IT Eggs and BB Cheese

Our first TV set was a GEC model like this antique. Yes, I am that old...

The bewildering world of multi-channel entertainment in the 1960s.

I’m the kind of person who can look at Sky’s online listings, or indeed any TV guide magazine and, in classic old buffer mode, declare that: ‘when I were a lad, all this were fields.’ In fact, it’s probably just as well that the television of my childhood offered so few alternatives, or I’d never have learned to read and write. Or, in all probability, walk. Imagine if there had been a channel dedicated to children’s television, available all day, back in the 1960s... no, let’s not go there.

When I was born, ITV was still a youngster itself – a mere six years old – and had been broadcasting in the Midlands for just five years. Of course, to me, it had always existed. As far as I was concerned, television itself had always existed, and it was impossible to conceive of a world without it. There were still only two channels, and although I was only three when it happened, I can still dimly recollect the arrival of BBC2. The most obvious sign of its arrival came in the form of Play School, which was also broadcast on BBC1: but even then, I knew that this new programme came from the new BBC channel.

I wasn’t able to watch BBC2 until about five years later, when the first 625-line set arrived in our house. You may not believe this, but I could actually perceive the difference in picture quality between BBC2 and the other channels, which were still, at that time, broadcasting in 405 lines. By modern standards, it was like comparing HD with SD. And we were still only watching in black and white.

Our first television set was a GEC model that my dad got through working for the company. It had a single channel selector knob, which was marked off with various meaningless channel numbers, two of which corresponded to the ITV and BBC frequencies in our area. The screen was reasonably proportioned, but extremely convex, and the valves inside the set glowed brightly when it was warmed up. The light streaming through the ventilation slots in the hardboard back of the telly contributed to the illusion that there were little people inside, and I can clearly remember gazing through the slots during Sunday Night at the London Palladium to see if I could see the participants from behind.

Although there were only two channels to choose from, ITV was known by a baffling number of different names. There was ITA (Independent Television Authority) whose branding appeared on the test pattern from the local transmitting station; then, there was our regional ITV operator, which in the Midlands was ATV. Adding to the confusion, on Saturdays and Sundays ATV was replaced by ABC for reasons I couldn’t comprehend. The news came from something called ITN, and the whole was known collectively as ITV. Confused? So too were the manufacturers of TV sets: at least one of ours had its channel buttons identified as ITA rather than ITV. One of them enticingly came with a ‘spare’ channel selector button, labelled ITA*. I waited with baited breath to see what, if anything might come of this spare channel, and would occasionally switch over to the invitable mass of static on the offchance that ‘ITV2’ had gone to air unannounced.

For some time, I think I imagined that the official name of ITV was ITN: that, after all, was where the news came from, and television doesn't get any more official than that. My mind always played with the sound of different words and thus, as a stupid private joke between my brother and myself, ITV (or, in my mind, ITN) became known, as ‘IT Eggs.’ Maintaining the dairy connection, the BBC was, inevitably ‘BB Cheese.’ Eggs or cheese. That, then was the choice available to the viewers of the 1960s...

Even with the addition of BBC2, there were still a mere three TV channels available to the viewers of Great Britain, as opposed to the ten billion – or, possibly infinity – of the modern era. One way in which you could experience a ‘new’ British TV station was, of course, to go on holiday. In those days, ITV was divided into regional programme providers, the content of which could vary wildly depending on where you lived. On holiday in the South West in 1971, I was able to tune in to Westward Television where, for the first and only time, I saw the famous Gus Honeybun, a moth-eaten glove puppet who sent out birthday greetings to young viewers. Some time later, during the mid 70s, holidays to Wales offered the chance to see episodes of older ITV series that were being repeated during the afternoon, such as Danger Man and The Saint, both of which were long gone from ATV in the midlands.

As mentioned above, our local station, ATV, yielded place at the weekends to ABC. This was the same ABC that ran the chain of cinemas, and their inverted triangular logo (which to my mind was copied from the green triangle in Quality Street) was a familiar sight on Saturdays and Sundays. ABC felt like a completely different channel from ATV, and its whole on-screen presence was oddly unfamiliar, like inviting a rarely-seen relative into the living room. ABC actually employed a woman continuity announcer, a rarity for the era, which added even further to its unsettling strangeness. They also showed series like Space Patrol, which I didn’t like at all. Good old ATV gave us Fireball XL5, all warm and cuddly, while ABC tried to scare us behind the sofa with music concrête and scary characters with beards (I was actually frightened of beards as a toddler). To be fair to ABC, they did give us Batman and Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea, amongst others. And we mustn’t forget The Avengers, which I was allowed to watch from the age of 6.

The three channel ‘duopoly’ in British television extended right through the 1970s. Now and then, the possibility of a fourth channel was raised in the media, and I confidently expected to see ‘ITV2’ within a few years. After all, it was only fair. BBC had two channels, why shouldn’t ITV? And what, you may wonder, did I expect to see on this new ITV channel? Repeats, of course. Even then, I was more interested in older programmes that I’d missed than anything new that ITV had to offer.

As things turned out, I was half right: because when Channel 4 finally went to air in November 1982, it included a fair few older programmes in its schedules, presumably as a relatively cheap means of filling up airtime. In the first week of broadcasting, we were offered The Avengers (absent from most of the ITV network since the early 70s), and over the coming months, oldies like Danger Man and Car 54 Where Are You? would return to the screen courtesy of Channel 4.

My diary for 1982 mentions the C4 opening night (although for me the highlight of that evening’s programmes was a BBC repeat of Sgt. Bilko at 23.05):

Channel 4 opens – on schedule, at 4.45 with routine word/number quiz prog ‘Countdown’. Best things are Paul Hogan show 8.30 (OK) & ‘The Comic Strip Presents – 'Five Go Mad in Dorset' (10.15).

By the time Channel 5 arrived, I had pretty well lost interest in the prospect of new television stations; added to which, the signal was so poor that it was virtually unwatchable. I later discovered that the signal strength made no difference at all...

Before the box set: 'illiterature' and the TV tie-in

'Illiterature': a selection of the good, the bad and the indifferent TV tie-ins and spin-offs of the 60s and 70s.
Note the imaginative titles: 'Z Cars Again.' Just as well they didn't run to a third edition...

Most television series are available pretty much on demand these days. Those you can’t download instantly as box sets are usually to be had on DVD from various sources (including the company for whom I work). Only a few obscure oldies have thus far escaped the safety net of digital formats, and there are usually good reasons for those omissions (tied up in rights hell, junked, etc).

Before we had the luxury of so much content at our fingertips, how did we TV junkies preserve the memory of our favourite shows? Options were few in number: you could carefully place a microphone in front of the television set and record the soundtrack as the programme went out, complete with familial coughs and complaints about the non-delivery of groceries (our mum, during an episode of Captain Scarlet recorded on December 8^th, 1967). In the case of a very few TV series, the BBC and various record labels saved you the trouble, by releasing soundtracks on LP and EP formats. A couple of classic Steptoe & Son episodes were thus available, as were one or two of the television Hancocks (occasionally re-recorded for album release). Gerry Anderson’s Century 21 records capitalised on the popularity of Thunderbirds, Captain Scarlet and others by releasing 33rpm 7” EPs, adapted from television soundtracks or specially written for the format. The number of Thunderbirds episodes given this treatment is truly mind-boggling, but at the time, I was aware of only a handful: I was given the Thunderbird One EP as a birthday present in 1966, but saw little or nothing of the subsequent releases, which covered about half of the televised stories. Captain Scarlet’s efforts were, in a couple of cases, comically awful. The writers of these audio episodes seemed to take a perverse delight in setting their stories in decidedly uncool locations like Bodmin Moor or Athlone: stand by for accents, of the comically stereotyped variety (one of the characters in Captain Scarlet Vs. Captain Black sounded uncannily like Mrs. Pogle).

Such efforts were as high-tech as it came in the ’60s and ’70s. Beyond the realm of the LP and EP, the only items of television memorabilia worth the candle were the various paperback novelizations and tie-ins, published to cash-in on popular contemporary programmes. During the 1970s, when such artefacts were still appearing on a regular basis, I began to discover some interesting examples of the phenomenon from the previous decade. I even began to read them. One or two of them were worth the effort, but a great many were exactly what you’d expect: hack work, quickly knocked up from supplied scripts by writers who probably didn’t even own a television set. I think of them as ‘illiterature’: books for the television generation. That’s me, squire.

Who, you may wonder, would have wanted to read a paperback novelization of Z Cars? Enough to warrant two different collections adapted from TV episodes, and published by the short-lived Oxfam imprint Trust Books. As such efforts go, these were surprisingly well-written, and, as I discovered much later with the release of some early episodes on VHS tape, extremely faithful to the scripts that provided the source material. A further, original Z Cars novel appeared in the form of Barlow on Trial, from Panther books, while the Arrow imprint provided two collections of real-life stories from Det. Inspector William Prendergast, one of the former officers who acted as advisers to the TV series. Later still, further Z Cars scripts appeared in print in a couple of Coronet paperbacks tied-in to the Softly, Softly series. The fact that these books include episodes that are now lost adds value and significance to what would otherwise be ephemeral items.

Over on the other side, ITV’s programmes were receiving similar treatment: The Avengers began appearing in various paperback imprints, beginning with a Consul books edition tied in to the Cathy Gale episodes, and running through to the end of the Linda Thorson era (by which time the paperback series had been transferred to the USA and were available as imports with their distinctive yellow-edged pages). Danger Man spawned a series of pulpy novels, from writers like Peter Leslie, who would also go on to provide some of the British Man from UNCLE series (of which more in a later blog), while Gideon’s Way, deriving from original literary sources (John Creasey writing as J.J. Marrick) received some low-key tie-in covers where the only element from the TV series was a very small inset photo of John Gregson in the title role. Surprisingly, the television series with the strongest literary pedigree of this era – The Saint – spawned only a couple of editions tied-in specifically to the televised episodes (although the series was promoted on the rear covers of the long-running Hodder paperbacks).

I was constantly surprised at some of the titles that I turned up during trawls of secondhand book shops: an original McGill (Man in a Suitcase) adventure, in the form of The Sleeping Cupid (from Daily Mirror books), and novels of The Champions and Strange Report from Hodder. The decidedly odd Champions novel (The Sixth Sense is Death) came from the pen of John Garforth, who also penned four Emma Peel-era Avengers books. The latter, despite some decent efforts at replicating the voices of the characters, included some highly wayward episodes such as a whole sequence in which Steed appears in the nude – unthinkable on television.

A selection of Armada's Gerry Anderson tie-ins. (I've got all the others before you try to sell me your spare copies).

As a child, visiting our local branch of WH Smiths, I was somewhat surprised to notice Captain Scarlet paperback books on sale. I ignored these on the innate assumption that all paperback books were intended for grown-ups, but a year later was given, as a birthday present, Joe 90 and the Raiders, an Armada Paperback novel by TV21 hack Todd Sullivan. Armada had, in fact, been issuing paperback tie-ins since the days of Stingray, many of them from the pen of ‘John Theydon’ (John Jennision) whose storylines usually featured a claustrophic sequence in a tunnel or volcano or both. I acquired them all from market stalls and second hand bookshops during the 1970s, although multiple purchases were a necessity, since Armada’s sub-standard bindings caused the books to shed their pages like autumn leaves.

It is a somewhat shaming omission that, for a good many years, TV tie-in paperbacks accounted for the entirity of my reading that wasn’t demanded by school. Even books like The Colditz Story only found their way into my hands as a result of watching the BBC series and were, naturally, specially-reprinted tie-in editions. My diaries from the 1970s catalogue an endless run of fictionalised television, interspersed with Bonds and Alastair Maclean. I don’t think I read a single ‘proper’ novel for pleasure until Evelyn Waugh’s Decline and Fall some time around 1977.

As a collector, I’ve held onto these old paperback editions, and taken as a whole they provide a pretty good instant reference as to what was hot and what was not on television in the 1960s and 70s. There are some interesting omissions: Randall and Hopkirk (Deceased) never made it into print, and neither did Department S, although paperback writer Jason King did eventually make it into print as part of a deal between ATV/ ITC and Pan books.

Of this mixed bag, the most interesting are probably Penguin’s Quatermass paperbacks, presenting scripts in book form, and the most obscure item is probably Strange Report. There are still dozens on my shelves that I’ve never read, and probably never will (life’s too short, etc), but reading them was only ever half the fun to a collector. In some cases, it was none of the fun at all...

Nostalgia – it wasn't what it is

The almost mythical Top Cat book, from a recent ebay listing.

Sometime around 1974, I started collecting books. Not proper books, mind. The books I was interested in all owed their existence to various television series and films stretching back over the last decade or so, and I was soon surprised to discover how many TV programmes had spawned their own literary spin-offs (I use the word ‘literary’ in its broadest possible sense).

I’d been given annuals as christmas presents since the age of two: the Daily Mirror ‘Baby’s Own’ being the first of these, with a printing date of 1962. This was a simple picture book and ABC, but more sophisticated fare was just around the corner. At Christmas 1963, I was given the first Fireball XL5 Annual, and despite the fact that I could do no more than look at the pictures, this quickly became a favourite. It lost its covers and many pages over the next couple of years – I have an idea I may have wanted to read it in the bath – but even in its ruinous condition, I hung onto it.

About four years later – a lifetime, at that age – I experienced a Proustian rush of nostaglia at the sight of a clean, complete copy on the bookstall at a school jumble sale. My mum, for perverse reasons, would not countenance allowing a secondhand book in the house, and I can still remember how I felt watching someone else waltz off with it. I can even remember his name: now there’s a childhood trauma you don’t often hear about.

Around the same time, I was also seeking a replacement for another book from early childhood: one of the Golden Books series from the USA, handsomely-illustrated small softback reprints, many of which featured characters licensed from Hanna-Barbera and Warner Bros. The book in question was Top Cat, and like Fireball XL5, had lost its covers. When I saw someone at school with a complete copy, it set me off on a quest to find one. By this stage, although other ‘Little Golden Books’ were still available, their Top Cat editon had gone out of print. In one of my earliest school work books, from around the end of 1966, the story was spelled out in simple, laconic childhood language (in response to a request to write about what we’d done at the weekend): ‘We went to get a Top Cat book, but they hadn’t got one.’

Fast forward (slightly) to circa 1971. I had literally no idea where I might look for a replacement Fireball XL5 Annual. Frustratingly, all three of the subsequent editions were still relatively intact, making the spineless number one look decidedly out of place on the shelf. The only secondhand book store that I was aware of looked fearsomely fuddy duddy and academic, and no one had the nerve to enquire within. A Shakespeare folio or Dr. Johnson, maybe, but a kiddie’s annual from a couple of years ago. You wouldn’t ask, would you?

Then, via a school friend, my brother managed to borrow a copy. Borrow, mark you – the owner wanted it back. Nevertheless, I had access to a complete copy and so, insanely, I set out on the ludicrous task of ‘faking’ the missing cover and pages – something I had already attempted to do from memory. This work, which one might liken to a juvenile, felt-tip pen version of monastic illumination, dragged on into 1972, when – my first attempts being deemed unsatisfactory (by myself, always my own severest critic) – I was doing it all over again, as evidenced by my diary entry for Sunday, April 23 of that year: ‘Continue re-faking Fireball XL5 Annual. Finish front cover and inside cover…’

On the basis of this, I contend that not only did I invent pop culture nostalgia, I also invented the concept of remastering and restoring time-worn artefacts... probably.

It wasn’t until nearly ten years later that I finally acquired my own copy of this ‘literary’ holy grail. As for Top Cat, the hunt having drawn a blank, I forgot all about it until one day, about twelve years ago, when an ebay search located a complete copy in America. It wasn’t exactly the same as the copy I’d had, which was a softback reprint in the ‘Happy Time’ series, but it was the long-lost Top Cat book, and closure at last to a quest that started way back in 1966.