Videos Of The Week #9: Black & White Cat Station Choir

Welcome, once again to Videos Of The Week. Yet more videos, specially hand-picked by premium hands and shoved down some tubes into your face and general orifices. Yes. It's time to buckle up, put down that greased-up onion (you dirty bastard) and enjoy this digital shower.

You might as well blog going to the toilet

Tickets at the ready, as our first stop is all about a project I should have covered earlier, when it all started back in May. All The Trains is a project involving Geoff Marshall (who was in a video featured in a VOTW post in June) and Vicki Pipe, who are on a quest to travel to every single national railway station in Britain in 3 months. Along with a website that keeps track of their progress, there is a YouTube channel, where they upload a number of videos during each week, documenting their progress. The video featured below is the most recent one (as I write this), featuring the world-famous Felix, The Huddersfield Station Cat. TO THE TRAINS...

As things are right now, they are just over two-thirds of the way through their quest, so you might like to go back to the start, if you haven't already. I certainly think this is one of the best things online right now and I wish Geoff and Vicki the best of luck for the remainder of the stations.

Erm...

I don't know... I just don't know...

This video comes from Cool 3D World: A channel which consists of some of the most bizarre animations I have ever seen. There isn't much else I can say about them. Don't have nightmares. 

Her cat used the dry cleaning method

Let's take a bit of time out to calm down, by going back 50 years to the 6th July 1967 and BBC1, as we get to see some rarely-preserved presentation from this era. We join the action as BBC1's coverage of Wimbledon takes a break (still in black and white on BBC1, but in colour for the first time on BBC2), using the same piece of music that is used today at the end of each live broadcast during the championships. 

Then, the very well-spoken announcer gives us a time check before introducing Blue Peter - a long-running children's programme which is still going strong today, despite what a certain newspaper wants us to believe. Their first item is all about the cleaning method of different cats, which does seem rather bizarre and of its time, but I do remember some time around 2004/5 they got one of their cats to piss into a jar, so that they could put it under a UV light and watch it glow. This was something I genuinely didn't know until I saw them demonstrate it. See? It's still educational.

I absolutely love things like this, as it gives you a clear snapshot of what the world was like at a very particular time. Both programmes shown here are still on the air, it's just that they're in colour and they are presented in a different way. Some things never change.

Or is there a Pigeon on the aerial

Staying with black and white TV, the final clip this week comes from comedy duo Hale & Pace in 1988. Here, they pay musical tribute to monochrome broadcasting and some of the technical issues that it would sometimes encounter. To be fair, old analogue TV did have a few shortfalls, but at least you could still watch what was being transmitted whenever the signal suffered interference unlike with digital TV, which often becomes an unwatchable mess during a storm.

And that's your lot for this week. 

Go away.