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ClassicTV gold on youtube (February 2007)

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SW
Steve Williams
Jamie and Zoe's departure ended Live and Kicking as we know it. Steve and Emma in my opinion was the worst and worse than the 2000 reboot.

Live and Kicking tried to lure viewers back in January 2000 with supergirlie and the Simpsons repeats but when ITV gained rights to Pokemon (and Digimon too) all bets were off.

Personally I think that the 2000 reboot of Live and Kicking was fairly good but it was too late by then and like it as well as Smtv.


I would probably agree with this, the 2000 revamp wasn't very good but at least it was a proper attempt to move the brand along a bit, the 1999 revamp was just really boring. It was really strange, actually - I've said this before that I think the feeling in the Beeb at the time was that under Zoe and Jamie the show was skewing a bit too old and it was getting a bit hard to manage with them appearing in the papers all the time, so they considered it was important to aim it squarely at children again. That's a laudable aim, but they did it so badly.

It just seemed a really dull show. I suppose Steve and Emma looked alright on paper because, like Steve, Jamie wasn't that famous when he joined and Emma had been on MTV so she seemed quite cool like Zoe, but they probably tried to replicate the dynamic a bit too much so they were just like Zoe and Jamie but not as good. I suppose it's a bit like Nick and James replacing Trevor and Simon, they just weren't Trevor and Simon and so doomed to failure.

But the whole show seemed to just fall flat, there was no comedy team for the first time in over a decade and it didn't seem to have any kind of swagger. I don't know if there was a budget cut or anything but it didn't seem to be as much of a spectacle as it used to be. And there was probably some merit in them skewing younger, but they still carried on booking people like Elton John and Sting, so it was a bit of a weird mix that wasn't appealing to anyone. I think Chris Bellinger had also stood down as Editor, replaced by Angela Sharp, but she'd been on the production team for years and had vast experience so it shouldn't have been so bad. Maybe it would have been better if they'd got someone totally new in as Editor?

I'd been watching SMTV over the summer but still faithfully switched back to Live and Kicking in September (I was in my twenties at this point, of course), but it was so tedious I soon switched back. As you say, keeping it going over the summer was a masterstroke.

The 2000 revamp at least tried to do something different and not just replicate the old format to diminishing returns, but it just looked second-hand as it was so blatantly trying to just ape SMTV. And of course we already had SMTV doing that, they'd have been better off going for a completely different audience who wanted something a bit more involved.

My comment on his following was based on chrismoyles.net being around since he started early breakfast on Radio 1 (when it was called MoylesWorld) and the forum starting only a few years after that - indeed there’s a 9/11 thread on there and lots of downloads of full shows from around that time - but maybe saying he’s always had a dedicated following rather than a large one would have been more accurate.


Yeah, he'd certainly made a splash in his early days on Radio 1 - he was promoted to daytime very quickly and there was a period in early 1998 when he stood in on pretty much every daytime show in quick succession. He had a cult following very quickly.

I remember listening to Mark and Lard on the day, I don't think there was any mention until the 2.30 news and then after it Mark said "Well, in the light of that news we'll just be playing music for the rest of the show".
Revolution and VMPhil gave kudos
SW
Steve Williams
This is a top upload from Sir Neil Miles...



The last twenty minutes of Breakfast News from Friday 5th January 1990, followed by, er, more news and then the opening link of holiday morning CBBC.

And welcome to the weekend on Breakfast News with reports on child pornography (as one of the commenters points out, beautifully scheduled for just before kids shows) and ivory trading in the last ten minutes on Friday. I know people say Breakfast is a bit trivial these days but this is incredibly relentless, I know in Morning Glory John Stapleton talks about doing Breakfast Time immediately before it and saying it was "endless packages about the economy in Timbuktu", and you can see where he's coming from. It might as well be Newsnight, and there's no effort made to present anything more suitable for the potential audience.

It also includes the business news, and I know when I was younger I found it all totally unintelligible but assumed at one point, when I grew up, I would have to understand all about the Hang Seng and the Dow Jones and all that. Turns out I don't, and business news these days is just about shopping.

The CBBC bit is interesting, as it's a rare sight of Lisa Jones who only presented over Christmas 1989/90 and didn't get invited back. I don't recall thinking much of her at the time. It was an funny Christmas on CBBC, mind, because Simon Parkin wasn't present for most of it* because he was in panto, and there were a load of CFF films in the schedule, as indeed there is here. And it carried on until 5th January, as you can see, when I was long back in school and they'd clearly run out of material.

* If you look up this day on Genome you'll note Simon Parkin is billed as presenting, which I remember struck me as very strange at the time given he hadn't done the rest of it, but because I'd gone back to school I never saw who did present it. So thanks to Neil for taking off the tight shoes 29 years on.
SP
Steve in Pudsey
Interesting to see what I assume is a meeting taking place in the newsroom behind Jilly Carter. Never seems to happen at NBH!
RD
RDJ
I think there’s designated rooms or spaces for team meetings in NBH so that gatherings in the newsroom are kept to a minimum.

It doesn’t make for great telly to have the newsreader read the news in front of the backs of men in jackets.
BU
buster
I think shortly afterwards they tidied up the end of Breakfast News so that the last regional news bulletin was included in it, and the 9am "update" was done by the BN presenters. I definitely recall BN ending in quite a hurry when I was waiting for But First This to start in the holidays, as they had to do a much briefer style of bulletin at 9am than they did for the rest of the programme.

On the subject of Breakfast News, there is a period in the late 80s where it is running 0700-0835, with something like The Flintstones filling out the rest of the time to 9am. 95 minutes is a ridiculously short running time for a breakfast show...were there cuts or was it just a product of the new format and decision to stop competing with TV-am?
SW
Steve Williams
On the subject of Breakfast News, there is a period in the late 80s where it is running 0700-0835, with something like The Flintstones filling out the rest of the time to 9am. 95 minutes is a ridiculously short running time for a breakfast show...were there cuts or was it just a product of the new format and decision to stop competing with TV-am?


I think it was the latter, seemingly they decided that instead of having one show do everything, Breakfast Time would do the news and nothing but, with all the feature content as part of other shows. Open Air did a lot of the lighter chat that Breakfast Time used to do, and of course for a while they had Watchdog at 8.40 every day. Presumably it was also an attempt to start the daytime schedule earlier to get one jump on ITV.

It's a bit like how, in the seventies, the Radio 4 controller Iain McIntyre thought all the news programmes were too long and that if they were shorter they'd be more concise and incisive and not have to do whimsy to fill the time, hence he cut down The World at One and PM, and cut Today into two half-hour chunks with Up to The Hour in between which would do all the lighter stuff that Today had been doing. Of course, everyone hated that and McIntyre was soon shuffled over to Radio 3, but you get the general idea with that.
RE
Revolution
JCB posted:
I wonder how differently things would've panned out if Zoe & Jamie had done another year on Live & Kicking? I'm sure SM;TV would've still made gains over the summer of 99 but had Zoe & Jamie returned that September I wonder if SM:TV's ascendant would've been quite so dramatic.

I think Ant and Dec make a point in their autobiography that when Zoe and Jamie called it quits they felt SM:TV could now be in a position to dominate. I believe SM:TV stayed on air over the summer which helped, but when they got Pokemon that was a biggie. It was cool, it was hip, you could build a sketch around it and the kids would watch.
JA
james-2001
At 3:58 into this video, a 1997-2002 era CBBC ident that I don’t remember seeing at all:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nedF4J43MAI

(Well worth going through the rest of the channel’s videos if you’re nostalgic for ’90s and ’00s children’s TV by the way).


I didn't remember it at first, but it seems to ring a bell the more I think about it. It can't have been used much or for very long though. Maybe some skunk fanciers complained about the stereotype Wink Razz

Going by the quality of some of the clips on that channel, looks like escapees from the BBC archive!
VM
VMPhil
Another upload from said YT channel. This L&K episode is already available in full on YouTube but I post this one as it’s a rare chance to see the updated titles in good quality widescreen and hear the remixed theme tune in stereo.

IS
Inspector Sands

I didn't remember it at first, but it seems to ring a bell the more I think about it. It can't have been used much or for very long though. Maybe some skunk fanciers complained about the stereotype Wink Razz

Possibly to do with concerns about children misusing aerosols?
RD
RDJ
I remember the skunk ident pretty well. I don't think it was overly rare. The rare one that I scarcely remember is the magician pulling his long johns through his hat.

Anyway, not wanting to turn this into the Live & Kicking Gold thread, but the channel in question has posted another intriguing Live & Kicking clip.

Did you know that Katy Hill's first tenure at hosting Live & Kicking was not in the 2000 revamp, and it even happened before Steve and Emma.

Katy Hill hosted one morning with Jamie and stepped in for Zoe as she was off ill that morning. Katy was a guest that morning so was drafted in as host at the last minute presumably.

AN
Andrew Founding member
This is a top upload from Sir Neil Miles...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NnvfuMAhm1s

The last twenty minutes of Breakfast News from Friday 5th January 1990, followed by, er, more news and then the opening link of holiday morning CBBC.

And welcome to the weekend on Breakfast News with reports on child pornography (as one of the commenters points out, beautifully scheduled for just before kids shows).

The trailer immediately before BFT is slightly more disturbing.

As you say BBC Breakfast News was ridiculously heavy during this era, even the last half hour of the show, of course now it’s gone a tad too far the other way. It’s no wonder why TV-AM did so well.

And you can tell it’s a very different era of children’s TV, when the first hour of fast paced holiday mornings is filled with what looks like a very stuffy film. And Andy and Lisa can just about drum up enthusiasm to introduce it, before not appearing again until 10am (after yet another news bulletin of course).

Don’t worry though, there would be even more fun for kids at 10:55 when ‘Five to Eleven’ pops up!

There is a clip of a much tidier link between Breakfast News and BFT here



I wonder if Simon remembers his co host here or has forgotten her like Lorraine Kelly has!
Last edited by Andrew on 16 July 2019 11:38pm

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