This look at comedy on BBC Radio 3 and its predecessor the Third Programme was originally written as the introduction for an intended follow-up to Fun At One concentrating on Radio 3 comedy programmes. Yes there were some. More than you'd expect, in fact. For various reasons this was never finished and some bits of it ended up being absorbed into other projects, but in recognition of the Third Programme's seventieth anniversary, here it is...


On 10th June 1969, the jazz-rock outfit Soft Machine were in the BBC’s Maida Vale studios to record a session for Top Gear, the popular ‘progressive’ show on BBC Radio 1 presented by John Peel, which had been enthusiastically supporting the band since the station’s launch in 1967. Broadcast on 15th June, the session showcased several lengthy numbers intended for their forthcoming album Third, including one entitled Moon In June. Drummer and vocalist Robert Wyatt had already tried out several potential lyrics for this number but had rejected them all as unsatisfactory, and found himself at the session with literally no words to sing. Possibly inspired by the more irreverent and humourous atmosphere encouraged by Peel’s incoming producer John Walters – himself later a regular broadcaster for Radio 3 – Wyatt improvised amusing lyrics about the experience of recording sessions at the BBC, mixing tongue-in-cheek references to the tea machine and other facilities at Maida Vale with recollections of how, on their first appearance on the station, they had been forced to ensure all of their numbers clocked in at under three minutes. Now, however, as Wyatt memorably put it, they were "free to play for as long or as loud as a jazz group or an orchestra on Radio 3".

Following an extract being played on Radio 4’s cross-station highlights show Pick Of The Week, which caused much amusement within Radio 3’s corridors, the upshot of this extraordinary performance – one of the first recordings for Peel’s show ever to be commercially released – was that on 13th August 1970, Soft Machine were invited to take part in Radio 3’s coverage of the BBC Proms, sharing the bill with the unlikely combination of The BBC Symphony Orchestra and electronic music pioneer Tim Souster, treating the station’s eclectically-minded audience to numbers with such obtuse titles as Esther’s Nose Job and Out-Bloody-Rageous.

As humourous as Wyatt’s lyrics may have been, the session recording of Moon In June was very much a serious musical performance, yet the band’s appearance on Radio 3 the following year clearly demonstrates that even in those early days, despite popular perception, the station had both a sense of humour and a willingness to showcase interesting developments in the arts outside of the classical sector. This was, in fact, nothing new – launched on 30th September 1967, Radio 3 was intended as a successor to the existing Third Programme, a notably more speech-orientated BBC radio station devoted to the arts, science and intellectual pursuits, although for a variety of technical and administrative reasons the Third Programme would continue to exist as a standalone service, broadcasting mainly in the evenings, up until finally being subsumed into the more music dominated Radio 3 in April 1970. Despite its lofty reputation, the Third Programme did possess a sense of humour, albeit possibly not one that radio listeners more used to the exploits of Jimmy Clitheroe or Ted Ray might have recognised as such. Indeed, its first night of programming on 29th September 1946 had seen actress Joyce Grenfell deliver one of her celebrated spoof documentaries, How To Listen ("including How Not To, How You Ought To and How You Won’t"), which poked fun at the reverence with which audiences were supposed to treat ‘serious’ radio.


As early as 1949, there was an attempt at establishing a regular comedy show with Third Division, a sketch show described as ‘Some Vulgar Fractions’ and featuring the likes of Benny Hill, Peter Sellers, Michael Bentine, Patricia Hayes and Harry Secombe, with sketch material by Frank Muir and Denis Norden, which poked fun at the station’s cultural and academic obsessions in a manner that did not always please BBC executives. The station’s tenth anniversary in 1957 was marked with In Third Gear: A Homage To Their Betters, a satirical one-off in which Peter Ustinov and Peter Jones delivered a mock ‘Behind The Scenes’ feature on the Third Programme, which pulled even fewer punches, and a series of spoof diary readings by 'Mrs Cramp' (Patience Collier), written by Angus Wilson and Christopher Sykes as a literary send-up of The Light Programme’s Mrs Dale’s Diary, a reference point which was presumably lost on most of the Third Programme’s audience. Tom Stoppard produced many of his early comic plays for the station, notably If You’re Glad I’ll Be Frank (1966), featuring Timothy West as a man who recognises the speaking clock (Patsy Rowlands) as the voice of his wife, and the somewhat darker Albert’s Bridge (1967), while the mercurial talent Gerard Hoffnung made a number of appearances on the station both as a musician and a humourist. Most famously, between 1953 and 1959, Henry Reed penned a total of seven plays about ‘Hilda Tablet’, a wild and frequently surreal parody of modern classical composers, starring Mary O’Farrell as inventor of ‘musique concrete reinforcee’ Hilda, and Hugh Burden as the put-upon narrator.

More peculiar still was a 1963 hoax perpetrated by Hans Keller, the Third Programme’s resident music critic, whose fearsome intellect and waspish observations masked a genuine enthusiasm for elements of ‘low’ culture, notably his passionate love of Tottenham Hotspur, and a mischievous sense of humour coupled with a love of annoying the pompous and self-important . Having concocted a random and meaningless cacophony of percussion noises, Keller worked up a fictitious life story for the equally fictitious composer Piotr Zak, presenting it as a factual documentary as part of one of the station’s ‘Invitation Concerts’ on 5th June 1961. Despite some deliberately unrealistic elements in the story, many were taken in, some critics penning dismissive reviews of his work and others feigning a detailed knowledge of his career. Keller’s savage wit would later provide a fitting coda to the saga of the Third Programme, when he described the incoming Radio 3 with tongue very much in cheek as a ‘daytime music station’.

This sort of highbrow humour would even carry through into much of Radio 3’s regular output. For many years, the regular Jazz Record Requests slot inherited from the Third Programme was presented by Humphrey Lyttleton, a bandleader with a droll wit and chairman of the Radio 4 panel show I’m Sorry I Haven’t A Clue for over thirty years. The frequently absurdist Pied Piper (1971-76), a children’s show aimed at raising awareness of music, was presented by David Munrow, a firebrand of an early music enthusiast whose refusal to kowtow to ideas of classicism once saw him record a collection of Beatles covers on archaic instruments. Many at least nominally comic plays have been broadcast on the station, while the sporadic humorous content of review shows like The Verb, Late Junction, The Wire, Night Waves and In Tune would defy cataloguing. For a time the station was also home to the famously dry-witted Andy Kershaw, whose Radio 1 show was effectively airlifted onto Radio 3 when he was dropped from their schedules.

Although they have been few and far between, Radio 3 has even made the occasional attempt at establishing its own dedicated comedy show. While the station’s relatively small listenership has largely prevented any of them becoming well known – and even in some cases from becoming known to the performers’ not inconsiderable fanbases – these have been a surprisingly varied set of projects from surprisingly prominent comics and writers, clearly relishing the opportunity to do something slightly more personal and experimental than they would be able to on practically any other radio or television station. This is the story of that handful of quite remarkable shows, and – almost like a statement of intent – it begins with perhaps the least likely comedian ever to appear on Radio 3.


Fun At One, the story of comedy at BBC Radio 1, is available from here. You can also find more previously unseen material from A Third Opinion in Tim Worthington's Bookshelf.

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 writer Stephen O'Brien, who wonders why he gets blank looks all round whenever he mentions Steven Moffatt's The Office, LM magazine, You Can Do The Cube, eighties pop band Brilliant, The Beachcombers and other last-minute ITV emergency schedule replacement standys, and The Morecambe And Wise Board Game. No he's not making that last one up.

You can download it from here. And if you like what you've heard, you can subscribe via iTunes, or find all of the past episodes here.


Looks Unfamiliar is hosted by The Benatical, where you can find loads of other fabtastic podcasts. You can find Stephen's Stock Aitken Waterman blog Kean Canter Mattowskihere, and his more general blog Meaningless Insightshere. He's also written a book about eighties Christmas Singles, which you can get from here.

Eyes down for a special quiz featuring all your TV favourites!

Writer and indefatigable quizmaster Ben Baker has a new pocket-sized quiz book out, called Your Starter For Ben. To celebrate this - or, if you will, to drum up a bit of publicity - he's put together a brand new quiz especially for readers of this blog. Literally for readers of this blog, in fact, as it's based entirely around articles that have been featured on here.

Below you will find fifteen eight-word summaries of TV programmes that I've previously run features on. Can you work out what they are?


1. "He's only a lad, on snow not bad!"

2. "School's out forever; Rik and Ade to bash"

3. "Fuck off clown. Fuck off clown. Fuck off"

4. "Rubber-faced riotous romps with Citrus Spring King"

5. "Children's programme for children; also flying police box."

6. "So tired, of playing, playing their Portishead tape"

7. "Days Like Those were better in the seventies"

8. "Hey! There they went, walking down that street..."

9. "Despite what he says, it wasn't the news"

10. "We could be flying politicians, just for one day"

11. "Intergalactic Cop gets kids to do his work"

12. "Morris Mitchener will not be buying the DVDs"

13. "There'll be a good explanation I'm sure....oh"

14. "Pre-school fun with the Teds, Jemima and MURDERS"

15. "It stood for Ministry of Research Centre No.3"



You can get Your Starter For Ben from here. And if you follow Ben on Twitter, he's probably giving out discount codes too...

This look at the mid-eighties ITV sitcom Girls On Top - an undervalued and often forgotten early attempt at putting 'alternative' comedy in a mainstream timeslot - was originally written for the television review site Off The Telly. This slightly rewritten and updated version was intended for my published anthology Not On Your Telly, but ended up being left out as, well, it just felt a bit more well known than everything else covered in there. On reflection it probably wasn't but hey ho. Anyway, here, for the first time ever, is the full unexpurgated history of Girls On Top. You should still get Not On Your Telly, though, because it's good.

As strange as it may appear from this distance, television was initially very nervous of Dawn French and Jennifer Saunders. Of the original rising stars of the alternative comedy scene, they were the last to make their name in the medium by some distance. While this has often been attributed to the simple fact they were the dominant female presence in the movement – their comedy presumably unable to totally counteract the sexism it so frequently railed against – the reality is it was far more a result of the sheer strength of their humour. Much of French and Saunders’ early act was deliberately challenging and taboo-breaking, and while they made guest appearances in such shows as Friday Night And Saturday Morning and Whatever You Want, the first programme to capture them in full unrestrained flow – an edition of Channel 4’s stand-up anthology series The Entertainers (the name chosen as a deliberate counterpoint to ITV’s decidedly more ‘traditional’ The Comedians) – was bumped back from its usual 8:30pm slot to close to midnight. They were, of course, well known for their participation in the likes of The Young Ones, not to mention impressive turns as writers and performers on The Comic Strip Presents …, but as the middle of the eighties approached they had still yet to secure a headlining series of their own; and this was not for want of trying.

Early in 1982, French and Saunders had met Ruby Wax, a vivacious American actress who had been living and working in the UK since the mid-seventies, and was then contributing material to long forgotten Channel 4 chat show spoof For 4 Tonight. Finding that they had much in common, the three began to work on an idea for a prospective television vehicle based around their respective stage personas. It was obvious from the outset that the best way to get three such obnoxious and self-centred characters together was to have them forced by circumstance and desperation to share a flat, with none of them possessing the means, the motivation or indeed the intellect to get out and move somewhere better.

After initial writing meetings and discussions about possible storylines, they felt they needed a fourth lead character for balance, and French’s husband-to-be Lenny Henry suggested Tracey Ullman, whom he had recently worked with on three series of the vaguely ‘alternative’ BBC sketch show Three Of A Kind. Although barely into her twenties, Ullman had already enjoyed a dramatic rise to fame, initially drawing acclaim as a straightforward comic actress before demonstrating her versatility to a far wider audience with Three Of A Kind and its somewhat more variable stablemate A Kick Up the Eighties. In tandem with these projects, she had enjoyed considerable success as a pop singer, scoring hits with a number of sixties-tinged songs given a slight comic twist and memorably overtly comic videoes. In addition to her remarkable skills as a performer, Ullman brought an all-important bankable 'name' to the project, and it may well have been her involvement that ultimately secured a surprisingly high profile slot for what was a mildly 'dangerous' effort from a group of still largely unknown performers.


ITV's midlands franchise holder Central were sufficiently impressed by the resultant pitch to commission a pilot, which was made over the summer of 1983 under the title Four F’s to Share. While nothing of this pilot ever seems to have surfaced - it was later extensively rewritten and almost completely reshot as the first series opener Four-Play - it was clearly strong enough for Central to commission a series of thirteen episodes to go into production the following year. However, the projected recording dates in April 1984 fell victim to by industrial action, and despite some talk of an autumn remount it eventually transpired no convenient dates would be available until the New Year. According to some sources, Wax and Ullman used this unexpected break in production to collaborate on scripts for a series of standalone comic playlets, which ultimately came to nothing.

When the team finally returned to the studios in January 1985, so long had elapsed since the recording of the original pilot it was decided simply to remount production, with the first episode effectively acting as a ‘new’ pilot. It is likely the characters, performances and entire concept had already been sharpened considerably during this eighteen-month delay, but the new studio dates also brought with them a vital change on the production side. Whereas the original pilot had been handled by a team more used to working on Central’s traditional sitcoms, Paul Jackson, a young producer with a strong understanding of alternative comedy, and who had worked with the main performers in various permutations as far back as 1980, was assigned to take over the project. Now renamed Girls On Top, the new sitcom was finally ready to go before the cameras.

Wax’s loud, attention-demanding stage persona was streamlined for Girls On Top into Shelley Dupont, a brash drama student with plenty of ego but precious little discernible talent. French became Amanda Ripley, a humourless diehard left-wing feminist whose ideology was decidedly at odds with her rarely-satiated hunger for men, while Saunders became Amanda’s dozy, lethargic childhood friend Jennifer Marsh, a girl without a malicious thought - or possibly a thought of any kind - in her head. Ullman, meanwhile, quickly developed the part of Candice Valentine, a bitchy and manipulative It Girl who associated with the rich, powerful and glamorous, yet was still not above committing acts of petty theft against her flatmates. Rounding off the main cast was veteran actress Joan Greenwood as Lady Carlton, an eccentric romantic novelist who doubled-up, arguably not entirely to her own awareness, as the girls’ landlady.


Perhaps inevitably, much of the humour in Girls On Top revolves around the massive clash of personalities between the equally voluble and volatile Shelley and Amanda, with Jennifer playing less of a part in the dialogue but indulged with extended physical comedy sequences based on her immense lack of intellect and self-awareness. However, it is Candice who really steals the show, not least on account of her often lengthy 'solo' sequences taking place in a surreal, dreamlike world of glamorous discos and exclusive nightclubs, where it is never entirely clear to the viewer whether or not this is all simply taking place inside her head. The scripts for the first series were primarily written by French, Saunders and Wax, with Ullman contributing additional material and Ben Elton acting as script editor.

Introduced by a stylish theme song performed by the cast and written by Chris Difford and Glen Tilbrook of Squeeze, Girls On Top finally found its way onto ITV when the first run of seven episodes appeared in an 8.30pm Wednesday timeslot from 23rd October 1985. Storylines included Candice’s attempts to hoodwink Shelley into appearing in an ‘adult’ film, Jennifer being kidnapped and held to ransom, Amanda’s pathetic attempt at staging a multi-cultural street festival, the disappearance of Lady Carlton’s stuffed dog, and more attempts at dodging rent payments than the combined cast could have counted on their collective fingers. Among those making guest appearances were Helen Atkinson-Wood, Helen Lederer, Alan Rickman, Robbie Coltrane, Mark Arden, Stephen Frost, Simon Brint, Roland Rivron and – in a fantastic semi-regular turn as Amanda’s jumpsuited feminist activist co-conspirator – Harriet Thorpe.

Despite the inevitable limitations of its timeslot and prominence – although the writers did their best to find increasingly subtle ways around this – Girls On Top was an instant and deserved hit with both the regular sitcom audience and fans of the alternative scene alike. Its brashness and vulgarity were neatly balanced by the air of surrealism and the traditional bright lights and studio audience sitcom setup. Some observers have maintained the series was simply a carbon copy of The Young Ones, and superficially this criticism would appear to hold some weight. The basic setting is the same, and even the characters themselves are not that dissimilar – Amanda and Rik are certainly very close contemporaries, with Shelley effectively taking the place of Vyvyan, Jennifer as Neil and Candice as Mike. However, it is true that at least three of the characters were simply extensions of what their respective performers had been doing on stage for several years beforehand, and even taking usual television production practices into account, the idea of someone intentionally commissioning a series which was at that point barely more than a cult hit and literally only a couple of months old does stretch credibility somewhat.


What is perhaps most surprising about Girls On Top in retrospect was how much they were able to get away with in a prominent pre-watershed timeslot. While there is no actual swearing, there is a fair amount of what would be generally deemed ‘bad’ language, and a good deal of explicit sexual references, many of which were arguably still shocking in the mid-eighties. Central did in fact have some worries about this, but the writers preferred to leave the ensuing arguments in the capable hands of Paul Jackson, who was well experienced in negotiating with more conservative contemporaries. In any case, on some occasions Central seemed to be making a fuss over absolutely nothing, and Wax has often wearily recalled being informed of concerns that the utterly fictional Irma La Douce might sue for defamation of character.

By the time the first run of Girls On Top was being transmitted, Tracey Ullman was already in talks with American television networks about the possibility of her own solo project. This would eventually result in the acclaimed The Tracey Ullman Show, a series of offbeat playlets - some possibly derived from the abandoned series mooted during the interruption to production of Girls On Top - that ran on Fox between 1987 and 1990, although its success has since been somewhat overshadowed by the fact that it also included the television debut of The Simpsons. These negotiations precluded the possibility of Ullman appearing in the second series of Girls On Top, recorded in the early summer of 1986, but rather than replace her, Wax, French and Saunders opted instead to write Candice out. Ullman was ultimately available to record a small amount of material for the first episode, but her absence would leave the second series sorely lacking when it finally appeared in October 1986.

Candice had of course originally been added to the show to create a stronger dynamic between the other three leads, and her absence had an inevitable effect on the quality of Girls On Top. The main problem with the new batch of six episodes, which commenced on 30th October in the same timeslot, was not simply that they missed Candice and her glitzy fantasy world, but that the other characters had also been noticeably reshaped to compensate for her absence. This inevitably did not prove to be a successful move; Shelley’s brashness and confidence were noticeably toned down, Amanda was revealed to be unexpectedly weak-willed and easily manipulated by men, and most jarringly of all Jennifer became something of a scheming bitch, siding with whichever of the others she stood to gain the most from. This resulted in a muddled dynamic with less inspired interplay between the flatmates, and sadly as a consequence was just not as funny.


In fairness, and as Dawn French hinted at when interviewed for Roger Wilmut’s history of Alternative Comedy Didn’t You Kill My Mother-In-Law?, there may just not have been as much spare time and energy to spend working on six new scripts of Girls On Top. They entered production unexpectedly soon after the first batch, presumably in a bid to capitalise on the show's success, and the three leads had already planned to use this time working on other projects. Wax was engaged on a number of other writing assignments, while French and Saunders - the latter of whom was also pregnant during this time - were hard at work both on Ben Elton’s BBC sitcom Happy Families (also produced by Paul Jackson) and their The Comic Strip Presents… film Consuela. Ultimately, however, the second series was a massive comedown after the offbeat vulgar charm of the first. This is not to say it does not have its moments. The first episode, in which Amanda and Shelley are both accused of murdering Candice by assisting one of her 'mystery' illnesses - in reality she had run away to marry a rich nobleman, suggesting her apparent delusions may have been truthful after all - is well up to standard, while others featured entertaining guest appearances by Harry Enfield, John Sessions, Hugh Laurie, and Katherine Helmond as Shelley’s mother, but as a whole it failed to work as well as the first run had done. Even the theme song, remixed to remove Ullman’s vocals, seemed a pale shadow of its former self. On a brighter note, the second run did come accompanied by the only item of Girls On Top merchandise - a tie-in paperback, written by the cast and published by HarperCollins, which was every bit as brash, vulgar and indeed amusing as the first set of episodes.

With the final episode featuring the main characters apparently killed in an explosion – yet another unintentional but widely-derided echo of The Young Ones– Girls On Top made its final appearance on 11th December 1986. Despite never giving an inch in terms of the strength of its content, the success of the show in its unlikely timeslot did much to make this new strain of comedy acceptable in the eyes of the wider viewing public. It also acted as a springboard for the cast to find their way into similar areas. However, this success did not extend to all parties involved – early the following year, Central attempted to fill the gap that Girls On Top had left in their output with the similarly conceived Hardwicke House, which was rapidly pulled after only two episodes had been broadcast.

Sadly, and perhaps on account of the lacklustre second series, Girls On Top is now regarded as one of the lesser achievements of the 'alternative' comedy boom. But at least initially it was a sterling effort and deserves slightly more respect than its reputation might suggest. Yet arguably the biggest laugh of the entire series was that, having been shunned by television virtually outright for so long, Dawn French and Jennifer Saunders beat their contemporaries into the mainstream schedules by some considerable distance.


And if you want to know more about Hardwicke House, you can find the full story of that in Well At Least It's Free.

This is the story of how I didn't see a film.

A Clockwork Orange, Stanley Kubrick's controversial (not least with the author himself) 1971 big-screen version of Anthony Burgess' acclaimed novel, had caused a vivid furore on its release, and by the end of the decade had been withdrawn from UK distribution at the director's request. There have been wild stories of threats and protests outside the Kubrick family home from 'anti-violence' protesters, though it's also worth remembering that the film was used as a political football by moralising blowhards like pretty much no other before or since; including, to Burgess' great frustration, one James Wilson Vincent Savile. What an excellent arbiter of socially responsible behaviour he turned out to be. Anyway, whatever the reason, withdraw it Kubrick certainly did, and with home entertainment still really only in its infancy, this meant that - for UK audiences at least - A Clockwork Orange pretty much disappeared off the face of the planet.

As you can imagine, this made A Clockwork Orange a very intriguing prospect indeed to any self-respecting young student of the weird and lurid corners of cinema history. Surreally stylised and futuristic photos in books about 'Sci-Fi Films' were a nagging reminder of its tantalising unavailability. It stood almost alone as a movie that had been a huge hit one minute then basically erased from history the next, while older cousins and more verbose rock journalists hinted at a secret knowledge of it that you weren't allowed to share. Even the row about its content and suitability seemed more exciting than it maybe should have warranted. The fact that even if it had been available, I would have been too young to actually see A Clockwork Orange was neither here nor there - I was as obsessed with it as others were with A Nightmare On Elm Street or Predator. I read the book, I listened to the fantastic soundtrack album, I even cut out and kept a Guardian article about the RSC's stage adaptation starring Phil Daniels as Alex. There was just one small but significant flaw with this fanaticism - I hadn't actually seen the film itself.


There were rumours, of course, that it was widely available on 'pirate', but it always seemed to command the sort of sums of money that you didn't particularly want to be handing over to shifty teenagers on street corners, especially when you'd already seen the woeful quality of some of their more easily affordable wares. And so it was that, long after I'd seen Twisted Nerve, Peeping Tom, The Magic Christian, Supervixens, Cannibal Apocalyse, Vampyros Lesbos, The Trip, Monte Carlo Or Bust!, Psychomania, 200 Motels, Two-Lane Blacktop, Every Home Should Have One, The Rise And Rise Of Michael Rimmer and many other tantalisingly elusive doodles in the margin of cinema history, A Clockwork Orange remained my one big Halliwell-troubling box to tick. Yet despite the occasional frowning in a newspaper article accompanied by a badly-cropped version of that photo of Alex at the wheel of a car, it was still nowhere nearer becoming available.

Then, one day, a rumour began to circulate amongst members of a local Cinema Club that they were going to stage a secret - and not even remotely Kubrick-approved - screening of an under-the-counter print of the film to mark their tenth anniversary. Whether they ever actually intended to or not nobody really knows, as some ingrate prat promptly leaked the story to an illiterate muck-raking grief-porn-peddling chip-on-regional-shoulder local newspaper, who went predictably condemnatory crazy with the story - no prizes for guessing which photo they used to accompany it - prompting the cinema to issue a strenuous denial that they'd ever even considered it. Was this all a clever double-bluff, though? Was it worth running the risk of missing out on an actual chance to see it, and subsequently having to administer a self-kicking worthy of Alex and his Droogs? There was only one way to find out - to turn up on the supposed date and time and see if they were actually showing it away from prying smudgy-newsprint eyes.


As it turned out, I wasn't the only one who'd had that idea. A sizeable crowd had gathered outside the suspiciously darkened venue, made up primarily of studenty types holding cineaste-friendly impromptu discussions, nervy-looking lone gentlemen with an apparent disdain for washing their raincoats, and a small army of people in boiler suits and bowler hats. Oh, and a reporter, who was pleasingly blanked by everyone she attempted to speak to. As the night set in, the weather got colder, and it became increasingly obvious to anyone with a shred of sense that there was nobody actually inside the building, the Droogs seized their moment. A flurry of brolly-rapping on the determinedly shut doors and shouts to the effect of "but the slovo did viddy that the film would be on all horrorshow" did nothing to change the situation, so they started to indulge in in-character jostling of fellow would-be patrons instead. Once they began to loudly decry the arrival of 'the millicents', it really was time to give up and go home.

So, that's how effective banning films really is in terms of preventing copycat violence. Of course, there was also the time someone threw a full carton of Kia Ora at my head, but that's another story. And I actually saw the film that time too.


You can read more about my quest to see elusive films from the odder corners of movie history in Not On Your Telly.

This was one of only two posts that I put together for an abandoned blog idea called Moogs Funks Breaks. This would basically just have been a series of short impressionistic posts aimed at highlighting various overlooked songs that I'd been listening to recently, which as you can see below would have been a good deal more interesting than that description sounds. Anyway, here's what would have been the first post on Moogs Funks Breaks, looking at what happens when your MP3 player clocks up more than one song of the same name without you actually noticing...


One of the possibly unwelcome innovations of the MP3 age, and indeed one that Stewart Lee would presumably be both fascinated and alarmed by, is that it's now possible look through the list of tracks on your personal audio player and see just how many different versions of one song it's possible to have accumulated without realising. Seven of All Along The Watchtower. Fourteen of Mas Que Nada. And, somewhat less expectedly, three completely different songs all called The Garden Of Earthly Delights.

Presumably 'borrowing' their title from Hieronymous Bosch's fifteen and sixteenth century straddling series of Bible-depicting oil-on-canvas artworks - or, if raining, from somewhere where they'd seen it being used - the three Gardens Of Earthly Delights in question could not be further removed from each other musically, chronologically, or ideologically. Well, not exactly 'could not be', as none of them are by Skinned Teen, Bela Bartok or The All-New Nick Griffin Big Band, but you get the general idea.


The first of them, working on an arbitrarily chronological basis, is by late sixties early electronic act The United States Of America, a sarcastically-named outfit who were part of the same 'Hate Generation' as The Stooges, Frank Zappa and the equally ironically-monickered Love. Their lone self-titled album duly does away with the peace and love obsessions of the era in favour of songs about animal cruelty, middle-class sexual deviance, 'bad trip' flashbacks, Hiroshima, and an aggressive female vocalist roaring out a 'fuck you, I'm in charge here' ode to the joys of, erm, Hard Coming Love. As you can probably imagine, their The Garden Of Earthly Delights is rather light on the 'Delights', consisting mainly of a nightmarish botany lesson about venomous blossoms, blackening mushrooms, and - yikes - 'omniverous orchids'. It's safe to say Percy Thrower wasn't on their Christmas Card list.


Then it's a leap forward to the late eighties, when XTC opted to open their superlative defining moment of neo-psychedelia Oranges And Lemons with their own personal The Garden Of Earthly Delights. As you'd expect from Andy Partridge, this particular plea for human tolerance and co-operation is made up of a ridiculous volume of line-cramming words delivered at a frenetic pace, and comes with about seventeen thousand sub-clauses, but it's a mighty fine way to open one of the mightiest and finest albums ever made. And it's not even the best expression of that basic sentiment on there; if you've never heard Scarecrow People, Poor Skeleton Steps Out, Here Comes President Kill Again or The Loving, then you need to rectify that straight away.


Then, finally, it's off to the early nineties and overmanned Acid Jazz collective D*Note, of Now Is The Time near-hit infamy. This was the point at which the yellow sunglasses-wearing types started to break away from their more straight ahead raving contemporaries, substituting the Ecstasy-driven vision of a world united by one of those plinky three-chord piano riffs for a more globally-aware plea to take heed of history, ecology and ethnic tradition, which of course would pay off very handsomely for a certain gentleman in an oversized hat. Delivered over a furious modal jazz riff apparently sampled from the soundtrack of legendary big screen religious hokum The Cross And The Switchblade (bang goes my long-held assumption that it was purloined from Mike Westbrook's Metropolis (Part IX), then), guest vocalist Pamela 'Not That One' Anderson combines an urging for mankind to look to its own metaphorical 'garden' with wistful romantic whisperings to someone apparently obliviously scoffing a picnic. And they wonder why Reel II Reel Featuring The Mad Stuntman had the big hits.

And that, ladies and gentlemen, is why it can sometimes be fun to have different songs with the same name. Except when it's Twist And Shout.

This is what would have been the second post on the never-launched Moogs Funks Breaks blog - you can find the first one here - and it's about the now-little remembered mid-nineties loungey dance act The Gentle People, and how odd it is to contrast their present-day obscurity with how much exposure they got at the time. It ends with a rather weak off-the-peg argument that I probably wouldn't even make now, but let's not go about rewriting unpublished history. Anyway, if you want to know more about the build-up to Britpop and how the way that it gets remembered is decidedly at odds with its actual roots, you'll be wanting a copy of my scholarly study of the subject Higher Than The Sun. And now, we're off on a journey...


Recently I've been listening quite a bit to The Gentle People, a retro-electronica act that emerged from the Loungecore-Acid-Jazz-Easy-Listening-Big-Beat Madwoman In The Attic of Britpop that people try to avoid mentioning now (primarily if they're writing career histories of Noel Gallagher), inspired in no small part by that big new Corduroy box set that's just come out, complete with a previously unreleased two-fingers-to-Britpop-as-they-come cover of the Sesame Street theme.

Anyway, while enjoying their gloriously of-its-time combination of futuristic dance music sounds with an overall What Time's Issi Noho On? vibe, it's difficult to avoid reflecting on just how prominent they were for such a wilfully niche-marketed band. Only a couple of years earlier, they'd have been the sort of outfit that John Peel played apologetically in the last twenty minutes of his show, and then got complaints from miserable Grunge-worshipping dullards asking him never to play them again. In the mid-nineties, however, they were everywhere, from daytime TV to daytime radio, and the subject of countless multi-page colour spreads in magazines. And not just in the likes of Select or Vox either, but everything from Stuff to Loaded as well.

Yes, alright, so the latter sort of magazine might well have been drawn towards them by the fact that they had two attractive female members - though it's difficult to convince people these days that Loaded was actually a pretty good magazine for the first couple of years, placing articles on the likes of Peter Cook and Lancelot Link Secret Chimp in amongst all the Nicola Charles In Her Pants Again stuff, and heavily championing the likes of The League Of Gentlemen and Super Furry Animals way before they actually got anywhere, and that it was only finally consumed by the monster it accidentally created after Harry Hill featured on the last regular male-only cover in 1997 (although as I briefly appeared in a feature some two years after that - no, not telling you which, sorry - I can't really fingerwag as much as I'd like to), but that's an argument for another article - yet all the same there's no getting away from the fact that they weren't the sort of band that would have been considered potential mainstream fodder only a couple of years earlier, or indeed only a couple of years later. They were, after all, a gaggle of flourescently-dyed-in-the-wool confirmed retroheads like the similar headcases behind Radio Tip Top - themselves a regular sighting in these sort of unlikely avenues, and similarly pushed towards the mainstream to the extent that they nearly landed a daytime show on Radio 1 (and if you want to know more about that, you'll have to read my book Fun At One) - and hardly of a piece with bacon sandwiches, football tribalism or children's TV presenter 'babes'.


So what happened? Why was there that curious moment in the mid-nineties where the mainstream and the non-mainstream suddenly collided and everything seemed on a level playing field for the briefest of times (well, unless you were poor old Luke Haines)? A large part of it is obviously down to the success of the likes of Blur, Pulp and Supergrass, who waved their more angular influences in people's faces but at the same time had found a way to make them eyecatching, earcatching and marketable, and given that to the average punter it must have seemed like all these amazing bands were suddenly tumbling out of nowhere (whereas the average NME reader would doubtless have seen things a bit differently), it was inevitable that people would feel mildly curious about what else was 'out there'. Clearly that can't have been the entire cause, as it seemingly got through to people who wouldn't know Sofa (Of My Lethargy) if it pitched up in the middle of a Shine compilation and refused to budge until they had heard it so many times that their head exploded, but that's for some crazy futuristic Space Dominic Sandbrook to speculate on.

Anyway, for the briefest of moments - yet still one which in the heat of the moment seemed like it was stretching on into infinity in a sort of weird time distortion event of the sort that they used to use technobabble to describe before all this 'wibbly wobbly timey wimey' business started - it seemed like the 'outsiders' could take on the mainstream and, if not win, then at least co-exist in a more receptive plane of popular cultural existence. But of course, Simon Cowell wasn't having any of that...

Doctor Who does tend to lend itself to cliched - and usually inaccurate - ramblings about 'ends' of 'eras', but it's hard to know how else to describe the sixth series in 1968/69. Not only did it mark the departure of both the Second Doctor and his longest-serving assistant, it also marked the end of black and white production, and a fundamental change in the actual style and structure of the programme itself, as an incoming showrunner tasked with reinventing a fading hit opted to follow his instructions to the letter. It's also, significantly, the last run that anything is actually missing of. Though there was inevitably a degree of give and take on either side, it was almost as if the transmission of episode ten of The War Games on 21st June 1969 marked a decisive severing of Doctor Who's ties with its own past.

Watching the entirety of Doctor Who in order, you cannot help but be struck by the significance of this moment. The best part of a decade's worth of television, starting as a troubled production that suddenly took off due to the strength of its lead actor and the phenomenal overnight success of the first featured aliens, weathering innumberable changes to the regular cast (including the lead actor) and remaining must-watch teatime viewing throughout its highs, lows and The Sensorites, more or less comes to an end to be replaced by what was to all intents and purposes a new programme; it may have been the same, but it wasn't the same. What's more, it had already mostly been lost to bulk-erased master tape archival oblivion. And then you remember that everyone who was watching it at the time just thought it was quite good and they were looking forward to seeing it in colour, so it's time to dispense with the heavyweight cultural theorising and just get on with looking at what actually happens in the episodes. If you want to read me ambitiously tying this 'end of an era' business in with Chigley and In The Court Of The Crimson King, however, then you can find exactly that in this book here. Anyway, where were we? Oh yes that's right. Settling down for five episodes ram packed full of hi-tech edge of the seat thrills...


There Is Absolutely No Point To The Dominators Whatsoever


One of the few Doctor Who stories that there is virtually no disagreement about whatsoever is The Dominators. This is because everyone knows and recognises it as the one where those scowly blokes with the big shoulders, and their interestingly designed yet ultimately risible robot assistants the Quarks, arrive on inadvisedly-named planet Dulkis with the intention of... stealing some energy or something? Fortunately for them the sappy Walter The Softy-esque crepe paper tabard-sporting Dulcians are even more banal and inactive than their name suggests, and whatever their plot actually was, it was foiled virtually single-handedly by The Doctor, Jamie and Zoe. By now you've probably already got a vague notion that this isn't exactly on a par with that episode of Breaking Bad where they hijack the train, but seriously, you have no idea until you've actually sat through the whole tedious parade of nothingess, which is too boring even for its fairly nasty and reactionary politics to really register that much. And the worst thing about it is that everyone involved missed numerous opportunities to avoid having to make it in the first place. On account of a perceived lack of dramatic content, the story was cut from six episodes to five - we can only guess at what the longer version would have been like - though the idea of replacing it with something else more substantially broadcastable doesn't appear to have occurred to anyone. Writers Mervyn Haisman and Henry Lincoln were understandably slightly irked by this and resorted to legal sabre-rattling, though clearly not rattlingly enough to actually prevent it from being made. Perhaps most tellingly of all, the third episode - so tedious that the production team didn't even notice that they'd forgotten to allocate it an onscreen episode number - is to all intents and purposes an extended argument about whether they should even bother having a storyline. And there you have it - even The Dominators itself was actively trying to prevent its own production. Still, what can you expect from a story where the fact that a sound effect was titled Quark Goes Berserk And Explodes is more exciting than anything that appears in the actual episodes? With the notable exception of...


They Like Big Butts And They Cannot Lie (And Zoe's In Particular)


Throughout this look back at the black and white era of Doctor Who, we've seen time and time and time again how the production team's attempts to at least recognise the dawn of full-strength undiluted feminism were repeatedly undermined by the camera crew's apparent obsession with directing the visual focus towards whichever attractive young female cast member had the most over-upholstered backside. They must have thought all of their Christmases had come at once, then, when the infamously lower-stacked Wendy Padbury joined the regular cast at the end of the previous series as smug scientist Zoe Herriot. The most intelligent, capable and independent assistant seen in the series thus far by some considerable distance, she was nonetheless literally squeezed into a procession of catsuits and tight trouser-suits, and as you can no doubt imagine the cameras seemed to spend very little time in front of her. Most notorious - or memorable, depending on how you look at it - was the scene in the first episode of The Mind Robber where the Tardis breaks up and the console spins off into nothingness, where the breakdown of reality and logic and the rise of surreality suddenly takes second place to an alarmingly protracted close-up on her inappropriately-angled arse. And this 'enthusiasm' wasn't just confined to the 'backroom boys' either; there's a scene in The Invasion where she walks across U.N.I.T. HQ past a series of admiring glances in entirely the wrong direction from the extras hired to pose as soldiers. This rear-ended fixation had now reached critical mass, to an extent that made Jennifer Lopez look like she had entered the upper echelons of international superstardom purely on the basis of her unerring ability to spot a surefire hit movie, and frankly it was way past time for change in a more progressive direction. Speaking of which, those soldiers should count their blessings that one of Zoe's mates didn't notice their wandering eyes...


Society For Cutting Up (Cyber)Men


Over the summer of 1968, eight hundred and fifty sewing machinists at the Ford plant in Dagenham went on strike in a bid to get the same wages as their male counterparts, with their actions ultimately leading to the Equal Pay Act in 1970. On 15th November, writer Caroline Bird reputedly coined the term 'sexism' with the publication of her incendiary speech On Being Born Female. And in December, someone shouted at The Brigadier a bit. We've already seen how, despite its many other 'issues', sixties Doctor Who was absolutely ram-packed with strong and forward-thinking female characters. In fact, Anne Travers was singled out in the previous instalment as the strongest indication yet of the oncoming storm of feminism. And that storm hit in no uncertain terms with her replacement-due-to-performer-unavailability in The Invasion, Isobel Watkins. A photographer with nerves of steel - who also acts as her own model to pay the rent, a situation that she nonetheless still vocally resents - Isobel is tough, fearless and more excited than alarmed by the possibility of Cybermen striding around London streets. Never backwards in expressing her views and independence, and sternly observant of the 'line' that smitten U.N.I.T. soldiers should not overstep, her finest moment comes just after outlining a photographically complex method for capturing the Cybermen on film without being spotted. Not only does she have to contend with The Brigadier speculating that this may all be 'gibberish', she then has to stand there and be told that she is to stay put and that "this is a job for my men". Except that standing there is most definitely not on the agenda, and a visibly startled Brigadier finds himself lambasted as a cretin, a bigot, an idiot, and - worst of all - "you... man!!". Women's Lib had arrived in Doctor Who, and we would be seeing it a lot more in the seventies. As well as plenty that was absolutely nothing of the sort. But at least we know what Isobel's outburst actually looked like...


So When I Hear They Wiped The Space Pirates: 5, Saltwater Wells In My Eyes


The Space Pirates, the penultimate story to be made in black and white, is also the last story that there is anything missing of. Apart from Episode Two, of which ironically multiple copies have turned up (including, hilariously, on a miraculously surviving domestic videotape known to contain an off-air of an unidentified Doctor Who episode), absolutely nothing survives of it bar audio recordings and a handful of photographs. And some film trims that seem to last for several centuries, though it's best not to dwell on them. One consequence of this is that, aside from a costume design sketch, we have no real idea of what Dom Issigri, the missing intergalactic privateer around whom the entire storyline revolved, actually looked like. And he's not alone; there's Paris from The Myth Makers, lots of one-scene wonders from The Reign Of Terror, pretty much everyone from The Massacre, futuristic TV hosts Lizan and Roald from The Daleks' Master Plan, and that's just actual characters. There's no real way of saying for certain which of The Delegates showed up in which of the non-extant episodes of The Daleks' Master Plan. Did the cricket commentators in the same story actually appear on screen or not? What really happened at the start of both The Invasion and Fury From The Deep? How exactly did William Hartnell look as The Abbot Of Amboise? What in the name of sanity was actually seen by viewers at any point during the last ten minutes of The Massacre? And, most importantly, why does Polly have The Doctor's hat on at the end of The Underwater Menace? We can make educated guesses, but that's really all we can do, and in some cases it's not even as easy as that anyway. As we're about to move into an era that we now know pretty much everything about visually, even what colour the dragon was in The Mind Of Evil, it's worth reflecting on how sad the loss of so much perfectly good television is, and in balance how joyous it is that so much of it still actually does exist. There's proportionally way more of Doctor Who than there is most other sixties programmes, as any self-respecting fan of R.3 will tell you. It's also worth reflecting on the fact that, for all the know-alls it attracts, there is still so much still to be found out about Doctor Who. Incidentally, if you want to know more about The Space Pirates, a story that seemingly nobody cares about, you can find a huge piece on it in my book Not On Your Telly. This stuff doesn't just throw itself together you know. Mind you, not every ignored story is quite as tedious as 'fan wisdom' might suggest...


Why Does The Krotons Have Such A Bad Reputation?


As you may well have gathered by now, Series Six isn't exactly short on what might be most generously identified as 'misfires'. The Space Pirates is at least an interesting concept with impressive visuals, but struggles to keep up with its hurriedly-written six-episode overlength. The Dominators gives up almost straight away and makes no attempt to disguise its shameless lack of both content and style-over-content. And The Krotons... is actually quite good. For some reason, it has always had the reputation of being one of those mysteriously-defined 'turkeys' - as recently as Doctor Who Magazine's 'Mighty 200' poll, it could be found lurking right at the bottom amongst the entirely wiped stories that nobody's seen, the actual wastes of everyone's time, and the bulk of the Sylvester McCoy era which people are just too fond of their handy forum 'opinions' on to admit that they're actually good - but you'd be hard pushed to find anyone with an actual bad word to say about The Krotons. Non-committal and indifferent words, certainly, but not actually bad. It's a competently told if over-familiar storyline that uses its four episodes economically, it feels energetically performed and directed, it uses the regular cast well, and even the much-maligned Krotons themselves aren't that bad by the standards of sixties design. Or, if we're being honest about it, by the standards of design of some more recent episodes. At least their heads spin around and that. The worst thing that anyone could possibly call it is 'decent', so why's it ended being tarred with the same brush as Arc Of Infinity and that thing where there were all the trees? Well, there's not really an obvious answer. It doesn't appear to have been that popular with viewers at the time, and was possibly at the forefront of Derrick Sherwin's thoughts when he set about reinventing the series. It got a bit of a bashing in early fan publications, and it's also possible that some took against it when it had the temerity to show up in the The Five Faces Of Doctor Who repeat season in lieu of more well-regarded Troughton stories that didn't actually exist any more. Yet none of these really explain why it's still treated with such disdain when it's been available to rewatch and reassess for so long. Maybe Doctor Who fans just like having a convenient target of ire that they can pour scorn on and use as a trump card in arguments without having to actually put any though into it? No, probably not. It's not like it's Meglos or anything. Anyway, perhaps we'd all have liked it a bit more if The Krotons had invested in a handful of sequins...


He's The Leader, He's The Leader, He's The Leader Of The Ice Warriors He Is


The Seeds Of Death, in contrast, is generally considered to be one of the better offerings of Series Six, and rightly so. Featuring the return of the Ice Warriors, now accompanied by their somewhat more svelte and stylish superiors the Ice Lords, it's a lively and enjoyable story which touches on pollution and the relentless march of technology, and centres around a new ways vs. old ways smackdown as The Doctor and company try to determine whether they would be better advised repelling the invasion plans with the aid of brand spanking new global teleportation system T-Mat or an 'antique' space rocket, amusingly long since consigned to a museum. Also, computation-devouring technician Miss Kelly is ever so slightly easy on the eye, which doesn't exactly hinder matters. However, there's always one individual who has to go and lower a story's batting average, and in this case it's the newly-introduced third rank of would-be Martian interloper, The Grand Marshal. He may well only ever be glimpsed on a video screen demanding continual 'updates' from Commander Slaar, but it cannot realistically escape anyone's attention that he does so whilst sporting a large metal helmet covered liberally in sequins. Quite why this should be used to denote his rank is unclear. Was he a member of a post-psych proto-glam pop group later given to ruefully relating how Bolan and Bowie stole his ideas? Do Grand Marshalling duties include leading a formation display team as part of the Ice Warriors On Ice showbiz extravaganza? Did he simply raid Maggie Moone's 'battle re-enactment' wardrobe? Sadly, not even the New Adventures authors ever elaborated on that. Still, fashion-wise, he was simply ahead of his time. Some other stories were far more heavily steeped in the here and now and far out...


One Pill Makes You Larger, And One Pill Makes You Have A Different Face (For Two Episodes)

The Mind Robber, we are frequently told, is Doctor Who's most crazy far-out psychedelic story of all time ever. As we have already seen, this wasn't actually true, and in any case, most of its most pseudo-mind expanding elements came about as a result of last-minute production panic rather than Peter Bryant smoking that kerrazy acid. The 'Characters From Fiction Coming To Life' storyline, although impressively rendered in bad-trip pop-art visuals, was actually straight out of more uptight children's fiction of a decade earlier, and in fact wouldn't have been too out of place in one of the Hartnell-era stories. Well, one of the tie-in comic strips at any rate. Jamie losing his face and temporarily gaining another one came about simply because Frazer Hines was too ill to attend to the studio sessions. And that creepy first episode where they get lost in a white void - presumably the same one that Tomorrow's World and Play School later existed in - was more or less an extra episode thrown before the cameras when The Dominators had one taken away for being rubbish. It involved little more than the regular cast, the Tardis set, a bloody big curtain, and some robot costumes pulled out of storage. The White Robots, as they were known, originally came from an episode of the BBC2 science-fiction anthology series Out Of The Unknown, in which they had been, erm, Black. Based on Isaac Asimov's 1941 short story Reason, The Prophet told the story of a group of service robots on a space station, who come to worship a power source as a deity after one of their number develops higher levels of reasoning, yet find that - in a twist worthy of Black Mirror if it was in space and stopped going "aaaahhhhhhhhh!" for three minutes - they are still incapable of disobeying the First and Second Laws of Robotics. Although The Prophet had been wiped by the end of the sixties and absolutely nothing survives of it outside a handful of photographs, it's clear that the play was dominated by that eerily unfuturistic 'futuristic' mid-sixties view of space travel, and had a soundtrack - including the celebrated Robot Hymn Ziwzih Ziwzih OO-OO-OO - provided by Delia Derbyshire at the exact same moment that she was hanging around London's most gaudily wall-painted 'happenings' with Paul McCartney and Pink Floyd and The Waltham Green East Wapping Carpet Cleaning Rodent And Boggit Extermination Association. As such, The Prophet was way closer to the sounds and indeed lyrical obsessions (come on, they wouldn't bloody shut up about space at first) of The Roundhouse and the UFO Club than Doctor Who itself ever got. And of course, as well as never bloody shutting up about space at first, Pink Floyd also had a song about a scarecrow...


"By The Powers! How On Earth Would They Know My Name?"


So far, during this look back at Doctor Who, we've studiously avoided covering anything that wasn't actually seen on screen. We've reluctantly given a wide berth to the annuals, the TV Comic and TV21 strips, and The Curse Of The Daleks. So rigidly have we adhered to this rule that when it's come to a missing episode, we've relied primarily on the audio recording and taken little or notice of approximations - no matter how superbly done - of what they might have looked like. But sometimes, something will be just too downright odd to avoid mentioning. Anyone who had just been watching the television episodes would have seen Patrick Troughton spinning away into nothingness at the end of this series - which we'll be getting round to in a minute - followed by a full-colour Jon Pertwee staggering out of the Tardis at the start of the next. Exactly what happened in between was a mystery, except to anyone reading TV Comic. Possibly acting on guidance from the TV show's production team (nobody seems to be entirely sure one way or the other about that), they opted to show the actual regeneration in The Night Walkers, a three-part strip positing that The Doctor had actually escaped from the Time Lords'Top Of The Pops camera lens chicanery at the end of The War Games and managed to spend an unspecified amount of time hiding in plain sight having adventures on Earth. This bewilderingly led to him appearing as a panelist on Explain My Mystery, a television show hosted by Neil Morrissey-haired swinging dandy Perry Conway, where he came into contact with Farmer Glenlock-Hogan who claimed to have seen his scarecrows walking around at night. Intrigued, The Doctor went to investigate, and lo and behold the walking scarecrows turned out to be 'Servants of The Time Lords', sent there to corner him and enforce his regeneration. Despite Glenlock-Hogan's baffling mix of intellectual speech and yokelisms, The Night Walkers is actually a surprisingly bleak, ominous and nightmarishly-rendered tale - especially for a children's comic - and it would be nice to be able to accept it as a legitimate extension of the series proper. Except that then I'd also have to cover Turlough And The Earthlink Dilemma and that is not going to happen. Anyway, back to what we actually did see on screen...


The War Games Is Better Than It Has Any Right To Be


If there's been one consistent theme with sixties Doctor Who, it's that the longer stories tend to drag very badly in the middle. And if there's been another one, it's that the historical stories proved so unpopular with viewers that they'd been more or less phased out even by the time Patrick Troughton took over the role. And if you really, really want another one, it's that when the Tardis crew wander into the middle of somebody else's conflict, they end up with frustratingly little to do. So when it comes to a ten - TEN - episode story featuring a wide cast of military types drawn from all corners of Earth history and plonked together to fight each other until all that's left is one single unbeatable army, you'd expect it to be such a chore that even fewer people would have made it through the whole thing than The Sensorites. Which is why it's such a pleasant surprise to find that The War Games is a massively enjoyable edge-of-the-seat epic that never lets up its pace, gives valuable amounts of screentime to the series regulars, and chooses the exact right moment to bring the alien antagonists, and later the Time Lords, into proceedings. While it's certainly true that a new, younger and more enthusiastic production team were by now more or less in charge and keen to big up the arrival of their all-new all-colour all-singing all-dancing all-Channing series the following year, it's also almost as if someone somewhere had decided they wanted to see out this first phase of Doctor Who's existence in style and with a reminder of just why so many viewers went so wild for it back in 1963. And speaking of which...


"They'll Forget Me, Won't They?"


The final two episodes of The War Games, with The Doctor reduced to pleading with The Time Lords for help in returning all of the soldiers to their proper places in time and space, knowing that he himself will face a long-awaited punishment as a result, are just about as good as Doctor Who gets. Played out against a stark, oppressive backdrop that somehow perfectly expresses exactly how The Time Lords are simultaneously both benevolent and callously bureaucratic just by using certain shapes and shades, The Doctor's trial and sentencing - complete with cameo appearances by everyone's favourite monsters (oh and the Quarks) - still make for riveting viewing. It's hard not to feel choked when Patrick Troughton, conveying more emotion with a single sentence than in those entire episodes taken up by Amy blubbing about what schools her theoretical children might get into, dejectedly asks "they'll forget me, won't they?" as Jamie and Zoe are led away to have their memories wiped before being returned to their own times. And then there's the final scene, with The Doctor rejecting the 'incredible bunch' of potential choices for a new face, and arguing to the last as The Time Lords send him zooming off into nothingness with not a single walking scarecrow in sight. Although it's not just him spinning away into the past, it's also black and white television and, more symbolically, the 'sixties'. If you want to tie them all together, black and white sixties Doctor Who. And it's at this point that I briefly have to come out of 'character' and remark on how sad it feels to be leaving all this behind. Although it can sometimes feel like a small event at the start of a much longer story, sixties Doctor Who clocked up nearly two hundred and sixty episodes - and two feature films - and that's not even getting started on just how massive The Daleks and William Hartnell in particular were. It's also, crucially, the era of the show I'm most interested in. We started off by chortling at the over-reliance on rope bridges as a plot device, got through all manner of good stories, bad stories and entirely missing stories, celebrated the strong and progressive female characters at the same time as celebrating the big-arsed women placed decoratively around the set, questioned widely held assumptions, pondered on longstanding mysteries, and got away with only mentioning Jimmy Savile twice. And now we're about to move in to what is essentially a brand new series, and more to the point one that we actually know more or less everything about. Even what colour that dragon was. I'll be honest and say that this feels like such a nice, neat conclusion, and a correspondingly coherent set of articles, that it's tempting to draw a line here and go on instead to look at Look And Read or Ace Of Wands or something with an equally archaic and clearly-defined aesthetic. But there's so much else to cover. There's The Armageddon Factor and Meglos and The Two Doctors and Time-Flight and The Time Monster. Good lord almighty there's The Time Monster.

So join us again next time for Channing singing The Days Of Pearly Spencer, aliens with a vendetta against The Bluetones, and just how many voices Radio's 'Man Of A Thousand Voices' actually had...

Back when I first started using the Internet, one of the first websites I discovered was www.aceofwands.net, Simon Coward's now sadly defunct site devoted to ITV's early seventies children's drama series Ace Of Wands. If you've never seen Ace Of Wands, it is probably best described as a deeply stylised post-psychedelic pre-Glam action series about a stage magician who solves unusual - and frequently apparently supernatural - crimes in his spare time. Massive in its day, and then completely forgotten about, it had started to be rediscovered more or less by word of mouth but there'll be more about that later. Actually I found the website so long ago that at that point it was still hosted on Simon's Freeserve pages, which in itself amusingly now seems more archaic than any television show where the lead character goes about in a snakeskin jacket and Jim Morrison hair.

I'd been obsessed with Ace Of Wands - 'obsessed' is a bit of an understatement to be honest - ever since catching an episode by chance at an archive TV event. Even more than the actual show itself, it was the animated psychedelic opening titles with their self-drawing pentagrams and mystic hand-based imagery, and the accompanying progtastic yet naggingly catchy theme song with bafflingly indecipherable lyrics, that really caught my attention. Over the next couple of years, I would put more time and energy than is probably considered healthy into finding out whatever I could about Ace Of Wands, which in those days wasn't as easy as you might think. Searching for features and interviews in old issues of TV Times and Look-In was challenging and time-consuming enough, but it was tracking down that elusive theme single - more properly known as Tarot by Andrew Bown, with incidental music track Lulli Rides Again on the b-side - that really took dedication. I spent so long flicking through boxes in charity shops in the hope of spotting a casually discarded copy that the catalogue number is indelibly burned into my memory; Parlophone R5856. So much so in fact that I nearly referenced it in a wedding speech once, but that's another story.


As it transpired, there were quite a few other Ace Of Wands enthusiasts out there. The series was starting to get a good deal of coverage in the more esoteric archive TV fanzines, notably Andrew Pixley's early venture Time Screen, and increasingly in glossy genre magazines, which invariably referred to it as having 'returned for a stylish new season' featuring 'Tarot's sometimes sinister foes'. It was courtesy of said increasing coverage that I learned the sad fact that the first two series of the show - which, I was reliably informed, was when it was best - had long since been wiped; all that was left was Series Three, not all of it even in broadcast quality, and a handful of almost unintelligibly poor quality audio recordings of a couple of second series episodes made by holding a tape recorder up to a television speaker. Amusingly, I'd made my own equally poor audio recording of a third series episode in more or less exactly the same way during another archive TV event, back when the possibility of actually owning any of Ace Of Wands on video seemed so remote as to be laughable.

Needless to say, there was tremendous excitement when clips turned up on Telly Addicts and TV Weekly, and later on the sell-through video compilation The Best Children's TV Of The Decade - The Seventies. There were a handful of millionth generation VHS bootleg copies floating around, if you knew where to look for them, but otherwise that really did seem like the best that we were likely to get. So that's why Simon's website, packed with what were entirely 'new' facts, cuttings, trivia and images, seemed so thrilling and felt like everything I'd hoped for from this new fangled World Wide Web that they had now. One of the most intriguing of these 'new' facts was the suggestion of several correspondents that the first two series had used an entirely different set of opening title graphics, now entirely lost to history and with only literally sketchy artistic impressions to go on.

Return Of The Living Podcast! It's nearly Halloween, so to get you all into a suitably spooktacular mood, here's a second outing for the widely acclaimed fright-tastic special of Why Won't You?, in which Ben Baker, Phil Catterall and myself take a look at some of the ridiculous things on TV, in films and in pop music that terrified you as children.

Join us as we count down the top twenty five suggestions of things that weren't even remotely frightening but which you still found frightening regardless, from Mr. Noseybonk and Return To Oz to the Only When I Laugh opening titles and the Blue Peter boat. There's also room for all the old 'favourites' like Camberwick Green, Picture Box, Professor Yaffle, Raggerty, Watch Out There's A Humphrey About!, TV 'Girl' and 'Clown' (Test Card), Crow from You And Me, Vrillon Of Ashtar Galactic Command, The Muppets' eyes, The Max Headroom Broadcast Intrusion and many many more. No matter how often you ask them to go away.

Who would 'win' out of World In Action and Panorama? What was Helen Reddy really doing with that radio? Are Spitting Image puppets scarier when not moving? Which loveable puppet alien did Ben mistake for a man who'd exploded and gone inside out? And why were we all so traumatised by ordinary everyday television continuity slides?! Find out all of this and more in Why Won't Boo?!

You can download the first part of Why Won't Boo?here, and the second part here. And if you like it, please spread the word. And don't have nightmares. Except about The Dot Stop from Playbus, mwuh ha ha ha ha haaaaaaaaaaa...

This feature on the three memorable yet often overlooked serials written for the BBC schools programme Look And Read by Richard Carpenter - more widely recognised as the creator of Robin Of Sherwood, Catweazle and The Ghosts Of Motley Hall - was originally written for the television review site Off The Telly. Later, with a bit of reworking, it found its way into a special issue of the fanzine This Way Up devoted to Richard Carpenter, which is well worth tracking down if you can find a copy as there was a lot of very good material in it. This was basically written as a reaction to the manner in which 'genre' magazines would tend to dispense with Look And Read in little more than half a sentence when talking about his 'proper' shows; this was very much at odds with how fondly The Boy From Space in particular is remembered by those who actually watched it at school, or indeed chanced upon it as a bit of 'extra' sci-fi on a day off. You had to make your own entertainment in those days. Incidentally the title was intended to appear as Peep-Peep, Pandit And Papers, to reflect the technique used in Look And Read's animated interstitials, but nobody could ever find a way of making that work properly - including right now - so it always just looked a bit bland. Anyway, the piece itself is anything but bland, though I've had to trim it slightly to remove a couple of inaccuracies and a lot of waffle. Wordy would be proud.


What did Richard Carpenter once describe as “the most difficult thing I’ve ever written in my life”? His first ever television commission? Three series about a small cast limited to a single set? Trying to make The Adventures of Black Beauty in any way watchable?

No, it was The Boy from Space, a ten-part serial he penned for the long-running BBC Schools' programme Look And Read in 1971. Aimed at a primary school audience, Look And Read featured a combination of dramatised story segments, animated musical inserts and studio links with a presenter, and sought to reinforce reading and writing skills. A rare example of genuine 'entertainment' in education, the various Look And Read serials are inevitably fondly recalled by those who watched them at school, and many of the most well-remembered were written by Richard Carpenter.

Developing out of the similarly long-running Merry-Go-Round, Look And Read had made its debut in 1967 with the straightforward light-hearted crime caper Bob And Carol Look For Treasure. The somewhat grittier Len And The River Mob followed in 1968, which introduced the concept of the filmed drama segments being linked by one of the cast in character, in this instance George Layton as Len. Feeling that the programme needed to explore a fresh genre and direction, producer Claire Chovil then contacted a relatively new television writer to develop an idea for a science fiction-themed serial.

Previously an actor, Richard Carpenter had developed the idea for Catweazle, a comedy-drama about a medieval sorcerer who finds himself transported forward in time, in 1969. Quickly commissioned by London Weekend Television for broadcast the following year, Catweazle was an instant hit with viewers and critics alike, inspiring a best-selling tie-in novel and winning numerous industry awards. Impressed by his ability to relate advanced concepts to a younger audience through careful use of language, Chovil commissioned Carpenter to write a new serial limited to using, as he would later put it to TV Zone, "the first two hundred words of the English language, plus a few words like ‘telescope’ and ‘telephone’ and ‘television'". And unlike Catweazle, he couldn't make up his own new words and phrases to cover them either.


First transmitted in September 1971, The Boy From Space tells the story of Helen (Sylvestra Le Touzel) and Dan (Stephen Garlick), two astronimically-obsessed youngsters who come to the aid of a stranded alien boy who they nickname Peep-Peep after his garbled bleeping speech, and shield him from a sinister 'Thin Man' intent on extracting information from him. Although limited by its educative purpose and short episodic structure, The Boy From Space is more tense and enjoyable than might normally have been expected from a programme of this nature. Much of this is down to the skilful and economical direction by former BBC Radiophonic Workshop musician Maddalena Fagandini, though at its absolute foundation is Carpenter’s script, which managed to turn the small cast and equally limited number of locations to its advantage.

Although the BBC had nominally moved to colour broadcasting in 1970, some lower priority departments were still making programmes in black and white into the early seventies, and The Boy From Space was both taped and transmitted in monochrome; although the filmed segments were actually made in colour, with a view to later repeating them in 'movie' format. The serial was repeated up to the Autumn of 1973, after which the original tapes were erased. Little is known about the studio segments, other than that they were presented by actor Charles Collingwood and apparently from an observatory set, and all that remains of this original version are the standard Look And Read classroom workbook, featuring a simplified novelisation with illustrations and exercises based on the teaching segments, and an abridged version of the story soundtrack released by BBC Records And Tapes (RESR30). And the filmed inserts, of course, but more about them later.


First seen in Spring 1973, Joe And The Sheep Rustlers by Leonard Kingston was the first Look And Read serial to be made in colour, and took an entirely different direction yet again with its straightforward story of livestock pilfering. The following year, it was back to sci-fi as Richard Carpenter returned with Cloud Burst. Possibly inspired by the BBC's primetime 'sci-fact' serial Doomwatch, Cloud Burst brought the excitement thoroughly down to Earth with the tale of stolen plans for a 'Rain Gun' that could potentially eradicate drought and famine. Slightly less convincingly than their counterparts in The Boy From Space, youngsters Tim (Nigel Rathbone) and Jenny (Tina Heath) have an obsessive interest in atmospheric conditions, apparently on account of their father being a lock-keeper. This brings them into contact with scientist Ram Pandit (Renu Setna), who is developing the 'Rain Gun' in his laboratory; his twin brother Ravi is determined to steal his research and use it to make money rather than save lives, and what's more has a handy 'Gas Gun' at his disposal.

Unnervingly closer to a Cold War thriller than clean-cut childrens' adventure, and benefitting greatly from Carpenter's insistence that, with advancing technology in mind, Pandit's laboratory should have a 'home-made' feel to offset the computers looking outdated, Cloud Burst is a skilfully made serial with an unexpected 'lo-tech' twist at the climax. It also boasted an arresting opening sequence, with an ominious instrumental by the BBC Radiophonic Workshop's Roger Limb, complete with a perfectly-timed thunderclap, played out over time-lapse photography of blooming deserts. It was the first of many Look And Read serials to be re-edited in sound only for BBC Schools Radio, and to feature the celebrated 'darting eyes' opening animation, but it also brought with it a slightly more contentious innovation.


Incoming producer Sue Weeks was keen for Look And Read to introduce a regular puppet character that could interact with the human presenter, in much the same manner as other BBC Schools shows like Words And Pictures and You And Me. The result of this was Mr Watchword, or 'Wordy' as he was informally known - a huge orange electric typewriter print head with a face and arms and voiced by Charles Collingwood, who would smugly interject with know-all observations on how much better he was at using language than the rest of us 'Word-Watchers'. Wordy would remain with Look And Read until 1992, but was clearly a source of much irritation even at this early stage. The studio segments for Cloud Burst were presented by Richard Carpenter himself, in the postmodern guise of the story's writer, who would take great delight in pointing out to Wordy that he actually knew what would happen next.

Carpenter was the strictly off-screen writer of 1977's The King's Dragon, which kept up the postmodern pretence by featuring Kenneth Watson as Hasting Times editor Jack Dunbar, puzzling over how to paste up a story about the central archaeological mystery in the face of constant interruptions from Wordy. Indeed, there was a further experiment with encouraging the audience to produce their own classroom newsletter about the unfolding events, which was somewhat undermined by the relatively unspectacular nature of the serial itself.


Contrary to the sword and sorcery that the title might suggest, The King's Dragon is simply a historical artefact that has been stolen from a museum in a small Hastings village. Hot on the thieves' trail are Billy West (Sean Flanagan, also starring in Carpenter's The Ghosts Of Motley Hall at the time), a local youngster who has worked out their secret code for communicating via personal ads and newspaper headlines, and Ann Mills (Frankie Jordan), a Hastings Times reporter assigned to cover an archaeological dig. They soon find out that there are in fact two King's Dragons, and nothing about the theft is quite what it seems.

There is nothing wrong with The King's Dragon in itself - it's a taut escapade in the manner of Carpenter's more straightforward historical adventure serials such as Dick Turpin and Smuggler - but it had little to offer those who had thrilled to the decidedly atypical-for-the-classroom The Boy From Space and Cloud Burst. It inevitably came across as something of a comedown, not to mention a lot close to traditional classroom exercises, and - perhaps unfairly - it is widely regarded as the lesser of the three serials.


Unfortunately it was also Richard Carpenter's last new serial for Look And Read, although it did not actually mark his final contribution to the series. Following Leonard Kingston's Sky Hunter in 1978 - coincidentally featuring Catweazle star Geoffrey Bayldon amongst the cast - the production team were keen that their next project should be a cheaper book-balancing effort. The original filmed inserts for The Boy From Space were duly located, new animated inserts were commissioned, and studio dates were booked to tape Wordy and his technician Cosmo (Phil Cheney) aboard the space station Wordlab 1, which some may well have felt was the best place for them. However, it soon transpired that the film sequences required some restoration work and new editing, and also some new music and sound effects to bring them more in line with the current Look And Read house style. At a late stage of production, the decision was taken to film a brief new introductory sequence featuring Helen and Dan - played by the now adult Sylvestra Le Touzel and Stephen Garlick - returning to the observatory to reminisce; presumably, this was added to excuse some of the by then outmoded fashions and hairstyles on display. Needless to say, this did not exactly result in as much book-balancing as had been hoped for.

Nonetheless, this unexpected expense was arguably worth it for the BBC Radiophonic Workshop's Paddy Kingsland's musical contributions alone. Replacing the original contributions by his colleague John Baker, Kingsland added a more suitably post-Vangelis/Jean Michel Jarre style of 'space' music to the existing films and the new segments, and most memorably to the opening and closing titles. To the accompaniment of swooping portamento synth lines, Look And Read's regular singer Derek Griffiths plaintively asks "Out there in space, shall we find friends? Is there a place where the Universe Ends? When shall we find it? Never. Never. Space goes on forever...", echoing into the infinite distance as the closing credits roll. Lonely, haunting and dispassionate, it's likely that this song is what is most well remembered about The Boy From Space.


Although Cloud Burst and The King's Dragon have yet to put in an appearance, The Boy From Space is now available on DVD, complete with chapter points that make it easy to skip past the studio links when you've had quite enough of them. Space may well indeed go on forever, but thankfully Wordy does not have to.


There will be more about the BBC Records And Tapes LP version of The Boy From Space soon. In the meantime, you can get Top Of The Box - The Complete Guide To BBC Records And Tapes Singles from here.

If there was one thing that TV Times liked to promote even more than the current hot stars of ITV, it was TV Times itself. A bit like one of those annoying people that keeps on plugging their own book full of features about old ITV shows done in pastiche TV Times page layouts, they never wasted a single opportunity to put themselves front and centre, whether it was via a feature, a competition, a promotion, an interview, or Bruce Forsyth in a comedy oversized chef's hat making something that spelt out the name of the magazine out of 'leftovers'.

Most of the time, those bold red letters were seen as branding enough in themselves. Sometimes, however, they felt the need to try and create a TV Times'mascot'. And to keep on pushing and pushing and pushing them, in the face of overwhelming public indifference. Here are just a few of their spectacularly unsuccessful yet spectacularly sustained attempts at creating a loveable cuddly public face of knowing what day and time No Hiding Place was on...


Bizarrely kitted out in a manner that suggested he was 'flashing' passers-by with Echo Four Two transmission dates, cylindrical annoyance 'The TV Times Man' was an early attempt at encouraging brand identification, popping up between adverts to remind you that a handy magazine was available to tell you when the programme you were already watching was on. Needless to say, this was way too involved a concept for the average Criss Cross Quiz afficionado to grasp, and so TV Times opted instead to concentrate on dazzling impressionable younger viewers with zany character fun.


He isn't very big. He gets into some awful scrapes at times. He'll be on your television screens very soon. And he bears an uncanny resemblance to Rage Against The Machine frontman Zack De La Rocha. Meet Tivvy, the loveable novelty gonk-derived TV Times mascot, introduced to readers and indeed viewers here with a frankly preposterous neo-Geppetto account of his purported origins. Tivvy was the star of his own unbilled 'Extra TV' animated interstitials, but his primary deployment was within the pages of his home magazine. And didn't we know it.


Tivvy began his ascent to global indifference in a calculatedly understated manner, limiting his appearances to comic strips based around laboured and overtold postmodern gags, accompanied by incessant cameos within the TV Times'Junior' pages. This included a 'Make A Tivvy' competition, where the prizes seem to have been awarded to contestants who elected to A Frank The Postman Playing Guitar and A Tharil From Doctor Who And The Warriors' Gate instead. Notice, however, that at no point is there any indication that anyone actually liked him. But that was not going to stop the Tivvy bandwagon from rolling relentlessly on...


Determined to perpetuate the illusion that Tivvy was more popular and well-liked than he actually was, the editors took to shoving him in front of the big ITV stars wherever possible. Above you can see him being jabbed with Tickling Sticks by Ken Dodd and a somewhat less than enthusiastic-looking 'Diddy' David Hamilton, ostensibly to promote Doddy's Music Box, a short-lived point-evading rival to Top Of The Pops which, as you can find out here, was scheduled directly against Doctor Who for a while; we can only hope that the inter-song gags on offer were better than Doddy's inevitable witticism about looking a bit like Tivvy. The hazily-defined 'Tivvy Club' page regularly roped in small-screen celebs for a spot of tenuous cross-promotion, including this photograph of him posing with a suitably disdainful-looking Scott Tracy and Lady Penelope beneath a self-evidently bollocks headline about how he was 'nearly''go'. And finally, it's time for the ultimate in early sixties celebrity endorsements, as Tivvy takes to the stage to join John, Paul, George and Ringo for a quick rendition of Bombtrack.


Needless to say, it wasn't long before you could take your pick from a slew of Tivvy-inspired merchandise that nobody either wanted or needed. Replica Tivvys in, erm, 'fur and leather', and a worrying variety of sizes. A Christmas Special packed with page upon page of stiltedly-delivered illustrated zingers. And finally some genuine bona fide 9 Carat Tivvy Bling, taking its unlikely place alongside the Rovers Return crest from Coronation Street and, erm, 'Box 13' from Take Your Pick. The Underwater Goat With Snorkel And Flippers charm had unfortunately already sold out.


The inevitable then followed, and 'Tivvy' was ushered into a recording studio to commit his very own tepid 'break'-free marching tune to disc. Backed by 'The Clubmates', a bunch of ardent Tivvy cheerleaders who conveniently all happened to come from Hurst Primary School in Twyford, the resultant single featured both the dreary Tivvy's Tune and Tivvy's World Of Colour, which outlined how nice it was to live in in so-called 'Tivvyland' where everything was bright and vibrantly shaded, which must have felt like a slap in the face to all those viewers who were used to seeing him in black and white. His gameplan for this single was, apparently, to get into the Top Twenty, 'win' a 'golden disc', and have lots of girls scream at him while topping the bill at The Palladium. Perhaps if they'd employed the services of someone with more knowledge of what pop music actually involved, this may have stood more chance of occurring. Possibly.


Eventually, the backlash came. Viewers sent letters to TV Times in their single figures, pouring scorn on the over-exposed magazine-plugging soft furnishing, and the 'nut-cases' who liked him. This prompted one such 'nut-case' to write in and say that it was wrong to attack Tivvy because they had a toy of him or something, although there is precious little evidence to support the argument about needing a 'sense of humour' to appreciate him. Meanwhile, you do have to feel for the University Challenge team who wrote a plaintive 'where were the scouts?'-style missive to bemoan the loss of their lucky stuffed mascot, only to find themselves joined against their will by a massive life-size Tivvy. This may have been the day that Bamber Gascoine finally ran out of chummy puns and snapped.

Eventually, TV Times threw in the novelty tie-in official Tivvy towel, and were so keen to distance themselves from his dreary antics that they allowed precious advertising space to be given over to BBC2's inaugural mascot, Hullaballo and/or Custard. Of course, what the kids really wanted back in the sixties was Beatles, Beatles and more Beatles. And if you join us for the next part, that's exactly what they'll get. And more.

As everybody in the early sixties knew only too well, there was one group of celebrities whose star status eclipsed all others. Who inspired a 'mania' so huge and all-enveloping that it consigned their contemporaries to pop cultural historical footnote status. Whose vocalisations and distinctive appearance were emulated in playgrounds across the nation and eventually across the world. Whose artistic endeavours changed highbrow and lowbrow culture so fundamentally that their collective name became an actual word in its own right. And who were so popular and successful that they knocked Bruce Forsyth making something out of 'leftovers' into a cocked novelty oversized chef's hat.

But unfortunately for TV Times, The Daleks were on the BBC, and so they had to settle for giving relentless coverage to The Beatles instead. Here are just a few of their spurious attempts to pad out their pages with tenuous excuses for printing a photo of one or more of the Fab Four, to the delight of those who just couldn't get enough of John, 'Dinners', George and Ringo. Even if they had to wade through acres of features on the holiday plans of the cast of Ghost Squad: G.S.5 to get there...


Conveniently for magazine editors, the fact that there were four Beatles allowed them to spin any given feature out across a month's worth of issues, even if this resulted in each 'part' amounting to little more than two gigantic photos and three words. From the confusingly titled Hancock-evoking TV Times series 'Reada Beatla Week', here's the entry on 'Our' Ringo, in which the other three indulge in some trademark surreal dialogue about how he used to play the bins on the drums or something and take delivery of, quote, "a bottle of whisky and a crate of 'coke'". Note also the entirely coincidental and not at all stage-managed interruption from fellow Brian Epstein protege Billy J. Kramer. Anyway, join them again next week for another Fab Four profile and a special 'Beatle Bonus'. Hope it's Carnival Of Light!


Ringo Starr was lucky enough to have a name that lent itself punningly to pretty much every magazine feature imaginable. Here he is making an appearance in - boom boom - TV Times celebrity horoscope box-out 'Star Destiny', in which they correctly and uncannily deduce a dazzling array of facts that everybody on the entire surface of the planet already knew. Even their one attempt at predicting the future wouldn't impress anyone bar gullible buffoons; it was hardly a daring leap of faith to suggest that The Beatles might release a successful new album 'early' the following year. Meanwhile, not a single mention of The Concert For Bangladesh, Ognir Rrats or FROM THE EIGHTY FOURTH OF OCTEMBER, NO MORE AUTOGRAPHS.


Earlier on in their career, The Beatles were often to be found larking around with full-time comedians on television variety shows, and here TV Times''slice of life'-friendly 'lighter side of showbiz' reporter Dave Lanning paired them up with hot ITV stars (though they had to go to the BBC to become properly famous) Etic and Ern for a meeting of humorous minds that he presumably hoped would be dripping with rib-tickling comedy gold. Sadly it was nothing of the sort, though it's interesting to see Ernie Wise making an innocent gag that would doubtless turn him into the target of ferocious Twitter outrage if made today. Unless he said it when they went to Thames at the end, of course. Anyway, did The Beatles have their very own board game? Erm, yes they did, but that's by the by. Listen to Looks Unfamiliar. Thanks.


Essentially a Ready Steady Go! that you could take home to meet your parents, weekly family-friendly pop extravaganza Thank Your Lucky Stars was once one of ITV's biggest shows, and considered so pivotal and essential to the average beat combo's chances of pop success that its subsequent forgotten status is little short of bewildering. Certainly The Beatles continually fell over themselves in an apparent attempt to make as many appearances on it as possible. That, however, is an inexcusably flimsy pretext for this competition, in which lucky readers could win their very own Thank Your Lucky Stars t-shirt if they could think up a funny enough caption for this photo of a crazed teenage girl trying to grab the disembodied lower half of a 'Beatle Suit' while George attempts to make his escape by vaulting over a giant shortbread biscuit. Which, you can't help but notice, is even larger than the actual competition itself.


Occasionally, even TV Times would have to run a slightly more substantial feature on The Beatles, and on this occasion we get their long-serving press man Derek Taylor dishing the dirt on why John stole his trousers, explaining why they hate 'mayors', and finally revealing the real reason why Ringo collapsed just before a massive world tour. Probably got asked for too many autographs.


One of THE faces of Swinging London, by the mid-sixties Jane Asher had caused a sensation in The Masque Of Red Death and Alfie, become a major shareholder in Private Eye, and thoroughly immersed herself in the Capital's avant-garde art set, introducing her Beatle paramour to pop-artists, electronic musicians and classical ensembles that would have a profound effect on his songwriting and his band's recordings. To TV Times, however, she was simply 'Paul's Girl'. Not that we should really have expected anything better of them, mind...


As so often happened, the Great Beatle Debate soon spilled over into the TV Times letters page. Above you can see a staunch Beatlesceptic foaming at the mouth and demanding his Light Entertainment 'sovereignty' back, fundamentally misunderstanding the point that the 'Hit Parade' is compiled from statistics based on which records are selling in the largest quantities to the most people in the process. There's also some desperately unfunny satire at the expense of, apparently, electricity. It won't be doing THAT again! Next up is a bewildering pro-Beatle missive from someone who, it seems, was enjoying one of their performances so much that it made her keep knitting. And finally, one of those perplexing 'I'm funny, me!' efforts that you can still find in TV listings magazine letters pages to this day, from someone who assumes that combining reference comedy with a joke that nobody in the universe including them actually understands makes them into a comic genius. You will find absolutely none of that around here, of course. Not before The Grimleys is on, anyway.


And finally, here's a special Beatle Quiz, with twenty five fiendishly difficult questions to test your knowledge of the Fab Four. The answer to number seventeen is 'Warrien'.


Yeah, you can't fool us, Ian Butlin. That hottie with the suspiciously-angled pout won't actually BE at any of your holiday camps, will she? No matter how much your 'free coloured brochure' might try to suggest otherwise. And where in the name of sanity is Mosney? Anyway, join us again next time, when we'll be taking a look at some of the ways in which TV Times attempted to expand its readership by reaching out to our furry friends...

Well At Least It's Free, a book collecting some of my features on archive TV and pop music, is now available on the Amazon Kindle Store. Doctor Who fans may be interested to know that it includes huge features on the sixties historical stories, The Underwater Menace, The Daleks' Master Plan and the entire Russell T. Davies era. Everyone else may be interested to know that it also includes huge features on Lost, Heroes, The Flashing Blade, Primeval, Ashes To Ashes, The Secret Service, Bagpuss, Watch With Mother, Zokko! and lots more besides, including a rundown of all of the BBC's sci-fi/supernatural-themed children's series from The Phoenix And The Carpet to The Watch House, and what would have been the booklet for the cancelled DVD release of Hardwicke House. There's also some handy tips on what to do if you suddenly find yourself surrounded by a marching band in Quality Street getup.

You can get Well At Least It's Free from the Kindle Store by clicking here. Or, if you'd rather, the paperback is still available from here.

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 - Series Five - Series Six


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 mutually convenient 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.

Fun At One, the story of comedy at BBC Radio 1, is now available on the Kindle Store. It's a complete history of all things amusing on the BBC's pop station, all the way from Kenny Everett messing about with tape loops in the late sixties, right up to Dan And Phil and their 'Internet Takeover'. And along the way there's plenty on Chris Morris, The Mary Whitehouse Experience, Lee & Herring, Viv Stanshall, Collins & Maconie, Armando Iannucci, Vic Reeves, Victor Lewis-Smith, John Shuttleworth, Mark & Lard and many, many more. Yes, even Smashie & Nicey.

What's more, it's been very very slightly updated, with a show I missed the first time around, and even more details of commercial releases of Radio 1 comedy. Yes, Hector Spankfield is at large again...

You can get Fun At One from the Kindle Store by clicking here. Or, if you'd rather get the paperback to sit alongside The Mary Whitehouse Experience Encyclopedia and Hmmm Baby, then you can find that here.

If you’re a fan of Gene Roddenberry’s Dreamgate DSV - and there must be some out there, as indeed there must be such a series, probably - it’s no good moaning about the gap between ‘seasons’. If your withdrawal symptoms are really that bad, you’ve always got the spinoff series, the DVDs, the novels, the comics, the ‘webisodes’, the soundtrack albums, the coffee mugs, the dinner jackets and the submarine to fall back on. And if you’re really really stuck, you can start your own online fan forum and argue until you’re blue in the face with headcases who understand neither the programme nor how to formulate proper sentences.

But it wasn’t always like this. Not all that long ago, there was no Torchwood, no Heroes 360, and no Play Nick Cutter’s ‘Spot The Anomaly Game’ On Your Mobile Phone. Mainly because there was no Primeval, Heroes or revived Doctor Who, but that’s by the by. Before the home entertainment revolution, if your favourite show was off the air you just had to wait for it to come back. And wait. And, if it was The Tripods, wait some more.

If you were extremely lucky, there might be a handful of awkwardly-scheduled repeats, and if you were very rich you might even be able to buy two and a half scrappily-edited episodes on video, but mostly it was a case of trying to find something to fill the seemingly-endless gap. Which is where other completely unrelated examples of science fiction came in. No matter how much you may have been missing Kerr Avon and company, there was always something else around on television or radio (or indeed the cinema) if you looked hard enough. A stroll around your local library would reveal all manner of novels with lurid yet still laughable covers by writers with exotically American-sounding names and superfluous middle initials. And in a real emergency, there were always those books about Black Holes and Peter Davison’s Book Of Alien Planets that well-meaning relatives had bought you on being told you liked ‘space’.

Much of this Substitute Sci-Fi - and quite rightly in most cases - has been long since forgotten about. Everyone will still have their own fondly-remembered examples, though, and there’s a small amount that deserves to be remembered as more than simply what you did to while away time during that pesky eighteen-month Doctor Who‘hiatus’. Maybe some of it’s even due a revival, possibly even with ‘webisodes’ of its own. Here are a couple of shows, books, films and, erm, card games that this particular writer would like to see dusted down and given some long overdue appreciation.


The Stainless Steel Rat


Before Red Dwarf, before Terry Pratchett, even before Douglas Adams, there was only one name in sci-fi/comedy crossover - Harry Harrison. His wickedly satirical tales of futuristic conman James Bolivar diGriz, the ‘Stainless Steel Rat’ of the title who commits his crimes in the name of entertainment, began with the first novel in 1961 and had clocked up an impressive ten instalments (not to mention a board game, a strip in 2000AD, and a totally unhinged parody of ‘Choose Your Own Adventure’ books) by the time of the most recent to date in 1999. Along the way he’s got married, overthrown a dictator, joined a circus, and been coerced into countless time-travelling alien-battling missions by his law enforcing arch-enemies The Special Corps. If you’re thinking all of this sounds familiar then you’re entirely right - The Rat, whether knowingly or not, is the template for all of the science fiction anti-heroes that have become so beloved of audiences since, from Zaphod Beeblebrox to Captain Jack Harkness and beyond (there’s even a suspicious amount of a certain Doctor detectable in there too). At one time libraries were absolutely heaving with the books, which were eagerly borrowed by withdrawal symptom-suffering fans once they were finally allowed in the ‘adult section’, and although their following has since dwindled and some aren’t currently in print, they sold in massive numbers at the time and aren’t hard to find second hand. Harry Harrison’s written countless other books worth checking out too, including the closely-related (if slightly more straight-faced) Deathworld novels, the military-baiting Bill The Galactic Hero series, overpopulation thriller Make Room! Make Room! (later loosely adapted for the big screen as Soylent Green), and the utterly absurd parodies of a certain secret agent show, The Man From P.I.G. and The Man From R.O.B.O.T..


Earthsearch


You’re probably racking your brains in total bafflement at the name, but time was when Radio 4’s enduring sci-fi serial Earthsearch was a very big deal indeed. So much so in fact that its fame spread beyond radio to encompass spinoff novels, cassette releases, a stage play and a frankly unlistenable sound effects album (though that Inner Airlock Door Open And Close is a real groover). James Follett’s tales of the crew of the starship Challenger and their quest to discover planets suitable for human colonisation have a suitably bleak and isolated atmosphere and were very much in the ‘intellectual sci-fi’ style that the BBC in particular favoured in the late seventies/early eighties (think Blake’s 7, only with slightly more gripping storylines), and while they may seem a little wordy for modern tastes and the crew may despite their non-visual nature be clearly over-bearded, like the contemporaneous Radio 4 adaptation of The Lord Of The Rings - in which many of the Earthsearch cast also appeared - they really did connect with their target audience at the time and are fondly remembered by a surprisingly large contingent of devotees. Follett also wrote a number of other similar serials for Radio 4 including Rules Of Asylum, Light Of A Thousand Suns and The Destruction Factor, and he wasn’t the only one - the station produced many other sci-fi serials and plays around this time, most notably Aliens In The Mind, written by legendary Doctor Who scribe Robert Holmes and starring the impressive pairing of Vincent Price and Peter Cushing.


Jeff Wayne’s Musical Version Of The War Of The Worlds 


It started as a jingle composed for a Lego commercial, and ended up as one of the biggest-selling albums of the seventies. For all its apparent mass-marketed populism, Jeff Wayne’s Musical Version Of War Of The Worlds is effectively the then-recent and decidedly non-commercial trend towards concept albums and symphonic ‘soundscapes’ given a quick polish and taken to its most slickly commercial extreme; a kind of evil twin to Tubular Bells if you want to be poetic about it. And yet, despite all this, there was still something about the sonic retelling of HG Wells’ novel, ‘starring’ the likes of Richard Burton, David Essex, Phil Lynott and Julie Covington, that drew sci-fi starved genre devotees towards it long after it had finished its dominance of the album charts. Viewed as a whole it’s clearly a load of dreary prog-rock nonsense, but time has been kinder to this than it has been to most dreary prog-rock nonsense, and there’s an amused postmodern thrill to be had from the overambition of the project, not to mention a genuine musical thrill from some of the more inspired orchestral passages. Some may rightly point towards the superior Poe/Asimov-adapting efforts by The Alan Parsons project from which the whole idea was ‘borrowed’, and as such albums go this writer may infinitely prefer the more quirky and melodic tongue-in-cheek eco-thriller Consequences by Godley And Creme and Peter Cook, but Jeff Wayne’s moneyspinning take on the whole strange phenomenon is worth another listen. Well, one, maybe.


Low Budget Sci-Fi Films On Television 


These days any old sci-fi film that comes along has one eye on the BAFTAs whilst amping up those scary-noise-and-discordant-orchestra-and-high-speed-jerky-camera-action-oh-look-it’s-gone-black-and-white bits, but time was when the entire genre could be broken up into two subdivisions - Star Wars and Everything Else. And the natural habitat for Everything Else was, of course, on television on a Bank Holiday afternoon. How about the endearingly ramshackle Battle Beyond The Stars, famously shot in five weeks on sets where the paint was still drying yet somehow as enjoyable as enjoyable hokum gets? Then there’s Hammer’s lone Julie Driscoll-soundtracked excursion into science fiction Moon Zero Two, Gerry and Sylvia Anderson’s live action-debuting dry run for UFO that was Doppelganger, Disney’s uncharacteristically downbeat killer robot-festooned The Black Hole, Ralph Bashki’s oddball post-apocalyptic animated comedy Wizards, the influential-for-about-three-minutes Tron, The Last Starfighter, Flight Of The Navigator, Hangar 18, The Philadelphia Experiment, *batteries not included, Short Circuit, The Adventures Of Buckaroo Banzai Across The 8th Dimension, that one about the first passenger flight to the moon, that other one about the alien that helps the high school nerd bag a date with the head cheerleader, and so many more that may not even have had names in the first place. Not one masterpiece between them, and yet they were always such a welcome sight when found sandwiched between some ice-dancing spectacular and that Guinness Book Of Records thing that David Frost used to do. You don’t see them much any more, sadly, but maybe that’s because they’re probably all available on DVD in those ‘All Films £1.99’ bins. And we haven’t even got started on those illicitly-sneaked from the video shop ‘adult’ treats like Inseminoid and My Science Project...


V


Keeping along roughly the same lines, how many people out there went to great lengths to sneakily record this briefly notorious American big-budget miniseries (or, more daringly still, surreptitiously stayed up to watch it on the black and white portable) in the knowledge that they would never ‘officially’ be allowed to watch it? As a basic story V was one of the most clichéd in the sci-fi book, little more than a not particularly major spin on the time-honoured Evil Aliens Disguised As Kindly Humans Invade By Stealth And Crusading Journalist Uncovers The Truth format. V, however, had serious money and a crack team of scriptwriters behind it - not to mention short-lived lust icon Jane Badler as the primary antagonist - and did everything with such flair and panache that it was hard not to become hooked. Surprisingly for an American TV series of its vintage, there was a good deal of subtle and genuinely funny humour too, not least the notorious scene in which one of the carnivorous invaders scoffed a lab rat. V was a big enough hit to give rise to a second miniseries, V: The Final Battle, which proved to be misleadingly titled as it was followed in turn by a full-blown weekly series, which surprisingly fell flat on its face and was never recomissioned. The whole lot is now available on DVD, which you can pretend to be watching illegally in the middle of the night if you want to recreate the full original viewing thrill.


The Boy From Space


One of those perennial ‘what was the name of that one where...?’ TV shows, this filmed serial about a stranded alien on Earth was shown (and indeed endlessly repeated) as part of the long-running BBC Schools language development-themed show Look And Read. And although trying to follow it involved what seemed like hours of sitting through smug letter-embossed orange puppet presenter Wordy and his even more tedious still human helper droning on in their space station about what happens when you place vowels next to each other, it was well worth the effort because this was scary and atmospheric stuff, with the hapless garbled bleep-spouting spaceboy unable to communicate to his young human discoverers that he was being relentlessly pursued by a sinister ‘Thin Man’ (played by regular Doctor Who guest actor John Woodnutt). Until they worked out a way of deciphering... well, that would be spoiling it, although Wordy was sufficiently impressed by the method to refuse to shut up about it for what seemed like a century. The Boy From Space was written by Richard Carpenter of Catweazle, Robin Of Sherwood and The Ghosts Of Motley Hall fame, and is all the more impressive given that he was asked specifically to use no more than a couple of hundred basic words throughout the ten-part serial.


Captain Zep - Space Detective


While its close associate The Adventure Game is rightly celebrated, this other post-Douglas Adams Children’s BBC sci-fi game show seems to have sadly been forgotten about. Every week Captain Zep – “a man of steel, a man of nerve” as the bafflingly New Wave-tinged theme song had it - would relate one of his outer space case histories to a studio audience of youngsters from the ‘SOLVE Academy’ via a series of crudely animated watercolour renditions of alien beings and alien planets, stopping the narrative at a key point to ask if the audience could solve the case from the clues already given (“So who was the saboteur? Why was Grazarax in the Munitions Bay?”). The studio audience got to write their answers down on those ‘Magic Writing Slate’ things that wiped clean when you ran the plastic bar along them, but more excitingly you, the viewer at home, got to write in with your answer, and if you were one of the fifty lucky winners picked out from the proverbial ‘hat’, you’d receive a SOLVE badge all of your own. As dull as that may sound on the printed page, this was compulsive viewing at one point. A special mention here for the unnervingly uniform futuristic fashions (slicked-back hair and orange and yellow jumpsuits with unwieldy collars seemed to be the order of the day here), and for the fact that the actor playing the Captain changed between series, leading to a heated exchange of opinions on the BBC’s junior viewer correspondence show Take Two.


Starships


So you’ve read all your books, there’s nothing on the radio or TV, and you couldn’t possibly bear to hear Justin Hayward bleating “the chances of anything coming from Mars” one more time... how about a nice game of cards? Union Jack-logoed game-makers Waddington’s have a not entirely undeserved reputation for cheapskate ‘second division’ efforts, not least on account of their apparently fondness for ‘worthy’ (i.e. dull) dice-based Ludo variants and the dreaded inevitable Christmas present The Games Compendium, but sometimes they managed to pull something spectacular out of the Scrabble bag and this insanely addictive Game Of Outer Space was a prime example. The premise was ridiculously simple - draw random cards from a pile to assemble a very long Space Cruiser out of individual parts. But throw in a derived element of Top Trumps which allowed those in possession of the correct armaments to pilfer vital components from other players’ vehicles, and you end up with something almost disproportionately fun, fast-moving and competitive. Complete and un-scuffed copies are in high demand on certain auction sites, and it’s also worth remarking on how several of the illustrated cards had a strangely photographic quality to them. Did someone out there build their own ‘Starship’ for real??


Star Trader


If you were feeling a bit more ‘space age’ than a mere card game could cater for, you could always leave Starships in its box and have a go at this futuristic strategy game for the 48k ZX Spectrum. The primary aim of Star Trader was to make as much money as possible whilst zooming between planets to barter with large-headed Portland Bill lookalikes, dodging intergalactic pirates along the way, and making the difficult choice between a continental breakfast and the more expensive and score-depleting Full English. Slow and reliant on mathematical skills it may have been, but it boasted one crucial element that most other early home computer strategy games lacked; it did actually involve some degree of interaction with the game player, unlike the likes of Football Manager and The Great Space Race which basically required you to sit back and watch them playing themselves. It is perhaps testament to the former high status of this long forgotten game that manufacturers Bug-Byte Software still have their own star on hometown Liverpool’s long-abandoned ‘Walk of Fame’.


Redubbed Japanese Anime


One of the forgotten facets of the pre-Home Video age was that there was literally no market for some sorts of films and shows. Never was this truer than in the case of cult Japanese animation; though massively popular and moneyspinningly merchandised in its homeland, and indeed often raved about in genre magazines over here, there was no real viable outlet for it and so it largely went unseen. That is, until, some enterprising Americans got their hands on certain long-running TV series and chopped and changed them around to make them more suited to the sensitivities of English-speaking audiences. Thus it was that Science Ninja Team Gatchaman, shorn of all references to transvestism, schizophrenia and guards lacerated by flying metal birds, and with two much-derided comedy robots inserted in their place and mental space-age disco music bolted on, became the phenomenally popular Battle Of The Planets. With their curiosity aroused by this rearranged glimpse of an exciting world of entertainment they knew nothing about, said audiences also took with great enthusiasm to Star Fleet (or Bomber-X in old, erm, yen), and Ulysses 31 (Ulysses 31, believe it or not) amongst others. Nowadays, with the shelves of the average high street music store positively heaving with Manga films about someone going ‘a-a-aaaa’ when a bird’s eye glints or something, you can get the original versions with handy subtitles, but when it comes down to it we all initially fell in love with the mangled versions and don’t you forget it. And anyway, G-Force aren’t half as much fun without 7-Zark-7 and 1-Rover-1.


This is an extract from Well At Least It's Free, a collection of some of my writing on Cult and Archive TV, including features on Doctor Who, The Secret Service, Hardwicke House, Tales From Europe, Trumpton and many more. You can get it in paperback here or from the Kindle Store here.