1976: Summer of Nostalgia

Part Three: Episodes on Holiday

During the summer of 1976, most ITV regions were showing old ITC series on weekday mornings and afternoons. On Tuesdays London had The Saint at 11am; Yorkshire and Southern were showing Jason King at 3.25, whilst ATV had Strange Report in the same slot. These were likely to be the last outings for programmes that were now as much as ten years old, and viewers could hold little hope of seeing them again. There would, of course, be further repeats of ITC titles during the mid 1980s, but back in the 70s, it seemed highly unlikely that such vintage material would ever be broadcast again. In an age when most if not all such series are still readily available to own on DVD, others on streaming platforms, it’s hard to convey just how much it meant to see as much as a single episode in any of these 1970s repeat runs.

Our family took its 1976 annual summer holiday in late July, staying in a rented cottage in Wales. The dates meant I would miss episodes of both Strange Report (Tuesday 20 July) and Stingray (Thursday 22 July) but as compensation I would get to see Danger Man, which HTV were repeating in the same Tuesday afternoon slot as Strange Report. Outside it was brilliant holiday weather, with wall to wall sunshine – but on that Tuesday afternoon I chose to sit inside where a small black and white portable television sat within an inglenook in the lounge. At least I wasn’t missing anything by watching in monochrome, as Danger Man had been shot in black and white.

Back at home in ‘ATV land’, Danger Man had last been repeated on Friday afternoons in 1973, and I’d caught a random episode during that broadcast. That aside, I scarcely knew the series, so getting to see even a one-off episode was something of an event to anyone with an interest in those old ITC shows. I took in as much as I could, even drawing the opening title panel in my diary entry for the day, and writing up a synopsis which I summarised as ‘all in all, a pretty good one’.

The episode I’d chanced to see was Parallel Lines Sometimes Meet, first broadcast on 16 March 1965 as episode 22 of series 2, the first run of hour-long episodes. In Macolm Hulke’s storyline, Drake is sent to Haiti where a husband and wife scientist couple have disappeared from a beach. The trail leads to a mine where other captured scientists are being forced to work on an atom bomb for a rogue African state. Malcolm Hulke wasn’t one of the usual Danger Man writers – I knew his name for his work on Doctor Who – and this was his sole contribution to the series. With its sound stage ‘exteriors’ of Haitian beach and jungle, Parallel Lines... had rather the look of James Bond on the cheap, but on the tiny portable I scarcely noticed, and what the hell – it was Danger Man after all! Just to hear that famous harpsichord-driven theme provided an instant burst of nostalgia.

In common with this last round of ITC repeats, the programme was shown with all of its original commercial break captions intact: in this case, the ‘adcap’ took the form of a jagged hole framing John Drake’s eyes, accompanied by a sting reduction of Edwin Astley’s famous theme music. But after the first ad break, something odd happened. The storyline had jumped ahead, and didn’t follow on logically from the end of part one. Someone at HTV had got the reels mixed up and accidentally started up the third reel in place of the second. The programme ran for a couple of minutes before someone noticed, stopped it, and started it again in the right place. This is interesting because it tells us that, rather than whole reels, or even a video transfer, the episode was supplied as three individual reels of 35mm film. These kind of technical errors, though uncommon, were par for the course in the era when material was still broadcast direct from physical film. A few weeks later, one of ATV’s Stingray episodes ground to a halt mid way through the opening titles, forcing continuity announcer Simon Bates to fill in for a few seconds while the fault was fixed. We were recording the soundtrack, so his ad lib was captured for, er, posterity…

While I was watching Danger Man, viewers back home were sitting down to an episode of Strange Report – but it was not the one billed in the TV Times (Report 1533:Racist – A Most Dangerous Proposal). Tim Beddows saw it but afterwards couldn’t remember the complicated title. ‘It was called “Cousin” or something’ was the best he could report back, and we had no TV Times listings to go on. The correct title was, in fact Report 7931: Sniper– When is Your Cousin Not. I’d actually got the best of the deal with Danger Man, as Sniper is a candidate for the weakest episode of Strange Report. For the record, the scheduled episode, Racist, remained on the shelf at ATV where it was finally pulled out as a last minute replacement for a cancelled race meeting in January 1979. Tim missed it and, incensed, wrote to ATV to complain. You can see the reply he received below:

Next year's summer holiday saw us return to the same cottage. By this time, ATV had run out of ITC repeats, but HTV was still working its way through repeats of the last episodes of The Saint. In fact, we only just caught the series before it finished. The episode we got to see – on the same black and white portable TV – was The Man Who Gambled With Life, the antepenultimate outing for Roger Moore as Simon Templar. This time it was my turn to get the title wrong, misremembering it from Templar’s closing speech as The Man Who Gambled With Death – actually, a much better title, but unlikely to go down well on the American networks who always baulked at ‘death’ in the title of anything.

The biggest surprise on this occasion was the music that played over the opening titles. I well remembered Edwin Astley’s famous theme that had accompanied the first five series, but by series six he had been prevailed upon to write a new theme incorporating Leslie Charteris’ own whistling motif, which I’d never heard before. Tim had supplied me with a tiny tape recorder – almost small enough to fit inside one of John Drake’s shavers – and a correspondingly small reel of tape, with instructions to record the beginning and end titles of The Saint. The recording was dire quality, but that tape – comprising the whole ‘cold opening’ as far as the end of the main titles, and the tail of the final scene running into the titles – got played an awful lot over the coming months!

That 1977 Saint broadcast was one of the last ITC repeats of the era, and the whole experience of seeing different series when holidaying in different regions was a decidedly 1970s phenomenon. Before the end of the decade, the repeat rights on all the old 1960s series had expired and wouldn’t be renewed until the mid 1980s. As time wore on, the whole regional nature of ITV was slowly eroded until today, when the only difference you’ll notice from one region to another is in the local news programmes.

God Bless America...

 

...says the Radio Times

We were just ten days into what would prove to be a memorably hot and dry summer when this particular edition of Radio Times appeared in the newsagents, fifty years ago this week. Its cover, featuring the distinctive sculptural caricatures of Peter Fluck and Roger Law, was promoting a series of programmes on TV and radio celebrating the American bicentennial. Fluck and Law would, eight years later, give the world Spitting Image.

This week’s edition was all American, beginning on page 4 where no less an eminence than Andy Warhol provided a piece about his favourite television programmes – few of which would have been familiar to British viewers. His main focus was a series called The Neighbors, which encouraged real people to bitch about their friends in order to win cash prizes. Said Warhol: ‘it shows what ordinary people will do to get on television; in this case they are willing to destroy their social and personal lives’. An interesting observation from the man who predicted that, in the future, everyone would be famous for fifteen minutes.

Butted up against Warhol’s piece, on page 6, is a juxtaposition of which he would surely have approved: a page and a half ad for Crown ready-pasted vinyl wallpapers, showcasing some of their ‘beautiful florals, geometrics and bright modern patterns, in warm, and fresh cool colours’. You can see the reality below. Did people really decorate their homes like that?

On pages 8 and 9, another feature examined how major US film studios were moving increasingly into television production, while page 10 was taken up with an overview of the career of Mary Tyler Moore. On page 11, Philip Jenkinson’s regular film review column previewed the mostly American-flavoured movies to be found this week on BBC1 and BBC2, including, on Saturday morning, the very first appearance on BBC television of the 1936 Flash Gordon serial, edited together into two instalments. (The serial would be shown in full over Christmas later the same year.) Other major films in the BBC’s ‘Great American Picture Show’ season included Psycho (Saturday, 11.30pm BBC1), True Grit (Sunday 8.15pm BBC1) and On The Waterfront (Friday, 11.32pm, BBC1). 

The bicentennial theme extended to radio as well as television: a feature across pages 12 and 13 looked at country music station KLAC, based not in Nashville but Los Angeles. It was all a bit too much for regular RT columnist Peter Tinniswood, who sounded a sour note, dismissing the bicentennial celebrations as ‘tedious’. With his 70s shoulder-length hair and beard, he looked like Reggie Perrin’s boring son in law…

Saturday’s television kicked off with a repeat of the very first Mr. Benn (The Red Knight) at 8.55am, although those of an academic bent might well have been tuned in even earlier to see Foundation Maths – Relations at 7.40am, the first in the regular morning sequence of programmes from the Open University on BBC2. What was I just saying about 70s beards? No OU presenter was complete without one. Over on BBC1, Flash Gordon made his British television debut at 10.35am, stepping aside for Hopalong Cassidy at 11.25, before concluding his adventures on Mongo at 12.30pm.

The afternoon on BBC1 was given over to Wimbledon Grandstand, while an Italian-French film Morgan the Pirate (1960) opened BBC2’s late afternoon schedule (the channel was off air between 1.55 and 3.50pm). BBC1’s early evening news was followed by a magic show For My Next Trick, which included contributions from newcomers Faith Brown and Paul Daniels. The evening’s big American film was The Music Man (1962), followed by a very British slice of light entertainment in the form of Seaside Special, a show I always made a special point of avoiding. Tonight’s edition included The Three Degrees and Kenneth McKellar, which I suppose was diverse if nothing else…

Starsky and Hutch had more or less taken up permanent residence on Saturday evenings since their BBBC1 debut back in 1975, and put in an appearance this evening at 9.30pm, followed by the news at 10.20 and The Spinners at 10.30. Hitchcock fans would have to wait up until 11.30 to see Psycho (1960), clocking up its fifth appearance on British television since its BBC1 premiere in 1968. Over on BBC2, an alternate evening schedule included Victor Borge and something called The Drummonds of Megginch (typing of which is enough to make your spellchecker explode). According to my diary I didn’t see any of these programmes, but I did catch the very first edition of the now legendary late night music show So It Goes over on ITV. I also ignored the BBC's season of American films with one exception: Laurel & Hardy's 1932 short The Music Box, shown at 6.50pm on Tuesday 6 July – the last time that the famous comics would be scheduled during prime time television.

The day’s radio included The Elton John Story on Radio 1 at 1.00pm, up against a Radio 2 offering from forgotten comic David Morgan. Radio 4’s schedule included Pick of the Week, Any Questions and Desert Island Discs, all of them still with us half a century later.

It was on Sunday that the bicentennial celebrations really got under way, with the whole evening on BBC1 from 8.15pm onwards devoted to commemorative material: the movie True Grit was followed by an hour long programme Uncle Sam Celebrates, which saw James Burke presenting highlights of the day’s celebratory outside broadcasts from NBC. Meanwhile, over on BBC2, America Plays (8.15pm) was a celebration of stateside sporting achievement; Bicentennial Summer (9.10pm) focused on the Philadelphia Orchestra; and Alastair Cooke made his own contribution to the festivities with By the Rocket’s Red Glare (10.10pm), ‘a salute to America’. The evening was rounded off with the feature film 1776, an extravagant musical that had proved a costly failure to Columbia Pictures when released just four years earlier.

The Yanks didn’t have quite the whole evening to themselves: BBC1’s early evening programmes included a Blue Peter special revisiting John Noakes’ famous freefall descent with the RAF’s Flying Falcons, followed by Frances Hodgson Burnett’s The Secret Garden, all quintessentially English viewing. Not to be outdone, the Welsh moved in at 7.25 with a repeat of How Green Was My Valley, a 1975 adaptation starring Stanley Baker and Sian Phillips.

The week’s programme listings were peppered with icons of an eagle’s head, highlighting programmes with an American theme, and fairly plastered across the radio programme pages for Sunday, with much music and drama on Radio 3, G.B. Shaw’s The Devil’s Disciple (a satire on puritanism) on Radio 4, and many other themed items. Even Jimmy Savile was getting in on the act, speaking ‘only to Americans’ on his Speakeasy show.

Doctor Who fans were in for a summer treat this week, with two complete serials repeated: Planet of Evil from Monday to Friday, and the two-part Sontaran Experiment shown complete on Friday evening. Monday’s programme page even found room for a neat little illustration from Frank Bellamy, who always nabbed the Doctor Who gigs at the RT. This being the summer, repeats were inevitable, and included The Good Life (at the surprisingly late hour of 9.25pm on Tuesday), The Pallisers (Monday 10pm BBC2), scary kids’ drama The Changes (Wednesday 5.15pm BBC1), Porridge (Thursday 7.50pm BBC1) and David McCallum’s The Invisible Man (Friday 7.15pm BBC1). Another invariable fixture of the summer schedules was It’s a Knockout, which presented a one-off celebrity edition on Friday at 8.00pm. Amongst those taking part were Judith Chalmers, Anita Harris, George Layton, Bernard Cribbins, Frazer Hines, James Villiers (!), Ian Carmichael, Shaw Taylor, Raymond Baxter, Willie Rushton and Z Cars’ James Ellis – a unique and unrepeatable line-up of talent!

One or two series were making their debut: forgotten American cop Bert D’Angelo pounded the mean streets of San Francisco beginning on Friday evening (9.25pm BBC1): it’s safe to say that there really were far too many imported American detective series on British TV at this time – and we only had three channels in which to accommodate them. That aside, the only other new series flagged up in the RT listings were The Mister Men (Sunday), Speed Buggy (Wednesday) Newsround Extra and Bellamy’s Europe (Thursday), the latter providing yet another vehicle for the burbling bearded naturalist famously parodied by Lenny Henry.

Children’s programming included Blue Peter Flies the World and Play Away (Monday), Animal Magic and Lippy Lion (Tuesday), ‘Boss Cat’ (Thursday) and Screen Test on Friday. The pre-news slot was occupied by Barbapapa, a kind of pink blobby thing like a sentient blancmange, whose tales were told by Michael Flanders (and if you want more of this kind of thing – pre-news kids shows I mean, not sentient blancmange – I’ve got a huge item in preparation…)

The letters page reads very much like a primer for Mike Leigh’s Abigail’s Party (1977), with several readers writing in praise of The Roussos Phenomenon, shown on 10 June on BBC2, and showcasing the then unknown (in England) Greek musician and vocalist: ‘the most fantastic singer I have ever heard’ wrote (Mrs) Linda Reynolds of Cornwall. ‘Truly a great, talented, gifted, natural, joyous man’ agreed Pat de Kercrech of Cowen. One can almost hear Mr. Leigh’s pencil scribbling furiously… But not everyone was smitten with the warbling man-mountain: ‘his only remarkable features are that he weighs 17½ stone and wears silver boots’ complained F.W. Langley of Anlaby.

No review of an old Radio Times would be complete without a look at some of the week’s advertisers. The inside back page looks ironic in retrospect: a full-page colour advert for the ‘Philips Deluxe Sun Lamp’, one item that would certainly not be required over the coming weeks. Elsewhere there are ads for Omega watches, Nescafe Gold Blend (long before the brand was associated with Sharon Maughan and Anthony Head), the Peugeot 104, National Savings Certificates, the QE2, something called ‘the Pifco Steam Valet’ (don’t ask) and WH Smith: ‘a writer’s toy shop’, according to Kingsley Amis whose mugshot dominates a page ad for the once beloved high street retailer.

Across pages 52-57, critic and director Gavin Millar(rrrrrr) examined the world of America’s celluloid heroes, with illustrations from Ralph Steadman in his typical splattery style, and on the penultimate page, Stacey Keach delivered an essay on Kenneth Griffith’s film Give Me Liberty or Give Me Death, a personal interpretation of events surrounding the American Revolution. And finally, lest RT’s readers were tiring of the relentless Americanisation of this week’s edition, came a preview of next week’s cover, featuring… wait for it… the Queen and her corgis. The same edition promised recollections of British Army officer Orde Wingate, Beethoven’s Solemnis kicking off the Proms, Patrick Moore looking towards Mars and the imminent touchdown of the Viking lander, and memories of the Spanish Civil War… none of which, I’d like to bet, would get anywhere near a 2026 edition of Radio Times...

1976: Summer of Nostalgia

 

Part Two: Sunday in Old Books

At the same time that ITV was rolling out some vintage series on Saturday evenings, I was about to discover a veritable treasure trove of nostalgic items in the form of old books. I’d been casually collecting old paperbacks and annuals for a couple of years, focusing on out of print TV tie-in editions, most notably NEL/Four Square’s series of Man From UNCLE paperbacks that had appeared in the late 1960s. This was, essentially, TV nostalgia in print form.

Early in 1976, I’d sent away for a book collector magazine, an amateur publication printed, if memory serves, on a spirit duplicator or photocopier of some kind. It served as a shop window for vintage book dealers, ranging from the seriously academic to purveyors of old junk. It was this latter category that most interested me, and I scoured the pages in search of old bookshops that I’d not yet discovered and were within striking distance of where we lived, in Sutton Coldfield. One dull Saturday morning, I persuaded our dad to drive me and my brother to Burton on Trent, a place I’d never visited before, where there were two old booksellers that I wanted to check out.

The town was still largely given over to the brewing industry, and I was surprised at the number of dour red brick edifices that comprised the Bass site and its associated clerical offices. One of the booksellers was based in the town centre, and split its operations between contemporary, remaindered books in the front of the shop, and older editions in the back. But we drew a blank here. There wasn’t much else to be found from the other bookshop, which was located in a ramshackle single storey building at the foot of Bearwood Hill Road. From here, I picked up a number of Bonanza annuals and, on a later visit, a tatty Z Cars annual and (of course) a Man From UNCLE paperback. But the really big discovery was to come in late June.

The legendary hot summer had already kicked off, and the weather was brilliantly sunny all day. Once again, I’d had to prevail upon our dad to drive us to the place I’d heard about, as there was no other means of getting there. Our destination was a small antique shop in the village of Burntwood, near Lichfield. What made this particular expedition special was the day of the week: Sunday. Aside from petrol stations, newsagents and the odd garden centre, no retailer opened for business on a Sunday. Not so Royden Smith, whose antique shop kept unusual hours.

The front room in the shop was cluttered with spinning wheels, china, oil lamps and other country cottage nick nacks. No sign of any books. The shop was presided over by a couple of dapper gents who might have stepped out of a 1950s Ealing film. We were warmly welcomed and, once we’d explained what we’d come for were directed to the rear of the shop where a small conservatory opened into a yard surrounded by stable buildings. The yard behind the shop was dotted with old cartwheels, water pumps and garden furniture. Warm somnolent silence hung over the scene, dust motes dancing in rays of sunlight as we stepped into the nearest of the stable blocks. We found ourselves entering a veritable Tutankhamen’s tomb of old childrens' books, some examples dating back to the 1940s. Annuals were numerous, shelved and piled everywhere you looked. It was clear that the shop had never been discovered by anyone with an interest in old television. Within a few minutes, I’d picked up the first Man From UNCLE annual, two Z Cars annuals, a Saint annual and a Stingray annual. My brother picked up the paperback Stingray and the Monster, exceptionally rare even then, which we’d never set eyes on before. Alongside these came paperbacks of The Persuaders (book three), two Avengers titles and a very rare book of script adaptations from the 1960s Likely Lads series. Staggering under the weight of them all, we went back into the shop where the proprietor, Mr. Smith totted it all up. I don’t think he wanted more than ten or twenty pence for any individual item, and in total our haul came in at well under £5.

It was to be the first of many such expeditions, but of course it wasn’t the kind of place you could visit too often: you had to allow time for new stock to come in, and for the first year or more I remember seeing many of the same items (a Wagon Train annual for instance) still on the shelves. But as my interests moved into other areas, I was able to pick up items I’d not have noticed earlier, like an omnibus edition of Colin Watson’s Flaxborough novels, some of which were serialised on BBC2 in 1977. Mr. Smith and his partner Ken Hayward soon got to know us on sight, and there was always a friendly welcome whenever we showed up. 

Some days stay with you forever, and for me, Sunday 27 June 1976 is one of them – the balmy weather, the brilliant blue sky, the drowsy silence of those empty old barns piled high with books. Nothing would ever quite equal the thrill of entering and realising what we’d stumbled upon, coupled with the excitement of not knowing what vintage item you were going to turn up next. Our finds may have been trivial, but to us back then, this was a genuine treasure trove, the kind of thing one usually finds only in dreams.

I soon had to get new shelves in my bedroom to accommodate the books I was amassing, and today I still own every one of the items we found on that miraculous Sunday half a century ago.

Sadly, the antique and bookshop has long since closed. My last visit was on a Saturday afternoon around 25 years ago. Royden Smith, who had lived in Burntwood all his life, eventually turned the place into a B&B establishment, which earned some glowing reviews on TripAdvisor, but is now listed online as ‘permanently closed’. Some Googling reveals that the shop had formerly been a grocery, seemingly run by Royden or his family. Royden had replied to a message on a facebook group back in 2019 confirming that both he and Ken were still alive, with Ken about to turn 87. Ken lived to the age of 94, and died in November of last year. Although it was never stated openly in all the time I visited the shop, they were clearly a gay couple: the first I’d ever met.

Their shop may be closed, but it still looks exactly as it did back in 1976, and the barns at the back were still intact when Google’s streetview car last visited in September 2025.

Royden Smith's former antique shop, seen in 2025: the book barn is the building on the left