There’s no mistaking what the most indelible memory anyone will have of 2020. We won’t dwell on that, but as the world embraced the wonders of real-time online video communication, we were spurred onto create a Tiswas-themed charity stream each Saturday morning, starting at 10:30am, as was the tradition. Half an hour of clips from the show, then a piece where we went live to our Twitch audience, reacting to their comments and just chatting about the cult that is Tiswas.
We managed to get quite a lot of Tiswas stars to join us, via the Zoom platform. These parts were always like an extra on a DVD. Yes, lots of people watched the classic clips and then left us as we went live, the viewing audience always slumped a bit after 11am, but those who stayed got rewarded with brilliant revelations on the show. Frankly, these were the best viewers!
As Matt Lewis (better known to you as Matthew Butler, the singing bunny rabbit boy) is part of the six who run TiswasOnline, it made sense to have him on board as our first guest star. In this interview, Toby Riding discovers how Matt ended up on Tiswas; why he ended up on a festival line-up in front of 30,000 people and the brief Tiswas revival on Dick ‘n’ Dom In Da Bungalow. Also, there’s an explanation as to why he’s sitting in a fire station!
Our first few shows were plagued with technical problems, so the video quality isn’t always great, the framerate is poor, the presenters were still finding their feet, but gradually we got ourselves sorted. Still, who else could recreate the joy of a 1970s/1980s Saturday morning live on the internet, and raise thousands for charity?
