Tim Worthington's Newsround

Wogan, the BBC's flagship early evening chat show, was a regular fixture on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays between 1982 and 1992. Doctor Who, their occasionally flagship early evening family adventure serial, was a regular fixture on Saturdays between 1963 and 1986. And it was when Doctor Who finally slipped out of the Saturday evening schedules that the two programmes ran up against each other in a most unexpected way.

Having tried to quietly cancel it back in 1985, only to find that 'Doctor Who fans' and 'quietly' are concepts as alien to each other as The Voord, the BBC had been forced against their better judgement to bow to public pressure (and it's always worth pointing out that there was sane, rational and mainstream public pressure as well as all the buffoons picketing Colin Moynighan's house dressed as Vega Nexos) and bring it back. As they hadn't want to bring it back, and an initial attempt at recapturing its Saturday Night audience had failed spectacularly and taken Roland Rat with it, there was only one realistic option left open to them - to shove it away where nobody would see it and it could just sort of fade from view like a badly-rendered mid-seventies Tardis dematerialisation. Hence from its low-key high-profile relaunch in 1987 to its quiet gurgling down a plughole at the very end of the eighties, Doctor Who was scheduled on Monday and/or Wednesday evenings directly against Coronation Street.

Yes, that's Coronation Street, the ratings-conquering ITV soap opera that had not long celebrated its twenty-fifth anniversary, and was so popular that plans were afoot to bring in a third weekly instalment. Doctor Who on the other hand had just waded through two messy series featuring its least popular lead actor by some distance, so it wasn't so much not a fair fight as not anything even resembling a fight to begin with. Doctor Who got the polarity of its neutron flow comprehensively reversed by Brian Tilsley and company and there was nothing that anyone could do to prevent that. The fact that even most of its supposed fans were gleefully sticking the boot in didn't exactly help, admittedly, but you can't help wondering how much of the carping about 'pantomime embarrassment' and sneering at Sylvester McCoy fighting a cardboard monster made of a rubber set or something actually came from people who wanted to make sure that they got to watch Coronation Street on the colour TV set.

The average household at that time would more than likely have had a single colour television set and a corresponding black and white portable, and a combination of majority rule, passive aggressive occupation of armchairs and argumentative tactics learned from the soaps themselves usually resulted in the more mainstream-orientated members of the family getting their way and getting to watch in colour. The hapless Doctor Who fan would have to fiddle about with that crackle-prone tuning dial thing until they got a decent enough signal to watch the latest exploits of Mr. Ratcliffe and The Kandyman in glorious monochrome. True, it wasn't as unfair as when poor old dad was made to watch the snooker in black and white, but you can hear the massed fumings of injustice reverberate to this day. In the hope of preventing armed revolution in the living room, an uneasy truce was usually arrived at whereby the Doctor Who fan was allowed to video the show instead, and that's where their practical problems began.

With blank videotapes costing a comparatively fair amount, available recording space at a premium (if you worked it out correctly you could fit seven episodes on an E180, working out at two tapes per series), and little realistic hope of seeing any of the new episodes again otherwise - the BBC had released approximately two and a half Doctor Who stories on video by that point, and repeats seemed indescribably unlikely - getting the whole episode but nothing more on tape was paramount. And, due to the associated need to flit between two rooms in order to accomplish this - nobody upon nobody had the video hooked up to their 'other' television - a very tricky operation indeed. Thus it was that from about half past seven every Monday and/or Wednesday evening, a nation's hallways were filled with fans nervily listening out for the closing comments and closing music of Wogan, trying to work out the precise moment when they could press record with minimal space-wasting collateral damage. One shudders to think how many obsolete old tapes there are out there, wrapped in line-drawn 'Tape Library' covers done by a bloke at the Sci-Fi local group, containing late eighties episodes of Doctor Who interspersed with twenty seconds of the closing titles of Wogan. Mind you, you do have to feel for those fans who actually liked both... but that's another story.

Though you wouldn't know it from the average autopilot cut-and-paste history of the show or indeed grandstanding forum swear-off, belittled and embattled Doctor Who did actually put up a good and admirable fight against the Cat-heralded behemoth on the other side. Though only those few faithful who actually bothered to stick with it will be able to attest to that. Which, come to think of it, gives me an idea for an article...

"Sylvester Stallone's the new Mister Who!".

It was with those words, uttered by a classmate who was obsessed with being the 'first' with the latest showbiz news despite apparently never quite understanding what any of the words involved in it actually meant, that I learned of the casting of the seventh - and, as it would turn out, final - Doctor Who lead actor of the show's original run.

Whatever 'Mister Who' may have been, it's entirely possible that Sylvester Stallone might indeed have considered ditching Cobra to take up the lead role in it; after all, he was always being linked around then to unlikely revivals of old Cult TV shows that ultimately (and thankfully) never happened. As for Doctor Who, however, they'd perhaps more sensibly opted for Sylvester McCoy, who on paper at least seemed an inspired choice. To younger viewers, he was already well known as the anarchic quick-talking second-stringer in a variety of off-the-wall shows including Vision On, Eureka, Tiswas and a stint as the 'tall' one of The O-Men in Jigsaw. Meanwhile, to older viewers, he was familiar from a range of more cerebral shows like the gently absurdist nostalgic sitcom Big Jim And The Figaro Club, not to mention literal careering around arts and culture shows as part of the worryingly unpredictable performance troupe The Ken Campbell Roadshow. Those somewhere in between would at least have seen him marching around on Schools' TV holding up a placard reading 'EQUAL RIGHTS FOR MCCOY'. In short he was an energetic, freewheeling, versatile performer with wide experience of non-mainstream theatre and a clear leaning towards the 'outsider'. In other words, exactly what Doctor Who needed at that point.

Alright, let's be honest about this - what Doctor Who needed at that point was a lot more than that. It needed a new and more assertive producer, it needed the showboating BBC 'top brass' to admit to themselves that there were other scheduling White Elephants far more deserving and worthy of being run into the ground, it needed fans who weren't barking mad lunatics intent on catapulting themselves at The House Of Commons dressed as The Shrivenzale in protest at something or other where nobody was ever quite sure what it was, and above all it needed a slot in the schedules that wasn't directly against bastard Coronation Street. It didn't get any of this, of course, but never let it be said that those who were left to fight the battle didn't fight it admirably, and in a way that led many of the remaining faithful to believe, just for a minute, that they might win after all. It was, in a sense, Chris Morris' Large Charismatic Biblical Chicken, which I mention purely as a way of getting a plug in for my book about Radio 1 comedy, Fun At One. Yes, alright, I'll get back to Doctor Who now.

Despite what the revisionists from both outside and inside fandom might try to insist, and regardless of whether it actually worked or not, there really was a stylistic sea change from Sylvester McCoy's arrival onwards, and a vivid determination to get as far away as possible from directionless self-referential mean-spiritedness of the past couple of series. And for the admittedly few who did stay on board for what one certain continuity announcer infamously described as "a journey to an altogether more far-flung shore", this meant a much-needed freshness, brightness and sense of fun, and - just for the briefest of moments - a genuine hope that they might finally be getting it right again, and that the lingering threat of 'cancellation' might finally recede. The irreverent pranksters behind the definitive McCoy-era overview Wallowing In Our Own Weltschermz have argued with some force that, while still some way from hurtling back to shore at a rate of knots, the production team had at least turned the ship around, whilst Gareth Roberts, one of the most perceptive analysts that archive TV has ever had, put it more simply and directly still: "suddenly, somebody opens a window, turns on the air-conditioning, squirts lemon disinfectant around with abandon, and we get Season Twenty Four".

Of course, that optimism was quickly dashed, and fans would see in a new decade with that famously inspiring Doctor Who Magazine cover featuring a dejected-looking Sylvester McCoy beneath the headline 'Waiting In The Wings - What Does The Doctor Do Next?'. Over time, this hope-dashing would lead to a widespread and erroneous belief that there was never any hope to dash in the first place; that the series really was the 'pantomime embarrassment' that self-appointed 'superfans' with their own well-known personal beefs with cast and crew went to great lengths to inform us it was every three minutes, that the sets were uniformly flimsy and the music uniformly terrible, and that Sylvester McCoy spent three years falling over while saying "twosidzzzzzz onecoin" (and with friends like that, who needed Jonathan Powell?). And yet, there were so many who watched, accepted and liked those three series on face value, who saw and felt the excitement and potential of the gradual improvement, and really did believe for one gloriously deluded moment that Doctor Who in its original incarnation still had a fighting chance in a changing home entertainment landscape and against the machinations of an incoming wave of media 'money men'. Some of them may even have penned a short article for their Local Group's Newsletter analysing the out-of-season coverage between series twenty four and twenty five and described it as 'encouraging'. Which certain erstwhile Local Group Newsletter editors had best not now dig out lest their feature about how long the whole thing took to photocopy and staple should also 'leak' online.

Sometimes, in fairness, arguments against the McCoy era have been made cogently, rationally, and backed up with thoughtful assessment. Nine times out of ten, however, they've been made by prats whose evaluation goes no further than the fact that they don't particularly think much of McCoy's debut story Time And The Rani. That, apparently, is the beginning and end of their argument, no further questions Madame Inquisitor. Is Time And The Rani even that bad, though? Surely there were a lot of viewers who quite enjoyed it when it went out, and maybe even found it refreshing and invigorating after the aimless and alienating lack of restraint and focus that had dominated the past couple of series? Well, yes there are. Hello. You're reading the stridently pro-McCoy ramblings of one of them right now in fact. And this is as good a moment as any to take another look at the Seventh Doctor's debut outing and see if any of that scoffing and snorting actually does hold any weight after all. So, fire up the black and white portable, sit impatiently through the last two minutes of Wogan, flit trepidatiously in and out of the room where everyone else is watching Coronation Street in colour to make sure you start the video just at the right moment, and let's go!

NEXT TIME: Episode One, and the problems with Ikona - and banjos - begin...

Episode One of Time And The Rani is, so a lot of fans would have you believe, Where It All Went Wrong For Doctor Who. Actually, one or two of them say it's Paradise Towers Episode Two, but let's not split hairs here. This is the point at which, apparently, Doctor Who became entirely unwatchable. When it finally vaulted over the point of self-parody into what every third-rate fan writer insisted on referring to as 'pantomime embarrassment', and even its most ardent and unhinged supporters gave up, packed up, went home, and started lamenting the cancellation of Star Cops instead.

While it's all very nice and neat, this is a version of events that conveniently omits quite a few important points. For starters, there's the small matter of the two series that directly preceded it. Then there's the weaker Troughton stories, and all those times that Tom Baker was phoning it in while working from a script that the writer apparently couldn't even be bothered finishing. There's The Sensorites, there's Meglos, there's The Space Museum, there's The Dominators, there's The Armageddon Factor, there's The Two Doctors, there's Time-Flight and there's The Time Monster. Good Lord Almighty there's The Time Monster. And we haven't even got started on the average weekly reaction to any given post-2005 episode yet. So yes, it may well be that the people with their fingers wedged in their ears genuinely disliked and continue to dislike the Sylvester McCoy era; but it's also likely that it marked a convenient excuse for them to stop watching Doctor Who as they'd simply outgrown it, got bored, or had other things to do. Or, of course, preferred Coronation Street. And if you weren't actually watching at all at the time, you don't get a vote on that. Sorry. How's that Rings Of Akhaten working out for you?

Anyway, Episode One of Time And The Rani. It wasn't just fans who stopped watching - or at the very least elected not to start watching again - and Coronation Street was not entirely to blame. If we're going to get anywhere near understanding why, it's important to disregard any of the arguments that fans tie their brains into knots with and consider how it must have looked to the average ordinary everyday television watcher who'd just enjoyed an edition of Wogan, probably featuring Peter Egan. No matter what the HBO Evangelists may have to say about the need to persevere with an unfolding story arc for fifteen million episodes before you can possibly be allowed to decide whether you like a TV show or not, the cold hard fact of the matter remains that the average viewer has to be grabbed in no uncertain terms by the first couple of minutes of any television show, and if they aren't, it's Bonekickers time for everyone. And, even allowing for the huge wodge of the audience who would already have decided to watch Coronation Street instead, it's clear that the vast majority of viewers weren't hooked by the opening of the first episode of Time And The Rani. So if it's actually good and not bad like YOU thought - which of course is what we're trying to argue here - where did it go so wrong?

Well, that's a difficult question, and one that to a certain extent depends on when you were actually watching it. This widely-reviled twenty five minutes of television opens with a pre-credits sequence that is frequently held up to ridicule now, but actually seemed arresting and refreshingly different when it first went out. No, really. For a start, it was unusual to see a pre-credits sequence on any BBC programme back then, let alone one that opened with a hefty wallop of impressive visual effects, and it's this more than anything else that underlines the fact that everyone involved at least went into Series Twenty Four with the intention of doing something a bit different. In fact, especially when considered in conjunction with his liking for bringing in guest stars from theatre and musicals, cameos from popular Light Entertainers, and specially-shot trailers full of Blipvert-style fragments of flashy clips, it's almost as though John Nathan-Turner had seen the direction that American TV (and especially Doctor Who's close rivals) was headed in, and was trying emulate it on his own terms. Unfortunately for all concerned, he had neither the budget, the resources, the expensive film stock or indeed - let's be honest about this - the motivation and dedication to carry it off.

As if to labour the point, within this pre-credits sequence there are three small but significant breaks with recent tradition, all of which manage to highlight both the strengths and flaws of the entire McCoy era at the exact same time. There's a hefty dose of dazzling-for-the-time computer graphics and video effects, which are certainly more impressive than anything seen in the more lauded The Box Of Delights, but they're employed purely for show and not for any substantial dramatic or aesthetic reason. There's a guest star camping it up something rotten, in a manner that would soon become de rigueur even for more 'heavyweight' drama, but who is undermined by not having anybody to react to or interact with, and on an overlit Tardis set that had seen better days to boot. And, thanks to Colin Baker's understandable truculence, there's a regeneration accomplished with only one Doctor present on set, which is as bold a statement of John Nathan-Turner's defiant make-do-and-mend attitude as you're liable to find, only here there's no story completed to impressive effect in a car park when an asbestos scare booted them out of the studio, only Sylvester McCoy in a wig turning into Sylvester McCoy not in a wig. It all still looks and sounds great, but it's really rather empty in some respects; though, that said, as the entire purpose of the sequence was to shake off the stuffy stench of recent years and do something noticeably fresh and new from the outset, maybe that's all it needed to be. That shot with Ikona watching the Tardis plummet planetwards is good, though.

Then, with a burst of pixels and a splatter of Yamaha DX7-derived audio pyrotechnics, we're flung directly into the path of the primary weapon in the McCoy-sceptic's arsenal, their ultimate convenient stick to set about its muggy boneheadedness with; the brand spanking new all-singing all-dancing all-winking opening titles. In the interests of transparency and full disclosure, it's true to say that the new titles and theme arrangement weren't exactly universally well received even back then, but there's still an important differentiation to be drawn. Nowadays, the favoured line of attack is to scoff at how 'dated' they look and sound; technology and taste have marched on and we're all so much more cultured and aesthetic than those poor primitive fools back in 1987 with their Timbuk 3 and their Fido Dido and their Arkanoid on the Atari ST. When those poor primitive fools actually were back in 1987, however, the rumblings of dissent came instead from those who felt it was too 'modern', sufficiently alienated by the sampler'n'CAD-fuelled Shock Of The New to write distressed letters to fanzines voicing suspicion of this new-fangled McCoy man and the godless 'spray-can' effect of his dangerously modern logo.

In fairness, it's true to say that CAL Video's in retrospect slightly crammed and cluttered Elite-trouncing visuals have been long since superceded on every possible technical and artistic level, and that - as the makers of the opening titles themselves wearily sigh in one of the best ever Doctor Who DVD extras - you can do much the same on a mobile phone nowadays; a quick glance at YouTube, however, will confirm that for the majority of Doctor Who fans, the ability to do anything even halfway as entertaining with the technology remains depressingly elusive. Similarly, Keff McCulloch's bright and clipped micro-management of the theme music, resembling nothing less than an Art Of Noise record punching itself in the face, and swamped in so much MIDI that it makes Mike Lindup from Level 42 look like a lackadaisical technophobe, now sounds unnervingly similar to the sort of home-made Doctor Who theme ringtones that people gave up thinking were a good idea over a decade ago.

These are charges that, admittedly, it's difficult to refute. The first ever Doctor Who title sequence to use digital technology rather than stretched plastic bags and tape loops, it is with no small irony that it is now the most 'of its time' by some considerable distance (though that said we'll see how the current one looks in a couple of years). In its time, however, it looked and sounded little short of amazing, and again was streets ahead of pretty much everything else on the small screen back then; the camera cutting through one of the solar rings in particular was a topic of considerable excitement amongst the less luddistic fans. Yes well we had to make our own entertainment in those days. John Nathan-Turner wasn't always quite so sharp in his quest to stay one step ahead of technology - disastrous 'real robot' companion Kamelion is evidence enough of that - but here he made absolutely the right decision in reaching out to two experts at the cutting edge of their respective fields, and it's hardly any of their fault that the end result isn't quite as impressive all this time later. More to the point, you would have been hard pushed back in 1987 to find anyone cheerleading for Delia Derbyshire's sparse hand-crafted electronics or the creaky 'howlaround' effect; both were roundly viewed as primitive relics from another age and perhaps all adventurous technologies have to go through a period of derision or disinterest before they can be properly re-evaluated. Incidentally, there was a single-length edit of Keff's theme arrangement prepared, but it never actually saw release on 7". If you want to know why, though, I'm not telling you here. You'll have to get my book about BBC Records And Tapes Top Of The Box instead.

So, even from the outset, even the most titles-dazzled average viewer would probably have had at best mixed feelings about this journey to an altogether more far-flung shore, and mixed feelings do not an EastEnders-challenging ratings-topper make. Meanwhile, the end of the opening titles bring with them a sight that will strike fear into the very central nervous system of any self-respecting Doctor Who fan; no, not McCoy's wink, but a writing credit for Pip and Jane Baker. Defending the much and often rightly derided husband and wife scriptwriting team is not an enviable task in anyone's book (and given their involvement, we can only hope the book isn't Doctor Who: Race Against Time), but people aren't just asked to work on a primetime television series out of nowhere, as much as many fans may wish that was the case, and it's always worth taking a look at people's career paths outside of the show that far too many contributors' entire artistic value gets based on. The Bakers seem to have enjoyed a promising early career, contributing to several highly-rated drama series and penning a couple of well-received standalone dramas, though sadly much of this has long since been wiped. By the late eighties, though, they'd veered wildly off course, penning such groundbreaking masterpieces as children's sci-fi sitcom Watt On Earth. You'll never guess what it was about.

Anyway, there's no getting away from the fact that their four Doctor Who stories were putting it mildly not what was needed at that point, and on top of that their bullish fingers-in-ears defensiveness when faced with criticism did little to endear them to what was left of the show's audience. In their defence, though, they were quite often doing their best in difficult circumstances - one episode was as good as written overnight so that there would at least be something to go before the cameras in the morning - and were amongst the show's staunchest defenders at a time when taking that stance can hardly have brought them a wealth of professional benefits. On top of that, they frequently protested - to an equally finger-eared reaction from fans - that what ended up on screen often bore little resemblance to what they had originally written. In the case of Time And The Rani, they'd intended it for Colin Baker and had tailored the action specifically to take place on a heavily wooded planet, and some of the more notorious scenes apparently weren't even written by them in the first place. So, bear that in mind as we move into the episode proper...

...which we'll be doing in the next part, along with much discussion of rotten puns about hats, an ear-testing preponderance of banjos, and the general uselessness of Ikona. So why not join us? Or, alternately, take out a couple of half-sentences, string them together without their surrounding context, and then scoff indignantly on a forum that they don't add up with each other. Whichever way you look at it, it's all Strange Matter...

When you get past the pre-credits sequence and the new opening titles and actually start watching Time And The Rani, the first thing you notice is that it looks good. And this is no mean feat when you consider where, when and how it was made.

Some time around the mid-eighties, the BBC had switched from using 2" videotape to 1", which may not sound like much of a major lifestyle choice in this jetsetting digital age, but in all seriousness, there is a massive technical difference between the two. While 1" tape was cheaper, more cost-efficient and easier to edit, and the associated equipment took up a good deal less space, the regrettable trade-off to this convenience was that - putting it as simply and non-technically as possible - it just didn't look as good. Compared to 2", the resultant recordings were flat, lifeless and colourless, and this is the primary reason why pretty much every studio-based BBC show from the late eighties, be it Wogan, Open Air, What's That Noise?, Ever Decreasing Circles or Billy's Christmas Angels, looks and sounds more or less exactly the same as each other.

And that wasn't all. Mindful of the fact that the brand spanking not-all-that-shiny-really new 1" VT equipment was cheaper and more portable, and required a much smaller crew than film did, the BBC had also begun to 'encourage' producers to cut costs and balance books by using videotape for their location work as well. Doctor Who had notoriously switched over to 1" VT for its studio sessions with Warriors Of The Deep, a story that as a direct consequence showcased exactly the wrong kind of cheapness, and as of Episode One of Time And The Rani, they were using it for location sequences too. And bear in mind that this was at the exact same time that the exact same executives who were forcing these kinds of production and budgetary decisions were also publically berating Doctor Who for not looking as good as Star Wars; a complaint roughly equivalent to frowning over the fact that Panda Pops Green Cola doesn't taste as good as a Raymond Massey made with Macallan 55 Single Malt.

So by a simple process of technical elimination, you'd be forgiven for expecting Time And The Rani to look flat, dull, lifeless, colourless, and more or less indistinguishable from any given episode of Laura And Disorder. Yet it actually looks bright, vibrant, and colourful to the point of garishness, ironically resembling nothing so much as it does Panda Pops Green Cola, and giving off whatever the visual equivalent is of the now quite possibly illegal level of sugar rush too. This involved more than just throwing a couple of tins of primary coloured paint around, though; it was an attempt to work with a difficult and restrictive technological format and engage the ordinary everyday viewers again, with costumes, designs, effects and digital retouchings carefully designed to add a dash of liveliness and colour to this drearily Five To Eleven-esque world. Whether individual viewers or fans felt that it was 'for them' or not, it's an approach that would dominate the original series for the remainder of its time on air, and runs right through this particular story like the lettering in a stick of seaside rock.

Even in this opening episode, you'll find an overwhelming barrage of impressive - or at the very least vivid - visuals that present a substantial challenge to the widely held belief that latterday Doctor Who looked cheap, nasty and unconvincing. The computer-aided video effects are meticulously rendered and way ahead of their time, especially the spinning globe traps; the 'Tetrap's Eye View' camera effect adds a nice bit of variety to what would otherwise be rather staid and repetitive scenes, the model work is of a consistently high standard (have a look at the exterior shots of the Rani's lab cut into a cliff face if you want evidence of this), the Lakertyans' make-up is far better than the average alien 'prosthetics' of the day - well, at least by BBC sci-fi standards - and even the clearly budget-conscious costumes manage to come across as eyecatching. Where it falls down, unfortunately, is in the sheer cheapness of the studio sets, though at least they're cheap as in sparse rather than the painted backdrops and wobble-prone cardboard walls of legend. Even the quarry standing in for alien planet Lakertya - in lieu of Pip and Jane Baker's favoured tree-strewn vista - somehow manages to avoid looking quite as boring and unconvincing as usual, though a subtle amount of digital tweaking probably had some bearing on this.

Unfortunately, the second thing that you notice about the episode is just how nervous Sylvester McCoy is. When he'd shown up on Blue Peter a couple of months earlier to announce his casting, more or less in his own regular clothes and with little available detail to reveal about the forthcoming new series, he'd appeared uncharacteristically uneasy and racked with self-doubt; something that was reinforced by an alarming interview-closing comment about how he was 'looking forward' to the autumn, accompanied by a fretful gurn to camera. Without wishing to venture too far into the realms of sub-Big Brother's Little Brother mock-psychoanalysis, it does seem as though the sheer weight of expectation that came with taking on that part at that time was playing very heavily on his mind indeed. Seemingly very little had changed by the time that McCoy actually stepped in front of the camera, as his entire performance in this first episode is jumpy, reticent and noticeably short on comic timing. As we shall see, this would right itself soon enough, but perhaps the presence of a seemingly shaky leading man was part of the reason why so many people took so strongly against Time And The Rani from the outset.

Admittedly McCoy is hardly helped by the fact that his first lines as The Doctor come in the middle of a hamfisted and clunkily exposition-strewn scene, which would be an ideal starting point for launching into an extended takedown of Pip and Jane Baker if it wasn't for the fact that they didn't really write it. The Bakers had in fact wanted to open the episode with a scene showing King Solomon being abducted mid-wisdom dispensal, which would have been a much more effective and engaging way of kicking off the story and indeed the new-look new series, but were prevailed upon to replace it with The Rani shoving Einstein into a fish tank at comparatively short notice, and it's not unreasonable to assume that their original curtain-raising scene might have been slightly better than what ended up on screen. If you're scoffing at that, incidentally, then it's worth bearing in mind that this is more or less exactly how every third episode since Steven Moffatt took over has started. There's some debate as to how far The Bakers were even actually involved with the near-total rewrite, and even then if they were in fact particularly willing participants, so if this scene doesn't exactly help to hit the ground running, then for once it's not really their fault.

There can be less doubt, sadly, about the authorship of the impenetrable and scientifically unsound technobabble spouted by The Doctor when he comes to in The Rani's laboratory, still sporting his previous incarnation's horrendous costume; though, in fairness, it had been written with that coat's rightful wearer in mind and would have suited him much... well, not better, but that's another argument for another time. Naturally, the new Doctor is keen to know exactly what he's been brought to Lakertya for, but unfortunately seems more interested in reeling off endless streams of nonsense with no gaps between words - and indulging in some very un-McCoy-like badly-staged pratfalls - than doing anything constructive about it. The Rani doesn't seem very interested in doing anything constructive about his not doing anything constructive about it, though, and gives him enough time to mess about with her electronically-stored plans and discover something about a 'strange matter asteroid' and witter "What monstrous experiment are you dabbling in now? Your past is littered with the diabolical results of your unethical experiments!"before she finally sees fit to call in Urak The Tetrap - an extremely well-realised part-animatronic species of bat-like bipeds, who all the same would have worked much better in the original intended woodland setting - to put him out of action with a flashy spangly web-firing gun. Presumably he was not a fan of the dialogue.

This, really, is the problem with Episode One - it looks and sounds tremendous, but has the rug pulled from under it by just about every scene having one weak link so weak that everything else collapses sideways onto it. Whether it's the high-speed spurious pseudo-scientific gibberish, McCoy getting cold feet whenever someone shouted 'ACTION', the time-filling spoon-playing, The Rani's impersonation of Mel (which could have worked if it had been written with a bit more verve and properly played for laughs by all parties, but it wasn't, they didn't and it didn't), and those sodding misquoted proverbs, clearly somebody's idea of a good 'gimmick' for the new Doctor but which mercifully disappeared shortly afterwards. And then there's Ikona.

The Lakertyans ("rather unusual species, can't say I recognise it... human with a rrrrrrrrrrrreptilian influence") are by and large a sappy and ineffective bunch, persuaded into docile servitude towards The Rani by their useless leader Beyus. Dashing young Ikona, however, has rejected all of their values, including those concerning not being an irritating character. As we shall see, he gets progressively worse throughout the story, and what's all the more surprising about this is that actor Mark Greenstreet was something of an up and coming next big thing at the time, having recently turned in a widely-applauded dual-role turn in the BBC's 'Sunday Classics' adaptation of Brat Farrar, which coincidentally enough was produced by former Doctor Who showrunner Terrance Dicks (and if you want a detailed history of the 'Sunday Classics' slot, you'll find one in my book Not On Your Telly). He was also something of a favourite with teenage girls' magazines at the time - Mark Greenstreet, not Terrance Dicks - but his memorable for the wrong reasons stint as Ikona seems to have thrown a brick wall right in the path of his promising career. A few scattered appearances in high profile dramas and a failed attempt to become the next James Bond later, he retired from acting to forge a new career as a writer and director. Meanwhile co-star Karen Clegg, who plays fellow eye-candy Rogue Lakertyan with a weird run Sarn until she steps on one of the spinning globe traps, opted instead to concentrate on a busy theatre career, later developing a successful one-woman show reviving forties musical turns. You can bet she's pestered at the stage door by people wielding Dapol Tetraps to this day, though.

Meanwhile, if we're owning up to all of the less-than-good bits in Episode One of Time And The Rani, then we may as well come clean about that wince-inducingly unfunny scene with The Doctor picking out his new costume. By this time it was apparently a 'tradition' for the incoming Doctor's first episode to feature a scene set in the Tardis Wardrobe Room - after all, it had happened a staggering total of once before then* - and, so the story goes, when John Nathan Turner noticed that Pip and Jane had neglected to include one, he hastily scribbled one in himself. And good lord, can you tell. Thus it was that we got to enjoy Sylvester McCoy wandering around making weak puns about sweaters whilst Keff McCulloch indulged in a preposterous medley of musical motifs; a burst of accordion for some Napoleon-styled getup, a fanfare for a busby, school bells playing a flat approximation of the Big Ben chimes for a mortar board, some of Tom Baker's outfit accompanied by a bit of that xylophone that was always in every single scene of all of his stories, frilly-shirted Pertwee-esque harpsichord jangling, a comedy smashing window for the full Peter Davison ensemble, and finally a quick flourish of banjo as he steps out with a Troughtonesque coat, his new Bud Flanagan-inflected costume, and that bloody Question Mark Jumper, which surely nobody can ever have thought was a good idea. Even the fans who bought and wore their own. Incidentally, keep an ear out for that banjo, as you'll be hearing a lot more of it. More than you would ever conceivably want to, in fact.

So, one whole quarter into Time And The Rani, we find ourselves very much on the back foot. Everything that's even halfway impressive about this opening episode is undermined by problems that even the saner and more even-handed critics of the story could make a powerful case against it out of. How can it even be possible to prove that it's not that bad after all, or even to excuse the frankly ridiculous amount of words that have been written about it already? Well, there's still three more episodes to go. And some of them might not even have any banjo in...

*Before you start scoffing with loads of emoticons, it's true - the Second Doctor rummaged in a chest for his clothes, the Third stole Doctor Beavis' clobber from the hospital, the Fourth walked in and out of the Tardis door sporting different costumes, and the fifth took his from what appeared to be the Tardis Games Room...

While Time And The Rani was being broadcast, Children's BBC how-it-works show for under-tens Corners suddenly picked up a couple of million extra viewers. This was largely down to the fact that the show's new presenter Sophie Aldred was also set to become the next Doctor Who companion, and as well as the usual standard issue obsessive fan that has to watch every last appearance by every last actor connected with it, there were also a significant number of smitten teenagers who just couldn't get enough of their latest TV crush. While they would have to wait until 1989 to see Sophie dressed as Cleopatra and wearing a Victorian ballgown with a plunging neckline on Children's BBC game show Knock Knock, anyone who was still watching Corners in December 1987 would nonetheless have got a nice surprise of a very different kind.

During an edition devoted to 'Music', Sophie visited Keff McCulloch in a weirdly dingy cellar-based studio for a look at how he put that contentious new arrangement of the Doctor Who theme together. In a fun little interview, he explains how a synthesiser works, and essays not altogether convincing 'flute' and 'organ' tones before breaking out the somewhat less conventional sounds used in the theme, which it has to be said sounded little short of amazing when tearing out of your TV speaker in isolation. Sophie then gets to play the bassline and edit it into shape using a sequencer; she observes that 'you'd need about twenty hands to play all that', upon which Keff launches into a guided tour of the 24 Track Mixing Console, pushing the faders up and down in a way that seems barely noteworthy now but was the sort of thing that you normally didn't get to see or indeed hear back then.

You may speculate, of course, that this feature was originally intended to tie in with the abandoned single release of the Keff McCulloch version of the theme. Which I would normally use as an opportunity to plug my book about BBC Records And Tapes Top Of The Box, except for the fact that Ian Shazam and all the wacky japesters on the Charter Review committee have just announced that promoting anything to do with The BBC is very bad and wrong. Which I'm happy to comply with, as long as they are similarly happy to dodge an incessant hail of sharpened copies of Come To My Party by Keith Harris And Orville.

Anyway, one thing that surprisingly didn't put in an appearance in his actual arrangement of the theme music, but was all over his incidental music as if it was vying for prominence with that pesky banjo, was the dreaded 'orchestra hit'. For those of you who aren't familiar with it... well, let's face it, you are familiar with it. It's a blanket name for those sampler-derived bits of angular and slightly off-key punches of massed musical emphasis that you'll find roughly every three seconds in any given Pet Shop Boys single. It was an effect that had started to creep in during the early eighties, primarily via Trevor Horn, and by the end of the decade was everywhere, from Debbie Gibson's Electric Youth, through Express Yourself by NWA, all the way to that preposterous Sun-Pat 'P-P-P-Peanutritious' advert. Keff McCulloch had no searing expletive-strewn message to deliver about Black America needing to stop fighting itself before it could fight White America, though, nor indeed any phatic air-punching sentiments about how youngsters hold the 'key' if only the grown-ups would listen to them. Not even any reason to extol the nutritional virtues of a spread made from ninety three percent peanuts. He was there, purely and simply, to punctuate Gavrok thumping his fist through a flimsy paper 'loudspeaker', and didn't we know it.

First essayed in Time And The Rani, Keff McCulloch's approach to incidental music has since become one of the most widely derided aspects of the original run of Doctor Who, and in some regards it's not difficult to see why. Heavily indebted to the MIDI-er-than-thou computer-controlled samplings of The Art Of Noise - whose contemporaneous theme for The Krypton Factor would not have sounded out of place in a McCoy story - his contributions rely far too often on clinical and sterile 'funky' motifs driven by all-too-obviously synth-derived brass and piano sounds, with orchestra hits thrown in for good measure whenever a character does something dramatic like sit completely still doing absolutely nothing whatsoever. They are loud, they are mechanical, they are precise, and they are very much of their time. However, they were also perfectly good in their time, succeeding in making Doctor Who at least sound more modern than it had done since, well, ever really, and scoffing at them for having had the temerity to wear a bit badly is a bit like castigating Coldcut Featuring Yazz And The Plastic Population for not being Rich Homie Quan.

Admittedly, even allowing for this, Time And The Rani does not exactly find the beleaguered synth wizard at his best, seemingly weighed down by the need to make a good first impression, and with high-speed atmospherics careering about the place like a copy of Galactic Nightmare had burst all over the soundtrack. There are also way too many 'clever' variations on the basic theme tune melody; you can hear the first stirrings of his notorious 'Latin Version' here, if you're unhinged enough to actually want to. Ironically Keff McCulloch would do a much better job with a much shorter time to work in on the following story Paradise Towers, then really hit his stride when called on to throw in elements of fifties pastiche when they went back to 1959 - The Rock'n'Roll Years! - for Delta And The Bannermen.

There are plenty of decent moments in his Time And The Rani score, though, and the entire soundtrack does at least exemplify the one virtue that Keff McCulloch never gets anywhere near enough credit for - brevity. Unlike Murray Gold and his ceaseless attempts to shoehorn an entire symphony into every single close-up, there is invariably just enough music to make a point or set a mood and then they get on with the controversial business of actually allowing the audience to hear some of the dialogue. So much so that when some of his music was included on The Doctor Who 25th Anniversary Album the following year, full-length tracks had to be made up from bizarre ill-matching cut'n'shuts of much shorter pieces of music. Although, that said, the two extracts from Time And The Rani were actual full-length pieces, albeit only heard as brief background edits onscreen. Erm, as you were.

More to the point, the alarming modernity of Keff McCulloch's DX7-derived sounds were enough to lull hapless fans into a deluded notion that their 'cool' friends might start to see Doctor Who as 'cool' again. They'd probably deny it now, much like they'd deny that they ever purposefully ate McCoy's crisps in a misguided act of 'solidarity', but the truth of the matter is that every fan went through a stage of believing that the hip fashion-followers in their class could be converted to the cause if only the right 'in' could be found. And now Doctor Who had music that sounded a little bit like what was in the charts; was this the moment they'd all been waiting for? No it wasn't. It would take more than a couple of orchestra hits to tempt juvenile trend-surfers away from The Lost Boys and paisley waistcoats. It was about as liable to connect with them as that dreadful Italio House-themed Vimto ad, and the only time fans would be hearing the Doctor Who theme around school playgrounds was when the 'zany' kid sniggered and sang "OOOOOO-weeeee-oooooOOOOO" at them in a sort of out of tune sarcastic voice. The Beatmasters did not see fit to drag Roberta Tovey out of retirement for a chart-topping collaboration. There would be no We Sing In Praise Of Total War '88 by Eric B & Rakim feat. Robert Moubert.

Nonetheless, there remains a small but significant faction of fans out there who actually quite like Keff McCulloch's incidental music, and in the pre-DVD Extra age many of them would come to treasure that snippet of Corners that they'd hastily recorded between the omnibus repeats of Dick Spanner. Many would also 'treasure' off-airs of Never Kiss Frogs and Melvin And Maureen's Music-A-Grams, but perhaps we'd better not go into that. But of course, Sophie Aldred wasn't in Time And The Rani, and mentioning her so heavily in this context would be a bit like if an earlier draft of this piece had suggested that some of the additional Corners viewers "had turned on too early for Droids", when in fact the BBC didn't start showing the animated adventures of R2D2 and C3P0 until the following year. It's time to turn our attention back to what Ikona and company are up to.

Meanwhile, in a freak coincidence, there actually was a credible crossover between Doctor Who and new-fangled dance music the following year, and it would have wider and longer-lasting implications than anyone expected at the time... but that's another story.

Whether you like or dislike the Sylvester McCoy era of Doctor Who, it's important to remember that it wasn't alone. In the mid to late eighties, TV was awash with dramatically updated takes on old favourites. There were the direct remakes, of course, with Star Trek: The Next Generation and The (New) Twilight Zone succeeding where The Saint tumbled headlong into a bin while Simon Dutton did his 'wryly amused' face. There were the revivals of tried and trusted characters, with Robin Of Sherwood's literal sword and sorcery makeover proving a rare triumph alongside the overly violent hidden-away-on-ITV-Nighttime William Tell reboot and the Salkind-profferred franchise-flogging post-Bratpack empty-headed teen melodrama of Superboy. There were the bewildering reappearances of Alf Garnett and Mind Your Language at a time when their attitudes and comedy could scarcely have been less welcome. There was the notoriously disastrous attempt to reposition Play School as a whizz-bang satire-fuelled knockabout blast of anarchic energy for the under-fives. And then there were those that simply gave a quick spraypaint to an actual existing format.

What's My Line?, Juke Box Jury, Opportunity Knocks, New Faces and The Generation Game would all put in suitably rejigged return appearances around this time, while somebody somewhere decided that having the Royal Family fall into paddling pools in giant inflatable cow costumes would serve as a suitable salute to the legacy of It's A Knockout. More intellectual viewers got to sit back and say 'aaaaaaahhh!' as Late Night Line-Up rebranded itself as The Late Show, while over on Radio 1 Pick Of The Pops would suffer the ultimate pop-picking indignity, relegated from the status of hip and happening up to the minute chart show to one that traded exclusively in music from the past.

Above and beyond that, there were the shows that simply updated a basic idea. For no readily obvious reason, this was particularly prevalent in Children's BBC, from Sylvester McCoy's inter-Doctor Who engagements on What's Your Story?, a show that took the tried and tested 'viewers write in to suggest what happens next' concept and encouraged its audience to think about 'issues' as they did so, and What's That Noise?, a hipped-up jazzed-up take on the introducing-the-band music-can-be-fun approach as favoured by Schools' TV. Notoriously, this eclectic genre-jumping extravanganza could feature anything from Young Flautist Of The Year types to Napalm Death, Then Jerico, and - unforgettably - Craig Charles leading some sub-King's Singers choristers, scat-yodelling jazz vocalist Cleveland Watkiss, and Nathan Moore out of Brother Beyond through what is best described as an idiosyncratic reworking of The Tears Of A Clown. He probably won't appreciate being reminded of the 'rap' he improvised over the intro. Or actually, come to think of it, he probably WILL, as he'll just start using it as a 6Music jingle.

Although it would be best to draw a line under the idea of drawing a line between Craig Charles joining Hue & Cry for a cover of Ordinary Angel and whatever was going on in Doctor Who at that point in time, other areas of the Children's BBC schedules should not be disregarded so lightly. As much as it would pain many fans and their it's-not-a-children's-programme! fumings to admit it, in some ways it's worth viewing the 1987 relaunch of Doctor Who as being more in line with the more acclaimed and successful redevelopment of the traditional sci-fi/fantasy-themed Children's BBC drama serials that also happened around this time. From The Box Of Delights onwards, they had dramatically upped the production values and widened both the sense of ambition and the storytelling scope. It was with Aliens In The Family - broadcast later on during this particular run of Doctor Who - that they really hit their stride, escaping the all-too-familiar BBC Children's Drama trappings to present a new and thoroughly contemporary story that concentrated as much on feuding step-siblings fond of near-the-knuckle language as it did the Wirdegen-dodging Top Shop model-esque stranded alien that they befriended; and which included a contemporary pop culture gag that was both more successful and more funny than anything in any post-2005 Doctor Who episode. In fact, there was a rumour around this time that Paul Stone, the producer who had overseen the bulk of these serials, had been approached to take over as showrunner for Doctor Who. It could all have been so very different. But then again, we probably wouldn't have got Time And The Rani.

Anyway, whatever the fact of the matter was, John Nathan-Turner was inevitably 'persuaded to stay', and we did indeed get Time And The Rani. And although we've spent much too long singing the praises of all of those contemporaneous serials already - if you want to read more about them, then you'll find a massive overview of them in my book Well At Least It's Free, covering everything from The Phoenix And The Carpet to The Watch House with a couple of interesting diversions (and ITV shows) along the way - there are still some parallels worth drawing between the two unlikely Time Screen-friendly extremes. Time And The Rani - and indeed the entire Sylvester McCoy era - is dominated by acting, effects, costumes, music, locations, sets, and if we're being completist about it a videotape format, that attract widespread derision and scorn, and yet are more or less directly equatable to what you will find in those more fondly and fairly remembered serials. The Lakertyans look no less convincing or above ridicule than The Galgonquans. Paula and Narinder's quest to stop Charlie Elkin from recovering his lost 'bins' came punctuated by hefty doses of Keff McCulloch-style sampler mechanics. One or two of the effects in Kay Harker's pre-Christmas escapades looked distinctly ropey compared to those spinning globe traps. Even The Mint Juleps' acapella guiding of Billy towards his errant pawned electric guitar was only a marginally more credible and Red Wedge-conscious variant of the sort of stunt-casting that John Nathan-Turner was regularly foisting on Doctor Who around that point. Yes, people knew who they were back then. They did. Stop arguing.

So what exactly is being suggested here? That Time And The Rani seems acceptable if you pretend that it was something aimed at much younger viewers? Well no, not really. Even aside from the fact that this would be doing an enormous disservice to the Children's Department's concerted efforts to improve and update their entire output in the late eighties, much of which could have held its own against family or adult programming from any genre, it's also more a question of context. Did people, perhaps ridiculously, expect 'more' from Doctor Who than they did from an unexpectedly impressive six-parter about a boy befriending some Restoration-era ghosts (or are they?) that they'd caught by accident? Were they yearning for the dazzling visual depth of Meglos, the bracing good clean fun of The Two Doctors, and the Stoppard-rivalling narrative strength of Four To Doomsday? Probably, knowing Doctor Who fans, but that's by the by.

Much like how Stock, Aitken And Waterman productions are never quite allowed into the 'great pop music' bracket because of mysterious and vigorously-held 'reasons' that nobody ever seems willing or able to elucidate on, so the Sylvester McCoy era of Doctor Who remains stuck outside a locked door while other shows that share both its weaknesses and its strengths - be they Moondial, The Tripods, Star Cops or - yeah, go on, I'm spoiling for a fight here - Press Gang - waltz on merrily through. Even the rebooted Play School probably gets to wedge its foot in the gap, on account of the short-lived Breakfast Time parody 'TTV' having been quite funny. That did, however, lead directly to the inexcusable spinoff series TTV, in which diseased-looking puppet cat Scragtag presided over unfunny bits of filmed insert nothingness while sitting on a bin, so please slam that door on Big Ted's foot with maximum force.

Can we get Time And The Rani through that door though? Never mind giving it a fairer crack of the whip by considering it on the same level as other 'lesser' programmes, is there enough good stuff in it to actually make it work considering in the first place? Well, that's what we'll be getting around to in the next part... probably.

Although Look-In wasn't really in the habit of covering BBC shows, it's fair to say that late eighties Doctor Who would have benefitted from its support. BEEB, the BBC's rival to the self-styled 'Junior TV Times', often felt reserved and esoteric in comparison, and seemingly embarrassed about the idea of actually promoting any of the shows that it covered; so if you've got a spare copy lying around, please feel free to roll it up and whack John Whittingdale and Ian Shazam with it until they get fed up and go away. Look-In, on the other hand, would not just back any horse that happened to be cantering across the ITV regional schedules in a self-defeatingly asynchronous manner, but hire a squadron of those vans with loudspeakers on the top and go around shouting about them until every last driver had been arrested and charged with breach of the peace.

It didn't even matter what percentage of their readership could actually see the shows in question, or even if they were any good or not; maybe the late eighties revival of The Saint stank to high heaven but it still got more than its fair share of double-page features, while despite being banished to post-midnight screenings in most regions, William Tell actually made it onto the cover of one issue. BEEB would never have given post-1987 Doctor Who that kind of unapologetic promotion, although the fact that it had ceased publication in 1985 hardly helped.

Instead, it was left to hapless old Doctor Who Magazine to preach to the converted about the forthcoming new series and new Doctor. Their pre-transmission coverage of Time And The Rani in particular went way overboard, combining the traditional impenetrable and unfunny behind-the-scenes anecdotes - on this occasion something to do with Lit Roundels and Tetraps-On-A-Stick - with a really rather alarming amount of enthusing over the sets; which, as has already been admitted, are one of the genuine weak links in this story. The magazine's 'Autumn Special', which included fascinating features on new techniques in design, video effects and computer-generated title sequences, was held back until Time And The Rani had actually been transmitted in the hope of avoiding lessening the impact of the New Look Doctor Who; an early manifestation of the profound misunderstanding of the concept of 'spoilers' that plagues the show's production team to this day. With entirely the wrong kind of features giving them a totally misleading impression of what to expect from this exciting relaunch, even the programme's staunchest fans were left underwhelmed, and in fairness they can hardly be blamed for their unrealistic expectations on this occasion.

So, if this was Look-In - or BEEB, or Doctor Who Magazine, or Sky, or LM, or Number One, or Crash ZX Spectrum, or that sort of intellectual broadsheet thing for teenagers that just had Robert Elms going aaaaaaaaahhhhhhh about soap operas every week, or that rubbish free comic they used to give away with Rowntree's Striper, or just about anything that you might have pulled off the newsagent's shelves to help pass time during that long wait for a third series of The Tripods - how would we approach it? What is there in and about Time And The Rani that would be worth slapping a photo on a front page over?

Well, perhaps we're approaching this a little too literally here. What about the various multimedia bits and pieces that actually had to have Time And The Rani on the cover, as their literal only selling point? Are there any clues to be found in any of them? Well, not really. The Target Books novelisation of the story, written by Pip And Jane Baker themselves, famously accidentally featured an upside down photo of the Tetraps hanging upside down on the cover. This was quickly corrected, but it would remain forever known as the one with the classic design clanger, which is at least vaguely in keeping with how the story itself is remembered. This is a shame, as it's one of the better covers and indeed one of the brisker and more fun novels, but it's also somehow entirely appropriate and indeed a good metaphor for how the McCoy era itself is viewed.

The subsequent Virgin Books reprint used a bash-it-out-after-tea bit of artwork showing The Rani apparently cowering from The Doctor and Urak arriving on a rainbow, while the BBC Video release opted for similar artwork of the unsmiling heads of the three protagonists set against a dull grey rock facade and a noticeably non-canonically darkened sky, almost as if attempting to reclaim the story in the name of gritty realism. Meanwhile, 1988's The Doctor Who 25th Anniversary Album, which featured two whole full-length tracks from Time And The Rani - peculiar human voice-sample driven pastiche of Indian Devotional Music that was still better than Kula Shaker Future Pleasure, as featured in the scene where a frowning Ikona shows Mel his fellow docile sap Lakertyans in their Centre Of Leisure shortly before they get attacked by that endlessly recycled flying insect effect, and the climactic Rani's-plan-comes-together medlodrama of The Brain, smothered in so many Orchestra Hits that Debbie Gibson's 'Electric Youth' would have been left dejectedly contemplating their alternative career options - didn't see fit to feature any of the characters on the cover.

In fact it didn't see fit to feature any characters atall. Despite being a Keff McCulloch-dominated present-day series soundtrack album in all but name and a handful of old arrangements of the theme music, it was promoted with - what else - the tediously over-eulogised 'Diamond Logo', which hadn't been seen on screen for over eight years by that point, in a procession of utterly non-collectable 'collectable' glittery variants to boot. You would be hard pushed to find a better example of how by then Doctor Who was being sold by people who didn't care to fans who didn't have the faintest idea of how to actually keep it on the air. Sometimes, it was difficult not to sympathise with Starburst's 'Mr. Controversial' Paul Mount.

So we're not doing too well really. Until, that is, you consider the DVD cover. Designed by one Clayton Hickman, it's an unashamed riot of beams of light in varying shades of pink, with four key characters front and centre and actually smiling (well, apart from Ikona), and is less an illustration than an invitation to watch the story. It knows that it's bright and gaudy and light-hearted fun and it just doesn't care, almost as though Ken Kesey And His Merry Pranksters have waded into the middle of a McCoy-bashing forum thread to tell the miserable sods to lighten the fuck up. This is not a paisley-banded-panama-hat-in-hand apology for the story, it's the work of someone who understands and appreciates late eighties Doctor Who for what it is, and woe betide you if you want to sit in the corner frowning. It's a whopping great gauntlet thrown down to the non-fans who will merrily sneer at the McCoy era without ever having seen any of it. And it's exactly how we should be heading into the home straight of any self-respecting defence of Time And The Rani. Time to set up the banjo-dampening soundproofing, pour that Panda Pops Green Cola into the Macallan 55 Single Malt, and get down to business...

Those of you who are familiar with the works of the comedian Richard Herring will probably be aware of Me1 vs. Me2 Snooker, the notorious podcast in which he relentlessly plays against himself on the celebrated Snooker Board of the Shepherd's Bush Dodecahedron. It has been the subject of alarm, derision, and jittery spectating from Smithers The Cat, but still it ploughs on, ceaselessly, with Herring stating consistently that he intends to keep playing until absolutely no-one is left listening.

In a sense, this series of articles about Time And The Rani has become much like Me1 vs. Me2 Snooker; not simply because the declining reader stats and increasing volume of increasingly pleading calls for me to stop with immediate effect are only making me more determined to see it through to the banjo-accompanied conclusion, but because trying to explain to people that you think that Time And The Rani is actually quite good is a bit like trying to explain to them why you find Commentator1 (or occasionally Commentator2) remarking on how a shot jingled and jangled like some topical reference so amusing. The inadvertent running gags, the wilful misunderstanding of non-Self-Playing Snooker terminology and the determination of various third parties to disrupt or even prevent the frames from being played are funny enough, but it's the sheer ridiculous repetition that really gives rise to the humour, a bit like Stewart Lee does, only better.

Yet there's so much understandable pre-judgement, and so much effort required to get into it - not least because the rules state that you have to start at the beginning and listen to each frame in order - that there's really no point trying to forcibly win converts to the cause. And multiply that by nine hundred and fifty three and you've got Time And The Rani.

Well, get your Ready Reckoners ready, because I'm forcibly converting you to this cause, and there's nothing you can do about it. I've already offered extended defences of the opening titles, the theme music, the incidental music, the costume and set design, the production values, the special effects, and pretty much everything else notorious about the story apart from Ikona. Now it's time to look past such surface level elements and tackle the much more problematic question of why I think that Time And The Rani actually works as a story. Apart from Ikona.

Towards the end of Episode One, in amongst all of the stuff that didn't quite work, there's a really rather impressive scene in which Ikona's fellow Lakertyan Faroon ventures into a dingy underground cave. The Tetraps are seen and indeed heard hanging upside down as she pulls a lever, and some authentically gunky looking gunk splurges down a chute for, presumably, their culinary delectation. Whatever this goo is, that's what it's for. There's no real need as such for this scene - it plays absolutely no part in plot advancement whatsoever - but it lends some much-needed depth and atmosphere to an episode otherwise overrun by overlit pratfalls and Beyus doing his 'concerned' face. And, frankly, it's all uphill from there.

In fact, what's most immediately obvious about Episodes Two to Four of Time And The Rani is just how effectively the problems that were all too evident in Episode One are addressed and overcome. Well, most of them. Everything suddenly gets just that bit more confident and energetic, finally catching up with the confident and energetic visuals, and this is largely driven by the efforts of one individual in particular.

Seemingly having got over his initial unease, underpreparedness and overenthusiasm, Sylvester McCoy very quickly settles into the role and gives a more than creditable performance. Not quite as good as he would later get, perhaps, but definitely hurtling towards it at a noticeable pace. His main obstacle continues to be those awful misquoted proverbs - although "it's a lottery, and I've drawn the short plank" is actually quite effective in a presumably unintended sense - but when he gets something slightly weightier to work with, the difference is dramatic. If you want proof of this, have a look at his downcast and introspective - something he always did well - delivery of the really rather arresting line "the more I know me, the less I like me". The fact that this also does in one sentence what they tried and failed to do in two whole years of positing Colin Baker as a more abrasive Doctor should not be overlooked either.

Yet as much as he might ponder on whether "perhaps this is my new persona - sulky, bad tempered", it's the lightness of touch that McCoy brings to the role that really makes a difference after the misfires and meanderings of previous years. It's hard to counter the accusations that he sometimes let the temptation to zany things up get the better of him, but better that than simply shouting everything three times, and in any case, it's not like the previous Doctors weren't without their similar problems. Again, if you want to argue, you'll be wanting to sit through a couple of the less effort-intensive Second and Fourth Doctor stories first. In tandem with this, the physical comedy becomes more restrained and better handled, and there's also a decent quota of much better verbal gags; "Your powers are truly wondrous Mistress Ran-[Click]", "I'll find him without you" - "You can't miss him in that outfit", although needless to say Ikona's "Centre Of Indolence!" snarking doesn't come across quite so well.

Speaking of things that don't come across so well, it's time to finally address the one aspect of Time And The Rani that has been studiously and conspicuously avoided thus far - Bonnie Langford. There's no getting away from the fact that - as Bonnie herself has since good-humouredly conceded - her casting was a gamble that just didn't come off. What the production team were hoping for was a new energy and pace to the onscreen action, and a new influx of curious mainstream viewers who knew her as an all-singing all-dancing force of nature (and if you think that's a bit daft, just think about how many similar figures - including one John Barrowman - have shown up in the revived series). What they got, unfortunately, was an actress unused to limiting her performances for the small screen, and writers, directors and even fellow cast members seemingly unable to work out how to best harness and channel her undeniable remarkable stage presence and sheer upbeat weight of force. It was all downhill from the thoroughly ill-advised moment that Bonnie and Colin Baker were 'introduced' to the press zooming about on panto wires. But it didn't need to be.

While it's true to say that her brash and boisterous approach to the role tended to look a bit much even next to the erstwhile ferret-juggling leading man's less restrained moments, not to mention guest stars like Richard Briers doing their inexcusable "theyyyy buried me awayy"-level scene-ruining, there were also moments, albeit few and far between, where Bonnie Langford actually managed to play it just right. When required to take part in a more downbeat scene, or one in which she's called on to reason with another character, she usually handles it quite well, and there are even occasions on which she manages to play her over-the-top theatrics successfully off against another judiciously caricatured guest star; have a look at the grotesquely chilling scenes with Tabby and Tilda in Paradise Towers if you want evidence of that. With a bit more effort and indeed collaboration from all concerned, and of course an actual proper backstory and some defined characteristics, Mel could actually have worked out as a halfway decent companion, but everyone's immediate concerns were elsewhere and it would have needed a good deal more production time and indeed screen time than was ever available. Not to mention a good deal more goodwill from fans, who were too busy fuming over not being personally consulted about major production decisions and snickering on a loop that Violet Elizabeth would thcweam and thcweam until she was thick because that was the only counterargument that their amusingly blinkered frame of reference would actually allow them to come up with.

On the whole, it has to be admitted that Time And The Rani is not one of these better moments, and the ridiculous ear-assaulting quantity of screaming and yelping gets so much that Ikona actually asks her to 'stop squawking'. In fairness, the script does call for her to match a ludicrously hammy Kate O'Mara's impersonation of her characteristic for characteristic, and she may also have been unconsciously if ill-advisedly over-compensating for her new co-star's nervousness, and for Ikona's general inertness. In equal fairness, there are some scenes in which she gives a decent performance, notably the one in which Faroon learns about Sarn stepping on the spinny globe thing; a scene which it's worth noting also features an impressively and suitably restrained contribution from Keff McCulloch. Overall, however, the exaggerated stagey running and alarmingly expansive smile don't quite sit easily with the show's much-vaunted new direction, and as unfair as it is to do too much finger-pointing in one direction, those shrieky interludes have probably played a large part in securing the reputation that Time And The Rani currently 'enjoys'.

There are, of course, plenty of other decent scenes scattered throughout the story, from that over-enunciated 'Nine-Five-Three!' amusingness, to any in which The Tetraps get to indulge their comical boneheadedness. There are impressive effects that haven't even been touched on yet, not least the amazing scene in which Mel and Ikona act AROUND one of the spinning globes in close-up. There are convincing full-size location sets shot from unusual angles, explanations shorn of technobabble (even if they don't make scientific sense), enjoyable blasts of incidental music, and a priceless moment of viewer exasperation as Ikona pours away the endlessly recycled flying insect effect antidote for absolutely no good reason whatsoever. Even the spoon-playing just about works in context. Just.

In fact, we could keep coming up with more and more similar examples until the number of articles in this series spirals on out into infinity, but you have to draw a line somewhere. Even when it comes to defending Time And The Rani. So in the forthcoming final part, it's time to review the findings and deliver the ultimate pro-Time And The Rani argument. Unless, of course, anyone tweets 'OMG are you still doing this? pls stop', in which case it's straight back onto the Snooker Board and you only have yourselves to blame...

In case you hadn't realised where this terrifyingly overlong series of articles got its name from, it's the final misquoted proverb in the final scene of Time And The Rani. To the accompaniment of one last flourish of banjo, The Doctor and Mel bid a jaunty farewell to the Lakertyans and head into the Tardis on - it has to be said - a rather uncertain note. "You're certainly going to take a bit of getting used to", muses the normally perma-chirpy companion. "Oh I'll grow on you, Mel", replies her newly regenerated fellow traveller. "I'll grow on you".

Whether you like it or not, Sylvester McCoy - and the last couple of series of Doctor Who in general - did grow on people. There were, as has already been pointed out at considerable length, a large number of fans who actually enjoyed it for what it was, without recourse to hair-splitting about the 'legacy' of the Diamond Logo or the 'classic' status of wiped sixties stories they could not possibly have seen. There was a tangible sense that while the BBC 'suits' were most definitely not behind the show, the departments involved with promotion and commercial exploitation and the actual business of what average viewers want to watch very much were. And, for better or for worse, it seemed that the general public at the very least had some idea of who the latest Doctor was and what he looked like; something that hadn't really happened since Peter Davison very first took on the role. And then, of course, 1989 rolled around and Doctor Who wandered off into a hedge muttering something about how the tea's getting cold aye unless it isn't.

After that, this momentum just seemed to evaporate as if it had stepped on a spinning globe thing. Time And The Rani immediately slunk to the very bottom of every Best Story Ever!!!4 poll, with the majority of the other Seventh Doctor stories not far behind. Or ahead. However that works exactly. Even the most battle-hardened McCoy defender would happily admit that fresh converts to the cause have been decidedly thin on the ground. Lengthy and considered ruminations on the strengths of those last couple of series - and this is in no way the lengthiest; I cannot recommend the fantastic Wallowing In Our Own Weltschmerz highly enough - are met with indignant cries of "rubbesh!!" that make that ancient huffing and puffing about 'pantomime embarrassment' seem erudite and original. In short, set out to defend the McCoy era, and you've got an almighty task on your hands.

Around the time that Time And The Rani went out, John Nathan-Turner was fond of responding to harrumphy claims that Doctor Who wasn't as good as it used to be by insisting that 'the memory cheats'. If fans could see all those cherished early stories again now, he implied, they'd find that it had always suffered from budgetary restrictions, waffly scripts, cramped studio space, limited rehearsal time and ropey effects. Back then, with about two and a half stories having been released on video at a cost of roughly eighty seven thousand pounds per tape, this was a fairly safe defence to mount. Within a couple of years, though, this argument would unravel in spectacular fashion as story after story after story came out at an affordable price and fans could judge the extent to which their memories had hoodwinked them for themselves.

In some ways, in absolute fairness, he was right - Doctor Who old and new has always suffered from all of the above and more, with far too many fans far too obsessed with concentrating on an agreed pantheon of 'classics' and 'turkeys' to bother too much about problematic questions like that. Objective and rational analysis was never actually on the agenda, though - the late eighties episodes were being attacked from a perspective of personal preference, and defended from a perspective of personal preference. And those same harrumphing fans - and, let's not forget, the general public, who couldn't care less but they liked it when it was Tom Pertwee and the maggots or something - found that yes, they did prefer those older episodes, Anti-Matter Monster and all.

So no, if taken in that specific sense, the memory had not cheated. But has it 'cheated' in entirely the opposite direction? Has - and you'll need to take a deep breath before reading this sentence - the story that they were most determined to delineate their preference for older Doctor Who against now itself come to be negatively defined by that exact same nostalgic process? Or, in short, do people now - whether through a misguided sense of nostalgia or simply a popular perception that they have subsequently picked up on - enjoy hating Time And The Rani more than they do actually having to have an actual opinion on it? Well, gauging that would require large numbers of fans to actually watch it again, which most of them seem curiously reluctant to do. And given how many of them will tell you without being asked that they 'stopped watching' after the first episode, it's questionable how many of them have actually seen enough of it to make a proper judgement in the first place.

In his excellent KLF biography Chaos, Magic And The Band Who Burned A Million Pounds, John Higgs spends a good deal of time discussing Doctor Who. Not simply because the band scored a number one hit with a House Music-styled cover of the theme tune - itself much more of an act of artistic subversion than the 'novelty hit' it gets tediously written off as - but because of its strange correlation with The KLF's own story. Approaching it from the perspective of Alan Moore's intriguing theory about the 'Idea Space', he focuses in on the moment when a once-loved television show falling from favour landed right in the path of two musical pranksters looking for a reference point to prove their theory that treasured pop culture references welded to familiar riffs and modish musical trappings could bag you a chart-topping single. This was the point, argues Higgs at far greater length and with far greater detail than it might appear here, when the slow reversal of Doctor Who's fortunes began; from the moment Gareth Roberts reached for the lemon disinfectant, through the brief but pivotal interlude when the future of the show was actually in the hands of a handful of fans with genuine talent and imagination, through the crossbar-hitting mid-nineties revival (which, lest we forget, featured Sylvester McCoy for a whole quarter of its running time), on into the general public finally starting to look back on it with affection and interest, and right up to its triumphant ratings-conquering return. It was a long and gradual increment, and one that this book argues starts right with the 1987 production team's flawed but defiant refusal to bow out quietly. You might not quite agree with this, of course, but it's worth pondering on the next time that Davina McCall and Pappy's Fun Club snicker at The Kandyman on some dribbling clip show.

You probably won't be too surprised to hear, however, that I do largely agree with it. And here's why. Paul Cornell once described Doctor Who in the late eighties as a 'bullied' programme, and in amongst the acres and acres of reams of nonsense that have been written about 'black-clad' villains and 'bohemian' lead actors, there's seldom been a truer or more perceptive word spoken. Doctor Who spent the final years of its original incarnation dodging a hail of metaphorical and possibly even literal dustbins, attracting more and more sustained abuse than such actual deserving targets as Benefits Street, Days Like These or Adrian Mole - The Cappuccino Years as even its own fans seemed bafflingly determined to drive it into the ground. Even that rancid late eighties revival of The Saint somehow got off lightly in comparison.

But note the use of the word 'dodged'. Like or hate what they did with the programme, the production team were not prepared to go without a fight, and they put up a good one against so many batterings from so many directions; as indeed did the fans who actually did like what they did with it. Maybe it didn't always quite hit the mark, but without that small but substantial display of defiance there might have been no fan-driven attempts at official continuations of the series in other media, and given that one of these fans was a certain Russell T. Davies - who included plenty of stylistic nods to the McCoy era in his own interpretation of Doctor Who (as I wrote about at some length in my book Well At Least It's Free) - you can pretty much finish that line of thought yourself. Also I think Time And The Rani is quite good. You might not have picked up on that.

Right at the end of that closing scene, as Keff McCulloch weighs in with a deliberately jarring and ponderous chord change, Sylvester McCoy leans back out through the Tardis door and doffs his hat to the Lakertyans, sporting a confident and mischevious grin that is pretty much the polar opposite of the nervous and knowingly sarcastic smile to camera that had ended his first official appearance as 'The Doctor'. He'd arrived, and it certainly gave a good feeling to at least one viewer who just wouldn't get on board with this idea that you weren't 'supposed' to like Doctor Who any more. And sometimes this kind of brash, upbeat confidence is all you want from a television show. Not drama, not menace, not 'emotion', not slick sophistication, just a good-natured ending to a good-natured bit of unashamedly cheap and cheerful in-your-face entertainment with boisterous acting, restraint-free music, and ridiculously over-the-top colours. Even if you were watching on the black and white portable.

George Martin. Joe Meek. The BBC Radiophonic Workshop. Nowadays you'll find cheerleaders for just about every once-overlooked Brit-based sonic pioneer of the pre-Rubber Soul era, and rightly so. Even Freddie Phillips and his Trumptonshire-traversing hammer-ons, though in fairness you'll probably actually have to read something written by me to find that.

But who's singing - doubtless with over-elaborate vocal extemporisation - the praises of Johnny Dankworth and Cleo Laine? Well, given that the general public's entire image of them seems to be based on The Two Ronnies impersonating them every single week with jokes seemingly based on two other performers altogether, probably very few people. So it's time to put a stop to that nonsense. Before they settled comfortably and deservedly into middle-bit-of-Pebble-Mill-At-One ubiquity, Johnny and Cleo were amongst the first to mess around with concept albums, global rhythms, pre-synthesiser electronic keyboards, sound effects, multimedia, reverb, spoken word comedy bits and much more besides, most of it in glorious mono to boot. So join me as we take a stroll through some of the highlights of their jaw-droppingly prolific early output, all of which is almost as exciting as The Exciting Mr. Fitch himself...

Experiments With Mice (1956)

One of George Martin's first productions, as Johnny reads out his absurdist Beat Poetry reworking of the saga of the Three Blind Mice, relocated to a recording studio and zigzagging in and out of different Modern and Trad Jazz styles as they try to avoid being assailed by a 'cat'. Packed with sound-effects and verbal and musical in-jokes, and it's not hard to see how George got from here to being so creatively efficient in the studio with those Beatle Boys. Back in the days when putting together a good 7" single was an infinitely bigger deal than even thinking about releasing an album, this climbed to Number Seven. Stitch that, 'Murs'.

Soundtrack Music From 'The Criminal' (1960)

A no-holds-barred look at prison life starring Stanley Baker as an inveterate pilferer with a penchant for racecourse cash boxes should usually call for frenetic Crime Jazz, and that's exactly what we get here with the likes of the swaggering Riverside Stomp and the alarmingly haphazard Freedom Walk. Those in search of the full experience will also be wanting Cleo's moody theme song Thieving Boy, with remorse-lust lyrics co-penned by none other than Alun Owen, which was released as a standalone single backed by Let's Slip Away, her more wistful and optimistic curtain-raiser for the same year's big-screen version of Saturday Night And Sunday Morning. It's also worth noting that this soundtrack dates from Dudley Moore's brief spell with the Johnny Dankworth Big Band, which doubtless proved a source of great amusement to Peter Cook.

African Waltz (1961)

The EP of the Big Pop Hit, featuring not just the shrill 3/4 foot-twisting top ten smash title track, but also percussion-hefty Mod dancefloor filler Chano, swaggering Soul Jazz slow-groover Moanin', and the original version of the original theme tune from Honor Blackman era The Avengers. Although it's hardly on the same level as Laurie Johnson's subsequent more celebrated Steed-accompaniment (though, to be fair, few TV themes actually are), only the most blinkeredly cloth-eared of Popular Beat Music-averse Archive TV obsessives could realistically deride it as a load of old rubbish. And unfortunately, there are a lot of them out there. Still, some decidedly more funky types clearly thought it was something approaching lost fabness...

What The Dickens! (1963)

With the aid of an all-star horn-honkin' line-up including Tubby Hayes and Ronnie Scott, Johnny takes an impressionistic instrumental trip through the collected works of Charles Dickens, improvising across the pages of The Pickwick Papers, The Old Curiosity Shop, Nicholas Nickleby, Oliver Twist, A Christmas Carol and David Copperfield, though sadly there was no accompanying EP based on Sketches By Boz. Inspired by the 'feel' of the source novels, it's like the soundtrack to some sadly non-existent Swinging Sixties-era Dickens biopic, with highlights including catchy street-saunter Little Nell, and Pickwick Club, which is so warm and quirky that you can just imagine Tupman and Snodgrass taking their boots off in front of a roaring fire with hilarious social faux pas consequences. It's probably more useful than the average A-Level Study Guide too.

Shakespeare And All That Jazz (1964)

Not to be outdone, Cleo also turned her hand to the exciting new world of Literary-Jazz crossover, and came up with an entire album's worth of adaptations of Iambic Pentameter into Iam-bee-ba-ba-doo-bah-be-dah-dic Penta-mah-da-doo-da-de-dam-eter. The Bard may only have been the fifth greatest wordsmith of history (after Dickens, Douglas Adams, PG Wodehouse and Richard 'Skinhead Escapes' Allen), but this is every bit a worthy companion piece to What The Dickens!, with highlights including the surprisingly riqsue (well, by 1964 standards) It Was A Lover And Her Lass, Scottish Play-summarising breathy Jazz Cellar epic Dunsinane Blues, and the suitably chilly Blow, Blow Thou Winter Wind. Much beloved of English teachers desperate to prove to their charges that they were still 'with it'.

Beefeaters (1964)

Originally composed and recorded as the theme for long-forgotten ITV X Factor template Search For A Star, a talent show that reportedly discovered future Doctor Who companion Wendy Padbury, this wild jazz stomper was later picked up as theme music by a certain Pirate Radio DJ, and - with the judicious addition of 'barks' from Arnold The Dog - subsequently became, as over-literal hern-ing bores will never tire of pointing out to you, technically the actual first record heard on Radio 1. Which makes it something of a weird coincidence that the not-that-dissimilar b-side was entitled Down A Tone.

Sands Of The Kalahari (1965)

Only two tracks were released from the soundtrack to cinema's most edge-of-the-seat baboon-plagued desert trek, but what tracks they were. The massive-sounding yet inappropriately jaunty title theme waltz is pretty much the musical embodiment of a time when British Cinema could do no wrong, while the moodier and more reflective flip Night Thoughts showed up in a key scene but was perhaps still, erm, a little too jaunty for the on-screen action. You'll find the movie itself on Film4 every couple of minutes, but unfortunately there's still no sign of a release for the full score.

Little Boat (1965)

More 45-only action (though the a-side later appeared on the fabulously 'Pipe Down, Blokes'-themed album Woman Talk, which you can see the fantastic cover of below); Cleo's chart-scraping translation of Bossa Nova favourite O Barquinho is fab enough, but it's the b-side you should really look out for, with its percussion-rattling piano-smashing ode to the charms of some heart-fluttering cocktail-swilling ski-jumping Jeff Winger-esque aesthete who apparently has his own personal brass band to fanfare his entrance, but not any tangible hint of a first name. All in all, not altogether surprising that this didn't make it to the album...

The Zodiac Variations (1965)

While Cleo was musing on gender-politic rumblings, Johnny got a bit cosmic with this set of twelve impressionistic Late Night BBC2-friendly instrumentals based on the purported characteristics of the dozen chronological subdivisions of everyone's favourite dupe-fleecing hokum. From his musical findings, we can deduce that while Librans like to chill out with a hefty book and a good strong coffee, Aquarians are rather more fond of doing a dance in front of a mirror with a glittery top hat and cane. Though I would say that, being a Taurus. TV's Catweazle will mayhap be pleased to hear that this rotating plastic demon also includes a 'thirteenth' star sign sign in the form of ecliptic-straddling medley Way With The Stars.

The Idol (1966)

We're heading into the sadly all-too-brief Golden Age of Dankworth/Laine film soundtracks now, with this obscure number starring Michael Parks as a pranksterism-friendly hip'n'happenin' art student with a 'thing' for whatever they called MILFs in 'old money', and John Leyton as a disapproving best friend/son. Not quite the lost classic that it might sound, if we're being honest about it, but the frug-tastic party scene-friendly musical contributions deserve a bit more exposure than the film itself.

Modesty Blaise (1966)

She'll turn your head, though she might use a judo hold! One of cinema's most glorious psychedelic messes scorches the projector when Monica Vitti puts in an impenetrably-accented turn as the pulp paperback spy as she shags, hallucinates and assassinates her way across Europe, in pursuit of some stolen diamonds that haven't actually been stolen yet. Nosebleed-inducing pop-art mayhem with a soundtrack to match, from the ridiculously camp and overblown title song featuring the vocal talents of long-forgotten pop hopefuls David And Jonathan, to the overdriven wasp-trapped-in-Farfisa thrills of The Willie Waltz. The sort of film that can nowadays get you No-Platformed for liking it, though in mitigation the b-side of the single version of the main theme features the more politically acceptable strains of the swaggering vibe-heavy blare that introduced The Frost Report, the perfect accompaniment to David Frost holding up a microphone to a Keep Left sign and doing a 'sceptical' face.

Fathom (1967)

And if you weren't quite tutting enough yet, get a load of Raquel Welch as a military skydiver in an impressively cantilevered lime green bikini, trying to recover a stolen nuclear detonator whilst dodging a bull intent on stealing her bra, and Richard Briers occasionally saying some lines in the background. This all a tad more subdued, sultry and samba-tinged than the walloping Modesty Blaise score, but somehow you get the impression that the music wasn't really one of the most prominent points here.

The $1,000,000 Collection (1967)

It wasn't just pop that went a bit psychedelic over the summer of 1967, and here Johnny treats us to a series of Prog Jazz-anticipating 'sound paintings' inspired by his favourite pieces of pricey modern art. It's a strangely under-acknowledged fact that the UK Jazz community were the most enthusiastic and profligate patrons of the pop artists, op artists and photorealists, and Johnny and Cleo actually owned Derrick Greaves'Two Piece Flower, as seen on the album's cover and sketched out here in a catchy experiment with plucked strings. Also well worthy of their purported price tag are the kaleidoscopic sleighbell-underpinned frost-on-the-windows salute to Thomas Kinkade's greetings card-esque Winter Scene, and a Late Night Line-Up-evoking beatnik jive rumination on Modigliani's Little Girl In Blue, which is certainly more cheerful than her miseryguts expression should warrant.

Off Duty! (1969)

The Prog Jazz leanings continue with an album of covers of recent genre favourites including Charlie Barnett's Skyliner and Gerry Mulligan's Bernie's Tune, alongside an alarming reworking of African Waltz and the blaring Dankworth-composed American sitcom theme-esque mini-suite title track. Also on board is a seriously funky reworking of Holloway House, an early effort from little-known piano-pounding jazz trio leader Laurie Holloway, later to furnish many an ITV Saturday Night Light Entertainment show with a near-identical theme boasting the exact same eight-note ending as each other.

Portrait (1971)

Cleo treats us to interpretations of a handful of her recent soul and jazz favourites, amongst them a soaring rampage through Aquarius, a peculiar bit of architectural satire on Model Cities Programme, a reworking of Bossa Palma Nova from the Fathom soundtrack, and best of all, a rip-roaring blast through Northern Soul stomper Night Owl. Snorted at by purists, apparently, presumably while spinning round and not having much imagination.

Lifeline (1973)

We're now in proper full-on Test Card Funk territory as wah-wah guitars and slap bass wallop their way across the stereo mix, and the entire second side taken up with some sort of suprious Journey To The Shopping Centre Of The Earth-style musical narrative, which is really just an excuse to indulge in some seriously heavy extended grooves. Meanwhile, over on the first side you'll find Johnny's legendary theme for Tomorrow's World, a tune so aware of its own brilliance that it takes an entire three opening fanfares and a Hammond Organ voluntary before it sees fit to properly get going. Also worthy of note is the accompanying non-LP single Bitter Lemons, featuring a wonky Sly Stone-inspired groove underpinning some abrasive trumpet that appears to be being played underwater.

Movies 'N Me (1974)

An updated re-recorded rifle through Johnny's soundtrack back catalogue, taking in extracts from deleriously obscure sixties Brit Movies like Darling, The Servant, Return From The Ashes and more, including the first ever outing for his main title for controversial gorilla suit-facilitated mental breakdown comedy Morgan: A Suitable Case For Treatment, sadly still not available in its original form (though the contemporaneous cover by Manfred Mann's Mike Vickers is well worth checking out). The break-festooned whipped-up-tempo take on Modesty Blaise was later sampled by Gorillaz, but the real highlight is Look Stranger, his inappropriately funky theme for BBC2's long series of grainy ruralist-pluralist documentary films about beardy blokes in coastal towns lamenting how they don't make them new-fangled fishing nets like they used to or something. Who'd have thought it? For a similar discrepancy between theme music and on-screen action, see Telford's Change, released as a single by BBC Records And Tapes around this time (and also covered in Top Of The Box!).

MISSING IN ACTION...

Johnny's utterly bonkers theme from early seventies ITV children's show The Enchanted House, a maddeningly catchy yet disconcertingly topsy-turvy tune welded to a wall of tuned percussion. You can read more about The Enchanted House in my book Not On Your Telly, but the show itself hasn't been seen anywhere since the early eighties, and even the trebly recording of the theme that was on YouTube seems to have disappeared now...

In between the second series of Doctor Who and its baffling obsession with ants, and the third series with its deployment of 'Mods' in all the wrong places, The Doctor and company made a slight detour onto the big screen. Or, to be more accurate, The Daleks did.

Although 'Dr. Who', Ian, Susan and Barbara (or, if raining, 'Louise') did nominally occupy the lead roles, recast and in canon-confounding slightly rewritten incarnations to boot, they took a back seat to The Daleks when it came to promotion. This was, after all, the height of 'Dalekmania', and Amicus Productions head honcho Milton Subotsky probably wasn't exactly thinking of the thrills and spills of The Sensorites when he snapped up the movie rights to Doctor Who.

'From the B.B.C. TV Serial by Terry Nation' - the cause of a million glib misattributions in 'sci-fi fantasy movie guides' written by clueless Americans - Dr. Who & The Daleks and Daleks - Invasion Earth: 2150 A.D. have traditionally been written off by fans as somewhere between an of-their-time curio and an embarrassing cash-in. Well, enough of that nonsense. The Dalek Films are brash, loud, colourful, action-packed, and more deserving of the average Doctor Who fan's attention than a good deal of Doctor Who itself. If your primary concern is where they fit into 'canon', then you should probably just fire yourself out of one.

That doesn't necessarily mean that everything about them was quite so spectacular, though...

They Could Have Spent A Bit More On The Opening Titles

It's scarcely worth pointing this out, but the big-screen Dalek adaptations had a great deal more money, bigger and better sets, more spectacular effects, and more colour in general to play with than their small-screen counterparts. Though you really, really wouldn't know this from their opening titles. Underneath a credit font that might as well just say 'HOORAY FOR BRITISH FILMS' over and over again, the first movie merely relies on a couple of blurry sweet wrapper-esque coloured lights pitched somewhere between the burbly mind transference effects in superlative cheapo Brit sci-fi-horror The Sorcerers and the end credits of decidedly non-superlative cheapo make-learning-fun imported animation The Wonderful Stories Of Professor Kitzel. The second, if anything, looks even worse, simply relying on a procession of slow moving vaguely tinted whirlpool-stroke-plughole effects that might actually literally be footage of paint drying. Meanwhile, the small-screen Doctor Who opening titles of the time were famously visually arresting, and had been made for virtually no money whatsoever. In fairness, the massive orchestral themes playing out over the inexcusably dull titles are somewhat on the thrilling side, but on the other hand...

What Was Going On With Those Soundtrack Singles?

Nowadays, thanks to the sterling efforts of Mark Ayres and Silva Screen, we can enjoy the splendid soundtracks to both Dalek movies in full. Back when the films were first released, though, all that music-crazed moviegoers had to remind them of the Skaro-friendly score were a handful of tie-in singles. And what peculiar tie-in singles they were. Possibly 'inspired' by John Barry's bongo-tastic break-festooned A Man Alone, Part 2 from The Ipcress File, composer Malcolm Lockyer sped up the main title theme and the Thal Ambush bit of Dr. Who & The Daleks into beat-crazy guitar'n'brass instrumental stompers, under the misleadingly sedate titles of The Eccentric Dr. Who and Daleks And Thals respectively. Less explicably still, Daleks - Invasion Earth: 2150 A.D. soundtrack-provider Bill McGuffie took the Bach-inspired piano hammering from the Cribbins-outwitted-by-jewel-thieves opening scene and fashioned it into a decidedly chart-unfriendly spot of classical/free jazz crossover called Fugue For Thought. As an impulse buy in the foyer they must have fitted the bill, but as straightforward Hit Parade contenders - which, let's be honest about it, most singles released back then very much were - they made little sense at all. However, both of these pale into rationality next to the in-character single released by Big Screen Susan Roberta Tovey. Recorded under the musical direction of Malcolm Lockyer, the Movie Doctor-eulogising a-side Who's Who? is bad enough, with its unfortunate combination of a perfectly acceptable sixties throwaway pop melody and arrangement with cloying and debatable vocal talents and peculiar lyrics about how The Doctor is "quite at home on a big spaceship/or sitting on top of a horse". Meanwhile the b-side Not So Old was doubtless written and recorded in all innocence back then, but nowadays an adolescent girl asking a fully grown man to 'wait' for her on the proviso that he doesn't tell her mother just sounds downright wrong. A pity, because it's actually not a bad tune at all. Incidentally, if you want to know more about the little-known radio spinoff from the movie, there's a huge feature on it my book Not On Your Telly. But while we're on a certain subject...

Roberta Tovey Is Actually Quite Good

If you read pretty much any article ever written about the Dalek films, whether favourable or not, you'll come away with the distinct impression that their most substantial problem is Roberta Tovey. Repositioned as a Top Juniors smartypants rather than an enigmatic otherworldly teenybopper, Movie Susan, so the literal armchair critics would have us believe, spoils everything with her shrill stage-school performance and precocious mannerisms. From this we can only deduce - as is so often the case - that they have no frame of reference outside of Doctor Who. It was pretty much an unwritten law that any British Film of the era had to have at least one chirpy, polite and adventure-happy child character hovering around the eleven-years-old mark - it wasn't as though TV Susan Carole Ann Ford hadn't occupied that role a couple of times herself, in fact - and as they tend to go, Roberta Tovey is a lot more restrained, likeable, expressive, and capable of delivering dialogue in a manner that suggests she may even have read something aloud at some point in the past. Alright, so she's hardly exactly operating on a Whistle Down The Wind level, but nor is she worthy of swelling the cast of Our Mother's House either. And while we're taking down the main points of scoffing-fuelled attack on the movies...

The Dalek Smoke Guns Are Also Actually Quite Good

Whether the original plan for them to be armed with flamethrowers was vetoed on health and safety grounds, or because it would risk terrifying the juvenile audience (which seems a bit incongruous given that the TV Daleks were OP-ER-A-TING-PYRO-FLAMES left, right and centre), the Movie Daleks ended up spraying Peter Cushing and company with huge blasts of exterminating steam courtesy of their controversial 'fire extinguisher' attachment. Conventional fan wisdom would have you believe that this was a cheap and nasty compromise, which looked little short of embarrassing next to the simple but effective negative image gambit deployed on the small screen. Once again, if you consider the movies in their proper context as standalone sixties British Films, as opposed to charging at them with your Doctor Who gloves on and waving a copy of The Unfolding Text, it all starts to seem a lot more favourable. Cinema audiences needed a big sound and a very visible effect to go with it, and the skilful direction actually gives the off-the-cuff replacement for a familiar effect the illusion of a dangerous weapon. They may fire vapour rather than concentrated light as a needs must measure, but it actually adds a distinct atmosphere to the bigger, bolder and brighter Dalek films. Of course, though, not everything seen in the films was quite so different from their television counterparts...

They Like Big Butts And They Cannot Lie - Now On The Big Screen In Colour!

We've already looked at how, presumably courtesy of cameramen angling to hook themselves a gig on Top Of The Pops, mid-late sixties Doctor Who had a disconcerting habit of zooming in on female cast members with sizeable backsides. And rest assured that there is plenty more - and plenty worse - to come. Needless to say, the films did not let the side down in this, erm, area, notably with poor old Film Barbara Jennie Linden being forced to squeeze herself into a circulation-threateningly tight pair of pink trousers, and directed to continually thrust her arse in the direction of the all-too-eager cameramen, almost as if it had been specified in the script. Not to be outdone, her Daleks - Invasion Earth: 2150 A.D. replacement Jill Curzon opted to capitalise on her new-found fame by stripping down to her bra and pants and draping herself all over a Dalek in a somewhat racy-for-the-time photo session. Terry Nation's thoughts on this blatant misuse of his creations are sadly unrecorded.

And, funnily enough, that's not the only dubious production detail of the television version to find its way into the films...

The Stock Footage Invariably Looks Awful

Alright, this is a bit of a misleading heading, as there's only really one piece of stock footage between the two movies. But what a glorious mismatch of film stock it is. Right at the end of the first film, Ian opens the Tardis door onto an off-screen adventure that will probably have 'canon' obsessed fans... well, they never are going to give up and go home, are they? Anyway, he opens the door onto bought-in film of advancing Roman Centurions, apparently giant-sized and abiding by an entirely different colour spectrum, who march straight through the Tardis exterior without even drawing breath. It's a fun way to end the on-screen action, but even to audiences back then it must have looked every bit as jarring as every last second of muddy and battered film of clouds that they could get to see in black and white and for free at home. And although it's not quite the same thing, a special mention here for the sore thumb-like use of toy Daleks in the second movie's climactic explosions.

In case you hadn't worked out from the above, Movie Ian is a lot less rational and practical and a lot more comical than his small-screen counterpart, and sometimes they take that a bit too far...

What Box Of Chocolates Ever Made A Noise Like That?

During Ian's zanily clumsy on-screen introduction, there's a scene in which Roy Castle is called upon to accidentally sit down on the box of chocolates he had brought as a gift for Barbara, while Dr. Who and Susan look on in bemused despair. There's nothing wrong with this scene in itself, not least because it's played with decent comic timing from all concerned, but the real issue is with the sound effect used to denote the chocolates being crushed; a loud splintery crash. This is all the more ill-fitting given that the assembled company have only just made a bewilderingly big deal of the fact that they are in fact SOFT centres ('Barbara's Favourite', apparently). Unless Terry's were planning to introduce their hastily-cancelled Balsa Wood Assortment as a tie-in with the film, we'll just have to chalk this up to the exuberance of sixties filmmaking. Speaking of which, despite what the others keep saying, it's not actually Ian's fault that the Tardis accidentally takes off and ends on Skaro - he's knocked over by an over-affectionate Barbara, who keeps conveniently quiet once blame starts being apportioned. And while we're on the subject of things being broken by Ian...

The Other 'Monsters' Look Rubbish Compared To Their TV Versions

In-house BBC staff designer Ray Cusick may have infamously lost out on his chance to share in the Dalekmania Millions due to tedious contractual reasons, but he was clearly able to prevent Subotksy and company from using certain other of his designs. How else would you explain the fact that The Magnedon, the creepy, spindly fossilised metal reptile that the Tardis crew find on first venturing out into the petrified forest, here becomes a sort of multicoloured dog with a ruff on. Or that the creature in the Lake Of Mutations - never exactly the best realised of alien menaces in the first place - is barely even visible at all. Still, what can you expect when the planet's dominant life form simply pops down to their local Habitat for their hi-tech scientific equipment...

Why Do The Daleks Have So Many Lava Lamps?

On the whole, the Dalek city and flying saucer sets in the two films are pretty impressive. The eye-cameras mounted on the walls look sinister and oppressive, the automatic doors open and close convincingly (even if Ian does decide to mount a low-budget recreation of the video for Glory Of Love with them for some reason), and even the signs saying 'WASTE DISPOSAL' make sense if you interpret them as being there for the benefit of the Robomen. The only jarring note is that the Dalek labs are positively groaning under the weight of Lava Lamps. And not incorporated into the design either, just free-standing on any available bare-looking surface. Given that Lava Lamps had been commercially available for over two years by that point, they can't even be explained away as having been 'new' at the time, and frankly it just smacks of cheapness in an impressively expensive-looking franchise. Then again, The Daleks did appear to be using those static lightning plasma globes as a key piece of equipment in 1988's Remembrance Of The Daleks, so novelty ornament gadgets were clearly of enormous technological importance to them. Don't be surprised if when The Power Of The Daleks finally turns up, there's a scene featuring them playing with those spidery octopus things that rolled down windows.

There's Never A Postmodern Policeman Around When You Need One

Mention Daleks, the mid-sixties and the so-called 'fourth wall' to the average Doctor Who fan, and chances are that the first thing they think of will be William Hartnell's bafflingly contentious toast to the viewers at home on Christmas Day 1965. A more alarming and incongruous travel in hyperreality occurs, however, immediately prior to the opening titles of Daleks - Invasion Earth: 2150 A.D.. Keen to report the 'smash and grab' to the local bobby, a cheerful down-to-earth honest-to-goodness-guvnor geezer in a flat cap and mac hurls himself bodily at the nearest Police Box, only to find himself falling right through the dematerialising Tardis. Apparently used to this sort of thing happening, he turns to the camera and looks straight at the audience with a shrug and a comically exasperated expression. Quite where that now places the films in accepted Doctor Who'canon' is anyone's guess...

...but next time, we're back to the series itself, so join us then for a 'Galaxy Accident', a Twitter War with @maaga_, and Dodo swapping fashion tips with Roy Wood...

You don't really tend to get very many people talking about archive BBC radio sci-fi. In fairness, that's probably because there's never really been that much of it to talk about.

Well, in fairness, there's been quite a lot of it, just very little that is actually widely known about. Leaving aside the possibly unresolvable question of whether The Hitch-Hiker's Guide To The Galaxy counts as 'sci-fi drama' or not, there are indeed a couple of well-remembered and widely-loved examples; the original atom age Light Programme cliffhanging serial Journey Into Space, Radio 4's lengthy post-microchip 'intelligent sci-fi' cult favourite Earthsearch, and the same station's superlative adaptations of The Hobbit and The Lord Of The Rings (the former, incidentally, almost shorter in its entirety than the first part of Peter Jackson's bloated big-screen reading).

Beyond these there are a handful of shows with minor but significant appeal to fans of other genre favourites; Nigel Kneale's largely forgotten nineties postscript The Quatermass Memoirs, serials and plays by Doctor Who writers including Victor Pemberton's The Slide and Robert Holmes'Aliens In The Mind, and a late sixties version of The War Of The Worlds with music from the BBC Radiophonic Workshop's David Cain. And beyond these, there are hundreds if not thousands that came and went and thrilled a few million listeners before being almost completely forgotten.

Broadcast once by the Light Programme late in 1959, Orbiter X was a relatively straight-laced serial inspired by recent scientific developments in the 'space race', which was then at its most intense and confrontational. Running to fourteen episodes on Monday evenings between 28th September and 28th December, the storyline was based very closely on theoretical plans for an orbiting 'refuelling station' that would enable rockets to travel deeper into space than was then physically possible. However, this wasn't the only topical aspect to the serial; while it was carefully and diplomatically disguised with less contentious character and place names, there was a definite tinge of Cold War paranoia in the unfolding storyline.

You would be forgiven for expecting the action to take place on board Orbiter X itself, but at the start of the series it hasn't even been built yet. A rocket carrying a team of experts who were due to supervise the construction process has gone missing, prompting Captain Britton and his assistants - more inquisitive than intrepid - to set off on a rescue mission. On arriving at the station's intended location, they are greeted by an unidentified spacecraft, and discover that they've been led into a trap; someone - who may or may not be from Earth - has plans for Orbiter X that go way beyond doling out a bit of additional rocket fuel. Brilliantly, the audience must have been as surprised by this as the characters were; the sizeable Radio Times article that accompanied the first episode cunningly only suggested that the series would examine the emotional and technological impact of working in a vacuum.

Produced by Charles Maxwell, a name more normally associated with radio comedy (most notably commissioning the phenomenally popular sketch show I'm Sorry I'll Read That Again), Orbiter X was written by prolific radio dramatist B.D. Chapman. Previously a lead writer on Dick Barton - Special Agent, Chapman had deliberately devised the serial to appeal to a family audience rather than just flying saucer-obsessed youngsters, and saw the scientific plausibility and topical concerns as key to achieving this; indeed, Chapman only half-jokingly told Radio Times that he was concerned some aspects might be overtaken by reality ahead of transmission. Hammer Films and ITC regular John Carson headed the cast as Captain Britton, with Barrie Gosney and Andrew Crawford as his assistants Flight Engineer Hicks and Captain McLelland; reportedly, the three wore makeshift space helmets during recording to get an authentic sense of change in breathing for scenes where they were required to put them on or take them off. This attention to sonic detail was shared by sound effects designer Harry Morriss, who created a set of around forty effects that could be combined in different ways to lend the serial a touch of variance across its lengthy run.

Orbiter X was apparently never repeated, and was also apparently wiped shortly after its lone transmission. Following that, the series was all but forgotten about, and until recently the only mention of it on the entire Internet was on a general fifties nostalgia site. At some point, a set of BBC Transcription Services discs of the entire series were discovered at BBC Enterprises; putting it in very simple terms, these were essentially vinyl records of BBC radio shows made for sale to overseas broadcasters. Often these would have material removed or re-recorded to avoid confusing or offending overseas listeners, and a small amount edited out to allow broadcasters to fit in commercial breaks, so these recordings may not quite be what audiences thrilled to back in 1959, but the fact that they survived is remarkable enough frankly. Now they've been literally dusted down by Radio 4Extra, and have proved to be a more compelling listen than perhaps anyone was reasonably expecting.

Far from being a creaky relic weighed down by overly polite voices and laughable 'futuristic' elements, Orbiter X is a taut and believable thriller, and enough time and technology have elapsed for its quaint sounds and equally quaint theories to blast off into their own esoteric solar system. True, given that it was made not just with a different audience but with an entire different way of enjoying radio in mind, it isn't exactly what you would call an easy background listen. But it's one that rewards the small amount of additional effort and attention required tenfold, and if you blast it out from a tiny phone or tablet speaker, you can even get some sense of what it might have sounded like issuing from the 'radiogram' back in the days before Yuri Gagarin had even lifted one foot off the ground.

Orbiter X is hugely enjoyable proof that there's always something new - and good - to find hidden away in the radio and TV listings of the past, and let's hope there's more to come. Meanwhile, you may well have noticed, there aren't any radio stations devoted to revisiting the vast archive of sci-fi - or drama, comedy, documentary, soap opera, live sessions or whatever else you might care to mention - from commercial radio. Funny, that.

We asked for your suggestions for the Most Nostalgic Things EVER! And you sent them in. In their hundreds. And with no discernible way of turning any of them into anything resembling a chart, or a ranking, or even a pop-up ad festooned list of Eight Retro Things So Retro That They Will Make Your Mind Sort Of Short Circuit And Fall Over While Singing Beagle 2 By Blur!!4.

In desperation, the nominations - all eight hundred and forty seven of them - were fed into our Nostalgia Supercomputer, The Commodore BoglinTM. Which duly printed out a bewilderingly-ranked list that was full of repetition and contradiction, but is now officially the official list of the 350 Most Nostalgic Things EVER! No arguments. Start a 'you haev to have been born in the eightys to remember pac man' zany viral email attachment thingy if you're that bothered about it.

And, like some crazy edition of I Love Some Unidentifiable All-Encompassing Year Somewhere In Either The Seventies Or The Eighties Or Even The Nineties But Nobody's Quite Sure , we're going to be going through the whole lot of them, all the way from 350 to 1. Doubtless with a good deal of shouting, swearing, and general harrumphing about the lack of representation of Captain Zep - Space Detective along the way. So, getting straight on with it...

350. The Brown And Orange WH Smith Logo

Now that it's evolved into little more than a huge magazine rack with some oversized bars of chocolate at the end, it's strange to think that WH Smith was once one of the big draw go-to shops on the high street, regardless of whether you were headed there to stock up on all your Book/Magazine/Newspaper/Music/Computer Game/Pen/Pencil/Ring Binder Page Reinforcer Stickers That Nobody Ever Used needs, or just to wait in the bit outside for one of your friends to turn up. The old-style livery with the chunky condensed 'WHS' cube is inextricably linked to those long-lost glory days, no matter when they actually adopted the shark-jumping designer blue and white tedium, and extra points for the way that the lesser-sighted Music Section variant had - gasp - a pop record around it!! And what a fine manner in which to kick off this list - a bold, bright, colourful icon of fun and leisure from days gone by, with absolutely no trace whatsoever of that so-called hauntological 'dark nostalgia' business.

349. The Once Upon A Time... Man Opening Titles

Franco-sourced animated one-time week-round Summer Holidays mainstay, with historically educational imperative (as seen through the perspective of a chimp, an old geezer with a really long white beard, and some sort of hovering robot calendar thing... it probably made more sense in French) impressively signposted by a title sequence that strove to depict the entire evolution of man, all the way from the Big Bang to the imagined destruction of an Earth in Vyvyan-haired dystopian meltdown. Many were left terrified by this Bach-accompanied apocalyptic extrapolation. Others were simply puzzled by the inexplicable appearance of Barnaby over the lividly-visualised first stirrings of Darwinism, a mere but significant year or two after he dropped off the televisual radar. Either way, it was probably considered a dangerously free-thinking and forward-looking approach to education by Nicky Morgan.

348. Game & Watch

Nintendo's earliest foray into handheld portable gaming, which once inspired huge playground queues to even just get a look at its blocky and barely distinguishable characters moving from left to right behind a static colour foreground, let alone actually get a turn playing on one. Game & Watch also ostensibly functioned as a 'watch', albeit one roughly eight times the size of the average wrist-mounted digital, though there weren't quite so many queues to check out that aspect of it. Evocatively bluntly-titled game variants included Manhole, Vermin, Octopus, Safebuster, Mickey Mouse, Snoopy Tennis and, erm, Mario's Cement Factory.

347. Letts Revision Guides

Perennial friend to the mediocre kid in your class who couldn't be bothered to form any actual opinions of their own about Great Expectations, these do in fact actually still exist, but are nonetheless something of a cumbersomely bag-outsizing anomoly in the all-singing all-dancing all-downloading-somebody-else's-coursework-and-submitting-it-as-your-own Internet age. Certainly you never see smug types waving them about in lieu of the actual course text books themselves any more. Presumably as they're too busy waving Bing search results instead.

346. Berol Felt-Tip Pens (With Click-Top Lid)

Barring a couple of minor design modifications, these longtime favourites with kids who were high on fussy artistic skills but low on actual creativity are in fact still around, and indeed are probably widely available in your local non-brown and orange branch of WH Smith, so quite how and why they found their way onto this list is a something of a mystery. Here's hoping for some actually halfway esoteric and nostalgic stuff in the next instalment...

Time for the second part of our epic trawl through the official list of The 350 Most Nostalgic Things EVER!, and due to an R Tape Loading Error on our Nostalgia Supercomputer The Commodore BoglinTM, we'll have to phone this conveniently-named 'Dial-A-Retro' line for the next five...

345. Dial-A-Disc

Premium Line Telephone Services are, it has to be said, one of the less celebrated of the creakingly prehistoric antecedents to the internet age. Whether you were wanting to stay one step ahead of the day's weather, catch up on missed-due-to-phone-call - oh the irony - soap opera storylines, or just be read a ropey bedtime story by Bernard Cribbins masquerading as 'Buzby', there was a heftily-charging phone-in service just for you, many of them fulfilling much the same role as the most popular apps do today. Top of the list for historically-challenged what-the-fuck-was-that-actually-FOR-ness was Dial-A-Disc, a bafflingly popular service which allowed you to hear Love And Pride by King in crackling tinny mono speaker quality for about three times what it would have cost you to buy the single once it dropped out of the top forty. Still probably sonically superior to those prats playing 'choons' on their phones on the bus, though.

344. School Trips To The Local Wildfowl Centre (With Sheets To Fill In During The Visit)

Presumably the nostalgia here is for feelings of stultifying tedium, as even by the already pretty low standards of school trips, the regimented trudge around the bird sanctuary where you couldn't actually see any birds invariably left you feeling as though you might even have had a more entertaining time staying in the classroom. While John Craven-led features on 'Britain's disappearing wildlife' on Saturday Morning TV felt like extra school outside of school hours, this somehow managed to feel like extra school within school hours. Still, those badly photocopied sheets where you couldn't make out what the smudgy woodblock-esque images were actually supposed to be probably do have some retro-nostalgic value. Of sorts.

343. Watching Cricket Scores Change On Ceefax

A somewhat specific Teletext-related memory here, and it's not the last one either. For the benefit of anyone who doesn't know what it was, Ceefax was the BBC's teletext service, launched in 1972 and only very recently retired, which provided all manner of Prokaryotic Diversification-level 'interactivity' for people watching Marty Back Together Again. Time was that it was the absolute height of cutting-edge technology that enabled Ceefax's 'Sport' pages - introduced, as ever, by an aesthetically-challenging collage featuring a four-sided cricket bat, the world’s smallest FA Cup, a giant tennis ball (helpfully rendered in green and white so you knew it was 'tennis'), and what experts believe to be an elongated multicoloured fly swat - to self-update the scores in something that might have passed for 'real time' as percieved by Flash from Fingerbobs on a particularly stress-free day. Google takes all the fun out of it, frankly.

342. Ray Alan

Llaconic dinner-jacketed sidekick to sherry-sozzled monocle-sporting upper-crust ventriloquist dummy Lord Charles (and formerly the historically impenetrable 'Tich' and 'Quackers'), usually to be found shoring up the quick-get-a-variety-act-on bit in the middle of every Light Entertainment show ever, who in truth never really went away despite being one of those 'olden days' acts wheeled out pseudo-ironically by Peter Kay et al going "yer thought yer'd forgotten him, remember him? with 'is little puppet, eh? eh?". Primarily remembered, however, as a source of Royal Variety Performance-ruining confusion with Ray Charles.

341. The Oxo Family

It's a fair bet that nobody is actually properly nostalgic for the 'heartwarming' (translation: unfunny) powdered meat-plugging escapades of Lynda Bellingham and her imaginary brood, who were prone to turning into 'punks' only to abandon their Lydonesque posturing at the first whiff of reconstituted beef stock. It probably just feels nosalgia-worthy as it's an emblematic and indeed now outmoded form of product-pushing that's just too understated and indeed good-natured for the cut and thrust of today's level of inter-show advertising. Still, that one with the drumming gorilla was good. Oh well, let's hope for something moderately less twee next time...

On with the list of the 350 Most Nostalgic Things EVER!, and it looks like we'll have to insert a few coins into The Commodore BoglinTM to get the next five up on the screen...

340. Track & Field

One-time state-of-the-art arcade game from one-time state-of-the-art arcade game makers Konami (or, if you will, 'Kjonami'), surfing the waves of Los Angeles Olympics Mania with decidedly unfit-looking computer graphic competitors putting themselves through the most unexciting gameplay-occasioning sporting pursuits imaginable, and posing something of a logic bomb for those furrowing their brows about how young people should stop playing 'computer console' and immerse themselves in fresh-faced sporting endeavour instead. Track & Field's real nostalgic currency, however, comes from its branding-obscured use as a hi-tech joystick-battering round in Debbie Greenwood-hosted Children's BBC quiz show First Class. Not a patch on Daley Thompson's Decathlon, mind.

339. Life Before Remote Controls

While it's true to say that before the remote control became a standard living room fixture there was less opportunity to indulge in so called 'channel surfing' (something that was only ever practiced by Beavis, Butthead, and some imaginary people Charlie Brooker pretends to be annoyed about anyway), it's also true that there were only three channels - most households got a remote within a couple of years of Channel 4 launching - so there wasn't really that much point in zigzagging between them, so this is a bit of a misleading suggestion. And anyway, despite the 'you either watched one or the other' fallacy that's sprung up since, most youngsters would sit flipping between Tiswas and Swap Shop with a speed and dexterity that outstripped any remote control's capabilities.

338. Betamax

One of the great mysteries of the home entertainment age is how Betamax, the better quality and sturdier-taped evolutionary offshoot of early home video, lost out in the so-called 'format war' to the cheaper and nastier - and indeed 'Nasty'-er - VHS. The BBC Micro-esque clean cut image of Betamax - favoured by schools and posh households, and with nary a low-budget Italian-made Alien rip-off in sight to trouble sensitive rental shelf browsers - probably had something to do with it though. Now a byword for all things technological and outmoded, of course, but would Ian Levine have been able to retain all of those off-airs without it?

337. Pretending To Be Drunk On 1% Shandy

A fallacy that it suited both the offenders and the offence-takers to maintain, with the one-sip-of-anything-stronger-than-Panda-Pops-and-your-life-is-ruined parental concern brigade as happy with the arrangement as the youngsters relocating The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test to a poorly-regulated off-licence somewhere in dreary commuter-belt suburbia. Wistful teenage imaginings suggested the fabled 'alcohol' to have some kind of mind-bending one-pill-makes-you-larger properties, rather than the grim reality that it just amps up the more annoying facets of your personality and makes you view girls in taxi queues as 'marriage material' whilst holding court on the big issues of the day as if you were some sort of cross between Oscar Wilde and Noam Chomsky whereas you probably come across more like a cross between Paddy McGuinness and someone reviewing albums for Bella. Erm, or so we hear.

336. Geometry Sets

Of course, everyone knows that nowadays schoolkids don't need geometry sets, as they get given the answers and have all their work done for them by classroom assistants. It's true. David Mitchell said so in his column. And if that's the case, then sadly they'll never know the joys of trying to figure out why in the name of sanity that set they were given for Christmas by an unimaginative relative in lieu of a proper present had an exhausted-looking cartoon dog buckling under the weight of a monolithic set square on the cover. Fuck it, let's bring back the geometry set. And make a giant protractor to refract searing rays of unfiltered sunlight into Michael Gove's eyes. Hang on, you mean he's not Education Secretary any more? Well, that's one thing we won't be getting nostalgic about...

More from the great big list of The 350 Most Nostalgic Things EVER!, none of which Peter Kay remembers. And in any case, there's too many of them for him to do that counting-off-an-imaginary-list-on-his-fingers thing...

335. Your Mother’s ABBA/Neil Sedaka/Helen Reddy Albums

Well, technically it was Pete Seeger, Bill Haley & The Comets and the pre-'weird' Beatles, but this is a bit of an odd one anyway. Once you'd graduated past those Music For Pleasure albums with carnivorous-looking puppets on the cover, the parental record collection was a source of great wonder, simultaneously horizon-expanding and archaically limited, and a thought-provoking glimpse into the reality behind all those protests about having been 'young once too you know', and a time before they would have considered doling out a 'talking-to' over The Queen Is Dead/We Call It Acieeed et al, and indeed before you yourself started pondering what the next family generation would make of Spirea X. But surely everyone's experience of this phenomenon would be stylistically and historically different? Not as 'most' nostalgic as all that, frankly.

334. Your Father’s Pipe Band Of The 9th Dragoons Album

See above. And anyway, it was Peter Sellers.

333. Pac-Land

Presumably this refers specifically to the Pac-dynasty's arcade-thrilling ill-advised excursion into scrolling platform-bounding ill-suitedness. Though to be honest there's probably more esoterica value in the actual concept of Pac-Land, perhaps the ultimate indulgence of an era when any successful fictional thingy, from Rodge & Podge to Hamburglar, had to have a ridiculously involved and unnecessarily complicated backstory built around it. There was absolutely no requirement for a blocky yellow maze-traversing 8-bit ghost-scoffing circular mouth thing to inspire a cast of friends and family or a place of residence - not least because the entire phenomenon was perfectly marketable enough as it was - but by 1983 he'd acquired a wife, a child, and a Chief Scientist (no, really), whilst 'Pac-Land' was elevated to fictional cityscape status to accomodate them. This then inspired all manner of aimed-at-nobody-in-particular nonsense ranging from Hanna-Barbera's baffling animated series - rarely sighted now, presumably on account of an unfortunate but constantly-deployed contraction of the title character's name - to a genuinely bewildering Christmas album set in the tenuously-canonical environs of 'Pacville', which you can hear myself and Ben Baker puzzling over here. Wonder how far that kid who got a letter from Ronald Reagan congratulating him on finishing Pac-Man got with Rock Star Ate My Hamster?

332. Water Bombs

Successive generations seem to have had differing definitions of what actually constitutes a 'water bomb', but it's safe to say that here we're probably talking about those mini-balloon thingymajigs that would invariably explode anywhere but within splashing vicinity of their actual intended target. The least effective weapon in the playground artillery, and only ever wielded by that pillock who was in theory too wet to hang around with the 'tearaways' but maintained an overcompensating court jesterish illusion for fear of being rumbled. And to think this was only a couple of years after Grange Hill's attempted wheel-reinvention of classroom projectiles with the fork-mounted sausage.

331. Closedown (With The National Anthem)

TV. It's always there. Spewing out unfiltered output twenty four hours a day, unavoidable, inescapable, forcing behind-the-scenes spinoffs of reality shows that barely justified in-front-of-the-scenes in the first place, eight million episodes of American Dad with fifty percent of a joke between them, and daytime Babestation presenters having to keep their clothes on and chat about recycling collection times into your consciousness unbidden, and all of it virtually interchangeable at any hour of the day. An entire generation has grown up without ever knowing the joy of cult-inspiring afternoon gameshow oddities, pastorally transcendental early Sunday Morning programming, small hours equipment-testing tape-spooling scariness, and indeed those occasions when there wasn't actually any TV on at all. Time was when the BBC would sign off for the night with a last outing for the globe, a blast of the National Anthem, a dry topical witticism from the continuity announcer and, if you were lucky, an equally topical and witty photo montage. Since the launch of News 24, however, we've just had a largely wit-free untopical 'handover', and that's not quite the same thing. On the other hand, though, telly - whenever you want it! Wonder if The Grimleys is on...?

Remember when each of these instalments counting down the official list of The 350 Most Nostalgic Things EVER! used to start with a joke about Nostalgia Supercomputer The Commodore BoglinTM? Yes, of course you do, because they still do. And our lines are now open for...

330. 01 Or Other Old Telephone Dialling Codes

Something of an uninspiring and predictable start to what is, frankly, a fairly uninspiring and predictable chunk of the list. It's debatable whether anyone actually feels any affection or nostalgia towards retired cross-country telephonic prefixes - which, lest we forget, were in existence way past the days of Buzby, Dial-A-Disc and those annoying Maureen Lipman adverts where people got all tetchy if you refused to concede that they were 'clever', not least because they were only occasionally deployed, usually when the time came around to make the contractually-obligated annual call to not-particularly-far-flung relatives. It's a fair bet that they were only really seared into people's memories in the first place because of all those TV shows that were constantly inviting you to call in to 01-prefixed hotlines; in which case, see also London W12 8QT and Manchester M60 9 Ee Aeh, neither of which appear to have found their way into this list. Or have they...?

329. School Buses

There's a bit of an educational slant to this instalment - well, this and one other entry mention school - but even so there's not really much happening here that could do whatever the opposite of 'derail' is to the lack of momentum inspired by the previous entry. Either your Local Education Authority put on a 'school bus' - a uniform-only antique double-decker crammed to window-misting point with stereotypical pupils-in-transit hi-jinks - or you got the same bus as everyone else, indulging only in subdued glower-silenced minor horseplay akin to that seen in the infrequent commutational excursions of the pupils of Grange Hill, and equated 'school buses' with those yellow things full of fictional American schoolchildren complaining that they'd been given pastrami on rye again. And despite all the Telegraph scare stories about 'yummy mummies' blocking up the rush hour dual carriageways with school-bound People Carriers, they probably still have school buses too. So, evocative to some, abstract irrelevancy to others. And anyway, those of us who got 'proper' buses have our own stories about clashes with nutters claiming to be Ian Paisley in 'disguise' and stealing Christine Bibby's socks and so on, thank you very much.

328. Nutty Comic

Now you're talking. In 1980, not content with an already huge share of the comic market courtesy of The Beano (for the straight ahead laugh-seekers), The Dandy (for those who wanted a bit of slow-moving mirth-scant square-jawed adventure thrown into the equation), The Topper (for those who had been thrown out of the adult section in the library for trying to read The Spectator) and The Beezer (for, frankly, the aspirant one-pill-makes-you-larger contingent), D.C. Thomson & Co Ltd. opted to launch a new title aimed at a more wild and lawless strain of scribble-favouring chortlers - Nutty. Famously - though it's now often forgotten - the original home to Bananaman, and less famously to Samuel Creeps, The Snobbs And The Slobbs, Pig Tales and the indescribably tedious Nip And Rrip, Nutty was notorious for giving away reader-enticing free gifts at the drop of a hat (including, probably, a hat to drop), but never quite managed to pull in a readership capable of elevating it above 'Fifth Beatle' status and it folded in 1985. Never the most riveting of comics, it nonetheless scores highly on the Nostalgia Value-O-Meter for being a high profile 'new launch' on a similar scale to that of Channel 4. Though it tended to dispense with the four-letter-words and artistic nudity in favour of 'Cuddles' throwing some clay at a baby who shouted 'WUGGLY BUGGLY'.

327. Ultra Quiz

Whilst nowadays the key ingredients for a hit cerebral game show seem to be using a simple logistical poser to impressive effect and cramming as much blue into the studio set as possible, back in the eighties it was high concepts that pulled in the viewers, and concepts didn't come much higher than in Ultra Quiz. Devised by one Jeremy Beadle, this was an ITV teatime-hogging epic that sought to whittle five hundred contestants down to one over the course of a series, using such ambitious stunts as giving them a question with two possible answers, and asking them to board one of two trains headed in opposing directions depending on which they were opting for. And what's more they did this across several continents, which frankly makes The Cube look ever so slightly on the I Have A Horsey Neigh Neigh side. Variously presented by such unlikely duos as Michael Aspel/Russell Grant, David Frost/Willie Rushton and Jonathan King/Sally James, Ultra Quiz remains one of the ultimate examples of the mock-cerebral-meets-surreally-banal approach to Saturday evening television that's now seemingly gone forever. Just don't bring up Dame Edna's Neighbourhood Watch.

326. School Milk

Another school-related entry, and indeed another that has an element of regional dependency for its relevancy, as some Local Education Authorities continued to dole out the geographical fact-festooned cartons for some years after then-Secretary Of State For Education Margaret Thatcher demanded the withdrawal of this extravagant drain on the nation's coffers, while others caved straight away and were therefore directly and personally accountable for the entire eighties, including The Promise You Made by Cock Robin. Meanwhile, as this was being typed, George Osborne was committing even more unfair and bewildering budgetary crimes from the perspective of an overprivileged, underqualified arrogant halfwit with more money than sense who deserves to have free school milk pumped into his sinuses until his head swells up and explodes in a shower of Bullingdon Club oxygen-wastage that has never heard a single Happy Mondays record. But as he's unlikely to be reading this, expect Graham Linehan, writer TV 'Paris', to be along in a minute to tell us how this is all a waste of time and there was no point to it ever having been written and it should be deleted at once and all you people reading it should unread it with immediate effect. He's reckoned without The Commodore BoglinTM, though...

Hey you! Yes, you! Do YOU remember this sort of blocky blue Teletext dog that used to have very slow adventures just before Countdown came on? Probably not, as according to the official list of The 350 Most Nostalgic Things EVER! as compiled by The Commodore BoglinTM, he's only at...

325. 4-Tel

Just as Channel 4 set out to be an artier and more intellectual counterpart to ITV courtesy of its so-called 'distinctive remit' - initially a mandatory requirement to carry all manner of minority and avant-garde programming but more recently used as a statutory Get Out Of Jail Free card to legitimise unpleasant voyeurism via an unqualified 'expert' offering their 'opinion', and endless repeats of the same episode of Come Dine With Me (oh, and Berek) - so their Teletext service 4-Tel strove to be the Guardian to Oracle's TV Times; word-heavy, alternately wry and dry in tone, and dispensing with the postal-driven interactive frippery in favour of quasi-weighty viewer-penned thinkpieces. They still managed the requisite quota of characters accidentally replaced by semi-colons, though. Daily pluggage came courtesy of 4-Tel On View, a Pages From Ceefax-riffing filler from the days when they still didn't run a full afternoon service, which became the stuff of legend due to the occasional glimpses of blue blocky cartoon dog 4-T, whose single-frame 'adventures' still went by at too rapid a pace for anyone but the most obsessive daily text scourer to keep up with. Strange to think that individual Teletext services could once have had their own distinctive tone and 'character', considering that nowadays every single Red Button page reads like TV Hits trying its hardest to avoid saying anything about the day's headlines. Anyway, if you're so inclined, you can find some more detailed analysis of 4-Tel here.

324. Red And Yellow Packets Of Sherbet Dip-Dabs (With Swizzle Stick)

Blimey, what a mess! There seem to be at least fourteen dozen different methods of sherbet conveyance jumbled up within this putative dab of sweet-based supernostalgia, as though it's all been shovelled together into one gigantic heap of differently additive-addled sugars. And to metaphorically unravel them and find out which bit of the heading goes with which, we'll be calling on the services of the fabtastic The Great British Tuck Shop by Phil Norman and Steve Berry. The so-called 'Swizzle Stick' actually came with the Swizzle Double-Dip, an awkwardly hinged pack of two different flavour sherbets, while the Barratts Dip-Dab featured a miniaturised tongue-roughening red lolly and crumbly sherbet of such sinus-permeating overpoweringness that it would probably set off Biohazard monitors. Both rival brands are in fact still available, and indeed the Dip-Dab packaging is still defiantly red and yellow, albeit as rejigged by a modern day designer with one eye on 'interfacing'. Double-Dip's packaging, meanwhile, now features what appears to be Kate Thornton proferring powerful hallucinogens consumerwards. 'Nostalgia' as interpreted by someone who's overdosed on sherbet, frankly. though we quite like the idea of force-feeding industrial-strength quantitites of the two mismatched variants to Iain Duncan Smith until he dissolves into a pile of virulently-coloured processed sugar that wishes it had spent more time listening to Acid Drops, Spacedust And Flying Saucers.

323. Atari Game Console Cartridges

The Atari 2600, as it was properly known, enjoyed a surprisingly long run as the number one arcade-aping gaming console. Launched in 1977 and manufactured right up to 1992, it saw off all manner of technologically advanced rivals from the unweildy Ultravision Video Arcade System to the 3D-proffering Vectrex, and even survived a kamikaze attempt by Film 'E.T.' to take it down with a legendarily bad tie-in game (we won't even mention the Pac-Man one), while the likes of Yars' Revenge and Pitfall remain legendary in the gaming world, so it's hardly surprising that it's become an inescapably t-shirt inspiring nostalgic icon. Notably less iconic, however, are the blocky slabs of robust-looking plastic, disconcertingly akin to those visions of purported repositories for futuristic 'data' circa Buck Rogers In The 25th Century, that the games themselves were stored on. A shelf-hogging bastion of obsolete technology that you somehow can't bring yourself to throw away if ever there was one. The Atari 2600's greatest legacy, however, was inspiring Lee & Herring's 'Atari Fu', a long-forgotten martial art which involved practitioners defeating their assailants by suggesting they have a game of Atari instead, until Galaxians came out with its superior graphic technology and the Atari Fu master was smited once more.

322. Wham Bars

Pleasingly, there's not just a confectionary-based theme to this instalment, but an actual sherbet-specific one. For the McCowan-instigated rock-solid-yet-unchewably-chewy chew bar with industrial adhesive-like qualities contained retina-maddening fragments of citrus-tinged yellow sherbet embedded in its lurid raspberry-flavoured main constituent, and with a famously low price tag quickly became a longstanding favourite. This did of course mean that it also served an unintended dual purpose as inadvertent George Michael cross-promotion, though the precise cultural meeting point between purchasers of Club Fantastic Megamix and youngsters who liked a bit of vague generic 'space' iconography with their jaw dislocation-inviting confectionary remains a matter of conjecture. Still being made now, of course, though the fact that it has since diversified into a million different favour combinations does lend the original incarnation a tinge of nostalgia value. But if you want real retro-evocative points, look no further than the emergence of a second unintended running theme, as it was the Wham Bar that lost Lee & Herring's poll to find The Nation's Favourite Chew Bar, leading to a phone conversation between Herring and an incredulous McCowan's executive who splutteringly extolled the virtues of its 'natural colours' ("that's not natural, yellow and pink... it's from space!").

321. The Smell Of The Ink Used In A Banda Copier

Time was when if you wanted to make a copy of a document, you had to use one of those carbon sheet thingys. Then the photocopier and later the printer came along, and you could have as many copies as you wanted literally at the touch of a button. And now we've got the photocopier and printer combined in the so-called 'smart' printer, of such complex multifunctionality that even people who can perform server-end implementation of print queues can't work out which button to press and have to get their office's equivalent of Cerie from 30 Rock to do it for them. Somewhere inbetween came the Banda Duplicating Machine, a hand-cranked rotating replicator much favoured by Martin from Ever Decreasing Circles, and powered by ink that, frankly, smelled like someone was trying to cover up the distinct lingering odour of meths with Parma Violets, and was quite possibly considered a 'gateway drug' by gullible tabloid-led berks. Of course, now we have more sophisticated technology like Nostalgia Supercomputer The Commodore BoglinTM... who knows what half-remembered nonsense it will pick out next?!?

Time for yet another instalment of The 350 Most Nostalgic Things EVER!, our laugh-a-minute look back at things that were big in the 'eighties', along with poverty-instigated inner-city unrest, privatisation of public services, institutionalised stigmatisation of minorities, and colluding on monumental cover-ups with your friends in the press and police. How's about that then, guys'n'gals?

320. Sealink Ferries With The Huge British Rail Logo On One Side Of The Funnel And A Back-To-Front British Rail Logo On The Other Side

And speaking of privatised public services, erstwhile vendors of 'satire'-inviting sandwiches British Rail also used to operate a number of seabound services, most famously the short haul Sealink ferries. Said vessels handily signposted themselves as British Rail affiliates as described above, with the flipped-over logo incorporated just in case somebody needed to identify it quickly in their rear view mirror in the middle of the English Channel, though doubtless also causing many stricken rail passengers who'd somehow become lost at sea ("which is a normal journey... for British Rail!" - Rob Newman, 1989) to mistakenly assume they'd skipped dimensions into some sort of mirror reverse world where everything's backwards. Then somebody sold off the transport franchises and we got to enjoy paying eight million quid for the privilege being directed onto the wrong train by some disinterested high visibility jacketed jerk and then started on by some fucking snarling three year old in a uniform for having the wrong ticket and with even worse sandwiches to boot for ever more, and the Sealinks inevitably disappeared soon after. We contacted David Cameron's office for a quote, and were told that he had "certainly been on a ferry, quite relatively recently, in fact, and it went across the water from somewhere to somewhere like all ferries do, I can tell you, and I was on it, certainly, being on a ferry, which I have".

319. The BBC Schools Diamond

Though the inadvertent interactivity element means that more people tend to reminisce about the later BBC Schools' Clock - in other words that not-particularly-clock-like circular assembly of dots that blinked down the remaining minute before W.A.L.R.U.S. whilst a small army of cross-legged children affected to 'shoot' the disappearing discs with their fingers to the strains of over-enthusiastic prog-AOR guitar soloing akin to an escaped bit of the Dazed And Confused soundtrack - it nonetheless remains the poor relation to its immediate predecessor, The BBC Schools' Diamond. Booting the stuffy black-and-white-ness of the oh so formal BBC Schools' Pie Chart (no, really) into archival oblivion with its riotous use of new-fangled 'colour' (initially Sam Tyler Blue on black, later yellow on Less Interesting Blue), pulsating mindbending meeting-point-between-psychedelia-and-Glam-Rock self-animation, and defiant deployment of sub-Soft Machine Prog Jazz, it was about as 'seventies' as it could possibly get without turning into Patrick Mower and making a getaway on a Spacehopper whilst scoffing some Spangles. Anyway, you can read more about it - and absolutely nothing about Parky - here.

318. Pocketeers

In this age of smartphones and tablets, it's odd to think that not so long ago, the hi-est possible tech in portable entertainment involved catapulting ball bearings around a spinny-round-bit festooned 'maze' encased in eminently scuffable perspex. Launched in 1975, Palitoy's Pocketeers were originally strictly sport-themed and featured a Once Upon A Time... Man-esque cartoon 'everyman' figure on their packaging, and were an instant success, no doubt due to the perrennially frustration-engendering 'YER LIKE SPORT DON'T YER' relationship between child and distant relative. Later in the decade, Pocketeers diversified into such esoteric thematic realms as gambling, military strategy, time travel, organised crime, cat-versus-mouse rivalry, and the celebrated minimalist subreality of Cracked Crab. Oh, and about eighteen million Smurf-themed ones, but frankly they can fuck off. The fact that one of the last variants produced was a dismal Space Invaders ripoff confirms that by the early eighties, the writing was on the wall in 'calculator' font, and indeed the humble Pocketeer was quickly usurped as gadget game of choice by none other than Game And Watch, which was of course at Number 348...

317. Citrus Spring

A no-nonsense, back to basics orange-skewed carbonated beverage launched into a sea of vogue-chasing designer-clad luridly-hued fizzy drinks with blunt dramatic one-word names, Citrus Spring was tailor made for late eighties adolescent malcontents who wanted to affect Robert Elms-level intellectual stylishness but in a way that reflected their growing feeling that rampant post-Live Aid consumerism had gone 'too far' (except of course for when it involved Kim Wilde in her pants) and watched French & Saunders, listened to The Smiths, and read The News On Sunday for all three minutes that it existed. And yet Citrus Spring had originally been deployed by Britvic as some sort of bafflingly misconstrued attempt to cash in on the short-lived post-Neighbours'Australia Being Cool' phenomenon, complete with a Hogan-infringing Fake Rod Hull-voiced bloke saying 'ripper!' in the adverts, though it soon became obvious that neither Charlene Fenn, Yahoo Serious nor Pseudo Echo were going to be snapped quaffing a can, upon which they ditched all of the INXS-surfing 'tinnie' iconography and went back to straight ahead more culturally acceptable advertising playing on its flavour-to-sparkling ratio against the inevitable footage of rolling vistas and expanses of crystal clear spring water. However, it remains best known as the favoured beverage of rubber-faced funnyman Phil Cool.

316. Waiting For TV To ‘Start’

And it seems the unintentional theme of this particular entry is just how far and how quickly we've come in terms of round-the-clock on-demand home entertainment. Believe it or not - and it all changed so long ago that there might well be people reading who are young enough not to believe it - the number of hours of television it was possible to transmit in a single day used to be limited both by technology and by law. As a result there was nothing but a blank screen overnight, and for a good long while during the majority of the daytime too. The mechanics of the day-ending Closedown were a matter for those who had stayed up to watch the 'Late Film' or someone you've heard of but never heard performing live on BBC2, and indeed are a matter for another entry; what concerns us here is what used to greet the excitable youngsters who'd got up at one of those seven o'clocks in the morning they used to have at weekends back then, only to find that they'd got up before the TV stations themselves had. Thus it was that sitting through the IBA Colour Bars, stray glimpses of the Open University and its stentorian the-likes-of-you-have-no-business-watching-this shield and fanfare (which, of course, inevitably piped in at terrifying volume when you were least expecting it), blood-curdling extended blasts of Test Card F with weedy ragtime accompaniment, day-ruining Public Information Films, and the logic-taxing ITV regional startups with their cinematic sweeps through local areas of note and zooms in on cheapo station-identifying statuettes (and you can find more about them here), became just as much a part of the viewing experience as the piss-poor Ruby-Spears cartoons that inevitably followed. Except that anyone with half a brain now celebrates the gaudy laugh-depleted cartoons rather than making up some weirdness about how the grinding-into-gear broacast equipment warmup irrelevance that preceded them was masterminded by an evil scarecrow who had won Edward Heath's soul in a game of cards using pylons as the cards or something. And, what's more, if you were back soon enough after school, you got to enjoy the whole shebang on weekdays too, owing to the BBC's endearing habit of shutting down for the afternoon. But then came Breakfast Television, then Daytime On One, then ITV Night Network, then News 24, and so on and so on until cricket commentators amiably rambling "well we at BBC1 leave you there, and we'll see you again at 3.50 for the news from your region" as the action faded into a broadcasting void was but a distant memory. Here's to more Homes Under The Hammer!

Another instalment of The 350 Most Nostalgic Things EVER! - the increasingly yet also not actually increasingly lengthy trawl through the definitive list of obsolete cultural ephemera that nobody ever mentions on Live At The Apollo. "UGH BLOCKED" - Graham Linehan.

315. The King’s Singers

One-time inescapable vocal sextet forged in the suspiciously levity-discouraging environs of Cambridge University's Music Department, who took the whole choral thing to a new and more Russell Harty-savvy audience by indefatigably appearing in the musical breaks on chat shows and BBC2 arts programmes, sporting mysteriously colour-coded jacket linings and either covering some recent pop hit in an amusingly formal style, or else warbling some self-penned witticism about trying to park in a multi-storey car park. So all-pervading was their reach that in 1978 they were even asked to write and perform a song detailing the imminent changes in BBC radio frequencies - a major technological sea-change in those far off days - which combined tedious tuning instruction information with wince-inducing witticisms about Radio 3 being renamed 'Wonderful Radio 3' when it took up Radio 1's old position on the dial. Their stock has fallen considerably since then - there was no corresponding ditty to accompany the transition from BBC Choice to BBC Three - but apparently they are still performing, albeit with none of the original original original members still in the lineup. They probably have a witty song about that too.

314. Horace, Of ZX Spectrum Fame

In a world of believeable multi-facted fully-rounded computer gaming figureheads, where queues will form around the block for the latest Lara Croft revival but nobody ever offers any cigars to poor old Pac-Man, it's hard to credit that home gaming's most emblematic characters were once slightly less than one dimensional. But slightly less than one dimensional they were, and for ZX Spectrum owners in particular, they didn't come much more emblematic than a certain creation of Australian software company Melbourne House. Horace, basically a perma-peraumbulating featureless blue face on legs, first appeared in 1982's not-even-thinly disguised Pac-Man clone Hungry Horace, in which he had to dodge disconcertingly PC-predating 'Park-keepers' whilst making his way around a maze in search of not at all Power Pill-like bells that rendered the Parkies incapacitated and prone to Horace-devourment. It was legally different because the maze had grass around it. Then came Horace Goes Skiing, an epic outing of near O Lucky Man! proportions for a ZX Spectrum game, charting his ambulance-occasioning progress across a busy road (populated by Melbourne House lorries delivering either 'SOFT-WARE' or 'HARD-WARE' depending on which direction they were travelling in), followed by an even trickier level in which he had to weave his randomly directional way between some slalom flags. And finally, the trilogy was completed with Horace And The Spiders, a new-fangled scrolling platform effort in which he is bewilderingly entrusted with the task of ridding 'Spider Mountains' of their tyrannous eight-legged occupants. Perhaps choosing a new name might have been a useful first step. After this, Horace disappeared into 16k oblivion, his position as home gaming mega-celeb usurped by Bugaboo The Flea, Kokotoni Wilf, and all those other names that still live on in any conversation about games you could never complete.

313. Adrian Juste

Back when Radio 1 wasn't afraid to be wacky, they didn't come much wackier than Adrian Juste. Always the sort to enthusiastically pose for publicity photos whilst standing in a dustbin and shrugging, he dominated Saturday afternoons for nigh on twenty years, interspersing the top pop waxings with alarmingly-paced helium-voiced sketch zaniness mixed in with bits of old comedy records - a style once nailed by Jonathan Ross as "here's the sound of a man falling down a hole [cartoon-style 'falling' whistle]... I wonder what... Tony Hancock would have to say about that? 'Oh blimey'..." - and was pretty much the closest that homegrown radio ever came to those standard issue American 'looks like those clowns in congress did it again! [HONK HONK]' platter-spinners. For maximum impact, his show was usually followed by straight-faced 'serious music' magazine show mumblings. Massive in its day but genuinely starting to look a little out of place by the time the dreaded Matthew Bannister came along, and Juste was shown the door in a rather undignified fashion without a word of thanks for his years of service. Meanwhile, in a certain book called Fun At One, he commented "it's very unhealthy to let politicians, and this preponderance of celebrity nonentities we have these days, get away with the crap they spout uncontested... we all need a laugh every now and again... at their overpaid, mollycoddled expense". And frankly, he couldn't be more right about that. Philip Davies MP, we're coming for you...

312. BBC1's Old 5:35pm Slot Before Neighbours Came Along

For years, the BBC never really knew what to do with that awkward gap between the end of children's programming and the start of the evening news, trying and usually failing to bridge the two with all manner of family-skewed light comedy and game shows, most famously and, bish and trivvock, enduringly Ask The Family, Robert Robinson's little quiz for, if you will, all of the family, if ever a family as was. Ironically, the timeslot's heyday came in the mid-eighties, at the exact point that Michael Grade decided to obliterate the familiar template and bring in wall to cardboard wall Neighbours, at which time it was playing rotating host to amongst others Oddie-fronted waaaaah-Bodyform-theme-songed facts and figures oddity Fax, snotty finger-wagging 'keep fit'-pushing look-down-nose-athon Go For It!, amusing-for-three-minutes sitcom import Charles In Charge, amusing-for-two-minutes sitcom import It's Your Move, highbrow Rippon-equipped quiz standoff Masterteam, and of course First Class, the Debbie Greenwood-presented game show in which teams of 'all rounder' schoolkids were invited to display their knowledge-fuelled dexterity on such subjects as films and pop music, try and guess the identity of the celebrity not particularly well hidden behind the 'spinning gold disc', and make good on their prowess at a specially adapated arcade game; initially our Number 340 smash Track And Field, then latterly Paperboy. Then, of course, Grade's daughter complained that she never saw what happened after that cliffhanger where there was a bloke hiding in Daphne's cupboard, and the rest was... well, not so much 'history' as 'only watching whenever Melissa Bell came back into it'. 'Classic' timeslot now reinstated with the arrival of Pointless, presented by TV 'Pal George Osborne'.

311. Public Information Films

Yes, yes, Tufty, Charley, Reginald Molehusband, Jimmieeeeeeeee, The Spirit Of Dark And Lonely Water, Richard Massingham, Dusty, Claude The Caravan, Green Cross Code Man, Jo & Petunia, Thingy Who Lit The Gas Fire When His Parents Told Him Not To, Duncan Preston Chatting Up Schoolgirls, John Altman Drink-Driving, There Were Three Of Them In A Boat, Apaches, Building Sites Bite, Protect And Survive, Cross Ply And Radial, Weird Thing Apparently About Tightrope Walking Over A Railway, the whole sodding lot of them... once they were fascinating edge-of-the-memory glimpses of an age that was simultaneously both only just out of chronological reach and the sociocultural equivalent of a million years ago, and frozen-in-time snapshots of fashions and lifestyles that were somehow familiar and yet never really existed. Then they started being in every single bastard list show in existence and latterly became the basis for all manner of tiresome chortle free-ness about 'if you drive Edward Heath at speeds in excess of 20mph on a country lane, think about the local Porridge Tramp before you dip your headlights'. And if anything ever was going to induce tiredness in motorists or indeed in anyone, it's that. Anyway, you still get them now, only about more niche-targeted subjects like the 'don't make a drunken speed-snorting show of yourself at parties' one screengrabbed above, and if that means nobody's warning Milo Yiannopolous not to pick up a lit sparkler, then all to the good.

Who's On, Wogan?

Time And Tide Melts The Snowman: Part One

Time And Tide Melts The Snowman: Part Two

Time And Tide Melts The Snowman: Part Three

Time And Tide Melts The Snowman: Part Four

Time And Tide Melts The Snowman: Part Five

Time And Tide Melts The Snowman: Part Six

Time And Tide Melts The Snowman: Part Seven

Time And Tide Melts The Snowman: Part Eight

Diggin' The Dankworths

It's Still A Police Box, Why Hasn't It Changed? Part Three: Su-Su-Su-Subotksy!

Orbiter X

The 350 Most Nostalgic Things EVER! Part 1: 350-346

The 350 Most Nostalgic Things EVER! Part 2: 345-341

The 350 Most Nostalgic Things EVER! Part 3: 340-336

The 350 Most Nostalgic Things EVER! Part 4: 335-331

The 350 Most Nostalgic Things EVER! Part 5: 330-326

The 350 Most Nostalgic Things EVER! Part 6: 325-321

The 350 Most Nostalgic Things EVER! Part 7: 320-316

The 350 Most Nostalgic Things EVER! Part 8: 315-311