Now Listen to Me...

 

The Ipcress File at Sixty

One of the most iconic films in the espionage genre turns sixty this week: The Ipcress File was released on 18 March 1965, its dour urban setting in complete contrast to the prevailing winds then blowing through spy fiction in the cinema and on television. Espionage on the big and small screen was becoming increasingly ironic and camp, but The Ipcress File managed to have its cake and eat it, cashing in on the spy boom whilst striking out in a completely new direction.

John Le Carré had already signalled the beginning of a move towards realism in espionage fiction with his 1961 novel Call For the Dead, and more famously, 1963’s The Spy Who Came in From the Cold. But neither film had yet been adapted for the cinema.

Len Deighton’s source novel had appeared between Le Carré’s first two works, and he was most likely working on it when Call for the Dead was published. Was he influenced by Le Carré? It’s hard to imagine that he wasn’t, although he later cited as inspiration the story of a neighbour who had spied for Germany during the Second World War, along with Raymond Chandler (for the cynical, first person narrative) and an old Bogart movie, Beat the Devil.

Deighton had been working as a successful book jacket designer, and earned enough from his work to try his hand as a novelist. The Ipcress File was his first attempt at writing and, frankly, you can tell. He later claimed that he wanted the book to be ‘ragged and untidy, as life is’ when in fact it’s ragged and untidy as a badly-edited first draft novel is. On paper, The Ipcress File isn’t far off being a car crash. It’s hard to see what attracted Harry Salzman to it as a potential movie property, aside from the obvious: this was an era when almost any work of spy fiction was bound to attract the attention of filmmakers. Deighton knew exactly what he was doing when he chose to write an espionage novel.

Stylistically, The Ipcress File is pitched somewhere between the hard-boiled detective fiction of Dasheill Hammett and the down-to-earth prosaic spy novels of Le Carré. Bond is clearly an influence too, though you wouldn’t guess it from the film which ditches the novel’s exotic locations (Beirut and the South Pacific). Deighton, a keen historian, fleshes out his text with a plethora of detail, blending fiction and reality. There are (inevitably) name checks for Burgess and Maclean, whose story he co-opts as background for the spy codenamed Jay (the film makes him ‘Bluejay’ in a nod to American audiences), and he provides an accurate description of a nuclear test facility where an experimental neutron bomb is to be exploded (the neutron bomb was bang up to the minute stuff – if you’ll forgive the pun – still in the theoretical stage at the time).

Commentators all point to the supposedly working class background of Deighton’s unnamed protagonist, but in all honesty he doesn’t make that big a deal out of it, and the character drops so many learned cultural references in his narrative that it’s hard to accept him as anything other than a well educated and erudite individual. We see some of this in the film – Palmer is a music lover, gourmet and cook, but he’s no way the kind of clued-up smart arse we meet on paper.

To mark the film’s sixtieth anniversary, I wanted to understand where it diverges from the source novel, which I’d never previously read. In fact, the novel is as unlike the movie as any of Ian Fleming’s Bond books. The screenplay is essentially a stripped down version of ideas from Deighton’s text, which it refashions into a much tighter yet still complex narrative. As written, the novel would have been unfilmable without a huge budget, so the elisions are to some extent understandable, but the text is also quite badly structured, with a long drawn out final section that includes some unbelievably clunky exposition where the narrator explains what’s been happening to his assistant Jean Tonnensen (one suspects this was added at the behest of an editor, Deighton’s having left so many dangling plot points throughout the text).

Here’s a summary of the key differences:

Harry Palmer: any film buff will tell you that the name Harry Palmer was created to serve the movie. In the book, the narrator informs us: “Now my name isn't Harry, but in this business it's hard to remember whether it ever had been.” The character in fact changes his identity during the course of the narrative (for no obvious reason), collecting a whole package of documents and items such as a false passport and a police warrant card. The novel’s protagonist actually assumes control of Dalby’s department in his absence, and is clearly an older, more senior figure than the Harry Palmer we meet on screen. The movie Palmer is seen cooking and shopping, but there are no such scenes in the book. His only encounter with a kitchen is when he watches Jay cooking a lobster.

Location: The film makes a virtue of its London settings, contrasting the gentility of Regents’ Park (favoured by Dalby and Ross) with the grimier backstreets where Palmer lives and works. The novel adopts a similar setting for much of the action, but there are interludes in Beirut (where the kidnapped scientist is retaken by force in an operation involving Dalby and the narrator) and a Pacifc atoll where a bomb test is about to take place. Here, the narrator is framed, arrested as a spy and wakes up in a cell, seemingly somewhere behind the iron curtain.

Supporting Characters: Ross and Dalby and both present in the novel, although their personalities seem to have been switched for the film. On paper, Dalby is quite young, blonde haired and clearly an ex-public school type, while Ross, older, moustached and balding, is more like the uptight military persona of Nigel Green’s Dalby. Palmer’s relationship with Dalby is tense and fractious on screen, whereas in the book the two characters are more like equals with a sparring, slightly jokey relationship. Courtney (Sue Lloyd) is Jean in print, and the relationship between her and ‘Palmer’ is far less obvious; Carswell (Gordon Jackson) is a different character entirely in the text, much older, and a statistician who is trying to find patterns in the records of missing persons. He doesn’t borrow a car and isn’t shot in mistake for ‘Palmer’. The novel’s spymaster Jay becomes Bluejay in the movie, and is given an English-sounding identity (Grantby) where the ‘Jay’ of the novel has an Eastern European name. The dowdy ‘Alice’ on screen is a much younger character in the book.

Action: Most of the iconic scenes in the film were crafted for the screenplay: in the novel, the kidnapping of the scientist is not shown, neither is the handover in the underground car park (Dalby and the narrator ambush his captors on the road in Beirut). Carswell isn’t killed in print (although a similar fate befalls an old friend whom the protagonist calls on after escaping from captivity). The warehouse where the IPCRESS tape is discovered is a domestic residence in the book (and the tape is not labelled). On screen, Palmer is abducted on a train, whereas the novel’s protagonist is arrested at the bomb test location. Most tellingly, there is no brainwashing sequence. The indoctrination techniques described in the book are a far cry from the audio-visual torture Palmer undergoes on screen. In the book, there is no IPCRESS noise, no hypnotic visuals, and no trigger phrase ('now listen to me...')

Following his escape, the action in the novel rather loses its way – the narrator calls on an old friend (who is susequently murdered), before travelling to Dalby’s country cottage where he sees Jay and one of his captors. Jay is followed to London and arrested by Ross: Dalby is later reported to have died in a car accident. The movie’s classic ending, with Dalby and Ross held at gunpoint by Palmer while Dalby orders him to ‘shoot the traitor’ is nowhere to be found. The novel peters out in twenty pages of rather laboured and undramatic exposition. 

In the film, following the warehouse raid, Dalby testily complains to one of the detectives that their tardiness in starting the operation isn’t good enough. Having now read the original Ipcress File, I might make the same observation. There are good ideas present, but the text really needed sharpening and re-editing, quite heavily in my opinion. Deighton starts out well, and the style is sharply laconic, but the plot structure slowly comes apart, and the scenes on the bomb test atoll are, frankly, unnecessary. He’s also not very good at describing action sequences, and one is often left wondering exactly what’s meant to be happening. His narrator, so memorably portrayed on celluloid by Michael Caine, is less of the insubordinate cheery cockney and more of a cynical know-all, who uses jargon without explanation. I wonder whether this was rather in the nature of a self portrait? The book is also the only novel I have ever encountered where passages cut from the text are served up wholesale in an appendix. None of them is really necessary, and in many cases they serve only to let the reader know the extent of Deighton’s arcane knowledge of matters such as the going rate for Indian Hemp or recipes for some clearly fictitious cocktails.

It’s arguable that the reputation of Deighton’s novel relies almost entirely on the film, which improves upon it in almost every conceivable way. The film isn’t entirely without its flaws, though: if anyone can explain to me how Grantby manages to abduct Radcliffe in the opening scene, then immediately kill and dispose of his escort (who is seen only seconds later dumped in a baggage trolley), I’d be glad to hear from them!

Panther's film tie-in edition of The Ipcress File: left, cover, right, inside cover

Old School Shopping

 

There’s an episode of the 1980s sitcom Ever Decreasing Circles in which Richard Briers’ character, the obsessive and slightly neurotic Martin Bryce, has cause to visit his local ironmonger. It’s a properly old school establishment, and his reason for visiting is simple: he wants a single galvanized six-inch nail, which the local DIY store insists in selling in multipacks. Mr. Lazenby, the ironmonger, a frail old man, happily complies with his request.

I had cause to visit just such an establishment myself this past week. Not an ironmonger (I doubt if any still exist) but a hi-fi shop. It’s been in Burton on Trent for as long as I can remember, but, I’ve never had cause to visit it before. It has a properly old school name: The London Wireless Company. Don’t bother looking for it online, you won’t find it. This is retailing as it used to be.

The first thing I noticed when I went inside was a small display case behind the counter, containing replacement cartridges and styli for record decks. I remember seeing them in hi-fi shops way back in the 1970s, but it’s been years since I saw one in situ. The shop sells high end home entertainment, mostly huge televisions, but with a line of what looked to be decent hi-fi equipment. The proprietor (imagine a Toby Jones type) looked entirely at home in his surroundings, emerging from a back room when I entered the shop. There was no one else around. I noticed old carpeting on the floor and an area of vintage wallpaper behind the counter – better and better.

My reason for visiting was simple: I knew the shop undertook repairs (this much, at least, can be gleaned online, although the shop has no website), and I wanted some adjustments made to my Denon record deck, which was playing slightly too fast. It’s the kind of thing that would have annoyed Richard Briers’ character: hearing a song playing in E double flat instead of D major: the platter was rotating at maybe 34rpm. I left it there and about a week later got a phone call to say the deck was ready for collection. The cost was a mere £25 which I found entirely reasonable. The deck now plays perfectly.

I mention all this as an example of what we’re in danger of losing in the blinkered rush to online retailing. Old fashioned personal service. I’m not averse to buying the odd book or CD from Amazon, but given the choice I’d still prefer to get them from a real shop in the physical world. Unfortunately, I appear to be one of a dwindling minority.

There’s a generation now that weren’t alive in the era before online retailing, and their lazy preference for shopping from the sofa has already cost us several high street retailers who you’d have thought would endure forever. At time of writing, the venerable WH Smith high street chain is up for sale and will likely cease to exist in any recognisable form.

Call me old fashioned, but I refuse to pass judgement on any product until I’ve seen it for real. Anything can be made to look impressive in a photograph. I can’t understand people who buy clothes online. You can’t tell anything about a garment from a photograph apart from its appearance. When buying clothes I want to see how well they’ve been put together, feel the texture of the fabric, get a proper appreciation of quality.

Even car retailing is moving increasingly towards an online platform with the likes of Cazoo, where you pick your vehicle from an image on the internet and it is delivered to you on a trailer. Unless and until this is the only means of buying a vehicle, I refuse to go along with it, however good, bad or indifferent the experience. In the past few years, I’ve bought a couple of cars, in the process of which I checked out numerous examples online. Nine times out of ten, when I finally got to see the vehicles for real, there were defects visible that the photos didn’t show: paint swirls, small dents, chips, scuffs and the like.

Back in the 70s and 80s, shopping was a much more interesting experience, because you never knew what you were going to find. You’d go into a record retailer and come across an album you never expected to see. In my case, collecting secondhand books, I was forever discovering caches of unexpected treasures like Giles annuals of impossible vintage. Today, the collector can usually track down all but the rarest and most elusive items online, but it’s not quite the same. I’ve collected old guitars for forty years, and still nothing compares to the moment when, stepping into some musty emporium that’s been in business for decades, you stumbled upon an unbelievable old relic gathering dust high up on some pegboard wall.

I’m not completely anti online as a tool in the collector’s arsenal – it’s enabled me to track down some very interesting and unique artefacts I’d never have found by other means. I just don’t want it to become the default method of going shopping.

It’s easy to see why retailers are participating in this seismic shift towards online: retail premises are costly to build, rent and maintain. Never mind the question of convenience. Banks have largely decided to abandon those customers who still want to use them in person, and in so doing are driving more and more customers into the waiting arms of online scammers. I’ve banked with Barclays since 1983, but our local branch closed for good last year. A few months later, in response to demand from customers, they were obliged to open a ‘pod’ (tent to you and me) in the local shopping mall where you can still deal with a real person (well, they looked real when I walked by but who knows what AI is capable of...)

Forty years ago, when John Esmonde and Bob Larbey were writing Ever Decreasing Circles, the internet did not exist – not in any recognisable form at any rate, and certainly not accessible by anyone other than academics in computing. Back in 1987, the ‘enemy’ was the out of town shopping park, examples of which were springing up on the fringes of just about every average-sized town. Martin Bryce apologises to Mr. Lazenby for using the local DIY superstore instead of his old, independent establishment. The principle, however, is still the same – big corporations sweeping away the smaller, independent retailers. The difference today is that they’re doing it in the virtual world. The ‘High Street’ will soon be as redundant a concept as the ‘muffin man’ was in my childhood.

I’m glad that establishments like The London Wireless Company still exist. Most independent retailers have seen the writing on the wall and have at least some kind of presence online even if they don’t sell their products and services that way. I’d like to think that there will eventually be a backlash against internet retailing, but you can’t change people’s habits that easily and the habit of click and deliver (who wants to collect?) has already become deeply ingrained.

Let’s celebrate the old school while it’s still standing. Next time I’m in the market for hi-fi, The London Wireless Company will be my first port of call. I only hope it’s still there.

Eve of Destruction

 

A Close Encounter with Barry McGuire

The religious studies department at our grammar school occasionally arranged ‘entertainments’ for morning assembly. On one occasion, a Christian music group called Rosetta Stone played in the school hall (‘Big School’ as we called it). I wasn’t into their message, but it was a change from routine, and the extended assembly meant we missed the first lesson of the day. I’ve no idea whatever happened to Rosetta Stone; the name was later appropriated by a goth rock band with no apparent connection to the folkies who visited our school. But another such guest appearance was from a considerably more eminent musician. 

Barry McGuire had scored an international hit in 1965 with his recording of P.F. Sloan’s ‘Eve of Destruction’, earning himself a gold disc in the process. The record had become a hit quite by accident: intended as the B-side to another Sloan composition, it was played on air in error by a DJ and quickly became a surprise hit. McGuire’s growly vocal was only intended a guide track, but the disc took off so quickly it was never re-recorded.

Depending on your point of view, ‘Eve of Destruction’ was either a symbol of everything that was wrong with contemporary youth culture or a crass cash-in on the folk rock/protest boom. Its elevation to number one on the Billboard Hot One Hundred and number three in the UK charts does however, seem to have signalled the end of the folkie protest movement whose initiator, Bob Dylan, had already consigned protest songs to his ‘back pages’.

Back in 1975, I knew none of this, and had never even heard the song ‘Eve of Destruction’. How Barry McGuire came to be playing solo to a hall full of grammar school boys I have no idea. He’d become a born again Christian four years earlier and must have been in Britain spreading the word. I remember the event quite clearly: McGuire, huge and bearded, came on stage weilding a big acoustic 12-string guitar. He seemed to be struggling to tune it, and in the course of his performance managed to break a couple of strings. He was still playing ‘Eve of Destruction’, although many of its lyrical references were now somwhat out of date. 

I doubt if many of us had much idea who McGuire was. ‘Eve of Destruction’ had been subjected to a partial airplay ban by the BBC, who decreed it could not be played on ‘general entertainment programmes’ (although it clocked up a single appearance on Top of the Pops during its time in the top ten). I’d have been more impressed if McGuire had announced that he’d sung the lead vocal on the New Christy Minstrels’ novelty hit ‘Three Wheels on my Wagon’, but unsurprisingly this did not figure in his set of evangelical folk songs.

Clearly, we knew he was famous, because afterwards a crowd of us went up to the stage to get his autograph. I handed him my school fountain pen which he couldn’t get to work, and he signed some random piece of paper I’d found in my pocket, now sadly lost.

I was keeping a diary at the time, but neglected to mention McGuire’s visit. I know we were in the third year at the time, which places it somewhere between autumn ‘74 and summer ‘75, and at a guess I’d say it was more or less exactly fifty years ago almost to the day. I know it to have been before the summer of 1975, because that was when I finally got to hear the original ‘Eve of Destruction’ single, courtesy of Jimmy Savile’s Double Top Ten Show.

Looking back, it seems slightly bizarre to think of this pop icon of the 1960s standing on stage in ‘Big School’ strumming his 12-string guitar. This was a guy who was a contemporary of acts like the Byrds. Members of the legendary ‘Wrecking Crew’, Hal Blaine and Larry Knetchel had played on the single. McGuire got a namecheck in the chorus of the Mamas and the Papas’ single ‘Creeque Alley’ (the band sang backing vocals on his cover of their own hit, ‘California Dreamin’’), and Frank Zappa even cited him as an influence on his Freak Out! album sleeve (was he being sarcastic?)

In the US, ‘Eve of Destruction’ had caused no little controversy. Although decried in hip circles as a sell-out, the song’s lyrics were contentious, with lines like ‘you’re old enough to kill, but not for votin’’ (a reference to the draft registration age of 18). Sloan’s record company had told him the song was unpublishable, hence its demotion to a B-side. Perhaps its problem was that it was too full-on, too determined to cause offence, where other ‘protest singers’ adopted a more subtle approach in getting their message across, through poetry and allegory. Some of Sloan’s lyrics veer very close to parody: 

Yeah, my blood's so mad, feels like coagulatin'/ I'm sittin' here just contemplatin'

In production terms, the arrangement ticked all the required folk/protest boxes. The backing is so thin as to be almost inaudible, carried along principally by acoustic guitar, and there are occasional snatches of the obligatory harmonica, lending the whole piece a ‘Dylan-by-nunbers’ vibe. But as an anti-war song released during the Vietnam era, it most definitely touched a nerve. Its references may have dated, but the sentiment isn’t altogether irrelevant today as the governments of the world fulminate over another conflict that shows no signs of ending.

As for Barry McGuire, following the single’s success, he never again made Billboard’s top 40, although he remained active as a singer and performer and is still going today at the age of 89.

Wikipedia’s picture of him (above) coincidentally captures his 1970s appearance and is exactly the way he looked the day he stepped out on stage in Bishop Vesey’s grammar school fifty years ago. I bet it’s even the same 12-string guitar he’s playing.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_38SWIIKITE

Sixty Years Sans Laurel

 

23 February 2025: the world has been without Stan Laurel for exactly sixty years. When he cracked his last joke, seconds before expiring back in 1965, I doubt I was even aware of who he was. Myself, I was three going on four. If I’d seen Laurel and Hardy at that age, then it was most likely on the flickering, silent medium of 8mm film – an uncle owned a projector and no self-respecting home movie buff was without a few L&H comedies.

The BBC had been showing Laurel and Hardy films since 1948, but in the years since I was born, screenings had dwindled to a mere handful: none at all in 1961 or 1962; a sole screening of the feature A Chump at Oxford in 1963, and a random broadcast of the 1934 short Oliver the Eighth in October 1964. Was this my first sighting of L&H? I can’t remember.

Back in the 60s, with only two channels available, the BBC were far less likely to mark the passing of a comedy legend than is the case today. Admittedly, the published schedule may have been altered to allow for the screening of a film in tribute to Stan at the time of his death, but such last-minute alterations are not reflected in the BBC’s Genome listings which derive from the Radio Times. It wasn’t until May of that year that another L&H film made it into the schedule, and it was another outing for A Chump at Oxford. In July, a brief season of shorts played on Saturday teatimes in the slot normally occupied by Dr. Who (he was on his summer holiday). These are quite likely the first Laurel and Hardy comedies I ever saw. The short season kicked off with the Academy Award-winning The Music Box (31.07.65, 17.40), with Hog Wild, Dirty Work, Towed in a Hole and Oliver the Eighth following in the same slot over subsequent weeks.

Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy were both deceased, but for me, Stan and Ollie were very much alive on the small screen. Even when I was old enough to understand the fact of their mortality, I still couldn’t quite accept it. No one truly dies whose image has been immortalised in that way. I continued to enjoy their films on television through the 60s and into the 70s. At Christmas 1974, the BBC broadcast an Omnibus documentary about the comedy team, affording my first insights into the background behind the partnership. This week, it has been dusted off and shown again on BBC4 for the first time in 48 years.

Since that film first went out, I’ve read widely about L&H and their career, and the information it delivers now seems fairly sparse. Episodes in their careers that have since been covered in depth – Stan’s marital disharmony, his falling-out with Hal Roach, the team’s disastrous migration to Fox and MGM – were alluded to, but not examined in any detail: but with only 65 minutes of screen time and a big story to tell, this was only to be expected.

What the film also shows us is how we’d got used to seeing the L&H movies presented on television. There are plenty of clips of classic moments, all of them displaying the low resolution, degraded image quality that was typical of the TV screenings. The BBC was reliant on 16mm material for the bulk of its L&H broadcasts, and the same prints had most likely been in circulation since the late 40s. Most of the short subjects derived from resissues under the ‘Film Classics’ banner, easily identified by their opening title card in the form of a brass nameplate. Watching at the time, it was easy to draw the conclusion that the condition of the films was down to their age: the shorts were over thirty years old. It was only when the Roach studios embarked on a resmastering programme in the 1980s and 90s, returning to original materials, that it became clear exactly how much we’d been missing. I’d assumed that comedies from the 20s and 30s had always looked grainy and fuzzy. Now it was possible to see them in something approaching high definition.

Of all the clips included in the Omnibus documentary, only the dancing sequence ‘At the Ball, That’s All’ from Way Out West looked clear and clean, suggesting that the BBC held a 35mm print in its archive, and in general the feature films always seemed in better shape whenever they turned up on screen. The shorts, however, continued to be broadcast from the same worn-out 16mm copies until well into the 1980s: I taped many of them and came to recognise some of the splices and damage. One print even contained what I at first took to be an intriguing glimpse of an unknown closing shot, seemingly showing Stan and Ollie as ghosts. This was later explained as the fade-out from another film print, Oliver the Eighth, whose end title card had been roughly spliced onto the BBC’s copy of The Midnight Patrol.

Today, the films are slowly – and I mean very slowly – finding their way onto Blu-ray. At present, only a handful of classic shorts has been released, along with the first, silent year of the teaming. But with interest in physical media dwindling and customers increasingly favouring streaming or downloads, will their complete work ever make it into HD?

Stan and Ollie were well served by the BBC, who continued to show their films until the early 2000s, with the old 16mm prints eventually replaced by the 1990s restorations. Yet since then, there’s been next to no sight of them. Without those regular broadcasts, I doubt if I would have got to know them as well as I did, and who knows how many potential devotees are missing out. Their comedy is timeless, and there isn’t even the excuse of the films being in black and white to explain their absence from the schedules – Roach colourised all the sound shorts and features back in the 80s – admittedly with less than impressive results, but at least providing a more attractive alternative to potential broadcasters.

Clearly, whatever rights the BBC once held have long since lapsed, and the only item available from the archive that could be shown to mark 60 years since Stan’s passing was the Omnibus film, paired with the 2018 movie Stan and Ollie.

I was intrigued to see the documentary appear in the schedule, only two months after name checking it twice in this blog. Had someone read it? The BBC seems to have been oblivious as to the existence of the Omnibus film up to now: it could easily have been dusted off for Stan’s centenary in 1990, or the fiftieth anniversary of his death in 2015, but both occasions went by without sight of it. Either way, it’s good to have it back and hopefully this won’t be its last sighting on the network. There’s another anniversary due in two years' time – 2027 will mark one hundred years since the Laurel and Hardy partnership was first enshrined on screen.

I’d be interested to know the extent to which Laurel and Hardy are recognised by younger generations. In Britain, nobody born since the turn of the century has been given much opportunity to see them on television. Talking Pictures has shown a few selected shorts, but TPTV is old people’s television and I doubt they got through to a younger audience. 

Today, the best place to find Laurel and Hardy films is online. But you’ve got to be looking for them. As memories fade and older audiences dwindle to nothing, who will carry Stan and Ollie into the future?

The Lost World of the Radiogram – part 2

Last time, I looked back to my first encounters with recorded music via my parents’ modest but interesting collection of records, kept inside the huge veneered cabinet of the radiogram. The very word ‘radiogram’ is now an archaism. Once upon a time, it meant any piece of home entertainment equipment that comprised both a radio set and gramophone in a single unit. They were usually presented as stylish pieces of furniture, at home in any modern living room.

In my recollection, the radio was turned on most days. In the mornings, we would hear Housewives’ Choice and Music While You Work, the latter a survivor from the war years that was still going in the early 60s (astonishingly, the venerable Workers’ Playtime was also still running as late as 1964). Around lunchtime, our mum would retune to the Home Service for the news, Listen With Mother and Woman’s Hour.

This was still the era of valves, and any valve-driven piece of equipment needed a few minutes to warm up after being switched on. This was certainly the case with our old ‘KB Junior’. You knew it was switched on because a lamp lit up behind the tuning display with its list of domestic and European stations. I knew the words on that display long before they meant anything to me: Third, North, Light and Home for the BBC – Luxembourg, Hilversum, Helsinki and other European capitals, although we seldom ventured away from the familiar territory of the BBC Home Service or Light Programme. After maybe a minute, a hum began to emanate from the speakers, and if the set was switched to radio, you’d hear voices or music start to filter through.

Housewives’ Choice, a programme of record requests, went out every weekday at 9am, running for just 55 minutes. If you want to know what sort of programme it was, watch the opening credits of the film Billy Liar (1963) which re-creates a typical broadcast, complete with presenter Godfrey Wynn.

Housewives' Choice was followed by a short reading in a slot with the self-explanatory title  ‘Five to Ten’, a fragment of which can also be heard in Billy Liar. The Radio Times listing described it as ‘a story, a hymn and a prayer.’

Music While You Work ran for just half an hour and featured live music. ‘Needle time’ was subject to restrictions imposed by the Musician’s Union, ensuring a ready supply of work for its members, so the number of programmes featuring gramophone records was strictly limited.

Despite this, I remember hearing a good many records on the radio. It was on the radio that I first heard the Beatles and, indeed, all the other groups of the early 60s; but the sounds reaching me from our KB Junior were for the most part a far cry from pop music as we know it today. The charts were still wide open to all comers, and a typical playlist from around sixty years ago would comprise an eclectic blend of pop groups, jazz, crooners, comedy records, novelty songs, light orchestral numbers and popular classics.

I absorbed all of this material unquestioningly. Yet looking back, it seems an almost bizarre hybrid of styles. One minute you’d have folkie Josh Macrae singing about ‘Messing About on the River’, the next you’d hear the Beatles singing ‘All My Loving’, followed by The Singing Nun’s surprise international hit ‘Dominique’. ‘Elizabethan Serenade’ was a popular light orchestral piece that got played a lot, and if I heard Prokofiev’s ‘Peter and the Wolf’ once (with narration by Peter Ustinov) I must have heard it a dozen times. There were records aimed at children – Ronnie Hilton’s ‘A Windmill in Old Amsterdam’ or Peter Paul and Mary’s ‘Puff the Magic Dragon’ – comedy songs from the likes of Bernard Cribbins, Charley Drake and Rolf Harris – and spoken-word comedy from performers like Kenneth Williams, whose bank holdup skit ‘Hand Up Your Sticks’ puzzled and slightly unnerved me as a child.

The playlist of memory still surprises me. A random selection, all of which reached me via the Light Programme in the early 1960s: Horst Jankovski’s ‘A Walk in the Black Forest’; Helmut Zacharias’ ‘Tokyo Melody’ (the official theme to the 1964 olympic games); Russ Conway’s ‘Side Saddle’ (already an oldie of some five years’ vintage); Bernard Cribbins’ ‘Right Said Fred’; Charlie Drake’s ‘My Boomerang Won’t Come Back’; ‘Morningtown Ride’ by The Seekers; The Mamas and the Papas’ ‘Monday Monday’; The Tornados’ ‘Telstar’; Burt Bacharach’s ‘Trains and Boats and Planes’; Peggy Lee singing ‘Pass Me By’; Doris Day’s ‘Move Over Darling’, and the Searchers’ ‘Don’t Throw Your Love Away’ – a song to which I supplied the alternative lyric ‘Don’t Throw Mrs. Tubby Away’ (Mrs. T was a battered old teddy bear sans ears whom our mum once threatened to put in the dustbin). Most of these tracks date from 1964, the year when I began to emerge from the fog of semi-comprehension that is early childhood, and started to take notice of the world around me.

Now and again, I’d hear songs that got played on only a handful of occasions but which unaccountably got stuck in the memory. ‘My Name is Mud’ was a 1962 country song by someone called James O’Gwyn, which reached my ears around 1965 or 66. The title amused me at the time, but I would not hear it again for nearly sixty years when it turned up unexpectedly on Liza Tarbuck’s Saturday evening programme. Indeed, if you want to get anything like a flavour of the eclectisism of early 1960s pop radio, her playlist is the closest thing you’ll find on any contemporary radio station.

One of the most bizarre songs I recall hearing was ‘Down Came the Rain’ by the songwriter Mitch Murray, styled on the label as ‘Mister Murray’. This appeared around 1965 and got a few airplays, which is susprising considering what a caterwauling confection it was. I suspect it had been written for Charlie Drake, as the hidously off-key chorus sounds just like him. This soon disappeared without a trace, and I wouldn’t hear it again for another forty years when it popped up unexpectedly on Brian Matthew’s Sounds of the Sixties – by a bizarre coincidence, I’d been thinking about the song about half an hour before it got played…

Sharing the airwaves with the popular record releases of the day were a variety of other programmes which our mum listened to. I knew the theme to The Archers from a very early age, but I couldn’t tell you anything else about the programme during that era (or since, for that matter). Radio’s other daily soap was The Dales, broadcast every weekday morning and afternoon, and better remembered in its earlier incarnation, Mrs. Dale’s Diary. I could still hum you the theme from The Dales, I heard it that many times. I believe the version in my head was a signature tune by Johnny Dankworth that had a lively, uptempo feel and had, apparently, only recently replaced a more sedate piece, to the consternation of listeners. My head may yet be its final resting place, as I’ve searched in vain for it online.

For children, there was, of course, Listen With Mother. I’m sure some of this must still exist in the BBC’s archive, but if so, it continues to gather dust. I recall fragments of songs – a traditional ditty about someone called Aitken Drum, a man who lived in the moon who ‘played upon a ladle’ (and prompted the earliest nightmare in my recollection); the song ‘pussycat, pussycat’; and a ‘walking song’ about a pair of boots named Horniman and Sir. I can still hear the presenters’ voices if I concentrate hard enough – Daphne Oxenford and George Dixon in particular.

On Saturday mornings, there was a record request programme for children, hosted most famously by Ed ‘Stewpot’ Stewart, but formerly presided over by Blue Peter presenter Christopher Trace. The Seekers’ ‘Morningtown Ride’ later became enshrined as the theme music, and other records were perennial favourites with listeners: I doubt if I’d ever have heard Terry Scott’s ‘My Bruvver’ if it hadn’t been for Junior Choice. These days, the format is usually revived for Christmas morning by Anneka Rice.

Another good source of music on the wireless was the Sunday lunchtime request show Two-Way Family Favourites, aimed at an audience of ex-pats mostly in the armed forces (many requests would include the initials B.F.P.O. for British Forces Posted Overseas). Judith Chalmers was the usual presenter, and the music was a family-friendly mix of what would later become known as ‘easy listening’. One song I heard more than any other on this programme was The New Christy Minstrels’ ‘Three Wheels On My Wagon’, a comedy country number from a band whose line-up had briefly included future Byrds vocalist Gene Clark. The song was written in 1961 by Bob Hilliard and Burt Bacharach, and the Minstrels’ recording appeared on an EP the following year, with Barry (‘Eve of Destruction’) McGuire on lead vocals. Other popular songs on TWFF included film themes and selections from the popular musicals of the era. On any given Sunday you stood a better than average chance of hearing ‘Climb Every Mountain’ rubbing shoulders with Chaim Topol’s ‘If I Were a Rich Man’ (from Fiddler on the Roof).

Radio comedy passed me by completely. I’m sure we listened to some of the shows of the era, but the likes of Round the Horne were unknown territory to me until much later. The earliest radio comedy I was aware of was The Clitheroe Kid, another Sunday lunchtime perennial, but I didn’t really tune into comedy until I was quite a bit older.

One curiosity I remember is what I presume to have been a skit on Thunderbirds, performed around the beginning of 1966. The obvious candidate was Cook and Moore’s ‘Superthunderstingcar’, but the sketch only ever appeared on television. Clearly, someone else had a similar idea: whoever it was, I can still remember hearing what I took to be Thunderbirds on the radio, accompanied by audience laughter, which made for a bizarre listening experience at the age of four or five.

The KB Junior radiogram made the move with us to our new home in Sutton Coldfield in 1967, but our home audio was due for an upgrade, and in 1968 our dad invested in a proper hi-fi system, with stereo speakers. I’d never seen (or heard) stereo before, and the sound it made was impressive: but for the first decade its sole purpose was for playing jazz records from his personal collection. My brother and myself were later permitted to play pop albums on it, but the EQ was set for a curiously muffled low/mid range spectrum which made everything sound a bit weird to me.

My brother had by this time been bought a small record player of his own, which began to supplant the KB, whose record deck had become erratic in operation. The KB was finally retired around 1974, when it was replaced by a modern stereo radiogram from the popular manufacturer Fidelity. It was on here that our pop singles got played for the next eight years or so.

My last memory of the KB Junior is of it sitting up in my brother’s bedroom where its short-wave setting could be used to listen in on the local police and taxi firms. By now, it had lost a couple of its control knobs and was starting to look somewhat the worse for wear after more than twenty years. The very last thing I remember hearing on it was the single ‘This World of Water’ by New Musik, in the spring of 1980: my brother wasn’t around and I’d been randomly messing around with the old radiogram to see if I could get anything out of it.

Examples of the KB Junior are now extremely hard to come by. When they do crop up, it’s usually in auctions of house clearance items and their value is no more than £20 or £30. Ours ended its days on the council refuse tip in Sutton Coldfield not long after its 1980 swansong. I’m not sure what I’d do if I came across one now: it’s simply too big to make room for, even for the sake of nostalgia. But as my introduction to records and radio, indeed as my introduction to music itself, the old KB played a big part in my formative years.

The Lost World of the Radiogram

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Miles Davis: More Miles ep/ Fontana 1958

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Rolf Harris: Sun Arise/ Columbia 1962

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

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

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

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

Get your coconut water (four for five)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

1969: A Space Oddity

Doppelgänger vs 2001: fair comparison?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The 'Short Present'

 

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

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

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

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

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