TV Cream

» see tvcream.co.uk as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

Nostalgia does not export. TV Cream was written by and for people who had been small children in Britain in the 1970s, sitting in front of a set with three or four channels on it, and everything the site was good at depended on that shared room. My childhood television was TRT, one state broadcaster in a country that had no private channels at all until 1990, so I can read TV Cream the way you read somebody else's family photographs. The affection is obvious. The people in it are strangers.

It started on 31 August 1997 as a site called The Arkhive, put up by a writer named Phil Norman, and took the name TV Cream the following year. What it did was catalog British television programs of the 1970s and 80s and write about them at a length nobody was paying for. The house term for the period was the Cream Era, and the house standard for what qualified was as arbitrary and as strictly enforced as these things always are.

Over the years it collected a crew rather than an audience. Steve Berry, Ian Jones, Graham Kibble-White and TJ Worthington are among the names that recur, all of them writing about theme tunes and the specific texture of a Thursday evening in 1979. Four books came out of it, including one about toys and one about British confectionery. A sister site called Off The Telly ran the serious television criticism until it stopped taking new pieces in 2010.

The strapline said "celebrating defunct pop culture since 1997", which means the site spent twenty-seven years as a graveyard and then became one. That is not irony so much as arithmetic. Keep a site about dead things running long enough and it joins the collection.

~ the case file ~

~ the right kind of nostalgia ~

The thing that separated TV Cream from the reams of "remember the 90s" filler that British television and the British web were both producing at the time was that it was fussy. The site had opinions about which memories counted, expressed in a running joke about The Right Kind Of nostalgia, and it was funny about the material rather than sentimental about it.

That fussiness is why it lasted. Anyone can list programs. Very few people can write four hundred words about a continuity announcer that still reads well twenty years later, and TV Cream could field a dozen who would do it for nothing. It was nominated for a Yahoo award for best comedy website in 2003, which is a very 2003 sentence, and it kept going long after the awards and the traffic had gone somewhere else.

~ creamguide ~

The other half of the operation was an email. Creamguide went out weekly and told you what was worth watching on British television in the coming days, filtered through the same taste as the site, and it kept a readership through the whole run of blogs and social networks that were each supposed to have made a mailing list pointless.

A later companion called Why Don't YouTube did the same job for archive clips, pulling together what happened this week in television history. Both of them are the reason the closure was not total. When the site went, the mailings carried on, because a mailing list does not need a server anyone has to pay for.

~ the delete key ~

On 31 August 2024, its twenty-seventh birthday, TV Cream posted a farewell that opened with "GREAT NEWS FOR ALL READERS" and then explained that this was not a joke. The site would cease to be from 19 September. The reasons given were honest and slightly deflating. Nothing much had been added for a couple of years apart from at Christmas, and the few people still orbiting the place were busy or had moved on to projects they found more rewarding. Maybe, they wrote, the passion for nostalgia had simply waned.

Then came the part that matters if you run anything like this. They were not going to leave the site sitting there. It would be deleted. Hosting costs were one reason, and the other one they refused to spell out, writing only that there were trickier issues involved and that the short version was "The Man". Twenty-seven years of writing, taken down on purpose, by the people who wrote it, without ever saying who had made them nervous.

~ what is left of it ~

They said they were keeping an offline backup of everything, Off The Telly included, and holding on to the domain names in case a way opened up to put it back where it could not cause trouble. Nothing has come of that so far. The Internet Archive has most of the site, which is where anyone reading this will end up, and the comments under the closedown post are the usual queue of people saying they read it in a university computer room twenty years ago and then on a phone at work ever since.

The line the site used for what it collected was "good, great memories". It is a fitting last entry for a project that spent nearly three decades insisting that ephemeral television was worth writing down, and then decided that the writing itself was fine to lose.

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