ITV@70

 

               

I wasn’t watching ITV yesterday (Monday 22 September), so I didn’t notice if the channel chose to mark its seventieth anniversary in any way, even if was just the ‘and finally’ item on the evening news. Somehow, I doubt it. Ten years ago, I seem to recall a similar lack of celebration when the channel turned sixty. At the Network label, we put out a lavish box set in celebration of the sixtieth anniversary (for which I did the artwork), but I suspect that the people responsible for on air promos and content at the station aren’t really focused on the past, and events of seven decades ago must seem positively prehistoric and beyond the lifespan of even their extended families.

It was a different story back in 1976, when the network celebrated its 21st anniversary. The TV Times included a ‘souvenir supplement’ reproducing its first ever cover (above), and a selection of others providing a timeline of memorable programming. On the night itself, Eamonn Andrews hosted a two-hour celebration ITV – This is Your Life, the contents of which can well be imagined. My diary mentions the inclusion of clips from The Prisoner, Thunderbirds and even The Adventures of Twizzle (which may account for how a solitary episode came to survive in the archive). Viewers in the ATV region were also getting to see The Prisoner on late night repeats, although, ironically, I wasn’t allowed to stop up to watch on this particular week, as the episode had been pushed back half an hour to make room for ‘The Independent Broadcasting Authority Banquet’. Quite why the network chose to televise a black tie junket for its executives and members of Parliament I can’t imagine. It certainly can’t have attracted many viewers.

You might have imagined that the anniversary provided an excuse to present a season of vintage programmes, in much the same way as the BBC had done back in the summer of '76 with its own ‘Festival Forty’. But the BBC had a channel to spare, whereas at ITV, such a celebratory season would have played havoc with scheduling and wasn’t likely to prove popular with advertisers. As a general rule, ITV has never really gone in for this kind of commemorative scheduling: if viewers wanted older programmes, they had to seek them out in the afternoons and late-night slots where occasional vintage items acted as filler for much of the 1970s.

In 1980, ITV’s quarter century was commemorated in print with a lavish coffee table book, produced in association with Michael Joseph. Imagine such a publication appearing today, when the only piece of vintage television that’s regularly enshrined in print is Dr. Who. The TV Times once again acknowledged the occasion with a silver jubilee edition, although the evening itself was marked only by a forty five-minute celebration, hidden away at 11.30pm. My diary recorded the fact of ITV’s 25th anniversary, but I didn’t bother with this self-congratulatory programme. The main event of the evening was The French Connection over on BBC1. The TV Times did rather better, with a nostalgic item at the back of the issue, including yet another reproduction of that 1955 Lucille Ball cover and the schedule for the channel’s first evening of broadcasting. Remarkably, we find something called Crossroads scheduled at 7.30, but this was a discussion forum – the infamous motel still lay nine years in the future. The early evening included ‘Flickwiz’, described as ‘a magazine programme for boys and girls’, but with a logo that, in print, could be interpreted somewhat differently…

My archive of TV Times pdfs fizzles out around 1983, so I can’t report on what, if anything, might have appeared at the time of ITV’s subsequent anniversaries. By the time the channel turned 50, in 2005, it was a ‘do it yourself’ celebration, as Tim Beddows pulled out numerous items from his personal archive to present one of his legendary film shows (for an audience of one!). The day’s programme, recorded in my diary, comprised The Persuaders (Someone Waiting); Return of the Saint (The Nightmare Man); The Adventurer (which broke down); The Saint (The Lawless Lady); Man in a Suitcase (Castle in the Clouds) and finally, Gideon’s Way (The Wall), all projected from 16mm or 35mm film prints. It wasn’t all ITV, though: we also found room for a ‘musical interlude from the BBC circa 1930s/40s’, an edition of Noel Gordon’s Lunchbox, and a vintage advertising film about the benefits of electricity which will no doubt resurface on Talking Pictures’ Footage Detectives sometime, if it hasn’t already (where would they be without Tim’s film archive?)

So there it is – ITV has been going for seventy years, if anyone cares. Without it, we’d never have had The Prisoner, The Sweeney, The Avengers, anything from Gerry Anderson and countless other classic series that have acquired the status of icons. These days, apart from Robert Peston and Tom Bradby, I barely bother with the channel, or indeed much else from contemporary television.

Back in 2015, I’m not sure if I’d have given ITV another decade, but it’s still here, with an extended presence as a streaming service, not to mention four freeview/satellite channels and a YouTube channel. Where they’ll be in another ten years is anybody’s guess, as the television viewing experience continues to fragment into ever increasing subscription services. If there’s still anything resembling today’s scheduled broadcast television around in 2035, I’ll be very surprised… assuming I’m even here to see it.

1999 @ 50

 

I’d known about Space:1999 for months. Paperback novelisations had begun appearing in bookshops well before the series got anywhere near a TV screen. The TV Times had mentioned it a year earlier, publishing a photo of Martin Landau and Barbara Bain and calling the series Space 99 (a better title if you ask me). The BBC’s Horizon had included clips in a film about the special effects industry, How on Earth Did They Do That, broadcast on 23 December 1974. I knew something was on its way from Gerry Anderson, I just didn’t know when to expect it.

Finally, on September 4, 1975, it arrived, promoted as part of ITV’s ‘Big Season’ of autumn programmes. Viewers in the ATV Midlands region, of whom I was one, got to see it first, at 7.00pm that evening, along with the Yorkshire, Grampian, Scottish, Border and Ulster regions. In the London and Anglia areas, it began two days later, on Saturday 6th at 5.50pm – arguably a better slot, but up against Dr. Who on BBC1 – and the Timelord had stolen a march on the Alphans by grabbing viewers a week earlier. This, clearly, didn’t help the Andersons' cause. Neither did the events of the coming months, when many ITV regions relegated the series to different slots. Christmas has a habit of interrupting any scheduled series, and in the LWT area, it provided the perfect excuse to demote Space:1999 to Saturday mornings at 11.50 commencing January 1976. One can only imagine what Gerry Anderson and Lew Grade thought of seeing their £3m investment treated as kids’s stuff.

'Space 99' gets its first mention in the TV Times, September 1974

It was too often the case on British television that science fiction was dismissed as juvenile fodder, the BBC’s Quatermass and Out of the Unknown being notable exceptions to an almost universal rule. Science fiction meant space ships, robots and men in monster suits. It did not equate to serious drama. When the BBC began showing Star Trek in the summer of 1969, it was in the slot normally occupied by Dr. Who. When the show’s appeal to adults was better understood, it got taken more seriously, and was promoted to a 7pm slot on midweek evenings – exactly the same slot that most ITV regions originally chose for Space:1999. Mr. Spock would have approved of their logic...

By the time the series appeared, I'd got ahead of the curve by reading the novelisation of the first episode. Further novels appeared through the autumn, along with a Space:1999 Annual, which a friend of mine got ordered for us through his mum's mail order catalogue. The series was promoted in the comic Look-in, where John Burns provided a rushed strip cartoon version (he reportedly hated drawing comics based on TV series). I'd stopped reading Look-in when it started featuring the likes of David Cassidy, but I made an exception this week. I might have kept on buying it if I'd liked the comic strip, but I wasn't keen on John Burns' artwork. Why couldn't they have got Mike Noble? (Don't tell me, I know...)

Here in the ATV region, Space:1999 stayed put on Thursday evenings for its whole first series run, with only a single episode, The Last Sunset, broadcast in an earlier slot on New Year’s Day 1976. When it returned, in the autumn, for a second season, ATV played the same trick as LWT and Anglia the previous year, putting it up against Dr. Who. I was quite happy to forsake the Doctor (I was never that keen on Tom Baker), and tuned in on Saturday 4 September for the first of the new series. Teatime on Saturday felt like a good time to watch Space:1999, ideally accompanied by a bacon and sausage sandwich – but it wouldn’t last. Only seven episodes were shown in that slot before the series was bumped to 4.45 on Thursday evenings, commencing with the all time dud episode, The Rules of Luton. Had the programme been under-performing against Dr. Who? It seems highly likely. But series two got the scheduling it deserved – under Fred Freiberger’s influence, it had degenerated into a children’s show, on a par with Lost in Space. Aged fifteen, I was keenly aware of this, and although I kept on watching, I knew the series had lost everything that had made it special – the serious, metaphysical air that pervaded year one was replaced with comic gags about Tony Verdeschi’s home-brewed beer, and a parade of increasingly silly monsters. It’s clear from my diary that I wasn’t taking the new series entirely seriously when I wrote about the Alphans blowing up ‘Brian Blessed’s fizzy drinks machine’ in the season opener, The Metamorph. Series two disappeared after Christmas, leaving seven episodes as yet unbroadcast, but by this time, I didn’t really care. The tail end of the series finally made it to the screen in August of 1977, when five episodes were shown, whilst the remaining two (The Immunity Syndrome and The Dorcons) were rolled out on a couple of Bank Holiday Mondays in 1978.

It’s sobering to reflect that half a century has passed since I first saw Breakaway. That broadcast was probably the very last time that a new sci-fi TV series gave me a frisson of anticipation. For the first few weeks it was all new, and strange and amazing, the sets, the hardware, the music – I’d got the same buzz about every Anderson series from Thunderbirds onwards, when I was old enough to enjoy the anticipation of a new and exciting series. I know it’s a feeling I’ll never get again.

TV Times looks at Space:1999 during its first week on air.

The Big Season

ITV pulls the stops out... September 1975

Autumn was always traditionally the time when broadcasters unveiled their new programme line-ups for the coming season, and this week fifty years ago, it was all kicking off on ITV and BBC1. From quite an early age, I was aware of the 'new series for autumn' phenomenon: for me, it usually meant a new series from Gerry Anderson: Thunderbirds (1965), Captain Scarlet (1967), Joe 90 (1968). Every autumn, the TV Times would promote forthcoming attractions in a special feature, whilst on-air promotional trails often featured a special jingle or seasonal graphics. In 1975, it all came together – on ITV at any rate – in a package called ‘The Big Season’. It even had its own logo – a very 70s design – featured prominently on the trailers, and splashed across the cover of seven weeks’ worth of the TV Times. No broadcaster in the UK had ever put this amount of effort into trailing their new autumn schedule, and whilst the BBC had been previewing its own autumn line-up since the middle of August, there was no comparable cross-over into the pages of the Radio Times.

‘It’s the Big Season on ITV’ sang the trailers, accompanied by the big, flabby 1970s logo that had been designed for use across the campaign. There were clips of everything from Raffles to Space:1999, and a lot of attention lavished on ITV’s big new crime drama, The Sweeney, about to enter its second season. I even drew my own ‘Big Season’ graphic in my diary to mark the occasion, although I misspelled the title of the new series – as did the publishers of the spin-off novel that appeared in bookshops the same week.

Here in the Midlands, 'The Big Season' even merited a whole programme to itself, which also got a mention in my diary. Aimed specifically at local viewers, and shown at 6.45pm on Saturday 30 August, this clip-fest, hosted by one of the regional continuity announcers, provided a first look at the new autumn line up, including clips from Space:1999 and the long deferred third series of Batman, both of which would make their debut the following Thursday. For me, Space:1999 was the big event of the season. Ironically, my first glimpse of Gerry Anderson’s outer space epic had been on BBC2, almost a year earlier, when the Horizon series presented a look at the special effects industry (How on Earth Did They Do That, 23 December 1974). Space:1999 was not well served by ITV, with broadcasts split across the various regions – London and Anglia scheduled it on Saturday teatime, in deliberate competition with Dr. Who, whilst in other areas it arrived two days earlier, at 7.00pm on Thursday 4 September. 

ITV’s big promotional push was pipped to the post by the BBC, who had begun to roll out its own autumn programmes a week earlier, in much the same way that supermarkets start stocking mince pies as soon as August Bank Holiday is out of the way. Pre-September debuts included rugged adventure series Oil Strike North (Tuesday 26th August), Le Carré-esque espionage drama Quiller (Friday 29th August) and new series of old favourites Softly, Softly: Task Force (Wednesday 27th August), The Liver Birds (Friday 29th) and Dr. Who (Saturday 30th), while September would bring new arrivals in the form of student nurse drama Angels (Monday 1st), beat-pounding comedy in The Growing Pains of PC Penrose (Thursday 4th) and an eighth series of Dad’s Army (Friday 5th). Also that autumn, a little number entitled Fawlty Towers shuffled hesitantly onto the small screen with next to no fanfare...

I'm sure no one at ITV took any notice: the network had plenty of its own big guns still waiting to roll out, including the return of Upstairs Downstairs (Sunday 7th September), while other popular titles being dusted off for the new season included Sale of the Century, Within These Walls (Saturday 6th) and World in Action (Monday 8th). Brand new drama included The Stars Look Down (Wednesday 3rd), Shades of Greene (Tuesday 9th) and Raffles (Wednesday 10th). But the biggest highlight of all, and a guaranteed ratings winner, was the television debut of James Bond, when Dr. No made its first appearance on the small screen on Tuesday 28th October.

All through September and well into October, the TV Times kept up its promotional campaign, with ‘Big Season’ cover montages highlighting the week’s biggest new arrivals. Inside the magazine, listings were accompanied by a ‘Big Season’ thumbnail, replacing the austere ‘new series’ flash that had previously served to alert viewers. Even children’s television got the same star treatment: Cosgrove Hall’s Noddy (Monday 22nd September), Here Comes Mumfie and Sooty (Wednesday 24th) all merited ‘Big Season’ status in the listings.

All of which merely served to guarantee what most media watchers already knew: in 1975, ITV were regularly trouncing the BBC in the ratings wars, with some of the year’s biggest audiences tuning in for The Benny Hill Show, The Royal Variety Performance, The Sweeney, Edward VII and Coronation Street. Not all of ITV’s new autumn programmes did the business, though. Space:1999 fared quite badly and in the London area was demoted after Christmas to a Saturday morning slot. One can well imagine what Lew Grade thought about this, having bankrolled the series to the tune of £3m. A brand-new Sunday evening comedy My Brother’s Keeper, starring George Layton and Jonathan Lynn as an ill-matched pair of brothers (one a policeman, the other a lefty agitator) is now long forgotten, along with Jewish family comedy My Son Reuben, and Vince Powell’s Rule Britannia, a sitcom embodiment of the old ‘Englishman, Irishman and Scotsman’ gag, which I think posterity can probably do without.

The ‘Big Season’ run of TV Times covers ended with the edition for 11-17 October, with a cover highlighting afternoon viewing. For many, this meant horse racing, but there was also the return of Crown Court and the medical soap General Hospital, alongside programmes focusing on travel, cookery and antiques. A latecomer in the sitcom stakes, John Esmonde and Bob Larbey’s national service comedy Get Some In! also began the same week, whilst Rising Damp – still some way off becoming a cult favourite – returned for a second series in November. I had yet to discover its brilliance, as it clashed with The Invisible Man over on BBC1 (David McCallum’s short-lived fantasy adventure, cancelled after a single series). 

Fifty years on, it’s interesting to look back at an era when television viewing was a good deal more straightforward than it has become: just two networks competing for viewers, and all the big new series available to anyone with a TV set and a license. Today, I wouldn’t have the first idea where to look for big new television series this autumn, and I doubt I’d bother even if I did know. Streaming services have fragmented and diffused the television viewing experience, and one would need a second mortgage to keep up with them all. You may well think that more channels, more choice, high definition and feature film production values all adds up to a whole lot more than viewers were being offered back in 1975. I’ll beg to differ with you.

Part of a large preview feature from the TV Times for 30 Aug-5 Sept 1975

Missing in Action: the end of a comic

 

The Demise of TV Action – August 1973

It’s always a shame to see a favourite comic come to an end, rather less so when the comic has become a shadow of its former self. It was towards the end of the long summer holiday in 1973 when TV Action, formerly Countdown disappeared suddenly, and without any warning. The comic had got off to a promising start in February 1971 with a line-up that felt like a throwback to the classic era of TV21. All of Gerry Anderson’s productions from Fireball XL5 onwards were featured in rotation over the coming weeks, alongside articles on current developments in science and space hardware, but it was Dr. Who, flown in from sibling title TV Comic that really pulled in the readers.

As the months rolled by, the Gerry Anderson content dropped off like needles from a Christmas tree. At issue 35, a minor revamp ushered in the exploits of TV’s latest playboy adventurers, The Persuaders! Brett and Danny were still in the line-up when the comic drew its last breath in August 1973, but by this time the title was barely recognisable, and as of April ‘72 had changed its name to the less sci-fi oriented TV Action. The revamp was necessitated by the end of an arrangement with Sun Printers, who had offered Polystyle a year's worth of machine time on their under-utilised rotogravure machines for the cost of materials only (Sun had also handled the first year of the Eagle comic). To keep production costs down, TV Action would henceforth be printed on cheap pulp paper, a far cry from the glossy magazine stock of the Countdown era.

The Countdown name was still appended to the rechristened comic, and Dr. Who was promoted to the cover, albeit losing over a page of colour artwork in the process, but this was now a very different entity from the space and sci-fi oriented title it had started out as. Only a handful of Gerry Anderson titles remained on board – UFO, drawn in black and white by Brian Lewis, Thunderbirds (Don Harley), and colour reprints of Ron Embleton’s Stingray spreads from TV21 (John Burns' Countdown strip, the comic's only original creation, had ended at issue 70). Signalling the move away from science fiction content, new strips comprised Hawaii 5-0 (nicely drawn in black and white by Leslie Branton), the Hanna Barbera cartoon Motormouse and Autocat (which the comic insisted on calling Autocat and Motormouse), and ATV’s teenage drama Tightrope. The latter seemed an unusual choice given that it was a standalone serial that didn’t lend itself to further development. It merited only a single monochrome page, with artwork from Stanley Houghton. 

The comic continued in this format, with minor content changes until January 1973 by which time Dr. Who was down to just two pages (including the cover), and other strips comprised UFO (John Burns), Mission Impossible (John Burns again) and The Persuaders! (Frank Langford). Motormouse and Autocat were still on the back cover and still titled in reverse order. UFO aside, there was no other Gerry Anderson content apart from a colour photo spread of his current series The Protectors. Harry Rule and co were the cover stars when the comic was once again revamped, in January 1973, entering what would prove to be its final phase.

With a redesigned masthead, a painted montage cover and calling itself ‘The New TV Action’, the comic’s line-up now included a weekly complete story (running across seven pages in black and white); Dr. Who (still in the capable hands of Gerry Haylock), Hawaii 5-0 (Leslie Branton), Mission Impossible (John Burns), and The Persuaders! Comic relief was provided by Dad’s Army (drafted in from sibling paper TV Comic) and Tex Avery’s Droopy, whose cartoons had recently been enjoying a revival on BBC1. An incongruous collection of pop star photos occupied the colour centre spread, perhaps aimed at readers’ little sisters, but aside from Dr. Who and The Persuaders! all the comic strip content was in black and white. Further new arrivals over the coming weeks included the portly Frank Cannon and western heroes Alias Smith and Jones, but even these TV heavyweights couldn’t stave off the inevitable.

Last editions of comics (or those preceding a merger with another title from the same publisher) usually came with cover splashes proclaiming ‘great news inside’. By contrast, TV Action’s last cover gave no hint that the game was up. The first clue came on page two where a single column promo listed the contents to be found ‘next week in TV Comic’, a line-up including Dr. Who, Dad’s Army, Droopy and Basil Brush. Given that three of them were currently featuring in TV Action, readers may have been forgiven for thinking ‘huh?’ I certainly did. It was, as Dr. Who’s teaser promised, ‘a most puzzling tale.’

TV Action directs readers towards its sibling comic without owning up to the fact that this is the final edition.

Countdown may have started with a bang, but TV Action went out, quite frankly, on a bit of a whimper. The week’s complete story was a risible Persuaders! tale about a hypnotic, exploding musical box, scrappily drawn by Jose Ortiz. Mission Impossible was still in the hands of John Burns, whose colour sense did not sit happily on the very absorbent pulp paper, and frankly came across in print as a murky mess*. The plot, wrapping up a Middle East conspiracy, wasn’t up to much. Droopy was still present and correct, and one-hit wonders Blackfoot Sue (already a year beyond their only UK chart action) made unlikely colour pinups across the centre pages. 

The following spread was given over to a cruel trick devised to entice readers across to next week’s TV Comic: the first in a two-part competition with the chance of winning one of 10 Raleigh Chopper bikes – a most desirable prize in 1973. To enter, you had to cut up and assemble a jigsaw of TV Comic characters, and colour in the results… and then wait for next week. Presumably, you were in with a much better chance of winning if you knew the correct colours for characters such as Texas Ted, Basil Brush and TV Terrors (to be in the know, you’d have had to be in possession of last year’s TV Comic Annual).

Dad’s Army occupied the next two pages, which were followed by TV Action’s very last colour strip, the last part of a cranky Protectors adventure, drawn by Mario Capaldi (Italian artists’ names were always a sure sign of a comic with a dwindling budget). The last four pages comprised a full-page advertisement for Brooke Bond’s latest set of collectable cards (Adventurers and Explorers) and the end of the disappointing Persuaders! strip. On the back cover, Harry Rule and Paul Bucket (sorry, Buchet) prepared to desert the sinking ship in a helicopter.

And with that, we were done.

My original copy of that swansong edition is still in reasonably good condition, but has worn a lot less well than older copies of Countdown: the uncoated pulp paper is now quite discoloured. It’s interesting, though, to reflect on the demise of a comic whose content was so closely tied in with television. It’s all well and good bringing on board the likes of The Persuaders! or The Protectors when the series themselves are brand new, but by August 1973, The Persuaders! was nearly two years old and reduced to random repeats across the ITV regions – not a great enticement to readers. Cannon was, if anything, too adult in tone to appeal to kids who liked Dr. Who (it never appealed to me), and Alias Smith and Jones was, well, a western – and western comic strips hadn’t been popular in Britain since the 1950s.

Countdown had been an interesting experiment. All experiments are devised to prove a theory, and in this case we can conclude that, by 1971, there was next to no market left for a comic devoted to Gerry Anderson content, or indeed any comic so closely wedded to an ephemeral medium like television. And so it proved. The 1990s brought short-lived comic revivals for Thunderbirds, Stingray and others, always piggybacking on repeat runs, but these endeavours had even shorter life spans than TV Action.

TV Action was, ultimately, a product of its time, reflecting an era of glossy, action-packed television series. Its editorial style harked back to the tone of Eagle, blending adventure strips with well-written factual material, and like Eagle, it gave employment to some of the best creatives in the British comics industry. There’s been nothing like it since. Today, you’ll find remnants of its DNA in Dr. Who Weekly, but there will never again be a weekly comic offering such diversity of content, produced to the same style or quality.

[* Interestingly, when John Burns contributed a strip to Network's one-shot TV21 revival, he remarked to me about the poor quality of the paper – perhaps he was reminded of the awful print quality of those TV Actions.]

Summer Schedule: Robinson Crusoe

 

'A staple part of the BBC's school summer holiday schedules' according to Wikipedia. But was it? As ever, the reality is more nuanced than the internet would have us believe... 

Ask anyone of a certain age what television series they remember watching during the school summer holidays of the 1970s, and you’ll get one of two answers: a) ‘I didn’t sit indoors watching television during the holidays’ or b) ‘Robinson Crusoe’.

The Franco London Productions TV film series The Adventures of Robinson Crusoe had first aired on BBC1 in the autumn of 1965 and is perhaps best remembered for its theme and incidental music by Gian Piero Reverberi – once heard, never forgotten (the music score had been appended to the original German version at the insistence of the BBC when the serial was dubbed into English). In the title role, actor Robert Hoffman made for a somewhat ‘mittel-European’ Crusoe, with his blonde, Aryan good looks: his English voice was dubbed by Lee Payant.

I saw this original broadcast, which occupied a 5pm slot on Tuesday evenings from 12 October 1965 until 4 January 1966. It formed part of an early evening schedule that included the forgotten magazine series Tom-Tom, and The Magic Roundabout (which made its TV debut the same week as Crusoe). Towards the end of the run, the BBC’s brand-new storytelling series Jackanory was slotted in before Crusoe at 4.45pm, and with this, the corporation’s children’s output had found a successful line-up from which it would not deviate for a couple of generations.

A repeat run of Robinson Crusoe began in February 1967 and another in June 1969. The serial still occupied the same teatime slot, but when it returned, in 1972, it was in the recently introduced summer morning programme schedule. Preceded by The Flashing Blade (another classic enshrined in the memory for its summer morning associations), the repeat run kicked off on Wednesday 23 August at 10am, following an episode of Mr. Benn. The episodes were stripped across weekday mornings at this same time, ending on Friday 8 September. Although I was well aware of the new morning schedule and had been following the Tintin adventure The Crab With the Golden Claws a few weeks earlier, I took no notice of these summer Crusoes. But I wasn’t done with the series just yet.

The following year it was back, restored to its early evening slot. Scheduled at 5.15, it made for a black and white hiatus between Blue Peter at 4.50 and Hector’s House at 5.40, both of which were broadcasting in colour (although this made no difference to me, watching on a monochrome set). The serial was now eight years old, and watching this 1973 repeat run felt very nostalgic: it got a name check most weeks in my diary. In retrospect, it seems unusual that the BBC chose to show a black and white serial in an evening schedule of colour programmes, and unsurprisingly this was to be its last sighting in this slot.

The summer morning repeats continued in 1975, with a run on BBC1 Scotland during July, and the national service in August. By now, the series had become a staple of morning scheduling alongside other oldies like Whirlybirds (1957) and Camp Runamuck (1965), and rolled around again on Saturday 5 March 1977 at 9.35am – the morning’s programmes having kicked off with The Mister Men at 9.00am, and film cartoon series Jeannie at 9.15. A final repeat run, again on Saturdays, and this time at 10am, followed in April 1982, before the series was shelved, never to be seen on air again.

Of its eight runs on BBC television, Robinson Crusoe was seen four times in early evening slots, and four times in the mornings. Only two of these morning broadcasts fell during the school summer holidays – yet it is for these summer holiday morning screenings that the serial is best remembered: Wikipedia’s entry on the series describes it as a ‘staple’ of the BBC’s school summer holday schedules.

The same Wikipedia page also gives a name check to Tim Beddows who rescued the English-dubbed Crusoe prints from obscurity, some fifteen years after the serial’s last appearance on television. The BBC no longer held film prints in its archive, but Tim was determined to release the English dub on his recently founded Network label (at the time focused solely on the VHS video format), and after a lot of research, finally traced a complete set of prints to a film vault in Paris. The story was told in a BBC Radio 4 programme, Rescued Again, broadcast on 20 January 2011, and presented by the writer and film historian Glenn Mitchell.

Tim did more than merely release the serial: he bought the UK rights, and sales of the VHS tape (and, latterly DVD) were earning him a significant annual royalty. Following his passing in 2022 and the subsequent collapse of the Network label, the series ownership is now a grey area. The rights were certainly offered for sale during the liquidation process, but what, if anything became of this is unknown, as is the status of the physical materials – the film prints that Tim rescued from France and the digital copies owned by Network. Within the last decade, the films were sent to a London storage facility along with a lot of other Network-owned material, and hundreds of items from Tim’s personal film archive. When the Network label collapsed, the vault was left with an unpaid bill and refused to release the material. At time of writing, Robinson Crusoe is, therefore, ‘lost’ again, and the fate of those rescued film prints remains uncertain.

Network’s DVD of Robinson Crusoe, though deleted, is still readily available at reasonable prices from various online sources. Or you can, of course, resort to YouTube... for added atmosphere, try watching an episode a day at 10am...

Boing! 50 years of Carrott

 

“I’ve just heard a song on the radio called Funky Moped, by a bloke called Jasper Carrott.” So said our Dad, as he came in from work one evening in the summer of 1975. We didn’t believe him. Our Dad was a bit of a joker, and used to come out with silly names and comical ideas to amuse my brother and myself when we were children. He insisted it was true – he’d been listening to one of the local radio stations on his way home, when the record came on.

A few weeks later, at a cousin’s 21^st birthday party, we got to hear it ourselves. I even mentioned it in my diary: ‘hear The Funky Moped’ reads the entry for Sunday 6 July. I think it was the same cousins who advised us that we ought to listen to the B-side. My brother bought the single, probably shortly afterwards, and we duly played the B-side, ‘Magic Roundabout.’ So did a lot of other people. Rather than a song, it was a stand-up comedy routine, parodying the popular childrens’ TV programme in a vulgar manner: ‘Do you think Florence is a Virgin? Drops ‘em for certain…’

On the strength of people buying the single to hear the B-side, ‘Funky Moped’ entered the charts, fifty years ago this week. By now, Jasper Carrott was quickly becoming a new local hero – he hailed from Solihull, where he’d formed his own folk club, The Boggery, back in 1969 (I’d seen its advertising blocks in the Birmingham Evening Mail). His folk singer routine – including covers of songs by the likes of Jake Thackray – had quickly been eclipsed by his comic patter, although for his earliest television appearances he still appeared with an acoustic guitar.

A self-produced live album, comprised mostly of stand-up routines, had been sold around the clubs in 1973, and it was from here that the ‘Magic Roundabout’ track was extracted to provide a B-side for the ‘Funky Moped’ single. DJM records had signed Carrott, hoping to repeat the success of recent comedy albums by Billy Conolly, Mike Harding and others, and the single was conceived as a means of promoting their new artist to a wider audience.

I was following Carrott’s progress in my diary: ‘Funky Moped enters charts at No.13’, I wrote on 26 August. Two days later, the entry read: ‘Jasper Carrott is on Top of the Pops’, followed by the note ‘miss him’. I’m sure I saw his performance a week or so later, as the single continued to climb the charts, reaching No. 5 on 20 September. For his TOTP appearance, Carrott decided to send himself up, donning a Vegas-style white suit and matching shoes. Those in the know nodded and smiled and got the joke: everybody else was left scratching their heads. In retrospect, Carrott realised it was a mistake. Perhaps he should have got himself a Moped and a naff helmet? It didn’t matter – a new comedy star had arrived.

By now, his DJM album ‘Jasper Carrott Rabbitts On and On’ had appeared in the shops, and was on my Christmas list. The following year, I got his new live album, ‘Carrott in Notts’. By this time, he’d appeared in a one-man show on BBC1, A Half Hour Mislaid With Jasper Carrott, shown in a regional opt-out slot on Friday 17 September 1976 at 10.15pm. But it was the commercial channel that provided Carrott with his mainstream TV breakthrough. LWT boss Michael Grade had caught his act in Stratford and quickly offered him a contract, resulting in five TV specials: An Audience With Jasper Carrott (1978), The Unrecorded Jasper Carrott (1979), Carrott Gets Rowdie (1980) Beat the Carrott (1981) and Carrott Del Sol (1981). By the time of Carrott Del Sol, I owned a video recorder and kept a copy of the programme (which hasn’t been seen since but is available to watch on YouTube).

By now, his routines were very familiar to myself and my friends, including one about his attempts to rid his garden of a persistent mole and another about his antics as a lorry driver. At last, Birmingham had produced a comedy folk hero, to stand alongside the region’s pop superstars (Jeff Lynne had produced ‘Funky Moped’ and Bev Bevan, a childhood friend of Carrott, played drums on the track).

In 1982, Carrott migrated to BBC1, invited to front a new late Saturday night programme, conceived as a modern-day version of That Was the Week That Was. Carrott’s Lib debuted on 2 October 1982 and ran for a year. My diary records that I watched and taped the debut edition, and over the coming months, a lot more episodes were committed to tape. By now, though, I’d discovered another Midlands comic hero in the form of Rik Mayall – or rather, his investigative reporter persona Kevin Turvey – and I began to take less of an interest in Carrott’s television efforts. Carrott’s Commercial Breakdown (1989-1996) presented eccentric TV adverts from around the world, while Canned Carrott (1990-1995) saw a return to the stand-up format, including a regular sketch The Detectives (later developed as a series in its own right), and introducing performers Steve Punt and Hugh Dennis. Carrott continued to appear on the BBC, presenting stand-up routines until 2012’s The One Jasper Carrott. From Carrott’s Lib onwards, his act, scripted by various hands, increasingly began to incorporate topical material, and watching this week’s BBC4 repeat of The One… it was immediately apparent how dated this type of material sounds, in contrast to his more personal, observational comedy – latterly focusing on family issues and ageing.

Jasper Carrott is still performing and has no plans to retire. A quadruple heart bypass in 2017 gave him ‘a new lease of life’, and he didn’t do too badly from selling his shares in the TV production company Celador, for a reported £10m. In 2023 he joined the cast of The Archers, and I’m sure he’ll continue to rabbitt on and on for the forseeable future. Fair play to BBC4 for acknowledging his half century as a media star, by presenting an evening of material on Tuesday 19 August. For me, though, he really belongs to the 1970s, and those early stand-up routines. The LPs are long gone from my collection, but can be found easily enough on YouTube.

‘Boing! Time for bed...’

Comics on Sea

In August 1974, our family were on holiday in Llandudno, North Wales. It was our fourth and last visit to the resort. Days were spent mooching around the town, playing games of miniature golf, and taking various trips out. Most of my diary entries for the week, however, are lists of comics. On our first day, outside a newsagents, my eye had been drawn to a wire carousel on which were displayed a lot of American comic books. They all bore the imprint of the publisher Charlton, and they all featured Hanna Barbera cartoon characters, depicted in a series of colourful covers. I’d never seen anything like them before – this was my first ever encounter with genuine American comic books. There were plenty to choose from, and I selected a Top Cat title, No. 19 in a series, and dated inside to December 1973. The price was 6p, over-stamped in a roundel on the front cover – the original price having been 20c. During the week, I picked up more titles including Yogi Bear and The Jetsons.

How had they got here, and why had I never seen these comics before? They weren’t available in the shops back home in Birmingham. Later, comparing notes with other comic fans, I found out that these ‘comic books from the seaside’ were what we’d now call a ‘thing’, and for a time during the 1970s were liable to pop up at almost any coastal resort. Later still, I heard about how they’d come into the country as ballast in freighters. However they got here, they were here, and more to the point, they were in Llandudno in the summer of 1974. By the end of that holiday, my brother and myself went home with a small mountain of them – and I still have them to this day.

The stamped cover price on some of those comics includes the letters T&P, and online research reveals this to have been the imprint of a publisher and distributor called Thorpe and Porter, who had pioneered the importation of American comic books into Britain at the end of the 1950s. In 1959, they had become the exclusive UK distributors for DC, Marvel, Dell, Charlton and American Comics Group titles. Some had their covers altered for UK consumption back in the States, whilst others, like the examples we’d found, were simply ink-stamped with the British price.

Detail from a Top Cat comic cover, showing Thorpe & Porter's price stamp

These Charlton titles fell some way below the standard of the Gold Key series, an imprint of Western Publishing, whose titles made up the content of many British annuals sold by the Manchester publisher World Distributors. Many of the Charlton strips are credited to Gwen Krause and Ray Dirgo, and the likenesses of the comic characters were always very good. The pair must have been working flat out, though, as there were literally dozens of Charlton titles appearing during the early 1970s, and occasionally the artwork looks rushed. The printing was of an acceptable standard, with occasional examples of plates off register, but on the whole the panels didn’t look a lot different to the Gold Key examples I’d seen in annuals. The stories, however, were very poor stuff, scarcely lasting for more than six pages, some of them consisting of a single gag – whereas Gold Key’s storylines could run to twelve pages or more, and employed smaller panels. Alongside the cover stars, a typical Charlton comic included lots of advertising, much of it encouraging young readers to sell a newspaper called ‘Grit’ or cheap greetings cards in exchange for cash or prizes. Other adverts, less well targeted, featured hair restoring products and cheap jewelery, with headlines addressed to 'military men'. One curious example is headed ‘Help Save the Beatles’, and offers a selection of 8mm film material featuring the Fab Four, available by mail order. There were, of course, the usual tacky pages of tricks and novelties like Frankenstein masks, x-ray specs and the curious ‘sea monkeys’. Despite all this tat, the comics still felt like good value at 6p for 36 pages, and the covers were always colourful and attractive. 

A typical page of tat advertising from a Charlton title.

At the time, it struck me as unusual that comics featuring the likes of Top Cat and Yogi Bear should still be in production – the shows having had their heyday on British television over a decade earlier – but publication was almost certainly in response to the TV series continuing to live on in syndication. 

Aside from the stash we discovered at Llandudno, I never saw these comic books again, save for one occasion when I spotted a few Gold Key titles and a couple of later Charlton editions at a newsagents near Birmingham. These aside, it seems that, for the most part, those ‘comics from the seaside’ never penetrated much further inland. Whether this is in any way related to their use as ballast on ships, I’ve no idea, but I’ve seen reports online of large piles of American comics being found in dockside locations, so there may be a connection.

I’d discovered Charlton comics during a time at which the brand, then 29 years old, was undergoing a revival by artist/writer/editor Nicola Cuti. The Hanna Barbera titles, many of them previously licensed to Gold Key, had begun appearing in the mid-60s, becoming one of the company’s staples, particularly after the cancellation of their earlier superhero comics. But the writing was on the wall for the publisher. Many titles were cancelled in 1976, and the majority of those still in print were suspended for eight months the following year. The comic book industry was entering a period of decline, and following a number of attempts to rally the company’s fortunes, Charlton went out of business in 1985.

For true comics fans, Charlton’s high watermark had come during the so called ‘silver age’, although the company never quite managed to create an iconic character to match those of its rivals. War stories, ghostly tales and horror abounded, along with comics based on monster movies, before the move towards TV cartoon characters. I’m sure I’d have snapped up the likes of Gorgo or Reptilicus if I’d seen them, but from what I can remember, the bulk of the comics we found on that carousel in Llandudno were from the Hanna Barbera range.

Seasides were also a good place to find toys that were nearly a decade out of date. From shops in the Torbay area, circa 1971, my brother and myself were bought Fireball XL5 Rocket Guns. These toys, originally sold in Dan Dare packaging, were produced by J&R Randall and sold under their ‘Merit’ brand in the mid 60s. The same shop still had scores of old Thunderbirds toys on its shelves, which, in their original boxes, would have made a fine haul if we’d been minded to ask for them. Whilst the ballast connection may explain the presence of American comics at the seaside, these out-of-date toys are less easy to account for. And it wasn’t just one shop, either – around Paignton, we came across several retailers selling similar ‘new old stock’ items, including die-cast toys by Corgi and Dinky. 

The shop where we bought those comics lasted a long time. Google Streetview showed it still thriving in 2014, when apart from some modern signage, it presented very much the same appearance as I remember from over fifty years ago – the comic carousels were beneath the awning, close to where the newspaper headline board is sitting in the Streetview picture below. Sadly, when Google returned a decade later, the shop appeared to have ceased trading.

I don't know how long the 'comics on sea' phenomenon lasted: for me, it was just a few days in 1974. Maybe today there are still seaside retailers selling comics from a few years ago... but finding a title from 2023 in 2025 wouldn't be quite the same, somehow...