Tim Worthington's Newsround

Remember when they used to have that big list with all stuff you remembered on it? Well here's a bit more of it! Yes, it's time for another instalment of The 350 Most Nostalgic Things Ever, and for those who've been asking, yes, we will tone down the George Osborne references in future. Sorry, that should have read 'sand down George Osborne'. But while you're all waiting for that, here's...

310. Rondo Veneziano

Post-prog Jeff Wayne-infringing Italy-derived 'rock classical' project put together by erstwhile Giallo-soundtracker Gian Piero Reverberi, who performed their Making Learning Fun-esque cello-driven rock-outs whilst dressed in Baroque clothing and wigs, complemented by child-spookingly blank 'robot' faces. Their signature number La Serenissima - perhaps the ultimate example of a tune where you know how it goes but have no idea of what it's actually called or who performed it - was originally the consciousness-raising theme for the Venice In Peril restoration fund, and as such came accompanied by an abstract animated message-hammering video in which a passing alien rescued them from the water-stricken city in cartoon form, thus affording those who were slightly too old to be freaked out by their appearance the opportunity to join in the fun after 'seeing' the imminent environmental chaos looming close on the horizon. Unlikely hit status resulted in a million chat show appearances, causing younger viewer consternation over the fact that Terry Wogan was seemingly so unconcerned about The Rise Of The Machines, whilst its subsequent adoption as backing music for schedule rundowns by the BBC, and unexpected-gap-filling off-the-shelf pop video convenience by ITV, kept the respective elder sibling enviropanic going for some years afterwards. Meanwhile, if you're a passing alien and find that the blank-faced anachronistically-dressed character you've just beamed up is in fact George Galloway, chuck the fucker back in the water.

309. Those Unconvincing Oversized Plastic ‘Rings’ That Squirted Water With The Aid Of A Totally Inconspicuous Massive Squeezable Bulb

The clue's arguably in the title, there. Though seriously, DO NOT try Googling it. Ostensibly the stuff of those 'Joke Shops' that they apparently used to have, though more likely to have been obtained through regularly being given away free with the likes of Whizzer & Chips and Cor! (meaning there were approximately nine million in prominently displayed playground circulation the following week, thus reducing their chances of being mistaken for the real thing even further), and fooled nobody except parents exaggeratedly pretending to be taken in for the purposes of amusing their offspring, which is presumably why they haven't lasted the course as front line child artillery and have instead been inducted into dreaded 'ironic present' status. We could make a joke here about Kay Burley being sufficiently clueless to fall for it, but she's wet enough as it is anyway.

308. Farmhouse Kitchen

Long-running ITV afternoon culinary shenanigans from the days before they had the faintest idea of what they were doing with their daytime schedules, served up by the primly-dressed no-nonsense Dorothy Sleightholme and Grace Mulligan, who took viewers through recipes for hearty traditional fare in the photo-in-cookbook-with-inexplicable-stray-stalks-of-wheat-knocking-about style with thick-cut eighty seven percent crust bread and industrial-strength vats of sugar very much to the fore. Primarily remembered, however, for its dementedly ill-fitting modern jazz theme in which flute histrionics did battle with syncopated vibes, and a Hammond Organ apparently throwing a strop about being overshadowed by the other two. Enjoyed a staggering eighteen year run before finally buckling under the deluge of increasing imported soap saturation; though let's face it, laid-back real-time baking could never, erm, measure up to daily helpings of Rebekah Elmaloglou. Now, of course, daytime cookery shows are all the rage. Just be thankful nobody was ever able to live tweet an episode of Sounds Like Music.

307. Alec Christie From The Children Of Green Knowe

Juvenile thespian who briefly found himself championed by the Blue Peter/Radio Times Back Pages lobby after portraying Tudor Spectre-befriending post-war schoolboy spending Christmas with elderly relative at family ancestral home 'Tolly' in the BBC's 1986 adapatation of The Children Of Green Knowe, which will one day be rightly hailed as Exhibit A in the legal fight to establish the mid to late eighties as the real Golden Age Of Television, and which experts controversially believe to have been even better than The Box Of Delights. Whether you're now fuming in disagreement, fuming in agreement or fuming in plain confusion, you can read more on this highly contentious topic in Well At Least It's Free, buying-books-written-by-me fans. Like just about everyone who starred in the vaguely supernaturally-tinged children's dramas that the BBC always used to put out in the run-up to Christmas in those days, Alec Christie went on to enjoy a distinguished career both in front of and behind the camera without ever really becoming a household name, but his enduring iconographic pal-of-The-Broom-Cupboard status is doubtless reward enough in itself.

306. Starbar

Undistinguished Nuts'n'Caramel - Together At Last! Cadbury mainstay, initially founded on typographical infringement of the Star Wars bandwagon but which is still available in more or less the same form today, and which presumably only made it onto the list courtesy of its troublingly prolific tendency towards 'relaunches'. A suitably aimless ending to what has not exactly been the most inspiring grouping of items on this list, out of which it's been near-impossible to contrive any sort of spurious running 'theme', let alone come up with much in the way of searing 10 O'Clock Live-style political satire ("unless they're planning a Starbar tax, ho ho" - Nev Fountain, yesterday). Oh well, the next one's got weapons-grade crisps in it.

Looking for a nostalgic antidote to what's proving to be a rather grim time for innocent whimsical past-remembering fun? Then get a load of The 350 Most Nostalgic Things EVER!, a very long list of half-forgotten banalities of yesteryear, from playground panics about rumoured influxes of worm-like 'bloodsuckers' without a single thought in their head other than to drain unwary schoolchildren of Type O Negative like something out of a Ruby Spears-level Video Nasty, to playground panics about rumours of 'a punk' - singular - on the rampage in the vicinity and fending off entire armies of policemen whilst committing Godzilla-like acts of old-skool city smashing. Grab your parachute - or, preferably, George Osborne's - and skydive in...

305. KP Sky Divers

Simultaneously saliva-inducing and mouth-aridificating corn snacks hurtled groundwards at the height of The Red Devils being a 'thing', fashioning a rudimentary stick man out of the thickest state-instable maize imaginable like some sort of abandoned Return Of The Saint tie-in snack, available in several flavours but most famously rendered in a Salt & Vinegar of such acidic virulence that it seemed liable to remove a layer of skin from the roof of your mouth. Unfortunately, the era of indefinable 'daredevil' sportsmen being hailed as heroes and Fisher Price Adventure Playsets being the go-to present for any youngster who had shown no interest in outdoor pursuits whatsoever didn't last very long, and Sky Divers went with it.

304. Chris Needham

Mullet-sporting self-proclaimed Saviour Of Heavy Metal and fifteen minute famous graduand of BBC2's Teenage Video Diaries, sweeping aside a dull and worthy selection of profiles of youngsters who claimed to be 'allergic' to school with In Bed With Chris Needham, a part-intentional part-accidental sendup of rockumentary foibles, charting his ascent to the giddy heights of doing a Megadeth cover in front of a ropey camcorder, like that Metallica film relocated to a Wimpy in the Midlands. One of those true word-of-mouth phenomena of the sort you'd never get any more in this age of hashtags and Amazon Prime, with a succession of rapidly-scheduled repeats flung out to meet friend-recommended popular demand. So emblematic that he found his way onto BBC2's fortieth anniversary celebrations alongside highbrow arts and current affairs characters.

303. ‘Something Outa Nothing’/'Every Loser Wins’/'Anyone Can Fall In Love’

"Oi! Jimi Hendrix! Knock it on the head, will you?". Despite it famously taking a worrying amount of time to find its demographic 'feet', right from the outset there were a dizzying variety of attempts to cash in on EastEnders When It Was Good, from the vaguely racy 'Teen EastEnders' novels to that bizarre cockney knees-up singalong album the entire cast did for BBC Records And Tapes. However, all of these pale into insignificance next to theme music composer Simon May's attempts to instigate a Cowell-anticipating chart-conquering pop empire off the back of the show. Having scored an unexpected chart smash with the theme from Howard's Way earlier in 1985, he wasted no time in getting a single version of the EastEnders theme - with the 'Special Episode' variation Julia's Theme on the b-side - into the shops and into the charts. But that wasn't enough. Early in 1986 he persuaded Anita Dobson to surf the waves of post-'Merry Christmas Ange' mania by recording a vocal version of the theme as Anyone Can Fall In Love; a trick that he would pull again later in the year by getting Marti Webb to warble some even flimsier lyrics over the top of the Howard's Way theme, now cunningly renamed Always There so nobody would suspect a thing. Anita Dobson's effort only narrowly missed out on topping the charts, and as a result he was able to persuade the producers to instigate a storyline wherein two of his compositions would be played several times per episode for what seemed like months on end. Thus it was that Sharon (vocals), Kelvin (vocals), Ian (drums) and 'Wicksy' (keyboards) joined forces with their previously unseen pal 'Eddie' ('rumbled' by Smash Hits as "Sir Billiam Idol with a pink feather duster atop his 'bonce'") to form Dog Market, peddling a sort of goth/synthpop hybrid that sent Roly scurrying out of the Vic in canine feedback panic and caused 'Dirty' Den no end of mind-the-pint-pots comic misunderstanding over Ian's trademark drum roll 'The Breaking Glass'. After a dismal debut gig they joined forces with Billy Bragg-alike fellow previously unseen pal Harry, who imposed a Paul Morley-style manifesto on the band and renamed them - ho ho - The Banned. Friction between Harry and Wicksy saw the latter quit and attempt to launch a solo career by spending an incalculable amount of screen time bashing out soaring ballad Every Loser Wins, the May-composed soundtrack to Lofty sliding down his bedroom door, on that weird double-keyboard piano the Queen Vic was originally equipped with. Meanwhile The Banned took their Wicksy co-written call-to-arms Something Outa Nothing to a local 'Battle Of The Bands', where their performance was sabotaged by Harry in a proto-KLF outbreak of situationism in response to his fear that they were getting too big too quickly. Every Loser Wins was subsequently bought by every loser who liked a good drippy ballad with English-as-a-foreign-language Greetings Card lyrics and spent several weeks atop the charts. Something Outa Nothing, despite being actually quite a good song, was only bought by unhealthily fixated adolescent males in the mistaken belief that owning a copy might give them an 'in' with Letitia Dean. And you don't hear any of the records anywhere any more. And you can read more about this bizarre chain of events, and so many more besides, in my book about BBC Records And Tapes Top Of The Box.

302. Marvin Glue (And The Green Spatulas Used To Apply It)

Schoolroom-safe adhesive-property-deficient whiter-than-the-Ace-of-Tippex glue famously conveyed in hefty plant food-esque plastic flagons and doled out into beakers in all its unsticky glory for the purposes of failing to append one bit of card to another, even with the recommended deployment of a green plastic spatula that pretty much bent backwards into utter uselessness if you so much as looked at it. Probably still in widespread use today, because Michael Gove loves the stuff. Seriously. He can't get enough of it. If you see him, why not pour eighteen gallons down his throat?

301. Rainbow-Striped Scented Rubbers (The Pencil Case Variety)

Notice the need for post-Mates clarification there. That's something that we may well be coming back to. Anyway, almost certainly not something that's gone away, but which did enjoy a brief spell of becoming the latest craze, evolving from the sappy Holly Hobby-evoking examples you'd find on the desk of the resident sappy girl who was 'good at art' (i.e. drew boringly and sensibly rather than indulging in mad pop-art splurges of frowned-upon creativity), with a flurry of playground one-upmanship over who could find the most outlandishly shaped and vividly scented. The grand prize of course must go to those ones that affected to look like albums (presumably scented like The Stereo Sequence off Radio 1), especially the one with a concerned-looking Algernon Razzmatazz-infringer below the legend 'Reggae'. Probably still in widespread use today, because teachers are forever having to clean up after the piss-poor mess left behind by successive Education Secretaries of all political stripes who have all laboured under the delusion that the way to 'fix' things that don't appear to need fixing is to blame the poor fuckers who have to spend their lives looking after other people's kids for everything, including things that have nothing to do with education in any way, shape or form, and make them do ridiculous amounts of unnecessary paperwork, attend pointless 'training' days seemingly as punishment for having the temerity to have some annual leave, and adhere to an enforced curriculum that suits nobody and brings us ever closer to the 'education as a commodity' model that Rupert Murdoch has been openly espousing too often for comfort recently. Still, it was good when Mr Miles got that 'E180' label stuck to his jacket sleeve.

Welcome back my friends to the list of nostalgic stuff that you'd never get Russell Kane making jokes about that never ends. Or at least feels like it doesn't. We're still only about a sixth of the way through The 350 Most Nostalgic Things EVER!, but George Obsorne will be along in a moment to make a speech about how great it is that he played a small personal role in making sure that this list ended up appearing on this blog and how great this is for Britain as a nation. Just like he did with Star Wars, despite being so quite patently clueless about Star Wars and indeed films in general that without the assistance of his army of advisors he'd probably have accidentally brought the 'Cannibal Ferox franchise' to the UK by mistake.

300. Denim

No, not Lawrence and his seventies-remembering bandmates, but the Nobby's Nuts-esque 'anyone who doesn't use this is a great big nancy and can't be in our special men's club for men' aftershave, famously promoted by a soft porn-aping TV ad wherein a womanly hand applied the scent to a bloke's unseen face and then attempted to snake inside his shirt, only to be thwarted at the last second by his firm restraining grasp (because he's in charge, love) and not through any censurious insistence of the IBA honest, all of it set to a scuzzy post-prog bit of guitar riffing set atop one of those 'breaks' that Fatboy Slim goes kerrazy for, and a gravel-throated voiceover from trailer-narrating Carlsberg-plugging Bill Mitchell, better known as acquatic megalomaniac Zor from the story record Doctor Who And The Pescatons. For many years Denim - 'For The Man Who Doesn't Have To Try Too Hard' - was the autopilot last-minute present of choice for that difficult to buy for male relative, though teenage boys generally would have preferred to have been given its close contemporary Hai Karate instead, for the equally ideologically dubious connotations of a mixture of nunchuck-happy Martial Arts mania and an ad campaign involving a rampant scent-aroused Valerie Leon twatting some hapless businessman type over the head with her knockers. All of which probably bore as close a relation to their actual real lives as singing Hello Dolly to distract a marauding alien fish did.

299. Singer Button Magic

Vastly technologically superior to its more well remembered contemporary the Ronco Buttoneer (which - oh the indignity - still required you to do some of the actual work yourself), and more importantly actually available from the shops rather than just via plugged-on-ITV-by-erstwhile-Radio-1-DJ mail order, this stapler-like contraption took all the stress out of replacing lost buttons by simply hardwiring a new one onto your garment at the clunk of a lever. Still available now, of course, though in a suitably streamlined design that has inevitably jettisoned the original Sam Tyler-mind-addling brown and beige colour scheme. But does it still do the job? There's only one way to find out - by attaching some buttons to John Whittingdale's face!

298. The Local 'Bread Van'

Almost certainly still in existence in some form, not least in this high-tech futuristic age of Internet Deliveries where My Bloody Valentine's website falls over the second they release a new album, but presumably suggested here for the long-gone juvenile clamour whenever a brand or indeed foodstuff-specific van arrived in the street, doubtless interlinked with the same inexplicable generic excitement as those bags that just said 'SPORT' on them. You had to make your own entertainment in those days. Anyway, let us take a moment to salute those noble bread product-conveying drivers and delivery boys, none of whom would ever have parked in a disabled bay and when someone points it out to them get annoyed and say they were 'unaware' they had done so as if that makes it alright and only a short while after they were photographed laughing their fucking fat neck off whilst passing a bill to financially penalise the disabled for no good or indeed economically coherent reason and ignoring fellow members of the house pleading with them to stop laughing into the bargain.

297. Watching Afternoon TV Whilst Off School Sick

Note the 'afternoon' caveat, so unfortunately there's not really any scope for going on about the bleak morningtime choice between BBC Schools And Colleges and the risk of stumbling across a grim secondary schools show about history or something you couldn't comprehend with a folky song about "for either the rain is destroying his grain/or the wind is destroying his roof", ITV Programmes For Schools And Colleges and the risk of stumbling across the Picture Box opening titles or worse still a stray inter-programme appearance by some Public Information mood-dampener like JIMMMIIIEEE or that girl who got a firework in the face amongst the more reliably upbeat fare, or on rarer occasions the Trade Union Congress and the hours of stultifying well-at-least-it's-telly tedium endured for the sake of occasionally being amused by a name like 'Rodney Trotter'. Oh yes, we're way before the days of Out Of This World here. In fact these were the days when they seemingly didn't consider it worth putting anything non-functional on in the mornings at all. Afternoons, however, were a different matter, and once Crown Court, Fingerbobs and Leonard Parkin And Some Scary Green Hands Typing were out of the way, they'd actually put on a couple of dramas and game shows for the benefit of what was presumably still considered a negligible percentage of the viewing public, while for the illness-stricken sofa-bound schoolkid, the harsh authoritarian stripes of the morning would give way to something somewhere between torpor and surrealism. We've already taken an in-depth look at Farmhouse Kitchenhere; other ITV-sponsored favourites included self-explanatory celeb floorshows Whose Baby? and That's My Dog, Dennis Norden-helmed proto-Wrong Kind Of Nostalgia-fest Looks Familiar, Slattery-infested rag trade drama Gems, word-free tradicraft bonanza Hands, and all kinds of bits of schedule-buffering filler you wouldn't get at any other hour of the day including that Butterfly Ball thing, the 'Adventure Sports'-riffing film of that bloke in the arctic on a powersledge thing, and - most inexplicably of all - the video for Big Log by Robert Plant, in which he drives into a petrol station and some things happen. The BBC had yet to fully embrace daytime, of course, and instead of the slightest of light entertainment you'd get an old-skool comedy film and sometimes even the odd stray who's-this-actually-for? episode of something like The Magic Roundabout, which was arguably the better deal. Then, of course, Daytime On One arrived, and it all changed for, well, the better really. At least in the short term. Who's coming round to watch The Original Dot on Playbus?

296. Berlitz Phrasebooks

Widely-consulted I Speaka Da Lingo-facilitiating glossy pocketbooks devised by one Max Berlitz, whose actions-speak-louder-than-words system of illustrated wordpower-boostage enabled billions of global travellers to confidently declare "I will not buy this record it is scratched". Cunning marketing ruse involved stuffing the demonstrative illustrations with as many smouldering maroon-shirted hunks and Geography Teacher-alike bits of 'skirt' as print technology would allow, thus subliminally engendering dreams of holiday romance and Live Is Life by Opus becoming 'our song' for the hapless holidaymaker. Later shamelessly emulated by once-ubiquitous secondary schools textbook Tricolore, packed to bursting point with photos of impossibly cute-looking French teenagers and zany stories about top pop combo 'The Zingos', and last seen being rammed sideways down Michael Gove's throat. Sorry, bit of 'bias' there.

Yes, it's time for more from The 350 Most Nostalgic Things EVER!, the gigantic list of evocative stuff from yesteryear that's now so obscure that it's forgotten to remember Spangles. It will remember John Whittingdale's name, though...

295. SMP Maths Cards

Charity-funded number-crunching set of puzzle sheets allegedly devised in an outbreak of Space Race-instigated Reds-under-the-bed panic, concentrating on set theory, graph theory, vectors, logic, binary et al, in the hope of rapidly equipping an up and coming generation of keen anti-freedom campaigners with the ability to discern the dimensions of the biggest leaf on demand. Coming across like a stray round from Ask The Family gone horribly stentorian and smug (well, 'gone more smug'), SMP Cards were widely enforced on schools in a fashion that was decidedly at odds with the recurring panic that introducing similarly 'progressive' ideas into the classroom would lead to a complete collapse of law and order. As opposed to those time-honoured traditional schooling methods, which turn out nothing but well-rounded, considerate, compassionate individuals who are more than capable of running a country.

294. The Purdey Haircut

Widely-emulated - though scarcely successfully emulated - sleek bleached bowl-cut variant akin to a stray member of sixties garage-psych band The Standells chancing upon some 'product', as popularised by Joanna Lumley, who allegedly landed it on the unsuspecting and initially sceptical producers of The New Avengers mere days before filming began. All in all very much the 'The Rachel' of its day, except that it reeked of Cinzano Bianco, jetsetting glamour and dresses that resembled two-man tents designed by a cake decorator, rather than 'kooky' arty girls listening to Kick Out The Jams and drinking too much coffee. Later revived, way outside the scope of this listing, as the image template for early nineties indie 'bad boys' Birdland.

293. Proper 'Supporting Features' At The Cinema

Long-discontinued 'whole meal in a roll'-style gambit for adding extra value to the cinematic experience by bundling the latest blockbuster with an accompanying short film, usually of utterly thematically mismatched hue, partly for the purposes of padding it out to the sort of length where it felt like a proper afternoon/evening out, but also so they could squeeze in about fifteen million extra inter-programme intermissions and shift those vital extra units of Kia Ora and King Cone. Probably at its most sensibly deployed in the fifties and early sixties, when the later-feted likes of Gerry Anderson's big screen debut Crossroads To Crime and Sellers/Milligan-instigated lunacy like The Running Jumping Standing Still Film and brick-purloining crime caper dementedness The Case Of The Mukkinese Battlehorn, which at least came from roughly the same genre universe as their main features. After television started to get the upper hand, however, any sense of coherence went out of the window and the support slot became a dumping ground for award-winning film students, unsaleable studio offcuts, and footage of karate blokes smashing blocks of ice with their heads. Reached its peak of insanity in the late seventies/early eighties, where even apart from rightly celebrated Python short Away From It All, classics included recurring priest-on-a-motorbike Disney whimsy Hang Your Hat On The Wind, Tom Baker and Eric Morecambe duelling for the affections of Madeline Smith in The Passionate Pilgrim, and those dual Star Wars-straddling memory-haunters, The Empire Strikes Back's custom-made sword and sorcery short companion piece Black Angel, from which everyone remembers one puzzlingly unmemorable line and nothing else, and weird dialogue-free creativity-vs-nuclear-weapons proto-CGI animated pre-Jedi short Dilemma. Consigned to the cinematic scrapheap many years ago, despite Quentin Tarantino's laudable if inevitable attempt to revive it by flinging out Spitting Image-funded Kirk Douglas-riffing surrealist silliness The Big Story alongside Pulp Fiction, and the DVD-maximising expansion to two hours default movie running time probably finished it off for good. Though, judging by the occasional one that does still show up like that We Are The Village Green Flower Pressing Cockney Villain Pals thing or charmless adverts-by-stealth for Pixar DVDs, we're probably not missing much. Oh well, have a bonus Tom Baker pic to make up for it:

292. Piglets

Porcine-proportioned and indeed flavoured (apart from the, erm, Pickled Onion variety) potato-based snack from reliable crisp second stringers Burtons, wrapped in their standard crinkle-resistant 'sheet cellophane' packaging and rather distressingly featuring traditional pig scoff-antagonist 'the wolf' on the front, which like many of its contemporaries is covered in entertaining detail in The Great British Tuck Shop by Phil Norman and Steve Berry, recently described by one grudging recipient as 'written in a lefty right-on style I couldn't stand'. Why not buy a copy for Danny Alexander?!

291. Top-Loading VCRs

Clunky, battleship-weighted, 'piano key'-encumbered, gunmetal grey room dominating sleaze-dispensers requiring you to insert the tape into a damage-friendly ejector seat bit and then push it down before hitting 'Play'. About as futuristic looking as Boss from Doctor Who And The Green Death. Inextricably bound with the days of 'Nasties', Fundamental Frolics, Alexei Sayle's Pirate Video and whatever in the name of sanity that Charlie's Balloon thing was, and similarly inextricably linked with inadvertent poorly-top-loaded-related tape-chewage, which is why those pesky pre-certs now fetch a pretty penny on eBay. And for once there's been no way of contriving a false running 'theme' to these entries, unless you were given to scoffing Piglets whilst watching Black Angel on your first video player and sporting a Purdey wig. And, erm, doing some of those SMP Maths Cards. And anyway, we've sort of already done this one in the writeup for Betamax. Ah well, you should see what Nostalgia Supercomputer The Commodore BoglinTM has picked out as top of the list for the NEXT part...

Hello, and welcome to the latest instalment of The 350 Most Nostalgic Things EVER!, and this time, before the witticisms about pre-cert videos and classroom crazes get underway, we're starting with an apology. Judging from reactions to recent posts, it seems that many of you do not take kindly to having blunt and unsubtle political satire intertwined with your past-remembering fun, especially when it involves threats of comic if inventive violence towards current cabinet members. The message, it's sad to say, is loud and clear - keep politics out of nostalgia. So to keep the peace and indeed to avoid offending people's sensitivities to the point where they will apparently avoid reading that post about Skiboy'just in case', from this point on The 350 Most Nostalgic Things EVER! will stick strictly to the gags and the reminiscences, and no space will be afforded to radical polemic. This is a cast-iron watertight guarantee that there will be no further political content. And now, on with the list...

290. Conservative Governments

Well, when this list was first fed into The Commodore BoglinTM - it's not as fast as modern computers, you know - they did seem like archaic ancient cultural history, and they'd only been gone a couple of years as well. This is admittedly partly due to the transient, here today and, if I may say so, gone tomorrow nature of the entire John Major era, which sort of passed by in a relative blur of comparative sociopolitical mildness and now has been omitted from history as totally and misleadingly as The Noel Edmonds Saturday Roadshow, fashioning the Channel 4 Documentary-friendly illusion that we went straight from a shower of greasy tweedy self-important bigoted warmongering poor-punishing infrastructure-decimating Section 28-waving Hillsborough-covering-up blowhards to the Alcopop-fulled rise of everyone's favourite Noel Gallagher-cosying Pretty Straight Guy and his favourite band Wheeler 18, finally overturning eighteen years of Tory tyranny to the strains of I Like To Move It Move It by Reel 2 Reel Featuring The Mad Stuntman. Then your miseryguts friend who spoiled it for everyone pre-election by claiming that they 'just didn't trust him' was proved right when they started fucking about with dubious military intervention, mysterious deaths of implicated scientists, and allowing Rupert Bastard Murdoch a freer hand and greater influence than any previous regimes ever did, and then put a top hat on it and took the time to readjust it at a jaunty rakish angle by allowing a useless waste of space to become Prime Minister purely because he wanted to, which is why we're now stuck with the useless cross-party shower we have now, and indeed with this particular nostalgic item no longer being 'nostalgic' in any way, shape or form. For fuck's sake, couldn't we have had Pipkins back instead?

289. Eye-Wateringly-Coloured Leotard/Tights ‘Uniform’ For Anyone Into Aerobics/Keep-Fit

Ocular irritation-occasioning collision of the eighties fad for all things 'designer', the eighties fad for ostentatious acts of 'self-improvement', and the eighties fad for making sure everyone paid attention to you and what you were doing all the time, resulting in all participants in the suspiciously indefinable pursuit of 'keep fit' being required by unwritten law to don clashing pastel shades, unnecessary headbands, unflattering leggings and the like. Sported by everyone from television fitness guru headcases to sitcom characters comically attempting a couple of star jumps, and sitting neatly with their Swatches and cans of 'Isotonic' sports drinks, until some bright spark realised that you could make even more money with exercise programmes that actually put exercise value above what to wear, and by the dawn of the nineties it was pretty much back to basics. Its most undesirable side-effect, however, was the BBC's game show for smug pillocks Go For It!.

288. Warming Up Your TV

A phenomenon that, if not quite invented, has certainly been overplayed by history, with the popular reminiscence that in the pre-flat screen days you'd have to switch your set on a good three hours before intending to watch whilst a blurry colour-washed Test Card F slowly fizzled into view, as opposed to the reality that you'd have, say, twenty odd seconds of a blue Cheggers looking as though he was being reflected in a funfair mirror before things settled down to normality. It never got in the way of Captain Zep - Space Detective, and that's the important thing.

287. Fluorescent Socks

Pretty much part and parcel of the 'keep fit'-ostentation noted above, intended as a fashion item in their own right but mostly used for providing trend-conscious types with a not-that-subtle-really way of keeping up the 'designer' leanings whilst forced by circumstance into their more sober day wear. Descent from fashionability to ridiculousness was alarmingly rapid, and within months they had fallen to the status of something that the school tearaway would turn up in and get in indefinable 'trouble' for wearing, as depressingly memory-imprintingly celebrated in song by Tony Slattery's schoolroom-based sketch show Behind The Bike Sheds.

286. The Swing-Door Wooden Cabinets That Housed Schools''Big' TVs

There's a lot about Schools Television in this list, but this is actually about the Schools Televisions themselves, and in particular the security-conscious lockable housing for the oversized cathode ray-driven How We Used To Live-disseminators, which can't really have been much of a deterrent for burglars as they only really added a minor amount of weight and size to their overall purloinability, and thus must presumably have been in place as a deterrent against unauthorised viewing by Please-Sir-I-cannot-tell-a-lie-ERIC-is-not-here type stray pupils hoping to get a glimpse of Afternoon Plus, though they'd probably just have ended up getting a glimpse of Jimmiiiiieee and his frisbee instead. Ha ha, serves them right. Or, in Live At The Apollo-ese, "them big tellies with the cupboard... d'y'remember them, with the cupboard... what were they all about?".

Hello, and welcome to yet another selection from the great big list of nostalgic stuff that sees your Bagpuss and raises you Oscar In Rubbidge. And once again we're taking a stroll down Hazy Memory Lane right in the middle of a major political storm, this time about allegations of an affair between influential individuals whose extra-curricular dalliance could undermine the credibility of the entire government. That said, we all knew about Jeremy Hunt and The Bin anyway

285. Today

Newsprint upstart and putative Mail/Express rival flung Wapping-wards in 1986 by shadowy union-foiling Mel Smith/Phil Collins/Bob Hoskins-esque Second-String Press Baron Eddy Shah, making much headline-grabbing play of its American tabloid-style usage of full-colour printing - usually generating the same sort of effect as when Whizzer & Chips'went wrong' and the yellow ended up six millimetres to the right - and indeed American tabloid-style approach to reporting, all of it produced under the banner 'Propa Truth Not Propaganda' and helped in no small part by the enrolment of a pre-spin Alistair Campbell as Political Editor. Ultimately it all proved too 'news'-heavy for its target audience, and after barely a year in print was bought by Rupert Murdoch, who unfortunately neglected to fall into the colour printer and get some six-millimetre-to-the-right yellow seared into his face forever. And we haven't even mentioned The News On Sunday yet...

284. School Milk

...and now we're off into the uncharted realms of meta-nostalgia, existentially-taxingly reduced to 'remembering' stuff that we've already 'remembered', or possibly even 'remembering' previous examples of 'remembering', as this very subject has already come up in the list. Not just a subject that covered similar thematic ground, but the actual literal same one, occupying the coveted number twenty five slot and explored in some detail in this post here. It's the first time this has happened on the list, but almost certainly won't be the last. Still, The Commodore BoglinTM must have its reasons. Anyway, the points made in that original post still stand, as do the mooted Food Of Your Choice-style punishment for George Osborne and indeed the sarky comments about everyone's favourite Twitter Policeman Graham Linehan. But by now you'll all be grumbling that you want the new stuff, so on we go...

283. Rotary Dials On Telephones (Or Indeed Pulse Dialling)

We've already taken a look at outmoded dialling codes here, and the reason they are so indelibly imprinted on the memories of people who probably can't even remember their own mobile number without looking it up is largely down to the clunky mechanism that was used to actually make the archival calls. Except that, erm, there's not really anything that interesting to say about the subject. You turned a dial, it made a sort of numerically-variable pulsing sound, and nine times out of ten you got connected to the person you wanted to speak to. It was just a phone, and you made calls on it, and anyone who is somehow apparently wringing some sense of nostalgia out of it needs to get straight back to Amazon and post some one star book reviews because a goat annoyed them while they were reading it. Yes, you were promised some new stuff in the entry before this one, but we really need something decent to work with first. It's not even possible to work up some whimsy about Mr Wantage and Fred from Trumpton to go with it. Honestly, you'll be getting nostalgic about 'old-skool' cracks in the pavement next. Actually, what is next?

282. Any TV Presentation That Says 'In Colour'

Erm... um... well... they used to say it at the start and end of programmes back in the seventies, partly so that you didn't accidentally think "oh no, this colour thing doesn't say it's in colour, therefore it must be black and white, by that logic it's probably The Adventures Of Robinson Crusoe or something, so I'm not watching, pass the Spangles", and partly because 'colour' was the latest new fangled Eddy Shah-styled thing and they wanted to shout about it, apart from when the 'colour'-savvy technicians went on strike and they had to do everything in black and white anyway. But surely a more list-friendly suggestion would have been those American shows in the eighties that used to say 'IN STEREO (where available)', years before we had anything resembling stereo television over here, On My New Toshiba or otherwise? Yes folks, it seems we're well into the slightly less inspired part of the list. And this one started so well too...

281. The Put-Downs 'Not' And 'Get A Life'

Modish Twitter-predicting argument-closers that didn't require you to actually have an argument of your own, uttered in turn by slavish blockbuster-jumpers who didn't seem to understand how to actually deploy their chosen witty rejoinder, and by walking supervolcanos of insecurity who appeared to believe that those poor deluded fools who liked Star Trek a bit should chill out, get with it and invest in some pastel-hued Americana-riffing clothing, think Fido Dido was quite good, listen to INXS and not really do anything in particular other than not threaten anyone's loudly signposted belonging to the 'crowd' by bringing troublesome hobbies and interests into the equation. See an instalment of The 350 Most Nostalgic Things EVER! that started well, then went really uninspired and difficult to find anything to say about and then suddenly got good again? That's you, that is.

More from The 350 Most Nostalgic Things EVER!, the great big overlong list of several hundred things that nobody ever seems to remember - more than likely because there's not really that much point in ever remembering any of them - but which may well yet prove useful to Boris Johnson in his campaign to capture the hearts, minds and votes of idiots by keeping up the pretence of being a 'bumbling eccentric' with our best interests at heart. Part of this strategy appears to involve trying to out-funny someone who once told a joke that set almost the entire country against him and had national newspapers calling for him to be 'banned' en masse. Yeah, good luck with that.

276. Chinos

Twill-hewn Bratpack-inspired late eighties trouser of choice that went hand-in-machine-sewn-turn-up with the questionable 'casual' fashion choices outlined in the previous entry, about which there's really not that much else to say. Yes, we've hit a pretty uninspired stretch of the list of late, and we're not even a third of the way through. In fact, things got so dull in the last instalment that we forgot to include the usual suggestion of innovative punishments for George Osborne's face. What we really need is for some exciting new technology to come along and liven things up a bit...

279. Quantel

Image-splitting 'morph'-facilitating here-comes-CGI computer-driven video effect much beloved of hard-hitting current affairs shows, replication-riffing sci-fi efforts, and Children's BBC programmes where the presenters needed to 'go small'. More famously seen, however, as primary driving force behind Cyndi Lauper's 'moving around the screen in a box in the direction she's looking in' pop video antics, and that inter-sketch idiocy where a still frame of Russ Abbot and Les Dennis would shrink into the shape of a wine glass that then turned into a sports car and drove off or something. Famously operable only by trained boffins, owing to Command Line-driven programming-based operating system, and measuring about eighteen million feet by six thousand miles, its degradation to eventual status of being done better by free Apps was both inevitable and deserved.

278. TV Tops

Non-partisan attempt at straddling the TV-based-magazine-with-comic-strips-in-it middle ground between the polar extremes of Look-In and Beeb, speech-bubble rendering the likes of Hart To Hart, Knight Rider, Spit The Dog, Metal Mickey, Minder, The Professionals, Little And Large, Marmalade Atkins, Hi-De-Hi!, Fame!, and several other non-exclamation-marked programmes including, most startlingly, Granada's short-lived Spielberg-pisser-on Young Sherlock. Most famously home, however, to a truly insane Adam Ant strip in which he got involved in some weird dreamscape escapade involving possessed schoolchildren and some kind of chess game between the 'gods'. Gamely fought against its more easily get-behindable on-the-bus-or-off-the-bus rivals for a good three or four years, and - if anyone from a The Works-friendly publishing house is reading - long overdue the bumper hardback compilation treatment.

277. Tony Dortie

Proto-'embarrassing dad' down-with-da-kidz TV pop show anchorman whose Paul Leyshon meets DJ Wakner meets It's About That Time For Megablast I'm Outta Here PEACE-eace-eace-eace presentational style enlivened everything from long-forgotten lower-end-of-top-forty-heavy satellite service Music Box to long-forgotten CBBC holiday morning trendsurfing with added features on 'improving' hobbies UP2U, and - most infamously - the notorious Everyone Must Sing Live (Yes Even You 'Shaft') 1991 relaunch of Top Of The Pops as an unwatchable puddle of horse urine. Still, at least presenters actually still had a bit of character back then, even if the 'character' was that animated singing can of Vimto that got all agitated about 'My Mate Elton' being 'flat' in a hip-hop stylee.

75. Slime

Mattel-spewed 'trash can'-conveyed Prostetnic Vogon Jeltz-esque toy gunge of dubious texture and indeed dubious purpose, occasionally embellished with suitably quasi-revolting accoutrements such as eyeballs and worms, fashioned from Esther Rantzen's old con artist slimming aid bete noire Guar Gum, and widely deployed for low budget playground recreations of Alien or The Hammer House Of Horror with a Blake's 7-level effects budget. Certifiably non-toxic to boot, which unfortunately means that forcing eighteen million gallons of it down George Osborne's throat will have absolutely no effect whatsoever.

And we're back with more of The 350 Most Nostalgic Things EVER! - the list that makes Robert Webb's A Load Of Tedious Observations About Clips From Really Obvious Films look like something on BBC3 that nobody's put any thought or attention into. And as we were going to press, news was just emerging that John Whittingdale had openly admitted that he found falling head first into a burning bin full of drawing pins a 'tempting prospect'. Pity, as we'd been saving that bin for George Osborne.

275. Bermuda Shorts

Almost-but-not-quite knee-length shorts briefly adopted by fashionistas in a vague after-effect of the post-'Crocodile' Dundee clamour for all things quasi-Australian - indeed their most prominent exponent was Roo Stewart from Home And Away, though as you can see the only available screengrab shows her from halfway-up-t-shirt-up -but later taken up by fans of Carter The Unstoppable Sex Machine, Kingmaker et al as an anti-authoritarian badge of, erm, not wearing long trousers. And this is the third consecutive entry to feature something fashion-related and, as iconic as such outmoded items of apparel may be, they aren't exactly easy to be interesting or funny about. Still, at least we've not had to cover anything to do with sport (as opposed to 'Sport') as yet...

274. Liverpool FC Being Any Good

Well, that's just petty point-scoring about a percieved lack of point-scoring, and frankly has no place on this list. It's not even really possible to extrapolate any of that football fan faux-nostalgia about Cheese and Bovril Soup and scarves being knitted slightly differently from it. Honestly, haven't any of you lot ever heard of Those Spidery Octopus Things That Rolled Down Windows?

273. Leather Jackets

Evidently not. Honestly, the actual styles of the jackets themselves may have changed with fashion, and their popularity may have waxed and waned (and indeed waxed and waned) with the rising tide of animal rights issues, but has the leather jacket ever dipped in visibility to the extent that it's even possible to think about waxing and indeed waning nostalgic over them? Of course not. Now can we please have no more of this list-confounding clothing-based stuff and move on to something utterly and bewilderingly 'of its time'??

272. Breakdance 2: Electric Boogaloo

That's more like it. Dance craze-centric video shop-friendly attempt at creating a sequel to an already pretty flimsily concieved cash-in Hip-Hopsploitation movie, and with the novelty of - gasp - breakdancing on the big screen having worn off, they had to try and work some semblance of a plot into proceedings, which apparently had something to do with the first movie's rival gangs putting aside their differences to fight the bigger foe. Which in this case was a corrupt city official whom they fought by, erm, breakdancing at him. Quite how or why this could be considered to constitute 'Electric Boogaloo' was never specificed. File next to Street Dance by Break Machine, in a bargain bin in WH Smiths, for the benefit of some posh youngsters looking for 'breakdancing music' about three years after that term meant anything to anyone anywhere. Meanwhile, if any politically motivated youngsters out there would like to try breakdancing at Peter Bone MP, please be our guest. It can only help.

271. Ruby Spears Cartoons

Second division substitute bench licensing-crazy inspiration-deficient animations called into service whenever the money for buying in Hanna-Barbera efforts ran out, usually to be found parachuted into such prestigious slots as first thing on a Saturday morning (some regions only), and later bought in bulk to expand the quality and choice of those Murdoch-owned stations they all keep telling us we'd be better off watching. Notable contributions to our rich cultural tapestry included Plastic Man, Fangface, Heathcliff & Marmaduke, The Puppy's New Adventures, The Mork & Mindy/Laverne & Shirley/Fonz Hour, Pac-Man, Rambo And The Forces Of Freedom, Police Academy The Animated Series, the explanation-defying 'issue'-battling extra-curricular exploits of Mr. T, and the truly inexcusable Rubik The Amazing Cube. No, really. Now let's never sneer at Pipkins again.

Welcome, one and all, to more highlights from The 350 Most Nostalgic Things EVER!, the list that sees that clumsily edited Back To The Future on ITV3 that actually ends up looking more racially dubious rather than less, and asks 'where's Nice Girls Don't Explode these days?'.

270. Gunge Tanks And/Or Booths

An early example of Health And Safety Gone Mad, as the previously free-flowing gaudy unlikely-coloured artificial gloopy flingage so beloved of the likes of Tiswas and How Dare You! suddenly fell under the jurisdiction of stringent regulation imposed on us by those Eurocrats from Brussells, and was from henceforth only allowed to be deployed in controlled and concentrated bursts in an enclosed space, resulting in the installation of corresponding Gunge Tanks and Booths in any self-respecting (though curiously short on self-respect in themselves) television Light Entertainment show. For years thereafter you couldn't move for hapless quiz contestants who didn't know any answers, actors taking the most inappropriate course of action imaginable to promote their new heavyweight drama series, and indeed presenters moonlighting from their own gunge-heavy show, being given a very much ceremonial dunking or shower in the fluorescent custard-like stuff, especially if there was somehow some kind of charity angle to be mined. Then of course public tastes moved on and the Tanks and Booths shut up shop. How quickly they rose, and how quickly they fell. Usually onto the head of a self-proclaimed 'zany' personality where nobody could work out what they actually did. That said, with Michael Gove pushing for withdrawal from Europe with immediate effect, perhaps we could throw him in some gunge to celebrate when it happens. And then not let him back up again.

269. The Barron Knights

Long-serving troupe of pop parodists essentially composed of the 'anarchic' one from The King's Singers' class at school replicated five times, or, if you will, The Black Abbotts if they actually knew any jokes. Began life as a struggling 'beat boom' combo but all that changed when they got annoyed by every single other struggling 'beat boom' combo having a hit except them, and vented their fury in a single in which they put different lyrics to some Rolling Stones songs about how everyone who was actually in the charts should be enlisted in the army with immediate effect. Thus began a lengthy career of putting irreverent new words to recent pop hits, though their Imperial Phase was undoubtedly the late seventies, when a combination of the infinite parody-friendly-ness of punk and disco, countless promo video hookups with the Tiswas crew, and the all-important presence of a 'Tim Brooke-Taylor one' within their ranks saw them score an unlikely run of top ten hits. Thus it was that The Smurf Song somehow became synonymous with escaped convicts, Day Trip To Bangor was puzzlingly relocated to an office party, and Wired For Sound would forever open with the youngster vote-courting couplet "I like tall teachers/I like small teachers/just as long as they're nailed to the ground", though more often than not the retooled lyrics tended to involve them eating Christmas Pudding or something. As the eighties arrived, they tried to 'refine' their approach, starring in their own Innes Book Of Records-plagiarising Channel 4 series wherein a song called Water saw The Tim Brooke-Taylor One get doused with a bucket of water whenever he tried to add high-pitched backing vocals, but to no avail, and by the end of the decade they were well and truly consigned to the variety circuit. The sort of thing, frankly, that gives Jo Whiley nightmares, and for that reason alone they need to be back on primetime ITV with immediate effect.

268. ‘Comedy’ T-Shirts With ‘Naughty’ Highway Code Signs, “I’m With Stupid!” Etc.

Regrettable faux-taboo-busting trend for 'ha ha, we all get it!' nod and wink 'naughty' amusement, communicating to all and sundry through 'code' that the t-shirt wearer was a bit of a 'character' a la TV's Peter Kay. That said, they were more likely to be found being sported by 'tearaway' youngsters swinging from foot to foot in train stations 'late at night' (i.e. about 7pm), those who were so deeply and securely certain of their own inherent funniness that they had to repeat the joke they'd just made (and had invariably stolen from somebody else and got wrong anyway) three times until they were absolutely sure that everyone had heard it and had laughed out of politeness, and people who were obsessed with 'holiday romances' but seemed to spend all of their time sat on a sun lounger in conversation with the same three people. Reached its absolute nadir with the ludicrous 'The Real Mr. Men', whose gallery of inaccurately-rendered perverted Hargreaves-knock-offs didn't even work as parody. Now thankfully as outmoded as those 'Kiss Me Quick' hats that people insist existed at some point, though that said, they never quite scaled the same heights of pointlessness as those t-shirts with a surfing mouse saying 'Loadsamoney!'.

267. American Football Being Popular

In addition to 'actually making programmes that were any good', part of Channel 4's long-abandoned remit for serving minority audiences was buying in suitably unsuitable-for-the-other-channels programming from around the world; not just dramas like Chateauvallon, Brides Of Christ and Empress Wu, or indeed sitcoms like Xerxes and that Israeli thing about the orchestra, but also sport. Yes, actual proper sport, and not that Jerome Flynn's Shoe-Polishing Xtreem sort of thing they palm viewers off with now. The surprise hit was American Football, flung out in a teatime slot to an eager audience of young males fuelled by a combination of disillusion with the not that really joke-about-able 'Whither Soccer?' mid-eighties popularity dip, and Bratpack-instigated fawning over all things 'soda'-quaffing and letterman jacket-sporting. Thus it was that Linebackers, John Madden, Vin Scully and William 'The Refrigerator' Perry came within the Neutral Zone of becoming household names, though this proved to be a short-lived tenure in the national consciousness; by the end of the eighties, 'proper' football had got its act together, and was back at the top of the league of tedious conversations you feel obliged to have with people who ignore the fact that you're personally more interested in Michael Caine films.

266. Hi-Tec Trainers

Never quite scaling the fashion-adherent heights of Nike or Adidas, though certainly more widely favoured than the likes of Ascis Tiger and New Balance, Hi-Tec and their Pi-meets-'The-Symbol'-off-Heroes horizontally jagged emblem were the trainer of choice for many a youngster who wanted to combine sensible footwear, sensible price tags, and sensible avoidance of an unsolicited playground critique from aspirant Trinny Woodalls. Still available, of course, though long since relegated to the status of straight-ahead 'leisurewear', which once again places us in the 'difficult to reminisce about' quandry. Still, this has been a pretty good entry on the whole, at least compared to the recent ones, and like Iain Duncan Smith, I have a belief that I am right about this. I also have a belief that I am right about Iain Duncan Smith's face being able to withstand anvils.

Hello, and welcome to a post that you probably won't get to read, as all signs point towards the likelihood that, by the end of the week, David Cameron's already worryingly amorphous 'opt-in' scheme (which at the time of writing had suddenly mysteriously started encompassing 'self-harm' websites out of nowhere) will have expanded to restrict access to any sites featuring explicit and malicious instances of remembering Spangles. Still, one of the inevitable consequences of such a hastily-concieved popular vote-courting move is that, at the same time as inadvertently restricting access to many legitimate and legal things, it will fail to have adequate powers to cover some areas that do need attention, and with a bit of luck we'll still be able to advocate the use of George Osborne's face to unblock drains that have already had an unsuccessful application of caustic soda without any fear of censorship. Wait, what do you mean it looks like this introduction was written some time ago? Shush, you'll interfere with The Commodore BoglinTM's coding. And now, on with the list...

265. Rainbow Brite

Inexplicably gimmick-deficient gimmicky post-Care Bears cartoon tie-in novelty doll thingymajig, purportedly some sort of defender of 'color' against the forces of monochrominence, assisted in her quest by the nauseatingly eighties-American-pop-star-like song and dance-friendly 'Color Kids'. Originally unleashed on the world via a sickly advert with awestruck youngsters vomiting up a slow-motion toy-plugging rewrite of Over The Rainbow, but subsequently catapulted into animated ubiquity ensuring eventual ousting of the loathesome Cabbage Patch Kids as the ultimate icon of eighties tweeness. And unless we recieve five hundred pounds in used banknotes before next Thursday, we'll be posting a photo of a reader of this blog who once went to a fancy dress party as Rainbow Brite.

264. Simon Bates Explaining BBFC Certificates

VHS-era closest evolutionary relative of The Unskippable Menu, featuring Radio 1's long-running 'Morning World'-spouting 'Golden Hour'-curating 'Our Tune'-proferring Voice Of The People (Though Mainly Voice Of Himself) taking time out from getting so worked up about the latest 'issue' that he audibly folded his arms and declared "nope... not got any more to say... bedda pudda record on" to helpfully explain the new post-The Beast In Heat home video certificates and what they meant for you. After all, chances are that most viewers wouldn't have taken any notice of the title, the cover art, the description on the back nor indeed the actual certificate as plastered all over the sleeve, and would have needed pop music's least influential yet most self-important personality to advise them of the likelihood of stumbling across 'partial nudity or sexual swear words'. An irritant at the time but now inexplicably fondly remembered, not least by legions of weeping truckdrivers. So successful was Bates in this role, in fact, that Radio 1 later employed him to issue a frowny finger-wagging warning all over the start of the radio edit of Prince's Sexy MF.

263. Marshall Cavendish

'Partwork'-crazy publishing phenomenon, specialising in limited run limited interest TV-plugged titles that purportedly coalesced neatly into the free binder with issue one, though in all probability most punters only bought two or three thereafter with large gaps in between. Definitive offerings included dullard's bible How It Works, cassette-accompanied second-division-strip-strewn goody-two-shoes comic Story Teller, and playground sensation-causing guide to getting it on Face To Face, titles that now loom large in the memory in the sense of people saying 'what was that one where you got the free binder and it was about... something?'. Long since rendered irrelevant by the rise of the internet and indeed those partworks where you get a free vanilla DVD of one episode of a TV series per issue and end up paying two and a half times as much as you would for the box set, but since it's been under the financial stewardship of Murdoch since the early eighties anyway, we'll give the artform all the 'nostalgia' it deserves and move immediately on to the next entry.

262. Punks Being Scary

Quite why they were any more deserving of this status than any other youth cult is something of a mystery - though those zany Sex Pistols saying 'barstard' at Bill Grundy might have had something to do with it - but punks loomed larger in the juvenile catalogue of terrifying peers than perhaps any other historical equivalent ever. Indeed, even well into the 'Punk's Not Dead' era, it was not unusual for school playgrounds to reverberate with distressed reports of 'a punk' on the rampage in the vicinity, usually accompanied by Godzilla-esque tales of them headbutting chunks out of buildings whilst a small army of police cowered helplessly behind riot shields. Then some time around Channel 4's celebration of the, erm, Fourteenth Anniversary of Punk, they suddenly lost all of their terror-generating cachet, and even the tabloid press started to view them as some sort of loveable friend-in-need in the fight against the 'dangerous' dogs, ecstasy-addled hordes and obvious hoaxes about 'live' ghost-hunting that had become the new public bete noires. Remember them this way: as a spiky-haired old-skool city smasher hurtling down the street shouting 'RAR RAR RADDL-A-RARR!' in the face of nobody in particular.

261. Monday Night 8:30pm World In Action/Panorama Smackdown

So, will you be wanting your hard-hitting authorities-enraging corruption-exposing investigative journalism with an expanding and contracting globe and that music from out of Un Homme Et Une Femme, or with a circle-encased scary sullen hippy seen from every angle at once and a Joe Cocker-less Grease Band Vanilla Fudging their way through the inspiringly-titled Jam For World In Action? Yes, things were pretty much interchangeable a lot of the time, with more or less the same thing on two channels at a time when we only had four (or even, in fact, three). That was until 1985, when the first stirrings of the 'This Is The Newwwwwws' mindset saw Panorama moved to 9:30pm, kickstarting a long history of it being catapulted haphazardly around the schedules, while World In Action - 'the one with somebody's knackers on the start' according to Marc 'Lard' Riley (read Fun At One if you don't have the faintest idea what any of that's about) - stopped being in action altogether in 1998. Both should of course be reinstated into their slugging-it-out slot with immediate effect, if only because it would give Jeremy Hunt a weekly half-hour of genuine terror. Actually, let's just have one of those brought in anyway

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Stock Footage Invariably Looks Awful

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

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

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

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

Barbara Would Seriously Get It

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

There Are Too Many Fucking Rope Bridges

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

The Bit With The Ice Soldier Unexpectedly Reviving Is Extremely Effective

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Top Of The Box by Tim Worthington - excellent cover art by Graham Kibble-White

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

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

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

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

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

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

RBT1 Fun At The Zoo

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

RBT2 Come To A Party

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

RBT3 Listen With Mother

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

RBT4 Animal Magic

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

RBT5 Jackanory

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

RBT6 Party Time

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

RBT7 The Wizard Of Oz

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

RBT8 Magic Roundabout

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

RBT9 Listen With Mother No.2

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

RBT10 Play School

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

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

RBT12 The Adventures Of Sir Prancelot

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

RBT13 Camberwick Green

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

RBT14 Music Time

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

RBT15 Bedtime Stories

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

RBT16 Mary, Mungo And Midge

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

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

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

RBT18 Adventures Of Parsley

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

RBT19 Play Away

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

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

RBT21 Songs Of Praise For Young Folk

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

RBT101 Bobby Lamb And The Keymen

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

RBT102 The Many Voices Of Peter Ustinov

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

RBT103 Girl On the Test Card

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

RBT104 S'Wonderful

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

RBT106 Jumping To Fame - The Story Of Showjumping Today

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

RBT 107 With Brass And Strings

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

Top Of The Box, the story behind every single released by BBC Records And Tapes (including more from 'Girl' and 'Clown', but don't let that scare you away), is available here.

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

In fairness, most people probably don't even realise that there actually is any missing radio; and to be honest I didn't either until I started research for my books about Radio 1 comedy Fun At One, and discovered that there were a lot of surprising gaps in surprising places. Many of said gaps have since been plugged, and while I'm not that into blowing my own trumpet, it's fair to say that the schedule for Radio 4Extra's 'Comedy Controller' slot might be even more repetitive still without a couple of bits and pieces that I've tracked down and returned to the archives.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

You can find features on many more obscure and long-forgotten programmes, including my top ten of The TV That Time Forgot, in my book Not On Your Telly.

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

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

1. PUT UP SOME OLD-SKOOL DECORATIONS

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

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

2. REMAIN UNMOVED BY HI-TECH CHRISTMAS TREES

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

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

3. RESIST THE FESTIVE LATTE

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

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

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

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

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

5. SCOFF A RETRO SELECTION BOX

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

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

6. CIRCLE YOUR HIGHLIGHTS IN A VINTAGE TV LISTING

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

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

7. DIG OUT NOW - THE CHRISTMAS ALBUM

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"And that's how Jesus was born!" beams James. "But our Nativity story isn't over yet" adds Louise in quick-cut succession. Which is somewhat convenient, as we're about to move on to Part Two...

Suggesting that the BBC Schools department had scant concern about potential 'spoilers', the second part opens with the modelling clay turning into three camel-bound individuals bearing gifts. Back in Bethlehem, Louise duly gives us a quick recap of what was apparently "only half the story" - a little too convenient, given that they've split it into two - before moving straight on to introducing the Three Wise Men. And lo and behold, they (or at least close approximations thereof) actually appear in her field of vision, subtly accompanied both by an off-screen James singing the title number from Follow The Star and by a very poorly patched in, erm, 'star'.

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

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

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

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

For a spot of pantomime with the Rentaghost cast, head here.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Dobbin does, however, prove to be a worthwhile addition to the repertory company and throws himself into rehearsals with aplomb, joining in with a choreographed rendition of Me And My Shadow with worryingly limb-flailing abandon. This is followed by Ethel and the ghosts tearing through the breakbeat-festooned funk-out I've Got A Genial Genie - which appears to be the only entirely original musical number in the whole programme - and Claypole trying out his 'levitation' effect on Marjorie (though he has to be quickly talked out of similarly demonstrating an effect that will 'bring the house down'), before Harold is called to the phone to be given the possibly not exactly bad news that their props have been damaged in storage and the show will have to be cancelled.

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

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

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

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

To find out how Bod tackled the subject of Christmas entirely within its own 'in-universe' house style, head here. Or for a more academic (with added paper puppets) take on The Nativity courtesy of BBC Schools show Watch, try here.

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

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

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

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

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

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

There goes Bod. And here comes...?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Staggeringly, given that the programme had been running since 1964, this is the first Christmas-themed edition of Play School that still exists; equally staggeringly, it was actually the third time that they'd 'done' Christmas in colour, having moved over to full chrominance in tandem with technologically leapfrogging parent channel BBC2 in 1968. That said, the Play School production team had done almost literally nothing to facilitate this beyond changing the type of cameras that they made the programme with, and while Hilary Hayton's original house design may well have been given a subtly garish reddish-on-reddish tint, the rest of the programme is still very much still in the style of Play School as it had been in the Swinging Sixties, set design, theme music and all. And that's pretty much where we join presenters Brian Cant and Julie Stevens, caught in a pivotal cultural void somewhere between the decline of The Waltham Green East Wapping Carpet Cleaning Rodent And Boggit Extermination Association and the rise of Slade.

Play School opened on 24th December 1970 with Julie bringing in a basket full of presents for Brian, which she then attempts to hide in strategic places around the tinsel-strewn set. Needless to say, Brian shows up mid-concealment and starts asking all manner of awkward questions, leading to some amusing hiding-things-behind-back physical comedy and conspiratorial whispering of present-stashing updates directly into the camera. Eventually Brian goes off to look for some red ribbon, giving Julie time to complete her parcel-stuffage and then set the day and date on the calendar, which comes accompanied by some faint bonging on bells.

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

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

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

...Square Window?

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

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

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

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

For Christmas in the company of Play School alumnus Bod, head here.

Meanwhile, you can find a huge feature on Play School in my book Not On Your Telly.

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

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

Great Pop Things

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

States Of Mind

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

Absolute Beginners

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

'Ziggy' From Grange Hill

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

"It's My Lunch, Terry"

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

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

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

The Real Pin-Ups

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

'He Decamped To Berlin With Eno'

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

Transmission, Transition (Repeat Until Students' Heads Explode)

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

Bowie Buskers

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

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

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

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