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...

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...

Yes, it's ITV's 60th Birthday - and to celebrate, we're actually going to be nice about them for once!

No, really - to mark this momentous milestone in the broadcasting history of the makers of TV's Hey, It's My Birthday Too!, it's time to take a look through the archives (though not the TVS archive, thanks to the machinations of That Bastard Mouse) and highlight a couple of past posts about all things ITV. Including...


A detailed - and opinionated - look back at some of ITV's lunchtime children's shows...




The sorry tale of ITV's attempt at remaking a hit American sitcom for UK audiences...






A gallery of peculiar images used to promote whatever might have been coming up 'after the break'...





The weird and Matthew Kelly-heavy world of Children's ITV continuity....





A salute to ITV's not-much-missed me-too Ceefax copyist Oracle...






IDENEANATASF!!...







...and an in-depth look at the sitcom they're still too chicken to show, Hardwicke House!










And that's not all! If you're so inclined, you can get venerated old-skool ITV sci-fi shows Sapphire & Steel and Children Of The Stones on DVD with books about the shows by me included, and find some hefty features on the more neglected corners of ITV's archives (including the likes of The Secret Service, The Tyrant King and, erm, Bognor) in my books Well At Least It's Free and Not On Your Telly.


And now, here's a couple of my favourite clippings from TV Times...

Those of you who've been following my ramblings for a while might just have noticed that I have a slight tendency to occasionally tie in musings and theorising on sociocultural phenomena with BBC Test Card F, the bastard creepy photo of a sinisterly-smiling girl locked in an interminably paused game of chalkboard noughts and crosses with a nightmarish multicoloured clown in the middle of a mish-mash of hazardous-looking tuning grids. Some of you may also be aware that I'm something of an admirer of sixties pop trailblazer Jimi Hendrix, at least in his Experience era, and indeed once became drawn into a RHLSTP (RHLSTP!)-bookending Twitter discussion with Richard Herring about which Rodney Bewes sitcom themes Hendrix might realistically have added some guitar work to.

As such, if you're at all clued up about either subject, you're probably now expecting this article to be a detailed examination of the well-known story that Hendrix wrote The Wind Cries Mary while waiting, in front of the TV with guitar in hand, for his then-girlfriend (and journalist, which rarely gets mentioned) Kathy Etchingham to come home following an argument, drawing unlikely inspiration for the opening line "and the clowns have all gone to bed" as Carole Hersee and her garish combatant stared menacingly out towards him to the sound of tuneless big band babble at the end of an evening's viewing. Well, yes, it's a great story, and one that I'll freely admit - on account of having heard Kathy recount it herself in person - that I've repeated as fact before now. But there's also a bit of a problem with it.


As far as anyone can properly ascertain (and no, this is not a green light for ident obsessives to harangue me with herning demands to rewrite the piece to their own speficiations), Test Card F was first transmitted by BBC2 on 2nd July 1967, while The Wind Cries Mary had been released as a single on 5th May 1967. And, more problematically still, had been recorded on at De Lane Lea studios on 11th January 1967, famously put together on the spot after Hendrix turned up with a new song when The Experience had nominally convened to put Purple Haze down on tape. Even allowing for all for all that slowed-down spaceman-voiced blabbering about bending the rules of space and time on Third Stone From The Sun, could Jimi Hendrix really have foreseen the future of broadcast continuity with such uncanny accuracy? Well no, he couldn't. But my contention here is that the story is more or less true, only slightly distorted by the passage of time, the vagaries of popular culture, and, well, Love Or Confusion, and that Kathy Etchingham was simply getting her TV Clowns wrong.

Let's consider a few suitably hazy, if not purply, variables here - putting it as delicately as possible, it doesn't exactly sound like this was the only row the couple had, and it's easy for emotionally-charged details to become conflated and confused; there's nothing - especially given the sheer amount of times that the Test Card in whatever alphabetical incarnation would have been seen in a single twenty four hour stretch in the days of daytime and overnight closedowns - to suggest what time of day the storming out, the waiting and the songwriting took place; all we know for definite is that Hendrix turned up to the studio with the song completed, and while it's tempting from a narrative point of view to suggest that he'd written it the night before, in all likelihood it probably took a couple of days to assemble; and noughts-wielder Bubbles was far from the only clown hovering silently around the nation's television sets around that time. Yes, in case you hadn't worked it out already, it's my contention that Jimi Hendrix had actually been watching Camberwick Green.


Not convinced? Or simply rolling your eyes in exasperated amusement at my shoehorning in of yet another of my popular cultural touchstones? Well, let's crunch a few numbers. Peter The Postman, the first episode of Camberwick Green (which you can read a lot more about here), was repeated by BBC1 - its fourth showing in twelve months - at 1.30pm on 6th January 1967. The full opening lyric of The Wind Cries Mary is of course "after all the jacks are in their boxes, and the clowns have all gone to bed", and as Camberwick Green infamously ended with the episode's central character rotating away into a Music Box, followed by a terrifying glowering clown operating a roller caption with the show's end credits on them (and, perhaps not coincidentally, all of it accompanied by some natty and inadvertently UK Psych-friendly guitar work from Freddie Phillips), it doesn't take much in the way of imagination-stretching to see that this is a much better fit than Test Card F would have been even if it was a chronological possibility. It's also worth noting that Tuesday 10th January saw the first showing of Miss Lovelace And The Mayor's Hat, the second episode of Camberwick Green's near-neighbouring follow-on companion show Trumpton, which depicted lugubrious Park-Keeper Mr. Craddock and his broom indulging in what can only be described as a spot of "drearily sweeping", though he was noticeably less concerned with the broken pieces of yesterday's life than he was with silver paper, toffee paper, dirty bit of cardboard, chair ticket, bus ticket, button from a dress, chocolate wrapper, envelope, another bit of cardboard, and the vexing question of why 'they' can't use litter bins and not make such a mess. Though, that said, he does immediately go into a rant about a broken bench (which ultimately leads to the Mayor's hat being propelled into a tree, but that's another story). It's not beyond the realms of possibility that the only-recently-arrived-in-the-UK guitarist might have been sufficiently intrigued by his new TV puppet pals to follow their exploits regularly, and that this might also have worked its tenuous way into his new lyrics. Though admittedly any attempt to claim that the solo from The Wind Cries Mary was in any way inspired by the 'Joe So Sad' music from Monday 10th's instalment of the racy urban Hammond-scorch-soundtracked escapades of juvenile petrolhead upstart Joe would most likely be a theoretical leap too far.

So, much like my suggestion to Richard Herring that Rodney Bewes' confused anecdote about singing with Hendrix might have actually related to the theme from Dear Mother Love Albert, there you have it. The Wind Cries Mary probably was inspired by a stray bit of emotional ennui-driven TV-gawpage after all, just not in the way that everyone thought it was. And conspiracy theorists may like to take note that this is the third song, after Happy Time by Tim Buckley and The Gnome by Pink Floyd, that I've directly attributed to the influence of the closing sequence of Camberwick Green. Can I possibly extend this seemingly ridiculous notion any further? Pass me that copy of AMMmusic1966...

Just a quick note to say that I'll be on Music Mill FM at around 9pm tonight talking about BBC-To-ITV defections and vice versa in the wake of Robert Peston's recent ship-jumping whilst cunningly disguised as a member of Menswe@r. Expect plenty of natter about Russ Abbot, Morecambe And Wise, Roland Rat, The Goodies, Up The Garden Path, Bruce Forsyth and many others. Including, inevitably, Parky...

...and if you missed it, you can download it from here!

You can't move for tenuous Doctor Who'anniversaries' nowadays, but what happened on that very first one way back in November 1963? Did anything even happen at all? Would the BBC have noticed, or even cared, that what was in many ways just another show had notched up a less-than-dazzling twelve months on air?

Well, as you've probably worked out by now, I've been trying to find this out, and you can now read the results of this recorded-as-live black and white quest in One Glorious Year, a special mini-magazine available as part of a special one-off revival of Faze, John Connors' offbeat and influential nineties Doctor Who fanzine. Why was Jason The Cat excused from sending Verity Lambert a congratulatory telegram? How are Marvin Gaye, some photos of Lulu, and a Beatles song that hadn't even been recorded yet involved in all this? Who were 'Peter And The Headlines'? And why was William Hartnell plying a young blonde lady with booze? Find out all of this, and more (including which Light Programme jazz concert I'm now looking for an off-air of) in One Glorious Year!

Faze is available as a free eBook or a limited edition print version (which really does look rather splendid), and you can find out more about how to get hold of it by clicking here. 'Time out for comedy!'.


You can find tons more about the early years of Doctor Who in my book Well At Least It's Free.

Let's Go Round Again - The Story Of The Magic Roundabout is on BBC Radio 4 at 4pm on Monday 12th October. I've contributed to this as a researcher and interviewee, and knowing a bit about the show's contents, the standard of the contributors and the efforts of ace producer Elizabeth Foster, I'm pleased to say that this will be really rather good indeed, and certainly a cut above the usual level of archive TV documentary. For starters, I'll be talking about the real reason why Eric Thompson wrote his own original scripts for the show, the forgotten other theme tune, and why I think the Nigel Planer version is better than anyone gives it credit for. But you can judge all that for yourselves...

The official programme page is here (and you can Listen Again now), and keep an eye out on here for a couple of special tie-in features on The Magic Roundabout this week, including some rare bits and pieces from the archives and a couple of brand new ones...

To tie in with Let's Go Round Again - The Story Of The Magic Roundabout (which you can find out more about here), here's a feature on Dougal And The Blue Cat that originally appeared in issue fourteen of my Cult TV/Music/Films fanzine Paintbox back in 1998. Click, as ever, to enlarge...


If you enjoyed that, you can find more details of a book collecting highlights from Paintboxhere.

This is the first of three The Magic Roundabout-covering extracts from Here Is A Box, an unfinished attempt at a full-length book taking a bizarre Zen And The Art Of Motorcycle Maintenance-style free-form look at the 1976 album Music From BBC Children's Programmes. You can find what was written of Here Is A Box, alongside a whopping great load of other incomplete and unpublished bits and pieces, in my eventual bumper-sized bits and pieces book Super Expanded Deluxe Edition. And you can still hear Let's Go Round Again - The Story Of The Magic Roundabouthere.


This Drum And Fife mystery* clearly isn't going to get resolved any time soon, which is all the more unfortunate for anyone who was hoping to eventually find an answer here, as we're not going to be spending any more time than we have to on Blue Peter. Instead, it's time to move on to track four of Music From BBC Children's Programmes, and a show that is probably going to end up being discussed in such depth and from so many different angles that it'll leave you feeling like the coverage of John Noakes and company was almost insultingly fleeting.

It's been a bit of a journey of musical mixed fortunes through Music From BBC Children's Programmes thus far, remaining resolutely rooted in the shallow end of the hoped-for psychedelic blast of retro-iconographic pre-school far-outness, with only the Play Away team and their bubblegum pop funkateering really coming up with the hypothetical goods. Throughout all of this, you may just have ever so slightly noticed, there have been constant and hopeful references to various other shows, and one in particular, that would more closely fit the hypothetical bill and blast all thoughts of that jolly stylised sailing ship out of the water in a shockwave of primarily-coloured stop-motion puppetry and badly aligned end credit slides. But as Barnaby has yet to put in an appearance (his true followers still believe he will make himself manifest and wreak havoc with the forces of creation, though they've probably been taking the opening titles of Once Upon A Time... Man a little too literally), it's time to turn instead to the show that played Chemical World to his For Tomorrow.

You may remember, if you've a long memory and infinite patience for wading through base insults directed at Blue Peter, that a couple of chapters back mention was made of an ancient BBC continuity slide, with much cheerleading in the general direction of its left hand side. If you're somewhat slightly baffled by the idea of someone supporting the left hand side and left hand side only of a continuity slide, then you'll have to go back and read the chapter in question (it's called Bleu, Bleu, L'amour Est Bleu (Surtout En Regardent Pierre Bleu) and is a couple of continuity-slide-counteracting pages back from this, probably), but suffice it to say that it was something to do with the fact that all of the Children's BBC character iconography most in tune with our purported cause were to be found on the left (yes, alright, this isn't Robin Carmody's Got Talent, you know). One of these was a certain moustachioed jack-in-a-box on a spring, and thankfully there's no need to refer to a thirty-years-plus-out-of-date schedule that's probably tainted by We Are The Champions anyway (and, come to think of it, has nothing to do with the tracklisting of Music From BBC Children's Programmes, so it wouldn't be any use anyway) to find out that, coming up next, it's The Magic Roundabout.

The Magic Roundabout, as doubtless most people reading this were aware already, began in France in 1963, where it was known as Le Manège Enchanté. However, when the BBC bought the series for transmission in 1965, they decided not to go for direct translations of the original scripts (which had a more simplistic and educational quality that was sort of lost in, um, translation), and instead roped in Play School presenter, absurdist, jazz enthusiast and all round Father Of Emma Eric Thompson to make up his own storylines and characters based on what he thought was happening onscreen. The result was a surreal and dryly humorous exercise in Zen-based storytelling set to distinctively offbeat visuals, which remained lodged in a pre-news slot at the tail-end of the BBC's children's schedules right up to the end of the seventies, and infamously found as much favour with adult viewers as it did with its target audience; sometimes with good reason, sometimes with decidedly less than good reason, but we'll get round to all that in due course. More to the point it was, in its own unselfconscious way, about as psychedelic as the BBC's children's programming ever got (discounting Zokko! as a 'bad trip'), though again this was much misunderstood and again we'll be coming back to that in due course.

For the moment, all you need to know is that The Magic Roundabout was, give or take the occasional power struggle with the more anarcho-radicalist Barnaby and the odd bit of Mr. Benn, the high watermark of exactly the sort of subcultural mindset that I was hoping to unlock within Music From BBC Children's Programmes' grooves. And its theme music was up next.


*A debate over the correct title of the closing music from Blue Peter, kickstarted by TV Cream's Steve Berry. You can find the full rumination in Super Expanded Deluxe Edition.

A second extract from Here Is A Box, this time looking at a spate of rave records inspired by or indeed directly samplingThe Magic Roundabout. It must have been something in the water. As indeed must have been whatever inspired me to embark on the whole Here Is A Box project in the first place. At the time, much like Richard Herring's Me1 vs Me2 snooker, I was convinced that it was the best thing that I had ever done, high on the free-form time-travel mind-expansion and revelling in the absurd running gags that kept forming of their own accord. But also like Richard Herring's Me1 vs Me Snooker, it found a small hardcore of devoted fans and a larger number of bewildered detractors, one of whom described it as a 'breakdown'. However I didn't quite feel the need to go on Twitter sobbing about 'haterz' as a consequence. Anyway, I'm still very fond of it (and may even revisit the format at some point), and if you want to read more you can find the full(ish) thing in Super Expanded Deluxe Edition. And you can still hear Let's Go Round Again - The Story Of The Magic Roundabouthere.


Let's get the tedious bit out of the way, then. The Magic Roundabout, so conventional 'wisdom' has it, was at best the acid-frazzled creation of someone who had imbibed far too many hallucinogens and 'seen' the hat-sporting pink cows lurking on the periphery of human sensory awareness, and at worst crafty pro-drug propaganda for the under-fives with Dougal cast as a sugarcube-scoffing acid visionary, Dylan as a weed-smoking layabout, Mr Rusty as a cart-toting pusher in the mould of Bubbles from The Wire, the Roundabout itself as a giant mushroom, and Ermintrude/Brian/Zebedee/The Train/Delete Where Ohhangonaminute somehow representing 'speed', however that works exactly. And if you play the theme music backwards, it says DINNERS' HAS BEEN DEAD FOR AGES HONESTLY. Notice how this perfect fit analysis invariably omits Mr McHenry, Florence, Paul, Basil and Rosalie, not to mention Penelope The Spider and Tweet & Tweet Tweet.

Notice also, more importantly, that there is absolutely no truth in this nonsense whatsoever, and no amount of nudging and winking from third-rate standups nor indeed bare-faced insistence from 'talking heads' on clip shows (both of which, funnily enough, our old pal Ricky Hervaid is guilty of) will ever make it so. If you were alighting on these pages hoping for some zany lolz about how they must all have been on those crazy drugs!1, then please go elsewhere and take that bloody Half Man Half Biscuit song with you. Anyway, we've already sort of been through this once with all that stuff about Jonathan Cohen playing Don't Fight It Feel It on the Bontempi organ or whatever it was*. And now, you'll doubtless be delighted to hear, that's the tedious bit out of the way. The bit about Bubbles was quite good though.

Meanwhile, what all this sub-Slater From Dazed & Confused rumourmongering annoyingly obscures is that, well, there's no getting away from the fact that The Magic Roundabout really did chime with the times. Like all of the best 'accidental psychedelia', from Colour My World by Petula Clark and The Great Jelly Of London to The BBC Schools Diamond and Bedazzled, it was made in all 'straight'-ness but still allowed itself to be influenced by the fashion, design and style of the day, and as such ended up more effective in its kaleidoscopic otherworldliness than many more humourless and contrived attemps at 'being psychedelic'; this was even more true of the Thompson-reworked version, which was far from averse to throwing in chortling references to countercultural totems. And it had across-the-board appeal too, drawing in as many appreciative adult viewers who understood the idiosyncracies of Thompson's wit as target audience members fresh from taking their Pelham Puppets Dougal for a 'walk'.

More to the point, it found itself unexpectedly chiming with the times in the early nineties too. Not only were Channel 4 screening some previously unseen episodes with writing and narrating dutes taken on by Nigel Planer (who also produced a bonkers spoof Dispatches-style documentary ridiculing the more outlandish theories that have grown up around the show), but it had also been adopted on a more iconographic face value by the post-Acid House 'rave' generation (who, let's face it, were so blatant in their 'E'-centric hallucinogen propaganda that they didn't need to look for any 'hidden' messages anywhere else), not just as fashion-appropriate t-shirt fodder but also in musical terms, with no less than three superb examples of neo-psychedelia - Too Much Fun by The Chillin' Krew, Summers Magic by Mark Summers, and Everlasting Day by, erm, Magik Roundabout (who also apparently did a cover of The Porpoise Song that nobody seems to have heard) - either making lyrical references to or sampling the theme music of The Magic Roundabout.

But could it chime with the times a third time? Was that all-too-familiar eighteen-note refrain what was needed to forge a psychotropic pathway to Cheggers Plays Zen and obliterate all memory of bloody Barnacle Bill**...? Get cranking that handle, Pere Pivoine...


*A back-reference to a previous section covering Play Away and drawing ludicrous parallels with Screamdelica. In a chapter titled, erm, Captain Kipper's Clipper (Hypnotone Brain Machine Mix).
**That Man Steve Berry and his throwdown challenge to widely-accepted sea-shanty titlings again...

The third and final extract from the section of Here Is A Box looking at The Magic Roundabout - after this it went into an equally strange diversion about hip-hop turntablists extending the 'breaks' in the Chigley theme - and this time covering some of the theme music-related areas that I touched on in Let's Go Round Again (which you can still hear here). The full madness of Here Is A Box can be found in Super Expanded Deluxe Edition.


If you've ever heard the original French theme music from The Magic Roundabout, or rather Le Manège Enchanté (which, as we've already heard, and will soon hear again, is more or less the same thing but with some subtle yet significant differences), you'll know that, much like the show itself, it's broadly similar to the version you're familiar with, but at the same time subtly yet significantly different. It's built around the same chords and melody but is performed at a much slower pace, and is bolstered by some very sixties organ work and an arrangement not unlike that of a Francoise Hardy record. At one point it even had lyrics, sung as a duet between Margote and Pere Pivoine (or Florence and Mr. Rusty in 'old money'), which basically just do little apart from describe how a roundabout habitually turns round but at least sound nice and exotic in the original French. Later on, for some reason, the producers saw fit to replace it with Pollux (or 'Dougal' in old money) singing a bland song with a peg on his nose about how he was "friend of all adults and children", apparently, and which sounds about as far removed from a Françoise Hardy record as you're liable to get. Even if she was to stick a peg on her nose.

Over here on the BBC, the earliest Eric Thompson-redubbed instalments did indeed use an instrumental version of the original theme, but eschewed the delights of hastily penning some mechanic rotation-centric lyrics for Sandie Shaw (though someone at EMI's cheapo imprint Music For Pleasure later did write some, albeit not for Sandie Shaw, and yes they're every bit as unimaginative as you're probably imagining, but that's another story), in favour of swapping it for a manically sped-up reworking that sounded like it was being played on a steam-driven barrel organ held together with springs and on the verge of exploding; the only resemblance this would bear to a Françoise Hardy record would be if you were to play one at 16rpm while throwing your record player down the stairs.

This would stay in place for the entirety of its run (and indeed for the later Nigel Planer-dubbed Channel 4 remounting, albeit horribly compressed and with some nasty synth bass added, but that's another story... and one that we won't even be going near frankly), and that was pretty much it as far as music for The Magic Roundabout (as opposed to Le Manège Enchanté) went. While the original versions featured dozens of admittedly rather inconsequential songs, as evidenced by those featured in the big-screen spinoff Dougal And The Blue Cat (where they came accompanied by all manner of choreographed hoo-hah so there was pretty much no option but to leave them in place), Thompson preferred to leave the 'clean' instrumentals on the undubbed film prints simply as vocal-free backing music, and get on with the more serious business of wisecracking about mouthy plants forming unions. Though he did once see fit to incorporate a self-recorded approximation of Dylan and Brian jamming an instrumental cover of Rainy Day Women #12 & 35. No, really.

How and why said worryingly haphazard 'everybody take cover!!' arrangement came to be used for the BBC redubs in place of the original themes, and indeed from whence it came in the first place, are questions to which there seems to be no straightforward answer. There's not even an easily identifiable artist credit, more a logic bomb-esque confusion of series creators and music publishers and what appears to be some initials too, so it's not so much a research dead-end as something that gives you a headache just by looking at it. But used it was, at the start and end (and sometimes in the middle) of close to four hundred editions of The Magic Roundabout, so small wonder that it's come to be so firmly embedded in the national subconscious, and indeed so powerfully evocative of a surreal pyschedelic mindset that all of those tedious rumours about it being 'about drugs' could only hope to even begin to hint at.

And here it was, at the start of the fourth track of Music From BBC Children's Programmes, poised ready to evoke that selfsame surreal psychedelic mindset without the aid of psychotropic substances or a peg on Mireille Mathieu's nose (or Marianne Faithfull in 'old money'). But would it work? And, more to the point, what made up the remainder of that fourth track?

In case you hadn't worked out from the sheer deluge of people changing their Twitter names to 'scary' variants back in late August whilst simultaneously moaning about everyone mentioning Christmas too early, it's nearly Halloween! So to mark the occasion, we've got a handful of nobody standups to do 'shocked' faces at an old Ghosts, Monsters And Legends from The Wide Awake Club.

Or, just possibly, we might have abandoned that idea in favour of a brand new two-part special of Why Won't You?, the podcast in which myself, Ben Baker and Phil Catterall take a look at some of the things that you can do with your spare time but probably won't. And as it's Halloween, the traditional time for watching spook-free modern horror films and dressing up as 'sexy' versions of characters from dull 'zoo vet'-based eighties dramas or something, we're going to to be counting down the 25 Most Scary Things That Weren't Meant To Be Scary.

Yes, there'll be no Ghostwatch, no Threads, no Alien, no Misty comic, no Public Information Films, no Stephen King, no The Usborne Book Of Ghosts, and definitely no Night Of The Sea Gulls. What there will be includes mime artists, weird pop songs, authoritarian logos, misunderstood film premises, stolen milk, a small army of puppets, and quite possibly a deep south ne'er-do-well jumping off the Tallahatchie Bridge.

Who would 'win' out of a snogging French couple and the Vitruvian Man? What's Helen Reddy's favourite Video Nasty? And why are all the scariest punks walking two dogs on a lead? Find out all of this and more in Part Onehere!

Part Two will follow on Friday... and here it is!

Let's face it, pretty much everyone in the known universe is doing their own heavily annotated from-the-start Doctor Who rewatch nowadays. And probably everyone in E-Space too.

And yes, as you've probably already worked out for yourselves, I've also started doing a from-the-start Doctor Who rewatch, only without the annotation-heavy element. There are, let's be honest about this, so many episode-by-episode story-by-story series-by-series in-depth reviews-slash-commentaries going on right now that if I launched one of my own it would basically have ended up playing Bonekickers to The Wife In Space's, well, Doctor Who. Which is why I had actually embarked on this epic DVD Player-hogging Bellal-heavy bonanza for no other reason than sheer personal entertainment, with the idea of taking my own critical stroll through the adventures of Hartnell and company and beyond seeming so obvious and indeed pointless an exercise that it didn't even occur to me as I sat down to watch that Kenneth Williams-esque extra pull a sarky camp face at a teen mag at the start of An Unearthly Child for something approaching the fifty three billionth time.

Anyway, that was the plan - effectively not to even have a plan beyond watching and enjoying old episodes of Doctor Who, and just plain watching The Armageddon Factor. While I was watching and enjoying, though, thoughts, opinions, observations and jokes kept inevitably occurring to me, and I ended up sharing a few of them on Twitter. People seemed to quite like these, and a couple of them suggested that I really ought to be doing this as a series of articles. And so, erm, here we are.

Like Sidney Newman and his disdain for 'B.E.M.'s, though, or indeed like Head of Drama Shaun Sutton demanding a cheaper approach, we need to establish a couple of ground rules first. As a bit of a break from the norm, and in the hope of coming up with something individual enough to make it halfway worthwhile, there'll be no narrative, no through-story, and no attempt a coherent episode-by-episode recycled-flying-insect-effect-by-recycled-flying-insect-effect critical analysis. Instead, it's just going to be a series of observations that occurred to me while watching. It's still going to be series by series though, because, well, you still have to have some kind of structure. Secondly, in the case of missing episodes, I'll be listening to the commercially-released audio recordings rather than watching any reconstructions or what have you - it's actually in some ways the most reliably closest thing we have to what viewers would actually have seen on various relevant Saturdays between 1964 and 1969, it's only right that there should be some hat-tippage towards the people who put so much effort into making these recordings available at a time when that was literally all that was left of the wiped material, and above all else I'm not playing Philip Morris' increasingly tedious game. Of course, there are a couple of officially released reconstructions which throw this 'rule' slightly off target, but we'll cross that bridge as and when. Finally, where relevant, I'll be covering a couple of extra-curricular projects which, in accordance with my self-defined rules and regulations which we won't be going into here, I consider to be more or less 'canon'. Yes, they are. Or rather they will be. Stop arguing.

Anyway, now that we've got all of that established, let's get straight into Series One...


William Hartnell Is The Best Lead Actor The Show Has Ever Had


There. I've said it. And if you want to argue, my fingers are wedged firmly in my ears. Although we're generally encouraged to think of the early black and white days as being slow, creaky and full of 'wooden' acting (as defined by the sort of people who appear to think that primetime ITV1 dramas are full of performances roughly akin to Billie Whitelaw and Keith Michell battling it out over the last remaining BAFTA in the known universe), the actual fact of the matter is that they rarely dip beneath the level of a very good stage play - and, let's face it, in some respects most television shows were essentially stage plays at that point - and that, with no offence intended, William Hartnell is several leagues ahead of pretty much anyone else he shares the screen with. Almost every eccentric slip and stumble is deliberate and intentional, any actual slip or stumble - which, y'know, sometimes happened what with it being recorded as live and that - is quickly and effectively improvised around without ever breaking character, and it's no exaggeration to say that when he's in a scene, everyone else in it ups their game considerably. So the next time someone starts up about him 'fluffing' lines and the like, bear in mind that he was initially reluctant to take the role due to being a successful  and acclaimed serious film actor. He did say 'EH?' a lot, though.


The Stock Footage Invariably Looks Awful


It's not really surprising that the early years of Doctor Who should have made such sprocket-overloadingly heavy use of bits and pieces of off-the-shelf film footage from other productions, as it would have been hard and indeed costly enough for an early sixties feature film to convincingly mock up, say, a thunderstorm or a pacing lion, let alone something recorded 'as live' on a handful of sets in three quarters of a broom cupboard at Lime Grove. It doesn't really help, though, when the clips they use have the sharpness, consistency, luminance and definition of an episode of the colour Andy Pandy that's been marinaded in used dishwater infused with marscapone before being rolled down the stairs, used as makeshift dental floss, and left on top of a blast furnace for eight months. And that's even after the Restoration Team have been able to track down, clean up and neatly re-insert the original footage - lord alone knows how it must have looked back in 1963/64. Probably still better than when some Grange Hill pupils on videotape stumbled across some 'foxes' on crackly poorly-matched 16mm with a big tramline scratch, though.


The Female Characters Are Stronger And Better Defined Than Popular Opinion Would Have You Believe


Popular opinion - and the slightly less popular opinion of rentagob dimwits on clip shows - would have us all believe that Doctor Who is amongst the most problematically sexist creations in the entirety of popular culture, with 'the man' dashing around solving all of the problems and getting all of the glory, and 'the girl' left to stand in the background looking pretty, screaming a bit and handing things to him when required. There are, let's be frank, parts of the show's history where this is arguably a legitimate criticism, but the first two series are not amongst them. At this point, it's worth remembering, the show had a strident young female producer and a fifty percent female regular cast, and if the Bechdel Test is your particular favoured method of measuring worth then the overwhelming majority of those nigh on a hundred episodes pass it with ease. Even above and beyond that, Susan and Barbara will often take the lead in a storyline, facing off against Daleks, ritual historical violence and even the laws of time on their own terms, and encountering all manner of well drawn and sympathetically portrayed female characters en route. Even their less Bechdel-impressing conversations are noteworthy for a television show made in the early sixties, particularly their dealings with the numerous other ladies they meet during The Keys Of Marinus, and Susan's celebrated chat with Ping Cho about her life and expectations in Thirteenth Century China. Most notably of all, there's a lengthy scene in which Barbara and Susan reflect with some weariness on the male characters' attitude towards them, which is unfortunately undermined when, almost immediately afterwards, a statue grabs Barbara's arse.


Which is perhaps an opportune moment to move on to...


Barbara Would Seriously Get It


Well, um, we'd probably better qualify this one a bit. With very few exceptions, the focus of the 'Doctor Who Girl' has always been slanted towards the late teens/early twenties end of the scale, with successive production teams shamelessly stating their intention to use the latest cutesy thespianically-challenged sidekick with knockers straining against her ill-tailored top for little other purpose than to get 'the dads' watching. The fact that this role was originally filled by - gasp - a thirtysomething with 'sensible' wardrobe choices and a rather dated hairstyle has always generally been dismissed by fans with a worrying undercurrent of ageism as an of-its-time neccessity that nobody in their right mind would deploy now (apart from the fact that, erm, when Russell T. Davies did it really, really worked), and hapless Barbara has always found herself conveniently omitted from lists of sexy and/or 'icon'-leaning companions. There were to be no adolescent-friendly full-page Doctor Who Magazine posters of poor old Jacqueline Hill. But, with the benefit of a bit more maturity in both senses of the word, let's put a stop to that nonsense here and now and point out that you only have to watch for a couple of seconds to realise that Jacqueline was a strikingly good-looking woman (especially so in these early promo shots unearthed by Clayton Hickman), who also, when they deign to allow her to wear something a tad more with-it, clearly, er, 'has it going on' as well. Meanwhile, once the regular characters have got past the initial prickliness about being intruders in 'the ship', Barbara also emerges as a likeable and attractive character; witty, thoughtful and headstrong, and her flirting with Léon Colbert in The Reign Of Terror is really rather sweet to witness. No wonder the writers of the tie-in novels were always drooling over her. And as it's in black and white, you can pretend she has red hair too. Um, did I really just say that out loud?


There Are Too Many Fucking Rope Bridges


Got twenty five minutes of Saturday afternoon television to fill? Then why not stuff huge chunks of it full of half of your regular cast and a handful of guest stars doing desperately unconvincing 'swaying' acting as they make a protracted tension-deficient meal of their attempts to traverse a hazardous chasm by performing cramped feats of trapeze artistry with dislocated bits of a rickety-looking rope bridge whilst a sound effect snarls off-screen? Even the old Republic movie serials were never this shameless about it.


The Bit With The Ice Soldier Unexpectedly Reviving Is Extremely Effective


You can spend six months and hundreds of thousands of pounds on ambitious CGI effects, and then spend a further six months showing off about them in an endless procession of almost indistinguishable behind-the-scenes features, but sometimes you're just going to get a better result from a meticulously directed and acted sequence in which an immobile suit of armour suddenly jerks into motion in the middle of everyone else's armour-disregarding dialogue. It's also worth noting that Peter Davison claims to have been alarmed by this as a youngster - and not by The Ice Warriors as lazy clip show compilers routinely assume - which is a seal of approval that no amount of BAFTA Craft Awards can buy.


Why Does Everyone Have So Much Trouble With Aydan's Name?


It's Sentence Of Death, episode five of The Keys Of Marinus, and the travellers are transported into 'The City Of Millennium' and indeed straight into a murder mystery that they seem set to wrongly take the rap for. A bigger mystery, though, is why nobody seems to be able to agree on one single definitive pronounciation of the name of actual perpetrator Aydan. Throughout the episode you'll hear a wide range of stresses, emphases and vowel sounds, with William Hartnell alone offering more than one variation. Small wonder he nearly evaded the attention of the City's finest judicial minds.


It's Impossible To Remember Where You're Up To With The Sensorites


Black and white Doctor Who is full of stories that start well with an intriguing first episode, but quickly tail off afterwards, and nowhere is this discrepancy more evident than with The Sensorites. So much so, in fact, that if you opt to break up your viewing of it to an episode-by-episode basis (and, let's be blunt, that's the only way that anyone in their right mind ever would choose to watch it), you'll have a hard time remembering exactly which episode you're on. They all seem to meld into one after a while - it looks, sounds and feels more like an early sixties British sci-fi film than anything else in Series One, which is perhaps not surprising given Peter R. Newman's background as a screenwriter, but not neccessarily a good thing in itself; for a start, it's almost twice the length of one of said films, and was made for less than a tenth of their already unimpressive average budget - and the end always seems to be impossibly far off on the horizon. Some fans have speculated that nobody has ever actually seen the last episode, and while I know for certain that I have seen it, and recently too, I couldn't tell you a single thing about it.

Anyway, that's Series One, and we'll see you again soon for Series Two, starring an Inconsistent Cat, The Other Type Of Dalek Cutaway, and Far Too Many Ants...


And if you want to read a more detailed piece on Marco Polo, The Aztecs, The Reign Of Terror and all of the other sixties historical stories, you can find one in my book Well At Least It's Free.

If you'd like the chance of own a special edition of Fun At One - The Story Of Comedy At BBC Radio 1 - signed, with a mystery extra bit, and most importantly a free one-off CD with sleevenotes featuring some of my favourite Radio 1 comedy clips - then you'll be wanting to get your bid in here.

If you'd rather just buy the regular version - and today you can get it 30% cheaper with the discount code NOVFLASH30 - then that's still available here.

Normal article-type-stuff service will resume soon...

 
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.

So why, at an all time career height of popularity, did David Bowie see fit to form his much-derided band Tin Machine? Well, if you believe the average prat writing a boxout list at the foot of an article on flop albums in The Guardian, it was 'his mid-life crisis'. Nothing more, nothing less. Four years and three albums dismissed with a bit of sneering from someone who themselves is probably no stranger to acting their shoe size rather than their age, and whom more than likely hasn't heard any of those three albums anyway, let alone Bus Stop (Country Version).

The reality of it, and indeed the it that, whatever your opinion of the album, led to Reality, is - surprise surprise - ever so slightly different. To understand why Tin Machine made their expectation-confounding appearance at the end of the eighties, you really need to look at the expectation-meeting that Bowie had been doing for the rest of the decade. Well, excepting Scary Monsters... And Super Creeps, Alabama Song, the Baal's Hymn EP and all the rest of that turn-of-the-decade post-Berlin avant-gardeness, but that's where and how it all really starts. Let's Dance, Live Aid, the launch of Now That's What I Call Music!, and so many other small but significant routes into the mass mainstream audience had conspired to push David Bowie into somewhere he probably shouldn't have been and very clearly didn't want to be, and not unreasonably he felt obliged to induldge in an extended outburst of crowd-pleasing. The Let's Dance parent album, while certainly one of his most rewardingly listenable, was not one of his more artistically challenging moments, and this fed directly into the inspiration-free void (alright, Loving The Alien aside) of the for once not unfarily maligned Tonight, and the anti-climactic Never Let Me Down, which sees a set of mostly very strong songs buried beneath ear-assaultingly overloaded eighties production that even Bowie himself now seems to regret; standout track Time Will Crawl has only ever appeared on latterday compilations in a later and vastly-improved stripped-back mix, while one song, Too Dizzy, has proved sufficiently embarrassing to be removed from the album itself.

In between those two underachieving and underinspiring albums came a handful of singles that seemed to suggest that Bowie himself was all-too-aware of his creative straitjacket. Recorded with the not exactly chart-troubling Pat Metheny Group, This Is Not America was a wifully obstuse diversion from the lighters-in-the-air mood of the time, while the lightweight but fun Dancing In The Street seemed to be taking the piss out of his current status (not least in the accompanying video), and Absolute Beginners is quite simply one of the best songs he has ever written. If it's never quite nudged into the upper echelons of the public-percepted Bowie Canon, it's largely due to its association with a film that people can't seem to look past on account of its poor reputation, despite the fact that they've probably never seen it themselves and that indeed it's actually a lot better than Halliwell's Film Guide would have you believe. And yes, there is a bit of an important theme developing there.

The idea for Bowie's subsequent career detour started to formulate during 1987's post-Never Let Me Down'Glass Spider' tour, an expensive, technically ambitious and not entirely successful attempt at taking his avant-garde ideas to the mainstream. During the tour, Bowie was both introduced to experimental guitarist Reeves Gabrels and reacquainted with Iggy Pop's former bassist and drummer Tony and Hunt Sales; desperate to try something new, yearning for the relative anonymity of being part of a band, fascinated by the proto-grunge sounds of Screaming Blue Messiahs and The Pixies, and quite possibly indulging in a spot of Oblique Strategies-inspired lateral thinking, Bowie initiated rehearsals with the stated aim of 'making the kind of music we want to listen to'. Rather than trying to take the avant-garde to the mainstream, he was now intending to drag the mainstream, kicking and screaming, towards the avant-garde. And as we shall see, they would not like this one bit.


So, on paper, Tin Machine look like an astonishing prospect; you've got an acclaimed innovatory guitarist, the rhythm section from Lust For Life, and David Bowie. What's more, you've got a David Bowie keen to find his creative fire again, helped along in no small part by the voluble and wisecracking Sales brothers poking fun at his more overblown ideas, and Gabrels' even more influential mantra repeated whenever Bowie talked about having to do artistic or commercial things that he didn't want to - "stop doing it". What's more, they were all expecting and expected to contribute to the songwriting and even singing. As we will see, this laudably ego-deflating band democracry would ultimately prove as much of an achilles heel as it was a strength... but let's save that for later. Nobody even knows Tin Machine exist yet.

By the end of 1988, Tin Machine - naming themselves after a song they had written pretty much on the spot in rehearsals - were in the studio. Recording as live in record time, and with music and lyrics both intentionally left rough and unpolished, the band had an entire album and releaseable outtakes to spare in the can before 1989 had even really started. During the sessions, without having formally announced the project, they played a secret gig at a small club near to Nassau's Compass Point Studios, to audible audience debate over whether the mysterious bearded figure onstage was actually David Bowie or not. And when the self-titled debut album - yes, the one with the bafflingly mocked sharp-suited position-changing cover photo - appeared with astonishing speed in May, it did so to what were initially enthusiastic reviews; and, before Q started having to have endless bastard lists of the Eighteen Thousand Worst Albums Ever Made every three sodding minutes, it made their list of best albums at the end of the year. So why's it treated with such disdain now?

Well, for starters, there's the wider general public's reaction. Critics and a sizeable proportion of Bowie devotees who knew their Subterraneans from their Cat People (Putting Out Fire) might well have embraced this unexpected turn of events, but there's no escaping the fact that a damagingly large number of more recent converts from across the globe, who liked that he'd apparently now joined the long line-up of formerly innovative rock stars who had given in to the urge to coast along at a crowd-pleasing artistic standstill, would have - not unreasonably - found it disorentating and unpleasant, and probably even felt ripped off (and music snobs should accept that there's nothing wrong with that feeling, as anyone who owns Tarantula by Ride will wearily attest). Meanwhile, many critics would soon revise their opinion on finding that this 'band' genuinely were placing themselves on an equal footing even when it came to promotional duties, and it's quite likely that many of the more scathing articles that followed were written by journos who had found themselves chatting to Hunt, Tony or Reeves when they had been expecting a chance to meet David.


Even then, some actual hardcore Bowie fans weren't exactly keen, which is as good a moment as any to start talking about the album itself. In fairness, it's an incredible departure even by the tiresomely over-analysed and over-exaggerated standards of the 'chameleon of rock', and is as much the other three's album as it is his. It's rooted in influences from a genre that, even before it really had a name as such, had deliberately set itself apart from established norms, and involved the sort of sounds that in some cases listeners might actually have turned towards the likes of Bowie actively to avoid. They're also the sort of sounds that in some regards haven't aged well, based primarily around a clattering wall of noise and lacking the finesse and diversity that Nirvana would have everyone emulating a short while later. And on top of that, some simply don't like the lyrics - direct, less poetic, and often dealing with subjects (poverty and drug abuse in Crack City, violence as cheap entertainment in Video Crime, police racism in Under The God and so on and so on) that well-to-do rock stars are hardly exactly well-placed to pontificate on; in balance, however, many of these were in fact influenced by the work of Gabrels' investigative journalist wife Sara Terry, and in any case, a millionaire rock star shining a light on the uglier day to day realities of corners of the globe that had been left to decay in the name of profit was something of a welcome relief after several years of them all asking us to put our hands in our pockets rather than address the actual underlying causes of situations.

If, however, you were an impressionable youngster who liked David Bowie (and was then still unaware enough of notions of 'canon' to think Day In Day Out was a great song) every bit as much as the murky, speaker-rattling noise buzzing out of John Peel's Radio 1 show, the idea of the two colliding was about as exciting as it got, and perhaps those listeners who did accept it on face value are worth listening to. They'd probably tell you that Heaven's In Here, Prisoner Of Love, Under The God and Baby Can Dance are easily superior to the bulk of his previous three albums, that the weary yet snarling riposte to where he had found himself I Can't Read ("I don't know a book from Countdown") is even better than that, that Bus Stop provides a brief note of comic relief with its short sharp story of a commuter finding religion, and that the more laid-back and hazy Amazing momentarily dispenses with the sonic overload to present some intriguing hints of where they might go next. True, there are also some throwaway thrashes and a jarring cover of John Lennon's Working Class Hero - not exactly the sturdiest of songs to begin with - but how many albums, and this does include most of Bowie's, have never included at least one fish out of quality-related water? And anyway, two of those throwaway thrashes were only included on the CD, back in the days when an unwritten law stated that all releases on the brand spanking new CostlyDisc format had to have additional exclusive 'content' or Jonathan Gordon-Davies would cry, so technically they can't really be held up as shortcomings anyway. Plus on top of all this, those who 'got' the band were rewarded with a top smart non-LP single in the form of a rowdy - and decidedly pointed - cover of Bob Dylan's Maggie's Farm. Less than a year later, she was gone. Makes you think.


Then fast-forward eighteen months to the summer of 1991 - one of the most packed eighteen months in Bowie's entire career, with the Sound + Vision tour and box set, the arrival of his back catalogue on CD with fantastic bonus tracks (notably Bombers, I Pray, Ole and the astonishing Some Are), the superb pre-fame singles collection Early On, and, erm, the quietly forgotten 'best of'Changesbowie and accompanying remix single Fame '90 - and while the post-Live Aid contingent might well have been blissfully boring themselves senseless with Simply Red and Bryan Adams, it was a rather exciting time to be a fan of indie, alt-rock, or whatever you prefer to call it. Even aside from the onslaught of noise that was about to crashland from across the Atlantic, there was still just enough hope left that The Stone Roses, Happy Mondays and Inspiral Carpets might take on the mainstream and win - hope that, for three wildly differing reasons, would be dashed before the year was out - and The KLF were busy taking art terrorism into the orbit of even the most empty-headed chart-head, while Creation Records were gearing up to release four (and very nearly five) hotly tipped and eagerly anticipated albums that between them reinvented everyone's idea of what 'independent' music could achieve both creatively and commercially; a reinvention that Britpop would take its cue from but then sadly squander only a couple of years later. If you don't know what those four (and very nearly five) albums are, by the way, well, maybe somebody's written a book about them. And into the middle of all this walked Tin Machine.

No, really. Literally into the middle of it. Perhaps recognising that trying to pull their angular conceit off in the arena-playing arena had worked against them with the first album, this time around Tin Machine did everything they could to place themselves alongside the bands that were technically their musical peers, to the extent of recording a live set for Radio 1's The Evening Session, performing on hip and happening TV shows like Paramount City, and even embarking on the 'It's My Life' Tour around the sort of venues that Bowie probably hadn't even seen since about 1969; indeed, I would get to see and hear them blasting the air with noise and a set that included a cover of The Pixies'Debaser in the exact same venue where around that time I would more normally have gone to see the likes of Ride and My Bloody Valentine. Even the accompanying album, Tin Machine II, was released - thanks to Bowie's general disgruntlement with EMI - on the sort of vaugely-ish independent label Victory. Yes, alright, so it was technically bankrolled by JVC, but it was formed especially for Tin Machine and they licensed it to long-established UK indie London Records anyway, so who's counting?


Half of Tin Machine II is a vastly better album than the band's debut. And, unfortunately, half of it is much, much worse. On the plus side, there's the propulsive Baby Universal, the surprisingly melodic - if slightly overlong (and dubiously-lyriced) - One Shot, the likeable if undistinguished Roxy Music-alike You Belong In Rock'n'Roll (although the accompanying cover of Roxy's If There Is Something falls somewhat wide of the mark), and Bowie's soaring, affecting salute to the natural disaster-ravaged architectural beauty of Amlapura. The other tracks, however, veer from the OK-ish but unremarkable Betty Wrong to Hunt Sales' notorious bluesy plod Stateside, which has the dubious distinction of being the most roundly disliked song ever to appear on a David Bowie record. In its defence - which is not a sentence I had ever envisaged myself writing - as bluesy plods go it's at least on the tolerable side, the bands they sought to emulate and indeed Bowie himself as a solo artist were never averse to including listener-challenging bits of overlong ill-fittedness when it suited them (any scoffing Pixies fans are respectfully asked when the last time they listened to Silver was), and to throw things into a bit of perspective it's not like The Police's albums ever get quite so much of a battering for including Andy Summers songs.

Still, the album as a whole is characterised by a more diverse and sophisticated sound than the debut, and it also includes two of David Bowie's greatest ever songs. The admirably restrained barrage of soured Americana Goodbye Mr. Ed is the one song that even avowed Tin Machine haters will confess to really, really liking, whilst the arresting Shopping For Girls really is in a class of its own. A third-person look through the eyes of a sex-trade tourist set to a classic Bowie-style backing that cleverly references both cliched 'oriental' melodies and Prince's 1999, it combines uncomfortable yet righteously vitriolic lyrics (complete with an ambiguous reference to Michael Jackson) with an angst-ridden, despairing delivery and, at a climactic moment, Reeves Gabrels chiming in with a blast of guitar noise that sounds for all the world like Sweep from The Sooty Show is plummeting ablaze from the sky, intent on launching himself bodily at the rat-infested room that Bowie describes with such fury. It really is dispiriting to think that these two songs, and I Can't Read, are never likely to reach the popularity they deserve, purely on account of the fact that so many listeners just can't bring themselves to look past what they think it says on the, erm, tin.


Although the singles were a moderate success - leading to two appearances on Top Of The Pops, one of which saw Gabrels infamously elect to smear his guitar with a chocolate eclair and cause Bowie to crack up while the other was a belting live performance at a time when many of the other featured acts were struggling to cope with the all-new all-live format, as well as an infamous interview on Wogan which turned into an essay in tense nervousness as the host ungraciously ignored Tony Sales and made a beeline for Bowie, who indignantly responded with monosyllabic non-sequiturs  - the album underperformed badly and Bowie was already dropping hints that it was time to move on. After that, and the almost completely ignored live album Oy Vey, Baby (rendered inessential on account of containing absolutely no rarities or exclusives whatsoever; perhaps foolishly, they'd already used their live cover of Shakin' All Over as a b-side and given away their live cover of Go Now to the much-more-ropey-than-Tin-Machine-IINME compilation Ruby Trax, plus there was an eight minute version of Stateside which didn't exactly help), Bowie's solo career resumed with the electro-disco single Real Cool World (although all of the journalists who have more recently taken to referring to that as a 'return to form' require investigation under the Trade Descriptions Act), and Tin Machine were quietly decommissioned. And then even more quietly written out of David Bowie's career history. While Reeves Gabrels would stay on as a collaborator for several albums, Bowie has occasionally revived a couple of songs including Shopping For Girls and I Can't Read, and a fair selection from both albums ended up on the Sound + Vision box set, you'll be hard pushed to find any acknowledgement of Tin Machine in any official Bowie overview.


The first album is still available, albeit lacking key bonus tracks like Maggie's Farm and the alternate Bus Stop, while, staggeringly, Tin Machine II has been out of print for years. Just think about that for a second. A David Bowie album is not available to buy, even digitally, in a world where you can get the equally derided sixties and nineties output literally at the click of a button. Never mind that, you can get sodding David Live. This is usually explained away as being due to 'low demand', which is a reasonable explanation but not one that really tallies with mint condition copies of the CD routinely changing hands for silly money. The likely real explanation is that it took such a battering on release, mostly from people who had either never heard it or were being paid to be 'controversial', that even Bowie and his current back catalogue distributors have started to believe it and are preferring to quietly forget that it ever existed. Some (though not all) of the better tracks are on the recently-reissued Sound + Vision, of course, but that's hardly the same thing. Oy Vey, Baby is also currently unavailable, but... erm... um... anyone got any kettles that need descaling?

There's probably a case for saying that, even allowing for band democracy, Tin Machine maybe would have benefitted from giving a little more control and influence to the member with the proven track record in crafting globally successful albums, but then again if they'd done that, the albums might have been better but they just wouldn't have been Tin Machine. As an exercise in both artistic deck-clearing and shaking off an artistically restrictive audience, it certainly did its job admirably - like or loathe Bowie's nineties output, at least he'd started making music that surprised people again - and unlike The Divine Comedy's 'serious' album and so many other similar career missteps, at least people actually remember it. And as there isn't any more of this to read, why not try listening to I Can't Read?

Higher Than The Sun is a book by me about four albums released late in 1991 - Screamadelica by Primal Scream, Foxbase Alpha by Saint Etienne, Bandwagonesque by Teenage Fanclub and Loveless by My Bloody Valentine, and how, long before they discovered Oasis, Creation Records took on the world and nearly won.

Back in the days before daytime radio would touch indie music with a bargepole, and when indie arists in turn were still similarly wary of the mainstream, these four albums, without a shred of compromise, came closer to commercial and critical mainstream acceptability than almost any of their peers had previously managed. Higher Than The Sun tells the story of the closely intertwined making of the four albums - one of which was completed with change left over from the recording budget, whilst another very nearly bankrupted Creation - and the sometimes unlikely shared influences and extra-curricular escapades of the four bands. There's also plenty about their friends, colleagues and rivals including Blur, Ride, The KLF, House Of Love, Adorable, Denim, The Jesus And Mary Chain, The Manic Street Preachers, Flowered Up and Fabulous. There are stories of wild parties in hijacked mansions, studios infested by poltergeists, and listening to French football matches late at night. Along the way they cross paths with Madonna, Kylie Minogue, Chris Morris and Almost Brian Cant. It's a story that starts with a compilation tape, and ends with a jaw-dropping act of career sucicide, and in between someone gets chased by a cow. And what's that? One of the albums wasn't on Creation? Well, that's covered as well...

You can get Higher Than The Sun in paperback here, or as an eBook here. There'll be lots more tying in with the book on here over the next couple of days - follow Higher Than The Sun on Facebook or Twitter to keep up to date!