Location Spotting: Cooling Towers

 

I’m always interested in locations from film and television. Many years ago, I trailed around the suburbs of Manchester trying to find locations from the 1963 film Billy Liar only to discover, much later, that they’d been shot in Bradford. But back then, I didn't have the internet to assist me...

Locations are always easier to track down when they include a landmark of some kind – by which I mean large, prominent buildings or other distinctive features in the landscape. Since childhood, I’ve nutured a curious fascination for coal-fired power stations, having been impressed at an early age by the shape and proportions of the cooling towers that were usually associated with such places. Within the past month, Britain’s last coal-fired generating station at Ratcliffe on Soar, Nottinghamshire, was closed for good, and the past twenty years have seen the decommissioning and demolition of stations the length and breadth of the British Isles. Save for a few stragglers – such as the five towers of Willington Power Station in Derbyshire – the many cooling towers that once dominated the landscape have long since gone to dust.

So if I ever spot a power station on an old piece of film or television, I’m keen to find out where it was. Last week, in Z Cars – currently being repeated on Talking Pictures TV – we got some good shots of two good examples in North London. There were a good many power stations dotted across the London suburbs over the years, so identification is not always easy. One of the two stations, however, I recognised, as it can also be seen in John Betjeman’s film Metro-land, shot a year before the Z Cars episode in 1972. This facility, located in Neasden, can easily be identified by the distinctive shape of its twin cooling towers (these structures showed a surprising amount of variation in their appearance). Neasden was already mothballed by the time the Z Cars episode was filmed, having been decomissioned in 1968. 

 

Neasden power station as seen in Z Cars, Absence (above) and Metro-Land (below)

The Z Cars episode included shots of another power station, still in operation, and located close to a canal. This one proved somewhat harder to identify. As the shots from the episode show, the station had three cooling towers and two smokestacks emerging from a large, brick built boiler house. Its canalside location helped in tracking it down, as did proximity to Neasden. I considered, but ruled out Brimsdown in Essex (too many cooling towers and of the wrong design) and West Ham power station (towers in the wrong configfuration), but after a bit of Googling, I found an image that matched almost exactly to one of the shots in the episode. The station in question was at Acton Lane, Willesden – not far from Neasden and conveniently close to the BBC studios at Shepherds’ Bush. The plant remained in operation until 1983, and its location can be seen clearly on this section from a London A-Z map of the same era.

It’s surprising to realise exactly how many power stations once served the major urban and industrial areas of the UK. Googling for images reveals numerous examples, all variations on the same basic design and layout, with plants often comprising half a dozen or more cooling towers. In more recent times, cooling towers have been demonised as iconography of fossil fuel power generation, with picture editors on news and documentary programmes using shots of the structures to illustrate the issue of global warming. In fact, nothing but steam ever emerged from cooling towers, which were used, as their name suggests, to cool the water from the steam turbines before recyling it back into the plant. The harmful carbon emissions from power stations came only from the tall smokestacks. But cooling towers, with their vast size and grimy weathering, made a better visual scapegoat.

In fact, I’ve always found them intriguing structures, and having lived in the vicinity of a few examples, would often be impressed by the effect of different lighting conditions, especially when the plants were running at full capacity and sending up vast columns of steam. I’m sure most people considered them blots on the landscape, but those who lived in close proximity to such stations have often developed a sentimental attachment to the towers and are sad to see them go.

And of course, modern thinking tells us that coal-fired power generation was a bad thing. That may be so, but where would we have been without it? One only has to think back to the days of miners’ strikes and the resulting power cuts to appreciate the monumental importance those stations played in everyday life.

There’s no point in looking out for power stations in today’s Britain, unless you happen to be travelling along the A50 trunk road, where you’ll still see the examples I mentioned earlier. So the best place to spot them is in vintage film and television...

Acton Lane (Willesden) power station as seen in Z Cars above, and in a Flickr image taken from the same spot, evidently a few years later (note the same tree is still visible)

Anything Can Happen in the Last Sixty Years

 

Stingray: A Personal Memoir

‘Stand by for Action!’ It was sixty years ago this week that young viewers were alerted by the barking voice of Commander Shore and the thundering drumbeat that ushered in the very first episode of Gerry and Sylvia Anderson’s Stingray. Viewers in the London ITV region got there first, on Sunday 4 October. Up here in the Midlands, we had to wait until Tuesday. Assuming we were actually watching…

This blog is primarily about pop cultural events and icons that I can remember. Yet I have no recollection whatsoever of the debut of Stingray. I was already a fan of Fireball XL5 – I’d had the annual bought for me the previous Christmas, and the series had scarcely been off the screen in all that time. Now here was a new Supermarionation show, bigger, more dynamic, more explosive than ever. Surely it arrived in a blaze of publicity? If so, I was utterly oblivious.

Here in the Midlands, Stingray was scheduled at the slightly unusual time of 7.00pm. Fireball had also been broadcast in this timeslot, which, when it debuted in March 1963, was a little after my bedtime. One of my earliest memories is of being brought downstairs to see the programme, possibly on its first screening. After its initial run, Fireball was moved to the more child-friendly slot of 5.25pm, at which hour I have much clearer recollections. By 1964, I was certainly stopping up until seven or seven thirty, as I can remember some of the programmes that occupied this time slot on ITV. So there’s no reason to suppose I was not allowed to see Stingray at this time. As I wrote in my last entry, I have many quite clear memories of television from the autumn of 1964: but my recollections of Stingray begin in 1965.

In my memory, Stingray was always on earlier, at a time when it was still light outside. This means that I’m remembering the broadcasts from spring 1965 onwards. That’s not to say I hadn’t seen it sooner – but I just don’t associate it with being on at 7pm. Batman, yes. Thunderbirds, certainly. Just not Stingray. But while Fireball saw out the whole of its first broadcast in the 7pm slot, Stingray would be brought forward to 5.25pm as of 03.02.65. Coincidentally or not, this move came a week after the launch of the TV21 comic, itself launched via a TV ad campaign. Viewers who hadn’t already seen Stingray in its later slot would have been introduced to the series with its all-time dud episode The Cool Caveman!

My earliest recollection of a specific episode is Raptures of the Deep, and it was definitely light outside, which dates that memory to its second broadcast on Wednesday 25 August 1965 – mere weeks before the arrival of Thunderbirds.

For much of 1965, Stingray was, for me, one of the main events on television. Toys had arrived in our local shops by early in the year, and I saw the very desirable battery-operated Stingray model from Lincoln International demonstrated in our favourite toy shop Osbornes’ – but I didn’t want it. Why not? Well, for one thing, I was never a huge fan of battery-operated toys, but I think the real reason is more simple: Stingray went underwater, and I wanted a toy you could play with in the bath. Fortunately, another manufacturer, Plaston, had what I wanted: a soft vinyl Stingray toy that was ideal for bathtime adventures. I already had their Supercar toy, and the Plaston Stingray was duly added to the toybox. I can still remember getting it, on an afternoon in 1965. Today, of this highly collectable toy, only the ‘ratemaster’ propellor remains.

Other Stingray toys that found their way into my hands included a wooden jigsaw of Marineville (still extant as of 2024); a die-cast cap gun, which came from a toyshop close to our grandparents’ home; and a smaller Stingray model, again intended for aquatic operation, that was driven by a rubber band. I saw, but was not bought, that year’s Stingray Annual, which was displayed on the wall of our local newsagents, and I also had the 33rpm ‘Mini-Album’ Into Action With Troy Tempest. This was an oddity: a record that spoke directly to you, the listener. I felt a bit uneasy being ordered about by Commander Shore, who wanted me to do impersonations of Troy Tempest and Phones. “Let’s hear you try to talk just like him,” he instructed, in a voice that meant business.

One of the most ludicrous items of Stingray merchandise was the so-called ‘scan shoes’: elasticated slippers decorated with the heads of Troy Tempest and Phones. These were on display in the window of Lichfield’s ‘Model Shop’ toy retailer when we went in to get the Plaston model, and even at the age of four, I found them utterly ridiculous.

Aside from playing with my plastic models in the bath, there was another kind of Stingray game I made up. This involved filling a plastic seaside bucket with water, then flinging it up the garden while shouting ‘stand by for action!’ The resulting watery explosion was meant to replicate the one we saw on the opening titles, and this particular game – which we called ‘Action Buckets’ – became a favourite of my brother and myself. I’m not sure our mum was quite so keen. She did, however, display some ingenuity when I asked for a pair of hydrophones like those worn by Stingray’s co-pilot, Phones. You couldn’t get them in the shops, and we had no real headphones in the house. As a substitute, our mum sliced a used Jif lemon squeezer in half, added two lollypop sticks for aerials, and connected the two resulting ‘hydrophones’ with a piece of knicker elastic. It was a proper Blue Peter job, but the idea was, as far as I’m aware, completely original. Those Jif phones lasted for decades: years later I would still come across them whilst sifting through the junk in our loft.

The summer of 1965 was really the high watermark for Stingray toys, and in my memory it was bright, sunny weather – exactly like the blue summery sky in the Marineville jigsaw I had bought for me during those months. Like any spell of summer weather, it couldn’t last. When Thunderbirds exploded onto ITV in the autumn, all of Gerry Anderson’s earlier work was instantly eclipsed, and Stingray suddenly seemed like yesterday’s news. It had been ‘tomorrow’s news today’ as the main feature in the TV21 comic when it launched back in January, but TV21 was primarily conceived as a promotional vehicle for the coming Thunderbirds: its first dozen issues included covers featuring exciting new hardware from the work in progress, and a weekly strip introduced readers to the characters of Lady Penelope and Parker. Stingray may have had the lion’s share of TV21 covers during 1965, but from January 66 onwards, Thunderbirds was the main event.

In truth, Stingray’s days were numbered from the moment that AP Films began work on its successor. Journalists who called the studio wanting to know more about Troy Tempest and co were disappointed to learn that their creators weren’t really interested in promoting the series, and aside from ongoing merchandising deals, Stingray quickly dropped off the PR radar.

On television, it was a different matter. Here in the Midlands, Stingray was barely off the air from its October 1964 debut right through to June 1966, with the series ending randomly on the repeated episode Rescue From the Skies. After a seven-month gap, it was back, in February 1967, with The Big Gun (the episode order was all over the place during these broadcasts). Following a ludicrously misplaced screening of A Christmas to Remember on the first of August (!) this extended run came to an end the following week with yet another outing for The Big Gun.

I can remember these 1967 broadcasts, but mainly for a meterological reason: we were watching an episode some time around the end of April, when I looked up the garden and noticed it was snowing! I’d like to report that the episode we were watching had been Pink Ice (repeated on 27.04.67) but sadly this doesn’t quite match up with Met Office records.

In truth, I was getting a little tired of Stingray by this time, and I’m not sure we even bothered with it some weeks. The series was off the air completely during 1968 and for all but the last two weeks of 1969, when another repeat run commenced on Thursday afternoons. These repeats ran all the way through to September 1970, when the show was replaced by Fireball XL5. One particular episode from this run remains as a clear memory – Invisible Enemy, broadcast on 07.05.70 – and again, it’s for a weather-related reason, the afternoon in question having been notably thundery.

Troy and co were put on (pink) ice by ATV for the whole of 1971 and 72, and when they returned, it was in the recently introduced summer morning schedule, beginning with the pilot episode on 24.07.73. My brother recorded the next episode, The Ghost Ship (26.07.73) on cassette, and the same summer we also committed the episode Deep Heat to open-reel tape (30.08.73).

Stingray is, of course, famous for being the first British-made TV series to be shot entirely in colour: yet for all this time, we’d been watching in black and white. I wouldn’t get to see the series in colour until the summer of 1975, and ironically, it was the very last episode, Aquanaut of the Year. Episodes were being stripped into the Saturday morning kid-fest Tiswas, without any mention in the TV Times, and by the time I got wise to the fact, the series was all but over. It was back the following summer, when we managed to see another handful of episodes, but I would have to wait until 1982, and a full repeat run on ITV before I could claim to have seen the whole series as originally intended.

Compared with other Gerry Anderson series, Stingray got a bit of a raw deal – barely a year in the spotlight before being eclipsed by Thunderbirds. Supercar and Fireball XL5 both ran for a good eighteen months or more before being relegated to second base by their successors. I would argue that Stingray did appreciably better when revived by the BBC in the early 90s. The young viewers who tuned into these broadcasts had been primed by an earlier rerun of Thunderbirds (1991-92) which must have had the strange effect of making Stingray look like its successor. This was the first time either series had been nationally networked, and a ‘second generation’ of merchandising soon began to appear in the shops.

My own small contribution to the history of Stingray came towards the end of the Network DVD label in 2022, when the series was finally subjected to a long-overdue remaster and released in High Definition. I have to say the remastering work was a disappointment to me, with some episodes lacking in density and contrast, and displaying variable colour values (it was done, comparatively speaking, on the cheap), but it was still a big improvement on the old masters that had been doing the rounds since the advent of DVD. I was told to big up the set – and ended up cramming a whole pile of collectable goodies into the double-boxed ‘Super Deluxe’ edition, designed as an instant collectable, which sold out quite quickly (at time of writing, this edition is unavailable anywhere online, with the merely ‘deluxe’ complete box set listed at prices ranging from £150 to £300.)

Will Stingray endure into the future? Will any of these series, in an era when CGI and AI are capable of creating similar asethetics without the sweat and toil expended by Gerry Anderson’s creative team? I think they will. AI/CGI will never equal any of the ‘real world’ practical effects from the golden age of film and television production. Real light falling on real 3d objects is a phenomenon that no computer will ever convincingly recreate. As future audiences grow jaded with this kind of slick technology, they will, one hopes, rediscover the unique magic that was Supermarionation.

I may never watch Stingray again – I’ve seen the series so many times that, in the words of Commander Sam Shore, “I know every rusty old cannonball in it.” But it’s there for whenever I feel the memory needs topping up. And – thanks to the encouragement of Commander Shore on that 1965 Mini-Album – I can now recite whole swathes of dialogue in the voices of the original characters. You should hear me do Marina...

A collection of Stingray goodies as illustrated in the 'Merchandising Guide' included with Network's Super Deluxe edition blu ray.

A Pale Shade of Pink

A ramble through the autumn of 1964...

Memories are intriguing. They lie, for years, like gold coins lost in the mud and silt at the bottom of a pond. Then something comes along to stir up the silt and suddenly, there they are, revealed and still shiny like new, like they’d happened yesterday.

I’m find this happens a lot lately – maybe it’s part of getting older. Just recently, BBC4 ran a couple of Peter, Paul and Mary concerts from 1983. Seeing them, I was reminded of the very first time I saw the folk trio, on television in the early 60s, singing their hit 'Blowin' in the Wind'. For some reason, I knew it had been a Sunday afternoon. Out of curiosity, I checked the BBC’s Genome database – and straight away I found the broadcast I was thinking of, on the afternoon of Sunday 25 October 1964. The day happened to be our Grandfather’s 56th birthday, and we would almost certainly have been entertaining our grandparents to Sunday tea. It might all have happened yesterday…

In the autumn of 1964, I was just three and a half years old. Prior to this, my memories are more fragmentary, and there’s less sense of continuity. Suddenly, though, around this time, they begin to join up. Rather than glimpses or flashes of the past, they become a narrative. This week in 1964, Herman’s Hermits were number one in what used to be called the ‘Hit Parade’ with their single ‘I’m Into Something Good’. This was the very first record I owned, and that fact speaks of a growing awareness of my environment, an appreciation of atmosphere, a sense of time and place that seems to have got going around now. I can still remember having the record bought for me: the shop sold televisions, gramophones and domestic goods, as well as having a supply of singles and Lps. A dansette style record player stood at one end of the counter so that customers could try out a record before buying, and a wire rack held some of the most popular discs of the day. The 7” single was on the Columbia label, and came in a green paper sleeve. I can clearly remember taking it home – it was a bright, sunny day, a memory which is borne out by Met Office records – their summary for September 1964 reads ‘sunny and dry.’

A week or so later, the XVIII Olympiad began in Tokyo, an event of which I was principally aware on account of Helmut Zacharias’ evocative ‘Tokyo Melody’, an oriental sounding theme that accompanied the TV coverage, and was widely played on radio, reaching number 9 in the charts in November. A nightly round-up of the day’s Olympic events preceded the BBC News every evening during the fortnight of the games, and although I was far too young to take an interest in what was happening in the sporting world, the imagery left an impression – the Olympic logo, and a shot of the stadium that formed a backdrop to the BBC studio presentation. 

It was around this time that a lot of television series began to leave a lasting impression. Autumn 1964 saw the arrival of Gerry Anderson’s Stingray – and I’ve already written about the return of Bleep and Booster, who had made their Blue Peter debut back in March. Other children’s programmes that autumn included The Five O’Clock Club, Zoo Time and Junior Criss-Cross Quiz on ITV; Deputy Dawg, Animal Magic and Tales from Europe on BBC1, along with Crackerjack and Junior Points of View. I was also aware of programmes aimed at an older audience – US comedies Car 54 Where Are You? and The Beverley Hillbillies were running on ITV, alongside quiz shows Double Your Money and Take Your Pick.

The BBC’s Watch With Mother had been doubled up since earlier in the year, with a broadcast at 10.45 in the morning – seemingly intended as a ‘primer’ for Play School, which followed it over on BBC2 – and a different series in the traditional lunchtime slot. The original line-up was still in place, each series assigned to a specific day of the week: Picture Book on Monday, Andy Pandy on Tuesday, Rag, Tag and Bobtail on Thursday and The Woodentops on Friday. This year, however, saw Rag, Tag and Bobtail ousted by relative newcomer Tales of the Riverbank, not originally a WWM series (it had been broadcast at teatime since 1960). R,T&B would be dropped altogether the following year.

There’s one specific afternoon in autumn 1964 I’m able to recall, and thanks to the TV listings I can put a date to it: Tuesday 20 October. That afternoon, BBC1 had Olympic coverage from 3.00pm till 5.05, followed by children’s programmes beginning with Deputy Dawg. Our dad typically arrived home from work around 6.00 – and it was while the evening’s Olympic Report was going out on BBC1 (5.55-6.20) that I heard him say something about a TV series on later that evening which he called ‘The Aeroplane Story.’ I had many toy aeroplanes, but had never seen a real one other than those that occasionally droned overhead – and my ears pricked up at the sound of this. Any television programme with a title like that must surely be of interest. I think I’d have been disappointed if I’d been allowed to stay up for it. The programme was actually ATV’s The Plane Makers, and was more concerned with boardroom drama than the planes themselves. The popular drama kicked off its third series on that evening, which is why our dad would have been talking about it. How I can date this memory so precisely is simply a quirk of memory: his words stayed in my mind, and with them, the image of the Olympic stadium which is probably what I was looking at on TV while he was talking.

A few weeks later, on Thursday 19 November, the BBC introduced a generation to a television serial that became embedded in the national psyche. The Singing Ringing Tree had been a colour film produced in the GDR in 1957, which was acquired by the BBC’s Peggy Miller and cut down into a three-part serial, broadcast in black and white, with an English narration from actor Tony Bilbow. There was an unsettling atmosphere about the whole production, arising partly through the use of studio sets standing in for exteriors but mostly on account of the costumes and characters, some of which were the stuff of nightmares: especially the Bear (into which form a luckless Prince is transformed) and, dare I use the word, the dwarf, sight of whom sent me for cover behind one of our fireside chairs. There is a very specific atmosphere attached to this memory: I can see leafless branches in the garden against a blue-grey evening sky, there’s the residual memory of Blue Peter that preceded the serial (Christopher Trace and Valerie Singleton were the presenters) and the image of my brother in a tartan romper suit. I was becoming increasingly aware of mood and atmosphere, and The Singing Ringing Tree was a classic example. 1964 had a particular feeling, an atmosphere of its own, and evenings like this were a big part of what defined it.

It wasn’t all about television, though. Our mum usually had the radio on all day, tuned to the BBC Light Programme, which meant I got to hear programmes like Housewives’ Choice and Music While You Work, both of whose theme tunes were instantly familiar. Looking back on them, they seem to come from an earlier era. Another very familiar radio theme was that of The Archers, which preceded Listen With Mother every afternoon. I also recall The Dales – an update of the original Mrs. Dale’s Diary – which was broadcast twice a day, morning and afternoon. Its melodic, slightly melancholic signature tune (composed by Johnny Dankworth) is deeply etched into my memories of this era, but has defied all my efforts to find a copy online.

Away from the mass media, I was becoming more aware of my surroundings. The man-made environment of cars and buildings was opening out, and I began to take more notice of things like street furniture – roadsigns, street lamps, pillar boxes – and packaging. The boxed items I saw in shops – sweets in particular – and signage such as that employed by Corgi Toys left a powerful impression. Graphic design had evolved into a stylish minimalism, with occasional nods towards Op Art. To this day, the fonts that were ‘of the moment’ in 1964 remain my favourites: Grotesk No. 9, Compacta, Franklin Gothic Condensed. Serifs were old hat. There was a kind of style consensus in play in this era, the like of which it’s hard to conceive of today. People dressed in specific ways, and furnished their homes with remarkable consistency. I think it was this year that our parents gave their bedroom a bit of a facelift – a new pink carpet and a matching lampshade. If I had to sum up my recollections of 1964 with a single sensory impression, it would be that shade of pale pink. 

There was no reason not to suppose that this man-made world I saw opening out around me would endure in this form in perpetuity. In reality, it was all gone in a couple of years. What I experienced in 1964, in asethetic terms, was really the high watermark of 1950s style – the end of the atom age. By the mid-60s, a looser, freer style had taken hold, sweeping away the formalism that had held sway during the post-war era. People looked different. The world looked different. 1964 was, if anything, a year of transition: America was recovering from the shock of Kennedy’s assassination, and the Beatles were setting out on their mission of world domination. England was beginning to swing. Men were preparing to fly to the moon.

The world I was suddenly aware of was on the brink of radical change. But in the suburban Midlands, it was still, in a sense, the 1950s. And pale pink.

'The end of the atom age': though not specific to 1964, these confectionery packages perfectly illustrate the ultimate expression of 1950s minimalist styling, that reached its zenith in that year.

Bleep and Booster at Sixty

No sixtieth anniversary in pop culture should go unremarked, particularly when it’s a science fiction subject that has links to the BBC’s Doctor Who and Blue Peter. Have I got your attention? In that case, let’s consider a piece of television that made its first appearance in 1964, ran for five years, but was never a television programme in its own right. It was, rather, a programme within a programme – which means you won’t find it listed anywhere on the BBC’s Genome database.

I’m talking about Bleep and Booster – a modestly-produced outer space serial with a unique charm and fascination that belied its bargain basement production values. In fact, aside from some artwork boards, narration and ‘special sound’, it had no production values at all. Bleep and Booster was neither puppetry nor cartoon. The stories were played out by means of rostrum camera work, panning in and around large panels of artwork: a process that, in the field of advertising, was once known as an ‘animatic’.

Bleep and Booster was the creation of artist William ‘Tim’ Timyn, who had made his mark on television with the stories of Bengo, a Boxer dog puppy, a regular feature in the early days of Blue Peter. For the original Bengo stories, ‘Tim’ drew the pictures live on air, while telling the stories he’d written himself. By the time of Bleep and Booster, the artwork and presentation were pre-filmed. The stories were narrated by Peter Hawkins – already famous as the voices of Bill and Ben, Spotty Dog and the Daleks – and accompanied with ‘special sound’ courtesy of Brian Hodgson, a pioneer of the BBC Radiophonic workshop, whose contributions to Dr. Who included the famous dematerialisation sound of the TARDIS – still in use to this day.

Bleep and Booster made their first appearance on Blue Peter on Monday 2 March 1964. The four-episode serial, written and illustrated by Timyn, told the story of how boy inventor ‘Booster’ meets up with space-boy Bleep when his home-made rocket runs out of fuel. The space race was all over the media at the time, with NASA planning feverishly to land men on the moon before the end of the decade, so a space adventure was bound to be popular. Bleep and Booster immediately captured the imaginations of young viewers – of whom I was one – and were brought back to Blue Peter for a second adventure, commencing on Monday 14 September. In 1965, the first story was turned into an illustrated book, published by Purnell, which my mum bought for me out of that year’s Freeman’s Catalogue. I still have it, minus a page which readers were encouraged to cut out and turn into a cardboard mobile.

Bleep and Booster's return to Blue Peter was highlighted with this Radio Times panel,
accompanying the listings for Monday 14 September 1964.

Tim’s artwork had a unique quality, with energetic brushwork and a deceptive simplicity. The characters were engaging and had immediate appeal. Bleep, and the other inhabitants of his homeworld Miron, were presented as semi-robotic creatures, with flexible arms, sucker feet and antennae. They clearly were not robots – Bleep’s father had a moustache, and the Miron space technicians tended to sport chinstrap beards. They ate normal food, too. But they were aliens, and highly imaginative at that. Elsewhere in their adventures, Bleep and Booster would encounter other unusual races including the thuggish, conical-capped Trugs and the 3-eyed Rotundans – round heads balanced on spindly legs (quite likely inspired by the Martians of H.G. Wells’ War of the Worlds).

The space hardware started off with a decidedly 50s look – Miron Space Freighter 9 could have flown straight out of Dan Dare, and was slickly rendered to suggest a gleaming chrome exterior; but as the stories progressed, the spacecraft became ever more imaginative – the Solar Energy Squadron looked like winged submarines, while the ‘Space Catamaran’ and ‘Solaron’ ship, despite being mere 2d paintings, were as good as anything dreamed up by Gerry Anderson’s designers and may well have been influenced by the styling of those more sophisticated productions.

Brian Hodgson’s ‘special sound’ formed an important part of the stories, adding a palpable sense of atmopshere and drama. A classic Radiophonic piece prefaced each 5-minute episode, and the sound score – including the droning sounds of the Space Freighter and ‘solar guns’ – was eerily evocative and other-worldly. I well remember the impression these sounds created: when taken in combination with the rostrum camera work, it was easy to forget you were simply watching a succession of still images. If anyone had asked me at the time whether Bleep and Booster had movement like an animated cartoon, I’d almost certainly have answered ‘yes!’

As for the stories, they were straightforward adventures, yet with a warmth and charm that went far beyond the simplicity of their presentation. If anything like Bleep and Booster were attempted today, it would, of course, be slickly produced in CGI, with gaggy, streetwise scripts and characters. But these were different times, and we were a different audience.

I totally loved Bleep and Booster. It was only on twice a year, with one serial in the spring, and another in the autumn or winter, and I always looked forward to the next adventure. To see it now is to be transported back to the living room of our home in Lichfield on a dark evening in November, curtains closed, coals burning in the grate and our mum in the kitchen getting the tea ready. The idea of a boy building a rocket in his back garden seemed totally feasible to me, and I fantasised about doing the same thing myself. If I ever came across an old spring or any random bit of junk around the house, I would see it as a vital component in the rocket I would one day build myself. Even as late as 1971, I had thoughts of building a colour television, when all I had to use was the spring out of an old biro…

Bleep and Booster never made it into the 70s. Their last adventure was aired between October and November 1969, by which time man had landed on the moon and interest in space was already beginning to wane. A palpable sense of ‘been there, done that’ soon took hold, and space subjects no longer seemed as appealing as they had done a decade earlier. But while the television adventures might have come to an end, Bleep and Booster continued to feature in the Blue Peter Annuals as late as 1977.

The characters got their own annual in 1966, courtesy of publishers Purnell, who had previously produced the original story book adventure. Two further annuals followed in 1967 and 1968, with a second story book, ‘Bleep and Booster’s Space Secret’ appearing around the same time. With illustrations by ‘Tim’, these books were as good as the TV serials, and offered the chance of seeing the characters in full colour. They were, and still are, some of my favourite books from childhood.

For such a simple, rostrum-camera based production, the two space boys clocked up a surprising amount of merchandise, including jigsaws, poseable figures and a series of marionettes from the ever-reliable Pelham Puppets (their ‘Rotundan’ has to be seen to be believed!)

Of the ten Bleep and Booster serials produced, only two are known to exist – although it is rumoured that others may yet survive in the BBC’s archives. The two extant serials – Solaron and The Giant Brain – were the last two produced, and fortunately for posterity, were released as a VHS tape in 1993 by the Polygram video label. An enterprising YouTuber has created HD upgrades from the original tapes using AI, and the results are entirely faithful to the original presentation. New viewers (and old) start here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6Fkc1zkLgFs

It may have been black and white, static drawings and as low-fi as television presentation got, but Bleep and Booster was a classic example of being so much more than the sum of its parts: proof that, in the world of children’s fiction, all you need are great characters, a good story and no limits to your imagination. Who needs CGI? Who needs AI? Bring on the art boards...

Queach, Strongle, Ablewhacket and Zurf

 

No, it’s not the sequel to Unman, Wittering and Zigo, merely a collection of linguistic oddities as served up in the TV panel game Call My Bluff. This brilliantly simple TV show, which ran from 1965 to 2004, has, for no apparent reason, been dusted off by BBC4 who are currently showing vintage episodes from the mid 70s on Monday evenings.

Unlike many other word games, Call My Bluff did not require erudition or an Oxbridge degree on the part of the viewer. Anyone could play. Each of the two teams would take it in turns to offer up three alternative definitions of obscure words from the Oxford English Dictionary, while the opposing team would attempt to deduce which of them was true and which a bluff. This simplicity and accessibility goes a long way to explain the show’s longevity. 

I don’t when or why I took to watching Call My Bluff, but it was sometime in the early to mid 70s, an era which might be considered the programme’s high watermark, and from which the BBC4 episodes have been drawn. It’s unlikely that much survives in the archive: to date we’ve seen episodes from 1974, 75 and 76, and one rather suspects these to be the sole surviving examples from three complete series (a series might comprise as many as 26 episodes). A typical example, transmitted on 3 March 1975 featured a guest line-up comprising Edward Woodward, Judy Geeson, Joan Bakewell and, somewhat surprisingly, Noel Edmonds. The two regular ‘team captains’ were Frank Muir and Patrick Campbell, and the whole shebang was presided over by Robert Robinson, possessor of one of the most famous combovers on television. Robinson was familiar to me as the presenter of Points of View (in both senior and junior incarnations) and as the host of BBC1’s upper middle class quiz Ask the Family. Frank Muir was also known to me from various appearances on Jackanory, where he often read his own tales of a dog named Whatamess. His genial demeanour and distinctive bow tie made him stand out, a genuine personality in an era when people on television were still allowed to be slightly eccentric, and middle-aged. His opposing team captain I’d never seen before (or indeed in any other context ever). Patrick Campbell, AKA the 3rd Baron Glenavy, was a humorist and man of letters, but is probably best known for his appearances on the show, where his natural stammer added a highly idiosyncratic edge to the proceedings: he often made fun of himself when he was unable to get a word out.

This was, as I’ve said, the ‘classic’ era of Call My Bluff, and the line-up endured until Campbell’s death, aged 67, in 1980. He was replaced by Arthur Marshall, whom Wikipedia describes as a writer and raconteur. Whilst he made an agreeable substitute for Campbell, I always felt the show was never quite the same again: I’d found the stammering Campbell an endearing personality, and his friendly sparring with Frank Muir and his team was always entertaining. Watching the episodes again, it’s splendid to see how much good natured gamesmanship was on display, with each side mildly taunting the other as to the veracity of their definitions. Muir is cock-a-hoop when he gets a particularly tricky word right: one almost expects his bow-tie to light up and commence to rotate at such moments.

 

Frank Muir gets one right!

There has been one slightly discomforting aspect to these repeats, in as much as I last saw them in my teens, when Muir and Campbell were in their mid 50s and early 60s respectively. Watching in 2024, at the age of 63, Muir, in his fifties, is now a comparative youngster, while Campbell is the same age as myself. Sobering...

The Radio Times, somewhat perversely, insisted on describing Call My Bluff as ‘a duel of words and wit’ which may well have deterred some viewers, expecting a highbrow panel game that would go way above their heads. That’s probably how I thought of it myself before I first tuned in. Was it at the behest of a teacher, or a school friend with superior taste? The earliest entry I can find in my diary is on Monday 21 October 1974, on which edition the guests comprised Sheila Tracy, Charles Osborne, Madeline Smith and Peter Sallis. This may well have been my introduction to the series, although I have no recollection of the episode. I did, however, retain a strong visual memory of the show with its simplistic sets – a pastel coloured geometric background behind the teams and a basic display board behind Robinson on which the words would be presented and the score kept. Robinson summoned up each new word with a ping of a small hotel lobby-style bell, and the word would duly appear behind him, clearly rotated into position by a couple of unseen stage hands. In one of the BBC4 episodes, he is amused to find one of the words already in postion before his summons: ‘Why ring the bell, it’s already there! Thanks, lads!’ The distinctive theme tune (with its three staccato beats spelling out the title) was in fact a library piece, Ciccolino, by composer and producer Norrie Paramor.

Call My Bluff wasn’t the kind of programme I typically mentioned in my diaries, but I certainly watched it week after week (assuming it didn’t clash with one of the other channels), and aside from that glancing reference in 1974, there are few entries. On Friday 29 April 1977 I did give it a mention – it was back for a new series and Joanna Lumley was one of the guests. I also spelled Patrick Campbell’s name with twelve letter ‘P’s. What a wit…

Watching the series now, its old school, low-budget presentation makes for a stark contrast against modern programming where visuals and sets are slicker and shinier in appearance. Call My Bluff is simply lit, mostly beige in tonality, and edited in the most straightforward manner imaginable. The studio format where two teams of three are ranged around a central compere, is as old as television itself, yet endures in the likes of Have I Got News for You and QI. I’m sure there are enough lingustic oddities remaining in the OED to keep any revival of the series on air indefinitely, but I don’t expect it to happen. If it was made today, it would be demoted to radio.

If, as I suspect, these random editions are all that remains of the show’s mid-70s run, then it’s a shame; but a series like this would never have been a prime candidate for archiving, especially in an era when the BBC couldn’t even manage to keep some of their classic sitcoms intact; and we should probably be thankful that any of it has survived at all. Either way, it may be with us for a few weeks yet: there is a further episode scheduled for this coming Monday, and the four shown to date can be found on iPlayer. I’m keeping copies myself, in anticipation of this being potentially the show’s last hurrah. If 1970s television and obscure words are your thing, then catch it while you can.

And the next word is...

https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/m0022nph/call-my-bluff-13051976

Life Without ITV

Forty Five Years Ago this week, Britain was reduced to a 2-channel TV nation. However did we manage?

Television was a different country back in the 1970s. Across Britain, viewers had a choice of three channels, two of them operated by the BBC. But for almost three months during the summer and early autumn of 1979, a different situation held sway. If we could travel back in time forty five years and switch on any television set, we’d find only two channels to choose from. On the third we would discover the following caption: ‘INDEPENDENT TELEVISION. We are sorry that programmes have been interrupted. There is an industrial dispute. Transmissions will start again as soon as possible.’

ITV was off the air, the victim of industrial action by members of the EETPU and ACTT trade unions. Nobody knew how long the strike would last, so that wording ‘as soon as possible’ gave false hope to viewers who, not unreasonably, must have expected a resolution within hours, if not days. Indeed, the apology caption racked up a viewing figure of close to one million, as sets were left on in the hope of normal service being resumed. That, after all, was the norm. Viewers had experienced industrial action on previous occasions, the worst instance coming in 1968 when an emergency national ITV service was mounted to cover a walkout by technicians lasting a mere few days. There would be no such quick fix in 1979. The ITV companies, headed by Thames, dug in and the unions refused to budge. By the time a resolution was agreed – in the unions’ favour – it was estimated that the ITV operators had lost £100 million in advertising revenue. Across the network, only one station maintained a service. Channel Television, ITV’s smallest operator, would not have survived the loss of its income from advertisers, and maintained a local emergency service for the duration of the strike. No network programmes were available, and only ‘off the shelf’ film items and regional news bulletins were broadcast.

For any ITV addict, then, Jersey or Guernesy would have been the place to spend your summer holiday in 1979. Definitely not Weston Super Mare, which is where I’d gone on holiday with my parents and my brother for just a few days in the second week of August. It was on the evening of Wednesday 8 August that we turned on the set in the guest house to find the regional operator HTV was off the air. By Friday, the blackout had spread to the whole independent Television network, and my diary entry for Sunday 12 August reads ‘ITV totally blacked out. BBC is rubbish programmes’. I think we need to delve a little further here. In fact, the BBC gave viewers a day of classic Hitchcock: The Thirty Nine Steps on BBC1 at 13.55, To Catch a Thief on the same channel at 20.05, and Psycho at 23.00 on BBC2. Not a bad effort, and definitely not rubbish (but I had yet to discover the genius of Mr. Hitchcock).

Like everyone else at the time, I’m sure I expected ITV to be back in a matter of days, a week at the outside. But no. My diary entries for Monday 13 and Tuesday 14 August both read the same: ‘ITV still totally blacked out’, with Tuesday’s entry adding the ominous caveat: ‘and will probably remain so.’ I had been following the situation via the BBC news and our daily paper, The Express. I’m sure I discussed it in earnest with my friend Tim Beddows, who was a regular visitor at the time. Whatever we expected to happen, we did not envisage ITV remaining off air for eleven weeks. So what were we, as confirmed ITV fans, to do in the meantime? If nothing else, we needed our nightly dose of Reginald Bosanquet on News at Ten. In fact, there weren’t that many ongoing ITV series that we were missing out on. According to my diary for the week immediately prior to the strike, Monday night meant Spooner’s Patch and Rumpole of the Bailey; Tuesday, Mind Your Language and Get Some In!; Wednesday Benny Hill, Mumfie and Cloppa Castle(which Tim and I watched in a spirit of irony) while Thursday meant a date with those elemental investigators Sapphire and Steel. My diary records no ITV activity for Friday, Saturday or Sunday, although Tim and I were now able to watch a kind of ‘alternative ITV’ in my bedroom on my 8mm sound projector, meaning that on the evening of Friday 3 August we were probably the only people in the UK watching the 1967 Avengers episode Return of the Cybernauts.

That projector would do good service during the weeks that ITV remained off air. But Super-8 aside, how did we fill our evenings with a third of Britain’s television network blacked out? For the first few days, it hardly mattered, as I was still on holiday. On Wednesday 8 August, a day of continuous heavy rain, we went to see Moonraker – the last Bond I would ever see on its original cinema release. The following evening, my mum and myself went to Weston’s Playhouse Theatre to see the comic farce Shut Your Eyes and Think of England, with a cast that included Bernard Bresslaw and John F. Landry, whom I recognised from the ITV serial Turtle’s Progress.

Some good news for vintage telly addicts like ourselves was delivered by Tim Beddows on Monday 13 August: it had been announced that the BBC was to screen twenty episodes of the vintage US anthology chiller The Outer Limits. On Tuesday, the projector, fresh from an overhaul, was out through its paces screening 8mm prints of Fireball XL5, Stingray, The Pink Panther and Laurel and Hardy. Thursday evening’s television consisted of Citizen Smith and The Persuaders – before you ask, the latter was a BBC documentary about the advertising industry rather than the better known Curtis+Moore playboy fest.

The following week saw Tim turn up with a vintage and rare item: nothing less than the Beatles’ Magical Mystery Tour on 8mm. Neither of us had seen it on its original broadcasts, and it had been gathering dust in the BBC archive ever since. Ironically, it would get an airing on BBC2 less than six months later as part of a Christmas season of Beatles films. But Tim and I were, on this occasion, ahead of the curve.

Aside from such 8mm entertainments, it was left to the BBC to keep us entertained for the duration. On Friday evenings, we got repeats of Star Trek and All Creatures Great and Small, whilst Saturday late nights brought a season of horror and sci-fi double bills. A memorable pairing was It Came From Outer Space followed by Quatermass and the Pit on Saturday 25 August. This was my first look at the third Quatermass film and I was impressed.

On Sunday 26 August, I watched televised motor racing in the evening, which was decidedly out of my wheelhouse. Bank Holiday Monday brought a Laurel & Hardy double bill (Way Out West and Fraternally Yours [the British title of Sons of the Desert]), to say nothing of Trumpton or The Magic Roundabout. The evening’s big film was The Great Escape. By this time we might well have been forgiven for thinking ‘who needs ITV anyway?’

By Saturday 1 September, with ITV still blacked out, the BBC began to roll out the big hitters for its autumn season, getting in so far ahead of their commercial rivals that the independent network stood no chance at all if and when normal service was resumed. Larry Grayson was back fronting The Generation Game which this week presented a compilation of the past series’ highlights. Also returning this evening was Dr. Who, a series I’d given up on a few years previously, when it had clashed with Space:1999. Now, with no competition from the other side, it was time to give the Doctor a second chance, and it was a Dalek story after all. What’s less easy to explain is why, that same evening, I subjected myself to Junior That’s Life. I can’t remember anything about it, which is probably for the best...

The first week of September saw me in listening mode as I worked my way through a tape of Gerry Anderson goodies that came courtesy of fellow enthusiast Theo De Klerk. Other highlights included The Lavender Hill Mob on Tuesday evening, Top of the Pops, Tomorrow’s World and Some Mothers Do ‘Ave ‘Em. On Wednesday 5 September, BBC1 had scheduled an episode of Star Trek, The Galileo Seven, but it went unbroadcast, the evening’s programmes having been pre-empted by the televised funeral of Lord Mountbatten, following his murder by the IRA on 27 August.

By now, ITV had been off air for a whole month, an unprecedented situation. It was beginning to look as if the situation might never be resolved, and the blackout wasn’t even halfway over. ‘Nothing much on TV’ reports my diary for Monday 10 September, although I contradicted myself a few lines later by recording that I’d watched the 1973 movie That’ll Be the Day (BBC1, 21.25). A step forward in Tim’s and my enjoyment of 8mm films came on Wednesday 12 September when I finally got myself a screen. Prior to this, we’d had to resort to watching films projected onto the cardboard lid of a posh birthday card (which was, it must be said, most effective). Home movies occupied a fair chunk of this week, with telly highlights including one of Star Trek’s most effective episodes, The Enemy Within, and, on Sunday evening, the first part of the well remembered BBC adaptation of John Le Carre’s Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy starring Alec Guinness.

Monday 17 September saw a minor setback, with the projector returned for ‘minor repairs’ (it had a tendency to run slow). No matter: Tim and I resorted to records. He turned up that evening with an armful of current chart singles including Roxy Music’s ‘Angel Eyes’, ELO’s ‘The Diary of Horace Wimp’ (horrors!) and Gerry Rafferty’s ‘Get it Right Next Time’. Some new bedroom furniture occupied some of my time midweek, sorting out books and stuff, and on Thursday I put a new ribbon in my portable typewriter. Those early autumn evenings were fairly flying by...

Monday 25 September saw the ITV strike enter its seventh week, with still no sign of a resolution. Tim and I watched Return of the Cybernauts again, while the evening brought episode three of Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy and The Two Ronnies. Wednesday night saw Michael Parkinson return with a new series, displaced from its customary Saturday slot. My diary offered an exclamation mark by way of a raised eyebrow. But the most memorable evening of the week came on Saturday. Tim had procured an episode of The Champions on 8mm, Project Zero (the only known copy). I hadn’t seen the series for nine years, and never in colour, and just to hear the music again was a properly nostalgic experience. That mild autumn evening has stayed with me ever since. But change was imminent. Monday 1 October was my first day in higher education, as I embarked on a degree in Communication Studies at Coventry (Lanchester) Polytechnic. As a degree, it was worthless, as a passport to any kind of future career less than useless, and as an opportunity to fly the nest and get away from the family home, it was squandered. I commuted there for three years.

One thing the course had its favour was the occasional opportunity to watch bits of television. On Thursday 4 October, we got to watch an episode of G.F. Newman’s series Law and Order, the harrowing (for its time) A Prisoner’s Tale. The following day brought two colour films of Thunderbirds all the way from Amsterdam, but they were only five minutes long. And silent…

The BBCs programme planners must have been on a roll, as each new item in the autumn schedule was unveiled with no threat of competition, apart from themselves. Sunday 30 September introduced a strong Sunday evening line-up with the Penelope Keith comedy To the Manor Born and radio detective Shoestring both making their debut. That was my Sunday evenings sorted out for the forseeable future. Another new series arrived on Wednesday 10 October, with a short return for Michael Palin and Terry Jones’ Ripping Yarns. Although my diary pronounced it ‘V. good’ I remember being somewhat underwhelmed at the time. The following week brought still more new comedy to BBC2 in the form of Not the Nine O’Clock News. I missed the first week, but was tuned in for the second episode on Tuesday 23 October, which also happened to be the last full day of the ITV dispute.

The network returned, with due fanfare, on Wednesday 24 October, with a nationally networked service for the first two weeks. I could still sing you the celebratory jingle ‘Welcome Home to ITV’ that introduced that first night, but I won’t (the Mike Sammes Singers were more than up to the task). Programmes recommenced with the News at 5.45. We tended to watch the BBC’s early evening news in our house, but must have made an exception this evening. The network was, however, at a distinct disadvantage, with no new studio productions ready to roll. The evening’s big draw was a brand new Quatermass serial that saw John Mills donning the mantle of Nigel Kneale’s venerable crusty scientist, and this was only available as it had been shot on film, by the independent production base Euston Films. Viewers starved of ITV for the best part of three months must surely have tuned in to see it, but far from being the saviour of the network, Quatermass was something of a non-event, with disappointing reviews and ratings. ITV would continue to struggle for several months to come, as the various operators worked to make good the defecit in new programming. Another new, filmed series debuted the following Monday, in the form of Minder, Dennis Waterman’s big new post-Sweeney role (he even got to sing the theme tune). I tuned in, almost out of loyalty to ITV and Euston Films, and continued to watch for the remainder of the series; but I never became a true fan. Dennis Waterman’s performance was too much like George Carter, and I didn’t care for the light comedy drama style. Some years later I would recognise it for what it was – LWT’s Budgie, revisited.

For all that, ITV was back – we had The Professionals on Saturday nights , the rest of Quatermass, a new Jasper Carrott show (Carrott Gets Rowdy, Friday 2 November) and… and… well, frankly, not a lot else. In truth, ITV had become the poor relation in our house. Once, back in the 60s, we’d watched it all the time, but that had been the era of ITC, with a glamorous new series every autumn, and Gerry Anderson productions everywhere you looked. By the late 70s, ITV looked played out to me. Michael Grade’s attempt to annexe Saturday evenings with Bruce’s Big Night had failed, and the network was struggling to establish any really good new situation comedies.

The TV Times offered some small insights into how viewers had coped with the absence of ITV over eleven weeks, and the 27 October ‘emergency’ national edition included a small feature which concluded that the genre most missed by viewers was sitcom. 44% of those interviewed in a national survey said they’d missed the comedy shows, while 40% were feeling the lack of movies. 39% cited ITN news as their most missed item, 38% said sport, while 34% were left reeling from the absence of their favourite soaps. All of which provided an excuse to flag down some of the comedies featured in the coming week’s listings. With Freddie Starr and Bernie Winters getting namechecks, it was hardly the strongest of line-ups.

Highlights from the first full week of post-strike ITV included the movie Gold, blooper show It’ll Be All Right on the Night 2, new sitcom Only When I Laugh, George and Mildred, drearily incomprehensible gameshow 3,2,1, The Muppets and Cannon and Ball, big hitters all, but I wasn’t biting, not even when the bait was the long-delayed second adventure for Sapphire and Steel that the strike had interrupted.

It’s tempting to speculate on how the nation would have coped in the event of all three television channels going off air. Many viewers would still have remembered the days when the choice had been BBC or ITV, and the commercial network had only been on the scene for a little over twenty years. I’m sure it would not have been a catastrophe. ITV’s absence from the airwaves was probably more worrying to its executives and shareholders than to the average viewer at home.

Today, of course, we have an almost unlimited choice of viewing from satellite, digital and streaming platforms. It’s not beyond the bounds of possibility that something like a cyber attack or catastrophic system failure could take out a sizeable number of those channels, but would people miss them? Would they even notice? Take away their social media feed for more than thirty seconds and panic sets in, but television? I don’t think so. We live in different times.

The Collector – 3: Stamps

It may have escaped your notice – indeed, it will have escaped the notice of all but the most dedicated philatelists – but 2024 marks the 100th anniversary of the commemorative postage stamp. The very first issue, marking the British Empire Exhibition, appeared in April 1924. It was a slow beginning: another five years were to elapse before the next commemorative issue, celebrating the Ninth Universal Postal Union Congress of 1929, and any budding collectors would have had to wait a further six years until the silver jubilee of King George V was commemorated by four stamps issued in May of 1936.

It wasn’t until the reign of Queen Elizabeth II that the idea of commemorative stamps really started to take off. A mere seven issues had spanned the era of her father, George VI, and even the Elzabethan age took its time to produce anything of serious interest to philatelists. These early commemoratives are quite dull by comparison with the colourful designs that would follow, and were usually printed in single colours. Two-colour printing arrived with 1960’s issue commemorating the European Postal and Telecommunications Conference. The design, in green and purple, was very traditional, looking rather like a banknote, and gave no hint of the radical ideas that would follow during the next decade.

I have never, in all honesty, been a bona fide collector of stamps. I own a couple of stamp albums, certainly, but my interest in philately has never been more than casual; occasional spurts of renewed enthusiasm in between decades of indifference. Like most collectors, I began by saving any interesting stamps that arrived in the post. Which is to say, my mum began saving them. She received regular mail from relatives in the Republic of Ireland, so those were probably among the first stamps I ever collected. Others were culled from postcards hailing mostly from mainland Europe, and the occasional letter from an aunt in America.

Besides steaming them off envelopes, you could buy packets of stamps in most local newsagents. In the late 1960s, during a mania for anything to do with dinosaurs, I spotted a set of prehistoric animal stamps in the window of Dillons newsagents in Mere Green, close to where we lived. Needless to say, these were not a British issue – no prehistoric reptiles would appear on our stamps until 1991. The stamps were of a kind produced specifically to appeal to juvenile collectors, and hailed from places I’d never heard of – Fujeira and Umm Al Quwain, both members of the United Arab Emirates. They were also very large – much bigger than any British stamps – and highly coloured. Although they all bore franking marks across their corners, these were faked for the sake of supposed collectabilty. The stamps had never genuinely been posted.

Although I’d watched Blue Peter for many years and seen the programme’s own stamp album regularly updated by Val, John and Pete, I took little or no interest in British stamps at this time. In 1966, the programme had run a competition to design what would go on to be the UK’s first ever Christmas commemorative stamps. I didn’t enter. The competition was won by Tasveer Shemza and James Barry, with their designs of a Magi king and a snowman respectively. Tasveer was in fact the daughter of a Pakistani artist and poet, Anwar Shemza, which probably gave her an edge over the other entrants. Her design quickly became iconic, and its journey from a child’s painting to mass production at Harrison and Sons, printers to the GPO, provided an interesting feature on Blue Peter (reproduced in the following year’s annual). This may well have been one of the first British stamps our mum steamed off an envelope for me.

Stamp collecting remained a now and then kind of hobby, one best saved for rainy afternoons on weekends and school holidays when all other avenues of interest had been thoroughly explored. I still have my first ‘Trans World’ stamp album, into which I would add occasional items. All nations were allocated a single page, and it is a wonder to me looking through it now that the best represented country should be the former Yugoslavia, a fact for which I cannot account.

In 1975, my collecting began to step up a gear and I began to buy packets of used stamps from an Oxfam shop in Sutton Coldfield. These were comprised of British stamps, both commemorative and definitive (the name collectors assign to ‘ordinary’ postage stamps). Each packet contained a completely random sample, culled mostly from the past decade and a half. Anything of value had been carefully weeded out, so there were no chance discoveries of Penny Blacks, although some of the more common Victorian stamps turned up frequently.

Before long, I removed the stamps from the British pages of my Trans World album, and began to compile a new collection, devoted specifically to British issues. This must have been in the summer of 1975, because the first set I went out and bought from new was released on 13 August of that year, marking the 150th anniversary of the steam train. The album is testament to the mercurial nature of my interest: many sets were bought but remained unmounted, and it fizzled out altogether some time in 1980.

One name stands pre-eminent in the world of philatetly, and it was to this fount of knowledge that I turned when I began in a semi-serious manner to collect British stamps. Stanley Gibbons is the world’s longest established dealer in rare stamps, and their check list, costing just 30p, became my guide to the world of British stamps. I still have their 12th edition, illustrating, in colour, every British stamp ever issued, from the Penny Black of 1840, right through to the County Cricket commemorative set of May 1973. Every stamp was accompanied by its current market value in used or unused condition. An unused Penny Black would have left you £125 lighter back in 1973, whereas today even a heavily cancelled example can be worth four or five times that amount, and certain desirable variants are priced in the thousands. Elsewhere, however, it’s a different story. The commemoratives that interested me in that 1973 catalogue varied in price from a few pence up to as much as £1.50 for examples with phosphor bands (an optional type that was being trialled as part of the development of mechanical sorting offices). Today, the values of most such stamps have declined in real terms, and complete year sets can easily be obtained for no more than a couple of pounds (with only the phosphor issues retaining any level of rarity and value). In the early 90s, I wandered into a stamp fair at the local civic hall, and was surprised at how values had collapsed. Stamps that cost maybe £2 each in that 1973 catalogue were now available for pennies. A dealer explained the situation to me: following the stock market crash of 1987, many collectors cashed in their stamp albums, resulting in an oversupply. This situation has persisted until the present day. Any collector starting out could now buy virtually the entire decade of 1960s British commemorative stamps for around £30.

I decided this was what I would do: start again on collecting GB commemoratives, this time in mint condition, and compiling full year sets from the 60s and 70s. Once again, however, I did not pursue my rediscovered hobby with any real level of dilgence. From the fair, I bought a few year sets containing stamps I’d never managed to collect the first time around, and bought a new album with proper cellophane mounts to keep the stamps pristine. I soon forgot all about it. Something like fifteen years went by before I looked out my ‘new’ stamp album again, and decided to try and fill some of the gaps. A flurry of ebay purchases followed before, once again, philately and I parted company. 

One thing I decided long ago was to stop collecting new commemorative stamps. They just weren't the same any more. Back in the 1960s, with designs from the likes of prolific artist David Gentleman, a definite aesthetic held sway over British stamps. Many issues made use of only two or three colours, yet within these limitations some dynamic designs appeared, many of them reflecting Harold Wilson’s ‘White Heat’ technological revolution: the Forth Bridge, the GPO Tower, nuclear reactors, the E-Type Jaguar… all of these had appeared on British stamps by the middle of the decade. Even the Queen’s image had been given a stylised makeover: David Gentleman, frustrated at having to include the monarch’s portrait in his commemorative designs, proposed a new, simplified silhouette which, through the offices of Postmaster General Tony Benn, was soon given the Royal seal of approval. That same silhouette would appear on all commemorative stamps until the end of the Elizabethan era. Meanwhile, advances in print technology saw the first full-colour designs (British Birds, 8 August 1966), and a new large format (British Paintings, 10 July 1967). Some sets were issued in continuous blocks – David Gentleman’s 1966 Battle of Hasting set imaginatively used imagery from the Bayeux Tapestry with the stamps issued ‘se-tenant’ in conjoined strips of six.

My appreciation of stamps fed into my apreciation of modern design history: comparing stamps from the early 60s with those of a decade later, I could see trends in design such as the lean towards traditionalism in the ‘Laura Ashley’ era of the late 60s and early 70s. Some years were better than others: for me, the years 1964-68 were the high watermark of commemorative stamp design, with a clean, unfussy and often minimalist approach exemplfied by the work of Gentleman and others. 1970 and 1971 by contrast, were strikingly dull, with drab and dreary colours and some dull subject matter. For me, the absolute worst set ever was 1977’s Jubilee issue, whose colour schemes strongly suggested the work of a colour blind designer. By now, a much more ornate look had come to dominate the stamp world, with many admittedly fine but perhaps over elaborate illustrations replacing the sometimes stark graphics of the mid 60s, and I began to lose interest in stamps as aesthetic objects.

The anniversaries and achievements commemorated on stamps had always been of a high order: explorers, technological innovation, historic moments, all of them good, sober, academic subjects to which any Mastermind contestant might aspire. Today, it’s a different world. Dinosaurs have finally featured on British stamps (more than once), as have X-Men, Dame Shirley Bassey, Paddington (the bear, not the railway station), Aardman Animations, The Spice Girls, Harry Potter and Peppa Pig. Alongside these (some would say) frivolous issues, there have been a few sets in the older manner, commemorating the Red Arrows, The Flying Scotsman, Windrush and, of course, Christmas.

Meantime, I still have my own album to complete. I doubt it will ever extend beyone 1980, and I’m stretching a point by including some of the ‘dull years’ that I’ve avoided until now: but all collections should have an endpoint, a moment at which they reach completeness. It’s only taken me forty-nine years...