Other TV

It’s odd, how some shows fade from the common memory.

Take How Do They Do That?, a magazine show which aired on BBC1 between 1994-97. You do not require a long explanation of what the point of the show was: the format of the programme is contained entirely within its title. Just ask that question a few hundred times per episode, give some answers, and you have yourself a television programme.

These days, the show mainly known for two things. Among TV presentation fans, it’s known for this behind-the-scenes look at the making of the BBC2 idents. And among Red Dwarf fans, it’s known for this behind-the-scenes look at the model effects for Series VII. And that’s pretty much your lot.

But I have one very, very strong memory of the show. Something which stuck with me for 25 years. The other day, I decided to see if anybody had uploaded it anywhere, not expecting to be rewarded. And blow me down, somebody else had remembered it too.

Here’s the day – the 24th January 1996, although the explanation part of the clip comes from the following week – when the How Do They Do That? studio was flooded.

Usually, when writing about my TV memories, I make an effort to note down what I remember about a show before watching the resulting video. This time, however, I was caught off-guard. I never really expected it to be online, let alone to find it so easily. So my memories of watching this stunt in 1996 are now thoroughly blended with me watching the video in 2021, and they’re difficult to disentangle.

But there is one moment I 100%, absolutely do remember. And that’s the point 36 seconds in, where we cut from studio VT to film.¹ It blew my mind when I first watched it, aged 14. It still fairly blows my mind now. Suddenly, with that one shot change, we see the barriers between different kinds of television breaking down. Magazine shows just aren’t supposed to turn into films on a whim. But this one had. I couldn’t quite believe what I was seeing.

I’ve always had a love for television which send genres crashing into each other. Red Dwarf is a sitcom crossed with science fiction. Ghostwatch is a drama, done as a live documentary. And here is a normal magazine show, crossed with a disaster movie. There’s nothing that is more designed to send my brain flying off in weird directions than that. It’s exactly the kind of TV that I adore. The fact they actually then went behind-the-scenes in order to tell us how it all worked was the icing on the cake, but that wasn’t the thing I truly loved about the sequence. I loved the initial genre-bending, legitimately odd piece of television.

And this is exactly the kind of thing which TV finds it difficult to do in 2021. No evening magazine show on BBC One is going to have the money to go off to Pinewood Studios and shoot a sequence like this in their water tank. With a few honourable exceptions such as The One Show, evening magazine shows are an endangered species full stop these days, let alone anything else. The budget for television to go out and do spectacular, stupid things like this just isn’t there any more, at least for this kind of show.

Which makes me sad. Because this is one reason why I loved the kind of TV that was around when I was 14. Not because I was 14. Not because of rose-tinted spectacles. But because truly odd, spectacular things like this could happen on a Wednesday evening on BBC1.

And I miss it.

With thanks to KillianM2 for the original YouTube upload. Their YouTube channel has loads of great stuff, that you could – and should – get lost for hours in.

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1. Sadly a little obscured by the upload, as the VT sequence has been folded down to half the temporal resolution it would have had on broadcast. But you still get some of the effect. ↩

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tv memories

Earlier this year, I wrote about how I traced down an early childhood TV memory. It seems to be quite the year for it, because blow me down, somebody’s helped me track down another one. And today’s story involves a certain Paul Daniels.

Not his famous Halloween stunt from 1987, which I have precisely zero memory of, and almost certainly never saw. (That’s the kind of thing which makes you feel cheated of a really good TV memory. Luckily, I fully remember Ghostwatch, five years later.) No, my memory of Paul Daniels is rather more low-key.

Although, like many of my early TV memories, it involves an explosion.

*   *   *

It’s around 1990, and I’m about nine years old. Could be a couple of years earlier or later. Paul Daniels is doing a card trick on the telly, as he is wont to do. But this is a slightly unusual card trick. Some kind of strange machine is spitting out cards at Paul. What is he doing – guessing which cards will come out? I can’t quite remember.

But something wrong. The machine keeps spitting out cards faster and faster. Paul is concerned, and tries to stop it. But it’s to no avail. The machine explodes, leaving Paul with a cartoon-like blackened face. He looks straight to camera, with a look of resignation, and throws the remaining cards away. End of routine.

I’m intrigued… and mildly disturbed. Electric things going wrong are already a slight fascination with me. I remember nothing of the rest of the show, but this one moment is seared into my memory. And I never saw it again.

*   *   *

Well, until now.

This is one of those memories where I made a few half-hearted searches over the years, but never made any serious effort. (There is a lot of Paul Daniels on YouTube.) I occasionally mentioned it, but had kind of resigned myself to never seeing it again.

Until I idly mentioned all this on Twitter… and hello, Timothy Roger Talbot came up with the goods. Here it is, from the very opening of the episode:

There are clearly many things I didn’t remember, or remembered wrongly – I’d even forgotten about the fundamental conceit of a “spelling machine”. But it came flooding back as soon as I watched it; this is definitely the programme in question. I got a Proustian rush when the cards came flying manically out of the machine, and when Daniels blows the flames out; images I couldn’t quite dredge from my head until now, but were clearly buried deep within my skull.

As for the routine itself, I’m the world’s worst person at figuring out magic tricks. From my exceedingly untrained eye, presumably the following is happening:

• The cards Paul puts in the machine at the top are nothing to do with the rest of the trick, and are never seen again.
• The dial at the front is pure misdirection, and also does nothing.
• The pure power of suggestion gets the required words out of the audience member. The obvious rhyme for bow is “cow”, and the obvious rhyme for mouse is “house”.

It’s a fun piece of television, and certainly the kind of thing you don’t get much of on BBC One any more, unfortunately. Though let me extremely clear: the reason this particular routine stuck in my head is because it was something electrical which exploded, which I found faintly unnerving.

So, the final question: when exactly was this broadcast, and how old was I? The video says the show is from 1988, and luckily, BBC Genome made it very easy to track down the exact episode, as luckily it specifically mentions the spelling machine. Unfortunately, The Paul Daniels Show routinely got a repeat on BBC2 – which is, incidentally, where the video above comes from. So I either saw it on its original BBC1 showing on the 30th January 1988, or the BBC2 repeat on the 11th August 1988. Both these showings are earlier than I thought; I would have been aged 6 on the first showing, and 7 on the repeat. I’m slightly amazed that the memory still lingers.

I’m not going to end this post with “now that’s magic”, because I simply have too much respect for you.

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tv memories