Beating the drum for Tom Tom

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Bleep, Booster, Zebedee and Zabadak

 

 

Blue Peter memories part 2

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Designing the Decades...

Ten Years of Blue Peter Books

'Here's some I found earlier' : Blue Peter books spanning the years 1966-1974

Nothing conveys the look and feel of a given era quite like graphic design, and I should know – having spent over a decade re-creating the graphics from vintage TV series for use on DVD sleeves. As an outspoken critic of modern design excesses, I feel that today’s designers could learn a lot (or in many cases, re-learn everything) by looking back to the examples of their predecessors. Today, in the field of childrens’ books and magazines especially, design is too often a garish mash-up of conflicting elements: typography, photography, vivid colours and fake 3d effects, with designers cramming their page layouts in a desperate effort to make them appear ‘fun’ and thereby prolong the waning attention span of their audience. White space is seldom seen, with page backgrounds more often adopting dark or vivid colours. How different from what we find on opening a vintage Blue Peter Book from the 1960s – as I did this week in prepartion for a piece on the series.

The Blue Peter Book first appeared in 1964 , at which time the series itself had been on air for some six years. The first edition was, surprisingly, not produced by the BBC, but by an independent publisher, who had licensed the title from the corporation. It sold well, and the next year BBC Enterprises, knowing a good thing when they saw it, took over publication. Never referred to as an ‘annual’ (with its implied commitment to yearly publication) the books nevertheless continued to appear in time for the Christmas market every year throughout the 1960s and 70s.

The first volume that found its way into my hands had a publication date of 1967, and was the fourth in the series. Interestingly, it was the first edition (and one of only a handful over the complete run) not to feature the faces of the presenters on the cover, with pets Petra, Patch, Jason and Joey (the parrot) in their place. This may have been a result of politics, since the series was undergoing a transition during 1967. Original presenter Christopher Trace was becoming difficult to work with, and his extra-marital affair had provided a subject for press gossip, which didn’t help. Trace was notorious for his threatened resignations, and once John Noakes (introduced early in 1966) had become an accepted part of the format, Trace’s next resignation was accepted by his bosses at the BBC. His appearances in the show became less frequent, and he left permanently in July of 1967. The fourth book would have been in preparation at this time, and its content notably omits Trace completely. Peter Purves, meanwhile, would not join the series until November ‘67, by which time the book was in the shops. So a pet-based cover was the simplest solution.

Stylish, yet restrained: interior spread from the Fourth Blue Peter Book (1967)

The interior design of the fourth book provides an object lesson in restraint and minimalism. The typography is particularly strong, vibrant and contemporary, without going overboard, with fonts echoing those in use elsewhere on television and in magazines. Page layouts are simple, but well-balanced grids, with text set in Baskerville or Grotesk, giving a choice of serif or sans. Headline fonts are all sans, with the then-contemporary Futura Display much in evidence, alongside less easily identifiable examples, most likely from the Univers family. Colours are kept to a minimum, with headlines set in black, green or red. Uniquely for a publication such as this, the designers are credited at the end of the book, albeit by their surnames only: Baker/Broom/Edwards. The same team was on board for the fifth book (published autumn 1968), although the graphics were all-new, with the slab serif Egyptienne face featuring prominently alongside Futura Extra Bold. The balance between textual matter and white space remained attractive, but somehow the fifth book lacks the finesse of its predecessor.

New year, new font: Egyptienne is the title treatment of choice for the Fifth book (1968)

Prior to 1967, the covers of the Blue Peter Books had failed to adopt a consistent approach, with the 1966 edition an orange and blue affair, with a large, sans serif title block, contrasting the red and yellow of 1965 and the yellow/blue of 1964. The fourth book took a new, bolder approach, with its title spanning the width of the cover, in electric blue Windsor, a font reflecting the trend towards Edwardiana that had crept into graphic and interior design from circa 1966. The same look prevailed for 1968, while the 1969 edition, with an all-over dark photographic background, retained the Windsor font, this time in red, with white outlining. Martin Bronkhorst was the designer on 1969’s Sixth Book, with the layout continuing the look of the preceding editions, albeit with increasing instances of photos bleeding off at the edges, where white margins had been more in evidence beforehand.

It was all change for the edition published in 1970, again with an all-over photographic cover. The Windsor font was gone (but would return), replaced by an unidentifiable sans font with a naive, almost hand-drawn quality. The designer this time was one Haydon Young, and the typography throughout is noticeably less confident, and more inconsistent than that of its predecessors. A variety of text fonts is in use – Times, Rockwell, Gill – and the all-white page backgrounds rule has been thrown out, sometimes with less than satisfactory results, as on pages 12 and 13 where some of the instructions for making a cardboard farm are barely readable against a photographic background of the finished model. The worst offence, though, is text cramming. Where 1969’s pages had large header/footer areas, their size was drastically reduced for 1970, while the average font size increased by three or four points, resulting in pages that look too text-heavy and are uninviting to the reader. This looks to me like editorial intervention. While the font sizes of earlier editions made for attractive page layouts, it may have been felt that in some cases the text was too small for young readers. And while the Seventh Book represents a step backwards from the clear, balanced layouts of earlier years, it’s still preferable to anything that modern design has to offer.

How not to do it... text cramming in the seventh and eighth books.

The Eighth Book was again designed by Haydon Young, and this time the typography was, in places, catastrophic. Page 70 is possibly the worst laid-out page in any annual or magazine of the era that I’ve seen, with over a third of it given over to an introductory paragraph set in what looks like 18 or 20-point Grotesk. Elsewhere, a feature on Velazquez is crammed into two pages, with dense Times typography that simply encourages the reader to turn over. It wasn’t all bad, and there are some attractive spreads, but it was a far cry from the exemplary work of Baker, Broom and Edwards. The cover once again featured an all-over photograph, with the title in a drab sans font, airbrushed to give a faux 3d effect.

The Ninth Book, designed by George Mayhew, was a return to form, with the cover marking the return of the Windsor title treatment – this would now become an established element of the cover designs over the following years, and looking back, it can be hard to remember that it was never used on-screen, where the title card was invariably in a plain, heavy sans-serif treatment. The Ninth Book cover returns to the white ground of four and five, albeit with a double border of bright blue and pink, which seems somewhat superfluous. Inside, the layout shows much more restraint, with thoughtful typography, better balance and use of white space, looking much more like the immediate successor to 1968’s edition. There are perhaps too many different text fonts in use, but the effect is never clashing, and there is a notable lack of any overtly contemporary influences. Unfortunately, this would not prove to be the case for much longer.

The Tenth Book, designed by one John Strange, featured a gimmick cover design that I didn’t particularly like at the time. By now there were four regular Blue Peter presenters, Lesley Judd having joined the classic Val/John/Pete axis in 1973. The Tenth cover features all four, albeit as heads and hands only, peering over a large blue square. The design is repeated inside itself, with a sequence of three more coloured squares and a small reproduction of the whole cover in the centre. It’s the old infinity effect, seen many times elsewhere, and whilst it may have seemed novel, to me it just didn’t compare with the ‘proper’ covers featuring a single, large photographic image.

The gimmickry continued inside, with a mish-mash of different title treatments, including a lot of hand-drawn efforts that now look extremely dated. The text setting was generally well balanced, with only a couple of features appearing too long for their available space. The same formula was maintained for the Eleventh Book, with John Strange once again doing the design (although his credit was now part of a general acknowledgement block). The most interesting aspect of the Eleventh Book (published in 1974) is the endpapers, which are nothing more than a copy of the Hard Day’s Night album sleeve of a decade previously...

The Eleventh Blue Peter book was the last edition I received as a Christmas present, and I’d stopped watching the series itself around the end of 1973. Possibly even more so than the programmes themselves, the books remain emblematic of the era in which they were produced, and it’s interesting to observe how they reflect wider trends in design, regrettable or otherwise. The best of them stand the test of time, and in spite of the retro look of certain fonts, still stand as textbook examples of how to lay out an illustrated book page with taste and restraint.

Next time, we’ll have a look at what went into the books themselves and how they related to the content of the TV series.

Bye-bye!

The Ones I Didn't Watch...

I’ve written a lot about the television I remember watching in the past, but I’ve just been put in mind of a couple of series neither of which I watched, but both of which I remember. In both cases, it’s not so much a case of recollecting the programmes, but a certain atmosphere with which they’ve become associated.

There was never any shortage of Western series on TV during the 1960s, from Wagon Train (before my time) to Bonanza. The genre was beginning to wane in popularity by the end of the decade, but two particular titles remained perennial favourites of the schedulers at the BBC. The Virginian, starring James Drury, had been shown by the corporation since 1964, initially on BBC2, then from the mid-60s onwards, on BBC1. The series itself, produced by America’s NBC network, was television’s third longest-running Western, amassing a total of 249 episodes over nine years, and its demise in 1971 signalled the end of the dominance of the genre. The other fixture Western at the BBC, this time on BBC2, was The High Chaparral, which had also aired on NBC in the States from 1967 to 1971. Both series continued to be repeated on the BBC as late as the year 2000, clocking up hundreds of broadcasts between them. Interestingly (or not), these were the only two big Western series that the corporation picked up in the 1960s, with titles like Bonanza, Gunsmoke and Wagon Train going to their commercial rivals, who had more money available to spend on such imports. ITV had pretty much given up on Westerns by the late 60s – it’s hard to think of any examples that were being scheduled by around 1970 – but the BBC continued to show both The Virginian and The High Chaparral in primetime slots well into the new decade.

I remember our dad watching both of them (on the rare evenings when he wasn’t out playing the drums), but I’d lost interest in Westerns at about the same age that I grew out of my cowboy outfit. There had been an offbeat entry on ITV in the early 60s, called Sugarfoot (known in its home country as Tenderfoot), which was broadcast by ABC in the Midlands and North of England on Saturday teatimes, and which I remember watching with some level of enjoyment (although I was barely of an age to be able to follow the storylines), but aside from this one example, and a few old movies that were cranked out on Sunday afternoons, I never really got into the genre.

Yet, simply by dint of their constant presence in the schedules, both The Virginian (latterly The Men From Shiloh) and The High Chaparral worked their way into my consciousness. A glance at their opening titles, courtesy of YouTube (links below) shows them to be instantly familiar, albeit in colour, where I would have been watching in black and white, and each is accompanied by a memorably evocative piece of theme music (composed, in the case of The Virginian, by the prolific Percy [Theme from a Summer Place] Faith). In fact, I always felt that the theme from The High Chaparral had plagiarised the melody from Joe Meek’s Telstar, adding a soupçon of Jerome Moross’s theme from the movie The Big Country. In the case of both these series, the opening credits were as much as I ever saw, but the face of Virginian star James Drury is instantly familiar even now, whereas the cast of The High Chaparral, glimpsed only in passing during the opening credits, are still a mystery to me.

By the early 70s, these two series had each settled into a bit of a scheduler’s rut, with Chaparral tending to occupy a slot around 8pm on Monday nights, and always on BBC2. The Virginian, meanwhile, was a staple of Friday evenings, generally to be found in the 6.40pm slot, immediately after Nationwide. The merest glance at the listings on the BBC’s genome database confirms that these slots persisted over months, if not years, the cumulative effect of which was to confer on each series certain associations.

Just hearing the music from The High Chaparral is enough to evoke the dull tedium of a Monday evening, knowing that there was nothing else to see that night on television (nothing I was allowed to stay up for, at any rate) and with the knowledge of another four days to be endured at school before the weekend rolled around again. The music from Panorama has pretty much the same effect. The Virginian, on the other hand, and still to this day, comes with a Friday feeling, welcoming the start of the weekend; and although I never sat through an episode, the music and opening credits still have that magical Pavolvian effect. A further level of association comes with The Virginian, probably spurred by my imagination conjuring up impressions from the wide, Wyoming landscape glimpsed in the titles. What it says to me is not necessarily the ‘West’, but the idea of there being a wider world out there, and ideas about what it might contain. It also speaks somehow of the lighter evenings in spring and early summer, and that glimpse of landscape might also be conjuring up the rather more parochial setting of the wide expanses of Sutton Park, a potential destination for a trip out on such evenings.

Athough I never sat and watched either of these series, in a curious way, the memory of them is clearer than my recollection of programmes that I actually did make a point of watching, certainly when those series disappeared off air in a relatively short space of time. I tend to find, though, that however much one thinks one remembers, or not, memory remains imprinted in the mind, like a recording, and even things one imagines one has forgotten can spring to mind afresh just by some associative stimulus. Repetiton is clearly a big factor, and regardless of whether one was a devotee of either The High Chaparral, The Virginian or, for that matter, Panorama, the memory of hearing that same piece of music, week after week, played out at a set time of day, with its surrounding context of obligations to school, work, or whatever is deeply imprinted, set permanently in the wet cement of the past.

See if it works for you:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hjjUlljGNK0

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

 

Uh Huh, It was the Manfreds...

This week forty years ago, I was listening a lot to an LP I’d been given at Christmas. Of course, it wasn’t anything contemporary: I didn’t hear much in the modern pop charts that appealed to me, and was more interested in acquiring some of the music I’d listened to in the previous decade. By even the most objective analysis, the music of the 1960s had been more original, more interesting and more exciting than anything that 1977 had to offer.

Most of the music on the album in question was a decade old, and in the case of certain tracks, I don’t think I can have heard them much, if at all, since their original appearance in the charts of the late 60s. The album was called Mannerisms, and was a budget-priced collection of ‘A’ and ‘B’-sides from the second incarnation of the band Manfred Mann.

The Manfreds had first enjoyed chart success with the self-composed theme to the TV series Ready, Steady, Go (5-4-3-2-1), and followed it up with several more top ten hits, with vocalist Paul Jones fronting the band. By 1966, Jones was increasingly focusing on his acting career, and took the decision to quit, at which time ex-public schoolboy Mike D’Abo was drafted in from Harrow school alumni A Band of Angels. D’Abo was a songwriter as well as a singer (his best-known compositions being Handbags and Gladrags and Build Me Up, Buttercup), but this cut no ice with the Manfreds, whose policy was to source songs for their single releases from outside the band. Founder members Manfred Mann and Mike Hugg were first and foremost jazz-blues players, for whom the business of making pop singles was simply a means to an end. Drawing on the best work of contemporary songwriters paid off, and the band’s cover of Bob Dylan’s Just Like a Woman scored a first chart hit for the new D’Abo-fronted band lineup. Dylan would pay dividends again in 1968, when the Manfred’s' cover of The Mighty Quinn got to number one, well before most people had even heard Dylan’s version.

This is where I come in... more or less. I’d been aware of the earlier Manfred Mann from their chart singles Do Wah Diddy Diddy and Pretty Flamingo, but the first of the D’Abo era singles had escaped my attention (I seemed to have missed a lot of chart records during 1966, an absence which is partially explained by the clash on television between Thunderbirds and Top of the Pops). The Mighty Quinn, however, I knew very well, and was bought the single at around the time of its reaching the top of the charts in late February 1968 – the school half-term holiday, as I recollect. Unusually, the single came from a chemist’s shop: John Frosts in Sutton Coldfield was a large-ish dispensing chemists who also happened to have a record department – I can picture it to this day: down a few steps from the entrace, and into a small, semi-subterranean domain of picture sleeves on walls, and a few racks of LPs. Singles were displayed in a rack on the counter.

I remember feeling quite pleased at owning the record that was number one in the charts that week. The Mighty Quinn was only the second pop single I’d ever been bought, and the first (Herman’s Hermits’ I’m Into Something Good) had also made number one. The song itself was somewhat baffling lyrically, with its tale of an Eskimo, whom I pictured paddling in his kyak towards a city square where people were feeding pigeons in the trees (much later, I learned that the song’s titular character was supposedly inspired by Anthony Quinn’s portrayal of an Eskimo in the 1960 movie The Savage Innocents, hence the name...)

Something we always did whenever a single came into our house was to play the B-side. In some cases, the flips ended up getting more play than their A-sides. Mighty Quinn presented a extremely unusual recording on its reverse side, a parody along the lines of the as yet unreleased Beatles novelty You Know My Name (Look up the Number). By Request – Edwin Garvey was a Mike D’Abo composition and may well have started life as a serious ballad. But the Manfreds chose to send it up in a tongue-in cheek fashion, with one of the band doing a full-on Noel Coward impression, while the other members played in the style of a slightly inept light cabaret outfit. I’m not sure that I understood it entirely, but it was clearly not intended to be taken seriously. Nevertheless, it got played, probably a lot more than it deserved...

The Manfreds followed up Quinn’s success in the summer of 1968 with the single My Name is Jack, a song which, if anything, I liked better than its predecessor (although on this occasion I had to make do with hearing it on the radio). It came to embody the first sunny weeks of that year’s school summer holiday, and to this day the opening flute passage evokes a Pavlovian image of deck chairs in the back garden. Once again, I found myself wondering what it was all about. The singer informed us that he lived ‘in the back of the Greta Garbo Home... for Wayward Boys and Girls.’ All of which begged some form of explanation. I don’t think I found out who Greta Garbo really was until much later, and at the age of seven must have imagined that she was just a kindly philanthropic old lady. And what, I desired to know, were ‘wayward boys and girls’? Presumably the characters in the song could serve as a clue. One of them was ‘Carl over there with his funny old hair’ whom I felt I recognised from my class at school, one of whom was a boy called Carl who had notably fluffy curly hair... but wayward? Who knows how he turned out...

My Name is Jack felt like a transitional song, its presence in the charts marking, for me, the move up from infants to junior school. It had dropped out of the top 20 by early August, and somehow its disappearance from the airwaves felt like the first hint of summer coming to an end...

The Manfreds were back in the charts at the end of the year with Fox On the Run, yet another recording that now feels infused with the essence of those times... the days just after Christmas... lumps of half-melted snow lying in the gardens... the Christmas decorations coming down. Not all songs from the era have this weirdly evocative quality, but the Manfreds always managed it somehow. They did it again in May of 1969 with their swansong, Murray and Calendar’s Ragamuffin Man, which always conjurs up a memory of seeing the band miming it on The Basil Brush Show, and a rainy Saturday train journey into Birmingham in pursuit of Lego...

I can’t say that I had such a thing as a favourite band growing up. I simply heard and absorbed the music that surrounded me. I liked The Beatles, but would not own a single one of their records until 1974. I liked anything with melody and attractive production values, which is probably what drew me to Manfred Mann and Herman’s Hermits. I never cared for The Kinks, whose records seemed to give off a kind of sneering cynicism, or indeed The Rolling Stones. As for The Who, I came to them very late indeed, their chart offerings failing to make the playlist of Stewpot’s Junior Choice. As a rule, any song that I liked a lot, I had bought for me: Glenn Campbell’s Wichita Lineman, Amen Corner’s (If Paradise Is) Half as Nice, and Zager & Evans’ In The Year 2525. But I seldom liked more than one song from any given artist. So my response to the late chart career of Manfred Mann leads me to the conclusion that, at least for a couple of years, 1968-69, they were probably my favourite band. I only owned one of their singles, but I liked all the others that I heard, and that’s something that can’t be said for many other artists of the time.

The Mannerisms collection found room for a number of chart misses and B-sides, which only served to confirm my opinion of the band. Mike Hugg’s composition Up the Junction had formed the title track of the 1968 Brit-flick starring Dennis Waterman and Suzie Kendall, and discovering it ten years later it sounded revelatory and sophisticated with its compound chords (a technique which Hugg also used on the single B-side Funniest Gig). For me, it was the standout track on the LP, and a friend of mine, to whom I played it enthusiastically, agreed. We immediately began to speculate about the movie and what it must be like.

Then – literally within a week – what should turn up on late Friday night but the very thing we’d been hoping for: Up the Junction was broadcast by ATV in the Midlands on January 13, 1978. It felt almost too much of a coincidence that this ten-year-old movie, which we’d literally just heard about, should be delivered into our lap as it were. And it wasn’t the first time that I’d be on the receiving end of such a happy coincidence...

These days, Manfred Mann are somewhat overlooked. One seldom hears any of their late-60s chart hits played on the radio, aside from the ubiquitous Mighty Quinn, and they’re rarely accorded the kind of serious critical analysis that is perhaps too often applied to their contemporaries. In retrospect, the decision to concentrate on covers as opposed to original compositions seems to have worked against them, cover versions being perceived (by rock critics at least) as having less integrity than self-penned compositions. Nevertheless, the Manfreds stamped their own identity on their singles: Mighty Quinn had been a raw and rambling Dylan demo, widely circulated amongst publishers, but not generally available until its inclusion on The Basement Tapes many years later. The Manfreds completely retooled the song, with a bang-on contemporary production job that confirmed the band’s genius as interpreters of other writers’ material. An even more radical re-imagining was applied to Randy Newman’s orchestral ballad So Long, Dad, which in the hands of Mann and Hugg became a kind of pub piano singalong, in a style that was briefly popular around the fag end of 1967. Listening to it now, it sounds like a guaranteed smash hit, yet it failed to enter the UK charts at all.

If you listen to only one piece of old pop music in these first weeks of the new year, take a leaf out of my 1978 diary and revisit the Mike D’Abo era of Manfred Mann. In those few short years from 1966-69, they left us with some of the most perfectly-realised pop songs of their era. Just one word of advice – give Edwin Garvey a wide berth. Nothing good has ever come of that name...

No Ride Into the Sunset... Sitcoms and Sentimentality

From The Likely Lads to Detectorists... what makes a good sitcom

I recently, and accidentally, found myself watching an episode of Only Fools and Horses, a series I’ve had no time for these past twenty-odd years. Although I watched it regularly across its first few seasons, and would be the first to acknowledge that there was some great comedy amongst those early episodes, I eventually went cold on it. The episode I chanced upon was 1990’s ‘Christmas Special’ – which is to say that it was broadcast on Christmas Day, but contained no actual festive content as far as I could see. I only stuck it for twenty minutes or so, which was more than enough time to remind me why I’d given up on Del, Rodders and co. all those years ago. Part of the problem was, for a sitcom, fairly fundamental. It wasn’t really that funny. Most of what I saw revolved around the disintegrating domestic relationship of Rodney and his girlfriend, Cassandra, scenes which wouldn’t have felt out of place in, say Coronation Street (although I’d venture to suggest that there would have been more laughs in Corrie).

Only Fools and Horses is still cited as one of Britain’s most beloved sitcoms, and who am I to disagree? Well, bear with me. By 1990, the series had been on air for nine years, and would still be hanging around, quite literally like the ghost of Christmas past, until 2003. The dynamic between the characters – principally Del and Rodney – was well established, and even the replacement of the original Grandad with the cockney stereotype Uncle Albert hadn’t affected the series’ popularity, which continued to grow and grow. Then, in the late 1980s, writer John Sullivan decided to stir things up by introducing an element that had been more or less absent from the series until this point: love interest for both Del and Rodney. There’s nothing wrong with that as an idea. The problem lay in its execution, and here I’m going to refer to another example of the same thing, in the form of The Likely Lads; an illustration of how to mess with the formula and actually make it better.

In its original incarnation, The Likely Lads contained no ongoing love interest for Bob and Terry, which was exactly how it should be. It did, however, contain a network of supporting characters, reinforcing the idea that our heroes were real people, grounded in the kind of everyday lifestyle that would be familiar to viewers. Some of these supporting characters returned when the series was revived in 1973 as Whatever Happened to the Likely Lads. But there was now a much more important component in the format, a character that turned the series from a two-hander into, effectively, a comedy trio. That character was, of course, Thelma, Bob’s fiancée in the first series, and his wife in the second. It would have been very easy for writers Dick Clement and Ian La Frenais to have fallen back on clichés about the pitfalls of married life, and portrayed Thelma as a standard, shrewish ‘nagging wife’; but they were better than that. As indeed was the actress chosen to play Thelma, Brigit Forsyth. Thelma, in fact, was the pivotal character in Whatever Happened to the Likely Lads, as across the two series, Bob found himself torn between his loyalties to her and Terry. Many stories hinge on the tensions created by Bob trying not to upset either of the two most important people in his life, and the writers don’t let him off lightly. Over the course of twenty-seven episodes, Bob endures many personal indignities and even physical injury, all of them directly attritbutable to his divided loyalties. This may sound obvious, but it was very carefully worked out by Clement and La Frenais, whose scripts allowed situations to develop naturally before collapsing into disastrous consequences. Barely married for a few months, Bob and Thelma split up, and the domestic roles were suddenly reversed, with Terry moving in to support his mate in a time of crisis. Throughout all this, the acting was of such a high standard that the blend of drama and comedy never felt forced, nor did the scripts descend at any time into sentimentality.

Sentimentality, on the other hand, was at the root of what I felt to be the problem with Only Fools and Horses, and it was the principal reason why I stopped watching, or indeed caring about what happened to the characters. Writer John Sullivan fell into the looming trap of becoming too close to his creations, and once that happened, his scripts became increasingly dominated by sentimentality. This doesn’t just mean letting your characters off the hook: conversely, it tends just as much towards the opposite pole, and a writer too in love with his creations will often place them in heart-wrenching situations, simply to enjoy the exhilerating release of stepping in as their saviour. Of course, it works for viewers, but it’s a form of simplistic emotional manipulation that the greatest writers recognise and avoid. It’s this kind of writing that has spoiled the latter day Dr. Who, and it can be seen clearly in the Only Fools and Horses episodes post-dating the introduction of Del and Rodney’s love interests.

Dennis Potter spoke of it happening to him during the writing of his serial Pennies From Heaven, and brilliant though the series was, this aspect of the writing is quite obvious on screen – lead character Arthur Parker (Bob Hoskins) may end up being hanged, but he still gets to come back for one last song-and-dance sequence.

The difference with Clement and La Frenais’s scripts was that, although Bob and Terry were characters whom they knew and understood in intimate detail, they always maintained a kind of writer’s objectivity, a detachment that allowed them to put their creations through the wringer, without necessarily offering any hope of resolution. If you want an example of that, consider the ending of the Likely Lads feature film script, which has Bob stranded on a merchant ship bound for Bahrain. We, the viewers, know instinctively that the status quo will eventually be restored, but the resolution is never offered on screen. The same formula was used successfully throughout Whatever Happened to... and can also be seen at play in Clement and La Frenais’ writing for Porridge. Bob and Thelma’s marriage is continually subjected to stress and trauma, but the reconciliation is rarely depicted. A sentimentalist would have wallowed in the making-up, but Clement and La Frenais never waver.

Compare this with Only Fools and Horses, where the ‘girlfriends’ simply served as a distraction for the main characters, a simple focus for love interest, rather than key plot movers in the manner of Thelma. When Rodney and Cassandra split up, it all feels forced, a mere excuse to justify the inevitable sentimental resolution, and this, regrettably, became more and more the norm for the series, with epiphanies awaiting our heroes at the end of each interminable Christmas special. Del finally becomes a father... then ends up a millionaire thanks to the auction of a valuable antique. This is, in effect, a ride into the sunset, something that Bob, Thelma and Terry were never allowed, and a cliché that the greatest comedy writers, from Stan Laurel onwards, have studiously avoided.

Whatever Happened to the Likely Lads was, in fact, very much akin to a soap opera, with its storylines developing across multiple episodes, and its characters frequently found themselves in the kind of situations that have been well explored in the soap genre. The difference is that Clement and La Frenais, with their detached relationship to Bob and Terry, were able to inject some very sharp humour into their scripts. There’s not much comic potential in watching two characters enjoy the fruits of a successful marriage, but place it under the kind of strain that Bob and Thelma’s is subjected to, and the humour comes thick and fast. Such is the way of human nature. No contrivance was necessary; with Whatever Happened to the Likely Lads, Clement and La Frenais created a potent cocktail of characters and situation that continues to impress over forty years later.

It’s a formula that, more recently, has paid dividends for the writers of Channel 4’s Peep Show, a series where it was quite clear from the outset that there would be no sentimental relationship between the creators and their characters. A similar dynamic can be found in BBC4’s Detectorists: two close friends whose lives are subject to the tensions created by their relationships with other, mostly female characters. It’s hard to tell if writer/ director McKenzie Crook has fallen into the sentimentality trap, and his scripts tread a fine line at times, contrasting the harsh treatment regulatly meted out to the protagonists of Peep Show, and continued in the recent and excellent Mitchell/Webb vehicle Back.

These three series all share something of their comic DNA with Whatever Happened to the Likely Lads, but unfortunately, writing of this quality has become the exception rather than the rule. The cloying sentimentality that scuppered Only Fools and Horses is very much alive and well and embodied in just about every sitcom commissioned by BBC1, notably the execrable Mrs. Brown’s Boys, which doubtless appeals to all those who once delighted in the antics of Del Boy and Rodney.

Myself, I’m sticking with those old Likely Lads episodes. There won’t be any better comedy writing on British television, and today’s best examples owe much, if not everything, to the work of Clement and La Frenais.

Whatever Happened to the Likely Lad?

'Boom Boom!' Mr. Rodney with Basil Brush, 1968

We’re a Likely Lad less than we were yesterday, with the very sad news of the passing of Rodney Bewes, best known for his role as Robert Scarborough Ferris in the classic sitcom. But it was in his capacity as sidekick to Basil Brush that I first became aware of him, and for me he will always be ‘Mr. Rodney.’ I can even give the exact date when I first saw him on television... it was Friday 14^th June, 1968, and the musical guests on that first ever Basil Brush Show were Manfred Mann, miming their current chart hit, My Name is Jack.

It was Basil Brush’s first solo series, having been promoted from his former roles as, originally, one of the ‘Three Scampies’ and, latterly, assistant to TV magician David Nixon. In his capacity as mentor to the irrepressible fox, Rodney Bewes established a formula that would endure for the next twelve years, as further ‘Misters’ stepped into the role, beginning with Derek Fowlds in 1969. Strangely, my memory is of Rodney Bewes’ tenure on the show lasting much longer, but in fact he was there for just twelve weeks over the summer of 1968, during which another enduring aspect of the show was established: the episodic story, usually of a swashbuckling character, entertainingly interrupted by Basil’s interjections, bags of sweeties and, much later, a battery operated yapping dog called ‘Little Ticker.’ During this first season, the story concerned the wild west adventures of outlaw Des P. Rado of Cripple Creek (later tales usually involved a hero named Basil). Basil, in typical fashion, misheard ‘Cripple Creek’ as Chiswell Green (or possibly Kensall Green), leading to some typical byplay with Mr. Rodney.

It’s a shame that Mr. Rodney’s tenure on the show was so brief, as there was a genuine rapport between him and his foxy co-star, and he proved to be a jovial host, displaying his versatility as a bit of a song and dance man by joining in singalongs with various musical guests. Although Derek Fowlds proved to be an excellent replacement, I still retained fond memories of the classic ‘Mr. Rodney’ era of the show (not a single episode of which, sadly, survives).

As to Mr. Rodney himself, it wasn’t long before he turned up again on the small screen, in a series which became a personal favourite of mine at the time, Dear Mother, Love Albert. Bewes not only starred in the series, but was its creator and producer, his star being decidedly in the ascendent by this time. The format had been inspired by his friend Tom Courtenay, whose surname was appropriated for the titular Albert. Courtenay’s letters from his mother (later published) provided the premise for the series, which saw Bewes’ northern character writing home from his London bedsit, and embellishing his somewhat mundane lifestyle in his correspondence. The first series, produced for Thames Television, is believed lost, but series 2-4 saw a move to Yorkshire Television, and all of these episodes survive. Watching them now, it’s easy to see similarities between the persona of Bewes’ Albert character, and that of Bob Ferris, whom he had already played for three series over on BBC television. The similarities even extend to the area of wardrobe, with Albert favouring the same kind of dark blue, three-piece suits that Bob Ferris would later be seen wearing in Whatever Happened to the Likely Lads. Bob, however, was to become a far more nuanced and complex comic creation than Albert, who was more of a good-natured fall guy, forever getting into scrapes with girlfriends, landladies and his boss, Strain (an early role for future Sweeney guvnor Garfield Morgan).

I’d never seen the original Likely Lads series, which had come to an end in 1966, but in the first week of 1973, the BBC’s New Year programme line-up included a brand new series, Whatever Happened to the Likely Lads. Our mum, who remembered the original, encouraged me and my brother to watch, and seeing Rodney Bewes again was like encountering an old friend, as indeed happens to Bob and Terry in that introductory episode, Strangers on a Train. Over the coming weeks, the series became a favourite, and I began to find myself identifiying quite strongly with the character of Bob. His middle-class aspirations – marriage, a good job, a nice house – all seemed entirely admirable to me at the age of eleven going on twelve. I didn’t realise at the time that writers Dick Clement and Ian La Frenais were actually poking fun at the shallowness of Bob and those who shared his values. But what was the alternative? To be an idler like Terry Collier? This was the dilemma facing millions of people in 1970s Britain: you either bought into the system and became smothered by its narrow, middle-England values; or you dropped out and risked being marginalised like Terry, whose workshy, cynical attitude to life typified the era’s armchair lefties – strong on opinion, but lacking the commitment and drive to actually get up and do anything.

Social comment aside, Whatever Happened to the Likely Lads was brilliantly written; some of its best moments are still laugh-out-loud funny over forty years later. Yet it lasted for just two series and a solitary Christmas special, a total of twenty seven episodes (plus a further nineteen of the original series). The decision to end the the series seems to have come from Clement and La Frenais who felt at the time that there was nowhere else to go with the Bob and Terry relationship, and instead developed a new comedy vehicle for Ronnie Barker in the form of Porridge.

But it wasn’t quite the end. Three years after the last Whatever Happened to... episode, the lads returned for a final outing, this time on the big screen. Feature film spin-offs from successful TV series had been reasonably successful in the early ’70s, and The Likely Lads (1977) was a relatively late entry in the genre. Without a doubt, it is the best of all such efforts, with comic sequences that rival the best moments of the TV series, and a melancholic atmosphere recalling the neo-realism of early sixties movies in which both Bolam and Bewes had appeared.

With the sole exception of a boarding house episode that was reycled from an early Likely Lads script, the movie was all new material; indeed, there was easily more than enough potential in that one script to have developed a third series for television. The lads’ lives are changing... Bob is beginning to question the ‘full and exciting life’ that he supposedly enjoys with Thelma, while Terry, with the run of his parents’ high rise flat and a new, Finnish girlfriend, is living a bachelor lifestyle of ‘sport, slippers and sex’ that is the envy of Bob. An attempt to combine the two comes drastically apart when the lads decide to sneak home early from a caravan weekend in the country, brazenly picking up two girl hitchhikers despite having Thelma and Terry’s girlfriend literally in tow. As Bob’s lifestyle flies to pieces, his shiny red Vauxhall Chevette becomes a visual metaphor for the damage being wrought, as it slowly succumbs to accidents and incidents of vandalism. The last we see of our heroes is Terry, with suitcases in hand, having had a change of heart about a planned career aboard a merchant ship, while Bob finds himself literally cast adrift as the merchantman steams away, next stop Bahrain.

It wasn’t just Bob Ferris who was cast adrift. The movie was, sadly, one of the last high profile appearances for Rodney Bewes who, after more than a decade in the television spotlight, now retreated to a primarily stage career, often touring in one-man shows (Wikipedia claims he presented a version of Rollerball which seems exceedingly hard to swallow – much more in character was his solo stage version of Three Men in a Boat).

Bewes reportedly enjoyed a friendly relationship with his co-star James Bolam, until the pair fell out, seemingly over an indiscreet remark made by Bewes regarding Bolam’s girlfriend, the actress Susan Jamieson, who had fallen pregnant. Bolam, an intensely private man, was angry that Bewes had spoken about it in public, and following an acrimonous phone call, the pair never spoke again.

What’s less easy to understand is why Bewes was seen so little in TV and film from the late ’70s onwards. It’s hard to imagine this situation being of his choosing: in later years, he lamented the lack of TV repeats of The Likely Lads, citing James Bolam’s refusal to give consent, and making it quite clear that he could have used the fees from such reruns. A few years ago, I read Bewes’ autobiography, A Likely Story, wondering if it might provide any clues as to why he became sidelined from two very important branches of the acting profession. Had he somehow made himself difficult to work with? Nothing obvious came to light, other than a tendency to drop famous names rather more often than necessary; that plus the sense that, like many other celebrities, he gave the impression of living in his own personal microcosm, a ‘Rodney Beweniverse’ if you will. But in a profession where the individual becomes a product to be sold, this is very much par for the course, and I can’t bring myself to believe that Bewes had an ego big enough to deter his peers from wanting to work alongside him.

Seven years ago, I produced a demo of a song in tribute to Rodney Bewes. Despite its slightly humorous slant, it was meant sincerely, and was a reflection of the time, in the 1970s, in which I genuinely wanted to grow up to be Rodney Bewes, or rather, one of the types he portrayed on film and television. In some ways, perhaps I have... Although I never met him, I later became aware that Bewes had heard the song, and referred to it in at least one interview. I’d like to think he found it flattering.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b8RB8IiGyM8 

As Bob Ferris, he may have had his ups and downs in fictional married life, and as Rodney Bewes, his career trajectory may not have worked out quite the way he might have hoped for: but to be remembered for even one role on TV, and in a series as iconic and fondly-remembered as The Likely Lads is an achievement of which he should have been rightly proud. And he had been a young, succesful actor during the most exciting, creative and dynamic decade in the history of humankind.

Let’s face it: who wouldn’t want to have been Rodney Bewes?