A Look at Sunny Side Up

A Forgotten Children's ITV Show from 1982

Sunny Side Up was a Yorkshire Television production which served as the follow-up series to Ad Lib, some footage of which can be found here. Sunny Side Up ran for two series in 1982 in the children’s late afternoon slot on ITV, then known as Watch It! rather than Children’s ITV.

The programme was very similar in tone and feel to Ad-Lib, being a mixture of documentaries, roving reports, songs, comedy and, being 1982, bright, bright outfits for the presenters. Only Nicky Christian transferred over from the Ad Lib presenting team, with the most familiar new face being Tim Whitnall, who would later go on to play Angelo in the iconic Mike & Angelo.

Footage of Sunny Side Up is scarce, but I managed to secure a few episodes of the series during the pandemic. I had been planning to write another book on forgotten children’s television, which Sunny Side Up would have featured in, but the pandemic restrictions extinguished all hopes of completing enough research. Anyway, I decided that the Curious British Telly Substack was the ideal place to look at the first two episodes, so here we go.