'It has to be said' – A Memoir of Glenn Ashcroft, 1968-2023

A rare cartoon of Glenn, in Newcastle United shirt, circa 2000

Once again, I find myself writing a tribute to an old friend who has passed away... 

I met Glenn when I went to work for a Birmingham advertising agency in 1998. Amazingly, he’d been living about a hundred yards from my house for several years without our paths ever having crossed. I got at once that he shared the same ironic sense of humour as myself: within hours of my starting in the job, the conversation had turned to On the Buses – then being repeated daily on satellite TV – and from there to other neglected corners of pop culture, usually of the ‘so bad it’s good’ variety. Within a week, we were summoned to the boardroom by one of the directors – a candidate for angriest man in the universe – and told we were ‘laughing too much’. Because one isn’t supposed to have fun at work, right? It was like On the Buses coming true – he was Blakey, and we were Stan and Jack (don’t ask me which was which).

From that moment on, we formed a united front against the management, privately taking the proverbial at every possible moment. Our impressions of Angry Man’s co-director – let’s call him Posh Buffoon – became legendary, as did our cartoons. At Christmas that year, I gave Glenn the one and only copy of the ‘Steve Harland Annual’… Steve was our mild mannered head of studio, who was constantly put upon by Angry Man. He never saw our cartoons of him: I’m not sure what he would have thought of being turned into a creation worthy of The Dandy. In return, Glenn gave me a rubber effigy of Angry Man that he’d customised from an executive toy. It came in its own special box that Glenn created himself (and printed out on the company’s time).

Company director 'Angry Man' looks on as Steve Harland's mac explodes... cover illustration from the 'Steve Harland Annual 2000' (1999)

Glenn and myself were supposed to be a creative team, but the only ideas we were ever allowed to work on were those handed down to us by Angry Man and Posh Buffoon… a computer monitor with duck’s feet? That actually happened, and provided more ammunition for our satirical mickey taking. By 1999 we were commuting to Leamington, a drive of over an hour every day. Without Glenn to share the driving, it just wouldn’t have been tolerable. For most of the drive, we conversed in the voice of Posh Buffoon, satirising his attitudes towards the ‘proles’ and ‘pond life’ whom he saw everywhere: basically, everyone below his rung on the social ladder. That level of insanity kept us sane in a job that never rose above the level of predictable drudge. When, at last, I was deemed ‘surplus to requirements’, the only thing I missed about my ex-career was Glenn. He very thoughtfully copied the folder of salacious material I kept on my work computer, and gave it to me on a CD, deleting the orginal before it could fall into the wrong hands.

We stayed in touch even after I’d moved away to Sheffield: the quirky gifts and cranky cards kept on coming. I still have them to this day. So, Glenn, the final word (in the voice and favourite catchphrase of ‘Posh’…) “It has to be said… you were one of the best.”

Glenn, in leather jacket, appears in the final frame of this satirical office cartoon (1999)

REPORT 6823: REVIEW – A critical appraisal

A curious thing, Strange Report. While most ITC series were British-made but aimed at America, the short-lived adventures of Adam Strange and friends were the result of a co-production deal with US network NBC’s film arm Arena, with former Man from UNCLE executive producer Norman Felton stepping into the same role on the new series. Felton must have had a thing about quirky titles – where every UNCLE episode had been styled ‘The …. Affair’, Strange Report’s titles were presented as numbered ‘reports’, with a single word descriptive title followed by a longer sub-title. The numbering makes no sense at all: if Adam Strange numbered his reports sequentially, then he appears to have handled 8,295 cases in the course of the series… or 11.36 cases per day over a two-year period...

Strange Report was intended as series of two halves: the first sixteen episodes followed criminologist Adam Strange and his scientific sidekick Hamlyn Gynt as they pursued mysteries around London. At the mid series point, the characters were intended to relocate to the USA, for reasons unknown (Ham hints at a return to his homeland in one episode), presumably dragging Strange’s neighbour Evelyn along for the ride. But as things panned out, both Anthony Quayle and Anneke Wills demurred on the stateside relocation, and the series stalled at a mere 16 episodes. NBC were evidently unimpressed: although shooting on the London episodes was completed by March 1969, the network kept them on the shelf until January 1971. This can’t have done Strange Report any favours at all. The series clearly set out to capitalise on whole ‘Swinging London’ fad, but came rather too late to the party. 1967 would have been an ideal broadcast year, but the cameras didn’t start rolling until July 1968. Even in Britain, ‘Swinging London’ as a pop cultural concept was beginning to feel decidedly outré by the time Strange Report went to air in September 1969, and an episode like Covergirls, with its Mary Quant style fashions, looked instantly dated.

The series certainly set out to be topical, with storylines influenced by events and ideologies of its time: heart transplant surgery was one of the biggest news stories of 1967, so that went in. 1968 had seen widespread student unrest in Paris and the USA, so that was another certainty, whilst episodes like Racist and Epidemic reflected the racial tensions of the era. The tone of certain storylines was much darker than viewers had come to expect of most ITC output, and the ‘issue’ episodes had more in common with serious drama than the lightweight hokum served up by the likes of The Saint and The Baron. And unlike those examples, whose location work seldom ventured further afield than the car park at Elstree studios, Strange Report made use of extensive location filming around London, with the producers seeking out some interesting and often atypical surroundings – most notably, the shabby villa in Little Venice that was home to Adam Strange (it looks like a building site in several early episodes, on account of development going on across the street). If nothing else, the series always looked good, and has the most realistic milieu of any ITC production bar Gideon’s Way.

Strange Report boasted a major star of film and theatre in the shape of Anthony Quayle, taking on his first starring role in a television series (he had made earlier guest appearances in ITC series Man of the World, The Saint and Espionage). Quayle reportedly grew a beard because he felt it suited the character, and coupled with Strange’s habitual pipe-smoking, it lent him the air of a fatherly figure watching over his two young friends Ham and Evelyn.

Kaz Garas was a relative newcomer, who had been seen in a few bit parts in the likes of Hawaii 5-0 before his casting as Ham Gynt, whilst Anneke Wills had not long finished a stint on Dr. Who, and would have been a familiar face to most British viewers, even without her long blonde wig. On paper, the three stars weren’t given a great deal to work with: Adam Strange was a widowed, retired police commissioner who now operated in a freelance capacity rather like a latterday Sherlock Holmes, with Gynt serving as a kind of forensic Dr. Watson, with a side interest in Egyptology. Evelyn McClaine (Adam/ Eve – geddit?) was Strange’s neighbour, a jobbing girl-about-town who divided her time between modelling assignments and painting. It was entirely down to the individual actors’ charisma that the series worked at all, and their on-screen bonding gave genuine warmth to a portfolio of stories whose scripts were a decidedly mixed bag.

Having contemporatry issue-driven stories filmed on the real streets of 1960s London was all very laudable, but the scripts simply weren’t up to the job and the majority don’t stand up to scrutiny today. Behind the thin veneer of reality lurked some decidedly iffy writing. TV journeyman Arthur Dales’ effort REPORT 1553: RACIST – A Most Dangerous Proposal deals with a white supremacist politician who aims to frame himself for murder and create a media frenzy. This is all well and good as an idea, but it comes to pieces in the execution. Clive Francis stands out for all the wrong reasons as an unhinged expat South African who is co-opted into the murder plot, and in the leading guest roles, Jane Merrow and Guy Doleman are simply wasted. The episode’s most interesting sequence takes place at Lydd Airport in Kent, where Adam Strange and his taxi follow their quarry on board a Bristol 170 Air Freighter of a type that regularly flew cars and their passengers to the near continent during the 50s and 60s. The story also includes a sequence wherein Strange is briefed on his mission by a mysterious civil servant, ‘Sir George Davies’ who takes a ride in his taxi to clue Strange and the viewers in on the plot. This looks as if it had been intended as a recurring plot device (“it’s him”, mutters Ham when Strange is summoned by telephone). If so, then the idea was abandoned immediately. The scenes with Sir George just don’t play well (the back projection doesn’t help), and the idea of Strange reporting to a government official was simply too restricting for the series’ freewheeling format.

Racist was the second episode to go before the cameras, following on from REPORT 4407: HEART – No Choice for the Donor, which presented the morbid idea of a heart transplant donor being selected and murdered for the operation. In order for such a preposterous idea to appear even remotely plausible, the protagonists had to be members of a foreign power from a made-up country, and the results, whilst entertaining, never succeeed in convincing us to suspend our disbelief.

The series did rather better when it ventured into the realm of criminal psychology, with REPORT 2475: REVENGE – When a Man Hates proving to be one of the more memorable and successful entries, thanks to strong support from Julian Glover and Rosemary Leach, who do their best to inject some realism and humanity into their cardoard cut-out characters.

My first experience of the series, in 1969, was the episode chosen to open the run, REPORT 5055: CULT – Murder Shrieks Out (actually the fourth episode as filmed). The characters and format are all well settled by this time, and the story is one of the series’ more original examples, with its tale of corruption and fraud hiding behind the facade of a charitable organisation. It also includes a climactic helicopter crash (off screen, naturally), which is always a favourite with TV and film moguls, and probably accounts for its elevation to first-night status. It’s not all good, though: the murder device of electrically altering the wiring in a guitar is impossible – electrocution by completing a circuit between a guitar and microphone was certainly a reality, (ironically, there were a couple of well publicised examples a few years later), but such real-life accidents were caused by badly-earthed microphones, and no amount of tinkering with a guitar’s wiring could induce the same effect.

Watching the series aged 15, on its repeat run in 1976, I was fairly well satisfied with the handful of episodes I got to see. Clear contenders for best in series were REPORT 2641: Hostage – If You Won’t Learn, Die! (featuring a rare guest appearance by the always watchable Kenneth Haigh) and REPORT 0649: SKELETON – Let Sleeping Heroes Lie: I was fortunate in being able to catch both of these before ATV began tinkering with timeslots (as covered in part one of this article). I wasn’t so enamoured of the fashion-conscious REPORT 3906: COVERGIRLS – Last Year’s Model, but some of its location work in Hampstead helped to elevate what was otherwise a relatively trivial storyline.

It wasn’t until the mid 1990s that I was finally able to assess Strange Report in its entirity, courtesy of a full screening on retro satellite channel Bravo. Of the episodes I’d missed to date, only REPORT 8319: GRENADE – What Price Change stood out, even if it included the risible device of molotov cocktail light bulbs and a stodgy performance from Bernard Lee.

Unfortunately, far too many of the scripts depended on unbelievable occurrences, such as the fraudulent printing of banknotes in REPORT 4977: SWINDLE – Square Root of Evil. The writers try with varying degrees of success to persuade the viewer to believe in some of their far-fetched plot ideas, but ultimately old school hokum wins the day. REPORT 8944: HAND – A Matter of Witchcraft plays out promisingly enough – and throws the spotlight onto Evelyn for once – but it all turns to palpable tosh in the final five minutes.

For me, there’s a tie for worst in series between REPORT 4821: X-RAY – Who Weeps for the Doctor and REPORT 1021: SHRAPNEL – The Wish in the Dream. This is Strange Report at its closet fo full-on daytime soap opera, and none of the guest cast does anything to enliven the very downbeat proceedings. X-Ray came from scriptwriter Roger Parkes, who also provided medical and forensic storylines for BBC’s The Expert and Doomwatch, as well as The Prisoner’s ‘frontal lobotomy’ episode, A Change of Mind. It’s hard to imagine how he saw X-Ray as fit for purpose, unless the script was substantially altered before filming. The audience is asked to accept that a medical professional, confronted with an X-ray showing he has an inoperable brain tumour would take his own life a) without obtaining a second opinion and b) without experiencing any of the ‘red flag’ symptoms that one would expect in such a case. This basic flaw renders the whole story unbelievable, and is typical of the series’ occasional forays into the realms of implausibility. It doesn't help having Dad's Army’s John Laurie along for the ride: one expects him at any minute to roll his eyes and cry out: ‘rubbish!’

It was a shame that these two episodes became some of the more readily available examples for fans wishing to revisit the series in the pre-DVD era: Italian 8mm imprint Techno Film chose Shrapnel to release on the Super-8 format, and in the 1990s, ITC Video included X-Ray on one of its two VHS releases.

The Techno Film is notable for being one of only three items of spin-off merchandising generated by the series, the others being a Hodder paperback adapted by the perennial John Burke from the episodes Cult and Skeleton, and Roger Webb’s theme music which was released as a 7” single on Columbia records in certain territories (a cover version by Geoff Love's orchestra was also available on the 1972 album Your Top TV Themes).

For all its flaws, Strange Report is still an enjoyable series to revisit, if only to spend some time in the company of its three very engaging characters, and its heavy use of real streets locations adds a nostalgic quality that was already apparent during the 1976 repeat run. Just eight years had elapsed since the filming took place, but so much appeared different – cars, fashions, interior décor. I doubt one would notice the same thing today watching a series filmed in 2015!

With its bright colours and often sunny location work, it still feels like the perfect series for a summer afternoon – and that’s exactly what I’m going to do right now!

'They're watching Columbo': the vanishing world of ITC, 1970-77

A typical midweek evening, 1976. Note the 'hilarious' mistake in the title of Columbo.

When ITV introduced colour broadcasts on 15 November 1969, the ITC catalogue must have looked like a scheduler’s dream of ready-made colour programming. Since 1966, all ITC productions had been filmed in colour, which was by now essential in securing sales to the American networks. Gerry Anderson had jumped the gun, and was filming in colour from 1962 onwards. By the dawn of colour, and including series that were then midway through their first run, ITC could offer over two hundred hours of filmed drama, in colour, as well as filmed comedy (From a Bird’s Eye View) and a further 170 colour episodes from the Gerry Anderson stable.

With that in mind, it’s interesting to note how little ITC material featured in ITV’s first week of colour. Not every region could receive colour broadcasts at this stage, but on ATV in the Midlands, colour was available from the beginning of programmes on Saturday 15 November. After an introductory ‘Welcome to Colour’ presentation, programmes kicked off with an episode of Thunderbirds (Cry Wolf). So far, so good.

Strange Report was a couple of months into its first run, but on this particular Sunday it had to make way for the full colour spectacle of the Royal Variety Performance. As compensation, viewers could watch one of Simon Templar’s colour adventures (The Man Who Gambled With Life) at 10.35pm. But elsewhere in the schedules, there were no further ITC offerings to be found, aside from Friday’s first-run episode of Randall and Hopkirk (Deceased).

By January 1970, not much had changed. Aside from Gerry Anderson productions (Stingray and Thunderbirds), there were no ITC productions to be found in a typical week’s programming on ATV Midlands. Viewers in the Anglia region did somewhat better: the station had not yet upgraded to colour broadcasts, so it was still possible to catch up with some earlier series – the hour-long Danger Man episodes were going out on Sunday afternoons, while the WWII drama Court Martial was tucked away late on Saturday night. Sunday also saw Strange Report at 9.10pm, still on its first run, and The Baron at 11.25pm, albeit both of these colour series could only be seen in monochrome. This wasn’t entirely a bad thing, and February 1970 saw the station embark on a repeat run of Gideon’s Way, a series which would soon disappear from the ITV network: being in black and white made it less attractive to schedulers. But what of those other 200-odd colour episodes of ITC productions?

A typical week in the early 70s might see two or three series dotted across the schedules, with popular titles like The Saint and The Champions still going out at prime time. Most regions offered a similar mix of first-run and first-repeat-run episodes from the ITC stable: Department S and Man in a Suitcase could still cut it in a mid-evening 7.30/8.00pm slot, but if you were a fan of The Baron, you needed a mug of Horlicks on the go: it was hard to catch John Mannering much before 11.00pm. Similarly, The Prisoner, now on its first repeat run, gravitated towards the post-News at Ten slot, as did regional repeat runs of ABC’s The Avengers.

Not much changed through 1971. The novelty value of seeing older programmes in colour kept many ITC titles in the schedules, and a typical week on ATV Midlands in the spring of 1971 included repeats of The Saint, Strange Report and The Prisoner, alongside Gerry Anderson’s UFO and Fireball XL5, the latter now a rare sighting on account of its lowly monochrome status. Brand new ITC material was, of course, still appearing, albeit not in anything like the quantity that had been seen in the late 60s. The Persuaders! joined the line-up in September 71, but with fewer new British filmed productions available to schedule, ITV’s film buyers were looking increasingly across the Atlantic for their programming. By September 1971, a typical Saturday line-up for Midland viewers still included a repeat of Joe 90 at lunchtime, but the evening was dominated by American imports: It Takes a Thief at 5.00pm, a Henry Fonda Western at 6.30pm, and David Janssen’s post-Fugitive starring vehicle, O’Hara: U.S. Treasury Agent at 8.35pm.

The reliance on imported filmed material began to give a skewed look to ITV’s schedules. ATV, who had always modelled themselves on the lines of an American network, began buying in more and more imported films and drama series, as the cost of home-grown productions continued to spiral upwards. Autumn ‘72 saw the arrival of just two new ITC action series – The Protectors and The Adventurer, and in the Midlands, they were stripped together to fill the slot that had last year been allocated to The Persuaders! Two for the price of one, as it were, but neither came close to the bar that had been set by Brett and Danny’s antics.

By 1973, the old ITC titles – many of them still less than five years old – were getting hard to spot. In the Midlands, Randall and Hopkirk (Deceased) had been demoted to Sunday lunchtimes, and The Persuaders! was repeated on midweek evenings through the summer. Even Gerry Anderson’s series, which had once been ubiquitous across ATV’s schedules, were looking a bit thin on the ground, with an odd Thunderbirds episode occasionally appearing on a Saturday morning, and Stingray going out in the summer holidays.

1974 brought just one new ITC offering in the form of The Zoo Gang, but at a mere six episodes it felt a far cry from the heady days of 30-episode runs. UFO, Department S and The Persuaders! all found a home on Sunday lunchtimes, but it was rare to find a complete, uninterrupted run of anything and repeat runs could extend over a year from start to finish.

Spring of 1975 saw most ITV regions maintaining a weekday afternoon slot in which one of the ITC titles might appear, and a few were still wont to turn up last thing at night. ATV were mopping up what remained of Department S on Wednesday afternoons, before moving onto a short run of black and white Saint episodes. A couple of orphaned episodes of UFO popped up on weekday afternoons and late nights, while the likes of Stingray and Captain Scarlet were now being stripped into the new Saturday morning format Tiswas – no good at all if you relied on the TV Times for your programme information as neither was mentioned in the listings. At least we got Space:1999, which was more than can be said for a lot of the ITV network. But the golden ‘oldies’ were increasingly hard to find.

'Halo, goodbye': Simon Templar gets a rare black and white outing on ATV, April 1975

‘They’re watching Columbo’: so said the man in the television detector van in a famous scare-mongering advertising campaign of the mid-70s. And viewers certainly were watching Columbo, along with dozens more imported American productions, many of them in the now popular ‘Mystery Movie’ 90-minute format. What they weren’t watching in the mid 70s was The Saint, or Man in a Suitcase or, indeed any of the ‘classic’ ITC era productions that had featured so prominently in the schedules of just a few years before, certainly not at prime time. Hawkish viewers with magnifying glasses might spot an occasional repeat in the minuscule TV Times listings for ‘other regions’, but in the ATV area where I was viewing, it was beginning to look like the end of an era.

1976, of course, saw what one might call a ‘slight return’ of ITC product, with Strange Report and, more famously, The Prisoner both seeing repeat runs on ATV. Midsummer afternoons became a ‘take your pick’ of ITC across the regions, with the likes of Danger Man, Jason King and Strange Report on offer depending on where you lived. Late nights in Wales and Southern also found room for Department S (now something of a rarity) and Randall and Hopkirk (Deceased). By the following year, ITC material had all but vanished from most of the ITV network. ATV repeated Space:1999 on Sunday lunchtimes, but that was all we got. In the absence of ITC product, fans of vintage filmed drama picked up on a surprising first-run of the Fox/Hammer co-production Journey to the Unknown. It had only taken ATV nine years to get around to it. 

It was still possible to find the likes of The Champions (Yorkshire) and The Saint (HTV) in an afternoon slot, but for the most part, the three-repeats-and-out rule had kicked in, meaning that old ITC titles could not be shown again without renegotiating the original Equity agreement. This would effectively keep those old shows off air for the next seven years.

At the time, there seemed no reason to expect to see any of those old series again. Nostalgia for old television was a phenomenon that had only just kicked in, and ITV saw little mileage in it: their telly-nostalgia panel game Those Wonderful TV Times was hidden away in a lunchtime slot, with schedulers presumably imagining it would appeal only to OAPs. The show, when you could get to see it, was an intriguing source of archive clips. But clips were all we got.

By comparison with the videotaped drama of the era, the ITC series hadn’t done too badly. Some series (eg LWT’s Budgie) didn’t even make it to a first repeat run, and the same applied to much of ITV’s sitcom output. A series like On The Buses would return with new episodes each year, but it was rare for earlier series to get a repeat run. It should also be borne in mind that this was an era in which the word ‘repeat’ as applied to television was always used pejortatively. Repeats were a bad thing: this was the accepted mindset of viewers as perceived by those who scheduled our TV programmes. It would take the concerted efforts of a small number of dedicated fans to bring about a sea change in attitudes, but such things took time, and there would be many ‘wilderness years’ to endure before fans could once again revisit their old favourites from the 1960s.

Back in 1977, no one, not even Lew Grade himself, would have imagined you could make money by packaging up and selling old television in formats that didn’t yet exist. The home entertainment boom in video and, more significantly DVD would extend the ‘afterlife’ of those old ITC series well into the next century: but even that era is now drawing to a close. Don’t imagine for a moment that ITVX is going to rush to find room in its streaming service for the likes of Danger Man or Man in a Suitcase. Only a few digital channels still include archive television in their listings, but this is, if anything, a retrograde step, leaving viewers once again at the mercy of those who schedule content. It’s all too easy to imagine those old series retreating into the obscurity in which they languished during the late 70s. If you want to watch them in the future, you’d better hold onto those blu-rays and DVDs...

REPORT 0876 – REPEAT: No Choice for the Viewer

In an era when archive television series have become, for the most part, readily available online or on physical media, it’s sobering to look back to a time when television aficionados were entirely at the mercy of the schedulers – who could at times be perverse and capricious in their handling of a beloved old series...

Forty seven years ago this week, ITC’s Strange Report was staggering to the end of what would prove to be its last outing on terrestrial television. As repeat broadcasts go, it’s hard to think of a more inept example. The series had been on air since March of that year, when ATV Midlands dusted off the episodes for a third and final run under the prevailing repeats agreement with the actors’ union Equity. My diary noted its return with some celebration: I dimly remembered Strange Report from its first run back in 1969, when it had been heavily promoted as part of ITV’s big new autumn season, but I had hardly seen any of it: the first few episodes had gone out on Sunday evenings in the family-friendly timeslot of 7.25pm, but quite soon the series was bumped to 9.10pm, possibly on account of some darker storylines that didn’t sit well in a slot more often associated with sitcom and variety. I remembered the series in particular for Anthony Quayle’s very watchable and avuncular Adam Strange, and a rather splendid theme tune. Roger Webb’s memorable piece had found its way onto a Geoff Love TV themes compilation, issued as late as 1972, and having the record in the house served us as a reminder of what had looked like a rather superior offering in the annals of detective drama.

A late night repeat run in 1970-71 had escaped my notice, and was academic, as its 11pm slot was way past my bedtime at the age of ten. So the 1976 repeats looked like a long overdue opportunity to catch up on the series. Unfortunately, ATV had other plans. When Strange Report returned on the afternoon of Sunday 14 March, 1976, it was simply filling a temporarily vacant slot. By 4 April, with only three episodes broadcast, a season of Glenn Ford movies occupied the mid-afternoon schedule, and there would be no further sightings of Adam Strange for the time being. The next episode I got to see, Report 3906: Cover Girls – Last Year’s Model, turned up as morning filler during the half term holiday, and another episode, Lonelyhearts, was shown in a similar timeslot when I was at school and unable to watch. 

It wasn’t until the summer that the series settled into a predictable pattern, with episodes occupying a Tuesday mid-afternoon slot at 3.25pm from mid June onwards. This was still no use to me, as we didn’t break up for the summer holidays until 16 July, by which time the episodes Revenge, Epidemic, Swindle and Hand had all been broadcast. We’d taken the initiative, however, by setting up our dad’s reel-to-reel tape recorder to enable our mum to tape two of these broadcasts. My friend Tim Beddows, however, thought nothing of bunking off school to watch what had quickly become his favourite TV series.

Opt-outs for racing coverage meant that the six week school holiday yielded only three more episodes that I was able to watch: X-Ray on 3 August, Kidnap the following week, and Heart on 24 August. Our family holiday in July meant I was away for the week in which ATV had scheduled the episode Racist, but in the event it was replaced by Sniper. Tim saw the unscheduled episode, but couldn’t quite remember the title: ‘It was called “Cousin” or something’ he reported to me on my return. As compensation, I’d been able to watch an episode of Danger Man on HTV Wales, where Parallel Lines Sometimes Meet was shown on Tuesday 20 July, complete with its original ad break captions (and a transmission error that saw reel three transmitted in place of reel two: the error was noticed and corrected after a couple of minutes).

Only three more episodes of Strange Report remained to be broadcast, and frustratingly, the series returned to its inaccessible morning slots in September, with Shrapnel broadcast at 11.10am on Tuesday 7 September, and Grenade in the same slot the following week. Of the missing-in-action episode Racist, there remained no sign. In fact it would take another two and a half years for ATV to make good the defecit, and they couldn’t have done a worse job. Racist finally went out, unscheduled, on Wednesday 3 January 1979, as a replacement for a cancelled race meeting. A near neighbour of Tim’s saw it and reported as much a few days later. What made this even more infuriating to us was that the unscheduled broadcast had fallen during the Christmas holidays when we would easily have been able to see it. An angry letter went off to ATV’s head of audience relations, no less an eminence than ‘Aunty’ Jean Morton of Tingha and Tucker fame, but to no avail. The good ship Strange Report had sailed, and would not be seen in the waters of terrestrial television again.

If we’d had to wait for the series’ return to the small screen, we’d have been sitting around until the 1990s, when the episodes turned up on the now defunct satellite channel Bravo in 1996. But by the end of the 70s, both Tim and myself were collecting films, and an episode of Strange Report had, incredibly, been made available in the 8mm format. Unfortunately, it was the supreme dud of the series, Shrapel, featuring a dreary guest appearance from Gerald Flood, and a storyline that was just plain dull.

We did better on 16mm, in which format Tim acquired the episodes Revenge and Swindle: good news in that I’d missed them both on the 1976 broadcasts, and knew Revenge only from its recorded soundtrack.

In the early 90s, a few ITC series began appearing as pre-recorded video tapes, and Tim excitedly reported that Strange Report was due out in this format. One afternoon in 1994, we went into Birmingham where we obtained the tapes from the HMV store. The four episodes released included a couple of decent examples – Heart and Cult – alongside the lightweight Covergirls and the misery fest that was X-Ray.

When the series next appeared in a home media format, it was Tim himself who was responsible. Having set up the Network DVD label in 1997, by 2004 he was able to persuade ITV to agree to a one-off release of his favourite series, using brand new copies prepared for BBC Studios by remastering genius Jonathan Wood. It says a lot about Tim’s loyalty to this oft-overlooked series that he chose it as the very first ITC release on his label, and during the preparation of special features for the release, he met and made a lifelong friend of Anneke Wills. He also asked me to design the sleeve – my first work for the label – as he deemed Network’s in-house designer insufficiently sympatico with Adam Strange. It was a good move, for I would go on to design the packaging for the bulk of Network’s ITC releases. Now, almost twenty years on, it’s mildly gratifying to see my old Strange Report sleeve design being used as iconography on imdb.

Network would go on to release the series' soundtrack in our curious 'CDs in DVD cases' format. A vinyl release was mooted (I went so far as to design a cover) but never materialised. A solitary episode – Kidnap – was upgraded to blu-ray as part of Network's HD sampler series Retro Action. Unfortunately, Tim got his titles mixed up when ordering up the master: he mistook Kidnap for Hostage (our favourite episode) and the error went overlooked. And for anyone wondering why Strange Report never got the full series blu-ray treatment, the answer is simple: Tim was quite happy with the 2004 DVD restoration, and considered a blu-ray upgrade low priority. That's not to say that it wouldn't have come along eventually – like Adam Strange's taxi – but without Tim, and without Network, Strange Report looks destined to remain in standard definition for the forseeable future.

In part two of this article, I’ll take a closer look at Strange Report and examine how well it stands up after fifty four years...

A candid shot of Anthony Quayle during filming of an insert for the opening titles.

Dad's Drive to Nowhere...

 

... well, West Bromwich

It happened fifty years ago this weekend just gone, on a thundery Sunday evening. As always happened during a storm, our mum had insisted on turning off everything electric: radio, television, even, on this occasion, light bulbs. This was all too much for our dad. A semi-pro musician, he was usually out on a gig on weekend evenings, but this particular Sunday saw him at home. Perhaps a gig was cancelled? He didn’t often get the chance to stay in and watch television, so maybe he was looking forward to having a night off. We’d been listening to Tom Browne’s Top 40 rundown, between six and seven, a regular Sunday evening fixture, most likely accompanied by sardines on toast. The show was followed, as always, by the Cliff Adams Singers’ showcase, ‘Sing Something Simple’, but I’m not sure we got this far, as the aforementioned storm was gathering and our mum swung into action.

This had all happened before. Three years earlier, we’d had the radio on one Saturday lunchtime when a storm broke. Our mum came in and turned it off, halfway through the Gunter Kallman Choir’s recording of ‘Daydream’, a song which instantly lodged itself in my memory forever (for a fuller account, see my earlier post, ‘Daydream – A Time Detective Story’).

This time, the gathering storm brought on a premature twilight, and with the lights off, I was struggling to read my Fireball XL5 Annual, while our dad couldn’t see to read last night’s Birmingham Evening Mail.

Suddenly, he got up from his chair in the front room and announced that we were all going out in the car. I dare say our mum asked what this was all about, to which dad replied that we couldn’t do anything in the house – no TV, no radio, can’t see to read – so we might as well go out for a drive. Never mind that it was semi-dark and raining. So we all climbed into his recently-acquired Harvest Gold Austin 2200 and set off. Where to? Nobody knew. Probably not even our dad.

I can’t recollect whether our mum took part in this ‘jaunt to nowhere’: it being a Sunday evening, she probably had things to do, like the ironing. In my recollection, there is a blank in the nearside back seat where she customarily sat. So perhaps she stayed at home.

Our mum’s reaction to thunderstorms was peculiar: she never showed any fear, but clung onto the notion that you had to turn off everything. There is some logic in this: a direct lightning strike can blow out the entire ring main and cause serious damage to anything that’s plugged in (whether it’s turned on or off). Once, during a thundery summer evening in 1970, I found her in the back room, with the french windows opened onto the darkened garden. When I asked why she had the doors open, she replied ‘if the lightning gets in, it can get out again’. Which was possibly something she’d heard in childhood, growing up in rural Ireland.

Back to dad’s drive: we headed off in a more or less dead straight line from where we lived. Passing through Mere Green, our nearest shopping centre, we went straight over at the roundabout, and kept to this course, without deviation, taking us alongside Sutton Park and ultimately to the Queslett Road. All the time, the storm was going on, but in the car you couldn’t hear much of it. We passed the Scott Arms at Great Barr, still sticking to the same route. By this time, I had only a vague idea of where we were, as beyond the Scott Arms was unknown territory. I saw a vivid orange lightning strike up in the grimly overcast sky as we headed towards our ultimate destination… West Bromwich. I only knew where we were because I noticed a signpost as we entered the town: the name was significant as my best friend’s dad was the local MP, and we’d never been there before. We drove up the High Street in the premature, thundery twilight, passing darkened shop fronts and a distinctive church spire, before looping around the town and, I believe, returning via the same route.

I don’t remember what, if anything, was said when we got back, and I never thought to look into the reasons for our dad’s unusual outburst: he was always a very gentle, placid character, not given to impulsive acts. Was there something else bothering him? He’d been through a few rocky years at work, losing a job at GEC and bridging the gap by taking a summer season drumming with a small ensemble at a Pontins’ holiday camp back in 1971. In 1972 he’d worked, briefly, for a wallpaper manufacturer called Coloroll, before finally settling into what would be his last full-time job, as distribution manager at an electrical component manufacturer in Walsall. I’m uncertain as to the exact timeline, so that last appointment may still have been undecided on that thundery evening.

What I do know is that it remained with me, that strange evening of lowering grey skies, the ominous atmosphere of the rainy suburbs, with the streetlights coming on early. My diary even mentions it: the page is filled with a huge zig-zag of biro lightning accompanied by the entry: ‘it thunders.’ And, at the bottom of the page is a further entry: ‘go out for a long time.’ This is how I can be so precise as to the date.

The page from my diary. The 'Randall & Hopkirk' entry, done in the manner of the series titles is interesting in retrospect...

This year, we’ve had a few similarly thundery Sunday evenings, but I held off until the nearest to the actual date – 24 June, 1973 – to recreate Dad’s drive, picking up the route at Thornhill Road, Streetly. The evening was clear, so the atmosphere was completely different, but I wanted to see how much, if any, of the route I could recall. As we drew close to West Bromwich, along a stretch of dual carriageway, I began to remember.

West Bromwich itself, however, is much changed in fifty years. A new urban expressway has sliced through the town, and the High Street is now semi pedestrianised, making it impossible to continue on the route we would have taken in 1973. Arriving in the centre, the eye is assaulted by an architectural abomination: a huge purple brick with blob-shaped windows, outlined in cerise. A sign proclaimed this to be the local sixth form college, but it was formerly an arts facility, known as ‘The Public’, dedicated to ‘interactive digital art’ (whatever that may be), and slammed by the government as a ‘gross waste of public money’. Its infantilised appearance, like a kid’s drawing made reality, is utterly at odds with its urban surroundings. We took a quick look up what remains of the High Street before heading back.

Later, consulting a vintage street map (shown above), I was able to see how radically the road network has been reshaped over the past half century; but I also noticed something else: the street where we lived just made it onto the map at its top right hand edge. On the extreme left hand side of the map is West Bromwich. It felt like a map of our world, circa 1973. West Bromwich was as far as you could go without going off the map, and on that curious evening, it marked the limits of our dad’s escape route.

We never went back. West Bromwich High Street underwent pedestrianisation in 1974, making it impossible to recreate our dad's car ride. When I next passed through the town some time in the 1980s, it was mostly unchanged, just rather run down and with a noticeably different demographic than had been the case fifteen years earlier. Returning in 2023, one gets a sharp, slightly shocking reminder of how radically the British urban landscape has been transformed in half a century, and not necessarily for the better.

Life returned to normal. Dad’s ride to nowhere was a complete one-off. Nothing like it every happened again, although that same year he did drive the family to Aberystwyth for a day trip (no mean feat) so we could look over a potential holiday destination. We never went back there either.

One thing came of that unusual evening. It was the very last instance of our mum’s thunderstorm paranoia. When evening storms came in the future, the lights, and even the television stayed on. My dad had made his point. All it took was a car ride to West Bromwich.

High Street, West Bromwich, 1974, during pedestrianisation.

Too Much of a Good Thing?

The End of Nostalgia?

I’m now in my seventh decade of living with a bunch of characters and machines from the future – a future that will never happen. The worlds of Gerry Anderson are as old as I am. His futuristic visions first hit the small screen five weeks before I was born, and over the following decade, I think it’s safe to say that at least one episode of his work could be seen on TV almost every week.

This blog is about nostalgia. Nostalgia is defined as a wistful or sentimental yearning for the past, usually a past that is irrecoverable. But what happens to nostalgia when its object reappears, becomes readily available, ubiquitous, even?

I’ve long been aware that, in order to preserve the sharp tang of genuine nostalgia, one has to ration one’s exposure to the object of one’s nostalgic feelings. As an example, I’m going to use Gerry Anderson’s Fireball XL5, which was, I believe, the first pop cultural artefact to have that effect on me.

Fireball XL5 made its television debut in the Midlands early in 1963, when I was just two years old. For the next three years it was seldom off the screen, and I probably got to see most of the episodes two or three times. In 1966, the endless run of repeats came to an end, and Fireball would not appear again on our screens for another four years – which to me, aged nine, was almost half a lifetime.

I think my personal fascination for the series was piqued by narrowly missing out on a copy of the first Fireball XL5 Annual at a jumble sale. I still owned my original copy, bought for me at Christmas 1963, but it had lost its covers and quite a few pages. Getting a new copy of that book became an obsession. Without recourse to bookshops or other potential sources of supply, I set myself the task of ‘faking’ the missing cover and pages by drawing them in biro and felt-tip pen. Working off a borrowed copy (I might more usefully have offered to buy it from its owner), this work took me through to around 1972. Ludicrous, I hear you say, and I agree entirely. But it is a measure of the extent to which I was infatuated with this series.

From the day of the jumble sale, which I estimate as having been in the summer of 1967 or 68, right through to the autumn of 1970, I fixated on Fireball XL5, as mentioned elsewhere in this blog. In September 1970, finally, came the long-awaited repeat run. But once it had ended, I was back where I’d started, unable to see the series again until ATV Midlands chose to schedule another repeat. Incredibly, this happened within six months of the previous run, but frustratingly, the episodes were scheduled on weekday lunchtimes when I was at school. I remember envying my brother who was off school with a cold and got to see The Doomed Planet! In early 1972, ATV began experimenting with early Saturday morning broadcasts, none of which was scheduled in the TV Times. Many episodes of Fireball appeared in this context, of which only one – Space Monster – appeared in the listings. This broadcast, on April 29, 1972, would be my last sighting of Fireball XL5 for another four years. When I saw it again, in the autumn of 1976, it was in the form of two edited 8mm episodes owned by a lad from school. Over the next five years, I acquired the six episodes that had been released in this format, and an 8mm sound projector on which to run them. The complete series, however, remained elusive.

It would take until 1985 for the series to return in a repeat run on television. By this time, I was equipped with a VHS recorder and finally was able to obtain copies of all 39 episodes. For the first time, the series shifted out of the arena of nostalgia and into the realm of the immediately available. I’m not sure how many times I watched those tapes, but for the first two or three repeats, they retained their nostalgic appeal. Most of these were episodes I’d not seen in any form for fourteen years. Again, this was over half my lifetime, and it felt like it.

Gradually, however, I was becoming aware that the sharp nostalgic feeling for Fireball was beginning to diminish. I began to know many of the episodes in detail. In 2002, I got my first DVD set (imported from America, as the series had yet to appear on the format in Britain). I watched them all again, impressed at the vast improvement over the dirty, spliced old prints from the mid-80s repeats. I probably left it a year or two before running the DVDs again. Then I decided I had to put the series out of my life for a longer period of time. It wasn’t that I didn’t still want to watch them, or own the DVDs. I just felt sated. By 2010, when I ran the episodes through again, sufficient time had elapsed for them to have regained some of their nostalgic appeal, but I now knew them in sufficient detail as to be able to note subtlties in their production, such as the use of different Steve Zodiac puppets, continuity between episodes, re-use of sets, models and so forth. In short, I probably knew the episodes too well. By this time, I was watching on a DVD collection in which I’d had a hand myself, having designed the packaging for its release on the Network DVD label. I redesigned it for the 40th anniversary in 2012, and again, for its fiftieth, when the series finally made it to blu-ray in 2022. This time around, I chanelled some of my childhood enthusiasm into creating a raft of ephemera to include in the packaging.

I watched all the episodes again in their new HD editions – for what must have been maybe the tenth or twelfth time. How many more times could I sit through them? Did I even need to sit through them when I could replay huge chunks of episodes in my mind’s eye?

As of this summer, the series is back on the small screen, for the first time in 38 years, courtesy of free-to-air broadcaster Talking Pictures TV. I’m not watching them – TPTV’s relatively low bandwidth can’t compete with the detail on the blu-ray set, and Saturday afternoon is hardly an ideal slot – but I’m glad they’re still out there. More than that, I’m intrigued when I see people posting on social media that they’re watching the series for the first time since childhood. I wonder what that must feel like? There are TV series I’ve not seen since the very early 60s, but for the most part, those childhood artefacts have generally been made available to watch, where they still exist. There isn’t enough left of my life to put Fireball XL5 on the shelf for a decade, and if I do, I run the risk of dying without seeing it again. Unthinkable. But equally hard to accept is that I may never again get to experience the thrill of nostalgia fulfilled that I got from seeing the episodes when they reappeared in 1970 and 1985.

What do you want? Nostalgia or availability? You can’t have both. The more times you’re exposed to anything like a book, film or TV series, the less of its nostalgic appeal it retains. ‘Nostalgia isn’t what it was’ runs the old witticism, to which I might add: ‘and will never be again.’

'You Can't Leave Basil Like That!'

Mid-story with Mr. Derek, circa 1970. Note the strategically placed bag of sherbet!

Memories of a Foxy Favourite

'Hello, hello, hello... and to the show... webble-webble-elcome!'

If I’d been asked, around the year 1970, to nominate my favourite television programmes, close to the top of the list you’d have found The Basil Brush Show. It turned 55 this week. Midsummer seems like a strange time to roll out a brand new childrens’ TV series, but it was on 14 June, 1968, that Basil’s first solo BBC series went out. Basil was already a familiar character from his many appearances alongside David Nixon, so when we sat down to watch on that Friday afternoon, we had a pretty good idea of the fun that was in store.

The show settled instantly into a format that would have been recognisable to viewers over a decade later: Basil was ‘mentored’ by his human co-host, ‘Mister’ Rodney Bewes, and the show comprised a mixture of simple sketches, interspersed with variety artistes and one pop performance per episode – on week one, Manfred Mann lip-synched to their current chart hit My Name is Jack. The show was rounded off with what was easily the best item in the line-up, the weekly story, read by Mr. Rodney, but constantly interrupted by Basil. The stories would later focus on swashbuckling tales, featuring various heroes all named Basil, but for this first series, it was the punningly-christened cowboy ‘Des P. Rado of Cripple Creek.’ (On the first episode, Basil misheard Cripple Creek as ‘Chiswell Green’.) It was rounded off with a rousing song, in which the audience of school children were invited to join in. In later series, the songs would build up to the line ‘he was a brave, brave man’, at which the kids would yell back, Crackerjack fashion: ‘who’s that?’

Sadly, not a single example of the Rodney Bewes era is known to have survived. Rodney himself lasted only for a single series, and the following year moved to ITV, where he starred in his own sitcom Dear Mother, Love Albert. Into the gap stepped my personal favourite of Basil’s co-hosts, the avuncular Derek Fowlds, whose sparring relationship with Basil during the stories was always a highlight. A few of these ‘Mr. Derek’ episodes have survived, and I’ve been lucky enough to see two examples in recent years. Of the pair, the edition from 25 September 1970 is clearly superior, featuring an extended sketch that sees Basil attempting to camp out in the woods (an obvious studio set) but being scared by creepy-crawlies, a thunderstorm and other terrors (special mention should go to that week’s variety artiste Dieter Osweno, whose act included juggling a portable television with his feet while the set was switched on). Though broadcast in colour, the episode survives only as a black and white telerecording: but at least it survives.

The weekly story was key to the success of the Basil Brush Show, because of the interplay between Basil and the various ‘Misters’, all of whom would feign anger and exasperation at his interjections, sometimes resorting to clamping his mouth shut to keep him quiet, and often having to stifle their own laughter. A typical sequence might see Basil with his nose in a bag of jelly babies; in later series, his ‘pet’ dog, ‘Ticker’, a battery-operated hound, would regularly interrupt proceedings. Sometimes, Basil would ask to read the story himself, culminating in the non-sequitur ‘Paganini’ when he got to the foot of, you guessed it, ‘page nine’. If the pace was slowing, Basil would egg on his ‘Mister’ with the exhortation ‘come on, come on!’ And when the plot got exciting, each line in the story was followed by a breathless ‘yes’ from Basil. Every week’s instalment culminated on a cliff-hanger: Mr. Derek would slam the storybook shut, declaring ‘and that’s all we’ve got time for!’ ‘All we’ve got time for?’ protested his foxy chum: ‘but you can’t leave Basil like that!’

The Mr. Derek era lasted until 1973, when Roy North took the helm. I was getting a little old for Basil Brush by this time, but kept watching despite never really warming to ‘Mister Roy’. By the time Mister Roy yielded place to Mister Howard (Williams), I was no longer watching. In my recollection, 1970 was the show’s high water mark: Mr Derek had settled in nicely after his first series, and the scripts were genuinely funny. Basil had also now entered the lucrative arena of character merchandising. A plush glove puppet manufactured by Wendy Boston toys was so popular as to be virtually unobtainable. When we asked at our favourite toy shop, we were offered the alternative of a stuffed Basil. ‘You could puppefy him’ suggested the nice lady in the shop, using an expression I’ve never heard anywhere else. The idea was we could open Basil up, remove his stuffing, and turn him into a glove puppet. Fortunately for Basil, we decided against such radical surgery, and even in his stuffed state, he became a favourite toy. The glove puppet, when it finally appeared, looked a lot less like Basil, with a red corduroy body in place of his fancy clobber.

I even entered a painting competition in an endeavour to win a Basil Brush glove puppet. The contest, organised by the Daily Sketch newspaper, offered puppets as prizes to those entries judged to be the best, and a star prize of a visit to a Royal Garden Party where Basil would be in attendance. My efforts earned me the consolation prize of a Basil Brush sticker fun and colouring book, which I have kept to this day – the only competition prize I have ever won. The Sketch printed one of the winning entries, submitted by one Paul Venables (that’s how miffed I was at missing that prized puppet – I can remember his name more than half a century later!) Later still, I was dismayed to realise that Paul Venables had audaciously copied his picture of Basil in top hat and tails from a drawing in one of the Basil Brush Annuals!

The original, 'copied' by competition winner Paul Venables, from the Basil Brush Annual, publ. 1970

In 1972, Corgi Toys brought out a Basil Brush car as part of their ‘Corgi Comics’ range. The car had been seen in the TV series and also featured in Basil’s stage show, and the model came complete with the unique gimmick of two Basil Brush ‘laugh tapes’. These were in fact serrated lengths of red plastic, which, when dragged through a slot in the supplied cardboard ‘sound box’ made a grating noise intended to mimic Basil’s trademark laugh. What it actually sounded like was someone dragging a length of serrated plastic strip through a slot in a cardboard box…

Beginning in 1970, publishing house World Distributors offered a Basil Brush Annual for several years, but their contents were disappointing. World had licensed the use of the Basil character, but not his human co-stars, whose interplay with him was the whole point of the series. Instead, Basil was reimagined as a kind of country squire, with a Butler, Chummers, who participated in his exploits, a format that also appeared as a strip cartoon in TV Comic around the same time. 

I even got to see Basil ‘live’, on stage in Blackpool in 1973, where he shared star billing with impressionist Mike Yarwood. Basil is obviously very small, and we were sitting up in the ‘gods’, so he was a little hard to make out, but there was no denying that was the real Basil Brush down there on the stage, with Ivan Owen working him invisibly from below and providing his voice. The only item on the bill I can recall with any clarity was a sequence in which Basil 'drove' his car, in front of a back projection screen.

Basil’s first run on television was terminated in 1980 following a dispute between the BBC and creator Ivan Owen, who was angling to revamp the character to appeal to a more adult audience. After a few years in which Basil was reduced to presenting a schools programme for Granada Television, he returned as the host of Crackerjack. In the 1990s, Ivan Owen finally got his wish when Basil appeared on the adult comedy series Fantasy Football League, but it wasn’t a success: the show’s format hinged on improvisation and Basil, without a script, was reduced at times to gaping open-mouthed, with nothing to say. Perhaps Ivan Owen, who was still providing Basil’s distinctive voice, didn’t know anything about football.

Owen and co-creator Peter Firmin sold the rights to the character in 1997, and five years later, a reimagined and revoiced Basil became the star of a new sitcom-style series broadcast on the CBBC channel. But we needn’t linger here. The ‘real’ Basil Brush is the one I remember from childhood. The original puppet still survives and judging from a recent photograph, has been remarkably well preserved. Misters Rodney, Derek and Howard have all left us, along with the ‘real’ Basil, Ivan Owen. Part of Owen’s genius was never to appear alongside his creation, and never to give interviews, helping to reinforce the illusion of Basil being a personality in his own right. I think it’s safe to say that, in the arena of glove puppets and ventriloquism, there was no one to rival Basil, who really deserves the last word here:

'A-ha-ha-haa-haa-haa! Boom-boom!'

Basil Brush merchandise: Wendy Boston plush toy, 1970: Corgi Comics car, 1972,
and the first three Basil Brush Annuals (publ. 1970, 1971, 1972)