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.

 

Summer Schedule: Hergé's Adventures of Tintin

 

Over the coming weeks, I’ll be turning my attention to some of those television series that are associated in memory with the school summer holidays – and a few others that for me personally belong in the same category. First off, and one of the earliest examples of children’s programming being shown on summer holiday mornings, is the Belgian boy detective Tintin...

During the early 1970s, no school holiday was complete without one of the many Tintin serials being repeated on BBC1. Commencing on Monday 17 July 1972, the channel’s morning schedule included an hour and fifteen minutes of programmes for children. This was an innovation, as the mornings had previously been a dead zone on BBC1, with nothing to see besides the test card. The first day’s summer morning line-up kicked off at 9.45am with an episode of Mary, Mungo and Midge. American period adventure series Casey Jones steamed in at 10am, while the 1963 wildlife series Attenborough and Animals ran from 10.25 to 10.50. Then it was time for The Adventures of Tintin: The Crab With the Golden Claws, with the morning’s programmes rounded off by The Magic Roundabout at 10.55. This set a template that would be followed, with only minor changes, until the end of the school summer holidays.

At this time, I knew Tintin only from the Tele-Hachette/ Belvision cartoon series that had been shown during the 1960s, and knew nothing of the comic albums, a situation that was soon to change. BBC Television had first begun broadcasting Tintin’s adventures back in 1959, with the serial King Ottokar’s Sceptre, commencing on Sunday 12 April. Produced in black and white by Belvision, this eight-part serial was crude compared to later efforts, with only limited animation, and relied heavily on static panels from the original books. The English voices were supplied by Derek Guyler – although it’s hard to imagine him providing a convincing voice for the young Belgian reporter. A further serial, The Broken Ear, was broadcast in 1962, allowing British Tintin fans to experience an adventure that would not be available in book form for another thirteen years. Neither of these two black and white serials was ever repeated.

The same year, 1962, saw the debut of the better remembered cartoon series, produced this time in colour (although it would not be broadcast in colour until 1972). The Crab With the Golden Claws, freely adapted from Hergé’s 1941 comic album, was shown in twelve ten-minute episodes, beginning on Sunday 27 May and running until Sunday 26 August. It received a repeat run the following year, with the episodes this time edited into 20-minute instalments, beginning on Thursday 2 May at 17.30. This time slot, immediately before the evening news, would become the serial’s natural home for the next six years. The repeat run was followed by The Mystery of the Unicorn (AKA The Secret of the Unicorn), beginning on Thursday 30 May, in the same timeslot. The episodes were again of twenty minutes duration.

On Monday 6 April 1964, a new Tintin serial began. Although it would later be shown in five-minute segments, for this first broadcast Objective Moon (adapted from Hergé’s original comic albums Objectif Lune and On a Marché Sur la Lune) was presented as four twenty-five minute episodes. This may well have been the first Tintin serial I ever saw, and was for many years the only one of which I held any recollection. I almost certainly saw the serials that followed it, but Objective Moon, with its science fiction trappings held the most appeal for me.

Next up was Red Rackham’s Treasure, a sequel story to The Mystery of the Unicorn, broadcast in three parts from 24 June 1964. Up next, on 21 and 28 September came the two-part The Black Island, the original album of which was the only one of Tintin’s adventures set in the United Kingdom. The following year would see a brand new edition of the book, Hergé’s UK publishers Methuen having decreed that the 1939 original, with its dated vehicles and settings, needed updating.

1965 saw repeats for Objective Moon (still in its four-part format) and Red Rackham’s Treasure, the latter in the five-minute episodes that would become the norm for all future broadcasts. From 1966, the Radio Times listings become slightly harder to follow, as the publication began spelling the character’s name as if he were a member of International Rescue – ‘Tin Tin’. The Black Island, now in five-minute segments, was repeated commencing 28 March, followed on 19 April by a brand new, 13-part serial, The Calculus Case (adapted from the 1956 album L’Affaire Tournesol).

The Crab With the Golden Claws, now comprised of 17 five-minute instalments, began a repeat run on 12 May, followed by a 22-part version of Objective Moon, commencing 14 June. Tintin was now in the middle of his longest unbroken run on BBC television, with serials lined up all the way through to the autumn: The Secret of the Unicorn (25 July), Red Rackham’s Treasure (10 August) and to end the run, the previously unseen Star of Mystery (14 September).

1967 saw a repeat of this same serial (now billed as Mysterious Star), beginning on Monday 3 July, and followed by another outing for The Calculus Case (20 July). Finally, July 1968 saw a repeat run for Objective Moon, in its last appearance on BBC television. A year later, real men would land on the real moon, rendering Tintin’s exploits somewhat old hat…

I can still remember seeing this final Tintin serial on this, its fourth run. I also remember the laconic advice that one young viewer sent in to Junior Points of View: ‘put Tintin in the bin-bin’. Someone in programme planning must have been taking notes, because the ‘bin-bin’ is where the intrepid boy reporter found himself for the next four years. It was only with the advent of school holiday scheduling that he was granted a reprieve.

Following its 1972 broadcast, The Crab With the Golden Claws received a repeat run during the summer of 1973, then at Easter 1974, The Secret of the Unicorn was dusted off. Red Rackham’s Treasure followed, logically enough, during the summer holiday, and these same two serials were then repeated to the exclusion of all others: Unicorn at Easter 1975, and Rackham during the summer holiday in 1976. By now, the BBC’s prints must have been getting rather worn, and following repeat runs for Unicorn in 1983 and Rackham the following year, Tintin was consigned to the bin-bin for good… 

Whilst this was certainly the end for the Belvision cartoon series, Tintin remained a highly popular character, and a brand new cartoon series, animated more realistically in the style of the original comics, appeared in the early 90s, with episodes being broadcast on Channel 4. The BBC’s Gaelic channel, Alba, also showed them (with translated audio) in the early 2020s. The boy reporter's adventures were also adapted as a radio series (1992-93).

The two live action Tintin movies – Tintin and the Golden Fleece and Tintin and the Blue Oranges – were much harder to find on television, and to my knowledge only the former has ever been broadcast in the UK, making its last appearance (in a restored edition) on BBC2 ten years ago. The cartoon feature, Tintin and the Lake of Sharks (1972) was shown twice by the corporation, in 1977 and 1979. There is, of course, the Speilberg movie, about which the less said, the better…

Although I’d seen Tintin during the 1960s, it wasn’t until the summer 1972 repeat of The Crab With the Golden Claws that I began to take a real interest in the character. Coincidence or not, the cartoon albums, previously available only in hardback, began to appear in paperback that same year, and on a trip to Lichfield on Thursday 27 July, I spotted the book version of The Crab With the Golden Claws in WH Smith and had it bought for me, whilst my brother chose The Black Island. By Thursday 10 August, my diary reports that I was already doing Tintin drawings.

Over the coming years, I collected the many Tintin albums, some of which were still only available in hardback and often had to be ordered specially from Hudsons' bookshop in Birmingham. They're still on my shelves more than fifty years later, but arguably none of it might have happened were it not for those summer holiday screenings back in 1972. And although I’d be the first to acknowledge that the Belvision cartoon series was risible in may respects, it had a certain charm, and even today, it’s those voices I hear in my head when I’m reading the originals...

Next time: he's the most tip-top... Top Cat.

Accidental Television: The Man Outside

Sometimes, I got to see a piece of television quite by chance, a series I would not normally tune in for, often at odd times, when the television was turned on for some other purpose. We often had the set turned on when we had visitors such as our grandparents, and on the evening of Friday 7 July 1972, they came over on the occasion of our mum’s forty third birthday, a visit that I recorded in my diary.

Later that evening, we all sat down in front of the television, most likely so that the grown-ups could watch the Nine O’Clock News. I had no interest in this – but it was followed by an eerie mystery series that I’d never seen before, and will almost certainly never see again, all but two episodes having been wiped. The Man Outside was that comparative rarity in British television drama, an anthology series. Each week’s story was topped and tailed by Rupert Davies, playing a character named Baker (the thirteen-episode series had the working title Baker’s Dozen). Seated in his library, in very much the manner of Roald Dahl introducing his Tales of the Unexpected, Baker would begin to tell the story of one of life’s outsiders (hence the title) – loneliness being the factor that united a disparate array of unsettling narratives – before the action cut to the story itself. 

The episode I caught that evening – and the sole example from the series that I ever saw – was Bye, Bye Mrs. Bly, an eerily atmospheric piece starring Sylvia Coleridge as an old lady who lives alone in a ramshackle cottage. The village children torment her and call her a witch, while their parents treat her with suspicion and believe her to be unhinged (Coleridge gave a very similar performance that same year in a memorable episode of The Lotus Eaters). Is there a dark secret in her past, and what has it got to do with the gnarled old tree in her cottage garden? I can tell you without risk of spoilers (since the episode no longer exists) that beneath the tree there lay a body.

Unusually, I sat and watched Bye Bye Mrs. Bly right through to the end – ordinarily, when the grown-ups settled down to watch one of ‘their’ programmes, I would find something else to do. Someone said something about Rupert Davies, evidently recognising him as Maigret, but the association meant nothing to me – I didn’t even recognise him as the voice of Professor MacClaine from Gerry Anderson’s Joe 90.

According to the Radio Times data, accessible via BBC’s Genome database, Bye Bye Mrs. Bly was broadcast not on 7 July 1972, but on the following Friday, the 14th. So either I’m remembering it wrongly, or the episode was substituted after the Radio Times had gone to print, as quite often happened. Given that I saw no other episodes of The Man Outside, and only chanced to see this one because of the visit from our grandparents, I’ll stick my neck out and say I’m right and Genome is wrong. The BBC holds ‘Programme as Broadcast’ data which could confirm it one way or the other, so if anyone out there ever happens to be looking through July 1972, I’d be interested to know the answer.

But it gets stranger still: because I’d swear to having seen Bye Bye Mrs. Bly on another occasion – probably in early 1973. I remembered it as ‘the one with the old woman and the tree.’ But this broadcast is unlisted on Genome – indeed, The Man Outside was wiped without ever being repeated, which always strikes me as an insult to all the actors and crew who were involved in the production. And if that’s not enough, my memory of the episode is in colour – although we only had a black and white set at the time...

A search on Google turned up some production dates for the series, which was shot in studio and on outside broadcast VT – unusual for 1972. Between 12 and 14 January 1972, the episode Last Target was on location in Chenies and Latimer, followed by shoots at White Waltham (27-28 January), Kilburn (3-4 February), Norland Square W1 (4-25 February) and Ealing (8-9 May). Studio days included 14-15 March (TC1), 14-15 April (TC3) and 5-6 May (TC3). The same source gives some interesting and slightly prurient anecdotes about the series’ production.

None of this would be worth mentioning were it not for the archive status of The Man Outside, of which only two episodes are extant. Someone has certainly seen them, as there are screen grabs on imdb (above and below), but they’re nowhere to be found online. 

The early 70s were a good time for British anthology TV, with series such as Out of the Unknown and Menace turning up reasonably regularly, and The Man Outside was a worthy entry in the genre, similar in tone to ITV's Thriller series but with a somewhat more melancholic edge to the drama. With so little of it left, it’s unlikely we’ll ever get to see The Man Outside on Talking Pictures or any of the digital stations that still go in for archival material. If the episode I saw was anything to go by, then this is an unfortunate loss. Whilst the discovery of a missing Dr. Who episode would probably melt the internet, there would be little or no reaction should any of The Man Outside ever resurface. There isn't a single review for the series on imdb. And that’s a shame.

The Sixty Years Later Affair

It was Thursday 24 June 1965 when British viewers were first introduced to the pop cultural phenomenon that was The Man From UNCLE. At 8pm that evening, BBC1 embarked on a run of broadcasts that would go all the way through to August 1968, encompassing episodes from all four series of the spy-fi classic. British viewers were behind the curve – the series had got started stateside back in September of 1964, and the UK broadcast order deviated radically from the American NBC screenings, commencing at episode three (The Quadripartite Affair), followed, logically enough, by episode four (The Shark Affair) before jumping to episode 18 – The Mad, Mad Tea Party Affair. It’s easy to see why the BBC placed this episode so early in its running order. Its ‘through the looking glass’ plot sees a girl bystander accidentally brought into UNCLE HQ, and serves as a useful introduction to the fictitious organisation’s modus operandi (today, it also happens to be the top rated of all 105 Man From UNCLE episodes on imdb).

I’ve wracked my memory for any recollection of seeing The Man From UNCLE's original BBC broadcasts, and I can find nothing. The 8pm screening time was rather late for me, but that’s not to say I wasn’t aware of the series. At my birthday in March 1967, I had the famous Corgi ‘Thrush-Buster’ bought for me. It was a cool toy, and it didn’t really matter that I’d never seen an episode of the series that inspired it. If anything, the ‘Waverly Ring’ included in the packaging impressed me even more than the car, with its alternating lenticular images of Napoleon Solo and Ilya Kuryakin. Lenticular images had become popular in the 1950s, but this was the first example I’d ever seen, and it felt not unlike magic.

I must have had some knowledge of UNCLE by this time, as the series had featured in the newly-launched TV Tornado comic (14 January 1967), which I had bought for me over a number of weeks. The UNCLE stories were presented as text rather than strip cartoons, typical of the comic’s cheeseparing production values, and I can still remember trying to get our teacher to read one of these tales to the class, a story that pitted UNCLE against the abominable snowman…

Over the coming years, a few items of UNCLE merchandise found their way into my hands including a cap-firing pistol that came mounted on card bearing the images of Napoleon Solo, Ilya Kuryakin and the famous UNCLE logo. Not being a regular viewer of the series, The Man From UNCLE became, for me, more of a toy merchandising operation. On holiday in Ireland in 1970, I found two Action Man-size figures of Solo and Kuryakin in an out of the way toy shop. I’m still unsure whether I knew the series in any more detail by this time, but I had the dolls bought for me nevertheless – they came in black roll necks and trousers, with guns in shoulder holsters. Unlike the examples that can be found online, this pair did not ‘raise arm and shoot cap-firing pistol’. I’m not even sure how such a thing was possible? How could an Action Man-sized pistol fire caps?

By this time, the series had ended its run on BBC1, where it would not be seen again until a solitary episode (The Arabian Affair) aired in 1981. Unlike Star Trek, which the corporation kept on endless repeats, The Man From UNCLE was allowed to slip out of the schedules, even when the episodes could have been seen in colour. Perhaps the series felt too much of its time.

But it was not the end for Solo and Kuryakin on British television: in the early 1970s, ITV acquired the rights to the ‘feature films’ that had been compiled from extended two-part episodes. The UNCLE movies were initally shown in primetime slots. One of my first encounters with them – if not the very first – was The Spy With My Face, shown by ATV Midlands on Thursday 24 August 1972 at 7.30pm. Others in the series would turn up as the ‘Sunday Star Movie’ and similar prestigious slots until well into the decade, before being demoted to summer holiday morning filler.

By the early 70s, I’d taken to collecting second hand books, specifically any titles that had been published to tie in with television series. Scouring a local book sale, I discovered a Man From UNCLE paperback. A few minutes later I found another. It was the beginning of a collecting fad that was to last several years as I slowly amassed the complete run of 16 titles that had been published during the mid 60s by Souvenir Press (in America, the series ran to 24). In addition to these, I located copies of no fewer than four Man From UNCLE annuals, published between 1966 and 1969 and relying heavily on reprints of American comic book material.

On paper, I knew The Man From UNCLE very well by this time, but aside from the films, I still hadn’t had sight of a single television episode, and this remained the case until the one-off broadcast mentioned above. By the time the BBC got around to a more comprehensive repeat run in the 1990s, my interest had dwindled and I didn’t bother to tune in. Since then, the series has surfaced occasionally on satellite channels, but it’s only the colour episodes that get shown.

Around ten years ago, the first series made it onto a Region 2 DVD release, which I acquired at the time and am still (at time of writing) working my way through. Series one isn’t quite as campy and fun as the later episodes, but it’s far from being full-on serious. The format’s trope of involving an innocent party (usually female) in each week’s caper lends a lightweight quality to many storylines. This ‘innocent party’ was intended as someone with whom the audience could identify, but the prevalence of scatty or ‘dizzy’ types, and their tendency to get romantically involved with Napoleon Solo quickly becomes tedious. After a handful of episodes, one also starts to notice the same locations cropping up time and time again – the city street where UNCLE’s secret entrance is located was a well-used backlot that can be seen in many TV series of the era – and even when venturing father afield, there was a tendency to rely on the same bits of countryside (probably privately-owned ranches). The cumulative effect is that, after a few weeks, you’ve seen just about everything the show has to offer.

For all that, The Man From UNCLE was still enjoyable, escapist entertainment, reflecting an era when pop culture was awash with spies, glamour and intrigue. It benefited from having two memorable characters, portrayed by charismatic actors, and the sight of an American and a Russian working on the same side must have come as a welcome contrast to the reality of international relations in the cold war era. Even Star Trek took a leaf out of the UNCLE manual by introducing its own friendly, mop-topped Russian. Like so many other pop culture classics of the 60s, the format has been revived – once with the original actors, and again in 2015, but the format and characters don’t work when removed from their 1960s context, and it’s still the original that endures in the memory.

For me, the show represents something of a gap in my personal pop culture experience, and I still get a kind of retrospective FOMO when I look back on those original BBC broadcasts. I loved Batman, and was watching The Avengers at age seven… why did it take me so long to get behind The Man From UNCLE? There’s every chance now that I will never get to see all four series complete (if that even matters); but I still have my Corgi Thrush-Buster, so that’s okay... 

The Story of Pop

 

Part Two: On the air 

The early 70s was a time of 1950s revivalism in pop music. The styles and clichés of an earlier decade began to resurface in contemporary hits from bands like Wizzard, Showaddywaddy and even artists like Elton John – his 1972 hit “Crocodile Rock” was the first time I’d ever heard the clichéd arpeggiated guitar pattern that had been part of the 1950s’ musical DNA (originating in songs like Paul Anka’s 1957 hit “Diana” and Buddy Holly's "Heartbeat"). I decided I rather liked these sounds, but it would be a while before I got to hear any authentic period pieces.

In early 1974, spurred on by the resurgence of interest in rock and roll, Bill Haley’s seminal hit single “Rock Around the Clock” was reissued (and not for the first time). This, at least, was a bona fide 1950s artefact, and more to the point, I liked it. I liked that Haley was weilding a huge semi-acoustic Gibson guitar, which by the early 70s was totally unhip; and I liked the sounds his band produced.

As to Elvis, I’d known next to nothing about him during the 1960s, when his visits to the British charts were infrequent. In fact, when his single “In the Ghetto” charted in 1969, I thought he was a new arrival on the scene. “In the Ghetto” was a long way from the likes of “Hound Dog” and “Heartbreak Hotel”, and I didn’t care for its maudlin production. For the moment, however, the earlier Elvis remained out of reach.

It was in the Story of Pop book (see previous entry) that I first began to get an idea about what had been happening in the pop charts of the 1950s. If I’d listened to the radio more often, I’m sure I’d have picked up on various golden oldies getting airplay, but in the early 70s my radio listening in musical terms was confined to the weekly chart rundown. Then, in 1975, another programme came along that was to change everything.

The Double Top Ten Show had in fact been running since the autumn of 1973, its arrival quite likely inspired by the contemporaneous Story of Pop broadcasts. Forming the first hour of Jimmy Savile’s Sunday lunchtime show, it did exactly as the title suggested, playing the top tens of two different years. Typically, a late 50s chart might be paired up with one from the mid to late sixties, and whilst nostalgia was the name of the game, some of the featured charts were, at the time, only a couple of years old. 

A school friend tipped me off about the programme, and it first merited an entry in my diary on Sunday 6 July 1975. It must have taken some persuasion on my part to convince our mum to retune from Radio 2, thus usurping the perennial Two Way Family Favourites from its time honoured position of Sunday lunchtime listening in our house. Once established, The Double Top Ten Show became essential listening. I was slightly put off by the fact that it was presented by Jimmy Savile, whose weird mannerisms never held any appeal for me, but at the time he came across as merely laughable or embarrassing rather than creepy and dangerous. 

Savile’s schtick included awarding imaginary points to listeners for knowing the precise title of a disc as it appeared on the centre of the record. For instance, you might think that Zager and Evans’s 1969 number one hit was called “In the Year 2525” whereas the title on the disc was in fact “In the Year 2525 (Exordium and Terminus)”. Savile loved trying to catch out listeners with stuff like this, and would award himself points for a particularly obscure item. The programme usually went out live, and often purported to be going on in a club rather than a radio studio. I could never work out if this was just a bit of studio verité – some of the crowd sounds came from Savile's signature tune, Ramsey Lewis’ 1965 live instrumental version of “The In Crowd”:

 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jsFST-7Hx-Y 

On the days when the show had been recorded in advance, Savile referred to himself as ‘Herbert Hologram’. Records were always 'zoom-zooming up the charts' or 'on their way down slowly as befits a good record.' Aside from this nonsense, the only memorable bit of his drivel I remember was when he referred to Peter Sarstedt as “Doctor Vinegar” (I’m sure you can work that one out…)

From the very first week that I heard it, The Double Top Ten Show threw open the doors on music that I would never have got to hear anywhere else. Fitting two top tens into an hour meant that a few tracks had to be omitted, with priority accorded to the week's climbers and new entries. Occasionally, the show found room for records that had failed to chart, such as Marty Wilde's 1968 release "Abergavenny", while discs that had formerly been subjected to airplay bans were now deemed acceptable listening, including Serge Gainsbourg’s notorious pop musical orgasm “Je T’Aime (Moi Non Plus)".

Perhaps the best aspect of the show was the fact that we got to hear these vintage hits in context, and after a few weeks of hearing the charts of, say, 1959, I could almost imagine I’d been alive at the time. Each ‘Double Top Ten’ was played in rotation, so that one week we might get to hear the charts from 1967 and 1970 – then, after a few weeks, the same pair of charts turned up again. This really helped to give an idea of how pop music had developed as various fads came and went. It was here, on the DTTS (as my diary constantly referred to it) that I got my first exposure to some of pop’s undisputed classics – Johnny Kidd and the Pirates’ “Shakin’ All Over”, Cliff Richard’s “Move It”, and countless discs by the Shadows, whom I barely knew at this point in time.

By the end of 1975, I knew for a fact that I preferred the music of the late 50s to anything I was hearing in the contemporary charts. From jumble sales, I began to pick up old singles that I’d heard on the DTTS, from artists including Adam Faith, Conway Twitty, Anthony Newley and Lord Rockingham’s XI (I may never have heard their hogmanay hit “Hoots Mon” if it hadn’t been for the DTTS). I even found myself a copy of Charlie Drake singing “Splish Splash”. I was vicariously living the charts of the 1950s at a remove of almost two decades...

More critically, those 50s charts regularly included hits from the likes of Elvis, Eddie Cochran and Buddy Holly, whose careers I could read up in the Story of Pop book. Another artist I discovered through the DTTS was Lonnie Donegan. Up to this point in time, I knew next to nothing about skiffle music, and whilst I was already familiar with Donegan’s 1960 comedy hit “My Old Man’s a Dustman”, his earlier, 'straight' skiffle numbers like “Cumberland Gap” were new to me. I wasn’t just widening my own musical horizons, I was beginning to understand where artists like the Beatles had come from – those charts of 1957, 58 and 59 contained the music that had inspired them.

I kept up with the DTTS over the coming years, picking up not only on music that pre-dated my lifetime, but also filling in various gaps when, for one reason or another, I’d stopped following the charts. From January 1978, the programme was billed as 'Jimmy Savile's Old Record Club' in the Radio Times, although the listing still referred to 'The Double Top Ten Show'. The programme now extended over two hours, bringing an end to Speakeasy and Savile's Travels (some would say not before time).

Eventually, Savile moved on, and the show, now re-christened Pick of the Pops, was picked up by Alan Freeman, who brought along his old signature tune “At the Sign of the Swinging Cymbal” replacing the old Ramsey Lewis theme. The show had by this time been moved to Saturday lunchtime, where it would become a fixture for over twenty years, with the presenter baton passed along to Dale Winton, Tony Blackburn and Paul Gambaccini before ending up with Mark Goodier.

“Pick of the Pops” still exists today on Radio 2 and has recently been relocated to the Sunday teatime spot that was once occupied by the chart countdown – a reflection, perhaps, of how little interest there is in today’s chart music. Sadly, it rarely ventures back further than the 1980s, and only a selection of the chart is played, with much of the show given over to info dumps and listeners’ reminiscences. Back in the 70s, we might have had to put up with Jimmy Savile, but we had more and better music from a show that was, for me at any rate, a genuine musical education. There’s not a lot we can thank Jimmy Savile for, but I’ll grudgingly allow him that much.

The Story of Pop

Part One: in print

For its first decade and a half, pop music was a phenomenon not much given to looking over its shoulder. It was of necessity immediate, contemporary, of the moment. To maintain chart success, acts must keep one eye on the present and the other on the future. Nobody gave much thought to what had gone before or to the fact that history was being written around them. Music journalism was all about current developments and future plans – sometimes anticipating events that would never happen.

This left music fans in a quandry – there was no shortage of news and comment about the latest 'chartbound sounds', but unless you’d kept a mountain of back issues of New Musical Express and its ilk, there was nowhere you could look for information about the music of earlier eras. Today, you’ll find a healthy selection of music reference works and biographies in any decent bookseller (and a truckload of worthless AI-generated crap on Amazon), but back in the early 70s, music fans would have searched the shelves in vain. There had been a smattering of biographies, such as Hunter Davies’ The Beatles, The Authorised Biography (1968); and The Shadows had ghost-written their own story way back in 1961. But works like these were the exception, and, critically, no one had yet risen to the monumental chllenge of compiling a complete history of pop music.

That all changed in 1973. In collaboration with Phoebus publishing, the BBC launched an ambitious 26-week radio series, tied in to a weekly partwork of the same title: The Story of Pop. The magazine was impressively produced, featuring copious photographs and incisive articles from leading music journalists. This was to be a history of everything that belonged under the pop/rock banner, the serious and the not-so-serious, by turns informative, analytical and critical. Styling itself ‘The First Encyclopaedia of Pop in 26 Weekly Parts’, the first issue – adorned by an airbrushed cover image of Elvis and Bowie – appeared at the end of September, with the series launching on Radio One that same week, on Saturday afternoon (with a Sunday afternoon repeat). I remember tuning in for some – though by no means all – of this ground breaking series. The magazine, meanwhile, launched with a series of adverts on commercial television, which was highly unusual for an endeavour involving the BBC.

The magazine wasn’t cheap – its cover price of 25p was five times the cost of the Radio Times, and five pence more than the most expensive glossies like Cosmpolitan. But this was a partwork rather than a magazine, and its 38 pages were all content, with no financial support from advertising. As such, it was remarkably good value: by the end of 26 weeks, for an outlay of just £6.50, readers would have in their possession the best and most comprehensive guide to rock and pop music that had yet been committed to print, and for an additional £1.55 you could send away for not one but two heavy duty binders to hold your collection (by comparison, the hardback book version, when it appeared in 1974, comprised only a selection of highlights from the magazines and cost £3.95).

Pop music itself had entered a phase of revivalism in the early 70s, with many acts looking back to the sounds of the 1950s, and it must have seemed like the right moment to step back and consider its origins. The BBC Omnibus strand had had a tentative stab back in 1968 with the overview documentary All My Loving, but nothing on this scale had ever been attempted. As a story, it was well beyond the remit of a single writer, and while the radio episodes were mostly handled by Tim Blackmore and Charlie Gillett, the partwork drew on the cream of British music journalism to ensure all bases were covered.

The magazine was astutely conceived, with the Elvis/Bowie cover clearly designed to appeal to fans of contemporary sounds as much as the rock revivalists. Taking 1956 as its starting point, but eschewing the obvious chronological approach, each issue juxtaposed articles on past acts and current superstars, whilst ongoing features examined the wider aspects of pop culture, and focused on specific genres. A weekly A-Z roundup of artists old and new provided a handy at-a-glance reference guide to who was who in the rock and pop arena, and the first issue was accompanied by a fold-out poster, ‘The Story of Pop Star Trek’ which illustrated, in typically colourful 1970s fashion, the network of influences that had contributed to the enormous diversity in contemporary pop. This was more than just a history – it was bang up to date with analysis and features on the latest acts. Pop fans could hardly have asked for more.

When the radio series came to an end in 1974, the magazine's run was extended for a further fourteen issues, alongside standalone specials devoted to The Beatles, The Rolling Stones and 50s Rock & Roll. These publications (which would today be styled ‘bookazines’) brought together the best of the parent mag’s features in each subject area. I had The Beatles edition bought for me in August of 1974, just as I was beginning to take a serious interest in their back catalogue, and my brother had the hardback Story of Pop book bought for him that Christmas. I can’t overstate the importance of this book to me in opening up the history of pop music. Over the coming years, I read up on the bands that interested me, and even those that didn’t – the chapter on Bob Dylan was hugely influential in convincing me to listen to his albums, as were those on The Kinks, The Beach Boys and The Byrds. Its features on 50s artists from before my time shone a light onto a musical era that I might otherwise have ignored.

Despite its 300,000 word remit, the partwork couldn’t find room for absolutely everyone. Those artists judged to have been the most important and influential had whole articles devoted to them (including the likes of Adam Faith and Tom Jones), whilst others were covered in overview articles examining specific genres such as Merseybeat and Acid Rock. All of the big names were there, from Elvis, Buddy Holly and Eddie Cochran through Chuck Berry, Little Richard, The Beatles, The Stones, Dylan, The Byrds, all the way to contemporary artists like Marc Bolan, Slade and Sweet.

The book, condensing the magzine’s vast panoply of content (and largely reprinting the pages as they they had originally appeared), was organised into five sections: ‘Rock & Roll’, ‘Black Music’, ‘The Beatles & British Rock’, ‘Dylan & American Rock’ and ‘70s Rock’. It’s interesting to note which of the artists profiled in the magazine were deemed significant enough for inclusion in the hardcover edition. Of the British acts, aside from The Beatles and The Rolling Stones, only The Animals, Cream, The Bee Gees, Tom Jones, The Kinks and The Who made the final cut – Tom Jones’ inclusion being particularly intriguing. American rock was represented by Dylan, The Band, The Beach Boys, The Byrds, Creedence Clearwater Revival, Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young, Jefferson Airplane, Janis Joplin, The Lovin’ Spoonful and Simon & Garfunkel, whilst the 1950s section featured Bill Haley, Elvis, Jerry Lee Lewis and Buddy Holly amongst others.

The magazine continued beyond the life of the radio series, with a series of ‘special volumes’ extending the run to 40 issues. Such is the nature of any document that attempts to summarise an ongoing and ephemeral phenomenon – pop music didn't conveniently end in 1974 and still hasn't (although one could convincingly argue for its being dead in the water). For me, though, The Story of Pop book was as much as I needed to know about pop music circa 1974. It was an era when I was taking less of an interest in contemporary pop, and between those covers lay the future of my own personal musical investigations. In the next part of this article, I’ll go on to look at how and where I tuned into the sounds of the 50s and 60s on the radio.

The original run of 26 Story of Pop magazines have been uploaded online as pdfs, and can be found here:

https://www.worldradiohistory.com/UK/Radio-One-Pop/Radio-One-Story-of-Pop-26.pdf

Dad's Cars

‘To 1 Standard 8 Saloon 1955, complete as inspected: £400’ So reads the earliest item of paperwork I have relating to my dad’s cars. Our dad was never what you’d call a petrol head, although in his younger days, during his national service, he’d ridden a motorcycle, a fact I always found hard to equate with his mild-mannered persona. Cars or occasionally vans were a necessity – as a semi-pro musician, he needed transport to get himself and his drum kit to gigs all over the Midlands and occasionally further afield. As a young musician, he’d had to take his drums on the bus to engagements, fitting them under the stairs, so it’s easy to see why, in an era when car ownership was much less commonplace than it is today, he chose to get himself mobile at an early age.

The Standard 8, registration RNA 883, wasn’t dad’s first car, although he would often reminisce about it in later years. As the garage receipt shows, he traded in a van, of which no details survive. He owned the Standard until June 1961, when it was traded in against an Austin A35, XOJ 62. This was, I believe, another van, the same as the one later made famous by Wallace and Gromit (dad would have appreciated the connection). I have no recollection of this vehicle, which was with him for just over a year. In its place came 799 HDH, a Triumph Herald in two-tone cream and brown. I got to know this car very well over the coming years. Dad later claimed that he would let me sit on his lap and hold the steering wheel as he drove down our quiet suburban street, unlikely as this sounds. Either way, I soon became fixated on Triumph Heralds and even got to own one myself – a pedal car version made by Tri-Ang. There weren’t may production saloons available as pedal cars, so I was unusually lucky in being able to own a miniature version of ‘daddy’s car’.

Some time in the summer of 1964, aged three, I was dismayed to see, from my bedroom window, a canary yellow Vauxhall Victor pulling onto the drive with dad at the wheel. What had happened to the beloved Triumph Herald? I would never see it (or, indeed, the Victor) again. The Vauxhall was a temporary car supplied by the garage from which dad got his next vehicle, a white Hillman Minx, registration KRF 467B. It arrived in time for the family summer holiday that year, when it was captured briefly on film, showing its grey/white paintwork and red upholstery.

On 7 May, 1965, the Minx was involved in an accident. I was completely unaware of this at the time, and only discovered it when going through a folder of very old paperwork, which yielded up the documents seen here. The paperwork, from insurers Beddall Bradford and Co, shows that dad’s policy was bought through his membership of the RAC. Of even greater interest is a copy of a letter that dad sent to the insurance company detailing aspects of the claim and how the repair was handled. The Minx was temporarily replaced by a Ford Anglia, mentioned on a cheque book stub from June ‘65.

By this time, dad was travelling around not merely in his part-time role as a drummer, but in his full-time job working for the G.E.C., and in the summer of 1966 he was given the use of a company car. This time, it was a Vauxhall Victor, DDD 567C, in pale grey. One of its first long hauls was to take the family down to Weston Super Mare for the annual summer holiday, a trip that was made in awful conditions of heavy rain, at a time when the M5 was still incomplete. For a while, we were a two-car family, although the Minx was kept in the garage, with its insurance cover suspended while the Victor was in daily use. This situation continued until April 1966, when dad paid off the finance outstanding on the Minx.

In September 1967, the company car was returned and dad bought himself a brand new Singer Gazelle, HRF 821F, in deep maroon. Like the Minx, this model also came from the Rootes Group, a Midlands-based manufacturer that was taken over by Chrysler in 1970. The Gazelle featured modern styling, with a very rectangular appearance and a body shell shared by other models from the group including the Hillman Hunter. It was a first for us in having a radio, which none of the earlier cars had included. I remember dad seemed particularly proud of this vehicle at the time, and there were several visits to dealerships before the deal was done. It wasn’t the first car he’d owned from new, but somehow this one seemed special, for all that it was really no more than a modest mid-range family saloon.

The Gazelle saw us through holidays to Llandudno in 1968 and 69, Ireland in 1970, and a summer season in 1971 when dad’s musical activities become his full-time job with a residency at Pontins’ holiday camp, Brixham. A garage receipt survives detailing a routine service that was carried out at a dealer in Paignton: you’ll notice that the receipt is now headed Chrysler, following the Rootes Group takeover. An undated note, probably from around this time, totted up dad’s annual mileage – his band work accounted for 7,400 miles, whilst travel for his 9-5 job amounted to 12,000: a total of nearly 20,000 miles. It’s no wonder he changed his cars with such regularity – the average saloon car of the 1960s had a far shorter life expectancy than today’s models, with many developing mechanical faults within a matter of months, and most models being prone to rust.

In the autumn of 1971, the Singer Gazelle was involved in an accident, this time more serious than the minor bump with the Hillman Minx. Dad set out for his Saturday night gig only to return within the hour – the car had been broadsided at a junction less than a mile from home. He was shaken but unhurt, though I believe the car to have been declared a write-off. Unfortunately, no paperwork survives from this incident, or indeed any later than 1971, and from here I have to rely on diaries.

‘Daddy gets new car, Austin 1800’ was my entry for Tuesday 20 June 1972. Between the Gazelle accident and now, he’d had the use of a red Vauxhall Victor, which I believe to have been a company car during a brief period of employment with Cressall, a manufacturer of electrical resistors. The new car, VOV 900J, finished in plain white, took us on holidays to Llandudno (for a third time) in 1972, and Blackpool the following year. On Good Friday 1973, arriving home from work early, dad scraped it against the wall at the end of the drive – not a major incident, but he wasn’t best pleased.

Perhaps the most unusual journey I remember making in this car was on the evening of Sunday 24 June 1973. There was a thunderstorm at the time, and I think the power had gone off. We couldn’t watch television or play records, and it was too gloomy to sit and read. On an impulse, dad decided that we were all going out in the car. Where to? It didn’t matter. Just as long as it got us out of the house. In the event, he drove us as far as West Bromwich, a journey of some twelve miles and a round trip of about an hour. 

The Austin 1800 was the contemporary version of a saloon that had been in production since 1964, with a body style that has become known as the ‘land crab.’ I remember it as being a reasonably comfortable car, with the usual vinyl upholstery typical of the era (on a hot day it gave off a distinctive smell), and curious door handles that comprised a plastic flap locked into place by a clip. As a back seat passenger, I appreciated the folding armrest that was incorporated into the bench seat. Of course, we didn’t have seatbelts in the back during this era, and even for front seat passengers they weren’t yet mandatory. I’m sure our dad used them, and remember some of the early examples as having quite fiddly locking and release mechanisms. The 1800 wasn’t quite a prestige vehicle, and always struck me as having a kind of dowdy appearance. Of dad’s earlier cars, I preferred the Herald, Minx and Victor, and was bought die-cast versions of them all. Dinky made a model of the 1800, liveried as a taxi, which I owned and later repainted in Humbol enamel to resemble dad’s example.

Sales brochure for the Morris 2200 (identical to the Austin) showing it in the, 'ahem', desirable shade of Harvest Gold

Dad no sooner took possession of the car than he began to covet an upgraded version of the model, with a more powerful six-cylinder engine. The Austin 2200 had been launched at around the same time that he acquired the 1800, and quickly became a car which he aspired to (for comparison, our uncle, who owned an estate agency, drove a Jensen Interceptor). The most desirable colour, as far as dad was concerned, was ‘Harvest Gold’, a kind of mustardy shade, ‘complemented’ by an orangey-brown interior, that told you in no uncertain terms that you were living in the 1970s. Dad finally got to own this ‘dream car’ on Wednesday 3 July 1974, as noted in my Letts Schoolboys’ Diary. It saw us through family holidays to Llandudno (again!), Weston Super Mare, and a Welsh farm cottage before being replaced, in January 1978, by a white Austin Maxi, SOV 781S. This was our first ‘hatchback’, a feature which must have been very helpful to dad in moving his drums around, as he was still playing four or five nights a week. I didn’t care for the Maxi… if the 1800 had been dowdy, this was positively plain, a really drab and unimaginative car from an era when British motor manufacturing was in steep decline.

It was replaced, in 1980 and in considerable style, by a Ford Granada, EOX 983V, finished in a kind of metallic greenish gold. This was the most prestigious car our dad ever owned, as well as being the largest. It wasn’t the famous ‘Sweeney’ style (theirs was actually a Consul), but the MkII, introduced in 1977, and looking very much like the example below, illustrated on Wikipedia. It was around for a long time, and by this time I wasn’t given to noting such things in my diary. Alongside it came a bright orange VW Beetle, followed by an Opel. Dad didn’t drive these himself: they were provided (courtesy of a local haulage company) as cars for my brother and myself to use should we wish to do so. I hadn’t yet learned to drive, so never availed myself of the opportunity. The Opel’s most memorable moment came when it caught fire, while parked directly in front of our house. Remarkably, the house sustained no damage, although the car was written off.

Dad’s last car, which he still owned at the time of his passing in August 2001, was a Vauxhall Cavalier MkII hatchback, in silver. It says something for the reliability of cars during this era that he was able to keep it on the road for so long – it dated from the mid 1980s and was still perfectly driveable over a decade later.

These, then, were dad's cars – spanning over forty years of motoring and goodness knows how many thousands of miles. None of them, with the possible exception of the Granada, was anything more than an average family saloon. Some, like the Maxi, aren't well regarded today, whilst others like the A35 and Triumph Herald are considered classics. They all served him well – it was rare for any of them to be off the road for more than the occasional service – and in that respect they did exactly what they were built to do, providing reliable family motoring to an unassuming and unpretentious man who put family above all other considerations.