It Started With Swap Shop (not!)

Ask any group of Brits of a certain age what they watched on Saturday mornings as a kid, and you’ll see an instant polarisation take place.

In one corner will be the Tiswas fans, shouting “Compost Corner? COMPOST CORNER!” at each other, while in the other will be the more intelligent kids like me who watched Multi-Coloured Swap Shop.

”Swap Shop” ran for 6 years – a very long time when you consider that it would be on all morning each Saturday, and as a magazine-show was predominantly talk-based.

The memories are too long to list here, but this reunion show was as long as an original edition, and reunited pretty well everyone who’d ever been regularly on it. In terms of chronicling Swap Shop, the show really did its subject justice.

The second half of the programme also dealt well with what happened to the strand after Swap Shop itself had finished, citing several long-running shows in the same mould, but not even mentioning stuff like The 8:15 From Manchester or It’s Wicked!

And that slightly smug self-important attitude was my only real problem with this show. It should have been up-front and honest about chronicling the history of merely that slot on BBC-1, instead of arrogantly claiming that Swap Shop was the first ever Saturday-morning show on any channel.

Despite my allegiance, the plain fact remains that Tiswas actually did come first (Swap Shop was the BBC’s response to it), and Saturday Scene of course beat both of them.

What on Earth is the BBC’s problem?