More Sweets You Can Still Eat..

 

(and a few you can't)

So... how many of the above can you expect to find in any half decent sweet shop today? The spread comes from Robert Opie’s excellent (and highly recommended) ‘70s Scrapbook’, collected from his museum of packaging and other ephemera. There are a fair few in that line-up that have made it into the twenty-first century, most of them still recognisable, if occasionally somewhat diminished in size...

One thing the survivors have in common is that, from my perspective, they’ve mostly been around for a lot longer than I have. Curiously, though, a lot of the chocolate bars launched during my lifetime have been less enduring. Bar Six, introduced by Cadbury’s in the mid 1960s, was a six-segmented chocolate-covered wafer bar. At our grammar school, we had a wall-mounted dispenser which would disgorge Bars Six in exchange for a 5p piece. We couldn’t get enough of them. But Bar Six vanished some time in the 1980s. I once unwrapped a bar to find it was solid chocolate – someone had forgotten to add the wafers to the production line that day, and it wasn’t the only time it happened. Today, it would probably go viral...

Even shorter-lived was the Aztec bar introduced by Cadburys in 1967 as a kind of rival to the Mars bar. On the outside, it looked just the same as a Mars, but beneath the thick chocolate were three separate layers: soft caramel on top, brown, Mars-style nougat below and white nougat on the bottom layer.* I found it very chewy – much more so than a Mars bar – and probably ate less than half a dozen of them (not all at the same time). Some time in the 1970s, I realised Aztec had quietly been dropped. Cadbury’s briefly revived it in 1999 (above left), but deserve a wooden spoon for their efforts, as what they came up with was simply a Mars bar, without the three-layer appearance of the original Aztec. Did nobody bother to do any research? All they had to do was look at the 1960s commercial where the bar's layers can be seen quite clearly:

A 1967 commercial introducing Aztec: I've heard it claimed that the bar contained raisins: it absolutely did not.

Others ‘missing in action’ brands include Cadbury’s Ice Breaker (chocolate bar with mint pieces) and Milk Tray bar (selection of Milk Tray chocolates fused together into a chocolate bar). Topic is a recent loss to sweet addicts, having been discontinued in 2021, with the last shelf stock selling out around 2023. Shame, as its white nougat centre made it quite unlike any other chocolate bar, but it seems that declining sales led to its demise. Introduced in 1962, it was famously promoted for many years with the slogan ‘a hazelnut in every bite'. Bill Oddie provides the voice of Toby alongside (I think) Jon Pertwee in this mid 70s TV spot:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lsLceXcFd6I

So much for the history books, but we’re concerned here with the sweets you can still eat… so let’s have a few more...

I was going to add Old Jamaica to the casualty list until I discovered it had been relaunched six years ago as a sub-brand of Bournville dark chocolate and is still available at time of writing, although reviews online suggest it’s ‘not the same as it used to be’ (is anything?) This rum and raisin flavoured bar first hit the shelves back in the 1970s and was promoted with a ‘Treasure Island’ styled ad campaign in which a whiskery old pirate advised his young shipmate ‘don’t ee knock it all back at once.’ 

Curlywurly, introduced by Cadbury’s in the early 70s, and promoted on television by comedian Terry Scott, is also still very much alive, and appears unchanged from its original appearance. This, again, has traditionally been aimed at children, but that didn’t stop me from checking out an example just recently. It is still very chewy, although the toffee centre is slightly smoother than it used to be, and the chocolate still falls to bits when you eat it. Perhaps they should have tied their advertising in with Persil...

Toffee Crisp arrived in the early 60s, with a launch campaign on television that emphasised the huge crunch produced when you bit into one, which was exaggerated in the advert to seismic proportions. The bar was derived from a chocolate and rice krispies cake made by the wife of John Henderson, great-nephew of Mackintosh’s founder John Mackintosh. Today’s version is more or less indistinguishable from the original, and the orange/yellow packaging has evolved from an earlier orange and white version. As you can see in the Robert Opie spread, a plain chocolate version was also available for a while during the 1970s.

Also still present and correct on the shelves of any self-respecting sweet shop is the ages old favourite Bounty, introduced by Mars in 1951, and more recently developed into an ice cream equivalent (in my opinion one of the more successful ‘choc bar to ice cream’ transitions). Originally sold as individual bars, a two-pack Milky Way-style package eventually became the default, with a cardboard slide insert that has disappeared over the years. Like Charlie Brown, I used to hate any chocolate that contained coconut, and was a late adopter of Bounty: I doubt I ate it at all prior to the 1980s. Today, it is unchanged as far as I can tell, and the chocolate retains its distinctive thickness. Bounty's advertising played off the exotic associations of coconut, and featured a group of ‘Bounty hunters’ on a tropical island whence they had come ‘in search of paradise.’ Our dad always used to add: ‘and all they found was chocolate bars’.

The plain chocolate Bounty in its red variant wrapper was always far harder to find, and as of 2023 is reported to be extinct. A garage just up the road from where I live was certainly still selling them in relatively recent years, so news of its demise may yet prove to be premature.

Picnic, still with us, is a bar of Australian origin, created in 1950 by the MacRobertson confectionery company, which was acquired by Cadbury’s in 1967. I can’t find any confirmation of this, but I’m certain that Picnic originally did not contain peanuts, and that the ‘Peanut Picnic’ was a new variety introduced a few years later. Does anyone know for sure? In my recollection, ‘original’ Picnic was rather like a Lion bar.

Other favourites still available at your local sweetshop include Starbar (which disappeared for a time, after being rebranded as a variant of Boost but has made a return in recent years), Wispa (famously advertised on television by various comedy double acts), Aero (with us in one form or another since 1935), Boost (launched in 1985) and of course the ever popular Cadbury’s bars: Dairy Milk, (1905-present), Fruit and Nut (1926 - ), Wholenut (1930 - ), and Bournville (1908 - ) The latter has been ‘retooled’ in the past year, and is now moulded in larger segments which are much harder to eat. In the late 60s and early 70s, Bournville was promoted on television with an ‘X certificate’ campaign, emphasising that it was a chocolate for adults: I couldn’t fault their reasoning, and was never that big a fan of dark chocolate, except when it came on biscuits…

Cadbury’s Creme Egg is happily unaffected by shrinkflation – you can’t change the shape of an egg after all (although Cadbury’s have recently changed the shape of their large Easter Eggs, giving them a flat base, so they’re not egg-shaped all round. You know where to write and complain…) Creme Eggs were introduced in Britain in 1963, and I can still remember eating one for the first time, half expecting the ‘yolk and white’ fondant to taste like a real egg. Originally sold under the Fry’s brand name, they were brought under the Cadbury’s banner in 1971. During the 1970s, Cadbury’s also sold ‘Border Creme Eggs’ in tartan wrappers, with toffee fondant centres. There’s nothing like them around today, although the ‘Caramel Creme Egg’ comes close, and there have been any number of variant editions over the years. This year, by accident, I bought a pack of white chocolate creme eggs, which look disconcertingly like real eggs and taste very, very sickly. Not recommended...

Back in 1967, Cadbury’s started selling its famous Mini Eggs, which I believe were originally intended as cake decorations. In later years they were promoted by ‘Mr. Cadbury’s parrot.’ Recent reports suggest that, unlike Creme Eggs, these candy-coated chocolates are showing disturbing signs of shrinkage… the eggs remain the same size as ever, but there are fewer in a packet, down from 80g to 74g, whilst the price is now upwards of £2.15. Rising costs of cocoa and dairy products have been blamed – and as ever, the cost is absorbed by the consumer instead of eating into the manufacturer’s profit margins… plus ça change: people have always complained about Easter eggs being bad value for money, traditionally pointing to the excessive packaging and the meagre amount of sweets you find inside them.

Today, the chocolate I buy more often than any other is Cadbury’s Caramel. At time of writing the large bar tends to retail for around £2.75, but I recently spotted them on sale in a local Tesco for just £2. Bargain! Launched in 1976 with an advertising campaign featuring a seductive bunny rabbit that’s remembered to this day, it was later brought under the ‘Dairy Milk’ branding. And the human owner of that slinkily seductive bunny voice? Miriam Margolyes.

What, if anything have we learned from all this? Well, if you like continuity in your chocolate, then be wary of fickle Cadbury's, as their brands seem more prone to discontinuation than those of other manufacturers – just consider the list of casualties above, and you'll see they're mostly Cadbury's. Mars products seem to stick around for longer, as do those of Nestlé. Perhaps it's more the case that Cadbury's like to experiment more than other makers, and experiments don't always work: in their defence, they have occasionally reintroduced items in response to popular demand. I'd really like to see them bring back Aztec, and to do it right this time... they might even make it better than the original. But on the whole, we don't do too badly for sweets here in Britain – at least we get proper chocolate unlike what passes for it in the United States, and notwithstanding shrinkflation, I think it's safe to assume that most of our long standing chocolate brands will be with us for a while yet.

Think of it as edible nostalgia...

Sweets You Can Still Eat

 

...with or without ruining your appetite!

Vintage confectionery has long been a potent subject for nostalgia: Robert Opie’s excellent books are full of spreads of chocolate bars you’ll never see or consume again, and you can barely turn on Channel 5 without stumbling across yet another retrospective of sweets and chocolates we’ve ‘loved and lost’. But what of the nostalgic sweets that are still with us? Those chocolate bars that, like certain members of the acting profession, have continued into their nineties – and in some cases, beyond? There is still a surprising number of confectionery items available today whose pedigree goes back a hundred years and more. So let’s hear it for the sweets you can still eat (with or without ruining your appetite)...

Mars has been with us since 1932, when Forrest Mars Snr. began manufacturing the iconic bar in the United Kingdom. It had, in fact, been introduced by his father, Frank Mars in 1923, in the United States where it was known (confusingly to us Brits) as Milky Way (and is still sold there under that name today). Like many of the long lasting chocolate bars, Mars has changed little in appearance over the years. Its black, red and gold packaging is still recognisably similar to the bars I first unwrapped back in the 1960s, and the bar itself, whilst having suffered to some extent from ‘shrinkflation’, is the same creation of nougat and caramel, coated in milk chocolate. As can be seen in this vintage TV ad https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JOJZoDZpVmQ  the bar was originally deeper and less elongated than today’s iteration. The chocolate was also a good deal thicker: commercials frequently reminded us that ‘there’s glucose, sugar and thick, thick chocolate in a Mars.’ The well-remembered slogan ‘a Mars a day helps you work, rest and play’, though essentially meaningless, appeared throughout the 60s and 70s and was even printed on the wrappers. Jasper Carrott famously equated consumption of Mars bars with overnight acne: ‘eat a Mars bar, next day, bloody great zit’ ('zit' being a Carrottism for an eruption of acne which he tried to popularise in the 1970s). 

Unlike Mars, which was aimed at a wider demographic, Milky Way has always been promoted as a bar for children, with the oft-repeated claim that it was ‘the sweet you can eat between meals without ruining your appetite.’ This debatable claim hails from the era when advertisers could make grandiose claims for their products (eg ‘Mackeson does you a power of good’) without any supporting evidence. How does one measure ruined appetite, anyway? Did Mars test Milky Way on groups of children in between meals, with a control group given other sweeties, then measure how much of their dinners they were able to eat?

Milky Way is, essentially, a Mars bar with less chocolate, no caramel and a lighter, fluffier centre. Curiously, in light of the encouragement to be consumed between meals, they’re often sold in double packs, with two bars originally presented on a kind of cardboard slide. The packaging was always blue with a white logo surrounded by stars, and hasn’t changed much to this day. The bar itself still has the same sculpted chocolate exterior but the fluffy filling is now a light creamy colour as opposed to the original brown. Today’s Milky Way is a shadow of its former self: I’d estimate it to be less than ¾ of its original width. It still comes in packs of two, while the individual bar must rate as one of Britain’s cheapest chocolates, priced at less than 50p in the convenience store I visited today. The double pack was a pocket money-friendly 89p, so you can guess which one I went for…

The same store provided me with an example of a chocolate bar I’d previously thought defunct, Nestlé’s Crunch (formerly known as ‘Dairy Crunch’). This chocolate and crisped rice confection first hit sweetshops back in 1938, but didn’t make it to the UK until the mid 1960s, and was one of the first ‘new’ chocolate bars I remember seeing advertised on television. The blue white and red colour scheme of its packaging remains the same today, as you can see. In the 1990s, the bar’s name was shortened to simply ‘Crunch’. Today's bars are somewhat slimmer than they used to be but otherwise unaltered. 

Another ‘newcomer’ as far as I was concerned was Marathon, known to the rest of the world as ‘Snickers’ since its inception in 1930 – the name came from a horse owned by the Mars family. This side of the pond, we didn’t get to try Snickers until 1968 when it was belatedly introduced to Britain and Ireland under its new name – allegedly chosen because the American name sounded too much like ‘knickers’. Marathon advertising always emphasised how it was ‘packed with peanuts’ – rather too many for my liking, and even today I find one bar goes a long way, which probably bears out Mars’ claim that ‘it’s so satisfying’ .Above left is a wrapper I preserved back in 1995 just before the name change.

The internet is full of misleading rubbish. Google Quality Street and its AI overview will try to convince you the brand was ‘created by Nestlé in 1936.’ Cobblers. It was Halifax sweet manufacturers Mackintosh’s who introduced Quality Street, and Nestlé didn’t have any association with the name until 1988 when they bought Rowntree Mackintosh. Today’s tins (or, rather, plastic boxes) still contain many of the familiar or seemingly familiar varieties from the original, but appearances can be deceptive. The so-called ‘purple one’ which formerly contained a brazil nut has been downgraded to a hazelnut. I’ve not looked inside a packet for some time, so I’ve no idea whether the truly horrible toffee brittle is still part of the line-up. These were always the last to go from our family tins at Christmas, along with the opal-fruit shaped toffee and the famously sticky toffee penny. I’m fairly sure that the ‘Chocolate ABC logo’ is still in there: a green-foil wrapped triangle which, when unwrapped, presented as a chocolate version of the logo that used to appear on ABC cinemas and their television channel; whether by intent or design I have no idea. Quality Street tins were originally adorned with romanticised artwork of a soldier in dress uniform and an elegant lady. I still have a small example in my garage (of the tin, not the elegant lady).

Vintage 1lb tin of Quality Street, circa early 60s. The tin is small, just 5" diameter.

Fry’s Turkish Delight was a sweet I avoided during childhood, probably scared away by an early encounter with the fragrant, chocolate-coated jelly which bears only a passing resemblance to genuine Turkish Delight. The adverts were all over television at one time, and featured an Omar Sharif type, in a tent in a desert, with a harem of belly dancers, accompanied by some eastern-sounding music and a voice-over declaring the chocolate to be ‘full of eastern promise’ whatever that was supposed to mean. The ‘Fry’s’ name is deceptive, as the bar has been manufactured by Cadburys since 1919, when they acquired Bristol confectioners J.S. Fry & Sons. Today, it’s still sold in more or less the same form as I remember from the 1960s, a flat slab in a magenta foil wrapper, with a logo that has hardly changed if at all. I do occasionally partake of the odd Turkish Delight bar – they’re sold in supermarket multipacks – and of all the surviving sweets of earlier eras, it’s probably seen the fewest changes. The chocolate coating seems thinner than it used to be, but that’s about it.

Also bearing the Fry’s brandname, and of an even older vintage – dating back 150 years, no less – is the famous Chocolate Cream, still available and still more or less the same product that was once humped around in crates by future James Bond George Lazenby in a series of mid-60s TV commercials. I’ve recently consumed a 2026 Chocolate Cream (purely for research purposes, you understand), and can offer the following observations (based on the supermarket multipack version): the bar’s dimensions are somewhat reduced; you can no longer break the segments apart without shattering the bar; the chocolate is a shade thinner, and the fondant filling slightly smoother. Otherwise, it’s business as usual. I never cared much for Chocolate Cream as a child, finding the combination of dark chocolate and sweet fondant rather too rich for my taste. There was once a companion bar, ‘Fry’s Five Centres’, which contained separate segments of orange, raspberry, lime, strawberry and pineapple fondant. I never ate one, and don’t even remember seeing it on sale, although it was apparently available until 1992.

No roundup of chocolate favourites would be complete without Kit-Kat, arguably one of the most famous chocolate bars in Britain. It’s been around since 1935, which probably explains its ‘jazz era’ nomenclature – there were plenty of ‘Kit Kat Clubs’ around in the 1930s. Kit-Kat was created by Rowntrees and originally sold under the prosaic name of ‘Chocolate Crisp’, with the more familiar brand name arriving in 1937, a year after the ‘two finger’ Kit-Kat was introduced. The packaging has always been red and white except during 1945, when a blue variant appeared (illustrated as a 1995 reissue). I believe the blue wrapper indicated a temporary change from milk to dark chocolate, although the 1990s version contained a normal Kit Kat. Television advertising for the brand arrived in 1958, with the famous slogan ‘have a break… have a Kit-Kat.’ In 1980s America, this was coarsened somewhat to ‘gimme a break.’ Typical…

Numerous Kit-Kat variations have appeared over the years, including the tooth-loosening chunky version; but the original is still popular and, I’m sure most would agree, the best. Last time I looked it was also still recognisably the same dimensions it’s always been, so hats off to Nestlé for not going down the road to shrinkflation.

Also still with is is Nestlé’s Milkybar, famously promoted on television by a speccy kid in a cowboy outfit. The commercials, which began in 1961, have been running with variations ever since, originally accompanied by a song extolling ‘the goodness that’s in Milkybar.’ That’s goodness as in a load of sugar, and the slogan was, unsurprisingly, revised in later years. Those old adverts also remind us of an era when nobody in Britain understood French pronunciation, and ‘Nestlé’ was always pronounced as if it were the English word ‘nestle.’ 

White chocolate tastes sweeter than milk or dark chocolate on account of its lack of cocoa solids, and the sickly sweet taste is probably why Milkybar’s advertising has always been aimed at kids; although this particular kid was immune. Even as a child, I hated Milkybar – a Milkybar egg filled with Milkybar buttons was one of the worst things you get given for Easter. Outside of the UK, Milkybar is known by the meaningless name Galak.

Other sweet ‘chocolate’ bars I couldn’t abide included the short-lived Pink Panther bar of the 1970s (which was, of course, Pink, and a sickly strawberry flavour), and Caramac, which was made using similar ingredients to vanilla fudge, but was far too sweet for my palate. Never mind the taste, I didn’t even like the smell of it! Caramac was introduced in the UK in 1959 and was only discontinued as recently as 2023 , although it reportedly enjoyed a short-lived revival in July 2024. Its modern equivalent is Cadbury’s Caramilk, which I have yet to experience...

One facet of these vintage chocolates that’s interesting to observe is how little the packaging has changed across the decades, with only minimal design tweaks, and iconic colour schemes enduring over generations. A very good example of this is Cadbury’s Flake, which has been sold in a yellow wrapper as far back as I can remember and possibly for a lot longer. The bar was developed in 1920 when a Cadbury’s employee observed how the chocolate run-off from moulds set into a distinctive flaky pattern. It became equally famous in its ice-cream incarnation, instantly transforming any ‘ordinary’ cornet into a ‘99’. Why ‘99’? Nobody seems to know for sure, and various theories have been put forward. More famous still was the series of TV commercials from the 1960s onwards with a decidedly adult theme, suggestive of… well, I’m sure you know. One of them featured actress Dolorez Mantez, taking a furlough from working on the moon for Ed Straker’s SHADO organisation. The ad’s famous song was composed by top jingle writer Ronnie Bond (not the identically-named drummer from the Troggs).

Six of the best again for Wikipedia who insist that the ‘dipped flake’ variant (a standard Flake bar covered in chocolate so as to offset the messy process of eating one) was launched in 2003. Once again, cobblers. I had them bought for me as early as 1972 and they almost certainly existed before this time. What actually happened is that the original bar disappeared in the wake of the very similar ‘Twirl’ and was relaunched in 2003. All Wikipedia employees will write out one hundred times: ‘I will not publish inaccurate information about chocolate bars.’

We're not done yet... next time, we'll look at a few more 'still with us today' items. and one or two we've lost along the way.

Forty Eight Years of the Prefab Four

 

Easter was very early in 1978. On Easter Monday, 27 March, BBC2’s evening line-up included The Rutles, Eric Idle’s now famous Beatles parody and, perhaps unusually, still the only Beatles parody to appear in the mass media.

I noticed it in the Radio Times, mispronouncing the title to myself as ‘The Rootles’ until I got to see the film a few days later. The RT’s description promised us songs like ‘A Hard Day’s Rut’, ‘All You Need is Lunch’ and ‘W.C. Fields Forever’, but what we got was something funnier and more nuanced. Neil Innes’ songs were the making of The Rutles (AKA All You Need is Cash). Beyond them the film is an amusing, occasionally razor-sharp parody of the Beatles' career with all its ups and downs, but without the music I doubt we'd still be talking about The Rutles today. 

Idle’s scriptwriting process was aided and abetted by a Beatle himself, George Harrison, who granted him exclusive access to the band’s official biographical film The Long and Winding Road, unreleased and on ice pending its much later development into the Anthology television series. Various elements from the film, including concert footage (of the fans not the band) were incorporated and adapted into Idle’s project.

The Rutles anticipated later entries in the ‘mockumentary’ genre, most notably This is Spinal Tap and, like Spinal Tap, was given a huge lift by the sheer quality of the songs. Neil Innes’ material worked because the songs themselves weren’t inherently funny, but were brilliantly observed. They occasionally sounded funny – the first laugh-out-loud moment for me came on hearing ‘Get Up and Go’ which is so obviously a parody of ‘Get Back’; the second was seeing the band’s ‘Ed Sullivan Show’ appearance performing ‘Hold My Hand’, a comical mash-up of Beatle hits. The film, as presented by the BBC, ran for 65 minutes, so was slightly shorter than its full 76 minutes runtime. Amongst the items removed was Nasty and Chastity’s ‘One Hundred Feet of Film’ which, frankly, it was better off without.

The Rutles grew out of an idea Innes had presented to Idle during the making of Idle’s TV series Rutland Weekend Television. Innes had written a Beatley-sounding song (‘I Must be in Love’) and conceived the idea for a parody film. I’d given up on Idle’s series after just one episode, so I never got to see the original Rutles film (it’s been available on YouTube for years). Shot in black and white, and essentially a parody of A Hard Day’s Night, the ‘band’ members mucked about to a backing of Innes’ song. Further spots by Idle and Innes on Saturday Night Live led to the decision to make the full-length film, co-directed by Idle and SNL’s Gary Weis. 

The film premiered on NBC five days ahead of its BBC broadcast, earning the lowest ratings of any show on the primetime US networks that week. The BBC screening apparently did a lot better, and within a fortnight there was a Rutles LP available to buy in the shops. The album came with a glossy colour booklet sewn into the gatefold sleeve, its design clearly influenced by Roy Carr and Tony Tyler’s The Beatles: An Illustrated Record, which had been published three years earlier. My diary records that I got my copy, from the long vanished Bradshaw’s record shop in Lichfield, on Saturday 20 May. A week later, The Rutles received a repeat broadcast, this time on BBC1, sandwiched between the news and Saturday Night at the Mill. It would prove to be my last look at the Prefab Four for another ten years...

The LP booklet provided a chance to see those superbly accurate parody sleeves in full detail

All of this parodic business was of special interest to me, because, along with my brother, we’d been doing exactly the same thing ourselves, writing and drawing comedy histories of made-up bands whose career arcs mirrored the Beatles at every step: one of them even made a film called ‘Ouch!’ whilst another fell under the influence of coffee (as opposed to tea). This wouldn’t be worth mentioning if it weren’t for the fact that we’d written our versions at least a year before we saw The Rutles... Hearing Neil Innes’ songs gave me the idea that I could try writing some of the hits that I’d imagined for my own comedy pop groups. It was my first proper attempt at songwriting… and I had the Rutles to thank for it.

The Rutles LP, despite being incomplete (it contained fourteen of the twenty tracks heard in the film) was an excellent souvenir of the film, and in the absence of any further broadcasts, one could still replay the vinyl. Eric Idle made no contributions to the music, which was performed by Neil Innes, with on-screen Rutles John Halsey and Ricky Fataar joined by Ollie Halsall (providing the Dirk McQuickly vocals). Halsall was glimpsed briefly in a still photograph, playing the part of original band member Leppo. Musically, it sounded convincingly Beatlesque, although I could tell there was something not quite right about the early tracks, which have a 1970s studio sound about them and contain a lot more production than any comparable Beatle recordings. The songs of the psychedelic era were, on the whole, more authentically realised.

John Lennon had advised against the inclusion of ‘Get Up and Go’ on account of its strong musical similarity to ‘Get Back’, and the other omissions were simply for reasons of timing: but it didn’t stop ATV Music, holders of the Beatles copyrights, from suing Innes for copyright infringement. Innes settled out of court, but had to give up 50% of the royalties from sales of the album, and agree to the additon of Lennon and McCartney’s names to his composer credit.

The Rutles’ last appearance on the BBC came on Saturday 30 January 1988 (actually, early Sunday morning – it was scheduled at 12.05am) and I was finally able to capture the film on videotape. Many years later, the original US version was released on DVD, by which time the Rutles had been revived, without the participation of Eric Idle, for a new album written by Neil Innes and performed by most of the original musical line-up. The revival had been inspired by the Beatles’ Anthology series and LPs, which Neil Innes reimagined as Archaeology, providing the chance to craft some more Beatle-styled material, this time carefully avoiding any accusations of plagiarism. I went out and bought it, but have played it only once. By this time, I’d learned a little about music production and could coax some convincingly 1960s vibes out of a basic 4-track desk, and to me, the new Rutles songs sounded far too much like slick studio artefacts of the 1990s. Lacking the support of the film and its attendant visuals, they weren’t funny, either.

How does the film stand up today? For me, not particularly well. It’s like a joke that works brilliantly the first time around but palls with re-telling. The best parts are the re-creations of concert and studio performance. Being a vintage instrument nerd, I can tell you that the guitars are mostly wrong (in a 'close but no cigar' manner), but back in 1977 there weren’t the kind of vintage reissue models available that one sees today in the hands of every self-respecting Beatles tribute band. The band’s clothes and hair were nicely re-created, but their teenybopper fans look like they’d been rounded up at a Bay City Rollers concert: not a beehive or bob among them.

Part of the problem with watching The Rutles today is a question of context. Back in 1978, few of us were familiar with the archival clips that Idle had seen in The Long and Winding Road and chosen to parody – newsreel film from the US tours, press conferences and suchlike. For many years, I genuinely believed that there had been an original film of the Beatles leaping from the front of a Carvair car-carrying aircraft, as the Rutles are seen to do at the beginning of the film – but it was a sequence unique to the Prefab Four. Seeing the Rutles mucking about in hotel rooms was amusing and nostalgic in 1978, but today, we’ve all seen the original Beatles footage many times over in Anthology, Eight Days a Week and countless other documentaries; and here’s the thing – the Beatles are funnier than the Rutles.

You can’t really get past that. Even Nasty’s apology for claiming the Rutles are bigger than God is less interesting to watch than Lennon dealing with the real thing, and he doesn’t actually say anything funny, lamely declaring ‘I think you’re all daft.’ Idle’s film is also on shaky ground when dealing with the darker aspects of the Beatles’ career – reimagining Yoko as a neo-Nazi was uncalled for, and I still find it hard to raise a smile when manager Leggy Mountbatten ‘tragically’ accepts a teaching post in Australia. The best moments are the recreations of Magical Mystery Tour and Yellow Submarine which are hard to tell apart from the originals.

Many good ideas are best left alone, and The Rutles is no exception. Eric Idle unwisely revisited his idea back in 2002, with the release of The Rutles 2 – Can’t Buy Me Lunch. The film was deferred by Warners until fans shouted loudly enough to force a belated release, after which the fans kept shouting; this time in dismay at the feeble mess the film turned out to be. There was no new footage in the sequel, just a few unused trims from interviews with Mick Jagger and Paul Simon, propped up with various new celebrity interviews, while the linking script was dull and unfunny. If you don’t believe me, check out the reviews on imdb.

Will we ever see the Rutles revisited? With the prospect of yet another Beatles biopic on the horizon (whose cast look less like the Fab Four than any of the Rutles did), will some enterprising producer conceive the idea of creating a ‘new’ Rutles with young actors presented as, perhaps, a stage show? I’m surprised Eric Idle hasn’t thought of doing so, given the success of Python musical Spamalot. He’s only 82. He could do a lot worse.

Over to you, Dirk McQuickly...

Nasty sports an almost but not quite right Rickenbacker, while Stig's 1973 Gretsch Country Gentleman doesn't really belong in this 'Rat Keller era' pose.

On Your Wavelength?

 

In my last posting, I lamented the state of today’s radio playlists, which have become increasingly focused on either contemporary music or a narrowing choice of over-familiar ‘greatest hits’. Where, I asked, were those more obscure items, the kind of songs you heard maybe once back in the mid 60s and never again? Where are those ‘rubbishy’ items that used to annoy us during their time in the top 20? Radio 2 has long since become Radio 1 in all but name: until a few years ago, Sundays were the only day of the week where one might find anything remotely resembling the station in its heyday, but with the deaths of presenters like Desmond Carrington and Richard Baker, and various scheduling overhauls, the ‘old school Sunday’ disappeared from national radio. But all is not lost... 

There is still a radio station where this kind of overlooked, easy listening music has a home. Serenade Radio is an internet station that models itself on the old Light Programme, with a schedule devoted to easy listening across the genres of pop, folk and jazz. Last weekend, I tuned in for the first time and was pleasantly surprised. In broadcasting terms, its nearest equivalent is the nostalgic TV channel Talking Pictures: but you won’t be annoyed by those endless commercials for Dormeo mattresses, because there aren’t any commercials on Serenade Radio: the station is run by professional presenters who give their time for free, and is entirely funded through donations from listeners. It’s been on air since 2015.

The station is the brainchild of Andy Marriott, a name I’ve known for years – he was an associate of my friend Tim Beddows, and would occasionally supply him with rare materials from the vintage years of television. Elsewhere in the schedule, we find Peter Tomlinson, a former continuity announcer from ATV in the Midlands, and a genuinely nice guy (he recorded a whole day of ‘in-vision continuity’ for my 60th birthday at the behest of Tim Beddows). There are even vintage editions of Sing Something Simple, a Sunday evening staple of Radio 2 that always followed the Top 20 rundown – and on weekday mornings, Music While You Work, originally launched during World War II as a morale-boosting programme of uplifting music.

I was tipped off about the station by Steve James, who presents a breakfast show on Saturday and Sunday mornings and posted a comment on my last blog, and last weekend I tuned in (if that’s the right expression when listening on an iPad) for the first time. The playlist was almost exactly what I was writing about last time – not that they play ‘rubbish’, but rather the kind of easy listening instrumentals that were once a staple of the Light Programme, from names like Tony Hatch, Percy Faith, Herb Alpert and many others. Alongside these items, there are pop records of that particular stripe once favoured by the Light Programme – so, no noisy rock bands (who are well served by the many ‘greatest hits’ style broadcasters). 

Much of what gets played is unfamiliar to me, but not unwelcome. I’ve caught a few personal favourites – the Johnny Mann Singers’ version of 'Up, Up and Away', and Reparata and the Delrons’ 'Captain of Your Ship', which I mentioned in a post back in 2021. Today, I even heard a track by Ken Dodd...

Perhaps most intriguingly though, I’ve caught a couple of records which I ‘know but don’t know’ if that makes any sense. Just this morning, I heard a track by the Tony Hatch Orchestra, ‘Maori’, a choral instrumental that struck a chord somewhere in the deepest recesses of memory. I was sure I knew this track, but had no memory of having heard it. This begs the question: if you hear a piece of music only once and never again, is it stored somewhere in the memory? Hearing songs like this is a bit like a benign form of hypnotic regression, recovering memories that had all but been erased: a kind of ‘Stone Tape’ of memory (for those familiar with the Nigel Kneale ghost story).

Serenade Radio is genuinely like revisiting the old Light Programme, which was a constant background in our home during the 1960s. It’s a welcome change from the state of modern radio, with its unashamedly ‘old school’ style of presentation. You even get the Greenwich Time Signal ‘pips’ on the hour, although, for pedants, they are the ‘post-1972’ variety, with the sixth pip longer than the others. Judging from the station’s website, there is a high level of listener engagement, with over 30 comments posted in the last seven days. This is unsurprising, as the BBC’s listener demographic has become increasingly biased towards the 30 and under age group, certainly as far as music radio is concerned, and there is little or nothing in their output with this kind of appeal to older listeners. It’s not beyond the bounds of possibility that the BBC might consider doing its own version of a station like this – there are, after all, no fewer than four iterations of Radio 1, and a ‘Radio 2 Extra’ would, I’m sure find an appreciative audience – but I think it’s unlikely.

You can find Serenade Radio here: https://www.serenade-radio.com

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.