When Schedules Change

 

December 9, 1980

It should have been just an ordinary Tuesday evening’s television. The evening news at 5.40pm, followed by Nationwide. The 1966 Paul Newman film Winning was scheduled to air at 7pm, an action drama focused on the efforts of a racing driver to win the prestigious Indianapolis 500. The two-hour film was to be followed by a party political broadcast by the Labour Party, some eighteen months into what would prove to be a full eighteen years in opposition. After the 9.00 News, Play For Today presented the comedy drama of a researcher from the future who arrives in London in 1980 – The Flipside of Dominick Hide.

This was the BBC’s intended schedule, as published in that week’s edition of the Radio Times. What went out that evening was radically different, on account of a tragic event the previous night in New York City.

John Lennon had always believed the number nine held some significance in his life. “It’s just a number that follows me around,” he once said in an interview. His earliest address was 9 Newcastle Road, Wavertree. He was born on the 9th of October. There were many more significant number nines in his life, leading him to compose the songs 'Revolution 9' and 'No.9 Dream'. And although it was December 8 when he was murdered in New York, it was already December 9 in his home country.

On the morning of December 9 1980, I’d visited our local library. On coming out, around lunchtime, I entered Preedy’s newsagents opposite, where I saw Lennon’s face staring up in black and white from the top of a pile of the Birmingham Evening Mail’s lunchtime edition. The stark headline said it all: ‘John Lennon Shot Dead.’ I still have that newspaper. Returning home, I turned on Radio 1, where wall-to-wall Lennon and Beatles tracks were being played. I couldn’t believe what had happened. The world couldn’t believe it. Paul McCartney declared it was ‘a drag’ when doorstepped by the media, a remark he immediately regretted and certainly didn’t mean.

At the BBC, the evening’s programme schedule was torn up. Nationwide, originally scheduled to end at 7pm, was extended to ninety minutes, with much of the programme consisting of a tribute to the late Beatle. I’d got my first video recorder less than four weeks ago, and had blank tapes at the ready. I recorded the Nationwide tribute, which was followed by a special screening of the film Help! The Beatles’ lightweight comedy was not, perhaps, the most appropriate memorial, but it showed Lennon the way many of his fans would choose to remember him – as Beatle John, mop-topped and still a creative world away from 'Strawberry Fields Forever'. Over on BBC2, the scheduled edition of The Old Grey Whistle Test was hastily retooled, with Andy Peebles brought into the studio – he’d interviewed Lennon just two days earlier, talking about the recently released album Double Fantasy.

On BBC1, normal service, of a kind, was resumed at 9.00 with the news, albeit the bulletin was dominated by Lennon’s murder, and overran by some twelve minutes. The Flipside of Dominick Hide, originally scheduled to air at 9.25, went out instead at 9.37. The play, which was well received by critics, and went on to become a minor cult classic, can’t have benefited from the schedule upheaval and for many viewers would have been totally eclipsed by the news from New York. I finally got to see it myself two years later, when it was repeated ahead of its sequel, Another Flip for Dominick. I found it charmingly offbeat, original and different; but I certainly wasn’t in the mood for it on December 9, 1980...

Over on ITV, there was less to see. The commercial channel owned no Beatle films that could be shown, and with ad space having been sold in advance, the primetime schedule was non-negotiable. For the record, viewers in the Anglia region would have seen Crossroads at 6.30, followed by a quiz, Gambit, and a half hour comedy. At 8pm, there was a networked two-hour drama starring Tom Bell, The Sailor's Return, followed by News at Ten. It was only in the post-news slot that anything changed, with the scheduled late night film replaced by a very poor studio discussion about Lennon's life and work that hardly bore comparison with the BBC's fulsome tribute.

Somewhat ironically, the BBC's play, The Flipside of Dominick Hide, dealt with a visitor from the future who accidentally alters history and becomes his own destiny. History had indeed been altered on December 8 1980. For years, a Beatle reunion had been rumoured, denied and rumoured yet again. In the months before Lennon's murder, there had been renewed contact with Paul McCartney – and who knows what might have happened if events had panned out differently.

The BBC's Genome database, derived from Radio Times listings, still presents the evening's television as it was originally intended. Reading it is like receiving a communique from a parallel universe where John Lennon is still alive, and a loser from Hawaii was never born.