As I’ve spoken about many times before on this site, I’m constantly surprised at how often the generally accepted transmission dates for various TV shows turn out to be a load of rubbish. Sometimes, the confusion is understandable – a last-minute schedule change not reflected in the Radio Times, say. Other times, I struggle to see the thought process.
This time? Well, we have ourselves a bit of a strange one.
As part of the research for my last piece on Terry and June, I had cause to look at the transmission dates for the series broadcast in late 1983. Here’s what epguides.com thinks:
Six episodes, broadcast weekly from the 31st October 1983. Simple enough. And at the time of writing, this is also exactly what Wikipedia, IMDB, and the British Comedy Guide think happened too.
But on bbc.co.uk, we have a different story. The first four episodes of the series are indeed broadcast weekly… but then the show skips a week. The BBC has “Pardon My Dust” airing on the 5th December, and “The Artistic Touch” airing on the 12th December.
Oddly, the BBC there seems to think there are seven episodes in the series. This, at least, is definitely wrong: there were only six. There was an episode of Terry and June broadcast the following week on the 19th December 1983, but this was just a repeat of the 1982 Christmas Special.
What’s going on here? For the answer, let’s check the contemporary listings for The Guardian. That agrees with bbc.co.uk, rather than epguides.com et al:
5th December 1983
12th December 1983
So what does The Guardian claim was broadcast on the 28th November, the missing week?1
Championship Snooker. And all other contemporary newspaper listings agree.
But still: isn’t there a chance that there was a last-minute schedule change, and Terry and June was parachuted in to replace the snooker? Yeah, a dim one. So I’ve gone and checked the Beeb paperwork for this run of the show. Not only does it clearly state that Terry and June was broadcast when the newspaper listings claim, but the schedule for the 28th November confirms that the snooker was definitely transmitted on this date:
19.26.47 – 20.08.48
OB: CHAMPIONSHIP SNOOKER “THE CORAL UK PROFESSIONAL SNOOKER CHAMPIONSHIPS 1983 – REARDON V WHITE” (1/NMR H300F)
So Series 7 of Terry and June actually looks like this:
| Terry and June Series 7 | ||
|---|---|---|
| Episode | Studio RX | TX |
| Photo-Finish! | 28/5/83 | 31/10/83 |
| One Little Pig | 30/4/83 | 7/11/83 |
| The Raft Race | 14/5/83 | 14/11/83 |
| Too Many Cooks | 7/5/83 | 21/11/83 |
| Pardon My Dust | 4/6/83 | 5/12/83 |
| The Artistic Touch | 21/5/83 | 12/12/83 |
Case closed.
* * *
Well, nearly, anyway. There’s a couple more things which are niggling at the back of my brain. For a start, there’s usually a reason why TX dates are inaccurate. What happened here? Did people start with the date of the first episode of the series, and just lazily assumed weekly broadcasts?
Maybe. Or maybe there’s something more complicated going on here. For instance: did you wonder why I didn’t invoke the Radio Times above, and leapt straight for The Guardian instead? There’s a good reason for that: it’s impossible to get a full record of what was scheduled around this period from the Radio Times. Not just “difficult to get hold of”: actually impossible.
Sure, we can see that on the 28th November, Championship Snooker was definitely scheduled, indicating that it was planned all along and wasn’t a last-minute change:2
That was Issue 3133 of the Radio Times, covering the 26th November – 2nd December. There was no Issue 3134. Why? Well, a short note at the beginning of Issue 3135, covering 10th – 16th December, explains:
“For the second time this year unofficial strike action by print union Sogat 82 is disrupting Radio Times. In recent weeks copies have not been available in some areas and last week’s issue was not printed. This week’s Radio Times is produced as one national edition. Unfortunately, it is not possible to show details of Radio Scotland, Radio Wales/Cymru and Radio Ulster, but we do include a summary of BBC Local Radio. We hope to be back to normal as soon as possible.”
Now sure, Issue 3135 does contain the correct information for the final episode of the series, broadcast on the 12th December:3
But the issue which would have contained the listing for “Pardon My Dust”, broadcast on the 5th December, was never printed. Could all this nonsense have lead to the confusion surrounding the TX dates of these episodes? Especially as the Radio Times admits that even before the skipped week, “copies have not been available in some areas”?
Who knows. But it feels possible, at least.
* * *
Just one more thing. Right at the top of this article, I quoted epguides.com, giving the incorrect dates of the 28th November and 5th December for the final two episodes of the series.
But if we use the Wayback Machine, and see what the page looked like back in October 2006, we get the following:
Yes, it states this was Series 6 rather than 7, due to splitting up the episodes differently. But most importantly: this version of the guide has the correct TX dates of the 5th and 12th of December for the final two episodes of this run!
A bit of poking around suggests that this first went wrong in June 2009, when epguides.com started partnering with the now all-but-defunct TV Rage for its listings. TV Rage had the incorrect information, and it clearly got pasted over to epguides.com. Which is mildly infuriating. epguides.com had it right, and then buggered it up.
The moral of this story? Probably none. Except perhaps to say that if you’re writing about a TV show, it’s worth doing a bit of digging here and there to find out whether the generally accepted TX dates are actually right or not. And while I have contacts who can check internal BBC paperwork for such things, it didn’t take that to figure out something was awry here.
It just took not assuming that “everyone” was correct.
Yes, the Guardian listing for this week is differently-formatted to the subsequent two weeks. I’ve not got the wrong paper; they had a redesign. ↩
Note that oddly enough, the Radio Times seems to correctly predict the two players for that night’s match – Ray Reardon and Jimmy White. ↩
Incidentally, the capsule for Tom and Jerry followed immediately by Terry and June does strange things to my brain. I’m imagining Terry Scott chasing June Whitfield into a mousehole. ↩
12 comments
John J. Hoare on 22 July 2025 @ 6pm
I can’t believe it’s taken until 2025 before this website got a “terry and june” tag.
B DESSAU on 22 July 2025 @ 6pm
Three points.
1. Amazing detective work
2. I have only just realised four decades too late that Richard Briers and Paul Eddington played Tom and Jerry in The Good Life.
3. We both need to get a life.
Gareth Randall on 22 July 2025 @ 8pm
60 Minutes billed as “Sixty-Minutes”? Was that typical?
John J. Hoare on 22 July 2025 @ 9pm
Bruce: Thanks/Ditto/True.
Gareth: Fun fact – I once wrote an internal email to everyone in BBC pres detailing my immense dismay that nobody could figure out whether our slides should say “Homes under the Hammer” or “Homes Under the Hammer”. It was mostly the Radio Times which was insisting on the uncapitalised “under”.
Michael Auld on 22 July 2025 @ 11pm
Hey Gareth
It was always Sixty Minutes on screen (in graphics) and in print everywhere. I suspect to distance itself at launch from the US current affairs show. It was only a numeric 60 on-screen in their curly stylised logo. ITV ended up importing “60 Minutes” and screening it late 80s on overnights.
massy on 23 July 2025 @ 9pm
I’ve submitted changes to Wikipedia, IMDb and tvdb so they should all be correct now.
Steve Williams on 28 July 2025 @ 8am
I have an (almost) complete run of Radio Times from 1983, and that strike-bound edition from December is quite something, a bizarre collection of fonts and huge gaps on some listings pages where planned pictures didn’t make it to whatever nuclear bunker they were typesetting it from. It’s the only issue which bills it as “Sixty-Minutes”, seemingly an issue produced under very challenging conditions.
The issue from the end of November covering The Five Doctors with the Doctor Who cover was the first affected by the strike, which is why it wasn’t in the otherwise full run I have, and why when you see it on sale it’s often at a ridiculous price because it had such a low print run.
John J. Hoare on 28 July 2025 @ 12pm
Two things:
a) I hadn’t even noticed the dodgy layout of the Radio Times in that strikebound issue, despite it being plainly apparent in the two pictures above.
b) I did mention the change in The Guardian’s layout – lowercase for the programme titles, etc – but I assumed it was just a redesign. No, that change is ALSO because of the strike, if you go back further, the television pages revert back to the other design!
Steve Williams on 28 July 2025 @ 8pm
In Tony Currie’s Radio Times Story book, the chapter on the early eighties is called “Diminished Form”, so frequently did RT apologise for it being published in that manner due to numerous strikes. He also says “the words ‘diminished form’ do not adequately describe the issue of 10th December”, so eccentric is its layout.
There was a national printers’ strike in November 1983 with pretty much all papers affected in some form and at least one day when no papers were printed at all. Indeed, there’s an episode of Match of the Day from November 1983 where Jimmy Hill promises an extended look at the full football results “in the absence of newspapers”. That was one of the first episodes of MOTD after it returned from their own extended strike that autumn – where the Beeb showed the Montreux episode of Three of a Kind unbilled in its place, as seen on this site just a few weeks before! Everything’s connected!
Steve Williams on 28 July 2025 @ 8pm
Here are some more pictures from that bizarre-looking RT – https://bsky.app/profile/skillagesteve.bsky.social/post/3lv2eplt4x22p
Stuart on 30 July 2025 @ 6pm
The back of the DVD says 12/12/83 so someone at BBC Worldwide, as was, looked it up correctly
John J. Hoare on 30 July 2025 @ 9pm
And Mark Lewisohn also got it right in the Radio Times Guide to Comedy. (There are very few dates wrong in that tome, I believe. The only one which springs to mind is the pilot for A Bit of Fry and Laurie.)
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