ITV in 'praise' shock

It's been a while. Hello.

So, what's new? Well, I'm still getting abuse from Russell Howard fans, who have an insane level of hero-worship for him, so nothing new there. Other than that, business as usual.

Apart from one thing. A few weeks ago, I praised ITV.

I know, I couldn't believe it either.

To celebrate 30 years of Children's ITV, the CITV channel ran an Old Skool Weekend, and as you can imagine, I was a bit bloody happy about it. For all of its many, many, many faults, ITV was responsible for some of the best children's television during the 80s and 90s, eclipsing Auntie Beeb almost entirely. It was generally more anarchic, less staid, and tapped into the psyche of kids in a way that Peter Simon's Double Dare could only dream of.

"Where am I?"
"You're in a room."

A few things became obvious during these two days of brilliance. Firstly, child actors used to be less drama schooly, to coin a phrase; they were believably normal kids, bereft of the plague of jazz-hands camera-mugging that infects the airwaves nowadays, such as Dani Harmer with her unfeasibly large, orange face. We were treated to two episodes each of Woof!, from opposite ends of the show's run,  Children's Ward from around 2006 (by which time the general quality of CITV had diminished somewhat), Knightmare (from the last series where they started pissing around with the formula, brought in fledgling CGI and tried to make it look like an Amiga role playing game), and the wonderful Press Gang, Steven Moffat's first television work. How jarring to hear mild swearing and to see a dead drug user in a children's programme. The late, lamented Cosgrave-Hall's Dangermouse and Count Duckula, the 90s remake of The Tomorrow People, and the very bleak Dramarama, a children's Twilight Zone made on a children's department budget, the episode 'Back to Front' being a highlight of the whole weekend, with a very dark, downbeat ending. Largely superb stuff overall.

I have no idea who two of these people are.

However, how do you choose from three decades of programming to cram into a microscopic schedule? There were some notable omissions, like Your Mother Wouldn't Like It and its spin-off, Palace Hill. Round the Bend was absent, as were Bad Influence and Telebugs, and seeing as it was on a weekend, an episode of Number 73, Get Fresh, Ghost Train or Motormouth wouldn't have gone amiss. A couple of episodes of Fraggle Rock ended up as filler material, and it was the US version that was never shown over here, being as the localised UK version starring Fulton Mackay and John Gordon-Sinclair has been wiped from the master tapes, just like the Beeb used to do with Doctor Who. Seems like a literal waste of time to me.

The choices did seem a little odd at times. As I mentioned, Knightmare was represented by a couple of latter-day episodes rather than the early stuff when it was at its height of popularity and quality, and Press Gang was bookended by its first ever and last ever episodes. For nostalgia-seekers like me who found themselves getting drawn into the episodes, it's a tad cruel to deny us everything that happened in between.

And there's the problem. Facebook was awash with people of a certain age clamouring for more, talking over the whole weekend about their memories of these gems of broadcasting, but it ended as quickly as it started. That's it, no more. The following day's schedule on CITV just highlighted how utterly shit their modern day programming is, and how overlooked the entire era is. Nostalgia channels will show 'grown-up' shows from decades past, but there is a huge gap in the schedules for nostalgic children's channels.

When TV was good.

Still, kudos overall to ITV for daring to make this weekend possible, with entire episodes of both forgotten and fondly-remembered classics dominating the arse end of the channels list for a couple of days. If the BBC attempted anything like this, it would take the form of a 1-hour listings show on BBC Three narrated by Robert Webb, a countdown of brief clips interspersed by talking heads segments with Fearne Cotton, Jack Whitehall and Barney Harwood taking the piss out of, rather than celebrating, the shows. Credit where credit's due, for one brief weekend, innocence without irony won the day. More please.