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)

Happy New Years Gone By

 

No fireworks, no Jools Holland, just Andy Stewart...

Unless you live in the middle of nowhere, 2026 probably started with a bang. Fireworks have become a New Year tradition in Britain: this year they were popping at random all evening before the midnight barrage got going at around five minutes to twelve. From where I live, I can look out across the town from a high vantage point, which affords the spectacle of seeing everybody letting off their fireworks at once, across a span of two or three miles, looking almost like a co-ordinated display. This year, there seemed more than ever. But it wasn’t always like this.

Fifty years ago, if you wanted to see fireworks on New Years’ Eve, you’d have had to be in a major city, where there might have been a few organised displays at midnight. But in smaller towns, and out in the suburbs, the year turned in wintry silence. No one let off fireworks in their own gardens, and if they did, they’d have been in a minority. For one thing, pyrotechnics were only sold to the public ahead of November 5, so there’d have been none in the shops. Those who felt like celebrating the new year with a bang would have had to hoard a supply from Guy Fawkes Night. But the reality is that people didn’t bother. Maybe they went in for it in Scotland, where New Year (or Hogmanay) has always been a bigger deal, and was often accompanied by fiery displays – although these were not usually fireworks as such.

The whole ‘fireworks at midnight’ thing only really took off at the millennium. This was the first time I could recollect seeing (and hearing) fireworks being let off to celebrate a new year, and on this occasion it was understandable: we weren’t just welcoming in a new year but a whole new millennium. But come December 31 in the year 2000, the whole thing happened again – and has been happening ever since.

Growing up, New Year’s Eve never really struck me as a great occasion. On New Year’s Day, our mum usually did another Christmas dinner (sometimes comprising left overs from the first one), but on the whole, the night before was no big deal. From the age of ten, I was allowed to stay up to see in the New Year – my 1972 diary mentions it – but this didn’t amount to much more than watching Big Ben strike midnight on television. There were no big celebrations in our house – our dad, being a semi-professional musician, was always out on New Year’s Eve, which for any musician is traditionally the best paying night of the year. Sometimes, he was accompanied by my brother, leaving my mum and myself to see in the New Year on our own.

Only once or twice do I remember our observing any kind of New Year customs – I was sent round the house to re-enter by the front door, in the tradition of ‘first foot’ (the first to enter a dwelling on January 1 was, according to tradition, dark haired, and should carry items of food, drink and fuel. We had a gas fire so that ruled out coal, and I can’t remember drink being involved – just half a loaf of bread). Other years, we’d simply be in front of the television where some kind of Hogmanay entertainment would be presented – usually involving, pipes, drums, country dancing and Andy Stewart, British television’s go-to Scottish entertainer.

Another televisual New Year tradition was the Old Grey Whistle Test’s famous ‘pick of the year’: although this didn’t get started until 1974, and wasn’t billed as such until the following year. The first year’s edition (beginning at just after midnight on 1 January 1975) was billed in the Radio Times as ‘Rock Till Two’, and seems to have been more akin to Jools Holland’s annual Hootenanny with guests performing live in the studio and a look back at some of the past year’s highlights. Next year, there were no live acts on the night, and the programme became an annual round up of clips. The tradition was kept up until New Year’s Eve 1987, when Bob Harris presented the very last edition of the now retitled ‘Whistle Test’, a five and a half hour marathon edition including live performance, documentary items and a raid on the archives. New Year’s Eve 1988 featured a concert by Eurythmics and a David Bowie programme, whilst the following year presented a round-up of the decade in rock music, followed by an Arena programme ‘Heavy Metal Heaven’. Certainly not the kind of thing I’d have stopped up to watch. By now, BBC2 had established a tradition of rock music to see viewers into the New Year: 1990 brought a Rolling Stones concert, and 1991 the classic ‘rockumentary’ This is Spinal Tap. But what all of these programmes lacked was a countdown to midnight, ushering in the New Year.

New Year’s Eve 1992 on BBC2 was an anomaly – music made way for comedy in the form of Monty Python, Rab C Nesbitt and Sandra Bernhard – but if this was an attempt to establish a new end of year tradition, it was to prove short lived. 1993 brought the first of Jools Holland’s annual Hootenannies, and he’s been a fixture on New Year’s Eve ever since. The programme maintains the pretence of counting down to midnight, but is always pre-recorded.

My diaries mention ‘seeing in’ the New Year pretty well every year from 1972 onwards. I recall seeing a fair few of the Whistle Test compilations, but occasionally I was lured away by other entertainments such as BBC1’s Welcome 1977, a variety compilation featuring New Year’s greetings from Kojak, Starsky and Hutch and Petula Clark amongst others (including the inevitable Andy Stewart). For three years from the 70s into the 80s, my mum and myself were invited to a neighbour’s New Year party, which was a quietly sedentary occasion populated by elderly relatives. One year, I entertained them all with an impersonation of Jake Thackray…

From 1980 onwards, my New Years Eves were generally spent in a pub or at various friends’ houses where the entertainment was only marginally less sedentary than that offered by our neighbours across the road. None of them was specially memorable, and they now appear as a blur of quiches, pop quizzes, dull games, ham rolls and the chimes of Big Ben. The one thing that was conspicuously absent from all of them was fireworks…

Pop culture has, on the whole, failed to celebrate the New Year in any form beyond the ephemeral entertainments of the evening itself: one tends not to find New Year episodes of sitcoms, whereas Christmas episodes abound. Charles Dickens, who did a lot to popularise the idea of the festive season being memorialised in literature, actually wrote more New Year tales than specifically Christmas stories, but the tradition has never really taken hold in the era of film and television.

When it comes to pop music, the Christmas chart topper has long exerted a hold on the popular imagination, but no one seems to care what’s number one at New Year – which perhaps is for the best. Pop songs aimed at New Year are few indeed – I mentioned one example in a recent blog: ‘Hoots Mon’ by Lord Rockingham’s XI was clearly pitched at the Hogmanay party crowd. The most famous example of a hit for New Year is, of course, U2’s ‘New Year’s Day’, but hardly anyone else has followed their lead. John Lennon added ‘and a happy new year’ into his famous Christmas hit, and George Harrison had a bash back in 1974 with ‘Ding Dong Ding Dong’, but it hardly set the charts alight, which perhaps served as a deterrent to anyone else considering a ‘song for New Year’. Pilot’s ‘January’ (1975) was about the month rather than the first of the month: and Wings’s ‘Mull of Kintyre’, which annexed the Christmas number one during the festive season of 1977 made no lyrical reference to either Christmas or New Year – though the song’s massed bagpipes made Macca’s festive intentions quite clear.

Comics have occasionally gone in for New Year covers, with the snow on the masthead still frozen in place from Christmas, and characters depicted making and breaking New Year resolutions. A quick trawl through my modest collection of comics produced two New Year examples, both from 1972: and whilst there were plenty of references to the season in IPC's Knockout (above), the Beano, hailing from Dundee, only managed this Dennis the Menace strip: elsewhere, it was business as usual for the regular characters.

Dennis the Menace stages a New Year Revolution in the Beano, January 1, 1972 (click to enlarge)

In England if not elsewhere, New Year has always been the poor relation of Christmas, the last gasp of the festive season, the last date on which the Radio and TV Times bother to decorate the mastheads in their festive double editions. But Christmas itself owes its date to New Year's Day, chosen for the Christian calendar to compete with the pagan winter solstice on 21 December, and conveniently located exactly seven days before New Year. These days, that means many people have a ready made excuse to take a whole week off. New Year’s Eve is the last chance to party before reality kicks in again and everyone goes back to work. Until 1974, January the first was an ordinary working day in England (the Scots had it as a Bank Holiday since 1871), so there was perhaps rather less incentive to stay up late and set off fireworks… which, of course, nobody did.

Happy New Year!

December 75 – week four/ week five

 

Holiday Star Trek, Dad's Army and a complete Doctor Who... from Christmas Day to New Year's Eve, 1975

Continuing my trawl through the pages of my diary from fifty years ago...

The Christmas Day routine was always the same in our house. I was now aged fourteen, my brother two years younger, but there was still the same childlike rush to open our presents and my recollection is of opening them while it was still dark out, even as late as 1975. The click of the front room light switch on Christmas morning marked the moment when we saw the room transformed overnight with heaps of presents. Lunchtime meant either a visit to our Grandparents or their visiting us – the diary doesn’t say which. If it was us going to them, it meant leaving behind all our new toys and taking maybe one or two plus an annual with us. Christmas dinner was soup or smoked salmon to start (sometimes both), followed by the traditional turkey with all the ‘trimmings’. Point to note: back in 1975 nobody called sausages wrapped in bacon ‘pigs in blankets’. We certainly ate them, but that appellation lay way, way in the future (unless anyone can prove otherwise). Christmas puddings were invariably home made by my mum or grandmother (although shop bought examples were readily available), and there was often an alternative for those who didn’t care for the traditional pudding. Home made puddings invariably included a few items of small change, traditionally the old sixpenny coins which were still legal tender and would remain so until 1980. By the age of 14, I was allowed to drink wine with the meal, which meant either Mateus Rosé or Goldener Oktober. Our grandad once caused a bottle of Mateus to explode when trying to open it with a pump-action corkscrew (the ovoid shape of the bottle may have had something to do with it). Then came cheese, grapes, coffee and the obligatory After Eight Mints – or, conceivably, Matchmakers, which were just as popular back then. Not, I hasten to add, Ferrero Rocher: they weren’t invented until 1979.

After all that, there would invariably be a big tea around 6.30 or 7.00, with salads, cold meats, sandwiches, sausage rolls, pork pie, mince pies, trifle, blancmange, jelly, Christmas cake, you name it. Around 1980, our mum began to make a dessert that involved soaking Maryland cookies in sherry, then pressing them together with clotted cream to make a roll, which itself was covered with more clotted cream and chocolate sprinkles. Leave to chill, and be sure to have a defibrillator to hand… 

Boxing Day: 'Watch Let it Be. Do typing of Supercar stories for annual. The Bennets [sic] come round in evening. Watch Mike Yarwood Xmas Show & Dad’s Army. Read Goodies Book of Criminal Records.'

The Bennetts were neighbours from across the road, a couple with two sons around the same age as myself and my brother, and their Boxing Day visitation was acquiring a kind of ritualistic status, an excuse to break out the sherry and deploy the bowls of crisps and nuts, along with anything left over from yesterday’s cold collation. 

The Holiday Star Trek episodes had continued today, but I don’t appear to have been tuned in for The Paradise Syndrome (it’s still an episode I’d choose to avoid). The Beatles’ Let it Be received its British TV premiere at the slightly unimpressive hour of 10.55am. The film, as presented back then, was very grainy in appearance – my friend Tim Beddows later acquired the BBC’s old 16mm print. Today, of course, it looks shiny and new, assuming you can see it at all (you’ll need a Disney + subscription to do so). 

Tonight’s Dad’s Army was the first broadcast of one of the series’ undisputed classics: My Brother and I saw Arthur Lowe playing a dual role as Captain Mainwaring and his dissolute sibling who turns up unexpectedly in Walmington on Sea, threatening to disrupt the platoon’s genteel sherry party. Surely this was Arthur Lowe’s finest hour: his performances as George and Barry Mainwaring are so different it’s like watching two individual actors.

Saturday 27th: 'Watch complete Dr. Who story Genesis of the Daleks at 3.00. Read Goodies Book of Criminal Records. Do typed letters to David. Go to Steven (Auntie Rita’s) 21st Birthday party till past midnight.'

By 1975, no Christmas was complete without a complete Dr. Who story – that’s complete in the sense of a whole serial condensed into a single episode, but edited accordingly. In many cases, this abridgement made for a much more satisfactory viewing experience, removing needless red herring cliff hangers, essential in any serial format narrative, and stripping away any padding (which could be excessive in a six-part serial, especially when Terry Nation was writing the script). That said, there’s no denying that Genesis of the Daleks has become one of the seminal moments in the series’ history. Personally, I’d have enjoyed it more with Jon Pertwee as the Doctor as I never really warmed to Tom Baker – the teeth, the pop-eyed looks, the scarf and hat were all distractions.

Staying up (and indeed out) until past midnight was still an event worthy of comment, as my diary entry makes clear. The occasion was the 21st birthday of a cousin, who was named after the feast day of St. Stephen. I remember absolutely nothing about it.

Sunday 28th: 'Watch Holiday Star Trek 'The Cloud Minders'. Do typing. Listen to Double Top Ten Show, Top 20. Do Supercar Annual.'

Monday 29th: 'Ring up David. Watch Laurel & Hardy in The Chimp. Holiday Star Trek Requiem for Methuselah. Also Kes (film) & R.U. Being Served.'

The rest of the Christmas holiday was occupied with more telly (mostly Star Trek and Laurel & Hardy), which we watched whilst consuming bags of Fun Size Mars Bars. Today, these items have become little more than individual chocolates, but back in 1975 they were substantially bigger. Smaller than a ‘full size’ Mars, I’ll grant you, but still of around the same proportions as a regular Milky Way. Shrinkflation: another word nobody had heard of in 1975.

Tuesday 30th: 'Go to David's. Go to Sutton. Get 'The Golden Age of Hollywood Comedy Laurel & Hardy' & The Sea Devils. Play Laurel & Hardy LP. Watch Batman & Norman Wisdom in Press for Time. L&H Murder Case.'

On Tuesday 30 December, I went into Birmingham with my friend David, and came back with an LP of soundtrack highlights from Laurel & Hardy films – a purchase which marked the beginning of my taking a closer interest in the comics and their career. The Sea Devils was another Target paperback.

Wednesday 31st: 'Watch Laurel & Hardy in Chickens Come Home and Star Trek in Day of the Dove. Watch Norman Wisdom film 'Just my Luck; about betting on horses. Do typing.'

The year ended with more L&H, yet another Star Trek, and the Norman Wisdom comedy Just My Luck, the title of which would later become the catchphrase of another teenage diarist – Adrian Mole. There's no mention of having stayed up to see in the New Year, to the accompaniment of The Old Grey Whistle Test, but I'm sure we did so. The 'tradition' lives on in the form of Jools Holland's annual 'Hootenanny' but the music will never be as good again.

From the 1975 diary, we bid you farewell and a Happy New Year!

Note: The Radio Times spread illustrating this piece was sourced from the facebook group Vintage Radio Times which is well worth following if you don't already: Facebook Vintage Radio Times

December 75: Week Four

Monday 22^nd: 'Watch Holiday Star Trek ‘Amok Time’ and Laurel and Hardy ‘Hog Wild’. Also watch Batman – The Funny Feline Felonies pt1 (pt2 tomorrow), The Invisible Man (best yet) and Are You Being Served.'

Describing an episode of The Invisible Man as being ‘the best yet’ wasn’t saying very much. For the record, tonight’s episode saw an escaped mental patient determined to learn the secret of invisibility. The BBC repeated the series during the summer of 1976, following which it was never seen again (you see what I did there).

Tuesday 23^rd: 'Watch Thunderbirds ‘Ricochet’, Star Trek ‘Dagger of the Mind’ and Laurel and Hardy ‘Be Big’. Also Batman pt2, Tomorrow’s World Xmas special, Carry On Up the Khyber, The Liver Birds, The Night That Panicked America, A Ghost Story for Christmas.'

My diary entry attests to the fact that I did little else besides watch television on this particular day. Here’s how it panned out: 11.10-12.00: Thunderbirds. 11.40-12.30: Star Trek (clearly, we missed the beginning on account of the clash with Thunderbirds) 12.30-12.55 Laurel and Hardy. 18.30-19.00 Tomorrow’s World Xmas Special (repeated last week on BBC4) 19.00-20.25 Carry On Up the Khyber. 20.25-21.05 The Liver Birds. 21.20-22.55 The Night That Panicked America. 23.25-00.00 A Ghost Story for Christmas. Between the last two programmes we got The Spinners at Christmas, which one was sort of contractually obliged to watch as there was nothing worth turning over for. And although the diary doesn’t record it, I’m sure I also saw this evening’s festive Top of the Pops (17.50-18.30), a round-up of the year’s number one hits. All told, that added up to over eight hours of viewing between 10am and midnight…

The Night That Panicked America was a dramatisation of the infamous Orson Welles War of the Worlds broadcast of 1938. The BBC’s Ghost Story for Christmas this year was The Ash Tree, the last M.R. James story to be adapted until the modern era. 1976 brought Charles Dickens’ The Signalman, whilst the final two years’ films were specially written for the series. A Ghost Story For Christmas was still far from being the cult favourite that it would become, and the films went mostly unrepeated until the 1990s.

Christmas Eve: 'Watch Star Trek ‘Operation Annihilate’ and Laurel & Hardy ‘Thicker Than Water.’ Uncle Johnny comes. Read OHMSS. Watch Jim’ll Fix It, Great Locomotive Chase, Dick Emery and Porridge.'

I remember Christmas Eve ‘75 as being something of a televisual non-event. Our Dad had gone off on a gig as he did every Christmas and New Year’s Eve, and this year my brother, who was starting to take a serious interest in drumming, had gone with him. Mum was in the kitchen making mince pies and sausage rolls, and I was left with nothing to do but watch television (again!) Unfortunately, the schedule for this evening wasn’t a patch on last night’s line-up, with the exception of Porridge. From 18.30-19.55 BBC1 offered up Walt Disney’s The Great Locomotive Chase – hardly seasonal fare, this 1956 adventure film was based on an actual incident that took place during the American Civil War. I watched it, but only because the alternatives were This Is Your Life and Coronation Street on ITV and Carols from Kings on BBC2: and I’d probably had enough of carols after the school concert. I wanted Christmas Eve to feel Christmassy, and watching some old trains chasing around America just didn’t do it for me. I could have helped out in the kitchen, but I’d probably only have been in the way. Even after half a century I can still remember what a dull evening that was. Bah!

Christmas Day: 'Get: Typewriter, Jasper Carrott Rabbits On, Goodies Book of Criminal Records, New Goodies LP, Meaty Beaty Big and Bouncy, Shadows Greatest, desk diary, talc, pen, Eagle freighter, file thing, felt tips, mars bars, other sweets, Penguin Book of Comics, Dr Who & the Daemons, Dr Who & the Terror of the Autons, Highfly, Blue Ridge Mountains, Round the Horne [book], Space 1999 game, money. Watch Some Mothers Do Ave Em and Morecambe and Wise.'

Presents are a useful shorthand to those items of popular culture that I’d latched onto during the year. New arrivals for 1975 included Jasper Carrott, and, for me at any rate, The Shadows: this compilation was the first of their records I ever owned. John Miles’ single ‘Highfly’ had caught my attention when it popped into the Top 20 late in the year. He would enjoy his biggest success the following spring with the single ‘Music’ .

Meaty, Beaty, Big and Bouncy was the first retrospective album from The Who, rounding up the band's key releases from 1964 to 1969. Provisionally titled 'The Who Look Back', the eventual title was a description of the four band members: Daltry (Meaty), Moon (Beaty), Entwistle (Big) and Townshend (Bouncy). The album has survived in mint condition. By complete contrast, The New Goodies LP cashed in on the comic trio's chart success earlier in the year. On vinyl, the Goodies became, effectively, The Oddies, with Bill writing all the material and performing the bulk of it, with backing from top session musicians including former Tornado Clem Cattini. The Beatles/Beach Boys-inspired track Cricklewood anticipated The Rutles by three years with its Penny Lane pastiche.

The Penguin Book of Comics was an essential overview of British and American material, illustrated with examples from classics of the genre and a few more obscure moments. Inexplicably, Dundee publishers DC Thompson refused permission to reproduce any of their comics, essentially writing themselves out of what is otherwise a comprehensive history. George Perry and Alan Aldridge produced the first edition back in 1967, with the latter supplying some of his distinctive and eccentric illustrations. This was a reprint of the updated edition from 1971.

Round the Horne was a collection of scripts from the BBC radio series of which I had yet to hear a single episode. All I knew of the programme was Kenneth Williams' language-mangling folk singer Rambling Sid Rumpo (his name a parody of American singer and raconteur Ramblin' Jack Elliott). I'd been put onto the series by a friend at school, but repeats were few and far between and I wouldn't get to hear an example for a good few years. These days, it's a regular fixture on BBC Radio 4 Extra, and over the years I must have heard most, if not all of the episodes. Curious, then, that I didn't recognise a single one of the scripts when I flipped through the book again. The guy on the front with the guitar is presumably meant to be Rambling Sid: so why doesn't he look like Kenneth Williams? And the girl looks nothing like Betty Marsden. What were they thinking of?

Christmas Day television included the British TV premiere of The Wizard of Oz, but I passed on that one. I also passed on (or rather, was unable to watch) Laurel & Hardy’s feature film Pack Up Your Troubles, which clashed with the Christmas dinner. At 17.50, we got a festive edition of Bruce Forsyth and the Generation Game, now firmly established as a Christmas evening telly tradition, then Some Mothers Do Ave Em, with a brand-new Christmas episode that sadly failed to maintain the standard of last year’s. The forty-five minute episode was like three separate stories stuck together – Frank working as an elf in Santa’s grotto (Santa being portrayed by an implausible George Sewell); Frank taking a driving test; and Frank showing off his DIY prowess to David Jacobs. This last sequence went on far too long and relied too heavily on the collapsing furniture routines that the series had by this time done to death. I’m sure Morecambe and Wise did better, although I can’t remember this year’s edition in any detail. Fear not – it is available to watch on BBC iPlayer:

https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/m000qrxq/the-morecambe-and-wise-show-christmas-show-1975

Next time: Boxing Day and beyond...

December 75: Week Three

Monday 15th: 'Read OHMSS. Orchestra cancelled. Watch The Goodies in which they are buried in concrete for 75 years. 10 Days [to Christmas]'

The cancellation of the school orchestra practise was always a cause for celebration, because attendance kept us late at school every Monday evening, and being in the orchestra was a ball ache of epic proportions. As I’d opted to do music ‘O’ level, I was obliged to be in the orchestra, and in order to do so had taken up the clarinet, simply because there happened to be a clarinet available: it had once belonged to my Grandad.

Orchestra was presided over by the school’s ageing music teacher ‘Doc’ Terry. To this day, I have no idea if he was a genuine 'doctor' of anything, but it seems unlikely: he'd once owned a shop selling records and sheet music, and had played in dance bands in the 1930s – my Grandad remembered him. If he had any feel or love for music, it was undetectable in his crotchety, ill-humoured demeanour. "You're about as much use as a sack of potatoes" he would inform someone whose playing wasn't up to scratch ("a sack of potatoes is quite useful" we muttered to ourselves). A bout of throat cancer had left him with a strange croaky voice that sounded oddly like W.C. Fields, but he still smoked a pipe during lessons, unthinkable in this day and age. Music lessons consisted mostly of our listening to ‘set pieces’ whilst following them in a score while he polluted the air. When we weren’t doing that, it was ‘orals and aurals’ which meant singing notes that Doc played on the piano. The only worthwhile thing he ever did for me in three years of music lessons, was telling me I had perfect pitch – I could name any note he played. But that hardly lets him off. My abiding memory of those ‘orals and aurals’ is of Doc hammering the keyboard so hard as to risk destroying the instrument whilst bawling ‘IS THAT THIS NOTE? IS IT?’ at one of our unfortunate classmates who was tone deaf and couldn’t sing a note in tune to save his life (or ours). 

Cartoon of 'Doc' Terry, circa 1977. No idea who the portrait behind him was meant to be.
He called everyone 'Tommy' so as not to have to remember our names.

The orchestra was diabolical. We’d have given the Portsmouth Sinfonia a run for their money. The violin section was the worst, consisting of a few youngsters hopelessly scraping away. Everything was taken at a funereal pace; years later, if I should ever chance to hear a professional orchestra playing one of the pieces in our repertoire, I’d always be surprised at how fast it sounded. Doc’s manner was little better during these practise sessions, but softened somewhat when we were joined by members of the Girls’ Grammar on the other side of town, to whom he presented an avuncular air, whilst keeping his beady eye fixed on the rest of us. He was, without a doubt, the worst teacher I ever had the misfortune to encounter. This blog marks his sole appearance on the internet... which is probably just as well.

Tuesday 16th: 'Carol Concert in evening. No school, really: carol practice morn, games in afternoon. Read OHMSS. See that ATV is making a new Space:1999 series.'

The carol concert was, of course, presided over by Doc, but the choir sounded a lot better than the orchestra, especially when we were accompanied by the school’s impressive church organ, with its full complement of stops, diapasons and enormous pipes. I’ve no recollection of what we performed this particular year, but alongside the familiar carols, there was usually something exotic or ancient thrown in – one year, it was a modern carol by the composer William Mathias – another, it was Adam lay ybounden, a 15th century text with a modern setting by Boris Ord. 

A small announcement in the television column of this evening’s Birmingham Evening Mail offered up the potentially exciting announcement about Space:1999. If I'd known what was coming, I'd have been a lot less enthused...

Wednesday 17th: 'Stay at home instead of going out in evening. Finish special XL5 story. Watch the Benny Hill Show. Read OHMSS.'

‘Going out in evening’ actually meant accompanying my parents on our regular midweek trip to visit our Grandparents, who lived around half an hour away. There was a decent fish and chip shop just around the corner, from where we would usually get cod and chips, bringing it all the way home in the car. Saturday afternoon was similarly set aside, with the ritual of going down to the newsagents’ to fetch our Grandad’s copy of the Birmingham Evening Mail, plus whatever comics my brother and myself were reading at the time.

Thursday 18th: 'Break up! At 2.35 (report). Watch Space:1999, ‘Another Time, Another Place’ (from bk2), Love Thy Neighbour and a new Carry On Christmas. Play guitar. Read OHMSS.'

Yes, we got a school report at the end of every term. It might even survive somewhere, though (perhaps fortunately), I don't have it to hand...

Friday 19th: 'David comes. Go to Mere Green. Get mum’s xmas present. Read OHMSS. Watch Top Cat & It’s the Wolf. See a bit of King Kong.'

Where exactly did I get to see ‘a bit of King Kong’? (And which bit, one might also enquire). Consulting the programme listings for this evening, we find the last in a six-part David Attenborough series on BBC1 at 5.15, Fabulous Animals, which tonight looked at legendary and unknown creatures. Although the listing doesn’t mention Kong, and my diary entry wasn’t more specific, this is almost certainly where I saw him: the programme followed Top Cat (which the BBC still insisted on billing as ‘Boss Cat’).

Saturday 20th: 'Watch Star Trek ‘Wink of an Eye’ and Laurel and Hardy ‘Another Fine Mess’. Go to Nanny & Grandad’s & Wilde [sic] Green. Get film edition of OHMSS. Do more to Supercar annual, leaving written stories until have got typewriter [for Christmas].'

‘Holiday Star Trek’ was a short-lived festive tradition that had got going the previous year (https://sundayinoldmoney.blogspot.com/2024/12/advent-sunday-in-old-money-day-23.html) and now made a welcome return. The season ran until 2 January, comprising a grab bag of twelve episodes from across all three series of which the best were Amok Time (22 December), Dagger of the Mind (23 December) and Operation – Annihilate! (24 December), all of them duly noted in my diary. 

As my diary also makes clear, I knew in advance what I was getting for Christmas – I’d asked for a typewriter, to assist in my comic-making activitites. I still own it to this day, but it hasn’t been used in a very long time. It last saw action when I photographed it to use in the design for the Network DVD sleeve of the series Jason King, (left) a typewriter having featured in the opening titles. The Silver-Reed model featured a ribbon that could print in black or red, the colour being selected by the small switch that can be seen on the far right in the pic below:

Sunday 21st: 'Read OHMSS. Change to Film Edition. Do more to home-made Supercar annual. Play guitar. Watch Holiday Star Trek at 12.00. Listen to the Double Top Ten Show with Hoots Mon by Lord Rockingham’s XI. Watch Goodies Rule – OK? & Punch review.'

I’d never heard Lord Rockingham’s XI’s festive hit until this year, as it had charted before my time and had never been revived in the years since. The XI were the house band on TV’s rock and roll programme Oh Boy!, led by Harry Robinson and featuring the legendary Cherry Wainer on organ. Harry Robinson later conducted and composed the backing for Nick Drake’s song ‘River Man’, as well as many different TV themes. The descendants of the real Lord Rockingham (a title defunct since 1782) mean spiritedly took the band to court over their use of the name. ‘Hoots Mon’ was the XI’s only significant chart hit, reaching number one at Christmas 1958. With its cod Scottish interjections, I think we can rule out a revival in this era of heightened sensitivity to pretty well everything...

Next time: an eight-hour day of television... and the worst Christmas Eve TV schedule to date

When Schedules Change

 

December 9, 1980

It should have been just an ordinary Tuesday evening’s television. The evening news at 5.40pm, followed by Nationwide. The 1966 Paul Newman film Winning was scheduled to air at 7pm, an action drama focused on the efforts of a racing driver to win the prestigious Indianapolis 500. The two-hour film was to be followed by a party political broadcast by the Labour Party, some eighteen months into what would prove to be a full eighteen years in opposition. After the 9.00 News, Play For Today presented the comedy drama of a researcher from the future who arrives in London in 1980 – The Flipside of Dominick Hide.

This was the BBC’s intended schedule, as published in that week’s edition of the Radio Times. What went out that evening was radically different, on account of a tragic event the previous night in New York City.

John Lennon had always believed the number nine held some significance in his life. “It’s just a number that follows me around,” he once said in an interview. His earliest address was 9 Newcastle Road, Wavertree. He was born on the 9th of October. There were many more significant number nines in his life, leading him to compose the songs 'Revolution 9' and 'No.9 Dream'. And although it was December 8 when he was murdered in New York, it was already December 9 in his home country.

On the morning of December 9 1980, I’d visited our local library. On coming out, around lunchtime, I entered Preedy’s newsagents opposite, where I saw Lennon’s face staring up in black and white from the top of a pile of the Birmingham Evening Mail’s lunchtime edition. The stark headline said it all: ‘John Lennon Shot Dead.’ I still have that newspaper. Returning home, I turned on Radio 1, where wall-to-wall Lennon and Beatles tracks were being played. I couldn’t believe what had happened. The world couldn’t believe it. Paul McCartney declared it was ‘a drag’ when doorstepped by the media, a remark he immediately regretted and certainly didn’t mean.

At the BBC, the evening’s programme schedule was torn up. Nationwide, originally scheduled to end at 7pm, was extended to ninety minutes, with much of the programme consisting of a tribute to the late Beatle. I’d got my first video recorder less than four weeks ago, and had blank tapes at the ready. I recorded the Nationwide tribute, which was followed by a special screening of the film Help! The Beatles’ lightweight comedy was not, perhaps, the most appropriate memorial, but it showed Lennon the way many of his fans would choose to remember him – as Beatle John, mop-topped and still a creative world away from 'Strawberry Fields Forever'. Over on BBC2, the scheduled edition of The Old Grey Whistle Test was hastily retooled, with Andy Peebles brought into the studio – he’d interviewed Lennon just two days earlier, talking about the recently released album Double Fantasy.

On BBC1, normal service, of a kind, was resumed at 9.00 with the news, albeit the bulletin was dominated by Lennon’s murder, and overran by some twelve minutes. The Flipside of Dominick Hide, originally scheduled to air at 9.25, went out instead at 9.37. The play, which was well received by critics, and went on to become a minor cult classic, can’t have benefited from the schedule upheaval and for many viewers would have been totally eclipsed by the news from New York. I finally got to see it myself two years later, when it was repeated ahead of its sequel, Another Flip for Dominick. I found it charmingly offbeat, original and different; but I certainly wasn’t in the mood for it on December 9, 1980...

Over on ITV, there was less to see. The commercial channel owned no Beatle films that could be shown, and with ad space having been sold in advance, the primetime schedule was non-negotiable. For the record, viewers in the Anglia region would have seen Crossroads at 6.30, followed by a quiz, Gambit, and a half hour comedy. At 8pm, there was a networked two-hour drama starring Tom Bell, The Sailor's Return, followed by News at Ten. It was only in the post-news slot that anything changed, with the scheduled late night film replaced by a very poor studio discussion about Lennon's life and work that hardly bore comparison with the BBC's fulsome tribute.

Somewhat ironically, the BBC's play, The Flipside of Dominick Hide, dealt with a visitor from the future who accidentally alters history and becomes his own destiny. History had indeed been altered on December 8 1980. For years, a Beatle reunion had been rumoured, denied and rumoured yet again. In the months before Lennon's murder, there had been renewed contact with Paul McCartney – and who knows what might have happened if events had panned out differently.

The BBC's Genome database, derived from Radio Times listings, still presents the evening's television as it was originally intended. Reading it is like receiving a communique from a parallel universe where John Lennon is still alive, and a loser from Hawaii was never born.