Originally written for the splendid Feeling Listless blog as part of their look back at 2014, here's a review of Saint Etienne's archaically-festive compilation Songs For A London Winter...

This has been republished to promote Higher Than The Sun, which you can find out more about here.

If you haven't been following the 'Saint Etienne Presents...' series of compilations, then you really have been missing out on something special. Put together by Bob, Pete and Sarah from their massive collective collection of forgotten popular beat waxings, with assistance from their longtime associate and genre-inventing crate-digger extraordinaire Martin Green, each one aims to evoke a specific time and place, from Central Park to a Lyons Corner House, using nothing but the sort of little-remembered pop discs you might have expected to hear in the designated venue. What's more, they're mostly drawn from pop's formative years, pulling in hits that have been hiding in plain sight since the late fifties and waving a jazzy two fingers at the tedious insistence by the mainstream rock press that everything started with Love Me Do.

This time, they've turned their attention to Christmas, which will hardly surprise anyone familiar with Saint Etienne's back catalogue; after all, they've released a Christmas EP every year since 1993 (kicking off, of course, with the glorious I Was Born On Christmas Day), and even released a full album of Christmas Songs. But being Saint Etienne, and indeed being their 'Presents...' series, this isn't just any old 'Christmas'. It's Christmas in London in the long-lost days of black and white TV, when festive shop window displays were a dazzling new thing, home entertainment barely existed, and people were as likely to pile into the local carol service as they were the office party. This of course involves rifling through the surprisingly large volume of Yuletide-themed chart contenders in the days before we came to associate the Festive season even with Glam Rock Santa-hattage and Phil Spector emulation, let alone X Factor winners and, erm, Rage Against The Machine. So there's some familiar names, some not so familiar names, and some rescued from well-worn nigh-on-sixty-year-old discs in the absence of master tapes, which occasionally makes listening on headphones a bit haphazard but let's face it, who cares when this stuff actually is on CD, in many cases for the first time ever?


Songs For A London Winter, it turns out, are a mixture of rinky-dink singalongs, politely furious instrumentals, skiffled-up carolling, cheapo cash-in supermarket own brand covers, and the odd bit of Cleo Laine and Johnny Dankworth thrown in for good measure. Johnny Keating turns in a ramble through We Three Kings in the style of his more familiar Z Cars theme, John Barry rattles through a Shadows-aping rewrite of When The Saints Go Marching In that bizarrely threatens to turn into incidental music from Mr. Benn at one point, and brother-and-sister singing child sensations Elaine and Derek - 'Derek' of course growing up to become Charlie in Casualty - try their hardest not to sound like they're trying to sound like Anthony Newley while listing the sights and sounds of advent. Meanwhile, Zack Laurence, who would go on to become both Mr Bloe (as in Groovin' With) and the theme composer for Treasure Hunt and Interceptor, engages in a bit of piano tinkling in honour of the humble snowman. There's even what sounds like it could be an early electronic instrument on the aptly-titled Sounds Like Winter by Dusty Springfield's backing band The Echoes.

Where the the real surprises lie, though, are with the songs and artists that you sort of half-knew at the back of your mind. Even aside from Billy Fury's original of My Christmas Prayer, as later of course covered by Saint Etienne, you'll find The Beverley Sisters getting a touch funky on Little Donkey, and Ted Heath doing quite nicely on Swinging Shepherd Blues, even if his definition of 'Swinging' might pose some problems under laboratory conditions, while the piano-rattling of Russ Conway - so often the target of 'naff' jokes, sometimes even in person, in latterday comedy shows - turns out to be very pleasantly produced and arranged, Lionel Bart being Lionel Bart - oh what a surprise, he's asking for a 'kiss' - is never not welcome, and Adam Faith's Lonely Pup (In A Christmas Shop) isn't quite as annoying as you'd assumed it was on the very fringes of your consciousness. Alma Cogan can still keep that laugh-in-her-voice to herself, mind.

This is more than just a look at a prehistoric age of pop music, though - it's literally a glimpse of a lost world. This is the sound of the sort of Christmas you see in ancient Pathe News films, where massive crowds turned up to watch trees being unveiled on the high street, where queues for department store Santas snaked around the block and the youngsters only left with a cheap plastic doll where the hair came off when you washed it, and indeed where The Beatles put together their very first Christmas Fan Club records, and, believe it or not, even appeared in panto. See, it didn't quite all change with Love Me Do.

Higher Than The Sun - the story of Screamadelica, Foxbase Alpha, Bandwagonesque, Loveless and Creation Records' first attempt at taking on the world - is available as a paperback here or as an eBook here.

An extract from Higher Than The Sun looking at Screamadelica's problematic second single...

Yet while he was making overtures to Teenage Fanclub, Alan McGee once again had his hands full with Primal Scream, albeit on this occasion for entirely musical reasons. Against some expectations, the band had come up with a more than adequate follow-up to Loaded in the form of the gospel-influenced laid-back dance groove of Come Together. Once again, they had elected to work on separate versions of the song with Andrew Weatherall and Terry Farley; the latter had turned in a hymnal and infectiously catchy treatment tailored for radio play, while the former – despite some initial friction with Robert Young, who was uneasy with the idea that this version would feature no guitar at all – took Gillespie’s suggestion that the song should be ‘transported to another planet’ and transformed it into an overpowering ten minute plus epic, embellishing the drums, organ and bass with judiciously punctuated samples, not least another opening call to arms in the form of an address by civil rights activist Jesse Jackson to the 1972 Wattstax Festival.

However, perhaps betraying his relative inexperience in the field, Farley found himself unable to come up with a final mix that everyone involved was happy with; several attempts at a finished version were rejected out of concern that they didn’t sound right for top forty radio, and as a consequence serious consideration was given to simply putting out an edit of the non-vocal Weatherall version as the a-side. McGee in particular objected strongly to this, and was characteristically vocal in his disdain for the idea of putting out a single that did not audibly feature Gillespie at all. Despite the clear commercial potential of the song itself, it seemed increasingly likely that Come Together would end up being shelved.

Only at the very last minute did Farley manage to deliver a satisfactory version of the mix, and while Come Together, which on the 12” also featured a more conventionally ‘rave’-styled remix by recent Creation signings Hypnotone featuring an unlikely sample from the Pearl And Dean cinema advertising jingle, would stall at number twenty six on its eventual release in September – possibly not helped by the video being a near carbon copy of that of Loaded– it was clear that Primal Scream were slowly breaking through to a new and receptive audience. Key amongst this was an accompanying feature in Smash Hits where Gillespie showed the magazine’s readers around his record collection, placing obscure dance white labels and reggae albums alongside The Sex Pistols, Inspiral Carpets, The Who, The 13th Floor Elevators and The Stooges. Like Saint Etienne, Primal Scream were successfully synthesising a blend of ‘old’ and ‘new’ sounds, and there was certainly a potential audience for that approach.

However, some at Creation still had some misgivings about the likelihood of this apparent new direction both catching on and indeed proving to be something that the band would even adhere to, and plans to issue a harder-edged dance single featuring Denise Johnson as a guest vocalist later in the year were forcibly shelved by the label; McGee’s established unease at the idea of Primal Scream singles that did not feature the band’s lead vocalist did not exactly help matters. More to the point, there still wasn’t an album ready to launch off the back of Loaded and Come Together, and in the meantime many other indie-dance acts had already got their albums into the shops and in some cases into the charts. The fact that many of these were shoddy and hastily thrown-together efforts that indeed are scarcely remembered now was neither here nor there; if the music press wanted to pounce on a latecomer as trends changed, Primal Scream would be squarely in their line of fire.


Higher Than The Sun - the story of Screamadelica, Foxbase Alpha, Bandwagonesque, Loveless and Creation Records' first attempt at taking on the world - is available as a paperback here or as an eBook here.

Not On Your Telly includes The TV That Time Forgot, a series of articles looking at my top ten examples of TV shows that were highly popular in their day but are all but forgotten now. At number three, edging out Bizzy Lizzy, Hear'Say It's Saturday!, Dear Heart, Something For The Weekend, Bognor, The Enchanted House and Small World, comes Rubovia, featuring some very familiar-looking puppets...


Mention Camberwick Green or Trumpton to anyone of a certain age, and they’ll probably know what you’re talking about. Mention the slightly less well-remembered Chigley, and you’re likely to start to get a few blank looks. And if you mention Rubovia, you’ll probably just get accused of having made it up.

It wasn’t made up, though, and in fact this wasn’t actually the first that viewers had seen of the titular magical medieval mittel-European kingdom. In the late fifties and early sixties, Rubovia was a regular fixture at Saturday teatimes on the BBC, as a series of comic plays by the then-extant BBC Puppet Theatre. Creator Gordon Murray then moved into both independent production and stop-motion animation, and spent the rest of the decade working on the three shows set in ‘Trumptonshire’. The BBC would continue repeating Camberwick Green, Trumpton and Chigley for years to come, though Murray was keen to continue making new shows, and in the early seventies he began work on a remake of Rubovia in his now familiar style.

King Rufus XIV and Queen Caroline presided over the decidedly madcap kingdom, aided and abetted by the put-upon Lord Chamberlain, industrious Farmer Bottle, Rubina the exasperated cat, Caroline’s pampered pet dragon Pongo, MacGregor the Chinese Native American wheeler-dealer, card game-loving neighbouring monarch King Boris of Borsovia, and court ‘magician’ (as well as practically every other job title he could affix his name to) Albert Weatherspoon, whose ineptitude with all things sorcery-related was usually the root cause of the odd happenings with exploding wine and levitating noblemen. Brian Cant, who had narrated the Trumptonshire shows, was unavailable, and so character voices were handled by Roy Skelton - who had contributed to the earlier Rubovia plays - and narration by Gordon Murray himself, with music from Murray’s longtime collaborator Freddie Phillips.


Although Rubovia was exactly the sort of wacky surrealist stop-motion sitcom that the above description suggests, the BBC - for reasons best known to themselves - decided to air it in the Watch With Mother timeslot. Gordon Murray, who had intended it for the afternoon children’s schedules and a slightly older audience, was surprised at this and felt it was too sophisticated and dialogue-heavy for Watch With Mother viewers. The fact that it never really caught on and disappeared after only a couple of years would seem to suggest he was correct. His next shows, the equally humorous Skip & Fuffy and The Gublins, would go out as inserts in Noel Edmonds’ Multicoloured Swap Shop.

There was absolutely tons of Rubovia merchandise available at the time - including books, a record, jigsaws, a board game, a plasticine modelling set, and a strip in Pippin In Playland comic that ran into the early eighties - but even that wasn’t quite enough to prevent it from becoming the ‘forgotten’ fourth show, and little more than a troubling hazy memory for people who can’t quite work out how a dragon would have fitted in to Trumpton.


Not On Your Telly, a book collecting some of my articles on the archive TV we never get to see, is available in paperback here or as an eBook here.

Not On Your Telly includes The TV That Time Forgot, a series of articles looking at my top ten examples of TV shows that were highly popular in their day but are all but forgotten now. At number two comes Skiboy, an ITC action serial that doesn't quite have the same reputation as The Prisoner or The Saint...


Throughout the sixties and seventies, ITC were responsible for the vast majority of ITV’s most popular detective, sci-fi/fantasy and action series, with their long list of hits including The Prisoner, The Saint, The Champions, Thunderbirds, Randall And Hopkirk (Deceased) and Department S. Even less successful shows, like The Zoo Gang, The Adventurer and Gideon’s Way, have their fan followings. And then there’s Skiboy.

Sixteen year old Stephen Hudis (son of ITC scriptwriter and creator of the Carry On films Norman) starred as Bobby Noel, the skiing boy of the title, with Patricia Haines and Frederick Jaeger as his parents. The basic premise was that if the thriving snowbound resort where they lived was ever disrupted by stricken climbers or oddly-located smugglers, Bobby would come to the rescue with his skiing skills, and... well... that was about it. Not for him tussles with hi-tech spies, allegorical subterfuge in a mysterious retirement village, or choreographed fist-fights with men dressed as Andre Previn. Skiboy was, as you might have already surmised, about a boy who skiied, and it was enough of a stretch of credibility to bring even the most mundane of mysteries to his Alpine hometown.


Quite how Skiboy managed to turn out so eminently forgettable is something of a mystery. It wasn’t as if it lacked a strong behind-the-scenes team - producer Derrick Sherwin was fresh from masterminding a successful reinvention of Doctor Who, while head writer Dennis Spooner had contributed prolifically to most of ITC’s past hits - and there was certainly something of a fascination with the exotic allure of skiing at the time, as underlined by the Milk Tray adverts and more than one James Bond film. It also benefitted from extensive co-production funding and lavish location filming (at St. Luc, Switzerland), though - unusually for an ITC series - it did have an off-puttingly bland disco-funk theme tune. Skiboy slalomed into a prime Saturday evening slot and gamely lasted the course, inspiring a small amount of merchandise and even making it onto the front page of Look-In, although they could seemingly find nothing more to say about it than that it was TV's 'newest' series. It also seemed to do well in France, where it went by the name of À Skis Redoublés (an almost untranslatable title which basically means nobody skis more than him), and has been repeated several times.

Over here, however, Skiboy went straight off-piste after its one and only networked showing, fading into the hazy world of school holidays repeats and from there into obscurity. So obscure, in fact, that while almost equally forgotten ITC efforts are all available on DVD, poor old Bobby has yet to make the ski-jump into the digital medium.

 
Not On Your Telly, a book collecting some of my articles on the archive TV we never get to see, is available in paperback here or as an eBook here.

Not On Your Telly includes The TV That Time Forgot, a series of articles looking at my top ten examples of TV shows that were highly popular in their day but are all but forgotten now. And at number one, it's a visiting American comic breaking the fourth wall before anyone had really realised it was there...


In the late seventies, American standup comedian Kelly Monteith, already a TV star in his home country, found himself temporarily based in London. Following a string of well-recieved guest appearances on Des O’Connor Tonight, the BBC - noting his popularity and comfortability with UK audiences - approached him about the possibility of appearing in his own show.

As luck would have it, Monteith had been unsuccessfully hawking a format around the more restrictive American networks for a while, and it proved to be exactly what the BBC were looking for. Co-written with longtime David Frost collaborator Neil Shand, the self-titled series starred Monteith as, erm, a standup comedian named Kelly Monteith, charting comic incidents that occurred as he and his wife Gabrielle Drake adjusted to life in London. Except it wasn’t quite as much of a conventional sitcom as that might make it sound.

Firstly, it was something of a novelty for the audience to see an American comic on ‘our’ television. Secondly, the show frequently strayed into decidedly ‘adult’ and even at times vaguely taboo subjects, albeit with such charm and casualness that it was hard for anyone to take offence. Thirdly - and most significantly - it was presented in a distinctive deconstructionist style, where the sitcom element weaved in and out of standup routines, and sometimes even diverted into Monteith discussing the mechanics of writing and performing the show with the audience. And in case you were wondering, it did get shown in America, so Garry Shandling, Larry David and Jerry Seinfeld might well have been looking in.

Mirroring Monteith’s own personal situation, the third series saw an abrupt change in storyline as the couple separated and eventually divorced. From there on, the series followed the likeable comic as he was thrust unwillingly back into the dating scene, leading to if anything even more risque comic scenarios, some of which were doubtless drawn from recent real-life experiences. In 1984, after an impressive six series and several standup specials, Monteith (who was keen to move back to America full time) and the BBC agreed that the series had run its course, though such was his popularity that he continued to tour the UK regularly for some years afterwards. Kelly Monteith is perhaps the definitive example of a show that was huge in its day but has since been all but forgotten. It could be that this is due to the later influx of similarly sophisticated American imports, or, as Monteith himself speculates, due to a lack of repeats and commercial releases. All we need, really, is for him to break off in the middle of a sketch to elaborate on that.


Not On Your Telly, a book collecting some of my articles on the archive TV we never get to see, is available in paperback here or as an eBook here.

Watching The Fierce Flowers again - which isn't easy, as the DVDs have been out of print for quite some time - the first thing you notice is that each episode of Battle Of The Planets originally opened with a spoileriffic teaser with a silly bombastic voiceover, all of which were thankfully edited out by the BBC for transmission over here. Whether they made any other edits is difficult to determine from this distance, though it's quite feasible that they did, so potentially we're dealing here not just with a re-edited show in the style of The Monkees and The Banana Splits, but a re-edit of an already re-edited show. But before you start letting that possibility frazzle your mind too much, please rest assured that in a weird sort of double-negative way, in this scenario it doesn't actually matter. The Fierce Flowers had such an unsettling impact that no amount of reinstated snipped bits here and there could possibly amplify or intensify it in any way. It was as creepy as fuck and will always remain so.

Anyway, let's just quietly tiptoe past the jarringly ill-fitting teaser, as it's not only the one thing that was definitely not present in the BBC broadcasts, it's also structure-disruptingly liable to pre-empt some of the stuff we're most likely going to be covering later on, and above all is both annoying and rubbish. Instead, let's move straight on to the opening titles, and indeed to the two primary reasons why Battle Of The Planets seemed so dazzlingly, exotically and futuristically different from the norm. And from The Space Sentinels.


Ignoring the shameless typographic attempt at jumping on the slantily scrolling Star Wars bandwagon (or should that be Landspeeder?), if there's one thing that you can say about the Battle Of The Planets opening titles, it's that they were cut together by somebody who knew how to grab the target audience's attention. Spaceships shoot across the screen and we're introduced by a booming proto-Barrowman voiceover to G-Force, "five incredible young people with super powers", and - watching over them from Centre Neptune - 7-Zark-7. There's some edge-of-the-seat grandstanding about "surprise attacks by alien galaxies from beyond space", while Mark, Jason, Princess, Tiny and Keyop blast off in their signature multi-atmospheric transport The Phoenix, dodge an attack by SPECTRA's fighter pilots, and finally form a human pyramid and whirl around in a circle until they create a bad-guy walloping mini-vortex. And as they break away at its apex and tumble haphazardly through the clouds, there's an infamous glimpse of Princess' alarmingly detailed pants. "Always five, acting as one - dedicated, inseparable, invincible!" concludes Voiceover Man as The Phoenix pulsates into the legendary 'Firey Phoenix', and admit it, you're wanting to watch from that description alone, aren't you? And we haven't even started on THAT theme tune yet.


Hang on a minute, let's just rewind a couple of sentences there. It's the early eighties, it's the BBC, it's slap bang in the middle of children's television, and some animated eye candy's jaw-droppingly contoured scanties are taking up the lion's share of the TV screen. How in the name of every single letter to Points Of View about Grange Hill did that one manage to slip through?? Well, in all honesty, it was probably more to do with money than anything else. Although, as we have seen, the BBC were not exactly averse to going to the time and expense of making great big butterfingered cuts for a variety of reasons to the imported likes of The Monkees, The Banana Splits and Boss Cat (call it by its proper name), by this time their efforts were really starting to look a little bit embarrassing and a lot like battered and badly-edited film prints, yet purchasing shiny new replacement copies would have been well beyond their meagre means. It's more than likely that whichever newer broom was looking after their bought-in catalogue by then didn't want to pay for any more trims than were absolutely necessary, and certainly wouldn't have wanted a huge great Least Effectual Top Cat-style music-kilter-skewing jump-cut at a key moment, especially if it might have to be reverted a couple of years down the line, and so just left it in. As for how it got there in the first place, it's possible that Sandy Frank Entertainment may have seen it as a younger viewer 'excitement'-generating selling point, but it's more than likely that it just slipped the net when they were trying to eradicate every single other trace of unsuitability from the decidely more adult-aimed Japanese original. As we shall see, sometimes this 'adult' nature was just too strong to disguise with any amount of chopping and changing, and without wanting to put anyone off there are a couple of troubling hints to come that a quick flash of knicker might have been the least of Science Ninja Team Gatchaman's worries. Anyway, suffice it to say that this did not go unappreciated by a generation of pre-Internet youngsters who had to take their kicks where they could find them. And also the reason why if you Google for some combination of 'princess', 'battle of the planets', 'cosplay' and 'comic con', you might find yourself with some explaining to do.


Meanwhile, the aforementioned undisguisable origins of the show meant that the target audience were at least able to get another, very different sort of kick where they could find it. At that time, the lurid and vivid world of Japanese animation (and indeed 'suitmation') was something of a far-flung exotic mystery, barely known about even by those who 'know these things', and only infrequently and unrepresentatively glimpsed through clunkily repurposed monster movies, earlier TV cartoon manglings like Marine Boy, and the occasional awestruck whisper from someone whose older brother had read about something once. Along with the similarly Anglicised Star Fleet (or, in old yen, X-Bomber) and Ulysses 31 (erm, Space Legend Ulysses 31), it gave an exciting hint of a whole alternate universe of sci-fi-flavoured animated entertainment, although despite the iconographically recognisable design hallmarks few actually knew what it was, less still what it was called. Stuck for a genre name, some would simply resort to calling it 'A-a-aaaaaa', in reference to the downtrodden and enthusiasm-deficient sigh croaked by the inevitable Keyop-esque 'gawky non-human child' character as they were knocked to the floor by a guard, or, if raining, saw a bird's eye gleam or something. It wasn't until somewhere around the late eighties/early nineties, when home video became more widely and affordably available and Akira briefly became the underground cineaste's obscurity of choice before being taken up en masse by an army of grubby schoolboys in WASP t-shirts, that anyone really realised that it was actually a 'thing'. And even then they mistakenly referred to it as 'Manga' at first.


Of course, once 'Anime'-mania kicked in, news of Battle Of The Planets' true origins spread like SPECTRA-disseminated plant life, and almost overnight those chirpy linking droids went from being dimly recalled figurheads of childhood cartoon excitement to fandom-denounced hate figures, mounted on a virtual dartboard for over-furious proto-bloggers to throw uncensored Metal Bird Things at. Even sidestepping the humourlessness, the tedious purism and the undertones of smug 'I could do better at cartoons because I seened a cartoon once'-ism inherent in this kind of attitude, it's also one that should be challenged because, well, untampered-with Science Ninja Team Gatchaman was not the reason why we all fell in love with Battle Of The Planets to begin with. Viewers who didn't know any better enjoyed the episodes with 7-Zark-7 and 1-Rover-1 present and correct, not in spite of them, and that wasn't simply down to blinkered youthful inexperience as everyone detested Scrappy Doo and wished that they'd just go back to showing proper Scooby Doo, Where Are You?. They were as much part and parcel of the show's success and appeal as, on a similar note, Godzooky and Brock (who is provably 'canon') were to Hanna-Barbera's contemporaneous Americanisation of the similarly-sourced Godzilla franchise, and never let anyone tell you otherwise.

Of course, this partness and parceldom does mean that 7-Zark-7 and 1-Rover-1 are going to be featuring heavily in The Fierce Flowers, the two-part story that this has somehow managed to expand into a three-part review of, so maybe we should get on with talking about those actual two parts themselves...


NEXT TIME: 7-Zark-7 causes a new 'BBC Fakery' scandal, Zoltar forms a double-act with Stewart Lee, and we might actually get around to talking about those 'Spaceburgers' at last..

Roger Finn thundering through the 'Broom Cupboard' and telling a departing Andy Crane live on air that he'd done a "bloody good job". Caron Keating more or less having an orgasm whilst getting a massage during a Blue Peter expedition to Russia. The Housemartins doing The People Who Grinned Themselves To Death on The Wide Awake Club, lyrics about The Queen throttling children and all. For no readily obvious reason, eighties children's television was seemingly full of blink-and-you'll-miss-them-and-then-refuse-to-believe-anyone-who-actually-did moments of unintentional unsuitability like these. And we haven't even started on the more widely acknowledged I'd Like To Ask Five Star Why Are You So Lego Man's Head Fell Off clip show-friendly side of things yet.

Yet there's one thing that all of the above, and so many more incidents like them, have in common. They were, to greater or lesser extents, random and spontaneous instances of something 'going wrong', and nobody planned for them even to take place, let alone to be transmitted. Less celebrated, yet in some ways more disturbing, were some others that were actually intentionally thought up, scripted, filmed, vetted, cleared, and shown to an audience who were in no way expecting anything like it to assault their Charles In Charge-anticipating critical faculties. The jarring sweariness of The December Rose and The Cuckoo Sister, the Bronski Beat-backed racially-fuelled punchups in Sticks And Stones, the infamous 'Gro-Bust'-flinging catfight in Aliens In The Family, Sophie Aldred's negligibly-necklined costumes in Knock Knock, the troubling and barely legally acceptable insistence of the producers of The Queen's Nose on using Melody as anything from a wet t-shirt model to a bukkake receptacle, and pretty much anything that ever happened in Grange Hill. Well, apart from when Ro-land stole some 'Minto' bars.

As we've already discussed at some length, the appearance of Princess' thinly concealed lady area in the opening titles of Battle Of The Planets would definitely fall very much into this category. But the two-part story The Fierce Flowers went off in a completely different direction and into what was at the time - and still now if we're being honest about it - totally uncharted territory for children's television. Without a word of exaggeration, it presented unsuspecting viewers with disturbing jolting hints of eco-horror, emotional brutality, and even worrying hints of proto-'torture porn', all of it only just about kept in check by the deft re-editing that Sandy Frank Entertainment had deployed to make the more adult-orientated Japanese original suitable for younger dubbed international audiences. You're probably not unreasonably thinking that this widely held opinion is actually just a collective hazily-recollected mass distortion of childhood thrills, and that closer and more recent examination would no doubt reveal The Fierce Flowers to be in fact rather tame. Well, I've examined it closely and more recently, and 'tame' it is most definitely not.


Admittedly, though, it does start in a deceptively tame fashion. Part 1 of The Fierce Flowers opens, somewhat inevitably, with an establishing shot of 'Centre Neptune', the underwater residence of those controversially-inserted sex-and-violence-replacing plot-hole-covering comedy robot narrators 7-Zark-7 and 1-Rover-1. The former, as is his chirpy C3P0-infringing wont, is busily informing the audience about how much he loves the thankless task of monitoring the entire galaxy for surprise attacks by alien domination-seekers SPECTRA, when he is suddenly interrupted by 'Susan', the Caramel Bunny-voiced flickery light-represented Artificial Intelligence housed in an Early Warning Station on - cough - 'Planet Pluto'. For technologically bewildering reasons, 7-Zark-7 has a 'crush' on Susan which causes him to blush - yes blush - uncontrollably whenever she compliments him. There's no time for any of this now, though, as she's calling to report that an unidentified flying object has apparently been launched by SPECTRA from the 'Crab Nebul-ay'. Which isn't a 'sultry' mispronounciation, as Zark immediately repeats it, and that's about as far from 'sultry' as you can get.


Aboard said Nebulay-flung unidentified flying object, birdy-faced Captain Morlok is reporting to SPECTRA head honcho Zoltar - whose gender, it should be noted, randomly alternated in the original Science Ninja Team Gatchaman, a complication that was averted in Battle Of The Planets by the pretence that he was periodically deputised for by his 'sister' - about his latest plan for conquering the Earth. He doesn't say too much about what it actually entails, though Zoltar's exclamation to nobody in particular "greetings Earth people, I am sending you flowers from Spectra", followed by what appears to be Richard Herring's laugh, does rather give the game away somewhat.


Hardly surprisingly, this is followed by a sinisterly surreal sequence of unsuspecting passers-by cooing at a huge swathe of blossom falling gently from the sky, which cuts to a downpour of torrential rain, upon which the fuckers start germinating with nasty-sounding rasping electronic burbles. Within minutes, they've self-cultivated into big spidery lotus things that look like they mean business. And if that wasn't unnerving enough, they suddenly get up on their hind tentrils and start walking, developing a really quite unpleasantly undertoned liking for cornering young women in alleyways. 7-Zark-7, not unreasonably, considers this an apposite moment to alert G-Force. From the look of it, he might also have saved us from things getting even more visually ugly.


At that moment, G-Force are all in their pre-'Transmute' off-duty proto-Britpop civvies, and are hanging out in a sandwich bar that, for no readily obvious reason, Princess is looking after for a friend; though, given that her name in the Japanese original was Jun and there's a great big letter 'J' outside, maybe it's actually technically her own translationally-inconvenient sandwich bar. Cheapo disco sounds play in the background while Tiny pulls a face about the lack of 'Spaceburgers', Keyop splutteringly helps out with the washing up on a promise of payment in 'apple pie', and Jason and Mark are already frowning over front page newspaper reports about the agressive floral proliferation. Yep, he's really on the ball is 7-Zark-7.


As the others set off to investigate the flowers, Princess stays behind for a moment to lock up, and - you guessed it - that's when we get a really creepy shot of an advancing flower reflected in the glass she's cleaning. Clearly unconcerned about the absence of 'Spaceburgers' from the menu, a couple of them have made their way into the sandwich shop, and even after 'transmuting', Princess find that she needs all the kung fu kicks and assistance from her trademark electrified yoyo thing that she can get. Eventually, after a lengthy fight, she manages to overpower all of the pollen-powered intruders, of whom there can be no debate about their rather audience-inappropriate allegorical properties...


Over at the research centre headed by their Mr. Benn's Neighbour-lookalike scientific advisor Chief Anderson, G-Force are being briefed on what he's been able to deduce about the flowers so far. Presumably filling in for a fair amount of snipped material, he informs the assembled Transmutees that the plants are carnivorous, and have been subjected to sufficient scientific analysis for 7-Zark-7 to have been able to devise a protective suit that will enable anyone swallowed by one to withstand their digestive effects. Which is handy, because he's also deduced that in order to be able to fully understand them, someone will have to be swallowed by a flower and survive. Princess, it transpires, has already been selected for the honour. Why not send Keyop, you might wonder, as he's smaller and we could do without him saying 'rou-boot-deet' every three seconds anyway? Oh, because the protective suit 'seems to work particularly well on females', apparently. This, coupled with the scenes of female commuters being chased and cornered by flowers and some clearly toned-down overtones elsewhere, suggests that something rather worryingly misogynistic has been lost in translation. Thank fuck, then, for 1-Rover-1.

In fairness Keyop does offer to go in her place, apparently not having paid the slightest bit of attention to what's just been said, but Princess insists on undertaking the mission herself, and heads off on her motorbike to the sound of yet more daft funk (which, amusingly, sounds not unlike Daft Punk). Keyop, against her wishes, tails her in his rubbish bug-like car thing, and witnesses her being swallowed by a flower in a really quite unnerving and quite unpleasantly sexualised manner. Needless to say, on seeing this he goes "a-a-aaaaaa" and flees the scene, only narrowly avoiding ending up as suit-deficient flower food himself. A pacing 7-Zark-7 observes that their plan seems to have 'backfired', which is a bit strange given that this was their exact plan all along, and 1-Rover-1 assists by 'barking'. He also tells us that the rain is 'unusual', and that he suspects that it may have been generated by SPECTRA. Yes, thanks for that, Columbo.


Meanwhile, the remaining members of G-Force are sitting around recapping all of that stuff about the protective suits working better on women. Fuck knows what they were actually saying in the original, as the action then cuts abruptly to a truly nausea-inducing weirdly tinted scene of Princess convulsing inside a flower. Back at the conversation, we find out that this is an even worse situation than it appeared on nauseatingly tinted face value, as in the drier weather the flowers have shrunk considerably. Yet it appears they can think of little to help their miniaturised petal-enclosed friend other than that they should wait and "let Zoltar play his hand". As luck would have it, Zoltar is indeed playing his hand, and after reflecting on the success of the plan so far and handily revealing that the rain was caused by his taking over of Earth's 'main reservoir', he sends a batallion of Armed Motorised SPECTRA Units to put G-Force out of action. Unfortunately, his uniformed bikers are easily averted by some deft highway manouvres from Mark and company. Yeah, it was worth waiting for him to play that hand, wasn't it.

With that little diversion out of the way, Chief Anderson outlines his plans to simply bomb the flowers out of Percy Throwerdom. Everyone agrees with this course of action apart from Jason, who angrily breaks ranks over the risk that indiscriminate flower-torching poses to the still-trapped Princess. He's overruled, though, as nobody can see that they have any other choice, and to the strains of what appears to the a distant relative of the theme from The Fall And Rise Of Reginald Perrin, Mark jets off in a sort of converted crop duster to set fire to huge swathes of flowers. As he does so, he's haunted by really quite freaky visions of Princess giggling whilst spinning round in front of a psychedelic backdrop. And after all that, it turns out that it was a totally pointless exercise anyway, as Zoltar scoffs that "fire cannot destroy them, you have only released more spores". Well, that's one way of setting up a second episode.


As the flowers set about repollinating themselves, 7-Zark-7 delivers an inappropriately chirpy episode-ending monologue about how his work defending the galaxy must go on, though he won't leave his post "until we've rescued Princess". They really ought to make their mind up what their actual gameplan is. Even allowing for the fact that the two wittering droids were introduced to give the programme a lighter edge, this is a very jarring way to close proceedings. And we've got another twenty five minutes of it left...


NEXT TIME: Princess gets drawn by someone with their eyes shut and their hands tied behind their back, Mark ghostwrites My Booky Wook, and 7-Zark-7 fails to be of any use whatsoever...

When we last left The Fierce Flowers, Princess was still trapped inside a now-miniaturised Fierce Flower, and G-Force were wrestling with the moral complications of weighing up the need to set the malevolent plant life ablaze on a scale that would cause Bob Flowerdew to sink to his knees shouting "NOOOOOoooooooooooo" against the possibility that they might still be able to locate and rescue their teammate. Which it has to be said is something of a better recap than 7-Zark-7 manages at the start of the second episode. After consulting a computer, wittering about how the newly released spores "wait only for rain to bring them sporouting into menacing life" and informing all and sundry that he will be maintaining a Red Alert until further notice, he whizzes down a transporter tube thing into his usual command centre, indicating that - despite his solemn promise at the end of the previous episode - he did indeed leave his post before Princess was rescued.


As if to underline the fact that Princess hasn't been rescued yet, we see the rest of G-Force moping around at that sandwich place that she had been looking after in the previous episode. Jason and Tiny snark at each other over who's the most responsibe for the situation, Mark volunteers that "I never thought I could get so angry at a bunch of flowers", and Keyop indulges in an extended bout of a-a-aaaaaaaaaing, resulting in him shedding a lone splashing tear that shows Princess disco dancing in its reflection. "Mark's taking it harder than all of us", observes Tiny, "he and Princess, they had good vibes". Whether they were related to disco dancing is left to the viewer to decide.

Over at the laboratory, Chief Anderson has deduced that water acts as a catalyst for the plant growth - you don't say - and that they need to find a chemical that will permanently prevent this. He then goes off on some odd contextless free jazz improvisation about them thriving in the vicinity of volcanos and proliferating in swampland and even growing in the hottest deserts, all of which has about as much relevance to anything seen in either episode as a plot strand from Lost, and gives the impression that a significant amount has been cut from this episode too. Something that is only strengthened when G-Force react angrily to seemingly nothing, and slope off leaving Chief Anderson to mull over his findings while a flower in a tank rages behind him.


It's not the only one raging, either, as in an alarming sequence of quick cuts we see a small army of flowers parading through the sewers, smashing through concrete and so forth. "Luckily we had advance warning and had evacuated all people from the threatened cities", notes 7-Zark-7 in a handy distraction from the obvious snips made to the footage, though he doesn't see fit to offer any such explanation for the flower that suddenly emits a light beam thing that cracks open the ground; a property that is never referred to again. And as if all of that that wasn't enough, a TV news report implies that the flowers are now intentionally starting fires. Visually dazzling as all this may be, it's also highly bewildering and decidedly off-script, so perhaps it's fortunate that at that precise moment, Mark's communicator picks up a signal from Princess.

Yes, she's still alive inside that flower, and has worked out a way to send a distress call without her horticultural captor noticing. G-Force immediately set off to rescue her, and 7-Zark-7 notes that "she means a lot to me" and reiterates again that he won't leave his post until she's back, but there's a complication; the 'Federation Council' has voted to send in attack units in an attempt to eradicate the flowery menace. 7-Zark-7 bemoans that he warned them that this would only release more spores but that they didn't listen; we can only assume that he didn't actually try very hard at all. G-Force are going to have their work cut out for them, though, as without the aid of an explanatory scene, Zoltar and company have already located Princess and tied her up in a weird electronic bondage thing (perhaps the reason why we didn't get to see an explanatory scene), and are hoping to lead them into a trap.


Chief Anderson, meanwhile, is busy having a snarky one-sided conversation with the flower in the tank when he cuts his hand (on a... handrail?), and the drops of blood that consequently splash onto the bouquet-unfriendly specemin cause it first to throw an almighty tantrum, then to keel over and conk out. From this he deduces that they are unable to withstand exposure to haemoglobin, but the fact that they'd been merrily digesting females left right and centre gives another unpleasant suggestion that we're being redubbedly shielded from some less than enlightened overtones in the original.


Meanwhile, G-Force have tracked the signal to 'the city's old water plant', and after smashing through the wall in The Phoenix, they do some natty business with backflips, electric lasso/tightrope hybrids and - of course - metal bird things, and easily overpower Zoltar and company, who beg for mercy and... Mark lets them go because of 'morals'? There must have been a proper reason in the original. At the same time, Chief Anderson and 7-Zark-7 unleash a spray that they've synthesised from 'an iron molecule in haemoglobin combined with water', which puts paid to the flowers and they fizzle out en masse in an extraordinarily protracted sequence that puts the climax of The Evil Dead to shame.

There's just enough time for a couple of wisecracks and morals from the departing G-Force (no prizes for guessing who said what out of "it'll be a while before I buy flowers again", "they look so pretty and harmless" and "they should never have been taken from their home planet") and it's over to 7-Zark-7 and 1-Rover-1 for some rounding up; "Zoltar will have to come up with something else now, and of course he will, that's why I keep a twenty four hour watch... I don't think my trigatron(??!?) could have stood up to many more hours of pressure like that", and "[bark]" respectively. "I'll be alright as soon as my electrobank gets a quick one-hour recharge", muses the former, though it's clearly going to have to wait as this is indeed one of the episodes where a badly drawn rendition of one or more of G-Force comes to visit him. And on this occasion it's Princess, almost unrecognisable apart from her costume (and even that's a little debatable), who thanks her robotic associate and kisses him, causing the episode to end on a rather worrying 'BOING' sound. Ironically, the producers of Science Ninja Team Gatchaman would probably have cut that out of Battle Of The Planets.


So, that's The Fierce Flowers, and while it's some considerable distance from being a truly representative example of Battle Of The Planets - even aside from all the nearer-the-knuckle-than-usual content, there's no sign either of the Firey Phoenix or of Zoltar's grovel-inducing floating head thing superior 'O Luminous One' - it's not remotely difficult to see why it made such a lasting impression on everyone who saw it the first time around, many of whom probably couldn't even name a single other episode title (not even Attack Of The Space Terrapin). It's an uncomfortable collision of cosy action thrills and spills and dark futuristic-yet-primal terror - almost like a crossover between Castle and Ring - and was certainly far removed from the sort of troubles encountered by the well-spoken flat-capped youngsters that were prone to hanging around God's Wonderful Railway. Some may well now scoff at its chopped and changed sanitised nature, but you do have to ponder on how many people later got into other 'cooler' areas of film and TV and what have you precisely because of Battle Of The Planets, and in any case, there's a very strong sense that in some ways these episodes may actually have been made worse by the re-editing. There are a lot of gaps and leaps in logic that your mind is left to fill in, and the puzzling nature of the narrative jumps can sometimes leave you wondering if they'd left out something that was actually worse than it really was. Erm, if that makes any sense at all.

After the first episode's appearance as part of Buzzfax, according to the Radio Times billing, 'Buzz' was back along with 'Results of Back Page Puzzle'. And you can't really get a stronger underlining of just how different The Fierce Flowers was from anything else on offer than an immediate handover to some semi-animated bits of Ceefax smugly explaining how to decipher some Clive Doig-posed code. After all, it's not like there was some other imported entertainment on offer that morning to compare it favourably against...

It's not normally the done thing around here to just post a load of photos with very little context or explanation, as, frankly, we're more about Buzzfax than Buzzfeed. But just recently, whilst researching something for my next book, I've come across this frankly bizarre running ad campaign in some old issues Radio Times, and I thought that it deserved a bit of a wider audience.

It's one of those ads for a generic product rather than an individual brand of the sort that you don't really see any more, in this case an attempt by the Tea Marketing Board to extend their 'Join The Tea Set' campaign - once so widely known as a slogan that it was namechecked in a single by mod/psych band The Eyes -  to anyone who'd plonked themselves down in front of the telly for a good old watch of Quick Before They Catch Us. What's more, on at least one occasion, it explicitly references the BBC as the best accompaniment to a quick bit of tannin-slurping.

Quite what link they're trying to make between TV and Tea here is spectacularly unclear. There are some vague hints about how it might help to pass the time while TV 'Clown' and 'Girl' are pissing about for eight million years while you wait for your programme to start, or that drinking it might provide a sufficiently tranquilising dosage to prevent you from becoming too scandalised by the latest taboo-challenging instalment of The Wednesday Play, but in all honesty you could equally have placed an advert about how whiskey in general will enhance your ability to figure out what in the name of superfluous full stops was going on in the average episode of R.3. Or, as some wag is no doubt chortling to themselves by now, an advert for drugs to take so you are all drugs when The Magic Roundabout is drugs on drugs, lol. And anyway, Blur might not have had quite so much success with a song called Tea And TV.

There have of course been many TV shows that tried punning on 'tea' as a titular gambit, from Dee Time and Rich Tea And Sympathy to Teetime And Claudia and Children's ITV's enduring sci-fantasy sitcom T-Bag And The Many Changes Of Title. Then there was of course TTV, which started as an insert in the disastrous early eighties Here Come The Zanies-era Play School reboot with a load of sub-Guy Smiley puppets parodying the recently-launched Breakfast Time, and subsequently inexplicably mutated into a programme in its own right featuring rancid puppet cat Scragtag introducing filmed inserts from on top of a bin. Yeah, so thanks for reminding me of that, Don Draper.

Anyway, here are all of the members of the purported 'Tea-V' set that I've been able to find so far, so why not stick the kettle on, put your feet up, and watch the tel... have yourself a read of some of the fine articles on this here site? You will, you will, you will, you will...


UPDATE! More examples of the ad campaign have now come to light, both of them with a bizarrely unrealistic 'tannins and Telegoons will get you in her pants' vibe...


And finally, as a bit of a bonus, here's a letter to the Radio Times about the tea-drinking habits of your Top TV Pals:

 
Well, it looks like this is the two hundredth post on this blog. And to celebrate, I've put together something rather special...

Back in the sixties and seventies, especially in the throes of the year-round 'as-live' black and white era, TV shows reaching their two hundredth episode were ten a penny (or, in old money, two hundred a twenty pence, or, in actual old money, 6s 6d). Unfortunately, due to this very same timeframe and turnaround, most of these two hundredth episodes are long since lost, wiped back when nobody thought that they had any cultural or monetary value beyond the following Wednesday. From Episode Three of Doctor Who And The Fury From The Deep, which might actually exist in some huffy prat's lockup, to the two hundredth edition of Ready Steady Go!, which also might actually exist but Dave Clark's too busy telling us how he was more famous than Julie Christie, Worcestershire Sauce and The Waltham Green East Wapping Carpet Cleaning Rodent And Boggit Extermination Association combined to have time for anything so trivial as telling anyone which tapes are actually in his possession, they're... not very good examples really, are they? Still, there are many, many more that were seen once or at a push twice and that was it, and nobody has the faintest idea of what might have happened in them, or even if they were marked as the two hundredth episode in any way. And, you guessed it, I'm now trying to get the faintest idea of what might have happened in five of the longest lost yet most prominent examples. Starting with...


Play School (BBC2, 25th January 1965)


In an example of the aforementioned as-live black and white high turnaround so textbook that they might as well have shown a film about it through the Square Window, Play School was only a little over six months old when it clocked up its two hundredth edition, doubtless to the accompaniment of that weird tick tocking clarinet music. And not only is this long gone from the archives, it quite probably wasn't seen by very many people in the first place; at that point, the newly-launched higher definition second BBC channel was only available in a couple of transmitter regions, and even then few viewers owned the expensive new sets required to receive it, and BBC1 had yet to start repeating the show in the afternoons. So we've already got our work cut out for us here, though those few scant details that are available are actually much more useful than they might appear on face value.

For starters, this went out back when Play School still employed a daily 'themed' structure; as this was Tuesday it will have been 'Dressing Up Day', and therefore will have opened with the presenters standing next to a prop coat rack and picking out what bits of costume they needed for that day's stories and songs. The presenters in question were long-serving camera-blur-provoking high-speed hyperactive headcase Julie Stevens and short-stay four week wonder Paul Danquah - a noted 'kitchen sink drama' actor and patron of the arts who was one of surprisingly many ethnically diverse presenters used by Play School in the early years (and also openly gay, though few would have been aware of that at the time) - so it's safe to say that whatever those songs and stories might have been, they'll have been delivered in a somewhat boisterous fashion. Paul and Julie were joined for this edition by storyteller Enid Lorimer (also a regular on Jackanory around this time, of which more in a moment), presumably reading one of her self-penned children's stories, and by a slightly different line-up of toys, with Humpty, Jemima and Hamble (the first two in earlier and noticeably more 'sixties' designs) joined by original lone one-size-fits-all 'Teddy', whose tenure on the show came to an abrupt end when he was stolen during a recording break. So, all in all, this would have been a slightly yet significantly different take on the familiar format. The kind of missing piece of the jigsaw that makes you wish they really had just kept everything after all.


Late Night Line-Up (BBC2, 5th April 1965)

BBC2's daily late night open-ended swivel chair-mounted arts'n'culture proto-Parsons squabblefest clocked up its two hundredth episode only days before the channel itself celebrated the first anniversary of its technically shambolic launch, so it's likely that any actual in-show celebrations were held over to the 20th April. That said, it's impossible to say this for certain on the basis of the Radio Times billing; to be honest they didn't always bother printing much for Late Night Line-Up beyond the title and time, sometimes not even bothering with the latter and opting for 'NEWS followed by...' instead, so frankly the fact that this one reveals that the show was at least scheduled to be presented by Denis Tuohy, Michael Dean, Nicholas Tresilian and Philip Jenkinson is more of a starting point than might normally have been expected. For this edition came just after Jenkinson had been brought in to talk about films, just before Joan Bakewell arrived to lend a dash of mid-sixties pop-art intellectualism to proceedings, and while the show was still staying very much within its initial remit of discussing that day's output on BBC2, so it's fair to say that a quick look around elsewhere in that same Radio Times should give something of an idea of what they might have talked about.


Assuming that they didn't bother with Play School, the first item on the agenda would doubtless have been that night's edition of Humphrey Burton-helmed high arts hoedown Workshop, which featured renowned operatic types Evelyn Lear and Thomas Stewart performing excerpts from some of their favourite pieces and discussing their interpretations of them, to the accompaniment of the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra conducted by Mario Bernadri (who appeared 'by arrangement with Sadler's Wells Opera Company'). As it had been picked out as a highlight on the previous page, written up in a jaunty 'you thickos can like Don Giovanni too' style approach, it's likely that the brow-furrowing trio would have found considerable mileage in it. 'The Pen', the third episode of Francis Durbridge Presents... A Man Called Harry Brent, which starred Gerald Harper, Brian Wilde, Anna Wing, Edward Brayshaw, Judy Parfitt and one Brian Cant (and, Doctor Who fans, Story Edited by John Wiles and Produced And Directed by Alan Bromly), was also deemed worthy of a preview and so doubtless would also have found its way into their opinionated nattering. Elsewhere, the winningly-named Gadzooks! It's All Happening featured top pop sounds from The Animals, Alexis Korner's Blues Incorporated and, erm, The Three Bells, HM The Queen was still watching The Virginian, and Gay Byrne challenged Katie Boyle, Thelma Ruby, Charlie Chester and David Healy to Pick The Winner. Well, they had to give Philip Jenkinson something to talk about.



Jackanory - The Little House In The Big Woods 2: 'Out In The Dark' (BBC1, 25th October 1966)


In later years Jackanory would go bonkersly overboard at the merest suggestion of an anniversary - even sometimes if it wasn't their own - and commission all manner of week-long celebratory 'special readings' and what have you. Which is why it's a little strange to see that the two hundredth edition rolled around so quickly that they seemingly just put out a regular scheduled edition without any hint of an acknowledgement. This was the second part of the mysterious Red Shiveley's reading of The Little House In The Big Woods, the first in Laura Ingalls Wilder's long series of backwoods frontier days memoirs (described by Radio Times as "an American children's classic; it is a true story of family life a hundred years ago in the lonely and often dangerous backwoods of Wisconsin") that would ultimately give rise to a certain ceaseless drone of televisual tedium of end titles tumblage infamy. Unusually, there was no photo accompanying any of that week's editions in Radio Times, either of 'Red' or a generic scribbled woodcabin, so instead from the adjoining page here's a rare alternate edit of one of those 'Tea and TV' ads we were talking about recently:


Unlike a signifcant number of early Jackanory stories this one was never repeated, and perhaps unsurprisingly it's not amongst the dozen or so sixties editions that are still around, but some impression of what it might have been like can be gleaned from the credits; particularly under the tutelage of original showrunner Joy Whitby, Jackanory always attempted to give each week of stories its own distinct stylistic flavour, and these log-chop-centric adaptations came accompanied by illustrations from the BBC's prog album cover-anticipating in-house graphic designer Mina Martinez, violin from jazz fiddler and occasional Beatle collaborator Jack Fallon, and songs from Play School presenter and part-time singer-songwriter (and future Yoffy) Rick Jones. Pure speculation here but given the timing and the overall 'home on the range' ambience of the story, he could easily have been heard performing his proto-Acid Folk jangler The Flowers Are Mine, released as a single only weeks later. So, all in all, rather a low key and olde worlde muted sort of a way in which to mark such a notable milestone. Still, given that the one hundredth episode had featured a story about 'Golliwogg', this could have been a lot worse.



Top Of The Pops (BBC1, 9th  November 1967)

Well, we've immediately got a problem here. And it's a problem that doesn't so much present itself as leap out brandishing a cigar shouting 'eueureurgh' and demanding that we keep in mind that it's got us a lot of machines. Yes, as you'd probably already guessed, the two hundredth edition of Top Of The Pops was presented by TV's Scrawny Old Bastard himself, and as such the fact that it no longer exists is entirely academic; if it did, it would have been locked away by now anyway, Savile-free pop performances and all. No, really - that's the ridiculous extent that they're now going to in the name of 'compliance', and recently, an archive music documentary was prevented from using a clip of The Faces on the basis that it came from a Savile-helmed Light Entertainment show. We have to tread a bit carefully here, but it's time to get on a soapbox, then sort of step off it and half back on again. While the BBC obviously has its reputation and pre-emptively defending itself against pillocks like Grant Shapps to think of, not to mention the feelings of victims and the risk of prejudicing ongoing investigations, and in any case nobody should be bowing to the moanings of entitled archive TV prats who want to see any and every Top Of The Pops repeated in full just because they feel like demanding it and anyway Simon Cowell something something, at the same time it has to be said that nobody is protecting anybody by preventing us from seeing a mimed music performance without a single second of Sir James in shot, and that there's a case for arguing that pretending that he just didn't happen is actually kind of similar to how he was able to get away with whatever he did get away with in the first place. So, with this in mind, here's a screengrab from another extant Savile-fronted Top Of The Pops that in no way presents a bleakly ironic metaphor for how the establishment might have drawn a discreet veil over his activities to suit their own ends:


Mind you, whichever side of the 'he's not yet been found legally guilty in any legal court of law!!' fence you fall on, there can be little doubt that his links would have consisted of little more than a handful of repeated catchphrases and putting his arm around young girls in the audience in a worryingly forceful fashion, so we're not really missing much there. What's more interesting are the actual missing performances, though some of them are perhaps not as missing as all that. The repeated footage of Dave Dee, Dozy, Beaky Mick & Titch performing their proto-psychedelic gibberish World Music mantra Zabadak is presumably the same performance that does still exist from another edition, which is good news for all fans of girls with big hair doing that shimmering arms dance in a manner that suggests they may have 'had something', while Donovan's Zen-explaining There Is A Mountain was represented by an official promo film which is presumably still sitting in a record company vault somewhere. The Who's similarly repeated rattle through I Can See For Miles may be gone but their undoubtedly more thrilling performance on Twice A Fortnight still exists, Gene Pitney and The Kinks did Something's Gotten Hold Of My Heart and Autumn Almanac on plenty of other shows that managed to dodge the big magnet, and while this was a different performance of Baby Now That I've Found You by The Foundations to the one that shows up on Top Of The Pops 2 every three seconds, you can be fairly certain that it wasn't THAT different.


On the totally lost side, and rather thankfully, there's The Dave Clark Five doing Everybody Knows, which as it was a 'ballad one' probably saw them doing 'meaningful' swaying in lieu of their usual risible trooping onstage routine and then leaning from side to side with their instruments in a manner that suggested anything other than actually playing them. This would normally be the cue for Dave Clark to remind us that they sold almost as many records as The Beatles back in the sixties, but there's a crucial difference; during the course of a handful of years, which they both began and ended as the most famous individuals on the entire planet, The Beatles underwent an astonishing and never-emulated artistic evolution which became an artistic - and social - revolution, fundamentally shifting and redifining the way in which the entire world saw not just music but cinema, literature, art and even class division, religion and drugs, whereas by 1970, The Dave Clark Five were still trotting out inexcusably pedestrian covers of Get Together in the hope that they could score a hit before The Youngbloods had a chance to release their original over here. So, all in all, the only real loss here - and in many ways probably the best performance - is Val Doonican doing If The Whole World Stopped Loving. Sadly, he never did get to do O'Rafferty Went To Cheshire.

So, really, this is the least 'lost' two hundredth edition of all of these, as you could easily recreate it in your own home with the aid of YouTube, a mop, a vomited-up barrage of meaninglessly deployed catchphrases, and the sound of a police car pulling up outside your window.


Pipkins - Snap (ITV, 5th July 1978)

And finally, we have an ITV show. Yes, you did read that right. An ITV show. From 1978.

 
It always seems to be the BBC who have to dodge the hail of missiles whenever the subject of lost archive TV is brought up, but while they perhaps made some short-sighted decisions during the brief but prolific timeframe when they didn't consider it worth hanging on to anything much of their output, ITV's franchise-based business-driven structure and liking for buyouts and regional reshuffles has meant that, until genuinely very recently, the output of any given ITV company passim was at risk of hand-changing obliteration once Jenkins From Accounts got an eyeful of how much tape storage was costing the new rights holders. Even now some things are still at risk, not least the large volume of TVS programming (including such big hitters as C.A.T.S. Eyes, That's Love, The Boy Who Won The Pools and the UK version of Fraggle Rock) that has ended up in the possession of Disney, who intelligently shredded all of the accompanying paperwork and now as a result can't do anything with any of it, leading to genuine concern that the day might come when Walt's Boys fling it all into a big skip in the car park. The mere possibility of that is arguably reason enough to wallop That Bastard Mouse in the mush with a cryogenic suspension temperature control.

ATV, the entertainment heavyweight headed up by Lew Grade, lost the ITV Midlands franchise in 1981 and the rights to its archive went into owner-hopping freefall, with the unfortunate consequence that material was being binned well into the nineties. Only one episode of Timeslip now survives in colour with the rest in black and white, most of Rushton's Illustrated has vanished into the televisual ether, and most frustratingly of all, Goodbye Again existed on glossy full-colour videotape as late as 1989; now all you'll find are black and white film copies and some audience laughter-free colour inserts. In fact Sapphire & Steel almost went the same way, but you'll have to read my DVD-accompanying book about the show to find out what happened there.


In such exalted company, it's perhaps not surprising that the long-running lunchtime show Pipkins - the one where everyone says "ha ha, the pupats were a rubbesh!!" even though they were supposed to be - should have suffered particularly badly from tape-chuckage, but even so it's a touch staggering that over three hundred of them disappeared over the years with only a handful (if you have giant hands) of master tapes survving. A couple of dozen more have subsequently turned up as off-airs preserved by various cast members, but this tally does not include the two hundredth episode, Snap, of which TV Times noted "The card game snap is great fun - unless you play it with Hartley. He has become a snap bore and gets close to cheating". And, well, that will have effectively been the entire episode, albeit saturated with sarcasm, surrealism, and frame-defying puppet slapstick. You can probably more or less work out what happened yourself without actually needing to see it, but just in case you needed a bit of extra context; this was in the era when the opening titles featured that blaring brass fanfare and Hartley Hare being flattened by paintings of his puppet co-workers, the show itself featured second human overseer Tom as played by Jonathan Kydd and the redesigned 'jam roll ears' Topov puppet, Tortoise will not yet have achieved his multi-level harrumph-facilitating dumb waiter, Pig's voice will have been provided by Elizabeth Lindsay, and given how much both were being used around this time, there's a fairly good chance that both Hartley's ruralist Uncle Hare (i.e. the same puppet in a 'bumpkin' hat) and Tom's pal Jo will have featured in the episode. Whether Octavia, Mooney or The Doctor put in one of their seemingly random appearances, however, is anyone's guess.


And now, as an encore, the recently wiped two hundredth episode of The 11 O'Clock Show. What, it's not been wiped yet? OK, wait there, I'll be right back...

Although there's a lot to be said for the simpler, less media-intensive times in which the likes of Doctor Who, Monty Python and The Kinks put in their earliest appearances, the unfortunate flipside to this is that there's very little reliable or detailed evidence of just how they were recieved and discussed at the time, or what early fans' favourite song or episode was or... well, anything that would nowadays be indelibly all over Twitter within seconds. Just occasionally, though, you'll stumble across something rather revealing in the most unexpected of places, like this letter printed in the Radio Times dated 6th February 1964 (and presumably written while the first Dalek story was airing):


Doctor Who creator Sydney Newman would doubtless have been delighted to read that his intention to fuse family-friendly sci-fi hijinks and heavy-handed educational hoo-hah had proved such a success with at least one viewer. Less impressed, however, was one Lillian Roberts, who wrote to make her feelings known in no uncertain terms. And right in the middle of Doctor Who And The Inside The Spaceship to boot:


This tedious outbreak of proto-columnist sniggering at nothing in particular in a programme that they were mysteriously still watching despite professing so vociferously to dislike then prompted one Jean Glazebrook to submit a further missive, basically saying "put a sock in it, you're not funny":


And, ladies and gentlemen, nothing much has changed from that day to this.

If there ever was a happy medium between the ha ha ha ha look at the big telly like they used to have in school shhhhhhhh fingers on lips!! work night out lol abba are so retro banality of I Love The Seventies, and the WOOOOOOOOO MURDERS SCARECROW GIVES EXPERIMENTAL HALLUCINOGENS TO SOUTHERN TV TRANSMITTER INFORMATION CONTINUITY SLIDE tediousness of so-called 'hauntology', then it was a happy medium that fell squarely into mainstream TV sitcom-land in the late nineties.

Some time around 1991, the law that forcibly ringfenced all 'remembering' outside of wartime nostalgia to the fifties and sixties was finally overturned, and the all-pervading mish-mash of Andy Pandy, Miniskirts, 'Flower Power' and that thing where they shouted "OPEN THE BOXXXXXX!" or something gave way to an all-pervading mish-mash of Colour Andy Pandy, Hotpants, 'Punk Rockers' and that thing where they shouted "THE MONEY PROGRAMMMMMMMME" or something. It was a long and slow process getting from there to the point where seemingly every single advert for about three years used the Gallery music from Vision On, but nonetheless there were still some splendid scattered-yet-spangly platform-stomped rumblings earlier in the decade, from Denim's wittily personal debut album Back In Denim to Channel 4's hilarious Richard Allen-tastic one-off play The Token King, not to mention Richard Linklater's stoner-skewed hall pass slackery masterpiece Dazed And Confused wafting across the Atlantic on a cloud of suspicious-smelling smoke, all of which succeeded by virtue of treating the outdated reference points as something that informed the lives of real and believable characters rather than just as things held up to smirk at without even any actual tangible joke attached. It wasn't until the latter half of the decade, though, that seemingly everyone wanted to do The Hustle onto this Aztec Bar-fuelled Chopper Bike-shaped bandwagon.

As we've already discussed at some considerable real-Nesmith-hatted length here, the BBC didn't in fact commence their early eighties repeats of The Monkees with the actual first episode, Royal Flush, preferring for no readily obvious reason to open proceedings with the more assured twenty fourth instalment Monkees A La Mode. Instead, Davy's rapier-wielding beachfront entanglement in a plot to overthrow Princess Bettina of Harmonica would have to wait until the repeats were temporarily shunted from their inaugural weekday slot to Saturday Mornings, where it was fortunate - well, we say fortunate - enough to form part of one of the weirdest TV schedules of all time. No, not just one of the weirdest Saturday Morning ones. One of the weirdest ones ever. Full stop.

For reasons best known to themselves and to whatever had apparently leaked into their collective cerebral cortex, on 22nd August 1981, the BBC saw fit to hand over the summer-replacement-for-Swap-Shop Saturday Morning presentational reins to one Buzzfax. And despite the seemingly straightforward embarrassing-attempt-at-being-down-with-the-kids implications of title, this was no ordinary summer replacement for Swap Shop (and let's face it, the majority of them were very ordinary indeed). It involved no clean-cut aspirant Blue Peter presenters gamely attempting to link tedious filmed inserts about 'improving' hobbies and interests with sufficient verve to prevent a mass switchover to ITV. No up-and-coming pop stars were seen struggling through the throwaway b-side of their hit single to mass disinterest in lieu of a proper 'second number'. Instead, Buzzfax saw the whole ninety minutes thrown open to the 'backroom boys', with the full morning's entertainment presented entirely 'by' Ceefax.


Yes, you did read that right. For one week only, The Monkees, Battle Of The Planets, long-forgotten Popeye-affiliated Hanna Barbera canine gigantism third-divisioner Dinky Dog, and the inexplicably revived yawn-inviting Chopsticks-heralded slow-motion black and white comedy escapades of Edgar Kennedy (this week apparently seen facing off against 'The Big Beef') were interspersed with blocky renditions of their primary characters and chirpy quiztacular interjections from 'Buzz', a Ceefax-derived post-Space Invaders Vectrex Gaming System-esque geometrically askew character who may or may not have been voiced by the same bloke as Jig from Jigsaw, and whom in an early excursion into primitive multiplatform interactivity also introduced some puzzles that volleyed back and forth with those set in the back pages of that week's Radio Times. No prizes for guessing, then, that Jigsaw supremeo, Radio Times puzzle-setter extraordinaire, and veteran 'backroom boy' in general Clive Doig was the main creative mover and shaker behind Buzzfax.

In some respects, Buzzfax was an attempt to roll back the post-Posh Paws clock to the lawless frontier days of Saturday Morning TV, when programmes were linked by terrifying splurges of electronic noise and psychedelic graphics courtesy of the over-exclamation marked likes of Zokko!, Outa-Space! and Ed And Zed!, all of which with their dustpan-and-brush-in-a-cupboard-with-cables-in-it ambience did little to counter the prevalent juvenile lack-of-in-vision-continuity-fuelled assumption that 'The BBC' was a big empty building that showed the programmes via some sort of sentient machines that worked of their own volition. But by that point, of course, Noel Edmonds had not only brought 'in vision' continuity right slap bang into the middle of the whole shebang, but had done it with the sort of sense of fun that you weren't really supposed to come across in the square-jawed, improving world of children's television, so no matter how much technological wizardry may have been involved, there was simply no going back and poor old Buzzfax felt the full weight of force; in fact, it's interesting to compare this with the last gasp I Have A Horsey Neigh Neigh flooding of the afternoon Children's BBC schedules with ropey linking BBC Micro-derived 'computer graphics' a couple of years later before Philip Schofield was brought in to perform his own particular riff on the Edmonds format. Well it would be interesting to do that, except that it would be straying a little too far onto the 'serious' side of things for what we're trying to do around here. We're talking about some talking Teletext, for 4-T's sake.

Zokko!'s name might have rung out from the corners back in the day, but we weren't back in the day no more. The week before Buzzfax, outdoor pursuit-obsessed Hazel O'Connor-themed Peter Powell-fronted deluge of irritating chipperness Get Set For Summer had come to the end of its somewhat more conventional six week run. The week after, the very same programmes that had been bookended by 'Buzz' were left to fend for themselves in the continuity wilderness. Buzzfax lasted for one solitary week and was an experiment that was never to be repeated, and yet was so bewilderingly, well, bewildering that it burned itself indelibly into the memory of anyone who witnessed it. And yet this memory-searing may not even have been entirely down to 'Buzz' and his 888-troubling antics, as within its scheduling walls fell possibly the most disturbing, disorientating, disquieting and just plain inappropriate twenty five minutes ever to find their way into children's television. And no, it wasn't Edgar Kennedy.


First shown by the BBC in September 1979, Battle Of The Planets was infamously a redubbed re-edit of the 1972 Japanese animated series Science Ninja Team Gatchaman, which it's probably fair to say, what with its cross-dressing villains, neck-twisting wallops, 'choice' language and what have you, was originally aimed at a slightly older audience. It had been purchased by the massively-credited Sandy Frank Entertainment to cash in on the first throes of post-Star Wars spacemania, and retooled for wider merchandise-friendly Stateside consumption by cutting out whopping great inappropriate chunks, replacing them with new explanation-heavy linking footage featuring R5D4-infringing fretbucket 7-Zark-7 and his comedy electro-canine sidekick 1-Rover-1, adding a big walloping disco soundtrack, and generally renaming everyone, everything and everywhere until it was, to all intents and purposes, a different series.

Most of the time, though back-of-the-mind question marks did still remain over such widely-spotted anomalies as why Mark's metal bird throwing star thing caused the Spectra guards to recoil in incapacitated 'astonishment' or indeed what in the name of all that was suitable for the target audience was going on with a certain bit in the opening titles that we'll be coming back to very soon indeed, this audacious gambit worked and little of Battle Of The Planets' origins was perceptible to the untrained eye. Sometimes, however, much like when the BBFC tried and failed to make The Texas Chain Saw Massacre suitable for an 'X' certificate around the same time, the source material was simply too strong for any amount of re-editing to prevent its true nature from seeping through. And nowhere was this more obvious than in shudderingly-recalled two-part story The Fierce Flowers.

When the first part of The Fierce Flowers rolled up as an accident-rather-than-design component of Buzzfax, it wasn't actually the first time that it had been seen by an unsuspecting audience; over the Christmas of 1980, as part of a mighty school holiday mornings schedule that actually extended into the afternoon, and impressively included Chigley, California Fever and The Red Hand Gang alongside the expected likes of Lassie, Play Chess and Why Don't You...?, a couple of new episodes of Battle Of The Planets had sneaked out more or less under the radar. As they were shown on consecutive mornings in the no-man's land between Christmas and New Year when officially nothing ever happens and TV viewing-depleting visits to distant relatives are the order of the day, it's likely that most juvenile fans of the show missed one or both episodes, with only the briefest of glimpses of its bio-horror hardcore weirdness to play on their minds until the repeats rolled around. And when they did roll around, in that more accessible and noticeable Saturday morning slot, it's fair to say that The Fierce Flowers was what the young people call a 'game-changer'. But more on that in good time...


NEXT TIME: Princess' Pants, The Great 'Spaceburger' Shortage, and what people called 'Anime'before they knew it had a name...

To tie in with Fun At One, and following on from the collection of rarely heard shows, here's a handful of shorter and equally elusive clips of Radio 1 comedy...




Peter Cook and Dudley Moore chat to Steve Wright about the Not Only But Also video, and somehow get sidetracked into talking about Derek and Clive...




Lee and Herring cover their ears as The Fake Rod Hull is challenged by Another Fake Rod Hull.




Adam & Joe call the 'CineLine' in their unbroadcast Radio 1 pilot...




John Peel tells Danny Baker about being surprised for This Is Your Life.




The trailer for Lenny Henry's Sunday Hoot.




David Baddiel goes on Steve Wright's show to drum up some contributions for Sound Bites.




Victor Lewis-Smith shows up as a guest on Jonathan Ross' show.




Kenny Everett's original Radio 1 launch trailer.




And bringing us up to date, Tom Deacon creates culinary havoc with Selena Gomez...




...and Phil And Dan promote their Groundhog Day Special.


Fun At One, the story of comedy at BBC Radio 1, is available as a paperback here or as an eBook here.

Here's a nice surprise from the 'archives' - a previously unpublished piece from circa 2004 about seventies AOR megastar Al Stewart. This was originally written for Simon Scott's somewhat ahead of its time online fanzine God's Rude Wireless, which took an academic look at non-academic subjects, but ended up being shelved when Simon decided to call time on the project with an issue composed entirely of footnotes. No, really.

After that it sort of got forgotten about, until it turned up the the other day and, well, it's not too shabby really, as you can find out for yourself by clicking here (it's a PDF download, format fans).

Meanwhile, you can find some more of my pieces for God's Rude Wireless, including my quest to discover the identity of the books on Professor Yaffle's shelf in Bagpuss, in Well At Least It's Free.

Here's a free mini-ebook collecting some of my old fanzine articles about Blur, in their original scanned-page format, along with a couple of more recent pieces. You can get it from here, and if you'd like to see a whole book's worth of scanned old fanzine stuff, then you can find out about that here.

Another eBook-styled Free Gift, this time taking the form of a previously unseen history of On The Hour and The Day Today. This is based on a series of articles from my old nineties fanzine Paintbox, which were written with the assistance and input of Chris Morris, Armando Iannucci, Stewart Lee and Richard Herring (which arrived in the form of old-fangled 'letters'), and had been reworked with a hefty new intro for my book Well At Least It's Free, before I decided that I wanted to do a collection of Paintbox highlights at some point and shelved it.

You can get it here, while you can also find the Paintbox compilation here and Well At Least It's Freehere.

In the throes of the recent muddle-headed debate about the need for a 'root and branch reform' of the BBC, a number of self-qualified and self-appointed 'experts' have focused in on BBC Three and BBC Four, scoffing at a percieved lack of both purpose and ability to generate distinctive or worthwhile programming. This is of course a load of nonsense, as anyone who has heard of Gavin And Stacey, The Thick Of It or Torchwood should be able to attest but probably won't if it doesn't suit their argument; and as further proof, here's a review I once wrote of a hidden and barely-noticed treat that once appeared on BBC4...
 
It’s probably escaped most people’s attention, but for the past six weeks (and finishing tonight, sadly), BBC Four has been playing host to what is possibly the most enjoyably surreal television treat of the year.

Though the title gives little of this away, Britain’s Best Drives essentially involves Richard Wilson – in a move very much in character for a man who will lend his name to anything from a ‘dancercise’ video to the shocking waste of paper that was Richard Wilson’s Big Book Of I Don’t Believe It– hopping in a procession of Fonz-friendly vintage automobiles to recreate what an anicent AA Guide picked out as the most enjoyable and picturesque British motoring routes of the late fifties, in honour of fifty years of something or other.

Surprisingly these must-get-home-in-time-for-Quatermass road-trip map-doodles are more or less still intact, meaning that we are deprived of the joy of seeing Richard Wilson disgruntledly tearing through shopping centres at 70mph, but what’s more interesting are the places that he stops off at along the way. They’re exactly the sort of quiet, local trade-dominated villages that you’d think time had completely stood still in, yet his chats with the locals reveal that their lives have in fact changed almost immeasurably over the past fifty years, albeit in gradual and subtle ways that have altered or consigned to history some things that barely anyone noticed in the first place. And aside from that, there are encounters with a healthy quotient of unselfconscious eccentrics, from the man well into his seventies still operating a one-man coal mine built on what must surely be the world’s smallest seam to 'some of these goths I've been hearing about’ in Whitby.

As if to put the Morris Traveller icing on the whole bizarre retro-but-not-retro cake, the series has been given a light coating of period orchestral music, including – to the undoubted surprise and delight of several viewers – that sweeping piece that briefly plays over the opening credits of Monty Python And The Holy Grail just as they start rambling on about Olaf Prott and his Moose-handling duties, only for the hoax credits to be abruptly wound downabout thirty seconds into it, and thereby creating a decade-straddling musical holy grail for fans of, um, Holy Grail.

All in all this is far from traditional Wednesday evening fare, but all the better for it and quite a nice way to kick off off an evening’s viewing. Here’s to a second series of Britain’s Best Drives, in which Richard Wilson recreates the classic motoring routes of the sixties, driving a psychedelically-patterned Rolls Royce around Stevenage to the sound of The Waltham Green East Wapping Carpet Cleaning Rodent And Boggit Extermination Association.

This look at some of ITV's seventies lunchtime shows for younger viewers was originally written as a promo piece for the excellent Look-Back On 70s Telly - Issue 1 DVD set released by Network a while back, but ended up not being used. So here it is, with the suitably esoteric reference points fully intact...


If ever there was a 'Fantasy DVD' that most readers had probably been carrying around in their head for years, it's the two 'Issues' of Look-Back recently released by Network. Raiding the surprisingly well-stocked ITV archives for deleriously obscure yet fondly remembered children's television of the seventies and eighties - though a couple of 'big hitters' are glaringly absent, reportedly for rights reasons - the contents of the discs are almost like a direct line into the hazier fringes of your subconscious, and yet, as we'll come back to, there is absolutely no tedious straight-facedness about the presentation. In fact, that's pretty much what inspired this review in the first place, as the precious few overviews that are out there are mostly full of hand-wringing O Tempora O Mores O Heggarty Haggerty nonsense about how sad it is that today's children would rather watch programmes aimed at them than forty year old shows and how 'this charming little gem ought to be revived' when some of them were barely broadcastable even at the time and something something 'Politically Correct Brigade : (' etc etc. Well, enough of that nonsense - Look-Back is presented as fun, and should be viewed for fun, and that's exactly what we'll be having here - fun.

...and if you're demanding some kind of confirmation of this contentious 'fun' angle, look no futher than the packaging, which takes the form of an absurdist parody of an issue of Look-In, and on the cover of Issue One features that famously pessimistic, misanthropic and generally proto-Thom Yorke figure of not fun, Hartley Hare from Pipkins. Inside you'll find an actual spoof issue of Look-In, packed with spurious celebrity interviews, impossible quizzes, effort-deficient spin-off comic strips, implausible pin-ups, adverts for ludicrous tie-in Dinky toy vehicles (including 'The ITC Stock Footage Jaguar'), and a barbed pastiche of the ITV regional listings grid which will have anyone who ever seethed with jealousy over viewers in the Anglia region getting off-radar repeats of Voyage To The Bottom Of The Sea chortling in recognition. And then there's the shows themselves - some familiar, some half-familiar, some forgotten even while they were being made (and in some cases clearly by the people who were actually making them too), and all of them a long overdue trip down memory lane where you can't actually really remember most of the memories. So come on, lose that long face, and let's take a platform-soled trip through a world of Spangles and Spacehoppers. Or, in 'old money', watch some old TV shows and take the piss out of them.

And after we've got past the suitably garish menu with a neat pastiche of the Ace Of Wands theme, it's time for...


And we're straight into unfamiliar territory, as this edition of Rainbow is drawn from the unsuprisingly forgotten 'original' incarnation; title graphics straight out of one of those last-minute birthday cards you have to buy from a bookshop, crash helmet-haired David Cook occupying the 'Geoffrey' role, terrifying feral-looking original Bungle costume, piss-poor sub-Dictionary Corner gag-trading hand puppets Mooney and Sunshine, film inserts that look as though they've been marinaded in dishwater rather than developed, hippy-dippy interstitials, and original singing troupe Telltale looking for all the world like they'd rather be spotting their own name in the tracklisting of Picnic - A Breath Of Fresh Air. There's a nice bit of film about children spotting shapes from a bus window complete with Cook/Bungle two-hander narration, wool-headed flare-clad prog folk-friendly stop-motion Cosgrove Hall scamps Sally And Jake put in an early appearance with accompanying drollery about the futility of their stone-collecting antics from Sly The Cat, and there's also a glimpse of the original Zippy, basically the same puppet but with a Went To School With David Cameron voice. At this stage, there's precious little indication of the mediocre student t-shirt industry that Rainbow would later evolve into, and it's a bit like starting this compilation in an alternate reality where everything's slightly different. All the same, it's interesting to see and a much better way to kick off proceedings than with the altogether more predictable choice of something from the Hayes-fronted era.


Rainbow is followed by the cover star, and indeed the show that probably most people bought this DVD for - Pipkins. But before we go any further, let's get one thing straight from the outset. The puppets were supposed to look cheap and threadbare, and the original storyline was about them being cobbled together out of discarded old bits and pieces of fabric, so pointing their raggedy appearance out as if you're the first person to notice it doesn't make you look any more of a comic genius than someone saying "Doctor Who's Tardis, why doesn't he ever change it from being a Police Box, what's that all about eh?". And now we've got that out of the way... there've been dozens of episodes of Pipkins released on DVD in recent years, most of them recovered from domestic recordings in the absence of much in the way of extant broadcast quality tapes, and every one of them is a sidesplitting blast of anarchic genius. Taken from yet another surprisingly good quality off-air, this is a new episode to DVD, and concerns an invasion of the Pipkins office by a small army of inanimate garden gnomes. And we'll just pause for a second there whilst anyone previously unfamiliar with Hartley Hare and company recovers their grasp on reality. Anyway, this episode - featuring long-serving human stooge Tom, and the 'Hartley floored by theatrical backdrops' opening titles - is something of an unexpected treat for fans of the show, as it features an equally small army of little-seen occasional characters including Octavia The Ostritch, Mooney The Badger and Hartley's Hartley-in-a-hat ruralist relative Uncle Hare, though sadly there's no sign of little-recalled Anthony Perkins-a-gram The Doctor, nor indeed for some strange reason of usual series mainstay Pig. Still, Hartley, Topov and Tortoise are all on board, and as is par for the course for Pipkins, all of the enjoyably eccentric characters get to indulge in large amounts of verbal and physical comedy. As will become all too depressingly obvious, that's something that is going to prove to be in seriously short supply as we make our way through the discs...


If Pipkins is proof positive that programmes you enjoyed in your childhood can be even better when you watch them again now, Cloppa Castle is, unfortunately, proof positive that sometimes it can be best just to leave them languishing in the collective half-memory. Concived as zany parody for the under fives of just about any political flare-up of the seventies that you might care to mention, Cloppa Castle chronicled the puppet struggles of rival factions The Bygones and The Hasbeenes - satire, there - for control of a seam of oil that neither of them particularly needed. As programmes for its target audience went, this was a fairly sophisticated format and it's hardly surprising that it became the talk of the playground. But where Pipkins traded in surrealism, sarcasm and subversion, Cloppa Castle went straight for the one-liners, in this episode sending up the whims and excesses of the fashion industry, and with the best will in the world, they're not one-liners that have stood the test of time particularly well. The script could be straight out of any fourth division early seventies British comedy film; actually, it's worse than that - the jokes are about of the same standard as those when they tried to cross fourth division early seventies British comedy film with another genre like horror or soft porn. Actually, no, it's like a summer replacement for Week Ending. OK, maybe that's going a bit far. That said, this episode isn't helped by the frankly dreadful picture and sound quality, and by the presence of frankly terrifying occasional puppet wizard Mudlyn.


Gammon And Spinach is a programme about which this writer remembers absolutely nothing at all bar the fact that it existed, that it had opening titles with a well-to-do animated frog changing into Edwardian bathing gear to the strains of an oompah version of that Frog He Would A Wooing Go song - which was presumably taken as the cue to change the channel - and that Marmalade Atkins made some kind of agreed-with derogatory remark about it during her stint hosting the CITV 'Watch It!' slot. This level of lack of knowledge is usually somewhat less than a good sign. As it turns out, however, Gammon And Spinach is an unexciting but amiable storytelling slot, featuring former Play School presenter Valerie Pitts narrating her way through a book called Garth Pig And The Ice Cream Lady, about a young porker's encounter with a wolf driving a Mr Whippy van, with the inevitable light-heartedly delivered note of caution sounded at the end. Valerie Pitts tries her best, but really at the end of the day it's not a great format and not a great story, and comes across like one of the less gripping editions of Jackanory only even less gripping. That said, the next episode - as trailered at the end of this one - looks somewhat slightly more enticing, featuring as it does a exotically 'American' storybook with what appears to be David Mitchell with a false moustache on the cover.


The early seventies saw an alarming number of failed and failing singer-songwriters jack in the trudging round the folk clubs for a stint as a Play School presenter. Those who didn't make it through the door - or, if you will, through the windows one, two, three, four - still had the option of long-running Granada-produced effort A Handful Of Songs, the format of which should scarcely require any explanation. Hippy/glam crossover eye candy Maria Morgan and the troublingly Martin Freeman-like Keith Field hover into guitar-cramped view courtesy of some wonky CSO, singing the titular Tommy Steele hit as they go, and proceed to strum their way through a series of requests and accompanying drawings sent in by viewers; these include such usual Music For Pleasure-friendly suspects as Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious, The Teddy Bears' Picnic and Humpty Dumpty, the latter amusingly accompanied by under-the-radar artistic renditions of what is clearly supposed to be a certain other suspiciously familiar Humpty. Also someone's sent in a picture of Sooty for reasons that are never quite elaborated on. You're not really going to find any lost Acid Folk gems in this kind of a setup, but on the other hand this does mean that only a complete plank could describe it as anything other than the polar opposite of so-called 'Hauntology', and that can only be a good thing. Anyway, it's a pleasant enough show if one that belongs to another age entirely, and what's more, it's sobering to think that just for a minor twist of fate, it could have been Nick Drake and Shelagh MacDonald sitting on those stools...


Paperplay is one of those shows that seems to actually be remembered by far more people than would ever be officially recognised by the Supreme Worldwide Bureau Of Nostalgia, Chair. Peter Kay (motto 'Whatwereallus Thataboutum?'). Part of the same post-hippydom tradicraft-skewed 'make your own toys and games' imperative as Fingerbobs - one of the few attempts at making learning fun ever to successfully fulfil both criteria - the long-running show saw former Magpie presenter Susan Stranks demonstrating how to self-assemble what were effectively more witty and colourful takes on the traditional Blue Peter'make' with the aid - well, sort of - of jibbering puppet spiders Itsy and Bitsy. Oh, and cardboard tree-mounted cardboard tropical bird Kate, who is remembered by hardly anyone, presumably on account of doing very little apart from tilting back and forth. As this particular episode sees them making dangling cardboard cats with springy perpetual motion tails, they're joined on this occasion by a surprisingly well-behaved ginger kitten named Mitch, whose primary contribution to proceedings is waving the occasional puppet-spooking paw at the magic marker-wielding Itsy and Bitsy, like some kind of species-cognitive galley master 'encouraging' them to get it finished within the allotted screen time. Paperplay might well struggle to hold the attention of the average modern viewer, taking as it does the best part of fifteen minutes to convey what would take up a couple of bullet points and a handful of photos on a web page, but that said it's actually a lot of fun, especially with the mildly surrealist angle added by the puppet co-conspirators. Well, maybe not the bird one. It's not the sort of programme that anyone would really be desperate to see revived - though doubtless you wouldn't have to delve too deeply into the internet to find some berk demanding just that whilst also blowing a fuse about 'reality rubbish like Loius Walsh' or something - but it's a nice surprise to both see it on here and find it so enjoyable, and, unlike Gammon & Spinach, it does actually bode well for the less well-remembered inclusions.


We've already touched on the fact that over the course of this collection, we're going to be encountering a lot of shows that are surprisingly obscure and barely-recalled for something made in a decade that certain parties have made a comfortable living out of 'remembering'. The Tingha And Tucker Club, however, plays by an entirely different set of rules. To all intents and purposes, it belongs to another age. The 'club', such as it was, first opened its doors in 1962, and, well, closed them again in 1970, just about nudging its way into the Look-Back timeframe by the edge of its transmission spool, and even then it's still a chronologically and indeed stylistically questionable inclusion. And, at least on face value, one that you would quite reasonably expect to be the most tedious by some distance; a hangover from the days when ITV lunchtime children's shows were an altogether more formal and clunky affair, spun off from a bit of improvised continuity with some koala toys that were simply nearer to hand than anything else, and presented by a no-nonsense lady with immobile hair alongside some hopelessly archaically-named puppets. Indeed, the clip from the start of this very episode that previously appeared on early nineties VHS compilation The Best Children's TV Of The Seventies (which, coincidentally, there's a post about here), seemed to underline all of that in triplicate. But that's just the start of the episode, and once we've got past all of that all-too-familiar business with playing indecipherable tunes on a recorder for about eight million years, it turns into a very different sort of programme indeed, fitting in all manner of madcap puppet uncontrollability around the standard birthday-reading-out duties. Better still, the entire second half of the episode is given over to the first part of an alarmingly rowdy serialised puppet-fuelled retelling of The Pied Piper Of Hamelin, replete with knowingly corny puns, proto-postmodernist asides about the paucity of their production values, and ear-assaultingly high-pitched cast renditions of High Hopes and Food Glorious Food. Unfortunately, as this is apparently the only surviving edition out of probably nigh on three thousand, whatever madness the next instalment contained will have to remain a mystery. This is a shame, as despite all understandable preconceptions The Tingha And Tucker Club is actually a lot more enjoyable than several shows on here that you'd probably be expecting to enjoy more, and proof positive that you can sometimes find the best stuff in places you wouldn't neccessarily think of looking.


And speaking of stuff found in places you wouldn't think of looking, if ever there was a name that lurked troublingly on the haziest fringes of the memory of any self-respecting just-about-seventies-rememberer, and in unsteady-looking 'military' font to boot, it's Issi Noho. A semi-animated panda cast adrift in a wood, Issi was discovered by bear-befriending youngsters Andrew, Sally and the frankly terrifying Neil in a partially obscured crate where leafy infringement had rendered the legend 'THIS SIDE UP USE NO HOOKS' as, you guessed it, 'ISSI NOHO'. Though the earlier episodes had some kind of a running storyline about the trio's attempts to shelter and feed him without being discovered, taking in some youngster disgruntlement when his nomenclatural deceit was rumbled, it soon descended into his living openly with a family and creating sub-Paddington slapstick chaos wherever he went (with, scoring a full house of seventies animated bear poor-relation-ness, a smattering of sub-Teddy Edward'angry' flute at the end of the theme music). And, unfortunately, it's the latter era that the episode included here hails from. In it, Issi infiltrates a panto for comic effect and then runs up against a real life beanstalk-topping giant, whose attempts to consume him between two large slices of bread are thwarted by some quick-talking thinking-on-his-paws. And, well, it's noticeably lacking in the sort of excitement-generating ursine subterfuge that the show tends to be associated with in most people's memories. That's not to say that it's in any way dull, and it's certainly not as if the series can be divided up into its own equivalent of pre- and post-Nat Hiken incarnations, but it probably isn't what a lot of viewers would have been hazily half-expecting so seeing it again for the first time in a frightening amount of years could easily prove to be ever so slightly on the anti-climactic side. It's a bit like, say, when they choose something from the good-but-not-AS-good era of Smith And Jones for a tribute night; you're effectively being asked to be nostalgic for something that isn't quite what you're actually feeling nostalgic for. Erm, if that makes any sense. Anyway, we'd better not be too critical for fear of upsetting Neil...


Whereas most of these shows were the work of people making programmes for children but trying to shoehorn in a bit of vaguely surreal or satirical whimsy for the benefit of the sizeable captive audience of adults, this one comes from the quite possibly unique perspective of an adult humorist (that's 'adult' as in sophisticated, rather than in the Roy 'Chubby' Brown/ironic 'blue' Nookie Bear/that Spike Milligan album with the song about rolling a joint sense of the word) tailoring his technologically cutting edge satire and indeed surrealism for a much younger audience than usual. Bentine had been combining topical swipes with elaborate model effects and studio-endangering explosions since the late fifties, mostly in fast-moving sketch shows; Michael Bentine's Potty Time on the other hand developed from an idea he had for longer vignettes involving 'Potties', featureless puppets deliberately concieved to emphasise that whatever costumes and outrageously exaggerated socio-political situations they were inserted into, they were all essentially the same underneath. Much like Cloppa Castle, it used historical situations and allusions to make subtle - though mostly not all that subtle - comments on the global goings-on of today, and this particular escapade sees Professor Bentine attempting to reason with some Empire-era British military men in a cannon-fuelled standoff with 'The Mad Mullah'. Regrettably this does involve an unfortunate smattering of Goon-typical dubious ethnic jibberings, but if you can look past that it's actually quite a thoughtful look at how strategy can sometimes get in the way of common sense. Also it's very funny indeed. Of course, this is hardly surprising, given that Michael Bentine's Potty Time has long been held up as an example of programming for the very young at its very best, and indeed has always been seen as of a piece with his more ambitious adult-aimed efforts like It's A Square World. Though really, a handy Glam Rock analogy would have been quite useful here.


Jamie And The Magic Torch is one of the ones that needs the least in the way of introduction. Jamie's pleasingly never over-whatwerethatallabouted sub-Yellow Submarine exploits in Cuckooland were shown constantly for nigh on ten years, and are about as well known as lunchtime ITV shows get. But for anyone who doesn't know: kid with natty pyjamas and chunky blow-wave has strobing tunnel-generating 'Magic Torch' that allows he and curmudgeonly woolly hat-sporting dog to visit Rowntree Mackintosh Selection Box-esque landscape of cartoony eccentrics by traversing an eye-hurting helter skelter and rebounding off a cushion with a mod target on, accompanied by Bat Out Of Hell-infringing post-prog gravel-throated rock yodelling of eminent pub-bore-gets-lyrics-wrong-ability. In this particular episode, Jamie and Wordsworth team up with 'zany pop star'-style Glam Rock-hued Capital City Goofball variant Strumpers Plunkett and uni-wheeled all-in-one mobile unit Constable Gotcha to apprehend resident accelleration-troubler The Yoohoo Bird, but find themselves caught up instead in a mystery concerning a potential local Yeti. It doesn't take a genius to work out what happens at the end of the episode, especially as the actual title more or less gives it away before the story's even started. Anyway, bearing as it does that all-important credit for maverick Mancunian animation house Cosgrove Hall, you probably won't be at all surprised to learn that Jamie And The Magic Torch stands up every bit as well as you were probably hoping, walloping a hefty dose of Glam-diluted post-psychedelia and an equally hefty dose of actual storyline into its short running time (even shorter when you count the epic length of its opening and closing titles), and that unhinged theme song is just as exciting as it was back when you were too young to work out that it was actually "life is one long glorious game". Yes the whole lot of them have been released several million times before, but Issue One of Look-Back just wouldn't have been complete without an episode of this. But where, then, is Cosgrove Hall's once equally iconic Briers-narrated take on Noddy? Rights problems, Wordsworth...


So far, every show we've covered has been at least partly remembered; even The Tingha And Tucker Club, which was the sort of thing always namechecked by elderly relatives who would insist that it was 'on' and that you knew what it was despite it having been retired for over a decade. Now, however, we're onto the first proper bona fide one that nobody upon nobody remembers, as evidenced by the fact that, while lazily searching for an off-the-shelf photo to illustrate it here, Google doesn't even clock up a single page devoted to it (and, for perspective, there's one about R.3 out there). Even dedicated researchers only know The Laughing Policeman as a puzzling corner-of-the-eye title glimpsed occasionally whilst scouring the listings in old issues of TV Times for info on more heavyweight shows. So it's a bit of a surprise, then, to find that it stars well-known TV copper Deryck Guyler as the titluar chortler out of the old Music Hall ditty, examining junk in a 'street' set whilst doling out helpful 'bobby'-standard hints and tips and introducing some of the weirdest looking puppets in history flailing about to the likes of Sweet Gingerbread Man, like some kind of glitz-deficient evolutionary ancestor of Dooby Duck's Disco Bus. The result is both eye-hurting and mind-frazzling, and yet neither interesting nor entertaining. It is, then, a suitably obscure and disorientating moment on which to conclude the first disc, and things are going to get a lot more weird and indeed a lot more boring on the second one, often at the same time...


How fickle and unfair the public consciousness can be. Time was when - Pipkins aside - the Granada-instigated Hickory House was the closest thing that Rainbow had to a rival, running for five years in the same schedules and pursuing a similarly learning-orientated puppet-houseshare agenda. Then it slipped from our screens, and indeed from people's memories, to the extent that back when TV Cream first started up, nobody could find even the most inconsequential of photos of its era-emblematic cast. One eventually did turn up, featuring the puppets 'meeting' the bigwigs at Granada, but that's another story. Quite how the 'Hickory' element came into proceedings is spectacularly unclear (though perhaps in true Pipkins fashion it was explained in the first episode, and then summarily ignored by tedious standups looking to make a joke about ha ha something or other, which would work as an observation if enough of them and enough of their audience actually remembered Hickory House for it to be viable and indeed worthwhile for them to make jokes about it in the first place, but hey ho), but the 'House' was where Amanda Barrie and Alan Rothwell jostled for sofa space with the scratchy-looking Humphrey Cushion and Dusty Mop, and habitually repeated fundamental tenets concerning shapes and colours and what have you. Though this episode sadly dates from before the production team had the bright idea of having the Granada 'G' turn into the animated house in the opening titles, the alarmingly chirpy flute-led theme is present and correct, and it's straight into an entire episode's worth of Amanda and Alan, decked out in the most retina-wallopingly seventies fashions imaginable, trading pre-school educative riffs with the aforementioned hand-operated household items; Barrie would later recount in her autobiography how ill at ease she always felt next to Humphrey's elongated nose considering certain of her, erm, 'lifestyle choices'. Sadly, one look at Hickory House is enough to explain why it never quite managed to join Rainbow in the upper echelons of the mediocre student t-shirt industry. The puppets are too polite and teacherish and utterly bereft of anarchic tendencies, the filmed inserts seem flat compared to the at least vividly directed ones found in the likes of, well, Rainbow, and there isn't really a narrative hook - they just demonstrate reading, 'riting and 'rithmetic-friendly concepts to camera and then say goodbye. In fairness it's doubtful that anyone ever remembered it as anything other than a visually arresting pre-school example of 'extra school', and much comic mileage was being made out of its improving tone and overall blandness even before anything of it turned up anywhere, and it's at least smile-occasioning to see it again.


Mister Trimble was another Rainbow rival, and this time one that for many viewers broke even beyond the Humphrey Cushion barrier of half-rememberedness to become little more than a mystifying recollection of a title in a TV Times listing with attached appropriate 'genre icon'. And again, despite being a regular fixture for much of the seventies it's not difficult to see why it retreated so far into the recesses of the collective memory. The bumbling moustachioed one-man-band-esque Dotty Professor-style Trimble - played by drama teacher Tony Boden - lives in a rather untidy-looking flat-above-a-shop-type affair with various puppet associates, notably irritating needy goldfish Glug, and a drama student-ish 'band' who live downstairs and, in this episode, sing an interminable song explaning the premise of the show to the tune of its bland fairgroundy squelchy Moog theme, provided by Library Music legend Alan Hawkshaw. There's also the requisite quota of animated interstitials - and particularly hallucinogenic and troublingly clown-heavy at that - and, of course, filmed inserts featuring well-behaved children wordlessly learning about things. In contrast to Hickory House, there is, if anything, too much going on here - a small army of presenters, puppets and guests, and features, songs and stories that whizz by in a blur, with scarcely any time for the hardly exactly Ibsen-depth characters to establish themselves. It's at moments that this that you realise that, for all its faults and its irritating lol lol lol he said a drugs remember Walls Big Feast ubiquity, Rainbow had a strong and well-defined format, with puppets that could interact with each other conversationally and individual segments presented from different sets, holding the viewer's attention by joining together defined bits and pieces rather than half-heartedly shoving them all together, like Heroes And Villains might have been if Brian Wilson had been less interested in hallucinogens and more into Bungle asking if they could sing that Pray Open Your Umbrella song again. But it's still less dull than some things still to come...


The tale of a Tim Brooke-Taylor voiced goose who used his neck as a bridge in the opening titles or something, Gideon, adapted from the original French cartoon series Gedeon (which was written and directed by the suspiciously named Michel Ocelot), was given its Goodie-retooled makoever for UK viewers by Yorkshire Television in 1979, with the portamento-crazy Korg-derived theme music (noticeably and disconcertingly edited to fit the substantially shorter end credits by somebody who has never heard of 'music') again provided by Alan Hawkshaw. What's surprising about the faded-coloured aqua-marine-themed exploits of the over-chirpy waterfowl and his woodland chums is how downbeat in tone they are; in this particular episode, they come up against a bloodthirsty ferret and a fish-hungry angler, vowing to avenge their ferreted and angled chums by coming up with a plan that, with true military ingenuity, pits the two enemies against each other and results in them sending each other packing in a painful-looking manner. This, disturbingly, is something that Gideon chooses to crow about in his episode-closing singalong recap. Gideon is one of those shows where everything that you'd forgotten about it comes tumbling back the second that you catch a glimpse of the opening frame, but also one that leaves you wondering how you managed to sit through it as a youngster without being overwhelmed by waves of existentialism of such magnitude and ferocity that the average viewer would probably end up listening to Scott 3 for light relief. Less philosophically troublingly, it's also something of a mystery why, given the general theme, they didn't turn to Tim Brooke Taylor's Super Bird Pal fellow Goodie Bill Oddie to do the voiceover honours. In short Gideon is not only one of the more watchable, interesting and stylistically evocative inclusions on Look-Back, it's also one that's haunted esrtwhile viewers' memories and turns out to have good reason to have done so. Which sets the tone... well, not exactly 'nicely'... for the next offering.


So, maybe you think you know your obscurities when it comes to children's TV. Perhaps you've cruised laughing past the assembled hordes of people congratulating themselves for remembering the names of a couple of the mice from Bagpuss, secure in the knowledge that your ability to recall Rubovia in terrifyingly intricate detail will forever win you a seat in the upper echelons of the Remembering Things Senate (Secretary General: Andrew Collins). And then you come across something like The Magic Fountain. Those that do remember this unpromisingly-named animated obscurity usually do so with a shudder more worthy of the clown from Camberwick Green, and once you actually watch it, it's not difficult to see why. The Magic Fountain is ostensibly the Edward Judd-narrated story of a boy on holiday with his parents, only with hefty doses of existential European cinema-style para-reality ennui as he goes though forced jollity holiday mundanity, followed by a procession of encounters with shadowy figures, sinister artefacts and secret passages that lead him - via some burbling post-psychedelic 'underwater' sequences - to what appears to be that skeleton-strewn underground chamber from the last episode of Lost, whereupon he travels back in time to witness an ancient-secret-possessing monk being silenced with a ceremonial dagger. The mystery is on, and it all comes rendered in stylised graphic novel-style animation interspersed with that 'wavy indefinable shape' live action psychedelic business, and snarling Moog drones courtesy of none other than Alan Hawkshaw. Stitch that, 'Bungle'. Quite how something that has more in common with Celine And Julie Go Boating than Gammon And Spinach found its way into a timeslot aimed at television's youngest viewers would be impossible to explain even if there was anything resembling explanation. In short, The Magic Fountain is one of the most interesting inclusions here, and definitely the oddest by some considerable distance.


Another show with 'magic' in the title already? This does not bode well. You'd be forgiven for stopping watching at this point. In fact, you'd be forgiven for ejecting the disc and throwing it in a special lead-lined burning bin. But as anyone who remembers The Magic Ball will be able to tell you - and, surprisingly, that's seemingly not very many more people than remember The Magic Fountain - it's safe to come out from behind that sofa that nobody ever actually hid behind now. Produced by Granada in 1971, animated by a nascent Cosgrove-Hall, and written and narrated by the man behind The Magic Roundabout Eric Thompson, The Magic Ball was still being repeated well into the early eighties, and indeed was later revived in the mid-nineties as an insert in Katie Puckrick's overnight magazine show Pyjama Party, where it was annoyingly billed for no readily obvious reason as 'Sam's Magic Ball', leading to many a furious early hours halls of residence debate. As you may have already worked out, smartly turned-out Sam was indeed the owner of the titular Magic Ball, which he used to transport to locations connected to objects in his Aunt Mil's Mr Benn-style antique shop, where he would encounter Mr Benn-style characters having Mr Benn-style dilemmas and present them with Mr Benn-style solutions. No wonder I once mistakenly claimed it was narrated by Ray Brooks on a certain leading nostalgia website. Though it too has its fair share of wibbling electronic sound effects, The Magic Ball is thankfully about as far removed from The Magic Fountain as it's possible to get, with the distinctively rendered visuals and Thompson's famously dry wit lending it a watchability that eludes many of the other shows presented here. Though definitely not the next one...


Over the course of this look back at Look-Back, you'll doubtless have noticed an unfortunate tendency towards programmes that you remember very fondly actually turning out on a repeat viewing to be as dull as, well, using that gag about looking back at Look-Back for the eight hundred millionth time. This is why it's an absolute joy when you stumble across one that you thought that you hated, but which actually turns out to be very enjoyable indeed. Hazy recollections might well suggest that Topper's Tales involved nothing more than dull static storytelling of a slightly younger sibling vintage, and therby occupying the lowest rung imaginable on the Look-Back target audience's decidedly non-metaphor-friendly ladder (and believe me, when you've got Gammon And Spinach involved, that's a pretty long ladder, non-metaphor-friendly or otherwise), but the reality is a lot more peculiar than that. Apparently based on the pseudo-satirical 'Brownies' stories written and illustrated by Palmer Cox in dawn-of-the-Twentieth-Century America, which you've doubtless all got at home, Topper's Tales was written and narrated by Julian Orchard, a once-ubiquitous but now largely forgotten comic actor whose none-more-esoteric list of credits takes in prominent roles in numerous Carry On Films, Father Came Too!, The Spy With A Cold Nose, Half A Sixpence, Can Heironymous Merkin Ever Forget Mercy Humpe And Find True Happiness?, Futtocks End, The Slipper And The Rose, Adventures Of A Private Eye, The Goodies, Whack-o!, Pickwick and The World Of Beachcomber, and relates the, well, tales of Topper, a sort of monocled pixie/toff hybrid thing, who lives with a small army of identical 'Brownies' and bearded wild west old timer-esque regulation-obsessed prophet of doom 'The Old One', summarily denounced in the opening narration as 'Bo-ring!'. And their collective exploits, it transpires, can only be described as a PG Wodehouse short story rewritten by Thijs Van Leer, with one foot in post-prog Tolkeinist tomfoolery and the other more expensively shoed one in well-appointed Charleston-fuelled whimsy. As we have seen before, a bit of genuine wit goes a long way in these sort of shows, and Topper's Tales succeeds on the sheer audacity of its absurdity, which was probably lost on the majority of its viewers at the time, but which only makes it all the more successful in latterly wrongfooting them. Plus there's a livid green tramline scratch throughout the episode. Rock'n'roll!


Some are commissioned mundane. Others achieve mundanity. Others have mundanity thrust upon them. And then there's Daisy Daisy. Hidden away at the very back of the recollective wardrobe, provoking even in the most hardened of nostalgists nothing more than a faint recollection of a title and a twee rendition of the already distinctly twee theme song, Daisy Daisy was nonetheless a near-permanent fixture in the schedules for many years, so it must have done something really bad to sink this far into obscurity. Or, worse still, done absolutely nothing at all. What you get after the lavishly animated, if bafflingly context-deficient, opening titles is sub-Rainbow - no, make that sub-Hickory House - shenanigans with a recurring Alan Rothwell and a very young Jan Harvey, and Trade Descriptions Act-troubling barely mobile 'puppets' Wriggle (worm) and Splodge (snail), as they learn about something... to do with... tidying up around the house or... something? No, nobody's sure here, either. There is a small amount of tidying-related larking about with those most iconic of late seventies/early eighties children's television break-in-the-middle-of-the-show mainstays (well, most iconic after The Dingbats), Those Puppets On A Black Background, whose appearance in this set is frankly long overdue, but, with the possible exception of Jan's quite alarming trousers, there's absolutely nothing about this that engages with the viewer in the first place, let alone sticks in the memory, so you can understand why, as TV Cream's Phil Norman once postulated, "it should have long since collapsed under the weight of its own inconsequentialness". Nice to see again, for a couple of minutes at least, but that really is about it.


Much like how, in the days before the coming of the age of celebrity, up and coming comedians had to take all kinds of interesting extra-curricular offers of work to make ends meet, the same was also true of name-making actors, even when they already had a hit show or two under their belt. Peter Davison, for example, presented a number of children's shows while he was still just on the verge of the big time, one of which was long running Granada-produced storytelling slot Once Upon A Time; it's also telling that, immediately after leaving Doctor Who, his next bit of television work was the Blue Jam-style gambit of providing the voiceover for decidedly creepy puppet show Fox Tales (thankfully not yet included on any volume of Look-Back). And yes, this is yet another storytelling slot, but it's one with an extremely welcome difference; the storytelling is interspersed with pseudo-academic reference to magnetic shapes on a tree-trunk prop, further post-story Puppets On A Black Background shenanigans - this time involving some doo wop-crazed parrots getting in the way of the presenter's intended good sit down - take up the second half of the show, and above all else there's the hugely enlivening presence of Davison himself. He approaches it with the air of someone who's realised that if he does this and does it well, he can expand his appeal and audience without having to work very hard at doing so at all; this comes across in a genuinely winning and likeable performance, and you do get the impression that he's actually enjoying himself, particularly when larking about with the puppet birds. Like Davison's stint in Doctor Who, this really is a lot better than popular reputation would have you believe, and primarily on account of the man himself. Now where's that Complete Sink Or Swim box set?


It's fair to say that over the course of Look-Back, we've encountered more than a few shows that are here simply because they were there, which ended up becoming the stuff of nostalgia through their militarised regular-as-clockwork scheduling ubiquity rather than because they were actually anything really worth remembering. Once in a while, though, you did get a show that was so outlandish and description-averse that to this day people can still scarcely believe it actually existed, and this Glam Rock-skewed take on The Banana Splits is one that still troubles the collective subconscious and with very good eye-hurting and indeed ear-assaulting reason; although getting the name wrong, as so many are wont to do, is an offence punishable by wheelclamping. The basic premise of Animal Kwackers is that beat combo in huge cartoony animal costumes Bongo (dog, drums), Rory (lion, guitar), Twang (chimp, bass) and Boots (tiger, guitar) arrive in a TV studio from 'Popland' via a flying saucer, sing glammed-up versions of a couple of sixties hits and nursery rhymes - incorporating in this one a blissed-out Vanilla Fudge-style slowing down of Len Barry's 1-2-3 - and tell a far-fetched story about their exploits on 'the road', which thankfully tend to involve more in the way of helping to repair fences than they do dozing on top of runaway amps rolling down a hill, demanding colour co-ordinated bowls of confectionary, or videotaping Belinda Carlisle wanking. This is memory-searingly heralded by a platform boot-stomping call-to-arms imploring "Rory! Rory! Tell us a story! Rory! Rory! Tell it like it is!", which indie kids of a certain vintage will be unable to help but notice bears an uncanny resemblance to the intro of Changes by Sugar. There's little than can be said about Animal Kwackers other than that it's still jaw-droppingly belief-beggaringly mind-hurtingly peculiar for peculiarness' sake, lacking even the modicum of logic and purpose that The Banana Splits had (I did say 'modicum'), and this is all just on the basis of one episode - for a real excursion into the darker corners of Bongo-inspired sensory deprivation hinging on insanity see John Williams' review of the entire series. Ricky Gervais, of course, once opined that Animal Kwackers was the ultimate TV moment 'from hell', making some observations that nobody asked for on the possible motivations of the performers in the costumes. Yeah, whatever you say, Hervaid.


And from the psychotropic to the existential. The slightly-more-animated-than-we've-seen-for-a-while Little Blue is an elephant and, as the Walker Brothers-esque opening song explains at considerable downcast length, he acquired his atypical hue when he broke a fountain pen in the bath, upon which "the ink it squirted in the water - wow!/Mummy's got a blue boy now". And it continues: "They rubbed and scrubbed all night he cried and kicked up a din/the more they tried to wash it out the more it washed in/he cried 'Oh Mummy, now what shall I do?/I'll have to stay a Little Blue'". A mere bit of theme song whimsy to some, it spoke on another level entirely to those who had 'seen' the labels that the modern condition forces on us by default. The low-level psychological effects of his predicament were, you will probably be surprised to hear, actually expanded on within his small-screen adventures. Presumably, the more perplexing question of why and how an anthropomorphic elephant, blue or otherwise, was roaming freely in an otherwise entirely human society was considered a secondary matter. Let's hope they never get Damon Lindelof in to do a 'reboot', then. As hinted above, there's more than a touch of post-The Man Who Fell To Earth examination of the irony of social decay through social improvement in his lugubrious blue-tinged escapades, constantly finding himself an outcast on account of his internal malaise - although, needless to say, his elephantine status is never once remarked upon by his opposable-thumbed contemporaries at the local school - and in this episode he takes off into the cosmos in order to prove a point to a teacher who has grown weary of his astronomical obsessions. Yes, you did read that right. In the space of a mere three shows, we have gone from the laudable face of careerism to consciousness-corroding strangeness to the very depths of the modal jazz-soundtracked soul. Let's face it, then, the last show is bound to be an absolute corker...


Oh. Right you are, then. In lieu of any of the above, here's TV's Music Man Ulf Goran, of bearded incomprehensibly-accented guitar-toting fame, to sing a couple of songs for an audience of two polite, formally dressed and largely silent youngsters. The kindest thing you can say about Music Man is that it's slow. It's very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very slow. To the extent that you start wishing he'd strap a capo onto his fretboard just to add a touch of excitement. This not only makes Animal Kwackers look like The Who Live At Leeds, it makes Daisy Daisy look like Vote, Vote, Vote For Nigel Barton. Rather than ending on a high, Network have chosen to conclude Issue 1 of Look-Back with the archival children's television equivalent of blowing a raspberry, kind of like putting a jokey track at the end of a heavyweight album although sadly Ulf doesn't treat us to his rendition of Chant Of The Ever-Circling Skeletal Family. And, well, that's about it for Look-Back Issue 1, ending not with a bang, nor even a whimper, just some bloke singing about how he "comes from down your way" in a sort of high pitched sub-yodel. Ah well, it's Issue 2 - and drama - next...


Well, there never actually was a second part, but if the response to this one is positive enough, there might well be...

Hidden somewhere deep within a photo album at my parents' house, there's a snap of myself and my siblings on Christmas Day in 1989. In amongst the tableau of hastily unwrapped hair straighteners, Stephen King novels, Neighbours-related board games and boxes of orange Matchmakers, you can just about make out a grinning youngster holding up an 808 State album and sporting the unmistakeable telltale combination of a long-sleeved What The World Is Waiting For t-shirt - note, not a Fool's Gold one - and an overgrown centre parting; the trouser cuffs, sadly, are out of shot, but it's a fair bet that they fitted the stylistic bill too. And you won't win one of the boxes of orange Matchmakers for deducing that it was me.

By that point I had already become a fairly obsessive and evangelical follower of The Stone Roses and indeed pretty much all of the other similarly-minded bands that emerged from Manchester (and, let's be honest about it, a fair few other Northern towns and cities, and even London managed to come up with a couple of decent ones too) around the same time. They weren't in fact the first of the 'Madchester' bands that I'd discovered; that honour went to Happy Mondays, and you can find the tale of my constantly-thwarted efforts to get hold of the 12" of 24 Hour Party People after hearing John Peel play it one evening in Well At Least It's Free. Peel never really played The Stone Roses - as was his idiosyncratic wont, he had cultivated a bizarre dislike of them despite enthusiastically championing dozens of other outfits who sounded similar without being even a tenth as good - so I'd been seeing their name mentioned in increasingly excited terms in the music press for a good while before I actually heard them. But that all changed when I was illictily staying up late one night in January 1989 to watch The Other Side Of Midnight, a regional ITV arts show presented by Tony Wilson, and four moptopped casuals (and their oft-forgotten effect box-operating sidekick) showed up doing a dancey and hypnotic jangly guitar-pop song with mesmeric lyrics to match. It was that immediate. On the basis of one performance of one song, I suddenly had a new favourite band. And not just a favourite band, one that eclipsed anything I'd liked before, from The Smiths and My Bloody Valentine to Bomb The Bass and N.W.A. and, well, even Happy Mondays. It was not unreasonable to say that I was now something of a fan of The Stone Roses.


Within days I'd got hold of their previous single Elephant Stone, closely followed by the imminently-released Made Of Stone, and although I have to confess to feeling a bit ripped off by the backward versions of the a-sides that helped pad out both of those 12"s, the other b-sides were intriguing enough to draw me futher in. Then in July came She Bangs The Drums, featuring two of the best b-sides in the entire history of singles ever, and more pertinently a third on which they finally got the hang of this 'backwards' lark and came up with something that was shimmering and ethereal yet also sonically overwhelming, and better still didn't bear any relation to anything that you'd already forked out for. Well, not at that point anyway. The self-titled debut album, meanwhile, had sneaked out initially unnoticed in early May; as unbelievable as it may seem nowadays, I had some trouble getting hold of it in the week of release, and after being told by at least one high street store that "we don't always stock all the independent records" I eventually managed to find a copy in - appropriately enough, given its fusion of sixties and nineties pyschedelia - the 'New Dance Releases' rack in Penny Lane Records. THAT song from THAT television appearance was there in all of its elongated transcendent glory, and better still also appeared in a superb reworked backwards form (and there were photos of the performance in the sleeve art too), and seemingly every other track was every bit as good, from the nigh-on ten-minute closing number which spiralled out from a dynamic Byrds-go-Motown song that you would not have liked to have been the lyrical target of into an immense early seventies-style stop-start funk workout, to the brief and to-the-point burst of folk song with literal monarchy-targeting lyrics that seemed genuinely shocking at the time. Yes, even to someone who had been playing Fuck Tha Police on a loop for months on end. Cultural differences are a foreign country.

Bob Stanley's Melody Maker review of The Stone Roses famously concluded "this is simply the best debut LP I've heard in my record buying lifetime; forget everybody else, forget work tomorrow", and for me and countless others like me, the effect was similarly immediate. Here was a band that seemed destined to change all the rules without following anyone else's, for whom great things seemed ahead both artistically and commercially, and whose surly dismissals of the idea of being in competition with anyone from The Rolling Stones downwards seemed more a statement of fact than arrogance. This was a feeling that was only compounded with the release late in the year of the swaggering folky groove of What The World Is Waiting For, and its initially ignored double a-side Fool's Gold, a no-holds-barred dive into the cutting edge world of samples, loops and breakbeats. No matter how many times the word 'down' might have been repeated in the second verse, there was no keeping Fool's Gold down and the single was quickly flipped, leading to the celebrated same-edition Top Of The Pops debuts of The Stone Roses and Happy Mondays just as the eighties receded from view. We were, as that song that they had started doing live but hadn't released yet had it, on the verge of something shining. And coming throu-oo-ou-ah-ou-ah-oo-wa-ough.


As 1990 dawned, The Stone Roses were everywhere. There were the chart-hogging reissues of earlier singles, the innovative-for-the-time one-off outdoor shows in unlikely locations - most infamously North West industrial park Spike Island - the splendiferous top five single One Love, and the cover of every magazine from Sky to Smash Hits. And then... nothing. Alerted by a shrewd advisor to a ropey clause in an early contract, they entered into litigation that was supposed to free them up to take on the world, but instead dragged everything into a whirlpool of appeals and counter-appeals, with the band left unable to record or even visibly write anything new for fear that they might have to forfeit material if matters didn't go their way. And somehow, this just added to the momentum, with credible rumours circulating that they were quietly planning the album that would wipe the floor with the pop, rock and dance establishment in one fell swoop, and palpable excitement when an impatient NME journalist tracked them down to a rehearsal room and was politely ejected with a handful of trademark Ian Brown zen mutterings before they had a chance to hear a single note of new music. Four long years later, the legal coast was finally clear and... well, this article isn't about that. Nor about the bands that I got into while waiting for The Stone Roses to reappear (although you can find a whole book by me about that here). It's about something else that Happened Next.

It was around this time that I started to get the first stirrings of a nasty feeling that my past was being sold back to me. By early 1994, I was at University and the Student Union astutely put on a couple of 'Madchester' revival nights, drawing in a surprisingly large crowd who were as pleased to hear New FADS as they were The Stone Roses, Happy Mondays or Inspiral Carpets. Then they put one on later in the year, following the rise of Oasis, and it all seemed to have changed; 'mad fer it' types vacated the dancefloor at the first bars of Shall We Take A Trip?, Can You Dig It? and All On You (Perfume), besieged the DJs with requests for 'anything by Oasis', and took to greeting any Stone Roses number with whoops, cheers, football-style group hugs, and embarrassing displays of bottle-in-hand Liam Gallagher-aping dancing. That's where it started, and it's got worse from there.


You might be surprised at this point to discover that this is one of the few things in the entire history of the universe that I'm not about to blame on Oasis. In fairness to Noel Gallagher, he only ever really posited The Stone Roses as one of a wide number of influences, and even then spoke more of drawing inspiration from their attitude and appearance than from their music (a point that The Stone Roses' own Gary Mounfield seemed to agree on when he launched into a fairly voluble rejoinder to a clueless 6Music presenter's offhanded comment that Oasis had 'carried on where The Stone Roses left off', stating with audible irritation that he felt the 'arty, intelligent' Blur who had, crucially, 'heard Wire and Syd Barrett' had more in common with his former outfit). Oasis were many things but they were not Stone Roses copyists either musically or image-wise; they simply had the misfortune to play into the hands of tedious rock journalists and broadcasters furrowing their brows over where those troublesome 'Madchester' characters fitted into their easily-defined off-the-peg History Of Rock where everything started with Love Me Do, and a financially battered former record label keen to make as much money as they could out of their departed signings' comparatively small back catalogue.

Suddenly, after being ignored and even derided as a curious relic from a bygone age, The Stone Roses were apparently 'Classic Rock' through and through. Those misfiring rip-off backwards b-sides were reclaimed as 'genius' via swathes of floridly-written gibberish. Silly opinions were vouchsafed about the comparative lack of worth of the likes of The Mock Turtles, The Paris Angels and Candy Flip, for whom, according to the 'Pocket Essential Guide' to 'The Madchester Scene', "a seventh level of imitation Madchester hell" was apparently waiting; this might have come as something of a surprise to anyone who bought and liked Strawberry Fields Forever. Suspicious accounts were given of the Spike Island concert as some kind of harmonious pilgrimage to a utopian musical bliss, without a single mention of the smell, the dodgy sound system, the deep techno warmup acts, or the gangs of ne'er-do-wells who clearly weren't there for the music (and, conversely, referring to the venue as a 'derelict wasteland' when it had actually been reclaimed as a 'green space' several years previously), almost as though they might not actually have been there. Most infuriatingly of all, it somehow became acceptable to refer to 'She Bangs The Drum'. Singular. By the sort of people who would fly off the handle if anyone put a 'The' in front of 'Pixies'.

Meanwhile, although Silvertone's determination to exploit every last scrap of Stone Roses material that they happened to have lying around actually started as a good thing - fans desperate for new material were more than rewarded with the studio version of Where Angels Play and the Adrian Sherwood take on One Love, while singles and rarities compilation Turns Into Stone can in retrospect be viewed as the second album that should have been - matters rapidly went downhill, from Blackpool Live hardly exactly capturing what was great about the band, through the just about doing-what-it-says-on-the-tin The Complete Stone Roses, down past the endless and barely distinguishable remixes of Fool's Gold and increasingly contrived repackagings of the album, and reaching a wince-inducing nadir with The Remixes, a whole album's worth of modern-day overhauls nobody asked for.


Eventually, the two dovetailed in time for - you guessed it - the twentieth anniversary of the album's release, prompting a flurry of toturous music press waffle (though, admirably, almost blanket silence from the band themselves), and a paving slab-sized ludicrously-priced anniversary box set that would have had those 1989 record store employees guffawing in disbelief, and which provoked me into penning the following snarky outburst for my then-current blog:

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"The Stone Roses 20th Anniversary Box Set: What You Get For Your £873.54

- The Stone Roses and Turns Into Stone for at least the fifteenth time, as if there isn't a single person in the world who doesn't already own both of them eighteen million times over

- Blackpool Live for at least the fifteenth time, as if there is a single person in the world who ever wanted to willingly own it in the first place

- lyric booklet with lots of extraneous commas

- exclusive John Squire art print of something

- USB memory stick containing rare photos (like that one of them all crouching on a rooftop), rare videos (only ever previously available on the five hundred different Stone Roses videos and DVDs), rare screensavers, rare wallpapers, and a rare documentary featuring two hours' worth of some 'Madchester veteran' music journalist you've never bloody heard of, but absolutely no contributions whatsoever from the band themselves

- £50 to buy the 2-Disc version of The Complete Stone Roses, featuring several tracks inexplicably omitted from this box set, from some greedy fucker on Amazon Marketplace

- Why The Roses Were Top, Man!: an exclusive memoir by That Fat Bloke Doing An Air-Punching Dance To Waterfall In Every Indie Disco In the World

- Somewhere Soon by The High

- free 'Space Spinner'

- full colour poster of Gonch, Robbie and 'Trew'

- the baffled disdain of anyone who bought the album in 1989 after being told by two major high street stores that "we don't always stock all of the independent albums" and loved it and played it until the tape literally fell apart and they had to buy another eighteen months later and who got caught up in the excitement of this arty, intelligent band (where's all this nonsense about them being 'lads' come from?) threatening to smash into the upper echelons of chart stardom and dethrone the mainstream megastars and ultimately failing but spectactularly so and in any case they paved the way for Britpop to make that a reality five years later and who can't help but feel ever so slightly cheated by the 'Classic Rock Radio' fodder and mediocre student t-shirt industry they've since become courtesy of people who weren't even born in 1989 but have still come up with this make believe scenario in which everything changed forever when the entire world went Stone Roses crazy as opposed to just a few of the hipper types in school and some students you knew while everyone else was too busy listening to The Chimes and saying "these bands you like, how come I've never heard of them in the charts?" because it wasn't all Madchester in 1989 you know there was The Sundays and The Heartthrobs and the collapse of the Eastern Bloc and Emma Thompson's awful sketch show these youngsters today they don't know they're born and I'll tell you what I bet they never snogged Alison Lee either etc etc..."

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Ahead would come that dismal Spike Island film and Shane Meadows' muddly documentary, and, basically, that's how we've got from someone discovering The Stone Roses by seeing them do Waterfall on a small-hours regional-only TV show in 1989 to Bradley Wiggins claiming that he discovered them by seeing them do Don't Stop on a children's TV show after coming home from school in 1991, and nobody batting an eyelid.

Doubtless by the time that you've read this far, there'll already be someone on Twitter scoffing "heff peff have you ever met mr pot mr kettle?????". And yes, back in 1989 - at least in terms of my interest in sixties music, archive TV etc - I almost certainly was guilty as charged. But, crucially, it was precisely this moving of the Stone Roses-related goalposts that taught me never to accept notions of 'The Past' on face value and to always go back and look at things in a wider cultural and technological context, to think about the mechanics of their production, and to get a first hand impression of how they were genuinely recieved at the time. And that, ladies and gentlemen, is how you end up on a national news broadcast with a big caption saying 'CLANGERS EXPERT'.

Anyway, I can't tell you how many times I listened to the 12" of Fool's Gold over that Christmas. But I also can't tell you how many times around the same time I listened to The Madchester Rave On EP, The Island Head EP, Boing!, Nowhere, Quality Street, Two Sides, A Life With Brian, Madstock, Leisure, Pigeonhole, Sundew, Some Friendly, Ninety, Native Place or Chicken Rhythms. Oh alright, I can tell you that one. Once.