It’s hard to believe that not so long ago, terrestrial tv would completely shut down and go off air overnight.

The unseen continuity announcer would wish everyone goodnight soon after midnight – probably because his wife had said: “Please don’t put on another film. Make me some Horlicks and come to bed.”

He’d play a recording of the national anthem for no reason whatsoever – although, apparently, some people would stand up and salute the tv – and then he’d wave around his plastic Whirly Tube to produce such a high-pitched sound, people were forced to rise from their sofas to physically turn off the tv and go to bed.

The noise was also used as a health and safety warning as televisions would get hot and overheat if they were left on overnight and they’d often blow up.

87% of all house fires back then were due to exploding television sets and not chip pan fires but the BBC couldn’t run the public information films about it because people would have watched tv sparingly and their viewing audiences for Dick Emery would have plummeted into minus numbers. *

52% of patients admitted to A&E departments were from television burns where they had tried to turn off their hot tvs without wearing the supplied oven gloves; and opticians were forever sending people to hospital for surgery on their square eyes caused by watching too much of the standard 4×3 television screens.  It’s why these TVs were outlawed by government legislation. **

But 3^rd degree burns and eye problems aside, old televisions did provide some health benefits.  Channel hopping meant you literally had to hop over to the tv to change channels.

And holding your sister out of the window with an aerial in her hand (or an improvised wire coat hanger) to get “a good reception” was a brilliant exercise for developing your upper body strength.

Your dexterity was improved by constantly messing around with the “vertical” and “horizontal” hold knobs that stabilised the picture and by twiddling with the brightness, contrast and tint controls without really knowing the subtleties of what any of them did.

Occasionally, you would inexplicably lose a channel and spend endless hours twiddling away trying to find it again.

Sometimes you would pick up a very fuzzy Anglia TV channel by mistake and ponder whether you really wanted to know about a farmer in Norfolk’s award-winning sheepdog or whether you should just continue searching for BBC2.

The introduction of remote controls made everyone lazy and unhealthy and government figures show that it was solely due to the invention of the TV remote control in the 1980’s that obesity increased in Britain by 100%. ***

After shutdown, appearing overnight on the screen was something called The Test Card.  No one really understood what the test was for but presumed it was guessing where the creepy young girl was going to place her ‘x’ in the game of noughts and crosses with her freakish clown doll.

She’d still be there the following morning trying to decide, in what was probably the longest game of noughts and crosses, ever.  No wonder the doll looked so frustrated.

In the late 1980’s, ITV launched regionalised night-time programmes. Where I lived, in the south, TVS launched something called “Late-Night-Late” because “After Midnight” was probably too much of a stretch of their imagination or the jingle had already been written?

The continuity announcers appeared on screen.  Ironically, both Graham Rogers and David Vickery had the widest of eyes, looking like they were being propped up by matchsticks and were in desperate need of some sleep.

And I’m pretty sure Laura Penn (whose hair was so lacquered, it could stay up later than any human and present the programme links by itself) was the secret fantasy crush of many teenage boys, simply because, apart from their mums, she was the only woman allowed to talk to them in their bedrooms after 2am, by-passing all the “adequate security checks” that mums would impose.

The programmes ranged from Video View with husky-voiced (drinking man’s crumpet) Mariella Frostrup reviewing the new VHS releases; and Get Stuffed, a chaotic ten-minute cookery show designed for students and drunkards to concoct something surprisingly tasty from their practically bare cupboards.

There was America’s Top Ten with Casey Kasem – the guy who voiced Shaggy from Scooby Doo. It would have been more entertaining if he had stayed in character.

There was 00000000000000000.1% of people in Britain who actually cared about America’s Top Ten – specifically, DJ Mike Read.

The other overnight American import was called “American Gladiators” – just to avoid confusion with any other version of the show from any other country that, in reality, didn’t exist.

Gary Crowley hosted The Beat by continually walking around his cameraman, making you feel like you had come home from the pub far drunker than you actually were.

Night Shift was a 5–10-minute filler programme filmed with a hand-held camera showing a guy constantly dressed in an Edmonton Oilers jacket visiting buildings that were predominantly empty with no one working.

To be honest, every episode was really dull. But his visit to a fire station overnight is widely believed to be the inspiration for the REC and Quarantine movies.

But if you were ever in danger of falling asleep, the absurdly loud advertisement for Chatback 0891 50 50 50 would wake you up again and entice you to spend whatever money you had left over from your evening out to drunkenly phone and speak to random strangers to talk about your kebab in the name of “virtual fun.”

The morning would end with a programme tantalisingly called Night Thoughts.  In reality, it would be a minister talking for a couple of minutes about a religious expedition they’ve been on or a passage from the bible and the enlightenment they’ve found to pass onto us all to help us get through life and be optimistic about the forthcoming day.

Nowadays, night-time tv is filled with rolling news, gambling shows, shopping channels, films that were long forgotten for a reason and endless repeats of shows you wouldn’t have watched during the daytime. If the BBC wanted to make savings, they could just scrap their overnight output altogether.

Or there’s Babestation – which is both depressing and hilarious at the same time as you watch some half-dressed, ridiculously surgically enhanced woman clumsily rolling around on a table and mouthing into her phone “call me” and you’re thinking no because that would be utter madness and cost you loads and that if she was your girlfriend and you took her away to a romantic secluded cabin in the woods and laid her down before a roaring open log fire, she would literally melt in your arms like Cher.

When I was a child, all I wanted to do was stay up late to watch tv.  Now I’m an adult, all I want to do is go to bed because night-time tv is not an incentive to stay up late. If anything, with its programmes seemingly specifically designed to make you sleep, it’s a great cure for insomnia. I’d rather watch The Test Card.

*Not Fact Checked.

**Definitely not Fact Checked.

*** Probably true.

Categories:Film, Food, Health, Music, Pubs, Shopping, Television

Tags: American Gladiators, Anglia TV, Babestation, BBC, Casey Kasem, Chatback, Dick Emery, Health & Safety, Hospital, ITV, Laura Penn, Mariella Frostrup, Mike Read, National Anthem, Norfolk, Obesity, Quarantine, REC, Television South, TV