Don't Forget the Rubbish

There’s nothing I hate more on radio than what I call the ‘curated playlist’. By that, I mean any radio programme that claims to play the hits of a specific decade but sticks ridgidly to a kind of greatest hits reshuffle, resulting in a show that plays out like a compilation album. What, you may ask, is wrong with that? Nothing as such. It’s just that, for a proper nostalgia trip back in time, you really need to hear everything – not just the greatest hits but those lesser tracks that skirted the top twenty for maybe just a couple of weeks, or even missed it completely. And you need the rubbish, too – those tracks that, incredibly, made it into the top ten (or in some cases, reached number one) despite being unlistenable pap. My point being that, listening back in the day to a programme like the weekly Top Forty rundown, you got to hear everything as a rule. If there was some awful record in the charts, you had to sit through it.

There’s no radio show more guilty of ‘curated playlisting’ than Radio 2’s Pick of the Pops, recently relocated to Sunday teatime and presided over by Mark Goodier (never the edgiest of radio DJs). The programme, following a tradition that goes back to Jimmy Savile’s Double Top Ten Show of the 1970s, plays two charts from a given week in history (rarely venturing back further than the 1980s). The charts are, of course, incomplete, and the programme is bogged down by the usual tedious programme trails, and a lot of pointless factoids about the year in question that anyone interested could look up on Wikipedia. But the real issue with the show is how the charts are cherry picked. Odd and obscure items are glossed over. Anything by personae non gratae such as Rolf Harris, Gary Glitter or Jonathan King is omitted without comment, which, in this era of cancel culture, is only to be expected. But not all the omitted music is from artistes such as these. Each top twenty is whittled down to around twelve or thirteen songs, with priority given to climbers (though not always); and you can bet it’s the time-worn ‘greatest hits’ that always make it through this vetting process. Anything a bit weird or out of left field doesn’t make the cut. A recent Pick of the Pops chart from 1969 allowed in all the 'usual suspects' like 'Ob-la-di-Ob-la-da' but couldn't find room for Des O'Connor's '1,2,3 O'Leary'. Bad call!

The numerous, themed hits stations like Boom Radio and Greatest Hits Radio are, if anything, even more guilty of this kind of thing. GHR’s daytime playlist is like a zombie roll-call of ‘heard it a million times never need to hear it again’ hits, focused on the 80s and 90s with seldom a 60s track to be heard. I had to give up listening to it, and not only on account of the dreadful, repetitive commercials. Unfortunately, it is now the only place one can hear Ken Bruce, whose old Radio 2 show, despite an obligation to include a quota of talent-free contemporary artists, did manage to maintain some degree of musical integrity – where else on radio might you have heard a track like ‘Jackie Blue’ by the Ozark Mountain Daredevils?

There’s more to pop nostalgia than greatest hits. Around twenty years ago, when mp3s became readily obtainable online, I began to compile collections that I dubbed ‘old and cheesy’, focusing on the kind of obscure vintage material one seldom gets to hear on radio. In doing so, I located songs I remembered from childhood that rarely, if ever, trouble the compilers of contemporary radio playlists. Daytime radio in the 1960s would be utterly unrecognisable to anyone born after around 1970, consisting as it did of pop songs, comedy records, light orchestral numbers and crooners. In its own way, it was ‘curated’, in that the Light Programme tended to avoid the noisier pop songs of the era – you never heard anyone like the Kinks or the Who. As to the Sunday afternoon chart rundown, a near complete top twenty was played, with only a few of the lower numbers omitted when they were on their way out of the charts or seasonally inappropriate (like Christmas singles that hung around into mid January).

For this reason, songs that I didn’t particularly like – Ken Dodd’s ‘Eight by Ten’, for instance – are embedded in the memory along with everthing else that was getting radio play at the same time. I can pretty much guarantee that no radio station in the UK will have played ‘Eight by Ten’ in years, decades even. Yet the irony is that these seldom heard songs are often more evocative of a moment in time than their more frequently playlisted contemporaries. ‘Eight by Ten’ reached its peak chart position of number 22 in the chart of 27 February – 4 March 1964, a week that saw Cilla Black’s ‘Anyone Who Had a Heart’ at number one, the Searchers at number three with ‘Needles and Pins’ and the Dave Clark Five making a right racket at number four with ‘Bits and Pieces’. All of these are ‘frequent fliers’ on 60s nostalgia shows. But not ‘Eight by Ten’. Nor are we likely to hear Ronnie Hilton’s ‘A Windmill in Old Amsterdam’ or Josh Macrae’s ‘Messing About on the River’, both of which I remember vividly from radio plays in the early 60s (we even had the single of ‘Windmill in Old Amsterdam’). I think this is a shame. Old rubbish deserves to be heard, if only for its potent nostalgia value. Of course, one has to draw the line somewhere – the Ramblers’ ‘The Sparrow’, Brian and Michael’s ‘Matchstalk Men’, and any song about grandparents (step forward Clive Dunn and St Winifred’s School Choir). But on the whole, I’m usually happy to hear any of the more unlikely old records when they occasionally pop up on the airwaves, even more so when they do so in the context of a complete chart from the year in question. As I’ve written elsewhere, nostalgic items produce a kind of nuclear reaction when juxtaposed: a song, a TV series and a comic from the same week in, say, 1965, will give you a much more powerful hit of nostalgia when you can experience them simultaneously. It’s as close as we may ever get to travelling in time. But to be absolutely true to any given era, you have to take the rubbish along with the classics.

One of the few DJs on Radio 2 who was ever likely to play eccentric items of the sort I’m talking about was Liza Tarbuck – and, sadly, she has recently retired from her Saturday evening radio show. Liza’s was undoubtedly the most eclectic and original playlist on the radio, reflecting her own diverse tastes in music, and the antithesis of the kind of ‘curated’ playlisting I’m talking about here. I’d go so far as to insist that her playlists were more interesting and certainly way more diverse than even John Peel, purely on account of the eccentric oddities she allowed out on air. 

Of Radio 2’s remaining crop of DJs, only Tony Blackburn is worthy of comment: his weekly ‘Sounds of the Sixties’ show often includes tracks that Tony admits to not liking himself. This week, his playlist included Esther and Abi Ofarim’s (pictured above) 1968 novelty single ‘Cinderella Rockefeller’, which I hated in 1968 and still hate today. Staggeringly, this bizarro oddity reached number one in the charts. She sounds like Vampirella and he sings like a bad yodeller. As a piece of music it’s catastrophically bad, but it rode on the coat tails of a brief chart flirtation with 1920s era flapper jazz (‘Winchester Cathedral’, ‘What a Day for a Daydream,’ ‘Honey Pie’) and because it hung around the charts for so long, it’s still embedded in the minds of anyone exposed to it at the time. Like Strontium 90.

As if that weren’t enough, the same show found room for Lulu’s 1969 Eurovision winner ‘Boom Bang-a-Bang’ (famously parodied by Monty Python as ‘Bing-Tiddle-Tiddle-Bong’) another song of questionable musical merit. But merit isn’t the point here – inclusion is. Hearing these tracks takes you back to their era much more readily than the over-played greatest hits that shared the charts alongside them. Constant repetition of a piece of music seems somehow to dull its nostalgic appeal, rendering it ‘timeless’ in a way that ‘Boom Bang-a-Bang’ is not. I'd much rather hear the likes of 'Sunshine Girl' or 'Something's Happening' by Herman's Hermits, or Oliver's 'Good Morning Starshine' (also in Tony Blackburn's playlist this week) than anything by the Kinks, the Stones or any of the other bands who crowd other artists out of the nostalgia spotlight.

Tony Blackburn’s ‘Sounds of the Sixties’, unlike many other radio nostalgia shows, is the genuine sound of an era, warts and all. Because real nostalgia has to allow for the rubbish alongside the good stuff.

 

It's Only a Dream... or is it?

 

How popular culture gets you while you’re sleeping…

As if I didn’t devote enough of my waking hours as a child to obsessing over Gerry Anderson’s TV series, reading books and comics about them, and collecting the myriad toys, I occasionally found them invading my dreams: albeit in a totally unfamiliar form.

I’ve heard comic and book collectors talk about dreams in which they discover previously unknown or unusual versions of series that they collect in real life, and I’ve had plenty of similar examples myself, to the point at which I consider them to be a trope of the unconscious mind. The dream typically involves finding, in a shop or at a jumble sale, a pile of previously unseen editions of a series such as Hergé’s Adventures of Tintin, or the annual collections of Carl Giles. Sometimes I get to leaf through the pages, which resemble the originals but have been changed in various ways: the dream Giles annuals often contain colour pages where the originals were always black and white, and bear dates going back to the 1920s whereas the series didn’t begin until 1945. In the Gerry Anderson universe, the most frequently occurring example is that of Fireball XL5. It’s always one of the annuals that I discover in the dream, usually a rare pre-publication ‘demo’ edition with an unusual cover and contents that don’t match any of the real world examples. I can trace this particular dream back as far as the late 60s or early 70s, and it was often so vivid that, on waking, I was spurred on to try and create my own versions of what I’d imagined.

Sometimes, though, it wasn’t just a book that I saw in the dream, but a televised episode. And rather than being an episode of one of Gerry Anderson’s actual TV series, it was always, without exception, something that didn’t exist. The earliest version of this dream came to me around 1970 and was almost certainly influenced by the ongoing repeats of Thunderbirds that were being broacast around this time. We were still watching in black and white, but the dream was in vivid colour – it was all centered around an oil refinery or similar industrial complex, which I saw rendered in fine detail, silver towers and pipe networks standing out against a bright blue sky. The hero of the piece was a security guy who had to protect the plant from attack by enemy craft which resembled the Shuttlecraft in Star Trek. The characters were all puppets, and they wore the kind of uniforms one saw in all the Supermarionation series, with peaked caps and tunics with exaggerated shoulders. It all came over as quite exciting in the dream and I looked forward to watching it again. Except, of course, that I couldn’t. The show didn’t exist. My mind had conflated aspects of Thunderbirds (the industrial plant was an almost direct lift from episodes like The Mighty Atom) and Captain Scarlet (the uniforms, the quest to defeat an enemy agency). It was all so clear that I started at once to draw the characters and settings (sadly, those drawings no longer exist).

I never dreamed about the same series again, but I had another variation on the ‘Anderson mash-up’ a little later, maybe even the same year. This time, rather than a completely new idea, I was shown a sequel to Captain Scarlet. It was set on the moon, and the characters travelled around on high-speed moon motorcycles, which featured prominently in the opening credits. These were typically Andersonesque, with a strident theme song and the title zooming up onto the screen: ‘Black Means Death’. I can still picture it now. I imagine the title referred to Captain Black, the nemesis of the Spectrum organisation, but I didn’t see enough of it to find out. This again, was most likely a conflation of ideas: the moon-based episodes of the real Captain Scarlet series, and the lunar aspects of Gerry Anderson’s UFO, which had started broadcasting around the same time as the ‘dream episode’ came to me – the characters accessed their ‘moon motorbikes’ in a similar manner to the pilots of the SHADO Interceptors. I knew by this time that Gerry Anderson had given up on puppets, and the dream came like a false dawn, suggesting that he might return to producing the kind of films that had made his reputation. He would, of course, but not for another fifteen years.

The most unusual example of this phenomenon happened over twenty years later, and is logged in my diary for 1996. Once again, I was watching an episode of an unknown puppet series, and this time it had been discovered by a collector. The untitled series involved a moustached character (bearing a vague resemblence to Super Mario), who acted as a kind of cleaning man and flew around in an aircraft that slightly resembled Sky One from UFO, but with a yellow nose cone. He had a sidekick along with him. The guy’s name was, bizarrely, ‘Mr. Pennywhacket’ which sounds rather more like a character from Trumpton than anything by Gerry Anderson, but the whole thing was intriguing and had an unusual aesthetic, not far removed from the look of Thunderbirds. Again, it was in colour.

None of this would be worthy of comment were it not for the fact that, within eighteen months of having this dream, I found myself watching the rediscovered pilot episode of Roberta Leigh’s Paul Starr, which had been unearthed by Tim Beddows, and had never been seen outside of a handful of television executives. Paul Starr didn’t have a moustache, but he did have a sidekick, and he travelled in an aircraft that strongly resembled the machine in my dream, but for the minor detail of its red nosecone (illustrated above). The interior of the ship was exactly as I’d seen it in the dream.

Almost exactly as I dreamed it... the interior of Paul Starr's plane/sub/spaceship/whatever...

I’d had no knowledge whatsoever of Paul Starr back in 1996, and had assumed that Roberta Leigh’s forays into ersatz Supermarionation had ended with Space Patrol: but the unbroadcast pilot film had been amongst the film cans stored in her lock-up garage when Tim finally persuaded her to let him release Space Patrol. We couldn’t quite believe it when we projected the film for the first time. It had a dream-like quality of its own, with its knock-off Daleks and ideas appropriated from the worlds of Gerry Anderson.

Thinking about it (perhaps in a little too much depth), did the dream perhaps include more of the contents of Paul Starr than were at first apparent? The character in the dream may have looked like Super Mario, but ‘super mario’ is more than half of ‘supermarionation’ is it not? The name Paul Starr was, of course, a synthesis of two Beatles: but couldn’t my character’s name be decoded as referring, obliquely, to the Beatles? Penny, as in Penny Lane (a Paul McCartney composition), and ‘whacket’ suggesting scousers? Either way, the fact remains that I’d dreamed of an unknown ‘supermarionation’ styled series, filmed in colour, nearly two years before being present at the rediscovery of just such an artefact.

What, if anything, do these kind of dreams tell us? Most obviously, they’re illustrative of the nature of dreams themselves, as the unconscious mind cherry picks imagery and ideas familar to the dreamer, and reassembles them in often surprising ways – but to what end? Is there a kind of wish fulfilment involved? In the case of Paul Starr, there’s also a paranormal aspect, one which I’ve experienced in other ways, that of a dream appearing to foreshadow actual events. 

It still happens: only last night, I dreamed I’d heard an announcer on Radio 4 Extra telling listeners about a lost old radio comedy from 1969 that would be returning to the airwaves next week. It revolved around Kenneth Horne and Kenneth Williams running a hotel together, Williams playing his part as a ‘mad Welshman’. Kenneth Horne, of course, died in 1969, so that’s one that’s definitely not going to surface any time… more’s the pity, as I was quite looking forward to hearing it. Unrelated it may be, but on waking, I learned that the BBC had just announced the discovery of two lost episodes… of Dr. Who.

Discovering Kenneth Williams

'Good evening...'

One of my intentions when I began this blog back in 2016 was to attempt to describe how I first encountered various icons of popular culture. Pop cultural icons don’t come much bigger than Kenneth Williams, and to mark his centenary, I thought I’d delve back to see exactly how and when this inimitable entertainer first insinuated himself into my consciousness.

For a generation above me, Kenneth Williams first came to prominence as a member of the cast of Hancock’s Half Hour, in which he appeared regularly between November 1954 and October 1959. Ironically, he’d been spotted by the show’s producer Dennis Main Wilson in a serious role (the Dauphin) in a West End production of George Bernard Shaw’s Saint Joan. As the resident character voice on the Hancock shows, Williams’ career was tugged in a different direction from what he’d originally envisaged. Soon he began to star in West End revues, establishing himself firmly as a comic performer. If anyone had been left in any doubt, his contributions to Beyond Our Ken (1958-64) and Round the Horne (1965-68) confirmed his comedy credentials and showcased the increasingly outrageous aspects of his persona.

I knew none of this at the time. The Hancock series had ended before I was born, and I have no recollection of hearing either Beyond Our Ken or Round the Horne until much later. What I do remember is a man with a funny voice who would crop up occasionally on the radio, repeating phrases like ‘give me your money’ in a sneering accent. This was, in fact, a sketch entitled ‘Hand Up Your Sticks’, written by Peter Cook for Williams’ 1961 revue ‘One Over the Eight’, which had been released on a Decca LP in 1961 and as the featured track on a 1963 EP. It was this EP, around the time of its release, that I kept hearing on the radio: I can’t have been more than two or three at the time, and I didn’t much care for the sound of Williams’ voice. He played the sketch in the so-called ‘Snide’* persona that he’d developed on Hancock’s Half Hour, portraying an inept bank robber who couldn’t master the simple phrase ‘stick up your hands and give me your money’ and kept coming out with garbled manglings of the words in everything but the right order. The LP version had been recorded in a studio without an audience, so there was no laughter to alert me to the fact that what I was hearing was supposed to be funny...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1iAfaXO_Szs

I had no idea who Kenneth Williams was beyond this silly, nameless voice, and I began to dread hearing the sketch, which would pop up in the Light Programme’s morning schedule with regularity. Curiously, though, I began to form a mental picture of him which was not far removed from reality.

I didn’t get to actually see Kenneth Williams until around 1967. ABC Television, who provided programmes for the ITV Midlands region at weekends, owned the rights to the early Carry On films, and would frequently screen them on Saturday evenings. My brother and I were allowed to sit up and watch them, and it was here that I first saw Williams doing his thing for the cameras. I particularly remembered a scene in Carry On Nurse (1959) where a bar of nougat made him nauseous: but I was still too young to put names to faces, and even though he became familiar for his performances across the other films in the series, I still didn’t think ‘that’s Kenneth Williams’ whenever he appeared on screen. So when, exactly, was I first able to put face and name together?

It was through television that I came to recognise celebrities, and Williams wasn’t a regular television performer at this time: his small screen appearances in the mid 60s were mostly guest spots on programmes including International Cabaret, Call My Bluff and The Rolf Harris Show. It was, I believe, Jackanory that finally did the trick. Beginning in December 1968 with The Land of Green Ginger, Williams would become a frequent contributor to the series, and his readings were always highly watchable on account of his animated expressions and range of humorous voices. His next appearance on the programme was in September of the following year, reading Tolstoy’s The Founding of Evil Hold School, and by the time he returned in October 1972 with Agaton Sax and the Max Brothers, he’d become a face I could put a name to. By this time, I was probably most familiar with Williams through his contributions to the radio panel game Just a Minute, on which he’d been appearing regularly since September 1968, and which I often heard when I came home from school at lunchtimes.

I still hadn’t discovered Round the Horne or, indeed, Hancock’s Half Hour, but I did stumble across the short-lived replacement series for RTH that ran for two seasons following Kenneth Horne’s death in 1969. Stop Messing About took as its title Kenneth Williams’ famous catchphrase coined for him by Galton and Simpson as part of the ‘Snide’ character in the Hancock series, but the risqué humour was far too advanced for me at the age of eight or nine. Nevertheless, it must have struck a chord somewhere, as I was able to remember the signature tune decades after its last broadcast, well before it re-emerged on Radio 4 Extra. I became further acquainted with Williams’ performing style via two further radio series, The Secret Life of Kenneth Williams, in 1971 and 1973, curiously produced by the BBC radio drama department despite being wholly comic affairs.

Of Round the Horne itself, I remained in ignorance until introduced to it through a friend at school who had a couple of LP collections. Of the series’ characters, the one I really latched onto was the folk singer with the peculiar vocabulary, Rambling Syd Rumpo. He’s mentioned in my diary on February 12 1975, when a Radio 4 compilation, Celebration, presented ‘a reminder of entertaining Radio and Television characters who have become household names’ (I was also, around this time, discovering the comic genius of Peter Sellers, who was featured in the same programme). Rambling Syd was illustrated in the Radio Times and a few weeks later, I bought an EMI cassette of the album ‘The Best of Rambling Syd Rumpo’, originally released in 1970 and hard to obtain on vinyl (which explains my choice of format).

In the summer of 1976, I finally caught up with Hancock’s Half Hour: the radio series had been repeated on and off over the years, but it was only when it arrived on Radio 4 for a series of Monday evening broadcasts that I tuned in at last. Kenneth Williams appeared in all but one of these repeated episodes, and his ‘Snide’ persona soon became a favourite part of the programme (it’s easy to see how Hancock came to resent Williams getting ‘easy laughs’ with the character’s exaggerated voice and catchphrases). By the time of another repeat run in the autumn of 1977, I was making special mention in my diary of ‘Kenneth Williams (+ silly voice)’.

In 1982, I began, belatedly, to catch up with Round the Horne, when episodes from the second series were repeated on Sunday lunchtimes. Kenneth Williams’ occasional (scripted) tantrums were a favourite part of the programme, but curiously I was less enamoured of the beloved double act that was Julian and Sandy, and didn’t come to fully appreciate them until much later. By this time, Williams had lent his many voices and cartoon image to the five-minute animated series Willo the Wisp which, solely on account of his contributions, became essential viewing not only for its intended audience of children, but many older viewers like myself.

By now, I probably thought I knew Kenneth Williams as a performer as well as it was possible to know any television, film or radio celebrity. It wasn’t until the posthumous publication of his diaries that I (and, indeed the vast majority of people) fully appreciated the truth about his complex and tortured private persona. What was it about these ‘funny voice men’ that caused such traumas in their personal lives? Peter Sellers was another tortured genius, differing from Williams in that he imposed his internal psychodramas onto his family and colleagues. Like Williams, he found his calling through wartime service in the entertainments branch of the armed forces, and also had ambitions to be taken seriously as an actor, as opposed to a provider of comic characters.

Sellers’s manic personality ended up destroying him – the cardiac problems that finally killed him arose after deliberately inhaling amyl nitrite (‘poppers’) in an attempt to bolster his sex life with new bride Britt Ekland. Williams, morbidly depressed and suffering from an endless list of niggling ailments, ended it all on 15 April 1988 with an overdose of barbituartes. His last diary entry said, hopelessly, ‘oh, what’s the bloody point.’

We could have answered that one at the time, and 38 years later, as his centenary is celebrated on the BBC, the answer is even more obvious: Kenneth Williams was a beloved entertainer whose persona and performances delighted and entertained millions during his lifetime and continue to do so to this day. That, surely, was ‘the bloody point...’

* * *

[* ‘Ken (Snide) is how Galton and Simpson habitually indicated Williams’ annoying character in the Hancock programmes, but the part he played wasn’t really ‘snide’ in the true sense of the word – the correct defintion is of one who is ‘derogatory or mocking in an indirect way’ which doesn’t fully or even accurately describe the wheedling idiocy of Williams’ Hancock persona.]

Owning Number One

There used to be something good about owning the number one single of the week. It was almost as if some of the artist’s success had attached itself to you. Better still if you’d bought the record while it was still on its way up the charts, so that when it hit the top spot it validated your musical taste and your ability to spot a hit. All this, of course, rather depended on the quality of the record in question. Surely not many music fans got a good feeling from owning Ken Dodd’s ‘Tears’, number one for five weeks in 1965, or Englebert Humperdinck’s ‘Release Me’ which annexed the top spot for six weeks during March and April of 1967. But in general, the records that made number one during the 1960s and, to some extent the 70s were all deserving of their hit status. Owning a number one single by The Beatles, the Rolling Stones, The Kinks or any number of class acts of the era was like wearing a badge of honour. Conversely, since the 1990s, when the charts came increasingly to be dominated by manufactured acts and worthless novelty songs, ownership of the week’s number one single was not always something to be advertised, and the same thing still applies today – even more so, as the pop charts have been reduced to an irrelevance populated by acts of uniform blandness.

I thought it would be interesting to go back through the charts of the past six decades and pick out the number one singles that myself and my brother owned at the time. Anything bought after the fact didn’t count, which ruled out everything by The Beatles – we didn’t own a single Beatle record until 1974. To qualify, we needed to have owned the single – or its album equivalent – at the time that it made number one in the charts, or so close to the time as to make no difference. Wikipedia has handy lists of every UK number one record going right back to the beginning of the pop charts, organised by decades, so it was an easy task to scroll down and pick out the number ones that we’d owned. All told, there were just 26 of them, spanning the years 1964 to 2002. One or two of them were slightly surprising, but on the whole, with only a few exceptions, there was nothing there to cause undue embarrassment. Or, indeed, baggy trousers...

These 26 records were, of course, the mere tip of an iceberg. Between us, my brother and myself had plenty of records in our collections, both singles and albums, originally bought for us by our mum and dad, sometimes purchased with tokens or our own money. Often, we would wait until singles had dropped out of the chart in order to buy them at a reduced price. And beyond the records we actually owned were the many others that we liked well enough but were happy to hear as and when they turned up on the radio or television. Some of my favourite and best remembered songs of the 60s and 70s belong in that category.

The first single I ever had bought for me also happened to be number one at the time. Herman’s Hermits’ (pictured above) ‘I’m Into Something Good’ reached the top of the charts on 24 September 1964, and remained there for just two weeks. During this time, I remember being taken into our local record store – actually an electrical goods retailer that sold records as a sideline – and having the single bought for me. I don’t know if I’d asked for it, but I certainly liked it. Our mum made the purchase, so she evidently considered Herman’s Hermits to be acceptable listening for me at the age of just three and a half. They were nice boys, well-scrubbed, unthreatening, and the song was a jaunty lightweight singalong. And it was number one in the charts, a fact I may have dimly perceived at the time. I was literally, myself, ‘into something good’. It wasn’t the first pop record that had worked its way into my consciousness – I’d been noticing songs on the radio from a very young age indeed, and can recollect hearing some of the earliest Beatle records – ‘She Loves You’ and ‘I Want to Hold Your Hand’ – around the time of their appearance in the charts.

I wasn’t bought very many pop singles during the 1960s, and of those 26 number ones, just seven are from that decade. The next number one that found its way into my hands was Manfred Mann’s ‘The Mighty Quinn’ which made the top spot on 14 February 1968, during the half term holiday. It came from the chemist’s. John Frosts in Sutton Coldfield also had a modest record department, and at the time was one of the few places in the town town from which you could buy singles and LPs. I can still remember seeing that week’s edition of Top of the Pops, and feeling slightly pleased that I had this week’s top-selling single in my collection. That’s collection as in two singles.

I picked another number one again later in the year: Hugo Montenegro’s cover of Ennio Morricone’s main title theme from The Good, the Bad and the Ugly topped the charts on 13 November 1968. We were in the record department of WH Smith in Lichfield around that time (I remember being intrigued at the lenticular sleeve of the Rolling Stones’ Satanic Majesties LP), and I had the single in my hand, ready to take to the counter. Then, at the last minute, I changed my mind, deciding instead to have The Gun’s ‘Race With the Devil’ bought for me, a frantic heavy rock workout with the weirdest guitar tones I’d ever heard. Strange choice…

1969 saw a unique situation when, between us, my brother and myself had four consecutive number one records bought for us. This had never happened before and would never happen again. The singles in question were Fleetwood Mac’s ‘Albatross’ (29 January), the Move’s ‘Blackberry Way’ (5 February), Amen Corner’s ‘(If Paradise is) Half as Nice’ (12 February) and Peter Sarstedt’s ‘Where Do You Go To (My Lovely)?’ (26 February). The reason for this cluster of chart toppers is easily explained – my brother’s birthday is in early February, my own a month later, and we had these singles bought for us as presents (I can’t recall whether we were influenced by their chart-topping status). In the chart of 12-18 February, three of them occupied the top of the charts – Amen Corner at number one had just bumped Fleetwood Mac down to number two whilst the Move were waiting at number three to make their own assault on the top spot.

Of these four number ones, I owned only one – Amen Corner. My brother, just turned six years old, was emerging as the ‘serious’ music fan in the household. I liked them all well enough but was aghast at the sight of the Move when they appeared on Top of the Pops: I’d never seen so much hair! When Roy Wood sang ‘what am I supposed to do now?’ I answered, without missing a beat, ‘get a haircut!’

The next single I had bought for me that year was another number one – Zager and Evans’ apocalyptic folk-rock ditty ‘In the Year 2525’. I remember watching them strumming their acoustic guitars, perched on stools in the film clip shown on Top of the Pops and thinking I’d quite like to do that myself (strum a guitar, not sit on a stool…) My next number one is one of the few it’s somewhat shameful to admit to owning. Even before we knew the truth about him, Rolf Harris’s ‘Two Little Boys’ was not the kind of single that you’d boast about to your friends. But I liked it well enough, even if I didn’t quite grasp its anti-war message, and had it bought for me at Christmas 1969. It became the first number one single of the new decade, holding the top spot for the whole of January until replaced on the very last day of the month by Edison Lighthouse’s ‘Love Grows (Where My Rosemary Goes)’ – which I also had bought for me. Another two consecutive number ones – but they were to be the last.

Around this same time, I was bought the novelty single ‘Gimme Dat Ding’, the perpetrators of which, The Pipkins, appeared on TOTP the same week as Edison Lighthouse. I remember noticing the resemblance between their vocalists. There was an excellent reason for this – they were one and the same person, session singer Tony Burrows.

Our hit-spotting run of early 1969 was never to be repeated. During 1970, there were plenty of good nunber one records (and, of course, the bloody awful ‘In the Summertime’), but only one of them made it into our house – the England World Cup Squad’s overly-optimistic anthem ‘Back Home’, which made number one on 16 May. Getting to the top of the charts and walking off with the World Cup was just too much to hope for…

From late 1970 through to the spring of 1971, I took no interest in the pop charts, for reasons that now escape me. There weren’t a lot of great songs around in any case, and the only one of that era that I really noticed – for all the wrong reasons – was Clive Dunn’s ‘Grandad’, which hit the top on 9 January 1971. Fortunately for our future credibility as music fans, neither myself nor my brother had this bought for us. It was a narrow escape, I suppose, as it was the kind of record that I’m sure was foisted on a lot of kids as a paen to their own grandparents. I hated it.

1971 was topped and tailed by novelty records from TV comedians, and in December my very modest record collection clocked up another number one in the form of ‘Ernie (The Fastest Milkman in the West)’. No shame in that, surely? We even lived at ‘number 22’ ourselves, though not, of course in ‘Lily Lane’. In my mind’s eye I can still see the accompanying film with Benny Hill squaring up to Henry McGee’s ‘Two Ton Ted’, that was shown for weeks on Top of the Pops. I can even recite all the lyrics in the voice of Benny Hill. Is that a ‘no’?

The next chart-topping single to make it into our household was another ‘novelty’ hit, one of those bizarre fluke number ones that used to pop up now and then. The Band of the Royal Scots Dragoon Guards released a bagpipe rendition of the 1772 hymn ‘Amazing Grace’ which not only reached number one in the charts (on 15 April 1972) but became the year’s best selling single and was an international hit. I hate the sound of the bagpipes and can plead not guilty here, though my brother won’t relish being reminded that it was, to the best of my knowledge, bought on his behest (although I suspect our mum may have exerted some influence).

There were plenty of iconic number one records during the 1970s, but almost none of them found their way into our hands, and I went for almost the entire decade without owning any more number one singles. In 1973 I owned the number one piece of sheet music when 10CC’s ‘Rubber Bullets’ made number one on 23 June 1973. How I laughed when, in that week’s Beano, Minnie the Minx substituted the sheet music for ‘this week’s number one record’ for the sedate chamber music being played by a quartet of old biddies who immediately went into overdrive. Ironically, 10CC’s next album was called Sheet Music.

The same thing happened when Pilot’s single ‘January’ reached number one in – uh – February of 1975. I bought the sheet music rather than the single. In fact, I think I had it in my mind to get the song on an LP whenever it became available but it somehow never happened, or at least not until many, many years later. By this time, I’d gone off singles altogether, and now preferred to play albums, so it was in LP form that I owned 10CC’s ‘I’m Not in Love’ when it topped the charts on 28 June 1975. I’d had the album The Original Soundtrack since Easter.

Over four years would elapse before I owned any more contemporary number one hits, and I’m not sure I can allow them in because they came into my possession, as tracks on albums, weeks or even months after their original chart appearances. So, it’s more of an honourable mention for The Police with ‘Message in a Bottle’ and ‘Walking on the Moon’. Likewise Kate Bush’s ‘Wuthering Heights’ which I hated on release but finally allowed into my collection when I bought the album The Kick Inside two years later.

I went out and bought the Police’s ‘Don’t Stand So Close to Me’ when it was released in the autumn of 1980, which probably makes it the first number one single I owned prior to its topping the charts – although by this time in the band’s career, it’s chart-topping status was more or less a foregone conclusion. The following year, I already owned ‘Every Little Thing She Does is Magic’ on the Ghost in the Machine album when the single reached number one on 14 November.

In all, I owned ten number one hits of the 1980s at the time they topped the charts. Some, like Madness’s ‘House of Fun’ I’d prefer to forget, and I’ve long since disposed of the Housemartins’ acapella Christmas hit ‘Caravan of Love’. I’m not wild about admitting to having bought Spandau Ballet’s ‘True’ in its trendy David Band sleeve, but I’m afraid it’s, er, true… and as for Cliff and the Young One’s irreverent cover of Lionel Bart’s ‘Living Doll’, if I find it still lurking anywhere amongst my records, I’ll be sure to dispatch it to the nearest charity shop – although the dustbin would require less effort.

Topping the list of ‘oh my God, did I really go out and buy that’ is the ‘novelty’ (if that’s the right word) dance hit of September 1992 ‘Ebeneezer Goode’. Oh the shame(n)! I have no idea what possessed me to wish to own this piece of nonsense other than the idea that it had so permeated the fabric of reality at the time through endless radio play that it might in the future aquire a patina of 90s nostalgia. Pull the other one! Got any salmon? Sorted…

Equally embarrassing to own up to is Oasis’s 2002 single ‘The Hindu Times’ which a friend recommended to me. It didn’t cost a lot, maybe around a quid, and I played it but once. There just wasn’t a bloody tune there…

So we come to the last, the very last number one record that I went out and bought. It was June 2002 and the record in question was ‘A Little Less Conversation’, an obscure 1968 Elvis cut that had been given an injection of contemporary chart steroids by Dutch multi-instrumentalist and composer (according to Wikipedia) Tom Holkenborg, AKA ‘Junkie XL’ or just plain JXL. Whoever and whatever he was, his production was a huge improvement on the song in its original form.

And there you have it – from Herman’s Hermits to Elvis – my own personal story of chart-topping hits. It seems almost like a trip backwards, from a 60s act to a 50s act whose late 60s recording was remixed in the 21st century. Are you still with me?

By the time I clocked out, the charts were becoming a place to avoid, with worthless one-off dance or, God help us, trance acts trading places at the top on an almost weekly basis with boy bands, junk groups like Aqua and the era’s ‘big hitters’ like Robbie Williams, Kylie and Oasis. Adding to the horror were novelties aimed at children, like singles from Teletubbies and Bob the Builder, both of them shameless commercial cash-ins from people who should have known better.

Today, I couldn’t name you a single chart act. Just scrolling through the list of number ones since the year 2000 is a depressing business where I find myself constantly asking ‘who’, ‘what’ and ‘why’. The plain fact is that being number one used to mean something and today it means less than nothing. To reach number one in the 1960s, an act had to sell in the tens of thousands, if not millions. Today, I’ve no idea nor interest in how many streams it takes to get into the charts, but it’s no way near the colossal sales enjoyed by the artists of pop’s golden age. Pop today is all too often merely one facet of a multi-media mix designed to promote the latest shiny young piece of talent. Which strikes me as an utterly specious reason for making music...

The Toys Department is Open...

Head over here for a new spin-off from this blog, dedicated to the toys I grew up with... 

many of which, as you can see, are still with me... 

https://sundayinoldmoneytoysdept.blogspot.com/2026/02/welcome-to-toys-department.html

Watch With Macca... and John, George and Ringo

 

Or... The Fingletoad Resort of Teddiviscious

What did the Beatles watch on television? It’s a question that I doubt has been asked many times, if at all. Did they even have time to watch television? Between 1963 and 1966, the whirlwind of Beatlemania – an almost constant round of touring and recording – didn't leave them much time to themselves. It’s likely that they spent more time appearing on television than they did watching it. But they definitely did watch television, whenever time allowed. The question is, what programmes were they watching?

In all the Beatles’ recorded work there is only one reference to a specific television series, although they were occasionally influenced by things they’d seen on the small screen: Paul’s desire to use a piccolo trumpet on the recording of 'Penny Lane' is known to have arisen after watching a televised performance of Bach’s Brandenburg Concerto. The concert was shown as part of BBC2’s Masterworks series on the evening of Wednesday 11 January 1967. So far, so good. But what other items on television were the Fab Four aware of?

The Beatles grew up in an age when home entertainment was dominated by the wireless, and it’s well known that they were great fans of the Goons – the same anarchic humour can be found in John Lennon’s humorous writings, and Paul in particular was wont to assume funny voices at the drop of a hat. Even if there were television sets in the Beatle family households, it’s doubtful that they would have devoted much time to watching the box, being more focused on their musical activities away from the home.

When the group were quizzed as to their likes and dislikes for a music press feature in 1963, only John and Paul made any mention of television, John listing it among his hobbies and Paul among his ‘likes’. An early acknowledgement of television – probably the first in the band’s career – can be found on volume 2 of the CD collection The Beatles at the BBC. And the programme in question was... The Flowerpot Men.

Bill and Ben are referenced twice on the CD, the first mention coming in an edition of Pop Goes the Beatles, recorded on 10 July 1963 for transmission twenty days later. George reads out a fan letter asking if he likes The Flowerpot Men: "I think you are even nicer than Ben, but I hate Bill cause he squeaks" runs the letter. For the final edition of the series, recorded on 3 September for broadcast on the 24th, the group signed off by singing their own version of the song that closed each week’s episode of The Flowerpot Men… ‘Goodbye Bill, Goodbye Ben…’ In the hands of the Beatles, the lyrics were now:

‘Goodbye George, Goodbye John, Ringo, Paul, Ringo, Paul, Rodney Burke’ 

(Burke was the programme’s presenter).

When the band were able to make time to watch television, one of their favourite programmes was, apparently, Steptoe and Son. When John made his famous ‘rattle your jewelery’ announcement at the end of the Beatles’ appearance at the Royal Command Performance on 4 November 1963, he ended it by pulling a face that could well have been meant as an imitation of Wilfrid Brambell in the role of Albert Steptoe – Brambell and Corbett appeared on the same bill that evening in a specially written comedy sketch. Brambell would, of course, go on to appear with the Beatles in their first feature film, A Hard Day’s Night, whose script was peppered with knowing references to Steptoe. In the TV series, Brambell’s character was famously derided as a ‘dirty old man’ whilst in A Hard Day’s Night, he’s ‘very clean.’ On 2 December of the same year, the Beatles made an appearance on the Morecambe and Wise Show, recorded at Elstree Studios in Borehamwood. It’s clear that they’re all familiar with Eric and Ernie and their work – at one point, George utters Eric’s famous catchphrase ‘get out of that!’

There's no evidence that the Beatles ever watched Doctor Who. The band was approached (via Brian Epstein) to appear in an episode during 1965, but the idea was vetoed, perhaps without even being put in front of the band. Instead, a brief clip from Top of the Pops (10 April 1965) was included in the serial The Chase. John and Cynthia were photographed in close proximity to a Dalek prop at the Cannes Film Festival in May of the same year, but John seems to be ignoring it. Some fans have mistakenly assumed that the Beatles appeared in a Doctor Who parody based on the Abominable Snowmen serial, but they’d got their wires crossed: the photographs in question date from the band’s Christmas show of December 1964, almost three years before the Abominable Snowmen appeared on TV.

For our next bit of Beatle telly-viewing evidence, we must fast forward to Monday 8 November 1965. The band was in the middle of recording sessions for the Rubber Soul album (as yet untitled), and time was running short. A session was booked in Studio Two at EMI Studios, running from 9pm until 3am. Equally pressing was the need to record some comic material for inclusion on the obligatory fan club Christmas record. To this end, in the hope of capturing some off-the-cuff nonsense, George Martin left the tape running during rehearsals for George’s song ‘Think For Yourself’. Amongst lots of spontaneous banter and silly voices, Paul suddenly goes into a parody of Gerry Anderson’s Stingray. The band are trying to work out the song’s three-part harmony:

JOHN: (In cod American accent): We’ll have one more try, you know… I can see.

PAUL: (In cod American accent mispronouncing the word ‘try’): Troy… it looks like Supercar’s getting out of control, Troy.

JOHN (Laughs)

PAUL (singing in comedy falsetto): Marina, Aqua Marina…

JOHN: We’ll do one of them for Christmas.

PAUL: Yeah. (Continuing in falsetto, singing to the tune of ‘Aqua Marina’): How come you fuck up everything that you do?

(Laughter)

JOHN (in comedy evil alien voice): I will be pleased to see the Earthmen disintegrated!

The routine is cut off here by a return to the work in hand – so we never get to hear what else the Beatles might have made of a Gerry Anderson parody. They would have been a few months ahead of the curve if they had – Peter Cook and Dudley Moore’s famous ‘Superthunderstingcar’ skit wouldn’t appear until the spring of 1966.

What this snatch of banter tells us is that the Beatles were aware of Gerry Anderson’s puppet adventure series, even if Paul has got Supercar and Stingray muddled up. The series had ended by the time of the recording session, but two days earlier a first-run episode of Thunderbirds had been broadcast on ATV London. Thunderbirds, of course, included amongst their number a yellow submarine – Thunderbird Four – although the Beatles, if they were watching at all, would have been watching in black and white...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2Z9RQqfvmJI

By 1967, the Beatles had stopped touring, and once he’d returned from filming How I Won the War in Spain, John reportedly spent a lot of time in his den at his Surrey mansion, watching television. Thus we find the one and only reference to a television series in any Beatle lyric, which occurs in ‘Good Morning, Good Morning’, a song inspired by a television commercial for Kellogg’s Corn Flakes, and later dismissed by Lennon as ‘a piece of garbage’. Conmenting on the song, he later said: ‘I always had the TV on very low in the background when I was writing, and it [the commercial] came over.’

The song’s chorus lifts the lyrics from the Conflakes ad, but its most direct television reference comes in the line ‘it’s time for tea and meet the wife’. Meet the Wife was a domestic sitcom by writers Ronald Wolfe and Ronald Chesney, later to become better known for On the Buses. The show starred Freddie Frinton and Thora Hird as an argumentative married couple, and its fifth series had been shown during the autumn of 1966, around the time that the Beatles would have been preparing material for their next LP.

The next actual evidence we have of the Beatles having watched a specific piece of television comes on 8 January 1969, during filming of the aborted Get Back project – eventually realised as the movie Let it Be, before being refashioned by director Peter Jackson for release in 2021. It’s in this version rather than the original that George Harrison can be heard in conversation with Ringo about the previous evening’s television. They’ve both seen an episode of the BBC2 science fiction anthology series Out of the Unknown, broadcast at 21.05 on Tuesday 7 January. The episode in question, Immortality Inc, was the first of the third series, and no longer exists. Adapted from a novel by the American writer Robert Sheckley, the story concerns a man (Derek Benfield) whose mind has been implanted into a new body at a date in the distant future. From George’s description of the programme, it appears that the protagonist (or his mind) has been snatched from a car accident and brought back to life in the 22nd century.

George seems to have dozed off during the programme, because he complains that one minute he was watching ‘that science fiction thing’ and the next found himself halfway through ‘that crap about medals and things'. The ‘crap’ was in fact an episode of a BBC2 series, Europa (broadcast at 21.55) which, according to the Radio Times, ‘look[ed] at aspects of pomp and circumstance through European eyes’. The programme would scarcely be worthy of comment but for the fact that a piece of music used in the production – Johann Strauss’s ‘Kaiser Waltz’ – gave George the idea for a song in waltz time which by the next morning had become a prototype version of ‘I Me Mine’. ‘There was some music that was just playing… like a 3/ 4 thing’, he explained in the studio, demonstrating the new song on an acoustic guitar. One further point to consider here is how and why George and Ringo came to be watching BBC2. The answer is, most likely, colour: the channel had been broadcasting in colour since the summer of 1967, and the third series of Out of the Unknown was the first to be produced in colour. In January 1969, both BBC1 and ITV were still broadcasting in monochrome, so a Beatle with a colour television set was surely going to take advantage of it...

Meantime, John, according to his diary for 1969, was ‘watching telly’ pretty well every evening – though the entries never referred to any specific programmes. John was most likely the real telly addict in the band. His collection of humorous nonsense, In His Own Write (1964) includes a comical survey of television, 'The Fingletoad Resort of Teddiviscious', in which Panorama becomes 'Panorasthma' and Granada's People and Places becomes 'Peckle and Braces'. Richard Dimbleby and Bill Grundy are namechecked in typical Lennon fashion as 'Rinkled Dinglebone' and 'Big Grunty'. The piece is actually a parody of the Pilkington Committee Report on broadcasting, that had been published in 1962. In John's mangled English, 'Pilkington Report' becomes both 'Fingletoad Resort' and 'Piltdown Retord'.

Whilst the band were often quizzed about their tastes in everything from music and fashion to food and girls, few if any journalists seem to have enquired as to what they watched on television, probably deciding that such a question would be deemed too trivial. Google the Beatles and television and you’ll find myriad references to their many TV appearances around the world, but almost nothing about what they actually watched, which is rather a pity. What these glimpses tell us is that the Beatles were essentially casual viewers, happy to sit down and watch whatever happened to be on at any given time, but with no special favourites. They had better things to do than sit at home watching the box, and even if they had been fans of a particular series, they'd never have been able to keep up with it from week to week. Post-Beatles, George famously became such a fan of Monty Python's Flying Circus that he put up the money to help finance the film Life of Brian, but even in their solo careers, the Beatles had little or nothing to say on the subject of television.

From The Flowerpot Men to Out of the Unknown is, nevertheless, quite a televisual journey, finding room on the way for a bit of Bach, and some situation comedy. Not to mention Stingray… or was it Supercar?

Goodbye Watch With Mother, Hello Camberwick Green

 

I started school in the spring term of 1966, a moment that marked the end of an era in television as far as I was concerned. For as long as I could remember, the BBC’s Watch With Mother had been a staple of my daily viewing, traditionally occupying a weekday lunchtime slot but also broadcast mid mornings (from April 1963 to September 1966).

The school timetable brought an end to all that. Lunch was from 12 till 1, and Watch With Mother’s lunchtime slot was 1.30, so that even though I came home for my dinner, I was no longer able to watch any of those old favourites, except during the school holidays.

Watch With Mother’s content had remained relatively static for years. The days of the week varied over time, but a typical schedule saw Picture Book on Monday, Andy Pandy on Tuesday, The Flowerpot Men on Wednesday, Rag, Tag and Bobtail on Thursday and The Woodentops on Friday. The first big change came about when Rag, Tag and Bobtail was replaced by the real life adventures of Hammy Hamster and friends in Tales of the Riverbank. Tales… had originally been broadcast at teatime, beginning in January 1963, before being added to the Watch With Mother line-up later the same year. It wasn’t quite the end for Rag, Tag and Bobtail, which continued to be repeated for another two years, but in December 1965, the three glove puppet friends were seen for the very last time, disappearing from the schedules along with another WWM staple, Picture Book.

The first week of 1966 brought a revised line-up. Picture Book, which had occupied the Monday slot, now made way for a brand new series, Camberwick Green. The rest of the week was business as usual: The Woodentops on Tuesday, Andy Pandy on Wednesday, Tales of the Riverbank on Thursday and The Flowerpot Men on Friday. But change was afoot, and notice had been served on the old guard.

The new series was the work of producer and puppeteer Gordon Murray, who had previously produced A Rubivian Legend using conventional marionettes. From Camberwick Green onwards, Murray adopted stop-motion animation for his productions, and also took the decision to film in colour. As a result, his so-called ‘Trumptonshore Trilogy’ series would continue to be shown on television for over three decades, long after the BBC had called time on the monochrome exploits of Bill and Ben, the Woodentops and Andy Pandy.

I can dimly remember the arrival of Camberwick Green, mainly because of the simple fact that I wasn’t going to be able to watch it. The series began on Monday 3 January 1966, and the spring term didn’t start for about a week. As I recall, I got to see one or maybe two episodes before being whisked away to the reception class in the local infants school. I liked what I saw of Camberwick Green, but it was my brother, two years younger, who really got to enjoy it, and was soon bought an LP record of stories and songs from the series.

This was really the end of the line for me and Watch With Mother. I would continue to see occasional episodes during school holidays, but nothing more. 1966 was something of a watershed year for the brand, with three new titles joining the line-up. As well as Camberwick Green, we got Pogles’ Wood (7 April) and Joe (3 October). I never cared much for Joe – it was far too sentimental and childish for my taste (at the mature age of five and a half!). Every episode’s plotline built to a point at which, to quote from the narration, ‘Joe... began... to cry.’ 

Pogles’ Wood, on the other hand, was not to be missed – yet, sadly, I was seldom able to watch it, and to this day have never managed to see all of the 32 episodes produced. It was the same story with Camberwick Green and its successors. Between 1966 and 1985, Camberwick Green was broadcast no fewer than 32 times by the BBC, and in all that time, I still hadn’t seen all the available episodes. Only 13 were produced, but the repeats were frequent. In its first year alone, the series was shown three times. The first run ended on Monday 28 March, but it was back again the following week at the earlier time of 10.45am. This second run ended on 27 June, with a further repeat beginning on Wednesday 5 October, and ending on 28 December. Two more repeat runs followed in 1967 (Friday 6 January – Friday 31 March/ Tuesday 4 July – Tuesday 26 September), by which time it had been joined by its sibling series Trumpton (commencing 3 January 1967).

The frequency of these repeats meant I had plenty of opportunities to catch up on Camberwick Green during school holidays, but watching the series was like trying to collect bubblegum cards – every time I had a chance to view, it always seemed to be the same episode (either Windy Miller whistling for the wind or Private Lumley of Pippin Fort who couldn’t tell his right from left). I’m quite sure I didn’t complete the series until the 1990s, by which time it had transitioned to Channel 4. If that sounds bad, consider the situation with Chigley, the third and final Trumptonshire series, which I didn’t finish watching until acquiring a DVD in 2023.

I may have struggled to see it, but Camberwick Green quickly became a favourite. Within a year of its debut, the first items of merchandise had begun to arrive in the toy shops, of which the ultimate was the set of model buildings, which my brother and I received as presents at Christmas 1967. Of course, we had no idea that the episodes had been made in colour – for the record, the series was first broadcast in colour on 9 january 1970 – but the LP sleeve showed us just how colourful a place Camberwick Green really was. The LP, of course, featured the music of Freddie Phillips, whose Spanish guitar settings of Gordon Murray’s lyrics added greatly to the appeal of the series, and it was through repeated plays of this record, as much as the actual broadcasts, that I really came to know the inhabitants of Camberwick Green.

The end of Watch With Mother may seem trivial in the grand scheme of things, but at the time it felt like a significant moment. A marker had been passed, and things would never seem quite the same again. When, in adult life, I occasionally tuned in to see an episode of Camberwick Green, it felt like unbottling a vintage from childhood – the blissful closing music evoking drowsy, summery afternoons of the unreachable past. 

The Watch With Mother branding came to an end in 1975, replaced by less well remembered names like ‘See-Saw’. Camberwick Green continued on the BBC until 1985, and saw a brief revival on Channel 4 in the following decade. For years, the Trumptonshire series were poorly served by physical media releases, appearing initially on VHS tapes comprising only selected episodes, and eventually finding their way onto DVD, albeit badly remastered, with serious image defects. Happily, these have now been rectified and the most recent high definition scans were released a few years back on blu-ray by the Fabulous Films label.

Images scanned from the sleeve of the LP 'Welcome to Camberwick Green' (MFP 1109, 1966)