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.

You'd Better Believe It – The Lost Songs of Rick Jones

By the end of the 1960s, I was a little too old to be watching Play School. Like Watch With Mother, it was aimed at pre-school children, and I was now aged eight or nine. Nevertheless, I still saw occasional episodes of both series during holidays and other absences from school.

Songs were a regular feature on Play School, and they usually took the form of jaunty, child-friendly singalongs with lots of repetition and strong rhythm, traditional nursery rhymes mixed up with original compositions. Canadian presenter Rick Jones was a familiar face on the series. He often played his own songs, accompanying himself on guitar, and it was one such example that I chanced to hear when watching a random episode some time in the late 60s. The song he performed that day was a far cry from the usual toddler-friendly Play School fare; it was moody and sophisticated, more typical of the material being produced by the singer-songwriters of the day. I heard it only once, but fragments of it have remained with me ever since, which is always the measure of a great song. Those snatches of melody and lyric could well be all that survives of the song, as the master tapes of Play School have long since been wiped. Odd episodes do occasionally surface – Tim Beddows owned one (coincidentally a Rick Jones edition) which has recently been recovered, but the chances of that specific episode I saw ever surfacing are something like one in 3,500.

Rick’s song contrasted the experiences of living in the town and living in the country. I can still remember the opening bars of melody and lyric: 

“Smoky town/ kinda gets me down/ each of your days is a grey one.”

Clearly, this was at some remove from Pop Goes the Weasel. Beyond that opening phrase, my memory fades into a blur until the hummed wordless chorus. Here, the chords and melody changed key, and swung from a major chord to a relative minor. The hummed melody was exactly the same as the theme from Twin Peaks: so much so that decades later, when I heard the Twin Peaks theme, I recognised it as Rick Jones’ Play School song. I wonder if he noticed the similarity himself?

During the song, viewers were shown a sequence of slides contrasting smoky townscapes dotted with chimneys and overhung with smog, contrasting bucolic scenes of open fields (although I noted the presence of overhead electric wires in some of these countryside shots). Why all this has remained with me, I have no idea, and I can attribute it only to the quality of Rick's song and the way he put it across. It impressed me with its moody sophistication: I’d grown up against a backdrop of eclectic music from the radio and my parents’ record collections, including the likes of Frank Sinatra and Dave Brubeck, and by the age of eight or nine, I was highly receptive to original and intriguing melodies.

Rick Jones’ Play School song will almost certainly never resurface. An album of songs from the series was released in 1969, around the time of ‘Smoky Town’, but no joy. If nothing else, I wondered if I could at least work out when I’d actually heard the song. Using the BBC’s genome database, I checked every appearance of Rick Jones on Play School from the late 60s (I was convinced the memory dated to around 1969). After going through over two years’s worth of broadcasts, I turned up an episode that looked like it might be the one: Monday 29 June 1970’s edition had Rick Jones as one of its presenters, and featured a story called ‘Town Mouse and Country Mouse’, presumably adapted from Beatrix Potter’s Tale of Johnny Town Mouse, a story I’d loved from childhood. This tale, contrasting the lives and attitudes of the town and country characters, seemed a very good fit for Rick’s song. On that basis, I concluded that this must be the episode I’d seen. One other fragment of memory helped to confirm the date: I clearly remembered it as being a dull, overcast day, which fits with the met office records for late June 1970.

Why and how I came to be watching daytime television on Monday 29 June 1970 is a question I can’t readily answer. The schools weren’t on holiday, so I must have been absent owing to illness, although I've no memory to that effect. Either way, I was reasonably confident that I’d found the date I was looking for. Regrettably, I will never now find that song.

It occurred to me some years back that it might be possible to contact Rick Jones through the internet – he’d been back in his native Canada for decades, but I found a website promoting his stage musical Laughing Daughter (based on songs from his country rock band Meal Ticket), and I’m pretty sure there was a contact email given. I set it aside as a project for another time and the idea promptly went out of my head. It came to mind again just recently and I determined that this time, I would finally do it. Would he respond to an unsolicited email from a bloke in Britain reminiscing about a song he’d probably forgotten and most likely had no record of? I’ll never know: for a quick Google search revealed the sad fact that Rick Jones died back in 2021 aged 84.

With him died all hope of ever resurrecting the ghost of that song I’d heard him sing back in 1970. But at least we still have other examples of his work: I was immediately taken with his theme to the BBC Play for Today episode The Flipside of Dominick Hide on first hearing it in 1982, instantly recognising his soft Canadian accent: and without realising it, I’d been enjoying another of his compositions years earlier in the form of his theme for the imported French aviation series The Aeronauts.

Anyone who’s heard Rick’s Dominick Hide theme will know what a fine singer and songwriter he was. All I can say is that his Play School song was its equal in mood and atmosphere. One might well speculate as to how many other songs of comparable quality he performed during his years on Play School, few of which we are ever likely to recover. One example does survive, and like 'Smoky Town' is an excellent example of Rick's sophisticated songwriting style: imagine Carole King writing a song about toys – it's that good:

For me, ‘Smoky Town’ is the ultimate lost piece of pop culture ephemera, unlikely ever to resurface, never commercially recorded apart from that wiped broadcast. To have remained in my mind after 55 years and having heard it only once makes it more than a bit special, but you’ve only got my word for it. As Rick said himself in his Dominick Hide lyric: “you’d better believe it.”