TISWAS with Robert Plant
1981
1981
This is.......bizarre. But very British.
'Tiswas' ('Today Is Saturday: Watch And Smile') was a Saturday morning kid's TV show that ran in the UK from 1974 to 1982. In the clip posted below, the female hostess is Sally James; the mustached man is co-host Gordon Astley.
It was not at all unusual for British rock stars - including the Clash, Queen, Duran Duran, the Who, Genesis, and Sting ('which town [in America] was Stewart Copeland born in ?') - to come onto the show to promote their projects, as well as participate in the hijinks.
Some acts would film sketches for later airing. From 1980, here is a surreal clip of The Pretenders singing the TISWAS 'Bucket of Water' theme song..........and then dousing each other ?! When they appeared on set, of course, Pete Farndon, Martin Chambers, and Chrissie Hynde wound up getting pie-ed............
[The show apparently places special emphasis on the 'Midlands' region of the UK, but I'm not sufficiently familiar with Brit culture to know the significance of this.]
In this episode from 1981, the tiny set is overwhelmed with kids and adults who are eating cereal and toast (presumably with marmalade on it).
Robert Plant (!?) is the guest star, who, to his credit, seems to take it all in good fun, even the pie-throwing. Also with him on the set is Cozy Powell (the stage name of Colin Trevor Flooks), a well-known drummer in the UK music scene of the 70s and 80s. At the time this episode was taped, Plant and Powell were working on the former's first solo album, Pictures at Eleven (1982), although both Powell and Plant play it coy when Sally James asks for an inside scoop.
I can't fully grasp the Britishness of the show's content, such as the boys with slogans written on their bare chests (likely would not pass muster nowadays), or Plant's shoutout to the 'Queen's Head Sports and Social Club', or the congratulations to 'Anne Dooley and her husband Bob Welsh on the birth of their baby boy', but I gather they would make sense to Brits.............?
As a Brit old enough to remember Tiswas, I can report that there's no particular significance of the British Midlands region other than that it was (and largely still is) an unglamourous and often neglected part of the country. Most studio-based TV programmes would have been made in London, so Tiswas was making a point of going out into the 'real' world. The show was very much 'down with the kids'. Mostly mayhem, in fact.
ReplyDeleteThe content of those shoutouts again won't have been significant. It was just a continuation of the tradition of people sending in requests to radio DJs so that they or their friends or family would get the thrill of hearing their names on air. That was considered fun back then. We must have been desperate for entertainment.