Tonight’s Yorkshire Television… in 1975 

23 May 2018 tbs.pm/65846

It’s Friday 23 May 1975. The 1970s have much worth noting about them, but the weird weather conditions in the middle of the decade stand out. 1976 would be the year of the great drought after a startlingly long and hot heatwave. This would be followed by floods in the winter. Meanwhile, with the heatwave a year away, there was snow on the ground in many parts of the UK, and that afternoon a thick blanket of fog settled across a swathe of the country.

On YTV, the day started with schools in the morning, followed by the usual mix of programmes for those who may be at home and watching television during the day: Hickory House and A Handful of Songs from midday for children, Songs that Stopped the Shows at 12.30pm for pensioners, the ITN news at 1 – not yet called that – for the middle classes eating lunch, and then into the programmes for housewives from 1.30pm.

The second part of this week’s Crown Court drama features few recognisable names. The show often had character actors you recognised but couldn’t place, or young actors whose names would later be famous but weren’t at this time. The judge was played by William Mervyn, the epitome of the former phenomena: he was in The Railway Children, Doctor Who, All Gas and Gaiters and a couple of Carry Ons, but I bet you couldn’t pick him out of a line-up.

The only name that leaps out of ATV’s General Hospital‘s cast at 2pm is Tony Adams, playing Dr Bywaters. His fame lay before him: he moved to ATV’s perennial soap opera Crossroads in 1978, playing the role of Adam Chance.

The 25-minute episode of The Count of Monte Cristo at 4.25pm is baffling. Them there interwebz have no record of an episode called “Caverns of Slavery” from either the 1956 ITC series (which this is most likely to be) or the 1964 BBC series of the same name. ITC had released a film of The Count of Monte Cristo in January of this year, but it’s not likely to be part of that either. Odd.

Prime time starts at 7pm, after Crossroads, with something that sounds truly terrible: Husband of the Year, with a downright weird panel chaired by Pete Murray. As an aside, just after the advertisement break in this show, I arrived in the world head-first.

At 7.30pm we have a split network, as each region goes their own way. The Yorkshire edition of the TVTimes says, as you see, that YTV showed Shut That Door!!. The Anglia edition says that YTV showed F.B.I. Meanwhile, the Anglia edition says Anglia is showing Shut That Door!!, while the Yorkshire edition says Anglia is showing “Dollar Man” (presumably the then-new The Six Million Dollar Man).

Both of the shows the out-of-region TVTimes are showing for 7.30pm are, in-region, then shown at 8pm. Nobody ever said this job was easy.

At 9pm, and pushing everything to run ten minutes late for the rest of the evening, the “No” campaign for the forthcoming advisory EEC referendum have their allotted broadcast. “Yes” had theirs at the same time last night. The result on 5 June was a convincing large majority vote of over 67% in favour of the status quo – remaining members of the European project. This near-landslide then spent 40 years being described as “a close thing” until we re-ran it in 2016 and got the definitive, strong, the-people-have-spoken, no-arguments-allowed answer of… 51.9:48.1% to leave. Ho hum.

The network having got back together at 9pm, it continues as such for The Main Chance, a long running serial drama about a man who moves from London to Leeds to seek his fortune.

The network splits again after the News at Ten at 10.10pm, and again the TVTimes gets confused as to what’s on where. Anglia do indeed appear to go for Kung Fu at 10.40pm; but Anglia’s TVTimes puts Cinema at 10.40pm on YTV and the following film at 11.10pm.

Note that YTV’s reporter for its special on Leeds in the European Cup is Fred Dinenage – a man inextricably linked to Southern and TVS in my brain, but often to be seen popping up all over the country throughout his long career.

The Friday Night Film at 11.40 is the 1964 British black-and-white 20th Century-Fox sci-fi thriller The Earth Dies Screaming, a bizarre cross between Terry Nation’s Survivors and a zombie flick. It’s truly terrible and well worth a watch.

External links

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