Well, Thank You Very Much!

 

A sitcom classic turns fifty this week. Only fifty? It feels like The Good Life has been with us forever, yet it originally ran for just four short seasons of seven episodes each over a period of two years. In the world of television, less is always more. Creators John Esmonde and Bob Larbey were right to end the series when they did, before it could get stuck in the solipsistic self-referential rut that has been the fate of most long-running British sitcoms (cf. Last of the Summer Wine).

I was watching plenty of television during the week when The Good Life made its debut in April 1975: my diary lists The Goodies, Are You Being Served, Dave Allen at Large and The Liver Birds; yet I missed out on this future classic (I tended to mistrust any new television series unless it came from the likes of Gerry Anderson). I’m certain I saw trails for The Good Life and must have decided it wasn’t for me. Aged fourteen, I tended to prefer the more anarchic comedy of The Goodies, and the smutty, Carry-On style humour of Are You Being Served. I’m not sure if I even noticed that the new sitcom came from the writing team who had previously given us Please Sir!, which would certainly have been a point in its favour. Either way, I was not tuned in on 4 April 1975 to witness the Goods setting out on their self-sufficiency journey.

A second series began in December, but we were visiting our grandparents on that particular evening, and again I failed to pick up on it. It doesn’t get mentioned in my diary at all until Friday 9 January 1976. That week’s episode was Mutiny – an acknowledged classic, wherein Margo finally gets to star in the Sound of Music and Jerry gets fired (briefly) by ‘sir’ (Reginald Marsh). As an introduction to the series, it was hardly typical, with the Goods’ lifestyle scercely getting a look in. My diary entry is intriguing:

‘Watch the Good Life, in which their next-door neighbour (Strand – from Special Branch) loses his job because of the Sound of Music.’

The fact that I’d singled out Paul Eddington strongly suggests that this was indeed my very first encounter with the Good Life, and strange as it may seem, he was the only member in the cast whom I recognised. Richard Briers hadn’t done much television in recent years – I was too young to remember him from Marriage Lines a decade earlier – but I must have known his voice as the narrator of Bob Godfrey’s cartoon series Roobarb, not to mention countless commercials. Felicity Kendall and Penelope Keith were both, like Briers, seasoned theatre performers (perhaps that’s why the series was so good), but I knew neither of them.

I stuck with the Goods for the rest of the series (just two more episodes) and was finally able to catch up with series one when it began a repeat run on Tuesday 1 June. The third series began on 10 September, in the same Friday evening slot it had occupied since the beginning, and usually merited a mention in my diary. On Friday 1 October, I missed most of the episode (I Talk to the Trees) on account of a thunderstorm – our mum always insisted on turning off the television during a storm. Even today, when I’ve seen all four series many times over, this episode still feels slightly unfamiliar, especially the scenes where Noel Howlett (a veteran of Esmonde and Larbey’s Please Sir!) appears as an old gardener who converses with his plants.

When the series returned on 10 April 1977, there was no suggestion that it was to be the last. I mentioned it in my diary most weeks, and only passed comment on the final episode, Anniversary, which I speculated may be the last ever. I was almost right: barring the Christmas special, shown on Boxing Day, and 1978’s one-off ‘Royal Command’ episode, this was indeed the end of the line for the Goods.

Anniversary always bothered me. Esmonde and Larbey were taking a huge risk having such a downbeat ending, but the cast brought it off superbly, despite the odd nervous titter from the audience when the Goods’ trashed living room was revealed. For me, the designers went a shade too far with the destruction – the nazi graffiti was unnecessary – but I suppose the point had to be made, and a few ripped cushions wouldn’t have been enough on the small screen. Interviewed for a retrospective in 2011, Penelope Keith spoke of her sadness at seeing the familiar set that had remained unchanged over four series defiled, and I’m sure many viewers felt the same. Of course, it was all put right for the Christmas episode, but clearly this had been filmed before the destructive finale of Anniversary.

Wikipedia’s entry on the series, citing no sources, claims that the Christmas special was originally intended for the Royal Command production, but that the Queen’s schedule made it impossible to attend. This seems highly unlikely. The living loom set had been trashed beyond salvation at the end of Anniversary but still has its original, untouched appearance in the Christmas special. The actual command performance episode, When I’m 65, was written to order (which disproves the Christmas episode theory), and didn’t make use of the Goods’ living room, so it seems reasonable to conclude that the set was never restored after Anniversary. Which seems a shame…

In fact, the Royal Command edition was almost the first of a continuing series of one-off Good Life episodes: interviewed for the Radio Times in 1978, producer John Howard Davies spoke of his hope to do more ‘just occasionally, because we all like working together so much.’ It’s a shame that nothing came of this ambition...

All four series were repeated through 1978, but after this, there would be no complete repeat runs for some time. Random episodes were shown between 1980 and 82, billed as ‘Comedy Classics’. Other sitcoms were given similar treatment in this era – Dad’s Army, Whatever Happened to the Likely Lads and others were reduced to the status of random schedule fillers. Finally, a full repeat run got going on Sunday 2 January 1983, in the unusual slot of 17.25 – more often occupied by classic serials – but the series ended an episode short on Sunday 6 February.

The missing final episode from series one turned up at last on Friday 22 April in the more grown-up slot of 19.00, leading into a complete run of series two. After a two-week break at the end of June, the series was once again reduced to a ‘comedy classic’ filler, with two episodes from the third series. This haphazard repeat run never reached series four, apart from a Boxing Day afternoon outing for Silly But It’s Fun: the series started again from scratch on Wednesday 5 September 1984, and it was back in a children’s hour slot (17.25). Granted, it was by now nine years old, but surely still deserving of a place in primetime? This repeat run again failed to reach series four, ending just three episodes into the third series. By now, we’ve reached January 1985 and the series is fast approaching its ten-year anniversary (which was to pass unnoticed). Series four, by now the least repeated of all, finally began a repeat run on Friday 25 May, in the same teatime slot of 17.30. Notably, the last episode, Anniversary, was omitted. 

By this time, I was renting a VHS recorder and committing episodes to tape whenever I could, but compiling complete runs proved difficult on account of the BBC’s scattergun approach to scheduling. For the record, the first episode I ever managed to get down on tape was the Christmas episode, Silly, But It’s Fun, when it rolled up on New Year’s Day 1981. 

By the mid 80s, there was a new Richard Briers sitcom occupying a prime Sunday evening slot – Ever Decreasing Circles had begun in January 1984, so it’s perhaps understandable that the BBC didn’t want his earlier show given too much prominence in the schedules. Between 1986 and 1987, only a single episode of The Good Life made it to air, and it wasn’t seen again until 18 September 1988, now relegated to the kind of late-night slot where one might expect to find Sgt. Bilko. Series one was dashed off in a mere ten days, with episodes appearing on various nights of the week, in the same late night slot. The bizarre scheduling was for a reason – the late night episodes were there to lead viewers into live coverage of the 1988 Olympics in Seoul. 

Normal service was resumed on Tuesday 3 January 1989, and – hooray! – Tim and Fatima were finally back where they belonged, at 8pm. This run of repeats took in all of the second and third series, but viewers would have to wait over a year for series four, which finally turned up on Tuesday 20 November 1990, still in its primetime 20.00 slot. Once again, the repeat run ended without sight of the downbeat Anniversary which was fast becoming the series’ holy grail. In fact, the episode went unaired on the BBC for a staggering 21 years, between December 1978 and November 1999, which must be some kind of record for such a popular TV sitcom.

In the 1970s, before the era of home recording, it wasn’t unusual to see popular sitcoms appearing as paperback novelisations, and The Good Life was no exception. What was unusual was the publisher – Penguin books were not normally associated with television spin-offs, and the two Good Life paperbacks were their first such endeavours since the Quatermass script books of the 1950s. Adapted from the first series, The Good Life appeared in 1976, with More of the Good Life following in 1977 with a selection of stories from series two and three, the adaptations this time credited to Christine Sparks.

Today, it’s not hard to find The Good Life on air – it’s been a staple of various freeview channels for decades, and BBC’s iPlayer has made the entire series available to view: a far cry from the corporation’s formerly haphazard approach to repeats. The series itself has long since been acknowledged as a classic of the genre, but for a time it was derided in some quarters for its middle class attitudes. The Young Ones famously had a go at it: but where The Young Ones has aged very badly and now looks like a post-punk artefact of the early 80s, The Good Life, for all its 70s suburban mannerisms, is as funny today – if not funnier – than when we first encountered it half a century ago.

What makes the series so enduring? To me, it’s like two sitcoms for the price of one: either of the two couples, Tom and Barbara, Margo and Jerry could easily have carried a series on their own. The genius of Esmonde and Larbey was in juxtaposing their disparate attitudes and lifestyles. They did it again, and with equal success, in Briers’ 1980s vehicle, Ever Decreasing Circles, which saw his neurotic little Englander rubbing up against a suave, effortlessly successful next door neighbour.

How long will the series endure? Its environmental credentials make it, if anything, more relevant today than it was back in 1975, and as society polarises increasingly towards a wealthy elite lording it over the poverty-stricken masses, there will be even more cause to sympathise with Tom and Barbara as they struggle to make ends meet. It is also, increasingly, beginning to look like an historic document of ‘how we used to live in the 1970s’ – Tom and Barbara’s dowdy living room, with its random mix of furnishings, was typical of many I remember, as indeed was the Leadbetters’, with its reproduction antiques and draylon sofas. But above all, there will still be cause to watch the series as long as there are people left who have a sense of humour and the ability to laugh at themselves…

The two Penguin paperbacks: the strapline 'now a BBC TV comedy series' suggests it had started life as a novel, which we can perhaps put down to wishful thinking on Penguin's part. Note how Margo gets in on the act on the second volume...

April Fool!

Spaghetti harvests, lunar conspiracies and dinosaurs...

I always used to make a point of tuning into the BBC’s Nationwide every year on the first of April. You could guarantee that, amongst the serious news stories, there would be one spurious item intended as an April fool’s joke. As I well knew, the joke was on the BBC for pulling an April fool stunt after midday – according to the age old tradition, April fool was a decidedly pre-prandial activity and if you played a trick on anyone after noon, you became the fool yourself.

The origins of the April fool tradition are unknown – some scholars believe there is a 14^th century reference in Chaucer, but this is debated. Television adopted the tradition relatively early, with the first recorded instance occurring in 1957, perpetrated by no less an authority than Panorama. The ‘Spaghetti Harvest’ film, purporting to show the pasta dish growing on trees, became famous, notorious even. The item, featuring deadpan narration by the corporation’s voice of authority Richard Dimbleby, convinced many viewers, who were unused to being hoodwinked by broadcasters. I wasn’t even born at the time, but I remember seeing the clip when it was exhumed years later during a BBC retrospective.

By the 1970s, the task of dreaming up such televisual tricks had been passed on to Nationwide, whose content usually found room for a whimsical or quirky news report. A collection of examples can be found here: https://www.bbc.co.uk/articles/c4nnnwr9rr9o. I certainly remember seeing the ‘Jurassic Park’ spoof when it went out in 1980 (ten years before Michael Crichton’s novel), which is typical in that it builds from what at first appears to be a serious feature, with the gag only being revealed towards the end. I mentioned the spoof in my diary, together with one from the Daily Express about busby hats that grew themselves.

A couple more from my diary for 1982 were a ‘drop-head beer’ with the froth at the bottom, seen on the BBC’s Midlands Today, and a Concorde simulator featured on Russell Harty’s chat show… or was it? The Concorde simulator was in fact a reality, built in 1974 at a cost of £3m to train British Airways crew. This illustrates the danger of televised April Fool gags – once you’ve seen one, you can’t take anything else seriously for the rest of the evening.

In 1977, ITV planned an elaborate and expensive April fool in the form of a documentary, Alternative 3. This conspiracy theory scenario described how plans were under way to make the surfaces of the moon and Mars habitable as a last resort in the event of a global environmental catastrophe. Unlike the lighthearted items that the BBC went in for, this was heavier stuff, much more the kind of thing that is perpetrated today by 'real life' conspiracy theorists. The joke backfired when the producers, Anglia Television, were unable to secure a slot on the desired date. The programme eventually went out on the decidedly unfunny 20th of June, leaving some viewers baffled and others angry – much like the reaction to Panorama’s spaghetti film of twenty years earlier. Alternative 3 was never repeated, and the DVD (issued to mark the film’s 30th anniversary) was sourced from the only surviving 16mm print.

Pulling April fool pranks may have been a Nationwide tradition, but the programme only went out five nights a week, and on years when April 1 fell on a Saturday or Sunday, it was harder to know who, if anyone, was being less than serious. When April 1 fell on a Sunday, as it did in 1978 and 1984, the role of corporation court jesters fell to the That's Life team, as can be seen from the BBC’s compilation (above). I remember both of these items, although I’m not sure if I spotted the fact that ‘Lirpa Loof’ was in fact April Fool spelled backwards until Esther pointed it out at the end of the clip. Anagrams often featured in these media pranks. One Nationwide gag involved something called the ‘prialofol’ grub, the exact nature of which eludes me (‘prialofol’ is, unsurprisingly, a Googlewhack, returning no results whatsoever – so perhaps nobody else remembers it).

Comics often featured April fool stories, but rather than make fools of their young readers, they would have the characters playing pranks on each other as can be seen on this Dandy cover from 1965.

Today, you’re unlikely to find any kind of spoofery amongst the BBC’s news and current affairs output. The corporation has recently blown a chunk of your licence fee on an incredibly self-righteous promotional film extolling the squeaky clean virtues of BBC news gathering and its factual reliability (narrated by the equally squeaky clean Clive Myrie), and BBC news regularly runs a ‘fact check’ on items of contentious content. In the light of all this, they’re hardly likely to be indulging in the kind of wool-over-the-eyes schoolboy japery that we used to find on Nationwide and elsewhere. In an era when media outlets are rife with fake news and delusional ideas, April fool silliness is more likely to be found in the social media feeds of prominent brands. Sometimes, a double bluff is played, by announcing an unlikely but real product or event on April 1.

As for myself, I am this year involved in a minor April fool endeavour, which went live this morning: the XTC podcast ‘What Do You Call That Noise’ this month looks back to the band’s own April Fool jape, a cod psychedelic album released under the pseudonym The Dukes of Stratosphear. In celebration of the album’s 40th anniversary, the podcasters have concocted a surreal show in a Chris Morris vein, featuring ‘fake’ music from a variety of contributors, two of whom are me.

It can be found here: 

https://www.xtclimelight.com/2025/04/01/the-dukes-of-stratosphear-xtc-40th-anniversary/?v=7885444af42e

No kidding!

Alternative 3 - ITV's April Fool that missed the date.

 

Now Listen to Me...

 

The Ipcress File at Sixty

One of the most iconic films in the espionage genre turns sixty this week: The Ipcress File was released on 18 March 1965, its dour urban setting in complete contrast to the prevailing winds then blowing through spy fiction in the cinema and on television. Espionage on the big and small screen was becoming increasingly ironic and camp, but The Ipcress File managed to have its cake and eat it, cashing in on the spy boom whilst striking out in a completely new direction.

John Le Carré had already signalled the beginning of a move towards realism in espionage fiction with his 1961 novel Call For the Dead, and more famously, 1963’s The Spy Who Came in From the Cold. But neither film had yet been adapted for the cinema.

Len Deighton’s source novel had appeared between Le Carré’s first two works, and he was most likely working on it when Call for the Dead was published. Was he influenced by Le Carré? It’s hard to imagine that he wasn’t, although he later cited as inspiration the story of a neighbour who had spied for Germany during the Second World War, along with Raymond Chandler (for the cynical, first person narrative) and an old Bogart movie, Beat the Devil.

Deighton had been working as a successful book jacket designer, and earned enough from his work to try his hand as a novelist. The Ipcress File was his first attempt at writing and, frankly, you can tell. He later claimed that he wanted the book to be ‘ragged and untidy, as life is’ when in fact it’s ragged and untidy as a badly-edited first draft novel is. On paper, The Ipcress File isn’t far off being a car crash. It’s hard to see what attracted Harry Salzman to it as a potential movie property, aside from the obvious: this was an era when almost any work of spy fiction was bound to attract the attention of filmmakers. Deighton knew exactly what he was doing when he chose to write an espionage novel.

Stylistically, The Ipcress File is pitched somewhere between the hard-boiled detective fiction of Dasheill Hammett and the down-to-earth prosaic spy novels of Le Carré. Bond is clearly an influence too, though you wouldn’t guess it from the film which ditches the novel’s exotic locations (Beirut and the South Pacific). Deighton, a keen historian, fleshes out his text with a plethora of detail, blending fiction and reality. There are (inevitably) name checks for Burgess and Maclean, whose story he co-opts as background for the spy codenamed Jay (the film makes him ‘Bluejay’ in a nod to American audiences), and he provides an accurate description of a nuclear test facility where an experimental neutron bomb is to be exploded (the neutron bomb was bang up to the minute stuff – if you’ll forgive the pun – still in the theoretical stage at the time).

Commentators all point to the supposedly working class background of Deighton’s unnamed protagonist, but in all honesty he doesn’t make that big a deal out of it, and the character drops so many learned cultural references in his narrative that it’s hard to accept him as anything other than a well educated and erudite individual. We see some of this in the film – Palmer is a music lover, gourmet and cook, but he’s no way the kind of clued-up smart arse we meet on paper.

To mark the film’s sixtieth anniversary, I wanted to understand where it diverges from the source novel, which I’d never previously read. In fact, the novel is as unlike the movie as any of Ian Fleming’s Bond books. The screenplay is essentially a stripped down version of ideas from Deighton’s text, which it refashions into a much tighter yet still complex narrative. As written, the novel would have been unfilmable without a huge budget, so the elisions are to some extent understandable, but the text is also quite badly structured, with a long drawn out final section that includes some unbelievably clunky exposition where the narrator explains what’s been happening to his assistant Jean Tonnensen (one suspects this was added at the behest of an editor, Deighton’s having left so many dangling plot points throughout the text).

Here’s a summary of the key differences:

Harry Palmer: any film buff will tell you that the name Harry Palmer was created to serve the movie. In the book, the narrator informs us: “Now my name isn't Harry, but in this business it's hard to remember whether it ever had been.” The character in fact changes his identity during the course of the narrative (for no obvious reason), collecting a whole package of documents and items such as a false passport and a police warrant card. The novel’s protagonist actually assumes control of Dalby’s department in his absence, and is clearly an older, more senior figure than the Harry Palmer we meet on screen. The movie Palmer is seen cooking and shopping, but there are no such scenes in the book. His only encounter with a kitchen is when he watches Jay cooking a lobster.

Location: The film makes a virtue of its London settings, contrasting the gentility of Regents’ Park (favoured by Dalby and Ross) with the grimier backstreets where Palmer lives and works. The novel adopts a similar setting for much of the action, but there are interludes in Beirut (where the kidnapped scientist is retaken by force in an operation involving Dalby and the narrator) and a Pacifc atoll where a bomb test is about to take place. Here, the narrator is framed, arrested as a spy and wakes up in a cell, seemingly somewhere behind the iron curtain.

Supporting Characters: Ross and Dalby and both present in the novel, although their personalities seem to have been switched for the film. On paper, Dalby is quite young, blonde haired and clearly an ex-public school type, while Ross, older, moustached and balding, is more like the uptight military persona of Nigel Green’s Dalby. Palmer’s relationship with Dalby is tense and fractious on screen, whereas in the book the two characters are more like equals with a sparring, slightly jokey relationship. Courtney (Sue Lloyd) is Jean in print, and the relationship between her and ‘Palmer’ is far less obvious; Carswell (Gordon Jackson) is a different character entirely in the text, much older, and a statistician who is trying to find patterns in the records of missing persons. He doesn’t borrow a car and isn’t shot in mistake for ‘Palmer’. The novel’s spymaster Jay becomes Bluejay in the movie, and is given an English-sounding identity (Grantby) where the ‘Jay’ of the novel has an Eastern European name. The dowdy ‘Alice’ on screen is a much younger character in the book.

Action: Most of the iconic scenes in the film were crafted for the screenplay: in the novel, the kidnapping of the scientist is not shown, neither is the handover in the underground car park (Dalby and the narrator ambush his captors on the road in Beirut). Carswell isn’t killed in print (although a similar fate befalls an old friend whom the protagonist calls on after escaping from captivity). The warehouse where the IPCRESS tape is discovered is a domestic residence in the book (and the tape is not labelled). On screen, Palmer is abducted on a train, whereas the novel’s protagonist is arrested at the bomb test location. Most tellingly, there is no brainwashing sequence. The indoctrination techniques described in the book are a far cry from the audio-visual torture Palmer undergoes on screen. In the book, there is no IPCRESS noise, no hypnotic visuals, and no trigger phrase ('now listen to me...')

Following his escape, the action in the novel rather loses its way – the narrator calls on an old friend (who is susequently murdered), before travelling to Dalby’s country cottage where he sees Jay and one of his captors. Jay is followed to London and arrested by Ross: Dalby is later reported to have died in a car accident. The movie’s classic ending, with Dalby and Ross held at gunpoint by Palmer while Dalby orders him to ‘shoot the traitor’ is nowhere to be found. The novel peters out in twenty pages of rather laboured and undramatic exposition. 

In the film, following the warehouse raid, Dalby testily complains to one of the detectives that their tardiness in starting the operation isn’t good enough. Having now read the original Ipcress File, I might make the same observation. There are good ideas present, but the text really needed sharpening and re-editing, quite heavily in my opinion. Deighton starts out well, and the style is sharply laconic, but the plot structure slowly comes apart, and the scenes on the bomb test atoll are, frankly, unnecessary. He’s also not very good at describing action sequences, and one is often left wondering exactly what’s meant to be happening. His narrator, so memorably portrayed on celluloid by Michael Caine, is less of the insubordinate cheery cockney and more of a cynical know-all, who uses jargon without explanation. I wonder whether this was rather in the nature of a self portrait? The book is also the only novel I have ever encountered where passages cut from the text are served up wholesale in an appendix. None of them is really necessary, and in many cases they serve only to let the reader know the extent of Deighton’s arcane knowledge of matters such as the going rate for Indian Hemp or recipes for some clearly fictitious cocktails.

It’s arguable that the reputation of Deighton’s novel relies almost entirely on the film, which improves upon it in almost every conceivable way. The film isn’t entirely without its flaws, though: if anyone can explain to me how Grantby manages to abduct Radcliffe in the opening scene, then immediately kill and dispose of his escort (who is seen only seconds later dumped in a baggage trolley), I’d be glad to hear from them!

Panther's film tie-in edition of The Ipcress File: left, cover, right, inside cover

Old School Shopping

 

There’s an episode of the 1980s sitcom Ever Decreasing Circles in which Richard Briers’ character, the obsessive and slightly neurotic Martin Bryce, has cause to visit his local ironmonger. It’s a properly old school establishment, and his reason for visiting is simple: he wants a single galvanized six-inch nail, which the local DIY store insists in selling in multipacks. Mr. Lazenby, the ironmonger, a frail old man, happily complies with his request.

I had cause to visit just such an establishment myself this past week. Not an ironmonger (I doubt if any still exist) but a hi-fi shop. It’s been in Burton on Trent for as long as I can remember, but, I’ve never had cause to visit it before. It has a properly old school name: The London Wireless Company. Don’t bother looking for it online, you won’t find it. This is retailing as it used to be.

The first thing I noticed when I went inside was a small display case behind the counter, containing replacement cartridges and styli for record decks. I remember seeing them in hi-fi shops way back in the 1970s, but it’s been years since I saw one in situ. The shop sells high end home entertainment, mostly huge televisions, but with a line of what looked to be decent hi-fi equipment. The proprietor (imagine a Toby Jones type) looked entirely at home in his surroundings, emerging from a back room when I entered the shop. There was no one else around. I noticed old carpeting on the floor and an area of vintage wallpaper behind the counter – better and better.

My reason for visiting was simple: I knew the shop undertook repairs (this much, at least, can be gleaned online, although the shop has no website), and I wanted some adjustments made to my Denon record deck, which was playing slightly too fast. It’s the kind of thing that would have annoyed Richard Briers’ character: hearing a song playing in E double flat instead of D major: the platter was rotating at maybe 34rpm. I left it there and about a week later got a phone call to say the deck was ready for collection. The cost was a mere £25 which I found entirely reasonable. The deck now plays perfectly.

I mention all this as an example of what we’re in danger of losing in the blinkered rush to online retailing. Old fashioned personal service. I’m not averse to buying the odd book or CD from Amazon, but given the choice I’d still prefer to get them from a real shop in the physical world. Unfortunately, I appear to be one of a dwindling minority.

There’s a generation now that weren’t alive in the era before online retailing, and their lazy preference for shopping from the sofa has already cost us several high street retailers who you’d have thought would endure forever. At time of writing, the venerable WH Smith high street chain is up for sale and will likely cease to exist in any recognisable form.

Call me old fashioned, but I refuse to pass judgement on any product until I’ve seen it for real. Anything can be made to look impressive in a photograph. I can’t understand people who buy clothes online. You can’t tell anything about a garment from a photograph apart from its appearance. When buying clothes I want to see how well they’ve been put together, feel the texture of the fabric, get a proper appreciation of quality.

Even car retailing is moving increasingly towards an online platform with the likes of Cazoo, where you pick your vehicle from an image on the internet and it is delivered to you on a trailer. Unless and until this is the only means of buying a vehicle, I refuse to go along with it, however good, bad or indifferent the experience. In the past few years, I’ve bought a couple of cars, in the process of which I checked out numerous examples online. Nine times out of ten, when I finally got to see the vehicles for real, there were defects visible that the photos didn’t show: paint swirls, small dents, chips, scuffs and the like.

Back in the 70s and 80s, shopping was a much more interesting experience, because you never knew what you were going to find. You’d go into a record retailer and come across an album you never expected to see. In my case, collecting secondhand books, I was forever discovering caches of unexpected treasures like Giles annuals of impossible vintage. Today, the collector can usually track down all but the rarest and most elusive items online, but it’s not quite the same. I’ve collected old guitars for forty years, and still nothing compares to the moment when, stepping into some musty emporium that’s been in business for decades, you stumbled upon an unbelievable old relic gathering dust high up on some pegboard wall.

I’m not completely anti online as a tool in the collector’s arsenal – it’s enabled me to track down some very interesting and unique artefacts I’d never have found by other means. I just don’t want it to become the default method of going shopping.

It’s easy to see why retailers are participating in this seismic shift towards online: retail premises are costly to build, rent and maintain. Never mind the question of convenience. Banks have largely decided to abandon those customers who still want to use them in person, and in so doing are driving more and more customers into the waiting arms of online scammers. I’ve banked with Barclays since 1983, but our local branch closed for good last year. A few months later, in response to demand from customers, they were obliged to open a ‘pod’ (tent to you and me) in the local shopping mall where you can still deal with a real person (well, they looked real when I walked by but who knows what AI is capable of...)

Forty years ago, when John Esmonde and Bob Larbey were writing Ever Decreasing Circles, the internet did not exist – not in any recognisable form at any rate, and certainly not accessible by anyone other than academics in computing. Back in 1987, the ‘enemy’ was the out of town shopping park, examples of which were springing up on the fringes of just about every average-sized town. Martin Bryce apologises to Mr. Lazenby for using the local DIY superstore instead of his old, independent establishment. The principle, however, is still the same – big corporations sweeping away the smaller, independent retailers. The difference today is that they’re doing it in the virtual world. The ‘High Street’ will soon be as redundant a concept as the ‘muffin man’ was in my childhood.

I’m glad that establishments like The London Wireless Company still exist. Most independent retailers have seen the writing on the wall and have at least some kind of presence online even if they don’t sell their products and services that way. I’d like to think that there will eventually be a backlash against internet retailing, but you can’t change people’s habits that easily and the habit of click and deliver (who wants to collect?) has already become deeply ingrained.

Let’s celebrate the old school while it’s still standing. Next time I’m in the market for hi-fi, The London Wireless Company will be my first port of call. I only hope it’s still there.

Eve of Destruction

 

A Close Encounter with Barry McGuire

The religious studies department at our grammar school occasionally arranged ‘entertainments’ for morning assembly. On one occasion, a Christian music group called Rosetta Stone played in the school hall (‘Big School’ as we called it). I wasn’t into their message, but it was a change from routine, and the extended assembly meant we missed the first lesson of the day. I’ve no idea whatever happened to Rosetta Stone; the name was later appropriated by a goth rock band with no apparent connection to the folkies who visited our school. But another such guest appearance was from a considerably more eminent musician. 

Barry McGuire had scored an international hit in 1965 with his recording of P.F. Sloan’s ‘Eve of Destruction’, earning himself a gold disc in the process. The record had become a hit quite by accident: intended as the B-side to another Sloan composition, it was played on air in error by a DJ and quickly became a surprise hit. McGuire’s growly vocal was only intended a guide track, but the disc took off so quickly it was never re-recorded.

Depending on your point of view, ‘Eve of Destruction’ was either a symbol of everything that was wrong with contemporary youth culture or a crass cash-in on the folk rock/protest boom. Its elevation to number one on the Billboard Hot One Hundred and number three in the UK charts does however, seem to have signalled the end of the folkie protest movement whose initiator, Bob Dylan, had already consigned protest songs to his ‘back pages’.

Back in 1975, I knew none of this, and had never even heard the song ‘Eve of Destruction’. How Barry McGuire came to be playing solo to a hall full of grammar school boys I have no idea. He’d become a born again Christian four years earlier and must have been in Britain spreading the word. I remember the event quite clearly: McGuire, huge and bearded, came on stage weilding a big acoustic 12-string guitar. He seemed to be struggling to tune it, and in the course of his performance managed to break a couple of strings. He was still playing ‘Eve of Destruction’, although many of its lyrical references were now somwhat out of date. 

I doubt if many of us had much idea who McGuire was. ‘Eve of Destruction’ had been subjected to a partial airplay ban by the BBC, who decreed it could not be played on ‘general entertainment programmes’ (although it clocked up a single appearance on Top of the Pops during its time in the top ten). I’d have been more impressed if McGuire had announced that he’d sung the lead vocal on the New Christy Minstrels’ novelty hit ‘Three Wheels on my Wagon’, but unsurprisingly this did not figure in his set of evangelical folk songs.

Clearly, we knew he was famous, because afterwards a crowd of us went up to the stage to get his autograph. I handed him my school fountain pen which he couldn’t get to work, and he signed some random piece of paper I’d found in my pocket, now sadly lost.

I was keeping a diary at the time, but neglected to mention McGuire’s visit. I know we were in the third year at the time, which places it somewhere between autumn ‘74 and summer ‘75, and at a guess I’d say it was more or less exactly fifty years ago almost to the day. I know it to have been before the summer of 1975, because that was when I finally got to hear the original ‘Eve of Destruction’ single, courtesy of Jimmy Savile’s Double Top Ten Show.

Looking back, it seems slightly bizarre to think of this pop icon of the 1960s standing on stage in ‘Big School’ strumming his 12-string guitar. This was a guy who was a contemporary of acts like the Byrds. Members of the legendary ‘Wrecking Crew’, Hal Blaine and Larry Knetchel had played on the single. McGuire got a namecheck in the chorus of the Mamas and the Papas’ single ‘Creeque Alley’ (the band sang backing vocals on his cover of their own hit, ‘California Dreamin’’), and Frank Zappa even cited him as an influence on his Freak Out! album sleeve (was he being sarcastic?)

In the US, ‘Eve of Destruction’ had caused no little controversy. Although decried in hip circles as a sell-out, the song’s lyrics were contentious, with lines like ‘you’re old enough to kill, but not for votin’’ (a reference to the draft registration age of 18). Sloan’s record company had told him the song was unpublishable, hence its demotion to a B-side. Perhaps its problem was that it was too full-on, too determined to cause offence, where other ‘protest singers’ adopted a more subtle approach in getting their message across, through poetry and allegory. Some of Sloan’s lyrics veer very close to parody: 

Yeah, my blood's so mad, feels like coagulatin'/ I'm sittin' here just contemplatin'

In production terms, the arrangement ticked all the required folk/protest boxes. The backing is so thin as to be almost inaudible, carried along principally by acoustic guitar, and there are occasional snatches of the obligatory harmonica, lending the whole piece a ‘Dylan-by-nunbers’ vibe. But as an anti-war song released during the Vietnam era, it most definitely touched a nerve. Its references may have dated, but the sentiment isn’t altogether irrelevant today as the governments of the world fulminate over another conflict that shows no signs of ending.

As for Barry McGuire, following the single’s success, he never again made Billboard’s top 40, although he remained active as a singer and performer and is still going today at the age of 89.

Wikipedia’s picture of him (above) coincidentally captures his 1970s appearance and is exactly the way he looked the day he stepped out on stage in Bishop Vesey’s grammar school fifty years ago. I bet it’s even the same 12-string guitar he’s playing.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_38SWIIKITE

Sixty Years Sans Laurel

 

23 February 2025: the world has been without Stan Laurel for exactly sixty years. When he cracked his last joke, seconds before expiring back in 1965, I doubt I was even aware of who he was. Myself, I was three going on four. If I’d seen Laurel and Hardy at that age, then it was most likely on the flickering, silent medium of 8mm film – an uncle owned a projector and no self-respecting home movie buff was without a few L&H comedies.

The BBC had been showing Laurel and Hardy films since 1948, but in the years since I was born, screenings had dwindled to a mere handful: none at all in 1961 or 1962; a sole screening of the feature A Chump at Oxford in 1963, and a random broadcast of the 1934 short Oliver the Eighth in October 1964. Was this my first sighting of L&H? I can’t remember.

Back in the 60s, with only two channels available, the BBC were far less likely to mark the passing of a comedy legend than is the case today. Admittedly, the published schedule may have been altered to allow for the screening of a film in tribute to Stan at the time of his death, but such last-minute alterations are not reflected in the BBC’s Genome listings which derive from the Radio Times. It wasn’t until May of that year that another L&H film made it into the schedule, and it was another outing for A Chump at Oxford. In July, a brief season of shorts played on Saturday teatimes in the slot normally occupied by Dr. Who (he was on his summer holiday). These are quite likely the first Laurel and Hardy comedies I ever saw. The short season kicked off with the Academy Award-winning The Music Box (31.07.65, 17.40), with Hog Wild, Dirty Work, Towed in a Hole and Oliver the Eighth following in the same slot over subsequent weeks.

Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy were both deceased, but for me, Stan and Ollie were very much alive on the small screen. Even when I was old enough to understand the fact of their mortality, I still couldn’t quite accept it. No one truly dies whose image has been immortalised in that way. I continued to enjoy their films on television through the 60s and into the 70s. At Christmas 1974, the BBC broadcast an Omnibus documentary about the comedy team, affording my first insights into the background behind the partnership. This week, it has been dusted off and shown again on BBC4 for the first time in 48 years.

Since that film first went out, I’ve read widely about L&H and their career, and the information it delivers now seems fairly sparse. Episodes in their careers that have since been covered in depth – Stan’s marital disharmony, his falling-out with Hal Roach, the team’s disastrous migration to Fox and MGM – were alluded to, but not examined in any detail: but with only 65 minutes of screen time and a big story to tell, this was only to be expected.

What the film also shows us is how we’d got used to seeing the L&H movies presented on television. There are plenty of clips of classic moments, all of them displaying the low resolution, degraded image quality that was typical of the TV screenings. The BBC was reliant on 16mm material for the bulk of its L&H broadcasts, and the same prints had most likely been in circulation since the late 40s. Most of the short subjects derived from resissues under the ‘Film Classics’ banner, easily identified by their opening title card in the form of a brass nameplate. Watching at the time, it was easy to draw the conclusion that the condition of the films was down to their age: the shorts were over thirty years old. It was only when the Roach studios embarked on a resmastering programme in the 1980s and 90s, returning to original materials, that it became clear exactly how much we’d been missing. I’d assumed that comedies from the 20s and 30s had always looked grainy and fuzzy. Now it was possible to see them in something approaching high definition.

Of all the clips included in the Omnibus documentary, only the dancing sequence ‘At the Ball, That’s All’ from Way Out West looked clear and clean, suggesting that the BBC held a 35mm print in its archive, and in general the feature films always seemed in better shape whenever they turned up on screen. The shorts, however, continued to be broadcast from the same worn-out 16mm copies until well into the 1980s: I taped many of them and came to recognise some of the splices and damage. One print even contained what I at first took to be an intriguing glimpse of an unknown closing shot, seemingly showing Stan and Ollie as ghosts. This was later explained as the fade-out from another film print, Oliver the Eighth, whose end title card had been roughly spliced onto the BBC’s copy of The Midnight Patrol.

Today, the films are slowly – and I mean very slowly – finding their way onto Blu-ray. At present, only a handful of classic shorts has been released, along with the first, silent year of the teaming. But with interest in physical media dwindling and customers increasingly favouring streaming or downloads, will their complete work ever make it into HD?

Stan and Ollie were well served by the BBC, who continued to show their films until the early 2000s, with the old 16mm prints eventually replaced by the 1990s restorations. Yet since then, there’s been next to no sight of them. Without those regular broadcasts, I doubt if I would have got to know them as well as I did, and who knows how many potential devotees are missing out. Their comedy is timeless, and there isn’t even the excuse of the films being in black and white to explain their absence from the schedules – Roach colourised all the sound shorts and features back in the 80s – admittedly with less than impressive results, but at least providing a more attractive alternative to potential broadcasters.

Clearly, whatever rights the BBC once held have long since lapsed, and the only item available from the archive that could be shown to mark 60 years since Stan’s passing was the Omnibus film, paired with the 2018 movie Stan and Ollie.

I was intrigued to see the documentary appear in the schedule, only two months after name checking it twice in this blog. Had someone read it? The BBC seems to have been oblivious as to the existence of the Omnibus film up to now: it could easily have been dusted off for Stan’s centenary in 1990, or the fiftieth anniversary of his death in 2015, but both occasions went by without sight of it. Either way, it’s good to have it back and hopefully this won’t be its last sighting on the network. There’s another anniversary due in two years' time – 2027 will mark one hundred years since the Laurel and Hardy partnership was first enshrined on screen.

I’d be interested to know the extent to which Laurel and Hardy are recognised by younger generations. In Britain, nobody born since the turn of the century has been given much opportunity to see them on television. Talking Pictures has shown a few selected shorts, but TPTV is old people’s television and I doubt they got through to a younger audience. 

Today, the best place to find Laurel and Hardy films is online. But you’ve got to be looking for them. As memories fade and older audiences dwindle to nothing, who will carry Stan and Ollie into the future?

The Lost World of the Radiogram – part 2

Last time, I looked back to my first encounters with recorded music via my parents’ modest but interesting collection of records, kept inside the huge veneered cabinet of the radiogram. The very word ‘radiogram’ is now an archaism. Once upon a time, it meant any piece of home entertainment equipment that comprised both a radio set and gramophone in a single unit. They were usually presented as stylish pieces of furniture, at home in any modern living room.

In my recollection, the radio was turned on most days. In the mornings, we would hear Housewives’ Choice and Music While You Work, the latter a survivor from the war years that was still going in the early 60s (astonishingly, the venerable Workers’ Playtime was also still running as late as 1964). Around lunchtime, our mum would retune to the Home Service for the news, Listen With Mother and Woman’s Hour.

This was still the era of valves, and any valve-driven piece of equipment needed a few minutes to warm up after being switched on. This was certainly the case with our old ‘KB Junior’. You knew it was switched on because a lamp lit up behind the tuning display with its list of domestic and European stations. I knew the words on that display long before they meant anything to me: Third, North, Light and Home for the BBC – Luxembourg, Hilversum, Helsinki and other European capitals, although we seldom ventured away from the familiar territory of the BBC Home Service or Light Programme. After maybe a minute, a hum began to emanate from the speakers, and if the set was switched to radio, you’d hear voices or music start to filter through.

Housewives’ Choice, a programme of record requests, went out every weekday at 9am, running for just 55 minutes. If you want to know what sort of programme it was, watch the opening credits of the film Billy Liar (1963) which re-creates a typical broadcast, complete with presenter Godfrey Wynn.

Housewives' Choice was followed by a short reading in a slot with the self-explanatory title  ‘Five to Ten’, a fragment of which can also be heard in Billy Liar. The Radio Times listing described it as ‘a story, a hymn and a prayer.’

Music While You Work ran for just half an hour and featured live music. ‘Needle time’ was subject to restrictions imposed by the Musician’s Union, ensuring a ready supply of work for its members, so the number of programmes featuring gramophone records was strictly limited.

Despite this, I remember hearing a good many records on the radio. It was on the radio that I first heard the Beatles and, indeed, all the other groups of the early 60s; but the sounds reaching me from our KB Junior were for the most part a far cry from pop music as we know it today. The charts were still wide open to all comers, and a typical playlist from around sixty years ago would comprise an eclectic blend of pop groups, jazz, crooners, comedy records, novelty songs, light orchestral numbers and popular classics.

I absorbed all of this material unquestioningly. Yet looking back, it seems an almost bizarre hybrid of styles. One minute you’d have folkie Josh Macrae singing about ‘Messing About on the River’, the next you’d hear the Beatles singing ‘All My Loving’, followed by The Singing Nun’s surprise international hit ‘Dominique’. ‘Elizabethan Serenade’ was a popular light orchestral piece that got played a lot, and if I heard Prokofiev’s ‘Peter and the Wolf’ once (with narration by Peter Ustinov) I must have heard it a dozen times. There were records aimed at children – Ronnie Hilton’s ‘A Windmill in Old Amsterdam’ or Peter Paul and Mary’s ‘Puff the Magic Dragon’ – comedy songs from the likes of Bernard Cribbins, Charley Drake and Rolf Harris – and spoken-word comedy from performers like Kenneth Williams, whose bank holdup skit ‘Hand Up Your Sticks’ puzzled and slightly unnerved me as a child.

The playlist of memory still surprises me. A random selection, all of which reached me via the Light Programme in the early 1960s: Horst Jankovski’s ‘A Walk in the Black Forest’; Helmut Zacharias’ ‘Tokyo Melody’ (the official theme to the 1964 olympic games); Russ Conway’s ‘Side Saddle’ (already an oldie of some five years’ vintage); Bernard Cribbins’ ‘Right Said Fred’; Charlie Drake’s ‘My Boomerang Won’t Come Back’; ‘Morningtown Ride’ by The Seekers; The Mamas and the Papas’ ‘Monday Monday’; The Tornados’ ‘Telstar’; Burt Bacharach’s ‘Trains and Boats and Planes’; Peggy Lee singing ‘Pass Me By’; Doris Day’s ‘Move Over Darling’, and the Searchers’ ‘Don’t Throw Your Love Away’ – a song to which I supplied the alternative lyric ‘Don’t Throw Mrs. Tubby Away’ (Mrs. T was a battered old teddy bear sans ears whom our mum once threatened to put in the dustbin). Most of these tracks date from 1964, the year when I began to emerge from the fog of semi-comprehension that is early childhood, and started to take notice of the world around me.

Now and again, I’d hear songs that got played on only a handful of occasions but which unaccountably got stuck in the memory. ‘My Name is Mud’ was a 1962 country song by someone called James O’Gwyn, which reached my ears around 1965 or 66. The title amused me at the time, but I would not hear it again for nearly sixty years when it turned up unexpectedly on Liza Tarbuck’s Saturday evening programme. Indeed, if you want to get anything like a flavour of the eclectisism of early 1960s pop radio, her playlist is the closest thing you’ll find on any contemporary radio station.

One of the most bizarre songs I recall hearing was ‘Down Came the Rain’ by the songwriter Mitch Murray, styled on the label as ‘Mister Murray’. This appeared around 1965 and got a few airplays, which is susprising considering what a caterwauling confection it was. I suspect it had been written for Charlie Drake, as the hidously off-key chorus sounds just like him. This soon disappeared without a trace, and I wouldn’t hear it again for another forty years when it popped up unexpectedly on Brian Matthew’s Sounds of the Sixties – by a bizarre coincidence, I’d been thinking about the song about half an hour before it got played…

Sharing the airwaves with the popular record releases of the day were a variety of other programmes which our mum listened to. I knew the theme to The Archers from a very early age, but I couldn’t tell you anything else about the programme during that era (or since, for that matter). Radio’s other daily soap was The Dales, broadcast every weekday morning and afternoon, and better remembered in its earlier incarnation, Mrs. Dale’s Diary. I could still hum you the theme from The Dales, I heard it that many times. I believe the version in my head was a signature tune by Johnny Dankworth that had a lively, uptempo feel and had, apparently, only recently replaced a more sedate piece, to the consternation of listeners. My head may yet be its final resting place, as I’ve searched in vain for it online.

For children, there was, of course, Listen With Mother. I’m sure some of this must still exist in the BBC’s archive, but if so, it continues to gather dust. I recall fragments of songs – a traditional ditty about someone called Aitken Drum, a man who lived in the moon who ‘played upon a ladle’ (and prompted the earliest nightmare in my recollection); the song ‘pussycat, pussycat’; and a ‘walking song’ about a pair of boots named Horniman and Sir. I can still hear the presenters’ voices if I concentrate hard enough – Daphne Oxenford and George Dixon in particular.

On Saturday mornings, there was a record request programme for children, hosted most famously by Ed ‘Stewpot’ Stewart, but formerly presided over by Blue Peter presenter Christopher Trace. The Seekers’ ‘Morningtown Ride’ later became enshrined as the theme music, and other records were perennial favourites with listeners: I doubt if I’d ever have heard Terry Scott’s ‘My Bruvver’ if it hadn’t been for Junior Choice. These days, the format is usually revived for Christmas morning by Anneka Rice.

Another good source of music on the wireless was the Sunday lunchtime request show Two-Way Family Favourites, aimed at an audience of ex-pats mostly in the armed forces (many requests would include the initials B.F.P.O. for British Forces Posted Overseas). Judith Chalmers was the usual presenter, and the music was a family-friendly mix of what would later become known as ‘easy listening’. One song I heard more than any other on this programme was The New Christy Minstrels’ ‘Three Wheels On My Wagon’, a comedy country number from a band whose line-up had briefly included future Byrds vocalist Gene Clark. The song was written in 1961 by Bob Hilliard and Burt Bacharach, and the Minstrels’ recording appeared on an EP the following year, with Barry (‘Eve of Destruction’) McGuire on lead vocals. Other popular songs on TWFF included film themes and selections from the popular musicals of the era. On any given Sunday you stood a better than average chance of hearing ‘Climb Every Mountain’ rubbing shoulders with Chaim Topol’s ‘If I Were a Rich Man’ (from Fiddler on the Roof).

Radio comedy passed me by completely. I’m sure we listened to some of the shows of the era, but the likes of Round the Horne were unknown territory to me until much later. The earliest radio comedy I was aware of was The Clitheroe Kid, another Sunday lunchtime perennial, but I didn’t really tune into comedy until I was quite a bit older.

One curiosity I remember is what I presume to have been a skit on Thunderbirds, performed around the beginning of 1966. The obvious candidate was Cook and Moore’s ‘Superthunderstingcar’, but the sketch only ever appeared on television. Clearly, someone else had a similar idea: whoever it was, I can still remember hearing what I took to be Thunderbirds on the radio, accompanied by audience laughter, which made for a bizarre listening experience at the age of four or five.

The KB Junior radiogram made the move with us to our new home in Sutton Coldfield in 1967, but our home audio was due for an upgrade, and in 1968 our dad invested in a proper hi-fi system, with stereo speakers. I’d never seen (or heard) stereo before, and the sound it made was impressive: but for the first decade its sole purpose was for playing jazz records from his personal collection. My brother and myself were later permitted to play pop albums on it, but the EQ was set for a curiously muffled low/mid range spectrum which made everything sound a bit weird to me.

My brother had by this time been bought a small record player of his own, which began to supplant the KB, whose record deck had become erratic in operation. The KB was finally retired around 1974, when it was replaced by a modern stereo radiogram from the popular manufacturer Fidelity. It was on here that our pop singles got played for the next eight years or so.

My last memory of the KB Junior is of it sitting up in my brother’s bedroom where its short-wave setting could be used to listen in on the local police and taxi firms. By now, it had lost a couple of its control knobs and was starting to look somewhat the worse for wear after more than twenty years. The very last thing I remember hearing on it was the single ‘This World of Water’ by New Musik, in the spring of 1980: my brother wasn’t around and I’d been randomly messing around with the old radiogram to see if I could get anything out of it.

Examples of the KB Junior are now extremely hard to come by. When they do crop up, it’s usually in auctions of house clearance items and their value is no more than £20 or £30. Ours ended its days on the council refuse tip in Sutton Coldfield not long after its 1980 swansong. I’m not sure what I’d do if I came across one now: it’s simply too big to make room for, even for the sake of nostalgia. But as my introduction to records and radio, indeed as my introduction to music itself, the old KB played a big part in my formative years.