Summer Schedule: Top Cat

This week, my delve into summer holiday scheduling considers the British TV career of that feline finagler Top Cat. More usually to be found in the early evening, T.C. and the gang finally turned up in the weekday morning summer schedule in 1977. It was the show’s fifteenth year on air.

Top Cat had debuted on BBC Television back in May 1962, under its original title, but only four episodes were shown before a rapid name change took place: someone at the BBC evidently realised that the corporation was inadvertantly advertising a brand of cat food. From now on, the Radio Times billing read ‘The Boss Cat’, and the magazine was careful to avoid mentioning him by name – the episode Sergeant Top Cat was coyly billed as ‘Sergeant T.C.’ It was all a bit silly really, and of course there was nothing to be done about the famous song, or the episode dialogue, which remained unchanged – but the BBC wouldn’t have it any other way and ‘Boss Cat’ it would remain until 1999 when the show moved across to BBC2.

In the United States, Top Cat had premiered eight months earlier, in black and white, on the ABC-TV Network on Wednesday 27 September 1961 at 8.30pm. Its appearance in this primetime placement came as a direct result of the success of The Flintsones in capturing the so-called ‘kidult’ audience in the same timeslot, a year earlier. Early reviews for Top Cat were generally favourable, but opined that, to hold its own in a primetime 8.30pm slot, the scripts would need to be considerably sharper. The resemblance to The Phil Silvers Show was noted, but critics were more inclined to cite Damon Runyan as an influence – the American journalist and short story writer was noted for his Manhattan settings and sharp-talking, streetwise characters with cool names.

Unlike The Flintstones, Top Cat proved a disappointment in the ratings, and although a further four episodes were ordered in December 1961, and announced in the trade press, the show was cancelled after just one season. It went on to perform much better in a syndicated Saturday morning slot.

The original 26 Top Cat episodes were shown by the BBC in two batches of thirteen, with the first run ending on Wednesday 8 August 1962. TC and the gang returned on Saturday 15 December for another thirteen-week run, which ended with four episodes as yet unbroadcast – it seems safe to assume that these were the four additional episodes that ABC had ordered back in December 1961, namely Top Cat Falls in Love, The Tycoon, The Grand Tour and Choo Choo Goes Ga-Ga. These episodes would not appear in any of the subsequent BBC repeat runs, with the exception of The Grand Tour, which finally made it to air during the series’ fourth broadcast in 1971, and Top Cat Falls in Love which debuted in 1972. The complete thirty-episode series would not be shown in full until 2005.

I was aware of Top Cat from a very early age: it’s conceivable that I saw it right from the very beginning, as my parents had owned a TV set since autumn 1961. Curiously, it wasn’t until 1971 that I noticed the alternate title, picking it up initially from the billing in the Radio Times, where I mistakenly assumed it to be a different programme. As anyone who saw the BBC broadcasts back in the 60s and 70s will know, the beginning and end titles had been rather scrappily modified to remove the title card, which was replaced in the opening sequence with a static graphic, while the end titles were marred by a jump-cut. These ‘BBC prints’ remained in circulation for decades, and appear to have had their last outing in 1989 before the series decamped to BBC2.

The BBC's alternate title card

The series’ history on the BBC is long and quite complicated. Its first repeat run commenced on Thursday 3 October 1963, and my earliest memories probably stem from these broadcasts, which ran through till Wednesday 25 March 1964. There were no further screenings until 1967 when a repeat run began on Wednesday 22 February. The BBC had adopted its own episode order, which was quite at variance with the American broadcasts, and this ‘UK running order’ was more or less adhered to for the first three complete broadcasts. Tuesday 15 August 1967 was to be Top Cat’s last sighting on British television for four years. The fourth run got started on Friday 6 August 1971, including a premiere for The Grand Tour on 3 December. After a three month break, the series returned on 16 March 1972, when the Radio Times billing rather risibly gave the title as ‘Boss Cat Falls in Love’: the episode was being shown by the BBC for the first time. This week also marked the first appearance of Top Cat in any of my diaries and unlike the Radio Times, I gave the episode its correct title.

A random episode was shown on Thursday 14 September, before yet another repeat run got going in March 1973. By this time, any attempt at maintaining a consistent episode order had been abandoned, and the broadcasts lasted for just sixteen weeks. A further batch appeared in April of the following year, which rounded off the series’ fifth time on air. From here onwards, things get messy (for greater detail, please refer to the first of my ‘Sunday Supplements’ where I’ll make available my unedited notes on the series):

https://sundaysupplemental.blogspot.com/2025/07/top-cat-bbc-broadcasts-1962-2007.html

By this time, the series was entering into a kind of ‘afterlife’ which saw it reduced to the status of programme filler. A solo episode on Wednesday 18 December 1974 was followed by a short run during the Christmas holidays – the first time that episodes had appeared in the morning schedule. Another random episode appeared in the early evening schedule on Saturday 3 May 1975 – this was almost certainly a piece of tactical scheduling, allowing for a possible overrun of the afternoon’s FA Cup coverage. In the event, the match ended on time, and Top Cat appeared as promised at 17.10, followed by the evening news and Dr. Who.

August ‘75 saw a short run of Saturday morning episodes, followed by a more organised re-run beginning on Tuesday 26 August that saw the programme returned to its traditional early evening slot. Further repeats ran through to July 1976. By this time, it was rare for the Radio Times to list titles, so it’s conceivable (though unlikely) that the two yet unaired episodes might have appeared during this run.

Following a few weeks of evening repeats in the spring of 1977, the summer holiday morning run kicked off on Tuesday 16 August – which is where we came in. The show was then promoted back to the early evening schedule from 14 June 1978. Once again, the Radio Times failed to give titles, but my diaries are able to fill in the gaps for anyone who’s interested (see Sunday Supplement for details). From the late 70s and onwards into the 80s, Top Cat (still billed as ‘Boss Cat’) became appended to various Saturday morning ‘portmanteau’ programmes such as Multi Coloured Swap Shop, and Saturday Superstore.

In the early 80s, I managed to tape a few odd episodes, but I had to wait for the advent of DVD to get a complete run. On Tuesday 6 April 1999, TC and co jumped ship from BBC1 to BBC2, and the series was now billed, for the first time since 1962, as Top Cat. I was still tuning in for odd episodes as late as 2005, and it must have been around this time that I acquired a complete series DVD – albeit in Region 1 format (the series would be released to Region 2 some years later). According to BBC Genome, the very last episode of Top Cat to air on the BBC was Sergeant Top Cat, on the morning of Friday 21 December 2007. And with that, TC’s adventures on British terrestrial television came to an end (since then, Top Cat has appeared across various digital channels, but this blog is only concerned with old school analogue TV). At time of writing, the show is readily available to stream on both Apple TV and Amazon, and it’s reassuring to know it’s still out there for new generations to discover. 

My own voyage of discovery with Top Cat actually ran in reverse, because the show led me back to the comedy that had provided its inspiration – The Phil Silvers Show. Bilko was still being shown on the BBC in the early 80s and one Saturday evening I sat up till 12.20am to see what it was all about. Within a few minutes, I had recognised the voice of Maurice Gosfield and, finally, was able to put a human face to Benny the Ball. I have to say, he looked more or less as expected...

Maurice Gosfield and Arnold Stang - the voices behind Benny and T.C.