Tonight’s Yorkshire TV… in 1971 

10 May 2017 tbs.pm/12227

The TVTimes tells us what was on YTV on Monday 10 May 1971. Things worth noting include:

• We start with the TVTimes getting confused. A description of Thames Television’s junior quiz Full House at 5.20pm weirdly collides with a description of YTV’s sitcom On the House. The two are unrelated, so quite how this happened is for you to guess
• Southern’s Houseparty at 3.05pm is carried by ATV at 3.20pm but ignored by Anglia and TTT, who stay off air according to the TVTimes
• More Thames at 3.20pm on YTV, making use of the London weekday contractor’s close links with the cinema industry to package up clips from big movies into a programme that has “cheap filler” written all over it
• Can we all just admit now that Skippy, at 4.55pm, was terrible and preposterous and then move on with our lives?
• Full House is a pretty generic title for a show – the BBC would have a Full House on air next year, a typically BBC-2 weird mix of comedy items and arts reviews – enough to make finding out anything about it difficult 46 years later. It made no impact on me
• Calendar gets 15 minutes – YTV is struggling financially at this point due in part to its region being eroded by the switch to UHF – whilst About Anglia and even ATV Today are 40 minutes long. Even the Tyne Tees evening magazine, Today at Six, gets a longer slot
• The short Calendar allows YTV to slip in an episode of ABC’s The Odd Couple before OpNox. This is S01E09, fresh from the US last November
• Julian Roach, writer of today’s Coronation Street episode at 7.30pm – the first properly networked item of the day outside of schools – would later go on to co-create the sublime Granada sitcom Brass
• Coronation Street kicks off an hour and a half of networked Granada, being followed by World in Action at 8pm, which looked at the Tanzania to Zambia railway, then under construction thanks to funding and personnel from the Chinese People’s Liberation Army – a fact that struck horror into Sir Alec Douglas-Hulme at the British Foreign and Commonwealth Office
• Granada’s slot ends with the start of The Last of the Baskets, a sitcom vehicle for Arthur Lowe in his breaks from filming Dad’s Army for the BBC. It ran for 13 episodes across 2 series
• Not for the first time in 1971, YTV’s evening rounds off with some adult education, this time sending Calendar’s Richard Whitely to visit “a well-known store” (shades of Acorn Antiques there) to talk to the shoppies. They’re off air at 11.50pm, with only TTT carrying on past midnight

External links

• See the rival BBC-1 London schedule at the Genome project.
• See the rival BBC-2 England schedule at the Genome project.