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…