[Stooky Bill]

I guess you could say the later series of The Disney Club was a lot like Number 73 with it being scripted segments with the presenters playing characters in between the usual interviews, features and performances (though Craig Doyle tended to handle most of that rather than the younger presenters). Which is why Paul "jailbird" Ballard was known as Des, as that was his Disney Club character, but it stuck even after he took on the more straightforward presenting role in Roadhog and Diggit. In the video I posted a couple of pages back you can see Gunnar Cauthery was called Roland, and when he joined later on Reggie Yates' character was called Robbie (though he did occasionally present Diggit with his real name), I think Fearne Cotton was the only child/teen presenter to use her real name (as she became presenter via winning a contest- I remember a few years back seeing a programme showing a clip of "Des" revealing her as the winner).

The Goggle watch segments that took over CITV continuity for a week a year for a while in the 90s was a similar sort of idea, Why Don't You ended up that way towards the end as well, and the first series of Parallel 9 (less so the second and third when they had presenters separate to the scripted characters).

It happened a couple of times on Motormouth too. The first series which took over from 7T3 had a scripted element called Spin Off, set supposedly behind the scenes of the programme. Then they abandoned that idea until the 4th and last series when a similar production team narrative was mixed with the traditional show.

I do remember being slightly confused by the fictional vs real life names, especially when Motormouth started and Dawn became Andrea. Their mode of address was very different too.

I thought Sandi Toksvig's name was Ethel until she appeared on Whose Line Is It Anyway

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Another Number 73 from only a couple of weeks after the last one, beginning with another WAC link up at the very start, though talking through the TV rather than the phone:

It's a really clever idea for breaking up the enforced break in flow of the children's programme. Presumably the idea was to try ans stop viewers turning over to BBC1 at 9:25