A Pale Shade of Pink

A ramble through the autumn of 1964...

Memories are intriguing. They lie, for years, like gold coins lost in the mud and silt at the bottom of a pond. Then something comes along to stir up the silt and suddenly, there they are, revealed and still shiny like new, like they’d happened yesterday.

I’m find this happens a lot lately – maybe it’s part of getting older. Just recently, BBC4 ran a couple of Peter, Paul and Mary concerts from 1983. Seeing them, I was reminded of the very first time I saw the folk trio, on television in the early 60s, singing their hit 'Blowin' in the Wind'. For some reason, I knew it had been a Sunday afternoon. Out of curiosity, I checked the BBC’s Genome database – and straight away I found the broadcast I was thinking of, on the afternoon of Sunday 25 October 1964. The day happened to be our Grandfather’s 56th birthday, and we would almost certainly have been entertaining our grandparents to Sunday tea. It might all have happened yesterday…

In the autumn of 1964, I was just three and a half years old. Prior to this, my memories are more fragmentary, and there’s less sense of continuity. Suddenly, though, around this time, they begin to join up. Rather than glimpses or flashes of the past, they become a narrative. This week in 1964, Herman’s Hermits were number one in what used to be called the ‘Hit Parade’ with their single ‘I’m Into Something Good’. This was the very first record I owned, and that fact speaks of a growing awareness of my environment, an appreciation of atmosphere, a sense of time and place that seems to have got going around now. I can still remember having the record bought for me: the shop sold televisions, gramophones and domestic goods, as well as having a supply of singles and Lps. A dansette style record player stood at one end of the counter so that customers could try out a record before buying, and a wire rack held some of the most popular discs of the day. The 7” single was on the Columbia label, and came in a green paper sleeve. I can clearly remember taking it home – it was a bright, sunny day, a memory which is borne out by Met Office records – their summary for September 1964 reads ‘sunny and dry.’

A week or so later, the XVIII Olympiad began in Tokyo, an event of which I was principally aware on account of Helmut Zacharias’ evocative ‘Tokyo Melody’, an oriental sounding theme that accompanied the TV coverage, and was widely played on radio, reaching number 9 in the charts in November. A nightly round-up of the day’s Olympic events preceded the BBC News every evening during the fortnight of the games, and although I was far too young to take an interest in what was happening in the sporting world, the imagery left an impression – the Olympic logo, and a shot of the stadium that formed a backdrop to the BBC studio presentation. 

It was around this time that a lot of television series began to leave a lasting impression. Autumn 1964 saw the arrival of Gerry Anderson’s Stingray – and I’ve already written about the return of Bleep and Booster, who had made their Blue Peter debut back in March. Other children’s programmes that autumn included The Five O’Clock Club, Zoo Time and Junior Criss-Cross Quiz on ITV; Deputy Dawg, Animal Magic and Tales from Europe on BBC1, along with Crackerjack and Junior Points of View. I was also aware of programmes aimed at an older audience – US comedies Car 54 Where Are You? and The Beverley Hillbillies were running on ITV, alongside quiz shows Double Your Money and Take Your Pick.

The BBC’s Watch With Mother had been doubled up since earlier in the year, with a broadcast at 10.45 in the morning – seemingly intended as a ‘primer’ for Play School, which followed it over on BBC2 – and a different series in the traditional lunchtime slot. The original line-up was still in place, each series assigned to a specific day of the week: Picture Book on Monday, Andy Pandy on Tuesday, Rag, Tag and Bobtail on Thursday and The Woodentops on Friday. This year, however, saw Rag, Tag and Bobtail ousted by relative newcomer Tales of the Riverbank, not originally a WWM series (it had been broadcast at teatime since 1960). R,T&B would be dropped altogether the following year.

There’s one specific afternoon in autumn 1964 I’m able to recall, and thanks to the TV listings I can put a date to it: Tuesday 20 October. That afternoon, BBC1 had Olympic coverage from 3.00pm till 5.05, followed by children’s programmes beginning with Deputy Dawg. Our dad typically arrived home from work around 6.00 – and it was while the evening’s Olympic Report was going out on BBC1 (5.55-6.20) that I heard him say something about a TV series on later that evening which he called ‘The Aeroplane Story.’ I had many toy aeroplanes, but had never seen a real one other than those that occasionally droned overhead – and my ears pricked up at the sound of this. Any television programme with a title like that must surely be of interest. I think I’d have been disappointed if I’d been allowed to stay up for it. The programme was actually ATV’s The Plane Makers, and was more concerned with boardroom drama than the planes themselves. The popular drama kicked off its third series on that evening, which is why our dad would have been talking about it. How I can date this memory so precisely is simply a quirk of memory: his words stayed in my mind, and with them, the image of the Olympic stadium which is probably what I was looking at on TV while he was talking.

A few weeks later, on Thursday 19 November, the BBC introduced a generation to a television serial that became embedded in the national psyche. The Singing Ringing Tree had been a colour film produced in the GDR in 1957, which was acquired by the BBC’s Peggy Miller and cut down into a three-part serial, broadcast in black and white, with an English narration from actor Tony Bilbow. There was an unsettling atmosphere about the whole production, arising partly through the use of studio sets standing in for exteriors but mostly on account of the costumes and characters, some of which were the stuff of nightmares: especially the Bear (into which form a luckless Prince is transformed) and, dare I use the word, the dwarf, sight of whom sent me for cover behind one of our fireside chairs. There is a very specific atmosphere attached to this memory: I can see leafless branches in the garden against a blue-grey evening sky, there’s the residual memory of Blue Peter that preceded the serial (Christopher Trace and Valerie Singleton were the presenters) and the image of my brother in a tartan romper suit. I was becoming increasingly aware of mood and atmosphere, and The Singing Ringing Tree was a classic example. 1964 had a particular feeling, an atmosphere of its own, and evenings like this were a big part of what defined it.

It wasn’t all about television, though. Our mum usually had the radio on all day, tuned to the BBC Light Programme, which meant I got to hear programmes like Housewives’ Choice and Music While You Work, both of whose theme tunes were instantly familiar. Looking back on them, they seem to come from an earlier era. Another very familiar radio theme was that of The Archers, which preceded Listen With Mother every afternoon. I also recall The Dales – an update of the original Mrs. Dale’s Diary – which was broadcast twice a day, morning and afternoon. Its melodic, slightly melancholic signature tune (composed by Johnny Dankworth) is deeply etched into my memories of this era, but has defied all my efforts to find a copy online.

Away from the mass media, I was becoming more aware of my surroundings. The man-made environment of cars and buildings was opening out, and I began to take more notice of things like street furniture – roadsigns, street lamps, pillar boxes – and packaging. The boxed items I saw in shops – sweets in particular – and signage such as that employed by Corgi Toys left a powerful impression. Graphic design had evolved into a stylish minimalism, with occasional nods towards Op Art. To this day, the fonts that were ‘of the moment’ in 1964 remain my favourites: Grotesk No. 9, Compacta, Franklin Gothic Condensed. Serifs were old hat. There was a kind of style consensus in play in this era, the like of which it’s hard to conceive of today. People dressed in specific ways, and furnished their homes with remarkable consistency. I think it was this year that our parents gave their bedroom a bit of a facelift – a new pink carpet and a matching lampshade. If I had to sum up my recollections of 1964 with a single sensory impression, it would be that shade of pale pink. 

There was no reason not to suppose that this man-made world I saw opening out around me would endure in this form in perpetuity. In reality, it was all gone in a couple of years. What I experienced in 1964, in asethetic terms, was really the high watermark of 1950s style – the end of the atom age. By the mid-60s, a looser, freer style had taken hold, sweeping away the formalism that had held sway during the post-war era. People looked different. The world looked different. 1964 was, if anything, a year of transition: America was recovering from the shock of Kennedy’s assassination, and the Beatles were setting out on their mission of world domination. England was beginning to swing. Men were preparing to fly to the moon.

The world I was suddenly aware of was on the brink of radical change. But in the suburban Midlands, it was still, in a sense, the 1950s. And pale pink.

'The end of the atom age': though not specific to 1964, these confectionery packages perfectly illustrate the ultimate expression of 1950s minimalist styling, that reached its zenith in that year.

Bleep and Booster at Sixty

No sixtieth anniversary in pop culture should go unremarked, particularly when it’s a science fiction subject that has links to the BBC’s Doctor Who and Blue Peter. Have I got your attention? In that case, let’s consider a piece of television that made its first appearance in 1964, ran for five years, but was never a television programme in its own right. It was, rather, a programme within a programme – which means you won’t find it listed anywhere on the BBC’s Genome database.

I’m talking about Bleep and Booster – a modestly-produced outer space serial with a unique charm and fascination that belied its bargain basement production values. In fact, aside from some artwork boards, narration and ‘special sound’, it had no production values at all. Bleep and Booster was neither puppetry nor cartoon. The stories were played out by means of rostrum camera work, panning in and around large panels of artwork: a process that, in the field of advertising, was once known as an ‘animatic’.

Bleep and Booster was the creation of artist William ‘Tim’ Timyn, who had made his mark on television with the stories of Bengo, a Boxer dog puppy, a regular feature in the early days of Blue Peter. For the original Bengo stories, ‘Tim’ drew the pictures live on air, while telling the stories he’d written himself. By the time of Bleep and Booster, the artwork and presentation were pre-filmed. The stories were narrated by Peter Hawkins – already famous as the voices of Bill and Ben, Spotty Dog and the Daleks – and accompanied with ‘special sound’ courtesy of Brian Hodgson, a pioneer of the BBC Radiophonic workshop, whose contributions to Dr. Who included the famous dematerialisation sound of the TARDIS – still in use to this day.

Bleep and Booster made their first appearance on Blue Peter on Monday 2 March 1964. The four-episode serial, written and illustrated by Timyn, told the story of how boy inventor ‘Booster’ meets up with space-boy Bleep when his home-made rocket runs out of fuel. The space race was all over the media at the time, with NASA planning feverishly to land men on the moon before the end of the decade, so a space adventure was bound to be popular. Bleep and Booster immediately captured the imaginations of young viewers – of whom I was one – and were brought back to Blue Peter for a second adventure, commencing on Monday 14 September. In 1965, the first story was turned into an illustrated book, published by Purnell, which my mum bought for me out of that year’s Freeman’s Catalogue. I still have it, minus a page which readers were encouraged to cut out and turn into a cardboard mobile.

Bleep and Booster's return to Blue Peter was highlighted with this Radio Times panel,
accompanying the listings for Monday 14 September 1964.

Tim’s artwork had a unique quality, with energetic brushwork and a deceptive simplicity. The characters were engaging and had immediate appeal. Bleep, and the other inhabitants of his homeworld Miron, were presented as semi-robotic creatures, with flexible arms, sucker feet and antennae. They clearly were not robots – Bleep’s father had a moustache, and the Miron space technicians tended to sport chinstrap beards. They ate normal food, too. But they were aliens, and highly imaginative at that. Elsewhere in their adventures, Bleep and Booster would encounter other unusual races including the thuggish, conical-capped Trugs and the 3-eyed Rotundans – round heads balanced on spindly legs (quite likely inspired by the Martians of H.G. Wells’ War of the Worlds).

The space hardware started off with a decidedly 50s look – Miron Space Freighter 9 could have flown straight out of Dan Dare, and was slickly rendered to suggest a gleaming chrome exterior; but as the stories progressed, the spacecraft became ever more imaginative – the Solar Energy Squadron looked like winged submarines, while the ‘Space Catamaran’ and ‘Solaron’ ship, despite being mere 2d paintings, were as good as anything dreamed up by Gerry Anderson’s designers and may well have been influenced by the styling of those more sophisticated productions.

Brian Hodgson’s ‘special sound’ formed an important part of the stories, adding a palpable sense of atmopshere and drama. A classic Radiophonic piece prefaced each 5-minute episode, and the sound score – including the droning sounds of the Space Freighter and ‘solar guns’ – was eerily evocative and other-worldly. I well remember the impression these sounds created: when taken in combination with the rostrum camera work, it was easy to forget you were simply watching a succession of still images. If anyone had asked me at the time whether Bleep and Booster had movement like an animated cartoon, I’d almost certainly have answered ‘yes!’

As for the stories, they were straightforward adventures, yet with a warmth and charm that went far beyond the simplicity of their presentation. If anything like Bleep and Booster were attempted today, it would, of course, be slickly produced in CGI, with gaggy, streetwise scripts and characters. But these were different times, and we were a different audience.

I totally loved Bleep and Booster. It was only on twice a year, with one serial in the spring, and another in the autumn or winter, and I always looked forward to the next adventure. To see it now is to be transported back to the living room of our home in Lichfield on a dark evening in November, curtains closed, coals burning in the grate and our mum in the kitchen getting the tea ready. The idea of a boy building a rocket in his back garden seemed totally feasible to me, and I fantasised about doing the same thing myself. If I ever came across an old spring or any random bit of junk around the house, I would see it as a vital component in the rocket I would one day build myself. Even as late as 1971, I had thoughts of building a colour television, when all I had to use was the spring out of an old biro…

Bleep and Booster never made it into the 70s. Their last adventure was aired between October and November 1969, by which time man had landed on the moon and interest in space was already beginning to wane. A palpable sense of ‘been there, done that’ soon took hold, and space subjects no longer seemed as appealing as they had done a decade earlier. But while the television adventures might have come to an end, Bleep and Booster continued to feature in the Blue Peter Annuals as late as 1977.

The characters got their own annual in 1966, courtesy of publishers Purnell, who had previously produced the original story book adventure. Two further annuals followed in 1967 and 1968, with a second story book, ‘Bleep and Booster’s Space Secret’ appearing around the same time. With illustrations by ‘Tim’, these books were as good as the TV serials, and offered the chance of seeing the characters in full colour. They were, and still are, some of my favourite books from childhood.

For such a simple, rostrum-camera based production, the two space boys clocked up a surprising amount of merchandise, including jigsaws, poseable figures and a series of marionettes from the ever-reliable Pelham Puppets (their ‘Rotundan’ has to be seen to be believed!)

Of the ten Bleep and Booster serials produced, only two are known to exist – although it is rumoured that others may yet survive in the BBC’s archives. The two extant serials – Solaron and The Giant Brain – were the last two produced, and fortunately for posterity, were released as a VHS tape in 1993 by the Polygram video label. An enterprising YouTuber has created HD upgrades from the original tapes using AI, and the results are entirely faithful to the original presentation. New viewers (and old) start here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6Fkc1zkLgFs

It may have been black and white, static drawings and as low-fi as television presentation got, but Bleep and Booster was a classic example of being so much more than the sum of its parts: proof that, in the world of children’s fiction, all you need are great characters, a good story and no limits to your imagination. Who needs CGI? Who needs AI? Bring on the art boards...

Queach, Strongle, Ablewhacket and Zurf

 

No, it’s not the sequel to Unman, Wittering and Zigo, merely a collection of linguistic oddities as served up in the TV panel game Call My Bluff. This brilliantly simple TV show, which ran from 1965 to 2004, has, for no apparent reason, been dusted off by BBC4 who are currently showing vintage episodes from the mid 70s on Monday evenings.

Unlike many other word games, Call My Bluff did not require erudition or an Oxbridge degree on the part of the viewer. Anyone could play. Each of the two teams would take it in turns to offer up three alternative definitions of obscure words from the Oxford English Dictionary, while the opposing team would attempt to deduce which of them was true and which a bluff. This simplicity and accessibility goes a long way to explain the show’s longevity. 

I don’t when or why I took to watching Call My Bluff, but it was sometime in the early to mid 70s, an era which might be considered the programme’s high watermark, and from which the BBC4 episodes have been drawn. It’s unlikely that much survives in the archive: to date we’ve seen episodes from 1974, 75 and 76, and one rather suspects these to be the sole surviving examples from three complete series (a series might comprise as many as 26 episodes). A typical example, transmitted on 3 March 1975 featured a guest line-up comprising Edward Woodward, Judy Geeson, Joan Bakewell and, somewhat surprisingly, Noel Edmonds. The two regular ‘team captains’ were Frank Muir and Patrick Campbell, and the whole shebang was presided over by Robert Robinson, possessor of one of the most famous combovers on television. Robinson was familiar to me as the presenter of Points of View (in both senior and junior incarnations) and as the host of BBC1’s upper middle class quiz Ask the Family. Frank Muir was also known to me from various appearances on Jackanory, where he often read his own tales of a dog named Whatamess. His genial demeanour and distinctive bow tie made him stand out, a genuine personality in an era when people on television were still allowed to be slightly eccentric, and middle-aged. His opposing team captain I’d never seen before (or indeed in any other context ever). Patrick Campbell, AKA the 3rd Baron Glenavy, was a humorist and man of letters, but is probably best known for his appearances on the show, where his natural stammer added a highly idiosyncratic edge to the proceedings: he often made fun of himself when he was unable to get a word out.

This was, as I’ve said, the ‘classic’ era of Call My Bluff, and the line-up endured until Campbell’s death, aged 67, in 1980. He was replaced by Arthur Marshall, whom Wikipedia describes as a writer and raconteur. Whilst he made an agreeable substitute for Campbell, I always felt the show was never quite the same again: I’d found the stammering Campbell an endearing personality, and his friendly sparring with Frank Muir and his team was always entertaining. Watching the episodes again, it’s splendid to see how much good natured gamesmanship was on display, with each side mildly taunting the other as to the veracity of their definitions. Muir is cock-a-hoop when he gets a particularly tricky word right: one almost expects his bow-tie to light up and commence to rotate at such moments.

 

Frank Muir gets one right!

There has been one slightly discomforting aspect to these repeats, in as much as I last saw them in my teens, when Muir and Campbell were in their mid 50s and early 60s respectively. Watching in 2024, at the age of 63, Muir, in his fifties, is now a comparative youngster, while Campbell is the same age as myself. Sobering...

The Radio Times, somewhat perversely, insisted on describing Call My Bluff as ‘a duel of words and wit’ which may well have deterred some viewers, expecting a highbrow panel game that would go way above their heads. That’s probably how I thought of it myself before I first tuned in. Was it at the behest of a teacher, or a school friend with superior taste? The earliest entry I can find in my diary is on Monday 21 October 1974, on which edition the guests comprised Sheila Tracy, Charles Osborne, Madeline Smith and Peter Sallis. This may well have been my introduction to the series, although I have no recollection of the episode. I did, however, retain a strong visual memory of the show with its simplistic sets – a pastel coloured geometric background behind the teams and a basic display board behind Robinson on which the words would be presented and the score kept. Robinson summoned up each new word with a ping of a small hotel lobby-style bell, and the word would duly appear behind him, clearly rotated into position by a couple of unseen stage hands. In one of the BBC4 episodes, he is amused to find one of the words already in postion before his summons: ‘Why ring the bell, it’s already there! Thanks, lads!’ The distinctive theme tune (with its three staccato beats spelling out the title) was in fact a library piece, Ciccolino, by composer and producer Norrie Paramor.

Call My Bluff wasn’t the kind of programme I typically mentioned in my diaries, but I certainly watched it week after week (assuming it didn’t clash with one of the other channels), and aside from that glancing reference in 1974, there are few entries. On Friday 29 April 1977 I did give it a mention – it was back for a new series and Joanna Lumley was one of the guests. I also spelled Patrick Campbell’s name with twelve letter ‘P’s. What a wit…

Watching the series now, its old school, low-budget presentation makes for a stark contrast against modern programming where visuals and sets are slicker and shinier in appearance. Call My Bluff is simply lit, mostly beige in tonality, and edited in the most straightforward manner imaginable. The studio format where two teams of three are ranged around a central compere, is as old as television itself, yet endures in the likes of Have I Got News for You and QI. I’m sure there are enough lingustic oddities remaining in the OED to keep any revival of the series on air indefinitely, but I don’t expect it to happen. If it was made today, it would be demoted to radio.

If, as I suspect, these random editions are all that remains of the show’s mid-70s run, then it’s a shame; but a series like this would never have been a prime candidate for archiving, especially in an era when the BBC couldn’t even manage to keep some of their classic sitcoms intact; and we should probably be thankful that any of it has survived at all. Either way, it may be with us for a few weeks yet: there is a further episode scheduled for this coming Monday, and the four shown to date can be found on iPlayer. I’m keeping copies myself, in anticipation of this being potentially the show’s last hurrah. If 1970s television and obscure words are your thing, then catch it while you can.

And the next word is...

https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/m0022nph/call-my-bluff-13051976