Fact #156086
When:
Short story:
A new UK tv show, The Tube, has its first broadcast, on Channel 4. Acts appearing live include Dexy’s Midnight Runners and The Jam.
Full article:
Malcolm Gerrie (producer, The Tube) : In 1976 I was head of English and drama in a school in a village outside of Sunderland. We broke the mould by putting on Stardust, and the producer David Puttnam came over from New York and persuaded me to leave teaching.
He told me there was a woman working out of Tyne Tees Television in Newcastle who was making waves. Andrea Wonfor was pioneering children's programmes but her obsession was what came to be known as youth programming. She thought this was an entire demographic that was ignored way before Janet Street-Porter was invented. She was fascinated about the work I was doing with teenagers. We were at the start of the boring 70s, so for a producer looking after children's programmes to be asking me about bands like the Sex Pistols and The Clash was remarkable.
Those seeds developed into one of the biggest music programmes of all time, The Tube.
There were rumours about a new network being born and Channel 4 was really the watershed for both Andrea and me. We pitched a music show of six half-hours to Jeremy Isaacs, and they ended up wanting 20 1-hour, 45-minute episodes starting the week Channel 4 went on air, live from Newcastle, England, UK, Europe.
We worked on it together from the first episode in 1982 to the final one in 1987. Andrea was encouraging me to take risks which caused trouble with the regulators, but she fought all the battles to give us our freedom. Even though she became director of programmes it was very much her baby and she would come to every show and be in the pub afterwards with Joe Strummer or Tina Turner .
(Source : The Independent, June 4, 2007)
Malcolm Gerrie (producer, The Tube) : After the first show Pete Townshend (of The Who) told me I must be insane, trying to cram three live bands, plus film and video clips, plus interviews, plus poetry into a live television show. He's probably right, but we like to run that risk.
(Source : interview with Johnny Black, for Smash Hits magazine in January 1983)
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He told me there was a woman working out of Tyne Tees Television in Newcastle who was making waves. Andrea Wonfor was pioneering children's programmes but her obsession was what came to be known as youth programming. She thought this was an entire demographic that was ignored way before Janet Street-Porter was invented. She was fascinated about the work I was doing with teenagers. We were at the start of the boring 70s, so for a producer looking after children's programmes to be asking me about bands like the Sex Pistols and The Clash was remarkable.
Those seeds developed into one of the biggest music programmes of all time, The Tube.
There were rumours about a new network being born and Channel 4 was really the watershed for both Andrea and me. We pitched a music show of six half-hours to Jeremy Isaacs, and they ended up wanting 20 1-hour, 45-minute episodes starting the week Channel 4 went on air, live from Newcastle, England, UK, Europe.
We worked on it together from the first episode in 1982 to the final one in 1987. Andrea was encouraging me to take risks which caused trouble with the regulators, but she fought all the battles to give us our freedom. Even though she became director of programmes it was very much her baby and she would come to every show and be in the pub afterwards with Joe Strummer or Tina Turner .
(Source : The Independent, June 4, 2007)
Malcolm Gerrie (producer, The Tube) : After the first show Pete Townshend (of The Who) told me I must be insane, trying to cram three live bands, plus film and video clips, plus interviews, plus poetry into a live television show. He's probably right, but we like to run that risk.
(Source : interview with Johnny Black, for Smash Hits magazine in January 1983)