By the end of the 1960s, I was a little too old to be watching Play School. Like Watch With Mother, it was aimed at pre-school children, and I was now aged eight or nine. Nevertheless, I still saw occasional episodes of both series during holidays and other absences from school.
Songs were a regular feature on Play School, and they usually took the form of jaunty, child-friendly singalongs with lots of repetition and strong rhythm, traditional nursery rhymes mixed up with original compositions. Canadian presenter Rick Jones was a familiar face on the series. He often played his own songs, accompanying himself on guitar, and it was one such example that I chanced to hear when watching a random episode some time in the late 60s. The song he performed that day was a far cry from the usual toddler-friendly Play School fare; it was moody and sophisticated, more typical of the material being produced by the singer-songwriters of the day. I heard it only once, but fragments of it have remained with me ever since, which is always the measure of a great song. Those snatches of melody and lyric could well be all that survives of the song, as the master tapes of Play School have long since been wiped. Odd episodes do occasionally surface – Tim Beddows owned one (coincidentally a Rick Jones edition) which has recently been recovered, but the chances of that specific episode I saw ever surfacing are something like one in 3,500.
Rick’s song contrasted the experiences of living in the town and living in the country. I can still remember the opening bars of melody and lyric:
“Smoky town/ kinda gets me down/ each of your days is a grey one.”
Clearly, this was at some remove from Pop Goes the Weasel. Beyond that opening phrase, my memory fades into a blur until the hummed wordless chorus. Here, the chords and melody changed key, and swung from a major chord to a relative minor. The hummed melody was exactly the same as the theme from Twin Peaks: so much so that decades later, when I heard the Twin Peaks theme, I recognised it as Rick Jones’ Play School song. I wonder if he noticed the similarity himself?
During the song, viewers were shown a sequence of slides contrasting smoky townscapes dotted with chimneys and overhung with smog, contrasting bucolic scenes of open fields (although I noted the presence of overhead electric wires in some of these countryside shots). Why all this has remained with me, I have no idea, and I can attribute it only to the quality of Rick's song and the way he put it across. It impressed me with its moody sophistication: I’d grown up against a backdrop of eclectic music from the radio and my parents’ record collections, including the likes of Frank Sinatra and Dave Brubeck, and by the age of eight or nine, I was highly receptive to original and intriguing melodies.
Rick Jones’ Play School song will almost certainly never resurface. An album of songs from the series was released in 1969, around the time of ‘Smoky Town’, but no joy. If nothing else, I wondered if I could at least work out when I’d actually heard the song. Using the BBC’s genome database, I checked every appearance of Rick Jones on Play School from the late 60s (I was convinced the memory dated to around 1969). After going through over two years’s worth of broadcasts, I turned up an episode that looked like it might be the one: Monday 29 June 1970’s edition had Rick Jones as one of its presenters, and featured a story called ‘Town Mouse and Country Mouse’, presumably adapted from Beatrix Potter’s Tale of Johnny Town Mouse, a story I’d loved from childhood. This tale, contrasting the lives and attitudes of the town and country characters, seemed a very good fit for Rick’s song. On that basis, I concluded that this must be the episode I’d seen. One other fragment of memory helped to confirm the date: I clearly remembered it as being a dull, overcast day, which fits with the met office records for late June 1970.
Why and how I came to be watching daytime television on Monday 29 June 1970 is a question I can’t readily answer. The schools weren’t on holiday, so I must have been absent owing to illness, although I've no memory to that effect. Either way, I was reasonably confident that I’d found the date I was looking for. Regrettably, I will never now find that song.
It occurred to me some years back that it might be possible to contact Rick Jones through the internet – he’d been back in his native Canada for decades, but I found a website promoting his stage musical Laughing Daughter (based on songs from his country rock band Meal Ticket), and I’m pretty sure there was a contact email given. I set it aside as a project for another time and the idea promptly went out of my head. It came to mind again just recently and I determined that this time, I would finally do it. Would he respond to an unsolicited email from a bloke in Britain reminiscing about a song he’d probably forgotten and most likely had no record of? I’ll never know: for a quick Google search revealed the sad fact that Rick Jones died back in 2021 aged 84.
With him died all hope of ever resurrecting the ghost of that song I’d heard him sing back in 1970. But at least we still have other examples of his work: I was immediately taken with his theme to the BBC Play for Today episode The Flipside of Dominick Hide on first hearing it in 1982, instantly recognising his soft Canadian accent: and without realising it, I’d been enjoying another of his compositions years earlier in the form of his theme for the imported French aviation series The Aeronauts.
Anyone who’s heard Rick’s Dominick Hide theme will know what a fine singer and songwriter he was. All I can say is that his Play School song was its equal in mood and atmosphere. One might well speculate as to how many other songs of comparable quality he performed during his years on Play School, few of which we are ever likely to recover. One example does survive, and like 'Smoky Town' is an excellent example of Rick's sophisticated songwriting style: imagine Carole King writing a song about toys – it's that good:
For me, ‘Smoky Town’ is the ultimate lost piece of pop culture ephemera, unlikely ever to resurface, never commercially recorded apart from that wiped broadcast. To have remained in my mind after 55 years and having heard it only once makes it more than a bit special, but you’ve only got my word for it. As Rick said himself in his Dominick Hide lyric: “you’d better believe it.”