January 1st, 1972
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| 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 20th 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.
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