty, I was amazed. Amazed that they were still going at all. 

The idea of video or DVD rental is a quaint concept that maybe even children my daughter's age will not get their heads around. Imagine having to go to a shop to pick up a film, watching it and then taking it back the next day, I remember it and it sounds daft when you think about it now.

There was something rather sweet about a video shop, or even the local off-licence/newsagent who had a wall of films to rent. You could have a little conversation about your choices, and they would recommend films based on what you already watched, (an idea used by Amazon now). Every now and again, they would put a collection of old posters out for you to take home and decorate your bedroom wall with, (when you were of putting posters on your bedroom wall age).

As with digital photography, I was slow to join in with the DVD changeover. The main reason (aside from the fact that DVDs used to cost several million pounds when they first landed in the shops), was because I wanted to make sure that the same thing didn't happen that happened with videotapes. Betamax was a far superior brand both in terms of picture and sound quality, but VHS won the fight. You couldn't record onto a Betamax tape, so VHS waded in with the innovative novelty of being able to go out and not miss your favourite programme. Another lesser known reason was that the porn industry decided to nail their colours to the VHS mast.

I still have a lot of my home recorded video tapes in storage, sadly we don't have a video player in the house anymore. We dug our old one out at Christmas for a few years until it packed up and now we had to replace some of our Christmas films with DVDs. Home taping used to give me a huge amount of pleasure when I was a kid, (I was easily pleased), although I don't know if I've actually got anything of interest as far as archive material is concerned. There might be some old adverts on there and there's definitely some musical stuff (bands on talk shows, that sort of thing), and comedians, (I used to tape the equivalent of Live At The Apollo, which was a rarer thing then, with the pause button on so I just had the good bits), but I hardly think the episodes of Friends and Only Fools And Horses need keeping.

When I was a postman in York, there was a video rental shop called Ace Video. At some point I remember them having a clear out sale to get rid of their video cassette collection, this was the beginning of their switch to becoming a DVD rental business. A quick Google search brought up a few listings on local information sites, but they don't seem to have a website. They were a nice couple who ran it, so I hope they are still going. Blockbuster changed to DVD and computer games fairly early on, which is probably what kept them alive on borrowed time for so long. It's a shame to see the whole concept vanish, but I personally haven't used a video shop for years. DVDs have come down in price, you can select from a film library as part of your Virgin Media package (or whatever service you use), and you can buy DVDs online of course. As for the rental market, there is LoveFilm, who post you a DVD (not the one you asked for usually), and you can send it back and get another one. I don't know if there are other companies in the LoveFilm business model, I would hope so because LoveFilm are shit. There is also Netflix, but I wouldn't recommend that because it fucks up your computer.

The video shop might just be the only business to totally vanish during my lifetime, which coincides with the VCR being the only thing invented and becoming obsolete during my short life. Maybe they are still being made somewhere to satisfy a niche market. After all, they only stopped making typewriters last year, and the last Sony Walkman limped off the production line two years ago. I still occasionally buy videotapes from charity shops, which gave me the inspiration for Charity Shop Film Guide, but the good pickings are few and far between. Especially as you can buy most films on DVD for less than a fiver, in fact a few charity shops have stopped accepting videotapes as donations. The last time I bought videotapes was as part of a 'five for a pound' deal, no individual price, you had to buy five. The vinyl record has managed to fight back, but sadly I don't think the humble VHS will be as lucky.

Once we get a DVD box set in the house, we tend to get into the habit of watching several episodes a night. As soon as one episode ends, we want to watch 'just one more' and before we know it we have watched the entire thing. The complete Friends set took some doing, but we made swift work of The Mighty Boosh and the first five series of CSI:NY. Before Christmas we started watching Big Train, but that fell by the wayside because of the Christmas films, and we haven't got back to it yet because I bought Mandi The Royle Family. Three series, Christmas specials, and a documentary. I can't remember when we started watching these, but we are almost finished. Our pile of unwatched DVDs is getting a bit silly to be honest, so we really need a couple of free days to get watching.

I had forgotten, (save for a couple of episodes glimpsed on GOLD from time to time), what a brilliantly made programme The Royle Family was. The single camera, no audience or canned laughter, and uncomfortable situations; many people credit Ricky Gervais for creating this style with The Office, but this came years before it. Caroline Aherne and Craig Cash have written the perfect look at life in a northern family where money is tight. As writers, they could quite easily in another time have written the very early Coronation Street, (when it was a down to earth kitchen sink drama rather than the camp remake of Last Of The Summer Wine that it has become), or a gritty film in the canon of Saturday Night And Sunday Morning, or Taste Of Honey with Alan Bennet as an adviser. Not since the Hancock's Half Hour episode Sunday Afternoon At Home has boredom and nothingness been depicted so well.

Strange as it may seem, the easiest comparison can be made with The Simpsons. Although the family squabble and pick holes with each other, deep down you can tell that there is a lot of love between them. The scenes of snatched tenderness between Jim and Barbara show that despite everything, he isn't all that bad after all.

It's a move that seems to have worked, only bringing the show back for Christmas specials. As good as the show is, one wonders why it was picked out of all the sitcoms out there, to keep being made in this way. Towards the end of its life, Only Fools And Horses was kept alive this way, although it jumped the shark by coming back several years after it came to a natural end. Hopefully this fate won't befall The Royle Family, although given that the last episode, Barbara's Old Ring, wasn't up to the usual standard, time will tell if they decide to quit before the decision is made for them.

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In the early hours of this morning, while perusing Twitter, I saw the news that Dick Clark had died. The name doesn't really mean a lot in this country, but in America he is a cultural icon. In this country his name has been heard in film and television, most famously on an episode of Friends titled 'The One With The Routine'. Dick Clarke's New Years Rockin' Eve was an example of 'event television' that will probably never be equalled in popularity in America. I can't really think who the equivalent person is in this country; part John Peel maybe because of his ear for new music, but a much more populist version.

Starting his career in radio, Clark became the second string presenter on a programme simply called Bandstand. The main presenter, Bob Horn, was accused of 'sexual impropriety' towards members of the teenage audience, and Dick Clarke was promoted to main presenter of the newly named American Bandstand. The revamped show kicked off in August 1957, and ran until 1989 with Dick Clarke presenting, earning him the nickname of 'the world's oldest teenager'. I was hoping to get through this blog without using that line, but he and the tag go hand in hand.

Dick Clark owned American Bandstand, a rarity in those days when the networks were the boss. Nowadays, most presenters make their own programmes to sell to the channel. He had a good ear for musical trends, and an appearance on American Bandstand was a passport to success during the show's thirty year run. His stake in a large number of record companies earned him royalties, which was his only brush with anything close to controversy during his career, while the 'payola' scandal was being investigated. Clark was cleared of any wrongdoing, but was forced to choose between his investments or the show, and chose the show. American Bandstand not only broke new acts to a national television audience, but also broke ground in 1950s America by featuring black artists on the show, and black teenagers in the crowd, unheard of at the time. The British television show Oh Boy! was based on the American Bandstand model, after Jack Good saw what was happening. Of course our version didn't have the same longevity, and only Top Of The Pops comes close.

The New Year's Eve events were must see television, the like of which we in this country just won't ever get our heads around. Jools Holland's Hootenanny doesn't even touch the sides. Although he had a stroke in 2004, he carried on with a co-presenter.

Aside from his flagship shows, his company produced game-shows, films and television drama, and owned a chain of American Bandstand themed diners. Dick Clark Productions was sold in 2002 for $136 million, though he kept his hand in as chairman.

American pop culture will never his like again, and yet he remains something of a mystery to us Brits. Mentioned on Grease, Happy Days, and others, we kept hearing the name but didn't come to the party. In another rare move in the late 1950s and early 1960s, when live television output wasn't archived, Clark kept his own tapes of American Bandstand episodes, building a rich treasure trove of popular music history. BBC4, get on the phone to someone now!

I know Sunday morning is supposed to be about the radio, but while I was flicking through the television channels trying to find Radio 4, (a 21st century space age idea if ever there was one-radio on telly?), I noticed that Sky Arts 1 were showing an episode of Saturday Night Live. This is an iconic show in America, one of those television shows that becomes an event, something we don't have anymore in this country. It seems funny that a programme broadcast from New York, the city that never sleeps, can command such a high audience on a Saturday night when you would think that all the cool people were down at the discotheque. 

Of all the American comedy shows that we have had broadcast over here over the years, from Bilko in the 1950s to Friends and everything in between, we have never had a proper run of Saturday Night Live. Considering how many comedians from the show's alumni are well known here, this is a little strange. There have been clip shows, so we are all aware of pre-movie success sketches that Dan Ackroyd and John Belushi did as The Blues Brothers for example. BBC2 also broadcast a short compilation run of the Wayne's World sketches to jump on the first film bandwagon. But apart from the occasional filler late at night, we haven't formed a relationship, if that is the right word, with the show in the same way we do with others.

I have a video tape that I bought years ago, called SNL: The Best Of John Belushi, which showcases his comedic talents in such classic sketches, (that we all know) as Samurai Delicatessen, or his spot on impression of Joe Cocker. Having seen the career trajectory of his co-stars, with the exception of Bill Murray, it is probably a good thing that he died young. Not to wish anyone dead, but John Belushi left behind a legacy of work of which there isn't a duff moment. After the success of The Blues Brothers, and Ghostbusters, Dan Ackroyd's career has been very hit and miss. Chevy Chase should in my opinion be one of the biggest comedians in the world, but his work really dried up and now we hardly ever see him. Would John Belushi too be trading on past glory if he had survived? 

Fetch Your Cloth!

Having seen off the first series of The Mighty Boosh, and series three of Friends, we are now kicking the shit out of Virgin Media’s ‘on demand’ service by way of the very first series of Open All Hours. I don’t need to tell you that Ronnie Barker and David Jason are comedy legends, and seeing them working together is a joy.

As an aside, Ronnie Barker was my first choice for the lead role in the screenplay I will probably never write. He ruined his chances by dying, which wasn’t entirely his fault. My second choice was Eric Sykes, my favourite comedian, but he doesn’t seem to have long left. Especially when I consider the time I am spending writing it, I may have to plump for someone who is really young now as an investment. My current choice incidentally, is David Jason.

As another aside, watch David Jason made to look like an old man when he played Blanco in Porridge. Look at him now; he has aged into the work of a 1970s sitcom make up artist!