Tuesday January 31st 1967
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| 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 3rd. 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 29th, 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 31st
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:
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.
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