'In the Meantime, Here is Some Music…' Technical hitches, and the Incredible Shrinking Noggin the Nog

Noggin the Nog is shrunken by a voltage reduction, September 1965 or thereabouts.
(Image re-created in photoshop… but we had that exact GEC telly).

Some of my earliest memories of television are of it going wrong. Whether as the result of an unaccountable break in transmission, voltage reductions, or simply a valve blowing in the back of the set, breakdowns were enough of a regular occurrence to seem like a normal part of the viewing experience back in the 1960s. Most people of a certain age will recall the various apology captions used by broadcasters when, for whatever reason, there was an unexpected break in transmission. The usual message was: ‘We apologise for the loss of your programme.’ This printed caption would sometimes be reinforced by a voiceover from the continuity announcer, leading to the inevitable: ‘in the meantime, here is some music.’

Commonplace as such interruptions were, it was frustrating when a favourite programme fell victim to a technical hitch. On the evening of Friday January 12^th, 1968, my brother and I sat down to watch that week’s episode of Captain Scarlet and the Mysterons, a story entitled ‘Traitor.’ It featured the first (and only) appearance in the series of the Spectrum hovercraft, the sabotage of which formed the cornerstone of the plot. The episode had barely got underway when, just as an ominous jet of oil had begun to spray forth from the doomed vehicle, the screen went blank. Beyond this, I don’t recall the exact details of the breakdown, other than that the episode did not resume: I have a vague idea that an ATV logo appeared on the screen, and there was probably some kind of announcement and/ or apology to the effect that the break in transmission was as a result of industrial action. Either way, there was no Captain Scarlet that day. Forever after, my brother and I recalled this occasion as the instance when ‘the technicians went on strike.’

There was to be a more serious strike later that year, affecting ITV in the aftermath of the franchise reshuffle of July ‘68 (the point at which our local weekend broadcaster, ABC, ceased to exist). But whatever pulled Captain Scarlet off air in January was most likely a local dispute. True to form, the indestructible man returned to complete his interrupted mission, over three months later, when the episode was finally aired on April 23^rd.

The Captain Scarlet breakdown was by no means the first technical hitch I remember. From quite an early age, I was aware that television sets were prone to breakdowns, and have memories of an overalled engineer tinkering about in the back of the set whenever a valve went west. When the set was fully warmed up, the valves generated a fair amount of light and heat which could be seen through the ventilation slots in the back. The light from inside the set helped to reinforce the childish impression that there were little people inside it, performing, and I still remember looking through the slots during an edition of Sunday Night at the London Palladium to see if I could spot a tiny Norman Vaughan...

The early valve-driven TV sets were much more prone to breakdowns, but even in the era of the solid-state colour sets, there could be problems: I well remember the green complexion of Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea’s Admiral Harriman Nelson when one of the ‘colour guns’ in the back of our set went on the blink... and an equally annoying – and seemingly incurable problem arrived with the dawn of televisions with hi-fi sound: the magnetic field from the speakers on either side of the set was prone to induce areas of false colour in the tube. I was reliably informed that degaussing would cure the problem. Getting another set was simpler: we rented until well into the 1990s. In an era when the technology was so prone to developing faults, this was a safe bet, as the cost of any remedial work was immediately covered: although it could sometimes mean going without the telly for a few days while the repair was carried out.

An earlier and almost entirely forgotten technical phenomenon affecting one’s enjoyment of television was that of the voltage reduction. These step-downs in the local supply were well known during the 1950s and 60s but nowadays seem to have been completely forgotten, and are neglected in all commentary on the early days of television. The sole reference that I’ve been able to find is one made by Tony Hancock, who offered the voltage reductions as an argument in defence of the poor ratings for his ATV series broadcast at the beginning of 1963. ‘All the viewers could see on their sets was a postage stamp-sized Hancock’, he complained to the Daily Express.

My recollection is slightly different: a ‘postage stamp-sized’ Hancock suggests a small, square picture in the centre of the screen, which may well have been the case on certain occasions. But the instance that I recollect most clearly came during a Sunday afternoon broadcast of Noggin the Nog (a check on the BBC’s Genome website suggests this to have been Noggin and the Firecake, broadcast on Sunday evenings during September 1965). During the transmission, the picture began to shrink... almost as though it had been affected by an evil spell from Nogbad the Bad. But rather than diminishing into a small postage-stamp sized image, the shrinkage affected only the height of the picture so that, after a short time, the end result was as per the image I’ve re-created above. No amount of adjustment to the horizontal hold would cure the problem, and this was by no means the only occasion on which it occurred. Aside from that Hancock reference, I have never come across anyone who remembers this happening, but happen it most certainly did...

Since the dawn of home video, technical breakdowns are occasionally preserved for posterity, as this clip of Star Trek from January 1985 illustrates. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P8xLEl_Uh1Q And even in today’s slick digital era, it’s not unknown for a station to drop off the air completely for no apparent reason. But the 1960s and 70s are my remit, and as far as I’m concerned most modern telly can happily disappear off air forever...

The Final Front Ear… Star Trek, part 3

That famous (and award-winning) Heineken poster...

It’s almost impossible to imagine a time before Star Trek had become a fixture in the popular imagination. To describe it as ‘iconic’ doesn’t even begin to approach the extent to which the franchise has become embedded in popular culture. It’s tempting to speculate that its influence may well endure until the 23^rd century in which the original series was set. If so, and assuming humanity has developed interstellar space flight by that time, what’s the betting on there being a real-life, functional starship Enterprise?

Growing up with the series (I was eight years old when it debuted here in Britain), I was able to see how it quickly became absorbed into other aspects of cultural life: by this I don’t just mean comics, books and memorabilia, but other TV programmes. Star Trek spoofs were beginning to appear by the early to mid 1970s (The Two Ronnies were amongst the comedians who offered their own take on the series) and by this time, jargon such as ‘Captain’s log’ ‘energise’ and ‘dilithium crystals’ were becoming familiar enough to lend themselves to comic sketch parody. The Goodies included references to Star Trek in a space-themed episode first shown in 1973, and there were many others as the decade wore on.

At school, we were already starting to form a slightly cynical attitude towards series tropes such as the expendable red-shirted security men. Of course, you needed a colour television to properly appreciate this, and we got our first in November 1974. The first episode I saw in colour was the above mentioned The Enemy Within, on 23^rd December of that year. Wow, Kirk’s tunic is green! The planet sky is orange! Cool! But I was already familiar with the look of Star Trek in colour from collecting the bubblegum cards a few years previously.

Much later, the comedy band ‘The Firm’ nailed many of the Star Trek tropes firmly on the head with their single ‘Star Trekkin’. But in the playground, years earlier, we’d already picked up on the likes of Scotty’s ‘I canna change the laws of physics’ (first uttered in The Naked Time, a mere seven episodes into the first series). And even McCoy’s growled ‘he’s dead Jim’ (spoken just four times across the series – although once would have been enough) was well-known long before the Firm enshrined it in song.

One of my favourite contemporary parodies came in the form of the Heineken poster at the top of this blog, which I remember appearing towards the end of the 1970s. Spock, of course, was ripe for parody (Ronnie Barker played him in the Two Ronnies skit), with the ears providing an endless source of comic inspiration. A playground joke of the era ran as follows:

Q: How many ears has Mr. Spock got?

A: Three: the left ear, the right ear, and the final front ear.

By the time a TV series is generating spoofs, jokes and Mad comic strips, you know it’s acquired the status of a cultural phenomenon.

One might usefully ask what it was about Star Trek that led to this spate of mickey-taking, and at such an early stage in the history of the franchise (indeed, long before it was ever thought of as a ‘franchise’). Popularity, of course, is the most obvious answer: by the mid-70’s, in the UK if not elsewhere, Star Trek and its iconography would have been familiar even to people who didn’t make a habit of watching the series. It’s through cross-cultural references like comic parodies that a TV series, film or comic book character begins the slow process of ‘bleeding through’ into the popular consciousness, and such activities certainly helped cement Star Trek as something of an ‘institution’. Star Trek offered many aspects of both imagery and language that were grist to the mill of the seasoned parodist: its signs, symbols and jargon were easily and effectively subverted to comic effect (‘Captain’s log – still not flushed away’) and its characters, embodied in the brilliant portrayals of William Shatner, Leonard Nimoy and DeForest Kelley, soon began to feel like universal archetypes.

Yet for all this, Star Trek may not be the phenomenon it is today were it not for the intervention of another milestone in popular culture: Star Wars. The original series had been defunct for eight years when Star Wars signalled the dawn of an new wave of interest in space opera, robots and science-fiction in general: a wave that has continued unabated into the present day.

Despite what we might think, there was no great appetitie for science fiction on film or television during the 1960s. The first wave of space movies had dawned in the 50s, spawning the likes of Forbidden Planet (an admitted influence on Star Trek), but by the mid-60s, spy fiction had become the dominant genre in popular cinema, and only a maverick like Stanley Kubrick would risk his reputation on a science-fiction subject. This was partly down to the costs involved in realising science fiction effects and settings on screen, but the film and television industry were, as ever, reactive rather than pro-active, for the most part following trends instead of setting them.

By the end of the 1960s, science-fiction had established a small but dedicated audience, which we can characterise as essentially male, white, middle class, middle income: the kind of people who would pay to see a movie like Silent Running, or Dark Star. These were the ‘hard core’ of the fanbase for a series like Star Trek. But where Star Trek differed – certainly in the UK – was in reaching out to a wider, popular audience, arguably on a level proportionately much greater than it had achieved in the USA. Not having that mainstream crossover appeal is probably what killed Star Trek at home (although it continued to thrive in syndication), whereas in Britain, the series was an almost permanent fixture on BBC1 right through to the late 1980s, guaranteeing a huge mass audience.

By contrast, ITV’s offerings in the sci-fi department – which effectively boiled down to anything from the Gerry Anderson stable – were hamstrung by haphazard, uncoordinated screenings region by region, denying the likes of UFO and Space:1999 the nationwide audience that Star Trek enjoyed.

It wasn’t until Star Wars that a mass audience of this kind turned once again to science fiction, this time on a global scale. And Star Trek, that had looked like a pioneer in its early days, was now reduced to playing follow-my-leader as one by one the major studios realised they needed to be bankrolling epic science-fiction films. As an already established phenomeon, Star Trek was ripe for resurrection: and so began the transition from mere cultural phenomenon to global franchise.

As Mr. Spock might say: fascinating...

'Next week, the return of Dr Who…' Early encounters with Star Trek, part 2

The Star Trek 'fotonovels' (see below). Why scan when you can download?

Star Trek was responsible for introducing me to Dr. Who, a series I’d avoided since its debut (I was too young for it in 1963, and scared stiff of the Daleks). But following the ‘last in the present series’ in the BBC’s first 25-episode run of Star Trek (The Gaileo Seven) on December 27^th 1969, there came a preview of what was coming up in that timeslot next week... a brand new series of Dr. Who... in colour (not that it made any difference to us with our black and white set)... and with a new Doctor in the shape of Jon Pertwee. I’d been dimly aware of Patrick Troughton, but never took any interest during his tenure. That trailer, though... well, I was sold.

But let’s get back to Star Trek. Unknown to myself, the BBC had taken a small creative liberty with their film prints by moving the opening credits to the beginning of each episode. This meant that the three or four-minute ‘teaser’ scene intended as a pre-credit sequence now cut straight through to the episode title. Why the BBC chose to do this remains unknown: pre-title sequences were familiar enough to UK viewers, and had been seen as far back as the first series of The Saint, if not earlier. Nevertheless, this is the way we saw Star Trek in the UK until the early 1990s. A favourite BBC trick during this era was to fade the BBC’s rotating world symbol into the star field that now appeared at the head of the programme. They never tired of doing this, as my extant VHS copies from 1984 attest.

Following the first run of episodes during autumn of 1969, Star Trek returned in April 1970 with a mix of leftover shows from season one, combined with the bulk of season two. I, of course, believed this selection to be the ‘actual’ second series of Star Trek, and it wasn’t until much later that I realised that The Enemy Within (13^th April, 1970) was one of the first episodes to be filmed. This edition was somewhat confusing in this respect, because as the series progressed, I came to recognise certain aspects of the production that set the later episodes apart from the earlier ones. The most obvious aspect was the presence (or absence) of Mr. Chekov. The second was the appearance of Captain Kirk’s ‘other’ tunic (which I later discovered to be green): this is the one with the V-cutout neckline, seen in a few first series episodes, but more often worn by Kirk during series 2. Its presence in The Enemy Within (as a device for distinguishing between the ‘good’ and ‘evil’ Kirks), along with that episode’s inclusion in the BBC’s second block, was the cause of my confusion...

One other intriuguing aspect of those first broadcasts that has stayed with me concerns the frames used to adorn the end titles. As time wore on, I began to notice images that were unfamiliar from the episodes I’d seen: one, in particular, of a futuristic city (from Operation Annihilate), and another of a typical Star Trek creation, a white furry gorilla with a horn. Alongside these were pictures which harked back to early episodes like The Naked Time or The Corbomite Manoever, which, as time wore on, didn’t seem to be repeated as much as others – or if they were, I chanced to miss them.

As it turned out, Operation Annihilate – despite being from the first series – wasn’t shown by the BBC until December 1970, and I probably didn’t watch it at that time because it clashed with UFO over on ITV. My first clear recollection of seeing that episode was as late as December 1975, when I recognised the story from one of the Star Trek novels...

Yes, the novels. Back then, novelisations were the only means of revisiting any TV programme outside of its appearances on screen. During the summer of 1971, a rather battered copy of Star Trek 3 found its way into our house, although I’d glimpsed the first novel on a carousel in our local newsagents some time earlier. I quickly devoured this, and in so doing discovered that one of my favourite episodes – the two-parter The Menagerie – had in fact derived from an early pilot for the series. This is now, of course, common knowledge, but back then the discovery came as something of a revelation. In fact, it was the first time I had come across the concept of the ‘pilot’ episode, which added a small but significant item to my understanding of television. The story in its novelised form abandoned the framing material from the two-part episode, and presented it as a piece of Enterprise history, raising the still more intriguing prospect of how the episode might have looked in its original state... in the event, it was almost twenty years before I found out.

During the early 70s, I acquired as many of the Star Trek novelisations as I could find. And finding them was no easy matter. Some larger branches of WH Smiths carried them, but beyond the fourth edition, interest appeared to wane, and I remember acquiring volumes five and upwards from specialist sci-fi bookshops. These were still imported editions, with their distinctive yellow-tinted edges (does anybody know why American paperbacks looked like that?) Later in the decade, an ‘official’ UK imprint series appeared, and these editions were much more widely available. But by this time, a more interesting series of books had begun to appear... the Star Trek 'fotonovels'.

In the pre-video era, those 'fotonovels' were the nearest thing to having your own copy of the episode. I bought every one as soon as it appeared, and was somewhat disappointed when the series came to an end after only twelve editions. The episodes selected for this treatment stemmed from across the series, and comprised some of the most memorable editions (The City on the Edge of Forever, The Devil in the Dark) alongside a couple of lesser entries. But by the time they appeared, I knew the best of the Star Trek episodes inside out...

Where's Captain Kurt? Early encounters with Star Trek

Star Trek celebrates its 50^th anniversary this year: indeed, Captain Kirk and Mr. Sulu beamed down to the NEC last weekend as part of a celebratory event (I wasn’t there). All well and good, if you live in the USA. But here in Britain, the Star Trek phenomenon is a mere 47 years young. The series was already cancelled and sold into an afterlife of syndication by the time it made its debut on BBC1 in the summer of 1969.

The first installment of Star Trek in the Joe 90 comic (image borrowed from the excellent 'Blimey…' blog by Lew Stringer… well, it saves me from doing an identical scan from my own copy!)

But I knew about Star Trek already. I’d known about it for seven months, in fact, and had been eagerly awaiting its arrival. My first encounter with the series was in comic strip form, as the impressive centrespread of the Joe 90 comic, launched in January 1969 as a companion paper to TV21. I was immediately intrigued, and, more than anything else, impressed by the design of the Enterprise, which was like no other fictional space vehicle I’d ever seen. But what exactly was Star Trek? Had it been made up for Joe 90 comic? Evidently not, as I noted from the copyright panel citing Paramount Pictures corporation. Star Trek was, seemingly, a TV series: so how come I’d never seen it? My dad offered the plausible suggestion that it might be running in one of the other ITV regions; but beyond that, Star Trek remained an engima.

(For more on the history of Joe 90 comic, see here: http://lewstringer.blogspot.co.uk/2015/05/joe-90-top-secret-1969.html

A few aspects of the strip provided further cause for intrigue, for the artist, Harry Lindfield, had been supplied with references of space suits and other hardware from 2001: A Space Odyssey. I recognised these items, having seen the film on release the previous year (I was seven when I saw it... more on that story later). Their presence served to reinforce the impression that Star Trek must be some kind of film or television series. Another oddity within the strip was the depiction of the Enterprise making planetfall, in the second installment. Although I knew nothing of the TV series, or the concept of the transporter, this image still struck me as decidedly odd: the Enterprise just didn’t look as if it had been designed to land on a planet. As it transpired, I was right. One error rapidly corrected was the misnaming of Kirk as Kurt in the first two episodes. Again, I noticed this and wondered why the name had been changed...

It was on a sunny Saturday afternoon in July of that year that the mystery was finally solved. I was playing outside in the back garden when our mum opened the kitchen window and called to me to come and see what was on television. I ran into the front room to be confronted with... Star Trek. The episode (Where No Man has Gone Before) was already under way, but I watched it through to the end (in fact, it would be almost ten years before I saw the first five minutes of this episode). I was hooked immediately, and didn’t miss a single episode right through to the end of this ‘first series’ in December (the BBC showed Star Trek in four seasons, often mixing episodes from across the three series – notably, during this first run, the second season episode The Doomsday Machine was shown as a last-minute replacement for The Alternative Factor and to this day it still ‘feels’ more like a first series episode to me).

Star Trek quickly became a favourite game to play in the back garden during the summer of ‘69: at the time, I owned a mustard yellow top that looked almost exactly like the early version of the jersey worn by Captain Kirk in the second pilot, so I usually took the role of Captain, with my brother playing Spock or McCoy or anybody he felt like. In fact, I looked a lot more like a junior edition of Spock, with Vulcan-style eyebrows and, before long, a Vulcan fringe. All I lacked was the ears. We even had our own phasers, in the form of two toy torch-rayguns, manufactured by Pifco (a company more famous for its hairdryers and Christmas tree lights). These guns had a red plastic tip on the barrel which, when unscrewed, left them looking uncannily like the ‘phaser 2’ weapons seen in the series. As if that wasn’t enough, we also had ‘phaser number one’ in the form of a small Ever Ready pocket torch which again, was of a very similar shape to the smaller hand phaser seen in episodes like What Are Little Girls Made Of?

The wrapper and a selection of the cards from the A&BC Star Trek bubblegum set (1970)

That particular episode was featured in one of the first items of Star Trek memorabilia that I encountered: a series of bubble gum cards, available during 1970-71, which told the story in frames clipped from a 35mm print. Although it’s far from being classic Star Trek (Spock barely gets a look in and McCoy, Scotty and Sulu are all absent) this was, for a while, the episode with which I was most familiar, simply on account of those gum cards.

As to the other Star Trek memorabilia, it was a long time coming. I recall seeing – or thinking I’d seen – an Enterprise model kit in the window of a toy shop close to our grandparents’ house. I’d glimpsed it from the car as we were driving past, but on visiting the shop the following week, it was nowhere to be found. It was some considerable time before the Enterprise kit arrived in the UK, and when it did, it was in a different sized box, adorned with a photograph of the kit, as opposed to the tall, rectangular box with its painted cover that I’d seen in the shop window. It wasn’t until many years later that I saw one of the original USA kits made by AMT and recognised it for the one I’d glimpsed fleetingly, several decades before. The enterprising owner of that toy shop (see what I did there?) had evidently acquired some early imports of the American kit, which unsurprisingly sold out very quickly.

Until the arrival of that kit here in the UK (at Christmas 1971, alongside a companion kit of Mr. Spock fighting a multi-headed snake), there was pretty well nothing to be had in the way of Star Trek merchandise. An annual appeared in time for Christmas 1970, from the reliable World Distributors imprint. In common with many of their licensed annuals, this and subsequent editions were compiled from the Gold Key comic strips that had been appearing in the USA for several years. But as to toy phasers, or communicators, or shuttlecraft: well, we had to make our own.

Compare that situation with what we have now: more merchandise than you can shake a Vulcan lirpa at, and most of it little more than generic corporate tat adorned with a logo. It would have been impossible to stage a memorabilia fair back in 1970, because that kind of memorabilia simply didn’t exist…

This Star Trek blog will continue after station identification...

Preserving the old ways...

They were the Village Green Preservation Society – the Kinks.
 L-R: Pete Quaife, Ray Davies, Dave Davies, Mick Avory

I recently met the author of this small but informative book about the album The Kinks are The Village Green Preservation Society. The venue for this encounter was a symposium on the subject of 60s film, and, specifically, the question of where 60s pop culture belongs in the 21^st century. Not surprisingly, there was a lot of love for the Kinks, and having spent more than a decade masquerading as Ray Davies in a Kinks tribute, I drew on this experience myself in considering the subject under discussion.

The band in question – Kounterfeit Kinks (look us up on facebook) – had played a mere handful of gigs when, in the autumn of 2004, we performed at a rather fusty hotel in Ashby de la Zouche. The band, playing in a small and under-patronised bar, was barely getting through to an indifferent audience, when in strolled a trio of guys who looked to be around nineteen. These three then proceeded to make more noise and show more appreciation than the rest of the audience put together, and collectively, saved what would otherwise have been a disastrous gig. Afterwards, thanking them for their appreciation, I asked how it was that guys their age were so into a band like the Kinks. The obvious answer: they’d been plundering their parents’ record collections.

We’ve all done it. My own musical education started the same way; only back in the early 60s, it was the likes of Frank Sinatra, Harry Belafonte and the Dave Brubeck Quartet that made up the bulk of my parents’ small collection of vinyl. I’d go a little further and suggest that the paucity of good new pop groups in the early 2000s (a dearth that continues to this day) is probably what sent those teenage guys trawling back through their parents’ record collections. So much for Philip Larkin’s assertion about parental influence...

Measured in terms of chart success and popular appeal, the Kinks were a spent force by the time they released the Village Green Preservation Society album. Yet this, above any of the band’s other efforts, is the title most often name-dropped by other artistes, reviewers, and cultural commentators. When it came out, in 1968, it pretty well failed to register. But its themes of preservation, memory and nostalgia, are exactly what set me to writing this blog; and I think they’re also the reason why the album has gained so much of a retrospective reputation.

I’m writing these musings for the same reasons that drove Ray Davies to compose many of the key tracks on TKATVGPS... as he says in ‘The Last of the Steam Powered Trains’: ‘I live in a museum... so that’s okay.’ (You haven’t seen my front room. It’s a shrine to old toys and vintage guitars.) Ray, of course, is delivering a more complex, duplicitous message as Andy Miller outlines in his discussion of the album. He’s having his nostalgic battenburg and eating it: delivering a caustic dismissmal of the efforts of mid-60s blues revivalists, yet doing so in an almost spot-on genre pastiche, complete with riff-references to Howlin’ Wolf’s ‘Smokestack Lightning’, itself the source DNA for the whole blues revival.

Those bands that Ray was having a dig at – Alexis Corner, Manfred Mann, Stones et al – were, in their own way, doing exactly the same thing as those three guys who saved the evening in Ashby de la Zouche: digging back into recent musical history in search of inspiration. Whatever Ray Davies’ ambivalent thoughts about blues revivalism, it’s still an aspect of preservation, although in the album’s title song, he puts this into perspective: ‘preserving the old ways from being abused/ protecting the new ways for me and for you.’ Holding onto the present whilst acknowledging the importance of the past.

What I’m getting round to here is the importance of artefacts: the old diaries, volumes of the TVTimes, comics and toys that I’ve drawn on in writing these musings are direct physical links with the past. Our parents’ record collections are a link with an even earlier time; but as long as those artefacts are available for inspection, the past will continue to live on through popular culture, and, we hope, attract new generations of enthusiasts.

At that same symposium mentioned above, I was asked how a company like Network (my employers) can continue to find a new, younger audience for some of the archive titles we release. Having considered the question, I’ve reached the conclusion that we’re already doing something significant simply by creating physical products of neglected and forgotten TV and film titles. I’m not sure what the rate of decay of a DVD might be, but I think (at least I hope) it’s a safe bet that they’ll still be around, and in a playable state, in a couple of generations from now. It’s far easier to imagine some child of the future picking up a DVD boxset in their grandparents’ bedroom than it is to imagine them scrolling through the contents of grandad’s hard drive. Even if those DVDs are, by that time, unplayable, I’d like to think that the packaging alone might be enough to spur them on to further investigation... in much the same way as I have often been tempted to investigate some otherwise unknown film, book or album simply because I liked the sleeve.

As a sleeve designer, of course, I would say that...

Those Madeleine Moments… (part one)

This blog, if it is anything, is an attempt to nail down lost moments in time through recollections of artefacts, pop culture and ephemera, often of the most trivial and inconsequential kind. Proust had his Madeleine (essentially, a fairy cake – dipped in tea – which undoubtedly made it go horribly soggy) and we all have our own personal equivalents.

The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy included the story of a man (Trintragula) who managed to extrapolate the whole of creation from a small piece of fairy cake, thereby creating the ‘Total Perspective Vortex’, an experience in which an individual is made aware of his or her utter insignificance in the face of the whole of creation. Proust, with his own piece of fairy cake, was trying to extrapolate the whole of his lifetime’s memory and thereby ensure his everlasting significance in the great scheme of things: an antidote, if you like, to the ‘Total Perspective Vortex’ of oblivion which lurks at the back of our consciousness. I think we can conclude that he succeeded.

For me, that single metaphorical fairy cake is always rendered even more potent when taken in combination with some other related fragment from memory dating to the same moment in time. A good example of this concerns the spring of 1968. I can even recall what the weather was like (rather mild and sunny preceding a summer of horrendous thunderstorms). The ‘trigger’ for these memories, and one of my own personal ‘Madeleines’ is the music from the television series White Horses, which was shown on BBC1 on Monday evenings commencing on March 11^th, and running through to the beginning of June. Just to hear that music again is to be back in our living room, with the curtains closed against the late afternoon light. But there are other triggers from that same point in time which, when taken alongside that glorious single by Jackie, add up to an experience that’s as close to time travel as I'm ever going to get.

One such is Cilla Black’s single ‘Step Inside Love’, the opening theme to her BBC1 series Cilla, which was going out on Tuesday evenings at the same time as White Horses was playing out on Mondays. The single entered the charts on March 18^th, enjoying a nine-week run, so it was pretty well impossible to escape from it at the time, and it duly became embedded in the wet cement of memory...

Ron Embleton's painting that formed a jigsaw from the backs of the Captain Scarlet bubblegum cards.
Captain Scarlet might conceivably have been doing something more exciting than holding a piece of paper, but in fairness, Embleton had already provided sufficient action for the indestructible man in his end title paintings.

That’s two ‘Madeleine moments’. Let’s go for three: Captain Scarlet bubblegum cards. Issued by Anglo confectionery Ltd, and featuring the artwork of the Embleton brothers, Ron and Gerry (Gerry’s drawings adorned the fronts while Ron’s huge painting formed a jigsaw on the backs), this series of cards was, during early 1968, available in waxy packets of bubblegum which, for some reason, we always obtained from the Tonibell ice cream van. The van tended to put in an appearance on our street early in the evening, so the associations begin to pull together: White Horses on the TV, ice cream van out in the street, packets of bubblegum (or even a ‘Tonibell Miniball’ – a hollow plastic sphere filled with ice cream that could later do service as a decidedly un-bouncy ball: I still have a couple somewhere).

The threatening sky in Embleton's painting, with its sunset shading into stormy darkness, is also potently evocative of the time, for reasons which will become apparent below.

All these items remained in my memory down the years, and, taken together have always been able to conjur up a certain feeling that seemed to be in the air at that time. It rolls on into memories of the brilliantly sunny early summer (Manfred Mann’s ‘My Name is Jack’ in the charts) and then a hideous thundery breakdown which saw one particular afternoon plunged into a grim twilight. This 1968 weather event can actually be found referenced online, as it was notably apocalyptic in some parts of the UK. (The same thing also happened in parts of the country yesterday.)

* * *

When trawling back through memories such as these, I've found the BBC’s Genome website an invaluable source of reference: an online version of the Radio Times going back to the very beginning. Although occasionally unreliable (rescheduled programmes are never included), this can prove a potent source of ‘add-on’ memories: and a glance through the weeks mentioned above revealed a programme that I’d all but forgotten. Entitled Whoosh! and starring Play School’s Rick Jones (author of, amongst others, the memorable themes from The Aeronauts and The Flipside of Dominick Hide), this was a minimalist entertainment for youngsters, broadcast at the (for the time) unusual hour of 12.25 on Saturday lunchtimes. The sheer novelty value of there being anything on television at this hour enticed me to watch, although I have to say I found the programme itself not entirely to my taste: if memory serves, the content was rather like watching three enthusiastic student teachers having fun with a dressing-up box and a few props. Play School, in effect, for a slightly older crop of viewers. Not that I’d want to diss the immensely talented Rick Jones, an amiable presenter and a sadly neglected songwriter. I can still remember a folky ballad he performed on an edition of Play School around 1970 (I was far too old for it, but it was the school holidays) although I haven’t heard it from that day to this.

Whoosh! might never have come to mind again, had I not gone trawling through the Genome listings. In my memory, that Saturday lunchtime slot belonged to another experimental outing, Zokko! from November of the same year. This time, the twenty-minute programme adopted a ‘portmanteau’ format, with a robotic pinball machine serving as the link between odd film clips (such as a rider’s-eye view of a rollercoaster ride) and a space serial, ‘Skayn’, presented rostrum-camera style in the manner of Blue Peter’s stories and serials such as Bleep and Booster.

See where a small piece of fairy cake will get you!

Annuals are Go!

Late summer and early autumn was always a time of excitement back in the 60s and 70s. Never mind the inevitable return to school in September – this was the time of year when the annuals began to appear in the shops. I always awaited their appearance with eager anticipation, perhaps for the simple fact that annuals equalled Christmas and were, as a rule, the first potential Christmas presents to appear in the shops.

Sometimes, one was afforded a glimpse of them even sooner, via the pages of gift catalogues from Grattans, Great Universal and the like. The autumn/winter editions of these (now highly collectable) tomes generally turned up on the doorstep towards the end of the school summer holidays, and the toys section was invariably located towards the end of the book, followed by bicycles and camping gear. By chance, a page from a 1965 edition has survived down the years, through having been glued into a scrapbook later in that decade. Here, on display, was a selection of that year’s annuals alongside storybooks and a few improving classics (which were of no interest to me).

Such catalogues (or ‘club books’ as they were known in our house) would have been in preparation since the early part of the year, and it’s a safe bet that most of the annuals in this line-up are dummies. If you look closely at the Z Cars Annual, you might be able to see that the cover is a printer’s proof wrapped around the previous year’s red-covered edition in the manner of a dust jacket. The cover is evidently a studio mock-up, for although the same painting appeared on the final edition, the graphics were somewhat different, garish tones of red and yellow being substituted for the more subtle orange, white and black on show here.

Of this selection, I ended up with Fireball XL5 (though I liked the look of Z Cars and James Bond), as well as the slim Bleep and Booster book. Fireball XL5 Annual was a regular Christmas present, and always came courtesy of my grandparents, in a somewhat charming family tradition. The run of four Fireball XL5 annuals came to an end in 1966, which was coincidentally the last year that we spent in our first home, before moving on. That last edition, therefore, came to symbolise the end of an era.

Compared to what passes for children’s annuals in this day and age, these were weighty tomes indeed. Collins’ Fireball XL5 and Supercar titles came in at 96 pages each, and, with a few minor variations, followed a set format that combined limited colour pages (beginning, middle and end) with black/red spot colour and plain black printing. Colour pages were printed on a lightly coated stock, while the remainder were on heavy pulp. There were no photographs, and this tended to be the case with most annuals from the 1960s, with just a few titles managing a photographic cover such as the one seen here on Bonanza. Inside, photography, in the few editions in which it appeared, was generally limited to endpapers and title plates or, as in the case of the Dalek annuals, centre sections. Until 1966, such interior photographs were almost all reproduced in black and white.

Compare that to the slick, all-colour pages of modern annuals, which generally come packed with photographs, and it may look as if today’s kids are getting more for their money. But I’d argue that they’re getting less. The annuals of the 1960s may have been churned out by the truckload, but, in most cases, it was quality churning.

Annuals were always the poor relations of their comic counterparts, and those produced to tie-in with TV Century 21 are a good example of this trend. The big-name artists were tied to their desks (one suspects literally in some cases) turning out colour spreads, and were thus unable to contribute to the production of the annuals. Only a few of TV Century 21’s weekly contributors made it into the annuals, most notably Ron Embleton (on the covers), Jim Watson and Ron Turner. For the most part, the contents came from the pens of lesser, though occasionally interesting talents.

The first TV Century 21 Annual was somewhat of a disappointment to me when I tracked down a copy in the mid ’70s. The printing was harsh, with sour tones of blue, pink and yellow predominating, the colour being applied pre-press to black and white outline artwork. I recognised the artwork of Desmond Walduck from the same year’s Fireball XL5 Annual (which incorrectly credited him as ‘B. Walduck’), and the tight, cross-hatched work of Rab Hamilton; but none of the other artists was familiar to me.

Later years saw an improvement, and the addition of colour photographs, which added greatly to the appeal of the TV21-based annuals, as did the change to a larger format (commencing with the Thunderbirds and Lady Penelope annuals printed in 1966). The colour printing of the stories, however, remained bizarre, and seemed to have been airbrushed almost at random onto overlays corresponding to the process colours of yellow, magenta and cyan. This combined to give a smery, imprecise effect, with colours spreading across the edges of the black and white line work in a unique, but not very professional manner.

World Distributors’ titles also cut corners in the production process, opting for a similar technique, whereby areas of colour (and Ben Day dots or similar screening effects) were daubed onto overlays. In fact, of the annuals I encountered during the 1960s, the only ‘proper’ colour printing (ie. full colour artwork photographed into colour separations) was in the Fireball XL5 and TV Comic Annuals, along with a handful of nursery titles such as the sumptuously-produced Teddy Bear.

As a consumer of these artefacts, I knew which ones I preferred. Fireball XL5 was, to me, a cut above the others purely in terms of the quality of artwork on display. Eric L. Eden, a former Dan Dare alumnus, contributed most of the illustrations to the first two, and his absence was sorely felt in the later editions. Eden was, in fact, the very first comic strip artist whose work I could put a name to (although Gerry Embleton and Gerry Wood were also present in those early editions, and it was a simple process of elimination to work out who had done what). Eden, critically, signed most of his airbrushed endpapers (and one of his three covers), so it was his name that I associated with quality renderings of Fireball XL5. This was the kind of artwork I aspired to produce myself. I’d never heard of an airbrush, but what the hell? When I drew my own Fireball XL5 comics, it was Eric Eden’s artwork that I used for reference.

Looking back with a more critical eye, I can see now that Eden’s figure work was not as assured as that of his former mentor, Frank Hampson, and the pages he later produced for TV21 had a rather plain, naive look about them, with extensive airbrushing replacing his former penchant for detailed cross-hatching (as evidenced in the early Fireball XL5 and Supercar annuals). But back in the mid 60s, I had found my first comic strip hero. Were it not for his involvement with Dan Dare, Eden might have been utterly overlooked by collectors, but even so, his work remains criminally under-appreciated outside of the Dare fraternity. He died young, not particularly wealthy, and in relative obscurity, some of his last comic efforts being Dan Dare strips for a couple of 1970s Eagle annuals.

Annuals remained a Christmas (and occasionally autumn) tradition for me right through to the late 70s, with The New Avengers and The Sweeney being amongst the last I acquired. By this time, a new name had appeared on the scene, Brown Watson, whose publications showed a marked improvement in quality over what we’d been getting from World Distributors and City Magazines.

Just a few days ago, with this blog entry already in progress, I happened to find myself in the former ‘mecca’ of Annual production – Norwich. I’d always noticed the ‘Jarrold and Sons’ printing credit on the title plates of Stingray, TV21 and others, and wandering through the narrow city streets, I came upon a department store of the same name. Surely there must be a connection with the company that had printed so many annuals? A quick Google search revealed that it was indeed the same company, or a division thereof. Jarrold and Sons was, in fact, founded as far back as 1770, in Woodbridge, Suffolk, moving to Norwich in 1823. Although the publishing division was later sold on, Jarrold remains a thriving independent retailer, with its department store and other specialist shops (including a very nice art shop) still an important part of Norwich city centre. In these days of corporate takeovers, and ruthless individuals asset-stripping well-loved high street names for personal gain, it’s nice to see an independent retailer with such a long history continuing to do well. The annuals may have ended, but this year’s crop are still on sale in the book department of their Norwich department store: two traditions going side by side into the future.