Above should be an excellent vintage discovery from Google Video - Saturday Live, a music-and-comedy programme that I remember from Channel 4 in the mid 1980s - this programme (all 90 minutes of it) being hosted by Peter Cook, no less.

Particularly enjoyable because how poor the programme was technically - I remember it being hugely cool at the time - and the bizarre comedy. Only Peter Cook would do a piece based on Harold Macmillan (a prime minister that I doubt anyone in the target audience would remember). The ‘right-on’ Ben Elton is awful, diabolically awful, irredeemably awful, and the audience clapped anything that was against ‘Thatch’ without even thinking what was being said. Bizarre. But some of this is really quite funny. Still. Excellent.

The one thing that stands out for me is that the entire show was live - and 90 minutes?! Grief. That’s longer than anything you’d see these days; the comedy sketches are almost unacceptably long for today’s television, too - compare with Rory Bremner’s programme, for example. Part of that was presumably a desperate plan to fill the space; part of that might have been the different audience expectation.

Also interesting - 90 minutes, live, and the programme still ended, exactly, to time. No mean feat.

And sadly, only 13 people had watched this video before me. I hope, by sharing it, it gets it an extra audience, all over again.

(PS: Interestingly - this appears to be a video recorded in the control room at LWT, which shot the programme; there’s no network idents and the commercial breaks are very strange indeed.)

Tags: ben_elton, channel_4, comedy, peter_cook, television, tv | Permalink | Comments RSS | Leave a response, or trackback.