Tommy Rot: Children's ITV junction and adverts, 4th September 1992

The Baffling Nightmares of Teddy Ruxpin come to an end with the then-customary pile of classic closing logos which will come to be skipped over along with the rest of the credits within a decade, lest a generation of children grow up with attention spans. Dic. That fades to a close-up of Tommy Boyd's face. TVS viewers missed out on the start of Children's ITV for some reason, but fear not, it's still here - the relatively brief post-Scally, pre-Ryde era where they weren't even pretending not to be copying the Broom Cupboard. Boyd's task on this day is to promote the forthcoming post-Summer Holidays CITV lineup, and in that capacity he's joined by the Disney Club presenters: Andrea Boardman, the surprisingly hot daughter of wizened Scouse racist Stan, and the legendary Paul Hendy. Unfortunately the power of speech deserts him when trying to promote How 2 ("here's three other superstars of shit"), but he recovers sufficiently for a laboured gag about a secret new Disney Club presenter (it's just Richard Orford) which involves all the other cameos you'll be seeing in later uploads. Name them all and win absolutely nothing whatsoever. Next: Cartoon Time. First: adverts. Starting with cheese, theoretically, only it's apparently "blended cheeses in a pot" for spreading on sandwiches. It's called Country Crock. I'll bet it is. Griff Rhys Jones gets paid, as does some poor bastard doing the standard Mummerset accent at the end. Because "country". Push a Push Pop! The novelty value of these things wore out fast. Faster than imitating the "don't push me" bit in the playground did. Apparently you can still get them, though, they're just not a craze like they momentarily were in 1992. Just as well considering the imagery the advertising calls up. Blatantly an American advert - if you couldn't tell from the accents, the bleary NTSC colour transfer's another giveaway. Next, an advert I uploaded before about eight ice ages ago in which a cut-price Soo Catwoman cleans her house with Jif (trying to get on the aspirational opulence bandwagon at least two years too late) while pretending to be a cat burglar. If she was, this probably wouldn't work as a way of covering her tracks, so don't try it yourselves. Management accepts no responsibility for the consequences. Cats. Smokey has his favourites, which being a cat he probably changes on a daily basis because they don't have great attention spans. His mummy also tries to tell herself she's one of them. She probably is, mostly because she brings the Whiskas. Whiskas Select Cuts, in this case. Succulent, juicy and delicious. Well, the cat eats it anyway. Finally, tea. Freeze dried instant tea, because it's 1992 and that's a minor fad. All the big guns have one. Typhoo have QT, advertised by a pair of lips; PG have that bland couple and their boring relationship. Tetley, for one reason or another, or more likely none at all, have gone with Rita Rudner. Which is fine, and certainly preferable to the other two. I don't remember her having a schtick, or reputation, of being unusually thick, however. But that's the whole joke here. Rita Rudner is dumb. And the use of "even I" suggests we're expected to know that from the start. She had a talk show on BBC 2! When it was '|'\\'(), even. She wrote "Peter's Friends" for crying out loud. Anyway, these days she mainly seems to annoy Seth MacFarlane, who keeps putting in cutaway gags about how she isn't funny. Now there's a glass house you don't want to walk around in without shoes. Back to CITV (it's being called that on a regular basis by now, and will lose the word "Children's" altogether in a couple of years) and Tommy is still bellowing semi-coherently about the new Autumn lineup while Neil Buchanan attempts to tidy the desk and Sweep the Dog runs around squeaking as usual. Buchanan's improv skills were honed on No. 73. Boyd's on the Wide Awake Club. This makes quite a visible difference, especially when Treguard shows up with a broken bit of Art Attack's set and all Boyd can do is spit random nouns. I'm not casting nasturtiums, it's all I could ever do when I tried improv as well. Some people can do it, some can't. Cartoon Time turns out to mean a Looney Tune: a Friz Freleng Bugs v. Fudd from 1949.