Category: British
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dinnerladies Clippings
The early reporting about dinnerladies focused on two things. First, that this was going to be Victoria Wood’s first sitcom, and second that it marked a new role for Corrie’s Thelma Barlow. Here’s the first mention I can find, in the Dublin Evening Herald from 24 October 1998. On the 3rd November, this interview with…
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The League Of Gentleclips
The first mention I can find of the League Of Gentlemen as a sketch comedy troupe is this, from The Stage on Thursday 4th April 1996. Just four months later, they received top-billing in the same publication’s Edinburgh Fringe preview. A year later, and the trio garnered a few mentions in Phil Gibby’s festival diary,…
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Hardwicke House Tapes Destroyed
Let’s begin in the middle. On Thursday 9th July 1987, The Stage’s Television Today had this front page headline. So, how did we get here? How did we get to the point where Central insiders were telling the papers that the Independent Broadcasting Authority had ordered them to wipe the tapes of a sitcom? Why…
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Peter Sellers And Spike Milligan Came This Close To Making A 70s Sitcom
Two facts crop up in everything I’ve read about the sitcom The Melting Pot. One, that the pilot was only ever broadcast once, and two, that a full series of six episodes was later filmed and never shown on TV. According to some sources, Milligan thinks this was because the scripts weren’t good enough, and…
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Mr Bean’s Limited Potential On Radio
Considering that it went on to win the Rose D’Or, be watched by upwards of 18 million people, and spawned two movies that have grossed half a billion dollars between them, Mr Bean arrived on our screens with a relative whisper. The first mention of the show appears in this article about Paul Bown, star…
