Nostalgia, comics and Nostalgia and Comics

 

Nostalgia and comics are two topics that I’ve returned to many times over the nine years I’ve been writing this blog, so it’s surprising to realise that I haven’t, to date, mentioned the shop of the same name in Birmingham, where I spent a fair amount of time (and money) during the late 70s and early 80s. If ever there was a shop that did ‘exactly what it said on the tin’, Nostalgia and Comics was it (although I always found their stock leaned more heavily towards comics rather than nostalgia). Although most people will remember the shop in the Albany building on Smallbrook Queensway, it started life across the road in very cramped quarters on the corner of Hurst Street subway. The subway is long gone, but the building is still there.

It was here, some time in 1977, that I acquired a copy of the first ever Eagle comic for the princely sum of £5. I’m not even sure if the shop had a name at this point in time: to me it was simply ‘the comic shop.’ It didn’t last long in its cramped quarters – within a year, it had relocated into the subway itself, occupying a long, narrow retail unit beneath Smallbrook Queensway. From here, in September 1977, I acquired a few more vintage copies of Eagle.

I’ve never been a fan of American comics or their merchandising off-shoots, so much of the shop’s stock held no interest for me. It was, however, the first place I’d seen selling vintage copies of British comics like Eagle, TV21 and others, alongside odd annuals, TV and film tie-in paperbacks and occasional vintage toys. It was in hope of securing similar items that I took to visiting the shop on a reasonably regular basis.

I was keeping a diary in the late 70s, and although I neglected to log the date on which I acquired that number one Eagle, I recorded a few more visits to the shop over the years, often accompanied by my friend Tim Beddows (who would later go on to form the Network DVD label). A couple of typical entries:

Friday 31 March 1978: ‘Go to comic shop. Tim gets T Birds cards and returns later for ‘The Spotlight’. This gives a good indication of the shop’s eclectic stock at this point in time: The Spotlight was two volumes of the actors directory dating back to 1969. If you’ve never seen one, imagine something the size of an old telephone directory filled with page after page of promotional photographs of actors, categorised according to type: leading men, younger leading men, etc. These were very unusual items to find. The Thunderbirds cards were from the Somportex bubble gum series issued in the mid 1960s.

Friday 29 June 1979: ‘See T. Birds game and S. Car (Supercar) annual in comic shop.’ It was hard to find old toys from the Gerry Anderson series: one occasionally turned up examples at jumble sales and junk shops. In this case, it was Waddington’s board game of Thunderbirds. The Supercar Annual was a fairly hefty price, perhaps as much as £10, and I passed on it – at a jumble sale it would have been 10p. As a comparison, the same edition sells today for £15-£30 on ebay. I did, however, return a few days later for the Thunderbirds game.

By 1980, the shop had moved again, to what would become its definitive trading base in the Albany building. Now operating over two floors, the ground floor was devoted to American comics and brand-new merchandise, whilst the upper, mezzanine floor concentrated on vintage items. Whenever I visited the shop, I would make straight for the upper floor. I already knew bearded Phil Clarke, the shop’s owner, by sight, and now I made the acquaintance of Colin who manned the upstairs counter, a friendly guy who, unfortunately, also happened to collect Gerry Anderson merchandise. This gave him first dibs on anything cool that came into the shop, and, like old man Steptoe, he would keep the best items for himself. This was going on as early as June 1980, when my diary records a visit to the shop when I was shown a very nice, boxed example of the Lincoln International battery-operated Stingray: 'shown' being the operative word – It wasn’t for sale. As compensation, he did allow me to buy a vintage Thunderbird One pencil sharpener! 

One other item I managed to prise out of their hands, for around a tenner was a ‘Codeg’ branded Dalek moneybox, a ‘new old stock’ item recovered from a shop, in mint and boxed condition, which proved to be a decent investment: an example is currently listed on eBay for over £300. This same diary entry also named the shop for the first time.

The ones that got away: the shop actually allowed me to purchase these two 'new old stock' items, but anything else was strictly for looking at and not for sale.

As with Stingray toys, so too with copies of TV Century 21. Colin was evidently putting a set together for himself, and again got the pick of whatever came into the shop. I don’t blame him, I’d have done the same myself. Around this same time, I managed to walk away with a copy of number 6, but there was no sign of issues 1-5. As time went by (and Colin, presumably, filled the gaps in his collection), it became easier to find TV21s for sale, mint and bagged copies selling for £2.50 each. I also bagged a fair few Eagles, choosing them for their covers rather than trying to complete a run. As you can see below, the price of these items crept upwards over the years.

In 1983, I began working at an advertising agency in Birmingham which, as luck would have it, was located in Western House, just across the road from Nostalgia and Comics (the original shop unit was now a sandwich bar which I visited most lunchtimes). I took to popping across to N&C a couple of times each week, and the TV21s in my own collection slowly began to mount up. Once, finding a particularly large pile in their display cabinet, I left a deposit and nabbed the lot for myself. These are all worth a lot more now than I gave at the time, but perhaps the best buys I made were a couple of the TV21 summer extras, and the first three editions of Lady Penelope comic, which command very high prices today.

Aside from TV21s and occasional ‘look at this, it’s not for sale’ Gerry Anderson toys, the most interesting item in the shop as far as I was concerned was an original page of artwork from the Dan Dare serial ‘Terra Nova’, which was framed and mounted on the wall. There seemed little point in enquiring if it was for sale, and I wouldn’t have been able to afford it anyway. 

Eventually, the company I was working for relocated to Birmingham’s Jewelery Quarter on the other side of town, and with only an hour for lunch, it was hard to get to the shop and back and have time to browse their stock. By the early 90s, I was working at home, and visited on fewer and fewer occasions. Eventually, the upper sales floor was roped off and no longer accessible to the public, and the vintage British comics that had once been a staple of the shop’s stock disappeared altogether.

The shop is still there today, and still selling comics from the same unit at 14-16 Smallbrook Queensway. It was bought out by Forbidden Planet a long time ago, and was probably trading under that name the last time I crossed the threshold, whenever that might have been. Today it’s called Worlds Apart, which as a name has a sort of intriguing fantasy aura, but is, dare I say, a world apart from the ‘tell it like it is’ branding that was Nostalgia and Comics. Somewhere, I’m sure I still have an old Nostalgia and Comics bag, complete with the shop’s logo in the old ‘Ripping Yarns’ typeface (actually called ‘Algerian’). If I can find it, and scan it, I’ll post it here, but if not, a Google search will turn up a copy for you...

Inflation at work... copies of Eagle in their original N&C bags and price tags, as sold circa early 80s.

Summer Schedule: Festival 77

 

The BBC’s Festival 40 must have been considered a success, because exactly a year later, the corporation did it all over again, presenting another retrospective season, this time under the umbrella title of Festival 77. The Radio Times for the week in question uniquely relegated its familiar masthead to a corner, making room for a display of twenty five vintage covers. This time, taking its cue from the Queen’s Silver Jubilee, the trawl through the archives was a celebration of 25 years of BBC television, spanning 1952 to the then present day.

Viewers expecting the BBC to make good on the comparative dearth of truly populist material in the previous year’s retrospective were to be disappointed: if anything, Festival 77 was even more elitist than its predecessor. Over twenty-five nights, a different programme was presented as representative of a different year in the broadcaster’s history. Once again, a compilation programme served to introduce the season: Thanks for the Memory (Sunday 31 July, 20.10 BBC2) adopted a vox pop approach, drawing on the memories of viewers and contributors to television, once again illustrated with a choice helping of clips from the archives. My diary noted the inclusion of the original Z Cars titles, along with what I referred to as ‘other silly programmes’ one of which, was, if memory serves, the famous 'Spaghetti Harvest' film presented by Panorama as an April Fool's joke back in 1957. But if this was a lightweight selection, the season itself would prove to be anything but. 

With so much early television going out live, the choice of material available from the 1950s was decidedly limited, and the first evening’s offering was a compilation of the old television newsreel, Retrospect 1952 – a kind of Rock and Roll Years without the rock and roll, good nostalgia fodder for anyone alive at the time, but of no special interest to myself (I opted for the film The Magus over on BBC1). The programme was, like everything else in the 1977 season, prefaced with an introduction from the broadcaster and war correspondent René Cutforth. The same evening saw a one-off revival of the discussion programme Late Night Line-Up, which solicited contributions from David Frost, Dennis Potter and others, and considered topics including the development and importance of the television play from the 1960s. 

Tuesday evening’s selection took the form of two interviews from 1953, with Aneurin Bevan and Adlai Stevenson – hardly the kind of thing that viewers would have held dear in the memory – but Wednesday night brought the season’s first real gem in the form of Nineteen Eighty-Four: the legendary Nigel Kneale/ Rudolph Cartier production of 1954. I made a special point of watching this. It was black and white, blurry (no kind of restoration having been attempted), and with the static, slow-moving production values typical of its era – but it was still powerful stuff. My diary didn’t afford much room for comment aside from the laconic note ‘is good’ (my diary entries often sound as if they’d been written by Manuel out of Fawlty Towers…)

Radio Times listing for 1984 – the picture quality wasn't as bad as their Schaflined image suggests.

The following night’s selection, from 1955, was hardly typical of mid-50s television, comprising a nostalgic celebration of the tenth anniversary of Victory in Europe. Cue Vera Lynne, Richard Murdoch, Jack Warner et al… On Friday evening, At Home (1956) was a pair of outside broadcasts visiting famous people in their domestic surroundings, and offering up the sharp cultural contrast of the Archbishop of Canterbury and Kenneth Horne. 1957’s offering again eschewed contemporary content for another return to the war years, Men in Battle: Arnhem. Important television it undoubtedly was, but hardly the stuff of which nostalgic retrospectives are made…

1958 was represented by an early ‘fly on the wall’ documentary, presenting a ‘vivid portrait of community life in the East End’, long before Albert Square became inextricably associated with that particular corner of the metropolis. 1959’s offering was the crime drama Who, Me?, with a cast that included Lee Montague and Z Cars’ Leonard Williams; while from 1960 another two episodes of Face to Face were dusted off, presenting interviews with Evelyn Waugh and Adam Faith. From here, it was downhill to populist comedy fare with Here’s Harry representing the BBC’s output from the year of my birth, 1961. Back in 1977, I still thought Harry Worth was vaguely amusing, and it was worth tuning in if only to see the ‘legendary’ title sequence where he gets himself up against a shop window and does that thing with his arms and legs. The episode concerned his attempts to get a record request played on Housewives’ Choice.

Thursday night’s selection has been seen on BBC4 within the past few months: Pop Goes the Easel (1962) was described as ‘an exciting early film by Ken Russell from the Monitor series’, and looked at the work of four ‘pop artists’ (Radio Times’ commas, not mine), Peter Blake, Derek Boshier, Pauline Boty and Peter Phillips. I was tuned in again on Friday 12 August for That Was the Week That Was, a programme I’d first heard about in last year’s compilation. TW3 was very much a programme whose reputation preceded it. Having clocked up 37 episodes across two series, its run was abruptly terminated in December of 1963 on the pretext of 1964 being an election year – and heaven forbid that a piece of televised satire might have an influence on the way people voted. If the establishment had been running scared, it did them no good, as the Tories were ousted anyway – but it all goes to show how far we’ve come since those days – and not in a favourable direction.

By 1964, Beatlemania was at its height and the media were increasingly obsessed with the fads, fashions and opinions of teenagers, which may explain the next entry in the Festival 77 line-up. Ten Years After was a return visit to a group of London teenagers from differing backgrounds who had been the subject of a 1955 Special Enquiry film. Following the broadcast, René Cutforth spoke to some of the participants, 22 years on from the original film. ITV pursued a similar line of enquiry with their own series, Seven Up, that premiered the same year as the updated BBC documentary. Coincidence or not?

Sunday 14 August saw the seminal drama Up the Junction given an airing. The BBC’s original black and white production was a good deal more earthy and raw than the colour feature film of 1968, which I had yet to discover. Up the Junction has become something of a touchstone when discussing the neo-realist ‘kitchen sink’ dramas of the late 50s and early 60s, and still delivers a clout even today.

Monday took viewers back to 1966 for a early episode of Till Death Us Do Part. First broadcast on 20 June 1966, the episode was now clocking up its third airing, following a repeat run in September of the same year. I was vaguely familiar with Alf Garnett, but not a special fan of the series – I could never warm to Johnny Speight’s acerbic humour – but I made a point of watching this vintage piece of television. It has since been shown on BBC2 in 1997 and on BBC4.

1967’s representative programme was In Two Minds, a hard-hitting drama tackling the subject of schizophrenia – again, I passed on this one, but was back in front of the set for All My Loving, Tony Palmer’s 1968 film about pop music, and one of the first documentaries ever to interrogate the subject in any depth. From 1969, Royal Family was a famous ‘fly on Buckingham Palace wall’ documentary, described by the Radio Times as a ‘revelation’. Shock horror for viewers at the realisation that the Windsors were just a regular family like any other. Pull the other one, auntie…

On Friday 19 August, viewers were afforded a trip back to 1970 and the seaside in the form of Bird’s Eye View, an aerial tour of the coast with commentary from Sir John Betjeman. From this affable travelogue it was straight into the gutter for the harrowing Edna, the Inebriate Woman, a warts and all (warts and nothing else?) portrayal of a drunken down-and-out, portrayed by Patricia Hayes. I should probably have seen this, if not in 1977 then on its subsequent repeat run during another archival season in 1986. This was the kind of television play about which grown-ups were heard to mutter darkly and disapprovingly.

Having been passed over for the previous year’s line-up, Morecambe and Wise finally made the grade for 1972’s archival offering. The comedy continued on Monday 22 August with the first episode of Whatever Happened to the Likely Lads, a welcome repeat as far as I was concerned. I’d last seen it on a repeat run in December 1974 which already felt like ages ago. It is now…

It was back to much heavier and challenging fare on Tuesday 23 August with Joey, a dramatised true story about a man with severe brain damage who, despite facing significant communication difficulties had managed to dictate his own life story. The following night, Just Another Saturday, from 1975, presented a film portrait of a marching band. This was followed on Thursday 25 August by the most unusual item in the whole season – a 1976 edition of Noel Edmonds’ Multi-Coloured Swap Shop, the only occasion on which the programme was ever seen outside of its customary Saturday morning slot, and the only edition ever to be given a repeat screening. The episode, described in the Radio Times as a ‘condensed’ edition, included contributions from Softly, Softly’s Frank Windsor and Norman Bowler, motor racing champion James Hunt, and the Electric Light Orchestra. Bringing the season right up to date on Friday 26 August was a special new edition of Horizon, looking back at the past 25 years of the documentary strand. And with this, Festival 77 sank gracefully below the horizon…

These two consecutive seasons of archival exhumations may have led some to suspect that this would now become an annual treat on BBC2, but it was not to be. Aside from the usual repeat runs for series of not-so-distant vintage, there would be no further mining of the archives for almost a decade, when BBC television marked its fiftieth anniversary in 1986. The corporation would acknowledge notable dates like Z Cars’ twentieth anniversary in January 1982 by exhuming odd episodes (and once, memorably, picked out an episode of Maigret from which Rupert Davies was almost entirely absent!) but on the whole, archival material was thin on the ground and most often found an outlet in compilations like the short-lived but well meaning Windmill. Today, real rarities occasionally find their way to the screen – just recently BBC4 viewers were treated to four episodes of Andy Pandy – but the kind of archive seasons we saw in the 1970s and 80s are less common. On the other hand, where it was once considered enough to show a single episode, today’s viewers are more likely to find entire series available to watch, such as 2022’s welcome repeat for the rarely seen 1970 production Roads to Freedom, which resurfaced as part of a comprehensive drama retrospective.

With many vintage items having become available on home media, and still more on YouTube, the value of retrospective seasons is no longer quite what it was in the 1970s when there was no other means of access to the archive. Are we in a better place? Undoubtedly. But it would still be nice to see another season of repeats with the diversity and rarity value of Festivals 40 and 77.

Summer Schedule: Festival 40

The timing couldn’t have been better. 1976 was the year in which I first began to take a keen interest in archive television, scarcely realising that some thirty years later I’d be making a living from it. Early in the year, I’d picked up on repeats of ITC’s criminology series Strange Report, and our local commercial station, ATV, had run a short Saturday night series of vintage American series including Rawhide and 77 Sunset Strip under the umbrella title ‘Play it Again.’

Now it was the turn of the BBC to open up their archives. The television service was celebrating forty years since its inception in 1936, and a season of archival material was presented on BBC2 spanning the month of August. This was a rare treat for viewers – in the mid 70s, it was rare to find vintage programmes in the schedule, especially material from the days of black and white broadcasting, and some of the series shown over the coming weeks had not been seen in over a decade. I immediately took an interest – but Festival 40 was far from being a populist celebration of television. It was, more to the point, a celebration of BBC television, and almost from the outset, one could sense that this was no mere retrospective – this was a season with an agenda.

Of the thirty-two archival items presented under the Festival 40 banner, nineteen were serious documentaries or arts programmes. There were just four comedies, two light entertainment items, two single plays and, rather bizarrely, the World Cup Final of 1966. With such a preponderance of heavyweight material, Festival 40 tells us a lot about how the BBC saw itself back in the mid 70s, with the Reithian philosophy still very much at the forefront – a public service broadcaster with a duty to inform, educate and entertain, maintaining a haughty distance from the populist, lightweight alternative of ITV.

It’s almost more instructive to consider those programmes that were omitted from Festival 40 than those that made the final selection: there was no Dixon of Dock Green, no Doctor Who, no Quatermass – although clips from all of them were shown in a compilation, Forty Years, that kicked off the season – no Morecambe and Wise, no TW3, next to nothing of the corporation’s prolific drama output, and absolutely no children’s television. As a summary of the BBC’s first forty years, this was an extremely partial selection. But it was, after all, going out on BBC2 – and BBC2 had standards to maintain.

The celebrations got started on on Sunday 1 August with Forty Years, described by the Radio Times as ‘a raid on the archives of BBC Television.’ Spanning two and a half hours, Forty Years afforded an entertaining flypast of the BBC’s television output that boded well for the coming retrospective, packed as it was with rare archival material. I was particularly intrigued to see the famous piece of continuity that had preceded an episode of the serial Quatermas II, with the announcer’s grave warning that the programme was ‘not suitable for children or for those of you who may have a nervous disposition’. This was all new to me – I’d never even heard of Quatermass before. What did it mean, anyway? The mere word was enough to send you behind the sofa, nervous disposition or not.

From this taster, it was on to the main course of complete programmes from the archive, as over the coming four weeks one or two items were served up each evening on BBC2. First on the menu was a 1964 episode of Michael Bentine’s surrealist sketch comedy It’s a Square World, a series of which I held no recollection whatsoever. Speaking to the Radio Times, Bentine said, in all modesty: “Looking back I suppose the series was a pioneer, containing the essence of almost every comedy show that followed it - Monty Python, The Goodies and Ronnie Barker have all acknowledged their debt.” Well, he would say that, wouldn’t he? I watched out of curiosity but found it mostly forced and unfunny. Of all the programmes the BBC could have chosen to begin a festival of television, it was an odd choice.

Odder still was Tuesday night’s selection – the entire World Cup Final from 1966, running from 9pm till 11pm. A sporting highlight maybe, but hardly the kind of thing one expected from a festival of television. This was not the colour film record of the event, but a telerecording of BBC’s own black and white presentation, with commentary from Kenneth Wolstenholme, who recalled the event in a Radio Times feature.

On Wednesday evening, we were served up two of the BBC’s drama successes. From 1965, came an episode of Dr. Finlay’s Casebook; but of more interest to me was the 1963 Z Cars which followed it. Neither episode had ever been repeated, nor have they been seen since. Today, there are a good many vintage Z Cars to be found on YouTube, but the episode chosen for Festival 40, Police Work, isn’t one of them. It was a hard-hitting and surprisingly violent example of the series: constables Smith and Weir, in Z Victor One, are dispatched to bring in a witness at the demand of the coroner. Arriving at an isolated cottage, they are attacked by a deranged individual weilding a shotgun. With Jock wounded and Fancy having twisted his ankle, their only hope lies in Z Victor Two (it was unusual for both patrol cars to feature in a single episode).

The following day’s offering was a double header of material from well before my time: the panel game What’s My Line, followed by an edition of the landmark interview series Face to Face, featuring WML panellist Gilbert Harding, who famously broke down in sobs when interviewer John Freeman asked a question about his mother. This was the kind of stuff to get your mum and dad misty eyed, but for me, it was too far before my time. 

So far, the season had concentrated on comedy, drama, and light entertainment, but more serious items were waiting in the wings. Friday 6 August’s offering was Your Life in Their Hands, an episode from the medical series that took viewers into the operating theatre for the very first time. The Radio Times listing gave some background to the series which had run from 1953 until 1964, describing how, at the outset, it had been the cause of no little controversy, debated in the House of Commons and criticised in the British Medical Journal. It also described a moment of ‘unintentional comedy’ captured during the filming of a gall bladder operation. I think I’ll take their word on that…

Saturday evening offered up a performance of Benjamin Britten’s two-act opera Billy Budd, originally broadcast in a strand called ‘Opera 625’ back in December 1966. It was precisely the kind of thing one would never have expected to see on ITV – or, for that matter, on BBC1. Festival 40’s ‘agenda’ was beginning to emerge...

What else lay in store? Thus far, the season had been comprised entirely of black and white material, but Sunday evening’s selection, A Walk in the Sun, was a mere six years old, and in colour. The film profiled death-defying high wire walker Karl Wallenda, whom I’d seen some years earlier on Blue Peter. Two years later, he would be killed attempting to walk between the two ten-storey towers of a Puerto Rican hotel. 

It was back to black and white for Monday evening’s offering, the original Comedy Playhouse pilot The Offer, which had spawned the series Steptoe and Son. I’d become a fan of Steptoe over the last few years, and I watched with interest, although I found the 1962 original tame by comparison with the more raucous tone of the 1970s episodes. Tuesday evening served up a documentary called Dispute, which, according to the Radio Times, ‘used new techniques to follow for the first time a Trade Union dispute exactly as it happened…’ Groundbreaking, certainly, but it was hardly the kind of television that had kept viewers glued to their sets.

On Wednesday 11 August, with commendable logic, the season presented an iconic example of The Wednesday Play, Cathy Come Home. I’d seen clips of this dour misery fest during the introductory evening, but as an evening’s entertainment for a fifteen-year-old, it really wasn’t my cup of tea. The following evening’s selections comprised an Omnibus exploration of William Blake’s poem ‘Tyger Tyger’, followed by an intimate portrait of everyday life in Sheffield, Morning in the Streets. I tuned in for neither of these – I was over on ITV watching the movie The Flight of the Phoenix. Friday 13 August brought a Horizon film examining the work of the BBC’s natural history film makers, in complete contrast to Saturday’s offering of The Billy Cotton Band Show. I was less interested in this, but made sure to be tuned in at 9.50 for a vintage edition of Frost Over England which included the now legendary sketch about class distinction, performed by Ronnies Barker and Corbett and John Cleese.

Sunday evening’s selection was, for me, another turn off – ‘three weeks in the life of eight riflemen bound for a routine four-month tour of duty in Belfast’ as the Radio Times described it. This, undoubtedly, was television documentary at its most challenging, but in the mid 70s, we were getting enough of that kind of thing on the nightly news. It wasn’t all doom and gloom: Monday evening brought a ‘special edition’ of Monty Python’s Flying Circus.

We were now into the middle of August, and the season had a fortnight left to run. Tuesday 17th looked back to a Malcolm Muggeridge profile of the work of Mother Theresa of Calcutta, and although I had a relative in a convent in France, I wasn’t of a mind to watch this kind of worthy offering. Neither was I tuned in on Wednesday 18 August for Harold Pinter’s Tea Party. Dr. Who fans might have taken a passing interest for the involvement of producer Sidney Newman, but on the whole, Festival 40 was proving to be a much more highbrow season than I’d been expecting. No matter: that day’s edition of the TV Times brought the welcome news that Patrick McGoohan’s mind boggling series The Prisoner would begin a repeat run commencing next week. That was much more my kind of thing…

Festival 40 maintained its elitist tone with an episode from Kenneth Clark’s Civilisation on Thursday evening. According to the Genome listing, this episode, which can be viewed today on iPlayer, is ‘available for years’: I’m not sure if that’s reassuring or depressing…. Also available to watch on iPlayer is the next Festival 40 offering, which was taken from the Man Alive documentary strand and told the tragic tale of a teenage drug addict.

Saturday 21 August offered The Golden Ring, a documentary charting a gramophone recording of Wagner’s ‘Götterdämmerung’. I was wrestling with the classics doing my music ‘O’ level, but I ignored this in favour of Starsky and Hutch over on BBC1. Sunday 22nd brought The World in a Box, a compilation of foreign programmes chosen by BBC producer Anthony Smith, which was rather stretching the remit of a season intended to celebrate the BBC’s own television output. The programme had originally been shown back in 1968.

More populist fare was the order of the day on Monday 23 August, which afforded me my first ever look at Tony Hancock’s television series. The Blood Donor has long been acknowledged as a classic, but unfortunately the Radio Times chose to draw attention to the fact that Hancock, having been in a minor car accident a few days prior to the recording, had been reading his lines from an autocue… armed with this knowledge, it was glaringly obvious what he was doing.

One of the very best items in the whole season followed on Tuesday evening, and I didn’t even bother to watch. Back in 1976, I had John Betjeman filed under ‘old buffer’. He was, after all, the poet laureate. His elegiac Metro-Land was hardly a vintage item, being only three years old at the time, but had been hailed back in 1973 as an ‘instant classic’. The film, featuring some imaginative camerawork from John McGlashan (who shot most of the BBC’s M.R. James ghost stories), was a celebration of suburbia, illustrated with visits to some architectural curiosities and other wonders to be found along the route of the Metropolitan Railway. I discovered it many years later and have revisited it on numeous occasions. Somewhat surprisingly, it is not currently available on BBC iPlayer.

No BBC retrospective could be complete without a contribution from Dennis Potter, and Wednesday 25 August saw a repeat for his 1966 play Where the Buffalo Roam. I had yet to learn that Dennis Potter was considered an important figure in the history of television drama, and wouldn’t get to see this play until another retrospective many years later. Today, I’m not as convinced by the Potter legend as I once was – much of his work was, to my eyes, solipsistic, tricksy and neurotically focused on a narrow field of vision. In case that sounds too judgemental, let me also mention that my diary entry for this particular evening records that I was watching Jeux Sans Frontiers and Are You Being Served (rolls eyes and exits stage left…)

Thursday 26 August was the big night, but not on BBC2 – over on ITV, The Prisoner was back for a repeat run at 11pm, and earlier in the day, I’d got to see a first run colour episode of Stingray. And did I mention The Time Tunnel? Small wonder I missed out on tonight’s Festival 40 offering, L.S. Lowry, RA, a film in which the recently deceased artist spoke about his life and work. As with Potter, so too with Lowry, an artist whose appeal I’ve never truly understood – and that dreadful pop song didn’t help matters either.

Festival 40 was by now drawing towards its end. Friday 27 August saw a repeat of the 1964 documentary reconstruction of the battle of Culloden, Saturday night offered up two terpsichorial items, and Sunday wrapped up the season with What Do You Think of It So Far, a brand new discussion programme presented by David Frost and examining the impact of television on people’s lives.

It would be interesting to know what the average viewer made of Festival 40, and I’ve no doubt there were a few letters to the Radio Times on the subject. For me, it provided rare chances to see early episodes of Z Cars and Steptoe and Son, and I’d have welcomed more of this kind of material, a season focused on entertainment rather than excellence. Looking back over the month-long retrospective, I’m rather more concerned about what it says about my own viewing habits then and now. Given the same selection of material today, I’d still make more or less the same choices. I think, frankly, it’s too late now to do anything about it…

Summer Schedule: Jack the Ripper

 

Friday late evenings during the summer of 1973 were the time to revisit dark deeds from Victorian London when Softly Softly’s detective duo of Charlie Barlow (latterly departed to star in his own spin-off series) and John Watt were given the unusual task of fronting a unique dramatised documentary investigation into the case of Jack the Ripper.

I don’t know what made me sit up and watch this series – I wasn't a special fan of Softly, Softly – but I did just that, and stuck with it for the full six episodes, catching the last of them in the TV lounge of the Blackpool guest house where we’d gone for our annual summer holiday. Commencing on Friday 13 July at 9.25pm, the programme occupied the ‘post 9.0 news drama’ slot lately vacated by the espionage thriller series Spy Trap. For the record, the evening’s programmes on BBC1 had included Top of the Pops at 6.55, a repeat of Star Trek’s most reviled episode Spock’s Brain at 7.30, and The Blackpool Tower Circus at 8.15. The Radio Times featured the series on the cover for the 7-13 July edition, and a feature inside looked at the case in some detail.

I’m sure I’d already heard about history’s most notorious serial killer, whose name had long since entered the annals of popular folklore, but until now he’d been little more to me than just a name. The series, scripted by Softly... stalwarts Elwyn Jones and John Lloyd, was based on actual witness statements, and stuck closely to the facts so far as they were known at the time, with speculation (usually offered by Watt) kept to a minimum. Seen today, it makes for rather static and slow-paced viewing: the action cuts between scenes of Barlow and Watt assembling the available evidence and coutroom set-ups where various experts and witnesses speak the actual texts of those who gave evidence at the time. There are occasional re-enactments of short scenes, but there’s no gore and no violence depicted on screen, which might have disappointed viewers hopeful of something more dramatic. As an Amazon reviewer puts it, the series is ideal for those with a serious interest in the subject, and was a far fry from the kind of exploitative treatment that often attends the Ripper elsewhere in the mainstream media.

Stagey it may have been, but the series still managed to conjur up a convincingly claustrophobic atmosphere suggestive of old London. The opening titles were mounted in the form of a Victorian playbill, whilst the end credits played out over an antique engraving of the city. Composer Bill Southgate supplied the memorable theme which, with its leering bass clarinet runs, lent a suitably menacing air to the proceedings (Southgate had also arranged the title music for the most recent series of Softly, Softly).

The series certainly left an impression, as for years afterwards I continued to associate long summer evenings with those televisual trips back to Victorian London. Unlike many similar literary endeavours, the series had no new theory to prove, as Jones and Lloyd were at pains to point out in the introduction to the paperback adaptation, although the final episode did hint at the possibility of the Ripper’s having been a member of the aristocracy or even a minor royal, an idea which has been proposed elsewhere by writers on the subject. 

Barlow and Watt did it all over again a couple of years later for the 1976 series Second Verdict, in which the detectives coralled the evidence from various historic crimes and unsolved mysteries including the Lindberg kidnapping, the burning of the Reichstag and the Gallic serial killer Henri Désiré Landru. Rather than merely reporting the facts, the detectives considered possible miscarriages of justice and, as the title suggested, often questioned the official verdicts on the crimes under investigation. Once again, Bill Southgate’s sinister theme topped and tailed each episode. Second Verdict also marked the TV swansong for the Barlow and Watt double act, 14 years on from their debut in Z Cars, although Watt would return later the same year in the final series of Softly, Softly, and turned up in the last ever Z Cars two years later.

Somewhat surprisingly, given the BBC’s track record for retaining videotape masters, Jack the Ripper has survived intact – although the series was shown only once in the UK. It spawned a book, The Ripper File, by Jones and Lloyd, published some two years after the series was shown. For anyone with an interest in the case, the book is still a very useful summary of the events of 1888, drawn from the same primary source materials that formed the basis of the series, and free of sensationalist or exploitative content. The text was, uniquely, adapted back into a film, serving as the source for 1979 movie Murder by Decree which saw Sherlock Holmes (Christopher Plummer) investigating the Whitechaper murders.

The series would not be available to view today without the DVD release which appeared in 2019 from the late, lamented Simply Media. Sadly, there was no follow up release of the equally impressive Second Verdict, and with the demise of the only worthwhile DVD labels focused on obscure British television, it’s unlikely we’ll ever get to see it now. The series evidently still exists, judging from the huge number of frame grabs to be found on imdb.

Jack the Ripper was an interesting experiment, bringing fictional detectives to bear on a real life unsolved murder case. Having Barlow and Watt on board probably smoothed the way for viewers who might have felt less inclined to watch a straightforward documentary; and the sober, restrained presentation of the facts and witness statements must have satisfied anyone with a serious interest in the case. Speaking to the Radio Times in 1971, Elwyn Jones said that, in a sense, the writers’ credit on the series was ‘untrue’: ‘All that John Lloyd and I have written are the Barlow and Watt exchanges. All the rest of the words already existed. Besides, I couldn’t write as well as that to save my life.’ 

Nine Decades of Penguins

 

An Evolution in Design

I’ve had Penguins in my home for decades. I refer, of course, to the famous paperback imprint, founded in 1935 by publisher Allen Lane. According to legend, he was inspired to launch the brand after being dismayed at the lack of quality reading material available to purchase on the platform at Exeter St. David’s station. In the mid 30s, paperbacks were nothing new. The format had been popularised by Ward & Lock in the mid 19th century, with ‘yellowback’ volumes sold principally at the railway outlets of bookseller W.H. Smith. By the early 30s, however, paperback books had acquired a rather seamy reputation, with the format becoming dominated by pulp crime thrillers often dressed in lurid covers.

Lane, who was already managing editor of publishers Bodley Head, invested his own capital to launch a range of paperbacks that would bring quality literature to a mass audience at an affordable price: the first Penguins were sold for 6d each. The Penguin name was, reputedly, suggested by Allen’s secretary, the characterful bird supposedly epitomising the brand’s ‘dignified but flippant’ attitude to publishing. Borrowing an idea from the German publisher Albatross, Lane adopted a colour code for his paperback series: orange for general fiction, green for crime, cerise for travel and so forth. By the 1960s, the range had standardised on the orange fiction and green crime titles, with blue set aside for the non-fiction offshoot Pelican and grey/orange for the upmarket 'Modern Fiction' titles. A range of children’s books was launched in 1940 under the Puffin brand.

I collected Penguins for many years, sometimes buying them as much for their covers as the contents. For around a decade, Penguin covers had been synonymous with innovative design and radical illustration styles, and I began to pick up examples wherever I found them – this being an era when a secondhand paperbacks could be bought for pennies. From 1961 to 1972, Italian designer Germano Facetti was head of design at Penguin, and it was under his watch that the imprint’s covers reached a high watermark of style and imagination that has never been equalled since. In 1961, a new cover grid was launched, replacing the vertical and horizontal formats that had been the norm since the 1930s and 40s. Polish designer Romek Marber created his now legendary cover layout, using mathematical principles derived from the so-called ‘golden ratio’. Retaining the austere approach to typography of Penguin’s earlier covers, Marber’s grid cleared the way for illustrators to give free reign to their imaginations, and some fairly wild ideas resulted – many of them from rising star Alan Aldridge, who would himself become chief designer in 1965.

Three different editions of the same novel, illustrating the evolution of Penguin covers. Far left, a classic 'Marber Grid' example from 1962: centre, 1967, and far right, a return to austere typography (1970)

Aldridge’s cover illustrations now look very typical of their era – his drawings often embodied the art nouveau and Victoriana influences that were spreading through popular culture as a whole. But he didn’t care for the Marber Grid, and quickly did away with it. Under his watch, an ‘anything goes’ approach prevailed: aside from the Penguin logo in the top left corner, the rest of the cover was now a blank canvas for designers and illustrators. Photographs had been a rarity on Penguin covers before the mid 60s, but now began to appear with increasing frequency. Aldridge may have been an inspired illustrator, but under his tenure, Penguins lost many of the asethetic qualities that had set them apart from rival publishers. The departure of Facetti in 1972 signalled the end of the true classic era in Penguin covers, and by the end of the decade there was only the orange spine left to tell them apart from others on the booksellers’ shelves.

Today, Penguin is owned by Random House, but the imprint continues, and the orange logo is now standard across fiction and non fiction titles. 

To illustrate this article, I’ve pulled a selection of Penguins off my bookshelves, which give a good idea of how the cover designs evolved (click on the images to see them at a larger scale). The earliest examples show the original horizontal grid, and the earliest iteration of the famous logo – the ‘double penguin’ on Angel Pavement being an unusual variant. By the 1950s, a new vertical grid was in use, and illustrations were beginning to appear, usually of a sketchy or woodcut style. Doctor in Love is an unusual example of a hardback cover being adopted for a paperback reprint: all of Richard Gordon’s Doctor novels received this same treatment. The Great Escape, pre-dating the Marber Grid, is an anomaly that doesn’t conform to any of the then standard layouts. The End of the Affair is pure Marber, whilst The Urban District Lover fairly screams late 60s with its ‘Goodies’ style font and Alan Aldridge illustration in a stereotypical Heinz Edelmann ‘Yellow Submarine’ manner.

Across the middle row we see the evolution of Penguin Classics, from austere orange and white/ woodcut illustration, through the grey and orange phase of the early 60s, ending with three Marber Grid examples from an era in which covers often made use of fine art. Strangers on a Train is a post-Facetti example of the ‘anything goes’ era, whilst on the bottom row we find two classic green crime covers, both making use of the Marber Grid (the Hundred Gibbets cover is derived from the end frames from the BBC TV Maigret series). Following these, we have five examples of science fiction, three of them employing the short lived purple logo. Time and Again is another very recognisable Alan Aldridge cover. Finally, from the late 70s, and still employing a variant of the Marber grid, an example from the Pelican non-fiction range.

Summer Schedule: Stingray

Often to be found in the TV schedules for midsummer mornings, Gerry Anderson's Stingray is, for many of us, indelibly associated with broadcasts during the school holidays. This overview looks back at the programme's history on British terrestrial television, from 1964-1995...

ITV were a year behind BBC1 in bringing children’s programming to summer holiday mornings, and the various regions did it at their own pace: in the Granada area, for example, episodes of Stingray had been airing for weeks before the school summer holiday of 1973. Here in the Midlands, ATV’s summer morning children’s schedule got started on Monday 23 July with episodes of The Forest Rangers and Captain Scarlet. The following day brought Stingray at 9.55am, but it was academic as far as I was concerned – our school hadn’t yet broken up for the holidays. My brother, away from school with German Measles on Thursday 26 July, was able to tape the next episode, Ghost Ship, on a cassette. From that same summer season, another off-air recording survives in the form of Deep Heat (30 August). ‘Nothing to do with rheumatism, just water’ gagged continuity announcer Kevin Morrison. Having initiated this repeat run during the summer, ATV picked it up again at Christmas, and continued the following summer. Episodes were shown in the same eccentric order that ATV had used since its original broadcasts.

Stingray had debuted on ATV Midlands in October 1964 in the unusual timeslot of 7.00pm – and although I can recall seeing at least one episode of Fireballl XL5 in this same slot a year earlier, I have no memory of these 7pm Stingrays. From 3 February 1965, the programme was moved to the more child-friendly time of 5.25pm, where it would remain until 1970. Through 1965, 66 and 67, Stingray was seldom off air, and even at the age of six, I was soon bored with the endless repetition and didn’t always bother to tune in. If Stingray itself wasn’t being shown, then you could always bank on seeing a commercial for the ‘Seajet’ ice lolly tied in to the series.

The ubiquity of Gerry Anderson’s Supermarionation series in ATV’s children’s schedules had not gone unnoticed at the Independent Television Authority, and the Midland operator was warned that it had been giving undue prominence to these programmes (produced by its parent company) at the expense of more diverse childrens’ programming from other regions. This ‘warning off’ seems to have happened around the end of 1967, when there was yet another Gerry Anderson production to add to the mix in the form of Captain Scarlet. 

During 1968, the repeats were curtailed, taking both Thunderbirds and Stingray off the air for at least twelve months. Thunderbirds returned in early 1969, with a repeat run that was replaced in December by another round of Stingray. By this time, some episodes were onto their fifth broadcast, but after nearly two years off air, I was happy to sit down and watch the series again, with the run extending all the way to 10 September 1970.

The next time Troy Tempest and co saw action was in the summer holiday repeat run of 1973… officially, at any rate. However, a number of episodes had been shown unscheduled on Saturday mornings during 1972, seemingly as a trial run by ATV. Discovering these repeats by accident, I saw at least two episodes, without realising that I was missing similarly unscheduled episodes of Fireball XL5. What were ATV playing at? The first episode I caught in these ‘secret’ screenings was Subterranean Sea, (01.04.72) usually shown as the fourth in the series, suggesting that the broadcasts had been going on for several weeks. It was followed by Loch Ness Monster (08.04.72), but thereafter the broadcasts seem to have stopped.

By 1975, Stingray had been added to ATV’s stash of film filler material, and was being stripped into the Saturday morning madness of Tiswas. I was unaware of this until a friend tipped me off, and quite annoyed at missing out, as I was now able to watch in colour. I finally got to see an episode on Saturday 12 July, only for it to be the last in the series…

1975’s summer morning schedule was a Supermarionation-free zone, but Stingray would be back in what had now come to feel like its natural home in the summer of 1976. As usual, the broadcasts commenced a week or so before we broke up for the holiday, and the first episode I was able to catch was Loch Ness Monster on Thursday 29 July. By this time, we were taping the episode soundtracks off air, and the half dozen we saw that summer went on to become very familiar from the many times those tapes got replayed. I can remember listening to Raptures of the Deep around this time and thinking how cool it would be if the tape recorder could play back images as well as sound. I scarcely realised that home video taping was just around the corner...

Back on ATV, another episode, Tune of Danger, made it to air on New Year’s Day 1977. The 1976 screening was far from complete, but there would be no more summer holiday episodes for the time being. Another ‘filler’ episode, Stand by For Action, escaped into the wild on the morning of Saturday 15 November 1980, shown as an unscheduled replacement: luckily, I was able to track down a video recording through a friend. The broadcast was unique in that it contained a commercial break – there had been no ad breaks during Stingray since 1967 – and the adcap on this recording is now the sole surviving example of the series’ colour end of part caption (it was recreated in high definition as part of the Network DVD blu-ray release in 2022).

TV Times listings for Stingray episodes, 1973-76

ATV never showed Stingray again. By the time the series came up for another repeat run, in 1982, the regional operator had been re-christened Central. This time, brand new 35mm prints had been struck and I had a VHS machine with which to preserve them. The prints were excellent quality, some of the best that have ever been broadcast, and superior to the masters that were used for subsequent DVD releases. Unfortunately, the scheduling was haphazard. Six episodes were shown on Saturday mornings commencing 8 April, before a layoff until Monday 5 July, which saw the series return to its by now traditional summer morning slot. Subterranean Sea went out at 11.15am, followed by another nine episodes over the coming weeks, ending with Man From the Navy on Monday 13 September. Further episodes trickled out over the next twelve months, but the series was still far from complete when broadcasts fizzled out during the summer of 1983. The pristine 35mm prints were never seen again.

For its very last airing on ITV, Stingray was back in a summer morning slot, and back on 16mm film – very likely the same copies that had been used for the 1969-70 run, as the prints were in dire condition. Here in the Midlands, the super-sub’s ITV swansong was launched on Monday 20 July 1987 at 9.30am, but the episodes shown were frequently not those that had been advertised in the TV Times, so anyone who has compiled titles from that source should beware. This time, rather than one a week, episodes were shown every weekday morning. I taped them all and finally managed to assemble a complete set. It had only taken five years – thanks, ITV!

In 1992, Stingray did the unthinkable and defected to BBC2, following the success of Thunderbirds on the network the previous year. To young viewers it was effectively a brand new series, and the BBC had high quality masters available for transmission. Beginning on Friday 11 September, 29 episodes were shown at 6pm before the series took a break, returning in a Sunday lunchtime slot from 3 October 1993. From here onwards, the series resumed its summer filler status, with episodes stripped across weekday lunchtimes beginning in August 1995. The show reached its earliest ever slot on Monday 9 October 1995, when it went out at 7.35am… all of which has taken us a long way from those summer holiday broadcasts of the 1970s.

Stingray’s over-exposure on ITV in the 1960s had dampened my enthusiasm for the series, and by the time of the 1973 repeats, it was far from being my favourite of the Gerry Anderson canon. Still, any Supermarionation series was better than nothing, and repeat runs over the coming years served to rekindle my interest in the show, especially when I was finally able to watch them in colour. By 1980, I was also watching the handful of episodes that had been made available on 8mm film, but I was more impressed when my friend Tim Beddows lucked upon a solitary colour 16mm print… so much so that I even noted down the date and time when we watched it, 3.40pm on Friday 16 May 1980. The episode, Rescue From the Skies was one I hadn’t seen since the 1970 repeat run, and was in excellent condition with no visible scratches or colour degradation. When Tim’s personal film archive was summarily disposed of, I made quite sure to rescue this one print. I don’t have the means to project it, but it’s a nice thing to own...

Summer Schedule: Top Cat

This week, my delve into summer holiday scheduling considers the British TV career of that feline finagler Top Cat. More usually to be found in the early evening, T.C. and the gang finally turned up in the weekday morning summer schedule in 1977. It was the show’s fifteenth year on air.

Top Cat had debuted on BBC Television back in May 1962, under its original title, but only four episodes were shown before a rapid name change took place: someone at the BBC evidently realised that the corporation was inadvertantly advertising a brand of cat food. From now on, the Radio Times billing read ‘The Boss Cat’, and the magazine was careful to avoid mentioning him by name – the episode Sergeant Top Cat was coyly billed as ‘Sergeant T.C.’ It was all a bit silly really, and of course there was nothing to be done about the famous song, or the episode dialogue, which remained unchanged – but the BBC wouldn’t have it any other way and ‘Boss Cat’ it would remain until 1999 when the show moved across to BBC2.

In the United States, Top Cat had premiered eight months earlier, in black and white, on the ABC-TV Network on Wednesday 27 September 1961 at 8.30pm. Its appearance in this primetime placement came as a direct result of the success of The Flintsones in capturing the so-called ‘kidult’ audience in the same timeslot, a year earlier. Early reviews for Top Cat were generally favourable, but opined that, to hold its own in a primetime 8.30pm slot, the scripts would need to be considerably sharper. The resemblance to The Phil Silvers Show was noted, but critics were more inclined to cite Damon Runyan as an influence – the American journalist and short story writer was noted for his Manhattan settings and sharp-talking, streetwise characters with cool names.

Unlike The Flintstones, Top Cat proved a disappointment in the ratings, and although a further four episodes were ordered in December 1961, and announced in the trade press, the show was cancelled after just one season. It went on to perform much better in a syndicated Saturday morning slot.

The original 26 Top Cat episodes were shown by the BBC in two batches of thirteen, with the first run ending on Wednesday 8 August 1962. TC and the gang returned on Saturday 15 December for another thirteen-week run, which ended with four episodes as yet unbroadcast – it seems safe to assume that these were the four additional episodes that ABC had ordered back in December 1961, namely Top Cat Falls in Love, The Tycoon, The Grand Tour and Choo Choo Goes Ga-Ga. These episodes would not appear in any of the subsequent BBC repeat runs, with the exception of The Grand Tour, which finally made it to air during the series’ fourth broadcast in 1971, and Top Cat Falls in Love which debuted in 1972. The complete thirty-episode series would not be shown in full until 2005.

I was aware of Top Cat from a very early age: it’s conceivable that I saw it right from the very beginning, as my parents had owned a TV set since autumn 1961. Curiously, it wasn’t until 1971 that I noticed the alternate title, picking it up initially from the billing in the Radio Times, where I mistakenly assumed it to be a different programme. As anyone who saw the BBC broadcasts back in the 60s and 70s will know, the beginning and end titles had been rather scrappily modified to remove the title card, which was replaced in the opening sequence with a static graphic, while the end titles were marred by a jump-cut. These ‘BBC prints’ remained in circulation for decades, and appear to have had their last outing in 1989 before the series decamped to BBC2.

The BBC's alternate title card

The series’ history on the BBC is long and quite complicated. Its first repeat run commenced on Thursday 3 October 1963, and my earliest memories probably stem from these broadcasts, which ran through till Wednesday 25 March 1964. There were no further screenings until 1967 when a repeat run began on Wednesday 22 February. The BBC had adopted its own episode order, which was quite at variance with the American broadcasts, and this ‘UK running order’ was more or less adhered to for the first three complete broadcasts. Tuesday 15 August 1967 was to be Top Cat’s last sighting on British television for four years. The fourth run got started on Friday 6 August 1971, including a premiere for The Grand Tour on 3 December. After a three month break, the series returned on 16 March 1972, when the Radio Times billing rather risibly gave the title as ‘Boss Cat Falls in Love’: the episode was being shown by the BBC for the first time. This week also marked the first appearance of Top Cat in any of my diaries and unlike the Radio Times, I gave the episode its correct title.

A random episode was shown on Thursday 14 September, before yet another repeat run got going in March 1973. By this time, any attempt at maintaining a consistent episode order had been abandoned, and the broadcasts lasted for just sixteen weeks. A further batch appeared in April of the following year, which rounded off the series’ fifth time on air. From here onwards, things get messy (for greater detail, please refer to the first of my ‘Sunday Supplements’ where I’ll make available my unedited notes on the series):

https://sundaysupplemental.blogspot.com/2025/07/top-cat-bbc-broadcasts-1962-2007.html

By this time, the series was entering into a kind of ‘afterlife’ which saw it reduced to the status of programme filler. A solo episode on Wednesday 18 December 1974 was followed by a short run during the Christmas holidays – the first time that episodes had appeared in the morning schedule. Another random episode appeared in the early evening schedule on Saturday 3 May 1975 – this was almost certainly a piece of tactical scheduling, allowing for a possible overrun of the afternoon’s FA Cup coverage. In the event, the match ended on time, and Top Cat appeared as promised at 17.10, followed by the evening news and Dr. Who.

August ‘75 saw a short run of Saturday morning episodes, followed by a more organised re-run beginning on Tuesday 26 August that saw the programme returned to its traditional early evening slot. Further repeats ran through to July 1976. By this time, it was rare for the Radio Times to list titles, so it’s conceivable (though unlikely) that the two yet unaired episodes might have appeared during this run.

Following a few weeks of evening repeats in the spring of 1977, the summer holiday morning run kicked off on Tuesday 16 August – which is where we came in. The show was then promoted back to the early evening schedule from 14 June 1978. Once again, the Radio Times failed to give titles, but my diaries are able to fill in the gaps for anyone who’s interested (see Sunday Supplement for details). From the late 70s and onwards into the 80s, Top Cat (still billed as ‘Boss Cat’) became appended to various Saturday morning ‘portmanteau’ programmes such as Multi Coloured Swap Shop, and Saturday Superstore.

In the early 80s, I managed to tape a few odd episodes, but I had to wait for the advent of DVD to get a complete run. On Tuesday 6 April 1999, TC and co jumped ship from BBC1 to BBC2, and the series was now billed, for the first time since 1962, as Top Cat. I was still tuning in for odd episodes as late as 2005, and it must have been around this time that I acquired a complete series DVD – albeit in Region 1 format (the series would be released to Region 2 some years later). According to BBC Genome, the very last episode of Top Cat to air on the BBC was Sergeant Top Cat, on the morning of Friday 21 December 2007. And with that, TC’s adventures on British terrestrial television came to an end (since then, Top Cat has appeared across various digital channels, but this blog is only concerned with old school analogue TV). At time of writing, the show is readily available to stream on both Apple TV and Amazon, and it’s reassuring to know it’s still out there for new generations to discover. 

My own voyage of discovery with Top Cat actually ran in reverse, because the show led me back to the comedy that had provided its inspiration – The Phil Silvers Show. Bilko was still being shown on the BBC in the early 80s and one Saturday evening I sat up till 12.20am to see what it was all about. Within a few minutes, I had recognised the voice of Maurice Gosfield and, finally, was able to put a human face to Benny the Ball. I have to say, he looked more or less as expected...

Maurice Gosfield and Arnold Stang - the voices behind Benny and T.C.