An evening of classic BBC children's programmes

A night (well, couple of hours) of classic shows on BBC4 on the 21st December:

Grange Hill episode being shown on BBC Four on 21st December? Fingers crossed this is true #GrangeHill #CBBC #BBC pic.twitter.com/LKVnv3fUUu

— GrangeHill1978-2008 (@GrangeHillYears) November 29, 2015

I'm surprised no-one has mentioned this - an evening of classic BBC children's programmes and a documentary on BBC Four, 21st December. The schedule is within the link.

http://www.transdiffusion.org/2015/12/01/andy-pandy-to-zebedee

It was mentioned at the bottom of the last page; it's bound to be an interesting night.

From a bit of research using the episode descriptions on the BBC website: http://www.bbc.co.uk/bbcfour/programmes/schedules/2015/12/21
I reckon these are the original tx dates:

7.35 Play School - 20/10/76
8.00 John Craven's Newsround - 06/12/73
8.10 Blue Peter - 04/11/74 (same episode that BBC Four showed in May 2012 on Television Centre night)
8.35 Grange Hill - 21/02/86

A shame they didn't dig out a few gems beyond the obvious staples of CBBC.

Looking at On This Day I can't see anything particularly significant that Newsround would have covered that day, so I wonder why they chose that episode.

Interestingly, this popped up this week

https://www.facebook.com/cbeebies/videos/903465176355452/

Could Andi and Edd be doing (pre-rec) continuity on BBC Four, or is that wishful thinking?

Two episodes of Newsround exist from December 1973, that and the week later. To my mind, the week later might have been more interesting because it would have been the first day of the three day week, but never mind. It doesn't need to be significant anyway, the excitement of it is because it's an example of normal everyday TV.

They're showing episodes of Play School and Newsround that haven't been shown for forty years, and Grange Hill in primetime on a FTA channel, so to be honest I think you would have to be incredibly mean-spirited to find fault in this schedule.

I believe Newsround wasn't routinely recorded, the early episodes that survive do so by virtue of the tape still rolling after Blue Peter, so that might be the oldest intact episode they could find?

Richard Marson's Blue Peter Inside The Archive makes a note of all the Newsround episodes that exist from its first decade. As you say, it mostly survived by leaving the tape run after Blue Peter, but that does actually mean there are quite a lot that exist - four from 1972 (the earliest of all, from October, was actually deliberately recorded as an example) and seventeen from 1973, which certainly compared to many other kids shows from that period is extremely good (probably only Blue Peter itself and Play School beat it). In addition in its early days it wasn't on all year round, or five days a week either. What it does mean is that more or less all the episodes from the seventies are from Mondays and Thursdays (usually Thursdays, it wasn't on Mondays for a few years).

So they could have shown some others, but they decided to show this one. Maybe they picked it at random. They're all very much the same, really.

I hope not. As three out of four are from the 1970s, then let's have Bruce Hamill or David Allen OOV and the globe please

I imagine that clip was recorded at the same time as their continuity pieces for CBBC's birthday celebrations.

What a strange programme Play school is.