Highway to the Sun

The Lost Golden Age of the BBC4 Documentary

Hidden away on BBC4 while the World Cup final was playing out over on BBC1 was one of the best factual programmes I’ve seen in the past twenty years; a film that hails from a now vanished golden age of original documentaries from the BBC’s fourth television channel.

A303: Highway to the Sun first appeared back in May 2011. In the hour-long film, writer Tom Fort takes as his subject a modest British trunk road, travelling its length from Micheldever, just south west of Basingstoke, to its unremarkable terminus, twenty five miles short of Exeter, where, like a meterological depression, it loses its identity, becoming the A30. Along the way, he stops to give us some of the route’s history, and explores places and artefacts to be found close to the highway. His encounters include a Roman mosaic fish, uncovered specially for the film; an 18th century folly; the Neolithic ‘Amesbury Archer’; and, of course, Stonehenge, whose site is, notoriously, bypassed by the A303, despite numerous efforts to have its course diverted or sent underground. 

Despite being only fifteen years old, the film is already a historic document, as the landscape around the monument has been drastically reconfigured in the intervening time. When the film was made, the A344 still formed a triangular junction with the 303 due east of Stonehenge, but two years later, it was closed and the route returned to the landscape. 

I’ve only once had cause to use the A303, on a weekend when I had occasion to travel to Yeovil after an overnight stay in London. My diary describes it as a memorable drive – I’ve long had an abiding fascination for Britain’s older roads and landscapes – and my soundtrack of choice for the drive included Mike Oldfield’s Tubular Bells. I knew I’d be passing Stonehenge and, never having visited before, made the time to stop. The trip was still quite fresh in my mind when, a few years later, I first saw Tom Fort’s film, and I recognised a lot of the route: even the dull parts.

Fort, at the wheel of a vintage Morris Traveller, made for an engaging presenter, avuncular in manner, well-informed and clearly with an abiding interest in his subject. In approach, the film recalls John Betjeman’s classic Metro-Land, wherein the poet laureate used the route of the Metropolitan Railway as a springboard to local history and eccentric individuals. Where Betjeman met a man with a cinema organ in his suburban home, Fort took a drive with a gentleman who found and ate roadkill.

Fort’s BBC film was later turned into a book, published the following year; and two years later, he embarked on another cross country journey, developing his book ‘Downstream’ into the BBC4 film, River of Dreams: Crossing England in a Punt. This time, his journey took him through territory much more familiar to myself, as he traced the route of the river Trent from its source on Biddulph Moor in Staffordshire to its confluence with the Humber Estuary. His ports of call en route included Donington Hall, where he recounted a scandalous elopement; the Bass Museum in Burton on Trent (sadly now closed) where he learned the history of India Pale Ale; and the abandoned cooling towers of Willington Power Station, one of the last surviving relics of the chain of coal fired power stations that once followed the line of the Trent and were known collectively as ‘Megawatt Valley’.

Crossing England in a Punt was a worthy successor to Fort’s A303 film and one might have hoped for more of the same: he’s written around a dozen books on similar themes, and is still writing, so there was plenty of scope. Alas, not. The likelihood of BBC4 commissioning any further films has now receded into history along with the Amesbury Archer. In short, the channel does not now commission new documentaries, and has no budget allocation. In retrospect, we can look back to the first decade of this century as something of a golden age for BBC4 factual series. From The Secret Life of the Motorway (2007) through The Department Store (2008) to The Secret Life of Rubbish (2012), there was always something new and interesting to watch on the channel, and these relatively low key documentaries, presented with minimal promotion, were a welcome antidote to the ‘point the camera at the presenter’ style of Brian Cox, Lucy Worsley and others.

Tom Fort was no shrinking violet as a presenter, but his style was easy going and undemonstrative. ‘That’s enough of that,’ he blushes, having been cajoled into recreating a novices’ initiation ritual from Weyhill Fair in Hampshire in a pub full of customers. He’s the kind of bloke you could listen to for hours in the pub without getting bored, and he clearly has a passion for his subject matter, not to mention a genius for winkling out interesting historical tit-bits.

A303: Highway to the Sun has, fortunately, been repeated on numerous occasions, and at time of writing is still available to watch on BBC iPlayer. I’ve seen it easily half a dozen times, and I know I’ll watch it again. Like Metro-Land and other classic documentaries, it repays repeated viewing. One can only hope that, with no new factual programmes being commissioned, BBC4 will unearth some of the other gems from its archive – The Department Store would be especially welcome, as indeed would Fort's Crossing England in a Punt.

I’d happily tune in for a whole series of Tom Fort travel films, but I expect it’s a vain hope. If the BBC can’t oblige, surely there’s room for him on one of the other channels? Sky Arts? His latest book is a history of the Lido, and this summer’s weather would have provided an ideal opportunity to turn it into a documentary. Come on, film makers, and commissioning editors, get on the case! 

https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b0116ly6/a303-highway-to-the-sun

1976: Summer of Nostalgia

Part Three: Episodes on Holiday

During the summer of 1976, most ITV regions were showing old ITC series on weekday mornings and afternoons. On Tuesdays London had The Saint at 11am; Yorkshire and Southern were showing Jason King at 3.25, whilst ATV had Strange Report in the same slot. These were likely to be the last outings for programmes that were now as much as ten years old, and viewers could hold little hope of seeing them again. There would, of course, be further repeats of ITC titles during the mid 1980s, but back in the 70s, it seemed highly unlikely that such vintage material would ever be broadcast again. In an age when most if not all such series are still readily available to own on DVD, others on streaming platforms, it’s hard to convey just how much it meant to see as much as a single episode in any of these 1970s repeat runs.

Our family took its 1976 annual summer holiday in late July, staying in a rented cottage in Wales. The dates meant I would miss episodes of both Strange Report (Tuesday 20 July) and Stingray (Thursday 22 July) but as compensation I would get to see Danger Man, which HTV were repeating in the same Tuesday afternoon slot as Strange Report. Outside it was brilliant holiday weather, with wall to wall sunshine – but on that Tuesday afternoon I chose to sit inside where a small black and white portable television sat within an inglenook in the lounge. At least I wasn’t missing anything by watching in monochrome, as Danger Man had been shot in black and white.

Back at home in ‘ATV land’, Danger Man had last been repeated on Friday afternoons in 1973, and I’d caught a random episode during that broadcast. That aside, I scarcely knew the series, so getting to see even a one-off episode was something of an event to anyone with an interest in those old ITC shows. I took in as much as I could, even drawing the opening title panel in my diary entry for the day, and writing up a synopsis which I summarised as ‘all in all, a pretty good one’.

The episode I’d chanced to see was Parallel Lines Sometimes Meet, first broadcast on 16 March 1965 as episode 22 of series 2, the first run of hour-long episodes. In Macolm Hulke’s storyline, Drake is sent to Haiti where a husband and wife scientist couple have disappeared from a beach. The trail leads to a mine where other captured scientists are being forced to work on an atom bomb for a rogue African state. Malcolm Hulke wasn’t one of the usual Danger Man writers – I knew his name for his work on Doctor Who – and this was his sole contribution to the series. With its sound stage ‘exteriors’ of Haitian beach and jungle, Parallel Lines... had rather the look of James Bond on the cheap, but on the tiny portable I scarcely noticed, and what the hell – it was Danger Man after all! Just to hear that famous harpsichord-driven theme provided an instant burst of nostalgia.

In common with this last round of ITC repeats, the programme was shown with all of its original commercial break captions intact: in this case, the ‘adcap’ took the form of a jagged hole framing John Drake’s eyes, accompanied by a sting reduction of Edwin Astley’s famous theme music. But after the first ad break, something odd happened. The storyline had jumped ahead, and didn’t follow on logically from the end of part one. Someone at HTV had got the reels mixed up and accidentally started up the third reel in place of the second. The programme ran for a couple of minutes before someone noticed, stopped it, and started it again in the right place. This is interesting because it tells us that, rather than whole reels, or even a video transfer, the episode was supplied as three individual reels of 35mm film. These kind of technical errors, though uncommon, were par for the course in the era when material was still broadcast direct from physical film. A few weeks later, one of ATV’s Stingray episodes ground to a halt mid way through the opening titles, forcing continuity announcer Simon Bates to fill in for a few seconds while the fault was fixed. We were recording the soundtrack, so his ad lib was captured for, er, posterity…

While I was watching Danger Man, viewers back home were sitting down to an episode of Strange Report – but it was not the one billed in the TV Times (Report 1533:Racist – A Most Dangerous Proposal). Tim Beddows saw it but afterwards couldn’t remember the complicated title. ‘It was called “Cousin” or something’ was the best he could report back, and we had no TV Times listings to go on. The correct title was, in fact Report 7931: Sniper– When is Your Cousin Not. I’d actually got the best of the deal with Danger Man, as Sniper is a candidate for the weakest episode of Strange Report. For the record, the scheduled episode, Racist, remained on the shelf at ATV where it was finally pulled out as a last minute replacement for a cancelled race meeting in January 1979. Tim missed it and, incensed, wrote to ATV to complain. You can see the reply he received below:

Next year's summer holiday saw us return to the same cottage. By this time, ATV had run out of ITC repeats, but HTV was still working its way through repeats of the last episodes of The Saint. In fact, we only just caught the series before it finished. The episode we got to see – on the same black and white portable TV – was The Man Who Gambled With Life, the antepenultimate outing for Roger Moore as Simon Templar. This time it was my turn to get the title wrong, misremembering it from Templar’s closing speech as The Man Who Gambled With Death – actually, a much better title, but unlikely to go down well on the American networks who always baulked at ‘death’ in the title of anything.

The biggest surprise on this occasion was the music that played over the opening titles. I well remembered Edwin Astley’s famous theme that had accompanied the first five series, but by series six he had been prevailed upon to write a new theme incorporating Leslie Charteris’ own whistling motif, which I’d never heard before. Tim had supplied me with a tiny tape recorder – almost small enough to fit inside one of John Drake’s shavers – and a correspondingly small reel of tape, with instructions to record the beginning and end titles of The Saint. The recording was dire quality, but that tape – comprising the whole ‘cold opening’ as far as the end of the main titles, and the tail of the final scene running into the titles – got played an awful lot over the coming months!

That 1977 Saint broadcast was one of the last ITC repeats of the era, and the whole experience of seeing different series when holidaying in different regions was a decidedly 1970s phenomenon. Before the end of the decade, the repeat rights on all the old 1960s series had expired and wouldn’t be renewed until the mid 1980s. As time wore on, the whole regional nature of ITV was slowly eroded until today, when the only difference you’ll notice from one region to another is in the local news programmes.

God Bless America...

 

...says the Radio Times

We were just ten days into what would prove to be a memorably hot and dry summer when this particular edition of Radio Times appeared in the newsagents, fifty years ago this week. Its cover, featuring the distinctive sculptural caricatures of Peter Fluck and Roger Law, was promoting a series of programmes on TV and radio celebrating the American bicentennial. Fluck and Law would, eight years later, give the world Spitting Image.

This week’s edition was all American, beginning on page 4 where no less an eminence than Andy Warhol provided a piece about his favourite television programmes – few of which would have been familiar to British viewers. His main focus was a series called The Neighbors, which encouraged real people to bitch about their friends in order to win cash prizes. Said Warhol: ‘it shows what ordinary people will do to get on television; in this case they are willing to destroy their social and personal lives’. An interesting observation from the man who predicted that, in the future, everyone would be famous for fifteen minutes.

Butted up against Warhol’s piece, on page 6, is a juxtaposition of which he would surely have approved: a page and a half ad for Crown ready-pasted vinyl wallpapers, showcasing some of their ‘beautiful florals, geometrics and bright modern patterns, in warm, and fresh cool colours’. You can see the reality below. Did people really decorate their homes like that?

On pages 8 and 9, another feature examined how major US film studios were moving increasingly into television production, while page 10 was taken up with an overview of the career of Mary Tyler Moore. On page 11, Philip Jenkinson’s regular film review column previewed the mostly American-flavoured movies to be found this week on BBC1 and BBC2, including, on Saturday morning, the very first appearance on BBC television of the 1936 Flash Gordon serial, edited together into two instalments. (The serial would be shown in full over Christmas later the same year.) Other major films in the BBC’s ‘Great American Picture Show’ season included Psycho (Saturday, 11.30pm BBC1), True Grit (Sunday 8.15pm BBC1) and On The Waterfront (Friday, 11.32pm, BBC1). 

The bicentennial theme extended to radio as well as television: a feature across pages 12 and 13 looked at country music station KLAC, based not in Nashville but Los Angeles. It was all a bit too much for regular RT columnist Peter Tinniswood, who sounded a sour note, dismissing the bicentennial celebrations as ‘tedious’. With his 70s shoulder-length hair and beard, he looked like Reggie Perrin’s boring son in law…

Saturday’s television kicked off with a repeat of the very first Mr. Benn (The Red Knight) at 8.55am, although those of an academic bent might well have been tuned in even earlier to see Foundation Maths – Relations at 7.40am, the first in the regular morning sequence of programmes from the Open University on BBC2. What was I just saying about 70s beards? No OU presenter was complete without one. Over on BBC1, Flash Gordon made his British television debut at 10.35am, stepping aside for Hopalong Cassidy at 11.25, before concluding his adventures on Mongo at 12.30pm.

The afternoon on BBC1 was given over to Wimbledon Grandstand, while an Italian-French film Morgan the Pirate (1960) opened BBC2’s late afternoon schedule (the channel was off air between 1.55 and 3.50pm). BBC1’s early evening news was followed by a magic show For My Next Trick, which included contributions from newcomers Faith Brown and Paul Daniels. The evening’s big American film was The Music Man (1962), followed by a very British slice of light entertainment in the form of Seaside Special, a show I always made a special point of avoiding. Tonight’s edition included The Three Degrees and Kenneth McKellar, which I suppose was diverse if nothing else…

Starsky and Hutch had more or less taken up permanent residence on Saturday evenings since their BBBC1 debut back in 1975, and put in an appearance this evening at 9.30pm, followed by the news at 10.20 and The Spinners at 10.30. Hitchcock fans would have to wait up until 11.30 to see Psycho (1960), clocking up its fifth appearance on British television since its BBC1 premiere in 1968. Over on BBC2, an alternate evening schedule included Victor Borge and something called The Drummonds of Megginch (typing of which is enough to make your spellchecker explode). According to my diary I didn’t see any of these programmes, but I did catch the very first edition of the now legendary late night music show So It Goes over on ITV. I also ignored the BBC's season of American films with one exception: Laurel & Hardy's 1932 short The Music Box, shown at 6.50pm on Tuesday 6 July – the last time that the famous comics would be scheduled during prime time television.

The day’s radio included The Elton John Story on Radio 1 at 1.00pm, up against a Radio 2 offering from forgotten comic David Morgan. Radio 4’s schedule included Pick of the Week, Any Questions and Desert Island Discs, all of them still with us half a century later.

It was on Sunday that the bicentennial celebrations really got under way, with the whole evening on BBC1 from 8.15pm onwards devoted to commemorative material: the movie True Grit was followed by an hour long programme Uncle Sam Celebrates, which saw James Burke presenting highlights of the day’s celebratory outside broadcasts from NBC. Meanwhile, over on BBC2, America Plays (8.15pm) was a celebration of stateside sporting achievement; Bicentennial Summer (9.10pm) focused on the Philadelphia Orchestra; and Alastair Cooke made his own contribution to the festivities with By the Rocket’s Red Glare (10.10pm), ‘a salute to America’. The evening was rounded off with the feature film 1776, an extravagant musical that had proved a costly failure to Columbia Pictures when released just four years earlier.

The Yanks didn’t have quite the whole evening to themselves: BBC1’s early evening programmes included a Blue Peter special revisiting John Noakes’ famous freefall descent with the RAF’s Flying Falcons, followed by Frances Hodgson Burnett’s The Secret Garden, all quintessentially English viewing. Not to be outdone, the Welsh moved in at 7.25 with a repeat of How Green Was My Valley, a 1975 adaptation starring Stanley Baker and Sian Phillips.

The week’s programme listings were peppered with icons of an eagle’s head, highlighting programmes with an American theme, and fairly plastered across the radio programme pages for Sunday, with much music and drama on Radio 3, G.B. Shaw’s The Devil’s Disciple (a satire on puritanism) on Radio 4, and many other themed items. Even Jimmy Savile was getting in on the act, speaking ‘only to Americans’ on his Speakeasy show.

Doctor Who fans were in for a summer treat this week, with two complete serials repeated: Planet of Evil from Monday to Friday, and the two-part Sontaran Experiment shown complete on Friday evening. Monday’s programme page even found room for a neat little illustration from Frank Bellamy, who always nabbed the Doctor Who gigs at the RT. This being the summer, repeats were inevitable, and included The Good Life (at the surprisingly late hour of 9.25pm on Tuesday), The Pallisers (Monday 10pm BBC2), scary kids’ drama The Changes (Wednesday 5.15pm BBC1), Porridge (Thursday 7.50pm BBC1) and David McCallum’s The Invisible Man (Friday 7.15pm BBC1). Another invariable fixture of the summer schedules was It’s a Knockout, which presented a one-off celebrity edition on Friday at 8.00pm. Amongst those taking part were Judith Chalmers, Anita Harris, George Layton, Bernard Cribbins, Frazer Hines, James Villiers (!), Ian Carmichael, Shaw Taylor, Raymond Baxter, Willie Rushton and Z Cars’ James Ellis – a unique and unrepeatable line-up of talent!

One or two series were making their debut: forgotten American cop Bert D’Angelo pounded the mean streets of San Francisco beginning on Friday evening (9.25pm BBC1): it’s safe to say that there really were far too many imported American detective series on British TV at this time – and we only had three channels in which to accommodate them. That aside, the only other new series flagged up in the RT listings were The Mister Men (Sunday), Speed Buggy (Wednesday) Newsround Extra and Bellamy’s Europe (Thursday), the latter providing yet another vehicle for the burbling bearded naturalist famously parodied by Lenny Henry.

Children’s programming included Blue Peter Flies the World and Play Away (Monday), Animal Magic and Lippy Lion (Tuesday), ‘Boss Cat’ (Thursday) and Screen Test on Friday. The pre-news slot was occupied by Barbapapa, a kind of pink blobby thing like a sentient blancmange, whose tales were told by Michael Flanders (and if you want more of this kind of thing – pre-news kids shows I mean, not sentient blancmange – I’ve got a huge item in preparation…)

The letters page reads very much like a primer for Mike Leigh’s Abigail’s Party (1977), with several readers writing in praise of The Roussos Phenomenon, shown on 10 June on BBC2, and showcasing the then unknown (in England) Greek musician and vocalist: ‘the most fantastic singer I have ever heard’ wrote (Mrs) Linda Reynolds of Cornwall. ‘Truly a great, talented, gifted, natural, joyous man’ agreed Pat de Kercrech of Cowen. One can almost hear Mr. Leigh’s pencil scribbling furiously… But not everyone was smitten with the warbling man-mountain: ‘his only remarkable features are that he weighs 17½ stone and wears silver boots’ complained F.W. Langley of Anlaby.

No review of an old Radio Times would be complete without a look at some of the week’s advertisers. The inside back page looks ironic in retrospect: a full-page colour advert for the ‘Philips Deluxe Sun Lamp’, one item that would certainly not be required over the coming weeks. Elsewhere there are ads for Omega watches, Nescafe Gold Blend (long before the brand was associated with Sharon Maughan and Anthony Head), the Peugeot 104, National Savings Certificates, the QE2, something called ‘the Pifco Steam Valet’ (don’t ask) and WH Smith: ‘a writer’s toy shop’, according to Kingsley Amis whose mugshot dominates a page ad for the once beloved high street retailer.

Across pages 52-57, critic and director Gavin Millar(rrrrrr) examined the world of America’s celluloid heroes, with illustrations from Ralph Steadman in his typical splattery style, and on the penultimate page, Stacey Keach delivered an essay on Kenneth Griffith’s film Give Me Liberty or Give Me Death, a personal interpretation of events surrounding the American Revolution. And finally, lest RT’s readers were tiring of the relentless Americanisation of this week’s edition, came a preview of next week’s cover, featuring… wait for it… the Queen and her corgis. The same edition promised recollections of British Army officer Orde Wingate, Beethoven’s Solemnis kicking off the Proms, Patrick Moore looking towards Mars and the imminent touchdown of the Viking lander, and memories of the Spanish Civil War… none of which, I’d like to bet, would get anywhere near a 2026 edition of Radio Times...

1976: Summer of Nostalgia

 

Part Two: Sunday in Old Books

At the same time that ITV was rolling out some vintage series on Saturday evenings, I was about to discover a veritable treasure trove of nostalgic items in the form of old books. I’d been casually collecting old paperbacks and annuals for a couple of years, focusing on out of print TV tie-in editions, most notably NEL/Four Square’s series of Man From UNCLE paperbacks that had appeared in the late 1960s. This was, essentially, TV nostalgia in print form.

Early in 1976, I’d sent away for a book collector magazine, an amateur publication printed, if memory serves, on a spirit duplicator or photocopier of some kind. It served as a shop window for vintage book dealers, ranging from the seriously academic to purveyors of old junk. It was this latter category that most interested me, and I scoured the pages in search of old bookshops that I’d not yet discovered and were within striking distance of where we lived, in Sutton Coldfield. One dull Saturday morning, I persuaded our dad to drive me and my brother to Burton on Trent, a place I’d never visited before, where there were two old booksellers that I wanted to check out.

The town was still largely given over to the brewing industry, and I was surprised at the number of dour red brick edifices that comprised the Bass site and its associated clerical offices. One of the booksellers was based in the town centre, and split its operations between contemporary, remaindered books in the front of the shop, and older editions in the back. But we drew a blank here. There wasn’t much else to be found from the other bookshop, which was located in a ramshackle single storey building at the foot of Bearwood Hill Road. From here, I picked up a number of Bonanza annuals and, on a later visit, a tatty Z Cars annual and (of course) a Man From UNCLE paperback. But the really big discovery was to come in late June.

The legendary hot summer had already kicked off, and the weather was brilliantly sunny all day. Once again, I’d had to prevail upon our dad to drive us to the place I’d heard about, as there was no other means of getting there. Our destination was a small antique shop in the village of Burntwood, near Lichfield. What made this particular expedition special was the day of the week: Sunday. Aside from petrol stations, newsagents and the odd garden centre, no retailer opened for business on a Sunday. Not so Royden Smith, whose antique shop kept unusual hours.

The front room in the shop was cluttered with spinning wheels, china, oil lamps and other country cottage nick nacks. No sign of any books. The shop was presided over by a couple of dapper gents who might have stepped out of a 1950s Ealing film. We were warmly welcomed and, once we’d explained what we’d come for were directed to the rear of the shop where a small conservatory opened into a yard surrounded by stable buildings. The yard behind the shop was dotted with old cartwheels, water pumps and garden furniture. Warm somnolent silence hung over the scene, dust motes dancing in rays of sunlight as we stepped into the nearest of the stable blocks. We found ourselves entering a veritable Tutankhamen’s tomb of old childrens' books, some examples dating back to the 1940s. Annuals were numerous, shelved and piled everywhere you looked. It was clear that the shop had never been discovered by anyone with an interest in old television. Within a few minutes, I’d picked up the first Man From UNCLE annual, two Z Cars annuals, a Saint annual and a Stingray annual. My brother picked up the paperback Stingray and the Monster, exceptionally rare even then, which we’d never set eyes on before. Alongside these came paperbacks of The Persuaders (book three), two Avengers titles and a very rare book of script adaptations from the 1960s Likely Lads series. Staggering under the weight of them all, we went back into the shop where the proprietor, Mr. Smith totted it all up. I don’t think he wanted more than ten or twenty pence for any individual item, and in total our haul came in at well under £5.

It was to be the first of many such expeditions, but of course it wasn’t the kind of place you could visit too often: you had to allow time for new stock to come in, and for the first year or more I remember seeing many of the same items (a Wagon Train annual for instance) still on the shelves. But as my interests moved into other areas, I was able to pick up items I’d not have noticed earlier, like an omnibus edition of Colin Watson’s Flaxborough novels, some of which were serialised on BBC2 in 1977. Mr. Smith and his partner Ken Hayward soon got to know us on sight, and there was always a friendly welcome whenever we showed up. 

Some days stay with you forever, and for me, Sunday 27 June 1976 is one of them – the balmy weather, the brilliant blue sky, the drowsy silence of those empty old barns piled high with books. Nothing would ever quite equal the thrill of entering and realising what we’d stumbled upon, coupled with the excitement of not knowing what vintage item you were going to turn up next. Our finds may have been trivial, but to us back then, this was a genuine treasure trove, the kind of thing one usually finds only in dreams.

I soon had to get new shelves in my bedroom to accommodate the books I was amassing, and today I still own every one of the items we found on that miraculous Sunday half a century ago.

Sadly, the antique and bookshop has long since closed. My last visit was on a Saturday afternoon around 25 years ago. Royden Smith, who had lived in Burntwood all his life, eventually turned the place into a B&B establishment, which earned some glowing reviews on TripAdvisor, but is now listed online as ‘permanently closed’. Some Googling reveals that the shop had formerly been a grocery, seemingly run by Royden or his family. Royden had replied to a message on a facebook group back in 2019 confirming that both he and Ken were still alive, with Ken about to turn 87. Ken lived to the age of 94, and died in November of last year. Although it was never stated openly in all the time I visited the shop, they were clearly a gay couple: the first I’d ever met.

Their shop may be closed, but it still looks exactly as it did back in 1976, and the barns at the back were still intact when Google’s streetview car last visited in September 2025.

Royden Smith's former antique shop, seen in 2025: the book barn is the building on the left

1976: Summer of Nostalgia

Part One: Television

Here in the twenty first century, television nostaglia has become a mini industry. There are several television channels whose output consists entirely of vintage programmes and films, and still more material to be found on YouTube. Fifty years ago, the phenomenon barely existed, except in the minds of a few individuals like myself and my friend Tim Beddows. Indeed, we first came together over a shared interest in ‘vintage’ TV programmes which at the time weren’t even a decade old. Imagine some fifteen-year-old of 2026 getting excited about the prospect of seeing a TV series from 2017. It just wouldn’t happen.

Part of the reason for this is the degree to which content has become accessible to the general public. There’s barely a title from TV or film that can’t be found with a quick online search, whether the result directs you to a physical media release, streaming service or illegal upload. Back in 1976, the idea that so much archival content should be so easily accessible was inconceivable. With only three TV networks, broadcasting time was limited, and contemporary programming occupied the bulk of the programme schedules. Until 1972, the usual place to find repeat broadcasts of series like The Saint or The Avengers was late at night, around 11pm, with Sunday lunchtimes offering another limited window of opportunity. In October of 1972, however, the government lifted restrictions on broadcasting hours, allowing the BBC and ITV to show programmes in the afternoon. ITV were quick to take advantage of this, and a new weekday afternoon schedule appeared, with hour-long slots devoted to repeat broadcasts. That very first week of afternoon programming ushered in repeat runs for A Family at War (Tuesday) and The Saint (Wednesday), with Simon Templar’s adventures being seen across several different ITV regions.

As time wore on, more and more of the old ITC series began to pop up in the afternoons, but what you got to see depended on where you lived, making for a veritable postcode lottery of archive television. Viewers in Wales might be treated to a repeat run of Danger Man, whilst in the Midlands we got Strange Report. This was clearly not enough for some viewers, and while hour-long dramas were often repeated, the same did not apply to sitcoms and variety shows, which rarely resurfaced after their original broadcasts. In early 1976, and probably reflecting a nationwide trend, the Birmingham Evening Mail encouraged readers to write in with their memories of vintage television, nominating those series they would most like to see again. The resulting correspondence was shown to executives at the local ITV station, who sanctioned a run of primetime repeats to be shown on Saturday evenings during late spring and early summer. The resulting season, given the umbrella title of ‘Play it Again’ comprised only American drama series, repeats of British material being restricted by agreements with the actors’ union Equity. Nevertheless, the season proved popular enough for the idea to be extended to the whole of the ITV network with a series of repeats appearing from late June under the title ‘Command Performance’, and beginning with a vintage edition of 77 Sunset Strip (above).

Viewers in the ATV region got to see two episodes of 77 Sunset Strip within days of each other – The Bouncing Chip (above) as part of the 'Play it Again' strand and The Cookie Caper three days later. The film print of the latter later found its way into Tim Beddows' film collection.

The series has never been seen since in the UK.

Similar archival seasons had been shown by the BBC in the late 60s, with strands such as Star Choice presenting repeat episodes from well loved series like Softly, Softly, chosen by members of the cast, but on the whole contemporary television tended to avoid repeats. For every viewer who wrote in asking to see an old series again, there were probably ten who complained about the number of repeats. In fact, the BBC did a poor job of repeating its series, with many popular dramas like The Troubleshooters and Doomwatch clocking up just a single broadcast. Doctor Who was repeated only in exceptional circumstances, such as the show’s annual summer break, and most of its serials were seen only once.

I’d been aware of the afternoon repeats of Danger Man and others since around 1973 when I chanced upon an episode of that particular series during the school holidays. I was more interested in repeats of Gerry Anderson’s series, which from 1973 onwards became a fixture of summer holiday mornings. Then, in March 1976, our local ITV station, ATV, began a Sunday afternoon repeat run of Strange Report, a series of which I had some vague memories from its original broadcast back in 1979. Only three episodes appeared before the schedule was rejigged, and the rest of the series was shown piecemeal over the coming months, eventually finding a temporary home on Tuesday afternoons. It was this series more than any other that really kickstarted my own interest in old television series, and the coming autumn would provide still more nostalgia fodder in the shape of Patrick McGoohan’s iconic series The Prisoner.

That 1976 repeat run of The Prisoner was a pivotal moment in archive television appreciation, because the subsequent fan club brought together individuals whose interests also embraced other items of vintage broadcasting. At around the same time, Doctor Who fans were similarly getting their act together.

Even before this happened, the BBC opened up its own TV archives in the summer of 1976 for their ‘Festival 40’ season of repeats, about which I’ve written elsewhere. This provided rare chances to see Steptoe and Son, Hancock, Dr. Finlay’s Casebook and an episode of Z Cars that recently resurfaced on Talking Pictures TV (its first sighting in fifty years). What I learned from watching these old series was that there was more to archive television than mere nostalgia. These old programmes were well written, imaginative, and featured some great performances from actors who had gone on to become household names. Production values had, of course, advanced considerably, and programmes from only a decade ago were already showing their age. No matter. In many cases, they were superior to their contemporary equivalents.

Even with the gradual opening up of the archives, fans of old television still had their work cut out getting to see those old programmes. Tim Beddows resorted to buying old 16mm prints of series like Randall & Hopkirk (Deceased), exactly the kind of collecting activity that later saw film buff Bob Monkhouse hauled through the courts. Extraordinary as it now seems, it was technically illegal even to own film prints of old TV series, never mind whether you were able to profit from them commercially. Compare that to the ‘Wild West’ situation that still prevails on YouTube, where entire channels are comprised of content uploaded without the copyright holders’ consent.

I was going to say we’ve come a long way in fifty years, but in fact the last few years have seen some major setbacks as several dedicated archive TV labels were forced to close. It’s to be hoped that this situation can be reversed: there is already a growing trend back towards physical media as users grow jaded with streaming services (and their endless, excessive commercials), and CD sales are beginning to pick up again. Will the same thing happen with DVD?

There’s an irony to all this, though: because access to content ultimately works against nostalgia, a phenomenon which thrives on memory and loss. If everything from the archives was instantly available to watch, would people care any more? After all, The Prisoner Appreciation Society came together to campaign for repeats of the series. If we’d had YouTube back then, would anyone have bothered? Equally, it’s one thing to feel a warm glow of nostalgia for a TV series you haven’t seen in years, and something else entirely when all the episodes become available on DVD or online. Because not all of those rose tinted memories stand up to scrutiny today…

‘Play it Again’ has probably been forgotten by those of us old enough to have seen it, and as a purely American season it had limited value. Its significance lies in the fact that, for the first time, a broadcaster had acknowledged the demand for repeats of vintage material, and responded in kind. TV nostalgia had arrived.

Summer of 76

Some years are defined by the weather. I still remember grown ups reminscing about the ferociously cold winters of 1947 and 1963. I’d been alive for the latter, but was too young to remember it. Summer heatwaves came and went, but none seemed to outstay its welcome. The memorably hot summer of 1959 was eighteen months too early for me, and the 1960s saw a run of rainy summers punctuated with violent thunderstorms. But the mid 70s would bring one of the best remembered and most talked about years in British meterological history...

The first prolonged hot summer I remember was 1975. Indeed, if it hadn’t been trumped by the following year’s events, we’d still be talking about it today. After a cold and mostly dry spring with snowfall at Easter, a high pressure area settled over the UK in late June, bringing warm weather to most parts. The hot weather continued into July, interrupted by thundery outbreaks, one of which gave me my first sight of golfball-sized hail. August saw a similar pattern. The autumn and winter, however, were notably dry – the period from October to December was the driest over England and Wales since 1879. The below average rainfall continued into early 1976, and by early spring, much of the country was already in a drought situation. The prolonged dry spell was so alarming that the BBC put out a Horizon Special at the end of May – some weeks before the really hot weather took hold. Weather presenter Jack Scott topped and tailed the programme, ending on a long range forecast for the period up to the middle of June. Even then, the Met Office was using computers (albeit of the analogue and tickertape variety), but the equipment at their Bracknell headquarters could only project thirty days ahead. The forecast was for average rainfall in June; but apart from north west Scotland, all areas would see below average rainfall, with a few places recording monthly totals of less than 0.5mm. The weathermen had got it wrong. July was drier still, the driest since 1955, and August was largely the same. The prolonged hot and dry spell came to an end in September, which the Met Office Monthly Weather Report summed up as ‘mostly very wet’. So much for the statistics: but what was the summer of 1976 really like?

As I remember it, the dry, sunny weather seemed unremarkable at first. It was summer, after all, and one expected at least a few sunny days. We were taking end of year exams at school, and the heat didn’t help: we were given permission to take off our blazers. It wasn’t until a few weeks into the hot spell that anyone began to really remark on the conditions, and items began to pop up on the news and in the press. One of the first phenomena that grabbed people’s attention was the swarms of ladybirds that plagued parts of the country, notably at the seaside where one normally didn’t encounter the creatures in such numbers. The insects had abandoned the parched countryside in search of food and water elsewhere.

Seen in retrospect, and as presented on TV documentaries, it’s easy to imagine that no rain fell at all during the months of June, July and August, and that bright blue skies held sway for the whole time. Neither description is wholly accurate. We took our family holiday in mid July, and although the weather was hot and sunny on arrival at our rented cottage on the mid Wales coast, there was prolonged and heavy rain on two days during the week. As for those blue skies, if you want to see the reality, you can find it in episodes of The Sweeney (series three) shot during that summer. After a few weeks of the endless hot, dry weather, a haze of dust and pollutants had developed, lending a diffuse, milky quality to the sunlight, especially in urban areas. Rather than brilliant azure, the summer sky was more of a misty blue, certainly by late August when I well remember the hot, hazy dusty conditions during a trip into Birmingham.

No documentary about the summer of 1976 is complete without the obligatory film of housewives queueing up to draw water from standpipes. In certain areas where supplies were dwindling, the water companies reduced mains pressure so that the supply wouldn’t reach homes, but could be accessed from the street. This, of course, was the reality for people in the affected areas, but we saw nothing like that in the midlands where the water supply came largely from reservoirs in the Elan Valley in mid Wales – an area with very high rainfall (as we discovered on our holiday). I do, however, remember talk of hosepipe bans, and water saving tips in the media, such as the often repeated suggestion that couples should share a bath. Well, it was the 1970s after all… In our house, we recycled bath water for use on the garden.

The government’s save water campaign was fronted by Brummie Dennis Howell, MP for Birmingham Small Heath – ironic, in light of the fact that Birmingham was one of the areas least affected by the drought. Officially dubbed ‘minister for drought’, a dubious online story (originated as late as 2012 in the Birmingham Mail) claims he was ‘ordered by No.10 to do a rain dance on behalf of the nation’. I well remember Howell’s chubby face and avuncular manner – he seemed to be on the national news most nights – but the rain dance story is nonsense, a typical online misconstruction of an idea that had occurred to most wags back in the day. What is true is that, when the hot weather finally broke and heavy rainfall ensued, he was instantly dubbed ‘Minister for Floods’.

The hot weather didn’t make much difference to me, as I wasn’t really the outdoor type, and didn’t go in for sports or al fresco recreation of any kind. Indeed, I spent quite a lot of that summer indoors watching television – repeats of Gerry Anderson’s Stingray, and the ITC series Strange Report. It was, as I’ve written elsewhere, a notable summer for vintage television, with seasons of repeats on both ITV and BBC. Perhaps in an effort to counter all this, our mum bought a badminton set – complete with net – that was set up in the back garden and provided some alternative entertainment for the summer months.

Nothing captures the feeling of a moment in time like the pop charts of the era, and for me, the essence of Summer ‘76 is to be found in singles like Peter Frampton’s ‘Show Me the Way’ (number 10 on 19 June), The Isley Brothers’ ‘Harvest for the World’ (number 10 in early August), Wings’ ‘Let ‘Em in’ (number 2 in late August), and Manfred Mann’s Earthband’s ‘Blinded by the Light’.

There was, of course, rather more to the summer of 1976 than a British heatwave: America was celebrating its bicentennial in July, and the BBC marked the occasion with a season of programmes (more on that story next time). Further afield – on Mars, to be exact – NASA had just landed its Viking 1 mission, whose images were being beamed back to Earth in late July – I remember seeing them on the tiny portable television in our holiday cottage. In London, the punk rock scene was just getting off the ground, but would only really come to national prominence later in the year in the wake of the Sex Pistols’ notorious TV appearance with Bill Grundy. In July, David Steel was elected the new leader of the Liberal Party; Ford launched its new small hatchback the Fiesta; and the work of forger Tom Keating was exposed in a series of articles in the Times. As the drought continued into August, former MP John Stonehouse, who had famously ‘done a Reggie Perrin’ two years earlier, was sentenced to seven years in jail for fraud, and the month ended in riots at the heavily policed Notting Hill Carnival.

Today, with the issue of climate change so much in the media spotlight, it’s easy to look back at the summer of 1976 as a foretaste of things to come. Yet even then, scientists were wondering if the freak weather was a random occurence or an early indicator of long term climate change (a few years before, the big worry had been a new ice age). The weather of 1975-6, both here in Britain and across large swathes of the planet, strongly suggested that all was not as it should be, and some observers cautioned that we might be in for a run of hot, dry summers. 1977 put paid to that idea: the summer was mostly dull, cool and wet. And while today the warming trend is undeniable – all five of the warmest UK summers having occurred since the year 2000 – prolonged heatwaves and drought still aren’t inevitable, and next year could easily be cool and rainy. There’s still no reliable way of knowing. The Met Office computers of 1976 could ‘only’ predict trends up to thirty days ahead, and even then with no guarantee of accuracy. Yet fifty years later, with advanced modelling tools available, the long range forecast still isn’t very much better. Will this coming summer be a repeat run of 1976? I'm all for repeats when it's old television, but I draw the line at heatwaves...

The DNA of Frozen Orange Juice

 

As someone who writes songs as a hobby, I’ve always been interested in what one might call the DNA of pop music: what it is that makes certain songs appealing, others annoying. Perhaps the best exponent of this type of pop song analysis is record producer and YouTuber Rick Beato, whose videos explain, in musical terms, exactly why songs by artists like the Beatles sound the way they do. Songwriting will almost certainly never be reduced to an exact science, and it will be a black day for the music industry if it ever is. Artificial Intelligence thinks it can write songs, but all it really does is act as a kind of food processor, mixing ingredients from other sources and ending up with a kind of generic slop. Songwriters rely on instinct and inspiration, two qualities which AI will never achieve if it lasts a thousand years.

With a little musical knowledge and insight, it is, nevertheless, possible to isolate elements in specific songs that add to their character and appeal, and I’ve just recently done this with Peter Sarstedt’s 1969 chart hit ‘Frozen Orange Juice’. Why that particular song? Well, a track I was working on put me in mind of it. It was a song I’d written a long time ago and had only just got round to recording. I’d never noticed any similarity between this song and ‘Frozen Orange Juice’, but when I was listening to the playback I was reminded of it. Was it the melody, the chords? This all set me to thinking about the musical components of ‘Frozen Orange Juice’, and wondering exactly what it was about the song that made it special.

‘Frozen Orange Juice’ has a very simple structure: there is no verse/chorus as such, just two 8-bar sections. The first eight bars state the main melody, in the home key of F major: ‘I’ll buy you one more frozen orange juice/ on this fantastic day’. The second eight bars modulate to B flat major: ‘And if you feel you wanna run down a ravine…’ This second section occurs again as the refrain ‘you rescue me, I’ll rescue you’. There are three verses, a la-la instrumental verse and three bridge sections. That’s all there is to it.

The arrangement adds interest and variety, with strings and woodwind restating the main theme, and a pedal steel guitar adding some soaring, sliding notes. The lyrics are happily optimistic, but there’s also a hint of sadness, of parting, as in the last verse the narrator states ‘I’ll be on my way’. It’s this subtle melancholy that is the key to the song’s appeal, and it all hinges on one specific note in the melody that occurs on the first syllable of ‘frozen’. It’s a fourth above the home key of F major, and fourths are a funny thing in music. AI (dare I admit it) says that the perfect fourth ‘evokes a sense of reaching or longing’, which is exactly what Sarstedt is aiming for in his composition. The narrator knows very well that ‘this fantastic day’ won’t last forever and that by tomorrow morning it will be simply a happy memory.

The main melody climbs to the fourth and then backs down again, just like the characters in the song walking ‘the sunny hills of Madrid’. Sarstedt only hits one higher note in the whole song, the high B flat of ‘if you wanna run’… and from this musical high point, the melody again does exactly what the lyrics describe, and runs downhill. If instead of stopping at the fourth, the melody had risen to the fifth note of the scale, or higher, the sense of longing would have been diminished. In the final verse, the melody hits the fourth again when the lyrics reach ‘on my way’, again reinforcing the underlying sadness.

It doesn’t really matter whether Sarstedt did all this by design or instinct (I suspect the latter). It’s that ‘yearning’ fourth that adds the sense of happy/sadness that I think he was aiming for. The song sounds joyously optimistic, but there’s also the tug of nostalgia for good times past. It’s interesting to note some of the comments posted on one of the YouTube uploads of the track: ‘a sound of sunshine, freedom and joy’; ‘smiles all round’; ‘reminds me of long hot summers’. For me, it has always evoked the brilliant blue sky of a summer day, seen from my parents’ back garden, and, simultaneously, the landscape described in the lyrics. It’s a song of bright blue and brilliant yellow, and the key of F major conveys the warmth of the sunny hills around Madrid.

‘Frozen Orange Juice’ spent nine weeks in the UK charts, entering at number 50 on 10 June 1969, and making its last appearance at number 30 on the week of 2 August. Its highest position was number 10, for one week on 7 July – perfect timing, for the release coincided with a spell of warm sunny weather which almost certainly helped it up the charts.

Curiously, though, it was quite unlike Sarstedt’s huge hit of earlier the same year, ‘Where Do You Go to (My Lovely)’, which had reached number one with its folk club sound, Parisian accordion and enigmatic lyrics. ‘Frozen Orange Juice’ by contrast, sounds more like a pop record, with its full band and orchestration. Production was by Ray Singer, with an arrangement by Ian Green. Singer had allegedly discovered Sarstedt busking in Paris, although this sounds like the kind of story that’s often invented for PR purposes – Sarstedt, lest we forget, came from a musical family and his brother had scored hits earlier in the decade as Eden Kane. Singer’s later production work included David Sylvian and Japan. Ian Green had also arranged the minimalist backing on ‘Where Do You Go To’ and his work was heard on singles from Edison Lighthouse (‘Love Grows’) and Thunderclap Newman (‘Something in the Air’), which is no mean track record and gives an indication of his versatility.

The real underlying sadness behind ‘Frozen Orange Juice’ is that it would be Peter Sarstedt’s chart swansong, and though he would continue to release singles until 1978, none would ever repeat the spectacular success of 1969. In a way, the song feels almost prophetic: as Sarstedt’s narrator realises, that ‘fantastic day’ in the sun simply couldn’t last.

I thought it was worth sharing this silly sleeve which makes an ice lolly out of Sarstedt