Sixty Years Old... or Forty Years Young?

 

A celebration of TV Century 21

Depending on how you look at it, the comic TV Century 21 is either 60 years old or minus 40 years young this week – launched in January 1965, with a cover dateline one hundred years hence, a conceit it would maintain for the next four years.

Enough has been written elsewhere concerning the history and creation of this fondly-remembered comic, the first ever publication whose contents were entirely derived from television series copyrights, but I can’t let the occasion pass without paying homage. It was by no means the first comic to take television as its inspiration, with earlier titles including TV Comic (1951), TV Fun (1953) and TV Express (1956). Indeed, considering those dates, TV Century 21 was rather late to the party – but it put those earlier efforts in the shade.

Conceived by AP Films’ merchandising man Keith Shackleton, TV Century 21 was an astute move, launched some nine months ahead of the Thunderbirds TV series. The British comics market of the early 60s was aggressively competitive, and new titles often sank within a few months of being launched, or else were revamped or amalgamated with their more successful siblings. TV Century 21, uniquely, was launched in the certain knowledge that it would upgrade in around a year’s time to feature the Andersons’ latest creation. The story of Supermarionation to date had provided an object lesson in how character merchandising could yield huge profits: Supercar, Fireball XL5 and Stingray had all landed lucrative merchandising deals, and A.P. Films would have had every reason to expect even greater things of Thunderbirds. It therefore made sense to have a ready-made comic vehicle on standby for when the series went to air. With this end in sight, the first few weeks of TV21 teased the upcoming series with exciting photographs of some of the hardware that would be seen on screen – although none of the Thunderbird craft was unveiled.

The biggest nod towards the work in progress came in the form of a Lady Penelope comic strip which would have caused early readers to scratch their heads: who was this new character? Issue one provided the backstory as to how Lady P and Parker got together and saw the pair off on their first adventure. Lady P even found time to visit Elstree Studios for a perfunctory interview with Roger Moore!

The model for TV Century 21 was the hugely successful Eagle, pre-eminent amongst British comic papers since its launch nearly fifteen years earlier. By 1965, however, a series of takeovers and editorial reshuffles had sent the title into a slow decline, and some of its key artists, sensing the writing on the wall, were more than willing to jump ship. The big coup was enticing Frank Bellamy, a task which reportedly took editor Alan Fennell over a year to pull off – Bellamy would not make his TV21 debut until 1966.

The new comic was carefully planned and prepared, with nothing left to chance: its three main illustrators were amongst the top names in their field – Ron Embleton, late of TV Express, Mike Noble (Girl, Express Weekly, TV Comic) and Eric Eden (Eagle). In addition to the three big Supermarionation series, the contents included titles licensed from elsewhere – Burke’s Law was a popular detective series starring Gene Barry, then running on ITV, whilst My Favourite Martian was an imported US sitcom, unknown to much of the ITV network through the vicissitudes of regional scheduling (the first comic strip give readers a brief introduction to the characters and situations for those unfamiliar with the show). 

Biggest of all the bought-in content were the Daleks, whose back cover colour strip began by telling the origin story of the evil aliens. Though credited to their creator, Terry Nation, the weekly strip was in fact penned by Dr. Who script editor David Whitaker, with Nation doing little more than rubber stamping his storylines. Adding them to the TV21 mix was an astute move, as 1965 would see the phenomenon of Dalek mania take the United Kingdom by storm.

It’s interesting to speculate how much the Daleks contributed to the success of TV Century 21. Gerry Anderson told the story of how he was alarmed to find piles of unsold copies in his local newsagent during the comic’s first week, only to return a few days later to find them all gone. The Daleks were being used to sell everything from soap to wallpaper, but there was no mention of them on the first TV21 cover. Did word get around? Did the new comic ‘go viral’, to use modern parlance, in the playgrounds of Britain? “Look, it’s got the Daleks on the back…!”

Whether or not the Daleks had anything to do with it, word of mouth certainly seems to have played its part – there’s no way that anyone could make a case for the first TV Century 21 cover being visually dynamic or eye catching, certainly when seen against the backdrop of a typical week’s comics of the time. Different, certainly, but in a good way? After all, it looked like a newspaper. Okay, so there was a big colour photo of Stingray, but the layout was sedate to say the least: no flashes, starbursts, or huge banners to entice potential readers. You really had to look inside to get a proper idea of what was in store. The newspaper covers would, in their time, become the stuff of legend, but one has to try and get inside the mind of a six or seven year old kid in January 1965, confronted with something that looked like his mum and dad’s daily paper. No wonder it took a few days to sell; but when it did, it did so in spectacular fashion – issue one sold out.

The newspaper cover was a huge gamble that might well have misfired. Ultimately, when the format was ditched three years later, readers immediately wrote in demanding its return. When all’s said and done, the concept wasn’t even original – a couple of Eagle issues had already done the ‘futuristic newspaper’ cover idea in the 1950s – but it took the genius of TV Century 21’s creators to realise its full potential.

The new comic was, according to the late comic collector Denis Gifford, one of the first titles to use television advertising to promote its launch. Now, at the age of three going on four, I was admittedly a bit young at the time, but I was well aware of television advertising, especially as regards new comic launches. In the coming years, I would be persuaded to ask for titles as diverse as Pippin, Playland, Pow! and Solo purely on the strength of their TV launch campaigns. Yet in January 1965, I was utterly oblivious to TV Century 21 – ironic, considering that it contained some of my favourite TV series. It’s conceivable that the launch ad didn’t even air in the ATV Midlands region where I was watching, although it would be perverse if that were the case, as ATV’s money had helped to get A.P. Films off the ground.

I’m not sure I had sight of TV21 until the summer of 1966, when I was bought a copy one Saturday in place of my usual weekly, Teddy Bear, which for some reason was unobtainable that week. I had it bought for me again later in the year when I learned that this week’s copy included the incredible free gift of a cardboard Thunderbirds hat. From thereon in, my consumption of TV21 remained sporadic: I was still getting it in December 1966, as a rough copy of a competition entry has survived, relating to issue No. 98; and my earliest surviving copy dates to March 1967. Thereafter, it fell off my radar until later in the year, when I became aware, belatedly, of the arrival of Captain Scarlet. From this point on, I would stick with TV21 until its demise in the summer of 1969, by which time the comic had been through further format changes and was in danger of transforming into a football weekly.

My entry for the jigsaw competition in TV21 issue No. 98, December 1966 

So, exactly what was in that first TV Century 21 of sixty years ago? Well, following the newspaper cover, the first two pages were a black and white strip of Burke’s Law. The CBS television series would be revamped later in the year as Amos Burke Secret Agent, but by that time, he’d parted company with TV21. The strip was well drawn, in a style reminiscent of Alex Raymond’s Rip Kirby, and the scripting was tight, telling a complete story in a mere two pages. If anything, it was a little adult in tone for the readership, but it was a decent effort.

The following two pages comprised the first instalment of the Fireball XL5 comic strip. Mike Noble was already working on his version of the strip, which would commence at issue 6, and had seemingly prepared the masthead (presumably retained from the dummy edition); but for the first five weeks the artist in residence was Graham Coton, marking his only contribution to the comic. His work was sound but lacked the slick professionalism of Noble et al. The opening instalment ended with Steve Zodiac apparently dead, having been zapped by a mysterious bat-creature. Given that we were only on issue one, it was a safe bet that he’d make a full recovery…

The following page was the first in a series of factual articles about space travel, providing an overview of the current state of play and a look forward to possible future developments. It’s interesting to note that, as of January 1965, no astronaut had ventured more than a few hundred miles out into space, none had escaped the Earth’s gravitational pull, and no one had walked in space (although Alexey Leonov was just three months away from his epoch making space walk of March 1965).

The next page was My Favourite Martian, competently drawn in black and white by the ever reliable Bill Titcombe, who would go on to illustrate other sitcom-derived comic strips for numerous titles over the coming decades. To this day, I have never seem an episode of this US sitcom, and I know it only from its appearances in TV21. Am I missing anything? I kind of doubt it...

Following a page of advertising matter, prominently featuring Quercetti toys’ desirable Fireball XL5 catapult-launching model, came the Contact 21 feature – essentially a jazzed-up ‘letters to the editor’ given a spy-fi twist. Readers were encouraged to send in reports to the mysterious ‘Twenty One’, who described himself as the ‘head of a vast Secret Service organisation.’ The comic had come with a free gift ‘Identicode’, enabling readers to use one of two colour codes, red or blue, in order to read and send secret messages. At this stage, Twenty One did not have his own comic strip, as is often erroneously stated by some commentators – that would not arrive until issue 20.

The centre pages were occupied by Ron Embleton’s stunning Stingray strip, taking full advantage of the spread to present the artwork in four horizontal bands. A few photographs were inserted between the illustrations, each with a border of ‘sprocket holes’: this trend would continue for the first dozen or so issues. Anyone who’d turned straight here from the front cover might have been surprised to realise that the strip did not quite match the 'Stingray Lost' headline or the accompanying article: nowhere in the strip does Marineville lose contact with Stingray. So was the cover created independently of the strip, perhaps held over from the original dummy edition? As this has never come to light, there’s no way of knowing. Either way, Embleton’s artwork gave a foretaste of what readers could come to expect for the next couple of years.

The aquatic theme ran onto the next page, another black and white feature entitled Oceans of Mystery, which detailed some of the attempts being made to probe ever deeper into the sea. Another advertising page followed, and then came the poorest effort in the whole comic – Supercar, turned into a comedy strip. The artwork was fine, as comedy strips go, but this would prove to be TV21’s least appealing feature: the first, self-contained story didn’t veer too far from the tone of the TV series, but over the coming months it would become increasingly ludicrous. Running to just one and a half pages, it was joined by a short travelogue feature Orbit Over, describing itself as a ‘special report from TV21’s space satellite.’ Which I’m sure really existed…

The next two pages marked the debut of Lady Penelope, drawn in colour by the competent Eric Eden – a wizard with the airbrush, but a little less sure of himself when it came to figure drawing, although the likenesses of Penelope and Parker were excellent.

Alan Fennell's charming letter of welcome to his readers in the first issue

The final black and white spread included a comedy news section, Cosmic Capers, and an interesting column by composer Barry Gray, giving some insight into the business of three-track recording in a professional studio. Editor Alan Fennell welcomed his readers with a friendly letter, urging them to write to him whenever they liked. Finally, a half page advert/editorial item from Corgi Toys and a short feature on jellyfish rounded off the interior contents. That just left the back page, where we met the Daleks, in colour, and drawn by Richard Jennings. His rendering of the Daleks themselves left something to be desired, but his artwork was energetic and colourful, featuring a lot of fine detailed cross hatching.

And that was it – week one of what would prove to be nearly five years of adventure in the twenty first century. TV21 would stray off course at times – the unwelcome merger with TV Tornado, the misguided attempt to shoehorn soccer into the mix – but it was still arguably the last great British comic of the Silver Age. By 1970, the title still existed, but it was unrecognisable. I think I packed it in later that same year, by which time the Gerry Anderson content had been reduced to nil, and Star Trek was the only game in town. When Mike Noble left (to take up his commission on Look-in) there was no reason to go on.

Could it have lasted longer? Arguably, yes: in 1971, Countdown proved there was still a market for a comic that strongly featured the worlds of Gerry Anderson, trading off the back of the brand new series UFO. But it was a shrinking market. Once the Supermarionation series began to drop off people’s radar, as ITV broadcasts came to an end, it was hard for any publisher to maintain readers’ interest in material that was rapidly becoming nostalgia fodder.

There have been various attempts to produce Gerry Anderson comics for the modern era, but none has stayed the distance: when your comic is tied specifically to a single title such as Stingray or Thunderbirds, you’ve got nowhere to go when your audience moves on. TV21 had that much in its favour – a format that allowed it to adapt and bring in new series as they came to television. Perhaps its biggest mistake was in not admitting Joe 90 into the format: by launching him in a separate title, the publishers split their audience, and within less than a year the two comics had been merged, with disappointing results.

The original run of TV Century 21 have long been highly collectable – prices seem to have stabilised of recent years with the average price per copy being around £20. That’s not bad when you consider they were fetching between £2.50 and £5 each forty years ago and you factor in inflation. It took me over thirty years to complete my own set, although my number one is minus a back cover and one or two of the later editions are a bit the worse for wear. I’m now contemplating re-reading them as a project, one a week over the next five years. I’ll let you know how that goes sometime in the summer of 2029… all being well...

Billy Liar and I

Sunday 12 January 1975: BBC1’s Film of the Week, broadcast this evening at 20.15, was 1963’s Billy Liar, John Schlesinger’s highly regarded adaptation of Keith Waterhouse’s comic novel of 1959. Prime time scheduling of vintage black and white material like this was not unknown, but by 1975 had become the exception rather than the rule – so the BBC must have thought very highly of this British New Wave classic. Making its TV debut back in 1971, Billy Liar was first scheduled on BBC2 in the kind of late evening slot usually reserved for ‘art’ movies and revered foreign language subjects. What had happened to bring about its elevation to its first broadcast on BBC1?

For answer, we need to turn over to commercial television. A sitcom based on Waterhouse’s Billy Liar characters (and scripted by himself in collaboration with Willis Hall) had aired on ITV over two seasons in the autumn of 1973 and 74, and the character would have been readily familiar to an audience less well acquainted with the source novel, film or stage play. Perhaps this was what prompted the BBC to schedule the 1963 movie as its prime Sunday evening feature?

I’d enjoyed LWT’s Billy Liar series, without realising that the character already had three previous lives – novel, theatrical production and movie. I was very familiar with the characters in their TV incarnations: Jeff Rawle, a newcomer to television, played Billy, ably backed up by George A. Cooper as his irate, blustering father, May Warden as his dotty Gran, and Colin Jeavons as the memorably oleaginous Mr. Shadrack. Now I had to reimagine the entire cast and I wasn’t sure at first whether I cared for them as much as their LWT counterparts. One or two of them were unfamiliar to me. I don’t believe I’d ever seen Tom Courtenay in anything before, but his Billy soon erased all memory of Jeff Rawle. The role of Shadrack was taken in the movie by Leonard Rossiter, who in 1975 was on the cusp of becoming a household name but as yet unknown to me. Shadrack was sharply portrayed in the original novel as a snide and supercilious character with a mannered way of speaking. On TV, Colin Jeavons had totally nailed his unctuous persona and I wasn’t quite ready to accept Leonard Rossiter in his stead, pencil moustache and all...

One cast member I was more than familiar with – Rodney Bewes in the role of Billy’s workmate Arthur Crabtree. Bewes gave a performance that he would effectively replicate a year later as Likely Lad Bob Ferris, and I enjoyed his contributions to the movie. Cast wise, the movie’s greatest asset that set it apart from the TV series was Julie Christie: and whilst her movie version of Billy’s nomadic girlfriend Liz wasn’t quite as down at heel as she’s portrayed in print, she was instantly memorable. By the end of the film, I’d decided that this was the kind of girlfriend I needed in my own life.

On the strength of that one viewing, Billy Liar, the movie, became an instant favourite – so much so that when, years later, I had the opportunity of watching the old LWT sitcom again, I couldn’t accept it. Tom Courtenay had become the Billy Fisher of my imagination, and no one else would do… least of all Albert Finney, who had played him in the original West End production.

Setting aside the characters and plot, Billy Liar spoke to me in another dimension – its depiction of the contemporary urban environment circa 1963. Realism was key to the British New Wave, and for the film makers of the era this meant seeking out gritty, northern locales. In Waterhouse’s source novel, Billy Fisher lives in a fictitious north country town called Stradhoughton – but made-up placenames didn’t sit well with the new drive for realism, and the town is unnamed in the movie (similarly, Stan Barstow’s fictional Cressley was not namechecked in the 1961 film of his novel A Kind of Loving).

Only twelve years in the past, Billy Liar was already beginning to look like an artfact from another world. Demolition and redevelopment is a theme that the movie touches on in several key scenes: location work shot around Manchester shows the modernist high rise developments going up along Piccadilly, while older Victorian architecture falls victim to the wrecking ball. The entire opening sequence provides a fascinating drive through various suburban landscapes, culminating in a scene of elderly houses in process of being demolished. Later on, encountering the formidable figure of Councillor Duxbury during a walk over the moors, Billy puts on an act of comical fake nostalgia for the old man, who is bemoaning the loss of the town’s old buildings.

This is interesting because, by the time I got to see the film, this work of post war urban renewal was largely completed. Few town centres were without their own take on brutalist modernity in the form of shopping arcades and civic centres, and high-rise estates had mushroomed where back-to-back houses once stood. We see the same nostalgia for the lost urban landscape in the early episodes of Whatever Happened to the Likely Lads, and its feature film spin-off (which manages to look like the last gasp of the British New Wave). So much had changed in such a short space of time – in 1975, couples no longer went dancing to live music at Mecca and Roxy ballrooms, and nothing dates the movie so much as its depictions of the twist dance craze and coffee bar culture. By the 70s, this all seemed extraordinarily nostalgic, as did the fashions, furnishings and indeed the movie’s entire milieu. Look back twelve years from 2025 and we find ourselves in 2013, with little evidence of anything having changed – certainly not to the same extent that I saw back in 1975.

One aspect of the movie that sets Billy Liar well apart from other entries in the British New Wave is its emphasis on humour. No other film from the era is so rich in comic scenes and performances – indeed, the genre tended towards a dour pessimism, with unwanted pregnancies featuring in just about every plotline. Billy’s dilemma is more personal and existential, and it was one with I could (and still do) empathise – his desire is to escape from the dull routine of his suburban existence, and he achieves it via his fantasy life, memorably brought to life on screen. When reality offers him a real chance to set himself free, he fails to act on it, preferring the safety of his own fantasy world where he can be dictator, MP, famous author and military hero without the risk of failure.

I knew this film was different because it left a palpable atmosphere in its wake when it ended. I saw it again in October 1977, on what would prove to be its last BBC1 broadcast, and within a year or so, had read Keith Waterhouse’s original novel.

Over the years, the movie came and went across the TV networks, spending a few years in the custody of Channel 4 before returning to BBC2 in the early 90s. I seldom passed up on a chance of watching it, and by the mid 80s had managed to commit it to VHS tape.

Shot in 2.35:1 CinemaScope, the film adapted remarkably well to the pan-and-scan technique employed by broadcasters in the era before television sets could accept widescreen. By 1993, the BBC had adopted a kind of half-way to widescreen compromise, with black bars top and bottom of the picture, but it wouldn’t be until the DVD release of the early 2000s that I finally got to see the film the way its director intended: suddenly, the moorside landscape where Billy gets rid of his Shadrack and Duxbury calendars was opened right out – where once we saw only overhead wires, there was now a whole pylon on view. An overhead shot that has Billy in a toilet cubicle attempting to flush those selfsame calendars to oblivion could now be seen in its original artful intent, with Billy and Shadrack facing off on either side of a locked door.

Fifty years on, I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve seen Billy Liar. I know whole swathes of the dialogue verbatim, and yet I could still go on watching. During the late 1980s, I searched fruitlessly for some of the locations, believing the film to have been shot in Manchester – I was part right: there are a few street scenes in the city, including a barely recognisable Old Trafford – but the bulk of the filming took place in Bradford and Leeds. A BBC documentary, Hollywood UK, revisited some key locations in the 1990s, including the Fisher family home, located on Hinchcliffe Avenue, Baildon, Shipley. Seen today on Street View, the house still has its original leaded front windows and side bay which can be seen clearly on screen. I tracked it down many years ago, but was alarmed to realise that the inhabitant was a neurotic who was paranoid about visits from film fanatics. The house has been sold twice since then – perhaps unsurprisingly – and for a Billy Liar fan could have been had for the ‘bargain’ price of £150,000 back in 2019. Perhaps its status as a place of fan pilgrimage keeps the price down – or maybe it's because Baildon is, frankly, horrible...

Billy Liar is a fantasist who aspires to be a writer but exists in a dream world of his own devising. Had I been more self aware in 1975, I might have recognised some of myself in him – at age thirteen, I had already created my own alternate reality, populated with fantasy characters, and had ambitions to someday become a writer. It doesn’t end there, either – Billy Liar is a songwriter, like myself. In fact the only ways in which I don’t resemble William Fisher are his infidelities, his lies, and his fractious family life. Looking back, it’s tempting to see that 1975 broadcast as a warning – you have to take risks, like getting on a train to London, if you want to be in with a chance of realising your ambitions. Or, you can simply stay at home and do it all in your imagination... as Councillor Duxbury says, 'think on!'

Let's Quist Again

 

Doomwatch is back. 

It stirred up controversy in its day, and made a pin-up out of a young Robert Powell (above) before blowing him to kingdom come. What was the fuss all about? If you haven't seen Doomwatch since the 70s (or indeed, at all), now's your chance to find out.

For those of us who bought the DVD collection back in 2016, the return of Doomwatch to broadcast TV is no big deal. What matters is that it's being shown at all, having been absent from the small screen since an early 90s Saturday morning repeat on UK Gold. But as of tonight, it's back in its proper place, at 9pm, on Talking Pictures TV.

Fans of the series will, of course, own the DVDs already, but what makes these 2025 repeats more interesting is the fact that they will draw in more casual viewers, many of whom will probably remember the show from back in the 70s, without ever having thought to seek it out on DVD or online. Others will be watching for the first time...

One might well wonder what today’s audience will make of Doomwatch. With its eco-friendly agenda, it will no doubt have a certain resonance even if the environmental disasters it predicted are more reflective of the era in which it was made. Today’s eco disasters are way beyond the scope of Dr. Quist’s Doomwatch department. Even so, it was an important series in that it was one of the first, if not the first television series that asked its audience to engage with the problem of pollution in its many forms. It went a bit off the rails at times – by series three, the Doomwatch department were dealing with moral pollution, in an episode that has yet to be broadcast by any television channel – but on the whole it did much to forefront concern for the environment, and sounded a timely note of caution in respect of scientific progress left unchallenged.

Fifty-five years later, we can all see the results of what happens if you give technology its head – the internet is arguably the atomic bomb of the 21st century, and if you want an example of moral pollution, there can be no more pernicious example. There are many other arenas in which society today could benefit from an initiative like Doomwatch – driverless vehicles for one – and in general, it seems, from where I’m standing, as though science and technology are being given far too much leeway. App-based AI has played into the hands of multi-billion corporations, and Keir Starmer’s naive pronouncements this week about Britain becoming an AI superpower need watching very carefully. AI allows big business to do away with manpower and transform its customer-facing operations into a chatbot-driven nightmare. It has almost totally eliminated banking from our high streets, and if you want virtually any other kind of public service, there is no alternative other than to go online. Will this make for a better Britain, or will it transform society into a mass of smartphone-dependent individuals, everyone online but no one truly connected to their fellow human beings? Or has that already happened? Where's Dr. Quist when you need him?

Doomwatch may not have foreseen the internet, but its creators Kit Pedler and Gerry Davis could already see the potential danger of putting too much faith in computers: the episode Project Sahara is the closest Doomwatch gets to interrogating AI, where we see an advanced computer system (far beyond anything that existed in 1970) being used to make recruitment decisions – exactly what is happening right now.

Elsewhere, the concerns of 1970 sometimes seem like a storm in a teacup – there has never been a nuclear-powered rocket launch system, nor has science evolved a species of intelligent super rats. Some of the science was questionable even at the time: ‘thunder shake’, a pheomenon which Quist observes in a cracked brandy glass (having supposedly been caused by aircraft noise) is a real thing, but it is observed in wood, not glass. Real scientists occasionally took the series to task in print, but Doomwatch was always a step ahead of reality and therefore, essentially, science fiction. Its value as a piece of television was in getting people talking, stimulating debate about the real problems posed by real world science.

It was, of course, a product of its time, and casual sexism abounds, to an extent that 21st century viewers will find hard to accept. The characters were, on paper, cardboard cut-outs, and it was only the skill of the actors that brought them to life. Much of the series consists of men in ill-advised attire shouting at each other in rooms that look like the Goodies’ Cricklewood headquarters. At its worst, Doomwatch is Man at C&A vs Man in Carnaby Street, with the two extremes personified by Doctors Quist and Ridge respectively. But it meant well, and it didn’t deserve the treatment it got from the BBC, who wiped the bulk of the master tapes without ever repeating a single episode. 

It is more by luck than judgement that Doomwatch survives at all, and viewers tuning in to the upcoming Talking Pictures repeats are bound to notice the uneven quality between episodes preserved as video master tapes, and those upscaled from poorer quality sources.

Will I even bother to watch myself? It’s not that long since I last dusted off the DVD collection, and I only made it through the incomplete first series before giving up. Series two is a very mixed bag, with far too many regular characters and some episodes that are plain boring. Series three effectively doesn’t exist, with only three episodes extant, one of them the unbroadcast Sex and Violence, which is embarrassingly bad. For a series that started on a thermonuclear bang, Doomwatch went out on a whimper – relegated to a midsummer slot when hardly anybody was watching.

That said, I’ll be tuned in, if only for the existential experience of seeing Doomwatch broadcast at a properly adult, 9pm ‘post watershed’ slot for the first time since 1972. And I hope that it won’t just be the old guard watching. The series deserves to be better remembered, and if today’s viewers can see past the flowery shirts and sexism, they may be surprised at what they find.

Doomwatch – Fridays from 17 January, 9pm, Talking Pictures TV

In the Year 2025

I ended 2024's advent calendar of blog posts with Zager & Evans' 1969 single In the Year 2525. That's still five hundred years distant, but here in 2025 we'll be seeing a few anniversaries of icons from pop culture. Here's a rundown of some that I've picked out...

Now we are ten: Talking Pictures TV got started in 2015. The channel, specialising in archive entertainment, grew out of the Renown Pictures DVD label, and its earliest schedules featured a lot of old British films to which Renown held rights. Its first forays into vintage television were all of American vintage – Honey West, Amos Burke and others – but deals with ITV and BBC soon led to a fuller and more interesting mix of programming.

The channel quickly became a media talking point, and was praised for reviving some long forgotten items, most of which had, in fact, already been released on the Network DVD label. But Network was never at its best when it came to self-promotion, so it was hardly surprising when the latecomers took all the credit for revivals like Gideon’s Way and Maigret. Network and TP should really have got together, but aside from selling them the broadcast rights to Maigret, it never really happened.

TPTV will, I’m sure, continue to be successful, although some reinvention will almost certainly be required as their target audience ages into oblivion. If high definition is your priority, there are better places to source a lot of its material, for the bitrate remains disappointingly low, but rare items do often surface that can’t readily be found elsewhere. Of the few broadcasters specialising in what one might call ‘extreme archive’ material, TPTV remains at the forefront, outclassing channels like That’sTV (who appear to be using DVDs as source material) or Rewind, whose line-up is simply boring. So here’s to another ten years of Talking Pictures… will that usherette ever get the right change, I wonder?

Now we are twenty: Desperate Housewives made its first British appearance on Channel 4 on 5 January 2005, with overnight viewing figures (4.4 million) scoring the second highest ratings for an American series in the channel’s history. I’d heard it being talked about in the media during that week, most notably by the late Steve Wright who seemed particularly taken with it, but I'd decided it probably wasn’t for me. Later that week, I’d had the TV turned on to watch some DVDs and when they ended, the set defaulted to whatever was being broadcast at the time. I found myself in the middle of a domestic farce that was sharply witty, well observed and, in places, laugh out loud funny. What on earth was it? Came the next advert break, I realised I’d been watching Desperate Housewives, on a rebroadcast of the opening episode. It was quite unlike me to get behind any piece of contemporary television, but I stuck with it to the end of the first series and some way beyond – not, I might add, to the bitter end (whenever that was). It clearly owed much to the style of David Lynch, with its outwardly innocuous suburban setting concealing darkly comedic existential angst and some edgy storylines. Perhaps its most influential aspect was the quirky soundtrack which has been imitated to death ever since on hundreds of lifestyle and makeover shows.

Now we are thirty: I wasn’t watching a lot of television back in 1995, and what I was watching tended to be archive material on satellite channels like UK Gold and the late, lamented Bravo. Of the year’s new series, I remained almost utterly oblivious. I was late to the party for Father Ted (21 April 1995), which I initially dismissed as a dreary ecclesiastical comedy before being tipped off by a friend as to its surreally subversive style. That aside, the year’s only notable televisual event for me came in November with the long awaited Beatles Anthology series. Judging from the over-long and excessively detailed account of 1995 in British television that appears on Wikipedia, I didn’t miss anything. And the pop charts were a bit rubbish too, unless you cared about the much hyped and pointless ‘rivalry’ between Blur and Oasis…

Now we are forty: Live Aid will celebrate its fourth decade anniversary on 13 July this year, a fact which Bob Geldof curiously omitted to mention on Jools Holland’s New Year’s Eve Hootenanny, where he was busy promoting the fifttieth anniversary of his band, the Boomtown Rats. I sat and watched some, but by no means all of the 1985 event at a gathering of friends who made an afternoon of it with food and drink. I can’t say that many of the participants were of particular interest to me at the time, as I’d taken to following more obscure independent artists, but you couldn’t help but acknowledge that history was being made…

Now we are fifty: The Sweeney has already scored its half century on 2 January. I don’t know how well it was promoted at the time of its 1975 debut, and it's more than likely that any trailers got lost amongst the festive schedules. For whatever reason,  I didn’t cotton onto it until the second series, beginning in the autumn, and I suspect this was the case for other viewers, too. 1975 was a prime year for television debuts, with The Good Life kicking off in April, Fawlty Towers in September and Gerry Anderson’s Space:1999 the same month.

Now we are sixty: Later this month, it will be the 60th anniversary of TV Century 21, its January 1965 launch clearly timed to provide a useful promotional tool for the upcoming Thunderbirds (60 in September). 1965 also saw the Beatles’ second feature film Help! released in cinemas, with the album of the same name followed in December by Rubber Soul. 

Now we are seventy: The biggest televisual anniversary of this year, whether the network chooses to commemorate it or not, will be that of ITV (22 September 1955). The channel was only initially available to viewers in the London and South East areas, before extending its coverage to the Midlands and North the following year. Earlier in the year, Muffin the Mule’s adventures were curtailed by the death of his piano-playing mentor Annette Mills, and Benny Hill’s first television series premiered on the BBC. One of the most anticipated television events of 1955 must have been Quatermass II (22 October), the belated sequel to the 1953 original. But the award for the most enduring TV series of 1955 belongs to The Phil Silvers Show (aka Sgt Bilko) which made its debut Stateside on 20 September. British viewers would have to wait until April 1957, but were able to watch it in repeat runs for another forty-five years. Now, if Talking Pictures want a sure fire success to add some much needed comedic weight to their schedule, they could do a lot worse than drafting in the Fort Baxter crowd... 

I'll be returning to some of these subjects when their respective anniversaries roll around... along with a variety of other topics.