'It's only a dog running up the side of the house...'

... the beginnings of horror. Part Two

Denis Gifford’s was a name I encountered many times during my teens, a man whose enthusiasms for comics, horror and science-fiction films mirrored my own. He was the author of numerous books that I quickly came to regard as definitive texts, including Happy Days: A Century of Comics and a publication that found its way into my hands early in 1974, A Pictorial History of Horror Movies. This book became my guide to the genre, its limits and scope coming in time to define the extent of my own interest in horror films. At the time of its publication in 1973, Gifford’s guide, essentially an illustrated companion to the whole horror genre, covered pretty well every significant title ever committed to celluloid in the name of scaring the moviegoing public of Britain and America. It had little or nothing to say on examples from other countries, and this omission goes a long way to explain why, to this day, I have never taken an interest in European horror films.

In actual fact, the years of my serious interest in horror films were essentially the decade of the 1970s. By its end, my attention was beginning to waver, and I took no interest in the increasingly violent and erotic offerings that were arriving in cinemas with depressing regularity. Frankly, I drew the line at Dracula AD 1972. I still do.

Denis Gifford’s book included dozens of stills, posters and lobby cards, some depicting films I have yet to see forty-four years later, others serving as an indication that it probably wasn’t worth bothering with them. As is always the case when selecting a single image to stand for a whole movie, many of the pictures were misleading, or misleadingly labelled. A particular favourite was the small black and white still from Fiend Without a Face (1958), which purported to show a woman having her brain ‘sucked out by materialised thought.’ In fact, she was being attacked by a flying brain and spinal column with antennae: possibly the most ludicrous monster ever conceived for a horror picture (the genre not being noted for its adherence to plausibility, it must be said). That small still, however, was enough to convince me to add Fiend Without a Face to my ever-growing list of horror movies that I must somehow endeavour to watch (invariably, although not always, on television). In fact, it would take over forty years before I finally got to see the movie (on a film print in a privately-owned screening facility) and I recognised it at once for a prime, oven-ready turkey. A bum steer if ever there was one: thanks, Denis...

Good, bad or bloody terrible, the films covered in Denis Gifford’s weighty tome supplied me with a bucket list of horror pictures to be investigated as and when they turned up on television. It also set a limit on the extent of my interest in the genre, and to this day, there are few horror films post-dating that book that I’d willingly sit down to watch. Once it was relatively easy to find such old movies on television, although these days one struggles to find anything pre-dating the last turn of the century... back in the 70s and 80s, it was a different matter entirely, and horror films lay thick on the ground, classics, obscurities, the whole gamut, stretching back to the 1930s. 

ITV’s late-night Friday horrors of the 70s formed part of the subject of my last blog post, and the slot, starting life under the bland umbrella title of ‘The Late Film’, soon became enshrined under the far more evocative appellation, ‘Appointment With Fear’. These were the days of the in-vision continuity announcer, one of whom, Peter Tomlinson, became inextricably associated with those late-night terrors. He appeared one week accompanied by a knitted panda, which a thoughtful viewer had sent in as company to sit with him through the scary pictures. One thing led to another, and before too long, Tomlinson would turn up on screen surrounded by a veritable menagerie of cuddly toys (didn’t he do well?) I had the pleasure of lunching with Mr. Tomlinson last year, and can report that he still holds fond memories of ‘Panda’ and those late-night broadcasts...

Frankly, this was the only way to watch horror movies. Forget the cinema or today’s shiny new blu-ray remasters: nothing quite recaptures the experience of watching a splicy, scratchy old film being shown late at night, sometimes with the threat of a thunderstorm rumbling away in the near distance. The defining example of this experience occurred on Spring Bank Holiday Monday May 28^th, 1973, and while the film in question wasn’t exactly to my taste (the 1943, musical version of The Phantom of the Opera, starring Claude Rains), the ensuing night more than made up for the movie’s lack of terrors. By the time the movie ended at a quarter past midnight, there were some curious, distant bumping sounds coming from somewhere outside. It sounded, implausibly enough, like someone moving furniture out of a van a few yards down the street. It was not, as suggested by our mum, a ‘dog running up the side of the house’, which was possibly the scariest of the infinitely possible alternative explanations. In fact, it was the distant, continuous roar of a gigantic thunderstorm, of Hollywood biblical epic proportions, which, when it finally arrived, would rage far into the small hours, utterly obliterating the memory of Claude Rains and his facial scars.

Thunderstorms are, of course, a staple of the gothic/horror genre, and there are many classic examples in the history of horror films, none more so than the storm that forms the centrepiece of Bride of Frankenstein (no matter that it was all achieved by studio artifice). Even if there wasn’t a storm in a particular picture, the creaky old prints being pressed into service by ITV and BBC during the the 1970s often had such rumbly soundtracks that it was hard to tell whether or not some distant thunderstorm might be lurking just over the horizon, either in the movie or, more worryingly, in real life. The effect was most noticeable during quieter passages, and once again it fell to our mum to provide an explanation for this phenomenon: it was, she told us, just the film ‘rolling on’. Highly technical, I know, but this shorthand explanation was seized on by my brother and myself whenever we encountered a particularly rumbly soundtrack on one of these late night horrors (curiously, the phenomenon never seemed to afflict other movies shown on TV).

Appointment With Fear and its associated seasons (such as ‘The Monster Movie’) dominated Friday late night television for a good many years, and through the good offices of ATV, I got to see a lot of horror movies from the 1930s through to the 1970s, amongst them Taste the Blood of Dracula, Tarantula!, The Blood Beast Terror, The Fly (and its disappointing sequels), The Hound of the Baskervilles, It Came From Beneath the Sea, The Mummy’s Shroud, Twenty Million Miles to Earth, The Sorcerers, and Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man.

But inevitably, enough is as good as a feast, and after a few years I was pretty well done with horror movies, to the extent that, when the BBC instigated a late-night horror double bill in the 1980s, I rarely made the effort to tune in, unless the Radio Times guide assured me of catching something special (such as Night of the Demon, broadcast on 2nd January 1991). It’s also telling to look back and realise how many of those films I’ve never seen again.

Of the films released after the Gifford book came out, pretty well the only horror movie I’d single out as a go-to title for me would be Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining, which with its famous quotation from The Three Little Pigs, brings us neatly back to where we began...

One of the last of the ITV horror seasons that I made a special effort to watch went out in early 1979 under the umbrella title ‘Christopher Lee, Prince of Terror’, and in the last part of this series, I’ll look back at the most significant film of that season...

'There's a wolf and a monkey upstairs'...

... the beginnings of horror. Part One.

I know the exact date of my first exposure to the horror movie genre: ominously enough, it was Friday 13^th (the date, not the actual film, which would not be made for another nine years). It was 1971, and the month was August, right in the middle of the school summer holiday, which meant that staying up late to watch something on TV was, for once, an option. The film in question was ten years old and making what was probably its first appearance on British television: The Curse of the Werewolf, starring Oliver Reed.

When it appeared in cinemas, The Curse of the Werewolf was the latest in a run of pictures from the now legendary Hammer studio, which effectively updated most of the iconic horrors of the 1930s, in colour, for modern audiences. Colour meant blood, of course, although I was watching in black and white. Exactly why I was watching is what this blog aims to find out. How, where and when had I discovered the horror film genre and what had piqued my interest to such an extent?

I knew next to nothing about horror films at this time, and unlike today when information is freely available online, the process by which one discovered such artefacts could be long, tenuous, and spun out over many years. I’d heard the names Frankenstein and Dracula bandied about in the playground for quite some time, without knowing exactly what or whom they were referring to. The first depictions of horror movie characters I saw on TV were probably those featured in Hanna-Barbera’s Scooby-Doo, Where Are You? which had debuted on BBC1 in September 1970. Episode 24 featured a werewolf story, and assuming the BBC showed the episodes in their original order, I would have seen this instalment on 25 February 1971. Although it’s not mentioned in my diary, I was almost certainly watching on that date, as the alternative on ITV was Magpie, a series we always ignored in our house. Either way, I doubt it was Scooby-Doo that piqued my interest in horror films, and I’m fairly sure I know when I first came across a depiction of a werewolf.

As a child, I found the mere idea of a wolf a scary proposition. My brother and I would dare one another to go upstairs in the dark, attesting to the presence up there of a ‘wolf and a monkey’. I’d learned to fear wolves as the bad guys in countless fairy tales, and I’d seen some particularly creepy illustrations in a storybook from the iconic ‘Little Golden Books’ series. Three Bedtime Stories was illustrated by Garth Williams, whose stylised but detailed drawings, with every piece of fur painted in, could make even the Three Little Kittens into the stuff of nightmares. His depiction of the Big, Bad Wolf in the story of the Three Little Pigs looked next to nothing like a real wolf, but it was certainly scary: especially when reduced to a single, menacing eyeball peering through the wooden door of the home built by the second little pig...

The scariest illustration ever: Garth Williams' painting for The Three Little Pigs (Golden Press, 1958)

So why should the mythical wolf upstairs have been accompanied by a monkey? Simple. Or, perhaps not quite. I have a memory of seeing one of what might be termed the ‘big monkey movies’ on a Sunday afternoon on television in 1965 or 66. It was almost certainly not King Kong, whose iconic status ensured it would not be released to television until the 1970s. Which leaves us with Mighty Joe Young, the Kong-lite fantasy released by RKO pictures in 1949, and produced by the same creative team responsible for the genre-defining original. Mighty Joe Young is, of course, a more sympathetic and less destructive creation than Kong, but the sight of an oversized gorilla attacking a bunch of cowboys must have impressed itself on my consciousness. Allied to this, somewhat ludicrously, was a cuddly monkey which was kept in a box at the local hairdressing salon, as part of a batch of toys intended to keep children quiet while their mothers had a shampoo and set. The cuddly toy had a fur body and a plastic face and hands. It was without a doubt, one of the scariest things I’d seen at that age. So, a cuddly toy and a vintage movie equated to a fear of monkeys. I have to admit, I still don’t go a bundle on our simian relatives...

I don’t class Mighty Joe Young as a horror film, though. Its Sunday afternoon slot (and a subsequent Saturday evening showing in 1967) was indicative of its suitabilty for family viewing. Which leaves Oliver Reed’s werewolf unchallenged as the first bona fide horror movie I sat down to watch. But why did I do so?

I’m fairly sure the answer to this question lies in the range of horror movie monster kits produced by the now legendary Aurora company during the 1960s and 70s. Later revised into the well-remembered ‘Glows in the Dark’ editions, which incorporated luminous plastic parts, these kits were originally offered in normal (one might say boring), non-glowing plastic, and it was a display of these original versions that I encountered during a trip to one of Birmingham’s department stores in the winter of 1970. The painting on the box (illustrated at the top of this post) was an extremely atmospheric depiction of the Oliver Reed wolf man (identifiable as such by his red cummerbund, although the kit itself was clearly based on Lon Chaney Jnr’s portrayal in the Universal original), and it was that image, allied to the entirely new (and extremely scary) idea of a hybrid creature, part human and part wolf, that set my imagination running. That's a scary picture, no doubt about it. See the house in the background, with the lit windows? That's your house, kid, and that tree he's hiding behind is just at the bottom of your garden... the Wolf Man is out there in the darkness, and he's coming to get you... tonight!

We didn’t buy the kit, but I couldn’t get that painting out of my mind. After the Garth Williams illustration, it was the single most disturbing image I'd seen up to that time. Wolves again... race memory or fear learned in childhood? Who can tell. Without realising that I was employing basic psychology, I decided that the best way to deal with this new-found fear was to confront it head-on. Or maybe my dad did, I don’t remember. Either way, seeing that box and its artwork – and a few months later encountering the ‘Glows in the Dark’ series of monster kits – would lead directly to my watching the ITV broadcast of The Curse of the Werewolf on Friday 13^th August, 1971.

I don’t have the Midland edition of TVTimes for the week in question, so I can’t say whether the broadcast went out as part of a specific, branded horror film season. A few weeks later, The Terror of the Tongs was shown under the banner of ‘The Late Movie’, a strand which was still running in early 1972, when, on Friday 14^th January, I caught the classic Universal horror Werewolf of London. Despite its 1930s origins, I found Werewolf of London decidedly superior to The Curse of the Werewolf, and had been tipped off by the TVTimes film reviewer to watch out for the innovative ‘tranformation scene’ wherein the stricken Dr. Glendon passes behind a series of pillars, emerging a little more hairy each time. This was, for me, the key scene in the whole film, but there was plenty to enjoy elsewhere, with a memorable musical score and creepy, ‘fake London’ atmosphere, all stagey studio sets and noirish lighting. My diary notes this screening, and even mentions the fact that it was ‘a Universal picture’, the rotating globe logo somehow adding to the overall atmosphere of this black and white classic. I actually missed the first ten minutes of the film, which explained how Dr. Glendon became afflicted with Lycanthropy. The reason for this? It clashed with a re-run of The Goodies, over on BBC2. Never mind silver bullets, Cricklewood’s finest could see off any werewolf...

The next horror mentioned in my diary was Hammer’s production of The Mummy on Friday 17^th March 1972. The Friday late night slot at this time included numerous other titles, such as City of the Dead, but I only tuned in to see the iconic monsters, the next of which was Hammer’s Dracula on Friday 9^th June, 1972. Anything that had figured as a plastic kit from Aurora was fair game, and by Christmas of 1971, a fair few of these had found their way into our house. From being scared by the box artwork, I'd gone as far as inviting it into the family home... some therapy!

Summer of 1971 had seen our family holidaying in Brixham where my dad, recently laid off from his day job, had accepted a summer season playing drums as part of a trio at the nearby Pontins holiday camp. The band members shared a flat above a shop in the high street, and two doors down was a model shop whose window was fairly crammed with Aurora kits. The first of these I remember acquiring was the Seaview from Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea, but I also saw the ‘Glows in the Dark’ monsters which were to become an obsession over the coming months. During that holiday, my brother and I were bought two kits from this range: King Kong and Godzilla. King Kong I knew well enough, despite not having seen it (ironically, ITV had showed it on a Sunday night on one of the weekends when we were away), but Godzilla was an entirely new discovery. Frankly, I didn’t really care what Godzilla was or where he’d come from at that stage: it was enough to know that he was a huge monster, glowing with radioactivity (literally, in the case of those luminous plastic parts) and depicted in the act of trashing a city.

Aurora's kits of Godzilla and King Kong: what 1970s kid could not want to own these?

Normally, when confronted with an unfamiliar item of pop culture, I’d turned to my parents to ask if they knew anything about it, but neither my dad nor any of his fellow musicians was able to supply much if anything by way of background on Godzilla, which is hardly surprising, given that the original film was sixteen years old, and its sequels had tended to be relegated to Saturday morning kids’ programmes on the rare occasions when they even made it into British cinemas. Indeed, it was at just such a matinee performance (complete with cartoons and a live comedy compere) that I saw my first Godzilla picture, the serio-comic Son of Godzilla, on Saturday 18^th May, 1974.

Returning to 1971, the experience of seeing all those horror movie monsters depicted in artwork form on the many Aurora boxes in that Brixham model shop was clearly a major influence in my taking the plunge into the murky depths of horror movies... where lurked such bizarre creations as the Creature from the Black Lagoon (another Aurora model: I would have to wait another four years to see the somewhat disapppointing film). The kits acted as a de facto trainspotter’s guide to horror films: clearly, the featured monsters were the most important examples of the genre, and thus, ignoring pretty well anything else, I set out to see them all in their movie incarnations. One or two were, it transpired, the manufacturer’s own creations: ‘The Forgotten Prisoner of Castel-Mare’ was just a chained skeleton in rags, but the title suggested a movie, for which I searched the TV schedules in vain. I had more luck with the likes of Frankenstein, Dracula et al, and was immediately impressed by Christopher Lee’s depiction of the latter. Brides of Dracula was shown by ATV on the week immediately following The Curse of the Werewolf, but I don’t know if I caught this screening. I do know that, of all the classic bogeymen of horror films, Dracula stood head, shoulders, cape and fangs above the lot...

Aurora's plastic kits had provided me with a useful introduction to some of the iconic movies of the horror genre, but as yet, I still didn’t know much about the wider world of horror movies. That situation was soon to change with the acquisition of a certain publication...

Morning and afternoon delights...

Nothing to do all day? Now you can just watch the telly... ITV announces the commencement of daytime programming, October 1972.

The beginnings of daytime television...

This morning, at about 9.25am, I sat down to watch an episode of Gerry Anderson’s Stingray – on DVD, of course – it’s a very long time since Stingray last featured in the television schedules (fourteen years and four months to be exact). This always happens around this time of year on any notably sunny morning, the fine weather serving to rekindle memories of summer holiday repeats in the early 1970s. For several years, Stingray was a staple of these early morning schedules, with episodes appearing in 1973, ’74 and ’76, then again in 1982 and 1987. Although other Gerry Anderson titles were shown in similar slots (including Captain Scarlet and Fireball XL5), it’s Stingray that I’ve always associated most strongly with these daytime broadcasts. Despite its underwater setting, Stingray episodes often had a bright, sunlit appearance (exemplified by the generic shots of Marineville, which was almost always depicted against a blue, summery sky). I think the association was in place for me as early as 1965 when, during a period of notably fine weather that lasted into the early autumn, I remember being bought a wooden jigsaw depicting Stingray’s Marineville headquarters. The blue sky may have been a painted backdrop, but to me it might as well have been the real thing. Stingray, and summer skies... a lifelong, pavlovian association was beginning to form...

1976 was a memorably fine summer and once again, our local ITV station ATV chose to schedule morning repeats of Stingray, beginning, somewhat frustratingly, about two weeks prior to the end of term. Unlike earlier repeat runs, where two episodes had been shown per week, the 1976 repeats were limited to a single broadcast, on Thursday mornings, typically at around 11am. Naturally, my brother and myself made sure to watch every episode, preserving audio recordings of their soundtracks (the audio also preserved the temporary breakdown of the episode Set Sail For Adventure which ground to a halt during the opening titles, forcing continuity announcer Simon Bates [yes, that Simon Bates] to extemporise pointlessly for about twenty seconds while the fault was fixed).

* * *

The whole phenomenon of watching old television during the summer holidays is familiar to many, especially anyone of the right age during the 1970s, which is when the whole thing got started. It was ITV who took the initiative, when in October 1972, after five years of unsuccessful representations to various governments, the network finally got its way, and a new schedule of daytime programmes was introduced. For those like me who remembered the classics of the 1960s, this provided the opportunity to miss countless episodes of Danger Man, Strange Report and so on, which were broadcast on weekday afternoons when I was at school. During term time, the morning schedules were set aside for educational broadcasts, but when these ended for the holidays, a new slot became vacant, and it was here, in the ATV region, that repeats of Stingray and Captain Scarlet began to figure from July 1973.

The BBC had made some attempts to do likewise in 1972, with the classic serial The Flashing Blade featuring on school holiday mornings, but the schedule was piecemeal, and aside from sports coverage, the service tended to close down again at around 11am. A similar situation prevailed in 1973, with daily episodes of The Adventures of Tintin, followed by a factual half hour item and closedown at 11am. A similar line-up would continue through the 1970s, with incremental increases in the amount of children’s programming being broadcast, although the mid-morning closedown remained a staple (most likely retained as a scheduled maintenance block for transmitter engineers). By this time, ITV was running a complete daytime schedule, the likes of which would not be seen on the rival station for several years.

Of course, the extended broadcasting hours were more than a mere excuse to show afternoon repeats, and ITV threw a not inconsiderable budget into providing new series, tailor-made for the daytime audience, which a TVTimes article identified as ‘the housewife, the child, the shiftworker, the pensioner, the sick or disabled.’ New soaps were commissioned, including the perennial Emmerdale Farm, alongside now forgotten offerings like Harriet’s Back in Town, a story centered on a recently-divorced woman played by Pauline Yates (perhaps best known for her role as the wife of Reginald Perrin). There were new quiz programmes including Mr. and Mrs. and, a few years later, television’s first serious delve into its own archives with the nostalgia gameshow Those Wonderful TV Times. There was a much-trumpeted lunchtime news bulletin, pitched as a daytime equivalent of New at Ten; and there were brand new programmes for the very young, an audience whom ITV had traditionally left in the capable hands of their rival’s Watch With Mother. Both Pipkins and Rainbow made their debut during ITV’s first week of daytime television in October 1972, and would remain staples of the lunchtime schedule for the forseeable future. 

The arrival of a full daytime programme schedule, as opposed to the earlier model of schools, sport and closedowns was indeed a watershed moment in British television, the first paviour on the way towards today’s style of broadcasting. Daytime programming has long been taken as read, across all networks, and broadcasters now largely continue to show programmes through the night. Children now have their own dedicated channels, leaving the main networks clear to show cookery and DIY programmes in their morning and afternoon schedules where once old series and films held sway. Such vintage items have, however, recently found a new home in the form of vintage TV and film channel Talking Pictures TV, whose archaic nomenclature belies the fact that its programme schedule is comprised largely of items from the 1950s to the 1980s.

The surfeit of television channels is a situation that is unlikely to endure. With downloads fast becoming the preferred form of delivery for television programming, the traditional schedule is likely to disappear within the next decade, leaving viewers to browse menus of material available on demand at any time. The most hopeful outcome of this will be to drive out today’s plethora of largely superfluous channels broadcasting low-quality cheaply acquired material to notional audiences who probably aren’t even watching. The present broadcasting model needs slimming down: less than one hundred specialist channels would suffice to cater for the majority of viewers, and the instant availability of downloads obviates the need for so many different iterations of Sky Movies, to take just one example. Shopping channels will struggle to survive – indeed, it’s a wonder that in the age of online shopping any still exist.

Twenty years from now, the very idea of a programme schedule will seem as quaint as the 1950s Interlude does to modern viewers; and those summer broadcasts of the 1970s, when daytime television was strange and new will be almost unimaginable. Like summers themselves, their time was fleeting, but the memory – and their legacy – endures.

Nostalgia and reality

Now: lovely, quaint nostalgia. Then: dull bloody normality. (Phyllis Nicklin collection)

Imagine you had a time machine, and could select any era to visit. Top of the list would surely be the sixties. Who wouldn’t want to witness first-hand the decade that produced the Beatles, and so many other pop cultural icons, not only in the arena of music, but in film, television, art, literature, you name it. Quite apart from being witness to such epoch-making endeavours would be the ineffably strange experience of witnessing life on the streets as it was lived: the cars, the clothes, the sights long since vanished from the urban landscape. How cool is that? Very. But only to the modern observer. 

Living in the 1960s, or for that matter, the 70s was, in many important respects, cooler than inhabiting the modern world. People were less selfish, not as rude, in less of a hurry, less obsessed with possessions (materialism was certainly a fact of life, but in a form so scaled-back as to be almost unrecognisable by contemporary standards). But here comes the point: back then, it didn’t feel cool to be surrounded by so much good design. It just felt like the norm. Exactly like now, in other words.

Check out any old newsreel film of the 60s, and you’ll see exactly what life was like. But at the same time, you won’t. Because you’re viewing it through the filter of intervening years, coloured by the knowledge of what’s changed, and how modern life is different. Those lovely old cars didn’t look lovely to us at the time: they were just the unremarkable baseline of what everyday life looked like.

I didn’t think very much of British cars during the 1960s. Many of them epitomised a kind of dreary suburbanism, class-conscious in their use of design features, many of which had been scaled-down from more expensive, desirable models, American cars even. The humble Ford Anglia, in its circa 1960 incarnation, took its inward-raking rear window from the far more stylish American Lincoln Continental. But as cars went, the Anglia was stuffily middle-class, a real middle-management machine. Back in the days when Anglias were pretty well ubiquitous on Britain’s roads, I hardly gave them a second look. My perceptions had been skewed by the knowledge that far cooler cars were available, mostly from toy shops, but also via the medium of television.

For Anglia, 1959-68 model. Typical suburban car, typical suburban driveway. Not cool, just very, very ordinary.

Most of my toy cars were American models, like the Ford Thunderbird or Cadillac Eldorado. Some of these late 50s and early 60s American models took their atom-age styling cues from outer space, but in Britain, car makers knew that the nation’s motorists weren’t that adventurous. In any event, the average American saloon was far too big for British roads. Instead, we got scaled-down, ‘suburbanised’ versions of American styles where chrome and fins were certainly present, but in a much more restrained manner. Although I was entirely unaware of the thinking behind the look of a car like Ford’s Zephyr or Zodiac, I found them more aesthetically pleasing than, say, the pipe-and-slippers styling of the Morris Minor, which in its ‘half-timbered’ estate form vaguely resembled a typical mock-tudor suburban villa. To me, the ‘Moggie Minor’ was a ludicrous car, the kind of car your elderly relatives might drive. Equally unsatisfactory was the Austin/Morris 1100, whose styling straddled a deeply uncomfortable line between tradition and modernity. I still hate it, yet at the time it felt so typically British in appearance that its silhouette became the standard shape used to represent cars on the new generation of roadsigns, phased in from the mid-60 onwards (and still in use today).

Old film of Britain’s roads looks to us today like a cavalcade of motoring nostalgia. Back then, it was mere traffic. Noisy, dirty, mostly unlovely, something you wouldn’t take a second look at, unless an E-Type Jag happened by. That’s the difference between how things were and how they seem in retrospect. Nostagia makes us see what was once dreary normality as though it were the creation of some retro-stylist production designer on a period movie. And what holds good for cars also holds good for clothes: even more so, in fact.

Modern Britain is, without doubt, the worst-dressed nation on earth. The day sportswear began to be adopted for everyday use (shopping, going to the pub, etc) was the beginning of the end for anything approaching sartorial elegance in this country, and the average Brit of 2018, regardless of age, gender or social standing is in general, a badly-dressed scruffbag. Baggy, ill-fitting rubbish abounds. Trainers, once the preserve of athletes only, are ubiquitous. And anyone donning a baseball cap without intent to step out onto the diamond in the shoes of Joe DiMaggio should be offered counselling.

As a nation, we were better tailored in the 1960s. Men, on the whole, wore a suit and tie, whether going to work or for a drink down the local. Your typical casual top (weekends in the garden or on the golf course) was either a roll-neck or a Fred Perry-style shirt with three buttons at the neck. Jeans were for students, beatniks and wannabe Rolling Stones. Nobody else would think twice of donning a pair, even as workwear. Women wore skirts, dresses, sometimes slacks (trouser suits had yet to put in an appearance). Children, meanwhile, had the choice of dressing like either a Tiny Tears doll or Just William.

People just wearing whatever they put on this morning: Birmingham street scene, circa 1959 (Phyllis Nicklin collection)

Yet I would argue that, to live for a day or two as an average citizen of 1960s Britain, unburdened by modern perceptions of retro and cool, would be a mostly dismal experience, asethetically speaking. We were, then as now, generally badly-dressed. Suits rarely fitted well, and were mostly cut from cheap, unattractive cloth. Forget about what Roger Moore is wearing in your average Saint episode: the typical bloke on the street got his clothes off the peg. Having said which, made-to-measure wasn’t the exotic rarity it’s become today; but even a good quality, tailored Hepworth’s suit wasn’t likely to get you nominated as Britain’s best-dressed man. Women’s fashions were just as bad, in their own way. Again, the high-fashion styles sported by characters in film and television were a world away from the dowdy floral prints worn by your auntie or the lady next door. Cheap clothes have always looked cheap, and in an era when most people’s idea of style meant simply trying to look ‘smart’ (however that might be achieved), the net effect was, on the whole, drearily conformist. Of course to modern eyes it all looks quaint and appealingly retro, but back then, it was, once again, the norm, the baseline, something nobody noticed.

Our homes were pretty much the same. Mid-century furnishings continue to have considerable appeal, and many modern items look back to the era of Eames and Ercol, when ergonomics and stylistic restraint began to replace the excesses and fancies of earlier eras. But aside from the super-rich, very few could afford to completely restyle their homes in one fell swoop. A scenario: your typical middle-income family decides to replace their three-piece suite, circa 1965. There are bold, modern styles available, in bright colours like orange, mauve and teal green. The bold, modern suite is duly ordered and takes its place alongside a gate-leg table from the 1930s, a sideboard of similar vintage, floral curtains and carpets of a decade earlier, and a clutter of assorted table lamps, nick-nacks and God-knows-what-else, inherited or acquired over the years with no consideration of style, colour scheme, etc. The net effect is a random patchwork of decades, and this is how pretty well all ‘normal’ homes looked like for a very long time. Many still do.

Living rooms really did look like this in the 1960s... but only in furniture catalogues.

Confusing the issue still further was the fact that not all new furniture sold during the 1960s epitomised what we’d now think of as ‘classic’ mid-century styling, and traditional items still held sway. Even today, a browse around any typical furniture showroom will reveal the stolidly old-fashioned alongside the determinedly retro-futuristic.

Thus were our homes furnished in the 50s, 60s, 70s... it’s a nuance that mostly escapes the attention of production designers in film and television who tend to adhere slavishly to one-decade styling when called upon to dress a set for, say, a 1960s lounge-dining room.

My point is this: the notion of being able to live again in the 1960s or 70s may seem like an appealing nostalgia trip, but to have been there at the time was to have no perception of how aesthetically pleasing life actually was. Despite what you see online and in magazines, the tide of fashion tends to move pretty slowly, so that it takes many years for a new look to establish itself as the ‘norm.’ Seen in purely stylistic terms, the 1960s seems, in retrospect, to be an evolution destined to reach its purest form of expression in the following decade. There was, of course, no pivotal moment when, to the average observer, the sixties looked like the sixties and nothing else, much as that may appear in retrospect to have been the case. Cars from the 1950s and even earlier were still to be found on Britain’s roads, and only celebrities or the very wealthy could afford to stay abreast of ‘the latest fads and trends’, assuming they even chose to do so.

We can’t see what’s around us when we’re part of it. None of history makes any sense until it is actually history. Only then do the forms, the themes, the shifting tectonic plates of fate, coincidence and collective experience acquire meaning. Only then do we truly appreciate nostalgia for what it is... or rather, what it was.

Forty years of that wholly remarkable book...

 

Revisiting The Hitch-Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy

I think it’s safe to refer to The Hitch-Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy as a phenomenon: one that has embraced pretty well every enterainment medium since its humble debut on BBC radio forty years ago: LP, television, film (eventually), stage show, video games and novels. I may be alone here, but down the decades since its inception, I’ve ignored most of that mass of media iterations in favour of the original medium, in which the majority of its ideas and gags still come across most effectively.

I was a couple of years late coming to Hitch-Hiker’s... the original radio series having been broadcast several times before I first tuned in; and the first series that I heard was in fact the second, broadcast across a single week in January 1980 (these days we’d say ‘stripped’, a term not in use back then). I’d been aware of the programme prior to this, via the listings in Radio Times, which were often accompanied by retro-futurist Barney Bubbles-style graphics. It ticked two boxes that should have immediately appealed to me: science fiction, and comedy, and I’d even read the programme descriptions – although this may have served as something of a deterrent: after all, what kind of a series included characters with such stupid names as ‘Zaphod Beeblebox’? (as I initially misread it).

So why had I not tuned in? The answer to that question is simple (and not 42): radio. Not that I didn’t listen to the radio: far from it. My diaries attest to the fact that I often listened to various repeats of classic radio comedy, as well as contemporary editions of series like I’m Sorry I Haven’t a Clue and Just a Minute. But I was far from being a regular listener, and only did so at specific times of day: lunchtimes and, occasionally, early evenings. The first broadcast of The Hitch-Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy went out at 10.30 in the evening: a time at which radio listening was, for me, somehow inconceivable. Indeed, the late evening scheduling may well have been problematic for other listeners, for the series was immediately repeated in the more accessible slot of 11am on Sunday mornings. Yet still I didn’t tune in. Nor again in November of that same year, when a third repeat began on Wednesday evenings at 8.15. Three broadcasts in the space of a year was almost unheard of, and a clear indication of the huge impact the first series had made. But not on me. Not yet, anyway.

In fact, it was only in response to a request for audio recordings that I tuned in to series two on its first outing in January 1980. A guy with whom I’d been corresponding on the subject of Gerry Anderson had asked me if I could record the second series when it went out: he lived in Holland where the broadcasts could not be received in good enough quality. As it transpired, I wasn’t able to provide very good quality copies myself, since I did not possess a decent tape recorder at the time. Our back room hi-fi was the only system in the house equipped with a radio (apart from a near-defunct valve radiogram that lived in my brother’s bedroom), and the ‘Fidelity’-branded unit, though offering stereo reception, did not include a cassette deck (you can see the exact same model in Bob and Thelma’s living room in Whatever Happened to the Likely Lads). With the broadcasts going out in stereo, I had to resort to recording them from the monaural Medium Wave transmissions, and on reel-to-reel tape, which somewhat diminished the listening experience, but meant that I was able to employ the primitive method of placing a microphone in front of a single speaker, without losing half the audio. I could tell the guy wasn’t too impressed with this, but I wasn’t about to go out and buy a new hi-fi system just so he could have pristine stereo recordings. 

Radio 4 followed the pattern previously established by the first series of Hitch-Hiker’s... and a Sunday morning repeat of series two began about a month later, when I was finally able to tune in in stereo. It sounded much better that way, but even in mono, on Medium Wave, I’d been hooked. In its favour, series two did start on a particularly strong episode, somewhat untypical of the series as a whole with its focus on Zaphod Beeblebrox, and his encounter with the ‘Total Perspective Vortex.’ The myriad original ideas and comic philosophical annotations courtesy of ‘the book’ convinced me at once that this was my kind of thing, and I’d clearly been missing out.

Unfortunately, the high standard of that opening episode couldn’t be maintained. As is well-documented elsewhere, series creator Douglas Adams had trouble delivering his scripts on time, and by the time that series two was in development, was concurrently working on other projects including the LP record adaptation of the fiest series. The quality of the scripts for the second series didn’t so much decline as drop off a cliff: following two excellent instalments, the shift in the action to the planet Brontitall saw the storyline disappear down a blind and not very interesting alley (dumped by Adams in his subsequent novelisations). The most entertaining aspect of the programmes continued to be the numerous digressions courtesy of the book, and one suspects that it was these elements as opposed to the mechanics of the script which most engaged Douglas Adams (a South Bank Show profile on Adams later revealed the source of inspiration for this aspect of the scripts to have been Flann O’Brien’s comic novel The Third Policeman, which is peppered throughout with bizarrely inventive quasi-scientific footnotes from an idiot-savant philosopher).

At this stage, I hadn’t heard series one, and wasn’t aware of how the story had got started. There were, of course, various references to what had gone before, but these were often perfunctory, glossing over numerous yawning chasms that had opened up in the storyline: how, for instance, had Zaphod recovered the starship Heart of Gold, last seen on the planet Magrathea, from which our heroes had fallen through a time warp into the Restaurant at the End of the Universe? ‘I got lucky,’ says Zaphod. And that’s it. Of course, Adams needed the Heart of Gold back in the plot, because its ‘Infinite Improbability Drive’ provided the ultimate explanation for anything ludicrously coincidental that might crop up in the storyline. But more critically, this seeming lack of attention to matters of plot and continuity gives us a big clue as to the real purpose of the series: it was primarily a vehicle for skewed ideas, warped scientific fantasies such as extrapolating the whole of creation from a small piece of fairy cake. And with comic invention that good on board, did it matter if the plot made sense or whether the various episodes ended up fitting neatly together? Of course not.

Ironically, it was the subsequent attempts of Adams and others to reconcile various conflicting strands of plot that proved to be the series’ undoing for me, and a key reason why I finally gave up on it. When Radio 4 launched The Hexagonal Phase (ie. sixth series) earlier this year, in celebration of Hitch-Hiker’s fortieth anniversary, the first twenty minutes (at least) comprised an attempt to summarise and tie up many of the convoluted twists and turns taken by the plot over Adams’ books (which were posthumously serialised for radio beginning in 2004). I have to say I gave up, just as I’d given up on the third, fourth and fifth series.

I also baled out of the books at, I believe, volume four (comically describing itself as the fourth part in the trilogy), although I’d enjoyed the first of them, which provided me with my introduction to Arthur Dent’s backstory when I read it in December of 1980. Within weeks, the series arrived on television, and so it was this revised version of the plot (the ‘Disaster Area’ version as opposed to the ‘Hagunennon’ version) that I came to know best. The book also clued me in on something of which I’d been totally unaware during the broadcasts of series two: the fact that Zaphod Beeblebrox possessed two heads (and an extra arm). Not knowing about the latter rendered Zaphod’s utterance when he and Ford shake hands on their reunion somewhat meaningless: ‘Put it there! And there! And there!’

I’d done some doodles of my own, visualising characters like Marvin and Zaphod, along with the starship Heart of Gold (described in the book as resembling a sleek running shoe), and primitive though they were, my biro sketches proved to be surprisingly close to what we finally saw on the TV screen. Even so, I began to question whether Hitch-Hiker’s really gained anything from the added visuals: some of the jokes played on the fact that the audience couldn’t see what was happening, and to encumber actor Mark Wing-Davey with a rubber head was probably a step too far. The whole two-head thing, humorous enough as a throwaway line in a radio script, continued to pose a problem for designers and make-up technicians down the years when the simplest answer would have been to ditch it as early as possible, like so many other aspects of the original radio series (certainly the second, which was later conveniently written out of the continuity as having taken place in Zarniwoop’s artificial universe).

The TV series was, in effect, the first radio series with pictures added, and the script remained remarkably close to the original, with some innovative animations providing a context for the often prolix and off-topic interjections from the guide itself. By the time it went to air, I was waiting in eager anticipation and, on the whole, was not disappointed. I’d prefered the radio versions of Ford and Trillian, and only later realised that Geoffrey McGivern didn’t look anything like I’d imagined. Simon Jones, on the other hand, was every inch Arthur Dent, and exactly as I’d pictured him. So too, to some extent, was Mark Wing-Davey, whose Zaphod Beeblebrox on camera was not a million parsecs away from how I’d imagined him on radio (although as the ‘worst-dressed sentient being in the universe’, his wardrobe probably worked a lot better on radio). On the special effects front, things weren’t quite as satisfactory: the design for the ship looked awkward, and the chroma-key overlay effects were juddery and marred by rough edges, with the final result looking rather like a duff episode of Doctor Who.

Radio Times visualises the guide for its readers (January 1980). Not a million miles away from your ipad...

I returned to the radio where, shortly after the conclusion of the TV series, the original run of episodes began again in a 7.30pm timeslot. Unfortunately, this meant that there would often be a clash with TV or other evening activities, and I didn’t catch all the episodes. Sometime during this period, I also borrowed a copy of one of the LP iterations of the series, which impressed me rather less than its radio counterpart. In the event, it wasn’t until 1983 that I finally heard all twelve radio episodes, including the ‘Christmas Special’ that bridged (or perhaps opened) the gap between first and second series, which I’d managed to miss up to now. I was also, finally, able to record them in stereo, having acquired a modern, fit-for-purpose cassette deck as part of a component hi-fi system the previous year.

I stuck with the books, and was aware of the rumours that surfaced from time to time suggesting a movie version might be on the way. By the time a film did emerge, however, I’d long since lost the plot on all things Hitch-Hiker’s and galactic. Quite literally. When all that existed was the first two series, and a couple of novels, it was relatively easy to keep track of who had done what, with which, and to whom. But as subsequent novels added layers of plot and continuity that had somehow to be encompassed within a single, satisfactory timeline, the purpose of the concept, as a vehicle for comic invention, became lost. Sure, you needed a basic plot as an excuse to engage the characters, but Hitch-Hiker’s lost its own plot, somewhere in the black hole between radio, printed page and television. By the time it was revived for radio in 2004, I couldn’t care less about the status of Arthur and Trillian’s relationship, or whether or not they’d had a daughter. I wanted more of that comic stuff from the guide itself, but that might just be me: I’ve never really been one for plotlines, especially when they become as distracting as Hitch-Hiker’s did.

I’d venture to suggest that, when Douglas Adams set out to write the first series, he had no more idea of where he’d end up than did his characters. Series one is almost like a set of six individual playlets, loosely joined (in some cases barely at all) by an ongoing cast, three of whom get eaten in the final episode. No two episodes are quite the same, from Arthur Dent’s failed attempt to save his home through to his and Ford’s being stranded in prehistory. Did Adams even conceive of there being a second series? Not judging by the fate met by Zaphod, Trillian and Marvin in episode six. Series one works quite satisfactorily on its own, and is nicely cyclical in that it manages to return Arthur Dent to his home world. And it found room along the way for some genuinely original science fiction concepts, many of which would have been at home in a serious narrative.

Series two, on the other hand struggles to find a reason for its existence. Zaphod Beeblebrox has sent a mysterious mental message to himself, which sends him in search of Zarniwoop, editor of the Hitch-Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. But this strand of plot is immediately usurped when he’s whisked off to the Frogstar on an entertaining but ultimately pointless digression. By episode two, our heroes have mostly been reunited on board the Heart of Gold, and survived an encounter with the Vogons, but thereafter, the plot becomes derailed with a detour to a planet whose bird-like inhabitants are the evolutionary outcome of ill-fitting footwear: which would have made a fine short piece from the guide, but when expanded over two episodes of plot rapidly becomes tedious and annoying. There’s another blind alley as Zaphod and Ford find a spaceship that’s been waiting aeons for take off while awaiting a conignment of ‘lemon-scented paper napkins’, but here, ultimately, they find Zarniwoop and the series reaches a conclusion of sorts. 

Even listening for the first time, without any knowledge of where the first series had been, I was aware of this ‘tailing-off’ as the plot just ran out of good ideas. From the upbeat madness of episode one to the bleak emptiness of episode five was a long way to travel in a single week; but there had been enough in those first couple of episodes to engage my enthusiasm, and I subsequently realised that they were much more in the spirit of series one. In fact, considering it all in retrospect, an ‘ideal’ version of the story for me would be the first series, plus the first three episodes of series two, with an open-ended conclusion leaving our heroes free to roam the galaxy. Who needs plot lines tied up, or elaboated upon ad infinitum? Did we honestly need the mind-mangling complexity of what was to follow? Douglas Adams should maybe have followed the advice of his own creation, Marvin the Paranoid Android:

“Make it up? Why should I want to make anything up? Life's bad enough as it is without wanting to invent any more of it.” 

The best ideas don’t have to be complicated, and for me, The Hitch-Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy would have done better to have abandoned plot altogether in favour of a free-wheeling ride to Zarquon-knows-where. Which, in series one, is very nearly what it did.

Radio 4 Extra has, this past week, been repeating series one and two of The Hitch-Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy to celebrate the fortieth episode of the original broadcast, and the episodes are going out in their original timeslot of 10.30pm. Listening at that hour is instantly nostalgic, and I’m transported back to January 1980, the Medium Wave, and a borrowed reel-to-reel tape recorder. The intervening years might never have happened. The earth wasn’t destroyed at all. Was it?

Beating the drum for Tom Tom

Tom Tom – presenter Jeremy Carrad (right) discusses the 1968 Grand Prix season with modelmaker Rex Hays

‘New, unusual, and fascinating stories and items of interest in a modern and changing world.’ This was how the Radio Times billing described a new series which debuted on Tuesday 12 October 1965. The series was Tom Tom, and it hailed from BBC Bristol, whose Points West anchor man Jeremy Carrad served as presenter. Largely forgotten today, Tom Tom was, in essence, Blue Peter for the modern world, with a focus on science, invention and technology. They even had their own ‘robot’, Tobor (‘robot’ spelled backwards), although the walking, talking machine was a mere flight of special effects fancy, contrasting the programme’s serious approach to science. 

Tom Tom seems to have evolved out of an earlier, more juvenile format Treasure House (24 March - 21 July 1965), that paired Carrad with a robotic hound, the punningly-named Serendipity Dog, who posed questions on a variety of topics, allowing Carrad to supply answers in the form of a wide range of factual information. Tom Tom effectively dropped the dog and added John Earle as a roving reporter, and the programme followed the Blue Peter template with a mix of studio-based items and filmed reports. An early item initiated in the series was to follow the progress of the 1966 Grand Prix Drivers’ Championship in the studio, initially with a scoreboard and scale models, latterly in the form of ambitious slot-car reconstructions of the actual events. In later years, Carrad would present filmed reports from the racetracks of the world.

My own recollections of Tom Tom are scant, but I remember Carrad as an affable presenter, and the robot was an amusing distraction, particularly when he was ‘programmed’ to do some comic business such as coming up with his own song for Christmas. One item I associate with Tom Tom was a feature about James’ Bond’s Aston Martin as seen in Goldfinger, which was released around the time of the series’ television debut (although this may well have been on Blue Peter). As I remember it, the team showed viewers a model of the car, which I recollect as including features that were not present in the first production example from Corgi Toys (I still remember wondering why my first Corgi model did not include tyre-slashers).

Although I saw Tom Tom most weeks in its early days, I doubt I made a special effort to see it, although I was still watching sporadically at the dawn of the 1970s, when the programme looked forward fifty years to imagine the dizzying future world of 2020. I wonder how many of their predictions have come true...

With its focus on technology, Tom Tom always felt somewhat more serious than Blue Peter, and was probably more akin to a junior version of Tomorrow’s World. The original target audience seems to have been boys aged eight and upwards, although this changed somewhat with the introduction, later in the decade, of female presenters, including future newsreader Jan Leeming, and the inclusion of items such as a competition inviting viewers to design the fashions of the year 2020.

1970 was to be Tom Tom’s last year on air, with the final edition going out on 4 November. Carrad had departed in 1969, exiting via a magician’s disappearing cabinet, but he had long since relinquished his presenter’s role to ex-ITV anchor man Norman Tozer, turning instead to filing filmed reports from around the world.

Unlike Blue Peter, Tom Tom never received the recognition of a yearly annual, nor any other type of publication or merchandise. Its status as a regional production may have had some bearing on this; BBC Enterprises were perhaps less likely to invest in a title that originated from outside London. There are almost no images of Tom Tom available online– the above image being the sole example I’ve been able to track down. This, if anything, is an indicator of the extent to which the series has been forgotten.

Part of what makes Tom Tom interesting, in retrospect, is the fact that it was pretty well the only attempt by the BBC to emulate the successful format of Blue Peter, albeit aiming at a somewhat more sophisticated audience. After Tom Tom, there would be no further efforts to create a magazine-style programme for young viewers, although Nationwide (and latterly, The One Show) subsequently became a de facto Blue Peter for grown ups. ITV, of course, enjoyed great, if not lasting success with Magpie, whose cooler, more contemporary vibe may well have been influenced by Tom Tom.

Tom Tom is one of those programmes that are poised on the brink of oblivion – almost forgotten by the majority, dimly remembered by a small minority, barrely represented (if at all) in the archives – and such items of television will ultimately be completely forgotten unless those of us who remember them do something about it. I’ve already had to correct the Wikipedia entry on the series which was short on information, and factually inaccurate in several respects, drawing on the dubious, badly-researched efforts of a website called TV Cream (which I do not recommend). The best online resource available to anyone interested in the history of Tom Tom is the BBC’s Genome database, derived from Radio Times billings, which includes several substantial write-ups of various editions from the latter part of the series’ run.

It may not have been Blue Peter, but Tom Tom was a worthwhile attempt to present modern, factual television to children in an era when experimentation and novelty were still the watchwords of television. And it had a cool robot and a big Scalextric set. In the ’60s, you couldn’t ask for much more than that.

Bleep, Booster, Zebedee and Zabadak

 

 

Blue Peter memories part 2

Blue Peter is amongst my earliest television memories and must certainly have been one of the first television programmes I ever saw, probably at an age when I’d have been too young to make much, if anything of the content. Memories become less hazy around 1964 or 65, and it’s little surprise that one of the first aspects of the programme that I recollect with any clarity was the semi-regular serial Bleep and Booster (above).

Written and drawn by the artist William Timyn (always identified on screen and in print as simply ‘Tim’), Bleep and Booster told the story of a boy from Earth, ‘Booster’, who builds a space rocket in his back garden (I have to say, this struck me at age three or four as an entirely plausible scenario). Rocketing into space, Booster finds himself unable to return, but is befriended by the small, robotic inhabitant of a bleeping flying saucer. This is Bleep, the space-boy, from the planet Miron, and the stage is now set for a long-running series of outer space adventures, told entirely in the form of still images and narration. ‘Tim’ wrote the stories himself, as well as painting the illustrations in a slick, stylised black and white wash technique that was especially well-suited to depicting the shiny metal of spacecraft and other hardware. Reportedly, Timyn also shot the five-minute episodes himself, presumably making use of a rostrum camera, panning between scenes and adding zoom to bring his still pictures to life. ‘Special sound’ was provided by Brian Hodgson of the BBC Radiophonic workshop, and these electronic effects lent a surprising amount of atmosphere to the stories. The narrator was Flowerpot Men and Dalek voice genius Peter Hawkins.

Bleep and Booster’s history is not well documented, and there’s a good deal of uncertainty as to when the serials began. A storybook retelling of the first adventure appeared in 1965, so it seems a safe bet to date their debut to a few months or maybe a year before. Bleep and Booster did not always feature on Blue Peter, and there would typically be maybe two serials a year, probably in the autumn or winter (my memory is of watching them with the curtains closed). At other times, ‘Tim’ provided stories of a Boxer dog pup called Bengo. His illustrations for these charming tales gave me an early artistic tip which I remembered much later – drawing smiling faces with the eyes as two semicircles.

Information online relating to Bleep and Booster is scant, and riddled with errors. Various sources claim that their adventures aired until 1977, but this is simply not true. As far as I recollect – and I can lay claim to doing so with some accuracy – Bleep and Booster did not feature in Blue Peter much after 1969 if at all, and the serials had come to an end well before the programme began to be produced in colour. Two of the last adventures – they may indeed be the very last, but information is hard to obtain – appeared on a VHS tape in the early 1990s, and anyone interested in acquainting themselves with these illustrated adventures is advised to track down a copy. Despite their absence from the small screen, Bleep and Booster continued to appear in the Blue Peter books produced each year until 1977, and their ‘after life’ in print is most likely the source of the confusion over the television screening dates.

In pure merchandising terms, Bleep and Booster were, for a time, more successful than their parent programme, and between 1965 and 1969 spawned a series of toys (including some very rare and desirable marionettes) and three annuals, all written and illustrated by ‘Tim’ in his customary style. The stories were imaginative adventures, not far removed from the Gerry Anderson template, expanding on the universe of alien beings and worlds that had appeared on television. Some memorable alien creations included the Rotundans (trunkless heads with long, tentacle-like arms and legs) and the belligerent Trugs (originally known as the Frigs, their name was changed for obvious reasons), whose hot tempers could be contained only by wearing small conical hats!

Sadly, ‘Tim’s artwork began to show signs of diminishing quality with the passage of time, and his illustrations for the Blue Peter Books from the mid ’70s onwards are noticeably less assured than the work he was producing at his peak in the mid to late ’60s. He lived until 1990, but his creations are remembered by a generation who grew up with Blue Peter during the 1960s.

The classic line-up from 1967: Peter Purves, Valerie Singleton, John Noakes, plus pets Joey, Petra, Patch and Jason

Clips of early surviving Blue Peter episodes indicate that pop groups made appearances on the programme – one example being Freddie and the Dreamers. This is one aspect of the series that I don’t recollect, and I assume that these kind of mimed studio performances must have been phased out by say 1965 which is when my earliest memories date from. One of the only examples I can recall of pop music featuring in the programmes involved Dave Dee, Dozy, Beaky, Mick and Tich’s 1967 single Zabadak!, the title of which was chosen as the name for one of Petra’s grandpuppies (the other being Zebedee). The song was played in the studio while Val and John jiggled the pups up and down, although DDDBM&T did not appear themselves.

My earliest Blue Peter memories are of the two-handed presentation team of Christopher Trace and Valerie Singleton. Trace came over as an affable cross between an elder brother and an uncle, and was often to be found adding components to the programme’s model railway layout, sightings of which are among my earliest recollections of the series. The layout featured no scenic detail, other than occasional items like a suspension bridge, and was used primarily as a means to highlight new arrivals in the toyshop, serving almost as a commercial for manufacturers Tri-ang/Hornby. I remember being particularly impressed by a car transporter, to the extent of asking for it at Christmas or my birthday of that year. Another set demonstrated on air was the ‘Freightliner’, highlighting the arrival on Britain’s railways of the now familiar container-based transport system (this would have been around 1967 or ’68). Again, the ‘Freightliner’ set became a Christmas present, entirely on the strength of being shown on the programme – and if that’s not a commercial, I don’t know what is!

If this sounds like blatant product placement, it should be remembered that the manufacturer’s name was never mentioned (but with Tri-ang/Hornby enjoying a virtual monopoly of the model railway business, this was hardly necessary). This sensitivity to brand names was most apparent whenever Val, John or whoever demonstrated one of their DIY model projects. Sellotape was always carefully referred to as ‘sticky tape’, and anything like a bottle of Gloy gum would have its label either removed or turned away from the camera. The ubiquitous ‘sticky-backed plastic’ was in fact available at the time from only one major manufacturer, under the ‘Fablon’ brand name, – which must have enjoyed a sales spike in the ’60s and ’70s judging from the number of times it was put to use in the making of a doll’s house or a base for Action Man (sorry, ‘your soldier doll’).

I’m not sure which is the earliest of these Blue Peter ‘makes’ that I remember, but I certainly recall John Noakes shaping polystyrene tiles into gliders, which would have occurred in maybe late 1966 or early 1967, and appeared in the book at the end of the latter year. Polystyrene tiles were pressed into use on other occasions too, and I seem to remember Christopher Trace suggesting a ‘snow landscape’ for plastic farmyard animals, which could be pressed into the polystyrene to keep them upright. Trace also presented a ‘pack away farm’ project at about the same time, featuring in the Blue Peter book at the end of 1965. Despite these being such regular items on the programme, I can’t remember attempting many of them, due in no small part to the usual requirement for about a hundred lolly sticks or empty matchboxes. Lolly sticks can be obtained by the bag these days from the average craft shop, but such places, if they even existed in the 1960s, would have been few and far between. And how many lollies could one child get through in a typical summer? Scarcely enough to cover one gable end of Action Man’s log cabin...

In between craft projects, Blue Peter was never short of interesting items, usually presented as filmed inserts. Latterly, these often came to feature John Noakes undertaking some manner of dare-devilry, but they could just as easily be on historic subjects. An item on the fate of Pompeii, shown some time in 1965 or ’66 (and never reproduced in any of the books) impressed me particularly, and I’m fairly sure served as my introduction to the concept, not to mention the chilling reality of volcanoes in general (the Blue Peter team would later visit the slopes of the erupting Mount Etna in 1971). Indeed, looking back, I’m surprised at how much of what I now consider ‘general knowledge’ or trivia has its origins in a Blue Peter item: Frost Fairs on the Thames; The Great Fire of London; how stamps are printed; the Royal Mint; Big Ben; the history of ‘Silent Night’... these and countless other topics first became known to me through items included in editions of Blue Peter, and what holds good for me must also apply to others too. I doubt any other television programme can make the same claim.

The books, of course, always drew on items that had featured in the programme over the preceding eighteen months or so (the average annual requiring something like a year to produce and print), and these pictorial accounts served to refresh the memory of what had been seen on screen. As late as 1974, when I acquired a second-hand copy of the Blue Peter book from 1966, I was still able to remember seeing items on screen such as the story of a stricken merchant navy vessel, the Flying Enterprise, and an item about the origins of the London Fire Brigade.

Everyone points to John Noakes as the quintessential Blue Peter presenter, and his skill as a broadcaster, coupled with his avuncular, easy-going everyman persona cannot be over-stated. Yet I’d always preferred Christopher Trace, who in 1965 and ’66 was also to be found presenting Junior Choice on the BBC Light Programme (a role later filled definitively by Ed Stewart). My preference for Chris over Val probably had a lot to do with the types of items each would present. Gender stereotyping was never a worry in the 1960s, and it made perfect sense for Val to host an item about dolls’ houses while Chris looked at the latest developments in model cars and railways, thus guaranteeing the loyalty of small boys like myself. The departure of Christopher Trace marked, for me, the first watershed in my memories of the programme, and I can still remember the months during which Blue Peter was reduced to just Val, John and the pets. Peter Purves, if memory served, first appeared in a filmed segment about life-saving, shot in a swimming baths and broadcast towards the end of 1967. Purves turned out to be an ideal choice to replace Chris, and his friendly persona shines through in every photograph of him in the Blue Peter annuals. I’d never seen him in Dr. Who, so had no preconceptions about him when he joined the team, and he seemed at home and at ease right from the word go. A bantering relationship soon developed with Noakes, and when the two of them went off on some assignment together, the results could be hilarious. I remember one example that saw the pair undertaking something like an assault course in the middle of a forest. Arriving at a point where their route diverged, they stood for a moment debating on which way to go until the army instructor, or whoever was in charge, popped up from behind a tree yelling ‘that way!’ This may not sound like much, but such little moments of humour were not only innovative in children’s television of the time – they helped pave the way for some of the television we have today.

Blue Peter’s DNA is all over modern programming. The Clarkson/Hammond/May era of Top Gear was clearly in its debt, taking the old construction projects to absurd new heights, to say nothing of their ventures into foreign climes. And one can clearly see the legacy in series like Michael Portillo’s Great... Railway Journeys, every edition of which is made up of the kind of features that appeared regularly on Blue Peter (and I dare say, even some of the exact same items). Even a show like QI, with its focus on arcane information, looks back to the example of Val, John et al.

Blue Peter, of course, continues to exist. The BBC would probably refer to it now as a ‘brand’, but I won’t. Neither have I much interest in what the programme now comprises other than to observe that, as a template for children’s television, it has to be preferable to many of the often inane alternatives on offer to today’s audience. If we can say that a programme like Blue Peter provided a service to viewers in the ’60s and ’70s, then it was as an encouragement to be creative (with or without sticky-back plastic), or to get out and see things, and go places. It was an introduction to topics of both contemporary and historical interest, and beyond all that, it was just good, no-nonsense television entertainment.