What follows is a blog about New Years eve on Babestation Freeview 2009, originally posted by @Babe_TV on 21st December 2013 on their Tumblr account. Their’s was an incredibly detailed account and charted many of the events of Babestation going back a long time. Unfortunately, it can no longer be accessed as the account has been deleted. Luckily we have a number of posts and we will be posting them here and on babestation.tv in tribute to the work that was done.
The New Year of 2009 saw the Freeview babe channels at the height of their novelty.
There were basically only two acknowledged terrestrial babeshows at the time: Party People, on Freeview 37, and Party Girls (which itself incorporated a version of Party People), on Freeview 46. It could be argued that daytime show The Chat (also on Channel 46) was a babeshow too, but it had a different format, less focused on flirt, and it wasn’t considered to be a babeshow by its presenters.
The night of New Year’s Eve to New Year’s Day 2009 was a very cold one. There’d been a hard frost and freezing fog through Wednesday 31st December, and most areas across England had to contend with sub zero temperatures through the night. Party Girls was hosted by Dani O’Neal and Tiffany Chambers, and it shut down for around ten minutes at midnight, so the girls could go and celebrate the New Year with the rest of the Babestation live staff. It was normal for Party Girls to screen a slideshow during interruptions to the programme, but for the New Year celebration break there was no graphic display – just a pan to the backdrop and a static vision of black curtain until the hosts returned.
With no competition from rival babeshows (because Party People didn’t begin until 3am) the only television likely to prize Freeview viewers away from Party Girls would be mainstream programming. Perhaps the biggest rival on this particular night was Jools Holland’s Hootenanny, featuring live performances from Annie Lennox, the Ting Tings, Duffy, Dizzee Rascal, Lily Allen, Adele, Dave Edmunds, The Hold Steady, Sam Sparro, and Martha & The Vandellas. In the cult backwater of Channel 46, however, TV babes Dani and Tiffany didn’t in any way look to be struggling for calls, so if anyone’s viewing figures did take a bashing, it was probably Jools Holland’s.
The Party People New Year night show featured Yvette Merriman and Megan Moore – another A-list duo of big names from the babeshow explosion of 2008. The typical routine when PP’s night portion finished at 05:30, was for the dedicated daytime staff to take over. However, on New Year’s morning ‘09, Yvette worked through solo onto the day show, and it’s her intro to the 05:30 section which is depicted in this post.
The image serves as a great reminder of the golden age of Babe TV. If you’d like to see more of Babestation’s archived content, click here to become a VIP Member.
