Tuesday is Tiswas day

Yes, there is one edition of the Tiswas series that was made and broadcast on a Tuesday! And it still kept its name like that, even though ‘correcting’ it from Today Is Saturday Watch And Smile would mean calling it… oh… No, I won’t be typing THAT acronym out! Ahem.

Why did Tiswas broadcast on a Tuesday? The clue is in the date – 24th December 1974. Yep, this is a Christmas Eve edition. It was the first and only time Tiswas appeared in TV schedules outside of a Saturday (aside from a three-week repeat run on Wednesdays across the 1979 Easter holidays, only on ATV).

All present and correct for this edition of Tiswas were the core presenting gang of this time: Chris Tarrant; John Asher; Peter Tomlinson and Trevor East.

It’s pretty unusual for Saturday morning shows to crop up anywhere else in the week, but from late 1974, ATV had truly committed itself to Tiswas, turning it into an all-year-round effort. Giving it a Christmas Eve slot showed that the station was fully backing the show after a temperamental start earlier in the year.

With a 9:30am start time, at this point it was the earliest start time Tiswas had appeared on the airwaves, though that would become the usual start time for most of series four which began in late 1977. As it finished by 12 noon, it took up a two-and-a-half hour slot of the ATV schedule.

We have to thank Tiswas superfan Dave Clark for having noted down these details at the time. Remember, there is no surviving video recording of this edition whatsoever, but we can bring you four of the cartoons and some idea of what went on.

• Tiswas Pantomime Time
• Tiswas Trevor Time
• Tiswas Tarrant Time

The pantomime sounds really intriguing, but having never seen this edition, I can’t tell you what happened in it. No doubt some low-budget dressing-up peppered with daft jokes. I know that Trevor’s slot allowed him to talk about the latest happenings in sport, with some heavy bias towards his beloved Derby City.

• Happy Harmonies: Alias Saint Nick (1934)
• Merrie Melodies – Porky Pig And Daffy Duck: The Ducksters (1950)
• The Captain And The Kids: The Captain’s Christmas (1938)

We’re told there was a promotional video of The Osmonds, though we don’t know which song was used.

A couple of 25-minute shows also helped fill time. One of them was from the Warner Bros Television series The Cowboys –  a Western drama serial that only lasted twelve episodes. This particular episode was The Indian Givers, first shown in the US on 1st May 1974. In the story, the cowboys’ horses are seemingly stolen by Indians.

The Cowboys certainly wasn’t a common part of Tiswas. This was the first time the show – adapted from Warner Bros’ 1972 John Wayne movie of the same name – had been broadcast within Tiswas. It would only be seen within the show a further two times – inside the last two November 1975 editions of Tiswas. Outside of ATV, The Cowboys did see Saturday morning transmission elsewhere in the UK, on a few mornings in Grampian’s schedule over in early 1975.

The other long cartoon was the eleventh episode of The Houndcats, entitled The Outta Sight Blight Mission. We touched upon this DePatie–Freleng cartoon series in our post about 1974 Saturday mornings across ITV regions, as it got an outing on Southern’s schedule. The Houndcats, which first aired on USA’s NBC network in late 1972, is where cats and dogs get into adventures that are clearly inspired by Mission: Impossible. It’s one of those American animations where canned laughter punctuates every joke.

This would be the first time The Houndcats appeared within Tiswas. There were thirteen episodes in total and all of them would be shown as part of Tiswas, but on rather random dates from late 1975 right up to March 1976, and not in the original transmission order.

This Houndcats episode would appear again on the 4th Oct 1975 Tiswas, the other twelve would only appear once.

Now, it’s pretty typical for Tiswas to end and then the ITV network taking over with World Of Sport from the LWT studios to fill the afternoon schedule for hours until prime time kicks in. This ain’t a weekend and London Weekend isn’t transmitting, as the other London franchisee, Thames, is looking after ITV in the capital, as it always did on weekdays in the 1970s.

At 12 noon, all the ITV regions cut to Hickory House – pre-school puppet programme from Granada Television, sometimes presented by Alan Rothwell.

From 12:15, all of ITV showed Amazingly Enough It’s Rod Hull and Emu – a Thames Television production, largely thought lost from archives. The puppeteer Rod Hull had gained success in Australia in the early 1970s and this series was his first regular gig on British television. This was the final of the 25-episode series, which had been on ITV during 1973 and 1974. It was typically broadcast on Tuesdays at 12:15.

Here’s a look at how the Saturday morning of Christmas Eve 1974 played out across the rest of the UK’s television schedules: