The telly-watching telly show is back, as is Bob Harris, for a live outing of the classic music show. Plus: Anguilla is stoic after Hurricane Irma
Gogglebox
9pm, Channel 4
We’ll miss the no-nonsense assessments of Leon and June Bernicoff (Leon passed away late last year), but it’s an otherwise welcome return for the National Television award-winning Gogglebox. Now on its 11th series, Channel 4’s fly-on-the-wall telly show about people watching telly shows provides a rare snapshot of the modern family in its natural habit. It has graduated from improbable hit to appointment viewing, with national cultural institution now in its sights. More pressingly, what did Stephen and Christopher make of the McMafia finale? Ellen E Jones
An Island Parish
9pm, BBC Two
The most recent series of this doc was shot on Anguilla, roughly a year before the British overseas territory was battered by Hurricane Irma. This film returns to the island a month after the storm, to see how the parishioners are coping. The destruction, while astonishing, seems to have prompted stoic resolve. Andrew Mueller
Lethal Weapon
9pm, ITV
A suspicious death at a local surf spot means overworked cop partners Riggs and Murtaugh can toss some gnarly Point Break lingo into their reliably high-octane pop-culture stew. Other ingredients include a lanky cameo from Chicago Bulls star Scottie Pippen and a nod to The Silence of the Lambs. Graeme Virtue
The Old Grey Whistle Test Live
9pm, BBC Four
Marking 30 years since the final episode of the show, Bob Harris presents this live edition that fits BBC Four as snugly as Richard Thompson’s beret. There’ll be performances from Peter Frampton and Albert Lee, and chats with some of the classic show’s former presenters, including Andy Kershaw. Ali Catterall
Jamestown
9pm, Sky1
During the show’s first series, critics’ main bugbear was that this soapy new-world drama featured anachronistically bolshy female characters. This time around, the issue isn’t the women, but the fact that the newly arrived slave population are yet to get much in the way of screentime. Tonight, Read, the blacksmith, is hit by tragedy. Hannah J Davies
Will & Grace
10pm, Channel 5
The turn-of-the-millennium sitcom has returned in an essentially low-key way. Apart from the president, nothing much seems to have changed for our protagonists. Tonight’s episode is enlivened for woodworkers and Parks and Rec fans by a guest spot from Nick Offerman as a celebrity baker. John Robinson
Film choice
Facebook Twitter Pinterest Perceptive portrait … Ben Stiller and Naomi Watts in While We’re Young. Photograph: Allstar/Scott Rudin Prod
While We’re Young (Noah Baumbach, 2014) 11.05pm, BBC Two
Ben Stiller reunites with Noah Baumbach for another funny and perceptive portrait of middle age. Stiller is Josh Schrebnick, a fading documentary-maker who, with his wife Cornelia (Naomi Watts), grows fascinated by a twentysomething couple, setting them on a search for their long-lost inner youth. Paul Howlett
Live sport
Winter Olympics 2018 Day 16 will include ice hockey semi-finals. 6am, BBC Two.
Championship football: Hull City v Sheffield United A second-tier game from the KCOM stadium. 7pm, Sky Sports Main Event.
Six Nations rugby: France v Italy A bottom-of-the-table match between the continental sides. 7.30pm, BBC One.
The radio DJ looks back at the glory days of the BBC music show ahead of a three-hour tribute programme on BBC4
Bob Harris is checking Twitter. It’s a cold Thursday afternoon and in a meeting room at the BBC’s Wogan House the 71-year-old radio presenter is reading social media responses to the news that he’s hosting a three-hour programme on BBC4 marking 30 years since The Old Grey Whistle Test was last broadcast (which airs on BBC4 on Friday 23 February at 9.00pm).
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“The response has been fabulous!” enthuses Harris, who helmed the landmark BBC2 music series during its imperial period, from 1972 to 1978, and whose hushed tones conferred churchly reverence on a remarkable run of live performers that included David Bowie, Bob Marley, John Martyn and Joni Mitchell.
But Harris, who can also currently be heard on Radio 2, presenting Old Grey Whistle Test at 40 – a 16-part series, first broadcast in 2011 – admits to conflicted emotions about the current anniversary: an undoubted sense of pride at what he achieved, yet a renewed sadness at his departure and its demise.
“Very bittersweet,” he says, with a sigh. “During my last two years on the show I came under intensive fire from the punk bands.”
Ironically, Harris’s first big break came via punk champion DJ John Peel. In August 1968, a 22-year-old Harris appeared on Peel’s Radio 1 show to talk about Time Out, the new magazine he’d just launched with his pal Tony Elliott.
When Peel went on holiday in 1970, it was suggested that Harris sit in. Almost as an act of homage, Peel’s radio model – a conspiratorial late-night scene for the cognoscenti – was one that Harris transferred whole to Whistle Test.
“It was this word-of-mouth doorway into an exclusive club,” he explains. “You wouldn’t hear these musicians anywhere else. Because they couldn’t afford to dress the studio, everyone looked like squatters. Plus it was the last programme of the night, so if a guitar solo went on too long, no one complained. Open-ended creativity. I loved it.”
But by 1976, that indulgent private-club feel, coupled with Harris’s appearance and background – long-haired, middle-class, son of a Northamptonshire policeman – was entirely out of step. To lairy young punks, “Whispering” Bob was the establishment.
It all came to a head in the London club Dingwalls in March 1977, when a group of punks attacked Harris, demanding to know when the Sex Pistols would be on the show.
“I hadn’t set out to antagonise anyone,” says Harris, “but Whistle Test was an albums show. Top of the Pops was singles. Punk came up through singles.”
Some argue that the damage was done a few years earlier, when Harris dismissed New Wave progenitors Roxy Music as being “style over substance”, and dubbed proto-punk US rockers the New York Dolls as “mock rock”.
“I was wrong,” admits Harris. “In the era of the big rock critic I felt you had to be outspoken. Watching that Dolls clip now I think, ‘What were you thinking, Bob?’ I became the Ken Barlow of rock. It ate away at me.”
Stepping away from the spotlight, Harris moved to Italy where he lived a below-the-radar existence before returning to Radio 1 in 1989 to host the after-midnight slot. Then, in 1994, along with Dave Lee Travis and Simon Bates, Harris was jettisoned from the station by the new controller, Matthew Bannister: “Did I want to leave? Absolutely not. Could I understand his decision? Completely. I was already unfashionable in 1976, so I was probably at the top of Matthew’s list.”
Worse was to come. During the 1990s property boom, Harris borrowed £130,000 from fellow DJ Bruno Brookes to buy a flat. Then came the crash and Harris was unable to repay the debt, which led to an expensive legal dispute.
I’d always assumed that Harris lost his huge collection of vinyl records during the dispute, but no. Happily for him the court accepted that his records were “tools of trade”.
I tell Harris he’s a fighter. We talk briefly about his recovery from prostate cancer in 2007, before discussion returns to Brookes. “I realise I had this steel in me,” he says. “After the whole Bruno thing, I had a new determination. What else am I going to do? I love music.”
Harris is currently developing a production company with his wife, Trudie, and his son, Miles, and he is also working on a podcast about walking. (“Wandering Bob?”, suggests his PR.)
Most important is the Thursday-night country music show on Radio 2 that he’s been presenting since 1999, and which finds the presenter at the heart of a creative, modern scene he absolutely loves: “I’ll occasionally have cabbies say, ‘Oh Bob, music’s not what it used to be.’ I’ll say, ‘No it isn’t. There’s more choice, it’s more accessible, there’s more of everything.’”
This enthusiasm is present in everything he does. His YouTube channel, WhisperingBobTV, broadcasts modern country artists playing live in the shed-cum-studio at the bottom of his garden in Steventon, Oxfordshire, and he’s currently developing a new live concert series, broadcast from musicians’ own homes.
I tell him he’s had the last laugh, that none of the 1977 punks who urged his demise would ever imagine he’d still be thriving in 2018. “Those barriers have broken down,” he says with delight. “Because of YouTube and Spotify, the 70s tribalism that was my undoing doesn’t exist any more.”
I ask if a new BBC music programme could successfully capture this eclectic boundary-free world of modern music. He thinks for a minute.
“It would need to be magazine show with a main band, a smaller band, a news desk… you’d have film reports, gig clips, interviews… that would instantly be different.” It’s hard to know if Bob is pulling my leg, but I tell him he’s just described a modern version of The Old Grey Whistle Test.
“Emphatically! Yes!” he says with delight, and a small twinkle in his eye.
By Andrew Male
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The Old Grey Whistle Test is on 9pm Friday, BBC4. Bob Harris Country is on Thursday 7pm Radio 2
The Old Grey Whistle Test Anniversary Show 2018 – Online Vote Terms and Conditions
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2. Votes can be made online by accessing www.bbc.co.uk/whistletest from 22nd February 2018 during Steve Wright’s show on Radio 2 when the vote will be launched and opened until around 23:15 on 23rd February 2018 during The Old Grey Whistle Test Anniversary show on BBC Four when the vote will be closed.
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Hosted by Bob Harris, this live studio show features music, special guests and rare archive footage to mark the 30 years since the legendary series was last broadcast.
Featuring performances from Peter Frampton, Richard Thompson, Albert Lee and more. Bob also chats to Whistle Test alumni, including Dave Stewart, Joan Armatrading, Ian Anderson, Chris Difford and Kiki Dee, as well as fan Danny Baker.
