By late 1991, with their stint on Radio 4's weekly topical satire show Week Ending thankfully now behind them, Stewart Lee and Richard Herring were in considerable demand as writers. Significantly, December had seen the launch of The End Of The Road Show, a sketch comedy show for Radio 4 which - barring some additional material from Armando Iannucci - they had almost entirely written.

Billed as “a four-part comedy series from Radio 4’s student roadshows”, the series poked fun at the contrasting approaches of BBC Radio 1 and Radio 4, combining the boisterous 'Roadshow' traditions of the former with the more formal and less frivolous tone of the latter. The sketch material, performed by Rebecca Front, Tony Hawks, Nick Hancock and Neil Mullarkey, was generally good rather than great, but at the same time it provided an insight into the rapid development of Lee and Herring’s comedy style; indeed, many of the later staples of their act - such as Herring’s insistence on introducing himself in a strange manner - have their roots in The End Of The Road Show. Most interesting of all in retrospect, however, is the sheer irony of the central joke; Radio 4 would soon make some surprisingly successful attempts at aligning its comedy output with that of Radio 1, and Lee and Herring were responsible for perhaps the most successful of all these shows.

In July 1991, Lee and Herring had written and recorded a pilot show for Radio 4 under the title Lionel Nimrod’s Spooky World Of…, which parodied a recent trend for television programmes fixated with the paranormal and the unexplained. Neither felt that the pilot was a tremendous success, not least because Radio 4 insisted that they should present the show not as themselves but in the guise of 'popular Northern youth TV celebrity' Barry Crustings and science writer Francis Sousa, although producer Sarah Smith was sufficiently convinced of its potential to threaten to resign in protest when Radio 4 initially suggested that they would not commission a full series.


Smith’s belief in the show was strong enough to persuade Radio 4 to record a second pilot, and Lee and Herring took full advantage of the opportunity to make changes to the style and format. Recorded nearly a year after the first pilot, what would become the first edition of Lionel Nimrod’s Inexplicable World saw the duo finally allowed to perform as themselves. This brought immediate and noticeable benefits; they sounded more comfortable when performing the material, and the natural conflict between their exaggerated stage personas (Lee the cynical and pessimistic realist; Herring the cheerfully naïve and immature idiot) infused the comedy with a believable edge, embodying the eternal struggle between science and nature as a somewhat more petty struggle between two individuals with equally ridiculous perspectives on the subject (“we must not question what we do not understand”– “but that’s the whole point of this programme”). This second pilot was adjudged to be strong enough to warrant a full six episode series, which was transmitted by Radio 4 between 8th October and 12th November 1992.

Each edition of Lionel Nimrod’s Inexplicable World was introduced by none other than Lionel Nimrod himself, as portrayed by none other than Tom Baker. A washed-up veteran sci-fi star best known as “inventor of the Stellar Laser Ray Gun Toy, and Mackay off of ABC-TV’s Star Ark”, Nimrod was a remarkable comic creation whose fictitious curriculum vitae closely echoed those of certain real life former sci-fi stars who had been reduced to trading on their diminishing fame. A bitter and deluded washed-up 'proper' actor, Nimrod’s reminiscences of filming special effects extravaganza The Fantastic Odyssey, the seventh Star Ark movie The Search For Mackay and Spalanski’s fifteen hour epic Lancelot And Guinevere (witness to a sordid incident in which Nimrod and Spalanski joined a coven of teenage witches as 'research', ruining their careers and preventing them from ever returning to Wales), attempts to give some semblance of prestige to his recent recreations of the voyages of minor cartographers for Channel 4, reverential recollections of mysterious instructions and commandments that had been left to him by Star Ark creator Phillip Lamarr (most of which seemed to involve nothing more than ensuring that Nimrod was as far away from him as possible at all times), rueful condemnation of the youthful folly that led him to record his pop LP Lionel Nimrod’s Songs From Space and bold proclamations on man’s attempts to comprehend concepts that he cannot possibly explain (from the human subconscious to 'an elf ') were so close an evocation of the actual demeanour of such cult figures that a less knowledgeable listener could easily have mistaken him for the genuine article.

Nimrod’s invitations to “come with me now, into the swirling mists of human inadequacy” led into Lee and Herring’s own dissections of such concepts as Good And Evil, The Human Mind and Love, all examined with a mixture of traditional mythology and that which has been added around them by feature films and television. The biblical and scientific accounts of evolution were weighed against Planet Of The Apes, the route to hell in Dante’s Inferno was compared with the route to heaven (“a sort of lift”) in the BBC childrens’ sitcom Rentaghost, Nostradamus took part in a game show with that equally unsuccessful visionary, television weatherman Ian Macaskill, and HG Wells’ predictions of Things To Come were shown to have been let down by his vision of a triangular video recorder.

Other subjects of discussion included people with telekinetic powers who will only use their abilities to render cutlery useless, Martin Luther King’s other dream about a giant ant (which failed to inspire the sixties civil rights movement to quite the same extent), the proverb that “love is not only blind, but also is deaf and has no sense of touch and is stupid” in the case of attractive young women who go out with unattractive old millionaires, Horseman of The Apocalypse Pestilence’s fill-in job as a milkman, the Oracle of Rome and its close rival the Ceefax of Athens, the sinister reality behind graffiti proclaiming 'York City Are Magic', the subsequent career moved of the Naked Man and Woman seen in generations of school biology textbooks, the struggle between the human manifestations of good (the Cubs, who spend their days doing good turns and advising developing world nations on crop rotation) and evil (the scouts, who exist simply to drink cider and give Chinese burns), and elves that steal one of each pair of Ben Elton’s socks from a laundrette.


There were also plenty of jibes at the expense of Week Ending, including the revelation that the show is regarded as high surrealist art in the furthest reaches of the universe, and that if an infinite number of monkeys were given an infinite number of typewriters, they would only avoid being mistaken for one of the programme’s writers meetings by virtue of having less bodily hair and not smelling quite as much. Fascinating scientific facts detailed during the course of the series included the first successful human cloning (by Robert Smith, lead vocalist of The Cure, who managed to make hundreds of exact replicas of himself during the eighties), what would result if all of the entrails in a human body were laid end to end (a jail sentence), and the origins of the phrase “you are what you eat” in the unfortunate tale of revolutionary leader Garibaldi.

Boasting that “we have nothing to fear but fear itself… and monsters”, Lee and Herring’s love of ridiculing traditional tales and revered quotes from the likes of Oscar Wilde and George Bernard Shaw, ability to recognise why certain public figures and cultural items - such as the Sinclair ZX81 and American actor Greg Evigan - are inherently amusing, affectionate mockery of popular comic devices (“I didn’t expect the Spanish Inquisition”– “well you should have done, it’s the seventeenth century and they’re torturing everyone”) and simple odd juxtapositions of words (“Ian Pterodactyl was here”) made for a hugely enjoyable show that succeeded in treating the subject matter with the irreverence it deserved after so many years of earnest televisual 'study'.

The supporting roles in Lionel Nimrod's Inexplicable World were played by Lee and Herring’s former On The Hour colleagues Rebecca Front and Armando Iannucci. Both were perfectly suited to the show, and Iannucci’s performances in particular were a revelation to audiences that had previously only known him as a producer, appearing in the guise of such unlikely characters as De Montfort University’s Professor of Urine (who tells the future through the colour of the liquid – orange, for example, indicates that the subject has been drinking too much Irn Bru and will consume slightly less in future), and organist Peter Fenn, whose regular 'Believe It Or Not Spot' related bizarre statistics to the accompaniment of a selection of Easy Listening classics.


The final show in the first series, supposedly broadcast live from the ship featured in the seventies television sitcom The Love Boat, examined the mysteries of love and romance. In between charting what became of those who adhered literally to the Beatles’ proclamation that All You Need Is Love and the philosophical ramifications of Howard Jones’ mid-eighties hit What Is Love?, Lee and Herring interviewed representatives of the various forms of love (including Front as a woman who loved her God, her Queen and her fellow countrymen but found it difficult to juggle the various relationships without them finding out about each other; Iannucci as a man who believed in the medieval principle of courtly love and was infatuated with a woman he had never seen; and Peter Baynham as a man who had formed an unhealthy attachment to spaghetti), before Lee fell victim to the crudely pornographic 'song' of the mythological Sirens. Herring bemoaned the loss of his one true friend (“sometimes you can’t see what you’ve got until it’s taken away… by evil lizard flying vulture women”), but Lee returned unharmed, refreshed by a night of passion with the legendary flesh-eating creatures and armed with an understanding of the true essence of love – the smell of spaghetti.

The highly individual humour of Lionel Nimrod’s Inexplicable World had much appeal for the same sort of audience as Radio 1's recent comedy hit The Mary Whitehouse Experience, and despite the considerable distance between Lee and Herring’s work and much of the rest of Radio 4’s output, the show found an enthusiastic audience, many of whom were a good deal younger than the station’s traditional audience. A second series of six episodes ran from 15th July to 19th August 1993, ending with a 'deus ex machina' appearance by Lionel Nimrod, turning the Stellar Laser Ray Gun Toy on Lee and Herring after having finally been driven insane by the haunting gravity of Phillip Lamarr’s words.

This was not quite the end of the Inexplicable World; Radio 1 had been sufficiently impressed by the show to repeat four editions of the second series in their regular half hour comedy slot in August, commencing their run before the series had actually finished on Radio 4. In addition to recognising that Lionel Nimrod’s Inexplicable World deserved far wider recognition, this also suggested that Lee and Herring would find a comfortable home on the station. By the time that the final episode of the second series went out on Radio 4, Lee and Herring and Sarah Smith had been commissioned to produce a pilot show for Radio 1.


This is an abridged excerpt from Fun At One - The Story Of Comedy At BBC Radio 1, which has tons more on Stewart Lee, Richard Herring, Armando Iannucci and many, many others besides. You can get Fun At One as a paperback here or from the Kindle Store here.

Not On Your Telly, a book collecting some of my features on lost, forgotten or censored television shows, is now available on the Amazon Kindle Store. Doctor Who fans may be interested to know that includes hefty features on The Evil Of The Daleks, The Space Pirates,The Android Invasion and a radio adaptation of the Peter Cushing Dalek Films, as well as the BBC 'Sunday Classics' serials produced by former showrunners Barry Letts and Terrance Dicks. Everyone else may be interested to know that it includes similarly hefty features on Fist Of Fun, Play School, The Tyrant King, The 8:15 From Manchester, Madhouse On Castle Street, Rubovia, Bizzy Lizzy, Dear Heart, Hear'Say It's Saturday and Kelly Monteith. And, um, Spatz. In addition there are also features on the joys of mono sixties pop music, why researching old stage plays is so difficult, some of the odder part-time jobs taken by comedians in the days before arena tours, and a look at the album that inspired Britpop, Alan Klein's Well At Least It's British.

You can get Not On Your Telly from the Kindle Store by clicking here. Or, if you'd rather, the paperback is still available from here.

Those who have been following this blog for a while will know how obsessed I am with sixties television and music, and in particular how the ephemeral nature of popular culture back then means that much of it is now lost forever, or at least shorn of its context to the point of indecipherableness.

Although lost TV is more celebrated, and perhaps rightly so, the same can also be true of music, particularly with songs that formed part of a band’s live set in those pre-Official Souvenir Tour DVD days. How many of you out there were left utterly baffled as to why Pink Floyd’s Alan’s Psychedelic Breakfast - an audio collage of ambient instrumental jollity, looped bits of speech and vague kitchen sounds - or The Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band’s Music For The Head Ballet - little more than an unremarkable fairground-esque harpsichord waltz - should be occupying prominent positions on albums, only to later discover that the latter literally was music for a ‘Head Ballet’, used in live shows to accompany an alarming display of choreographed head-jerking, and the former a truly ridiculous ‘only in 1970’ frying-bacon-on-stage sonic experiment with accompanying breakfast-related whimsical commentary from the band? Incidentally, in the lone surviving live recording, you can actually hear the audience having hysterics at said whimsy; and they say prog rockers had no sense of humour?


Of course, in all of the above cases and more, a bit of dedicated detective work and indeed educated guesswork will normally fill in the gaps to a greater or lesser extent. When it comes to sixties stage plays, though, you’re pretty much onto a loser from the start. This was, of course, a time when television had yet to reach saturation point and was only broadcasting for a couple of hours a day anyway, and people would still go to the cinema two or three times a week regardless of what was on; demand for the theatre was still equally high, to the extent that browsing through the various available listings and adverts almost suggests that they were struggling to produce enough new shows to meet demand. And there were so many fascinating-sounding off-the-wall ventures in those pre-organised smash days too - Private Eye’s satirical musical Mrs Wilson’s Diary, early Doctor Who cash-in Curse Of The Daleks, the endless outbursts of whimsy from Anthony Newley and Lionel Bart (the latter’s Blitz! having a poster that boasted possibly the most ‘sixties’ design of all time), and many, many more long-forgotten efforts that Dominic Sandbrook could potentially use as a shorthand indicator of how the tide was turning either ‘for’ or ‘against’ something in wider society.


And yet, precisely because of that lack of a cross-platform multimedia market, there’s very little evidence of any of these stage shows left, especially those that - like most of the above - closed after a couple of weeks and were promptly forgotten about. There’s the reviews, publicity photos and scripts - though you can’t always guarantee that one will still be around, or even then that it’ll be easy to access - and in some cases a soundtrack album, and in some even rarer cases a big screen adaptation or truncated television presentation (though that said most of those will be long wiped anyway), but getting a sense of what the overall production was like and how the performers approached their roles is nigh on impossible. Even Harry Secombe’s famous turn in Pickwick - which, lest we forget, was where latterday standard If I Ruled The World originally came from - was never really captured as anything beyond an Original Cast Recording.

Revivals are all very well and good but the problem is that they’re exactly that - a modern day take on something where nobody’s quite sure what the original was like. Yes, miracles do sometimes happen - not least the rediscovery of the long-lost television taping of Beyond The Fringe in pretty much its entirety - but if you’re looking at something from before the home video boom then chances are you’re going to struggle to get much detail on it. And even some from after that; surprisingly, there doesn’t appear to be a recording of either of the stage shows spun off from The Young Ones in circulation. Yes, you can dig out details, statistics and box office totals until you’re literally submerged by paperwork, but none of it can really tell you what the actual performances were like. So if you want to draw conclusions from something more substantial than a list of dates, you’re best off sticking with television and pop music.

Mind you, having said all that, if anyone out there can figure out exactly why the cast of radio sitcom The Glums saw fit to record a vocal version of the theme from Soviet-irking early BBC spy thriller The Little Red Monkey, then you’re doing better than anyone else ever has.


This article is taken from Not On Your Telly, a book collecting some of my musings on lost, ignored and censored television with all kinds of interesting diversions along the way. You can get Not On Your Telly as a paperback here or from the Kindle Store here.

From Monday to Friday this week, Bob Fischer's show on BBC Radio Tees will be featuring a track from a BBC Records And Tapes album or single chosen by me. There are a couple of rarely-heard treats in store, including one that might possibly have never previously been played on the radio anywhere ever, and with good reason too. I've also provided some 'sleevenotes' of unusual facts to go with each track, and a couple were so obscure that we've had to take them straight from my vinyl copies.

You can find Bob's show here - the tracks should be going out between 3:30pm and 3:45pm each day. And don't forget that you can still get Top Of The Box - The Complete Guide To BBC Records And Tapes Singles in paperback here or as an eBook here.

The Camberwick Green Procrastination Society, a book collecting some of the ridiculously lengthy diversions I've gone on about archive TV and pop music when I really should have been working on something more substantial, is now available from the Amazon Kindle Store. Regular readers may be interested to know that it includes exclusive and previously unpublished pieces on Chigley, Wait 'Till Your Father Gets Home and David Bowie's early TV appearances. Elsewhere there are features on Doctor Who, The Monkees, Battle Of The Planets, Tin Machine, Skiboy, The Stone Roses, Glam Rock, Jimi Hendrix, Hardwicke House, Rubik's Magic, Blue Jam and Camberwick Green. There's quite a lot about that, in fact.

You can get The Camberwick Green Procrastination Society from the Kindle Store by clicking here. Or if you'd prefer, you can still get the paperback from here, or the original full-colour eBook from here.

RESL124 Orville's Song/I Didn't - Keith Harris And Orville (December 1982)


Although a TV regular since the mid-sixties, ventriloquist Keith Harris’ career didn’t really take off – ironically – until he introduced bashful luminous green duck who couldn’t fly Orville into his act in the late seventies. By 1982 he, or rather they, had landed a prominent variety slot on BBC1 with The Keith Harris Show, although he remained a popular and enthusiastic stage performer, which gave rise to this single written by pianist and former talent show winner – and old friend of the ‘duo’ – Bobby Crush. Taking the form of a dialogue between Harris and his puppet charting the latter’s inability to take to the skies, Orville’s Song is certainly cloying, sentimental and delivered by a gratingly-voiced character that not all of the target audience found quite so loveable, but is in its own way an effective and endearing composition that in no way deserves the deluge of ‘Worst Record Ever’ accolades that have been heaped upon it since. Certainly record-buyers at the time didn’t seem to agree, sending the single to Number Four over Christmas 1982.


RESL138 Come To My Party – Keith Harris, Orville And Dippy/Thank You For Telling Me ‘Bout Christmas – Keith Harris And Orville (December 1983)


A seasonal outing for Keith Harris and his many puppets, with the a-side again written by Bobby Crush. Although the single did enjoy some minor chart action, climbing to number forty four over the festive season, it surprisingly failed to corner the lucrative Christmas market and ultimately caused few worries to Paul McCartney and David Essex.


RESL162 The Box Of Delights/The Carol Symphony - The Pro Arte Orchestra (December 1984) 


Marked out by top-drawer acting and pioneering video effects, BBC1’s 1984 adaptation of John Masefield’s 1935 festive children’s novel The Box Of Delights– something of a favourite with the BBC, having been adapted seven times across several media – was rightly fanfared as a landmark production and remains held in high regard by audiences and critics alike to this day. For theme music, the production team elected to use an extract from the third movement of Victor Hely-Hutchinson’s 1927 Carol Symphony, an extended piece based on orchestral arrangements of themes and motifs from numerous traditional Christmas Carols which had in fact originally been written as a contribution to an early BBC radio broadcast. The extract featured a variation on The First Nowell, and was taken from a 1966 recording of The Carol Symphony for EMI by The Pro Arte Orchestra; it was, however, subjected to minor manipulation by Roger Limb of the BBC Radiophonic Workshop to make it more in keeping with the mood and style of the serial. Limb’s modifications were frustratingly absent from the direct edit featured on this single, which featured another excerpt from the movement, this time based on a segment of the Coventry Carol, on the b-side. Selling in small quantities at the time, and one of only a handful of pieces of official The Box Of Delights-related merchandise, this is now one of the most eagerly sought-after BBC Records And Tapes releases.


RESL179 The Ballad Of Sandra Claus/The Goulash Break – Bryan Joan Elliott and The Elf Service (December 1985) 


American comedian Bryan Joan Elliott was something of a minor star in the UK in the mid-eighties, largely thanks to her regular appearances on the ITV game show Punchlines. This unusual attempt at cornering the Christmas market for 1985 came about as a result of some recent well-received appearances on high profile BBC chat shows, notably BBC2’s The Bob Monkhouse Show.


RESL234 Christmas Is Here Again/Awake Zion Awake - Bryn Coch Primary School (December 1989)


The first release after a gap of almost a year – suggesting that all was not well at BBC Records And Tapes in the new John Birt-led regime – was a Yuletide-themed offering from the pupils of a Welsh primary school accompanied by harpist Glenys Lightfoot, recruited by the label following popularity with local radio listeners, in an attempt to create yet another school-sourced singing phenomenon and indeed to secure a hit in the lucrative Christmas market. Sadly, this single fell short of expectations on both counts.


RESL236 Christmas Past And Christmas Present/Christmas Past And Christmas Present (Festive Fun Mix) – Euphoria (December 1989)


Seemingly determined to corner the Christmas market for 1989, BBC Records And Tapes put out a staggering third Yuletide-themed single in the form of this choral effort based on Kings College Cambridge’s traditional Festival Of Nine Lessons And Carols service. Unsurprisingly, this one didn’t sell very many copies either. The ‘Festive Fun Mix’ fails to live up to its title. RESL237 was set aside for yet another Festive-friendly single – Glory Be To God On High, a re-recording of the EastEnders theme with yet more new lyrics by Simon May, performed with a choir of children and premiered on BBC1’s Songs Of Praise. Contractual difficulties saw to it that this was instead released by Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Really Useful label; however – perhaps mercifully – it still failed to make the charts. This all took place, however, late in 1988, suggesting that some or all of the preceding singles may have been in the works since the previous Festive Season – a sure sign that the writing was on the wall for BBC Records And Tapes...



This is an extract from Top Of The Box - The Complete Guide To BBC Records And Tapes Singles, which is available as a paperback here, or from the Kindle Store here.

"I don't want a lot for Christmas", Mariah Carey once sang. This is an adage well worth adhering to. Personally I am only hoping to receive a Camberwick Green Village Playset with the street lamp intact, the original film spool of Doctor Who And The Mission To The Unknown, and two Karen Gillans waving a bottle of Macallan 50.

However, this was not always the case, and back in the greedy capitalist eighties, come Christmas time the grabbing hands grabbed all they could, only with chunky green and white mittens on or something. Others may have yearned for B.A.R.T., Rock Lords or one of those big Ferrero trays with the two other foul-tasing liqueur-based ones, but back in 1986 there was only one present I wanted. Well, five, to be honest, but this was the age of the Filofax-toting 'entrepreneur'.


Back To Skool


Skool Daze, a noisy, witty and fast-moving game about trying to 'liberate' a disapproving report card from under the noses of a staffroom full of academic archetypes and stereotypes, was arguably the single greatest computer game ever made for the once-mighty rubber-keyed ZX Spectrum. It sold in such deservedly high quantities that manufacturers Microsphere - whose very name recalls a lost era when the word 'micro' was seen as a powerful futuristic totem and an authentic glimpse of things to come, and whose other releases included Wheelie, Skyranger, Contact Sam Cruise and the ever-playable ZX Sideprint - couldn't resist the temptation to produce a sequel, and that's where it all started to come undone. Where the original had restricted its gameplay to one single cramped-yet-capacious scrolling school building, Back To Skool ("Skooldaze Too", as it described itself in an hilarious Grimleys-tempting Slade-style misspelled cover tag gambit that no doubt backfired and saw more than one purchaser complaining to WH Smith that they didn't in fact have two games on the tape as promised) expanded the concept to bring in an adjoining girl's school, with a playground straddling the two, and a load of jolly hockeystick-wielding St Trinian's escapees to join the established cast of Einstein, Boy Wander, Mr Wacker et al. And whereas the objective of the original game had been simple and straightforward, involving little more than judicious use of a pixelated catapult and a book about historical battles, Back To Skool had a rambling, nonsensical and almost unplayably complicated plot which took in a bicycle, a water pistol and, erm, some stray frogs. The must-have game of the year, no question, but it took a couple of months for everyone to start admitting it wasn't quite what they had been expecting. "Please sir, I cannot tell a lie... BACK TO SKOOL is rubbish!".


Santa Claus Is On the Dole


Following on from the irony-caked runaway success of supposed-to-be-a-sendup-of-novelty-hits-but-ended-up-a-novelty-hit-itself The Chicken Song earlier in the year, Spitting Image made another bid for chart stardom with the unfairly overlooked Santa Claus Is On The Dole. Penned by imminent Red Dwarf launchers Rob Grant and Doug Naylor and perennial Christmas-hater and skinner alive of Roland Rat Phil Pope, half withering social satire, half silliness for silliness' sake, unlike The Chicken Song this was planned as a seasonal market-cornering single from the outset, which makes it all the more surprising that it only just limped into the top twenty and has been pretty much forgotten since then.Anyway, ignore the revisionists - Spitting Image was fantastic and in the days before the noble art of satiyrre was tainted forever by The 11 O'Clock Show and Chris Morris' Steamhammer thingy, any release containing any of the uniformly ace songs was a must-have for anyone who liked their devastating critiques of the Thatcher regime served up with a side order of silly puppets hitting each other. The b-side, the Ian Hislop-instigated The First Atheist Tabernacle Choir, was top stuff too. And why get it for Christmas rather than just buying it yourself? Because the ever so slightly more expensive 12" version contained proper extended versions of both songs, with extra comedy material and everything. You try telling the multi-format fixated young people of today that, and they won't believe you.


Now That's What I Call Music 8


Nowadays we're all more familiar with the Now series of compilations as a long unending string of shoddy cash-ins, but back when the concept was first launched, it seemed new and exciting to be able to get that many chart hits for minimal financial outlay. Plus in those days they couldn't convince every record company or pop star to play ball, meaning that there were often hefty gaps where massive chart hits should have been that ended up plugged with all manner of straight-in-at-number-twenty-six obscura. Adhering to the usual vague thematic approach that it sort of loosely took in the age of vinyl, tape and four sides to every double-album, Now That's What I Call Music 8 - which by then had jettisoned its baffling 'pig with headphones' motif in favour of oh-so-eighties cover designs based on silk, satin or in this case some strangely warped chrome - started off with a strong collection of what could be loosely termed Radio-Friendly Big Pop/Rock Hits. Duran Duran's ace comeback single Notorious, Pet Shop Boys' dog bark-equipped Suburbia, The Communards with politically subtext-laden video-accompanied Don't Leave Me This Way, Aerosmith and Run DMC's urban myth-inducing Walk This Way, and the incomparable Breakout by Swing Out Sister rubbed shoulders with Steve Winwood'squite good but a bit out of place in such company Higher Love, OMD's boring Forever Live And Die, and Genesis' frankly awful In Too Deep. Side Two took a dance/soul approach and was therefore duly mentally marked as The One To Fast Forward To The End Of. It starts off well enough with Cameo's Top Of The Pops viewer-infuriating Word Up! and Mel & Kim's Showing Out (Get Fresh At The Weekend), a song that was pretty much The Clothes Show made music, but soon tailed off with overly repetitive offerings from Jaki Graham and Janet Jackson, Boris Gardiner's ear-offending I Wanna Wake Up With You, that We Don't Have To Take Our Clothes Off thing, and Grace Jones'I'm Not Perfect (But I'm Perfect For You), which barely even qualifies as a song. For some reason, The Human League's Human is plonked in the middle of all this too. Side Three, almost equally skippable, is the muso-friendly one; Big Country, Huey Lewis And The News, Peter Gabriel and Kate Bush joining forces for half the expected impact, they're all there in full-on dreariness mode, mercifully interrupted by The Housemartins, Madness, Status Quo's only halfway decent record of the entire decade, and the most unlikely inclusion on a Now album ever, Billy Bragg's Greetings To The New Brunette. Finally, Side Four is something of a White Elephant Stall, yet all the same manages to pretty much sum up 1986 in eight tracks flat, key highlights being Kim Wilde's ridiculous cover of You Keep Me Hangin' On, Dr And The Medics' flop revival of Waterloo, It Bites'Calling All The Heroes, and two date-specific television spinoff singles par excellence - Paul Hardcastle's one-time Top Of The Pops theme The Wizard, included here with runout groove message from Geoffrey Bayldon intact, and Nick Berry's May-composed soundtrack to Lofty sliding down his bedroom door, Every Loser Wins. It was the best of Now albums, it was the worst of Now albums, and on hearing it more than a few decided to finally throw in the towel with chart music take the plunge and see what that NME mail-order cassette C86 that everyone was raving over was all about.


Cool It!


From the neon suits and is-he-alternative-comedy-or-isn't-he? positioning of its rubber-faced star, to the Housemartins-like theme tune and accompanying pastel shaded semi-animated opening titles, there was no television show more intrinsically and unequivocally '1986' than BBC2's surprise sandwiched-between-repeats-of-Fawlty-Towers-and-new-episodes-of-Victoria-Wood-As-Seen-On-TV hit vehicle for the versatile impressionist Phil Cool. That year, excitingly, BBC Video had finally stopped charging eight hundred and seventy six million pounds for their wares and had started to make stuff available at a more affordable 'Budget Price', and while massive queues were forming (literally) for copies of Watch With Mother and Doctor Who And The Death To The Daleks, discerning comedy fans were equally keen to get their hands on this hour-long compilation of Cool with the old BBC Video 'star' logo tacked on to the start. Unfortunately - well, not exactly unfortunately, as it was still ace, but view the comment in context - this material was actually culled from the previous year's overlooked tryout run of three shows, presented here pretty much in their entirety but with a decidedly sparse set of opening titles in place of the definitive item. Still, how many comics do you know who can get a massive laugh out of 'doing' Rik Mayall, just by moving their mouths a bit and not actually saying anything?


The Utterly Utterly Merry Comic Relief Christmas Book


While Comic Relief is undeniably serving a useful purpose and a good cause in general, it has to be said that much of its associated spinoff fundraising merchandising falls distinctly into the 'will this do?' bracket. And next time Peter Kay does unspeakable things to an innocent 'pop classic', let's hope that the answer is 'no it fucking won't'. Time was, though, when with Comic Relief you really did get something substantial for your donated money, especially to accompany its launch in 1986 when they came up with the still-entertaining Cliff Richard & The Young Ones single, a genuine bona fide all-star live comedy stage show that later became an equally great album and video, and The Utterly Utterly Merry Comic Relief Christmas Book; edited by Douglas Adams and Peter Fincham, as if that wasn't recommendation enough, and just look at the contents. An exclusive new Hitchhikers story! Meaning Of Liff addenda! Otherwise unpublished Adrian Mole! The Young Ones' Nativity Play! Material from the then still-lost Out Of The Trees! Contributions from the writers of Yes, Minister and Spitting Image! Angus Deayton, Lenny Henry, Terry Jones and Mel Smith in general! And most notoriously of all, Richard Curtis' controversial The Gospel According To A Sheep, which got the book withdrawn under blasphemy laws following complaints from idiot God-botherers who decided that likely extra future sales and the ensuing benefit for people dying of hunger in the third world wasn't worth offending their religious sensibilities for! It's funny, and it's controversial - beat that, Don't Get Done Get Dom Meets Mock The Week!


Meanwhile, if you're still wondering what to put on your own Christmas List this year... how about one of these?

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

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

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

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


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

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


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

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.

Quincy's Quest is one of those television shows that large numbers of people seem to remember for no readily obvious reason. Shown by ITV on 20th December 1979, in a 7.00pm Thursday evening timeslot when a fair percentage of its intended audience would probably have been in bed to boot (and repeated - once - in more or less the same timeslot in 1981), it was nevertheless unquestionably one of the network's seasonal big guns at the end of a strike-stricken year during which they had lost a great deal of goodwill. It was plugged on the front cover of that week's TV Times via a photo montage that looked as though Here Comes Mumfie had collided head-first with a Tiger Tots advert, and a massive boxout taking up approximately eighty three percent of the day's listings. In fact overall they gave it more prominence than they rising starlet Christina World in a see-through top, news of where you could find Paul Henry in panto, and two blokes out of short-lived thriller The Racing Game walloping each other for some reason. It's fair to say, then, that they expected a few people to watch it.

What they probably didn't expect, however, was that it would make such an indelible impression on so many of those viewers. At a time when most television was still considered ephemeral and throwaway, ITV's Light Entertainment output was considered more ephemeral and throwaway still, and especially so at Christmas; seriously, you try finding one of those tinsel-festooned all-star variety efforts from the seventies in broadcast format and you'll more than likely find yourself embarking on a 'quest' of your very own. Yet Quincy's Quest - which, needless to say, does still exist in broadcast format - seems to have garishly burned itself into the memories of those who saw it, and chances are that many of them would have gone on to feel a tingle of quickly-dashed excitement on spotting Quincy loitering around in the ITV listings over the next couple of years.

Quincy's Quest was written by and starred Tommy Steele, who also co-composed the music, and doubtless part of the reason for its success was that he'd had quite some time to perfect the production in. An earlier, shorter version of Quincy's Quest had appeared on ITV as part of The Tommy Steele Show on 23rd December 1962 - back when he was still essentially a recording star first and foremost - which amazingly appears still to exist in some form. By the late seventies, of course, he had swapped the hit parade for the stage, and could regularly be found treading the boards in the song-and-dance-fuelled likes of Half A Sixpence, Hans Christian Andersen and She Stoops To Conquer. Doubtless this additional experience in big brash audience-friendly razzle-dazzle helped to give the 1979 version of Quincy's Quest its extra youngster-entrancing advantage.

It's at this point we have to be honest and admit that there is no way whatsoever that Quincy's Quest will be able to replicate that effect on an adult viewer all this time later. We can keep on calling it a 'lost gem' until the cows come home, but the cold hard fact of the matter is that it connected with a specific audience of child viewers at a particular time and that 'magic' will not be possible to recapture. Yet whatever that errant 'magic' was, it was still something that clearly gave Quincy's Quest an edge over pretty much every other children's TV show that was on that year other than Rentasanta. And that's precisely what we'll be going on a 'quest' to identify as we take another look at the gaudy big budget oddity. What do you mean, we've already done that joke? Shush. It's starting.


After a suitably festive peal of bells, and a title card depicting the sort of youngsters who would grow up to take every opportunity to remind you that all they got in their day was a wooden train and a tangerine and they were grateful for them too, Quincy's Quest opens with animation of the London skyline which, while not credited as such, certainly looks as though it's the work of regular Thames TV collaborators Cosgrove Hall. As a twinkly trail of snow spirals through the streets and bursts above the rooftops, we zoom in on a clock face chiming the hour with the aid of a clearly less than enthused 'old man with nightcap and candle' clockwork figure. Then it's down the front of the building like some reverse version of The Hudsucker Proxy, past a plasterwork Humpty Dumpty, past signs promising 'Fun Gifts', 'Games', 'Jokes & Tricks' and 'Costume Dolls', and ending up focusing in on a huge santa hoarding. Yes, it's a department store, and if it's not quite the night before Christmas, then it's certainly very close to it.


Just below the shop front there's a standard issue illuminated basement window, and we duly zoom in - mixing fairly seamlessly to live action in the process - to find doddery old toymaker Smithy working away and telling a creepy-looking boy doll that due to a design defect, he'll have to be filed away with all the others that weren't good enough to go on sale in the store. To a Golden Age Of Hollywood-esque sweep of strings, Smithy sadly notes that if he was a younger man, he could have done a better job, and dejectedly walks away from the workshop for the night. It's at this point - conveniently - that some of that animated snow we saw earlier spangles its way through the window and alights on the discarded doll. Courtesy of a simple but effective vision mix, the snow-sprinkled doll becomes a walking, talking Tommy Steele, who - with a cry of "Yikes - it's time!" - jumps up and declares himself to be called Quincy. Issuing a firm welcome to his fellow discarded toys, Quincy makes his presence known courtesy of a chirpy song full of exhortations to "make today a red letter day, a nothing can top, ever be better day", "a put on the mappening, joyous handclappening happening day", and other similarly Hufnagel-esque linguistic contortions. He's a bit put out, then, to discover that none of the rest of them are feeling quite so chipper and upbeat.


Apparently not one to be brought down by the prevailing mood, Quincy asks Zelda the fairy if she's granted any good wishes lately. "Don't be stupid", she replies, "all the magic's gone out of my life - who wants a fat fairy with a wonky wand? A Tatty Teddy? An Action Man who's out of action? A puffer who's run out of puff? Or a baby girl who's lost her momma and can't stop crying?". This is all too much for poor old Teddy, who pleads with the bawling baby doll for a bit of peace and quiet; upon which he is promptly propelled through air courtesy of the arrival of a hitherto overlooked Jack In The Box. Quincy, who reveals he was actually briefly on sale before being batted about by the store's cat, berates the miserable shower and asks again if any of them are up for a bit of fun. It's only then that Jack In The Box - the self-appointed spokesman of the Rejects' Union - sees fit to inform him that tomorrow is D-Day. 'D' as in 'Destruction'.

Yes, 9am sharp the following morning, they're all getting chucked in the store furnace as every single shop apparently had in those days. Needless to say, Quincy is virtually jaunty in his disbelief, and thunders into a rousing rant about how while they may not be perfect like 'them upstairs', he's not going to give up and let the Rejects "stand around here moaning and groaning doing nothing about it". Personally speaking, Quincy very much intends to do something about it, by making his way to the store grotto on the top floor and asking Santa to save them from incineration. Everyone else inevitably has an excuse as to why they can't join him on this epic and perilous journey, but Quincy is undeterred and cheerfully insists on going alone, and they don't exactly brim over with optimism about his plan. He has to get there before the store opens, everyone points out, or he'll instantly turn back into an inanimate toy. Teddy reminds him that "once you're out of the Reject Department, you're alone" - yeah, thanks for the vote of confidence there - and Zelda warns him to be careful of the robots and The Witch. "The Witch?", asks Quincy with barely a note of alarm. That would be the roundly feared Witch Of The Store, mention of whose name is heralded by lightning and tingly string section jangles. Quincy understandably shows a glimmer of hesitation at this, upon which the others suddenly change their position and urge him to carry on with his mission courtesy of a song about how "you can't send a toy to do a boy's work". "I won't let you down!", Quincy shouts while ascending the basement stairs with some 'wobbly walk' acting that, it has to be said, does not bode well for his chances of success.


As Quincy sets off on his titular quest, two significant production details become clear. The first is that rather than using special effects, the production team have opted to make Tommy Steele look doll-sized by having him walk around well-realised 'big' sets, something that is both more complicated and more expensive to properly pull off than you might normally think. The second is that there appears to be at least an element of postmodernism at work here, as Quincy quickly acknowledges his robot and witch-rationalising voiceover as exactly that ("if I keep talking to meself, it'll be like having a bit of company"). A device and indeed a theme that, oddly, are never really touched on again.


At the end of the first corridor, Quincy comes to a door marked 'Costume Dolls' - so it wasn't a slapdash title sequence juxtaposition, then - and ventures inside to the accompaniment of 'thriller'-type music and witchy cackles. Presumably a 'd' had somehow fallen off the end of the word 'Costume' in both locations at once, as he finds himself in a Doctor Who And The Celestial Toymaker-evoking room full of dolls done up as powdered wig fops, pierrots, Quality Street box illustrations and so forth, none of whom are even remotely pleased to find themselves in the company of a Reject. Indeed, they reinforce this point by singing a haughty little song about how perfect they are ("superior, superior, not one of us inferior"). Quincy, as is his wont, proudly declares that "my wear and tear's unthinkable, I'm spliitable and shrinkable", but while he's busy wasting time skipping about, untoward things are happening out in the corridor...


Conn, a Max Miller-infringing ventriloquist's dummy, is on the oversized blower to The Witch, who is screechily briefing him about how she watns him to deal with the rogue living doll. On spotting Quincy, Conn switches into full Barnum mode and ushers him through a sleazy strip club-style doorway promising both 'Girls Girls' and 'Novelties', bamboozling him with rapid-fire comedy patter en route; "they don't call me Con for nothing!", he grins sinisterly to the audience. In the auditorum, Quincy takes a seat in front of a Safety Curtain decorated with Victorian lithographs of archaic vaudeville figures and what appears to be Gary Davies; as you might have predicted, Conn then beckons Quincy up on stage to join him in a swaggering number called Have Half Of My Laughter. After a hesitant start, he soon gets into the literal swing of things - suddenly acquiring a duplicate of Conn's stage outfit in the process - and finishes up dancing wildly with a chorus line of blonde Sindy-style dolls. Needless to say, this sequence outstays its welcome by several thousand millennia and is the exact polar opposite of what any average child viewer would have found entertaining anyway.


Despite his reservations about double-crossing the 'nice kid', Conn duly phones The Witch to confirm that he'll usher him aboard a toy train as planned. Needless to say, Quincy is as cheerfully gullible as ever when he's promised a locomotive-based shortcut to Santa, and gleefully boards the driver's carriage to the strains of a wah-wah-wah-wahhhhhhhh-ing version of Have Half Of My Laughter. He's busily shovelling coal into the boiler and humming along to a chugging accellerating reprise of - you guessed it - Have Half Of My Laughter when a cackle and a flash of lightning divert the Grotto Express to 'Devil's Gulch' and a hefty black train appears from nowhere speeding head-on towards his. Quincy spots it just in time for them to collide on a bridge with a spectacular display of sparkler-level pyrotechnics, and it's into the ad break with a DA-DA-DAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA variation on the Thames jingle. And if they didn't sneak a Quality Street advert in there somewhere, then they really were missing a thematically appropriate trick.


Part Two opens with a recap of the train crash, though this time we get to see that Quincy has safely rolled away onto some cheapo non-branded copyright-averting knock-off Lego. There he is discovered by a Miss Muffett-esque young lady named Rebecca, and the two seem to hit it off, strolling off hand in hand through a CSO-derived Not Lego vista. Rebecca wants to show him her interlocking brick-derived village, and on the way they sing a song about how much they have in common, interspersed with toe-curlingly panto-style 'romantic' dialogue. There's only one problem though - Rebecca has always dreamed of marrying a doll in uniform, and passive-agressively provokes a pride-wounded Quincy into huffily acquiring some military attire from the village tailor. Needless to say, he is promptly mistaken for a real soldier and marched off to battle. Rebecca enthusiastically and admiringly shouts that he should write to her every day, and then and only then decides to sob that she liked him as he was and that she doesn't think she will ever see him again. It would probably not be too unfair to call her a fucking idiot and ask what in the name of sanity she was actually expecting to happen.


In amongst vast swathes of exploding plastic toy soliders, Quincy finds himself surrounded by fellow combatants with absolutely no qualms whatsoever about the prospect of ending up 'smithereened'. Attempts at appealing to their innate sense of insubordination ("What makes us do it?" - "The cause!" - "What is the cause?" - "Dunno - ask the officers") don't really get very far, and so Quincy marches up the hill himself to remonstrate with the blustery moustachioed safe distance types on horseback. Offered a choice between going back and getting smithereened in battle and staying there and getting smithereened for desertion ("It's not fair!" - "It's not meant to be fair, it's regulations"), Quincy - having 'seen' the futility of war - opts instead to just walk out of the room and back onto his quest. "Did we win?", asks one of the generals. "No sir, nobody ever does", comes the shouted reply over mournful music and a montage of toppled toys. They could really have done with a fox who's just been appointed Professor Of Cunning at Oxford University spotting a particularly nasty splinter.

The Witch is clearly quite happy with this state of affairs, as back in the corridor, we see the expected shadow and hear the expected cackle as she uses one of her lightning flashes to throw a Captain Scarlet-esque pile of boxes down the stairs and into Quincy's path. He's on the verge of giving up when a song about the ability to do whatever you put your mind to starts blaring out from nowhere, inspiring him to fashion a grappling hook from a nearby needle and thread. He uses this to ascend to the top of the stairwell, shouting echoey updates on his progress to the Rejects as he goes. After all of this exertion, he needs a bit of a rest, and wakes up after a quick nap to find himself surrounded by an assortment of Boss Cat-voiced stuffed animals. These include an ostrich, an elephant, a terrifyingly threadbare lion, a leopard who keeps asking to 'eat' him, and a large pink hippo who in no way whatsoever resembles George from fellow Thames production Rainbow. After somewhat unfairly berating them for acting like 'a pack of animals' in front of a complete stranger and updating them on the fortunes of their Reject pal Cedric The Camel, Quincy gets them to join him in a song and dance number about how wonderful he is, and then wanders off, leaving the leopard to wonder aloud again why they can't eat him. Not an unreasonable question in the circumstances.


Meanwhile, Rebecca is busy writing in a giant diary about how she'd liked to have been Mrs Quincy IF SHE HADN'T BEEN SO SODDING RIDICULOUSY NEEDY AND NEGATIVE FOR NO GOOD REASON, when in a totally unexpected plot twist, he stumbles across her and they enjoy a tender reunion. The two fully poseable lovers skip off hand in hand towards the grotto, only to decide from nowhere to waste a couple of valuable minutes looking around a funfair hall of mirrors. Rebecca's sense of trepidation about this latest enterprise turns out to be well-founded when The Witch - finally revealed in a staggering screechy performance by Gretchen Franklin - replaces her reflection and takes over her body. The fully witchified Rebecca gleefully informs Quincy that there's nothing he can do to save the Rejects now, and the spooky horror film version of the Thames jingle that follows would appear to support that hypothesis.


As we rejoin the action for Part Three, Quincy is dangling in front of a big target while The Witch bitterly recounts how she has spent years on sale without being bought, hence her pathological resentment of the Rejects. Her solution to the thorny issue of their imminent salvation is, impressively, to have some battery-powered robots fire lasers at Quincy, though being unsophisticated tricky action types with randomly flashing lights and bleepy burbling voices, they contrive to actually zap through the rope holding him up instead. To the accompaniment of over-the-top disco mayhem that makes the Skiboy theme sound restrained, Quincy dodges their blasts behind a chair leg and launches a successful counterattack with the aid of a toy tank and a plane launcher game. With her robotic henchmen incapacitated, The Witch elects to activate Archie-Medies, a big massive suitmation-style robot bearing a potentially legally problematic resemblance to a Cylon, whose programming gets broken by a couple of plane launcher handle wallops from Quincy, causing it to go after The Witch instead. And that, ladies and gentlemen, is why you should never mix sci-fi and folk horror.


Quincy goes back into battle stations when a weird Cyril From Doctor Who And The Celestial Toymaker-like spinning top schoolboy thing appears, but it turns out that he's actually one of the good guys and is there to escort him the last couple of feet to Santa's Grotto. What's more, some plaintive sobbing from the middle distance signals that The Witch has gone and Rebecca is back. It all seems like plain sailing from there, except that they then decide to waste several minutes singing a reprise of that you can do whatever you put your mind to song, and arrive in the Grotto to find that Santa's not there and the clock is striking nine. As they turn back into toys - courtesy of a sequence that is hardly exactly Bagpuss - Quincy sings a plaintive snatch of a fragment of a song about going out in style. Perhaps one last shout for assistance might have been more in order there?


An ominous shadow and an equally ominous blast of music suggest that The Witch has returned to exact revenge on the now inanimate dolls. But no, it's actualy Santa, who picks them up with a kindly expression and a jaunty musical quote from Good King Wenceslas. At that moment, a voluble hoard of kids stampede into the grotto, and a young Patsy Kensit asks Santa if she can have Quincy and Rebecca. A pompous store manager tries to prevent her from taking them on the basis that Rejects are bad for 'branding', upon which he is deftly booted in the shin by one enterprising youngster and they all race off to the basement. The Rejects are seconds away from being loaded into the store furnace - complete with those garish seventies studio videotape flames - when the kids thunder in, wallop the janitor and race off into the snow bearing imperfect toys, leaving Smithy bewildered but delighted. Back at the Grotto, Santa tells Quincy and Rebecca that he'd like to keep them "to remind all those children with broken toys about love and understanding" - however that would work on a practical level - and that's Quincy's Quest.


While it certainly looks spectacular - and much like how you might expect it would look if one of those old Andy Williams Christmas Specials exploded and left a small artillery of 'candy canes' embedded in one of those displays that you used to get adjacent to the queues for an upmarket department store Grotto - it has to be said that Quincy's Quest is somewhat light on actual storyline. While there's a definite narrative start and end point, not much really happens in between other than a series of... well, calling them vignettes in the first place would be pushing it, and trying to suggest that they were in any way interconnected would get us laughed off the face of the planet. Substantially speaking, it's little more than a string of dazzlingly-realised setpieces, and you do have to wonder how it would fare against the fundamentally shifted attention spans of modern youngsters.

That said, it's also worth emphasising that at the time, there would have been as good as nothing else like it on television. Anything else of that length on the days either side of Christmas would have been one of those 'charming' animations that children do not like but adults try to insist that they do, and in the unlikely event that something similar had been on Christmas Eve, Christmas Day or Boxing Day, chances are that you would not have got to see it due to the overwhelming volume of relatives wanting to see whatever was on the 'other side'. It was essentially extra out-of-hours Children's programming that looked as spectacular as, well, any of those tinsel-festooned all-star variety efforts, so small wonder that the enraptured army of younger viewers failed to be overtly concerned by the lack of narrative focus.

Of course, Quincy's Quest wasn't strictly a children's programme, and had greater resources and a more prominent timeslot at its disposal, and so was almost certain to make more of an impact than any of the actual Children's ITV shows when they started flinging tinsel and cellophane-derived 'stained glass' around. But that didn't stop them from trying...

We’ve no way of knowing for certain what Gordon Murray was doing on 22nd December 1965, but we can take a fairly good guess. Chances are he was editing Mrs Honeyman And Her Baby, the thirteenth and final episode of Camberwick Green, by hand in his tiny Crouch End studio, delivering it to the BBC only days (or according to some accounts hours) before the first one went out on 3rd January 1966. Over in a slightly more well-appointed studio in Slough, Sylvia Anderson was probably watching a rough cut of the Thunderbirds episode The Cham-Cham, flushed with the excitement of its runaway success and doubtless little realising that men in suits behind desks would later claim all of the credit for her ideas. Meanwhile, in Kent, David Bowie was most likely listening to an advance acetate of Can’t Help Thinking About Me, and wondering if this would be the one that finally made him into a pop star.

David Bowie, Sylvia Anderson and Gordon Murray, of course, all died in 2016. All three are people whose work I have admired with an almost unequalled fervour for pretty much as long as I can remember; and no, that’s not really an exaggeration in Bowie’s case. The first two of them often tackled their thoughts and fears on nuclear conflict in their work; Gordon Murray sure never did, but he did once tell a BBC documentary maker that his creative imperative was to “protect children, while they are children, for as long as possible from this dreadful world that we’re living in”, so it doesn’t take too much imagination to work out what his thoughts on the matter were.


Arthur Lee and Bryan MacLean, the angry, cynical frontmen of the provocative and defiantly mixed race band Love, both left us a long time ago, but they were recording their debut album in December 1965 and their almost plainsong-like plea Mushroom Clouds remains one of the simplest yet most chillingly effective expressions of that same fear. Their labelmate Tim Buckley hadn’t made it into the studio yet, but he was certainly performing his furious analysis of the Cold War’s intangible sense of threat No Man Can Find The War live by that point. And we really could go on and on and on about December 1965 there, but it’s straying from the point a bit. A bit. Suffice it to say that, one way or the other, none of them nor indeed any of their contemporaries would have imagined that we’d still be having the same sense of dread and paranoia over fifty years later.

David Bowie, Sylvia Anderson and Gordon Murray will be missed by many and their work will live on. But they’re not who we’re supposed to remember. They’re artists. Creatives. Producers of material that, at least in 1965, was literally intended to entertain audiences for a couple of months then disappear forever. They are not statesmen or politicians, and even Bowie will struggle to make much of a dent on the history books, let alone a couple of people who pushed a couple of puppets around, and one of them an uppity woman at that. We’re supposed to save our reverence, our remembrance, our memorials for the decision-makers and strategists, regardless of how well they may actually have treated us. Monuments, as the similarly long gone folk singer Jake Thackray once put it, “for the eyes and admiration of the common people who/you never ever in your lifetime ever liked or ever knew”. Given that he was never afraid of having arrogant authority figures reduced to giving rosettes to prize-winning pigs or sexually assaulted by apes, simply telling these ‘Famous People’ that “you are unwise/to imagine you are dear” speaks contemptuous volumes.


I can’t say it really happened with Gordon Murray or Sylvia Anderson, but there were people who openly expressed bewilderment bordering on hostility at the idea that David Bowie’s death should be mourned by anyone in any way at all. Many of these, it has to be said, spent much of 2016 publically crawling up to the very political figures who have got us right back to Love’s nightmarish visions of “little children dying/in an age of hate”. Yet there’s one last thing that all three of them had in common. As did Prince, Victoria Wood, Greg Lake, Leonard Cohen, Terry Wogan, Pete Burns, Caroline Ahearne and, on a personal note, Kris Ealey, who was an old friend and one of the people least affected by celebrity ever, who only ever saw acting as his job and was far happier hanging out at record fairs and playing his guitar in tiny bars in his spare time. And in fact any of the celebrities who have died this year and had columnists snorting at the pathetic public and their silly outpourings of sadness. They made people's lives just that tiny bit better. Their names may not be on plaques or on paper, but they and their work are who and what real people will remember, and long may it stay that way.

Over the Christmas of 1995, BBC Radio 4 broadcast a fantastic documentary series called Trumpton Riots, which took a light-hearted yet in-depth at Children's TV of the sixties and seventies. One edition, Val Or Sue? John Or Tommy?, concentrated on Blue Peter and its one-time ITV counterpart Magpie, and the intense rivalry that existed between the shows, their presenters and even their viewers.

This was a rivalry that did not seem to have in any way abated. Regrettably, with the conspicuously generous exception of John Noakes, the Blue Peter personnel interviewed for it did themselves no favours at all, barely wasting an opportunity to patronise their trendier competitors and pour scorn on the percieved intelligence level of their viewers. The Magpie team, on the other hand, still seemed only too aware that they were dealing with an audience that weren't properly catered for elsewhere, and fought their corner with a frequently revealing passion. Mick Robertson was audibly hurt when former Blue Peter editor Biddy Baxter derided Magpie as embarrassing and a mess, memorably countering "well... messy Magpie... sterile Blue Peter". Tommy Boyd, while refreshingly candid about his own view of the show's shortcomings, denounced Blue Peter as the opposition rather than the enemy, as their more important battles were with the 'suits' on the upper floors. Susan Stranks recalled that even an overture towards arranging a social event with said 'opposition' was frostily rebuffed. And all of them shrugged and alluded to possible boardroom power struggles while admitting that nobody ever actually told any of them when or why Magpie was cancelled.

Nowadays, you're almost guaranteed to see lots of Blue Peter around Christmas, whether in clip form or - increasingly - full shows. Their yearly traditions of home-made Advent Crowns, last-show-before-Christmas sign-offs and shoddily-wrapped presents for the show's pets have long since become the stuff of lazy uncritical nostalgia. You'll struggle ever to find any mention of Magpie, though, but there is a very good reason for this; out of only eighty four full surviving broadcast quality editions, only one of them is a bona fide Christmas edition. There's no particular apparent reason why this should have survived other than by pure chance, but it's nice that it does as there isn't really much evidence out there to indicate how Magpie attempted to lure the Yuletide audience away from its more formal opposite number. Even TV Times merely promised "more fun and facts on a seasonal note with Jenny, Doug and Mick" for the edition broadcast at 4:45pm 24th December 1976. Which, in the unlikely event that you haven't worked it out already, is the one that actually does still exist.

So, how didMagpie celebrate Christmas? Was it an unruly riot of knocking over Christmas Trees while a social worker looked on 'understandingly'? Did Mick Robertson treat us to one of his Festive-themed faux-Glam Rock numbers? Did their Advent Crown actually catch fire live on air? Well, there's only one way to find out...


Rather than the expected combination of The Spencer Davis Group's hammond-hammering - which must have been starting to sound a little old hat, or if you will John Lennon Hat, by 1976 - this edition opens with a slow pan across a darkened fairy-lit Teddington Lock while some unruly-looking dockside youngsters chirrup Ding Dong Merrily On High. Somehow managing to make herself heard above a container-load of ambient noise, Jenny Hanley admits that they'd hoped it would be snowing during this intro, but here they all are next to the official Outside Broadcast Christmas Tree and they'll be making the best of it regardless. She gives a quick rundown of the items that viewers can expect to see in this festive edition, starting with...


Sporting a truly astonishing oversized woolly hat, Mick is in Luton and on grainy ITN Newsfilm-esque 16mm film to report on an outbreak of legitimate state-sanctioned graffiti. In true post-Whole Earth Catalog pre-punk fashion, this was the idea of Philip Hartigan, a former 'Prog Painter' who had worked with both Andy Warhol and British Rail, and once had his collar felt for painting a 'disrespectful' pound sign over the entrance to The Roundhouse. Sensing that he had more in common with kids scrawling 'MICK MOPASH 73' on the side of bridges than others might have assumed, he and his collective The Fine Heart Squad launched an initiative to harness both the creative impulse and the apolitical dissatisfaction of juvenile wall-scrawlers by arranging for them to literally brighten up derelict and disused walls.

Mick has a brief chat to Philip's colleague Peter Carey, who explains the team's aims and also reveals that they involve local residents in the scheme, using their suggestions to work out a theme based on what they would like to see around them. What the people of Luton would like to see, apparently, is a bunch of inaccurately yet enthusiastically rendered approximations of copyright-busting D.C. Thomson/Charles M. Shulz/Walt Disney characters driving cars. Mick joins in with the lab-coated ethnically-diverse collection of legal wall-defacers, risking existential oblivion adding himself into the montage of cartoon characters, and it's back to the studio.


Far away from excessive woollen headgear, Jenny is in the suitably festively-adorned studio sporting a dazzling spangly strawberry-themed Alkasura jacket, and oh my good lord a flattering pair of loud orange pants. We'll be coming back to them later. Anyway, she's also sporting a full complement of Mr. Ali Bayan/People Of Restricted Seriousness novelty facial adornments as, with the most cursory of attempts at a Groucho Marx vocal inflection, she's trying out some of her worst wall-themed gags on the camera crew. There's a pun about 'Bri-ckasso', a Knock Knock joke with the punchline 'wall who do you think?', and something about 'what's a wallweigh?' that doesn't quite make any sense at all.

A now hatless Mick joins her in anticipation of reeling off a couple of wall-centric Music Hall two-handers, but before they can deliver so much as a feedline they are interrupted by 'Judge Rae', who reads out a selection of fun-curtailing historical laws that had never actually been repealed. These include Henry VIII's 1541 Unlawful Games Act, and its bizarre Charles I-sponsored amendment that permitted leaping as long as it did not come accompanied by singing. At the time, this kind of cursory throwaway entertainment-driven smash-and-grab approach to history was no doubt widely viewed as empty-headed reductivism of the worst kind, with absolutely no percieved educational merit whatsoever. Yet it's in examples like this - very much a product of the seventies - that you can see the first stirrings of the likes of Horrible Histories and Absolute Genius With Dick And Dom, which dispense with the tired old non-starter of Making Learning Fun to concentrate on Making Fun Learning and probably engage and excite more young minds than the fourteen millionth Blue Peter retelling of the story of The Stone Of Scone ever sodding managed to.


Musing that "it's a bit strong when people won't let you have a laugh at Christmas", Mick and Jenny race for the safety of the 'make' area, where they are free to show the viewers some magic tricks without magisterial interjections. Of course, as you can see above, the real magic on display here is Jenny's astonishing trouserage, but that's by the by. Together they rattle through how to make an empty matchbox sound full, and how to make a matchbox land picture side up on command, and Doug arrives to demonstrate the old 'stick a pin in a balloon without bursting it' routine. After doing so, he tries to usher the bunch of balloons quietly off set, only to find that they keep hovering back into vision, provoking some really quite amusing improvised comedy reactions from the trio. Then finally Jenny gets her Derren Brown on by convincing the other two that she can telepathically implant a word into their minds. No spoilers, but it works.


It doesn't seem to work, however, on Judge Rae, who berates Jenny for hanging tinsel in contravention of Oliver Cromwell's 1643 act banning the public display of 'monuments of superstition'. Cromwell also, it transpires, effectively outlawed the consumption of mince pies, and in 1647 very nearly managed to ban Christmas outright, presumably little discussed as it would almost certainly cause a outbreak of neurological short-circuitry in today's shower of Caps Lock-shouting 'patriots'. Mick makes some wry observations on what a hit Cromwell must have been at parties, adding that all of this talk of sour-faced fun-curtailment is driving him up the wall. You can probably guess what that was leading into. Except that the film takes an absolute ice age to cue in, leading to a couple of seconds of awkward silence, followed by Mick chuckling to the production team in true 'Moss Staples has been to Ireland where he don' dis' tradition.


Back at Luton, we get some speeded up film of Mick and company getting to work on a blank wall to the accompaniment of a funked-up take on Good King Wenceslas. They seem to be painting houses, and indeed there's some amusing camera trickery showing the kids 'walking' in and out of the doors to Mick's comic bafflement. At the end, the camera pulls out and we get to see that it's an actually really well done Christmas scene, complete with oversized Santa. You can scoff at trendy do-gooders all you like, but the fact remains that some probably neither impeccably-behaved nor academically-inclined youngsters did and enjoyed doing this instead of tightrope walking over railways, retrieving frisbees from substations, or going out in pursuit of unspecified ne'er-do-well-isms while a badly aligned caption asks if you know where your lad's going tonight, and maybe some of them were even inspired into pursuing a more artistic or socially benevolent career path as a consequence. And frankly, that's something that we could do with a lot more of right now.

You had to take your progressive views where you could find them in the seventies, though, and Magpie immediately undermines all of this good work with a spot of casual stereotyping. Back in the studio, Judge Rae is trying to stop Jenny and Mick from giving each other presents in contravention of Charles I's 1906 Prevention Of Corruption Act, which they point out is unfortunate as they had some presents there for him too - some 'Mature' Haggis, a book called 100 Ways To Save Money, and a copy of Kenneth McKellar's Greatest Hits. So desperate is Doug to get his hands on this modern day equivalent of McGold, Frankincense and Myrrh that he abandons all notions of national pride and sheepishly admits that this particular act has since been repealed. "Is there a law against painting walls at Christmas", asks Mick? Well, yes and no.

In our final visit to Luton, Mick chats to some of the youngsters about why they enjoy the scheme and what benefits they think it brings to the area, and there are also a couple of outtakey bits showing hasty painting mistakes and accidental clothing splatterage. Mick ends the piece with a direct address to camera, reminding viewers at home that if they want to have a go themselves, they'll need to get permission from "whoever owns the wall". He also, showing commendable awareness of exactly who his audience are, gives practical tips on how to contact the local authorities to make sure it's all above board and properly organised, and indeed to see if they can suggest a suitable location themselves. All of which is a far cry from getting discounted entry to National Trust buildings.


Outside, the choir are sprinting through The Holly And The Ivy and Jenny is releasing balloons, with noticeably greater success than Doug enjoyed earlier. These are, she hurriedly informs us, special Magpie balloons, and if you find one then you should write in straight away in the hope of winning some as yet unspecified New Year prize, but in the meantime it's over to the Thames TV lobby where Doug is presenting an update on the show's Christmas appeal total. This is measured via a stripy line running across the reception walls and up the stairs, and they had been hoping to have reached the oddly specific total of £30,355.29 by this edition. In fact they'd actually reached £38,905.19, and the unexpected additional eight thousand five hundred and forty nine pounds and nine pence has been ploughed into renovating a care home. Their new aim for the first show of 1977 is £42,499.19 which, as Doug points out, will allow them to 'get cracking' on central heating for it too. At the risk of sounding like a Channel 4 clip show, it's worth pointing out that this was little more than a fortnight after these studios had reverberated to the sound of The Sex Pistols saying 'BARSTARD' at Bill Grundy. Significantly, you can easily imagine Mick and Jenny not necessarily approving of the language but certainly having some sympathy for their cause. You could never really have said this of any Blue Peter presenter.

Over at the lock, Mick has now joined Jenny and the carollers, and enlists their help in very loudly and stiltedly reading out letters from some of the viewers who've donated to the appeal, including one who sent in all of his birthday money. There's just enough time for a still-in-studio Doug to give a reading of A Visit From St. Nicholas with the assistance of cardboard props and sound effects, and a multihanded linked-up goodbye until next year from the various broadcast locations, before the credits roll over the undisciplined choir thundering through I Saw Three Ships (Come Sailing In), and that's how Magpie'did' Christmas Eve.


On this evidence at least, Magpie wasn't quite as much a bought-from-the-market knock-off of Blue Peter as popular opinion might suggest. The basic format may be similar, but the presenters themselves are more relaxed and informal, and closer to acting as the viewers''friends' than to being aspirant Junior School teachers getting in a bit of practice when you could have been watching The Robonic Stooges instead. They clearly relish the challenge of live (or at the very least 'as live') television, and aren't afraid to acknowledge and have a bit of a laugh when things don't go quite to plan. Also, crucially, while the format may be almost litigiously similar, the actual structure isn't, and there's a surprising quick-changing pace to proceedings that could almost convince you that modern youngsters could quite happily watch this. Mick's hat may prove something of a barrier to that, though.

All in all, it's a shame that Magpie has such a low reputation and indeed that there's so little left of it. It ran for over a decade, and if Tommy Boyd is to believed, might have gone on if it wasn't for certain executives looking for that next rung on the career ladder. Indeed, from Mick's own Freetime to Toksvig to Kellyvision to Do It! to Ace Reports/CBTV to whatever that one was with that one with the red hair and polka-dot top who made a sub-Stock Aitken Waterman pop record in one edition, Children's ITV would spend the next decade endlessly remaking Magpie in all but name. As for that technique of having the camera crew join in on the studio bits, though, did any somewhat more well regarded Thames productions use that as a key device in the late seventies? No. Definitely not...

Whatever innovations the emergence of 'serious' rock in the late sixties may have brought with it, they certainly didn't include an abundance of zany knockabout slapstick horseplay.

Back when pretty much everything in the charts was still seen as 'pop', 'pop' itself was in turn still largely seen - at least in the UK - as essentially an offshoot of Light Entertainment. Many of the biggest pop acts - including, at least initially, The Beatles and The Rolling Stones - actually still played the variety circuit, and most fancied themselves as 'all round' entertainers who could raise a chortle as easily and efficiently as they could inspire a dance craze. Even beyond the more overtly comedic likes of Freddie And The Dreamers and The Temperance Seven, you will still find a far broader vein of humour running through the average sixties popular beat combo's discography than you would do for any randomly selected act at pretty much any point since then.


The Beatles, of course, treated almost every appearance they made as an excuse to make with the sarcastic wit and surrealist interchanges, while The Kinks rightly considered themselves to be every bit the equal of the stars of the 'satire boom'. The Move, The Who, The Hollies, The Small Faces, Manfred Mann, Lulu and many, many others routinely filled out their albums and b-sides - and sometimes even their a-sides - with out and out tomfoolery. Jimi Hendrix apologised for long solos in his lyrics, recorded humorous outer space travelogues for b-sides, and once told Neil Innes that he believed that he and The Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band were 'doing the same thing'. David Bowie tried to make his name with a fairly notorious bit of speeded-up silliness, while Syd Barrett-era Pink Floyd were never a couple of extended improvisations away from half-chortled whimsy about scarecrows and gnomes. And was there ever an entirely serious Dave Dee, Dozy, Beaky Mick And Tich record? From Cilla Black and Herman's Hermits to The Waltham Green East Wapping Carpet Cleaning Rodent And Boggit Extermination Association, everyone had their novelty songs, their comedy routines and their jokey accents, and if we tried to list every single slapstick caper film featuring a sixties UK pop act we'd be here all day. And probably still not get them all. Even The Dave Clark Five might have cracked a smile once or twice.

It would be a mistake to say that the arrival of more 'serious' rock did away with humour completely. You'll find quips, wordplay and situationist musical pranks aplenty on any given Pink Floyd or Led Zeppelin album, to name but two, but the difference by now was that they almost uniformly traded in subtle and sophisticated humour that you had to be looking for to find. In fairness, a fair few of the leading lights of Prog Rock had been plying their trade in unsuccessful beat bands since the mid-sixties and may well have got all of that out of their system by then; Ritchie Blackmore, for example, was probably in no hurry to repeat the Joe Meek-instigated publicity stunt tomfoolery he'd endured as a member of The Outlaws. In addition to that, the Glam Rockers had already adopted the more visual elements of pop-slanted humour into an equally updated and visually baffling take on the phenomenon. At the end of the day, though, they were dealing with audiences who wanted to think about the music, man, and no doubt spotting one of Pete Sinfield's witty lyrical conceits after 'seeing' the haunting existential dilemma of the cover of In The Court Of The Crimson King was an afternoon well spent in early seventies Ladbroke Grove.

Unfortunately, this fundamental shift in the music-to-laughs ratio has resulted in far too many of the emergent 'serious' rock acts being written off as pompous and humourless bores who considered themselves above such trifling concerns as levity, when in reality the majority of them were nothing of the sort. This is especially, and especially unfairly, true of the handful of bands that paved the way for said emergence, which is why we're going to be taking the opportunity here to say a couple of words in defence of Cream.


Hang on a minute, you're probably not unreasonably thinking. Weren't Cream the virtuoso blues purists who started all of this 'Robert Johnson is real music' tediousness and did that twenty seven million hour concert that gets shown on BBC4 every three minutes? Well, yes they were, and to be honest Ginger Baker's entertaining yet dismissive curmudgeonliness and Eric Clapton's dreary stadium rock boreathons and boneheaded declarations that Enoch was 'right' - which he was still refusing to entirely recant as recently as 2007 - have done little to help the band's cause. Yet believe it or not, all of this came surrounded by subsequently critically-ignored outbursts of levity and absurdity. Dressing up as convicts and park-keepers, miming on television with tennis racquets, writing a jokey song about catching an STD from a groupie with the chorus "WAAA-AAAAAA-AAA-A-ARGH!!", dancers in bear costumes, the very clearly Spike Milligan-inspired likes of SWLABR and Pressed Rat And Warthog, the scarcastic scorn-pouring of Politician, finishing off a hard and heavy album with a psyched-up close-harmony stroll through that Your Baby Has Gorn Dahn The Plug'ole thing and so much more besides, especially in the earlier days when they remembered to keep everything under four minutes long. And then there's the small matter of their debut single.

Even the most dedicated and in-depth 'rock guides', not to mention Eric Clapton biographies, tend to gloss over poor old Wrapping Paper. At best it will be described as 'low key', 'atypical' and 'barely featuring Clapton's guitar'. At worst it will just find itself on the receiving end of a barrage of disdainful bafflement and rhetorical demands to know what they were thinking, usually backed up by a typically forthright quote from Ginger Baker. A more accurate description, however, would be a charming and wistful Music Hall pastiche - a good six months before The Beatles got in on that particular act - with some nifty rolling piano and a sublime instrumental break where Clapton trades slide guitar licks with a cello. It was written and sung by Jack Bruce, but if Clapton and Baker had any issue with it at the time, then it certainly wasn't apparent in their joyous and enthusiastic backing vocals. Sadly, as it stalled at number thirty four, we can only guess at what Tongue Tied-esque antics they might have been planning to mime to it with on Top Of The Pops.


Wrapping Paper was also very clearly deliberately intended to be low key, atypical, Clapton-deficient and all the rest of it, as it was equally clearly deliberately intended as a joke at the expense of the more humourless contingent of their audience. And yes, they did have one already; Cream may not have released a record yet, but if you look back through the music press over the latter half of 1966, you'll find all manner of feverish articles about this brand spanking new 'supergroup' formed by three highly talented refugees from popular live acts, crammed with wild speculation about how loud the drums would be, how many centuries the guitar solos would go on for, and just how thrillingly dull and purist they would be. Small wonder, then, that they would choose to launch themselves on the world with a misleading bit of whimsy. In fact, around the same time, you could find similarly over-eager predictions being made for the similarly conceived Traffic, whose immediate diversion into soul-jazz with heavy psychedelic pop overtones must have caused similar alarm amongst the Clapton Is God brigade. Oh well, at least they could have consoled themselves with the ferocious rampage through the blues standard Cat's Squirrel on the b-side.

Sadly, we never did find out whether Wanderin' Sandy made it back to the house of old times, nor indeed whether he trod the weeds down. Overlooked and unloved, Wrapping Paper never made it onto an official Cream album and has even been omitted from some reissue campaigns, which is a shame as it really is a hugely enjoyable song, and strong evidence of just how downright peculiar mainstream pop music was getting in the mid-sixties. It's about time that it got wrapped up again and re-gifted, frankly. Well come on, this whole article is about unsophisticated humour. What were you expecting?


You can find more about Cream, Jimi Hendrix, Pink Floyd and company and their various escapades on late-night BBC2 in The Camberwick Green Procrastination Society.

This is an interview about Higher Than The Sun that I did with Creation Records as part of their celebration of twenty five years since the release of Screamadelica. It turned into quite a wide-ranging discussion, touching on attitudes to Britpop, nostalgia for 'compilation tapes', and who the best Evening Session host was. And of course there was plenty about Screamadelica, Foxbase Alpha, Bandwagonesque and Loveless. You can get Higher Than The Sun in paperback, as an eBook, or from the Kindle Store.


1991 was a great year for alternative music in general, what inspired you to write a book about some of the releases?

I’d written about all four albums individually in the past, but the idea for Higher Than The Sun really came about when there was that outbreak of Britpop ‘anniversary’ mania a while back. Which is obviously worth celebrating, but I always felt like we were only getting part of the story. It wasn’t something that just magically appeared from nowhere when Modern Life Is Rubbish came out, there was a whole gradual build-up to it with a lot of false starts along the way, and some bands and even entire scenes that have been written out of history. Not that they had anything to do with Britpop but Carter USM were actual proper pop stars for a good while, and they never get mentioned now. And added to that, on the other side of the coin, there was the sneering from people determined that we should all know how little they cared about Britpop. By the time we got to columnists blaming Elastica for Nigel Farage or something, I was a bit fed up with it all.

I suppose this made me want to look for a fresh ‘angle’ to look at it from, and this started me thinking about that phase just prior to Britpop when there were a lot of bands taking a similar approach but still with that ‘indie’ attitude and lack of interest in playing the ‘fame game’. Almost literally from the release of the C86 compilation to The KLF sabotaging The Brits; and in fact there was a concerted effort by the BPI to take ‘control’ of the independents around then, which I’d entirely forgotten about. As far as I’m concerned, Screamadelica, Foxbase Alpha, Bandwagonesque and Loveless were the greatest achievements to come out of all of that, so it made sense to make them the focus of the ‘story’. And once I started to look into it, it became obvious that there really was a story here, and the four albums were linked in all kinds of surprising ways that went way beyond the fact that they were all released within weeks of each other. Andrew Weatherall was very heavily involved, for example, and there was a shared enthusiasm for the seventies rock band Big Star. Often the production of one album would impact directly on another. They all had direct links to C86. It just got more and more interesting from there, really.

On a more personal level, I’m more known for writing about archive TV and radio and had recently written a book about Radio 1, which had the misfortune to come out just as certain allegations were starting to emerge… so I needed a bit of a change and what better way to do that than with four of my favourite albums!


From the start were you going to just feature those albums or was there a temptation to include some other albums from that era?

I knew from the outset I wanted to concentrate on those four albums, but also put them in their proper context. So there was always going to be quite a bit about Madchester and Shoegazing, and also the early Heavenly bands, who were way more colourful and cartoonish than everything else that was going on at the time – very at odds with the usual view of the early nineties. As it progressed, all kinds of other names started to get drawn into the story, from 808 State and Spirea X to Tin Machine and Sugar. So I talk about a few other albums, but the only one to get any substantial coverage is Back In Denim by Denim, which really was an unofficial ‘fifth’ in many ways.


Which of those four is your favourite?

I’d find it hard to choose between them, to be honest, but if I was pressed on the point I’d have to say Foxbase Alpha. So many ideas and so much potential, and it actually feels like it exists in several different eras of pop music all at once – it’d be as at home on a sixties pirate radio station as on a nineties dance one. Also the reference points are so esoteric and individual – if it’s ‘retro’, then it’s recalling an alternate timeline to the usual fare.


How did you first discover most of those bands and what drew you to them?

I’d had C86 and a couple of earlier singles by most of them, but it really started when Mark Goodier took over The Evening Session in the Summer of 1990. He was right behind all four acts from the outset – more than John Peel ever was – and probably did more than anyone else to get them out to mainstream listeners and into the charts. When you consider that included convincing enough people to push To Here Knows When into the top thirty, that’s quite an achievement. I think he’s been done an enormous disservice by the rock history books and I was really glad to have the opportunity to redress the balance a little. Time was when his was my favourite radio show bar none.

As for what drew me to them, I’d been a massive fan of The Stone Roses, Happy Mondays et al, but by the middle of 1991 they’d all hit a wall for various reasons and it was time to start listening out for something new. In all four cases it was the imagination and the sheer diversity of their influences – and I do include Teenage Fanclub in that – that caught my attention. And all of their singles really, really stood out, at a time when certain more successful acts didn’t even seem to be trying.


That’s really interesting that you talk about Mark Goodier, I know he does the odd stand-in on Radio 2 but he’s pretty forgotten about these days. He’d be more suitable for 6Music perhaps?

I’d certainly like to see him better represented in the endless Britpop ‘retrospectives’. Obviously it’s true that Steve Lamacq and Jo Whiley were presenting The Evening Session right in the thick of it – and I have to say I really enjoyed their recent revival of the show on Radio 2 – but it’s also worth stressing that he did a huge amount of the groundwork. For example he was determined to play Blur when nobody else cared. In fact I’ve a vivid memory of him raving about advance tapes of Modern Life Is Rubbish in very early 1993, and saying that he couldn’t wait to play the new songs on the show. He was a straight-ahead, facts-first DJ who wasn’t too ‘cool’ to enthuse about new discoveries – for the record, I didn’t think that Chris Morris sketch was a very accurate parody even at the time – and yes I do think we need a bit more of that these days.


Back in those days bands ‘breaking through’ seemed a lot more black and white, the press and radio either promoted you or you were unknown. Were you an avid NME, Sounds or Melody Maker reader?

Definitely NME for me! I loved the attitude they had then that you shouldn’t be afraid to poke fun at things that you actually liked, and I was very much a fan of Andrew Collins, Stuart Maconie and David Quantick – in fact I still crack up laughing when I remember stuff they did like the Rock Family Trees parody and the celebration of the Fourteenth Anniversary Of Punk. The others left me a bit cold sometimes, though I obviously still read them occasionally. It’s worth pointing out though that even back then, there was a suspicion of bands that were being backed by the press and radio, and they’d often be derided by the sort of indie fans who’d then go on about some wilfully uncommercial outfit that you stood little chance of actually hearing. I can remember people reacting to the ‘hype’ around Suede as if they were Bad Boys Inc or something. So maybe that even worked against bands sometimes; I’d imagine there was probably some recoiling in horror at the idea of Teenage Fanclub performing on Saturday Night Live.


My first impressions of Screamadelica were that it seemed more of a compilation of previously released material with a few new tracks. It took me a while to get it as a whole. Did it click with you straight away?

Funnily enough, yes I did ‘get’ it straight away, on the very first listen. I think that was probably down to having then recently discovered a lot of the musical reference points; people forget now that pre-Internet, there was that whole tape trading culture. It gets reduced to nostalgia about ‘mixtapes’ now but there was also a huge element of music obsessives making tapes with discoveries they thought each other would like, and in those days that’s how you found out about Francoise Hardy, Neu!, Northern Soul, Bowie’s sixties material and what have you. ‘Home Taping Is Killing Music’ was a bit of a silly slogan when you think about it. So yes, I’d recently been introduced to 13th Floor Elevators, Big Star, Robert Johnson, Pet Sounds etc, and had a nodding acquaintance with ‘rave’ culture – it was hard not to back then admittedly – so it all seemed to make perfect sense.


You mentioned Britpop, I think all four albums you’ve written about (and Ride’s first two albums) have stood the test of time so much better than anything from Britpop. I think you hit the nail on the head when you mentioned the 'fame game' which ultimately lead to less experimentation in music. Should we blame Britpop for the corporate/celebrity culture we suffer today?

Yes and no really. Noel Gallagher was blatantly ambitious but nobody could ever accuse him of following anyone else’s ‘rules’. Blur would have top ten hits but with lead guitar that sounded like it belonged on a Wire record. There were the likes of Elastica and Menswe@r who emerged so fast from the small-time indie scene that they maybe weren’t properly equipped to cope with so much mass mainstream attention. So I think that even then they were trying to find ways of making their ideas commercial, rather than just going straight for the cash register. There were exceptions, but I think they also really just prove that point; Supergrass and Super Furry Animals did whatever they felt like doing but lost that mainstream audience pretty quickly, and the real unfortunate casualty was Luke Haines, who stuck admirably to the ‘old’ attitude but got left behind as a result. That was a real shame. But the problems started when the bands that came in their wake went straight for the money rather than the music so ultimately maybe it did do a lot more harm than good.


You mentioned you’ve written a book about Radio 1. In these days of Spotify and YouTube does it still hold the same influence as it did?

I think it’s starting to again, as they’re now finding ways of engaging with New Media that no longer make everyone cringe. Some of the best new DJs have emerged through YouTube which some people would probably snort at, but is it really any different from finding past presenters on Pirate Radio or Local Radio? The only problem is that there’s now much less distance between the regular shows and the specialist shows – again, maybe a byproduct of Britpop – and you have to go to 1Xtra or Asian Network to hear something really ‘out there’.


There’s obviously been other books that have featured those albums but it's great you’ve focused purely on those four. Have you read David Cavanagh’s and Paolo Hewitt’s books on Creation Records?

Yes and they’re both great books; I especially like that they cover the story of Creation from entirely different approaches. I suppose mine was from the listener’s point of view, which was different again. Which reminds me that I’d like to get a tip of the hat in for Paolo’s Small Faces book The Young Mods’ Forgotten Story, which I really enjoyed and I don’t think has ever got the attention it deserved. I’d imagine they both found, as I did, that nobody’s account of any story quite added up with each other. People interpret artistic situations differently, and while you can have the facts nailed down, the view that the people involved had or have is just as important, and just because they recalled details incorrectly they’re not necessarily ‘wrong’. So it becomes a matter of finding a common ground between how everyone involved, including the audience, saw it… I’d like to think I’ve done a decent job of that, and hopefully others do too!

Mention long-lost Cable TV channel Bravo, and most people will remember it as some sort of nightmarish collision of FHM and TV Zone, pitching the likes of Street Hawk and The New Avengers alongside the prosaically titled Hard Bastards and When Hidden Cameras Attack. Given that their audiences probably weren't exactly awash with hard-partying hedonists who went out re-enacting the Smack My Bitch Up video before coming home and throwing up their unholy cocktail of alcopops, cocaine and chilli sauce-sloshed kebab over their strictly chronologically-arranged copies of Doctor Who Classic Comics, it's hard to determine precisely who they were aiming their output at.

Before they started chasing this bewildering demographic, though, Bravo had another short-lived and little-remembered - if equally obscurely targeted - entertainment agenda. Backed up by RKO-evoking stings and idents with appropriately dusty-sounding fanfares, Bravo in its original incarnation aspired towards some sort of rainy Bank Holiday afternoon-style uniformly monochrome high watermark of 'Golden Age'-slanted classic entertainment. Song and dance-heavy Hollywood extravaganzas rubbed shoulders with ancient American sitcoms and, erm, Torchy The Battery Boy. There was very little risk of accidentally stumbling across a late-night showing of Zombie Creeping Flesh in those days.

What you might well have stumbled across, though, was an unlikely and long-forgotten UK television show. With their choices already limited by the parlous state of the black and white-era archives, and limited further still by UK Gold and Granada Plus already having the rights to most of what little did still exist, Bravo had little option but to go rooting around for the more obscure BBC and ITV shows of yesteryear. One such more obscure series that they ended up pulling off a doubtless hazardously dusty shelf was Hadleigh, Yorkshire TV's light drama that ran for an impressive fifty two episodes between 1969 and 1976, but had barely even been mentioned since then.


A spinoff from Gazette, Yorkshire's 1968 series about the thrills and spills of life in a local newspaper office, Hadleigh retained that show's unexpected 'breakout' character, wealthy yet civically-minded proprietor James Hadleigh. Swinging dandy-about-town Hadleigh had recently inherited the paper, along with a title, land, ancestral home and seemingly inexhaustible artillery of paisley cravats, from his late father, but in spirit belonged to a younger generation in touch with progressive ideals and resentful of the selfish attitudes of the landed gentry. Adding insult to social faux-pas, he consistently shunned all entreaties to 'marry rich' in favour of on-off dalliances with local ladies from - gasp - the middle class, with a particular 'thing' for schoolteachers. If you're understandably thinking that this sounds a somewhat flimsy premise to hang a television show that you expected to run for more than three episodes on, it's worth keeping in mind that, even then, this was still a mildly contentious stance in the face of ongoing class-cultural upheaval; and, more to the point, allowed the production team to venture into all manner of then-socially contentious issues.

Back in 1969, issues didn't come much more socially contentious than recreational use of powerful hallucinogens, yet that's exactly what Hadleigh found himself up against in Patron Of The Arts, the fifth episode of the first series, originally broadcast by ITV on 14th October 1969. It would probably have provoked fewer furious letters to TV Times by the time that it rolled up late one Sunday night on Bravo, but nonetheless it still looked startling and, frankly, startlingly realistic. Not for Hadleigh a music festival crammed with Ronnie Corbett's idea of 'hippies' saying 'hey man' to all and sundry, but a realistic-looking house party full of presentable young people having fun expanding their minds, and if you're thinking that sounds unlikely to the point of impossibility then just swallow this sugarcube and let's set off on a voyage across an ocean, wave off our minds, our sense and motion, and get lost in a wonderland of colour and of sound. Only with slightly more expensive suits.


Hadleigh opens with a simple but effective title sequence showing Gerald Harper - doubtless relieved that his first major post-Adam Adamant Lives! gig was somewhat more on the conventional side - going about his silk-tied business, riding around various properties and businesses in an expensive car before being shown 'relaxing' via horse riding and clay pigeon shooting. This is accompanied by Alan Moorhouse's startling theme music, in which a blaring brass-led melody - bearing more than a passing resemblance to High On A Hill, the now highly collectable instrumental single Moorhouse had written for sixties talent show winner Nigel Hopkins only a couple of months earlier - does battle with over-energetic bongos and an alarming series of firework-esque ricochets from a Hammond Organ. This was presumably intended to signify the 'culture clash' of Hadleigh's lifestyle, and if so then it does the job more than effectively. The Forsyte Saga this is most evidently not.

The episode begins with Hadleigh meeting with local Lord Lieutenant Sir George Withy, who is keen for him to follow in the family footsteps and become a Justice Of The Peace. They are looking, it transpires, for someone who can talk to young offenders in their own language, particularly following an incident the previous week in which a "young bastard" - yes, they really do say that - raided a sweetshop, jostled the elderly female proprietor, and in his most hideous and indefensible action "laughed in old Crawford's face" when sentenced. Initially reluctant, Hadleigh has been just about talked into it when they are interrupted by some bland and generic-sounding library music issuing from the next room. "What's that extraordinary noise?", asks Sir George as he gets up to leave. A pop record from 1964, by the sound of it.

It turns out that the popular beat combo in question are 'The Pink Shape', and their latest hot disc is issuing from a transistor radio owned by Hadleigh's secretary Lolly, as played by an extremely young Paula Wilcox. After serving up some instant coffee, which Hadleigh controversially professes to prefer to the genuine article, she begins dancing coyly to said Pink Shape hit parade smash and asks her employer if he would like to come to her birthday party. Hadleigh is surprised and a tad reluctant, causing a clearly quite crush-stricken Lolly to pull a face and mention that her friends had "dared me I wouldn't invite you", and could only conclude that she must have just imagined that he liked her. This clumsy attempt at reverse psychology has the desired effect and he agrees to show his face at her auntie's house at the allotted time, although Lolly's instructions on how to get there via the 92 bus from outside the Odeon only occasion an exasperated look and an offer of a lift. As Lolly prepares to leave, Hadleigh takes the opportunity to point out that he doesn't know what her name is actually short for. "Lolita", she replies with a wink. Ahem.


Informing his butler Maxwell that he won't need a driver tonight as he'll be sticking to soft drinks - yeah, and the rest - Hadleigh picks up a transistor-toting Lolly in his Rolls Royce, pausing only to ask her if they're still listening to The Pink Shape - "no, it's The Idiots" - before pulling up outside a bland semi. Inside, Lolly's George Layton-resembling zonked-out hippy pals are passing around bits of card and suspiciously thick cigarettes, with a couple of them venturing as far as to sway indeterminately to far-out psychedelic sounds, when a young Christian Rodska approaches Hadleigh to venture some of his Acid-fuelled insight. "He who knows the masculine and yet keeps to the feminine will become a channel drawing all the world towards it, and he who knows the white and yet keeps to the black will become the standard of the world", apparently. Hadleigh, who in turn offers the wisdom that he has to be up early the next morning, feels decidedly out of place but does partake in a snifter of 'fire water'. Upon which the record player blasts out what appears to be a showband version of Led Zeppelin, and Lolly briefly persuades Hadleigh to dance before he is again accosted by the pre-Follyfoot prophet in full zen-dispensing flow. "It's a well-worn scene man, a well-worn scene" - "Yes, you've certainly got a point there".

Even apart from the impressively underplayed depictions of drug taking and drug effects - which, rather than moralising per se, carefully emphasise just how tedious the majority of babbling psychedelic voyagers are - what's remarkable about this extended sequence is just how effectively it captures the stop-start to-ing and fro-ing of a genuine house party. So much so, in fact, that a concerned neighbour makes an anonymous call to the rozzers to tip them off about the legally-dubious happenings. Presumably they'd been keeping up with all that stuff about Mars Bars in the tabloids. The police are clearly in no particular hurry to put a stop to it, though, as there's enough time for a plunky sitar groover to play out while Hadleigh partially fends off a huge drunken come-on from Lolly and heroically endures an extended business plan presentation from his new friend ("...and I shall call it the theatre of contemplation!" - "But if there are no words and no actors, what are they contemplating?" - "I shall place a number of evocative articles on the stage - an umbrella, a teddy bear, a beer bottle... light them significantly, and have electronic music... after a time, each member of the audience will respond according to his subconscious, and leave the theatre the richer for it" - "Will you, do you think?" - "Humour, was that?" - "No, I was just trying to assess your chances of success") before they pull up outside very very slowly to the accompaniment of what sounds suspiciously like Mr. Bloe would have done if he only had a toy harmonica to groove with.


Lolly seems to be finally wearing down Hadleigh's romantic defences just as the coppers complete their eighteen hour walk up the drive. An unidentified Kinks-y song greets the arrival of Sergeant Banstead, who makes a beeline for Hadleigh, having already spotted his car outside. The Sergeant offers him the chance to slip quietly out of the back door, but Hadleigh not only refuses but actually stands up for the long-haired layabouts he's been partying with, arguing that the police can surely make better use of their time and resources, and insisting on being searched along with everyone else. After they have successfully felt a couple of collars, Hadleigh tries to leave with Lolly - aye fucking aye - but they are stopped by a constable who insists that she's still technically a suspect. Hadleigh insists that he can not only vouch for her good character but will be happy to do so to his good friend the Chief Inspector, upon which they suddenly decide everything is perfectly fine and he can proceed on his way by himself of his own accord. The other partygoers aren't quite so fortunate, however, and are bundled out of the house along with a projector and an armful of Indian devotional music long-players. "What's the charge, guv?" asks one of the massed George Laytons. "Don't act innocent with me Snow White, we found the Seven Dwarves". So possession of illegally copied Disney film prints, then.

Back at home the next morning, Hadleigh is complaining of his digestive system being temporarily 'stunned' when Maxwell appears to inform him that a mysterious and "rather seedy" gentleman, has turned up demanding an audience; and who also, in a disconcertingly subtle back-reference, is carrying a copy of "that book there was all that trouble about". This, it transpires, is Miles Crispin, a somewhat dubious 'photographer' played by TV's Mestor The Gastropod himself, Edwin Richfield. It soon transpires that Crispin is not there to tout for work, but rather to "dispose of the copyright" of some photographs he has taken recently. Yes, as you've doubtless already guessed, he got wind of the party and its likely guest list - from Lolly, who moonlights as one of his models - and has taken a couple of compromising ten-by-eights that he would be happy to offload for somewhere in the region of twenty thousand quid.


Even though the pictures only appear to show him and Lolly leaving the premises, Hadleigh is concerned enough to offer Crispin a sherry and hear him out. Despite Crispin's warning that "people never read the harmless explanations... they're in such small print, they only look at the pictures", Hadleigh initially stands his ground, believing his character will stand him in good stead. Crispin duly offers the additional information that in one upstairs room "there were blue movies of a... particularly nauseating shade" - though presumably still 'blue' - while in another "elderly voyeurs were catered for with a little balletic improvisation", combining to make up a Lord Longford-alarming smorgasbord that would not only present a challenge the very best of good names, but would also most likely dissuade any self-respecting high-ranking police officer from risking association by speaking up for anyone who might have been there. In a last ditch attempt at reasoning with Crispin, Hadleigh demands to know his motivation for blackmailing an innocent man. Turns out it's money, pure and simple, with a side order of clumsily expressed class warfare rhetoric. "Well", responds the surprisingly sanguine blackmailee, "you're certainly curing my hangover".

Sarcastically expressing a desire that Crispin will put the money to civic use, Hadleigh agrees to hand over the cash at a prearranged time and place, on the condition that "you'll allow me to deduct the cost of the briefcase". Seemingly satisfied, Crispin leaves, but on his way out remarks almost matter-of-factly that one of the paintings hanging on Hadleigh's office wall is clearly a forgery. This, combined with Crispin's poorly concealed educated demeanour and accidentally disclosed knowledge of expensive alcoholic beverages, is enough to start Hadleigh suspecting that, in true The Curious Orange? A Cardboard Box? Jelly? fashion, something here is awry.


Acting on this sizeable hunch, Hadleigh pays a visit to Charles Lancing's gallery, where the harrassed proprietor is trying to fend off a pair of loud Americans voicing suspicion that he's trying to palm them off with a load of goddamn baloney. It turns out that Lancing remembers Miles Crispin only too well, as a talented painter but also an "uncompromising bastard" who alienated dealers and priced himself out of the market. What's more, matters got worse from there - his wife died, he got mixed up with some shady types who pressured him into producing fake Van Goghs, and was last heard of up to his easel in pornography ("Blue Movies?" - "Well, fifteen years ago they didn't move..."). Keen to avoid any negative publicity, Lancing sold all of Crispin's works in his collection to another gallery in Colchester, which - as you may have already worked out - is our next port of call. The unnamed giddy posh custodian at this next gallery is more than pleased to see Hadleigh, and repeatedly offers to show him her 'Sunset At Clacton'. Perhaps sensing that he's already in enough hot water with the ladies, Hadleigh politely declines and insists that he's just there to see the Crispins. After clarifying that this isn't actually a variety of biscuit, he's invited for a 'rummage' in her storeroom, where whatever tension he may have been fending off is sated by the discovery of a series of well-rendered if dusty and neglected nudes. "It's frank, isn't it?", notes the gallery owner.

Not nearly as frank as the scene that follows it, in which we see Crispin hard at work in his studio, painting a nude study of a surprisingly-revealed-for-1969 Lolly. She's not happy when he makes her turn off more of her blasted 'pop' music, and even less happy still when he relates his blackmail plot, retorting that her employer is a nice man and is being treated unfairly, and anyway, didn't Crispin go to one of them posh schools himself? This makes him ever so slightly furious, though his temper is subdued by, in turn, Lolly booting him in the knackers and an unexpected ring on the doorbell. Despite momentary panic that it might be the police, it turns out to be - surprise surprise - Hadleigh. He's got the money but has deducted fifteen quid for the briefcase. "I said not more than ten", snarls Crispin. "Well, what's a fiver between connoisseurs?".


Hadleigh gets straight in with a critical appraisal of his work, and while Crispin tries to rebuff this by reminding him that "you're not on Late Night Line-Up", Lolly sees her chance to help and whips out her favourite of his renderings of her - a JH Lynch-esque baps-ahoy number that presumably kept any teenage viewers that were looking in excited for an entire fortnight. Speaking from an art-loving rather than knocker-loving perspective, Hadleigh opines that a work like that ought to be seen, and reveals that the briefcase is actually stuffed with old newspaper; his offer instead is to donate a grant to allow Crispin to resume serious painting, and what's more he'll pull some strings and arrange for Lancing to mount a high-profile retrospective of his work. A humiliated Crispin declines, and asks the unwanted "deus ex machina bettering the lives of poor unfortunates" to leave. Which Hadleigh duly does, noting on his way to the door that he now wants to pay the original demanded sum out of sheer irritation. Erm, however that works exactly.

Back at home, Hadleigh is discussing Crispin's work with an equally artistically impressed Maxwell, and pondering on what would drive a man to refuse to be helped ("Pride, Sir"), when Crispin arrives, bearing both his genuine accent and a hefty slice of humble pie. He is taken aback to see one of his prints up on the wall in place of the forgery, expresses surprisingly explicit regret for his porn work and genuine lament for an artistic interest in the female form gone wrong, and breaks the ice by jokingly referring to Hadleigh as "more patronising than a Tory landlord". Over a glass of the expensive stuff, the two unlikely associates toast their new business agreement, with Hadleigh musing that "we don't want a slow fade to soft music, do we?". No, what we want is the end credits over a carefully cropped nude of lolly with a full-length album-edit 12" extended version of the theme music complete with over-extravagant middle eight, and that's precisely what we get. And, well, that's Hadleigh. On 'drugs'.


Patron Of The Arts does, it has to be said, have what feels like a flimsy cop-out ending, but it's also fair to say that it probably packed more of a viewer-surprising punch back at the tail-end of the sixties, when the upper classes were still at least halfway honest about their nose-looking-down proclivities rather than clowning around on panel shows pretending to be an ordinary common folk just like all of you at home until everyone's conned into agreeing to something for the sake of further lining their pockets. Indeed, to describe this as 'light drama' seems a tad unfair, especially when you take the frank, realistic and atypically sympathetic depiction of recreational drug use into account, even if it was clearly written by someone who had had just about enough of their friends turning into 'visionary' dullards who wouldn't bloody shut up. It's also quite surprising to find such a subtle yet undeniable sense of disdain for the police and their law-bending bias towards the great and good; the sniffy rubber-gloved attitude towards 'obscene' art is slightly more as might be expected, although it would be interesting to ponder on whether this stance might have changed following the Open Space Theatre raid and the Oz Trial only a couple of months later. Admittedly Lolly's rather passive role in her starring episode does leave a little to be desired, but this was 1969, and anyway she did get to stand up for herself physically in an impressively eye-watering fashion.

More surprising still is the substantial element of self-awareness verging on postmodernism that runs throughout the entire episode. From jibes at cliched fade-outs to swipes at whatever was on 'the other side' at the time - not to mention Hadleigh's constant sharp rejoinders that chime so closely with the viewer's perspective that they may as well be addressed directly to camera - there's a sense that the production team were intentionally trying to position the show somewhere outside the pigeonhole of nattily-dressed fluff, and while these may not seem quite as wildly deconstructionist now, and even at the time were hardly as 'out there' as The Strange World Of Gurney Slade, it's still something of a surprise to find such leanings in such an apparently ordinary and unremarkable show. On top of that, it's also a decent bit of light drama and Gerald Harper is superb as the lead. It would be a stretch to call Hadleigh an undiscovered classic of television that should be up there with The Prisoner and Up The Junction, but it's certainly proof that you can still find enjoyable surprises in the most unlikely and overlooked of places.

What's more, with its nudity, choice language, unflinching drug references and thorough disrespect for the conventions of decent society, this episode of Hadleigh was probably more extreme than anything else shown by Bravo. Stitch that, Brits Behind Bars.

Back in 1964, The Daleks really were The Masters of Earth. You might think it's a big event when the BBC unveil the trailer for the trailer for the 'minisode' preceding the new series of Doctor Who, but that's got nothing on the runaway levels of sheer excitement that greeted their first ever return appearance. At that point, with the possible exception of The Beatles (and that's only 'possible'), The Daleks were pretty much the biggest thing on the planet. They didn't call it ‘Dalekmania’ for nothing, you know.

World's End, the first episode of The Dalek Invasion of Earth, was transmitted by BBC1 at 17.40pm on 21st November 1964, and judging from the accompanying publicity it's probably safe to say that one or two people were reasonably keen on seeing it. But what else might they have watched or listened to whilst whiling away the Dalek Hours until it was on, or indeed afterwards while trying to chill out and stave off the big Post-Dalek Comedown? Well, get warming up your set - television or wireless - as we're going to be taking a look at some of the highlights of what else was on offer that day. As well as one or two that were absolutely not highlights in any way whatsoever...

7.15 On Your Farm (Home Service)
"A weekly review of the agricultural scene introduced by Charles Jarvis". The Weekend Starts Here!

10.0 Saturday Club (Light Programme)
A special edition of what was then the BBC's then-flagship pop programme - it was actually still more popular and influential than Top Of The Pops for a brief while - as Brian Matthew takes a Fab Four-inspired trip to Hamburg to catch up with John, Paul, George and Ringo's reissue-friendly former bill-sharer Tony Sheridan. He also found time to have a chat with Wenn Doch Jede Woche Mal Der Erste Wär hitmaker Gus Backus, popular beat combo The Rattles, and 'Rocking Stars'-toting bandleader Günter Fuhlisch, whose collective fans quite possibly included the stars of...

12.30 Komm Mit! (BBC1)
The BBC used to make loads of these light drama-based foreign language instruction courses - see also Cold War-tinged ski resort thriller Suivez La Piste! and Cold War-tinged alien-on-Earth thriller Slim John - though there was probably slightly less in the way of Eastern Bloc allegory on the agenda as ‘Heidi’ and ‘Dieter’ attempted to obtain tickets for the opera, doubtless with mildly amusing consequences. Incidentally, ‘Komm Mit’ means, essentially, ‘Come With’, so at least you've learned something today.


1.40 Desert Island Discs (Home Service)
Honor Blackman chats to Roy Plomley and judo-throws a load of classical and jazz waxings – not to mention Johnny Dankworth's original The Avengers theme, which is good and not rubbish like you think – overboard from the sinking ship. She also wants Michelangelo’s David as her luxury item for some reason. Can't possibly begin to imagine why.

4.0 Open House (BBC2)
Time for the first big ‘I... what?’ moment of the day, as Gay Byrne presides over a bafflingly disparate collection of 'People-Places-Pops' which takes in Marvin Gaye, The Merseybeats, Valerie Masters Tony Osborne And His Orchestra and that hep cat all the kids were going crazy for, Dr. Michael Winstanley, alongside some prominently-billed extracts from the big screen version of Lord Of The Flies. We can but hope that this was all more hip and happening than it sounds.

5.15 Juke Box Jury (BBC1)
David Jacobs presides over the typically unlikely combination of Spike Milligan, Alma Cogan, Pete Murray and a very young Liza Minnelli - then appearing with mother Judy Garland in a 'songs from the musicals' extravaganza at the London Palladium - venturing their opinion on a handful of the latest pop waxings, including top discs from The Everly Brothers, Sandie Shaw, Herman's Hermits, Frank Ifield, and those Beatle Boys with their new offering I Feel Fine. As you can see from this still from the single's promo video, Ringo wasn't even the best exercise bike rider in The Beatles.


5.50pm Thank Your Lucky Stars Special (ITV)
And speaking of I Feel Fine, The Beatles were also busy belting it out on the 'other channel' along with She's A Woman, I'm A Loser and Rock'n'Roll Music, while Brenda Lee and Freddie And The Dreamers waved haplessly from the corner. In fact it was audience-chasing all the way on ITV tonight, with Thank Your Lucky Stars followed by Danger Man grappling with The Colonel's Daughter at 7.25pm, now forgotten big comedy name of his day Arthur Haynes at 8.25pm, now even more forgotten Good Honest Copperin' action serial Gideon's Way at 9.10 pm, light-hearted Rantzen-purloined current affairs reports from On The Braden Beat at 11.05pm, and a repeat of five-year-old drama series HG Wells' The Invisible Man at 11.30pm. And that's literally all that we can find to say about ITV on that day, in an article with the primary purpose of celebrating the odd, the unusual, the inexplicable and the just plain uncelebrated of television of yesteryear. This should be printed out and stapled to the foreheads of anyone involved with those boneheaded 'Dismmantal Biassed BBC NOW pls' campaigns. You won't know what you're losing until it's gone so fight them while there's still time. Though, in fairness, they do have such powerful and overwhelming evidence of the need for 'reform' at their disposal...

6.0 Historic French Organs: 3: Saint- Maximin (Third Programme)
“Music by Couperin played by Michel Chapuis on a gramophone record” BBC FAKERY

6.30 The Beat Room (BBC2)
Top of the Pops’ more musically credible EPs-and-live-bands-based counterpart weighs in with Pat Campbell introducing performances from The Rockin' Berries, Jackie De Shannon, Heinz and The Paramounts, all of whom were pretty big names at the time but whom only shortly afterwards would be left mumbling “I have a horsey... neigh... neigh” in the wake of Rubber Soul. And, erm, Peter And The Headlines, who weren't. Incidentally, you can read all about David Bowie's early appearances on The Beat Room in The Camberwick Green Procrastination Society.


7.30 Starlight Hour (Home Service)
It's slightly strange to think that radio variety shows were once such a big deal, but they were and here's one of the biggest of them. Kenneth Horne introduces singers Janet Coster, Maryetta Midgley and John Hauxwell, violinist Alan Loveday, comics Kenneth Connor, June Whitfield and Ronnie Barker, proper ac-tor Naunton Wayne, and The Starlight Orchestra conducted by Malcolm Lockyer, with a script provide by Rentaghost creator Bob Block. All of the above doubtless had much more high profile things to be getting on with at the time, which gives some indication of just how high esteem radio was still held in back then. In fact, we can see some of those high profile things now; “Naunton Wayne is in ‘The Reluctant Peer’ at the Duchess Theatre; Kenneth Connor in ‘A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to The Forum’ at the Strand Theatre; Maryetta Midgley in ‘Camelot’ at the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane, London; John Hauxwell broadcasts by kind permission of the Sadler's Wells Opera Company”. What's more, Naunton Wayne was also the lead in a translation of Carlo Fruttero and Franco Lucentini's on-your-bike-Black-Mirror dark sci-fi comedy The Memory Machine on The Third Programme earlier in the evening. Stitch that, Live at the Apollo!

7.50 The Black And White Minstrel Show (BBC1)
It'd be preferable not to even mention this, except that... "'The Black and White Minstrel Show' is appearing at the Victoria Palace, London and at the Grand Theatre, Leeds". The actual programme?!

10.05 Jazz 625 (BBC2)
Coleman Hawkins tootles out some high-definition sounds with the aid of Jimmy Woode on bass, Jo Jones on drums, Sir Charles Thompson on piano and Harry 'Sweets' Edison on trumpet. The Jazz Names Shop had evidently closed just before they got there.

10.20 Not So Much A Programme, More A Way Of Life (BBC1)
The toned-down replacement for That Was the Week That Was, which the BBC had cancelled earlier in the year due to governmental pressure (though they face-savingly, or if you will misleadingly, claimed it was due to a need to remain impartial with an election in the offing - how times have changed) came in for such a bashing from the wider satirical community – most infamously Private Eye's flexidisc Not So Much A Programme, More A Shower Of Shit– that today even dedicated comedy historians seem to know little about what went on in it. This is particularly astonishing given that more or less every edition – including this one – still exists. So what would Frost, Rushton, Bron, Bird, Hudd, Sherrin and company have been casting their Friday Night Armistice Satirical Eye over this week? Well, British Troops were finally withdrawing from Kenya, Pope Paul VI had postponed a vote on Religious Liberty, and The Times had just published an article declaring that the Satire Boom had outstayed its welcome. And then of course there was the return of those Dalek characters...

The first major news story that I can really clearly remember wasn't, as you might not unreasonably expect, a space mission or a sporting event. It was one that fascinated and terrified me in equal measure. It was about a man who was assassinated in broad daylight with a poison-tipped umbrella.

Playwright, novelist and co-creator of the television detective series At Every Milestone, Georgi Markov had been a successful and popular figure in Bulgaria since the late fifties, even at the height of communist rule. By the late sixties, however, matters had started to change and his caustic and trenchant humour was of increasing concern to the authorities; Prime Minister Todor Zhikov made several unsuccessful attempts at persuading him to more closely endorse the ruling party, his plays were increasingly prevented from being staged due to state disapproval, and his satirical novel The Roof was forcibly pulled from publication literally while it was still on the presses. Using family connections in Italy, Markov fled to London in 1969; not long afterwards he would be found guilty of defection and sentenced to six and a half years imprisonment in absentia.

While his works were being quietly yet efficiently withdrawn from view in Bulgaria, Markov quickly established himself as a prolific and popular writer and broadcaster, working regularly for Deutsche Welle, Radio Free Europe, and most famously the BBC World Service, where his defiantly-titled In Absentia took an irreverent look at news from behind the Iron Curtain, and from Bulgaria in particular; needless to say, many of his harshest jibes and criticisms were reserved for Zhikov. During this time several of his 'banned' plays were staged in the UK, and he also found personal stability, marrying and starting a family with his World Service colleague Annabel Dilke.


On the morning of 7th September 1978 - which, in a staggering coincidence, also just happened to be Todor Zhikov's birthday - Markov was waiting at a bus stop when, according to what he told a BBC colleague, he felt a sharp pain in his leg and noticed a man with an umbrella hurrying away and possibly mumbling pleasantries in a suspiciously heavy accent. During the course of the day he fell ill, and was taken to hospital, where it was determined too late that he had a poison-filled pellet embedded in his leg. He had been murdered for speaking his mind, at the behest of a notoriously thin-skinned dictator. It was an act that caused alarm and outrage in his adopted homeland, and is still widely considered one of the Cold War's darkest moments.

From this distance, it's difficult to gauge exactly how provocative Markov's radio broadcasts were. Other than brief clips in documentaries and news reports, none of them are widely available, and while they were later collected in print form, this is now almost impossible to find in a translated version. Even then, they were written specifically for broadcast, and will almost certainly lack the nuance and character that they would have been presented with. That said, his pseudonymous 1978 satirical novel The Right Honourable Chimpanzee - you can probably work out the plot for yourself - should give enough of a sense of his style and intent. While Dilke - herself a prolific journalist and screenwriter - remarked that she had grown concerned by the vitriol and level of personal attack in his recent pieces and was convinced that there had been previous attempts to silence him both figuratively and literally, The Times, whom Markov occasionally wrote for, felt compelled to stress that his commentary was no stronger than that of dozens of other prominent exiled dissidents, with an editorial even venturing a belief that he had been assassinated to send a 'message' to the rest of them. In that same newspaper, Markov's family posted a short and to the point obituary notice - "his fight will go on".


The use of the word 'fight' is significant there, as a popular perception has arisen that Markov was somehow 'asking for it'; that he'd knowingly and intentionally goaded the authorities until they reacted in the manner he should have been anticipating all along. With that in mind, it's worth looking at a couple of things that you might have seen or heard while the police were busy trying to figure out what had happened to this mild-mannered broadcaster and how. Over on Radio 3, a spoof documentary by a then-unknown Rowan Atkinson introduced the world to Sir Benjamin Fletcher, a statesman with definite echoes of certain real-life contemporaries, not all of whom enjoy intact reputations today. Soon afterwards, he joined the cast of Not The Nine O'Clock News, a series that essentially specialised in note-perfect impersonations of global politicians while calling them out for hypocrisy, greed, bigotry, wet liberalism and any other charge that may have arisen. Peter Cook and Dudley Moore sent a letter to Margaret Thatcher asking what, as leader of the opposition, she planned to do about them having 'the horn', and the former caused a sensation at the inaugural Secret Policeman's Ball with a ruthless takedown of the judge presiding over the farcical Jeremy Thorpe trial. And then, of course, there was Life Of Brian. We're all familiar with the varying degrees of trouble the above may or may not have caused, but - as much certain parties may have wanted it for The Pythons - can you really visualise arrests or worse as a consequence?

Still not convinced? Let's put it in a modern setting then. What if it was Armando Iannucci, Frankie Boyle, Josie Long, Russell Brand, Charlie Brooker or Stewart Lee? Or, for that matter, Toby Young, Camilla Long, Rod Liddle, Julia Hartley-Brewer or Dan Hannan? And why should we stop there? Since social media has given us all a platform, chances are that your various timelines are full of ordinary everyday people expressing views and opinions that certain authority figures would be quite happy to see them locked up for. Or, to take us totally and utterly into the realms of hypothesis and extrapolation, what about the cast and crew of an American television sketch show trading in mild traditional satire? This is not in any way to suggest that people should not be challenged for what they say - on the contrary, a huge proportion of the blame for whatever issues we have now rests with the fact that people no longer seem to feel they have to take responsibility for their words (and yes, before some lower-case smartarse pipes up, search hard enough and you'll probably find an example of me doing that at some point, whoop de fucking do) - but if you think the answer is censorship or worse still threats of violent retribution, you're a part of the problem yourself. Markov's 'fight' was, simply, a fight to be heard.


Officially, Georgi Markov wasn't 'heard' in communist-run Bulgaria, although his works circulated illicitly and were considered invaluable texts by a growing resistance. After the fall of the regime - and Zhikov - late in 1989, he was hailed as a national hero and awarded Bulgaria's highest honour, the Stara Planina, in recognition of his 'exceptional civic position and confrontation to the communist regime'. In 2014, a statue of Georgi Markov - grinning from ear to ear, as he always was in those tiny photos behind newsreaders' heads - was unveiled in Journalist Square in central Sofia. Recognition that is well deserved, although the cowardly and despicable act that led to it was most certainly not.

Freedom of thought, and the freedom to express opposing views, should indeed be fought for. And if you're seeing even the faintest echo of any of the above around you right now, then perhaps it's time to stop giving credence to those who oppose it, or worse still claim to endorse it whilst peddling nothing of the sort.

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.

I'm quite often asked how and when I cultivated my obsession with sixties jazz. I'm equally often asked why I did, and how come nobody staged an intervention. Well, as bewildering as it might sound, it all started with an album called Music From BBC Children's Programmes.

Technically, and notably less bewilderingly, it actually started when I was trying to find a copy of that particular album. For reasons that we'll be going into over the next couple of posts - and believe me, we'll be going into them alright - I had become ever so slightly fixated on finding a copy. The only problem, albeit something of a serious one, was that this apparent Noah And Nelly In The Skylark Of The Covenant wasn't exactly easy to track down. BBC Records And Tapes had deleted it from their catalogue many years beforehand, so simply walking into a shop and buying it was out. It wasn't really the sort of thing that second hand record shops bothered touching with a bargepole at that point either, so simply walking into a second hand record shop and buying it was out as well.

The only hope, it seemed, was endless rooting around in charity shops. But these were the days before fund-raising joints wised up to the financial potential of a copy of Bringing It All Back Home with a huge coffee mug ring on the cover, and all 'Long Players' tended to be flung haphazardly into the sort of shabby corner-shoved cardboard box that required anyone who'd been within ten feet of it to be treated for trichodermic mould inhalation. And even if you had managed to circumnavigate the weird characters standing at awkward angles whilst perusing the same Decca Stereo Sampler tracklisting for hours on end and got to flip through the contents, whilst carefully avoiding the urge to punch Mario Lanza in his irritatingly recurring cardboard face, there was no guarantee that you'd actually find an album that hadn't been smeared with peanut butter and used as a makeshift trouser press by its previous one careful owner. What you did sometimes find, though, in amongst the miles upon miles of James Last, Bert Kaempfert, Ray Conniff, Johnny Mann, Nina And Frederik, Nana Mouskouri, Johnny Mathis, Manuel And His Music Of The Mountains, Mario Lanza, Mario Lanza, Mario Lanza and Mario Lanza, was an unusually high proportion of sixties jazz records. Presumably the genre afficionados hadn't quite got around to appreciating the merits of vibe-heavy breathy-lady-voiced Modern Jazz with world music inflections and touches of sitar-and-backward-tape experimentalness yet, because this stuff really did just used to sit there untouched, with the intriguing-looking tinted sleeves and elongated typefaces seeming to become more and more appealing as Barnaby's Heavy Concept Album seemed to become more and more elusive. After a while, it seemed churlish not to give a couple a try.


This was, it turned out, an entry into a very different sort of secret world to the quasi-psychedelic retro-heavy nirvana seemingly and tantalisingly promised by Music From BBC Children's Programmes. It was similar how you'd always thought jazz sounded as a youngster - albeit in the mould of those piano-syncopating characters that showed up in the middle of chat shows, rather than stripy-blazered 'ragtime' loons like those planks who did the music for Harold Lloyd's World Of Comedy and indeed exhorted us all to "laugh a while","dig that style"and surrender to the comic value of"a pair of glasses and a smile" - but spiralling off in all manner of unexpected directions, with vibraphones and electric organs to the fore and full of smooth instrumental textures, modal chord changes and wild improvisation that evoked some lost Beatle-John-Lennon-Meets-Dalek-era world of arty sophisticates slipping into hip modernist joints serving terrifyingly strong coffee. Even beyond the expected likes of Georgie Fame, Gerry Mulligan, Johnny Dankworth And Cleo Laine and Julie Driscoll, Brian Auger And The Trinity, and half-familiar names like Mike Westbrook and Michael Garrick, there was a whole alternate musical universe of just-out-of-view sounds to explore. There was Blossom Dearie, who sounded on her That's Just The Way I Want To Be album at least like some hip Kohl-eyed psychedelian that the cover photo confirmed she was most definitely not. There was the entertainingly-named Tubby Hayes, whose frantic impressionistic 'sound pictures' seemed almost too fast for the vinyl to keep up with. There was The London Jazz Four, whose underappreciated Take A New Look At The Beatles succeeded in making even the overfamiliar likes of Michelle and I Feel Fine sound like totally fresh compositions. More exotically, there were the bossanova-toting likes of Stan Getz and Astrud Gilberto, and the deeply hallucinogenic raga experiments of Wolfgang Dauner, The Dave Pike Set and, of course, The Joe Harriott And John Mayer Double Quintet.

All very exciting, but in the words of another charity shop find from around the same time, "nice though this be, I seek yet further kicks". And where soft drugs and soft porn lead some on to harder drugs and harder porn, the hapless jazz addict will find themselves drawn towards ever lengthier and more abstract ventures until they arrive at that point of no musical return - 'free jazz'. No, this doesn't have anything to do with Jools Holland And His Boogie Woogie Big Brigade playing for the benefit of non-paying passers by. It's a style of jazz where improvisation takes precedence over melody and structure, and the players dispense with such trivialities as chord sequences and tempo and literally 'play how they feel'. It's complex, it's challenging, it's intellectual and it gives you an air of depth and sophistication. The only problem is that a good deal of it is basically an unlistenable racket. And yet even that sounds like Mantovani covering Take That's most commercial single next to the... well, you can't really call it 'music' of a certain band responsible for a certain album with a certain yellow lorry on the cover.


You may struggle to pick out a discernible tune in the wilder works of Sun Ra, Ornette Coleman and Charles Mingus, but AMM pretty much dispensed with the whole notion of a 'tune' altogether. This fluid collective were regulars on London's mid-sixties 'psychedelic underground' circuit, where they donned lab coats and turned the scoffing that free jazz was 'just noise' to their advantage, recruiting someone to 'play' the transistor radio alongside conventional instruments and doing away with anything resembling riffs or melody to concentrate on creating evocative soundscapes with names like Later During A Flaming Riviera Sunset and After Rapidly Circling The Plaza. Yes, there are moments when the screeching and scraping can all get a bit too much. Yes, there are moments when it sounds like a BBC Sound Effects One Hundred Best Parking Buses With Knackered Brakes album has been dropped on the floor and smashed and then haphazardly glued back together. And yes, there are moments that can only be described as sounding like a goose, browbeaten and exhausted by the relentless cacophony, is weakly pleading to be allowed out of the room. But if you're in the right mood, it can be quite an entertaining listen. Although it's not exactly one to break out as 'mood music' for a first date.

Free Jazz - it may be 'clever', but it's not big. And what's more, as the spectre-at-the-feast that was Derek Griffiths yelling "doo dk'n dk'n doo da dooda dadooda, do do do do do d'doooo!" kept naggingly reminding me, it was an improvisation too far from the real musical holy grail; as indeed the above overlong and overcomplex write-how-you-feel free-form shenanigans have been from the point that I'm supposed to be getting to. As Sun Ra And His Arkestra jetted off further into some kind of sax-wailing cosmos, Bod And His Friends were wandering into a horizonless green void. And I was somewhere in the middle, still rifling through those hazardous cardboard boxes in search of Music From BBC Children's Programmes.


Top Of The Box, The Complete Guide To BBC Records And Tapes Singles, is available as a paperback here or an eBook here; a sequel covering the albums is coming soon! And as a special bonus treat, here's myself and Ben Baker talking about Take A New Look At The Beatles:

So, Music From BBC Children's Programmes. Which, in fairness, was what I was originally looking for when all that jazz business got in the way. Like all good stories, this starts once upon a time. Like no other stories ever, let alone any good ones, this also starts with some incidental music from Doctor Who. Yes, I know some good Doctor Who stories start with incidental music from Doctor Who, but let's not get too self-referential just yet. There's plenty of that to come.

So anyway, let's travel back in time to November 1988, when Starburst, the long-defunct monthly bible of all things sci-fi and fantasy and impenetrable stuff about some artwork thing you didn't understand, were running a review of the newly-released barrage of orchestra hits that was The Doctor Who 25th Anniversary Album. In tandem with a general inability to decide whether they thought it was any good or not, the review also incorporated a brief history of the countable-on-one-hand commercial releases of Doctor Who music over the years. Alongside the expected namechecks for the various theme single variations and the two volumes of Doctor Who - The Music, there was also mention of something called The World Of Doctor Who. This exotic-sounding oddity cobbled together from bits of early seventies incidental music was, reportedly, originally the b-side to the theme from Moonbase 3, the famously dull 1973 adult drama about the scientific realities of space travel, and which later, as they oh so casually remarked, "found its way onto a Music From BBC Children's Programmes album".


That remark, as tantalising and casual as it may have been, was more than enough to send one particular pre-Internet imagination into overdrive. Not so much over The World Of Doctor Who per se - though admittedly they did make it sound like some kind of Brian Wilson-style 'Pocket Symphony' rather than a load of screechy effects flung at a half-hearted funk backing with the Roger Delgado-heralding 'Master Theme' tacked onto the end - but rather more over the possible potential contents of said casually-referenced album. This would, some hasty Pertwee-skewed mathematics suggested, date from some time around the mid-seventies. In other words, the exact timeframe that played host to all those hazily-recalled first-awareness-of-television fringe-of-the-memory shows that had retreated so utterly and intangibly into 'The Past' that you might as well have just made them up. Something that, in the case of Rubovia, I was regularly accused of actually having done.

What transcendentally obscure delights might be found within its grooves? Rentaghost? Cheggers Plays Pop? Ragtime? Barnaby? Whichever still unidentified programme it was that ended with footage of dandelion seeds being blown away whilst a disembodied voice ominously intoned "one o'clock... two o'clock" and so forth? The tracklisting just kept writing itself, in ever more evocative and exciting post-Glam pre-Punk ways. And indeed the cover just kept drawing itself too, an ever-fractally-evolving psychedelic splurge with Dylan The Rabbit, Mr Benn and indeed 'Cheggers' thrust listenerwards through the magic of clumsy graphic design. Music From BBC Children's Programmes, it seemed reasonable to assume, was the key to the gates of some sort of retro-nostalgic nirvana, with a bit of Doctor Who incidental music thrown in for good measure. If some of those jazz albums had been mind-expanding, then this had to be completely off the psychedelic scale.

Eventually, quite by accident, in a true moment of zen I found without trying what I'd long since lost sight of the fact that I was actually searching for. For there, in a charity shop, inadvertently yanked out of the decaying carboard box alongside a Johnny Dankworth LP, was a white sleeve bearing what appeared to be a certain near-mythical title rendered in the same sort of font as that old-skool stripey BBC2 '2'. Yes, it was Music From BBC Children's Programmes. At long, long last. For a second I stood transfixed by the cover. Then I tried to actually decipher the weird visual jumble, made up of a headache-inducing Grog-On-Blue-Peter-Boat graphical nightmare of a load of programme logos all piled on top of each other. Some of these could just about be breathlessly made out, and gave exciting pointers as to what might be contained within. An excitement that was immediately tempered by the ominous presence of two bland and well-mannered youngsters in the bottom left-hand corner.


Until a long-overdue getting-with of the times in the mid-eighties, the BBC were always irritatingly fond of using clean-cut, fresh-faced young innocents - frequently toting toy trains for some reason - as iconography for their children's output. Presumably this was intended as a reflection of the improving Reithian values that children's shows like Blue Peter, Treasure Houses and The Song And The Story were supposed to embody; by which logic we can only conclude that Zokko! would have been represented by some unkempt screaming incoherent kept locked in the airing cupboard for their own safety. These were kind of youngsters who would dutifully watch BBC Schools programmes even when they weren't at school, singing along enthusiastically to Music Time yet all the while failing to appreciate the unanticipated joys of that frenetic AOR instrumental that accompanied the 'dots', or the sprightly flutey theme from Watch, or indeed its easy-on-the-eye presenter Louise Hall-Taylor. The sort of children who made it past the opening titles of Go With Noakes. The sort of children, in short, who could potentially ruin this most mythologised of albums with their thoroughly non-malign influence. Come on in, they seem to be saying, it's all good clean fun here. You'll find nothing to trouble or disturb you. Apart from possibly The World Of Doctor Who.

But we were already in way above our heads. I'd spent too many hours and seen too many Mario Lanza album covers to be dissuaded now. There was a potential doorway to retronostalgic nirvana here and I was waiting for someone to say "ready to knock, turn the lock", and no amount of sepia-toned goody two shoeses were going to stand in my way. It was time to actually listen to Music From BBC Children's Programmes.


Top Of The Box, The Complete Guide To BBC Records And Tapes Singles, is available as a paperback here or an eBook here; a sequel covering the albums is coming soon!