Fifty Years Ago Today...

Tuesday January 31^st 1967

On this day in 1967… Trumpton reaches its fifth broadcast episode…  'ele-vate!'

January 1967 was very nearly the end of an era for me: our family moved from our first home in March of that year, and by this time, the deal must have pretty well been done. I remember it as a strangely dark winter, with many gloomy, rainy mornings – very much like this year has been – and songs like Simon and Garfunkel's Homeward Bound or 59th Street Bridge Song (as covered by Harpers Bizarre) still bring those months vividly to life. There were a couple of new comics on the news stands: Solo (a Disney-centric title from the publishers of TV21) and Pow!, the first edition of which came with a free Spiderman gun, whose little sticky 'spider' discs can still be turned up in odd corners of my mum's house… but for today's entry, I've turned again to the programme schedules to find out exactly what I was watching on television fifty years ago to the day.

• • •

BBC or ITV? That was your choice of viewing in 1967. BBC, of course, was itself a choice of two channels, with BBC2 offering a schedule remarkably similar to today’s BBC4. You needed a 625-line set to receive it, and we didn’t have one in our house until 1968 or 69. I imagine the same was true for many families, still reliant on 405-line receivers, and in all honesty, unless you were a Joan Bakewell junkie, there was no good reason to update your television set for the time being. A few would be tempted by the introduction of the new colour service in July 67, but back in January, the majority of households would still have only BBC1 or ITV to choose from. So what was I, as a five-year-old, watching on this day in 1967?

Going back through the old programme schedules, I find much more that I remember from the BBC. ITV’s schedules seem, at times, like a foreign country, certainly during the hours of children’s television. The form in our house seemed to be BBC until the evening news, followed by a switch to ITV for the likes of Crossroads, Coronation Street and Take Your Pick. ITV only ever got a look in when there was a Gerry Anderson series being shown; which, in fairness, was often two or three nights a week. On such days, we would tune in at the start of programmes, usually around 4.45, with The Tingha and Tucker Club.

On this day, fifty years ago, BBC held sway. I’d been going to school for almost a year, so I wasn’t at home to watch Trumpton’s fifth episode at 1.30, but I would have seen the debut installment, broadcast during the school holidays on Tuesday January 3^rd. I’m not sure that I didn’t even experience a vague notion that these lunchtime programmes were becoming a bit too childish for me (I was just shy of my sixth birthday!) though I watched them whenever I was at home. Joe, then being shown on Monday lunchtimes, was certainly a series I felt too old for, even then, and watching it was always a slightly uncomfortable experience. The lad was frankly a bit soft, for in pretty well every episode the plot would build towards an emotional climax at which, to quote the narration verbatim, dramatic pauses and all, ‘Joe... began... to cry.’

The same scriptwriter, Alison Prince, was also responsible for the decidedly superior Trumpton, a series that could be appreciated for its marvellous sets and puppets, to say nothing of the music. Today’s episode in 1967, Mr. Platt and the Painter, featured two of the very best songs, those of the eponymous Mr. Platt, the clockmaker, and Walter Harkin, painter and decorator. Mr. Platt’s song in particular was an extremely clever composition by guitarist Freddie Phillips, based around a chord of E Major 9 (the chord sounded on the hour by a chiming clock), and a melody derived from the Westminster chime. I didn’t get to hear this particular song until a day off school in December of that year, and to say it made an impression on me is something of an understatement. I play it on the guitar to this day...

Trumpton was a hard series to see when you were at school, and despite the fact that only thirteen episodes were made, I would be grown up before I finally saw them all. It was repeated almost continuously on BBC1 until its very last billed broadcast on Friday November 29^th, 1985. On those rare occasions when I was able to catch it during school holidays, it always left an unusually strong impression, part of which I attribute to the fact that it was shown in isolation, often before or after an interval or closedown. You watched it, you turned off the set and went out into the afternoon... but your head was still ringing with a kind of Trumpton-ness, and those extraordinary songs...

On Tuesday January 31^st 1967, Trumpton was followed by a news bulletin, then a half hour programme for schools and colleges (narrated, as a matter of incidental interest, by voice of Steve Zodiac, Paul Maxwell). Then nothing... or rather, the test card, as BBC1 closed down for the afternoon. Programmes resumed with Jackanory at 4.40 (just into its second year), followed at 4.55 by Jonny Quest, a Hanna-Barbera cartoon series that I well remember watching at this time. There’s only one episode of which I have any clear recollection, and it involved a volcano. By a complete coincidence, this appears to have been the episode shown on this day fifty years ago. Jonny Quest was a ‘straight’ cartoon, with realistic-looking characters (by Hanna-Barbera standards at any rate), and a very earnest approach, unlike the later, jokey adventures of Scooby-Doo and co.

It was followed at 5.20 by Tom Tom, a series described in the Radio Times as: ‘new, unusual and fascinating stories and items of interest in a modern and changing world.’ Nothing to do with sat-nav, then; although if it had been around at the time, that’s exactly the kind of thing that viewers would have seen. I remember Tom Tom as a slightly more technological Blue Peter; typical features might include a demonstration of a robot (the series had its own, the palindromically-named Tobor), photographs of the far side of the moon, or a look at James Bond’s Aston Martin. Clearly, it owed its existence to the pioneers at Blue Peter, but it was doomed to play the Aztec Bar to Blue Peter’s Mars... doing the same thing, but with less success. Produced by the BBC’s Bristol studio, and reflecting a certain bias towards filmed reports from locations around the West Country, Tom Tom ran from 1965 to 1970.

Tom Tom was followed by Magic Roundabout, now firmly established in its celebrated time slot, immediately preceding the evening weather forecast (Eric Thompson’s scripts would often include references to weather presenter Bert Foord). And that was it for children’s TV. An eight-minute news summary was followed by regional news magazines (here in the Midlands, then as now, we had Midlands Today, a programme that struck me even then as somehow drab and parochial (not that I’d have put it in those terms as a five-year-old).

Children’s television may have ended, but my viewing continued into the early evening. Tonight, we had a dull antiques quiz in the form of Going for a Song – no recollection of that, and no surprise, either. But after it came Bewitched, a series I definitely saw at the time and which needs no further comment – beyond the fact that, after these mid-60s broadcasts, it would be more than thirty years before I saw it again, in a breakfast-time slot on Channel 4 circa 2000. Bewitched was followed in its turn by The Newcomers, a short-lived suburban soap opera, reflecting the era’s obsession with kitchen sink dramas about ‘real people.’ I recall nothing about it save for the theme tune. A few well-known faces appeared in the series, including Wendy Richard, Judy Geeson and Robin Bailey, and the original producer was Dr. Who’s Verity Lambert. Only five complete editions have survived, and here, for what it’s worth, is one of them, from May 1967 featuring, in the opening scene, Inigo Pipkin himself, George Woodbridge, being served tea by Selwyn Froggitt’s ‘mam’, Megs Jenkins:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NnRSyyE-ESU

By now, we’ve reached 7.30, which in 1967 was most likely my bed time; meaning that I didn’t get to see All Gas and Gaiters, the ecclesiastical comedy that made a household name of Derek Nimmo. That was a ‘treat’ I had still to come… also still to come was that house move – and after that, nothing would ever be quite the same again.

All in a Day's Viewing…

January 1st, 1972

Let's start as we mean to go on… 1972 is kicked off in style by the Radio Times.

This blog began from my childhood diaries, which provide a rough guide to some early encounters with popular culture, but has of late strayed into other arenas. Time to get back on track...

My diaries go back to 1971. There’s not a lot in those early years, beyond lists of what I watched on television or what comics I’d been bought that week. In fact, this would remain the form for a long time to come. I wasn’t into writing about myself, and any such remarks were generally confined to whatever toys or games I’d been playing with. This is perhaps for the best, because later, when I was given to the odd bout of soul searching (usually with reference to some girl or other) the results were far too embarrassing to share in public.

Another aspect of the diaries is that they generally start off well, but tend to fizzle out around March, so that for many years, they provide little more than a vague snapshot of what I was watching on television between Christmas and my birthday. In many cases, there’s not much detail, but it’s often enough for me to be able to read between the lines.

As an example of this, the entry for Saturday January 20^th 1973 briefly mentions some comics, a Saturday night film on BBC1 (Invasion, a 1966 b/w sci-fi thriller starring Edward Judd), and the fact that it had snowed heavily. From these scant facts, I can piece together a pretty accurate memory of that entire afternoon and evening, beginning with sighting the first snow flurries in a Sutton Coldfield car park, right through to mid evening, peering out from the window of a darkened back room to see the extent of the snowfall. By modern standards, it was remarkable. Compared with the feeble dusting that made BBC headline news a week or so ago, this was nothing short of an epoch-making event: the snow lay several inches thick on the back garden, enough of it for me to record, the following day, that I had ‘made igloo’ (my diary entries often read as if they were written by Manuel out of Fawlty Towers). Needless to say, this deep snow affecting Sutton Coldfield (and doubtless further afield) did not trouble the media of 1973. It was winter, these things happened. We shovelled the driveways, donned wellington boots and got to work, school, or wherever, without transport chaos, closures or other alarmist measures.

But I digress: my point here is that, from a few simple observations, I can revisit an entire weekend from forty four years ago. And since most of my diaries are at their best in the first two months of the year, I thought I’d start looking in detail at one of the earliest years on record – 1972 – adding detail from reference sources like BBC’s Genome, and some scanned editions of the TVTimes. Neatly enough, 1972 began, like all listings magazines, on a Saturday. The diary records that I watched the following programmes:

BBC1

11.15 Tom & Jerry: Jerry, Jerry Quite Contrary

11.20 Laurel & Hardy: The Chimp

11.45 (Here Come the) Double Deckers: Happy Haunting

12.10 Dastardly & Muttley in their Flying Machines

17.00 Whacko!

17.50 Dr. Who: The Day of the Daleks pt1

ITV

18.30 Please Sir!

(I seldom included episode titles in my diary entries: these, along with the timings, derive from the various listings.) Let’s look at this day's viewing in more detail:

For a start, it’s clear that BBC1 has finally got its act together on Saturday mornings. With the possible exception of Laurel and Hardy, this wasn’t just a special schedule for New Year’s Day, and the screenings of Dastardly & Muttley and The Double Deckers would continue over subsequent weeks, establishing the idea that Saturday morning kid's TV was here to stay (1972 would also see some ITV regions running an experimental schedule of Gerry Anderson series on Saturday mornings, screenings which were seldom billed in the TVTimes).

The Tom and Jerry cartoon was a remarkably recent example, of a mere six years’ vintage. My memories of seeing Tom and Jerry on the BBC are generally of the ‘classic’ Fred Quimby era cartoons, but a look at the schedules for these early weeks of 1972 reveals that, at this point in time, the classics had taken a back seat in favour of newer material. The cartoon shorts were seen most frequently in the post-Nationwide slot of 6.50 on weekday evenings (6.20 on Fridays when Nationwide was rested), and over the early weeks of 1972, a selection of titles from the previous decade were rolled out, including Carmen Get It (1962), It’s Greek to Mee-ow (1961), and Buddies Thicker Than Water (1962) (as a rule of thumb, the later [and feebler] Tom and Jerry cartoons can always be distinguished by their excrutiating punning titles).

Laurel and Hardy, meanwhile, had been a staple of the BBC’s schedules since 1948, although somewhat remarkably, today’s screening of 1932’s The Chimp was a first-run for the network. An excerpt had been included in the compilation series Sound of Laughter, shown mere months before this broadcast, and the complete film would not be aired again until 1975. The Chimp seems to have suffered from poor distribution following its initial release, and for unknown reasons had been overlooked until now. 1972 would also see first appearances on the BBC for several other L&H shorts including Any Old Port (February 27), Twice Two (26 April) and Chickens Come Home (30 April).

Dastardly and Muttley had first taken to the BBC airwaves in their Flying Machines on Tuesday October 13, 1970, exactly one year and one month to the day from their US television debut. Their futile efforts to stop Yankee Doodle Pigeon had been ongoing on BBC1 ever since. The Radio Times listings consisted of a generic synopses, with no individual titles listed; this was presumably, an expedient, given that each 22-minute episode comprised several different adventures, including the ongoing daydreams of Dastardly’s ‘snickering, fluffy-eared hound’ in Magnificent Muttley. The spin-off series came as no surprise to me, as the pair were far and away the stand-out characters to emerge from Wacky Races.

Further new material from the Hanna-Barbera stable was rolled out in the first week of 1972, with Motor Mouse and Autocat debuting on BBC1 from Tuesday January 11, in a double-header with It’s the Wolf, the latter a virtual reprise of The Perils of Penelope Pitstop in sheep’s clothing. In retrospect, these were a pair of mostly forgettable series, and a cynic might observe that the notion of putting a warring cat and mouse into rival automobiles was just a cheap way of saving time on expensively animating arms and legs. I liked it fine as a ten-year-old, mind you, and welcomed its inclusion in the revamped TV Action comic in April of the same year.

So much for the lunchtime schedules. According to the diary, the afternoon was spent in visiting my Grandparents, a regular Saturday ritual during these years. At some point in the afternoon, our mum would volunteer to fetch the Birmingham Evening Mail from the newsagent’s down the road for my Grandad, an errand on which I would accompany her – glad of any excuse to get out of doors. Along with the evening paper, my brother and myself would be bought a couple of comics. This week, it was TV Comic and Knockout for me, while my brother was getting the far cooler Countdown (fair’s fair: I’d been getting Look-In for the past year). TV Comic was running its own take on Tom and Jerry on the front cover, slickly drawn by Bill Titcombe, and endowing the titular characters with the power of speech. The publication was now leaning heavily on the ‘comic’ in its title, with humour strips outweighing drama by a long way. Dr. Who, never an entirely successful outing in its TV Comic iteration, had long since migrated to Countdown, and TVC was now increasingly reliant on the likes of Droopy, the perennial Mighty Moth, Dad’s Army and a barely recognisable Basil Brush.

Knockout, a title revived from the 1940s (my Dad was disappointed to realise it was not the same comic he’d read as a boy) was having a hard time finding its feet. Launched barely six months previously, it had already undergone a cover revamp, ditching the Bash Street derivative Super Seven in favour of a rigidly formulaic cover feature called The Full House. The idea, innovative for a couple of weeks, was to turn the comic strip frames into the rooms of a dwelling, in which various characters would be depicted in the middle of comic situations. It was lazily written, there being scant plot requirement, and scrappily drawn. It also had the unforseen consequence of rendering each week’s cover almost exactly like that of the preceding edition. I didn’t like it at all, and would rather have continued with The Super Seven (by the end of 1972, The Full House was out, and one of Knockout’s more popular characters, Joker, had been elevated to cover star).

Having consumed these goodies, it would be time for Saturday evening tea – as like as not comprising a bacon and sausage sandwich – and back to the telly. Whack-O! had been running since late November of the preceding year, and despite the archaic Billy Bunteresque setting, was a series we regularly tuned in to, unaware that it had been revived from an earlier black and white version of ten years’ vintage. These days, I fail to see the appeal in Jimmy Edwards’ overbearing, grasping schoolmaster, but the broad, obvious comedy, along with the ever-present threat of a whacking (doubtless inflicted on the hapless pupil Taplow) held a certain appeal at the time. It could never be made now, and for that, we must utter a silent prayer of thanks...

By contrast to the cape and motarboard shenanigans of Jimmy Edwards’ throwback teacher, ITV offered something much more contemporary in the form of Please Sir! Unfortunately, the series was well past its best, following the departure of form 5C and their teacher, Bernard Hedges, and the focus of the plots had shifted from the classroom to the staff room. Today’s episode, What are You Incinerating, saw headmaster Cromwell (played by the wonderful Noel Howlett) embarking on a ‘clean up Fenn Street’ campaign, doubtless helmed by caretaker Potter (Deryck Guyler – now the series’ lead). Creators John Esmonde and Bob Larbey were now busy working on spin-off series The Fenn Street Gang, and scripting duties on Please Sir! were divvied up between themselves and subsitute team Geoff Rowley and Andy Baker. Even as a ten-year-old, I was aware that the series had suffered a marked drop in quality with the departure of Hedges and co.

And of course, no Saturday evening between January and June 1972 would have been complete without a visit from the Doctor. Tonight marked the debut of Jon Pertwee’s third year in the role, but was most noatble for the much anticipated return of the Daleks, following a five-year hiatus. I’d been far too young to appreciate them in the 1960s, but now I was in a rare state of excitement at the prospect of seeing them again, with the new series heavily trailed across the network, and featured on the cover of this week’s Radio Times, in a stunning piece of artwork by Frank Bellamy. I remember recognising the signature (and, indeed the style) from his work in TV Century 21.

Over the coming weeks, my diary entries begin to make mention of various Dalek-based activities – somewhat hampered by an absence of any good Dalek toys: our collection ran to a handful of Rolykins and two of the soft plastic ‘swappits’ from the mid 60s. Eventually, I resorted to hacking a lump of old wood into a rudimentary Dalek, undeterred by the lack of any woodworking skill. This involved sawing the corner off a short wooden block (to give a vague impression of the head) and banging in some nails to serve as eyestalk and arms. Don’t talk to me about health and safety...

The return of the Daleks seemed to prompt every kid in the land who still owned an old battery operated Louis Marx Dalek to dust it off – I well remember seeing our next door neighbours (both of them girls) playing with theirs. A lad across the road even appeared in his Dalek suit. These being long unobtainable, my mum gamely knocked one up for me from some old curtain, with a colander for the head… the sink plunger was the real thing.

Cannily, Countdown got in on the act, shoehorning the Daleks into their ongoing Dr. Who serial, for all that the plot had given no indication to date that it would feature Skaro’s finest. It might seem hard to believe they could have been caught on the hop like this, until you realise that the comic’s contents would have been in preparation months in advance, and the return of the Daleks had been kept a secret until very close to the broadcast date.

As to the serial itself, the first episode as usual kept the titular monsters out of sight until the last possible moment. All the way through, I wanted less of the Ogrons and more of the Daleks. Much later, I realised that the Daleks had been grafted onto a storyline featuring the Ogrons, which explained the latter's prominence in what was supposed to be a Dalek adventure. Perhaps the most intriguing scene for me – as someone who had come to Dr. Who with the dawn of the Pertwee era – was the scene in which the Daleks determine that the Doctor is their old nemesis, with fleeting images of his previous two incarnations appearing on screen. This short sequence got me started on wondering about the history of the series, a train of thought that would be given added momentum with the publication, later that same year, of the book The Making of Doctor Who. The following year, of course, would mark the programme’s tenth anniversary, and my growing interest in its history would be rewarded with a nice Radio Times souvenir magazine, and the return of the first two Doctors. But we’ll save that one for another moment in time and space...

That’s a lot of mileage from a single day’s television (and comics)... and there’ll be more of the same to follow.

'Mind the Gap, Alan...'

Remembering (and revisiting) Thunderbirds Are Go!

One of the UK release posters: rather boringly symmetrical... where are the explosions?
And what's the Solar Station from Lord Parker's 'Oliday doing in there?

It’s a shade over fifty years since I was taken, as a five-year-old child, to the cinema to see the first big-screen outing for International Rescue, Thunderbirds Are Go! It was my first trip on a train, too – as if the thought of seeing Thunderbirds on the big screen in colour wasn’t excitement enough – though when the train rolled into Lichfield City station I was somewhat disappointed that it didn’t resemble any of the models in my Triang-Hornby train set. It didn’t look like a train at all, frankly: no funnel, no coal tender, no huge driving wheels...

You probably think you know where this is going... from one disappointment (the end of the age of steam) to another, in the form of the cinematic let-down that was Thunderbirds Are Go! Well, no. Not in January 1967, at any rate. Aside from the baffling and pointless dream sequence in the middle of the movie, my five-year-old self was glued to the screen from start to finish, right from ‘This is Assembly Control’ to the thinly-disguised Tracy family toasting Alan at the Swinging Star. All those models... Zero-X... astonishing... rock snakes... wow! Not to mention the experience of seeing Thunderbirds in colour for the first time. If you’d asked me, even ten years later, whether the film had been a resounding success, I’d have answered in the affirmative. So it was that, much further down the line, it came as something of a surprise to realise the film had been a box office failure. The Andersons, at the time, baffled by the poor reception for their movie, attributed it to over-familiarity. Why, they argued, would people pay to go and see something at the cinema that they could get for nothing on television? Fair point, and maybe they might have thought of it a bit sooner. But it doesn’t go anywhere near far enough in addressing what was wrong with Thunderbirds Are Go!

As a child, I was up for any film that featured spaceships, UFOs, or science fiction trappings of any kind. Never mind whether or not it had a story. Thunderbirds Are Go! featured Zero-X: possibly the coolest spaceship yet depicted in any movie or TV series (a title it would soon lose to the Starship Enterprise). Zero-X was cool because it was vast... bigger than Fireflash, Fireball XL5, the lot. It was a cool colour. And perhaps coolest of all, the nose cone was actually part of the control tower (I remember being particularly impressed by this detail). Zero-X was, as the Century 21 merchandising department would later, cannily, point out, five toys in one... those five being, er... the MEV... two lifting bodies... the main body (surely not a contender for a toy in its own right?) and... well, whatever. I left the cinema convinced that I had just seen a preview of Gerry Anderson’s next TV series. How could Zero-X not be given a series of its own?

TV21’s editorial staff were evidently of the same opinion, for even while the movie was still showing at your local provincial flea pit, Zero-X was off on a series of 2-page colour comic strip adventures drawn, for the first year, by Mike Noble (now relieved of duty on Fireball XL5). But as we all know, Zero-X lived and died (twice) in the course of a single feature film. Looking back, it could never have worked on television: this was a spaceship designed specifically to take advantage of widescreen cinema, and back in 1967, widescreen television was technology beyond even Brains’ wildest dreams.

Was this, in fact, the whole high concept behind Thunderbirds Are Go!? Imagine the creative brainstorm as Gerry and Sylvia thrashed out the idea: ‘It’s a widescreen picture so we’ll have a widescreen spaceship!’ ‘Brilliant! What will we do with it?’ ‘I dunno... send it to the moon?’ ‘No, there’ll be men there before the end of the decade. What about Mars?’ ‘Okay, so it goes to Mars. What else do we do with it?’ ‘How about we destroy it in a huge explosion?’ ‘What, again?’ ‘Yes. Except that this time, just to be different, we’ll destroy it twice.’

Gerry Anderson was, by all accounts, a sucker for a big explosion. You’d never have guessed, would you? And, of course, there are plenty of pyrotechnics in Thunderbirds Are Go! But hang on just a moment. What kind of a spaceship is Zero-X that it can’t be returned to base and landed safely just because the Hood’s boot has got stuck in a single elevator control? Does Captain Travers make any attempt to do this? Of course not! We need that big explosion! Likewise, is the ship genuinely incapable of being brought down with a single Lift Body? You’d have thought the designers might have allowed for such an eventuality. But no... we’ve spent billions of dollars on this ship and we’re just going to trash it at the first niggling little technical hitch... and by the way, we’re going to destroy a whole town in the process. Glenn Field’s attorneys must have been on a nice little earner sorting out all those compensation claims...

This may sound like nit-picking, but it’s indicative of what’s wrong with the script of Thunderbirds Are Go! There simply isn’t enough of the right kind of drama, the type that made the TV series so watchable. The technical problems encountered by Zero-X are of molehill proportions, but the script uses them as an excuse for a mountain of destruction, because the script can’t differentiate between a genuinely dramatic situation and a trivial situation that happens to culminate in a bloody big explosion. The dilemmas in the TV series scripts were of a much higher order, knife-edge situations that couldn’t possibly be resolved without a call to International Rescue. The problem with Zero-X is that it’s just crap. It can’t take off or land without crashing. It isn’t even sabotaged properly... the Hood was only taking photographs after all... there’s no bomb in the landing gear or anything of that order. He just put his foot in the wrong place. Zero-X is unarguably an International Rescue just waiting to happen; but the rescue, when it finally arrives, involves nothing more exciting than a quick re-wiring job. No fantastic machinery like the Mole, or the ‘Restraining Outfit’ from The Duchess Assignment (my favourite pod vehicle as a kid). Just a bloody screwdriver...

This is a sterling example of why creators shouldn’t be let loose on their own creations... Thunderbirds was a hell of a concept, but aside from the pilot episode, Gerry and Sylvia Anderson left the writing chores to a variety of hired hands. The Andersons wrote the two Thunderbirds films single-handed, and they wrote them partly to indulge some of their own fantasies... like working with The Beatles (okay, they had to settle for Cliff in the end), and blowing up spaceships on a previously undreamed of scale. Compared to some of the Andersons’ other creations, the Thunderbirds movies feel flabby and self-indulgent, like kids let loose in a sweet shop that they already own.

Now that's more like it… if only the rock snakes had really come to earth on Zero X and destroyed Glenn Field. 

As a five-year-old, I didn’t have many boxes that needed ticking from a Thunderbirds film. It was a film, tick, and it was Thunderbirds, tick. It was in colour (added bonus), and it had most of the Thunderbird craft in it, along with all the characters – what was not to like? How about a dreadful expository scene around the pool table, where Jeff, Scott and Virgil exchange awful, clunky dialogue about what’s been happening on the Zero-X mission. Of course I didn’t notice this at the time. Nor did I notice how much screen time was being wasted on that damn assembly sequence (or the fact that we got a fair bit of it twice). I didn’t notice the rubbish, self-aware humour of Penelope asking Jeff to ‘pull a few strings.’ And I didn’t notice how little time the MEV spent on Mars, or how, instead of getting the crew out on the surface to get down and dirty with those rock snakes one-on-one, they stayed nice and cosily inside the ship while the fiendish thingies ineffectually showered them with fireworks. I still wonder what the point of the rock snakes was, as an actual life form: how did they reproduce? What did they eat? Molten lava? Why were they even there? What did they do when they weren’t attacking Zero-X? Ah, but therein lies the whole point. They were there only to attack the MEV. Bad scriptwriting rears its fire-breathing, rock-encrusted head...

In fairness to the Andersons, they improved significantly on this scenario when scripting the pilot episode of Captain Scarlet and the Mysterons... instead of a pointless life form that has no purpose other than to attack our heroes, we had the titular alien race, peaceful beings given a rude awakening by trigger-happy Captain Black and, naturally, wanting their revenge. It's neat, and it's logical. Mind you, the rock snakes looked cooler than the Mysterons who were, uh… invisible...

Still, TBAG was all good fun for a five-year-old, and it feels slightly cynical to carp at the film’s creative shortcomings. Even so, imagine how much better it might have been if, instead of that bloody Swinging Star dream sequence, there had been a dramatic rescue sub-plot in the middle of the film, something huge and spectacular that could never have been realised on television... maybe one of the boys slips up... for the first time... and redeems himself by saving the Zero-X... ideally with something more than just a screwdriver. And what if the Zero-X had gone properly wrong... MEV holed by the rock snakes and leaking oxygen... crew unconscious... beginning to burn up on re-entry? It’s not hard to imagine how the inert, flabby mass of the script might have been given a few injections of solid drama. Did Gerry and Sylvia not even watch their own TV series? Looking at Thunderbirds are Go!, you might be forgiven for drawing that conclusion.

Perhaps the most astonishing thing about Thunderbirds Are Go!, given its failure to perform at the box office, is that there was ever a second Thunderbirds movie. I remember being taken to see Thunderbird 6 when it came out, and, on this occasion, feeling slightly underwhelmed by it all. Amazingly, the Andersons not only repeated all the same mistakes of the previous feature, but added some new ones (open-mouthed, laughing puppets... an airship... set-dressing self indulgence to shame even the freakiest Carnaby Street trip-out). By 1968, in any case, Thunderbirds was beginning to look a bit tired... Captain Scarlet had been on television for over six months, and the new characters and hardware were a lot more interesting than a world tour of Lady Penelope’s wardrobe... which is what much of TB6 amounted to. The biggest let down of all, however, was saved for the end... the sixth Thunderbird that we’d been promised by the title, and had been waiting for the whole movie to see. Aaand... it was just the bloody Tiger Moth! As Jeff Tracy should have said: ‘Brains, you old son of a gun! Now sod off and build me a proper Thunderbird!’ Of all cop-out movie endings, this has to be one of the worst ever. The only thing that can be said in its favour is that it makes a kind of sense... but that’s not saying very much. Actually, I’d rather not say anything in its favour... I still feel short-changed every time I see that ending.

After those original cinema screenings, it was a long time before I saw either of the Thunderbirds movies again – something in the order of ten years – and it’s fair to say that I didn’t miss them. When they turned up on television, they looked just awful in cropped, pan-and-scan format, and what was worse, I was now watching them as a teenager ,with the first stirrings of a cynical, critical adult beginning to influence my opinion.

Just recently I saw Thunderbirds Are Go! again in its recently-remastered form on Film4, and it scrubs up pretty well. There’s nothing at all wrong with it as eye-candy for a special effects junkie, and that’s all I expected from it. Well, there was something slightly wrong with it... all of the credits were missing... including the Anderson’s own scriptwriting and production credits. The crew credits originally appeared over the Zero-X launch sequence, but somewhere along the line, during the remastering process, they’ve been lost. The technical reason for this is simple... all films and TV series retain ‘clean’ versions of their opening titles, to allow for foreign titling; this footage is always of superior quality to the titled version, which is a generation further away from the negative. Most decent restorations use the clean titles where necessary, adding new captions to match the style and content of the originals. It’s just that, this time around, someone forgot to do it. And while it’s nice to see the launch sequence in its ‘clean’ version, it’s a shameful omission not to have on-screen credits for the many talented people who actually made the film – even more so when the end titles are given over to spurious fake credits, thanking the director of Glenn Field and the Martian Exploration Centre for their contributions. Maybe there’s an option to play the film with or without credits off the blu-ray disc: if so, someone goofed at Film4.

Either way, watching the film again, and in sterling HD quality, only served as a reminder of the gap between an idea and its execution. Thunderbirds on the big screen still sounds like a pretty good idea. So why has there never been a decent Thunderbirds movie? Will there ever be? Not unless someone can write a script and finance a production good enough to bridge the idea/execution gap. As Lady Penelope helpfully says at the end of that dream sequence: ‘mind the gap, Alan.’

'BBC1 will now explode…' or, Ident-ity Crisis

A look back at some of Auntie's graphic endeavours…

'This is BBC1'… the so-called 'watch-strap' logo (1966-69)

Ask anyone of a certain age what the BBC uses for a symbol, and they’ll probably still say: ‘a globe.’ It hasn't been a globe since 2002 (and that was, more properly speaking, a balloon), but a globe it was for the best part of forty years. And in the week that sees a new raft of BBC1 idents rolled out across the network (of which, more later), I thought it an opportune moment to look back at some of the network’s earlier graphic attempts.

For me, growing up in the 1960s and 70s, the BBC was always a globe... Auntie clinging onto a Reithian ideal of empire, of nation speaking peace unto nation. It was not always thus. Before the globe came the… thingumajig, weird and undescribable, looking rather like a dangling mobile that had been sent back through time from the Play School studio, or ingeniously constructed out of folded paper by John Noakes. Whatever it was meant to be, it was in use for a decade starting in 1953, and I’m pleased to say that I have no recollection of it whatsoever. It was elaborate, geometric and highly artistic, perhaps refecting how the BBC felt about itself at the time. (Swimming hippopotami? This is the British Broadcasting Corporation, for heaven’s sake!)

Unlike the symbols which would replace it – all of which were broadcast in real-time by pointing a TV camera at a rotating model – this early TV symbol was transmitted from a piece of stock film (one they’d made earlier, you might say). This proved to be a wise decision, as the delicate mechanical contraption fell to pieces shortly afterwards.

In 1963, the Corporation cast aside this esoteric art deco confection in favour of something new and dynamic, a global brand for a thrusting new decade, reflecting the corporation’s status as a supplier of programmes to countries far and wide. The result was the symbol that so many of us came to associate with the BBC down the ensuing decades: a rotating globe.

One of the comfortingly real-world 3d BBC globes (the lighting alone tells you it's a model)

The original globe was exactly what it looked like: a three dimensional object, rotating mechanically in front of a locked-off camera, and for the first three years of its on-screen existence, it was labelled, simply, BBC tv. A revised version, popularly known as the ‘watch strap’ appeared in 1966 when the channel was, for the first time, identified on screen as BBC1 (although the BBC1 brand had come into being with the launch of BBC2 in 1964). This is the first BBC symbol of which I have any clear recollection. It remained in use for only three years, until a new version ushered in the era of colour broadcasting.

The new ‘colour’ symbol placed the rotating globe in front of a mirrored background image, with the colour, such as it was, added electronically. It wasn’t exactly a riot of colour, as this image illustrates: black background, blue landmass and logo – the colour contrast being deemed suitable for viewing on black and white equipment. By contrast, BBC2’s contemporaneous logo was more colourful (albeit confined to shades of blue and white) and more modern in appearance.

'BBC1 will now explode.' The original BBC1 colour ident, much parodied by Monty Python

This was the BBC1 ident I saw on our first colour television set in November 1974, but I didn’t have long to get used to it: a month later, the logo was updated again, to a brighter colour scheme of blue and yellow. I have to confess that I rather mourned the passing of the italic, boxed BBC logo, which had been around since 1963 (familiar to me from its many appearances on items of licensed merchandise such as Dr. Who and Z Cars annuals, Dalek toys and the like).

The new logo, if you can call it such, comprised the station name in a bland, heavy weight of the typeface Futura. No boxes, nothing. It may seem nostalgic now, but at the time, it looked clunky, bland and modern. It remained in vision until 1981, and is preserved on some of my earliest video recordings.

The 'acid yellow' makeover of 1981. With a font from 1970...

It was given a subtle if pointless makeover in 1981, with the warm yellow replaced by an unpleasant acid hue, and the BBC1 legend updated to a groovier font (for all that it looked a whole decade out of date). I really didn’t like this version, and the vile yellow never looked good, especially on video tapes which tended to react badly to areas of over-saturated colour. This acid yellow iteration would prove to be the last of the ‘real-time’ mechanical models, for new technology was on the horizon.

1985 saw the advent of the first computer-generated globe: by comparison with the early 80s version, and, indeed, most of what would come later, this was a model of tasteful restraint, with a blue and gold semi-transparent rotating globe sitting on a plain black ground above a faux three-dimensional BBC1 logo. It was simple and didn’t draw attention to itself. If anything, it was perhaps a little unremarkable, but that didn’t matter: no one in 1985 expected the BBC’s ident to be all-singing, all-dancing (or a bunch of synchronised swimming hippos, for that matter).

A model of taste and restraint… only it's not a model. The first computer-generated BBC globe.

For its next makeover, the BBC outsourced the work to the Lambie-Nairn agency, the first time that a station ident from the corporation had been handled by an external supplier. Lambie-Nairn had impressed the industry with their work on the Channel 4 ident, and their new BBC1 brand harked back to an earlier era, resurrecting the defunct, boxed italic BBC logo. The globe, of course, was retained, but its days were numbered.

In 1997, the BBC underwent a much-publicised rebranding exercise: indeed, there was plenty of comment at the time regarding the eye-watering cost. For reasons unknown, the BBC symbol, with a heritage of some thirty four years (barring its decade-long absence from 1981-91) was now ditched in favour of... something almost the same but not quite. The italic boxes were straightened out and the classic BBC font replaced by a variant of the blandly ubiquitous Gill Sans – a 1930s font that has been seen and used on everything from the London Underground to those annoying Keep Calm And... novelties. This new logo quickly became intrusive, with some BBC mandarin decreeing that it must appear over the opening credits of every BBC-produced programme (it was even added electronically to earlier productions). Fortunately, in a move no doubt welcomed by the designers of programme title sequences, this was later quietly dropped.

'It's only a model…' One of the mechanical globes as used until 1985.

As part of the 1997 rebrand, the BBC globe was ‘imaginatively’ updated to... a hot air balloon. Decked out in a counter-intuitive colour scheme of red and yellow, the new floating BBC symbol was filmed (and later electronically inserted) over a variety of typical British landscapes. This must have taken some doing, as hot air balloons tend to be, well, balloon-shaped (ie. an inverted pear) as opposed to perfectly spherical, like a globe.

In 2002, a short-lived new set of so-called ‘Rhythm and Movement’ (ie. dancing) BBC idents replaced the balloon, but these proved hugely unpopular with viewers and were dumped within four years of their introduction. By this time, it was almost unthinkable that a TV station should use anything as pedestrian as a static (or rotating) graphic as its on-screen identity, and filmic logos were now considered de rigeur. Thus the new set of BBC1 idents, introduced in 2006 (yes, that long ago) all featured filmed and CGI-manipulated sequences loosely themed around a circular formation (such as multi-coloured cyclists, and, yes, those damned hippos).

ITV quickly followed suit, although their efforts have always felt a bit random, with no discernible thematic link between the various sequences. Channel 4, on the other hand, with its eccentric ‘how the hell did they do that’ idents (like, those pylons...) continues to lead the way (though their recent coloured rhomboids feel somewhat infantilised, smacking of nursery bricks or cusinaire rods).

Now, with the new year, comes a brand new set of BBC1 idents. I haven’t even seen them yet, but I have seen some of the online reaction. For the record, the new theme is ‘oneness’, and the images (I’ve only seen them as still frames, but I presume they move about a bit) come courtesy of photographer Martin Parr, who, for the record, once compiled a book of ‘boring postcards’. Just saying...

Maybe it’s time to bring back the globe... I have some balloons left over from Christmas and a felt-tip pen... we can do this...