Saturday, if you got up early enough, was Tiswas day. If you stayed up late enough, it was The Big Film day too. In between, provided you didn’t doze off in the afternoon as a consequence of trying to watch both of the above, you could find all of those other celebrated mainstays of the legendary days of the Saturday television schedules including the Action Replay-festooned rivalry between Grandstand and World Of Sport, public-as-stars game shows like The Generation Game and its many somewhat less illustrious imitators, brash brass-funk themed American detective like Kojak and Cannon where the perpetrator always got away at the beginning and they spent the entire rest of the episode trying to find them, and Michael Parkinson moaning about something or other whenever he found time in between mentioning Billy Connolly – and, over on ITV in that awkward slot between the end of the sport and the onset of the entertainment, a juvenile-skewed American sitcom or action series bought in by the gallon and flung out with such intense region-hopping regularity that anyone scouring that Regional Variations boxout at the foot of the TV Times listings could be forgiven for thinking that they were caught in some nightmarish perpetual present, only with more Jon and Ponch.

Famously, for much of the eighties – and making something of a mockery of the opening narration’s disclaimer that ‘if you can find them’ – this back-from-the-big shop slot was home to The A-Team, and whenever it wasn’t, you could usually find Tanner-perplexing resident puppet alien ALF causing uneccessary chaos for no tangible benefit there instead. Some ITV regions, however – and doubtless in obstinate ignorance of the widespread howls of objection from the hapless ‘ITV households’ they foisted them on – insisted on doing their own ‘thing’ and ploughing ahead with bought-in underachievers that left audiences begging Mr. Smith to come back on the reassurance that all was orangutan-exoneratingly forgiven. On this Patreon-only special of ALFsplaining, I’m joining inveterate Look-In listing-scourers Ben Baker and John Matthews to take another look at notorious ALF-elbowers Mr. Merlin, Here’s Boomer, Whiz Kids, Superboy and Street Hawk to see whether there is anything about them to suggest they may have been worth missing your weekly fix of Trevor Ochmonek for after all. As well as speculating on what a ‘scared schedule’ might consist of, witnessing Welcome Back Kotter sliding off the bottom of the page in TV Times in real time, critically evaulating The Pink Panther’s attempts at topical satire, debating who would ‘win’ out of Bucky Barnes and Wil Cwac Cwac and watching Cannon And Ball But They’re Detectives and Magnum π whilst refusing to watch Little Duke Alderthwaite and Geese Whitsun, we also take the opportunity to revisit a few Saturday Evening mainstays of days gone by including Private Benjamin, Trick Or Treat, The Flying Doctors, Bob’s Full House and – at last! – The Noel Edmonds Saturday Roadshow. Plus we try and answer the question that’s been raging everywhere for weeks – is The Man just one big prank played by Paul McCartney and Michael Jackson?

Find out in ALFsplaining: Teatime Without ALF here!

Buy A Book!

The old ALFer himself isn’t actually featured in it but there’s lots on tons of other relentless imported sitcoms crowbarred into the BBC and ITV’s children’s schedules with big whopping edits for ‘content’ in The Golden Age Of Children’s TV, available in all good bookshops and from Waterstones here, Amazon here, from the Kindle Store here and directly from Black And White Publishing here.

Alternately, if you’re just feeling generous, you can buy me a coffee here. It had better arrive a little more promptly than the Street Hawk ZX Spectrum game.

Further Listening

You can find me joining Ben and John on ALFsplaining for a chat about Prime Time – an episode in which ALF battles to save his new favourite programme Polka Jamboree from cancellation – here.

John and Ben both joined me on It’s Good, Except It Sucks for a look at ALF’s cameo appearance in the Marvel Cinematic Universe in I Am Groot here. You can also find Ben on It’s Good, Except It Sucks talking about Ant-Man here, Cloak And Dagger here and Avengers: Endgame here.

You can find Ben on Looks Unfamiliar talking about TV Mayhem, The Onion Bag, Fiendish Feet, the early internet craze for misidentifying every comedy song as ‘by’ Weird Al Yankovic, Bingo Brown and the International Youth Service penpal scheme here, ITV’s daytime nostalgia show Looks Familiar here, Toksvig, The Whizzkid’s Guide, Mysteries Of Old Peking, Mo-Ho-Bish-O-Pi, Go (the 1999 film) and Making Your Own TV Listings Magazines here, Mr T’s Christmas Dream, There’s Something Wrong In Paradise, God In The House, To Hell With The Devil, Highway, The Flint Street Nativity, the 1990 Bullseye Christmas Special, Adam And Joe’s Fourmative Years and TFI 1998 here, The Goodies: Snow White 2, Roland’s Yuletide Binge and Grange Hill For Christmas here, the original version of Now – The Christmas Album here and Bernard And The Genie here. You can also find John – in his guise as nineties pop star Ricardo Autobahn – talking about Pull The Other One, the Pink Panther Bar, the Panther 6, Hot Wheels Crack-Ups, Explorer, Inside The Magic Rectangle by Victor Lewis-Smith, I Live In A Giant Mushroom by Eric The Gardener, The Car, The Sooty Show episode Fun Being Small and ‘Thunderclap Pop’ here and Ed Starink, The Big Bus, The Wizard Of Speed And Time, Roadmaker, Chimera, Talkin’ ‘Bout Your Generation, Blackgang Chine and the final season of The Dukes Of Hazzard here. You can also find Ben on The Golden Age Of Children’s TV talking about Round The Bend here and Ricardo on Rainbow here.

Further Reading

There’s more about Superboy and an accompanying entire deluge of late eighties attempts at relaunching much-loved franchises with the apparent involvement of nobody who was actually especially interested in Time And Tide Melts The Snowman: Part Five here.

© Tim Worthington.
Please don’t copy this only with more italics and exclamation marks.