TV Pop Diaries
Pop Music on British Television 1955 - 1999

London Weekend's ground-breaking Saturday Scene was coming to an end with host Sally James heading to ATVLand to co-host Tiswas. The following week, the seemingly experimental Our Show replaced it. Experimental, in as much as it was hosted by kids for kids. However, as with most things, it had been done before. The BBC's Why Don't You... had begun in 1973 playing during school holidays and encouraged kids to get away from the TV set and create something more interesting for themselves.

Our Show didn't use any old kids to present the show, but booked stage school actors like Suzanne Tully, Graham Fletcher, Melissa Wilkes, Elvis Payne, Jamie Forman, Nicholas Lyndhurst among others, all of whom would turn up on grown-up telly later on. They would present contests, news and sports reports, cartoons, talk to any passing star on the plugging trail and introduce promo clips and occasional pop stars, mostly playing live, and as usual for the seventies, Junior Police 5, but now rebooted as JP10. The two and a half hour show would also facilitate American imports like The Monkees and Happy Days.

A few months' in and the show was reduced in length and had Happy Days surgically removed, leaving the show at an hour and probably the better for it, however, American shows would return later on with Sesame Street, only to be removed once again. It's obvious that London Weekend didn't know how to present the show, just like the hosts. It was not cute, nor charming, nor funny, just noisy and irritating, like babysitting terrible children as a favour with no real reward.

The length of the show was mucked around with yet again as it was sliced into two halves in April 1978, resulting in in Our Show / Half Hour Show.

Their music guests swung from the likes of Donovan to Cock Sparrow and Generation X, via Noddy Holder, Kate Bush, Elton John and in one memorable edition from late 1977 Monkees' Davy Jones and Mickey Dolenz, in to plug their West End production of Harry Nilsson's The Point.

It lasted a school year, but it had to be replaced, and Southern TV's The Saturday Banana would fill the space until the scheduled return of the show at the beginning of 1979, but that never occurred.

OUR SHOW

London Weekend

10th September 1977 - 1st July 1978