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Come With Me Now, Into The Swirling Mists Of Human Inadequacy...
By late 1991, with their stint on Radio 4's weekly topical satire show Week Ending thankfully now behind them, Stewart Lee and Richard Herring were in considerable demand as writers. Significantly,...
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Not On Your Telly (But On The Kindle Store)
Not On Your Telly, a book collecting some of my features on lost, forgotten or censored television shows, is now available on the Amazon Kindle Store. Doctor Who fans may be interested to know that...
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Plays For Yesterday
Those who have been following this blog for a while will know how obsessed I am with sixties television and music, and in particular how the ephemeral nature of popular culture back then means that...
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The BBC Radio Collection
From Monday to Friday this week, Bob Fischer's show on BBC Radio Tees will be featuring a track from a BBC Records And Tapes album or single chosen by me. There are a couple of rarely-heard treats in...
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This Is The Camberwick Green Procrastination Society/Now On The Kindle Store...
The Camberwick Green Procrastination Society, a book collecting some of the ridiculously lengthy diversions I've gone on about archive TV and pop music when I really should have been working on...
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Christmas With BBC Records And Tapes
RESL124 Orville's Song/I Didn't - Keith Harris And Orville (December 1982)Although a TV regular since the mid-sixties, ventriloquist Keith Harris’ career didn’t really take off – ironically – until he...
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Dear Father Christmas, I Would Like The Following (In 1986)
"I don't want a lot for Christmas", Mariah Carey once sang. This is an adage well worth adhering to. Personally I am only hoping to receive a Camberwick Green Village Playset with the street lamp...
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The Road To Rawlinson End
Following the demise of The Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band, the various former members set about launching solo careers. Viv Stanshall seemed to have more difficulty in making a firm decision on a musical...
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Well At Least It's On The Kindle Store
Well At Least It's Free, a book collecting some of my features on archive TV and pop music, is now available on the Amazon Kindle Store. Doctor Who fans may be interested to know that it includes huge...
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Christmas With Children's ITV: Quincy's Quest
Quincy's Quest is one of those television shows that large numbers of people seem to remember for no readily obvious reason. Shown by ITV on 20th December 1979, in a 7.00pm Thursday evening timeslot...
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All Dead, But Still Alive
We’ve no way of knowing for certain what Gordon Murray was doing on 22nd December 1965, but we can take a fairly good guess. Chances are he was editing Mrs Honeyman And Her Baby, the thirteenth and...
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Christmas With Children's ITV: Magpie, Christmas Eve 1976
Over the Christmas of 1995, BBC Radio 4 broadcast a fantastic documentary series called Trumpton Riots, which took a light-hearted yet in-depth at Children's TV of the sixties and seventies. One...
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When The Levity Breaks
Whatever innovations the emergence of 'serious' rock in the late sixties may have brought with it, they certainly didn't include an abundance of zany knockabout slapstick horseplay.Back when pretty...
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Just What Is It That You Want To Do?
This is an interview about Higher Than The Sun that I did with Creation Records as part of their celebration of twenty five years since the release of Screamadelica. It turned into quite a wide-ranging...
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One Pill Makes You Gerald Harper
Mention long-lost Cable TV channel Bravo, and most people will remember it as some sort of nightmarish collision of FHM and TV Zone, pitching the likes of Street Hawk and The New Avengers alongside the...
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Looking Back At... The Dalek Invasion Of Earth
Back in 1964, The Daleks really were The Masters of Earth. You might think it's a big event when the BBC unveil the trailer for the trailer for the 'minisode' preceding the new series of Doctor Who,...
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The Truth That Killed
The first major news story that I can really clearly remember wasn't, as you might not unreasonably expect, a space mission or a sporting event. It was one that fascinated and terrified me in equal...
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Thanks For Dropping By
This look at the mid-eighties ITV sitcom Girls On Top - an undervalued and often forgotten early attempt at putting 'alternative' comedy in a mainstream timeslot - was originally written for the...
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Sweet Georgie Fame
I'm quite often asked how and when I cultivated my obsession with sixties jazz. I'm equally often asked why I did, and how come nobody staged an intervention. Well, as bewildering as it might sound, it...
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The Party Is About To Begin
So, Music From BBC Children's Programmes. Which, in fairness, was what I was originally looking for when all that jazz business got in the way. Like all good stories, this starts once upon a time. Like...
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