I ended 2024's advent calendar of blog posts with Zager & Evans' 1969 single In the Year 2525. That's still five hundred years distant, but here in 2025 we'll be seeing a few anniversaries of icons from pop culture. Here's a rundown of some that I've picked out...
Now we are ten: Talking Pictures TV got started in 2015. The channel, specialising in archive entertainment, grew out of the Renown Pictures DVD label, and its earliest schedules featured a lot of old British films to which Renown held rights. Its first forays into vintage television were all of American vintage – Honey West, Amos Burke and others – but deals with ITV and BBC soon led to a fuller and more interesting mix of programming.
The channel quickly became a media talking point, and was praised for reviving some long forgotten items, most of which had, in fact, already been released on the Network DVD label. But Network was never at its best when it came to self-promotion, so it was hardly surprising when the latecomers took all the credit for revivals like Gideon’s Way and Maigret. Network and TP should really have got together, but aside from selling them the broadcast rights to Maigret, it never really happened.
TPTV will, I’m sure, continue to be successful, although some reinvention will almost certainly be required as their target audience ages into oblivion. If high definition is your priority, there are better places to source a lot of its material, for the bitrate remains disappointingly low, but rare items do often surface that can’t readily be found elsewhere. Of the few broadcasters specialising in what one might call ‘extreme archive’ material, TPTV remains at the forefront, outclassing channels like That’sTV (who appear to be using DVDs as source material) or Rewind, whose line-up is simply boring. So here’s to another ten years of Talking Pictures… will that usherette ever get the right change, I wonder?
Now we are twenty: Desperate Housewives made its first British appearance on Channel 4 on 5 January 2005, with overnight viewing figures (4.4 million) scoring the second highest ratings for an American series in the channel’s history. I’d heard it being talked about in the media during that week, most notably by the late Steve Wright who seemed particularly taken with it, but I'd decided it probably wasn’t for me. Later that week, I’d had the TV turned on to watch some DVDs and when they ended, the set defaulted to whatever was being broadcast at the time. I found myself in the middle of a domestic farce that was sharply witty, well observed and, in places, laugh out loud funny. What on earth was it? Came the next advert break, I realised I’d been watching Desperate Housewives, on a rebroadcast of the opening episode. It was quite unlike me to get behind any piece of contemporary television, but I stuck with it to the end of the first series and some way beyond – not, I might add, to the bitter end (whenever that was). It clearly owed much to the style of David Lynch, with its outwardly innocuous suburban setting concealing darkly comedic existential angst and some edgy storylines. Perhaps its most influential aspect was the quirky soundtrack which has been imitated to death ever since on hundreds of lifestyle and makeover shows.
Now we are thirty: I wasn’t watching a lot of television back in 1995, and what I was watching tended to be archive material on satellite channels like UK Gold and the late, lamented Bravo. Of the year’s new series, I remained almost utterly oblivious. I was late to the party for Father Ted (21 April 1995), which I initially dismissed as a dreary ecclesiastical comedy before being tipped off by a friend as to its surreally subversive style. That aside, the year’s only notable televisual event for me came in November with the long awaited Beatles Anthology series. Judging from the over-long and excessively detailed account of 1995 in British television that appears on Wikipedia, I didn’t miss anything. And the pop charts were a bit rubbish too, unless you cared about the much hyped and pointless ‘rivalry’ between Blur and Oasis…
Now we are forty: Live Aid will celebrate its fourth decade anniversary on 13 July this year, a fact which Bob Geldof curiously omitted to mention on Jools Holland’s New Year’s Eve Hootenanny, where he was busy promoting the fifttieth anniversary of his band, the Boomtown Rats. I sat and watched some, but by no means all of the 1985 event at a gathering of friends who made an afternoon of it with food and drink. I can’t say that many of the participants were of particular interest to me at the time, as I’d taken to following more obscure independent artists, but you couldn’t help but acknowledge that history was being made…
Now we are fifty: The Sweeney has already scored its half century on 2 January. I don’t know how well it was promoted at the time of its 1975 debut, and it's more than likely that any trailers got lost amongst the festive schedules. For whatever reason, I didn’t cotton onto it until the second series, beginning in the autumn, and I suspect this was the case for other viewers, too. 1975 was a prime year for television debuts, with The Good Life kicking off in April, Fawlty Towers in September and Gerry Anderson’s Space:1999 the same month.
Now we are sixty: Later this month, it will be the 60th anniversary of TV Century 21, its January 1965 launch clearly timed to provide a useful promotional tool for the upcoming Thunderbirds (60 in September). 1965 also saw the Beatles’ second feature film Help! released in cinemas, with the album of the same name followed in December by Rubber Soul.
Now we are seventy: The biggest televisual anniversary of this year, whether the network chooses to commemorate it or not, will be that of ITV (22 September 1955). The channel was only initially available to viewers in the London and South East areas, before extending its coverage to the Midlands and North the following year. Earlier in the year, Muffin the Mule’s adventures were curtailed by the death of his piano-playing mentor Annette Mills, and Benny Hill’s first television series premiered on the BBC. One of the most anticipated television events of 1955 must have been Quatermass II (22 October), the belated sequel to the 1953 original. But the award for the most enduring TV series of 1955 belongs to The Phil Silvers Show (aka Sgt Bilko) which made its debut Stateside on 20 September. British viewers would have to wait until April 1957, but were able to watch it in repeat runs for another forty-five years. Now, if Talking Pictures want a sure fire success to add some much needed comedic weight to their schedule, they could do a lot worse than drafting in the Fort Baxter crowd...
I'll be returning to some of these subjects when their respective anniversaries roll around... along with a variety of other topics.