The Collector: 1 – The Curse of the Corgi Technocrats

 

I grew up with Corgi Toys. Having emerged in the 1950s as a rival to die-cast kings Dinky, the brand was well established by the time I began to have toys bought for me. Realism was the key to Corgi’s success: their models came with plastic windows – which Dinky, at the time, did not – and would go on to feature refinments like spring suspension, opening doors, bonnets and boots, spare wheels and even ‘Trans-o-lite’ headlamps (a small prism in the back window created the illusion of the lights being lit). Dinky played catch-up all the way to the 1970s, but I always had a preference for Corgi. Dinky’s castings seemed somehow less refined, and even when coated in enamellised paint, felt different in the hand than Corgis. I also preferred Corgi’s packaging (an early indicator, perhaps, of my future career). By the early 60s, Dinky Toys came in yellow boxes with red lettering, whereas Corgi opted for a pleasant, complementary colour scheme of yellow and sky blue. To this day, I still prefer those 1960s Corgi boxes over any other style of toy packaging.

It couldn’t last, of course. The quest for realism coupled with some highly imaginative designs and a popular range of licenced character cars kept Corgi sales bouyant through the 1960s. But over in America, a new brand was ringing the changes. Mattel’s Hot Wheels, though smaller than Corgi toys, made use of innovative new ‘frictionless’ wheels, giving much faster running than had previously been possible with die-cast toys. These new wheels, coupled with plastic race tracks, enabled the tiny cars to perform stunts such as looping the loop and leaping across canyons.

Hot Wheels were huge in America and soon found their way to our shores. I never cared for them: their designs were based on muscle cars and pimped-up dragsters before pimping was even a word in the automotive world. Like Lesney’s more prosaic (and realistic) Matchbox series, the interlopers were scaled at 1:64, as opposed to the larger 1:48 scale favoured by Corgi and Dinky. Corgi’s response was immediate. Commencing in the autumn of 1969 – just in time to catch the all important Christmas market – a brand new range of 1:64 scale Corgi Toys was unveiled under the banner ‘Corgi Rockets’. Hot rods were the order of the day, although the range did feature some real road-going cars. The new toys came with the added gimmick of having a removable chassis that could be unlocked from the vehicle by using a special golden ‘tune-up’ key supplied with every model. Quite what this added in terms of play value I can’t imagine, but it was a cool gimmick for a while. The cars were intended to run on flexible plastic track, an innovation that was soon taken up by Matchbox.

By 1970, frictionless-wheeled 1:64 scale cars racing on plastic tracks was the new, must-have way of playing with toy cars. No more trundling them slowly across the living room carpet whilst vocalising unconvincing engine noises. My brother and myself were bought both Corgi Rockets and Matchbox ‘Superfast’ tracks; and whilst we enjoyed racing the tiny vehicles and watching them loop the loop, I was already feeling pangs of nostalgia for the way things used to be. Suddenly, every model in the Corgi, Dinky and Matchbox catalogues was retro-fitted with the new frictionless wheels. I knew a line had been crossed the day I was bought a Matchbox Dustcart, with ‘Superfast’ wheels. This was all wrong!

Over at Corgi HQ, things weren’t any better. Suddenly, in addition to the fast-running ‘whizzwheels’, cars began to acquire lurid paint jobs: metallic purple, bronze, dayglo pink. For me, this change, more than almost anything else, epitomised the fact that we were now living in the 1970s. By the time of Corgi’s 1971 catalogue, only two of their ‘cars about town’ still had the old-style wheels, a bubble car and a mini. They were also still sold in the old blue and yellow boxes, which had otherwise been displaced by a new era of ‘window’ boxes.

This style of packaging, which allowed you to see the model in the box before you bought it, had been introduced by Tri-Ang’s Spot-On diecast range in the mid-60s. Dinky soon adopted its own version, presenting their ‘prestige’ models on small sections of cardboard roadway, enclosed in rigid plastic casing, and around 1967, Corgi followed suit.

I didn’t go much for competition cars or dragsters – I liked my model cars sedate and realistic (although I made exceptions for the likes of Batman and Basil Brush). I liked the old, ‘real world’ colour schemes, and the old-style wheels. Corgi wheels had been changed once before, when the original unrealistic flat hubs of the 1950s were replaced with so-called ‘spun hubs’. Flat hubs went out before my time, but were still depicted on the box illustrations, and I liked the way they looked. You just couldn’t get them any more. So, in a sense, I was nostalgic for something that hadn’t even been around in my lifetime! But huge change was on the horizon.

Corgi’s marketing department were determined to push us into the glitzy, dayglo, whizzwheeled 70s whether we liked it or not. Around 1971, the company’s advertising and packaging began to feature a group of comic character heads named The Corgi Technocrats. Originally comprising ‘H.W’, a balding boffin, Whizz, a geeky specky kid and ‘Zak’, a Milk Tray Man type hunk, the three ‘Technocrats’ were soon joined by a girl, ‘Penny’ whose mission was to tell them about ‘what girls like in toys’. Hmmm: if you’d asked me that in 1971, I’d have said ‘Tiny Tears’…

I didn’t care for these characters or the new, ‘down with the kids’ Corgi that they represented. It didn’t matter very much in the long run, as 1972 was the last year in which I was bought toy cars, but if anything, the new lurid, fast-running Corgi toys probably hastened my decline in interest. The same thing was happening over at Matchbox, whose output was, by 1971, ridiculously skewed in favour of implausible hot-rods in unlikely colours. Needless to say, I hated them. Corgi Rockets, meanwhile, fell foul of a lawsuit brought by Mattel, which found in the American company’s favour. The 1:48 scale Corgis continued well into the 70s, with the company recording its largest ever profits in 1978. Parent company Mettoy then invested in an expensive project to develop a new computer system for younger users, a development which ultimately put a drain on resources and led to the company having to call in the Official Receiver in 1983. By this time, Corgi was the last man standing in the British diecast toy market, with both Dinky and Lesney (owners of Matchbox) having failed during the preceding three years.

Looking back, I’m glad to have lived through the high watermark of British diecast toy making, with all three major brands reaching a peak of quality and innovation in the mid-60s. I pity anyone who grew up with the toys of the late 70s or 80s. They were, in a word, horrible.

Unthinakably for purists like me, the original Corgi brand ended its days having been bought out by Mattel, the company who’d first stirred up the diecast market back in the mid-60s. But before the original company folded up, a Corgi Toy appeared including elements that I’d designed myself, a replica of the ‘Timesaver’ buses operated by West Midlands Travel, aimed at specialist collectors. Mattel lost ownership of the brand following a management buyout in 1995, and in 2008, Corgi was acquired by the famous Hornby group. Models continue to be produced to this day, sold online and replicating vintage editions from the 1960s. Interestingly, all the models I’ve seen feature the old blue and yellow boxes, with no sign as yet of the dreaded Technocrats. I’m not one to say I was right all along, but clearly I was not the only fan of the old, pre-whizzwheels Corgis. For anyone else who wishes to indulge in die-cast nostalgia, scans of the original Corgi catalogues can be found here: https://www.corgi-toys.net/lists/1958.html

Tomorrow, the Ratatouille

 

An evening of 1970s rodent paranoia

I used to like those occasional themed nights of programming that once upon a time tended to turn up on BBC2. These days, the natural home for that kind of television is BBC4. Or you can always create your own...

The idea came to me part way through watching a notorious episode of the BBC’s 1970s eco-thriller series Doomwatch. The story, which caused a minor stir when first broadcast, concerned the accidental creation of a strain of man-eating intelligent rats. I thought it would be amusing to contrast this melodramatic story with something more frivolous in the shape of Fawlty Towers’ swansong episode, Basil the Rat. But for a proper ‘evening’ of rat-infested viewing, I really needed a third example. No problem on that count… and if you have the DVDs yourself, you might like to ‘try this at home’. Just don’t invite any real rats along to the party…

Let’s start with Doomwatch, the earliest of our three rodent reruns. Tomorrow, the Rat was first broadcast on Monday 2 March 1970, as the fourth episode in the series. Much of the first season was wiped without ever being repeated, but this example was recovered from a Canadian 525-line copy a few years later. Whether it deserved to survive is another matter entirely. Doomwatch meant well. Its ecological themes focused viewers’ minds on the pressing issue of what humankind was doing to its home planet in a way that television had never explicitly dealt with before. To get their points across, series creators Kit Pedler and Gerry Davies took real world topics and gave them a ‘what-if’ science fiction spin. If this resulted in some implausible narratives, then no matter – at least it got people talking. It even got questions asked in the house. The series’ title was seized on by journalists who went on using it long after the programme itself was long forgotten.

So far so good. But Tomorrow the Rat pushed the boundaries a little too far. Series producer Terence Dudley not only produced but directed his own script. And with no one above him to question his judgement, some poor decisions were made. At its heart, the narrative contains a solid, worthwhile idea, being aired years ahead of its time – the question of genetic engineering, its morality and implications. Unfortunately, Dudley chose to go for the jugular – or in the case of Robert Powell, the trouser leg – and his script set out intentionally to shock. Like almost all of Doomwatch, it is mired in outdated chauvinist attitudes towards women (of which, more later), and this week’s guest character, a geneticist whose ill-advised experiments have created the dreaded ‘rattus sapiens’, is portrayed as a neurotic nymphomaniac. Ultimately, she falls victim to her own creations, and in a closing scene included specifically to shock and anger viewers, the camera lingers on her half-eaten corpse. It wasn’t acceptable in 1970 and it’s even less so today. There were, of course complaints, which the BBC’s internal programme review board upheld, deeming that, as producer/director/writer, Dudley had been allowed to go too far.

I’m pleased that some of Doomwatch has survived, but I can’t say I’m still as enamoured of the programme as I was when I first got to see it on the videotape releases of the 1980s. The acting style is typical of its era – full-on, no holds barred – and the scripts can be very unbalanced. The production values are dire even by 1970 standards, with the Doomwatch office a case in point, and the stuffed rats on show in this example are funnier than anything served up (with biscuits) in Fawlty Towers. Sexism is rampant – a complaint that the producers attempted to address in the second series (unsucessfully, in my opinion). It’s a series that, frankly, has to be cut a hell of a lot of slack to be tolerated today, and Tomorrow the Rat, despite being a fan favourite, enshrines pretty well everything that the programme makers got wrong. 

Time for some light relief. Basil the Rat, first broadcast in 1979 as the very last episode of Fawlty Towers, has gone on to enjoy legendary status. I saw it the first time and have to say that while I agree it was funny – very much so in places – for me, it didn’t quite match the series’ best efforts (if you’re asking, I’d nominate Gourmet Night and The Hotel Inspectors). After many, many repeats, it can still raise a smile, though as I’ve got older I do find myself more sympathetic towards Basil (Fawlty, not the rat), whose staff in this episode are conniving and stupid. I also find I’ve come to almost loathe Manuel. ‘Don’t look at me with those cow eyes!’ cries Basil as the hapless waiter cowers before his wrath. I know how he feels. ‘Filigree Siberian Hamster’ indeed! Nine years had passed since Doomwatch, and the BBC’s special effects people had got a little better at realising rats and the creation that gazes at Mr. Carnegie from out of the biscuit box is a shade less risible than his verminous chums who scuttled up Toby Wren’s trousers back in 1970.

From humour, we move onto a piece of genuinely scary television, from the pen of Nigel Kneale, a man who knew all about shocking the viewing public. His 1950s Quatermass tales were prefaced with a warning that they might not be suitable for those of a nervous disposition. Twenty years on, Kneale had clearly not mellowed one iota, and, like Doomwatch before it, this episode of his anthology series Beasts set out to give its audience nightmares. During Barty’s Party places an upper-middle-class couple (Elizabeth Sellars and Anthony Bate) in a remote, rural house which comes under siege from a mass migration of ‘intelligent super rats’. Sounds familiar? Kneale would certainly have been aware of the earlier Doomwatch episode, but a more recent source of inspiration probably came from James Herbert’s famous pulp novel The Rats. Which may itself have contained a bit of Doomwatch DNA. 

Kneale’s writing belongs in the same sexist league as Doomwatch, with Elizabeth Sellars’ character portrayed as a twitchy neurotic. He’d done the same thing a few years earlier in the BBC ghost story The Stone Tape, and it’s a bit tedious to see the same old schtick on display here. Her husband Anthony Bate starts off calm and collected but by the episode’s end he too has been reduced to a quivering wreck as the army of rats closes in.

Of our two dramatic selections, Beasts is a much more effective piece of television, due in no small part to the power of suggestion. Doomwatch is full of cutaways of scuttling (and dead) rodents, but here we don’t get to see a single one. We just hear them. And that’s the genius of Nigel Kneale. You’ve probably never found yourself in a lonely house with a hoard of scratching scuttling, invisible rats for company, but my partner and I once were, and I can attest to the fact that it’s every bit as unsettling as the events we see depicted here. During Barty’s Party is a claustrophobia-fest. Aside from some sinister shots of an abandoned car which open the episode (with the implication that its occupants have fallen victim to the rats), the camera never moves outside the house, with its gloomy, oppressive décor. This was videotaped drama doing what it always did best – the so-called ‘bottle’ story. The only minor let-down comes in the form of radio DJ Barty Wills, whose phone-in programme runs as a background to the unfolding events. Even by 1970s commercial radio DJ standards, his patter is unconvincing. TV scriptwriters never were able to judge this kind of thing, and there were innumerable examples in the BBC’s Shoestring. That aside, this is a grim, convincing hour of television that builds nicely towards an unresolved climax, and knows how to play on the viewer’s imagination for its shock effects. Where Doomwatch was gratuitous, Beasts kept the horror out of sight, and comes out on top of our, if you will, TV ‘rat-a-thon’.

Back in the 1970s, TV producers seemingly couldn’t go wrong with rats, whether they were employed for comic or shocking effect. After all, nobody likes rats. Or do they? Personally, I don’t share the seemingly universal revulsion they engender in most people. I wouldn’t want them in my home, but I’ve had them in the garden and have to admit that there’s something in those twitching whiskers and bright button eyes that I can’t bring myself to hate. But then, I’m probably drawing on childhood memories of the first rat I remember from television – Roderick, in Tales of the Riverbank. Back when hamsters really were hamsters...

Time Flies by - Revisiting Chigley

 

It was the last of Gordon Murray’s famous ‘Trumptonshire’ trilogy, and the only one in the series to acknowledge the existence of such a place. Previous entries Camberwick Green and Trumpton had existed more or less independently of each other, barring a few recurring characters. Chigley’s opening titles finally nailed the geography of Murray’s fictitious shire, with the location of the titular village specified on the title card as being ‘near Camberwick Green, Trumptonshire.’ 

I was just a few weeks away from starting school when Camberwick Green arrived on BBC1 on 3 January 1966. An episode (Mr. Dagenham, the Salesman) was, indeed, broadcast on my 5th birthday, when I finally reached school age. Trumpton arrived a year later, by which time my viewing was restricted to school holidays. It took a good few years before I could confidently say I’d seen all the episodes of either series, and I’m sure some eluded me until well into the 1980s or 90s.

Chigley was a different matter. By the time it came to the screen, in October 1969, I considered myself a bit beyond such childish entertainment. Watch With Mother was, after all, intended for pre-school children and I was now eight going on nine. Starting as it did mid way into the autumn term, I’m not sure when I’d have caught my first episode of Chigley, but I’d hazard a guess that it was most likely during the half-term holiday when we would occasionally tune in at lunchtime to see which of the old WWM classics were still running (the answer was, surprisingly, almost all of them). 

I’d enjoyed both Camberwick Green and Trumpton, but Chigley didn’t quite do it for me. Unlike its predecessors, it lacked a clear sense of where the stories were set. Camberwick Green and Trumpton both had obvious centres, around which the stories took place, before venturing further afield to locations like Pippin Fort or Colley’s Mill. In the case of Chigley, there was no village centre, just a series of diverse loci: namely, the pottery, Treadle’s Wharf, Winkstead Hall and the bauhaus-inspired factory of Creswell’s Chigley Biscuits (CCB… a nice in-joke from Gordon Murray). Right from the very first episode I saw, I decided I wasn’t going to like Chigley. The characters weren’t as diverse or colourful as those we’d met before, and their accompanying songs were a step back from the sophisticated tunesmithery of Trumpton, whose themes had included some unusually subtle chord voicings from composer Freddie Phillips.

Chigley seemed staid and uninteresting after the endless invention displayed during Trumpton, and some of this dullness must be attributed to the creator, Gordon Murrary, who was back to handling script duties. Trumpton, whose stories evolved with neat, logical simplicity, was scripted by Alison Prince, but she received no credit on Chigley. And it shows. The stories are dull and repetitive. Every episode of Trumpton had provided work for the Fire Brigade, but it was always something different each week – from rescuing the Mayor’s hat to demolishing a dodgy chimney. In Chigley, the equivalent sequence involved Lord Belborough and his vintage railway engine, Bessie. Coming back to the series via the recent blu-ray restoration, it occurs to me that the whole ‘heritage railway’ aspect of the stories was derived from the old Ealing comedy The Tifield Thunderbolt. Lord Belborough even bears a distinct resemblance to actor George Relph who played Titfield’s engine-driving curate.

For the first couple of weeks, the trips out on Bessie were entertaining enough, and provided the series’ only truly memorable musical moment, ‘Time Flies by When I’m the Driver of a Train’. But it soon began to pall. All Bessie ever seemed to do was steam out to Treadle’s Wharf and collect cargos of bricks or stone from Mr. Swallow, the Wharfinger. And once you’ve seen all the shtick with the crane once, it doesn’t bear endless repetition.

But what really put me off Chigley – even at the age of eight – was the peculiar end sequence that took the place of Trumpton’s band concert. The firemen’s brass band in the park had seemed a perfectly acceptable piece of minor civic pomp, even if they did perform the same tune every week (and none of them was playing a Spanish Guitar). At Chigley, we got the ‘six o’clock whistle’. Having left their place of work, the CCB employees were obliged to attend a kind of square dance for which Lord Belborough provided music on his ‘Dutch Organ’ (best not to ask). And this seemingly happened every day. You’d think his Lordship might have had better things to do. As for the dance itself, it had a decidedly Eastern European flavour, judging by the ladies’ costumes. The whole affair smacked of the kind of communal activities you see on old newsreels of the Hitler Youth or factory workers in wartime Japan. It felt somehow un-British. Certainly it seemed unlikely. And worst of all, it was contrived. Of course, it was advantageous to the production team in that the sequence used up a good two minutes of screen time, thereby reducing the amount of animation required for each episode. Add to that the two and a half minutes spent watching Bessie steaming along the tracks, and the amount of new footage required for each episode was down to around nine minutes.

I probably saw no more than a couple of Chigley episodes during its first year on air. The series continued to be broadcast on BBC1 (latterly in the ‘See-Saw’ strand that had replaced Watch With Mother) until 1986, but unlike its predecessors, which I would occasionally endeavour to watch during days off from work, I made no such efforts with Chigley. In the 1990s, it found its way onto Channel 4 where I caught one or two more episodes. But at time of writing, I can confidently say that there are episodes of Chigley that I have still never seen, even after 55 years. The recent blu-ray release of all three series has provided the opportunity to make good this defecit. So does it look any better with the benefit of rose-tinted nostalgia? Not really. Of the episodes I have watched thus far, only The Balloon (previously unseen) provided any real visual interest, with a hot air balloon ride giving viewers a look at some previously unseen Trumptonshire scenery including a castle and a clutter of rooftops. One or two scenes are rather more sumptuously realised than had been the case in Camberwick Green – the road into Chigley is nicely detailed with trees, shrubs and even telegraph poles. And the camerawork includes more close-ups of the characters than had previously been attempted. Had the film makers acquired some different lenses? 

Perhaps by the end of thirteen episodes I might have changed my mind about Chigley, but I’m still inclined to go with my original 1969 opinion. And I suspect it was shared by other viewers. Somehow, Chigley never quite caught the popular imagination in the same way as its forebears. Of course, it spawned its share of merchandise, including an LP record, annuals and a number of story books. But of the three Trumptonshire titles, the real merchandising moneyspinner was Camberwick Green, whose characters were realised as plastic dolls and even tubes of toothpaste! I have never come across a Chigley spin-off toy, and I suspect there simply weren’t any. 

Whether or not one is the driver of a train, time flies by, and after fifty-five years I’ve finally completed my tour of Trumptonshire. Chigley may have been a disappointment, but I still cherish the worlds of Camberwick Green and Trumpton far more so, dare I say, than the worlds of another 1960s TV puppet-meister…

The Satirist: 2 – 'Spell my name properly when you speak to me!'

 

The 'Z-Dozer' goes into action in the very last 'Z-Car Toons'

1976 was the fortieth anniversary of BBC Television. That summer, a number of old programmes were dusted off and presented as a celebratory season, ‘Festival 40’. On Wednesday 4 August, a 1960s Z Cars episode, Police Work was broadcast. I wasn’t a fan of 1970s Z Cars, but I sat down to watch this special repeat with a feeling of nostalgia. The BBC used to repeat Z Cars on Sunday afternoons, which is where I first came to see it, aged maybe three or four. I had no idea what was going on, but I liked the constables’ peaked caps and their Ford Zephyr patrol car. In 1973, I’d got hold of a Z Cars Annual at a school bazaar, and a few years later chanced on a brace of vintage paperbacks that adapted scripts from the series into novel format. Unlike Supercar, I knew all the characters very well, and the books contained their fair share of comical asides, particularly involving Fancy Smith.

A couple of weeks after the repeated episode, on Wednesday 18 August, BBC1’s award-winning series The Explorers repeated a film about Roald Amundsen’s Antarctic journey. The snow-bound scenery suggested an idea to me: a comic strip about Z Victor One getting stuck in a snowdrift. Don’t ask me where these ideas come from. It couldn’t be serious, of course, and in recognition of the fact, I drew it – very badly – using a green felt-tipped pen. This became the first in a series of what I came to christen ‘Z Car-Toons’, comedic romps featuring the 1960s cast of Z Cars, getting into scrapes that usually culminated with Z Victor One reduced to a heap of unrecognisable scrap metal and Newtown HQ rendered into rubble. They were scribbled out quickly and with absolutely no finesse, in a series of Woolworths jotter pads. Green felt tip soon gave way to black biro, but the comedy/ absurdity content continued unabated. Barlow, who was an irascible character on screen, became a horror in the cartoons, with a sarcastic attitude that put his television persona in the shade. When he threatens to suspend Fancy and Jock from duty, Fancy queries his decision: ‘Suspended?’ ‘Yes, Smith’, replies Barlow. ‘It’s another word for hung.’

D.C. Thompson’s Sparky comic had been running its own comedy take on Z Cars for a few years. ‘L Cars’ featured the exploits of two Laurel and Hardyesque characters (fat and thin) in a patrol car, whose senior officer regularly sent them on their way with a kick up the arse. I decided this was the perfect trait for Barlow, who began applying the boot to the backsides of Fancy and the eternally misspelled ‘Jok’. Barlow’s name soon lost its terminal ‘W’, usually when he was being addressed by the Z Car crews. ‘Spell my name properly when you speak to me!’ he would bawl. At such moments, his face would be rendered as mostly a mouth, with some scratched-in lines to suggest a scowl.

The comic adventures mostly revolved around Z Victor One. Fancy and Jok’s eternal nemeses were either a bunch of Seaport tearaways known as the ‘Young Toughies’, or some criminal scrap-metal merchants, ‘The Old Ironers’ who weren’t beyond lobbing ‘old iron bombs’ at Z Victor One. The stories were stupid and violent. None was plotted in advance: I would simply start on page one of a new jotter and see where the story went. Wrecked Z Cars were a regular occurrence, and it wasn’t beyond the realms of possibility for an atom bomb to be dropped on Newtown HQ.

These nonsensical endeavours saw me through many a school holiday, and I went on drawing them into the early 80s. The very last one appeared as late as the 1990s, featuring a comic plot I was rather pleased with. In this story, Newtown had been struck by a violent gale, leaving a huge fallen tree blocking the access to Barlow’s house. Fancy and Jok arrive on the scene and can’t decide whether it’s an oak or an elm until Barlow throws a couple of house bricks at them. It’s ‘John Aloysius Watt’ who comes to the rescue at the wheel of the ‘Z-Dozer’, as can be seen in the panels above and below, which give a good idea of the extremely crude nature of my, ahem, 'artwork'. 

‘Z Car-Toons’ were hardly satire, but they were yet another example of my tendency to take nothing seriously in the worlds of film and television. Where had this come from? I had, of course, seen it done on TV by the likes of the Two Ronnies, who once memorably parodied Star Trek. So maybe it was just the logical thing to do. In the comic strip field, Mad magazine was pre-eminent at this kind of thing, and their parodies were always superbly drawn, but I'd never seen a copy when I began cranking out my own crude equivalents.

Over the years, I would knock off cartoon parodies of series including Danger UXB, The Professionals and Strange Report. None of them was drawn properly, and none took more than a few minutes to complete. Somehow, the thought of doing them seriously seemed to go against the whole idea. I saved ‘proper’ drawing for serious endeavours. Many of these comic creations were produced to entertain my friend Tim Beddows, who always knew the series in question and would understand whatever gags I included. Random lines of dialogue would be turned into catchphrases: in one (real) episode of Danger UXB, Brian Ash (Anthony Andrews), despairing after being injured in an explosion, implores his girlfriend Judy Geeson to ‘please go away!’ This became his stock signing-off phrase in the cartoons – which invariably ended in a huge explosion.

It’s never really left me, the urge to take comic swipes at pop culture’s sacred cows. In the 2000s, I dashed off a Dr. Who parody that saw the Cybermen trying to tempt the Doctor with their home-baked cakes. ‘You will be delighted’, they assured him. I was quite pleased with that, but it exists only as a piece of rudimentary scribble. It just didn’t seem to merit the effort required to work it up properly. Meanwhile, cartoonist Lew Stringer was doing it properly with his ‘Daft Dimensions’ series of humour strips. Maybe I've been missing a trick.

Well into the 21^st century I still find the urge to create parody hard to resist. Back in 2016, having watched the DVD release of the BBC’s Doomwatch, I decided that the characters – cardboard clichés for the most part – would lend themselves well to a cartoon treatment. This time I did it ‘properly’, drawing the panels neatly and even colouring them in Photoshop. The result (extract below) is to date my most recent attempt at cartoon satire. Whether it is the last remains to be seen...

The Satirist: 1 - Taking the Mickey out of Mike Mercury

 

... or how I learned to take nothing seriously

I was just eleven years old when it happened, I can even put a date to it: Sunday 19th March, 1972. The day’s entry in my diary reads: ‘Hilarious game of Supercar people’. The ‘Supercar people’ were small plastic figurines of the characters from Gerry Anderson’s series (illustrated above), and my brother and I had been enacting games with them for some little while, unhindered by the fact that we scarcely remembered the series (indeed, my brother had never seen it at all). I think it was this void in our knowledge that led me to take what seems, in retrospect, like a momentous decision.

Up to now, I’d always treated my pop culture heroes with a measure of respect, reverence even. The likes of Thunderbirds and Captain Scarlet were there to be taken seriously, and my childhood games were in deadly earnest. I remember being somewhat baffled on a visit to the cinema in 1966 to see the Batman movie when my parents and, indeed, most of the audience, greeted Batman’s tussle with a shark with gales of laughter. Similarly, around the same time, I remember hearing what I took to be ‘Thunderbirds on the radio’, accompanied by an audience laughing. What was going on? It would take a few years, but in 1972, I finally got the joke. Those old series were inherently funny – the characters were funny, the whole idea of puppets prancing around, saving humanity was absurd beyond belief. Of course, I didn’t rationalise it that way at the time. I just thought I’d come up with a way of making our ‘Supercar people’ games more entertaining.

By 1972, it was nine years since I’d last had sight of an episode of Supercar, and apart from the basics – the vehicle could go anywhere, do anything and was piloted by Mike Mercury – I knew less than nothing about the format. Our mum filled in a few gaps, providing the name of ‘Little Jimmy’, and we knew Dr. Beaker and Mitch by name. But who was the fifth member of the team? The plastic figures, maufactured in the mid-60s by Cecil Coleman, were each set on a small green base, enabling them to stand upright. Mike, Beaker and even Jimmy were depicted standing: but the mystery fifth character seemed to be squatting down, like a goblin sitting on a toadstool. What was his name? We couldn’t remember. I would later come to know him as Professor Popkiss, but in 1972 the best I could come up with was that he was clearly a Professor. Only a mad scientist would be depicted peering over a pair of half-moon specs. He wasn’t even painted in the correct colours. Instead of Popkiss’s white hair and coat, the Cecil Coleman version had been rendered in the same shades as Dr. Beaker, with a blue suit and black hair. The character was something of an engima. I’d asked a friend at school, who assured me his name was Professor Popkiss, but this didn’t ring true to me. School friends were notoriously unreliable when it came to stuff like this, so I chose to ignore him. What happened on Sunday 19th  March 1972 was that I finally came up with a name for this character, a name so absurd I won’t bother to write it down – and you wouldn’t be able to pronounce it if I did. Adding to his air of absurdity was his ability to fly. The Cecil Coleman plastic base became a kind of sit-’n’-ride flying machine. To operate it, all the character had to do was to shout his name aloud. My eleven-year-old imagination was clearly spiralling out of control…

Before very long, with input from my brother, we had completely trashed the whole Supercar format and reimagined the characters. Mike Mercury became James Jupiter (deliberately misspelled as 'Jupita'), a pompous swaggering type who was inordinately proud of his hairdo. Jimmy was turned into a whining brat, forever being sent off to the barber shop where he would be subjected to a ‘thimble cut’ (instead of the traditional pudding basin, the barber would place a thimble on his head and shave off everything else – a style now known as Turkish hairdressing). Lording it over them all was our reimagined Professor Popkiss, who would spin off into his own independent series of absurd adventures. The characters soon evolved into a cartoon, their appearance now radically altered. ‘Dr. Beaker’ (whose name, we decided, was Heinz), was always depicted with eyes in the form of huge spirals, whilst the whole crew were given bizarre hamster cheeks. How, or why these modifications took place, I have no idea. They just made us laugh at the time. In their new incarnation, the Supercar crew became a pop group, and utterly ludicrous they looked with their platform boots and 24-string guitars*.

Now, no Gerry Anderson series was safe. It wasn’t long before I decided that the crew of Fireball XL5 should also be turned into a pop group. One day, our mum came home with a couple of notebooks with psychedelic covers that she’d bought for us from the local post office. This seemed the perfect format in which to set out the history of Fireball XL5’s pop group, known as the Steve ‘n’ Matt Powerhouse. In 1975, I’d been bought a pictorial history of The Beatles, a 12” square softcover publication that comprised an overview of their career, focusing on their record releases. Album covers were depicted at actual size, hence the format. Basing my own version on the layout of the Beatles book, I began to concoct the humorous career history of the Fireball characters. They weren’t puppets after all: Gerry Anderson had merely attached strings to his recalcitrant actors to keep them in line. On ending the series, they’d gone off and formed a band, with Commander Zero in the role of Brian Epstein. Their career mirrored that of the Beatles – films in 1964 and 65, followed by a psychedelic era. I know what you’re thinking, and you’d be wrong. I started this endeavour in 1975 and The Rutles would not appear for another three years. When they did, the accompanying album was also clearly influenced by the same Beatles book that had provided the inspiration for my own piece of satire. Actually, satire is too grand a word for what I was doing: it was pure nonsense.

It didn’t stop there. I’d soon started writing parallel histories of the pop groups that evolved from the characters in Stingray and Thunderbirds. In the latter, I’d decided that instead of taking drugs, the Tracy brothers would get high on coffee (this idea came from a comment by Jeff Tracy on the Century 21 record Introducing Thunderbirds in which he claimed they all drank ‘gallons of the stuff’). Again, this was a good two years ahead of the Rutles: so when I saw Eric Idle’s creations getting high on tea instead of coffee, I began to wonder if he’d been dwelling in my head. The whole Rutles concept was so totally where I was at with my own comedy pop groups. Except that in their case, they were only satirising the Beatles, while I was making fun of them and the whole Gerry Anderson empire at a stroke.

As I later came to realise, it wasn’t just my brother and myself who saw the comic potential in the worlds of Gerry Anderson. Peter Cook and Dudley Moore had been there in 1966 with their legendary ‘Superthunderstingcar’, featuring a character called Johnny Jupiter. Clearly, we were on the same page.

Was nothing sacred?

Seemingly not, as we’ll see in part two…

[* There is no such thing as a 24-string guitar]

The Top Shelf

 

Around the year 1975 I discovered the world of second-hand bookshops. All it took was a few visits to get me started on collecting old paperbacks and annuals of the past decade. I soon learned that there were bookshops and bookshops – especially when one went into Birmingham city centre. Here there were shops that looked intriguing from a distance but up close revealed themselves to be purveyors of a very different kind of literature. Not the kind of emporia where one might expect to find that sought-after Man From UNCLE paperback. The names of these establishments usually served as a warning to the unwary – ‘Continental Book Exchange’ being a typical example. There was a well-known shop up in Birmingham’s Summer Row that sold not only ‘continental’ books but paraphernalia of dubious provenance and off-putting appearance. This was, after all, the 1970s and if we were to believe the mass media, we were living in the so-called ‘permissive society’.

The permissive society was a pernicious idea that gained a lot of ground during the 60s and 70s, espoused for the most part by liberal types who confused freedom of thought and speech with freedoms of a more prurient nature. I’m not sure that it ever really existed other than as a construct, the lifestyle it implied being open only to a privileged few centred on London and the Home Counties. Elsewhere, the only real evidence for its existence was to be found on the top shelves of pretty well any newsagent. The fact that soft porn was so easily obtainable from such mundane sources seems shocking today, and (without looking, you understand), I’m fairly certain that times have changed. As a teenager in 1970s Britain, I soon acquired the habit of deliberately averting my gaze from that certain shelf. Merely to be seen looking, even accidentally, was to risk being marked down as a potential pervert or troublemaker. I still can’t imagine how anyone – even those of the stereotypical ‘dirty mac’ fraternity – would have the gall to take down a copy of something like Penthouse, then take it to the counter and pay for it. Popular mythology suggests that the magazine in question was usually folded inside a more innocuous periodical on gardening or fishing, but as I have never witnessed anyone buying such a publication, I’ll have to take that as read.

Of course, for those who balked at the idea of purchasing an actual magazine, soft porn images were to be found every day on page three of The Sun, which began using them as bait for gullible male readers around 1970. The term ‘page three girl’ soon entered the language, and other newspapers followed suit. In our house, we stuck with The Daily Express, where at least we got the Giles cartoon.

As we entered the third form at grammar school, a few of my friends began to produce examples of soft porn magazines that they’d acquired somehow. Nicked? Borrowed from an older sibling (or even their fathers)? I knew from the outset exactly what I thought about them: I hated them. I even hated the kind of super-shiny paper on which they were usually printed. Why did the pages have to be so slick and glossy? I’m sure there was a sound practical reason which is best left to the imagination. There was something profoundly seedy and unpleasant about seeing one’s school friends poring over such salacious literature. I was in no doubt as to my sexual orientation – straight – but those magazines were a turn-off. Some of this may be down to association, as the types who tended to flaunt them were often boorish and dull of intellect. This was well before the age when anyone spoke of such literature as being demeaning to women, but I still knew that it wasn’t for me. Nevertheless, peer pressure dictated that one had to put on a show of ‘going along with it’, and I think a folded centrespread may once have found its way into my possession, simply because you couldn’t be seen to be turning down an offer like that. Owning it was like being handed a lump of plutonium. Where the hell could you keep it that your mum wouldn’t stumble across it whilst tidying your room? I’m not sure what I did with it or if I’m misremembering the whole thing. I do know that the first image of a nude woman that ever legitimately came into my possession was contained within the covers of a book published by The Goodies around 1975. And there were some Victorian examples in Monty Python’s Big Red Book. Even so, I usually skipped over the pages in question.

One of the first television programmes to deal explicitly with the topic of pornographic literature was Budgie (above). Adam Faith’s low-life loser worked as an odd job man for Soho porn baron Charles Endell, played memorably by Iain Cuthbertson. Interestingly, Endell avows complete distaste for pornography and makes it quite clear that he despises the pathetic types who frequent his shop. Its interior – which appears to have been accurately realised – was the first time, barring documentaries, that television viewers had seen inside a ‘dirty bookshop’. In the very first episode, Budgie and his dim mate Grogan accidentally knock off a van-load of hardcore en route to the public incinerator. ‘I didn’t know you could do it like that, Budgie,’ muses Grogan, peering at a page from one of their purloined publications. ‘At your age!’ scoffs Budgie. Then he has a look for himself: ‘Gor blimey, neither did I!’

I was just ten years old when Budgie appeared on screen, but I saw nothing of it beyond the opening titles. Programmes like this were safely tucked away beyond the nine o’clock watershed, and it wasn’t until a mid-80s repeat by Channel 4 that I saw what had been going on. By this time, I’d visited Berwick Street and the ‘naughty square mile’ for myself, this being the sector of London in which a lot of film post-production studios were located. My visits were to oversee recordings of voice-overs I’d scripted for TV commercials; and whilst some of the old Soho was still in evidence, there was little left of the explicit ‘they are naked and they move’ era depicted in Budgie. Unless it all came out at night.

Like most people, I was shocked at the revelation, by his biographer Andrew Motion, that the poet Philip Larkin had owned a secret stash of pornography, albeit of the so-called ‘soft’ variety. From what I’ve seen, some of it was almost laughably naive, consisting of the ‘underwear catalogue’ era of porn that was popular in the 40s and 50s when Larkin was a young man – in many cases, there was no actual nudity on show. Even so, there was still something a bit grubby about the idea of a grown man, and a university librarian at that, gazing at images of ‘scantily clad bathing beauties’ in his down time. Was it right to be shocked, though? Modern sensibilites certainly say so, but in the 60s and 70s, Larkin was just one of the thousands of men who routinely used such material. If it hadn’t been a money earner, the magazine proprietors wouldn’t have published so much of it. At the time, it was just another ‘fact of life’ that we learned to live with. It didn’t automatically follow that every heterosexual male was a potential client for the porn barons, but those of us who weren’t didn’t pay much attention to the others who felt the need for it.

One of my other hobbies during the late 70s was 8mm movies, and here again, I might easily have fit the profile of the pornographer’s ideal customer. Except that in my case, it wasn’t blue movies that interested me but black and white ones, specifically old episodes of Fireball XL5 and Stingray. It must be said, though, that the company who released these titles, Walton Films, had done very nicely thank you from their range of so-called ‘glamour films’ which featured in their catalogue during the 1950s.

As with bookshops, so too with the cinemas of Birmingham – there were those which one knew well to avoid: specifically, the ‘Sunset Cinema Club’ and the ‘Jacey Cinephone’, both of them located just two minutes walk from the office where I worked for five years during the mid-80s. These establishments tended to open around lunchtime, and I genuinely recall seeing members of the ‘dirty raincoat brigade’ waiting patiently outside on the pavement. The closest I ever came to a blue movie was when a seedy exploitation flick turned up as the supporting feature to Assault on Precinct 13 – itself hardly a model of uplifting cinema.

It’s been a long time since I bothered to check in any newsagent or branch of WH Smith, but I’m fairly confident that magazines of the type one saw on display in the 1970s are no longer on view. The internet has hoovered up a lot of the trade for prurient imagery – indeed when I first tried using a search engine in 1998, about 90% of the hits were pornographic, and I’d been using some utterly innocuous terms in my searches. The 1990s saw the arrival of a different kind of magazine, the so-called ‘lad mag’ which aimed for a middle ground between Penthouse and What Car. I found these laughable and pathetic and have only ever glanced at their pages when there was nothing else on offer in the dentist’s waiting room. The whole sorry era of so-called ‘lad culture’ seems to have been born as a reaction to an increasing tendency across the media to espouse soft liberal values and adopt a high-handed attitude towards public morals. As is so often the case, the trend went too far in the opposite direction.

There aren’t many aspects of modern culture and sensibilites that I agree with, but I have to say I welcome the turning of the tide of popular opinion against the unquestioning acceptance of pornography as an inevitable aspect of modern life. However, a note of caution must be sounded; for when pornography was more visible and above the counter, it was accordingly easier to monitor and keep in check. Today, the mags may be gone from the local newsagent, but there are far worse things accessible online than Charlie Endell ever sold in his Soho bookshop. Are we any better off? 

Flambards at Forty-Five

 

Tim Beddows and I first came together over a shared love of film and television – James Bond, The Persuaders! The Prisoner, the whole gamut of ITC and Gerry Anderson productions. All of them very much in the action/adventure mould and set either in the present day or the imaginary future. Yet February 1979 saw us fixated on a new TV favourite that was none of these things. It was set in the years leading up to the First World War, the setting was a crumbling country house, and the stories centered on horse riding and pioneer aviators. What on earth had brought us here?

The series was Yorkshire TV’s Flambards, seldom seen in this day and age (note to Talking Pictures – you’re missing a trick). By turns romantic, wistfully melancholic and melodramatic, this period piece was so not our thing that I still find myself wondering how we ever came to watch it and fall under its spell. All I can recall of the week or so prior to its first broadcast was seeing a trailer and hearing a very distinctive piece of music, featuring a memorable whistling theme. I think it might well have been the music that sold us. It did, after all, include the cymbalom, a Hungarian instrument whose plangeant tones had been featured prominently in John Barry’s theme from The Persuaders! not to mention his score for The Ipcress File.

Flambards’ music was composed by the late David Fanshawe, a composer and ethnographical explorer, who was an early proselytiser for what we now refer to as World Music. The main theme – a three-and-a-half bar whistle – had come to him at random during a train journey, and went on to become a unique signature for the series. The motif was developed across the episodic score with the use of another exotic instrument, the Ondes Martenot, an etherial-sounding keyboard operated by a ribbon controller, which produced unearthly sliding notes in a similar manner to the Theramin.

All of which made for a highly unique and occasionally idosyncratic score. One episode even included a song about the principal character, Christina Parsons. For a costume drama, this was radical stuff. Yet Fanshawe’s music was a perfect fit for the period drama, and his many charming leitmotifs underpinned the emotional lives of the characters who lived and died before our eyes. The music divided opinion – I’ve spoken to some who hated it with a passion. Yet for many, it came to define the series, and was sufficiently popular to merit a special soundtrack LP, a rarity for any TV series, especially in the 1970s. To play that LP today is to relive the series in miniature; the music is so evocative, one scarcely needs the pictures. For me, replaying it recently for the first time in decades, the only slightly jarring note was sounded by the aforementioned Song of Christina, which was used to accompany a flying sequence that would otherwise have been mute. I loved it at the time, but today it feels slightly embarrassing. Its swing tempo seems out of kilter with the 1914 setting, and Alan Plater’s lyrics paint Christina as rather more of a boistrous rebel than she came across on screen in the form of the beguiling Christine McKenna.

Time, indeed, that we took a closer look at our heroine. Might she have been part of the reason why Tim and I remained faithful to this series over twelve weeks? I can’t speak for Tim, but she certainly was for me. Coming to the series from a career divided between musical theatre and a few television appearances (most notably The Kids from 47a) Christine McKenna was a new face as far as I was concerned, and I fully expected to see a lot more of her in the coming years. But that was one of the odd things about Flambards – few of its principal actors would go on to greater things. Stephen Grives, memorably obnoxious in the role of Mark Russell, Christina’s cousin, was already familiar to Tim and myself from a recent appearance in Thames’ wartime drama Danger UXB, and seems to be the only one of the main cast members to have remained partcularly active post Flambards. Alan Parnaby, who played his aeroplane-obsessed brother was another actor I’d never seen before. Or, indeed, since. The biggest ‘name’ in the series was right at the end of his career. Edward Judd had been tipped for major stardom in the early 1960s, as witness his lead role in proto-eco-thriller The Day the Earth Caught Fire. Judd doubtless expected his career to do likewise (ie. catch fire), but it never really happened. I’ve heard rumours of his being a bit of a handful, and if that was the case, then he certainly channelled his personal demons into his portrayal of Flambards’ patriarchal figure, the furiously wheelchair-bound Uncle Russell. Russell existed in a permanent state of incandescent rage, incapable of uttering a civil word to anyone. When a visiting Doctor declines a glass of port saying ‘don’t bother on my account’, Russell snaps back ‘we’re NOT bothering on YOUR account, DOCTOR!’ He also berates the hapless medic for hovering in a doorway, bawling: ‘I can’t stand people who hover in doorways!’, like the reasonable fellow that he was. Tim and I couldn’t get enough of this kind of scenery-chewing, and would often repeat those lines to one another over the coming decades.

So, intriguing music, a fanciable heroine and a mad old bastard. Was that the sum total of Flambards’ appeal? Well, not quite. I’ll own that neither Tim nor I went a bundle on horses, and there were plenty of our equine chums on show here. I’d never heard of a Point-to-Point before, and didn’t care for the bloodsports depicted in the early episodes. Nor were we particularly interested in the ‘kites with propellors’ era of pioneer aviators, which took up the middle part of the series. But despite our antipathy to the subject matter, the story had us hooked, thanks to the brilliance of source author K.M. Peyton, whose three Flambards novels formed the core of the series. I may not have been a fan of horses, but I cared about the fate of Christina’s favourite Sweetbriar, whom Uncle Russell planned to sell for offal after being injured in an accident. And I was also completely seduced by the drama of the pioneer aviators, their triumphs and personal tragedies.

Favourite characters coming to grief in TV is a trope that’s been beaten to a predictable pulp in recent years by the likes of Dr. Who. But when characters died in Flambards – and many of them did – it was for keeps. No tricks, no dreams, no resets.

Shot entirely on 16mm film, and directed by practitioners with long experience in the format (including legendary Ghost Story for Christmas director Lawrence Gordon Clark), Flambards looked like an expensive piece of television, with production values that bore comparison with important series of the era like Brideshead Revisited. Given Tim’s fondness for the series, it inevitably found its way onto his own Network DVD label, albeit in a quality that barely improved on the previously available release from Granada Ventures. This being the case, I’d long encouraged him to have the series properly remastered, and had Network and Tim survived, I’d hoped this work might have been done in time for the series’ 45th anniversary, which occurred on Friday 2 February 2024. Needless to say, I commemorated the event – and my absent friend Tim – by commencing a rescreening.

It seems unlikely that a remaster of Flambards will ever happen now. It still looks the way we saw it in 1979, grainy, rather washed-out and very definitely 16mm. Tim Beddows was the only person who cared enough about the series to have even considered having it remastered, but there were always other titles that came before it in the pecking order.

Here in Britain, the series was shown just twice by ITV, once in its original Friday evening 7pm slot, and again two years later on Sunday afternoons, where it was arguably a much better fit. One peculiarity of the first broadcast was that episodes one and two were edited together to form a 90-minute pilot (with two separate on-screen titles). When it was repeated (and subsequently released on DVD), the two episodes were presented separately. In America, the series formed part of the Masterpiece Theatre strand, a home for bought-in costume drama, where it seems to have won a loyal if rather limited following. Carlton’s DVD release of the early 2000s was superceded by Network’s release of a few years later, and it’s sad but true to report that the picture quality on our own set was, if anything, inferior to the Carlton edition.

As mentioned earlier, the Flambards cast more or less went to ground after the series had ended. Christine McKenna resurfaced in character on the cover of Kathleen Peyton’s fourth Flambards novel, Flambards Divided, published in 1981, and I saw her live on stage in a touring production of a lightweight farce whose name escapes me. She last pinged my radar a few years ago when I was driving home one Sunday afternoon with Paul O’Grady’s show on the radio. The programme featured a regular TV theme spot and the previous week’s entry had been Flambards. This prompted a missive to the show from none other than Christine/Christina herself, which O’Grady read out on air. I was sorely tempted to write in and ask for her contact details, so that we might conceivably interview her ahead of a re-release of the series. But the moment passed.

If you’ve never seen Flambards, I urge you to seek it out. An anniversary is always a good excuse for revisiting, or discovering a piece of classic television. The acting and direction were excellent throughout, and David Fanshawe’s score is enough to make all modern TV composers hang their heads in shame. I guarantee you’ll be whistling the theme for the forseeable future.