Summer Schedule: Robinson Crusoe

 

'A staple part of the BBC's school summer holiday schedules' according to Wikipedia. But was it? As ever, the reality is more nuanced than the internet would have us believe... 

Ask anyone of a certain age what television series they remember watching during the school summer holidays of the 1970s, and you’ll get one of two answers: a) ‘I didn’t sit indoors watching television during the holidays’ or b) ‘Robinson Crusoe’.

The Franco London Productions TV film series The Adventures of Robinson Crusoe had first aired on BBC1 in the autumn of 1965 and is perhaps best remembered for its theme and incidental music by Gian Piero Reverberi – once heard, never forgotten (the music score had been appended to the original German version at the insistence of the BBC when the serial was dubbed into English). In the title role, actor Robert Hoffman made for a somewhat ‘mittel-European’ Crusoe, with his blonde, Aryan good looks: his English voice was dubbed by Lee Payant.

I saw this original broadcast, which occupied a 5pm slot on Tuesday evenings from 12 October 1965 until 4 January 1966. It formed part of an early evening schedule that included the forgotten magazine series Tom-Tom, and The Magic Roundabout (which made its TV debut the same week as Crusoe). Towards the end of the run, the BBC’s brand-new storytelling series Jackanory was slotted in before Crusoe at 4.45pm, and with this, the corporation’s children’s output had found a successful line-up from which it would not deviate for a couple of generations.

A repeat run of Robinson Crusoe began in February 1967 and another in June 1969. The serial still occupied the same teatime slot, but when it returned, in 1972, it was in the recently introduced summer morning programme schedule. Preceded by The Flashing Blade (another classic enshrined in the memory for its summer morning associations), the repeat run kicked off on Wednesday 23 August at 10am, following an episode of Mr. Benn. The episodes were stripped across weekday mornings at this same time, ending on Friday 8 September. Although I was well aware of the new morning schedule and had been following the Tintin adventure The Crab With the Golden Claws a few weeks earlier, I took no notice of these summer Crusoes. But I wasn’t done with the series just yet.

The following year it was back, restored to its early evening slot. Scheduled at 5.15, it made for a black and white hiatus between Blue Peter at 4.50 and Hector’s House at 5.40, both of which were broadcasting in colour (although this made no difference to me, watching on a monochrome set). The serial was now eight years old, and watching this 1973 repeat run felt very nostalgic: it got a name check most weeks in my diary. In retrospect, it seems unusual that the BBC chose to show a black and white serial in an evening schedule of colour programmes, and unsurprisingly this was to be its last sighting in this slot.

The summer morning repeats continued in 1975, with a run on BBC1 Scotland during July, and the national service in August. By now, the series had become a staple of morning scheduling alongside other oldies like Whirlybirds (1957) and Camp Runamuck (1965), and rolled around again on Saturday 5 March 1977 at 9.35am – the morning’s programmes having kicked off with The Mister Men at 9.00am, and film cartoon series Jeannie at 9.15. A final repeat run, again on Saturdays, and this time at 10am, followed in April 1982, before the series was shelved, never to be seen on air again.

Of its eight runs on BBC television, Robinson Crusoe was seen four times in early evening slots, and four times in the mornings. Only two of these morning broadcasts fell during the school summer holidays – yet it is for these summer holiday morning screenings that the serial is best remembered: Wikipedia’s entry on the series describes it as a ‘staple’ of the BBC’s school summer holday schedules.

The same Wikipedia page also gives a name check to Tim Beddows who rescued the English-dubbed Crusoe prints from obscurity, some fifteen years after the serial’s last appearance on television. The BBC no longer held film prints in its archive, but Tim was determined to release the English dub on his recently founded Network label (at the time focused solely on the VHS video format), and after a lot of research, finally traced a complete set of prints to a film vault in Paris. The story was told in a BBC Radio 4 programme, Rescued Again, broadcast on 20 January 2011, and presented by the writer and film historian Glenn Mitchell.

Tim did more than merely release the serial: he bought the UK rights, and sales of the VHS tape (and, latterly DVD) were earning him a significant annual royalty. Following his passing in 2022 and the subsequent collapse of the Network label, the series ownership is now a grey area. The rights were certainly offered for sale during the liquidation process, but what, if anything became of this is unknown, as is the status of the physical materials – the film prints that Tim rescued from France and the digital copies owned by Network. Within the last decade, the films were sent to a London storage facility along with a lot of other Network-owned material, and hundreds of items from Tim’s personal film archive. When the Network label collapsed, the vault was left with an unpaid bill and refused to release the material. At time of writing, Robinson Crusoe is, therefore, ‘lost’ again, and the fate of those rescued film prints remains uncertain.

Network’s DVD of Robinson Crusoe, though deleted, is still readily available at reasonable prices from various online sources. Or you can, of course, resort to YouTube... for added atmosphere, try watching an episode a day at 10am...

Boing! 50 years of Carrott

 

“I’ve just heard a song on the radio called Funky Moped, by a bloke called Jasper Carrott.” So said our Dad, as he came in from work one evening in the summer of 1975. We didn’t believe him. Our Dad was a bit of a joker, and used to come out with silly names and comical ideas to amuse my brother and myself when we were children. He insisted it was true – he’d been listening to one of the local radio stations on his way home, when the record came on.

A few weeks later, at a cousin’s 21^st birthday party, we got to hear it ourselves. I even mentioned it in my diary: ‘hear The Funky Moped’ reads the entry for Sunday 6 July. I think it was the same cousins who advised us that we ought to listen to the B-side. My brother bought the single, probably shortly afterwards, and we duly played the B-side, ‘Magic Roundabout.’ So did a lot of other people. Rather than a song, it was a stand-up comedy routine, parodying the popular childrens’ TV programme in a vulgar manner: ‘Do you think Florence is a Virgin? Drops ‘em for certain…’

On the strength of people buying the single to hear the B-side, ‘Funky Moped’ entered the charts, fifty years ago this week. By now, Jasper Carrott was quickly becoming a new local hero – he hailed from Solihull, where he’d formed his own folk club, The Boggery, back in 1969 (I’d seen its advertising blocks in the Birmingham Evening Mail). His folk singer routine – including covers of songs by the likes of Jake Thackray – had quickly been eclipsed by his comic patter, although for his earliest television appearances he still appeared with an acoustic guitar.

A self-produced live album, comprised mostly of stand-up routines, had been sold around the clubs in 1973, and it was from here that the ‘Magic Roundabout’ track was extracted to provide a B-side for the ‘Funky Moped’ single. DJM records had signed Carrott, hoping to repeat the success of recent comedy albums by Billy Conolly, Mike Harding and others, and the single was conceived as a means of promoting their new artist to a wider audience.

I was following Carrott’s progress in my diary: ‘Funky Moped enters charts at No.13’, I wrote on 26 August. Two days later, the entry read: ‘Jasper Carrott is on Top of the Pops’, followed by the note ‘miss him’. I’m sure I saw his performance a week or so later, as the single continued to climb the charts, reaching No. 5 on 20 September. For his TOTP appearance, Carrott decided to send himself up, donning a Vegas-style white suit and matching shoes. Those in the know nodded and smiled and got the joke: everybody else was left scratching their heads. In retrospect, Carrott realised it was a mistake. Perhaps he should have got himself a Moped and a naff helmet? It didn’t matter – a new comedy star had arrived.

By now, his DJM album ‘Jasper Carrott Rabbitts On and On’ had appeared in the shops, and was on my Christmas list. The following year, I got his new live album, ‘Carrott in Notts’. By this time, he’d appeared in a one-man show on BBC1, A Half Hour Mislaid With Jasper Carrott, shown in a regional opt-out slot on Friday 17 September 1976 at 10.15pm. But it was the commercial channel that provided Carrott with his mainstream TV breakthrough. LWT boss Michael Grade had caught his act in Stratford and quickly offered him a contract, resulting in five TV specials: An Audience With Jasper Carrott (1978), The Unrecorded Jasper Carrott (1979), Carrott Gets Rowdie (1980) Beat the Carrott (1981) and Carrott Del Sol (1981). By the time of Carrott Del Sol, I owned a video recorder and kept a copy of the programme (which hasn’t been seen since but is available to watch on YouTube).

By now, his routines were very familiar to myself and my friends, including one about his attempts to rid his garden of a persistent mole and another about his antics as a lorry driver. At last, Birmingham had produced a comedy folk hero, to stand alongside the region’s pop superstars (Jeff Lynne had produced ‘Funky Moped’ and Bev Bevan, a childhood friend of Carrott, played drums on the track).

In 1982, Carrott migrated to BBC1, invited to front a new late Saturday night programme, conceived as a modern-day version of That Was the Week That Was. Carrott’s Lib debuted on 2 October 1982 and ran for a year. My diary records that I watched and taped the debut edition, and over the coming months, a lot more episodes were committed to tape. By now, though, I’d discovered another Midlands comic hero in the form of Rik Mayall – or rather, his investigative reporter persona Kevin Turvey – and I began to take less of an interest in Carrott’s television efforts. Carrott’s Commercial Breakdown (1989-1996) presented eccentric TV adverts from around the world, while Canned Carrott (1990-1995) saw a return to the stand-up format, including a regular sketch The Detectives (later developed as a series in its own right), and introducing performers Steve Punt and Hugh Dennis. Carrott continued to appear on the BBC, presenting stand-up routines until 2012’s The One Jasper Carrott. From Carrott’s Lib onwards, his act, scripted by various hands, increasingly began to incorporate topical material, and watching this week’s BBC4 repeat of The One… it was immediately apparent how dated this type of material sounds, in contrast to his more personal, observational comedy – latterly focusing on family issues and ageing.

Jasper Carrott is still performing and has no plans to retire. A quadruple heart bypass in 2017 gave him ‘a new lease of life’, and he didn’t do too badly from selling his shares in the TV production company Celador, for a reported £10m. In 2023 he joined the cast of The Archers, and I’m sure he’ll continue to rabbitt on and on for the forseeable future. Fair play to BBC4 for acknowledging his half century as a media star, by presenting an evening of material on Tuesday 19 August. For me, though, he really belongs to the 1970s, and those early stand-up routines. The LPs are long gone from my collection, but can be found easily enough on YouTube.

‘Boing! Time for bed...’

Comics on Sea

In August 1974, our family were on holiday in Llandudno, North Wales. It was our fourth and last visit to the resort. Days were spent mooching around the town, playing games of miniature golf, and taking various trips out. Most of my diary entries for the week, however, are lists of comics. On our first day, outside a newsagents, my eye had been drawn to a wire carousel on which were displayed a lot of American comic books. They all bore the imprint of the publisher Charlton, and they all featured Hanna Barbera cartoon characters, depicted in a series of colourful covers. I’d never seen anything like them before – this was my first ever encounter with genuine American comic books. There were plenty to choose from, and I selected a Top Cat title, No. 19 in a series, and dated inside to December 1973. The price was 6p, over-stamped in a roundel on the front cover – the original price having been 20c. During the week, I picked up more titles including Yogi Bear and The Jetsons.

How had they got here, and why had I never seen these comics before? They weren’t available in the shops back home in Birmingham. Later, comparing notes with other comic fans, I found out that these ‘comic books from the seaside’ were what we’d now call a ‘thing’, and for a time during the 1970s were liable to pop up at almost any coastal resort. Later still, I heard about how they’d come into the country as ballast in freighters. However they got here, they were here, and more to the point, they were in Llandudno in the summer of 1974. By the end of that holiday, my brother and myself went home with a small mountain of them – and I still have them to this day.

The stamped cover price on some of those comics includes the letters T&P, and online research reveals this to have been the imprint of a publisher and distributor called Thorpe and Porter, who had pioneered the importation of American comic books into Britain at the end of the 1950s. In 1959, they had become the exclusive UK distributors for DC, Marvel, Dell, Charlton and American Comics Group titles. Some had their covers altered for UK consumption back in the States, whilst others, like the examples we’d found, were simply ink-stamped with the British price.

Detail from a Top Cat comic cover, showing Thorpe & Porter's price stamp

These Charlton titles fell some way below the standard of the Gold Key series, an imprint of Western Publishing, whose titles made up the content of many British annuals sold by the Manchester publisher World Distributors. Many of the Charlton strips are credited to Gwen Krause and Ray Dirgo, and the likenesses of the comic characters were always very good. The pair must have been working flat out, though, as there were literally dozens of Charlton titles appearing during the early 1970s, and occasionally the artwork looks rushed. The printing was of an acceptable standard, with occasional examples of plates off register, but on the whole the panels didn’t look a lot different to the Gold Key examples I’d seen in annuals. The stories, however, were very poor stuff, scarcely lasting for more than six pages, some of them consisting of a single gag – whereas Gold Key’s storylines could run to twelve pages or more, and employed smaller panels. Alongside the cover stars, a typical Charlton comic included lots of advertising, much of it encouraging young readers to sell a newspaper called ‘Grit’ or cheap greetings cards in exchange for cash or prizes. Other adverts, less well targeted, featured hair restoring products and cheap jewelery, with headlines addressed to 'military men'. One curious example is headed ‘Help Save the Beatles’, and offers a selection of 8mm film material featuring the Fab Four, available by mail order. There were, of course, the usual tacky pages of tricks and novelties like Frankenstein masks, x-ray specs and the curious ‘sea monkeys’. Despite all this tat, the comics still felt like good value at 6p for 36 pages, and the covers were always colourful and attractive. 

A typical page of tat advertising from a Charlton title.

At the time, it struck me as unusual that comics featuring the likes of Top Cat and Yogi Bear should still be in production – the shows having had their heyday on British television over a decade earlier – but publication was almost certainly in response to the TV series continuing to live on in syndication. 

Aside from the stash we discovered at Llandudno, I never saw these comic books again, save for one occasion when I spotted a few Gold Key titles and a couple of later Charlton editions at a newsagents near Birmingham. These aside, it seems that, for the most part, those ‘comics from the seaside’ never penetrated much further inland. Whether this is in any way related to their use as ballast on ships, I’ve no idea, but I’ve seen reports online of large piles of American comics being found in dockside locations, so there may be a connection.

I’d discovered Charlton comics during a time at which the brand, then 29 years old, was undergoing a revival by artist/writer/editor Nicola Cuti. The Hanna Barbera titles, many of them previously licensed to Gold Key, had begun appearing in the mid-60s, becoming one of the company’s staples, particularly after the cancellation of their earlier superhero comics. But the writing was on the wall for the publisher. Many titles were cancelled in 1976, and the majority of those still in print were suspended for eight months the following year. The comic book industry was entering a period of decline, and following a number of attempts to rally the company’s fortunes, Charlton went out of business in 1985.

For true comics fans, Charlton’s high watermark had come during the so called ‘silver age’, although the company never quite managed to create an iconic character to match those of its rivals. War stories, ghostly tales and horror abounded, along with comics based on monster movies, before the move towards TV cartoon characters. I’m sure I’d have snapped up the likes of Gorgo or Reptilicus if I’d seen them, but from what I can remember, the bulk of the comics we found on that carousel in Llandudno were from the Hanna Barbera range.

Seasides were also a good place to find toys that were nearly a decade out of date. From shops in the Torbay area, circa 1971, my brother and myself were bought Fireball XL5 Rocket Guns. These toys, originally sold in Dan Dare packaging, were produced by J&R Randall and sold under their ‘Merit’ brand in the mid 60s. The same shop still had scores of old Thunderbirds toys on its shelves, which, in their original boxes, would have made a fine haul if we’d been minded to ask for them. Whilst the ballast connection may explain the presence of American comics at the seaside, these out-of-date toys are less easy to account for. And it wasn’t just one shop, either – around Paignton, we came across several retailers selling similar ‘new old stock’ items, including die-cast toys by Corgi and Dinky. 

The shop where we bought those comics lasted a long time. Google Streetview showed it still thriving in 2014, when apart from some modern signage, it presented very much the same appearance as I remember from over fifty years ago – the comic carousels were beneath the awning, close to where the newspaper headline board is sitting in the Streetview picture below. Sadly, when Google returned a decade later, the shop appeared to have ceased trading.

I don't know how long the 'comics on sea' phenomenon lasted: for me, it was just a few days in 1974. Maybe today there are still seaside retailers selling comics from a few years ago... but finding a title from 2023 in 2025 wouldn't be quite the same, somehow...

Summer Schedule: The Jetsons

 

‘Get 4 JETSONS comics’ reads my diary entry for Tuesday 13 August 1974. We were on holiday in Llandudno, North Wales, where I’d discovered a carousel of imported American comic books outside a newsagents. Most of the comics were based on Hanna Barbera characters. Top Cat, Yogi Bear and The Flintstones were all very familiar, but The Jetsons? I’m not sure if I’d even heard of them before. Either way, the colourful covers and retro-futurist asethetic appealed to me, and that day I picked up numbers 13, 17, 18 and 19 of a series published in 1972 and 73.

It was in the pages of these four comics that I discovered The Jetsons – parents George and Jane, offspring Judy and Elroy, space-mutt Astro and Rosie the Robot. It looked like a fun series. So how come it had never been on television? Top Cat, which had been bought by the BBC, was seldom off the air. ITV, on the other hand, owned the rights to The Flintstones, which, despite dating back to 1960, had only really become known to me in the early 70s. Did ITV also own The Jetsons? If so, what had they done with it?

I’d been alert to TV cartoons from a very early age, and knew most of the famous Hanna Barbera creations very well – Yogi Bear, Huckleberry Hound, Pixie, Dixie and Mr. Jinx. Some I’d seen in books without ever spotting them on television – Hokey Wolf, Fibber Fox, Snagglepuss, Yakky and Chopper, Magilla Gorilla. But not The Jetsons. 

There was a simple reason why I’d never seen the series – it had fallen victim to ITV’s regionalistion, where local stations could take their pick of bought-in American filmed series, which would be broadcast on a regional basis without ever being nationally networked. Series like The Flintstones appeared sporadically across the regions, with some areas not committing to the show until the early 70s. Similarly, the live action sitcom My Favourite Martian was shown in only selected regions, with some areas not picking it up at all. And this was the fate that befell The Jetsons.

In its home country, The Jetsons was privileged to become the first programme broadcast in colour on the ABC network when it debuted in 1962. Network repeats saw it through to September 1963 in prime time slots, by which time the show had already been cancelled. Saturday morning reruns on all three networks proved to be much more popular, indicating that the show – which, like The Flintstones, had been conceived as a sitcom with a broader family appeal – was performing better with an audience of children. Over twenty years later, the series was revived, with new episodes going direct to syndication in 1985 and 87. In 1990, the Jetsons finally arrived on the big screen.

Here in Britain, however, it was a very different story. Granada picked up the show in summer 1963, placing it in the 6.05pm slot that was frequently occupied by live-action sitcoms. The TV Times listing, as you can see, even included the complete voice cast, and the show was promoted on the page with a neat graphic of Rosey, the family’s robot maid. A small article in the same issue drew attention to the series, describing it, entirely accurately, as ‘a space-age version of The Flintstones.’ But there seems to have been less enthusiasm elsewhere on the ITV network – by the end of 1963, of the larger regional operators, only Granada had taken The Jetsons. Here, the series ran all the way through to 18 December, and although I don’t have all the TV Times available for inspection, it can reasonably be inferred that all 24 episodes had been shown. Two years later and there was still no sign of the series on any of the other regional operators – while Granada, having an endless supply of new programmes to broadcast, didn’t run to a repeat.

Here in the Midlands, we would have to wait until 1978 for a glimpse of The Jetsons, and a glimpse was all we got. It was four years on from buying those comics – almost to the day – that I finally got to see the programme for real. We were a couple of weeks into the summer holiday when ATV, for whatever reason, suddenly began screening the sixteen-year-old series (the previous week, they’d been showing episodes of the American crime drama Banacek). ‘Watch the Jetsons for 1st time at 11.10am’ read my diary entry for Wednesday 2 August 1978. It was, however, to be very much a ‘blink and you’ll miss it’ broadcast.

I must have been impressed by my first look at The Jetsons, because I wrote up the whole synopsis on the opposite page of my diary. Watching it again, I can see I’d been paying close attention, as I even specified the ‘pineapple upside down cake’ that ended up on the head of George’s boss, Mr. Spaceley…

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-rVeOh1I-uY

Of all the characters in that first episode, the most endearing was Rosie the Robot, voiced by Jean Van Der Pyl, who was already familiar to me as the voice of Wilma Flintstone. Yet in spite of being a regular in the Charlton comics, she only made two appearances in the original TV series. But never mind – there was always space-mutt Astro who, looking and sounding like an early prototype for Scooby-Doo, turned up in the fifth episode. With his coming, the Jetson household was complete… but my brief encounter with the futuristic family was about to reach a premature end. I got to see only one more episode (Jetson’s Night Out) before the new school term began on Tuesday 5 September. Another episode was shown the following day, which, of course, I missed. It was the last in this repeat run, but the series would resurface in the morning schedule in May 1979, for just two weeks. My diary lists the episodes Rosie's Boyfriend and Elroy's TV Show at 9.55 am on Thursday 31 May and Thursday 7 June. It's more than likely that ATV showed other episodes around this time, but if so, I failed to catch any of them – and in the absence of TV Times details, it's impossible to check. Either way, Elroy's TV Show would prove to be my last look at The Jetsons for some considerable time.

The series seems to have seen scant action elsewhere on the ITV network, and from contemporary editions of the TV Times, I can find only one other region showing episodes – around half a dozen having appeared on Tyne Tees around June and July 1978.

It’s small wonder that here in Britain, The Jetsons has left next to no impression as an item of popular culture – I don’t know anyone else who remembers seeing it. Why wasn’t it more popular? It was, as the TV Times put it, a space-age Flintstones; and perhaps that was the problem. The Flintstones had the cute gimmick of seeing modern technology reimagined for the stone-age, whereas The Jetsons’ running gags all revolved around the family’s excessively automated lifestyle. That’s not to say that the gags weren’t good – I particularly like the way George’s flying saucer car folds up into a briefcase (there is now, I believe, a real life car that can perform the same trick) – but the visual gags never quite displayed the level of perverse imagination seen in the town of Bedrock.

Spurred into action by the release of the Jetsons movie in 1990, the BBC nabbed the rights to the series, but put it out at a time when only children and the unemployed would be watching, with the first episode airing on Tuesday 10 July 1990 at 10am. The Radio Times listings were perfunctory at best, but from the scant synopses, it can be inferred that the broadcasts included episodes from the 1960s original and the 80s revival, and lasted a good deal longer than ITV’s attempt. I saw none of them, and was barely even aware that the series had popped up again. Online sources also state that episodes were shown on Channel 5 – I’ll take their word for it.

At time of writing, there are only two full episodes of The Jetsons available to watch online, and there is no UK DVD or blu-ray release (although the blu-ray available through Amazon is stated to be region free). Aside from a VHS release in the 1980s, Jetsons merchandise has always been thin on the ground here in Britain. There were a couple of annuals from World Distributors in the early sixties – the publisher was based in Manchester, one of the only places where the series was being broadcast. 

Having revisited The Jetsons for the purpose of writing this piece, I’d happily watch more of them, though I suspect I’d bail out after the 1960s era. If any of this has whetted your appetite for retro space age fun, the good news is that the Charlton comics are available to view online: there was a series of 20, published in the early 70s:

https://archive.org/details/TheJetsonsCharlton/01%20-%20The%20Jetsons%20%231%20%28Charlton%201970%29/

And when you’ve read those, you can take a trip further back in time to Gold Key’s superior Jetsons series from 1963-4: 

https://archive.org/details/TheJetsonsGoldKey/01%20-%20The%20Jetsons%20%231%20%28Gold%20Key%201963%29/page/n21/mode/2up

Nostalgia, comics and Nostalgia and Comics

 

Nostalgia and comics are two topics that I’ve returned to many times over the nine years I’ve been writing this blog, so it’s surprising to realise that I haven’t, to date, mentioned the shop of the same name in Birmingham, where I spent a fair amount of time (and money) during the late 70s and early 80s. If ever there was a shop that did ‘exactly what it said on the tin’, Nostalgia and Comics was it (although I always found their stock leaned more heavily towards comics rather than nostalgia). Although most people will remember the shop in the Albany building on Smallbrook Queensway, it started life across the road in very cramped quarters on the corner of Hurst Street subway. The subway is long gone, but the building is still there.

It was here, some time in 1977, that I acquired a copy of the first ever Eagle comic for the princely sum of £5. I’m not even sure if the shop had a name at this point in time: to me it was simply ‘the comic shop.’ It didn’t last long in its cramped quarters – within a year, it had relocated into the subway itself, occupying a long, narrow retail unit beneath Smallbrook Queensway. From here, in September 1977, I acquired a few more vintage copies of Eagle.

I’ve never been a fan of American comics or their merchandising off-shoots, so much of the shop’s stock held no interest for me. It was, however, the first place I’d seen selling vintage copies of British comics like Eagle, TV21 and others, alongside odd annuals, TV and film tie-in paperbacks and occasional vintage toys. It was in hope of securing similar items that I took to visiting the shop on a reasonably regular basis.

I was keeping a diary in the late 70s, and although I neglected to log the date on which I acquired that number one Eagle, I recorded a few more visits to the shop over the years, often accompanied by my friend Tim Beddows (who would later go on to form the Network DVD label). A couple of typical entries:

Friday 31 March 1978: ‘Go to comic shop. Tim gets T Birds cards and returns later for ‘The Spotlight’. This gives a good indication of the shop’s eclectic stock at this point in time: The Spotlight was two volumes of the actors directory dating back to 1969. If you’ve never seen one, imagine something the size of an old telephone directory filled with page after page of promotional photographs of actors, categorised according to type: leading men, younger leading men, etc. These were very unusual items to find. The Thunderbirds cards were from the Somportex bubble gum series issued in the mid 1960s.

Friday 29 June 1979: ‘See T. Birds game and S. Car (Supercar) annual in comic shop.’ It was hard to find old toys from the Gerry Anderson series: one occasionally turned up examples at jumble sales and junk shops. In this case, it was Waddington’s board game of Thunderbirds. The Supercar Annual was a fairly hefty price, perhaps as much as £10, and I passed on it – at a jumble sale it would have been 10p. As a comparison, the same edition sells today for £15-£30 on ebay. I did, however, return a few days later for the Thunderbirds game.

By 1980, the shop had moved again, to what would become its definitive trading base in the Albany building. Now operating over two floors, the ground floor was devoted to American comics and brand-new merchandise, whilst the upper, mezzanine floor concentrated on vintage items. Whenever I visited the shop, I would make straight for the upper floor. I already knew bearded Phil Clarke, the shop’s owner, by sight, and now I made the acquaintance of Colin who manned the upstairs counter, a friendly guy who, unfortunately, also happened to collect Gerry Anderson merchandise. This gave him first dibs on anything cool that came into the shop, and, like old man Steptoe, he would keep the best items for himself. This was going on as early as June 1980, when my diary records a visit to the shop when I was shown a very nice, boxed example of the Lincoln International battery-operated Stingray: 'shown' being the operative word – It wasn’t for sale. As compensation, he did allow me to buy a vintage Thunderbird One pencil sharpener! 

One other item I managed to prise out of their hands, for around a tenner was a ‘Codeg’ branded Dalek moneybox, a ‘new old stock’ item recovered from a shop, in mint and boxed condition, which proved to be a decent investment: an example is currently listed on eBay for over £300. This same diary entry also named the shop for the first time.

The ones that got away: the shop actually allowed me to purchase these two 'new old stock' items, but anything else was strictly for looking at and not for sale.

As with Stingray toys, so too with copies of TV Century 21. Colin was evidently putting a set together for himself, and again got the pick of whatever came into the shop. I don’t blame him, I’d have done the same myself. Around this same time, I managed to walk away with a copy of number 6, but there was no sign of issues 1-5. As time went by (and Colin, presumably, filled the gaps in his collection), it became easier to find TV21s for sale, mint and bagged copies selling for £2.50 each. I also bagged a fair few Eagles, choosing them for their covers rather than trying to complete a run. As you can see below, the price of these items crept upwards over the years.

In 1983, I began working at an advertising agency in Birmingham which, as luck would have it, was located in Western House, just across the road from Nostalgia and Comics (the original shop unit was now a sandwich bar which I visited most lunchtimes). I took to popping across to N&C a couple of times each week, and the TV21s in my own collection slowly began to mount up. Once, finding a particularly large pile in their display cabinet, I left a deposit and nabbed the lot for myself. These are all worth a lot more now than I gave at the time, but perhaps the best buys I made were a couple of the TV21 summer extras, and the first three editions of Lady Penelope comic, which command very high prices today.

Aside from TV21s and occasional ‘look at this, it’s not for sale’ Gerry Anderson toys, the most interesting item in the shop as far as I was concerned was an original page of artwork from the Dan Dare serial ‘Terra Nova’, which was framed and mounted on the wall. There seemed little point in enquiring if it was for sale, and I wouldn’t have been able to afford it anyway. 

Eventually, the company I was working for relocated to Birmingham’s Jewelery Quarter on the other side of town, and with only an hour for lunch, it was hard to get to the shop and back and have time to browse their stock. By the early 90s, I was working at home, and visited on fewer and fewer occasions. Eventually, the upper sales floor was roped off and no longer accessible to the public, and the vintage British comics that had once been a staple of the shop’s stock disappeared altogether.

The shop is still there today, and still selling comics from the same unit at 14-16 Smallbrook Queensway. It was bought out by Forbidden Planet a long time ago, and was probably trading under that name the last time I crossed the threshold, whenever that might have been. Today it’s called Worlds Apart, which as a name has a sort of intriguing fantasy aura, but is, dare I say, a world apart from the ‘tell it like it is’ branding that was Nostalgia and Comics. Somewhere, I’m sure I still have an old Nostalgia and Comics bag, complete with the shop’s logo in the old ‘Ripping Yarns’ typeface (actually called ‘Algerian’). If I can find it, and scan it, I’ll post it here, but if not, a Google search will turn up a copy for you...

Inflation at work... copies of Eagle in their original N&C bags and price tags, as sold circa early 80s.

Summer Schedule: Festival 77

 

The BBC’s Festival 40 must have been considered a success, because exactly a year later, the corporation did it all over again, presenting another retrospective season, this time under the umbrella title of Festival 77. The Radio Times for the week in question uniquely relegated its familiar masthead to a corner, making room for a display of twenty five vintage covers. This time, taking its cue from the Queen’s Silver Jubilee, the trawl through the archives was a celebration of 25 years of BBC television, spanning 1952 to the then present day.

Viewers expecting the BBC to make good on the comparative dearth of truly populist material in the previous year’s retrospective were to be disappointed: if anything, Festival 77 was even more elitist than its predecessor. Over twenty-five nights, a different programme was presented as representative of a different year in the broadcaster’s history. Once again, a compilation programme served to introduce the season: Thanks for the Memory (Sunday 31 July, 20.10 BBC2) adopted a vox pop approach, drawing on the memories of viewers and contributors to television, once again illustrated with a choice helping of clips from the archives. My diary noted the inclusion of the original Z Cars titles, along with what I referred to as ‘other silly programmes’ one of which, was, if memory serves, the famous 'Spaghetti Harvest' film presented by Panorama as an April Fool's joke back in 1957. But if this was a lightweight selection, the season itself would prove to be anything but. 

With so much early television going out live, the choice of material available from the 1950s was decidedly limited, and the first evening’s offering was a compilation of the old television newsreel, Retrospect 1952 – a kind of Rock and Roll Years without the rock and roll, good nostalgia fodder for anyone alive at the time, but of no special interest to myself (I opted for the film The Magus over on BBC1). The programme was, like everything else in the 1977 season, prefaced with an introduction from the broadcaster and war correspondent René Cutforth. The same evening saw a one-off revival of the discussion programme Late Night Line-Up, which solicited contributions from David Frost, Dennis Potter and others, and considered topics including the development and importance of the television play from the 1960s. 

Tuesday evening’s selection took the form of two interviews from 1953, with Aneurin Bevan and Adlai Stevenson – hardly the kind of thing that viewers would have held dear in the memory – but Wednesday night brought the season’s first real gem in the form of Nineteen Eighty-Four: the legendary Nigel Kneale/ Rudolph Cartier production of 1954. I made a special point of watching this. It was black and white, blurry (no kind of restoration having been attempted), and with the static, slow-moving production values typical of its era – but it was still powerful stuff. My diary didn’t afford much room for comment aside from the laconic note ‘is good’ (my diary entries often sound as if they’d been written by Manuel out of Fawlty Towers…)

Radio Times listing for 1984 – the picture quality wasn't as bad as their Schaflined image suggests.

The following night’s selection, from 1955, was hardly typical of mid-50s television, comprising a nostalgic celebration of the tenth anniversary of Victory in Europe. Cue Vera Lynne, Richard Murdoch, Jack Warner et al… On Friday evening, At Home (1956) was a pair of outside broadcasts visiting famous people in their domestic surroundings, and offering up the sharp cultural contrast of the Archbishop of Canterbury and Kenneth Horne. 1957’s offering again eschewed contemporary content for another return to the war years, Men in Battle: Arnhem. Important television it undoubtedly was, but hardly the stuff of which nostalgic retrospectives are made…

1958 was represented by an early ‘fly on the wall’ documentary, presenting a ‘vivid portrait of community life in the East End’, long before Albert Square became inextricably associated with that particular corner of the metropolis. 1959’s offering was the crime drama Who, Me?, with a cast that included Lee Montague and Z Cars’ Leonard Williams; while from 1960 another two episodes of Face to Face were dusted off, presenting interviews with Evelyn Waugh and Adam Faith. From here, it was downhill to populist comedy fare with Here’s Harry representing the BBC’s output from the year of my birth, 1961. Back in 1977, I still thought Harry Worth was vaguely amusing, and it was worth tuning in if only to see the ‘legendary’ title sequence where he gets himself up against a shop window and does that thing with his arms and legs. The episode concerned his attempts to get a record request played on Housewives’ Choice.

Thursday night’s selection has been seen on BBC4 within the past few months: Pop Goes the Easel (1962) was described as ‘an exciting early film by Ken Russell from the Monitor series’, and looked at the work of four ‘pop artists’ (Radio Times’ commas, not mine), Peter Blake, Derek Boshier, Pauline Boty and Peter Phillips. I was tuned in again on Friday 12 August for That Was the Week That Was, a programme I’d first heard about in last year’s compilation. TW3 was very much a programme whose reputation preceded it. Having clocked up 37 episodes across two series, its run was abruptly terminated in December of 1963 on the pretext of 1964 being an election year – and heaven forbid that a piece of televised satire might have an influence on the way people voted. If the establishment had been running scared, it did them no good, as the Tories were ousted anyway – but it all goes to show how far we’ve come since those days – and not in a favourable direction.

By 1964, Beatlemania was at its height and the media were increasingly obsessed with the fads, fashions and opinions of teenagers, which may explain the next entry in the Festival 77 line-up. Ten Years After was a return visit to a group of London teenagers from differing backgrounds who had been the subject of a 1955 Special Enquiry film. Following the broadcast, René Cutforth spoke to some of the participants, 22 years on from the original film. ITV pursued a similar line of enquiry with their own series, Seven Up, that premiered the same year as the updated BBC documentary. Coincidence or not?

Sunday 14 August saw the seminal drama Up the Junction given an airing. The BBC’s original black and white production was a good deal more earthy and raw than the colour feature film of 1968, which I had yet to discover. Up the Junction has become something of a touchstone when discussing the neo-realist ‘kitchen sink’ dramas of the late 50s and early 60s, and still delivers a clout even today.

Monday took viewers back to 1966 for a early episode of Till Death Us Do Part. First broadcast on 20 June 1966, the episode was now clocking up its third airing, following a repeat run in September of the same year. I was vaguely familiar with Alf Garnett, but not a special fan of the series – I could never warm to Johnny Speight’s acerbic humour – but I made a point of watching this vintage piece of television. It has since been shown on BBC2 in 1997 and on BBC4.

1967’s representative programme was In Two Minds, a hard-hitting drama tackling the subject of schizophrenia – again, I passed on this one, but was back in front of the set for All My Loving, Tony Palmer’s 1968 film about pop music, and one of the first documentaries ever to interrogate the subject in any depth. From 1969, Royal Family was a famous ‘fly on Buckingham Palace wall’ documentary, described by the Radio Times as a ‘revelation’. Shock horror for viewers at the realisation that the Windsors were just a regular family like any other. Pull the other one, auntie…

On Friday 19 August, viewers were afforded a trip back to 1970 and the seaside in the form of Bird’s Eye View, an aerial tour of the coast with commentary from Sir John Betjeman. From this affable travelogue it was straight into the gutter for the harrowing Edna, the Inebriate Woman, a warts and all (warts and nothing else?) portrayal of a drunken down-and-out, portrayed by Patricia Hayes. I should probably have seen this, if not in 1977 then on its subsequent repeat run during another archival season in 1986. This was the kind of television play about which grown-ups were heard to mutter darkly and disapprovingly.

Having been passed over for the previous year’s line-up, Morecambe and Wise finally made the grade for 1972’s archival offering. The comedy continued on Monday 22 August with the first episode of Whatever Happened to the Likely Lads, a welcome repeat as far as I was concerned. I’d last seen it on a repeat run in December 1974 which already felt like ages ago. It is now…

It was back to much heavier and challenging fare on Tuesday 23 August with Joey, a dramatised true story about a man with severe brain damage who, despite facing significant communication difficulties had managed to dictate his own life story. The following night, Just Another Saturday, from 1975, presented a film portrait of a marching band. This was followed on Thursday 25 August by the most unusual item in the whole season – a 1976 edition of Noel Edmonds’ Multi-Coloured Swap Shop, the only occasion on which the programme was ever seen outside of its customary Saturday morning slot, and the only edition ever to be given a repeat screening. The episode, described in the Radio Times as a ‘condensed’ edition, included contributions from Softly, Softly’s Frank Windsor and Norman Bowler, motor racing champion James Hunt, and the Electric Light Orchestra. Bringing the season right up to date on Friday 26 August was a special new edition of Horizon, looking back at the past 25 years of the documentary strand. And with this, Festival 77 sank gracefully below the horizon…

These two consecutive seasons of archival exhumations may have led some to suspect that this would now become an annual treat on BBC2, but it was not to be. Aside from the usual repeat runs for series of not-so-distant vintage, there would be no further mining of the archives for almost a decade, when BBC television marked its fiftieth anniversary in 1986. The corporation would acknowledge notable dates like Z Cars’ twentieth anniversary in January 1982 by exhuming odd episodes (and once, memorably, picked out an episode of Maigret from which Rupert Davies was almost entirely absent!) but on the whole, archival material was thin on the ground and most often found an outlet in compilations like the short-lived but well meaning Windmill. Today, real rarities occasionally find their way to the screen – just recently BBC4 viewers were treated to four episodes of Andy Pandy – but the kind of archive seasons we saw in the 1970s and 80s are less common. On the other hand, where it was once considered enough to show a single episode, today’s viewers are more likely to find entire series available to watch, such as 2022’s welcome repeat for the rarely seen 1970 production Roads to Freedom, which resurfaced as part of a comprehensive drama retrospective.

With many vintage items having become available on home media, and still more on YouTube, the value of retrospective seasons is no longer quite what it was in the 1970s when there was no other means of access to the archive. Are we in a better place? Undoubtedly. But it would still be nice to see another season of repeats with the diversity and rarity value of Festivals 40 and 77.

Summer Schedule: Festival 40

The timing couldn’t have been better. 1976 was the year in which I first began to take a keen interest in archive television, scarcely realising that some thirty years later I’d be making a living from it. Early in the year, I’d picked up on repeats of ITC’s criminology series Strange Report, and our local commercial station, ATV, had run a short Saturday night series of vintage American series including Rawhide and 77 Sunset Strip under the umbrella title ‘Play it Again.’

Now it was the turn of the BBC to open up their archives. The television service was celebrating forty years since its inception in 1936, and a season of archival material was presented on BBC2 spanning the month of August. This was a rare treat for viewers – in the mid 70s, it was rare to find vintage programmes in the schedule, especially material from the days of black and white broadcasting, and some of the series shown over the coming weeks had not been seen in over a decade. I immediately took an interest – but Festival 40 was far from being a populist celebration of television. It was, more to the point, a celebration of BBC television, and almost from the outset, one could sense that this was no mere retrospective – this was a season with an agenda.

Of the thirty-two archival items presented under the Festival 40 banner, nineteen were serious documentaries or arts programmes. There were just four comedies, two light entertainment items, two single plays and, rather bizarrely, the World Cup Final of 1966. With such a preponderance of heavyweight material, Festival 40 tells us a lot about how the BBC saw itself back in the mid 70s, with the Reithian philosophy still very much at the forefront – a public service broadcaster with a duty to inform, educate and entertain, maintaining a haughty distance from the populist, lightweight alternative of ITV.

It’s almost more instructive to consider those programmes that were omitted from Festival 40 than those that made the final selection: there was no Dixon of Dock Green, no Doctor Who, no Quatermass – although clips from all of them were shown in a compilation, Forty Years, that kicked off the season – no Morecambe and Wise, no TW3, next to nothing of the corporation’s prolific drama output, and absolutely no children’s television. As a summary of the BBC’s first forty years, this was an extremely partial selection. But it was, after all, going out on BBC2 – and BBC2 had standards to maintain.

The celebrations got started on on Sunday 1 August with Forty Years, described by the Radio Times as ‘a raid on the archives of BBC Television.’ Spanning two and a half hours, Forty Years afforded an entertaining flypast of the BBC’s television output that boded well for the coming retrospective, packed as it was with rare archival material. I was particularly intrigued to see the famous piece of continuity that had preceded an episode of the serial Quatermas II, with the announcer’s grave warning that the programme was ‘not suitable for children or for those of you who may have a nervous disposition’. This was all new to me – I’d never even heard of Quatermass before. What did it mean, anyway? The mere word was enough to send you behind the sofa, nervous disposition or not.

From this taster, it was on to the main course of complete programmes from the archive, as over the coming four weeks one or two items were served up each evening on BBC2. First on the menu was a 1964 episode of Michael Bentine’s surrealist sketch comedy It’s a Square World, a series of which I held no recollection whatsoever. Speaking to the Radio Times, Bentine said, in all modesty: “Looking back I suppose the series was a pioneer, containing the essence of almost every comedy show that followed it - Monty Python, The Goodies and Ronnie Barker have all acknowledged their debt.” Well, he would say that, wouldn’t he? I watched out of curiosity but found it mostly forced and unfunny. Of all the programmes the BBC could have chosen to begin a festival of television, it was an odd choice.

Odder still was Tuesday night’s selection – the entire World Cup Final from 1966, running from 9pm till 11pm. A sporting highlight maybe, but hardly the kind of thing one expected from a festival of television. This was not the colour film record of the event, but a telerecording of BBC’s own black and white presentation, with commentary from Kenneth Wolstenholme, who recalled the event in a Radio Times feature.

On Wednesday evening, we were served up two of the BBC’s drama successes. From 1965, came an episode of Dr. Finlay’s Casebook; but of more interest to me was the 1963 Z Cars which followed it. Neither episode had ever been repeated, nor have they been seen since. Today, there are a good many vintage Z Cars to be found on YouTube, but the episode chosen for Festival 40, Police Work, isn’t one of them. It was a hard-hitting and surprisingly violent example of the series: constables Smith and Weir, in Z Victor One, are dispatched to bring in a witness at the demand of the coroner. Arriving at an isolated cottage, they are attacked by a deranged individual weilding a shotgun. With Jock wounded and Fancy having twisted his ankle, their only hope lies in Z Victor Two (it was unusual for both patrol cars to feature in a single episode).

The following day’s offering was a double header of material from well before my time: the panel game What’s My Line, followed by an edition of the landmark interview series Face to Face, featuring WML panellist Gilbert Harding, who famously broke down in sobs when interviewer John Freeman asked a question about his mother. This was the kind of stuff to get your mum and dad misty eyed, but for me, it was too far before my time. 

So far, the season had concentrated on comedy, drama, and light entertainment, but more serious items were waiting in the wings. Friday 6 August’s offering was Your Life in Their Hands, an episode from the medical series that took viewers into the operating theatre for the very first time. The Radio Times listing gave some background to the series which had run from 1953 until 1964, describing how, at the outset, it had been the cause of no little controversy, debated in the House of Commons and criticised in the British Medical Journal. It also described a moment of ‘unintentional comedy’ captured during the filming of a gall bladder operation. I think I’ll take their word on that…

Saturday evening offered up a performance of Benjamin Britten’s two-act opera Billy Budd, originally broadcast in a strand called ‘Opera 625’ back in December 1966. It was precisely the kind of thing one would never have expected to see on ITV – or, for that matter, on BBC1. Festival 40’s ‘agenda’ was beginning to emerge...

What else lay in store? Thus far, the season had been comprised entirely of black and white material, but Sunday evening’s selection, A Walk in the Sun, was a mere six years old, and in colour. The film profiled death-defying high wire walker Karl Wallenda, whom I’d seen some years earlier on Blue Peter. Two years later, he would be killed attempting to walk between the two ten-storey towers of a Puerto Rican hotel. 

It was back to black and white for Monday evening’s offering, the original Comedy Playhouse pilot The Offer, which had spawned the series Steptoe and Son. I’d become a fan of Steptoe over the last few years, and I watched with interest, although I found the 1962 original tame by comparison with the more raucous tone of the 1970s episodes. Tuesday evening served up a documentary called Dispute, which, according to the Radio Times, ‘used new techniques to follow for the first time a Trade Union dispute exactly as it happened…’ Groundbreaking, certainly, but it was hardly the kind of television that had kept viewers glued to their sets.

On Wednesday 11 August, with commendable logic, the season presented an iconic example of The Wednesday Play, Cathy Come Home. I’d seen clips of this dour misery fest during the introductory evening, but as an evening’s entertainment for a fifteen-year-old, it really wasn’t my cup of tea. The following evening’s selections comprised an Omnibus exploration of William Blake’s poem ‘Tyger Tyger’, followed by an intimate portrait of everyday life in Sheffield, Morning in the Streets. I tuned in for neither of these – I was over on ITV watching the movie The Flight of the Phoenix. Friday 13 August brought a Horizon film examining the work of the BBC’s natural history film makers, in complete contrast to Saturday’s offering of The Billy Cotton Band Show. I was less interested in this, but made sure to be tuned in at 9.50 for a vintage edition of Frost Over England which included the now legendary sketch about class distinction, performed by Ronnies Barker and Corbett and John Cleese.

Sunday evening’s selection was, for me, another turn off – ‘three weeks in the life of eight riflemen bound for a routine four-month tour of duty in Belfast’ as the Radio Times described it. This, undoubtedly, was television documentary at its most challenging, but in the mid 70s, we were getting enough of that kind of thing on the nightly news. It wasn’t all doom and gloom: Monday evening brought a ‘special edition’ of Monty Python’s Flying Circus.

We were now into the middle of August, and the season had a fortnight left to run. Tuesday 17th looked back to a Malcolm Muggeridge profile of the work of Mother Theresa of Calcutta, and although I had a relative in a convent in France, I wasn’t of a mind to watch this kind of worthy offering. Neither was I tuned in on Wednesday 18 August for Harold Pinter’s Tea Party. Dr. Who fans might have taken a passing interest for the involvement of producer Sidney Newman, but on the whole, Festival 40 was proving to be a much more highbrow season than I’d been expecting. No matter: that day’s edition of the TV Times brought the welcome news that Patrick McGoohan’s mind boggling series The Prisoner would begin a repeat run commencing next week. That was much more my kind of thing…

Festival 40 maintained its elitist tone with an episode from Kenneth Clark’s Civilisation on Thursday evening. According to the Genome listing, this episode, which can be viewed today on iPlayer, is ‘available for years’: I’m not sure if that’s reassuring or depressing…. Also available to watch on iPlayer is the next Festival 40 offering, which was taken from the Man Alive documentary strand and told the tragic tale of a teenage drug addict.

Saturday 21 August offered The Golden Ring, a documentary charting a gramophone recording of Wagner’s ‘Götterdämmerung’. I was wrestling with the classics doing my music ‘O’ level, but I ignored this in favour of Starsky and Hutch over on BBC1. Sunday 22nd brought The World in a Box, a compilation of foreign programmes chosen by BBC producer Anthony Smith, which was rather stretching the remit of a season intended to celebrate the BBC’s own television output. The programme had originally been shown back in 1968.

More populist fare was the order of the day on Monday 23 August, which afforded me my first ever look at Tony Hancock’s television series. The Blood Donor has long been acknowledged as a classic, but unfortunately the Radio Times chose to draw attention to the fact that Hancock, having been in a minor car accident a few days prior to the recording, had been reading his lines from an autocue… armed with this knowledge, it was glaringly obvious what he was doing.

One of the very best items in the whole season followed on Tuesday evening, and I didn’t even bother to watch. Back in 1976, I had John Betjeman filed under ‘old buffer’. He was, after all, the poet laureate. His elegiac Metro-Land was hardly a vintage item, being only three years old at the time, but had been hailed back in 1973 as an ‘instant classic’. The film, featuring some imaginative camerawork from John McGlashan (who shot most of the BBC’s M.R. James ghost stories), was a celebration of suburbia, illustrated with visits to some architectural curiosities and other wonders to be found along the route of the Metropolitan Railway. I discovered it many years later and have revisited it on numeous occasions. Somewhat surprisingly, it is not currently available on BBC iPlayer.

No BBC retrospective could be complete without a contribution from Dennis Potter, and Wednesday 25 August saw a repeat for his 1966 play Where the Buffalo Roam. I had yet to learn that Dennis Potter was considered an important figure in the history of television drama, and wouldn’t get to see this play until another retrospective many years later. Today, I’m not as convinced by the Potter legend as I once was – much of his work was, to my eyes, solipsistic, tricksy and neurotically focused on a narrow field of vision. In case that sounds too judgemental, let me also mention that my diary entry for this particular evening records that I was watching Jeux Sans Frontiers and Are You Being Served (rolls eyes and exits stage left…)

Thursday 26 August was the big night, but not on BBC2 – over on ITV, The Prisoner was back for a repeat run at 11pm, and earlier in the day, I’d got to see a first run colour episode of Stingray. And did I mention The Time Tunnel? Small wonder I missed out on tonight’s Festival 40 offering, L.S. Lowry, RA, a film in which the recently deceased artist spoke about his life and work. As with Potter, so too with Lowry, an artist whose appeal I’ve never truly understood – and that dreadful pop song didn’t help matters either.

Festival 40 was by now drawing towards its end. Friday 27 August saw a repeat of the 1964 documentary reconstruction of the battle of Culloden, Saturday night offered up two terpsichorial items, and Sunday wrapped up the season with What Do You Think of It So Far, a brand new discussion programme presented by David Frost and examining the impact of television on people’s lives.

It would be interesting to know what the average viewer made of Festival 40, and I’ve no doubt there were a few letters to the Radio Times on the subject. For me, it provided rare chances to see early episodes of Z Cars and Steptoe and Son, and I’d have welcomed more of this kind of material, a season focused on entertainment rather than excellence. Looking back over the month-long retrospective, I’m rather more concerned about what it says about my own viewing habits then and now. Given the same selection of material today, I’d still make more or less the same choices. I think, frankly, it’s too late now to do anything about it…