The Dangerous Territory: BBC1 Continuity, 6th January 1987

It's 1987 in this video, but only just. 6th of January to be precise, so the Christmas decorations only just went down (if you're following the proper chronology, that is). Whatever was in the news that day doesn't seem to have been too harrowing, judging by the contented expressions of Julia Somerville and Andrew Harvey as the 9 O'Clock News comes to an end. Of all the late eighties-early nineties separate identities for the various BBC bulletins, this is the least loved. The music isn't as catchy as the One or the Six and the letters-in-space motif (formed via some mad laser fishfinger animation) feels altogether too gaudy and, well, American for the BBC. And it only lasted three years anyway. And then we cut rather artlessly into the Scottish news, because it also happens to be Scotland. That's the long-standing BBC Scotland logo looming over the shoulders of the newsreader (Bob Christie, who looks a bit like what Gok Wan would do with a garden gnome). Quite a clever logo, really, taking advantage of the wonky parallelogrammic geometry of Fair Alba by looking simultaneously like a silhouette of the country and a letter S. They still use it now, or a variation on it. In your highly Scottish news today: another damn prison riot. This one's at HMP Barlinnie in Glasgow, aka The Big Hoose or Bar-L. There was a lot of it about at this point, with our prison system already dangerously outdated at the start of the decade, and brutal treatment the order of the day. This was just the start of 1987: a couple of months later, as seen in my previous upload, there was some unpleasantness in Northern Ireland, and here in Scotland before the year was out they'd see violence at Perth and, most famously, Peterhead, which had to be subdued by the SAS. All culminating in the three-and-a-half-week occupation of Strangeways (which at that point was basically Hell), which actually forced the authorities to make changes to the system so people could tolerably exist in it and human dignity didn't just shrivel and die of despair moments after setting foot there. Anyway, at Barlinnie on the evening of the 6th of January 1987, it's relatively quiet and most of the rioters have tucked themselves in for the night while the outside world deals with their claims of brutalisation. One convict's highly Glaswegian sister is unimpressed by the whole thing. The Chief Screw, played by Malcolm McDowell disguised as Professor Yaffle, says it's all a load of bollocks and the only brutality comes from the convicts themselves. But then of course he does. In other news, a plague of burst water pipes in Glasgow; Strathclyde Council shrugs. And the head of EIS (the Scottish teacher's union) will quit if they don't accept the latest deal. Spoiler: he doesn't. And now the weather, with John Kettley. Or rather not, because I don't have that for some reason, even though Christie looks to the bottom left as if that's where it's coming from. This was originally two files, and the BBC Genome confirms they follow one another, but Sir Kettley, who is a weatherman, is on neither. So skipping ahead, here's a trailer! With the lavish, 80s-pastelled "new for 87" motif that was used on both BBC channels: some hooks detonate dramatically to let a curtain fall, or a veil, or some kind of thing signifying a revelation, on an art-deco installation of the letters BBC, in which the numbers eight and seven glow like ingots. New year: it's serious business! The show it's promoting is the miniseries A Sort of Innocence, which you will never, ever see again. An earnest drama starring Charlotte Campbell, Michael Byrne and a particularly reptillian Kenneth Cranham, its exploration of "the dangerous territory of relationships between children and adults" would be eerie enough if it wasn't for what we now know about its author, the strangely misspelled Alick Rowe, and his own transgressions into that territory. With choirboys, even. That doesn't seem to be necessarily what this was about, but either way, we're unlikely to see it again, or a DVD release, just because of the writer. At this point, though, he's still a respected BBC workhorse, six years away from a BAFTA, and his genuinely funny radio play Crisp and Even Brightly still gets played at Christmas on occasion. He died in 2009, in the country to which he'd escaped after leaving prison: Thailand. No comment. More acceptable pederasty now on BBC1 Scotland, however, with The Graduate. Pronounced Grad-you-eight.