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I've been doing some research this past week on the UK airdates of 'The Muppet Show' courtesy of some Scottish newspapers that are available for viewing through Google. What I've discovered is that some of our ideas as to what happened back then are completely wrong, while others have thrown up mysteries to be solved.
First of all, it looks like most of the ITV regions took TMS on the same day (Sunday) as ATV (though not always at the same time) and in the same order. The exception to this is LWT (London Weekend Television) which didn't take the series until late October (it started early September in the other regions.)
Now this is where the mysteries begin; the listings I have been looking are for one of the Scottish channels - STV. STV has the Bruce Forsyth episode as the last of season one. However, if that's right then STV (and some of the other regions) only aired 21 out of 24 episodes; the missing three are Ethel Merman, Connie Stevens and Vincent Price. To confuse matters, someone has found the dates for the UK airings and posted them on the Wikipedia article "List of the Muppet Show Episodes" and the above three episodes are listed in the Guardian (London paper) as airing in February 1977. It had originally been thought that those last three aired in April after a series of reruns aired between January and April 1977. In fact, the reruns aired in April 1977 after the Easter weekend; on Easter Sunday 1977 the ITV regions list a one-hour programme called Best of the Muppets which is billed as being a compilation featuring Rita Moreno and Ethel Merman. I've heard of this, but have no idea as to what it was - was this a compilation of different clips or just those two episodes repeated one after the other?
More to follow at a later time...
First of all, it looks like most of the ITV regions took TMS on the same day (Sunday) as ATV (though not always at the same time) and in the same order. The exception to this is LWT (London Weekend Television) which didn't take the series until late October (it started early September in the other regions.)
Now this is where the mysteries begin; the listings I have been looking are for one of the Scottish channels - STV. STV has the Bruce Forsyth episode as the last of season one. However, if that's right then STV (and some of the other regions) only aired 21 out of 24 episodes; the missing three are Ethel Merman, Connie Stevens and Vincent Price. To confuse matters, someone has found the dates for the UK airings and posted them on the Wikipedia article "List of the Muppet Show Episodes" and the above three episodes are listed in the Guardian (London paper) as airing in February 1977. It had originally been thought that those last three aired in April after a series of reruns aired between January and April 1977. In fact, the reruns aired in April 1977 after the Easter weekend; on Easter Sunday 1977 the ITV regions list a one-hour programme called Best of the Muppets which is billed as being a compilation featuring Rita Moreno and Ethel Merman. I've heard of this, but have no idea as to what it was - was this a compilation of different clips or just those two episodes repeated one after the other?
More to follow at a later time...