tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-65078837490377885332024-03-14T15:49:07.005-07:00Sunday in Old MoneyMart Chttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04883883503677556135noreply@blogger.comBlogger137125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6507883749037788533.post-51413887542393792412024-03-14T15:37:00.000-07:002024-03-14T15:48:06.010-07:00How to Live Forever (according to ITC)<p><span style="font-family: arial;"><br /></span></p><p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg_fukALJrxzKRqGrk3EI8vGf0yJkqSOFdruGRCh8-v0-cHAxuL057z8sXKgVAOmoexPyp9KcTEkwAjq3gH6mndfxDkWcPYz5iUIIP9iMj5CDQeXuw4agp35Lk-S17QY0aYAUI9cAovICrQoEybfUMxDW_hmztJQcO9vIrsB4yTySxIUvPXrEZMcOyCEm4/s908/Screenshot%202024-03-14%20at%2022.30.07.png" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><span style="font-family: arial;"><img border="0" data-original-height="550" data-original-width="908" height="388" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg_fukALJrxzKRqGrk3EI8vGf0yJkqSOFdruGRCh8-v0-cHAxuL057z8sXKgVAOmoexPyp9KcTEkwAjq3gH6mndfxDkWcPYz5iUIIP9iMj5CDQeXuw4agp35Lk-S17QY0aYAUI9cAovICrQoEybfUMxDW_hmztJQcO9vIrsB4yTySxIUvPXrEZMcOyCEm4/w640-h388/Screenshot%202024-03-14%20at%2022.30.07.png" width="640" /></span></a></div><span style="font-family: arial;"><br /></span><p></p><p style="line-height: 24px; margin-bottom: 0cm;"><span style="font-family: arial;">Going through some very old cassette tapes in my garage, I turned up a minor piece of history reminding me of my long standing friendship with the late Tim Beddows, creator of the Network DVD label. In 1977, our family holiday took us to a rented cottage on the mid Wales coast. The views and the scenery were all very well, but being in Wales for a week had the added advantage of being able to watch an episode of <i>The Saint</i>. It hadn’t been on in our home region (ATV Midlands) for some five years. Forewarned of this possibility, Tim gave me his tiny open-reel tape recorder with a request to record the programme's beginning and end titles, simply so that he could have a copy of the music.</span></p><p style="line-height: 24px; margin-bottom: 0cm;"><span style="font-family: arial;">The tape I discovered today was a dupe from Tim’s tiny three inch spool, itself a pretty ropey recording to begin with. But it’s evidence of a kind, a link back to the past and a late, lamented friend. It’s somewhat ironic, in retrospect, to reflect that the episode broadcast that week on HTV was <i>The Man Who Gambled With Life</i>, number 18 in the last series of <i>The Saint</i>, and first broadcast in January 1969. Make a note of that date, as it’s relevant to what follows. The story, written by series script editor Harry W. Junkin, concerned the efforts of wealthy industrialist Keith Longman (Clifford Evans) to keep himself alive when faced with a deteriorating heart condition. Cryogenics was a recently arrived fad over in the USA, and Junkin, a Canadian, would have been well aware of the trend. His script feels rather more like an outing for <i>The Avengers</i> (and even namechecks Emma Peel as if in acknowledgement of the fact), but it still provided a reasonably entertaining fifty minutes, somewhat off the usual Saintly beaten path.</span></p><p style="line-height: 24px; margin-bottom: 0cm;"><span style="font-family: arial;">Fast forward now to January 1970 and an episode of <i>Department S</i>: <i>Spencer Bodily is S</i><i>i</i><i>xty Years Old</i>. Once again, the theme is longevity, and this time the premise involves participants in a long term experiment who have been using a drug known as BHT (or Butylated Hydroxytoluene) in order to slow down the ageing process. I didn’t get to see this episode until last year, but when I did, I immediately spotted a connection back to the aforementioned episode of <i>The Saint</i>. When Templar is first approached by Longman’s team, he is given a box containing a white mouse. Longman’s daughter explains that the animal’s life span has been significantly extended by injections of... Butylated Hydroxytoluene. The two episodes were the work of the same writer, Harry W. Junkin. So was he merely rehashing an old idea or was there something more to all this? I decided to find out…</span></p><p style="line-height: 24px; margin-bottom: 0cm;"><span style="font-family: arial;">First off, I wanted to know about Butylated Hydroxytoluene. It sounded plausible enough, but it could simply have been a scriptwriter’s invention. A quick Google search confirmed that it was real enough. BHT (as it is correctly referred to in <i>Departmen</i><i>t</i><i> S</i>) is a known antioxidant, widely used in food preservation, and a key ingredient in various cosmetics. Its effect, is simply, to delay the onset of rancidity. In chemical terms, it inhibits the process of oxidation caused by free radicals. So far, so good. And looking into the matter a little further, there is plenty of literature about the reputed benefits of antioxidants in their natural state – foods including blueberries, dark chocolate, beetroot and broccoli are all natural antioxidants. But wasn’t Mr. Junkin delving into the realms of fantasy with his scripts? Not as far as you might think.</span></p><p style="line-height: 24px; margin-bottom: 0cm;"><span style="font-family: arial;">In June 1968, an article entitled ‘Biochemistry: The Elixir of Youth’ appeared in <i>Time</i> magazine. The piece described research into ageing being conducted by Biochemist Denham Harman of the University of Nebraska medical school. The article includes the following statement:</span></p><p style="line-height: 24px; margin-bottom: 0cm;"><span style="font-family: arial;">“Now researchers are beginning to wonder if the preservative [BHT] cannot also be used to prolong the life of man [...] With regular feedings of BHT, [Harman] was able to lengthen the life span of a strain of laboratory mice by 50%. “In human terms,” says Harman, "this is equivalent to increasing life expectancy from 70 years to 105 years.”</span></p><p style="line-height: 24px; margin-bottom: 0cm;"><span style="font-family: arial;">Here, without a doubt, is Harry W. Junkin’s original source material. In light of the fact that he turned in two scripts with a longevity theme within the space of a few months, can we presume that Mr. Junkin was intrigued by the possibility of extending his own life span? Unfortunately, if he took any steps in this direction, they were unsuccessful, as he was to live for only another ten years, dying in 1978 at the age of only 62. But hang on a minute: if that research was published back in 1968, how come we’re not all now living to 105?</span></p><p style="line-height: 24px; margin-bottom: 0cm;"><span style="font-family: arial;">What holds good for laboratory mice does not necessarily hold good for human beings, and no one was about to start adding another chemical to the human food chain without rigorous testing… and we all know, don’t we, that flouridation was nothing more than a communist plot to contaminate our precious bodily essences…</span></p><p style="line-height: 24px; margin-bottom: 0cm;"><span style="font-family: arial;">The sobering fact is that the elixir of life dream of Denham Harman, Harry Junkin and many others remains just that: a dream. BHT is still regularly added to many foodstuffs, but has been linked in various studies with forms of cancer (although ongoing research has more or less ruled this out), which may explain why some manufacturers are now voluntarily removing it from their products. Exactly how much you’d have to take to live to 105 isn’t stated in the <i>Time </i>magazine article, but you’d have thought that, if it were possible, some kind of Seven Seas style capsule might have been made available by now. In the absence of any such wonder drug, then, is there anything we can take away from all this?</span></p><p style="line-height: 24px; margin-bottom: 0cm;"><span style="font-family: arial;">Antioxidants are the subject of fierce debate in the scientific community. Taken as a whole, there seems to be no persuasive argument in favour of their efficacy, but neither have they been shown to have no beneficial effects at all. The best one can hope for is to ‘suck it and see’ as the saying goes. Over the past few months, I’ve upped my intake of blueberries from, well, zero, to a punnet every couple of weeks. Do I feel any better for it? I don’t think so. On the other hand, if I live to 105, you probably won’t be around to hear about it, and equally if it doesn’t work, I won’t be around to report on that either.</span></p><p style="line-height: 24px; margin-bottom: 0cm;"><span style="font-family: arial;">As to cryogenics (or, more accurately, cryonics), there’s still a glimmer of hope, but you’ll need something like $200,000 if you want to join the small, select band of 250 or so frozen individuals following the Saintly path of Harry Junkin’s script. Alan Whicker reported on the state of the industry in the early 1970s, but sadly for those pioneers, eternal life was only as good as the company running the freezer, and all but one of the early cryonics ventures failed: with terminal results for their clients. It’s often stated that Walt Disney has been cryonically preserved, but that’s an urban myth. Although I wouldn’t put it past him to re-emerge in the future as some kind of clone/AI hybrid...</span></p><p style="line-height: 24px; margin-bottom: 0cm;"><span style="font-family: arial;">There’s one final aspect of all this that we need to consider. Let’s imagine that Denham Harman really had cracked the secret of longevity back in the mid 60s. Did any government want its citizens living to advanced old age? Even without an elixir of life drug, we can already see the problems of an ageing population as the average lifespan gets longer. If there is some secret wonder drug out there, you’re never going to find it on the shelves at Holland and Barrett: but you can bet that both of this year’s presidential candidates have been shovelling it down on a daily basis. Which might explain a great deal...</span></p><p style="line-height: 24px; margin-bottom: 0cm;"><span style="font-family: arial;">Meantime, it's back to the blueberries. The second part of this article will appear in March 2066...</span></p><p style="line-height: 24px; margin-bottom: 0cm;"><span style="font-family: arial;"><br /></span></p><p style="line-height: 24px; margin-bottom: 0cm;"><span style="font-family: arial;"><br /></span></p>Mart Chttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04883883503677556135noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6507883749037788533.post-86611385798223674522024-03-10T04:22:00.000-07:002024-03-10T04:22:14.210-07:00Many a Slip<p> </p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi9_rGsStflppUJj5-LhnPllI8ba9T03joGbfg36rKYHBMYKUqp5Rdc1cXQtqdI6ib8ru7pV0exA11tMfxd2RS6p1dnW1NycqeauyZ8effjxwtnYMlReL_BAfhZ3sohJb4Po8XR8cWPbdkeJLjZmTd4rGb197Z-Ytuay6OvONTJz7mOlTI5ILyS2oPHY4U/s645/Screenshot%202024-03-10%20at%2010.29.23.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="330" data-original-width="645" height="330" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi9_rGsStflppUJj5-LhnPllI8ba9T03joGbfg36rKYHBMYKUqp5Rdc1cXQtqdI6ib8ru7pV0exA11tMfxd2RS6p1dnW1NycqeauyZ8effjxwtnYMlReL_BAfhZ3sohJb4Po8XR8cWPbdkeJLjZmTd4rGb197Z-Ytuay6OvONTJz7mOlTI5ILyS2oPHY4U/w640-h330/Screenshot%202024-03-10%20at%2010.29.23.png" width="640" /></a></div><p></p><p><br /></p><p align="justify" style="line-height: 24px; margin-bottom: 0cm;"><span style="color: black; font-family: arial;">Panel games have always been a regular feature of BBC radio. Growing up, I heard many of these lightweight, humorous shows without really understanding much of what was going on. <i>Just a Minute</i> was easy enough to follow, even without an appreciation of the panellists’ erudition (or lack thereof), but shows like <i>My Word</i>, <i>My Music</i> or <i>Does the Team Think</i> were aimed at a mature, intelligent and well educated audience. Nevertheless, I got to hear all of these and many others through the simple fact of our having the radio turned on at lunchtime. During the 60s and 70s, and indeed for decades afterwards, the 12.25pm slot on Radio Four (formerly The Home Service) was a natural home for light comedy and panel games. Even when I was going to school, I got to hear many of these programmes, as for many years I came home for dinner rather than risking the school canteen with its inevitable cheese flans and semolina.</span></p><p align="justify" style="line-height: 24px; margin-bottom: 0cm;"><span style="color: black; font-family: arial;">In April 1971, I encountered a panel show that was new to me and, I assumed, newly arrived on the airwaves. In fact, it had been running since 1964. <i>Many a Slip</i> was created by Ian Messiter, whose other contributions to broadcasting included women’s forum <i>Petticoat Line</i> and, more famously, <i>Just a Minute</i>. The format was simple: playing the game was anything but. Show host Roy Plomley would read out short and often humorous pieces of prose containing deliberate solecisms. The two teams would buzz in every time they spotted a mistake, with points awarded or deducted according to whether the mistake was intentional, unintentional or not a mistake at all. Midway through each episode, a round of ‘musical mistakes’ would be presided over by genial Steve Race, who would intentionally mix up melodies and lyrics from popular songs – which is to say, songs that had been popular thirty or forty years previously.</span></p><p align="justify" style="line-height: 24px; margin-bottom: 0cm;"><span style="color: black; font-family: arial;">Two teams competed regularly across the series, and when I first heard the show, these comprised the ladies – Eleanor Summerfield and Isobel Barnet – and the gentlemen, David Nixon and Richard Murdoch. Unlike today’s panel shows, the team members remained the same week after week, with only minor changes between series as various players moved on. This was, in fact, the ‘classic’ line-up, enduring over nine series from 1966 to 1974. Murdoch departed in ‘74 and Barnet the following year. The choice of players harked back to the early days of television panel games, with both Nixon and Barnet having been regulars on <i>What’s My Line</i>. <i>Many a Slip</i> was itself trialled briefly on television during the autumn of 1965, when a run of just ten episodes appeared on the recently arrived BBC2 channel. But the show, with its emphasis on listening, was more at home on the radio.</span></p><p align="justify" style="line-height: 24px; margin-bottom: 0cm;"><span style="color: black; font-family: arial;">I’m not entirely sure why I’d not been aware of <i>Many a Slip</i> prior to 1971, but I suspect that music may have had something to do with it. In its early years, the show had no opening or closing theme, and was simply introduced by Plomley (as a sole surviving episode from 1967 makes clear). Somewhere further down the line, the show was outfitted with a quirky little melody from BBC Radiophonic Workshop contributor John Baker. Constructed in his customary manner from sounds generated by blowing across bottles and cut into notational lengths, the tune was instantly recognisable, and certainly caught my ear in the spring of 1971. Baker had provided a very similar linking piece for the radio comedy <i>Doctor in the House</i>, which debuted in 1968, and his themes were in regular use on both TV and radio going into the new decade. I must have heard <i>Many a Slip</i> prior to 1971, so this makes me wonder whether this was the first year for the music.</span></p><p align="justify" style="line-height: 24px; margin-bottom: 0cm;"><span style="color: black; font-family: arial;">Either way, that odd little bit of music became, for me, part of the fabric of the summer of 1971, and is wedded forever in memory with the opening of the school swimming pool, and other radio items from the same era, including a lost adaptation of H.E. Bates’ Larkins stories (<i>Just Perfick</i>), and the schools programme <i>Singing Together</i>. Indeed, although <i>Many a Slip</i> would continue, complete with the same theme music, until 1979, I never heard it again after that summer, which explains its potent associations.</span></p><p align="justify" style="line-height: 24px; margin-bottom: 0cm;"><span style="color: black; font-family: arial;">That’s not strictly true, though. A recently discovered diary entry for Monday 2 February 1976 reminded me that I heard that evening’s broadcast at 6.15pm on Radio Four. Our television had temporarily packed in, and in its place, we left the radio on. This, though, would be my last encounter with the programme until a one-off edition, broadcast in a radio retrospective series nineteen years later.</span></p><p align="justify" style="line-height: 24px; margin-bottom: 0cm;"><span style="color: black; font-family: arial;"><i>Many a Slip</i> returned to BBC Radio in the digital era, with episodes resurfacing on BBC7 in 2003. I couldn’t receive digital radio at the time, and so it wasn’t until 2018, when the show returned to the renamed Radio Four Extra that I finally got to hear a run of episodes. For a series that was broadcast regularly over fifteen years, averaging two seasons per year, <i>Many a Slip</i>’s archive status is extremely disappointing. Only a handful of episodes survives, with just two hailing from the era of the ‘classic’ team line-up, and the majority dating to 1978. No complete series survives.</span></p><p align="justify" style="line-height: 24px; margin-bottom: 0cm;"><span style="color: black; font-family: arial;">At time of writing, <i>MAS</i> is due for a return next week on Radio Four Extra, with a run of episodes that appears to be omitting two orphaned examples from 1967 and 1973. It’s too much to hope that any more survivors will have been unearthed since the show’s last outing two years ago, but with so many broadcasts from the past, there’s still the chance that home tapes may come to light: the show was reputedly popular with teachers, who sometimes wrote in asking for copies of Messiter’s word games, and must surely have recorded the odd episode off air.</span></p><p align="justify" style="line-height: 24px; margin-bottom: 0cm;"><span style="color: black; font-family: arial;">I couldn’t appreciate <i>Many a Slip</i> at the age of ten, but at 63 it’s a different matter. It may be slightly old hat and exceedingly upper middle class, but hey, if that’s not my demographic, I don’t know what is. If you’ve never heard it, and want to expose yourself to thirty minutes of archival erudition – you’ll get the added bonus of hearing a clearly drunk Eleanor Summerfield in some of the surviving editions – then tune in from next week on Radio Four Extra.</span></p><p align="justify" style="line-height: 24px; margin-bottom: 0cm;"><span style="color: black; font-family: arial;">One of the rounds in <i>Many a Slip</i> had the teams listening to a short prose essay, which was repeated, with alterations, later in the programme, points being earned for every alteration the players picked up. So, for anyone who can be bothered, you can play the game right now, because I’m going to repost this entire entry with some of the facts and phrases altered. Award yourself a point for each ‘error’ you spot… (there are fifty five ‘intentional’ errors or alterations… bonus points if you spot any I didn’t intend).</span></p><p align="justify" style="line-height: 24px; margin-bottom: 0cm;"><span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: Liberation Serif, serif;"><br /></span></span></p><h3 style="text-align: left;"><span style="color: red; font-family: arial;">Take Two:</span></h3><p align="justify" style="line-height: 24px; margin-bottom: 0cm;"><span style="color: black; font-family: arial;">Panel games have never been a regular feature of BBC radio. Growing up, I heard many of these heavyweight, humourless shows without really understanding much of what was going on. <i>Just a Minute</i> was easy enough to follow, even without an appreciation of the panellists’ erudition (or lack thereof), but shows like <i>My Word</i>, <i>My Music</i> or <i>Twenty Questions</i> were aimed at a mature, intelligent and well educated audience. Nevertheless, I got to hear all of these and many others through the simple fact of our having the radio turned on at teatime. During the 50s and 60s, and indeed for decades afterwards, the 6.15pm slot on Radio Two (formerly The Third Programme) was a natural home for light comedy and panel games. Even when I was going to school, I got to hear many of these programmes, as for many years I came home for dinner rather than risking the school canteen with its inevitable liver and onions.</span></p><p align="justify" style="line-height: 24px; margin-bottom: 0cm;"><span style="color: black; font-family: arial;">In April 1975, I encountered a panel show that was new to me and, I assumed, newly arrived on the airwaves. In fact, it had been running since 1954. <i>Many a Slip</i> was created by Ian Messiter, whose other contributions to broadcasting included women’s forum <i>Petticoat Line</i> and, more famously, <i>What’s My Line</i>. The format was simple: playing the game was anything but. Show host Steve Race would read out short and often humorous pieces of prose containing unintentional solecisms. The three teams would buzz in every time they spotted an error, with points awarded or deducted according to whether the mistake was intentional, unintentional or not a mistake at all. At the end of each episode, a round of ‘musical mistakes’ would be presided over by genial Steve Wright, who would intentionally mix up melodies and lyrics from popular songs – which is to say, songs that had been popular fifty or sixty years previously.</span></p><p align="justify" style="line-height: 24px; margin-bottom: 0cm;"><span style="color: black; font-family: arial;">Two teams competed regularly across the series, and when I first heard the show, these comprised the ladies – Eleanor Bron and Isobel Barnet – and the gentlemen, Richard Nixon and Stinker Murdoch. Unlike today’s panel shows, the team members remained the same month after month, with only minor changes between series as various players moved on. This was, in fact, the ‘classic’ line-up, enduring over nineteen series from 1966 to 1974. Murdoch departed in ‘74 and Barnet the following year. The choice of players harked back to the early days of television panel games, with both Nixon and Barnet having been regulars on <i>The Brains Trust</i>. <i>Many a Slip</i> was itself trialled briefly on the small screen during the autumn of 1965, when a run of just ten episodes appeared on the recently arrived ABC channel. But the show, with its emphasis on listening, was more at home on the radio.</span></p><p align="justify" style="line-height: 24px; margin-bottom: 0cm;"><span style="color: black; font-family: arial;">I’m not entirely sure why I’d not been aware of <i>Many a Slip</i> prior to 1971, but I suspect that music may have had nothing to do with it. In its early years, the show had no opening theme, and was simply introduced by Plomley (as a sole surviving episode from 1967 makes clear). Somewhere further down the line, the show was outfitted with a quirky little melody from BBC Radiophonic Workshop contributor Richard Baker. Constructed in his customary manner from sounds generated by blowing across jam jars and cut into notational lengths, the tune was instantly recognisable, and certainly caught my ear in the spring of 1971. Baker had provided a very similar linking piece for the radio comedy <i>Doctor </i><i>at Sea</i>, which debuted in 1968, and his themes were in regular use on both TV and radio going into the new decade. I must have heard <i>Many a Slip</i> prior to 1971, so this makes me wonder whether this was the first year for the music.</span></p><p align="justify" style="line-height: 24px; margin-bottom: 0cm;"><span style="color: black; font-family: arial;">Either way, that odd little bit of music became, for me, part of the fabric of the winter of 1971, and is wedded forever in memory with the opening of the school science block, and other radio items from the same era, including a lost adaptation of Philip Larkin stories (<i>Just Perfick</i>), and the schools programme <i>Singing Together</i>. Indeed, although <i>Many a Slip</i> would continue, complete with the same theme music, until 1989, I never heard it again after that summer, which explains its potent associations.</span></p><p align="justify" style="line-height: 24px; margin-bottom: 0cm;"><span style="color: black; font-family: arial;">That’s not entirely true, though. A recently discovered diary entry for Monday 2 February 1976 reminded me that I heard that evening’s broadcast at 6.15pm on Radio Four. Our television had temporarily packed in, and in its place, we left the radio on. This, though, would be my last encounter with the programme until a one-off edition, broadcast in a radio retrospective series fifty years later.</span></p><p align="justify" style="line-height: 24px; margin-bottom: 0cm;"><span style="color: black; font-family: arial;"><i>Many a Slip</i> returned to BBC Radio in the digital era, with episodes resurfacing on BBC3 in 2007. I couldn’t receive digital radio at the time, and so it wasn’t until 2018, when the show returned to the renamed Radio Five Live that I finally got to hear a run of episodes. For a series that was broadcast regularly over fifty years, averaging two seasons per year, <i>Many a Slip</i>’s archive status is extremely encouraging. Only a handful of episodes survives, with just two hailing from the era of the ‘classic’ team line-up, and the majority dating to 1978. One complete series survives.</span></p><p align="justify" style="line-height: 24px; margin-bottom: 0cm;"><span style="color: black; font-family: arial;">At time of writing, <i>MAS</i> is due for a return last week on Radio Four, with a run of episodes that appears to be omitting two orphaned examples from 1967 and 1973. It’s too much to hope that any more survivors will have been dug up since the show’s last outing five years ago, but with so few broadcasts from the past, there’s still the chance that home tapes may come to light: the show was reputedly popular with lawyers, who sometimes wrote in asking for copies of Messiter’s word games, and must surely have recorded the odd episode off air.</span></p><p align="justify" style="line-height: 24px; margin-bottom: 0cm;"><span style="color: black; font-family: arial;">I could appreciate <i>Many a Slip</i> at the age of ten, but at 63 it’s a different matter. It may be slightly archaic and exceedingly upper middle class, but hey, if that’s not my demographic, I don’t know what is. If you’ve never heard it, and want to expose yourself to sixty minutes of archival erudition – you’ll get the added bonus of hearing a clearly drunk Eleanor Summerfield in some of the surviving editions – then tune in from next week on Radio Four Extra.</span></p><p align="justify" style="line-height: 24px; margin-bottom: 0cm;"><span style="color: black; font-family: arial;">One of the rounds in <i>Many a Slip</i> had the teams listening to a long prose essay, which was repeated, with aberrations, later in the programme, points being earned for every alteration the players picked up. So, for anyone who can’t be bothered, you can play the game right now, because I’m going to repost this entire entry with one of the facts and phrases altered. Award yourself a point for each ‘error’ you spot… </span></p>Mart Chttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04883883503677556135noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6507883749037788533.post-90395159770379567932024-02-20T10:09:00.000-08:002024-02-20T10:09:32.014-08:00The Collector: 1 – The Curse of the Corgi Technocrats<p> </p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjMrii9FBdue37Y2kM8Z18A3eKx7rKRxEU-VGYzfTQ2OouieE6Pi94loE7UffbuxAF-AbUByNPmxyIWnO4_hJc5d1AEOLGTV3KQgeldHIWGJK72rhX0e5mKVZawhifYSsrdwYJUK_lxLkV6H-oBPx2AwGyNvzbQikLJanmBi8lCxJSl_qmLU3mIRSL08eM/s1684/IMG_20240220_0001.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1368" data-original-width="1684" height="520" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjMrii9FBdue37Y2kM8Z18A3eKx7rKRxEU-VGYzfTQ2OouieE6Pi94loE7UffbuxAF-AbUByNPmxyIWnO4_hJc5d1AEOLGTV3KQgeldHIWGJK72rhX0e5mKVZawhifYSsrdwYJUK_lxLkV6H-oBPx2AwGyNvzbQikLJanmBi8lCxJSl_qmLU3mIRSL08eM/w640-h520/IMG_20240220_0001.jpg" width="640" /></a></div><p></p><p><br /></p><p align="justify" style="line-height: 24px; margin-bottom: 0cm;">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.</p><p align="justify" style="line-height: 24px; margin-bottom: 0cm;">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.</p><p align="justify" style="line-height: 24px; margin-bottom: 0cm;">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.</p><p align="justify" style="line-height: 24px; margin-bottom: 0cm;">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!</p><p align="justify" style="line-height: 24px; margin-bottom: 0cm;"><br /></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEidDKL0MLKctRcz-Lb4QGQ9zo-ub6HlXlCh_IGBGRHr-h-LTE5klMRRdmRrfxQkiUkhGVIMCgoSc4ZAvJ2SvsS1JJgKdkdVE4ha6o0vCc9tUrdqq1Y1z_qx-ACwUdIai2WFrIUhpX800vIcDVVixCUumNqOV0F-R2iLw8Kut84vEhW4MmM1Qa7-tuWRD3E/s4030/IMG_5390.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="2314" data-original-width="4030" height="370" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEidDKL0MLKctRcz-Lb4QGQ9zo-ub6HlXlCh_IGBGRHr-h-LTE5klMRRdmRrfxQkiUkhGVIMCgoSc4ZAvJ2SvsS1JJgKdkdVE4ha6o0vCc9tUrdqq1Y1z_qx-ACwUdIai2WFrIUhpX800vIcDVVixCUumNqOV0F-R2iLw8Kut84vEhW4MmM1Qa7-tuWRD3E/w640-h370/IMG_5390.jpg" width="640" /></a></div><p align="justify" style="line-height: 24px; margin-bottom: 0cm;">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.</p><p align="justify" style="line-height: 24px; margin-bottom: 0cm;">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.</p><p align="justify" style="line-height: 24px; margin-bottom: 0cm;">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.</p><p align="justify" style="line-height: 24px; margin-bottom: 0cm;">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’…</p><p align="justify" style="line-height: 24px; margin-bottom: 0cm;">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.</p><p align="justify" style="line-height: 24px; margin-bottom: 0cm;">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.</p><p align="justify" style="line-height: 24px; margin-bottom: 0cm;">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: <a href="https://www.corgi-toys.net/lists/1958.html">https://www.corgi-toys.net/lists/1958.html</a></p><p align="justify" style="line-height: 24px; margin-bottom: 0cm;"><br /></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhOYMAkpdzWbVaAWBSSKdcBs9tCLAd2s0PtYrChIrcagIKuRnUjxdzEn5920QhQhsW2TmHlc2Vees0UZu9uibSnGKtSLNKOuhGqO8_Dsl8zzLy3AdZ_368wm0Bf6kBcClIQj636pMtgRriNSvtu26Z6fWw3-4U7NhNo0vGr30Rzj0sORg_afc-Q4HEplew/s1220/Screenshot%202024-02-20%20at%2017.51.18.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="484" data-original-width="1220" height="254" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhOYMAkpdzWbVaAWBSSKdcBs9tCLAd2s0PtYrChIrcagIKuRnUjxdzEn5920QhQhsW2TmHlc2Vees0UZu9uibSnGKtSLNKOuhGqO8_Dsl8zzLy3AdZ_368wm0Bf6kBcClIQj636pMtgRriNSvtu26Z6fWw3-4U7NhNo0vGr30Rzj0sORg_afc-Q4HEplew/w640-h254/Screenshot%202024-02-20%20at%2017.51.18.png" width="640" /></a></div><br /><p align="justify" style="line-height: 24px; margin-bottom: 0cm;"><br /></p><p align="justify" style="line-height: 24px; margin-bottom: 0cm;"><br /></p>Mart Chttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04883883503677556135noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6507883749037788533.post-26543566964146815642024-02-15T15:10:00.000-08:002024-02-15T15:10:56.844-08:00Tomorrow, the Ratatouille<p> </p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgHmU_ypV7nunQd1iCpDqoR7ZfDsgz1IOwm34dJKq7yM0dwRC8jnv2sxAWArVhQxXt6PgQUj67KUOlFBMxvZz5fF1Tb26mx_gVuA1l8gSOK2RbkWY0Rfgig8u8CyiprssIuf2h6GvcC97m4-3woaSiJEsMmm4Q6ytQNe7Fb5UZ5701FEwCS30Xw94nND2M/s1140/Screenshot%202024-02-15%20at%2022.46.36.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="680" data-original-width="1140" height="384" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgHmU_ypV7nunQd1iCpDqoR7ZfDsgz1IOwm34dJKq7yM0dwRC8jnv2sxAWArVhQxXt6PgQUj67KUOlFBMxvZz5fF1Tb26mx_gVuA1l8gSOK2RbkWY0Rfgig8u8CyiprssIuf2h6GvcC97m4-3woaSiJEsMmm4Q6ytQNe7Fb5UZ5701FEwCS30Xw94nND2M/w640-h384/Screenshot%202024-02-15%20at%2022.46.36.png" width="640" /></a></div><br /><p></p><h1 style="text-align: left;"><span style="color: red;">An evening of 1970s rodent paranoia</span></h1><p><br /></p><p align="justify" style="line-height: 24px; margin-bottom: 0cm;">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...</p><p align="justify" style="line-height: 24px; margin-bottom: 0cm;">The idea came to me part way through watching a notorious episode of the BBC’s 1970s eco-thriller series <i>Doomwatch</i>. 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 <i>Fawlty Towers</i>’ swansong episode, <i>Basil the Rat</i>. 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…</p><p align="justify" style="line-height: 24px; margin-bottom: 0cm;"><span style="text-align: left;">Let’s start with</span><span style="text-align: left;"> </span><i style="text-align: left;">Doomwatch</i><span style="text-align: left;">, the earliest of our three rodent reruns.</span><span style="text-align: left;"> </span><i style="text-align: left;">Tomorrow, the Rat </i><span style="text-align: left;">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.</span><span style="text-align: left;"> </span><i style="text-align: left;">Doomwatch</i><span style="text-align: left;"> </span><span style="text-align: left;">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.</span></p><p align="justify" style="line-height: 24px; margin-bottom: 0cm;">So far so good. But <i>Tomorrow the Rat</i> 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 <i>Doomwatch</i>, 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.</p><p align="justify" style="line-height: 24px; margin-bottom: 0cm;">I’m pleased that some of <i>Doomwatch</i> 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 <i>Doomwatch</i> office a case in point, and the stuffed rats on show in this example are funnier than anything served up (with biscuits) in <i>Fawlty Towers</i>. 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 <i>Tomorrow the Rat</i>, despite being a fan favourite, enshrines pretty well everything that the programme makers got wrong. </p><p align="justify" style="line-height: 24px; margin-bottom: 0cm;">Time for some light relief. <i>Basil the Rat</i>, first broadcast in 1979 as the very last episode of <i>Fawlty Towers</i>, 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 <i>Gourmet Night</i> and <i>The Hotel Inspectors</i>). 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 <i>Doomwatch</i>, 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.</p><p align="justify" style="line-height: 24px; margin-bottom: 0cm;">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 <i>Quatermass</i> 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 <i>Doomwatch</i> before it, this episode of his anthology series <i>Beasts</i> set out to give its audience nightmares. <i>During Barty’s Party</i> 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 <i>Doomwatch</i> episode, but a more recent source of inspiration probably came from James Herbert’s famous pulp novel <i>The Rats</i>. Which may itself have contained a bit of <i>Doomwatch</i> DNA. </p><p align="justify" style="line-height: 24px; margin-bottom: 0cm;">Kneale’s writing belongs in the same sexist league as <i>Doomwatch</i>, with Elizabeth Sellars’ character portrayed as a twitchy neurotic. He’d done the same thing a few years earlier in the BBC ghost story <i>The Stone Tape</i>, 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.</p><p align="justify" style="line-height: 24px; margin-bottom: 0cm;">Of our two dramatic selections, <i>Beasts</i> is a much more effective piece of television, due in no small part to the power of suggestion. <i>Doomwatch</i> 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. <i>During Barty’s Party</i> 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 <i>Shoestring</i>. 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 <i>Doomwatch</i> was gratuitous, <i>Beasts</i> kept the horror out of sight, and comes out on top of our, if you will, TV ‘rat-a-thon’.</p><p align="justify" style="line-height: 24px; margin-bottom: 0cm;">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 <i>Tales of the Riverbank</i>. Back when hamsters really were hamsters...</p><p align="justify" style="line-height: 24px; margin-bottom: 0cm;"><br /></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgHyWvvYbqAfchPDWOO3_shVYwLJQ45kCs8ImiA6I-5VtuuvRQWUJ85NsyPb-PFir32TyBK-uorcq97U19BTiDDWNefUGu5MOlk3escSwa8n3h7BQpBsKLKGFnRiR7H7XPLHDDb-IqTXhBV9d_DxQ4d-Gd51ewzMIXkUYurTyVlLunyJhvn31eGJu6ZR3c/s734/Screenshot%202024-02-15%20at%2022.49.00.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="504" data-original-width="734" height="440" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgHyWvvYbqAfchPDWOO3_shVYwLJQ45kCs8ImiA6I-5VtuuvRQWUJ85NsyPb-PFir32TyBK-uorcq97U19BTiDDWNefUGu5MOlk3escSwa8n3h7BQpBsKLKGFnRiR7H7XPLHDDb-IqTXhBV9d_DxQ4d-Gd51ewzMIXkUYurTyVlLunyJhvn31eGJu6ZR3c/w640-h440/Screenshot%202024-02-15%20at%2022.49.00.png" width="640" /></a></div><br /><p align="justify" style="line-height: 24px; margin-bottom: 0cm;"><br /></p>Mart Chttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04883883503677556135noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6507883749037788533.post-65753780653469242842024-02-13T07:44:00.000-08:002024-02-13T11:32:33.160-08:00Time Flies by - Revisiting Chigley<p> </p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj3zwXi-Tt00jjV9jtfZx26Nu0XxtpbWsXml-Q0s5gwaAFqfqPlrUF2K2OyTzWt8F1iBuqef1H6nM4Px49sedXPzIpOA_ebkv6RkxW4demv3xu26F7kYFOP4gmr2YLs9aU4apl1BEebr5Vo4WcB0_lYgLUNkXHWVeZcHp9XDt1fBEiJU3UZ-XwIgyxIyMY/s700/fb19691f4a7824e2d925ea4c01ed2a04.webp" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="351" data-original-width="700" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj3zwXi-Tt00jjV9jtfZx26Nu0XxtpbWsXml-Q0s5gwaAFqfqPlrUF2K2OyTzWt8F1iBuqef1H6nM4Px49sedXPzIpOA_ebkv6RkxW4demv3xu26F7kYFOP4gmr2YLs9aU4apl1BEebr5Vo4WcB0_lYgLUNkXHWVeZcHp9XDt1fBEiJU3UZ-XwIgyxIyMY/w640-h320/fb19691f4a7824e2d925ea4c01ed2a04.webp" width="640" /></a></div><p></p><p><br /></p><p align="justify" style="line-height: 24px; margin-bottom: 0cm;">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 <i>Camberwick Green</i> and <i>Trumpton</i> 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.’ </p><p align="justify" style="line-height: 24px; margin-bottom: 0cm;">I was just a few weeks away from starting school when <i>Camberwick Green</i> arrived on BBC1 on 3 January 1966. An episode (<i>Mr. Dagenham, the Salesman</i>) was, indeed, broadcast on my 5th birthday, when I finally reached school age. <i>Trumpton</i> 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.</p><p align="justify" style="line-height: 24px; margin-bottom: 0cm;"><i>Chigley</i> was a different matter. By the time it came to the screen, in October 1969, I considered myself a bit beyond such childish entertainment. <i>Watch With Mother</i> 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 <i>Chigley</i>, 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). </p><p align="justify" style="line-height: 24px; margin-bottom: 0cm;">I’d enjoyed both<i> Camberwick Green</i> and <i>Trumpton</i>, but <i>Chigley</i> 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 <i>Chigley</i>. 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 <i>Trumpton</i>, whose themes had included some unusually subtle chord voicings from composer Freddie Phillips.</p><p align="justify" style="line-height: 24px; margin-bottom: 0cm;"><i>Chigley</i> seemed staid and uninteresting after the endless invention displayed during <i>Trumpton</i>, and some of this dullness must be attributed to the creator, Gordon Murrary, who was back to handling script duties. <i>Trumpton</i>, whose stories evolved with neat, logical simplicity, was scripted by Alison Prince, but she received no credit on <i>Chigley</i>. And it shows. The stories are dull and repetitive. Every episode of <i>Trumpton</i> 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 <i>Chigley</i>, 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 <i>The Tifield Thunderbolt</i>. Lord Belborough even bears a distinct resemblance to actor George Relph who played Titfield’s engine-driving curate.</p><p align="justify" style="line-height: 24px; margin-bottom: 0cm;">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.</p><p align="justify" style="line-height: 24px; margin-bottom: 0cm;">But what really put me off <i>Chigley</i> – even at the age of eight – was the peculiar end sequence that took the place of <i>Trumpton</i>’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.</p><p align="justify" style="line-height: 24px; margin-bottom: 0cm;">I probably saw no more than a couple of <i>Chigley</i> episodes during its first year on air. The series continued to be broadcast on BBC1 (latterly in the ‘See-Saw’ strand that had replaced <i>Watch With Mother</i>) until 1986, but unlike its predecessors, which I would occasionally endeavour to watch during days off from work, I made no such efforts with <i>Chigley</i>. 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 <i>Chigley</i> 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 <i>The Balloon</i> (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 <i>Camberwick Green</i> – 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? </p><p align="justify" style="line-height: 24px; margin-bottom: 0cm;">Perhaps by the end of thirteen episodes I might have changed my mind about <i>Chigley</i>, but I’m still inclined to go with my original 1969 opinion. And I suspect it was shared by other viewers. Somehow, <i>Chigley</i> 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 <i>Camberwick Green</i>, whose characters were realised as plastic dolls and even tubes of toothpaste! I have never come across a <i>Chigley</i> spin-off toy, and I suspect there simply weren’t any. </p><p align="justify" style="line-height: 24px; margin-bottom: 0cm;">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…</p><p align="justify" style="line-height: 24px; margin-bottom: 0cm;"><br /></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEigcSfw0YClpJUoj3KeiNa05E-5VY5j_002ILF0GVIqn175pbwldu03xHan6ErnEYeFsJe0B6P0R1Mf7FteQwEzBJTtBxYf2lZOP2lIRH3CqpaknnEhWAJTxKf6-sF7IIOGQbPPTih7LASL92ZWiqYO84SR4N-PiYKDEwwuEH5BTcJ2nKtBfk0b9DXCVKA/s500/R-5249437-1422114839-5403.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="500" data-original-width="500" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEigcSfw0YClpJUoj3KeiNa05E-5VY5j_002ILF0GVIqn175pbwldu03xHan6ErnEYeFsJe0B6P0R1Mf7FteQwEzBJTtBxYf2lZOP2lIRH3CqpaknnEhWAJTxKf6-sF7IIOGQbPPTih7LASL92ZWiqYO84SR4N-PiYKDEwwuEH5BTcJ2nKtBfk0b9DXCVKA/s16000/R-5249437-1422114839-5403.jpg" /></a></div><br /><p align="justify" style="line-height: 24px; margin-bottom: 0cm;"><br /></p>Mart Chttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04883883503677556135noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6507883749037788533.post-20073197866134609512024-02-13T04:08:00.000-08:002024-02-13T06:03:11.486-08:00The Satirist: 2 – 'Spell my name properly when you speak to me!'<p> </p><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg9DCW9Lugyc2dySnPINVM5gYdmDM3Y0tEG_oKsqbY8VYlwYQr-tIF2-8t-nderJfm59a95VwY9Yr-kltBiLUe5r6XI9-3K8I0NfqtIMGYERhNiWOt3UiDk1hJXlg7A512UMyZ1ecDpjRUvCyr8XemMzUWpylOtO0Nrm5BCzSl8meA8w9LwHHwwBswBSjw/s1272/Screenshot%202024-02-13%20at%2011.39.10.png" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="571" data-original-width="1272" height="287" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg9DCW9Lugyc2dySnPINVM5gYdmDM3Y0tEG_oKsqbY8VYlwYQr-tIF2-8t-nderJfm59a95VwY9Yr-kltBiLUe5r6XI9-3K8I0NfqtIMGYERhNiWOt3UiDk1hJXlg7A512UMyZ1ecDpjRUvCyr8XemMzUWpylOtO0Nrm5BCzSl8meA8w9LwHHwwBswBSjw/w640-h287/Screenshot%202024-02-13%20at%2011.39.10.png" width="640" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">The 'Z-Dozer' goes into action in the very last 'Z-Car Toons'</td></tr></tbody></table><p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br /></div><p></p><p align="justify" style="line-height: 24px; margin-bottom: 0cm;">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 <i>Z Cars</i> episode, <i>Police Work</i> 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 <i>Z Cars</i> 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 <i>Z Cars Annual</i> 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 <i>Supercar</i>, I knew all the characters very well, and the books contained their fair share of comical asides, particularly involving Fancy Smith.</p><p align="justify" style="line-height: 24px; margin-bottom: 0cm;">A couple of weeks after the repeated episode, on Wednesday 18 August, BBC1’s award-winning series <i>The Explorers </i>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.’</p><p align="justify" style="line-height: 24px; margin-bottom: 0cm;">D.C. Thompson’s <i>Sparky</i> comic had been running its own comedy take on <i>Z Cars</i> 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.</p><p align="justify" style="line-height: 24px; margin-bottom: 0cm;">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.</p><p align="justify" style="line-height: 24px; margin-bottom: 0cm;">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'. </p><p align="justify" style="line-height: 24px; margin-bottom: 0cm;"><br /></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEioAtrIT_Z9qbLnSaDXTQQyNsg_HEoNE6SAmjFBoW-v8Cf23aF-JCa-8Sk-oB3U6o8dLix-k-sP4tylbpk4EsMjM9sjMnhwGW1EXlbIZP57LvTE69XE_Hqhjxo_xMojOtLx1Ok-l67r_sdWVLeCLoFFcKflOUh1BKABnNZPVoUKemJFqN_cGs9I-Xz0edI/s1271/Screenshot%202024-02-13%20at%2011.39.24.png" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="600" data-original-width="1271" height="302" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEioAtrIT_Z9qbLnSaDXTQQyNsg_HEoNE6SAmjFBoW-v8Cf23aF-JCa-8Sk-oB3U6o8dLix-k-sP4tylbpk4EsMjM9sjMnhwGW1EXlbIZP57LvTE69XE_Hqhjxo_xMojOtLx1Ok-l67r_sdWVLeCLoFFcKflOUh1BKABnNZPVoUKemJFqN_cGs9I-Xz0edI/w640-h302/Screenshot%202024-02-13%20at%2011.39.24.png" width="640" /></a></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br /></div><p align="justify" style="line-height: 24px; margin-bottom: 0cm;">‘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 <i>Star Trek</i>. So maybe it was just the logical thing to do. In the comic strip field, <i>Mad</i> 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.</p><p align="justify" style="line-height: 24px; margin-bottom: 0cm;">Over the years, I would knock off c<span style="text-align: left;">artoon parodies of series including</span><span style="text-align: left;"> </span><i style="text-align: left;">Danger UXB</i><span style="text-align: left;">,</span><span style="text-align: left;"> </span><i style="text-align: left;">The Professionals </i><span style="text-align: left;">and</span><span style="text-align: left;"> </span><i style="text-align: left;">Strange Report</i><span style="text-align: left;">. 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</span><span style="text-align: left;"> </span><i style="text-align: left;">Danger UXB</i><span style="text-align: left;">, 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.</span></p><p align="justify" style="line-height: 24px; margin-bottom: 0cm;">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 <i>Dr. Who</i> 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.</p><p align="justify" style="line-height: 24px; margin-bottom: 0cm;">Well into the 21<sup>st</sup> century I still find the urge to create parody hard to resist. Back in 2016, having watched the DVD release of the BBC’s <i>Doomwatch</i>, 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...</p><p align="justify" style="line-height: 24px; margin-bottom: 0cm;"><br /></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi9sv0sa2P7CqtbwC0ELFrZw6tDaAY18Hlj3rZdZ52AVsU4nLfpOre6ZSx-J4RNwFfeQ3Z4P2YbctkGBIN_1djAVcjvx7OzouNnpEX9x4kPK0mQiTrnk2oWf6zRzedKCQunEw3TeR_MtfbQC06pT6K-YCnAmvVFq-tFCmqfH8c1xmBsK8rrp9t9JphIKO8/s1765/Screenshot%202024-02-13%20at%2011.30.16.png" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="640" data-original-width="1765" height="232" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi9sv0sa2P7CqtbwC0ELFrZw6tDaAY18Hlj3rZdZ52AVsU4nLfpOre6ZSx-J4RNwFfeQ3Z4P2YbctkGBIN_1djAVcjvx7OzouNnpEX9x4kPK0mQiTrnk2oWf6zRzedKCQunEw3TeR_MtfbQC06pT6K-YCnAmvVFq-tFCmqfH8c1xmBsK8rrp9t9JphIKO8/w640-h232/Screenshot%202024-02-13%20at%2011.30.16.png" width="640" /></a></div><br /><p align="justify" style="line-height: 24px; margin-bottom: 0cm;"><br /></p><p align="justify" style="line-height: 24px; margin-bottom: 0cm;"><br /></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br /></div><br /><p align="justify" style="line-height: 24px; margin-bottom: 0cm;"><br /></p>Mart Chttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04883883503677556135noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6507883749037788533.post-44586703858650499132024-02-13T03:27:00.000-08:002024-02-13T03:27:11.888-08:00The Satirist: 1 - Taking the Mickey out of Mike Mercury<p> </p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh2_JWmH5jfpsp1Qe9lG8U6qYPZ-3s8sk2XX0R7q4cW23eklI_5ir-hyqpyl5nqYjSJuzDw5Q3tv5omlK3KbxnVN1PqRRWu-YGFPsKVAISnQVFI7ZS24NpSdFiWfHCkxq_CRPPzeZeV4u_yOfD_lZVUHMYb7eU4qaSXOjqgi2kCUinaWd4ZWyyNrvX387w/s793/Screenshot%202024-02-13%20at%2011.16.56.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="457" data-original-width="793" height="368" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh2_JWmH5jfpsp1Qe9lG8U6qYPZ-3s8sk2XX0R7q4cW23eklI_5ir-hyqpyl5nqYjSJuzDw5Q3tv5omlK3KbxnVN1PqRRWu-YGFPsKVAISnQVFI7ZS24NpSdFiWfHCkxq_CRPPzeZeV4u_yOfD_lZVUHMYb7eU4qaSXOjqgi2kCUinaWd4ZWyyNrvX387w/w640-h368/Screenshot%202024-02-13%20at%2011.16.56.png" width="640" /></a></div><br /><p></p><h3 style="text-align: left;"><span style="color: red;">... or how I learned to take nothing seriously</span></h3><div><br /></div><div><p align="justify" style="line-height: 24px; margin-bottom: 0cm;">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.</p><p align="justify" style="line-height: 24px; margin-bottom: 0cm;">Up to now, I’d always treated my pop culture heroes with a measure of respect, reverence even. The likes of <i>Thunderbirds</i> and <i>Captain Scarlet</i> 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 <i>Batman</i> 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.</p><p align="justify" style="line-height: 24px; margin-bottom: 0cm;">By 1972, it was nine years since I’d last had sight of an episode of <i>Supercar</i>, 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…</p><p align="justify" style="line-height: 24px; margin-bottom: 0cm;">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*.</p><p align="justify" style="line-height: 24px; margin-bottom: 0cm;">Now, no Gerry Anderson series was safe. It wasn’t long before I decided that the crew of <i>Fireball XL5</i> 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 <i>Fireball XL5</i>’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 <i>Fireball</i> 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.</p><p align="justify" style="line-height: 24px; margin-bottom: 0cm;">It didn’t stop there. I’d soon started writing parallel histories of the pop groups that evolved from the characters in <i>Stingray</i> and <i>Thunderbirds</i>. 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 <i>Introducing Thunderbirds</i> 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.</p><p align="justify" style="line-height: 24px; margin-bottom: 0cm;">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.</p><p align="justify" style="line-height: 24px; margin-bottom: 0cm;">Was nothing sacred?</p><p align="justify" style="line-height: 24px; margin-bottom: 0cm;">Seemingly not, as we’ll see in part two…</p><p align="justify" style="line-height: 24px; margin-bottom: 0cm;">[* There is no such thing as a 24-string guitar]</p><p align="justify" style="line-height: 24px; margin-bottom: 0cm;"><br /></p></div>Mart Chttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04883883503677556135noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6507883749037788533.post-90462860091459617422024-02-08T11:17:00.000-08:002024-02-08T11:17:21.563-08:00The Top Shelf<p> </p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgythNL3ogc5dhCIjORcmvIVHnEbMn6xvU8uC66ew0nCU_dZ6HxKEy0AtcdUVvYLRb3gtAqZQnNnzr0a-bmS_hRRidIfBHtdmVoeOwnkl55RUPBeN6nSiBaUgFxd2V-8jvYVwTIPS_4s0Ll-FyHIMM9qocMJENb4XL7RQFaPXq1MlbPQnU1QAcjWch0XiI/s2570/BUDGIE_009.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1840" data-original-width="2570" height="458" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgythNL3ogc5dhCIjORcmvIVHnEbMn6xvU8uC66ew0nCU_dZ6HxKEy0AtcdUVvYLRb3gtAqZQnNnzr0a-bmS_hRRidIfBHtdmVoeOwnkl55RUPBeN6nSiBaUgFxd2V-8jvYVwTIPS_4s0Ll-FyHIMM9qocMJENb4XL7RQFaPXq1MlbPQnU1QAcjWch0XiI/w640-h458/BUDGIE_009.jpg" width="640" /></a></div><p></p><p align="justify" style="line-height: 24px; margin-bottom: 0cm;">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 <i>Man From UNCLE </i>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’.</p><p align="justify" style="line-height: 24px; margin-bottom: 0cm;">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 <i>Penthouse</i>, 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.</p><p align="justify" style="line-height: 24px; margin-bottom: 0cm;">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 <i>The Sun</i>, 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 <i>The Daily Express</i>, where at least we got the Giles cartoon.</p><p align="justify" style="line-height: 24px; margin-bottom: 0cm;">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 <i>Monty Python’s Big Red Book</i>. Even so, I usually skipped over the pages in question.</p><p align="justify" style="line-height: 24px; margin-bottom: 0cm;">One of the first television programmes to deal explicitly with the topic of pornographic literature was <i>Budgie </i>(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!’</p><p align="justify" style="line-height: 24px; margin-bottom: 0cm;">I was just ten years old when <i>Budgie</i> 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 <i>Budgie</i>. Unless it all came out at night.</p><p align="justify" style="line-height: 24px; margin-bottom: 0cm;">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.</p><p align="justify" style="line-height: 24px; margin-bottom: 0cm;">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 <i>Fireball XL5</i> and <i>Stingray</i>. 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.</p><p align="justify" style="line-height: 24px; margin-bottom: 0cm;">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 <i>Assault on Precinct 13</i> – itself hardly a model of uplifting cinema.</p><p align="justify" style="line-height: 24px; margin-bottom: 0cm;">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 <i>Penthouse</i> and <i>What Car</i>. 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.</p><p align="justify" style="line-height: 24px; margin-bottom: 0cm;">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? </p><p align="justify" style="line-height: 24px; margin-bottom: 0cm;"><br /></p>Mart Chttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04883883503677556135noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6507883749037788533.post-40158267177928564542024-02-03T07:34:00.000-08:002024-02-03T07:34:13.586-08:00Flambards at Forty-Five<p> </p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgPFClVLbyztslT25PmYMIhUlOwhB_5Eg_sZYid0QP2f3yOkTRC0j5Dr1KZvlKc_qsF-neueqeC1820313mhThd3_6tBQJ00yoKWDesY_cnrlb62nk4j6XHjWYlkIs2m3LjU2nJk8LQ7PRK2J8WlA88-gqZf8nLgS3ESRa4Ncdv2PFUTg4opJ8UB5L6iTw/s980/28459_994947.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="400" data-original-width="980" height="262" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgPFClVLbyztslT25PmYMIhUlOwhB_5Eg_sZYid0QP2f3yOkTRC0j5Dr1KZvlKc_qsF-neueqeC1820313mhThd3_6tBQJ00yoKWDesY_cnrlb62nk4j6XHjWYlkIs2m3LjU2nJk8LQ7PRK2J8WlA88-gqZf8nLgS3ESRa4Ncdv2PFUTg4opJ8UB5L6iTw/w640-h262/28459_994947.jpg" width="640" /></a></div><p align="left" style="line-height: 24px; margin-bottom: 0cm;">Tim Beddows and I first came together over a shared love of film and television – James Bond, <i>The Persuaders!</i> <i>The Prisoner</i>, 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?</p><p align="left" style="line-height: 24px; margin-bottom: 0cm;">The series was Yorkshire TV’s <i>Flambards</i>, 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 <i>The Persuaders!</i> not to mention his score for <i>The Ipcress File</i>.</p><p align="left" style="line-height: 24px; margin-bottom: 0cm;"><i>Flambards</i>’ 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.</p><p align="left" style="line-height: 24px; margin-bottom: 0cm;">All of which made for a highly unique and occasionally idosyncratic score. One episode even included a <i>song</i> 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 <i>Song of Christina</i>, 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.</p><p align="left" style="line-height: 24px; margin-bottom: 0cm;">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 <i>The Kids from 47a</i>) 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 <i>Flambards</i> – 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 <i>Danger UXB, </i>and seems to be the only one of the main cast members to have remained partcularly active post <i>Flambards</i>. 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 <i>The Day the Earth Caught Fire</i>. 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 <i>Flambards</i>’ 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.</p><p align="left" style="line-height: 24px; margin-bottom: 0cm;">So, intriguing music, a fanciable heroine and a mad old bastard. Was that the sum total of <i>Flambards</i>’ 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.</p><p align="left" style="line-height: 24px; margin-bottom: 0cm;">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 <i>Dr. Who</i>. But when characters died in <i>Flambards</i> – and many of them did – it was for keeps. No tricks, no dreams, no resets.</p><p align="left" style="line-height: 24px; margin-bottom: 0cm;">Shot entirely on 16mm film, and directed by practitioners with long experience in the format (including legendary <i>Ghost Story for Christmas</i> director Lawrence Gordon Clark), <i>Flambards</i> looked like an expensive piece of television, with production values that bore comparison with important series of the era like <i>Brideshead Revisited</i>. 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.</p><p align="left" style="line-height: 24px; margin-bottom: 0cm;">It seems unlikely that a remaster of <i>Flambards</i> 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.</p><p align="left" style="line-height: 24px; margin-bottom: 0cm;">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 <i>Masterpiece Theatre</i> 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.</p><p align="left" style="line-height: 24px; margin-bottom: 0cm;">As mentioned earlier, the <i>Flambards</i> 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 <i>Flambards</i> novel, <i>Flambards Divided</i>, 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 <i>Flambards</i>. 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.</p><p align="left" style="line-height: 24px; margin-bottom: 0cm;">If you’ve never seen <i>Flambards</i>, 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.</p><p align="left" style="line-height: 24px; margin-bottom: 0cm;"><br /></p>Mart Chttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04883883503677556135noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6507883749037788533.post-35814470215859602072024-01-19T05:16:00.000-08:002024-01-21T06:17:11.614-08:00Fifty Years Ago This Week<p style="text-align: justify;"> </p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: justify;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh3Y9-TfEEftfX25DMz170TW-owR0iG5chnVOMFUyn94LsEpIU98IGkxIZ_eJQ2yvc1gwQvWsnqPy-vDWXPfhN2LvKbaFEopHrdDxUL2O8gzhCjFeJ1HF0WwLp7PnGHtrZ1s-sqMDAaHy-w9tc-hpHb1jDMybBpV61kfQcJul15KLvU-GsbiLJbrcKXWAs/s4032/IMG_5334.JPG" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="3024" data-original-width="4032" height="480" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh3Y9-TfEEftfX25DMz170TW-owR0iG5chnVOMFUyn94LsEpIU98IGkxIZ_eJQ2yvc1gwQvWsnqPy-vDWXPfhN2LvKbaFEopHrdDxUL2O8gzhCjFeJ1HF0WwLp7PnGHtrZ1s-sqMDAaHy-w9tc-hpHb1jDMybBpV61kfQcJul15KLvU-GsbiLJbrcKXWAs/w640-h480/IMG_5334.JPG" width="640" /></a></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><p></p><p style="text-align: justify;"><br /></p><p align="justify" style="line-height: 24px; margin-bottom: 0cm;">It is January 1974. Britain is a nation in crisis. On the first of the month, the doomed Heath government introduces the notorious ‘Three-Day Week’ as a fuel-saving measure during the ongoing industrial action by the miners’ union, orchestrated by Arthur Scargill. You could hardly turn on the TV news without being subjected to his combover and haranguing anti-government diatribes. The situation would reach crisis point on 7 February when Heath, in frustration, called a General Election to settle the issue of who governed the country: his administration or Scargill’s union. The voters decided – but only just – in favour of the latter. It would take a further election in October to settle the resulting electoral stalemate and deliver a minority government into the hands of Harold Wilson.</p><p align="justify" style="line-height: 24px; margin-bottom: 0cm;">Aged twelve, I took scant interest in such affairs of state, but it was hard not to be aware of what was going on. Our dad was affected by the Three-Day Week, and I can remember hearing it being discussed on the <i>Today</i> programme playing in my friend’s dad’s car as he drove us to school. On television, we were subjected to a campaign of government advertising encouraging us all to ‘Switch Off Something’. I’ve seen it stated – incorrectly – that the SOS TV campaign was never actually broadcast (like the infamous Protect and Survive films of a decade later). Yet I can well remember those commercials, voiced by John Paul late of the BBC’s <i>Doomwatch </i>(a highly apposite choice).</p><p align="justify" style="line-height: 24px; margin-bottom: 0cm;">The miners’ industrial action had served to exacerbate an already critical energy situation brought about by an oil crisis in the Middle East: OPEC had imposed an embargo on those nations, including Britain, that had supported Israel in the Yom Kippur war of October 1973, and fuel supplies were running critically low in Europe and America. Here in Britain, Petrol coupons were printed, but the government stopped short of actually issuing them. Meanwhile, drivers queued up at forecourts as supplies dwindled, and arrived home to find their homes blacked out by power cuts.</p><p align="justify" style="line-height: 24px; margin-bottom: 0cm;">In the small street where my family lived, however, blackouts were rare. We’d see the lights go out in the houses at the back of us, but our supply remained switched on: a handy quirk of being on the same circuit that served Sutton Coldfield’s Good Hope Hospital. A few mean-minded cirizens complained about this to no avail. The result was that our 1970s experience was slightly less unpleasant than one sees depicted in the many TV documentaries covering the era. The emergency supply of candles that our mum bought around this time was still extant when I cleared the house in 2021. And here they are.</p><p align="justify" style="line-height: 24px; margin-bottom: 0cm;">Being immune from power cuts meant that my television viewing went uninterrupted, (although we were still watching in black and white), and my diary gives a snapshot of what I saw this week in January 1974 (and little else, it has to be said). Letts’ Schoolboys’ Diary was a stocking filler at Christmas, and its small pages offered little room for budding Adrian Moles. Fortunately, I was not thus inclined, and my entries are laconic to say the least: ‘UFO, SG60’ reads the entry for Sunday January 13, where we begin our look back across five decades.</p><p align="justify" style="line-height: 24px; margin-bottom: 0cm;">Gerry Anderson’s <i>UFO</i> had begun a repeat run on Sunday lunchtimes the previous week, so it’s safe to say that today’s episode would have been <i>Exposed</i>, introducing James-Bond-who-never-was Michael Billington, in the first of several toupées essaying the role of Colonel Foster. ‘SG60’, meanwhile, was shorthand for the <i>Sold Gold 60</i>, Tom Browne’s weekly chart rundown which was a Sunday evening ritual, often accompanied by sardines on toast.</p><p align="justify" style="line-height: 24px; margin-bottom: 0cm;">And what, you may ask, was troubling the pop charts in this week of national crisis? Slade’s <i>Merry Xmas Everybody </i>had slipped down to number three, and wasn’t getting played any longer. Well, after all, like the proverbial puppy, it <i>was</i> only for Christmas… meanwhile, Wizzard’s own Christmas hit had plummeted twelve places to number 16. The number one spot was currently occupied by the New Seekers’ forgettable ditty <i>You Won’t Find Another Fool Like Me</i>, which I’m sure was on constant rotation on Ted Heath’s jukebox, certainly if Mike Yarwood had anything to do with it. On the way up the chart we find Cozy Powell’s instrumental hit <i>Dance With the Devil</i> at number four (most of its melody was ‘recycled’ from Jimi Hendrix’s <i>Third Rock From the Sun</i>), while Netherland rockers Golden Earring’s one-hit wonder <i>Radar Love</i> had gone up two places to number seven. Mud’s glam floor-filler <i>Tiger Feet</i> was new in at number ten, while a particular favourite of my brother and myself, <i>Pool Hall Richard</i>, had slipped down to number 8 for Rod Stewart and the Faces. Three of the Beatles were in the Top 50: Macca’s Wings had dropped down to 41 with <i>Helen Wheels</i>, while John’s boring effort <i>Mind Games</i> stood five rungs further down, having managed a peak of only 26. And right at the bottom, at number 50, we find Ringo’s amiable <i>Photograph – </i>co-written with George Harrison – which had peaked at number 8 in the autumn.</p><p align="justify" style="line-height: 24px; margin-bottom: 0cm;">Back on television, Mondays saw us staying loyal to <i>Blue Peter</i>, though I was nearing the end of my time as a viewer. The line-up of presenters was currently Noakes, Purvis and Lesley Judd. I don’t believe I watched the programme that followed at 5.15, an adaptation of the splendid children’s novel <i>Tom’s Midnight Garden</i>, but if I had a time machine I’d probably put this right. You could tell it was the 1970s because just before the news we had a visit from trippy cartoon characters <i>Crystal Tipps and Alistair</i>. And that was it for Monday’s children’s viewing. I’m sure I watched <i>Nationwide </i>after tea, and maybe even <i>Young Scientists of the Year</i> at 6.45. I definitely didn't bother with <i>Z Cars</i>, which<i> </i>followed at ten past seven: the programme had reverted to a fifty-minute format after seven years in a twice weekly 25-minute slot, during which time the once hard-hitting police procedural had become bogged down in dreary soap-style storylines. It had even lost its classic theme, emasculated by a ‘groovy’ 1970s makeover. Monday evening’s must-see telly was <i>Colditz</i>, just two weeks into its second series. This week, Flight Lt. Carter (David McCallum) devised a plan to hide two British officers to give the false impression of their having escaped – the logic being that they wouldn’t be missed when a real escape took place. I watched this episode just last night. The directorial style of <i>Colditz</i> was standard for all videotaped drama of the era and indeed, even more austere than was usually the case. The incarceration storyline lent itself to an entirely studio-bound production, but the real surprise here is the total lack of music other than the main theme and the odd diegetic item. Where today’s directors lazily strip music across every millisecond of the action, <i>Colditz</i> succeeded entirely on the merits of its cast, writers and directors. Special mention must be made of the late David McCallum, who brought a fierce intensity to his performance as Carter. You have to pinch yourself to remember that this is the same actor who’d been Ilya Kuryakiun in <i>The Man from UNCLE</i>.</p><p align="justify" style="line-height: 24px; margin-bottom: 0cm;">Tuesday’s children’s line-up included <i>Scooby-Doo</i> – which I’d given up on quite some time ago – and <i>Vision On</i>, which I also ignored. The evening’s programmes kicked off with <i>A Question of Sport </i>– not a favourite of mine as I knew nothing about the subject – before an Abbott and Costello movie. It’s hard to convey how singularly unfunny I find Abbott and Costello, now as then, and I’m certain I didn’t bother with their 1942 effort <i>Pardon My Sarong</i>. Even the title fails to raise a smile. Fortunately, things got a lot better at 8.30 with <i>Whatever Happened to the Likely Lads. </i>Episode three of series two, going out tonight for the first time, contrasted the lifestyles of Terry – stay at home slob – and Bob, the industrious worker. Beyond the Nine O’Clock News lurked a <i>Tuesday’s Documentary</i> about oil exploration in the Shetland Isles, the kind of programme that Bernard Cribbins might demand to watch when staying at <i>Fawlty Towers.</i> We didn’t bother with that particular televisual feast...</p><p align="justify" style="line-height: 24px; margin-bottom: 0cm;">You’ll notice we’ve been on BBC1 for most of the week so far, but Wednesday evening saw us over on ITV where <i>The World at War </i>was about halfway through its 26-episode run. It’s hard to mention <i>The World at War </i>without using the word ‘landmark’ in the same sentence, so there you go. This week’s episode, <i>Red Star</i>, examined conditions in the Soviet Union between 1941 and 1943. It was preceded at 8.30 by <i>Man About the House</i>, an incongrous pairing if ever there was one. Tonight’s episode, <i>Colour Me Yellow</i>, was the second episode in the second series. I’m not sure if I watched it – the diary says nothing. I don’t think the coincidence of two series with coloured episode titles is worth mentioning, so I won’t…</p><p align="justify" style="line-height: 24px; margin-bottom: 0cm;">Thursday saw us back with BBC1 for <i>Top of the Pops</i> and <i>It Aint Half Hot Mum</i>. <i>TOTP</i> was introduced this week by the well-known airbrushed-from-history presenter with a face like a halloween lantern. Amongst the acts featured were Andy Williams, miming to his hit <i>Solitaire;</i> Suzi Quatro, prancing around in <i>Devil Gate Drive;</i> The Sweet ripping it up with their <i>Teenage Rampage;</i> and Mud stomping up to number one with <i>Tiger Feet</i>.</p><p align="justify" style="line-height: 24px; margin-bottom: 0cm;">As if you-know-who wasn’t enough to offend modern sensibilities, <i>TOTP</i> was followed by <i>It Aint Half Hot Mum</i>, featuring Michael Bates in blackface. I certainly watched this – the diary says so – and found it funny at the time, not so much for Bates as for Windsor Davies who always raised a smile with his endless bellowing ‘shut up!’ and insistence that the concert party was just ‘a bunch of poofs’. Different times, indeed.</p><p align="justify" style="line-height: 24px; margin-bottom: 0cm;">Friday teatime saw the old black and white set switched back to ITV where we caught a repeat run of <i>Timeslip </i>(ironically missing the last chance to see the show in colour before the tapes were wiped), followed by <i>The Flintstones</i>. Bedrock’s finest had become a Friday teatime staple a year or so earlier, and despite the series hailing from the early 60s, we were watching Fred, Barney and co for the first time. I was so taken with the characters that I pained two huge watercolour portraits of Fred and Barney onto a piece of hardboard originally intended for an abandoned model railway. It stood in the corner of my bedroom for years.</p><p align="justify" style="line-height: 24px; margin-bottom: 0cm;">I’d become a fan of Jeff Rawle’s <i>Billy Liar</i> back in the autumn – inevitably, I identified with his daydreamy personality – and I’m sure I was still watching when he showed up at 8.30 on ITV in the last of the present series. Billy Fisher was hardly an ideal role model for life, but it’s a bit too late to do anything about that now… Following his escapade on ITV, we switched back sharpish to BBC1 to avoid exposure to the horror of <i>Within These Walls</i>. Fortunately, auntie had a treat in store beyond the Nine O’Clock news in the form of Cricklewood’s intrepid trio, <i>The Goodies</i>, with a repeat of the episode <i>Superstar</i>, promising to lift the lid on the pop scene. Within the year, the trio would be part of the scene themselves with their own chart singles <i>Inbetweenies</i> and <i>The Funky Gibbon.</i></p><p align="justify" style="line-height: 24px; margin-bottom: 0cm;">Rounding off the week in my diary, on Saturday 19 January, we find the second episode of one of <i>Dr. Who</i>’s less successful serials, <i>Invasion of the Dinosaurs</i>. Rubber monsters notwithstanding, the story dragged on for weeks, including a sequence involving a group of people who thought they were in a spaceship but were actually in a warehouse in London. Which, as a description, pretty well nails 70s Who to a ‘T’. The Doctor and his chums led us nicely into Saturday evening on BBC1, where we find <i>The Generation Game</i>, followed by <i>Dixon of Dock Green</i>. Mid-evening variety came courtesy of Cilla, who was elbowed out of the way at 8.20 by Chief Ironside. The inevitable <i>Match of the Day</i> rounded off proceedings at 9.25 but was roundly ignored in our house. If that seems unusually early for <i>MOTD</i>, bear in mind that broadcasting closed down at 10.30 in line with the national crisis. Assuming you were able to tune in at all.</p><p align="justify" style="line-height: 24px; margin-bottom: 0cm;">As we’ve seen, ITV scarcely got a look in this week. In retrospect, that’s probably no bad thing given the cover star of this week’s <i>TVTimes </i>whose headline reads ‘The Frantic Art of Rolf Harris’. Fifty years on, that could well be subject to misinterpretation. In fact, the single most interesting aspect of the week’s edition is the inclusion of the following caveat on the listings pages: ‘Owing to Government measures in support of the economy, programmes scheduled for transmission may be subject to late changes. Watch for screen announcements to this effect.’</p><p align="justify" style="line-height: 24px; margin-bottom: 0cm;">Back in crisis-hit 1974 Britain, I’m sure there can’t have been many who wouldn’t have leapt at the chance to ride fifty years into the future in a time machine, and get away from it all. They’d have had a shock in store. For all its black and white, fuel crisis, Switch-Off-Something, Jimi-Savile-on-the-telly brutalist-concrete instant-mash awfulness, I’d still take 1974 in preference to where we are now. So if you happen to see a time machine with seats available, let me know...</p><p align="justify" style="line-height: 24px; margin-bottom: 0cm;"><br /></p>Mart Chttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04883883503677556135noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6507883749037788533.post-48556002863475510682023-12-23T06:12:00.000-08:002023-12-23T06:12:11.551-08:00Christmas at the Radio TImes<p> </p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhqvdqCa3d9MZ_-dXvA4qg0G2uRHIRx2jAfqQTVC4QKXudxkvtilmqIzGV5_4vz9epFed6qFGvyLgXQY6jNULWx0IGdQSUwbp5m5lf5ZfVT1CuM7nea3Gw9XiTW9-vZtC4Qdlf_POvGKY1cscrLwOIqKHg0YUmqSyS3GuEzhd4MnP9_mxdWIpj05IHzg3E/s1236/Screenshot%202023-12-23%20at%2012.00.41.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="428" data-original-width="1236" height="222" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhqvdqCa3d9MZ_-dXvA4qg0G2uRHIRx2jAfqQTVC4QKXudxkvtilmqIzGV5_4vz9epFed6qFGvyLgXQY6jNULWx0IGdQSUwbp5m5lf5ZfVT1CuM7nea3Gw9XiTW9-vZtC4Qdlf_POvGKY1cscrLwOIqKHg0YUmqSyS3GuEzhd4MnP9_mxdWIpj05IHzg3E/w640-h222/Screenshot%202023-12-23%20at%2012.00.41.png" width="640" /></a></div><br /><p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjHhSIwlw3mgWFgUtIcD7KRjJ2pOLSlDRQUGs-NU1xPn2BccV71p383jEeZrgAUjyIannMQLiuh7kYCeJInmsXJd9rZjRmhQYKAKyycrY0k2yLJykGC_xEd5TfF6MmuyKvY1-WyQPmwve1ypRFJKNd-l4vIK3lHi_ixlgN9mQD7-BJopCxEnx7-jDuO1gc/s1171/Screenshot%202023-12-23%20at%2012.00.50.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="406" data-original-width="1171" height="222" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjHhSIwlw3mgWFgUtIcD7KRjJ2pOLSlDRQUGs-NU1xPn2BccV71p383jEeZrgAUjyIannMQLiuh7kYCeJInmsXJd9rZjRmhQYKAKyycrY0k2yLJykGC_xEd5TfF6MmuyKvY1-WyQPmwve1ypRFJKNd-l4vIK3lHi_ixlgN9mQD7-BJopCxEnx7-jDuO1gc/w640-h222/Screenshot%202023-12-23%20at%2012.00.50.png" width="640" /></a></div><br /><div><br /></div><div>Christmas wouldn't be Christmas without the Radio Times. At least that's what this year's advertising campaign tells us. Well, I beg to differ. With the double issue now weighing in at a budget-busting five quid, I've decided to do without it, breaking a tradition that goes back almost as far as this gallery of covers. To mark this unauspicious and Scrooge-like decision, I've found this run of festive RT covers which I present here for your seasonal entertainment, complete with a sometimes caustic commentary...</div><div><br /></div><div>The double issue was already an established tradition when I had sight of my first example, second from left on the top line, way back in 1970. I'm rather glad we didn't get it in 1969 as the cover is pretty awful and not specially festive either. The collage looks like someone was trying to re-create a Victorian postcard, or possibly Monty Python. Either way, I think we can agree it was a dud. This was the first year of the RT's classic swash caps masthead, which seems to have been influenced by the fad for Edwardiana in the late 1960s. It certainly wasn't typical of the era, and I have to confess that I never really liked it. One got used to it over time, but would have preferred something more like the RT mastheads of the 1960s. I'm still amazed at how long it lasted.</div><div><br /></div><div>1970's festive spread felt far more in keeping with Christmas. I can't quite make out who all the dinner guests are, but I think Morecambe and Wise might be among them. The Two Ronnies nabbed the cover for 1971, which was the first year of their enduring TV comedy partnership. As if to ensure fair play, Morecambe and Wise got the gig in 1972, and all four were present for 1973's line-up. I don't care for that 1972 cover, though. Who says that circuses equal Christmas? There's not a bit of snow, holly or even a bauble in evidence. Frank Spencer made the cover in 1974, but the design was austere to say the least. That's the 1970s for you...</div><div><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhWHWsb58RgkPeI0HtsT6iVp36iRmMgW4rRoZV6HpxX_giaO4qsXcuY8GN7-M61_6zY2lGdH_XQo3qRbcCjjJnWjf25NCalGpLVh-Gp83ytlOKGWEcatab3SKYv87ijSp4KsdeYzyHzfuPBfPlWjcr5QJfekd1F9dmCLbo924DnJnYxCHWdDcLhi4_xRog/s1171/Screenshot%202023-12-23%20at%2012.00.58.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="418" data-original-width="1171" height="228" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhWHWsb58RgkPeI0HtsT6iVp36iRmMgW4rRoZV6HpxX_giaO4qsXcuY8GN7-M61_6zY2lGdH_XQo3qRbcCjjJnWjf25NCalGpLVh-Gp83ytlOKGWEcatab3SKYv87ijSp4KsdeYzyHzfuPBfPlWjcr5QJfekd1F9dmCLbo924DnJnYxCHWdDcLhi4_xRog/w640-h228/Screenshot%202023-12-23%20at%2012.00.58.png" width="640" /></a></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiUQgkFg3zC4i9kpphUGA3GAdUQhEywxFQDWmVplcJzq7YPlpYbtgUy9Wg7t4I9mENL7s01riLzjU5lal5LPzLjWgy605aLvtT3q3iJpS_B-doSSRLceUmvNUYbyUhVODztCzOr_kQ2UEeKyUsFeVSwRPX0M6BQwsUJT3EBm95ZNPsmQE9h0I8pWzi0z9A/s1198/Screenshot%202023-12-23%20at%2012.16.44.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="424" data-original-width="1198" height="226" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiUQgkFg3zC4i9kpphUGA3GAdUQhEywxFQDWmVplcJzq7YPlpYbtgUy9Wg7t4I9mENL7s01riLzjU5lal5LPzLjWgy605aLvtT3q3iJpS_B-doSSRLceUmvNUYbyUhVODztCzOr_kQ2UEeKyUsFeVSwRPX0M6BQwsUJT3EBm95ZNPsmQE9h0I8pWzi0z9A/w640-h226/Screenshot%202023-12-23%20at%2012.16.44.png" width="640" /></a></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">1975 saw a return to illustrated covers – back in the 20s and 30s, there had been some fine artworks gracing the Christmas numbers of RT, and the mid-70s would keep up this tradition. 1975's cover could easily have come from several decades earlier, and was a fine festive composition, albeit with rather low-key colour values. 1976's stained glass effort depicting Good King Wenceslas has the look of a Royal Mail Christmas stamp issue, while 1977's design, again in muted colours, pulled off a neat visual trick. Just when readers were getting acclimatised to artworked covers, 1978 was a throwback to earlier in the decade, with the year's biggest Christmas star – Mike Yarwood – getting pride of place. His Christmas Day show was now one of the big draws on BBC1, and would continue until 1981 when he moved to ITV. Artwork covers were back for 1979 although once again the colour values look decidedly muted when set against more recent examples. 1980's cover was even worse in this respect. The flat colour just looks drab, and the children look more bored than excited. Couldn't the artist have added Santa and his reindeer in the sky? As it is, they appear to be looking out at a the glow from a distant nuclear detonation. But it was 1980 after all, and the Third World War was just around the corner. Or so we imagined...</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi_1dpmmuvqYnU2hP-84SaOKxxz-B85QhSakCXPC29s9kNMF3-eKXWETiyllONykW91BgE2RqBtGo_Lx_oFr28gDsBBbQWdabOxB2eW6J1qheFee_7FieHxfiovaPhiwjFhks2pDAfLHoalp8XNcJCBU5Q81rqu5LS6nc6EKdVQ3fsiKUpKcIJGsNPq0NY/s1191/Screenshot%202023-12-23%20at%2012.01.15.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="425" data-original-width="1191" height="228" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi_1dpmmuvqYnU2hP-84SaOKxxz-B85QhSakCXPC29s9kNMF3-eKXWETiyllONykW91BgE2RqBtGo_Lx_oFr28gDsBBbQWdabOxB2eW6J1qheFee_7FieHxfiovaPhiwjFhks2pDAfLHoalp8XNcJCBU5Q81rqu5LS6nc6EKdVQ3fsiKUpKcIJGsNPq0NY/w640-h228/Screenshot%202023-12-23%20at%2012.01.15.png" width="640" /></a></div><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiwAA5U6co84nhkSRekZGFSR2nOpYBAf4lSMjWOwQCT_0YxvbtE8dXoOVxa0DVP65pJhGfAqIJ24zRkn1Jr0oAJKAqTU8L_91o9uKAabK4Tmm2lvCgeHAwhDBBtnGxx7TvWUJLUewT4DytktVx8ZT10cxsjK6IZt2shwkAUtmVnqV0cRZudCYGleWwRMHU/s1188/Screenshot%202023-12-23%20at%2012.01.22.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="412" data-original-width="1188" height="222" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiwAA5U6co84nhkSRekZGFSR2nOpYBAf4lSMjWOwQCT_0YxvbtE8dXoOVxa0DVP65pJhGfAqIJ24zRkn1Jr0oAJKAqTU8L_91o9uKAabK4Tmm2lvCgeHAwhDBBtnGxx7TvWUJLUewT4DytktVx8ZT10cxsjK6IZt2shwkAUtmVnqV0cRZudCYGleWwRMHU/w640-h222/Screenshot%202023-12-23%20at%2012.01.22.png" width="640" /></a></div><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">Artwork covers would rule the roost for the next four years, with 1981 again looking like a Christmas stamp contender: a nice, restrained festive image, happily ignoring all the season's visual clichés. 1982 was probably a step too far in that direction. Yes, we get the 'I Saw Three Ships' motif, assuming that was the artist's intent, but a galleon, even in festive trappings doesn't exactly scream out 'It's Christmaas' in a Noddy Holder stylee... 1983 was back to postage stamp land, with a design incorporating the twelve days of Christmas. The kind of thing you might see sold as a Christmas card in a National Trust shop. 1984's pariedolia cover is just scary. Who is that face meant to be? Santa, the Green Man or the spirit of Christmas past? Either way, I hate it. Back then, I'm not sure I even saw the face when viewed at full size. But in all honesty, I was less interested in what the Radio Times chose to put on the cover than in the programme listings. Photographs were back for the next two years, suggesting that the Christmas cover images were decided on the basis of which programme had scored the highest ratings the year before. The Only Fools cover could have been from a decade earlier, but the saturated orange background overwhelms the characters and isn't exactly festive. The EastEnders cover is just boring. Who wanted to look at the Albert Square crowd for a fortnight over the festive season? Having them on the TV was bad enough. The cover designer seems to have realised that the photograph simply wasn't Christmassy enough, and has added a festive border, the only nice touch on what is arguably the dullest cover here.</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiUmbm23aq6FPlwimwrhNxnsbFx_ZsOXydZyJcaRAbj4JdowaY11nK1vclr4q6kaboMw4beRGJefLnhSp6x6LMp1jpRQfWofQqmtp2DmGdwMazWA3d6QlZS-t5sqYcProw7ARy4ydYSin5M62KdOD5P8MpvvLooPJcDjoF17SXIxSM7PQ_M5cFx9dcKmN8/s1197/Screenshot%202023-12-23%20at%2012.01.29.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="425" data-original-width="1197" height="228" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiUmbm23aq6FPlwimwrhNxnsbFx_ZsOXydZyJcaRAbj4JdowaY11nK1vclr4q6kaboMw4beRGJefLnhSp6x6LMp1jpRQfWofQqmtp2DmGdwMazWA3d6QlZS-t5sqYcProw7ARy4ydYSin5M62KdOD5P8MpvvLooPJcDjoF17SXIxSM7PQ_M5cFx9dcKmN8/w640-h228/Screenshot%202023-12-23%20at%2012.01.29.png" width="640" /></a></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgd_HFBjT3a8EjxS_ft20rB1J5OQYbr2jSDFlilXZDgM5_dBpypp6Kn3OjcYO4i3PU7SO1CPHzIPH9ivNveYZ0iRPT4EqmYbt3didmZi8v4gNxxFXlfhMvE7nGQLMGkMqi1bpqrJxNcEGYTLrdJeYHHwG7WPYLqVhVq9vZd2vYJo6seTukj1_jJJtMvf9c/s1186/Screenshot%202023-12-23%20at%2012.01.40.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="427" data-original-width="1186" height="230" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgd_HFBjT3a8EjxS_ft20rB1J5OQYbr2jSDFlilXZDgM5_dBpypp6Kn3OjcYO4i3PU7SO1CPHzIPH9ivNveYZ0iRPT4EqmYbt3didmZi8v4gNxxFXlfhMvE7nGQLMGkMqi1bpqrJxNcEGYTLrdJeYHHwG7WPYLqVhVq9vZd2vYJo6seTukj1_jJJtMvf9c/w640-h230/Screenshot%202023-12-23%20at%2012.01.40.png" width="640" /></a></div><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">1987 was another Victoriana throwback, a cloying sickly design and one of my least favourites. Festive yes, but not in a good way. 1988's panto artwork was fine, and the lack of distracting text admirable. The kind of cover you didn't mind having on your festive coffee table. 1989's choirboy cover was a rare example of RT drawing attention to the true meaning of Christmas and was a welcome change from Del Boy, EastEnders et al. It just didn't make for a very interesting cover. 1990, by contrast was as cloyingly traditional as it gets. Nice artwork, but horrible image. Santa looks decidedly like his famous Coca-Cola incarnation. For the first time ever, the cover depicts what the Christmas RT was all about – watching the telly. And if Santa hadn't already eaten all the pies, he was certainly about to. I wonder who won the seventy grand? 1991's cover set the tone for almost all subsequent Christmas RTs. A lot of text there, and bigging up the fact that you could now get all channel listings in a single publication. The artwork was traditional to a fault, and one of the most unimaginative Christmas covers RT had served up to date. It's also self-congratulatory in a most un-Reithian fashion. Who cared if RT was magazine of the year? And who knew Santa needed specs? 1992's snowman wasn't much better, but at least the amount of text had been reduced. This would be the first year of the cover flagging up the staggering amount of movies available over the festive season – more than 500. But there was worse to come...</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEil_0t_-KVRgCxzooYq6hMKkdDW7Wq660hRy9lYYvDcOEBuOSp92QW_CXu16etkgxm0JGVdZuG82oaC3vEV3E9l5ruz0f9_Krb_1UXzJ8SOG4bC46QxQ9ktW-Y8vsYfFkEP6BJZbmQQGLAP0-8V3uoU3ylNBG6m8Q6C6n5heuvJamWvSSxIGQTLXnweOIQ/s1189/Screenshot%202023-12-23%20at%2012.01.51.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="421" data-original-width="1189" height="226" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEil_0t_-KVRgCxzooYq6hMKkdDW7Wq660hRy9lYYvDcOEBuOSp92QW_CXu16etkgxm0JGVdZuG82oaC3vEV3E9l5ruz0f9_Krb_1UXzJ8SOG4bC46QxQ9ktW-Y8vsYfFkEP6BJZbmQQGLAP0-8V3uoU3ylNBG6m8Q6C6n5heuvJamWvSSxIGQTLXnweOIQ/w640-h226/Screenshot%202023-12-23%20at%2012.01.51.png" width="640" /></a></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhmn4jh8JUZ6V4PpEzjSdA8E-HDRZGv8nPn4-L3NWTKnZ_f72yDkv9n80lD2uYq9tEMG6hoDAbULyasIZFuORXPO9BbTw_t4xrJtyyPgkU6X4eRglimkoLFJWELBMwGf4_BgszZge_SNI6FNQYl7AOqZnv5fayB1gpe8UAs9e13KMuVIX9tTsNcLQRuWrc/s1183/Screenshot%202023-12-23%20at%2012.01.59.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="426" data-original-width="1183" height="230" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhmn4jh8JUZ6V4PpEzjSdA8E-HDRZGv8nPn4-L3NWTKnZ_f72yDkv9n80lD2uYq9tEMG6hoDAbULyasIZFuORXPO9BbTw_t4xrJtyyPgkU6X4eRglimkoLFJWELBMwGf4_BgszZge_SNI6FNQYl7AOqZnv5fayB1gpe8UAs9e13KMuVIX9tTsNcLQRuWrc/w640-h230/Screenshot%202023-12-23%20at%2012.01.59.png" width="640" /></a></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">If there has to be a wooden spoon for the least popular Christmas RT cover of all time, 1993's effort wins it by a mile. Mick Brownfield's artwork played on the song 'All I Want for Christmas', but despite being nicely executed, it wasn't what RT readers wanted on the cover of their double issue. I detect the heavy hand of editorial influence here. Next year's cover played safe by revisiting a classic illustration from the 1930s. One notable change this year is the modification of the 'classic' swash caps masthead, which would endure for only six more years. The movie count is now up to 700. That's more than any video recorder could cope with.</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">1995's cover was just horrible. Yes, I know, it was Christmas, and Santa Claus is all part of the festive iconic mix, but it's hard to imagine a more yucky rendition of him. Movies now seem to be the magazine's raison d'etre, judging from the clapperboard motif. And what's that I spy? Snow-lined lettering... a publisher's cliché that RT had admirably resisted until now. It hadn't thawed by the time of 1996's snowman – acceptable but lacking in imagination – while 1997's stylised Santa at least had the virtue of minimal text. Where would it have gone, anyway? In his beard? No logo snow this year, either, but it was back in 1998, by which time the the movie count had doubled from its original 1992 quota. I don't care much for this cover, either. Santa riding his reindeer like a cowboy across a snow-covered prairie? Nah.</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgxWSNLQAUX_uEbPLWtRggYPS9pDW5IxBpDzZ2_Cbpmctgl9Lg8m6gz-mI4wIl1oiTh0pkqYxuUvSFsVKr9c-RJ_aiNkyKaGWLhuG7FCGIxXeMDXDXsyF9QRlOeJIOUb6AvjqH9L6Vnq7RuJ2aVCj0wYDPYBasU9GQ397FOKMLTtGZJ_q62o8jnCFUoi7c/s1190/Screenshot%202023-12-23%20at%2012.02.07.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="421" data-original-width="1190" height="226" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgxWSNLQAUX_uEbPLWtRggYPS9pDW5IxBpDzZ2_Cbpmctgl9Lg8m6gz-mI4wIl1oiTh0pkqYxuUvSFsVKr9c-RJ_aiNkyKaGWLhuG7FCGIxXeMDXDXsyF9QRlOeJIOUb6AvjqH9L6Vnq7RuJ2aVCj0wYDPYBasU9GQ397FOKMLTtGZJ_q62o8jnCFUoi7c/w640-h226/Screenshot%202023-12-23%20at%2012.02.07.png" width="640" /></a></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEglA5TH0wHQdU_Q1XI19p6NcnF-WHyCpQ5dC6OEm8nVW6ZKwzbyM9FSwruhYEQNTtQvQE4pvnf3S9eC9HcB3IqdNlvKHUqG4hGVK_eVxIKEdg4uT4SSPjAf7dn7LVD9EiQ8HNtFAbQG97zUiNCZEwfojomLMCmSJ8H1q1QesaFZ1PE_N520opg3y03r0hE/s1195/Screenshot%202023-12-23%20at%2012.02.20.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="425" data-original-width="1195" height="228" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEglA5TH0wHQdU_Q1XI19p6NcnF-WHyCpQ5dC6OEm8nVW6ZKwzbyM9FSwruhYEQNTtQvQE4pvnf3S9eC9HcB3IqdNlvKHUqG4hGVK_eVxIKEdg4uT4SSPjAf7dn7LVD9EiQ8HNtFAbQG97zUiNCZEwfojomLMCmSJ8H1q1QesaFZ1PE_N520opg3y03r0hE/w640-h228/Screenshot%202023-12-23%20at%2012.02.20.png" width="640" /></a></div><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">Those films just kept on coming... 1750 of them in 2001, 2000 the following year. Artwork continued to dominate the covers. Naive in 99 (hated it), un-festive Harry Potter in 2000 (hated it again), contrived in 2001, and as many festive trappings as you could imagine over the next three years. Was there a rule in the art department that the Christmas covers had to feature a blue background? Taken together like this, their paucity of imagination is quite striking. And we've also seen the last of the swash caps RT logo that had dominated the cover since 1969. 2001's sans font was just boring, but it was probably easier for snow to settle on sans serifs. This boring look dominated the next four years.</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi1rSkwALra9v6vG4waL7A-KYDOX0v8AtxjzkBogREP7UAvJjpYtAeYNJhIjFNLkSCPtJDxOR0rSDgQlziS5NdRwSPIwoG1luBwfpcm5eTZAA4Ug7_nONgS4E4wczuYr03iTqz1uffhRI4dAFBKvbsUD_Xg-vTccfdZX6MxaFvLLnRvfFbzz9ySg7X_rCc/s1194/Screenshot%202023-12-23%20at%2012.02.28.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="422" data-original-width="1194" height="226" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi1rSkwALra9v6vG4waL7A-KYDOX0v8AtxjzkBogREP7UAvJjpYtAeYNJhIjFNLkSCPtJDxOR0rSDgQlziS5NdRwSPIwoG1luBwfpcm5eTZAA4Ug7_nONgS4E4wczuYr03iTqz1uffhRI4dAFBKvbsUD_Xg-vTccfdZX6MxaFvLLnRvfFbzz9ySg7X_rCc/w640-h226/Screenshot%202023-12-23%20at%2012.02.28.png" width="640" /></a></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhJGjsH75hSaVYUpQbPxTpda9wdFGRAcqj6gZxyW4DO-EwWEQXoNMlYQPdvacqiF4u7p4yrO8kfQ6O7Wc4aAR9H0e3nx9wn8sR58Zzp8TvcSAvzuLOlEFaYrRSan83urCxmkakpokRl7rj-6yWyHDLlUbMA_Ga6L99-2Y1iZxSOK778UsjoRCTZ48iGeSQ/s1191/Screenshot%202023-12-23%20at%2012.02.37.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="420" data-original-width="1191" height="226" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhJGjsH75hSaVYUpQbPxTpda9wdFGRAcqj6gZxyW4DO-EwWEQXoNMlYQPdvacqiF4u7p4yrO8kfQ6O7Wc4aAR9H0e3nx9wn8sR58Zzp8TvcSAvzuLOlEFaYrRSan83urCxmkakpokRl7rj-6yWyHDLlUbMA_Ga6L99-2Y1iZxSOK778UsjoRCTZ48iGeSQ/w640-h226/Screenshot%202023-12-23%20at%2012.02.37.png" width="640" /></a></div><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">The sans title block evidently wasn't popular, and was gone by 2005's Tardis snowglobe cover, replaced with a heavy, condensed font. It still wasn't much to look at, but it made for a bolder cover design. The Dr. Who imagery reflected the show's much anticipated return to the screen that year. In 2006 you even got a 'free Doctor Who CD' whatever that might have been. And it was actually inside, rather than a mail-away offer. I have no recollection of seeing this, so must conclude that 2006 was a year in which I chose to go without the festive RT. At £1.99, the price was rather more than we'd been paying back in the 1980s, but seems like a bargain compared to the five quid they want for 2023's edition. Santa's snow angel of 2007 reflects a trend that must have gone viral around this time – we certainly didn't do it in the 1960s or 70s – and it was back to photographs with Wallace and Gromit in 2008. A welcome change from cheesy paintings of Santa, but don't outstay your welcome, guys. 2009 saw a return visit for that Coca-Cola Santa, and the first in a regrettable trend of offering alternative covers. If this wasn't taking advantage of collectors, I don't know what was...</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjdv3qQXYYmuKwrpjX0TInRxN9A4Tt-Vm5X85tytpKemmVRsuyiRY1mj5j1sImZCDAeF8flnGG8LjyOSAOfNadB__LoIXRI5eEY4fEIeOwxFzXc4y5VLyCFY_cJRxeYtja0AxS5g1bZo1I6YyXZbeI74ETZTgjO9BMfaBPzDtfsfZDzIC9GkUs34w2S6jA/s1192/Screenshot%202023-12-23%20at%2012.02.45.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="429" data-original-width="1192" height="230" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjdv3qQXYYmuKwrpjX0TInRxN9A4Tt-Vm5X85tytpKemmVRsuyiRY1mj5j1sImZCDAeF8flnGG8LjyOSAOfNadB__LoIXRI5eEY4fEIeOwxFzXc4y5VLyCFY_cJRxeYtja0AxS5g1bZo1I6YyXZbeI74ETZTgjO9BMfaBPzDtfsfZDzIC9GkUs34w2S6jA/w640-h230/Screenshot%202023-12-23%20at%2012.02.45.png" width="640" /></a></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh4KsXu-H9E65tGaTwgjeg-P6NgH0e3PZekpTdqY-CpcFrwiXb8ofFjPN54BCI4trzkRBfI__gLuDryd_3QhSg4yLN_R2X8pvXUJGD9OLfNqBciz3N-ctVDGwtUTFrygTN8mOSUheveUDNlHNyohpRghHYEtDV-fNsjcPRXL_65k-zKReFYhYd8rCmM-MI/s1194/Screenshot%202023-12-23%20at%2012.02.54.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="436" data-original-width="1194" height="234" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh4KsXu-H9E65tGaTwgjeg-P6NgH0e3PZekpTdqY-CpcFrwiXb8ofFjPN54BCI4trzkRBfI__gLuDryd_3QhSg4yLN_R2X8pvXUJGD9OLfNqBciz3N-ctVDGwtUTFrygTN8mOSUheveUDNlHNyohpRghHYEtDV-fNsjcPRXL_65k-zKReFYhYd8rCmM-MI/w640-h234/Screenshot%202023-12-23%20at%2012.02.54.png" width="640" /></a></div><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">Originality was nowhere to be seen in 2010 when Wallace and Gromit again nabbed the Christmas cover: the only characters since Morecambe and Wise and the Two Ronnies to make it onto the cover twice. 2011's alternate covers looked like charity Christmas cards. At least the blue background was gone, but one wonders what was the point. At least we were spared sickly Santas. It's hard to argue with the next two years' Raymond Briggs covers, but I've never been a fan of Judith Kerr's art, and felt her 2014 cover was playing too much to the younger members of the gallery. One regrettable trend to emerge from this run of covers is the self congratulatory puff 'The Legendary Double Issue.' Traditional, I'll grant you, but magazine covers have never been the stuff of legends. Get a grip, editior!</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjjMDYw1NbGs4hsPIbw5w9m0ABlm41pK15v-gPhYnzd3jF8RnjFWpKkWBjwlhGs5vuG02eMLTcO2uQw0Sf9uqjFkEpdkf-OThpquzKyLEykk2iFmjigz2Lznsv5dGtvSzOVCaFPRetugg7Hau79wsYhMQjaTI_gfF8R1N5ZcRVPsxZlD75QDDuPTvVcB5Q/s1146/Screenshot%202023-12-23%20at%2012.03.07.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="406" data-original-width="1146" height="226" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjjMDYw1NbGs4hsPIbw5w9m0ABlm41pK15v-gPhYnzd3jF8RnjFWpKkWBjwlhGs5vuG02eMLTcO2uQw0Sf9uqjFkEpdkf-OThpquzKyLEykk2iFmjigz2Lznsv5dGtvSzOVCaFPRetugg7Hau79wsYhMQjaTI_gfF8R1N5ZcRVPsxZlD75QDDuPTvVcB5Q/w640-h226/Screenshot%202023-12-23%20at%2012.03.07.png" width="640" /></a></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjbQ_fm2Qz_ImkNc_5EN6TD1OeAZAeMuGKuznVS-alBRbBRPhFpGN7JCA_NFflpaLZxE3i3FfAjcmNl6hxZt_jnDQYIUAG9R8pDuBWiC69toVBVcOdOr-VS5A1aKZS-gU7WtDVBU6avzGL8MPpNMVc56748YZteOPxdBPxxq1cwyoZHZ_NhfxNeO2QIrRM/s1173/Screenshot%202023-12-23%20at%2012.03.15.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="407" data-original-width="1173" height="222" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjbQ_fm2Qz_ImkNc_5EN6TD1OeAZAeMuGKuznVS-alBRbBRPhFpGN7JCA_NFflpaLZxE3i3FfAjcmNl6hxZt_jnDQYIUAG9R8pDuBWiC69toVBVcOdOr-VS5A1aKZS-gU7WtDVBU6avzGL8MPpNMVc56748YZteOPxdBPxxq1cwyoZHZ_NhfxNeO2QIrRM/w640-h222/Screenshot%202023-12-23%20at%2012.03.15.png" width="640" /></a></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br /></div>If you couldn't have Wallace and Gromit again, then the next best thing was Sean the Sheep... and is it just me, or did Santa look suspiciously like Shane McGowan? 2016's cover reverted to twee family friendly art, while 2017 looks like it may have been the work of Raymond Briggs. 2018 certainly was. Readers who had held onto their 2012 copies might have been tempted to spot the difference. I'll tell you the answer: 2012's cover was promoting that year's new arrival, <i>The Snowman and the Snowdog</i>, while 2018's image hails from the original. 2019's reindeer cover rings no (sleigh) bells with me, but that's not to say I didn't buy it: more likely it's down to visual fatigue. After so many years of Christmas RT covers, they all become a blur. 2020's Santa was so generic you could be forgiven for not noticing it at all... which brings us almost up to date.<div><br /></div><div>2021 set a corpulent Briggsian Santa against a backdrop of chimneys, and that traditional dark blue sky. By now, the amount of snow on the logo had reached excessive proportions. It's about time someone swept it all off. 2022 meanwhile, was another throwback cover. Surely that's 2011 again? It was certainly hard to tell them apart. Fortunately, you didn't have to, unless you were a time traveller. This year we have Mog, star of the by now obligatory heart-warming Christmas cartoon. Is there room on the broom for any more? Evidently yes. Merry Christmas from your resident designer Scrooge.</div><div><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjpE2AOxn4K6twgacGNckG7QwYoV7EASguQZHW_eYZPCZaMGltzHgwD0XpMRmj51vKtPhV_LPJb_riY-gTNg2UzYlk77jzTML9k4AKPUTnvrdgMBZQpZb-D_tXCwKlvmg_FnC0K0FQ6RPo2gVzRItQe7qEpAoqtHAqiDdlWu7OUXQNcYRUZQ5Pj5tFfESk/s1168/Screenshot%202023-12-23%20at%2012.03.23.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="412" data-original-width="1168" height="226" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjpE2AOxn4K6twgacGNckG7QwYoV7EASguQZHW_eYZPCZaMGltzHgwD0XpMRmj51vKtPhV_LPJb_riY-gTNg2UzYlk77jzTML9k4AKPUTnvrdgMBZQpZb-D_tXCwKlvmg_FnC0K0FQ6RPo2gVzRItQe7qEpAoqtHAqiDdlWu7OUXQNcYRUZQ5Pj5tFfESk/w640-h226/Screenshot%202023-12-23%20at%2012.03.23.png" width="640" /></a></div><br /><div><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">Larger copies of these scans, along with the covers spanning the years 1936-1968 can be found here:</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><a href="https://ukchristmastv.weebly.com/christmas-radio-times-covers-1936-1968.html">https://ukchristmastv.weebly.com/christmas-radio-times-covers-1936-1968.html</a><br /></div><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><br /></div><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><br /></div><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br /></div><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><br /></div><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><br /></div><br /><div><br /></div></div>Mart Chttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04883883503677556135noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6507883749037788533.post-40365890622537148332023-12-23T03:54:00.000-08:002023-12-23T03:54:29.341-08:00Decades of Christmas Past: 1993<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjKakJBR1T7wSG5rKmoHviwr7ZfadH0a61QraQ06L3GwklrXJT1s448NY34W_5LnW_hFsY6WnOOPR91NANXjTViKEIFXumuYKXKGR9Z8IPmmwJ3ZNFOtaxG_yIO5jDS6NNvuGgGSp8Z0wBr58vkLs-k4Srf_dw2M-LUK6SZ431BF8Hk7br7AEsMK3FVOL4/s946/Screenshot%202023-12-22%20at%2022.07.53.png" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="946" data-original-width="719" height="640" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjKakJBR1T7wSG5rKmoHviwr7ZfadH0a61QraQ06L3GwklrXJT1s448NY34W_5LnW_hFsY6WnOOPR91NANXjTViKEIFXumuYKXKGR9Z8IPmmwJ3ZNFOtaxG_yIO5jDS6NNvuGgGSp8Z0wBr58vkLs-k4Srf_dw2M-LUK6SZ431BF8Hk7br7AEsMK3FVOL4/w486-h640/Screenshot%202023-12-22%20at%2022.07.53.png" width="486" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><br /></td></tr></tbody></table><p align="left" style="line-height: 24px; margin-bottom: 0cm;">Christmas 1993 saw some changes in my personal circumstances compared with a decade earlier. For one thing, I was no longer going out to work: I’d become freelance in 1991, so aside from work commitments, I was a free agent – albeit one with limited resources. I kept a partial diary this year, mostly as a place to record out-of-pocket expenses that could be claimed back on my tax return, and the Christmas period saw a full run of entries beginning on Monday 20th December and continuing on into January.</p><p align="left" style="line-height: 24px; margin-bottom: 0cm;">Monday 20th December brought what everyone wants for Christmas – snow. I'd spent the afternoon visiting a friend, and drove home into a virtual blizzard. Despite the worsening conditions, I went out later to meet up with some other friends at a rural pub: surely not a great idea. The gritters had been caught out, and even the dual carriageway A38 was like driving through mashed potato. At home later, I watched Newman and Baddiel’s <i>Christmas in Pieces</i>. Now, there’s a comedy double act that time has forgotten. I think this 30-year-old relic must now qualify as a ghost of Christmas past; or to put it in the idiom of the show’s two infantile history professors: “You see an old television programme that nobody remembers apart from really old people? That’s you, that is.”</p><p align="left" style="line-height: 24px; margin-bottom: 0cm;">The snow endured overnight, thanks to sub zero temperatures, and the following morning I took some Christmas card-type photos around the Cathedral in Lichfield, where I was now living. The odds on a White Christmas must have upped considerably, but we were to be disappointed: the following day brought a thaw and heavy rain. Bah, humbug…</p><p align="left" style="line-height: 24px; margin-bottom: 0cm;">One festive tradition that has endured down the years is the Christmas Double Issue of the Radio and TV Times. As the above image shows, the RT now included complete programme listings across all available channels, meaning that one no longer had to buy the TV Times as well. The cover artwork was by Mick Brownfield, whose work monopolised the festive RT covers during the early 90s. I didn't care for this year's offering, and I seem to recollect seeing a few complaining letters about it in the new year. You couldn't argue with Brownfield's technique, but the toothless kid was an ugly image to have staring up at you from the coffee table over the festive season. I folded the front cover inside out so as to avoid looking at it. Brownfield had provided the covers for 1991 and 1992, but 1993 was his last year on the job, and I bet that gappy-toothed kid had something to do with it.</p><p align="left" style="line-height: 24px; margin-bottom: 0cm;">Wednesday the 22nd gives us a couple more clues to the prevailing televisual climate. At 6pm, the BBC2 offered us a <i>Star Trek</i> premiere in the form of the previously unbroadcast <i>Plato’s Stepchildren</i>. Best described as interesting but awful. Later in the evening, my diary records that I watched the final episode of <i>Stark</i>, a three-part serial produced in collaboration between the BBC and the Australian ABC network, and based on Ben Elton’s novel of 1989. I remember the novel generating a fair amount of media interest on its release. Comedian writes novel? Whatever next? Step forward Stephen Fry and… just about everybody else. As to the TV adaptation of <i>Stark</i>, if it wasn't for my diary entry, I’d have assumed I never saw it. Less than nothing of it remains in my recollection. Which is probably for the best. Having said which, I suspect Elon Musk may still be hoping to turn the novel’s premise – super rich bastards abandon eco-disaster Earth in spaceships – into a reality.</p><p align="left" style="line-height: 24px; margin-bottom: 0cm;">That same evening (December 22nd), on video, I watched Monday night’s episode of <i>Prime Suspect</i>, now in its third series. But again, like Newman and Baddiel, this award-winning show seems to be sliding slowly into obscurity. Netflix made it available to stream in 2013, but that’s a decade ago, as was the blu-ray release from now-defunct Acorn Media. It was certainly one of the most talked about TV series of its decade, and made Helen Mirren a household name if she wasn’t one already.</p><p align="left" style="line-height: 24px; margin-bottom: 0cm;">Thursday 23rd December saw the UNCLE movie <i>The Karate Killers</i> get an airing on BBC2. I’d probably already got this taped, so didn’t bother with it. BBC1 offered us David Attenborough’s <i>Life in the Freezer</i>, a compelling 6-part profile of Antarctia. And you can still watch it, as the whole series has been made available on iPlayer.</p><p align="left" style="line-height: 24px; margin-bottom: 0cm;">My diary reports that I also watched the rom-sitcom <i>Goodnight Sweetheart</i>, in which Nicholas Lyndhurst cheated on his present day girlfriend by wandering back in time to the Second World War. Wikipedia describes this as a ‘science fiction’ sitcom, but that makes it sound like <i>Red Dwarf</i>. There was no sci-fi on show here, just a rather pedestrian form of time travel (he merely strolls down a certain street). This week’s was the final episode of its first series. I didn't follow it into the future, but I’m sure it’s probably playing on some satellite channel even as we speak.</p><p align="left" style="line-height: 24px; margin-bottom: 0cm;">Christmas Eve started with a <i>Just William</i> reading on Radio 4. In the afternoon, I watched the classic film <i>Genevieve</i> for possibly the first time. It would not be the last. The evening’s entertainment all came courtesy of VHS tape, on which format I revisited the old Christmas editions of <i>Get Some In! </i>and <i>The Likely Lads</i>. The latter was my prized recording from Tuesday 23 December 1980 of what was only the second screening of this Christmas comedy classic. These days, it can no longer be seen in its original form as Bob’s line ‘I can even take Rolf Harris’ (in reference to Christmas televisual tat) has been excised from all future broadcasts.</p><p align="left" style="line-height: 24px; margin-bottom: 0cm;">Over on ITV, meanwhile, Melvyn Bragg might shudder today at the recollection that <i>The South Bank Show</i> presented a special programme about... Cliff Richard.</p><p align="left" style="line-height: 24px; margin-bottom: 0cm;">That was it for Christmas Eve on the box. Christmas Day on BBC1 offered the resistable <i>Back to the Future III</i> for the afternoon’s entertainment (we didn’t bother), and the by now obligatory <i>Only Fools and Horses</i> at 18.05: ‘the worst ever’ according to my diary. This year’s piece of festive ‘fun’ saw Del put through the emotional wringer when his wife Racquel walked out on him. If that wasn’t enough, hard on its heels came <i>EastEnders</i> which could always be relied on to serve up a thick slice of seasonal misery. <i>Birds of a Feather</i> (8pm) may have done better, but as I seldom watched the series, I neither knew nor cared. The evening’s big film was <i>Ghost</i>, but I’d already seen that at the cinema. My diary records that I spent much of the day at our parents’ house reading one of my brother’s Christmas presents – <i>T</i><i>he Kenneth Williams Diaries</i>, which I’d given him myself (cunning, eh?) Boxing Day on BBC1 included <i>Keeping Up Appearances</i> and <i>One Foot in the Grave</i>, which are almost the yin and yang of 1990s suburban sitcom. Did BBC2 do any better? Well, yes, as a matter of fact: Christmas Day brought us another repeat of <i>The Treasure of Abbot Thomas</i>, now getting its third outing. And this time I taped it.</p><p align="left" style="line-height: 24px; margin-bottom: 0cm;">Boxing Day was not, technically speaking Boxing Day this year, falling as it did on a Sunday. In years past, such as 1976, when December 26th fell on a Sunday, it was known as Christmas Sunday, and 'Boxing Day' became the Bank Holiday Monday, the 27th. My 1976 diary confirms this, but by 1993, the diary insists that Boxing Day was December 26th, with the 27th listed as 'Christmas Holiday'. I always think it's a pity when these old traditions fall out of use.</p><p align="left" style="line-height: 24px; margin-bottom: 0cm;">Despite Monday being a Bank Holiday, some of the shops were open – another sign of the times. From our local Woolworths, I bought a VHS tape of Gerry Anderson's<i> The Secret Service </i>at the reduced price of £5.99, for which you got a whopping four episodes. VHS tapes had also been amongst my Christmas presents, including the <i>Dr. Who</i> serial <i>Terror of the Autons</i>, which I was already making my way through. The evening's TV on BBC1 included shows that I either never watched (<i>Lovejoy</i>) or had fallen out of love with (<i>Last of the Summer Wine</i>). Fortunately, over on BBC2, we were offered a night of programmes curated by comedy flavours of the month Vic Reeves and Bob Mortimer. I sat through most, if not all of this, taping selected items including a rare <i>Dad's Army</i> sketch from 1972's <i>Christmas Night With the Stars</i>. The big draw for me was Mike Leigh's <i>Nuts In May</i>, which I'd never seen before.</p><p align="left" style="line-height: 24px; margin-bottom: 0cm;">Snow fell again overnight, with my diary recording that there was 'quite a covering' the next morning. This was inconvenient, as I'd arranged to test drive a brand new Vauxhall Corsa that day, and had to postpone until the 29th. My current vehicle, a Rover Metro ('they've rebadged it, you fool' – Alan Partridge) was utterly unreliable, having a tendency to run slow and/or stop altogether in driving rain. The designers had included two pointless vents on the bonnet, which seemed to serve no purpose other than to allow rain into the engine compartment. It was only a few years old, but it had to go, and indeed it did. The snow didn't last either – the diary records that it was gone by evening.</p><p align="left" style="line-height: 24px; margin-bottom: 0cm;">And with that final thaw of 1993, we reach the end of this seasonal look back across the decades. I won't be visiting 2003, its having being a festive season that I'd prefer not to remember; and 2013 is just, well, too recent innit? Whatever decade you choose to inhabit, have a very merry Christmas and a happy new year. 1964 is just around the corner – for me, at any rate.</p><p align="left" style="line-height: 24px; margin-bottom: 0cm;"><br /></p><p align="left" style="line-height: 24px; margin-bottom: 0cm;"><br /></p><p align="left" style="line-height: 24px; margin-bottom: 0cm;"><br /></p>Mart Chttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04883883503677556135noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6507883749037788533.post-27953866120642248082023-12-22T14:05:00.000-08:002023-12-22T14:05:54.798-08:00Decades of Christmas Past: 1983<p> </p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj4FO6jqDOox7hzTB0DYymtg72LCMx2FzwR8eXvJVKYiLGIIoTYSnssC-I_UkLDhRwQORwyNdFnFuiOz7-4ztqcrDkRiLYF2NakQvZHN-xRQOyuonfD9UGZrFQAnDogol672prtbnriSXRI4ey41mv6v_-OpnkhWgA989THM2K0vzcrpPZf8uitHIzsNKA/s600/IMG_1930.jpeg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="600" data-original-width="600" height="640" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj4FO6jqDOox7hzTB0DYymtg72LCMx2FzwR8eXvJVKYiLGIIoTYSnssC-I_UkLDhRwQORwyNdFnFuiOz7-4ztqcrDkRiLYF2NakQvZHN-xRQOyuonfD9UGZrFQAnDogol672prtbnriSXRI4ey41mv6v_-OpnkhWgA989THM2K0vzcrpPZf8uitHIzsNKA/w640-h640/IMG_1930.jpeg" width="640" /></a></div><br /><p></p><p align="left" style="line-height: 24px; margin-bottom: 0cm;">Strange as it is to recount, I have less recollection of Christmas 1983 than I do of the festivities ten years earlier. Not having kept a diary that year, I have no idea what gifts I gave or received, though by this time, LPs were almost guaranteed for Christmas, and annuals had been replaced by gift books of varying quality, none of which has left any lasting impression.</p><p align="left" style="line-height: 24px; margin-bottom: 0cm;">One thing I can say definitively about this festive season was that it was my first as an employee: I’d joined the staff of a small Birmingham-based advertising agency back in May, and in the week before Christmas we all decamped to a corner pub diagonally opposite the Hippodrome Theatre. The pub retained its Victorian interior and was decorated with photos, playbills and sheet music reflecting its long history as a watering hole for thesps and music hall entertainers like Dan Leno. Our traditional Christmas dinner was served in a rear function room of Dickensian aspect, the smell of boiled sprouts and turkey wafting through to the saloon bar while we had our pre-dinner drinks. The jukebox was playing Paul Young’s <i>Love of the Common People</i>, which was currently riding high in the charts. The windows were all steamed up from the cooking. This is the clearest memory I have of that forty-year-old Christmas, and I have to look elsewhere to get a better idea of what else might have been going on.</p><p align="left" style="line-height: 24px; margin-bottom: 0cm;">The pop charts offer a few clues, but nothing significant. Christmas singles were, of course, unavoidable by 1983, with the most enduring of this year’s crop proving to be the Pretenders’ <i>2000 Miles</i>. I’d heard a novelty single on the radio one afternoon at work, which Steve Wright suggested might be the work of XTC. I didn’t believe it myself – surely they wouldn’t stoop to such banal festive tat as <i>Thanks for Christmas? </i>But Wrighty was right: under the pseudonym The Three Wise Men, the Swindon trio had released a Christmas single replete with trumpets, twelve-string guitars and sleighbells. Despite getting Radio One airplay, it failled enter the Top 100 singles chart (as a meaasure of its lack of success, the theme from <i>Terrahawks</i> sold more copies). I bought a copy of XTC’s effort out of loyalty to the band, and got over my initial antipathy towards it.</p><p align="left" style="line-height: 24px; margin-bottom: 0cm;">Elsewhere in the Top 100 of Christmas week, Elton John’s dreary <i>Cold as Christmas</i> had crawled up to an unimpressive number 33 while Slade’s <i>Merry Xmas Everyone</i> was out on its third release, ten years on from its original success. Slade’s activities weren’t confined to reissues, however, and their current release <i>My Oh My</i> was aimed squarely at the New Year’s Eve crowd with its folksy singalong melody. The top spot that year had been annexed by acapella vocal group The Flying Pickets, whose arrangement of Yazoo’s <i>Only You</i> had nothing whatsoever to do with Christmas: this didn’t stop them from appearing on the Christmas <i>Top of the Pops </i>dressed as snowmen. I hated it as much then as I do today. Also appearing in the ‘Christmas single that isn’t Christmassy’ category was Paul McCartney, whose <i>Pipes of Peace</i> included Indian tablas but not a single sleighbell. Only the video made clear its festive aspirations, with Macca recreating the famous Christmas truce between the front line troops of 1914. By this time, my musical tastes were drifting away from the Top 20, and in the whole top 100 of Christmas week, there are only a handful of records I own – and two of those were reissues.</p><p align="left" style="line-height: 24px; margin-bottom: 0cm;">I was also drifting away from the television set, so I don’t have any particular fond memories of that year’s festive line-up. Christmas Eve on BBC1 included a repeat of the <i>Some Mothers Do ‘Ave ‘Em</i> special of 1978, followed by a seasonal edition of <i>Pop Quiz</i>. The evening’s main event was the premiere of the movie <i>Flash Gordon</i>, a mere three years on from its theatrical release. Flash (ah-ah) was bookended by Little and Large and Val Doonican. Later in the evening came an edition of <i>Bergerac</i> (snore) and a Christmas special of <i>The Good Old Days</i>, a show I always took great care to avoid seeing. In fact, judging by the schedule, I’m sure I must have been out that evening. I didn’t see <i>Flash Gordon</i> until nearly twenty years later.</p><p align="left" style="line-height: 24px; margin-bottom: 0cm;">BBC2 offered a more interesting line-up, including an adaptation of Laurie Lee’s <i>Cider With Rosie</i> and a couple of Cary Grant movies. But none of it rings any bells.</p><p align="left" style="line-height: 24px; margin-bottom: 0cm;">Christmas Day television no longer included the once obligatory visit to a children’s ward, but children featured prominently in the morning schedule, offering ‘songs, pictures and thoughts about the Nativity’ at 9.50. Not a broken leg or later-to-be-disgraced celebrity presenter in sight. But not so fast… because the dread antipodean bearded one whose name we dare not utter managed to worm his way into the listings, with an animated adventure, <i>The Little Convict</i>, featuring his character Jake the Peg.</p><p align="left" style="line-height: 24px; margin-bottom: 0cm;"><i>Christmas Top of the Pops</i> occupied its time-honoured post-prandial slot of 2pm, leading viewers nicely up to the Queen’s speech. The rest of the afternoon was given over to <i>Blanketty Blank</i> and the 1950 film of <i>Treasure Island</i>, which despite its 33-year-old vintage was at least in colour. Following the news at 5.25pm, up popped another Ghost of Christmas Past in the shape of <i>Jim’ll Fix It</i>, whose contents included ‘how to crack Christmas walnuts.’ I’m saying nothing.</p><p align="left" style="line-height: 24px; margin-bottom: 0cm;">The evening’s big hitters came courtesy of <i>The Two Ronnies</i>, <i>All Creatures Great and Small</i> and the inevitable <i>Only Fools and Horses</i> – which in scheduling terms was surely <i>The Mrs. Brown’s Boys</i> of its day. Except that it was funny. I’m sure I sat through all that lot. In the immortal words of Robert Scarborough Ferris, ‘Christmas night, full of food, you just want to sit back in an armchair and watch the box.’ Unusually, the Christmas edition of <i>The Likely Lads</i> does not appear to have been dusted off this year, although <i>The Good Life</i>’s <i>Silly But it’s Fun</i> got a lunchtime outing on Boxing Day. I most likely recorded this. It was followed by the feature film <i>Bridge on the River Kwai</i>, perfect scheduling for a Boxing Day afternoon. Pass the nuts…</p><p align="left" style="line-height: 24px; margin-bottom: 0cm;">Boxing Day’s festive nightmare came courtesy of Keith Harris and (the) Orville, who hosted their Christmas party at 4.35pm. I declined the invitation. And, oh dear me, it just got worse after that. Who, honestly, wanted to see the <i>Circus World Championships</i> on this or any other day? Only the participants, I’ll wager. I bloody hate circuses (sorry, I seem to be turning into Alexei Sayle...)</p><p align="left" style="line-height: 24px; margin-bottom: 0cm;">Then… having seen off that sawdust-ridden offering, we got... Paul Daniels (good magician, but whose brand of schtick I liked not a lot)… Kenny Everett (never got him at all… the endless manic carrying on. Next, please…) Oh God, Rocky. As in Sly Stallone, rather than the chocolate biscuit or Raccoon. I may even have watched a bit of this, though I promise never to do so again.</p><p align="left" style="line-height: 24px; margin-bottom: 0cm;">Over on BBC2, the evening line-up included <i>A Life in the Theatre: Gwen Ffrangcon-Davies</i> (thanks, but no thanks) and the ballet of La Scala presenting <i>Romeo and Juliet </i>(cue old Man Steptoe grimacing face). These were the days when BBC2 was still determinedly BBC2. It was left to the graveyard slot to bring out the best two items of the day, and wouldn’t you know it, they clashed. Over on BBC1, we got the first ever repeat of 1974’s <i>Ghost Story for Christmas</i>, <i>The Treasure of Abbot Thomas</i>, while BBC2 offered us <i>The Ipcress File</i>. You could, of course, record one whilst watching the other, but you couldn’t record both. My VHS copy of Abbot Thomas dates to a decade later, so if either offering made it onto tape, it was Ipcress.</p><p align="left" style="line-height: 24px; margin-bottom: 0cm;">So much for popular culture, but what of the climate? Did it snow? This was, after all, the 1980s, and only two years on from a notably wintry December where snow lay crisp and even for most of Christmas week, although the failure of a single flake to land on the Met Office roof during December 25<sup>th</sup> meant it failed to meet the criteria for an official White Christmas (as recognised by bookmakers). Christmas 1981 certainly had lying snow where I lived in the Midlands, but 1983 didn’t quite measure up, with the Met Office monthly report summarising conditions as ‘mostly mild and unsettled’, the monthly maximum temperature having been recorded at Colwyn Bay on the 27<sup>th</sup>, at a balmy 16.5 degrees. And you thought global warming was invented by Greta Thunberg… Snow did actually fall, albeit too early for Christmas, by which time the milder weather had set in. Moderate to heavy accumulations were recorded on the 11<sup>th</sup> and 12<sup>th</sup>, mostly over higher ground from Wales and the Midlands northwards. I can’t remember whether we got any at home in Birmingham, but I usually photographed any notable snowfalls and have nothing to show for this particular year.</p><p align="left" style="line-height: 24px; margin-bottom: 0cm;">So this was Christmas… and what did we do? Sorry, I can’t remember. Maybe I’ll do better in another ten years’ time…</p><p align="left" style="line-height: 24px; margin-bottom: 0cm;"><br /></p><p align="left" style="line-height: 24px; margin-bottom: 0cm;"><br /></p>Mart Chttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04883883503677556135noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6507883749037788533.post-25340778261456259662023-12-21T06:54:00.000-08:002023-12-21T06:54:20.232-08:00Decades of Christmas Past: 1973<p></p><div style="text-align: justify;"> </div><table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhnvEb23pkwa8TDBuWvwDZNVWATw-mYwJG114lOFq8RoV9-E5GQvlB4j4vjM-ZCEiJSub9r6a7U-3n2aAuqQGlcnNOo12Wkp-o5PRzyHZy20JULTbssgpqpYsalJN0HYOiBshTUwHWx754vInWxRHMJEBHAMhnNG3HakasfkDgn2oERp7aXKVn4xJosTvQ/s975/Screenshot%202023-12-21%20at%2013.37.28.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="975" data-original-width="768" height="640" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhnvEb23pkwa8TDBuWvwDZNVWATw-mYwJG114lOFq8RoV9-E5GQvlB4j4vjM-ZCEiJSub9r6a7U-3n2aAuqQGlcnNOo12Wkp-o5PRzyHZy20JULTbssgpqpYsalJN0HYOiBshTUwHWx754vInWxRHMJEBHAMhnNG3HakasfkDgn2oERp7aXKVn4xJosTvQ/w504-h640/Screenshot%202023-12-21%20at%2013.37.28.png" width="504" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">State of the nation circa Christmas 1973? This TV Times cover says it all...<br /></td></tr></tbody></table><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><p></p><p style="line-height: 24px; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;">Last time, I pushed the boundaries of memory and attempted to rediscover Christmas of 60 years ago. Memories were foggy if not non existent. But jump forward another decade and it's a different matter.</p><p style="line-height: 24px; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;">Autumn and winter of 1973 had been a period of crisis, both at home in Britain and on the global stage. A new Arab/Israeli conflict had created the so called 'oil shock' that saw the price of petrol and deisel spiralling upwards. Here in Britain, garages ran dry and there was even talk of rationing. Parallel with these developments, industrial action in the energy sector led to the notorious three-day week, power cuts and, in the coming February, the downfall of Edward Heath's Conservative government. Sid and Babs were doing their best to get festive on the cover of the TV Times, but it was hard for many people to anticipate having a merry Christmas with so much doom and gloom in the news. Enter Noddy Holder and Slade, with a seasonal singalong to lift the mood of the nation.</p><p style="line-height: 24px; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;">The preceding paragraph is, in a nutshell, Christmas 1973 as seen by today's self-appointed cultural commentators like Dominic Sandbrook (who wasn't even born at the time). It's a popular conception. But is it a misconception? I can remember enough of that winter to paint a slightly more upbeat portrait – as glimpsed from where I was standing, in middle class Midland suburbia. Power cuts never troubled us – for reasons I don't entirely understand, our street would escape being blacked out whilst the estate beyond our back garden was regularly plunged into darkness. A neighbour offered the explanation that our supply was on the same grid that served the local hospital (although it was about two miles away). I'm not saying we got off entirely, but we certainly used a lot fewer candles than other families nearby.</p><p style="line-height: 24px; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;">As festivities went, we were in a better position financially than had been the case for a couple of years, with our dad now back in regular employment running a distribution warehouse for an electrical manufacturer. My big present this year was an amplifier for my electric guitar. This would have set our dad back something in the region of £70. So I reckon I was doing all right.</p><p style="line-height: 24px; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;">On the domestic scene, our kitchen had been upgraded earlier in the year. The Hygeina units would remain in place for nearly 50 years. It wasn't the greatest ever kitchen makeover: the original 1950s tiles, in a dreary shade of creamy yellow, were left in place. But it was better than what we'd had before. In the lounge, we had a recently acquired Fidelity hi-fi system on which to play our records, and probably new wallpaper – our mum tended to paper at least one room every year. She was working too, in the canteen of a local school. Between them, our mum and dad had never had it so good. So the popular myth of the early 70s equating to penury is just that: a myth.</p><p style="line-height: 24px; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;">There was only one front on which we still lagged behind in the luxury goods arena: our television set. Colour broadcasts had been available across all three TV channels since November 1969, but we were still watching in monochrome. Our first colour set would arrive in time for Christmas the following year, but in 1973 we were stuck with black and white. On Christmas Day itself, however, we were watching in colour, on account of a minor family spat. Our household tended to decamp to our grandparents’ house for Christmas Day, and had done so every year since 1967. This didn’t sit well with other branches of the family, and I have in 1973 our dad’s sister more or less demanded to host Christmas Day round at their place. We had dinner at home – I can clearly recall watching the Christmas <i>Top of the Pops</i> in our front room – but went round to the relatives’ for the evening where we got to see <i>Von Ryan’s Express</i> on their colour television, whilst eating their nuts, Quality Street and crystallised fruit...</p><p style="line-height: 24px; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;"><br /></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjzs9Zj_06Uy3zUBAHsIX3Vp129yH92vbF3rISELXiW8w-9uWiWPZbMwJtEZVnQfQvGEeJMKvo87LnxZ_ML4Z8f8gPJzrNCh6cbGVrrAFbMnjWENQVGRwa4mVGiv5puEiPj7C0cE9q94-zDf6ilB6i6CS-08iOi3sZrHCGP5Jstoc1G3KLK43utO2bxqds/s978/Screenshot%202023-12-21%20at%2013.38.24.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="978" data-original-width="762" height="640" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjzs9Zj_06Uy3zUBAHsIX3Vp129yH92vbF3rISELXiW8w-9uWiWPZbMwJtEZVnQfQvGEeJMKvo87LnxZ_ML4Z8f8gPJzrNCh6cbGVrrAFbMnjWENQVGRwa4mVGiv5puEiPj7C0cE9q94-zDf6ilB6i6CS-08iOi3sZrHCGP5Jstoc1G3KLK43utO2bxqds/w498-h640/Screenshot%202023-12-21%20at%2013.38.24.png" width="498" /></a></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: justify;"><br /></div><p style="line-height: 24px; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;">Von Ryan's Express was a mere eight years old, so still qualified as a Christmas night blockbuster. But what of the rest of the schedule? Last time, I had a brief trawl through the Christmas Day listings of 60 years ago, and little had changed by the time we reached 1973, where the ITV/ BBC1 schedule reads like a check-list of time-honoured traditions to be ticked off: circuses? You had a choice of two: Chipperfield’s on ITV at 1pm, and Billy Smart’s on BBC immediately after the Queen. Nicely scheduled so you could watch both if you were so inclined. We weren’t. Elsewhere in that half-a-century old line-up, we find Abbott and Costello (again!) on ITV at 11.30am, and, of course, a pantomime, <i>Robin Hood</i>, on BBC1 at 4.20pm. If you didn’t fancy that, you could switch over to ITV for… another panto.</p><p style="line-height: 24px; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;">The BBC’s <i>Christmas Night With the Stars</i> had come to an end the previous year, but ITV gamely kept up the tradition with their <i>All Star Comedy Carnival</i>, introduced by Jimmy Tarbuck. This offering still exists (and was released as a Network DVD a few years back). The presentation is cringe-making, but some decent sitcoms and shows were included, amongst them <i>Dr. in Charge</i>,<i> Sez Les</i> and <i>Man About the House</i>. Its 6.30pm slot meant that it clashed with Bruce Forsyth’s <i>Generation Game </i>and <i>Mike Yarwood’s Christmas Show</i> over on BBC1. No contest, really. BBC1’s dominance of the evening schedule was further assured by a classic <i>Morecambe and Wise </i><i>S</i><i>how</i> at 7.35. Further into the evening, viewers who didn't fancy a ride on <i>Von Ryan's Express</i> could join <i>The Odd Couple</i> (1968) on BBC1. Late evening was devoted to classical music on both channels, with BBC1 rounding off the schedule with another of their M.R. James adaptations, <i>Lost Hearts</i>.</p><p style="line-height: 24px; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;">Of course, by 1973 viewers now had a mind-boggling three channels to choose from, so what of BBC2’s festive fare? <i>Play School</i> opened the batting at 11am, following which much of the day’s schedule was given over to feature films: <i>White Christmas</i> (1954) at 11.35, <i>Far From the Madding Crowd</i> (1967) at 3.15pm, and <i>Quatermass and the Pit </i>(1967) at 10.30. In amongst these offerings, we find Buster Keaton revisiting his classic <i>The General</i> in <i>The Railrodder</i> at 5.55pm; a Parisian Puppet Theatre at 6.20, and even the venerable <i>What’s My Line.</i></p><p style="line-height: 24px; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;">The biggest deal on television for me this Christmas was to be found on the morning of Boxing Day, in the form of the Beatles’ first feature film <i>A Hard Day’s Night</i>. This was in fact the third time it had been shown on the BBC, the first broadcast coming at Christmas 1970, a mere six years after the film’s release. I’d missed out on this and its subsequent repeat, but it was a case of third time lucky. I didn’t exactly need converting to the cause of The Beatles: I knew them well enough in the 1960s, and had already seen the TV premiere of <i>Help! </i>on its Boxing Day broadcast in 1972. But with the focus on the glam rock bands in the weekly pop charts, the fabs had fallen off my radar somewhat. 1973’s broadcast of <i>A Hard Day’s Night</i><i> </i>would prove to be the turning point. Slade may have been at number one in the charts, but that Boxing Day broadcast of <i>A Hard Day’s Night</i> more or less cured me of glam rock at a stroke. Bands didn’t have to look ridiculous. The Beatles of 1964 were sharply dressed and looked cool. If was looking for role models, I’d just found them.</p><p style="line-height: 24px; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;">Until this point, we’d had no Beatle records in our household, but immediately after Christmas, my brother used a record token to buy a copy of the <i>Hard Day’s Night</i> album. The same post-Christmas shopping trip landed me a Beatles song music book spanning the years 1962-65. This was immediately turned to good effect in learning the songs off the <i>Hard Day’s Night </i>album. With my newly arrived amplifier, plus the 1960s Ludwig kit that our dad had handed down to my brother, it should come as no surprise to learn that within a matter of days, many of the fabs’ songs were being bashed out by us in the back bedroom. It sounds like the beginning of many a pop music career, but events were to pan out quite differently.</p><p style="line-height: 24px; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;">There is one other musical aspect of Christmas 1973 that has stayed with me ever since. That autumn I’d started at grammar school, and within a few weeks had been conscripted into the choir. Practise sessions took place on Monday lunchtimes, and from late September onwards, we began preparing for that year’s carol concert. Most of the programme consisted of the usual standards, but there was one song that caught my ear with its radical modality. ‘Wassail!’ (not to be confused with the traditional ‘Wassail Carol’) was almost brand new, having been published as recently as 1966. It was written by Welsh composer William Mathias, a former child prodigy who had been composing since the age of five. As soon as our music teacher, ‘Doc’ Terry began to block it out on the piano, I realised this was something a bit different. After a rousing choral introduction, the piano began to pick out an intriguing six-note phrase in the Lydian mode. Lydian mode has a flattened fifth, which lends it a slightly sour but interesting quality, the kind of musical trick one occasionally hears in pop songs. As a song for a school choir to learn, it was a challenge, and we devoted more time to it than anything else on the programme. We would go from those choir practises down to the games field (Monday afternoons meant rugby), with that song ringing in our ears – well, mine at any rate. Its modal melody became part of the zeitgeist of that first Michaelmas term at the grammar school. Came Christmas, we gave the concert. And I never heard the song again. Yet it stuck in my mind.</p><p style="line-height: 24px; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;">Someone, surely, must have made a recording of it? I’d neglected to note the name of the composer from the score, so I had nowhere to start looking. Nearly two decades later, I came across the sheet music in the local library and his identity was finally known to me. I began to search through collections of choral works for Christmas – plenty of choirs had recorded the familiar Wassail Carol but none had performed William Mathias’ radical modern composition. I even found album collections of Mathias’ choral works, but as ‘Wassail’ was a short, standalone piece of around two minutes’ duration, it had been overlooked. Every Christmas, I would scour the Radio Three listings in case anyone was planning to give a rendition. I was determined to hear it again.</p><p style="line-height: 24px; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;">In the end, it took me nearly thirty years to track down a recording of that carol. It had been included in a collection from the choir of Kings College, Cambridge. The original release was out of print, but it could be bought as a download from Amazon. Today, it can even be found on YouTube and Spotify. And if my tale has intrigued you, it can be heard here: </p><p style="line-height: 24px; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;"><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8KSDI6oc9wo">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8KSDI6oc9wo</a><br /></p><p style="line-height: 24px; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;">From modernist choral music to glam rock via The Beatles is quite a musical journey: and it all took place in December 1973.</p><p style="line-height: 24px; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;"><br /></p>Mart Chttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04883883503677556135noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6507883749037788533.post-31778450338848668052023-12-20T08:01:00.000-08:002023-12-20T08:01:22.402-08:00Decades of Christmas Past: 1963<p> </p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhR6PyhypBgcpdJ_H9EgX2wUwbjmnYOb1Sf_OyzYKhXwc5J_-yU66K1FKcaA61atLcLaokJVa7tZFT5yKYXGgO2Nmn52HZSwHnECMPvxUDu_10iLKzovC2aR2T8G6OUwNN56tqGj_Y68iLxA-0f2KoQxYI7qerHxwdJz7CAuWFQ64pdmOGc3rpqDo-FH3o/s1174/Screenshot%202023-11-15%20at%2012.29.41.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1174" data-original-width="888" height="640" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhR6PyhypBgcpdJ_H9EgX2wUwbjmnYOb1Sf_OyzYKhXwc5J_-yU66K1FKcaA61atLcLaokJVa7tZFT5yKYXGgO2Nmn52HZSwHnECMPvxUDu_10iLKzovC2aR2T8G6OUwNN56tqGj_Y68iLxA-0f2KoQxYI7qerHxwdJz7CAuWFQ64pdmOGc3rpqDo-FH3o/w484-h640/Screenshot%202023-11-15%20at%2012.29.41.png" width="484" /></a></div><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br /></div><p></p><p>Over the next few posts, I’m going to be revisiting festivities from decades past. Beginning sixty years ago...</p><p align="left" style="line-height: 24px; margin-bottom: 0cm;">Do I remember Christmas 1963? Not with any degree of clarity. Aside from fragmentary glimpses, my memories of childhood don’t begin until around 1964. What I do know with reasonable certainty is that my big present of Christmas 1963 was a Triumph Herald pedal car, made by Tri-ang. It was unusual for toy manufacturers to make pedal cars of actual production models, so the fact that they’d chosen to make a child-size version of the selfsame model driven by our dad was felicitous to say the least. I can be seen pedalling it around the back garden in a cine film taken the following summer, which is how I can date the toy’s arrival to Christmas ‘63. Our dad always told the story of how, shortly before Christmas and aged just two and a half, I casually asked one day why there was a Triumph Herald on top of my parents’ wardrobe. I’d been in their bedroom for some reason and, glancing upward, had seen the end of the cardboard carton – curiously, and most likely on account of our dad’s recollection, I can still just about picture that moment. Had I actually read the name Triumph Herald? More likely, there would have been a line drawing of the toy on the side of the box. Either way, I’d caught out Santa – but it didn’t stop me from believing in him.</p><p align="left" style="line-height: 24px; margin-bottom: 0cm;"><br /></p><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgJl9Ig7tN1b6TjuWbIm8VHzlTaeSADol8hSiPAhPbHLGyZ9ltHWg2TjtYcpNgkttZrX1aBbnEU7np8IKpv8S9gc5_LpMmsyxhExqVKaS6DOLbvPdCeNQzAS-KZ4tv3cYF5ThbYDSzWLTGEk_EQSuOZoMnqv2OC83dh6FXjp5FDqBTLUW3GIJE91557mNY/s1175/Screenshot%202023-11-14%20at%2012.27.37.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="993" data-original-width="1175" height="540" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgJl9Ig7tN1b6TjuWbIm8VHzlTaeSADol8hSiPAhPbHLGyZ9ltHWg2TjtYcpNgkttZrX1aBbnEU7np8IKpv8S9gc5_LpMmsyxhExqVKaS6DOLbvPdCeNQzAS-KZ4tv3cYF5ThbYDSzWLTGEk_EQSuOZoMnqv2OC83dh6FXjp5FDqBTLUW3GIJE91557mNY/w640-h540/Screenshot%202023-11-14%20at%2012.27.37.png" width="640" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">That Triumph pedal car, as seen in the summer of 1964</td></tr></tbody></table><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br /></div><p style="line-height: 24px; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;">The ‘real’ father Christmas was to be found not at the North Pole, but in Lewis’s department store in Birmingham. His grotto contained a posting box for letters to Santa: what more proof did one require? 1963 was very likely the first year in which we made our pilgrimage to Lewis’, to find ourselves in a queue winding up the stairwell to the 5<sup>th</sup> or 6<sup>th</sup> floor where the grotto was located. Lewis’s Santa was always more convincing than others. Maybe the beard was real? He certainly had the voice off to a tee – think of James Hayter’s voice-over in the classic ‘Mr. Kipling’ cake commercials and you’ve got it. He sounded as if his cheeks were stuffed with cotton wool, which they very likely were. The grotto was always attractively done out with festive tableaux, of which I can remember next to nothing: these scenic distractions provided something to stare at while we each waited for our audience with Father Christmas. Aside from Santa himself, Lewis’s – in line with other Selfridges’ stores – employed a seasonal ‘minder’ to preside over the grotto and ensure good behaviour on the part of the young visitors. His name was ‘Uncle Holly’, and he was done up in hunting green and a white curly wig and sideburns, giving him the appearance of a kind of festive John Bull, although as a child I thought he looked like Hughie Green. Uncle Holly handed out badges to well-behaved children, who automatically became members of the ‘Uncle Holly Circle’.</p><p style="line-height: 24px; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;"><br /></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgAh-HUuW-ehsMohmegK4kTcnAn-UjvT8rtrFfiGz8e3cwq67UO1RdcM-sbRv-4Z7QVHd525A7xhzCa27K3y3Cw0c0kgNKB5ih4hpUHO-shgqt3Qo6dv4kF3bfAjMoZNCrCiGwuPMp0RBTuiS5DIeQOTN-sK-JcAzUoG6oYEHfTkgchRDcWGe5Vdovh0GA/s889/IMG_20231220_0001.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="826" data-original-width="889" height="297" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgAh-HUuW-ehsMohmegK4kTcnAn-UjvT8rtrFfiGz8e3cwq67UO1RdcM-sbRv-4Z7QVHd525A7xhzCa27K3y3Cw0c0kgNKB5ih4hpUHO-shgqt3Qo6dv4kF3bfAjMoZNCrCiGwuPMp0RBTuiS5DIeQOTN-sK-JcAzUoG6oYEHfTkgchRDcWGe5Vdovh0GA/s320/IMG_20231220_0001.jpg" width="320" /></a></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br /></div><p align="left" style="line-height: 24px; margin-bottom: 0cm;">Having whispered in Santa’s ear what they wanted for Christmas, each child was allowed a pick from his bran tubs – one for boys, one for girls. The presents were usually a simple boxed game, or plastic toy. Once, memorably, I was given a girl’s present by Santa. This was one of the ‘imposter’ Santas one found in other stores, in this case the long-vanished Co-Op department store in Lichfield. Opening my gift, I found it to be a small plastic kewpie-style doll sitting in a pink bathtub. I can still see it as clear as day: the toy came in a thin cardboard container, with a cellophane window. Our dad found this a source of great hilarity, and the incident of the ‘dolly in the bath’ was often referred to in later years.</p><p align="left" style="line-height: 24px; margin-bottom: 0cm;">Aside from the pedal Trumph Herald, I’m not sure what other presents arrived at Christmas 1963. Our dad, who earned a modest income from his clerical job at GEC, supplemented his earnings by playing drums in dance bands several nights a week – activities which he referred to as ‘earning pennies for toys.’A sizeable chunk of this supplementary income went on providing Christmas presents for my brother and myself, and his generosity knew no bounds. There were certainly plenty of other toys under the tree on that Christmas Day of sixty years ago, but the only items I can identify for certain were a pair of that year’s annuals, some of the first I ever owned.</p><p align="left" style="line-height: 24px; margin-bottom: 0cm;"><i>Fireball XL5 Annual</i> was a gift from my grandparents, who would go on to buy me all four editions as a kind of Christmas ritual. This particular volume was certainly well-loved. Within a year or so, its board covers had ‘done a Fireball Junior’ and become detached from the main body of the book, along with the last twelve pages. It remained in this state for years, until I decided to draw the missing pages myself, and stick them back in with sellotape. Today, one could find a copy in seconds on ebay. That annual became as important to me as the TV series itself, if not more so. Fireball was scarcely off the screen during 1963 and 64, but it was only on once a week, while the annual could be enjoyed at any time – including in the bath, which probably took care of those covers!</p><p align="left" style="line-height: 24px; margin-bottom: 0cm;">The other annual I received that year fared much better than Fireball, and was clearly less of a favourite. Indeed, it survives intact to this day, with only some minor damage to the spine to show for its age. Coincidentally or not, the book came from the same publisher as the Fireball annual, W.M. Collins and son, and was an example of their ‘Children’s Annual’. Printed on heavy pulp boards, in the same line and spot colour technique employed in the Fireball volume, this was a collection of mostly text stories, varying between realistic adventure and fairytale whimsy, the kind of book intended to be read aloud (which probably accounts for how it survived in such good condition). All the contributors to this volume were credited in the frontispiece, a rarity in children’s annuals, but none of the names is familiar. Illustrations were in a variety of styles, some imitative of the likes of Arthur Rackham, whilst others had a more contemporary feel. I found some of the drawings a bit unpleasant, and would refrain from looking at them. My personal favourite story, and one which I asked for time and again was called ‘Lost in the Snow’, a heart-warming tale of a little girl who gets lost in a snowstorm on ‘the downs’ while taking lunch to her father, the farmer. The story is credited to E.M. Langford, whilst the line and tone illustrations – in a kind of early 60s knitting pattern style – came from one H.C. Gaffron. The name is unfamiliar, but Google reveals him to have been Horace Gaffron, a reasonably prolific, though obscure illustrator active in the children’s book field at this time.</p><p align="left" style="line-height: 24px; margin-bottom: 0cm;">As to the actual activities of Christmas Day 1963, I’m sure they must have been in line with what we did on subsequent years. Our grandparents would have come for Christmas dinner and tea, and no doubt the television would have been turned on at some point. I was aware of television from a very young age, but a glance at the programme schedules for Christmas 1963 rings no bells. ITV’s programmes began at 10.35 with <i>The Christmas Tree</i>, a party involving Pussy Cat Willum and friends. Christmas Morning Service was followed by the story of the nativity and a half-hour film looking at some of the people who have to work on Christmas Day. Following the news at 1pm, a pre-<i>Crossroads</i> Noele Gordon was the hostess of <i>Christmas Box</i>, an hour-long entertainment. Cliff Richard and the Shadows were top of the bill at 2pm with <i>Christmas Swingtime</i>, which led viewers nicely into the Queen’s message to the commonwealth, at its traditional time of 3pm. The rest of the afternoon was devoted to a movie, <i>The Charge of the Light Brigade </i>(1936). By teatime, a near normal weekday schedule had resumed, with Desmond Morris presenting<i> Zoo Time</i> at 4.50, followed by an episode of <i>William Tell</i>. At 5.45 came a festive edition of the 1960s equivalent of <i>Give Us a Clue</i> – <i>Don’t Say a Word</i> – followed by another news summary at 6.10. A ten-minute address from the Archbishop of Canterbury was followed by <i>Carols, Coffee and Crackers</i>, described as a ‘light-hearted carol sing-song… from the Youth Club of Yardley Parish Church, Birmingham’. Clearly, this one was for Midland viewers only. Regular weekday programmes resumed at 7pm with the quiz <i>Take a Letter</i>, followed at 7.30 by <i>Coronation Street</i> (this being a Wednesday). 8pm brought <i>Christmas Startime</i>, a variety showcase featuring the likes of Bruce Forsyth, David Nixon, Bernard Braden and Barbara Kelly, to say nothing of Mr. Acker Bilk. The news at 8.55 was followed by a reimagining of Charles Dickens’ Pickwick Papers, starring Arthur Lowe. The decidedly un-festive <i>University Challenge</i> followed at 10.40, then at 11.10, a compilation of regional entertainment filled the forty-odd minutes left until the Epilogue and Closedown.</p><p align="left" style="line-height: 24px; margin-bottom: 0cm;">Over on BBC Television, the day’s programmes began in Welsh, before the Queen’s Christmas Message (curiously in sound only) at 9.30. The rest of the day’s programmes included an obligatory visit to a children’s hospital ward, in the company of Frankie Howerd. Tittered they not, I have no doubt. The afternoon was taken up by an hour-long profile of the still living Walt Disney, and a visit to Billy Smart’s Circus. BBC’s film choice wasn’t quite as venerable as ITV’s – <i>Abbott and Costello Meet Captain Kidd</i> was a mere ten years old. Sooty and Sweep invited viewers to their Christmas Party at 5.15, then the evening news was followed by a charity appeal by the Mills family – John, Mary, Juliet, Hayley and Jonathan. It being Christmas Day, viewers weren’t going to escape without a panto, which arrived in the shape of <i>Dick Whittington</i>, starring Terry Scott, Hugh Lloyd and Reg Varney. At 7.15, we had a festive edition of <i>Z Cars</i>, followed by the traditional <i>Christmas Night With the Stars</i> compilation. Curiously, the contents included a segment of <i>Juke Box Jury</i>, and even a visit to Dock Green. Charlie Chaplin’s <i>The Gold Rush </i>followed at 9.25, then after a five-minute news summary, a programme of classical music rounded off the day.</p><p align="left" style="line-height: 24px; margin-bottom: 0cm;">Did I see any of these entertainments? I’m sure the television would have been turned on by the evening, if not in time for the Queen’s speech, but I was probably too engrossed with new toys to pay any attention.</p><p align="left" style="line-height: 24px; margin-bottom: 0cm;">A popular misconception – primarily held by people too young to know better – is that Christmases of the past were often snowy. So did we have snow for Christmas 1963? The Met Office Monthly report summarises the situation: ‘On the evening of the 24<sup>th</sup> a depression to the west of Ireland deepened rapidly as it moved north, and associated fronts brought rain to most districts that night and for much of Christmas Day.’</p><p align="left" style="line-height: 24px; margin-bottom: 0cm;">As Greg Lake would put it in his hit single of twelve years later, ‘it just kept on raining.’</p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br /></div><br /><p align="left" style="line-height: 24px; margin-bottom: 0cm;"><br /></p>Mart Chttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04883883503677556135noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6507883749037788533.post-89341534962344116742023-12-19T07:52:00.000-08:002023-12-19T07:52:50.834-08:00Annuals Revisited – End of an Era<p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiyDegaI_Quyo6KP_qRCODlw5qMJw6ysYj1f56emM_Op8BovxIvEqfGq3mL1bOcGLg8bmZisKDwVi0t_Tno0ZcoxwL_s-BCUnxF_7Y4kSijDqb-SP5UYvlFUkxAda6YFpzQdFqw5wi48pghg2fzWk1tnJl-me3wTPdFo7O7X0bOoLT4IHgTVYt1di-6wDI/s4032/IMG_5255.jpeg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="4032" data-original-width="3024" height="640" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiyDegaI_Quyo6KP_qRCODlw5qMJw6ysYj1f56emM_Op8BovxIvEqfGq3mL1bOcGLg8bmZisKDwVi0t_Tno0ZcoxwL_s-BCUnxF_7Y4kSijDqb-SP5UYvlFUkxAda6YFpzQdFqw5wi48pghg2fzWk1tnJl-me3wTPdFo7O7X0bOoLT4IHgTVYt1di-6wDI/w480-h640/IMG_5255.jpeg" width="480" /></a></div><p></p><div><br /></div><div><p style="line-height: 24px; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;">A glance in any bookstore around Christmas time will reveal that Annuals continue to be a festive tradition, with brightly-coloured tomes reflecting the pop cultural obsessions of today’s young generation. Of the titles we had back in the 70s, only a handful remain – <i>Dandy</i> and <i>Beano</i> will both celebrate their centenaries in around fifteen years, and both annuals remain in print even if only one of them is still an actual comic. Rupert is still going, and still in the same yellow check trousers, but there’s not much else out there that a comics or TV fan of the 70s would recognise. <i>Guin</i><i>n</i><i>ess World Records</i> still appears year on year – we got our one and only copy back in 1972 – whilst <i>Ripley’s Believe it Or Not</i> continues to log barely believable facts and figures in a series that Wikipedia reckons started in 2005. Now, I hate to disagree, but I have a copy cover-dated 1974, which was given to my brother at Christmas fifty years ago. It’s a World Distributors effort, compiled from reprints of the American <i>Believe It or Not</i> comic book. Other offerings for 2024 include <i>Pokemon</i> (still popular after all this time?), <i>Peppa Pig</i>, <i>Thomas the Tank Engine</i>, <i>Minecraft</i> (*sigh*) and a bunch of other kids’ TV tie-ins (presumably) that I’ve never heard of.</p><p align="left" style="line-height: 24px; margin-bottom: 0cm;"><br /></p><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj4dR9n2VIhaMKqmdaqY6y6PfEYdWXRRJGYyBSGcgLpkCbbSPZ5IsBWFdIG4wiDrw0jGlC8RjkSUBUEZQIZfoouf9iOaGEyQzVUiNLylJkn-esMraW6CZzaJRGyIzQu5YGUj-miQ5zHtkqLtDzSe3rsD0T9gmCq8yU6D5tSP68Tjadhf51EcUPVLL4YVYA/s755/Screenshot%202023-12-19%20at%2014.32.49.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="505" data-original-width="755" height="428" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj4dR9n2VIhaMKqmdaqY6y6PfEYdWXRRJGYyBSGcgLpkCbbSPZ5IsBWFdIG4wiDrw0jGlC8RjkSUBUEZQIZfoouf9iOaGEyQzVUiNLylJkn-esMraW6CZzaJRGyIzQu5YGUj-miQ5zHtkqLtDzSe3rsD0T9gmCq8yU6D5tSP68Tjadhf51EcUPVLL4YVYA/w640-h428/Screenshot%202023-12-19%20at%2014.32.49.png" width="640" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">A design car crash: some of the garishly-coloured covers of this year's annuals.</td></tr></tbody></table><br /><p style="line-height: 24px; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;">In an era when children’s entertainment is dominated by social media, I find it rather reassuring (© 1977 Ned Sherrin) to see such publications piled up in Smiths, even if many of them look like they were put together by a team of colour blind AI chimpanzees...</p><p style="line-height: 24px; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;">A modern Beano book with its glossy four colour interior is a very different animal from the more austere versions I remember from the 1970s, and I’m not sure that’s necessarily a good thing (although I can’t see today’s kids going a bundle on the old two-colour print jobs). In common with most modern publications, today’s annuals are garish in appearance, with covers that are cluttered, over-coloured and over-designed. The golden turkey for worst offender this year must go to the <i>Match of the Day Annual</i>, whose cover is the worst piece of design I have ever seen on a professional publication. It literally looks as if the designer has dropped all the photo cut-outs and typographic elements he needs into a page template and then just left them where they landed. To think of someone getting paid to do hack work like this while I remain unemployed is galling to say the least: not that I’d go a bundle on designing any kind of football publication. Even the once reliable Rupert is a car crash of colour with its cheap computer rendering. Compared to the subtly toned, hand-painted covers that once graced the Rupert books, this is almost a travesty. Clearly, budget is king and no one will pay for ‘real world’ artwork any more. I wonder if any comic artist still owns a box of paints? Still, if it sells, it sells, so who am I to argue. What would today's kids make of the annuals I had as a child? Not much, I'll wager.</p><p style="line-height: 24px; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;">For me, it is now more than twenty years since I last bought an annual – 2002 saw both <i>Captain Scarlet </i>and <i>Thunderbirds</i> back in print from Carlton, tied in to their recent revival on BBC television. Design-wise, they didn’t have a lot going for them: generic ‘high tech’ Photoshop covers, and fonts that just screamed ‘early 21<sup>st</sup> century’. The only reason I bought them was for the photo-strips they contained, adapted from TV episodes. In an era before frame grabs were easily obtainable, this was a good opportunity to study the characters and hardware. Feature items borrowed material from the 1960s annuals to provide biographies of the characters. At sixty A4 pages each, they were somewhat lightweight compared to the annuals of the 60s, but they were in colour throughout and I’m sure the youngsters of 2001 were more than happy with them. One thing decidedly lacking from these publications is nostalgic value: ignoring the dated Photoshop work and typography, they look barely any different from this year’s crop and could sit alongside them in any bookshop without raising an eyebrow. You couldn’t say that of 1963’s <i>Fireball XL5 Annual</i>, which looks properly of its time.</p><p style="line-height: 24px; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;"></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgUGV7E1pL-ii7pH32pFXO8yzxD_zvZvE4zfHWwqp0BfSciLwxSGh1lT_6t_jCPhmmy2YRxxAtzrdRnqgtFBsMD6gs2sXCrrpg21cxo6eI-exezHh9F5WfdQC_iekm7cjk8z_7Y4mDvLd-JDwLv7bu2DEMaQ3Ko3hwczXFsp2Z-IRDwYVD1hHF29FUvxjM/s1000/91pjDzeedmL._AC_UF1000,1000_QL80_.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1000" data-original-width="759" height="200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgUGV7E1pL-ii7pH32pFXO8yzxD_zvZvE4zfHWwqp0BfSciLwxSGh1lT_6t_jCPhmmy2YRxxAtzrdRnqgtFBsMD6gs2sXCrrpg21cxo6eI-exezHh9F5WfdQC_iekm7cjk8z_7Y4mDvLd-JDwLv7bu2DEMaQ3Ko3hwczXFsp2Z-IRDwYVD1hHF29FUvxjM/w152-h200/91pjDzeedmL._AC_UF1000,1000_QL80_.jpg" width="152" /></a></div><br /><div style="text-align: justify;">At the time, these were my first annual purchases in around twenty years. Back in 1983 or 84, I went out and bought myself the first <i>Terrahawks Annual</i>, a World Distributors effort that ticked all the publisher’s usual boxes: heavy on splurgily-painted text stories and artworked from the cheapest possible sources. I no longer own this copy (I detest <i>Terrahawks</i>), but online images reveal the artwork from this and its second incarnation to have been either drearily naive or undisciplined and garish. The programme clearly got the treatment it deserved. This was the very last World Distrubutors annual that I owned. The company would be defunct within a decade, spelling the end of a publishing phenomenon that went all the way back to the early 1950s.</div><p></p><p style="line-height: 24px; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;">Rather better were the efforts of Howard & Wyndham whose Brown Watson imprint was responsible for a late flowering of TV crime tie-in annuals during the late 70s. Beginning in 1977 with <i>The Sweeney</i> and<i> The New Avengers</i>, the annuals ran for only a year or two. The company’s history is hard to make out: Howard & Wyndham was a theatre-owning and management company that later owned shares in Independent Television, which might explain the publishing tie-ins. However, the company closed eight years before the first of these annuals appeared in bookshops. Brown Watson, meanwhile, continues as a children’s book imprint, based in Leicester, but with a history going back to only 1980.</p><p style="line-height: 24px; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;">1977’s first <i>Sweeney Annual</i> was arguably the best of these publications, featuring some terrific comic strip art from Brian Lewis – his style was instantly familiar to me from the work he’d done on the <i>Countdown</i> comic – alongside a few photo-illustrated text stories and features. It wouldn’t surprise me if the designer had worked on <i>Look-in</i> or even the <i>Blue Peter</i> books, as the page layouts are strong and reminiscent of those titles. The second year’s effort saw the standards slip somewhat, with fewer photographs and, for my money, inferior artwork. Brian Lewis was otherwise occupied illustrating that year’s<i> Van Der Valk Annual</i>, turning in some excellent colour pages.</p><p style="line-height: 24px; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;">The two <i>New Avengers Annual</i>s followed a similar format, with the second including two very recognisable David Lloyd strips, adapted from TV episodes. One thing that all of these Brown Watson titles had in their favour was fidelity to the on-screen graphic look of the various series, and the covers were all very well done, within the limitations of contemporary print technology.</p><p style="line-height: 24px; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;">1978 really was my last year of having annuals bought for me at Christmas, and alongside these creditable publications we find, sadly, the very worst of all the examples I’ve considered in the course of these articles. <i>Return of the Saint Annual</i>, hailing from Knutsford-based publishing house Stafford Pemberton, arrived in the same year as the series itself. The look of this all-colour publication was reminiscent of the Century 21 storybooks of a decade earlier. The only artist I can identify is Malcolm Stokes, who had worked on City Magazines’ annuals and <i>Countdown</i> comic. He was definitely <i>not</i> responsible for the comic strips, which were scrappily drawn and amateurishly lettered. Photographs were in short supply, and rendered quite badly: the colour printing wasn’t helped by the use of inferior paper that soaked up the ink and made for a dull appearance. I remember being very disappointed with this annual when I got it. Okay, it scored points for using the correct TV title sequence logo, but the cover was a design exercise in how not to do it. It's a shame to go out on a low note, but as we've seen, the golden age of annuals was well and truly over. By now, classics like the Rupert books of the 1930s were being faithfully reprinted using techniques and materials that captured the essence of such vintage items. But no one was seriously going to do that for a modern title aimed at a modern audience.</p><p style="line-height: 24px; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;">One wonders how long annuals will continue as an end of year tradition. They may be barely recognisable from the thoughfully-crafted publications of my youth, but at least they're still there: and in a world where online is increasingly the name of the game, that should be some small cause for celebration. Just don't get me that Match of the Day annual for Christmas, okay?</p><p style="line-height: 24px; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;"><br /></p><p style="line-height: 24px; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;"><br /></p><p style="line-height: 24px; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;"><br /></p><p style="line-height: 24px; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;"><br /></p></div>Mart Chttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04883883503677556135noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6507883749037788533.post-90563698058973130852023-12-17T11:12:00.000-08:002023-12-17T11:17:41.079-08:00Annuals Revisited – The 1970s<p> </p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjy-QvCjFlerZ1xX-rpD96HUBq8rM8gdc9QGUlm56TMPwEeF2zDvRuhWzfRb5gxxw_IxB92lsueYuEG4jHv8Lb7jPapC9rWeMbk_ngSZwu_W-HBJq_3DPC6K0ihf36a7GZmDny_BurDdItZYtDpr21SPSHLXshWhzHLCxxT2BHLqsgR_PxbWn-efQpHnp8/s3384/IMG_5254.jpeg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="2927" data-original-width="3384" height="554" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjy-QvCjFlerZ1xX-rpD96HUBq8rM8gdc9QGUlm56TMPwEeF2zDvRuhWzfRb5gxxw_IxB92lsueYuEG4jHv8Lb7jPapC9rWeMbk_ngSZwu_W-HBJq_3DPC6K0ihf36a7GZmDny_BurDdItZYtDpr21SPSHLXshWhzHLCxxT2BHLqsgR_PxbWn-efQpHnp8/w640-h554/IMG_5254.jpeg" width="640" /></a></div><p></p><p><br /></p><p align="left" style="line-height: 24px; margin-bottom: 0cm;">And thus to the 1970s, a decade in which TV spin-offs from World Distributors enjoyed a near monopoly over the festive annual market. D.C. Thompson continued to keep the Dundee flag flying with its regular publications, of which we received the <i>Beano</i>, <i>Dandy</i>, <i>Beezer</i> and <i>Topper</i> at various times over the next few years. Both my brother and myself had outgrown nursery papers like <i>Teddy Bear</i> and <i>Pippin</i>, and the yearly crop of annuals began to feature more grown-up fare. By 1975 I was no longer content to wait until Christmas and would make sure of getting a copy of something like the <i>Space:1999 Annual</i> as soon as it appeared. In this case, my friend’s mum ordered a couple of copies from a catalogue for us.</p><p align="left" style="line-height: 24px; margin-bottom: 0cm;"><span style="color: red;"><b>1970</b></span></p><p align="left" style="line-height: 24px; margin-bottom: 0cm;"><i><span style="color: red;">UFO Annual</span> – </i>Polystyle, publishers of <i>TV Comic</i> certainly hit the ground running with this sumptuously illustrated book that reached the shelves in time for Christmas, a mere three months after UFO had made its TV debut. The absence of comic strips in any annual is always a clear indication of a short lead time, and the reliance on photos illustrating text stories and features meant that this would have been a comparatively easy item to produce. For me, the exclusive use of photos gave this annual an edge over the typical World Distributors efforts, which relied far too heavily on artwork that often looked rushed. The <i>UFO Annual</i> was clearly designed by someone who’d studied the series and its iconography: the Eurostile font employed on the main titles is used throughout. Purists might bemoan the absence of comic strips, but for me, their absence adds quality – there being no rubbishy artwork to spoil the clean page layouts. Of all the Gerry Anderson tie-in annuals, <i>UFO</i> is up there with the best of them.</p><p align="left" style="line-height: 24px; margin-bottom: 0cm;"><i><span style="color: red;">The Beano Book/ The Beezer Book</span> – </i>Strange as it may sound, these were the first of the classic D.C. Thompson annuals to arrive in our house, and they owed their appearance to a summer holiday ferry trip to the Republic of Ireland when my brother and myself had been bought copies of the <i>Beano</i> and <i>Beezer</i> to keep us entertained on the voyage. Of incidental interest is the fact that the copies for sale on the ferry were several weeks out of synch with what you’d have found in any newsagent. After the holiday, we started getting both comics on a regular basis, so the year’s annuals seemed like a safe bet. I still think Colonel Blink is the single funniest creation ever to emerge from D.C. Thompson, but it’s probably not okay any more to use myopia as a source of humour. Oddly, we see a distinct difference in production values between these two sibling annuals – The <i>Beezer</i> had a lower page count, but was printed in colour throughout (likewise the <i>Topper</i>), whilst the <i>Beano</i> book was longer, but printed in black line with a variety of spot colours, a format also adopted by the <i>Dandy</i>.</p><p align="left" style="line-height: 24px; margin-bottom: 0cm;"><i><span style="color: red;">TV21 Annual</span> – </i>After the bumper crop of <i>TV21</i> spin-off annuals that had taken pride of place over the last three years, 1970 saw the wheels come off the operation. <i>TV21</i> had been thoughtlessly amalgamated with <i>Joe 90</i> the previous year, losing most of the remaining Gerry Anderson strips in the process. Unbelievably, <i>Tarzan</i> and <i>The Saint</i>, both of them renegades from <i>TV Tornado</i> following its merger into <i>TV21</i>, were still on the roster for this year’s annual. But the golden turkey here was <i>Land of the Giants</i>, a survivor from the <i>Joe 90 </i>comic, whose author had clearly seen the series but never read a single piece of promotional literature, for he insisted on referring to the little people’s spaceship as the ‘Spendthrift’ (it was really the ‘Spindrift’). A clear case of Chinese whispers, I think. If one had to sum up this annual in a single word, I think ‘rubbish’ would suffice.</p><p align="left" style="line-height: 24px; margin-bottom: 0cm;"><i><span style="color: red;">Thunderbirds Annual</span> </i>– A curiosity, this. For, despite the title, the contents look very much like what we might have expected from this year’s <i>TV21 Annual – </i>or perhaps last year's.The featured series was to be found in just four stories and features, whilst the remaineder of the contents comprised titles from the 1969 <i>TV21</i> weekly – <i>Department S, Captain Scarlet</i>, <i>Secret Agent 21</i> and <i>Zero-X – </i>plus <i>Joe 90</i>. It certainly did not reflect the state of TV21 circa 1970. Pages were printed in the customary ‘cheap colour overlay’ process familiar from the last few years’ annuals from City Magazines, alongside red and green duotones. Artwork was of the very cheapest: functional journeyman stuff with neither the commitment nor flair of the genre’s greatest exponents.</p><p align="left" style="line-height: 24px; margin-bottom: 0cm;"><i><span style="color: red;">TV Comic Annual </span>– </i>The last edition to find its way into our house had arrived at Christmas 1965, but 1970 would be the first of several years in which either myself or my brother was given this annual at Christmas. Of the 1966 strip line-up, <i>TV Terrors</i> and <i>Mighty Moth</i> were still present and correct, alongside <i>Dr. Who</i> and <i>Popeye</i>, although the rest of the contents had been updated to keep in line with what was currently popular on the box. To say that the two <i>Dr. Who </i>strips were not quite like the TV series is something of an understatement: both the Doctor and the Brigadier were present, but beyond that, continuity went out of the window. One strip saw the Doctor experimenting with levitation and thus capturing a fleeing spy whilst the other saw him using his trusty recorder (shurely shome mishtake? - Ed) to communicate with some dolphins.</p><p align="left" style="line-height: 24px; margin-bottom: 0cm;"><i><span style="color: red;"></span></i></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><i><span style="color: red;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiVVKJCLZwAzeJYaTU0WF-UALhXMWG4bEk-BHHcPhTQNTMPLEyj4uIuN5Dt37-i73vI5VP5J23nMGPx4QreodUOLxEkduKtKLd6gEFXDjk3sGc_T4z-qOooteF_0BPvSWgNJgxDxxgdua9i_1U1gL6zTRW4p2CQwhJ4Kvy1yntu9xuZKQXlqJs6Mjz6cWw/s1600/s-l1600-11.jpg" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1600" data-original-width="1200" height="200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiVVKJCLZwAzeJYaTU0WF-UALhXMWG4bEk-BHHcPhTQNTMPLEyj4uIuN5Dt37-i73vI5VP5J23nMGPx4QreodUOLxEkduKtKLd6gEFXDjk3sGc_T4z-qOooteF_0BPvSWgNJgxDxxgdua9i_1U1gL6zTRW4p2CQwhJ4Kvy1yntu9xuZKQXlqJs6Mjz6cWw/w150-h200/s-l1600-11.jpg" width="150" /></a></span></i></div><i><span style="color: red;"><br />Star Trek</span></i> – I would continue to receive these <i>Star Trek Annual</i>s as a Christmas tradition right the way through to 1975, and they have all survived in mint condition. I was and still am a fan of the original series, but I never thought much of its comic strip incarnations, and publishers World Distributors relied on US comic book content for their <i>Star Trek </i><i>a</i>nnuals for as long as the title remained in publication. As a footnote, I didn’t mind <i>TV21</i>’s take on the series: by 1970, Mike Noble’s strip was the only decent thing left in the comic, although he clearly did not possess a colour television set as he insisted on depicting Captain Kirk in a red shirt...<p></p><p align="left" style="line-height: 24px; margin-bottom: 0cm;"><br /></p><p align="left" style="line-height: 24px; margin-bottom: 0cm;"><span style="color: red;"><b>1971</b></span></p><p align="left" style="line-height: 24px; margin-bottom: 0cm;"><span style="color: red;"><i>Look-</i><i>i</i><i>n Annual/ </i></span><i><span style="color: red;">Countdown Annual</span> – </i>1971 wasn’t a bad year for comic launches, with the two best offerings arriving hot on each others’ heels early in the year. The early start meant there was ample time to have an annual ready in time for the Christmas market, and both <i>Look-In</i> and <i>Countdown</i> weighed in with a couple of quite respectable efforts. Of the two, <i>Look-In</i> felt somewhat superior, with a classic laminated board cover, although the pages were falling out from day one. <i>Countdown</i> found room for artwork from comic contributors John M Burns, John Cooper and Jon Davis – although I have to confess I have never liked the work of the latter pair. Former <i>Dan Dare</i> assistant Don Harley turned in a fine if rather routine take on <i>Thunderbirds</i>, distinguished by some excellent likenesses of the characters. The strip, <i>Terror at Toreba </i>featured a kind of giant roast chicken from space crash landing on a Pacific island. Elsewhere, the annual followed the comic’s format with features about space travel and UFOs, the latter including some highly dubious photographs...</p><p align="left" style="line-height: 24px; margin-bottom: 0cm;"><i><span style="color: red;"></span></i></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><i><span style="color: red;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgpwT3rFj18lvHNu-MCvbRT45SysnhP9GKqKc6buyRQylHTbStHREpXLu2hbwMxFBlMD80W8wJyU70gIr4h71DlvmAlfvpX03Ma94cXXSSp1QuD1L9Ugj3fxIQfeanG-EbK0HjUm-E6SQM7B2VD_O7uljhRllS3cMqkmWY51yKoW7WwF0hPMQINptOjgT8/s2836/IMG_5237.jpeg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="2836" data-original-width="2038" height="200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgpwT3rFj18lvHNu-MCvbRT45SysnhP9GKqKc6buyRQylHTbStHREpXLu2hbwMxFBlMD80W8wJyU70gIr4h71DlvmAlfvpX03Ma94cXXSSp1QuD1L9Ugj3fxIQfeanG-EbK0HjUm-E6SQM7B2VD_O7uljhRllS3cMqkmWY51yKoW7WwF0hPMQINptOjgT8/w144-h200/IMG_5237.jpeg" width="144" /></a></span></i></div><i><span style="color: red;"><br />Barrier Reef Annual</span> – </i>Yet another World Distributors TV tie-in, and one that you can’t give away today on ebay. Try finding anyone who remembers the series! I watched it and had this annual bought for me this Christmas, but I doubt I’ve ever given it more than a cursory glance. The series never had much of an impact, and one wonders why World even bothered with an annual, unless the title came as part of a BBC licensing package deal. I’d have preferred an <i>Ace of Wands</i> annual myself, but sadly no such publication ever appeared. Incidentally, I can still hum the ‘feem toon’ from <i>Barrier Reef</i>, if anyone’s interested? Thought not...<p></p><p align="left" style="line-height: 24px; margin-bottom: 0cm;"><i><span style="color: red;"></span></i></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><i><span style="color: red;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhO9YToXT3htMlYCxpGU8ZV9rz8sTWPjyR6HfYRuHzPv520PBSatFnkyLs41SDeBaY96KD7OrEnOWzV0ZEfRsEvwnDnSnPw-Of53Qopd72u7y1twsyk-nMd2LpnYTavW81j2ZR4fcbzvrVi0A_QQR8bNSJurI_p7i_2t_l6449tqRT6mMBq_3wLkMlYzak/s1331/s-l1600-12.jpeg" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1331" data-original-width="998" height="200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhO9YToXT3htMlYCxpGU8ZV9rz8sTWPjyR6HfYRuHzPv520PBSatFnkyLs41SDeBaY96KD7OrEnOWzV0ZEfRsEvwnDnSnPw-Of53Qopd72u7y1twsyk-nMd2LpnYTavW81j2ZR4fcbzvrVi0A_QQR8bNSJurI_p7i_2t_l6449tqRT6mMBq_3wLkMlYzak/w150-h200/s-l1600-12.jpeg" width="150" /></a></span></i></div><i><span style="color: red;"><br />Laurel and Hardy Bumper Book</span> – </i>Arriving before Christmas and hailing, if memory serves, from what must have been my last ever trip to Santa’s grotto, this gift book follows the World Distributors model of reproducing material from comic books. A couple of photo articles, one of them illustrated with a picture of Morecambe and Wise, belied the book’s British origins – although like a good many such efforts, it was printed overseas. The characters are not quite the Laurel and Hardy of the Hal Roach films, but a ‘reimagining’ by cartoon producer Larry Harmon, based on his TV films. Having said that, I couldn’t really tell the difference aged ten, and enjoyed reading this book in the run-up to Christmas, several of the stories having a festive or autumnal flavour.<p></p><p align="left" style="line-height: 24px; margin-bottom: 0cm;"><br /></p><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjc0xR4zjeUujQSJQFmUJYc_mFV478EP0zd9_31DRarMyGekvj4XENEZDuquzGhA69GdcNVmiGLJMj4u5Vi4xhQBpBW9wBq38kE1jWw_xXymJxncaTHQzDu8yLaJ9_cpFfK_FBgsLoOgai4KoXmU5hxpCpSAqdiLBeDmBrCaabePACbpDMTZvgzk6zDjrQ/s3736/IMG_5235.jpeg" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="2735" data-original-width="3736" height="469" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjc0xR4zjeUujQSJQFmUJYc_mFV478EP0zd9_31DRarMyGekvj4XENEZDuquzGhA69GdcNVmiGLJMj4u5Vi4xhQBpBW9wBq38kE1jWw_xXymJxncaTHQzDu8yLaJ9_cpFfK_FBgsLoOgai4KoXmU5hxpCpSAqdiLBeDmBrCaabePACbpDMTZvgzk6zDjrQ/w640-h469/IMG_5235.jpeg" width="640" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"></td></tr></tbody></table><p align="left" style="line-height: 24px; margin-bottom: 0cm;"><i><span style="color: red;">Tom & Jerry Annual</span> –</i> I’m not sure how many of these were produced, but we got given a couple of examples this year and next. Like Laurel and Hardy, these were definitely not the Tom & Jerry of the original cinema cartoons, as both of them spoke (it would have been hard for them not to do so in the comic strip format), although their appearance was unaltered. The artwork, reproduced from American comic books, was slick and excellent.</p><p align="left" style="line-height: 24px; margin-bottom: 0cm;"><i><span style="color: red;">TV Comic Annual</span> </i>– Another excellent effort from Polystyle, maintaining the production format familiar from our old 1966 example, blending full colour strips (of which there seemed more this year) alongside red or green duotone. <i>Popeye</i> remained a perennial favourite, as did <i>Mighty Moth</i> and <i>TV Terrors</i>, but this year saw new original characters in the form of <i>Nelly and her Telly</i> (she daydreamed herself into the programmes she was watching) and <i>Texas Ted</i>, a stetson-hatted braggart who came across like a charmless Desperate Dan. Tom and Jerry were the cover stars during this era and are featured prominently, alongside <i>Roadrunner</i>, <i>Pink Panther</i> and <i>Bugs Bunny</i>. Other licensed TV material included <i>Animal Magic</i>, <i>Basil Brush</i>, <i>Dad’s Army</i> (nicely drawn by <i>TV Comic</i> regular Bill Titcombe), <i>Skippy</i>, <i>Titch and Quackers, Whacko! </i>and, somewhat surprisingly, <i>The Avengers</i>. <i>Dr. Who</i> had by this time been regenerated into the new <i>Countdown</i> comic which was perhaps for the best...</p><p align="left" style="line-height: 24px; margin-bottom: 0cm;">Also weighing in this year were annuals from <i>The Beano </i>and <i>The Dandy</i>, alongside the <i>Beezer</i> and <i>Topper</i>.</p><p align="left" style="line-height: 24px; margin-bottom: 0cm;"><span style="color: red;"><b>1972</b></span></p><p align="left" style="line-height: 24px; margin-bottom: 0cm;"><i><span style="color: red;">The Persuaders Annual</span> – </i>If I’d had the task of designing this annual, I doubt I’d have done any different, as the cover follows the same rules I applied when designing the DVD releases of the series, using the same colour palette and, critically the same font as the TV title sequence. A slim volume, like others from the Polystyle stable, this was nevertheless a decent effort, with artwork of a quality comparable to that seen in the <i>Countdown</i> and <i>TV Action</i> comics, and a few decent colour photographs. The strips were provided by Frank Langford, a regular on the <i>Countdown</i> comic, and Martin Asbury, whose energetic style fairly leaps off the page.</p><p align="left" style="line-height: 24px; margin-bottom: 0cm;"><i><span style="color: red;">Countdown Annual</span></i> – By the end of 1972, <i>Countdown</i> had long since been revamped into<i> TV Action</i>, but this year's annual – subtitle notwithstanding – still reflected the comic's original line-up of strips and features, with <i>The Persuaders!</i> included albeit only as a text story. The artwork was still noticeably superior to anything seen in the TV21 series of annuals, with extensive four colour printing and a decent array of photographs.</p><p align="left" style="line-height: 24px; margin-bottom: 0cm;"><i><span style="color: red;">Dr. Who Annual</span> –</i> I’d only picked up on <i>Doctor Who</i> with the beginning of the Jon Pertwee era, since which time there had been only one annual published, in 1970. Why World Distributors missed a year is unknown, but they returned to the fray with this example, boasting a nice colour photographic cover. Inside, artwork ruled the roost, not all of it of a particularly inspiring quality. Nevertheless, I was happy to have it, and would continue to receive the <i>Dr. Who</i> annuals every Christmas until the end of the Pertwee era. During the 70s, I also managed to obtain copies of the two annuals hailing from the William Hartnell era (published in 1965 and 66), and one of the three Patrick Troughton editions, featuring a Cyberman cover painting. These latter must have had considerably smaller print runs than the Hartnells, as they never turned up in the second hand shops and jumble sales from which such old items were usually acquired.</p><p align="left" style="line-height: 24px; margin-bottom: 0cm;"><i><span style="color: red;">TV Comic Annual</span></i> – Hard to tell this one apart from the previous year’s edition, with most of the same content still present and correct. <i>Catweazle</i> replaced<i> The Avengers</i>, but otherwise it was the mixture as before.</p><p align="left" style="line-height: 24px; margin-bottom: 0cm;"><i><span style="color: red;"></span></i></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><i><span style="color: red;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiV69aFVizub9bWrdVuRzCKD-ehoInffLZuWmxoGg5E3oAPQqcbALPLMMzwBuiO53Azni0V2h6KxJA0ywYlCk9vIrbjlpEu_XiRKYSxG0CxArwtldLHdTg9IdEqfXIIehO0p6GF3ALXoxVvTFJyzD9JgaE_AJyA41X3guHy2t5Imur3Oi_HDoIhOJxvdkk/s1000/pdf_d152f940-4581-11e3-9126-eb68cc7f5bc9.jpg" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1000" data-original-width="727" height="200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiV69aFVizub9bWrdVuRzCKD-ehoInffLZuWmxoGg5E3oAPQqcbALPLMMzwBuiO53Azni0V2h6KxJA0ywYlCk9vIrbjlpEu_XiRKYSxG0CxArwtldLHdTg9IdEqfXIIehO0p6GF3ALXoxVvTFJyzD9JgaE_AJyA41X3guHy2t5Imur3Oi_HDoIhOJxvdkk/w146-h200/pdf_d152f940-4581-11e3-9126-eb68cc7f5bc9.jpg" width="146" /></a></span></i></div><i><span style="color: red;"><br />The Aeronauts Annual</span> – </i>This French TV series had been shown during childen’s viewing hours by BBC1 – although in its home country it was a prime-time mid evening series aimed at adults. Quite what the BBC was thinking was anybody’s guess. The series being based on a comic strip, this was an easy assignment for World Distributors, who simply commissioned a painted cover (nicely depicting the TV series actors), pairing it with a couple of the French comic adventures, translated by Charles Pemberton. Given that the series was based on the comic rather than the other way round, the characters in the strips bore scant resemblance to the TV actors; although the artwork was excellent, especially in its depictions of the various fighter jets.<p></p><p align="left" style="line-height: 24px; margin-bottom: 0cm;"><i><span style="color: red;">Knockout Annual</span></i> – The <i>Knockout</i> title, which had been around in my Dad’s day, was revived with all-new content by IPC in the spring of 1971, which didn’t allow for the publication of an annual that year. The comic was quickly revamped, shifting Bash Street knock-offs <i>The Super Seven</i> from the cover to the inside pages, with a gimmick strip <i>The Full House </i>taking their place. Both are present here, although <i>The Full House</i> (a cutaway with panels showing the events in different rooms of the titular dwelling) didn’t translate well to the narrower page format. All the regulars were present, including <i>Fuss Pot</i> (probably the title’s most successful creation), <i>Joker</i>, <i>The Toffs and the Toughs</i> and <i>Pete’s Pockets</i>. Two strips featuring <i>The Group</i>, appear to have been reprinted from another IPC title, but I’ve no idea of their origin.</p><p align="left" style="line-height: 24px; margin-bottom: 0cm;">Once again, the <i>Beano</i>, <i>Dandy</i> and possibly Beezer annuals found their way into Santa’s sack this year, along with another<i> Tom & Jerry</i> and <i>The Flintstones</i>.</p><p align="left" style="line-height: 24px; margin-bottom: 0cm;"><span style="color: red;"><b>1973</b></span></p><p align="left" style="line-height: 24px; margin-bottom: 0cm;"><i><span style="color: red;">Dr Who</span></i> – ‘...your 2003 Christmas present is likely to be something like a miniature pocket computer.’ So spoke 1973’s <i>Dr. Who Annual</i> in a feature entitled ‘A Space Age Christmas’ imagining the festivities of thirty years hence. The same article warned young readers that ‘if pollution and the effects of the population explosion go on … there will probably be very few trees left in the world’ (lest anyone was still in any doubt that environmental awareness existed before the Thunberg generation.) Elsewhere, this year’s annual was the expected mix of text stories, perfunctorily illustrated with what look like designer’s roughs. Better artwork was on show in the two strip stories (one of them in full colour), courtesy of one Steve Livesey.</p><p align="left" style="line-height: 24px; margin-bottom: 0cm;"><i><span style="color: red;">Dad’s Army</span></i> – It might surprise you to know that no fewer than five <i>Dad’s Army</i> annuals were produced by World Distributors, published every year from 1972 to 1976. This edition was the only one I ever owned, and looks to be typical. The contents were analogous to those of the <i>Dr. Who</i> annuals, heavy on the text stories, with two comic strips and a mix of features, in this case focusing on wartime and military history. The artwork in this edition was a shade better than this year’s <i>Dr. Who</i>, and the artists are all familiar from other World Distributors titles. A nicely designed colour photographic cover added value – subsequent editions would feature artworked covers.</p><p align="left" style="line-height: 24px; margin-bottom: 0cm;"><i><span style="color: red;">Top of the Pops</span></i> – The weekly pop show was about to celebrate its tenth anniversary, which probably accounts for the appearance of this debut publication, the first of many: a TOTP annual was still appearing as late as 1991, although the original run (from, you’ve guessed it, World Distributors) ran out of steam in 1984. Edited by Ken Irwin, this first edition began with a brief overview of the programme’s history – not too much, mind, we don’t want to alienate the teenyboppers of 1973! The teenies were well catered for with the rest of the content, spotlighting current hit artists including Gilbert O’Sullivan, the Jacksons and of course, Slade. Three of the programme’s most popular presenters – including a certain Mr. Savile – each got to pen a short autobiographical piece; and there was, of course, a short feature focusing on the inevitable Pan’s People. Much of the content was in black and white, with a few colour portraits thrown in to justify the 75p price point (standard across all World Distributors titles this year). The preponderance of monochrome pages seems ironic in light of the fact that most of 1973’s TOTP shows that survive exist only as black and white kinescopes!</p><p align="left" style="line-height: 24px; margin-bottom: 0cm;"><span style="color: red;"><i>The Goodies </i><i>Annual</i></span> – The Cricklewood trio were well established as TV comedy favourites by 1973, and must have looked like a cert to shift a few thousand annuals when World Distributors signed them up for this one-off publication. Monty Python had already published their first tie-in ‘Big Red Book’, aimed squarely at a mature audience, and alongside such sophistication, <i>T</i><i>he</i> <i>Goodies Annual</i> seems to justify John Cleese’s taunt ‘kids’ programme’ at the end of 1973’s festive special, <i>The Goodies and the Beanstalk</i>. World Distributors knew a winning formula when they saw it: essentially, this is just another <i>Dr. Who Annual</i> with the Goodies taking the place of the Timelord. Comic strips took up more of the content than usual, alongside a couple of text stories, games and a number of photo features, one illustrating the trio in the recording studio (more than a year before <i>The Funky Gibbon</i>), whilst the other looked at the show’s innovative special effects. Some cartoon contributions from Graeme Garden added a kind of Cricklewood Royal Warrant to the whole endeavour, but the Goodies themselves were left decidedly underwhelmed by their first venture into print. Their dissatisfaction with the end product spurred them on to do something better themselves, and next year saw publication of <i>The Goodies File</i>, which played the Pythons at their own game to excellent effect.</p><p align="left" style="line-height: 24px; margin-bottom: 0cm;"><span style="color: red;"><i></i></span></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><span style="color: red;"><i><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEixj50RY4kISBeR1nmBY_QrK-3YsVNRTk5Rzcsgxbj7k3CO4StBKKAS75lodDRbw2nJPAykBCKs22pxdnPACOAYNG_0LWz2EulJLBs3ctG3qR_M_vNw7mc8WPZ-2702VQQFYjhgbgV0owJvQlUqGEno0XWK3M18VPy9ySbMPn1afH8BHKRKEV5SNrTGhEg/s3111/IMG_5242.jpeg" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="3111" data-original-width="2467" height="200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEixj50RY4kISBeR1nmBY_QrK-3YsVNRTk5Rzcsgxbj7k3CO4StBKKAS75lodDRbw2nJPAykBCKs22pxdnPACOAYNG_0LWz2EulJLBs3ctG3qR_M_vNw7mc8WPZ-2702VQQFYjhgbgV0owJvQlUqGEno0XWK3M18VPy9ySbMPn1afH8BHKRKEV5SNrTGhEg/w159-h200/IMG_5242.jpeg" width="159" /></a></i></span></div><span style="color: red;"><i><br />Dan Dare </i><i>Annual</i></span> – I have to confess to knowing next to nothing about Dan Dare at this point in time. The space ace had first appeared more than a decade before I was born, and by the time I was of an age to appreciate his adventures, they had all but come to an end. This welcome volume reprinted two stories from the classic Frank Hampson era – 1951’s <i>The Red Moon Mystery</i> and 1959’s <i>Safari in Space</i>. As an illustration of Hampson’s progress on the strip, the compilers couldn’t have done a better job. <i>Red Moon</i> was brilliantly realised and a cracking adventure that feels like the template for every environmental disaster movie ever filmed; but <i>Safari</i> looked simply stunning. I’d never seen better artwork on the pages of a comic and surely never will. Hampson’s studio system was by this time running like a well-oiled machine, although the wheels were about to come off, and this would be the last of Dan’s adventures that he saw through to the end. Part way into the continuation story, <i>Terra Nova</i>, Frank left the strip under something of a cloud and would never return. I knew none of this back in 1973, and was able to appreciate the annual for what it was – namely, some of the greatest comic strip artwork ever produced. Up to now, my comic heroes had been the stalwarts of TV21 – Noble, Bellamy, Embleton – but Frank Hampson kicked them all into touch.<p></p><p align="left" style="line-height: 24px; margin-bottom: 0cm;"><i><span style="color: red;">Dennis the Menace</span></i> – For many years the star of his own spin-off annual, Dennis’s solo outings were not strictly annuals given that they appeared every two years. A somewhat slimmer volume than the accompanying Beano book, it shared the same spot colour artwork, in this case red (or orange) and black, the better to depict Dennis’s iconic striped jersey. This was the second Dennis annual we got to see, and almost immediately I spotted something a bit odd about some of the comic strips: Dennis looked different. He was thin and spindly-legged, contrasting his squat, bulky early 70s appearance. I wondered whether these strips might be reprints from an earlier era, which indeed proved to be the case. Despite having been well read, this example survives in absolutely mint condition, which must surely be a testament to D.C. Thompson’s robust production values.</p><p align="left" style="line-height: 24px; margin-bottom: 0cm;">With 1973 done and dusted, we've reached the end of what I personally consider to have been the golden age of annuals, but there would be plenty more to come during the 70s, with World Distributors continuing to license any TV property that looked like it could shift a few thousand copies. In the third and final part of this feature, I'll look at some of the last few annuals that ever made it into my hands, and reflect on the slow decline in content and quality that has brought us to where we are today.</p><p align="left" style="line-height: 24px; margin-bottom: 0cm;"><br /></p><p align="left" style="line-height: 24px; margin-bottom: 0cm;"><br /></p>Mart Chttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04883883503677556135noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6507883749037788533.post-49636736095675313462023-12-16T04:42:00.000-08:002023-12-16T04:42:28.124-08:00Annuals Revisited<p style="text-align: justify;"> </p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: justify;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhKBN1UWc9kNVusfSSn_mFetkpDfG3xBu_LqGsrYFmj2dzbt8_evm6OEeWSqoEFpvjAssmbSBC3bPL84VqM9ZagA75N3L8upORXLZOHkCwZOO1ABoDZHiCt5pukZkc0sujcsHQ3UOTC4N-11UbPUV_cu4fW5TkwareyBeXCwmd9fVq4ipr7gQ6p9ePTONM/s3918/IMG_5245.jpeg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="3918" data-original-width="2766" height="640" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhKBN1UWc9kNVusfSSn_mFetkpDfG3xBu_LqGsrYFmj2dzbt8_evm6OEeWSqoEFpvjAssmbSBC3bPL84VqM9ZagA75N3L8upORXLZOHkCwZOO1ABoDZHiCt5pukZkc0sujcsHQ3UOTC4N-11UbPUV_cu4fW5TkwareyBeXCwmd9fVq4ipr7gQ6p9ePTONM/w452-h640/IMG_5245.jpeg" width="452" /></a></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><p></p><h1 style="text-align: justify;"><span style="color: red; font-family: helvetica;">Part One: The 1960s</span></h1><p style="line-height: 24px; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;">Back in the 1960s and 70s, no Christmas was complete without annuals. I had them bought for me every year until I was in my mid teens. I still have the very first of them, <i>Baby’s Own</i>, a Fleetway publication printed in 1962. In the days before I’d learned to read, the bright colour illustrations in this book left a huge impression on my developing imagination. By the late 60s, the sight of annuals in the shops was an exciting reminder that Christmas wasn’t too far away. I can clearly recall seeing 1967’s<i> Captain Scarlet Annual </i>piled up in WH Smiths, brand new and still fresh from the printer, with its distinctive new-printed smell.</p><p style="line-height: 24px; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;">Every Christmas brought a fresh crop of annuals, some years providing a bumper harvest, and between my brother and myself, we probably got around half a dozen new annuals every year. Most of them are still in my possession, and it occurred to me to make a list of all the ones we had, going right back to 1962. Which were the most popular? Which survived intact? And which was the very last?</p><p style="line-height: 24px; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;">As mentioned above, <i>Baby’s Own</i> set the ball rolling back in 1962 when I was a mere eighteen months old. In addition to this, I had earlier been given two of the so called ‘Big Noddy Books’, annual-sized publications that had been published on a semi-regular basis since the early 50s. So, as of Christmas 1962, my collection of annuals stood at three. Now, let’s count off the rest, year by year…</p><p style="line-height: 24px; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;"><br /></p><h3 style="text-align: justify;"><span style="color: red;">1963</span></h3><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0 0 0 40px; padding: 0px;"><p style="line-height: 24px; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;"><i></i></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><i><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiNxpuBl9V8RQCcbfaH5-Y-5N9kZywHEAWcY6dxNpcOpmSDa2uNlp2yPP4QWzMMvfxpNddL7Zpj1oxsFYbW9CyiBF4NrTzCP15cSkZtZCeqJX139dy97anwasb-qtcbhOvH6ledq0u7KeZt3ttx-Mu7Ri8Uqwy-HPZJZvLb_F_7h0aIzIhOtNPOTexG-8A/s3065/IMG_5234.jpeg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em; text-align: justify;"><img border="0" data-original-height="3065" data-original-width="2587" height="200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiNxpuBl9V8RQCcbfaH5-Y-5N9kZywHEAWcY6dxNpcOpmSDa2uNlp2yPP4QWzMMvfxpNddL7Zpj1oxsFYbW9CyiBF4NrTzCP15cSkZtZCeqJX139dy97anwasb-qtcbhOvH6ledq0u7KeZt3ttx-Mu7Ri8Uqwy-HPZJZvLb_F_7h0aIzIhOtNPOTexG-8A/w169-h200/IMG_5234.jpeg" width="169" /></a></i></div><p></p></blockquote><p style="line-height: 24px; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;"><i><span style="color: red;">Fireball XL5 Annual</span></i> – the first of four, from publishers WM Collins and son, and a clear favourite judging by the distressed condition in which it survives to this day. All four in the series followed the same format, with full colour printing at the beginning, middle and end, and single colour/ spot colour on heavy pulp paper elsewhere. Such 1930s production values were on the way out, and would not endure beyond the mid-1960s.</p><p style="line-height: 24px; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;"><i><span style="color: red;">Collins’ Childrens’ Annual</span></i> – a blend of mostly text stories, ranging from fairytale whimsy to Enid Blytonesque rollicking adventure, the <i>Children’s Annual</i> had been going for years by the time I was given my one and only copy. It survives to this day in very good condition, testament to the fact that I didn’t care much for it, although one particular story – <i>Lost in the Snow </i>– became a childhood favourite. </p><p style="line-height: 24px; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;"><i></i></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><i><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhQFzLmksCHkXXHKmzkLSc3_OjaboU-pbSiny1aa_1FAfb8Hxvd8L-762b63cfb-Nj7BADMrXjDD7bK9HvF2EsuD_458WJ_A5dZ8Ni2hYB16ZRVaJ1U97GpV-bH1sznpAnoAIg27r_FXIsn3E_Io0QlKLMXSg8cdEo6OUE00Q3ka2az6Wi_8CtGw5QDQq4/s3732/IMG_5246.jpeg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em; text-align: justify;"><img border="0" data-original-height="3732" data-original-width="2839" height="200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhQFzLmksCHkXXHKmzkLSc3_OjaboU-pbSiny1aa_1FAfb8Hxvd8L-762b63cfb-Nj7BADMrXjDD7bK9HvF2EsuD_458WJ_A5dZ8Ni2hYB16ZRVaJ1U97GpV-bH1sznpAnoAIg27r_FXIsn3E_Io0QlKLMXSg8cdEo6OUE00Q3ka2az6Wi_8CtGw5QDQq4/w152-h200/IMG_5246.jpeg" width="152" /></a></i></div><i><div style="text-align: justify;"><i><span style="color: red;">Bobby Bear’s Annual</span></i></div></i><div><div style="text-align: justify;">Dean and Son’s <i>Bobby Bear</i> had been a fixture of the <i>Daily Herald</i> newspaper since 1919, making him even older than Rupert, and his annuals went all the way back to the 1920s. The <i>Herald</i> had undergone a change of ownership in 1961 and would be revamped into <i>The Sun</i> just over a year later, so Bobby’s days were numbered. This annual was clearly well-loved, and suffered the same fate as <i>Fireball XL5</i>, losing its board covers and several pages. More recently, I bought myself this mint condition copy off ebay.</div><div><p></p><p style="line-height: 24px; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;"><br /></p><h3 style="text-align: justify;"><span style="color: red;"><br /></span></h3><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="color: red;"><br /></span></div><h3 style="text-align: justify;"><span style="color: red;">1964</span></h3><p style="line-height: 24px; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;"><i><span style="color: red;">Fireball XL5 Annual</span></i> – the second of the series, this one survived rather better than its predcessor, though I must have given it away in the 1970s as the original is no longer in my possession, having been replaced by a cleaner copy. The stories were written by Alan Fennell, who had contributed about half of the scripts for the TV series, so they were very much in the style of the original. With the TV series only on air once a week, and often absent from the screen altogether, the Fireball Annuals became as important to me as the programme itself.</p><p style="line-height: 24px; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;"><i><span style="color: red;">Robin Annual</span> – </i>Cover-dated 1965, this was another favourite, alongside the following year’s edition. I’m not sure if we were ever bought the <i>Robin</i> comic on anything like a regular basis, and these two annuals were the only examples we ever owned. Our mum gave them away in the 1970s, but I later found replacement copies. Some of the stories from this year’s edition became beloved childhood favourites and just to look at the illustrations is to evoke a rush of nostalgia for winter afternoons in front of the fire. TV characters like Andy Pandy and Bill and Ben rub shoulders here with the likes of Bizzy Beaver, Nutty Squirrel and Richard Lion; but <i>Robin</i>’s most intriguing character was based on Mr Woppit, the teddy bear mascot that accompanied speed demon Donald Campbell in his various Bluebirds (and was rescued from the final tragic wreck on Coniston Water). Originating in the 50s, by 1964 Woppit looked more like a pig than a bear, and was accompanied by his friends Mokey the donkey, and Tiptop, a clown.</p><p style="line-height: 24px; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;"><span style="color: red;"><i>TV Land Annual</i> </span>– <i>TV Land</i> was a short-lived comic, launched as a junior companion to<i> TV Comic</i> when the latter revamped its contents to appeal to a slightly older readership. The comic’s original cover star, Pussy Cat Willum, was long gone by the time this annual was published. It was, I believe, bought for my brother, and survives intact to this day. Stories include Noggin the Nog and Ivor the Engine (both with illustrations by Peter Firmin); The Woodentops; and a cartoon elephant called Packi, created by Tony Hart.</p><p style="line-height: 24px; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;"><i><span style="color: red;">Teddy Bear Annual</span> –</i> <i>Teddy Bear</i> was a Fleetway publication, promoted as being ‘the only story paper for mothers with young children written by a mother with young children’, and had been appearing weekly since late 1963. Its title character was a charming little bear who lived with his family in ‘Bear Green’ (clearly inspired by the real life Beare Green in Surrey), and other regulars included a pre-Denis Healey Silly Billy, Nurse Susan and Dr. David and Paddy-Paws the puppy (of which I own several original art boards). Creator/writer Barbara Hayes appears to have been a prolific contributor to Amalgamated Press and Fleetway publications, and in 2010 published a book on ‘How to be a Successful Writer’. So she must have done all right out of it.</p><p style="line-height: 24px; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;"><br /></p><table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgKCY95Pm-75CXOq5J6UmvjsrN-qVZOWDAk5x5JWEacdhbomvE2CoaoQRABwf8TvYjg8JRlm3ma9o3cFJV_sx9j-Zd90H3LiCR7auzYsU4TlM8RCN0wjp9y1BWqwnCslhgytmfWMijFsIgIDJwLjOeDBn9i1EIWFr8X_I4gSVqTHteN37uf-lKW6mXPMu0/s3343/IMG_5241%20(1).jpeg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="2945" data-original-width="3343" height="565" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgKCY95Pm-75CXOq5J6UmvjsrN-qVZOWDAk5x5JWEacdhbomvE2CoaoQRABwf8TvYjg8JRlm3ma9o3cFJV_sx9j-Zd90H3LiCR7auzYsU4TlM8RCN0wjp9y1BWqwnCslhgytmfWMijFsIgIDJwLjOeDBn9i1EIWFr8X_I4gSVqTHteN37uf-lKW6mXPMu0/w640-h565/IMG_5241%20(1).jpeg" width="640" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><br /></td></tr></tbody></table><h3 style="text-align: justify;"><span style="color: red;">1965</span></h3><p style="line-height: 24px; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;"><i><span style="color: red;">Fireball XL5 Annual </span>– </i>Ex-<i>Eagle</i> artist Eric Eden's fine artwork had featured in the first two volumes but this year the comic strips were supplied by another <i>Eagle</i> contributor, Desmond Walduck. His illustrations of Fireball made the ship look as if it had eaten all the pies in Space City. The stories were still excellent stuff, and included a couple of classics. Eden remained on board, providing paintings for the cover and endpapers, but by 1965 had found weekly employment on TV21, illustrating the Lady Penelope strip.</p><p style="line-height: 24px; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;"><i><span style="color: red;">Robin Annual</span> – </i>Although the original was long gone, many years later I chanced upon a copy of this year’s <i>Robin Annual</i> in an antiquarian bookseller in Lichfield. I hadn’t had sight of the contents for over thirty years, and when I opened it up, it was a full-on hit of forgotten childhood. <i>Robin</i>, like its older sibling <i>Eagle</i>, used the best illustrators in the business, and this year’s annual includes some fine work from John M. Burns and Gerry Embleton.</p><p style="line-height: 24px; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;"><i><span style="color: red;">TV Comic Annual</span> – </i><i>TV Land</i> having ceased publication, my brother was bought this in its place. The line-up of characters seemed designed to put me off as a reader, as it included several series I found hard to take on the television: not only did we have <i>Dr. Who</i>, but <i>Space Patrol </i>and (horrors!) <i>T</i><i>he Telegoons</i>. On the printed page, they were somewhat less disturbing, but I still tried to avoid looking at the colour endpaper photographs of the <i>Space Patrol</i> crew. The original copy has survived to this day. </p><p style="line-height: 24px; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;"><i><span style="color: red;">Teddy Bear Annual</span> –</i> Author/editor Barbara Hayes was really working her socks off, turning out every week’s edition of the comic (for which she received sole writer credit) and a couple of annuals every year. Artists are hard to identify, except for the prolific Jesus Blasco, better known for his action-oriented strips, but who could turn his hand to fairytale whimsy when the occasion demanded. I own a panel of his artwork from this year's annual, which accompanied the tale of 'Barbara One-Shoe'. I told you she was working her socks off...</p><p style="line-height: 24px; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;"><br /></p><h3 style="text-align: justify;"><span style="color: red;">1966</span></h3><p style="line-height: 24px; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;"><i><span style="color: red;">Thunderbirds Annual</span> – </i>International Rescue had arrived on the small screen in the autumn of 1965, which was too late for that year’s crop of annuals, so it was another year before <i>Thunderbirds</i> scored its own annual. TV21 publisher City Magazines was responsible, and this was the first of their publications to appear in a new large format. The inclusion of colour photographs added interest, but the contents were for the most part illustrations, rendered in the same cheap line and wash printing technique that City used on all of their annuals. Nevertheless, I was pleased to get it and can remember opening it on Christmas Day when it was still dark outside...</p><p style="line-height: 24px; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;"><i><span style="color: red;">Fireball XL5 Annual </span>–</i> This was to be the last of Collins’ Gerry Anderson tie-ins, and with the series itself fast disappearing from screens, there must have seemed little point in continuing. The covers of the first three had all been provided by Eric Eden, but this year saw him demoted to the endpapers, with <i>TV21</i>’s Fireball artist Mike Noble doing the honours on the cover. Unlike the cobalt blue space backgrounds that appeared in the TV21 comic strip, Noble here bowed to convention and provided a solid black space background, giving the four Fireball annuals a kind of visual continuity. Of the four, this was my least favourite, mostly on account of what I felt was somewhat inferior artwork (I was a hard taskmaster at the age of five).</p><p style="line-height: 24px; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;"><i></i></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><i><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiTRyTcxvgGf58VJ4qw7xFOS3dxaaYVaBHyJNA1AFhU0Z3uU3dJWs0q_aRHEDXJaDFNMPMDi1oKjEC-OoPpiBRXqrEo3CM-cEs5fbbuILQb6BmDZuzQM3vqW66kH5OzBW1A_dYj7EfI4LMoLLOtr37wRJwe94V1w0rbhygdfy5JoP4japSjNNWQqGfr4wQ/s4032/IMG_5247.jpeg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em; text-align: justify;"><img border="0" data-original-height="4032" data-original-width="3024" height="200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiTRyTcxvgGf58VJ4qw7xFOS3dxaaYVaBHyJNA1AFhU0Z3uU3dJWs0q_aRHEDXJaDFNMPMDi1oKjEC-OoPpiBRXqrEo3CM-cEs5fbbuILQb6BmDZuzQM3vqW66kH5OzBW1A_dYj7EfI4LMoLLOtr37wRJwe94V1w0rbhygdfy5JoP4japSjNNWQqGfr4wQ/w150-h200/IMG_5247.jpeg" width="150" /></a></i></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-style: italic;"><br /></span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><p></p><p style="line-height: 24px; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;"><i><span style="color: red;">Batman Story Book Annual</span> –</i> The Caped Crusader had been the year’s must-see television event, and by the autumn was spawning merchandising spin-offs including toys, bubble gum cards and this cheap cash-in from Manchester-based publishing house World Distributors. World’s annuals often looked like rush jobs, abd Batman was no exception. Comic strips took time to produce and were expensive to commission, so all too often these publications consisted of nothing but text stories, illustrated in haste by one Walter Howarth – a name revered by <i>Dr. Who</i> fans for his work on that series’ annuals. Howarth could turn out excellent likenesses of key actors, but his technique was rushed – hardly surprising considering his workload – and the cheap Ben Day dot printing process didn’t add much to his slick linework. The cover artist looks to have been under orders to avoid <i>any</i> resemblance to Adam West...</p><p style="line-height: 24px; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;"><br /></p><h3 style="text-align: justify;"><span style="color: red;">1967 </span></h3><p style="line-height: 24px; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;"><i><span style="color: red;">Blue Peter Book</span> –</i> I’d been watching <i>Blue Peter</i> on television since we’d had a set in the house, but this was the first year I’d had one of the ‘Blue Peter Books’ bought for me. The programme was at a point of transition, with John Noakes having recently joined, and Peter Purves waiting in the wings, so the cover designer played safe by photographing the show’s line-up of pets, arrayed around the Blue Peter emblem. The contents included an illustrated guide to making your own Christmas ‘advent crown’ (coathangers and tinsel), which proves that this kitsch classic had been a staple of the programme since the mid 60s. I would continue to receive the <i>Blue Peter</i> books every christmas for the next four or five years, by which time I’d stopped watching the programme.</p><p style="line-height: 24px; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;">These were great annuals for Christmas day reading, with their blend of easy-to-read features (generally reprising material from the TV episodes), puzzles and stories featuring William ‘Tim’ Timmins’ perennial favourites Bengo the boxer pup, and junior space adventurers Bleep and Booster.</p><p style="line-height: 24px; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;"><i><span style="color: red;">Captain Scarlet Annual</span> –</i> The first of only two dedicated <i>Captain Scarlet</i> annuals (though there would be later examples when the series was revived in the 1990s). I can still recall the excitement of seeing this in the shops, only a matter of weeks after the series had started on TV. Annuals like this were a great source of reference material if, like me, you wanted to draw pictures of your TV heroes, as there were plenty of colour photographs available to study (my original copy still bears a palimpsest of scored-in outlines where I’d traced various photographs). Artwork came courtesy of TV21’s ‘B-listers’, Ron Turner and Jim Watson. </p><p style="line-height: 24px; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;"><i><span style="color: red;">The Pogles Annual</span> – </i>Slim, but handsomely produced, and featuring a photographic cover, this was one of my brother’s annuals at Christmas 1967. The following year brought a further volume.</p><p style="line-height: 24px; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;"><i><span style="color: red;">Sooty Annual</span> – </i>The <i>Daily Mirror</i> had been cranking out Sooty annuals for a good few years, but this was the first of them to make it into our house. I never cared for them very much: Sooty was reinvented in a kind of toytown setting populated with characters who never saw action on the TV series. Harry Corbett, of course, was nowhere to be seen, as the annual Sooty had grown a pair… of legs, that is.</p><p style="line-height: 24px; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;">The same year brought a further <i>Teddy Bear Annual</i> – now a gift for my brother – but little else. I’d passed on the second <i>Thunderbirds Annual</i>, having somewhat lost interest in the show in the wake of <i>Captain Scarlet</i>. I would make up the defecit a few years later by acquiring a copy discarded by our cousins.</p><p style="line-height: 24px; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;"><br /></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: justify;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg9WiqWouvN5HACwEOq6wBYDOBJ3YzNKVP9JfQon-SwkiKjposb3jXlntY_eRFshfzdw-bry2C-fODrHzysN8AyVvOgh3dw6YkBxPMfV51piuCw8fhTAKIhWWO_Br_T_Xhw6n-sKYFXGV-WY8l5rHrj06qzBh-cXANtyUD4gDAgEXwPY693rowhaVdNP_Q/s3985/IMG_5240%20(1).jpeg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="2722" data-original-width="3985" height="438" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg9WiqWouvN5HACwEOq6wBYDOBJ3YzNKVP9JfQon-SwkiKjposb3jXlntY_eRFshfzdw-bry2C-fODrHzysN8AyVvOgh3dw6YkBxPMfV51piuCw8fhTAKIhWWO_Br_T_Xhw6n-sKYFXGV-WY8l5rHrj06qzBh-cXANtyUD4gDAgEXwPY693rowhaVdNP_Q/w640-h438/IMG_5240%20(1).jpeg" width="640" /></a></div><p style="line-height: 24px; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;"><br /></p><h3 style="text-align: justify;"><span style="color: red;">1968</span></h3><p style="line-height: 24px; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;"><i><span style="color: red;">Joe 90 Annual</span></i> – I can still remember seeing this in a <i>TV21</i> half-page advert in the autumn of 1968, a week or so <i>before</i> the series appeared on television. The cover image of Joe in the Big Rat intrigued me: what was it all about? I’m afraid the series, when it arrived, had rather less of an impact. The format followed the look of the Captain Scarlet and Thunderbirds examples. Good colour photographs, cheaply overlaid colour printing on the strips. And those ‘B-listers’ were being kept busy, Ron Turner in particular...</p><p style="line-height: 24px; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;"><i><span style="color: red;">Captain Scarlet Annual</span> – </i>Another fine effort from the <i>TV21</i> production team, with art editor Jim Watson providing a number of strips. The excellent Ron Turner was also on board, although as a child I found his drawings too stylised, and he was rather less adept at drawing the series’ hardware than he was at making up his own. And he couldn’t draw Captain Scarlet’s hat to save his life!</p><p style="line-height: 24px; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;"><i><span style="color: red;">Thunderbirds Annual</span> – </i>Nice cover design here, placing each of the Thunderbird craft inside its respective number. I’ve long been of the opinion that, when he was asked to design the International Rescue vehicles, Derek Meddings started by drawing the numbers one to five and using them as the basis for their shapes. Thunderbird Four looks just like a figure four, Thunderbird One is clearly a figure one, Thunderbird Three has three nacelles… all of which has no relevance to this year’s annual. Amongst the strip stories was an effort clearly from the pen of <i>TV21</i>’s Scott Goodall, who never missed an opportunity of smashing up the hero craft. In his strip <i>Curse of the Elastos</i>, much of Tracy Island gets pounded into rubble and Thunderbird Three is completely destroyed. I mean, it’s only a comic strip, but you just don’t <i>do</i> that kind of thing!</p><p style="line-height: 24px; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;"><i><span style="color: red;">TV21 Annual</span> –</i> I’d started getting TV21 on a regular basis in late November of 1967, too late to be bothered with that year’s annual, and this one was the first I had bought for me. This year saw a big family gathering at our grandparents’ small semi, and our grandad had gone to the trouble of making a ‘bran tub’ from which we each extracted our presents, mine including this particular annual, which has survived with me to the present day.</p><p style="line-height: 24px; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;">Also in the running for this year were <i>The Herbs Annual</i> – a gift for my brother – and yet another of the perennially popular <i>Teddy Bear</i>, alongside another outing for <i>The Pogles</i>. Meanwhile, in the category of ‘I’d have liked it but didn’t get it’ we find<i> TV21</i>’s spin-off<i> Project Sword.</i> Despite being bought several of the toys tied into the concept, we never had the annual, and I wouldn’t have sight of it until I turned up a copy in the late 70s.</p><p style="line-height: 24px; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;"><br /></p><h3 style="text-align: justify;"><span style="color: red;">1969<i> </i></span></h3><p style="line-height: 24px; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;"><i><span style="color: red;">Star Trek Annual</span> –</i> <i>Star Trek</i> had only been on air since July, but World Distributors were quick off the mark, with an annual in the shops in time for Christmas. This one followed their long-established practise of licensing comic strips from the USA and reprinting them alongside a few hastily cobbled together features. For all that, I was glad to have it, and one of those features promised the return of Halley’s Comet in the far distant future of 1986. I could hardly wait.</p><p style="line-height: 24px; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;"><span style="color: red;"></span></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; font-style: italic; text-align: center;"><span style="color: red;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEivW3-oMNp-VAgtvWwjy0h61xFf_a0iu-8at83UTK1CD4eRc6PRZ9pyX1GLU8u8iDTs1j9h5WMB4LnCphpjr_3guLLrHhkdrq5zrF6cstztEOOqvw-kmKkSU7TI1fZUN69SqV_lkJxa8AqMlylXpU-a43DrN2-N4rijH80KNXOdAdyAHQHKIl5YRACh7Hg/s1000/81mCtG6NEdL._AC_UF894,1000_QL80_.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em; text-align: justify;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1000" data-original-width="698" height="200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEivW3-oMNp-VAgtvWwjy0h61xFf_a0iu-8at83UTK1CD4eRc6PRZ9pyX1GLU8u8iDTs1j9h5WMB4LnCphpjr_3guLLrHhkdrq5zrF6cstztEOOqvw-kmKkSU7TI1fZUN69SqV_lkJxa8AqMlylXpU-a43DrN2-N4rijH80KNXOdAdyAHQHKIl5YRACh7Hg/w139-h200/81mCtG6NEdL._AC_UF894,1000_QL80_.jpg" width="139" /></a></span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="color: red; font-style: italic;">Joe 90 Annual</span> – Joe got two annuals this year, a series edition and another based on the comic that had been launched under his moniker in January. My brother got the latter whilst I was given the former. It followed the by now standard City Magazines format of strip stories and text stories illustrated with colour photographs. The self-styled ‘Joe 90 Comic Annual’ included the same character line-up as the weekly, which meant appearances from <i>The Champions </i>, <i>Land of the Giants</i> and two sporting Inuits known as Ninepence+Tenpence alongside Joe himself.</div><p></p><p style="line-height: 24px; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;"><span style="color: red;"></span></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; font-style: italic; text-align: center;"><span style="color: red;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiUVZOEqhFaQ3yuIklHVtliKH0KASNNOdemaochcSJZCz9fYPXhE2H4ctgTFrZ0Hy4wIqWcHtHTDip50o-dt-VjOTCp8lYVmMZ3b0-fzzLwFgJCosGXOoGPIZD6MkkuLchkzDtF7HfInPrm_S5qaiAQHBHuTwe_Uwvc-knnqF4slFp7CkJrj9Rwo8DobCg/s1000/91nPenP8yoL._AC_UF894,1000_QL80_.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em; text-align: justify;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1000" data-original-width="695" height="200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiUVZOEqhFaQ3yuIklHVtliKH0KASNNOdemaochcSJZCz9fYPXhE2H4ctgTFrZ0Hy4wIqWcHtHTDip50o-dt-VjOTCp8lYVmMZ3b0-fzzLwFgJCosGXOoGPIZD6MkkuLchkzDtF7HfInPrm_S5qaiAQHBHuTwe_Uwvc-knnqF4slFp7CkJrj9Rwo8DobCg/w139-h200/91nPenP8yoL._AC_UF894,1000_QL80_.jpg" width="139" /></a></span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="color: red; font-style: italic;">Captain Scarlet and Thunderbirds Annual</span> – You couldn’t get the wrapping off this one… oh, as you were, that brown paper and string is part of the cover design. A demotion for two Gerry Anderson properties who were nearing their sell-by date and had clearly not shifted enough copies last year. The contents were the usual TV21 Annual-style artworked strips, alongside text stories illustrated with photos. For me, the artwork in these annuals was getting worse with every passing year. Jim Watson and Ron Turner provided their usual reliable schtick, but alongside them we got the sketchy efforts of Jon Cooper, whose work I have never liked, and an unidentified artist with a dreadful exaggerated style that verged on caricature. Whoever he was, his two stories – The Mind Machine and Secret of the Mummy’s Tomb – were so downright awful that I’ve never bothered to read them!</div><p></p><p style="line-height: 24px; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;"><span style="color: red;"></span></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; font-style: italic; text-align: center;"><span style="color: red;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgAm71SE0u5kjZFxPSGHI7TkFoJ19EmgWwj9mxvr-uSzmRyfSzDFSpema-6WpZrFmYKs0smUC_3gVpX31jQMEE5gDAdA2BEgV7TYfNQi49lNFlTYtKkmD6J7OVzt5XUcjyeQmKD6aea4Tkd2-kXK3PBa0nynyJYX-LtxIPu_Vid5KGlRyxaBkd-KjUabtA/s1000/91kTX4TdIgL._AC_UF894,1000_QL80_.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em; text-align: justify;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1000" data-original-width="697" height="200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgAm71SE0u5kjZFxPSGHI7TkFoJ19EmgWwj9mxvr-uSzmRyfSzDFSpema-6WpZrFmYKs0smUC_3gVpX31jQMEE5gDAdA2BEgV7TYfNQi49lNFlTYtKkmD6J7OVzt5XUcjyeQmKD6aea4Tkd2-kXK3PBa0nynyJYX-LtxIPu_Vid5KGlRyxaBkd-KjUabtA/w139-h200/91kTX4TdIgL._AC_UF894,1000_QL80_.jpg" width="139" /></a></span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="color: red; font-style: italic;">TV21 Annual</span><span style="font-style: italic;"> </span><i>– </i>Now in its fifth year, but sporting a rather pedestrian cover design of boxed photos, this would prove to be the last of the really good TV21 publications before the comic and its associated annuals turned bad. The following year’s example was dire. This year we still had the expected comic line-up of <i>Captain Scarlet</i>, <i>Thunderbirds</i> and <i>Secret Agent 21</i>, who also appeared in his revamped format as <i>Mr. Magnet</i>, plus appearances from <i>Fireball XL5</i> and <i>Stingray</i>, both of which had been absent from the comic for more than a year. The colour photographic endpaper of Fireball XL5 alone makes this edition worth collecting, as the original transparency has long since vanished.</div><p></p><p style="line-height: 24px; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;"><br /></p><p style="line-height: 24px; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;">In the next part, I'll consider the many different annuals – mostly TV spin-offs – that arrived in the 1970s.</p><p style="line-height: 24px; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;"><br /></p></div></div>Mart Chttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04883883503677556135noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6507883749037788533.post-81089118745607085562023-12-13T03:26:00.000-08:002023-12-13T04:01:13.212-08:00Farewell, Earthling Phil<p> </p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgGqwCFX-gN9ZxdnNBHMP2A53y0PZF7fE2LUKKEsyqZk2e_-AJuB5ME8qEFaCirJlNxz8AAsQ4Lu7Hl2nDpCefXLqCsZYRKOQ47cH89CrZTc_wBtAdiHK9E93zOdP0uV3nuqBECQ0tTAoohxRILwVj4ROjOqSDt9g6qkq5rWmQmi8GmpovR0OXTYrPemN8/s1792/IMG_20231213_0001.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1158" data-original-width="1792" height="414" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgGqwCFX-gN9ZxdnNBHMP2A53y0PZF7fE2LUKKEsyqZk2e_-AJuB5ME8qEFaCirJlNxz8AAsQ4Lu7Hl2nDpCefXLqCsZYRKOQ47cH89CrZTc_wBtAdiHK9E93zOdP0uV3nuqBECQ0tTAoohxRILwVj4ROjOqSDt9g6qkq5rWmQmi8GmpovR0OXTYrPemN8/w640-h414/IMG_20231213_0001.jpg" width="640" /></a></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br /></div><p></p><p align="left" style="line-height: 24px; margin-bottom: 0cm;">Around 1971, our dad got made redundant. He’d moved from a steady but undemanding clerical job at the GEC to wallpaper manufacturer Colorall, in a sales position. The job didn’t last long – maybe he didn’t shift enough rolls – but by the spring of 1971 he was out of work again. Fortunately, he had a second career, as a semi-professional drummer, in which capacity he’d been working the dance band and supper club scene in the Midlands for over thirty years. With the day job gone, he fell back on music as his sole source of income. Around this time, he’d been a ‘dep’ (temporary replacement) drummer for Midland bandleader Graham Dalley, whose residency at The Barn nightspot in Solihull provided a semi-regular source of work. Dalley was a multi-instrumentalist – his LP ‘At the Barn’ credits him with piano, vibraphone, trumpet and electric harp. He was also, if the sleeve is anything to go by, a joker with an irreverent sense of humour. Five years earlier, he’d annoyed the BBC with his Parlophone single <i>Landing of the Daleks</i>, a shameless Joe Meek influenced cash-in, that was promoted using the commercially available Scorpion Automotives Dalek Playsuit (the band probably owned more copies of the suit than anyone else). For the purposes of the recording, Dalley’s Barn line-up christened themselves The Earthlings, and it was organist Ray Pritchard who caused the kerfuffle when he added a morse code signal – ‘SOS Daleks have landed’ – to the recording. Auntie was having none of this, and banned the single from airplay on the grounds that the interpolated SOS signal might confuse shipping. More likely it was a case of sour grapes at anyone trying to make money from one of their own commercial properties. Unfortunately, our dad isn’t on that record, as he wouldn’t hook up with Dalley for another few years. But his guitarist – the subject of this article – was.</p><p align="left" style="line-height: 24px; margin-bottom: 0cm;"><br /></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjTawietQQhgfpUftDHsie6D410uEGkVMohRXAQ7uZ3tRAv15dMwgm4FrM4t9xAt3F-x3QOeKOukwW57_feCLSvG4tXIZRLWauybP6GLX5KDuemFT7Yp4iPl8M8LjisWKV0i5sGiIet0Y7idcEO03e19s_-X8VuZOvrVB56NUkytNX0r-BCpFCvziziyxE/s1106/Screenshot%202023-12-13%20at%2011.02.51.png" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1106" data-original-width="761" height="640" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjTawietQQhgfpUftDHsie6D410uEGkVMohRXAQ7uZ3tRAv15dMwgm4FrM4t9xAt3F-x3QOeKOukwW57_feCLSvG4tXIZRLWauybP6GLX5KDuemFT7Yp4iPl8M8LjisWKV0i5sGiIet0Y7idcEO03e19s_-X8VuZOvrVB56NUkytNX0r-BCpFCvziziyxE/w440-h640/Screenshot%202023-12-13%20at%2011.02.51.png" width="440" /></a></div><p align="left" style="line-height: 24px; margin-bottom: 0cm;">Phil Nelson was a consummate jazz guitarist, who’d been active on the Midlands circuit for some time. When our dad joined up with the Dalley ensemble they became friends, sharing the same warm philosophical outlook on life. Tragically, Graham Dalley died suddenly in 1970, leaving the Barn ensemble without a bandleader and the band in search of a new residency. Naughty SOS man Pritchard teamed up with Phil and our dad to form a trio, who quickly secured a residency at the Pontins Wall Park holiday camp in Brixham, Devon. During that spring and summer, they lived in digs in Paignton and Brixham, a student-style existence that was occasionally shared by Phil’s wife Jenny and their large poodle Fred (‘You’ve heard of Manfred Mann?’ Phil said; ‘Well, this is Dog Fred Dog’).</p><p align="left" style="line-height: 24px; margin-bottom: 0cm;">There was plenty of room in the accommodation, enough for our mum, my brother and myself to visit on holiday twice during that summer. We got to know Phil quite well: he had a passion for aircraft and science fiction – the digs was littered with pulp paperbacks and copies of Aero Modeller magazine, some of which passed into my hands and are still in my possession. He never mentioned his ‘Earthling’ credentials, which is a shame, as it’s exactly the kind of thing that would have impressed us as kids – especially since the Daleks were about to make a return to Dr. Who. We saw the trio perform at the holiday camp on at least one occasion. I remember wishing to myself that they would play the James Bond theme when they did precisely that. Phil was the first person I ever saw in real life playing a ‘proper’ guitar: in this case, a Gibson Super 400, the same huge single-cutaway jazz guitar beloved of early rock and rollers. Our dad later reported that Phil had painted it blue and turned it into a wall ornament, but I rather hope this wasn’t the case – an unmolested Super 400 would today be worth around £20,000.</p><p align="left" style="line-height: 24px; margin-bottom: 0cm;">The summer season proved to be a one-off, and from the autumn onwards, the trio returned to home turf, gigging around the Midlands. Phil and Jenny visited our house on several occasions: I remember them being impressed by some of my felt-pen drawings of cartoon characters, which were always fetched out when we had visitors. A couple of years later, Phil attempted to teach me the guitar. Our dad had bought me an electric guitar for my 12<sup>th</sup> birthday, on the agreement that I would take lessons. Phil even advised us on the best instrument available from Birmingham's music shops on a budget of £30. The fact that I am not today a jazz guitarist is entirely my failing, not Phil’s. He did his level best and taught me scales and basic positions: but I was more interested in learning how to play the solo from 10CC’s <i>Rubber Bullets</i> (I had the sheet music, but the solo wasn’t included). After a few months of this tuition, we gave it up as a bad job. Aside from occasional visits to our house, I didn’t see Phil again, and the trio gradually drifted apart.</p><p align="left" style="line-height: 24px; margin-bottom: 0cm;">Decades later, I hooked up with him on facebook, where he still displayed the same warm sense of fun that had appealed to us back in the 70s. Of all my facebook friends, Phil was the most likely to comment on a post, sometimes humorously, but often with a thoughtful, philosophical insight. He never had anything to sell, or sought to promote himself in any way. He was more likely to share a photo of one of his dogs – all of whom were identical clones of the original ‘Dog Fred Dog’. It is to my eternal regret that this rekindled virtual friendship never went beyond the computer, but even in that limited capacity, I was glad to have him as a friend, and facebook won’t be the same without his ‘likes’ and comments. He was a warm and funny man, very much like our dad in outlook. He is survived by his wife Jenny and son and daugher Clark and Philippa.</p><p align="left" style="line-height: 24px; margin-bottom: 0cm;">You can hear Phil and friends warn earth of the imminent Landing of the Daleks here (and note the first two comments from Phil himself):</p><p align="left" style="line-height: 24px; margin-bottom: 0cm;"><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sFHJonHQbiM">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sFHJonHQbiM</a><br /></p><p align="left" style="line-height: 24px; margin-bottom: 0cm;"><br /></p><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg_EwS5G05CCUn2Qs08vYhyphenhyphenF5XefqHWxW9-2TQQhvsPrxdz0wxeI5NPqh5FKSBmRU05hkBODWXZ-j0ATXw1d7h7VuLhNrjOy_R5uxIPqsE5un7RWbMXzjy-iRCdtoW3MXnDfEjYHOkCbEq4_5a_n6U4W49Er3CtIVDRwvtlRCCAmqL6bjn8fIkcxw1NCkk/s1175/Screenshot%202023-12-13%20at%2011.03.13.png" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1175" data-original-width="1133" height="640" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg_EwS5G05CCUn2Qs08vYhyphenhyphenF5XefqHWxW9-2TQQhvsPrxdz0wxeI5NPqh5FKSBmRU05hkBODWXZ-j0ATXw1d7h7VuLhNrjOy_R5uxIPqsE5un7RWbMXzjy-iRCdtoW3MXnDfEjYHOkCbEq4_5a_n6U4W49Er3CtIVDRwvtlRCCAmqL6bjn8fIkcxw1NCkk/w618-h640/Screenshot%202023-12-13%20at%2011.03.13.png" width="618" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Press clipping promoting the 'controversial' single. Phil is weilding a Framus 12-string guitar.</td></tr></tbody></table><br /><p align="left" style="line-height: 24px; margin-bottom: 0cm;"><br /></p>Mart Chttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04883883503677556135noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6507883749037788533.post-80788164312674749342023-12-09T06:35:00.000-08:002023-12-09T06:35:48.116-08:00Something Nice (will fly by)<p> </p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj75cy8udEW5Jldky-CMKdyvGFJLWHSP3ae4rZtEFainP6EuJgQgESVw7-xQIYjwqHPVA0SM4ZKGJpkIS54FvKiPCm92YtoX4Wi9icNL6ZqUXsFtgNb71P7yoIEZAlzxkLlNM1a19BnhPAiRUVPLmxkjcogKZUAVPb9vWpa7EKlWogU1N_K7B2H_vjzz_o/s3295/D0030393-362A-4EEF-BB42-45C14B984FE3.jpeg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="3295" data-original-width="2981" height="640" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj75cy8udEW5Jldky-CMKdyvGFJLWHSP3ae4rZtEFainP6EuJgQgESVw7-xQIYjwqHPVA0SM4ZKGJpkIS54FvKiPCm92YtoX4Wi9icNL6ZqUXsFtgNb71P7yoIEZAlzxkLlNM1a19BnhPAiRUVPLmxkjcogKZUAVPb9vWpa7EKlWogU1N_K7B2H_vjzz_o/w580-h640/D0030393-362A-4EEF-BB42-45C14B984FE3.jpeg" width="580" /></a></div><br /><p></p><p align="left" style="line-height: 24px; margin-bottom: 0cm;">It was whilst looking through a 35-year-old diary for something else that I stumbled across the entry for today’s date, December 9. At a glance, it might seem to an outside observer like a relatively ordinary entry. I’d taken the day off work and had gone with my dad on an early shopping trip into Lichfield. This in itself was a relatively unusual event, as I normally went on such trips alone. It may even have been the last time I ever went shopping with our dad (although he would live for another thirteen years). Did I think back to the times he took myself and my brother around the toyshops of Lichfield during the 1960s? Probably not. Of course, if this really was our last ever shopping trip, I had no way of knowing this. It’s the kind of thing that is revealed only when it’s too late to do anything about it. During our tour of the shops in search of gifts, we happened to look in at the small independent record shop that had its premises in Tudor Row, a small passage alongside a genuine Tudor building where we’d been bought sugar mice as children. Browsing through the shop’s rack of recent releases, my eye was caught by the sleeve of a 12” single, featuring an attractive design in the style of the Incas. The record was by an ensemble called Robert Lloyd and the New Four Seasons, of whom I knew precisely nothing. Lloyd was, if I had but known it, something of a local hero, hailing from Birmingham, whose band The Nightingales had been long standing favourites of DJ John Peel. I’d never heard the record, but something about the sleeve intruigued me enough to risk £2.95 on a purchase (the price tag is still attached to the sleeve 35 years later).</p><p align="left" style="line-height: 24px; margin-bottom: 0cm;">Back at home, that lunchtime, I gave it a listen. The song, <i>Something Nice</i>, weighed in at a staggering nine and a half minutes – three times the length of the average pop single. It began with a relentless ‘four on the floor’ drumbeat that didn’t let up for the entire recording. The melody was pretty unimaginative, consisting of just two notes for the verse and another two notes for the chorus. For all that, it was quite listenable, if lacking in dynamics. But what really drew me in were the lyrics – and at nine and half minutes, there were quite a lot of them. The singer seemed to be taking himself to task for his failure to grasp life’s opportunities for fear that ‘something nice would fly by.’ He talks about his responsibilities, his failings, his work and his relationships in a frank and self deprecating manner. And that was what I related to. Like Mr. Lloyd, I wasn’t entirely happy with how my own life was shaping up (shaping down?) at the age of twenty-seven. I too was afraid that ‘something nice might fly by’. Rather than sticking my head above the parapet and risking having it shot off, I’d been keeping my various creative endeavours – primarily of a musical nature – to myself. The single seemed like a warning. It might have been sent by my future self. And yet I failed to act upon it. Thirty-five years later, as far as ambitions go, I’m still where I was that December day back in 1988. The only difference between then and now is that, at the age of 27, I still had some good years ahead, years in which I might conceivably make good on my failure to get anything off the ground. At the age of 62, the Billy Liar-esque notion of somehow becoming a pop singer – or even a writer of scripts for Danny Boon – begins to seem not only unattainable but laughable. The creative industries have never gone a bundle on old people. You’ll have noticed the decided lack of sexagenarians on TikTok.</p><p align="left" style="line-height: 24px; margin-bottom: 0cm;"><i>Something Nice</i> – life, to be precise – has indeed flown by. Finding that diary entry feels akin to Philip Larkin’s reflection on lost youth in his verse <i>Sad Steps</i> (1968). The poet, ‘groping back to bed after a piss’ parts the curtains and is confronted by the startling sight of a full moon in a ‘wind-picked sky’. It serves him not as a romantic symbol, but as ‘a reminder of the strength and pain of being young/ that it can’t come again/ but is for others undiminished somewhere.’ On finding that diary entry, I fetched out my copy of <i>Something Nice</i> – it lay in a cupboard mere inches from where I sat – and, for the first time in many years put it on the turntable. As I did so, the windy overcast of the morning blew aside to let in a low, wintry sun – recreating precisely the same conditions of weather as on that long-lost day in 1988. I’d even venture to suggest that, purely by chance, I’d chosen to play the record at the exact same time of day. A circle had just been squared.</p><p align="left" style="line-height: 24px; margin-bottom: 0cm;">Back in 1988, I played that song to anyone who would listen. It came to feel like a kind of personal soundtrack, a manifesto even; and it accompanied a developing relationship that in time would bring some of Larkin’s ‘strength and pain’. But I was still young. I got over it. </p><p align="left" style="line-height: 24px; margin-bottom: 0cm;">As for Robert Lloyd, the single, on small indie label InTape Records, did nothing, but it got him noticed, along with his slightly more successful and tuneful pop song <i>Nothing Matters</i>. Within a year or so, he’d been signed to Virgin. <i>Something Nice</i>, now pruned to a radio-friendly four minutes, was re-recorded and reissued. It still did nothing. Lloyd and Virgin soon parted company. Much later, he would revive his new wave combo The Nightingales, whose noisy cacophony was a world away from the smoother sounds he’d been aiming for in the late 80s. As an artist, Lloyd seemed determined not to play the conventional pop star game. When last sighted, he was the subject of a Sky Arts documentary, and came across as an immensely likeable, funny guy with a Midland sense of humour that I got immediately. The kind of chap who could keep you entertained for hours down the pub. His own personal Something Nice has long since flown by, but judging from that film, he seems happy with his lot.</p><p align="left" style="line-height: 24px; margin-bottom: 0cm;">As for me, to subvert a lyric from Doris Day, what will be has been. I can look back thirty-five years but I can’t look that far forward. As a more quotable source has it, ‘nothing will come of nothing.’ And I can’t say I wasn’t warned.</p><p align="left" style="line-height: 24px; margin-bottom: 0cm;">If any of that intrigues you, then the original, full-length Something Nice can be heard here:</p><p align="left" style="line-height: 24px; margin-bottom: 0cm;"><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FuL4isLD7cc">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FuL4isLD7cc</a><br /></p><p align="left" style="line-height: 24px; margin-bottom: 0cm;"><br /></p><p align="left" style="line-height: 24px; margin-bottom: 0cm;"><br /></p>Mart Chttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04883883503677556135noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6507883749037788533.post-68264606428927299732023-09-26T14:41:00.000-07:002023-09-26T14:41:23.179-07:00The Plastic David McCallum Affair<p> </p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiaPTP-wVFSgg8cQnx4pI0w3xeZlXymXQjeX6L5t1yHZbtXpw2n9lEoBZkUjSoE4RB2XF14ahCIKnIWUlsob7Ix1WYRbYBKGF5kYLwT6rFfg6orpwvJjIfXHR0hsEt2LQsyA5YxX3H0TpD7fw4cYckqQIONt71s3zvwzFRWdHThHjcAbR3Cxc9Rdyz6sEo/s768/skynews-the-man-from-uncle_6298190.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="432" data-original-width="768" height="360" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiaPTP-wVFSgg8cQnx4pI0w3xeZlXymXQjeX6L5t1yHZbtXpw2n9lEoBZkUjSoE4RB2XF14ahCIKnIWUlsob7Ix1WYRbYBKGF5kYLwT6rFfg6orpwvJjIfXHR0hsEt2LQsyA5YxX3H0TpD7fw4cYckqQIONt71s3zvwzFRWdHThHjcAbR3Cxc9Rdyz6sEo/w640-h360/skynews-the-man-from-uncle_6298190.jpg" width="640" /></a></div><br /><p></p><h3 style="text-align: left;"><span style="color: #0b5394;">The strange immortality of the toyshop icon...</span></h3><p style="line-height: 24px; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: justify;">One of the side effects of being a well-known actor in an iconic television series or film is that sooner of later you’ll probably get turned into a doll. It tends to affect performers in most fantasy, spy-fi and horror series, and I’ve always thought what a curious thing it must be to see your effigy in a toyshop window, a plastic plaything, an action figure that will long outlast the original. But in order to become an effigy, one must first become an icon. And David McCallum was certainly that.</p><p style="line-height: 24px; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: justify;">For viewers of a certain age, McCallum will forever be Steel to Joanna Lumley’s Sapphire. Others will remember him as Ashley-Pitt (‘Dispersal’), the ingenious inventor of <i>The Great Escape.</i> He was incarcerated again in the BBC’s <i>Colditz</i> between 1972 and 74, and rendered see-through in NBC’s short lived <i>The Invisible Man</i> in 1975. Still more recently, he became familiar to modern audiences through his role in <i>NCIS</i> which endured for twenty years. For me, though, he will always be Ilya Kuryakin. And it was in this incarnation that he became immortalised in soft poly vinyl sometime in the late 60s by Gilbert Toys. I discovered their UNCLE action figures in an out of the way toyshop in Southern Ireland in the summer of 1970, where they had probably been gathering dust for several years. The dolls were cheaply made and not a patch on Palitoy’s definitive Action Man: simply dressed in black trousers and roll neck sweater, each came equipped with a pistol in a shoulder holster. If I’d been Robert Vaughn or David McCallum, I’d have found them laughable if not insulting, and as the image below shows, the resemblance to the actors was slight to the point of non-existent. Action-figure Ilya looks rather more like John Inman: ‘Mr. Kuryakin, are you free?’ </p><p align="left" style="line-height: 24px; margin-bottom: 0cm;"><br /></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi9WEfMpLksxnAfS6VuqjCzGsjny56bOKegp0jp9yfIftQ_2GYTimtfI_JxreOo9szt3uc9LjAp56SfnnxVvl2REscIgjEc4qcVnS7xRrl3Qz9b9jWScCQHVPxnMeC4SyjEDASz3daS9zETwxSdeUrUkAAuMv3ZdLn17qaIEAn5Jur5VmSfzlPpFa38BHY/s1354/img20230926_09551115.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1354" data-original-width="1297" height="640" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi9WEfMpLksxnAfS6VuqjCzGsjny56bOKegp0jp9yfIftQ_2GYTimtfI_JxreOo9szt3uc9LjAp56SfnnxVvl2REscIgjEc4qcVnS7xRrl3Qz9b9jWScCQHVPxnMeC4SyjEDASz3daS9zETwxSdeUrUkAAuMv3ZdLn17qaIEAn5Jur5VmSfzlPpFa38BHY/w614-h640/img20230926_09551115.jpg" width="614" /></a></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br /></div><p style="line-height: 24px; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: justify;">In his UNCLE alter ego, David McCallum became a poster boy of the mid 60s. His youthful looks belied the fact that he was over thirty when the series started, and the same age as Robert Vaughn, who looked decidedly more mature. Seeing your image on the covers of books and magazines must be just as uncanny as becoming a plastic doll, and McCallum’s face was plastered all over teenage publications, not to mention the many ‘literary’ spin-offs from his TV success. In the face of such iconography, it can be hard for a performer to be taken seriously, and I always had the impression that the real David McCallum was studious and rather intense. His appearance on the BBC’s <i>Juke Box Jury </i>in 1960, alongside his then wife Jill Ireland was decidedly straight-faced and he was withering to the point of condescension in his assessment of some of the music on offer. Something of this seriousness comes across in his portrayal of Steel, and in the character of Simon Carter in <i>Colditz</i>, but he brought a much lighter, charismatic approach to Kuryakin. Both he and Vaughn always looked as if they were having a ball in the UNCLE adventures.</p><p style="line-height: 24px; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: justify;">It could be argued that of all the pop culture heartthrobs of the 1960s, Ilya Kuryakin was an excellent role model: a Russian who was on ‘our’ side. In an era still tainted with the dregs of McCarthyism, a positive portrayal of a Soviet agent on American television was quite a daring decision, and Kuryakin’s example paved the way for <i>Star Trek</i>’s Mr. Chekov a couple of years later.</p><p style="line-height: 24px; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: justify;">It’s a fine tribute to McCallum that his UNCLE character is still remembered over fifty years after the series ended, and was namechecked in every one of today’s obituaries. It was the show that made his name, put his face in hundreds of books and magazines, and his cartoon image in comic strips. It also put him in the toyshop window; not merely as an action figure but a feature on a must-have toy car, Corgi’s famous ‘Thrush Buster’ Oldsmobile, where a tiny, plastic McCallum could be made to pop out of the passenger window by pressing the periscope on the roof. It's a strange form of immortality, and it's granted to only a few of us...</p><p align="left" style="line-height: 24px; margin-bottom: 0cm;"><br /></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhuz9KWhRh1lza_xKBpAjJyVm07oM2hG5ngapkDaE8u9LPoS_b2fnaEwLCT4l4s7BICphXYkNVXpZRNHpQ1akoaCgmz39vzz8VGZr1MNsIJmVjDF6A7tKle9JVyFa5tf3c2IC84210sYUEv5TFX98pmsRQ8OGmZTjJj0X50yDiDvc5yTJR3OyuRVHqEiTo/s2538/img20230926_10004517.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="2119" data-original-width="2538" height="534" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhuz9KWhRh1lza_xKBpAjJyVm07oM2hG5ngapkDaE8u9LPoS_b2fnaEwLCT4l4s7BICphXYkNVXpZRNHpQ1akoaCgmz39vzz8VGZr1MNsIJmVjDF6A7tKle9JVyFa5tf3c2IC84210sYUEv5TFX98pmsRQ8OGmZTjJj0X50yDiDvc5yTJR3OyuRVHqEiTo/w640-h534/img20230926_10004517.jpg" width="640" /></a></div><br /><p align="left" style="line-height: 24px; margin-bottom: 0cm;"><br /></p>Mart Chttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04883883503677556135noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6507883749037788533.post-54423203972839222382023-09-23T06:21:00.001-07:002023-09-23T06:21:59.451-07:00Whistle Stop<p style="text-align: justify;"> </p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: justify;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjjlaq7LIUlFq0g8Kn0kKoCgLhN6GyyKHF8O80bgS379RurnEFavWnZzPLPgOglHgY04fUkimexQP9cn1vD3xvLo5Kdhxq_AFFTa2S7ZqjA6laVvwu89aaksBS71wk006x0hPkJjJzGFtgQhddwVFd9dnNLrDzGNb4x4_5Ibo1pvkd700PbQjxqu6AwjwY/s976/_131122971_roger_6ac6baf1a5ea900e1ad2b99c15430e1d0645411c.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="549" data-original-width="976" height="360" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjjlaq7LIUlFq0g8Kn0kKoCgLhN6GyyKHF8O80bgS379RurnEFavWnZzPLPgOglHgY04fUkimexQP9cn1vD3xvLo5Kdhxq_AFFTa2S7ZqjA6laVvwu89aaksBS71wk006x0hPkJjJzGFtgQhddwVFd9dnNLrDzGNb4x4_5Ibo1pvkd700PbQjxqu6AwjwY/w640-h360/_131122971_roger_6ac6baf1a5ea900e1ad2b99c15430e1d0645411c.jpg" width="640" /></a></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><h3 style="text-align: justify;"><span style="color: #cc0000;">Remembering Roger Whittaker (1936-2023)</span></h3><p style="line-height: 24px; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: justify;">You had to look pretty hard to find obituaries in the British media for the singer Roger Whittaker, who died last week aged 87. A friend of mine heard it reported on the BBC World Service, perhaps unsurprising given that Whittaker always enjoyed a large following across Europe, where his popularity endured long after his last appearance on the UK charts. What you won’t find in any of his obituaries is much in the way of reference to his career on television. Wikipedia makes no mention of it, and lazy obituarists no doubt rely on that sole source of reference. Even more surprisingly, his own website (which has yet to report on his demise) deals only with his career as a singer. Yet it was on BBC television that I first came across ‘Rog’ Whittaker, back in the mid 60s when he had yet to make an appearance in the pop charts.</p><p style="line-height: 24px; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: justify;">Whittaker, raised in Kenya to parents who hailed from Staffordshire, came to the UK in the late 50s to study biochemistry at Bangor University. His first songs appeared on flexidiscs issued with the campus newspaper, and these activities shortly led to his first professional engagements. Folk music was enjoying a spike in popularity in the early 60s, and Whittaker’s style included his unique and very accomplished whistling, a distinctive touch which allowed him to stand out from the crowd of acoustic guitar-weilding troubadours. He was soon signed to Fontana Records, who issued his first single, <i>The Charge of the Light Brigade</i>, in 1962. From here, until the late 60s, he was known professionally as ‘Rog’ Whittaker. It would be seven years until any of his records broke into the UK charts, by which time he was already well established on BBC television and radio. His first BBC engagement was on <i>The Talent Spot</i>, a showcase for newcomers broadcast on the Light Programme on Tuesday 10 April 1962. It was to be the first of many radio broadcasts that year, on programmes including <i>The Monday Show</i>, <i>The Beat Show</i> and <i>Country Club</i>.</p><p style="line-height: 24px; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: justify;">In the same year, he secured his first TV spots, on Ulster Television’s <i>This and That</i>, then, in August, BBC Television’s <i>The Saturday Show</i>, a primetime 7pm variety show with an international flavour, introduced by Ted Ray. Whittaker's Kenyan roots were specifically mentioned in the<i> Radio Times</i> billing. In 1964, billed as ‘Roger’, he appeared in <i>Open House</i> on the recently inaugurated BBC2, a programme described in the <i>Radio Times</i> as ‘People – Places – Pops’, on a bill that included Acker Bilk, Vince Hill, Dusty Springfield and The Swinging Blue Jeans.</p><p style="line-height: 24px; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: justify;">In 1965, he became a regular contributor to BBC2’s pop/folk showcase <i>Gadzooks!</i> sharing billing on his first appearance with The Byrds and Sonny and Cher. 1967 saw appearances on <i>The Rolf Harris Show</i>, <i>Crackerjack</i>, and a regular guest spot on <i>Now For Nixon</i>, a children’s entertainment hosted by avuncular magician David Nixon and including contributions from Basil Brush. It must have been these appearances on children’s television that first introduced me to the bearded balladeer, with his trademark whistling. His self-penned ‘Mexican Whistler’ became a kind of musical calling card around this time, despite failing to chart in the UK. It turned up regularly on the radio and would almost certainly have been a playlist favourite on the likes of <i>Junior Choice</i>.</p><p style="line-height: 24px; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: justify;"><br /></p><table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: justify;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgue_x87f7lR_HosG0oj-r9jSaSpMVp52RNxgUHyJrXciG0FqetFAxc8jGOoSGVg2ICLhqB1oJplclqBf0_4-Ybot0cdLrVtQF-Jv9OmhpsxM-w2dk7l2JQukj2_PZe3XRJbcEY6PPFx_RMeDVhVaOlOSIbU0Hna9aOvIJgxJY7v5vZVL25iaMOg48_paY/s435/Screenshot%202023-09-23%20at%2010.10.38.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="435" data-original-width="406" height="640" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgue_x87f7lR_HosG0oj-r9jSaSpMVp52RNxgUHyJrXciG0FqetFAxc8jGOoSGVg2ICLhqB1oJplclqBf0_4-Ybot0cdLrVtQF-Jv9OmhpsxM-w2dk7l2JQukj2_PZe3XRJbcEY6PPFx_RMeDVhVaOlOSIbU0Hna9aOvIJgxJY7v5vZVL25iaMOg48_paY/w598-h640/Screenshot%202023-09-23%20at%2010.10.38.png" width="598" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">'Rog' and his fellow performers on <i>Whistle Stop</i>, 1967</td></tr></tbody></table><p style="line-height: 24px; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: justify;">These guest spots on BBC television paved the way for Whittaker to host his own show, aimed at a young audience, which took over the 4.55pm slot from <i>Now For Nixon</i> on Friday 18 August 1967. The new show was called <i>Whistle Stop</i>, its title playing on the host’s trademark performing style. A preview panel in <i>Radio Times</i> summed it up as ‘a fast-moving tour with music, puppetry, quizzing, car-racing and comedy.’ The forty-five minute show was certainly all that. Whittaker, still billed as ‘Rog’, would sing songs and preside over a variety of entertainments, with Richard ‘Mr Pastry’ Hearne and Dodi West as regular contributors. Also on board was puppeteer Larry Parker and his white rabbit glove puppet Theodore – who even received his own billing in the <i>Radio Times</i>. </p><p style="line-height: 24px; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: justify;">The ‘quizzing’ referred to in the <i>Radio Times</i> took the form of a quick-fire contest named, inexplicably, ‘Baddlewat’. ‘The questions are quite simple,’ read the article, ‘ – the accent is on the swiftness of the replies by the two teams of five.’ I can remember this part of the show quite well, but have no clue as to the mystifying title which baffled me then as now. Perhaps it was a call sign like ‘bingo’ that the contestants had to shout out? Either way, ‘Rog’ presided over the game, with assistance from Larry Parker and Theodore. The show also featured a ‘grand prix’ – which to judge from the <i>Radio Times</i> piece was run using slot cars of the Scalextrix variety – and film inserts featuring the misadventures of Richard Hearne in charge of a Scout troop. The show ran for seven weeks, and returned in February 1968, with Whittaker billed as ‘Rog’ in the <i>Radio Times</i> for the first week only. Thereafter, he appears to have settled on Roger for all future performances. For this second series, Dodi West was replaced by Dilys Laye, and Jack Haig’s exploits as ‘Mr Wacky Jacky’ took the place of Richard Hearne’s filmed inserts. This second run lasted an impressive fifteen weeks.</p><p style="line-height: 24px; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: justify;">Alongside his TV series, Whittaker was still making regular appearances on radio, contributing songs to <i>The Piano Magic of Ronnie Aldritch</i> during the spring of 1968, and turning up as a guest on various other shows. In April 1969 he hosted a one-off evening show <i>My Kind of Folk</i> on Radio One, and would eventually be given his own mid-morning show on Radio Two commencing in October 1970. By this time, Whittaker had scored his first major chart success with <i>Durham Town (The Leaving)</i>, the first of several chart entries that would see him into the early 70s. On BBC television, he returned to guest spots on the likes of <i>Crackerjack</i> and even <i>The Kenneth Williams Show</i>, whilst over on ITV he presented <i>Whittaker’s World of Music</i>, a compilation of which can be seen on YouTube:<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oG9q_jYpiJA" style="color: navy;">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oG9q_jYpiJA</a> This was very much of its time, with a studio set that had seen service in many previous pop music productions, and a line-up slanted towards the easier listening end of the genre. It was all a far cry from ‘Rog’’s folk roots. Also on ITV, in 1971, he made a surprising appearance on the soundtrack to an episode of LWT’s <i>Budgie</i>, in which he can be heard singing (and whistling) the songs <i>Two Little Boys</i> and <i>Do Not Forsake Me Oh My Darling</i>, their lyrics illustrating Budgie’s daydream of becoming a ‘have-a-go’ hero. Even further away from his customary territory was Whittaker’s contribution of the title song to Cornel Wilde’s unhinged apocalyptic movie <i>No Blade of Grass</i>. His thoughtful ballad sounds remarkably modern with its warning of environmental hazards and impending natural disaster.</p><p style="line-height: 24px; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: justify;">1973 saw him participating as a panellist in a BBC wildlife quiz <i>The Animal Game</i>, which continued into the following year, while the latter half of the decade brought appearances on <i>The Vera Lynn Show</i>, <i>Going For a Song</i> and <i>It’s a Celebrity Knockout</i> amongst others.</p><p style="line-height: 24px; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: justify;">Two years later, his chart career underwent an unexpected revival when his song <i>The Last Farewell</i> went to number two in the UK Top Forty. It was only the massive sales of Rod Stewart’s <i>Sailing</i> that prevented Whittaker’s song from topping the charts. It owed its origins to Roger’s Radio Two show, wherein he would invite listeners to send in lyrics which he would then set to music, and had been recorded and released without fanfare on his 1971 album <i>New World in the Morning</i>. The single release came about when the song was discovered by the wife of a radio programme director in Atlanta Georgia. Airplay popularity led to a single release and the song was soon in the top 20 of the Billboard Hot 100. It would go on to become Whittaker’s biggest success, selling over eleven million copies worldwide. Promoting the track on British television saw him make a return visit to <i>Top of the Pops</i>. Aged only 29, he still cut a mature figure amongst the post-glam pop idols of the era, but it was not to be his last appearance on the show. His duet of <i>The Skye Boat Song </i>with Des O’Connor became a surprise chart hit in 1986, reaching number 10 and earning him a final appearance on the iconic pop programme.</p><p style="line-height: 24px; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: justify;">Whittaker continued to record until 2012, releasing many albums in German during the 1980s and 90s, a reflection of his enduring popularity in that country. At home, he tended to be consigned to the Golden Oldies/ Where Are They Now category, and his sporadic television guset spots had more or less come to an end in Britain by the beginning of the 90s.</p><p style="line-height: 24px; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: justify;">For me, it will always be those early TV spots that I remember, <i>Whistle Stop</i> in particular. Information on the show is scant, and it’s taken several years of trawling through archives to unearth anything useful. His obituaries have nothing to say about his TV career, yet as we’ve seen, it was these appearances that established him as a household name and face, well before his chart appearances. His unassuming, avuncular style made him a natural presenter, and it’s surprising he didn’t do more work of this kind. But music was his calling – he’d given up a potential career in science to pursue his real ambition – and it was music that ultimately made him an international star. Roger Whittaker’s career should serve as a reminder that there was once, not so very long ago, a time when talent and originality were all you needed to make it in the entertainment industry. It was his trademark whistling that first set him apart. Now he’s come to his final whistle stop.</p><p style="line-height: 24px; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: justify;"><br /></p><p style="line-height: 24px; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;"><br /></p>Mart Chttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04883883503677556135noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6507883749037788533.post-23307876417809578722023-09-11T04:13:00.001-07:002023-09-11T13:43:49.568-07:00Class of '73<p> </p><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiUqXCQ5kF6Dmw3awjwO20RSyktILLyZZ5am8-yFRSIlK0aLAVLtPJY5vlit0gXKaz-cfIT-S2xZqwwfa0IG-y_6nlyIbzKxNeliFIUZst2ED98glqwn3a8Lsnd_R97DZ2u3Itd3BC92QYwL7soiFzRkEShLit9Fc3UI9invCpv43aPdBtjjyC0VLhqCyk/s900/casanova_73.jpg" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="450" data-original-width="900" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiUqXCQ5kF6Dmw3awjwO20RSyktILLyZZ5am8-yFRSIlK0aLAVLtPJY5vlit0gXKaz-cfIT-S2xZqwwfa0IG-y_6nlyIbzKxNeliFIUZst2ED98glqwn3a8Lsnd_R97DZ2u3Itd3BC92QYwL7soiFzRkEShLit9Fc3UI9invCpv43aPdBtjjyC0VLhqCyk/w640-h320/casanova_73.jpg" width="640" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">'Ding-dong, what went wrong? ' Leslie Phillips prepares to trash his career in <i>Casanova '73<br /><br /></i></td></tr></tbody></table><p></p><h3 style="text-align: left;"><span style="color: #e69138;">TV Highlights (and Lowlights) of September '73</span></h3><div><span style="color: #e69138;"><br /></span></div><div><p style="line-height: 24px; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: justify;">Last time, I looked back at the week I started secondary education, fifty years ago. Until this point in time, TV had tended to take out a sizeable chunk of my weekday evenings (although glancing through old schedules only seems to prove that I never spent as much time in front of the box as I remember). Now, with the accession to Grammar School education, there would be the obligation to do homework of an evening. TV would, increasingly, be taking a back seat... and it was probably for the best.</p><p style="line-height: 24px; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: justify;">Coincidentally, the autumn of 1973 proved to be a fallow season on television – at least as far as I was concerned – with few big new series on offer from either BBC or ITV. Britain was sliding into economic crisis under Ted Heath’s Conservative Government, who faced pressure for wage claims from the increasingly militant NUM. By the end of the year, the infamous Three-Day Week would come into force, and the autumn would see fuel costs escalate alarmingly as new conflict kicked off in the Middle East. Belts were being tightened all round, and TV production budgets suffered accordingly. ITV had been clobbered with new rules on taxation of advertising levies, which would effectively shut down the lavish filmed productions like <i>The Persuaders!</i> that Lew Grade’s ITC had bankrolled since the early 60s. With ITV increasingly reliant on American imports and the BBC creatively treading water, there was very little to tempt viewers in the autumn line-up. New programmes were appearing in the schedule before the end of August, but big hitters were in decidedly short supply...</p><p style="line-height: 24px; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: justify;">My clearest televisual recollection from September ‘73 is seeing Derek Nimmo’s new ecclesiastical comedy <i>Oh Father!</i> which began its one and only series on BBC1 commencing Wednesday 12 September. This largely forgotten series has, surprisingly, found its way onto DVD and episodes are available online for what they’re worth. I’m sure I only remember it on account of its launch coinciding with the new term, and just to hear the theme tune again would evoke a Pavolvian response to go into the back room and do my homework. The series followed on from Nimmo's popular late-60s comedy <i>Oh, Brother!</i> and saw his character Dominic leaving his monastic life to become a Catholic priest. It can't have been a success, as the series lasted a mere seven weeks and would not return. </p><p style="line-height: 24px; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: justify;">The BBC dominated the week’s schedules in our house, from <i>Bruce Forsyth and the Generation Game</i> on Saturday evenings through to <i>Jeux Sans Frontiers</i> on Friday. On Sunday evening, two days before term began, I was tuned in for the first of a new science fiction series on BBC1. <i>Moonbase Three</i> offered a ‘realistic’ view of life on a lunar colony in the dizzying future of – wait for it – 2003. Back in 1973, with NASA’s Apollo programme still active, it seemed quite reasonable to assume that, thirty years hence, humanity would have established such outposts on the moon. The series, which ran for just six episodes, was frankly a bit of a dud. This wasn’t science fiction in the exciting mould of <i>Star Trek</i> or <i>Doctor Who</i> – it was more like <i>The Brothers</i> in outer space: a talky, stagey drama, with no aliens, explosions or any of the other futuristic trappings that Gerry Anderson was in the process of applying to the forthcoming <i>Space:1999</i>. We wouldn’t get to visit Moonbase Alpha for another two years, and in the meantime we’d just have to make do with <i>Moonbase Three</i>. It looked like a lot of plastic egg boxes. It probably was.</p><p style="line-height: 24px; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: justify;"><i>Moonbase Three</i> meant we would no longer be tuned in to the sitcom <i>Bowler</i> over on ITV, but that was no great loss. George Baker played the titular character, who was a kind of social-climbing spiv, seen originally in <i>Please Sir!</i> spin-off <i>The Fenn Street Gang</i>. A spin-off from a spin-off. Like <i>Oh Father!</i>, it may be forgotten but found its way onto DVD a few years ago. I should know, I designed the sleeve. Comedy giants John Esmonde and Bob Larbey were the writers. <i>Bowler</i> may have been a dud, but <i>The Good Life</i> awaited them…</p><p style="line-height: 24px; margin-bottom: 0cm;"><br /></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjoh5h6GorXqq7kk1cHkWJDpkLI1mJXPf3sMU9XovNYUOI7RGG3WzRcLkFcd49HR8wSaS4USRcbCTmXRkn2tSfKMH2NkO0PFPOqYNFgAwtVs5U1FSntooO6z1OlCqAv-MHHnr-OjUsJI4b6Ij5SElkg40zbjaWa3KwHJsCQ-I66aJDulQdO6k0ooRnAm9Q/s868/Screenshot%202023-09-11%20at%2011.50.34.png" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="868" data-original-width="677" height="640" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjoh5h6GorXqq7kk1cHkWJDpkLI1mJXPf3sMU9XovNYUOI7RGG3WzRcLkFcd49HR8wSaS4USRcbCTmXRkn2tSfKMH2NkO0PFPOqYNFgAwtVs5U1FSntooO6z1OlCqAv-MHHnr-OjUsJI4b6Ij5SElkg40zbjaWa3KwHJsCQ-I66aJDulQdO6k0ooRnAm9Q/w500-h640/Screenshot%202023-09-11%20at%2011.50.34.png" width="500" /></a></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br /></div><p style="line-height: 24px; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: justify;">Returning for a second series on Wednesday evenings was popular Amsterdam detective <i>Van der Valk</i>. The jolly theme music (originally a library piece) was already on its way up the pop charts where it would spend no less than four weeks at number one. I didn’t watch <i>Van der Valk</i> myself, but that music, more than any other piece of pop culture, has infused my memories of that far off autumn…</p><p style="line-height: 24px; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: justify;">Elsewhere on the commercial station, American imports held sway. You couldn’t turn on the telly on a weekday evening without encountering the likes of <i>Columbo</i>, <i>McMillan and Wife</i> or, um, <i>Hec Ramsay</i> (nope, me neither). Fridays brought <i>Hawaii 5-0</i> and <i>The Streets of San Francisco</i>, while Gerry Anderson’s glossy but shallow offering <i>The Protectors</i> kicked off the evening schedule at 7pm. I didn’t bother with any of them myself.</p><p style="line-height: 24px; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: justify;"><i>Star Trek</i> had, by this time, taken up almost permanent residence in the BBC’s evening schedule, and was usually to be found on Mondays around 7pm. 10 September’s episode was one of the worst. <i>The Alternative Factor</i>, despite belonging to the show’s first series, had been deferred in Britain and didn’t air until December 1971, making this only its second screening. The story started well enough, with a mysterious shock wave causing the whole of creation to ‘wink out of existence’ for a second. Unfortunately, it quickly descended into an impenetrable plot about an unhinged alien and his ‘anti-matter’ double who spent the rest of the episode beating each other up. <i>Trek</i> producer Robert H Justman was also behind a new offering this week on BBC1. <i>Search Control </i>followed <i>Oh Father!</i><i> </i>on Wednesday evenings, with the <i>Radio Times</i> describing it as ‘a new film series starring Hugh O'Brian, Tony Franciosa, Doug McClure as three electronic space-age agents ready for action - anytime, anywhere…’ Known as plain <i>Search</i> in America (the BBC changed the title to avoid confusion with its own series of the same name), the show ran for only one season and from YouTube clips looks to have been typical ‘spy-fi’ hokum. Homework guaranteed I never saw it, but 30 seconds online is enough to be sure I didn’t miss anything…</p><p style="line-height: 24px; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: justify;">One of few new arrivals that autumn was a series that, on paper, looked guaranteed for success: Leslie Phillips starring in scripts by Galton and Simpson. What could go wrong? It might be easier to ask what went right. Galton and Simpson completely misread the mood of the nation when they dreamed up this contemporary take on the Italian author and amorous adventurer Giacomo Casanova. Billed as ‘the adventures of a 20th Century Libertine’, <i>Casanova ’73</i> featured Leslie Phillips as Henry Newhouse (his surname a literal translation of Casa Nova), a typical bawdy, chauvinist, womanising product of his era. The first episode was met with howls of outrage from the usual suspects, and by week two it had been bumped from its 8pm slot to a safely ‘post watershed’ 9.25. I most likely saw that first episode, but it’s the scandal I remember more than anything else. Viewers were tired of being patronised with smutty inuendo and the series did no one any favours. Leslie Phillips would be absent from the small screen for the next twelve years whilst his movie career would remain mired in cheap smut for the rest of the decade. As for Galton and Simpson, <i>Casanova ’73</i> sunk what was left of their scriptwriting reputation at the BBC. A disappointing effort to revive the old <i>Comedy Playhouse</i> format at ITV lasted only one series and Simpson would retire just five years later.</p><p style="line-height: 24px; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: justify;">Finally, a curiosity in the week's schedule that's worth mentioning: Monday afternoon on BBC1 included a series entitled <i>The Fanatics</i>, focusing on ‘people with unusual enthusiams’ to quote the <i>Radio Times.</i> The subjects of this week’s edition? The England Women’s Football Team…</p><p style="line-height: 24px; margin-bottom: 0cm;"><br /></p></div>Mart Chttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04883883503677556135noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6507883749037788533.post-1375817638285025922023-09-10T06:45:00.000-07:002023-09-10T06:45:47.120-07:00Back to School, 50 Years On<p> </p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEih62NkgFw3bXD6q4pmQ9YpCzdvwdHyC2fOKRkoe3wisUNupXldJvQfcgeL7OcMr1pzbN71yTWjnn0Bm_jTgEQCM1bbx0WHjNDZit4Xv5XeT68ox9vGrw5-oDq2StDKnpV1PRkErUGyt6hyw33sIvsUn9z6Y31h9e3aPaqM3fkUX9GE1UwUkcDxL5j_mRA/s1903/events1.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="700" data-original-width="1903" height="236" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEih62NkgFw3bXD6q4pmQ9YpCzdvwdHyC2fOKRkoe3wisUNupXldJvQfcgeL7OcMr1pzbN71yTWjnn0Bm_jTgEQCM1bbx0WHjNDZit4Xv5XeT68ox9vGrw5-oDq2StDKnpV1PRkErUGyt6hyw33sIvsUn9z6Y31h9e3aPaqM3fkUX9GE1UwUkcDxL5j_mRA/w640-h236/events1.jpg" width="640" /></a></div><p><br /></p><p style="line-height: 24px; margin-bottom: 0cm;">September 11 is a date that has gone down in history, for all the wrong reasons. To me it has rather different associations, for it was on Tuesday September 11, 1973 that I started my secondary education, at Sutton Coldfield’s ‘poshest’ seat of learning, Bishop Vesey’s Grammar. The school’s heritage went back to Tudor times. It would be unfair, if not entirely inaccurate to report the same of some of the teaching staff...</p><p style="line-height: 24px; margin-bottom: 0cm;">To get to Bishop Vesey, one had to pass the eleven plus exam which, for my generation, had been bumped on a year to the age of twelve. In practical terms, this meant wasting a pointless additional year at junior school: a year spent more or less treading water, educationally speaking. That’s not to see we didn’t enjoy it. During that final year, our teacher, Mr. Bashford, was a young, cool guy who, when he wasn’t strumming Simon and Garfunkel songs on his guitar or reading to us from a book of Brian Aldiss short stories, attempted to engage our curiosity by such endeavours as sawing a pig’s head in half (the head was already detached from the pig).</p><p style="line-height: 24px; margin-bottom: 0cm;">Mr. Bashford may have been a man of his time, but the teachers that awaited us at the Grammar School belonged to a different era. Every five years, a school photograph was taken – the classic line-up of pupils and masters with the school buildings as a backdrop – and each one duly took its place along the corridor walls, to be pored over while we waited to go into our lessons. Amongst the line-ups from the 40s and 50s were faces still recognisable if no longer so youthful. A couple of venerable types might even have been gathering dust since the 1920s.</p><p style="line-height: 24px; margin-bottom: 0cm;">Their teaching methods were every bit as archaic as one might expect. I recall my very first physics lesson, delivered by a balding, boffinish character called Crook, who looked almost exactly like the headmaster from the sitcom <i>Please, Sir! </i>He was probably better suited to dealing with sixth formers gearing up for university degress, but as far as I was concerned, his lessons were incomprehensible. He marked down my first attempt at homework, but failed to explain where I’d been going wrong.</p><p style="line-height: 24px; margin-bottom: 0cm;"><br /></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiXb4k5j-btYkciD89zTc8ogq-YJuGqXQUSBwQcjR7JwzvdP7xPczs_WzbOVdIEciwevMU07RAelDa3D8GqiGlhB7LwgWLTT5wSFYNV2NmXRDWApuDuHjithXcyH0WO2UAoywlWW0fR30PEmvh6XMrJzRcjF1wtjH1g3ONS0oNadPzuTPKLLchc07inxro/s2145/img20230910_14091426.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1166" data-original-width="2145" height="347" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiXb4k5j-btYkciD89zTc8ogq-YJuGqXQUSBwQcjR7JwzvdP7xPczs_WzbOVdIEciwevMU07RAelDa3D8GqiGlhB7LwgWLTT5wSFYNV2NmXRDWApuDuHjithXcyH0WO2UAoywlWW0fR30PEmvh6XMrJzRcjF1wtjH1g3ONS0oNadPzuTPKLLchc07inxro/w640-h347/img20230910_14091426.jpg" width="640" /></a></div><br /><p style="line-height: 24px; margin-bottom: 0cm;">Crook may have been boring and beyond comprehension, but at least he was reasonably civil, unlike the character who terrorised the biology department. In his old fashioned specs he bore a remarkable resemblance to gangster Ronnie Kray, and was every bit as feared by those unlucky enough to have him for a teacher. Fortunately, our biology master was somewhat more benign, and in his light cream suits looked more like a product of the early 70s. Rather than bawling at the class in the manner of his colleague, he adopted a manner of understated menace.</p><p style="line-height: 24px; margin-bottom: 0cm;">There was something about the sciences that seemed to foster eccentric or sociopathic tendencies in the teaching staff. Most of ours were either boring, bellowing or bonkers. ‘Dingle’ Dann was all three. I never had the dubious pleasure of being taught chemistry by this ageing boffin/buffoon, who came across as a kind of off-colour Charles Hawtrey, and became a butt for all manner of schoolboy pranks. In my first year, I was taught chemistry by the school’s then headmaster, nicknamed ‘Spock’. He was every inch the balding, slightly bonkers stereotype of the nutty professor, with a kind of manic quality but without the menacing air of some of his colleagues. For all that, his efforts to teach us stuff like the periodic table fell on deaf ears as far as I was concerned. When we returned after the summer break in 1974, it was to the news that ‘Spock’ had died during the vacation. He was replaced by a mathematician with a broad West Country accent and a bantering comic personality, whose most memorable moment was appearing on the BBC’s <i>Ask the Family</i> in 1977.</p><p style="line-height: 24px; margin-bottom: 0cm;">Not all the masters were knocking on heaven’s door. Some of them were fresh out of teacher training colleage, via Oxbridge (a mandatory requirement to secure a job on the staff). The best of this bunch earned our respect for their easygoing manner – step forward Mr. Fisher of the English department – while the worst came across as tyrants in waiting. Tempers would flare, but always ineffectually.</p><p style="line-height: 24px; margin-bottom: 0cm;">It wasn’t long before I took to caricaturing some of them. A master in the RE department was known for his prominent chin, and drawing him was easy. Balding, bespectacled history teacher Nick Malden was easier still: all you needed was an oval, a hint of hair at the temples, two blank spectacle lenses and a simple nose and mouth. These activities reached their natural conclusion in the sixth form when I presented an, ahem, entertainment based on imitations and drawings of selected members of staff. Such endeavours are often cited in the biographies of comedians like Steve Coogan. So what went wrong? </p><p style="line-height: 24px; margin-bottom: 0cm;"><br /></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjlcSJDItv0V8kBEU2CIDEQgPtUbCs2LthqI98wXRZQwJ2zIMrFczrOg6wHsST4ac6-bGElPkokZLG85jRlCNJ-2CYM06YNgVFnaegtdJ7bSYZIG0cdK7QLPdqhnOJJ6ovoPXERgN3ZXqaUm5l9HcVntB8oLiVQ71RLXNovvYmIn_pUeqblE67y3_KPBxM/s1839/img20230910_14193378.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1389" data-original-width="1839" height="484" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjlcSJDItv0V8kBEU2CIDEQgPtUbCs2LthqI98wXRZQwJ2zIMrFczrOg6wHsST4ac6-bGElPkokZLG85jRlCNJ-2CYM06YNgVFnaegtdJ7bSYZIG0cdK7QLPdqhnOJJ6ovoPXERgN3ZXqaUm5l9HcVntB8oLiVQ71RLXNovvYmIn_pUeqblE67y3_KPBxM/w640-h484/img20230910_14193378.jpg" width="640" /></a></div><p align="center" style="line-height: 24px; margin-bottom: 0cm;"><br /></p><p style="line-height: 24px; margin-bottom: 0cm;">Let’s return to September 1973. I have surprisingly little recall of that first day and how it panned out. Somehow, we were allocated into forms – mine was 2.4 (styled as two/four). No ranking was implied by the numeric system – not this year at any rate. I found myself in a classroom at the dead end of the deepest and dingiest corridor in the whole building, under the form mastership of ‘Herr’ Arthur Cash (he taught German). Mr. Cash was one of the good guys, and as if in Karmic payback, would live to a ripe old age. Many years later, he came to the assistance of our mum when she suffered a fainting fit whilst waiting for a bus in Sutton Coldfield. He was that kind of man: helpful, never angry, endlessly patient and with a warm, avuncular personality.</p><p style="line-height: 24px; margin-bottom: 0cm;">I don’t remember if we had any actual lessons on that first day, but we would certainly have been issued with timetables which we dutifully filled out, probably copying it all down from the blackboard. I entered mine into my diary for the following year, and it’s reproduced here for what it’s worth. Monday was a horror: double physics first thing (little wonder I couldn’t get to grips with the subject) and the entire afternoon devoted to ‘games’. No self respecting grammar school allowed soccer on the curriculum, so rugby was the order of the day. Aged twelve, I had absolutely no appreciation of what a hard and violent game this was. I soon found out, and despise it to this day. During the winter months, it was either rugby or cross country on those afternoons, and cross country meant a mile walk to the nearby Sutton Park before the run even started. The route was specially chosen to include plenty of swampy, muddy terrain, and it was a long time before I could go back to Sutton Park without rekindling memories of those afternoons of torture.</p><p style="line-height: 24px; margin-bottom: 0cm;">The school buildings, like the teaching staff, were an uncomfortable blend of ancient and modern. The oldest wing dated back to the 19<sup>th</sup> century and strongly resembled Colditz castle, which I knew well from the BBC series. It even had architectural features like light wells, which figured in at least one escape attempt (from Colditz, not school). The heart of the site comprised two wings that had been added on in the 1930s, and contained ‘Big School’ where assemblies for the older years were held. Former science classrooms had recently been turned over to other departments, which meant that our history room had a kind of miniature greenhouse window jutting out at the far end. From this block, a glazed link bridge allowed access to the almost brand-new science block, opened a mere six years earlier, where purpose built labs were available for physics, chemistry and biology. In addition, there was a large art room, complete with a north light – although it’s fair to say that subjects like art weren’t actively encouraged in a school that favoured hard academic subjects. The modern block also contained the school canteen, although modernity did not extend to the menu.</p><p style="line-height: 24px; margin-bottom: 0cm;">School dinners were dished up on a first come first served basis, with a rota system in operation. Each year would be allocated its place, with sixth formers free to come and go as they pleased. Anything half way decent like fish would soon ‘sell out’, whilst the likes of liver and onions would endure until the end of service, so it was pot luck if your year was last in the rota for the day. It was not unknown for some of us to come away with nothing more than a serving of mashed potato when the meat courses were just too awful to contemplate. Nothing tasted the way one expected. ‘Faggots’ were grey instead of brown, and tasted plain weird. Meat consisted of a lot of scrag end and fat. Even the fish was fake – the price of cod was being driven skywards by the so-called ‘Cod Wars’ of the era, so the education authority specified a cheaper alternative, ‘coley’. It was okay, but you had to watch out for the bones. If all the hot meals were unappealing, there was always the choice of a salad, but – and I’ll never understand how this was possible – school salads always, always tasted odd. They also came with hard boiled egg as standard, and to this day I can’t take hard boiled egg at any price. One was on slightly safer ground when it came to dessert, with a range of tray-baked sponge puddings proving popular (even if the custard tasted slightly odd). Semolina was the one everyone avoided. It might have been quite nice, although I kind of doubt it. It’s best described as white sludge with pink bits. I never indulged. If all else failed, there was always the reliable staple of cheese and biscuits, which came pre-packed in cellophane wrappers. The small oblongs of cheese had an unerring knack of finding their way onto the floor, or even into the water jugs. But at least they were edible. Just.</p><p style="line-height: 24px; margin-bottom: 0cm;">Like many others, the school was divided into ‘houses’, for the purpose of competitive sporting events. As I avoided sport wherever possible, I took little part in these activities. The junior years all wore ties with a coloured stripe identifying your house. Mine was ‘red’ (someone somewhere lacked imagination – at junior school, our houses had all been named after explorers). In all my years at the school, I think the only thing I ever ‘did for the house’ was to produce a play in 1977.</p><p style="line-height: 24px; margin-bottom: 0cm;">The regime was not entirely unlike what one might have expected to find in prison. Apart from houses, there were various clubs and societies which one could join, although I also avoided most of these, as meetings tended to be held at lunchtimes when there were often better things to do like, er, hanging around outside. One of the few societies I joined was the weekly film club, which hired out 16mm prints of movies to be projected in ‘Big School’ after hours on Friday afternoons. A few of these passed into school legend. One week, the schlock horror <i>Theatre of Blood</i> was on the schedule, but when the afternoon’s sport was rained off, it was shown to the second years, many of whom either fainted, vomited or both. Needless to say, no one else got to see it. Another entry, 1965’s <i>One Way Pendulum</i> caused a minor stir for being utterly incomprehensible, but I’d wisely chosen not to attend that week. I finally saw it last year, confirming the wisdom of my decision in 1973. It is the worst film ever produced.</p><p style="line-height: 24px; margin-bottom: 0cm;">The six years I spent at Grammar School feel, in retrospect, much as they did at the time: a kind of cross between <i>Colditz</i> and <i>The Prisoner</i> (we had black blazers but no big white balloons). I was not a number, but I wasn’t free either, and escaping was forbidden (although I don’t recall anyone actually being shot). Tuition methods were slowly adapting themselves to a more contemporary model, but the process was as slow as glaciation. I’ve read accounts of the school careers of writers and actors a couple of generations older than myself, and they tally very closely with my own recollections. The Grammar School experience hadn’t changed much in the hundred years before I started, but fifty years on is unrecognisable. In the 1970s, I used to draw comics at home as a hobby. Today, that would be on the curriculum, and don’t think I’m joking.</p><p style="line-height: 24px; margin-bottom: 0cm;">All that remains of my old school is the building itself, and the less said about school buildings, the better. Although heavily extended in the decades since we left, the original fabric remains intact: no mean feat considering some of the buildings date from the era of Reinforced Autoclaved Aerated Concrete. A quick visit online also reveals that the uniforms have stayed the same, rugby is still played, and the pupils, once exclusively male, now include girls. The school has also recently courted controversy over its decision to sell alcohol on the premises. Not, it should be stated, to pupils, but to parents during out of hours events.</p><p style="line-height: 24px; margin-bottom: 0cm;">As to the teachers, many are long dead, whilst others soldier on into retirement. History teacher Mr. Malden was sighted in the last ten years by my mother, who fell into conversation with him at the local bus stop. The man had a photographic memory for names and initials, and incredibly, after all that time, he still remembered my brother and myself: ‘P.J. Cater, brother of M.G.A.’</p><p style="line-height: 24px; margin-bottom: 0cm;">This essay is probably longer than anything I produced during my school career, and I have no doubt that the gimlet eye of 'Ron' Homer, one of our English masters, would still take me to task on the question of style if not grammar. I almost feel obliged to add a diagram of a castle keep or a drawing of the Egyptians building the pyramids... </p><p style="line-height: 24px; margin-bottom: 0cm;"><br /></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh5YquJmbzFh6Tplrr99UvzDtJ8WBhyn1AAjOpSjzC1APBoSJF6w0D0F1EW501vwlGwEdIsIhXzMu5H4AGJO113qn1BNzbj_xsX3dfciCtGfM_-pAl61Yu6JogbRUNfiu5VYBB-E_7DcqmkP0lOjQtoA5cMn0NO2lNdB5ZgjHdTMTMkzpD91EVVE7-PwZQ/s1958/img20230910_14133615.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="610" data-original-width="1958" height="200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh5YquJmbzFh6Tplrr99UvzDtJ8WBhyn1AAjOpSjzC1APBoSJF6w0D0F1EW501vwlGwEdIsIhXzMu5H4AGJO113qn1BNzbj_xsX3dfciCtGfM_-pAl61Yu6JogbRUNfiu5VYBB-E_7DcqmkP0lOjQtoA5cMn0NO2lNdB5ZgjHdTMTMkzpD91EVVE7-PwZQ/w640-h200/img20230910_14133615.jpg" width="640" /></a></div><br /><p style="line-height: 24px; margin-bottom: 0cm;"><br /></p><p style="line-height: 24px; margin-bottom: 0cm;"><br /></p>Mart Chttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04883883503677556135noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6507883749037788533.post-41816904811760020852023-09-10T03:22:00.000-07:002023-09-10T03:22:27.792-07:00May Contain Nuts<p><br /></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjxOYgjVfvo8aybf4Lj6G2If3DnZGBJPzXVav91Cm4G0De4yv8-5ViShF2Kh2mCILSNDd4VtBHTol70-iIhMcAEPW4OWa3Ax96E71mini_zi-t1uvFl9goF4kqMJSLOUU83gj5KqZ_E7z0Q9sDPb-cVlnIyMUhAdK0ly-hKTFDjjyqPy50YBSW15HAfoA0/s900/nuts_in_may.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="450" data-original-width="900" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjxOYgjVfvo8aybf4Lj6G2If3DnZGBJPzXVav91Cm4G0De4yv8-5ViShF2Kh2mCILSNDd4VtBHTol70-iIhMcAEPW4OWa3Ax96E71mini_zi-t1uvFl9goF4kqMJSLOUU83gj5KqZ_E7z0Q9sDPb-cVlnIyMUhAdK0ly-hKTFDjjyqPy50YBSW15HAfoA0/w640-h320/nuts_in_may.jpg" width="640" /></a></div><p><br /></p><h3 style="text-align: left;"><span style="color: #6aa84f;">“Keith… what does it mean, Keith?”</span></h3><p style="line-height: 24px; margin-bottom: 0cm;">This single line of dialogue was the first I knew of Mike Leigh’s classic BBC play <i>Nuts in May</i>, delivered in a surprisingly accurate impersonation of Alison Steadman’s wheedling tones by a (male) friend of mine. He was wont to quote chunks of the play’s dialogue at appropriate moments, usually on car journeys. I hadn’t the slightest idea what it was all about until he explained it to me.</p><p style="line-height: 24px; margin-bottom: 0cm;"><i>Play for Today</i> was a series I never bothered with, indeed tended to avoid. It was angst-ridden, issue-driven, bleak and contemporary – at least that’s the way I saw it. Even today, I find it hard to work up any real enthusiasm for the long running strand of BBC television plays, with one or two notable exceptions. My aversion to the series meant that I failed to see <i>Nuts in May</i> on any of its original three broadcasts – 1976, 1977 and 1982 – following which it was left to gather dust in the archive for over a decade.</p><p style="line-height: 24px; margin-bottom: 0cm;">By the time I finally got to see it – as part of an evening of television curated by Vic Reeves and Bob Mortimer – I already knew about half the dialogue, courtesy of my friend’s imitations, and I was intrigued to see it done for real. The plot, such as it is, needs little or no explanation – a self righteous couple go on a camping holiday in Dorset. The names of the two protagonists, Keith Pratt and his wife Candice-Marie, tell us all we need to know about their personalities. They are, simply, a pair of Pratts. Keith, memorably portrayed by Roger Sloman, is a neurotic obsessive with a controlling personality, who has planned their holiday down to the smallest detail. When a road closure scuppers his plans to drive to Lulworth Cove, he won’t alter the schedule and go tomorrow instead: ‘we’re going to a quarry tomorrow,’ he patiently explains to Candice-Marie.</p><p style="line-height: 24px; margin-bottom: 0cm;">Candice-Marie, on the other hand, is a drippy passive-aggressive who can’t pronounce her ‘R’s and nags at Keith constantly. When a fellow camper, Ray, pitches nearby with a noisy radio, Keith feigns ignorance and tries to read a book. But Candice-Marie, like the externalised voice of his own righteous indignation, keeps urging him to do something about it. When Keith’s efforts come to nothing, Candice-Marie still won’t let it go: ‘he’s just ignored you, Keith.’</p><p style="line-height: 24px; margin-bottom: 0cm;">The pair are vegetarians, of course, and earnest proselytisers of their ‘better’ way of living. They chew their food 72 times – although, as Keith explains when Candice-Marie takes less time to masticate a mushroom, “the important thing is to use your discretion.” When Ray is finally invited over for a cup of tea, Keith lectures him on the various types of sugar: “glucose, sucrose and frucrose. Did you know that, Ray?” His tiny slip – frucrose instead of fructose – reveals that Keith isn’t quite as knowledgable as he likes to think he is. He takes a keen interest in the weather, and can later be heard marvelling at the ‘nimbo cumulus’ clouds towering above the landscape. He means ‘cumulo-nimbus’ and he’s wrong in any case. When he assures Candice-Marie that the rainy weather is just passing showers from low stratus that will be over soon, it’s a safe bet that the rain won’t stop. He’s the type that knows everything but understands nothing.</p><p style="line-height: 24px; margin-bottom: 0cm;">Having conceived a manic jealousy when he sees Candice-Marie visiting Ray to innocently show him some pebbles collected from the beach, Keith’s true nature begins to show itself. When Candice-Marie won’t stop talking about Ray’s problems with his college course, Keith angrily stomps across to Ray’s tent to demand he explain things for himself. Candice-Marie insists that Keith apologises, which he eventually does – in the middle of the night, shining a torch through the canvas of Ray’s tent. This is a man who, in modern parlance, has issues.</p><p style="line-height: 24px; margin-bottom: 0cm;">A power relationship has now been established, and Keith begins to take control, clearly in his element. The play’s best remembered scene has Keith and Candice-Marie coercing Ray into singing along with their inane ditty about visiting the zoo. Keith laboriously explains the structure of the simple song, leaning in manically towards Ray every time his turn to sing comes around: ‘ready Ray? Your turn now!’ Meanwhile, the camera cuts tighter and tighter in on Ray, so that the audience really gets to share his squirming embarrasment.</p><p style="line-height: 24px; margin-bottom: 0cm;">With this, the play’s first sequence reaches a peak. Candice-Marie and Keith have attained a kind of simple nirvana, strumming away together in a rendition of <i>C</i><i>areless </i><i>L</i><i>ove</i>. What can possibly go wrong? Plenty. They haven’t even finished the song before a motorcyle arrives in the field, ridden by a pair of cartoonish Brummies, ‘Finger’ and his girlfriend Honky. Despite there being acres of open space in the camp site, they elect to pitch their tent only a few feet away from Keith and Candice-Marie (who have already moved once to avoid Ray’s radio).</p><p style="line-height: 24px; margin-bottom: 0cm;">Finger and Honky are the polar opposites of the Pratts. They put up their tent inside out, and have less than no idea about the niceties of camping. Finger is surprised when he finds the ground wet the following morning. ‘It’s the dew’, Ray explains. ‘Lot of ‘em about,’ laughs Finger, in a joke I’d like to bet gets cut from any future BBC broadcasts. Morning brings the clash of values between the Pratts and their new neighbours to a head. Finger goes off gathering wood with the intention of getting a fire going. Keith attempts to advise him – ‘for your own good’ – that open fires are not permitted on the camp site. When Finger ignores him, the situation spirals out of control. All pretence at civilized behaviour is stripped away as Keith grabs a huge branch and goes after Finger, bellowing “I’ll knock your head off!” The pair have become cave men, arguing over the right to gather wood and make fire. Deep down, behind his veneer of thoughtful, civilized existence, Keith is just like any other animal – fiercely territorial.</p><p style="line-height: 24px; margin-bottom: 0cm;">Ironically, for all his insistence on upholding the letter of the law, it is ultimately Keith who falls foul of the boys in blue when a bored patrolman decides to look over his elderly Morris Minor. The spare wheel is found to be in a bald condition. “You know that’s an offence?” the policeman advises. By this time, the Pratts have been driven off their original camp site, and ultimately end up in a field belonging to a dairy farmer. While Candice-Marie strums a ditty about litter and pollution on her cheap guitar, Keith goes off with a shovel to do his toilet. Our last glimpse of him is as he crosses a barbed wire fence into a field inhabited by pigs – a final metaphor for all that has unfolded during the past hour and twenty minutes.</p><p style="line-height: 24px; margin-bottom: 0cm;">In the 70s, when <i>Nuts in May</i> was filmed, proto ‘new age’ types like the Pratts were an easy target, with their obsessively healthy lifestyle and rigidly middle class morality. A similar family was depicted in<i> The Fall and Rise of Reginald Perrin</i>, and viewers were left in no doubt as to the absurdity of their priggish behaviour. Mike Leigh’s attitude toward his own characters is crystal clear. They are laughable, ludicrous, comic stereotypes. Leigh would explore similar territory the following year with <i>Abigail’s Party</i>, again featuring Alison Steadman (Leigh’s then wife) playing a middle class grotesque of an altogether different stripe.</p><p style="line-height: 24px; margin-bottom: 0cm;">Watching <i>Nuts in May</i><i> </i>in 2023, it’s easier to find oneself in agreement with some of the Pratts’ values. Keith is right to be upset at the failure of others to consider anyone else, an attitude that has become endemic in modern society, helped along by the ‘me-first-and-screw-you’ mindset that emerged from the Thatcher years. These days, Candice-Marie would probably be singing songs about climate change. One can’t imagine the Thunberg generation finding anything to laugh at here. Po-faced eco friendly attitudes are no longer quite the ‘legitimate target’ they must have appeared in 1975 when the play was written, and coincidence or not, it’s now almost ten years since <i>Nuts in May</i> last had an outing on BBC television. One senses the Corporation’s own values are closer, in the twenty first century, to those of Keith and Candice-Marie, and that should the play be broadcast again, it will come prefaced with the now obligatory warning about ‘attitudes and language of its time.’ May contain nuts, indeed...</p><p style="line-height: 24px; margin-bottom: 0cm;"><br /></p>Mart Chttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04883883503677556135noreply@blogger.com0