Home Advent Calendar 2017 Day 7: Grapevine, 1981

"The Self-Help Show", which originally used the Slits' cover of I Heard It Through The Grapevine as its theme and at this point was BBC Community Programming Unit Meets Rockers Uptown, is still low-key in its dark studio and occasional mumbling - at one point Jeni 'You & Me' Barnett introduces "a film from Telford" with no further details, and we're still not sure what it was about even after watching it - and its parochial idea of fun is a screenprinting demonstration, a film made by an animation workshop for kids, a very short piece of juggling and, good god, Doc Cox as Ivor Biggun. The following year's extravaganza sounds like even more of a, if you'll pardon the expression, cracker: "David Rappaport has a close encounter with three shocking pink dancing girls, two performing seals, and a headmaster in a Christmas tree. Plus a seasonally apt report on home birth rights; a film featuring community shopping in the Outer Hebrides; and Juliet Blake's Gripe-vine of the week."