Tim Worthington's Bookshelf is a collection of highlights from my books and a few surprises, and it's completely FREE!

If you're new to my writing, or have been curious about any the books but never actually bought them, then this is the place to start. It features extracts from Top Of The Box, Not On Your Telly, Well At Least It's Free, Fun At One, The Camberwick Green Procrastination Society and Higher Than The Sun, as well as material from the now deleted limited edition The Very Best Of Paintbox and Super Expanded Deluxe Edition.

Even if you've got some or all of the above, there are still a few new, rare or exclusive bits worth picking it up for, including updated versions of the features on Zokko! and Blue Jam, the Trumpton article that there wasn't room for in The Camberwick Green Procrastination Society, a look at BBC Records And Tapes' children's albums, the programme from a live event I worked on, and some little-seen shouting at old TV Times listings. Plus there's also a preview of something that hasn't actually been published yet...

You can get Tim Worthington's Bookshelf as a FREE eBook by clicking here.

There is also a print version if you'd rather, but I couldn't make that free. It does look nice though. And it's here.

Ah, good evening, and often may you say that the television shows that seem the strangest now were the ones that seemed the most mundane and quotidian at the time. No matter how good they may be, those that tried to be unusual now only really look like another era's idea of 'unusual'. Whereas those that simply existed, with their lack of audiovisual trimmings, their quaint meldings of one medium's stylistic preferences with another's format and technology, and their now almost completely unrelatable 'real time' feel, now come across like a quasi-hallucinatory vision of an alternate reality. Plus they're often quite unintentionally amusing too. One such show, if ever a show as was, was Ask The Family, which ran on BBC1 between 1967 and 1974. That much, is certain.

Ask The Family was just one of many highbrow quiz shows - including Call My Bluff, Brain Of Britain and The Book Game - hosted by critic, author, columnist and all-round polymath Robert Robinson. He had started his career as a heavyweight political pundit, and his 'descent' into quizzing ubiquity is often held up as a textbook example of 'how the mighty have fallen'; however Robinson himself claimed that he'd moved in this direction voluntarily after growing tired of the "sonorous drivel" of politicians. It was, he noted, "impossible to make the bastards reply to a straight question", and the comparative appeal of Brain Of Britain and company lay in the fact that they were "just a game". It was, in effect, a Godfrey Humphrey-style sophisticated satirical attack on the entire political establishment, and one so precision-targetedly aaaaaaahhhhhhhhh that even Tony Parsons didn't expect it. Or did expect it. Or was expecting us to expect that he wouldn't expect it. Or however that works exactly.


The basic format of Ask The Family was that two sets of smugly well-read families - often, it has to be said, displaying scant awareness of how they might look on screen - would vie to outdo each other as all-round smartarses while Robert Robinson posed cultured and literate puzzlers on science and history and the like, famously divided up into bizarre 'Father And Eldest Child Only'-type designations. Generally this would take the form of logical posers of the 'if you took off from New York and landed in Moscow with a brief stopover in Helsinki, what would the time difference be?' variety, which the audience on the whole found baffling. Its only concession to modernity and television technology came in a round where the teams would be asked to identify an object photographed in extreme close-up; usually this would conclude with some trademark Robinson haughty waffle along the lines of "a... video... recorder; a device, they tell me, that allows one to permit the recording of the output of one television channel, whilst watching the output of another... whatever will they think of next!". The Large Hadron Particle Collider, mate. That's what they thought of next.

It's often been remarked that the families being asked on Ask The Family bore absolutely no resemblance to any that you might have encountered in real life. In actual fact, they were everywhere. They were the exact same families as the ones at the end of the street where the children had SLAVE-1, Mr Frosty and Turn The Terrible Tank, but instead insisted on playing some tedious and impenetrable heraldry-related board game that went on forever and had a load of Charles I blokes on the box. Small wonder, then, that they should have been in such a clamour to compete on so polite, excitement-averse and intellectual superiority-conferring a game show. To the extent, in fact, that calling it a 'game show' looks somehow wrong. 'Game' would normally tend to suggest some element of fun might have been involved at some point.

The deeply strange thing, however, was that you would neither have known nor expected this (no, not even you, Tony Parsons) from the deeply strange opening titles. And that's opening titles plural. More than once, Ask The Family adopted visuals and indeed music that didn't just give a completely misleading idea of what was to follow, but appeared to belong to an entirely different television show from an entirely different planet.


There's modishly mind-expanding graphics and colours, there's migrane-inducing op-art monochrome refractions, and then there's the original Ask The Family opening titles. Beginning with a deck of Happy Families cards bearing illustrations apparently based on one of Bjork's nightmares, they would flip over to reveal a series of orange and purple hard-psych fractal designs of the kind that hippies were fond of using to determine your inner aura strength or whatever it was that week, finally zooming in on the one that deployed the time-honoured 'Candlestick or Two Faces?' optical illusion while the show's title appeared in a font that more rightly belonged on a birthday card sent by Yoffy from Fingerbobs to Tarot from Ace Of Wands. Looking more like you'd finally caved and allowed that weird 'mystical' girl in school to read your 'vibrations' than you were about to watch some clean-cut types vying to name the greatest number of winged insects, the overall effect was not dissimilar to one of those elaborate fold-out paper engineering-facilitated Prog Rock album sleeves where nobody bought them at the time and they're worth a small fortune undamaged now. Small wonder, then, that these visuals had music to match.

Robert Robinson's appearance being heralded by relentless sitars and a beat that would have had Zeenat Aman and company up on their feet in any given Bollywood offering might sound like something that the so-called 'satirists' might have made up as an incongruous comical wheeze, but - staggeringly - it was absolutely true. Acka Raga had originally been recorded by that famously far-out acid visionary Mr. Acker Bilk, whose version has a fantastically ludicrous 'Light Programme Goes East' vibe to it, sounding more or less equivalent to The Paul Butterfield Blues Band being produced by Norrie Paramor. The version that enlivened Ask The Family, however, was as interpreted by Brit-Jazzers Joe Harriott and John Mayer (and of course their 'Double Quintet') for their self-explanatory groundbreaking 1967 album Indo-Jazz Fusions, melding herky-jerk Prog-Jazz rhythms with traditional percussion and lashings of sitar. And, incidentally, you do have to wonder if Paul Weller had the Ask The Family opening titles in mind when he was putting together a certain pseudonymous sitar-dominated dancefloor smash...


It was, to all intents and purposes, like some sort of Chapter 24-instructed pocket nirvana tucked away at the start of an evening's entertainment on BBC1; something that was underlined by the fact that Dutch psych-rockers and Venus hitmakers Shocking Blue were sufficiently inspired by a chance sighting of Ask The Family on an early UK jaunt that they ended up putting a slightly more funked-up cover of Acka Raga on their somewhat suspiciously strewn torn card-covered LP At Home. But as the late seventies drew near, this sort of transcendental incongruity could not last. Plots to overthrow Harold Wilson were fomenting behind closed Gentlemen's Club doors with padded leather upholstery on them, the punks were waiting in the wings to shout 'BARSTARD' at Father and Youngest Child Only, and the brandy-in-decanter blokes in suits at the BBC had had quite enough of this longhaired multicoloured popular beat disobedience. It was time for change. And how.


The hippy dream had turned sour, and Ask The Family promptly defected to a neo-Illiberalist totalitarian state. Acka Raga was replaced by Sun Ride, a thoroughly inappropriately-named 'in Soviet Russia, family asks you' Cimbalom-sourced outbreak of Cold War Spy Film-hued menace provided by one John Leach. In tandem with this, the visuals were replaced by a creepy-looking rotating Edwardian family painted on the side of some weird spinning metallic fairground optical illusion thing. From the look of them, you wouldn't particularly want to ask this family anything, other than to please stop trying to steal your face.


The ramifications of this were immediate and far-reaching. Millions of children dived behind 'the sofa' whenever the continuity announcer mentioned Ask The Family. Go Video and Vipco became locked in a fierce bidding war for the rights to top Video Nasty Robert Robinson Presents The Everyman Book Of Light Verse - Live. The various rival TV 'Clowns' put aside their differences and penned an open letter objecting to this base infringement on their audience-terrifying territory. The BBC 'Top Brass' had to act, and while Sun Ride stayed, the creepy guady family were discarded in favour of more up to date iconography of the sort that would more normally have been found introducing a BBC2 magazine show that looked at topical issues from 'an angle'. Rumours that they had been discovered advancing on the question mark coat hanger pin man from the start of Over The Moon cannot be confirmed.


The 1980s. The microchip revolution. The dawn of Home Entertainment. A time when the likes of Equinox and Zig Zag were taking enormous leaps forwards and introducing themselves to viewers with digitally-generated neon and chrome lettering and scorching blasts of Korg. Odd, then, that Ask The Family opted not so much to move with the times as to move backwards away from them. A radical overhaul - though the show itself, of course, remained resolutely the same - brought in a polite arrangement of Scott Joplin's piano-punishing standard Maple Leaf Rag, accompanied by photo-animation of a for once perfectly normal-looking family, pulling puzzled faces around a red and white check tablecloth and an inexplicably oversized teapot. Seemingly self-destructively determined to mark itself out as an anachronism, the writing was on the wall for Ask The Family, and even someone viewing the wall in extreme close-up could see it.


But ah, the pity of it, starp and trivvock. While they still kept Maple Leaf Rag, the final series in 1984 opted for a much more hip and with-it ITV Daytime game show-style video grid showing the 'families' being jovial and light-hearted, along with a couple of frames of Robert Robinson doing likewise in a bizarre 'Smuggins goes zanes' gambit. Needless to say, it didn't work, and Ask The Family was one of the first casualties of the BBC Daytime-funding Night Of The Long Schedules that put paid to so many long-running old-favourites in the mid-eighties. Time, our old enemy, had rolled round again. It bade us goodbye, it bade us farewell, but aaaaah, tussock, flip and fourpence... not for long?


Ahhh, would that it were. Attempts to revive Ask The Family have been decidedly few, and decidedly less than successful. UK Gold had a go in the late nineties, with Alan Titchmarsh fronting a not particularly updated update that retained Sun Ride over a montage of 'highbrow' slides of microscopes and gorillas and the like, and - oddly - the original 'optical illusion' logo. Unfortunately, this proved to be even less entertaining than the drying paint at least one family was presumably called upon to identify in close-up, and nobody really noticed it happening. Not so the 2005 revival with Dick'n'Dom - theme music a hazardously Bhangra-ed up version of the original Acka Raga - which replaced all the staid 'improving' stuffiness with loud hooters and messy energetic rounds involving donkey masks for some reason, drawing the ire of many of the original's production team and even the Eeny Meeny Macka Racka Rare Are Dominacka Shickeypoppa Dickywhoppa Om Pom Stick-toting duo themselves soon identified the whole venture as a 'disaster'. Meanwhile, Acka Raga found its way back into the charts courtesy of a bizarre Şımarık-esque 'And An Extra Point For Being So Knockers' hookah-toking vocal reworking by saucy Russian Indie-Dance outfit Reflex. What would Robert Robinson have said?!


So ah, here's a thing, it only remains for me to declare Ask The Family the sort of programme that despite its opening title weirdness was defiantly and deliberately out of step with the times from the word go, and yet paradoxically exactly the sort of programme that all channels should be reclaiming that dull start-of-the-evening wasteland with now. As long as they keep all the reality and celebrity stuff as well, mind. We're not the Ask The Family families, you know.

The Guardian has recently caused something of a stir with their rundown of 'TV's Most Criminally Overrated Shows'. If you've not read it, this basically reduces down to a list of ten relatively recent critical favourites, each unflinchingly 'debunked' by a columnist saying little more than 'my friends all liked it but when I watched it I didn't!!'. Meanwhile, quite what criminality is involved here is sadly not clarified.

The correct response to this and indeed anything like this, of course, is to ignore it as lazy 'outrage'-courting clickbait nonsense of the first order and just get on with holding your own opinion on the criminal overratees. After all, even if you find This Is England to be patronising misery-porn with distractingly glaring chronological inaccuracies, are bored senseless by The Walking Dead's 'edgy' rehashing of cliches that you saw in a million straight-to-video epics back when 'zombies' weren't quite so trendy, want to punch everyone involved in Lost for their smugness over that weak lemon drink con-trick of an ending, and aren't even entirely sure of what Downton Abbey actually is, you should at least be able to concede that this is entirely a matter of personal preference and that they are all genuinely in the top ten percent of television made in the digital age (if not ever in some cases), and on top of everything else should simply be able to come up with a better argument.

Except that they've now chosen to follow it up with a list of 'TV's Most Underrated Shows' - essentially a collection of uber-hip programmes that their friends haven't discovered yet and so are presumably OK to like, punctuated by Top Gear which at least gets talkedabout more than practically any other current TV show, and Time Trumpet, a misfiring sketch show that even hardcore fans of the participants would be hard pushed to describe as anything stronger than 'quite good'. True, you would hardly expect such a list to feature Colour Me Pop, The Secret Service, Ask The Family and Rik Mayall Presents, and indeed nor should it. There's not even anything particularly wrong with the majority of the actual choices on either list, just the smug, mock-'iconoclastic', I'm-in-a-secret-club-and-you're-not attitude underpinning the entire venture. Nobody needs to be told off for watching or not watching something. Unless it's Captain Butler.

Yes, that's all very well and good, as some shirty individual is probably already saying on Twitter, but I didn't like Mad Men either!!!!!8 so what are you going to about it eh eh? Well nothing, frankly, other than to suggest that maybe you read the first three paragraphs again. This has started off an interesting train of thought, though - what are the ten most popular programmes ever covered on here, and what do they say about what people really think is over-and-underrated in television? Probably very little if we're being honest about it, but you're getting that top ten and you're liking it. Doctor Who has been left out, though, as it quite obviously eclipses anything else by a long margin. Anyway, we're starting somewhat inevitably with...


10. Skiboy


Amazingly, when my feature on Skiboy first went up, there were quite a few accusations that it was all an elaborate hoax. Some suggested it might have been some kind of sophisticated satirical prank on the obscurer-than-thou element of archive TV enthusiasm, while others even named a couple of likely-sounding films that I might have lifted screengrabs from and pulled off some convincing Photoshop trickery. But no, it's a series as real as they come, and one that for all its flaws and ridiculousness I would love to see released on DVD in full; it's certainly more underrated than sodding Treme. And judging by the number of hits it continues to get, I'm not the only one.


9. This Life


A surprisingly high entry, given than on the whole posts about more 'modern' stuff never do even half as well, and that these days This Life seems to get at best written off as self-conscuiously trendy 'of its time' fluff and at worst to blame for any given malaise currently afflicting the broadcast industry. But within minutes of going live the link was being shared like crazy - certainly faster and more enthusiastically than the Ask The Family piece - which suggests that there's a silent majority out there who actually quite like it and aren't ashamed to say so. This Life probably wasn't too far away from that 'Most Overrated Shows' list. To which we say yah boo sucks, frankly.


8. Rentasanta


The week of in-depth features on seventies Children's BBC Christmas Specials was a huge success all round (well, apart from the one on Bod for some reason), and it's a format that's probably worth revisiting. But for some reason, the one about the little-seen feature-length Rentaghost Christmas Special went way beyond all the others, and is still hovering inside the top ten most viewed posts each week even now. Part of this can be explained by someone noticing that some of the panto costumes were actually recycled from Doctor Who And The Robots Of Death, but beyond that, presumably people just didn't remember it and REALLY wanted to know where Dobbin came from.


7. Buzzfax


This was actually technically the first part of an epic-length look at the Battle Of The Planets two-parter The Fierce Flowers, but the huge drop-off when it came to the (actually impressively viewed in themselves) instalments proper points towards it being the weird one-week-only Ceefax Linking Saturday Morning TV experiment that everyone was really interested in. There's probably a serious point to be made here about how these sort of odd one-offs were both more likely to get through and indeed more likely to be remembered in a pre-multichannel/streaming landscape, but probably everyone would just get huffy that you were dissing Joss Whedon or something.


6. Orbiter X


Not strictly a TV programme - well, not actually a TV programme at all - but the response to a bit of background detail on a creaky old radio serial that I thought only I was listening to was little short of phenomenal, widely shared and even picked up on by a couple of academic and archive literature sites. I'd deliberately tried to make it more than just a 'review' and give as much of a feel to the information on the context and production of the show as to the descriptions of the show itself, and this must presumably have struck some sort of a chord with people. I'd very much like to do more about forgotten old radio on here so this is a good incentive.


5. Days Like These


It took a long time to put together a decent comparison of the first episode of That 70s Show with its tepid point-missing ITV remake, and it first it seemed that this might have been wasted effort. Nobody really appeared to be that interested, and it was rapidly eclipsed by a jokey look at a couple of Doctor Who clippings from Radio Times that went up shortly afterwards. However it eventually took off and even Days Like These scriptwriter Sam Bain got in touch to say he'd enjoyed it. As an attempt to look at why a notorious TV flop didn't work rather than just sneering, I'm quite proud of it I have to say. But please don't try rehabilitating Days Like These.


4. The Mersey Pirate


For reasons that will become obvious if you scroll back a couple of posts, this look at the strange story behind ITV's most ill-advised idea for a Saturday Morning show ever wasn't exactly written in the brightest and most upbeat of circumstances, but in some ways that made me more determined than ever to turn it into an interesting and amusing account and I'd like to think that the staggering popularity it met with reflected this. Identifying which actual ferry Gerry Marsden was on in which promo film is probably verging on madness, but it's also the sort of detail that people seem to enjoy and which really gives an extra sense of depth. Yes, depth and The Mersey Pirate in the same sentence...


3. How Do You Do!


When I announced that I'd found some wiped episodes of this long-forgotten BBC children's show, some prat decided for no obvious reason that this meant I had found Doctor Who And The Power Of The Daleks and went around saying as such on various sodding forums, leading to badmouthing and threats when the 'truth' emerged. Other more general archive TV enthusiasts were unstinting in their gratitude. And then there were the massive number of teary-eyed late thirtysomethings who got in touch to thank me for letting them see Carmen, Greg and Miss King's Class again. Happy to be of service to all of you, including the mad Doctor Who fans.


2. Play School


Perhaps a bit of an obvious one, and also it's a 'score' based on a couple of posts combined (though even separately they'd still sneak into this list), but there's no getting away from the fact that both the look at the Christmas Eve edition from 1970 and the complete rundown of Play School and Play Away albums attracted massive interest from the off, as indeed did my trivia-drenched live-Tweeting of that edition that BBC4 repeated recently. While we really shouldn't be encouraging Hamble, perhaps this is an indication that Play School is a programme that the BBC really ought to be doing more to exploit?


1. Hardwicke House


Well, it looks as though more people want to see ITV's notoriously banned sitcom than perhaps anyone had expected. This is certainly true if you look at the sheer number of sites that have copied the content of my Hardwicke House pieces uncredited - only with more italics and exclamation marks! Scandalously, of course, it's still not available for ridiculous and quite possibly spurious reasons, which you can read more about here. And I say again, you may find my obsession with this show baffling (though I'm clearly not alone), but what possible good is being done for anyone by continuing to withhold it. There's your entire overrated, underrated, good, bad, best, worst list right there, Grauniad!


Although, as we've already established, there is one individual, whose many and varied adventures across time and space would apear, in terms of popularity at least, to have no equal:


Hang on a minute... Parky? What's he doing here?!

Poor old TV Times. Always the cheap and nasty downmarket relation to the aesthete's choice Radio Times, and never held in as high regard, nor indeed any regard at all. It might have told you what time Skiboy was on, but it did so surrounded by acres of lightweight tabloidy frivolity, assembled on the assumption that viewers would be less interested in how a programme was made than what Bruce Forsyth might be able to throw together with some 'leftovers' and a comedy oversized chef's hat.

Celebrated neither in its time nor in retrospect, the Second Division status of TV Times is evidenced by the fact that while every last vaguest mention of Doctor Who in Radio Times has long since been collated, anthologised and scrutinised in forensic detail, its commercial counterpart could concievably have published an article in which Patrick Macnee and Patrick McGoohan explained how to turn base metals into gold using just some 'leftovers' and a comedy oversized chef's hat and nobody would ever even have noticed. In fact, we can't be entirely sure that they didn't.

What we can be sure of, though, is that - especially during the sixties and seventies - TV Times frequently ran items that did it absolutely no favours whatsoever. Rampant sexism, rabid right-wing pontificating, racially offensive adverts, retrospectively ill-advised billings for certain celebrities, they could all be found within its pages and over the next couple of instalments we're going to be taking a look at what horrors you might well stumble across when trying to work out which came first out of City Beneath The Sea and Secret Beneath The Sea. Please leave all notions of Safe Spaces, No-Platforming and Trigger Warnings at the door. You have been warned...


Although it was certainly ITV who kept the ghastly, patronising, insulting, pervgusting and above all not in any way 'sexy' spectre of Miss World haunting our televisions into the late eighties and well past the point where anyone with a shred of decency had started to decry it as outmoded sexist claptrap, we have to be fair here and point out that it was actually the politically correct lefty biased BBC who started the whole depressing business, probably as part of a plot to misrepresent Jeremy Corbyn, and continued to show it up until the late seventies, even after 1970 host Bob Hope had been attacked with flourbombs by people shouting about it really being called Dalek Cutaway or something. Throughout that time, however, ITV weren't content to be left standing outside the party, and attempted to get in on the action by launching their own annual - and, it must be said, slightly less glamorous - Miss TV Times award.


In a typical scenario, here's 1964 winner Valerie Martin of Lancashire, hoisting her crown aloft in honour of her £100 prize plus free clothes and a 'TV Test', which doesn't seem to have netted her any actual roles, even in TV's Turn Out The Lights. Valerie would probably be smiling a good deal less if she knew that this photo was being used not just to launch the search for her successor, but to announce that they would walk away with almost five times her winnings. She must have been absolutely delighted. Still, send that swimsuit pic in NOW and you too could pocket a crisp tenner!!


Just in case Valerie's putative successors were worrying their pretty little heads about it, the rules were spelt out in no uncertain terms on the following page. Just so it was all nice and legal and above board, entrants had to be between seventeen and a half and twenty five, prepared to wear evening or cocktail wear and a swimsuit, and content to be judged on beauty, face, hair, teeth, figure and deportment. All that they had to do in return was declare that they were neither an employee of the magazine or related to Ian TV Times himself, consent to waiving all rights over use of their image, and agree to abide by the rules set down by Mecca Ltd, who in somewhat shadowy fashion are only just entering into proceedings now. So what are you waiting for? Tell the world your name, address, age, occupation and bust and hip size, and you too could get to the regional finals without making a personal appearance! Meanwhile, what happened to all those photos afterwards is something we're best not speculating on...


Still, we shouldn't be too judgemental. Although we can clearly see such contests for what they are now, back then they were largely considered to be harmless fun family entertainment, and here's a reminder for any stray hopefuls to get their entry in while there's still time, underneath a headline that in no way looks unfortunate or ill-advised in retrospect. And if you're wondering what that 'Bedtime Story' was all about, I've read the whole thing and have no idea either.


As a bit of a change of pace, taken from comic strip-fulled close relation TV Comic rather than from TV Times itself, here's TV Favourites Eccles and Bluebottle from The Telegoons urging readers to 'Send 9/11'. And if you think that's in slightly dubious taste, you haven't seen what else was lurking in TV Times at the height of the Swinging Sixties...

Suppose you'd had enough of those lefty liberal do-gooders telling you what you can and can't say. Suppose you think political correctness really has gone mad and you've had it up to here with those immigrants coming over here taking our jobs and those trendy intellectuals mocking us with their plays and books. And suppose you've decided that enough's enough and it's down to you to do something about it before it's too late. Where's the first place you should think of for making your voice heard?

Yes, that's right, TV Times. Admittedly it's calmed down a good deal since then, not least when the publishers realised that all their readers wanted was Bruce Forsyth in a comedy oversized chef's hat making something out of 'leftovers', but back in the sixties, Independent Television's premier listings magazine was no friend of the Permissive Society. The letters page was regularly filled with mouth-frothing rants against nothing in particular that put the average Daily Mail correspondent to shame, and quite often their celebrity contributors weren't much better. Here are a couple of... well, they're not exactly 'highlights', are they?



Young Keith R. Warren was doubtless aaaaaahhhhing away with self-satisfied pride when his declaration of how much cleverer he was than every single other television viewer made it into print. Don't be a miserable minnie and object when you find something substandard or offensive, he suggests, read a book or spend time with your children instead, or even knuckle down and do an honest day's work! So committed is he to this cause that he even gets a dig at the BBC in, though thankfully he stops short of saying that he doesn't want to go to Callaghan's promised land which much surely rank as the most abhorrent and miserable land that has ever been promised to the people of a nation state. Anyway, we can but hope that all readers took heed of his advice. Or alternatively told him to fuck off and behave like an actual sixteen year old and generally mind his own fucking business. Whichever works best for you.



Continuing on one of Keith's themes, Michael A. Considine of Fulwood, Lancashire, clearly a man who has had enough of experts, writes to inform us all that his opinions on the BBC are more valid and worth heeding than those of the Postmaster General. There is, he believes, no longer any need for the BBC to exist, not least because nobody is watching it, and as such it should be immediately decommissioned and all broadcast frequencies should be handed to the commercial channels. He even has some not at all vague ideas of how these channels could be funded in future, involving a series of regional taxes. Though at no point does he state that it's not a rule and not one that has to be complied with.



Of course, ITV itself was never above criticism, and its loyal adherents were always quick to write in and point out when this free service that they did not pay for had failed to comply directly and unswervingly with their own personal socio-political standpoint. Here (Mrs) Shirley Foster tuts loudly at the mere idea that the police force might ever be portrayed in a manner that facilitates comedy or indeed actual proper drama with a storyline that lasts longer than three and a half minutes, while (Mr) H. Bennett gets all red in the face about those young upstart satirists having the temerity to poke fun at a distinguished statesman whose only crime was to take near-dictatorial measures to preserve white minority rule in an African territory. And if you think Joe Public was bad, have a look at some of Independent Television's stars...



Here, in a typical example, 'Geraldo' - the host of Gerry's Inn and leader of the 'Gaucho Tango Orchestra' - furrows his brow over the skiffle boom, which he summarily denounces as 'piffle'. Geddit?! Popular music is being 'murdered' by Tommy Steele and company, he believes, though in a classic 'make your mind up, mate' manoeuvre he also believes that 'most' people have rejected rock'n'roll. This sort of controversial outburst probably kept him in shirts with Toplinised collars for a while, but the cold hard fact of the matter is that now you can't move for BBC4 and Radio 2 documentaries about Lonnie Donegan, but nobody even seems to remember poor old Geraldo Bright. And he wasn't the worst musical offender by any means...



Now come, on, we all know about Eric Clapton's infamous 'Enoch Was Right' outburst, but this is ridiculous. Especially as they can't even have been more than about two years old at the time. And speaking of everyone's favourite exponent of speeches that go up 'fizz' like a rocket...



Here's the original swivel-eyed loon himself back in 1964, explaining rather confusingly why he believes that politicians should ignore the base distraction of television debate and discussion and get on with the serious business of politics, upon which the public will just fall into line or something and certainly not base anything on whatever they see or hear in the media, a tradition currently being grandly upheld by celebrated doer of wheelies on his BMX, Jeremy Corbyn. Small wonder, then, that the odious quavery-voiced old creep didn't invite any television crews along to the Rivers Of Blood speech, and spent all of his time thereafter claiming that anyone waving transcripts of his own words at him could not possibly claim to understand the subtleties of a speech they were not witness to. When he wasn't blabbering on about an unknown biblical source named Q and something about it not being an elephant, that was.



There was, of course, only one solution to this, as 'The Editor' makes clear - close down the BBC. After all, he (come on, it was probably a 'he') points out, it's old and it costs money that doesn't go into the pocket of the businessman in his suit and tie, and anyway someone said once they liked it better than ITV which isn't fair. Plus with their main rival out of the way, they'd be free to make even more episodes of World In Action and Credo, honest.



Still, never let it be said that they weren't prepared to give space to opposing views, and here's Michael Foot MP explaining his entirely logically-founded and thoroughly thought-through view that there should be no censorship of television under any circumstances ever. Sadly, his views on Big Breadwinner Hog are not on record.



Well, we need a bit of a chance of pace after all of that, frankly, so here's Ronnie Barker talking about his worryingly obsessive Rod Hull/Jelly-like interest in 'postcards'. But only 13,000 of them. The others he doesn't care about. Anyway, join us again the time after next time for some of the most hideous sexism ever to appear in the name of television listings. Next time itself, though, there's something more terrifying still...

It seems that more than a few of you are alighting on here after seeing my name in Doctor Who Magazine. You're probably looking for the Doctor Who-related articles rather than all that stuff about sixties pop music and Camberwick Green, so here's a handy set of links all in one page...



It's Still A Police Box, Why Hasn't It Changed? - an in-depth series-by series look back at Doctor Who, asking the questions nobody else dares - or can be bothered - to ask.
Series One - Series Two - The Dalek Films - Series Three - Series Four



Time And Tide Melts The Snowman - a massive dissertation on why Time And The Rani is good, and not bad like you thought. Also explains how the story is linked to Terry Wogan, N.W.A, Richard Herring and Craig Charles singing Tears Of A Clown.
Introduction - Part One - Part Two - Part Three - Part Four - Part Five - Part Six - Part Seven - Part Eight



Doctor Who Fan Wars, 1964 Style - some odd exchanges found in the Radio Times letters page... Click Here



Ten Things I Hate About Who - some things that really get my goat about Doctor Who. And its fans. Click Here



Who Is Dr. Who? - a lengthy review of the excellent compilation of baffling early Doctor Who novelty spinoff singles. Click Here



New Who Reviews - a series of reviews of individual episodes. Not always complimentary...
The Long Game - The Idiot's Lantern - Human Nature/The Family Of Blood - Utopia - Silence In The Library/Forest Of The Dead - Amy's Choice - The Doctor's Wife - Night Terrors - The Bells Of St John - When I Got Fed Up And Decided Not To Review Any More New Episodes


And in some books I've written...


Top Of The Box -  a complete guide to the singles released by BBC Records And Tapes, with reviews and facts for each one. Includes all of the Doctor Who theme singles (including the unreleased Keff McCulloch one), as well as a couple of spinoffs, related shows like Blake's 7 and Captain Zep - Space Detective, and singles by BBC Radiophonic Workshop members such as Paddy Kingsland and Peter Howell. Find Out More Here



The Camberwick Green Procrastination Society - includes a lengthy look at how the BBC might have celebrated the first anniversary of Doctor Who in long-wiped magazine shows, and a longer version of the piece about Doctor Who being scheduled against Wogan. And, needless to say, tons about all manner of other weird and wonderful archive TV oddities. Find Out More Here



Not On Your Telly - a collection of some of my archive TV-related articles with an emphasis on wiped, banned or just plain ignored shows. Includes detailed features on The Space Pirates, The Android Invasion, and a 1966 BBC Radio adaptation of Daleks - Invasion Earth: 2150 A.D.. Also features a history of the 'Sunday Classics' serials produced by Barry Letts and Terrance Dicks. Find Out More Here



Well At Least It's Free - an anthology of articles and columns from the archives. Includes several lengthy Doctor Who pieces including features on The Underwater Menace, The Daleks' Master Plan and the sixties historicals, and an overview of the entire Russell T. Davies era. Find Out More Here


And if you want to get a taste of what the books are like, this eBook sampler is currently available for free...

In the days before warehouse-driven online shopping, the Grattan catalogue was where any self-respecting youngster would head for to bulk up their Christmas Present-coveting 'wants' list. Page after page of the latest and most exciting toys and games, arranged in enticing poses and crammed in together so tightly that you frequently had to deploy a magnifying glass to enable closer examination. Back when you had to make your own entertainment, it was so important and fiercely sought-after a resource that it was not unknown for inter-sibling fights to break out over who got to look at it first.

The same was probably never true of the toy adverts in TV Times, though. With the big companies saving their advertising for avenues where it might actually make a difference, i.e. television, there was plenty of affordable space available in the corresponding listings magazine for more cash-strapped toy pushers to push the cheap, the nasty, the boring and, well, the downright terrifying...


Standing at a mammoth two feet and three inches, 'Jackie' was a heavily-plugged doll who could walk, talk, laugh, sing, recite nursery rhymes, and, erm, 'pray'. Yes, you read that right. Pray. The advert doesn't specify where in the USA she was imported from, but we're guessing it was somewhere within the Bible Belt. Note also that the advert does not state at any point that she requires any kind of batteries, suggesting that she didn't just look like she could come to life of her own volition.


Eventually villagers with pitchforks and flaming torches surrounded 'Jackie', who was presumed destroyed in the ensuing conflagration and, erm, whatever the word is for loads of poking with pitchforks. However, you can't keep an evil doll down, and the following year she was back, with an additional nursery rhyme and slightly different hair, posing as 'Candy'. And what's more, this time she had an accomplice - 'Gina', billed as The Most Thrilling Doll Ever, and apparently capable of walking a mile on her own. Not exactly the sort of bold claim that could realistically be tested by purchasers. And anyway, who in their right mind would challenge her on it?


Ah, that's much better. A nice, polite, smartly-turned out Teddy, keeping a dutiful eye on a Duty Free Shop-friendly assemblage of putative presents available at Boots including handbags, tea sets, card games, and an official Concorde electric blanket. The future is now! But why's there a malevolent-looking clown apparently about to eagerly scoff the entire lot? That's not really'putting the fun back into Christmas Shopping', is it?


Meanwhile, this poor sod's behind bars! Assuming that this wasn't in fact some cunningly subtle and sophisticated satire on that nice Mr. Heath, you do have to wonder how poor old Edward ended up in the slammer, though we'll give him the benefit of the doubt and assume that he was imprisoned for his beliefs. Or that he worked on the controversial 'Teddys' issue of Oz. Anyway, you could help free him by buying baby products from the decidedly unappealing-sounding 'UniChem', apparently once such a big deal that they had their very own 'House' in Chessington. Look on their works, ye mighty, and... actually, no, just have a look what time Gideon's Way is on.


More violence in the name of promotional giveaways from Spillers, who ask only for two dog food labels in exchange for a 'Pongo Puncho', a Disney-skewed inflatable toy whose apparent sole purpose is to encourage children to thump dogs in the face. Mercifully, they appear never to have done one based on The Incredible Journey. Or Nazi Supermen Are Our Superiors.


Rivalling Disney in the early sixties rush to get the last remaining tie-in toy in the shops on 24th December stakes were a number of ITV shows, including Fireball XL5, Supercar, The Flintstones, Wells Fargo and Space Patrol, not to mention their rivals at Warner Bros. Somewhat slightly further down the Santa-begging list came Gus Honeybun, the still geographically baffling Westward/TSW rabbit mascot thingymajig rarely sighted outside of 'Regional Variations' and much beloved of ident-obsessed forum-dwelling headcases pining for the days before the 'politically correct brigade : (' stopped The Black And White Minstrels from using hosepipes on their Benny Hill golliwogs. Here a stuffed variant on the Honeybun formula is somewhat ambitiously touted as a 'TV-Land favourite' who is on sale 'locally'. You don't say.


Quite how a *spit* BBC programme found its way into TV Times was doubtless the subject of a major internal inquiry, but all the same here's a plug for Triang's rather quite splendid board game based on The Magic Roundabout, alongside fellow non-television related big hitters like Twister and Frantic Frogs. And, erm, The Sir Francis Chichester Game, which is presumably even less exciting than it sounds. And Checklines, which promises 'simple but thought-provoking rules'. Was it about class mobility or something?!


If she's seeing a pink elephant THAT big, we can only assume that the gift she'll never forget was a crate of gin.


No, we don't know what TV's The Meddling Monk had been up to that warranted this punishment, but that pigeon sure looks like it means business. Anyway, here's hoping you don't wake up to find ANY of the above in your pillowcase on Christmas Morning (sozzled-looking redheads waving large pink elephants are an exception), and join us again next time when we'll be looking at just how TV Times kept those blasted Women's Libbers in their place...

Back in the sixties, Radio Times was hardly exactly Spare Rib, but it did at least have some semblance of a sense that the gender balance was changing rapidly and for the better. You were as likely to see a sympathetic feature on a female academic, politician or industrialist - particularly once BBC2 had started up - as you were one of Top Of The Pops' resident dancers The Go-Jos complaining that they couldn't have their miniskirts as mini as they would have liked them. It wasn't always perfect, but it was a start, and you have to start somewhere.

And it definitely, definitely wasn't starting over at TV Times. Very occasionally they might have had to lower themselves to give up valuable column inches to some feminist firebrand who had found herself the focus of World In Action or a mouthy folk singer that those blasted youngsters had demanded appear on Ready Steady Go!, but nine times out of ten it was doubtful that they'd ever even heard of the mere word 'liberation'. Much as they were when doling out 'points' on flagship game shows, women were there to be decorative and to speak as little as possible. After all, we didn't want the readership catching 'opinions' as lord knows what might happen then. They were never quite told to get back in the kitchen - after all, that's where you'd find Brucie in a comedy oversized chef's hat making something out of 'leftovers' - but here are some of the more jaw-dropping examples to disgrace the listings pages back in the decade when Carnaby Street swung like a pendulum do or something...


1965 was the year when The Ipcress File broke significant ground by featuring Michael Caine as a Swinging London secret agent who read for pleasure, took pride in his culinary expertise, and enjoyed a casual and respectful relationship with an independent career woman whom he treated with respect and credited with intelligence. Perhaps alarmed by this, 1965 was also the year when TV Times conducted a survey which concluded that the overwhelming majority of unmarried men would tie the knot as a way of actually getting some laundry done and food cooked, except that in return their wives would probably spend all their money on nothing and prevent them from being able to buy The World's Best Car. And what's more, people were always trying to sneakily fix them up with a smashing gold-digging young lady in a nice frock to boot. Rumours that Cathy McGowan promptly invented the theoretical coding framework for Tinder specifically so she could delete her account cannot be confirmed.


Ann 'Honey' Lantree, the hard-walloping drummer with Have I The Right? hitmakers The Honeycombs, was and is an unsung pioneer and a landmark figure in rock music. Perfectly content to be seen as a musician rather than eye candy, she insisted on taking her turn driving the tour van and swearing at other motorists, snogged the odd male groupie as and when she felt like it, and wasn't afraid to stand up to the band's notoriously temperamental producer Joe Meek. She also, by stamping her foot on a wooden staircase to give the drums some extra punch, created one of the most iconic sounds in sixties pop. But what did TV Times want to know? When she was going to "settle down and become a housewife and mum". It's no wonder Huggybear bit that cameraman.


Seriously, even if you were just looking to see what time Send For Dithers was on, you couldn't move for photographs of assembled bikinied lovelies in sixties issues of TV Times. Above you can see a teenage-boy-misuse-friendly full-colour shot of the Blackpool Night Out dancers apparently lying in wait for the undisputed grand master of the game Lionel Blair, and below that short-lived chart star Eden Kane lassoing a big load of swimsuited hotties and dragging them away for some unspecified purpose. It might of course be innocent and might well say so the article itself, but frankly there are so many dubious opinions espoused therein that it's not worth quoting any of it. Well I Ask You was Eden Kane's big hit, but it's likely any self-respecting young lady would have preferred its little-remembered follow-up, Get Lost.


Women's Football had an early and formidable detractor in Professor John Cohen, from the Department of Psychology at the University of Manchester, who remarked with an apparently straight face that men have sporting prowess in their genes whereas if women - who have been "designed to bear children" - tried to kick a ball their tits might make them fall over or something. And that's not an exaggeration for comic effect - he almost literally word for word says that. They did make sure to get a nice photo of some footballing lady sticking her shorts-clad arse out to illustrate his point, though. Later on he does go in to some bizarre eulogistic celebration of the ball, that estimable sphere that so inflatedly facilitates our sporting enjoyment, but the rest is sufficiently repulsive to make it hard even to get many laughs out of that. Anyone else think a girl might have snuck a couple of goals past him at some point?


Still, the odd Women's Lib crank did occasionally somehow manage to get through, and here's (Mrs.) Doris Chandler flying the flag for the right to female-friendly sex and violence on TV once the kids have fucked off to bed where they belong, and never mind the poor manbabies being deprived of their football and their Eden Kane. You can be fairly sure that she wasn't amongst the callers who complained about Big Breadwinner Hog.


Anyway, to balance things out, let's have a man making a complete prat of himself and insisting on talking even when he has absolutely nothing to say. Thomas Scott of Leeds has a nonsensical observation based on absolutely nothing outside of a bewildering insistence on paying attention to the studio scenery rather than Bernard Levin's incisive political debate, and a complete and profound lack of understanding of how the pop charts, music itself and even the basic rudiments of language work, but he's sharing it with us regardless. Take that, something! Anyway, join us again next time, when we'll be taking a look at how Independent Television almost literally rammed junk food down our throats...

Let's face it, pretty much every issue of Smash Hits for the entire eighties was memorable from start to finish. But for some reason, the one published 16th July 1986 - with, of all people, The Jesus And Mary Chain on the cover - has the edge over all of the others. Well, for one really quite obvious reason.

Although the issue was jampacked with start-of-the-school-holidays hilarity, this reason wasn't the debate on whether we should keep the Royal Family (against - Bronski Beat, The Jesus And Mary Chain, Sade, Robert Smith, Annie Lennox, Mick Hucknall, Morrissey, Spandau Ballet, OMD, Dr Robert, The Housemartins, everyone involved with Red Wedge basically; for - Gary Numan, Claire Usher). Nor was it the deliberately tedious Cream facts tying in with I Feel Free showing up in "that Renault 21 TV ad where some rich snoot-bloke gets in his motor car and swishes off down country lanes", or the Sam Fox/Sly Fox-inspired boxout on Great Foxes In Pop (including, inevitably, Bruce "Fox"ton, "bass player with The Jam whose ties were ever a visual "treat" and whose solo "career" has been a blazing inferno of silence"). Nor the 'Get Smart' special on The Smiths, Black Type consulting The Party Pop-Up Book Of Unexplained Phenomena by "Dr" Jonathan Miller and Roy Castle ("remaindered" at 95p - a snip!), Cock Robin's album getting one out of ten, or the utterly pointless and unwarranted 'Day In The Life' of Roses-toting One Hit Wonder Haywoode (who would of course experience a brief One Hit Aftershock with the release of Hits 5). Not even the rightly snorted-at photo of The Cult posing moodily with some gung-ho American Football players.

No, it was the hilariously flippant attempt by some staff writer - most likely Tom Hibbert and/or Sylvia Patterson - at filling up a particularly threadbare instalment of regular gig listing "Happenings" with a spurious billing for Upper Bubblington Village Fete, featuring such top in-joke derived attractions as Reg "Reg" Snipton And His Banjo Boys, Reg "Reg" Snipton And His Banjo Gals, Mad Goths, The Complete Bastards, Flower Arranging And The Feminist Experience (Group Activity Orchestrated By Dame Margot Riviera), Pepe And Lord Alfred, and Throw A Coconut At Reg "Reg" Snipton. That isn't really enough to base a full-length article on, though, so instead let's turn our suitably summery attention to the other real memory-imprinter in that issue of Smash Hits - the advert for Now - The Summer Album.


In actual fact, there were TWO adverts for Now - The Summer Album in that issue; the regular full page full colour launch promotion from Now! themselves (strapline - "You Can't Imagine Summer Without It"), and another informing readers that it was available for 'A Cool £6.99' from John Menzies ('subject to availablity'). The announcement of any new Now! Album was always an attention-catching moment, of course, but this wasn't just any new Now! Album. This was a direct follow-on from the previous December's massively successful Now - The Christmas Album, and as such it boasted a double-album's worth of 'Golden Oldies' rather than recent chart-toppers. The only factor that unified them was that they were all in some way related to the vague and amorphous concept of 'Summer'. And, as we shall see, often that really was the only way in which they were related. And sometimes even that didn't really apply.

Lacking the cohesive precision-targeted line-up of cohesive precision-targeted seasonal cash-in records that at least aimed towards a recognisably similar sound of Now - The Christmas Album, Now - The Summer Album vaulted between decades, moods and musical styles like someone showing off on the trampolines at Pontins, and generated about as much sales excitement as the three days of hot weather we get before it starts throwing it down with rain again. It was, basically, aspiring towards the kind of summer that we just don't get over here, where Hot Rods, Holiday Romances, Beach Parties and Sizzlin' Food Shacks took second place to interminably delayed car journeys, endless imported children's serials on both channels, extortionately priced Big Feast variants, and weather-battered 'staying with relatives' seaside breaks where the highlight of the holiday was watching local fishermen helping to right a fishmonger's white van that had overturned on wet sand. True, many experienced all of the above and more on their actual summer holidays wherever in the Mediterranean was 'in' that year, but they preferred to remind themselves of this by bulk-buying the current novelty dance-pop favourites of Europe's leading discotheques and didn't we know it (that year's primary offender - Brother Louie by Modern Talking). The sort of Summer Hits that Now - The Summer Album compiled sort of came and went without ever really lodging in anyone's memory as a musical reminder of hot fun in the summertime. It was, if we're being blunt about it, the soundtrack to the sort of summer that the average Now!-album buyer never actually had.

Suppose, though, that you were the sort of average Now!-album buyer who had a keen interest in pop music from 'them days' at a time before it was really very easy to actually get hold of any of it. Suppose you'd been fascinated by a tracklisting that even looked esoteric in an advert when you didn't know what any of the songs sounded like. Suppose you'd even chanced upon a copy in an actual John Menzies whilst seeking refuge from the rain on exactly that sort of holiday, and rued the fact that you were unable to afford it, not least because you'd only just bought Now! That's What I Call Music 7. Suppose also that, some years later, you'd chanced upon a stray copy abandoned in a by then all-Compact Disc radio station and ensured that it 'accidentally''fell' into your bag. How would this most angular and unlikely of Now!-spinoffs (and that's angular and unlikely even in comparison to Now Dance) measure up against the promise of that imagination-firing advert?


Well, it's all such a strange and haphazard arrangement of musical selections that it's probably worth looking at them in very loose 'genres' rather than any kind of sequential order. Though don't assume from this that they're grouped in any sort of logical or coherent manner; the actual album zigzags back and forth with such casual disregard for mood, style and tempo that you have to wonder exactly what kind of a barbecue it might conceivably have soundtracked. It's perhaps surprising, then, to discover that an entire quarter of the double album is given over to what could loosely be described as relatively recent hits. That said, this in itself highlights two of the major issues affecting Now - The Summer Album - the baffling absence of certain tracks that you would have thought would have been first on the list for inclusion, and the fact that even within this narrowly defined subsector, there is little musical coherence or indeed any relation at all between any of them.

You'll search in vain for fresh-in-the-memory big-hitters Club Tropicana, Here Comes The Summer, I Won't Let The Sun Go Down On Me, Long Hot Summer or Holidays In The Sun - all of them either on Now!-affiliated record labels or indeed by Now! regulars - on Now - The Summer Album. In their place you'll find a fair half-dozen Raiders Of The Pop Charts-troubling contemporaries of dubious 'summer' credentials and, in some cases, limited appeal. The Level 42 song that non-Level 42 fans 'quite like', but that Level 42 fans aren't that fussed about, The Sun Goes Down (Living It Up) is as much about nuclear paranoia as it is about casual sex with that girl 'making eyes' in a flourescent-and-chrome holiday camp nightclub. It may well have been the breakthrough fairly successful mid-chart hit for the Isle Of Wight funk group, but for all the expected slap bass dexterity it doesn't really go anywhere and doesn't feature anywhere near enough high-pitched Mike Lindup vocal silliness or Angus Deayton-lookalike mundanity Boon Gould guitar. And above all doesn't really have that much obvious to do with 'summer'.

Similarly, KC And The Sunshine Band's irritatingly chirrupy Give It Up represented the very last gasp of disco and became a de facto 'summer song' by virtue of its chart timing and theme park tannoy-friendly sound, as the lyrics just seem to be a phatic declaration to some girl that she might as well go out with him if she feels like it. Presumably it was the ‘Sunshine Band’ bit that helped swing its inclusion here. In contrast Walking On Sunshine by Katrina And The Waves (previously of course on Now! 5) at least makes some effort towards a valid 'summery' theme, both in its lyrics and in its studiedly contemporary-yet-retro sound, notably that surftastic one-note guitar solo. Although it was a substantial hit at the time, Walking On Sunshine was one of those records - like its close contemporary The Whole Of The Moon - that subsequently became even more popular still; one of the select few 'oldies' that even the up-to-the-minute commercial pop stations kept on playing and playing and playing, and an inevitable choice of accompaniment for roller discos and bouncy castles and the like. In fact, it probably became more of a summer favourite after the release of Now - The Summer Album.

It's often forgotten that, for all their singalong punchy brass-driven radio-friendliness, Katrina And The Waves had their roots in arty post-punk experimentalism, and the remainder of the 'current' acts on the compilation occupy a similarly uneasy middle ground between proto-indie and pop. Not that any of them sound particularly like each other, mind. Nick Heyward and his fellow hair-mousse-overdoers in Haircut One Hundred give Fantastic Day a hazy jazzy summery jangly sound with Weekend Break-alluding lyrics to match, though it's quite surprising to discover that the song was actually a hit much earlier in the year. It's also got an unnervingly similiar chord progression to the end theme from Camberwick Green, though cunningly sped up so 'Clown' would never suspect a thing. Martha And The Muffins' somewhat over-lauded Echo Beach, on the other hand, opts for sub-Numan yearning for some dystopian futuristic Beach Of Tomorrow rather than holidays in sunnier climes, and is quite icily synth-driven in its New Waviness to boot, but it says 'Beach' in the title so in it goes. The Barracudas, with their Arthur-Lee-catching-a-wave Pirate Radio-friendly musical sensibilities, always sounded like they'd rather have been anywhere but the early eighties, and their stray hit Summer Fun makes this explicit with its use of an actual sixties American radio ad as an intro (not to mention the slightly less successful follow-up single (I Wish It Could Be) 1965 Again). Ironic, then, that their Ramones-meet-The-Beach-Boys-at-a-leaky-bus-stop number is the closest yet to actually evoking a typical British summer, making no false promises of anything other than an opportunity to make the most of a brief window of sunshine.

Above and beyond their recognisability and obvious commercial appeal, it's difficult to see what these inclusions had to offer thematically to this most thematically ambitious of compilations. The era in which they'd dominated the summer airwaves (well, even that wasn't applicable for Fantastic Day) was still too recent for anyone to feel anything resembling nostalgia towards it; in any case, for certain pockets of the UK, those late seventies/early eighties summers were something that they were most likely in no hurry to look back on. In all seriousness, they would have been better off putting Summer Run, Junior's reworking of Mama Used To Say as the theme for the short-lived yet seemingly endless TV-am Summer Holiday Morning fill-in Data Run variant of the same name, on there. At least it would have had some semblance of actual summer-related nostalgia value.


Needless to say, there is a good deal more focus, point and purpose shared by the equal number of tracks that had clearly been brought in to represent the so-called 'Summer Of Love'. Amazingly, for once, the compilers of a mainstream compilation managed to pick out a handful of tracks that, while not quite The Waltham Green East Wapping Carpet Cleaning Rodent And Boggit Extermination Association, still all managed to sit more comfortably on the folky semi-psychedelic half-mind-alter-y side of things than the twaddle they usually pull out of the bag whenenever Polly Toynbee starts droining on in short sentences about miniskirts and 'flower power' and That Was The Week That Was. In fact, they work so well in this context that you can practially hear Kevin Arnold going into a voiceover reflecting ruefully on the lessons he learned from whatever moneymaking 'chores' he had been handed in tandem with those three other kids that he hung around with whenever Winnie and Paul went away for the summer.

On Groovin', those previously clean-cut and presentable Young Rascals start their descent into full-on hippydom, a move that saw them daringly drop the 'Young' bit of their name in order to appear more 'far-out' (just wait until you get a load of It's Wonderful, Mr. America!). It's a strong and inventively-arranged song only slightly marred by its reliance on that Brian Hyland-esque shrill treble-heavy production that too many people inexplicably thought was a good idea in the sixties, and a clip-cloppy home on the range feel that, while certainly ideal for 'groovin' on a sunday afternoon or otherwise in the Midwest, made it somewhat less than sonically relatable for youngsters trying to chat up girls playing tennis in the local municipal park while dark clouds swirled three o'clockishly overhead. While we're on about unnecessary apostrophes, there's the ever-splendid California Dreamin' by The Mamas And The Papas, which may have a suitably summery sound but - and it's always worth pointing this out - is set in the autumn and spends almost its entire duration complaining about cold weather. And therefore, whatever their intent back in 1967, is inadvertently the most accurate depiction of a British summer that you're likely to find in a pop song.

This would be all very well and good if it wasn't for the fact that, but for a couple of misguided souls who drew CND symbols and wrote 'Imagine' on their school bags, by the mid-eighties hippydom, 'flower power', soft psychedelia and the Summer Of Love itself were all as naff as naff could be. They were the preserve of bores who kept going on and on about how much better everything was in 'the sixties', daytime TV presenters dressing up in kaftans and doing ludicrous 'hip lingo' for silly features, and impenetrable nostalgia documentaries that sought to draw a clip montage straight line between Thunderbirds and Jean Shrimpton. Crown Prince of these Clown Princes was 'The Voice Of' Scott McKenzie and his drippy call to whatever the opposite of arms is, San Francisco (Be Sure To Wear Flowers In Your Hair). While the media's insistence on depicting this weedy Walter The Softy Takes Acid folk-pop effort as the high watermark of psychedelia still rankles, and it was decisively trounced by both The Flowerpot Men's Let's Go To San Francisco ("where the flowers grow up to the sky", apparently) and The Animals' amusingly ridiculous San Franciscan Nights, distance and perspective allows you to appreciate that it's actually a fairly decent song and that sitar bit is really quite impressive and dramatic. Still, its tinkly and faraway bell-shaking peace and love vibes held little resonance for youngsters for whom 'summer' and 'flowers' meant either an interminable enforced trip to the garden centre (where they had invariably just sold out of the ice lollies that your parents would not have sodding well bought you anyway), or some live edition of Gardener's World expanding exponentially into the timeslot of your favourite comedy show. Speaking of which, that old-skool sweeping orchestral Gardener's World theme would probably be side one track one of a more geo-culturally realistic version of Now - The Summer Album. Let's not even meet these damn hippies halfway.

Let us be thankful, then, for the unpromisingly-named The Lovin' Spoonful, who show up with two consecutive tracks on side four (which still looks a tad incongruous even now, though as we shall see they are far from the only act to get two songs on the album) and offer a somewhat more robust Electric Jugband glimpse of the moment just before 'flower power' broke; when there was definitely something in the air, but on this evidence it was anyone's guess whether it would be a blissful heat haze or hammering hailstones. This is especially true of Summer In The City, a traffic-paced stop-start ode to the lack of joys of gainful employment in the sweltering heat as contrasted with ‘skirt’-pursuing nighttime balminess, embellished with enough ear-infuriating rush-hour sound effects to make Michael Douglas snap in Falling Down all over again, and which accurately evokes the sheer annoyance and discomfort of not being free to groove, wear flowers in your hair or even live it up until the sun goes down on a swelteringly hot day. It also, it's worth pointing out, bears more than a passing resemblance to the theme song from Children's BBC migrane-inducer Stop-Go!, and indeed Paul Weller's entire solo career. On the other side of the coin, there's also the loping whistly anthem for lounging around doing fuck all (apart from, erm, falling on your face on somebody’s new-mown lawn) Daydream, which occupies similar territory to Groovin' but with a more abrasive sound and a drier sense of humour.

It's odd to think that, despite their huge success only a relatively short while earlier, The Lovin' Spoonful were virtually forgotten by 1986 and were probably the second most '...who?' inclusion on Now - The Summer Album (we'll be coming to the 'most' one later). The same could not be said, however, of The Monkees, not least on account of the fact that the BBC had been repeating their series relentlessly over the past couple of summer holidays (and you can read more about that here). This was especially true of 1986, when the scheduling of episodes of The Monkees seemed to stretch gloriously on into infinity, alongside an equally if less glorious stretching on into infinity of youngster-aimed 'make your own entertainment' show Why Don't You...?, and those moments when the actual schedule itself seemed to stretch on into infinity (which once again you can read more about here). This Nesmith-driven tempora-spatial disruption assumed even further mind-blowing dimensions if you were prone to spending your school holidays at a local pool's 'swim club' which habitually included A Little Bit Me, A Little Bit You in the cheery backstroke-assisting sounds pumped out across the tannoy. As you're by now expecting, Daydream Believer has absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with 'summer' (not that you should pay much attention to anyone claiming that it does have any particular 'meaning'), but its presence here finally gives us something tangible and recognisable that we can latch on to as specifically 'summery' for the sort of people who would have been buying this album if they had actually been able to afford it. If only it had come accompanied by Hazel O'Connor singing Get Set For Summer.


Moving on from The Monkees and The Lovin' Spoonful, and indeed thankfully Woodstock-fixated didacticism, to 'The Sixties' in general, Do It Again is often fanfared as a triumphant return to The Beach Boys''classic' sound, but actually feels a tad polite, restrained and apologetic when compared to their actual'classic sound'. They were always at their best when Brian Wilson and Mike Love were waging an art-vs-commerce creative war that culminated in the SMiLE-related studio dustups, and no matter who you feel 'won', the fact remains that once the battle was over they were never quite the same again. Unluckily for Do It Again, California Girls is on hand elsewhere on the album to demonstrate just how that 'classic' sound actually sounded, with the rug pulled from under Mike Love’s ode to the comparative average arse size in varying American states by Brian Wilson tacking on one of the most peculiar intros in pop history. It's not difficult to see how barely six months later, they were squaring up to each other in the studio about a song sung from the perspective of a crow. Stitch that, ‘Murs’.

By 1986, of course, The Beach Boys had become 'hip', at least with the too-cool-for-school types in school more normally to be found practicing their high fives in letterman jackets. This was largely on account of the cheap and easy availability of SMiLE-averse compilation 20 Golden Greats in all of its fuzzy sound quality glory, though more cynical types might teasingly suggest that they all knew California Girls better from sendups like Russ Abbott's hilarious Upper Norwood Girls and that not at all remotely sexist British Caledonian advert. Less fortunate in this regard were Those Beatle Boys, who - despite a sneaking upsurge of interest in Sergeant Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band - were still roundly dismissed as being as naff as, well, Scott McKenzie. Perhaps that's partly why, oddly, EMI briefly began allowing their songs to appear on high-profile compilations in the mid-eighties, in the hope of luring in a whole new generation of punters who could be persuaded to pay full price for the same songs seventeen million times. These included the Music For Pleasure collection 20 Fab No.1's Of The Sixties (and, erm, Savile's Time Travels - 20 Golden Hits Of 1963), and - perhaps surprisingly - two songs on Now - The Summer Album.

At this point, you're probably running through the entire Beatles discography in your head and trying to work out which two songs were actually about the 'summer'. Well, the answer is that there aren't any, but that didn't stop Ashley Abram and Box Music from marching straight on with their track selection. Presumably sidestepping I'll Follow The Sun on account of its somewhat negative 'Dinners'-goes-walkabout vibes, and Sun King because they wanted listeners to keep hold of whatever remained of their sanity, they opted instead for the rather more popular choices of All You Need Is Love and Here Comes The Sun. Although its only tenuous connection with the theme of this album is that it was Number One for the majority of the 'Summer Of Love', All You Need Is Love is an interesting inclusion here in the sense that, while on actual Beatle albums it's invariably swamped by more inventive, psychedelic and melodically/instrumentally interesting numbers, when it's in isolation you realise what a deceptively clever (and wittily performed) song it really is. Here Comes The Sun, which if we're being honest about it never even really sounded that much like it was by the actual Beatles and not just George, can't help but stand there doing an I Have A Horsey Neigh Neigh number next to its more illustrious counterpart, but in fairness at least it actually mentions the summer.

Far more deserving of a place on this album, both on account of its subject matter and its redolence of a lost era when everyone would politely head off for seaside towns for a week and join in with all manner of uncool holidaymaking hilarity, rather than get stressed about going to, staying at and coming back from some 'sophisticated' destination interspersed with gallons of jagerbombs, is Summer Holiday by Cliff Richard And The Shadows. For anyone who doesn't know, this was the theme from the rather quite splendid 1963 film of the same name in which Cliff, The Shadows, Lauri Peters, Una Stubbs and Jeremy Bulloch borrow a double-decker bus for a spot of European sightseeing, and was knocked off the top of the charts by the also-from-the-same-soundtrack Foot Tapper by The Shadows, now more commonly known as the music when Your Old Mate Brian Matthew says that's the lot for this week, see you next week. It should be emphasises that at no point do they have cause to shout "LOOK OUT! VYYYYYYYVYAN!", though they are joined at one point by a stowaway that Cliff is especially cross to find out is actually a fully grown woman in disguise and not a young boy after all. Moving rapidly on, Summer Holiday was exactly the sort of film that anyone listening to this compilation would have seen a million times on interminable Summer Holiday afternoons while trying to work out what a 'Bachelor Boy' was and what was so good about being one, and so this jaunty, likeable and fantastically arranged number is a very welcome inclusion here. Even if it is hard to avoid the temptation to shout "it's raining, nyeh-hehhhh" over the top. More of a surprising inclusion, but an even more welcome one, is The Day I Met Marie, Cliff's Hank Marvin-penned Baroque Pop ode to how he'll not forget that happy night he chanced upon some young lady in a haystack. They didn't send a camera crew to cover that.


Beyond that, there are a couple of Nostalgia Souvenir Spread-friendly sixties-ish types who get a single song on the compilation; and all of them, oddly, with a reason why they don't quite fit. Mungo Jerry's jugband-goes-prog ode to going ha ha this a way ha ha that a way when the weather's fine and you got women you got women on your mind In The Summertime was probably almost genuinely inescapable back in 1970 and deservedly so, but by the time it showed up here was about to fall very rapidly from favour owing to a certain unfortunate line (though the less said about that radio edit that went "have a drive have a drive" the better). Nowadays, you're only marginally more likely to hear it than their famously airwave-eluding chart-topper Baby Jump. As fantastic as it is, someone presumably missed the sarcasm in The Kinks'Sunny Afternoon, and there are those that believe that the narrator may even be deluding himself about the good weather anyway. Lazy Sunday by The Small Faces is up there with The Lovin' Spoonful and The Day I Met Marie as an inspired inclusion, not least because it was still some years before their 'rediscovery' and it probably hadn't been heard that much between 1968 and then. It's an amazing song, but yet again one that - those lengthy Coach Trip To The Centre Of The Mind psychedelic bucket-and-spade interludes (which in themselves make you wonder why we didn't get Good Vibrations instead of Do It Again) aside - doesn't really seem to have very much to do with the summer at all. Well not any more than The Universal at any rate. Which is a touch inconvenient for anyone who might previously have described it as "Anthony Newley Goes To The Seaside Ferdy Ain’t Been Seen ‘As ‘E? changing hut-leaping cockney caterwauling about mods being thwarted in seaside amok-running plans by legions of deckchair-bound disapproving types with knotted hankies atop their heads, leaving quite literally no room for ‘ravers’", but hey ho.

Going back slightly further in time, to the bit in Summer Holiday before it goes into colour if you want to be cinematic about it, there area handful of songs that hail from a long-lost era when holidaymaking was more innocent and simplistic a pursuit, and 'summer fun' was literally just being outdoors. As if to underline this, Eddie Cochran's still thrilling Summertime Blues is a lament for how annoyed he is by 'The Man' (who in all manifestations still seems to talk with the same third-Muppet-from-the-left voice) preventing him from lazing around doing nothing; he even takes his problem to Plastic Bertrand and those Eurocrats in Brussells who regret to inform him that are unable to help, which doubtless struck a chord with a young Nigel Farage. The Drifters'Under The Boardwalk effortlessly captures the tinkly charms of a time when a stroll and an ice cream were high entertainment on a summer's day, though the compilers must have been kicking themselves when only twelve months later, The Drifters and Bruce Willis came up with an effectively updated version that seemed to stay in the charts into the autumn and beyond. Long-forgotten Kramer lookalike Jerry Keller was the man behind hotrods-and-soda-pop celebration of taking your best girl to the park Here Comes Summer, one of those 'golden oldies' that the Radio 1 Roadshow would always insist on foisting upon a Duran-hungry audience, but which - surprisingly - actually turns out to be quite likeable.

And then there's the darkest seventies, represented here by a procession of slick bolted-together pop-soul anthems tailor-made for car radios in true and-they-wonder-why-punk-happened fashion. One of those songs where you can never quite make your mind up whether it's any good or not, The Isley Brothers'Summer Breeze sees Psychedelic Soul take a bit of ‘me time’ after all that early seventies stuff about taking to the streets, stopping instead to smell the roses (well, jasmine) and take in the scenery, including those oh-so-summery ‘newspapers’, but still throwing in a bit of untamed fuzz guitar to scare any passing Republicans. Much the same is true of Lovely Day by Bill Withers, mercifully presented here in its original incarnation and not that hideous 'Woo! YEAH'-heavy 'Sunshine Mix' that blighted the charts shortly thereafter. Mind you, that note he famously holds for ages; it's hardly Captain Beefheart destroying a high quality studio microphone by singing into it, is it. 10cc's (cough) 'problematic' yet inexplicably popular Dreadlock Holiday should not even be allowed on the same holiday island as the rest of their output, and even Elton John himself probably can't remember how Island Girl went. Somewhere, The Barracudas were sharpening their Rickenbackers.


So then... what, apart from all the highlights that we've already picked out, are the real highlights of Now - The Summer Album? Well, oddly enough, it's the two that don't really fit even into any of the loosely-assembled stylistic brackets we've identified along the way. Both must have seemed bafflingly off at a Private Beach-occupying tangent at the time, and to be honest they still do now. And they're both fantastic.

The Girl From Ipanema appears here credited to Astrud Gilberto alone, rather than the two blokes who insisted their name went on the label in a jaw-dropping display of 'stand back luv, the men are in charge'-ness, and sure enough it's a severely truncated edit omitting much of their hoo-hah. It would be tempting to say that music's loss is feminism's gain, except that this does mean that we get to fully concentrate on the gap-toothed first lady of Bossa Nova getting a bit ‘and then they lez up’ about some hottie strolling along the beachfront while each one she passes goes "aaaaah", presumably in a non-Tony Parsons fashion. At the time that Now - The Summer Album came out, the other sixties selections seemed remote and rarely-glimpsed enough; The Girl From Ipanema, and other similar esoteric stray hits from other non-pop genres, were so far off the average pop fan's radar that they may as well have been from another planet. And perhaps that's part of the reason why, a couple of years later, so many of them started raiding charity shops for unlikely-looking albums hiding similarly exotic grooves. After all, you could always guarantee finding so many of them on holiday that you had trouble carrying them all home.

Then there's Summer (The First Time) by Bobby Goldsboro. Wikipedia believes that this tale of balmy evening horseplay with an 'older lady' belongs firmly in the 'Adult Contemporary' genre, but its piercing Test Card F-esque one-note string section, Casio test-tone piano riff, heat-haze synth tones, overpowering sound effects and crashing orchestral interlude designed to denote their 'getting it on' seem to exist outside anyone's established norms of musical genres, coming across as a very expensive lo-fi bedroom recording using highly paid session musicians. It's also got absolutely effortlessly brilliant lyrics, descriptive and elliptic yet highly sexually charged and very much to the point - in fact it's surprising it actually got enough radio play to become a hit back then - with much dwelling on heaving knockerage and, erm, 'helping hands'; although his insistence on emphasising the prominence of her facial features does make his conquest sound alarmingly like Father Bigley. And then at the end, the lyrics simply loop back to the start, as though he's caught in some kind of sexual time loop to rival the opening of Sweet Sweetback's Badasssss Song. Doubtless this drove Mary Whitehouse into short-lived radio-berating paroxysms of outrage, but there are few listeners who won't find that this strikes a chord and stirs up memories of that boy with the summer job at the local newsagents or that girl playing tennis in the park that time. Or, if raining, and it probably WAS fucking raining, whoever you fancied on Home And Away at that point.


Of course, there's every chance that Mr. Goldsboro's tales of scoring were every bit as exaggerated as those lurid yet unverifiable accounts of holiday romances in the Mediterranean that the more loudmouthed types in school would venture forth whether asked to or not come September. Yes, we're at the end of Now - The Summer Album, and the end of the school holidays, and the return of, well, school, looms close on the horizon. You're back from your family holiday, you're in that weird end of August limbo with nothing to do (especially if those scrooges at the BBC ended their daytime programming a week early), and Melissa from Great Yarmouth will never write back. What's worse, everyone from home has come up with a new running joke in your absence that you can never quite get to the bottom of. And that copy of Now - The Summer Album remained steadfastly in John Menzies. Ahead lie autumn evenings, Telly Addicts and the interminable stretch towards the next major school holiday... but that's a whole different Now! album.

There's no getting away from the fact that Now - The Summer Album singularly failed to do whatever it was that it set out to do in the first place, but in its marketing-led desperation to fill enough sides of vinyl to actually constitute a releasable album, it somehow became a work of accidental genius. Even on the most lazily slung-together 'Summer' compilation - and there have been many thousands of them since (oh and Summer Chart Party) - you would never find such a baffling and coherency-free collection of mismatched pop songs from mismatched genres and mismatched eras. If Bobby Goldsboro was a themed compilation, then this dates from the very start of that hot afternoon in the first day in June when the sun was a demon. By the time that Now! That's What I Call Summer came out in 2014, he'd seen the sun rise as a man, and frankly we'd lost something a bit more than virginity along the way.

As for Smash Hits, they would continue to mercilessly ridicule anyone who came along with a gimmicky summer smash for many years thereafter. In 1991, highly touted post-New Kids On The Block American act The Party - Chase, Damon, Tiffini, Deedee and Albert - saw fit to inflict a particularly lightweight bit of pop rap named Summer Vacation on the post Now - The Summer Album populace in the hope of scoring a UK chart breakthrough. Their review ran as follows: "Scientific Fact! The Sun is a huge burning ball of gas which one day will burn out and take most of the Solar System with it. How's about that then, 'Albert'?".


Special thanks to Brian McCloskey for finding Upper Bubblington Village Fete - see his excellent Smash Hits Archive here.

Commercial Television - it might well not be 'biased' against whoever's decided the BBC is 'biased' against them this week, but it sure never stops trying to flog you junk food. Whether it's some girl in a bath trying to go down on a Flake while a lizard looks on askance for some reason, a swanky sophisticate in a Little Black Dress reclining on a leather sofa to the sound of Rhapsody In Blue in the hope of flogging Suchard Moments, a grand piano full of talking hamburgers proclaiming Ronald McDonald to be 'the bun clown', children who should have their chirpily requested 'Sunny D' thrown into their faces with extreme force, or the sheer bafflement of Pyramint, you can't so much as sit through an episode of Stuff The Week without being coerced into wanting upwards of five fat-and-sugar-heavy 'treats'.

Needless to say, TV Times took to the associated advertising revenue with great enthusiasm. Crisps, sweets, fizzy drinks, biscuits, chocolates and 'adult' beverages took up such a large percentage of the available page space that you half expected Pig to somehow emerge from the listing for Pipkins and scoff the whole magazine in one go. Or indeed that elsewhere in the issue, you'd find Bruce Forsyth in an oversized comedy chef's hat making a meal from sweetshop-skewed 'leftovers'. And here are just some of the delights on the menu...


Years before the not even remotely racist or sexist advert stressing that you can stand it with Bandit (which, crucially, was "as big as jail door"), everyone's favourite trapezoid wafer bar opted for a much simpler telling-it-like-it-is approach, with particular emphasis given to the all-important flavour-enhancing hue of the wrapper. It's certainly putting a smile on the face of that Millicent Martin-a-gram, at any rate. Note also that it was still being made at that point by original manufacturers Macdonalds, before they joined forces with McVitie's and Crawfords to form the gigantic Doctor Who Christmas Special-esque supermarket aisle straddling behemoth United Biscuits.


Quite how 'marvellous' Mars really is when it's making Bob Monkhouse adopt a frenzied expression and go totally off-the-scale alliteration-crazy is open to question. Note also how the tagline seems more like a threat than an enticement.


Huntley & Palmers Ltd, esteemed manufacturers of the Lemon Puff, The Butter Shortie, and the satire-inviting 'Butter Osborne', here risk the wrath of the Advertising Standards Authority, not with any false promises about their wares but with the idea that anyone in their right mind could consider this a 'lovable' clown. Even in a decade when TV was absolutely awash with the fuckers, it still stands out as a particularly evil-looking example of the genre and it's likely that even punters with two appropriate biscuit wrappers to spare politely declined the offer.


Advertisers were quick to capitalise on the newly-minted purchasing power of the 'teenager', though some were quicker than others. Here Corn Flakes make a half-hearted I Have A Horsey Neigh Neigh-level attempt to counter Rice Krispies' phenomenally successful deployment of a blistering Rolling Stones jingle by attempting to convince parents that what their check-shirted daughter really wants while listening to her decade-old record player and swooning over discarded photos of generic 'dreamboats' is to wolf down a load of dry Corn Flakes straight from the packet. They've even included a special song she can sing while doing so, daddy-o! Hang on, what do you mean, 'they were both made by Kellogg's'?


Now then. Here's the ever-exotic Fry's inviting purchasers of the 'Big Fry' range - Crunchie, Picnic, Chocolate Cream and Turkish Delight - to win either an Austin Mini or a 'magnificent' record player, simply by stating the order in which they would play certain records if they were a bona fide Disc Jockey. Given that even the Light Programme would probably have baulked at placing The Beatles and The Rolling Stones alongside Marcello Minerva and, erm, Glenn Miller by the mid-sixties, this must have taken some doing. Note also that the competition rules stress the need to behave like a real life DJ and put together a 'truly balanced family programme'. Moving rapidly on...


Not to be outdone, 'froth'-fixated polar bear 'Cresta' is moving with the format-upgrading times and offering a free cassette recorder on the condition that you can reassemble the lyrics of his signature song into the correct order. And of course purchase at least two bottles of a drink of such water pollution-threatening viscocity that they turned it into a key advertising point. Sorry, did we not mention that?


Yes, you heard. Whether you're settling down for The Generation Game, Parkinson and Match Of The Day, or Credo, Highway and Seal Morning, grab yourself a great big slab of butter and get scoffing. It's the law.


I have no idea what these two have been surprised in the middle of, but I suspect that it's best left that way.

Anyway, lett's stop avoiding the elephant in the sweetshop. Surely there was a time before Nestle became enthusiastic sponsors of global evil and the focus of a billion Mark Thomas rants and dystopian rap songs and overall the sort of foodstuff manufacturer Skeletor might approve of, and were content to simply plug their taste-tastic wares in a nice, polite and wholly inoffensive way?


Yeah, good luck with that. Nice to see The Queen asked for her eyes to be blocked out to prevent identification, though.


For no reason other than a bit of a distraction from all that unpleasantness, here's a rare colour photo of Julian Chagrin and 'E.R.I.C', the man and the computer from, erm, TV's A Man And A Dog. Anyway, this is all just the tip of the Toblerone, so join us again next time for a second helping of glutinous sugary muck...

If you've read the previous instalment of this look back at distasteful, off-colour or just plain baffling space-filling nonsense from the TV Times archive, you'll be aware - or, if you'd rather, forewarned - that there was even more in the way of dubiously chirpy junk food adverts to come. And, well, here are the leftovers, so let's get straight on with them before Bruce Forsyth puts on his oversized comedy chef's hat and tries to fashion them into a recipe...


Before we go any further, remember that Mars advert with Bob Monkhouse pulling a worryingly frenzied face and indulging in way too many words beginning with 'm'? Well, it turns out that none other than Jon Pertwee also contributed to the campaign, though he seems to have swerved the effects that the combination of Milk Chocolate, Buttery Caramel and Chocolate Malted Milk had on poor old Bob, and appears here with an expression that merely suggests he is about to embark on one of his 'million voices' that all sounded the same. Meanwhile, note how careful the advert is to reiterate that the eating of Mars should take place in the mouth.


Speaking of all things bouche-amusing, here Wrigley's give their antisocial wares a plug with the assistance of some sub-Beverley Sisters clean-cut presentable young ladies, taking care to emphasise the somewhat debatable alleged dental care-friendly properties of chewing gum. This is cunningly rendered plausible through the diversionary mention of the even more spurious 'Birchmint' variant, a supposed flavour of which the World Wide Web throws up absolutely no corroborating evidence whatsoever. Note also how the one who was given 'Standard' flavour appears decidedly less happy about this turn of events than the others.


Opinion seems to be divided on whether the average mid-sixties football fan was a rattle-waving toff in an Uncle Sam hat or the 'I Shot J.R.' bloke from Father Ted overstating his Caledonian heritage, but there's one thing we can all be certain of - they never went to a match without an impractically-sized tin of Nuttall's Mintoes to hand. There's also a promise of 'five minutes of extra time' attached to them, which presumably meant something at the time but now just leaves you wondering if said mints could somehow extend the match either spatio-temporally or literally.


In possibly the most direct and to-the-point advertising campaign ever, the not exactly unmurderous-looking 'Mr Pontelli' plugs the mints that share his name simply by demanding 'BUY SOME TODAY'. A gambit that clearly paid off as we're all always racing off down the corner shop to stock up on Pontelli Mints even today. Mr. Pontelli also advises us to 'Watch out for me on ITV', presumably in reference to his continually making random unscheduled appearances in Saturday Night At The London Palladium and Gideon's Way.


On a slightly less minty theme, this giant talking joint at least has the decency simply to ask us to 'enjoy' Bensons Oranges & Lemons. Wonder which one of them made you larger and which one made you small?


Meanwhile, the ones that mother gave you didn't do anything at all, which is presumably why this inexplicably Wild West-fixated youngster is demanding real Spam from his mam, as opposed to all that fake Spam they're always trying to palm off on us. In fact it goes as far as to confirm that genuine Spam can only be bought in a 12oz can, so keep an eye out for those crafty imitators. Meanwhile, quite why his mother is standing in the exact same pose as a Subbuteo goalkeeper is not specified.


Afterwards, why not wash your genuine Spam down with a nice bowl of Wall's Strawberry Fayre, a Battenberg-esque ice cream treat that is essentially just Neapolitan without the cumbersome inconvenience of chocolate. To be, boom boom, 'fayre', it does actually look quite nice, and the 'New as square strawberries' tagline is one that holds up as true even now. Though 'Not invented yet and never likely to be' would be more technically accurate.


Parents should also apparently take note that not only do children 'love' Weetabix (no, they really do), but it's also 'wholewheatedly' good for them, and 'packed with goodness from end to end right to the very end' - assurances that make it sound like a nice healthy alternative and, crucially, do not stand up to any kind of actionable legal scrutiny whatsoever. Steve Davis seems perfectly happy to endorse this standpoint, mind.


Years before somehow inexplicably managing to become the preferred option to Fanta, Tango offer an all expenses paid round-the-world trip to anyone who can identify which countries these none-more-sixties illustrations are sporting the patronisingly stereotypical national clobber of, and - more importantly - buy some more cans of Tango. The genius of that ad campaign was clearly still some distance from their grasp. No, not the one you're thinking of. The one just before that with the two kids in Miami Vice-inspired getup with Felix Howard haircuts playing pinball to the sound of Apache. Because that was better. Yes it was. Shut up. You should bloody well know when you've been Tangoed.


It's surprising that it's taken us this long to get round to a mention of Spangles, the much-'remembered' multi-flavoured boiled sweet that was frankly nice enough to warrant all that nostalgising and yah boo sucks to anyone who used to leave them until last in their Selection Box. First up is an actual entry form for the competition based on the question-mark denoted 'mystery' flavour, the identity of which was apparently never actually revealed, though that didn't stop, erm, someone from co-opting the iconography into the logo for a certain podcast. This is followed by some witty inter-Mod japesmithery on the subject of whether the pixie-cutted pillion passenger has neglected to stock up on something that, if not a suitable all-night-dance-facilitating legal stand-in for Purple Hearts, is apparently even more essential to the smooth operation of a moped than petrol. In fact, you could almost say she's forgotten to remember Spangles. As you were.


And finally, here's Zing, the bar that has 'everything'. Presumably on a planet composed entirely of chocolate and biscuit and nothing else.


Not that she has anything to do with any of the above either, but it would take too long to explain exactly why Diana Dors was being disclaimered as having 'nothing to do with geography', though doubtless the pre-Alternative Comedy funnymen could have come up with a billion hilarious 'reasons' within seconds. Anyway, join us again next time, when we'll be taking a look at some of the ways in which ITV conspired to convince viewers that they weren't watching enough television...

Looks Unfamiliar is a podcast in which I talk to a guest about some of the things that they think that only they remember.

Joining me in this episode is radio host and political pundit Mark Thompson, who's wondering why nobody else he knows seems to have heard of Whiz Kids, Crash ZX Spectrum, Night Shift, Public Information Film family The Blunders, The Last Train, and The Drak Pack. Along the way we'll be finding out why there should be more warnings about the dangers of hallucinating Emma Bunton, how to distinguish an American teenager on a BMX from Arthur Mullard in a school cap, and when it's appropriate to address Colin Bennett as 'Vince Purity'. Also, we finally find out the identity of our Mystery Theme Tune!

You can download it from here. And if you like what you've heard, you can subscribe via iTunes, or find the full archive here.


Looks Unfamiliar is hosted by The Benatical, where you can find loads of other great podcasts. Mark's podcast House Of Comments - which I'm a regular guest on - can be found here. And if you really want to know more about The Last Train, there's a big feature on that and several of the other shows we mention in my book Well At Least It's Free.

Hardwicke House may still be no nearer being released on DVD or even digitally, let alone actually shown by an actual TV station, but that doesn't mean that people are any less interested in it. In fact, as we were discussing only recently, it's the single most searched for programme on here by some considerable distance, far outstripping Play School, Buzzfax, The Mersey Pirate and poor old Skiboy. Even Doctor Who, which is technically so popular that I didn't include it in those results, is actually narrowly edged from the top slot by the famously banned sitcom.

Needless to say, an enormous number of that enormous number of searchers are very keen to see more of it. The only problem is that there never actually is any more to see. Thanks to both the machinations of Ian Compliance and the mysterious disappearance of all those bootlegs that were apparently around at one point, all that we have available to watch are the two transmitted episodes and that outtake with Rik Mayall, Ade Edmonson and Kevin Allen that bizarrely shows up on TV's Naughtiest Blunders-type shows every now and again. Which is why I was especially delighted to recieve an email from Mark Ayres saying that he'd found the pre-transmission trailer for Hardwicke House sandwiched between two programmes on an old VHS tape.

So, how was Hardwicke House originally sold to potential viewers? Was that actually part of the problem? And did it - as memory suggests it did - have any untransmitted material in it? Well, there's only one way to find out...


How many times the trailer was broadcast is anyone's guess, but this particular recording dates from 17th February 1987 - a full week before the series launch - and was shown at approximately 8:56pm, sandwiched between a repeat of Morecambe And Wise On Stage and Texas Rangers, the first episode of the second series of Boon. To the accompaniment of the opening theme, the announcer tells us to expect "a new zany comedy" as we go "back to school at Hardwicke House", illustrated with full zaniness by a shot of Mr. Flashman ducking and allowing a football to hit Mr. Philpott and send him flying, as seen in the first transmitted episode.


From an unbroadcast episode, the brilliantly malevolent Mr. Fowl tells a roomful of exam candidates that a pencil "is for writing with, and not cleaning out your orifices". "Sir, what's an orifice?" - "You are boy".


From the legendary unbroadcast episode featuring Rik Mayall and Ade Edmondson, Lenny and Tiny threaten Slasher Bates into telling them where Mr. Fowl's room is, a plan which falls apart when they remember they are unable to tell left from right. Once again it's worth emphasising that this episode is right up there with the best of the duo's work and deserves better than to be sat gathering dust on an archive shelf for absolutely no fathomable reason. If you're reading this and are in a position to do something about it, then please do.


"I've been poked!", exclaims Ms. Crabbe in an unbroadcast episode. "Come come Miss Crabbe", adds headmaster Mr. Wickham, "I'm sure you imagined that".


And finally, from the first broadcast episode, Mr. Flashman reluctantly reminds a fetish gear-clad Donna to "wear the uniform". With rather disturbingly detached glee, the voiceover signs off with "Donna, the voluptuous head girl of Hardwicke House, a new comedy series starting next Tuesday at eight, and continuing Wednesday and every Wednesday at eight thirty". Erm...

So did this trailer give a false impression of Hardwicke House? Well, no, really. It's true that it plays up the knockabout slapstick to a misleading degree, but there's also plenty of warning of potential off-colour language and subject matter. Even from this thirty second glimpse, it's clearly no family-friendly half-hour of cosy fun. So the widespread assumption that viewers were led to expect a very different show to what they actually saw isn't quite so accurate after all, even if it does make you wonder yet again what possessed somebody to think it was suitable for that timeslot. Though on the other hand it does possibly explain why so many people are so insistent that they saw the Rik and Ade episode go out.

Of course, something like this would make a great extra for a Hardwicke House DVD. But there isn't one. And nor is there likely to be. If you'd like to read the booklet that would have come with an abandoned DVD release, though, you can find it in Well At Least It's Free. If you want to know more about why it didn't come out, you can find that in The Camberwick Green Procrastination Society. And if you want to take the content of this article and pass it off as your own work, here is a list of short piers; please locate your nearest one and take a long walk off it. And we're back at Hardwicke House next Wednesday night from the same time...

Following the demise of The Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band, the various former members set about launching solo careers. Viv Stanshall seemed to have more difficulty in making a firm decision on a musical direction than his former colleagues, and saw Radio 1 sessions as a way of trying out potential - and often hastily abandoned - ideas.

His immediate post-Bonzos venture The Sean Head Showband only made it as far as one single. This was followed by the typically ambitious announcement that he was forming two bands that would run parallel to each other; Viv Stanshall’s Gargantuan Chums, who featured several former Bonzos bandmates and one Keith Moon on drums, and biG GRunt, featuring more or less the same lineup. Causing no little confusion to radio programmers, their debut single featured Gargantuan Chum's robust cover of Elvis Presley's Suspicion on one side, and biG GRunt's more whimsical original Blind Date on the other. Needless to say, it did not trouble the charts too much.

Neither band would officially release any more material, yet while it might appear on face value that this was yet another high-concept diversion that ended up going nowhere, the 'legacy' of both outfits would have a significant effect on Stanshall's future direction. One of biG GRunt's few other media appearances was, needless to say, a session for John Peel's Radio 1 show broadcast on 21st March 1970, where they performed Blind Date alongside a rocked-up cover of The Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band's 11 Moustachioed Daughters, and two new songs - The Strain, which would later appear with new lyrics on the Bonzos reunion album Let's Make Up And Be Friendly, and the propulsive instrumental Cyborg Signal. While this was certainly a strong set, Peel's producer John Walters - never a man to hold back his true feelings - was quick to remark that he felt such an intensely musical direction was a poor and inappropriate use of Stanshall's talents.

Doubtless Walters considered Stanshall's brief engagement as a regular on Radio 4's magazine show early in 1971 a far more suitable vehicle. In contrast to the show's straight-laced approach and the formal style of presenter Richard Baker, Stanshall contributed a series of wild, impressionistic monologues - notably his tales of life on the high seas aboard the SS Sausage - intercut with sound effects and suitably atmospheric extracts from pop records. Although Stanshall had dabbled with this form while in The Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band, this was really the first occasion on which he had fully explored the possibilities of spoken word, and it was as a direct consequence of these broadcasts that Walters invited him to stand in on Peel's show Top Gear while the presenter took a holiday over the summer of 1971.


Viv Stanshall's Radio Flashes, as Top Gear was renamed for the duration of August 1971, was a dazzling affair that scarcely found time for brand new Prog Rock releases amongst the whirlwind of poetry, in-character links, comedy sketches, adverts for fictitious animal repellents, technically ambitious pre-recorded items and the gripping weekly serial 'Breath From The Pit', in which Stanshall and his heroic sidekick Keith Moon fought to stop their old adversary The Scorpion and his fiendish plan to replace commuters with intelligent gorillas, armed only with the all-purpose Magic Trousers. 'Breath From The Pit', however, caused more headaches for Walters than any other part of the show, and given Stanshall's notorious lack of attention to deadlines this was no mean feat. On one occasion, having turned up two hours late for the recording of an instalment, Stanshall was asked by an impatient Walters and Moon for the script. With no little irritation, he replied that he had to write it first. Perhaps wisely, the next time holiday cover was needed, Walters booked Moon instead.

As for Gargantuan Chums, they were eventually joined by fellow former Bonzo Neil Innes, and - now calling themselves Freaks - they too had recorded a session for Top Gear. Broadcast in March 1971, this was made up of a mixture of old songs and new numbers that started Stanshall and Innes thinking towards a possible reunion. One of these was Rawlinson End, a lengthy spoken word parody of serials from women's magazines, building on his earlier Start The Week pieces by adding a narrative and a full cast of characters. This was to prove an unexpected hit with listeners, with many writing in asking to hear it again. It was also, more significantly, a hit with Walters, who began wondering if there was potential in exploring the saga further...


This is abridged from Fun At One - The Story Of Comedy On BBC Radio 1, which you can find out more about here. biG GRunt's Top Gear session has now been given its first ever release - with sleevenotes by me - by Megadodo Records. You can find out more about how to get hold of a copy here.

Hit BBC shows - and stars - being snatched away by commercial rivals is nothing new, and neither are indignance and outrage at it happening. Back at the very dawn of ITV, there was an episode of The Goon Show in which all of the characters defected to the flashier new advertising-funded service one by one, leaving just the ever-loyal Bluebottle to man the entire BBC by himself. In the early nineties, Chris Morris launched into a ferocious rant against his former colleagues from GLR who'd upped and offed to the newly-launched Virgin Radio the second that Ian Virgin waved a huge cheque under their noses. And it's worth stressing that it has sometimes worked in the other direction too, as anyone who has made it through an edition of H&P@BBC will tell you. If such people actually exist, that is.

So it's not really any surprise that the makers of The Great British Bake Off should have taken the bait and airlifted the entire show to Channel 4. In fairness they really had the BBC over a barrel with this one, and the extra TEN MILLION they were demanding for the right to keep hold of the rights to the show would have provoked all manner of mouth-foaming and collapsing in the gutter about RA RA LICENCE FEE, so the BBC just couldn't win. Not that we should have expected any better from the production company behind Why Don't You Speak English? but that's by the by. This is the Brave New World of broadcasting that Rupert Murdoch has been promising us in badly punctuated lower-case tweets for a while now, and with the BBC on the back foot and unable to do right for doing wrong we're probably going to be seeing a lot more of this kind of thing in the near future. In fact, the only BBC Stars we can be certain won't defect to commercial channels are TV 'Girl' and 'Clown', and that's probably just because everyone's too scared to ask them.

In amongst all the controversy and debate and GIFs of Paul Hollywood having his cake and eating it, though, there's one important detail that's been missed - it almost certainly will not work. The Great British Bake Off is a show that has caught the imagination of viewers precisely because of how it had to fit around the restrictions, resources and general 'house style' of BBC television, becoming distinctive and engaging viewing almost by accident. Over on commercial television, much like David Dickinson not so long ago, it will almost certainly get lost amongst the hours and hours and hours of similar fare, and its character - which, let's be honest about it, was what drew viewers in rather than the actual format itself - will be gone. Chances are it will fall flat on its face and they will only have their own greedy selves to blame. In the meantime, the BBC - if they have any sense - will have found a new unlikely subject area to successfully shoehorn into their schedules.

Why am I so certain of this? Because there is a long history of performers, presenters, writers, producers and even entire programmes moving from the BBC to commercial television and vice versa, seemingly unaware that their creative niche and indeed their audience had derived entirely from the structure and atmosphere that they were working in, and losing both almost before the ink had dried on the contract. But I'm not going to bore you by going on about them. At least not as part of this article. Instead, here's me on the radio a while back, talking to Mark Thompson about the notable and notorious failures (and the count-them-on-one-hand successes) of the Great TV Defections, from The World According To Smith And Jones to Bruce Forsyth's Big Night, and of course a certain Mr. Parkinson. After which I will be signing an exclusive contract with Channel 5.


If you've enjoyed this, you can hear me talking to Mark on an edition of Looks Unfamiliarhere.

Doctor Who's fifth series in 1967-68 probably seemed like just another day at the office for everyone involved. A well established success that had survived a potentially hazardous change of lead actor, it was nonetheless no more or less significant than any other TV show, especially now that 'Dalekmania' had started to fade into the past. It was high quality Saturday Evening science fiction thrills all the way, but it was also being churned out week in, week out, and in some regards had actually fallen into something of a pattern, famously over-reliant on the 'Base Under Siege' narrative model.

It must have come as some surprise, then, when fans later started to hail this series as the absolute high watermark of all things Doctor Who. And not without good reason. Largely wiped - in fact, at one point only three episodes out of the entire run were known to still exist - all that remained were eerie-looking photos and moody off-air audios, novelisations that hinted at tense and thought-provoking stories, and the memories of those who had actually seen the now intangible 'Monster Season' - presumably so named to distinguish it from all of those other ones with absolutely no monsters in them whatsoever - when it was transmitted; odd now to think that it was only a little over fifteen years old at that point. On top of that, The Daleks may have gone but you had two Cybermen stories, two Yeti stories, the Ice Warriors, Patrick Troughton playing a dual role, and some seaweed with ideas above its station. It really didn't get much more exciting - or at least exciting-sounding - than that.

Then of course huge swathes of it turned up and everything got turned on its head. Some stories turned out to not quite live up to the bold claims that had been made for them. Others, forgotten and ignored, turned out to be utterly fantastic. And everyone else looked on in bafflement and pointed out that they're all good and what are any of you lot on about? Still, the fact remains that few things in the entire Doctor Who'universe' have fallen as far and as quickly from favour as Series Five. And on past form, chances are that we're not exactly going to be helping to restore its reputation here. But we'll do our best, and what better place to begin than with the fearsome metal man from beyond the stars whose popularity with the viewing public so dominated this series...?


Why Is The Servo Robot So Famous?


More of an annoyance than an antagonist, The Servo Robot - the lumbering, aftershave-shaped, bipedal custodian of abandoned rocket The Silver Carrier in Series Five closer The Wheel In Space - is only seen in one episode, and even then gets blown apart in spectacular fashion in a textbook display of Previously Unmentioned Thing We've Just Got From The Tardis technobabble. It is merely one of a long line of underwhelmingly designed yet at the same time oddly futuristic robots in sixties Doctor Who. It doesn't even appear anywhere in the two existing episodes from the story, spectacularly blown apart or otherwise. So how come, then, it's by far the most widely-recognisable visual element of the story, if not the entirety of Series Five? So much so, in fact, that it very nearly became the lead image of this feature. Incoming assistant Zoe makes her first appearance in this story, and The Cybermen and The Cybermats have both had sleek redesigns, but ask the average fan what they think of first when you mention The Wheel In Space and they'll almost certainly say The Servo Robot. They'd struggle to tell you what contentious X-Ray Laser-powering mineral Bernalium, foxy Russian scientist Tanya Lernov, or even The Wheel itself looked like, but they could describe The Servo Robot in intricate detail without even trying. Quite how this has come about is something of a mystery. You can't blame publicity photos as there are actually substantially more of The Cybermen and Zoe, not to mention that Cybermat that fanzines were always using to fill awkward bits of landscape-format space. You can't point towards the scale blueprints in The Doctor Who Technical Manual as nobody ever really understood quite what that was for. And you can't even blame the Telesnaps - of which more in a moment - as it seems that with unerring accuracy, John Cura once again failed to capture anything of any of the actual key moments in the first episode. We can only assume, then, that it either did something visually astonishing that wasn't in the script and wasn't picked up on the soundtrack, or else that there was some never-recorded outbreak of 'Servomania', inspiring an avalanche of tie-in merchandise that was all completely obliterated and forcibly wiped from people's memories shortly afterwards. That said, some viewers most likely had their minds on other things...


They Like Big Boobs And They Cannot Lie


In the previous instalments, we've had plenty to say on the black and white era cameramen's pervy fixation with focusing in on female cast members with sizeable backsides. Presumably this was as much as the hot and bothered so-and-so's felt that they could reasonably get away with at the time, but this would all dramatically change with the arrival of Deborah Watling as Victoria. She was, lest we forget, the first assistant that the production team explicitly stated was there to get 'The Dads' watching, and brought with her a frankly unignorable frontage. Although plunging necklines were still some way away from acceptability, the costume designers nonetheless went out of their way to stick her in tight dresses and sweaters; the effect that this had on 'The Dads' doesn't bear thinking about. There's even a couple of lines that are delivered in a manner that suggest the rest of the cast are having a bit of knocker-heavy innuendo amusement with the entirely innocent script, not to mention someone more or less telling her that her tits are 'getting in the way' in The Tomb Of The Cybermen. Meanwhile, the fact that Victoria could only have been supposed to be fifteen at most is probably best sidestepped for now. Anyway, suffice it to say that the cameramen were seemingly in competition with each other to pan and tilt for the best angle on the thankfully very much overage Ms. Watling, although certain shots do suggest that old habits really did die hard...



Eagerly Pursuing All The Latest Fads And Trends, 'Cause He's A Dedicated Follower Of Fashion


Also paying close attention to certain aspects of Victoria's wardrobe, if the first episode of The Ice Warriors is anything to go by, was her travelling companion Jamie McCrimmon. In a textbook 'nice intention, shame about the execution' move for Doctor Who at the time, not to mention somewhat impractically for a research station in the middle of an icy tundra, Miss Garrett and her fellow climate-saving clever-clogs female technicians are given to walking around Brittanicus Base in Mary Quant-style two-tone minidresses of such alarming brevity that they would have finished higher than their underwear had they actually been wearing any, which logic dictates they can't have. Needless to say, Jamie has observed this and is not entirely upset about it. Presumably speaking for 'The Dads' everywhere, he adopts a louche, relaxed pose on a sort of bendy 'futuristic' couch thing and asks Victoria if she had noticed what 'those lassies' were wearing. Apparently having temporarily forgotten her own predeliction for dramatically short skirts, Victoria replies that yes she had, and she thinks they should have more self-respect, and shame on Jamie for taking such an active interest in the subject. Unfazed by this, Jamie breezily asks if Victoria sees herself wearing anything similar, which invites an even more stern rebuke and an announcement that she will now change the subject. Which is promptly done for her in an appalling display of Ice Warriorsplaining when Varga chooses that exact moment to lumber out from behind a curtain. There's probably an interesting article to be written looking at how despite its cake-and-eat-it general failure to 'do' feminism from a modern perspective, this and other examples from sixties Doctor Who were actually quite striking and daring in context and it's a shame they've since been overshadowed by later much worse behaviour and what have you, but the real pressing question is who decided Jamie should be offering his views on fashion and design and indeed why. Was his week-in-week-out uniform of shapeless jumper and kilt masking a secret obsession with the tripped-out stylings of I Was Lord Kitchener's Valet and Granny Takes A Trip? Was he frequently invited onto A Whole Scene Going to talk about shift dresses and the plastic raincoat revolution? Did he indeed flit from shop to shop just like a butterfly? Sadly, we may never know, though there are some vagaries of mid-sixties fashion we can be somewhat more certain of...


The Abominable Snowmen Was The Most 'Psychedelic' Doctor Who Story


Every so often, you'll get a BBC4 documentary about 'the sixties' diverting into talk of when Doctor Who'went' psychedelic. This, it is generally agreed, was when all those storybook characters came to life and everyone wandered around in a white void in The Mind Robber. Or, if raining, when all those toys came to life and everyone (well, The Toymaker and an invisible Doctor) wandered around in a white void in The Celestial Toymaker. Or, at an absolute push, when you had those giant butterfly men like everyone sees when they've been smoking acid in The Web Planet. Yet while all of those stories, and indeed numerous others that never get mentioned, certainly chime with the visual and thematic motifs of UK Psychedelia, were they actually that 'psychedelic'? Or just the rewritten-at-the-last-minute work of career-minded scriptwriters who were careful only to ever reach for the bottle marked The Ones That Mother Gives You? If you've learned your psychedelia from Dave Clark Five records, then yes, it's probably true that you do just need a couple of mindbending colours and Victoriana references and away you go. The real pioneers and practioners of the movement, though, were on more of a cerebral stroke spiritual quest, whether it was Traffic et al 'getting it together in the country' while cut off from the media with only scary folk records about how King Arthur Was Away-kyeddddddd for company, 'Dinners' and pals enthusiastically darting between avant-garde art installations and electronic music 'happenings', and Syd Barrett and company dabbling with Eastern philosophies until they at least understood enough of it to cobble together a half decent set of lyrics. The Abominable Snowmen might not look much like the cover of The Psychedelic Sounds Of The 13th Floor Elevators, but it's set in a remote part of Tibet (and filmed, incidentally, on pastoral Welsh hillsides) dominated by devotional Buddhist monks with a big stone temple who dole out small samples of wisdom and enlightenment when the script permits. Despite being set in the 1930s there's still a dash of Victorian-Edwardian pre-technology atmosphere due to the presence of beardy academic Professor Travers, and the whole story is shot through with a transcendental ambience that suggests that all movement really had been accomplished in six stages, and the seventh had indeed brought return. If you want to overplay the analogy a bit, you could also say that they might well have had Robot Yeti at one of those McCartney-patronised exhibitions. No? Alright, please yourselves then. Mind you, we've only got one episode and a handful of clips to base this on. But we do at least know what the others sounded and indeed looked like...


What Happened To All The Other Telesnaps?


If you've ever read anything about missing sixties Doctor Who, you'll no doubt have seen dozens upon dozens of funny blurry little television-shaped images of the long-wiped onscreen action. These are 'Telesnaps', taken by a photographer named John Cura, who specialised in providing commissioned images for actors and production staff alike, who would otherwise have had no record of their television work in the pre-video age. There are surviving Telesnaps for the vast majority of lost Doctor Who episodes, and a very faint half-rubbed-out pencilled-in question mark over whether there might be some out there for some of the other ones too. But it wasn't just Doctor Who that he Telesnapped. This was a popular and profitable business - enough for him to be profiled in a magazine article headed by some bikinied lovelies beneath the headline 'This Is How John Cura Does It' - and he spent all day every day photographing anything and everything that appeared on all three television channels. You might occasionally chance upon one from another programme like Z Cars, or a variety show, or some thing with Carole Ann Ford in, but why aren't we all struggling to escape from beneath a daily avalanche of Telesnaps? Well, rumour has it that the Cura family disposed of their boxes and boxes and boxes of negatives, contact sheets and enlargements after offering them to the BBC, only to be informed by a scoffing pen-pusher that they were 'moving forwards, not backwards'. That was only one set of copies, though; he'd taken the Telesnaps for a reason, and that reason was that someone had asked and paid for copies. There must be billions upon billions of them out there, in attics the length and breadth of the UK, and featuring the only known visual record of long-lost and unlikely to be recovered episodes of The Wednesday Play, and United!, and Adam Adamant Lives!, and Top Of The Pops, and Theatre 625, and Where Was Spring?, and Sara And Hoppity, and Quick Before They Catch Us, and Sugarball The Little Jungle Boy, and Hancock's Half Hour, and R.3, and Vendetta, and Armchair Theatre, and The Tennis Elbow Foot Game, and that thing with that Barry Bucknell, and everything I wrote about in Not On Your Telly, and the whole bloody lot of them. Of course, there might even be a shed somewhere with actual film prints of all of the above and more in. You never know. I mean it's not like anything similar has turned up from anywhere recently.


The Enemy Of The World's Enemy Is Not My Friend


Poor old The Enemy Of The World. Marooned without a monster in the middle of 'Monster Season', and represented by a lone dialogue-and-long-pause-heavy episode, it was the one that everyone always forgot about. All that anyone really knew about it was that Patrick Troughton played a 'dual role' as 'the villainous Salamander', and that there were some swear words in the tie-in novel. Or at least that's what we used to think. Then the rest of the story was found in Nigeria, alongside most of the rest of The Web Of Fear and nothing else at all whatsoever no honestly guv I would never feature such a puppet and was on holiday when it wasn't made, and we finally got to enjoy The Enemy Of The World in full and in its proper context for the first time since 1967/68. And 'enjoy' was the operative word; director (and later series producer) Barry Letts had always gone to great lengths to stress that the surviving third episode was the 'filler' one and the rest of it was far more tense and exciting stuff, and he was absolutely right. With its bleak location work, hi-tech Cold War thriller overtones and a towering performance from Patrick Troughton, The Enemy Of The World vaulted from obscurity into everyone's top ten favourite stories literally - thanks to the midnight release on iTunes - overnight. Well, almost everyone's. Time was when we only had to contend with Starburst's 'Mr Angry' Paul Mount indulging in 'look at me, everyone look me, I thought that clearly extremely good thing that you have to at least appreciate even if you didn't actually like was a big old load of rubbish!!'-type shenanigans. Now, however, the double-edged sword of the Internet Age has exposed us to an endless procession of the fuckers, all clamouring to be the first to naysay the consensus and boost up their forum 'star rating', with the sheer shamelessness of the sort of individual who might well write eighty seven thousand million words on why Time And The Rani is good, not bad like you thought. It was slow? You turned off after three minutes? It lacked the classic production values of the classic gothic Holmesian deux ex machina back-to-basics base-under-siege classics like The Pyramids Of Mars, The Deadly Assassin, The Brain Of Morbius and Time-Flight? Well, that was worth putting out there. Lizanne Henderson is probably quaking in her cultural theorist boots as we speak. Seriously, nobody's asking you to fall into line and call it your favourite story ever of all time through gritted teeth, but can't you put a bit more effort into the reasons why it isn't? And maybe, just maybe, emphasise some of the positives as well? Honestly, lord help us when the story that there's no surviving episodes from at all finally turns up...


Why Did Victoria Stay In 1968?


By now, we should be well used to Doctor Who assistants being written out in a cursory, convenient and logic-defying fashion. There's Susan and Vicki electing to marry men from the wrong end of history that they've only just met, Katarina catapulting herself off into the icy wastes of space, and Dodo liking the Pie Pie so much that she decides to stay in Shrewsbury. Yet there's something about Victoria's departure at the end of Fury From The Deep that makes it that bit more puzzling than all the others. Despite having previously been perfectly happy whizzing about in time and space with Jamie and The Doctor, she suddenly decides with next to no prior indication to stay behind in contemporary North Sea Oil Rig with drill-manning married couple Frank and Maggie Harris, who despite rumours to the contrary did not go on to present Ragtime. Quite how the prim and proper 1860s teenager coped with free love, Enoch Powell and The Waltham Green East Wapping Carpet Cleaning Rodent And Boggit Extermination Association is anybody's guess. As indeed is exactly why she wanted to. Or maybe I'm just still fuming that they rejected my proposal for a New Series Adventures novel where The Doctor and Donna went to the 1969 Isle Of Wight Festival and bumped into Victoria and were helped to defeat the story's antagonist by Viv Stanshall and Keith Moon. And the Torchwood one where there was an Inspiral Carpets t-shirt in a Victorian explorer's private collection of artefacts. Who knows.


What Did The Other Things In The Tardis Toolkit Actually Do??


Fury From The Deep may indeed mark Victoria's final appearance, but it also sees the debut of a somewhat more enduring Doctor Who mainstay - The Sonic Screwdriver. Although it's hard to say for certain on the basis of just an audio recording and some unclear Telesnaps, it appears that The Doctor actually produces this from some early variant on the infrequently glimpsed Tardis toolbox. While it was the Sonic Screwdriver that would last the distance, we did later get occasional glimpses of the other impractical-looking devices stored alongside it, though quite what purpose or technical application any of them might concievably have had is something of a mystery. According to that bible of all things bewildering yet accurately measured for no good reason The Doctor Who Technical Manual, these included a Universal Detector, a Neutron Ram, a Stalos Gyro, a Magnetic Clamp, a Moog Drone Clamp, a Master Drone Clamp, an Influx Booster Stabiliser, a Pen Torch, and that all-important multi-purpose Laser. While it would be difficult to refute the usefulness of the latter two, quite what everything else did was never made entirely clear. The Neutron Ram was used to locate Omega in Arc Of Infinity and made a fleeting cameo appearance in the McGann Movie, the Magnetic and Moog Drone Clamps were used in conjunction with the Stalos Gyro to do some, erm, clamping - and presumably gyroing - in Earthshock, and apart from that, well, they just sort of sat there. You could probably mount a decent argument that this was an enormous missed opportunity, and that the toolbox was basically a ready-made Thomas Salter Toys playset that never was, but they'd have had to decide what the other bits and pieces actually did first. Small wonder, then, that one of the first things Russell T. Davies did was to replace them all with a big Whac-A-Mole mallet. Mind you, we're really only guessing as to whether even an actual toolbox was seen in Fury From The Deep. Some things from the 'Monster Season' we can be far more certain about...


"++YOU WILL BE THE FIRST " - "++AND YOU WILL BE THE NEXT"


Of all of the 'Monster Season' escapades, The Tomb Of The Cybermen's reputation has taken the biggest hammering. Back when nobody could actually see or hear it, it looked and sounded like the most amazing story - if not the most amazing bit of television - ever, an assumption lent extra weight by the controversy caused by the Half-Cyberman On Cyberman fight scene towards the end of the last episode. Once a copy turned up, of course, it turned out to have been just another Doctor Who story after all, with many key moments including that viewer-enraging punch-up not quite living up to the awe-inspiring descriptions. Although we'd better not mention the 'memories' of a certain fan who prominently 'recalled' scenes that did not appear in the actual episodes at all, and then turned out not to have been born until 1970. It's important to bear in mind, though, that it's nonetheless just another very very good Doctor Who story, and the fact that it didn't quite match up to cliche-driven over-adulation in absentia is hardly the fault of Morris Barry and company struggling to get an ambitious adventure onto battered videotape in a cramped studio back in 1967. With one glaring exception. When The Cyber Controller is outlining his plan to cyberneticise the cornered experts and send them back to Earth, he points at Klieg and informs him that "YOU-WILL-BE-THE-FIRST". Which is all very well and good except that, with all the purpose and subtlety of that Santana Block Crew member interjecting "you better watch out!", one of his subordinates then points at Professor Parry and states "AND-YOU-WILL-BE-THE-NEXT". There's then an extended pause - presumably where two of the others were supposed to go "AND-YOU-WILL-BE-THE-ONE-AFTER-THAT" and "WE'LL-DO-YOU-A-WEEK-ON-THURSDAY" but forgot - and then, and only then, do the assembled company remember that they're supposed to be struggling with each other. It's difficult to mount a spirited defence of the story's relentless pace and eerie atmosphere when you've got something that jarring and stalling slap bang in the middle of it. Still, there were certain other characters in Series Five that were both the first and the next in a somewhat more positive context. Yes it will make sense. Honest.


"...So I Became A Scientist"


The Web Of Fear featured the return of both The Yeti, now wandering around the Underground with Malibu Stacy's new hat or something, and Professor Travers, now in the throes of Swinging London but more concerned with the fact that one of his Yeti Activation Spheres has simply rolled out of his laboratory of its own accord. It also boasted the debut appearances of both a prototype U.N.I.T. and The Brigadier, wearing the tape inlay card from ZX Spectrum game Chequered Flag as a hat for some reason. Meanwhile, poor old Anne Travers gets overlooked almost completely. While not the first strong female character by any stretch of the imagination, she's certainly the first to enjoy this level of prominence while remaining a grounded, naturalistic, rational and intelligent one without wandering into any silly damsel in distress antics, and without any need for excuses about coming from another planet or the future. Without any fanfare or hamfisted hoo-hah about skirt length, 'Women's Lib' had arrived in Doctor Who, as those two soldiers who asked her "what's a nice girl like you doing in a job like this?" found out to their embarrassment ("Well, when I was a little girl I thought I'd like to be a scientist... so I became a scientist"). It's a shame that Tina Packer's stage commitments prevented Anne from being kept on as U.N.I.T.'s regular scientific consultant, as she no doubt would have been, but she paved the way for so many other characters that followed in her wake, and that's something to be pleased about. Though it would be some time before the 'Monster Season'-era cameramen realised this...


Anyway, join us again next time for Grace Slick singing Ziwzih Ziwzih OO-OO-OO, The Ice Warriors inventing Noddy Holder, and the thorny question of just how many centuries those film trims from The Space Pirates actually last for...

Sometimes, despite what you might have read, it's been surprisingly difficult to find certain once-ubiquitous examples of retro iconography on the Internet. Until recently, you'd have searched in vain for any footage of Crow And Alice from You And Me, or any photographs of Number One magazine gossip columnist Lola Lush, or a recording of the original theme song from The Amazing Adventures Of Morph. Of course, all of the above have since put in an appearance, and you can find the full story behind that disappearing-from-history Morph song in Top Of The Box. I would also like to take this opportunity to strenuously deny any and all rumours that I was especially pleased to see Lola Lush again.

Sorry, where was I? Oh right, yes. Part of the reason why all of the above and more are now 'out there' was that one of my earlier attempts at a blog was specifically dedicated to smoking out copies of things that were conspicuous by their online absence. This isn't necessarily mentioned out of self-congratulation, by the way, as one of the first things that I managed to turn up was a Rolf Harris single. Something that I'm slightly more pleased to have found in retrospect, though, was the original Gardeners' World theme.

Some of you are no doubt about to point out to me that they're still using that sappy tweedle-eedle acoustic guitar thing, so why would anyone have needed to look that hard for it in the first place? Well, they only started using that one in the late eighties. Prior to that, Gardeners' World was heralded by a ludicrously over-the top cascade of sweeping strings that suggested anything but tranquil to-camera pieces on how to check your vegetable patch for wireworm. What's more, it was instantly familiar to an audience that went way beyond that of Gardeners' World itself. Not that they necessarily have matters under that much control these days, but BBC2 used to have a huge problem with live coverage overrunning, particularly when it came to snooker. Their solution was usually to simply shunt the schedule back by the requisite number of minutes, meaning that when you tuned in for Alexei Sayle's Stuff or Cool It! or whatever, you would have to sit through what seemed like several centuries of Bob Flowerdew and Gay Search inspecting herbaceous borders before what you actually wanted to see came on. Needless to say, the end theme of Gardeners' World wasn't exactly in the top ten of anyone who'd had to set their video for Comrade Dad.

Still, despite all that it was actually a rather exciting piece of music, calling to mind a bustling garden fete rather than newspaper 'Review' section-friendly allotment-tilling, and it was rather surprising to find that it wasn't online in any form. So I asked, and within minutes of the post going up, Chris Hughes of TV Cream had got in touch to say that he had a recording of it. Then someone else got in touch to say they had a slightly different version. And then someone got in touch to say they had a radically different version. Yes, the Gardeners' World theme - apparently more correctly and appropriately known as Green Fingers - had gone through a germination and flowering process all of its own. And here is a handy back-of-seed-packet style guide to cultivating your very own Gardeners' World theme music.



Apparently, when Gardener's World first appeared in the BBC2 schedules in 1968, it was introduced by a long-forgotten solo clarinet piece; which, if solo clarinet pieces for TV shows from around that time are anything to go by, can probably stay long-forgotten. A couple of years later, in came Green Fingers, though it was initially essayed as an almost unrecognisable reed-dominated quasi-baroque waltz with jazzy touches. Sounding like it would be much more at home introducing an early Radio 4 sitcom, you'd have to listen closely to notice that it even was the same tune, and while it may have been nice and flowery it was hardly going to attract the attention of the casual viewer. Nor indeed the frustration of the viewer who was having to wait for Oh In Colour. Clearly a rethink was in order.



In the early seventies, Green Fingers found itself on the recieving end of a fairly radical landscaping. Uprooted into 4/4, it was re-interpreted by a string section with 'pop' backing who attacked it at a ferocious pace with scant regard for the safety of the viewing public, calling to mind Mr Bilton from Chigley careering around the grounds of Winkstead Hall in a turbo-charged motorised lawnmower. Yet while the alarming musical overemphasis is already in evidence, it's still just not quite haphazard enough, and what's more it concludes with a frankly unnecessary bit of anti-climactic piano improvisation with way too many notes in. You can't have a build-up like that and not resolve it properly, and so by the middle of the decade...


The definitive reading of Green Fingers takes everything up a key with a small but vital increase in tempo, and what's more is played with such formidable force that you can't help but wonder if the closing bit of over-elaborate extemporisation came about because the violinist simply couldn't stop. And if that's not the sound of a trip to the local garden centre to stock up on seedlings, ornaments and ice lollies that they never seemed to sell anywhere else, then frankly nobody knows what is. Meanwhile, if you want to point out that there was also this acoustic Gardeners' World theme that hasn't been mentioned her for some reason, I will personally insert seven minutes of it into the start of every episode of Stewart Lee's Comedy Vehicle for you.

Screamadelica by Primal Scream is twenty five years old - and still sounding as fresh today as it did back in 1991 - and to mark the occasion, I've done an interview with Creation Records about the album and its influence and legacy. Along the way we cover such diverse topics as Mark Goodier, swapping C60s of Big Star in school, and why Britpop retrospectives never quite seem to get the story straight. You can read it here, and there's also a Spotify playlist of some of my favourite tracks from 1991 that you can listen to while reading. This may include Cathy Dennis.

You can find out how to get Higher Than The Sun, my book about Screamadelica, Foxbase Alpha, Bandwagonesque and Loveless - currently with free postage - here. Or if you'd prefer to read an extract from it before splashing out, you can find that in my free eBook Tim Worthington's Bookshelfhere. Or if you'd prefer to just read about my favourite Creation/Heavenly Records rarities, then you can find that here. You really do want to get the book though. Because that's what you're gonna do. You're gonna have a good time. You're gonna have a party. Of, erm, reading a book.

In 1986, I won a competition in Smash Hits. Though I'm not really quite sure of how and why I did.

Rather than the can of Citrus Spring autographed by Phil Cool that you might well be expecting, the prize in question was a copy of Streetsounds 17. As the name suggests, this was the the seventeenth instalment in the Streetsounds label's lengthy series of compilations of hot new electro, hip-hop and breakbeat tracks. Despite having more than a passing interest in the genre, and being the proud owner of K-Tel's surprisingly strong if slightly dubiously promoted Rap It Up collection, I don't recall ever being particularly desperate to get hold of this or indeed any other edition of Streetsounds. Scanning the lists of winners of other competitions in the same issue, I suspect that I may actually have been after the 12" of Rockin' With Rita by Vindaloo Summer Special, and had just entered the Streetsounds 17 one on a whim due to having a spare stamp.

In order to win a copy, you were challenged to explain, in an essay lasting no longer than five words, why Prince was so short. "The effects of Purple Rain" was my aaaaahhh-tastic pseudo-satirical response, which clearly amused Sylvia Patterson and company sufficiently for them to send me one of the fifty copies on offer. It arrived before the issue with the list of winners came out, in fact, and once it did hit the 'newsstands' I became something of a minor celebrity in school for a week or so. We had to make our own 'trending' in those days.

Anyway, I was reminded of this recently while I was scouring 1986 issues of Smash Hits as research for an article about Now - The Summer Album; which none of you actually read, clearly on account of the MSM bias against me. Sadly, I don't actually have the issue itself any more - a shame as it was the one with the brilliant feature on where the money that you spent on records actually went - but thanks to the fantastic Like Punk Never Happened, here's that list of winners in full. It's particularly interesting to see that the other winners included one 'Scott Walker'. There was such a prominent electro influence on Tilt after all.


However, while that issue of Smash Hits may have long since disappeared into the great magazine-based Bermuda Triangle of the rest of your family denying all knowledge of what might have happened to it, I do still have Streetsounds 17 itself. Not that I really remember very much about it - like all of the Streetsounds label's billions of releases, it was aimed primarily at hip DJs and people playing at being hip DJs, and intended as a way of getting hold of hot new tracks cheaply and easily rather than an actual coherent listening experience. So there's really not much of an excuse for not giving it another spin, is there?

Streetsounds 17 has an indistinct photo of an anonymous street funkateer in a long mac on the cover, and this sense of anonymity also extends to its contents. Many of the featured acts are so low-profile and little-remembered that it's virtually impossible to find an actual photo of them, and only three of the featured tracks resemble even anything approaching a hit single. Janet Jackson's oft-overlooked second hit Nasty might seem a surprising inclusion for such a radically urban and cutting edge series, but it was also a good deal harsher sounding than her usual fare; which is probably the reason why it's oft-overlooked, in fact. This is even more true of the 12" Extended Version included here, which strips it down to some suitably nasty-sounding beats that feel a lot closer to mid-eighties hardcore rap than mid-eighties Motown slickness.

Plenty of slickness can nonetheless be found on Step By Step by T.C. Curtis, the Jheri Curl-sporting synth-funk polymath who somehow failed to break through to mainstream success, despite appearing at the end of side two of every below-par Now! That's What I Call Music rip-off in existence. Step By Step may be presented here in an exclusive 'Streetsounds Remix', but it's still true to say that if you did ever catch one of those end-of-side-two tracks, then you'll have a fair idea of what this likeable but undistinguished mid-paced hoarse-voiced workout sounds like. It's worth noting that a now somewhat unfortunate yodel starts to creep in towards the end, though.


If we're being honest about it, though, most of you will probably have no idea of who T.C. Curtis even was, and if we're positing him as the third most famous artist featured on Streetsounds 17 (we'll get to the second later) then you've got some sense of just how obscure the others actually are. Sharp-suited Oran 'Juice' Jones-alike Michael Jonzun, who throws a hefty helping of vogueish Nu Shooz-esque 'barking dog' voice samples into Can't Fool Us, and Give Me Up non-hitmaker Beau Williams, whose primary gimmick was to fool you into thinking he was singing about a girl when he was actually singing about God, do at least have something approaching a traceable career path. As do Skipworth And Turner, the duo behind the energetic 'Streetsounds Exclusive Edit' of Children's ITV Game Show-friendly-synth-festooned Can't Give Her Up, whose main contribution to musical history was giving Kenny Thomas another hit nobody asked for by writing Thinking About Your Love. Actually, apparently they're different songs, but I couldn't be bothered checking and anyway, there's no point allowing the opportunity for a good Kenny Thomas gag to go by.

Above and beyond that, though, we're adrift in a fathomless factual void of sequinned jackets and Yamaha DX7s. Colors, the unimaginatively-named outfit responsible for the Mario Kart backing music-like Pay Me Back My Love, may possibly have featured veteran session singer Vaneese Thomas but nobody seems to be quite sure about that. Given that it opens with the same sort of over-extemporising saxaphone as any given mid-eighties US TV show, and continues in a suitably mediocre sub-Al Jarreau style, you'd be forgiven for assuming that Cargo, whose Love You So (Without You) is yet another 'Streetsounds Exclusive Mix' ('featuring Dave Collins'), were as American as they came. Yet, bafflingly, the credits seem to indicate they were not just UK-based but actually led by veteran beardy jazzers Mike Carr and Dick Morrissey. Meanwhile, Sleeque have fallen so far off the factual radar that they might as well not have even existed, which is a shame as their sturdy proto-Acid Jazz stomper One For The Money, with its amusing interpolation of the lyrics from Blue Suede Shoes, is the best track on here by some considerable distance.

Former disco ensemble who'd moved with the times Zapp, whose Computer Love (Extended Version) was presumably not a tribute to Zzap!64, sit uneasily somewhere between the two as they seem to have been around for several thousand years without anyone actually noticing them. On the evidence of this 'dreamy' soundscape that clocks in at nearly ten minutes without offering a single robot voice, this is hardly surprising. It's doubtful that it would even have appealed to nominally music-averse sci-fi fans because 'space'.


Right at the end, however, comes the 'Special Extended Remix' of Set Me Free by Birmingham's own Jaki Graham. Seemingly hovering around the charts for the entirety of 1986, even the regular version of Set Me Free was already a touch overlong and repetitive, so making it even longer still seems like an act of wilful obnoxiousness verging on madness. That's how they did 'remixes' back then, though, and frankly it's exactly what we want here. Turning a likeable if lightweight spot of full-throated jazz-funk into something approaching art terrorism exemplifies both everything that was wrong and everything that was right about mid-eighties pop music at the same time, and stands out way more than any of the seemingly endless procession of seemingly endless pleasant enough in-one-ear-and-out-of-the-other exhortations for swanky types in Midnight Starr-inspired clobber to get on down on the dancefloor that you'll find elsewhere on the album.

The regular version of Set Me Free did of course appear on Now! That's What I Call Music 7, which in addition to being a hugely listenable vivid and vibrant snapshot of the diversity of the mid-eighties pop charts, is also the very best Now! album bar none. Yes it is. Stop arguing. Yet for all their wilful angularness, we should be glad that the likes of Streetsounds and the Indie Top 20 series (which you can find Dave Bryant's excellent album-by-album review of here) existed, as they're probably the only way of really accurately measuring what went on beyond the Top Forty short of inventing a time machine and posing as Eugene Wilde. A pose that no doubt involved reclining forward into the camera lens with a satin jacket and a huge grin.

So, that's how I ended up with Streetsounds 17 instead of Rockin' With Rita. But can you guess which one of them I later ended up mentioning in a book?

Over The Moon was one of several studio-bound videotaped shows with human presenters that the BBC introduced into their schedules for younger viewers in the mid-to-late seventies. Like Playboard, Ragtime, Ring-A-Ding!, How Do You Do! and probably also one or two others that even I can't recall off the top of my head, it's not really anywhere near as well remembered as it logically should be.

Other than the possibility that some of the target audience resented anything that wasn't puppet-led, there's not really a readily obvious explanation for this. And that doesn't really work anyway as the Playboard presenter was never actually seen onscreen. Still, as you might have noticed, I tend to use Over The Moon as an example of TV That Time Forgot rather a lot; an example that is slightly undermined by the fact that a lot of people actually do remember something about it, even if they have no idea which programme it came from.


Introduced by an animated question mark/coathanger pin man rebounding off the side of various aspects of nature and industry to a squelchy synth backing, Over The Moon was to all intents and purposes a science show for the under fives. Introduced by the no-nonsense Sam Dale, who conducted very basic sub-Johnny Ball experiments in an equally basic studio set, the show also featured Play School-style filmed inserts illustrating the chosen scientific concept of the week, and a similarly illustrative quirky song set to animation by Pigeon Street designer in waiting Alan Rogers.

What was unusual in Over The Moon's case was that these songs were written and performed by actual singer-songwriters, albeit in most cases with previous links to BBC Children's programmes. As you can imagine, this meant that the songs were usually of a very high standard and indeed were remarkably memorable for such a widely-forgotten show. So much so, in fact, that it's likely that most people who remember the songs have little or no idea of what Over The Moon even was. Notable examples include Kim Goody's lament for Rat Van Winkle, who escaped from the 'Rat Race' to a land where a minute lasted a year, Jasper Carrott's salute to intrepid if unsuccessful wildlife photographer Angus McBluff, and a certain Derek Griffiths number concerning one Obadiah Blank.

This was a chirpy call-and-reseponse number about how we have our lucky stars to thank for Obadiah Blank, an indefatigable inventor whose achievements included devising the flying spoon and growing poppies on the moon; and ultimately an 'inventing machine', which could go on inventing for him while he sat back and, presumably, counted his own lucky stars. And it's very clearly the most well remembered detail about Over The Moon; any time that I mention the programme anywhere, you can guarantee that someone will ask if anyone else remembers the song, and more or less every reference to 'Obadiah Blank' on the Internet - apart from an article written by me - is someone asking what programme it came from and where they can get hold of it. It seems that a lot of people would like to see it again, in fact. But there's a slight problem with that.


Wheels And Wires, the edition of Over The Moon featuring the Obadiah Blank song, was first shown by BBC1 on 20th December 1978, and last seen 23rd June 1982. Needless to say, it was repeated countless times in the interim. Unfortunately the master tape was lost in the early nineties - if you want to know how and why this happened, then you can read more about that in this post here - and while a filmed insert from the show apparently does still exist, it's not clear as to whether this is Obadiah Blank or the live action sciencey bit. Or both, in fact, but anyway. So many people recall the song so vividly that somebody must have kept a copy of it, even if it's just a crumbly audio recording made by holding a built-in tape recorder microphone up to the television speaker.

So if you do have a recording of the Obadiah Blank song - or anything of Over The Moon in fact, as there's a few of them missing - please let me know. If we can find lost episodes of How Do You Do!, we can find this...