Advent Calendar 2020 Day 5: What's Up Doc?, 1992

The commonly agreed story of Saturday morning kids' shows is that ITV were hopeless in the decade or more between Number 73 becoming 7T3 and SMTV Live finding its feet. There's a lot of truth to that - the only genuine breakout star it had in those years was Gilbert The Alien, fondly remembered by some but Get Fresh mostly didn't deserve him. Beyond that, we're not about to start a re-evaluation of Mashed or Teleganticmegavision. However... What's Up Doc? may seem an unpromising candidate just from the title giving away that it was a Warner Bros tie-in to allow ITV the run of their archive, but at the time that included Animaniacs, Taz-Mania and the animated Batman. Furthermore while its Crane/Sharp/Fielding presenting team (Yvette's first gig after Blue Peter) is perfectly cromulent and took the piss out of themselves and the show the real meat was the chaotic menagerie of offbeat characters around them, most famously Bro and Bro the cannibalistic wolves who eventually got their own series. Stylistically it bridged a metaphorical gap between the Tiswas sketches and the odder Dick & Dom moments while occasionally outdoing both for adult oriented rudeness. Initially produced by TVS in their dying months, which may explain some of its devil-may-care attitude, replacement home STV got worried about what Warner Bros would make of the content, ordered the production team to change the format entirely, so the people behind the characters (including Steve Nallon) and most of the production team walked instead halfway through a second series that was beating Live & Kicking in the ratings, leaving it as a bog standard studio show with quickly evaporating interest. Anyway, here's a prime example of the good times in which John Altman appears and barely interacts with any of the humans, Darren Day appears and unfortunately does, Crane meets Brian Henson and his friends for one of the few genuinely good interviews with Muppets, Sharp dons stress relief shades that somehow end up as a competition prize and in-house socially awkward nerd and future Twix figurehead Simon Perry throws a Christmas party for all the characters, including Frank Sidebottom who was not only an occasional guest but Chris Sievey wrote the deeply strange even by this show's standards Life With The Amoebas segment. We may never see its like again. And Mr Spanky doesn't even appear properly.

SATURDAY SANTA SPECTACULARS: previously from the Saturday morning archives: Swap Shop, Tiswas, Saturday Banana, Saturday Superstore and Gone Live! 1989, 1990 and 1993