Here’s a mixed bag of things, starting with something familiar, UFO. This episode is The Psychobombs. Three people are summoned into the middle of nowhere by a UFO and programmed for something.
One of them stops Straker in his car, and after getting a lift, shakes him by the hand and pulls him half out of the car, and into unconsciousness. When he wakes up, he finds a letter in his car abut the imminent destruction of several top secret establishments.
One of the Psychobombs is Mike Pratt, from Randall and Hopkirk (Deceased).
Insert Obligatory Wanda Ventham screenshot here.
Christopher Timothy turns up in a Skydiver string vest in a very small role.
After this, recording continues for a short time, with the start of Robin Hood.
Then, recording switches to the end of Zoo Watch with Philippa Forrester and (sorry) Rolf Harris.
Then, there’s Agony Again, a sequel series for the fondly remembered (by me, at least) LWT sitcom from the early 80s.
Doon MacKichan plays a TV producer.
David Harewood plays a local councillor who appears on Jane Lucas’s daytime show. He also looks like he might become a love interest in future episodes.
The plot seems to be that she meets a homeless man, takes her into her home as an act of kindness, than he becomes her cleaner. Isn’t that the plot of the Seinfeld show that they pitched in the series?
It’s not bad, and Maureen Lipman is so good at comedy that she’s worth watching in anything.
BBC Genome: BBC One – 31st August 1995 – 20:30
After this, recording continues with the start of the Nine O’Clock News leading with more bombing in Bosnia.
Then, recording switches, and we get the end of French and Saunders, and the end of the magnificent Opera Classics sketch, possibly one of their greatest ever.
It also has the payoff of their continued references to Jane Asher.
Following this, we have Carrie on Hollywood, the first of two programmes in which the lovely (and deeply missed) Carrie Fisher looks at her home town. This episode is called Life and Love in LA LA Land. It looks at love and marriage, and how difficult it is to maintain either in Hollywood.
In the course of it she talks to her father, Eddie Fisher.
And her grandmother, Maxine Reynolds
Director and actor Penny Marshall
There’s a mind boggling sequence featuring a man who runs his own mail order sperm bank, and who processes his sperm donations (collected from the best minds in hollywood) in the front seat of his car.
George Lucas talks about his adopted family, two of whom he adopted as a single parent. His seems like the sanest voice in this entire documentary.
The section on people’s relationships with their dogs is less sane. One couple have a full funeral, complete with priest, and a poem written by the man, to their beloved swiss mountain dog. Luckily the programme knows this is a bit silly, as it goes into the credits with ‘I Will Always Love You’ by Whitney Houston, which made me laugh.
BBC Genome: BBC One – 31st August 1995 – 22:00
Recording continues with Proms 95, and a performance by the Scottish Symphony Orchestra. But the recording was cut short by a power cut, meaning they were unable to premiere a new piece of music, Tan Dun’s Orchestral Theatre II.
But we do get a performance of Tchaikovsky’s Romeo and Juliet Fantasy Overture, one of my favourite pieces of music.
Then, in place of the cancelled performance, there’s a performance from 1990 of The Confession of Isobel Gowdie by James MacMillan. Gowdie was a woman who was ‘wrongly accused of witchcraft’. I can’t imagine there were many women who were rightly accused of witchcraft myself.
It’s a bit modern. And one of those pieces that, when it finishes, the audience have to wait until the conductor ostentatiously puts his baton down before they can clap.
BBC Genome: BBC One – 31st August 1995 – 22:50
The tape continues with the start of a film, The Lion of Africa with Brian Dennehy and Brooke Adams. The tape ends during this film.
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