12-05-2022, 11:37 AM
Taken me a bit of time to reply to this one - what a lovely idea for a thread!
Like so many of us, my earliest TV memories are CBBC/CITV ones, but lots of that curiosity has been sated by various YouTube uploads over the years, so I've relived plenty of Studio A/Studio 9 CBBC continuity and early-00s Gas Street CITV continuity, enough to remember the general 'feel' of what you used to get on a weekday afternoon. Even big things that I remember like the 1997 CBBC move to Studio 9 is pretty well documented on YouTube.
There's the odd thing that I remember, like a birthday cards slot one morning (hosted by Josie D'Arby in my memory) when the sound didn't go out and they tried a couple of times but had to bail into the programmes. And I've no idea how accurate my memory is with that particular occasion (or, indeed, when it actually was within a period of about three years) - but most of the big stuff is there for me, when it comes to children's telly.
My own personal 'holy grails' are all related to Channel 4's cricket coverage. I'm a bit of an obsessive about it all (and it came at a really formative time for me - their seven years on air coincided with me being aged 7-13, so I was naturally going to remember it very fondly) and whilst I've got certain things recorded (most of which I've put up on YouTube), I wish that I had so much more.
I'd especially love to see an episode or two of the Saturday morning Cricket Roadshow once again - in my memory, it was a genuinely brilliant programme that hasn't been matched since (in terms of cricket coverage) - lively features, interesting interviews and pitching for the younger audience. I remember one in particular in 2002 that kept falling off air (at one point, it was off for so long that a filler was shown by pres), when they were opening a new cricket ground in South London that C4 had helped to fund (and you don't see Sky doing things like that these days). All a bit of a shame that the programme kept falling off air, but we did get to see Alex Tudor deliver the first ball on the new strip (which I do have footage of, but only for about 30 seconds!)
It's obviously all still in the archives, and bits of the highlights shows pop up on the ECB YouTube channel occasionally, but the long fills, the phone-ins at the lunch intervals, the Saturday morning Cricket Roadshow - they'll never pop up again, sadly, and very little seems to have been recorded or put up online.
I did have contact once with a C4 cricket fan account on Twitter (not long after I released an edited tribute to C4 cricket on YouTube) and they said that they had enquired about the archive, and it was available for purchase on a programme-by-programme basis (at a very expensive sum) and would I be interested in contributing to a purchase - sadly not for that cost!
Anyway, that's enough of that, and I know it's a bit of a niche interest, but for me it is all about the TV presentation from C4 cricket, rather than the action itself (which is easy enough to get hold of).
Shameless self-promotion further links, just in case anybody is remotely interested:
Said YouTube channel that has most of my recorded archive on it: https://www.youtube.com/user/madmusician91
An article I wrote about C4 cricket just before the 2019 World Cup Final: https://njfreestone.wordpress.com/2019/0...et-and-me/
Like so many of us, my earliest TV memories are CBBC/CITV ones, but lots of that curiosity has been sated by various YouTube uploads over the years, so I've relived plenty of Studio A/Studio 9 CBBC continuity and early-00s Gas Street CITV continuity, enough to remember the general 'feel' of what you used to get on a weekday afternoon. Even big things that I remember like the 1997 CBBC move to Studio 9 is pretty well documented on YouTube.
There's the odd thing that I remember, like a birthday cards slot one morning (hosted by Josie D'Arby in my memory) when the sound didn't go out and they tried a couple of times but had to bail into the programmes. And I've no idea how accurate my memory is with that particular occasion (or, indeed, when it actually was within a period of about three years) - but most of the big stuff is there for me, when it comes to children's telly.
My own personal 'holy grails' are all related to Channel 4's cricket coverage. I'm a bit of an obsessive about it all (and it came at a really formative time for me - their seven years on air coincided with me being aged 7-13, so I was naturally going to remember it very fondly) and whilst I've got certain things recorded (most of which I've put up on YouTube), I wish that I had so much more.
I'd especially love to see an episode or two of the Saturday morning Cricket Roadshow once again - in my memory, it was a genuinely brilliant programme that hasn't been matched since (in terms of cricket coverage) - lively features, interesting interviews and pitching for the younger audience. I remember one in particular in 2002 that kept falling off air (at one point, it was off for so long that a filler was shown by pres), when they were opening a new cricket ground in South London that C4 had helped to fund (and you don't see Sky doing things like that these days). All a bit of a shame that the programme kept falling off air, but we did get to see Alex Tudor deliver the first ball on the new strip (which I do have footage of, but only for about 30 seconds!)
It's obviously all still in the archives, and bits of the highlights shows pop up on the ECB YouTube channel occasionally, but the long fills, the phone-ins at the lunch intervals, the Saturday morning Cricket Roadshow - they'll never pop up again, sadly, and very little seems to have been recorded or put up online.
I did have contact once with a C4 cricket fan account on Twitter (not long after I released an edited tribute to C4 cricket on YouTube) and they said that they had enquired about the archive, and it was available for purchase on a programme-by-programme basis (at a very expensive sum) and would I be interested in contributing to a purchase - sadly not for that cost!
Anyway, that's enough of that, and I know it's a bit of a niche interest, but for me it is all about the TV presentation from C4 cricket, rather than the action itself (which is easy enough to get hold of).
Shameless self-promotion further links, just in case anybody is remotely interested:
Said YouTube channel that has most of my recorded archive on it: https://www.youtube.com/user/madmusician91
An article I wrote about C4 cricket just before the 2019 World Cup Final: https://njfreestone.wordpress.com/2019/0...et-and-me/
“First they came for the theme tune, and I did not speak out"