Here's a list of my favourite rarities, obscurities and downright oddities from the Heavenly Recordings and Creation Records vaults. And no, funnily enough, it doesn't include Like A Snowflake.


Primal Scream - Come Together (Hypnotone Brain Machine Mix)


When Primal Scream started messing around with dance music, they really didn't know what they were doing - which, let's face it, is how and why it ended up working so well - and that all-important follow-up to Loaded took several attempts to nail. Most readers will know the Andrew Weatherall version of Come Together that ended up on Screamadelica, which takes the song on a journey through the furthest reaches of space with The Reverend Jesse Jackson at the controls. Others will be familiar with the Terry Farley-helmed single version, locked neatly into a more traditional post-Madchester groove. But how many have heard the little-remembered third try at perfecting the problematic ditty, wherein dance duo Hypnotone - later to assume production duties for some tracks on Screamadelica - sped it up into a brain-frazzling rave-friendly sonic assault with alarming blasts of sampling from the Pearl & Dean jingle? Not something you hear on 6Music's 'listener mixtape' shows too often.


My Bloody Valentine - Sugar


Hailing from the brief period between Isn't Anything and Loveless, and originally only released on an obscure Creation promo single, Sugar is perhaps the most appropriately-named number in the entire My Bloody Valentine back catalogue, with tooth-corrodingly trebly high frequencies that probably would have damaged old-skool tape decks, and the overall feeling of being caught in a sandstorm of Tate & Lyle. Staggeringly, it was apparently written and recorded in a day too. We can only assume Kevin was on a bit of a sugar rush himself at the time.


Saint Etienne - Fake 88


Originally intended as the closing track of Foxbase Alpha, this moody sound collage contrasts with the 'up with vintage and modern pop!' mindset of the rest of the album by nailing what was wrong with the period between the two, featuring Stephen Duffy listing some of the eighties cultural phenomena that Pete, Bob and Sarah were more than happy to see the back of, from Thatcher and Chernenko to Toto Coelo, Transformers, Phil Redmond, Bratpack Films and, erm, Stephen 'TinTin' Duffy. That it shares its name with a certain Alexander O'Neal hit is probably no coincidence when you consider the lyrics of People Get Real...


Flowered Up - Enough's Enough


One of the B-sides of the original pulled 12" of Weekender, and frustratingly never officially issued anywhere (in fact, if anyone's reading who's in a position to do something, Flowered Up are in dire need of the deluxe 2CD treatment), this jaunty pisstake about naughty bedroom antics is how Laid by James would have sounded if it had been written by anyone with anything resembling a sense of humour. It's probably supposed to represent what someone else was getting up to while Weekender was off his face and being chased by a giant record player or something. And it's probably safer not to ask.


Teenage Fanclub - Like A Virgin


From the little-heard mini-album recorded at the end of the Bandwagonesque sessions The King, where it came surrounded by terrifying outbursts of scuzzy guitar and wailing police sirens, this tongue-in-cheek chug through a song that Madonna and Stephen Bray probably didn't write with four feedback-crazed Big Star devotees in mind is actually surprisingly effective. Though it's no Slow And Fast (The Ballad Of Bow Evil).


Ride - Everybody Knows


Ride's masterwork Going Blank Again was originally presented to Creation as a double-album, but was cut down to a single disc when their cost-conscious American record company started hyperventilating on the freeway or something. Which probably made for a stronger album if we're being honest about it. Some of the excised tracks ended up as fondly-remembered B-sides; others, including this nattily subdued number featuring a rare lead vocal from drummer Loz Colbert, ended up sitting inexplicably on the shelf for years.


Super Furry Animals - nO.K.


The B-side of The International Language Of Screaming, and something that might sound on first listen like a cheap and lazy attempt at filling space on a single by getting someone to recite the alphabet over the A-side's backing track. But have a closer listen. Notice any letters missing? And can you think of any bands from around that time that might have made prominent use of said letter, and indeed that Super Furry Animals might well have felt inclined to take a subtle swipe at?


Sugar - If I Can't Change Your Mind (Evening Session Version)


Given how effectively they were wiped off the musical map by the rise of Oasis (and, admittedly, by their own miserable third album), it's easy to forget just what a short but intense media sensation Bob Mould's tuneful noisecore trio caused in the early nineties. If you want evidence of this, look no futher than the blistering tracks recorded for Mark Goodier's Radio 1 show that appeared spread across various singles (and now on the deluxe edition of Copper Blue), especially this exhiliarating rattle through their biggest hit single.


The Creation & Ride - How Does It Feel To Feel?


Sorry, this isn't on YouTube, so here's the official video instead...

It has to be said that most of Alan McGee's post-Oasis 'great ideas' in the latter years of Creation are not worth even remembering in the first place, let alone dwelling on. One of his more inspired thoughts, however, was persuading the sixties mod-psych band that gave the label its name to reform for Creation's tenth anniversary concert (and later to record a brand new album), for which they teamed up with Ride for a barnstorming rendition of one of their more unhinged erstwhile hits. Put a sock in it, Noel.


The Boo Radleys - Zoom


Fat Larry's Band's squiggly synth-festooned bit of eighties sickliness falls into the hands of Mop-Haired Martin's Band, who transform it into something resembling Gabriel The Toad trying to bag a Peel Session some time circa August 1991. If you're going to do cover versions, do them as bafflingly unrecognisably as this.


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

Not so long ago, a certain prestigious gallery put on a huge exhibition entitled Glam! The Performance Of Style. Taking the satin and tat of Glam Rock as its stylistic cue - albeit leaning very much towards the artier Bowie/Roxy end of the scale rather than just having a huge screen showing Noddy Holder shouting "IT'S GRIM-LEYYYYYYYS" on an endless loop - this was an ambitious and well-presented collection that sought to reflect just how far Glam's influence had pervaded into the wider sphere of arts and culture, with exhibits ranging from a photo of Showaddywaddy to a small artillery of Alkasura jackets, some Richard Allen books safely secured in a glass case to prevent them from going on the rampage, and a collection of films by gender-ambiguous shock performance art troupe The Cockettes, one of which, following several minutes of provocative homoerotic male full-frontal activity, caused someone to tut and walk out when a topless lady appeared on screen.

There was, however, one figure who was perhaps even more conspicuous by his absence than he would have been by his presence. Come on, come on, you know full well who that is. Now, before we go any further, nobody is seriously suggesting for a second that there should have been huge framed photos of The Artist Formerly Known As Rubber Bucket taking up an entire wall of every single room, but the question remains of how you can stage a full and comprehensive retrospective of Glam Rock without in some way acknowledging - even if it's just via the same sort of 'cover versions by other artists' subterfuge as the compilers of the superb Glam box set Oh Yes We Can Love skilfully deployed - someone who, no matter how subsequently disgraced, was for many, many, many years seen by the general public at least as the be all and end all of all things Glam?

And the answer is that you can't. Well, not properly. If, due to the actions of a handful of genre participants (and, somewhat unfairly, a brace of untalented tosser DJs who happened to be presenting pop shows when Glam was big, as opposed to all those other years either side they were doing exactly the same that somehow don't seem to have wound up quite so tainted by association), you have to play down the fun and throwaway footstompy side of Glam - which, with its heavy slant towards provocative art, high fashion and gender politics as opposed to The Tomorrow People, Spangles and the BBC Schools Clock, Glam! The Performance Of Style seemed jarringly keen to do - then in some ways you have to start pretending that Glam Rock was something that it wasn't. Or rather something that was only half of what it was. Which is all very well and good when you're exploring the films, fashion houses and indeed art galleries that fired the imaginations of your Ferrys, Enos and Harleys, but not so much when people start trying to fill the musical void on the other side of the newly decimalised coin by roping in other more culturally acceptable yet less genre-appropriate pop favourites that simply happened to be around at the time. Look down any list of 'Glam Rock' artists these days, and it probably won't be long before you stumble across a mention of Abba, whose visual links with actual proper Glam Rock were tenuous at best, and musical links slightly less than non-existent. If wearing silly shiny clothes and having a bit of early seventies pop clout are all you need to qualify, then, frankly, let's have Bobby Crush on the lists too.

Just for now, though, let's take a look back at a time when lists of Glam Rock artists had actual literal Glam Rock artists on them. And were actual literal lists too. No, really. Back in 1989, probably before any of the featured artists even had a computer to take in to be fixed, K-Tel put out a rather splendid compilation entitled Glam Slam. Wrapped in a lavishly-designed memorabilia-strewn gatefold sleeve, this was quite possibly the first occasion on which anyone had attempted to put together a coherent overview of the genre, and alongside the obvious big hits and big hitters the compilers also found room to feature a couple of relative obscurities from the likes of Hello and Argent, and a mildly contentious inclusion from bill-fitters in sound only 10cc. Promoted by an inevitably Holder-shouted TV advert boasting camera flare-occasioning archive clippage of many of the featured artists, it was a foregone conclusion that any aspirant investigators of the more esoteric corners of pop and rock history would invest in Glam Slam as soon as paper round revenue permitted, and on top of that, exposure to this previously rarely discussed genre suddenly seemed to fling open a door on a lost popular cultural world every bit as remote and evocative as mid-sixties pyschedelia, only with more Barnaby.


Still tucked away inside the lavishly-designed memorabilia strewn gatefold sleeve of my own copy of Glam Slam is a not particularly neatly folded sheet of A4 paper, on which I attempted to scribble together a definitive list of artists connected to my then-new musical obsession. It's a list that's split into three columns, and the first - headed 'Glam' - features all of the usual suspects (and indeed suspects) with some newer and less well-known additions like Sailor, Barry Blue and The Arrows appended to the foot of the list in varying shades of biro. The second one, headed '?', catalogues the longer-careered likes of Elton John, Lou Reed, 'Dinners' McCartney and Lulu, who while never quite fully committing themselves to the Glam Rock cause certainly adopted its musical and sartorial trappings for a nicely effective while (though no Abba, oddly enough). And the third, helpfully headed '??', simply lists The Wombles and The Goodies. No, still can't figure that one out.

In addition to Glam Slam, a fair few of the names in the first column of that list were arrived at via the three volumes of Glam Rock released by Virgin Video around the same time, which featured a dazzling collection of vintage TV performances from across the globe by the familiar and the forgotten of Glam Rock (and, on the less essential third instalment, some more up-to-the-minute pop gaudiness from the likes of Sigue Sigue Sputnik, Twisted Sister and Doctor And The Medics), which in those pre-TOTP2 days was an almost unheard of feat of archival archaeology. Well, to be honest, you did occasionally get the odd clip on daytime TV shows and the then still-rare phenomenon of nostalgia shows and pop retrospectives, but you get the general idea. And, given that there's now no way that you're ever going to get a DVD release of any of them, it's time to take another look at one of those Glam Rock video compilations. Unusually, we're not going to be taking a look at the first Volume of Glam Rock here, as it's a bit too limited in terms of range of artists, and it was confusingly issued in two versions (one with Roxy Music doing Virginia Plain, one with Wizzard's Ball Park Incident instead) due to mysterious rights complications, and on top of that we'd have to deal with the thorny subject of someone going on Top Of The Pops in full Nazi uniform, and frankly we've already got enough on our plate as it is. Instead, though there'll no doubt be reference to the contents of the other two volumes en route, we'll be turning our attention to the more wide-ranging line-up - if not more widely-ranging in terms of trouser width - Glam Rock 2.


Despite the subtle but effective attention to detail in the sleeve art, featuring both some authentic-looking star-spangled fabric and a short but enticing sleevenote about how much fun the likes of Roy Wood and Noddy Holder brought to the pop scene, Glam Rock 2 opens with - ironically - a none-more-eighties scrolling video effect showing various featured performances, including, you can't help but notice, a Slade one that doesn't actually appear on the tape. Closer examination reveals this to be a mimed Coz I Luv You, and quite how and why it ended up being trimmed from the running order will have to remain a mystery.


What's less of a mystery is the identity of the lengthy drum intro playing behind this opening sequence, and sure enough, as soon as the guitars kick in we're straight over to Suzi Quatro, thundering through Can The Can with the aid of her band of Lance from Home And Away lookalikes. Though, it has to be said, very few people will be paying much attention to them - even when there's a close-up of one of them doing the 'eagle' noise on his guitar - when there's a sparkly-eyeshadowed busty leather-catsuited frontwoman whacking her bass and yelling with full force rock fury, proving years before punk that women could do 'real' music just as well as men without having to draw attention to the fact that they were doing so, and generally showing exactly why she was such a huge star at the time. Placing this as the first song on the video also raises a couple of interesting points from the outset; firstly that this sounds very heavy indeed for something that was roundly dismissed as 'pop rubbish' at the time (leading to an infamous incident in which her producer sent a giftwrapped brain to the NME), and secondly that, at least visually, this is a very different sort of 'Glam' to either of the previously identified strains, still glittery and androgynous but with a more straightforward, rather than parodied and exaggerated, fifties-influenced look. Of course, putting it at the start also makes sense in that it's simply a great opening track with a steadily excitement-building intro, much like Rock And Roll Part 2 had been for the first volume. And moving quickly on from that...


...we come straight onto, erm, the Glittery one himself. Let's be blunt about this; the flimsy Always Yours was already one of the least remembered chart-toppers of all time even before we were all instructed to forget it by law, and, unfortunately, hearing it again after such a long interval does nothing to improve its standing. This isn't even a particularly imaginative performance either, just some straightforward camp-expressioned miming with The Glitter Band standing around doing a synchonised arm-pointing dance. Not that any of his songs included on the first volume of Glam Rock were any more imaginatively staged, but at least they were good songs. Well some of them. Anyway, that's as good a moment as any to leave Always Yours where it is.


T. Rex's Electric Warrior-era singles were all on the first volume of Glam Rock, mostly drawn from refreshingly unfamiliar-looking European pop shows, so the first glimpse we get here of Marc Bolan and company is via the original promo film for Children Of The Revolution. Not that the 'rock historians' very often deigned to lower themselves to write about Glam Rock at the time - Stuart Maconie's two-page Glam retrospective in Vox circa 1990 was something approaching an act of revolution - but believe it or not, it was a widely expressed opinion back then that Children Of The Revolution marked the moment at which T. Rex 'jumped' the 'shark', largely on the basis of its purported Holidays In The Sun-esque lack of substantial discernible difference to previous offerings, and the fact that - shock horror - it only reached number two. However, one listen to the still-mighty song itself is enough to confirm why this daft opinion has long since been overturned, and though while admittedly the band do look a little, erm, 'tired' in this performance, there's no disputing the energy, enthusiasm and star quality that are still vividly on display. Of course, the words 'Bolan' and 'Boogie' would indeed become mutually incompatible soon enough, but thankfully we'll have to wait until Glam Rock 3 to witness any of that.


Next up is Alvin Stardust, once regarded as a derivative johnny-come-lately bandwagon-jumping Glam opportunist of the first order, but more recently belatedly promoted into the First Division for rather quite obvious reasons. Though it would have been better if the reasons had actually been to do with his music being quite good after all. And The Grimleys, obviously. He clearly wasn't quite so readily disregarded at the time, though, as this Top Of The Pops performance of My Coo Ca Choo is pretty much the most visually elaborate, if not ridiculously over the top, inclusion in this entire compilation. It starts with a Thermal Image Camera-enabled rendition of Alvin himself in profile, before he becomes a zoom-varying full-size figure superimposed in front of footage of his decidedly less than Glam-looking band, with additional psychedelic multi-image effects thrown in (or should that be thrown on?) for good measure. Meanwhile, in a weird coincidence, it was around the time of the video's release that Cadbury's Picnic opted to start advertising their wares with a comedy rewrite of My Coo Ca Choo, featuring the video-manipulated Calvin The Camel singing the praises of "peanuts, raisins, whuafffer biscuits". Though as the accompanying The Chart Show-riffing data boxes informed us, he wouldn't be touring because 'he can't stand dates'. The writers of TV's Thompson were reportedly not losing sleep.


Five numbers in, we finally get to Sweet, all of whose biggest and best hits - or at least the ones that there were actually still extant TV performances of - were included on the first volume of Glam Rock. Though even then they were somewhat compromised by the use of a weirdly edited promo film for Teenage Rampage that omitted roughly seventy five percent of the actual song, and the skipping over of the oft-repeated eye-maddeningly solarised Top Of The Pops performance of Blockbuster! in favour of another lesser-seen one from another edition, in which Steve Priest's somewhat ideologically dubious choice of 'camp' stage gear caused uneasiness and indeed queasiness even at the time the video was first released. Thankfully there's nothing so troubling on offer here, though unfortunately Glam Rock 2 is left with no archival option than to delve into the somewhat less celebrated era when they started writing and producing their own material, and it doesn't always make for satisfying listening. Action, dating from the all but post-Glam year of 1975, was a reasonably enough sized hit, but it's quite clear from this performance that the band had more or less phased out the spangly business in favour of a more conventional 'rock' look and indeed sound, while the song itself comes across as a collection of decent ideas in search of a way of actually working alongside each other. Barring a lone stray late seventies hit, Action was to prove to be their last regular top twenty appearance, and those lyrics about not needing to conform to other people's commercial gameplan, and indeed that sarky cash register in the middle, must have rung a tad hollow afterwards.


Thankfully, next up comes someone who quite clearly has no qualms about being commercial and doesn't care who knows it. Despite Roy Wood seemingly being unencumbered by the need to come up with more than one tune, Wizzard nonetheless managed to score a string of surprisingly credible Phil Spector-pastiching hits featuring increasingly bizarre instruments whilst trying their absolute hardest to look as ludicrously far past the point of tinselly ridiculousness as was possible, which stand up as some of the best chart offerings of their time. Early seventies pop did not come much more fun than this, plus they get extra points for jointly kickstarting the whole craze for Christmas singles, to the chagrin of miseryguts Scrooger-than-thou types and TV's Phil Popes everywhere. Appropriately taken from the 1973 Christmas Top Of The Pops, this performance of their finest five minutes See My Baby Jive features guitar-toting gorillas, foxy handjiving backing dancers, rollerskating angels, a custard pie fight, and Roy Wood playing both a French Horn and a vacuum cleaner - the possibility that that's exactly what he was playing on the actual record cannot be discounted - and should be used as Exhibit 'A' whenever anyone tries to prove that they're better at liking music than you by showing you a clip of Thom Yorke mumbling into a microphone about a bird that fell in a bin or something. This is exactly the sort of infectious pop silliness that we're losing out on by trying to play down the fun side of Glam Rock, and nobody's any the better off for that.


More tongue-in-cheek silliness follows, though this time it's 'allowed' due to Sparks' more critic-satisfying eccentric art-school leanings. This Town Ain't Big Enough For Both Of Us scarcely needs any introduction (though you'd be surprised at how rarely heard and indeed little remembered it was back then), and this Top Of The Pops appearance was the first that the majority of the UK had seen of Ron and Russell, and never let it be forgotten that the latter's exaggerated theatrics are every bit as entertaining as the former's more celebrated toothbrush-moustached glowering. For no readily obvious reason it's cut a bit short here, omitting the final verse and Russell's song-closing dramatics, but even so this is every bit as entertaining and indeed silly as the Wizzard performance, and once again this is exactly the sort of thing that will get missed out on if we start prizing 'art' above all else, however legitimate the reason. Although this wouldn't be missed out on due to it being regarded as 'art' in some quarters. Erm, as you were.


The same is less equivocally true of Suzi Quatro's Devil Gate Drive, which is a fun and rowdy enough rock'n'roll pastiche as it is, and is rendered here in a truly mind-frazzling sensory assault of dazzling multicoloured back-superimposed post-psychedelia psychedelia, which quick-cut alternates with an entire alternate performance in extreme close-up, while Suzi and the heavily-haired boys indulge in a wilfully ridiculous routine involving formation high-kicking dancing and bizarre interludes of 'worshipping' her gods-proferred bass guitar. It's in seeing footage like this (and indeed Can The Can) that you come to realise just how good a rock musician she was and just how unfairly this has been overlooked since, admittedly partly due to her later successful diversification into stage and television acting, radio presenting, all-round entertaining and presenting Central TV's Gas Street. Also, it's handy evidence to back up Noddy Holder's oft-repeated, under-appreciated assertion that Glam Rock came about because people needed a bit of fun in the face of the grim realities of the early seventies. Well that and the Carnaby Street boutiques starting selling glittery jackets, and the new studio technology that allowed for better recording of heavy drumbeats, and the influence of The Move, The Small Faces and Syd Barrett, and the general evolution of pop-art in a more minimalist and primary-coloured direction, and Dominic Sanbrook's probable conclusion that none of this happened outside of a couple of ephemeral second division pop stars who'd been palmed off on Mickie Most and/or Chinn And Chapman by their record companies in desperation, and... erm... um... c'mon boys, let's do it one more time for Suzi etc etc.


And it's a good job we've had that three-song outbreak of hilarity as - who'd ever believe it - a certain slightly less welcome party is now being wheeled onto the stage on the back of a giant tinselly revolving heart. I Love You Love Me Love was once so popular that it was included on the first ever commercially available compilation of karaoke backing tracks (1990's Karaoke Party on Trax Records - go on, look it up), but now just leaves the unwary listener with a bit of an uneasy feeling, particularly when it's staged with such adulation and reverence. You do have to feel a bit sorry for poor old Mike Leander, who wrote, produced, played on and probably even did the bulk of the singing on all of these now verboten hits, but it's a sympathy that can only extend so far and sometimes the inadvertent implications of a song and artist are just so much that you don't even feel like putting forward an argument for the music itself. Good Lord we need a good laugh at this point.


Thank fuck, then, for Alice Cooper, and the truly hilarious promo film for Elected, featuring everyone's favourite shock-rocker cruising the streets on his fictitious presidential campaign, 'meeting' the public (including one lady who appears to think he's an actual candidate) and planning his next senatorial move with the aid of a suited-up chimp. It's hard to convey in words just how expertly assembled this bit of irreverent comic nonsense is, from the moment a limo pulls up to reveal him grinning out of the window, to the madcap rally invaded by someone in a sub-Banana Splits elephant suit at the end, but if you're familiar with Elected and know how good it is, then saying that it's a perfectly judged visual accompaniment should get the manifesto across just fine. What's particularly interesting is that while this may all seem like a two-fingered response to America's political establishment in the wake Watergate, the actual scandal was still some months away from breaking when the song was recorded and indeed released as a single, and this promo film will almost certainly have in fact been filmed while the initial attempted covering up was taking place. Nothing ever hits quite so hard as inadvertent satire before the event.


One of the few non-Top Of The Pops performances on the tape, T. Rex's Telegram Sam is actually taken from Music In The Round, a short-lived London Weekend Television Sunday Morning arts show in which Humphrey Burton introduced and chatted to young and up-and-coming musicians ranging from The National Youth Jazz Orchestra to early music enthusiast David Munrow as they played to a small audience at London's celebrated Cockpit Theatre. The complete T. Rex edition, showcasing songs from The Slider, has since shown up on several official collections and is well worth tracking down, though the undisputed highlight is this powerful live rendition of the then-recent chart topper which, the superbly slovenly Bolan-voiced count-in aside, manages to sound impressively close to the original studio version. Incidentally, all of Music In The Round still exists, as do plenty of other ITV music shows from the sixties and early seventies featuring all manner of arcane and fascinating Glam, Psych, Prog, Soul and even straight ahead pop acts that were bewilderingly overlooked by the producers of recent missed opportunity Pop Gold. Still, it was worth it for all those endless clips of Bros on The Roxy.


Then Alvin Stardust's back with a decidely more visually appropriate backing band - who he's actually standing next to this time - for Jealous Mind, which was in fact a bigger hit than My Coo Ca Choo despite not being quite as good as it, and this is a much more moody performance, deliberately playing up the puzzling and quickly dropped 'Mean Man Of Glam' element to his stage persona with some half-hearted guitarist-shoving and microphone stand-twirling. Much like with Suzi Quatro, this was a very clear attempt to create a more subdued and stylised form of Glam, mining the rougher glitz and glamour of late fifties fashion rather than retina-infuriating gaudiness, and while it may have worked when he was telling errant road-crossers that they must be out of their tiny minds, pretending to be a big tough rebel telling 'the man' to stick it now doesn't seem to sit well with the context of times, and it was on becoming a more jovial and affable caricature that Mr. Stardust found his way into the public's affections and the wider world of all-round entertaining. TV-am, Hollyoaks, Godspell and I Feel Like Buddy Holly all lay ahead. Someone really ought to have put him in a sitcom, though.


A familiar - though noticeably re-recorded, presumably in accordance with those arcane Musicians' Union rules about bands having to mime to an alternate re-performance of their hit - Moog-tastic intro announces the arrival of Fox On The Run by Sweet, a superb bit of self-penned nonsense where they had the good sense to actually write and perform it in the style of their earlier production team-driven hits, meeting with massive success that unfortunately convinced them that they could do it all themselves in future. And what do you know, there's just enough of a hint of Glam still detectable in both their image and their performance to make it fit seamlessly in with the surrounding songs. Actually, on closer examination, those bizarre regulations don't seem to have been as rigorously enforced as you might expect them to have been, as surviving early seventies editions of Top Of The Pops appear to capture most of the featured acts more or less miming to the available-in-the-shops version, but as Sweet were so calamatiously keen to emphasise their 'real music' credentials to all and sundry by this stage, it's hardly surprising that they should have taken the fullest possible advantage of the opportunity to impress the wider viewing public.

Dalekmania is back! Yes, for no other reason than because I felt like it, I've done an article looking at what else you could have seen on TV on the day that The Daleks made their blockbusting return to the screens, in the first episode of The Dalek Invasion Of Earth on 21st November 1964. As well as the expected avalanche of Beatles, you'll find Honor Blackman picking her favourite records, Gay Byrne watching horror films, German Language romantic comedy, an unlikely Juke Box Jury guest, and, of course, Historic French Organs 3: Saint-Maximin. Oh and the sodding Black And White Minstrels, but the less said about them the better.

It's a guest post for Ben Baker - who does a lot of this kind of thing so it's well worth having a nose around the rest of his blog - and you can find it here.

And as it's nearly Doctor Who Anniversary Day, you can get any of my books at a whopping TWENTY FIVE PERCENT discount, which you can find out more about here. Well At Least It's Free and Not On Your Telly are the ones with Who-related stuff in, Hartnell Pals...

Top Of The Box is the story behind every single released by BBC Records And Tapes, from Every Loser Wins to Awesome Dood!.

Between 1970 and 1990, BBC Records And Tapes released almost three hundred singles, ranging from some of the best known and most loved theme tunes in television history to full-length versions of ones that nobody had even asked for a short version of to begin with. Along the way they also put out one-off oddities by everyone from George Formby impersonators and up-and-coming folkies to a 'computer orchestra' and some posh blokes going on about how marvellous The Queen is. Oh and then there's the one that's just the sound of someone hitting a phone.

Possibly the most bafflingly diverse catalogue of singles ever issued, viewed as a whole, it's a fascinating indication of what really was popular - and sometimes unpopular - with viewers at the time. Top Of The Box tells the story behind each of these singles, taking in familiar names, cult artists and obscure bafflements alike, and including the likes of Simon May, Peter Howell, Nick Berry, David Munrow, Roy Castle, Anita Dobson, Fascinating Aida, Aled Jones, Hazel O'Connor, Richard Stilgoe, Spike Milligan, Johnny Dankworth, Eric Clapton, The Grange Hill Cast, The Dooleys, Alan Hawkshaw, Enya, Keith Mansfield, Julie Covington, Georgie Fame, Godiego, Lena Zavaroni, Brown Sauce, Alan Price, Russell Grant, Kenneth Williams, Floella Benjamin, The Not The Nine O'Clock News Team, B.A. Robertson, Paddy Kingsland, Richard Denton & Martin Cook, The BBC Radiophonic Workshop, and of course Keith Harris & Orville. So many singles by Keith Harris & Orville. Including one that wasn't even released...

You can get Top Of The Box as a paperback here or as an eBook here, and - after thanking Graham Kibble-White for the excellent cover art, I'll just leave you with a couple of personal favourites from the catalogue...

Between 1969 and 1973, BBC Records And Tapes released a couple of dozen LPs on their short-lived 'Roundabout' imprint. Specifically aimed towards younger listeners, and presumably named in honour of a certain animated show that would have been very much on their radar at the time, the Roundabout series of albums started out strange and got even stranger, with a short and unwarranted outburst of sensibility in the middle. Here, then, is a guide to what you might expect to find if you chance upon one of these decidedly odd records lurking at the back of the 'Soundtracks' section in one of the larger charity shops...


RBT1 Fun At The Zoo


Leading naturalist Eric Simms invites us along on an All Back To Mine-style rifle through his personal collection of sound captures from zoos in That London. All immaculately recorded and sounding nice and nice and punchy in that mono field recording kind of a way, but it's debatable how much 'fun' this actually is for the young listeners, let alone the poor old elephants and tigers. You had to be there, I guess. Paul Simon's views on the album are not on record.


RBT2 Come To A Party


Perhaps indicating that they weren't quite ready to fork out for any actual actors or presenters to do the roundabouting duties just yet, BBC Radio producer Gordon Snell takes the frightfully well-spoken lead for a series of party games and songs, including quick Radiophonic Workshop-assisted rounds of Musical Bumps, Guess The Noise, O'Grady Says..., Polly Put The Kettle On, Oranges and Lemons, and, erm, 'Islands, Balloon and Parcel'. No, us neither. He also gets to read out one of his self-penned nonsense stories, 'How The Plonks Got Their Hair'. It's even weirder than you're thinking.


RBT3 Listen With Mother


Only three whole releases in, they've finally opted to put one out based on an actual recognisable children's programme, with the cast of long-running stories, songs and percussion radio hoedown Listen With Mother ushered into a recording booth to re-interpret some of their greatest hits for the listening masses. So basically the tambourine-thumped expected likes of Ring A Ring O' Roses, Little Bo Peep, This Is The Way The Ladies Ride and The Grand Old Duke Of York, alongside such slightly more esoteric fare as A Fishing Rod For Carlos, A Pig With A Wig, From The Cabbage Patch To Australia and, erm, Gay Go Up And Gay Go Down. Moving hastily on...


RBT4 Animal Magic


Still persisting with that off-putting generic front cover branding, but at least they've wheeled out a potentially interest-attracting big name this time around, in the form of veteran anthropomorphist and Public Enemy Number Fifty Three Million Johnny Morris, indulging in much the same sort of skidding-penguin-saying-"look-out-below-fellars!" antics as on the televisual version of Animal Magic, only this time without the televisuals. And what do you know, it works pretty much just as well. Plus, thankfully, he doesn't start warbling on about Gemini The Sealion here either.


RBT5 Jackanory


The BBC's kaleidoscope-fronted storytelling slot makes a hazardous book-TV-vinyl triple-jump with a quartet of readings of traditional folk tales - one each from England, Ireland, Scotland and Wales - culled from the show itself, complete with that never-explained 'hallucinogenic tree' iconography on the back cover. One-woman vaudeville act and pre-war TV mainstay Maureen Potter, Dempsey And Makepeace-botherer Ray Smith, Jackanory Week One helmsman Lee Montague, and Magnus Magnusson - with nary a 'started so I'll finish' gag in sight - do the royalty-free reading out honours. Distinctly short on grooves.


RBT6 Party Time

Gordon Snell's back, and this time he's armed with tongue-twisters, games of I-Spy and, well, more or less exactly the same as before, basically. The only real difference being that the generic cover art has undergone a less-than-subtle overhaul that might lead more suspicious minds to question exactly what refreshments were on offer at said party. Tizer, Caramac and blackcurrant jelly, obviously.


RBT7 The Wizard Of Oz


The optical cause for concern may well continue, but here for the first time ever the cover-mounted roundabout gets ditched in favour of some of the Hilary-Hayton-meets-Jelly-Tots interpretations of the lead characters from Jackanory's celebrated 1970 reading of Frank L. Baum's film-inspiring fantasy novel, as narrated (and indeed re-narrated for this release) by Bernard Cribbins with bits and pieces of hamfisted sound effects and loungey keyboard music. Nobody has tried syncing this up with The Dark Side Of The Moon as far as anyone knows.


RBT8 Magic Roundabout


Eric Thompson, the theme music, and straight-ahead no-nonsense re-recordings of ten original nonsense-crammed stories complete with obscure characters, incessantly-volumed boings, and Dylan and Brian apparently trying to play Rainy Day Women #12 And 35. Do you need any more qualification? Oh you do? Right, well, maybe somebody's been going on about The Magic Roundabout quite a bit recently...


RBT9 Listen With Mother No.2


The cover art experiments continue and everything's gone a bit E Arth Welcome, suggesting that we're about to be treated to a downbeat spoken word version of There's A Hole In My Bucket over a looped bit of Etienne de Crecy. Sadly, though, it's just a bunch of typical Listen With Mother stories with names like Mrs. Moppingdust And The Lettuce Thief and The Six Thin Brothers, though you do have to wonder if Thom Yorke was listening in for The Unhappy Computer.


RBT10 Play School


As the back cover photos which make the presenters look like they've just spilled out of a 'psychedelic' nightclub in a late sixties British spy thriller suggest, you'll find a far more far-out calibre of stories on here, including bleepy retro sci-fi tone poem The Moon Rocket, freestyle-inviting break-heavy animals-go-prog jolliness Fearless Fred's Amazing Animal Band, and the Radiophonic Workshop-assisted tale of everyday existentialism amongst the Splodges. Sampled by more than one dance artist, despite being a spoken word record. Stitch that, Gordon Snell!

It seems that there never was an RBT11, so instead it's straight on to... 


RBT12 The Adventures Of Sir Prancelot 


John Ryan's oft-forgotten post-Mary, Mungo And Midge middle ages tomfoolery steps into stereo for this epic-length crusade to the Holy Land, which would make this one of the highlights of the catalogue if it wasn't for one major drawback - while the sleeve makes a big deal of the inclusion of the bonkers electric sitar-led Jester-mimed what's-that-got-to-do-with-medieval theme music, it's actually only in heavily edited form and in one speaker. Tell those moogs funks breaks merchants on eBay where they can moog funk break it.


RBT13 Camberwick Green


A straight reissue of 1966's Welcome To Camberwick Green, giving listeners another chance to enjoy Peter Hazel and Windy Miller wandering aimlessly about in a flimsy pretext to cram in crisp clean mono versions of pretty much all of the songs from the show, some of them in vocal AND instrumental versions to boot. It's OK, you can come back now. 'The Clown' isn't on the cover.


RBT14 Music Time


In its original black and white 'Pie Chart'-heralded incarnation, Music Time was a very different show, and leaned very much towards the the Corn Riggs Are Bonnie end of the musical scale. Here letter-e-deficient duo Mari Griffith and Ian Humpris take us through some stark acoustic renditions of folk songs from around the world, including Deaf Woman's Courtship, Goodbye Old Paint, O Waly Waly and the ever so slightly dubious Man In The Wood. Cadet Rousselle was not available for comment. Other than to confirm that he has houses three.


RBT15 Bedtime Stories


Johnny Morris rattles through a selection of self-penned yawn-friendly yarns, apparently derived from 'The Post Office Dial-A-Bedtime-Story Service', and introducting us to the likes of Snapper The Crocodile, Snowdrop The Polar Bear, Tubthump The Gorilla (who presumably gets knocked down, but he gets up again), and... well, you get the picture. He doesn't tell one about that lamp, though.


RBT16 Mary, Mungo And Midge


TV's premier Girl/Dog/Mouse ensemble make it to vinyl with a handful of 'your favourite stories from BBCTV' (which doesn't include the one about the clock so that's false advertising for starters), which might lose something with the absence of the minimalist cardboard cutout animation but at least you get lovely medium-fi versions of the opening narration and closing music. There's also reputedly a 'break' hidden away on there somewhere, but even Spindarella hasn't been able to locate it.


RBT17 Bang On A Drum - Songs From Play School And Play Away


Oh yes, this is everything that cover promises. And so much more. Ridiculous Pickettywitch-meets-Mike-Westbrook Pop/Acid Folk/Brit-Jazz hybrid musical mismatch very much to the fore as various frustrated singer-songwriters who'd been reduced to presenting Play School to make ends meet get the opportunity to rework some of their back catalogue flops for younger listeners, going absolutely musically overboard on the way. Rammed from start to finish with hidden delights like Early In The Morning, Sunbeams Play, The Israeli Boat Song, I Like Peace I Like Quiet, and of course the much-sampled Bang On A Drum itself. Notice also how Hamble appears to just be attacking the air with her fists. Just adds to the mounting evidence, frankly.


RBT18 Adventures Of Parsley


Ten retold tales from the post-The Herbs excursion into free-form scattershot five-minute surrealism, with Parsley and Dill (who - controversially - 'narrates' a handful of them) joined by a procession of Guest Herbs and that Farfisa-blinking-in-and-out-of-dimensional-plane theme music in all of its bass speaker-blowing glory. Wonder if that geezer who was always looking for 'THE HERBS LP' in the Record Collector'Wanted' listings ever found a copy?


RBT19 Play Away


A pretty good attempt at doing a full edition of Play Away in sound only, meaning that there's sketches, gags, poems and free-form parlour games in between all of the music. Famed combination of Blaxploitation funk and Dawkins-esque rationalism Superstition is the obvious standout, though the likes of The Party Is About To Begin, Words Words Words, Umbababarumba and an energetic rattle through If I Had A Hammer are also ever so slightly good, and then on the non-musical side there's the word-walloping playlet Captain Kipper's Clipper. Note also the use of Toni Arthur's arse as a selling point.

As there was no RBT20, let's give thanks to The Lord for...


RBT21 Songs Of Praise For Young Folk


They're all we need to lift our lift our lift our lift our hearts. BBC Records And Tapes' early output was full of these Pete Seeger-inspired 'making worship fun' efforts performed in cahoots with then-struggling now-collectable Acid Folkies - previous offerings had involved the likes of Heather Jones, Dana Stirk and The Crown Folk - and this collaboration between a load of caterwauling kids and the label's in-house psych-heads Trane was no exception, treating listeners to renditions of such oddly-titled God-botherings as There Is A God, O Ru-Ru-Ru, Fisherman Peter and, erm, Love Came A-Tricklin' Down. But while it may be talked about in hushed tones by pillocks with wonky hats nowadays, was it a turntable favourite with youngsters back then? More than likely not.


RBT101 Bobby Lamb And The Keymen


What happened to RBT's 22 to 100 is something we may never know, and sadly listeners would be denied the chance to hear albums based on On The Farm and Mandog, as we leap straight on to... um... Radio 2 favourites Bobby Lamb and his Hammond-hammering wah wah-peddling backing ensemble taking a psych-lounge stroll through a handful of recent top pop disc hits. From a modern day Exotica fan's point of view there's no arguing with the escalating mayhem of their take on The Fool On The Hill, or the slow-burning funk of Harlem Nocturne and Cinnamon And Cloves, and it's rounds of applause all round when Paddy Kingsland of the BBC Radiophonic Workshop shows up to splatter some elastic Moog all over Aquarius, but you really do have to feel for any child who might have been inadvertently bought this when they were hoping for a selection of songs from Hope And Keen's Crazy Bus or something.


RBT102 The Many Voices Of Peter Ustinov


Explorer! Fitness Instructor! Croupier! Lord Mayor's Croupier! It seems we're straying a bit from the original Roundabout brief here, as rather than showing off his best Frank Spencer, TV's That Bloke Where You Were Never Quite Sure Exactly What He Did spends an entire two sides of vinyl deep in 'After Supper Conversation' with those teen sensations all the kids were going crazy for, Cliff Michelmore, Kenneth Allsop and Derek Hart. The latter clearly having left The Bishop Of Woolwich and a Nude Man at home on this occasion.


RBT103 Girl On the Test Card 


Pete Winslow and his not-particularly-onomatopaeic 'King Size Brass' tootle their way through a selection of commercially-available renditions of the non-commercially-available instrumentals regularly heard behind BBC Test Card F; the sleeve notes suggest that this was due to overwhelming viewer interest, though it's more than possible that TV's Scariest Bastards simply marched on BBC Records And Tapes and demanded the release themselves. To be honest, from Take Your Time to Menorcan Mardi Gras, it's all rather jolly, perky and ultimately 'beat'-free fare - even the misleadingly promisingly-titled Six Two Five 405 - but hidden away right at the end you'll find the nigh-on seven minute intergalactic groove of Space Chariots. How come it suddenly gets so interesting? You are not entitled to ask.


RBT104 S'Wonderful


You must remember that huge seventies craze for big band swing, when all the kids downed spacehoppers in favour of dusty old wax cylinders of The Edison Concert Band? No? Well it clearly happened, as here's BBC Records And Tapes' attempt to cash in on the phenomenon with a handful of lively toe-tappers cobbled together from other previous non-Roundabout releases and a distinctly un-childfriendly cover. Either that, or 'Girl' and 'Clown' really did manage to get their feet under the musical table - indeed, as if to underline this, there's a track from Girl On The Test Card included here - and this change of direction was taken merely in the desperate hope of keeping them happy. In which case we would like to categorically state that this is all jolly good, and well done everyone involved, and now please move on as there is nothing more to see here.


RBT106 Jumping To Fame - The Story Of Showjumping Today


At least some semblance of an acknowledgement of what young people like here - well, a certain percentage of them won't shut up about wanting to own a horse - with a cut-down version of a Radio 4 series featuring Leanine McMullen chatting to equestrians great and small about their Square Oxer shenanigans. It also clearly jumped RBT105 too, as there's no record of that ever having been released.


RBT 107 With Brass And Strings 


Another collection of stuff culled from other extant Big Band-friendly releases, including renditions of the themes from those top children's favourites Softly Softly, Owen M.D., Van Der Valk and the Shipping Forecast (and another tip of the blue triangular hat to TV 'Clown' and 'Girl'). And with that, the Roundabout experiment was quietly retired. Or, if you will, stopped rotating. Sorry.



Top Of The Box, the story behind every single released by BBC Records And Tapes (including more from 'Girl' and 'Clown'), is available here.

Some of you, if you've been following my ramblings for a while, might well be aware that I have a keen interest in 'lost' programmes from the sixties, seventies and even the eighties. Most of you, however, won't be aware that I've actually found quite a few previously 'lost' programmes myself. That's because these have mostly been recoveries of missing radio shows, and they never really get the same sort of attention that wiped television does.

In fairness, most people probably don't even realise that there actually is any missing radio; and to be honest I didn't either until I started research for Fun At One, and discovered that there were a lot of surprising gaps in surprising places. Many of said gaps have since been plugged, and while I'm not that into blowing my own trumpet, it's fair to say that the schedule for Radio 4Extra's 'Comedy Controller' slot might be even more repetitive still without a couple of bits and pieces that I've tracked down and returned to the archives.

On a handful of occasions, I've also been involved to varying - and mostly tangential - extents with the recovery of lost TV shows. Rather than liberated from far-flung film libraries or spotted on a table at a car boot sale, however, these have all been recovered from early off-air recordings, usually made and kept by someone who had no idea of their rarity or value; sometimes even the people involved in the shows haven't been aware that they are in possession of potentially the only copy in existence. This has included a couple of notable comedy shows and one very notable pop music show indeed, but I've rarely ever discussed any of this as, seeing as I wasn't actually the person who negotiated a loan of the tapes and then spent hours painstakingly retrieving a watchable copy from the fragile recording on an obsolete format, I don't feel that I really deserve credit for their recovery.

However, this time it's a bit different...


One area of the BBC's archive where there are substantial gaps, though you may not necessarily be aware of this, is in late seventies and early eighties children's television. Cutting a very long story very short indeed, this was the result of a project to digitise the archives around the late eighties/early nineties, and a corresponding shortfall in funding that meant that not everything could be transferred. The tapes that had fallen outside the allocated budget were offered to the BFI, who took what they could but unfortunately had neither the space nor the resources to take everything. The upshot of this was that a difficult decision was taken to jettison huge swathes of formulaic shows with little percieved repeat value, where it was felt at the time that a couple of representative examples might be all that anyone ever needed. A definition that somehow didn't quite manage to extend to EastEnders.

As you can imagine, Children's Television was particularly badly affected by this decision, and large numbers of editions of the likes of Swap Shop, Cheggers Plays Pop, Ragtime and Jackanory Playhouse were consigned to archival oblivion. In fairness, however, a significant number were also kept, and if you want to start blaming anyone, look instead to the 'money men', the middle-managers, and that blue sky thinking-obsessed prat at the top of the bureaucracy-addled tree. Also, despite wild rumours to the contrary, this wasn't adopted as a long-term wipe-crazy policy, and no matter what Stewart Lee might vaguely suggest, all of This Morning With Richard Not Judy is still present and correct. It's not on DVD, though, but that's another story.

Anyway, since the realisation sank in that this might possibly have been something of an error of judgement, there have been a number of recoveries and often even in broadcast quality too; notably there are now complete runs of Rentaghost and the extended Alberto Frog-equipped editions of Bod in existence. But when it came to the more obscure and less well-remembered shows affected by the decision, was there any hope of ever finding any lost episodes? Would anyone really have kept any off-airs of long-forgotten science-for-under-fives show Over The Moon?


Well, that's a question that I've been keeping very much in mind while working on an ongoing project that has involved chatting to quite a few people who were involved with BBC Children's Television around this time. Wherever possible, I've taken the opportunity to ask cast and crew members if they might still have a couple of VHSes (or even Betamaxes) of their television appearances knocking around. Sadly most have drawn a blank, and a couple of others are sure they do but so far haven't been able to turn anything up; more often than not, any such tapes will be in boxes behind tons of other boxes in attics rather than neatly filed and proudly displayed on the mantelpiece. More recently, though, I turned my attention to a show called How Do You Do!.


For the benefit of anyone who doesn't remember it - and I'd wager that's the vast majority of the people reading this - How Do You Do! made its debut in the BBC's traditional 'Watch With Mother' lunchtime slot in 1977. Created by Play School presenter Carole Ward, and representing an early and surprisingly subtle move to acknowledge multiculturalism, each edition featured presenters Carmen Munro and Greg Knowles playing counting and rhyming games, and a story - drawn by Joe creator Joan Hickson - about the hip and liberated pre-school teacher Miss King and her diverse class of charges; snooty Caroline, timid Mary, practical Tony, moody Scott, worryingly surreal twins Annie and Louise, outgoing George, quietly cheerful Kevin, tomboy space cadet Sandra, and Cheng, who didn't speak much English but was keen to learn. The thirteen episodes of How Do You Do! were repeated a staggering number of times up to 1981 - surviving for a while into the rebranding of the timeslot as 'See Saw' - but by the end of the decade there were only seven of them left.


Recently, I was lucky enough to be able have a bit of a chat with Greg Knowles, who aside from providing me with all manner of fascinating background details on the production of this little-documented show, also mentioned in passing that he still had quite a few episodes of How Do You Do! on video. Needless to say, I was somewhat excited by this; as indeed was Greg, who had no idea that the series was no longer intact in the archives. I quickly arranged for copies, and sat down to watch them, hoping that they wouldn't just be the seven extant ones. And, as luck would have it, three of them weren't, and copies of Counting Time, Finding Out and Baby Sitting in full and in surprisingly good quality are currently winging their way back to the archives. Suddenly we've gone from seven existing episodes to ten and it all feels a lot less incomplete. And I haven't even spoken to everyone involved in the show yet.


Some people are probably reading this and scoffing that this is a rather trivial find compared to, say, A Madhouse On Castle Street, Doctor Who And The Macra Terror or The Beatles on Juke Box Jury. Which is quite possibly true from a cultural or mass popularity point of view, but in its own way, this is every bit as important a find as anything more high profile. Like so many other unlikely recoveries in recent years of shows that were thought to be lost forever, it proves beyond all doubt that even the most obscure and unlikely programme shown after the arrival of home video might still be out there somewhere. So if you've got any more off-airs of How Do You Do!, please let me know. Or Playboard. Or Ragtime. Or Take Hart, Play School, Play Away, Why Don't You?, Over The Moon, Swap Shop, Saturday Superstore, Get Set For Summer, Cheggers Plays Pop, Ring-A-Ding, Lucky Numbers, Screen Test, Star Turn Challenge, Play Chess, Chock-A-Block, Animal Magic, The Adventure Game, Jackanory Playhouse...

Myself and Ben Baker are currently doing an Advent Calendar podcast, where we're talking about a different peculiar Christmas record every day in the run-up to 25th December.

We've already looked at the seasonal singing efforts of Band Aid II, Captain Sensible, Zig & Zag, The Royal Guardsmen, Lionel Bart, C3P0, the Z-Cars cast and many others (but NOT the fucking Minipops), and there's loads more to come. Along the way we've also discussed whether or not Aaron Neville was A Wizbit, what constitutes Droids canon, how Lee & Herring got the rules for the Rock'n'Roll Hall Of Mediocrity wrong, whether it's possible to make a decent pun on Peter Egan's name, The Impression Phil Cool Couldn't Do and whether National Lampoon's Christmas Vacation is any good or not. Which it isn't. Fact. And we haven't even got to the one with the Record Store Day joke in it yet...

You can find all the podcasts so far here. And if you'd like to sponsor a future one, please let us know...

Round about now, you’ll start seeing newspaper columnists offering their own personal ‘tips’ for ‘surviving’ the Festive Season. Usually these will involve ingesting specific herbal remedies and particular blends of tea or coffee, turning off your router to get ‘headspace’, recommendations of some heavyweight thing on Netflix and what have you… and really, seriously, what use are any of these to any of us? When you’re haring around Primark on the last Saturday before Christmas trying to find that last elusive present for that difficult-to-buy-for relative, do you really want the organisationally precarious pointers of some iPad-toting metropolitan type reverberating round your head as your last hope for inner peace and quiet?

Of course you don’t. You need an alternative. So join us as we go back in time. Not half-heartedly back in time like those trendy berks who pretend that they think VHS is a ‘superior format’, but way back, properly back. Back to a time when Christmas seemed less frantic, even though it probably wasn’t. And how do you get into this tranquil yet lazily uncritically nostalgic thoughtzone? Easy – by following these eight simple steps!



1. PUT UP SOME OLD-SKOOL DECORATIONS


Forget those enormous mazes of sequenced flashing lights that provoke constant baffling questions from elderly relatives. Ignore that battery-operated poinsettia that rotates and glitters while playing O Come All Ye Faithful. And whatever you do, don’t stick any of those signs outside your house saying “SANTA – PLEASE STOP HERE”, “WORLD’S BEST CHRISTMAS DAD 2000 XTREEM” or “MY OTHER SEASONAL OBSESSION IS TAKING MY COUCH OUT ON THE PAVEMENT AT THE FIRST SIGN OF SUMMER LIKE I’M SOMEONE OUT OF THE WIRE”. It’s costly, it’s unnecessary, and it’ll get you into an arms race-esque battle with the van driving geezer across the road and his inexhaustible supply of eight foot inflatable Rudolphs.

Nope, if you want to show everyone how much you like Christmas, you’ve got to go seriously old-skool. If you’re about to start decking the halls, get yourself a load of multi-coloured gummed paper  and cover every room in the sort of lo-fi decorations that children used to carry home from school at odd angles on the last day before Christmas, which parents would then have to put up out of politeness while that expensive moulded glittery gold relief they got from John Lewis sat unused in a drawer telepathically reminding them of its disproportionate price tag.



2. REMAIN UNMOVED BY HI-TECH CHRISTMAS TREES


Never mind the debate about ‘real’ vs ‘artificial’ trees - your position on that really does depend on your capacity for coping with excessive vaccuming and visits to the vets as your cat/dog/toddler inevitably gets all pine-needles in their feet. The retailers want to push you though; what’s left of Habitat have something that looks like a party hat, and it glows and everything, AND it fits on your desk. Maybe you want one that looks like a marble-run, or a catheter tube with lights in it. Perhaps one that stands in something resembling a French urinal, while it plays music and actual snow falls around it. It probably spins as well. That’s what they tell you that you should get.

No. Make Christmas magical again. Dig out the PROPER tree. Yes, it’s artificial. Some of the fake needles have fallen off again, and the branches are increasingly brittle. That stand is still a nightmare to put together. And it’s wonky once assembled. Doesn’t matter. Just make sure that it’s a pre-lit one, where the LED lights are tastefully wrapped around the branches for you. You don’t want to fall into a lazy comedy trope, after all.



3. RESIST THE FESTIVE LATTE


It’s an unending risk for the modern Christmas Shopper – every last coffee chain, sandwich shop and whatever you generically call those places where they do pasties and stuff is forever trying to lure you in to sample their festive wares to a soundtrack of jazzy reworkings of something that sounds almost but not quite like Once In Royal David’s City. Usually starting from the second week of October if we’re being honest about it. Angularly-syruped lattes! Caramel and Sticky Toffee ‘Christmas Slices’! Turkey, cranberry, bacon, bread sauce and stuffing slip hazards in waiting! Some would doubtless have you believe that such fripperies are the very fuel on which the harassed Christmas Shopper runs. But not us.

Save yourself at least some of that three pounds twenty and make some instant coffee at home, taking care to ensure it’s weak, badly stirred, and overall the sort of quality you’d expect from a vending machine that has been meticulously programmed to poorly replicate the coffee-making facilities of another vending machine. Take it with you in a flask, then pour it into a cheap styrofoam cup as if purchased from a stall run by a bloke in a football hat. Add a Kit-Kat or some other equally no-frills chocolate bar purchased from whatever they have instead of station kiosks now, and you have the perfect culinary accompaniment to wondering how everyone’s going to fit on the next train, and where in the name of Railwatch it is anyway.



4. BUY ONE OF ‘THIS YEAR’S TOP TOYS’ FROM ANOTHER YEAR


The humble ‘Christmas List’ has come a long way from the days when kids would just write ‘LEGO’ on a piece of paper and leave it lying around somewhere they thought constituted subtle. The rise of online retailers and Wish Lists have left us in no doubt as to what anyone from six to sixty wants for Christmas. And yes, probably even Mariah Carey’s got one too. But should you give in and pre-order them that Limited Edition Steelbook of The Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt and the twelve pack of interactive coffee pods or whatever it is?

No. They’ll get Boglins and they’ll like it. Admittedly you’ll often have to fork out a fair whack eBay for one of the REAL Top Toys of years gone by these days, but if you opt for something that was highly touted but never caught on, you’re pretty much quids in. Rock Lords, B.A.R.T., Wrinkles, Rubik’s Magic and so many other second division “oh… thanks” Christmas Morning Pillowcase mainstays of yesteryear make an ideal present for that easy-to-buy-for relative who needs reminding that a bit more gratitude every now and then might be a nice thing. Especially at Christmas.



5. SCOFF A RETRO SELECTION BOX


Celebrations. Miniature Heroes. Those Expensive Biscuits Where Everyone Takes The Foil-Wrapped Ones First. They’ve all long since come to dominate autopilot cursory Christmas Gift ubiquity to such an extent that they’ve even started to make Ferrero Rocher look like an infrequently-sighted and impossibly-exotic relic of better days. And does anyone even remember poor old Neapolitans now?

Doubtless you’ll have already acquired an EU Butter Mountain-rivalling stack of them from work – and that’s even before the extended family have chimed in – so take your mind off the endless repetitive choc-scoffage ahead by fashioning a close approximation of one of those old-style branded Selection Boxes that Mars, Cadbury and Rowntree Macintosh used to do. To do this you’ll need, say, a Mars, a Bounty and a Milky Way, plus Snickers and Starburst with replacement Marathon and Opal Fruit labels printed off from Google Images and glued over the top. You’ll just have to use your memory for Spangles, though. Then stick them in an only slightly bigger rectangular box, draw some thickly-lined snow and spiral-eyed reindeer on the front, and a rubbish game about helping Santa get to the Robin or something on the back, and, well, stuff your face before your siblings can get hold of it.



6. CIRCLE YOUR HIGHLIGHTS IN A VINTAGE TV LISTING


We’re not going to snipe at how technology has enhanced the modern viewing planning experience as, well, it’s actually quite a good thing.

Like us, though, you probably still miss the thrill of getting the actual physical double Radio Times and TV Times before the listings had been published anywhere else, having to wait impatiently for your ‘turn’ to look at it, then haphazardly circling anything you might have even the most microscopically remote interest in watching, blithely marking all kinds of non-festive Channel 4 documentaries and Radio 2 salutes to ‘the hits of the seventies’ as you went. There’s loads of scanned pages on the web now, so why not print one off and, in amongst the Coronation Streets and Bergeracs and Etics And Erns, see if you can find something where you’ll have no idea why you scribbled around it two weeks later.



7. DIG OUT NOW - THE CHRISTMAS ALBUM


Nothing says Christmas more than finally sitting down after you’ve done all your shopping, and realising that you have to wrap the presents now, and you really aren’t in the mood. There’s only one thing for it, chucking on the ultimate in mood-setting moneyspinning compilation albums that inexplicably get re-released with slightly different track orders every single year despite the fact that all of the good Christmas songs that people buy these for were released prior to 1990. You sit there trying to find the end of the sellotape while Noddy Holder vies with Roy Wood in the argument for the best of the party songs, but there’s more presents to wrap and it’s only a seventy minute CD. You’ll never get finished in time. Then a decision has to be made; it’s a double-CD album. Have you got one of the older ones full of old-standards? Bing without Bowie, Nat King Cole and Elvis with depressing ballads? Or is it one of the newer releases, all Robbie Williams singing Angels, and something by a fly-by night group hastily assembled on an ITV talent show two years ago. An earnest cover version from a John Lewis advert.

There’s only one sensible decision when faced with that choice. Stick on the original Now - The Christmas Album from 1985 again. Nobody wants to listen to Americans getting Christmas songs wrong, and you won't find Abba on there singing about having a Happy New Year. And don’t skip Another Rock And Roll Christmas by you know who.



8. JOIN THE TEAMS FOR ANOTHER ROUND... OF TELLY ADDICTS!


Given Noel usually turned up on Christmas Day most years, and the House Party famously saw off The Darling Buds of May on Boxing Day 1992, it's perhaps surprising that perhaps the Edmonds series we most associate with the festive season is Telly Addicts, but for some reason it's always been intertwined. Maybe this is because its presence in the schedules every September was the first marker on the long road to 25th December, knowing that it would run right up until Christmas. Which sadly doesn't happen any more, but Noel's ever hawk-like eye for the tie-in cash-in potential saw to it that you can recreate that thrill easily enough.

There were, we believe, two Telly Addicts games. The later one, a conventional board game going under the banner of Family Telly Addicts, we don't intend to dwell on (because we never had it), but the first was particularly exciting as it came with its own Hoofer Doofer! Alright, so it was basically a glorified calculator where you inputted the code number of the question and it gave you the numeric answer, then at the end calculated the score, but it seemed terrifically exciting thirty years ago, so much so that it didn't even need a board. The only other accompaniment was a series of books of questions covering all the rounds, including the Props round (not that exciting, you just read them out). But given you could supply your own sofas, this was probably the most accurate facsimile of a TV game show of them all. Those were halcyon days for Telly Addicts, before the show went shit and was axed, but then in 2003 came the Telly Addicts DVD Game! Recorded during Noel's lost weekend that lasted about five years at the turn of the century, we were delighted Noel introduced it by saying "We're back!", very much like ALF returning in pog form. This time we could actually see the clips, although the limited number and less-then-random sequencing rendered it a bit of a farce, and the only way you could stop the game was to physically eject it from the player as it overrode the stop button. Still, at least it served as a better ending that that awful running around revamp, so we all got a bit of closure.


The Essential Saturday-Before-Christmas Survival Guide (In Eight Easy Steps) written by Tim Worthington, Dan Thornton and Steve Williams. Models: Ruby Cunliffe, Garreth F. Hirons, Vikki Gregorich, Some Tinsel. You can find more festive nonsense in my book Super Expanded Deluxe Edition. And is Paul McCartney the real Santa Christmas?

Watching TV in school was a week-brightening treat at any time of the year, but especially so in the run-up to Christmas. While in those days the gap between the first week of September and the last week of December could seem to stretch on into infinity, whenever the Schools' TV shows went into their oft-repeated Festive modules, you at least knew that it was now only a matter of weeks until you were able to spend your mornings watching The Red Hand Gang and finding that all of the Matchmakers had been eaten before you'd even got near them. And - more importantly - not having to go to school.

Although Music Time's lavish stop motion-animated adaptations of The Nutcracker and Lieutenant Kije probably make it a close run thing, it's a fair bet that the most fondly remembered of these Festive diversions is the two-part retelling of The Nativity by Watch. First seen on BBC1 in 1977, and repeated many times up to the early nineties - sometimes in a standalone omnibus format on or around Christmas Day itself - it's perhaps not surprising that so many erstwhile schoolchildren should look back on it with such affection. As well as tying in with memories of sitting cross-legged in front of those funny big televisions with shutters on them, it's also redolent - much like Blue Peter's more widely celebrated Advent Crown - of a time when cheap home-made decorations were not just tolerated but actively encouraged, and of a long-lost simpler and more exuberant way of making and indeed watching television. And of course with realising that the Christmas Holidays were only a matter of weeks away. It probably wouldn't do to understate that one.

So, in the first of a series of articles looking back to that simpler and more exuberant time in BBC Children's Television in particular, today we're going to be taking a look at those two episodes of Watch and trying to work out what made them just so immovably lodged in the collective memory of a generation or two in a way that the Christmas modules of Going To Work or Mathshow sure never managed to. If indeed either of them ever actually had Christmas modules, and the fact that nobody's quite sure whether they did or not says a lot really. Anyway, it's time to watch Watch. A time of celebration. A time to clap your hands and be cheery...


The first episode of the Watch Nativity opens with that instantly familiar combination of jaunty jazzy flute theme music (as later shamelessly purloined by The Wonder Stuff for Welcome To The Cheap Seats) and shapeshifting title-spelling blobs of multicoloured modelling clay, which on this occasion set out their, erm, stall by morphing into a rough approximation of a crib. Instead of cutting straight to the studio, though, there's a dissolve into expensive-looking location footage of presenter Louise Hall-Taylor and her alarmingly expansive layered hairstyle sitting on a hillside in Jerusalem. Although Watch had been running since 1967, initially under the stewardship of the somewhat less with-it Rosanne Harvey, the former anchor of ITV lunchtime show Hickory House had come on board in 1976 as part of a more assertive relaunch of the well-established documentary strand to incorporate more interactivity and humour. Although Louise was also present for pretty much all of the other well-remembered Watch interludes, including the modules on Robinson Crusoe, David And Goliath, evolution and, erm, pancakes, this remains her definitive small-screen moment, and when you witness that opening shot it's not difficult to see why.

Pre-adolescent hearts might well have been a-flutter, but Watch is ostensibly here to engage their minds, and that's why Louise is keen to tell us her reason for lounging around on some rocks in a natty white dress and necktie - she's listening to some bells sounding from "not a very big town... but one of the most famous towns in the world". After some pretty impressive shots of Bethlehem and indeed those notably sonorous bells, she tells us that over the next two weeks they're going to be telling us a story, although it's actually going to be started off back in 'the studio' by her co-presenter James Earl Adair. If you'd been thinking that this was all starting to look impressively expensive for a schools television production, then the book-balancing is about to begin in earnest.

In fact, book-balancing is something of an understatement. James hasn't even finished making all of the props and puppets for the story before the cameras start rolling, and after introducing us to a model house ("it's not at all like the houses you live in, is it?") and the Mary and Joseph puppets, and filling in the details of how they came to have to head for Bethlehem in the first place, there's a quick cut to Louise walking along a dusty track and commenting on how the people of the past had to use donkeys instead of cars and motorways while he hastily fashions a donkey puppet on the spot; we rejoin James in the studio literally as he's stapling the pieces together. As he pushes the now donkey-equipped Mary and Joseph along and sings a soulful rendition of Little Donkey - of which more in a moment - there's also some location film of a couple actually riding a donkey along the dusty track that we saw a couple of minutes ago. While it's hardly Cannibal Ferox, you do have to wonder if this kind of ethically-iffy animal-exploiting footage would actually be allowed in a programme aimed at children now.


Although the donkey and its charges soon trot out of shot, we stay on location for the moment as Louise reiterates just how much Bethlehem has changed since Biblical times, the most significant manifestation of this apparently being that the rooves are now covered in television aerials. Thankfully, there's a somewhat less technologically advanced village nearby where she can give us some pointers towards what life and architecture might have been like in the days before houses were set up to facilitate easy viewing of Horses Galore. We then see the stand-in live action Mary, Joseph and Donkey 'arriving', only to meet with an overlong and overstated montage of all-too-literal representations of doors being slammed in their faces.


And, taking care to remind us that "these houses aren't made of stone, they're made of old shoeboxes", James is about to make more or less the exact same point back at the studio. Guiding his own Mary and Joseph between said repurposed shoeboxes, he treats us to his rendition of You Can't Come In, a haunting proggy number about their dejected trudging around the biblical streets; like all of the musical numbers in the Watch Nativity, this song originates from Follow The Star, a hit mid-seventies stage musical which the BBC would go on to present their own television version of - starring the once-ubiquitous Christopher Lillicrap - in 1979. Doctor Who fans might like to note that Follow The Star was written by Wally K. Daly, who is of course best known as the creator of TV 'Dwarf Mordant'. Anyway, perhaps betraying its external origins slightly, You Can't Come In is a surprisingly credible and effective number for a schools television production, particularly on the hushed repetition of the chorus. It's also accompanied by footage of the paper couple heading towards a suspiciously cave-resembling 'stable' and cleebrating the arrival of Jesus (in the exact same crib as in the opening titles), which you can't help but notice is actually presented on rather blurry and scratchy film; an odd and jarring juxtaposition of visuals to rank with the occasions when Gabriel The Toad was a real hand puppet or Windy Miller appeared stock still whilst spraying some bees with smoke. Yes these things did happen. They weren't just hallucinations provoked by juvenile overexposure. No.


Louise isn't about to start explaining the technical whys and wherefores of this production decision - probably a wise idea given that she's only on marginally better film stock herself - but she is on hand to point out that back in Biblical times, 'stables' were indeed only glorified caves (and that's a pretty tenuous definition of 'glorified' there). Inside one such glorified cave, she meets a donkey and some fairly agressive sheep, and then there's some overlong and unneccesarily technically detailed film demonstrating how a baby is 'swaddled'. Thankfully this is just a temporary interruption to the business with the spectacularly arsey sheep, who we then see in tandem with their rather resigned-looking shepherd. There will be no prizes for guessing which part of the story we're about to move on to.


Yes, surprisingly enough, James is busy making his own sheep and shepherds - a process that appears to take twice as long as swaddling a newborn - along with a possibly non-canon and very alarming-looking wolf. Thankfully, some stock footage from Horizon startles the lupine interloper, who sidles off-screen in head-hung celestial chastisement, and the shepherds get a message from another extract from Follow The Star. Arriving at the manger in glorious manky film stock-o-vision, they opt to spread the good news around the cardboard boxes, knocking on doors and greeting fellow puppets to the accompaniment of There Must Be Room, a jubilant funked-up gospel-inflected variant of You Can't Come In exhorting all and sundry to 'clap your hands and be cheery'. This was, famously, the cause of much teacher-disconcerting classroom hilarity, when the line "there must be room" was accompanied by the sight of one shepherd attempting to enter a doorway he was a good inch too tall to get through...


"And that's how Jesus was born!" beams James. "But our Nativity story isn't over yet" adds Louise in quick-cut succession. And yes, indeed, we're about to move on to part two...


Suggesting that the BBC Schools department had scant regard for 'spoilers', the second part opens with the modelling clay turning into three camel-bound individuals bearing gifts. Back in Bethlehem, Louise duly gives us a quick recap of what was apparently "only half the story" before moving straight on to introducing the Three Wise Men. And lo and behold, they actually appear in her field of vision, subtly accompanied by an off-screen James singing the title number from Follow The Star and by a very poorly patched in, erm, 'star'.


Partway through, they dissolve into their cardboard counterparts, and as James has only just been singing "gold for a crown, frankinsence fair, for the baby I shall take myrrh", it's only right and proper that he should explain what those oft-namechecked gifts actually were. After he's spent a ridiculous amount of time detailing how to make your own camels and attempting some kind of academically accurate introduction of Kaspar, Melchior and Balthazar (of whom he gamely admits "we don't really know very much about", whilst also conceding "strange names, aren't they?"), that is. 'Gold' of course needs little introduction, but some 'frankinsence' is brought on in a bowl and explained as coming from "the inside of trees" and "something that you burn to make the air smell nice", with James doing a somewhat suspicious blissed-out face as he inhales some suitably nice-smelling air, while myrrh - which "also comes from trees" - is shown in both its raw and medicinal state and its apparent usefulness for teething babies is spelt out in no uncertain terms. And then Melchior falls off his camel for accidental comic effect. 


As they trot off past paper palm trees to the accompaniment of yet another rendition of Follow The Star, it's over to Louise to show us the kind of desert that they might well have traversed and offer some scientific facts about camels and how this might have hampered the voyage of the Magi. This she then proceeds to illustrate by taking a ride on a camel called Leilla, looking somewhat green about the gills as she does so. Still, she manages to deliver her narration to camera without throwing up into the lens, although you do have to wonder how many takes were required. There's then a quick look at present day Bethlehem and its social and architectural parallels with ancient history, before James picks up the story with the Three Wise Men's decidedly unwise detour to the palace of King Herod.


In something approaching a dramatised section we get an inkling of Herod's intentions towards the metaphorical pretender to his throne - albeit without a song to rank with "that man David, he's a threat, catch him catch him in your net" - but judiciously moves on to their arrival at the stable and the timely Angel-issued alert about Herod's intentions, mercifully stopping short of a puppet depiction of The Slaughter Of The Innocents. Instead, as Louise advises, if you want to know what became of them all, "you'll have to ask your teacher about the rest of the story"; a comment that was doubtless greeted by a mass outbreak of frowns and folded arms. There is still room, however, for a closing comment from James about how Mary and Joseph "like all new parents, felt sure that their baby was the best baby in the world". A remark that was presumably not at all pointed in any what whatsoever.


Sidestepping the rather more complicated issue of whether an educational programme with such a singularly religious slant would even be made today - something that is complicated further by the fact that Watch more normally traded in cold hard scientific and historical fact and preferred to tackle such vexing questions as how post reaches the right address - it is still true to say that the two Nativity episodes belong to another age of television, when the presenters and producers weren't afraid to, appropriately enough for a Schools programme, show their working. And it was probably precisely that mismatched ramshackle charm that caught the attention and imagination of its intended audience at the time; well, that and the endless repeats. And the truncated version on the Watch album. It was also possibly the closest that Children's Television around this time got to recognising the 'real meaning' of Christmas, even if it did subject it to some degree of veracity-testing analytical rigour, which quite possibly helped it to stand out all the more. With most other shows, though, it was Yuletide entertainment all the way...

Rentasanta, the little-seen Christmas Special of long-running Children's BBC slapstick mayhem-driven sitcom Rentaghost, is a little bit more than just a Christmas Special. Although this was something that came about by accident rather than by design, it actually marks the end of the series in its original - and, many would contentiously contend, superior - incarnation.

Alright, so maybe it wasn't that different - after all, the show did still involve large amounts of spectral hi-jinks, comic misunderstandings and failures to transport antique vases with any degree of success - but the first three series of Rentaghost were built around an at least comparatively more structured and interesting format. The original central character was Fred Mumford (Anthony Jackson), a literal lifelong underachiever who had founded Rentaghost as an odd job agency with two Spirit World pals - medieval jester Timothy Claypole (Michael Staniforth) and Victoran gent Hubert Davenport (Michael Darbyshire) - in the hope of finally establishing a business venture that would impress his parents. However, he also wanted to prevent them from finding out he was now a ghost, which lent an extra element of escalating chaos to the already haphazard plots. The early escapades also involved a good deal of broad social satire on issues like Trade Union relations, airport delays and hoax 'mediums', which would be largely phased out as the show went on. Hardly Samuel Beckett, admittedly, but it does give you some idea of why a large percentage of erstwhile viewers still feel that it was never quite the same afterwards.

The reason why it was never quite the same, of course, indirectly involves Rentasanta. Not long after the work on the special was completed, the hugely talented Michael Darbyshire joined the Spirit World himself, and Anthony Jackson felt unable to carry on with the series in his absence. This meant that the entire show had to be rebuilt around Mr. Claypole - always the anarchic loose cannon in script terms - and he was joined for markedly zanier plots by a new roster of equally eccentric characters. One of which actually makes their debut in this very episode, but more about that later. Instead, it's time to hold our noses and teleport back to... well, theoretically December 1978, though it appears that - for reasons that aren't exactly easy to pin down - Rentasanta didn't actually go out on its intended broadcast date and viewers had to wait until Christmas 1979 to see it. Quite why this original showing was cancelled (if indeed it was) is anyone's guess, and a quick look at the schedules and headlines reveals nothing that really seems likely to have caused it to be shunted for timing or taste reasons, so if anyone reading can shed any light on this, please do get in touch.

There's also a bit of a myth that Rentasanta was never repeated, when in fact it got a couple of airings at the time, and later still a couple more on the CBBC channel (as you might well have deduced from these screengrabs) at the instigation of Dick And Dom. But enough of this scribbling questions marks over transmission details, and let's just get down to... erm... how do you do that teleportation noise phonetically exactly??


Surprisingly, while Rentasanta opens with the traditional framed portraits of the ghosts (thoughtfully enhanced on this occasion with copious amounts of tinself), it doesn't actually kick off with the familiar Staniforth-written-and-sung Rentaghost theme; instead, the lead trio descend from the ceiling with a brief tinsel-skipping rendition of Jingle Bells. Yes, in case you hadn't worked out yet, this is going to be a musical episode, and it's interesting to ponder on the possible reasons why. Rentaghost had an unintentional and entirely coincidental rival in ITV's The Ghosts Of Motley Hall, which employed a similar premise (even down to featuring a jester as a lead character) only with somewhat more dry witted and theatrical scripts; as Sir George Uproar and company had already featured in both an award-winning Christmas Special and a highly successful episode in which the ghosts all got to sing a song each, it's tempting to speculate that Rentaghost writer Bob Block might have felt compelled to rise to the indirect challenge. Added to this, a significant proportion of the Rentaghost regular cast had a background in musical theatre and weren't exactly backwards in coming forwards about that fact, and they may well have been pushing to get to do a touch more singing and dancing for a while by then.

Anyway, whatever the reason, it starts off looking as though it's going to be anything but a regular episode of Rentaghost, but once they've finished with all of the one horse open sleigh shenanigans it's very quickly back to business as usual. Fred has arranged for the trio to hire themselves out as Department Store Santas to help the real ones out during a busy period - a perfect example of the sort of escalating collapse of logic that Bob Block never really gets enough credit for - though is still wary of ruining his parents' Christmas by letting them find out that he's a ghost. As Davenport struggles with the concept of blinking fairy lights and Claypole prepares to send out playing cards to friends and wellwishers, Rentaghost's landlord Harold Meaker calls and informs them that they're double-booked; the ghosts are expected to help him and wife Ethel out with their Christmas Panto. Confident that they can pull their demanding joint duties off without a hitch - you can see the plot details mapping themselves out ahead of you - the trio launch into their 'Rentasanta' jingle, which only serves to make the average viewer wonder just how closely Bob Block had been watching The Goodies.


At the rehearsals for Aladdin - where Ethel is indulging in her usual love of overblown theatrics, and Claypole inevitably falls in love at first sight with co-star Marjorie ("she loves me!" - "oh no she doesn't") - the ghosts are unhappy with the idea of limiting their contributions to 'special effects' and start squabbling over which one of them should get to play the genie. When Claypole spitefully traps the other two inside the lamp "seeing as you find it so interesting", Harold lays down the law and insists that Mumford and Davenport have to play the pantomime horse. They are then visited by Adam Painting, the hapless department store manager who regularly hires Rentaghost despite the shop-wrecking trail of destruction they inevitably leave in their wake, who wants to employ their services for his grotto. Adam reveals himself to be a huge fan of The Meaker Dramatic Society: "I believe this is the third production they've done this year!" - "Did you see their last one?" - "I hope so..."

Meanwhile, Harold is expressing concerns that Ethel's portrayal of Aladdin lacks sincerity, conviction and credibility. Claypole offers to help out with this by casting a spell to make her 'live the part', which, inevitably, leads to her adopting a thigh-slapping panto persona offstage and getting into an 'oh no he isn't' argument with The Mumfords when they turn up looking for Fred. Eventually she concedes defeat and agrees to tell them the department store's address, which she does by singing whilst pointing at a cue card with a big stick.


Over at the store, the ghosts are finding their grotto duties a bit too much like hard work - "a pity Christmas has to come when all of the shops become busy" - when Mr. Painting joins them for an impromptu rendition of Santa Claus Is Coming To Town on a big showbizzy set that quite possibly wasn't a permanent installation in his retail space. No sooner are they done than Harold phones, demanding both that Claypole reverses the spell he's put on Ethel, and that Mumford and Davenport turn up immediately for rehearsals. Realising that his colleagues are too busy to perform both tasks at once, Claypole helpfully uses a bit of magic to bring the pantomime horse costume to clumsy, over-affectionate life. And there you have the first appearance of Dobbin, who would remain with the show for the remainder of its existence, and whose origins and purpose would forever prove a mystery to anyone who hadn't actually seen Rentasanta.


While the rehearsal horseplay continues without them, and with the aid of a weak pun about getting 'Santa Claustraphobia', the ghosts set about delivering some presents on behalf of Mr. Painting. This is about as much of a success as viewers might be expecting, as Mumford is floored by a sweep's brush, and Davenport makes it all the way down a chimney only to land on an open fire. For some reason, Claypole uses this as his cue to launch into a clipped and angular all-singing-all-dancing-all-jumping-at-alarming-gradients rendition of Swinging On A Star. At this point, it's probably worth saying a few words about Michael Staniforth; one of the most recognisable yet at the same time most mysterious figures of children's television of this era, it's clear he was both a born showman and a highly individual performer - the fact that his other credits include such diverse and prominent engagements as appearing in the original West End production of Starlight Express and in Rowan Atkinson's bizarre cerebral one-off sketch show Canned Laughter is testament to that - and that his promising career was cut tragically short when he became terminally ill shortly after Rentaghost came to its conclusion in the mid-eighties. Where that career might have gone next is anyone's guess. However, it has to be said that this somewhat idiosyncratic and way over-energetic performance of a song almost entirely unrelated to the narrative probably just left the majority of its intended audience feeling slightly baffled.


Bafflement is also the order of the day at the Meakers' house, where Harold's attempts to steal a kiss under the mistletoe ("I wouldn't kiss you under chloroform!") are thwarted by the arrival of Dobbin, who proceeds to knock over furniture, fling flowers in the air, and consume Mrs. Mumford's hat when she turns up still looking for Fred. Exhausted, Harold and Ethel head for bed, where they are woken up by the ghosts launching into a toe-tapping Broadway-style rendition of Sleigh Ride on the roof. They are somewhat less than pleased to find Dobbin lying across the bottom of the bed like a cat.
 

Dobbin does, however, prove to be a worthwhile addition to the repertory company and throws himself into rehearsals with aplomb, joining in with a choreographed rendition of Me And My Shadow with worryingly limb-flailing abandon. This is followed by Ethel and the ghosts tearing through the breakbeat-festooned funk-out I've Got A Genial Genie - which appears to be the only entirely original musical number in the whole programme - and Claypole trying out his 'levitation' effect on Marjorie (though he has to be quickly talked out of similarly demonstrating an effect that will 'bring the house down'), before Harold is called to the phone to be given the news that their props have been damaged in storage and the show will have to be cancelled.


Luckily for them - although perhaps not quite so luckily for the panto audience - they are able to call in a furniture-loaning favour from Adam Painting, although there's a catch; he demands to be allowed to join the cast as Widow Twankey and sing Keep Young And Beautiful. It's hard to shake the suspicion that this was as much at Christopher Biggins' insistence as that of his fictional counterpart. By this stage, the various stresses are causing The Meakers to lose their voices, although Claypole promises to make them sing 'unbelievably'; and sure enough, when they reach their solo parts in It's A Lovely Day Today, they find themselves singing with each other's voice.

Meanwhile, at Fred's misunderstood request, he's also cast a spell on The Mumfords to make them 'believe' what they are seeing, causing the hapless couple to rush the stage and remonstrate with the Sultan, and then report a threat to 'The Princess' to a policeman, who duly arranges for squad cars to be sent haring round to Buckingham Palace. As proceedings degenerate into total chaos, it's down to Claypole to restore order, which he does by summoning a real genie, thereby stopping everyone open-mouthed in their tracks. The cast take their bows in true panto fashion to the full-length Rentaghost theme song... and that's Rentasanta.


For what is in some ways a pivotal episode of Rentaghost - possibly not a phrase that many people were expecting ever to read - Rentasanta isn't a particularly strong or coherent one. With a slightly longer running time and a series of setpieces to string together, it lacks the tightly-scripted and frantically-performed mayhem of the regular episodes, and consequently seems a bit disjointed. At the same time, part of what gave the show its energy was that the cast's backgrounds in variety and stage comedy were allowed to inform their performances rather than drive proceedings, and giving them an opportunity to fully indulge their leanings just comes across as a bit, well, indulgent.

What can't be argued with, however, is that Rentasanta is a textbook example of the end-of-term attitude that was once allowed to dominate the BBC's - and, to be fair, ITV's - children's programming when Christmas rolled around, with everything from Animal Magic to All-Star Record Breakers (and even, to an extent, Blue Peter) dispensing with the need to play by their usual rules and instead giving cast, crew and audience the chance to have a bit of fun before seeing each other again in the New Year. Though how exactly you judge one episode of Rentaghost against another in terms of the capacity for 'having fun' is a logical conundrum best left for another time. And then, of course, there were the shows that were able to tackle the subject of Christmas entirely within their own 'in-universe' house style...

In some ways, it's something approaching a Christmas Miracle that the edition of Play School that was transmitted on 24th December 1970 actually still exists at all. It's not only the only surviving edition from that week (and there was one on Christmas Day too), it's one of just eighteen out of the two hundred and fifty five transmitted during 1970 that are still around. Doubtless this survived by accident rather than design, not least because it uses a fair amount of elements that were recycled in later festive editions, but basically, it's ever so slightly nice that it does.

Staggeringly, given that the programme had been running since 1964, this is the first Christmas-themed edition of Play School to exist; equally staggeringly, it was actually the third time that they'd 'done' Christmas in colour, having moved over with technologically leapfrogging parent channel BBC2 in 1968. That said, though, they had almost literally just changed the type of cameras that they made it with, and while Hilary Hayton's original house design may have been given a subtly garish reddish-on-reddish tint, the rest of the programme is still very much still in the style of Play School as it was in the Swinging Sixties, set design, theme music and all. And that's where we join presenters Brian Cant and Julie Stevens, caught in a pivotal void between the decline of The Waltham Green East Wapping Carpet Cleaning Rodent And Boggit Extermination Association and the rise of Slade...





The programme opens with Julie carrying a basket full of presents for Brian, which she attempts to hide in strategic places around the tinsel-strewn set. Needless to say, Brian shows up mid-concealment and starts asking all manner of awkward questions, leading to some amusing hiding-things-behind-back physical comedy and conspiratorially whispering of updates into the camera. Eventually he goes off to look for some red ribbon, giving Julie time to complete her present-stuffing and set the day and date on the calendar, accompanied by some faint bonging on bells.



It turns out that said bonging is actually issuing from the other side of the studio, where Brian has been joined by a Mulligan And O'Hare-like Peter Gosling who gives him a quick lesson in how to play the tubular bells, before sitting down to accompany him on piano, while Julie appears to handle the vocals for a rather cumbersomely worded number entitled Why Do The Bells Of Christmas Ring?. Brian and the percussionist then swap back to their more suited regular roles, with the latter providing some somewhat more adept tubular bell-hitting whilst the former responds with some of his trademark loose-limbed Music And Movement stances, encouraging the viewers at home to copy him as he flails around the set. We can only hope that they'd had time to move some of the furniture first.




Back on the main set, Julie tries to secretly show the post-flailing viewers the keyring that she's bought for Brian, but when he calls her over to help with a song, she has to quickly hide it and suggests that they might want to have a look at the clock instead. But while it's still got the long-running creepy tick-tock clarinet'n'glockenspiel music and shabby battered-looking backdrop, this is still the sixties clock with the incredibly noisy 'rotating petals' mechanism, which might come as a surprise to anyone expecting the more familiar pop-art cog-festooned effort with the heavily stylised blue and white face. Anyway, it's nine o'clock, and as there are some presents under the clock, there'll be very few presents for correctly guessing what the song will be.





Yes, it's a spirited two-handed rendition of The Twelve Days Of Christmas, with comedy reactions aplenty as Brian hands Julie hand-made representations of each of the gifts to place on a rapidly overloaded prop shelf, and plenty of free-form piano extemporisations to fill in while they lark about with the props. "Well, that lady did have some funny presents", muses Brian in a clearly improvised outro, "I wonder where she kept them all?". It's easy to forget just how much intentional humour there was in shows like Play School, and just how talented the presenters were at delivering and even spontaneously creating it, though in fairness it's possible that this was simply overshadowed by the regular and recognisable features of the show. One of which we'll be looking at through... the...




...Square Window?





Yes, alright, it's the Round Window, and today's film involves a foxy redhead in a Children's Film Foundation Villainess-esque rollneck/leather coat/gloves/miniskirt/thigh-length boots combo, who hares off in a Land Rover (readers who know the complicated equation that the production team used may have already been able to work out why the Round Window was used today) leaving her younger siblings to attend to the more mundane and less seasonal animal-feeding duties on the family farm. Unfortunately we do have to sit through a couple of sequences of them flinging hay at geese and what have you, but the lion's share of the insert is given over to our titian chum as she browses in a pleasingly old-fashioned gift shop and leaves with an armful of parcels, all of it to the accompaniment of the exact same extract from the exact same recording of Victor Hely-Hutchinson's Carol Symphony as was later used as the theme music for The Box Of Delights. Given how many people who started off working on Play School later went on to become senior figures in the BBC Children's Department, this is most probably no coincidence.





Then, back in the studio, we finally get to see The Toys. This was shortly after the mid-recording theft of the hapless original one-size-fits-all 'Teddy', so Big Ted and Little Ted were still a relatively new novelty, while they also appear to be using a particularly severely-coiffured variant of Hamble that makes no attempt to hide her evil intent. Brian is gamely trying to wrap his present for Julie whilst his cloth cohorts enjoy their usual levels of success in staying upright next to him, which he hilariously attempts to pass off as them getting 'excited' ("no, that's not for you Humpty!") before launching into a jaunty number named It's Half A Day To Christmas (which, given the timeslot this episode went out in, was almost technically accurate too). The toys then promptly make another attempt at lying face down on the floor just as Julie shows up to exchange presents and put their overexcited co-stars away in the cupboard. But they don't actually open the presents, and enticingly tell the audience that they'll be doing so on tomorrow's edition. Which no longer exists, so we may never know what Brian had got for Julie. It's not even in the production documentation. Yes, I was mad enough to check.

And that, basically, was how you kept Santa-obsessed overexcited youngsters quiet for twenty minutes back then. Speaking of which, there's a lot of talk at the moment about 'quiet' television, with an emergent craze for long, sweeping narration-free ambient shots of landscapes and handcrafts going on for hours like a Landscape Channel insert gone on the rampage. It's definitely a good thing that people are thinking more about using their senses and indeed their heads with their small-screen entertainment, but frustratingly little has been said about just how similar an effect can be obtained from old-style studio-bound multi-camera programmes, recorded in sequence and with a minimum of edits (in fact, the studio tape for this particular Play School still exists, and they only have to do one retake at the start of The Twelve Days Of Christmas). The space, silence and studio sights and sounds aren't quite as 'primitive' or 'embarrassing' as the average columnist would have us believe, and really do help to engage your mind with what you are watching and, well, maybe even cause you to appreciate it a bit more.

Anyway, you won't find Julie Stevens symbiotically guiding you towards your Big Ted-derived headspace tomorrow morning, but blame that on whoever wiped the edition from 25th December 1970. Merry Christmas!

Here's a list of my favourite rarities, obscurities and downright oddities from the Heavenly Recordings and Creation Records vaults. And no, funnily enough, it doesn't include Like A Snowflake.


Primal Scream - Come Together (Hypnotone Brain Machine Mix)


When Primal Scream started messing around with dance music, they really didn't know what they were doing - which, let's face it, is how and why it ended up working so well - and that all-important follow-up to Loaded took several attempts to nail. Most readers will know the Andrew Weatherall version of Come Together that ended up on Screamadelica, which takes the song on a journey through the furthest reaches of space with The Reverend Jesse Jackson at the controls. Others will be familiar with the Terry Farley-helmed single version, locked neatly into a more traditional post-Madchester groove. But how many have heard the little-remembered third try at perfecting the problematic ditty, wherein dance duo Hypnotone - later to assume production duties for some tracks on Screamadelica - sped it up into a brain-frazzling rave-friendly sonic assault with alarming blasts of sampling from the Pearl & Dean jingle? Not something you hear on 6Music's 'listener mixtape' shows too often.


My Bloody Valentine - Sugar


Hailing from the brief period between Isn't Anything and Loveless, and originally only released on an obscure Creation promo single, Sugar is perhaps the most appropriately-named number in the entire My Bloody Valentine back catalogue, with tooth-corrodingly trebly high frequencies that probably would have damaged old-skool tape decks, and the overall feeling of being caught in a sandstorm of Tate & Lyle. Staggeringly, it was apparently written and recorded in a day too. We can only assume Kevin was on a bit of a sugar rush himself at the time.


Saint Etienne - Fake 88


Originally intended as the closing track of Foxbase Alpha, this moody sound collage contrasts with the 'up with vintage and modern pop!' mindset of the rest of the album by nailing what was wrong with the period between the two, featuring Stephen Duffy listing some of the eighties cultural phenomena that Pete, Bob and Sarah were more than happy to see the back of, from Thatcher and Chernenko to Toto Coelo, Transformers, Phil Redmond, Bratpack Films and, erm, Stephen 'TinTin' Duffy. That it shares its name with a certain Alexander O'Neal hit is probably no coincidence when you consider the lyrics of People Get Real...


Flowered Up - Enough's Enough


One of the B-sides of the original pulled 12" of Weekender, and frustratingly never officially issued anywhere (in fact, if anyone's reading who's in a position to do something, Flowered Up are in dire need of the deluxe 2CD treatment), this jaunty pisstake about naughty bedroom antics is how Laid by James would have sounded if it had been written by anyone with anything resembling a sense of humour. It's probably supposed to represent what someone else was getting up to while Weekender was off his face and being chased by a giant record player or something. And it's probably safer not to ask.


Teenage Fanclub - Like A Virgin


From the little-heard mini-album recorded at the end of the Bandwagonesque sessions The King, where it came surrounded by terrifying outbursts of scuzzy guitar and wailing police sirens, this tongue-in-cheek chug through a song that Madonna and Stephen Bray probably didn't write with four feedback-crazed Big Star devotees in mind is actually surprisingly effective. Though it's no Slow And Fast (The Ballad Of Bow Evil).


Ride - Everybody Knows


Ride's masterwork Going Blank Again was originally presented to Creation as a double-album, but was cut down to a single disc when their cost-conscious American record company started hyperventilating on the freeway or something. Which probably made for a stronger album if we're being honest about it. Some of the excised tracks ended up as fondly-remembered B-sides; others, including this nattily subdued number featuring a rare lead vocal from drummer Loz Colbert, ended up sitting inexplicably on the shelf for years.


Super Furry Animals - nO.K.


The B-side of The International Language Of Screaming, and something that might sound on first listen like a cheap and lazy attempt at filling space on a single by getting someone to recite the alphabet over the A-side's backing track. But have a closer listen. Notice any letters missing? And can you think of any bands from around that time that might have made prominent use of said letter, and indeed that Super Furry Animals might well have felt inclined to take a subtle swipe at?


Sugar - If I Can't Change Your Mind (Evening Session Version)


Given how effectively they were wiped off the musical map by the rise of Oasis (and, admittedly, by their own miserable third album), it's easy to forget just what a short but intense media sensation Bob Mould's tuneful noisecore trio caused in the early nineties. If you want evidence of this, look no futher than the blistering tracks recorded for Mark Goodier's Radio 1 show that appeared spread across various singles (and now on the deluxe edition of Copper Blue), especially this exhiliarating rattle through their biggest hit single.


The Creation & Ride - How Does It Feel To Feel?


Sorry, this isn't on YouTube, so here's the official video instead...

It has to be said that most of Alan McGee's post-Oasis 'great ideas' in the latter years of Creation are not worth even remembering in the first place, let alone dwelling on. One of his more inspired thoughts, however, was persuading the sixties mod-psych band that gave the label its name to reform for Creation's tenth anniversary concert (and later to record a brand new album), for which they teamed up with Ride for a barnstorming rendition of one of their more unhinged erstwhile hits. Put a sock in it, Noel.


The Boo Radleys - Zoom


Fat Larry's Band's squiggly synth-festooned bit of eighties sickliness falls into the hands of Mop-Haired Martin's Band, who transform it into something resembling Gabriel The Toad trying to bag a Peel Session some time circa August 1991. If you're going to do cover versions, do them as bafflingly unrecognisably as this.


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

Not so long ago, a certain prestigious gallery put on a huge exhibition entitled Glam! The Performance Of Style. Taking the satin and tat of Glam Rock as its stylistic cue - albeit leaning very much towards the artier Bowie/Roxy end of the scale rather than just having a huge screen showing Noddy Holder shouting "IT'S GRIM-LEYYYYYYYS" on an endless loop - this was an ambitious and well-presented collection that sought to reflect just how far Glam's influence had pervaded into the wider sphere of arts and culture, with exhibits ranging from a photo of Showaddywaddy to a small artillery of Alkasura jackets, some Richard Allen books safely secured in a glass case to prevent them from going on the rampage, and a collection of films by gender-ambiguous shock performance art troupe The Cockettes, one of which, following several minutes of provocative homoerotic male full-frontal activity, caused someone to tut and walk out when a topless lady appeared on screen.

There was, however, one figure who was perhaps even more conspicuous by his absence than he would have been by his presence. Come on, come on, you know full well who that is. Now, before we go any further, nobody is seriously suggesting for a second that there should have been huge framed photos of The Artist Formerly Known As Rubber Bucket taking up an entire wall of every single room, but the question remains of how you can stage a full and comprehensive retrospective of Glam Rock without in some way acknowledging - even if it's just via the same sort of 'cover versions by other artists' subterfuge as the compilers of the superb Glam box set Oh Yes We Can Love skilfully deployed - someone who, no matter how subsequently disgraced, was for many, many, many years seen by the general public at least as the be all and end all of all things Glam?

And the answer is that you can't. Well, not properly. If, due to the actions of a handful of genre participants (and, somewhat unfairly, a brace of untalented tosser DJs who happened to be presenting pop shows when Glam was big, as opposed to all those other years either side they were doing exactly the same that somehow don't seem to have wound up quite so tainted by association), you have to play down the fun and throwaway footstompy side of Glam - which, with its heavy slant towards provocative art, high fashion and gender politics as opposed to The Tomorrow People, Spangles and the BBC Schools Clock, Glam! The Performance Of Style seemed jarringly keen to do - then in some ways you have to start pretending that Glam Rock was something that it wasn't. Or rather something that was only half of what it was. Which is all very well and good when you're exploring the films, fashion houses and indeed art galleries that fired the imaginations of your Ferrys, Enos and Harleys, but not so much when people start trying to fill the musical void on the other side of the newly decimalised coin by roping in other more culturally acceptable yet less genre-appropriate pop favourites that simply happened to be around at the time. Look down any list of 'Glam Rock' artists these days, and it probably won't be long before you stumble across a mention of Abba, whose visual links with actual proper Glam Rock were tenuous at best, and musical links slightly less than non-existent. If wearing silly shiny clothes and having a bit of early seventies pop clout are all you need to qualify, then, frankly, let's have Bobby Crush on the lists too.

Just for now, though, let's take a look back at a time when lists of Glam Rock artists had actual literal Glam Rock artists on them. And were actual literal lists too. No, really. Back in 1989, probably before any of the featured artists even had a computer to take in to be fixed, K-Tel put out a rather splendid compilation entitled Glam Slam. Wrapped in a lavishly-designed memorabilia-strewn gatefold sleeve, this was quite possibly the first occasion on which anyone had attempted to put together a coherent overview of the genre, and alongside the obvious big hits and big hitters the compilers also found room to feature a couple of relative obscurities from the likes of Hello and Argent, and a mildly contentious inclusion from bill-fitters in sound only 10cc. Promoted by an inevitably Holder-shouted TV advert boasting camera flare-occasioning archive clippage of many of the featured artists, it was a foregone conclusion that any aspirant investigators of the more esoteric corners of pop and rock history would invest in Glam Slam as soon as paper round revenue permitted, and on top of that, exposure to this previously rarely discussed genre suddenly seemed to fling open a door on a lost popular cultural world every bit as remote and evocative as mid-sixties pyschedelia, only with more Barnaby.


Still tucked away inside the lavishly-designed memorabilia strewn gatefold sleeve of my own copy of Glam Slam is a not particularly neatly folded sheet of A4 paper, on which I attempted to scribble together a definitive list of artists connected to my then-new musical obsession. It's a list that's split into three columns, and the first - headed 'Glam' - features all of the usual suspects (and indeed suspects) with some newer and less well-known additions like Sailor, Barry Blue and The Arrows appended to the foot of the list in varying shades of biro. The second one, headed '?', catalogues the longer-careered likes of Elton John, Lou Reed, 'Dinners' McCartney and Lulu, who while never quite fully committing themselves to the Glam Rock cause certainly adopted its musical and sartorial trappings for a nicely effective while (though no Abba, oddly enough). And the third, helpfully headed '??', simply lists The Wombles and The Goodies. No, still can't figure that one out.

In addition to Glam Slam, a fair few of the names in the first column of that list were arrived at via the three volumes of Glam Rock released by Virgin Video around the same time, which featured a dazzling collection of vintage TV performances from across the globe by the familiar and the forgotten of Glam Rock (and, on the less essential third instalment, some more up-to-the-minute pop gaudiness from the likes of Sigue Sigue Sputnik, Twisted Sister and Doctor And The Medics), which in those pre-TOTP2 days was an almost unheard of feat of archival archaeology. Well, to be honest, you did occasionally get the odd clip on daytime TV shows and the then still-rare phenomenon of nostalgia shows and pop retrospectives, but you get the general idea. And, given that there's now no way that you're ever going to get a DVD release of any of them, it's time to take another look at one of those Glam Rock video compilations. Unusually, we're not going to be taking a look at the first Volume of Glam Rock here, as it's a bit too limited in terms of range of artists, and it was confusingly issued in two versions (one with Roxy Music doing Virginia Plain, one with Wizzard's Ball Park Incident instead) due to mysterious rights complications, and on top of that we'd have to deal with the thorny subject of someone going on Top Of The Pops in full Nazi uniform, and frankly we've already got enough on our plate as it is. Instead, though there'll no doubt be reference to the contents of the other two volumes en route, we'll be turning our attention to the more wide-ranging line-up - if not more widely-ranging in terms of trouser width - Glam Rock 2.


Despite the subtle but effective attention to detail in the sleeve art, featuring both some authentic-looking star-spangled fabric and a short but enticing sleevenote about how much fun the likes of Roy Wood and Noddy Holder brought to the pop scene, Glam Rock 2 opens with - ironically - a none-more-eighties scrolling video effect showing various featured performances, including, you can't help but notice, a Slade one that doesn't actually appear on the tape. Closer examination reveals this to be a mimed Coz I Luv You, and quite how and why it ended up being trimmed from the running order will have to remain a mystery.


What's less of a mystery is the identity of the lengthy drum intro playing behind this opening sequence, and sure enough, as soon as the guitars kick in we're straight over to Suzi Quatro, thundering through Can The Can with the aid of her band of Lance from Home And Away lookalikes. Though, it has to be said, very few people will be paying much attention to them - even when there's a close-up of one of them doing the 'eagle' noise on his guitar - when there's a sparkly-eyeshadowed busty leather-catsuited frontwoman whacking her bass and yelling with full force rock fury, proving years before punk that women could do 'real' music just as well as men without having to draw attention to the fact that they were doing so, and generally showing exactly why she was such a huge star at the time. Placing this as the first song on the video also raises a couple of interesting points from the outset; firstly that this sounds very heavy indeed for something that was roundly dismissed as 'pop rubbish' at the time (leading to an infamous incident in which her producer sent a giftwrapped brain to the NME), and secondly that, at least visually, this is a very different sort of 'Glam' to either of the previously identified strains, still glittery and androgynous but with a more straightforward, rather than parodied and exaggerated, fifties-influenced look. Of course, putting it at the start also makes sense in that it's simply a great opening track with a steadily excitement-building intro, much like Rock And Roll Part 2 had been for the first volume. And moving quickly on from that...


...we come straight onto, erm, the Glittery one himself. Let's be blunt about this; the flimsy Always Yours was already one of the least remembered chart-toppers of all time even before we were all instructed to forget it by law, and, unfortunately, hearing it again after such a long interval does nothing to improve its standing. This isn't even a particularly imaginative performance either, just some straightforward camp-expressioned miming with The Glitter Band standing around doing a synchonised arm-pointing dance. Not that any of his songs included on the first volume of Glam Rock were any more imaginatively staged, but at least they were good songs. Well some of them. Anyway, that's as good a moment as any to leave Always Yours where it is.


T. Rex's Electric Warrior-era singles were all on the first volume of Glam Rock, mostly drawn from refreshingly unfamiliar-looking European pop shows, so the first glimpse we get here of Marc Bolan and company is via the original promo film for Children Of The Revolution. Not that the 'rock historians' very often deigned to lower themselves to write about Glam Rock at the time - Stuart Maconie's two-page Glam retrospective in Vox circa 1990 was something approaching an act of revolution - but believe it or not, it was a widely expressed opinion back then that Children Of The Revolution marked the moment at which T. Rex 'jumped' the 'shark', largely on the basis of its purported Holidays In The Sun-esque lack of substantial discernible difference to previous offerings, and the fact that - shock horror - it only reached number two. However, one listen to the still-mighty song itself is enough to confirm why this daft opinion has long since been overturned, and though while admittedly the band do look a little, erm, 'tired' in this performance, there's no disputing the energy, enthusiasm and star quality that are still vividly on display. Of course, the words 'Bolan' and 'Boogie' would indeed become mutually incompatible soon enough, but thankfully we'll have to wait until Glam Rock 3 to witness any of that.


Next up is Alvin Stardust, once regarded as a derivative johnny-come-lately bandwagon-jumping Glam opportunist of the first order, but more recently belatedly promoted into the First Division for rather quite obvious reasons. Though it would have been better if the reasons had actually been to do with his music being quite good after all. And The Grimleys, obviously. He clearly wasn't quite so readily disregarded at the time, though, as this Top Of The Pops performance of My Coo Ca Choo is pretty much the most visually elaborate, if not ridiculously over the top, inclusion in this entire compilation. It starts with a Thermal Image Camera-enabled rendition of Alvin himself in profile, before he becomes a zoom-varying full-size figure superimposed in front of footage of his decidedly less than Glam-looking band, with additional psychedelic multi-image effects thrown in (or should that be thrown on?) for good measure. Meanwhile, in a weird coincidence, it was around the time of the video's release that Cadbury's Picnic opted to start advertising their wares with a comedy rewrite of My Coo Ca Choo, featuring the video-manipulated Calvin The Camel singing the praises of "peanuts, raisins, whuafffer biscuits". Though as the accompanying The Chart Show-riffing data boxes informed us, he wouldn't be touring because 'he can't stand dates'. The writers of TV's Thompson were reportedly not losing sleep.


Five numbers in, we finally get to Sweet, all of whose biggest and best hits - or at least the ones that there were actually still extant TV performances of - were included on the first volume of Glam Rock. Though even then they were somewhat compromised by the use of a weirdly edited promo film for Teenage Rampage that omitted roughly seventy five percent of the actual song, and the skipping over of the oft-repeated eye-maddeningly solarised Top Of The Pops performance of Blockbuster! in favour of another lesser-seen one from another edition, in which Steve Priest's somewhat ideologically dubious choice of 'camp' stage gear caused uneasiness and indeed queasiness even at the time the video was first released. Thankfully there's nothing so troubling on offer here, though unfortunately Glam Rock 2 is left with no archival option than to delve into the somewhat less celebrated era when they started writing and producing their own material, and it doesn't always make for satisfying listening. Action, dating from the all but post-Glam year of 1975, was a reasonably enough sized hit, but it's quite clear from this performance that the band had more or less phased out the spangly business in favour of a more conventional 'rock' look and indeed sound, while the song itself comes across as a collection of decent ideas in search of a way of actually working alongside each other. Barring a lone stray late seventies hit, Action was to prove to be their last regular top twenty appearance, and those lyrics about not needing to conform to other people's commercial gameplan, and indeed that sarky cash register in the middle, must have rung a tad hollow afterwards.


Thankfully, next up comes someone who quite clearly has no qualms about being commercial and doesn't care who knows it. Despite Roy Wood seemingly being unencumbered by the need to come up with more than one tune, Wizzard nonetheless managed to score a string of surprisingly credible Phil Spector-pastiching hits featuring increasingly bizarre instruments whilst trying their absolute hardest to look as ludicrously far past the point of tinselly ridiculousness as was possible, which stand up as some of the best chart offerings of their time. Early seventies pop did not come much more fun than this, plus they get extra points for jointly kickstarting the whole craze for Christmas singles, to the chagrin of miseryguts Scrooger-than-thou types and TV's Phil Popes everywhere. Appropriately taken from the 1973 Christmas Top Of The Pops, this performance of their finest five minutes See My Baby Jive features guitar-toting gorillas, foxy handjiving backing dancers, rollerskating angels, a custard pie fight, and Roy Wood playing both a French Horn and a vacuum cleaner - the possibility that that's exactly what he was playing on the actual record cannot be discounted - and should be used as Exhibit 'A' whenever anyone tries to prove that they're better at liking music than you by showing you a clip of Thom Yorke mumbling into a microphone about a bird that fell in a bin or something. This is exactly the sort of infectious pop silliness that we're losing out on by trying to play down the fun side of Glam Rock, and nobody's any the better off for that.


More tongue-in-cheek silliness follows, though this time it's 'allowed' due to Sparks' more critic-satisfying eccentric art-school leanings. This Town Ain't Big Enough For Both Of Us scarcely needs any introduction (though you'd be surprised at how rarely heard and indeed little remembered it was back then), and this Top Of The Pops appearance was the first that the majority of the UK had seen of Ron and Russell, and never let it be forgotten that the latter's exaggerated theatrics are every bit as entertaining as the former's more celebrated toothbrush-moustached glowering. For no readily obvious reason it's cut a bit short here, omitting the final verse and Russell's song-closing dramatics, but even so this is every bit as entertaining and indeed silly as the Wizzard performance, and once again this is exactly the sort of thing that will get missed out on if we start prizing 'art' above all else, however legitimate the reason. Although this wouldn't be missed out on due to it being regarded as 'art' in some quarters. Erm, as you were.


The same is less equivocally true of Suzi Quatro's Devil Gate Drive, which is a fun and rowdy enough rock'n'roll pastiche as it is, and is rendered here in a truly mind-frazzling sensory assault of dazzling multicoloured back-superimposed post-psychedelia psychedelia, which quick-cut alternates with an entire alternate performance in extreme close-up, while Suzi and the heavily-haired boys indulge in a wilfully ridiculous routine involving formation high-kicking dancing and bizarre interludes of 'worshipping' her gods-proferred bass guitar. It's in seeing footage like this (and indeed Can The Can) that you come to realise just how good a rock musician she was and just how unfairly this has been overlooked since, admittedly partly due to her later successful diversification into stage and television acting, radio presenting, all-round entertaining and presenting Central TV's Gas Street. Also, it's handy evidence to back up Noddy Holder's oft-repeated, under-appreciated assertion that Glam Rock came about because people needed a bit of fun in the face of the grim realities of the early seventies. Well that and the Carnaby Street boutiques starting selling glittery jackets, and the new studio technology that allowed for better recording of heavy drumbeats, and the influence of The Move, The Small Faces and Syd Barrett, and the general evolution of pop-art in a more minimalist and primary-coloured direction, and Dominic Sanbrook's probable conclusion that none of this happened outside of a couple of ephemeral second division pop stars who'd been palmed off on Mickie Most and/or Chinn And Chapman by their record companies in desperation, and... erm... um... c'mon boys, let's do it one more time for Suzi etc etc.


And it's a good job we've had that three-song outbreak of hilarity as - who'd ever believe it - a certain slightly less welcome party is now being wheeled onto the stage on the back of a giant tinselly revolving heart. I Love You Love Me Love was once so popular that it was included on the first ever commercially available compilation of karaoke backing tracks (1990's Karaoke Party on Trax Records - go on, look it up), but now just leaves the unwary listener with a bit of an uneasy feeling, particularly when it's staged with such adulation and reverence. You do have to feel a bit sorry for poor old Mike Leander, who wrote, produced, played on and probably even did the bulk of the singing on all of these now verboten hits, but it's a sympathy that can only extend so far and sometimes the inadvertent implications of a song and artist are just so much that you don't even feel like putting forward an argument for the music itself. Good Lord we need a good laugh at this point.


Thank fuck, then, for Alice Cooper, and the truly hilarious promo film for Elected, featuring everyone's favourite shock-rocker cruising the streets on his fictitious presidential campaign, 'meeting' the public (including one lady who appears to think he's an actual candidate) and planning his next senatorial move with the aid of a suited-up chimp. It's hard to convey in words just how expertly assembled this bit of irreverent comic nonsense is, from the moment a limo pulls up to reveal him grinning out of the window, to the madcap rally invaded by someone in a sub-Banana Splits elephant suit at the end, but if you're familiar with Elected and know how good it is, then saying that it's a perfectly judged visual accompaniment should get the manifesto across just fine. What's particularly interesting is that while this may all seem like a two-fingered response to America's political establishment in the wake Watergate, the actual scandal was still some months away from breaking when the song was recorded and indeed released as a single, and this promo film will almost certainly have in fact been filmed while the initial attempted covering up was taking place. Nothing ever hits quite so hard as inadvertent satire before the event.


One of the few non-Top Of The Pops performances on the tape, T. Rex's Telegram Sam is actually taken from Music In The Round, a short-lived London Weekend Television Sunday Morning arts show in which Humphrey Burton introduced and chatted to young and up-and-coming musicians ranging from The National Youth Jazz Orchestra to early music enthusiast David Munrow as they played to a small audience at London's celebrated Cockpit Theatre. The complete T. Rex edition, showcasing songs from The Slider, has since shown up on several official collections and is well worth tracking down, though the undisputed highlight is this powerful live rendition of the then-recent chart topper which, the superbly slovenly Bolan-voiced count-in aside, manages to sound impressively close to the original studio version. Incidentally, all of Music In The Round still exists, as do plenty of other ITV music shows from the sixties and early seventies featuring all manner of arcane and fascinating Glam, Psych, Prog, Soul and even straight ahead pop acts that were bewilderingly overlooked by the producers of recent missed opportunity Pop Gold. Still, it was worth it for all those endless clips of Bros on The Roxy.


Then Alvin Stardust's back with a decidely more visually appropriate backing band - who he's actually standing next to this time - for Jealous Mind, which was in fact a bigger hit than My Coo Ca Choo despite not being quite as good as it, and this is a much more moody performance, deliberately playing up the puzzling and quickly dropped 'Mean Man Of Glam' element to his stage persona with some half-hearted guitarist-shoving and microphone stand-twirling. Much like with Suzi Quatro, this was a very clear attempt to create a more subdued and stylised form of Glam, mining the rougher glitz and glamour of late fifties fashion rather than retina-infuriating gaudiness, and while it may have worked when he was telling errant road-crossers that they must be out of their tiny minds, pretending to be a big tough rebel telling 'the man' to stick it now doesn't seem to sit well with the context of times, and it was on becoming a more jovial and affable caricature that Mr. Stardust found his way into the public's affections and the wider world of all-round entertaining. TV-am, Hollyoaks, Godspell and I Feel Like Buddy Holly all lay ahead. Someone really ought to have put him in a sitcom, though.


A familiar - though noticeably re-recorded, presumably in accordance with those arcane Musicians' Union rules about bands having to mime to an alternate re-performance of their hit - Moog-tastic intro announces the arrival of Fox On The Run by Sweet, a superb bit of self-penned nonsense where they had the good sense to actually write and perform it in the style of their earlier production team-driven hits, meeting with massive success that unfortunately convinced them that they could do it all themselves in future. And what do you know, there's just enough of a hint of Glam still detectable in both their image and their performance to make it fit seamlessly in with the surrounding songs. Actually, on closer examination, those bizarre regulations don't seem to have been as rigorously enforced as you might expect them to have been, as surviving early seventies editions of Top Of The Pops appear to capture most of the featured acts more or less miming to the available-in-the-shops version, but as Sweet were so calamatiously keen to emphasise their 'real music' credentials to all and sundry by this stage, it's hardly surprising that they should have taken the fullest possible advantage of the opportunity to impress the wider viewing public.

If anything ever deserved to be called 'seductive advertising', it was those glossy tracklisting-heavy double-page spreads that used to appear in Smash Hits at certain times of year to promote the latest forthcoming double-album collection of thirty two-ish recent-ish chart hits(ish).

True, you may only really have wanted about seven of said hits, and equally true, around half of them would invariably have bothered the charts just about long enough ago for you to be unable to properly remember whether you actually liked them or not, but once those tracklistings appeared in their customary whirl of eighties 'designer' visual swishness, the urge to own them was pretty hard to resist. Especially the ones that were released to coincide with the so-called 'Christmas Market'.

Many thousands of words – albeit usually pompous indecipherable gibberish about something to do with 'pure pop' that nobody really understands (though please do have a look at the excellent Now That's What I Call A Music Blog!) - have been penned in tribute to the undisputed market leader, the Now That’s What I Call Music! series, but nobody really seems to have very much fondness for its one-time near-rival, the WEA-bankrolled me-too cash-in Hits series.

Well, that’s all about to change, as we’re about to embark on an epic voyage through the high watermark of late 1986-ness that was the inexplicably dice-themed Hits 5.

Which soft-rock superstar accidentally invented the poorly compressed MP3? Who was guilty of the most profound misunderstanding of a David Bowie lyric ever? And where was 'Belouis''Some' while all this was going on? Find out all this, and more, as we take another listen to… Hits 5!

So, on Side One...


A-ha - 'I've Been Losing You'


A-ha were, it’s safe to say, the single biggest pop sensation of 1986; and in a year that also played Top Of The Pops-straddling host to such chart hopefuls as Amazulu, Jaki Graham and, of course, ‘Belouis’ ‘Some’, that’s no mean feat. Although The One That Everyone Remembers was actually a hit late in 1985, 1986 would see them score a whopping five top ten singles, including a chart-topper with The Sun Always Shines On TV, and as a consequence Mags, Pal and Morten spent the entire year on the front of every teen magazine - and indeed ‘postermag’ - in existence.

That selfsame teen mag ubiquity inevitably resulted A-ha being roundly sneered at by fans of ‘quality music’ – in other words, the sort of people who bought Deacon Blue records – for being inauthentic throwaway pretty-boy lightweights who should have been ‘banned’ from the charts in favour of Cock Robin . And yet Pal Waaktaar, Magne Furuholmen and Morten Horten Forten Harket wrote all of their own songs (often with unexpectedly complex arrangements and construction and sub-prog cryptic lyrics) and played all of their own instruments, came across as witty and cultured in interviews (how many other bands in 1986 would have told Smash Hits that their favourite film was If…?), and if they had emerged a decade later would almost certainly have been bracketed alongside The Cardigans and Whale rather than Take That and Sean Maguire. If you’re demanding evidence of this, which some of those disgruntled Deacon Blue fans almost certainly are, look no further than earlier-in-1986 top ten hit Train Of Thought, which married moody panpipe-driven synthpop to existential poetry-inspired lyrics about a commuter going mad and querying the ‘point’ of office doors. How’s about that then, ‘Boyzone’?

Anyway, Train Of Thought was merely their second top ten single of 1986. The fourth (following Hunting High And Low), and the one that duly made it onto Hits 5, was I’ve Been Losing You. With its hard-edged abrasive sound, minimalist chords and lyrics that appear to deal with the aftermath of a lovers’ tiff that may have descended into either metaphorical or literal murder, it was hardly exactly the most conventional pop hit of 1986, but nonetheless it sounded great on the radio – particularly when the volume-crazed brass section chimes in toward the end – and indeed sounded great as the curtain-raiser for Hits 5. Extra points must also be awarded for the brilliantly-timed false ending, which must have confounded a fair few listeners trying to make their own C60 of ‘highlights’ from Hits 5, although as if to balance all of this out there is a brief keyboard phrase that does little bar call to mind the cast of Rainbow singing that Pray Open Your Umbrella song. Still, you can’t have everything, and in terms of 1986 chart pop I’ve Been Losing You comes as close to everything as you probably can have.

Meanwhile, one of the joys of Hits 5 - and indeed the entire Hits series to be fair - is that, where applicable, it lists and indeed depicts the parent albums that the compiled hits were lifted from. It’s a fair bet that many of the albums in question have barely ever been heard by anyone bar the artists responsible, but I’ve Been Losing You of course hailed from A-ha's chart-topping second album Scoundrel Days, and while its embossed cloud-covered contents will scarcely need much introduction or elaboration, it’s always worth giving a namecheck to the legendarily ridiculous Maybe Maybe, home as it is to the truly unhinged lyric “maybe it was over when you chucked me out the Rover at full speed”. But that's not the next track on Hits 5, of course...


The Bangles - 'Walk Like An Egyptian'


So, you’re a guitar-obsessed mid-eighties teenager who has recently scored their first ever acoustic, with crazy rock dreams of becoming something somewhere between Johnny Marr and ‘Eddie’ from ‘The Banned’ on EastEnders. And then one day, while you’ve barely progressed past the stage of haplessly struggling along to Sunshine Of Your Love, along come four young American ladies with big guitars, big voices, and big hair to match, heightening all kinds of levels of inspiration. Ahem. Biggest guitar, voice and hair all belong to Vicki Peterson, the effortlessly cool lead guitarist and occasional lead vocalist, and inevitably an entire generation of guitar hero/heroine wannabes end up looking up to her, looking down her top, or both.

Yes, everyone had their own favourite Bangle, and indeed some particularly smitten fans no doubt crossed off the others on the cover of the Different Light album, like some crazy before-the-event Richard Herring. Yet the story of how they ascended to bedroom wall saturation is a strange one; originally eyeshadow-toting tie-dyed-in-the-wool neo-hallucinogenic sixties freaks, they’d formed as The Bangs in the early eighties and tiptoed around the nascent ‘Paisley Underground’ scene alongside the not-quite-chart-infiltrating likes of The Dream Syndicate and Rain Parade. Record company interest and the subsequent bankrolling of a hairbrush saw them reborn as The Bangles, four glammed-up girl-next-door-made-good types who nevertheless could attack their instruments with the ferocity of any of those bands that John Peel played. Upon which avowed fan of - and indeed avowed borrower of ideas from - the Paisley Underground Prince Rogers Nelson (who we'll be hearing more from later) offers to give them a helping hand with a song that he’s written with them in mind, or at least with Susannah Hoffs' pants in mind, and the rest is platinum-selling history.

The Bangles' third UK hit of 1986 (the first being, needless to say, the aforementioned Manic Monday, and the second the semi-forgotten If She Knew What She Wants), and indeed yet another to only narrowly miss out on the top slot, the none-more-eighties dance craze-sponsoring buzzsaw guitarsmithery of Walk Like An Egyptian was a bit of a surprising departure from their usually at least moderately ‘sixties’-tinged jangling, but a welcome one all the same, and indeed one that was all over the radio in minutes and frankly too infectious and enormous-sounding to ignore, particularly on account of its clever tactic of swapping lead vocalist for all three verses (hapless drummer Debbie was officially credited with the ‘Whistling Solo’, but even the most Yamaha DX-averse listener in 1986 could tell that it had clearly been rendered by synthesiser, something that was unfortunately underlined when they performed Walk Like An Egyptian on Whistle Test and a mistimed camera sweep caught it being picked out on a keyboard).

The actual Egyptian-walking putative dance craze side of the song was perhaps the only unsatisfactory part of the whole shebang (let’s just sidestep that unfortunate line about“foreign types and their hookah pipes”), not least because it gave rise to an irritating video full of eminently punchable members of the public ‘doing’ walking like an Egyptian, not to mention Princess Diana and Colonel Gadaffi joining in the 'fun' courtesy of ‘digital trickery’ that made the opening titles of Cool It! look like Pixar's most sophisticated offerings. Still, on the other hand, the video did also feature the four Bangle girls doing the purported dance in Turkish pants, Susanna’s famous close-up eye-rolling, and Vicki in THAT party frock, so it was a bit of a win-win situation really.

Walk Like An Egyptian was something of a shoo-in for Hits 5, and sonically perfect for following on from I’ve Been Losing You. But you couldn’t really say that about every track…


Don Johnson - 'Heart Beat'


Although uber-Bangle Vicki Peterson was who all self-respecting adolescents wanted to see getting up to late-night-TV-style shenanigans in 1986, what they actually did get to see on late-night TV - aside from the expected sneak-watch slap-up feed of Spitting Image and The Equalizer - was the dramatically of-its-time Miami Vice.

Frowned on by teachers, self-appointed ‘media watchdogs’, and humourless classmates who liked The Cure, set to a not-exactly-driving AOR soundtrack, and drenched in an eighties fashion overload that was frankly too pastel-shaded to be described as ‘eye-hurting’, the adventures of Sonny Crockett and Ricardo Tubbs in the murky world of undercover beachfront sex-and-drug-counteracting with suit jacket sleeves rolled up for good measure were a late night draw like few others (apart from V, obviously), usually occasioning a failed attempt at begging parents to allow you to stay up to watch it, followed by subterfugal deployment of the black and white portable with the volume turned as low as it could possibly go. Thus it was that classic episodes such as The One Where That Hooker Was Killing ‘Johns’ But They Couldn’t Work Out What The Murder Weapon Was, The One With The Serial Killer Who Did Stage Shows To An Audience Of Shop Window Dummies, The One With The Retired Judge Who Built His Own Super-Prison In His Basement and The One Where That Drug Dealer Went Mad And Thought A Puppet Was Telling Him To Fly passed into shared folklore in a way that Robert Smith dressed as a washing machine never could.

Part of the reason for the huge success of Miami Vice was its goth-horrifying close relationship with the more commercial end of the music industry, not just via the seemingly non-stop soundtrack made up in equal measures of Glenn Frey-style gritty rockers and treble-heavy synth-instrumental workouts from Jan Hammer, whose Miami Vice Theme and Crockett’s Theme (anyone notice – ahem – a theme developing there?) both became huge international hit singles (Crockett’s Theme, of course, later acting as the soundtrack to a particularly loathesome 1991 NatWest advert that nobody writing this appeared as an extra in honest and you will recieve a writ if you try to claim otherwise), but also courtesy of frequent guest-starring appearances from the likes of Phil Collins, doing a spot of ‘acting’ before being afforded some valuable-ish exposure for their latest single. It’s hardly surprising, then, that Crockett-portrayer Don Johnson (whose first screen appearance, lest we forget, was in the Sweet Gingerbread Man-unleashing big-screen freakout The Magic Garden Of Stanley Sweetheart) should also have had a modestly successful side career as a songwriter, and in turn even less surprising that someone at Epic Records should have put the ensuing commercial two and two together and ushered one of TV’s biggest stars at the time with a ready-made back catalogue into a recording studio to cut his very own album.

Lead single Heart Beat was an entirely predictable top ten smash in America, and as such was naturally assumed to be all set to do likewise over here. Needless to say, it didn’t. Chances are that Heart Beat is one of the least remembered tracks on Hits 5 (and indeed one of the least ‘hit’ tracks on Hits 5, failing to make the top 75 in the UK), and a quick relisten quickly explains why. Like Stay The Night by Benjamin Orr, and indeed a couple of other contemporaneous efforts we’ll be meeting a little further along on Hits 5, it’s one of those compressed-squeaky-lead-guitar festooned gravel-voiced soft-rock workouts with no discernible hint of a tune that were everywhere in the mid-eighties. True, this would probably have made it fit nicely onto the soundtrack of Miami Vice, but it stood absolutely zero chance in a pop chart dominated by the likes of, well, Walk Like And Egyptian and I’ve Been Losing You, and deservedly so. A video full of typical-for-its-time rock posturing and too many close-ups of the ‘other’ band members hardly helped, nor did the fact that it shared its name with the superiorly-theme-tuned BBC children’s art show fronted by Tony Hart, nor indeed did a cover that looked like it had been commissioned from somebody submitting a painting to Hart Beat, and it’s a fair bet that even less people have heard the enthusiastically-plugged parent album, also titled Heart Beat. Though we’d better stop there before some berk does an unfunny ‘Morph Vice’ Photoshop thingy.

Don Johnson may well be a key component in comprehending and deciphering the cultural maelstrom that gave rise to this double-album collection of putative chart hits, but with no small irony his own musical contribution stalls the momentum of Hits 5 a mere two tracks in. And it’s going to get worse before it gets better…


Paul Young - 'Wonderland'


Let’s be absolutely blunt about this. For all the good that Live Aid may have done in terms of raising global consciousness of issues affecting the developing world, and indeed in raising money full stop, on a purely musical level its effect was little short of catastrophic. It was the bland AOR veterans and their tiresome emphasis on the ‘live experience’ (which apparently had something to do with shoebox-shaped guitars), many of whom had been languishing in whatever the platinum-selling equivalent of career doldrums is only months earlier, that made the biggest and most lasting impression on the day. Suddenly they were back on top, and their resurgence would cast a long shadow over pop music for several years to come. The unfortunate upshot of all of this was that many post-New Wave popsters who had at least been trying to do something a bit different – and indeed some of whom had actually performed at Live Aid, though you’d never know that from the clip shows – suddenly found that nobody cared any more. Not for nothing did Smash Hits forcibly install ‘Belouis’ ‘Some’ as the most prominent resident of ‘The Dumper’.

One of said slightly-quirkier-than-the-norm pop stars who had performed at Live Aid without anyone really noticing was Paul Young, who by the time that Hits 5 was being put together was almost eighteen months absent from the singles chart, and must have been watching the unjust lack of fervour surrounding the likes of Radio Musicola and One To One with no small amount of trepidation. A leading proponent of ‘sophisticated’ pop at the best of times, there had been some talk of his imminent comeback album being characterised by more ‘mature’ sounds, and indeed Between Two Fires would prove to be full of music so laid-back and ambient that it made Come Back And Stay sound like Rocky Sharpe & The Replays at their most Cheggers Plays Pop-courting. And nowhere was this better exemplified than on lead single Wonderland.

Across a whopping five minutes – every single one of them present, correct and jaw-droppingly unedited on Hits 5– Wonderland charts a low-key path through post-Peter Gabriel swishing noise World Music-isms crossed with what appear to the be drums from Lionel Richie’s All Night Long (All Night), picking out a muted and part-improvised slow-reveal melody hailing from somewhere between Ladysmith Black Mambazo and the cast of Rainbow, with lyrics that don’t really say very much apart from vague promises to take the female addressee back to ‘Wonderland’. There’s probably some scope in there for making an obscure joke about T-Bag-inaugurating 1985 Children’s ITV serial Wonders In Letterland, but unfortunately for TV’s Jennie Stallwood, her first mention anywhere in T-Shirt alone knows how many years will have to give way to some details of Wonderland‘s chart prowess, if you could actually call it that. Although the parent album fared pretty well, the lead single barely scraped the top thirty and Paul Young would have to do some career-trajectory reassessment shortly thereafter. Unfortunately, this did ultimately involve Zucchero.

Though it failed to make much of an impression on Hits 5 listeners at the time, it has to be stressed that hindsight reveals Wonderland to be quite a good song. Placing it third on the opening side of a chart hits compilation, however, is just madness, and while it would undoubtedly have worked very well at the end of a side, here it does more to flatten the mood even than Don Johnson did. Oh well, at least there’s somebody teetering on a rickety microphone stand just around the corner…


Julian Cope - 'World Shut Your Mouth'


While the musical and cultural legacy of Live Aid may have instigated a divebomb bargain bin-wards for far too many of pop’s quirkier early eighties big hitters, it did also conversely provide an unexpected chart inroad for many of those previously considered to be too downright weird for mainstream appeal. At least partly influenced by Live Aid’s clear demonstration of how you could get large numbers of people reacting to solid, economical musical arrangements and carefully-deployed onstage antics, even if they probably cared little or less than little for those who had done the demonstrating, from late 1985 onwards a number of highly unlikely acts would suddenly sharpen up their sound and image in a chart-friendly direction without actually doing anything resembling ‘selling out’. The Housemartins, The Cure and The Jesus & Mary Chain were just a few of those who worked out how to get themselves heard on daytime radio and appeal to the average pop picker without alienating their usual fans, and became regular chart stars in the process. The Smiths would go even further, seemingly hovering on the verge of a stadium-level breakthrough just as Johnny Marr’s hissy fit over having to cover the theme from Don’t Just Lie There, Say Something led to their implosion and a million years' worth of ‘Is Morrissey A Gnu??’ shock exposes in the NME. And the unlikliest and yet most successful of the lot? Julian Cope.

Formerly frontman of The Teardrop Explodes, whose response to a brief flirtation with Top Of The Pops-troubling status was to blow the budget for their third album on climbing in and out of speeding car windows whilst an expensive studio remained resolutely un-recorded-in, Cope had embarked on a solo career in 1983, infamously offering up the enjoyable but extremely disjointed and hallucinogen-frazzled World Shut Your Mouth and Fried to a dwindling fanbase, bolstered by a to say the least ‘eccentric’ stage act. Yet just when he was being written off as an audience-endangering acid casualty with slightly less than minimal commercial prospects, Cope suddenly ‘cleaned up’ (well, relatively speaking), and began to make plans for an album combining his deeply unhinged musical imagination with a solidly commercial sound. The resulting album Saint Julian– and indeed its similarly successful follow up My Nation Underground– was a strong effort that threw a much needed note of angular weirdness into eighties pop radio. Apparently Cope himself no longer rates either of these albums, as evidenced by him making that lo-fi concept album about TV’s Funny Bones shortly afterwards as a form of artistic protest, which is a bit of a shame but there you go.

World Shut Your Mouth– confusingly, not from the album of the same name, with Cope declaring that he ‘didn’t realise it was a song title’ until emerging from his acid-heavy episode – was the lead single from Saint Julian, and a mighty lead single it was too, with a taut catchy melody comparable to The 13th Floor Elevators penning an old-skool advertising jingle (indeed, as if to somehow emphasise this point that's just been made up right here right now, there was a memorably bubblegummed-up cover of the Elevators’ I’ve Got Levitation on the b-side), and precision-engineered guitar pop musical backing with just the right amount of psychedelic weirdness hidden in the arrangement, sounding like a Monkees record for the age of the filofax (though ironically not like the actual Monkees record for the age of the filofax, 1986′s That Was Then But This Is Now, which sounded like a load of aimless warbling over a stolen bit of the Tom And Jerry theme). Sure enough, it took Cope into the charts and back onto Top Of The Pops, balancing atop his weird abstract sculpture microphone stand thing, and caused a million school buses the next morning to resonate to the sound of the ‘hard’ kids trying to adopt it as a vaguely rebellious anthem of indeterminate purpose and meaning, albeit without realising that there was actually a ‘world’ before the ‘shut your mouth’.

Following on from two mid-paced so-so efforts (or, in the case of Don Johnson, so-what effort) that stretched the definition of ‘hits’ to its metaphorical and indeed literal breaking point, World Shut Your Mouth boots a bit of energy back into Hits 5 in fine style, heralding the imminent arrival of a couple of none-more-1986 era-definers par excellence…


Bruce Hornsby And The Range - 'The Way It Is'


While we’re continuing to administer a bit of a kicking to Live Aid, it’s worth highlighting yet another of its unexpected and unfortunate side-effects; namely that while everyone who got involved agreed with the cause, not all of them neccessarily entirely agreed with the idea that it represented any kind of a solution. From Daryl Hall’s mid-event anger at being compelled to share a stage with ‘jerks’ who had played Sun City, to Bob Dylan’s onstage demand for some of the funds raised to be diverted towards America’s concurrent Farm Aid appeal, to Andy Kershaw having to almost literally have his arm twisted before agreeing to join the BBC’s presentation team, to the disgruntlement expressed by artists as diverse as Phil Oakey and Morrissey over how they were approached (and then, later, unapproached) about taking part, there was a general feeling that perhaps asking the public to bankroll relief operations was in some way allowing politicians and world leaders to get away with not actually having to do anything to address the underlying problems. If anything, this feeling probably only intensified when Bob Geldof released the rotten This Is The World Calling a couple of months later.

Into the middle of all this wandered one Bruce Hornsby, and his overmanned and indeed overhatted backing band The Range, with a catchy rolling piano riff and some scathing lyrics about the eighties ‘greed is good’ culture. Yes, for all that you may hear The Way It Is being used as backing music for football results or on daytime TV blandfests like Ear Nose & Throat Clinic Live, or indeed sampled by rappers mangling the lyrics into something that even Bill Cosby would deem grammatically unsatisfactory, the inescapable truth remains that atop that radio-friendly jazz-funk backdrop sit some rather quite startling couplets about unequal welfare laws and City Boys sneering at the unemployed, and an overall walloping in the throat of ‘Reaganomics’, like the prelude to some particularly amusing episode of House MD (which, to be fair, has probably used it over the closing montage at some point anyway). Whether you like it or not, The Way It Is is the closest that radio-friendly eighties AOR ever got to an iron fist in a velvet glove, albeit one too velvet-gloved for a good proportion of privileged idiots to understand. Indeed, it can only be a matter of time before David Cameron speaks warmly about how he loved the song while he was at university.

Though the ‘quality’ music press may have raved over follow-on single Mandolin Rain (which genuinely does appear to be about medieval instruments falling from the sky), it’s likely that few ever invested in similarly-titled parent album The Way It Is, and Bruce Hornsby’s status as an unexpected champion of the economically undertrodden was sadly short-lived. Which is why it’s all the more pleasing to find The Way It Is hiding near the end of the first side of Hits 5, sounding just as easy on the ear as it did back when your clock radio kicked in partway through the song and the aroma of burnt toast and sound of siblings shouting obscenities at TV-am’s Mike Morris filled the house. Mind you, if you tune said clock radio in to one of those present day ‘eighties hits’ stations and then burn some toast, you can probably replicate that feeling easily enough. But there’s some things on Hits 5 that probably haven’t been heard on the radio from that day to this…


Hollywood Beyond - 'What's The Colour Of Money?'


It’s strange to think that when Hits 5 was released, Channel 4′s irreverent pop music show The Tube was still a towering and subversive presence, and yet barely a month later it was gone, prematurely cancelled at the height of its powers in a storm of Jools Holland foulmouthery-instigated tabloid outrage. That such a convention-challenging youth show had lasted over four years in an era of intense hostility towards Channel Swore/Channel 4 The Big Bore, when the press (tabloid and broadsheet) and politicians alike were actively seeking the next big taboo-buster to get all hot under the collar about - much as they do with the BBC now, in fact - and constantly calling for it to be ‘banned’ in a manner that suggested they hadn’t actually realised that it was the same channel that also showed Cartoon Alphabet, Mama Malone, Everybody Here and Murun Buchstansangur, was in retrospect a remarkable enough achievement in itself. That it should have been utterly unmissable on top of this, in a way that Channel 4 never, ever managed in any of the subsequent attempts at rebottling its lightning, from The Word and Watch This Space to Ring My Bell and Passengers, was little short of a televisual miracle. And yet week in, week out, it offered up an essential watch-on-the-black-and-white-portable mix of live music, unfathomable fashion reports, comedy ‘stings’ from the likes of Mark Miwurdz and Vic Reeves, and opportunites for unsigned acts to get a precious three minutes of national exposure simply by sending in a video of themselves performing.

The most celebrated beneficiaries of this initiative were of course Frankie Goes To Hollywood, though for a time it really did seem that Hollywood Beyond weren’t too far behind them. Essentially a one-man ‘band’ made up of multi-instrumentalist singer-songwriter Mark Rogers, his home-taped appearance on The Tube singing No More Tears whilst sitting in a big chair that looked uncannily like those used in the Two Ronnies’ ‘Humphrey’ and ‘Godfrey’ sketches was enough to send the major labels into one of those time-honoured ‘bidding wars’, and WEA duly issued debut single What’s The Colour Of Money? in the summer of 1986. Its driving blend of funk, world music, scathing lyrics about commercial exploitation of the developing world (don’t tell him that you think it's green – him, he knows it’s red), expensive arty video retaining the 'Humphrey'/'Godfrey' setting, and Rogers’ arresting visual image meant that, for the briefest of moments, TV, radio and Smash Hits were all over Hollywood Beyond. What’s more, he was called back onto The Tube– for the legendary ‘Eurotube’ special, no less - to review some other sent-in tapes of new bands, discovering The Christians in the process. And then No More Tears itself came out and did nothing. Way in advance of the whole Soul II Soul-instigated ‘global dance music’ scene, and possibly representing too unpalatable a ’dark side’ of the emerging vogue for world music for Paul Simon fans to countenance, there was no permanent place in the pop firmament for poor old Mark Rogers, underlined by the fact that Malcolm McLaren is reputed to have once enigmatically quipped to him “it’s just as difficult arriving too early as arriving too late”.

Hollywood Beyond’s lone and inevitably overlooked album If quietly arrived in 1987, and has since become a major collector’s item, but for most pop fans in 1986 the only permanent reminder of What’s The Colour Of Money? was, well, What’s The Colour Of Money? appearing on side one of Hits 5. And though time may have lent a sheen of naiveity to the lyrical sentiments, and a sheen of annoyingness to the overused accordian, it still sounds pretty good – so good, in fact, that you’d find it hard to believe that someone who could come up with something so sophisticated and yet slick and catchy should have ended up a permanent resident of all of those statistically dubious Greatest One-Hit Wonders In The World… Ever!-type albums. However, not every indirectly chart-climbing The Tube-sourced phenomenon of 1986 was quite so intriguing…


Nick Kamen - 'Each Time You Break My Heart'


Towards the end of its run, The Tube was notoriously enlivened - if that's the right word - by the presence of short-lived co-anchor Felix Howard, a thirteen-year-old model whose Bruiser de Cadenet-anticipating presentational style – most kindly described as ‘unique’ - infamously saw him run out of anything to say whilst interviewing a touchingly sympathetic ‘Dinners’ McCartney. Yet as much as the audience may have chortled at his Jools-stalling haplessness, it was young Felix who had the last laugh, being hand-picked to appear in the video for Madonna’s Open Your Heart and going on to become a big cheese on the business side of the music industry. And he wasn’t the only vogueish – nor indeed Vogueish – male model to benefit from the erstwhile Mrs. Penn’s patronage in 1986.

Nick Kamen, male model, hogger of the cover of The Face, and star of the much-emulated Levi's advert in which he stripped to his boxers in a laundrette, leading to ad-soundtracker Marvin Gaye being propelled chartwards and TV’s Oblivion Boys being propelled into one of the most unfunny parodies of anything ever, had already been the subject of a million ‘who is this mystery hunk?’ pieces in gossip columns by the time he caught the ever-roving eye of Madonna. With the aid of regular collaborator Stephen Bray, she wrote and produced Each Time You Break My Heart for him, and doubtless smiled in satisfaction as it became a huge hit not just in the pretty much already guaranteed UK market but across the globe as well. Waxy of complexion, surprisingly strong of voice, romantically linked to female-model-of-the-moment and regular Tatler cover star Talisa Soto, and equipped with a seemingly endless supply of stylish jackets and brylcreem, Nick Kamen seemed to have been tailor made for the mid-eighties pop charts. Yet despite all this, second single Loving You Is Sweeter Than Ever only just scraped the top twenty, the more angular Nobody Else sank without trace, and all that remained for the briefly-popular jeans-discarder were the lucrative European and Japanese markets, some success as a songwriter, and a surprising subsequent career as an artist. In many, many respects, his story was the story of Chesney Hawkes five years before the event.

The automatic assumption, then, is that Each Time You Break My Heart will prove to be one of the more easily glossed-over selections on Hits 5. In fact, it’s actually rather good; perhaps a little too much like a Madonna record with someone else singing on it, but given this is mid-eighties Madonna we’re talking about, this is in no way a bad thing. The case-overstating video, with its Levi's-riffingly tedious adherence to the mid-eighties concept of ‘style’ as something from an imagined early sixties Americana, complete with mind-numbing ‘diner’ setting and one of those old microphones that you’re more likely to see in a behind-the-scenes photo of The Goon Show than in any performance by a Motown great, does give some indication of why the public seemingly got tired of him so quickly, but that’s just the video. Why this infectious and well-crafted song is so bafflingly absent from eighties-skewed oldies stations and hits compilations is a more puzzling matter altogether. Still, it’s here at the end of side one of Hits 5, which is about as high as this kind of honour gets. But will things stay as interesting once we’ve flipped the record over…?

On the first side of Hits 5, we encountered a bunch of quirky, sophisticated and sometimes angular mainstream pop and rock songs that didn't always quite come off, but between them amply demonstrated just what a strange year for chart music 1986 really was. But hold on to your Mexico '86 spiral paper hats, as we're about to get plunged straight into the dark side of that 1986 sound...


Paul Simon - 'You Can Call Me Al'


If you rejected the Tao of Nick Kamen (or, if you will, Kamenism), and had no desire to align yourself with the murkily-fringed sub-cultural world of the likes of The Smiths and The Jesus & Mary Chain, there was only one big showy look-at-me-I-disagree-with-the-populist-stuff stance left for you to adopt - namely affecting an interest in the burgeoning trend for ‘World Music’. Yes, 1986 saw a sudden increase in attention directed at all things global and groovy, as the broadsheet press and Channel 4 youth shows (not least the Eagle Eye Cherry-fronted Big World Cafe) were at risk of being submerged beneath a deluge of cake tin hats and people pretending that they’d liked all those African artists that Andy Kershaw played before you had even heard of them. And – whether those the people with the ‘Only when we have catapulted the last gnu will we realise we cannot eat KP Griddles’ mugs like it or not - the man who did the most to promote this, and indeed more than likely made the most money out of it (from royalties on record sales, before anyone reaches for the nearest lawyer), was quite probably the least expected of all. Well, least expected apart from ‘Belouis’ ‘Some’.

Paul Simon was already into his second decade as a solo artist when a chance hearing of Gumboots by the Boyoyo Boys changed his musical outlook forever. Out went slick post-folk-rock quirky tales of sub-Woody Allen romantic mishaps set to rinky-dink drum patterns, and in came rhythmically dense collaborations with artists from Africa and Latin America, still backing quirky tales of sub-Woody Allen romantic mishaps but cunningly mentioning ‘townships’ every now and then so nobody would ever suspect a thing. Needless to recount, Graceland– as the resultant album was cleverly titled in a double-barrelled reference to both his musical pilgrimage and a literal pilgrimage to Elvis’ former home (which doubtless added an extra element of too much perspective) - went on to become a multi-multi-multi million seller and was one of the albums responsible for ‘breaking’ the CD format, its massive success presumably contributing in some way towards the miraculous recovery of Mr. Simon’s hairline. Its musical, ethical, political, economic and indeed olfactory rights and wrongs have been widely debated elsewhere, and indeed it is still the subject of some controversy to this day, but at least it had The Boy In The Bubble on it. And, indeed, the single that eventually found its way onto the start of side two of Hits 5.

It’s scarcely worth going into any detail about You Can Call Me Al, nor indeed anything from Graceland, simply because it’s so well known, but despite the ‘unit-’shifting-related music press excitement and classmate hysteria over the quirky video featuring a lip-synching King Of The Video Rental Shops 1986 Chevy Chase being ‘zany’ that it generated at the time, the harsh reality is that it’s a fairly humdrum song with exceptionally irritating lyrics but one which is lifted no end by the then-unfamiliar instrumental flourishes, not least an arresting bass guitar solo by Bakithi Kumalo that everyone forgets about. More to the point, it’s difficult to stress just how well, in its original context, it fitted the winter-draws-on excitement of furtively scouring the Grattan catalogue for extra items to append to your Christmas list. As such, it’s only fitting that it should adopt such a prominent position on Hits 5 - though, that said, its positioning at the start of side two does seem to indicate that, having enjoyed an entire opening side’s worth of slightly-left-of-centre pop thrills, we might now be in for eight whole tracks of ‘quality rock’ drivel…


Eurythmics - 'Thorn In My Side'


Such was the all-conquering clock-resetting art-pop-decimating power of Live Aid that it was even able to work its ‘magic’ – in the most debatable definition of the word imaginable - on acts that didn’t even perform at the event. Eurythmics had in fact been pencilled in for a slot at Wembley Stadium, but had to pull out at the last minute due to Annie Lennox having a severe attack of vocal chord-related health worries, yet even so the latter half of 1985 would see them being pulled slowly but unstoppably towards the stadium rock end of the musical spectrum. Out went sophisticated if annoyingly arch two-person electropop with performance art leanings, and in came shoutalong choruses, eight million-member rock posturing lineups, and Dave Stewart flamboyantly strumming a guitar that was barely audible on the actual records. And throughout all of this, lest we forget, Dave Lee Travis insisted on telling Radio 1 listeners that he found their name – inspired by early 20th Century progressive theories on pre-school education techniques interpolating strictly-defined usage of rhythm patterns – ‘hilarious’. No, us neither.

It was something of a surprise, then – especially given the media-dominance of the irritatingly ubiquitous (and indeed irritating full stop) There Must Be An Angel (Playing With My Heart) the previous year – that their 1986 album Revenge was initially something of an under-performer in the UK, with lead single When Tomorrow Comes only just scraping into the top forty. However, their new-found theme-from-LA-Law-with-distortion-pedals-esque musical direction proved to be just what America was looking for, leading to music press murmurings of their off-radar States-conquering and the album being given a second push, duly propelling the uber-commercial Thorn In My Side into the UK top ten.

Though it was an obvious choice at the time for side two of Hits 5, it has to be said that Thorn In My Side isn’t exactly one of those inclusions on the tracklisting that fills the nostalgic relistener with excitement, and this is borne out by the fact that it’s actually quite pleasant to hear again for about thirty seconds, but after that massively outstays its welcome, especially during the seemingly endless ‘breakdown’ bit in the middle. What’s worse, it marks the first appearance on Hits 5 of that most hated of mid-eighties musical cliches, the American Saxaphone (of which The Housemartins perceptively observed “it follows me all the way from the telly to the public house/my fingers are always in my ears but the reed’s always in their mouth”), which immediately loses Dave and Annie any goodwill they may have been begrudgingly granted. Worse still, it bears some subtle but uncanny similarities to another, much better song that will appear later on Hits 5, and the video is overwrought model-festooned MTV-friendly glossy nothingness of the first order. Happily, some fellow post-punk stragglers are on hand to lift matters a bit…


The Stranglers - 'Always The Sun'


From legwarmers to yo-yos, from Batman t-shirts to those spidery octopus things that rolled down windows, fads famously came and went in the eighties with an alarmingly short average shelf life. The Stranglers, however, just kept on coming back. Every couple of years, they’d seem to fall out of fashion and into ridicule, only to suddenly score yet another hit with yet another strong single and find themselves flavour of the month yet again, with a fresh round of uniformly-adopted ‘The Men In Black Are Back!’ headlines even when they were wearing other colours. What’s more, with the aid of a liberal helping of tenuous adherence to (or, if you prefer, downright disregarding of) the Gregorian Calendar, you could make a reasonable claim that they sort of bookended the eighties with a brace of unlikely but well-recieved cover versions; Walk On By as the seventies faded, and 96 Tears as the nineties arrived.

Slap bang in the middle of the decade came yet another resurgence in career fortunes with the Dreamtime album, and its highly popular – if not exactly highly-top-thirty-scaling – attendant singles Nice In Nice and Always The Sun. The poor chart showing of these two particular singles – quite at odds with how successful the general public always seem to remember them as having been – is apparently still something of a sensitive point with the band, who even at the time were claiming that their then-record label weren’t responding to single-buying demand levels adequately. In the long term they would seem to have been proved right, not least on account of Always The Sun being reissued several times, becoming a cornerstone of a great many Greatest Hits collections, and later cropping up regularly in adverts and as backing music in TV shows.

It’s very difficult to be acerbic, sarcastic or surreal when you’re talking about a band that have had to put up with more than their fair share of mostly unwarranted and indeed mostly unfunny jibes over the course of a long career; even more so when it’s in relation to a song that’s never been given as fair a crack of the whip as it clearly deserves. Complicating matters still further, Always The Sun may not exactly be the most profound of statements on global economic inequality that climax with a cryptic allusion to nuclear war, but compared to most other mid-eighties attempts at doing this via the medium of pop music it’s at least restrained, impassioned and to the point. Even the video can’t really be mined for gag material, as it merely features The Men In, erm, Grey miming in a darkened studio with the occasional flash of ‘eco’-themed stock footage. Which makes it all the more pleasing to hear it on Hits 5, to be reminded how much of a great song it is, and to have little else to say so here. But will circumstances be quite so favourable for a certain other bunch of leftover New Wave-rs in it for the long haul…?


The Pretenders - 'Don't Get Me Wrong'
 
Like The Stranglers, The Pretenders are enduring New Wave-era stalwarts who have suffered from a long-term unreasonable image problem, though in their case it’s entirely the opposite kind of unreasonable image problem. Whereas the so-called Men In Black were all too regularly written off as little short of their own tribute act, unable to move on musically and trapped in the persona that had brought them their greatest public and critical adulation (both of which, as outlined in the previous entry, were demonstrably untrue), time has come to pigeonhole The Pretenders as ultra-bland ultra-radio-friendly stadium rock lightweights appealing to listeners who considered Q Magazine a bit ‘daring’. While Chrissie Hynde’s post-Live Aid ubiquity as featured vocalist on UB40′s rotten cover of I Got You Babe hardly exactly helped matters, this unfair bracketing does a tremendous disservice to their sharp and assertive early output, their frontwoman’s status as a take-no-prisoners role model for an entire generation of erstwhile teenage girls, and the fact that at this point they were barely two years away from a snarling, blistering song about the tragic fate of their original guitarist James Honeyman-Scott. Meanwhile, UB40 are yet another band that emerged from the post-punk scene and have since found themselves tarnished by an admittedly self-inflicted image problem that has all but wiped their better material from history… but unfortunately for them, they aren’t on Hits 5.

Sticking to bands who are on Hits 5, it’s difficult to avoid the fact that The Pretenders who made the album Get Close in 1986 were in many ways a different band to The Pretenders of the post-punk era. In fact they were almost literally a different band, with Hynde and Honeyman-Scott’s replacement Robbie McIntosh joined by former Haircut 100 drummer Blair Cunningham and perma-Raybanned bassist-for-hire TM Stevens, and a more jaunty and commercial sound replacing the often harsh-edged thrashy jangling of their earlier output. Though in balance, it did also include some ‘guitar synth’ work by Bowie sidekick Carlos Alomar, and a cover of Jimi Hendrix’s Room Full Of Mirrors, which hardly exactly left it sitting comfortably in the Deacon Blue bracket.

Released in the late summer of 1986, lead single Don’t Get Me Wrong was an unsurprising top ten hit, helped in no small part by a technically impressive-for-the-time video in which Chrissie Hynde was inserted into archive footage from The Avengers. It’s a bouncy and deceptively lightweight song bolstered by subtle but effective production (not least the unepected dramatic bursts of searing guitar towards the end), though despite what some Citation Needing contributors to Wikipedia may claim, the lyrics don’t really stand up to close scrutiny. In many ways, it’s a song that seemed tailor-made for ‘oldies’ radio even before it was a ‘newie’, and while it’s nice enough to hear again it’s not exactly a track that’s liable to get the listener freebaseing pure uncut 1986 nostalgia. Though sometimes even that can be a good thing. There is, after all, a dark side to Hits 5…


5 Star - 'Rain Or Shine'


If you’re taking a track-by-track look at a compilation of then-recent pop hits from many years ago, chances are that you will eventually run into something you really can’t stand. Something that you hated so much at the time that you still consider it one of the most irredeemably awful records you have ever had the misfortune to hear. And indeed, something so nauseating and offensive to the ears that the prospect of having to sit through it again in its entirety almost put you off doing this project altogether. That record, in case you haven’t worked it out already (the clue is, quite literally, in the title), is Rain Or Shine by Five Star.

Since we’ve so far gone to great lengths to challenge the widespread public perception of both The Stranglers and The Pretenders, given the sociopolitical benefit of the doubt to Paul Simon, charted a crash course through Julian Cope’s haphazard eighties output with a couple of jokes thrown in for good measure, and explained just why that bloke from Hollywood Beyond was sitting in that big chair all the time, it’s only fair that we afford an equal amount of proportionally due respect to Five Star. So, in short, they were a family-derived collection of bacofoil-clad Jacksons wannabes with an unreasonably inflated idea of their own musical worth, who specialised in tepid dance-pop only with post-New Romantic lyrical references to technology and the space age to make it more ‘exciting’, and were so inconsequential that they were openly mocked by children on live television. Whether you liked The Smiths, A-ha, Madonna or even ‘Belouis’ ‘Some’, they seemed to be the absolute antithesis of everything you found moving, exciting or fulfilling about pop music, and in this regard were far worse offenders than anyone who was ever produced by the in comparison outrageously unfairly maligned Stock, Aitken & Waterman. And Rain Or Shine was by some distance the worst of the lot; which, when you have a back catalogue that also includes If I Say Yes, is no mean feat.

Rain Or Shine, a sickly mid-paced drippy ballad of such overpowering tweeness that it makes Sarah from Belle & Sebastian look like she’s picking a fight with an entire taxi queue, is so unremittingly awful that for the sake of linguistic decency it’s scarcely worth commenting on, other than to chortle at the line “Robin Hood and Major Tom/all the superheroes rolled into one”. Not only does this hint at a profound misunderstanding of the lyrics of Space Oddity, and indeed the legend of Robin Hood, it’s also worth pointing out that ‘all the superheroes rolled into one’ is more or less an accurate description of Peter Petrelli from Heroes, who would certainly have had some angsty difficulty in living up to the romantic promise of the lyrics. And who wrote those lyrics? None other than Pete Sinfield, formerly of King Crimson, and author of the oft-quoted around these parts 21st Century Schizoid Man. Well, we all have our off days. If anyone really cares, Rain Or Shine came from the album Silk And Steel, which was also handily namechecked in the lyrics, and it may actually have the worst video of all time. Anyway, you can stop covering your ears now, the next one on Hits 5‘s quite good…


Dead Or Alive - 'Brand New Lover'


What a difference a year makes. In 1985, Dead Or Alive were scarcely out of the pop charts, and thanks to visually and verbally provocative frontman Pete Burns, barely out of the papers either. Hailing from the same Liverpool-centric post-punk jamboree as Julian Cope - indeed, Burns had previously worked behind the counter of scene-pivotal independent record shop Probe Records - Dead Or Alive had made a couple of murky-yet-tuneful critically-raved-over proto-goth electropop singles for indie labels before they were snapped up by Epic. One moderately successful debut album later, they were teamed up with Stock, Aitken & Waterman – one of the first acts to work with the soon-to-be-dominant pop production team, in fact – in an audacious gamble that paid off handsomely. With their sound refined into a sort of spectral eurodisco, and their knack for a catchy hook emphasised by up-to-the-minute synth-pop production, second album Youthquake gave rise to no less than four seizeable hit singles, not least two-week chart-topper You Spin Me Round (Like A Record). And in what was perhaps their most startling achievement of all, Dead Or Alive even seemed to still be attracting public interest post-Live Aid.

Quite what went wrong between then and late 1986 is difficult to say, but despite the absence of any readily discernible reason, the inescapable fact of the matter is that surprisingly few people seemed to have much interest in the return of Dead Or Alive. So few, in fact, that ready-to-roll follow-up album Mad, Bad & Dangerous To Know, again produced by a by-then-very-much-in-the-ascendant Stock, Aitken & Waterman, ended up being delayed until early 1987 following the poor chart performance of big comeback single Brand New Lover. It’s probably true to say that it was really more of an ‘album’ as opposed to a straight-up collection of potential hits like Youthquake, and as such probably gave off much less commercial ‘vibes’ from the outset, but even so, you’d think that a few more of their clearly enormous fanbase of only twelve months previously might have been at the very least vaguely interested in what they got up to next.

The compilers of Hits 5 clearly assumed so too, which is how it ended up being plonked towards the end of the second side, and although some sources point towards a pressing plant error resulting in not enough copies being in the shops to meet first week demand, a quick relisten to Brand New Lover reveals the uncomfortable truth that it’s a really rather ordinary song by a really rather good band. It’s pleasant enough, but doesn’t really go anywhere, doesn’t really stand out, and the rather muted production – more like something you would have heard on an early Jason Donovan b-side before Mike, Matt and Pete started putting a bit more effort into these things - doesn’t do it any favours either. Put it this way, it’s no In Too Deep. Perhaps, then, its failure to progress any further than number thirty one isn’t so hard to understand. Then again, a really rather ordinary Dead Or Alive song is still a million times better than some of the codswallop that enjoyed a stronger chart showing in 1986…


Haywoode - 'Roses'


With every double-album recent hits collection like Hits 5– so that will be the other Hits albums, the Now That’s What I Call Music!s, the Out Nows the Smash Hits Partys and that Raiders Of The Pop Charts thing – there was always one track that you’d just end up skipping altogether, sometimes even from the very first listen. Quite often the precise identity of this track would vary from listener to listener – opinion must have been divided on the likes of, say, Big Country, Jan Hammer and Jaki Graham to name but a few - but sometimes there turned out to be one song that almost everyone agreed on in their needle-lifting/fast-forward-hitting millions. Not because it was particularly bad, or particularly angular, or particularly by ‘Belouis’ ‘Some’, but just because it was, well, a bit on the dull side.

‘Sid’ Haywoode – for that was apparently her full name – had been making largely unsuccessful dance records since the early eighties, and it wasn’t until 1986 and a teaming up with Stock, Aitken & Waterman sideman turned part-time producer Phil Harding that she scored a hit with Roses. And the choice of Phil Harding was an apposite one, as everything about Roses– from the melody to the arrangement to the lyrics to even Haywoode’s actual adopted image for the video and tie-in appearances – smacked of little more than a transparent attempt to jump the pink-streaked bandwagon started by Mike, Matt and Pete’s big breakthrough act of the year before, Princess. The main difference, however, was that Princess had stronger songs, sharper melodies, denser production and, if we’re being pedantic about it, a better hat. Roses, with its ‘sassy’ lyrics masking a rather gender-politically dubious message and aesthetic-numbing Grandstand theme-aping squealy session guitar, was simply the right record at the right time. Everything else about it is just plain wrong.

What’s more mystifying is the question of what exactly it was doing on Hits 5. Roses had been a hit – actually stalling just outside the top ten – back in June 1986, and although as we shall see it wasn’t actually the oldest inclusion on the album, it was certainly long enough past its shelf life to strike any pop-obsessed youngster perusing the tracklisting as a chronological fish out of water. Haywoode clearly still has her followers, as there are plenty of online profiles out there that make ridiculously great play of her non-Roses achievements, coming across like some weird eighties pop counterpart to that article where Lester Bangs invented a parallel dimension decade-straddling career for sixties one-hit garage-psychers The Count Five, while Roses-sporting album Arrival has been reissued in a jaw-droppingly lavish Deluxe Edition. It’s not likely, however, that their ranks will be swelled by anyone taking a retrospective relisten to Hits 5. Still, at least people actually remember her one hit…


The Real Thing - 'Straight From The Heart'


For better or for worse, 1986 was the year when The Opportunistic Cash-In Re-release really came into its own. From jeans ad-soundtracking Kamen-endorsed Motown oldies, to anniversary-contorting punk hoedowns, to an unlikely rock’n'roll relic catapulted chartwards by an ideologically dubious claymation caricature, record companies were suddenly rifling through their back catalogues with a renewed vigour. The Real Thing’s seventies chart-topping disco favourite You To Me Are Everything hadn’t been used in an advert or film, nor was it – despite being subtitled ‘The Anniversary Remix’ – tied in with any tangible actual anniversary, nor was it even particularly favoured by the emergent ‘Rare Groove’ scene. In truth, it was really only promoting a standard-issue Greatest Hits album, and yet ironically it proved to be the most successful revival of the lot, only narrowly missing out on repeating its chart-topping antics and leading to two further Real Thing oldies – again in handy ‘Anniversary Remix’ makeovers – climbing almost as high again in the charts. And then, inevitably, they had to have a go with a ‘new’ song.

In fairness, The Real Thing had never really been away at all. They’d carried on scoring minor hits into the eighties, and once they hit a temporary brick wall chartwise, still managed to carve out a successful career in TV variety shows and backing old pals like David Essex. The second-time-around hits were in some ways little more than a welcome bonus for a band that were still a going concern and still doing very nicely thank you, and nobody could really blame them for trying to get their new material some exposure on the back of the reissue-mania. The problem, though, was exactly the same one that they’d faced the first time around – that despite their success in the field of Hill Street Blues theme-soundalike mid-paced balladeering, The Real Thing were actually a pretty serious band, heavily into their deep funk sounds and keen writers of socially aware material, including a startling late seventies song trilogy that more or less predicted the urban unrest that would break out in the UK in the early eighties, but whenever they headed in that direction, for some strange reason the public just didn’t want to know.

Straight To The Heart, the ill-fated ‘new’ single released at the tail-end of 1986, sat somewhere between their musical extremes, and – yes, you guessed it – once again the public just didn’t want to know. It only just scraped into the top seventy five, and thereafter disappeared from view completely, to the extent that it’s not even been uploaded to YouTube in any form. It is, however, preserved for posterity at the end of side two of Hits 5, and it’s a creditable effort with some neat jazz-funk touches in the backing and an interesting free-form approach to the verses. And, well, that’s it for side two, and ahead lies what you’ve all been dreading – the inevitable ‘ballads side’…

Bod's Present, the twelfth episode of much-inaccurately recalled Watch With Mother show Bod, probably hasn't been on anyone's Christmas List for a long time. Until recently, it was one of only five of the original thirteen episodes still to exist in its expanded Alberto Frog-equipped fifteen minute format - if you want to know how and why the others came to be missing in the first place, you'll be wanting to have a read of this piece about wiped BBC Children's TV - so nobody really had any particular reason to be looking out for it. On top of that, its seasonal nature means that it's not really as well remembered as the other episodes. And it's for precisely that reason that we're wrapping it up and 'regifting' it to you now.

In a sense, Bod's Present was actually a bit of a regifting in itself. Although the actual episode was first seen on BBC1 in December 1975, the basic storyline of the main animated section dated back to 1965 and the original series of Bod storybooks; indeed by that point it had already been read on Play School on a couple of suitably festive occasions. This is probably not too surprising when you consider that Bod's creators Michael and Joanne Cole were involved with Play School on the production side for many years, and that by the early seventies they had started to produce their own children's programmes for the BBC, amongst them Fingerbobs, Ring A Ding, Ragtime and, through a somewhat more roundabout route, Bod.

Like many other animated children's shows of the time, the thirteen Bod stories narrated by John Le Mesurier had already been made by the appropriately named 'Bodfilms' when the Coles took them to the BBC, presumably with the five-minute slot just before the news in mind though it was suggested that they should expand them for the lunchtime Watch With Mother slot by adding an extra ten minutes of puzzles, games and new stories with other characters. Each extended edition still opened with one of the original Bodfilms Bod films, however, and in true zen fashion that's right where we come in...


Given that the mid-sixties were something of a boom time for exploring alternative religions, when everyone from The Beatles and Peter Sellers to The Small Faces and probably even Basil Brush briefly fell under the spell of tosspot conmen wrapped in orange curtains, it should probably come as no surprise to learn that the original Bod stories were very much influenced by the somewhat more established and worthwhile teachings of Taoism. All of Bod's Daozang-derived escapades are based around the concept of action-through-inaction, as he pursues a simple thought or task secure in the knowledge that the fundamental interconnectedness of all things will lead him directly to his spiritual destination (or, if raining, head first into a giant bowl of strawberries and cream). Bod's Present is no exception and it opens with a balaclava-sporting parcel-carrying Bod trudging through the snow towards Aunt Flo's house, joined en route by the similarly-tasked PC Copper, Frank The Postman and Farmer Barleymow. As they travel onwards, the snow keeps falling in true In The Bleak Midwinter fashion until they are entirely submerged by it.


It's at this point that a curious cross-belief system intersection occurs, as midnight chimes and a decidedly Bod-canon Father Christmas with, you can't help but notice, a bright red nose rides into view. Presumably having been flicking through the Tao Te Ching on his way from the North Pole, Santa spots the apparently discarded parcels in the snow and resolves to deliver them to Aunt Flo himself. As he lifts them, up come Bod, Copper, Frank and Barleymow, who offer to help him with his deliveries in exchange for a lift to Aunt Flo's house.


After a night spent squeezing down chimneys, they finally alight at Aunt Flo's joint, where it soon becomes apparent that everyone has bought her the same hat, only in slightly varying shades. "What a Hatty Christmas!", Aunt Flo declares, before revealing that she's bought them all handkerchieves, upon which an exercise in lazy unimaginative gift-buying finds its harmonic purpose as they have all caught colds as a result of their overnight exposure to the elements. "It was worth catching a cold", says Bod, "to meet Father Christmas and see Aunt Flo in all those hats". If you say so, Robert M. Pirsig.


There goes Bod. And here comes...?


Well, a switch from film to videotape, the Le Mesurier-usurping voice of Maggie Henderson, and the rest of the programme, basically. When it came to making Bod up to transmission length, they simply cued the existing films into a video recording and filled up the rest of the time with charmingly crude real-time in-studio 'animation' and sparse narration with the occasional hum and clunk of distant technical goings-on in the background, representing a textbook example of a long-lost style of programme making. And, unfortunately, it was the fact that these extended shows were made on videotape that allowed them to be erased when storage practicalities became an issue (again, see this post here for clarification), while the actual Bod insert films survived quite happily in Michael Cole's shed. No, really, his actual shed.

Anyway, the first post-Bod item was invariably a suitably crudely-animated guessing game, on this occasion with the neatly Christmassy slant of trying to guess what's inside parcels and crackers. In fairness, there is an actual element of suspense to whether that cracker has a whistle, a ring or a paper crown in it, but you do have to wonder about anyone who couldn't have worked out on first glance that the wrapped-up presents were a piggy bank and a toy car (nice to get a glimpse of what were presumably home-made Cole Family decorations, though), and as for that teddy bearing an unnerving resemblance to a mummified cat, the less said about that the better.


Then it's time for the usual tambourine-backed variation on Ten Green Bottles - featuring on this occasion Five White Snowmen Standing In The Snow, who take it in turns to 'melt away, just so' with a quick accompanying warble of flexitone - with the snowman-depleted backdrop leading into a procession of snow-covered landscapes and a brief and very much zen-inflected bridging poem about how "snow falls on one and snow falls on all, on one twig and all, on all twigs and one", which itself leads into the establishing image of the programme's second story. Those of you who are half-musing that this seems ever so slightly similar to Terry Gilliam's bits in Monty Python's Flying Circus would be more correct than you are probably assuming you are - the Coles were huge fans of The Pythons, and Terry Gilliam in particular, and often cited his direct influence on some of their other shows. Anyway, you'll be wanting to know exactly where we've linked to. Well, there's the snow-festooned outside of a familiar building, a bit of tuning up based on God Rest Ye Merry, Gentlemen, and...


Yes, it's Alberto Frog and his Amazing Animal Band, the travelling orchestal ensemble who enjoyed a series of barely animated in-Bod-Universe escapades without ever actually meeting him or any of his friends. That said, Alberto certainly does seem to share a belief structure with his less anthropomorphic counterparts, with his adventures generally involving a more proactive use of the aligning forces of the universe to resolve a trivial issue, his only real reward for his efforts being a Quinlankian choice of a milkshake from a guessing game-friendly selection of flavours.

On this occasion, Alberto has noticed that, with a busy schedule of carol concerts in the offing, his tuba-toting Hippo pal is missing his usual swing. Hippo confesses that he's having difficulty deciding what to get for his wife, 'Mrs. Potamus', for Christmas, and having decided against chocolates or a hat he's now all out of ideas. Apparently caught in the middle of an appearance on a chintzy reboot of Mastermind, Alberto sets to work...


Following some worryingly Hogarthianally-rendered evening engagements, the Amazing Animal Band set about mysteriously rehearsing in remote locations where nobody can hear them - presumably inspired by the likes of Traffic 'getting it together in the country' - and on Christmas Morning, Mrs. Potamus opens her bedroom door to find them all lined up on the stairs and belting out crescendos like nobody's business. Everybody's happy, but there's something missing - at no point does Alberto ask for his traditional milkshake, Starbucks Yuletide Cranberry And Praline Flavour or otherwise. Come to think of it, none of the characters in the Bod section came accompanied by their usual Derek Griffiths-yodelled walk-on tunes either. Is this barely perceptible deviation from the formula some arcane Chapter 24-esque Taoist lesson that we've not picked up on?


Well, if it is, we've missed it, because as per usual here come said characters, zooming towards the front of the screen with their intro tunes blaring out loud and clear, as a lead-in to the weekly game of snap. Surprisingly, there are no seasonal additions to their usual natty playing card poses, and we just get the familiar round of Maggie suggesting "no that's not snap" a couple of times before noticing that it 'is' snap, upon which the assembled cast stride away into a green void behind the end credits. And, well, that's Bod's Present.


Unlike the other shows we've been looking at in this short series of Yuletide-themed features, Bod's Present can't really be considered an example of end-of-term letting down of hair at Children's BBC, as it was made as part of a series and indeed was occasionally shown at decidedly non-Christmassy times of year. Yet it's this more than any other that defines just how differently television was made then to how it is now, with the long silences, make-do-and-mend production techniques, stream-of-consciousness yet rigidly structured patchwork format, and odd juxtaposition of hi-tech equipment and lo-tech production values making it feel virtually - yet charmingly - prehistoric. In some ways, that's actually a better reflection of the intended philosophies and values than anything that was worked into the show itself. What's more peculiar still is that, despite the heavy slant in its contents, it doesn't actually feel particularly Christmassy. But you can't really say that about a certain other closely related programme...


If you want to know what Bod's friends at Play School were up to over Christmas, go here. Or for some Festive mayhem with the Rentaghost gang, here.

I've been thinking all day about what to write about David Bowie. Not so much because I'm short of anything to say, but because, well, everyone else is doing deep and serious and the big outpourings of emotion, and in some ways that was never who he was to me. As much as I love the Berlin Trilogy and all the rest of it, my absolute favourite aspects of Bowie's career have always been when he's playing around with the medium and the artform, and generally having a bit of a chuckle at everyone else's expense, not least those who would never stop moaning about why couldn't he do another record like that nice Let's Dance etc etc. The sixties albums, Earthling, Tin Machine, the bewildering acting engagements, those paintings of the back of his head or whatever they were, all of them laudable and amusing attempts to stray from paths that had been marked out for him by the wider audience, and aren't going to go away no matter how hard some people may wish they would.

So I kept on thinking about this, even vainly attempting to enlist the help of Oblique Strategies in a quest for inspiration, when I remembered a time that I'd ended up writing about David Bowie without ever intending to at all. This was when I was dared in the pub one evening to try and write an article about the famously dull sixties Doctor Who story The Space Pirates, and although I started off doing just that, halfway through I realised that I'd started writing about the Space Oddity album instead, which turned it into a very different and much better piece (and one that I'm still very pleased with, and which you can find in my book Not On Your Telly). This started me thinking about just how much David Bowie had worked his way into the background of pretty much every aspect of my everyday existence, and at that point I decided to do a list of ten unexpected examples of him doing just that. It's a little bit ragged and unpolished - a bit like the first Tin Machine album, then - but hopefully it says what I want to say. Thanks for everything, Silly Boy Blue.


Great Pop Things


It's difficult to put into words just how much I used to look forward to Great Pop Things, the skewed and not even remotely accurate history of rock by Colin B. Morton and Chuck Death, that appeared at the foot of every NME letters page between 1987 and 1997. Driven by an almost nihilistic irreverence, and crammed with wilfully arcane in-jokes and pop culture references, it ridiculed the great and good (and Bros) more with thoroughly deflating absurdity than offensiveness. I can still be reduced to helpless laughter just by thinking about how Atlantis by Donovan is "about six minutes of wibbling on about where Atlantis might be, followed by about six seconds of singing about wanting to live in a coral house under the sea", or U2 being instructed by Oblique Strategies to "play as boringly as possible", or NWA rejecting aspirant rappers MC W ("an' I'm here to trouble you!") and MC * ("and I'm... erm... um"), or Can forming in school ("Sir, The Beatles are better than Stockhausen (in German)" - "Do not be stupid boy (also in German)"), or Robert Smith upsetting Siouxsie by turning up to rehearsals with his new 'happy' image, or Morrissey's 'Glum Rock' album ("This Chin Is Big Enough For Both Of Us!") 'Produced by Mick Ronco for A Chinnichap', or Pere Ubu "of whom Talking Heads were a substandard just-far-out-enough-to-say-you'd-been pale shadow" reinventing themselves as "a sub-Talking Heads drippy love song type group", or Tom Baker telling a dumpster full of proto-grungers that "it's OK to come out now, the punks have all gone", or Jimi Hendrix being welcomed to London by Marianne Faithfull, Jeremy Thorpe and Ken Dodd, or PiL singing Where Is Love? ("B'dum! SKREEEE!"), or... well, I could seriously go on all night. But it began with a multi-part history of 'The Chameleon Of Rock', following him from getting in trouble in school for "cutting up library books and using the wrong changing rooms", through inciting beach riots with his incendiary mod anthem The Laughing Gnome, and his controversial late seventies attempt to hail a train whilst dressed as Hitler and singing Helden, all the way to Tin Machine's fractious relationship owing to the others' bewilderment at his constant On The Buses references. And the writers' comic obsession with the essential concept of 'Dave' would spill over into pretty much all of their other strips too, from Syd Barrett's mental deterioration being signposted by his bursting into The Laughing Gnome onstage, to the sidesplittingly Dickensian Sex Pistols story starting with 'tea-leaf' Steve Jones nicking Bowie's equipment in a swag bag, all the way to The Laughing Gnome himself proving a punning nuisance during the invention of the electric guitar. Sadly, although some other performers were known to enjoy it (though not Morrissey), Bowie never really expressed an opinion on Great Pop Things, but it's fairly safe to assume he would have seen the joke. "Give me a pickle, Olive!".


States Of Mind


These days, you'd be hard pushed to find a bigger fan of Satire Boom-launched polymath Jonathan Miller than me, and in particular his UK Psych-inventing film adaptation of Alice In Wonderland, the masterclass in how to make a complex TV series for uncomplicated audiences that is The Body In Question, and his assertion at the start of A Brief History Of Disbelief in 2004 that "I should perhaps warn you that what you are not going to see in this program is anything that you might be tempted to think of as 'Walking With Atheists'; I will not be seen leaning over a balcony, watching René Descartes nibbling his quill while he struggles with the problem of mind-brain duality, and there will be no blurred, slow motion shots of people making leaps of faith or failing to do so, because I think such dramatization is somewhat vulgar and inappropriate" ("OMG did that person just say that thing in that programme from thirty years ago!?!?!?" - Pappy's Fun Club, 2015). When I was a lot younger, however, he was simply the presenter of States Of Mind, a rather quite scary show about psychology and mental disorders that came on BBC2 at lunchtime on a Sunday after the family-friendly stuff like Windmill and Taken Obody Sword Forit had finished. States Of Mind was introduced by rotating concentric 'brain'-denoting circles and a creepy piece of electronic music that I later described as "an ominous synthesiser melody that sounds curiously like a toxic rewrite of the theme song from Orm And Cheep". This music would lodge itself in my mind and resurface at inopportune and disturbing moments - especially during exams - so you can imagine my surprise when I eventually bought the CD release of Low and found Art Decade hidden away on Side Two.


Absolute Beginners


Not the song per se, which admittedly is one of the best that Bowie ever wrote, but the film itself, a grand overhyped overlong jumble of a stylistically inconsistent bewilderingly directed Patsy-Kensit-meets-Courtney-Pine-meets-Sade-meets-Smiley-Culture-meets-Lionel-Blair mess, which may be many things but is never, ever boring. On any level. Being something of a sucker for the neglected corners of cinema, especially ill-conceived and under-budgeted British-made attempts to 'sweep the board' at any given awards ceremony (they never do), I'm naturally very fond of Absolute Beginners; it's never been given a fair critical crack of the whip and is a lot better than you've probably been told it is, and in any case, the bizarre story of how it came to be made in the first place, and then bomb so dramatically, is nothing short of a goldmine if you're interested in the relationship between society, culture and popular culture. So intoxicating is this infectious and all-consuming misjudgement of youth culture that it's easy to forget that David Bowie not only sang the theme song but contributed two other numbers and even acted in a key role until you actually watch it. Which, let's be honest, most of you haven't done, have you?


'Ziggy' From Grange Hill


On to a somewhat more popular and longstanding fixture of the viewing habits of eighties youngsters. When crash helmet-haired scouse cheeky chappie Eric Greaves arrived at Grange Hill in 1986 to wreak havoc with Gonch and Hollo's money-making plans, wisecrackingly derail the bullying aspirations of both Trevor Cleaver and Imelda Davies, and generally repeatedly end up with fibreglass down his back for reasons that nobody is really quite sure of, the story behind his given nickname of 'Ziggy' was initially left as a mystery. All would be revealed, however, when he 'rescued' some jumping-up-on-playground-wall-type girls from the world's smallest 'big' spider, confessing that it was his twin admiration for our eight-legged pals and David Bowie that had earned him his popular handle. Two characteristics that, in true Grange Hill fashion, were never remarked upon ever again.


"It's My Lunch, Terry"


I've written extensively about Tin Machine here, but it's always worth revisiting this. Back in its heyday, almost everyone watched BBC1's early evening chat show Wogan - seriously, just think about how many interviews have become longstanding national reference points - and it was always a pleasure to see a musical act turn up who really ought not to have been there. This was especially true when Tin Machine made a trip to Shepherd's Bush in 1991 to mime to You Believe In Rock'n'Roll and indulge in a spot of post-performance natter with the host. Terry Wogan wasn't always the genial figure we know and love him as - the really quite nasty interview with David Icke is evidence enough of that - and he approached the band with a gallery-playing combination of sneeriness, mocking disdain ("what are you trying to do here?"), and a total lack of interest in the other three members verging on base rudeness. It's hardly surprising, then, that Bowie should have reacted to his banal line of questioning (especially that bollocks about pretending not to realise what that shoebox-shaped guitar was) with interview-sabotaging non-sequiturs. Wogan has since repeatedly tried to paint himself as the victim in all of this, but in all honesty he brought it on himself. If you provoked David Bowie into refusing to play the fame game, you'd really gone wrong somewhere.


"Portable Telephones Could Make You Turn Into A Cow..."


Jump They Say is an exhilarating, danceable and powerfully affecting attempt by a major recording artist to come to terms with his brother's suicide, speculating on the thoughts that might have run through his head in a genuinely heart-wrenching fashion, inspiring you to look out for your fellow human beings and providing an emotional wallop in a way that certain of his peers' mawkish displays of familial mourning (or for Princess Diana for that matter) sure never managed. However, it also served as backing music for Armando Iannucci's short early nineties stint as a Radio 1 DJ, looping endlessly and hilariously in the background as he reviewed the new platform game 'Aled Jones II' and read out nonsense about Robert Robinson On Ice ("featuring scenes from Ask The Family and Call My Bluff"), the new one-sided two pence piece, and Sharon Stone starring as a granary bap in a movie adaptation of Delia Smith's One Is Fun.


The Real Pin-Ups


Unless they had a career as brief and unprolific as Nick Drake (and even he did bloody Tow The Line), it's always a mistake to claim that everything your favourite artist ever produced was on an equal level of brilliance. You'll all have your Bowie album that doesn't work for you, and mine is Pin-Ups, a great idea ruined by stilted and overthought production that just ends up trampling over a terrific set of mid-sixties r'n'b, beat and psych covers. His take on The Kinks'Where Have All The Good Times Gone? just about works; elsewhere his mannered and theatrical vocals struggle with lyrics that are anything but that, and there is all manner of musical horrendousness going on, from the guitar riff on I Wish You Would that makes you want to throw your stereo out of the window, to the truly awful mangling of See Emily Play. Really, honestly, the idea of David Bowie covering Syd Barrett should be a match made in heaven, but all we get here is the rough and ready psychedelic shock of the original replaced by needlessly avant-garde and neo-classical instrumentation, overdone harmonised yelping, and a synthesiser that makes it sound as though Zippy and George are about to join in on backing vocals. It's this more than any other track that makes you wish you were listening to a compilation of the originals instead... and years later, you realise that, well, you can do just that. And it's brilliant. And maybe, just maybe, that's what he wanted all along. Clever sod.


'He Decamped To Berlin With Eno'


Whether it's Chris Morris fans reminding you that he's "a godlike genius", Doctor Who historians and their overuse of the words 'emblazoned' and 'black-clad', or more obscurely the way early seventies sci-fi series Ace Of Wands apparently always "returned for a stylish new series" with "sometimes sinister foes", off-the-peg cliché lexicon stock phrases beloved of writers who can't be bothered to think for themselves are always amusing once you spot them, and there is no more ridiculous an example of this than the mainstream rock press' bizarre insistence on opening any article about the Berlin albums by informing readers that Bowie "decamped to Berlin with Eno". Quite what this means or what it involved nobody's quite sure, but it doesn't half make for a good in-jokey reference point with the other Bowie fans in your life ("I'm just decamping to the bar").


Transmission, Transition (Repeat Until Students' Heads Explode)


With the arrival of cheaper and more compact digital technology, the Pub Jukebox really came into its own in the mid-nineties, with an easily-navigable flipchart of entire albums to choose from. Unfortunately, this meant that people always chose the exact same things, and after you'd heard Wonderwall and Brown-Eyed Girl accompanied by slurry student caterwauling for the fourteen thousandth time that night, you really did want to take action. Action which may have involved all of your party pooling together as much money as they could and putting on TVC15 as many times as that allowed, until the place was noticeably less full of rowdy singalongs and a weary barman went over and reset the jukebox. Direct action!


Bowie Buskers


And finally, you've doubtless all heard buskers take on all of the obvious Bowie candidates, from Space Oddity and The Wild Eyed Boy From Freecloud to Rebel Rebel and China Girl. You might even have witnessed some braver souls strumming their way through Wild Is The Wind, When I Live My Dream or Rock'n'Roll Suicide. But you really have to hand it to the ones who jump right into the back catalogue without a parachute, treating puzzled commuters to acoustic guitar-wrested renditions of the likes of Chant Of The Ever Circling Family and V-2 Schneider; two numbers that I have genuinely heard real-life buskers attempt (and creditably so in both cases). They deserve all the spare change you have, frankly. If you haven't used it to put TVC15 on a jukebox, that is.


And that, ladies and gentlemen, ain't rock'n'roll, it's my attempt at wrestling something positive, amusing and uplifting out of some genuinely horrid news. I hope it did the same for you. And now, I'm 'Avin 'Oops!


This piece is dedicated to Camilla Long and Julia Hartley-Brewer, and to the rich and diverse contribution they have made to art, popular culture, and the improvement of the human experience.

In our look at the first series of Doctor Who, we saw how the show went virtually overnight from being a well-made but undistinguished making-learning-fun history-fest to the ratings-topping eye of a money-spinning storm flinging around the word 'Dalekmania' in those funny triangular letters. And also how there were too many fucking rope bridges.

After a short break over the summer of 1964, Doctor Who returned in the Autumn with a concerted effort to capitalise on this success in all senses of the word. Along the way, the production team would have to wrestle both with significant changes to the regular cast, and with their own apparent self-defeating wheel-reinventing determination to find the 'new' Daleks while the originals were still pretty much the second biggest phenomenon on the planet. Although the contenders for this honour most definitely did not include...


That Darn Cat!


You may recall that, back in the first series overview, there were a few subtle and restrained comments about the manky bulk-bought stock footage that the Doctor Who production team were prone to using around this time in lieu of having to film resource-challenging things like sweeping landscapes and extreme weather conditions. It's only when you witness one of their attempts at filming a complicated live action sequence for themselves that you realise just why they were so keen to reach for the crumbly bits of cloudy 16mm snipped out of dismal old films nobody liked. A significant proportion of the final episode of Planet Of Giants involves the inconveniently miniaturised Tardis crew being unconvincingly menaced by a particularly disinterested-looking normal-sized cat, determined to inadvertently thwart their attempts to prevent unscrupulous scientist Forester from getting his hands on decidedly eco-unfriendly compound DN6. This in itself is visually problematic enough, but if you watch closely you can't help but notice that the cat itself subtly but very definitely changes between shots, from a tortoiseshell with a straight-down-the-middle light/dark facial fur divide like some lost extra from the video for Passengers by Elton John, to another with a more subtle blend of mug-upholstery, and back again. Of course, this might have been down to the fact that episode three was actually edited down from two episodes' worth of material, and there may well have been some proto-Eurocrats In Brussels regulations about how many consecutive hours an individual cat could spend in Lime Grove, and as such the animal handlers might actually have brought along two mogsters for the recording blocks. But let's not weigh this down with reason and logic, shall we? Incidentally, it's also worth noting that for a swotty know-all science teacher whose primary purpose was to convey educational facts to the young audience, Ian really does come across as a bit dense in this story.


The Dalek Invasion Of Earth Is Astonishingly Well Made


You probably won't be too surprised to learn that The Cat did not manage to inspire a deluge of tie-in merchandise. Nor indeed did it cause Raymond Cusick to bitterly reflect on not getting his share of the rights to it every time a camera was plonked in front of him. In late 1964, though, The Daleks were everywhere, and you could scarcely walk past a shop without being submerged by a landslide of Dalek Fish Slices whilst a shopkeeper with a top hat and monocle counted a wad of guineas and grinningly reflected on the commercial boom of 'Dalekmania'. The BBC and Terry Nation both knew that they'd have to bring them back in a big way, and The Dalek Invasion Of Earth got this exactly right; ambitious, imaginative, action-packed, Daleks every three seconds, and - crucially - an entirely different story to their debut in almost every regard. From this distance, it would be easy to write The Dalek Invasion Of Earth off as a story elevated to 'classic' status by circumstance and hype (and there was a lot of hype - how many ITV shows at the time had trailers that expensive and prominent, let alone BBC offerings?), except for the fact that even now it still looks amazing. Sidestepping that never-explainable cliffhanger with a Dalek rising out of the Thames, Terry Nation's script is a clear attempt at playing with the big-screen big boys, and director Richard Martin rises to the challenge admirably with dynamic pacing, some very fast editing for the time (including lots of cutaways to Daleks, a joke that will be lost on approximately 93% of the audience), a skilful combination of imaginative location work and convincing studio sets, and just generally making everything look and feel 'bigger'. In fact, it's not really that far away from the later big screen adaptation of the story... but we'll come to that in due course. Meanwhile, if anyone has any idea of that business with the two mysterious figures caught measuring Robomen on set was all about... actually, on second thoughts, keep it to yourself will you?


Other Stories Were Less Astonishingly Well Made


OK, so we can point towards the Daleks haring across Tower Bridge, chasing Barbara past the Albert Memorial, and getting a bit soggy at Queen's Wharf, and rebut some of that insistent journalistic twaddle about cardboard monsters made of rubber or whatever it is. And yes, there are other superb effects dotted throughout this second series, from the model spaceship that doesn't look like a model at all in The Rescue to the flamethrower-strewn smackdown between The Daleks and The Mechonoids/Mechanoids/whichever spelling we're taking as authoritative today. Even those giant-sized props in the first story mostly look pretty convincing. When they don't quite pull it out of the bag, though... they really don't pull out of the bag. In fact you sometimes have to wonder if they'd even known where the bag was in the first place. You'll all have seen that Zarbi walking head first into the camera - possibly even without Pappy's Fun Club shrieking over the top - but there are so many other effect and design slip-ups more worthy of chortling disdain than poor old star-seeing John Scott-Martin. There's Vicki apparently doing her Wii Balance Board exercises to indicate that the Tardis is being forcibly moved, the hilariously unmenacing impracticality of the Mire Beast, the Optera's side-letting-down Ragdoll Productions-esque appearance, and let's not even get started on the somewhat less than advisable 'blacking up' in The Crusade, which is frankly too shoddily rendered even to be offensive. And all of this might well be linked in some roundabout way to...


What's That Coming Over The Hill, Is It A Fungoid?


One of the strengths of the first series of Doctor Who was that even the supporting characters were incredibly well-defined. Alright, so One-Line Wonder The Man From Lop brought down the average a bit, but on the whole they were believable characters with at least serviceable back stories, and were quite often given well-written 'star moment' scenes to explore their philosophies and motivation. On top of that, the production team very clearly spent a long time working on the regular characters, ensuring that their interactions, attitudes and propensity for twisting ankles were always consistent and easy for the viewer to identify with. Most impressively of all, some considerable thought went into making the female characters as strong and independent as was practical at the time, and they even had some dialogue on that very subject. By the time of the second series, though, this has all changed - The Doctor, Ian and particularly Barbara ("Oh boy... THAT was a mistake!") just about manage to cling on to their established personas, and there are a couple of exceptions amongst the rag-taggle of Dalek-fighting civilians, but just about everyone else ends up as little better than a one-dimensional cipher, all the way from the jovial village 'bobby' and the hilariously purpose-free Morok Messenger to new companion Vicki, who is likeable enough and has a good rapport with The Doctor, but never seems to actually 'do' anything as such. This is presumably because the bulk of everyone's creative energies was being given over to the newly-found 'So you like aliens, eh?' imperative, which would be all very well and good if it wasn't for the fact that Malsan The Aridian and company had about as much chance of dethroning The Daleks as Ian And The Zodiacs did The Beatles. And yes, this does include The Zarbi, no matter what volume of 'Plastoid' badges they may have inspired. Of course, this did change towards the end of the series... but more about that later. Meanwhile, on a similar note...


There Are Too Many Stories With A Good First Episode


Admittedly this was a problem that would continue to plague Doctor Who for many years (and still does, if you count the ones that have a good first seven minutes), and arguably actually began with The Sensorites in the previous series, but this was where the phenomenon first took hold. There are few greater disappointments than a creepy, atmospheric and tightly-plotted opening episode followed by three to five of just wandering about going 'erm', and you'll find more than anyone's fair share of them here. Take, as a completely random and not at all obvious example, The Space Museum, which opens in fine style with imaginatively realised spooky stuff about the 'ghost' Tardis and the Food Machine acting the goat, Hartnell's Dalek-impersonating interlude, and a genuinely shocking cliffhanger, and then follows it up with seventy five minutes of meandering along corridors and re-enacting the Tony and 'Control' sketches from A Bit Of Fry And Laurie. Then there's The Web Planet, in which a visually arresting opening episode with the cast wandering around Vortis in their Bespin Fatigues gives way to more or less nothing whatsoever, and adds insult to injury by at least making an effort with all that Top Of The Pops Studio Lights/Jackanory Kaleidoscope mayhem in the final episode, by which time most people had probably stopped watching. Quite how so many writers managed or indeed were allowed to put so much effort into their first script and yet follow it up week upon week with the first thing that sort of half came into their head-ish is something that no amount of production documentation can ever really adequately explain.


They Like Big Butts And They Cannot Lie


Quite what changed in the couple of weeks between production blocks is something that may never be known, but the evidence is there for all to see. And boy, is there evidence. In the second series of Doctor Who, the fun and improving show for all the family, there is a sudden and marked emphasis on casting ladies with oversized backsides, and what's more the cameramen go out of their way to draw attention to this, anchoring their shots on the back-gotters and lingering thereon until William Hartnell deigns to start speaking and they reluctantly have to turn to him. Even allowing for the 'outrageous' ((C) Polly Toynbee) vagaries of sixties fashion, this still seems a bit jarring and, well, over-abundant. This reaches its dubious highpoint - or possibly nadir - when an extra of Kardashian proportions takes a stroll around the top of the Empire State Building, attracting the intent attention of not only comedy Good Ol' Boy Morton Dill but also a suspiciously modern-looking extra, whose reaction was almost certainly authentic. And while we're in that general area, later on in the story there's the inadvertent exposure of Barbara's pants...



Seriously, What's With All The Ants?


In Planet Of Giants, the miniaturised Tardis crew encounter a DN6-immobilised Giant Ant. This is, it has to be admitted, an acceptable and probably even predictable plot device for this kind of story. What is somewhat less acceptable, and certainly less predictable, is the heavy recurrence of ants as a motif in the remainder of the run. Not only is Ian tortured in The Crusade by Ibrahim The Bandit dabbing a trail of date honey to his wrists and inviting his 'little friends' to sample the 'great delicacy' ("such ecstasy!"), there's also the not inconsiderable matter of the elephant-sized ants in the room in the cumbersome shape of The Zarbi. In the second series of Doctor Who, the Stewart Lee's True Fables-esque struggle between man and ant is as all-pervading a feature as the much more widely remarked-upon Mercury and Static Electricity. But why the sudden fear of our eusocial chums? Did David Whittaker live in constant fear of a six-legged army hightailing it out of his kitchen carrying entire slices of cake and joints of ham? Sadly, unless there are any long-lost internal memos headed 'Thirty Two Points Of Worry (Over Ants)' knocking about, we may never know.


Why Are There Only Eight Planets On The Time Space Visualiser?


The closest planet in the Solar System to The Sun, metal and silicate-based terrestrial body Mercury was first definitively observed as far back as the Fourteenth Century. Remotely mapped several times from the 1800s onwards, it was finally subjected to modern scientific analysis when a team of Russian scientists successfully bounced a radar signal off its surface in June 1962. However, news of this clearly had not filtered through to whoever made the Time Space Visualiser that The Doctor 'borrowed' from The Space Museum. Although ostensibly allowing visual access to any moment in space and time within the solar system, it actually only features labelled controls for eight planets (including Pluto - the International Astronomical Union hadn't started saying 'aaaaaaaahhhhh' yet), with poor old Mercury missed out altogether. We can only presume that its close proximity to the sun and negligible atmosphere renders it beyond the technological reach of the TSV. Either that, or whoever designed it wasn't really taken with that Kurt Vonnegut Jr book where those splodgy things hang on the cave walls or something. And while we're on the subject...


The Beatles Were As Clumsily Crowbarred In As Any New Series 'Reference'


OK, let's not set about rewriting history - not one line - as there's no escaping the fact that even by the Summer of 1965, The Beatles were ever so slightly huge. They were already an almost unprecedented two and a half years into a chart-topping career, and Ticket To Ride was not only their ninth hit, it was also their seventh consecutive number one. It was also, it should be added, taken from the soundtrack of their second box office-walloping feature film. That said, however, there's similarly no getting away from the fact that a large part of the potential audience of Doctor Who couldn't stand the sight of John, Paul, George or indeed Ringo, regarding them as an annoyingly ubiquitous and over-lauded passing fad who weren't really distinguishable from Heinz or The Swinging Blue Jeans. At that time there was simply no suggestion that they would make such a dramatic artistic leap forwards only a couple of months later, never mind go on to change the sociocultural face of the entire world and leave a legacy that shows no signs of abating even now, and there were plenty of people out there who were heartily sick of the merest mention of the Fab Four. So when they showed up on the Time Space Visualiser in the first episode of The Chase, was it really any better - for a large proportion of the audience at least - than when the All-Singing All-Dancing 'New' Series gratuitously crowbars in an appearance by a reality TV star or reference to some pop favourite du jour? No, it's not. And it could so easily have been Herman's Hermits...


Was This The First Ever 'Reboot'?


As exciting as The Dalek Invasion Of Earth is, as amusing as The Romans is, as good as William Hartnell continues to be, as much as any given villain might make thinly veiled statements of S&M-tinged intent towards Barbara, even the most ardent adherent of the black and white era would have to admit that in the second series of Doctor Who, there's an overall feeling that they were coasting on their success a bit. Except that, right at the end of the series, something very odd happens. Terry Nation's The Chase, another set of scripts well above the batting average, combines thrills, action and self-contained comic setpieces with a deftness that would have had the average adult series later in the Saturday schedules seething with envy. It also waves goodbye to Ian and Barbara with a beautifully light-hearted and surprisingly 'modern' montage of them pissing about in Central London, introduces new companion Steven as a much-needed mouthy know-all, and most significantly unveils The Mechonoids, the closest thing to a rival to The Daleks until The Cybermen came along, and hurls them into a literal guns-blazing battle with said rivals in a sequence that must have left the average 1965 youngster reeling, or at the very least rushing straight out into the street to 'play' Mechanus. Then the final story, The Time Meddler, not only introduces us to the first ever fellow renegade member of The Doctor's race in the form of Peter Butterworth as The Monk, but is also carried along on a wit and verve that has seldom if ever been witnessed before now. Even the stock footage of longships looks quite convincing, though that shot of a fox appears to hail from another somewhat grainier universe. Frankly there is too much of it going on to arrive at any other conclusion than that the production team had decided to up their game and get more in step with whatever else was grabbing the family audience at that time. Which was... um... well ITV were scheduling Thank Your Lucky Stars against Doctor Who so... erm... had Quick Before They Catch Us started yet? Anyway, whoever and whatever had managed to convince them to dial things up a notch, the fact of the matter is that they did, and when Doctor Who returned after a short break, all manner of mayhem was about to break loose...

...but we've got a slight detour to take first. So join us again next time for A Postmodern Tramp, More Base Voyeurism, Ian Singing The Glory Of Love, and Something About Professor Kitzel Falling Down A Plughole...


And if you want to read a more detailed piece on The Romans, The Crusade, The Time Meddler and all of the other sixties historical stories, you can find one in my book Well At Least It's Free.

Round about now, you’ll start seeing newspaper columnists offering their own personal ‘tips’ for ‘surviving’ the Festive Season. Usually these will involve ingesting specific herbal remedies and particular blends of tea or coffee, turning off your router to get ‘headspace’, recommendations of some heavyweight thing on Netflix and what have you… and really, seriously, what use are any of these to any of us? When you’re haring around Primark on the last Saturday before Christmas trying to find that last elusive present for that difficult-to-buy-for relative, do you really want the organisationally precarious pointers of some iPad-toting metropolitan type reverberating round your head as your last hope for inner peace and quiet?

Of course you don’t. You need an alternative. So join us as we go back in time. Not half-heartedly back in time like those trendy berks who pretend that they think VHS is a ‘superior format’, but way back, properly back. Back to a time when Christmas seemed less frantic, even though it probably wasn’t. And how do you get into this tranquil yet lazily uncritically nostalgic thoughtzone? Easy – by following these eight simple steps!



1. PUT UP SOME OLD-SKOOL DECORATIONS


Forget those enormous mazes of sequenced flashing lights that provoke constant baffling questions from elderly relatives. Ignore that battery-operated poinsettia that rotates and glitters while playing O Come All Ye Faithful. And whatever you do, don’t stick any of those signs outside your house saying “SANTA – PLEASE STOP HERE”, “WORLD’S BEST CHRISTMAS DAD 2000 XTREEM” or “MY OTHER SEASONAL OBSESSION IS TAKING MY COUCH OUT ON THE PAVEMENT AT THE FIRST SIGN OF SUMMER LIKE I’M SOMEONE OUT OF THE WIRE”. It’s costly, it’s unnecessary, and it’ll get you into an arms race-esque battle with the van driving geezer across the road and his inexhaustible supply of eight foot inflatable Rudolphs.

Nope, if you want to show everyone how much you like Christmas, you’ve got to go seriously old-skool. If you’re about to start decking the halls, get yourself a load of multi-coloured gummed paper  and cover every room in the sort of lo-fi decorations that children used to carry home from school at odd angles on the last day before Christmas, which parents would then have to put up out of politeness while that expensive moulded glittery gold relief they got from John Lewis sat unused in a drawer telepathically reminding them of its disproportionate price tag.



2. REMAIN UNMOVED BY HI-TECH CHRISTMAS TREES


Never mind the debate about ‘real’ vs ‘artificial’ trees - your position on that really does depend on your capacity for coping with excessive vaccuming and visits to the vets as your cat/dog/toddler inevitably gets all pine-needles in their feet. The retailers want to push you though; what’s left of Habitat have something that looks like a party hat, and it glows and everything, AND it fits on your desk. Maybe you want one that looks like a marble-run, or a catheter tube with lights in it. Perhaps one that stands in something resembling a French urinal, while it plays music and actual snow falls around it. It probably spins as well. That’s what they tell you that you should get.

No. Make Christmas magical again. Dig out the PROPER tree. Yes, it’s artificial. Some of the fake needles have fallen off again, and the branches are increasingly brittle. That stand is still a nightmare to put together. And it’s wonky once assembled. Doesn’t matter. Just make sure that it’s a pre-lit one, where the LED lights are tastefully wrapped around the branches for you. You don’t want to fall into a lazy comedy trope, after all.



3. RESIST THE FESTIVE LATTE


It’s an unending risk for the modern Christmas Shopper – every last coffee chain, sandwich shop and whatever you generically call those places where they do pasties and stuff is forever trying to lure you in to sample their festive wares to a soundtrack of jazzy reworkings of something that sounds almost but not quite like Once In Royal David’s City. Usually starting from the second week of October if we’re being honest about it. Angularly-syruped lattes! Caramel and Sticky Toffee ‘Christmas Slices’! Turkey, cranberry, bacon, bread sauce and stuffing slip hazards in waiting! Some would doubtless have you believe that such fripperies are the very fuel on which the harassed Christmas Shopper runs. But not us.

Save yourself at least some of that three pounds twenty and make some instant coffee at home, taking care to ensure it’s weak, badly stirred, and overall the sort of quality you’d expect from a vending machine that has been meticulously programmed to poorly replicate the coffee-making facilities of another vending machine. Take it with you in a flask, then pour it into a cheap styrofoam cup as if purchased from a stall run by a bloke in a football hat. Add a Kit-Kat or some other equally no-frills chocolate bar purchased from whatever they have instead of station kiosks now, and you have the perfect culinary accompaniment to wondering how everyone’s going to fit on the next train, and where in the name of Railwatch it is anyway.



4. BUY ONE OF ‘THIS YEAR’S TOP TOYS’ FROM ANOTHER YEAR


The humble ‘Christmas List’ has come a long way from the days when kids would just write ‘LEGO’ on a piece of paper and leave it lying around somewhere they thought constituted subtle. The rise of online retailers and Wish Lists have left us in no doubt as to what anyone from six to sixty wants for Christmas. And yes, probably even Mariah Carey’s got one too. But should you give in and pre-order them that Limited Edition Steelbook of The Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt and the twelve pack of interactive coffee pods or whatever it is?

No. They’ll get Boglins and they’ll like it. Admittedly you’ll often have to fork out a fair whack eBay for one of the REAL Top Toys of years gone by these days, but if you opt for something that was highly touted but never caught on, you’re pretty much quids in. Rock Lords, B.A.R.T., Wrinkles, Rubik’s Magic and so many other second division “oh… thanks” Christmas Morning Pillowcase mainstays of yesteryear make an ideal present for that easy-to-buy-for relative who needs reminding that a bit more gratitude every now and then might be a nice thing. Especially at Christmas.



5. SCOFF A RETRO SELECTION BOX


Celebrations. Miniature Heroes. Those Expensive Biscuits Where Everyone Takes The Foil-Wrapped Ones First. They’ve all long since come to dominate autopilot cursory Christmas Gift ubiquity to such an extent that they’ve even started to make Ferrero Rocher look like an infrequently-sighted and impossibly-exotic relic of better days. And does anyone even remember poor old Neapolitans now?

Doubtless you’ll have already acquired an EU Butter Mountain-rivalling stack of them from work – and that’s even before the extended family have chimed in – so take your mind off the endless repetitive choc-scoffage ahead by fashioning a close approximation of one of those old-style branded Selection Boxes that Mars, Cadbury and Rowntree Macintosh used to do. To do this you’ll need, say, a Mars, a Bounty and a Milky Way, plus Snickers and Starburst with replacement Marathon and Opal Fruit labels printed off from Google Images and glued over the top. You’ll just have to use your memory for Spangles, though. Then stick them in an only slightly bigger rectangular box, draw some thickly-lined snow and spiral-eyed reindeer on the front, and a rubbish game about helping Santa get to the Robin or something on the back, and, well, stuff your face before your siblings can get hold of it.



6. CIRCLE YOUR HIGHLIGHTS IN A VINTAGE TV LISTING


We’re not going to snipe at how technology has enhanced the modern viewing planning experience as, well, it’s actually quite a good thing.

Like us, though, you probably still miss the thrill of getting the actual physical double Radio Times and TV Times before the listings had been published anywhere else, having to wait impatiently for your ‘turn’ to look at it, then haphazardly circling anything you might have even the most microscopically remote interest in watching, blithely marking all kinds of non-festive Channel 4 documentaries and Radio 2 salutes to ‘the hits of the seventies’ as you went. There’s loads of scanned pages on the web now, so why not print one off and, in amongst the Coronation Streets and Bergeracs and Etics And Erns, see if you can find something where you’ll have no idea why you scribbled around it two weeks later.



7. DIG OUT NOW - THE CHRISTMAS ALBUM


Nothing says Christmas more than finally sitting down after you’ve done all your shopping, and realising that you have to wrap the presents now, and you really aren’t in the mood. There’s only one thing for it, chucking on the ultimate in mood-setting moneyspinning compilation albums that inexplicably get re-released with slightly different track orders every single year despite the fact that all of the good Christmas songs that people buy these for were released prior to 1990. You sit there trying to find the end of the sellotape while Noddy Holder vies with Roy Wood in the argument for the best of the party songs, but there’s more presents to wrap and it’s only a seventy minute CD. You’ll never get finished in time. Then a decision has to be made; it’s a double-CD album. Have you got one of the older ones full of old-standards? Bing without Bowie, Nat King Cole and Elvis with depressing ballads? Or is it one of the newer releases, all Robbie Williams singing Angels, and something by a fly-by night group hastily assembled on an ITV talent show two years ago. An earnest cover version from a John Lewis advert.

There’s only one sensible decision when faced with that choice. Stick on the original Now - The Christmas Album from 1985 again. Nobody wants to listen to Americans getting Christmas songs wrong, and you won't find Abba on there singing about having a Happy New Year. And don’t skip Another Rock And Roll Christmas by you know who.



8. JOIN THE TEAMS FOR ANOTHER ROUND... OF TELLY ADDICTS!


Given Noel usually turned up on Christmas Day most years, and the House Party famously saw off The Darling Buds of May on Boxing Day 1992, it's perhaps surprising that perhaps the Edmonds series we most associate with the festive season is Telly Addicts, but for some reason it's always been intertwined. Maybe this is because its presence in the schedules every September was the first marker on the long road to 25th December, knowing that it would run right up until Christmas. Which sadly doesn't happen any more, but Noel's ever hawk-like eye for the tie-in cash-in potential saw to it that you can recreate that thrill easily enough.

There were, we believe, two Telly Addicts games. The later one, a conventional board game going under the banner of Family Telly Addicts, we don't intend to dwell on (because we never had it), but the first was particularly exciting as it came with its own Hoofer Doofer! Alright, so it was basically a glorified calculator where you inputted the code number of the question and it gave you the numeric answer, then at the end calculated the score, but it seemed terrifically exciting thirty years ago, so much so that it didn't even need a board. The only other accompaniment was a series of books of questions covering all the rounds, including the Props round (not that exciting, you just read them out). But given you could supply your own sofas, this was probably the most accurate facsimile of a TV game show of them all. Those were halcyon days for Telly Addicts, before the show went shit and was axed, but then in 2003 came the Telly Addicts DVD Game! Recorded during Noel's lost weekend that lasted about five years at the turn of the century, we were delighted Noel introduced it by saying "We're back!", very much like ALF returning in pog form. This time we could actually see the clips, although the limited number and less-then-random sequencing rendered it a bit of a farce, and the only way you could stop the game was to physically eject it from the player as it overrode the stop button. Still, at least it served as a better ending that that awful running around revamp, so we all got a bit of closure.


The Essential Saturday-Before-Christmas Survival Guide (In Eight Easy Steps) written by Tim Worthington, Dan Thornton and Steve Williams. Models: Ruby Cunliffe, Garreth F. Hirons, Vikki Gregorich, Some Tinsel. You can find more festive nonsense in my book Super Expanded Deluxe Edition. And is Paul McCartney the real Santa Christmas?

One thing that those big walloping housebrick-sized books about the 'end' of 'the sixties' never get round to mentioning is the decline of ITC. Once ITV's in-house powerhouse of dynamic fashion-driven action serials, when everything started sliding towards loudly-patterened curtains and mirror-disc top hats and all the hippies jumped in a bin to hide from the BBC Schools Diamond or something, ITC lost their small-screen hitmaking direction in a way that their Jaguar-swerving lead characters sure would never have done.

Perhaps reflecting the more street-level politicised nature of the times, as the seventies rolled on audiences were increasingly looking for something grittier and grimier featuring detectives who wrestled with real 'issues' rather than billionaire supervillains and dangerous new inventions, which ITC seemingly took as their cue to move in completely the opposite direction. They may have seen in the decade strongly with UFO, Jason King and The Persuaders! - all of which at least technically began production in 1969 - but within a couple of years they'd moved on to such unmemorable fare as Millicent Martin-starring swinging air hostess solving crimes in her spare time effort From A Bird's Eye View, a vision of jet-setting glamour that was already jarringly several years out of step with the times, and bizarre co-production funding-driven Gerry Anderson-helmed detective series The Protectors, which even the cast and crew later admitted that they never quite understood. They also cut the average running time of their shows from an hour to thirty minutes, presumably in pursuit of some unfathomable Stateside 'syndication' deal, which hardly even gave them the chance to develop properly as action-driven television shows, let alone catch on with audiences. All in all, ITC's single biggest success of the time was The Adventures Of Rupert Bear, a long way and yet only a few years from their triumphantly lording it over the Saturday Night schedules with Captain Scarlet And The Mysterons and The Prisoner.

Times change, though, and nowadays even the biggest and boringest of TV flops of yesteryear has a reasonably profitable degree of cult appeal. Good, bad and The Adventurer alike, you'll now find every last ITC series on DVD, on Bluray, and on repeat channels on an unending loop. With one very glaring exception. First seen in 1974 (though some sources insist that the two-part pilot The Mountain Witch was shown as a one-parter in an hour-long slot in 1973), Skiboy starred seventeen year old Steve Hudis - son of Carry On films creator Norman - as Bobbie Noel, a skiing instructor who solved crimes, mounted daring rescue missions and defused wartime bombs in the Swiss Alps in his spare time. And that was literally the only skill and advantage he had at his disposal - skiing. In crimefighting terms, that makes him about as useful as Nathan Petrelli.

One area where young Bobby's quaterpiping skills should have proved an advantage, though, was in attracting viewers. At the time, fuelled by spectacular Olympic displays, glossy glamorous books like Stein Eriksen's Come Ski With Me, and World Of Sport's need to fill fifteen billion hours every Saturday with stuff that they could actually get the rights to, skiing was seen as pretty much the high altitude of thrill-packed glamour and sophistication. Ski chases and Alpine romances were a regular feature in James Bond films, while the Milk Tray man wouldn't even have considered delivering a single Strawberry Temptation without getting in a spot of downhill carving along the way. 'Action' comics like Tiger and Hotspur were crammed with storylines about their stunt plane pilot/record-breaking sportsman characters making emergency landings in hazardous off-piste areas, and their readers also thrilled to the endless procession of ski-themed Fisher Price Adventure People playsets. Toblerone was still the classy 'expensive chocolate' gift of choice, and it was unusual to see a European-made soft porn film that didn't feature a spot of hot Ski Lodge lovin'. Erm, apparently.


There was more than enough behind the scenes ambition to pull this off too. Skiboy was masterminded by producer Derrick Sherwin, who had recently pulled off a successful full colour relaunch of the floundering Doctor Who - including casting Jon Pertwee - and cameraman Charles de Jaeger, who had worked on some of the early Quatermass serials and was also primarily responsible for the infamous Panorama Spaghetti Harvest hoax. Under the letterhead-friendly auspices of 'Skiboy Productions', they were basically handed a huge wodge of co-production cash and told to go off and make a series on location to capitalise on this most intangible of crazes; only a couple of years later, they'd doubtless have done it as a martial-arts themed show called 'Dragonboy', which just goes to show what a huge potential audience they had. And they were given all this on the basis of what Sherwin recalls as a two-paragraph pitch, and the belief that a combination of their experience and the sheer glamour and exoticness of the setting would make for a winning formula. It was like Heaven's Gate, Neither Fish Nor Flesh and The Contrabulous Fabtraption Of Professor Horatio Hufnagel all rolled into one. And about as successful as any of them too.

Is this really fair though? Does Skiboy really deserve its... well, it doesn't even really have a reputation, does it. Does Skiboy deserve its obscurity? There's only one way to find out - to do something that possibly nobody at all has done since the scattered repeats finally took an Eddie 'The Eagle' Edwards-style jump into oblivion in the late eighties, and actually watch an episode...


Written by Derrick Sherwin himself, Hot Ice opens with a pair of standard issue big-coated seventies 'heavies' more or less shouting "BLAH BLAH SECRET PLAN" as they approach the ski lodge - to the accompaniment of some fancy wah-wah guitar and electric piano - in search of someone to guide them up a nearby mountain. While they do so, Bobbie and his winsome fellow instructor stroke love interest Sadie pass by unwittingly in the background, chasing their bone-pursuing pet dog Gruff and uttering some conveniently foreshadowing dialogue about how "thieves always bury their loot". Resort head honcho Claire is reluctant to assign any of her staff to guide them up what turns out to be called Monk's Fall, pointing out that it's completely inaccessible in winter, but clearly has some suspicions about their motives for wanting to visit the 'beautiful' Chalet Blanc; and not without good reason, as once they're back outside, the flatter-nosed 'heavy' announces that he'll find someone to take them "even if I have to use some... persuasion", adding rather obvious-statingly that he'll "kill anyone who tries to stop us".


Anyone who knows their ITC will be aware that this is usually the moment when the opening titles kick in, and lo and behold we're promptly treated to some startling footage of Bobbie skidding down slopes and hurtling through the air, to the accompaniment of the truly unhinged theme song. Written by Anthony Isaac, who was not exactly noted for his subtlety and restraint in the art of small screen show-openers, this features a brass-led disco-funk combo whipping up a storm whilst a string section play as if running on an overload of adrenaline and some harmonising girls belt out "SKI-BOY! SKI-I-I-I-I-YEE-BOY" at appropriate intervals. If nothing else, the series is worth revisiting for this thrillingly alarming piece of music alone, which is uncannily close to the sound that Air would later turn into a global sensation; and as the series was actually rather popular in France, where it was broadcast as A Skis Redoubles! -  a more or less untranslatable title which basically means nobody skis more than him - it's not beyond the bounds of possibility that they might have been tuning in.


The 'heavies' take their coats off menacingly and approach Peter Stringfellow-esque ski instructor Jean, who rejects their substantial offers of money and sternly informs them of the story of how Monk's Fall got its name. It's exactly how you suspect it got it. Back outside, there's some more conspicuous exposition about how they have to get there before a fellow criminal is released from prison and "we can't wait... and we won't". With a menacing growl of slap bass, this is followed by some lengthy footage of them skiing and arguing, more or less confirming the suspicion that the pair are played by stuntmen rather than full-time actors. Bobbie and Sadie, watching from the top of a nearby slope, are also suspicious of them, but for very different reasons; they've noticed the ne'er-do-wells watching them, though not closely enough to get wind of the plot to kidnap Gruff to ensure their assistance. And sure enough, once they've gone for a nice sit down in the lodge, the hapless mutt is tempted away with a rather inflexible-looking chop and bundled into the boot of a car.


Bobbie and Sadie head out to look for the errant pooch, and split up after about eight seconds, upon which Bobbie is promptly approached by the suspicious characters, who persuade him to help them in exchange for Gruff's safety in the manner of Dino and Luigi Vercotti. Early the next morning, Sadie can't find her dashing chum, and that's because he's already headed out to help guide the crooks on their treacherous journey, which takes in some genuinely hazardous-looking ice-climbing, occasioning the nervier of the 'heavies' to throw a momentary panic and refuse to move any further; "then stay there", adds his more menacing chum, "you'll either fall off, or freeze to death".


Back at the lodge, Claire, Sadie and Jean are busily comparing notes about Bobbie's disappearance, Gruff's disappearance and their encounters with the two sinister interlopers, but bewilderingly manage to conclude that none of them are in any way linked. They're in for a surprise, though, as Gruff has somehow managed to tunnel his way out of the hut where the villains had stashed him, and bounds up to them like some snow-drenched Lassie trying to alert them to the situation. It's only at this point that Claire realises that she recognises the men and that they're actually dangerous criminals who'd been up to no good in the area a couple of years previously; surely you'd actually have to make an effort not to remember that?! A lengthy display of skiing across Monk's Fall follows before the trio arrive at the Chateau, with the bad guys electing to shoot the padlock off the door when they find it's frozen shut. "That was no hunting rifle!", exclaims Jean from some considerable distance away, informing Sadie to call the authorities as he races off in his car.


After Bobbie is unconvincingly thrown to the floor, the 'heavies' start chiselling open the wall and find a cache of stolen diamonds - "the only ice on this mountain that's hot!" - but while they're babbling some rubbish about the ghosts of the old monks hiding it, Bobbie makes his escape and deftly skies not only around their gunshots but with sufficient verve to cause the snivelling smuggler to tumble down the mountainside. Every action series from around this time was required by law to have a scene featuring a helicopter, and sure enough, that's how Jean, Sadie and a snow-copper in a furry hat arrive on the scene; the less easily dissuaded bad guy tries firing on them but they zoom in close enough to make him lose his balance, upon which Bobbie races up and literally skis the gun out of his hand. You don't get that in Sons Of Anarchy.


Back at the lodge, Gruff and Bobbie are both eagerly tucking into breakfast when Claire suggests that he's likely to receive a reward; like some slalom-friendly Alberto Frog, Bobbie announces that he wants the biggest ice cream sundae Sadie's ever seen, and - in as standard issue an ITC closing gag as it's possible to get - as a special treat he's going to let her watch him eat it. Then there's some really rather thrilling closing titles, in which Bobbie races down a slope, slicing up huge clouds of snow and zigzagging through what look like real-life skiiers, before pausing, grinning at the camera in close-up, and whizzing off across the horizon into the invisible distance... and that's Skiboy.


Never exactly the star of the TV slopes - some regions would hastily shunt it into their weekday children's schedules, while all that Look-In could find to say to promote it was that it was 'TV's Newest Series' - poor old Skiboy never quite made the jump to a second series. Before long it had become TV's Forgottenest Series, to the extent that only just over a decade later, the famously exhaustive fanzine Time Screen overlooked it entirely in a massive retrospective of ITC scriptwriter Dennis Spooner's career. ITC looked as though they were finding their feet again afterwards, with Space: 1999 and Return Of The Saint, but other ITV companies had stolen their thunder with the likes of The Professionals and The Sweeney. ITC's response to this was a significant and ambitious change of direction, turning their attention towards grittier and harder-hitting feature films; a plan which was derailed by their washing their hands of the already-completed The Long Good Friday, and then sunk completely by Raise The Titanic.

Given that it's quite possibly the first thing that anyone has said about it from that day to this, the first thing to say about Skiboy is that it's not actually a bad series. In fact it's actually rather charming and enjoyable, and certainly a lot more fun than Spyder's Web or The Zoo Gang to name a couple of contemporaneous ITC offerings. True, it's hardly The Singing Detective, and the all-too-obvious desire to make it as 'family friendly' as possible leaves it feeling a bit on the lightweight side, but it looks amazing and zips along at a fair old pace, and sometimes, that's all you want from a television programme. Viewers at the time might not have wanted it, but that's not really a good enough reason to leave it languishing on the archive shelves; after all, they didn't want The Strange World Of Gurney Slade either.

Skiboy isn't just a half-decent not-even-half-remembered action series from a lost age of television, though; it's also a fascinating snapshot of that lost age of television, and indeed in some ways of the world around it. It's a textbook example of how shows were commissioned and made in the days before focus groups and tone meetings, when anyone with a proven track record could pitch a basic idea, and more than likely be handed a wodge of cash and told to go off and bring home the televisual bacon; which admittedly Skiboy didn't exactly manage to do but they were at least allowed to try before failing. It's also a vivid depiction of the last gasp of that sixties and seventies fascination with jet-setting Eurocentric glamour, before harsh economic realities and The Sex Pistols saying 'BARSTARD' at Bill Grundy moved the sociolcultural goalposts and the entire world went on to washed-out 16mm ITN newsfilm. On top of all that, thanks to the combination of dazzling location footage and equally dazzling fluorescent Alpine fashions captured on garish oversaturated film stock, it doesn't even look like any other TV show of the same vintage; if anything, it looks closer to those films that you'd stumble across on SAT1 and Bravo at a million o'clock in the morning like Modesty Blaise, Vampyros Lesbos and that German one about the three girls who stole a speedboat and a cine camera and... um... sorry, you were saying? Anyway, the cold hard fact remains that no matter how many column inches of ecstatic raving-over the latest HBO/AMC/Showtime/They're Just Making These Up Now heavyweight drama might inspire, none of them will ever be as inadvertently redolent a document of their time as Skiboy.

So, there you have it. Skiboy may not be the greatest television series ever made, but nor does it deserve to be languishing at the back of a cupboard where it's been for so long that it's probably gone mad and thinks it's actually zigzagging between Melbourne House Software and Hardware lorries on the way to the nearest ski hire shop. Given that even Stainless Steel And The Star Spies has been dusted down for reassessment, it's high time that TV's Newest Series got an opportunity to be TV's Newest Old Series. Just don't ask me to reassess The Adventurer.


You can read more about Skiboy, and other examples of The TV That Time Forgot, in my book Not On Your Telly.