Watch With Macca... and John, George and Ringo

 

Or... The Fingletoad Resort of Teddiviscious

What did the Beatles watch on television? It’s a question that I doubt has been asked many times, if at all. Did they even have time to watch television? Between 1963 and 1966, the whirlwind of Beatlemania – an almost constant round of touring and recording – didn't leave them much time to themselves. It’s likely that they spent more time appearing on television than they did watching it. But they definitely did watch television, whenever time allowed. The question is, what programmes were they watching?

In all the Beatles’ recorded work there is only one reference to a specific television series, although they were occasionally influenced by things they’d seen on the small screen: Paul’s desire to use a piccolo trumpet on the recording of 'Penny Lane' is known to have arisen after watching a televised performance of Bach’s Brandenburg Concerto. The concert was shown as part of BBC2’s Masterworks series on the evening of Wednesday 11 January 1967. So far, so good. But what other items on television were the Fab Four aware of?

The Beatles grew up in an age when home entertainment was dominated by the wireless, and it’s well known that they were great fans of the Goons – the same anarchic humour can be found in John Lennon’s humorous writings, and Paul in particular was wont to assume funny voices at the drop of a hat. Even if there were television sets in the Beatle family households, it’s doubtful that they would have devoted much time to watching the box, being more focused on their musical activities away from the home.

When the group were quizzed as to their likes and dislikes for a music press feature in 1963, only John and Paul made any mention of television, John listing it among his hobbies and Paul among his ‘likes’. An early acknowledgement of television – probably the first in the band’s career – can be found on volume 2 of the CD collection The Beatles at the BBC. And the programme in question was... The Flowerpot Men.

Bill and Ben are referenced twice on the CD, the first mention coming in an edition of Pop Goes the Beatles, recorded on 10 July 1963 for transmission twenty days later. George reads out a fan letter asking if he likes The Flowerpot Men: "I think you are even nicer than Ben, but I hate Bill cause he squeaks" runs the letter. For the final edition of the series, recorded on 3 September for broadcast on the 24th, the group signed off by singing their own version of the song that closed each week’s episode of The Flowerpot Men… ‘Goodbye Bill, Goodbye Ben…’ In the hands of the Beatles, the lyrics were now:

‘Goodbye George, Goodbye John, Ringo, Paul, Ringo, Paul, Rodney Burke’ 

(Burke was the programme’s presenter).

When the band were able to make time to watch television, one of their favourite programmes was, apparently, Steptoe and Son. When John made his famous ‘rattle your jewelery’ announcement at the end of the Beatles’ appearance at the Royal Command Performance on 4 November 1963, he ended it by pulling a face that could well have been meant as an imitation of Wilfrid Brambell in the role of Albert Steptoe – Brambell and Corbett appeared on the same bill that evening in a specially written comedy sketch. Brambell would, of course, go on to appear with the Beatles in their first feature film, A Hard Day’s Night, whose script was peppered with knowing references to Steptoe. In the TV series, Brambell’s character was famously derided as a ‘dirty old man’ whilst in A Hard Day’s Night, he’s ‘very clean.’ On 2 December of the same year, the Beatles made an appearance on the Morecambe and Wise Show, recorded at Elstree Studios in Borehamwood. It’s clear that they’re all familiar with Eric and Ernie and their work – at one point, George utters Eric’s famous catchphrase ‘get out of that!’

There's no evidence that the Beatles ever watched Doctor Who. The band was approached (via Brian Epstein) to appear in an episode during 1965, but the idea was vetoed, perhaps without even being put in front of the band. Instead, a brief clip from Top of the Pops (10 April 1965) was included in the serial The Chase. John and Cynthia were photographed in close proximity to a Dalek prop at the Cannes Film Festival in May of the same year, but John seems to be ignoring it. Some fans have mistakenly assumed that the Beatles appeared in a Doctor Who parody based on the Abominable Snowmen serial, but they’d got their wires crossed: the photographs in question date from the band’s Christmas show of December 1964, almost three years before the Abominable Snowmen appeared on TV.

For our next bit of Beatle telly-viewing evidence, we must fast forward to Monday 8 November 1965. The band was in the middle of recording sessions for the Rubber Soul album (as yet untitled), and time was running short. A session was booked in Studio Two at EMI Studios, running from 9pm until 3am. Equally pressing was the need to record some comic material for inclusion on the obligatory fan club Christmas record. To this end, in the hope of capturing some off-the-cuff nonsense, George Martin left the tape running during rehearsals for George’s song ‘Think For Yourself’. Amongst lots of spontaneous banter and silly voices, Paul suddenly goes into a parody of Gerry Anderson’s Stingray. The band are trying to work out the song’s three-part harmony:

JOHN: (In cod American accent): We’ll have one more try, you know… I can see.

PAUL: (In cod American accent mispronouncing the word ‘try’): Troy… it looks like Supercar’s getting out of control, Troy.

JOHN (Laughs)

PAUL (singing in comedy falsetto): Marina, Aqua Marina…

JOHN: We’ll do one of them for Christmas.

PAUL: Yeah. (Continuing in falsetto, singing to the tune of ‘Aqua Marina’): How come you fuck up everything that you do?

(Laughter)

JOHN (in comedy evil alien voice): I will be pleased to see the Earthmen disintegrated!

The routine is cut off here by a return to the work in hand – so we never get to hear what else the Beatles might have made of a Gerry Anderson parody. They would have been a few months ahead of the curve if they had – Peter Cook and Dudley Moore’s famous ‘Superthunderstingcar’ skit wouldn’t appear until the spring of 1966.

What this snatch of banter tells us is that the Beatles were aware of Gerry Anderson’s puppet adventure series, even if Paul has got Supercar and Stingray muddled up. The series had ended by the time of the recording session, but two days earlier a first-run episode of Thunderbirds had been broadcast on ATV London. Thunderbirds, of course, included amongst their number a yellow submarine – Thunderbird Four – although the Beatles, if they were watching at all, would have been watching in black and white...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2Z9RQqfvmJI

By 1967, the Beatles had stopped touring, and once he’d returned from filming How I Won the War in Spain, John reportedly spent a lot of time in his den at his Surrey mansion, watching television. Thus we find the one and only reference to a television series in any Beatle lyric, which occurs in ‘Good Morning, Good Morning’, a song inspired by a television commercial for Kellogg’s Corn Flakes, and later dismissed by Lennon as ‘a piece of garbage’. Conmenting on the song, he later said: ‘I always had the TV on very low in the background when I was writing, and it [the commercial] came over.’

The song’s chorus lifts the lyrics from the Conflakes ad, but its most direct television reference comes in the line ‘it’s time for tea and meet the wife’. Meet the Wife was a domestic sitcom by writers Ronald Wolfe and Ronald Chesney, later to become better known for On the Buses. The show starred Freddie Frinton and Thora Hird as an argumentative married couple, and its fifth series had been shown during the autumn of 1966, around the time that the Beatles would have been preparing material for their next LP.

The next actual evidence we have of the Beatles having watched a specific piece of television comes on 8 January 1969, during filming of the aborted Get Back project – eventually realised as the movie Let it Be, before being refashioned by director Peter Jackson for release in 2021. It’s in this version rather than the original that George Harrison can be heard in conversation with Ringo about the previous evening’s television. They’ve both seen an episode of the BBC2 science fiction anthology series Out of the Unknown, broadcast at 21.05 on Tuesday 7 January. The episode in question, Immortality Inc, was the first of the third series, and no longer exists. Adapted from a novel by the American writer Robert Sheckley, the story concerns a man (Derek Benfield) whose mind has been implanted into a new body at a date in the distant future. From George’s description of the programme, it appears that the protagonist (or his mind) has been snatched from a car accident and brought back to life in the 22nd century.

George seems to have dozed off during the programme, because he complains that one minute he was watching ‘that science fiction thing’ and the next found himself halfway through ‘that crap about medals and things'. The ‘crap’ was in fact an episode of a BBC2 series, Europa (broadcast at 21.55) which, according to the Radio Times, ‘look[ed] at aspects of pomp and circumstance through European eyes’. The programme would scarcely be worthy of comment but for the fact that a piece of music used in the production – Johann Strauss’s ‘Kaiser Waltz’ – gave George the idea for a song in waltz time which by the next morning had become a prototype version of ‘I Me Mine’. ‘There was some music that was just playing… like a 3/ 4 thing’, he explained in the studio, demonstrating the new song on an acoustic guitar. One further point to consider here is how and why George and Ringo came to be watching BBC2. The answer is, most likely, colour: the channel had been broadcasting in colour since the summer of 1967, and the third series of Out of the Unknown was the first to be produced in colour. In January 1969, both BBC1 and ITV were still broadcasting in monochrome, so a Beatle with a colour television set was surely going to take advantage of it...

Meantime, John, according to his diary for 1969, was ‘watching telly’ pretty well every evening – though the entries never referred to any specific programmes. John was most likely the real telly addict in the band. His collection of humorous nonsense, In His Own Write (1964) includes a comical survey of television, 'The Fingletoad Resort of Teddiviscious', in which Panorama becomes 'Panorasthma' and Granada's People and Places becomes 'Peckle and Braces'. Richard Dimbleby and Bill Grundy are namechecked in typical Lennon fashion as 'Rinkled Dinglebone' and 'Big Grunty'. The piece is actually a parody of the Pilkington Committee Report on broadcasting, that had been published in 1962. In John's mangled English, 'Pilkington Report' becomes both 'Fingletoad Resort' and 'Piltdown Retord'.

Whilst the band were often quizzed about their tastes in everything from music and fashion to food and girls, few if any journalists seem to have enquired as to what they watched on television, probably deciding that such a question would be deemed too trivial. Google the Beatles and television and you’ll find myriad references to their many TV appearances around the world, but almost nothing about what they actually watched, which is rather a pity. What these glimpses tell us is that the Beatles were essentially casual viewers, happy to sit down and watch whatever happened to be on at any given time, but with no special favourites. They had better things to do than sit at home watching the box, and even if they had been fans of a particular series, they'd never have been able to keep up with it from week to week. Post-Beatles, George famously became such a fan of Monty Python's Flying Circus that he put up the money to help finance the film Life of Brian, but even in their solo careers, the Beatles had little or nothing to say on the subject of television.

From The Flowerpot Men to Out of the Unknown is, nevertheless, quite a televisual journey, finding room on the way for a bit of Bach, and some situation comedy. Not to mention Stingray… or was it Supercar?

Goodbye Watch With Mother, Hello Camberwick Green

 

I started school in the spring term of 1966, a moment that marked the end of an era in television as far as I was concerned. For as long as I could remember, the BBC’s Watch With Mother had been a staple of my daily viewing, traditionally occupying a weekday lunchtime slot but also broadcast mid mornings (from April 1963 to September 1966).

The school timetable brought an end to all that. Lunch was from 12 till 1, and Watch With Mother’s lunchtime slot was 1.30, so that even though I came home for my dinner, I was no longer able to watch any of those old favourites, except during the school holidays.

Watch With Mother’s content had remained relatively static for years. The days of the week varied over time, but a typical schedule saw Picture Book on Monday, Andy Pandy on Tuesday, The Flowerpot Men on Wednesday, Rag, Tag and Bobtail on Thursday and The Woodentops on Friday. The first big change came about when Rag, Tag and Bobtail was replaced by the real life adventures of Hammy Hamster and friends in Tales of the Riverbank. Tales… had originally been broadcast at teatime, beginning in January 1963, before being added to the Watch With Mother line-up later the same year. It wasn’t quite the end for Rag, Tag and Bobtail, which continued to be repeated for another two years, but in December 1965, the three glove puppet friends were seen for the very last time, disappearing from the schedules along with another WWM staple, Picture Book.

The first week of 1966 brought a revised line-up. Picture Book, which had occupied the Monday slot, now made way for a brand new series, Camberwick Green. The rest of the week was business as usual: The Woodentops on Tuesday, Andy Pandy on Wednesday, Tales of the Riverbank on Thursday and The Flowerpot Men on Friday. But change was afoot, and notice had been served on the old guard.

The new series was the work of producer and puppeteer Gordon Murray, who had previously produced A Rubivian Legend using conventional marionettes. From Camberwick Green onwards, Murray adopted stop-motion animation for his productions, and also took the decision to film in colour. As a result, his so-called ‘Trumptonshore Trilogy’ series would continue to be shown on television for over three decades, long after the BBC had called time on the monochrome exploits of Bill and Ben, the Woodentops and Andy Pandy.

I can dimly remember the arrival of Camberwick Green, mainly because of the simple fact that I wasn’t going to be able to watch it. The series began on Monday 3 January 1966, and the spring term didn’t start for about a week. As I recall, I got to see one or maybe two episodes before being whisked away to the reception class in the local infants school. I liked what I saw of Camberwick Green, but it was my brother, two years younger, who really got to enjoy it, and was soon bought an LP record of stories and songs from the series.

This was really the end of the line for me and Watch With Mother. I would continue to see occasional episodes during school holidays, but nothing more. 1966 was something of a watershed year for the brand, with three new titles joining the line-up. As well as Camberwick Green, we got Pogles’ Wood (7 April) and Joe (3 October). I never cared much for Joe – it was far too sentimental and childish for my taste (at the mature age of five and a half!). Every episode’s plotline built to a point at which, to quote from the narration, ‘Joe... began... to cry.’ 

Pogles’ Wood, on the other hand, was not to be missed – yet, sadly, I was seldom able to watch it, and to this day have never managed to see all of the 32 episodes produced. It was the same story with Camberwick Green and its successors. Between 1966 and 1985, Camberwick Green was broadcast no fewer than 32 times by the BBC, and in all that time, I still hadn’t seen all the available episodes. Only 13 were produced, but the repeats were frequent. In its first year alone, the series was shown three times. The first run ended on Monday 28 March, but it was back again the following week at the earlier time of 10.45am. This second run ended on 27 June, with a further repeat beginning on Wednesday 5 October, and ending on 28 December. Two more repeat runs followed in 1967 (Friday 6 January – Friday 31 March/ Tuesday 4 July – Tuesday 26 September), by which time it had been joined by its sibling series Trumpton (commencing 3 January 1967).

The frequency of these repeats meant I had plenty of opportunities to catch up on Camberwick Green during school holidays, but watching the series was like trying to collect bubblegum cards – every time I had a chance to view, it always seemed to be the same episode (either Windy Miller whistling for the wind or Private Lumley of Pippin Fort who couldn’t tell his right from left). I’m quite sure I didn’t complete the series until the 1990s, by which time it had transitioned to Channel 4. If that sounds bad, consider the situation with Chigley, the third and final Trumptonshire series, which I didn’t finish watching until acquiring a DVD in 2023.

I may have struggled to see it, but Camberwick Green quickly became a favourite. Within a year of its debut, the first items of merchandise had begun to arrive in the toy shops, of which the ultimate was the set of model buildings, which my brother and I received as presents at Christmas 1967. Of course, we had no idea that the episodes had been made in colour – for the record, the series was first broadcast in colour on 9 january 1970 – but the LP sleeve showed us just how colourful a place Camberwick Green really was. The LP, of course, featured the music of Freddie Phillips, whose Spanish guitar settings of Gordon Murray’s lyrics added greatly to the appeal of the series, and it was through repeated plays of this record, as much as the actual broadcasts, that I really came to know the inhabitants of Camberwick Green.

The end of Watch With Mother may seem trivial in the grand scheme of things, but at the time it felt like a significant moment. A marker had been passed, and things would never seem quite the same again. When, in adult life, I occasionally tuned in to see an episode of Camberwick Green, it felt like unbottling a vintage from childhood – the blissful closing music evoking drowsy, summery afternoons of the unreachable past. 

The Watch With Mother branding came to an end in 1975, replaced by less well remembered names like ‘See-Saw’. Camberwick Green continued on the BBC until 1985, and saw a brief revival on Channel 4 in the following decade. For years, the Trumptonshire series were poorly served by physical media releases, appearing initially on VHS tapes comprising only selected episodes, and eventually finding their way onto DVD, albeit badly remastered, with serious image defects. Happily, these have now been rectified and the most recent high definition scans were released a few years back on blu-ray by the Fabulous Films label.

Images scanned from the sleeve of the LP 'Welcome to Camberwick Green' (MFP 1109, 1966)

Happy New Years Gone By

 

No fireworks, no Jools Holland, just Andy Stewart...

Unless you live in the middle of nowhere, 2026 probably started with a bang. Fireworks have become a New Year tradition in Britain: this year they were popping at random all evening before the midnight barrage got going at around five minutes to twelve. From where I live, I can look out across the town from a high vantage point, which affords the spectacle of seeing everybody letting off their fireworks at once, across a span of two or three miles, looking almost like a co-ordinated display. This year, there seemed more than ever. But it wasn’t always like this.

Fifty years ago, if you wanted to see fireworks on New Years’ Eve, you’d have had to be in a major city, where there might have been a few organised displays at midnight. But in smaller towns, and out in the suburbs, the year turned in wintry silence. No one let off fireworks in their own gardens, and if they did, they’d have been in a minority. For one thing, pyrotechnics were only sold to the public ahead of November 5, so there’d have been none in the shops. Those who felt like celebrating the new year with a bang would have had to hoard a supply from Guy Fawkes Night. But the reality is that people didn’t bother. Maybe they went in for it in Scotland, where New Year (or Hogmanay) has always been a bigger deal, and was often accompanied by fiery displays – although these were not usually fireworks as such.

The whole ‘fireworks at midnight’ thing only really took off at the millennium. This was the first time I could recollect seeing (and hearing) fireworks being let off to celebrate a new year, and on this occasion it was understandable: we weren’t just welcoming in a new year but a whole new millennium. But come December 31 in the year 2000, the whole thing happened again – and has been happening ever since.

Growing up, New Year’s Eve never really struck me as a great occasion. On New Year’s Day, our mum usually did another Christmas dinner (sometimes comprising left overs from the first one), but on the whole, the night before was no big deal. From the age of ten, I was allowed to stay up to see in the New Year – my 1972 diary mentions it – but this didn’t amount to much more than watching Big Ben strike midnight on television. There were no big celebrations in our house – our dad, being a semi-professional musician, was always out on New Year’s Eve, which for any musician is traditionally the best paying night of the year. Sometimes, he was accompanied by my brother, leaving my mum and myself to see in the New Year on our own.

Only once or twice do I remember our observing any kind of New Year customs – I was sent round the house to re-enter by the front door, in the tradition of ‘first foot’ (the first to enter a dwelling on January 1 was, according to tradition, dark haired, and should carry items of food, drink and fuel. We had a gas fire so that ruled out coal, and I can’t remember drink being involved – just half a loaf of bread). Other years, we’d simply be in front of the television where some kind of Hogmanay entertainment would be presented – usually involving, pipes, drums, country dancing and Andy Stewart, British television’s go-to Scottish entertainer.

Another televisual New Year tradition was the Old Grey Whistle Test’s famous ‘pick of the year’: although this didn’t get started until 1974, and wasn’t billed as such until the following year. The first year’s edition (beginning at just after midnight on 1 January 1975) was billed in the Radio Times as ‘Rock Till Two’, and seems to have been more akin to Jools Holland’s annual Hootenanny with guests performing live in the studio and a look back at some of the past year’s highlights. Next year, there were no live acts on the night, and the programme became an annual round up of clips. The tradition was kept up until New Year’s Eve 1987, when Bob Harris presented the very last edition of the now retitled ‘Whistle Test’, a five and a half hour marathon edition including live performance, documentary items and a raid on the archives. New Year’s Eve 1988 featured a concert by Eurythmics and a David Bowie programme, whilst the following year presented a round-up of the decade in rock music, followed by an Arena programme ‘Heavy Metal Heaven’. Certainly not the kind of thing I’d have stopped up to watch. By now, BBC2 had established a tradition of rock music to see viewers into the New Year: 1990 brought a Rolling Stones concert, and 1991 the classic ‘rockumentary’ This is Spinal Tap. But what all of these programmes lacked was a countdown to midnight, ushering in the New Year.

New Year’s Eve 1992 on BBC2 was an anomaly – music made way for comedy in the form of Monty Python, Rab C Nesbitt and Sandra Bernhard – but if this was an attempt to establish a new end of year tradition, it was to prove short lived. 1993 brought the first of Jools Holland’s annual Hootenannies, and he’s been a fixture on New Year’s Eve ever since. The programme maintains the pretence of counting down to midnight, but is always pre-recorded.

My diaries mention ‘seeing in’ the New Year pretty well every year from 1972 onwards. I recall seeing a fair few of the Whistle Test compilations, but occasionally I was lured away by other entertainments such as BBC1’s Welcome 1977, a variety compilation featuring New Year’s greetings from Kojak, Starsky and Hutch and Petula Clark amongst others (including the inevitable Andy Stewart). For three years from the 70s into the 80s, my mum and myself were invited to a neighbour’s New Year party, which was a quietly sedentary occasion populated by elderly relatives. One year, I entertained them all with an impersonation of Jake Thackray…

From 1980 onwards, my New Years Eves were generally spent in a pub or at various friends’ houses where the entertainment was only marginally less sedentary than that offered by our neighbours across the road. None of them was specially memorable, and they now appear as a blur of quiches, pop quizzes, dull games, ham rolls and the chimes of Big Ben. The one thing that was conspicuously absent from all of them was fireworks…

Pop culture has, on the whole, failed to celebrate the New Year in any form beyond the ephemeral entertainments of the evening itself: one tends not to find New Year episodes of sitcoms, whereas Christmas episodes abound. Charles Dickens, who did a lot to popularise the idea of the festive season being memorialised in literature, actually wrote more New Year tales than specifically Christmas stories, but the tradition has never really taken hold in the era of film and television.

When it comes to pop music, the Christmas chart topper has long exerted a hold on the popular imagination, but no one seems to care what’s number one at New Year – which perhaps is for the best. Pop songs aimed at New Year are few indeed – I mentioned one example in a recent blog: ‘Hoots Mon’ by Lord Rockingham’s XI was clearly pitched at the Hogmanay party crowd. The most famous example of a hit for New Year is, of course, U2’s ‘New Year’s Day’, but hardly anyone else has followed their lead. John Lennon added ‘and a happy new year’ into his famous Christmas hit, and George Harrison had a bash back in 1974 with ‘Ding Dong Ding Dong’, but it hardly set the charts alight, which perhaps served as a deterrent to anyone else considering a ‘song for New Year’. Pilot’s ‘January’ (1975) was about the month rather than the first of the month: and Wings’s ‘Mull of Kintyre’, which annexed the Christmas number one during the festive season of 1977 made no lyrical reference to either Christmas or New Year – though the song’s massed bagpipes made Macca’s festive intentions quite clear.

Comics have occasionally gone in for New Year covers, with the snow on the masthead still frozen in place from Christmas, and characters depicted making and breaking New Year resolutions. A quick trawl through my modest collection of comics produced two New Year examples, both from 1972: and whilst there were plenty of references to the season in IPC's Knockout (above), the Beano, hailing from Dundee, only managed this Dennis the Menace strip: elsewhere, it was business as usual for the regular characters.

Dennis the Menace stages a New Year Revolution in the Beano, January 1, 1972 (click to enlarge)

In England if not elsewhere, New Year has always been the poor relation of Christmas, the last gasp of the festive season, the last date on which the Radio and TV Times bother to decorate the mastheads in their festive double editions. But Christmas itself owes its date to New Year's Day, chosen for the Christian calendar to compete with the pagan winter solstice on 21 December, and conveniently located exactly seven days before New Year. These days, that means many people have a ready made excuse to take a whole week off. New Year’s Eve is the last chance to party before reality kicks in again and everyone goes back to work. Until 1974, January the first was an ordinary working day in England (the Scots had it as a Bank Holiday since 1871), so there was perhaps rather less incentive to stay up late and set off fireworks… which, of course, nobody did.

Happy New Year!