Summer… the first (and other) times

'Nothing says summer like breaking up from school' – Alice Cooper's 1972 classic.

Having trashed Mungo Jerry’s summer 1970 hit last time around, I thought I’d look back through chart history to see if there has ever been such a phenomenon as the bona fide summer chart hit. There have been plenty of songs with ‘summer’ in the title, but they haven’t all charted in the summer itself, if you count the summer months as being June, July and August. To take a notable example, John Travolta and Olivia Newton-John’s Summer Nights, clearly aimed at summer chart success, didn’t chart here in the UK until mid-September. Others have been even further off beam. Percy Faith’s Theme From a Summer Place, which sounds like the essence of summer itself with its dreamy 6/8 string-drenched melody, charted in March of 1960, while Cliff Richard’s Summer Holiday entered the charts in February 1963. If this seems inexplicable, there is at least a valid reason in this case: Cliff’s song was the theme to a movie, and movies don’t do as well in the summer months when punters, quite rightly, don’t relish the thought of being stuck in the dark with Cliff Richard, Una Stubbs and Richard O’Sullivan. In the cold grey of February, however, with summer still a distant prospect, it’s a different matter.

Taking a random sample of songs that actually mention the ‘S’ word, I found that, on the whole, they tended to enter the charts in September, suggesting that record company timing has been historically up the spout. Mungo Jerry, sadly, got it exactly right, entering the charts at number 13 on 6^th June 1970, and reaching number one the following week, where they remained for another six weeks. It is somewhat depressing to relate that In the Summertime didn’t drop out of the charts until the middle of October, having spent the last last four weeks of its run in the lower reaches of the top 50.

Clearly, Mungo Jerry’s hit was a premeditated and cynical attempt at scoring a summer hit with a summer-themed song. Luckily for everyone involved with the release, May 1970 had been mostly dry, though with below average amounts of sunshine, while June exceeded the average and was notably sunny, apart from some heavy thunderstorms. Like ice-cream vendors, Ray Dorset and pals must have banked on a decent summer to assist sales of their summer song, but while June was mostly okay, July was changeable and cool. Nevertheless, the great British public kept on buying In the Summertime, as if in hope of appeasing some meteorogical deity. It worked, almost: August brought a return to warmer weather before turning wet in the third week, by which time Mungo Jerry probably couldn’t have cared less, their master plan having paid off handsomely. Incidentally, if you want to know where I get all this weather data, you can find it here: http://www.metoffice.gov.uk/learning/library/archive-hidden-treasures/monthly-weather-report-1970s

Writing a summer song in hope of a summer hit might have worked in 1970, but it wasn’t always the way. Taking late July as an average, and looking at the top 20, we find surprisingly few summer themed or titled songs during the 1960s and 70s. 1959 was, I am assured, a notable summer, and the records show that most of Britain enjoyed dry, sunny weather from June through to October. It was notably hot at times, and there was talk of a drought as farmers waited in vain for rain to come and water their crops. As a summer, it would remain unsurpassed until 1976. Hits of summer ‘59 included Bobby Darin’s Dream Lover, Cliff Richard and the Drifers’ Living Doll and Connie Francis’ Lipstick on Your Collar. Meanwhile, Russ Conway was up and down the charts like a yo-yo with Side Saddle, Roulette and China Tea all in the top thirty simultaneously. But in spite of the weather, there was nothing remotely summery about the songs in the charts.

With a peerless summer in ‘59, we might have expected to see more summer-themed chart action in 1960. But no. In fact, the only single I can find that overtly acknowledges the time of year is Brian Hyland’s Itsy Bitsy Teenie Weenie Yellow Polka Dot Bikini which was new in at 31 on 14^th July. It’s a similar picture in ’61 and ’62, and over the coming years about the only shameless summer-themed chart entry is Cliff Richard’s On the Beach of 1964. You may well ask where were The Beach Boys when all this was going on, a band inextricably linked with summer. Well, wherever they were, it wasn’t in the British pop charts, at least not during the key summer months. While Brian Wilson and his pals might have been fixated on surfing, it wasn’t a popular pastime here in the UK, and probably their most ‘summery’ hit of the 60s was California Girls, charting in early September of 1965. It isn’t until 1966 and the Kinks’ Sunny Afternoon that we find a bona fide summer single topping the charts at the right time of year; and while 1967 is familiar as the summer of love, and offered above average amounts of sunshine in June and July, there was little sign of sunny weather in the charts, where Procul Harum’s A Whiter Shade of Pale dominated procedings during the summer months.

Fast forward to the notable summer of 1976 and we find a similar picture. The only bandwagon-jumpers of the season appear to have been Steve Harley and Cockney Rebel, whose cover version of Here Comes the Sun looks suspiciously like a cash-in, entering the charts on August 1^st. Assuming the band acted at the first sign of a prolonged heatwave and picked an obvious fine weather song to cover in haste, they had every chance of recording, pressing and releasing in time to pick up sales on the back of the enduring fine weather, which indeed they did.

In fact, it wasn’t that song, but another which seemed to embody the long, warm weeks of 1976 as far as I was concerned. That song was Afternoon Delight by the Starland Vocal Band, which despite peaking at a meagre No. 18 on the chart, still sounds like the spirit of summer ‘76 whenever I hear it.

This illustrates a point: in the absence of cynically crafted summer hits like those of Mungo Jerry, Steve Harley et. al, we make our own. The summers of my childhood are imprinted in memory by such diverse waxings as Manfred Mann’s My Name is Jack, Scott Walker’s The Lights of Cincinatti, Jethro Tull’s Living in the Past and Vince Hill’s The Importance of Your Love. One of the few actual summer songs that did the job for me was Bobby Goldsboro’s Summer (The First Time) [don’t forget those brackets] which began its ten-week chart run in August 1973. From the opening bars with their ocean-drenched crashing wave sound effects to the final reprise, this song says summer in every bar (sorry if that sounds like a chocolate commercial...) Even the key, B major, sounds like summer. I doubt any other artist will ever nail it the way Bobby Goldsboro did, without the slightest hint of a cash-in.

Another song that did the job admirably, and tactically avoiding mentioning the ‘S’ word (in the title at any rate) was Alice Cooper’s 1972 hit School’s Out. Unsurprisingly, this timely release reached number one in the UK, and includes one of my favourite ‘bits’ in a pop song – the ‘no more pencils’ refrain, which is musically straining to break free, rising on two suspended fourths (C and D) before breaking back out into the home key of E minor. You can almost visualise the Bash Street kids bursting through the doors at the key change. School’s Out was, in fact, a brilliant move on the part of Mr. Furnier, who rightly recognised that nothing says ‘summer’ quite like breaking up from school. It was an observation worthy of Chuck Berry.

Just behind School’s Out in the charts of summer ‘72 we find a much less creditable effort, a blatant attempt to snare some seasonal sales by Terry Dactyl (actually Jona Lewie) and the ‘Dinosaurs’ in the form of Seaside Shuffle. Even at the time of its release, I could sense the ghostly presence of In the Summertime looming over the proceedings, and whilst it gave less offence than its predecessor, I was still aware that there was something faintly distasteful about Seaside Shuffle – the pop equivalent of a ‘kiss me quick’ hat. Fortunately Lewie would recover himself with some aplomb, albeit it would take another eight and a bit years for it to happen, and when it did, it was with another ‘seasonal’ single (although not intended as such when originally recorded), Stop the Cavalry.

Mention of Christmas brings us bang up to date and Roy Wood’s I Wish It Could Be Christmas Every Day which has just been given a ‘summer’ makeover in the name of a Boots commercial. As cynical moves go, that leaves Messrs T. Dactyl, M. Jerry et al well in the shade... one ten in the shade, maybe?

Take it away Mr. Goldsboro…

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lQvGyEKO79w

In the Summertime… of 1970

Star Trek Sugar Smacks – one of the better aspects of 1970 (although this packet dates to 1969)

When I think on the nostalgic quality of pop songs, I can never quite decide what it is I’m responding to. Is it that the songs evoke the times in which they were first released, or is it that the songs themselves are the times? Increasingly, I’m coming to the latter conclusion.

Growing up in the 60s and 70s, it was hard to escape from pop music: not that we particularly wanted to. But the songs in the pop charts were all around you: on the radio at home, playing in shops or amusement arcades, an inescapable soundtrack to whatever you were doing: going to school, going shopping, going on holiday. My point here is that I retain better memories of times when the music in the charts was of a higher quality, and, correspondingly, less pleasant memories associated with those times when the charts seemed chock full of rubbish. It doesn’t matter what was happening to me personally at any given time. But as I look back, I find memories shading from pleasant to unpleasant within a matter of months with the shifting landscape of the pop charts. By unpleasant, I don’t mean anything actually traumatic... it’s more a sensation that life wasn’t quite as enjoyable at certain moments, almost as if, to coin a phrase, there was ‘something in the air.’

Ironically, Something In the Air by Thunderclap Newman is associated in memory with a particularly pleasant few months during the hot summer of 1969: a week in Llandudno, the school summer holidays, long, warm afternoons in the back garden at home. But there was something less pleasant in the air a year later, and I can only attribute it to the music that surrounded me at the time. I’m thinking of the summer of 1970.

In retrospect, 1970 seems like a pretty okay sort of year, and in my memory, feels almost like an extension to the previous decade: an extra year of the 1960s, time off for good behaviour, as it were. The 1970s proper didn’t really get started until later – say ’ 72 or ’73 when the era-defining glam rock acts first began to dominate the charts. So that 1970 and ’71 occupied a kind of pop culture limbo. Look at any film shot in those years, and you’d swear it was still the 1960s.

That’s not necessarily the way it felt at the time. For me, 1970 and ’71 were rather mixed years, blighted in part by the arrival of a sadistic school teacher, whose methods were totally out of step with what was appropriate in a suburban junior school. These days, he’d be out of a job in a week, but in 1971 it was seemingly okay to inflict psychological torture on a class of ten-year-olds, just because a couple of them had made a mess of their science books. Somehow, the presence of this malevolent entity in my small corner of the universe seemed to be reflected in pop charts where a kind of drab, bland conformity had taken hold, and some pretty awful records held sway.

1970 got off to a pretty good start, with the likes of Love Grows, Leavin’ On a Jet Plane and Come and Get it riding high in the top 20 by early February, all of which have pleasant associations and evoke a particular moment in time. Even a ludicrous novelty like Lee Marvin’s Wandrin’ Star posesses potent nostalgia value. Oddly, though, it was the Beatles who sounded a slightly sour note for me at this time with Let It Be, which I didn’t much care for (and still don’t to this day). Slow spiritual music was definitely in vogue, but I preferred Simon and Garfunkel’s Bridge Over Troubled Water. By complete contrast, however, the single that came to define my memories of spring 1970 was Dana’s Eurovision winner All Kinds of Everything, which reached number one on April 12^th. Admittedly, my half-Irish DNA meant that I was genetically programmed to fancy Dana, even at the age of 9, but it’s the song I remember more than the singer. Even now, 47 years later, every time of hearing it is like the first. I can’t account for that. It also unlocks a cascade of associated memories, most of them centered on a craze for collecting small plastic space creatures from Star Trek branded packets of Kelloggs’ Sugar Smacks that was peaking at about this same time. In much the same way, I can’t hear Manfred Mann’s 1969 chart swansong Ragamuffin Man without recalling a rainy trip to Birmingham on the train in search of lego sets. So do the songs reflect the times, or are they the times themselves? Sometimes it’s hard to tell: but let’s move on a month or two.

By early July 1970, a kind of sullen, sickly feeling has descended, clouding my recollections of the times, and all attributable to one specific record. That record was everywhere in summer 1970, and not just here in England. It was a massive multi-million seller around the world, which perhaps serves to illustrate how far my personal musical taste had already diverged from the rest of humanity. Of course you know the song: In the Summertime, by Mungo Jerry. How can anyone hate such a feelgood, lightweight pop novelty, the perfect summer hit? Let me count the ways.

I hated every nano second of that song, then as now. Its omipresent singalong choon became part of the fabric of reality during its seven weeks – SEVEN WEEKS! Count them – at number one. A whole summer holiday, ruined by a song that took composer Ray Dorset just ten minutes to write. As long as that?

In the Summertime is the devil’s work, a viral ear worm that, once heard, is in your system for life, like musical malaria. I said I hated every nano second of it, but let me be more specific on that point: in order of loathing, I particularly hated: a) the tune; b) the ‘chit-chi-chit-uuh!’ refrain that runs like percussion through the entire track (and sounds like it was chanted by a choir of trained chimpanzees); c) Dorset’s singing voice; d) the plucked banjo that relentlessly shadows the vocal melody; e) every other aspect of the song not covered in the preceding four points. The whole hideous confection, with its cheery jugband, chugalong vibe, actually induces a state of nausea in me every time I hear it. Oh yes, and I also hated the name Mungo Jerry. Horrible. Can’t explain why.

Quite apart from anything else, it’s TOO LONG! Hearing it again recently, I noticed, as I always do, that there comes a point, about half way through, that feels like the song’s natural ending. Would that it were. Instead, the damn thing starts over again and cycles back through everything we’ve heard up to that point – a needless repetition, extending it to an almost unendurable three minutes and forty seconds in length.

Believe me when I assure you that In the Summertime is, for me, the worst song ever written or recorded, a feat that I doubt will ever be topped, even by the most desperate, commercial vapidity of Cowell, Bieber et al. It holds that status partly because I hate it as much today as I did on its release 47 years ago, and partly because of the way it blighted the whole summer of 1970. You couldn’t escape the damn thing. We were on holiday in Ireland, but I swear it was still everywhere, chit-chi-chitting out of every transistor radio in every café, on the ferry, on the car radio. It was still at the top of the charts when we got home. Would the damn thing ever go away?

Well, no. Dorset hit paydirt when he came up with In the Summertime – in effect, the opposite to a Christmas single, in that it will be guaranteed airplay at a certain time of year for as long as there are radio stations broadcasting on planet Earth, if not elsewhere. It’s probably beaming across the cosmos to other, unsuspecting civilizations, intellects vast and cool and unsympathetic, who even now must be drawing their plans against us.

In the Summertime may have been the worst offender, but for me, the summer charts of 1970 were filled with records that seemed shot through with a similar nauseous quality. I absolutely couldn’t stand Lola, by the Kinks. Not that its subject matter offended me (I had no clue what Ray Davies was singing about), it was more the lumpen, plodding production and the song itself – one which, much later, and with some reluctance, I took to performing in public. I still don’t really like it, but can at least acknowledge it with a kind of grudging admiration, unlike Mungo Jerry. Other songs that belong in the same sickly summer-turned-sour fabric of time include Christie’s Yellow River (probably best remembered in its later incarnation as a Yellow Pages commercial); Quo’s Down the Dustpipe; and Ray Stevens’ Everything is Beautiful, which just seems to strike a note of desperation with its insistence on a kind of universal ideal. If everything is beautiful, then nothing is. QED, Mr. Stevens.

The question I have to ask is this: were these songs solely responsible for clouding my recollections of the summer of 1970, or were there other aspects of the times that played a part? I’ve written elsewhere of a memorable thunderstorm that occurred in late spring of that year, and it was followed by a run of quite nasty storms peppered across the summer months. I had still to appreciate the spectacle of a really good storm, so these events, with their associated strange atmospheres of brooding afternoon gloom and menace, were certainly a factor that helped to shape my memories of summer ’70.

Another inescapable phenomenon of that year was the World Cup, the first I recall with any degree of clarity, not that it interested me in the slightest. Football just wasn’t a thing in our household, and I couldn’t even be induced to collect the commemorative coins given away by Esso petrol stations, engraved with busts of the England squad (curiously, their jaunty and wrong-by-a-country-mile pop single Back Home evokes a kind of pleasing nostalgia, for reasons that I can’t begin to explain).

A picture is slowly beginning to emerge: there’s thunder in the air, rotten music on the radio, and the nation is gripped by a phenomenon from which I feel excluded. Anything else?

The rot sets in… TV21 never recovered from this last, desperate revamp of summer 1970, that finally rendered the comic utterly worthless.

Well, it’s trivial, but there is. Since 1967 I’d been reading TV21 comic on a weekly basis. In the intervening years, it had undergone various changes in format, including a complete relaunch in late 1969, and by summer 1970 was in its death throes. The page size had shrunk to something slightly smaller than the Beano, and pretty well all the Gerry Anderson content (the comic’s original raison d’etre) was gone, pushed aside by dismal features that seemed to belong to papers like Buster or Smash, none of which held any appeal for me. Aside from Mike Noble’s vaguely inaccurate rendition of Star Trek, there wasn’t anything good left in it, but I was still being bought TV21 on a weekly basis. Watching its gradual decline into mediocrity was bad enough: watching it to a soundtrack of Mungo Jerry’s In the Summertime was almost too much to take…

Fortunately, summer 1970 wasn’t all crap pop and rotten comics: there were SpaceX toys, a range of pocket-sized plastic space hardware, derived from Project SWORD designs, and, for some unknown reason, available in huge quantities in the Republic of Ireland (where our family spent two weeks that year); also on the toy front, and also available in Ireland, were two dolls of the Men from UNCLE (you may recall that Ilya Kuryakin incorporated an unintended ‘Tiny Tears’ feature); and there was the first appearance in our household of The Beano, acquired on the ‘Munster’ car ferry. And as summer turned to autumn, my favourite programme, Fireball XL5, returned to television, after an absence of four years.

Pop music, however, was headed into a slough of despond, a kind of post-Beatles hiatus in which you could almost sense a lack of direction, and from which it would not recover for almost two years. So maybe it was this sense of unwinding, of having finally to come down from the 1960s trip that tainted the music of summer 1970. Whatever it was, I still feel faintly sick whenever I hear any of those songs…

 ‘Chi-chi-chit-uuuh! Indeed.

Sunday in Old Books

The Burntwood bookshop, as seen on Google Street View: these days, it's a B&B but still owned by the same guys.

Memories of a bookshop…

In the collective memory of those who were around to see it, the summer of 1976 was a stunner, nay a ‘scorcher’ as the popular press of the day no doubt assured its readers. What’s less well remembered is that 1975 ran it very close, with several unbroken weeks of hot, sunny weather. But it’s to the summer of ’76 that I return this time, specifically the last weekend in June.

My diary for that year informs me that Sunday June 27^th was the ‘2^nd after Trinity.’ That’s as maybe: for me, it was little short of an epiphany. I’d been chasing old books for a couple of years by this time – not great literature, you understand, but its antithesis, ie. anything remotely connected with an old and, by extension, good television programme. Anything pre-1970 was automatically good, as far as I was concerned (although I wouldn’t have extended that definition far beyond the somewhat narrow remit of filmed adventure series and sitcoms).

The main problem with collecting old books as a hobby was finding suitable sources of supply. Jumble sales were a good bet, and in the mid-70s could usually be relied upon to turn up one or other of the many Gerry Anderson annual spin-offs. Book fairs offered occasional paperback tie-ins of The Man from UNCLE and The Avengers amongst others, but such affairs were few and far between. Around 1974 I’d located a small secondhand bookshop in Wylde Green on the fringes of Birmingham, which had proved an excellent source of vintage Giles cartoon annuals, and I was constantly on the lookout for similar establishments.

In the first few months of 1976 I sent away for a catalogue of secondhand book dealers: this proved to be a typewritten and mimeographed affair, stapled together in the manner of a school magazine. Most of the advertisers were too distant to be of any use, but there were a couple close to home. On Saturday 12^th June, a blandly overcast day, I persuaded my dad to drive myself and my brother over to Burton-On-Trent where there was not one but two old bookshops. One of them was a ramshackle single-storey building, the other a more conventional shop where modern ‘remaindered’ books were sold alongside a selection of older items. Neither shop yielded much of interest: I picked up a Bonanza annual (later discovering such items to be ten-a-penny in the world of old books) but generally the trip was a disappointment, a dull affair for a dull morning, and it was a long time before we went back.

By Sunday 27^th June the weather had improved: we didn’t know it but we stood poised at the brink of an oustanding summer. That morning, while the Sunday dinner was cooking, we set off under cloudless blue skies to investigate another bookshop not far from home. Royden Smith was an antique dealer on the edge of Burntwood, near Lichfield, and his shop, a converted cottage, comprised a small front room of vintage nick-nacks, from which several other rooms opened out, these other rooms being given over to shelf after shelf of secondhand books. Having lived in Lichfield until the age of six, the trip had a pleasingly nostalgic quality, and the roads are little changed even today.

Perhaps the greatest novelty of all was the fact of the shop’s opening hours. In the mid-1970s, hardly any shops opened on a Sunday, barring petrol stations and newsagents. Had I looked further afield, I might well have discovered similar shops keeping similar hours, but to me, the ‘old bookshop in Burntwood’ was unique. Royden Smith, a character straight out of Round the Horne, greeted us warmly, and on learning of our quest to locate old childrens’ books, directed us to investigate the stables to the rear of the premises.

Aside from ourselves, the place was deserted. A back door led out into a cobbled yard strewn with odd items of antique farm machinery, rust-pocked garden furniture and chimneypots. Under the brilliant June sunshine, a soporific silence held sway. The yard was surrounded by outbuildings, the largest of which was a former stable of two storeys. Dust motes swam in the sunbeams as we stepped inside. What I saw in there stunned me (I was easily impressed at the age of fifteen, but this was a genuinely remarkable moment). We found ourselves in an Aladdin’s Cave – nay, a Tutenkhamen’s tomb – of old books. Annuals dating back to the 1940s lay piled on every hand, whilst the walls were lined with hardbacks and paperbacks of unguessable antiquity, some of which had most likely lain unread since before the war. Almost immediately, I picked up a near mint copy of the first Man from UNCLE annual, an item I’d never previously seen. Multiple copies of the 1969 Saint annual were also available, and duly gathered up, along with Stingray, Z Cars and a handful of paperbacks. We returned to the front of the shop with our arms full. None of the annuals was priced at much more than twenty or thirty pence, while paperbacks were to be had for even less. In retrospect, I regret passing up a 1940s Beano book (now worth several hundred pounds), but at the time it seemed a strange, alien artefact from an era long before I was born. May dad forked out for all the items, and Mr. Smith was pleased that we’d had a fruitful trip, even though he can’t have made much more than a couple of pounds on the deal. The next visit would not be long in coming…

In the months to come, Royden Smith’s shop (I only learned his name many years later) would prove a rich source for Giles annuals, Gerry Anderson items and untold other artefacts. The only time I ever raised an eyebrow was when, in the 1990s, I asked if they had ‘anything on Nöel Coward.’ Royden and his partner were always charming, the former in a fairly old-school camp manner, and are still going strong as far as I’m aware, having converted their premises into a guest house. The bookshop was still trading into the early part of this century, my last visit coming around 2002, but it’s that first visit that remains imprinted in the memory, coming as it did in the first weeks of what would turn out to be a record-breaking summer. Nothing else ever quite topped it: the sheer excitement of knowing we’d stumbled upon such a treasure trove feels almost dreamlike in retrospect. Clearly, no one had gone there before us in search of 1960s annuals, allowing a huge stash to accumulate.

That whole weekend, in fact, held something of an epic quality for me; and I don’t think it would be overstating things to make the claim that this specific moment in time was when nostalgia for old television series really got started. On the Saturday evening, our local ITV station, ATV, had embarked on a series of summer repeats of nostalgic old television, in response to a lively discussion on the letters page of the Birmingham Evening Mail. Suddenly, people were sharing their memories of old telly and, instead of complaining about repeats, wondering why we couldn’t have more of them. This kind of thing had never happened before, certainly not in my experience, and the resulting repeats of American series including 77 Sunset Strip and Rawhide would lead directly to ATV’s most important repeat broadcast, The Prisoner, at the end of August that same year.

The simple reality is that The Prisoner was one of the few British-made series of the 1960s to which ATV still possessed broadcast rights. Such titles were generally made available for three screenings, under terms negotiated with Equity, and by 1976 most of the classic ITC series had enjoyed their full quota, Strange Report, broadcast from March of that year, being one of the last available to ATV in the Midlands. Responding to the deluge of letters requesting old programmes, ATV announced, via the pages of the Evening Mail, that The Prisoner would be making a comeback later in the year. For all that it was on its third outing, that repeat run would ultimately prove to be more important and influential than the original 1967 broadcast.

I think it’s fair to argue that it was this single repeat screening which kickstarted the whole TV nostalgia industry as we know it today, and which continues to keep me in gainful employment. Fans who came together as a result of that Prisoner repeat would discover a shared interest in similar items from the back pages of television, film, comics, you name it. Many of them would go on to become the creators of new generations of entertainment, others the custodians of the past (I’m aware that I may be starting to sound rather like Tom Baker’s Doctor arguing the case for not destroying the Daleks... which, if you think about it, is exactly what the BBC ended up doing.)

For me, then, it feels significant that, in the space of a single weekend, ATV kicked off their Play it Again series of old telly while, some twelve hours later, I opened the door on a goldmine of nostagic publications, all of them relating to old television programmes.

That peerless summer of 1976 was about to enter the record books, but for me, it will always be topped and tailed in the memory by old telly…

Remembering Brian Cant

I first saw Brian Cant on Monday 26^th July, 1965 – if that sounds too specific, then it may well be; but it was certainly within have a day or two of that date, which marked the first appearance on BBC1 of Play School. The programme had been broadcast since April 1964 on weekday mornings, on the newly-launched BBC2, with Cant’s first credited appearance (according to the Radio Times) coming in September of the same year. Its BBC1 repeat, introduced in the summer of 1965, was a clear sign of the programme’s growing popularity, and with BBC2 still a relative luxury (reception required a 625-line receiver), this would have been many young viewers’ introduction to the series.

Play School replaced Watch With Mother in its traditional post-lunchtime slot of 1.30pm, although WWM had also been broadcast at 10.45am for some time prior to this, and would continue at the same time for the forseeable future (my earliest recollections of Watch With Mother are of seeing it in this mid-morning slot).

Brian Cant was co-presenter of Play School’s first week on BBC1, a fact which may have helped to cement his reputation as one of the bastions of children’s television, although the presenters alternated week by week, drawn from a team of familiar faces, some of whom (Carol Chell, Rick Jones) are still dimly remembered, whilst others – young actors just out of drama school – came and went without registering at all in the popular consciousness. For most viewers, Brian Cant was Play School: his easygoing, avuncular style came to characterise the programme, and was widely and less successfully imitated by others.

He was sufficiently familiar for me to recognise his voice as the narrator of Gordon Murray’s Camberwick Green when it came to air in January 1966. An LP record swiftly followed (on EMI’s budget Music for Pleasure label) once again featuring Brian Cant’s narration and his simple, unaffected singing, accompanied by Freddie Phillips’ double-tracked Spanish guitar. In those pre-video days, the LP records of Camberwick Green (and later, Trumpton) were the only means of revisiting the programmes while they were off air, and believe me, those records were played a lot. So it’s no exaggeration to say that, for me, Brian Cant was the soul of Trumptonshire. From his recorded narrative, I could easily reconstruct the worlds of Trumpton and Camberwick Green in my imagination, in some cases visualising stories I had yet to see on screen.

Brian Cant not only told the story, but also provided, in the context of his narration, the voices for all the characters, male and female. Somehow, this seemed entirely right. It’s impossible to imagine those series voiced by multiple actors. Cant’s vocal range wasn’t vast: for many characters, he relied on subtle variations of his own speaking voice, aside from which he offered a pompous voice for authority figures (such as the Mayor of Trumpton), a ‘working class’ accent (for the tradesmen of Trumpton and Chigley) and a higher register female/child voice. Within that narrow range, however, his ear for timing and nuance was spot-on.

Gordon Murray’s puppet films were produced on a level that would nowadays be considered amateur, but the results were never less than professional. Rather than pay for expensive studio time, the soundtracks were recorded at home, with Brian Cant taking up residence in a wardrobe in an effort to minimise the sound of traffic noise from outside. This wasn’t entirely successful, as the LP records reveal: one can often hear, faintly, the sound of vehicles going by – real vehicles as opposed to the likes of the Trumpton fire engine, or Mickey Murphy’s van – and Cant’s narration has a distinctive ‘wardobey’ ambiance. Noticing these ‘defects’ was all part of the fun of listening to the LPs, quite apart from the opportunity to learn the songs on guitar.

The songs were something else. Composed by session guitarist Freddie Phillips to lyrics supplied by Gordon Murray, they were nothing less than character sketches in miniature, with some quick-fire wordplay reminiscent of Gilbert and Sullivan (not that I noticed this at the time). They were also a sight more sophisticated than anything else on children’s television. Brian Cant was no great shakes as a singer, but his workmanlike, almost naive delivery leant considerable charm to these wonderful compositions. Camberwick Green offered simple but memorable melodies to which any young viewer could sing along, but when it came to Trumpton, Freddie Phillips upped the ante considerably, with sophisticated chord voicings and modal compositions such as Mrs. Cobbett, the flower-seller’s song. Mr. Robinson, the plumber, had one of the best songs of all, with a brilliant counter-16 section modulating from E Major to a gloomy A Minor 6^th, that rocked backwards and forwards to a diminished second before bursting out into the brilliant resolution of D Major for the last verse as our hero triumphs over the adversity of a leaking water tank. Fixing a hole where the rain got in? Much has been written of the genius of Lennon and McCartney, but this was brilliance of a different order, and all in the service of a children’s song about a plumber! 

Brian Cant may have been out of vision for the Trumptonshire trilogy, but he was back in front of the cameras for Play School’s ‘grown-up’ cousin, Play Away. This was a programme I never had much time for – it always felt too juvenile for an older audience, and not enough of a step up from its predecessor; but I was in a minority, and Play Away remained popular for a couple of generations. As to growing up, I never ceased to be fascinated by Trumpton, and made efforts to see it whenever I could while the series remained on air (for the record, Camberwick Green, Trumpton and Chigley received their last BBC screening in 1985, under the children’s lunchtime umbrella title See-Saw).

It was the unique blend of Gordon Murray’s puppets (brilliantly animated by Bob Bura and John Hardwick), Freddie Phillips’ music, and Brian Cant’s charming narration that made the Trumptonshire trilogy so successful. That kind of chemistry doesn’t happen often in television or film, and there’s a timelessness about those series that I believe would guarantee their success well into the future. They were nostalgic from the word go: few places in England are remotely like Trumptonshire, yet it's undeniably familiar. Like the creations of Gerry Anderson, Camberwick Green and its sequels presented us with a fully realised world, an alternate reality, if you like, where the fire brigade is never called upon to put out a fire, and there’s a folk dance every evening at the biscuit factory.

Brian Cant may no longer be with us, but Trumptonshire lives on…

Playing VHS With Death...

In 1980, the first domestic video recorder arrived in our household. It was one of the early, top-loading models with huge metal switches and no remote control, provided by our local branch of Radio Rentals. I was not earning a living at this point, but I funded the monthly rental payments (scandalously, you may think, from my student grant). After all, it was I who would be making the most use of this new toy, and had I needed to justify it to myself, I could have argued that it would provide a handy research tool for my Communication Studies degree. The degree itself was a worthless endeavour, curated by bored lecturers across a range of barely-related disciplines, but it did touch on textual analysis of television programmes (principally, and inexplicably, Nationwide), in which capacity the ability to keep copies of said programmes, and endlessly rewind and replay content was, of course, invaluable.

I think the first thing I recorded was either a Laurel & Hardy film or an episode of Steptoe & Son. So much for those academic credentials…

In those early days – this was the latter part of 1980 – blank video tapes did not come cheap. A three-hour E-180 for under a tenner was considered something of a bargain, with £12 or more being the typical going rate. Clearly, there could be no prospect of compiling an archive of taped programmes. I decided that I would keep ‘selected examples’ of certain series (for example, the current run of the BBC’s Shoestring), but complete series were out of the question. This didn’t stop me from taping (and keeping) every episode of Steptoe and Son that the BBC repeated during a brief run that autumn.

The policy had gone out of the window by the time Thunderbirds returned the following year, and I already had getting on for a hundred tapes of recorded material, all of which I intended to keep for future reference. The VHS machine was, of course, used for the practical purpose of recording programmes that I was unable to watch on transmission, the idea being to catch up with them during the next few days. But days all too easily turned into months… and, in their turn, years. I still have VHS recordings that I have yet to catch up with – in some cases, dating back to the 1980s. It’s rare for me to actually pull out and watch a VHS tape these days, but on an evening last week, that’s exactly what I did.

In July 1993, BBC2 offered a late-night screening of Ingmar Bergman’s iconic classic The Seventh Seal. I was interested to see it, having recently discovered Scott Walker’s song of the same name, the lyrics of which are a loose reading of the plot – a knight returns from the crusades, discovers his homeland ravaged by plague, and plays chess with the hooded figure of death in the hope of winning salvation. Trouble is, this black and white classic had been tucked away in the late-night graveyard in which such items could once be found: the Sgt Bilko Hour, if you will (Bilkos being a staple of the round-midnight BBC schedules during this era). With a start time of five past midnight and an end time of God knows what unearthly hour, the obvious solution was to record it on the timer. In fact, what I actually did was to start the recording manually, and set the machine to turn itself off two hours later – a facility that certain VHS recorders had evolved by this time.

At the end of the recording, a complete 'end-of-programmes-for-tonight' piece of continuity is preserved, quite basic in presentation, comprising the BBC2 clock on a shaded background. Yet ironically, this continuity is now of considerably greater interest than the recording of the film itself (an old, rather worn print that the BBC had owned since 1967). More such items follow on the tape, which was next put to use on February 23^rd, 1994, to record an episode from the documentary series The Underworld, a look at London’s gangland of the 50s and 60s. Thus is preserved the national weather forecast, presented by Suzanne Charlton (daughter of Bobby), which showed a band of snow across the midlands and the north… no mention at all of plague...

The tape probably hadn’t been played since 1994, but last week, having listened again to Scott Walker’s fourth solo album (which begins with the song The Seventh Seal), I decided it was time at last to expose myself to Bergman’s classic. It is, of course, available on blu-ray and has no doubt been restored to the standard one might expect of a movie once hailed as one of the greatest achievements in cinema. But why waste time and money, when there was a VHS copy awaiting me in the garage? 

Seeing The Seventh Seal for the first time was an interesting experience in itself. Such a film comes carrying a huge portmanteau of expectation… it's a classic, iconic imagery, masterpiece, etc. Most of this hyperbole stems from a few breathless reviews by American critics around the time of the film's release in 1957, and not even Bergman himself considered it his best work. In fact, the whole enterprise has very much the appearance of those old Richard Green Robin Hood capers, crossed with scenes that recall nothing less than Monty Python and the Holy Grail. The history is all over the place, with crusaders, witch-trials and medieval peasants sharing the same time and place. The famous chess-game-with-death motif is probably the film's best-known element, much parodied by the likes of Bill and Ted and, of course, Monty Python. Having finally watched it, I can kind of understand why it took so long for me to get around to it – you have to be in the mood for a film like this, even though it is nowhere near as dark and gothic as its reputation suggests. But The Seventh Seal's meditations on mortality seemed somehow fitting. When I taped the film in 1993, I can hardly have imagined it would take nearly 24 years before I got round to watching it. That’s the same amount of time as had elapsed between Scott Walker’s song and the BBC2 broadcast. Or, to look at it from the other direction, another 24 years on from today will make me eighty... assuming death doesn’t checkmate me before then.

Collections are a constant reminder of mortality. Videotapes and photographs, with their snapshots of moments in time, even more so. For any collector, the constant nagging question is ‘when will I ever find time to look at/watch/read all this stuff again?’ I’m well aware that there is insufficient time left for me to revist every single one of the VHS recordings I kept for ‘posterity’, unless I committed to doing that and nothing else for the forseeable future. Of course, I know that's not going to happen. What of the books, DVDs and LPs? What of actually having a life outside of being a curator of old recordings?

Logic dictates that I should ditch those old tapes and live for the moment, but I know I’ll hang onto them, just in case, as happened last week, I feel the need to unearth an item from thirty years ago. It may have taken almost a quarter century for me to get round to The Seventh Seal, but I have older recordings as yet unviewed. I may never get to see them.

 I am, indeed, playing VHS with death…

I've Got Nothing to Say, but It's Okay...

The Beatles: An Illustrated Record, first edition, 1975. John Lennon read it and even wrote in with an addendum for the next edition: 'set the Illustrated Record straight' he wrote.

Remembering Remembering the Beatles… part two

Around 1975, a book appeared in our local branch of WH Smith that provided the first decent history of the Beatles that I’d seen in print. Formatted to the same dimensions as an LP cover, it was entitled The Beatles: An Illustrated Record, and had been written by NME journalists Roy Carr and Tony Tyler. Somewhat surprisingly, Carr and Tyler didn’t stop short of criticising the fabs’ efforts whenever they found them wanting. Beatles for Sale they considered decidedly below par, with songs like What You’re Doing and Every Little Thing dismissed by the pair as ‘domestic gripes.’ Rain, now rightly regarded as a classic, they wrote off as ‘an exercise in primitive psychedelia before the word, or its creative limitations had been defined.’ O-kay... I hadn’t even heard Rain at the time, and here were two music industry hacks telling me it was barely worth wasting my time on (my 1976 diary reveals that it was on April 14^th of that year when I finally got to hear Rain, courtesy of a friend who owned the Paperback Writer single. In a neat meterological coincidence, it was raining torrentially at the time...)

Carr and Tyler’s most withering scorn, however, was reserved for the solo works of George Harrison, whose post-Beatles output they roundly rubbished. Indeed, none of the band got off lightly when it came to the section in the book entitled ‘The Solo Years’, with all four judged to have turned in some less than creditable efforts in the aftermath of the break-up. To set this in some kind of context, it needs to be borne in mind that the music press, in common with pretty well the rest of the human race, circa the mid-1970s, still clung onto the notion that the Beatles would somehow, some day, resolve the differences that had driven them apart and reunite to create great music once again. Until then, we just had to put up with whatever solo efforts they chose to foist upon a world that had once worshipped at the altar of the eight-armed deity. One day, reason would prevail, and the Beatles would return to sweep all before them. A vain hope it may seem in retrospect, but it was worth clinging on to. My 1976 diary reports a press story of the day telling of a promoter who had offered insane amounts of money to all four Beatles if they would reunite for just one concert. Such tales were par for the course in the chilly musical hinterland we inhabited without the Beatles…

'Rain – an exercise in primitive psychedelia'. Indeed… but Carr and Tyler's book certainly looked very nice.

For all its criticisms, The Beatles: An Illustrated Record became, for me, a sort of Haynes Manual for the fab four, a straight ahead, no-frills telling of their story, complete with reviews of all the albums, discussion of key points in the band’s career, and even a chapter on bootlegs, my first encounter with this now familiar expression. And there were plenty of nice pictures. In retrospect, the pictorial content of the book seems no more than a single ice crystal on the tip of an iceberg of Titanic-sinking proportions, to which more material has been added with every passing year, as forgotten caches of press and private photographs are uncovered. In fact, I doubt that anyone can ever hope to own every single image of the Beatles. But back in 1975, I was quite happy with the contents of Carr and Tyler’s book – it had full-sized pictures of every album cover, alongside an assortment of imagery covering their films, concerts and other endeavours. A tone of barely suppressed cynicism pervaded the whole endeavour: ‘note the absence of guitar leads’ read the caption to a colour pic from the 1965 television special The Music of Lennon & McCartney, showing John and George miming with Rickenbacker and Gretsch respectively.

I sometimes wonder if it was Carr and Tyler’s failure to toe the party line that provided the first seeds for the cynical attitude I would adopt towards popular culture as I grew up. These days, when every vain, exploitative piece of music or film making seems to arrive with instant critical approval from that uncritical mass known as the online media, I think we could use a lot more healthy cynicism, of the Carr/Tyler variety. Not every creative endeavour by every individual is a paragon of excellence. In fact, I’d suggest that more than 95% are the opposite, and utterly worthless. Neither do I appreciate creators telling me online how good they think their latest album/comic/whatever happens to be. I’ll listen to an objective opinion when I hear one, thanks very much. To quote John Lennon in Good Morning, Good Morning, 'I've got nothing to say, but it's okay.' That, to me, is the mantra for much contemporary pop culture...

Meantime, the Beatles, of whom there is only one valid opinion, and Sgt Pepper, which today turns fifty, reminding us, as if we needed it, that there has been nothing else to equal it in half a century. Absolutely nothing, from no-one. Listening out for the next Sgt. Pepper is like probing the cosmos for signals from intelligent life…

Fifty Years Ago Today, it was Twenty Years Ago Today...

Remembering Remembering the Beatles: Part One

June 1^st 1967. As every music fan knows, the release date of the Beatles’ Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. Arguably, one of the most significant dates in the history of popular culture. Like today, June 1^st 1967 fell on a Thursday. It was half term, so I can't claim to have been distracted by school work. But I was utterly oblivious to what had happened.

Were I to plot my childhood awareness of the Beatles’ activities on a graph, summer 1967 would see something of a trough. I’d been well aware that there was a phenomenon called the Beatles from the age of about two and a half: I can recollect both She Loves You and I Want to Hold Your Hand getting their first round of airplay courtesy of the BBC Light Programme. More clearly, I remember Ticket to Ride sitting at number one in the hit parade, around Easter 1965. I remember seeing the Beatles on TV miming to I Feel Fine, a performance which helped to define my own personal image of the band. I remember right up to Help! and then…

Thinking back, I was curious as to why I had somehow missed out on significant singles like Day Tripper/ We Can Work It Out and Paperback Writer. Of the former tracks I have no recollection prior to acquiring my first Beatles album, A Collection of Beatles Oldies, in the spring of 1974. ‘Blimey,’ I thought, on hearing the introductory riff to Day Tripper: ‘this is all right!’ As for Paperback Writer, I must have been dimly aware of it, because I recognised it when the BBC used it as the introductory music for a book discussion programme during the 1970s. But as to whether I heard it back in 1966, I’m less certain. I have clear recollections of The Mamas and the Papas’ Monday Monday, which was in the charts around the same time; but I’m less sure on Paperback Writer. Why should this be?

I’ve come up with a triumvirate of reasons to explain this anomaly in my memories of the Beatles’ singles. First is the simple fact of exactly which songs I was able to hear on the radio. During the daytime, we listened primarily to either the BBC Light Programme – the source of all popular music – or the Home Service. The latter would be instantly recognisable to any modern listener, today's Radio 4 being barely any different. But the Light Programme was as its name suggests: light, and relatively undemanding. Contemporary pop music was just part of a mix of contemporary and light classical recordings that comprised the bulk of the station’s airplay, interspersed with comedy and variety shows. But the kind of pop music that got played on the Light Programme – certainly during the hours when I would have been able to listen – was generally of a kind considered ‘safe for broadcast’ by whoever made such decisions at Broadcasting House. The ‘heavier’ pop items of the day were not to be found playlisted on the likes of Housewive’s Choice nor the Saturday morning children’s request show fronted by, amongst others, Blue Peter’s Christopher Trace.

I’m not saying unequivocally that the Light Programme never played records by bands like the Who, the Kinks or the Stones; but their heavier releases certainly didn’t seem to figure in the playlist to the same extent as, say, Dominique by the Singing Nun, or Josh MacRae’s Messing About on the River. I heard Kenneth Williams' comedy monologue ‘Hand up your Sticks’ more times than I Can’t Explain, or You Really Got Me, neither of which made it into my awareness until years after their release. This, then, might be one reason why I missed out on some of the ‘heavier’ Beatle singles. But there’s another reason, and it’s significant.

In September of 1965, Thunderbirds arrived on television. It had been heavily trailed in the preceding weeks, and there was no way on earth that I was going to miss it. In the ATV region where I lived, it was broadcast at 7.30 on Thursday evenings – meaning that it clashed with Top of the Pops which, up to this point, had been a programme I saw quite regularly. Charting my memories of pop singles, I’ve noted a distinct dip beginning around late 1965 and lasting until spring of the following year: a dip that corresponds almost exactly to the first run of Thunderbirds. The Sunday chart show Pick of the Pops was a programme which I discovered a year or two later, so that at this time, TOTP presented my only opportunity to see and hear some of the edgier new artists who were making waves in the pop world. Without it, I missed several key releases.

Another factor, also occurring around this time, is that I started school. This happened when I turned five, in March of 1966. Prior to this, having been at home during the day, I’d had much more opportunity to hear new records when they were played on the radio. From spring ‘66 onwards, my listening was essentially confined to that Saturday morning show, adding the chart rundown from somewhere in late 1967.

Thus it was that, at the fulcrum moment in June 1967, I was not tuned in; neither, for that matter, was I turned on or dropped out… the only LSD I was aware of was pounds, shillings and pence. The first person I heard singing Sgt Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band was, sadly, Petula Clarke, on a Beatles-themed TV show around 1973. And at that point, I had genuinely never heard of it before...