Whatever Happened to You?

The Likely Lads of Popular Culture

Dave (1975) and Tim (2021) pose in front of the same patio door...

Nostalgia for old television. When did it get started? I’m sure that in my early childhood there were probably those who held fond memories of Sylvia Peters and the days when dinner jacketed BBC announcers addressed the nation surrounded by parlour palms and aspidistras. But it’s not something one heard the grown ups discussing. Television was certainly a topic of conversation, but it was decidedly in the present tense. As a genuinely popular cultural phenomenon, television didn’t really take a hold in Britain until the mid-50s, which means that when I first encountered it, it was barely five years old. And nostalgia takes a little longer than that to ferment…

For me, I think it all began around 1970, when I developed a fascination, bordering on the obsessive, with Gerry Anderson’s Fireball XL5. The series had been off air for just four years, but at the age of nine, that’s almost half a lifetime. All I had to remind me of the show was a few annuals, and a couple of toys that had survived almost intact. For months I fixated on Fireball, reading the books, playing with the toys. I even took my plastic Fireball XL5 toy on our family holiday. In the autumn, it seemed as if my obsession had borne fruit, because lo and behold, in the middle of September, timed to coincide with the debut of Gerry Anderson’s UFO, our local ITV station, ATV Midlands, began a repeat run of my favourite series.

I’m not sure that any of my friends at school shared my interest in Fireball XL5 and the work of Gerry Anderson in general. My brother went along with it, and was bought all the same toys, but I don’t think he ever quite went for the world of puppets the way I did. Nor did I know anyone who took much interest in another strand of television that was just beginning to pique my interest – the action/adventure series produced by ITC, which were entering a kind of afterlife of repeat runs.

In the spring of 1972, a school friend of my brother, two years younger than myself, became a regular visitor to our house. Tim, then aged just nine, was mad about any kind of audio gadgetry, which at the time amounted to tape recorders and record players. He had a tiny portable tape recorder with three-inch spools onto which he would record snippets from the television, most notably The Saint, which was being repeated on Friday evenings. It took a while for me to get to know him properly, but Tim would become one of the first people with whom I could share my enthusiasms for television and films, both old and new. In time, we would revisit series I dimly remembered, including ITC’s Strange Report and, most notably, The Prisoner.

In 1973, I moved up to the local grammar school, where I met another fellow traveller. Dave shared the same enthusiasms I’d picked up on over the years: Gerry Anderson, James Bond, Dr. Who, comics and old annuals. We began what might be termed ‘competitive collecting’, in as much as we were in the market for the same items, usually hard to find. Once, memorably, Dave whipped an old Supercar Annual from under my nose on a bookstall at the school’s Christmas Bazaar of 1975. I had to make do with an Avengers Annual from 1968, itself a rarity, but not in the same league as Supercar. Until that moment, neither of us had even seen a Supercar Annual, so this was a significant find. In fairness, he later loaned it out to me for a few weeks. Such is the danger of sharing your enthusiasms with your mates. As collectors of vintage ephemera we were a kind of Likely Lads of Popular Culture, chasing not girls but Doctor Who annuals, and occasionally falling out over them. I’m not sure who was who, but Dave looked more like Rodney Bewes than I did...

Still visible under the thumbprints: Dave, and Annuals, in our back garden, summer 1975

We were better matched with the Man from UNCLE paperback series which we both collected during 1974 and 75, these being somewhat easier to find (until you got past No.8… see my separate post for a full round-up of the UNCLE book mania).

While I stayed on at the grammar school to take ‘A’ levels, Dave left school after the ‘O’ level exams and I never saw him again after the summer of 1977. I’d begun to suspect he was losing interest in collecting, after his cool response when I found another, earlier Supercar Annual a few months after the incident at the Bazaar. I was ultimately proved wrong, for of the two of us, it was Dave who turned out to be the serious comic collector. Despite a tentative career in local industry, he somehow found his way into the world of buying and selling comics as a professional enterprise. When our parents met up by chance a few years later, I was told that Dave was now doing very nicely thank you working as a comic dealer out of New York. His career trajectory from that point onwards is unknown to me, but by the early 90s he was running a shop in Cambridge and, later, began working for the comics publisher Titan Books.

Dave dropping off the radar came as less of a loss than it might have done, because during the preceding year and a half, Tim had become a much more significant figure in my life. It helped that he lived within walking distance while Dave’s house was a bus ride away, and while Dave had other interests like football to distract him, Tim shared my antipathy for the ‘beautiful game’. Saturday afternoons for us meant trips up to Sherwoods’ film library in Birmingham, or the junk shops of Walsall, in search of TV tie-ins from the 1960s. If Dave and I had been the Likely Lads of Man from UNCLE paperbacks, then Tim and I became Bob and Terry in our enthusiasm for 8mm films of old TV series.

It was with Tim rather than Dave that I kindled my enthusiasm for the ITC series: we were both glued to the screen for the repeat run of Strange Report in 1976, albeit Tim’s glue had rather more adhesion than mine. When the series moved from its Sunday afternoon slot after only three episodes, it became a moveable feast across the schedule, liable to pop up on random Friday mornings before settling into a more consistent run as a weekday afternoon filler. Although he should have been at school for most of these broadcasts, Tim ‘bunked off’, something our mum would never have countenanced. The repeats primed us for the more significant return, in late August, of The Prisoner. I doubt if any screening of a television series was ever more keenly anticipated. We knew about it months ahead of time, via the television column in the Birmingham Evening Mail, and we were ready and waiting at 11pm on Thursday August 26.

Just as Dave outclassed me in comic collecting, so too did Tim. I was the first of us to own an 8mm sound projector, but it was Tim who provided the films we watched on it, making trips over to Dudley to hire episodes of The Avengers, The Sweeney and even The Beatles’s Magical Mystery Tour. It was Tim who went on to collect 16mm films, and ultimately, original broadcast prints of our favourite series on 35mm film. It was Tim who turned his obsession into a profitable business whilst I shouted encouragement from the sidelines. My own choice of career – illustrator cum graphic designer – was just about scraping along, so when Tim invited me to join his company I was grateful for the opportunity.

But of the three of us, only I remain to tell the story. In the past week I have learned of the death of Dave, with whom I had tentatively and briefly re-established contact via email some five years ago. But despite a flurry of communication over the space of a few weeks, we never did get to meet up face to face.

Tragically, Tim died suddenly in November 2022, bringing to an untimely end a friendship I imagined would endure into our dotage. I could even picture us, in his home cinema, still guffawing at his favourite junky, spliced-to-hell 16mm print of Jason King. As Simon and Garfunkel sang on their Bookends album: ‘How terribly strange to be seventy… and old friends’. A milestone we will, sadly, never see.

Tim was in my life for fifty years, from 1972-2022, Dave just shy of four years, 1973-77. Without them, the journey would have been a hell of a lot less fun.

In memory of Tim Beddows, 1963-2022 and David Hanks, 1960-2023