Another instalment of The 350 Most Nostalgic Things EVER! - the increasingly yet also not actually increasingly lengthy trawl through the definitive list of obsolete cultural ephemera that nobody ever mentions on Live At The Apollo. "UGH BLOCKED" - Graham Linehan.
315. The King’s Singers
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One-time inescapable vocal sextet forged in the suspiciously levity-discouraging environs of Cambridge University's Music Department, who took the whole choral thing to a new and more Russell Harty-savvy audience by indefatigably appearing in the musical breaks on chat shows and BBC2 arts programmes, sporting mysteriously colour-coded jacket linings and either covering some recent pop hit in an amusingly formal style, or else warbling some self-penned witticism about trying to park in a multi-storey car park. So all-pervading was their reach that in 1978 they were even asked to write and perform a song detailing the imminent changes in BBC radio frequencies - a major technological sea-change in those far off days - which combined tedious tuning instruction information with wince-inducing witticisms about Radio 3 being renamed 'Wonderful Radio 3' when it took up Radio 1's old position on the dial. Their stock has fallen considerably since then - there was no corresponding ditty to accompany the transition from BBC Choice to BBC Three - but apparently they are still performing, albeit with none of the original original original members still in the lineup. They probably have a witty song about that too.
314. Horace, Of ZX Spectrum Fame
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In a world of believeable multi-facted fully-rounded computer gaming figureheads, where queues will form around the block for the latest Lara Croft revival but nobody ever offers any cigars to poor old Pac-Man, it's hard to credit that home gaming's most emblematic characters were once slightly less than one dimensional. But slightly less than one dimensional they were, and for ZX Spectrum owners in particular, they didn't come much more emblematic than a certain creation of Australian software company Melbourne House. Horace, basically a perma-peraumbulating featureless blue face on legs, first appeared in 1982's not-even-thinly disguised Pac-Man clone Hungry Horace, in which he had to dodge disconcertingly PC-predating 'Park-keepers' whilst making his way around a maze in search of not at all Power Pill-like bells that rendered the Parkies incapacitated and prone to Horace-devourment. It was legally different because the maze had grass around it. Then came Horace Goes Skiing, an epic outing of near O Lucky Man! proportions for a ZX Spectrum game, charting his ambulance-occasioning progress across a busy road (populated by Melbourne House lorries delivering either 'SOFT-WARE' or 'HARD-WARE' depending on which direction they were travelling in), followed by an even trickier level in which he had to weave his randomly directional way between some slalom flags. And finally, the trilogy was completed with Horace And The Spiders, a new-fangled scrolling platform effort in which he is bewilderingly entrusted with the task of ridding 'Spider Mountains' of their tyrannous eight-legged occupants. Perhaps choosing a new name might have been a useful first step. After this, Horace disappeared into 16k oblivion, his position as home gaming mega-celeb usurped by Bugaboo The Flea, Kokotoni Wilf, and all those other names that still live on in any conversation about games you could never complete.
313. Adrian Juste
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Back when Radio 1 wasn't afraid to be wacky, they didn't come much wackier than Adrian Juste. Always the sort to enthusiastically pose for publicity photos whilst standing in a dustbin and shrugging, he dominated Saturday afternoons for nigh on twenty years, interspersing the top pop waxings with alarmingly-paced helium-voiced sketch zaniness mixed in with bits of old comedy records - a style once nailed by Jonathan Ross as "here's the sound of a man falling down a hole [cartoon-style 'falling' whistle]... I wonder what... Tony Hancock would have to say about that? 'Oh blimey'..." - and was pretty much the closest that homegrown radio ever came to those standard issue American 'looks like those clowns in congress did it again! [HONK HONK]' platter-spinners. For maximum impact, his show was usually followed by straight-faced 'serious music' magazine show mumblings. Massive in its day but genuinely starting to look a little out of place by the time the dreaded Matthew Bannister came along, and Juste was shown the door in a rather undignified fashion without a word of thanks for his years of service. Meanwhile, in a certain book called Fun At One, he commented "it's very unhealthy to let politicians, and this preponderance of celebrity nonentities we have these days, get away with the crap they spout uncontested... we all need a laugh every now and again... at their overpaid, mollycoddled expense". And frankly, he couldn't be more right about that. Philip Davies MP, we're coming for you...
312. BBC1's Old 5:35pm Slot Before Neighbours Came Along
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For years, the BBC never really knew what to do with that awkward gap between the end of children's programming and the start of the evening news, trying and usually failing to bridge the two with all manner of family-skewed light comedy and game shows, most famously and, bish and trivvock, enduringly Ask The Family, Robert Robinson's little quiz for, if you will, all of the family, if ever a family as was. Ironically, the timeslot's heyday came in the mid-eighties, at the exact point that Michael Grade decided to obliterate the familiar template and bring in wall to cardboard wall Neighbours, at which time it was playing rotating host to amongst others Oddie-fronted waaaaah-Bodyform-theme-songed facts and figures oddity Fax, snotty finger-wagging 'keep fit'-pushing look-down-nose-athon Go For It!, amusing-for-three-minutes sitcom import Charles In Charge, amusing-for-two-minutes sitcom import It's Your Move, highbrow Rippon-equipped quiz standoff Masterteam, and of course First Class, the Debbie Greenwood-presented game show in which teams of 'all rounder' schoolkids were invited to display their knowledge-fuelled dexterity on such subjects as films and pop music, try and guess the identity of the celebrity not particularly well hidden behind the 'spinning gold disc', and make good on their prowess at a specially adapated arcade game; initially our Number 340 smash Track And Field, then latterly Paperboy. Then, of course, Grade's daughter complained that she never saw what happened after that cliffhanger where there was a bloke hiding in Daphne's cupboard, and the rest was... well, not so much 'history' as 'only watching whenever Melissa Bell came back into it'. 'Classic' timeslot now reinstated with the arrival of Pointless, presented by TV 'Pal George Osborne'.
311. Public Information Films
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Yes, yes, Tufty, Charley, Reginald Molehusband, Jimmieeeeeeeee, The Spirit Of Dark And Lonely Water, Richard Massingham, Dusty, Claude The Caravan, Green Cross Code Man, Jo & Petunia, Thingy Who Lit The Gas Fire When His Parents Told Him Not To, Duncan Preston Chatting Up Schoolgirls, John Altman Drink-Driving, There Were Three Of Them In A Boat, Apaches, Building Sites Bite, Protect And Survive, Cross Ply And Radial, Weird Thing Apparently About Tightrope Walking Over A Railway, the whole sodding lot of them... once they were fascinating edge-of-the-memory glimpses of an age that was simultaneously both only just out of chronological reach and the sociocultural equivalent of a million years ago, and frozen-in-time snapshots of fashions and lifestyles that were somehow familiar and yet never really existed. Then they started being in every single bastard list show in existence and latterly became the basis for all manner of tiresome chortle free-ness about 'if you drive Edward Heath at speeds in excess of 20mph on a country lane, think about the local Porridge Tramp before you dip your headlights'. And if anything ever was going to induce tiredness in motorists or indeed in anyone, it's that. Anyway, you still get them now, only about more niche-targeted subjects like the 'don't make a drunken speed-snorting show of yourself at parties' one screengrabbed above, and if that means nobody's warning Milo Yiannopolous not to pick up a lit sparkler, then all to the good.
315. The King’s Singers
One-time inescapable vocal sextet forged in the suspiciously levity-discouraging environs of Cambridge University's Music Department, who took the whole choral thing to a new and more Russell Harty-savvy audience by indefatigably appearing in the musical breaks on chat shows and BBC2 arts programmes, sporting mysteriously colour-coded jacket linings and either covering some recent pop hit in an amusingly formal style, or else warbling some self-penned witticism about trying to park in a multi-storey car park. So all-pervading was their reach that in 1978 they were even asked to write and perform a song detailing the imminent changes in BBC radio frequencies - a major technological sea-change in those far off days - which combined tedious tuning instruction information with wince-inducing witticisms about Radio 3 being renamed 'Wonderful Radio 3' when it took up Radio 1's old position on the dial. Their stock has fallen considerably since then - there was no corresponding ditty to accompany the transition from BBC Choice to BBC Three - but apparently they are still performing, albeit with none of the original original original members still in the lineup. They probably have a witty song about that too.
314. Horace, Of ZX Spectrum Fame
In a world of believeable multi-facted fully-rounded computer gaming figureheads, where queues will form around the block for the latest Lara Croft revival but nobody ever offers any cigars to poor old Pac-Man, it's hard to credit that home gaming's most emblematic characters were once slightly less than one dimensional. But slightly less than one dimensional they were, and for ZX Spectrum owners in particular, they didn't come much more emblematic than a certain creation of Australian software company Melbourne House. Horace, basically a perma-peraumbulating featureless blue face on legs, first appeared in 1982's not-even-thinly disguised Pac-Man clone Hungry Horace, in which he had to dodge disconcertingly PC-predating 'Park-keepers' whilst making his way around a maze in search of not at all Power Pill-like bells that rendered the Parkies incapacitated and prone to Horace-devourment. It was legally different because the maze had grass around it. Then came Horace Goes Skiing, an epic outing of near O Lucky Man! proportions for a ZX Spectrum game, charting his ambulance-occasioning progress across a busy road (populated by Melbourne House lorries delivering either 'SOFT-WARE' or 'HARD-WARE' depending on which direction they were travelling in), followed by an even trickier level in which he had to weave his randomly directional way between some slalom flags. And finally, the trilogy was completed with Horace And The Spiders, a new-fangled scrolling platform effort in which he is bewilderingly entrusted with the task of ridding 'Spider Mountains' of their tyrannous eight-legged occupants. Perhaps choosing a new name might have been a useful first step. After this, Horace disappeared into 16k oblivion, his position as home gaming mega-celeb usurped by Bugaboo The Flea, Kokotoni Wilf, and all those other names that still live on in any conversation about games you could never complete.
313. Adrian Juste
Back when Radio 1 wasn't afraid to be wacky, they didn't come much wackier than Adrian Juste. Always the sort to enthusiastically pose for publicity photos whilst standing in a dustbin and shrugging, he dominated Saturday afternoons for nigh on twenty years, interspersing the top pop waxings with alarmingly-paced helium-voiced sketch zaniness mixed in with bits of old comedy records - a style once nailed by Jonathan Ross as "here's the sound of a man falling down a hole [cartoon-style 'falling' whistle]... I wonder what... Tony Hancock would have to say about that? 'Oh blimey'..." - and was pretty much the closest that homegrown radio ever came to those standard issue American 'looks like those clowns in congress did it again! [HONK HONK]' platter-spinners. For maximum impact, his show was usually followed by straight-faced 'serious music' magazine show mumblings. Massive in its day but genuinely starting to look a little out of place by the time the dreaded Matthew Bannister came along, and Juste was shown the door in a rather undignified fashion without a word of thanks for his years of service. Meanwhile, in a certain book called Fun At One, he commented "it's very unhealthy to let politicians, and this preponderance of celebrity nonentities we have these days, get away with the crap they spout uncontested... we all need a laugh every now and again... at their overpaid, mollycoddled expense". And frankly, he couldn't be more right about that. Philip Davies MP, we're coming for you...
312. BBC1's Old 5:35pm Slot Before Neighbours Came Along
For years, the BBC never really knew what to do with that awkward gap between the end of children's programming and the start of the evening news, trying and usually failing to bridge the two with all manner of family-skewed light comedy and game shows, most famously and, bish and trivvock, enduringly Ask The Family, Robert Robinson's little quiz for, if you will, all of the family, if ever a family as was. Ironically, the timeslot's heyday came in the mid-eighties, at the exact point that Michael Grade decided to obliterate the familiar template and bring in wall to cardboard wall Neighbours, at which time it was playing rotating host to amongst others Oddie-fronted waaaaah-Bodyform-theme-songed facts and figures oddity Fax, snotty finger-wagging 'keep fit'-pushing look-down-nose-athon Go For It!, amusing-for-three-minutes sitcom import Charles In Charge, amusing-for-two-minutes sitcom import It's Your Move, highbrow Rippon-equipped quiz standoff Masterteam, and of course First Class, the Debbie Greenwood-presented game show in which teams of 'all rounder' schoolkids were invited to display their knowledge-fuelled dexterity on such subjects as films and pop music, try and guess the identity of the celebrity not particularly well hidden behind the 'spinning gold disc', and make good on their prowess at a specially adapated arcade game; initially our Number 340 smash Track And Field, then latterly Paperboy. Then, of course, Grade's daughter complained that she never saw what happened after that cliffhanger where there was a bloke hiding in Daphne's cupboard, and the rest was... well, not so much 'history' as 'only watching whenever Melissa Bell came back into it'. 'Classic' timeslot now reinstated with the arrival of Pointless, presented by TV 'Pal George Osborne'.
311. Public Information Films
Yes, yes, Tufty, Charley, Reginald Molehusband, Jimmieeeeeeeee, The Spirit Of Dark And Lonely Water, Richard Massingham, Dusty, Claude The Caravan, Green Cross Code Man, Jo & Petunia, Thingy Who Lit The Gas Fire When His Parents Told Him Not To, Duncan Preston Chatting Up Schoolgirls, John Altman Drink-Driving, There Were Three Of Them In A Boat, Apaches, Building Sites Bite, Protect And Survive, Cross Ply And Radial, Weird Thing Apparently About Tightrope Walking Over A Railway, the whole sodding lot of them... once they were fascinating edge-of-the-memory glimpses of an age that was simultaneously both only just out of chronological reach and the sociocultural equivalent of a million years ago, and frozen-in-time snapshots of fashions and lifestyles that were somehow familiar and yet never really existed. Then they started being in every single bastard list show in existence and latterly became the basis for all manner of tiresome chortle free-ness about 'if you drive Edward Heath at speeds in excess of 20mph on a country lane, think about the local Porridge Tramp before you dip your headlights'. And if anything ever was going to induce tiredness in motorists or indeed in anyone, it's that. Anyway, you still get them now, only about more niche-targeted subjects like the 'don't make a drunken speed-snorting show of yourself at parties' one screengrabbed above, and if that means nobody's warning Milo Yiannopolous not to pick up a lit sparkler, then all to the good.