The Last Of...

So long, Mrs. Peel… Emma and Steed kiss goodbye in the Avengers episode The Forget-Me-Knot (1967)

… old so-and-so

Saying goodbye is never easy, not even when the person involved is a celluloid or televisual creation. I’ve always been keenly aware of the effect that a departing character can have on any established television series. As viewers, we invest our time in a favourite piece of television, and it can be hard to let go of a character whom we have grown to love or, indeed, hate…

Star Trek very nearly went into its second series without Mr. Spock, or certainly without Leonard Nimoy in the role. In retrospect, the idea of anyone else playing Spock is absurd, since it was the performance and not the character that audiences warmed to. Fortunately, we were spared this unthinkable revamp, but it hasn’t always been the case.

An early example I recall is the transition between Emma Peel and Tara King in The Avengers. I’d been allowed to stop up extra late on Saturday nights in the summer of 1967 because my mum liked The Avengers and thought it would appeal to me. It did. But when it returned for its next series, I noticed that it ‘wasn’t the same girl any more’ (or words to that effect: aged just six, I had little grasp of the names of either the actors or the characters). What I did notice was that the series wasn’t quite the same any more. I was, strictly speaking, too young to have noticed such niceties, but Emma appealed to me in a way that Tara did not. Emma Peel had been sharper, less fluffy, had a nicer voice, a nicer face. She even drove a better car.

The most famous re-casting of the 1960s didn’t even register with me. We didn’t watch Dr. Who at the time, which with its weird music and Daleks was simply too scary for a Saturday teatime, especially when Jimmy Clitheroe was on the other side.... so when William Hartnell regenerated into Patrick Troughton, it meant nothing to me. I probably saw it happen courtesy of Blue Peter, which I never missed, but I can only speculate as to what the fans must have felt at the time. A friend of mine who grew up with Hartnell tells me now that she didn’t buy into the Troughton thing at all, but all I knew about it was a story in the Daily Sketch some time in 1967, that attempted to drum up some scandal out of Hartnell’s not reckoning Troughton in the role he’d abandoned. I didn’t join the Doctor’s adventures until Jon Pertwee’s debut, and at the time, I couldn’t care less about what he’d looked like in the past. Once again, though, I did notice (and rather regretted) the departure of a cast regular, in the form of Caroline John as Liz Shaw (whom I rather liked), replaced for the second Pertwee series by the effervescent Katy Manning in the role of Jo (too silly, scatty and 70s for my tastes).

In fact, I’m not sure that there was ever a cast substitution on television that didn’t leave me pining for the old line-up. James Beck couldn’t do anything about his untimely departure from Dad’s Army, but the series was never quite the same without him, and the attempt to introduce a replacement character in the form of the dire Talfryn Thomas was misguided to say the least. Are You Being Served was never the same show after the departures of Messrs. Mash, Lucas, and most keenly missed of all, Arthur Brough as Mr. Grainger. And as for On The Buses without Reg Varney... a veil, please.

Drama series were no less prone to the replacement of key cast members. In the worst cases, a new actor was simply brought in to fill the shoes or space-boots of another. As Travis in Blakes Seven’s first series, Stephen Grief was totally on the money. When Brian Croucher – a face I knew from his many ‘thick-ear’ appearances in the likes of The Sweeney – was drafted in to replace him, the series was diminished in stature for me. Space Commanders don’t, or shouldn’t speak in ‘Saarf London’ accents. Space doesn’t have a south. Or a north, for that matter…

I was too young to watch Softly Softly in the 60s, and not sufficiently interested to pick it up during the 1970s, but when I finally started to see episodes on UK Gold in the 1990s, I was keenly aware of the absence of Stratford Johns in the series’ most famous role – that of Detective Chief Superintendent Barlow. Barlow, and his sarky sidekick John Watt had been the whole point of Softly Softly, when the detectives were promoted out of their original home in Z Cars, and continuing the series without such a key character seemed, again, a diminution. Barlow had left in 1972, continuing on his own in Barlow at Large and, later, Barlow, while Task Force soldiered on without him. Sure, we still had old hands John Watt and the amiable Det. Insp. Harry Hawkins; and other long-serving regulars like dog handler PC Snow, and rotund red-headed Sgt. Evans were present and correct. There were some cracking scripts, as good as any the series had produced to date. But no Barlow. The big, round hole he left in the format is a palpable presence in those episodes.

'I often considered going into service… as a valet, perhaps.' Soon to be late of Softly Softly: Task Force Sgt. Jackson (David Allister, left) provides a clean shirt for Det. Insp. Harry Hawkins

Only recently have I been able to appreciate the full English Barlow era of Softly Softly: Task Force via the recently-released DVDs. Yet once again comes the old disappointment of the disappearing favourite character. David Allister won’t be a familiar name to many (beyond a few advanced Dr. Who nuts who will know him from his appearances in a couple of 1980s serials), and his role in Task Force was semi-minor to say the least: a graduate copper with a posh voice and a highly efficient manner with paperwork, always with the facts of any case neatly filed away, just the kind of desk-bound type guaranteed to rub Barlow up the wrong way. And a nicely-judged performance it was too. Later in the 1971 series, the character (Sgt. Jackson) even gets a case of his own to solve, suggesting that we may be about to watch his career develop over subsequent stories. But no. The very next week, Jackson is promoted, out of the blue, to Inspector, and out of the series. Clearly this was a late script adjustment to accommodate the actor’s impending unavailability, and the same episode spends some time establishing a near-identical replacement character. Barlow and Watt can’t be bothered to give ‘Jacko’ a decent send-off, nipping off on a case instead of attending his leaving do – leaving Jackson to mutter ‘goodbye’ to an empty room as the episode ends.

Sometimes, it’s not so much the departure of a favourite character that we notice as the failure of a particular series to make good use of its best character/s. Simon Oates was a charming, charismatic actor who should have walked away with the role of James Bond. On TV, he was an occasional presence in series like Man in a Suitcase and The New Avengers, and he did, admittedly land a leading role in a movie. Shame it had to be a dud like The Terrornauts... Oates’ ship seemed to have come in when, in 1970, he was cast in the BBC’s new eco-thriller series Doomwatch. His character was very much of his time, an unreconstructed male chauvinist, replete with flowery shirts, cravates and all, yet Oates managed to invest this basically unlikeable cardboard creation with genuine warmth and humour. As if in revenge for being better than their scripts, the production team increasingly sidelined the character as the series wore on, culminating in a ludicrous, out-of-character episode that led to his semi-permanent departure from the format.

Some series have endeavoured (pun intended) to press on in the absence of the lead. Blakes’ Seven, famously, lost Blake after two series, and as to whether or not there were seven of them any more... Elsewhere, north of the border, Taggart became a Taggart-free zone; and Inspector Morse without Morse became, well, Lewis.

None of those departures troubled me unduly, but sometimes it just doesn’t seem fair when the character you’ve rooted for is written out, killed off or, worse still, recast. Perhaps it’s at times like this when TV gets a bit too close to home. The real characters in our real lives will one day be recast, or written out. I don’t just mean in the obvious ways, either. Favourite characters from a workplace can depart, changing the whole dynamic after they’ve gone. People move from being one of the ‘cast regulars’ to the status of a rarely-seen ‘special guest’ without you even knowing what’s happened. If television and film can do anything, they can compensate for the deficiencies of real life. When we warm to a certain character, we want more of them. We don’t want to see them horribly killed, or killed and brought back to life so many times we don’t care about them any more (Dr. Who writers, this means you!)

All of which probably brings me back to where I started, with Game of Thrones. I may not watch it, but I know from those who do that it’s no good forming relationships with characters for whom sudden death is an ever present prospect…

There’s probably some deep philosophical truth embedded in all of this. All I know is, I’m going back to watch all those Sgt. Jackson* episodes of Softly Softly: Task Force a second time. Life may be finite, but on DVD, everyone can live forever...

* I had hoped to be able to add a footnote to the effect that his character may be gone but David Allister lives on: sadly his Imdb resumé peters out around 2001, as do his many appearances in BBC radio plays. He may merely have been ‘written out’ into retirement, but who knows? Not the internet, that’s for sure…

The Last Of...

'Here's to the Good Life.' Tom, Barbara, Margo and Jerry drink a toast in the Goods' trashed living room in what was almost (but not quite) the last episode of The Good Life.

… the present series

These days, television seems to go on forever. How many series of Game of Thrones are we up to now? I neither watch nor am I keeping score, but it must be up to seven or eight. Of course, to the modern audience, a ‘series’ can comprise a mere six episodes whereas, back in the good old days, you’d be looking at thirteen episodes as a bare minimum. Film studios needed work to keep them in business, and the TV production industry kept many legendary production bases ticking over until well into the 1970s. But novelty was what sold. Lew Grade always maintained it was easier to sell a brand new idea than a repeat run of some tried and tested formula. This, at any rate, has been offered as a reason why Thunderbirds never went beyond one series, and although there were exceptions like The Saint and Danger Man, it was a rule by which most of his ITC series abided.

Elsewhere on television, in Britain at any rate, series tended to come and go. Expensive hour-long productions rarely remained on air for more than one or two series, with a few exceptions like The Avengers to prove the rule. Any filmed series that was retained for more than one series did so on the basis of worldwide sales, specifically to the US market, and where such sales were not forthcoming, titles were dropped like the proverbial hot brick.

The picture was somewhat different in the case of videotaped drama, which was not only cheaper to produce, but in many cases, an economic necessity. TV studios depended on regular videotaped series to keep their production schedule afloat, but even so, it could be a fight to buy studio time with so many titles vying for a piece of the action, and only the successful would enjoy more than a sole series. There were, of course, many notable successes, all of which enjoyed long runs on air: Dr. Who ran for decades in its original form, before being regenerated later in a model more akin to the ITC productions of an earlier era, and there were other notably long-lived series from the BBC, including Z Cars, its spin-off, Softly Softly, The Onedin Line and When the Boat Comes In.

But they all, eventually, came to an end. Some simply ran out of steam, while others ran out of viewers. Changing tastes took care of others – Softly, Softly, revamped into a new Task Force format in 1969, was beginning to look out of step with the times by its final series in the mid-70s, and its de facto replacement was the tougher, Sweeney-styled Target: a complete misfire which lasted only two short series.

In America, where bigger audiences meant bigger budgets, a popular series could easily run to hundreds of episodes, and their endings were often precipitated by the departure of the talent. Here in the UK, it’s hard to name a single series that enjoyed a lifespan across more than one decade. Dr. Who may indeed be the sole exception. These days, of course, the big record holder has become Casualty – one of TV’s oldest and least imaginative formats proving that sometimes, viewers can’t get enough of a bad thing. Emergency: Ward 10 had been a long-haul favourite with viewers in the late 50s and early 60s, but at least it had the good grace to bow out in the end. Series like Casualty seem almost to be kept on air to prove a point. The point being not the production of quality television, but just to enable the BBC to boast what a long-running success it has on its hands. Last of the Summer Wine was a similar case in point. Its first three or four series were amiable, low-key, dare I say ‘gentle’ comedy, and would have sufficed for the purposes of future repeats. Instead, the BBC just kept it going, propping up an increasingly geriatric format with new characters as the old ones died off. Towards the end, it began to look not unlike a sunset home for venerable character actors. I stopped watching it in the early 80s, by which time I judged it to have run out of ideas. But like Compo’s proverbial tin bath on wheels, it kept on going, and going. And going. Downhill.

None of my favourite series ever seemed to be thus favoured. Most lasted only a single series, whilst others struggled on through two or three. And those that did endure invariably only served to illustrate the law of diminishing returns. Should Star Trek have run to three series? Without a doubt. But was the third series any good? Not really. Its not being any good was down to various factors, but in retrospect it seems almost a criminal act to have allowed such an admirable piece of television to wither away as budgets and enthusiasm dwindled. These days, it wouldn’t be allowed. Witness the endless re-branding of the Star Trek franchise, on TV and in the cinema. The brand is too big to let it die. Throw more money at it. Reboot it. Put a woman in charge (yes, Who fans, Star Trek got there first…)

I’m well aware that TV series still come and go in the blink of an eye, in quantities far too large for me to keep abreast of; but the ones that last really do seem to outstay their welcome. If not actually cancelled, then they should be forcibly rested, while their audience develops a keen taste for that which an older generation calls nostalgia.

Ah, the ‘n’ word again. But that’s the whole point. Without cancellation, there can be no nostalgia. Nostalgia is the afterlife of any good idea. But no good idea is good enough to merit eternal life. Even the Beatles knew when to stop…

Growing up with the television, I soon came to recognise the sigh of disappointment that accompanied the words of the continuity announcer declaring: ‘that was the last in the present series.’ I’d never seen Steptoe and Son at the age of six, but the sight of a trailer advertising the last in a repeated series (some time around 1967) still felt tinged with regret. In the case of programmes which I watched and enjoyed, the knowledge that this week’s episode was the last, perhaps forever, certainly served as a focus for your attention. You had one last chance to enjoy your favourite show before it disappeared. There was no replay, no video, DVD or internet. Once the series had ended, that was your lot until such time as it was repeated. And repeats were by no means guaranteed.

Some series went out with a bang. I didn’t see it myself, but Doomwatch wrapped its first year by blowing up its most popular character. Blakes’ Seven blew up the Liberator, not once, but twice (the first time was a mere scriptwriter’s trick). Danger UXB took a leaf from the Doomwatch writer’s guide and blew up its star Anthony Andrews, in its penultimate episode, and on a seaside pier as well, in case anyone hadn’t noticed the similarity... clearly, you were in dangerous territory when you got to the last episode of anything.

Sometimes, though, what you got was a cop-out. Someone at the Gerry Anderson studio came up with the idea of ending their series with a clip-show instead of a proper episode. It was first done on Stingray, then again on Thunderbirds. By the time of Captain Scarlet and the Mysterons, the trick was beginning to feel over-played, and the script was highly contrived to allow for the tedious repetitions from earlier episodes. Maybe some fans liked to revist old favourites, but for me, it was a wasted opportunity. Amazingly, they got away with it a fourth time on Joe 90, and even in UFO, the re-used footage trick was worked into the episode Mindbender.

What you really wanted from that last episode was a cracker. If the series was to return, then it was fair game to leave the characters’ fates up in the air, but if not, could they please be allowed to have one last brilliant adventure before living happily ever after? Fireball XL5 didn’t do badly with its last episode, The Firefighters, which featured a lot of pyrotechnic explosions and the complete destruction of a key set. Favourite characters were placed in jeopardy... but Venus was saved from the flames by Steve Zodiac... of course.

Sometimes, writers took chances with their last episodes. The final edition of the regular series of Whatever Happened to the Likely Lads presented a decidedly downbeat meditation on the ultimate fate of Bob and Terry, who see themselves mirrored in two cantankerous old men. The Good Life went perhaps a step too far, when Tom and Barbara’s home was trashed by vandals: a horrible fate for characters whom viewers had cherished over three series. Oddly, the series returned for a single one-off episode, ‘by Royal Command’, taped in the presence of the Queen and Prince Philip. Had her Majesty been upset at the downbeat ending to the regular series? I’ve often suspected this may have been the case. Either way, this single half-hour effectively ‘re-set’ things in the Good household, and viewers could indeed be assured that Tom and Barbara lived happily ever after.

Occasionally, but only rarely, a series would end with the promise of a return ‘later in the year,’ but more often than not viewers were left in the dark as to the fate of their favourite programmes. Much of the time, a second or third series had not even been commissioned by the end of its predecessor. These days, the commissioning process is all too public, and fans often get to know of an impending new series when it is no more than a twinkle in the eye of its creative team.

It was a rarity indeed for any of my favourites to return for a second series. One notable exception was Space:1999, and in this case I learned of the proposed second series many months ahead of its screen debut, together with a few tantalising nuggets of information – Moonbase Alpha had been moved ‘underground’ (so we were told), and there would be changes in the cast. Losing a beloved character was sometimes the price to pay for another series of your favourite, and in the case of Space:1999, we lost the very best character, Victor Bergman, between series one and two. Space:1999’s second series was, of course, a travesty, proving that any TV or film fan should be careful what they wish for. More of your favourite doesn’t necessarily mean more of what you liked about the first series.

In part two, I’ll talk more about losing those favourite characters...

Stone me, what a life...

The slow process of discovering Tony Hancock

For a long time, Tony Hancock was nothing more than a name to me... mentioned in a kind of wistfully nostalgic context by my parents and grandparents. His TV and radio career had peaked before I was even born, and by the time I was of an age to take notice, the repeats had mostly fizzled out. My introduction to him was almost certainly via a series of television ads for the Egg Marketing Board, in which he featured alongside Patricia Hayes; although I had no awareness of him outside of these 30-second mini-comedies.

Dating from 1965, and with their memorable slogan ‘Go to Work on an Egg,’ the EMB commercials were some of Hancock’s last visibly successful endeavours in the British media. By this time, his personal life was a car-crash, the details of which were not widely known until much later, and his career decisions had been relentlessly off-target since splitting with his long-term writers Galton and Simpson around 1961. Increasingly alienated by the British media, and burdened by a worsening reputation for reliability, his appearances on the small screen became fewer and fewer, until one final offer of a TV series in Australia…

I have the dimmest recollections of my parents and other grown-ups reacting to the news of Hancock’s suicide in 1968, and I must have half-heard one or two radio repeats over the next few years; but for me, Tony Hancock remained essentially unknown territory until the mid-1970s. The first mention in my diary comes on Monday 9^th August, 1976: a series of repeats had been running on Radio 4 at 6.15pm for several weeks, and by early August I was sufficiently familiar with the series to add an elongated squiggly line after the letter H, in reference to Hancock’s characteristically drawn-out pronouncement of his name in the programme introduction. Running for eleven weeks, this repeat season presented a selection of classic episodes drawn from the six series Hancock made for BBC Radio between 1954 and 1959. In a short space of time, I came to recognise all the familiar characters: Hancock himself, vain, irascible, prone to ludicrous flights of fancy; and alongside him, swindling spiv Sid James, dopey antipodean Bill Kerr, secretary Miss Pugh (Hattie Jaques), and Kenneth Williams as just about everybody else, including a particularly silly voice (identified in the scripts as ‘Snide’) who would habitually turn up about five minutes from the end of a given episode. If I was still a little unfamiliar with Hancock himself, the presence of three Carry On stars in the episodes added greatly to their appeal.

Although these repeats are the first mention of Hancock in my diary, it’s more than likely that I had already heard from ‘the lad’ prior to this date, as at least two of my schoolfriends were wont to mention him whenever the talk turned in that direction. In both cases, their parents owned some of the LPs of Hancock that had been released on various labels since the late 50s, which accounted for their familiarity with the series, and indeed had played a large part in keeping the character fresh in people’s memories.

The 1976 radio repeats represented the longest unbroken run of Hancock’s Half Hour since the late 1950s, and were followed by a shorter season over four weeks during the autumn of 1977. Despite the late scheduling of these 1977 repeats (10.30pm on Tuesdays) I made a special effort to tune in for all of them, even going so far as to note details of the plot and characters in my pocket diary, eg. ‘Kenneth Williams (+ silly voice) is the Governor’ (The Conjuror, 13/9/77).

On screen, I’d already seen Hancock in the film The Punch and Judy Man, broadcast on Tuesday 18^th September 1973 in BBC1’s ‘British Film Night’ season, although the film was quite different from the radio and television series. An episode of the latter was shown as part of the BBC’s ‘Festival 40’ season in August 1976, providing an interesting comparison with the radio episodes running concurrently. The example chosen for this repeat broadcast, The Blood Donor, was, alongside the radio episode A Sunday Afternoon at Home, the one Tony Hancock show that everybody seemed to remember, due in no small measure to its having been released (in re-recorded form) on a 12” LP. It had last been broadcast during a season of repeats in 1969, although the lateness of these episodes (9.55pm) meant that they eluded me – as had other Hancock repeats on BBC television during the 1960s.

Unfortunately, prior to watching the 1976 repeat of The Blood Donor, I’d read an accompanying article in that week’s Radio Times, which related the story of how Hancock, having suffered minor injuries and concussion following a car accident, had been unable to learn his lines the week of the recording and, for the first time in his TV career, had been forced to rely on the autocue or teleprompt device (a monitor screen placed in the actor’s eyeline on which the script is displayed in a rolling fashion similar to a programme’s end credits). The fact that he was reading his lines was glaringly obvious, and rather took the edge off my introduction to the television Hancock.

It wasn’t until the mid1980s that a proper Hancock revival took place on television, with selected classic episodes broadcast in a Sunday evening prime time slot – unheard of for a black and white piece of archive television. Beginning on Sunday 23^rd February 1986, BBC1 broadcast no fewer than twelve classic TV Hancocks, at 7.15pm, beginning, inevitably, with another repeat for The Blood Donor, but going on to include such classics as The Lift, The Bowmans (a rather barbed parody of The Archers) and, a personal favourite of mine, The Economy Drive. Many of these episodes were, by this time, familiar to me, having been released the previous year on a series of VHS cassettes. The BBC weren’t overly generous with these releases, each of which contained just three episodes – but it was a start.

It was obvious to me watching these TV Hancocks that the superior episodes were those that saw him paired with Sid James. Hancock, in a drive for increasing realism, had demanded that the ‘repertory company’ of guest characters from the radio series be dropped for the transition to television, and although Kenneth Williams’ popular ‘Snide’ character did put in a few appearances on screen, he was quickly removed, reducing the regular cast to Hancock and James. Yet even this wasn’t enough for the increasingly fractious Hancock, and for the last BBC television series, James was deemed surplus to requirements. Many commentators point to some of these 1961 episodes as being amongst the best of Hancock, and his solo performance in The Bedsittter is certainly a classic, but for me, Hancock was at his best when he had a regular sidekick like James to bounce off. I never warmed to the other comic foils like John Vyvyan and Mario Fabrizi who regularly appeared in the TV episodes, and the continual reappearance of such players in minor roles can only have served to mitigate against the realism that Hancock himself sought.

It’s easy to dismiss Hancock’s ambitions in this direction as pretentious or delusional, but listening to some of the radio episodes, one can perhaps begin to appreciate where he was coming from. Realism and continuity never troubled writers Ray Galton and Alan Simpson, who would frequently bend the format (along with the laws of time/space/physics) in the service of a gag. Some of the time, it works. On other occasions, you can sense Hancock’s frustration as, for example, his colleagues act out of character to swindle him out of £4,000 (The Prize Money) or absurd, physically impossible events take place. This kind of madness came as a result of the radio format, with Galton and Simpson exploiting the advantage of the listener’s not being able to see anything. An exchange such as that between Hancock and James in the episode Hancock’s Car makes full use of the fact that the audience can’t see the vehicle in question:

HANCOCK : Don’t like the colour scheme? Orange and heliotrope? Very voguey, that is.

SID: I think it’s the tartan hood that spoils it.

Realism is swept even further aside by the revelation that Hancock’s car has been standing at the kerb for so long that the surrounding street is several inches higher after being resurfaced on several occasions. But it’s all good, comic stuff, and once the listener accepts the surreal, ever-shifting nature of 23 Railway Cuttings and its inhabitants, such nonsensical ideas become an expected part of the format. Even so, Galton and Simpson could get carried away with such flights of absurdity, to which Hancock raised increasingly vocal objections.

It’s not for me to take pot shots at such sacred cows, but taken as a whole, Galton and Simpson’s work on Hancock’s Half Hour is, I feel, somwhat of a mixed bag. Grinding out scripts week after week, year after year was no mean feat, and the hit rate of ‘classic’ episodes is still remarkable. Yet the writers’ reputation often comes with an implication of comic infallibility – the suggestion that they could literally do no wrong with a genius like Hancock to work for. And yet many of the radio episodes – as well as some of the TV examples – fail to sparkle, relying too heavily on well-established conventions (such as Sid James’ character’s villainy, a card played far too often) or bending reality until it breaks. Others start out with some neat ideas, which fail to develop: The Prize Money, for instance, begins with a note-perfect parody of Take Your Pick, before descending into an unpleasant out-of-character piece wherein Hancock’s friends cruelly trick him out of the money he’s won. There’s only so far that any script can take its characters away from their established personalities before they simply become obnoxious. Another example from the same series, The Sleepless Night, comes complete with what should be a classic Hancock set-up: ‘the lad’ needs to be up early the next morning for a new BBC engagement, and takes the precaution of going to bed at seven p.m. Yet somehow, it fails to gel as, via a series of increasingly contrived situations, Hancock fails to get a wink of sleep. By this time, Galton and Simpson were writing both for the radio and television series, and The Sleepless Night would probably have made a much better episode in the latter medium.

'Bags me be the boot!' The ever-enterprising Chad Valley managed to make a board game out of Hancock's Half Hour, which looks like a cross between snakes and ladders and Monopoly…

Eventually, after scripting an ambitious feature film The Rebel, that saw Hancock transplanted to the streets of Montmartre among a beatnik community of artists, Galton and Simpson parted company with ‘the lad’ who now also broke away from the BBC, defecting to commercial rival ATV. ATV must have been very pleased to have secured the services of the nation’s favourite comedian, but they can’t have known that they were buying damaged goods. Hancock was well past his best, and his troubled personal life was beginning to show in his performances.

New writers were brought in, including Richard Harris (who would go on to create Man in a Suitcase), Dennis Spooner and Terry Nation (a story in circulation has Hancock ‘creating’ the Daleks in a moment of madness, but it was invented by the author of a certain biography). Hancock scholar Roger Wilmut, reviewing the ATV episodes for his 1978 book ,Tony Hancock ‘Artiste’ , describes them as ‘mediocre without being actually bad.’ Attempts to release them on DVD have continually been hampered by tricky negotiations to secure the rights, and it is unlikely that the ATV Hancocks will ever be widely available. By all accounts, we’re not missing very much.

Hancock’s career never returned to the high watermark of the late ’50s; but the severance of his working relationship with Galton and Simpson paved the way for two more classic creations of TV comedy: Steptoe and Son. The warring rag-and-bone men’s first appearance came courtesy of a Comedy Playhouse script, from a season of one-off ‘pilots’ that the BBC offered to G&S to fill the gap left behind by Hancock’s departure. Galton and Simpson would write four Steptoe series during the 1960s, before reviving the characters, this time in colour, for a further four during the ’70s. The success of Steptoe and Son must go a long way towards explaining why further such ‘pilot’ seasons were offered to Galton and Simpson, with two ‘Playhouse’ collections for ITV in 1969 and 1977. One might speculate as to the failure of these endeavours to light the blue touchpaper behind any new situation comedies, although not all of the scripts lent themselves to series development. Equally, with two such comic classics as Hancock and Steptoe behind them, Galton and Simpson may well have felt they had nothing left to prove.

For Hancock fans once starved of material, the situation has improved immeasurably, with most of the radio episodes being recovered from various sources (including privately-taped copies), and creditable remakes of the small number still missing from the archive. The television episodes, many of them broadcast live, are sadly under-represented, although every available example has now been released (including a famous instance wherein a ‘collapsing’ set failed to perform as expected). These days, Hancock’s appearances in the media are confined to the almost continual repeats of his radio programmes on BBC Radio 4 Extra (some of which I am even now coming to for the first time), and infrequent broadcasts of his two cinema films, with even these items now largely confined to specialist-interest channels. It’s doubtful that Hancock will ever be broadcast in quantity on BBC television again, and the mid-80s prime time repeats are now as distant as were the original broadcasts at the time.

DVDs are still available to purchase, but as the trend for home media begins to shift away from physical media and towards online platforms, will such archive items continue to be available? What, indeed, is the status of the BBC’s original film prints? One hopes that they are carefully preserved in a controlled environment somewhere, and have at the very least been archived as digital copies. But digital broadcast standards are ever-evolving, and that which is considered acceptable today may not remain so for much longer. There is a danger that Hancock, and other archive classics, may one day be formatted out of existence. And, as I’ve written in my last entry, the dwindling audience for such items will one day dwindle down to nothing. It’s not inconceivable that, by the end of this century, the name Tony Hancock will mean as little to a future generation as that of Dan Leno does to ours. You have been warned…

As the lad himself would have said: ‘innit marvellous!’

Nostalgia… it isn't… what it wasn't… what it will be

Nostalgia… as it was. Radio Times celebrates itself (1977, right) and BBC television (1976, left).

The shifting sands of pop culture nostalgia...

It’s a much-overused and fairly ancient witticism: ‘nostalgia – it isn’t what it was.’ But it happens to be true. When I was growing up, nostalgia meant the thirties, forties and, just appearing on the radar of most pop cultural commentators, the fifties. Nowadays it means... well, you tell me.

In 1976, the BBC broadcast a series of programmes celebrating forty years of its television service. That’s the equivalent of looking back from now to the 1970s. The post-war television service, representing the bulk if not the entirity of the Corporation’s archive was, at that time, a mere thirty years old, and there were plenty of people around who remembered the likes of The Grove Family, or the famously grumpy appearances of Gilbert Harding on What’s My Line. John Freeman’s ground-breaking Face to Face interviews were still vividly remembered and recognised for their importance. These days, you’d be hard pressed to find anyone who even knew what Face to Face was, and as for Gilbert Harding…

Nostalgia has moved on. The reason so few people remember the early years of television is fairly fundamental – those people aren’t around any more. The sands of nostalgia are shifting. Ten years back, there was still a relatively high level of interest in the iconic television series of the 1960s – the likes of The Avengers, The Saint, The Prisoner et al. Yet even then, it would probably have been true to say that interest in such items was on the wane. The high watermark for 1960s television nostalgia came around 1990.

Nostalgia, 1993 style: the fad for all things 60s reached its high watermark around this time.
Talk about a role call of style icons...

The late ’80s and early ’90s saw a huge resurgence of interest in the style, culture and attitudes of the 1960s. Sometimes this took the form of a modern-day reimagining, such as the Acid House movement of circa 1989. Elsewhere, car stylists began to reference the classics of an earlier era, creating modern icons like Mazda’s MX5 (a clear lift from the mid-60s Lotus Elan) and the retro-futurist Jaguars of the same period that recalled and refined the classic lines of the E-Type. In its most basic form, the 80s/90s nostalgia for the 1960s saw the reappearance of dozens of archive television series, many of them winning new generations of fans. In large part, this was down to the personal preference of the then controller of BBC2, but other channels followed suit, and before long, nostalgically-styled and themed satellite channels began to emerge, dedicated to such old programming, in the form of UK Gold and Bravo (the latter subsequently revamped into a kind of lad-mag hell).

The demise of Bravo in its ‘ABC Weekend Television’ retro-styling tells us a lot about the staying power of nostalgia. Like contemporary fashion, nostalgia doesn’t stay the same for long, and the saturation diet of 1960s programming seemed to run out of steam fairly quickly. By the end of the ’90s, the fad for old television had calmed down, with the only regular broadcasts reduced to a few familiar recycled repeats on the likes of ITV4 and UK Gold. Comparison of UK Gold’s output in, say 1995 with its schedule of a decade later also shows a shift away from niche interest, older programming like Doomwatch or early Dr. Who episodes, and a tendency to focus on repeats of essentially familiar comedy material drawn from the preceding decade.

As someone who works in the nostalgia industry, this shifting ground gives cause for alarm. At Network, we’re currently preparing a 50^th Anniversary edition of The Prisoner, its release accompanied by a special event at Portmeirion. I think it’s fair to say that this will probably be the last major retrospective granted to the series. I first worked on designs for The Prisoner back in 2009, and taking into account the various Blu-Ray and repackaged editions, there have been something like four different design iterations to date. Finding a new stylistic spin on a cultural artefact as stylised as The Prisoner isn’t easy, and it’s almost a relief to know that it’s unlikely that I will ever be called on to do it again. There are still, believe it or not, surviving members of the cast and crew who made those episodes, but they won’t be with us for much longer. Neither, for that matter, will the fans. And without fans, the memory of any cultural artefact will begin to dwindle, or find a new expression ‘underground’, ie away from the mainstream media.

There are dedicated groups of people out there who celebrate the fashion, music and culture of the 1940s, 50s and 60s – the latter category containing a small but fanatical group of young mods who have adopted an identical style and mental attitude to those of their grandparents’ generation. But you have to dig deep to find them. The mainstream media views such activities as outsider, eccentric, niche, which indeed they are. You will always be able to sell mod or swing compilation CDs (or, more likely vinyl albums), but in ever fewer quantities. Nostalgia is a great observer of the law of diminishing returns.

The resurrection of the vinyl album as a format is an exception that proves the rule. Astute marketing, together with the patronage of key music industry figures has created a new sub-genre for recorded music in its most primitive physical form, flying in the face of Spotify and the ubiquitous mp3. It won’t rescue the music industry – which in its post-war form is doomed to extinction – but it goes some way towards deferring the inevitable day when music returns to its original, pre-commercial status as free entertainment provided by itinerant, unpaid performers. In some quarters (which I inhabit) it’s already there.

If you ask me what’s nostalgic now, I wouldn’t be able to tell you. It’s probably something like Pokémon or Teletubbies, both of them now over twenty years old. But... and it’s a big but... something fundamental has changed in the arena of popular culture, altering our perception of what is and isn’t nostalgic. Formerly, children’s television programmes tended to come and go within the space of one generation (barring a few notables like Bill and Ben or Andy Pandy). The rapid disappearance of items like Hector’s House or Mary, Mungo and Midge from programme schedules was a guarantee of potent nostalgia value ten to twenty years down the line. These days, brand has become all-important, and a creation like Teletubbies will be carefully product-managed to endure over successive generations of young viewers. When I first saw Postman Pat, around 1982, I thought it a charming successor to the likes of Camberwick Green, and assumed that, like those ’60s icons, it would enjoy its moment in the spotlight before fading slowly into history. But Pat and his black and white cat continue to soldier on. They’ll still be at it even when Greendale has disappeared beneath fracking installations…

It’s hard to say when this phenomenon first took a hold. The BBC continued to broadcast the black and white 1950s originals of Bill and Ben well into the era of colour television, and the characters were later the subject of a successful revival; but only after an interregnum of maybe thirty years. I’d point to something like The Mister Men as being one of the first really long-lasting children’s character brands, and the late ’70s as the era when marketing began to drive the staying power of such cultural icons. People will still feel nostalgia for the pop culture classics of their childhood, but it’s harder to get that same warm glow from something that never really went away, or is marketed so relentlessly to successive generations.

Genuine nostalgia is, for me, a rediscovery of something you’d forgotten about almost entirely, which played a significant part in your life however many years ago. Old television has been pretty well squeezed dry of its nostalgia value, and we’re not far off the stage when every single item of film or television that survives in an archive will somewhere be available to buy, download or otherwise interact with. So where else is there to look?

There has been a growing interest, in recent years, in what might be referred to as ephemeral items of broadcasting: programme trails, news bulletins, commercials and other such fleeting moments in the schedule referred to by those in the know as ‘programme junctions’ or simply ‘continuity’. Search TV continuity on YouTube and you’ll find a wealth of such material. Its copyright status is generally unclear (although technically it resides with the original broadcaster), and as a result such items tend to go unchallenged. They have no commercial value, unlike the pop songs and TV/ film items which are routinely taken down.

This, I would argue, is the last bastion of nostalgia for those for whom the ‘drug’ of an old episode of The Saint no longer works. The material is too vague, the copyright issues too muddied for such items ever to have any commercial value and thus they have found an ideal home online. Dare I say so, but Network got there first... the company’s debut release of 1997 presented a selection of venerable Public Information Films which most definitely satisfied the criteria for nostalgia I referred to above.

So will anyone still care about the likes of Thunderbirds, The Saint, or The Avengers in thirty years from now? One or two of the greats, maybe, will endure: Thunderbirds has been revamped so many times it’s conceivable that, by mid-century, it will still hold some nostalgia value for today’s generation. Assuming anyone still attaches any value to the idea of nostalgia. Will nostalgia still be around? It is not, after all, a twentieth century invention, although it was in the twentieth century that it found its most potent forms of expression via the media of mechanical reproduction. These days, I see an increasing mania for novelty – out with the old, update to the new. Who can possibly feel nostalgia about an old computer or iPhone? And yet, such items are already perceived as future collectables. Got an Apple Lisa in its original box? I’d hold onto it if I were you…

To subvert that old saying, nostalgia isn’t what it was, wasn’t what it is, and who knows what it will be. Except, perhaps, Doris Day.

Tarred, feathered, and turned into a chicken...

A rare original Tom & Jerry title card from 1942's Fraidy Cat.
The films shown by the BBC mostly had replacement titles dating from later reissues.

An appreciation of Tom & Jerry, Part Two...

By the mid 1970s, Tom and Jerry had become a fixture in the BBC1 listings, with the cartoon shorts employed by the corporation as a kind of ‘scheduler’s glue’ between unrelated items of programming; quite often Nationwide and whatever quiz, soap opera or comedy came next in the evening’s line-up. Tom and Jerry were, at first, only one in a series of cartoon shorts shown in isolation on BBC1, filling such odd five or ten-minute gaps in the schedule. Others seen frequently in the ’60s and ’70s included Barney Bear, Foghorn Leghorn and Droopy, whilst the characters from the Warner Brothers stable were generally to be found over on ITV. BBC, of course, also brought us the Pink Panther (debuting September 1970), although the ‘fink’ was presented in his own 20-miniute package ‘show’ rather than being shown in isolation.

I’ve often suspected that those five or ten minute cartoons were used tactically to keep the BBC’s schedule slightly out of synch with ITV’s. Over on the commercial channel, programmes tended to begin on the hour or the half hour, whereas BBC were much more likely to begin a programme at ten past the hour (their ‘hour long’ series tending to run for 48-50 minutes). This meant that there would often be an overlap between a half-hour BBC series scheduled at 7.40pm, and the start of an ITV drama at 8pm. You could watch one or the other, but not both. Short items like Tom and Jerry helped maintain this ‘imbalance’ between the stations. But that’s only a theory...

Certain Tom and Jerry cartoons tended to get shown by the BBC more frequently than others, although with 114 titles at their disposal, the Corporation had no reason to repeat them too often. Even so, it was classics like Dog Trouble (1942), Cue Ball Cat (1950), The Midnight Snack (1941) and The Dog House (1952) that proved most popular, with their winning formula of conflict and wanton destruction. One or two silently dropped off the schedules as the BBC became more aware of their uncomfortable content. His Mouse Friday (1951) was one of the most problematic, with its theme of native islanders who turn out to be cannibals. Other titles just seemed to languish on the shelves for no discernible reason.

The first mention of Tom and Jerry in my diary comes on New Year’s Day, 1972, although I had been watching the cartoons for many years prior to that date. The Radio Times billing lists that day’s cartoon as Jerry Jerry, Quite Contrary, a Chuck Jones-directed short from 1966. Jones had come to the series in 1964 following some frankly awful efforts from Gene Deitch, produced in Czechosolvakia between 1961 and 1962. To aficionados of T&J, the Deitch cartoons quickly became well-known for their catastrophic mismanagement of the characters and format, and anyone in the know soon came to recognise that the hallmark of quality on any Tom and Jerry cartoon was the production signature of Fred Quimby, appended to the opening title sequence. For me, even the widescreen title card came to serve as a warning sign, as the later Cinemascope efforts from the Hanna Barbera era saw a significant step down in quality from the earlier classics.

My diaries through the ’70s continued to note occasional viewings of T&J, but the cartoons were so ubiquitous as to render such comment almost superfluous. I certainly saw many more than I kept a note of, and by 1980 I had begun using them to fill up the inevitable spare five minutes at the end of E-180 VHS tapes. In so doing, I inadvertantly preserved unedited broadcasts of titles that would later be edited to remove content perceived as racist (eg 1948’s The Truce Hurts).

One notable broadcast that did merit a diary entry occurred on Tuesday 16^th February 1982, which, as far as I can determine, marked the first-ever BBC broadcast of the prototype T&J cartoon, Puss Gets the Boot. Even the Radio Times acknowledged the historic significance in its listing for the day. Puss Gets the Boot presents an immediately recognisable Tom and Jerry under the guise of Jasper and Jinx, their original and thankfully discarded identities. Tom (Jasper) is at his fluffiest and most cat-like, features he would gradually lose as the series evolved, although Jerry (Jinx) arrives pretty much fully-formed. No good idea goes unused forever, and the Jinx name would eventually resurface – appended this time to a cat – in Hanna Barbera’s later Pixie and Dixie series. One element most definitely present in Puss... was Tom’s nemesis, the housekeeper, generally known as ‘Mammy Two-Shoes’ (although she is never named in any of the cartoons).

In later years, ‘Mammy’ would prove to be something of a problem, with her deep south accent and servant status in the T&J household being perceived as racial stereotypes. The fact of her being, effectively, an authority figure with the power to eject Tom from his comfortable surroundings was largely overlooked in the rush to condemn. In the USA, certain cartoons were withheld from broadcast, whilst others were subtly modified to alter or remove ‘Mammy’, sometimes revoicing her with a rich Irish brogue. The BBC showed no such fastidiousness and screened the ‘Mammy’ cartoons for years without comment or editorial elisions. Instead, it was an instance of perceived ‘advertising’ that got the Corporation’s knickers in a twist.

Push-Button Kitty – a tale that saw Tom ousted from his job as rodent catcher by a robotic feline – had been screened on numerous occasions before some BBC bright spark observed that the name of the mechanical cat was ‘Mechano’. Which sounds just like a certain construction toy. You could even imagine ‘Mechano’ to have been built from said commercial product, with his primitive nuts-and-bolts appearance. For this reason and no other, Push-Button Kitty was quietly dropped from the BBC’s line-up of regularly-repeated T&Js. I know this, as I searched the listings for it in vain during the 1980s. Its last scheduled broadcast was on 10^th November 1978, a fact confirmed by my diary entry of the same date. (Push-Button Kitty is nothing less than the Tom and Jerry equivalent of The Terminator... the robotic cat gradually smashes itself to pieces in its insane drive to rid the house of dozens of clockwork mice unleashed by Jerry, but even with its head and body gone, the internal workings carry on unhindered, eventually ending up inside Tom and turning him into a kind of cat-cyborg...)

Before I took to recording Tom and Jerry cartoons on VHS, and indeed, before the format was even available, I’d owned a couple as 8mm home movies. The generally dialogue-free cartoons were an ideal choice for the format, since the silent editions made perfect sense without the need for inter-titles (although the Walton company who produced them also offered editions with magnetic soundtracks). A complete Tom and Jerry would have fit comfortably into the one-reel 8mm format, but Walton’s deal with MGM obligated them to release the cartoons in slightly edited form, and thus the TV broadcasts always provided the best possible editions. Or at least most of the time. Somewhere, on a VHS tape, I still have a heavily-edited version of The Yankee Doodle Mouse (1943), from which the BBC removed several firework-based gags, fearful of encouraging imitation in young viewers.

Tom and Jerry remained a staple of BBC1’s early-evening programming throughout the 1970s and 80s, sometimes running as one-shots, latterly as double, sometimes even triple bills. There seemed to be an unwritten rule book governing the cat and mouse’s appearance on television. Any time up to around 7.30pm seemed to be acceptable, but they were rarely if ever seen any later than that. Aside from a brief period in 1968 during which the cartoons appeared during the pre-news children’s programme schedule, the duo’s adventures were generally aimed at a family audience, and shown at times when both adults and children would be watching. T&J's last appearance on BBC1 in their original form came on Sunday 4^th February 2001, in a ten-minute slot at 1pm between the current affairs programme On the Record and the Eastenders omnibus. The programme schedules were becoming less reliant on odd five or ten-minute items, although it may simply have been the case that the Corporation’s rights in the original cartoons had finally expired, perhaps being taken up by one of the many satellite networks that had arisen during the 1990s. Whatever the reason, the cat-and-mouse antics that had been so familiar a part of the BBC1 schedule would never again be seen on the channel, or indeed, on any other BBC outlet.

By this time, another iteration of the series was airing as part of CBBC: Tom and Jerry Kids refashioned the characters from the classic cartoons as their younger selves, but this new version seemed to be aimed squarely at children and to this day I have never seen an example. Why bother, when there are 144 classic editions (mostly) available to view – dozens of them readily accessible in HD via the usual internet sites.

Although the duo are long gone from BBC1, it’s interesting to reflect on their enduring popularity. Produced in colour, the cartoons haven’t dated, and only a very few examples show their age by the inclusion of popular musical or cultural items from the era in which they were produced – Tom’s rendition of Louis Jordan’s Is You Is Or Is You Ain’t My Baby in Solid Serenade (1946) serves as a reminder of the cartoon’s mid-40s origins: likewise, 1944’s The Zoot Cat, wherein Tom literally becomes a ‘hep cat’ in a parody of the fashions and slang of the jive era. Setting aside the occasional examples of mild racism, the cartoons remain essentially timeless, their appeal universal.

Personally, I always preferred them to the safer fare on offer from Walt Disney. Disney’s characters seemed too clean-cut, unthreatening, all-American, whereas Tom and Jerry kicked ass... literally, on dozens of occasions. They may have been violent, and cruel, but they were – and still are – laugh-out-loud funny. Perhaps you need a certain sense of humour to appreciate them. After all, where else could you see a puppy being tarred, feathered, and turned into a chicken?*

* Slicked-up Pup (1951)

'Listen, Pussycat...'

an appreciation of Tom and Jerry… part one

Tom and Jerry… one of the classic title cards from the late 1940s

I don’t know when I first became aware of Tom and Jerry. Growing up, it seemed as though the characters had simply always been around. There was no sense of their being brand new, or even of encountering them for the first time. I might well have seen them in the cinema; this is quite likely, in fact, as original Tom and Jerry cartoons were still being shown as supporting shorts as late as the 1980s. It may even have been via the medium of 8mm home movies, although it seems that their appearance on this format came slightly later than their debut on British television. Whatever the truth, it’s certain that if I hadn’t encountered them before, then my introduction to the eternally warring cat and mouse duo came via the medium of television, some time in 1967.

It was in April of that year that the cartoons debuted on BBC1. I can find no record of their having been broadcast prior to this, and it looks likely that the BBC did their deal with MGM in the advent of the final theatrical releases, which appeared between January and September of 1967. From the outset, the BBC seems to have had access to virtually the entire MGM archive, which had been running successfully in cinemas since 1940, although it was the cartoons from the classic era (circa 1945-1955) that dominated the schedules, certainly in these early years. First off the block, on Tuesday 4^th April was the undisputed classic Dog Trouble, which aired at the unorthodox time of 18.17, between the regional news magazine programme and the immensely popular Dee Time.

Although many viewers would have been familiar with Tom and Jerry from encounters at the cinema, Dog Trouble was a good choice to introduce the series on television, as it established the power relationships between the warring axis of Tom, Jerry and the bulldog (unnamed here but later known as either Butch or Spike). With a release date of April 18^th, 1942, Dog Trouble was the fifth in the Hanna Barbera series that would extend to 114 titles by the time production ended in 1958. Typical of these early examples, the characters are truer to their animal origins than they would later become, with only Jerry favouring bipedal posture, and no one uttering a word aside from Jerry’s barely-audible whispering in Tom’s ear as the protagonists unite in their conflict against the angry bulldog. It’s violent, extremely destructive, and all in all, classic Tom and Jerry. The formula had already been established with 1940’s pilot film, Puss Gets the Boot, intended as a one-shot until MGM persuaded creators Hanna and Barbera to launch the protagonists (suitably renamed) in a series of their own. It was fast, violent action all the way, with the characters shaking off endless assaults on their physical form as the narrative, such as it was, lurched from one ingeniously destructive set-up to another. By the end of Dog Trouble, the house in which our heroes reside has been comprehensively trashed, and not for the last time.

You don’t mess with a successful formula, and there would be relatively little tinkering with Tom and Jerry during the golden era, which we can date from roughly the mid 1940s to the mid ’50s. The only noticeable changes during that time came in the appearance of the characters, and as the series progressed, it would be Tom who was subject to the most radical reimagining. Both he and Spike/Butch quickly evolved from being animals with human characteristics into, effectively, humans in the shape of animals. The early Tom is still very much a ‘pussycat’, with his twitching whiskers, bristling fur, and a tendency to prance around on all fours. When he howls, it is usually in a typical feline fashion, a far cry from the soon-to-be famous yell, provided distinctively by co-creator William Hanna. Butch/Spike is equally very much the average dog in these early cartoons, snarling and snapping at Tom’s heels. His benign paternal side would come later, with the addition of a puppy (variously known as Chip and Tyke) placing him in the role of father figure/protector, in which capacity he was afforded plenty of opportunities to come to blows with Tom.

Watching the series as they aired over the years (always on BBC1) I became aware of these subtle differences in the characters; and whilst the original dates were generally too small to discern on a television screen, it nevertheless became fairly easy to date a particular cartoon according to Tom’s physical form. The earliest titles, I categorised as being ‘Fluffy Toms’, owing to his rounder-faced and notably more furry appearance. It’s almost impossible to say exactly when the ‘newer’ Tom acquired his definitive style, but as an approximate rule of thumb, the ‘classic’ Tom seems to have been in place by the time of 1949’s Love That Pup. He would be subject to only minimal modifications during the remainder of the ’50s, the most obvious being a change in colour from grey to blue.

I also recognised the superior quality of the animation in the pre-1950s cartoons, especially the backgrounds, (many of them exquisitely redered in watercolour and airbrush), although the post-1950 titles still include many of the greatest examples in the series, which generally maintained its high level of quality until around the middle of the decade.

By 1950, the series had reached its half century, having won four Academy Awards, alongside a handful of nominations. The classic conflicts continued, although concerns about violence seem to have been responsible for steering the series towards softer, more whimsical storylines, often notable by the appearance of Jerry’s nephew, Nibbles/ Tuffy. The animation, of course, remained nothing short of superb; but for the T&J connoisseur, a ‘highbrow’ entry such as Johann Mouse (1954) simply couldn’t hold a candle to the no-holds-barred punchups of the mid to late ’40s. The wartime T&Js were, on the whole, more violent than their peacetime counterparts, a fact later acknowledged by series producer Fred Quimby.

Good old fashioned violence continued to be popular in later titles like Muscle Beach Tom and Barbecue Brawl (both 1956), but there was no disguising the fact that the series had peaked. The Flying Sorceress (1956), rarely if ever screened by the BBC, was an aberration that strayed too far from the classic format, while Blue Cat Blues of the same year struck a decidedly downbeat note, with its out-of-character narration and final scene of our heroes sitting on the railway tracks contemplating suicide. The series, now entirely in Cinemascope, juddered to a standstill with the safe, domestic fare of Tot Watchers (1958) by which time MGM’s executives had got wise to the fact that they could earn as much from re-runs as they could from expensive new productions. Tom and Jerry would return, but without their creators William Hanna and Joseph Barbera.

The Songs That Chose Us...

Strange, the songs we remember… whether we want to or not.

I’ve written before about songs that embed themselves in the memory, becoming inextricably linked with a specific time and place. This, for me, is an entirely different phenomenon from hearing a song and liking it.

I well remember something my brother told me years ago about a memorable night on which he went with my dad to a concert given by the Buddy Rich Big Band in Birmingham city centre. You’d imagine that, on such an occasion, one might have had a number like the Rich Band’s Straight, No Chaser or Mexicali Rose going round on an internal loop. But no. For my brother, the song that came to signify that night in memory was a contemporary piece of chart pop – Dancing in the City, by Marshall Hain. Doubtless, the resonance of the word ‘city’ in the title, along with the song’s lyrical mentions of ‘alleys’ and ‘tonight’ had a lot to do with this, but it typifies the phenomenon that I’m talking about. Sometime, the songs we remember choose us, rather than the other way around…

I can cite dozens of examples. Many of them are so early that they belong to an era before I’d acquired the power of discrimination; of being able to decide which songs I liked on the basis of preferring certain sounds and melodies above others. Thinking about this has led me to ponder on what it is that imprints certain pieces of music on the memory; how it is that hearing a specific song can be the nearest thing to time travel we can experience.

Is it that we’re born with a predisposition towards certain melodic and harmonic patterns and begin to recognise them from the soundworld in which we grow up? Do certain songs somehow exert a hypnotic influence from constant repetition? Whatever it is that happens, it seems that certain pieces of music act on the memory in a Pavlovian or Proustian manner, so that the mere act of hearing them conjurs up a snapshot of a particular moment in time and space with which the song is inextricably linked. And they’re not always good songs. I wrote recently about Mungo Jerry’s In the Summertime, a track which possesses this quality but which I despise.

One factor which seems to have a bearing on all this is repetition. Songs which we encounter year after year have, for me, far less of this Proustian quality than those which appear for a short time and are scarcely heard of again. Transience seems to be one of the keys to the phenomenon. Some of the songs which, for me, have the most vivid associations in memory were barely in the charts for a week or more, following which they were seldom, or never played again.

One such song is Vince Hill’s The Importance of Your Love, a single which scarcely troubled the top forty compilers on its release in the summer of 1968. It peaked at number 32 on 16^th July, but is for me forever associated with the summer holidays of that year, particularly the last week or so when the prospect of returning to school began to loom large. This illustrates the difference between chart position and airplay. The Importance of Your Love was evidently played a lot on the radio, despite its poor showing in the charts, and this is how it impressed itself onto my memory. The tune, by French chansonnier Gilbert Becaud, now seems steeped in essence of mid to late summer – hearing it now I can see the huge, straggling elder bush in the garden that used to flower and bear fruit at this time of year, or hear the chimes of the Tonibell ice cream van as it trundled around the neighbourhood. The same song also curiously brings to mind a memory of a rare visit from some relations who travelled over from Aston on the bus one day towards the end of the summer holidays that year…

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vv2IoIoDuZw

There’s something slightly stranger going on here, though. Gilbert Becaud’s melody is not entirely original. The Importance of Your Love had started life as L’Important C’est La Rose (A Rose is the Most Important Thing), and had been a huge hit in France during 1967; but in composing it, Becaud had accidentally used a seven-note melodic progression that can also be found in The Toys’ 1966 hit A Lover’s Concerto. This, for me, was the most memorable phrase in the song, its ‘signature’ if you like, that set it apart from all other records. I’d never heard the Toys’ song at the time of Vince Hill’s release, only encountering it in later years – but when I finally heard it... it had the same effect as the Vince Hill single. That melodic phrase took me right back to the late summer of 1968. Which is strange, to say the least. Does this, then, mean that the mnemonic effect of any song is embedded in its melody?

Melody is certainly a factor, but I’m also aware of the power of the individual performance and even the production of a single. Reparata and the Delrons’ Captain of Your Ship was a minor hit around Easter of 1968, and this time it’s the whole single I remember, especially its nautical sound effects. This particular song has the curious effect of conjuring up a morning-time scene on a day in the school holidays – a bright and breezy sort of day at that, and there was washing on the line, suggesting a Monday. Easter 1968 fell on April 16^th, which coincides exactly with the song’s highest week on the chart, at No. 13. We had Radio 2 on in our house, which meant the ‘J.Y. Prog’ at 10.00am – and it was definitely Jimmy Young I remember spinning Reparata’s disc. I can’t remember if this was the first time I’d heard the song, but I suspect it was. In later years, I barely heard the song again, its absence only serving to reinforce the connection to that one specific day in 1968.

Absence also accounts for my recollection of The Mamas and the Papas’ Monday Monday, a song fixed firmly in 1966 for me: I can still picture our old valve radiogram with the song drfting from the speaker grille, and our mum commenting on how funny it was for a song to have a title like that. After its brief tenure in the charts, it would be another ten years before I heard it again.

As the Vince Hill example illustrates, a song doesn’t have to be a major hit to imprint itself on one’s consciousness. Returning to 1968 we find Marty Wilde’s non-hit Abergavenny failing to make an impression on the charts, for all its insistent, repetitive brass band melody. Despite being a big hit across Europe, Abergavenny didn’t even make the top 40 in the UK, but it wasn’t for want of trying: the single was flogged to death on daytime radio during the weeks of its release, which happily (or not) coincicded with our family going on holiday to... Llandudno. Not Abergavenny, but near enough. I didn’t see a ‘red dove running free’ but I had I done so, I’d have returned it care of Marty Wilde...

I never saw Marty Wilde perform Abergavenny on TV: my only encounter with it was on the radio. I didn’t even know who Marty Wilde was. In later years, I forgot everything about the song apart from the title and the maddeningly repetitive verse/chorus, but in my mind’s eye it was being sung by... Marty Feldman!

I’ve written previously about the way in which various pop culture items join forces in the memory to prompt a rush of recollections: thus, from the simple stimulus of Cilla Black’s Step Inside Love, I still get an instant hit of Captain Scarlet bubblegum cards, Tonibell ‘miniballs’ (ice cream in a plastic sphere) and White Horses on TV. 1968 again. What is it with that year? Sometimes, it takes no more than a single play of a song to fix a particular moment in time, particularly if the song is somehow appropriate. I’d remembered the Gunther Kallman Chorus single Daydream on the basis of a single radio play which was terminated mid way through by a thunderstorm. Thunder, albeit in the distance, also accounts for a similar memory, which I believe dates from the same year, 1970…

It was nearly the end of the school holidays, and the weather had turned foul. Most of the country was affected by extremely heavy, thundery rain, with intense storms occurring in places, and generating coverage on the evening news. The weather meant an enforced stay indoors, and my brother and myself had created ‘dens’ by draping blankets across the armchairs in the living room. Outside, the scene across the gardens was one of near twilight, despite it being a summer afternoon, as the rain fell like stair rods. I was aware that other districts were experiencing thunderstorms, but aside from an occasional distant growl, there seemed no prospect of a storm here in Sutton Coldfield. Into this atmosphere, from the muttering radio, drifted a song, one line of which was entirely appropriate to the moment. The song was Peter Paul and Mary’s Day is Done, and the single line in the lyric ran: ‘Is it the thunder in the distance you fear?’ I never heard that song again – it was a random radio play of an LP track, rather than a chart single, and for many years I had no idea what it was called. Only with the advent of the internet was I able to track it down by searching for that specific lyric. The rest of the song had faded in the memory, but that one line of words and melody lingered on… 

Sometimes, the nostalgic effect of such songs took a while to sink in, whereas with others, it seemed to happen almost immediately. Vince Hill’s single genuinely felt as if it was part of the atmosphere of the time when I heard it on the radio back in ’68... a strange contender for the zeitgeist, but there you go. At other times, it seems as if, on glancing into the immediate past, we recognise certain aspects of our surroundings, of which music is only one example, which seem to evoke an ineluctable quality, an atmosphere, for want of a better word.

I’m not even sure if this phenomenon still happens for me. Not listening much to contemporary music on daytime radio means that the chances of a specific track becoming locked down in time are far fewer than they once were. A relatively ‘recent’ example came in the form of Steely Dan guitarist Walter Becker, whose solo single Down in the Bottom, culled from his only solo album 11 Tracks of Whack still provides a mainline to the balmy, early spring of 1995. And that’s over twenty years ago…

I’ll close on a playlist of a few more selected few songs that, for me, will always have strong associations with past time… hearing any one of them I can reach back into the past and reconstruct a surprisingly complete picture of what I was doing, thinking, watching on television, toys, comics, school holidays, the weather… everything. Like I said, it's time travel.

See you yesterday!

Carly Simon/ You’re So Vain – March 1973

Gilbert O’Sullivan – Oo Wakka Doo Wakka Day – Early summer 1972

Scott Walker – Lights of Cincinatti – Summer 1969

Cher – Gypsys, Tramps and Thieves – dark evenings in autumn 1971

Manfred Mann – Ragamuffin Man – Early summer 1969

Sparks – This Town Aint Big Enough For Both Of Us – Spring 1974

Cockney Rebel – Judy Teen – Summer 1974