Diaries of Christmas Past

 

When I started this blog, back in 2016, my original source of reference was the diaries I’d kept, sporadically, beginning in January 1971 and detailing, for the most part, what I saw on TV, what comics I read, and so forth – the idea being to convey some idea of how it felt to encounter some iconic pop cultural phenomena on their first appearance.

The diaries were seldom written in any great detail, and there are often large blanks, some of which I filled in at the time by referring back to copies of the Radio and TV Times to remind myself what I’d watched and when (I was in the habit of keeping whole copies from around 1976 onwards). But as a general rule, I would write in a little more detail around Christmas time – television tended to up its game, and there were new toys, books and records deserving of a mention.

So, for my next few entries, I’m going back to the diaries of the 1970s to see what I was watching all those Christmases ago. The first diary that contains any entries around Christmas time is 1974, and starting on Sunday 22 December, I note that I watched the big film on BBC1 that evening, Grand Prix... these days seldom seen on television, and a very distracting movie to watch on account of its reliance on split screen techniques. The Sunday-before-Christmas primetime slot suggested the BBC considered it a blockbuster, and it was certainly promoted as such, but today it is a near-forgotten movie.

Of much greater enduring interest that same evening, separated from the big movie by the news bulletin, was the Omnibus documentary Mr Laurel and Mr Hardy, a timely retrospective of the film careers of Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy, which yielded valuable archival interviews with many survivors of the era including their boss, Hal Roach Jr, who outlived his two comedy stars by several decades. This was the first L&H documentary ever attempted on television, but sadly, save for occasional exhumations of choice interview clips, it has languished in the archive for years.

Since 1972, holiday seasons meant daytime television repeats, and the BBC were running episodes of Star Trek throughout the festive season, billed as ‘Holiday Star Trek’, in a short tradition that would continue into the following year. Somewhat amusingly, the Radio Times billing refers to ‘the return of the real-life Captain Kirk’, the cartoon series having lately usurped the original in the schedules. My diary records that I saw the episode brodacast on Monday December 23, the classic tranporter malfunction tale The Enemy Within. The diary also records that on the same day, I saw ‘Boss Cat’ (I actually wrote it thus, preserving the BBC’s own appellation) – this at 9.55am. Later on, there was a Christmas Blue Peter which illustrated the theatrical ‘Kirby Wire’ flying harness in operation on the pantomime circuit. But the evening’s must-see programme came at 9.05pm on BBC2 in the form of a Horizon episode looking at the work of special effects in film and television, a subject which already fascinated me. Aside from glimpses of classics like King Kong and Mighty Joe Young (neither of which I had seen since the 1960s), the programme also offered viewers a fleeting first glimpse of Gerry Anderson’s Space:1999, which would not come to air for another nine months. Two great documentaries in a single festive season? The BBC would never reach such heights again, at least not in my estimation.

Monday December 23 concluded with what was fast becoming a Christmas tradition in the form of a filmed adaptation of an M.R. James ghost story. I’d seen my first of these back on Christmas Eve 1972, with the eerily atmospheric A Warning to the Curious, itself the second in the series and arguably one of the best editions. 1974’s offering was without doubt the very best: The Treasure of Abbot Thomas featured a notable performance from the great Shakespearean actor Michael Bryant – a face familiar to me from his memorable single-episode appearance in the series Colditz. I’m not sure I found Abbot Thomas quite the equal of A Warning... at the time, possibly on account of its antiquated atmosphere, and more obliquely realised threat, but when I finally saw it again, on a 1983 repeat, its greatness was instantly apparent. By that time, video recording was available and I had the presence of mind to commit Abbot Thomas to VHS, in which form I re-watched it on many successive Christmases... when a little slime may or may not have bubbled under the front door...

Christmas Eve ‘74 brought us what would go on to become a perennial classic festive sitcom episode, in the form of The Likely Lads (losing it’s ‘Whatever Happened to...’ prefix for this one-off festive edition). It’s probably the best of all of Bob and Terry’s televised adventures, albeit nobody knew at the time that we’d see no more of them (aside from 1976’s cinema outing, itself a staple of festive telly in years to come). We’d been out visiting relatives during the afternoon, but were back home in time for the lads' festive special. The episode has been much repeated over the years but today is to be seen in slightly modified form, a reference to Rolf Harris having been expunged by the BBC. Those wishing to see the unbowdlerised version are advised to seek out the DVD release.

This classic was followed by the evening’s big film Ice Station Zebra, receiving what must have been its British television premiere. The trails for this focused heavily on Patrick McGoohan’s scenery-chewing performance... ‘put another torpedo up the spout, blow another hole in the ice, but GET ME THERE!’ he roared.

Christmas Day highlights, as recorded by the diary, were The Generation Game, Mike Yarwood and Some Mothers Do ‘Ave ‘Em. No mention of Morecambe and Wise, and for good reason: inexplicably, there was no Eric and Ernie Christmas Show that year. Frank Spencer had bagged the cover of the Christmas double issue of The Radio Times (in the days before it had become, ahem, ‘legendary’) and his show, airing at 7.15pm on Christmas Night, was clearly the big draw of the year. One festive televisual tradition that seems to have fallen out of favour this year was the ‘Christmas Night With the Stars’ compilation, a mix of sitcom snippets and variety items that had been a popular Christmas Day tradition for at least a decade.

Boxing Day brought another festive tradition in the form of a Beatles movie. You only got one a year, and this year’s offering was Help!, going out at 10.30 am immediately after Star Trek’s dodgy Halloween outing Catspaw. Elsewhere in the schedules, The Magnificent Seven lost out in our house to ITV’s big evening movie offering, The Valley of Gwangi, with the dinosaur exiting stage left just in time to turn over for a slightly disappointing Christmas Steptoe and Son on BBC1 at 9.05. The ‘Harold wants a holiday and the old man doesn’t’ trope had been played out on previous occasions, and it’s a shame that Galton and Simpson chose to revisit this well-worn scenario for what would prove to be the very last episode of their classic creation.

With that, the festive telly entries in the 1974 diary begin to fizzle out... there were new LPs waiting to be played (one of them is still waiting, 46 years later), annuals to be read, games to be played. Was 1974 the year of Haunted House? The diary makes no mention, but does refer to something called Spy Trap, which despite the intriguing title, was a fairly primitive variation on ludo.

The diary does include honourable mentions for Top of the Pops ‘74 and the traditional ‘complete’ Dr. Who serial Planet of the Spiders, both duly noted for Friday December 27. And speaking of that pesky timelord, he’d only gone and changed his appearance, because Saturday evening brought the intriguing prospect of a new face in the Tardis.

New Year’s eve offered an Old Grey Whistle Test special, a tradition which arguably continues to date in the form of Jools Holland’s ‘Hootenanny’. And on New Year’s Day itself, we got an episode of UFO, The Pyschobombs... which was my first look at the series in colour.

Next time, we’ll fast forward to December ‘75...

End of the Road

Thunderbirds in the 70s... and beyond

I never grew out of Thunderbirds, although I can recall a time when it seemed to slip back into second or third place amongst the Anderson canon. Captain Scarlet, when he arrived, immediately conferred upon Thunderbirds a sort of dated quality, and it wasn’t merely a question of the new generation of marionettes. Curiously, part of it seemed to stem from the improved asethetics of the series, particularly as regards the use of typefaces. In the first series of Thunderbirds, every item of hardware that demanded a label seemed to be identified in a large, friendly sans serif font that I would later come to recognise as Grotesque No. 9. By the second run of episodes, a new, cooler, futuristic font was in evidence: Microgramma (otherwise known as Eurostile). The ubiquity of this typeface across the later Anderson productions (all the way through to UFO) helped to consign Thunderbirds to a kind of retro-futurist backwater of car indicator bulbs and toothpaste tube caps that had endured since the latter days of Supercar.

As the 1960s drew to a close, Thunderbirds began to lose its grip on the popular imagination. Toys gradually began to disappear from the shelves, and were seen on increasingly rare occasions: I recall finding a glut of mid-60s JR21 models in a toyshop in Paignton, Devon, as late as 1971, but such sightings were a rarity. Only Dinky toys remained widely available, with their FAB 1 and TB2 models continuing in the company’s catalogues for years to come. Adventures continued in TV21, but they became less and less like what I remembered from the TV series, with some quite out there artwork and psychotic villains more suited to a superhero comic. These strips still looked extraordinary thanks to the bravura artwork of Frank Bellamy, but the writing was, frankly, mental. Scripts were, I believe, the work of TV21 contributor Scott Goodall, who took every available opportunity to trash Tracy Island and the Thunderbird craft, having done the same with Fireball XL5 a few years earlier. Thunderbirds annuals continued through to 1969, when the series doubled up with Captain Scarlet, and saw a ‘slight return’ courtesy of Polystyle publications in 1971, but the contents were increasingly a disappointment.

The Tracys’ last hoorah came with the release, in summer of 1968, of the movie Thunderbird 6. We saw it at the Odeon Sutton Coldfield and even at age seven I recall a sense of feeling slightly underwhelmed by it all. I’d half expected a Captain Scarlet movie – and at the very least I was hoping for a cool new piece of hardware to fulfil the promise of the title. Granted, Skyship One looked great, and went out in a blaze of pyrotechnic glory, but did anyone my age care about an aeroplane of WW1 vintage? Indeed we did not. Was Gerry Anderson slipping? Further evidence arrived a few months later when Joe 90 made his TV debut. I was all in favour for a few weeks, but it somehow never quite lived up to the sheer explosive excitement of those earlier series.

Thunderbirds remained a staple of children’s television until around 1971, when my earliest diary entries record a new run of repeats, beginning with Trapped in the Sky before jumping to the mid-series episode The Imposters, and thence to a run of second series stories. Despite being broadcast in colour, I was still viewing in black and white, our first colour TV set being still three years in the future.

Seeing the series in colour for the first time was a minor milestone, but I had to wait until Easter 1975, when ATV in the Midlands ran a one-off broadcast of the episode Lord Parker’s ‘Oliday. Richocet followed at Christmas, but for me, this would prove to be the last sighting of International Rescue on the small screen for the best part of a decade. But there were other ways of watching Thunderbirds...

In the era before home taping of television programmes, the only way to see your favourite shows when not on air was via the medium of 8mm home movies. As far back as 1965 I recall seeing a 4-minute extract from a Fireball XL5 episode on my uncle’s Standard 8 projector, and several such films were available, some of them complete with soundtracks. At Christmas 1977, I was bought an 8mm movie projector and I quickly acquired the few Thunderbirds movies that were available in the format: Day of Disaster and Thirty Minutes After Noon came in 1-reel black and white silent editions lasting around eight minutes each, with captions burned into the picture. I later acquired some 50ft colour shorts of highlights from Trapped in the Sky and Attack of the Alligators, all of which was a far cry from owning the entire series as a DVD box set.

During the 1970s, I also brought my collection up to date by acquiring the Thunderbirds paperback novels that had appeared in the mid-60s and were still relatively easy to find at jumble sales and second hand shops. Toys were a different matter. Aside from a board game and a couple of jigsaws, I didn't find any old Thunderbirds merchandise available to buy, with the sole exception of a Thunderbird One-shaped pencil sharpener, a new old stock item that turned up at Birmingham's Nostalgia and Comics (also an excellent source of vintage TV21 comics).

 

'Sharpenings are go!' That TB1 pencil sharpener sits today in a cabinet of other vintage goodies

Strange as it may now seem in this era of never-ending über-fandom, by around 1980, to declare oneself a grown-up fan of Gerry Anderson was to belong to what felt like a very, very small clique of individuals, scattered across the globe. At this time, I enjoyed a correspondence with Amsterdam-based Anderson aficionado Theo De Klerk, who might easily have been the only person on the planet who shared my enthusiasm. Through his good offices, I was able to acquire photographs, film prints, audio tapes of episodes and even occasional video tapes on the recently-arrived VHS format. A few fellow enthusiasts gathered one evening in my parents’ back room to watch 16mm prints of Captain Scarlet (Seek and Destroy) and a stunning colour print of Stingray (Rescue from the Skies). Amongst those in attendance was Starlog writer David Hirsch, future Network CEO Tim Beddows, and the late modeller and prop collector supreme, Philip D. Rae. Sitting there in the dark with the projector clattering away, we felt like the last of the faithful. Fanderson hadn’t yet got going, and hooking up with fellow collectors was a tenuous and difficult business. Did anyone still care about Supermarionation? Fortunately, we now know the answer to that question, but back in 1980 it all felt a bit niche, frankly.

It was through these channels of tentative fandom that I acquired my first video copies of Thunderbirds. The series had made its last on-air appearance on British screens in the Yorkshire TV area, circa 1979, where a number of episodes were diligently committed to Umatic Video Tape by a college video technician by the name of Rod Oldfield. From this source, I was able to acquire decent (for the time) transfers of episodes including Sun Probe, End of the Road and The Uninvited. Compared with what came later, they barely qualified as ‘standard def’ but next to some of the barely watchable bootlegs I’d seen of other material, they were good stuff. The colours were a bit over-saturated and unsteady, but this was still emerging technology, and one had to be prepared to cut it a generous amount of slack. And, after all, this was Thunderbirds.

Acquiring these precious copies confirmed what I’d secretly known all along. Never mind those brief dalliances with Fireball XL5, Stingray or Captain Scarlet: Thunderbirds was the best and would never be beaten. You couldn’t keep a good thing down, and sure enough, within a year or so, a set of nice new 35mm prints saw the series restored to television for the first time in almost a decade. I spared no expense in acquiring a full set of off-air recordings in what was then seen as pristine quality. The colour grading of these prints (and the subsequent Carlton DVD release) was in fact superior to the later HD remaster.

Exciting though this revival was, it pales into insignificance compared with what was to come. In 1991, the unthinkable happened. Well, it seemed unthinkable to someone who’d grown up with Thunderbirds on ITV. Suddenly, the BBC had acquired the series, and a new, clean set of prints began to appear in a prime early evening slot (ITV’s 1982 screenings had been confined to lunchtimes and mornings). A whole new generation discovered the series and presumably experienced the same insane rush of excitement that I’d felt at the same age back in the mid-60s. Before you knew where you were, the whole merchandising phenomenon was starting all over again. History, from my own childhood, was repeating itself. Aged 30, I found myself visiting the local branch of Woolworths’ to see what new toys had been added to the range. Some of them were very nice indeed – one might even venture to say they were too good for their own good – but all were let down by the too slick, too shiny packaging, none of which managed to recapture the lovely retro aesthetic of those 1960s toys. I bought, and still own a few of them, but I’d trade the lot for a battery-operated, mid-60s J Rosenthal Thunderbird One.

Of the subsequent revivals and reboots, I will offer no comment except to say, simply, ‘not for me, thanks.’ For me, the whole point of ‘classic’ Thunderbirds is its real-world aesthetic of models being blown to bits with fireworks, and ‘real’ characters in ‘real’ rooms, all of them crafted by model makers of peerless talent and vision. This was a unique way of making television films and it’s a shame that Gerry Anderson allowed it all to be dismantled when the chance came to do it all with actors. Shame too, that the puppets had to ‘evolve’. So they bobbed around a bit, their heads were too big for their bodies, and their mouths went up and down in a fairly unrealistic way: but that was why we loved them, and what set them apart from any number of live actors, CGI creations or cell animations. A unique art form found its ultimate expression in Thunderbirds and this is why, I believe, there will still be kids watching it in 2065. And it won’t be the 2015 version they’re watching, either. 

F.A.B.!

The Case That Went Cold

 Revisiting The Enigma Files

 

I think I have one of ‘those faces’: you know the type. There’s something naggingly familiar that reminds you of someone you’ve seen on TV. At work and elsewhere, people often used to tell me I looked like such-and-such off the telly. Not all of them good, either. But the first of these ‘not quite lookalikes’ is the one I always remember: Tom Adams.

He may have been 42 to my 20-something, but, around the early 1980s there was a certain, and occasionally-remarked upon similarity between myself and the stage and screen actor who, at the time, was perhaps best known for fronting a long-running series of commercials for furniture warehouse DFS. Much later, I learned that our dates of birth were merely two days apart (and some 23 years...) but I don’t think astrology has much to do with physiognomy. Maybe it was on account of this slight resemblance that I was prepared to cut old Tom rather more than the usual amount of slack when it came to his appearances on the small screen.

A capable actor and a familiar face on television and film during the 1960s, there was, nevertheless, a certain quality about Tom Adams that made him an ideal candidate when the DFS gig came up. Remember Patrick Allen buzzing around in his helicopter whilst extolling the virtues of Barratt Homes? Yes, that quality... avuncular yet assertive: the tone is warm and reassuringly confident, but there’s no mistaking the call to sit up straight and pay attention. Admittedly, nobody did it quite like Patrick Allen (still much imitated long after his demise), but Adams came pretty close. Over the years, he clocked up guest appearances in the likes of The Avengers, Maigret, Dr. Who and even The Great Escape, as well as ongoing character roles in The Onedin Line and Emergency – Ward 10, although he remained under my own personal radar until the spring of 1980 when the BBC smuggled onto the schedules a low-budget crime drama series called The Engima Files.

The Enigma Files was possibly the first example on television of what would now be called a ‘cold case’ drama. Adams played an ex-Detective Inspector placed in charge of a warehouse of ‘open case’ files: investigations that have been left unconcluded but are no longer being pursued. It was original enough to grab my attention in an era when new, British detective type drama series were surprisingly thin on the ground, and accordingly, I tuned into BBC2 at 9.30pm on Tuesday, April 15, 1980.

Let’s just look again at that last sentence: BBC2, Tuesday, 9.30pm, April 15... this was clearly not a series of which the BBC entertained great expectations. With a start date of mid-April, the 15-part series would end in late July, a traditional television graveyard. A start date in January would have given it more of a chance, and as to the channel placement: well, I’m not sure to what extent if at all BBC2 commissioned its own drama series or whether this was a case of a show considered a dud being quietly hidden away in an inconspicuous slot. And slots don’t come much more inconspicuous than 9.30pm on a Tuesday, on BBC2. Even One Man and His Dog managed better...

So what was all the lack of hoo-hah in aid of? Thanks to the miracle that is YouTube, we can now find out, as some public-spirited user has uploaded what may very well be the entire 15-part series. The Enigma Files wasn’t just buried on release, it’s stayed that way ever since, without so much as a half-baked VHS to its name. I’m not sure if it found its way onto satellite, but if so, it eluded me (not that I was looking out for it). You might say, it became its own cold case...

Watching it again after over thirty years, it has acquired a quality it most certainly did not possess at the time: nostalgia. The street scenes, populated by dirty, unappealing cars (not to mention citizens) are strongly redolent of the late 70s (with good reason), and the grim November/December weather merely adds piquancy to that whole ‘winter of discontent’ vibe. Contasting this, the VT scenes look, to quote a comment from the TV forum Roobarb’s, ‘beige’: an excellent description which can be applied to a whole raft of videotaped drama and comedy from the same era.

The opening episode, The Sweeper, sees Detective Inspector Nick Lewis shunted out of the force, apparently on account of his maverick tendencies. The way his superior officer is going on, you’d think he was dealing with Jack Regan, not cosy Mr. DFS sofas. But heigh-ho... Nick takes up his new job in a very beige late 70s office where Sharon Maughan is doing a screen test for the Nescafé commercials that would make her a household face later in the decade (she is, honestly, stirring a cup of coffee when we first meet her). Sharon plays Kate Burton, a civil servant in charge of the administrative backwater in which Nick has been dumped. The only other member of the ‘team’ we get to meet is Phil Strong, a slightly chubby guy with a bad sweater and an even worse haircut, played by comic actor Duggie Brown (and, surprise, surprise, Phil is the series’ token ‘comic turn’).

Rather than spending all day filing dusty old Eastlight box files, DI Lewis, egged on by a daughter old enough to be his wife, decides to look into some of the unsolved cases, and starts with the murder of a petty criminal in the grounds of the mansion of a wealthy crime boss, portrayed by that doyen of Talking Pictures TV, Sydney Tafler. In the course of the investigation, Nick narrowly avoids being blown up by a car bomb and blown away by a sawn-off shotgun, all of which sounds like ripping adventure on paper and must have helped sell the series to whoever signed off on it. But the Enigma Files is no Sweeney. Sure, it had aspirations in that general direction: but Tom Adams is just too likeable to be a rival to Jack Regan, and despite some half-hearted efforts on the part of series writer Derek Ingrey (nope, me neither), the hoped-for bristling relationship between Nick and Kate doesn’t really catch fire... at least not in this first episode.

The music doesn’t help: back in the late 70s, it was written into the statute book that every crime or detective drama series must feature slightly funky incidental music with wah-wah guitar. That box was ticked with due diligence, but the result sounds more suited to accompany the exploits of PC Penrose than a hard-nosed detective on the mean, rainy streets of North London.

The drama proceeds at a reasonable pace, with a few talky interludes punctuated by some action sequences that feel more like an obligation than a natural part of the storyline; and, if you check it out, don’t expect much from the ending. But do check it out, because The Enigma Files had its heart in the right place, and is warmly nostalgic in all the right ways. It’s easy to see why the BBC clearly thought so little of it in its day, but the series did spawn the obligatory paperback novelisation, which suggests it might have done rather better business than Auntie anticipated. And, as a 19-year-old viewer, I stuck with it for pretty well the entire run, so it must have had something... apart from a lookalike lead actor, of course.

And now, having said all that, I’d like to take this opportunity to sell you a three-piece suite... 

https://youtu.be/nWx95k37tvM