Channel 4's Resident Triffid

A charming closedown from 1983

It’s possible to watch almost anything you want at any hour of the day in this modern world of streaming services and on-demand television. But rewind a few decades and your choice was slightly more limited. In fact, after midnight you were lucky if there was anything to watch outside of those new fangled VHS tapes. However, you were blessed enough to be treated to televisual closedowns every single night.

I spent part of this morning sifting through some Betamax tapes to see what nuggets of vintage joy I could hold up to the light. And I certainly found a little slice of charm in the above clip. Following on from an airing of the 1948 film The Big Clock, it’s time for Channel 4 to bid goodnight to its viewers. But this being the kind and caring past, we aren’t just shunted off into the dark. No, we have David Stranks to offer a kind word before we shuffle off to bed.

Stranks was a regular sight to nightowls in the early days of Channel Four, where he acted as an in-vision announcer for the closedown service. He also acted as the continuity annoucer throughout the evening, but this was purely an auditory experience. Stranks would later go on to carve out a lengthy career as a producer and developer behind the camera, but here he is in his early, formative years.

Anyway, tonight, he’s joined by the ‘Channel 4 Closedown Plant’ as I’ve always called it. However, here, Stranks refers to it as “our friendly neighbourhood Triffid” and even genders it as a male. Stranks makes an apology for the plant not responding to its significant fanmail - which mostly requests signed photos - but encourages viewers to carry on sending correspondence in.

Now, did people actually send fanmail in to the plant? I don’t know for sure, but it’s a charming proposition if they did. These days, of course, viewers would send letters in, but these would mostly be complaining about the virtue signalling of having a plant in the background, it clearly being some hidden agenda relating to enviromental matters. You know what people are like today.

But this situation would never arise as closedowns are long, long gone. We now live in a 24-hour world of entertainment where your every tittilation can be tittilated whenever you want. Okay, yes, it’s progress, but sometimes it’s nice to look back at simpler times, when we weren’t hardwired into our screens desperately searching for that next hit of dopamine. In 1983, it was time for bed or, heaven forbid, read a book. Sometimes simplicity is best.