Unlike the square old Radio Times and its inset photographs of well-turned out broadcasters with smart haircuts and nice ties, TV Times was always right at the cutting edge of fashion. And never more so than back in the days when 'Swinging London' was ram-packed with blokes in top hats trying on military jackets and women dressed as Capable Caroline from Here We Go Round The Mulberry Bush. Unless you've got a 'neo-history' show on BBC2, of course, in which case you should loudly announce that this never happened over footage of it actually happening.

Although they never quite managed to forge a fashion craze out of Bruce Forsyth in an oversized novelty chef's hat making something out of 'leftovers', TV Times was an ideal vehicle for anyone looking to promote their far-out crazy sixties fashions, with its captive audience of television viewers keen to emulate the stylish razzle-dazzle of the Ready Steady Go! audience, or at the very least that geezer talking to Viv Stanshall about how 'the longer shirts' were old fashioned. Here are just a few of the ingenious ways in which peddlers of non-natural psychedelically-shaded fibres attempted to harness the spending power of people looking to see when Sixpenny Corner was on.


Here's one hip and with-it young trendsetter explaining how top wash-and-wear synthetic mod favourite Crimplene is ideal for driving go-karts and failing to impress haystack-dwelling blondes. Either that, or this is some kind of low budget recreation of the Bank Holiday Mods And Rockers showdowns, with crash barriers, a safer mode of transport, and no Rockers.


Crimplene's even less flexible known associate Terylene receives a similar plug courtesy of this disconcerting tale of dating, cricket and weirdly possessive symbolic demands as apparently related by TV's Tom Chance. Note how the most positive thing they can find to say about Terylene trousers is that they are 'very okay'; meanwhile, we are probably best not knowing why he wanted Diana - who seems to have a 'thing' for synthetic trousers - to sponge them down after.


Meanwhile, it's 50% Fortrel Polyester and 50% Combed Cotton for wonderful new Wescoteers, the trousers that 'look after themselves'. Whatever scientific miracle this entails, it apparently results in them standing upright of their own accord, to the visible lack of delight of two awkwardly-slumped dolly birds. Note however that they are manufactured by Koratron, which sounds suspiciously like the sort of name you would have given to a rubbish villian in an early Doctor Who comic strip. So when you see a Policeman shouting "The trousers - they're walking - AND NOTHING CAN STOP THEM!" into his radio while standing at a weird eighty degree angle, you'll know exactly what has happened.


One size is slightly larger, and one size is too small, and the ones that mother buys you at the start of the 'school year' don't sodding well fit at all! You'd never have believed it but here's square, dependable and literally straight-laced Clarks jumping on the mod-psych bandwagon to flog their Flamingo-friendly wares to 'young women of tomorrow', presumably to replace their last pair which began dissolving in the waters that they trod. Quite where that young man of tomorrow lurking in the background fits into the equation, meanwhile, is anyone's guess.


Many of the raw synthetic materials for these Deptford Draylons-friendly fashion revolutions were provided by defunct chemical behemoth ICI, who took the unlikely opportunity to reposition themselves as bloke-behind-desk-led Carnabetian Trendsetters with a block-booked advert break plugging Crimplene, Terylene, Bri-Nylon and all the rest of them. If you wanted to know more about any of the featured clobber, then your luck was in courtesy of this handy form in TV Times; judging from the accompanying artificial fibre-sporting ladies, and in particular 'C' who was alarmingly racy even by tacky old ITV standards of the time, it's a fair bet that a few readers sent off for the free brochure for entirely the wrong reasons. You had to make your own XXXBunker in those days. Let's hope they all got a good kick out of those detailed diagrams of Astronlon-C and Astralene-C being immersed at high temperatures, then.


Of course, if you wanted to see real far-out game-changing sixties fashions on television, then you couldn't do much better than The Avengers. Once they'd got rid of Ian Hendry and his decidedly side-vent-five-inches-long-deficient mac, that is. Needless to say, TV Times were always more than happy to get a few wardrobe-centric words and photos out of the famously sharp-dressing series regulars, and here are literally just a handful of the dozens upon dozens of features the series inspired. First up, in amongst the standard deluge of weak puns and spurious statistics, Patrick Macnee reveals that in sharp contrast to his never less than dapper small screen persona, he hates ties with a vengance, and it turns out Harry H. Corbett's not dramatically keen on them either. Except if they involve something to do with pie, apparently. Honor Blackman, on the other hand, knows it's better simply to sing the praises of her designers and just generally look insanely hot in their creations without even trying. John Bates, who designed her successor's outfits, clearly wasn't impressed by this feature as he spends his interview pouring scorn on Honor's endless variations on a leather theme and detailing how he tried to counter this with a series of practical yet feminine op-art designs. And, despite talking quite forcefully about how men know nothing about women's fashion and it pays to listen to the suggestions of those who will actually have to wear them, still somehow fails to avoid sounding as, erm, 'sixties' as they come. And finally, as someone who has clearly never watched The Avengers says, Diana Rigg is set not on 'violence and vengeance' but on helping YOU to win a big money prize. Apparently this involves deciding which photo of her in full Emma Peel regalia you like best and... then... a panel of judges decides which of you was the most right? No us neither.


Not to be outdone, Fenella Fielding from ATV's Mrs Quilley's Murder Shoes participates in more or less the exact same competition, only with a decidedly Audrey Hepburn-influenced slant and some trademark 'exquisite, dahling!' commentary. The rules are really still no clearer, mind.


The face of Associated Rediffusion's youth magazine show That's For Me!, Ann'i'e Nightingale - apparently writing about herself in the third person - presents an extra-curricular feature on the return of the beret as a fashion item, with tips on cost-consciously repurposing your old school one by jumping up and down on it and throwing it in flourescent paint. Thankfully you don't have to rank the photos in order of something or other this time, though.


And finally, here's Jon Pertwee with an early example of his, erm, 'debatable' self-aggrandising jet-setting showbiz anecdotes. Now we're not saying that Radio's Man Of A Thousand Voices didn't personally think the silk was 'special', mind. Nor indeed are we denying that it may have been in the same square mile as the word 'Italy' at some point. It's just that the explanation sounds very very like "The Ghosts Of N-Space is number one in the hit parade!". Can Do, incidentally, was a game show that sounds to all intents and purposes exactly the same as You Bet!. Wonder if his anecdote about the lion on the Wall Of Death was put to the test?


Well Playmates, here's Arthur Askey giving you his cheery personal guarantee that you can buy all the latest fashions from your armchair with comfort, credit and confidence. Of course, there's no guarantee of any of the above if you buy my book Well At Least It's Free. It's what all the hip swingers are reading though. And better than a sodding catalogue!

Looks Unfamiliar 6 - Emma Burnell

Looks Unfamiliar is a podcast in which writer and occasional broadcaster Tim Worthington talks to a guest about some of the things that they remember that nobody else ever does. Joining Tim in this episode is broadcaster, columnist and standup comic Emma Burnell, who is banking on somebody else remembering Miners' Strike fundraising album Whose Side Are You On?, the Sweet Valley High novels, short-lived playground craze Scoubidou, children's horror novella The Patchwork Monkey, undistinguished Rutger Hauer vehicle Split Second, and the Ever Ready 'Power To The People' advert. Along the way we'll be discussing the sociocultural ramifications of an earnest man talking to some earnest men, assessing the risks of hiring videos from 'a van', and speculating on the possible psychotropic effects of smoking a Fanta Yo-yo.

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Looks Unfamiliar is hosted by Podnose. If you've enjoyed it, why not buy one of Tim's books? We can particularly recommend Well At Least It's Free.

So you're all set. You've cut that page out of TV Times, you've got your leftovers all nicely stored in the fridge, you've got your oversized novelty chef's hat on, and it's time to make whatever that recipe with Brucie was. There's only one problem, though - your kitchen looks grey, spartan and shabby even by the standards of the days of black and white TV, and doesn't even have a single shred of showbiz razzle-dazzle. To see it is definitely not nice.

Fortunately help is at hand. If you flick back a couple of pages through the magazine that, erm, you've cut a page out of, you can find all manner of cost-effective dazzling new utilities and decorating supplies to help turn your kitchen into a suitably hip and happening pop-art hangout for making a snack during the ad break of Fire Crackers...


It's On (Dr. Dre) 37°F Killa! Passive-agressive cross-utility smackdown time as a Bobbie Gentry-alike snorting a Rum Swizzle bemoans the fact that her fridge isn't quite as good as her sewing machine. Quite what indignity had caused Ian Singer to take so bitchily against the good people at Electrolux is sadly lost to history, but you really would worry about her ability to operate a sewing machine safely with all that booze flowing through her sinuses anyway.


No such chlorodifluoromethane-targeted outrage for Mrs Jacki Boardman, who apparently goes 'all the way' with her small artillery of white goods from Frigidaire's SheerLook 67 range; apparently the 'most stylish, most spacious, most 1967 fridges you ever saw'. Presumably they had a plaque commemorating Steve Chalmers' European Cup-winning goal for Celtic on the front, and played Sorry Mr. Green by The Walham Green East Wapping Carpet Cleaning Rodent And Boggit Extermination Association when opened. Meanwhile, we would never under any circumstances suggest that there is any direct correlation between her pose, her frenziedly delighted expression, and the rickety juddering mechanism of old-skool twin-tub washing machines. Because we get letters. We really do.


If you needed more time to devote to brow-furrowing over whether your fridge was literally orgasmic or just a poor substitute for a Ronco Buttoneer, you could always invest in some Marley Consort flooring. Boasting 'locked-in shine' in an early incarnation of that infuriating 'Such R.3! Many Hardluck Hall!' speech meme thing, it all but legally bindingly guaranteed that you would never ever need to actually clean it. A cat would probably like a word, then.


Out into the hallway, and you too could win a Big, Big Carpet! There are a mathematically bewildering array of prizes to be won, and no guarantee that if you sat down and worked it all out with a set square and graph paper, you wouldn't find that it essentially all added up to mean that absolutely nobody would end up winning absolutely anything whatsoever. Note also that said carpets are offered by a carpet cleaner manufacturer, who would presumably have reached straight for prizes that required you to deploy their product every three minutes, regardless of position on the 'big, big' scale.


Alternatively, you could opt for Polyflor, which probably requires more regular cleaning but at least is simple and straightforward enough for teh menz to work out. That's quite an extravagant way of congratulating him for successfully working out how to wield a mop, though.


An opportunity for a tacky observation about curtains matching carpet? No, because what we're concerned with here is the actual curtain track. It's strong, almost invisible, easy to fix, silent gliding, easy to clean, non-corroding, and presumably taken as read that it will also hold up your curtains successfully. Is, after all, the curtain track you've been waiting for, and despite the suspiciously keen look of the lady in the half-hearted John Squire-decorated t-shirt, almost impossible to contrive an untoward gag out of. Almost.


If you were looking to emphasise that revolutionary new curtain track with a nice fresh lick of paint, longstanding purveyors of finest substrate adherent Crown were hoping to attract your custom with this conspicuously modern-looking will-they-won't-they-choose-soft-khaki literally decorative couple. Quite what was amusing them in the first example of the campaign is sadly left unclear, while in the second one they appear to have wandered on to the set of The Trip. Touch the scream that climbs the walls... but make sure the second coat has set first. Yes, about three of you got that, didn't you?


Bizarre to think that it's now necessary to specify that the above gag referred to the highly banned Jack Nicholson-scripted 1967 big-screen freakout The Trip and not that thing with Coogan and Brydon sodding off to BSB in a go-kart or something, but there we are. Anyway, one thing that definitely won't be climbing any walls - providing they've been coated in the requisite quantity of confusingly named Walpamur Emulsion - is flies. This is the paint with the in-built 'Insect And Fly Control Agent', which probably did send a few winged buzzers tumbling undignified to the floor, but also quite possibly left three percent of your face attached to it if you ventured too close. Legal Disclaimer: this presumption is based on absolutely no evidence whatsoever. Apart from general alarm at the overall quite unnecessary wording and illustration of the advert.


Anyway, all the decorating is done, and it's time to move on to the furniture. And here's one of those standard-issue sixties foxy redheads pushing the need to replace old sofas with new with an almost propagandist zeal. Well, if there's one thing that Ian Furniture and the Furniture Industry Fatcats are going to have to come to terms with, it's the fact that we're all too psychologically robust and resilient to fall for cheap and tacky attempts to coerce us into parting with cash simply by deploying a str... sorry, was just looking at swivel chairs... am I supposed to be writing about Skiboy or something?


At a guess, I'd say that the mystery was why he considered this any more 'portable' than any other penny, especially considering the size of it. Anyway join us again next time, when we'll be looking at how TV Times plugged its very own small-screen stars in the most tenuous of tie-in features. At least two of whom appeared in programmes covered in entertaining depth in my book Well At Least It's Free, hint hint.

"Tony Wilson, who around this time was regularly featuring punk and New Wave acts on his Granada Television arts show So It Goes, was well known for his aesthetic tastes, interest in futuristic design, and fervent belief that Manchester could become a leading city on a global platform, and Factory’s output and indeed general outlook inevitably began to reflect his obsessions, with its eclectic and cerebral roster of artists encompassing arty funk outfit A Certain Ratio, classically-influenced guitar pop band Durutti Column, and confrontational stand-up comedian John Dowie, whilst the label’s musically diverse releases were given a unifying style by the minimalist and industrial-influenced designs of artist Peter Saville, and in turn by Wilson’s insistence on appending 'FAC' production codes to every project from album and single releases to the purchase of new office equipment; given his political sympathies, the absence of the second part of the word may not have been coincidental. By the early eighties, now with Joy Division's manager Rob Gretton and producer Martin Hannett as partners, and a recently-acquired nightclub, The Hacienda (FAC 51), as a base of operations, Factory was both as successful and as influential as an independent label could hope to be, particularly following the release of New Order’s acclaimed 12” only single Blue Monday in 1983"

When I think of Manchester, I tend to think of Tony Wilson. True, if you grew up in the Granada region, where he kept on fronting regional news and arts shows even when operating on a national and even global platform, and had a liking for the bands signed to his Factory label (yes, even Northside), this is hardly exactly a shocking revelation, but there's a little more to it than that. During some pretty dark and directionless times when the city was struggling every bit as much as any of its industrial neighbours, and beaten down so much that in many ways it had started to fight itself as much as it was being fought, he never ever lost his faith or his vision. The art, culture, inclusivity and rich creative and industrial history of the city, he argued, would always win out - the people would always win out - and one day Manchester would become an example to the entire world.

Although this never quite happened in the way he envisaged, and the numerous false starts and near misses must have frustrated him deeply - although the early nineties bid for Manchester to host the 2000 Olympics was both entertainingly over-ambitious, and a worthwhile show of strength and defiance towards those that preferred to write off Manchester and its neighbours as grey, derelict relics of a bygone age full of uneducated flat-capped Neanderthals; it's also entirely possible that the London 2012 bid might not have been quite so successful without its example to go by - there's a sense in which, way way beyond 'Cool Britannia', the nineties saw the entire UK become something at least vaguely in line with what Tony Wilson always believed Manchester to be. Not that he would really have conceded that, though. As nor indeed would Liam or Noel Gallagher, but we'd need to go too far into the history of alternative music to explain that.

From the collapse of Factory, which he breezily told fellow Granada Reports reporter Bob Greaves would "come back and carry on, but maybe not in the form everyone's expecting" (and in a sense it did with Oasis, which really wasn't what anyone was expecting), to his own later health struggles which he used to highlight the problematic and seemingly arbitrary allocation of NHS treatment funding, Tony Wilson faced pretty much anything that was thrown at him with optimism, practicality and wit, never suggesting there were easy answers to difficult questions and strongly believing that it was incumbent on all of us - including him - to work towards addressing issues that the authorities seemed unable to. Most of all, though, he loved to root for his hometown, and recent events have underlined just how much he and several others like him are missed in the social media age. There are modern-day equivalents around, of course, but they really don't get the exposure. It's them we should be listening to, though, rather than furious didactic combatants for the coveted 'Green Jumper' award for being Best At Being Right-On 1983, braying weasel-word Watch With Mother puppet bigots in suits that would shame someone drinking Special Brew on a bus at 10am, or shrieking car alarms salivating about how many comments they will get on their 'thinkpiece' the next morning.

Shaun Ryder, whom most eighties record companies would not have allowed past reception but whom Wilson was convinced was a 'poet' and didn't care who laughed at that, once recorded a song for Factory that ended - at least in its superlative 12" reading - with an exhortation to "think about the future". Which is what we should all do, frankly, and leave the shock value hatemongers famous and non-famous who've bored us senseless for too long now where they belong, and where too many people once thought Manchester itself belonged - the past.

Carnival Of Light is probably the most obscure track The Beatles ever recorded. Specifically created for a live art installation, it was heard twice in public and has never resurfaced. Not even on the newly-released Sergeant Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band'Sessions' box set, despite that being precisely where and when it was put down on tape. You could be forgiven for assuming that it's just an unimportant studio offcut and that if it was of any point or value whatsoever we'd have heard it by now. You'd be wrong, though, as it's also the subject of one of the most interesting stories in the Beatles' entire history. If you're interested in the mid-sixties counterculture and its associated artistic innovations rather than sex, drugs and indeed literally rock'n'roll, that is.

Carnival Of Light was The Beatles' contribution to an event called The Million Volt Light And Sound Rave, held at The Roundhouse in Chalk Farm on 28th January and 4th February 1967, and it's the chain of events behind that hazardously-named 'happening' that explain just why it is a little-explored corner of their work that deserves more exploration. It's depressingly common for articles about The Beatles to discuss them as if they were acting in complete isolation from anything else that was going on in 'the sixties', rather than the fulcrum around which hundreds of musical and artistic endeavours pivoted and vice versa, and that their mid-sixties experimentalism had absolutely no connection to their earlier cleaner-cut incarnation. How many reviews of the new box set, for example, will talk of the album as though it appeared as if by magic and not even touch on such fascinating details as the fact that "it's getting better all the time" was the catchphrase of short-stay Beatle Jimmie Nicol, who replaced an incapacitated Ringo on one of the American tours and who also later performed similar deputising duties for The Dave Clark 5 - it's a wonder they didn't keep him frankly; or that George Martin very deliberately lifted the audience sounds for the album from his hit recording of the Peter Cook/Dudley Moore/Alan Bennett/Jonathan Miller satirical stage revue Beyond The Fringe as he wanted to have a specific 'kind' of audience reacting; or the stray chortle that appears partway through the title track, which McCartney asked for because he remembered always being fascinated by radio comedy audiences laughing at things that listeners at home couldn't see; or the band specifically getting their old Hamburg mates Sounds Incorporated - a now largely forgotten instrumental outfit with a full brass section who had minor success throughout the sixties with alarming takes on the likes of the William Tell Overture and Hall Of The Mountain King - in to do suitably vulgar and blaring brass on Good Morning Good Morning rather than reaching for the nearest in-house session musicians? Probably about as many as will comment on the absence of Carnival Of Light, if we're being honest about it. It came about as the direct result of their association with a wider artistic scene, though, and there's a strong case for arguing that it had an important and immediate effect on the album that they were about to make.

Throughout 1966, London's experimental art community - the word 'psychedelic' would not come to be commonly used until late in the year - had started to converge on a number of venues; firstly the Spontaneous Underground events held at The Marquee on Sunday afternoons, closely followed by the UFO club on Tottenham Court Road, and The Roundhouse in Chalk Farm. A number of bands quickly found favour on this circuit, including the likes of Pink Floyd, Soft Machine, The Move, The Jimi Hendrix Experience and The Crazy World Of Arthur Brown, alongside the less well known likes of The Smoke, The Purple Gang, The Flies, The Riot Squad, Tomorrow and any given combination of Liverpool Poets Adrian Henri, Brian Patten, Roger McGough and their guitar-playing associate Andy Roberts. Many of these bands were given to indulging in extended free-form instrumentals, often with electronic effects, while the lab-coated free-jazz outfit AMM went even further and dispensed with any notions of actual song structure, concentrating on creating soundscapes with a combination of amplified instruments and transistor radios. However, these were never simply musical events, and usually involved elements of multimedia, stage theatrics and performance art, the latter often provided by a certain Yoko Ono. With his then-significant other Jane Asher, Paul McCartney was a regular at such venues and events, particularly Spontaneous Underground, and was no doubt left feeling sufficiently inspired to want to join in. That opportunity would come about through the unlikely route of buying a piano.


The main driving force behind The Million Volt Light And Sound Rave was David Vaughan, who with Doug Binder and Dudley Edwards made up BEV, a Swinging London-based design group who specialised in psychedelic murals with a pronounced and distinctive pop-art influence. Amongst those who employed BEV's services were The Kinks, Carnaby Street boutique Lord John, and infamous socialite Tara Browne, who would later provide the unfortunate inspiration for the opening verse of A Day In The Life. Late in 1966, Paul McCartney engaged BEV to decorate a piano for him, and when they delivered the alarmingly-hued finished article, Vaughan took the chance to ask if he or The Beatles would be interested in contributing something towards an electronic light and sound showcase they were planning. To his surprise, McCartney agreed enthusiastically, and on 5th January 1967, at the end of a session dedicated to overdubbing vocals onto the forthcoming single Penny Lane, The Beatles set to work in Abbey Road Studio 2.

Cobbled together from descriptions given by various individuals who have actually heard it - notably Beatles historian Mark Lewisohn and McCartney's friend and biographer (and, at the time, owner of focal point of the 'Underground' scene The Indica Gallery and Bookshop, and organiser of several similar events himself) Barry Miles - it appears that Carnival Of Light runs more or less along the following lines. Over a backing of organ and drums, recorded at a high speed to give an unnatural lower pitch and time distortion effect when played back, and overdubbed with church organ, frenetic tambourine and distorted electric guitar, McCartney and Lennon engage in seemingly random outbursts of echo-drenched proclamations, while various taped sound effects are cued in with equal spontaneity. The latter reportedly included gurgling water, pub piano, cinema organ and feedback, while the former include such meaningful interjections as "are you alright?" and "Barcelona!", in amongst a cacophony of whistling, chanting and random fragments of studio chatter, including at least one quite understandable coughing fit, and ending with an echo-saturated McCartney asking "can we hear it back now?". According to Miles, who was very much in tune with this style of making music, there is no conventional structure, and it simply moves between different tempos and hints of melody on a whim; it's clear that he actually considers this to be a good thing, incidentally. Some sources including Dudley Edwards have also claimed that it included a brief performance of Fixing A Hole; while it seems odd that Lewisohn would not have noted this detail, it is also entirely possible that McCartney may have appended a home demo of the song to the tape that was actually used at the event (recording of Fixing A Hole itself did not actually begin until 9th February). Incidentally, it's worth pondering on whether Berserk, a truly alarming early Blur b-side, might have been at least partially based on the description of Carnival Of Light given in Lewisohn's The Complete Beatles Recording Sessions.

When Doctor Who returned for its seventh run in 1970, it was almost a different programme. Much like we very nearly drew a line under this series of articles after the end of the black and white era, the BBC very nearly drew a line under the series itself; the details will always remain hazy and open to speculation, but with declining post-'Dalekmania' interest in mind, there were at the very least discussions about the possibility of replacing it with something new and exciting and more attuned to the thrilling new world of colour television. Thankfully, sanity - or more likely paperwork - prevailed, and producer Derrick Sherwin was encouraged to take Doctor Who in a fresh and reinvigorating direction.

Opting to literally bring the series down to Earth, Sherwin came up with a new format that crackled with the energy and freshness of the arrival of both colour television and a new decade; the exact same phenomenon that I touched on in the piece about Chigley in The Camberwick Green Procrastination Society, in fact. Inspired by certain recent hit movie franchises and ITV shows, with The Doctor in exile and working with a gadget-friendly military division dedicated to tackling alien, technological and quasi-paranormal threats, this gave rise to a fast-moving, action-packed, visually arresting set of episodes with a more relatable sense of menace, and a stylish new leading man in Jon Pertwee, who it's safe to say was one of the Doctors who enjoyed living the part. It also gave rise to the budget rapidly running out, and cost-consciously lengthy stories that continue to divide long-term opinion. Viewers at the time certainly seemed quite undivided, though, so fire up The Inferno and let's drill down to the real talking points about it...


Was The Opening Of Spearhead From Space Really A 'Shot-For-Shot Remake' Of The Opening Of Quatermass II?


Cash-spillingly made entirely on film and entirely on location, the appropriately-named Spearhead From Space was a powerhouse opener not just for the new series but for the entire new direction; indeed, there's a serious case for arguing that it is the single greatest Doctor Who story ever. Beating the BBC's simultaneously-launched new adult 'sci-fact' drama Doomwatch to the punch - created, possibly not entirely coincidentally, by recent ship-jumping Doctor Who scriptwriters Gerry Davis and Kit Pedler - it exhilaratingly scared the wits out of viewers with four episodes full of fast-moving Carry-On-film-gone-psychotic mayhem courtesy of a plastics factory infiltrated by a malevolent space octopus. And one fact that everyone knows about Spearhead From Space is that it opened with a 'shot for shot remake' of the opening of the revered 1955 BBC science fiction serial Quatermass II. Or did it? While it's established fact that as part of his relaunch strategy, Derrick Sherwin ordered up several episodes of the Quatermass serials from the BBC Film Library to plunder for inspiration, he himself has never referred to a 'remake' of any kind, let alone a 'shot for shot' one, and this appears to have been largely a fan assumption. A well-founded assumption, maybe, but an assumption nonetheless, and one that everyone has long just accepted on face value; how many dedicated fans of either programme could tell you with any certainty on the spot whether this was an accurate observation or not? After all, back when this phrase first became common currency, very few Doctor Who fans could realistically have seen Quatermass II. Now that we can see it, though... The Bolts, the first episode of Quatermass II, opens with spinning radars and dishes on top of military vans, a supervisor doing some trademark Nigel Kneale dry-witted dialogue with a radar operator about his voice going faint due to "the village boozer" and how "I'm going to make ruddy BBC announcers out of you lot if I have to soften up your gullets with my bare hand", reports of an unusual meteor shower that they actively dismiss as 'a jet or a fuel tank', and an interminable sequence with a farmer on a tractor stumbling across said non-jet/fuel meteors in transit. Episode One of Spearhead From Space opens with standard issue 'Earth seen from space' footage, a radar spinning on top of a radar station, a nervy operator calling 'ma'm' in for a second opinion on a weird meteor shower apparently flying in formation, and an impressive shot of the meteors searing through the sky and their mercifully quick discovery by the inaugural Pertwee-era Poacher, Sam Seeley. So not quite a shot-for-shot remake, but a very close and intentional homage, and very much in keeping with Sherwin's stated aim to capture the ambience and realism of the serials rather than just copy them directly. Anyway, if the comparison caused some fans to seek out the Quatermass serials, then there's nothing really wrong with a bit of harmless and convenient conclusion-jumping. Aside from which, there are bigger and more fundamental questions surrounding Spearhead From Space...


Who Was Channing?


When the Nestene Consciousness attempted to destroy mankind and take over the Earth, it did so with the assistance of specially created plastic human-ish figures with ray guns hidden in their wrists who did its space octopus bidding. At the most basic end of this artillery were a small army of skinheads in boiler suits whose efficiency would appear to be questionable at best. Next up the scale were the disconcertingly David McCallum-esque shop window dummies that smashed out onto the high street on cue, casually annihilating old women, members of The Bluetones and a not at all over-reacting man on a bike in a hat, and worse still causing disruption to poor old Wally The Workman's lunch break. And then there were the waxwork-usurping plastic replicas of politicians, world leaders, high-ranking military officials, and Auto Plastics' mysterious new manager, Channing. Hardly exactly somebody worth going to the trouble of replicating, you might think, and if you did then you'd be even more right than you thought. Not only is it never explained who the sinister figure given to Pearly Spencer-esque glares through frosted glass is supposed to be a replica of, it's even actively implied that there was nobody that he could even potentially have replaced; neither of his colleagues-by-proxy Ransome or Hibbert (with whom he forms an unnervingly Gilbert And George-esque double act) seem to associate him with any known figure from Auto Plastics management past or present, and there are even a couple of direct references to his just having arrived from nowhere. It's entirely feasible that the Nestene Consciousness might have simply plasticed him up from nowhere, but if that was the case, why not just replace Hibbert with a replica? It can't even really be argued that they needed the human staff of the factory under their control to 'make' Channing, as he appears to have pre-existed any of the actual untoward petrochemical-driven activity. One angular theory is that he may actually have been Hallam, Hugh Burden's character from the 1966 Michael Caine film Funeral In Berlin, whose defecting-to-the-East-to-steal-Nazi-gold chicanery would at least have made him an idea candidate to install as the head of a plastics factory bent on the destruction of humanity. Sadly, we may never know as, like all good Cold War double-agents, he melted at the end of the story. But at least he was something approaching a convincing mimicry of an actual identifiable human...


How Many Voices Did Radio's 'Man Of A Thousand Voices' Actually Have?


If there was one thing that Jon Pertwee was not short on, it was unlikely and frequently incoherent anecdotes that existed primarily to emphasise how brilliantly talented he was. From being offered virtually every part in Dad's Army at one point or another, to the endless pranks pulled by, with and on his 'old sparring partner' Tenniel Evans, to his frequently trotted out excuse about not having seen any of the subsequent Doctors because "I've been very busy working on another show called Worzel Gummidge", to the amusing mis-spellings of his name that weren't, to the proud proclamations that The Ghosts Of N-Space was 'Number One in the Hit Parade', to whatever that bewilderment was about bareback horse-riding in drag as 'Madam Pertweeova', he would offer each and every one of them uninvited if you gave him half the chance, and usually even if you didn't. And then there was his - and conspicuously few other people's - claim that he was known as Radio's 'Man Of A Thousand Voices'. Perhaps mercifully, he never really got to use any of them in Doctor Who. But he almost did. In episode five of Inferno, Pertwee utilised these self-proclaimed vocal talents to essay the part of a radio announcer reporting on the state of emergency imposed after the Parallel Earth's crust was penetrated by Project Inferno. To further cunningly conceal his identity and prevent anyone from suspecting a thing, Pertwee was actually seen on screen listening to his own announcement. Thankfully, producer Barry Letts saw sense and cut the brief scene before transmission, arguing that it was too obviously the series' lead actor doing one of his 'many' (it says here) voices and nobody would be fooled for a second. As sometimes happened in those days, though, this cut was actually enacted after duplicate copies of the finished episodes had been made for overseas sales, and when a full colour copy of Inferno was located in Canada in the mid-eighties, it turned out to have the missing sequence intact. Despite the best efforts of the cast and their 'concerned' faces, it has to be said that the voice issuing from the radio sounds absolutely nothing whatsoever like any newsreader in the entire history of news ever, and very much indeed like Jon Pertwee doing an effort-deficient impression of a Ray Alan-depleted Lord Charles in the middle of a maelstrom of static and crackles, giving rise to the possibility that Pertwee might actually have been responsible for the infamous 'Vrillon Of Ashtar Galactic Command' hoax. Mind you, it wasn't even the silliest line he delivered in that story...


"What Did You Expect? Some Kind Of Space Rocket With Batman At The Controls?"


In Inferno, The Doctor manages to get himself stuck in a parallel universe where he is able to observe what would happen if the drilling project in his own reality was allowed to continue unrestricted, and also if Benton shouted his lines with a slightly different inflection. While attempting to get back in time to warn everyone of the dangers of allowing furious toxic red sludge to seep corrosively all over the globe because a couple of self-satisfied men with bad hairstyles thought climate change was a myth, The Doctor has cause to show the detatched Tardis console to the alternate reality version of decidedly lava-averse drilling safety consultant Greg Sutton, whose bewilderment at this method of cross-dimensional transportation prompts The Doctor to ask if he was expecting "some kind of space rocket with Batman at the controls". Even aside from the logistical implications of acknowledging the Caped Crusader as a fictional element of the Doctor Who'universe', and the question of exactly how much time he spent at the controls of space rockets of any sort, there's no swerving the fact that this is a quite comprehensive and authoritative slight aimed at a longstanding rival, and one whose big television adaptation had only recently been pitched directly against Doctor Who by the 'other side' to boot. Was this the new production team announcing that the days of furrowing brows over whatever ITV could throw at them were over, and the 'ratings war' was won before it had even started? Possibly, but what is more interesting still is that this was the start of what would turn out to be a very bleak decade for poor old Bruce Wayne. A long way from anything resembling an organised 'rebranding', Batman spent the seventies as little more than a quasi-comedic piece of iconography, with all manner of untamed licensing arrangements leading to everything from a bizarre early seventies 'tour' by Adam West accompanied by Nicholas Young from The Tomorrow People as Robin, to the seemingly endless procession of mind-hurting 'Bugs Bunny Meets The Superheroes' touring stage shows, and all the while repeats of the sixties series swirled around the schedules to the 'delight' of an audience who were perhaps slightly more cynical than those who watched it the first time around. While the actual comics tried their best to return the franchise to its darker roots, which in turn would ultimately lead to the late eighties reinvention, the most sophisticated take on Batman that the wider seventies public saw was the Filmation series, and that's not necessarily as impressive a yardstick as it might sound. Anyway, regardless of how familiar the production team may or may not have been with what actually happened in Batman, Doctor Who had reason to be bigging itself up, not least on account of some of its decisive breaks with its recent past...


They Like Intelligent Strong Sensibly-Dressed Female Lead Characters And They Cannot Lie


Over the past couple of instalments, we've seen plenty of evidence of just how fond the Doctor Who production team were of casting shapely young ladies as series regulars - and in supporting roles whenever they got the chance, which was more or less all of the sodding time, basically - and what delight the cameraman took in angling their shots around certain prominent physical features. Good lord, have we seen it. So much so, in fact, that there have been a couple of complaints, almost as though someone writing about television made in the sixties from the perspective of an entirely different century should have had some say over exactly how it was made. Or indeed should ignore how it was made. Well, I'm not taking the blame for some blokes in suits speculating on what might get 'the dads' watching back in 1967 for a moment longer, and thankfully it was at just this point in Doctor Who history that Derrick Sherwin decided that he'd had quite enough of the dolly birds getting in the way of telling a thumping good scientifically veracious story too. Given that the relaunch involved Earth-exiled The Doctor teaming up with military counter-alien task force U.N.I.T., and bearing in mind the example set by previous one-off proto-feminist characters like Ann Travers and Isobel Watkins, he took the opportunity to ditch the traditional assistant and pair him up instead with level-headed long word-spouting Cambridge-educated academic Dr. Elizabeth Shaw. Rational, deductive, and never prone to panic even when being chased over railings by weirdly crouching stuntmen or whacked on the head by bipedal lizards in a barn, Liz was a breath of fresh air both in character and in appearance, favouring sensible hairdos and with-it yet presentable clobber over a self-consciously 'sexy' look, and some would argue actually ending up looking more sexy as a consequence. Perfectly suited to the longer form and more cerebral approach of Series Seven, Liz gave reinvented Doctor Who a depth and a level of dialogue that did an enormous amount to tackle the 'lol you can see the strings!!! oh no hang on that's Stingray' sneery misconceptions that were already haranguing the show and make it into a relevant and widely enjoyable series again. It's just a shame that, due to a number of reasons, the character was amicably written out after the end of the series and never really seen again. It's also a shame that nowadays buffoons spend too much time splitting hairs over whether she was an official 'companion' or not because we never saw her travel in the Tardis or something; no but she was in The Ambassadors Of Death so stick that in your wilful refusal to consider the conventions for crediting regular cast in BBC shows around the time The Daleks' Master Plan was made and smoke it. While Liz definitely had a new look, though, was she actually part of a wider one...?



The Music In The Silurians Isn't As 'Weird' As People Seem To Think


Aside from Channing looking through a frosted glass window, the big television event of 1970 was BBC1's adaptation of The Six Wives Of Henry VIII, famed as much for the towering central performance of Keith Michell as the divorce-behead-friendly monarch as it was for the honkingly dronethentic soundtrack provided by 'early music' firebrand David Munrow. Not far behind were the similarly Munrow-bolstered follow-up Elizabeth R and over in the cinema Ken Russell's The Devils, and Munrow himself could regularly be heard on Radio 3 introducing youngsters to the delights of the crumhorn in the storytelling slot Pied Piper. Prog Rock fans were thrilling to the adoption of medieval instruments by the likes of Led Zeppelin, Gentle Giant, Gryphon and The Roundtable, the last of whom coincidentally featured a certain David Munrow in their lineup. While it may well have been largely down to the efforts of one particular clavichord-wielding evangelist, the fact of the matter is that there was a significant resurgence of mainstream interest in 'early music' as the seventies rolled around. So when Carey Blyton opted to emphasise the earthy prehistoric nature of the primary antagonists of The Silurians by marking their appearance with something somewhere between Chris Morris''Answer Prancer' music and a minuetting goose, it wasn't quite so much of a deviation from normality as the average 'programme guide' might seem to suggest. Yes, it might be repetitive, distracting, and at a massive seven episodes' worth of it even verging on annoying in places (although, let's be honest about it, the sound made by that Silurian tracker detector thing was way more irritating), but suggesting that this was some crazy uncontrollable experiment in audience torture that got out of hand is a suggestion that could be disproven by Okdel in six seconds flat. And in any case, this was far from the only infiltration of the series by Progressive Rock...


Who Were The 'Heads' On The Production Team?


In some ways, Series Seven was quite 'Prog' in itself, with its lengthy stories, abstract concept album-friendly themes and storylines, and combination of mythological and futuristic concepts with slow-moving and refreshingly unspectacular scientific veracity. It's reasonable to assume that this was a fortuitous coincidence of timing and budget, and at the very most - and not unlike the 'early music' business - a background influence from the general popular-cultural mood of the time rather than a deliberate attempt to distract the far-out types who meant it, man, from their fourteen thousandth listen to Nice Enough To Eat. Though, that said, there was enough direct infiltration from actual Progressive Rock into Doctor Who to raise the odd retrospective eyebrow. The appearance of a short but prominent burst of Fleetwood Mac's Oh Well - Part 1 in Spearhead From Space can just about be explained away as being due to the fact that it was rocketing up the charts at the time the story was filmed, although it does seem a tad incongruous when they could have opted for something less hard and heavy - and probably easier to license for commercial releases later on - such as Early In The Morning by Vanity Fare. What can be less easily waved away, however, is a scene recorded for the next series story The Mind Of Evil later in 1970, wherein The Master is seen listening to The Devil's Triangle, an instrumental suite from King Crimson's top five LP In The Wake Of Poseidon. While this was undoubtedly one of the top sounds of the year, it was only really that amongst a certain audience of tuned-in album-leaning prog types, and somebody must have intentionally picked it out and argued the case for dubbing it on to a television programme with an audience made up primarily of people who probably thought that Yellow River by Christie was a little on the loud side. So who, if anyone, was wandering around the Doctor Who production office waving around copies of Space Hymns, May Blitz and Three Parts To My Soul? Although he probably would have loved Quintessence, it's doubtful that Barry Letts was first in the queue for the nearest A-AUSTR gig. Terrance Dicks would probably have said that Progressive Rock was fine by him "as long as they progress as far away from me as possible!". Jon Pertwee has been described by both of the above as a 'middle-aged teenager whose musical tastes ran to heavy rock', but although they certainly indulged his demands to perform 'funny voices' and dress up as a washerwoman every three minutes, would he really have been insisting on communicating his latest musical discoveries to the masses like some frock-coated John Peel? Can we assume, then, that it was the various directors assigned to the various stories? Or might this even be a silly and scarcely convincing contrivance to fill up a bit of space because with all of the stories being so long there's comparatively little to say about them? Or - hey - maybe they were all so stoned that they can't remember. LOL teh drugz etc. Anyway, whoever it was, they played their own small part in making sure that we actually got more Doctor Who...


What Did We Nearly Get Instead Of Series Eight?


As successful as the relaunch of Doctor Who may have been from the outset, both internally and with viewers, there was still no guarantee that it would actually return the following year until very late in the day. Not, in fact, until the incoming production team, Barry Letts and Terrance Dicks (who we'll be hearing a lot more about soon, incidentally), were just about to start work on Inferno in March 1970. Needless to say, both Letts and Dicks were sufficiently concerned about what they might do or ineed not do next that both had been actively developing other potential projects for the BBC, both of which have been extensively namechecked despite surprisingly little actually being known about either of them. Letts had done some quite extensive groundwork for Snowy White, an action serial about an Australian based in London, which is usually quite lazily described as sounding 'like Crocodile Dundee' when in fact it was more than likely influenced by Barry Humphries' massively popular 'Barry Mackenzie' comic strips, and would probably have had more in common with contemporaneous BBC offbeat crime dramas like Spy Trap and the updated take on radio favourite Paul Temple, as masterminded by one Derrick Sherwin. Dicks meanwhile was working on Better Late, a programme idea that he has seemingly never described in anything other than "well it wasn't better and it was late!"-type witticisms, though we can take a guess that it was probably about Ian Better who was always late, and Ian Late who was better at turning up on time, and the zany events that took place between the two arriving. Thankfully, neither series ever actually had to happen, and we all got to thrill to the small-screen adventures of Bert The Landlord and The IMC Robot instead. As for Derrick Sherwin, he moved on from Paul Temple to create the legendary Skiboy... but that's another story.

So join us again next time for fans getting confused by diphthongs, a Sensorite falling down a lift shaft, and polite and considered speculation on the intelligence level of viewers who actually believed that the BBC might have blown up a church...


You can find the full baffling story of Skiboy - along with features on Glam Rock, Hanna Barbera, Animal Kwackers, Seventies Film And TV Soundtracks and plenty more besides - in my book The Camberwick Green Procrastination Society.

Between 1971 and 1978, it was something of a tradition for BBC1 to scare festive viewers out of their wits with A Ghost Story For Christmas. Inspired by Jonathan Miller's superlative 1968 adaptation of Whistle And I'll Come To You, these were chillingly atmospheric and painstakingly realised short films, primarily directed by Lawrence Gordon Clark and mostly drawn from the works of writer M.R. James. They continue to be held in high regard and their influence has been obvious everywhere from Doctor Who to The League Of Gentlemen. And they were very definitely not intended for younger viewers, or for those of a nervous disposition.

What is less well remembered, however, is that in the early eighties, the Children's Department had a go at producing their own Ghost Stories For Christmas, which in all honesty were only slightly less disturbing than their adult counterparts. Masterminded by producer Anna Home, who was responsible for a number of well-regarded science fiction and fantasy serials for children's television in the late seventies and early eighties, the putative strand ultimately only ran to two one-off specials; although it seems to have been restructuring of their output, rather than any concerns about their suitability, that led to this short duration.

On 23rd December 1980 - six days after the final episode of an adaptation of L.T. Meade's A Little Silver Trumpet - BBC1 broadcast The Bells Of Astercote. Based on Penelope Lively's 1970 children's novel Astercote, this concerned a village that, according to legend, had lost its entire population to the plague. This becomes something of a pressing concern to the modern day residents of nearby Charlton Underwood when a man claiming to be six hundred years old and the guardian of The Chalice Of Astercote turns up displaying some disconcertingly familiar symptoms. Needless to say, the village is gripped by paranoia and apocalyptic visions, and it is only when some sceptical local bikers elect to involve themselves that the bizarre truth finally comes out. Directed by Home's regular collaborator Marilyn Fox, The Bells Of Astercote was broadcast from 16:40pm and was very nearly the last children's programme shown that day; doubtless a fair few viewers were relieved to see Paddington straight afterwards.


There was no repeat of the experiment in 1981 - the equivalent slot in the schedule was filled instead by a repeat of Rentasanta, which you can read more about here - but New Year's Eve 1982 brought an adaptation of Edward Chitham’s 1973 novel Ghost In The Water. The 'ghost' in question is that of Abigail Parkes, a young Black Country girl who had drowned in the late nineteenth century; although officially recorded as a suicide, Abigail was in fact trying to retrieve a ring given to her by her true love, who had died in a mining accident. A series of coded messages point two youngsters studying local history towards the truth, though whether they have simply discovered this or have been guided towards it by Abigail's restless spirit is another question, and one that needless to say comes to dominate the story. Not exactly traditional New Year's entertainment, Ghost In The Water - transmitted in more or less the exact same timeslot as The Bells Of Astercote - was produced by Paul Stone and directed by Renny Rye; two years later, the same pair were responsible for BBC1's acclaimed adaptation of John Masefield's The Box Of Delights.

Sadly, although The Bells Of Astercote was repeated over Easter 1982 and Ghost In The Water in March 1983, neither have ever been commercially released; collectors might however wish to keep an eye out for the tie-in reprint of the original novel of Ghost In The Water, and for the BBC Radiophonic Workshop album The Soundhouse, which included Roger Limb's soundtrack for the play. Both however are strong efforts that deserve to be more widely seen, so perhaps it might be worth repeating them instead of the next inevitable attempt at reviving A Ghost Story For Christmas.

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This is adapted from Winter's Tales, a longer piece looking at all of the BBC's supernatural/sci-fi children's serials of the seventies and eighties, in my book Well At Least It's Free. You can get Well At Least It's Free in paperback here or from the Kindle Store here.

The Psychedelic Spy (BBC Radio 4, 1990)


Writer Andrew Rissik was responsible for this witty, action-packed pastiche of every last military-jacketed secret agent from lurid late sixties pulp paperbacks and equally lurid mind-hurting lava lamp-drenched late sixties post-Bond cinematic knock-offs, following reluctant globetrotting spy Billy Hindle as he wrestles with the end of the sixties - Rissik deliberately set it in 1968 as "by then the whole thing had turned sour" - and the constant demands of his superiors to take on 'just one last job'. The impressive cast includes such pop art-hued espionage drama veterans as James Aubrey, Joanna Lumley, Gerald Harper and Ed Bishop. The Psychedelic Spy occasionally shows up on Radio 4 Extra, but really is crying out for a proper release in suitable pastiche packaging.


Black Cinderella Two Goes East, Or Confessions Of A Glass Slipper Tryer-Onner (BBC Radio 2, 1978)


A decidedly non-family friendly pantomime as the comedy stars of the sixties - Peter Cook, John Cleese, David Hatch, Bill Oddie, Graeme Garden, Tim Brooke-Taylor and Jo Kendall - join forces with their late seventies counterparts Douglas Adams, John Lloyd, Clive Anderson and Rory McGrath for a half-satirical half-silly sendup of standard issue oh-no-he-isn't clichés with a side order of sarcastic comment about rampant strike-mania. Also making slightly more incongruous appearances are wartime radio laughtermaker Richard Murdoch, Ragtime presenter Maggie Henderson, and self-mocking real-life Lib Dem MP - for about another five minutes - John Pardoe. The overall effect is essentially an I'm Sorry I'll Read That Again sketch run nightmarishly beyond control, which is every bit as fantastic as that sounds. Black Cinderella Two Goes East is widely circulated amongst collectors, but otherwise is a noticeable omission from the available works of certain performers whose every last other recorded moment has been repackaged again and again and again.


The Chris Morris Music Show (BBC Radio 1, 1994)


Still seeing himself as very much a pop radio DJ rather than a television comedian, Chris Morris followed the success of The Day Today with a high-profile, much-coveted and long-promised slot on Radio 1. What followed can best be described as barely controlled mayhem, with a suspension partway through the run and the show pulled off air shortly before broadcast on more than one occasion; and yet every single second of it was achingly, genuinely side-splittingly funny. From caustic tearing apart of the mechanics of journalism and surreally humiliating celebrity interviews to simply making fun of records he actually liked, Chris Morris hit Radio 1 like nothing before and arguably nothing after it. Inevitably his reign of terror (or, as he preferred, 'playing records and shouting') didn't last very long - as much because of fresh television offers as any nervousness over the content - but it disappeared as quietly as it arrived loudly; a sole promised BBC Radio Collection compilation, Newshound From Hell, ran into clearance problems and was never released. Possibly the single most important and influential radio comedy show of the nineties, and you can't buy a single second of it.


Lee & Herring (BBC Radio 1, 1994-95)


While not quite as problematic as their old comedy cohort Chris Morris, Stewart Lee and Richard Herring also enjoyed a significantly longer stint as 'proper' Radio 1 DJs, their popularity underlined by their briefly joining the roster of Top Of The Pops presenters. In addition to playing weird and wonderful records that may well have never been heard on any other radio show ever, they also spent their time trying out new comic ideas and encouraging the audience to indulge in situationist pranks such as paying to advertise their show in newsagents' windows; indeed, many of their most famous characters and routines including the lists of ridiculous pun sitcom titles, Ian News, Mr. Kennedy and Mr. Harris and The Fake Rod Hull made their first appearances here. Yet despite the rabidly obsessive nature of their still considerable fanbase, little of the Radio 1 shows has been heard from that day to this. A couple of sketches escaped as extras on the Fist Of Fun DVDs, but apart from that, nothing. There's a couple of good compilations in them at least. And I said good compilations, not those rubbish ones Radio 1 did after they left.


Room 101 (BBC Radio 5, 1992-94)


Room 101 was much better in the early Nick Hancock-presented days, but even better still in its original Nick Hancock-presented radio incarnation. With no audience and on the whole a more interesting selection of guests, they had to rely more on actual reasons and often hilarious anecdotage to get their choices in - and Hancock in turn had to argue harder to keep them out - and it was a far more esoteric and cerebral show than you might understandably expect. A handful of editions were repeated on Radio 1 and later on Radio 4 Extra, but most remain unheard from that day to this; the impressive roster of guests included Paul Merton, Jo Brand, Danny Baker, David Baddiel, Steve Punt, John Walters, Frank Skinner, Trevor And Simon and Donna McPhail. Clip clearance and the sheer number of choices that would prove 'problematic' post-Yewtree probably mean that compilations are the best we'll get, but if you've never heard of O! Punchinello, 'This Train Has Failed' or Golfiana, or indeed heard Danny Baker explaining why he hates Pete Sinfield of King Crimson's solo album so much, you'll probably agree that we need some.


Orbiter X (BBC Light Programme, 1959)


You can read a lot more about this fantastic Cold War-allegorising tale of space station subterfuge here; what's surprising is that despite the enduring popularity of the long-running Journey Into Space, the BBC have never really done very much with the various serials that followed in its wake, such as Orbiter X, Orbit One Zero, The Lost Planet and Nicholas Quinn - Anonymous. They have all spent far too long gathering cosmic dust and it would be nice to see them given the exposure and recognition they deserve. Preferably with booklets featuring rare photos and archive material.


Patterson (BBC Radio 3, 1981)


Radio 3 went through a very odd phase of trying to score a hit highbrow sitcom in the eighties, including such angular and intellectual takes on the genre as Such Rotten Luck and Blood And Bruises; the closest they came to scoring an actual success with audiences and critics alike was with the genuinely brilliant Patterson. Written by Malcolm Bradbury and Christopher Bigsby - not exactly your average sitcom scriptwriter pairing - the series was a loose thematic follow-on from the former's celebrated novel The History Man, and followed hapless University lecturer Andrew Patterson through a chain of absurdist happenings on campus; as you are probably imagining, it does bear some strong - though apparently genuinely coincidental - similarities to A Very Peculiar Practice. Repeated once by Radio 2 in a new Radio 2-friendly re-edit, it still inspires a significant online following, which makes its failure to resurface all the more like Prof. Misty has been put in charge of remembering it.


The Mary Whitehouse Experience (BBC Radio 1, 1989-90)


Staggeringly, apart from The Mary Whitehouse Experience Encyclopedia and a couple of bits on individual live videos (oh, and Minutes Of The Parish Council Meeting, if you insist), nothing from any incarnation of The Mary Whitehouse Experience has ever been made commercially available. This is astonishing when you consider both how popular and influential it was; rumours have long flown around that this was in fact down to one of the team blocking it, but while I was researching Fun At One all four confirmed to me that this wasn't the case (as, for that matter, did Mark Thomas, Jo Brand and one of Skint Video) so we can discount that right now. A couple of people associated with the show indicated that the issue had been raised with BBC Worldwide who felt that it was 'too topical', which if true indicates that nobody working there had ever actually heard any of it. Newman, Baddiel, Punt and Dennis are all still hugely successful - more so than ever in some cases - and enough time has elapsed for the original long-sleeve-t-shirt-sporting listeners to become genuinely nostalgic for it, so why isn't any of it available to buy? Conclusion: Ken Dodd Is Innocent.


Collins And Maconie's Hit Parade (BBC Radio 1, 1994-97)


Andrew Collins and Stuart Maconie - and resident weekly 'guest' David Quantick - were Radio 1's in-house acerbic music critics with a proper music show during some very interesting times for pop music, which amongst many highlights saw them delivering arguably the definitive take on the Blur/Oasis chart battle, and reacting live to Jarvis Cocker's stage invasion at the Brit Awards. There were plenty of discussions worth revisiting, numerous 'guset critics' who have gone on to enjoy greater prominence, and the weekly 'Quantick's World' rants, which as good as deserve an entire release on their own; not that Morrissey or Paul Weller would be too happy about that, mind. There are tons of contributions to other shows worth considering too, including their 'Eyewitness Reports' for The Evening Session, and the absurd bit of 'walking across the BBC' business they did when guest-hosting the following show...


The Graveyard Shift (BBC Radio 1, 1993-97)


If one show exemplified Radio 1's superb and much-needed early nineties reinvention, it was the late-night shenanigans of Mark Radcliffe, Marc Riley and their various friends, wellwishers and hangers-on. Promising "poetry, comedy, live music and a boy called Lard", it delivered all of this and more, day in day out, with the playlist of promising indie singles - effectively an unofficial testing ground for what might work on daytime radio, and a few major mid-nineties hits got their first play here - interspersed with lengthy and freewheeling chats on any given subject from whether Lady Chatterley's Lover needed 'spicing up' to an argument over what prog rock track was used as the theme music for Weekend World, with interjections from comedians and critics, notably Andrew Collins' diary readings, Stuart Maconie's 'veritable smorgasbord', Mark Kermode's Cult Film Corner and John Shuttleworth's rambling updates on his promising musical career. Oh and not forgetting 'Slippers, Please!'. A CD compilation of some of the regular sketches was released at the time, but we really could do with something more representative of the shu-, which after all was always full of loads of quality items. And him, Boy Lard.


Kremmen Of The Star Corps (Capital Radio, 1976-80)


One of the few commercial radio shows that would ever warrant a commercial release, Kenny Everett recorded dozens upon dozens of episodes of tongue-in-cheek cliffhanging sci-fi serial adventures of Captain Elvis Brandenburg Kremmen for Capital Radio during the seventies, some of which were later adapted for the animated version in his ITV sketch show. In fact, Captain Kremmen was just one of several ideas Everett developed for a London-only audience that ended up attracting national attention, which just serves to underline what a true one-off genius he was. One full story was released as the The Greatest Adventure Yet From Captain Kremmen LP in 1979, and a couple of others escaped on Capital promo singles and prize giveaways, but surprisingly nobody seems to have thought of stringing the rest of them together in box set form yet. The Thargoids have probably drained the idea from our collective intelligence.


Rawlinson End (BBC Radio 1, 1971-91)


English as tuppence, changing and changeless as canal water, nestling in green nowhere, Viv Stanshall's tales of life - or at least what passed for it - in and around Rawlinson End were one of the most popular features of John Peel's show, and used to provoke a flood of calls and letters asking if they were available to buy. And yet, one single album of rearranged and rerecorded early episodes aside, they never have been. The original unexpurgated exploits of Sir Henry, Aunt Florrie and unwilling company should be held up as a triumph of the language to rank with Dickens, Wodehouse and Adams, but instead they are just sort of sat on a shelf somewhere like disregarded souvenirs from military service in some far flung corner of the Empire. Perfectly in keeping with Rawlinson End itself, maybe, but an entirely ridiculous situation. Mrs. E, we do know what we want and we want it now!

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And while we're all waiting, you can read more about Rawlinson End, Kenny Everett, Lee And Herring, Chris Morris, The Graveyard Shift and Collins And Maconie in Fun At One - The Story Of Comedy At BBC Radio 1, available in paperback here or from the Kindle Store here.

While Camberwick Green and Trumpton are widely-quoted cornerstones of any self-respecting conversation about old children's television, it's difficult enough to find anyone who remembers Chigley with a sufficient degree of certainty to be able to say which characters were in which. When it comes to Rubovia, you might as well not bother even asking them. In fact, it's not unusual to find yourself being accused of just having made it up.

Higher Than The Sun, a book telling the story of four albums by Saint Etienne, Primal Scream, My Bloody Valentine and Teenage Fanclub that were released within days of each other late in 1991, was a deliberate attempt to do something a bit different. I was a bit bored of being limited to primarily Archive TV-related material, and was also a tad unhappy with some of the less ideologically pleasant ‘better in the old days’ following that I’d picked up as a result of concentrating on those areas, and so I decided to literally indulge one of my other great loves – ‘indie’ music from the days before Britpop came along and changed everything.

For the benefit of those that aren’t familiar with any of this – which I’m guessing will be more than a few of you – these four albums (all of which, not even remotely coincidentally, were released by Creation Records – well, you’ll have to read the book to find out how that applies to Saint Etienne) were remarkable and musically groundbreaking achievements, especially for bands working with a low budget and continually embarking on gruelling tours of dingy venues in the hope of breaking even. What’s more, they represented what was arguably the last occasion on which ‘indie’ music attempted to crash the mainstream entirely on its own terms, rather than playing by everyone else’s rules. And, more to the point, they had a surprisingly intertwined history stretching all the way back to the NME’s legendary ‘C86’ cassette, and in some cases even further than that. It’s all a lot more interesting than it sounds, honest.

As I say on the back cover, it’s a story that starts with a compilation tape, ends with a jawdropping act of career suicide, and in the middle someone gets chased by a cow. I knew this was going to be a much less strong seller than the other books from the outset, but that wasn’t really the point. I enjoyed every second of researching and writing it, and it gave me a renewed enthusiasm and overall I would say it’s the book that I’m most proud of. Also, it gave me a foot in the door with an entirely different kind of audience, and I cannot tell you how pleased I was to get the thumbs-up from music fans well used to rolling their eyes at badly researched and contextually baffling ‘histories’ of the bands and scenes they are devoted to. Hopefully, though, you might want to give it a try now too. In all honesty it’s really not that far removed from my more familiar work, both in terms of subject matter and approach. If you need any further convincing, here’s an abridged extract looking at how Primal Scream came to record their landmark single Loaded, which had started off as an entirely different song that had almost single-handedly put a stop to their career, until help came from an unlikely source…


Over the next couple of years, many below-par bands would laughably attempt jump on the ‘Madchester’ bandwagon by effectively doing little more than buying a drum machine and playing their existing songs over the top, but for the earliest and best outfits to explore this new possibility, the influence was more pervasive and fundamental, allowing their exposure to dance music to deconstruct and rebuild everything about their attitude to making music from songwriting to arrangement. The most hotly tipped by some distance, The Stone Roses saw parallels in modern electronic sounds with their love of The Byrds, The Beatles, The Rolling Stones and Jimi Hendrix, producing mesmerising, transcendental guitar pop with a danceable swagger that sat somewhere between House Music and Motown; even on their more laid-back and psychedelic moments, notably the hypnotic Waterfall, there was a sense that they were emulating the insistent sequencer-driven nature of dance music rather than traditional guitar pop structures. Inspiral Carpets welded thumping, shuffling beats to a Sixties-influenced organ sound consciously modelled on Acid House sequencer patterns, while Happy Mondays – who, to an extent, looked towards early seventies funk rather than sixties influences – were characterised by the arresting beat poetry lyrics of Shaun Ryder, and the crucial hands-on support of a rising breed of ‘superstar’ DJ.

Coming from entirely the opposite direction, 808 State and A Guy Called Gerald were straightforward dance music artists who had started to incorporate more traditional rock instrumentation into their music, effectively meeting their contemporaries in the middle; indeed, some of Inspiral Carpets’ early material was produced by 808 State. In the wake of this first wave of acts came the no less intriguing likes of The Charlatans, Candy Flip, Northside and New FADS. More to the point, influenced whether directly or through association by the communal nature of raves and the chilled-out euphoria induced by its chosen intoxicant, the music and the lyrical themes were becoming more upbeat and positive, and were more likely to be about environmental issues, panoramic landscapes or cult films than any of the more traditional obsessions of ‘indie’. By the summer, a huge amount of media attention was being focused on ‘Madchester’, and many of the acts were starting to nudge ever closer to the top forty. Creation Records, at that point, had no comparable artists on their roster.

When Primal Scream’s comeback single Ivy Ivy Ivy appeared in August 1989, however, it became obvious that they were still looking towards Manchester, California rather than Manchester, England, and its bluesy riffing, pounding piano and flighty harmonies found few takers. Although reviewers seemed to initially be well disposed towards the selftitled parent album Primal Scream, which would follow in September, even by the time that it was released it had already been overshadowed by developments elsewhere and found itself struggling for exposure; ultimately the album would not only fail to chart, but even fall some considerable distance short of debut album Sonic Flower Groove’s less than staggering sales figures. As the end of the eighties loomed, it was The Stone Roses, Happy Mondays and Inspiral Carpets who found themselves grabbing all of the attention and broaching the top twenty – famously causing the first two of the above to appear on the same edition of Top Of The Pops as each other – and they would be followed there in early in 1990 by the likes of Candy Flip and The Charlatans.


Any initial thoughts at Creation and indeed elsewhere that Primal Scream had made a great album soon gave way to concerns that they had made one that was desperately out of step with the times. Music press interest was minimal, to the extent that Creation press officer Jeff Barrett recalls the band suggesting in desperation that they should do some interviews with technical guitar magazines as an attempt to at least get some exposure. Creation rapidly lost interest in the album when it became depressingly obvious that it was unlikely to take off, and – more worryingly – the band’s previously considerable fanbase appeared to be following suit. What should have been a triumphant Christmas show at London’s Subterranean turned into a disaster when only a handful of people turned up, with even some of the band’s closest friends making excuses and staying away. One of the few who did make the effort was Lawrence from their labelmates Felt, who was moved to conclude that the eighties idea of ‘indie’ was over; he would see in the New Year by heading for America and planning a serious rethink of his career. Though by all accounts the band played a remarkable set that night, the members of Primal Scream were doubtless experiencing similar thoughts, left with several months of promotional work left to do on an album that they now really wanted to just put behind them. The last track on the first side of Primal Scream, I’m Losing More Than I’ll Ever Have, seemed to have suddenly taken on a new and ironic meaning. Yet as the nineties dawned, it would be that song, and a key figure in the scene that they had found themselves excluded from, that would change everything for Primal Scream.

Although there is always a tendency to greet a new decade with what can sometimes be misplaced optimism, in January 1990 it seemed that Creation had finally found the band that would make the label, and indie music in general, into a commercial force to be reckoned with. Presciently described in the first issue of NME of the nineties as ‘the band who’ll shake up the independents’, Oxford-based Ride combined a keen desire for stardom with a love of feedback, close harmony and chiming melodies. Fronted by the photogenic Mark Gardener, Ride were both musically adventurous and a formidable live act. Having been obsessive fans of Felt, The Jesus And Mary Chain and My Bloody Valentine during their schooldays, they were also very much in favour of being seen as a ‘Creation Band’, and eagerly signed to the label on a far longer term basis than any other act had previously. This fairly audacious move was to pay off handsomely; in January their debut release the Ride EP, hinged around infectious lead track Chelsea Girl and the sweeping drawn-out Drive Blind, garnered a good deal of critical praise and became the first Creation single ever to enter the top seventy five of the singles chart. April’s Play EP and its radio-friendly lead track Like A Daydream then took them into the top forty, but it was with the release of the Fall EP in September – and in particular lead track Taste, which combined powerful dance beats, cavernous vocals and a ‘wall of noise’ arrangement with a catchy singalong melody – that they really demonstrated their full potential. In October, their rapturously reviewed debut album Nowhere would only narrowly miss the top ten.

Along with the likes of Chapterhouse, Moose, Lush and fellow Creation signings Slowdive, Ride were part of a wave of My Bloody Valentine-influenced bands primarily from the South of England, whom the music press had rather dismissively tagged together as ‘Shoegazers’, in reference to their alleged habit of spending more time looking at their numerous guitar effects pedals than at the audience. Though few would have conceded it at the time, the ‘Shoegazing’ sound actually had a good deal in common with that associated with Madchester, and correspondingly there was a significant amount of crossover between their respective fanbases. This was certainly good news for the supposed Shoegazers, as 1990 saw many of their Northern counterparts on the verge of becoming phenomenally successful. The Stone Roses would only narrowly miss out on topping the charts with One Love[1], and staged a series of landmark live events – most famously the Spike Island concert held on an actual island in the River Mersey – that were virtually minifestivals in their own right. Happy Mondays meanwhile enjoyed ever stronger chart showings, particularly following the release of their third album Pills’n’Thrills’n’Bellyaches in November, and despite their occasionally somewhat haphazard approach to promotion they were even starting to make inroads into the American market. The Charlatans – whose early releases had served notice that there was much more musical substance to them than the initial accusations of bandwagon-jumping had suggested – scored a series of sizeable radio-friendly hits, while the more personable Inspiral Carpets were not only rarely out of the charts but rarely off children’s television; indeed, one of the strangest offshoots of the whole Madchester phenomenon was that the BBC launched an unusually fashion-conscious Saturday Morning children’s show named The 8:15 From Manchester, produced at their Manchester studios and intended to capitalise on the popularity of the scene. Its catchy theme music was a rewrite of the band’s recent single Find Out Why.


As the year progressed, all manner of geographically and musically associated acts from Candy Flip to Northside would find themselves the subject of unanticipated chart success and media attention, something that was often evidenced by certain bands’ uncomfortable and recalcitrant nature in interviews, while countless others desperately tried to readjust their sound accordingly in the hope of sharing in indie music’s sudden commercial viability. Even Primal Scream’s old rivals The Soupdragons managed to get in on the act with a wah-wah drenched gospel-influenced cover of the obscure Rolling Stones album track I’m Free, which brought them a top ten placing and earned them the disdain of the music press for some years to come. Meanwhile, in London, a young four-piece band who seemed to combine the best qualities of both Madchester and Shoegazing and boasted a highly photogenic frontman and an immensely talented guitarist alongside impressive songwriting skills were being hurried into the studio by EMI’s alternative subsidiary Food; at the insistence of the label, they had recently changed their name to Blur.

Primal Scream’s most recent album had hardly exactly found favour with followers of either vogueish indie-dance genre, but almost by chance it caught the ear of one of the DJs who had helped to shape the indie-dance sound in the first place. Andrew Weatherall had initially sought a career as a writer rather than a musician; with his associate Terry Farley, he had started a fanzine called Boy’s Own, an ebullient and ramshackle affair that sought to draw a connecting line between their shared passions for football, fashion and music. At that point, their favoured listening matter was ‘Rare Groove’, the obscure rediscovered seventies deep funk tracks that had become a short-lived phenomenon in London clubs[2], but this would change in a dramatic and career-defining fashion when their work on the fanzine brought them into the orbit of the pioneers of a new and radical dance music scene. Having – more by accident than design – chimed with the widespread obsessions of the emergent movement, Boy’s Own had become favoured reading matter amongst the early ‘Balearic Beat’ crowd that converged on Danny Rampling’s club Shoom, intended to cater for dancers who had discovered the laid-back House Music-spinoff sound whilst on hedonistic holidays to Ibiza. As an avid reader of Boys Own, Rampling had sensed that Weatherall and Farley would enjoy the sounds he was playing and invited them along to Shoom; the effect that exposure to this new and fairly radical strain of dance music and clubbing culture would have on them was both immediate and revolutionary.

Virtually overnight, Weatherall and Farley had become devoted converts to the emergent scene, putting their previous experience as DJs to good use and securing a residency at Shoom, as well as Paul Oakenfold’s Phuture and Spectrum club nights, and Nicky Holloway’s Trip. The latter is widely considered to have been the first to use a musical label that was quickly becoming associated with the scene – ‘Acid House’, in reference to a particularly harsh and repetitive yet anthemic variant of the sound – and many credit the eclectic and adventurous Weatherall and Farley, who would think nothing of mixing musically suitable tracks by artists as diverse as abrasive prog rockers Van Der Graaf Generator, indie janglers The Woodentops and MOR rocker Chris Rea into their sets if they suited the beat and tempo, as the true pioneers of not just Acid House itself but also both the modern dance music mix style and the ‘superstar DJ’ culture in general. The pair also soon established their own record label, named Boy’s Own in tribute to the fanzine which had by now undergone a radical change in approach, and their eclectic tastes had stood them in good stead when they were commissioned late in 1989 to work with Oakenfold on a series of remixes of Happy Mondays’ breakthrough top twenty hit Hallelujah. This latter experiment would subsequently prove to be the catalyst for another collaboration that would dramatically change the fortunes of everybody involved.


The popularity of Boy’s Own had also led to Weatherall developing a sideline as a music journalist, and it was in this capacity that the NMEsent him to a Primal Scream concert late in 1989; this was largely at the instigation of live editor and longtime fan of Primal Scream Helen Mead, who had astutely realised that what the floundering band really needed at that point was support from someone outside of their core audience. Though largely unimpressed with their set as a whole, feeling that the songs were not really strong enough and that the more upbeat numbers simply didn’t work in live performance[3], he had nonetheless been somewhat taken with the mid-paced ballad I’m Losing More Than I’ll Ever Have, going on to mention it favourably in his review and subsequently working it into his DJ sets. The band had been introduced to Weatherall after the show and had got on well with him, despite his mixed feelings about their musical approach, to the extent that he was booked as the warm-up DJ for the ill-fated Christmas show at The Vortex. Already the two unlikely allies were finding something approaching a common ground, and with a planned single release of I’m Losing More Than I’ll Ever Have in the offing, guitarist Andrew Innes began to formulate an idea for a way out of their apparent creative and commercial dead-end.

As Creation had already recorded a recent Primal Scream concert in New York to plunder for forthcoming b-sides, there was room within the single’s allocated budget to allow for a dance remix; this was not really an option that Creation had ever pursued before with any other acts, but recent developments in the music scene had left them with little choice but to at least experiment with the concept. Innes, however, felt there was little point in simply adding new drums to an existing track when they could theoretically make a dance record of their own, and duly approached Weatherall with the idea of rebuilding I’m Losing More Than I’ll Ever Havefrom the ground up as a new track in its own right; or as Innes put it to him, ‘just destroy it’. Excited by the suggestion, Weatherall had enthusiastically agreed, and over the course of a handful of sessions, the new track began to take shape. Far from being simply being engaged as a producer, Weatherall was treated in the sessions as essentially an auxiliary member of the band with ideas and contributions of his own; lead vocalist Bobby Gillespie would later remark that using a dance music artist in this manner was something that he saw as being very much in the spirit of punk rock.

Weatherall was given access to the original multitrack master tape of I’m Losing More Than I’ll Ever Have, and elected to break the song down into its individual instrumental components; a short brass flourish from near the end of the track became a huge fanfare that drove its new incarnation[4], and the band were called on to re-record some instrumental segments to go with it. Adding samples of a drum break borrowed from the typically unlikely source of a 12” mix of What I Am by American folk-rocker Edie Brickell[5], the chorus from seventies funk act (and Rare Groove scene favourites) The Emotions’ I Don’t Want To Lose Your Love, and Gillespie singing a couple of lines from thirties guitarist Robert Johnson’s Terraplane Blues to compensate for his unease about the removal of his vocals, the new track was virtually complete when Weatherall decided that what it really needed was an arresting spoken word intro. Inspiration came in the form of a rebellious speech by Peter Fonda in the controversial 1966 biker movie The Wild Angels[6], which chimed neatly with the growing feelings of anger at the government’s plans to crack down on rave culture. It was this defiant, confrontational burst of speech that gave the new track – the word ‘remix’ was no longer really applicable – its name; Loaded.


Sensing that they had produced something truly exceptional, Weatherall arranged for Terry Farley to produce another alternative version of Loaded, this time introducing more elements from I’m Losing More Than I’ll Ever Have itself including several of the actual verses; this was an astute move that would widen the track’s appeal considerably, based on their observation of trends within the dance music scene that suggested that DJs enjoyed having a ‘different’ version to experiment with, and indeed that fans enjoyed collecting multiple remixes. In addition to this, and at his own instigation, Weatherall himself came up with a 7” edit of Loaded that cut the running time from seven minutes to just short of four without losing any of the impact, and was intentionally crafted to suit the demands of daytime radio; accompanied by a video that cunningly combined trippy tinted slow-motion visuals of the band with The Wild Angels-inspired footage of them on motorbikes, this was perhaps the most carefully mainstream-targeted single that the label had released to date. Although many at Creation were initially unsure about the project – and indeed, only a couple of months earlier, Gillespie had made a point of stating in interviews that he felt that he could never produce anything resembling a ‘dance’ record – virtually everyone who heard the advance tapes of Loaded was immediately bowled over by it, with the result that a last minute decision was made to promote the edit to the a-side of the forthcoming single[7]. Test pressings had drawn encouraging feedback from club DJs, with one crowd reacting with sufficient enthusiasm to provoke an excited Weatherall to telephone Gillespie at 4am to tell him about it. Back at Creation, recently appointed press officer Laurence Verfaillie had set aside an afternoon for phoning music magazines to draw their attention to Loaded, only to find that virtually every office that she called already had the track playing in the background.

However, even despite these positive signs, few were prepared for just how decisively the single would break through to a wider audience. On its release in February 1990, Loaded was unexpectedly playlisted by Radio 1, and as a consequence it slowly started to climb up the top forty, eventually peaking at number sixteen in March and earning the band a well-remembered appearance on Top Of The Pops. That Loaded was so well received is in retrospect hardly surprising; it stands apart from pretty much anything else that was happening in dance music around that point, audibly positioned somewhere DJ culture and ‘real’ music, and it was clear that whether by accident or design, Primal Scream had stumbled across an exciting and truly original direction. How far they would be able to pursue this direction, though, was a different matter; as if to underline the difficulty that they would find in distancing themselves from their musical past and long-established image, the cover art featured Robert Young in a pose very much recalling the previous album’s imagery, while the primary b-side of the single was a live cover of MC5’s Ramblin’ Rose.


[1] Many of their earlier singles were also reissued during 1990, becoming substantial hits in the process.
[2] ‘Rare Groove’, largely based around forgotten funk/soul records by the likes of The Jackson Sisters and James Brown associates Sweet Charles, Lyn Collins and Maceo Parker, went hand in hand with the early UK house and hip-hop scene, which would look very much towards the early seventies for cultural reference points; the influence of Rare Groove can be clearly detected in early singles by the likes of Bomb The Bass, S’Express and The Funky Worm. 
[3] Their live set still included a number of songs from Sonic Flower Groove at this point, purely in the hope of at least retaining their existing fanbase, and it’s possible that Weatherall may actually have been reacting to these rather than to anything from the second album. 
[4] This was a gambit that Weatherall would use in several other remixes around this time, notably his reworking of James’ 1990 single Come Home.
[5] What I Am had been a minor hit in the UK early in 1989.
[6] Widely described as ‘banned’, The Wild Angels had in fact had a UK cinema certificate – albeit in slightly cut form – since the late sixties. However there had been some debate over its proposed home video release in the late eighties.
[7] This decision was in fact made so late in the day that there wasn’t time to recall the first batch of pressings of the single, with the result that early copies on some formats featured Loaded as the third track despite being listed first on the sleeve.

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This is an abridged excerpt from Higher Than The Sun, the story of Screamadelica, Foxbase Alpha, Loveless and Bandwagonesque (and much more besides), which is available in paperback here or from the Kindle Store here.

Launched by BBC Records And Tapes in 1974, the Beeb imprint was intended as a more focused and coherent outlet for some of the more commercially viable material from BBC shows, particularly session tracks from Radio 1 and Radio 2 broadcasts. It was hoped that the sub-label would be able to make better use of the talents of the more able and chart-savvy in-house composers and technical staff, but unfortunately, while this did result in some strong releases, they found themselves hampered by the parent label’s lack of experience and apparently interest in properly promoting their output. The singles released by Beeb enjoyed much greater success in Europe, where they were licensed to proper record labels and a series of successful ‘hits’ compilations followed, but none of them ever even came close to charting in the UK. While perhaps not as esoteric or evocative a collection of releases as the RESL series, the Beeb singles often had even more unusual and interesting stories behind them, and here are a couple of the most unusual and interesting.


BEEB001 Roll Over Beethoven/Say Mama/Be Bop A Lula - Gene Vincent (September 1974)


The Beeb series of singles began with this offering from veteran rock’n’roller Gene Vincent; in 1971, Vincent had been in the UK to promote his latest album The Day The World Turned Blue, and was determined to pursue his chances of a comeback with an energy quite at odds with his failing health. One of his final recordings was a strong session of rock’n’roll standards for Radio 1’s Johnny Walker Show – recorded only days before his death – from which this release was eventually drawn in response to public demand.


BEEB009 Duck'n'Roll/Sammy's Cha Cha - Sammy Duck (July 1975)


This unusual novelty single, featuring a pair of rock’n’roll numbers performed in an actionable approximation of Donald Duck’s voice, had been a sizeable hit in Europe earlier in 1975. Following airplay on a number of radio shows, notably Radio 1’s Junior Choice, it was licensed for UK release by Beeb, but perhaps deservedly failed to chart.


BEEB010 On The Move/Easy To Love You - The Dooleys (September 1975)


Broadcast on BBC1 on Sunday afternoons between 1975 and 1976 in a bid to promote adult literacy, the award-winning On The Move was a series of short comedy vignettes written by Barry Took and featuring Bob Hoskins as a delivery driver who had difficulty with reading and writing. Composed by prolific session musician Alan Hawkshaw, the catchy upbeat theme song was performed by The Dooleys, an unusually credible family rock band who, though virtually forgotten now, were top ten regulars in the late seventies. Despite its obscure origins, this remains one of the best loved BBC themes of all time, and in retrospect it is staggering that this was not a big a hit as the rest of The Dooleys’ output. On The Move was later included on REB236 Angels And 15 Other Original BBC-TV Themes.


BEEB019 Come Together/Dear Prudence – Graffiti (December 1976)


Graffiti were essentially a vehicle for up and coming singer-songwriter Phil Bates, and these two highly individual takes on Beatles numbers were released by Beeb in anticipation of a mooted BBC2 series in which the manufactured band would take part in a mixture of comedy, music and documentary segments, effectively a reworking of The Monkees for progressive rock fans. However, presumably due in no small part to this single’s lack of success, and more than likely to the emergence of several similar shows on the BBC, the planned series was ultimately shelved before production commenced.


BEEB021 Ten Years After/All Time Needletime Loser - Radio Active (September 1977)


Written and recorded by a band of BBC studio staff – including Radio 1 producers Malcolm Brown on guitar, BBC Records And Tapes' Mike Harding on keyboards, Paddy Kingsland of the BBC Radiophonic Workshop on bass, and Radio 1’s assistant controller Bryant Marriott on drums – this quirky pop-rock number was put together as a celebration of ten years of Radio 1 and released to tie in with the anniversary. Although the nominal a-side would ultimately attract little attention, the b-side proved far more popular; thrown together quickly and intended as a parody of punk rock, it amusingly ended up appealing to genuine fans of the movement, including John Peel who gave it a considerable amount of airtime on his Radio 1 show. Needless to say this single is now in high demand amongst those who grew up listening to Peel’s show.


BEEB026 New Wave Band/Theme From The Film Of The Same Name - Jock Swon And The Metres (November 1978)


In the Autumn of 1978, the BBC changed the frequencies of its four national radio stations in order to give them a greater national reach; while the more highbrow end of the audience were advised of this by a startling chorale from The King’s Singers (released by EMI as Some Enchanted Wavelengths), Radio 1 sought to announce the change with a topically punningly-entitled number pseudonymously provided by Glam Rock rock’n’roll revivalists Showaddywaddy with the ‘assistance’ of some of the station’s wackier DJs. It is not unreasonable to suggest that it might have left some listeners wanting to get the wrong frequency on purpose.


BEEB027 Blake's 7 Disco/Disco Jimmy – Federation (March 1979)


Terry Nation's much-loved 'space opera' has latterly acquired an unfair reputation as a poor relation of Doctor Who, although admittedly it was hardly helped by ridiculous ventures such as this; a weak attempt at producing a danceable version of the theme music in an equally weak attempt to cash in on the chart success of Mankind’s disco version of the Doctor Who theme. The unrelated b-side defies description. A measure of its ‘quality’ is that despite not being easy to find, the single is hardly sought after even by Blake’s 7’s intensely devoted fans.

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Top of The Box - The Story Behind Every BBC Records And Tapes Single, which covers all of the Beeb releases and more, is available in paperback here, or from the Kindle Store here.

Looks Unfamiliar 7 - Ben Baker

Looks Unfamiliar is a podcast in which writer and occasional broadcaster Tim Worthington talks to a guest about some of the things that they remember that nobody else ever does. Joining Tim for a second time is writer, broadcaster and quizmaster Ben Baker, who shares his not-widely-shared memories of Children's ITV magazine show Toksvig, the Whizzkids' Guide book series, sophisticated yet not exactly enlightened board game Mysteries Of Old Peking short-lived pop-punk sensations Mo-Ho-Bish-O-Pi, drug-fuelled post-Tarantino shock-comedy Go, and the entirely sensible hobby of making your own TV listings magazines. Along the way we'll be taking some advice from a Charcoal Jeremy Beadle, finding out why Ben had to hide his secret drawings of the Yorkshire TV logo, why Sandi Toksvig was at risk of exploding at any moment, and revealing which Shane Meadows film is not as good as a hat.

DOWNLOAD IT HERE - SUBSCRIBE IN ITUNES - RSS

Looks Unfamiliar is hosted by Podnose.

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Support Looks Unfamiliar by buying one of Tim's books! Fun At One - The Story Of Comedy At BBC Radio 1 is available in paperback here or from the Kindle Store here. And there's several other books to choose from here...

Early in 1967, BBC Engineer George Hersee unwittingly created a modern design icon. Back in the days when anyone who owned a television would have owned an analogue set that relied on a cathode ray tube, and would only have been able to choose from a handful of channels that conveniently shut down both overnight and for the majority of the daytime anyway, the Test Cards that showed up for half an hour or so at the start and close of broadcasting hours were not only a common sight but also served a crucial technical purpose. Carefully designed with appropriate geometrically precise uses of shapes and shades, not only did they give the ‘backroom boys’ at the television stations themselves an opportunity to check that everything was working correctly ahead of the actual programmes going out, they also allowed the owners of television shops to ensure that their display models were giving the best possible output, and served a similar purpose for television engineers called out to attend to sets that had gone ‘on the blink’.

With colour test transmissions due to begin imminently, Hersee – a BBC engineer since the late forties – had been charged with producing a new card that could be used for testing colour equipment. His innovation was to fill the central circle with a colourful photographic image in lieu of yet more gradations; after considering and rejecting prototypes using a fashion model, on the grounds that the Test Card was expected to have a long shelf life in the way that fashions do not, he opted instead for a photograph of his eight year old daughter Carole, dressed in a red top and hairband and a tartan skirt, and locked in the middle of a game of noughts and crosses on a blackboard against her home-made toy clown Bubbles. Not only did Test Card F become convenient and universally-deployed visual shorthand both for technical issues and for ‘television’ in general, it also struck terror into several generations of uncomprehending youngsters unnerved by the fixed grins of the unmoving duo - who, as everyone knew, might suddenly move at any minute - while jaunty non-copyright big band music played underneath.

Needless to say, Test Card F also became a widely-adopted and much-loved target for parody. And almost every single one of those parodies fell down on one small but crucial detail - none of them could ever quite get the Clown right. Take, for example, the noughts and crosses enthusiasts' appearance in legendary BBC time travel drama Life On Mars, spooking the adult Sam Tyler with memories of their spooking the young Sam Tyler whilst viewers laboured under the misapprehension that there might actually be a proper ending to all of this after all. As you can see, Bubbles had clearly spent the intervening years taking full advantage of every fast food restaurant offer shoved through his door, having already inexplicably expanded by one foot in size.


Well, you could be forgiven for thinking, that's quite a recent example, and maybe they were largely working from memory. After all, it isn't even on that much these days, is it? True, but if anything, contemporaneous parodies of Test Card F were even further wide of the 'nought'. For example...


1989, and Spitting Image decides for no readily obvious reason to run a sketch about 'Clown' going on strike because he is a football hooligan and being replaced by Nicholas Witchell or something. Quite how this gave a show renowned for its cruelly latex lampooningly accurate attention to facial and physical detail license to depict him as having a huge spherical head and disproportionately frame-hogging body will have to remain a mystery. Still, in fairness, this was around the time that Spitting Image was getting a bit experimental and trying their hand at other animation styles and indeed featuring human actors, the very first of whom was one Nick Hancock. Who at that point was arguably best known for this bit of prop-based mayhem...


Hancock And Mullarkey's celebrated 'TV Themes' routine saw them rapidly change into costumes and throw around props while a medley of small-screen signature tunes played behind them, from cardboard flames with dancing on a chair to sausage-on-a-fork-and-shooting-up shenanigans. It was an extremely funny piece that never failed to have studio audiences in worryingly excessive hysterics, and right in the middle they threw in a quick Test Card F gag, which scored high marks by featuring a suitably schmaltzy reading of All My Loving. Examine it too closely, though, and you can't help but notice that Nick Hancock has simply reached for the nearest 'clown' wig and is shamelessly relying on a quick spot of cognitive association from the LWT-bound shriekers. Nice how accurately Neil Mullarkey has captured the 'Girl's tie as well. But what if Ben Kingsley, Test Card F Parody Union is behind door?


The normally devastatingly spot-on children's sketch show that was more adult than most adult sketch shows End Of Part One lowers its batting average here a bit by not even bothering to mock up a vague approximation of Bubbles, opting instead for a nondescript doll attached to some balloons that must have made it pretty hard to get a game of noughts and crosses underway. No wonder Fred Harris looks alarmed.


And finally for now, here's an early nineties advert for Granada Television Rentals, which not only gets the launch date of Test Card F wildly wrong but also goes to the vast and thoroughly salary-justifying expense of replacing the clown with a teddy bear. Because they are exactly the same thing, aren't they? Anyway, we're now returning you to the proper Test Card and some music, but if you know of any other examples boasting similarly high levels of devotion to accuracy, do get in touch. You may even want to tell me on Twitter that The Boosh dressed up as 'Girl' and 'Clown' once. I was not aware of that!!4

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If you've enjoyed this article, you can find more about Test Card F, Radio Times and other items of old-skool BBC iconography - not all of it entirely respectful - in my book The Camberwick Green Procrastination Society, available in paperback here, from the Kindle Store here, or as a full-colour eBook here.

From the very earliest days of Gala Night At The Mayfair and Inaugural Speeches By The Lord Mayor, The Postmaster General And The Chairman Of The Independent Television Authority Sir Kenneth Clark, if there was one thing that ITV's top television stars could count on, it was full page photo ahoy cover to cover coverage in TV Times. Whether it was soap stars 'opening up' about their 'personal struggle', newsreaders hilariously trying their hand at an 'ordinary' job for a day, or Brucie making something out of 'leftovers' in an oversized comedy chef's hat, each issue was crammed with page after page after page of features on commercial television's all too often here-today-gone-tomorrow headliners - seriously, you won't believe how many people who warranted a three page interview in the average fifties or sixties edition are almost impossible to find out anything about now - and everyone was happy.

If there was anything else that they could count on, though, it was that TV Times would not allow them to self-promote in any way that at all afforded scope for the retention of a sub-atomic amount of self respect. Or that they would make any effort to avoid printing letters from viewers saying you were rubbish and should be thrown off television and into a skip with immediate effect. Here, then, are just a handful of the series-promoting profiles that probably nobody in their right mind will ever be allowing anywhere near any DVD extras...

If there was one programme that dominated TV Times more or less throughout the sixties, it was The Avengers; indeed, they were right behind it right from the outset, as you can see from this interview with original 'Avengers Girl' Ingrid Hafner in which she is charmingly asked about virtually nothing apart from her two male co-stars. We've seen plenty of examples of the barely disguised perving over her more catsuit-inclined successors in previous instalments of this series, so this time let's turn our attention instead to Patrick Macnee, whose sporting of a bowler hat on television apparently qualified him as a somewhat baffled and reluctant expert on any and every matter related to 'style' and fine gentlemanly living. Here, for example, is an interview in which he's keen to play down any resemblance between himself and John Steed, followed by his struggling to get a word in edgeways in the thick of someone else's breathless opinions on wine and when he does get to spear appears to try and steer the conversation towards whiskey instead, a plaintive 'they're not my real clothes, you know' conversation about his on-screen attire, and finally a frank admission that he knows absolutely nothing about the Football Pools and that if you see fit to adopt his gleefully randomly and panic-strickenly chosen tips then more fool you. With this sort of nonsense going on, you can understand why actors worry about being typecast. Mind you, he was not without his fans, as evidenced by this clear, concise and doubtless warmly received praise from schoolteacher Miss Margaret Tully, and a bewildering missive from (Miss) Jean Higson, which elicits a para-intelligible response that can only be described as purest refined goobledygook. So much so that it's a wonder that they didn't ask Patrick Macnee for his opinion on it.


Not all stars of the brand spanking new commercial channel enjoyed quite so enthusiastic a level of support, though. TV Times initially got right behind Tony Hancock when he pioneered the invariably disastrous 'Going To ITV' manoeuvre, but as soon as his ratings slumped in true When They Went To Thames At The End fashion, suddenly they became a touch more wary and each new series came and went with a simple 'oh and apparently there's been some sort of summit this week as well'-hued throwaway feature, such as a the alarmingly negative and accusatory one seen above. He still had his fans, though, and one took the trouble to write in fuming that even if you didn't like his new material, you should just say you did because reasons. Yes, that usually works out just fine.


Needless to say, widespread viewer bafflement and hastily shifted timeslot antics caused TV Times to more or less turn its back on Anthony Newley's short-lived deconstructionist sitcom The Strange World Of Gurney Slade while it was still on air. Nowadays of course we're all familiar with it as an ahead-of-its-time lost masterpiece rediscovered after half a century of neglect, but back then it had few supporters apart from the young David Bowie. Mind you, Miss V. J. Johnson was sufficiently aggrieved by the mass chorus of 'if it's too hard, I can't understand it' to write in and point out that it actually made perfect sense and was jolly amusing and what in the name of Moogies Bloogies are you all on about etc etc. Her opinion was clearly shared by an undaunted Anthony Newley, who responded to the critics with this fascinating article about how television was a new and exciting artform and should be treated as such, and for that reason The Strange World of Gurney Slade was a mistake worth making. It's that kind of thinking that got us The Prisoner. And Zokko!.


Sometimes, though, you just couldn't win against the viewers. Flirty, zany and not averse to singing filthy songs on the b-sides of her singles, satire's leading redhead Millicent Martin was almost literally everywhere in the early sixties, and you could scarcely move for articles like the one above featuring TV Times columnist Dave Lanning practically slobbering over her. But familiarity breeds contempt, and overexposure breeds people writing letters to a listings magazine demanding to see less of you as if that was in some way an achievable objective and the indeed direct responsibility of the hapless layout editors pasting up regional variations for Television Wales And West. Noele Gordon and Troy Tempest must have been thrilled with the idea that Millie was on every time viewers switch the TV on, though.


Anyway, back to the BBC-to-ITV ship-jumpers, and the cautionary tale of Carole Ann Ford, who left Doctor Who at the absolute height of 'Dalekmania', bringing the never-bettered original Tardis crew to an all-too-hasty conclusion, as she wanted to avoid typecasting. Hence this prominent feature on 'The Back To Earth Girl' to promote her appearance in gritty down-at-heel detective series Public Eye as what TV Times cautiously described as a 'vice girl'. As she herself has wryly reflected, this resulted in angry letters from mothers who had allowed their youngsters to stay up to see the new thing with 'Susan' in, little anticipating the exceptionally mild filth therein. By the end of the year they were still sufficiently taken with their new star to include her in resident astrologer Maurice Woodruff's 'Gemini Prediction Party', but the dazzling lights of fame soon fell elsewhere, leading her to embark on a lower-key career that if Doctor Who fan writers are to be believed consisted entirely of an endless procession of 'comebacks'. Apparently her stars suggested that in 1965, she'd be falling in the sea fully clothed for a film or TV part. That must have been quite a comeback.


Quite what fixation Maurice Woodruff had with 'Geminis' will have to remain a mystery, but here he is taking a fraudulent sham punt at what 1967 might hold for 'Dinners'. Even aside from saying he will put his money in 'building' rather than a big brown bag inside a zoo, it doesn't mention Carnival Of Light once!


Of course, Carole Ann's screen grandfather William Hartnell was a star on ITV long before Doctor Who, thanks to his appearances as the aptly named Sergeant Major Bullimore in National Service jape-wrangling sitcom The Army Game. However, TV Times apparently only ever owned one photograph of him. Here we see it called up to accompany some trademark grumbling about The Army Game not being 'legitimate' acting and how he was sick of authority figure roles and would rather be playing Polonius than policemen, despite revealing right at the end that he was literally just that minute off to make Brighton Rock, followed by a baffling piece about how he gets recognised in the street but something or other about wanting to wear 'civvies' on screen. No, us neither.


Character Actor Cyril Shaps, as it is apparently a legal requirement to refer to him as, had to wait until Patrick Troughton had taken over to get his first of many roles in Doctor Who - nearly all of them playing 'characters' funnily enough - but he was a regular sight in co-conspirator type roles in ITV series for years before that. In an early incarnation of the time-honoured 'you'll know the face, but you might not know the name' article that still thrives to this day, TV Times presents a profile of Cyril and his 'changing face'. Which you have to admit looks practically identical in all of the examples they've chosen.


Far more successful in the 'changing face' stakes was Bob Monkhouse, seen here in the little-remembered flop original live action version of Mr. Benn.


We've seen quite a few examples of the much-favoured TV Times gambit of getting telly stars to do something zanily unlikely and different for a the sake of filling a couple of column inches, but few can have provoked as much bafflement as this surely spurious filler item about Arthur Lowe, then starring as Leonard Swindley in Coronation Street spin-off Pardon The Expression, taking up judo. Answers on a postcard if you've got any idea of how they posed that photo.


And finally, here's Brucie, sans comedy oversized chef's hat, managing to get a full-page comic-pose-ahoy feature out of the fact that he's just had his tonsils out. A procedure that they're keen to point out will not affect his weekly presentational schedule in anywaywhatsoever. But then again, that's the typical ITV star for you - cheerful, professional, enthusiastic, able to put a positive spin on just about anything, and with bags of the right kind of talent for their chosen mass audience-pleasing niche. Good clean family fun, and with absolutely no reason to suspect they might have been up to no good.


Oh right. Yes. Still, THEY ALL KNEW at the BBC, eh?


If you can work out what the joke is here, or how and why it involved Peter Cook, you're doing better than us. Anyway, join us again next time, when we'll be looking at some of the many occasions on which TV Times printed something that made absolutely no sense whatsoever...

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If you've enjoyed this article, you can find lots more slightly more serious writing about fifties and sixties television in Not On Your Telly, which is available in paperback here or from the Kindle Store here.

It Started With Swap Shop was the name of a light-hearted retrospective broadcast by BBC2 in 2006, ostensibly celebrating thirty years of Saturday morning television but concentrating on one particular key example of the genre; Noel Edmonds’ Multicoloured Swap Shop. Like so many other light-hearted histories of the timeslot, this made the mistake of implicitly crediting Edmonds and company with the invention of the show format and pretty much the first ever use of the timeslot full stop. There were in fact a handful of now pretty much forgotten antecedents of Swap Shop, although the reasons for their being left out of such an overview are quite understandable. Saturday Scene, dating from 1973 and effectively the first use of the now-familiar Saturday morning format, was an ITV show, while the BBC’s own previous attempts at finding something suitable for this awkward timeslot were, to be blunt, just too downright weird to revisit.

Prior to 1968, neither the BBC nor ITV had really paid much attention to Saturday mornings. Although attendances were already dwindling, there still remained a strong and long-established tradition of Saturday morning cinema clubs, which provided young audiences with several hours’ worth of cartoons, serials and onstage games and entertainment. With broadcast technology still in its infancy, there seemed little point in starting up transmission for the benefit of an audience that would mostly be otherwise engaged. Usual practice – as far as the BBC was concerned – was simply to run an old film serial or an imported cartoon series after their transmission tests early in the morning, then possibly another before Grandstand started at midday, and leave screens blank for the remainder of the morning. Early in 1968, as part of a general overhaul of their output instigated by incoming departmental head Monica Sims, the BBC Children’s Department began to look into the idea of introducing structured programming to Saturday mornings.


Between 30th March and 22nd June 1968, an experimental – in both senses – magazine show called Whoosh! was added to the Saturday morning schedules. Devised by former Play School production team Cynthia Felgate and Peter Ridsdale-Scott, Whoosh! featured Play School presenter Rick Jones, ballet dancer turned comedienne Dawn Macdonald - who got the job after sending Felgate a photo of herself pulling a ridiculous face - and former child actor Jonathan Collins in what Radio Times described as ‘a place where anything can happen’ – in other words a surreal, psychedelically-decorated studio set full of eccentric prop machinery, where they tried to solve riddles and puzzles with the occasional filmed insert cued in to show them venturing ‘outdoors’. While this was some way away from the later style of Saturday morning shows, it nonetheless anticipated their energy and interplay, and predilection for offbeat storyline-driven formats.

While Whoosh! was certainly successful, and viewers enjoyed the heavy element of write-in interactivity, Sims felt that a more loose and fast-moving format akin to a televised comic was more appropriate for Saturday mornings, and was inclined to dispense with human presenters altogether. Eventually an experimental thirteen-week slot was decided on, and Children’s Department veteran Molly Cox, who had partly devised Jackanory and acted as its first director, was asked to come up with a suitable format in collaboration with newcomer Paul Ciani. Cox and Ciani shared Sims’ feelings about the kind of material appropriate for the timeslot; Saturday cinema had been a rowdy, colourful affair with plenty of action and comedy, and as such they took advantage of the perceived lack of need for a human presenter as an opportunity to pack as much action, comedy and pop music as possible into the available timeframe. The result of this meeting of minds was Zokko!, an 'electronic comic' that would zip between short features at high speed, and sought to replicate the effect of a reader flicking through an actual comic in search of their favourite strips and features. The show would contain a combination of in-house animation, stock footage, pop music, and a small amount of specially shot light entertainment material, all cut together using ‘pop art’ editing effects and graphical design that might more normally have been found on shows like Top Of The Pops or Spike Milligan’s Q5. The overall effect of this was, needless to say, disorientating and deeply strange. Introduced by a lengthy Radio Times piece urging viewers to 'Place a regular order with your television set NOW!', accompanied by an eye-catching Roy Lichtenstein-like pop-art illustration proclaiming 'BWAMmM it’s ZOKKO!', Zokko! began its first thirteen-week run on 2nd November 1968.

‘Perplexing’ is not too strong a word to use about Zokko!, and it virtually defies description even today. In place of the rejected human presenter, the production team opted instead for a talking pinball machine. Built by BBC Visual Effects designer Mike Ellis (father of later Blue Peter presenter Janet), this was a fully functioning prop, with its electronic voice provided by Brian Hodgson of the BBC Radiophonic Workshop. This would link the entire programme by autoplaying games, with each score corresponding to a different item, which would appear ‘through’ the holes in the pinball table as the robotic voice intoned the appropriate announcement (“Zokko … Score 15 … Serial”). Some of these items were made up of handy filler material that happened to be available, such as stock footage of racing car speed tests and bulk-bought Disney extracts, but unusually for a programme of this nature the vast majority were specially made in-house. As well as basic animations telling corny jokes (many of them penned by moonlighting novelist Ted Lewis) and short silent films of surreal slapstick gags, each edition of Zokko! included a running serial, pop records, and a live variety act.


Spanning the entire run, the sci-fi adventure yarn Skayn– concerning the theft of a gravity-wave-hologram capable of causing the Earth and the Moon to collide – was told through huge blow-ups of comic strip-style panels drawn by Leslie Caswell, with a pre-recorded dialogue track provided by prolific character actors Gordon Clyde, Sheelagh McGrath and Anthony Jackson. Unconventionally presented and drenched in bleeping Radiophonics, the serial segments came across as strangely tranquil and hypnotic, contrasting effectively with the loud and frenetic style of the rest of the programme. Leaning strongly towards jazzy ‘beat’ outfits like The Alan Price Set, Georgie Fame And The Blue Flames and The New Vaudeville Band, the pop tracks were accompanied by extremely well directed shorts reflecting the lyrical themes of the chosen numbers, some of which were also used in editions of Top Of The Pops.

Meanwhile, the variety acts simply turned up and did their stage performance within the very cramped confines of the Zokko! studio, doubtless causing severe logistical problems for the numerous jugglers. Even the basic list of artistes who appeared on the show makes for fascinating reading, featuring such evocative and long-forgotten names as The Tumblairs, The Skating Meteors, and The Breathtaking Eddy Limbo and ‘Pat’. A handful of more established acts would also show up including conjuring legend Ali Bongo; veteran brother and sister acrobatic duo Johnny and Suma Lamonte; visiting American Phil Enos and his Amazing Comedy Car; and popular illusionist and judo expert Geoff Ray, who though now retired still proudly includes Zokko! on his CV. Most notorious however were Arthur Scott and his Performing Seals, who left the tiny studio reeking so strongly of fish that recording was disrupted for days afterwards.

If this all sounds like a rather mindbending assembly of entertainment, its disorientating nature was amplified to nightmarish and jaw-dropping proportions by the adoption of a deeply psychedelic ‘Swinging London’ visual style, complete with flashing designs that looked garish even in black and white, captions written in lettering that would not have appeared out of place in an advert for a Carnaby Street boutique, and crash zooms on a modishly redesigned poster of Lord Kitchener. Even by the standards of the day this was a visually arresting approach, but the target audience seem to have taken it in their stride and Zokko! proved highly popular, with so many viewers writing in about the programme that the production team eventually had to start sending out postcards ‘from’ the talking pinball machine. Indeed, Zokko! was promptly repeated in full in the regular Wednesday afternoon children’s’ schedules from 6th August 1969, and Brian Fahey’s catchy theme music was released as a single, with the Band Parade music that also featured in the show on the b-side.


While the BBC had reverted to their regular Saturday morning pattern of a lone edition of Deputy Dawg once the first run had finished, a second series of Zokko! had been planned from very early on, and indeed would follow virtually straight on from the repeat run. With the Radio Times proudly proclaiming 'All For Fun! Fun For All! Tar-rah!', Zokko! returned for another thirteen week residency on Saturday mornings, starting from 6th December 1969. Although the new series retained the same production team, some significant changes were made; the sometimes excessively psychedelic design elements were toned down slightly in favour of a stark ‘two tone’ approach, and the pinball machine device was dropped altogether. The reasons for this decision have never been disclosed, although it is rumoured the expensive prop was damaged in storage and the cost of repairs would have been beyond the means of the meagre budget allocated for the second run. Despite this, Radio Times’ introduction to the new series promised the return of 'the old favourites and some new ones', alongside 'a brand new music machine, the like of which has never been seen before'. Said device was essentially a scaled-down Top Of The Pops set with a revolving stage, festooned with flashing lights and surrounded by gigantic bubbling test tubes, and resembling an antique pipe organ rebuilt to the specifications of the set designer of Willy Wonka And The Chocolate Factory. Filmed with camera angles better suited to a raucous pop music show - and more than likely the inspiration for the remarkably similar ‘Jackie Charlton and the Tonettes’ sketch in the second series of Monty Python’s Flying Circus, recorded shortly after the second series of Zokko! had aired - the indefinable contraption would pump out excerpts from stage musicals and instrumental pop hits while punningly appropriate inanimate objects revolved in the centre.

While this occupied the linking role formerly occupied by the pinball machine, the actual contents of the show remained much the same and just as mind-frazzling as ever. The animations, pop films, awful jokes, Disney extracts, stock footage, jarring bursts of exclamation marks and electronically treated voices were all back on board. Skayn returned for a new eight-part adventure, this time sent to investigate saboteurs at large on a moon colony, and the final five shows of the run were given over to the big top crime thriller Susan Starr Of The Circus, with voices provided by Jennifer Hill, Alan Devereux and Stanley Page,. The variety acts, meanwhile, remained as deliriously esoteric as before, top acts this time including The Skating Fontaines ('Thrills at Speed'), Ronny Cool ('Fantasy in Flames'), The Tricky Terriers ('Dog-gone Fun!'), Paul Fox ('The Act That’s Full of Bounce') who amusingly shared his name with the then-controller of BBC1, and Annalou and Maria, who promised 'A Feather and Fur Fantasy' that was doubtless far more innocent than it sounds.

Zokko! was last sighted on television screens on 28th February 1970, but its brief burst of ragged psychedelic lunacy had certainly left an impression on viewers, and would prove to have a more enduring legacy. Clearly undeterred by the sheer oddness of the results, the BBC would continue to allow Ciani to carry out equally unhinged experiments at finding a suitable format for Saturday morning television. Ed And Zed, which enjoyed a brief run later in 1970, paired Radio 1 DJ Ed Stewart with a robot assistant named Zed (voiced by Anthony Jackson) for a similar menu of low-key serials and Disney excerpts, although they were allowed to have proper bands in the studio this time. That said, given said musical acts included former Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band ‘mad scientist’ Roger Ruskin-Spear and his performing robots, this may not have been as much of a concession to sensibility as it might appear. This was followed in 1973 by Outa Space!, a show ‘presented’ by a pair of disembodied alien hands at the controls of a spaceship, in which the ever-present Disney footage rubbed shoulders with a familiar diet of pop-soundtracked films, semi-educational inserts on dinosaurs, and the gripping storyboard serial Vidar And The Ice Monster.


Although it may seem something of a massive jump from these insane early efforts to the more familiar format that has pretty much defined Saturday morning television from the arrival of Saturday Scene and Multicoloured Swap Shop onwards, the truth of the matter is Zokko! and company are essentially a rough pencil sketch of the final format. This is particularly pertinent when Zokko! is compared directly to early editions of Swap Shop; the obvious difference of an avuncular unscripted presenter and live interaction with viewers aside, they have much in common, with the musical inserts simply replaced by proper bands and the Hanna Barbera and Gordon Murray animations standing in for bulk-bought Disney. Even the whimsy and corny jokes are essentially similar; all that Swap Shop really did was to give them more structure and bring in John Craven as a comedy straightman. Although Molly Cox would soon return to the relative normality of factual programming, her subsequent credits including Take Hart, Roy Castle Beats Time and Why Don’t You?, Paul Ciani would later put the lunacy he had learned on Zokko! and its follow-ons to good use. Most prominently he would serve as the longtime director and producer of Rentaghost (again featuring Anthony Jackson), The Basil Brush Show and Crackerjack!, but also helmed a number of long-forgotten yet fondly-remembered offbeat children’s comedy shows such as Hope And Keen’s Crazy House, Bonny! and Great Big Groovy Horse, as well working on many top-rated light entertainment series including The Kenny Everett Television Show, The Paul Daniels Magic Show and Top Of The Pops, where he somehow resisted the temptation to fill the stage with bubbling test tubes.

Sadly, but not entirely unpredictably, very little of Zokko! now survives in the archives. The original master tape of the final second series edition escaped wiping by pure chance, and more recently a telerecording of a compilation edition of highlights from that run was recovered from a private collector. On the plus side this does mean that both Skayn and Susan Starr have had their adventures - or at least a fragment thereof - preserved for posterity, but unfortunately, bar a couple of photographs, nothing remains of the talking pinball machine that seems to have burnt itself indelibly onto so many memories. It’s a fair bet that even the slightest thought of It Started With Zokko! would be enough to give documentary and clip show producers weeks of psychedelically-flashing radiophonically-doused nightmares, but in all fairness Zokko! really was where it all began. Well, unless you count Whoosh!.

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This is adapted from Noise! Adventure! Glitter!, an article featured in my book Well At Least It's Free. You can get Well At Least It's Free in paperback here or from the Kindle Store here.

Since his last appearance on the station on Boxing Day 1994, there had been an open invitation of sorts for Chris Morris to do some more work for Radio 1.

The following two years had been taken up with work on Brass Eye, a six-part television series for Channel 4 that took his concepts of spoofing hoaxing news and current affairs to their logical conclusion, presenting a series of hard-hitting documentaries based around entirely fictitious subjects. Brass Eye was nothing if not provocative television, operating on a far more powerful level than practically any other comedy show ever transmitted, and an incident in which a hoax over the fabricated recreational drug ‘cake’ had spiralled out of control, and found itself the subject of a parliamentary discussion, caused enough concern within Channel 4 for station controller Michael Grade to postpone the series from its intended transmission while he verified whether or not it had transgressed broadcasting guidelines.

Brass Eye did indeed resurface, albeit in a substantially edited form, running from 29th January to 5th March 1997. Even in this slightly tamed incarnation the series was still strong stuff, but by this point the months of setbacks had taken their toll and Morris was thoroughly fed up with Brass Eye and keen to move on to something new. Rumours of a forthcoming new radio series had begun to circulate while Brass Eye was still airing, and over the summer of 1997 Morris recorded a pilot for Radio 1 under the working title Plankton Jam. It is perhaps telling that while the subsequent rash of inferior post-Brass Eye emulators were still little more than vague proposals, the man who inspired it all was making moves to distance himself completely from ‘news parody’.

Blue Jam, as the new Radio 1 series would eventually be renamed, did not even start out as a comedy show. Morris, who had always appreciated the woozy world of late-night radio where laid-back music tracks are linked by presenters talking in hushed tones that give a sense of the isolation of broadcasting from a largely empty building in the middle of the night, originally intended to create a more experimental take on this sort of show, a “3am lug lube” with an appropriate musical backdrop behind “first person stories that slowly went off the rails, from the point of view of the presenter”. While this would almost certainly have been diverting listening, it is interesting to ponder on whether or not they would actually have constituted ‘comedy’ as such; in effect, it would only have been a slightly exaggerated and distorted version of what could be found elsewhere on the radio dial at that time of night[1].

As work on the show progressed, sketch material began to find its way in through a somewhat roundabout route. According to Morris, the original concept of first person narratives evolved into “framing those narratives as ‘found sound’ as well, like bits of documentary actuality, and then dramatising bits of all of the scenarios”. This effectively grew out of a mocked-up ‘fly on the wall’ documentary in the pilot about a doctor who treated his patients with kisses and other displays of affection; this was considered by all who heard it to be the most effective item by far, occasioning a change of direction and a move towards outright sketch material with no DJ element. The doctor himself, caught up in increasingly bizarre scenarios but remaining unflappably by-the-book throughout, would go on to become the most heavily recurring character in the show.

Blue Jam was quite unlike anything that had been heard before in the name of radio comedy. The familiar presentational style, fabricated news stories and love of subverting pop music were all gone, replaced by a hazy montage of music over which fragments of monologue and conversation, alternately whimsical and disturbing, drifted in and out seemingly at random. The word ‘dreamlike’ has often been used to describe Blue Jam– and indeed an early pre-series trailer featured references to 'The 1FM Dreamline'– but not in the traditional sense. Instead, Blue Jam effectively evokes the disquieting, half-formed thoughts that pass through the semi-conscious mind in the early hours of the morning[2]. Although many have suggested that the nightmarish, otherworldly ambience of Blue Jam was influenced by the effects of hallucinogenic drugs, the reality of the situation is far more mundane and unpretentious. The original press release for the series included a list of the stylistic cues that had informed the show, which included Vivian Stanshall’s long-running Radio 1 tales of life at Rawlinson End, the ambient dance music act The KLF, and the effects of influenza, alongside the expected world of late-night radio; all indicative of a blurry and indistinct state, but one that is reached naturally rather than through any kind of chemical stimulation. Blue Jam was more effective in creating its own abstract ambience than any boring slab of drug-fuelled meandering could ever hope to be.

The first run of six hour-long instalments of Blue Jam went out on Radio 1 at midnight on Friday mornings, during November and December 1997. The most immediately striking feature, not to mention the most important in terms of setting the required tone, was the music. On a simplistic level, the shows could be divided down into the established ‘music show’ format, interspersing speech material with tracks played in full. However, the speech material was surrounded by looped sections of music tracks, which flowed in and out of the longer selections in one long pulsating soundtrack that ebbed and flowed with the mood of the material; so neat and seamless that it was difficult to determine where the music and comedy ended and started. This soundtrack was made up of excerpts from a selection of music tracks that were markedly diverse yet also strangely aligned, ranging from ambient dance music to spectral ballads, 1960s European pop numbers, and even a scratchy old blues record that claimed to be “dreamin’ ‘bout a reefer five feet long”. The KLF, Brigitte Bardot, Bjork, David Byrne, The Chemical Brothers, Stereolab, The Cardigans, Sly And The Family Stone, The Beach Boys, Beck and even the middle-of-the-road duo The Alessi Brothers were just a handful of the artists that found themselves absorbed into the first series of Blue Jam.

Each edition of Blue Jam opened and closed with a warped approximation of ‘beat’ poetry, conjuring up surreal juxtapositions and disturbing imagery and delivered in an obscure patois, conveying a feeling of distorted reality with a bleakly comic twist. Each edition also contained a lengthy monologue delivered by Morris, and written jointly with Robert Katz. These had their roots in ‘Temporary Open Space’, Katz’s contributions to Morris’ Greater London Radio shows (indeed, some of the monologues were adapted from earlier ‘Temporary Open Space’ pieces); these monologues probably give the clearest indication of what Morris had originally intended for Blue Jam. In the eventual transmitted shows they were surrounded by shorter sketches, written variously by Morris, Peter Baynham, David Quantick, Jane Bussmann, Graham Linehan and Arthur Matthews, and performed by a regular cast that included David Cann, Amelia Bulmore, Julia Davis, Kevin Eldon, Mark Heap, and on occasion Sally Phillips, Lewis MacLeod, Melanie Hudson and Phil Cornwell.

The sketch structure was to say the least unconventional, lacking deliberate start and end points (it was not unusual for a sketch to ‘end’ simply by fading into the distance on an echoed word), and divided between dialogue, monologue and a quasi-documentary approach. Twistedly humorous concepts introduced to listeners over the course of Blue Jam included an American couple who enter their baby in vicious fighting contests, a landlord who persuades his tenants to leave by slicing imperceptible slivers of skin from their feet as they sleep, a four year old girl with a secret double life as a ruthless gangland killer, a disease nicknamed “The Gush” that causes porn stars to literally ejaculate themselves to death, and an eyewitness account of a man who, lacking an available high window to throw himself out of, simply opted to commit suicide by repeatedly jumping from a first floor window.

While certainly highly amusing, such sketches have given rise to a belief that Blue Jam concerned itself solely with bleak humour based around shock tactic themes. This could not be further from the truth; the majority of sketches featured in the series are merely surreal, disorientating whimsy that are as light as the darker material is disturbing. Memorable examples included an angry man in search of the “owner” of the birds that annoyed him with their dawn chorus, an agency that hires out thick people to annoy customer service staff, a plot to joyride Professor Stephen Hawking around a racetrack, and David Bowie’s little-known side career as a relationship guidance counsellor. Meanwhile, Morris’ old standby of cutting and pasting of recorded speech resurfaced in a mangling of Radio 1’s Newsbeat (“police in Northumberland have sex with schoolgirls, and it’s all legal”), while an unsavoury backwards message was discovered in Elton John’s tribute to Diana, Princess Of Wales, Candle In The Wind ‘97.

The latter item, along with an interview with royal biographer Andrew Morton – quizzed on his attitude to non-existent internet-based games based on the crash, and how he would feel if a signed copy of his book was presented to Princes William and Harry by a Diana lookalike – formed part of an extraordinary run of material spread throughout the first run of Blue Jam, inspired by the outpourings of emotion that had followed Diana’s death. At no point was this material ever in any way cruel or insensitive about the situation itself, nor indeed about the people who felt affected by the tragedy; it simply reflected the feelings of someone who, like many others, had grown tired of the disproportionate public displays of grief, and the attendant media hysteria and hypocrisy, and their apparent refusal to abate even some months later. Blue Jam suffered from very little interference or censorship throughout its existence, but an item that was originally planned for the last show of the first series pushed Radio 1’s tolerance too far.

Around fifteen minutes into the original edit of show six, the following re-edit of the Archbishop Of Canterbury’s sermon from Diana’s memorial service appeared:

“We give thanks to God for those maimed through the evil of Mother Theresa, whose death we treasure. We pray for those most closely affected by her death, among them Trevor the sheep. Lord, we thank you for the precious gift of the sick, the maimed, and all whose lives are damaged, and for the strength we draw from all who are weak, poor and powerless, in this country and throughout the world. Lord, we commend to you Elizabeth, our Queen, whose death may serve the common good. We give thanks above all for her readiness to identify with God almighty, and for the way she gave sauce to so many people. Her mother, her brother, Dodi Fayed, and many, many, many more. We pray for the Royal Family as they discharge their members in Trevor Rhys Jones. Give them AIDS. Lord of landmines, hear our prayer. And now abideth faith, hope, love, these three… but the greatest of these is tortoise”

Morris was aware that this was likely to be problematic, and to that end recorded a deliberately obscene ‘Doctor’ sketch containing libel, blasphemy and an intentionally unsavoury remark about Diana, which was never seriously intended for broadcast (and not particularly funny either) and could be excised as a bargaining counter to argue for the Archbishop edit to remain uncut. Radio 1 seemed happy with this; the contentious sketch was duly removed from show four (which ran correspondingly short as result, with an extra music track added after the outro to make up the time[3]), and the full edit was cleared for broadcast as part of show six. However, when the sequence actually went to air, Radio 1’s duty manager insisted that the episode should be faded out and replaced for the rest of its duration with a repeat of show one. It is reputed that the engineer charged with the task of swapping the broadcast was a fan of the show and deliberately took his time, resulting in the offending item going out pretty much in its entirety, with only a single line of inoffensive material left unbroadcast. Quite why this came about is uncertain. Some of those who worked on the show claim that the sketch was mistaken for the excised ‘Doctor’ sketch by the inattentive duty manager, and faded out for that reason, while Radio 1 claimed at the time that they had changed their minds over the suitability of the Archbishop edit and had requested an alternate edit that never arrived[4].

Whatever the circumstances, Radio 1 subsequently became very unhappy about the item. When Morris tried to get the full version of show six broadcast, still with 45 minutes of unheard material, as part of a repeat run early in 1998, Radio 1 refused and in the absence of an alternate edit put out show one – its fourth airing in three months – in its place. Eventually, when it became clear that they were not prepared to give way, Morris relented and provided an edited version, which went out as the first of a new six-show run between March and May 1998 .

By now, Blue Jam was gaining both critical approval – it won the Sony Gold award for Best Radio Comedy for two consecutive years – and a small, but intensely loyal, audience. A third set of six shows running between January and February 1999 showed some signs of fatigue, particularly in the choices of music, but the material was generally of the same exceptionally high quality, and there could be little doubt that Blue Jam was an experiment that had succeeded beyond expectations.


[1] In fact, it may well have ended up somewhat reminiscent of Mark Radcliffe’s Radio 1 show Out On Blue Six, which achieved a similar detached ambience through judicious manipulation of the traditional music radio format with laid-back music and surreal interjections. Morris professes to have enjoyed Out On Blue Six greatly.
[2] Morris reinforced this point to me when he claimed that “the material generally came from a sense of wanting to make things hypnotic and unignorable”.
[3] This was Best Bit by Beth Orton; despite assumptions to the contrary, this actually appears on the broadcast master of the episode.
[4] More confusingly still, Radio 1 denied all knowledge of the incident to several listeners who called in during the broadcast to ask what was going on. Complicating matters still further, Radio 1’s then-Controller Matthew Bannister claimed in BBC Radio 4 Extra’s Morris retrospective Raw Meat Radio in 2014 that the entire incident had never happened and that all supposed off-air recordings were a hoax perpetrated by a fan. All I can say is that, hand on heart, my off-air recording is genuine. Numerous listeners will attest that this actually happened and it was reported on by a couple of newspapers at the time. Matthew Bannister politely declined to be interviewed for Fun At One, feeling not unreasonably that he had expressed his point of view definitively on several previous occasions.
[5] The item was first heard in full as part of a Blue Jam ‘Live’ event at the Battersea Arts Centre in 1998. A video version, prepared for the TV transfer jam but not actually used in the series, was later made available at www.bishopslips.com – this effectively comprised the 22nd track of the Blue Jam compilation CD released by Warp in 2000. It was also included on the limited edition Blue Jam Extras CD.

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This is an abridged excerpt from Fun At One - The Story Of Comedy At BBC Radio 1, which is available in paperback here or from the Kindle Store here.

For a limited time, you can get four books full of stuff by me - that's Well At Least It's Free, Not On Your Telly, The Camberwick Green Procrastination Society and Tim Worthington's Bookshelf - as one huge cut-price eBook. That's nearly six hundred pages on Doctor Who, David Bowie and much more besides.

Amongst that 'much more besides', you can find the following articles that you won't find anywhere else:


Switch On The TV, We May Pick Him Up On Channel Two - a look at David Bowie's lost early television appearances

School's Out! - what would have been the accompanying booklet for the cancelled DVD release of Hardwicke House

The Best Of Times - a full history of the BBC's 'Sunday Classics' slot, masterminded by former Doctor Who production team Terrance Dicks and Barry Letts

Unwatched And Somewhat Slightly Erased - a bold attempt to find something to like in the Doctor Who story that nobody likes, The Space Pirates

Every Time The Slightest Little Thing Goes Wrong - a look at Hanna-Barbera's bizarre attempt at post-Nixon satire for adult viewers, Wait Til Your Father Gets Home

May We Come With You? - Chigley and the end of 'the sixties'


There are tons of other articles too, but you can find more details of them elsewhere on the blog. Anyway, Here Is A Box (Set) is just £3.99 and is available here as a full-colour eBook... but not for long!

If you've been following this series of cuttings from old issues of TV Times, then you're probably of the opinion that it's already got pretty odd at times. We've seen plenty that's best described as inadvisable, inappropriate, or just plain inexplicable. And that's just Tivvy. Every so often though, you'll stumble across something so baffling and beyond explanation that it causes you to double-take. No amount of reading and re-reading will bring you any nearer comprehension, and you do have to start wondering if poor old Brucie and his oversized comedy chef's hat had stumbled across some 'leftovers' in a scowling hippy's damp-sodden kitchen. If you can figure out what was actually going on with any of the below, you're doing better than us...


Before television actually started broadcasting overnight, there were persistent playground rumours of 'Secret Television', with scarcely credible reports of adverts running backwards at high speed and Jon Pertwee being menaced by Kronos The Kronivore in black and white suddenly leaping terrifyingly out of nowhere in the deepest darkest recesses of the small hours where even The Open University feared to tread. The obvious and logical explanation was that it was just the 'backroom boys' testing equipment with a bit of it escaping onto the transmitters whether by accident or design, but the idea that there was some hidden McDonald's Menu Hack-style unlisted schedule on the other side of the IBA Colour Bars that the likes of you were not allowed to see on pain of retribution from 'Girl' and 'Clown' was too tantalising a possibility to discount. So you covertly waited up. And never saw anything ever. Here's proof that it actually did happen, though what's really interesting is the editor's disturbingly over-robust 'Sincerely - Little Girl'-style response making it clear that you should all move on and that there was nothing more to see here. Which more or less rubber-stamps the idea that they were clandestinely putting out Sunday Night At The London Palladium - Too Hot For TV and 100% All-Nude Her Off Of Weavers Green Uncensored at two in the morning after all.


In case you thought you had simply, erm, hallucinated unexpected middle-of-the-night television, then here's some stark and sensible advice on the subject of illegal substances from those noted experts at TV Times. In summary, dangerous drug marijuana is smuggled into the country by a 'drug-ring' straight out of Paul Temple, is distributed by 'negroes', and partaken in by sneering snickering teenagers who would do well to jolly well listen to those influential hep cats at the British Medical Association. And it's all down to 'jazz', according to this article from the week of release of Rubber Soul. Anyway, kids - remember the important rules. One pill makes you larger. And one pill makes you small. And the ones that Brucie makes out of 'leftovers' don't do anything at all.


Meanwhile, if you're a teenager confused by this 'dating' lark, and are full of questions about how many hours beforehand you should brush your teeth and how many square feet away from the door it's appropriate to 'walk' her to and which blouses offer the sturdiest defence against 'wandering' hands, who would you look to for advice? Yes, that's right, sixtysomething naval racounteur and confirmed 'funny he never married' type Godfrey Winn. After visiting a 'jive session' and speaking to some seamen, Godfrey solicits the opinion of a handful of teenagers who, well, y'know, can take it or leave it really but it's nice to have the option to do a bit of 'necking' if you get bored during Bunny Lake Is Missing etc etc. Quite how many lovelorn teenagers took his advice to heart is sadly not recorded, though presumably a princess looking for a prince found it useful. A reference that about two and a half people will get. Moving on...


As the snow began to fall/or was it a pigeon on the aer-i-alllll? No, it's a handful of MPs having an 'hilarious' - i.e. 'not' - debate about whether homing pigeons might get confused by television aerials despite there being absolutely nothing they could possibly concievably do about either factor in the equation, a bit like that episode of Trumpton only boring and with no jokes. Still, better that than "what about disability benefits?" - "tut tut your tie is not done in Christensen knot on St. Biliwick's Day you scruffy ruffian", "For the many, but after I've finished enabling Hard Brexit and forcing my party to wave through the pissing bastarding Investigatory Powers Bill eh?", and "me party is making significant gains that we have not seened the likes of since me best selling album Brothers In Arms come out".


Never mind all those press reports about Mark-Paul Gosselaar signing up for the first passenger flight to Neptune or whatever it is, here's TV Times arranging an exchange visit to 'space' back in 1964! With the aid of Bachelors, two lucky winners who manage to correctly guess the contents of a sort of low rent equivalent of that 'golden disc' Carl Sagan sent into space with an episode of Captain Butler on it or something get to go to 'Mars' and 'Venus' - both of which, in true Doctor Who And The Invasion Of The Dinosaurs fashion, appear to look suspiciously like France. In return, two old-skool take-me-to-your-leader-mister-parking-meter Martians get to visit Blackpool, with a trip to the illuminations - that year featuring tableaus of The Voord, Ian And The Zodiacs and 633 Squadron - very much on the agenda. Chances are that they spent twenty minutes in a long queue crawling past occasional street lamps with two or three bulbs on them and then gave up and went back to Viltvodle VI.


You may well think that some obscure television programmes get covered on here, but even poor old Skiboy has nothing on The Hathaways, a sitcom about a family bringing up three chimps - played by Charlie, Candy and 'Enoch' - which has been so deservedly forgotten that until recently there was not a single mention of it on the entire Internet. Here's proof positive that it existed in all its revoltingly exploitative glory, though, with a profile of the three 'stars' who were apparently no strangers to ITV variety shows. Honestly, you might well scoff at Martin Clunes Meets The Sealions or whatever they put on in primetime instead of actual proper programmes now, but at least they're sodding nice to the animals. And to Martin Clunes.


One peculiar recurring feature in the letters pages in the mid-sixties was 'Pot Shot', wherein readers were invited to assemble kitchen utensils into a rough Stainless Steel And The Star Spies-esque approximation of a leading television celebrity. Here you can see one E. Teskey-King's take on Ken Dodd, who was no doubt 'tickled' by it. Hmm, wonder which other wholesome and well-loved small-screen stars also received the honour?


...oh.


This would never happen now, of course. Nobody cares enough about writers to ask them to advertise anything.


A: No. Though if it does, please send Atlanta round to see me.


TV Times reporter Victor Edwards drops in on the production office of short-lived Anglia soap opera Weavers Green, set in a small rural community and featuring a young Kate O'Mara as a student vet. Here we can clearly see the sort of thrilling, contemporary, Mary Whitehouse-enraging storylines they traded in. Though apparently that one where a knight appeared on the village green and started rotating very slowly was a belter.


Get the TV Comic Holiday Special for forty eight pages of sitting eating fish and chips on a sort of kerb adjacent to the beach fun, thrills and puzzles with Supercar, Fireball XL5, Popeye, The Telegoons, and some sort of resigned-looking melting bespectacled cat with a propeller hat on. Or alternatively chase a walking Salt'n'Shake bag with a 'showbiz' straw hat on into a sort of newspaper-hued void. Or, failing that, join us again next time, when we'll be rocketing forward to The Eighties. The decade of Thatcher! Citrus Spring! And the 'Wacbada'...

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If you've enjoyed this article, you can find lots more slightly more serious writing about fifties and sixties television in Not On Your Telly, which is available in paperback here or from the Kindle Store here.

It’s unusual for a television series to find popularity in two different decades, though some have managed it through judiciously-placed repeats. Finding popularity in two different genres, though, is an entirely different matter, and should be logistically impossible. Yet that’s exactly what happened to The Flashing Blade. So how did the swashbuckling exploits of a French swordsman have audiences on the edge of their seats one minute and falling about with laughter the next? It’s all down to the redubbing. Two different sets of redubbing, in fact.

The Flashing Blade was originally known as Le Chevailer Tempête, a children’s adventure serial filmed early in 1967 as a co-production between Pathe Cinema and the French television company ORTF, with international funding coming from Switzerland and Canada. Written by Andre-Paul Antoine and Pierre-Aristide Breal, and stylishly directed by Yannick Andrei, the storyline was set in 17th century France but, unusually for a serial of this nature, was not actually based on genuine historical events.

The action takes place in 1630, around the besieged Fort Casal on the Savoie Border between the warring France and Spain. The liberation of the castle is the key to the intended truce, and there are those within the opposing ranks – most notably the devious Don Alonso – who will do anything in their power to prevent the agreement from taking place. Unfortunately for them, the French have assigned this mission to dashing young spy Francois, Chevalier de Recci and his loyal servant Guillot, a wisecracking pair who seem to get as much of a thrill from corny jokes as they do swordsmanship. Over the course of the serial they mount a number of plots to rescue the castle, adopt many disguises – including a lengthy spell hiding out with a troupe of travelling players – and stage near-constant daring escapes, whilst Francois becomes involved with a young local noblewoman, Isabelle de Sospel.

The popular costume drama actor Robert Etcheverry took the part of Francois, with Jacques Balutin as Guillot, Mario Pilar as Don Alonso, Genevieve Casile as Isabelle, Jean Martinelli as the Duke de Sospel and Denise Gray as the Comtesse. None of the cast were well known outside of France, despite a considerable list of starring roles on film and television between them – although in an amusing quirk, Balutin later ended up redubbing Paul Michael Glasier’s dialogue for the French language transmissions of Starsky And Hutch.


Le Chevailer Tempete was shown by ORTF in four seventy-five minute episodes in October 1967. The series attracted acclaim for its stylish direction and colourful cinematography - noticeably similar to the style adopted by many historically-based European feature films of the day, not to mention such British efforts as Masque Of The Red Death and Witchfinder General - as well as for scripts that skillfully combined lengthy action set-pieces with comic interludes – the latter perhaps best exemplified by the dashing duo’s attempts to pose as actors. As was common practice at the time, the serial was subsequently offered for adaptation by overseas broadcasters, and the BBC bought the rights during 1968 for transmission in Spring 1969. The four episodes were cut down by into twelve twenty-five-minute instalments, with the adaptation and redubbing overseen by Peggy Miller, who performed similar duties on a number of imported series. Indeed this was common practice for all imported children’s serials, subjected to changes that went anywhere from re-editing to entire rewrites, leading to the credit 'BBC Presentation By …' becoming a familiar sight. While the closing titles of the BBC version also revealed the new soundtrack was recorded at the famous De Lane Lea studios, a venue incongruously favoured by the big progressive rock acts of the day, the identity of the actors performing the English language dialogue was not revealed and remains something of a mystery to this day.

Although the new version of the serial ran to a dozen episodes, most UK viewers have only ever seen eleven of them, as the dubbed print of episode twelve suffered from a technical fault which caused a loss of vision partway through. The BBC attempted to show the episode on a couple of early runs of the series, and indeed once managed to air virtually the entire twenty five minutes with only a slight interruption, but still ran into the same problems each time. As a result, and no doubt to the frustration of those who had followed the long serial over numerous weeks, the final edition was never properly shown, although in response to viewer requests, the conclusion was later featured in the BBC children's clip show Ask Aspel. Fortunately for the BBC, episode eleven acted as an acceptable ending in its own right, with the truce signed, the Castle liberated, and Francois finally seeing off Don Alonso in an epic sword fight. Apart from confirming the wounded Guillot survived the climactic battle, episode twelve had little to do with the story proper, largely set a year after the events of the previous instalment and recounting a very slow reunion between Francoise and Isabelle. As most later showings were simply truncated to eleven, without much really being lost in the way of the storyline, it’s quite possible that many viewers never even noticed.

While Francois could stop a war virtually single-handed, it seems even the miracles of modern technology cannot resolve the same technical fault that first sent BBC1 haywire almost fifty years ago. On a DVD release of the complete English language version of The Flashing Blade, the twelfth episode has been replaced by an appropriate subtitled edit of the original French language version, complete with the original credits and theme music. This may have come as something of a surprise to erstwhile followers of the series, as The Flashing Blade is as well remembered in the UK for its dramatic galloping theme song as it is the swashbuckling exploits of the Chevailer de Recci, or indeed for technical breakdowns at the worst possible moment. Composed by Alex Masters, the theme was popular enough to be released as a single by Phillips, retitled Fight and credited to The Musketeers. Although it stopped some way short of the top forty, the single has subsequently become much sought-after by soundtrack collectors; sadly, the intriguing-sounding b-side Magnifico is in fact a rather ordinary love song that sounds more like a football team’s musical exploits than its more compelling a-side, despite clearly being recorded in the same session.


The adventures of Francois and Guillot would later find an altogether different notoriety when The Flashing Blade was cut up into five-minute segments and comically redubbed for the BBC1 Saturday morning show On The Waterfront in 1988. Written by producer Russell T Davies and voiced by the show’s cast with impressionist John Culshaw, the redubbings were initially very funny and quickly won a cult following – Don Alonso’s grim examination of a local map, for example, was turned into a weather report, and each instalment ended with the assembled cast shouting “Shut up!!” after the first couple of bars of the theme song. Inevitably inspiration soon ran dry – one later instalment consisted of little more than Isabelle singing an interminable song about how “she likes to stitch and sew her clothes”– but all the same it is fondly remembered to this day. In fact, it’s not too great a leap of the imagination to suggest the arrival on BBC2 the following year of The Staggering Stories Of Ferdinand De Bargos– which did much the same thing with genuine historical footage – owed more than a little to this idiosyncratic re-interpretation of The Flashing Blade.

The On The Waterfront inserts proved sufficiently popular to warrant a full (well, apart from episode twelve) re-run of The Flashing Blade in its proper form the following year, the last time to date that it has been shown on terrestrial television. It’s interesting to ponder on the fact none of the things it is best remembered for – the theme song, the redubbed send-up and the notorious technical fault – were ever part of Le Chevalier Tempete, and while two of these may not have been quite in line with what Peggy Miller and company intended for the serial, it does show that there was a lot more to 'BBC Presentation By …' than a simple vanity credit. This and so many other series bought in during the sixties and seventies were to a large extent shaped into almost new programmes, often near unrecognisable from their original form. Then again, few could deny that the straightforward thrill of all those seemingly endless sword fights on staircases had a lot to do with the appeal of The Flashing Blade too.

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This is adapted from an article featured in my book Well At Least It's Free. You can get Well At Least It's Free in paperback here or from the Kindle Store here.

Looks Unfamiliar 8 - Jem Roberts

Looks Unfamiliar is a podcast in which writer and occasional broadcaster Tim Worthington talks to a guest about some of the things that they remember that nobody else ever does. Joining Tim this time is comedy historian and storyteller Jem Roberts, who shares his widely-challenged recollections of an advert reuniting Neil and Vyvyan from The Young Ones, ZX Spectrum game Dizzy and its many close relatives, short-lived rave-goes-Charleston sensation Doop by Doop, budget maize snack Wheelz, powdered drink from outer space Alien Juice, and the dim and distant days of Wet Wet Wet Actually Being Any Good. Along the way we'll be finding out the best techniques for constructing a 'sandwich car', learning how not to confuse ET with a gardener, and wondering who smoked 'Rococan' and if they were able to still form sentences afterwards.

Find out more about Jem's fantastic Tales Of Britain project at www.talesofbritain.com.

DOWNLOAD IT HERE - SUBSCRIBE IN ITUNES - RSS

Looks Unfamiliar is hosted by Podnose.

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Support Looks Unfamiliar by buying one of Tim's books! Not On Your Telly is available in paperback here or from the Kindle Store here. And there's several other books to choose from here...