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Tonight’s Anglia Television… in 1966
7 May 2016 tbs.pm/9007
The TVTimes gives us a run down of Anglia Television programmes for Saturday 7 May 1966. Things worth noting include:
- We come on air at 12.30pm for a quick blast of adult education – Say it in Russian from Tyne Tees. ATV Midlands made a certain speciality of language-learning programmes for both adults and children, but TTT grabbed Russian due to the links between the Tyneside ports and Baltic sea trade, which saw a lot of Soviet sailors on layover. It couldn’t harm for the locals to be able to say Здравствуйте to the visitors.
- Independent Television presents World of Sport at 1pm. Actually, ABC Weekend presents it, with Eamonn Andrews and Dickie Davies tying together inserts from ATV, Eurovision, TTT and ABC themselves.
- The Flintstones episode at 5.15pm is from the rarely seen sixth and final season and aired on 17 September 1965 on ABC in the US. The hit Pebbles Flintstone and Bam Bam Rubble have is with the song ‘Open Up Your Heart (And Let the Sunshine In)’, which would go on to replace the existing theme tune later in the season – although it’s usually changed back to ‘Meet The Flintstones’ when seen in syndication.
- Weavers Green was Anglia’s big hit on the network in the 1960s, but it suffered from having its episodes split across the weekdays and weekends – a scheduling error that would later befall Granada’s Albion Market – and getting shoved from pillar to post in the schedules. On the other hand, amazingly, all 49 episodes survive.
- Jim Dale introduces ABC’s weekly pop show from the Alpha Studios near Birmingham, Thank Your Lucky Stars. This week he’s joined by Terry Scott, most likely singing his double-A side, ‘Juanita Banana’/’I Like Birds’.
- 6.55pm sees The Wild North, a 1952 MGM potboiler. It’s got some stunning colourful scenery, only partly marred here by being in black and white.
- Sergeant Cork at 9.10pm is a long-running ATV detective yarn set in Victorian times from the pen of Ted Willis. It’s still very evocative when seen now – the smog effects combine with the crisp black and white to produce a real sense of Victorian times, rarely matched by colour television.
- Ted Willis is back at 10.15pm to introduce the anthology series of dramas he curated for ATV, Knock On Any Door. There were 20 in total and they all survive.
- We’re off before midnight, a cautious use of the hours legally available considering that much of the day’s early output didn’t count.
You Say
14 responses to this article
steve brown wrote 7 May 2016 at 6:33 pm
On thank your lucky stars,manfred mann were performing the song that was #1 on this day in 1966-pretty flamingo
Paul Mason wrote 8 May 2016 at 3:10 am
I have seen that episode of the Flintstones, in which Pebbles and Bam Bam have a hit record. The episode contained The Brittles and their manager Eppy Brinestone. No Prince s for guessing the inspiration for those characters.
I may be referring to the newspaper comic strip version of the Flintstones, but didnt Pebbles and Bam Bam feature as teenagers on the TV shows?
Paul Mason wrote 8 May 2016 at 3:12 am
Sorry but another typo- by No Princes I meant “no prizes”.
Paul Mason wrote 8 May 2016 at 3:28 am
One of the useful aspects of the internet is that one can answer ones own ?s courtesy of Wikipedia. There was a Pebbles and Bamm Bamm Show where they were teenagers, made in 1971 but I dont know whether it aired here. There was a newspaprr cartoon strip syndicated to local papers, such as the Liverpool Echo where Fred complains about loud music played by teenage Pebbles and Bamm Bamm.
Arthur Nibble wrote 8 May 2016 at 11:57 am
I’m not very technically minded – how come one of Anglia’s bands (channel 7) only operated from the 5.45 news onwards?
Geoff Nash wrote 8 May 2016 at 4:23 pm
The spin off show ‘Pebbles and Bamm-Bamm’ aired in a few regions, I remember seeing it on Westward while on a Devon holiday in 1972, then later in the year on Thames. I remember it being quite amusing and featuring the original Flintstones characters as well, but it lacked the style of it’s parent show.
Russ J Graham wrote 8 May 2016 at 4:29 pm
When Sandy Heath opened, a local university had an exclusive daytime licence for some low VHF Band III channels for their radiotelescope, so for the first few months, Sandy Heath on channel 6 only came on after conditions stopped being useful for astronomy – typically as twilight approached.
The same would seem to be true for Belmont on 7 – the university was using the channel in the daytime and the ITA only had it later in the day, again for the first couple of months only.
Arthur Nibble wrote 9 May 2016 at 1:38 pm
Thanks for the explanation, Russ. It’s this minutiae and the detailed answers which I find fascinating.
Alan Keeling wrote 13 May 2016 at 8:57 pm
Regarding The Flintstones, ATV (Midlands) for some reason didn’t or wouldn’t screen this prime time cartoon series until September 1972, starting from season 3.
Joanne Gray wrote 21 May 2016 at 5:57 pm
Paul, Tyne Tees showed Pebbles and Bam Bam some time in the late 70s-early 80s. Can’t be more precise than that, unfortunately – but I think it was a Sunday morning thing in between The Smurfs and Morning Worship when the stations started transmitting at earlier times on weekends (but pre-TVAM)
Ronnie MacLennan Baird wrote 24 May 2016 at 9:25 pm
I see that Dickie Davies was still Richard Davies at this time and, also worthy of note, Ian Wooldridge commentating on the cricket – Mr Wooldridge being more highly regarded for his writing than his broadcasting.
steve brown wrote 28 June 2016 at 5:58 pm
Newcastle racecourse recently became an all-weather track
Christian Bews wrote 20 April 2017 at 10:33 pm
apart from ATV midlands who else in the ITV network did’nt take ‘the flintstones’ in the 60s? how did they not show it? it was mentioned on a few ATV shows that decade when morecambe & wise dressed up as fred & barney in their first ATV series ‘two of a kind’ & a model of fred flintstone was one of the toys on display in the children’s hospital in the ‘thunderbirds’ christmas episode ‘give or take a million’.how strange!
Les wrote 2 October 2020 at 4:49 pm
Belmont: the restricted hours, was because they hadn’t finished the mast. A tv times article said they needed 12 windless days to complete the work at the top. The restricted hours lasted until may.
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