Telegantic Megavision was a 90s kid's show that went behind the scenes on various TV sets as well as explain how things in TV were done and other things such as what the cue dots were for.
Yes, it wasn't very good at all, though, especially combined with its other role of being a Saturday morning programme. The concept was that Telegantic Megavison was a studio complex where all television and films ever were made, so alongside making the gunge in Terror Towers and showing a film's Electronic Press Kit, they also had to use extreme lateral thinking to include the other Saturday morning staples, so they would say they'd "made" the cartoons and the usual soap stars and pop stars would be there "in rehearsals" for a made-up show. It was the most contrived programme ever made, and within a few weeks all that went for a burton and it became just the most bog-standard Saturday morning show you'd ever seen.
I always remember an episode of Faking It, where TV professionals had to guess who was the newcomer directing segments for a shopping channel. I remember they spotted the culprit by realising they were wearing brand new trainers - in an attempt to look 'trendy'.
There was a bit of a hoo-haa over TV fakery at the turn of the century, you had the Vanessa fake guests business and also a Cutting Edge about fathers and daughters had to be dropped right at the last minute when they found out two of the subjects weren't father and daughter at all, and were just stringing them along to get on the telly. But they managed to salvage that by doing another Cutting Edge about how they did it.
While idly going through Youtube I came across old episodes of a TVS programme called TV Weekly. For those who don't know TV Weekly was a programme that looked behind the scenes at the industry. The last episode can be found here
TV Weekly was always a bit of a treat on a day off school, it was a bit like a televised version of the TV Times in its bright and breezy tone. In the early days there was a weekly nostalgia spot with Barry Took, which span off into the book 40 Years Of British Television, which is a pretty ace book all told, I've often referred to my copy over the years. I always remember them covering the deregulation of TV listings in 1991, with Bridget Rowe, the editor of the TV Times, unveiling the cover of their first all-channel issue. Elsewhere on YouTube you can also see them covering the ITV franchise announcements in October 1991, with Anne Diamond's old mate Greg Dyke being interviewed.
As far as I know, it initially ended with TVS at the end of 1992, because in January 1993 it was replaced by a similar show called The View with Loyd Grossman. All I remember about that was that they did a feature about how Sharon had become the catch-all name for unsophisticated women on TV, and launching a search for "Britain's Most Sophisticated Sharon". But then TV Weekly returned as an indie production and carried on for a few more years.
Slightly related, I was thinking the other day about those archive clip shows like Windmill and Boxpops and how important they were to me because they were the first places I saw things like Monty Python sketches and bits of old comedy shows that weren't repeated at the time. Today anything similar would be about nostalgia (e.g. The TV That Made Me), but these went out at the end of Children's BBC on a Sunday morning and were just as much about introducing these clips to kids for the first time.
Well, I would absolutely agree with that, my dad and I used to absolutely love Boxpops, I saw so much stuff on there I'd never seen before. During the Pops repeats from the late seventies and early eighties there were a number of songs I heard, and performances I saw, for the first time on Boxpops.
Boxpops ran for four series between 1988 and 1992, but there was a bit of a radical revamp for the third series, it was clearly being aimed at a much older audience, which I found terribly sophisticated. The episode I always remember is this one -
https://genome.ch.bbc.co.uk/schedules/bbctwo/england/1990-12-23#at-11.05 - because it included two clips that absolutely stuck with me. One was the appearance of Leigh Bowery on The Clothes Show, who I had never seen before and who absolutely terrified me (I would not recommend you Google him in the presence of small children) and the other was a hugely memorable clip from QED or something when a schoolgirl talked about a day where she'd woken up only a bit later to realise it was actually a dream, so got up again and went to school only to then wake up again and realise
that
was actually a dream, and so got up again and went to school only to then wake up again and realise
that
was actually a dream, and so endlessly on. I've spoken about this on Twitter before and loads of people remember it, it really stuck with people.
As you can see, that episode went out on 23rd December and a few years ago someone on Twitter said they were a researcher on that episode, so I complained at them for ruining Christmas.
After Biteback ended on BBC1 in the late nineties, the production team did two other series on late night BBC2, the first was called On Air with David Aaronovitch -
https://genome.ch.bbc.co.uk/schedules/bbctwo/england/1998-01-21#at-23.15 - and when that ended it became another show called The Viewing Room -
https://genome.ch.bbc.co.uk/search/0/20?order=asc&q=%22the+viewing+room%22#search. But neither of those really caught on, unsurprisingly in that slot.