TELEVISION MEMORIES 2. Get Stuffed!

 

Was anyone here a clubber or a student in the pre-phone-in-quiz-show days of late night ITV? If so does anyone remember the early hours schedule of ‘Granada TV’ (ITV1) in the late 1980s - early 1990s and especially that bizarre schedule filler called ‘Get Stuffed’? You might have been waiting to watch ‘The Hitman and Her’, ‘America’s Top Ten’ or (if you lived in HTV-land) ‘Gaz Top Non Stop’ but first squeezing itself into the late night line up was one of the most infamous ‘student attracting’ shows of our time.

 

With graphics and a soundtrack that may have influenced Nizlopi’s ‘JCB’ song, ‘Get Stuffed’ was not only a cookery show but a masterpiece of ultra-ultra-low budget television making (this compared to some of the shows that you may have found at the time on BSB or ‘Manhattan Cable’). It may have only taken up 10 minutes of the late night schedule each night, but for the shear volume of episodes created, there must have been enough brainstorming in the production department to have produced up to four seasons of ‘Floyd’ or ‘Nigella’. However, whereas Nigella’s shows are targeting a more luxurious end of the cookery market, ‘Get Stuffed’ would feature all the recipes a student would ever want to make at 4am in the morning after coming in from ‘50p a pint’ night at ‘the Venue’. So endless ‘Burger’ and ‘Chip Butty’ recipes would be cooked in the show’s kitchen, whilst cartoon inserts and footage of ‘the Mystery Chefs’ would be spliced throughout the show to increase the show’s ‘wacky’ content.

 

Even though it was the ‘Quality Save’ of all the cookery shows ever produced, ‘Get Stuffed!’ had enough bizarre charm to make it such a cult among students and the student targeted rock press of the time.

 

lol.. nope... i dont know of it! im sure one day youll pick summut ive heard/seen ...:lol:

Which (pre-ITV plc) region are you in? Did you get ‘Night Network’ or all the ‘Much Music’ and ‘Music Box’ shows instead?

The only thing worth watching on late night ITV at the time was Prisoner. Get Stuffed was an annoying 15 minute(?) long prog where students acted in the most annoyingly wacky way possible to produce a bowl of slop. Absolute c**p.

Yeah, I remember 'Get Stuffed' being on but didn't like it. I did like Prisoner : Cell Block H and the Hitman and Her though (although I used to tape the Hitman & Her and watch it on sunday mornings normally!)

 

I even used to watch the James Whale Radio Show, but God knows why.

I never really went out my way to watch James Whale’s show. I remember seeing the show only on a couple of occasions (I think it was broadcast on a Friday night/Saturday morning). On the other hand, I have seen many more clips from these series, on shows such as ‘It’ll be Alright on the Night’, which liked to play that infamous Wayne Hussey interview, where he is absolutely ‘bladdered’. Can you remember if the show was networked or was it just shown in the Northern regions (‘Granada’ / ‘Yorkshire’ etc.).

 

I think ‘The Hitman and Her’ may have also been limited to a Northern regional transmission area as the show seemed to be broadcast from ‘Mr Smiths’ in Warrington almost every other week, however I think there was one occasion when the show did actually venture below Stoke to a town somewhere along the lines of Croydon or Basildon.

 

I generally watched more of the pop music programmes, especially Casey Kasem’s ‘America’s Top Ten’ and programmes from the Toronto based ‘Much Music’ channel (where you might be lucky to get an interview with ‘the Dream Warriors’, ‘BNL’ or ‘Snow’ but for most episodes it was just ‘Narwhall’ messing about in the streets again).

 

There were a few other types of shows that I watched such as ‘In Bed with Medinner’, but here in ‘Granada-land’ we did not get ‘Gaz Top Non Stop’ which was also one of those shows that became a running joke in one of the music weeklies (‘Record Mirror’ maybe).

 

We got James Whale (including Whale On) and The Hitman and Her up in the Grampian TV region (no longer with us) so I'm pretty sure it was syndicated nationwide. Grampian was probably the worst station for replacing something good with some Gaelic arts programme to appease the three people who still insist on speaking the language.