Saturday Morning Memories – What’s Up Doc.

What’s Up Doc (CITV, 1992-1995)

In the 1990s, CITV showed lots of Warner Brothers cartoons. You would often see a classic Bugs Bunny or Porky Pig turn up in the schedule, so it seems that they took the idea to the extreme by making a Saturday Morning show around the characters and using Bugs Bunny’s famous catchphrase as the title. Let’s have a look at the presenters and the features on the show.

Andy Crane had been a host on CBBC in the 80s and moved to CITV to present the last couple of series of Motormouth and then stayed on to host that show’s Saturday Morning successor. He now does the news on ITV Granada. 

Pat Sharp was a familiar face on CITV at the time as he was also the host of the successful game show Fun House. In those days he was also a presenter on Capital FM. Surprisingly he had already been on TV for about a decade at this point, hosting some editions of Top Of The Pops as early as 1982. And yeah, his hair, what about it? 

Yvette Fielding had just finished presenting CBBC’s Blue Peter after five years before moving to CITV to host this show, although I think she left before the end. But those three weren’t necessarily the stars of the show… 

As well as the presenters, there was a very bizarre range of characters and features on the show, especially in the first series. The most memorable would be the two wolves puppets called Bro and Bro who went on to gain their own CITV show called Wolf It. 

As well as them, there was also some strange man called Simon who smelled of cheese. This character would later be revived for a series of adverts for Twix. 

There was also a big furry puppet thing, and a very odd character who it seems was called Mr Spanky who bemused the presenters with his nonsensical ramblings, and lots of others of that very odd style. 

I do remember enjoying a feature called Life With The Amoebas which was a soap opera about the adventures of a one-cell family. Where did they get these ideas from. 

Of course, in among all this lots of guests turned up to join in the fun including pop groups and good old Neil Buchanan, and they showed a lot of cartoons, naturally made by Warner Brothers. They included Batman and Taz-Mania, which featured the Tasmanian Devil character and his family, including his dad who had the memorable catchphrase “blah blah blah blah, yackety shmackety…” 

I very much enjoyed watching the early series of this show with its very odd range of characters and enjoyable cartoons. The style of humour was maybe a little too strange for some viewers but I always found it worth a watch to discover what would happen next. And yes, every episode did end with the phrase “That’s all folks!“.