TV Creamed.

TV Last week, nostalgia website TV Cream celebrated its 20th anniversary birthday, which I planned to mention here but entirely forgot about in the middle of everything and so here's a belated happy birthday anniversary to them.  My guess is I first stumbled into the website pretty soon after launch when it was still in its black html stage with alphabetical pages of text and downloadable real media recordings of programme theme tunes.

Having lived in a BBC family, it was an ideal way of learning about the kinds of programmes which had been broadcast on the other side as well as the proper USP of reminding of the programmes which I'd completely forgotten or slept through because I was a baby.  Finally I had an explanation for the programme filled with monsters which had haunted me for decades, multi-coloured beasts not of this dimension that cause a fair few nightmare.  It was Animal Kwackers.  See above.  Shocking.

Then there was the newsletter with its stunning length and authority. Just how many hands did work to produce this voluminous text?  During my recent life laundry, in one of the boxes I found a print-out of a Cream Digest from March 2004, the TOP 50 Media Movers and Shakers.  It's twenty-four pages long, in courier new, double sided.  Needless to say it's at the top of the magazine mountain waiting to be reread.  There are people listed who I've never heard of and that has always been one of TV Creams best aspects, making you feel like an insider.

Eventually I was invited to write for their sister publication Off The Telly which is pretty high in my list of things in life which I look back on with amazement and glee (if you see what I mean) and although I've been asked to write for Cream now and then I never seemed to have any decent enough ideas, or at least good enough to suggest, which can be added to the list of life's regrets along with not accepting the Kirsten from France's invitation into her room on my second night at BA (Hons) university, not actually living in Manchester during my MA university because I miscalculated my finances during the application process and not dieting until being forced to by my hernia operation.

To bury the headline somewhat, to celebrate the anniversary birthday, TV Cream have produced an actual television programme, which is quite frankly brilliant and you can watch through this YouTube playlist on YouTube.  It's an offshoot of the kinds of things they've created for their periodic podcast, but in vision with analyses of some frankly bonkers television, interviews and other surprises which I won't reveal because its best to watch with little idea of what to expect.

I'd love to see more of the commentary pieces on forgotten television if they wanted to turn that into a regular YouTube thing.  Please make these clips go viral pronto.  Anyway, Happy Birthday Anniversary TV Cream.  Here's to the next twenty years!