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New Print Article: The Birth of Teletext
A year on from my last published article, I’m back in the pages of Best of British with The Birth of Teletext.Ever since I first laid eyes on Pages from Ceefax back in the mid-1980s, I’ve been a little...
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Early Children's ITV Continuity Captured
I’ve been digging through some Betamax tapes this weekend and, as luck would have it, the first one I pulled out of the box had an absolute gem on it. And it came in the form of a rare clip of...
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BBC Select: A Failed Subscription Service
If, in 1987, you had been watching television very late at night, we’re talking post-closedown late, you could have stumbled across something very interesting on BBC2. To be precise, you would have...
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YouTube Pick: My Brother David
The tale of David Scarboro isn't one I was overly familiar with, but his short life and career on British television is, in itself, very much like the soap opera which defined his early fame. Full of...
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The Slow, Slow Start of BBC Video
I still remember the first BBC Video I got: Pyramids of Mars, the classic 1975 Doctor Who serial featuring Tom Baker. This was in 1987, and it meant a lot to a five-year-old who had only been on the...
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The Birth of Thames Television in 1968
Boasting productions such as The Bill, Minder, Man about the House, Rainbow and The Sooty Show, Thames Television produced some of my favourite television programmes of all time. And then there’s that...
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Winning a Lunch with Brian Cant in 1981
I’ve always been careful to ensure Curious British Telly doesn’t become a rose tinted, nostalgia-for-the-sake-of-nostalgia borefest - you know the thing, see all those Channel 5 documentaries about the...
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Book Review: Opening The Box of Delights (2024 Edition)
The festive season is upon us once more and, of course, that means The Box of Delights will be getting its yearly airing for countless fans of vintage British television. And 2024 marks 40 years since...
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Archive Tape Digging: December 2024
It's time for another look into the increasingly distant past with another edition of Archive Tape Digging, the feature which digs up old programmmes, mind-bending adverts, and curious slices of...
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Prospects - The Face: August 1985
One of the earliest programmes covered on Curious British Telly was the much underrated Prospects. Since that article, written over 12 years ago when I barely knew what I was wittering on about,...
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Up Our Street
I doubt many people remember Up Our Street. In fact I'd bet my bottom thrupenny bit that fewer than a handful do. But that's the ephemeral beauty of the past - not everything has to be remembered.More...
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Yes, There Was a Mid-1980s US Pilot of The Wombles
"The series will outsell The Muppets series of the late 1970s" Vincent C Piano, CEO of Mizlou Programming, 1986Over the years, there have been numerous U.S. adaptations of British TV shows. Some, such...
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The Curious Tale of Bristol Channel
Once upon a time, community television in Britain was considered an exciting experiment, something that hadn’t been done before and could unite communities while fostering creativity. In hindsight,...
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5 British TV Tie-in Computer Games from the 8-Bit Era
The Playstation 5 is the pinnacle of modern gaming. With 16GB of RAM, an 8-core AMD Zen 2 processor, a frame rate of 120Hz and capable of displaying billions of different colours, it’s a formidable...
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Secrets Out
As a child, my hobbies were far from eccentric. I whiled away the hours collecting coins, obsessing about Doctor Who and engaging in spirited wrestling matches with myself in the privacy of my bedroom...
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Friday People
The unstoppable rise of social media, paired with the bloated growth of British television to just shy of three million channels, has meant celebrities are now ten a penny. Once upon a time,...
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The Sky-Fi Music Show
It never ceases to astonish me that, in Britain during the mid-1980s, you weren’t strictly stuck with just BBC1, BBC2, ITV and Channel 4 for your viewing options. While most of the country soldiered on...
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The Substack is Active Again
A couple of years back, I launched a Substack account for Curious British Telly, a sort of digital attic where I could squirrel away peculiar odds and ends of vintage British television - those...
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The Critics View of The Day of the Triffids
The Day of the Triffids is one of the finest examples of British science fiction on television. The performances are less acted and more inhabited, the atmosphere coiled tighter than a rationed gas...
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Tongits: The Thrilling Filipino Card Game You Need to Try!
Are you ready for an electrifying card game that'll keep you on the edge of your seat? Look no further than Tongits, the pulse-pounding Filipino favorite that's taking the world by storm! This...
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Shades (1982)
If you were a fan of post-apocalyptic nuclear fiction in the first half of the 1980s, you were absolutely spoiled. From The Day After through to Threads and onto When the Wind Blows, it felt as though...
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Teletext: Without it your set's not with it
Teletext has always had a peculiar hold over me - a pixelated siren call from a bygone era of cathode-ray wonder. In those dim, pre-internet days, it was a digital portal into a wider world of up to...
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GameZone: Your Ultimate Destination for Online Gaming Excellence
GameZone: Your Ultimate Destination for Online Gaming ExcellenceIn the ever-expanding world of online gaming, finding a platform that offers both excitement and fairness can be a challenge. Enter...
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VHS and Betamax Tapes Appeal
When I first started digging through video tapes in 2016, the chances of securing collections of 1980s recordings via Ebay, Gumtree, Facebook Marketplace or kind donations were pretty decent. However,...
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Teetime and Claudia
I never thought I’d get to watch enough of Teetime and Claudia to write an article on it. Aside from one episode which was on YouTube - and half an episode I managed to dig up - it looked as though...
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