Tonight’s BBCtv… in 1968 

17 June 2016 tbs.pm/9096

The Radio Times gives us a run down of BBCtv programmes in the north for Monday 17 June 1968. Things worth noting include:

• It’s Monday, so Watch With Mother at 10.45am is Andy Pandy. There were 26 episodes of this series made by the BBC in 1950 and they ran one a week almost every week on a constant loop for 20 years. After all, for the toddlers who were watching, 26 weeks before a repeat was a considerable portion of their lifespan so far. They were unlikely to remember much detail!
• In Wales, Watch With Mother is replaced by Ar Lin Mam, which roughly translates as Watch With Mother. No details are given of what the Welsh-language children’s programme being shown is.
• 4.55pm sees Blue Peter. On the cover, the Radio Times has promised this in colour. Here they ‘fess up that it’s not in colour, but there’s a picture of cat Jason on page 33 that is.
• Castors Away! at 5.20 is based on the book by Hester Burton, but beyond that who knows? The series appears to be missing.
• At 5.55pm it’s time for Look North, recently split into three editions. There had been a pan-north Look North with Stuart Hall in Manchester and a north-east version from Newcastle with Mike Neville. The impending split of the ITV northern region in half and the creation of the new Yorkshire Television had forced a spoiler from the BBC. The Manchester edition was pushed on to the relay transmitters in the north west and the relatively new Winter Hill VHF channel 12; the existing and more popular pan-north was handed to the new Leeds programme, and thus was YTV deprived of a bit of uniqueness when it appeared at the end of next month.
• Z Cars at 7.05pm had started in 1962 as a drama serial; it was rested in the mid-1960s and brought back in 1967 as a twice-weekly semi-soap opera, with two episodes a week covering a single story but with on-going plot arcs amongst the policemen themselves. It would revert to one 50-minute episode a week later in the 1970s and become less soapy. It survived until 1978.
• Once we get the lighter stuff – Quiz Time, Gentleman Please!, Z Cars and Dick Emery – out of the way, BBC-1 suddenly becomes very heavy. At 8pm, a 50-minute documentary about the occupation of France in the 1940s.
• After the news, the BBC returns to its series of dramatising Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s non-Sherlockian stories. They’re good stories, but very dense in places.
• At 9.55 comes Twenty-Four Hours, effectively a cross between Tonight, the programme it was born out of, and Newsnight, which would take a similar slot (over on BBC-2) just over a decade later.
• BBC-2’s evening schedule is made up of 4 programmes plus the news, bring the total number of programmes for the day to 7 across less than 4 hours – about as much as money would allow. One thing it does allow that the BBC would’ve had trouble doing in the days of having just one channel is devoting over an hour and a half of peak time to recorded highlights of yesterday’s golf in Rochester, New York. It’s certainly alternative viewing but doesn’t leave much for a dedicated BBC viewer seeking lighter entertainment tonight.