First on this tape, for reasons surpassing understanding, Cirque du Soleil: Saltimbanco. Now, I’m as impressed as the next man with the skill of the performers with CdS, but when I last went to Las Vegas (it was work related, honestly) I think there were five different CdS shows running at different hotels on the strip. How many different ways can you dress up juggling contortionists?
Well here’s one way – as a tribute to perennial children’s nightmare Mr Noseybonk.
Whilst their acrobats are impressive, their clowns still aren’t funny.
After this, recording continues for a short time into an episode of The Commish and then switches to the end of the news.
There’s weather, and I’d take this in place of the weather right now any time.
There’s a trailer for Raising Cain, the end of which I looked at a little while ago.
There’s also a trailer for Flying Doctors: A 999 Special.
Then, French & Saunders are in the Wild West.
“You’ve booked the church. You’ve booked the vicar, and it’s not a woman.” “No, thank goodness.”
Next, they do the OJ Simpson trial but as Star Trek.
Dawn plays Judge Ito
There’s a Klingon Warrior in place of OJ.
Lenny Henry is Chris Darden and Jennifer Saunders is Marcia Clark – both names misspelled in the sketch’s opening titles.
Clarke Peters plays Johnny Cochrane and Patrick Barlow is billed as ‘Shapiro’ but his hairstyle suggests they’ve confused Robert Shapiro with Robert Kardashian. Which is a shame because Kardashian is a much better Star Trek name.
There’s a behind the scenes on the latest Jane Austen adaptation, featuring Rosemary Leach
Gary Waldhorn
Sue Perkins
and Mel Giedroyc
BBC Genome: BBC One – 8th February 1996 – 21:30
Recording switches to the end of Rab C Nesbitt featuring a guest appearance from Sylvester McCoy
There’s a trailer for Red Dwarf VI
Then, there’s an episode of The Fast Show. They open with the offroaders, which makes me laugh after the Top Gear Off Road special we had a few days ago.
There’s a guest appearance from Julia Fordham
BBC Genome:BBC Two – 9th February 1996 – 21:30
After this, there’s a trailer for a new series of the Fast Show.
Then there’s the start of The Real McCoy, before recording switches over to Channel 4.
Then, we have what I believe is the very first episode of TFI Friday. It opens with a sketch where Chris Evans has to identify a death – of Top of the Pops.
Music from Ocean Colour Scene (who do the song that, for some reason, I actually associate with TFIF).
Cathy Lloyd is a guest.
Music from Skunk Anansie
Music from The Circle
At Home with Chris and Cher
Shed Seven
Cathy Lloyd chainsaws some Pringles
Dawn French
More music from Count Indigo
Ronald Fraser is the Lord of Love
After this episode, there’s an episode of Beavis and Butthead. I never really found them funny. And yet I like Office Space and Silicon Valley.
The tape ends with the start of the film The Song of Bernadette.
Adverts:
- Daily Telegraph
- Bold
- Veno’s
- Batchelors Pastamania
- Persil – James Nesbitt
- Ambrosia
- Our Friends Electric
- trail: Tomorrow on Sky
- trail: The Commish
- Sky TV Guide
- McDonalds
- Vaseline Intensive Care
- Organics
- Batchelor’s Cup a Soup
- Dairylea
- Argos
- Ragu
- The No 1 Love Album
- trail: Getting Even With Dad
- trail: Sliders
- Danepak
- Tate & Lyle
- Johnson’s Clean & Clear
- Bird’s Eye Potato Waffles
- British Airways
- Colman’s of Norwich
- Parfum de Peperami
- Jeyes Parozone
- trail: Beverly Hills Cop
- trail: Beverly Hills Cop III
- trail: Sightings
- Citroen AX
- Organics
- Johnny Mnemonic in cinemas
- Knorr Pastaria
- Our Friends Electric
- Royal Mail
- trail: Schindler’s List
- Virgin Radio
- Pass The Vibes
- Heat in cinemas
- trail: NBA Live
- Bodyform
- Peugeot 406
- Carling Premier
- Carbon Monoxide Poisoning
- Doritos
- Nissan Micra
- Commercial Union
- Status Quo – Don’t Stop
- Sleeping Beauty on video – only available for 100 days
- Just for Men
- Teletext
- Pass The Vibes
- trail: Matinee
- Peugeot 406
- Digital
- Biactol
- Esso
- Commercial Union
- British Airways
- trail: The Big Breakfast
- trail: Board Stupid
- Galaxy
- Hula Hoops
- Nike
- Carling Premier
- The Best … In The World Ever
- Galaxy
- trail: NBA Live
- Oxy 10
- Heat in cinemas
- Capital Radio
- Modern Apprenticeships
- Pantene
- Volvo 850
- M&Ms
- The No 1 Love Album
- Kellogg’s Sustain
- Diet Coke
- Party Time
- trail: Island of Dreams
VHiStory 
That’s Kathy Lloyd, not Cathy Lloyd (it annoys me why it’s the C variant for some reason).
Goodness – just look at the weather. Can’t agree with you enough on that one. A little part of me died the day they replaced that with the first of the vomit-inducing movable monstrosities they use today. IIRC, shortly after introducing the updated map, vast numbers of complaints were received from Scottish viewers aggrieved by the fact that the map was tilted i n such a way as to foreshorten Scotland and magnify the south of England. The Beeb caved, and the map was tilted a lot less afterward.
I would be interested to know which song Skunk Anansie played – ‘Weak’, I would imagine. Paranoid and Sunburnt is a minor masterpiece. They never really seem to have got their dues as a band, but they really were a going concern for a few years in the 1990s – that album went gold, and they headlined Glastonbury in either 1996 or 1997 as I recall. The lyrics were about as subtle as a brick through a window, but the hooks were amazing – you could play along to that album forever.
Sylvester McCoy steals the show in that Rab C episode. The pathos of the show was on full display in that one.
And another Red Dwarf trailer – you spoil us, sir…
My favourite Skunk Anansie moment was when Mark Goodier accidentally played an expletive-filled track from their LP at teatime at Radio 1, and had to abruptly take it off after five seconds and about three fucks. And then a bit later he read out messages from listeners asking him to play all of it.
That is indeed the first TFI, and includes two bits they never did again, the first being a debate between two members of the audience about whether Noel’s House Party was down the dumper. The second bit was a trademark Danny Baker-style routine where he goes out into the street to “test” whether a joke about the England cricket team is funny or not. It’s exactly the same style as the sketches Dan used to do on his chat show, things like Three Hundred Years Of Adult Magazines, and I always used to love these little sketches, because the Bake had a very distinctive writing style and the sequences would always involve lots of cutaways and quick cuts and silly captions. When he wrote the Comedy Awards he used to do sketches like that as well for Jonathan Ross to do at the beginning. I can recognise a Bake script from a mile away. I wish they did more of those on TFI.
There were loads more bands on it at the start, Count Indigo was part of the very short-lived easy listening revival at the time but that record only got to number 59 in the charts and that was the end of that. I think in the second show Edwyn Collins was on because Keep On Burning had only entered the chart at number fifty and Evans specifically invited him on to perform it to get it a bit higher up the chart.
This really was Evans’ imperial phase, he was absolutely boiling over with ideas. On Good Friday that year they were supposed to do a compilation of TFI, it was billed as such in all the papers and he’d announced it the previous week. But then on the radio that week he was coming up with all these things he wanted to do on telly that week, and then later on I think he met Noel Gallagher and said he’d come on, so they ended up doing a live show that week, from Evans’ house. It really felt very exciting. But ran out of steam extremely quickly.