Do We Know It's Christmas…? Just Turn on the Radio!

A good Christmas album? That I actually like? You heard right. And ignore the twee cover, this one is honestly worth your while.

Christmas music; whatever you think of it, you can always guarantee it will still be there next year, like the pine needles under the sofa. In some cases, we actually expect it... who, these days, (in the UK at any rate) can imagine Christmas without hearing Noddy Holder bawling it at the top of his voice. You’ve probably seen the internet meme that has a picture of Nod with the caption: ‘Tay Christmas till oi say.’ Which just about hits the nail on the head.

Last time, I looked back at the history of the Christmas single as a phenomenon of the British pop charts, and wondered at the dearth of such efforts prior to Slade’s festive breakthrough. As we’ve seen, Christmas records weren’t unknown before the lads from Wolverhampton, but the buying public seemed strangely resistant to the idea, and I think I’m right in saying that Slade’s Merry Xmas Everyone was the first Christmas-themed single to reach number one in the UK charts since Harry Belafonte got there with Mary's Boy Child back in 1957 (the first Christmas single we ever had in our house). It’s that number one placing that is significant here: the goal that spurred on so many others to have a bash at making a record for what the Beatles called Chrimble.

Although UK-based artists took their time to climb on board the festive gravy train, across the pond, the Bisto Express, if you will, had been getting up a good head of steam for many years, even though a cursory glance at some festive charts suggests that in America as in Britain, the idea of the Christmas single in the 1960s was like driving on black ice – it had no traction whatsoever.

This is interesting, given that the most famous Christmas song of all time originated in America and had spent a staggering eleven weeks atop the Billboard chart in its first year of release alone. The song, of course, is Irving Berlin’s White Christmas in its definitive reading by Bing Crosby (the record was released ludicrously early for the Christmas market, even by modern day standards, on July 30^th 1942 as part of a box set of songs from the film Holiday Inn). So far so good, and the festive hit formula was still working for Harry Belafonte fifteen years later. So why is that by the time we reach the 1960s, and the era of modern pop music, Christmas songs get harder to find? Was it simply that the thrusting new artists of the day were too cool, too hip to pay lip service to a genre associated with the pork-pie-hatted golf fanatic of a previous decade? Not so Chuck Berry, who had his fair share of festive waxings, such as Run Rudolph Run. But not everyone was after a piece of the festive action. Not yet, anyway...

A notable landmark arrived in 1963 in the form of Phil Spector’s A Christmas Gift For You. Now regarded as a classic, at the time of its original release the album was considered a relative failure, and a glance at the Hot 100 for the week of December 28^th 1963 reveals the hollow promise of the festive wall of sound: not a single track from the album is to be found anywhere. In fact, the only entry in the whole chart that might even remotely be connected with Christmas was Dominique by The Singing Nun, standing at number one. Some of the chart looks almost perversely un-festive: The Trashmen’s garage classic Surfin’ Bird for one and Wonderful Summer by Robin Ward for another (nope, me neither).

Nevertheless, Spector’s efforts would later be seen as hugely influential: Wizzard’s I Wish it Could Be Christmas Every Day tips its Santa hat firmly in the direction of the Wall-of-Sound-Meister, and just a year after the Spector release, Brian Wilson, ever attentive to the musical machinations of his rival, tipped not just his metaphorical hat, but the whole Santa outfit, sleigh, bags and baggage in the form of The Beach Boys’ Christmas Album. The musical formula here echoed what Spector had done with his roster of artists: basically, standard production, drenched in sleighbells (Wilson had auditioned unsuccessfully to play piano on the Spector record). Surf and snow seems somewhat counter-intuitive, yet Wilson’s sneaky gambit payed off... on first release, the album reached No. 6 in the Billboard 200 chart, against the Spector album’s unlucky thirteen. Spector had indeed been the victim of bad luck, or bad timing at any rate: his album had been released on the day of the Kennedy assassination, an event that left America stunned, in mourning, and in no mood for an LP record of upbeat festivities. Brian Wilson’s sober In My Room did well on the singles chart in the coming weeks, and it’s surely a reflection of the mood of a nation when an acoustic guitar-weilding nun can get to number one.

These two records tell us something about the beginnings of Christmas pop music in the modern era: that in these early stages, the festive season was seen as an opportunity to sell not singles, but albums. Perry Como had got in on the act as early as 1956, and Andy Williams was another early uptaker, releasing the first of eight Christmas albums in the same year as Phil Spector’s Christmas Gift. There have been many more. Some might say, far too many.

Let’s leave the crooners to their festive jumpers and television spectaculars and fast-forward to the 1980s, by which time the Christmas single had become firmly established as an inevitable part of the festive season, although, as ever, some efforts struggled – Chris Rea’s Driving Home for Christmas, now an expected entry in any Christmas playlist, could manage no more than a peak position of 53 on first release in 1988. Viewed in the cold light of a non-Christmas winter day, it’s no great shakes as a song, certainly well down the pecking order in any list of the growler’s greatest hits. I’ve always taken issue with one particular lyric: ‘top to toe in tailbacks.’ That’s a vertical metaphor, Chris, and driving has always struck me as kind of, uh, horizontal. But we’ll let that pass.

A personal favourite of mine, XTC – who I thought would have known better – released their own festive effort, Thanks for Christmas, in 1983. I first heard it on the Steve Wright show one dark afternoon in the office, without knowing who was responsible for what struck me as a disposable piece of jingle-bell junk. ‘That sounds a bit like XTC to me’, remarked Wright, who was clearly in on the joke. The single had come out under the epiphanic pseudonym The Three Wise Men (there being but three regular members of XTC at this point in time), although songwriter Andy Partridge’s original master plan had been to record the ditty with vocals supplied by a choir made up of Virgin Records’ female staff members, to be known collectively as The Virgin Marys. Luckily, and not unsurprisingly, this notion was left unplucked on Partridge’s conceptual pear tree, but the record was made anyway, with the band members augmented by a trumpet player who may or may not have been a former schoolmate of mine: the putative horn man, one Pete Smalley, told me later that he had certainly played on the session, though couldn’t tell if his take was the one selected for the final mix.

Thanks for Christmas is a rarity amongst Christmas records – a near total failure. Most festive chart misses of yore eventually find their way onto some or other compilation, but The Three Wise Men’s effort remains overlooked. It is, perhaps, the exception that proves the rule, for in most cases, a Christmas song is, literally, the gift that keeps on giving. Some we might well describe as the unwanted sweater from the well-meaning relative that turns up year on year. Take Shakin’ Stevens (please! And as far away as possible...) Only this morning I was subjected to the background sound of his own waxing, the imaginatively-titled Merry Christmas Everyone, while wandering through our local mall. Is there anything of merit in this soulless seasonal cash-in? It has all the integrity of Max Bygraves’ Jingle Bell Rock, and might almost be taken for an artefact from the same late-50s era were it not for the drab, vibe-free 80s studio production. You can actually hear the carpeting on the wall if you listen hard enough – not that I’d recommend doing that without medical supervision.

Sadly, tat and the Christmas song go hand in hand, while imagination generally goes out of the window (or should that be up the chimney?) Gene Autry (not the bloke from the Carry On Films) was responsible for the inspiration-free Here Comes Santa Claus, which has been around for nearly as long as the son of God himself, born almost literally in a stable in 1946 (Autry is reputed to have had the idea for the song after riding his horse in a Christmas parade). Being rubbish, however, is no handicap to a Christmas toon, and Here Comes... has been covered by everyone from Bing Crosby to Bob Dylan, from Elvis Presley to Alvin and the Chipmunks. As I say, it’s the gift that keeps on giving... but only to those on the other side of the cash register.

The phenomenon was given a new slant and a veneer of integrity with the arrival, in 1984, of the charity Christmas single in the form of Band Aid’s Do They Know It’s Christmas. Given the altruistic motives behind the song, it’s hard to dislike DTKIC. But somehow, I managed it. I didn’t hold it in the same contempt as, say, Shakey and his festive knitwear, but, when it first climbed the charts, I quickly grew tired of hearing it. Anyone can do their bit for charity, and thumbs-up to all who do, but personally, I’d rather they didn’t shout it from the rooftops; and in the case of Do They Know... I rather suspected certain participants of getting involved solely for the kudos of being seen to be doing the right thing. (I really should put cynicism away for the festive season, but I can’t help it...) My intial antipathy was helped along by the fact that, for all its chiming Yamaha DX7 samples, the single didn’t sound like part of Christmas. Now, of course, it comes over all tinsel and turkey and trimmings, but at the time, I’d rather have seen Slade or Greg Lake back in the charts if the proceeds were going to charity.

As I’ve been reminded, there are plenty of half decent (and even some completely decent) efforts hiding on the huge, over-decorated Norway Spruce that we call Christmas music... The Pretenders, The Waitresses (it’s a bit of a rubbish rap, but it grows on you), Jethro Tull’s Ring Out Solstice Bells , Steeleye Span’s Gaudete (though I prefer Haitian Divorce myself... apologies for that bad cracker joke). It’s not all bad, and if we wait long enough there might just... just... be another good Christmas single waiting to happen.

These days, the festive album has seen something of a resurgence, with the likes of Sting, Annie Lennox and countless others recognising the potential of not necessarily Christmas, but winter as a conceptual hook with which to haul in unwary music fans (I know, I used ‘Sting’ and ‘music’ in the same sentence there, but it’s Christmas...) I discovered a new personal favourite in 2004 in the shape of The Pearlfishers’ A Sunflower at Christmas. You may well ask. The Pearlfishers are not so much a band as Glasgow-based solo artist David Scott, and they/ he have been responsible for some sublime and almost totally overlooked albums in a career spanning twenty years. The aforementioned Christmas effort originally appeared in mini-album format on the German Marina label, offering a mere seven tracks and proving, as ever, that less can be much, much more. If there is a more sublime Christmas song than Scott’s composition The Snow Lamb, I’ve yet to hear it.

I'm sure there's still much more to be said on this subject, and that I have overlooked dozens of worthwhile efforts, but for the time being, we'll leave the last words to that spirit of Christmas past in the mirrored top hat: IT'S CHRIIIISSSTMAAASSS!

Merry Christmas, everyone… 

The Singles of Christmas Past (and why we don't need any more for Christmas future)

Slade… the first time around.

One pop cultural aspect of Christmas that has, in my opinion, been overdone beyond even the most blackened festive goose is the Christmas single.... or however one refers to such things in these days of the download.

I can honestly remember a time when the phenomenon did not exist… a time when no one was remotely interested in which act would occupy the number one slot come Christmas. Can this be true? I assure you that it is. What we knew then, and what today’s audience have lost sight of, is that such things don’t matter. Did they ever? I’d venture to say ‘probably’, but it wasn’t for long... maybe for just a handful of years, starting in 1973.

1973 was, to me, the year in which the Christmas single phenomenon really kicked off. It was the year of Slade’s Merry Xmas Everybody and Wizzard’s I Wish it Could be Christmas Every Day (occupying the number one and number four slots respectively in the all important chart of December 23^rd). Elsewhere, however, it was business as usual, and barring Elton John’s Step into Christmas, which only managed a peak position of number 25, the charts were a festive-free zone. But things wouldn't stay that way for much longer...

Measured against the efforts of previous years, three Christmas singles in the top 40 was tantamount to an avalanche of musical good cheer. In 1972, the only records in the Christmas charts that acknowledged the time of year were John Lennon’s Happy Xmas (War is Over) and a rendition of The Little Drummer Boy from the Pipes and Drums of the Royal Scots Dragoon Guard. In 1971, the sum total of Christmas-themed singles in the charts on December 19^th was zero. What we had instead was a novelty record occupying the number one slot – in this case, Benny Hill’s Ernie (The Fastest Milkman in the West).

Novelty records for Christmas were becoming something of a tradition: the Scaffold’s Lily The Pink cornered the number one spot over Christmas 1968, and the following year, Rolf Harris made his bid with Two Little Boys (although he peaked too early, being knocked off number one for the chart of Christmas week). In 1972, Chuck Berry’s My Ding-a-Ling (a live recording made in Coventry, of all places) was released to cash in on the season of goodwill to all recording artists, but got pipped to the number one spot by Little Jimmy Osmond’s regrettable Long Haired Lover from Liverpool. I recall the sense of disappointment I experienced at seeing Chuck B ousted by such risible trash (aged just eleven, I had yet to decode the filthy intent couched within Mr. Berry’s tale of a ‘cute little toy’); so maybe 1972 was the year in which, for me at any rate, the Christmas number one first seemed to hold some special significance.

If you want to find a bona fide Christmas-themed record in the UK top twenty during the festive season before the 1970s, you have to go all the way back to 1962, when Brenda Lee’s Rockin’ Around the Christmas Tree made its first appearance; but such artefacts were as thin on the ground as snow in the midlands. Artists simply did not make Christmas records during the 1960s: they had better, more creative things to do. The Beatles’ only outing in a festive direction took the form of a repetitive, chugalong mantra Christmas Time is Here Again, but the fabs had sufficient taste and discretion to restrict it to one of their annual fan club Christmas records. (Dora Bryan’s shameless cash-in All I Want for Christmas is a Beatle had stalled at No. 24 in 1963).

1960’s chart is the only one out of the whole decade in which we find two festive-themed singles jockeying for position: Nina and Frederick’s Little Donkey taking on Adam Faith’s Lonely Pup in a Christmas Shop. Who would win in such a contest? As Harry Hill might say, there’s only one way to find out... in fact, it was the diminutive ass who won by a nose, peaking at number 3 while Adam Faith’s pup was left whimpering at the door of number four...

Christmas records were certainly being made in the 1950s and 60s, but as a rule, they failed to get anywhere near the top 20. Max Bygraves’ tawdry Jingle Bell Rock was let loose on a unsuspecting world in 1959, and did reasonable business, managing a respectable placing of number eleven; but like other Christmas singles of the period, it failed to perform what would later become the magic trick of all such festive items: resurrection via repeated radio play and, in some cases, re-release. That particular genie was still to be let out of its bottle... and when it was, even the Bygraves effort would find its way onto many a Christmas-themed compilation, in company with even less successful efforts from Christmases past, all of them now deemed entirely suitable for public consumption over the festive period.

Like turkey and mince pies, Christmas records are fine in moderation, but too many of them and you’ll be reaching for the Rennies. Via the medium of Radio 2, this past Saturday night, I was subjected to an endless playlist of Christmas music, none of which I had ever heard before, nor do I wish to hear again. It left me with the realisation that the phenomenon has gone well beyond saturation point. There are now enough Christmas-themed songs available to overload anyone’s iTunes folder and most of them, frankly, we can do without. As if it weren’t enough to have every cash-in conscious artist rolling out their own efforts (thank you Jamie Cullum, yours can go in the dumpster with all the rest), the music licensing industry has spent the past decade scraping the dregs from past barrels of festive tosh, to the point at which any song that so much as name checks anything dimly related to Christmas, snow, or whatever, is deemed worthy of inclusion on the latest compilation: viz. Alma Cogan’s Never Do a Tango With an Eskimo, which, in fairness to the late chanteuse, does not mention the C-word anywhere in its nonsensical lyric.

In fact, I’d like to see all Christmas songs deleted from history, with only a select playlist of the great and the good left for posterity. Okay, so maybe they’re not all intrinsically great and good, but a lot of what we now consider the classics of Christmas music have earned their place in our affections, sometimes after years of persistent toil.

This brings me to another aspect of the whole phenomenon: when, exactly, does a Christmas record begin to feel as if it belongs to the festive season? The 1970s were the golden age of the Christmas single, and I can remember hearing all of them on their original release, but with a few notable exceptions, none of them felt remotely Christmassy the first time around. For me, the only record that really succeeded in summoning up any kind of spirit of Christmas on its first release was Greg Lake’s I Believe in Father Christmas, one of the more sincere examples of a genre not noted for its artistic or musical integrity. Even in 1975, that song said something to me that was worth saying; and without laying on the festive trappings too heavily, it pulled off the trick of sounding like Christmas, with its sparkling acoustic 12-string guitar intro, the notes falling like snow crystals in the wintry air... (excuse me, I got a bit carried away there). Slade, on the other hand, was just a good old knees-up in the band’s already familiar oeuvre, and Roy Wood's effort had so many sleighbells and wassailing children, you couldn’t help feeling Christmassy when you heard it... but as for the rest...

Having displayed unusual restraint in the Christmas department, Paul McCartney finally threw his hat into the ring with 1979’s Wonderful Christmas Time. Nowadays, that echoing synth intro is enough to guarantee a subliminal, Pavolvian image of turkey, mince pie, holly, snow, you name it... but back then, it just sounded like any other synth-based pop record. In short, it may have been out at Christmas, and about Christmas, but it neither sounded nor felt in any way a part of the festive season. I remember feeling exactly the same thing about Jona Lewie’s now-obligatory anthem Stop the Cavalry on its first outing in 1980. Apart from the brass band, and a single glancing reference to being at home ‘for Christmaaaaa’ (did he or did he not enunciate that final sibilant?), there didn’t seem much in the way of good cheer about it. He even included a nod to then then-popular idea of an impending nuclear war. I didn’t think much of it at all. Then, the following year, the BBC snipped out the brass band refrain and used it as a background to trail their festive programme line-up. That did it for me: shorn of the miserabalist lyrics, I could hear the song in the way it was intended. It has now become a presence akin to Jacob Marley’s ghost, impossible not to hear as you push your overloaded trolley down some supermarket aisle. It happened to me this morning. It has become part of the fabric of Christmas. But not all efforts are as successful, nor are they ever likely to be.

Slade’s success over Christmas 1973 served as a clarion call to others to do likewise, and the following year, the bandwagon was well under way, with Mud, Showaddywaddy and the Wombles all on board. Though not strictly a Christmas record, we can also lump in Ralph McTell’s Streets of London, aiming for the sympathy vote with its end-of-year release. 1975 saw Greg Lake deservedly making a significant impression on the charts; indeed, had it not been for the phenomenon that was (and still is) Bohemian Rhapsody, the late Mr. Lake might conceivably have enjoyed a Christmas number one that year. Posterity owes it to him, perhaps more so than anyone else, though it’s maybe too much to hope for... ’75 also saw a slew of less well-intentioned efforts to crack the seasonal chart, including records from the Goodies, the BBC-banned Judge Dread and even Freddie Starr (stretching the limits of public goodwill with a version of White Christmas). Clearly, enough was already becoming as good as a feast.

If I had to name a record as the last ever festive release that didn’t move me to heave a yule log at the radio, then I’d nominate The Pogues’ Fairytale of New York. Again, it didn’t really sound Christmassy at the time, and it took a few years before it began to feel like a fully paid-up-member of the classic Christmas singles club; but at least it was an attempt to do something different, and its narrative of a squabbling, drunken couple’s Christmas in New York was refreshingly unsentimental. I even saw them peform it on the year of release, at Birmingham’s NEC, with Kirsty MacColl making an unexpected, though welcome appearance on stage.

Since then, I’d venture to say that there hasn’t been a single Christmas record deserving of our goodwill, or of earning a place at the top table. Me, I’d take Adam Faith’s shameless 1960 effort any day in preference to Coldplay’s dismal dirge, or the desperate Queen-by-numbers-but-without-the-genius that was the Darkness’ overplayed attempt of however many years ago. I’d have them all put in a big Santa sack, weighted down with some choice lumps of New Year’s Eve coal, and dumped in the cold North Sea, never to be heard from ever again.

I remain, yours truly, E. Scrooge, esq.

'The Great Escape was on, wasn't it? It usually is...'

Memories of Christmases on the box… part one

'Mellowing over a yuletide noggin with your mate'… Bob and Terry get festive, but not very, in 1974. Bob will, eventually, make it home on Terry's forklift truck...

You know it's getting near Christmas when the BBC start dusting off their festive idents. What was it last year? The anthropomorphic sprout? (Can you anthropomorphise a vegetable, anyway?) Either way, the appearance of pirouetting penguins between programmes – or whatever else auntie's graphics department can come up with – has become one of telly's festive traditions, even if they have tended of late to use the same ones several years running (a sure sign that belts are being tightened within the corporation). But when did it all start? Well, my diaries offer us a clue.

'BBC world is a Christmas pud' says my entry for Christmas Eve 1977, proving that the tradition goes back at least that far. In fact, this may well have been the first time it happened, as my earlier diaries make no mention of such a thing, and it’s exactly the kind of trivial observation I would have been sure to note down for posterity. Anyway, here we are in posterity and what's changed? Well, the graphics are of a standard that would have left us speechless back in the 70s, and are starting to appear weeks before the day itself. Back in the 1970s, however, as in so many other aspects of life in general and Christmas in particular, we favoured a more ascetic approach: the festive ident appeared on Christmas Eve and rarely made it past Boxing Day, when normal service was resumed and Newcastle play Carlisle… (sorry, just lapsing into a bit of festive Terry Collier there). It’s like every other aspect of Christmas... it just gets earlier every year. And... perhaps a little less imaginative? Or is that just my Scrooge cynicism showing through?

1978’s diary reports that auntie’s jolly new festive tradition was being upheld and indeed, arrived a day early, on the 23^rd, in the form of a ‘silly Santa face.’ I’ve no record of 1979’s offering, but by the following year, with VHS at my disposal, I captured the festive ident ahead of repeats of Fawlty Towers and the above mentioned episode of The Likely Lads (lacking its Whatever prefix for this seasonal outing). The idea of stuffy old auntie dropping its formal emblematic globe in favour of a pudding, bauble or whatever was a corporate nod of goodwill to all mankind, and these early attempts  were of crude and unsophisticated design, taking the form of three-dimensional models, not unlike the kind of tat that the Blue Peter team were given to knocking up at this time of year. They were filmed in real time, rotating, dangling or whatever, since TV graphics and computers as we now know them simply did not exist. This was a world of rub-down lettering, cardboard cut-outs and advent crown knock-offs.

As to the programmes themselves, barring Christmas night itself when the big guns were all rolled out, the schedules of the 70s exhibit an almost Dickensian austerity. A few choice movies would be peppered across the evenings between Christmas and New Year – The French Connection was always a safe bet, with its wintry New York setting (and a sighting of a street corner Santa), and I still have a VHS recording of Midnight Cowboy from its broadcast on December 21^st 1980; but festive trimmings could be thin on the ground. I still remember the dismal BBC 1 schedule from Christmas Eve 1975, dominated as it was by Disney’s The Great Locomotive Chase. What’s Christmassy about that? Prior to that, we had Blank’ll Fix It (name now excised from history), and later in the evening, a festive stir of Porridge, but all told it was a dreary line-up. There can’t have been anything better on ITV, either, or I’d have switched over. Bob Ferris sums it all up in that Christmas edition of The Likely Lads when he’s trying to remember last year’s festivities: ‘the Great Escape was on, wasn’t it? It usually is.’

1976’s diary entry (written in multicoloured felt-tip pen... don’t ask) informs us that Christmas Eve’s big viewing events again all came courtesy of auntie: an Are You Being Served Christmas special , Porridge (The Desperate Hours – the festive spirit scarcely lifted by the austere prison interiors) and that year’s Mastermind Final (it had started so it finished). For me, the most interesting aspect of that year’s Christmas programming was the inclusion in the morning schedules of the original Flash Gordon serial from the 1930s, which my dad had frequently told me about. Now, at last, I was able to see it in all its fizzing, low-tech sparklers-up-the-arse-of-rocketships splendour: ‘Give him everything he wants except his freedom,’ orders Emperor Ming as Dr. Zarkov is forced to work in his laboratories. He might have added: ‘or his trousers’ since, for reasons unexplored, the unfortunate Doctor was required to perform his duties wearing what looked like an oversized black nappy and no strides, showing off Frank Shannon’s hairy legs to terrifying effect.

Flash Gordon serves as a good illustration of a televisual tradition that is now in terminal decline... that of wheeling out a bunch of nostalgic good stuff for the duration of Christmas and the New Year. A season of Laurel and Hardy movies, for instance, or, best of all, the definitive Beatles extravaganza, as presented by BBC2 in 1979 – the only occasion on which all the available movies have been shown in a single season on British television. Even Magical Mystery Tour and the Shea Stadium concert were present, as was Let it Be... for what would prove to be its penultimate televised outing (it has not been seen on British TV since Saturday 8^th May, 1982). Beginning in 1974, episodes of Star Trek began to appear in morning and lunchtime slots at Christmas under the banner Holiday Star Trek (the title being a Radio Times conceit, as there were no festive trappings accompanying the broadcasts). For the record, the first of these was the classic The Enemy Within, and its screening on December 23^rd of that year was my first look at Star Trek in colour – a rented colour set having arrived in our house that November.

What else went to make up a typical 70s Christmas on the box? Well, you could always rely on Top of the Pops to present a compliation of the year’s hits on Christmas Day afternoon, usually with a second installment before New Year. 1971 saw the first in what would become a seasonal tradition of presenting one of the year’s Doctor Who stories in a single, complete episode. The Daemons was the first story given this festive refit, with the five-part story neatly condensed into ninety minutes, losing some of the often extraneous padding from which Dr. Who invariably suffered. Mercifully, the idea of doing a bona fide Christmas episode had been shelved after an experiment generally regarded as a misfire – 1965’s The Feast of Stephen (a comic interlude in the middle of the epic Daleks Master Plan). When William Hartnell turned to camera to salute everyone watching at home, he more or less guaranteed that there would be no more Christmas Who for another forty years. And a good thing too, if you ask me…

End of part one… 

Now watch a Christmas commercial for Woolies (you need to skim over the uploader's rubbish intro):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GSFWDh9n96c

HERGÉ’S ADVENTURES OF TINTIN!!!

A few of my Tintin books, some of which (eg. Explorers on the Moon) I've owned since the early 70s.

Anyone of a certain age (and a tediously comic disposition) will, at the mere mention of The Adventures of Tintin, launch into an imitation of the histrionic voice-over that announced every episode of the animated television exploits of the Belgian boy detective. [For the record, the man behind these strident announcements was American actor and voice artist Paul Frees, an occasional collaborator with Hanna Barbera, who makes a rare in camera appearance as a news reporter in George Pal’s War of the Worlds (1953)]

I’m sure I speak for a lot of viewers who saw these broadcasts during the 1960s and 70s, when I admit that, at the time, I had absolutely no idea what or whom Hergé might be. To me, it was a meaningless word tagged onto the narration to give it an extra rhythmical quality. To my brother and myself, it became corrupted into the more feasible enquiry: ‘who’s seen the Adventures of Tintin?’ We knew very well that wasn’t what he said, but it had to mean something. I didn’t even pick up on it when I had my first encounter with a Tintin book, circa 1968, in WH Smiths’ branch on The Parade, Sutton Coldfield. The book was The Castafiore Emerald, newly out in hardback, and the comic story it told was a far cry from Tintin’s usual dramatic exploits. To me, though, the front cover image of Tintin in front of a bank of television monitors belonged to his moon adventure which was currently being repeated on BBC1. Somewhat surprisingly, I didn’t investigate any further. As far as I was concerned, Tintin belonged on television, and at this stage, aged seven, I had little interest in reading his adventures.

‘Put Tintin in the bin-bin!’

So said a memorably laconic correspondent to BBC TV’s Junior Points of View some time in the autumn of 1968. The Objective Moon serial was nearing completion of its fourth broadcast at the time and, despite having seen it all before, I for one did not share the writer’s sour opinion of the be-quiffed Belgian. Indeed, I didn’t even know he was Belgian: all I knew about him was that he’d been to the moon in a grey checkered space rocket (we were watching in black and white).

The BBC had begun screening the Télé Hachette/ Belvision produced Hergé’s Adventures of Tintin on New Years’ Day 1962, commencing with The Broken Ear (an adventure which I’ve never seen in its televised form). It was shown in weekly fifteen-minute instalments on Monday evenings at 17.40. The Crab With the Golden Claws (from 27 May) saw the serial move to Sunday early evenings, with a repeat on Thursdays at 17.30 the following year, followed by another new adventure, The Mystery of the Unicorn, shown in two twenty-minute episodes. These were presumably edited together from shorter segments, as the serial was later broadcast in five-minute chunks, reverting to its more familiar English title The Secret of the Unicorn. Unusually, this first broadcast was not followed by the expected sequel, Red Rackham’s Treasure. Viewers would have to wait until July 1964 to see how the story panned out.

Next up was Objective Moon, commencing from Monday April 6^th, 1964, which, in spite of its title being a literal tranlation of the French album Objectif Lune, comprised both that story and its sequel, On a Marché Sur La Lune (Explorers on the Moon). Compared with the original comic strip volumes, the contents of the first were shoehorned into a single twenty-five minute episode, with the remaining three installments shifting the action to the moon. (The complete adventure was later released on a very rare VHS tape, not to be confused with the 1990s iteration). A repeat broadcast followed in May 1965, and it is these early transmissions which fixed the character of Tintin in my mind.

Other serials shown during this time included The Black Island and The Calculus Case (better known as The Calculus Affair or L’Affaire Tournesol), but it was the moon adventure which made the greatest impression on me, sucker as I was for anything involving a space rocket. By 1966, the format had been altered to five-minute segments, which would be retained for all remaining broadcasts, with episodes stripped throughout the week in the 17.50 slot prior to the evening news. Objective Moon ran in this format for 22 episodes from June 14^th, 1966. (Incidentally, anyone wishing to follow the screening dates on BBC Genome should take note of the fact that, from 1966 onwards, the series is billed as The Adventures of Tin Tin, someone at the Radio Times evidently having been confused by the Thunderbirds character). The next new broadcast was The Star of Mystery (from September 14^th, 1966, adapting L’Étoile Mysterieuse/The Shooting Star), with a repeat broadcast the following year.

After a break of around a year, Objective Moon was run for a fourth time from July 29^th, 1968 – the extent of the repeats perhaps signifying its popularity – and it was during this run that the sniping comment appeared in Junior Points of View’s postbag. JPOV was, in fact, occupying the same pre-news slot as Tintin at this time, on Friday evenings, presided over by he-of-the-smug-demeanour-and-comb-over – ah, would that it were – Robert Robinson. The letter writer must have felt uncommonly pleased with himself, for the BBC took him at his word: following the repeat of Objective Moon, Tintin was indeed consigned to the bin, with no further broadcasts until July 1972, when The Crab With the Golden Claws formed part of the new summer holiday schedule, stripped through the week in a 10.50am timeslot.

It was during this repeat run that I had my first proper encounter with Tintin in his bona fide comic strip incarnation. The books, previously available only in hardback, had just been issued by publishers Methuen in a new softcover series, comprising a selected few of the volumes then available in English translations; and spotting them (again, in a branch of WH Smith), I made the obvious choice by selecting The Crab With the Golden Claws. My brother made the better call with The Black Island: a revamped 1960s edition produced by the Hergé studios at the behest of the UK publishers who felt that the English settings in the earlier edition needed updating.

Reading The Crab With the Golden Claws, I immediately became aware of the huge liberties that had been taken with the text by the Belvision adaptations, and the television adventures which I’d previously enjoyed were instantly rendered risible. From here on in, I would be (and still am) a devotee of the originals, and over the next few years took pains to acquire as many of the books as I could. This was no mean feat, as the hardbacks were rapidly dwindling in number and could not readily be obtained from even a high-end bookseller. I had to resort to ordering certain editions from Hudsons in Birmingham, although the film editions Tintin and the Blue Oranges and Tintin and the Golden Fleece were by this stage unobtainable. Indeed, I have yet to track down copies of either, but consisting as they do of frame blow-ups from two strange live-action feature films, they’re hardly a priority after forty-odd years.

Back on television, The Secret of the Unicorn was repeated at Easter 1974 and again at the same time the following year. Red Rackham’s Treasure ran during the summer holidays in 1976, again on weekday mornings in a 9.45am slot. These broadcasts all retained the five-minute format that had been the norm since 1966.

At Christmas 1977, the feature film Tintin and the Lake of Sharks was given an afternoon screening at 16.30 on 30^th December. I’d owned the album version of this since 1973, and was curious to see how it looked in motion. The animation was very similar to that employed by the TV episodes, unsurprisingly given that the film’s director was Belvision supremo and Hergé collaborator (careful how you use that word) Raymond LeBlanc. One of the two live-action films, Tintin and the Golden Treasure was shown by the BBC in 1978 and again in 1979 and 1980, offering the curious spectacle of actors made up as Captain Haddock and Tintin. The other live-action effort seemingly never made it onto UK television.

Following Red Rackham’s Treasure in 1976, the Belvision series disappeared from the small screen, but was rescued from the ‘binbin’ in 1983 with yet another repeat for the perennially popular The Secret of the Unicorn, again in five-minute episodes. Its sequel was shown once more the following year, but this time it really was the end for the original series, and after twenty one years on air, Hergé’s Adventures of Tintin took its last bow at the BBC on Thursday, 28^th February 1984 at 16.20 (although some of the serials would later air on ITV and Channel 4). A new animated series was to follow in 1991, adapting all of the original texts, with superior cell animation, but the same old tendency to deviate from the plot. Despite being a fan, I never took the trouble to see many of these new films: by this time it was the books or nothing for me.

'Appearances in other media' (as Wikipedia would have it): this panel from Le 

Français d'Aujord' Hui, a school text book from the 1970s, illustrates part of the story L'Anniversaire de Maire-Claude. Note how the cover of Objectif Lune has been subtly altered to avoid copyright infringement. Expect a full blog on La Famille Bertillon plus tard…

So what was it about the Tintin books that I found so appealing? Initially, it was the artwork. I felt I already knew the characters from the TV episodes, and to this day, it’s the Belvision version of the Thompson Twins’ voices that I hear in my head (Paul Frees’ Captain Haddock has proved hard to shake off, too). Comparing the first two volumes that came into our house, I could see at once that huge advances had been made between the publication of The Crab With the Golden Claws (1943 in its French, colour edition) and The Black Island, a comparative newcomer dating back a mere eight years. The realism of the latter was remarkable, with superb renderings of vehicles such as a Triumph Herald convertible and Dr. Müller’s Jaguar Mk X. Stylised though the illustrations may have been, with their distinctive, crisp ‘ligne claire’ look, the effect was that of complete realism within Hergé’s own defined comic strip world. The man was evidently a genius. It was only much later that I learned of his studio methods whereby various collaborators (that word again!) would be co-opted to research and draw vehicles and settings, leaving Hergé himself free to concentrate on the characters. But frankly, given the opportunity and the budget, only a total control freak would fail to see the advantages in such a system, and the results took the Tintin adventures beyond brilliance into the realm of the truly unique.

I even commenced to create my own ‘Adventures of Tintin’ in biro and felt-tip pen; although these endeavours scarcely got beyond the covers. Any Google search will reveal an active cottage industry in the creation of highly convincing fake Tintin covers (one or two of them obscene), although they are of academic interest only, and in this age of photoshop, relatively simple for any half decent illustrator to produce. I wonder how many fans were doing the same thing back in 1974, as I was? I’m sure there must have been others.

I’m not saying I wouldn’t have stumbled across the boy detective and his dog (easily done) at some point – but without the prompt of those rubbery Belvision animations, it might have taken a while longer. Bastardised (or Blistering Barnaclised) they may well have been; but there was enough left of the originals to merit further investigation. And he even went to the moon... what more could anyone want of a comic-strip hero?

One last time, after three... HERGÉ’S ADVENTURES OF TINTIN!!!

'Don't Call Me Pop!' Remembering Space Patrol...

Space Patrol: from the first series. L-R: Slim, Col. Raeburn, Husky, Captain Dart

A question I often find myself asking is: are old television programmes best left to mature in the memory, like vintage wine, or should they be uncorked from time to time and tasted afresh? The answer is almost always the former. Old television, especially programmes aimed at children, doesn’t always travel very well, and with a few notable exceptions (such as most of the works of Gerry and Sylvia Anderson), simply does not stand up to scrutiny when revisited.

An excellent example of this is Roberta Leigh’s Space Patrol, a series which will only be remembered by the over-fifties, having been absent from the airwaves since 1968. For years, my recollection was of a darkly strange series with an oddly disturbing atmosphere quite at odds with the bumbling good humour of its contemporaries like Fireball XL5 and Stingray. In 1978 I caught my first glimpse of the series in a decade via the medium of 8mm home movies... and twenty years later saw them all on 16mm film prints when the series was finally rediscovered, an experience that illustrates that old adage about being careful what you wish for...

‘Uncorking’ Space Patrol after so many years was an interesting experience. It had not travelled well. While Supercar and Fireball XL5 may have seemed quaintly nostalgic, they at least benefited from decent production values and scripts from writers who understood concepts like pacing and drama. Whereas Space Patrol... well, where does one start?

* * *

For the uninitiated, or those who have simply forgotten, Space Patrol was a filmed puppet series that shared a little of the DNA of Gerry Anderson’s Supermarionation, its creator Roberta Leigh having been the progenitor of the entire genre when she commissioned his nascent film production company to produce her Noddy knock-off The Adventures of Twizzle. Its success led to the better remembered Torchy the Battery Boy (well before my time, I’m glad to say), which was even more of a Noddy rip-off, with its tale of a ‘toy boy’ who escapes to a world of lost toys (for which, read Toyland), his gimmick being a battery operated torch in his hat as opposed to a nodding head. After production of a single series of this tosh, Gerry Anderson, unsurprisingly, had had enough, and baled out. You’d have thought Torchy would have cured him of any desire ever to work with marionettes again, but conversely (and more than a little perversely) it left him with the burning desire to go one better: to make puppet films but to make them brilliantly, almost as if to teach Roberta Leigh a lesson...

This parting of the ways was, if you like, a quantum event in popular culture, that would see both Gerry and his former employer Roberta pursuing the same end with vastly different results. What might have transpired had the partnership not been dissolved at this point? That’s a matter for speculation, but I’d venture to suggest the outcome would have been fewer puppet series with more feeble scripts.

While Gerry and co. set to work on Four Feather Falls, Roberta Leigh produced a second series of Torchy, one having not been sufficient, so it would seem. Following this, her team turned out the whimsical Sara and Hoppity, of which only a solitary episode, the pilot, is extant.* (In fairness, Sara and Hoppity is a considerable tehnical advance on the efforts of the BBC Film Unit to make puppet films, but it sure ain’t Four Feather Falls).

(* A second episode, Georgy Goes Visiting, is held by the BFI.)

Meanwhile, Gerry Anderson had conceived an idea that would enable him to side-step the many limitations and technical frustrations of working with marionettes (frankly, he must have been bonkers to attempt a cowboy adventure in that format). His genius idea was simple: he would set his adventures in the future, or within a futuristic format that circumvented the need for his characters to walk anywhere. From here on in, they would fly, or hover, through their various adventures in the likes of Supercar et. al.

Watching from the sidelines of her own endeavours, Roberta Leigh must have been given pause for thought at the sight of Supercar; and at around the same time that Gerry’s team moved into outer space, so did their would-be rivals. Instead of a conventional rocket, Roberta Leigh’s spacemen travelled aboard a gyroscopic contraption called a ‘Galasphere’, driven not by rockets but by ‘meson power’ (in a nod to real-world physics).

Space Patrol employed the same electronic lip-synch that had been developed by A.P. Films, ownership of which was never contested by either party. But all similarities ended there. Whilst the characters of Fireball XL5 were broad caricatures, Space Patrol’s marionettes had more subtle, doll-like faces (some of them were reused from Sara and Hoppity). Like Fireball XL5, it was an outer space adventure, set roughly one hundred and fifty years in the future, but in a distinct improvement over the Andersons’ vision, Roberta Leigh’s version of the future boasted an extraordinary cityscape, whose fantastic buildings now seem like anticipations of the Shard, the Gherkin and the Walkie-Talkie. So far, so good…

The crew of Galasphere 347 with the gender-confused Jovian, Joe (I had my own doubts about Slim, extreme right, who I took for a female for some time).

In a nod to realism, the adventures of Galasphere 347 were for the most part confined to our own solar system (referred to throughout the series as ‘our galaxy’ – a misunderstanding which probably explains the name ‘Galasphere.’) Realism fell down somewhat with the realisation that pretty well every planet was inhabited, including the gas giants Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus (pronouned the old, ‘rude’ way) and Neptune. Although the credits boasted a ‘Space Consultant’ in the form of astronomer Colin Ronan, whatever advice he gave was subjected to considerable dramatic license, since the depictions of the planets reflected ideas that had for the most part been debunked or never accepted in the first place. Not that any of the young viewers tuning in would have been any the wiser.

It had dodgy science, doll-like characters and a budget a fraction of what Lew Grade was lobbing at Gerry Anderson, but what, if anything, had Space Patrol to offer the viewers of 1963? Well, it had atmosphere, of a kind. It had the first electronic music score of any television series (coming to air a full six months ahead of Dr. Who). And in spite of its glaring inaccuracies, it included some real science – Roberta Leigh may well have sold the series on this basis, as several episodes include explanations of actual scientific principles from obligatory ‘mad’ scientist Professor (don’t call me pop!) Haggerty... mention of whom brings us neatly on to the Space Patrol cast.

Like Fireball XL5, Space Patrol revolved around the adventures of a spaceship crew: hipsterish Captain Larry Dart, complete with goatee and collar-length hair was joined by his colleagues Slim (an elfin, pointed-eared Venusian whose thinking was dominated by logic – I know...) and Husky, a tall, endearing Martian with twig-like hair and a fixation on eating. Back on earth, their exploits were overseen by Colonel Raeburn (a handsome, aquiline-nosed character whose head was evidently broken sometime during production), and his ultra-efficient Venusian secretary Marla. Much of the interplay between the characters derived from repeated dialogue, re-used throughout the series to the point of tedium. A typical example:

RAEBURN: Tell General Smith I’m on my way to see him.

MARLA: I have already ordered your monobile.

RAEBURN: You think of everything.

MARLA: A Venusian has the facility never to forget.

If they did it once, they did it a thousand times... Elsewhere, the dialogue clunked like a steamroller over boulders. Attempts at humour were usually disastrous. The characters frequently behaved like idiots. In one episode, an unprotected Dart attempts to sneak up on a dangerous Martian bird (made from a dismembered teddy bear) and repeatedly gets stabbed in the arm for his trouble: “Agh! It got my arm again.” The man is clearly a cretin. You can hear voice artist Dick Vosburgh’s embarrassment at some of the lines he’s expected to deliver, not least when having to fight off the attentions of a Jovian creature called Joe whose one desire in life is to have Dart come and live with him. (I suspect he also produced Telstar by the Tornados...)

A special mention has to go to ‘Professor Aloysius O’Brien O’Rourke Haggerty’, Space Patrol’s resident mad genius and the most irritating character in the series by a long way, beating even the garrulous Gabblerdictum (a martian parrot voiced by Candaian comedienne Libby Morris). Again, Haggerty’s dialogue quickly becomes tediously repetitive with his endless rebukes of ‘don’t call me pop’ to his daughter Cassiopeia (a name which voice artist Ronnie Stevens was incapable of pronouncing). This is what passes for character development in Space Patrol: by the latter part of the series, even Raeburn is referring to it, in between making snide comments about Haggerty’s encroaching baldness.

Like Fireball XL5, there is an exotic space pet on offer: but Roberta Leigh immediately nixes any possibility of the Gabblerdictum’s involvement with the Galasphere’s adventures with the rule (oft repeated from the lips of Captain Dart) that ‘birds aren’t allowed on board spaceships.’ Instead, the pink, feathery fool is left on earth to annoy Professor Haggerty (who taught it to speak in the first place and should have known better).

Space Patrol is a classic case of a little going a long way. Repetition may be loved by children, but viewing the series as an adult, it’s just grating. Almost everything in the series is repeated or recycled time and time again: the same take-off programme sequence (used irrespective of the fact that the Galasphere is referred to by the wrong number), the same bits of stock footage, the same puppets, recycled with differing facial hair to portray different characters, and the same aliens. In fairness, the other races encountered by the Galasphere crew were on the whole more imaginative creations than the humanoid types so often seen in Fireball XL5, and included walking, talking cacti, a knitted bell, four-armed dinosaurs, and a kind of floating balloon. Unfortunately, there was also the supremely annoying Tyro, master of Neptune, a male character with a female voice (Gene Roddenberry would invert the same idea in Star Trek's first pilot: I've a sneaking suspicion he saw Space Patrol when it aired in the US as Planet Patrol).

If we are to believe the generic end credits, every single episode of Space Patrol was written by its creator, Roberta Leigh, a possibly unique feat for any television series. On the plus side, this allows for the development, across multiple episodes, of what we would now refer to as a ‘story arc’, and there are frequent cross-references between scripts. On the down side, with no other creative input, and no one to challenge some often cranky ideas and dodgy storytelling, it means that an awful lot of rotten scripts made it into production. It’s too much to expect a single authorial hand to write thirty-nine television episodes, and even with her background in churning out potboilers for Mills & Boon, Roberta Leigh must have had her work cut out. It is this single factor above all considerations that contiunually mitigates against Space Patrol. Scripts are alternately whimsical, feeble, poorly constructed or all three. Of the complete run of thirty nine, about a dozen are acceptable, and a handful more might have been made to work with some judicious script editing. Of the actors who breathed life into Ms. Leigh’s creations, only Dick Vosburgh was prepared to talk about his contribution (with a good deal of fondness) in later years, while Ronnie Stevens and Libby Morris disowned it completely. You have only to listen to them making fools of themselves to understand why.

Space Patrol is no fine wine: those who choose to sample it do so at their peril, as I have done recently. As I near the end of a re-run of all thirty-nine episodes, I can pause to reflect on how I felt about the series as a youngster. For the most part, I avoided it for its unearthly strangeness. Here in the midlands, it was a staple of Sunday teatimes, and my memories are mostly of seeing it in my grandparents’ back room. My dad thought the Gabblerdictum was great fun. I was less sure myself. If anything, it was the weird electronic music concrête that put me off. I didn’t notice the cheap sets (hard to see on 405-line television) or the deficiencies in the scripts; but there were some curious moments that embedded themselves in the memory, to resurface over thirty years later when the episodes were finally rediscovered.

Space Patrol was made in two discrete series, with notable visual differences between them: the puppets and sets were all spruced up for the second batch of thirteen episodes, and Libby Morris’ credit was replaced by Ysanne Churchman – who, in the role of Grace Archer, had been ‘sacrificed’ in a BBC attempt to trump ITV’s opening night in 1955. (Morris was still providing the voice of the Gabblerdictum). The first twenty-six episodes went out during 1963, with the second series airing in two batches between 1966 and ‘68. It is these later broadcasts that I remember the best, with the ‘66 screenings still having the power to evoke an irrational fear. By ‘68 I was lapping it up to the extent of recording my own made-up episode on my dad’s open-reel tape recorder. The seven episodes shown at this time were not, as I thought, repeats, but the last dregs from the barrel, and were shown over the last seven weeks of the old ABC network, prior to its closure in July 1968. For years, I laboured under the misapprehension that only seven episodes had been made... which would almost certainly have been an improvement.

I have to take some blame here, for without my involvement, Space Patrol might still be languishing in obscurity. Considered lost for years, a complete set of film prints had been stored in Roberta Leigh’s garage from which they were retrieved in the late 1990s by my friend Tim Beddows. He’d recently rescued the old Robinson Crusoe series from oblivion in a Paris archive, and on the back of that success, I urged him to try and do the same for Space Patrol. My nagging, coupled with Tim’s tenacity, led to us being the first people to see the episodes in thirty odd years, and it is in the form of that rough set of 16mm prints that Space Patrol has survived to this day... Network’s DVD release has been widely bootlegged and most episodes are available to view on YouTube. Just remember when you watch them who put them there…

“If you fill Ilya Kuryakin’s head with water and squeeze it, he cries real tears…” or… The Spin-Off Toys Affair

Corgi's Man from U.N.C.L.E. Oldsmobile, complete with Waverly ring (not mine, I'm sorry to say)

Back in the 1960s, it was possible to be aware of a TV series or film without ever seeing it: such was the growing power of merchandising. Aged just four, I knew all about James Bond simply because Corgi Toys had produced a James Bond car to tie-in with the release of Goldfinger: but I didn’t actually see a James Bond film for another nine years. When they produced another tie-in vehicle – a rocket-firing Toyota as seen in You Only Live Twice – I had that one as well, despite knowing nothing about the film. Likewise, the extremely cool car driven by The Green Hornet – whoever he might be. I’m not sure I cared, but to this day I find it hard to understand why a British toy manufacturer chose to produce a model tied in to a series that wasn’t even being broadcast here in the UK. For all I know, it might have made it onto some of the other ITV regions, but here in the Midlands, we certainly never had sight of it.

One series that most definitely was being shown across the UK – by virtue of its having been purchased by the BBC – was The Man from U.N.C.L.E. And in the week we lost Robert Vaughn, I found myself pondering on how I first became aware of a television series which, to the best of my knowledge, I never saw when it first appeared.

The BBC scheduled The Man from U.N.C.L.E. immediately after Top of the Pops on Thursday evenings, with the first episode going out on June 24^th 1965: about a year after the series had made its debut in the USA. It was a canny piece of scheduling, because the stars of U.N.C.L.E. – David McCallum in particular – quickly became established favourites of the pop pin-up magazines. But it was too late in the evening for me. Although I remember seeing Top of the Pops during this era, its end time of 8.00pm was my bedtime: and The Man from U.N.C.L.E. remained in its 8pm timeslot until 1968, when I dimly recollect it being on Saturday evenings after Simon Dee’s Dee Time. But I’d known about the series since 1966, when Corgi Toys issued their ‘THRUSH-Buster’ – a modified casting of their existing Oldsmobile Super 88…

To this day, I have no idea whether or not the U.N.C.L.E. agents employed this vehicle in their adventures, but it certainly never featured in any of the films, which, unlike the TV series episodes, I did get to see when they came to television in the early 1970s. Either way, it was a notably cool Corgi toy, with its gun-firing Solo and Kuryakin, who popped alternately out of the driver and passenger window if you pressed the periscope on top of the car. Which one was driving? Did it even matter? I still have my original ‘THRUSH-Buster’, which I believe was given to me as a birthday present in 1966 or 67.

My playworn 1966 original, not in bad shape considering... (note the Green Hornet's Black Beauty parked alongside… and Dylan and Mr. Rusty of The Magic Roundabout getting in on the act.)

As if the car wasn’t cool enough, it came with a special ‘Waverly’ ring, which showed a picture of either Mr. Solo or Mr. Kuryakin depending on which way you tilted it. This was, of course, an example of the familiar lenticular image effect that had been around since the 1940s. But in 1966, aged five, I’d never seen anything like it before, and wouldn’t again until I spotted The Rolling Stones’ Their Satanic Majesties Request album sleeve in a branch of WH Smith about a year later. Sadly, although I tried very hard to take care of it, my own ‘Waverly ring’ was last spotted at the bottom of a box of mixed junk (bits of broken toys, badges, cereal premiums etc) sometime in the early 1970s.

Although the Corgi car certainly helped to bring The Man from U.N.C.L.E. to my notice, there were other items of merchandise associated with the series: I had at least two different cap guns, and U.N.C.L.E. adventures formed part of the disappointing TV Tornado when it launched in January 1967. I well remember having this comic and being completely aware of who the Men from U.N.C.L.E. were by this point – so maybe I’d got to see some of the TV broadcasts? If I did, then I have no recollection of it.

Although the series was shot in colour from its second season onwards, the BBC broadcasts came to an end before the debut of colour television on BBC1, and their Genome database reveals that no episodes were shown beyond the summer of 1968. Apart from a solitary episode – The Arabian Affair – shown as part of a short season of one-off oldies in 1981, the BBC never showed a single stand-alone U.N.C.L.E. episode again. One possible reason for this might be that the Corporation had been supplied with black and white prints for broadcast (although the aforementioned episode was certainly screened in colour). Maybe it was simply that the fad for spies and gadgets had waned by the end of the 1960s.

Nevertheless, it was in the 1970s that I finally got properly acquainted with Mr. Solo and Mr. Kuryakin, via the ‘feature films’ (edited together from two-part TV episodes) which became a staple of the schedules during the decade. Curiously, although the series had been bought by the BBC, it was ITV who showed the U.N.C.L.E. movies, and their appearance on TV was usually treated as a bit of an event, with films like The Spy With My Face meriting a prime-time Sunday evening slot. To put this in context, James Bond had yet to make his television debut, and in his absence, Napoleon Solo would do very nicely, thank you...

By this time, of course, the Corgi ‘THRUSH-Buster’ was long gone from the toyshops, along with all of the other mid-60s U.N.C.L.E. merchandise. In fact, the last Man from U.N.C.L.E. toys I remember seeing on sale were a couple of cheap Action Man-type figures of Solo and Kuryakin, which I discovered in an out of the way shop in rural southern Ireland during a family holiday in 1970. These ‘dolls’ were of rudimentary construction, typical of the ‘Japanese Action Man’ figures that routinely turned up in bargain stores, and came dressed in black top and trousers, with a gun and shoulder holster. The arms and legs were simply articulated, lacking the sophisticated ball-and-socket joints of the Palitoy hero, and their squishy plastic heads were easily detached from the bodies. I discovered that, by squeezing their heads, you could induce a range of different expressions into the U.N.C.L.E. guys. Ilya Kuryakin for some reason had tiny slits in the corners of his eyes, probably a side-effect of the moulding process; this meant that, if you filled his head with water and squeezed it, he cried ‘real tears’. Notably, you couldn’t do the same thing with Napoleon Solo, which was entirely appropriate. It goes without saying that the dolls bore scant resemblance to their real-life counterparts, and in my games, Napoleon Solo was often co-opted to play the part of Captain Black against the really rather nice British-made Captain Scarlet dolly by Pedigree.

The U.N.C.L.E. dolls… the versions I had did not 'raise arm and shoot cap-firing pistol', but this pair can be yours from en ebay seller for a mere £500… so you'll need a THRUSH-type plan for world domination to afford them. 

The Sixteen Paperback Books Affair...

During the seventies, the main line of U.N.C.L.E. spin-off merchandising as far as I was concerned was the series of paperback books that had appeared in the previous decade, and were now a staple of just about every secondhand book seller or jumble sale. I found the first of them and thought it a one-off until, about two minutes later, I found number two or three at the same chuch hall-hosted book sale. There was evidently quite a range of titles, and when a friend showed me the orange-covered number nine (The Vampire Affair) I realised there had to be at least ten in the series. Then, about a year later, I stumbled upon Number 13 (The Corfu Affair). How many of these damn things were there? The same friend later produced a fourteenth edition (The Splintered Sunglasses Affair), and a fifteenth wasn’t long in coming. It wasn’t until a couple of years later that I found what proved to be the final paperback outing for the U.N.C.L.E. agents, the sixteenth and last in the Four-Square British series: The Unfare Fare Affair. The title alone was enough to suggest that, by this point, the publishers and the hack writers they employed were becoming a little jaded...

Of course, anyone reading this blog in the USA (faint hope) will be thoroughly confused by all this, because there was a ‘same but different’ range of U.N.C.L.E. paperbacks published across the pond. This ‘definitive’ series ran to a staggering twenty-four titles, of which sixteen formed the British run, although the numbering was somewhat at variance; doubtless a THRUSH ploy to ensure confusion amongst collectors...

Aside from the paperback books, there had been a series of U.N.C.L.E. annuals from the reliable source of World Distributors (Manchester) Ltd, who, true to form, bound up some licensed Gold Key comic strips alongside original text stories. I found numerous editions in second hand bookshops, enough to suggest that the annuals outlived the original TV broadcasts by a couple of years. The writers of these tomes, in common with the authors employed on the paperback series, had been handed a gift by the producers of the TV series in the shape of the formulaic titling: every single episode was known as ‘The (insert increasingly absurd combination of words) Affair.’ (Executive Producer Norman Felton would try something similar when he came to the UK a few years later to create ITC’s Strange Report). So for anyone commissioned to write a Man from U.N.C.L.E. story for a book or comic, the simple act of entitling it ‘The So-and-so Affair’ immediately added an air of authenticity, no matter how good, bad or indifferent the writer’s efforts.

For me as an U.N.C.L.E. collector and viewer, interest in the series (or, more specifically, the films) extended well into the 1980s, with the movie versions seldom absent from the small screen for very long. I recall the false dawn of a possible revival in the shape of the TV movie (in other words, failed pilot) The Return of the Man from U.N.C.L.E. Although Robert Vaughn and David McCallum were still in pretty good shape, the same couldn't be said for the writing or direction, and the film was a grade A dud, enough to kill any residual interest in the format for another 32 years...

It’s easy to dismiss a series like The Man from U.N.C.L.E. as lightweight escapist nonsense, typical of the era in which it was produced; and although it’s true that the third season descended into self-parody, at its best it was sharp, entertaining, and never less than watchable, entirely on account of the charisma and on-screen presence of its stars. I’d been planning an U.N.C.L.E. blog for some time, when this week came the news of the sad demise of Robert Vaughn: Napoleon Solo, we salute you.

Closing channel D...

Carry On Bonfire Night...

Who can still sing the old advertising jingle? 'Light up the sky with Standard Fireworks.'

Way back before we had all this Halloween hoo-hah here in the UK, Bonfire Night was the biggest thing on any child’s calendar between half term and Christmas. Trick or Treat was unheard of: I first encountered it via the Peanuts cartoons of Charles Schulz, and absolutely no one, but no one went from door to door blagging sweeties from strangers (and going against everything we’d been told in all those Public Information Films). Back then, ‘Penny for the Guy’ was the thing: I can still remember the sight of these ‘Guys’ being wheeled around the streets, usually in an old pram or pushchair, by a gaggle of unwashed urchins begging money to buy bangers (in the days before the sale of fireworks to minors was banned). The Guy was generally a bundle of old clothes, stuffed and sewn together, topped off by a papier-maché face mask of the style now most closely identified with the ‘Anonymous’ group, appropriated in its turn from the film adaptation of Alan Moore and David Lloyd’s graphic novel V for Vendetta.

These masks were a common sight in branches of Woolworths’ and local newsagents, alongside the odd ghoul or Frankenstein, which was as close as you got to anything resembling Halloween merchandise. The whole black and orange/ pumpkin/ cobwebby range of iconography simply didn’t exist. Not here in Britain, at any rate.

That’s not to say that we knew nothing of Halloween, or the traditions associated with it. I remember producing drawings and friezes at school, including the above image which dates to around 1969 or 70. But as to the tradition of hollowing out pumpkins into Jack O’Lanterns, well, it just wasn’t possible: pumpkins simply weren’t available in the shops. I remember our mum trying to do the same thing with a turnip, after I’d seen a piece on Blue Peter. It wasn’t quite the same. Now, pumpkins may very well have been available to a BBC researcher who knew where to go for such rarely-seen gourds, but you couldn’t get them at the local greengrocers, and as supermarkets hadn’t yet evolved into anything like their modern form, you couldn’t pop down to Tesco for one, either. Over in the USA, of course, Linus had been sitting out in his pumpkin patch awaiting the ‘Great Pumpkin’ for over a decade, but we in Britain would have to wait a lot longer for pumpkins to appear in the frankly ludicrous quantities in which they are now sold.

Either way, the big autumnal event here in Britain in the 60s and 70s was still Bonfire Night, which meant November 5^th (not the nearest Saturday or the days either side, unless it was rained off). It meant garden fireworks, and sometimes a bonfire, that would invariably produce more smoke than fire. Those garden fireworks included long, spike-nosed Roman Candles that you stuck in the flower bed; small conical volcanoes; ‘screech owls’ (small cylindrical fireworks with a plastic wing attachment that would, once lit, take flight and, on one memorable occasion, fly in through the neighbour’s bedroom window); ‘traffic lights’ (basically a lot of multicoloured smoke); and, of course, the Catherine Wheel, guaranteed to leave scorch marks on the fence post forever after. Most of these were relatively benign, but I recall one particular example that exploded with such force that we all took shelter around the side of the house. In general, though, fireworks weren’t half as noisy as they would later become, and were more about display than making a big bang.

From around mid October, our local toy shop, and the newsagents’ down the street would display their wares temptingly inside glass cabinets: the boxed selections from Brocks, Benwell and Standard, the great names in British fireworks. I remember being mightily impressed by one notably huge firework, with a bore the size of a cardboard postage tube, and wondering what kind of incredible detonation might result once you’d lit the blue touchpaper and retired…

I was never bothered by fireworks, unlike a lad down the street – a year or so older than myself – who would watch the proceedings from the safety of a back bedroom window. I just thought he was missing out on all the fun – the whole idea of standing out in the cold, dark back garden was part of the experience... along with the nervous anticipation while your dad gingerly leaned over the next firework, attempting to light it with a gently glowing spill.

One year... 1966, if memory serves... bonfire night was a washout: the first time in my recollection that it had been rained off. But our dad came home with a cunning ‘plan B’ in the form of indoor fireworks. I was surprised a few years ago to discover that these weird chemical concoctions were still available. Unsurprisingly, they were entirely lacking in the kind of pyrotechnic glory you got from the average box of Standard Fireworks, and consisted for the most part of bizarre smouldering effects such as you might see demonstrated by a benign chemistry teacher. The only one I recall with any clarity was the ‘snake in the grass’, which, when lit, began to smoulder like a cigarette, and slowly exude a noxious turd-like coil of something horrible. It was certainly snake-like in appearance, but a substitute for a good old fashioned Roman Candle it was not…

As I got older, the appeal of lighting your own fireworks in the garden began to wear off, and we would occasionally go out to watch an organised display in some nearby farmer’s field. In place of fireworks, the big bonfire night tradition became the baked potato: as per my diary entry for November 5^th, 1975. You’ll notice something else here: ‘Watch Carry on Screaming.’ This was, indeed, the ‘legendary’ bonfire night screening on BBC1 that would later unite Mark Gatiss and co, the members of the League of Gentlemen, all of whom shared the same childhood memory of that particular broadcast.

This year – and, I believe for the first time since 1975 – it’s happening again: ITV have scheduled Carry on Screaming for 11.15 on Saturday evening: bonfire night. ‘Frying tonight’ indeed...  

'In the Meantime, Here is Some Music…' Technical hitches, and the Incredible Shrinking Noggin the Nog

Noggin the Nog is shrunken by a voltage reduction, September 1965 or thereabouts.
(Image re-created in photoshop… but we had that exact GEC telly).

Some of my earliest memories of television are of it going wrong. Whether as the result of an unaccountable break in transmission, voltage reductions, or simply a valve blowing in the back of the set, breakdowns were enough of a regular occurrence to seem like a normal part of the viewing experience back in the 1960s. Most people of a certain age will recall the various apology captions used by broadcasters when, for whatever reason, there was an unexpected break in transmission. The usual message was: ‘We apologise for the loss of your programme.’ This printed caption would sometimes be reinforced by a voiceover from the continuity announcer, leading to the inevitable: ‘in the meantime, here is some music.’

Commonplace as such interruptions were, it was frustrating when a favourite programme fell victim to a technical hitch. On the evening of Friday January 12^th, 1968, my brother and I sat down to watch that week’s episode of Captain Scarlet and the Mysterons, a story entitled ‘Traitor.’ It featured the first (and only) appearance in the series of the Spectrum hovercraft, the sabotage of which formed the cornerstone of the plot. The episode had barely got underway when, just as an ominous jet of oil had begun to spray forth from the doomed vehicle, the screen went blank. Beyond this, I don’t recall the exact details of the breakdown, other than that the episode did not resume: I have a vague idea that an ATV logo appeared on the screen, and there was probably some kind of announcement and/ or apology to the effect that the break in transmission was as a result of industrial action. Either way, there was no Captain Scarlet that day. Forever after, my brother and I recalled this occasion as the instance when ‘the technicians went on strike.’

There was to be a more serious strike later that year, affecting ITV in the aftermath of the franchise reshuffle of July ‘68 (the point at which our local weekend broadcaster, ABC, ceased to exist). But whatever pulled Captain Scarlet off air in January was most likely a local dispute. True to form, the indestructible man returned to complete his interrupted mission, over three months later, when the episode was finally aired on April 23^rd.

The Captain Scarlet breakdown was by no means the first technical hitch I remember. From quite an early age, I was aware that television sets were prone to breakdowns, and have memories of an overalled engineer tinkering about in the back of the set whenever a valve went west. When the set was fully warmed up, the valves generated a fair amount of light and heat which could be seen through the ventilation slots in the back. The light from inside the set helped to reinforce the childish impression that there were little people inside it, performing, and I still remember looking through the slots during an edition of Sunday Night at the London Palladium to see if I could spot a tiny Norman Vaughan...

The early valve-driven TV sets were much more prone to breakdowns, but even in the era of the solid-state colour sets, there could be problems: I well remember the green complexion of Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea’s Admiral Harriman Nelson when one of the ‘colour guns’ in the back of our set went on the blink... and an equally annoying – and seemingly incurable problem arrived with the dawn of televisions with hi-fi sound: the magnetic field from the speakers on either side of the set was prone to induce areas of false colour in the tube. I was reliably informed that degaussing would cure the problem. Getting another set was simpler: we rented until well into the 1990s. In an era when the technology was so prone to developing faults, this was a safe bet, as the cost of any remedial work was immediately covered: although it could sometimes mean going without the telly for a few days while the repair was carried out.

An earlier and almost entirely forgotten technical phenomenon affecting one’s enjoyment of television was that of the voltage reduction. These step-downs in the local supply were well known during the 1950s and 60s but nowadays seem to have been completely forgotten, and are neglected in all commentary on the early days of television. The sole reference that I’ve been able to find is one made by Tony Hancock, who offered the voltage reductions as an argument in defence of the poor ratings for his ATV series broadcast at the beginning of 1963. ‘All the viewers could see on their sets was a postage stamp-sized Hancock’, he complained to the Daily Express.

My recollection is slightly different: a ‘postage stamp-sized’ Hancock suggests a small, square picture in the centre of the screen, which may well have been the case on certain occasions. But the instance that I recollect most clearly came during a Sunday afternoon broadcast of Noggin the Nog (a check on the BBC’s Genome website suggests this to have been Noggin and the Firecake, broadcast on Sunday evenings during September 1965). During the transmission, the picture began to shrink... almost as though it had been affected by an evil spell from Nogbad the Bad. But rather than diminishing into a small postage-stamp sized image, the shrinkage affected only the height of the picture so that, after a short time, the end result was as per the image I’ve re-created above. No amount of adjustment to the horizontal hold would cure the problem, and this was by no means the only occasion on which it occurred. Aside from that Hancock reference, I have never come across anyone who remembers this happening, but happen it most certainly did...

Since the dawn of home video, technical breakdowns are occasionally preserved for posterity, as this clip of Star Trek from January 1985 illustrates. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P8xLEl_Uh1Q And even in today’s slick digital era, it’s not unknown for a station to drop off the air completely for no apparent reason. But the 1960s and 70s are my remit, and as far as I’m concerned most modern telly can happily disappear off air forever...