No Ride Into the Sunset... Sitcoms and Sentimentality

From The Likely Lads to Detectorists... what makes a good sitcom

I recently, and accidentally, found myself watching an episode of Only Fools and Horses, a series I’ve had no time for these past twenty-odd years. Although I watched it regularly across its first few seasons, and would be the first to acknowledge that there was some great comedy amongst those early episodes, I eventually went cold on it. The episode I chanced upon was 1990’s ‘Christmas Special’ – which is to say that it was broadcast on Christmas Day, but contained no actual festive content as far as I could see. I only stuck it for twenty minutes or so, which was more than enough time to remind me why I’d given up on Del, Rodders and co. all those years ago. Part of the problem was, for a sitcom, fairly fundamental. It wasn’t really that funny. Most of what I saw revolved around the disintegrating domestic relationship of Rodney and his girlfriend, Cassandra, scenes which wouldn’t have felt out of place in, say Coronation Street (although I’d venture to suggest that there would have been more laughs in Corrie).

Only Fools and Horses is still cited as one of Britain’s most beloved sitcoms, and who am I to disagree? Well, bear with me. By 1990, the series had been on air for nine years, and would still be hanging around, quite literally like the ghost of Christmas past, until 2003. The dynamic between the characters – principally Del and Rodney – was well established, and even the replacement of the original Grandad with the cockney stereotype Uncle Albert hadn’t affected the series’ popularity, which continued to grow and grow. Then, in the late 1980s, writer John Sullivan decided to stir things up by introducing an element that had been more or less absent from the series until this point: love interest for both Del and Rodney. There’s nothing wrong with that as an idea. The problem lay in its execution, and here I’m going to refer to another example of the same thing, in the form of The Likely Lads; an illustration of how to mess with the formula and actually make it better.

In its original incarnation, The Likely Lads contained no ongoing love interest for Bob and Terry, which was exactly how it should be. It did, however, contain a network of supporting characters, reinforcing the idea that our heroes were real people, grounded in the kind of everyday lifestyle that would be familiar to viewers. Some of these supporting characters returned when the series was revived in 1973 as Whatever Happened to the Likely Lads. But there was now a much more important component in the format, a character that turned the series from a two-hander into, effectively, a comedy trio. That character was, of course, Thelma, Bob’s fiancée in the first series, and his wife in the second. It would have been very easy for writers Dick Clement and Ian La Frenais to have fallen back on clichés about the pitfalls of married life, and portrayed Thelma as a standard, shrewish ‘nagging wife’; but they were better than that. As indeed was the actress chosen to play Thelma, Brigit Forsyth. Thelma, in fact, was the pivotal character in Whatever Happened to the Likely Lads, as across the two series, Bob found himself torn between his loyalties to her and Terry. Many stories hinge on the tensions created by Bob trying not to upset either of the two most important people in his life, and the writers don’t let him off lightly. Over the course of twenty-seven episodes, Bob endures many personal indignities and even physical injury, all of them directly attritbutable to his divided loyalties. This may sound obvious, but it was very carefully worked out by Clement and La Frenais, whose scripts allowed situations to develop naturally before collapsing into disastrous consequences. Barely married for a few months, Bob and Thelma split up, and the domestic roles were suddenly reversed, with Terry moving in to support his mate in a time of crisis. Throughout all this, the acting was of such a high standard that the blend of drama and comedy never felt forced, nor did the scripts descend at any time into sentimentality.

Sentimentality, on the other hand, was at the root of what I felt to be the problem with Only Fools and Horses, and it was the principal reason why I stopped watching, or indeed caring about what happened to the characters. Writer John Sullivan fell into the looming trap of becoming too close to his creations, and once that happened, his scripts became increasingly dominated by sentimentality. This doesn’t just mean letting your characters off the hook: conversely, it tends just as much towards the opposite pole, and a writer too in love with his creations will often place them in heart-wrenching situations, simply to enjoy the exhilerating release of stepping in as their saviour. Of course, it works for viewers, but it’s a form of simplistic emotional manipulation that the greatest writers recognise and avoid. It’s this kind of writing that has spoiled the latter day Dr. Who, and it can be seen clearly in the Only Fools and Horses episodes post-dating the introduction of Del and Rodney’s love interests.

Dennis Potter spoke of it happening to him during the writing of his serial Pennies From Heaven, and brilliant though the series was, this aspect of the writing is quite obvious on screen – lead character Arthur Parker (Bob Hoskins) may end up being hanged, but he still gets to come back for one last song-and-dance sequence.

The difference with Clement and La Frenais’s scripts was that, although Bob and Terry were characters whom they knew and understood in intimate detail, they always maintained a kind of writer’s objectivity, a detachment that allowed them to put their creations through the wringer, without necessarily offering any hope of resolution. If you want an example of that, consider the ending of the Likely Lads feature film script, which has Bob stranded on a merchant ship bound for Bahrain. We, the viewers, know instinctively that the status quo will eventually be restored, but the resolution is never offered on screen. The same formula was used successfully throughout Whatever Happened to... and can also be seen at play in Clement and La Frenais’ writing for Porridge. Bob and Thelma’s marriage is continually subjected to stress and trauma, but the reconciliation is rarely depicted. A sentimentalist would have wallowed in the making-up, but Clement and La Frenais never waver.

Compare this with Only Fools and Horses, where the ‘girlfriends’ simply served as a distraction for the main characters, a simple focus for love interest, rather than key plot movers in the manner of Thelma. When Rodney and Cassandra split up, it all feels forced, a mere excuse to justify the inevitable sentimental resolution, and this, regrettably, became more and more the norm for the series, with epiphanies awaiting our heroes at the end of each interminable Christmas special. Del finally becomes a father... then ends up a millionaire thanks to the auction of a valuable antique. This is, in effect, a ride into the sunset, something that Bob, Thelma and Terry were never allowed, and a cliché that the greatest comedy writers, from Stan Laurel onwards, have studiously avoided.

Whatever Happened to the Likely Lads was, in fact, very much akin to a soap opera, with its storylines developing across multiple episodes, and its characters frequently found themselves in the kind of situations that have been well explored in the soap genre. The difference is that Clement and La Frenais, with their detached relationship to Bob and Terry, were able to inject some very sharp humour into their scripts. There’s not much comic potential in watching two characters enjoy the fruits of a successful marriage, but place it under the kind of strain that Bob and Thelma’s is subjected to, and the humour comes thick and fast. Such is the way of human nature. No contrivance was necessary; with Whatever Happened to the Likely Lads, Clement and La Frenais created a potent cocktail of characters and situation that continues to impress over forty years later.

It’s a formula that, more recently, has paid dividends for the writers of Channel 4’s Peep Show, a series where it was quite clear from the outset that there would be no sentimental relationship between the creators and their characters. A similar dynamic can be found in BBC4’s Detectorists: two close friends whose lives are subject to the tensions created by their relationships with other, mostly female characters. It’s hard to tell if writer/ director McKenzie Crook has fallen into the sentimentality trap, and his scripts tread a fine line at times, contrasting the harsh treatment regulatly meted out to the protagonists of Peep Show, and continued in the recent and excellent Mitchell/Webb vehicle Back.

These three series all share something of their comic DNA with Whatever Happened to the Likely Lads, but unfortunately, writing of this quality has become the exception rather than the rule. The cloying sentimentality that scuppered Only Fools and Horses is very much alive and well and embodied in just about every sitcom commissioned by BBC1, notably the execrable Mrs. Brown’s Boys, which doubtless appeals to all those who once delighted in the antics of Del Boy and Rodney.

Myself, I’m sticking with those old Likely Lads episodes. There won’t be any better comedy writing on British television, and today’s best examples owe much, if not everything, to the work of Clement and La Frenais.

Whatever Happened to the Likely Lad?

'Boom Boom!' Mr. Rodney with Basil Brush, 1968

We’re a Likely Lad less than we were yesterday, with the very sad news of the passing of Rodney Bewes, best known for his role as Robert Scarborough Ferris in the classic sitcom. But it was in his capacity as sidekick to Basil Brush that I first became aware of him, and for me he will always be ‘Mr. Rodney.’ I can even give the exact date when I first saw him on television... it was Friday 14^th June, 1968, and the musical guests on that first ever Basil Brush Show were Manfred Mann, miming their current chart hit, My Name is Jack.

It was Basil Brush’s first solo series, having been promoted from his former roles as, originally, one of the ‘Three Scampies’ and, latterly, assistant to TV magician David Nixon. In his capacity as mentor to the irrepressible fox, Rodney Bewes established a formula that would endure for the next twelve years, as further ‘Misters’ stepped into the role, beginning with Derek Fowlds in 1969. Strangely, my memory is of Rodney Bewes’ tenure on the show lasting much longer, but in fact he was there for just twelve weeks over the summer of 1968, during which another enduring aspect of the show was established: the episodic story, usually of a swashbuckling character, entertainingly interrupted by Basil’s interjections, bags of sweeties and, much later, a battery operated yapping dog called ‘Little Ticker.’ During this first season, the story concerned the wild west adventures of outlaw Des P. Rado of Cripple Creek (later tales usually involved a hero named Basil). Basil, in typical fashion, misheard ‘Cripple Creek’ as Chiswell Green (or possibly Kensall Green), leading to some typical byplay with Mr. Rodney.

It’s a shame that Mr. Rodney’s tenure on the show was so brief, as there was a genuine rapport between him and his foxy co-star, and he proved to be a jovial host, displaying his versatility as a bit of a song and dance man by joining in singalongs with various musical guests. Although Derek Fowlds proved to be an excellent replacement, I still retained fond memories of the classic ‘Mr. Rodney’ era of the show (not a single episode of which, sadly, survives).

As to Mr. Rodney himself, it wasn’t long before he turned up again on the small screen, in a series which became a personal favourite of mine at the time, Dear Mother, Love Albert. Bewes not only starred in the series, but was its creator and producer, his star being decidedly in the ascendent by this time. The format had been inspired by his friend Tom Courtenay, whose surname was appropriated for the titular Albert. Courtenay’s letters from his mother (later published) provided the premise for the series, which saw Bewes’ northern character writing home from his London bedsit, and embellishing his somewhat mundane lifestyle in his correspondence. The first series, produced for Thames Television, is believed lost, but series 2-4 saw a move to Yorkshire Television, and all of these episodes survive. Watching them now, it’s easy to see similarities between the persona of Bewes’ Albert character, and that of Bob Ferris, whom he had already played for three series over on BBC television. The similarities even extend to the area of wardrobe, with Albert favouring the same kind of dark blue, three-piece suits that Bob Ferris would later be seen wearing in Whatever Happened to the Likely Lads. Bob, however, was to become a far more nuanced and complex comic creation than Albert, who was more of a good-natured fall guy, forever getting into scrapes with girlfriends, landladies and his boss, Strain (an early role for future Sweeney guvnor Garfield Morgan).

I’d never seen the original Likely Lads series, which had come to an end in 1966, but in the first week of 1973, the BBC’s New Year programme line-up included a brand new series, Whatever Happened to the Likely Lads. Our mum, who remembered the original, encouraged me and my brother to watch, and seeing Rodney Bewes again was like encountering an old friend, as indeed happens to Bob and Terry in that introductory episode, Strangers on a Train. Over the coming weeks, the series became a favourite, and I began to find myself identifiying quite strongly with the character of Bob. His middle-class aspirations – marriage, a good job, a nice house – all seemed entirely admirable to me at the age of eleven going on twelve. I didn’t realise at the time that writers Dick Clement and Ian La Frenais were actually poking fun at the shallowness of Bob and those who shared his values. But what was the alternative? To be an idler like Terry Collier? This was the dilemma facing millions of people in 1970s Britain: you either bought into the system and became smothered by its narrow, middle-England values; or you dropped out and risked being marginalised like Terry, whose workshy, cynical attitude to life typified the era’s armchair lefties – strong on opinion, but lacking the commitment and drive to actually get up and do anything.

Social comment aside, Whatever Happened to the Likely Lads was brilliantly written; some of its best moments are still laugh-out-loud funny over forty years later. Yet it lasted for just two series and a solitary Christmas special, a total of twenty seven episodes (plus a further nineteen of the original series). The decision to end the the series seems to have come from Clement and La Frenais who felt at the time that there was nowhere else to go with the Bob and Terry relationship, and instead developed a new comedy vehicle for Ronnie Barker in the form of Porridge.

But it wasn’t quite the end. Three years after the last Whatever Happened to... episode, the lads returned for a final outing, this time on the big screen. Feature film spin-offs from successful TV series had been reasonably successful in the early ’70s, and The Likely Lads (1977) was a relatively late entry in the genre. Without a doubt, it is the best of all such efforts, with comic sequences that rival the best moments of the TV series, and a melancholic atmosphere recalling the neo-realism of early sixties movies in which both Bolam and Bewes had appeared.

With the sole exception of a boarding house episode that was reycled from an early Likely Lads script, the movie was all new material; indeed, there was easily more than enough potential in that one script to have developed a third series for television. The lads’ lives are changing... Bob is beginning to question the ‘full and exciting life’ that he supposedly enjoys with Thelma, while Terry, with the run of his parents’ high rise flat and a new, Finnish girlfriend, is living a bachelor lifestyle of ‘sport, slippers and sex’ that is the envy of Bob. An attempt to combine the two comes drastically apart when the lads decide to sneak home early from a caravan weekend in the country, brazenly picking up two girl hitchhikers despite having Thelma and Terry’s girlfriend literally in tow. As Bob’s lifestyle flies to pieces, his shiny red Vauxhall Chevette becomes a visual metaphor for the damage being wrought, as it slowly succumbs to accidents and incidents of vandalism. The last we see of our heroes is Terry, with suitcases in hand, having had a change of heart about a planned career aboard a merchant ship, while Bob finds himself literally cast adrift as the merchantman steams away, next stop Bahrain.

It wasn’t just Bob Ferris who was cast adrift. The movie was, sadly, one of the last high profile appearances for Rodney Bewes who, after more than a decade in the television spotlight, now retreated to a primarily stage career, often touring in one-man shows (Wikipedia claims he presented a version of Rollerball which seems exceedingly hard to swallow – much more in character was his solo stage version of Three Men in a Boat).

Bewes reportedly enjoyed a friendly relationship with his co-star James Bolam, until the pair fell out, seemingly over an indiscreet remark made by Bewes regarding Bolam’s girlfriend, the actress Susan Jamieson, who had fallen pregnant. Bolam, an intensely private man, was angry that Bewes had spoken about it in public, and following an acrimonous phone call, the pair never spoke again.

What’s less easy to understand is why Bewes was seen so little in TV and film from the late ’70s onwards. It’s hard to imagine this situation being of his choosing: in later years, he lamented the lack of TV repeats of The Likely Lads, citing James Bolam’s refusal to give consent, and making it quite clear that he could have used the fees from such reruns. A few years ago, I read Bewes’ autobiography, A Likely Story, wondering if it might provide any clues as to why he became sidelined from two very important branches of the acting profession. Had he somehow made himself difficult to work with? Nothing obvious came to light, other than a tendency to drop famous names rather more often than necessary; that plus the sense that, like many other celebrities, he gave the impression of living in his own personal microcosm, a ‘Rodney Beweniverse’ if you will. But in a profession where the individual becomes a product to be sold, this is very much par for the course, and I can’t bring myself to believe that Bewes had an ego big enough to deter his peers from wanting to work alongside him.

Seven years ago, I produced a demo of a song in tribute to Rodney Bewes. Despite its slightly humorous slant, it was meant sincerely, and was a reflection of the time, in the 1970s, in which I genuinely wanted to grow up to be Rodney Bewes, or rather, one of the types he portrayed on film and television. In some ways, perhaps I have... Although I never met him, I later became aware that Bewes had heard the song, and referred to it in at least one interview. I’d like to think he found it flattering.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b8RB8IiGyM8 

As Bob Ferris, he may have had his ups and downs in fictional married life, and as Rodney Bewes, his career trajectory may not have worked out quite the way he might have hoped for: but to be remembered for even one role on TV, and in a series as iconic and fondly-remembered as The Likely Lads is an achievement of which he should have been rightly proud. And he had been a young, succesful actor during the most exciting, creative and dynamic decade in the history of humankind.

Let’s face it: who wouldn’t want to have been Rodney Bewes?

Pilot of the Future... Product of the Past

To anyone remotely interested in British comic history, Dan Dare is an iconic figure, whose reputation has long since transcended the relatively narrow fraternity of comic collectors. It may come as some surprise then, when I report that, during the 1960s, I remained in blissful ignorance of his existence.

Dare had made his comic debut some eleven years before I was born, and by the time I was of an age to take an interest in more sophisticated comics, Eagle was drawing its final breath. 1969 saw it absorbed into old rival Lion, and the years immediately preceding the takeover had been a story of gradually diminishing quality. Dare himself, a front page feature for the whole of the 1950s, had eventually been relegated to the inside pages, and by the mid-60s new adventures were set aside in favour of reprints. This isn’t to say that there wasn’t anything of merit in the post-50s Eagle: indeed, the Dare strip had enjoyed a temporary reprieve around 1964, returning to the front cover, in colour, under the capable stewardship of Keith Watson, who had formerly served as an assistant to Dare’s creator, Frank Hampson. I, however, saw none of this, save for odd glimpses of back numbers that formed part of the comics stash kept in our school classroom to be broken out on rainy lunchtimes. Such occasions were less frequent than one might imagine, and I was fully occupied chasing up old copies of TV21 or following the exploits of The Cloak in vintage copies of Pow! I literally had no time to find out what those Eagle comics were all about.

By the early ’70s, I’m fairly sure I knew of the existence of a character called Dan Dare, but beyond that basic information, I was still very much in the dark. I’d seen Dare-branded toys on sale in a few shops, including a cool-looking torch raygun that produced a range of differently-hued beams of light; and I’d been afforded a passing glimpse of a 1960s Eagle cover in the first cinematic outing for Doctor Who, where Peter Cushing as the titular character was seen engrossed in a copy.

The first real step in my discovery of Dan and his chums came in the form of a parody. By the early ’60s, all rights in the Dan Dare character had passed into the hands of Odhams Press, who in 1964 launched a distinctive new humour comic in the form of Wham! Masterminded by Bash Street Kids creator Leo Baxendale, Wham! saw Odhams take on the tried and tested DC Thompson comics formula and bring it up to date. The inhabitants of Wham! had a slightly sassier, more contemporary edge than their Beano or Dandy counterparts, and even included a pair of pop-fans, The Wackers, whose exploits revolved around efforts to collect their idols’ autographs or sneak into gigs without paying. Another comic character in the Wham! lineup took advantage of Odham’s ownership of the Dan Dare copyright, in the form of Danny Dare, whose adventures came with the tag-line: ‘he’s Dan Dare’s number one fan.’ Danny, a junior Dare wannabe, complete with lantern jaw and ’50s hairstyle, imagined himself as his hero, with his winged go-cart standing in for Dan’s iconic ship, Anastasia; his mundane exploits in the here-and-now were transformed into futuristic reimaginings via thought bubbles interspersed between the normal comic frames. The strip was thus a curious mixture of styles, with Danny rendered in the standard Leo Baxendale manner (although not, seemingly, by Baxendale himself), whilst his imaginary adventures were drawn in a style approximating that of the contemporary Dare strip, which by this time had passed into the hands of Keith Watson.

From the 1966 Wham! Annual: Danny Dare. (Xel was the current villain in the real Dare strip at the time of publication)

I first came across this strip in a battered old copy of the first Wham! annual that had been passed on to me by a cousin. The Danny Dare strips probably weren’t the best thing in it (that honour falling instead to Eagle Eye, Junior Spy), but they intrigued me with their blend of comic and serious artwork, and in the ersatz Dan Dare panels, I felt I recognised something of the style of another artist whose work I had admired for some time. Although he had no input into the Wham! parody, the drawings had put me in mind of the work of Eric L. Eden, who had provided illustrations for some of WM Collins and Son’s Fireball XL5 annuals. I didn’t realise it at the time, but I’d accidentally made a connection that was entirely relevant: Eden had worked on the Dare strips as a studio assistant since Eagle’s beginnings, and his style had evolved from his close association with Frank Hampson.

Having discovered his comic alter ego, I would have welcomed any information or insights into the ‘real’ Dan Dare, but in the absence of Eagle or access to back numbers, I simply had to bide my time. The chance finally arrived at christmas 1973 with the publication of a Dan Dare Annual, again from the Odhams group. There had been a couple of Dan Dare annuals in the late ’50s and early ’60s, but none of them had registered on my personal comics radar. The 1973 publication was, in fact, comprised of reprinted material from the 1950s: the first half was made up of 1951-52’s The Red Moon Mystery, while the second consisted of 1959’s Safari in Space. One look at this annual was all I needed. The Danny Dare strip had dropped the vaguest of hints about the genuine Dare artwork, but nothing could have prepared me for my first encounter with the undisputed genius of Frank Hampson. In his pages, I recognised many of the techniques that had drawn me to the work of his assistant, Eden: the cross-hatching, the elaborate back-lighting, the tonal modelling on faces... but this was work of an altogether higher order. While Eden had achieved a form of stylised realism, some of Hampson’s panels might almost have been photographs outlined with a mapping pen. I still believe that it is the best work ever produced for any comic, anywhere in the world, and that it will never be bettered.

Hampson’s artwork had, in fact, never been seen to such impressive effect, for the printing technique of the 1970s collection far surpassed the somewhat limited rotogravure of the early Eagle, which had the effect of ironing out all the subtleties in shading and tonality. The annual had been put together from original artwork boards which, having been chopped up to remove the space left by Eagle’s red masthead, were newly photographed for four-colour offset lithographic reproduction. This may seem like vandalism, but at the time of its production, the Dare artworks would have been viewed by Odhams as nothing more than twenty-year-old assets ripe for exploitation, rather than artefacts for preservation. The two stories were somewhat shortened to fit the page count, but in so doing, the storytelling was considerably tightened, losing a few episodes where the narrative had trod water for a week or so. One such elision included an experimental page wherein Hampson, whether by intent or through fatigue, had lapsed into a loose, jagged technique that felt at odds with his customary detailed approach. A couple of pages in the annual had been redrawn, presumably in the absence of the original art boards, but otherwise this was full-on Frank Hampson.

The Red Moon Mystery must be one of the very best Dan Dare adventures. Its Earth/Mars setting gives it a realism that was set aside when Dare and co ventured into more exotic realms, and there are parts of the story that anticipate the later trend for disaster movies, with the British Isles battered by hurricanes as the rogue Red Moon approaches. The story also presents a very early example of Martian archaeology, with its backstory of Dan’s uncle Ivor investigating the ruins of an ancient civilization that had been wiped off the planet by a mysterious force known as ‘the Red Moon.’ This discovery provides the cue for the dramatic revelation that astronomers at Mount Palomar have discovered a rogue asteroid entering the solar system, to which they have coincidentally attached the selfsame appellation. The story builds and builds, finding time en route for a full-scale evacuation of Mars (portrayed here as a kind of ski resort in space), which culminates with a flotilla of little ships defying the gravitational pull of the rogue moon as they attempt to drag the orbiting space station away from its malign influence. It’s as good a piece of space opera sci-fi as has ever been realised in any medium.

Regrettably, the story begins to lose pace and focus towards the end. Hampson, succumbing to the first of many bouts of debilitating illness, took a forced leave of absence from the strip, leaving the concluding weeks in the hands of his studio team, whose work, whilst efficient, lacks the sparkle of their mentor in full flight. The ending, in fact, feels rushed, almost as if the team couldn’t wait to crack on with Dan’s next adventure, which a fully-recovered Hampson already had on the drawing board; but Marooned on Mercury would run for mere weeks before he was forced to relinquish control once again, and ended up a relatively drab and uninteresting affair.

Dan’s personal spaceship, the Anastasia, was already familiar to me from the two Danny Dare strips in the Wham! annual, and in the Red Moon Mystery it is employed to great effect, taking part in some of the story’s most dramatic episodes. In later years, ‘Annie’ would be absent altogether from some of Dan’s adventures, which seems a pity, given that it was such a neat, well-designed craft. To me, Anastasia was everything a spaceship should be: great looking, with a compact, yet detailed interior, an ideal setting for dramatic close-ups, and possessing a kind of cosy Englishness that recalled the interiors of wartime fighter-bombers.

If the artwork in the Red Moon Mystery impressed me, then Safari in Space was little short of stunning. In the seven years between the end of RMM and the beginning of Safari..., Hampson had honed his working methods to perfection, with a studio system that began with his own carefully-crafted page roughs, before moving on to posed photographs of the team in costume, or table-top models, that would serve as reference material for the final frames, ensuring that details such as shadows and folds in garments were rendered with absolute conviction. Of course, at the time of acquiring the Dan Dare Annual, I knew nothing of this, and blithely assumed that Hampson had done all the work himself, although there could be no question as to his genius. It wasn’t until the 1980s, with the publication of Alastair Crompton’s Dare/Hampson history, The Man Who Drew Tomorrow, that the full story was revealed to me. This volume, indispensible even in the wake of its supposedly upgraded edition, provides a salutory story and a stark warning for anyone contemplating comic art as a career path. Frank Hampson’s story was not a happy one: deprived of his copyright, cast into obscurity and forced to tout for entirely unsuitable commissions (his speculative pages for Modesty Blaise are a sad illustration that what looks good on one character doesn’t necessarily work for another).

Odhams’ 1973 annual may have been a cheaply-produced exploitation of a valued copyright character, but it started me on the road to Dare fandom. It’s not a journey I ever honestly completed, and although I have a modest pile of 1950s and 60s Eagles in the wardrobe, I’d draw the line at calling myself a full-on Dare fanatic. The merchandise, for instance, has never interested me, albeit its unavailability probably has a lot to do with this (Dare was, in fact, a very early example of the kind of character merchandising that would later attach itself to many film and television properties). Neither have I ever taken anything more than a passing interest in the many (one might argue too many) Dare revivals that have been talked about, argued over and occasionally put into production since the strip’s demise. 2000 AD’s attempt at a ‘punk’ reimagining of the character was Dan Dare in name only, and while there have been more faithful attempts to rekindle the magic of the glory years, none has ever come anywhere near equalling the sheer imaginative and creative power of the original. It’s a safe bet to say that there will never be any more Dan Dare artwork of the quality of those Hampson-era boards, and however diligently contemporary artists may work at likenesses and hardware, their efforts are constantly hampered by today’s reliance on digital colour. Whilst it is possible, with a great deal of time and effort, to achieve some stunning effects in the digital arena, it’s simply not possible to pass off such work as having been rendered in ink and gouache, and it’s those lovely organic textures of the original Dare that still shine through today, even from the muddiest, most faded old copy of Eagle.

Dan Dare was one of those creations who arrive at exactly the right time; in retrospect, the 1950s Eagle feels like a key component of the mood of post-war optimism, and the comic thrived in that environment, benefiting from improvements in reprographic technology, as demand pushed its circulation figures skywards. By the end of the decade, however, boys’ comics faced stiff competition from the mushrooming medium of television, and within ten years the golden age of Eagle would be little more than a fading memory. I regret not having been around to experience it at the time, but turning over the pages of those old and fragile editions is to take a step back into a more innocent world, where all things were possible, and the idea of Britain being the international base of an interplanetary space fleet still seemed eminently plausible...

Dan Dare may have been the pilot of the future, but for me at any rate, he is best appreciated as a product of the past.

Run for your lives, it's a synthesiser!

'Trying to connect you, caller.' An early Moog synthesiser, or telephone exchange...

Sometime in the summer of 1972, an unsual record appeared in the UK pop charts. Weirdly electronic, with an insistent, pulsing rhythm, it didn’t sound like anything else I’d ever heard before, certainly not in the form of a pop single. To the best of my knowledge, it was the first example of synthesiser-driven electronic pop to chart in the UK, and it was the forerunner of things to come.

Popcorn had, in fact, been around since 1969, when it first appeared on an album entitled Music to Moog By, recorded by one Gershon Kingsley. The better-known chart single version was recorded in 1972 by Stan Free, a member of Kingsley’s band, with his own outfit, Hot Butter. Thanks in no small part to its new sound, the single became a significant worldwide hit that same year. Although it sounded like a novelty record and was, in fact, a one-hit wonder, I had a sneaking suspicion that this might turn out to be the sound of the future.

Synthesisers had been making very slow inroads into the pop music field since the late ’60s, the revolutionary Moog (pronounced ‘mogue’ by those in the know) leading the field since its demonstration at the Monterey Pop Festival in 1967. Even the Beatles had used one, although its presence on Abbey Road was as texture rather than a prominent lead instrument. They weren’t the first either, having been pipped to the post by the Monkees (on their Pisces, Aquarius, Capricorn and Jones album), the Byrds, and Simon and Garfunkel. It has to be said that the Monkees’ use of the instrument was fairly chaotic and random, providing a kind of electronic aural scribble across their songs Daily Nightly and Star Collector; and Roger McGuinn had managed to lend it a doom-laden quality in his frankly fairly horrible offering Space Odyssey, a kind of science fiction sea-shanty, which had wisely been omitted from the original release of the Notorious Byrd Brothers album (finally making its appearance on a CD reissue).

At the time of Popcorn’s release, none of these efforts was known to me. As far as I was concerned, electronic pop began in 1972. But I had already heard electronic music elsewhere. Pre-dating the invention of the synth, Dr. Who’s distinctive theme was probably the best-known example of electronic music, owing its origin to the Heath-Robinsonesque aural experimentation of Delia Derbyshire and the BBC Radiophonic Workshop. Contrasting this innovative piece, Dr. Who’s early incidental music was pretty dreadful, as well as inconsistent, with some items sounding like the results of a troop of chimpanzees let loose with a load of kitchen utensils. By the 1970s, a more consistent approach had emerged, with Dudley Simpson’s synth cues becoming a recognisable part of the programme. The instrument may have been innovative, but Simpson’s incidental cues were for the most part quite conventional (the best item was probably the heavily vibrato’d three-note sting that usually accompanied each revelation of The Master).

Another early example of an electronic score accompanied Roberta Leigh’s Space Patrol, whose composer FC Judd was a maverick experimenter, pursuing similar lines to pop producer Joe Meek. In the case of Space Patrol’s soundtrack, it was hard to draw the line between which of the blips and warbles were intended as sound effects, and which were meant as music. In an effort to avoid music copyright issues, the series’ credits referred to this aural collage as ‘electronics’, and made no mention at all of music.

Elsewhere on television, Tomorrow’s World offered occasional demonstrations of synthesisers, and by the time of Popcorn’s appearance in the charts it was clear that, in the future, pop groups would move away from the guitar-heavy lineup that had dominated the scene for over a decade. But when the expected rush of Popcorn clones failed to materialise, I began to think it might all have been a nine-day wonder. Guitars remained the instrument of choice for the glam bands of the early ‘70s, and it took until the middle of the decade for another synth-driven hit to make a chart breakthrough. That single was Kraftwerk’s Autobahn.

Around the time of its release, Kraftwerk formed the subject of another piece on Tomorrow’s World, in which they spoke of such innovations as being able to play music using the lapels of their suits. I may have found favour with the band’s ascetic appearance, but I can’t say I was a fan of the sounds they were making. Nor, indeed, of any electronic music. Since my first exposure to the phenomenon, via the aforementioned TV series, I’d found the sound of synthesised music faintly repelling, for reasons I still can’t quite explain.

Both Dr. Who and Space Patrol were programmes that posessed a scary, other-worldly atmosphere, of which a significant component was the music: and this reaction may go some way to explain my later aversion to synth-pop; but it was Dudley Simpson’s efforts on Dr. Who that really turned me off. For some reason, I really disliked the reedy, resonant tones that Simpson coaxed out of his equipment, and part of me felt that, in a fundamental way, he was cheating. His music wasn’t a patch on that of Barry Gray, over in the Anderson camp, who not only wrote better themes, but scored them for a full orchestra, while Simpson was, seemingly, doing the whole lot himself on a single keyboard. By the age of eight or nine, I knew that I liked the sound of a full orchestra, with its wide palette of tone and colour, and had already discovered items like Holst’s The Planets suite (a clear influence on the work of Barry Gray). Next to that, a single, monophonic synth sounded as dramatic as someone humming through a comb-and-paper.

My opinion wasn’t altered by any of the coming tide of synth-driven pop music: in 1977, simultaneously on the chart, we had Space’s Magic Fly – a song I dislike as much today as when I first heard it – and Jean-Michel Jarre’s genre-defining Oxygene. By this time, I knew exactly what it was about the sound of the synthesiser that I didn’t like. It simply sounded too unreal. The ghostly tones of Oxygene sounded like the aural equivalent of an airbrush: nebulous and hard to define. Real music, even that of an electric guitar, came from the sound of air being moved around, and from the resonant properties of wood, metal and calfskin. Synth music was the sound of circuits being engaged, and it didn’t engage me at all. Prog-rock bands like ELP or Yes, who made heavy use of synthesisers definitely didn’t interest me, and their music seemed pompous, over-inflated, self-important.

Luckily, all this nonsense was about to be brought to a grinding halt by the intervention of punk. The back-to-basics ethos of punk saw a return to the traditional band line-up of guitar/bass/drums, and if a keyboard was employed anywhere, it would be in the form of some retro item like a Vox Continental organ. But you can’t keep a bad thing down, and by the end of the decade, the synth was starting to shake off its dodgy prog associations as bands like The Human League began to emerge.

Now the tide turned completely. During the early to mid ’80s, you couldn’t move for synth-pop, but I didn’t think much of any of its prime exponents, and I still didn't warm to the sound of the instrument (which, in its most recognisable form – such as Van Halen's Jump – was typically buzzy, bright and shouty, like a fake brass section). I still managed to buy my fair share of synth-pop singles, but it was hard to avoid doing so, with synths dominating the pop charts to such an extent. Meanwhile, guitar pop had migrated to the fringes of the music scene where it continued in semi-underground form as indie, with only occasional breakthrough acts like the Smiths serving to remind the wider pop-buying community that there were still guitar heroes out there if you knew where to look for them.

For me, the perfect marriage of synth and guitar pop came courtesy of the short-lived combo New Muzik, whose singles Living by Numbers and This World of Water managed to achieve an almost unique balance of acoustic and synthetic sounds: Tony Mansfield’s strummed 12-string guitar is as vital a component in the mix as the wash of synths adding colour and texture in the background; and the synth sounds were innovative and well-chosen. Somewhat later, The Blue Nile pulled off a similar feat, with their extensively synthetic compositions like Tinseltown in the Rain and A Walk Across the Rooftops managing to steer well clear of the usual synth-pop clichés. Even so, it took me the best part of ten years to discover them, such was my antipathy to anyone weilding a synth in anger.

By the 1980s, I owned and played musical instruments myself, but I wouldn’t give a synth house room. Neither would I contemplate using the synth’s cheating bedfellow, the sequencer, which was responsible for a lot of what passed for virtuoso playing on pop singles. Over one Christmas, I had the loan of a Yamaha DX7 synthesiser, a keyboard which included dozens of pre-set tones (the traditional synth required the user to create their own tones using a patch bay resembling a telephone exchange, through which various tone and waveform generators could be combined). It was certainly fun to mess around with, and many of the tones were instantly recognisable (virtually the entire backing track of Band Aid’s Do They Know It’s Christmas was generated on a DX7). But for the time being, I passed. In fact, it wasn’t until around ten years ago that I finally got round to purchasing a synth, at which time I discovered that the biggest problem with the devices is not how to use them, but how not to use them…

The average synth offers hundreds of tones and colours, ranging from the conventional (an electric piano or organ) to the utterly insane. The cheap Akai model I bought includes pre-sets that sound like they’ve been flown in from The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, alongside others that are straight emulations of Rick Wakeman and other well-known exponents. With so many sounds available, it’s easy to go mad. It’s also very, very hard to find exactly the right sound for a specific application, which is where the traditional, patch-bay synth wins out, allowing the user to start from scratch. One can easily spend hours ‘auditioning’ different sounds for a short piece in a recording. After owning a synth for a few months, I could more readily appreciate how a band like the Blue Nile were able to spend over a year recording an album and still not deem it fit to release…

I also began to realise how many records include synthesisers without them being in any way obvious. Sometimes, a low-level synth ‘bed’ forms a kind of aural glue that fills in the gaps in a recording in a manner that the listener can be completely unaware of. Take it away, and you’d notice. Synths are good at filling in missing mid-range frequencies that aren’t present in the very ‘toppy’ sounds of guitar and piano, and without them, many modern recordings would sound hollow and echoey, not unlike recordings from the 1960s (when the usual solution was to use compression and limiting to ‘push’ the sounds to their limits, reducing the amount of audible ‘space’ on a record).

It took a long while, but I came round to synths in the end... just don’t ever expect me to start a Kraftwerk tribute band.

Spectrum is… Fifty

He may be indestructible, but he can’t resist the march of time. Captain Scarlet turned fifty on Friday, 29 September, marking the anniversary of the first broadcast on ATV in the Midlands. Viewers in London will be celebrating today, having had their introduction to the series on Sunday, 1 October...

I can still remember where I first saw Captain Scarlet: it was in the pages of the Daily Sketch (later relaunched as The Sun), where a small, black and white photograph of the heroic Spectrum agent accompanied a piece about Gerry Anderson’s upcoming new production. This would have been in the spring or summer of 1967, well in advance of the series going to air. I remember noting that the Captain was wearing a peaked cap, putting me in mind of Troy Tempest, whose adventures in Stingray were currently being repeated on weekday evenings, and this detail, together with his title of ‘Captain’ (a rank which seemed associated with the sea), led me to imagine another nautical adventure. I’m fairly certain that the article, which took up little more than a single column’s width, did not go into any details about the format, and didn’t even mention the Mysterons.

This announcement came as a mild surprise, as I thought I already knew where Gerry Anderson would be going with his next TV series: back into outer space, aboard Zero-X, which had been an integral part of the recent feature film Thunderbirds Are Go! The spaceship and its crew were already enjoying weekly adventures in the pages of TV21, and their transition to television seemed a logical next step. In retrospect, it’s easy to see that the Zero-X spaceship had been designed to look good in a cinemascope frame, and wouldn’t have worked anywhere near as well within the confines of the television screen, but such niceties didn’t occur to me as a six-year-old.

Zero-X or otherwise, the prospect of any new Gerry Anderson production always generated a frisson of excitement, and back in the good old pre-internet days, it was next to impossible to glean much information about what to expect before the programme actually appeared on our screens. TV21 began dropping hints during the summer, as did its curious companion paper Solo, but at the time I wasn’t being bought either title and thus I had to wait for that first broadcast at the end of September before I knew what it was all about.

Unlike Thunderbirds, I don’t remember seeing any programme trails for Captain Scarlet, although I must have done so, and I don’t have any clear recollection of seeing the first episode on screen, although my brother and I were certainly in front of the television and waiting in eager anticipation at 5.25pm that September evening. Obviously, we were watching in black and white, and so the colour-coded characters were all, effectively, Captain Grey. I could grasp that the Spectrum agents were all named after colours, but what colour, exactly, was Captain Scarlet? His uniform had appeared black in the photo I’d seen in the Daily Sketch, and on screen it looked dark grey. I’d never heard of a colour called scarlet (nor, for that matter, the colours ochre and magenta, the codenames of two other Spectrum Captains), and at the time the first episode went out, I hadn’t yet seen a colour picture of our hero. My mum supplied the answer. and soon I would be drawing the good captain with the assistance of coloured pencils.

Merchandise was still a good way from hitting the shops, so as a stopgap, I drew and cut out a paper figure of Captain Scarlet. I used ruled writing paper, but the presence of parallel blue lines across the Spectrum agent’s uniform didn’t trouble me unduly. Indestructible he most certainly wasn’t. In fact, the paper Captain Scarlet met his end through being eaten by a hamster. We didn’t even own a hamster: the rodent lived in our school classroom, and I’d been given the honour of being able to take it home during the half term holidays. Paper Captain Scarlet just ventured a little too close to his cage... if only the Mysterons had known...

It always took a few weeks to acclimatise to any new Gerry Anderson series. Everything was new and different, and with all the different bits of hardware, there was a lot to take in. I’m not sure I quite understood that Spectrum’s headquarters Cloudbase was actually supposed to be suspended in mid air. On a black and white screen, the blue sky backdrop was less obvious than it appears in colour. It also took a few weeks before I realised what the name of the base actually was. Just nine days before the debut of Captain Scarlet, there had been a lot of hoo-hah in the media surrounding the launch of the QE2. I remember our class at school was even allowed to listen to a special live radio broadcast, and there had been a lot of talk in the media of ‘Clydeside’ and ‘Clyde bank.’ Thus it was that, for the first couple of weeks, I thought the name of Captain Scarlet’s operational HQ was ‘Clydebase.’ It was only much later that I realised the name ‘cloudbase’ was just another Gerry Anderson pun.

Captain Scarlet annexes the cover of TV21 – January 1968

The series had been on air for about six weeks when my brother and I were taken to the dentists’ for a check-up. This detail may seem irrelevant, but bear with me... As in all dentists’ waiting rooms, there were a number of back issues of magazines and comics lying around, one of which, a copy of Lady Penelope comic, included a big photographic article about Spectrum, focusing on the Angel pilots, who were given their own spin-off strip. Heedless of the fact that Lady Penelope was a comic for girls, I asked my mum to obtain a copy next week. She did better than that. On arrival home from school one afternoon in late November, I was presented with that week’s copy of TV21, complete with a Captain Scarlet story on the centre pages and a colour photograph of the Spectrum personnel on the back cover. I’d been bought TV21 for a few weeks earlier in the year, but hadn’t become a regular reader until now. From that moment on, I had TV21 bought for me every week until its demise in 1969, and continued reading well into into its ‘afterlife’ as TV21 & Joe 90 and beyond.

After three or four weeks, Captain Scarlet was finally beginning to sink in to my consciousness. I understood the premise of the series, without feeling any urge to throw myself from the top of a car park in imitation of the indestructible hero, and, after hearing it a few times, I knew pretty well how the theme music went, to say nothing of the distinctive drum-beat on tuned tympani. This rhythmical flourish accompanied the transitions between scenes, a unique back-and-forth edit that became part of the series’ visual style to such an extent, that, when playing with my Captain Scarlet toys, I used to ‘imitate’ it, by looking at two different things in quick succession. I know...

Ah yes, those toys…

A cynical observer might have imagined that the format of Captain Scarlet had been designed in order to sell a wide range of different toys, such was the variety of aircraft and roadgoing vehicles employed in the weekly adventures. Not all of the series’ hardware would make it into the toyshops, but even so, there was no shortage of merchandise bearing the Captain’s likeness and logo. One of the first items to become available was probably the most desirable: the SPV or Spectrum Pursuit Vehicle, an elephantine heavy-duty roadgoing machine in which, presumably for reasons of health and safety, the driver faced the rear. It was a particularly good design, and Dinky Toys’ die-cast version, released in time for Christmas 1967, was strikingly accurate, with ‘dynamic action features’ that included a pop-out door with seated Captain Scarlet, rear caterpillar tracks that could be flipped down (despite never being deployed in the series), fold-down aerials and, best of all, a missile hatch which popped open to enable the launching of the same white and red plastic missle that had previously featured in Dinky’s model of Lady Penelope’s FAB 1.

This, however, proved to be a somewhat troublesome feature, with the missile hatch tending to detach itself from the surrounding bodywork. It could be clipped back, with care, but this involved dismantling the toy with a screwdriver. If memory serves, this operation was required as early as Boxing Day... As to the missiles themselves, they had a tendency to disappear beneath immovable items of furniture, to emerge decades later when the living room was being redecorated.

Another highly desirable piece of merchandise (and now extremely collectable) was the Captain Scarlet ‘playsuit’, heavily promoted in TV21 towards the end of 1967. This early example of what would later become known as ‘cosplay’ (awful word) comprised a red gilet, grey trousers, calf-length red ‘gaiters’ (which fitted over your shoes to create the appearance of red knee-length boots) and a very realistic peaked cap with flip-down microphone. This latter item is now the sole surviving element of my own Captain Scarlet playsuit, acquired that same Christmas, and worn during many back-garden games over the next couple of years. The ‘gaiters’ were the only disappointing aspect of the set, and being made of soft vinyl, had a tendency to tear. Personally, I wanted a pair of the proper red ‘kinky’ boots as worn by the Captain himself, but such items were not available in children’s sizes. Perhaps it’s just as well.

The other essential Captain Scarlet toy was a dolly. Well, frankly, that’s what it amounted to, although by this time, the idea of ‘dolls for boys’ had gained in popularity, thanks to the sterling efforts of Palitoy’s Action Man. The Captain Scarlet doll was similarly engineered, almost to the point of contravening copyright, and bore a reasonable resemblance to the hero himself. He came in full uniform, including a pair of proper red plastic boots and a peaked cap, complete with microphone (which, with a bit of persuasion, could be made to flip downwards). The gilet seemed to have been made from bio-degradable felt, and did not survive more than a few years of play before disintegrating, while the hat, more maroon than scarlet in colour, survived intact despite being made from very brittle plastic. Unfortunately, the same can’t be said of the Captain himself: his interior jointing involved elasticated string and small metal components which, when exposed to the cold, damp atmosphere of the attic, decayed, causing the Captain’s limbs to drop off (all toys eventually found their way up into the loft once their playing days were over). Of the two examples bought for my brother and myself, only one survives, albeit in a semi-collapsed state, with arms and legs barely hanging on, and a number of bits missing altogether.

Indestructible? Pah!

* * *

In retrospect, Captain Scarlet and the Mysterons was clearly not up to the very high standards the Andersons had set for themselves with Thunderbirds, but, frankly, nothing aside from more Thunderbirds would have fit that bill. Back in 1967, though, it was a different matter entirely. Any new Gerry Anderson series almost always seemed to eclipse the others when it first arrived on the scene, and there can be no denying that Captain Scarlet and the Mysterons looked extremely impressive when first unveiled. It certainly booted Thunderbirds into touch as far as I was concerned, and it seemed entirely appropriate that the brilliant red upstart should take over TV21 comic. For the duration of its first run on ITV, Captain Scarlet felt like the acme of Supermarionation, and I for one was confidently expecting him to follow Thunderbirds into the cinema.

Looking back with a more jaundiced eye, the deficiencies begin to show through, and it’s clear that, despite later revivals, Captain Scarlet lacked the magic ingredients that had made Thunderbirds such a success. The format quickly became restrictive, with each episode being forced to follow the same basic template: the Mysterons issue a threat, destroy a person and/or piece of machinery in order to facilitate it, and Captain Scarlet must then kill himself in the process of attempting to thwart their plans. Anyone watching the episodes in order will notice that this latter aspect begins to fade out after a while. Despite being indestructible, Captain Scarlet does not end up dead every week, often coming through his adventures without suffering so much as a scratch. Did the Andersons have a change of heart concerning the violence in the series? Or did scriptwriter Tony Barwick simply get fed up with (or forget) the ‘indestructible’ premise? Certainly, the best episodes are to be found earlier in the series, with some later examples being highly derivative of their predecessors, and, accordingly, pretty dull fare.

The lack of humour doesn’t help, either. Thunderbirds was hardly a laugh-a-minute, but there was considerably more depth of character, and a lightness of touch which the Andersons never managed to achieve again. The few attempts at ‘humour’ in Captain Scarlet are generally lame and tedious: ‘Stone Point Village – SPV’ quips Captain Scarlet in a rare attempt at levity as he and Captain Blue trundle through the English countryside. And the scene wherein Colonel White ‘humorously’ sentences Captain Scarlet to death by firing squad is probably the worst misjudgement in the whole series (the effect is partially flattened by the fact that the ‘smiling’ Colonel White head looks anything but).

For all its flaws, there’s no denying that, visually, Captain Scarlet and the Mysterons is stunning, and whatever your opinion of the ‘properly proportioned’ puppets, it most definitely represented the high watermark of technical achievement from the Supermarionation team. The episodes have just been remastered in high definition for Network’s upcoming blu-ray release, and the results are extremely impressive.

Captain Scarlet may be fifty, but Spectrum is still definitely green.

Don't Say a Word...

Or: Who’s Afraid of Ronan O’Casey?

Who? Who indeed. Who even remembers him? It’s not a name that might be instantly familiar, but bear with me. Ronan O’Casey was a Canadian actor/producer who enjoyed a long and varied career in film, television and in the theatre. One of his more ‘interesting’ screen roles was that of the corpse in Antonioni’s Blow-Up. Yes, really. A minor part in the finished movie, it would appear that considerably more footage was originally planned, elaborating on his character’s affair with the woman, Jane, played by Vanessa Redgrave. Although scripted, none of this additional footage was shot, after the production was shut down prematurely by producer Carlo Ponti. O’Casey’s only scenes were the candid moments in the park glimpsed at a distance by David Hemmings, his only close-up, a brief cutaway shot of the dead body…

Elsewhere on the big screen, O’Casey’s roles were mostly of the minor supporting variety, but on television he was rather more visible, securing a key role in ITV’s early comedy series The Larkins, followed a few years later by a stint as host of two television gameshows. Which brings us back to our title…

Don’t Say a Word was a short-lived charades-based gameshow, running for just two seasons in 1963 and 1964, with a format similar to the later and better-remembered Give Us a Clue. There’s very little information available about the series, with only odd references online, and the most I’ve been able to locate comes from editions of the TVTimes.

The series began on Thursday, 13^th June 1963, and occupied the 7.00pm slot which had become an established home for half-hour gameshows (Take Your Pick, Double Your Money and others of similar ilk). The format appears to have involved chairman O’Casey miming ‘memorable’ phrases which two celebrity teams then had to guess, with none of the participants able to utter a word during the proceedings. The opposing teams comprised Jill Browne, Harry Fowler and Libby Morris on one side, versus Kenneth Connor, Glen Mason and Una Stubbs on the other. And Stubbs, of course, provides a link with the show’s later, 1970s incarnation. The TV Times listing also promised the inclusion of ‘two special guests.’

My earliest television memories are from 1963 and ‘64. I’m not sure in which year I first encountered it, but I certainly saw Don’t Say a Word, and retained a memory of it for years after. The reason it remained in my memory was quite basic. I was afraid of Ronan O’Casey. I had no idea of his name, but I vividly remembered the host of the programme looking directly into camera and saying – quite pointedly – ‘Don’t say a word!’ His mugging and mute miming no doubt also contributed to his ‘scariness’, but I think my reaction had more to do with the way he seemed to directly address the viewer. A TV host saying, into camera, ‘Don’t say a word’ probably came across as an admonishing adult, a schoolmaster figure, perhaps (and I hadn’t even started school!)

Viewers were invited to send in their own suggested phrases to stump the teams, and this may well explain the reason why O’Casey spoke so directly into camera. I’m not sure I’d ever seen anyone address the viewer in this way before, and I think I must have found it somewhat intimidating. Either way, for some reason or other, I took an almost instant dislike to Ronan O’Casey, who with his prematurely greying hair (a trait of his Irish lineage) looked quite distinctive on the black and white screen. I’m pretty sure that I remember wanting to leave the room whenever the programme came on. Fortunately for me, 1964 was the last season of Don’t Say a Word, although O’Casey returned the following year fronting a ‘guess the lyrics’ gameshow called Sing a Song of Sixpence (the title giving some idea of the kind of prize money offered by the average ITV quiz in those days). I remained utterly oblivious to this latter outing until I unearthed it while trawling TVTimes listings for this article. But the accompanying photo of O’Casey and co-host Anne Nightingale rang a long-silenced Pavlovian bell. This is how he looked as the host of Don’t Say a Word.

O'Casey as host of ITV's Sing a Song of Sixpence (1965) with co-host Anne Nightingale (and yes, I believe it is the same Annie Nightingale who later became a Radio One DJ)

It’s highly unlikely that anything survives of either series. O’Casey himself died as recently as 2012, but had been more or less retired from showbusiness since the early ’80s. DSAW gets a mention in his Wikipedia entry, and the Guardian obituary penned by his son, but otherwise it remains an obscurity, utterly obliterated by the passage of time. In fact, I mention it only because it illustrates a facet of memory: we don’t necessarily remember the good things from childhood, and the commonplace often doesn’t even register. But anything vaguely disturbing or scary is retained forever. Perverse, but true. I have no doubt that O’Casey was a genial, avuncular host, but to a three-year-old kid, unable to comprehend what was going on, both he and the programme were bewildering and unsettling. I didn’t like being confused by what I saw, and the sight of silent mumming on the TV screen was probably a bit too much to take, even in the seemingly benign context of a gameshow.

My memory of Don’t Say a Word is dredged from the deepest recesses of my recollection, but it belongs with a ‘spike’ of similar TV-related memories from around the same time: Will Hutchins as Sugarfoot on Saturday evenings (followed by the debut of Hughie Green’s Opportunity Knocks); The Littlest Hobo and No Time for Sergeants on Sunday teatime; Space Patrol and Bob Monkhouse with his old movies (also on Sundays); and my dad talking tantalisingly about a cool-sounding TV series called ‘The Aeroplane Story’ that was on too late for me to see (in fact he meant ITV’s boardroom drama The Plane Makers). All this and Alec Douglas-Home on the BBC news (he had just taken over from Harold Macmillan as Tory Party Leader and Prime Minister).

These were glimpses of an adult world that felt sophisticated and out of reach. I knew the likes of The Saint and Danger Man, but only from snatches of their opening titles and pre-credits. And TV coverage was also beginning to make me aware of events like the 1964 Olympics, staged in Tokyo. There was a wider world out there, which television was slowly revealing. Then as now, some of that world was intriguing, some of it incomprehensible, and some of it scary – for whatever reason. I wonder how many of today’s three-year-olds stare unknowingly at the television screen and get that same scary feeling from the sight of Donald Trump?