Broadcast for Schools .co.uk
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18th July 2021: first update in 8 years!
Introducing a guide to the long-running ITV Schools series Stop, Look, Listen of almost-hypnotically entertaining documentaries for junior pupils about baked bean factories, trainee policemen, living museums and coal miners. There is a detailed overview of how the series developed from 1971 to 2009, and an in-progress episode guide with historical Midlands location-spotting on an interactive map! This is a very tricky series to nail down (old TV Times listings are too basic to be much use) and these pages are the product of almost 20 years of research to make sense of everything.
Did you know...
- ... that those terrifically catchy traffic light-coloured opening titles, that you definitely remember if you're the right age, were broadcast a staggering 640 times between 1981 and 1993?
- ... that before he was famous and going on Extreme Railway journeys, Chris Tarrant narrated a documentary film in which children bought their tickets in 1975, travelled on a train in 1971, and disembarked back in 1975 again without anybody noticing - all through the magic of re-editing old programmes to make new ones?
- ... that Central TV inadvertently made a documentary for 7-year-olds about an international drug smuggler?
All this and more in the BroadcastForSchools website's new Stop, Look, Listen guide!
Also: the site has a completely new, modern layout, and more updates are coming.
Back in 2013 the site got a bit stuck in software that I couldn't update and kept bringing down its server, I also got busy doing other things - this website is a one-man band operation (like Mr Boom!). Now finally in 2021 I have rebuilt it on modern software that hopefully works properly so it can be updated again.
Lots has happened since 2013 that still needs to get updated here.
- All schools TV and radio broadcasts in Britain have ended after 58 and 94 years respectively (though BBC Alba muddied the water a bit with an extra repeat run of A' Bhùth in 2020-21). Lots of programme entries across the site need to be brought up to date.
- There are new websites, wikis and Wikipedia pages about schools programmes, and lots of example episodes of old schools TV (and some radio) programmes available unofficially on YouTube, to see what they were actually like.
- The BBC Genome project has been published and old BBC listings are easily available online, though not always for the schools broadcasts. Meanwhile the online archive catalogues for most ITV companies have gone offline.
- The Look and Read story The Boy from Space has officially come out on DVD (I wrote one of the articles in the DVD booklet)! This website you are reading now grew out of a Look and Read fan website which I started over 21 years ago in early 2000, and it badly needs better coverage of Look and Read programmes. It used to have a detailed episode-by-episode, behind-the-scenes guide to Through the Dragon's Eye, a walk through all of the filming locations for Geordie Racer, a scene-specific comparison of Sky Hunter and Sky Hunter II, and loads more. Don't bother looking for those things here now, they are lost to the mists of internet time. But they will come back, along with loads more...
- The forum for this website went offline in 2015. Don't ask me what happened there, I wasn't paying attention! It probably became incompatible with the server software or something. I do not intend to bring it back because I cannot be trusted to look after it properly.
Latest updates
| Today and Tomorrow (ITV) | TV |
| 23 Jul 2021 | |
Today and Tomorrow (BBC) 
|
TV |
| 23 Jul 2021 | |
| All About Us | TV |
| 23 Jul 2021 | |
| Series 2-17 (1975-93) (from Stop, Look, Listen)
|
TV |
| New 23 Jul 2021 | |
| A Christmas Journey (from Music Time) | TV |
| 23 Jul 2021 | |
| The Machine Gunners (2017)
|
Radio |
| New 23 Jul 2021 | |
| The Machine Gunners (2002) | Radio |
| 23 Jul 2021 | |
| A Christmas Carol | Radio |
| 23 Jul 2021 | |
| Stop, Look, Listen
|
TV |
| 21 Jul 2021 | |
| Ways with Words (1983) | TV |
| 19 Jul 2021 | |