Whatever Happened to You?

The Likely Lads of Popular Culture

Dave (1975) and Tim (2021) pose in front of the same patio door...

Nostalgia for old television. When did it get started? I’m sure that in my early childhood there were probably those who held fond memories of Sylvia Peters and the days when dinner jacketed BBC announcers addressed the nation surrounded by parlour palms and aspidistras. But it’s not something one heard the grown ups discussing. Television was certainly a topic of conversation, but it was decidedly in the present tense. As a genuinely popular cultural phenomenon, television didn’t really take a hold in Britain until the mid-50s, which means that when I first encountered it, it was barely five years old. And nostalgia takes a little longer than that to ferment…

For me, I think it all began around 1970, when I developed a fascination, bordering on the obsessive, with Gerry Anderson’s Fireball XL5. The series had been off air for just four years, but at the age of nine, that’s almost half a lifetime. All I had to remind me of the show was a few annuals, and a couple of toys that had survived almost intact. For months I fixated on Fireball, reading the books, playing with the toys. I even took my plastic Fireball XL5 toy on our family holiday. In the autumn, it seemed as if my obsession had borne fruit, because lo and behold, in the middle of September, timed to coincide with the debut of Gerry Anderson’s UFO, our local ITV station, ATV Midlands, began a repeat run of my favourite series.

I’m not sure that any of my friends at school shared my interest in Fireball XL5 and the work of Gerry Anderson in general. My brother went along with it, and was bought all the same toys, but I don’t think he ever quite went for the world of puppets the way I did. Nor did I know anyone who took much interest in another strand of television that was just beginning to pique my interest – the action/adventure series produced by ITC, which were entering a kind of afterlife of repeat runs.

In the spring of 1972, a school friend of my brother, two years younger than myself, became a regular visitor to our house. Tim, then aged just nine, was mad about any kind of audio gadgetry, which at the time amounted to tape recorders and record players. He had a tiny portable tape recorder with three-inch spools onto which he would record snippets from the television, most notably The Saint, which was being repeated on Friday evenings. It took a while for me to get to know him properly, but Tim would become one of the first people with whom I could share my enthusiasms for television and films, both old and new. In time, we would revisit series I dimly remembered, including ITC’s Strange Report and, most notably, The Prisoner.

In 1973, I moved up to the local grammar school, where I met another fellow traveller. Dave shared the same enthusiasms I’d picked up on over the years: Gerry Anderson, James Bond, Dr. Who, comics and old annuals. We began what might be termed ‘competitive collecting’, in as much as we were in the market for the same items, usually hard to find. Once, memorably, Dave whipped an old Supercar Annual from under my nose on a bookstall at the school’s Christmas Bazaar of 1975. I had to make do with an Avengers Annual from 1968, itself a rarity, but not in the same league as Supercar. Until that moment, neither of us had even seen a Supercar Annual, so this was a significant find. In fairness, he later loaned it out to me for a few weeks. Such is the danger of sharing your enthusiasms with your mates. As collectors of vintage ephemera we were a kind of Likely Lads of Popular Culture, chasing not girls but Doctor Who annuals, and occasionally falling out over them. I’m not sure who was who, but Dave looked more like Rodney Bewes than I did...

Still visible under the thumbprints: Dave, and Annuals, in our back garden, summer 1975

We were better matched with the Man from UNCLE paperback series which we both collected during 1974 and 75, these being somewhat easier to find (until you got past No.8… see my separate post for a full round-up of the UNCLE book mania).

While I stayed on at the grammar school to take ‘A’ levels, Dave left school after the ‘O’ level exams and I never saw him again after the summer of 1977. I’d begun to suspect he was losing interest in collecting, after his cool response when I found another, earlier Supercar Annual a few months after the incident at the Bazaar. I was ultimately proved wrong, for of the two of us, it was Dave who turned out to be the serious comic collector. Despite a tentative career in local industry, he somehow found his way into the world of buying and selling comics as a professional enterprise. When our parents met up by chance a few years later, I was told that Dave was now doing very nicely thank you working as a comic dealer out of New York. His career trajectory from that point onwards is unknown to me, but by the early 90s he was running a shop in Cambridge and, later, began working for the comics publisher Titan Books.

Dave dropping off the radar came as less of a loss than it might have done, because during the preceding year and a half, Tim had become a much more significant figure in my life. It helped that he lived within walking distance while Dave’s house was a bus ride away, and while Dave had other interests like football to distract him, Tim shared my antipathy for the ‘beautiful game’. Saturday afternoons for us meant trips up to Sherwoods’ film library in Birmingham, or the junk shops of Walsall, in search of TV tie-ins from the 1960s. If Dave and I had been the Likely Lads of Man from UNCLE paperbacks, then Tim and I became Bob and Terry in our enthusiasm for 8mm films of old TV series.

It was with Tim rather than Dave that I kindled my enthusiasm for the ITC series: we were both glued to the screen for the repeat run of Strange Report in 1976, albeit Tim’s glue had rather more adhesion than mine. When the series moved from its Sunday afternoon slot after only three episodes, it became a moveable feast across the schedule, liable to pop up on random Friday mornings before settling into a more consistent run as a weekday afternoon filler. Although he should have been at school for most of these broadcasts, Tim ‘bunked off’, something our mum would never have countenanced. The repeats primed us for the more significant return, in late August, of The Prisoner. I doubt if any screening of a television series was ever more keenly anticipated. We knew about it months ahead of time, via the television column in the Birmingham Evening Mail, and we were ready and waiting at 11pm on Thursday August 26.

Just as Dave outclassed me in comic collecting, so too did Tim. I was the first of us to own an 8mm sound projector, but it was Tim who provided the films we watched on it, making trips over to Dudley to hire episodes of The Avengers, The Sweeney and even The Beatles’s Magical Mystery Tour. It was Tim who went on to collect 16mm films, and ultimately, original broadcast prints of our favourite series on 35mm film. It was Tim who turned his obsession into a profitable business whilst I shouted encouragement from the sidelines. My own choice of career – illustrator cum graphic designer – was just about scraping along, so when Tim invited me to join his company I was grateful for the opportunity.

But of the three of us, only I remain to tell the story. In the past week I have learned of the death of Dave, with whom I had tentatively and briefly re-established contact via email some five years ago. But despite a flurry of communication over the space of a few weeks, we never did get to meet up face to face.

Tragically, Tim died suddenly in November 2022, bringing to an untimely end a friendship I imagined would endure into our dotage. I could even picture us, in his home cinema, still guffawing at his favourite junky, spliced-to-hell 16mm print of Jason King. As Simon and Garfunkel sang on their Bookends album: ‘How terribly strange to be seventy… and old friends’. A milestone we will, sadly, never see.

Tim was in my life for fifty years, from 1972-2022, Dave just shy of four years, 1973-77. Without them, the journey would have been a hell of a lot less fun.

In memory of Tim Beddows, 1963-2022 and David Hanks, 1960-2023

Goodbye, Sodium

An Edward Hopper-esque atmosphere on the packaging for Corgi's lamp standards kit.

I was fascinated by some strange things as a child. Pylons and cooling towers to name but two, and both from an extremely early age. For some reason, I found various aspects of the man-made environment intriguing, and none more so than street lights. I was reminded of this only last week, when, at twilight, I exited the M1 at Junction 24A. Along the sliproad leading up to the roundabout, the streetlights were glowing a soft shade of pink indicating that they had only just come on. Set against the misty pinkish-blue of the twilight, it made for an atmospheric moment, and one which I realised, with a pang of nostalgia, may never happen again. 

The reason for this is quite simple: LPS (Low Pressure Sodium) street lamps – the ubiquitous orange type that have dominated Britain’s major roads since the 1950s – are being phased out. As of 2019, the last factory producing the lantern units closed, and no more will be made. Anyone who has been out after dark on our major roads in the past few years can’t have failed to notice that the old ‘orange’ night time atmosphere is slowly disappearing, with modern LED lamps taking the place of the older units. Presumably this is being done for reasons of cost efficiency as much as anything else, and the improved colour spectrum of LED lights is claimed to bring benefits in road safety. I’m sure this is true, but I still regret the passing of the old sodium vapour lighting columns.

As a child, two aspects of street lights fascinated me: their colour, and the style of the lighting columns themselves. There was one right outside our house in Lichfield, a concrete column with right-angled bracket, on which was mounted a small, rectangular lamp. When first lit at twilight, the lamp glowed a soft pink, gradually acquiring the distinctive orange hue of sodium. The pink glow has a technical explanation: this initial colour comes from what’s known as ‘Penning mixture’, a blend of gases – usually helium or neon with xenon – used as a ‘starter’ to warm the metal sodium inside the lamp. I saw these colours in terms of confectionery: a strawberry Spangle, followed by an orange Spangle.

The original 1950s column was still in place outside our old home when I took this photo in 1980.
Needless to say, it has long since been replaced.

Not all street lamps were orange, though. Our dad provided the explanation: orange street lamps like the one outside our house were ‘sodium vapour’ whilst the greenish-white sort I’d seen elsewhere were ‘mercury vapour’. The latter were more often to be found on smaller suburban streets, typically mounted on distinctive metal columms, often quite ornate in appearance, topped by a ‘swan-neck’ lamp bracket. In the 1960s, however, mercury lamps could still be found on major roads around the country, to which they lent a ghostly greenish-white light (as mentioned by C.P. Snow in his Strangers and Brothers sequence of novels). Eachelhurst Road in Erdington, which we regularly travelled along on visits to our grandparents, was one stretch of highway I recall seeing under mercury vapour, the lamps sitting atop tall metal columns painted green that probably dated from the 1940s or 50s. Increasingly, though, sodium was becoming the norm.

On trips in our dad’s car at night, I would marvel at the sheer variety of lighting columns. On our grandparents’ road, the lanterns had a distinctive ‘witches hat’ or flying saucer appearance, whilst along the major roads leading into Birmingham a curious suspension system was still in use, whereby a single lantern hung over the middle of the carriageway, slung on chains between two columns mounted at the roadside: a configuration which I believe may have been associated with facilities for tram wires. Around Walsall, where there had definitely been ‘column-sharing’ between lighting and tram wires, one could still see examples of lamps on long metal brackets extending from the poles, some of which still had their old electric insulators and even wires attached. Around more prestigious areas, such as civic buildings, a ‘posh’ type of street lamp predominated. In Birmingham, these took the form of fluted metal columns, painted a discrete powder blue, topped with huge lighting units that gave out a white neon light (sodium was evidently too proletarian for such locations). Still further up the scale of prestige were the lamps to be found around the Cathedral and along Colmore Row in Birmingham City Centre, which employed the same pale blue fluted columns, but were topped off by columnar lights which stood upright. These units, known as ‘Festival’, were manufactured by a local company, REVO, based in Tipton. Few if any survive today, with some of the last known examples being the so-called ‘Richardson Candles’ of Cambridge.

Sourced from http://www.simoncornwell.com/lighting/collect/columns/index.htm

If we ever ventured further afield, I would always notice variations in the style of lamp standards, as civic authorities all tended to use different, often local sources of supply. Some of the older survivors were often extremely ornate, with baroque styling, but these struck me as excessive, and I prefered the more minimalist designs that had been introduced in the post-war era. If I had a favourite style of street light, it was surely the twin-lamp column, as seen so often on the central reservations of dual carriageways, on motorways, and at roundabouts and major road junctions.

I even had toy street lights bought for me, partly to add realism to games with toy cars but mostly because I liked them so much. Corgi offered a ‘kit’ of modern sodium lighting columns (to say it was a ‘kit’ was a bit much: all one had to do was to plug the column into a metal baseplate and attach the plastic lantern to the top), whilst Dinky toys had their own equivalent. Lego also provided street lights to enhance its plastic block environment. Needless to say, none of these examples actually worked, although electric versions would later become available for use on model railway layouts.

Toy street lamps: Dinky, far left/ unknown centre/ Corgi far right/ Lego, foreground

Like so many other items of street furniture, street lamps are somewhat ephemeral. Although installations often endure for decades, wear and tear and the failure of lanterns ensures that most will in time be replaced. 1960s columns were still a common sight on most arterial roads until well into the 1990s, and odd survivors can still be found, usually in overlooked corners that have escaped the ravages of modern redevelopment. I live on a major road whose concrete lighting columns date to the early 1980s and are almost certain to be replaced in the not too distant future. The lanterns are still the old LPS type, which lends a rather 1970s orange vibe to the night time environment.

Despite my abiding interest in street lights, it wasn’t until the age of maybe 13 that I became aware of one of the peculiar characteristics of sodium light: it has a very narrow spectrum, which renders all colours in shades of grey. I first noticed this whilst trying to read a TV21 Annual in the back of our dad’s car on an evening in 1974, when I noticed that the colour pictures in the book appeared monochrome under the light from the passing streetlamps. Sodium does present one distinct advantage over lanterns with a wider spectrum, in that it causes less ‘light pollution’. Astronomical observatories are able to filter out sodium light to give them a clearer view of the night sky, but this cannot be done with modern LED units.

It seems a pity that modern designers can’t hold a (Richardson) candle to those of the 50s, 60s and earlier eras, and contemporary lighting columns are unremarkable in appearance. Practicality (and cost, one assumes) has won out over asethetics. Shame.

On Again! On Again!

 

Discovering (and rediscovering) Jake Thackray

That’s Life! was regular viewing in our household. We’d been tuning in since its inception in 1973, so when a new series began on Sunday 2 January 1977, we were in front of the set at 10pm. 

The programme remains in my memory for a very specific reason, as it provided my first ever glimpse of an entertainer who had been established on television for almost a decade without ever impinging onto my consciousness. Jake Thackray, often misleadingly labelled as the ‘Yorkshire Nöel Coward’, had been a regular fixture on Braden’s Week from 1968-1972, a popular late-night entertainment which, like That’s Life!, had focused on consumer issues, alongside topical songs and sketches. In 1972, however, Braden had given the BBC pause for thought by appearing in a margarine commercial. The corporation deemed this unacceptable for a champion of consumer rights, and whilst Braden wasn’t directly sacked, his show was revamped to allow his co-presenter Esther Rantzen to take centre stage in his place. The rest is television history, as was Braden himself when That’s Life! launched without him in the early summer of 1973.

Esther Rantzen had been personally responsible for Thackray getting the gig on the Braden show in 1968, so it’s somewhat surprising he didn’t transfer to the new series. Like Braden’s Week, That’s Life! still featured a topical ‘song of the week’, but it would be nearly four years before the self-styled chansonnier was restored to his erstwhile position on the series. Now, two days into the new year of 1977, here he was at last, performing the title track of his new album, On Again! On Again!, his first release in five years.

I was immediately taken with this charismatic newcomer, but more than anything else, I liked the sound he created. Thackray was backed by a double bass player, Alan Williams, and session guitarist Ike Isaacs (who had previously accompanied him on Braden’s Week), and together they created a laid-back, jazzy sound reminiscent of the 1950s. The song itself was somewhat risqué, its opening line a paen to the hindquarters of the female anatomy. Let’s not bandy words: ‘I love a good bum on a woman, it makes my day’ he sang. In the next line, he used this observation as the basis for an extremely erudite bit of wordplay which I only fully understood many decades later: ‘to me it is palpable proof of God’s existence a posteriori’. The song was well-received, and although its sentiments were hardly in tune with the world view of a naive, uncynical 15-year-old like myself, I was instantly hooked. I began to note down Thackray’s appearances (and even non-appearances) in my diary. Fortunately for his fans, this series of That’s Life! remains intact in the BBC’s archives, and Jake’s performances were recently extracted for inclusion on a definitive DVD collection compiling all known surviving clips of the man during his BBC career, spanning the years 1968-1985. For fans, it is a revelation, for me, remarkable to see those old That’s Life! appearances again for the first time in 47 years.

Thackray was an intriguing, enimatic figure. Self-taught in both singing and guitar playing, and strongly influenced by the French chanson tradtion (as exemplified by Jacques Brel and, more pertinently, Georges Brassens), he had begun his career whilst working as a secondary school teacher in Leeds in the mid-1960s. Gravitating to local radio, his cause was championed by a BBC producer whose influence led to his being picked up on the national network and – almost unbelievably for an artist with no professional engagements to his credit – acquiring a recording contract with EMI. His first LP, The Last Will and Testament of Jake Thackray, was recorded at Abbey Road in 1967 while the Beatles were busy in the adjoining studio working on the soundtrack of their TV film Magical Mystery Tour. The fab four quickly picked up on Thackray’s quirky, humorous songs, and it’s reported that John Lennon took a tape of them with him to Rishikesh in 1968.

Thackray’s style of songwriting actually had more in common with the observational songs of Ray Davies, but it’s safe to say his approach was entirely his own. His primary influence was Georges Brassens, a major figure in his homeland of France but vitually unknown in the UK, and it was Brassens’s style of performance, accompanying himself on a nylon-string guitar, that Jake adopted, ending up with a unique hybrid of bluff northern gallic. Lyrically, his abilities outshone his contemporaries and remain unmatched to this day. A graduate in English language and literature, Thackray’s vocabulary went way beyond that of any other popular songwriter, and his ability to dovetail words together in perfect rhyme and metre remains unsurpassed. Stylistically, he was an acquired taste, with a curious singing voice that veered between bass/baritone in one line and a light near falsetto tenor the next. Words were often spat out or bitten off, in a half-singing-half-talking manner. He was not, technically, a great singer, but he had immense warmth and humanity, his pitching was always accurate and his style sounded like no one else on earth. Bernard Braden, in his sleeve notes for Jake’s second LP, reports that his initial appearances on the show led to a significant number of letters requesting his removal. Viewer reaction soon turned around, however, and within a matter of months, Jake Thackray was a household name. Just not in our household.

1977 was something of a career renaissance for Jake, with the That’s Life! spots cannily lined up ahead of a new record release. After three studio albums and a live collection for EMI, Jake’s career had turned back to performance in the early 70s, although even in this arena, he was a reluctant star, who would baulk at the idea of appearing at a 500-seater venue, preferring the intimacy of small folk clubs and pubs. I soon located the new LP in record shops, along with a couple of others from his rapidly disappearing back catalogue. At my birthday in March ‘77, I was bought the new album, and with birthday money purchased EMI’s Very Best of Jake Thackray compilation, which afforded a useful overview of his career to date. Or, to put it another way, his career in full – very nearly.

During the 1977 run of That’s Life!, Jake appeared more than a dozen times, singing carefully chosen numbers from the new album (not all were suitable for broadcast), alongside some old favourites. Although his songs were frequently intended to amuse, I seldom found them laugh out loud funny (some of the humour went way over my head at the time), but his storytelling was unmatched, and his compositions could just as easily be lyrical and melancholic. I found I liked these songs as much as (if not better) than the more overtly comic numbers. Another aspect of Thackray’s performance that interested me was his guitar technique, a simplified variation of the standard folkie ‘clawhammer’ style, focusing heavily on bass notes. I began to practise playing in this manner, and learned some of his songs. My diary for 31 December 1977 includes the entry: ‘did Jake Thackray impression at party’. At a month or so shy of 17 I was far too young to have carried this off convincingly, and my voice nowhere near deep enough to have been as accurate as it sounded in my head, but I’d discovered a new influence. Over forty years later, the voice is still there, but has matured: I open my mouth, and out comes Thackray. It’s a little unnerving…

Back in 1978 I’m sure I fully expected Jake to be back in harness when That’s Life! returned for a new series on 14 May, but I was disappointed. He would not return to television for another three years when the BBC finally gave him his own short-lived series, Jake Thackray and Songs. It was not for want of asking. Television may have made him a star, but Jake detested appearing on the ‘flickering rectangle’, denouncing TV production types on his final album sleeve as being characterised by headphones, cheesecloth and ‘frig’, qualities which, he was happy to report, had not been present during the filming of this low-key series, shot in the intimate atmosphere of a small club.

I could have seen Jake Thackray perform live many times during the coming decade, but never did: I often spotted his name in the listings for folk clubs not far from where I was living. But by this time in his career, seeing Jake’s name on a concert bill was no guarantee of seeing the man himself, and he was beginning to acquire a reputation as a no-show. Two agents washed their hands of him, tired of the endless (if imaginative) excuses with which he explained his all too frequent non-appearances. His career was self-destructing. The recently published biography ‘Beware of the Bull’ makes for quite harrowing reading in its latter stages. A staunch Catholic, Thackray seems to have been troubled by the idea of taking pride in himself and his work, and since his Jesuit schooldays had signed off all written work with the initials ‘AMDG’: ‘Ad maiorem Dei Gloriam’ (to the Glory of God). Towards the end of his life, when approached by fans enthusing about his work, he insisted that many of his songs were, in his opinion, worthless, citing some particular concert favourites as examples. He was also a committed socialist, and his lyrics often took devastating aim at those in society who lord it over others through entitlement and privilege. His late classic song ‘the Bull’ reads almost like his manifesto as it undermines those who set themselves up in authority only to use their privileged positions to drop ‘bullshite’ on the poor ‘bleeders below’.

Jake’s final years were spent in a council flat in Monmouth, estranged from his wife, suffering from alcoholism and surviving on hand-outs from friends and well-wishers. The last photographs of him, taken close to the end of his life in 2002, depict a man unrecognisable as the chisel-featured Byronic figure of the late 60s and early 70s. In a late flowering of enthusiasm, he had been fired up with the idea of a musical production based on his works when it was put to him late the same year. Tragically, he was found dead in his flat on Christmas Eve, aged only 64.

Since then, his legacy has been kept alive by a dedicated fan network whose efforts culimated last year in the release of the aforementioned DVD. Although TV rarely showed Jake at his best (his nervousness is quite obvious at times), this is a superb overview of his career, beginning with his very first TV spot (Beryl Reid Says Good Evening, 1968) and taking in all known surviving clips from the BBC’s archive until his disappearance from the medium in the mid 1980s.

There are few artists in the world of popular music who are genuine one-offs, but Jake Thackray is one of them. He was nothing less than a genius, extradorinarily original and utterly unrepeatable. 

The Last Snow of Childhood

 

Snow in the garden, Lichfield, circa 1964

It’s a sentiment one occasionally hears from persons of a certain age: the notion that the winters of our childhood were snowier than those of today. Certainly most winters would include at least one significant fall of snow, often around January or February, but much depended upon where one was living. In the midlands, where our family lived, snowfall was probably close to average. The memorably snowy winter of 1962-63 lies just beyond the limits of my recollection, but there were some heavy snowfalls during the next few years, one of them captured in a photograph.

As a child, one hoped for two things whenever it snowed: firstly, that the snow would settle deeply enough to allow one to play out in it, and secondly that it would lie on the ground for a few days. I judged a snowfall to have been a good one when it completely covered the lawn, so that not so much as the merest tip of a grass stalk was visible. Timing was also critical: if the snow fell during the week, there would be fewer opportunities to get out and play other than in the school playground, where snowball fights were discouraged.

An ideal snowfall would occur on a Friday, allowing the whole weekend for snow-based fun in the garden. There were no hills where we lived, so sledging was never an option: accordingly, I never owned one, and have no ‘Rosebud’ memories to look back on. Even so, a heavy snowfall was always cause for celebration. My earliest diary entry that mentions snow is from Friday 7 January 1972: ‘Today it has snowed heavily and settled very thick. Am hoping to play in it tomorrow.’ And play in it I most certainly did. The timing was propitious, this being the last weekend of the Christmas and New Year break (we did not return to school until Monday 10 January). The diary records no further falls of snow that winter, and judging from weather records, the months of November and December 1972 offered nothing like the kind of snowfall we’d seen in January. The next mention of snow comes in my diary for 1973, exactly fifty years ago this weekend, and once again, the timing was perfect.

On the afternoon of Saturday 20 January 1973, we had been shopping in the local town, and on returning to the car, snow was starting to fall. It came down in the kind of thick, cloying flakes that accumulate quickly and easily, and continued on into the evening, finally petering out around 8pm. I’d been dividing my time between reading comics – as the diary shows, I’d been bought no fewer than three different titles that day – and watching television. Dr. Who’s serial The Three Doctors had reached its fourth and final part, but the item that remains most clearly in my memory is the evening’s feature film, part of BBC1’s ‘High Adventure’ strand.

Invasion was a 1965 sci-fi thriller with a curiously intense, claustrophobic atmosphere. It had much of the feel of a Jon Pertwee Doctor Who, unsurprisingly, considering that the storyline came from DW contributor Robert Holmes (who reused some aspects in his 1970 serial Spearhead from Space). The plot concerns the arrival on earth of a group of alien visitors, the Lystrans, who take over a cottage hospital, enclosing it within a force field, which causes the temperature within the field to rise rapidly (the aliens were played by oriental actors, which reminded me of Gerry Anderson’s UFO). But it was the ‘extreme heat’ aspect of the plot that really fit in with the actual events of the evening. With the snow falling outside, our central heating was running at its usual ‘semi-tropical’ setting, but I was more concerned about the temperature outside. I’d seen the snow accumulating in the garden, but was worried as to whether it would last the night. When the film was over, I crept into the darkened back room and peered out between thick curtains at the snow-covered garden, pale and mysterious in the reflected light of the lying snow. I could hear water dripping from the guttering, and the snow in front of the french windows was dotted with small spots where the drips had been falling. This was not a good sign. Our mum, having heard the dripping, said she thought it was thawing already. This would be a calamity! There was more than enough snow out there to allow for the building of snowmen, but this was not an activity that could be undertaken in the dark. There followed an anxious night during which I hoped against hope that the snow might still be there in the morning. I was right to be worried: the met office report for January 1973 refers specifically to extensive falls of snow between the 19th and 21st, but also records that ‘it was too warm for snow to accumulate to any great depth or to lie for very long’.

My fears proved unfounded, for the next morning, the snow still lay to a depth of two or three inches in the back garden: more than enough for what I planned to do. The day was bright and sunny, as is often the case after a heavy snowfall, and we headed out into the garden right after breakfast, where we made not one, but two snowmen, one of them, apparently, a ‘snow soldier’. Exactly what it was about him that signified his military status, I can’t remember, but what is significant is that I built two snowmen, as though aware that I had to make the most of an opportunity which might not come again. The diary also records that I made an igloo, although this structure was clearly scaled to fit the Action Man-sized Man from UNCLE figures I’d taken out into the snow. The idea of building an igloo was one I’d had for some time, and I was determined to try it out. It was not easy, as the mounds of snow had a tendency to collapse once hollowed out. Maybe I knew this was to be my last chance.

The snow was still with us on Monday but this was a school day, and the diary records that, by Wednesday, it was all gone. I didn’t realise it, but those snowmen were the last I would ever build, and that snowy weekend was the very last time I played in the snow as a child. The winter of ‘73-’74 contained no notable falls of snow, and in March 1974 I became that dreaded phenomenon, the teenager. By the time of the next snowy winter (1976-77) I was too old for making snowmen and igloos in the back garden…

Looking back, I can still recall my anxiety that the snow of January 1973 would last long enough to allow us to play out in it. It’s almost as if, somehow, I knew this was to be my last chance. One thing I do know now is the answer to that legendary poetic question posed in the 16th Century by François Villon: ‘Ou sont les neiges d’antan?’ Answer: in my 1973 diary.

The Lost World of the Magazine Rack

It was a funny looking thing, all white wire and red plastic feet, a classic piece of ‘atom age’ design that my parents must have acquired when setting up home together in the late 1950s. I neither noticed nor appreciated its retro asethetic: it was just part of the living room furniture, like the tall ashtray in red enamel and chrome where our dad stubbed out his cigarettes. But, over time, the magazine rack acquired a strange fascination. It became, in effect, a Sargasso Sea of print; for any item deposited therein was destined to remain there seemingly forever, escaping our mum’s weekly purges of printed ephemera: newspapers, magazines and comics were routinely left out for the dustmen (no one had heard of reycling back then). Being consigned to the magazine rack seemed to confer a special status on whatever was left there. Rather than the daily newspapers, or weekly periodicals like the TV and Radio Times, it became a repository of items that, I presumed, my parents wished to retain for slightly longer. Whether that was so, or whether the contents accrued there by random chance I never discovered.

The magazine rack tended to find its way into overlooked corners of the living room, such as the recess between a faux leather armchair and the 1950s coffee table on which stood our dad’s Bang & Olufsen hi-fi. On dull days, typically in school holidays or wet weekends, I would occasionally turn my attention to its contents.

I can still name some of that neglected ephemera in specific detail. There was usually an Embassy Cigarettes Gift Catalogue (our dad smoked the brand and collected the coupons which could be exchanged for household goods); a home-making magazine such as the ubiquitous Family Circle; an overlooked Readers’ Digest from several autumns gone by; perhaps a motoring magazine, and the ever-present Christmas edition of Punch.

Alongside this random selection one might find a few instruction manuals for hi-fi or tape recorders, but rarely anything recent. Only the Embassy Catalogue ever seemed to change, as each new edition was mailed out.

There’s one item that I haven’t yet mentioned, and it was the reason why I returned, with increasing frequency, to the magazine rack. Tucked away amongst the magazine survivors was a curious book printed ‘the wrong way round’ (ie. in landscape format), and with a single word daubed in white across a corner of the cover: GILES. This was my first ever sighting of the famous cartoon albums that had been an annual event since 1944, and which would continue onwards to the present day (depite the fact that Giles himself died in 1995). The book belonged to our dad, who had received it as a gift from his parents at Christmas 1967. From conversations I had with him later, I learned that the Giles Annual had been a yearly tradition, and that he’d been given every one since their first appearance. This was amazing! Where were they now? (By this time, I’d taken to collecting Giles in a big way). Unfortunately, they’d gone the way of all such perceived ‘ephemeral’ items. Before he left home, they’d been in his old bedroom, but had long since been thrown out. As for the others, a decade’s worth spanning the years 1957-66, our mum had taken care of them. As Basil Fawlty once said, ‘lucky old bin’.

The survivor dated from 1967 – our first year in our second home – and its cover depicted a croquet match taking place on the lawn of a lovingly-depicted manor house. The players are all reacting to the arrival of a fizzing bomb that has been hurled onto the lawn: the drawing continues onto the back cover where we can see the culprits: a band of football-scarf-wearing and rattle-toting young tearaways in the typical Giles manner. The front-to-back gag was a running feature of every Giles album, with some layed out in the manner of our example, whilst others offered ‘before and after’ versions of a comic scenario.

Giles annuals tended to end up in doctors’ and dentists’ waiting rooms, a fact acknowledged in at least one of his cartoons by Giles himself, so clearly we were not alone in considering them ‘disposable’, but how the 1967 edition survived whilst others did not is something I never quite fathomed. No further editions appeared at subsequent Christmases, and none of the earlier albums had survived the move from our former home in Lichfield. When I first came across the book, I had no idea that it was one in a series that went back over thirty years: it was simply a random cartoon album that belonged to our dad. But the fact that it contained cartoons lent it a special fascination.

At first, I was more than a little wary of looking inside. A few cursory glances had revealed the characters to be, for the most part, grotesques, and initially I didn’t much care for Giles’ take on the human race. He didn’t balk at depictions of nudity, either – one cartoon showed a naked Adam and Eve romping through the undergrowth while a knowing schoolboy observed them with a sly grin as his teacher looked on disapprovingly. I noted that each cartoon was dated, and also that many of them included references to topical events, some of which I could still dimly remember. The year 1966-7 included references to Soviet Premier Kosygin, the Aberfan and Torrey Canyon disasters, and, closest to home for me, Batman.

The more I returned to the annual, the more I began to appreciate the quality of Giles’ draftsmanship. These were not the crudely sketched cartoons one found in newspaper columns or the humour sections in TV21 Annual. These were nothing less than mini masterpieces. Giles’ draftsmanship outclassed all of his contemporaries and has never been bettered. His compositions were often audacious in their use of ‘empty’ space: some panels might consist principally of sky, a featureless expanse of wall, or virgin snow (Giles was arguably the best artist since Breughel at depicting snow scenes). Characters were often dwarfed by their surroundings: perhaps this was his way of showing how human lives are overwhelmed by the worlds we inhabit. One aspect of his work that I particularly admired was his ability to suggest depth in two dimensional space. Intriguingly, Giles was blind in one eye following a motorcycle accident early in his career: so was his gift a form of compensation for his inability to perceive depth, or did his monocular vision make it easier to render the world as he saw it himself, in two dimensions? Either way, his abilities went beyond any definition of the word genius.

By the autumn of 1973, I had become hooked on Giles, and in early January I used some ‘Christmas money’ to purchase that year’s annual, whose cover depicted the Giles family picnicing in the woods whilst, on the back cover, Grandma is entertained to tea (and beer) by the Mad Hatter. As yet, it had not occurred to me to seek out earlier editions of the books, and when I first discovered them, in a local second hand bookshop, it was more by accident than design. In doing so, I set myself a task that may never be completed, given that Giles collections continue to be published every year to this day. I now own copies of every annual up to around the year 2000, and random examples thereafter. Some of the earlier editions are facsimile reprints – curiously, Number 5 is rarer than Number 1 on account of many copies having been lost in a warehouse fire – but for the most part, they are the originals, sourced over many years from countless bookshops and book fairs.

It was at one of the latter that I saw my first Giles original. The size of it staggered me: fully four times larger than it appeared in the annual. The distinctive areas of grey dot-matrix tone that were such a feature of Giles in print were indicated on the original by a pale blue wash. This would disappear when photographed for the printing plate, whilst another artist applied the tone areas on an overlay, using the blue as a guide – I once met one of them and he attested to the fact that it was no easy task.
Our dad’s old Giles annual survives to this day, but the magazine rack is long gone. Its place was taken, some time in the 1980s, by a varnished wooden example, utterly lacking in the retro charm of the original. Nevertheless, it had the same effect on anything placed inside it… as, indeed, does the anonymous example I own myself. Perhaps all magazine racks are the same, jealously holding onto anything given into their custody.

In preparation for this piece, I did a Google image search for 1950s Magazine Racks and turned up a pristine example of the exact piece our parents had owned, for sale on Etsy... you can see it above, loaded with some typical vintage content: the aforementioned Giles annual, a November 1967 edition of Woman magazine, an October 1974 Exchange and Mart, an April 1978 Warwickshire & Worcestershire Life (a midlands lifestyle magazine), and two old hi-fi leaflets.

Christmas Minus Fifty: Part Two

 

BBC and ITV square up to win the ratings battle for Christmas Day... fifty years ago.

Last time, we visited the TV schedules from fifty years ago, and found both ITV and BBC in reasonably traditional form. Films, stage spectacles and musical items dominated on both networks, while the only offering that would endure to the modern era was one of the most traditional: a ghost story. Not a single sitcom was in evidence, and soap opera had still to make its undesirable entry to the BBC schedules. On both networks, the big days for populist festive fare were Christmas Day and Boxing Day. Although television was already firmly established in most British homes, it’s interesting to reflect that, for many people, family activities were probably still favoured over the television at the festive season. By 1974, in that year’s edition of The Likely Lads, Bob Ferris reflects that on ‘Christmas night, full of food’, all he wanted to do was to ‘sit down and watch the box’. Times were changing, and Christmas TV would become an increasingly dominant part of the whole festive experience during the 1970s and onwards to the present day.

On BBC1, Christmas Day 1972 got started at 9.30am with an item called This is Christmas Morning, about which the Radio Times compiler waxed lyrical without actually telling us very much. At 10.00 Mr. Benn popped up (he did, after all, live in Festive Road), followed by a news summary. A Christmas Service and Christmas Appeal were followed at 11.30 by A Stocking Full of Stars, a comedy and cartoon compilation for children, co-hosted by avuncular favourites Roy Castle and Michael Aspel, and broadcast from the National Children's Home at Harpenden. Nothing so far in the schedule to offend modern sensibilities… but not so fast, because at 1.30pm came the unaccountably popular Black and White Minstrel Show. Now as then, we’ll skip very quickly on to the next item, Top of the Pops 72, but we can’t linger long here either. By this time established as a Christmas tradition, TOTP would always feature a round-up of the year’s hits during the festive season, most often on Christmas Day afternoon. Unfortunately, one of the two presenters is even more unwelcome in the modern era than the George Mitchell Minstrels…

At 3.00pm came the traditional Christmas broadcast by the Queen, a broadcasting tradition that was then in its fortieth year, having started on radio in 1932 before television took up the baton in 1957. I was never specially interested in the Royal Family or the Queen (other than as a piece of philatelic iconography), but our mum always liked to watch the Queen’s Speech, so I’m sure we left the TV on after Top of the Pops. It was almost certainly turned off or turned over before the next item, Billy Smart’s Christmas Circus. I wouldn’t have been tempted back for the next item either, a televised version of the pantomime Dick Whittington, recorded at the Wimbledon Theatre and starring the unlikely combination of Dick Emery and Peter Noone… to say nothing of Stratford Johns. The news at 5.45 was followed by a new Christmas Day TV tradition in the form of Bruce Forsyth and the Generation Game. By this time on Christmas Day, our mum was usually poised to unveil a huge cold collation that would see us through the evening. I well recall filling up plates at the table and taking them into the front room to eat in front of the telly.

If the stars of comedy and variety had been notable by their absence up to now, then the next item on the schedule would make up for it. Christmas Night With the Stars was a well established TV tradition, dating back to 1958, and this year’s instalment, hosted by the Two Ronnies, featured specially recorded festive snippets from current comedies including The Goodies, The Liver Birds and Dad’s Army. It was to be the last such compilation until the tradition was briefly revived in 1994. The big draw of the day was undoubtedly The Morecambe and Wise Christmas Show at 8.15.

A big movie was, of course, inevitable, and this year’s offering was neil Simon’s comedy, Barefoot in the Park, in its 1967 adaptation for the screen starring Robert Redford and Jane Fonda. This ran until 11pm when tradition reared its resistible head with a festive edition of old-time music hall nostalgia in the form of The Good Old Days. Finally, to round off the day’s viewing, Z Cars and Kelloggs Special ‘K’ stalwart John Slater told viewers A Christmas Story (the Radio Times offers no clue as to what it might have been).

Over on BBC2, the Christmas Day schedules found room for  Play School, kicking off broadcasts at 11.00am, before a cartoon film with music, narrated by Dustin Hoffman, The Point. Other items during the day included the documentary film strand Look, Stranger, and a retrospective of the year’s golfing action which had been dominated by names including Tony Jacklin and Lee Trevino. The Queen at 3.00 was followed by Laurence Olivier’s 1944 Technicolor production of Shakespeare’s Henry V. Going into the evening, we find an edition of Call My Bluff and a wordless film, The Stallion, relating the adventures of an escaped horse on Dartmoor, before the mid-evening schedule settled into full-on BBC2 mode with La Sylphide, a film from French television of a romantic ballet.

Arguably the best item on offer across all three channels this Christmas was another ghost story, albeit one dressed up in modern garb. Nigel Kneale’s The Stone Tape would go on to acquire legendary status, and provided a notable TV role for Michael Bryant who had just guest starred in a memorable episode of Colditz (see my earlier blog for more detail). Athough to modern viewers the story is marred by mysogyny and stereotypical characterisations, the core idea of traumatic happenings being somehow ‘recorded’ in their immediate environment still has resonance today and is often revisited by similarly paranormal productions.

The schedule was rounded off by a repeat of yesterday’s America, and a special edition of The Dick Cavett Show featuring legendary song-and-dance man Fred Astaire.

Meanwhile, over on the commercial channel, Christmas Day had got started with a concert of carols from the Royal Festival Hall, followed by a festive edition of the long forgotten cut-out cartoon series The Enchanted House. At 9.30, viewers were treated to the sight of ‘Leslie Crowther in a children’s ward’ (as referenced in the 1974 Christmas edition of The Likely Lads). ‘A Merry Morning’ was something of an ITV tradition, and this year’s programme came from the King Edward VII Orthopadeic Hospital, Sheffield, where ukulele man Alan Randall added to the festive fun. A Christmas edition of film magazine Clapperboard was followed by a Christmas Morning Service, taking programmes up to twelve noon, when the 1939 cartoon film Gulliver’s Travels was given an airing.

There was to be no escape from circuses, with ITV offering The Big Top at 1.15, with Billy Smart’s big rivals, Chipperfields, providing the acts under the ringmastership of David ‘Diddy’ Hamilton. A wildlife film, The Flight of the Snow Geese, straddled the hour from 2.00pm till 3.00pm when the Queen’s Speech also appeared. Afternoon entertainment was provided by the Morecambe and Wise 1966 cinema vehicle That Riviera Touch, which I remember being promoted quite heavily (ITV would finally bring the duo up to date when they decamped to Thames later in the decade). We certainly watched this before bailing out at 4.50 when Opportunity Knocks presented a 45-minute Christmas special. Hughie Green on top of turkey and christmas pudding was really too much to stomach.

Things took a turn for the better after the ITN News at 5.35, with ITV presenting its own comedic line up, with the All-Star Comedy Carnival. Scheduled deliberately to clash with the BBC alternative, viewers could watch one or the other, or perhaps shuttle between the two (this was, of course, before the days of the remote control). At 7.30 came the one and only soap opera in the Christmas schedules, in the form of Coronation Street, of which the TVTimes listing says: ‘at last the 1940’s (sic) show’. I’ve no idea what that might have been, but it sounds a far cry from the life-and-death-drama and shout-fests that the soaps currently insist on dishing up on Christmas Day. A festive Comedians followed at 8.00 before the evening’s big film, 1966’s Khartoum starring Charlton Heston, Laurence Olivier and Ralph Richardson. The ITN News cut into it at 10.15, while the evening was rounded off with The Love Goddesses, a film documentary about some of the iconic females of cinema.

It’s interesting to reflect that, of all the festive offerings on television this year, very few have endured into the modern era. The most often repeated (albeit mostly in truncated or clip form) must be The Morecambe and Wise Show, whilst the two comedy carnivals have, miraculously survived. The BBC edition was rebroadcast in recent years, whilst ITV’s is available on DVD. Other years are much less well represented in the archive. The compilations were never repeated, and seem to have been considered as disposable items, good for one year only, perhaps explaining how so many of them came to be junked. Back in 1972, full-length festive episodes of contemporary comedy series were much harder to find, and it’s notable to see no such examples on repeat as would increasingly become the case in later years. One should also reflect that, despite the preponderance of colour movies in the schedules, many (including ourselves) were still viewing in monochrome. The cost of a colour set in 1972 was £225, equivalent to over £3,000 today, and such expensive luxuries were well outside the budget of many families.

Those old schedules also tell us that Christmas television was a long way from being set in stone, and both networks were still very much feeling their way into the future, propping up their festive line-ups with reliable entertainment staples like films, circuses and variety. I would argue, though, that despite the huge array of channels available to modern viewers, there is less choice and diversity of content, and far too many formats and programmes look to have come to stay, seemingly forever. Could the BBC conceive of Christmas today without the obligatory staples of Strictly Come Dancing, EastEnders, Call the Midwife, Michael McIntyre et al? I doubt it. Programmes like these have become the schedulers’ crutch and will likely endure for however long ‘real time’ broadcast television has left to live. Personally, I’ll give it less than ten years. Who knows what we’ll be watching by then… or even how.

Next time, we’ll move onto 1972’s Boxing Day highlights.

Christmas Minus Fifty

 

A look back at the pop cultural highlights of Christmas 1972

As we clock up yet another Christmas, it’s interesting to reflect on how many of the old chestnuts still roasting on the open fire of popular culture weren’t around this time half a century ago. Oft-repeated Christmas episodes of The Likely Lads, Porridge, The Good Life, Some Mothers Do ‘Ave ‘Em and even Steptoe and Son had not yet been produced. On the radio, Christmas music lay as thinly on the ground as powdered snow: no Slade, Wizzard, Wham, Band Aid, Jona Lewie, Macca, Greg Lake, Pretenders: absolutely nothing existed from what has since become the default pop soundtrack to Christmas. So what, then, were we watching, and listening to on that long ago Christmas of 1972?

Let’s start with Christmas Eve, on BBC1, where broadcasting did not begin until 10am. Programmes kicked off in traditional festive flavour with a Christmas Eve mass from, of all places, Kings’ Heath, Birmingham. This was followed by a cartoon rendition of Dickens’ A Christmas Carol (illustrated, according to the Radio Times, ‘in the style of the original … by “Phiz”’. So far, so festive. 

Next up was a travelogue to Jerusalem (try finding anything like that in this year’s schedule), followed by a concert by the Vienna Boys’ Choir. So far, the day’s television could easily have hailed from several decades earlier, as did the next offering, Robert Youngson’s silent movie compilation, The Golden Age of Comedy. Unfortunately, my 1972 diary had fizzled out during the summer holidays, so I have no record of whether we sat down to watch this, but I suspect we probably did. We may have left the set on for Mary, Mungo and Midge: at eleven years old, I was rather too old for such nursery fare, but I adored Johnny Pearson’s theme music. At the time, I imagined it to have been written specially for the series: only much later did I discover that all the music cues were selections from the KPM library.

We certainly didn’t stay around for the next offering, Disney’s Davy Crockett, King of the Wild Frontier. The BBC always tended to include Disney items in their Christmas schedules, but they bored me rigid. I can well remember a subsequent year’s Christmas Eve television including Disney’s The Great Locomotive Chase, which was promoted so heavily you’d have thought it was a Hollywood blockbuster. As if this wasn’t enough, there was still more Disney to come at 5.20, in the form of Disney Time. I found this kind of clip compilation somewhat more digestible, but history has not dealt kindly with its antipodean presenter. Between these two festive wedges of Disney was sandwiched another travelogue item, Around the World in Eighty Minutes, described in the Radio Times as ‘a Guided Tour of our Spectacular Planet with Joyce Grenfell, Kenneth Allsop, David Attenborough and Tony Soper’. 

The news at five past six was followed by a twenty-minute film about children with muscular dystrophy. Again, it’s hard to imagine anything like this featuring on prime time Christmas BBC1 these days, where the likes of EastEnders and the merit-free Mrs. Brown hold sway. A respectful mood was maintained across the next two items, namely ‘the story of Jesus told in pictures’ and the obligatory Carols with Kings’ College Choir (almost the only item on offer that can be found in this year’s schedules).

Having done its festive public service duty, the BBC then kicked back and devoted the bulk of the evening’s viewing to a broadcast of the 1961 movie West Side Story, almost certainly its first outing on British television. The main news summary at 9.50pm was followed by an Omnibus profile of Judy Garland before what was for me the highlight of the evening, A Ghost Story for Christmas. Lawrence Gordon Clarke’s film of A Warning to the Curious was only the second in what would become a recurring strand of festive adapatations derived mostly from the works of M.R. James. I definitely stayed up to watch this, having seen the very atmospheric promotional trailer for it which had been aired several times in the run up to broadcast. This demonic offering was offset by the Midnight Eucharist, followed by closedown.

So much for Christmas Eve on BBC1. But what did the other two channels have to offer as alternatives? On BBC2, programmes didn’t start until 4.30pm, with an hour long film, Money at Work: The Poverty of Nations, examining how British aid money was being spent in under-developed countries. Other items during the evening included a festive quiz, Christmas! What’s It All About?, an episode from Alastair Cooke’s ongoing series America, the panel show Face the Music, a play, a Spike Milligan offering, and best of all by a very long way, Alan Bennett’s film A Day Out. This elegaic offering focused on a cycling club outing on a summer Sunday before the First World War, and featured fine performances from a cast of established and up-and-coming character actors. A very young Anthony Andrews appeared briefly, in a cast that included James Cossins, Brian Glover, Fred Feast and Philip Locke.

Christmas on ITV was, inevitably, a much more populist affair: one has only to glance at the cover of the double issue of TVTimes to get a flavour of what was in store. Christmas Eve started traditionally enough, with a Service of Lessons and Carols at 9.30am, followed incongruously by a repeat of Captain Scarlet and the Mysterons. I was never one to miss an episode, so I can say with certainty that I saw this. I’m not sure if we hung around for the festive edition of pop show Lift Off that followed at 11.00, but if we did, then the next offering was a definite cue to switch off the set: Stars at Christmas With Songs at Christmas featured an eclectic line-up of mostly venerable performers including Frank Ifield, The Beverley Sisters, Bob Monkhouse, and someone called Leila Khalil Utshant (who was neither a terrorist nor a song by the Teardrop Explodes). The archives were raided for the next item on the bill, the 1952 feature film Ivanhoe, which in spite of its age, boasted a production in Technicolor. 

Christmas Eve being a Sunday, ITV’s generic football offering, Star Soccer, filled its customary slot at 2.15, ahead of a song and dance revue, Christmas Company, with a bill that managed to find room for the Mike Sammes Singers, Jack Parnell and his Orchestra (ubiquitous TV performers of the era), and current pop chart one-hit wonders, Lieutenant Pigeon, whose hit 'Mouldy Old Dough' had been roosting at number one during October and November. Sunday also meant The Golden Shot, which by this point in its run was being compered by comedian Norman Vaughan, whose inept handling of contestants has to be seen to be believed. This was followed by Sleeping Beauty On Ice (whose TVTimes listing mysteriously includes Police 5 presenter Shaw Taylor!). Further spectacle followed with a staging of Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat. I’ve always hated musicals, especially those with Biblical storylines, so I think it’s safe to say that we were either tuned to BBC1 or, more likely, visiting relatives, since I distinctly remember seeing part of the evening’s big feature film, Gigi (1958), on our aunt and uncle’s colour television. Elsewhere in the schedule, ITV’s evening line-up found room for a children’s carol competition (hosted by Alan Partridge inspiration Fred Dineage), a musical special presided over by comic entertainer and pianist Victor Borge, and an Aquarius looking at the Christmas story. In common with BBC1, ITV also featured a midnight mass as an end to the day’s programmes.

What’s remarkable about the line-up on both channels is the lack of festive specials from the big comedy and entertainment names of the era, which both channels were keeping in reserve until the following day. And contrasting today’s schedules, where brand-new drama and comedy tend to dominate prime time on Christmas Eve, both ITV and BBC1 took the ‘easy’ option of filling their mid evening schedules with feature films. Of the two networks, it’s BBC’s offerings that have fared best down the years, with A Warning to the Curious having been broadcast in relatively recent years, as well as featuring on a DVD collection; Alan Bennett’s A Day Out would also enjoy several repeat broadcasts and is still available to view as part of a DVD collection. Of ITV’s schedule, pretty well the only items one could select to watch today are Captain Scarlet, Ivanhoe and Gigi.

Next time, we’ll consider what Christmas Day had to offer.