Let's Quist Again

 

Doomwatch is back. 

It stirred up controversy in its day, and made a pin-up out of a young Robert Powell (above) before blowing him to kingdom come. What was the fuss all about? If you haven't seen Doomwatch since the 70s (or indeed, at all), now's your chance to find out.

For those of us who bought the DVD collection back in 2016, the return of Doomwatch to broadcast TV is no big deal. What matters is that it's being shown at all, having been absent from the small screen since an early 90s Saturday morning repeat on UK Gold. But as of tonight, it's back in its proper place, at 9pm, on Talking Pictures TV.

Fans of the series will, of course, own the DVDs already, but what makes these 2025 repeats more interesting is the fact that they will draw in more casual viewers, many of whom will probably remember the show from back in the 70s, without ever having thought to seek it out on DVD or online. Others will be watching for the first time...

One might well wonder what today’s audience will make of Doomwatch. With its eco-friendly agenda, it will no doubt have a certain resonance even if the environmental disasters it predicted are more reflective of the era in which it was made. Today’s eco disasters are way beyond the scope of Dr. Quist’s Doomwatch department. Even so, it was an important series in that it was one of the first, if not the first television series that asked its audience to engage with the problem of pollution in its many forms. It went a bit off the rails at times – by series three, the Doomwatch department were dealing with moral pollution, in an episode that has yet to be broadcast by any television channel – but on the whole it did much to forefront concern for the environment, and sounded a timely note of caution in respect of scientific progress left unchallenged.

Fifty-five years later, we can all see the results of what happens if you give technology its head – the internet is arguably the atomic bomb of the 21st century, and if you want an example of moral pollution, there can be no more pernicious example. There are many other arenas in which society today could benefit from an initiative like Doomwatch – driverless vehicles for one – and in general, it seems, from where I’m standing, as though science and technology are being given far too much leeway. App-based AI has played into the hands of multi-billion corporations, and Keir Starmer’s naive pronouncements this week about Britain becoming an AI superpower need watching very carefully. AI allows big business to do away with manpower and transform its customer-facing operations into a chatbot-driven nightmare. It has almost totally eliminated banking from our high streets, and if you want virtually any other kind of public service, there is no alternative other than to go online. Will this make for a better Britain, or will it transform society into a mass of smartphone-dependent individuals, everyone online but no one truly connected to their fellow human beings? Or has that already happened? Where's Dr. Quist when you need him?

Doomwatch may not have foreseen the internet, but its creators Kit Pedler and Gerry Davis could already see the potential danger of putting too much faith in computers: the episode Project Sahara is the closest Doomwatch gets to interrogating AI, where we see an advanced computer system (far beyond anything that existed in 1970) being used to make recruitment decisions – exactly what is happening right now.

Elsewhere, the concerns of 1970 sometimes seem like a storm in a teacup – there has never been a nuclear-powered rocket launch system, nor has science evolved a species of intelligent super rats. Some of the science was questionable even at the time: ‘thunder shake’, a pheomenon which Quist observes in a cracked brandy glass (having supposedly been caused by aircraft noise) is a real thing, but it is observed in wood, not glass. Real scientists occasionally took the series to task in print, but Doomwatch was always a step ahead of reality and therefore, essentially, science fiction. Its value as a piece of television was in getting people talking, stimulating debate about the real problems posed by real world science.

It was, of course, a product of its time, and casual sexism abounds, to an extent that 21st century viewers will find hard to accept. The characters were, on paper, cardboard cut-outs, and it was only the skill of the actors that brought them to life. Much of the series consists of men in ill-advised attire shouting at each other in rooms that look like the Goodies’ Cricklewood headquarters. At its worst, Doomwatch is Man at C&A vs Man in Carnaby Street, with the two extremes personified by Doctors Quist and Ridge respectively. But it meant well, and it didn’t deserve the treatment it got from the BBC, who wiped the bulk of the master tapes without ever repeating a single episode. 

It is more by luck than judgement that Doomwatch survives at all, and viewers tuning in to the upcoming Talking Pictures repeats are bound to notice the uneven quality between episodes preserved as video master tapes, and those upscaled from poorer quality sources.

Will I even bother to watch myself? It’s not that long since I last dusted off the DVD collection, and I only made it through the incomplete first series before giving up. Series two is a very mixed bag, with far too many regular characters and some episodes that are plain boring. Series three effectively doesn’t exist, with only three episodes extant, one of them the unbroadcast Sex and Violence, which is embarrassingly bad. For a series that started on a thermonuclear bang, Doomwatch went out on a whimper – relegated to a midsummer slot when hardly anybody was watching.

That said, I’ll be tuned in, if only for the existential experience of seeing Doomwatch broadcast at a properly adult, 9pm ‘post watershed’ slot for the first time since 1972. And I hope that it won’t just be the old guard watching. The series deserves to be better remembered, and if today’s viewers can see past the flowery shirts and sexism, they may be surprised at what they find.

Doomwatch – Fridays from 17 January, 9pm, Talking Pictures TV

In the Year 2025

I ended 2024's advent calendar of blog posts with Zager & Evans' 1969 single In the Year 2525. That's still five hundred years distant, but here in 2025 we'll be seeing a few anniversaries of icons from pop culture. Here's a rundown of some that I've picked out...

Now we are ten: Talking Pictures TV got started in 2015. The channel, specialising in archive entertainment, grew out of the Renown Pictures DVD label, and its earliest schedules featured a lot of old British films to which Renown held rights. Its first forays into vintage television were all of American vintage – Honey West, Amos Burke and others – but deals with ITV and BBC soon led to a fuller and more interesting mix of programming.

The channel quickly became a media talking point, and was praised for reviving some long forgotten items, most of which had, in fact, already been released on the Network DVD label. But Network was never at its best when it came to self-promotion, so it was hardly surprising when the latecomers took all the credit for revivals like Gideon’s Way and Maigret. Network and TP should really have got together, but aside from selling them the broadcast rights to Maigret, it never really happened.

TPTV will, I’m sure, continue to be successful, although some reinvention will almost certainly be required as their target audience ages into oblivion. If high definition is your priority, there are better places to source a lot of its material, for the bitrate remains disappointingly low, but rare items do often surface that can’t readily be found elsewhere. Of the few broadcasters specialising in what one might call ‘extreme archive’ material, TPTV remains at the forefront, outclassing channels like That’sTV (who appear to be using DVDs as source material) or Rewind, whose line-up is simply boring. So here’s to another ten years of Talking Pictures… will that usherette ever get the right change, I wonder?

Now we are twenty: Desperate Housewives made its first British appearance on Channel 4 on 5 January 2005, with overnight viewing figures (4.4 million) scoring the second highest ratings for an American series in the channel’s history. I’d heard it being talked about in the media during that week, most notably by the late Steve Wright who seemed particularly taken with it, but I'd decided it probably wasn’t for me. Later that week, I’d had the TV turned on to watch some DVDs and when they ended, the set defaulted to whatever was being broadcast at the time. I found myself in the middle of a domestic farce that was sharply witty, well observed and, in places, laugh out loud funny. What on earth was it? Came the next advert break, I realised I’d been watching Desperate Housewives, on a rebroadcast of the opening episode. It was quite unlike me to get behind any piece of contemporary television, but I stuck with it to the end of the first series and some way beyond – not, I might add, to the bitter end (whenever that was). It clearly owed much to the style of David Lynch, with its outwardly innocuous suburban setting concealing darkly comedic existential angst and some edgy storylines. Perhaps its most influential aspect was the quirky soundtrack which has been imitated to death ever since on hundreds of lifestyle and makeover shows.

Now we are thirty: I wasn’t watching a lot of television back in 1995, and what I was watching tended to be archive material on satellite channels like UK Gold and the late, lamented Bravo. Of the year’s new series, I remained almost utterly oblivious. I was late to the party for Father Ted (21 April 1995), which I initially dismissed as a dreary ecclesiastical comedy before being tipped off by a friend as to its surreally subversive style. That aside, the year’s only notable televisual event for me came in November with the long awaited Beatles Anthology series. Judging from the over-long and excessively detailed account of 1995 in British television that appears on Wikipedia, I didn’t miss anything. And the pop charts were a bit rubbish too, unless you cared about the much hyped and pointless ‘rivalry’ between Blur and Oasis…

Now we are forty: Live Aid will celebrate its fourth decade anniversary on 13 July this year, a fact which Bob Geldof curiously omitted to mention on Jools Holland’s New Year’s Eve Hootenanny, where he was busy promoting the fifttieth anniversary of his band, the Boomtown Rats. I sat and watched some, but by no means all of the 1985 event at a gathering of friends who made an afternoon of it with food and drink. I can’t say that many of the participants were of particular interest to me at the time, as I’d taken to following more obscure independent artists, but you couldn’t help but acknowledge that history was being made…

Now we are fifty: The Sweeney has already scored its half century on 2 January. I don’t know how well it was promoted at the time of its 1975 debut, and it's more than likely that any trailers got lost amongst the festive schedules. For whatever reason,  I didn’t cotton onto it until the second series, beginning in the autumn, and I suspect this was the case for other viewers, too. 1975 was a prime year for television debuts, with The Good Life kicking off in April, Fawlty Towers in September and Gerry Anderson’s Space:1999 the same month.

Now we are sixty: Later this month, it will be the 60th anniversary of TV Century 21, its January 1965 launch clearly timed to provide a useful promotional tool for the upcoming Thunderbirds (60 in September). 1965 also saw the Beatles’ second feature film Help! released in cinemas, with the album of the same name followed in December by Rubber Soul. 

Now we are seventy: The biggest televisual anniversary of this year, whether the network chooses to commemorate it or not, will be that of ITV (22 September 1955). The channel was only initially available to viewers in the London and South East areas, before extending its coverage to the Midlands and North the following year. Earlier in the year, Muffin the Mule’s adventures were curtailed by the death of his piano-playing mentor Annette Mills, and Benny Hill’s first television series premiered on the BBC. One of the most anticipated television events of 1955 must have been Quatermass II (22 October), the belated sequel to the 1953 original. But the award for the most enduring TV series of 1955 belongs to The Phil Silvers Show (aka Sgt Bilko) which made its debut Stateside on 20 September. British viewers would have to wait until April 1957, but were able to watch it in repeat runs for another forty-five years. Now, if Talking Pictures want a sure fire success to add some much needed comedic weight to their schedule, they could do a lot worse than drafting in the Fort Baxter crowd... 

I'll be returning to some of these subjects when their respective anniversaries roll around... along with a variety of other topics. 

Advent Sunday in Old Money: Day 24

 

Christmas '74

Christmas 1974 – I can remember it in some detail. Not like it happened yesterday, but with reasonable clarity considering it was fifty years ago. Strange how the memory works – I can picture us driving out to see our relatives on the afternoon of Christmas Eve; I can even remember the kind of day it was, the sky typical for the time of year, partly blue, partly cloudy. We were passing Hams Hall Power Station on our way to see a couple of aunts and uncles who lived in that general direction, and the radio was playing in our dad’s Austin 2200. I can even tell you the record that was playing: Gloria Gaynor singing Never Can Say Goodbye, number 25 in that week’s top fifty. Why this particular moment should have become lodged in the memory I have no idea, as the rest of the afternoon is a blank...

Reconstructing the past is always easier if you have a diary to refer to. My ‘Letts’ Schoolboys’ Diary’ of that year is small, and short on detail, except for when it comes to television, but there’s just enough there for me to piece together a run-down of the days leading up to Christmas 1974. On Thursday 12 December, I went to a Christmas concert at my old junior school. On the following day, we put up our Christmas tree – for more on that see day 2 in this advent calendar. On the evening of Saturday 14 December, we put up paper chains, during Bruce Forsyth’s Generation Game – and I can still picture us doing it. In fact, decorating the tree during the Generation Game would become a bit of a tradition in our house during the mid-70s.

Christmas week 1974, as recorded in my Letts' Schoolboys' Diary

The following day saw me back on my comic creating activities, which I’ve written about recently, breaking off only when an old school friend came round to play guitar. On Monday night, I watched that year’s edition of Carry On Christmas, ITV’s annual festive version of the famous film series. Four decades later, I designed a sleeve for the DVD release. Wednesday’s big event was the coming of that year’s Christmas TV and Radio Times, the latter featuring Frank Spencer on a decidedly austere and mostly un-festive cover. Tommy Steele was on the TV Times, an issue sadly missing from my collection of pdfs. If I could spare the £54.99 the seller is asking for, I could have got the same ATV Midland edition off eBay in time for Christmas… albeit fifty years too late.

The following evening was the night of our school carol concert, and I was in the choir so attendance was inevitable. It’s solely on account of rehearsals for said concert that I know how to pronounce the word ‘excelsis’ which appears in the lyric of Ding-Dong Merrily On High. Back in primary school, we’d sung it the way it looks – ‘ex-sell-sis’ when in fact it should be pronounced ‘ex-chel-sis’as any Latin scholar would tell you, and our music master insisted. That’s very Boris Johnson of me, I know...

The following day, Thursday 19 December, we broke up for the holidays, giving us almost a whole free week to get ready for the big day. On the Friday evening, we got a repeat showing of last year’s Goodies and the Beanstalk, which was very welcome. On Saturday, I bought my mum’s Christmas present, seemingly from a discount warehouse called ‘Big D’ – the diary does not record what it was, but in the words of Bob Ferris from that year’s Likely Lads, it was almost certainly ‘something for the house’. I also got the Christmas edition of The Dandy, which you can share by scrolling down.

On Sunday, as I’ve mentioned previously, the evening’s must-see television event was the BBC’s Omnibus profile of the careers of Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy, a film that would be well worth resurrecting. On Monday 23rd, the BBC gave us another excellent documentary in the form of Horizon: How on Earth Did They Do That? (9.05pm, BBC2) a film that went behind the scenes of the movie special effects industry and included rare clips of scenes censored from King Kong, as well as a tantalising first glimpse of Gerry Anderson’s Space:1999. As if that wasn’t enough, by turning back to BBC1, if you could endure The Spinners at Christmas, you’d have been rewarded with the first broadcast of what was arguably the best of the BBC’s Ghost Stories for Christmas – The Treasure of Abbot Thomas (11.35pm, BBC1).

Christmas Eve was a Tuesday – then as now – which meant a new Top 20 at lunchtime. Following this, we went out for the afternoon, which is where I started this reminiscence. We were back home in time to see another festive first, the ‘Special Edition for Christmas’ of Whatever Happened to the Likely Lads. I’ve seen it so many times over the years, it's hard now to imagine it as a brand new programme. It will, unfortunately, never be broadcast in its original form again, the BBC having excised a line in which Bob namechecks the dread bearded antipodean entertainer. The episode ended with the characters having a ‘Christmas drink’ and I did the same thing myself as soon as the programme was over. Mine was a scotch and dry ginger, which was something of a watershed moment, as I believe it was one of the very first times that I drank spirits (I was just thirteen). These days, I’d pass on the dry ginger. With this in hand and a bowl of nuts on the table, I sat down to enjoy the evening’s big film, Ice Station Zebra.

Christmas Day brought a visit from our Grandparents – from 1967 until 1972 we’d been to their house at Christmas, which meant leaving all our new toys behind for the day when we’d only just opened them. A falling out between relatives had brought this to an end in 1973, and this year the roles were reversed. As to this year’s ‘toys’, for me, that meant a lot of LPs – three Beatle albums, a James Bond Collection, Eric Clapton’s recent 461 Ocean Boulevard, 10cc’s Sheet Music, an EMI Dracula album and, incongruously, an LP by the year’s chart-topping band Paper Lace. The latter is possibly on course for some kind of record, as it has never seen turntable action from that day to this. On top of all this, I got a Polaroid Camera – why I didn’t ask for a proper camera, I’ll never know. I think I liked the idea of getting instant results, but I was several decades too early for a smartphone...

Boxing Day meant a Beatles film, and as we’ve previously seen, this year’s offering was a second outing for Help! It may have been in colour, but it looked like an artefact from another time, for all that it was a mere nine years old… a few months older than the album Rubber Soul (originally released just in time for Christmas 1965), which I played for the first time that same afternoon. It was darkly overcast outside, and like that Christmas Eve car ride, I can still replay the scene in my mind’s eye. Hearing Rubber Soul was little short of a revelatory moment. I already knew the Beatles were good, but I didn’t know they’d ever done anything this good. The progress they’d made in the few months between this and Help! was phenomenal. It was the best LP I’d ever heard. It still is.

By 1974, Christmas on BBC1 meant a complete Dr. Who adventure, and this year’s offering was Planet of the Spiders, nicely edited down from the unweildy 6-episode original to fill an hour and forty five minutes on the afternoon of 27 December. Planet of the Spiders was the first regeneration I’d ever witnessed in Dr. Who, so it felt a bit special. The scheduling was deliberate, for the following day would see Tom Baker make his debut in the role.

The rest of the festive season was spent drawing nonsensical cartoons, playing games we’d been bought at Christmas (‘Spy Trap’ [above]– a kind of tiddlywinks with attitude) and playing with toys. I know – I was thirteen, surely I’d grown out of Lego by this time, but no. I may have been still of an age to play with toys, but I was old enough by now to be allowed to stay up and see in the New Year. This was no big deal in our house – our Dad was always out on a gig on New Year’s Eve, traditionally the best paying night of the year for any musician, so we didn’t do anything special. Instead, we saw a bit of The Old Grey Whistle Test, now well on its way to becoming a New Year tradition. New Year’s Day, a bank holiday for only the second time, brought a random repeat of a UFO episode (The Psychobombs), more Lego fun and a visit to our grandparents. There were still six more days remaining of the school holidays, which came to an end in style with a visit to the cinema on Monday 6 January to see a James Bond double bill – Live and Let Die and the nicely festive On Her Majesty’s Secret Service.

And with that, we were done. Whatever you’re up to fifty years later, have a very happy and peaceful Christmas and I hope you’ve enjoyed this nostalgic trip down an artificial snow-lined memory lane. Sunday – in even older money – will resume normal service in the year 2025. Which I think should be the cue to end on a song…

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=izQB2-Kmiic

And here's that Christmas Dandy – in full – click on each image for a larger version.

Advent Sunday in Old Money: Day 23

 

Holiday Star Trek

Monday, December 23rd 1974. We had the television on early – it was the Christmas holidays, and there were programmes on in the morning. This was a relatively recent development, and the coming years would see an interesting mix of nostalgic programming occupying the post-meridian slots on BBC and ITV. On this particular morning, we were tuned in to see Top Cat at 9.55am on BBC1. And when I say Top Cat, I mean Boss Cat – the BBC had coyly rebranded the series back in the 1960s to avoid giving free publicity to a brand of tinned cat meat. This retitling merely consisted of a new caption card, jaggedly cut into the original opening titles. How I wish they’d got someone to sing ‘Boss Cat’ over the title song, but it was not to be. I mean, ‘close friends get to call him BC’? 

Top Cat was all very well, but this morning’s schedule included a first for British television – an episode of Star Trek broadcast during the day as opposed to in the evening. It felt a bit special: I mean, it was Christmas, and Star Trek was on in the morning. Moreover, it was on again tomorrow, Christmas Eve – and again on Boxing Day. This wouldn’t seem in any way remarkable to modern viewers but back in 1974 it was a broadcasting first: four Star Trek episodes in the space of a week. How special can you get? The BBC obviously felt that way because the Radio Times billing gave the title as ‘Holiday Star Trek’, which still gives me a warm glow of nostalgia. Those broadcasts were special for me in another way, as they was the first episodes I ever got to see in colour (we’d got our first colour TV set back in November). 

There was nothing different about the presentation, although it’s quite possible that the continuity announcer would have added a festive note or two – unlike Top/Boss Cat, we didn’t get the word ‘Holiday’ superimposed over the opening titles. Although I rather wish we had…

One aspect of the BBC’s presentation of Star Trek that would surprise modern audiences was the decision to relocate the opening titles to the beginning of each episode. The BBC didn’t go a bundle on the kind of ‘cold opening’ favoured by American series, and wouldn’t do it on any of their own productions until Doomwatch in 1970. Having the main titles up front allowed the programme presentation technicians to crossfade from the rotating BBC world to the star field that opened each episode. I don’t know if they did it from day one, but it became a kind of stock in trade. I may even have some examples preserved on VHS tape somewhere. 

Another BBC tradition around this time was the addition of festive trappings to the rotating globe logo. I’m not sure exactly when this got started, but my diary entry for December 24 1977 begins with the observation ‘BBC world is a Christmas pud.’ So that may have been the first year. Unfortunately, ‘Holiday Star Trek’ was over and done with by then – indeed, the original series didn’t get a solitary airing during 1977. So the prospect of seeing a spaceborne Christmas pudding accompanying William Shatner’s magisterial ‘space, the final frontier’ must remain an unfulfilled fantasy.

‘Holiday Star Trek’ would run for only two festive seasons, in 1974 and 1975. Its first year comprised eight episodes from the show’s first two seasons – although, by the BBC’s reckoning these were all ‘second series’ episodes, the corporation having mixed up episodes from the three original US seasons to create four British series. The festive missions of the starship Enterprise kicked off with one of my personal favourites, The Enemy Within. I know I watched this, because the entry is there in my diary. Christmas Eve’s episode was Court Martial, but Christmas Day was a Trek-free zone. Boxing Day saw the Halloween episode Catspaw beamed into our living rooms, then Kirk and co were off air from Friday 27 December through Sunday 29th , returning on Monday where viewers could have seen a pre-Starsky and Hutch David Soul with an iffy hairdo in The Apple. New Year’s Eve brought Metamorphosis, while 1975 kicked off to the accompaniment of Wolf in the Fold at 10.55am. The Changeling followed on Thursday 2 January before The Trouble With Tribbles brought the short season to an end on Friday 3^rd.

The BBC weren’t just showing any old episodes at random – not yet anyway. Aside from transposing the first two episodes, this short run preserved the broadcast order adopted by the corporation for their ‘second series’ of Star Trekback in April 1970. A run of ‘first series’ repeats had come to an end on Wednesday 28 August 1974 with The Galileo Seven, and the festive season simply picked up where the evening repeats had left off.

When Star Trek was restored to its rightful place in the evening schedule – on Monday 19 May 1975 – the episodes were again following the BBC ‘second series’ broadcast order. It didn’t last long – Monday 9 June saw a leap forward with Return to Tomorrow (ironic titling if you like), before doubing back the following week with I, Mudd. By 21 July, the run of repeats had reached the BBC’s ‘third series’ (originally aired from October 1970 to February 1971), but conked out with The Gamesters of Triskelion (18 August).

In September, the cartoon series took over (on Saturday mornings), with ‘Holiday Star Trek’ returning for a second run on Saturday 20 December with an episode I had never previously seen – Wink of an Eye. I was tuned in again the following day for Let That be Your Last Battlefield, but with Amok Time on Monday 22 December, the BBC broadcast order went out of the window. The next day saw viewers beamed all the way back to series one for the episode Dagger of the Mind, while Christmas Eve brought Operation – Annihilate, a first season episode that the BBC had held back until its own third series (originally airing on 9 December 1970). Boxing Day saw The Paradise Syndrome scheduled at 10.05am immediately before a screening of the Beatles’ film Let It Be, following which Trek took a day off on the 27th before resuming on the 28th with The Cloud Minders – another first run for me. The last three days of 1975 saw Requiem for Methuselah, All Our Yesterdays and Day of the Dove, while two further episodes snuck in under the radar of 1976: Spectre of the Gun on Thursday 1 January and The Way to Eden on Friday 2nd. And with that, we were done. Star Trek went back to being an evening programme and would remain that way until a repeat run on Sunday mornings in October 1995, by which time the series had transitioned to BBC2.

These days, time-shifting, physical media and the plethora of digital channels mean that no programme seems particularly wedded to a specific time of day, so the ‘special’ quality of those festive Star Trek broadcasts may be hard for modern viewers to grasp. But at the age of thirteen, when one of your favourite TV series turns up at Christmas, in the morning as opposed to the evening, and you’re able to watch it in colour for the first time... you bet it was special.

Advent Sunday in Old Money: Day 22

 

Lighting the Streets

Back in the 1960s, I remember our dad driving the family into Birmingham on an evening close to Christmas. We weren’t going shopping – late night shopping hadn’t got started back then – and I don’t think we were visiting relatives. The purpose of the journey was simply to look at the Christmas lights, strung up along New Street and Corporation Street. I wouldn’t have realised it aged four or five, but this was a tradition that had only been going for around a decade.

According to a recent Channel 5 programme, it all started back in 1954 when the retailers on London’s Regent Street got together to put on a festive display. It must still have been considered a novelty six years later, because Kenneth Horne makes specific reference to the 'pretty lights on Regent Street' in that year's Christmas edition of Beyond Our Ken. Other streets weren't far behind, and Oxford Street soon got in on the act, with the trend quickly spreading to the provinces. A lot depended on the generosity of the local authority, with some areas getting very little besides the odd Christmas tree in the middle of a roundabout. But Birmingham was putting on large displays by the early 60s, and it was enough of an attraction to tempt families like us to make a special trip to see them. 

Aside from a few years during the energy crisis of the early 1970s, the tradition has continued, with ever more sophisticated and imaginative designs. In London, Oxford and Regent Streets vie with each other to put on the biggest display and attract the biggest celebrity names to push the button at the big switch-on event. Things began to get a little out of hand when lasers entered the arena, with no one considering the potential hazard they posed, but a low point was reached when Oxford Street's Christmas lights were sponsored by the soft drink Tango, who turned the street into an all-orange advertising display with lights spelling out the not particularly festive message 'Tis the Season to be Tangoed.' A line had been crossed, and such blatant commercialisation never happened again.

Today, almost every town has a Christmas lights switch-on event around the end of November, even if (as here in Burton) the lights themselves aren’t anything special. Judging from the firework display that accompanied this year’s event, I reckon more was spent on the pyrotechnics.

Early displays were static, with sequenced, flashing lights only appearing much later. Unlike today’s LED arrays, the original lighting rigs employed bulbs or fluorescent tubes, and the more ambitious displays incorporated decorative elements such as these giant crackers suspended along New Street in Birmingham in the 1960s:

These Christmas decorations, dating to the 1960s, made use of the suspension street lighting system that was common on many city streets during the era.

Such displays were, of course, limited to Christmas unless you lived in a town like Blackpool, that went in for illuminations during the autumn, or Walsall, whose Arboretum was always decked out in lighting arrays some of which were clearly of considerable vintage. In the same town, one particular street had a kind of permanent display of what had presumably originally been Christmas lights – large plastic oranges attached to the tops of the street lighting columns. I never saw them illuminated and of course, they’re long gone, but they were a source of fascination every time we visited.

Birmingham’s Christmas lights are preserved on a couple of YouTube videos – the quality is very poor, but there's just enough detail to get an idea of how the city streets looked in 1962 and 1964. Interestingly, whoever took the film also aimed their 8mm camera at a permanent advertising display promoting Schweppes drinks, which was attached to the side of a large office block that formed part of the Bull Ring redevelopment of the early 60s and remained in situ for over twenty years. The neon sign, far more sophisticated than the static festive displays, incorporated elements that turned on and off, causing the large letter ‘S’ to ‘fill up’ with light, as is well demonstrated by the YouTube video:

Schweppervescence

On our Christmas drive through the streets in 1965 or 66, I was particularly impressed by a similar advertisement for Robertson’s jam, featuring the famous Golly character. This was another permanent fixture, and the animated elements were probably what caught my eye. Both of these are now, of course, long gone, the buildings which played home to them having been demolished, and New Street has long since been pedestrianised, so our car journey of the 1960s would be impossible today.

Back then, elaborate displays of festive lighting were the preserve of local councils and traders’ associations, but in the last few decades, householders have often outdone the city streets with increasingly ambitious Christmas lights. I’m not sure when this modern tradition really got started, or went further than a few strings of lights wound around a conifer in the front garden, but around twenty years ago I visited the small town of Clowne in Derbyshire, where the residents of several streets had collaborated on their own display of Christmas lights, and this was the first time I’d seen anything organised on this kind of scale. Mince pies and mulled wine were on sale, and the whole event was being run as a charity fundraiser. Here in Burton, where the town’s lights are few and austere in appearance, residents regularly put on better displays in their own gardens: I have only to go a few yards down the road to see a couple of gardens done out as veritable winter wonderlands.

How you decorate your home is a matter of personal taste: I've never liked the trend of recent years for inflatables, and some displays simply go too far, when a simple statement can be much more effective. Of course, if you don't happen to go in for that kind of thing, and all your neighbours do, you can run the risk of looking like the neighbourhood Scrooge. Last year, I went humbug with nothing in my front windows, but this year the blue and white flashing lights are back – and that's more than enough, I reckon...

Advent Sunday in Old Money: Day 21

 

Cards of Christmas Past

Of all the Christmas traditions I’ve touched on in this advent blog, the sending of cards is one of the oldest of all. The first known example was received by James I of England back in 1611, but it took over two centuries before the idea became commercialised. The first commercially available card was commissioned by civil servant and inventor Sir Henry Cole who had two years previously been involved in establishing the Penny Post service. It’s easy to see why he came up with the idea of sending cards at Christmas. Cole’s first card was designed by genre and historical painter John Callcott Horsley and sold for a shilling. Over 2,000 cards were sold in the first year. Despite the festive image, there’s a decided lack of Christmas iconography – no snow, robins, evergreens or Santa Claus – and early Christmas cards tended to focus on decorative designs with no thematic connection to the festive season.

Today’s cards can be loosely grouped under three headings: sentimental, artistic and humorous. Every year seems to bring new variations, and for a time I was interested to see some cards featuring designs that were more wintry or autumnal than full-on Christmassy. Around ten years ago, I chose a design showing green winter fields, which I thought was a more accurate reflection of a real British Christmas; but I may have been in a minority, as 2024’s crop have been heavy on sentimentality and traditional imagery whilst the humour genre has provided some especially crude examples.

In a typical year, the hallway of our family home was liberally decorated with cards, some hanging on coloured string, others taped to the doors and staircase. When going through the contents of my parents’ house, I came across a suitcase containing some family Christmas cards that had survived for thirty or forty years. Many of them bear the imprint of the Hallmark brand, a family-owned American manufacturer founded in 1910 as Hall Brothers, with the Hallmark name emerging in 1928. Initially specialising in the market for Christmas cards (and inventing modern wrapping paper en route), the company later diversified into general greetings cards and is still going today. Our dad always gave large, colourful, sentimental cards to our mum at Christmas, and this Hallmark branded example probably dates to the early 80s although it looks rather older.

Hallmark were also responsible for the hugely successful range of cards featuring Charles Schulz’s Peanuts characters: I first saw these on shelves in the mid 70s, and this example dates from around a decade later. I’m interested to note the reference to ‘snow angels’, a tradition I only became aware of relatively recently (but which has origins that go back at least to 1970):   

In the humour category, we find this Gray Joliffe example, also dating to circa the late 1980s, which I sent to our dad, whilst the next card, from around the same era, was an example of a passing fad that appears to have died out – cards that played a piece of music when you opened them.  Although the card has survived, the music has not...

If you’d known me in the 1980s or 90s, there’s a chance that you might have received a hand-made Christmas card. There was a time when I did original hand-drawn cards for every occasion, but these days I don’t seem to have the time. From as far back as the mid-70s, I did a hand drawn Christmas card for my brother every year, usually based on some currently popular TV programme or other cultural artefact. One year (1988), I imitated the art of subversive cartoonist Gilbert Shelton to create a card based on his Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers – you couldn’t get anything like that in the shops. Another year it was the turn of the TV series Bottom, which probably places this particular card somewhere in the early 1990s.

Sometimes I drew original cartoons, such as this example showing Santa filling up his Reindeer at a petrol station. The reference to unleaded fuel, introduced in Britain in 1986, probably places it around the end of that decade, when it had become a popular media talking point. I'll leave you with another original which I created way back in 1989. The gag was my own, although I'm sure someone else has probably come up with it since...

Advent Sunday in Old Money: Day 20

 

Flash… ah-ah...

Nostalgia wasn’t really a thing with our parents’ generation, at least not if my own parents were anything to go by. Our dad’s tastes in music certainly harked back to the era when jazz and big band swing had, all too briefly, been the ‘popular music’ of their day, and he had a small collection of records reflecting this interest: but he hadn’t kept any books, toys or ephemera from his childhood – more’s the pity, as my brother and I would have got a kick out of seeing them.

One thing I do remember him reminiscing about was Saturday morning pictures at the cinema: the line-up of cartoons and serials that were regularly screened to entertain a pre-television generation of children. In the mid 60s, when Batman came to television, our dad remembered seeing the old cinema serial version in the 1940s. But the serial he remembered best of all was Flash Gordon. I entertained no expectation of seeing it myself, as it was far too old, and the BBC didn’t go in for that kind of thing – vintage Laurel and Hardy, certainly, but never any of the old cinema serials. Then came Christmas 1976...

By this time, we’d come to expect a few choice repeats from the television networks during the school holidays: for the past two years, BBC1 had shown episodes of Star Trek at Christmas; but this year, the corporation offered up the entire, unabridged Flash Gordon serial, which was celebrating its fortieth anniversary. The serial had been shown in a 2-part abridgement earlier in the year, which may have prompted this full-length festive broadcast, its first complete screening on any UK television network.

Buster Crabbe had first donned the mantle of Alex Raymond’s comic strip hero back in 1936, and returned again in Flash Gordon’s Trip to Mars (1938). Between this and the final entry in the series, Crabbe briefly switched comic book roles to portray Buck Rogers. The serials were all produced by Universal Pictures, and anyone with an ear for soundtracks might have recognised music cues from some of their horror pictures, most notably Bride of Frankenstein (1935), Werewolf of London (1935) and The Invisible Man (1933).

The original comic strip had been running for a shade over two years when Universal’s serialisation first hit the big screen, so this was bang up-to-the-minute stuff. Accounts differ as to the budget for the serial, with claims that it was in excess of a million dollars, but this seems unlikely given the amount of material reycled from earlier movies, both in the form of sets and previously shot footage. Nevertheless, the production design stuck closely to Alex Raymond’s original, and the characters would have been instantly recognisable to readers of the comic strip. Universal had an instant hit on their hands – the film was their second-highest grossing title of 1936, so sequels were inevitable.

Science fiction wasn’t new to cinema – Georges Méliès had wowed audiences as far back as 1902 with his fantasy A Trip to the Moon, but Flash Gordon was the first sci-fi serial for the screen, and its success heralded a wave of futuristic adventures. Not that Flash Gordon is heavy on the space hardware: in fact, it looks rather more like a medieval adventure with a few Roman centurions thrown into the mix. There were lots of fights – around one per episode, with Flash taking on all comers – Ming's soldiers, an 'Octosac' and a thing called an Orangopoid which looks suspiciously like Ethel the chimp from the 1930 Laurel and Hardy short...

Watching from a distance of forty years, one couldn’t help but smile at some of the special effects on show. The whole business of practical effects in movies and television had improved out of all recognition in the intervening years, but I still enjoyed seeing Dr. Zarkov’s rocket ship propelled through the strangely misty void of interplanetary space by means of a couple of sparklers. The sound effects were idiosyncratic too – rocket ships crackled and popped like a backfiring old banger when taking off, and in flight sounded more like an electrical generator than the smooth whooshing sounds we’d grown accustomed to in the Gerry Anderson productions.

The acting was, of course, corny and melodramatic, with the latter quality best exemplified by Charles Middleton’s unforgettable performance as Emperor Ming. He was a regular movie baddie, and had already menaced Laurel and Hardy in a couple of their films. Buster Crabbe was perfectly cast as Flash, and the trio of Earth explorers was completed by Jean Rogers as Dale Arden and Frank Shannon as Dr. Zarkov.

The serial kicked off forty-eight years ago today on 20 December 1976, with two episodes together, followed by another double-up on Tuesday 21st. The serial ran all the way through Christmas, pausing only for Christmas Day itself, with the concluding part shown on New Year’s Eve. Happily, our dad was off work for Christmas week and was able to sit in with us for some of the episodes, reliving a part of his childhood he’d never expected to see again.

We didn’t have to wait a year for the next serial, because in June 1977, the BBC rolled out the 15-part Flash Gordon’s Trip to Mars on Saturday mornings. I was a convert by now, and made sure to be tuned in. Christmas 1977 brought the final serial, Flash Gordon Conquers the Universe, generally regarded as the weakest of the three, before Christmas 1978 brought the 1939 Buck Rogers serial; and with that, the brief run of Saturday morning cinema classics came to an end. They were all repeated over the coming years before disappearing sometime in the early 90s. These days, your best bet is to go to YouTube, where the original serial can be found in its entirety:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jrdrha6AX3w 

In two years, that old Flash Gordon serial will be ninety. I doubt it will ever see action again on the BBC,  yet even as I speak, retro TV channel Rewind are mid way through a screening of Flash Gordon Conquers the Universe.

I’ll leave you with this sobering thought: back in 1976, the original Flash Gordon serial was, as I mentioned earlier, forty years old. Today, the 1980 colour remake directed by Dino De Laurentis is even older than that – forty four, to be precise. But I doubt it looks as old to modern eyes as the original Flash Gordon did to us back in 1976.