Bleep and Booster at Sixty

No sixtieth anniversary in pop culture should go unremarked, particularly when it’s a science fiction subject that has links to the BBC’s Doctor Who and Blue Peter. Have I got your attention? In that case, let’s consider a piece of television that made its first appearance in 1964, ran for five years, but was never a television programme in its own right. It was, rather, a programme within a programme – which means you won’t find it listed anywhere on the BBC’s Genome database.

I’m talking about Bleep and Booster – a modestly-produced outer space serial with a unique charm and fascination that belied its bargain basement production values. In fact, aside from some artwork boards, narration and ‘special sound’, it had no production values at all. Bleep and Booster was neither puppetry nor cartoon. The stories were played out by means of rostrum camera work, panning in and around large panels of artwork: a process that, in the field of advertising, was once known as an ‘animatic’.

Bleep and Booster was the creation of artist William ‘Tim’ Timyn, who had made his mark on television with the stories of Bengo, a Boxer dog puppy, a regular feature in the early days of Blue Peter. For the original Bengo stories, ‘Tim’ drew the pictures live on air, while telling the stories he’d written himself. By the time of Bleep and Booster, the artwork and presentation were pre-filmed. The stories were narrated by Peter Hawkins – already famous as the voices of Bill and Ben, Spotty Dog and the Daleks – and accompanied with ‘special sound’ courtesy of Brian Hodgson, a pioneer of the BBC Radiophonic workshop, whose contributions to Dr. Who included the famous dematerialisation sound of the TARDIS – still in use to this day.

Bleep and Booster made their first appearance on Blue Peter on Monday 2 March 1964. The four-episode serial, written and illustrated by Timyn, told the story of how boy inventor ‘Booster’ meets up with space-boy Bleep when his home-made rocket runs out of fuel. The space race was all over the media at the time, with NASA planning feverishly to land men on the moon before the end of the decade, so a space adventure was bound to be popular. Bleep and Booster immediately captured the imaginations of young viewers – of whom I was one – and were brought back to Blue Peter for a second adventure, commencing on Monday 14 September. In 1965, the first story was turned into an illustrated book, published by Purnell, which my mum bought for me out of that year’s Freeman’s Catalogue. I still have it, minus a page which readers were encouraged to cut out and turn into a cardboard mobile.

Bleep and Booster's return to Blue Peter was highlighted with this Radio Times panel,
accompanying the listings for Monday 14 September 1964.

Tim’s artwork had a unique quality, with energetic brushwork and a deceptive simplicity. The characters were engaging and had immediate appeal. Bleep, and the other inhabitants of his homeworld Miron, were presented as semi-robotic creatures, with flexible arms, sucker feet and antennae. They clearly were not robots – Bleep’s father had a moustache, and the Miron space technicians tended to sport chinstrap beards. They ate normal food, too. But they were aliens, and highly imaginative at that. Elsewhere in their adventures, Bleep and Booster would encounter other unusual races including the thuggish, conical-capped Trugs and the 3-eyed Rotundans – round heads balanced on spindly legs (quite likely inspired by the Martians of H.G. Wells’ War of the Worlds).

The space hardware started off with a decidedly 50s look – Miron Space Freighter 9 could have flown straight out of Dan Dare, and was slickly rendered to suggest a gleaming chrome exterior; but as the stories progressed, the spacecraft became ever more imaginative – the Solar Energy Squadron looked like winged submarines, while the ‘Space Catamaran’ and ‘Solaron’ ship, despite being mere 2d paintings, were as good as anything dreamed up by Gerry Anderson’s designers and may well have been influenced by the styling of those more sophisticated productions.

Brian Hodgson’s ‘special sound’ formed an important part of the stories, adding a palpable sense of atmopshere and drama. A classic Radiophonic piece prefaced each 5-minute episode, and the sound score – including the droning sounds of the Space Freighter and ‘solar guns’ – was eerily evocative and other-worldly. I well remember the impression these sounds created: when taken in combination with the rostrum camera work, it was easy to forget you were simply watching a succession of still images. If anyone had asked me at the time whether Bleep and Booster had movement like an animated cartoon, I’d almost certainly have answered ‘yes!’

As for the stories, they were straightforward adventures, yet with a warmth and charm that went far beyond the simplicity of their presentation. If anything like Bleep and Booster were attempted today, it would, of course, be slickly produced in CGI, with gaggy, streetwise scripts and characters. But these were different times, and we were a different audience.

I totally loved Bleep and Booster. It was only on twice a year, with one serial in the spring, and another in the autumn or winter, and I always looked forward to the next adventure. To see it now is to be transported back to the living room of our home in Lichfield on a dark evening in November, curtains closed, coals burning in the grate and our mum in the kitchen getting the tea ready. The idea of a boy building a rocket in his back garden seemed totally feasible to me, and I fantasised about doing the same thing myself. If I ever came across an old spring or any random bit of junk around the house, I would see it as a vital component in the rocket I would one day build myself. Even as late as 1971, I had thoughts of building a colour television, when all I had to use was the spring out of an old biro…

Bleep and Booster never made it into the 70s. Their last adventure was aired between October and November 1969, by which time man had landed on the moon and interest in space was already beginning to wane. A palpable sense of ‘been there, done that’ soon took hold, and space subjects no longer seemed as appealing as they had done a decade earlier. But while the television adventures might have come to an end, Bleep and Booster continued to feature in the Blue Peter Annuals as late as 1977.

The characters got their own annual in 1966, courtesy of publishers Purnell, who had previously produced the original story book adventure. Two further annuals followed in 1967 and 1968, with a second story book, ‘Bleep and Booster’s Space Secret’ appearing around the same time. With illustrations by ‘Tim’, these books were as good as the TV serials, and offered the chance of seeing the characters in full colour. They were, and still are, some of my favourite books from childhood.

For such a simple, rostrum-camera based production, the two space boys clocked up a surprising amount of merchandise, including jigsaws, poseable figures and a series of marionettes from the ever-reliable Pelham Puppets (their ‘Rotundan’ has to be seen to be believed!)

Of the ten Bleep and Booster serials produced, only two are known to exist – although it is rumoured that others may yet survive in the BBC’s archives. The two extant serials – Solaron and The Giant Brain – were the last two produced, and fortunately for posterity, were released as a VHS tape in 1993 by the Polygram video label. An enterprising YouTuber has created HD upgrades from the original tapes using AI, and the results are entirely faithful to the original presentation. New viewers (and old) start here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6Fkc1zkLgFs

It may have been black and white, static drawings and as low-fi as television presentation got, but Bleep and Booster was a classic example of being so much more than the sum of its parts: proof that, in the world of children’s fiction, all you need are great characters, a good story and no limits to your imagination. Who needs CGI? Who needs AI? Bring on the art boards...