The BBC’s more recent campaigns to make the case for the licence fee have featured star-studded versions of the Beach Boys’ God Only Knows and Lou Reed’s Perfect Day.
But rewind the clock 30 years and it was John Cleese in a pub of a thousand stars trying to persuade viewers that its TV and radio programmes were worth 16p a day (in 1986 the licence fee was £58).
The cast list in the trail, inspired by Monty Python’s “What did the Romans ever do for us?”, is a veritable BBC hall of fame from Michael Hordern and David Attenborough to David Jason and the Two Ronnies.
Some of them, like Attenborough, David Dimbleby, John Humphrys and Moira Stuart are still going strong on the BBC’s airwaves. Others – Alan Whicker, Peter West and Brian Johnston, among others – are sadly no longer with us.
At a time when the BBC is still under fire for not putting enough women and black and Asian faces on screen, it is striking how bad it was back then, the two-and-a-half minute video almost entirely white, middle class blokes.
It is also a reminder of what the BBC used to do but doesn’t any more, not least its sports coverage, shrunken in the age of multichannel TV and Sky (back then there were still only four channels).
Even though the Young Ones had already finished its run on BBC2, the trail still felt the need to separate “alternative comedy” from plain old “comedy”.
Name all the participants and win a prize. A licence fee application form.
