DON’T BLAME THIS SLEEPING SATELLITE [493]

As soon as I realised the cover date, I knew I had to take it. I had come across an eBay listing for a TV listings magazine where many of the programmes listed were never broadcast or never made.

Once it arrived, the only portent was in a corner of the contents page: “Readers of BSB TV Month will be aware of the merger between BSB and SKY which has resulted in the formation of a powerful new force in British television – British Sky Broadcasting. Unfortunately, news of the merger was announced too late for the exciting changes to be incorporated in this month’s issue.”

This merger was announced on 2nd November 1990, which I have talked about previously [https://www.leighspence.net/2023/10/did-we-fly-to-moon-to-soon-418.html], but on screens, it would appear as a takeover. The cover date of the magazine was 1st December 1990 to 1st December 1991 – British Satellite Broadcasting’s Now, the current affairs and arts channel ceased broadcasting on 1st December 1990, followed the next day by the Galaxy entertainment channel, with any programmes saved being folded into Sky One and Sky News. BSB’s competitor with MTV, The Power Station, would eventually end in April 1991, while their functionally-named The Sports Channel and The Movie Channel would continue under Sky branding.

You wouldn’t know any of this from reading “BSB TV Month”. The image of BSB contained within it is of a very bullish broadcaster ready to put on a show for the coming Christmas, ready to build on its successes into 1991, but the background story of the ruinously expensive launching of a satellite, getting dishes onto people’s homes, and then forcefully competing with Sky leading to an impasse and merger, creates the hindsight that renders the entire enterprise as hubris. What is worse, many of BSB’s shows were never kept following the merger, so all I have of these are the listings in this magazine.

Galaxy opened up each weekday morning with their children’s programming block, Galaxy Club. Its idents showed four human-sized letters with legs that spell CLUB, but the magazine tells us they have names and personalities: noisy Clive, quiet Lucy, bossy Una and brainy Benjamin. They are rarely on screen long enough for this to matter. Its flagship shows were “Teenage Mutant Hero Turtles”, renamed in the UK to avoid references to ninjas; “Kid’s Court”, its version of the Nickelodeon dilemma-solving show, hosted by Andrew O’Connor; and “Playabout”, an analogue to the BBC’s “Play School” featuring (now Baroness) Floella Benjamin. Also seen during the day would be soap operas, like CBS’s continuing shows “The Bold and the Beautiful” and “The Young and the Restless”, alongside BSB’s own “Jupiter Moon”, a sci-fi soap set on a space station university, and produced by former “Crossroads” and “The Archers” producer William Smethurst – this is just about the only BSB show ever to be released later on DVD.

Now opened each morning at 8.00am with “The Day Today”, a straightforward news round-up now only notable for how Chris Morris and Armando Iannucci used that name four years later for their satirical show – BSB’s own satire was on Galaxy at 10.30pm each night, in the oddly-named “Up Yer News!” Both shows were fifteen minutes in length, and a lot of similarly short shows appear all over Now’s schedule twice a day: cookery show “Plat Du Jour”; a show simply titled “Parenting”; topical interviews in “V.I.P.”; consumer show “You Can Do It”; and viewer write-in discussions with “Now Listen”. Perhaps their brief length was to try and catch their audience at various times, and to fill up the remainder of the hour left when Selina Scott’s current affairs show, “First Edition”, Sir Robin Day’s “Now Sir Robin”, Ann Leslie’s “Answer Time” and Geraldo Rivera’s chat show ended after forty-five minutes.

BBC Worldwide and Thames Television launched UK Gold, the first channel essentially dedicated to repeat broadcasts of old favourites, in 1992, but until then, Galaxy filled spaces across its evening schedule with BBC sitcoms like “Are You Being Served?”, “Till Death Us Do Part”, “The Young Ones”, “Porridge” and “Dad’s Army”, with “Doctor Who” and “Grange Hill” shown at the weekend. More current imported comedy shows also featured like “Night Court”, “Parker Lewis Can’t Lose”, “Murphy Brown” and “Kids in the Hall”, described as “Python for the 90s”. Drama would be older BBC shows Like “Secret Army” or newer imports like “Hill Street Blues”, “Hotel” and “China Beach”. Completing the “something for everyone” effect was evening quiz show “One False Move” and “31 West”, an entertainment show similar to how BBC One begins each evening with “The One Show”. Of particular note is Saturday night’s “The Happening”, a cabaret hosted by Jools Holland from London’s Astoria, its atmosphere perhaps feeding into his “Later... with Jools Holland” on the BBC. 

For the record, The Power Station, while opening each weekday morning with “Power Up with Chris Evans”, the radio DJ’s first TV show, includes a “Power Hour” of different genres each day, chart shows also by genre, a youth culture magazine named “Sushi TV”, and a heavy emphasis on live concerts in the evening, ranging from Faith No More to Rick Wakeman and Kenny G – its mix appears a bit more VH1 than MTV, if that still makes any sense.

So far, so good. “BSB TV Month” assumes you are buying the magazine because you are already watching the channels – there is no explanation of how to obtain the service, or how much it costs, for people wanting to find more, apart from enticing existing subscribers to opt into The Movie Channel for an extra £8.99 per month. (It seems that the standard subscription cost for the decoder box and other four channels was around £12.99 per month, on top of the initial £250 installation cost via Comet stores.) The rest of the magazine’s advertisements aim upmarket, with the new Ford Orion saloon, Pioneer hi-fi systems, the Lego Technic range and Fisher Price, while a company in Wales is selling a box to broadcast your decoder box’s signal to other TVs in your house, something apparently illegal if the signal is over 10mW in strength.

If BSB had reached Christmas Day unscathed, what would they have broadcast? Bill Murray in “Scrooged” adorned the front cover of “BSB TV Month”, its lunchtime showing on The Movie Channel followed by “Time Bandits”, “The Adventures of Baron Munchausen” and “Crocodile Dundee II”. Now, extending its weekend arts programmes into Monday, would have showed a ballet of “Sleeping Beauty”, and Placido Domingo leading Verdi’s opera “Il Trovatore”. Galaxy, meanwhile, were showing their regular programmes alongside Christmas specials of “Porridge” and “Steptoe and Son” – this would also have been the plan for Boxing Day. The BBC didn’t show them that Christmas, but neither were they showing “Up Yer News!”

WE HAD IT WITH YOUR DISCIPLINE [223]

I recently read "Live From New York," an oral history of "Saturday Night Live," filled with anecdotes about making, and almost ruining, a TV show that has become a cultural institution in the United States. "SNL" has only just begun showing in the UK, on Sky Comedy – previously, it could only be seen in sections officially posted on YouTube, and when other channels occasionally showed compilations of old sketches. Despite this paucity, everyone is almost expected to know what “SNL” is, and its hold on the landscape of US comedy.

"SNL" is a ninety-minute mix of comedy sketches, stand-up, and music, aired on NBC since 1975. The first episode had only about five sketches, and the second had just one, but the quality of the performance and writing meant the other "variety" elements, which included short films and the Muppets, were edged out in favour of the "Not Ready for Prime-Time Players," initially Dan Ackroyd, John Belushi, Chevy Chase, Gilda Radner, and Jane Curtin, later joined by Bill Murray. 

They starred in what has since been characterised as a "comedy college," crafting their future stardom. They were expected to help write their sketches, perform them live, and put in the hours of preparation necessary to achieve this, most notoriously in an overnight rewrite of the show into every Wednesday morning that requires even the guest host to attend, regardless of whether you are Alec Baldwin, Tom Hanks or John Goodman – as of February 2020, these examples have presented seventeen, nine and thirteen times each, so they were all aware of what was required of them, and they kept coming back.

As the original stars left, the new class came in: Harry Shearer, Eddie Murphy, Billy Crystal, Martin Short, Julia Louis-Dreyfus, Jon Lovitz, Robert Downey Jr. (yes, for a year from 1985), Damon Wayans, Mike Myers, Ben Stiller, Rob Schneider, Adam Sandler, Will Ferrell, Jimmy Fallon, Seth Myers, Chris Farley, David Spade, Chris Rock, Sarah Silverman, Tina Fey, Amy Poehler, and so on. All of American comedy over the last forty years, particularly those coming from comedy groups like The National Lampoon, Second City, The Groundlings and the Upright Citizens Brigade, has six degrees of separation to "SNL" like no show in the UK has managed, unless you count appearing on "Have I Got News for You."

However, the above people have only achieved greater fame after leaving "SNL," prompting a constant raid for new talent. From a business point of view, taking your old characters with you as you leave - "The Blues Brothers," "Wayne's World," "Coneheads" - is even worse for NBC, and when you are a TV network that no longer has the likes of "Friends," "Will & Grace" and "The Office," you need all the help you can get. The comedy college needed to start its own graduate programme.

Reportedly, from 1999 onwards, the contracts for new "SNL" actors, usually up to five or six years anyway, state they can be taken out of the show by NBC at any point after their second year, and be put into a pilot for a NBC sitcom - the actor can refuse the first two pilots, but must accept the third, all while putting themselves up for up to three roles in films produced as spin-offs to "SNL".

Few results from this set-up have reached the UK. The film "Mean Girls," produced by "SNL" creator Lorne Michaels, and written by the show's former head writer, Tina Fey, was released in 2004. Two years later, "30 Rock" appeared, a sitcom written by and starring Fey as the host of a show like the show she left, named after the building in which her old show is based - that it was also well done was purely down to talent, including Alec Baldwin again. It took until 2019 for another “SNL” cast member to have a high-profile series, when the BBC showed “Shrill,” starring Aidy Bryant.

The rest has stayed mostly in the US: "MacGruber," a 2010 parody of "MacGyver" starring Will Forte, who later starred in the sitcom "The Last Man on Earth"; “Portlandia,” a sketch show starring Fred Armisen; the expansion of producer Michaels into weekdays with "The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon" and "Late Night with Seth Myers," and numerous other things that are due to come out, or were previously abandoned, like “Mulaney,” “Up All Night” and “Sons & Daughters,” a sitcom unrelated to the Australian soap opera.

Looking at the earlier list of alumni, Eddie Murphy only returned to the show as a guest in 2019, upon the release of his “comeback” film “Dolemite is My Name,” having hated the show by the time he left in 1984; Adam Sandler and Sarah Silverman were fired; and Julia Louis-Dreyfus and Robert Downey Jr. were not given enough to do, only becoming stars after they left. Furthermore, they all had contracts that allowed them to choose what they did next, for good or worse.

Many of the sketches from "Saturday Night Live" are worth watching on YouTube, particularly anything involving Matt Foley, Stefon, Debbie Downer, or Christopher Walken. However, the live nature of “SNL,” and the inevitable corpsing from some actors – particularly Jimmy Fallon, when he was there – may leave you hankering for something more carefully crafted.