Ranking the TV Shows in the UK’s 1990s 6pm Weekday Slot

There are people who’ll tell you that Japanese folklore fantasy Monkey airing at 6pm on Friday nights in the 1980s was the highpoint of post-school, pre-bedtime TV scheduling in the UK. Let’s not tell them that they’re wrong; let’s just pity them for having mistimed their childhood by a decade. The 1990s were the real peak of […]

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There are people who’ll tell you that Japanese folklore fantasy Monkey airing at 6pm on Friday nights in the 1980s was the highpoint of post-school, pre-bedtime TV scheduling in the UK. Let’s not tell them that they’re wrong; let’s just pity them for having mistimed their childhood by a decade.

The 1990s were the real peak of the 6pm weeknight TV slot. As long as there was no Wimbledon, snooker, cricket, athletics or Horse of the Year Show, that’s where anyone too young to go to the pub found joy. While grown-ups were watching the Six O’Clock News, kids in households flush enough to have a second television switched on BBC Two or Channel 4. There, to quote Howard Carter upon breaking into Tutankhamun’s tomb, they found wonderful things.

Before the youth-oriented DEF II brought 1970s reruns to the slot, weekday teatimes on the BBC had all been about old movies. Then it was out with Elvis flicks and Margaret Lockwood in The Wicked Lady, and in with a new brand of US import aimed specifically at young people. Thanks to BBC Two and Channel 4, 1990s teens and and tweens had their own TV landscape – a patchwork of retro and new US comedies, classic sci-fi, YA drama and homegrown formats. Some of it was ropey, some of it was middling, some of it was stone-cold brilliant, but all of it is now able to induce nostalgic shivers in the right age group.

Let’s celebrate with a mostly comprehensive run-down of the top 30-ish shows, ranked (subjectively, obvs) from the rest to the best…

30. My Two Dads/Kate & Allie

These US 80s and 90s Channel 4 sitcom imports can be lumped together because, to the mind of a 10-year-old, they each provoked roughly the same amount of joy, namely: eh, some. My Two Dads had the fun – if judicially irresponsible – premise of two single, straight guys (Paul Reiser and Greg Evigan) living in different places but having shared custody of a teenage girl whose dead mother they’d both once dated. Kate & Allie was another blended family tale about two divorced straight women (Susan Saint James and Jane Curtin) who set up a household together. To a child, all were better than the news, but nothing to write in your lock-and-key diary about.

29. Home Improvement

Home Improvement was about Tim Allen grunting near power tools. See above regarding its attractiveness to a kid hopped up on Knightmare and Rugrats.

28. The Man From U.N.C.L.E./Mission: Impossible/Get Smart/The New Avengers

Yes, it’s sacrilegious to bundle these 1960s spy classics into one, especially on a site called Den of Geek, but what are you going to do? A child’s heart wants what it wants, and in the early 1990s, what mine wanted was American teenagers in denim with telephones in their bedrooms, not globe-trotting, action-packed peril and drama, sometimes in – horror of horrors – black and white.

27. TFI Friday

If the opening guitar riff from Ocean Colour Scene’s “The Riverboat Song” gives you an instant craving for Bernard Matthews’ Mini Chicken Kievs and a Cadbury’s Fuse bar, then you, friend, are a child of the 90s. Chris Evans and Danny Baker’s Friday night magazine show was reliable Channel 4 viewing for the post-school and pre-pub crowd. 2015 saw a one-off revival on Channel 4, and another return is rumoured but not confirmed.

26. Space Precinct

Gerry Anderson’s live-action, prosthetics-heavy sci-fi police procedural Space Precinct may have been short-lived, but its mid-1990s BBC Two run was fun while it lasted. Set on the planet Altor, it was the story of Lt. Brogan (Ted Shackelford), a NYC fish out of water in the crime-filled Demeter City.

25. Happy Days/Laverne & Shirley

Without these Channel 4 repeats of the Fonz’s adventures, how would UK children in the 1990s have even known what cool was, or, years later, been able to get excited every time Henry Winkler showed up in Parks and Rec or Barry?