Blog

As described in the weekend TV guide of The Southall Gazette, published Friday 12th November 1982: “5.20 MURUN BUCHSTANSANGUR. Original animated series featuring a smelly, disgusting, but irresistible creature that lives in a crack beneath the kitchen cupboard”.

From the Liverpool Echo, Saturday 28th November 1992:

CONFESSION time.

Denis Norden, the man who’s viewed more boobs on television than the Board of Film Censors, has an admission. He’s terrified of studio audiences.

Yep. He says he “loathes” presenting, becomes “traumatised with panic” and would much prefer to take a back seat. But he can’t.

He comes up with ideas for shows and because no-one else wants to perform his brand of “mild humour”, he says he ends up in the hot seat. Somewhere he would prefer not to be.

It was he who dreamed up the format for the hugely successful It’ll Be All Right on the Night series that revealed the mistakes that never made it on air, and ran to more parts than the Rocky or Nightmare on Elm Street films.

Now he’s come up with vet another format for a show – and again he’s drawn the short straw when it comes to presenting.

Denis Norden’s Trailer Cinema (tonight, ITV, 9.05 pm) unearths the naff and the novel, the nauseating and nasty trailers that attempted to draw audiences to the B-movies of the 50s and 60s.

The makers of B-movies knew that they weren’t likely to get bums on seats solely on the strength of their (usually awful) films, so they had to entice people to the cinema. Hence the imaginative trailers that even went so far as to show scenes that never actually featured in the movie.

Denis Norden trawled through more than 2,000 trailers, selecting his favourite 100 for this hour long special. Watch out for the references to sex, and the introduction of “new” faces Joan Collins, Sean Connery and Leonard Nimoy.