WHAT TO LOOK FOR IN SUMMER

Barlow and Watt pose on the Ripper trail for a Radio Times cover in 1973

The right programme, the right time...

It’s summer... the days are warmer and longer, there’s no excuse to be indoors staring at the television, with the curtains closed. That’s the theory, as espoused during the 1970s by our mum (and, I’m sure countless other parents). The reality was, of course, rather different. Summer holidays meant morning repeats of Stingray and The Adventures of Tintin amongst others. During the afternoons, if you picked your moment (according to which ITV region you were living in) you could spend an hour in the company of Adam Strange, Frank Marker or John Drake. But what happened in the evenings? Some of my TV memories are so specific to long summer evenings that it feels almost obligatory to watch those programmes at this time of year. I’m re-running one at the moment.

Jack the Ripper, a curious documentary-drama hybrid, presided over by the fictional characters of Detective Chief Inspector Barlow and Detective Inspector Watt (late of Softly Softly:Task Force) turned up on BBC1 during the summer of 1973, and although I wasn’t a fan of Softly Softly at the time, I was curious to find out more about this notorious episode of Victoriana. The programmes are slow, very talky, and consist in large part of actors in period costume reading archive documents aloud. They’re frankly, a bit boring. But the low budget studo-based production made for a unique atmosphere, no small part of which owed to the marvellously evocative theme tune, courtesy of Bill Southgate (who had previously arranged the title music for Softly Softly). Southgate’s darkly eerie theme for woodwind ensemble, featuring bass clarinet, instantly became my favourite aspect of the series: and when it was re-used, somewhat less appositely, for Barlow and Watt’s follow-up investigative series Second Verdict, I recorded it on a cassette. Watching Jack the Ripper again, forty-seven years later, I still feel the same way: hearing that theme playing out over a rostrum camera shot of an engraving of old London, on a summer evening, just gone twilight outside, makes for a genuinely nostalgic atmosphere. More to the point, back in 1973, it felt somehow right to be watching that series at that time of the evening, and not just because of its emphasis on darkness and dark deeds.

Watching TV back then, when there was no possibility of time-shifting, I often felt that particular programmes gained something from being seen under what might be termed the ‘right conditions’. Strange Report was best experienced on a hot, sunny afternoon in 1976 with the curtains closed, whilst The Prisoner, with its bright, mediterranean colours, struck just the right incongruous note when viewed at 11pm in the late summer of that same year. Morning viewing was the same: even today, I only ever feel the need to watch an episode of Stingray on the ‘right kind’ of summer morning: calm, bright, the air still cool but holding the promise of a sultry afternoon to come. By contrast, Stingray’s eeriest episode, Invisible Enemy, was once seen by my brother and myself on a gloomy late afternoon just ahead of a gathering thunderstorm (7 May, 1970), and was such a good fit with the brooding menace outside that we would talk forever after about the ‘Invisible Enemy Storm’.

Other series that had their moments: The Persuaders! Stumbling across a repeat episode (A Home of One’s Own) on a rainy late spring evening in 1973 felt exactly right. Once again, the episode’s atmosphere was enhanced by the rainy twilight without. Trinity Tales: this neglected but glorious Alan Plater production was given a repeat run on Wednesday evenings in June 1977. I’d seen the earlier broadcasts in late 1975, but the atmosphere properly clicked on those warm June evenings.

Moody & Pegg: ITV’s whimsical flat-sharing comedy drama turned up on the communal telly in the ‘TV lounge’ at ‘Sandilands’, a seaside guest house in Llandudno where our family went for a week in the summer of 1974, and another series was set forever in its given time and place... Murder Most English: first shown in the late spring/early summer of 1977 and repeated at about the same time the following year, these comic tales of murder and intrigue in a very English community felt to me like ideal summer evening viewing: midsummer murders, one might say... Shillingbury Tales... one of the more obvious candidates, but well placed at about 7.30 on a summer Sunday evening. I could go on. In fact, I will...

Budgie, unearthed by Channel 4 in the mid 1980s after gathering dust for over a decade, felt perfectly placed on Friday evenings during the summer, even if I mostly ended up watching them on VHS the following day. The BBC’s Star Cops, from the same era, was another example – it felt more at home on a light evening than it might have done during the autumn or winter. And don’t ask me to explain why because I can’t. In all these cases, where the programmes are still available to watch on DVD, I always favour a repeat run at the ‘right time of year.’ I’ve long maintained that, in the arena of TV and film nostalgia, you get a better ‘hit’ the more you’re able to recreate the circumstances of your original viewing experience. If you can get hold of the right chocolate bar or savoury snack, so much the better. For years, I couldn’t open a bag of Walkers’ Roast Chicken crisps without a Proustian mental image of the opening credits of Fireball XL5...

Of course, some of the strongest memories attach to those series we shall never see again. It’s a Knockout was tailor-made for long summer evenings, and as it was shown on Fridays, it meant you got to stay out longer in the garden, devising ingenious games to be played with buckets of water...

What this all means is that, for me at any rate, archive viewing is not so much a question of what one wants to watch as what it feels right to watch at a specific moment. It still applies, even today. I never watched Columbo during the 1970s, but I’ve latterly found the ideal home for it, at about 6.30-7.00pm on a Sunday evening. Equally, certain Ealing comedies play very well for me on summer evenings at around 8pm, so that they’re coming to an end just as the twilight is coming on. ‘The aesthetic fool’, you may think, and you’re probably right... now, where’s that Columbo box set?