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TV programmes you can't believe were ever made

Matt N

Matt N

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Hi guys. Over the years, TV has changed a lot. What people watch and what is au fait in the modern world has changed, and trends have come and gone along with changes in popular culture. Sometimes, you might watch an older TV program and notice elements of it that wouldn't fly in modern day culture, such as problematic elements, jokes or plot lines. You're likely to notice this to some extent in most programmes older than a certain age; times change. But sometimes, you might go a step further; you might watch or remember an older TV program and just find the whole premise inherently problematic and wonder "How on Earth was that ever green-lighted?". With this in mind, I'd be interested to know; what TV programmes can't you believe were ever made? What TV programmes have made you wonder "How was this ever thought of as acceptable television?" or "How was this ever allowed to air?".

I was thinking about this after I read an article in The Guardian earlier about how British romance shows are apparently some of the most risqué there are in the world (if you’re interested in reading it: https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-...wildest-tv-in-the-world?CMP=oth_b-aplnews_d-5). I was reading through some of the programmes it listed and thinking “how on Earth was that ever green lighted?”… maybe it's just me, but I'm surprised that some of these programs were ever aired on television!

I'll get the ball rolling with some of my ideas...

Personally, I have a couple of suggestions for this thread. These are:
  • The Jeremy Kyle Show - This aired for 14 years, but I'm slightly stunned that it was ever considered acceptable television. I only saw it on the odd occasion with my older sister, but when I did, it basically just looked like Jeremy Kyle hurling abuse at people while they hurled abuse at each other and their dirty laundry was being aired on national television... I'm honestly surprised that it took as long as it did for the format to be seen as problematic.
  • Various 2000s/2010s shows revolving around diet culture - I would lump a number of shows that I remember from my late 2000s/early 2010s childhood into this category; off the top of my head, some notable examples include Supersize vs Superskinny, Fat Families and You Are What You Eat, amongst others. These were among a number of shows focusing around diet culture and weight loss, and while I'm not saying that shows about weight loss are inherently problematic, the way in which these shows handled the topic was not vaguely sensitive. Things that these shows used to consider perfectly fine included hurling insults at overweight people, making people stand half-naked while the food they ate was shown in a tube and they were shamed about it, letting Gillian McKeith examine people's faeces and then berate them about their diets based on what she found, scaring people with morbid, fearful rhetoric and various other incredibly insensitive things... I can't quite believe that this lack of sensitivity towards a very complex issue was ever thought of as acceptable television.
But I'd be interested to know; what TV shows are you surprised were ever made? What TV shows have had you thinking "How was that ever acceptable television?" or "How was that ever given the green light?". I'd be really interested to know!
P.S. I wasn't sure if this should be here or in the Tavern... if it's more appropriate for the Tavern, mods, feel free to move it.
 
Matt N said:
The Jeremy Kyle Show
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Absolutely nothing compared to the original Jerry Springer. The latter evolved into an officially licenced spin off opera, performed on the West End, fronted by David Soul, which was later broadcast on BBC2. It was, and still is by some metrics, the most complained about broadcast on British television.

"There's Something About Miriam" is a British TV show that certainly shouldn't have ever have been made. Six men compete to win the affections of 21 year old Miriam, so far so normalish. The twist? Miriam's a male to female trans* person, none of the other cis-gendered heterosexual contestants know and SURPRISE they're not happy with it.

Miriam sadly took her own life in 2019.

"Queer as Folk", the original British Channel 4 show, couldn't / wouldn't be made now, certainly not with the same premise. The first episode opens with our protagonist (Stuart) having very visceral and graphic sex with Nathan. They're gay, it's the 90s, it's edgy only... SURPRISE! Nathan's actually only 15, at a time when the age of consent for gay men was 18. That's the end of Nathan, surely? Nope. He's a main character. The rest of the next two seasons revolve around various men sleeping with Nathan, or attempting to, as he tries to get back with Stuart (who is in his 30s). This TV series is still held up with awe in the industry and LGBTQIA+ community as being ground breaking, but watching it in 2024 makes for uncomfortable viewing. I can't believe it got commissioned then. I could not see it being commissioned now (with the same plot line).
 
The Jeremy Kyle show is, and even was at the time, absolutely appallingly exploitative. It was unacceptable at the time, let alone now, and it's shocking that they ever got away with airing it as long as they did. I haven't watched much of ITV since, as I have no respect at all for that network. It was distasteful and out of date before the first programme even aired. It's predecessor, Trisha, wasn't as bad and that wasn't acceptable either. Big Brother was also disgusting.

The diet programmes however are pretty much of their time (which wasn't very long ago). It depends what the original question means? Much of us are older than you, and could recite hundreds of TV shows that anyone who hasn't grown pubes yet would go and cry in a corner about if they watched now. Do you mean unacceptable at the time, or unacceptable by today's standards? They're distinct from one another.
 
Matt.GC said:
Do you mean unacceptable at the time, or unacceptable by today's standards? They're distinct from one another.
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I guess I could mean either, but perhaps more gravitated towards the former. In general, I was mainly thinking of things where you look back and think “how on Earth was that ever acceptable television?”, but I guess some of the most eye-catching examples you could name were probably controversial even when they aired.
 
Ghostwatch (the BBC one-off shown in 1992 on Halloween). Granted, I wasn't alive when this was broadcast but the entire premise of it fascinates me. There's a great YouTube video which goes in depth about it below, but in short it was a one-off fictional documentary shown on Halloween in the early 90s, and due to the gritty realistic manner in which they shot it (and included popular real TV presenters at the time) - many completely fell for it and were genuinely disturbed/terrified. Lovely bit of retro hysteria that could never be replicated in the modern day!


From: https://youtu.be/DgAKHmVtAcs?si=c2SUfdrra4Iydijq
 
All the fuss over Ghostwatch...
It was broadcast as a single episode of a clearly highlighted drama series...Screen One I think.
Watched it at work, with a bunch of kids, on Halloween night...who saw through it within a couple of minutes as fake entertainment.
The media made a meal of it, but the vast majority saw it for what it was...not as good as the spaghetti trees.

The real offensive stuff.
My mum used to watch the Black and White Minstrel Show, peak Saturday night entertainment on the precious BBC, every week, without fail...for two whole decades.
Beautiful historic American South entertainment show according to my mum.
Twenty whole years of blatant outrageously offensive racism at the BBC.
Leading members of society screamed to get the show scrapped in the first years of production, yet it ran from 1958 until 1978.
Family variety Saturday night peak entertainment, or absolutely blatant offensive racism...
One or the other, surely, can't be both, can it?
They tried to avoid criticism over the years by getting in a few black singers to do "whiteface".
Even Lenny Henry and that nice Leslie Crowther appeared on the show.
Shame shame shame.
Ran on the North Pier at Blackpool for years as well.
 
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Some of Little Britain has aged horribly. Whilst it can still be quite funny in places some of the sketches have dated incredibly quickly and in particular their depiction of other races can be somewhat problematic. The sketch where David Walliams blacks up and plays an overweight naked woman of colour for laughs at her body seems awful now. Both Matt Lucas and David Walliams have apologised for the content in Little Britain with Lucas saying the following:

“If I could go back and do Little Britain again, I wouldn’t make those jokes about transvestites. I wouldn’t play black characters,” he said in an interview with the Big Issue in 2017. “Basically, I wouldn’t make that show now. It would upset people. We made a more cruel kind of comedy than I’d do now.”
 
As someone who doesn’t know a lot about past TV and was born after some of these programs aired, I can’t quite believe some of these… I think There’s Something About Miriam sounds like the most eyebrow-raising I’ve seen mentioned so far (how on Earth that was ever accepted is beyond me…), but they’re all pretty surprising to me!

I have to say that Naked Jungle is possibly up there… I thought Naked Attraction was bad enough!

I’ve done some more research into this, and found some more that I’m frankly stunned ever aired:
  • Heil Honey, I’m Home: A sitcom about Adolf Hitler and Eva Braun living next door to a Jewish couple named the Goldensteins who they didn’t get on with. Only 1 episode was aired, and then the program was banned due to people feeling it was insensitive, but I’m honestly stunned that it ever even got 1 episode on air…
  • Minipops: The concept of this sounds innocent enough on paper, with it apparently being based around kids filming music videos for their favourite songs, but it apparently attracted controversy due to the kids often dancing provocatively and wearing provocative outfits…
 
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GooseOnTheLoose said:
"Queer as Folk", the original British Channel 4 show, couldn't / wouldn't be made now, certainly not with the same premise. The first episode opens with our protagonist (Stuart) having very visceral and graphic sex with Nathan. They're gay, it's the 90s, it's edgy only... SURPRISE! Nathan's actually only 15, at a time when the age of consent for gay men was 18. That's the end of Nathan, surely? Nope. He's a main character. The rest of the next two seasons revolve around various men sleeping with Nathan, or attempting to, as he tries to get back with Stuart (who is in his 30s). This TV series is still held up with awe in the industry and LGBTQIA+ community as being ground breaking, but watching it in 2024 makes for uncomfortable viewing. I can't believe it got commissioned then. I could not see it being commissioned now (with the same plot line).
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I think the show is a product of its time as the culture around going out clubbing mowadays is very different to the late 90s and early 2000s and therefore the show reflected the way people lived at the time. My experiance going to to bars and clubs (but in Birmingham not Manchester) in 1999-2005 was very similar to what QaF portrayed. I think Channel 4 would commision the same show now, but the content would be different because Russell T Davies would be writing about life in the 2020s not the end of the 1990s. Channel 4 have got history of commissioning the sort of stuff other networks never would.
He did effectively make a new QaF set in the 2010s with Cucumber/Banana.



Along similar lines to There's something about Miriam was I wanna Marry Harry with people competing to marry a fake Prince Harry, I've been meaning to listen to this podcast https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/ar...ricked-us-women-into-dating-fake-prince-harry

There is also a great BBC radio series about reality TV and some of the awful stuff from the 2000s, this is the episode about There's Something About Miriam https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p0c71jkv

and a BBC radio Podcast just about the X Factor https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m001vtth/episodes/player
 
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There was the reality show on Sky a few years back called “The Chop”, a competition about woodworking of all things. Cancelled after one episode due to a contestant having his face covered in neo-Nazi tattoos that weren’t picked up in vetting, which he attempted to justify by saying they were a tribute to his father who passed away. Except his father was actually still alive and they were just estranged.
 
rob666 said:
All the fuss over Ghostwatch...
It was broadcast as a single episode of a clearly highlighted drama series...Screen One I think.
Watched it at work, with a bunch of kids, on Halloween night...who saw through it within a couple of minutes as fake entertainment.
The media made a meal of it, but the vast majority saw it for what it was...not as good as the spaghetti trees.

The real offensive stuff.
My mum used to watch the Black and White Minstrel Show, peak Saturday night entertainment on the precious BBC, every week, without fail...for two whole decades.
Beautiful historic American South entertainment show according to my mum.
Twenty whole years of blatant outrageously offensive racism at the BBC.
Leading members of society screamed to get the show scrapped in the first years of production, yet it ran from 1958 until 1978.
Family variety Saturday night peak entertainment, or absolutely blatant offensive racism...
One or the other, surely, can't be both, can it?
They tried to avoid criticism over the years by getting in a few black singers to do "whiteface".
Even Lenny Henry and that nice Leslie Crowther appeared on the show.
Shame shame shame.
Ran on the North Pier at Blackpool for years as well.
Click to expand...

My old fella always claims the main issue with the black and white minstrel show was.......it's was crap.

What always amazes me about ghostwatch is just how folk believed it was true. But, I can see why they were sucked in. Why would parky and Sarah Greene lie to us. It's a turning point in television. Some people say it was the programme that made TV grow up and take responsibility, after the unfortunate suicide of that poor lad. Having said that, Britain became wise because Most Haunted live came along. With it's getting giddy about dust and kicking cupboard doors and screaming and, telling us Derek acurah was a fake. Some folk believed all that.

Looking back at my youth. Various programmes that wouldn't be touched now. TFI Friday as an example.
 
I accept that things were different in the early 90s, but was Ghostwatch not clearly highlighted as a drama in the TV guide or whatever people had back then? Or was it not clearly highlighted that it was a work of fiction?

Maybe I’m just used to the age of greater transparency and don’t comprehend how things were back then, but I struggle to understand how so many thought Ghostwatch was real when it wasn’t.
 
It all seemed so normal at the time though. All that's really happened is that we've driven shocking things away from the telly, and on to the internet. We wouldn't expect TV networks to broadcast some of the things in this thread now, but we've got used to all the controversial noise on the internet being a normal thing.

Who remembers the congressional hearings and parliamentary debates, with politicians whipping themselves up in a misinformed frenzy about violence in gaming, mainly focused on Night Trap and Mortal Kombat? All based on concipracy theories and misinformation, without a single shred of evidence to back up the outrage. One congressman was asked if he had played, or was even aware of what Night Trap even was. He had to admit that he didn't actually have a clue, he just assumed that the outage was justified.

That's just another typical day on YouTube or Twitter these days.
 
Matt N said:
I accept that things were different in the early 90s, but was Ghostwatch not clearly highlighted as a drama in the TV guide or whatever people had back then? Or was it not clearly highlighted that it was a work of fiction?

Maybe I’m just used to the age of greater transparency and don’t comprehend how things were back then, but I struggle to understand how so many thought Ghostwatch was real when it wasn’t.
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The word "drama" did appear in the Radio Times listing for the programme, but there wasn't a category highlight as such.
genome.ch.bbc.co.uk

BBC Programme Index

genome.ch.bbc.co.uk genome.ch.bbc.co.uk

You also need to remember that in 1992 the EPGs, which you've grown up with, didn't exist. You had to have a physical copy of the Radio Times to see what was on next, and then read the description to see it was a drama. Many people just left the television on one channel, there were only four after all.

Another thing which may blow your mind a little, is that until 9 months earlier the Radio Times had the exclusive rights to reproduce the listings for the two BBC channels. TV Times, or the listings in newspapers, didn't list BBC channels. They couldn't, legally. This changed in March 1991, but 9 months isn't much of a time to change buying habits.

Ceefax did exist, which would also display the television listings for you, but it didn't list a description or categorisation information. Time, programme name, that's it.

Unless you were actively looking for the information, it wasn't easy to stumble across it. Find your copy of the Radio Times, open it to the right page, and read the listing (rather than skimming the programme name).
 
Miss the old days of circling what to watch over Christmas holidays in the Radio Times.

Don't think times have changed that much for hysteria from TV. When Corrie had the tram crash some people allegedly thought it was real.

The recent 40th anniversary of Threads has had some interesting takes on it. Watched it the other year as Mrs got a DVD of it. Harrowing stuff that is strangely (and worryingly) timeless in its issues discussed.

Pretty much most stuff in the 2000s is questionable at best. Particularly comedy shows.
 
Matt N said:
I accept that things were different in the early 90s, but was Ghostwatch not clearly highlighted as a drama in the TV guide or whatever people had back then? Or was it not clearly highlighted that it was a work of fiction?

Maybe I’m just used to the age of greater transparency and don’t comprehend how things were back then, but I struggle to understand how so many thought Ghostwatch was real when it wasn’t.
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Correct Matt, on Halloween, on Screen One...a drama series...with a clear introduction by the continuity announcer.

But some people are a bit dim...
 
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