Those Madeleine Moments… (part one)

This blog, if it is anything, is an attempt to nail down lost moments in time through recollections of artefacts, pop culture and ephemera, often of the most trivial and inconsequential kind. Proust had his Madeleine (essentially, a fairy cake – dipped in tea – which undoubtedly made it go horribly soggy) and we all have our own personal equivalents.

The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy included the story of a man (Trintragula) who managed to extrapolate the whole of creation from a small piece of fairy cake, thereby creating the ‘Total Perspective Vortex’, an experience in which an individual is made aware of his or her utter insignificance in the face of the whole of creation. Proust, with his own piece of fairy cake, was trying to extrapolate the whole of his lifetime’s memory and thereby ensure his everlasting significance in the great scheme of things: an antidote, if you like, to the ‘Total Perspective Vortex’ of oblivion which lurks at the back of our consciousness. I think we can conclude that he succeeded.

For me, that single metaphorical fairy cake is always rendered even more potent when taken in combination with some other related fragment from memory dating to the same moment in time. A good example of this concerns the spring of 1968. I can even recall what the weather was like (rather mild and sunny preceding a summer of horrendous thunderstorms). The ‘trigger’ for these memories, and one of my own personal ‘Madeleines’ is the music from the television series White Horses, which was shown on BBC1 on Monday evenings commencing on March 11^th, and running through to the beginning of June. Just to hear that music again is to be back in our living room, with the curtains closed against the late afternoon light. But there are other triggers from that same point in time which, when taken alongside that glorious single by Jackie, add up to an experience that’s as close to time travel as I'm ever going to get.

One such is Cilla Black’s single ‘Step Inside Love’, the opening theme to her BBC1 series Cilla, which was going out on Tuesday evenings at the same time as White Horses was playing out on Mondays. The single entered the charts on March 18^th, enjoying a nine-week run, so it was pretty well impossible to escape from it at the time, and it duly became embedded in the wet cement of memory...

Ron Embleton's painting that formed a jigsaw from the backs of the Captain Scarlet bubblegum cards.
Captain Scarlet might conceivably have been doing something more exciting than holding a piece of paper, but in fairness, Embleton had already provided sufficient action for the indestructible man in his end title paintings.

That’s two ‘Madeleine moments’. Let’s go for three: Captain Scarlet bubblegum cards. Issued by Anglo confectionery Ltd, and featuring the artwork of the Embleton brothers, Ron and Gerry (Gerry’s drawings adorned the fronts while Ron’s huge painting formed a jigsaw on the backs), this series of cards was, during early 1968, available in waxy packets of bubblegum which, for some reason, we always obtained from the Tonibell ice cream van. The van tended to put in an appearance on our street early in the evening, so the associations begin to pull together: White Horses on the TV, ice cream van out in the street, packets of bubblegum (or even a ‘Tonibell Miniball’ – a hollow plastic sphere filled with ice cream that could later do service as a decidedly un-bouncy ball: I still have a couple somewhere).

The threatening sky in Embleton's painting, with its sunset shading into stormy darkness, is also potently evocative of the time, for reasons which will become apparent below.

All these items remained in my memory down the years, and, taken together have always been able to conjur up a certain feeling that seemed to be in the air at that time. It rolls on into memories of the brilliantly sunny early summer (Manfred Mann’s ‘My Name is Jack’ in the charts) and then a hideous thundery breakdown which saw one particular afternoon plunged into a grim twilight. This 1968 weather event can actually be found referenced online, as it was notably apocalyptic in some parts of the UK. (The same thing also happened in parts of the country yesterday.)

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When trawling back through memories such as these, I've found the BBC’s Genome website an invaluable source of reference: an online version of the Radio Times going back to the very beginning. Although occasionally unreliable (rescheduled programmes are never included), this can prove a potent source of ‘add-on’ memories: and a glance through the weeks mentioned above revealed a programme that I’d all but forgotten. Entitled Whoosh! and starring Play School’s Rick Jones (author of, amongst others, the memorable themes from The Aeronauts and The Flipside of Dominick Hide), this was a minimalist entertainment for youngsters, broadcast at the (for the time) unusual hour of 12.25 on Saturday lunchtimes. The sheer novelty value of there being anything on television at this hour enticed me to watch, although I have to say I found the programme itself not entirely to my taste: if memory serves, the content was rather like watching three enthusiastic student teachers having fun with a dressing-up box and a few props. Play School, in effect, for a slightly older crop of viewers. Not that I’d want to diss the immensely talented Rick Jones, an amiable presenter and a sadly neglected songwriter. I can still remember a folky ballad he performed on an edition of Play School around 1970 (I was far too old for it, but it was the school holidays) although I haven’t heard it from that day to this.

Whoosh! might never have come to mind again, had I not gone trawling through the Genome listings. In my memory, that Saturday lunchtime slot belonged to another experimental outing, Zokko! from November of the same year. This time, the twenty-minute programme adopted a ‘portmanteau’ format, with a robotic pinball machine serving as the link between odd film clips (such as a rider’s-eye view of a rollercoaster ride) and a space serial, ‘Skayn’, presented rostrum-camera style in the manner of Blue Peter’s stories and serials such as Bleep and Booster.

See where a small piece of fairy cake will get you!