Elephant with baby outline full#

ITV, of course, had ‘ Inaugural Ceremony at Guildhall‘, which can’t have been that good as it didn’t go on to get a full series.Īs the BBC’s first new channel since the launch of the Television Service in 1936, 1964’s plans for BBC-2’s launch night were as fancy as you might expect. Channel Five had the first episode of Family Affairs, which I needed to look up. Channel Four had the first episode of Countdown, which everyone remembers. When launching a television channel, it’s generally a good idea to pick something really good and important to kick things off. It’s time to look through the oblong window at:Ģ. Apologies to anyone getting this via email – it’s a long one. Hey ho.īut enough of me explaining why Genome ate my homework, let’s take a look at the programme in second place on the list. Then I discovered repeats of The Programme At Number One spent three months going out billed as “NEWS followed by… ”, which increased the gap by a load. After all this time, could it come down to a single figure difference? Or even actually end in a draw?

And then, on checking the other programme left to uncover, it looks like several broadcasts couldn’t be counted (due to actually being an unrelated film of the same name). How close did it come to the top? Well, on my initial recheck, if it had been shown just 26 more times, it would be top of the all-time chart. So much so, there was a very real chance this next programme might actually have topped the list. And so, as we’re talking about a programme broadcast more than 10,000 times, it took a lot of checking to see what hadn’t been picked up. On checking through everything, one programme had a large number of broadcasts missing from the database due to being buried under “Children’s BBC starting with…” billings, with the programme title itself in the RT ‘description’. Not so much as down to getting together a programme history of the show in question, but more to do with checking the broadcast histories of the Top Two programmes. If this blog has a catchphrase, it must be “that took a lot longer than I’d expected”.

Elephant with baby outline