'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...

The Final Front Ear… Star Trek, part 3

That famous (and award-winning) Heineken poster...

It’s almost impossible to imagine a time before Star Trek had become a fixture in the popular imagination. To describe it as ‘iconic’ doesn’t even begin to approach the extent to which the franchise has become embedded in popular culture. It’s tempting to speculate that its influence may well endure until the 23^rd century in which the original series was set. If so, and assuming humanity has developed interstellar space flight by that time, what’s the betting on there being a real-life, functional starship Enterprise?

Growing up with the series (I was eight years old when it debuted here in Britain), I was able to see how it quickly became absorbed into other aspects of cultural life: by this I don’t just mean comics, books and memorabilia, but other TV programmes. Star Trek spoofs were beginning to appear by the early to mid 1970s (The Two Ronnies were amongst the comedians who offered their own take on the series) and by this time, jargon such as ‘Captain’s log’ ‘energise’ and ‘dilithium crystals’ were becoming familiar enough to lend themselves to comic sketch parody. The Goodies included references to Star Trek in a space-themed episode first shown in 1973, and there were many others as the decade wore on.

At school, we were already starting to form a slightly cynical attitude towards series tropes such as the expendable red-shirted security men. Of course, you needed a colour television to properly appreciate this, and we got our first in November 1974. The first episode I saw in colour was the above mentioned The Enemy Within, on 23^rd December of that year. Wow, Kirk’s tunic is green! The planet sky is orange! Cool! But I was already familiar with the look of Star Trek in colour from collecting the bubblegum cards a few years previously.

Much later, the comedy band ‘The Firm’ nailed many of the Star Trek tropes firmly on the head with their single ‘Star Trekkin’. But in the playground, years earlier, we’d already picked up on the likes of Scotty’s ‘I canna change the laws of physics’ (first uttered in The Naked Time, a mere seven episodes into the first series). And even McCoy’s growled ‘he’s dead Jim’ (spoken just four times across the series – although once would have been enough) was well-known long before the Firm enshrined it in song.

One of my favourite contemporary parodies came in the form of the Heineken poster at the top of this blog, which I remember appearing towards the end of the 1970s. Spock, of course, was ripe for parody (Ronnie Barker played him in the Two Ronnies skit), with the ears providing an endless source of comic inspiration. A playground joke of the era ran as follows:

Q: How many ears has Mr. Spock got?

A: Three: the left ear, the right ear, and the final front ear.

By the time a TV series is generating spoofs, jokes and Mad comic strips, you know it’s acquired the status of a cultural phenomenon.

One might usefully ask what it was about Star Trek that led to this spate of mickey-taking, and at such an early stage in the history of the franchise (indeed, long before it was ever thought of as a ‘franchise’). Popularity, of course, is the most obvious answer: by the mid-70’s, in the UK if not elsewhere, Star Trek and its iconography would have been familiar even to people who didn’t make a habit of watching the series. It’s through cross-cultural references like comic parodies that a TV series, film or comic book character begins the slow process of ‘bleeding through’ into the popular consciousness, and such activities certainly helped cement Star Trek as something of an ‘institution’. Star Trek offered many aspects of both imagery and language that were grist to the mill of the seasoned parodist: its signs, symbols and jargon were easily and effectively subverted to comic effect (‘Captain’s log – still not flushed away’) and its characters, embodied in the brilliant portrayals of William Shatner, Leonard Nimoy and DeForest Kelley, soon began to feel like universal archetypes.

Yet for all this, Star Trek may not be the phenomenon it is today were it not for the intervention of another milestone in popular culture: Star Wars. The original series had been defunct for eight years when Star Wars signalled the dawn of an new wave of interest in space opera, robots and science-fiction in general: a wave that has continued unabated into the present day.

Despite what we might think, there was no great appetitie for science fiction on film or television during the 1960s. The first wave of space movies had dawned in the 50s, spawning the likes of Forbidden Planet (an admitted influence on Star Trek), but by the mid-60s, spy fiction had become the dominant genre in popular cinema, and only a maverick like Stanley Kubrick would risk his reputation on a science-fiction subject. This was partly down to the costs involved in realising science fiction effects and settings on screen, but the film and television industry were, as ever, reactive rather than pro-active, for the most part following trends instead of setting them.

By the end of the 1960s, science-fiction had established a small but dedicated audience, which we can characterise as essentially male, white, middle class, middle income: the kind of people who would pay to see a movie like Silent Running, or Dark Star. These were the ‘hard core’ of the fanbase for a series like Star Trek. But where Star Trek differed – certainly in the UK – was in reaching out to a wider, popular audience, arguably on a level proportionately much greater than it had achieved in the USA. Not having that mainstream crossover appeal is probably what killed Star Trek at home (although it continued to thrive in syndication), whereas in Britain, the series was an almost permanent fixture on BBC1 right through to the late 1980s, guaranteeing a huge mass audience.

By contrast, ITV’s offerings in the sci-fi department – which effectively boiled down to anything from the Gerry Anderson stable – were hamstrung by haphazard, uncoordinated screenings region by region, denying the likes of UFO and Space:1999 the nationwide audience that Star Trek enjoyed.

It wasn’t until Star Wars that a mass audience of this kind turned once again to science fiction, this time on a global scale. And Star Trek, that had looked like a pioneer in its early days, was now reduced to playing follow-my-leader as one by one the major studios realised they needed to be bankrolling epic science-fiction films. As an already established phenomeon, Star Trek was ripe for resurrection: and so began the transition from mere cultural phenomenon to global franchise.

As Mr. Spock might say: fascinating...

'Next week, the return of Dr Who…' Early encounters with Star Trek, part 2

The Star Trek 'fotonovels' (see below). Why scan when you can download?

Star Trek was responsible for introducing me to Dr. Who, a series I’d avoided since its debut (I was too young for it in 1963, and scared stiff of the Daleks). But following the ‘last in the present series’ in the BBC’s first 25-episode run of Star Trek (The Gaileo Seven) on December 27^th 1969, there came a preview of what was coming up in that timeslot next week... a brand new series of Dr. Who... in colour (not that it made any difference to us with our black and white set)... and with a new Doctor in the shape of Jon Pertwee. I’d been dimly aware of Patrick Troughton, but never took any interest during his tenure. That trailer, though... well, I was sold.

But let’s get back to Star Trek. Unknown to myself, the BBC had taken a small creative liberty with their film prints by moving the opening credits to the beginning of each episode. This meant that the three or four-minute ‘teaser’ scene intended as a pre-credit sequence now cut straight through to the episode title. Why the BBC chose to do this remains unknown: pre-title sequences were familiar enough to UK viewers, and had been seen as far back as the first series of The Saint, if not earlier. Nevertheless, this is the way we saw Star Trek in the UK until the early 1990s. A favourite BBC trick during this era was to fade the BBC’s rotating world symbol into the star field that now appeared at the head of the programme. They never tired of doing this, as my extant VHS copies from 1984 attest.

Following the first run of episodes during autumn of 1969, Star Trek returned in April 1970 with a mix of leftover shows from season one, combined with the bulk of season two. I, of course, believed this selection to be the ‘actual’ second series of Star Trek, and it wasn’t until much later that I realised that The Enemy Within (13^th April, 1970) was one of the first episodes to be filmed. This edition was somewhat confusing in this respect, because as the series progressed, I came to recognise certain aspects of the production that set the later episodes apart from the earlier ones. The most obvious aspect was the presence (or absence) of Mr. Chekov. The second was the appearance of Captain Kirk’s ‘other’ tunic (which I later discovered to be green): this is the one with the V-cutout neckline, seen in a few first series episodes, but more often worn by Kirk during series 2. Its presence in The Enemy Within (as a device for distinguishing between the ‘good’ and ‘evil’ Kirks), along with that episode’s inclusion in the BBC’s second block, was the cause of my confusion...

One other intriuguing aspect of those first broadcasts that has stayed with me concerns the frames used to adorn the end titles. As time wore on, I began to notice images that were unfamiliar from the episodes I’d seen: one, in particular, of a futuristic city (from Operation Annihilate), and another of a typical Star Trek creation, a white furry gorilla with a horn. Alongside these were pictures which harked back to early episodes like The Naked Time or The Corbomite Manoever, which, as time wore on, didn’t seem to be repeated as much as others – or if they were, I chanced to miss them.

As it turned out, Operation Annihilate – despite being from the first series – wasn’t shown by the BBC until December 1970, and I probably didn’t watch it at that time because it clashed with UFO over on ITV. My first clear recollection of seeing that episode was as late as December 1975, when I recognised the story from one of the Star Trek novels...

Yes, the novels. Back then, novelisations were the only means of revisiting any TV programme outside of its appearances on screen. During the summer of 1971, a rather battered copy of Star Trek 3 found its way into our house, although I’d glimpsed the first novel on a carousel in our local newsagents some time earlier. I quickly devoured this, and in so doing discovered that one of my favourite episodes – the two-parter The Menagerie – had in fact derived from an early pilot for the series. This is now, of course, common knowledge, but back then the discovery came as something of a revelation. In fact, it was the first time I had come across the concept of the ‘pilot’ episode, which added a small but significant item to my understanding of television. The story in its novelised form abandoned the framing material from the two-part episode, and presented it as a piece of Enterprise history, raising the still more intriguing prospect of how the episode might have looked in its original state... in the event, it was almost twenty years before I found out.

During the early 70s, I acquired as many of the Star Trek novelisations as I could find. And finding them was no easy matter. Some larger branches of WH Smiths carried them, but beyond the fourth edition, interest appeared to wane, and I remember acquiring volumes five and upwards from specialist sci-fi bookshops. These were still imported editions, with their distinctive yellow-tinted edges (does anybody know why American paperbacks looked like that?) Later in the decade, an ‘official’ UK imprint series appeared, and these editions were much more widely available. But by this time, a more interesting series of books had begun to appear... the Star Trek 'fotonovels'.

In the pre-video era, those 'fotonovels' were the nearest thing to having your own copy of the episode. I bought every one as soon as it appeared, and was somewhat disappointed when the series came to an end after only twelve editions. The episodes selected for this treatment stemmed from across the series, and comprised some of the most memorable editions (The City on the Edge of Forever, The Devil in the Dark) alongside a couple of lesser entries. But by the time they appeared, I knew the best of the Star Trek episodes inside out...

Where's Captain Kurt? Early encounters with Star Trek

Star Trek celebrates its 50^th anniversary this year: indeed, Captain Kirk and Mr. Sulu beamed down to the NEC last weekend as part of a celebratory event (I wasn’t there). All well and good, if you live in the USA. But here in Britain, the Star Trek phenomenon is a mere 47 years young. The series was already cancelled and sold into an afterlife of syndication by the time it made its debut on BBC1 in the summer of 1969.

The first installment of Star Trek in the Joe 90 comic (image borrowed from the excellent 'Blimey…' blog by Lew Stringer… well, it saves me from doing an identical scan from my own copy!)

But I knew about Star Trek already. I’d known about it for seven months, in fact, and had been eagerly awaiting its arrival. My first encounter with the series was in comic strip form, as the impressive centrespread of the Joe 90 comic, launched in January 1969 as a companion paper to TV21. I was immediately intrigued, and, more than anything else, impressed by the design of the Enterprise, which was like no other fictional space vehicle I’d ever seen. But what exactly was Star Trek? Had it been made up for Joe 90 comic? Evidently not, as I noted from the copyright panel citing Paramount Pictures corporation. Star Trek was, seemingly, a TV series: so how come I’d never seen it? My dad offered the plausible suggestion that it might be running in one of the other ITV regions; but beyond that, Star Trek remained an engima.

(For more on the history of Joe 90 comic, see here: http://lewstringer.blogspot.co.uk/2015/05/joe-90-top-secret-1969.html

A few aspects of the strip provided further cause for intrigue, for the artist, Harry Lindfield, had been supplied with references of space suits and other hardware from 2001: A Space Odyssey. I recognised these items, having seen the film on release the previous year (I was seven when I saw it... more on that story later). Their presence served to reinforce the impression that Star Trek must be some kind of film or television series. Another oddity within the strip was the depiction of the Enterprise making planetfall, in the second installment. Although I knew nothing of the TV series, or the concept of the transporter, this image still struck me as decidedly odd: the Enterprise just didn’t look as if it had been designed to land on a planet. As it transpired, I was right. One error rapidly corrected was the misnaming of Kirk as Kurt in the first two episodes. Again, I noticed this and wondered why the name had been changed...

It was on a sunny Saturday afternoon in July of that year that the mystery was finally solved. I was playing outside in the back garden when our mum opened the kitchen window and called to me to come and see what was on television. I ran into the front room to be confronted with... Star Trek. The episode (Where No Man has Gone Before) was already under way, but I watched it through to the end (in fact, it would be almost ten years before I saw the first five minutes of this episode). I was hooked immediately, and didn’t miss a single episode right through to the end of this ‘first series’ in December (the BBC showed Star Trek in four seasons, often mixing episodes from across the three series – notably, during this first run, the second season episode The Doomsday Machine was shown as a last-minute replacement for The Alternative Factor and to this day it still ‘feels’ more like a first series episode to me).

Star Trek quickly became a favourite game to play in the back garden during the summer of ‘69: at the time, I owned a mustard yellow top that looked almost exactly like the early version of the jersey worn by Captain Kirk in the second pilot, so I usually took the role of Captain, with my brother playing Spock or McCoy or anybody he felt like. In fact, I looked a lot more like a junior edition of Spock, with Vulcan-style eyebrows and, before long, a Vulcan fringe. All I lacked was the ears. We even had our own phasers, in the form of two toy torch-rayguns, manufactured by Pifco (a company more famous for its hairdryers and Christmas tree lights). These guns had a red plastic tip on the barrel which, when unscrewed, left them looking uncannily like the ‘phaser 2’ weapons seen in the series. As if that wasn’t enough, we also had ‘phaser number one’ in the form of a small Ever Ready pocket torch which again, was of a very similar shape to the smaller hand phaser seen in episodes like What Are Little Girls Made Of?

The wrapper and a selection of the cards from the A&BC Star Trek bubblegum set (1970)

That particular episode was featured in one of the first items of Star Trek memorabilia that I encountered: a series of bubble gum cards, available during 1970-71, which told the story in frames clipped from a 35mm print. Although it’s far from being classic Star Trek (Spock barely gets a look in and McCoy, Scotty and Sulu are all absent) this was, for a while, the episode with which I was most familiar, simply on account of those gum cards.

As to the other Star Trek memorabilia, it was a long time coming. I recall seeing – or thinking I’d seen – an Enterprise model kit in the window of a toy shop close to our grandparents’ house. I’d glimpsed it from the car as we were driving past, but on visiting the shop the following week, it was nowhere to be found. It was some considerable time before the Enterprise kit arrived in the UK, and when it did, it was in a different sized box, adorned with a photograph of the kit, as opposed to the tall, rectangular box with its painted cover that I’d seen in the shop window. It wasn’t until many years later that I saw one of the original USA kits made by AMT and recognised it for the one I’d glimpsed fleetingly, several decades before. The enterprising owner of that toy shop (see what I did there?) had evidently acquired some early imports of the American kit, which unsurprisingly sold out very quickly.

Until the arrival of that kit here in the UK (at Christmas 1971, alongside a companion kit of Mr. Spock fighting a multi-headed snake), there was pretty well nothing to be had in the way of Star Trek merchandise. An annual appeared in time for Christmas 1970, from the reliable World Distributors imprint. In common with many of their licensed annuals, this and subsequent editions were compiled from the Gold Key comic strips that had been appearing in the USA for several years. But as to toy phasers, or communicators, or shuttlecraft: well, we had to make our own.

Compare that situation with what we have now: more merchandise than you can shake a Vulcan lirpa at, and most of it little more than generic corporate tat adorned with a logo. It would have been impossible to stage a memorabilia fair back in 1970, because that kind of memorabilia simply didn’t exist…

This Star Trek blog will continue after station identification...