First Episode of Saturday Superstore Emerges
YouTube comes up trumps again with this excellent upload
A few years ago, over on the main Curious British Telly site, I undertook a rather exhaustive commentary of a 1985 episode of Saturday Superstore. Due to the painstaking labour of watching, rewatching, taking notes and writing the whole thing up, I’m never EVER doing something like that again. However, I was recently tickled pink (other colours are available) when I found that the very first episode of Saturday Superstore had made its way on to YouTube.
Transmitted on 2nd October 1982, it was an episode which kickstarted a five series run for Saturday Superstore, with its final episode airing on 18th April 1987. Therefore, it’s a mildly historic slice of archive television to suddenly descend from the heavens (even if it never really captured the love and devotion of the shows which preceded and followed it: Swap Shop and Going Live!).
The footage is also remarkably clear, if relatively soft in terms of picture quality. It appears to have arrived via an official source, rather than from a dusty old VHS (or Betamax) as there’s a timeclock at the start of the episode, so maybe there’s more to come.
Anyway, the episode itself is typical Saturday Superstore fare and, of course, it’s very 1980s with Mike Read handling in-store appearances from Adam Ant, Kate Bush and Paul Daniels. Keith Chegwin (the delivery boy), meanwhile, is over in Northampton in the Saturday Superstore delivery van to meet the local kids and, no doubt, hand out countless Saturday Superstore bags. John Craven is also in the studio to front the Customer Services section and David Icke (pre-conspiracy theories) is there to present the sports features.
It’s a nice find, but is it worth watching the whole thing in one run? Well, uh, no, not really. I wouldn’t recommend that unless you’re a glutton for punishment. However, dipping in and out to enjoy the guests and soaking up the general ambience (despite the studio sections sounding eerily quiet and flat) for a guilty, nostalgic pleasure is worth investing a little time.