Beating the drum for Tom Tom

Tom Tom – presenter Jeremy Carrad (right) discusses the 1968 Grand Prix season with modelmaker Rex Hays

‘New, unusual, and fascinating stories and items of interest in a modern and changing world.’ This was how the Radio Times billing described a new series which debuted on Tuesday 12 October 1965. The series was Tom Tom, and it hailed from BBC Bristol, whose Points West anchor man Jeremy Carrad served as presenter. Largely forgotten today, Tom Tom was, in essence, Blue Peter for the modern world, with a focus on science, invention and technology. They even had their own ‘robot’, Tobor (‘robot’ spelled backwards), although the walking, talking machine was a mere flight of special effects fancy, contrasting the programme’s serious approach to science. 

Tom Tom seems to have evolved out of an earlier, more juvenile format Treasure House (24 March - 21 July 1965), that paired Carrad with a robotic hound, the punningly-named Serendipity Dog, who posed questions on a variety of topics, allowing Carrad to supply answers in the form of a wide range of factual information. Tom Tom effectively dropped the dog and added John Earle as a roving reporter, and the programme followed the Blue Peter template with a mix of studio-based items and filmed reports. An early item initiated in the series was to follow the progress of the 1966 Grand Prix Drivers’ Championship in the studio, initially with a scoreboard and scale models, latterly in the form of ambitious slot-car reconstructions of the actual events. In later years, Carrad would present filmed reports from the racetracks of the world.

My own recollections of Tom Tom are scant, but I remember Carrad as an affable presenter, and the robot was an amusing distraction, particularly when he was ‘programmed’ to do some comic business such as coming up with his own song for Christmas. One item I associate with Tom Tom was a feature about James’ Bond’s Aston Martin as seen in Goldfinger, which was released around the time of the series’ television debut (although this may well have been on Blue Peter). As I remember it, the team showed viewers a model of the car, which I recollect as including features that were not present in the first production example from Corgi Toys (I still remember wondering why my first Corgi model did not include tyre-slashers).

Although I saw Tom Tom most weeks in its early days, I doubt I made a special effort to see it, although I was still watching sporadically at the dawn of the 1970s, when the programme looked forward fifty years to imagine the dizzying future world of 2020. I wonder how many of their predictions have come true...

With its focus on technology, Tom Tom always felt somewhat more serious than Blue Peter, and was probably more akin to a junior version of Tomorrow’s World. The original target audience seems to have been boys aged eight and upwards, although this changed somewhat with the introduction, later in the decade, of female presenters, including future newsreader Jan Leeming, and the inclusion of items such as a competition inviting viewers to design the fashions of the year 2020.

1970 was to be Tom Tom’s last year on air, with the final edition going out on 4 November. Carrad had departed in 1969, exiting via a magician’s disappearing cabinet, but he had long since relinquished his presenter’s role to ex-ITV anchor man Norman Tozer, turning instead to filing filmed reports from around the world.

Unlike Blue Peter, Tom Tom never received the recognition of a yearly annual, nor any other type of publication or merchandise. Its status as a regional production may have had some bearing on this; BBC Enterprises were perhaps less likely to invest in a title that originated from outside London. There are almost no images of Tom Tom available online– the above image being the sole example I’ve been able to track down. This, if anything, is an indicator of the extent to which the series has been forgotten.

Part of what makes Tom Tom interesting, in retrospect, is the fact that it was pretty well the only attempt by the BBC to emulate the successful format of Blue Peter, albeit aiming at a somewhat more sophisticated audience. After Tom Tom, there would be no further efforts to create a magazine-style programme for young viewers, although Nationwide (and latterly, The One Show) subsequently became a de facto Blue Peter for grown ups. ITV, of course, enjoyed great, if not lasting success with Magpie, whose cooler, more contemporary vibe may well have been influenced by Tom Tom.

Tom Tom is one of those programmes that are poised on the brink of oblivion – almost forgotten by the majority, dimly remembered by a small minority, barrely represented (if at all) in the archives – and such items of television will ultimately be completely forgotten unless those of us who remember them do something about it. I’ve already had to correct the Wikipedia entry on the series which was short on information, and factually inaccurate in several respects, drawing on the dubious, badly-researched efforts of a website called TV Cream (which I do not recommend). The best online resource available to anyone interested in the history of Tom Tom is the BBC’s Genome database, derived from Radio Times billings, which includes several substantial write-ups of various editions from the latter part of the series’ run.

It may not have been Blue Peter, but Tom Tom was a worthwhile attempt to present modern, factual television to children in an era when experimentation and novelty were still the watchwords of television. And it had a cool robot and a big Scalextric set. In the ’60s, you couldn’t ask for much more than that.