Closedown

TV Cream Towers is shutting its doors for good. Yup, this blog is embarking on its second move in just over six months, which will no doubt result in even more blogrolls and favourites’ lists becoming out-of-date.

It’s not quite the same as the last move, though. This time it’s less an eviction, more an amalgamation. TV Cream Towers is finally moving into its spiritual home: the TV Cream website itself. More precisely, the brand new TV Cream website, which is looking perilously like nearing completion.

You’ll find this blog, replete with its entire archive (from both Blogger and WordPress incarnations) sitting at the top of the front page. Hope to see you over there. Meanwhile there’s just time to look at tomorrow night’s programmes, were this 19 and a half years and a fair few less ugly confrontations with the demands of growing up and the real world ago:

For now, at least, goodbye.

Think of a number (between 82 and 100 (not 99))

It’s another bank holiday, and the enterprise TV Cream Towers launched on the bank holiday before last still isn’t finished.

Unlike present-day Blue Peter, the meeting of self-imposed empirical targets is still valued at TV Cream. If anyone can help nudge up our sequential song-based count from 1 to wherever (preferably 100), feel free to add suggestions to the Spotify playlist.

There’s a piece of cardboard – cut out of a cereal packet with the word RESERVED written on the plain side – sitting on number 99, but everything else between 82 and 100 is more than available.

TV Cream counts from 1 to…?: slight return

Nominations for our musical stepladder have dried up, understandably, so in a shameless attempt to revitalise interest, there is now a Spotify playlist in existence of songs from 1 up to 40.

It’s somewhat different from the original list, partly because some songs aren’t on Spotify, partly because some of those nominated, such as 26 Years by Menswear, are awful (as the nominator of that song himself implied). The need to compile a playlist that people might actually want to listen to, rather than one derived solely on an empirical basis, makes obvious sense.

Anyway, this new list contains some delights. There’s a nicely apt prologue courtesy of They Might Be Giants; Cab Calloway’s band pleading for a Fifteen Minutes Intermission and their boss graciously conceding it would be good for their “palpitating embochure”; Leroy Carr pledging to turn over a brand new leaf in the Nineteen Thirty One Blues; and Brigitte Fontaine pompously intoning  J’ai 26 ans. Fuck knows what it’s about, but it sounds lovely.

The list gets sequentially more obscure, though hopefully no less appealing. There are a couple of harmless acoustic noodlings for numbers 14 and 28; a bit of George Fenton film soundtrackage for number 34; and a washboard for number 38.

Best of all, perhaps, is the version of #9 Dream by A-ha. Here’s a textbook example of how to take a dreary bag of wank and turn it into something fresh and quite charming (not least by ditching that wretched “John! John!” bit). It somehow fittingly segues into Loudon Wainwright III’s achingly sad 4 x 10.

Feel free to add your suggestions to the playlist on where to go from here, specifically how to get to Fifty Ways To Leave Your Lover.

It’s a bank holiday, so TV Cream is making a list

About 14 or 15 years ago, Kevin Greening did a thing while standing in for Danny Baker on Saturday morning Radio 1. He spent the entire three-hour show trying to compile an inventory of songs whose titles counted upwards in numerical order from 1 to 100. A bell was sounded every time a listener successfully advanced the list one step towards its goal.

Whether 100 was actually reached by the time the show ended is a matter of addled memory. But it seems an empirically whimsical task for the TV Cream community to tuck into on a bank holiday. To get things started, here’s 1 to 20:

Chant No 1 (I Don’t Need This Pressure On), Spandau Ballet
It Takes Two, Liz Kershaw and Bruno Brookes
Three, Massive Attack
Work Is A Four Letter Word, Cilla Black
Five Get Over Excited, The Housemartins
6 Underground, Sneaker Pimps
Seven Tears, Goombay Dance Band
Eight Miles High, The Byrds
Number 9 Dream, John Lennon
10 Years Asleep, Kingmaker
11 O’clock Tick Tock, U2
Rainy Day Women 12 and 35, Bob Dylan
13 Steps Lead Down, Elvis Costello
14 Years, Guns and Roses
Fifteen Minutes, Kirsty MacColl
Sweet Little Sixteen, Jerry Lee Lewis
Seventeen, Let Loose
18 Carat Love Affair, The Associates
Nineteen, Paul Hardcastle
Twenty Flight Rock, Eddie Cochran

Suggestions, please, on how to get up to, ooh, shall we say 50?

On the Spotify

Hello, I’m Norris McWhirter, and I’ve just popped out from a meeting of the Freedom Association to tell you that TV Cream has relaxed its rules about its Spotify playlist.

From now on, certain artists will be allowed more than one song. I’m calling these artists Norris’s Notables. They are people like Paul McCartney, Elton John and David Bowie, who have distinguished themselves in the field of songwriting, and who, like me, have been around a bit and have dubious political affiliations.

You’re welcome to submit others for inclusion in this category.

And if you ever want to know in which country you can find the world’s fastest land mammal - look it up in a fucking book.

The sounds of TV Cream

Commercially manufactured noises have already been dealt with. What about those non-musical, non-vocal sounds that should be recognised for somehow forever embodying an aural dose of Creamage?

For starters:

The sticky crackle of a coloured page being prised apart from a black-and-white page in a copy of Radio Times.

The clunk-thunk of the lock when pulling shut an external door from the inside of Inter-City 125.

Early morning birdsong combined with the purr of the electric battery in a milkfloat.

The low, warm hum of an overhead projector.

The indeterminate murmur of a radio station lightly clouded in a fog of static on the Medium Wave.

A guiro being scraped in a primary school assembly hall.

The ping of a bell attached to the front door of a corner shop.

Repeated strikes of the ignition inside a Calor Gas heater.

A bean bag being sat upon.

The click of a trundle wheel being pushed around a playground.

Any more?

Sounds incorporated

Thanks to everyone who has added to the TV Cream Towers Spotify playlist.

Seeing as it how it’s all done under the cloak of anonymity, it’s not clear how many ‘everyone’ means. It could just be one person. But thanks all the same.

Like with most things to do with TV Cream, there are a couple of rules governing the playlist that perhaps should have been specified earlier, rules softly spoken but ruthlessly enforced. So, in case you’re wondering why your choice/s may have been deleted:

a) Only one track per artist is allowed.
b) No crap choices or ‘ironic’ selections are permitted. This is an uber-sincere playlist. Instant Sunshine aren’t on there for a joke.

Meanwhile, like they used to do in music magazines back when they were good, here is a list of 10 tracks from the playlist that, if there was a TV Cream Towers office, would be in heavy rotation on the cassette player by the overhead projector:

1) Something’s Jumpin’ In Your Shirt, MALCOLM MCLAREN AND THE BOOTZILLA ORCHESTRA
As with Norway and the Christmas tree in Trafalgar Square, the man should be able to bequeath an album to the nation every 12 months.
2) Danke Schoen, RAY CONNIFF AND THE SINGERS
Never ‘his’ singers. Ever the gentleman.
3) The Word Girl, SCRITTI POLITTI
Like having a bubble bath that lasts from 1980 to 1989.
4) Amnesia (Theme from The Roxy) BANANARAMA
Like walking down the best street you ever walked down when you were growing up.
5) The Pink Panther Theme, BOBBY MCFERRIN
Better than Mancini’s disco version.
6) Golden Brown, THE KING’S SINGERS
Better than the Stranglers version.
7) Wednesday Jones, STEPHEN DUFFY
Proving that in the hands of a master, even something like Chelmsford shopping centre can sound glorious.
8) Ordinary Angel, HUE AND CRY
Never let it be said they know Foucault about writing a good tune.
9) Merrily We Roll Along, MASSIMO FARAO
The wig-out begins 45 seconds in.
10) Never Say Never Again, THE FLEMISH RADIO ORCHESTRA
The second best Bond theme ever, now minus added Lani Hall.

What’s that noise: slight return

The TV Cream Towers Spotify playlist is now public property. Anyone can add a track, or a hundred tracks, of their own choosing. Maybe you know of a duet by Terry Wogan and Kate O’Mara that masquerades under a wry nom de plume. Perhaps you’re in possession of the moniker that represents a rare Fiddler’s Dram/Heaven 17 collaboration. Or maybe you just know of a good tune the TV Cream family (and that includes you) should hear. Pipe up.

What’s that noise?

Where might you find Instant Sunshine rubbing crisply-starched shoulders with Haircut 100? Prefab Sprout divided by mere seconds from Rolf Harris? The Art Of Noise staring across a single track listing at Bernard Cribbins? Why, on the TV Cream Towers Spotify playlist! Thomas Dolby, John Cale and Manhattan Transfer: together at last.

“Stephen!” “Just coming!”

It’s the couplet that’s sending the most search queries to this blog. It’s the neologism that’s very very very very slowly gaining a bit of a toehold in the national consciousness. Recent aural sightings – if such things are semantically possible – include a Ben Folds gig, a screening of Blade Runner at the IMAX in London, and a New York museum. It’s even being written about in Word magazine, for heaven’s sake.

The thing started almost eight months ago (note how the call-and-responses have already undergone a pith-inspired contraction). It’s high time, i.e. past the point when it could have been genuinely original, to think of how TV Cream can properly join in. We’ve been banging a drum for Adam and Joe’s 6 Music efforts for ages. Might their be a way to take this one step further and stage some kind of Cream-esque STEPHEN! intervention, nay happening?

This isn’t a plea for a kind of joyless Chris Morris/Victor Lewis-Smith hijacking of another TV or radio programme; rather, an imaginative and witty STEPHEN! stunt that could cap the ones essayed to date. Something outside Broadcasting House one Saturday morning? A pre-arranged communal STEPHEN! in one of the nation’s great outdoor spaces? A bit of original video or tunesmithery? Any and all suggestions – and perhaps more importantly participants – welcome.

Anyway, in case you’re still wondering, here’s how it all started.

Poll axed

It’s high time to see how TV Cream’s predictions for 2009 turned out. Who’d have thought that, as Big Ben chimed midnight back on New Year’s Eve, time would race so stoically yet falteringly onwards to 12.01am. Yet it did, and if ever there was a moment for looking back in a context not involving a BBC4 theme night rooted in a grim 60-minute Mark Lawson-piloted interview, now might well be it.

What, then, in our poll of likely events for 2009, proved to be on the money?

FORECAST: After spending much of 2008 trying to end Jonathan Ross’s career, journalists at the Media Guardian will spend much of 2009 trying to avoid losing theirs by generating copy based on numerous stories about Jonathan Ross.

TV CREAM 2009 MATRIX DATABANK SAYS: Ding!

FORECAST: The Dr Who fan community will accuse the programme’s makers of “breaking” the franchise by choosing a new Dr Who who isn’t a) older than them like David Tennant b) a Shakespearean actor like David Tennant c) in possession of bug eyes like David Tennant d) David Tenannt

TV CREAM 2009 MATRIX DATABANK SAYS: Ding!

FORECAST: Radio Times will run a billing on its ‘Today’s Choices’ page which ends by saying, with brazen laziness, ‘DVDs were unavailable but expect x, y and z’.

TV CREAM 2009 MATRIX DATABANK SAYS: Ding!
The City Uncovered with Evan Davis, Wednesday 14 January, 9pm BBC2
‘…DVDs were unavailable but expect hand-waving, twinkling smiles and lucid analysis.’

FORECAST: Patrick McGoohan will die, and someone will try and claim he invented the TV series Lost.

TV CREAM 2009 MATRIX DATABANK SAYS: Ding!

FORECAST: The Daily Mail goes fucking mental.

TV CREAM 2009 MATRIX DATABANK SAYS: Ding!

FORECAST: TV Cream Towers will compose a blog post on the premise that the year is over when it’s only half-way through January.

TV CREAM 2009 MATRIX DATABANK SAYS: Zero points. ‘Compose’ implies some thought goes into this thing.

Pod almighty

TV Cream’s second podcast is now available to download. It’s 70MB and lasts around 45 minutes.

Already you can see that heed has been paid to one of the main observations concerning the first podcast. That’s right. The running time has been brutally scythed by SIX MINUTES. In climates like these, everyone’s got to make cuts, and TV Cream’s podcast department* is no exception.

The theme of the podcast is Christmas. As such the show comes from a suitably seasonal location, and, not uncoincidentally, also features suitably seasonal features.

Among the sultana-shaped items protuding on aural sticks from this mpeg-encoded christingle are:

- an investigation into what makes the perfect Christmas song. SPOILER: it isn’t Fairytale of New York.

- a review of some correspondence received about the previous podcast, and a listen to some of your suggestions for theme sandwiches.

- a salute to Val Doonican and his festive television spectaculars.

- another attempt to make the facts amazing conceit work as a quiz.

There are also numerous guest appearances from the voices of familiar celebrities, though not like the B-side of Do They Know It’s Christmas, and last but not least a musical contribution from an inimitable personality – and you should try imitating him! Here is a clue to their identity.

*no such department exists.

Touched by the hand of pod

TV Cream’s second podcast will be available to download in just a few short days, and conveniently for the time of year, it’s all about Christmas.

By way of a preview, here’s a, erm, preview.

For pod’s sake

TV Cream’s first stab at a podcast is now available. You might have already seen the blurb on the site’s homepage; if not, you can download the MP3 here. It’s 75MB and, once saved to your own computer, will sit snugly in any media-playing device and run for about 54 minutes.

54 minutes of what, you may be wondering, before venturing to cock an ear, or even two.

Well, it’s a journey into stereophonic sound of all forms. Over 100 pieces of music turn up, some in unusual contexts, some in surprising hybrids, some written and performed by our own hand, some with annoying talking and shouting over the top.

But it’s not merely a glorified playlist of TV Cream favourites.

For starters, there’s a very special guest, who performs live in the studio. There are a few of what we’re calling theme sandwiches, delectable helpings of aural sustenance served in unlikely and, as it turns out, controversial taste sensations. There’s also a bit where two themes go head-to-head in what we’re not calling theme wars, the war of the themes.

The bulk of the podcast, however, is taken up with four exciting features. Here are some liner notes for anyone interested in lines:

Scene-setters

This is a complicated item that listeners may find hard to understand, so let’s see if it can be made simpler. There have been examples of music used on TV programmes that act not merely to compound title sequences with clusters of melodic and harmonic notation but contextualise and to an extent hypertextualise the subsequent transmission to a degree that prepares the viewer in both a moral and mental capacity for what they are about to ingest and thereby heightens those physiological sensations nurtured by latent synaptic pulses charged by the notion of cause and effect. These pieces of music are called scene-setters in that they cultivate and orientate our expectations around a particular manifestation of emotion thereby setting us up for an eventuality or scene that is shortly indeed almost immediately to unfold.

It’s also got loads of good TV themes in.

A Stack of Macca

The 10 best songs by Paul McCartney.

You’ve Made Your Musical Bed, Now You’ve Got To Lie In It

A guide to those ubiquitous tunes and samples that crop up as incidental music on innumerable documentaries and reality shows.

Riddle-me-Ron Grainer

Thrill to the sound of one man presenting another man with some Facts Amazing about the bloke who did the theme to Dr Who and challenging him to say whether they are true or false.

And that’s it. You can tell us what you think about the whole roustabout by emailing scene@tvcream.co.uk, or if you prefer to have your right to reply in public, bung your comments up here on this blog.

Lastly, by way of an unhidden extra, a couple of rejected attempts at podcast artwork. Can you see what we did here?

Change, m’dear

Welcome to the hitherto-titled Digi-Cream Times blog, now with added new-nameness and general all-round gumption.

You’ll see that all the archives have made it across from the old address. Well, almost all.

A few YouTube videos seem to be lost forever, including a rare clip from Teldorado, the 1992 special edition of Wogan with our man jetting off to Los Barcos to meet “the people who will be sharing their lives, and yours, twice-weekly for a very long time”; an extract from Clive’s Sinclairs, in which Clive James takes a pithy look at the history of home computing (“I’d heard that budding entrepreneur Alan Sugar was in town and wanted to pick my brains urgently”); and Larry Grayson performing ‘Shut That Door (It’s Awfully Cold In Here)’ on Top Of The Pops.

All the posts have now been assigned categories, listed in the sidebar on the right, so you can more easily browse and nitpick the blog’s tiresome recurrences.

The old blog will stay online, at least for the time being, so any referral links floating around will not suddenly become dead.

Meanwhile for anyone who missed it, here are The King’s Singers performing a special musical aide memoire, explaining the demise of Digi-Cream Times and the birth of TV Cream Towers.

It was the last thing to be posted on the old site, and hence makes little sense out of context over here, but since when have questions of sense and context bore any importance to the writer of this blog?

Take it away, chaps!

If it’s music you’re after

Advance notice of a new TV Cream pet project, which you’ll be able to hear from 1st November. Yup, a good two years or so after everyone else started, the very first TVC podcast is on its way.

Competition tiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiime

Courtesy of blog denizen John Rivers and the good people of Harper Collins, TV Cream has five copies of Lord Denis Norden’s new autobiography, Clips From A Life, to give away.

It’s a fine tome, expertly showcasing the man’s anecdote-hewn approach to life. There’s a predictably detailed glossary and index at the back, and photos including a publicity poster for Looks Familiar done up to look like a musical hall handbill proclaiming ‘By Popular Demand Switched From Matinee To After News At Ten!’

To win a copy, here’s the question:

What year was the first It’ll Be Alright On The Night broadcast?

Send your answer to digicreamguide@tvcream.co.uk – the first five correct ones will win the book.

Correspondence on this subject, as they say, is now closed. I’ll post up the names of the winners later.

For imediate distributon no Embargo

A press release arrives at TV Cream from drownedinmedia.com, bearing news that “legendary Broadcaster [sic] and five times Sony Award winning DJ, David ‘Kid’ Jensen, celebrates a milestone in British Broadcasting [sic] this year with an amazing 40 years service in the industry.”

It’s not clear why it’s been sent round today, given the actual anniversary is “on the 26th November”. Still, it’s always good to have a reason for looking back at Dave’s life and “the bands he’s met along the way”.

One of them appears to be somebody called “Gary Newman”. Apparently this person achieved great success and had a number of hit records. Ditto “Marc Bowlan”.

The press release also mentions a few “legendary broadcasters” Dave has worked with down the years, “such as the late and great Kenny Everet”. There’s also a list of the Kid’s “contemporaries still working in radio today”, including “Emperor Roscoe”. Sybil seems to be doing alright for herself, then.

Finally we’re treated to a couple of anecdotes from the man himself, including one concerning a guitarist called “Jimmy Hendrix”. There’s also a rundown of some of Dave’s TV work, which makes no mention of The Roxy whatsoever, but does acknowledge “the first 3 annual Brit Awards (known as the British Rock and Pop Awards)”.

ENDS

Notes to the Editor:

For more information about this blog post please contact Some Bloke In The Street Who Can’t Be Arsed And Who Doesn’t Know How To Write The Names Of Famous People Let Alone Cross-Check Them On A Computer.

The anatomy of TV Cream

Here’s TV Cream to the power of ten. For uber-viewing pleasure, watch the high quality version.

TV Cream’s Olympic theme

In this week’s Radio Times, Damon Albarn and Jamie Hewlett are interviewed about their “ground-breaking” titles for the BBC’s Olympic coverage. In the process they have a good moan about previous sequences which featured “a bunch of people running about in slow motion with Olympic torches – boring”.

Well, they’re wrong, because that’s precisely what Olympic titles should be about, not a load of cartoon animals with silly faces. In fact, for them to be any good, Olympic themes should follow a very strict format and never stray too far away from a few core components.

It’s all very well, you’re thinking, TV Cream laying into yet another target. Just what, you counter, should go in the place of Albarn and Hewlett’s effort?

Fair point. So here is an alternative. It’s been written with the following essentials in mind:
a) a hummable main melody
b) a moody bit at the start where the Beeb would show images of the sun rising, an old man doing exercises in a city square, someone sipping tea, an Chinese Army officer sharing a joke with a small child, etc.
c) an extended middle bit which would only be available on the accompanying 7″
d) plenty of space for highlights from the Games to be incorporated into the mix

It’s also, naturally, in your best Vangelis/Paddy Kingsland/Simon May style.

Now all it needs are lyrics for that limited edition tie-in single.

Let the Games begin.