The Lost World of the Radiogram

 

It was one of the largest pieces of furniture in our living room. Huge, wood veneered and standing on four squat legs, the radiogram was, next to the television, our sole source of home entertainment. Manufactured by long forgotten company Kolster Brandes, the KB Junior was a valve-driven radiogram comprising a radio receiver (Long Wave, Short Wave and VHF) and a record autochanger capable of handling all the commercially available disc speeds from 16 through to 78rpm. It was bought by my parents in 1957, shortly after their wedding, and I still have the Credit Sale agreement and paperwork dated 27 May of that year. The purchase price was £61/19/0, rising to £70/1/0 after purchase tax, a not inconsiderable sum. The credit agreement was finally paid off on 14 September of that year.

The radiogram was, of course, monaural. Stereo equipment for home audio was still in the experimental stages in 1957, and stereo records would not become commonplace for almost a decade, mono being the preferred format as late as the Beatles’ Sergeant Pepper.

To access the record player, one folded down the front panel of the cabinet, revealing a small Garrard autochanger within. Discs could be stacked on the tall centre spindle and held in place with a metal arm and a clip. As each disc finished playing, the next one in the stack dropped down on top of it, an ideal arrangement for parties, allowing for uninterrupted music. It was, in a sense, a simplified form of jukebox for the living room. We used this facility quite a lot in the early days.

Above the record player was a storage area in which discs could be kept. In here resided the first records I ever saw or heard, mostly belonging to our mum, and the majority hailing from the late 1950s. When I first became aware of it, this stash of discs (mostly 45rpm singles but with occasional 78rpm 10” discs) comprised the following releases:

Harry Belafonte: Cocoanut Woman/ Island in the Sun/ RCA Victor 78 rpm 1957

Frank Sinatra: Witchcraft/ Tell Her You Love Her/ Capitol 1957

Pat Boone: There’s a Gold Mine in the Sky/ Remember You’re Mine/ London 1957

Dave Brubeck Quartet: History of a Boy Scout/ Sounds of the Loop/ Fontana 1957

Cozy Cole: Topsy Part 1/ Topsy Part 2/ London 1958

Miles Davis: More Miles ep/ Fontana 1958

Vic Damone: On the Street Where You Live/ Arrivederci Roma/ Phillips 1958

Pat Boone: Sugar Moon/ Cherie I Love You/ London 1958

Harry Belafonte: The Son of Mary/ I Heard the Bells on Christmas Day/ RCA Victor 1958

Chris Barber’s Jazz Band: Whistlin’ Rufus/ Hushabye/ Pye Nixa 1959

Dave Brubeck Quartet: Take Five/ Blue Rondo a la Turk/ Fontana 1959

Stan Getz: Jazz Theme from Dr. Kildare/ Desafinado/ Verve 1962

Dave Brubeck Quartet: Bossa Nova U.S.A./ This Can’t Be Love/ CBS 1962

Rolf Harris: Sun Arise/ Columbia 1962

These were all singles. There were no 12” LPs, although I know our dad owned various jazz albums which he kept safely stored away somewhere. Aside from these singles, there was a sole 10” LP, Frank Sinatra’s Swing Easy, released in 1954 on the Capitol label, which would still have been on catalogue when the radiogram was purchased. Looking at that list, just 12 singles in five years, it’s clear that our parents were not avid record buyers. Clearly, there had been a spate of purchases coincident with the gramophone’s arrival, but this soon dwindled to a trickle of releases reflecting our dad’s interest in jazz, and his career as a semi-pro musician.

Whilst dad’s jazz albums remained out of sight, anything that lived in the radiogram was fair game, and we played some of those singles a lot. Both my brother (two years younger) and myself were soon able to operate the autochanger ourselves. It was quite simple: you loaded the disc onto the spindle, then pushed the start button around until the mechanism clicked in. When the disc had finished, the tonearm automatically returned to its holder.

Top of the playlist was Cocoanut Woman, a noisy and exuberant calypso written and performed by the singer, actor and civil rights activist Harry Belafonte:

‘Coconut woman is calling out/ And every day you can hear her shout/

Get your coconut water (four for five)

Man it’s good for your daughter (four for five)”

The melody was simple and easy to remember, although until Googling the lyrics, I’d always assumed the call and respone chorus was singing ‘coconut’ rather than ‘four for five’. On the B-side was the theme to the 1957 film Island in the Sun, a more sedate track which got played rather less often. The disc was a 78rpm record, pressed heavy and brittle shellac: the gramophone needle could be flipped to play such discs with a heavyweight stylus, but I’m not sure if we bothered with this.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ifIqn85gsio

Of the other discs, we didn’t much care for Pat Boone, whose songs were as saccharine as their titles, but we would listen quite often to Vic Damone’s single of Lerner & Loewe’s On the Street Where You Live. Originally written for the Broadway musical My Fair Lady, Damone’s recording had reached No.4 on the Billboard chart on release in 1956, and did even better in the UK where it made number one two years later.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_dTgg3fyQ4k

Our mum evidently liked crooners, and they were a popular fixture of the charts in the late 50s, none more so than Frank Sinatra, whose Witchcraft single was another one we played a lot. Our sole Sinatra LP, Swing Easy, got played even more: my brother and I knew most of the tracks by heart and could sing them in our own childish manner. Our dad observed that we would even sing the bridging sections of Nelson Riddle’s arrangements in between the vocals.

This all proved to be an intriguing education in not merely music, but the English language. I learned numerous words from listening to these records, and would always notice any that were unfamiliar. ‘Taboo’ was a word I had never encountered prior to hearing it in the lyric of Witchcraft, and it would be a good while before I learned what it meant or how to pronounce it properly (Sinatra stressed the first syllable to fit the rhythm).

And speaking of taboo, there was that Rolf Harris single, Sun Arise, a kind of Aboriginal anthem featuring the digeridoo, and produced by George Martin. I really can’t explain why or how we came to own this: I was too young to have asked for it myself, so that means either our mum (most likely) or our dad heard it on the radio and liked it enough to buy a copy. It’s still hard to credit. On the B-side was the comedy ditty Somebody’s Pinched My Winkles, a source of some hilarity in our household where ‘winkle’ was employed as a particular euphemism. Unknowingly, we’d uncovered a dark secret...

The rest of the records were jazz instrumentals, mostly in the laid-back small group style that was still popular in the late 50s. The one oddity was trombonist Chris Barber’s Whistlin’ Rufus, a Dixieland-style composition that had been released during the era’s Trad Jazz boom: but our dad didn’t listen to Trad Jazz. I can only assume that he’d bought it in order to learn the piece for a gig:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bNAAfLOoanI

The Stan Getz single was the sole release we owned by the prolific jazz saxophonist, but we made up for it by the amount of times it got played. If anything, the B-side, Desafinado, saw more action on the turntable, but I still have a soft spot for his jazzed-up version of the theme from the medical drama series Dr. Kildare:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y2NSGZ8NOMc

Cozy Cole’s Topsy is the only single I’ve ever heard where the artist introduces the song at the beginning of the disc. This was another stylistic oddity, released in 1957 yet reflecting the sounds of the previous decade. It always sounded vaguely sinister to me, conjuring up dark alleyways with its walking pace rhythm and electric organ – the first time I’d ever heard such an instrument.

William Randolph ‘Cozy’ Cole had come to prominence in the 30s and 40s, playing for the likes of Jelly Roll Morton and Cab Calloway during the swing era. His drumming is a big feature of the record, which presented two different arrangements of the same bluesy theme performed by Alan Hartwell’s Big Band. Listening to it today, you can detect the beginnings of rock drumming in his style. Cole was a great timekeeper but not the subtlest of performers: to use an expression of our dad’s, he fairly knocks seven bells out of his kit on both sides of the record. He sounds like he was having a good time: you can hear his enthusiastic shouts as he batters his snare drum to death during his solo in Part 2. It may not have been the ‘in vogue’ sound of 1958, but Topsy went on to sell over a million copies, earning a gold disc for Cole:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-Sn0gmkLdBc

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A1bkzLH0D1s

My favourite of those jazz instrumentals by a long way was The Dave Brubeck Quartet’s Take Five, a record which inspired me to take up a pair of our dad’s drumsticks and begin battering away on the arms of our sofa – which soon needed recovering. By the time of a relative’s wedding in August 1964, I was confident enough to ask to sit up to the drum kit at the reception and give a short rendition of the track. Its odd 5/4 meter could faze a lot of instrumentalists but sounded the most natural thing in the world to me.

On the B-side of this 1959 Fontana release was Blue Rondo a la Turk, a frenetic workout in the even more unorthodox time signature 9/8, derived from a curious rhythm Brubeck had heard being played by Turkish street musicians. To have been exposed to such radical musical ideas at such a young age was unusual, and to this day I prefer the unexpected and the unconventional in music.

This, then was the state of play when I first peered inside that old radiogram some time in the very early sixties. An eclectic selection of material mostly reflecting the disappearing styles of earlier eras. Soon, they would be joined by records bought for my brother and myself, most of them children’s stories (such as the Reverend W. Awdry’s railway series, narrated by Johnny Morris), but including the very first pop single I had bought for me, Herman’s Hermits’ I’m Into Something Good, which entered the collection in September of 1964.

In the next piece, I’ll be considering the other half of the old KB Junior: the radio.

1969: A Space Oddity

Doppelgänger vs 2001: fair comparison?

On the evening of Saturday 14 February 1976, I sat down to watch a film whose existence I’d been unaware of until a few days earlier. Gerry Anderson’s Journey to the Far Side of the Sun (aka Doppelgänger) had gone unremarked in the only overview of his career I’d seen to date (ITV’s Clapperboard special of 1975), and I’d never seen it mentioned in print.

Until this point, I’d imagined that the Andersons’ involvement in ‘proper’ films, using actors instead of puppets, had begun with UFO. Now, I knew differently. Doppelgänger had received its ITV premiere in the Granada region, two years earlier, but tonight’s screening marked its first appearance on ATV in the Midlands. This was a broadcast not to be missed. Indeed, on spotting the listing in that week's TV Times, I could barely believe it: a previously unknown piece of science fiction by Gerry Anderson and it was going to be on television in a matter of days. It was the kind of thing I often dreamed about...

My diary entry for the day confirms that I was already aware of the film’s alternate identity, a nugget of information I probably gleaned from the TV Times’ film review column. Billed as ‘Film Spectacular’, and shown with its American title, the broadcast went out at 7.45pm, sandwiched between comedy impressions show Who Do You Do and The Best of Upstairs Downstairs in a 105-minute slot that allowed for 15 minutes’ worth of advert breaks.

Watching for the first time, the parallels with UFO were immediately apparent – indeed, the film came across as a kind of 90-minute pilot for the series, albeit with a completely different concept. I recognised cars and cast members from the later series, and the film’s asethetics were pretty well identical. In my diary that night, I pronounced it ‘v. good’, but ended my entry with the query: ‘Is there a second earth – did it really happen?’ Watching the film again today, I find that is still the only satisfactory explanation – Jason Webb is nothing but a senile old man in a nursing home, who has imagined the whole thing. After all, the Andersons were somewhat notorious for their milking of the ‘everything’s been destroyed but phew, it was only a dream’ trope, having been there previously in Fireball XL5 and Captain Scarlet. Doppelgänger was, in effect, A Day in the Life of a Space General, done with live actors.

Back in 1976, I was more than happy to have discovered this previously unimagined addition to the Anderson canon, but today I can’t help looking at the movie with a more critical eye. This is a film that desperately wants to be 2001. In special effects terms, it’s up there with Kubrick's masterpiece, but in every other department it falls woefully short.

I thought it might be interesting to examine the ways in which Doppelgänger/ Journey to the Far Side of the Sun fails to measure up to 2001 and the reasons behind them:

a) It’s too wordy. I haven’t done a word count, but at a guess, I’d say there’s probably as much dialogue in the first twenty minutes of Doppelgänger as we get in the whole of 2001. Kubrick’s statement is essentially visual, with dialogue kept to a minimum. Long stretches of his film are wordless – the first and last half hours in particular. By comparison, the Andersons’ characters never shut up, yet the bulk of the dialogue is either technical or expository. None of it is good dialogue, or interesting or revealing. Some of it is fit only for puppets.

b) It tries to be too many things. The Andersons must have been cock-a-hoop that they were finally getting to do their sci-fi schtick with real people at long last, but in their excitement, they tried to do far too much. They were big fans of ATV's boardroom drama series The Power Game: so hey, let’s do it in the 21st century – we’ll even get Patrick Wymark so we can write the character we already know from television. The notion of doing The Power Game in the arena of space exploration wasn’t at all bad, but it was enough for a film in itself: one can easily imagine it – Jason Webb fighting to get his Sunprobe project accepted only to have it blow up in his face – no need whatsoever for the ludicrous ‘twin earth’ conceit.

But this was only one aspect of the movie: the Andersons also wanted some Bond-style espionage with gadgets, so we got a pointless preamble involving Herbert Lom with a camera in his eye that serves the plot only in so far as it provides a motivation for NASA to finance Webb’s space project. 

And we’re still not done: free from the constraints of working with fibreglass characters who couldn’t emote on screen, the Andersons added some, ahem, ‘human’ drama about an astronaut whose wife believes he’s sterile. Again, this is a topic for a film on its own terms, rather than the rushed subplot we’re served up in Doppelgänger. It goes nowhere – Colonel Ross discovers a packet of contraceptive pills and we’re done. This does, however, beg the question of why his wife would be taking them then complaining to him that they can’t conceive? The Andersons really did not understand human relationships and motivations at all.

All of this wastes a huge amount of time that might have been better spent on working up a more interesting character-based drama. The original script was written by Tony Williamson, a journeyman well known to fans of the ITC filmed adventure series, but no great shakes as a character writer. When his first attempt failed to pass muster, the Andersons took on the scripting job themselves, bringing in Donald James – a writer of similar background to Williamson – to help them flesh out the characters. I don’t think it’s unfair to say that he failed.

By comparison, Kubrick’s film isn’t concerned with characters at all, except in the case of HAL. He doesn’t delve into their backgrounds beyond a telephone call from Heywood Floyd to his daughter, and a happy birthday message from Astronaut Poole’s parents. His characters are vehicles to serve his ideas – there is no subplot in 2001. There’s a secondary plot (HAL’s breakdown) but it functions as one of Kubrik’s ‘non-submersible sequences’ – dramatic episodes within the main body of the film that serve as complete dramas within themselves while also serving as plot drivers. 

Perhaps it’s unfair to compare the two movies, but critics did so back in 1969 and it was inevitable: 2001 was still fresh in the mind when Doppelgänger received its theatrical release. But while Kubrick had spent years planning and filming his epic in meticulous detail, the Andersons were done in a couple of months. There is literally no comparison between the two, but the Andersons didn’t help their case with their shameless plagiarising of themes from 2001, which brings us to our next point:

c) It’s imitative. The Andersons would have been well advised to leave 2001 well alone: but not content with doing a boardroom drama in space, a ‘human drama’ and a straightforward space movie, they had to try and add a bit of Kubrick’s mystique. This, in practice, meant three sequences that were shamelessly inspired by 2001: a couple of psychedelic interludes, and a coda that depicts the leading actor as an elderly man.

The psychedelic sequences are probably the worst offenders: while Kubrick’s bizarre visuals are there to show his astronaunt travelling through an uncanny space phenomenon, the astronauts in Doppelgänger merely doze off for a few weeks. The resulting sequence is justified only in that it allowed Barry Gray to compose one of his finest music cues. But like so much else in the movie, it just bogs down the action.

At the end of 2001, in an inscrutable silent sequence, we see an aged Astronaut Bowman living in an elegant period bedroom. At the end of Doppelgänger, an elderly Jason Webb resides in a nursing home whose interior decorator was probably the same one emplpyed by the monolith intelligence of 2001. It’s so pat, it’s laughable, but as I mentioned earlier, it provides the only reasonable explanation for all the implausible things that have been happening for the previous ninety minutes. If 2001 was the Beatles, then Doppelgänger was the Rutles...

d) Pacing. No one could claim that 2001 is a ‘pacey’ movie – its tone is sedate, langourous, even, but all the time there’s a palpable sense of development, of a story and an idea that is going somewhere. Doppelgänger, on the other hand, dwells far too long on the business of launching the Sunprobe rocket, a sequence which seems to be there only to let the audience know how much the Andersons knew about real life space missions. They’d already committed the same error with Thunderbirds Are Go!, although in the earlier movie, the protracted launch sequence served as a bed for the opening credits. Doppelgänger could easily have spent more time on characterisation and story if there had been less emphasis on the hardware. Admittedly, it’s good hardware, and the effects are some of Derek Meddings’ best efforts – it’s just not enough to save the rest of the film.

e) It does nothing with its own idea. One of the severest criticisms of Doppelgänger is that it fails to explore its own central conceit. The idea of a duplicate Earth where everyone and everything exists in a mirror twin of our own world is frankly about the worst thing Gerry Anderson ever came up with, but having decided to run with it, he should really have thought harder, and done a better job of selling it to the audience. Nothing in science can explain it away, which leaves us in the realm of the mystical – but the film doesn’t go there either, until the risible coda where again the Andersons try to make off with some of Kubrick’s enigma. They simply can’t pull off the heist.

Having said all this, Doppelgänger is still a watchable piece of escapist nonsense, distinguished by fantastic space hardware and elevated above its B-movie status by some decent actors doing their best with a lousy script. As long as you can accept it as such, and expect nothing more from it than a long, off-topic episode of UFO, you’ll be fine.

The big, big problem with the movie is that it couldn’t help trying to be 2001. The closest the Andersons would get to Kubrick’s vision of the future came a few years later with Space:1999 (which managed to sneakily borrow Clavius base from 2001 to do duty as Moonbase Alpha – not to mention the Discovery probe as an alien spaceship). But while Space:1999 managed to pull off some of the asethetics of 2001, it missed its aim whenever the writers tried for enigmatic obscurity, which they did on far too many occasions.

Revisiting 2001 for the purpose of this piece, it occurred to me that it’s probably unfair to judge any other piece of film making against it. Kubrick’s masterpiece is much more than just a science fiction film – it’s an artistic statement, unparalleled in the annals of movie making. It set the bar impossibly high for everyone who followed, and no one has bettered it yet. They probably never will. It was the Andersons’ bad luck to be some of the first off the block with another sci-fi epic when the world was still coming to terms with the phenomenon that was 2001.

It may seem unfair to even draw comparisons between the work of an auteur like Kubrick and a television director such as Gerry Anderson, whose only directing experience prior to Doppelgänger was with marionettes (we'll draw a veil over the lamentable Crossroads to Crime [1960]). The comparison would be irrelevant if the Andersons hadn't tried to co-opt so many of Kubrick's ideas into their own work. They were always on safer ground when aiming for originality, and both UFO and Space:1999 would make considerable advances on Doppelgänger. If this goes to prove anything, it is simply the old maxim: know your strengths. Sadly, Gerry Anderson never did, and never truly appreciated the unique asethetic of his own work. It's easy to say he should have stuck with puppets. But it's also true.

The 'Short Present'

 

Our dad always played fair with my brother and myself when it came to gifts. If one of us was bought something like a toy car, the other received the equivalent. In the case of particularly desirable toys, such as the Dinky models from Gerry Anderson series, we’d be bought one each of the model in question, to circumvent any arguments over ownership. To this day, my old box of childhood toys contains a fair few duplicated models – Corgi’s deluxe Lincoln Continental of 1967, FAB1, Thunderbird 2 and Captain Scarlet’s SPV to name but a few.

Our birthdays are 27 days apart (28 days in a leap year). Not wanting either of us to feel left out on the other's birthday, our dad instigated a policy of buying what he called ‘short presents’ for whichever of us wasn’t celebrating his birthday, a kind of ‘runner-up’ gift, usually something like a book or a toy car. Whether this tradition came from his own family I can’t say, and I’ve never heard of it anywhere else: in fact, the closest equivalent I can find is the notion of an ‘unbirthday’ in Alice Through the Looking Glass, although we never used the expression ourselves.

To this day, I can still identify some of those so-called ‘short presents’ and my diaries of the early 70s list a few examples. In 1971, I was bought a copy of the recently published paperback novelisation of the Timeslip TV series; in 1973, a bar of chocolate; but for some reason, 1972 proved to be a bumper year – for my brother’s birthday, I received no fewer than four ‘short presents’: Corgi’s Basil Brush car, a UFO paperback book, a peanuts paperback (Here Comes Snoopy – the first I ever owned) and a plastic model of Dick Dastardly’s car. By comparison, when my own birthday rolled around a month later, the list of presents reads like a line-up from the Generation Game conveyor belt: three die-cast vehicles, a Viewmaster and slides, two Airfix kits, a box of After Eight mints, a ‘pop-a-point’ pencil, ‘magic letters’, gloves, a false beard, a ‘pit-stop set’ (whatever that was), two Biggles books and a set of felt-tipped pens. I can report that most of these items are still extant.

I don’t know when the tradition of the ‘short present’ got started: I can remember being bought a Matchbox die cast model of a Ford Mustang at my brother’s birthday back in 1966, and as late as 1975 my diary records that I was bought two Dr. Who paperbacks during a birthday trip to Birmingham, but these seem to have been the last examples of the tradition. The diary for 1976, despite being a long entry, makes no mention of my having received any presents. After all, we were old enough by now (14 and 12) to deal with not getting a present of our own on the other’s birthday.

I’m certain that other families with children have probably implemented similar policies, but our dad was uncommonly generous when it came to birthdays and Christmas and I’m sure we did a lot better than some of our contemporaries. One thing I’m sure of: nobody else has ever used the expression ‘short present’ in this context: as a search term it yields zero results on Google, so it was very likely a neologism coined by our dad. He had a kind of ‘meta-language’ of his own, an idiolect derived from bits he’d retained from reading stories to my brother and me, fragments of the Goon shows, puns and snatches of comedy he’d heard when working in cabaret. All families have their own unique sayings (one has only to tune into Liza Tarbuck’s Saturday evening show on Radio 2 to hear examples being shared) and this was one of ours. The etymology is hard to fathom, but it made perfect sense to us as children. ‘Short presents’ were special in a way that set them apart from the random toys we might have had bought for us on non-festive occasions, and that’s probably why I can still remember them after all this time.

You'd Better Believe It – The Lost Songs of Rick Jones

By the end of the 1960s, I was a little too old to be watching Play School. Like Watch With Mother, it was aimed at pre-school children, and I was now aged eight or nine. Nevertheless, I still saw occasional episodes of both series during holidays and other absences from school.

Songs were a regular feature on Play School, and they usually took the form of jaunty, child-friendly singalongs with lots of repetition and strong rhythm, traditional nursery rhymes mixed up with original compositions. Canadian presenter Rick Jones was a familiar face on the series. He often played his own songs, accompanying himself on guitar, and it was one such example that I chanced to hear when watching a random episode some time in the late 60s. The song he performed that day was a far cry from the usual toddler-friendly Play School fare; it was moody and sophisticated, more typical of the material being produced by the singer-songwriters of the day. I heard it only once, but fragments of it have remained with me ever since, which is always the measure of a great song. Those snatches of melody and lyric could well be all that survives of the song, as the master tapes of Play School have long since been wiped. Odd episodes do occasionally surface – Tim Beddows owned one (coincidentally a Rick Jones edition) which has recently been recovered, but the chances of that specific episode I saw ever surfacing are something like one in 3,500.

Rick’s song contrasted the experiences of living in the town and living in the country. I can still remember the opening bars of melody and lyric: 

“Smoky town/ kinda gets me down/ each of your days is a grey one.”

Clearly, this was at some remove from Pop Goes the Weasel. Beyond that opening phrase, my memory fades into a blur until the hummed wordless chorus. Here, the chords and melody changed key, and swung from a major chord to a relative minor. The hummed melody was exactly the same as the theme from Twin Peaks: so much so that decades later, when I heard the Twin Peaks theme, I recognised it as Rick Jones’ Play School song. I wonder if he noticed the similarity himself?

During the song, viewers were shown a sequence of slides contrasting smoky townscapes dotted with chimneys and overhung with smog, contrasting bucolic scenes of open fields (although I noted the presence of overhead electric wires in some of these countryside shots). Why all this has remained with me, I have no idea, and I can attribute it only to the quality of Rick's song and the way he put it across. It impressed me with its moody sophistication: I’d grown up against a backdrop of eclectic music from the radio and my parents’ record collections, including the likes of Frank Sinatra and Dave Brubeck, and by the age of eight or nine, I was highly receptive to original and intriguing melodies.

Rick Jones’ Play School song will almost certainly never resurface. An album of songs from the series was released in 1969, around the time of ‘Smoky Town’, but no joy. If nothing else, I wondered if I could at least work out when I’d actually heard the song. Using the BBC’s genome database, I checked every appearance of Rick Jones on Play School from the late 60s (I was convinced the memory dated to around 1969). After going through over two years’s worth of broadcasts, I turned up an episode that looked like it might be the one: Monday 29 June 1970’s edition had Rick Jones as one of its presenters, and featured a story called ‘Town Mouse and Country Mouse’, presumably adapted from Beatrix Potter’s Tale of Johnny Town Mouse, a story I’d loved from childhood. This tale, contrasting the lives and attitudes of the town and country characters, seemed a very good fit for Rick’s song. On that basis, I concluded that this must be the episode I’d seen. One other fragment of memory helped to confirm the date: I clearly remembered it as being a dull, overcast day, which fits with the met office records for late June 1970.

Why and how I came to be watching daytime television on Monday 29 June 1970 is a question I can’t readily answer. The schools weren’t on holiday, so I must have been absent owing to illness, although I've no memory to that effect. Either way, I was reasonably confident that I’d found the date I was looking for. Regrettably, I will never now find that song.

It occurred to me some years back that it might be possible to contact Rick Jones through the internet – he’d been back in his native Canada for decades, but I found a website promoting his stage musical Laughing Daughter (based on songs from his country rock band Meal Ticket), and I’m pretty sure there was a contact email given. I set it aside as a project for another time and the idea promptly went out of my head. It came to mind again just recently and I determined that this time, I would finally do it. Would he respond to an unsolicited email from a bloke in Britain reminiscing about a song he’d probably forgotten and most likely had no record of? I’ll never know: for a quick Google search revealed the sad fact that Rick Jones died back in 2021 aged 84.

With him died all hope of ever resurrecting the ghost of that song I’d heard him sing back in 1970. But at least we still have other examples of his work: I was immediately taken with his theme to the BBC Play for Today episode The Flipside of Dominick Hide on first hearing it in 1982, instantly recognising his soft Canadian accent: and without realising it, I’d been enjoying another of his compositions years earlier in the form of his theme for the imported French aviation series The Aeronauts.

Anyone who’s heard Rick’s Dominick Hide theme will know what a fine singer and songwriter he was. All I can say is that his Play School song was its equal in mood and atmosphere. One might well speculate as to how many other songs of comparable quality he performed during his years on Play School, few of which we are ever likely to recover. One example does survive, and like 'Smoky Town' is an excellent example of Rick's sophisticated songwriting style: imagine Carole King writing a song about toys – it's that good:

For me, ‘Smoky Town’ is the ultimate lost piece of pop culture ephemera, unlikely ever to resurface, never commercially recorded apart from that wiped broadcast. To have remained in my mind after 55 years and having heard it only once makes it more than a bit special, but you’ve only got my word for it. As Rick said himself in his Dominick Hide lyric: “you’d better believe it.”

Sixty Years Old... or Forty Years Young?

 

A celebration of TV Century 21

Depending on how you look at it, the comic TV Century 21 is either 60 years old or minus 40 years young this week – launched in January 1965, with a cover dateline one hundred years hence, a conceit it would maintain for the next four years.

Enough has been written elsewhere concerning the history and creation of this fondly-remembered comic, the first ever publication whose contents were entirely derived from television series copyrights, but I can’t let the occasion pass without paying homage. It was by no means the first comic to take television as its inspiration, with earlier titles including TV Comic (1951), TV Fun (1953) and TV Express (1956). Indeed, considering those dates, TV Century 21 was rather late to the party – but it put those earlier efforts in the shade.

Conceived by AP Films’ merchandising man Keith Shackleton, TV Century 21 was an astute move, launched some nine months ahead of the Thunderbirds TV series. The British comics market of the early 60s was aggressively competitive, and new titles often sank within a few months of being launched, or else were revamped or amalgamated with their more successful siblings. TV Century 21, uniquely, was launched in the certain knowledge that it would upgrade in around a year’s time to feature the Andersons’ latest creation. The story of Supermarionation to date had provided an object lesson in how character merchandising could yield huge profits: Supercar, Fireball XL5 and Stingray had all landed lucrative merchandising deals, and A.P. Films would have had every reason to expect even greater things of Thunderbirds. It therefore made sense to have a ready-made comic vehicle on standby for when the series went to air. With this end in sight, the first few weeks of TV21 teased the upcoming series with exciting photographs of some of the hardware that would be seen on screen – although none of the Thunderbird craft was unveiled.

The biggest nod towards the work in progress came in the form of a Lady Penelope comic strip which would have caused early readers to scratch their heads: who was this new character? Issue one provided the backstory as to how Lady P and Parker got together and saw the pair off on their first adventure. Lady P even found time to visit Elstree Studios for a perfunctory interview with Roger Moore!

The model for TV Century 21 was the hugely successful Eagle, pre-eminent amongst British comic papers since its launch nearly fifteen years earlier. By 1965, however, a series of takeovers and editorial reshuffles had sent the title into a slow decline, and some of its key artists, sensing the writing on the wall, were more than willing to jump ship. The big coup was enticing Frank Bellamy, a task which reportedly took editor Alan Fennell over a year to pull off – Bellamy would not make his TV21 debut until 1966.

The new comic was carefully planned and prepared, with nothing left to chance: its three main illustrators were amongst the top names in their field – Ron Embleton, late of TV Express, Mike Noble (Girl, Express Weekly, TV Comic) and Eric Eden (Eagle). In addition to the three big Supermarionation series, the contents included titles licensed from elsewhere – Burke’s Law was a popular detective series starring Gene Barry, then running on ITV, whilst My Favourite Martian was an imported US sitcom, unknown to much of the ITV network through the vicissitudes of regional scheduling (the first comic strip give readers a brief introduction to the characters and situations for those unfamiliar with the show). 

Biggest of all the bought-in content were the Daleks, whose back cover colour strip began by telling the origin story of the evil aliens. Though credited to their creator, Terry Nation, the weekly strip was in fact penned by Dr. Who script editor David Whitaker, with Nation doing little more than rubber stamping his storylines. Adding them to the TV21 mix was an astute move, as 1965 would see the phenomenon of Dalek mania take the United Kingdom by storm.

It’s interesting to speculate how much the Daleks contributed to the success of TV Century 21. Gerry Anderson told the story of how he was alarmed to find piles of unsold copies in his local newsagent during the comic’s first week, only to return a few days later to find them all gone. The Daleks were being used to sell everything from soap to wallpaper, but there was no mention of them on the first TV21 cover. Did word get around? Did the new comic ‘go viral’, to use modern parlance, in the playgrounds of Britain? “Look, it’s got the Daleks on the back…!”

Whether or not the Daleks had anything to do with it, word of mouth certainly seems to have played its part – there’s no way that anyone could make a case for the first TV Century 21 cover being visually dynamic or eye catching, certainly when seen against the backdrop of a typical week’s comics of the time. Different, certainly, but in a good way? After all, it looked like a newspaper. Okay, so there was a big colour photo of Stingray, but the layout was sedate to say the least: no flashes, starbursts, or huge banners to entice potential readers. You really had to look inside to get a proper idea of what was in store. The newspaper covers would, in their time, become the stuff of legend, but one has to try and get inside the mind of a six or seven year old kid in January 1965, confronted with something that looked like his mum and dad’s daily paper. No wonder it took a few days to sell; but when it did, it did so in spectacular fashion – issue one sold out.

The newspaper cover was a huge gamble that might well have misfired. Ultimately, when the format was ditched three years later, readers immediately wrote in demanding its return. When all’s said and done, the concept wasn’t even original – a couple of Eagle issues had already done the ‘futuristic newspaper’ cover idea in the 1950s – but it took the genius of TV Century 21’s creators to realise its full potential.

The new comic was, according to the late comic collector Denis Gifford, one of the first titles to use television advertising to promote its launch. Now, at the age of three going on four, I was admittedly a bit young at the time, but I was well aware of television advertising, especially as regards new comic launches. In the coming years, I would be persuaded to ask for titles as diverse as Pippin, Playland, Pow! and Solo purely on the strength of their TV launch campaigns. Yet in January 1965, I was utterly oblivious to TV Century 21 – ironic, considering that it contained some of my favourite TV series. It’s conceivable that the launch ad didn’t even air in the ATV Midlands region where I was watching, although it would be perverse if that were the case, as ATV’s money had helped to get A.P. Films off the ground.

I’m not sure I had sight of TV21 until the summer of 1966, when I was bought a copy one Saturday in place of my usual weekly, Teddy Bear, which for some reason was unobtainable that week. I had it bought for me again later in the year when I learned that this week’s copy included the incredible free gift of a cardboard Thunderbirds hat. From thereon in, my consumption of TV21 remained sporadic: I was still getting it in December 1966, as a rough copy of a competition entry has survived, relating to issue No. 98; and my earliest surviving copy dates to March 1967. Thereafter, it fell off my radar until later in the year, when I became aware, belatedly, of the arrival of Captain Scarlet. From this point on, I would stick with TV21 until its demise in the summer of 1969, by which time the comic had been through further format changes and was in danger of transforming into a football weekly.

My entry for the jigsaw competition in TV21 issue No. 98, December 1966 

So, exactly what was in that first TV Century 21 of sixty years ago? Well, following the newspaper cover, the first two pages were a black and white strip of Burke’s Law. The CBS television series would be revamped later in the year as Amos Burke Secret Agent, but by that time, he’d parted company with TV21. The strip was well drawn, in a style reminiscent of Alex Raymond’s Rip Kirby, and the scripting was tight, telling a complete story in a mere two pages. If anything, it was a little adult in tone for the readership, but it was a decent effort.

The following two pages comprised the first instalment of the Fireball XL5 comic strip. Mike Noble was already working on his version of the strip, which would commence at issue 6, and had seemingly prepared the masthead (presumably retained from the dummy edition); but for the first five weeks the artist in residence was Graham Coton, marking his only contribution to the comic. His work was sound but lacked the slick professionalism of Noble et al. The opening instalment ended with Steve Zodiac apparently dead, having been zapped by a mysterious bat-creature. Given that we were only on issue one, it was a safe bet that he’d make a full recovery…

The following page was the first in a series of factual articles about space travel, providing an overview of the current state of play and a look forward to possible future developments. It’s interesting to note that, as of January 1965, no astronaut had ventured more than a few hundred miles out into space, none had escaped the Earth’s gravitational pull, and no one had walked in space (although Alexey Leonov was just three months away from his epoch making space walk of March 1965).

The next page was My Favourite Martian, competently drawn in black and white by the ever reliable Bill Titcombe, who would go on to illustrate other sitcom-derived comic strips for numerous titles over the coming decades. To this day, I have never seem an episode of this US sitcom, and I know it only from its appearances in TV21. Am I missing anything? I kind of doubt it...

Following a page of advertising matter, prominently featuring Quercetti toys’ desirable Fireball XL5 catapult-launching model, came the Contact 21 feature – essentially a jazzed-up ‘letters to the editor’ given a spy-fi twist. Readers were encouraged to send in reports to the mysterious ‘Twenty One’, who described himself as the ‘head of a vast Secret Service organisation.’ The comic had come with a free gift ‘Identicode’, enabling readers to use one of two colour codes, red or blue, in order to read and send secret messages. At this stage, Twenty One did not have his own comic strip, as is often erroneously stated by some commentators – that would not arrive until issue 20.

The centre pages were occupied by Ron Embleton’s stunning Stingray strip, taking full advantage of the spread to present the artwork in four horizontal bands. A few photographs were inserted between the illustrations, each with a border of ‘sprocket holes’: this trend would continue for the first dozen or so issues. Anyone who’d turned straight here from the front cover might have been surprised to realise that the strip did not quite match the 'Stingray Lost' headline or the accompanying article: nowhere in the strip does Marineville lose contact with Stingray. So was the cover created independently of the strip, perhaps held over from the original dummy edition? As this has never come to light, there’s no way of knowing. Either way, Embleton’s artwork gave a foretaste of what readers could come to expect for the next couple of years.

The aquatic theme ran onto the next page, another black and white feature entitled Oceans of Mystery, which detailed some of the attempts being made to probe ever deeper into the sea. Another advertising page followed, and then came the poorest effort in the whole comic – Supercar, turned into a comedy strip. The artwork was fine, as comedy strips go, but this would prove to be TV21’s least appealing feature: the first, self-contained story didn’t veer too far from the tone of the TV series, but over the coming months it would become increasingly ludicrous. Running to just one and a half pages, it was joined by a short travelogue feature Orbit Over, describing itself as a ‘special report from TV21’s space satellite.’ Which I’m sure really existed…

The next two pages marked the debut of Lady Penelope, drawn in colour by the competent Eric Eden – a wizard with the airbrush, but a little less sure of himself when it came to figure drawing, although the likenesses of Penelope and Parker were excellent.

Alan Fennell's charming letter of welcome to his readers in the first issue

The final black and white spread included a comedy news section, Cosmic Capers, and an interesting column by composer Barry Gray, giving some insight into the business of three-track recording in a professional studio. Editor Alan Fennell welcomed his readers with a friendly letter, urging them to write to him whenever they liked. Finally, a half page advert/editorial item from Corgi Toys and a short feature on jellyfish rounded off the interior contents. That just left the back page, where we met the Daleks, in colour, and drawn by Richard Jennings. His rendering of the Daleks themselves left something to be desired, but his artwork was energetic and colourful, featuring a lot of fine detailed cross hatching.

And that was it – week one of what would prove to be nearly five years of adventure in the twenty first century. TV21 would stray off course at times – the unwelcome merger with TV Tornado, the misguided attempt to shoehorn soccer into the mix – but it was still arguably the last great British comic of the Silver Age. By 1970, the title still existed, but it was unrecognisable. I think I packed it in later that same year, by which time the Gerry Anderson content had been reduced to nil, and Star Trek was the only game in town. When Mike Noble left (to take up his commission on Look-in) there was no reason to go on.

Could it have lasted longer? Arguably, yes: in 1971, Countdown proved there was still a market for a comic that strongly featured the worlds of Gerry Anderson, trading off the back of the brand new series UFO. But it was a shrinking market. Once the Supermarionation series began to drop off people’s radar, as ITV broadcasts came to an end, it was hard for any publisher to maintain readers’ interest in material that was rapidly becoming nostalgia fodder.

There have been various attempts to produce Gerry Anderson comics for the modern era, but none has stayed the distance: when your comic is tied specifically to a single title such as Stingray or Thunderbirds, you’ve got nowhere to go when your audience moves on. TV21 had that much in its favour – a format that allowed it to adapt and bring in new series as they came to television. Perhaps its biggest mistake was in not admitting Joe 90 into the format: by launching him in a separate title, the publishers split their audience, and within less than a year the two comics had been merged, with disappointing results.

The original run of TV Century 21 have long been highly collectable – prices seem to have stabilised of recent years with the average price per copy being around £20. That’s not bad when you consider they were fetching between £2.50 and £5 each forty years ago and you factor in inflation. It took me over thirty years to complete my own set, although my number one is minus a back cover and one or two of the later editions are a bit the worse for wear. I’m now contemplating re-reading them as a project, one a week over the next five years. I’ll let you know how that goes sometime in the summer of 2029… all being well...

Billy Liar and I

Sunday 12 January 1975: BBC1’s Film of the Week, broadcast this evening at 20.15, was 1963’s Billy Liar, John Schlesinger’s highly regarded adaptation of Keith Waterhouse’s comic novel of 1959. Prime time scheduling of vintage black and white material like this was not unknown, but by 1975 had become the exception rather than the rule – so the BBC must have thought very highly of this British New Wave classic. Making its TV debut back in 1971, Billy Liar was first scheduled on BBC2 in the kind of late evening slot usually reserved for ‘art’ movies and revered foreign language subjects. What had happened to bring about its elevation to its first broadcast on BBC1?

For answer, we need to turn over to commercial television. A sitcom based on Waterhouse’s Billy Liar characters (and scripted by himself in collaboration with Willis Hall) had aired on ITV over two seasons in the autumn of 1973 and 74, and the character would have been readily familiar to an audience less well acquainted with the source novel, film or stage play. Perhaps this was what prompted the BBC to schedule the 1963 movie as its prime Sunday evening feature?

I’d enjoyed LWT’s Billy Liar series, without realising that the character already had three previous lives – novel, theatrical production and movie. I was very familiar with the characters in their TV incarnations: Jeff Rawle, a newcomer to television, played Billy, ably backed up by George A. Cooper as his irate, blustering father, May Warden as his dotty Gran, and Colin Jeavons as the memorably oleaginous Mr. Shadrack. Now I had to reimagine the entire cast and I wasn’t sure at first whether I cared for them as much as their LWT counterparts. One or two of them were unfamiliar to me. I don’t believe I’d ever seen Tom Courtenay in anything before, but his Billy soon erased all memory of Jeff Rawle. The role of Shadrack was taken in the movie by Leonard Rossiter, who in 1975 was on the cusp of becoming a household name but as yet unknown to me. Shadrack was sharply portrayed in the original novel as a snide and supercilious character with a mannered way of speaking. On TV, Colin Jeavons had totally nailed his unctuous persona and I wasn’t quite ready to accept Leonard Rossiter in his stead, pencil moustache and all...

One cast member I was more than familiar with – Rodney Bewes in the role of Billy’s workmate Arthur Crabtree. Bewes gave a performance that he would effectively replicate a year later as Likely Lad Bob Ferris, and I enjoyed his contributions to the movie. Cast wise, the movie’s greatest asset that set it apart from the TV series was Julie Christie: and whilst her movie version of Billy’s nomadic girlfriend Liz wasn’t quite as down at heel as she’s portrayed in print, she was instantly memorable. By the end of the film, I’d decided that this was the kind of girlfriend I needed in my own life.

On the strength of that one viewing, Billy Liar, the movie, became an instant favourite – so much so that when, years later, I had the opportunity of watching the old LWT sitcom again, I couldn’t accept it. Tom Courtenay had become the Billy Fisher of my imagination, and no one else would do… least of all Albert Finney, who had played him in the original West End production.

Setting aside the characters and plot, Billy Liar spoke to me in another dimension – its depiction of the contemporary urban environment circa 1963. Realism was key to the British New Wave, and for the film makers of the era this meant seeking out gritty, northern locales. In Waterhouse’s source novel, Billy Fisher lives in a fictitious north country town called Stradhoughton – but made-up placenames didn’t sit well with the new drive for realism, and the town is unnamed in the movie (similarly, Stan Barstow’s fictional Cressley was not namechecked in the 1961 film of his novel A Kind of Loving).

Only twelve years in the past, Billy Liar was already beginning to look like an artfact from another world. Demolition and redevelopment is a theme that the movie touches on in several key scenes: location work shot around Manchester shows the modernist high rise developments going up along Piccadilly, while older Victorian architecture falls victim to the wrecking ball. The entire opening sequence provides a fascinating drive through various suburban landscapes, culminating in a scene of elderly houses in process of being demolished. Later on, encountering the formidable figure of Councillor Duxbury during a walk over the moors, Billy puts on an act of comical fake nostalgia for the old man, who is bemoaning the loss of the town’s old buildings.

This is interesting because, by the time I got to see the film, this work of post war urban renewal was largely completed. Few town centres were without their own take on brutalist modernity in the form of shopping arcades and civic centres, and high-rise estates had mushroomed where back-to-back houses once stood. We see the same nostalgia for the lost urban landscape in the early episodes of Whatever Happened to the Likely Lads, and its feature film spin-off (which manages to look like the last gasp of the British New Wave). So much had changed in such a short space of time – in 1975, couples no longer went dancing to live music at Mecca and Roxy ballrooms, and nothing dates the movie so much as its depictions of the twist dance craze and coffee bar culture. By the 70s, this all seemed extraordinarily nostalgic, as did the fashions, furnishings and indeed the movie’s entire milieu. Look back twelve years from 2025 and we find ourselves in 2013, with little evidence of anything having changed – certainly not to the same extent that I saw back in 1975.

One aspect of the movie that sets Billy Liar well apart from other entries in the British New Wave is its emphasis on humour. No other film from the era is so rich in comic scenes and performances – indeed, the genre tended towards a dour pessimism, with unwanted pregnancies featuring in just about every plotline. Billy’s dilemma is more personal and existential, and it was one with I could (and still do) empathise – his desire is to escape from the dull routine of his suburban existence, and he achieves it via his fantasy life, memorably brought to life on screen. When reality offers him a real chance to set himself free, he fails to act on it, preferring the safety of his own fantasy world where he can be dictator, MP, famous author and military hero without the risk of failure.

I knew this film was different because it left a palpable atmosphere in its wake when it ended. I saw it again in October 1977, on what would prove to be its last BBC1 broadcast, and within a year or so, had read Keith Waterhouse’s original novel.

Over the years, the movie came and went across the TV networks, spending a few years in the custody of Channel 4 before returning to BBC2 in the early 90s. I seldom passed up on a chance of watching it, and by the mid 80s had managed to commit it to VHS tape.

Shot in 2.35:1 CinemaScope, the film adapted remarkably well to the pan-and-scan technique employed by broadcasters in the era before television sets could accept widescreen. By 1993, the BBC had adopted a kind of half-way to widescreen compromise, with black bars top and bottom of the picture, but it wouldn’t be until the DVD release of the early 2000s that I finally got to see the film the way its director intended: suddenly, the moorside landscape where Billy gets rid of his Shadrack and Duxbury calendars was opened right out – where once we saw only overhead wires, there was now a whole pylon on view. An overhead shot that has Billy in a toilet cubicle attempting to flush those selfsame calendars to oblivion could now be seen in its original artful intent, with Billy and Shadrack facing off on either side of a locked door.

Fifty years on, I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve seen Billy Liar. I know whole swathes of the dialogue verbatim, and yet I could still go on watching. During the late 1980s, I searched fruitlessly for some of the locations, believing the film to have been shot in Manchester – I was part right: there are a few street scenes in the city, including a barely recognisable Old Trafford – but the bulk of the filming took place in Bradford and Leeds. A BBC documentary, Hollywood UK, revisited some key locations in the 1990s, including the Fisher family home, located on Hinchcliffe Avenue, Baildon, Shipley. Seen today on Street View, the house still has its original leaded front windows and side bay which can be seen clearly on screen. I tracked it down many years ago, but was alarmed to realise that the inhabitant was a neurotic who was paranoid about visits from film fanatics. The house has been sold twice since then – perhaps unsurprisingly – and for a Billy Liar fan could have been had for the ‘bargain’ price of £150,000 back in 2019. Perhaps its status as a place of fan pilgrimage keeps the price down – or maybe it's because Baildon is, frankly, horrible...

Billy Liar is a fantasist who aspires to be a writer but exists in a dream world of his own devising. Had I been more self aware in 1975, I might have recognised some of myself in him – at age thirteen, I had already created my own alternate reality, populated with fantasy characters, and had ambitions to someday become a writer. It doesn’t end there, either – Billy Liar is a songwriter, like myself. In fact the only ways in which I don’t resemble William Fisher are his infidelities, his lies, and his fractious family life. Looking back, it’s tempting to see that 1975 broadcast as a warning – you have to take risks, like getting on a train to London, if you want to be in with a chance of realising your ambitions. Or, you can simply stay at home and do it all in your imagination... as Councillor Duxbury says, 'think on!'

Let's Quist Again

 

Doomwatch is back. 

It stirred up controversy in its day, and made a pin-up out of a young Robert Powell (above) before blowing him to kingdom come. What was the fuss all about? If you haven't seen Doomwatch since the 70s (or indeed, at all), now's your chance to find out.

For those of us who bought the DVD collection back in 2016, the return of Doomwatch to broadcast TV is no big deal. What matters is that it's being shown at all, having been absent from the small screen since an early 90s Saturday morning repeat on UK Gold. But as of tonight, it's back in its proper place, at 9pm, on Talking Pictures TV.

Fans of the series will, of course, own the DVDs already, but what makes these 2025 repeats more interesting is the fact that they will draw in more casual viewers, many of whom will probably remember the show from back in the 70s, without ever having thought to seek it out on DVD or online. Others will be watching for the first time...

One might well wonder what today’s audience will make of Doomwatch. With its eco-friendly agenda, it will no doubt have a certain resonance even if the environmental disasters it predicted are more reflective of the era in which it was made. Today’s eco disasters are way beyond the scope of Dr. Quist’s Doomwatch department. Even so, it was an important series in that it was one of the first, if not the first television series that asked its audience to engage with the problem of pollution in its many forms. It went a bit off the rails at times – by series three, the Doomwatch department were dealing with moral pollution, in an episode that has yet to be broadcast by any television channel – but on the whole it did much to forefront concern for the environment, and sounded a timely note of caution in respect of scientific progress left unchallenged.

Fifty-five years later, we can all see the results of what happens if you give technology its head – the internet is arguably the atomic bomb of the 21st century, and if you want an example of moral pollution, there can be no more pernicious example. There are many other arenas in which society today could benefit from an initiative like Doomwatch – driverless vehicles for one – and in general, it seems, from where I’m standing, as though science and technology are being given far too much leeway. App-based AI has played into the hands of multi-billion corporations, and Keir Starmer’s naive pronouncements this week about Britain becoming an AI superpower need watching very carefully. AI allows big business to do away with manpower and transform its customer-facing operations into a chatbot-driven nightmare. It has almost totally eliminated banking from our high streets, and if you want virtually any other kind of public service, there is no alternative other than to go online. Will this make for a better Britain, or will it transform society into a mass of smartphone-dependent individuals, everyone online but no one truly connected to their fellow human beings? Or has that already happened? Where's Dr. Quist when you need him?

Doomwatch may not have foreseen the internet, but its creators Kit Pedler and Gerry Davis could already see the potential danger of putting too much faith in computers: the episode Project Sahara is the closest Doomwatch gets to interrogating AI, where we see an advanced computer system (far beyond anything that existed in 1970) being used to make recruitment decisions – exactly what is happening right now.

Elsewhere, the concerns of 1970 sometimes seem like a storm in a teacup – there has never been a nuclear-powered rocket launch system, nor has science evolved a species of intelligent super rats. Some of the science was questionable even at the time: ‘thunder shake’, a pheomenon which Quist observes in a cracked brandy glass (having supposedly been caused by aircraft noise) is a real thing, but it is observed in wood, not glass. Real scientists occasionally took the series to task in print, but Doomwatch was always a step ahead of reality and therefore, essentially, science fiction. Its value as a piece of television was in getting people talking, stimulating debate about the real problems posed by real world science.

It was, of course, a product of its time, and casual sexism abounds, to an extent that 21st century viewers will find hard to accept. The characters were, on paper, cardboard cut-outs, and it was only the skill of the actors that brought them to life. Much of the series consists of men in ill-advised attire shouting at each other in rooms that look like the Goodies’ Cricklewood headquarters. At its worst, Doomwatch is Man at C&A vs Man in Carnaby Street, with the two extremes personified by Doctors Quist and Ridge respectively. But it meant well, and it didn’t deserve the treatment it got from the BBC, who wiped the bulk of the master tapes without ever repeating a single episode. 

It is more by luck than judgement that Doomwatch survives at all, and viewers tuning in to the upcoming Talking Pictures repeats are bound to notice the uneven quality between episodes preserved as video master tapes, and those upscaled from poorer quality sources.

Will I even bother to watch myself? It’s not that long since I last dusted off the DVD collection, and I only made it through the incomplete first series before giving up. Series two is a very mixed bag, with far too many regular characters and some episodes that are plain boring. Series three effectively doesn’t exist, with only three episodes extant, one of them the unbroadcast Sex and Violence, which is embarrassingly bad. For a series that started on a thermonuclear bang, Doomwatch went out on a whimper – relegated to a midsummer slot when hardly anybody was watching.

That said, I’ll be tuned in, if only for the existential experience of seeing Doomwatch broadcast at a properly adult, 9pm ‘post watershed’ slot for the first time since 1972. And I hope that it won’t just be the old guard watching. The series deserves to be better remembered, and if today’s viewers can see past the flowery shirts and sexism, they may be surprised at what they find.

Doomwatch – Fridays from 17 January, 9pm, Talking Pictures TV