Saturday Banana

Saturday Banana
Country of origin	UK
Production
Running time	22 minutes
Release
Original network	ITV

The Saturday Banana was a Saturday morning children's television show produced by Southern Television for ITV and presented by Goodies star Bill Oddie. Oddie also wrote and sang the theme tune. The series began on 8 July 1978, running through the summer and continuing up to December, with a Christmas Special.

According to a TV Times interview with presenter Bill Oddie when the show was aired, it was to have been named The Saturday Bonanza, but was renamed due to poor handwriting being mis-read.

The Saturday Banana was shown by several ITV stations including Anglia, Border, HTV, LWT, STV, Southern, Westward and Yorkshire. For its first run, the series was available to ITV companies at the same time as the popular Tiswas, so whether the viewer saw Tiswas or The Saturday Banana was up to their regional ITV station. For the series's second run in 1979, only Southern and Anglia broadcast the show while most other regions screened Tiswas.

As was a common practice within television at that time, the policy of Southern TV was to wipe any videotape recording of contemporary non-news programming, due to the high cost of videotape. Children's shows were often wiped as it was thought they would have little future value so consequently little remains of The Saturday Banana on broadcast quality master tape. However, the final episode before Christmas, 1979 remains in its entirety along with a sequence from 1978 which features Bill talking to George Chakiris, a discussion of fruitbats, some snake and toad sequences and presenter Bill Gamon briefly chatting to then-chart toppers Darts. A 'chart rundown' is also shown, with clips of the top ten played while the camera pans over the young audience members. A second edition exists in the Wessex Film Archive, in mediocre quality, copied from a domestic video recording.

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