Terence Alan "Spike" Milligan was an Irish comedian, writer, musician, poet, playwright and actor. The son of an English mother and Irish father, he was born in British Colonial India, where he spent his childhood before relocating in 1931 to England, where he lived and worked for the majority of his life. Disliking his first name, he began to call himself "Spike" after hearing the band Spike Jones and his City Slickers on Radio Luxembourg.
The Goon Show is a British radio comedy programme, originally produced and broadcast by the BBC Home Service from 1951 to 1960, with occasional repeats on the BBC Light Programme. The first series, broadcast from 28 May to 20 September 1951, was titled Crazy People; subsequent series had the title The Goon Show.
John Michael Bird was an English actor, director, writer and satirist. He performed in the television satire boom of the 1960s, appearing in That Was the Week That Was. His television work included many appearances with John Fortune. Bird had an acting career in film, television, theatre and radio for over 55 years. He appeared in films including Take A Girl Like You (1970) and Jabberwocky (1977) as well as in television shows such as Joint Account, Marmalade Atkins, El C.I.D. and Chambers. He and Fortune also starred with Rory Bremner in the sketch show Bremner, Bird and Fortune (1999–2010), on Channel 4, which was nominated for BAFTA TV Awards.
William Henry Kerr was a British and Australian actor, comedian, and vaudevillian.
Windsor Davies was a British actor. He is best remembered for playing Battery Sergeant Major Williams in the sitcom It Ain't Half Hot Mum (1974–1981) over its entire run. The show's popularity resulted in Davies and his co-star Don Estelle achieving a UK number-one hit with a version of "Whispering Grass" in 1975. He later starred with Donald Sinden in Never the Twain (1981–1991), and his deep Welsh-accented voice was heard extensively in advertising voice-overs.
Johnny Speight was an English television scriptwriter of many classic British sitcoms.
Comedy Playhouse is a long-running British anthology series of one-off unrelated sitcoms that aired for 128 episodes from 1961 to 1975. Many episodes later graduated to their own series, including Steptoe and Son, Meet the Wife, Till Death Us Do Part, All Gas and Gaiters, Up Pompeii!, Not in Front of the Children, Me Mammy, That's Your Funeral, The Liver Birds, Are You Being Served? and particularly Last of the Summer Wine, which is the world's longest running sitcom, having run from January 1973 to August 2010. In all, 27 sitcoms started from a pilot in the Comedy Playhouse strand.
The Liver Birds is a British sitcom, set in Liverpool, North West England, which aired on BBC1 from April 1969 to December 1978, and again in 1996. The show was created by Carla Lane and Myra Taylor. The two Liverpudlian housewives had met at a local writers club and decided to pool their talents. Having been invited to London by Michael Mills, the BBC's then Head of Comedy, and asked to write about two women sharing a flat, Mills brought in sitcom expert Sydney Lotterby to work with the writing team.
Hugh Francis Carson KSG was a Northern Irish comedian and actor from Belfast. He was best known for being a regular face on television for many years from the 1970s onwards, appearing in series such as The Comedians and Tiswas. His trademark line was "It's the way I tell them!". Carson was a member of the entertainment charity the Grand Order of Water Rats.
Q... is a surreal television comedy sketch show written by Spike Milligan and Neil Shand, and starring Spike Milligan with supporting players, usually including Julia Breck, John Bluthal, Bob Todd, and John Wells. The show ran from 1969 to 1982 on BBC2. There were six series in all, the first five numbered from Q5 to Q9, and a final series titled There's a Lot of It About. The first and third series ran for seven episodes, and the others for six episodes, each of which was 30 minutes long.
Edward Ian MacNaughton was a Scottish actor, television producer and director, best known for his work with the Monty Python team.
The World of Beachcomber was a surreal television comedy show produced by the BBC inspired by the Beachcomber column in the Daily Express newspaper.
Robert Dorning was a musician, dance band vocalist, ballet dancer and stage, film and television actor. He is known to have performed in at least 77 television and film productions between 1940 and 1988.
Henry James Fowler, MBE was an English character actor in film and television. Over a career lasting more than six decades, he made nearly 200 appearances on screen.
Curry and Chips is a British television sitcom broadcast in 1969 which was produced by London Weekend Television for the ITV network.
Alexandra Dane is an English actress who appeared in many films including Carry On Doctor, Carry On Loving, other Carry On films, The Ups and Downs of a Handyman, Le Pétomane and Terry Gilliam's Jabberwocky.
I Love the '70s is a television nostalgia series produced by the BBC that examines the pop culture of the 1970s. It was broadcast in ten hour-long episodes, one dedicated to each year, with the first episode, I Love 1970, premiering on BBC Two on 22 July 2000, and the last, I Love 1979, premiering on 23 September 2000. On the original broadcasts, each episode was followed by the host introducing a film from that particular year. Repeat editions have often been edited down in length by featuring less items, typically to half an hour runtime.
This is a list of British television related events from 1975.
Oh In Colour was a comedy television sketch programme broadcast on BBC 2 in 1970. It ran for one six-episode series from September to November 1970. It was written by and featured Spike Milligan, who was accompanied by different stars every week. It was shown after the thoroughly more popular Q5, also written by Milligan and Neil Shand. It is likely the programme was written to bridge the long production gap between Q5 and the next series, Q6, which did not appear on TV screens until 1975.
Lawrence Geoffrey Stephens was a BBC radio scriptwriter, best remembered for co-writing The Goon Show with Spike Milligan. Stephens was a regular writer of the show for the first two years, and then returned to The Goon Show to assist Milligan. From his association with Milligan, Stephens became involved with Associated London Scripts (ALS), and was said to have been "one of the most eye-catching characters, in the earliest days of the company...he played a significant cameo role in the first phase of success for ALS".
