Dad's Drive to Nowhere...

 

... well, West Bromwich

It happened fifty years ago this weekend just gone, on a thundery Sunday evening. As always happened during a storm, our mum had insisted on turning off everything electric: radio, television, even, on this occasion, light bulbs. This was all too much for our dad. A semi-pro musician, he was usually out on a gig on weekend evenings, but this particular Sunday saw him at home. Perhaps a gig was cancelled? He didn’t often get the chance to stay in and watch television, so maybe he was looking forward to having a night off. We’d been listening to Tom Browne’s Top 40 rundown, between six and seven, a regular Sunday evening fixture, most likely accompanied by sardines on toast. The show was followed, as always, by the Cliff Adams Singers’ showcase, ‘Sing Something Simple’, but I’m not sure we got this far, as the aforementioned storm was gathering and our mum swung into action.

This had all happened before. Three years earlier, we’d had the radio on one Saturday lunchtime when a storm broke. Our mum came in and turned it off, halfway through the Gunter Kallman Choir’s recording of ‘Daydream’, a song which instantly lodged itself in my memory forever (for a fuller account, see my earlier post, ‘Daydream – A Time Detective Story’).

This time, the gathering storm brought on a premature twilight, and with the lights off, I was struggling to read my Fireball XL5 Annual, while our dad couldn’t see to read last night’s Birmingham Evening Mail.

Suddenly, he got up from his chair in the front room and announced that we were all going out in the car. I dare say our mum asked what this was all about, to which dad replied that we couldn’t do anything in the house – no TV, no radio, can’t see to read – so we might as well go out for a drive. Never mind that it was semi-dark and raining. So we all climbed into his recently-acquired Harvest Gold Austin 2200 and set off. Where to? Nobody knew. Probably not even our dad.

I can’t recollect whether our mum took part in this ‘jaunt to nowhere’: it being a Sunday evening, she probably had things to do, like the ironing. In my recollection, there is a blank in the nearside back seat where she customarily sat. So perhaps she stayed at home.

Our mum’s reaction to thunderstorms was peculiar: she never showed any fear, but clung onto the notion that you had to turn off everything. There is some logic in this: a direct lightning strike can blow out the entire ring main and cause serious damage to anything that’s plugged in (whether it’s turned on or off). Once, during a thundery summer evening in 1970, I found her in the back room, with the french windows opened onto the darkened garden. When I asked why she had the doors open, she replied ‘if the lightning gets in, it can get out again’. Which was possibly something she’d heard in childhood, growing up in rural Ireland.

Back to dad’s drive: we headed off in a more or less dead straight line from where we lived. Passing through Mere Green, our nearest shopping centre, we went straight over at the roundabout, and kept to this course, without deviation, taking us alongside Sutton Park and ultimately to the Queslett Road. All the time, the storm was going on, but in the car you couldn’t hear much of it. We passed the Scott Arms at Great Barr, still sticking to the same route. By this time, I had only a vague idea of where we were, as beyond the Scott Arms was unknown territory. I saw a vivid orange lightning strike up in the grimly overcast sky as we headed towards our ultimate destination… West Bromwich. I only knew where we were because I noticed a signpost as we entered the town: the name was significant as my best friend’s dad was the local MP, and we’d never been there before. We drove up the High Street in the premature, thundery twilight, passing darkened shop fronts and a distinctive church spire, before looping around the town and, I believe, returning via the same route.

I don’t remember what, if anything, was said when we got back, and I never thought to look into the reasons for our dad’s unusual outburst: he was always a very gentle, placid character, not given to impulsive acts. Was there something else bothering him? He’d been through a few rocky years at work, losing a job at GEC and bridging the gap by taking a summer season drumming with a small ensemble at a Pontins’ holiday camp back in 1971. In 1972 he’d worked, briefly, for a wallpaper manufacturer called Coloroll, before finally settling into what would be his last full-time job, as distribution manager at an electrical component manufacturer in Walsall. I’m uncertain as to the exact timeline, so that last appointment may still have been undecided on that thundery evening.

What I do know is that it remained with me, that strange evening of lowering grey skies, the ominous atmosphere of the rainy suburbs, with the streetlights coming on early. My diary even mentions it: the page is filled with a huge zig-zag of biro lightning accompanied by the entry: ‘it thunders.’ And, at the bottom of the page is a further entry: ‘go out for a long time.’ This is how I can be so precise as to the date.

The page from my diary. The 'Randall & Hopkirk' entry, done in the manner of the series titles is interesting in retrospect...

This year, we’ve had a few similarly thundery Sunday evenings, but I held off until the nearest to the actual date – 24 June, 1973 – to recreate Dad’s drive, picking up the route at Thornhill Road, Streetly. The evening was clear, so the atmosphere was completely different, but I wanted to see how much, if any, of the route I could recall. As we drew close to West Bromwich, along a stretch of dual carriageway, I began to remember.

West Bromwich itself, however, is much changed in fifty years. A new urban expressway has sliced through the town, and the High Street is now semi pedestrianised, making it impossible to continue on the route we would have taken in 1973. Arriving in the centre, the eye is assaulted by an architectural abomination: a huge purple brick with blob-shaped windows, outlined in cerise. A sign proclaimed this to be the local sixth form college, but it was formerly an arts facility, known as ‘The Public’, dedicated to ‘interactive digital art’ (whatever that may be), and slammed by the government as a ‘gross waste of public money’. Its infantilised appearance, like a kid’s drawing made reality, is utterly at odds with its urban surroundings. We took a quick look up what remains of the High Street before heading back.

Later, consulting a vintage street map (shown above), I was able to see how radically the road network has been reshaped over the past half century; but I also noticed something else: the street where we lived just made it onto the map at its top right hand edge. On the extreme left hand side of the map is West Bromwich. It felt like a map of our world, circa 1973. West Bromwich was as far as you could go without going off the map, and on that curious evening, it marked the limits of our dad’s escape route.

We never went back. West Bromwich High Street underwent pedestrianisation in 1974, making it impossible to recreate our dad's car ride. When I next passed through the town some time in the 1980s, it was mostly unchanged, just rather run down and with a noticeably different demographic than had been the case fifteen years earlier. Returning in 2023, one gets a sharp, slightly shocking reminder of how radically the British urban landscape has been transformed in half a century, and not necessarily for the better.

Life returned to normal. Dad’s ride to nowhere was a complete one-off. Nothing like it every happened again, although that same year he did drive the family to Aberystwyth for a day trip (no mean feat) so we could look over a potential holiday destination. We never went back there either.

One thing came of that unusual evening. It was the very last instance of our mum’s thunderstorm paranoia. When evening storms came in the future, the lights, and even the television stayed on. My dad had made his point. All it took was a car ride to West Bromwich.

High Street, West Bromwich, 1974, during pedestrianisation.

Too Much of a Good Thing?

The End of Nostalgia?

I’m now in my seventh decade of living with a bunch of characters and machines from the future – a future that will never happen. The worlds of Gerry Anderson are as old as I am. His futuristic visions first hit the small screen five weeks before I was born, and over the following decade, I think it’s safe to say that at least one episode of his work could be seen on TV almost every week.

This blog is about nostalgia. Nostalgia is defined as a wistful or sentimental yearning for the past, usually a past that is irrecoverable. But what happens to nostalgia when its object reappears, becomes readily available, ubiquitous, even?

I’ve long been aware that, in order to preserve the sharp tang of genuine nostalgia, one has to ration one’s exposure to the object of one’s nostalgic feelings. As an example, I’m going to use Gerry Anderson’s Fireball XL5, which was, I believe, the first pop cultural artefact to have that effect on me.

Fireball XL5 made its television debut in the Midlands early in 1963, when I was just two years old. For the next three years it was seldom off the screen, and I probably got to see most of the episodes two or three times. In 1966, the endless run of repeats came to an end, and Fireball would not appear again on our screens for another four years – which to me, aged nine, was almost half a lifetime.

I think my personal fascination for the series was piqued by narrowly missing out on a copy of the first Fireball XL5 Annual at a jumble sale. I still owned my original copy, bought for me at Christmas 1963, but it had lost its covers and quite a few pages. Getting a new copy of that book became an obsession. Without recourse to bookshops or other potential sources of supply, I set myself the task of ‘faking’ the missing cover and pages by drawing them in biro and felt-tip pen. Working off a borrowed copy (I might more usefully have offered to buy it from its owner), this work took me through to around 1972. Ludicrous, I hear you say, and I agree entirely. But it is a measure of the extent to which I was infatuated with this series.

From the day of the jumble sale, which I estimate as having been in the summer of 1967 or 68, right through to the autumn of 1970, I fixated on Fireball XL5, as mentioned elsewhere in this blog. In September 1970, finally, came the long-awaited repeat run. But once it had ended, I was back where I’d started, unable to see the series again until ATV Midlands chose to schedule another repeat. Incredibly, this happened within six months of the previous run, but frustratingly, the episodes were scheduled on weekday lunchtimes when I was at school. I remember envying my brother who was off school with a cold and got to see The Doomed Planet! In early 1972, ATV began experimenting with early Saturday morning broadcasts, none of which was scheduled in the TV Times. Many episodes of Fireball appeared in this context, of which only one – Space Monster – appeared in the listings. This broadcast, on April 29, 1972, would be my last sighting of Fireball XL5 for another four years. When I saw it again, in the autumn of 1976, it was in the form of two edited 8mm episodes owned by a lad from school. Over the next five years, I acquired the six episodes that had been released in this format, and an 8mm sound projector on which to run them. The complete series, however, remained elusive.

It would take until 1985 for the series to return in a repeat run on television. By this time, I was equipped with a VHS recorder and finally was able to obtain copies of all 39 episodes. For the first time, the series shifted out of the arena of nostalgia and into the realm of the immediately available. I’m not sure how many times I watched those tapes, but for the first two or three repeats, they retained their nostalgic appeal. Most of these were episodes I’d not seen in any form for fourteen years. Again, this was over half my lifetime, and it felt like it.

Gradually, however, I was becoming aware that the sharp nostalgic feeling for Fireball was beginning to diminish. I began to know many of the episodes in detail. In 2002, I got my first DVD set (imported from America, as the series had yet to appear on the format in Britain). I watched them all again, impressed at the vast improvement over the dirty, spliced old prints from the mid-80s repeats. I probably left it a year or two before running the DVDs again. Then I decided I had to put the series out of my life for a longer period of time. It wasn’t that I didn’t still want to watch them, or own the DVDs. I just felt sated. By 2010, when I ran the episodes through again, sufficient time had elapsed for them to have regained some of their nostalgic appeal, but I now knew them in sufficient detail as to be able to note subtlties in their production, such as the use of different Steve Zodiac puppets, continuity between episodes, re-use of sets, models and so forth. In short, I probably knew the episodes too well. By this time, I was watching on a DVD collection in which I’d had a hand myself, having designed the packaging for its release on the Network DVD label. I redesigned it for the 40th anniversary in 2012, and again, for its fiftieth, when the series finally made it to blu-ray in 2022. This time around, I chanelled some of my childhood enthusiasm into creating a raft of ephemera to include in the packaging.

I watched all the episodes again in their new HD editions – for what must have been maybe the tenth or twelfth time. How many more times could I sit through them? Did I even need to sit through them when I could replay huge chunks of episodes in my mind’s eye?

As of this summer, the series is back on the small screen, for the first time in 38 years, courtesy of free-to-air broadcaster Talking Pictures TV. I’m not watching them – TPTV’s relatively low bandwidth can’t compete with the detail on the blu-ray set, and Saturday afternoon is hardly an ideal slot – but I’m glad they’re still out there. More than that, I’m intrigued when I see people posting on social media that they’re watching the series for the first time since childhood. I wonder what that must feel like? There are TV series I’ve not seen since the very early 60s, but for the most part, those childhood artefacts have generally been made available to watch, where they still exist. There isn’t enough left of my life to put Fireball XL5 on the shelf for a decade, and if I do, I run the risk of dying without seeing it again. Unthinkable. But equally hard to accept is that I may never again get to experience the thrill of nostalgia fulfilled that I got from seeing the episodes when they reappeared in 1970 and 1985.

What do you want? Nostalgia or availability? You can’t have both. The more times you’re exposed to anything like a book, film or TV series, the less of its nostalgic appeal it retains. ‘Nostalgia isn’t what it was’ runs the old witticism, to which I might add: ‘and will never be again.’

'You Can't Leave Basil Like That!'

Mid-story with Mr. Derek, circa 1970. Note the strategically placed bag of sherbet!

Memories of a Foxy Favourite

'Hello, hello, hello... and to the show... webble-webble-elcome!'

If I’d been asked, around the year 1970, to nominate my favourite television programmes, close to the top of the list you’d have found The Basil Brush Show. It turned 55 this week. Midsummer seems like a strange time to roll out a brand new childrens’ TV series, but it was on 14 June, 1968, that Basil’s first solo BBC series went out. Basil was already a familiar character from his many appearances alongside David Nixon, so when we sat down to watch on that Friday afternoon, we had a pretty good idea of the fun that was in store.

The show settled instantly into a format that would have been recognisable to viewers over a decade later: Basil was ‘mentored’ by his human co-host, ‘Mister’ Rodney Bewes, and the show comprised a mixture of simple sketches, interspersed with variety artistes and one pop performance per episode – on week one, Manfred Mann lip-synched to their current chart hit My Name is Jack. The show was rounded off with what was easily the best item in the line-up, the weekly story, read by Mr. Rodney, but constantly interrupted by Basil. The stories would later focus on swashbuckling tales, featuring various heroes all named Basil, but for this first series, it was the punningly-christened cowboy ‘Des P. Rado of Cripple Creek.’ (On the first episode, Basil misheard Cripple Creek as ‘Chiswell Green’.) It was rounded off with a rousing song, in which the audience of school children were invited to join in. In later series, the songs would build up to the line ‘he was a brave, brave man’, at which the kids would yell back, Crackerjack fashion: ‘who’s that?’

Sadly, not a single example of the Rodney Bewes era is known to have survived. Rodney himself lasted only for a single series, and the following year moved to ITV, where he starred in his own sitcom Dear Mother, Love Albert. Into the gap stepped my personal favourite of Basil’s co-hosts, the avuncular Derek Fowlds, whose sparring relationship with Basil during the stories was always a highlight. A few of these ‘Mr. Derek’ episodes have survived, and I’ve been lucky enough to see two examples in recent years. Of the pair, the edition from 25 September 1970 is clearly superior, featuring an extended sketch that sees Basil attempting to camp out in the woods (an obvious studio set) but being scared by creepy-crawlies, a thunderstorm and other terrors (special mention should go to that week’s variety artiste Dieter Osweno, whose act included juggling a portable television with his feet while the set was switched on). Though broadcast in colour, the episode survives only as a black and white telerecording: but at least it survives.

The weekly story was key to the success of the Basil Brush Show, because of the interplay between Basil and the various ‘Misters’, all of whom would feign anger and exasperation at his interjections, sometimes resorting to clamping his mouth shut to keep him quiet, and often having to stifle their own laughter. A typical sequence might see Basil with his nose in a bag of jelly babies; in later series, his ‘pet’ dog, ‘Ticker’, a battery-operated hound, would regularly interrupt proceedings. Sometimes, Basil would ask to read the story himself, culminating in the non-sequitur ‘Paganini’ when he got to the foot of, you guessed it, ‘page nine’. If the pace was slowing, Basil would egg on his ‘Mister’ with the exhortation ‘come on, come on!’ And when the plot got exciting, each line in the story was followed by a breathless ‘yes’ from Basil. Every week’s instalment culminated on a cliff-hanger: Mr. Derek would slam the storybook shut, declaring ‘and that’s all we’ve got time for!’ ‘All we’ve got time for?’ protested his foxy chum: ‘but you can’t leave Basil like that!’

The Mr. Derek era lasted until 1973, when Roy North took the helm. I was getting a little old for Basil Brush by this time, but kept watching despite never really warming to ‘Mister Roy’. By the time Mister Roy yielded place to Mister Howard (Williams), I was no longer watching. In my recollection, 1970 was the show’s high water mark: Mr Derek had settled in nicely after his first series, and the scripts were genuinely funny. Basil had also now entered the lucrative arena of character merchandising. A plush glove puppet manufactured by Wendy Boston toys was so popular as to be virtually unobtainable. When we asked at our favourite toy shop, we were offered the alternative of a stuffed Basil. ‘You could puppefy him’ suggested the nice lady in the shop, using an expression I’ve never heard anywhere else. The idea was we could open Basil up, remove his stuffing, and turn him into a glove puppet. Fortunately for Basil, we decided against such radical surgery, and even in his stuffed state, he became a favourite toy. The glove puppet, when it finally appeared, looked a lot less like Basil, with a red corduroy body in place of his fancy clobber.

I even entered a painting competition in an endeavour to win a Basil Brush glove puppet. The contest, organised by the Daily Sketch newspaper, offered puppets as prizes to those entries judged to be the best, and a star prize of a visit to a Royal Garden Party where Basil would be in attendance. My efforts earned me the consolation prize of a Basil Brush sticker fun and colouring book, which I have kept to this day – the only competition prize I have ever won. The Sketch printed one of the winning entries, submitted by one Paul Venables (that’s how miffed I was at missing that prized puppet – I can remember his name more than half a century later!) Later still, I was dismayed to realise that Paul Venables had audaciously copied his picture of Basil in top hat and tails from a drawing in one of the Basil Brush Annuals!

The original, 'copied' by competition winner Paul Venables, from the Basil Brush Annual, publ. 1970

In 1972, Corgi Toys brought out a Basil Brush car as part of their ‘Corgi Comics’ range. The car had been seen in the TV series and also featured in Basil’s stage show, and the model came complete with the unique gimmick of two Basil Brush ‘laugh tapes’. These were in fact serrated lengths of red plastic, which, when dragged through a slot in the supplied cardboard ‘sound box’ made a grating noise intended to mimic Basil’s trademark laugh. What it actually sounded like was someone dragging a length of serrated plastic strip through a slot in a cardboard box…

Beginning in 1970, publishing house World Distributors offered a Basil Brush Annual for several years, but their contents were disappointing. World had licensed the use of the Basil character, but not his human co-stars, whose interplay with him was the whole point of the series. Instead, Basil was reimagined as a kind of country squire, with a Butler, Chummers, who participated in his exploits, a format that also appeared as a strip cartoon in TV Comic around the same time. 

I even got to see Basil ‘live’, on stage in Blackpool in 1973, where he shared star billing with impressionist Mike Yarwood. Basil is obviously very small, and we were sitting up in the ‘gods’, so he was a little hard to make out, but there was no denying that was the real Basil Brush down there on the stage, with Ivan Owen working him invisibly from below and providing his voice. The only item on the bill I can recall with any clarity was a sequence in which Basil 'drove' his car, in front of a back projection screen.

Basil’s first run on television was terminated in 1980 following a dispute between the BBC and creator Ivan Owen, who was angling to revamp the character to appeal to a more adult audience. After a few years in which Basil was reduced to presenting a schools programme for Granada Television, he returned as the host of Crackerjack. In the 1990s, Ivan Owen finally got his wish when Basil appeared on the adult comedy series Fantasy Football League, but it wasn’t a success: the show’s format hinged on improvisation and Basil, without a script, was reduced at times to gaping open-mouthed, with nothing to say. Perhaps Ivan Owen, who was still providing Basil’s distinctive voice, didn’t know anything about football.

Owen and co-creator Peter Firmin sold the rights to the character in 1997, and five years later, a reimagined and revoiced Basil became the star of a new sitcom-style series broadcast on the CBBC channel. But we needn’t linger here. The ‘real’ Basil Brush is the one I remember from childhood. The original puppet still survives and judging from a recent photograph, has been remarkably well preserved. Misters Rodney, Derek and Howard have all left us, along with the ‘real’ Basil, Ivan Owen. Part of Owen’s genius was never to appear alongside his creation, and never to give interviews, helping to reinforce the illusion of Basil being a personality in his own right. I think it’s safe to say that, in the arena of glove puppets and ventriloquism, there was no one to rival Basil, who really deserves the last word here:

'A-ha-ha-haa-haa-haa! Boom-boom!'

Basil Brush merchandise: Wendy Boston plush toy, 1970: Corgi Comics car, 1972,
and the first three Basil Brush Annuals (publ. 1970, 1971, 1972)