Perfect Night In: Bank Holiday Special

As a special Bank Holiday post, here's the modern eejit take on Channel 4's recent Perfect Night In series. It's not a definitive list of the best telly ever, objectively or from a modern eejit perspective; rather a personal choice of what would make a great night's viewing (though, admittedly, it'd be rather a long night).

Let's start with channel idents. Well, they're the first things you see, aren't they? These are two classics and, though decades old, both seem really vivid and distinctive, now that every channel is going for the same kind of mini-lifestyle film (the BBC one is evidently taken from the close of programmes - hence the stirring anthem!):





OK, so onto the programmes proper. Early evening, so time for this:



Really charming stuff, and can you imagine a theme tune like that for a kids' show nowadays? We was really spoiled then.

Speaking of theme tunes:



and you won't enjoy the full majesty of anything like again that if the BBC have their way.

If we're still early evening then there has to be a episode of Doctor Who. Hopefully one like this:



Or this:



Or this:



Marvellous stuff! Now, maybe a bit of music after that excitement. Ah, good old Top of the Pops. That's where I first saw this, my earliest exposure to visual effects:



and where you could conceivably see something like this:



Or this Pops classic:



And, finally, some serious strutting:



True Reithian eclecticism. After that sugar rush I'd be tempted to take things down a gear with an episode of HTV's Robin of Sherwood. Amazingly we managed to follow the stories without any whooshing signposts in those days. As we're over on ITV we'd have to have some adverts. I love this one (and in the course of searching for that, found this, which gives a rare showcase to my spiritual home):



Staying on the commercial channel, let's slip in an episode of The Sweeney; maybe even the one featuring these two, shown here in one of the simplest and funniest routines I've ever seen:



Turning back to BBC1, I'd probably now go for an episode of Clocking Off - excellent and overlooked series of a few years back - or the eternal Potter classic, The Singing Detective; as epic and sumptuous as a nineteenth century novel.


After that, it's got to be something life-enhancingly stupid - this, say, or this.

Then, for an intentional laugh, an episode of the sublime Porridge - one of the Christmas specials, for a treat.

Flicking over to Channel 4, this was where I got my cinematic education, in the days before people started selling their houses on telly. I might never have heard of Terence Davies were it not for the screenings of his heartbreakingly-beautiful films Distant Voices, Still Lives, and The Long Day Closes in the early 90s - both of which are infuriatingly still unavailable on DVD.


'Infuriatingly still unavailable on DVD' leads me naturally to A Very Peculiar Practice, the second series of which suffers this fate. A funny, unsettling and melancholy series, product of a distinct authorial voice; who would have guessed it would be all bodices and bustles for Andrew Davies after this?


Ahh, Rose Marie! To finish, pint in hand and big bag of kettle chips aplenty, three slices of Saturday night telly, full of weekend glamour and silliness:







There we go. Proof, if proof be need be, of what a marvellous thing telly is - and what better way to spend a rainy British Bank Holiday than watching some, or all, of that?