The Camberwick Green Procrastination Society

Readers of Tim Worthington’s blog will know that whenever he’s supposed to be working on something more substantial, he starts writing about Camberwick Green instead. And The Monkees, and ‘Boss Cat’, and Hardwicke House, and radio comedy, and, well, pretty much anything else other than the task at hand.

As a consequence, ‘Tim Worthington’s Newsround’ has featured many popular and acclaimed articles, the best of which are now included here in expanded form with some previously unpublished pieces and even a couple of extras.

There’s the story of what Jimi Hendrix was really watching when he wrote The Wind Cries Mary, a fresh look at the disastrous ITV sitcom Days Like These, some showing off about having found an off-air recording of a lost TV show, and lots more besides. The overwhelming majority of it involving Camberwick Green in some capacity.

“Every single one of these articles is a productive unproductive waste of time or something… erm… can’t I go back to talking about Rubik’s Magic again?”, says writer Tim Worthington.

Tim of course is well qualified to say this, having written material for a host of television and radio programmes on a vast variety of subjects – documentary and… documentary.

Here then is The Camberwick Green Procrastination Society. Let Tim Worthington’s timewasting be a guide to you.

Welcome to The Camberwick Green Procrastination Society!

Author’s Note

The Camberwick Green Procrastination Society was originally conceived a series of magazine and book layout pastiches, each of them in some way relevant to the subject of the article; Q for Tin Machine, TV Times for Hardwicke House, Look-In for Skiboy etc. The Wait Till Your Father Gets Home one was in the style of my old paper fanzine Paintbox, which presumably about three people will actually have noticed. Anyway, it wasn’t possible to replicate this for the Kindle edition, so if you’d like to see this as it was originally intended, please tweet a photo of yourself reading the Kindle version and I’ll be happy to send the original eBook to you.

The original version also featured a number of short boxouts, again in keeping with the layout styles, adapted from some other articles that didn’t make the final cut. Other than the ITV Lunchtime programme listings included at the end, I’ve taken the decision to omit these here. It also included a number of pastiche adverts on behalf of friends and wellwishers which didn’t really fit here; you can now find these on the blog post accompanying this new edition.

And finally, something that was never in the original version – the acknowledgements! Thanks for their help in various ways to Ben Baker, Justin Lewis, Dave Bryant, Stephen O’Brien, Richard Herring, Tanya Jones, Garreth F. Hirons, John Connors, Dave Rolinson, Bob Stanley, James Gent, Nicholas Pegg, Iain Lee, Steve Williams, Chris Hughes, Louis Barfe, Mark Ayres, Gareth Roberts, Miwk Publishing, Graham Kibble-White and Sam Bain, who contacted me out of the blue to say how much he enjoyed the article on Days Like These. I really wasn’t expecting that.

The Best Pictures Are In The (Radio) Times

The simple, long-lost thrill of researching popular culture of the past in the pre-Internet era is a subject that I've talked about extensively before - and yes, you guessed it, it's a subject that I'm about to talk about extensively yet again.

Back in the days when the closest evolutionary relative of IMDB was those books called things like Variety's Sci-Fi Enthusiast's Guide To Out Of This World Movie Credits From Space, which were produced to such high and exacting standards that practically every page had half line gaps in the middle of words, the absolute and almost inconceivably exotic researching holy grail was access to back issues of Radio Times and TV Times.

Definitive, unarguable (well, sort of - but that's something that would come to light much later) records of what had been on radio and TV, who had appeared in and made it, and where and when it went out, and all of it without having to wade through interminable wittering about Project UFO first. Of course, if for some strange reason you did want to know about the UK transmissions of Project UFO, then you could find them in there too, but that's by the by.

Eventually, and more by accident than design, I did manage to locate a collection of bound volumes in the awe-inspiring city centre library; although they would later restrict access to dedicated researchers who were prepared to sign official-looking forms and then wait twenty minutes while the staff mysteriously disappeared and returned with the requested copies occupying about a sixteenth of the available space on the world's squeakiest trolley, back then they were just sitting on a shelf and you essentially had the free run of TV listings from 1962 to date.

Unfortunately this did mean that some prat had already gone through and torn out all of the pages referring to Doctor Who, or worse still carefully levered them out with a craft knife leaving damaging lacerations on all of the surrounding pages too, but in all honesty that was really just a minor annoyance. There was so much more in there to find out about than the already overdocumented Doctor Who, and that so much more was precisely what I was in search of. There was, if you will, so much more than TV Times in TV Times magazine. Except that doesn't really work as Doctor Who was in the Radio Times. But you get the general idea.

Suddenly, there were so many longstanding back-of-the-mind questions that could quite conceivably be answered. What were the storylines of the untransmitted episodes of Hardwicke House? Did Channel 4 really show a documentary with clips from ‘Video Nasties’? Was there any truth in the rumour that Monty Python's Flying Circus hadn't been properly repeated prior to 1986? Didn't TV Times used to use bizarre 'genre' icons in their listings? Did the abandoned Not The Nine O'Clock News launch make it as far as being scheduled? Was Lenny Henry really a DJ on Radio 1? What about that reference somewhere once to a Billy Liar TV series? Had I just imagined Rubovia? And what in the name of all that is sane and rational was Whoops Baghdad? All of these questions, and more, would soon find their sometimes surprising resolutions. But what I looked up first was something else entirely.

Camberwick Green had been quietly retired from the BBC's lunchtime children's schedules in 1985 - having been shown over thirty times since its debut in 1966 - and like any other TV or radio show (or indeed film) that had been consigned to the archive shelves in the days before there was the technology or impetus to sell it all back to us constantly, it had already slipped into a sort of cultural limbo. You didn't have to look very far to find evidence that it had existed, of course, but the actual show itself already seemed intangibly remote and distant, far in the subconscious depths of character songs drilled into your memory by repetition and fraught recollections of never being quite sure about that clown in the opening and closing titles. It was something that had once been a permanent fixture in the background but had since retreated inaccessibly into a musical box marked ‘the past’, and that sense of the inaccessible recent past was what drove me to look up its very first transmission.

And there it was - Monday 3rd January 1966, 1.30pm on BBC1, an episode billed as ‘1: Peter The Postman’ and described as ‘For the very young’. To be honest, all of the handful of accompanying credits were details that I knew already anyway, involving names that were all too familiar from the clown-rotated credit scroller, but what was really arresting was the small accompanying illustration of the aforementioned Peter The Postman, and a single line in italics at the foot of the listing reading ‘See page 19’. And on page 19, there it was – a full-size version of the artwork, featuring Peter Hazel standing atop the Music Box (although for some reason he had actually been drawn taller than it), accompanied by a short and noticeably hyperbole-lacking piece introducing the various characters, hinting at (though stopping short of explicitly stating) its status as the first truly independent production to be made for the BBC, and handily explaining the stop-motion animation process for the benefit of question-plagued parents.

And that, believe it or not, was how you launched a major new smallscreen venture in 1966. Other highlights for that Monday picked out on the same page included Bob Monkhouse in a ‘straight’ role in Thirty Minute Theatre, Peter Falk (who apparently “holds an ‘Emmy’ award, which he won for his part in ‘The Price Of Tomatoes’”) guesting in The Danny Kaye Show, an episode of Hugh And I – “more comic adventures with Terry Scott and Hugh Lloyd” – which had apparently been picked out on the basis of having a new theme tune, and an interesting-sounding documentary named Women In Europe, which looked at how our more progressive continental neighbours were opening out employment opportunities and which featured an interview with the Soviet Union's first female commercial pilot. What Mrs. Dingle The Postmistress would have made of all that is anyone's guess.

Since then, for various reasons, I've done a good deal more research into Camberwick Green and its various sequels and spin-offs. Along the way I've got to see part (although, as we shall see, not all) of the original black and white ‘pilot’ version of ‘1: Peter The Postman’ with its notorious animation blunder, waded through a stack of paperwork outlining the tedious contractual reasons behind Chigley's disappearance from the schedules for a couple of years in the late seventies, and even heard a Danish-dubbed version of the ‘Welcome To Camberwick Green’ album (or, in old krone, 'Velkommen Til Grønærteby'). But none of this has ever matched the thrill of finding that small quarter-page introductory piece, and indeed that evocative accompanying artwork, probably produced in minutes flat for a magazine that by its very definition had the shortest of shelf lives, but which all this time later remains resonant with the ‘feel’ of a lost world of prehistoric broadcasting. Of course, so deeply ingrained was the show itself in the formative experiences of successive generations that we're actually long overdue a politician proclaiming that we should “all try to be a bit more like the people of Camberwick Green”. To which we should say fine, as long as they personally are prepared to be visited by the clown late at night.

Wound Up And Ready To Play

There are few dilemmas greater than that faced by the young viewer who wants to watch something that they are simultaneously terrified of. And nowhere was this dilemma more profound and troubling than in the case of the BBC's one-time lunchtime staple, Camberwick Green.

Camberwick Green, for those who aren't familiar with it, was a stop-motion animation set in a tranquil village, which charted the lighthearted escapades of its many and vocationally varied occupants in bright colours with a brisk folk-meets-UK-psych soundtrack. Along with its later companion pieces, the sprawlingly suburban Trumpton and the efficiently industrial estate-bolstered Chigley (and, lest we forget, the little-remembered Rubovia), this was compelling viewing for the average preschool television watcher. Though with one not inconsiderable drawback.

For reasons that have never been satisfactorarily explained,

Camberwick Green opened and closed with a mysterious clown operating a roller blackboard bearing the programme's credits. And this was no ordinary mysterious clown. Mouthless and silent, he stared directly outwards at the viewer with eyes that seemed to be able to observe you beyond the television screen, remaining utterly motionless until – when you least expected it – he would suddenly jerk the roller handle, sharply turn his head around to survey the newly revealed text at an angle that suggested dispassionate existentialist contempt for the animators and designers, and then just as sharply return his gaze to the viewer. Beneath all of this, a chiming folky melody played out, ending on a jarring discordant jangly strum that arrived seemingly out of nowhere and called to mind Nick Drake falling down the stairs, and all the while his stare continued ever outwards. Even apart from looking - and sounding

- terrifying, it was his sheer lack of quantifiable context, purpose and agenda that really placed him in the Premier League of childhood televisual fear-causers. Small wonder, then, that generations of troubled youngsters would take to waiting outside the front room until they were in receipt of parental assurances that 'the clown' wasn't on.

And yes, that does say 'generations'. Although only thirteen episodes were ever made, Camberwick Green enjoyed an impressive innings on the BBC, first seen in 1966 and last seen twenty whole years later; during that time it would be repeated up to three times a year, sometimes with an additional first-thing-on-Sunday-morning showing to boot. Needless to say, this provided ample opportunity for being caught offguard.

We can, sadly, only guess at what the effect on those viewers catching sight of him for the first time back in 1966 must have been. In fact, we can literally only guess at this, as they would actually have been watching an entirely different episode to the rest of us. No, really.

The first ever episode was originally made in black and white, and it was only after it had been completed that producer Gordon Murray was persuaded, with an eye on the imminent arrival of colour television, to invest in some colour film stock. The remaining twelve episodes were duly shot both in black and white and colour, using two side-by-side cameras, but the already completed first had to be entirely remade using colour film stock. This did give the production team an opportunity to sharpen the new version up slightly, famously correcting a sequence in which the black and white original had inadvertently captured some scenery slowly wilting in time-lapse under the hot studio lights, making the trees appear to loom ominously towards the puppets like some lost scene from Dr. Terror's House Of Horrors. Yet although the monochrome prints do still exist, they've not been seen from their final late sixties outing to this day, and whatever other changes were made between the two versions of the first episode will have to remain a mystery. Whether the clown was even toned down slightly from his original appearance is something we sadly do not know. Actually, perhaps that's not actually 'sadly'.

Anyway, it's worth taking another look at the nearest thing that we do have to that inaugural outing - the colour version of the first episode, Peter The Postman. While it's always going to be impossible to exactly replicate that televisual Shock Of The New – if not the easily replicable Shock Of The Clown – it is worth exploring the context of that first broadcast a little. Appearing just three days into a year that would prove pivotal in sociocultural terms, from the England World Cup victory and The Beatles releasing Revolver to the broadcast of Cathy Come Home and the roll-out of electric rail networks (which began, coincidentally enough, on the same day as the clown and his pals made their first television appearance), Camberwick Green was quietly revolutionary in its own way; stop-motion was still a relatively new and pioneering animation process, to the extent that Radio Times felt compelled to run a piece explaining how it worked for the benefit of question-plagued parents, and not only was it the first entirely new show to find its way into the rotating

'Watch With Mother' midday schedules in a decade, it was also one of the first truly independent productions to appear on the BBC full stop. Not revolutionary to the extent that Farmer Bell became the 'face' of the June 1966 launch of Barclaycard, admittedly, but you can't have everything.

The 'face' of 3rd January 1966 was most definitely a certain clown, and it's him that we inevitably join at the start of the episode, positioned in front of his gaudily-patterned backdrop and equipped for no readily obvious reason with a lute, a bell, and an impractically oversized drum.

With a brief tinkle of glockenspiel and the rapidly-scrolled programme title picked out in Playbill, he's come and gone in seconds and on this evidence it's difficult to comprehend how and why he had such a lastingly chilling effect. But we'll come back to that later. Instead, the 'action' switches straight over to another puzzlingly adorned set, where the celebrated Music Box sits on a table top surrounded by books, a lamp and a magnifying glass, presumably located in the study of some seriously eccentric academic. The familiar offscreen voice of Brian Cant chimes in with "here is a box, a musical box, wound up and ready to play... and this box can hide a secret inside... can you guess what is in it today?", which was never quite so much of a guessing game if you'd read the Radio Times billing, or indeed had remembered the running order from the fifteen thousand or so previous repeat runs that you'd sat through. The Music Box clicks into operation of its own volition, and with a hefty clunk and whirr begins rotating and indeed emitting an angular acoustic guitar mantra courtesy of one Freddie Phillips, though more about him later.

Today's 'secret' is Peter Hazel The Postman, rotating into view with a mailbag and open pillarbox to hand. After some cheery salutations and an unexpected burst of dry wit ("What are you going to do now? Close the box? Well that's closed and no mistake!"), Brian Cant asks if we can 'come with' him to the Post

Office, and through the miracle of the film splice we find ourselves in a tree-lined avenue as Peter strides off to the accompaniment of a jaunty song-and-whistle about the procedural details of his profession. Before long he runs into

Paddy and Mary Murphy, the children of baker Mickey Murphy who despite their impeccable appearance always seemed on the verge of being up to no good. And lo and behold, they're haranguing an unfeasibly large hedgehog, a situation which Peter sensibly deduces is best left alone.

But it's at this point that something disconcertingly 'different' about this very first episode becomes apparent; at certain expressive moments, the distinctive mouthless puppets inexplicably acquire mouths. And this isn't the only troubling deviation from the norm.

Peter's next port of call is the Post Office, where he encounters both Packet the Post Office puppy, who dives onto a pile of parcels in apparent pursuit of 'sausages', and Mrs Dingle The Postmistress, who issues him with a handful of oversized envelopes for delivery and breaks into her own extemporised solo verse of Peter's song, detailing who the letters are for and how many they will each be receiving. This not only specifies that one is for the never-seen "Mr Honeyman who keeps the Chemist's shop" (though we'll be meeting his other half in a minute), but in the version included on the Welcome To Camberwick Green LP also refers to Mickey Murphy as 'Bertie Baker'. The latter had presumably been driven out of business by Mickey by the time the series began. Or maybe he was actually in that black and white version?

Peter gives a quick recap of who the letters are intended for, with

Packet inexplicably nodding in agreement whenever he gets them correct (and then, erm, jumping on the counter), and it's straight off into a freeform instrumental excursion on Peter's song whilst he and Mrs Dingle indulge in choreographed waltzing to congratulate themselves on a job well done. Then, after waving a brief salutation to Mr. Carraway the fishmonger, Peter's off to deliver a letter to Mickey Murphy, but after knocking twice with his 'special knock' - which, you cannot help but notice, bears an uncanny resemblance to the percussive motif from The Beatles'

Being For The Benefit Of Mr Kite! - and getting no answer, he ventures round the back and, seeing smoke issuing from the chimney, contrives to determine that the bakery interior must be ablaze. So it's back round to the front to raise the alarm, and after inadvertently performing his 'special knock' on Mickey's nose – honestly, there is much more slapstick in these things than you remember – he receives baker-hatted reassurance that the chimney is simply operating on its normal intended basis.

We then encounter Dr. Mopp in conversation with village chatterbox Mrs. Honeyman, allowing Peter to dispense with two of his deliveries at the same time before being regaled with some unfathomable gossip about a cat whilst the stern-looking medical man beats a hasty and well-advised retreat. Then it's off to Colley's Mill to meet Windy Miller, whose windmill is in full operational motion with its memory-burning mechanical sound effect, which provides an ideal moment to talk about musician Freddie Phillips. A classical guitarist by profession, he also enjoyed a lucrative sideline in soundtrack work, contributing to projects as diverse as 1960 horror film Peeping Tom and a series of 'Network Openings' that played over the BBC logo at the start of the day's programming throughout the sixties. Though it's safe to say that this was far from his intention, his short but charming character songs chimed perfectly if accidentally with the emerging psychedelic musical mood of the time, and if the likes of Donovan, Syd Barrett and Deram-era David Bowie weren't looking in and getting ideas then John Lennon Hats will be eaten all round. An early advocate of tape manipulation and multi-track recording, Phillips was also fairly adept when it came to wrestling appropriate sound effects out of conventional instruments, and the windmill mechanism was apparently derived from a recording of one of those percussive scraper things (apparently more properly known as a 'kret') played back at varying speeds. Sadly, the ingenious needs-must efforts of early studio trickery pioneers like Freddie Phillips go largely uncelebrated these days, and while it would perhaps be a touch extreme to elevate him to the same level as the similarly underacknowledged George Martin, Joe Meek or The BBC Radiophonic Workshop, there is much more sonic invention at work in these deceptively simple shows than many might have thought.

Not all of his efforts quite hit the mark, though, and with a sound effect more worthy of Dick Emery, Peter's mailbag gets caught on the sails and is hoisted skywards, requiring intervention from Windy who saves the day by turning the sails off again; a turn of events that the two seem to find disproportionately amusing. Then it's finally time for that fourteen note bugle call that drilled itself into your mind and resurfaced every time you sat an exam, as we're off to Pippin Fort, Peter's final port of call, to hand over a whopping nine letters to Captain Snort and the 'Soldier Boys'.

After a bit of square-bashing interrupted by Peter's arrival and a mad dash for the proffered post, accompanied by a very jarringly out-of-place spot of wa-wa-wa-waaaaa toy trumpet lamenting as the Captain sighs at his charges' lack of concentration, Peter’s day's work is done, and it's back to the pillarbox and indeed back into the Music Box, where surprisingly the table adornments have not been joined by a tumbler of whiskey left by the academic who can't get anyone to believe him that he's seen 'puppet people' moving about.

Then it's back to the clown and his scrolling credits (including some names that, you can't help but notice, have had to be literally crammed on due to their length), accompanied by a piece of music that bears such a strong similarity to Happy Time by Tim Buckley that you can't help but suspect that the yodelling jazz-folk troubadour caught sight of an episode of Camberwick Green while on one of his many UK jaunts and thought "I should just copy that, only with less clown". And, well, it wouldn't be hard to get less clown than this, as we're treated - if that's the right word - to a full minute's worth of credit-staring and even a small but interminable couple of seconds of silence after that troublesome chord fades out, which doesn't exactly help in the trauma-avoidance stakes.

What's unusual about watching this very first visit to

Trumptonshire again now is how subtly different it is to everything that you would normally have associated with it. Even aside from the stylistic deviations noted above, there's a lot less reliance on familiar visual and musical motifs; while Peter's song seems to more or less continue throughout the whole episode, you'll search in vain for the likes of Captain Snort's song, Riding Along In An Army Truck or indeed Riding Along In A Baker's Van, while the likes of Mr. Dagenham, Mr. Crockett and even PC McGarry are nowhere to be seen. There's also not much of a storyline; Peter basically just wanders around meeting people and... that's it. Admittedly this was something that was much more prominent when it came to Trumpton and Chigley, but even the later episodes of Camberwick Green seemed to at least have some sort of dramatic endpoint of sorts in mind. Yet it still looks and sounds amazing, all the more impressive when you consider that it was made for next to no money in an ad-hoc animation studio using a fairly pioneering technique, and Brian Cant and Freddie Phillips' contributions both help to give it a sense of character that was sorely lacking in so many other now rightly ignored efforts of the time.

And as this piece rotates back into its own Music Box, is it possible to get any sense at all of how this would have come across back in 1966? Well, as was the way in those prehistoric broadcasting times, there was very little else on television full stop that day, especially for younger viewers. BBC1 also offered the first part of Jackanory's retelling of The Snow Queen, followed by a somewhat mixed selection for slightly older younger viewers in the form of Blue Peter and something with The Spinners singing on a boat (yeah, they'll have loved that), followed by a repeat of 'Florence Gets A Surprise', an early episode of The Magic Roundabout from when they still all had a running storyline and individual titles. BBC2 could only offer Play School, nominally on 'Useful Box Day' though apparently concerning itself more with a storytelling visitor offering 'African Animal Stories'. Meanwhile ITV barely even bothered, casually flinging out meh-worthy 'younger viewer' effort Romper Room before going on to wave two fingers at all concerned with a not especially exciting sounding magazine show called Action, and ropey neither-here-nor-there import The Magic Boomerang. As a result,

Camberwick Green must have stood out in that day's televisual output as something that a good deal of effort had gone into and that had turned out to be of very high and lasting quality indeed. And it's best that we stop looking at what else was on that day before we speculating on what precisely Terry Scott and Hugh Lloyd were doing to that dog in the photo higher up the page.

So, that's Camberwick Green, and if you've been standing outside waiting for confirmation that it was safe to watch... well, you’ve missed everything, really.

Never Too Quickly, Never Too Slowly

If you still hadn’t recovered from the weekend’s celebrations on Tuesday 3rd January 1967, then you were in for a sharp wake-up call. At 13.30pm on BBC1, a shaky zoom in on a clock tower, followed by a riotous start-of-working-day burst of puppet activity, filled the nation’s television screens for the first time. Steadily, sensibly, never too quickly but never too slowly, Trumpton was here.

Gordon Murray had been commissioned by the BBC to make a second stop-motion series shortly after work on Camberwick Green had finished, but while it would be set in the same fictional locale and use the same production techniques and indeed narrator and musician, it was obvious from the outset that this would be a very different prospect to the laid-back working days of Farmer Bell and company. Set in a busy, bustling town centre, Trumpton was more colourful (though admittedly this was not obvious on the early black and white transmissions), energetic and – comparatively – noisy, set in an urban environment with a greater emphasis on transport, professions and machinery, and a large cast of characters constantly crossing each other’s paths in communal areas.

In order to achieve the right sort of pace and tone, Murray had co-written the scripts with Alison Prince, whose dangerously modern tales of transport café life in Joe had caused a minor stir amongst the Mothers doing the Watching With earlier in 1966. An entirely new cast of puppet characters was created, a number of short repeated sequences were inserted into each episode, and Freddie Phillips composed a set of decidedly more brisk and strident songs that in many cases would not have sounded out of place amongst David Bowie's Deram-era material. Ironically for a programme that would later start to look creaky and out of touch as attitudes and audience expectations evolved, back in 1967, Trumpton was probably about as modern as it got.

Telephone, the seventh and 'middle' episode of Trumpton, was first seen on BBC1 on 14th February 1967, and would continue to be constantly repeated right up to 9th May 1985. Like pretty much every episode of Trumpton, it revolved around the townsfolk encountering a practical and/or technical conundrum that had to be resolved with the assistance of the local Fire Brigade; quite possibly the reason why its storylines are now recalled more vividly than the looser and more travelogue-like counterparts seen in Camberwick Green and Chigley. On this particular occasion, the practical and/or technical conundrum was all down to a couple of GPO Engineers and some excessively nosey dogs.

Like every episode of Trumpton, Telephone opens with the familiar sight of the programme's name in white text on a black splodge on a deep blue background, and what appear to be the exact same first three notes as the opening theme from Camberwick Green, presumably incorporated as part of some sort of vague Clown-skewed cross-show continuity that we are probably best not questioning. There's that celebrated unsteady zoom as Brian Cant weighs in with his familiar introduction to the clock - "steadily, sensibly, never too quickly, never too slowly, telling the time... for Trumpton!" - and the figures of town founders Sir Rufus And Lady de Trompe emerge to strike the hour and announce the start of the working day. This they do to the accompaniment of one of Freddie Phillips' best compositions Chime And Clock Theme, which, as if to underline his precision-targeted home-made musical genius, features exactly nine chimes to tally with the clockface showing nine am. PC Potter (and not PC McGarry like you thought) takes a look around the town square, which immediately bursts into life as a milk float cruises by and everyone opens up shops, sets up selling pitches and looks out of windows to the jerky, frantically-paced sound of Busy Little Market Town, which fades out just as the Mayor comes out onto the Town Hall balcony to get some fresh air.

Looking down onto the Town Square, The Mayor catches sight of carpenter Chippy Minton and his son Nibs pulling up in their pickup truck, and initiates a shouted conversation about their respective daily itineraries. Chippy and Nibs, it transpires, are here to do something unspecified but presumably wood-related for Mr. Platt the clockmaker, while The Mayor has to head back into his office to look over some paperwork at the behest of his unnervingly David Steel-like Town Clerk Mr. Troop. Top of the pile are a handful of complaints about the streetlamps in the never-glimpsed but oft-referenced George Street, prompting Mr. Troop to place a call to never-glimpsed but oft-referenced borough engineer Mr. Bolt. Unfortunately, neither Mr. Bolt nor the Mayor can hear each other properly due to some loud crackling on the line; Mr. Troop reports that this has been happening all morning, upon which they abandon any pretence of continuing to care about the state of the street lights and telephone instead for a GPO Engineer. Quite how this was any more intelligible than any of the other referenced calls is never exactly explained.

Mr. Wantage and his apprentice Fred promptly show up in their oddly-shaped van, pull up a paving slab, and sing a catchy little number about their line of work, complete with ringing phone sound effects and Rex Harrison-style 'spoken-sung' interludes. It has to be said that it does seem rather odd and jarring now to hear so many references to the GPO and 'Post Office Telephones', and it might be worth clearing your throat and giving this song an airing the next time that a privatisation-crazy politician starts blethering on about how aspirational a view of life Trumptonshire represents. It might also be worth giving it an airing to Thom Yorke and telling him that this is how you write an actual proper song with a tune and everything, but anyway...

With cables and wires sufficiently exposed and untangled, the two engineers break for lunch, but Mr. Wantage finds to his alarm that his unwrapped sandwich parcel actually contains 'Granny's birthday present'. Far too ravenous to wait until they've finished the job, he heads off home to fetch his errant lunch and leaves Fred with strict instructions not to touch anything. And bang on cue, expansively over-dressed hatmaker Miss Lovelace arrives with her three yappy Pekingese Spaniels, Mitzi, Daphne and Lulu. The overenergetic canine chums are more often than not the cause of mishaps in and around Trumpton, and sure enough, they mob poor old Fred in a quest to make off with his sandwiches, ending up with Mitzi toppling nose-first into the manhole. Fred quickly pulls her back out, but dislodges some of the wires in the process; fearful of a dressing down from the himself hardly exactly attentive to detail Mr. Wantage, and encouraged by buck-passing flattery from Miss Lovelace, he elects to take matters into his own hands and shove them back in where it looks like they should go. You can probably take a reasonable guess at what happens next.

Over in his print shop, Mr. Munnings is hard at work setting up his ink and typeface - as we are told in seemingly unstoppably intricate detail over an instrumental version of his song - to knock out some branded paper bags for greengrocer Mr. Clamp; who, what with his own song exhorting all and sundry to "come buy, come buy, come buy them from me", never seems to have missed a promotional trick. Constable Potter sticks his head round the door for no obvious reason while the bags are printing, and then promptly disappears again, which was a tad inconvenient of him as he could easily have helped avert the chain of ridiculousness that followed. As a result of Fred's copper cabling chicanery, when Mr. Munnings telephones Mr. Clamp to inform him that the bags are ready, he gets through instead to Miss Lovelace, who is none too impressed at having her time wasted with paper bag-related blather.

To add to the mounting nonsense, an impatient Dora Minton telephones Mr. Platt to inform a tardy Chippy and Nibs that their dinner is at risk of burning. Only the message is relayed instead to Captain Flack at the Fire Station, who hears the flame-related terminology and inevitably sounds the alarm. Well, they never did seem to get to tackle an actual blaze, so you can understand them jumping the gun a bit. "There, that should fetch him!", muses a riled and long-suffering-sounding Dora, blissfully unaware that Captain Flack has already flicked the big massive switch next to what close inspection reveals to be - bewilderingly - a map of Florence. Freddie Phillips' slowed-down alarm clock standing in for a fire bell sounds, and Trumpton's single most famous sequence begins.

As anyone of a certain age will be able to recall with alarming clarity and detail, the impressively heavy-looking Fire Station doors clang open, Pugh, Pugh, Barney McGrew, Cuthbert, Dibble and Grubb slide down the pole and line up next to the engine, Captain Flack blows his whistle and conducts a quick inspection and they're off and away through the streets of Trumpton to the strains of the jaunty Firemen Bold, which you can't help but notice bears more than a passing resemblance to a certain Buffalo Springfield number. On arriving Chez Minton, they are surprised to be greeted by a placid Dora and a distinct lack of smoke. Chippy and Nibs promptly turn up, and calmly theorise that there must have been some kind of mixup with the GPO engineers, before dismissing all of this nonsense and heading indoors in search of their not yet burned dinner, in a tone that suggests an implied impatient "woman!" at the end. "Poor Captain Flack", muses Brian Cant as the picture momentarily fades to black, "he never has a proper fire to put out". No, but he gets all manner of other and probably more interesting stuff to do. AND makes Cuthbert fall in a pond.

Back in the Town Square, in a scenario that will be familiar to anyone who's ever been expected to fix a computer in their spare time, Fred is surrounded by a disgruntled mob (well, Mr. Platt, Mr. Munnings, Mr. Clamp and Mr. Troop) demanding that he dispense with the technical jargon and put everything right at once. To make matters worse, The Mayor then strolls up admonishing him for causing the Fire Brigade to be called out on a false alarm, conveniently sidestepping the fact that it wouldn't have happened if Captain Flack had elected to engage his ears, closely followed by his brain. The hapless Fred's bacon is saved by the arrival of the suspiciously late Mr. Wantage, and the intervention of Miss Lovelace, who confesses that her dogs were in fact responsible. Upon which The Mayor decides to dish out a bollocking to them instead. You would have to wonder how he ended up in high office, if it wasn't for the example set by certain real life mayors we're all too familiar with.

Anyway, everything is all sorted out quickly and easily enough and to everyone's satisfaction. So much so in fact that The Mayor invites Mr. Wantage and Fred to come along to the park and enjoy the Fire Brigade's daily band concert. Although this involves more or less the same footage as every episode of Trumpton, with the Fire Brigade bashing out their boisterous waltz on brass instruments that sound suspiciously like a double-tracked acoustic guitar, while the locals and a disconcerting influx of Camberwick Green puppets look on, we do get an additional cutaway shot showing Mr. Wantage and Fred arriving to lend an ear. Then it's back to Chime And Clock Theme, and more of those splodges carrying credits that seemed so mysterious and evocative to younger viewers (of which, it should be said, a significant number for the time are for female contributors), before fading out with not a single terrifying clown in sight.

Even all this time later, Trumpton still resonates with an infectious energy and vibrancy. It would be more than a little misleading to adopt a default Guardian columnist position and indulge in some waffle about how this 'reflected its Swinging London origins' - no matter how fond Alison Prince may have been of loud shirts - but in a more realistic sense it was still very much a product of the background excitement of its time. Gordon Murray may not have been hanging out with Billy Nicholls at the Million Volt Rave, but all the same he was at the cutting edge of both television technology and independent film-making, and when combined with a lively contemporary setting and engaging real-world storylines - something that the actual scriptwriter seldom gets sufficient credit for - the overall effect was striking and, unsurprisingly, enduringly popular. Camberwick Green may have done the actual ground-breaking, but Trumpton built on this rather than just offering more of the same, which in a very vague and tenuous way was somewhat in line with what The Beatles and The Rolling Stones were up to with each successive single around then. Though thankfully Freddie Phillips never saw fit to enter into a public row with George Harrison and Brian Jones over who was best at 'sitars'.

So, that's Trumpton. And if you've been waiting outside for confirmation that it isn't the one with 'The Clown', then you've missed everything. You could have checked in Radio Times, you know.

The Wind Cries (Mickey) Murphy

Those of you who've been following my ramblings for a while might just have noticed that I have a slight tendency to occasionally tie in musings and theorising on sociocultural phenomena with BBC Test Card F, the bastard creepy photo of a sinisterly-smiling girl locked in an interminably paused game of chalkboard noughts and crosses with a nightmarish multi-coloured clown in the middle of a mish-mash of hazardous looking tuning grids. Some of you may also be aware that I'm something of an admirer of sixties pop trailblazer Jimi Hendrix, at least in his Experience era, and indeed once became drawn into a Twitter discussion with Richard Herring about which Rodney Bewes sitcom theme Hendrix might realistically have added some guitar work to.

As such, if you're at all clued up about either subject, you're probably now expecting this article to be a detailed examination of the well-known story that Hendrix wrote The Wind Cries Mary while waiting, in front of the TV with guitar in hand, for his then-girlfriend (and journalist, which rarely gets mentioned) Kathy

Etchingham to come home following an argument, drawing unlikely inspiration for the opening line "and the clowns have all gone to bed" as Carole Hersee and her garish combatant stared menacingly out towards him to the sound of tuneless big band babble at the end of an evening's viewing. Well, yes, it's a great story, and one that I'll freely admit - on account of having heard Kathy recount it herself in person - that I've repeated as fact before now. But there's also a bit of a problem with it.

As far as anyone can properly ascertain (and no, this is not a green light for ident obsessives to harangue me with demands to rewrite the piece to their own specifications), Test Card F was first transmitted by BBC2 on 2nd July 1967, while The Wind Cries Mary had been released as a single on 5th May 1967. And, more problematically still, had been recorded on at De Lane Lea studios on 11th January 1967, famously put together on the spot after Hendrix turned up with a new song when The Experience had nominally convened to put Purple Haze down on tape. Even allowing for all for all that slowed-down spaceman-voiced blabbering about bending the rules of space and time on Third Stone From The Sun, could Jimi Hendrix really have foreseen the future of broadcast continuity with such uncanny accuracy? Well no, he couldn't. But my contention here is that the story is more or less true, only slightly distorted by the passage of time, the vagaries of popular culture, and, well, Love Or Confusion, and that Kathy Etchingham was simply getting her TV Clowns wrong.

Let's consider a few suitably hazy, if not purply, variables here - putting it as delicately as possible, it doesn't exactly sound like this was the only row the couple had, and it's easy for emotionally-charged details to become conflated and confused; there's nothing - especially given the sheer amount of times that the Test Card in whatever alphabetical incarnation would have been seen in a single twenty four hour stretch in the days of daytime and overnight closedowns - to suggest what time of day the storming out, the waiting and the songwriting took place; all we know for definite is that Hendrix turned up to the studio with the song completed, and while it's tempting from a narrative point of view to suggest that he'd written it the night before, in all likelihood it probably took a couple of days to assemble; and noughts-wielder Bubbles was far from the only clown hovering silently around the nation's television sets around that time. Yes, in case you hadn't worked it out already, it's my contention that Jimi Hendrix had actually been watching Camberwick Green.

Not convinced? Or simply rolling your eyes in exasperated amusement at my shoehorning in of yet another of my popular cultural touchstones? Well, let's crunch a few numbers. Peter The Postman, the first episode of Camberwick Green, was repeated by BBC1 - its fourth showing in twelve months – at 1.30pm on 6th January 1967. The full opening lyric of The Wind Cries Mary is of course "after all the jacks are in their boxes, and the clowns have all gone to bed", and as Camberwick Green infamously ended with the episode's central character rotating away into a Music Box, followed by a terrifying glowering clown operating a roller caption with the show's end credits on them (and, perhaps not coincidentally, all of it accompanied by some natty and inadvertently UK Psych-friendly guitar work from

Freddie Phillips), it doesn't take much in the way of imagination-stretching to see that this is a much better fit than Test Card F would have been even if it was a chronological possibility. It's also worth noting that Tuesday 10th January saw the first showing of Miss Lovelace And The Mayor's Hat, the second episode of Camberwick Green's near-neighbouring follow-on companion show Trumpton, which depicted lugubrious Park-Keeper Mr. Craddock and his broom indulging in what can only be described as a spot of "drearily sweeping", though he was noticeably less concerned with the broken pieces of yesterday's life than he was with silver paper, toffee paper, dirty bit of cardboard, chair ticket, bus ticket, button from a dress, chocolate wrapper, envelope, another bit of cardboard, and the vexing question of why 'they' can't use litter bins and not make such a mess. Though, that said, he does immediately go into a rant about a broken bench (which ultimately leads to the Mayor's hat being propelled into a tree, but that's another story). It's not beyond the realms of possibility that the only-recently-arrived-in-the-UK guitarist might have been sufficiently intrigued by his new TV puppet pals to follow their exploits regularly, and that this might also have worked its tenuous way into his new lyrics. Though admittedly any attempt to claim that the solo from The Wind Cries Mary was in any way inspired by the 'Joe So Sad' music from Monday 10th's instalment of the racy urban Hammond-scorch-soundtracked escapades of juvenile petrolhead upstart Joe would most likely be a theoretical leap too far.

So, much like my suggestion to Richard Herring that Rodney Bewes' confused anecdote about singing with Jimi Hendrix might have actually related to the theme from Dear Mother Love Albert rather than Whatever Happened To The Likely Lads?, there you have it. The Wind Cries Mary probably was inspired by a stray bit of emotional ennui-driven TV gawpage after all, just not in the way that everyone not unreasonably thought that it was.

And conspiracy theorists may like to take note that this is the third song, after Happy Time by Tim Buckley and The Gnome by Pink Floyd, that I've directly attributed to the influence of the closing sequence of Camberwick Green. Can I possibly extend this seemingly ridiculous notion any further? Pass me that copy of AMMmusic1966...

That Sight, Those Sounds…

In this age of YouTube, Deluxe Edition reissues with bonus DVDs, and endless round-the-clock repeats of Top Of The

Pops 2, it's difficult to convey just how exciting BBC2's Sounds Of The 60s seemed back in 1991. Running for ten editions - at a time when it was hard enough to get into and indeed in many cases simply get hold of sixties music in the first place, let alone any TV performances by any artists (including the really big ones) - it took a thematically arranged look back through the archives at the BBC's most interesting pop music performances of that over-eulogised yet also under-eulogised decade, from polite black and white pre-Beatle rinky-dink crooning to the proggers and folkies blasting off to the centre of the mind in glorious Technicolour.

Technically, in fact, it took a look back at the most interesting pop music performances that were actually left in the BBC's archives; inevitably, out of the countless thousands of hours of pop, folk and everything else that found its way onto the small screen between 1960 and 1969, very little had survived from a time when TV was seen to have an even shorter shelf life than pop music, and despite the series’ producer David Jeffcock lamenting to Vox Magazine at the time of broadcast that some bands such as The Troggs had simply vanished completely, it's still amazing that enough had made it through intact to make up ten half hours of such high musical quality, and indeed that so well represented both their era and their genre.

Better still, Sounds Of The 60s didn't just stop at the pop performances, and also threw in stray bits of ancient continuity, interesting snippets from the surrounding shows, and clips from the likes of Dee Time and Play School just to give a flavour of the time; again, all of it material that you never really got the opportunity to see anywhere else in those days. And these were pretty exciting times to be giving a flavour of, especially if you had a keen interest in that there 'psychedelic' music that was all the rage later in the decade. As the chronologically advancing instalments went by, there were more and more tantalising hints of the gathering swirly purple-and-orange storm; Brian Jones discovering another planet in the middle of The Last Time, Bob

Dylan doing moody and introspective in front of a big photo of some houses, Tim Buckley yodelling "Camber-amberamberwick

Greeeeen" through a cloud of dry ice, Julie Driscoll fixing the Top Of The Pops cameras with a spaced-out glittery stare, and The Move whipping up the audience with an energetic smash-and-grab performance of Fire Brigade. Oh and Dave Dee, Dozy, Beaky, Mick And Tich jabbering away in a nonsense invented language if you're not one of those prats who splits hairs about what's 'allowed' psychedelia. And when that storm finally hit, in the eighth edition - appropriately subtitled Hip To The Trip – it was like having your mind blown by an acid flashback a quarter of a century after the event.

So yes, it might be difficult to convey just how exciting - or indeed reality-transcending - Hip To The Trip was back in 1991, but in the mind-expanding spirit of the times we're going to be having a go anyway. So grab one pill that makes you larger, or, if raining, one pill that makes you small, as we feel inclined to blow your mind...

Following the opening titles and their actually quite imaginative use of feet walking backwards and forwards in constantly evolving sixties fashions (and, erm, a dog for some reason), it's straight over to the trusty old BBC 'watch strap' clock, and an announcer pausing for what seems like an absolute ice age before telling us that the time is almost eleven minutes past eleven, and that at approximately eleven forty two – ten minutes later than published in Radio Times - there's a chance to see recorded extracts from today's solemn opening of the Roman Catholic Cathedral in Liverpool. But first... The Look Of The

Week.

It's at this point that the screen fills up with a familiar face in extreme close-up, intently intoning 'ba-boomba tchtchhhhhhh' into a microphone whilst the studio lights flash wildly in and out. As the camera pulls out, he's joined by an ominous organ tone and the rest of the now visible band making bird and jungle noises, and suddenly going absolutely full throttle on their assorted instruments for a good eight seconds before an almighty crash from a gong. You could be forgiven for not noticing the show's title scrolling across the front. "That sight, those sounds", as the reassuringly smug visage of presenter Robert Robinson informs us, "were made by The Pink Floyd, a pop group who took over Queen Elizabeth Hall on Friday night, for the entertainment they called Games For May; of them more hereafter", all of it delivered in the same endearing tone of affected interest that he would adopt whenever the 'Extreme Close-Up Photo' round in Ask The Family featured such technologically dazzling devices as "a... video... re-corder, a device, they tell me, that allows you to record television programmes and watch them at some later time... whatever will they think of next!". The Large Hadron Particle Collider. That's what they thought of next, pal.

Anyway, yes, this is a very early appearance by 'The' Pink Floyd, giving unsuspecting listeners a quick top-of-the-show blast of Pow. R Toc. H, and what was really astonishing for unsuspecting viewers too young to remember the sixties was that the aforementioned extreme close-up face belonged to Syd Barrett, the enigmatic and reclusive original frontman and driving force behind the band, who famously walked away from the entire music scene at the end of the decade and never did anything public ever again. He was someone who at that point, even to obsessive fans of the band, was little more than a name and the odd artistically blurry photo on a handful of album covers, and yet here he was, moving, singing and playing as if we'd discovered some mental pathway into the past straight out of the lyrics of Chapter 24.

But of him, of Pink Floyd, and indeed of The Look Of The Week itself, more hereafter. We've got a couple of other bands to get through first, whilst the combover-toting polymath backannouncing their micro-performance has an interview with Christopher Isherwood, whose new novel A Meeting By The River was due to be published at the end of the month, and a report on a retrospective exhibition of the work of Dame Laura Knight that was set to open at the Upper Grosvenor Galleries the following week.

But are we going to see any of this? Ah, would that we were. Instead, it's time for another familiar voice - albeit a more modest and indeed more nasal one - promising us "an assault on the senses, an LSD trip without drugs, flashing strobe lights, spermatozoic colour...". He may not have seen fit to add "the stupid moustache, the old fashioned glasses", but you've probably figured out by now anyway that this is none other than Alan Whicker, from when his benchmark-setting travelogue Whicker's World touched down in San Francisco in 1967 to see what all this crazy far-out mind-bending Summer Of

Love was all about, and believe it or not, he's taking in a Grateful Dead concert as part of his research. Depending on which side of the Kaleidoscope UK/ Kaleidoscope US side of the fence you're inclined to fall on, you could be forgiven for thinking that, while certainly a fascinating piece of archive footage, this is hardly going to be an interesting or exciting way in which to open this compilation. Well, not quite open, but you get the point.

To some, The Grateful Dead are the definitive example of how America got psychedelia wrong, with their twenty thousand year guitar solos, tedious 'on the bus or off the bus' posturing (it's hard to call it 'political' when it never seemed to involve any actual definable policies), questionable taste in... well, they seemed to be clothes, and endless songs about being hassled by 'the pigs' and/or by 'chicks' about 'bread', all of which seemed a million miles away from the imaginative speaker-rattling short sharp shocks of fuzz guitar and swirly organ that their fellow countrymen likes of 13th Floor Elevators and Chocolate Watchband had been snarling out only about eighteen months earlier, let alone the intricately-arranged mod-shirted folky jazzy rambles through Music Hall and Edward Lear that Traffic, The Small Faces and others were merrily indulging in over here. Plus they went on to do a horrendous mangling of the theme from The Twilight Zone, a piece of music that it should not be possible to ruin but which they somehow managed to render not so much der ner ner ner as aaaaaahhhhhhhhhhhhhhh.

And yet, this footage is actually really, really good. Captured in sense-walloping technicolour on That Film, Jerry and his interchangeable-looking chums hurtle through first album opener The Golden Road To Unlimited Devotion whilst their legendary light show flares blisteringly all over everyone's field of vision. Admittedly way too much of this is projected onto crash-zooms in on their gallery of inexcusable facial hair, but during the wild and mercifully brief guitar solo there's some astonishing footage of a strobe-lit hippychick dancing in the audience with a visibly expanded mind. There are even a couple of stray shots of the 'backroom boys' flipping sheets of cellophane in coloured water to create the jaw-dropping visuals. What's more - and quite astonishingly - this all takes place in a little under two minutes. Bet they kept it going for several hours when Alan wasn't around to keep an eye on them, though.

Then it's back into black and white and in what is rapidly becoming a running theme for this episode, there's yet another intrusion by a smartly-dressed establishment 'square'. Yes, it's classical composer Sir William Walton, brought onto the BBC's short-lived Future Pythons And Goodies-festooned youth magazine show Twice A Fortnight to discuss lord alone knows what, but shown here introducing a performance by The Who, who in a neat coincidence were managed by his godson Kit Lambert. After a cringe-inducing 10-O'Clock-Live-gone-even-wronger moment when he's asked what he thinks of young persons' pop music and affects to give a bewildered down-with- the-kids answer that even Robert Robinson would have considered a tad insincere (which also involves singing a bit of a dreadful-sounding song on the grounds that it has the word 'who' in it), he's asked if he 'approves' of his godson's 'activities'. "Well I don't know what they are!", Sir William retorts to audience hysteria. It's... best to leave that there.

By now well into their equally short-lived psychedelic phase, with moptops and paisley neckerchieves very much to the fore, The Who thunder through their controversial-for-the-wrong-reasons rumbling ode to long-distance possessiveness I Can See For Miles, courtesy of a series of quick-cutting shaky zoom close-ups which even Keith Moon can't keep pace with and which bear the unmistakeable hallmarks of early rock directing genius Tony Palmer, in front of a huge photographic blow-up of Charles De

Gaulle because 'satire'. He won't be doing THAT again.

Yet even despite the frequent Doctor Who And The Tomb Of The Cybermen-style offlocks that plague the visuals and a splurgy moment of self-varispeeding audio courtesy of the pretty knackered Telerecording that this edition presumably accidentally survives on, it's still easy to see what an exciting performance this was and just what a thrill it must have been to catch sight of one of those all-too-rare glimpses of pop music on TV during pop music's most exciting decade, especially when they were as energetically and imaginatively rendered as this. We can only hope that Sir William came to a similar conclusion.

Then, yes, you guessed it, it's straight over to yet another tweedy old stick, and indeed one who courtesy of this particular bit of unearthed footage is possibly more well-known now than he might well have ended up otherwise. Amongst many other broadcasting and journalistic gigs, ranging from serious intellectual discussions to football punditry, Hans Keller was the resident music critic on The Look Of The Week, a weekend review show on BBC1 which was to all intents and purposes a spin-off from BBC2's proto-Parsons nightly critical chinwag Late Night Line-Up, which was aimed at bringing 'the arts' to an audience that might not normally have noticed them tucked away there. As such, Keller usually got to verbally joust with classical musicians, theatre impresarios and heavyweight jazzers, with The Look Of The Week's interactions with the pop scene - barely regarded even as a part of the 'arts' at that point - rarely venturing beyond standard issue Beatle-enthusing and the odd bit of opinionating from renta-viewpoint Russell Brand of his day Mick Jagger.

But this was a time when the more populist side of the arts and the artier side of pop music were nudging ever closer together, and the production team responsible for The Look Of The Week had previously given Late Night Line-Up airtime to all manner of cautiously critically-endorsed popsters, and indeed were about to shoot a pilot for BBC2 which featured psychedelic soul mayhem-makers The Chambers Brothers threatening to make BBC Presentation Studio B disappear in on itself in a fuzz guitar-ravaged psychedelic blur. So when one of those artier outfits took over a noted classical venue for an event that was supposed to get the audience to listen rather than dance, it was inevitable that they would end up covering it in some way.

In amongst said audience at said mixed-media performance, attempting to listen to an early version of something called

‘The Bicycle Song’ whilst being bombarded with bubbles and daffodils, was Hans Keller, and he wasn't quite what you'd call impressed. Holding a cigarette aloft he presages their appearance on the show thusly:

“The Pink Floyd – you’re going to hear them in a minute and I do not want to prejudice you. Hear them and see them first and we’ll talk about them afterwards but four quick points I want to make before you hear them. The first is that what you heard at the beginning, that short bit, those few seconds, are really all I can hear in them, which is to say to my mind, there is continuous repetition and proportionally they are a bit boring. My second point is that they are terribly loud. You couldn’t quite hear because, of course, it isn’t as loud from your sets as it is here in the studio or as it was at the Queen Elizabeth Hall on Friday" - "I will ask them about that when we come to talk" he adds as if asking them if they'd mind stepping outside for a moment - "my third point is that perhaps I am a little bit too much of a musician to appreciate them. And the reason why that – why I say that – is that four, they have an audience, and people who have an audience ought to be heard. Perhaps it is my fault that I don’t appreciate them”.

And with a tilt of his head in the direction of the other end of the studio, it's over to some blobby amorphous light patterns and a spaceman voice intoning obscure intergalactic facts, and ‘The’ Pink Floyd delivering an astonishing performance of celestial travelogue Astonomy Domine, then still some months from making its first public appearance on their debut album; to early fans of the band, this must have been as exciting as the likes of Blur, Suede and The Stone Roses giving an airing to 'new' tunes on The Look Of The Week's late-night cultural progeny was by the time this showed up again on Sounds Of The 60s. It's also the best surviving indication of what the original line-up sounded like live, the most accurate record of their famed but ephemeral light show (and yes, Barrett is playing his mirror-disc Telecaster, adding to the visual cacophony), and above all that it's simply a thrilling performance of a terrific song. And that's not all.

As they finish, Syd Barrett and Roger Waters politely set down their guitars and walk slowly over to some of those taller-sitting-down-than-standing-up stools as favoured by the likes of Bernard Levin, for a bit of a natter with Hans Keller. He opens by confrontationally asking them why it all has to be so 'terribly loud', pointing out that he 'grew up with the string quartet' and as a consequence finds this kind of volume unbearable.

Waters and Barrett - both visibly cracking up - can only meekly offer that they like it that way, that they didn't grow up with the string quartet, and that it doesn't sound terribly loud to them, with Keller obliterating the latter two arguments but accepting that they see it as important to their art; often mistaken for a bit of stuffy pomposity, this is actually the prelude to a much longer interview in which the waspish and mischievous Keller – the nearest thing that the high arts ever had to a loose cannon, and whose notorious antics included broadcasting a fake documentary about a fictitious composer to see who fell for it and refusing to appear on 'daytime music station' Radio 3 - expresses some considerable sympathy for their attempts to present pop music in a more considered format, not least when he hears about the hostility that they have encountered from both dancehall audiences and broadsheet columnists.

What's more astonishing still is that, for the first few years of their career at least, this appearance was about as highbrow and arty as the reclusive seventies high-concept stadium-fillers got.

There was no such thing as 'rock' music at that point, and like everyone else making records from Craig Douglas to The

Waltham Green East Wapping Carpet Cleaning Rodent And Boggit Extermination Association, Pink Floyd spent much of their time trudging around Children's TV and Light Entertainment shows in the hope of drumming up a few extra sales. Much of it long since wiped, so we should be grateful that The Look Of

The Week was seen as that bit more 'prestigious'.

Presumably Keller's reappearance fulfilled the starchy old geezer quota on this occasion too, as it's straight from that abrupt mid-interview edit into an all-too-mind- numbingly familiar quasi-religious organ motif. One that is redolent of the prehistoric ancestry of overwrought X Factor histrionics and twee advert girly acoustic cover versions, and indeed of wishing that the title sequence would stop being seventeen thousand hours long and that we could just get on with enjoying the Nuggets-era comedy antics of Kevin Arnold with some proper decent music plastered all over them to boot. Yes, it's Joe Cocker And The Grease Band with their bewilderingly popular, and frankly unnecessary in the first place, caterwauled mangling of With A Little Help From My Friends.

'Surely he can't be serious?', many of you are possibly thinking right now. 'Isn't it the definitive reading of a Lennon and

McCartney classic?'. Well no, it's not, and I am, and here are five reasons why. Firstly, it has all but obliterated the hot-off-the-presses Summer Of 1967 top ten cover by psychedelically-jacketed scamps The Young Idea from pop history. Secondly, it was clearly an attempt to emulate the dazzling time-distortion cover of You Keep Me Hangin' On by Vanilla Fudge, yet somehow contrived to omit any of the tongue-in-cheek theatricality, sinister mock-sitar splurges and Motown-goes-paranoid extended riffing on the staccato bits that had made that into an actually rather good record in the first place; avowed Vanilla Fudge fan Kevin

Arnold would NOT have approved. Thirdly, it's in the risible position of having inspired a parody version - Bill Oddie's meticulously appropriated reading of On Ilkla Moor Baht' 'At - that is both more likeable and more tuneful than the target of its lampoonery. Fourthly, the backing so impressed some hard-hitting current affairs dullard at Granada that The Grease Band were invited to perform a spot of pompous instrumental waffling to worship the news by, subsequently afforded the appropriately cursory title Jam For World In Action. And finally, it was also covered around this time by Pinky & Perky, who did not subsequently see fit to inflict Up Where We Belong on the general populace.

So, is there anything worth saying about this fairly straightforward TV performance of the overextended song?

Well, it comes from an edition of How It Is, the BBC's countercultural chat show oddity presented by the unlikely triumvirate of Richard Neville, Angela Huth and John Peel with music from chunky-jumpered shouters about spitting in a cup or something The Spinners, which miraculously appears to have survived on its original videotape... oh, you mean about the actual performance? Do we have to? Oh alright then, if you insist. There's a lot of 'earnest' facepulling and some pretend 'exhaustion' at the end, but none of it really goes anywhere, and despite using the exact same Tony Palmer-helmed visual template as The Who only twelve months previously (albeit with less Charles De Gaulle), and despite the band and indeed

Ol' Painty Can Cocker himself certainly displaying an impressive degree of musical muscle, it just doesn't seem to have any of the excitement. This, really, was the moment where 'rock' parted ways from 'pop'.

Thankfully, we're parting ways with Joe and The Grease Band there too, courtesy of an hilariously primitive-looking BBC

Globe and one of Ronnie Hazelhurst's very much of-their-time B-B-C! stings, and yet another well-tailored well-spoken chap is on hand to amplify those far-out psychedelic vibes. This is Broadway's own Leonard Bernstein, apparently having loaned his hair from Humpty from Play School, and he's appearing on television to respond to claims that he attempted to prevent a cover of one of his West Side Story show-stoppers from being released in America, in a version which he reportedly felt had been turned into 'an anti-American dirge'. "The Nice, you say? I haven't heard of them", he offers with the same level of confidently affable deniability that had us all resting assured that Rupert Murdoch really did know nothing about any morally dubious journalistic practices within his organisation and there were no further questions to be asked.

In fairness, even an outspoken social progressive like Bernstein would have had problems with allowing one of his compositions - and a sarcastically trampled-over furious instrumental reading of it at that - to be associated with the sort of wild proto-Pranksterist japery that The Nice had got up to in the name of promoting their contentious pop waxing. No adherents of the American Dream, the band had promoted the single's release with adverts featuring portraits of the freshly-assassinated

Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King, whilst madcap keyboard player Keith Emerson had taken to interspersing his energetic runs up and down the ivories with displays of stars'n'stripes-burning and demonstrations of natty knifethrowing skills in the direction of images of 'Uncle Sam'. It's also not entirely beyond the realms of possibility that their ever-astute manager Andrew Loog Oldham might have at the very least exaggerated the situation with the aim of getting a bit of press coverage for and sympathy towards his charges, but who knows on that score.

Happily, this musical and sociocultural two-fingeredness, knife-hurlage and all, was captured for the ages in another performance on How It Is, which even more surprisingly also seems to survive on the original videotape. Aside from the somewhat side-letting-down fact that the closing monologue has to be impact-lackingly delivered by one of the band rather than by P.P. Arnold's son (this would have gone out way past his bedtime, after all), this is a dynamic performance by a band who seem determined to continually leap into every last millimetre of space on the makeshift stage; indeed, at one point Emerson elects to use his Hammond Organ as a vaulting horse, producing a thrilling Quark Goes Berserk And Explodes-style judder that gives some credence to the stories that many leading music stores refused to service his Hammond due to general aghastness at his ungentlemanly treatment of it. And what's more, all of this is yet again rendered in glorious Palmer-O-Vision, producing an effect that would likely have left the average viewer feeling seasick. As they reach their frantic and furious conclusion behind the show's closing caption, it's hard not to feel some sort of yearning for the days when something like this would literally have been the very last bit of television of the day.

Then there's a bit more of Sir William, telling us all that popular beat music is jolly good in his opinion and let's have more of it please hurrah, then getting embarrassed when the hippy-heavy audience cross-leggedly applaud him, before one last bit of videotape, which was famously - or at least famously to those who know about these things - illicitly saved by a BBC engineer who just couldn't bring himself to destroy it.

This is half of The Jimi Hendrix Experience's infamous appearance on Happening For Lulu - the second, where they played about twelve seconds of Hey Joe before going off-script with an impromptu free-form take on Sunshine Of Your Love, throwing the producer's timesheet and the host's presentational links into disarray, would appear two weeks later in the final edition of Sounds Of The 60s - wherein the trio give a robust rendition of Voodoo Child (Slight Return). Like with Pink Floyd, it's difficult these days to comprehend that Hendrix – more normally sighted in his later 'being less interesting at festivals' phase – once did the rounds of TV and radio (seriously, the amount of sessions he recorded for Radio 1 alone is astonishing) like any other pop hopeful, and this is something that it's even harder still to comprehend when you hear this overpowering blast of elastic white noise with a bit of singing over the top issuing from a sparse and doubtless sparsely-equipped Light

Entertainment studio setup. What's more, his cheeky grin to camera makes you realise that the line "I didn't mean to take up all your sweet time, I'll get right back one of the days" was actually intended as a joke about the extended soloing that preceded it. Who knows how many other similar musical gags from supposedly earnest and humourless rockers have been lost to the ages through the loss of so many early television shows.

Then right at the end there's one last bit of Hans Keller, summing up Pink Floyd's efforts - and by association, those of anyone flying the same psychedelic flag, including all of the acts in this compilation - as "a little bit of a regression to childhood, but then again, why not?"; again much misunderstood, his comments basically both hone in on one of the musical movement's key artistic imperatives, and benignly suggest that it has its place, even if that place isn't anywhere near him and his peers in their suits and ties. More to the point, it is more or less the exact same as what the average rock critic invariably has to say on the subject. And as the end credits play out to Something In The Air by Thunderclap Newman, and a series of Now That's What I Call Music-esque Top Pop Facts about the artists combined with original pop-art design tickets for recordings of the likes of Braden's Week, It Strikes A Chord, Frost Over England, Roger Whittaker's Whistle Stop, Jazz At The Maltings and some no-me-neither thing called Ooh La La!, maybe it's worth reflecting for a second on the preponderance of tweedy intellectuals showing up between clips. In their own variously begrudging ways, they exemplify a moment when the intellectual great and good began to realise that, contrary to what everyone else outside its target audience was thinking, this pop music business was not going to go away, and was in fact permeating so far into everyday life that they should probably start thinking about redefining their analytical boundaries to allow it. From The Times' controversial nomination of Lennon and McCartney as Composers Of The Year onwards, those clever clogs types were the first to latch on to the idea of treating popular beat music as a valid art form in its own right and don't let any plank of a columnist tell you otherwise.

And, anyway, if it hadn't have been for that early begrudging, none of this stuff would be around now to shoehorn into compilation shows. Simple as that. Of course, since Sounds Of The 60s first went out - I say 'first' because it regularly shows up on BBC4, albeit hamfistedly edited to remove any glimpses of since-discredited scrawny old bastards - a lot more of 'this stuff' has turned up, including one of Pink Floyd's Top Of The Pops appearances, though there's still no sign of the poor old Troggs.

Nobody's seen fit to revisit the series with any of this newly-rediscovered material, though, as it would be a bit like trying to reinvent the wheel; by very nature of its wide and easy availability, it's impossible to make the same sort of impact with this material as you could back when most of it hadn't been seen since broadcast. As for Hip To The Trip itself, it's still a fascinating, and compellingly assembled, experience, though surprisingly less for its dazzling and disorientating visuals as for the now totally alien mechanics of how these shows were metaphorically and literally put together, all of them made to be shown once without a single thought that anyone might be even remotely interested half a century later. It's also an effective barometer of just how quickly things were changing in those days, and with the post-credits trailer pointing to a whole new universe of full colour performances by the likes of Frank Zappa and The Small Faces, and some of the earlier ones painting just as evocative a picture of their own particular corner of the decade, perhaps it might be worth taking another look at a few more of them…

Switch On The TV, We May Pick Him Up On Channel Two

Up until around 1977, a large amount of the BBC and ITV’s output was either wiped for re-use after broadcast, or simply not recorded at all, leaving both huge gaps and huge question marks.

While some of David Bowie’s early television appearances do still exist – most infamously the inter-view on BBC1’s ‘Tonight’ with The Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Long Haired Young Men – many others were shown once and then wiped, and are seemingly gone forever.

In this feature we’ll be taking a look at the dozen or so appearances that David Bowie made on UK television between 1964 and 1970 that no longer exist, and trying to work out what might have happened in them. It’s good to think that, even now, David Bowie is still giving us something ‘new’…

JUKE BOX JURY (BBC1 6th JUNE 1964)

‘Juke Box Jury’ – a panel show in which celebrities voted on whether a new pop single was a ‘Hit’ or a ‘Miss’ – was hardly the most radical of pop music shows but it was certainly one of the most enduring; a huge Saturday Night smash for the BBC in its original run between 1959 and 1967, it was revived in 1979, then again in 1989.

On 6th June 1964, one of the records under scrutiny of was ‘Liza Jane’ by Davie Jones With The King Bees, giving rise to David Bowie’s first television appearance.

Every week, one of the acts would be shown backstage, listening to the panel’s opinions before being brought out as a surprise guest, and Davie Jones was that week’s lucky pop hopeful.

While comedian Charlie Drake appeared to quite like Liza Jane and voted it would a ‘Hit’, actress Diana Dors, songwriter Bunny Lewis and singer and dancer turned Radio’s Mrs. Dale Jessie Matthews were less impressed – reportedly scathingly so – and voted it a ‘Miss’; Bowie’s reactions are not on record and we can only hope that the identity of his unlikely supporter appealed to his sense of humour. It’s doubtful, however, that Bowie exchanged anything other than an awkward smile with the panellists, and the fact that he isn’t listed on the production documentation as ‘Taking Part’ would seem to confirm that.

Only two editions of the original incarnation of Juke Box Jury still survive in the archives, and needless to say this is not one of them.

READY STEADY GO! (A-R TV, 19TH JUNE 1964, 5TH MARCH 1965, 4TH MARCH 1966)

Virtually synonymous with the entire concept of ‘The Sixties’, ‘Ready Steady Go!’ – motto ‘The Weekend Starts Here’ – tapped into youth culture like no television show before it and like very few since. With hip young presenters, inventive camera work and a set design that combined minimalism with pop-art iconography, it successfully transplanted the up to the minute sights and sounds of the Mod scene and ‘Swinging London’ onto the nation’s television sets every Friday evening.

Made by ITV’s original London area broadcaster Associated Rediffusion, ‘Ready Steady Go!’ would only run between 1963 and 1966 but its impact on pop music and popular culture can be felt to this day.

Suggesting that he wasn’t quite the directionless nonentity that journalists like to imply, David Bowie would make an impressive total of three appearances on ‘Ready Steady Go!’ – performing ‘Liza Jane’ with The King Bees on 19th June 1964, interviewed to tie in with the release of ‘I Pity The Fool’ – and the brief haircut controversy (see Gadzooks! It’s All Happening) – on 5th March 1965, and performing ‘Can’t Help Thinking About Me’ with The Buzz on 4th March 1966.

There is no real visual record of Bowie’s early bands, but it is likely that they adopted the energetic-yet-polite performing style favoured by the likes of The Yardbirds, which was widely emulated on the live circuits they played. This was probably more true of the earlier appearances, though the fact that Bowie recalled Steve Marriott of The Small Faces shouting “jump about a bit, you’re on TV!” to him during ‘Can’t Help Thinking About Me’ suggests that they hadn’t exactly moved very far forwards by 1966.

It’s generally assumed that none of David Bowie’s appearances on ‘Ready Steady Go!’ exist, although this is far from certain – both the rights to and the surviving tapes of Ready Steady Go! were purchased by Dave Clark of The Dave Clark Five, who put together a series of patchy and unrepresentative compilations and is apparently too busy going on about how his band were better than The Beatles and The Rolling Stones combined to do anything so mundane as respond to queries about what does and doesn’t actually still exist.

Colour press shots of Bowie’s third appearance do survive, and suggest that he may have been displaying early leanings towards mime and theatrics, albeit in a very static, arm-folded and Steve Marriott-perplexing manner.

THE BEAT ROOM/ GADZOOKS! IT’S ALL HAPPENING (BBC2 27TH JULY 1964, 8TH MARCH 1965)

Designed to highlight the arty and intellectual brief of the newly-launched BBC2, ‘The Beat Room’ was conceived as a more ‘serious’ counterpart to ‘Top Of The Pops’, with an emphasis on popular live acts rather than teen idols and on albums and EPs rather than hit singles; something that was reflected in its authentic ‘club’ setting and modishly-attired studio audience.

Davie Jones And The King Bees showed up on the fourth edition on 27th July 1964 to perform ‘Liza Jane’, alongside a suitably gritty club-friendly line-up of Kenny Lynch, Elkie Brooks and Georgie Fame, although this exposure does not appear to have assisted its chart prowess.

With its serious-minded approach proving more of a barrier to audiences than expected – hardly ideal given that not all viewers could receive BBC2 in the first place – ‘The Beat Room’ was revamped early in 1965 into the more pop-focused ‘Gadzooks! It’s All Happening’.

Davy Jones And The King Bees appeared on the 8th March 1965 edition of ‘Gadzooks! It’s All Happening’, performing ‘I Pity The Fool’ alongside the noticeably less credible line-up of Adrienne Poster, Johnny Nash and The Applejacks. Once again this did little to improve single sales, despite Bowie and the show’s producer manufacturing a publicity stunt about him being forced to cut his hair for the show, which caught the attention of the tabloids but did little to advance his actual musical career.

‘Gadzooks! It’s All Happening’ would become ‘Gadzooks! It’s The In Crowd’ in May 1965, then simply ‘Gadzooks!’ a couple of weeks later, before being retired in September while BBC2 rethought its entire approach to popular beat music; we’ll find out about the part Bowie played in that later on. Out a total of sixty five weekly shows, only The Beat Room from 5th October 1964, featuring Tom Jones, The Syndicats, The Kinks, Wayne Gibson, John Lee Hooker and Julie Rogers, exists, with not even photos of the Bowie appearances surviving.

THEATRE 625: THE PISTOL SHOT (BBC2 20th MAY 1968)

Another show created to take advantage of BBC2’s distinctive remit, ‘Theatre 625’ ran between 1964 and 1968 and sought to present challenging plays aimed at an intellectual audience; some celebrated instalments include surreal classroom conspiracy fable ‘Unman Wittering And Zigo’, the complex multi-stranded family melodrama ‘Talking To A Stranger’, and prescient warning about the demands of ‘Reality TV’ ‘The Year Of The Sex Olympics’.              The odd name of the series, incidentally, derived from the fact that BBC2 broadcast in 625 lines; at that point, BBC1 and ITV were still limited to a lower definition of 405 lines.

Adapted by politician and playwright Nicholas Bethell from a 19th Century short story by Alexander Pushkin, ‘The Pistol Shot’ starred John Ronane as a highly decorated soldier who declines an invitation to a duel for reasons he refuses to disclose. Bowie and his then-girlfriend Hermione Farthingale – a regular feature in his late sixties material both as a performer and as lyrical inspiration – appeared briefly as extras, sporting elaborate period gear in a ballroom dance sequence. This was choreographed by mime artist Lindsay Kemp, whom both were studying with at the time. Although it would admittedly have been hard to miss the statuesque Hermione, there’s no evidence to suggest they were clearly visible on screen at all.

Made in colour and broadcast on 20th May 1968, ‘The Pistol Shot’ was certainly well received – The Sunday Times called it “beautifully dressed and impeccably designed” while The Daily Telegraph noted that “duels have been parodied so often that it was a tribute to the production team that this one had to be taken seriously” – and it was given a prominent repeat on 24th December 1968; it then became one of many Theatre 625 productions to be wiped and probably lost forever. That said, this is one of the early appearances that there’s less of an air of intrigue about. Imagine a standard BBC costume drama in which you might be able to briefly see the back of Bowie’s head, and you’re probably halfway there.

COLOUR ME POP (BBC2 14th JUNE 1969)

Spun off from BBC2’s celebrated arts show ‘Late Night Line-Up’, which had featured more cerebral and challenging pop acts since its launch in 1964, ‘Colour Me Pop’ gave such acts the chance to expand on this with extended half-hour in-studio sets combining live performances, filmed items and, where applicable, displays of other artistic ventures like painting, poetry and comic sketches.

Artists featured during its year-long run between 1968 and 1969 included Manfred Mann, Fleetwood Mac, The Kinks, Spooky Tooth, The Hollies, David Ackles, Honeybus, Jethro Tull, The Nice, Julie Driscoll And The Brian Auger Trinity, Timebox, Giles Giles And Fripp, Love Sculpture, Chicken Shack, Orange Bicycle, The Love Affair and many other names that will be tantalisingly familiar to fans of late sixties beat music. One of the first such shows to be made and broadcast in colour, it was in many respects the starting point of all modern rock television, and it is hardly surprising that it continues to be held in high regard.

Still some time away from a chart breakthrough, folk-rock outfit Strawbs had not long released their debut album when they were invited to appear on the 14th June 1969 edition of ‘Colour Me Pop’. Around this time they were often performing on the same bill as Bowie, and to add a dash of variety to this key television appearance, they invited him to perform a mime to ‘Poor Jimmy Wilson’ (often incorrectly described as a traditional blues number; it was in fact written by the band’s vocalist Dave Cousins).

Some sources state that Tony Visconti – who is listed as a performer on production documentation – also took part in the mime, which is certainly possible, though as he was about to take over as Strawbs’ producer it is more likely that he was present to assist them in a technical capacity. Sadly there is no known visual record of the mime, though it is likely that in common with all of the non-musical segments in ‘Colour Me Pop’, it was performed on a sparsely-rendered set with the backdrop and floor decorated in vivid shades.

A handful of editions of Colour Me Pop – featuring The Chambers Brothers, The Small Faces, The Move and The Moody Blues – still exist, along with extracts featuring The Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band, Trapeze, Honeybus and Clodagh Rogers, but sadly nothing of the Strawbs appearance has surfaced.

TOP OF THE POPS (BBC1 9th 0CTOBER 1969)

Perhaps the best-known and certainly the most high-profile of Bowie’s lost early TV appearances, his performance on ‘Top Of The Pops’ on 9th October 1969 (and repeated as part of the following week’s show) is also the least interesting. This is not to detract from its importance in any way, but it simply involved Bowie miming to ‘Space Oddity’ with an acoustic guitar; there are several other similar extant performances out there, notably from the 1970 Ivor Novello Awards and German TV’s ‘Beat Club’, and it’s unlikely that this one held any particular surprises.

At manager Ken Pitt’s insistence, Bowie also used his Stylophone in the hope of getting a bit of extra publicity, while the song’s instrumental section was interspersed with NASA stock footage. It has also been claimed that he was backed by both the dreaded Top Of The Pops Orchestra and the show’s resident dance troupe The Ladybirds; both of these claims are difficult to verify, although there are convincing accounts of the single’s producer Gus Dudgeon struggling to synchronise an effects tape with the dinner jacketed big band’s interpretation of the song. The latter, however, seems very unlikely indeed.

The show was presented by Pete Murray and other performers included The Hollies doing ‘He Ain’t Heavy He’s My Brother’, Bobbie Gentry’s take on ‘I’ll Never Fall In Love Again’, Lou Christie with his high-pitched yodelling mayhem ‘I’m Gonna Make You Mine’, The Temptations up on ‘Cloud Nine’, Esther Ofarim’s flop attempt at psychedelic bandwagon-jumping ‘Saturday Night At The World’, and the Top Of The Pops Orchestra doing their best to avoid upsetting Mary Whitehouse by substituting their polite instrumental cover of ‘Je T’aime… Moi Non Plus’ for the original by Jane Birkin And Serge Gainsbourg. It’s unknown whether David Bowie hung out with any of the other performers backstage, though if he’d come back the following week he’d have at least seen his old pal from the club circuit Joe Cocker. And, erm, The Archies.

Until 1976, ‘Top Of The Pops’ was one of the least well archived of any BBC television show, and each edition was generally only kept until December in case the Number One was needed for the Christmas Day show, and then cleared for wiping early the next year. As a consequence, few complete editions survive from the show’s early days, but the recovery rate for individual performances has been little short of phenomenal. While many of the most important early clips are still missing, others have turned up where and when they were least expected.

Many people reading this will be aware that Bowie’s performance of ‘The Jean Genie’ from 1972 was recovered a couple of years back, found in the middle of a cameraman’s showreel. Around the same time, a domestic recording of Pink Floyd doing ‘See Emily Play’ in 1967 – itself a key influence on Bowie – was located in a private collection, suggesting that while it’s a very slim chance indeed, someone out there may well have kept their own off-air of the ‘Space Oddity’ performance.

CAIRNGORM SKI NIGHT (GRAMPIAN TV 27th FEBRUARY 1970)

Although only seen in a handful of ITV regions, the exotically titled ‘Cairngorm Ski Night’ – a peculiar show sitting uneasily somewhere between variety and arts review – was a regular feature on ITV’s North and North East Scotland service Grampian between 1966 and 1970.

Accompanied by resident house ensemble The Alex Sutherland Band, who were more normally to be found rocking up Scottish traditional numbers in local folk clubs so we can only guess at what this must have sounded like, Bowie appeared on the show on 27th February 1970, performing ‘London Bye Ta Ta’ with the aid of a twelve-string acoustic guitar and a synthesiser that had recently been purchased by Grampian.

An unreleased leftover from the Deram era, and one of the greatest of Bowie’s more obscure songs, ‘London Bye Ta Ta’ had recently been re-recorded and radically overhauled as a potential follow-up single to ‘Space Oddity’, although it was rejected at the last minute by Bowie in favour of ‘The Prettiest Star’, much to the displeasure of Ken Pitt. This would appear to make ‘London Bye Ta Ta’ an unusual choice for this appearance, other than that ‘The Prettiest Star’ was literally only a couple of weeks old at that point, and as he had been performing ‘London Bye Ta Ta’ with different backing outfits for at least three years it would have been much easier to teach to the studio band.

This performance was followed by a mime piece with Angie Barnett – she wouldn’t become Bowie until a fortnight later – and Lindsay Kemp, and it’s quite possible that the synthesiser was used for this rather than ‘London Bye Ta Ta’. The three were in Scotland to film ‘The Looking Glass Murders’, an adaptation of Kemp’s 1967 stage piece ‘Pierrot In Turquoise’ in which Bowie played ‘Cloud’ and also sang a couple of numbers (including a rewritten ‘London Bye Ta Ta’ with new lyrics), for Scottish Television’s arts strand ‘Gateway’ – named after the company’s purpose-built theatre – and it’s likely that this performance came about as a result of that engagement.

Presumably the mime took the form of an extract from ‘The Looking Glass Murders’, and it’s also highly likely that Bowie was interviewed on the show, although such details are difficult to confirm; indeed, there’s even some dispute amongst Bowie experts over the precise date that he appeared on ‘Cairngorm Ski Night’.

Whatever went on in the mime, Lindsay Kemp was of the opinion that they had “shown too much tits and ass for Scottish television” and that this was why the tape was later erased. However, not a single second of five years’ worth of ‘Cairngorm Ski Night’ still exists, suggesting that it was simply routinely wiped.

SIX-O-ONE (GRANADA TV JUNE 1970)

Ken Pitt’s misgivings about ‘The Prettiest Star’ seem to have been borne out when it failed to follow ‘Space Oddity’ into the charts, and for his next single Bowie went back to his recent album for a re-recording of ‘Memory Of A Free Festival’.

Without even the short wave of interest that usually greets the follow-up to a big hit, ‘Memory Of A Free Festival’ would fare even worse than ‘The Prettiest Star’, attracting little attention outside of a small amount of radio support and a performance on ‘Six-O-One’, Granada’s regional news magazine show for ITV viewers in the North West of England.

Granada has a long history of entertaining and informative regional news and arts shows – more often than not they are indivisible from each other – which have regularly heavily featured up-and-coming acts from the artier end of pop music; Granada was one of the first broadcasters to embrace punk, for example, while the cover photos of both Iggy Pop’s ‘Lust For Life’ and The Stone Roses’ debut album were shot on set in the main news studio. Replacing the earlier ‘Scene At 6:30’, ‘Six-O-One’ was a short-lived reinvention of their daily news magazine show to accompany the arrival of both a new decade and a full colour service (and a slightly earlier timeslot), and it would feature many artists in a similar career position to Bowie.

Although a precise date is difficult to determine, it seems likely that Bowie appeared on ‘Six-O-One’ in the week of 12th-16th June 1970 to promote the single’s release, and that he performed it live in the studio, presumably with members of his then-current backing band The Hype. What is certain, however, is that he was introduced and interviewed by Bob Greaves, a veteran Granada presenter who despite his advancing years was often called upon to handle features on artists and musicians, which he did so sympathetically and with the impression that he had at least familiarised himself with their work beforehand.

Noted as an early champion of Joy Division, Greaves would continue to fulfil this role into the nineties, and a quick Google will turn up some of his later interviews with the likes of Inspiral Carpets and Pulp. It’s likely, then, that they enjoyed an informative and revealing chat; as this was at a point when Bowie must have been experiencing some uncertainty over his future direction, his answers may well have been more revealing than usual.

Even at this point, Bowie clearly had supporters at Granada, as he would turn up again on 20th January 1971 to perform the flop follow-up single Holy Holy, reportedly wearing a dress from the Mr. Fish boutique. By this time, ‘Six-O-One’ had been revamped as ‘Newsday’ – the two titles are sometimes conflated – and the following year it would be relaunched again as the somewhat longer running ‘Granada Reports’.

As no clips of either performance have ever surfaced it seems likely that neither exist, although it is worth bearing in mind that Granada’s archive was both rigorously maintained and, until relatively recently, poorly catalogued, and even now items are turning up that were presumed to have been long lost. Could one or both of Bowie’s appearances from the least well documented phase of his career still be sitting on a shelf waiting for someone to decode the mistyped or missing programme info? Let’s hope so…

Take A Giant Step

Over the years, without anyone ever asking or probably even wanting me to, I've given several wildly conflicting accounts of where and how my interest in sixties music started. I’ve often talked about how it all really began when I got hold of a ropey C90 of legendary garage punk compilation Nuggets, and heard the terrifying juddering buzzsaw guitar opening of I Had Too Much To Dream Last Night for the first time. At various other times, I've gone on record and in print with similar recollections - 'anecdotes' would be erroneously suggesting that they were stories that actually went somewhere – about similar inaugural encounters with Shapes Of Things, The Tears Of A

Clown, Alone Again Or, See Emily Play and doubtless several dozen others that I can't remember right now. Then there's that feature I wrote about Sounds Of The 60s. I've probably even tried to pin the blame on the poor old Waltham Green East

Wapping Carpet Cleaning Rodent And Boggit Extermination Association before now.

The problem with all of these versions of events, though, is that they're all pretty much dependent on a pre-existing fascination with the hilariously amorphous concept of 'sixties' pop music. They're all ever so slightly similar accounts of where the story really started, rather than where it actually started. And if we're going to get anywhere near that - and indeed if anyone reading actually wants me to get anywhere near that - we're going to have to go back, give or take the odd Beatles film and/or cartoon, to when the BBC decided for no readily apparent reason to start repeating a TV series from almost two decades previously as part of their children’s schedules.

Yes, I have tried and tried and tried to determine how and why

The Monkees wound up in that post-school timeslot, but the reasons - if indeed there were any – have proved elusive, so for now we'll just have to conclude that the BBC simply felt like showing them again. But wind up there it did, and immediately caused a shockwave of baffled excitement as playground speculation ran rampant over whether those four identically-shirted moptops that had achieved near-Rentaghost levels of laughter were 'new' or 'from them days'.

Micky, Mike, Davy and Peter's antics and indeed music quickly caught on in a way that probably nobody would really have expected of a fairly ancient imported TV show flung out as a bit of cheap filler. Birthday parties were momentarily suspended so that the assembled cake-crazed revellers could watch the episode with Stan Freberg as the toy factory owner, with howls of laughter greeting the scene where The Monkees accidentally invented a boomerangesque toy that couldn't be thrown away – especially when Peter closed a window on it – that were quite possibly louder and more raucous than any actual party events.

Reader's Digest's well-timed compilation Here Come The Monkees, which placed the hits alongside a handful of fairly obscure album tracks, proved a handy Christmas Present option for otherwise stumped relatives, and gave their new-found fans the opportunity to enjoy the music without being distracted by speeded-up footage of chases on weirdly elongated bike-kart things. Those same after-the-event converts would quickly draw in their even younger siblings, giving rise to shared reminiscences about how 'clever' they thought the lyric "Mr Green, he's so serene, he's got a TV in every room" was, or how weird that fast song with all the different coloured trumpets where Micky sang was, or just how re-enactable the 'Chaperone' episode was, in the same sort of way that others would back on family holidays. In truth, given their subsequent ubiquity in the Summer Morning schedules, for some The Monkees actually were their holidays.

Many, if not most, would move on to other more modern thrills soon enough, but for some - like, you guessed it, me – The Monkees were an obsession that stuck. And, more importantly, one that led directly into other obsessions. Fascination at the fact that, as became apparent during a brief spell of Monkee-free scheduling, someone had decided to copy it only more weirdly and with more cartoons about families who had a shrinking car and renamed it The Banana Splits Adventure Hour was one of the mundane yet intriguing things that got me wondering about the history of this television whatnot, and how it all fitted together and responded to changing fashions and values and advertising demands and what have you.

An oft-thwarted desire to see the elusive and rarely-discussed Monkees big-screen outing Head, which finally showed up on Channel 4 in the late eighties (and let's not even get started on the long, long hunt for 33 1/3 Revolutions Per Monkee), and the quest for tiny scraps of information in whopping great oversized books in the Film And TV section of the local library was instrumental in instituting a fascination with other neglected and forgotten corners of cinema history. Later, I would have fun disproving the longstanding myth that Head was never shown in the UK at the time of release, but that's another story.

More significantly, the search after seeing Head for a copy of The Porpoise Song – you would not believe the prices that the not-yet-reissued soundtrack album commanded in those days- led me to an import-only American psychedelic compilation that also featured the likes of Love, The Turtles, The Seeds, Strawberry Alarm Clock, Vanilla Fudge and Kenny Rogers And The First

Edition. Whilst in that record shop, I also picked up a VHS bootleg of episodes of the Monkees TV series, which included one where Tim Buckley strummed and yodelled a really rather startling song whilst sat on a smashed-up old car. It is safe to say that I was being ever so slightly lured in a certain musical direction.

It's also safe to say that we're also being lured in that musical direction again now, which isn't so much addressing the conundrum outlined in the opening paragraph as replicating it entirely. So before we get caught up in recollections about hunting down copies of Super K's Bubblegum Explosion, let's get back to what this rambling originally set out to do, and take another look at that episode of The Monkees that so captured all those imaginations all that time ago. As it made such an indelible impression, we won't be needing BBC Genome to tell us that the episode in question was Monkees A La Mode - which, astonishingly, still isn't available on DVD over here - so let's put down the Tommy James And The Shondells 'Original Album Series' box set and get on with it, shall we?

Despite what you might not unreasonably assume, Monkees A La Mode was not actually the first episode of The Monkees but the twenty fourth; predictably there is no discernible rhyme, reason or logic to them, but all the same we're playing by the BBC's idiosyncratic rules here, and that's something that will come very much to the fore in a couple of paragraphs' time. Equally surprisingly, Monkees A La Mode doesn't open with the usual display of fourhanded Beatle-resenting quickfire japsesmithery, but with an icy career woman in an elaborate hat, a mod-attired groovy chick, and a camp psychedelic dandy getting up to all manner of Ugly Betty-prefiguring fashion industry lampoonery in a Pop Art office as they rifle through pics of up-and-coming celebrities to feature in a forthcoming spread. They alight on some black and white glossies of The Monkees and announce their plans to make over the long haired weirdos 'in our own image'.

Then the action flips over - literally - to the Monkees’ hangout, where the invitation to appear in Chic magazine is greeted with no little disdain. Davy volunteers a style tip; "Why not take little metal bottle tops and nail them to your living room floor? It gives you the impression that you're walking... on... little metal bottle tops". Peter, on the other hand, is impressed that the magazine features a 'serial'; "this month it's cornflakes", he adds whilst decanting some from the pages into his bowl.

Then it's straight into the opening titles, but not the opening titles as anyone who watched those repeat broadcasts would know them. In the years since The Monkees had first been shown, the BBC had made all manner of 'improvements' to their purchased prints of the show, from removing flashframe cutaways and onscreen caption gags - you can bet the quick burst of the end credits montage of them trying on trendsetting hats had gone from this episode, for starters - to removing entire songs for no readily obvious reason. The Monkees was, of course, far from the only show to be subjected to this blunt-scissored

reappropriation, and not too far from it in the repeat schedules you would often find The Banana Splits (as it was renamed in ad-free BBC-land due to no longer lasting an hour), which had somehow mislaid the live action Danger Island serial along the way, and the famously doctored prints of Boss Cat (we'll call it by its proper name around here, thanks), ham-fistedly whittled to remove any risk of free advertising for pet food manufacturers, with the truncated opening titles cutting abruptly to an infamously shoddy title caption card, and a whopping great mid-lyric jump cut in the closing credits.

Quite when and why this happened to The Monkees is anyone's guess, but at some point the BBC's prints all had the series two opening titles edited onto them, which is why most viewers would probably be expecting the Wild West/Foreign Legion/Live Performance/ Running Away From The Tide antics and the Peter? Peter! Gag; instead there’s an entirely different set of clips with the Monkeemobile very much to the fore. And, erm, Mike sitting on a skateboard.

What's more, the opening titles are directly followed by a Kellogg's sponsor bumper, complete with its own Monkee-sung jingle and box-hoisting comedy antics, which would doubtless have been binned before this episode got anywhere near the BBC. Then at last there's the familiar Four Faces On Orange Background caption card and the brief harpsichord reprise of the theme, but it's already obvious that this is, in some respects, going to be a slightly different experience to that of those edit-unaware youngsters watching way back when. But are we going to put this feature on hold for several months while we track down a possibly non-extant copy of that bizarre BBC-mangled version? Are we Mijacogeo.

Instead, it's straight back to the Monkees' pad, where a quick outbreak of polo-necked cod-Shakespearianism gets derailed by the arrival of the put-upon fashionistas - Tobi Willis and Robroy Fingerhead to give them their full names - wondering aloud how they are going to manage to whip these long-haired scruffians into photo shoot-friendly shape. The first suggestion is that

Chic should show the world "what you are and the way you live", to which Davy responds with alarm "you want to get us arrested?", earning a timpani-accompanied elbow in the ribs from

Mike for his troubles; in an amusing bit of postmodernism, it’s implied that Davy has actually made this noise himself, and he sternly reminds Mike "don't do that".

Journalistic rifling through the band's bric-a-brac - including that never-explained Gerald Campion-alike dummy - ensues, hampered by a manically flailing Peter and sarcastically sceptical

Mike, though it's actually the surprisingly touchy Davy who takes the greatest exception to the shorthand-toting twosome and their snobby dismissals of all things Monkee. Micky just stands on the

sidelines smirking, as though he's waiting for the right moment to deliver a scene-flattening one-liner, and sure enough it's him who gets to deliver spurious cutaway-accompanied claims about the historical lineage of the various items of junk dotted about the place. Robroy remains cattily unimpressed, but Tobi is more sympathetic and asks them to come to the office the following morning. "What have we got to lose, fellers?" asks an unconvinced Davy. "Our shirts" is the group reply. You can guess the cutaway.

The following morning Wilhelmina-Slater-Meets-Helen-A editor Madame Quagmeyer is ruminating on "the worst looking dummy I've ever seen" when, bang on cue, Peter ambles into the studio.

After being introduced to some haughty society gal researchers, occasioning Mike to 'introduce' himself to the other Monkees, Micky to try and seduce one by posing as a Chinese-born French speaker, Davy to remark that what he looks for in a girl "depends on what I've lost", and Peter to strike up a conversation with a lamp, they are ushered before the camera, where Robroy attempts to get himself on the Olympic bitching team with exasperation at their lack of posture and colour coordination, not to mention Micky's incessant drumming, before the entire shoot degenerates into a performance of Davy-sung second album filler Laugh. This comes accompanied by all manner of high-speed photoshoot diorama slapstick; Micky wrestles with a stuffed tiger, Peter larks about with giant scissors and pencils, and Davy gets pursued by an alarmingly realistic-looking toy chimp. In a gleeful note of subversion, even audience-pleasing shots of them actually smouldering for the camera have the rug pulled from underneath by the unexpected addition of comedy 'arrow-thru-head' props and the like, simultaneously acknowledging and refusing to take seriously the reasons for the band's popularity.

Madame Quagmeyer is so pleased with the results of the photo session that she screws up the pasted up pages without reading them, and flings them in the bin in front of Tobi's astonished face, commissioning Robroy to make a second attempt; in true media creep fashion (and indeed fashion), he's already got one ready in his pocket. Meanwhile, back at the pad, the boys are busying themselves with, erm, feeding a toy giraffe when a procession of angry girls turn up at the door to slap them, followed by a note around a brick smashing through the window – which Davy presumes is "an advert for a glass factory" – before

Tobi finally turns up with the long-awaited copy of Chic; "we haven't read it, but we've a feeling some of our friends have", muses Mike.

Indeed, Robroy has turned in a hatchet job repositioning them as cultured aesthetes and overall snobs, which has caused Tobi to quit her job in a fit of ethical pique. Meanwhile, flushed with success, Madame Quagmeyer sends The Monkees a telegram demanding that they represent her at The Young American People Trophy Award Thing later that evening. Davy and

Micky propose replying with 'Monkee Telegram 26a' ("you can take your trophy and..."), but Mike has other ideas.

What follows is a madcap explosion of sabotage, vandalism, snoring, babbling, mime, pratfalls, bizarre accents, loose-limbed tomfoolery and close harmony barbershop caterwauling, striking terror into the very cultural sensibilities of the assembled 'suits'.

This culminates with The Monkees dedicating the award to Robroy, whose attempts to sneak out with his reputation intact are thwarted by yet more choreographed mayhem. Instead, while he’s left to deal with the chaos, it's The Monkees who flee the building, performing ad-hoc conjuring tricks and building towers of teacups as they go.

The next morning, they turn up at the office to demand a retraction, only to find that Tobi is now editor, with Robroy and Madam Quagmire as her meek and terrified assistants; and that despite this apparent game of musical office chairs, basically nothing has actually changed. Rather a strong note of social satire for a sitcom widely derided as inconsequential zany trend-surfing Beatle-plagiarising camera trickery heavy fluff to end on, you might think.

Except it's not quite the end of the episode itself, as there's still then-as-yet-unreleased corker You Just May Be The One - written by Mike, and with most of them contributing to the backing track, so stick that in your Not Even Mike Nesmith's

Real Hat and smoke it - followed by the familiar end credits only with Kelloggs cereal boxes troubling their faces.

And, well, that's Monkees A La Mode, the very same episode that brought their getting the funniest looks from everyone they meet to a whole new audience way back when, and in its own small way did a large amount to introduce the idea that the pop music of the past could be resold to those outside of their original target audience. Whether that was a good or a bad thing is something that you will need to take up with your nearest Fourteen Thousand Hits Of The Sixties - The Era That Defined An Era (Some Tracks Have Been Recreated Using As Many Of The Original Artists As Possible) box set.

So, how does Monkees A La Mode measure up to the reaction that it unexpectedly provoked back then? Despite the juvenile confusion over whether it was 'new' or not - in itself an indication of just how little archive material you'd find on television in those days - it was a garish film stock window into the sound and style of another age at a time when ninety nine percent of anything that wasn't one hundred percent current was locked away in a big box labelled 'the past', and even something like Ragtime could seem like a hazy memory only a year or two after they stopped showing it. Or, if you prefer something a bit culturally, chronologically and geographically closer to The Monkees itself, the original Scooby Doo, Where Are You? did after it disappeared for a couple of years and was replaced by wall to wall Scooby Doo And Scrappy Doo.

Even though this episode is bafflingly not commercially available in the UK, it only took me a couple of seconds to find (yeah, and what are you going to do about that, Ian Screen Gems?; bring it out to buy and I'll buy it), and that couldn't be further removed from the days when you were lucky if you saw twenty seconds of Peter And Gordon at the start of a local news report about someone 'bringing back' the 'Swinging Sixties'. And that's not even taking into account the fact that this is a substantially different edit of the episode. These things do make a difference you know. As you'd know if you'd heard the album edit of The

Porpoise Song.

What it is easy to conclude, however, is that The Monkees is a good deal more sophisticated than both memory and columnist prats who scoff that they weren't any good until Head might suggest, and certainly streets ahead of the likes of The Ghost And Mrs Muir. The satire of the fashion industry is way more barbed and disdainful than might be expected, and in that sense, with all the music and effects taken into account too, it's a lot closer to The Goodies than to The Mothers In Law. It's also surprising to see just how involved as a character Davy was; often misrembered as a ludicrously accented number-maker-upper whose primary purpose was to fall inconveniently in love - a misconception that he admittedly did little to help with his self-parody bits in Head - here he's actually shown to be the most cynical and at times even most surreal of the four (which is no mean feat), though perhaps that kind of wit is easily lost on younger viewers.

Even so, it's precisely that kind of hidden depth that caused it to become a success all over again; practically every other fondly remembered children’s TV comedy series from the around the same time, from Seaview and Maggie to Educating Marmalade and Behind The Bike Sheds, and indeed from Smith And

Goody to Luna, credited its audience with a degree of intelligence and sophistication that was rarely to be found elsewhere in the children’s schedules, which is perhaps why we're talking about them now and not sodding Brendon Chase.

So that's why The Monkees are still watched, listened to, enjoyed and indeed talked about now in a way that certain of their more self-aggrandising contemporaries only ever have been in their own heads. Also, I would like an award for resisting the temptation to call this article 'Monkee Business'. I thank you.

Dedicated, Inseparable, Invincible (Except When Confronted By Carnivorous Plants)

As we've already discussed at some considerable length, the BBC didn't in fact commence their early eighties repeats of The Monkees with the actual first episode, Royal Flush, preferring for no readily obvious reason to open proceedings with the more  assured twenty fourth instalment Monkees A La Mode.

Instead, Davy's rapier-wielding entanglement in a plot to overthrow Princess Bettina of Harmonica would have to wait until the repeats were temporarily shunted to Saturday Mornings, where it formed part of one of the weirdest TV schedules of all time. No, not just the weirdest Saturday Morning one. One of the weirdest ever. Full stop.

For reasons best known to themselves and to whatever had leaked into their collective cerebral cortex, on 22nd August 1981, the BBC saw fit to hand over the summer-replacement-for-Swap-Shop reins to Buzzfax. And despite the seemingly straightforward down-with-the-kids implications of the title, this was no ordinary summer replacement for Swap Shop (and let's face it, the majority of them were very ordinary indeed).

Buzzfax involved no clean-cut aspirant Blue Peter presenters gamely attempting to link tedious filmed inserts about 'improving' hobbies with sufficient verve to prevent a mass switchover to ITV. No up-and-coming pop stars were seen struggling through the throwaway b-side of their hit single to mass disinterest in lieu of a proper 'second number'. Instead, Buzzfax saw the whole ninety minutes thrown open to the 'backroom boys', with the full morning's entertainment presented entirely 'by' Ceefax. Yes, you did read that right. For one week only, The Monkees, Battle Of The Planets, Dinky Dog, and the yawn-inviting Chopsticks-heralded black and white escapades of Edgar Kennedy (this week apparently facing off against 'The Big Beef') were interspersed with blocky renditions of their primary characters and chirpy quiztacular interjections from 'Buzz'.

Buzz, in case you were wondering, was a Ceefax-derived post-

Space Invaders Vectrex Gaming System-esque geometrically askew character voiced by the same bloke as Jig from Jigsaw, whom in an early excursion into primitive multiplatform interactivity also introduced some puzzles that volleyed back and forth with those set in the back pages of that week's Radio Times. No prizes for guessing, then, that Jigsaw supremo, Radio Times puzzle-setter extraordinaire and veteran 'backroom boy' Clive

Doig was the main creative mover and shaker behind Buzzfax.

In some respects, Buzzfax was an attempt to roll back the post-

Posh Paws clock to the lawless frontier days of Saturday Morning

TV, when programmes were linked by terrifying splurges of electronic noise and psychedelic graphics courtesy of the over-exclamationmarked likes of Zokko!, Outa-Space! and Ed And Zed!, all of which with their dustpan-and-brush-in-a-cupboard-with-cables- in-it ambience did little to counter the prevalent juvenile lack-of-in-vision-continuity-fuelled assumption that

'The BBC' was a big empty building that showed programmes via sentient machines that worked of their own volition.

By that point, Noel Edmonds had not only brought 'in vision' continuity to Saturday Mornings, but had done it with a sense of fun that you weren't really supposed to find in the improving world of children's television. No matter how much technological wizardry may have been involved, there was simply no going back and poor old Buzzfax felt the full weight of force; in fact, it's interesting to compare this with Children’s BBC’s ropey linking BBC Micro-derived 'computer graphics' a couple of years later, shortly before Philip Schofield was brought in to perform his own riff on the Edmonds format. Well it would be interesting to do that, except that it would be straying a little too far onto the 'serious' side of things for what we're trying to do around here. We're talking about some talking Teletext, for 4-T's sake.

Zokko!'s name might have rung out from the corners back in the day, but we weren't back in the day no more. The week before

Buzzfax, the outdoor pursuit-obsessed Hazel O'Connor-themed

Peter Powell-fronted slab of mediocrity Get Set For Summer had come to the end of its six week run. The week after, the very same programmes that had been bookended by 'Buzz' were left to fend for themselves in the continuity wilderness. Buzzfax lasted for one solitary week, and yet was so bewilderingly, well, bewildering that it burned itself indelibly into the memory of anyone who witnessed it.

And yet this memory-searing may not even have been entirely down to 'Buzz' and his 888-troubling antics, as within its schedule fell possibly the most disturbing, disorientating, disquieting and just plain inappropriate twenty five minutes ever to find their way into children's television. And no, it wasn't Edgar Kennedy.

First shown by the BBC in September 1979, Battle Of The Planets was infamously a redubbed re-edit of the 1972 Japanese animated series Science Ninja Team Gatchaman, which it's probably fair to say, what with its cross-dressing villains, neck-twisting wallops, 'choice' language and what have you, was originally aimed at a slightly older audience. It had been purchased by the massively-credited Sandy Frank Entertainment to cash in on the first throes of post-Star Wars spacemania, and retooled for wider consumption by cutting out whopping great inappropriate chunks, replacing them with new linking footage featuring R5D4-infringing fretbucket 7-Zark-7 and his comedy electro-canine sidekick 1-Rover-1, adding a big walloping disco soundtrack, and generally renaming everyone, everything and everywhere until it was, to all intents and purposes, a different series.

Most of the time, though back-of-the-mind question marks did still remain over such widely-spotted anomalies as why Mark's metal bird throwing star thing caused the Spectra guards to recoil in incapacitated 'astonishment', or indeed what was going on with a certain bit in the opening titles that we'll be coming back to soon, this audacious gambit worked and little of Battle

Of The Planets' origins was perceptible to the untrained eye.

Sometimes, however, the source material was simply too strong for any amount of re-editing to prevent its true nature from seeping through. And nowhere was this more obvious than in shudderingly-recalled two-part story The Fierce Flowers.

When the first part of The Fierce Flowers rolled up as part of

Buzzfax, it wasn't actually the first time that it had been seen by an unsuspecting audience; over the Christmas of 1980, as part of the school holiday mornings schedules, a couple of new episodes of Battle Of The Planets had sneaked out more or less under the radar. As they were shown on consecutive mornings in the relative-visiting no-man's land between Christmas and New

Year, it's likely that most juvenile fans of the show missed one or both episodes, with only the briefest of glimpses of its biohorror

hardcore weirdness to play on their minds until the repeats rolled around. And when they did roll around, in that more accessible and noticeable Saturday morning slot, it's fair to say that The Fierce Flowers was what the young people call a 'game-changer'.

Watching The Fierce Flowers again – which isn't easy, as the DVDs have been out of print for quite some time - the first thing you notice is that each episode of Battle Of The Planets originally opened with a teaser with a silly bombastic voiceover, all of which were thankfully edited out by the BBC for transmission over here.

Whether they made any other edits is difficult to determine from this distance, though it's quite feasible that they did, so potentially we're dealing here not just with a reedited show in the style of The Monkees and The Banana Splits, but a re-edit of an already re-edited show. But before you start letting that frazzle your mind too much, please rest assured that in this scenario it doesn't actually matter. The Fierce Flowers had such an unsettling impact that no amount of reinstated snipped bits could possibly amplify or intensify it in any way. It was as creepy as fuck and will always remain so.

Anyway, let's just quietly tiptoe past the jarringly ill-fitting teaser, as it's not only the one thing that was definitely not present in the BBC broadcasts, it's also liable to pre-empt some of the stuff we're going to be covering later on, and above all is both annoying and rubbish. Instead, let's move straight on to the opening titles, and indeed to the two primary reasons why Battle Of The Planets seemed so dazzlingly, exotically and futuristically different from the norm. And from The Space Sentinels.

Ignoring the shameless typographic attempt at jumping on the slantily scrolling Star Wars bandwagon (or should that be Landspeeder?), if there's one thing that you can say about the Battle Of The Planets opening titles, it's that they were cut together by somebody who knew how to grab the target audience's attention. Spaceships shoot across the screen and we're introduced by a booming voiceover to G-Force, "five incredible young people with super powers", and - watching over them from Centre Neptune - 7-Zark-7. There's some edge-of-the-seat grandstanding about "surprise attacks by alien galaxies from beyond space", while Mark, Jason, Princess, Tiny and Keyop blast off in their signature multi-atmospheric transport The Phoenix, dodge an attack by SPECTRA's fighter pilots, and finally form a human pyramid and whirl around in a circle until they create a bad-guy walloping mini- vortex. And as they break away at its apex and tumble haphazardly through the clouds, there's an infamous glimpse of Princess' alarmingly detailed pants.

"Always five, acting as one - dedicated, inseparable, invincible!" concludes Voiceover Man as The Phoenix pulsates into the legendary 'Firey Phoenix', and admit it, you're wanting to watch it from that description alone, aren't you? And we haven't even started on THAT theme tune yet.

Hang on, let's rewind a couple of sentences. It's the early eighties, it's the BBC, it's slap bang in the middle of children's television, and some animated eye candy's jaw-droppingly contoured scanties are taking up the lion's share of the TV screen. How in the name of every single letter to Points Of View about Grange Hill did that one manage to slip through??

Well, in all honesty, it was probably more to do with money than anything else. Although the BBC were not exactly averse to making great big butterfingered cuts to the imported likes of

Boss Cat (call it by its proper name), by this time their efforts were really starting to look a little bit embarrassing and a lot like battered and badly-edited film prints, yet purchasing shiny new replacement copies would have been well beyond their meagre means. It's more than likely that whichever newer broom was looking after their bought-in catalogue by then didn't want to pay for any more trims than were absolutely necessary, and certainly wouldn't have wanted a huge great music-skewing jump-cut at a key moment, and so just left it in.

As for how it got there in the first place, it's possible that Sandy Frank Entertainment may have seen it as a younger viewer 'excitement'-generating selling point, but it's more likely that it just slipped the net when they were trying to eradicate every single other trace of unsuitability from the decidedly more adult-aimed Japanese original. As we shall see, sometimes this 'adult' nature was just too strong to disguise with any amount of chopping and changing, and without wanting to put anyone off there are a couple of troubling hints to come that a quick flash of knicker might have been the least of Science Ninja Team Gatchaman's worries.

Anyway, suffice it to say that this did not go unappreciated by a generation of pre-Internet youngsters who had to take their kicks where they could find them. And also the reason why if you Google for some combination of 'princess', 'battle of the planets', 'cosplay' and 'comic con', you might find yourself with some explaining to do.

Meanwhile, the undisguisable origins of the show meant that the target audience were at least able to get another very different sort of kick where they could find it. At that time, the lurid and vivid world of Japanese animation was something of a far-flung exotic mystery, barely known about even by those who 'know these things', and only infrequently and glimpsed through clunkily repurposed monster movies, earlier TV cartoon

manglings like Marine Boy, and the occasional awestruck whisper from someone whose older brother had read about something once.

Along with the similarly Anglicised Star Fleet (or, in old yen, X-Bomber) and Ulysses 31 (erm, Space Legend Ulysses 31), it gave an exciting hint of an alternate universe of sci-fi animated entertainment, although, despite the instantly recognisable design hallmarks, few actually knew what it was, less still what it was called. Stuck for a genre name, some would simply resort to calling it 'A-a-aaaaaa', in reference to the downtrodden sigh croaked by the inevitable Keyopesque 'gawky non-human child' character as they were knocked to the floor by a guard, or, if raining, saw a bird's eye gleam or something. It wasn't until somewhere around the late eighties/early nineties, when home video became more widely and affordably available and Akira briefly became the underground cineaste's obscurity of choice before being taken up en masse by an army of grubby schoolboys in WASP t-shirts, that anyone really realised that it was actually a 'thing'. And even then they mistakenly referred to it as 'Manga' at first.

Of course, once 'Anime'-mania kicked in, news of Battle Of The Planets' true origins spread like SPECTRA-disseminated plant life, and almost overnight those chirpy linking droids went from being dimly recalled figureheads of childhood cartoon excitement to fandom-denounced hate figures, mounted on a virtual dartboard for overfurious proto-bloggers to throw uncensored Metal Bird Things at. Even sidestepping the humourlessness, the tedious purism and the undertones of smug 'I could do better at cartoons because I seened a cartoon once'-ism inherent in this kind of attitude, it's also one that should be challenged because, well, untampered-with Science Ninja Team Gatchaman was not the reason why we all fell in love with Battle Of The Planets to begin with.

Viewers who didn't know any better enjoyed the episodes with 7-Zark-7 and 1-Rover-1 present and correct, not in spite of them, and that wasn't simply down to blinkered youthful inexperience as everyone detested Scrappy Doo. They were as much part and parcel of the show's success and appeal as, on a similar note, Godzooky and Brock were to Hanna-Barbera's contemporaneous

Americanisation of the similarly-sourced Godzilla franchise, and never let anyone tell you otherwise. But Battle Of The Planets had an extra special appeal all of its own…

Roger Finn thundering through the 'Broom Cupboard' to tell a departing Andy Crane live on air that he'd done a "bloody good job". Caron Keating more or less having an orgasm whilst getting a massage during a Blue Peter expedition to Russia. The Housemartins doing The People Who Grinned Themselves To Death on The Wide Awake Club, lyrics about The Queen throttling children and all. For no readily obvious reason, eighties children's television was full of blink-and-you'll-miss-them-and-then-refuse-to-believe-anyone-who-actually-did unintentional moments of unsuitability like these. And we haven't even started on the more widely acknowledged I'd Like To Ask Five Star Why Are You So Lego Man's Head Fell Off clip show-friendly side of things.

Yet there's one thing that all of the above, and so many more incidents like them, have in common. They were, to greater or lesser extents, random and spontaneous instances of something 'going wrong', and nobody planned for them even to take place, let alone to be transmitted. Less celebrated, yet in some ways more disturbing, were some others that were actually intentionally thought up, scripted, filmed, vetted, cleared, and shown to an audience who were in no way expecting anything like it to assault their Charles In Charge-anticipating critical faculties. The sweariness of The December Rose and The Cuckoo Sister, the Bronski Beat-backed racially-fuelled punchups in

Sticks And Stones, the infamous 'Gro-Bust'-flinging catfight in Aliens In The Family, Sophie Aldred's negligibly-necklined costumes in Knock Knock, the troubling and barely legally acceptable insistence of the producers of The Queen's Nose on using Melody as anything from a wet t-shirt model to a bukkake receptacle, and pretty much anything that ever happened in Grange Hill. Well, apart from when Ro-land stole some 'Minto' bars.

As we've already discussed at some length, the appearance of Princess' thinly concealed lady area in the opening titles of Battle Of The Planets would definitely fall very much into this category. But the two-part story The Fierce Flowers went off in a completely different direction and into what was at the time - and still now if we're being honest about it - totally uncharted territory for children's television. Without a word of exaggeration, it presented unsuspecting viewers with disturbing jolting hints of eco-horror, emotional brutality, and even worrying hints of proto- 'torture porn', all of it only just about kept in check by the deft re-editing. You're probably not unreasonably thinking that this is actually just a collective mass distortion of childhood thrills, and that closer and more recent examination would reveal The Fierce

Flowers to be in fact rather tame. Well, I've examined it closely and more recently, and 'tame' it is most definitely not.

Admittedly, though, it does start in a deceptively tame fashion. Part 1 of The Fierce Flowers opens, somewhat inevitably, with an establishing shot of 'Centre Neptune', the underwater residence of controversially-inserted sex-and-violence-replacing plot-hole-covering comedy robot narrators 7-Zark-7 and 1-Rover-1. The former, as is his chirpy C3P0- infringing wont, is busily informing the audience about how much he loves the thankless task of monitoring the entire galaxy for surprise attacks by alien domination-seekers SPECTRA, when he is suddenly interrupted by 'Susan', the Caramel Bunny-voiced flickery light-represented

Artificial Intelligence housed in an Early Warning Station on - cough - 'Planet Pluto'. For technologically bewildering reasons, 7-Zark-7 has a 'crush' on Susan which causes him to blush – yes blush – uncontrollably whenever she compliments him. There's no time for any of this now, though, as she's calling to report that an unidentified flying object has apparently been launched by SPECTRA from the 'Crab Nebul-ay'. Which isn't in fact a 'sultry' mispronunciation, as Zark immediately repeats it, and that's about as far from 'sultry' as you can get.

Aboard said Nebulay-flung unidentified flying object, birdy-faced Captain Morlok is reporting to SPECTRA head honcho Zoltar - whose gender, it should be noted, randomly alternated in the original Science Ninja Team Gatchaman, a complication averted in Battle Of The Planets via the pretence that he was periodically deputised for by his 'sister' - about his latest plan for conquering Earth. He doesn't say too much about what it actually entails, though Zoltar's exclamation to nobody in particular "greetings Earth people, I am sending you flowers from Spectra", followed by what appears to be Richard Herring's laugh, does rather give the game away somewhat.

This is followed by a sinisterly surreal sequence of unsuspecting passers-by cooing at a huge swathe of blossom falling gently from the sky, which cuts to a downpour of torrential rain, upon which the fuckers start germinating with nasty-sounding rasping electronic burbles. Within minutes, they've self-cultivated into big spidery lotus things that look like they mean business. And if that wasn't unnerving enough, they suddenly get up on their hind tendrils and start walking, developing a really quite unpleasantly undertoned liking for cornering young women in alleyways. 7-Zark-7, not unreasonably, considers this an apposite moment to alert G-Force. From the look of it, he might also have saved us from things getting even more visually ugly.

At that moment, G-Force are all in their pre- 'Transmute' off-duty proto-Britpop civvies, and are hanging out in a sandwich bar that, for no readily obvious reason, Princess is looking after for a friend; though, given that her name in the original was Jun and there's a great big letter 'J' outside, maybe it's actually her own translationally-inconvenient sandwich bar. Cheapo disco sounds play in the background while Tiny pulls a face about the lack of 'Spaceburgers', Keyop helps out with the washing up on a promise of payment in 'apple pie', and Jason and Mark are already frowning over newspaper reports about the aggressive floral proliferation. Yep, he's really on the ball is 7-Zark-7.

As the others set off to investigate, Princess stays behind to lock up, and – you guessed it - we get a creepy shot of an advancing flower reflected in the glass she's cleaning. Clearly unconcerned about the lack of 'Spaceburgers', a couple of them have made their way into the shop, and even after 'transmuting', Princess needs all the assistance from her electrified yoyo thing that she can get. After a lengthy fight, she manages to overpower all of the pollen-powered intruders, of whom there can be no debate about their rather audience-inappropriate physically allegorical properties.

Over at the research centre headed by their scientific advisor Chief Anderson, G-Force are being briefed on what he's deduced about the flowers so far. Presumably filling in for a fair amount of snipped material, he informs the assembled Transmutees that the plants are carnivorous, and have been subjected to sufficient scientific analysis for 7-Zark-7 to devise a protective suit that will enable anyone swallowed by one to withstand their digestive effects. Which is handy, because he's also deduced that in order to be able to fully understand them, someone will have to be swallowed by a flower and survive; Princess, it transpires, has already been selected for the honour. Why not send Keyop, you might wonder, as he's smaller and we could do without him saying 'rouboot-deet' every three seconds anyway? Because the protective suit 'seems to work particularly well on females', apparently. This, coupled with the scenes of female commuters being chased and cornered by flowers, suggests that something worryingly misogynistic has been lost in translation. Thank fuck, then, for 1-Rover-1.

In fairness Keyop does offer to go in her place, apparently not having paid the slightest bit of attention to what's just been said, but Princess insists on taking on the mission herself, and heads off on her motorbike to the sound of yet more daft funk (which amusingly, sounds not unlike Daft Punk). Keyop, against her wishes, follows her in his rubbish bug-like car thing, and witnesses her being swallowed by a flower in a really quite unnerving and unpleasantly sexualised manner. Needless to say, on seeing this he goes "a-aaaaaaa" and flees the scene, only narrowly avoiding ending up as flower food himself.

A pacing 7-Zark-7 observes that their plan seems to have 'backfired', which is a bit strange given that this was their exact plan all along, and 1-Rover-1 assists by 'barking'. He also tells us that the rain is 'unusual', and that he suspects that it may have been generated by SPECTRA. Yes, thanks for that, Columbo.

Meanwhile, the remaining members of G-Force sitting around recapping all of that stuff about the protective suits working better on women. Lord alone knows what they were actually saying in the original, as the action then cuts abruptly to a truly nausea-inducing weirdly tinted scene of Princess convulsing inside a flower. Back at the conversation, we find out that this is an even worse situation than it appeared on nauseatingly tinted face value, as in the drier weather the flowers have shrunk considerably; though it seems they can think of little to help their miniaturised petal-enclosed friend other than that they should wait and "let Zoltar play his hand".

As luck would have it, Zoltar is indeed playing his hand, and after reflecting on the success of the plan so far and handily revealing that the rain was caused by his taking over of Earth's 'main reservoir', sends a battalion of Armed Motorised SPECTRA Units to put G-Force out of action. His uniformed bikers are promptly defeated by some deft highway manoeuvres from Mark and company. Yeah, it was worth waiting for him to play that hand, wasn't it.

With that little diversion out of the way, Chief Anderson outlines his plans to simply bomb the flowers out of Percy Throwerdom. Everyone agrees with this course of action apart from Jason, who angrily breaks ranks over the risk that indiscriminate flowertorching poses to the still trapped Princess. He's overruled, though, and Mark jets off in a sort of converted crop duster to set fire to huge swathes of flowers. As he does so, he's haunted by really quite freaky visions of Princess giggling whilst spinning round in front of a psychedelic backdrop. And after all that, it turns out to have been a totally pointless exercise anyway, as Zoltar scoffs that "fire cannot destroy them, you have only released more spores". Well, that's one way of setting up a second episode.

As the flowers set about repollinating themselves, 7-Zark-7 delivers an inappropriately chirpy episode-closing monologue about how his work defending the galaxy must go on, though he won't leave his post "until we've rescued Princess". They really ought to make their mind up what their actual gameplan is. Even allowing for the fact that the two wittering droids were introduced to give the programme a lighter edge, this is a very jarring way to close proceedings. And we've got another twenty five minutes of it left...

And he’s there again at the start of Part 2, wittering about how the newly released spores "wait only for rain to bring them sprouting into menacing life". Informing all and sundry that he will be maintaining a Red Alert until further notice, 7-Zark-7 whizzes down a transporter tube into the command centre, indicating that - despite his solemn promise at the end of the previous episode - he did indeed leave his post before Princess was rescued.

As if to underline the fact that Princess hasn't been rescued yet, we see the rest of G-Force moping around at that sandwich place. Jason and Tiny snark at each other over who's the most responsible for the situation, Mark volunteers that "I never thought I could get so angry at a bunch of flowers", and Keyop indulges in an extended bout of a-aaaaaaaaaaing, resulting in him shedding a lone splashing tear that shows

Princess disco dancing in its reflection. "Mark's taking it harder than all of us", observes Tiny, "he and Princess, they had good vibes". Whether they were related to disco dancing is left to the viewer to decide.

Over at the laboratory, Chief Anderson has concluded that water acts as a catalyst for plant growth - you don't say - and that they need to find a chemical that will permanently prevent this. He then goes off on some odd improvisation about them thriving in the vicinity of volcanos and proliferating in swampland and even growing in the hottest deserts, giving the impression a significant amount has been cut from this episode too. Something that is only strengthened when G-Force react angrily to seemingly nothing, and slope off leaving Chief Anderson to mull over his findings while a flower in a tank rages behind him.

It's not the only one raging, either, as in an alarming sequence of quick cuts we see a small army of flowers parading through the sewers, smashing through concrete and so forth. "Luckily we had advance warning and had evacuated all people from the threatened cities", notes 7-Zark-7 in a handy distraction from the obvious snips, though he doesn't see fit to offer any such explanation for the flower that suddenly emits a light beam that cracks open the ground; a property that is never referred to again. As if all of that that wasn't enough, a TV news report implies that the flowers are now intentionally starting fires.

Visually dazzling as all this may be, it's also highly bewildering and decidedly off-script, so perhaps it's fortunate that at that precise moment, Mark's communicator picks up a signal from Princess. Yes, she's still inside that flower, and has worked out how to send a distress call without her horticultural captor noticing. G-Force immediately set off to rescue her, and 7-Zark-7 notes that "she means a lot to me" and again claims that he won't leave his post until she's back, but there's a complication; the

'Federation Council' has voted to send in attack units to eradicate the flowery menace. 7-Zark-7 bemoans that he warned them that this would only release more spores but they didn't listen; we can only assume that he didn't actually try very hard at all.

G-Force have their work cut out for them, though, as without the aid of an explanatory scene, Zoltar and company have already located Princess and tied her up in a weird electronic bondage thing (perhaps the reason why we didn't get to see an explanatory scene), hoping to lead them into a trap. Chief Anderson, meanwhile, is busy having a one-sided conversation with the flower in the tank when he cuts his hand (on a... handrail?), and the drops of blood that splash onto the bouquet-unfriendly specimen cause it first to throw an almighty tantrum, then to keel over and conk out. From this he deduces that they are unable to withstand exposure to haemoglobin, but the fact that they'd been merrily digesting females left right and centre gives another unpleasant suggestion altogether…

Meanwhile, G-Force have tracked the signal to 'the city's old water plant', and after smashing through the wall in The Phoenix, they do some natty business with backflips, electric lasso/tightrope hybrids and - of course - Metal Bird Things, and easily overpower Zoltar and company, who beg for mercy and... Mark lets them go because of 'morals'? There must have been a proper reason in the original. At the same time, Chief Anderson and 7-Zark-7 unleash a spray synthesised from 'an iron molecule in haemoglobin combined with water', which puts paid to the flowers; which fizzle out en masse in an extraordinarily protracted sequence that puts the climax of The Evil Dead to shame.

There's just enough time for a couple of wisecracks and morals from G-Force (no prizes for guessing who said what out of "it'll be a while before I buy flowers again", "they look so pretty and harmless" and "they should never have been taken from their home planet") and it's over to 7-Zark-7 and 1-Rover-1 for some rounding up; "Zoltar will have to come up with something else now, and of course he will, that's why I keep a twenty four hour watch… I don't think my Trigatron could have stood up to many more hours of pressure like that", and "[bark]" respectively.

"I'll be alright as soon as my electrobank gets a quick one-hour recharge", muses 7-Zark-7, though it's clearly going to have to wait as this is indeed one of the episodes where a badly drawn rendition of one or more of G-Force comes to visit him.

Princess, almost unrecognisable apart from her costume (and even that's debatable), thanks and kisses him, causing the episode to end on a rather worrying 'BOING' sound. Ironically, the producers of Science Ninja Team Gatchaman would probably have cut that out of Battle Of The Planets.

So, that's The Fierce Flowers, and while it's some considerable distance from being a truly representative example of Battle Of The Planets - even aside from all the nearer-the-knuckle-than-usual content, there's no sign either of the Firey Phoenix or of Zoltar's grovel-inducing floating head thing superior 'O Luminous One' - it's not remotely difficult to see why it made such a lasting impression on everyone who saw it the first time around, many of whom probably couldn't even name a single other episode title (not even Attack Of The Space Terrapin). It's an uncomfortable collision of action thrills and spills and dark futuristic-yet-primal terror and was certainly far removed from the sort of troubles encountered by the well-spoken flat-capped youngsters that were prone to hanging around God's Wonderful Railway. Some may well now scoff at its chopped and changed sanitised nature, but you do have to ponder on how many people later got into other 'cooler' areas of film and TV precisely because of Battle Of The Planets, and in any case, there's a strong sense that in some ways these episodes may actually have been made worse by the re-editing. There are a lot of gaps and leaps in logic that your mind is left to fill in, and the puzzling nature of the narrative jumps can sometimes leave you wondering if they'd left out something that was actually worse than it really was. If that makes any sense at all.

After Part 1's appearance as part of Buzzfax, 'Buzz' was back with 'Results of Back Page Puzzle'. And you can't really get a stronger underlining of just how different The Fierce Flowers was from anything else on offer than an immediate handover to some semi-animated bits of Ceefax smugly explaining how to decipher some Clive Doig-posed code. After all, it's not like there was any other imported entertainment that morning to compare it against. Although that does depend on how you classify The Big Beef.

Every Time The Slightest Little Thing Goes Wrong…

The bizarre and possibly unique problem with Wait Till Your Father Gets Home was not so much that it didn't know what it wanted to be, but rather that nobody else really knew what they wanted it to be. Made by Hanna-Barbera for a primetime adult audience, and indeed originally sighted as an insert in the very definitely adult-orientated sitcom-anthology oddity Love,

American Style (the first of a great many parallels that can be drawn between this show and the Tracey Ullman-proffered The Simpsons, but we'll leave that for others to dwell on as more important matters are afoot here), it did its best by taking potshots at all sides of the turbulent early seventies sociocultural stand-off, with beleaguered everyman Harry Boyle left as exasperated by the arms-stockpiling reds-under-the-beds uber-patriots as he was by those damn radicals and their flag-burning shenanigans. But although the show gamely lasted a whole three seasons, it's doubtful that the audience remained exclusively or even just largely adult; a cartoon is a cartoon to a younger viewer, and to many it must have been simply one of 'their' programmes that was on too late, while parents who would rather have been thrilling to the post-'Nam gritty urban coppering of The Rookies more than likely also felt pretty much like it was one of 'their' programmes that was on too early. Teenagers fuming over the mid-season cancellation of The New People probably didn't much care either way.

Certainly over in the UK, while it may have started out by just edging its way into sitcom-and-game-show land, Wait Till Your Father Gets Home slowly but surely slipped further back into the schedules, and by the mid-eighties the BBC were shoving it out, largely uncut, as by-the-mile filler in the summer holiday morning schedules. Much has been made of how much of the satire, and in particular the very much of-their-time allusions to

Nixon et al, must have sailed straight over the heads of younger viewers, but that really is missing the point and indeed the genius of this odd attempt at audience-straddling. Behind all of the barbed pseudo-topical gags - which were admittedly about as up-to-the-minute as the radio-presenting computer that usurped Bill and Marty in The Simpsons - were broad caricatures of the sort that even the most Current Affairs-averse youngster could understand, recognise and laugh at; in that sense, it was arguably a precursor to the likes of Beavis And Butthead, King Of The Hill and many other more recent animated offerings with intentionally wide appeal. Yes, including the show that we're already sick of mentioning, The Simpsons.

It's perhaps an underlining of just how accessible they were making those socio-political gags that the third episode of the first series focused on a 'hippy'. In 1972. That’s five years after

Monterey Pop and Abbie Hoffman’s attempt to levitate The Pentagon. Three years after Woodstock, two years after cinema audiences thrilled to Bill Compton’s vigilante rampage against those damn lazy do-nothings, and twelve months after Nixon controversially ‘met’ them ‘halfway’. That singing amendment had probably even changed the constitution and made all sorts of crazy laws by then. In short, it’s fair to say that ‘angry’ flutes were no longer as sonically ubiquitous as they had been.

The Hippie – remember man, we’re in America – opens with The Boyle’s doubtless intentionally Nixon-resembling neighbour Ralph Kane, a man who really did believe that there were a lot of flag-burners who had got too much freedom, crouching behind a privet hedge with his small army of patriotic pensioners. Surprisingly, he’s not actually planning to go into people’s houses at night and wreck up the place, but on the lookout for a “pinko Mr. Big with the money from Moscow”. They duly pounce on a shadowy figure that turns out to actually be Harry. The reasons for his clandestine lurking aren’t quite obvious just yet, but the Boyle Family Dog (apparently only ever known as ‘boy’) is clearly very interested in whatever he’s carrying in a paper bag. Either that, or he’s in league with Leonid Brezhnev’s dog. And that, ladies and gentlemen, is Satire, American Style. Erm, apparently.

Then, in true sitcom fashion, it’s straight into the opening titles, and that catchy multi-handed opening song which, you can’t help but notice, bears a striking resemblance to that aforementioned amendment singing about how those liberal freaks go too far. We meet the youths of the Boyle household, variously crashing cars into garage doors, demanding financial handouts, and sliding down banisters into a huge stack of plates that suggest they may have been catering for slightly more than five people. Jamie rifles through a wad of suspiciously-sourced cash, Chet starts a fight with a bag of icing sugar (a fight with the others, not a fight with the actual bag), and in a rather worrying sequence, Alice leaves for a date with a flower-carrying longhair geezer, returning seconds later seeing stars and with her clothing stretched and torn. The lyric that accompanies this is “what daddy doesn’t know won’t hurt ‘em”. Hmm.

Throughout all of this, stern and sensible mom Irma wags her finger and advises the three good-for-nothings to “wait till your father gets, until your father gets, wait till your father gets home”. Which he eventually does, driving along the show’s plushly upholstered logo before pulling up at the house, walking in, and causing the roof to lift off in exasperation in time to a comedy kettle drum boing. Hokey Wolf this is not.

After a title card depicting a very much turned on, tuned in and dropped out version of Harry, the episode proper begins with an exhausted Boyle patriarch returning home from work armed only with a small artillery of downtrodden zingers (“Is that you honey?” – “I don’t know, you’d better check my dog tags”). Irma starts serving dinner, causing Alice, who’s “starving on this diet”, and Jamie, who wants three weeks’ back money from Harry for bringing him the paper as “you can’t run a business on sentiment”, to appear at supersonically voracious speed, but there’s no sign of the usually insatiably-appetited Chet. Indeed, the only sign that he’s even in the house is a quick burst of guitar which is presumably supposed to represent ‘far-out’ psychedelic improvisation but in fact sounds more like the middle bit of I Remember Punk Rock by Vic Reeves. Harry asks him to turn his ‘phonograph’ down, but the reply comes back that it’s actually being played live by Chet’s guitar-toting friend Claude.

His musical efforts may not sound too much like The WC Fields Memorial Electric String Band, but Claude is as tie-dyed in the wool a hippy as they come, with his headband, coloured shades, freaked-out hairstyle, and proclamation that he doesn’t live around here but “sometimes here… sometimes there… like, the idea of living in one place is old-fashioned”. Needless to say,

Harry is not especially impressed by this philosophy – especially once Claude elects to treat them to a taste of his singer-songwriting at the dinner table – and launches into yet another barrage of one-liners; “I live in a great big house I call The Universe” – “What an honour, out of the whole universe he picked our kitchen!”, “He’s a philosophical non-conformist” – “Oh, unemployed, huh?”, “He writes all his own stuff dad!” “No kidding, I thought it was Irving Berlin”. None of this does anything to dent Chet’s admiration for his new partner-in-slacking, however, and with a quick bit of tutting at Harry and

Irma for their generation’s attitude to money (“I wish you’d tell that to the butcher”), Claude readily accepts an invitation to stay overnight. Night-time in the Boyle household is seen out with Irma making a cutting gag about the formulaic nature of real life NBC light drama Marcus Welby, M.D., and it’s interesting to note that from this perspective, having a go at a rival TV show seems the most radical thing about this episode of Wait Till Your

Father Gets Home by some considerable distance. Even if it was one on the same network.

The next evening, after dodging Ralph’s plot to rescue The Boyles from the long-haired commie holding them hostage and singing anti-American songs about peace and freedom, Harry comes home to find Claude is still there. As Claude purportedly has no place to go (“he doesn’t get along with his folks” – “Already I like ‘em!”), Chet insists that he has to stay. Claude immediately takes full advantage of Harry and Irma’s reluctant hospitality through the suspiciously un-hippylike gambit of enthusiastically scoffing all of the burgers at a family barbecue. What’s more, he insists that they have to be served on the inevitably promptly broken best china, as paper plates qualify as ‘tree-hating’. This drives a processed meat-deprived Jamie to salute the metaphorical

HIPPY MUST GO flag, and together with his parents works up the cunning ploy of getting Claude a job at the factory Harry manages. Surely, like any good decent American, he’ll crumble at the first sign of a payslip?

Unfortunately not, as Claude promptly leads his co-workers in an anti-materialistic singalong, with not one of them shouting ‘JUDAS!’. An exasperated Harry (“twenty five years in business and today we had our first music festival!”) promptly comes up with an even more audacious plan, and shows up to breakfast sporting full hippy attire and attitude. While this far-out gambit inevitably causes Ralph to panic and enlist his company of rabid pensioners to build a perimeter wall around the Boyle house, accidentally bricking up Sergeant Whittaker’s leg in the process, it initially seems to backfire and, rather than feeling threatened or mocked, Claude is actually encouraging of his apparent new convert. Chet, however, starts to cave when Harry’s new ecological values prevent him from using the family car. Alice’s resolve is similarly weakened when dinner turns out to consist of a Claude-endorsed one salad between everyone, prompting her to attempt to make off with the dog’s bowl. When Jamie slips out and returns with a burger – “one of the benefits of being materialistic” – Harry attempts to covertly do likewise, leading directly into that previously baffling pre-credits sequence. It’s replayed here exactly frame for frame; which may seem puzzling until you consider that the overwhelming majority of ‘normal’

Hanna-Barbera productions were routinely padded out to their purported running time with several minutes’ worth of episode-filling repeated footage sequences, be it Hong Kong Phooey changing into his superhero clobber or Godzilla responding to a signal sent out by Brock and company. Claude’s views on this breadheaded swindle of the masses are sadly unrecorded.

The next morning, a news crew turn up to run a story on Ralph’s wall, but before the assembled Boyles can give Claude his marching orders, the caterwauling good-for-nothing gets offered a job writing jingles for commercials by a sponsor who’s overheard his singing. “Twenty five grand a year – and I’m grabbing it, see you at the bank!” is his decidedly anti-anti-materialistic parting shot, causing Chet and Alice to lament the fact that he was a fraud all along, and Jamie to lament that he should have held out for thirty thousand. Then Ralph’s wall collapses, the entire family laugh, and the hippy menace has been comprehensively trounced by satire only half a decade too late. They won’t be doing THAT again.

In spite of the sociocultural holes that more or less pick themselves in the episode, it has to be said that The Hippie stands up very well as a piece of entertainment. It’s witty, relatively even-handed, and far better drawn and animated than popular memory might suggest. The voice cast put a great deal of energy and enthusiasm into making their two-dimensional counterparts seem likeable and realistic archetypes, especially Tom Bosley as Harry, Joan Gerber as both Irma and Private Whittaker, and none other than Jackie Earle Haley as Jamie. In fact, in this regard, Wait Till Your Father Gets Home is more reminiscent of Family Guy than The Simpsons, and if truth be told it has a similar air of blunt satire, political agenda and explanation-free surrealism.

In some respects, it wasn’t quite that wide of the satirical mark either. While hippydom in itself may have been all over bar the shouting at audience members on the David Frost Show by

1972, average ordinary Americans weren’t quite so down with the hip lingo and probably still lived in a state of perpetual anxiety that Max Frost and Prez were going to sweep the board at the next election. Little did they suspect where the real risk to their liberty and freedom would come from, or quite what was going on while this episode was in production, but that was a whole different burgled hotel room. In any case, certain of the more prominent long-haired freaks actually did turn out to have been all about the bread after all, though it’s safe to say that we’d never have heard Tuli Kupferberg singing for the 3 Musketeers Bar dollar.

Wait Till Your Father Gets Home was one of the more outlandish experiments of a time when Hanna-Barbera just couldn’t let the experimenting go; around the same time they were also messing around with live action (The Banana Splits Adventure Hour, Korg: 70,000 B.C., The Skatebirds, that terrifying variety show with ‘Honey’ and ‘Sis’), live action over the top of animation (The New Adventures Of Huckleberry Finn), full-on genre pastiches (Hong Kong Phooey, Mumbly), and the just plain inexplicable The Robonic Stooges. Yet although it might not have taken off in the manner and with the audience that was intended, the fact that, like so many of their other efforts around this time, it could not get away from the fact that it was ‘just’ a cartoon would stand it in good stead later on. It was, after all, an ‘adult’ animation that children could still ‘get’, and it’s telling that when it did find its way into the BBC’s holiday morning filler schedules, a large proportion of that target audience preferred it to the past-their-prime drivel that Hanna-Barbera were trying to force on them by then. Ralph may not have approved of un- American activities, but he’d have hated Heyyy, It’s The King! even more.

Time Will Crawl

Every day during the school summer holidays, at somewhere around 10:55am on BBC1, time would stand still.

This was, of course, the weird five minute limbo between what the TV schedules delineated as the 'morning' and the 'afternoon', when the initial crack of dawn exhilaration at a lack of school and a couple of hours' worth of mostly pretty good programming (and, let's be honest about this, the BBC's Monkees/Pink Panther/Battle Of The Planets-heavy lineups were always preferable to ITV's lazy slinging out of a ropey film and an even ropier imported 'edutainment' series like 3-2-1 Contact or Unicorn Tales) gave way to a realisation that an afternoon of mindless ennui and parental-instigated trudging around hardware stores would follow. And in between those two extremes fell an atemporal vacuum that seemed to stretch on into infinity.

Imagine, if you will, that time had been stopped by Hiro Nakamura right in the middle of the slowing-down-and-speeding-up bit of Time Has Come Today by The Chambers Brothers at the exact same moment that the mechanism of the Trumpton town clock was jammed by that paint pot, and amplify the effect tenfold, and you're not even halfway there. It's not even useful to make reference to those slow motion sequences in Doctor Who And The Time Monster, or indeed the gag about it making Rag Tag And Bobtail look like The Wizard Of Speed And Time stuck on fast forward, as that would give the impression that time still perceptively moved forwards during those nominal five minutes, which it most certainly did not. The accepted boundaries of chronometric physics were simply not interested in applying.

And it was in this Galileo-averse gap in the schedules that the most banal, inconsequential and interminable animated series ever committed to celluloid would set up camp, and not so much refuse to leave as expand exponentially to fill the void. The worst offender of these by some considerable distance was C.P. And Qwikstitch, which depicted the cheaply rendered escapades of two miserable scrap-hewn R2D2 and C3PO emulants encountering the inevitable 'problems a little like yours and mine' whilst stranded on spare part-strewn planet Junkus Minor; literally a piss-poor imagination-free counterpart to Star Wars: Droids. In fact it's quite possible that nothing ever actually happened in it at all, but so powerful and pervasive was the accompanying eradication of temporal awareness that there was no option but to watch. Even the act of changing the channel was too deeply rooted in established scientific frameworks to seem feasible. The Why Don't You? Gang tried to warn us all to switch off our television sets and go out and do something less boring instead, they really did.

Eventually, after what seemed like whatever the equivalent of millennia are in a parareality with no use for gradations of time, normality would jolt back in with the brief and quickly faded out thrill of the Wimbledon/Cricket opening music. And yet even the phenomenon itself seemed to last for longer than it actually did; by 1986, with the rolling out of a structured BBC daytime service, and the associated move towards branded and strip-stranded children's programming, that five minute black hole of time had all but collapsed in on itself under the combined onslaught of But First... This and Andy Crane reading out the top ten in a leather jacket. The BBC did try to harness its reality-warping properties with daytime schedule staple Five To Eleven, which offered a five minute window for 'reflection' as bland actors read out bland poetry and some panpipe music played over a photo of a gorilla, but that simply made time appear to be moving very very slowly, not stopped completely. It just wasn't the same thing at all.

Whether C.P. and Qwikstitch ever managed to find their way off Junkus Minor is something that, frankly, nobody knows nor cares about. But in a completely unintended sense, their adventures took them into a realm of scientific improbability that even Steven Moffat-era Doctor Who would have had second thoughts about. Well, possibly.

Could It Be Magic?

Relax had Two Tribes. The Secret Diary Of Adrian Mole Aged 13 ¾ had The Growing Pains Of Adrian Mole. Rockliffe's Babies had

Rockliffe's Folly. Even C.A.B. had C.A.B. 2.

But the Rubik's Cube? Well, that's one unexpected runaway eighties success story that never actually inspired a sequel. Or so you'd think, given how it's now pretty much uniformly used as a textbook example of a one-off here-today-gone-tomorrow short-lived global sensation to rank with The Dirtwater Dynasty and It Bites. Which is a very strange way of looking at it, as not only does that version of events imply that precisely none of the millions upon millions upon millions addicted to attempting to master the art of flipping edges and twirling corners before flinging it at the wall in frustration with a copy of a You Can Do

The Cube by Patrick Bossert in hot pursuit - in numbers and with an intensity that made Flappy Birds look like Atlantis Is Calling (S.O.S. For Love) by Modern Talking - would ever have been salivating at the prospect of a brand new follow-up puzzle from the same team, it also fails to entertain the likelihood that Professor Erno Rubik would have wanted to further capitalise on the phenomenal worldwide popularity of his maths homework that got out of hand.

The non-clip-show-friendly fact of the matter is that once the original plastic mind-and-wrist-hurter had caught on, a legion of cube-infringing imitators soon sprang up like third division Britpop bands singing about eating some loverley fish and chips, hoping to cash in on the purported puzzle craze by convincing punters to fork out for market stall-proffered Rubik-alikes in all sizes and shapes from barrel to tennis ball. And like a first division Britpop band, Professor Rubik responded to this poorly catered-for demand by changing direction entirely, promptly developing Rubik's Snake, a twisty turny angular shapemaking whatnot that was pretty much that thing from the episode of

The Monkees set in a toy factory made reality. Actually, Oasis make a bit of a mess of that analogy, but the point that hasn't actually been made yet still stands - namely that underneath all the branding and promotional fanfare the Snake was really just a fun novelty, and what everyone really wanted from the house of Rubik was another fully certified brainteaser and mindbender. And, bowing to public demand, a fully certified brainteaser and mindbender from the house of Rubik was exactly what they got in time for Christmas 1986.

Rubik's Magic, as it was rather grandly dubbed, consisted of a set of eight elaborately-hinged plastic squares, each bearing a portion of two of three multicoloured rings. Initially discrete, the point of the puzzle was to jumble the circular sections up and then reassemble them in one of many interlocked forms of ascending difficulty. It was, the global populace were breathlessly informed, the brand new trailblazing puzzle sensation with more than a hint of mid-eighties sophistication; literally the next Rubik's Cube. And so it was that on Christmas Day 1986, shortly after flicking through their copies of Cool's Out! and scoffing their Citrus Spring selection boxes, an entire generation of youngsters attempted to get to grips with the foldy-flipboard-interlinked-circles thing. And attempted. And attempted. And... gave up.

Much like the Sinclair QL was to the ZX Spectrum, or if you prefer like Dramarama: The Young Person's Guide To Going Backwards In The World was to Dramarama: The Young Person's Guide To Getting Their Ball Back, this wasn't even so much an attempt to reinvent the wheel as it was to reinvent an individual spoke. Nobody could accuse Rubik's Magic of skimping on the need for dexterity, logic or flashy displays of lateral thinking, but the important element it left out of the equation was fun. It didn't look as appealing as the Cube, it lacked the vital fiddlability factor (in fact, fiddle too idly with Rubik's Magic and you ran the risk of twisting one of the interconnecting wires unusably in the wrong direction), and played straight into the hands - literally and metaphorically - of people who would solve it and then go

'ahhhhhhhhhhhh!'. If anyone did try to dazzle you with their Magic-solving skills, it was about as impressive as the 'David Copperfield Unplugged' tricks from Chris Morris' Radio 1 show.

Where the Rubik's Cube had inspired still-bewildering Ruby Spears animated hijinks Rubik The Amazing Cube, Rubik's Magic could barely even scrape a mention on BBC2's 'popular science' shows. Patrick Bossert's You Can Do The Magic would sadly never see print. He may as well have invented Rubik's Shark and jumped over it.

Within a couple of years, Rubik's Magic was a regular trestle table sight at church bazaars. And yet, for all its shortfalling in terms of hands-on puzzling thrills, it at least had and indeed retains a charming air of mid-eighties highbrow high-concept folly, and we can only guess at what might be found on a Fantastic Eighties! compilation with the Magic rather than the Cube on the front (though the smart money's on Atlantis Is Calling (S.O.S For Love) by Modern Talking). There was an attempt at making amends with Rubik's Clock in 1988, which presented the hapless puzzle-solver with nine chronologically-skewed clockfaces in the style of one of Peter Petrelli's hallucinations, and challenged them to reset the mechanically-interlocking dials to all show the same time. However, this wasn't actually created by Professor Rubik, who simply bought the rights to market it, and so it doesn't really count.

Outwardly impressive, but lacking the true credentials, it was, in so many ways, the Beautiful South to his earlier creations' Housemartins.

But It’s Got Pipes In It!

For two nights early in 1987, it felt as though television had entirely lost control of itself.

Cutting a very long story very short indeed, Hardwicke House was an anarchic sitcom made by Central for ITV and set in a failing mid-eighties comprehensive school populated by feral pupils and incompetent and sadistic staff. Its humour was pitched somewhere between the already pretty controversial 'kids run amok' post-punk children's comedy shows Educating Marmalade and Your Mother Wouldn't Like It (with which it shared some of its cast), and the politically-charged violent slapstick and taboo-breaking of the Comic Strip crowd; indeed, Rik Mayall and Adrian Edmondson were set to show up halfway through the series as Lenny and Tiny, two highly dangerous former pupils fresh out of borstal.

Hardwicke House had been made with ITV's edgy late-night Sunday comedy slot - home to Spitting Image, Hale And Pace, Hot Metal and other fondly recalled shows you were 'allowed to stay up for' - in mind, but to the surprise and indeed concern of everyone involved with the show, was shunted into a midweek late evening slot, reputedly with the aim of capitalising on the recent early evening success of Central's Girls On Top, an itself hardly controversy-free (are you noticing a theme developing here?) vehicle for Dawn French, Jennifer Saunders, Tracey Ullman and Ruby Wax.

And so it was that, accompanied by a massive push from TV Times, those first two episodes went out on successive days between 8pm and 9pm, in what was possibly the most severe misjudging of the likelihood of scoring a hit TV show of all time. Of course, it was a 'hit' with those whom presumably would have sought it out in a later timeslot anyway, and I can personally attest to the playground being abuzz with excitement the next day (particularly over the scene with school bully Slasher Bates' gang eating raw liver as an initiation ceremony, and Granville Saxton's astonishing performance as the Dickensianly cruel Mr Fowl), much as it was over Blackadder II, Filthy Rich & Catflap,

Happy Families and Cool It! around the same time, but it sat much less comfortably with those who had been exposed to it by accident rather than design.

The first episode, with its rough language, hefty swipes at apartheid and teacher with an unhealthy interest in half-naked boys, upset a huge proportion of the viewing audience, and the second, with its infamous electrocution gag, upset even more – in all seriousness, you would not believe how utterly massive and headline-pervading and indeed virtually tangible the outcry was unless you'd been there to witness it first hand; the overall impression was that there was almost a panic that television had wilfully launched an assault on taste and decency and that law and order would break down if something wasn't 'done' 'about' it straight away - to the extent that the series was pulled with immediate effect, and the already commissioned second series was written off at considerable expense; and, for that matter, a projected video release and tie-in 'School Yearbook' were summarily cancelled.

And that very nearly wasn't all – loath to admit to their own mistake, and keen to pander to the offended, Central's 'high ups' originally demanded that the series was wiped to eradicate any danger of it accidentally causing them further upset by reappearing in some form; it's difficult not to draw parallels here with the whole 'Video Nasties' phenomenon, which provoked many campaigners and politicians into suggesting quite sanely and soberly that those hapless low-budget Italian horror films could somehow affect people by their very existence from beyond the tape. Some subterfuge from the rightly disgruntled staff at Central saw to it that the tapes survived in clandestine circumstances, but they were hardly exactly at risk of damage through overuse. Rumblings of a late night reshowing later in the year, or even on Channel 4, came and went (well, there is still a question mark hanging over that, but that's a discussion for another time), and even if the tapes hadn't been erased, Hardwicke House itself had been as good as erased from TV history.

Hardly surprisingly, most people just seemed to forget about Hardwicke House after that - you'll search in vain for a mention of it in Roger Wilmut's Didn't You Kill My Mother-In-Law?, an exhaustive history of alternative comedy (and Mayall and Edmondson in particular) published barely eighteen months later, and it also bafflingly failed to join the rogue's gallery of similarly controversy-stricken drama and comedy shows in BBC2's TV Hell night in 1992.

And yet there were those who just couldn't forget the thrill of what had been, whether retrospective commentators like it or not, a wild and dangerous intrusion into safe and sanitised fun family entertainment, and the mixture of incredulity and injustice that they had felt when they were suddenly told that they weren't allowed to see any more of it. Yes, injustice. Youngsters feel aggrieved about the most trivial and unreasonable things. Live with it. Anyway, as time went by, injustice was replaced by curiosity – as I've already noted the listings for the untransmitted episodes of Hardwicke House were amongst the first things I looked up when I realised my local library had back issues of TV Times available for research purposes – and eventually incredulity that, even in an age where all manner of much more sensitive material has been prised from much more highly regulated archives and a few smudgy black and white frames of a forthcoming Doctor Who episode can be all over the internet in seconds, not a single second of unseen Hardwicke House - apart from an outtake that regularly does the rounds of the TV's Naughtiest Blunders-type shows - had ever surfaced in any form.

A couple of years back, it looked as though all those unseen seconds of Hardwicke House finally were going to surface in one particular form, and I was commissioned to write a detailed history of the show for a prospective DVD release. The tapes had been located, the cast and crew clearances had all been obtained (which in itself was apparently no mean feat) and I had a fine time speaking to some of them and finding out some amazing behind-the- scenes detail. Unfortunately – and this really IS cutting a long story short - its untransmitted status meant that it had to be assessed as a 'new' programme by ITV's approval committee.

The fact that this was only a short while after 'Sachsgate' should probably be taken into account, but it seems that they didn't much care for it at all, and refused to sanction its release on the grounds that it was not the sort of programme that ITV would wish itself to be associated with. This was largely due to - and I don't think I can really be accused of 'spoilering' a series that nobody can see - the final episode, which would have gone out in Easter week, in which a vicar gets hit by a falling cross at the school's Easter Service, and the staff attempt to cover up the incident. Not exactly Full House, admittedly, but who in the name of sanity did they think would even see an episode at the far end of a DVD release of a deeply, deeply obscure comedy series notably short on big names, let alone take sufficient offence to cause any actual tangible trouble for anyone?

As with the DVD release of the similarly (if less severely) neglected Fist Of Fun, which did come out but was forcibly shorn of inoffensive material for ludicrous reasons, the kindest thing you can accuse these decision makers of is trying to tick a predefined amount of boxes on someone else's orders. The least kindest thing you can accuse them of, of course, is sheer cowardice, and capitulation to what the sort of people who ideally should be largely ignored might conceivably and theoretically be expected to potentially think about something that is probably so far off their radar that we'd actually need a bigger campaign to get them to notice it than the one against the show in the first place. Meanwhile, ITV continues to gleefully associate itself with exploitative 'docudramas', glorified witch hunts under the pretence of 'hard hitting' current affairs, and that thing with Dom Joly in. Still, at least they protected us all from seeing Slasher drop someone over a banister.

So near, and yet so, so far. And yet it's difficult to convince people of just how much this trivial and inconsequential television programme, that means absolutely nothing either positive or negative in the history of the medium, means to me personally, or for that matter of why it does. Some have bluntly and repeatedly told me it's not funny, as if that should be a line drawn under the whole matter, apparently missing the point that its weirdly off-target gags that misfire more often than not are actually part of the appeal in the first place. The world would be a dull place if we shunned everything bar committee-approved 'classic sitcoms'.

Others have scoffed that I wouldn't be nearly so interested if it hadn't been 'banned'; apart from being possibly the most pointlessly hypothetical argument of all time, that discounts the fact that, for those two exhilarating days, it was up there with so many other shows of its era that, rightly or wrongly, I'm still ever so slightly interested in.

But above all I just want to see it, and it seems ludicrous that now that I'm a fully grown adult, who has quite legally and legitimately sat through genuinely offensive films and albums (and that's not even getting started on the vile exploitative trash that gets forced into our consciousness unbidden by modern day TV), I should be told by fingerwagging PR-conscious nobodies that I'm not allowed to. And above even that, I want to see half an hour's worth of Rik and Ade at the top of their game, and it is truly staggering that when the proper Rik Mayall tribute shows rolled around, there wasn't a single frame of them driving haphazardly into the playground and perving over Pam Ferris. Remember, somebody somewhere has decided that you are not allowed to see that.

So, that's Hardwicke House, and that's why I will keep going on and on and on and on and on and on and on about it until it gets broadcast or released.

Who’s On, Wogan?

Wogan, the BBC's flagship early evening chat show, was a regular fixture on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays between 1982 and 1992.

Doctor Who, their occasionally flagship early evening family adventure serial, was a regular fixture on Saturdays between 1963 and 1986. And when Doctor Who finally slipped out of the

Saturday evening schedules, the two programmes ran up against each other in an unexpected way.

Having tried to quietly cancel it back in 1985, only to find that 'Doctor Who fans' and 'quietly' are concepts as alien to each other as The Voord, the BBC had been forced against their better judgement to bow to public pressure (and it's always worth pointing out that there was sane, rational and mainstream public pressure as well as all the buffoons picketing Colin Moynighan's house dressed as Vega Nexos or whatever it was) and bring it back. As they hadn't particularly wanted to bring it back, and an initial attempt at recapturing its Saturday Night audience had failed spectacularly and taken Roland Rat with it, there was only one realistic option left open to the BBC - to shove it away where nobody would see it, and it could just sort of fade from view like a badly-rendered mid-seventies Tardis dematerialisation.

Hence from its low-key high-profile relaunch in 1987 to its quiet gurgling down a plughole at the very end of the eighties, Doctor Who was scheduled on Monday and/or Wednesday evenings directly against Coronation Street.

Yes, that's Coronation Street, the ratings-conquering ITV soap opera that had not long celebrated its twenty-fifth anniversary, and indeed was so popular that plans were afoot to bring in a third weekly instalment. Doctor Who on the other hand had just waded through two messy series featuring its least popular lead actor by some distance, so it wasn't so much not a fair fight as not anything even resembling a fight to begin with. Doctor

Who got the polarity of its neutron flow comprehensively reversed by Brian Tilsley and company and there was nothing that anyone could do about it. The fact that even most of its supposed fans were gleefully sticking the boot in didn't exactly help, admittedly, but you can't help wondering how much of the carping about 'pantomime embarrassment' and sneering at Sylvester McCoy fighting a cardboard monster made of a rubber set or something actually came from people who wanted to make sure that they got to watch Coronation Street on the colour TV set.

The average household at that time would more than likely have had a single colour television set and a black and white portable in the 'other room', and a combination of majority rule, passive aggressive occupation of armchairs and argumentative tactics learned from the soaps themselves usually resulted in the more mainstream-orientated members of the family getting their way and getting to watch in colour. The hapless Doctor Who fan would therefore have to fiddle about with that crackle-prone tuning dial thing until they got a decent enough signal to watch the latest exploits of Mr. Ratcliffe and The Kandyman in glorious monochrome. True, it wasn't as unfair as when poor old dad was made to watch the snooker in black and white, but you can hear the massed fumings of injustice reverberate to this day.

In the hope of preventing armed revolution in the living room, an uneasy truce was usually arrived at whereby the Doctor Who fan was allowed to video the show instead to watch in colour at some later date, and that's where their practical problems began. With blank videotapes costing a comparatively fair amount, available recording space at a premium (if you worked it out correctly you could fit seven episodes on an E180, requiring a budget-friendly two tapes per series; leave it recording for any longer than was strictly necessary and you were forking out for a new tape for one solitary episode), and little realistic hope of seeing any of the new episodes again otherwise – the BBC had released approximately two and a half Doctor Who stories on video by that point, and repeats seemed indescribably unlikely - getting the whole episode but nothing more on tape was paramount. And, due to the need to flit between two rooms in order to accomplish this – nobody upon nobody had the video hooked up to their 'other' television - a very tricky operation indeed.

Thus it was that from about half past seven every Monday and/or

Wednesday evening, a nation's hallways were filled with fans nervily listening out for the closing comments and closing music of Wogan, trying to work out the precise moment when they could press record with minimal tapewasting collateral damage. One shudders to think how many obsolete old tapes there are out there, wrapped in line-drawn 'Tape Library' covers done by a bloke at the Sci-Fi local group, containing late eighties episodes of Doctor Who interspersed with twenty seconds of the closing titles of Wogan.

Mind you, you do have to feel for those fans who actually liked both Doctor Who and Coronation Street... but that's another story.

You Belong In Rock’n’Roll

So why, at an all-time career height of popularity, did David Bowie see fit to form his much-derided band Tin Machine?

Well, if you believe the average prat writing a boxout list at the foot of a Guardian article on flop albums, it was 'his mid-life crisis'. Nothing more, nothing less. Four years and three albums dismissed with a bit of sneering from someone who themselves is probably no stranger to acting their shoe size rather than their age, and whom more than likely hasn't heard any of those three albums anyway, let alone Bus Stop (Country

Version).

The reality of it, and indeed the it that, whatever your opinion of the album, led to Reality, is – surprise surprise - ever so slightly different. To understand why Tin Machine made their expectation-confounding appearance at the end of the eighties, you really need to look at the expectation-meeting that Bowie had been doing for the rest of the decade. Well, excepting Scary Monsters... And Super Creeps, Alabama Song, the Baal's Hymn EP and all the rest of that turn-of-the-decade post-Berlin avant-garde material, but that's where and how it all really starts.

Let's Dance, Live Aid, the launch of Now That's What I Call Music!, and so many other small but significant routes into the mass mainstream audience had conspired to push David Bowie into somewhere he probably shouldn't have been and very clearly didn't want to be, and not unreasonably he felt obliged to indulge in an extended outburst of crowd-pleasing. The Let's Dance album, while certainly one of his most listenable, was not one of his more artistically challenging moments, and this fed directly into the inspiration-free void (alright, Loving The Alien aside) of the for once not unfairly maligned Tonight, and the anti-climactic Never Let Me Down, which sees a set of mostly very strong songs buried beneath ear-assaultingly overloaded eighties production that even Bowie himself now seems to regret; standout track Time Will Crawl has only ever appeared on recent compilations in a vastly-improved stripped-back mix, while one song, Too Dizzy, has proved sufficiently embarrassing to be removed from the album itself.

In between those two under-inspiring efforts came a handful of singles that seemed to suggest that even Bowie himself was only too aware of his creative straitjacket. Written and recorded with the not exactly chart-troubling Pat Metheny Group, This Is Not America was a wilfully obtuse diversion from the prevailing lighters-in-the- air mood of the time; the lightweight but fun

Dancing In The Street seemed to be poking fun at his current star status (not least in the accompanying video); and Absolute Beginners is quite simply one of the best songs that Bowie has ever written. If it's never quite nudged into the upper echelons of the public-perceived Bowie Canon, it's largely due to its association with a film that people can't seem to look past on account of its poor reputation, despite the fact that they've probably never seen it themselves and that indeed it's actually a lot better than Halliwell's Film Guide would have you believe. And yes, there is a bit of an important theme developing there.

The idea for Bowie's career detour started to formulate during

1987's post-Never Let Me Down 'Glass Spider' tour, an expensive and not entirely successful attempt at taking his avant-garde ideas to the mainstream. During the tour, Bowie was both introduced to experimental guitarist Reeves Gabrels, and reacquainted with Iggy Pop's former backing musicians, bassist Tony and drummer Hunt Sales. Desperate to try something new, yearning for the relative anonymity of being part of a band, fascinated by the proto grunge sounds of the likes of the Pixies, and quite possibly indulging in a spot of Eno-inspired lateral thinking, Bowie had the idea of bringing these decidedly non-mainstream musicians together in a new band, and initiated rehearsals with the stated aim of 'making the kind of music we want to listen to'. Rather than trying to take the avant-garde to the mainstream, he was now intending to drag the mainstream, kicking and screaming, towards the avant-garde. And as we shall see, they would not like this one bit.

So, Tin Machine look like an astonishing prospect; you've got an acclaimed avant-garde guitarist, the rhythm section from Lust For Life, and David Bowie. What's more, you've got a David Bowie keen to find his creative fire again, helped along in no small part by the voluble Sales brothers poking fun at his more overblown ideas, and Gabrels' even more influential mantra, repeated whenever Bowie brought up commercial and artistic things that that he didn't want to do - "stop doing it". What's more, they were all expecting and indeed were expected to contribute to the songwriting and singing. As will later become all too apparent, this laudable band democracy would ultimately prove to be as much of an achilles heel as a strength... but let's save that for later. Nobody even knows that Tin Machine exist yet.

By the end of 1988, Tin Machine - naming themselves after a song they had written pretty much on the spot in rehearsals – were in the studio. Recording as live in record time, and with music and lyrics both intentionally left rough and unpolished, the band had an entire album and releasable outtakes to spare in the can before 1989 had even really started. During the sessions, without having formally announced the project, Tin Machine played a secret gig at a small club near to Compass Point Studios in Nassau, to audible audience debate over whether the bearded figure onstage was actually David Bowie or not. And when the band’s self-titled debut album - yes, the one with that bafflingly mocked sharp suited position-changing cover photo – appeared with astonishing speed in May, it did so to what were initially enthusiastic reviews; and, before Q started having to have endless bastard lists of the Eighteen Thousand Worst Ever Albums Ever Made every three sodding minutes, it made their list of best albums at the end of the year. So why's it treated with such disdain now?

Well, for starters, there's the wider public's reaction. Critics, and a sizeable proportion of devotees who knew their Subterraneans from their Cat People (Putting Out Fire), might well have embraced this unexpected turn of events, but there's no escaping the fact that a damagingly large number of more recent converts from across the globe, who liked that he'd apparently now joined the long line-up of formerly innovative rock stars who had given in to the urge to coast along at a crowdpleasing artistic standstill, would have - not unreasonably - found it disorientating and unpleasant, and probably even felt ripped off (and music snobs should accept that there's nothing wrong with that feeling, as anyone who owns Tarantula by Ride will wearily attest). Meanwhile, many critics would soon revise their opinion on finding that this 'band' genuinely were placing themselves on an equal footing even when it came to promotional duties, and it's quite likely that many of the more scathing articles that followed were written by journalists who had found themselves chatting to Hunt, Tony or Reeves when they had been expecting a chance to meet David.

Even then, some actual hardcore Bowie fans weren't exactly keen, which is as good a moment as any to start talking about the album itself. In fairness, it's an incredible departure even by the tiresomely over-analysed and overexaggerated standards of the 'chameleon of rock', and is as much the other three's album as it is his. It's rooted in influences from a genre that, even before it really had a name as such, had deliberately set itself apart from established norms, and involved the sort of sounds that some listeners might even have actually turned towards the likes of Bowie to avoid. They're also the sort of sounds that in some regards haven't aged well, based around a clattering wall of noise and lacking the finesse and diversity that Nirvana would have everyone emulating a short while later. And on top of that, some simply didn't like the lyrics - direct, less poetic, and often dealing with subjects (poverty and drug abuse in Crack City, violence as cheap entertainment in Video Crime, neo-fascism in Under The God and so on and so on) that well-to-do rock stars are hardly exactly well placed to pontificate on; in balance, however, many of these were influenced by the work of Gabrels' investigative journalist wife Sara Terry, and in any case, a millionaire rock star shining a light on the uglier day to day realities of corners of the globe that had been left to decay in the name of profit was something of a welcome relief after several years of them all asking us to put our hands in our pockets rather than address the actual underlying causes of situations.

If, however, you were an impressionable youngster who liked David Bowie (and was still unaware enough of notions of 'canon' to think Day In Day Out was a great song) every bit as much as the murky, speaker-rattling noise buzzing out of John Peel's Radio 1 show, the idea of the two colliding was about as exciting as it got, and perhaps those listeners who did accept it on face value are worth listening to. They'd probably tell you that Heaven's In Here, Prisoner Of Love, Under The God and Baby Can Dance are easily superior to the bulk of his previous three albums, that the weary yet snarling riposte to where he had found himself I Can't Read ("I don't know a book from Countdown") is even better than that, that Bus Stop provides a brief note of comic relief with its short sharp story of a commuter finding religion, and that the laid-back Amazing dispenses with the sonic overload to present some intriguing hints of where they might go next.

True, there are also a couple of throwaway thrashes and a jarring cover of John Lennon's Working Class Hero - not exactly the sturdiest of songs to begin with - but how many albums, and this does include most of Bowie's, have never included at least one fish out of quality-related water? And anyway, two of those throwaway thrashes were only included on the CD, back in the days when an unwritten law stated that all releases on the brand spanking new format had to have additional exclusive 'content' or audiophiles would cry, so technically they can't really be held up as shortcomings anyway. Plus on top of all this, those who 'got' the band were rewarded with a top smart non-LP single in the form of a rowdy - and decidedly pointed - cover of Bob Dylan's Maggie's Farm. Less than a year later, she was gone. Makes you think.

Then fast-forward eighteen months to the summer of 1991 - one of the most packed in Bowie's entire career, with the Sound + Vision tour and box set, the arrival of his back catalogue on CD with fantastic bonus tracks (notably Bombers, I Pray, Ole and the astonishing Some Are), the pre-fame singles collection Early On, and the quietly forgotten 'best of' Changesbowie and its accompanying remix single Fame '90 - and while the post-Live

Aid contingent might well have been content to be blissfully boring themselves senseless with Simply Red and Bryan Adams, it was a rather exciting time to be a fan of indie, alt-rock, or whatever you prefer to call it. Even aside from the onslaught of noise that was about to crashland from across the Atlantic, there was still just enough hope left that The Stone Roses, Happy Mondays and Inspiral Carpets might take on the mainstream and win; hope that, for three wildly differing reasons, would be dashed before the year was out. The KLF were busy taking art terrorism into the orbit of even the most empty-headed chart-head. Creation Records were gearing up to release four hotly tipped and eagerly anticipated albums that between them reinvented everyone's idea of what 'independent' music could achieve both creatively and commercially. And into the middle of all this walked Tin Machine.

No, really. Literally into the middle of it. Perhaps recognising that trying to pull their angular conceit off in the arena-playing arena had worked against them with the first album, this time around

Tin Machine did everything they could to place themselves alongside the bands that were technically their musical peers, to the extent of recording a live set for Radio 1's The Evening

Session, performing on hip and happening TV shows like Paramount City, and embarking on the 'It's My Life' Tour around the sort of venues that Bowie probably hadn't even seen since about 1969; indeed, I would get to see and hear them in the exact same venue where around that time I would more normally have gone to see the likes of Ride and My Bloody Valentine. Even the new album, Tin Machine II, was released - thanks to Bowie's disgruntlement with EMI - on sort of vaugely-ish independent label Victory. Yes, so it was technically bankrolled by JVC, but it was formed especially for Tin Machine, and they licensed the album for UK release to long-established independent London anyway, so who's counting?

Half of Tin Machine II is vastly better than almost anything on the band's debut. And, unfortunately, half of it is much, much worse. On the plus side, there's the propulsive Baby Universal, the melodic if slightly overlong (and with slightly ideologically dubious lyrics) One Shot, likeable Roxy Music-alike You Belong

In Rock'n'Roll (although the accompanying cover of Roxy Music's If There Is Something falls somewhat wide of the mark), and Bowie's soaring, affecting salute to the environmentally ravaged architectural beauty of Indonesian district Amlapura. The other tracks, however, veer from the likeable but unremarkable Betty Wrong to Hunt Sales' notorious bluesy plod Stateside, which enjoys the dubious distinction of being the most roundly disliked song ever to appear on a David Bowie record. In its defence - which is not a sentence I had ever envisaged myself writing - as bluesy plods go it's at least on the tolerable side, the bands they sought to emulate and indeed Bowie himself as a solo artist were never averse to including listener-challenging bits of overlong ill-fittedness when it suited them (any scoffing Pixies fans are respectfully asked when the last time they listened to Silver was), and to throw things into a bit of perspective it's not like The Police's albums ever get quite so much of a battering for including Andy Summers songs.

Still, the album as a whole is characterised by a more diverse and sophisticated sound than the debut, and it also includes two of

David Bowie's greatest ever songs. The restrained barrage of soured Americana Goodbye Mr. Ed is the one song that even avowed Tin Machine haters will confess to really, really liking, whilst the arresting Shopping For Girls really is in a class of its own. A third-person look through the eyes of a sex trade tourist set to a Classic Bowie style backing that cleverly references clichéd 'oriental' melodies and Prince's 1999, it combines uncomfortable yet righteously vitriolic lyrics (complete with an ambiguous reference to Michael Jackson) with angst-ridden, despairing delivery and, at a climactic moment, Gabrels chiming in with a blast of guitar noise that sounds for all the world like Sweep from The Sooty Show is plummeting ablaze from the sky, launching himself bodily at the rat-infested room Bowie describes with such fury. It really is dispiriting to think that these two songs, and I Can't Read, are never likely to reach the popularity that they deserve, purely on account of the fact that so many listeners just can't bring themselves to look past what they think it says on the, erm, tin.

The album’s lead singles You Belong In Rock’n’Roll and Baby Universal were moderately successful, leading to two appearances on Top Of The Pops, one of which saw Gabrels elect to smear his guitar with a vanilla eclair and cause Bowie to crack up, while the other was a belting live performance at a time when many of the other featured acts were struggling to cope with the all-new all-live format. There was also an infamous interview on Wogan, which turned into an essay in tense nervousness as the host ungraciously ignored Tony Sales and made a beeline for Bowie, who indignantly responded with monosyllabic nonsequiturs. The album on the other hand underperformed badly, and Bowie was already dropping hints that it was time to move on.

After that, and the almost completely ignored live album Oy Vey, Baby (rendered inessential on account of containing absolutely no rarities or exclusives whatsoever; also there was an eight minute version of Stateside which didn't exactly help), Bowie's solo career resumed with the electro-disco single Real Cool World - although all of the journalists who have recently taken to referring to that as a 'return to form' require investigation under the Trade Descriptions Act - and Tin Machine were quietly decommissioned. And then even more quietly written out of David Bowie's career history.

While Reeves Gabrels would stay on as a collaborator for several albums, Bowie occasionally revived a couple of songs including Shopping For Girls, Baby Universal and I Can't Read, and a fair selection from both albums ended up on the Sound + Vision box set, you'll be hard pushed to find any acknowledgement of Tin Machine in any official David Bowie overview. The first album is still available, albeit lacking key bonus tracks like Maggie's Farm and the alternate Bus Stop, while, staggeringly, Tin Machine II has been out of print for years. Just think about that for a second. A David Bowie album is not available to buy, even digitally, in a world where you can get the equally derided sixties and nineties output literally at the click of a button. Never mind that, you can get David Live. This is usually explained away as being due to 'low demand', which is a reasonable explanation but not one that really tallies with mint condition copies of the CD routinely changing hands for silly money. The likely real explanation is that it took such a battering on release, mostly from people who had either never heard it or were being paid to be 'controversial', that even Bowie and his back catalogue distributors started to believe it and preferred to quietly forget that Tin Machine II ever existed. Some (though not all) of the better tracks are on the recently-reissued Sound + Vision, of course, but that's hardly the same thing. Oy Vey, Baby is also currently unavailable, but... erm... um... anyone got any kettles that need descaling?

There's probably a case for saying that, even allowing for band democracy, Tin Machine maybe would have benefitted from giving a little more control to the member with a proven track record in crafting globally successful albums, but then again if they'd done that, the albums might have been better but they just wouldn't have been Tin Machine. As an exercise in both creative deck-clearing and shaking off an artistically restrictive audience, it certainly did its job admirably - like or loathe Bowie's nineties output, at least he'd started making music that surprised people again – and unlike The Divine Comedy's 'serious' album and so many other similar career missteps, at least people actually remember it. And as there isn't any more of this to read, why not try listening to I Can't Read?

This Was England ‘90

Hidden somewhere deep within a photo album at my parents' house, there's a snap taken on Christmas Day in 1989. In amongst the tableau of hastily unwrapped hair straighteners, Stephen King novels, Neighbours-related board games and boxes of orange Matchmakers, you can just about make out a grinning youngster holding up an 808 State album and sporting the unmistakeable telltale combination of a long-sleeved ‘What The

World Is Waiting’ For t-shirt - note, not a ‘Fool's Gold’ one - and an overgrown centre parting; the trouser cuffs, sadly, are out of shot, but it's a fair bet that they fitted the stylistic bill too. And you won't win one of the boxes of orange Matchmakers for deducing that it was me.

By that point I had already become a fairly obsessive and evangelical follower of The Stone Roses and indeed pretty much all of the other similarly-minded bands that emerged from Manchester (and, let's be honest about it, a fair few other Northern towns and cities, and even London managed to come up with a couple of decent ones too) around the same time. They weren't in fact the first of the 'Madchester' bands that I'd discovered; Happy Mondays, who I first heard on John Peel’s Radio 1 show. Peel never really played The Stone Roses - as was his idiosyncratic wont, he had cultivated a bizarre dislike of them despite enthusiastically championing dozens of other outfits who sounded similar without being even a tenth as good - so I'd been seeing their name mentioned in increasingly excited terms in the music press for a good while before I actually heard them.

But that all changed when I was illicitly staying up late one night in January 1989 to watch The Other Side Of Midnight, a regional ITV arts show presented by Tony Wilson, and four moptopped casuals (and their oft-forgotten effect box-operating sidekick) showed up doing a dancey and hypnotic jangly guitar-pop song with mesmeric lyrics to match. It was that immediate. On the basis of one performance of one song, I suddenly had a new favourite band. And not just a favourite band, one that eclipsed anything I'd liked before, from The Smiths and My Bloody Valentine to Bomb The Bass and N.W.A and, well, even Happy Mondays. It was not unreasonable to say that I was now something of a fan of The Stone Roses.

Within days I'd got hold of their previous single ‘Elephant Stone’, closely followed by the imminently-released ‘Made Of Stone’, and although I have to confess to feeling a bit ripped off by the backward versions of the a-sides that helped pad out both of those 12"s, the other b-sides were intriguing enough to draw me further in. Then in July came ‘She Bangs The Drums’, featuring two of the best b-sides in the entire history of singles ever, and more pertinently a third on which they finally got the hang of this 'backwards' lark and came up with something shimmering and ethereal yet also sonically overwhelming, which better still didn't bear any relation to anything that you'd already forked out for. Well, not at that point anyway.

The self-titled debut album, meanwhile, had sneaked out almost unnoticed in early May; as unbelievable as it may seem nowadays, I had some trouble getting hold of it in the week of release, and after being told by at least one high street store that "we don't always stock all the independent records" I eventually managed to find a copy in - appropriately enough, given its fusion of sixties and nineties psychedelia - the 'New Dance Releases' rack in Penny Lane Records. THAT song from THAT television appearance was there in all of its elongated transcendent glory, and better still also appeared in a superb reworked backwards form (and there were photos of the performance in the sleeve art too), and seemingly every other track was every bit as good, from the nigh-on ten-minute closing number which spiralled out from a dynamic Byrds-go-Motown number that you would not have liked to have been the lyrical target of into an immense early seventies-style stop-start funk workout, to the brief and to-the-point burst of folk song with literal monarchy-targeting lyrics that seemed genuinely shocking at the time. Yes, even to someone who had been playing ‘Fuck Tha Police’ on a loop for months on end. Cultural differences are a foreign country.

Bob Stanley's Melody Maker review of The Stone Roses famously concluded "this is simply the best debut LP I've heard in my record buying lifetime; forget everybody else, forget work tomorrow", and for me and countless others like me, the effect was similarly immediate. Here was a band that seemed destined to change all the rules without following anyone else's, for whom great things seemed ahead both artistically and commercially, and whose surly dismissals of the idea of being in competition with anyone from The Rolling Stones downwards seemed more a statement of fact than arrogance. This was a feeling that was only compounded with the release late in the year of the swaggering folky groove of ‘What The World Is Waiting For’, and its initially ignored double a-side ‘Fool's Gold’, a no-holds-barred dive into the cutting edge world of loops, samples and breakbeats. No matter how many times the word 'down' might have been repeated in the second verse, there was no keeping ‘Fool's Gold’ down and the single was quickly flipped, leading to the celebrated same-edition Top Of The Pops debuts of The Stone Roses and Happy Mondays just as the eighties receded from view. We were, as that song that they had started doing live but hadn't released yet had it, on the verge of something shining. And coming throu-oo-ou-ahou-ah-oo-wa-ough.

As 1990 dawned, The Stone Roses were everywhere. There were the chart-hogging reissues of earlier singles, the innovative-for-the-time one-off outdoor shows in unlikely locations - most infamously North West industrial park Spike Island - the splendiferous top five single ‘One Love’, and the cover of every magazine from Sky to Smash Hits. And then... nothing. Alerted by a shrewd advisor to a ropey clause in an early contract, they entered into litigation that was supposed to free them up to take on the world, but instead dragged everything into a whirlpool of appeals and counter-appeals, with the band left unable to record or even visibly write anything new for fear that they might have to forfeit material if matters didn't go their way. Somehow, this just added to the momentum, with credible rumours circulating that they were quietly planning the album that would wipe the floor with the pop, rock and dance establishment in one fell swoop, and palpable excitement when an impatient NME journalist tracked them down to a rehearsal room and was politely ejected with a handful of trademark Ian Brown zen mutterings before they had a chance to hear a single note of new music.

Four long years later, the legal coast was finally clear and... well, this article isn't about that. Nor about the bands that I got into while waiting for The Stone Roses to reappear. It's about something else that Happened Next. It was around this time that I started to get the first stirrings of a nasty feeling that my past was being sold back to me. By early 1994, I was at University and the Student Union astutely put on a couple of 'Madchester' revival nights, drawing in a surprisingly large crowd who were as pleased to hear New FADS as they were The Stone Roses, Happy Mondays or Inspiral Carpets. Then they put one on later in the year, A following the rise of Oasis, and it all seemed to have changed; 'mad fer it' types vacated the dancefloor at the first bars of ‘Shall We Take A Trip?’,’ Can You Dig It?’ and ‘All On You (Perfume)’, besieged the DJs with requests for ”anything by Oasis”, and took to greeting any Stone Roses number with whoops, cheers, football-style group hugs, and embarrassing displays of bottle-in-hand Liam Gallagher-aping dancing. That's where it started, and it's got worse from there.

You might be surprised at this point to discover that this is one of the few things in the entire history of the universe that I'm not about to blame on Oasis. In fairness to Noel Gallagher, he only ever really posited The Stone Roses as one of a wide number of influences, and even then spoke more of drawing inspiration from their attitude and appearance than from their music (a point that The Stone Roses' own Gary Mounfield seemed to agree on when he launched into a fairly voluble rejoinder to a clueless 6Music presenter's offhanded comment that Oasis had “carried on where The Stone Roses left off”, stating with audible irritation that he felt the “arty, intelligent” Blur who had, crucially, “heard Wire and Syd Barrett” had more in common with his former outfit). Oasis were many things but they were not Stone Roses copyists either musically or image-wise; they simply had the misfortune to play into the hands of tedious rock journalists and broadcasters furrowing their brows over where those troublesome 'Madchester' characters fitted into their easily-defined off-the-peg History Of Rock where everything started with ‘Love Me Do’, and a financially battered former record label keen to make as much money as they could out of their departed signings' comparatively small back catalogue.

Suddenly, after being ignored and even derided as a curious relic from a bygone age, The Stone Roses were apparently 'Classic Rock' through and through. Those misfiring rip-off backwards b-sides were reclaimed as ‘genius' via swathes of floridly-written gibberish. Silly opinions were vouchsafed about the comparative lack of worth of the likes of The Mock Turtles, The Paris Angels and Candy Flip, for whom, according to the 'Pocket Essential Guide' to 'The Madchester Scene', "a seventh level of imitation Madchester hell" was apparently waiting; this might have come as something of a surprise to anyone who bought and liked Strawberry Fields Forever. Suspicious accounts were given of the Spike Island concert as some kind of harmonious pilgrimage to a utopian musical bliss, without a single mention of the smell, the dodgy sound system, the deep techno warmup acts, or the gangs of ne'er-do-wells who clearly weren't there for the music (and, conversely, referring to the venue as a 'derelict wasteland' when it had actually been reclaimed as a 'green space' several years previously), almost as though they might not actually have been there. Most infuriatingly of all, it somehow became acceptable to refer to 'She Bangs The Drum'. Singular. By the sort of people who would fly off the handle if anyone put a 'The' in front of 'Pixies'.

Meanwhile, although Silvertone's determination to exploit every last scrap of Stone Roses material that they happened to have lying around actually started as something approaching a good thing - fans desperate for new material were more than rewarded with the studio version of ‘Where Angels Play’ and the Adrian Sherwood take on ‘One Love’, while singles and rarities compilation ‘Turns Into Stone’ can in retrospect be viewed as the second album that should have been - matters rapidly went downhill, from ‘Blackpool Live’ hardly exactly capturing what was great about the band, through the just about doing-what-it-says-on-the-tin ‘The Complete Stone Roses’, down past the endless and barely distinguishable remixes of ‘Fool's Gold’ and increasingly contrived repackagings of the album, and reaching a wince-inducing nadir with ‘The Remixes’, a whole album's worth of modern-day overhauls nobody asked for.

Eventually, the two dovetailed in time for - you guessed it - the twentieth anniversary of the album's release, prompting a flurry of torturous music press waffle (though, admirably, almost blanket silence from the band themselves), and a paving slab-sized ludicrously-priced anniversary box set that would have had those 1989 record store employees guffawing in disbelief. Ahead would come that dismal Spike Island film and Shane Meadows' muddly documentary, and, basically, that's how we've got from someone discovering The Stone Roses by seeing them do ‘Waterfall’ on a small hours regional-only TV show in 1989 to Bradley Wiggins claiming that he discovered them by seeing them do ‘Don't Stop’ on a children's TV show after coming home from school in 1991, and nobody batting an eyelid.

Doubtless by the time that you've read this far, there'll already be someone on Twitter scoffing "heff peff have you ever met mr pot mr kettle?????". And yes, back in 1989 - at least in terms of my interest in sixties music, archive TV and so on - I almost certainly was guilty as charged. But, crucially, it was precisely this moving of the Stone Roses-related goalposts that taught me never to accept notions of 'The Past' on face value; to always go back and look at things in a wider cultural and technological context, to think about the mechanics of their production, and to get a first hand impression of how they were genuinely received at the time. And that, ladies and gentlemen, is how you end up on a national news broadcast with a big caption saying 'CLANGERS EXPERT'.

Anyway, I can't tell you how many times I listened to the 12" of ‘Fool's Gold’ over that Christmas back in 1989. But I also can't tell you how many times around the same time I listened to The ‘Madchester Rave On’ EP, The ‘Island Head’ EP, ‘Boing!!’, ‘Nowhere’, ‘Quality Street’, ‘Two Sides’,’ A Life With Brian’, ‘Madstock’, ‘Leisure’, ‘Pigeonhole’, ‘Sundew’, ‘Some Friendly’, ‘Ninety’, ‘Native Place’ or ‘Chicken Rhythms’. Oh alright, I can tell you that one. Once.

All The Leaves Are Brown, And The Sky Is Grey

So when exactly was this Second Summer Of Love that Danny Wilson kept singing about?

Those who were in at the whole Fleecey Fleecey-sporting waving-arms-in-afield ground level would probably claim it was 1988. At the other extreme, anyone whose involvement was limited to thinking their radio had gone a bit funny would most likely point towards 1991, when something very definitely did get in the water Top Forty-wise and it was all Italio House Piano as far as the eye could see. Danny Wilson themselves would probably say 1989, because that's when their record was out. And Dominic Sandbrook counters that there was no Second Summer Of Love, at least not for anyone outside of a small elite hanging around outside Eastern Bloc records who had less than no impact on the daily lives of millions of people in Basingstoke, and anyway he thought Tricky Disco by Tricky Disco was rubbish.

When pushed, though, most people would probably suggest that the Second Summer Of Love took place in 1990. After all, that was the year in which the 'Madchester' bands and their ravey Adamski-type big-hatted chums briefly took over the charts, the ever-cheerful Graham Bright MP introduced his Entertainments (Increased Penalties) Act in the hope of clamping down on those pesky young people enjoying themselves without obtaining written permission first, and the Ecstasy Menace loomed so but-we're-her-fre-hunds-invitingly large that the government rushed out a Public Information Film about Dexter Fletcher's friend falling off a bridge while reaching for a Tracker bar or something. And, over and above all of this, 1990 was Time For The Guru. Unfortunately, nobody told Summer Chart Party.

For the benefit of those who are understandably left none the wiser by its Yahoo Serious Festival-compliant title, Summer Chart Party was a seemingly ubiquitous TV-advertised compilation album that gathered together some recent top pop hits to help your summer party, 'chart' or otherwise, go with a swing. And - helped in no small part by the fact that it appeared at the very dawn of Compact Disc, when choices were limited, parameters finite, and delusional beliefs that it would somehow now be possible to 'rationalise' your music collection were rife - it sold by the absolute bucketload, to the extent that it was not unusual to hear it blaring out from three neighbours' backyards hosting barbecues you weren't invited to within the same week. This it achieved despite being quite possibly the single worst compilation of all time; and yes, that does include Wig Wam Glam.

Surely, you'll be thinking by now, a public vote courting collection of hits from the days when people actually still took notice of them can't be that bad? Well yes, that's what you'd assume. But that's reckoning without just how out of step Summer Chart Party was with changing trends, musical fashion, and above all anything even remotely connected to the concept of 'summer' in the first place. Summer Chart Party was the work of the short-lived yet terrifyingly prolific Trax Music, who spent around eighteen months flooding record shops with tepid re-recordings of songs from 'the musicals', comeback albums nobody wanted nor needed, and baffling all-over-the-place 'themed' compilations called things like Strollin' Seventies. Summer Chart Party was their one big attempt at scoring a million seller in the already oversaturated pop market, and - like someone who had read The KLF's The Manual and decided to do it slightly wrong on purpose - it followed an established successful format virtually to the letter.

A cursory glance at both the cover and the tracklisting makes it all too wince-inducingly obvious that the compilers - and indeed the designers - of Summer Chart Party were shamelessly attempting to emulate the Hit Factory compilations, those million-selling late eighties collections of recent Stock Aitken & Waterman-affiliated hits with the odd rare 12" extended version and little-known 'big across Europe' curio thrown in for added interest. As such, we get a substantial line-up of PWL-friendly artists; Kylie Minogue, Jason Donovan, Pat &amp; Mick, Rick Astley, Lonnie Gordon, Sinitta and, er, Damian - mostly with tried and tested hits from a year or two previously so that listeners mercifully get I Should Be So Lucky and Too Many Broken Hearts instead of Hang On To Your Love - alongside contemporaneous Smash Hits fodder from Yazz, Lisa Stansfield, Stefan Dennis and long-forgotten Eurovision hopeful 'Emma'. Oh and Jive Bastard Bunny, but we'll come back to them in a moment.

Anyway, all of this would appear on face value to chime neatly with the prevailing What-Time's-Neighbours- On? mindset of the times, but trying to copy The Hit Factory on a compilation that proudly proclaimed itself The Sound Of Summer 1990 was a nonstarter on two counts. Firstly, whether they had admitted it to themselves yet or not, Stock Aitken & Waterman's popularity was most definitely on the wane by the summer of 1990, and most of their earlier hits had been sold and resold to punters a million times over already, not least on the Hit Factory compilations themselves. Secondly, and more significantly, it was an album that smacked of the eighties at the dawn of a new decade that just couldn't wait to leave the eighties behind.

Ignoring the New Kids On The Block-sized elephant in the room, and just ignoring Deacon Blue in general, what the pop-hungry audience that only months earlier had been thrilling to the likes of Big Fun and Sonia really wanted in 1990 was some kind of rap-friendly rave-tastic pseudo-hip hop crossover, perhaps best exemplified by Betty Boo, and even Kylie had dipped her toes into audibly-off-her-face waters to tremendous effect on Better The Devil You Know. Not for nothing did Smash Hits attempt to go head-to-head with Summer Chart Party with the prosaically-titled Smash Hits Rave!, seeing their Yazz and Sinitta and raising them Sydney Youngblood and The 49'ers. To be fair, Summer Chart Party did feature a couple of tracks on this wavelength, presumably by accident rather than design, notably the tremendous Got To Get by Rob'n'Raz Featuring Leila K, Candy Flip's cover of Strawberry Fields Forever - occupying a not-particularly-party-enhancing slot midway through the parade of upbeat pop fun - and the much-better-than-you-remember-it waaaaargh-hargh waaaaarghhargh waaaaargh-hargh wuwuwuwaaaaargh-hargh festival Ride On Time by Black Box. And while Erasure were somewhat devoid of common ground with the wide-trousered dancey types, it's nice to see Blue Savannah getting an airing here too.

On the other hand, this grudging concession to the rave-flavoured ambience of the time allows the point-evading woo-yeah festooned 'cover' of Venus by Don Pablo's Animals (or, if you will, lots of people in hats doing nothing in particular on Top Of The Pops) in through the back door to stink the place out, and amazingly that's not even the worst track on offer here. Nor even is Fairground Attraction's quick-say-'Ooh-I-love-this'-and-sort-of-jive-with-half-of-your-body-while-standing-stock-still-with-the-other 'real music' anthem for the terminally smug Perfect. No, that honour - in an alternate universe where 'honour' is a synonym for 'being hit with a cricket bat' - must surely go to That's What I Like by Jive Bunny & The Mastermixers. You know, the second one. With the Hawaii Five- O theme in it.

The kindest thing anyone could possibly find to say about the entire Jive Bunny phenomenon is that it was a shrewd idea; in every other sense, it was the culmination of some of the very worst trends of the eighties - the relentless rise of the 'medley', from Stars On 45 through The Sixties Mix, right up to this virtual entire wedding disco condensed into four minutes; the furious adherence to a decade-out-of-date notion that nostalgia for the fifties was in any way a good or desirable thing; the selling of novelty records on the back of shabby yet eyecatching videos; and the wilful provision of 'evidence' for the likes of Tony Parsons to further their not entirely sense-making theories about how pop music was only good in the past, and the fact that new pop music was simply regurgitating old pop music was a clear sign that new pop music was even more only good in the past than previously thought but old pop music was being made equally only good in the past or something. Or something. The Mastermixers were a bunch of faceless backroom boys who had put their inaugural rock'n'roll medley ('medley' being a generous term considering that it consisted of little more than the title of each song in rapid procession) together in the genuine hope of cornering the wedding disco market. Jive Bunny, on the other hand, was an animated figurehead seemingly drawn by a particularly disinterested member of the Why Don't You...? gang, who smugly popped up in front of archive footage of fuck all to do a couple of hand jives; particularly punchable at 3:26 in the video for Swing The Mood, though you do have to grudgingly admire the 'concerned' look it registers when Elvis joins the army.

Much like Summer Chart Party itself, That's What I Like simply repeated the earlier successful format note for note only using slightly less impressive source material, kicking off a long and tedious nosedive - you can't even really add 'diminishing returns' as that would imply that there were sufficient returns to diminish in the first place - to the point where even Pete Waterman was publically saying he would be embarrassed to be involved with the Jive Bunny franchise. And yet they ploughed ever onwards, flinging out threadbare medley after threadbare medley including the long forgotten likes of Can Can You Party?, Over To You John (Here We Go Again), and the truly odious Let's Party It's Christmas, although thankfully what little commercial appeal they had was totally eradicated when the 'Mastermixers' decided that they would like to appear in the photos instead of Jive Bunny. As for Summer Chart Party - an album that did not contain a single song that could in any way be described as emblematic of 'summer' - it was an experiment that the 'backroom boys' would not see fit to repeat.

The precise date of the Second Summer Of Love will likely remain in dispute for ever more. The First Summer Of Bewildering Compilations That Amazon Used And New Sellers Will Now Actually Pay You To Take A Copy Of, however, will always be 1990.

Inside The Infinite Misery Jumper

It just goes to show how much the internet has changed the world in such a short space of time. Back in 1997, I was what can only be described as a rabid Chris Morris fan, and more to the point not just one who was already aware of the burgeoning online fan community (and indeed had taken part in the Channel 4 messageboard pitched battle when the original transmission of Brass Eye was cancelled late in 1996) but even knew that Morris had been in talks with Radio 1 about a new show, and yet the first that I really knew about Blue Jam was when a friend phoned me up the day before the first episode went out, having heard a preview clip on The Evening Session. Nowadays, of course, it would have been hashtagged to within an inch of nanomolecular implosion before the first episode had even been written.

Quite what I might have been expecting from this new late night music-based show is something that I genuinely cannot recall; all that anyone really knew for certain was that while promoting Brass Eye earlier in the year (because, of course, he 'doesn't do interviews'), Morris had dropped some fairly substantial hints that he both wanted to go back to radio and wanted to do something completely different. Yet even then - coming as it did after three intensive years of some of the most startling and provocative comedy ever produced, characterised by full-on in-your-face attacks on all aspects of the media which for a time at least gave the feeling that change really was in the air, and which crucially included his own previous Radio 1 DJ show, which remains the most genuinely 'dangerous' radio ever broadcast - few can really have predicted just how different it would prove to be. Of course, I did later find out what his motivations for this were, and indeed how it was very nearly a very different kind of show altogether, but you're just going to have to read my book about Radio 1 comedy Fun At One to find that out.

And so it was that I tuned in to Radio 1 at midnight on 14th November 1997, as eager to just find out what was going on as I was to hear some new comedy, and it's no exaggeration to say that what heard had a significant impact on me. From the meaningless new-age-isms of the murmured intro and the amusingly disturbing opening monologue (in which Morris even seemed to be poking fun at his own work) onwards, the surreal, disorientating material which veered between shock and silliness with the frequency of a Warp Records bassline pulled you in and refused to let go. The combination of ambient dance music, Loungecore, exotic sixties pop and spectral laid-back indie that sat behind it, looped together so effectively that it was often difficult to determine when one track had finished and another had started, proved equally irresistible to someone who'd been drawn in that direction after Britpop reneged on its original wit and verve. The overall effect was as if a melancholic beat poet had gatecrashed a late-night local radio 'Love Zone' armed with a scratched copy of the Andrew Weatherall remix of Only Love Can Break Your Heart, and it really doesn't get much better than that.

That first show carried the presumably few listeners along on a pulsating soundwave of Bjork, Stereolab, Bomb The Bass, The Chemical Brothers, Ivor Cutler, The KLF, Brigitte Bardot, an interview about American 'baby fighting' pageants, a sting about Steve Lamacq trying to shake hands with an elephant, and Morris somehow persuading some hapless individual who had complained about a TV show to judge whether Mother Theresa or Mother Theresa II would be a more suitable role model for youngsters. By the time that it washed the listeners back out into reality with a replay of the intro and an extract from the Eraserhead soundtrack (and, almost like blowing a raspberry at the end, a fragment of REM's worst single to date), something really had changed. And it wasn't the sort of change that Brass Eye had left you anticipating, either. It was an astonishing and total reinvention for someone whose name had been utterly indivisible from news-based satire only days previously, and achieved with the least fanfare imaginable. As amusingly creakily archaic as this sentence may read now, I spent the next evening running off cassette copies which I then forced into the hands of unsuspecting friends on Saturday night, who probably all thought I'd gone mad. But people HAD to hear it.

And the astonishment didn't stop there. Over the next couple of weeks came four further equally strong shows and a sixth that, only fifteen minutes in, was faded out and replaced with a repeat of the first one when it went into a thoroughly disrespectful re-edit of The Archbishop Of Canterbury's speech about The Princess Of Wales (again, if you want the full straight-from-the-horse's-mouth account of what actually happened there, it’s in Fun At One). Amazingly, a full half year after that surreal couple of weeks, it still felt shocking that someone was prepared to be less than solemn and reverent about it in public. More amazingly still, Chris Morris had somehow managed to land himself in just as much hot water as ever while playing some fairly exclusionary records in the small hours of the morning. It's when you remember incidents like that you can understand why people still cling to this strange notion of him being a tireless fearless right-on crusader for something or other where nobody's actually sure what it is but whatever it is it's the satire that had to be made and no mistake down with the Daily Mail etc etc.

Of course, it couldn't last, and after three series of small-hours hilarity - Speedking Hawking, Bowie's Romantic Dinners, the Rothko monologue, "are they YOUR birds??", Fucking Noddy and his car, Michael Alexander St. John's Club News and so many others, and that's before we've even got anywhere near the over-lauded 'dark' material - and sublime music, the TV transfer followed and was inevitably a boringly literal comedown for anyone who'd been hooked by the radio version and indeed had spent long hours trying to figure out how in the name of sanity they could do a visual version in the first place. Ahead would lie several serious differences of opinion with the work of someone whom I'd once been such a rabid fan of, but that's another story and in any case, maybe that's the exact same point that he was trying to make with that bit of REM back in the very first show.

All The Fun Of The Flares

Some time around 1991, the law that forcibly ringfenced all 'remembering' outside of wartime nostalgia to the fifties and sixties was finally overturned, and the all-pervading mish-mash of Andy Pandy, Miniskirts, 'Flower Power' and that thing where they shouted "OPEN THE BOXXXXXX!" or something gave way to an all-pervading mish-mash of Colour Andy Pandy, Hotpants, 'Punk Rockers' and that thing where they shouted "THE MONEY PROGRAMMMMMMMME" or something.

It was a long and slow process getting from there to the point where seemingly every single advert for about three years used the Gallery music from Vision On, but nonetheless there were still some splendid scattered-yet-spangly platform-stomped rumblings earlier in the decade, from Denim's wittily personal debut album Back In Denim to Channel 4's hilarious Richard Allen-tastic one-off play The Token King, not to mention Richard Linklater's stoner-skewed hall pass slackery masterpiece Dazed And Confused wafting across the Atlantic on a cloud of suspicious-smelling smoke, all of which succeeded by virtue of treating the outdated reference points as something that informed the lives of real and believable characters rather than just as things held up to smirk at without even any actual tangible joke attached.

It wasn't until the latter half of the decade, though, that seemingly everyone wanted to do The Hustle onto this Aztec Bar-fuelled Chopper Bike-shaped bandwagon. When this wave of Patrick Mowermania finally took full hold, it gave rise to three very similar sitcoms making their debut at very similar times - That '70s Show, Days Like These and, of course, The Grimleys. Despite being wildly varied in terms of actual entertainment value, they all employed a markedly similar premise and indeed had suspiciously similar opening episodes. Well, not that suspicious when you consider that one was actually a direct remake of one of the others, but we have to get your attention somehow, and preferably without resorting to calling Bill Grundy 'an A Good Read goofball'. But which was best? Well, short of letting the respective lead characters battle it out with sharpened spacehoppers - which would be futile as Darren Grimley would inevitably emerge victorious - the best way is just to watch those opening episodes and compare them. So, crack open a bottle of Cresta, put down that copy of Shiver And Shake, and let's take a trip back in time...

...all the way back to 23rd August 1998, which was when That '70s Pilot, the all-too-obviously named opening episode of That '70s Show, made its first appearance on Fox. True, we would in fact have to wait a further two years to see it in the UK, but more on that in a moment. Made by sitcom heavyweights Carsey-Werner and created by 3rd Rock From The Sun maestros Bonnie and Terry Turner, if there's one thing that you can say about this pilot episode, it's that it doesn't mess about. There's a revving engine, a rattle of drums, a zooming retro logo, a caption placing us in Point Place Wisconsin on May 17 1976 (at 8:47pm, to be precise), and a belting opening scene set in Eric Forman's Basement, a den of guitars, speakers, discarded old board games and 'naughty' magazines, wherein the straight-laced Eric and his somewhat less upstanding teenage associates - wild-haired stoner conspiracy theorist Steven Hyde, gangling slacker Michael Kelso, and girl-next-door turned rad-fem Donna Pinciotti - concoct a wild scheme to 'liberate' some beer from Eric's parents' party, which is in full Captain And Tennille-soundtracked swing directly above them.

Various quick-cut attempts at grabbing cans whilst avoiding vigilant parents ("Eric - don't use the 'ass' word!"), dodgy perms and predatory older female neighbours follow, before the hapless would-be beer thief is simply asked to take some surplus cans to the basement. In three minutes flat, we've been introduced to four distinctive yet likeable leads, had quick glimpses of their various parents, and enjoyed some tremendous gags about a fairly universal teenage experience. THAT's how you kick off a TV series.

You can see from those same three minutes just how and why That '70s Show captured America's imagination so quickly and decisively, and indeed how and why someone at ITV thought it would be a good idea to do an Anglicised remake rather than just buy the rights to show the original. Yes, the first that UK viewers would get to see of Eric and company was courtesy of Days Like These, an 'adaptation' that would become a notorious part of a long and inglorious tradition of transatlantic sitcom transfers, where for every All In The Family or The Upper Hand there was a Payne, a Brighton Belles, a Dear John USA, a Stand By Your Man, a Reggie, a You Again?, a What A Country!, a DC Follies, a My Guide To Becoming A Rock Star, a Married For Life, a wince-inducing Red Dwarf remount where the only good line goes to the imported Kryten, a sanity-flattening attempt at doing Dad's Army in the middle of America complete with the classic scene where Captain Rosatti says "don't tell him Henderson!", and most odiously of all, Bill Cosby playing fast and loose with the near-perfect scripts for One Foot In The Grave and replacing all the proper jokes with tedious waffle about how while the women are doing the talking he will eat the cookies but the women, they have eaten all of the cookies.

In fairness, rather than an outright airlift of the concept and format, Days Like These was at least co-produced by Carsey-Werner, and they had the good sense to bring in sitcom veteran Bob Spiers (whose credits, for the uninitiated, range from Fawlty Towers to Absolutely Fabulous and Press Gang) to try and make some sense of the ambitious venture, but it was a co-production with Carlton Television, which must already be setting off alarm bells for many readers, and while it probably wasn't where the problems started, it's almost certainly where the problems cemented themselves as problems. Sadly, it's also a co-production from after David Cameron's tenure at Carlton, which denies us the opportunity for a great deal of invective later on.

Batteries Not Included, the first episode of Days Like These which was originally broadcast on 12th February 1999, doesn't exactly start off in fine style, opening with an animated Spacehopper (complete with a non-copyright generic smiley in place of the usual Spacehopper 'face'), a burst of music that sounds more like Metallica than anything from the seventies, and a logo straight out of a late seventies Sunday Morning BBC children's religious show. It's still 17th May 1976, and indeed still 8.47pm, but this time we're in Luton and Eric Forman's Garage. We then see something that looks for all the world like a rubbish sketch show parody of That '70s Show, complete with an 'adapted by' credit for Jesse Armstrong and Sam Bain (who have kept THAT well hidden from their CVs), with the four badly-wigged leads sort of reacting-ish to 'McGuire' (read 'Kelso') boinging out a tune on that most seventies of instruments, the Jew's Harp. While one of those rotatey circle executive toys enjoys some wince-inducingly prominent positioning, there's a stilted word-for-word replay of that zingy opening scene, only with some awful added business about 'shandy makes me randy' or something.

Once Eric ventures upstairs, again it's much the same only far more forced, and with substitutions for the more 'esoteric' reference points such as pizza sticks becoming a 'pineapple and cheese hedgehog' (not to mention "Eric, don't say the 'arse' word"). Presumably, this mild Transatlantic discrepancy between shared memories of the seventies was the primary reason that a remake was considered necessary in the first place - not that That '70s Show was exactly overflowing with references to S.W.A.T. or The Raspberries - and this imperative is somewhat undermined when you notice that the party still has The Captain And Tennille playing in the background. Also you do have to question whether whoever it was that crowbarred in that reference to The Wurzels had ever been to any actual parties ever.

Back over at That '70s Show, this is where we get the opening titles. And what opening titles they are, featuring the gang (including two whom we haven't actually met yet) cruising around in Eric's Oldsmobile Vista Cruiser and singing along to Big Star's In The Street, an inspired choice that both reflects what these characters might actually have been listening to, and underlines that the production team weren't just reaching for the nearest available bit of retro iconography. Days Like These, meanwhile, has them all cramped into a noticeably less sleek Ford Zephyr and singing an awful song about how 'days like these/I feel like I can change the world'. And where That '70s Show then runs into a witty bit of group commentary about an episode of The Brady Bunch - a show that, let's be honest about this, the real life equivalents of these characters doubtless resented for its patronising view of life as a 'teen' - Days Like These replaces it with some sneery and historically off-beam wank about Doctor Who (complete with a baffling reference to Sarah Jane 'jiggling up and down in a jumpsuit'). Already this is looking like it's going to be barely watchable, devoid of even the compelling 'awful sitcom' charm of something like Believe Nothing or High Stakes, and there's about eighteen more minutes of it to get through yet.

So let's head back over to Wisconsin with immediate effect. This is the point at which we meet Jackie, the hard-of-thinking rich kid who has somehow got mixed up with this dubious shower. Jackie’s main reason for showing up is to invite herself along to the Todd Rundgren concert the others are planning to attend; over at Days Like These, they're opting for Steve Harley And Cockney Rebel, which at least gets them some grudging points for realisticness. Eric needs to get parental permission to take the car, and there's also the first mention of 'Fez', about whom more very soon indeed. Jackie and Kelso head off, and there's some brilliantly played sexual tension between Eric and Donna, which their British counterparts replace with some arms-folded standoffishness that immediately loses them any points that they may have recently attained.

Both shows then go into the exact same 'fizzing daisy' animated interstitial, and the action in That 70s Show moves to Eric declaring his undying love for what the audience thinks is Donna, but which turns out to be the car; a joke that, you guessed it, is appallingly handled in the UK version, as are the accompanying amusements about Donna's father's perm. Days Like These opts to replace a shot of a singing Farrah Fawcett with some more animated daisies playing pinball, and you realise that it's going to be pretty much the same from this point on, with the remake taking good and well-performed gags from the original and ramming them into the ground like a broken bottle in a Public Information Film. Although there's one area where they could - that's could - turn the tables a bit.

The next scene of That '70s Show takes place in a hip arcade game-festooned hangout and introduces us to 'Fez', an exchange student from an unidentified subcontinent who is, at least at this early stage of the show's existence, played for some very dubious Del-and-Rodney-find-an-illegal-immigrant-style laughs. Not explicitly offensive, it should be stressed, but based on notions of language barriers and lack of cultural awareness that should really have been let go of by the nudging edge of the twenty first century. Surely, you will be thinking, surely Days Like These has to have taken the opportunity to do something a bit more enlightening? Well, this is where we meet Torbjorn, from an unidentified bit of Europe, who gets exactly the same semi-offensive gags at his own expense, which in this context somehow seem a little more acceptable but only a little. And indeed you'll still see stuff like this on TV all the time, which makes it all the more galling when people insist on having a go at sodding Rising Damp.

Still, a little better is a little better, and we do get both a half-decent extra scene with Donna and Jackie doing 'girls talk' in the bathroom about their views of each other and respective interest in Eric, and the seriously on-the-money sound of The Sutherland Brothers in the background, so Days Like These isn't doing quite as badly as expected. Though it almost is. After a smirk-friendly interstitial featuring Eric, Hyde and Kelso inhaling helium and harmonising Hooked On A Feeling (though Eric, Jones and McGuire give us You Should Be Dancing), the gang are depicted very unflinchingly post-joint and in an impressively restrained fashion, with Eric's updates on the car situation diverting into stoner paranoia about the oil shortages being faked and top secret car 'they' are supressing that runs on water, before a still-out-of-it Eric has to have a serious chat with his parents about his responsibilities as a driver whilst they subtly sway in and out of frame before his bleary eyes. As you can probably guess, Days Like These's giggle-heavy reinterpretation of this scene is straight out of the average newspaper cartoonist's rib-tickling view of 'drugs' and can, in short, fuck off. As can the replacement of Eric's parent-irking 'bitching!' on receiving the car keys with a much more blunt and unfunny go-on-Days-Like-These-you've-got-eight-minutes-say-somethingoutrageous 'shit'.

The next major scene in That '70s Show deals with the gang squabbling over who gets to sit where, and Eric's father issuing a concert-threatening instruction that he's not to drive out of town. This is much the same in its ITV translation only with less 'accomplished' acting, changed place names, and the driver on the other side; though when the car breaks down shortly afterwards, Days Like These at least has the good sense to insert a couple of lines to suggest Donna is more knowledgeable about motor vehicle maintenance than her more smug and self-assured male travelling companions. After they replace the battery, That '70s Show weighs in with an impressively realised Todd Rundgren gig complete with an actual live version of I Saw The Light threatening to drown out the dialogue. Days Like These on the other hand belches up a handful of extras in front of a blue light and Make Me Smile (Come Up And See Me), performed by neither Steve Harley nor Cockney Rebel very quietly in the background, and it's at this point that you want to start punching the show very hard in the master tape. Thankfully there's only a couple of minutes left, yet even in that short time they manage to do unspeakable things to a sweet scene between Jackie and Kelso, and to Eric and Donna's show-closing couple-of-inches-away-from-getting-it-on stargazing. Mercifully, That '70s Show gives us an under-the-credits glimpse of the exhausted revellers returning from the concert singing Hello It's Me, so at least we've got a halfway decent note to end on.

That '70s Show would go on to run for eight highly successful seasons up to 2006. Days Like These, on the other hand, was being shunted around the schedules within weeks ("to give the other programmes a chance", as Lee and Herring gleefully noted), and eventually Spacehopped its way offscreen with three of its thirteen episodes remaining unshown. And we can't even blame David Cameron for its failure. Shortly afterwards, Channel 5 picked up the rights to That '70s Show itself, and the attempt at remaking it for the benefit of audiences who had never so much as scoffed a Twinkie was quietly forgotten.

When it comes down to it, the biggest problem with Days Like These was that it was neither one thing nor the other. A pointedly American script nastily mangled for a British audience, gags from established old hands rewritten by up and coming highly talented youngsters, an attempt to force one strand of nostalgia into another in a manner that called to mind a seventies toddler trying to bash the wrong piece into the wrong slot of a Fisher Price shape sorter. It had no idea whether it wanted to be cosy past-remembering fun for all the family or an edgy must-see for teenagers able to relate to its timeless themes. What it definitely wasn't was That '70s Show. Or, more to the point, The Grimleys. What's that? We didn't even mention The Grimleys? What do you want, an accurate recreation of the past?!

This Was… Cult Fiction

If only Quentin Tarantino had known what he was starting.

Think back, if you will, to a time before cinema's Jimmy Dimmick was a millionaire megastar director who prefers to spend most of his time making the same film again and again but with different hats interspersed with getting a bit shirty on What The Papers Say, and when he was, quite simply, potentially the most exciting movie-maker ever. He was someone who - not unlike certain figures in the independent music scene around that time - appeared to have seen the good, the bad and the just plain weird in any and every area of 'underground' cinema from the forties onwards, and had decided that the time had come to put a nice new shirt on it and send it 'overground'. At a time when the concept of postmodernism itself was the stuff of postmodernity, Reservoir Dogs, Pulp Fiction, True Romance and Natural Born Killers arrived like a pop cultural call to arms (well, maybe not Natural Born Killers), simultaneously pointing the way into cinema's future and into the more weird and wonderful (though mostly just plain weird) corridors of its past.

Part of the reason for this, of course, was his revolutionary approach to soundtracks; ignoring the tradition of the Oscar-courting original orchestral score in favour of employing a similar sort of pop culture archaeology to his visuals, which was probably more inspired by American Graffiti than by any Polish art film with a stop-motion goose tapdancing to a slowed-down- then-speeded-up version of The Night Has A Thousand Eyes, and using the parade of non-stop half-remembered hits to actually emphasise something about the characters or setting; the tacky seventies pop radio sounds in Reservoir Dogs, for example, give an indefinable extra sense of definition to the sharp-suited career criminals addicted to oldies stations, while the sparse and trebly forgotten pre-Beatles chart smashes in Pulp Fiction do much to underscore the empty fringe-of-society netherworlds in which its various protagonists variously operate. Hardly surprising, then, that both films should have inspired soundtrack albums that bothered the upper reaches of the chart for years on end, to the extent that it's now impossible to venture into a charity shop without spotting one or the other of them. And then there's True Romance with its tongue-in-cheek reuse of existing film scores, and the blues-hollerin'-driven original script of Natural Born Killers. By the time of Kill Bill he really was just playing back-of-the-bargain-bin Top Trumps, though.

Needless to say, those top-selling soundtrack albums inspired a brief but prolific outburst of me-too soundtrack albums, and indeed me-too themed soundtrack compilations, all of which spectacularly missed the point of why those Tarantino efforts had been so popular in the first place (and of course Trackspotting, which missed the point of just about everything ever). Most of these efforts, as you can imagine, or indeed may well have been trying to forget, simply bolted together a couple of blatant borrows from Tarantino and Tarantino-affiliated (seriously, remember when we were supposed to regard Killing Zoe and Threesome as somehow relevant?) soundtracks with a handful of de facto Britpop-era hits and some seventies rock stuff that Loaded had said it was OK to like, which is why you'll now find them all lurking in their hundreds in the 58 CDs For £1 section at That's Entertainment.

There was one album, however - well, series of albums to be strictly accurate - that somehow managed to get this least get-right-able of approaches right, and would then subsequently go off on all manner of obscure and esoteric tangents that would have caused all those people whooping at Stuck In The Middle With You at the student union to shudder like they'd been forced to watch a single minute of The Magic Fountain on a loop for forty eight hours. It started off with both feet planted firmly in Tarantino-land, yet six volumes later it had taken in Count Indigo, Bardo, the 'wrong' Magic Roundabout, and plenty more besides. And, what do you know, they all still stand up well today. So join us, if you will, as we take an album-by-album relisten to... the Cult Fiction series!

As the Pulp Fiction-riffing title suggests, inaugural offering This Is Cult Fiction came very much in the slipstream of the initial outbreak of Tarantino-mania; something that was in turn very much reflected in the cover art, featuring as it does a stocking'n'suspendered and unfeasibly-chested blonde in a bleak motel, having recently discarded a wine glass and the world's smallest record. Meanwhile, lord alone knows what that TV show she's watching is supposed to be. Doubtless this was intended as some sort of non-copyright-troubling homage to Uma Thurman's iconic pose from the Pulp Fiction poster, only commissioned from an artist that was briefed to not to watch the film, nor to learn anything at all whatsoever about what might possibly happen in it.

Needless to say, the tracklisting leans very heavily towards the Tarantino-weighted end of the scale, and yet somehow, rather than seeming like yet another cash-in rip-off, it manages to hit all the right notes and throws in a few impressive surprises to boot. The opening double whammy of film-openers Little Green Bag and Misirlou still sounds amazing, the over-familiar but still great Stuck In The Middle With You rubs shoulders with the lesser-heard Jungle Boogie and You Never Can Tell, and the compilers also found room for Rumble, the menacing crumbly-toned Link Wray instrumental that was inexplicably left off the Pulp Fiction soundtrack album in favour of Maria McKee whistling about a sodding dress for twelve years. As you might well be deducing from that rather left-field inclusion (well, relatively), the compilers of This Is Cult Fiction seem to have been keen - as would rapidly become a trademark of theirs - to put that extra bit of effort in and come up with something that would both warrant and withstand repeated listening; no mean feat when you consider that many of the similar efforts it was jostling for space with in the HMV Soundtracks rack were a slog to get through even just the once.

The only problem is, when you've exhausted the Tarantino soundtracks and incorporated as much of them as you feasibly can without your target audience feeling royally ripped off, where do you go next? Well, this is where This Is Cult Fiction starts to get interesting. Initially they seem to have opted to reach for the nearest recent films with similar (if far lesser) 'cult' credentials, meaning that we get Bjork's still-astonishing theme from Young Americans and the original Lalo Schifrin version of Mission Impossible (as opposed to that miserable angle-grinding reworking by Larry Mullen and a bin, which was virtually inescapable at the time but thankfully barely heard now), though on the less appealing side we also get Here Comes The Hotstepper from Pret A Porter, a film that the media appeared to decide appealed to the 'Tarantino set' without actually canvassing any of them for their opinion on the matter, and - stretching the definition of 'recent' slightly - the never-entertaining Blue Velvet by Bobby Vinton. The latter had in fact been a barely explicable Twin Peaks-affiliated reissued top ten hit late in 1990, and indeed room was made for a couple of further Revived 45 chart-vaulters; Perez Prado's Guaglione, as featured in the first of several thousand Guinness adverts that apparently 'everyone' thought was amazing apart from anyone at all that you actually knew, and the similarly beer-propelled We Have All The Time In The World by Louis Armstrong.

The latter's James Bond associations provides a convenient route in for the James Bond Theme, here in one of its later John Barry re-recordings rather than the twisted beat boom twangings of the original, and while there aren't really that many big name big screen big themed spies or detectives worthy of a place alongside him on such a commercially minded compilation, there are nonetheless many TV counterparts who are eminently suitable for the task. Laurie Johnson's single version of The Avengers is joined by a couple of judiciously chosen top-drawer covers, The Les Reed Brass' take on The Saint and The Bob Leaper Orchestra's frantic rattle through Danger Man (which was then also doing a stint as the theme music for Mark Radcliffe's 'Graveyard Shift' Radio 1 show), while from across the 'pond' come the barnstorming original black-and-white-era version of The Man From UNCLE and, rather less impressively, a pedestrian trot through Hawaii Five-O by a struggling post-psychedelia The Ventures, twanging politely through an arrangement that does neither them nor the tune any favours.

Then there's a bit of a lurch forward into seventies urban funk hipness, with Theme From Shaft, The Harder They Come, the overquoted monologue-enhanced All The Animals Come Out At Night from Taxi Driver, and - letting the urban funk side down slightly – Everybody’s Talkin’ from Midnight Cowboy, as then recently pushed back into the charts by The Beautiful South though anyone with even the slightest bit of sense should prefer the reading by indie nearly-men Moose. And again there are some small screen contemporaries for this lot, with a reading of The Sweeney by the dreaded Power Pack Orchestra - an eighties studio ensemble that specialised in microscopically close approximations of original film and TV themes, virtually indistinguishable from the genuine article but just about mechanical and workmanlike enough to be detectable, which in a way is actually worse than a ludicrously inauthentic bash-it-out-after-lunch job - and the throw-some-notes-at-the-wall funk-jazz of The Streets Of San Francisco, a show that has blithely ignored repeated attempts to artificially build up any kind of cult following around it. Meanwhile, from completely the other end of the seventies comes Francis Monkman's alarming theme from The Long Good Friday, a suitably nasty-sounding reminder of the days when library music started to get just that bit unsettlingly antiseptic in a slap-bass-and-sequencer reflection of the dockland redevelopments that the in-character Bob Hoskins so despised.

And that's just about it, apart from three notable fishes out of big-poster-bought-from-the-Student-Union water. An all-too-familiar four-note twang signifies it's time for Twin Peaks, a show which has since disappeared from the 'cult' map in a manner that you really wouldn't have predicted from the endless conversations about the latest 'clues' back in 1990 (most of them conducted by people who claimed not to understand The Prisoner when it was repeated on Channel 4 a couple of years later), Great Big Giant Of The Cinema Horson Welles shows up to show these young upstarts how it's done with the beatnikky bongo freakout from the start of A Touch Of Evil, and then there's Joe 90. Yes, Joe 90. The least marketable of any Gerry Anderson show (and yes, that does include The Secret Service), and with more in common with Here Come The Double Deckers than Here Comes The Hotstepper. And yet Barry Gray's spectacular transistory Hammond and speaker-rattling guitar theme music is quite simply the best track on here by a very long distance indeed. Yes, Sam Loover and company may lack the cult credentials of the collar-turned-up sax-accompanied types that make up the bulk of the rest of This Is Cult Fiction - let's face it, they even lack the cult credentials of a country-yowling Supermarionation cowboy with an oversized head - but end up showing them all by virtue of having the best theme music.

This Is Cult Fiction had at least attempted to suggest to people who had bought it on the back of Pumpkin and Honeybunny's jabbering that there's a lot more esoteric music out there that they might like; something that The Tarantino Connection never quite managed. When the follow-up arrived early the next year, it took this to a whole new level.

Imagine, if you will - or indeed if you can bear to - an alternate universe where everything's backwards and Nathan Petrelli has slightly different hair, and Trackspotting proved so popular that the compilers got to do a second volume. There'd be more Tarantino barrel-scraping, probably with that one by Tha Dogg Pound from Natural Born Killers wedged awkwardly between all the tune-averting rock'n'roll stuff. There'd be the entire eighteen million minute version of A Final Hit by Leftfield. And there'd be The Passenger by Iggy Pop, doubtless crowbarred in on the back of a spuriously generic claim that it had been used in 'an advert' (or even - shudder - as 'the theme from Channel 4's Passengers').

Thankfully, though, we don't need the time-bending shenanigans of Peter Petrelli to correct the dimensional alignment on this occasion, and in reality it was, sensibly, the compilers of This Is Cult Fiction who got to do the compilation lap of honour. The first volume had of course diverted from its Tarantino-centric brief in all manner of interesting if vaguely related directions, but even so it would have been reasonable to assume that any follow-up would have basically just included more of the same. Well, how wrong we all were. And that's 'we' as in 'anyone who actually bothered guessing at the potential contents of a purely hypothetical follow-up that probably nobody had even had the slightest thought about'.

While This Is Cult Fiction was busy doing the rounds of the card-mounted counter-top record store display racks, a very strange offshoot of the Britpop phenomenon had been rapidly gathering mainstream-bound momentum. A world away from the 'Noelrock'-toting 'lad'- espousing flag-rehabilitating dullards that the scene would later come to be tarnished by association with, the original adherents of what probably wasn't really known as 'Britpop' at that point had - more through a lack of sufficient suitable sounds than anything else - invested a good deal of time and energy into mining the past for new pop favourites; not just the expected likes of The Who, Northern Soul and Julie Driscoll, Brian Auger & The Trinity but also further-afield esoterica culled from European pop exotica, Swinging Sixties film soundtracks and the groovier excursions of Light Entertainment superstars. Known as 'Loungecore' to its devotees, and 'a sort of Easy Listening revival thing' to the world at large, whatever it was, it had picked up its pace and started to find its way into the charts and onto the TV, with The Mike Flowers Pops' much-better-than-the-original cover of Wonderwall only narrowly missing out on the Christmas Number One slot late in 1995.

Of course, people would eventually miss the point with all this just as they did with Britpop, ignoring the fact that it was originally about the music first and foremost and indulging in all manner of ghastly 'irony' with crooners and safari suits, and the age of Funtastian Retrololz was upon us. Before that happened, though, a couple of pre-ironists managed to get in there with some pretty dazzling pre-irony compilations of music that had previously been obscurer than obscure; Martin Green's definitive library music trawl The Sound Gallery and its more cerebral spinoff The Sound Spectrum London-based DJ team The Karminsky Experience and their globe-spanning mock-soundtrack In-Flight Entertainment (and its sequel that took the 'flight' into space); The Easy Project which looked more towards the groovy Marine Offences Act-contravening sound of Pirate Radio; and, less impressively, the sound of a point starting to be missed on K-Tel's Nice'n'Easy. And then, with impeccable timing, came the one that would show them all how it's done - This Is Easy.

The first thing that you notice about This Is Easy is that, contrary to popular belief, it didn't quite perform a total musical volte-face on the first volume in the series, and the more Speeding On The Needlebliss-inclined percentage of its audience need not have felt any more alienated than they routinely pretended to in an attempt to show that they 'got' their favoured films. With a whole extra disc to play around with, there's plenty of room for movie and TV themes that are, for the most part, at the very least distant relatives of the ones that had ended up on This Is Cult Fiction. Indeed, Midnight Cowboy puts in a return appearance here, albeit in a carefully chosen schmaltz-tastic orchestral reworking of the title theme by John Barry himself, and there's a cunning redeployment of Misirlou as almost unrecognisably reimagined by birdsong-bonkers 'exotica' bandleader Martin Denny, while the not-that-'easy' electric harpsichord jangles of more recent (and, at least compared to a lot of films that ended up on the first album, more deserving) sneaker-in-through-the-back-door-of-cult Get Carter turn up for the first but by no means last time in the series (though more about that - you guessed it - later), albeit most likely more than a little 'influenced' by its recent appearance on The Sound Spectrum.

Meanwhile, if we're bending the rules to accommodate 'gritty' Westerns (as opposed to all those ones set in antiseptically clean municipal boroughs) there's the chant-tastic chart-troubling cover of the theme from The Good, The Bad And The Ugly by Hugo Montenegro, and for a touch of King Cone-scoffing authenticity the original Pearl & Dean jingle is thrown in for good measure. Even the Burt Bacharach number chosen to open the set, Bond Street, originates from the soundtrack of the original - and some would say only scientifically recognised - Casino Royale. In fact there's a lot of Bacharach & David to be found on This Is Easy - hardly surprising really, given that Noel Gallagher was continually dropping the former's name as an 'inspiration' in the hope that it would deflect attention away from the fact that he was actually just ‘borrowing’ old Milltown Brothers songs and replacing the lyrics with something even more clumsy (and that's no mean feat) - but that's not actually as much of a good thing as you might reasonably assume. For while Raindrops Keep Falling On My Head shows up as the definitive BJ Thomas original, complete with the weird jerky Stereolab-inspiring stop-start outro, and Dionne Warwick, Aretha Franklin and Matt Monro are on hand to handle Walk On By, I Say A Little Prayer and (They Long To Be) Close To You respectively (as, regrettably, is Jack Jones for Wives And Lovers), and light music maestro Ron Goodwin at least has a charming melting-trumpet whirl through Do You Know The Way To San Jose? and What The World Needs Now Is Love, several other key compositions are drawn from an album where Bacharach himself elected to recast them in drippy orchestral instrumental arrangements with just the odd random line sung here and there, which wasn't what anyone wanted or needed. Probably not even Noel Gallagher.

Meanwhile, hailing somewhat slightly less from the same genre universe come Un Homme Et Une Femme (the lift-door-opening-alike title theme AND the Panorama-purloined Aujourd'hui, C'est Toi, both in their rarely heard vocal versions), the maudlin, self-repeating and misleadingly tagged variance-free 'Theme And Variations For Two Pianos And Orchestra' from The Go-Between, and perhaps inevitably The Windmills Of Your Mind from The Thomas Crown Affair, upon which the jury will forever be out as to whether it's really good or a little bit annoying. But just before those groups of seven individuals (including the token 'girl one') dressed as Mr. Pink larking around in the foyer for a late-night cinema showing of the still-banned- on-video Reservoir Dogs start to feel so utterly left out of proceedings that they briefly consider purchasing The Cult Files: Reopened instead, a fair smattering of faintly hip-to-the-zeitgeist TV themes come screeching up in their E-Types. The Champions, Strange Report, The New Avengers, Man In A Suitcase, Tony Christie's earwax-shifting yodelling from the end credits of The Protectors, and of course The Pink Panther, who makes his way onto this list by virtue of having a snazzy car in the opening titles. No? How about because The Inspector was sort of like a jetsetting sixties detective if you bend the rules a bit, then bend the rules a lot, then just pretend that he was? Oh alright, please yourselves then.

Joining everyone's favourite antagonist of Man With The Triangle Nose on an equally sizeable list of TV themes, that (mostly) fit the bill musically but pose something of an image problem for someone attempting to recast themselves as Patrick Mower on a spacehopper, are a couple of sporting-themed selections that at least evoke the image of retro Adidas gear; namely soccer-heralding Hammond undisciplinedness The Big Match, and the none-more-loungetastic Superstars, that bizarre BBC effort that strove to determine which sporting giant was best at standing on a school assembly bench over a paddling pool. And sounding great but presenting logistical headaches for all but the most 'ironic' of easy scenesters there's The New Adventures Of Black Beauty, Crossroads, Animal Magic and This Is Your Life, the latter two in heavily truncated space-saving edits, which is something that as we shall see would become the lone blot in the copybook for the This Is... series.

Elsewhere, popular bandleader Ray Conniff is given the chance to show off some of his stereo test disc-ready instrumental readings of seventies MOR pop hits, and actual literal sixties non-MOR pop hits come courtesy of Aretha Franklin (I Say A Little Prayer), Dionne Warwick (Walk On By), Chris Montez (Call Me), Sergio Mendes (Chelsea Morning), Honeybus (I Can't Let Maggie Go), Fifth Dimension (Up Up And Away), Nancy Sinatra (As Tears Go By) and Sandie Shaw (There Is Always Something There To Remind Me, unfortunately in 're-recorded by the original artist' form). Also a couple of full-on lounge legends show up to show everyone who's boss; celebrated pal of Bear Asking For 'Cookies' Andy Williams with the Blur-purloined ode to Music To Watch Girls By, Bert Kaempfert's naggingly catchy Daktari-goes-mod silliness A Swingin' Safari, and best of all the wonky whistling and outer space backing vocal effects that make up Esquivel's interpretation of something that may at one point have vaguely resembled Sentimental Journey.

In acknowledgement of The Sound Gallery's library-scouring efforts there's also room for The Riviera Affair and Girl In A Sportscar, two tunes that are probably stuck in your head already if you ever watched any post-Loaded BBC2 magazine show, and there's that trademark This Is... touch of where-the-fuck-did-that-come-from? courtesy of Mason Williams' Classical Gas (a tune that had probably previously been mainly with Lord Winstanley urging you to claim that thirty seven and a half pence water rates rebate on This Is Your Right), some Herb Alpert numbers as hurriedly reworked for cash by 'The Mexicans' for long-lost Decca album The World Of Tijuana, and modern-day walking embodiment of all things lounge Count Indigo, whose My Unknown Love as recorded in cahoots with The Mike Flowers Pops is probably the second greatest track to be found on here.

So, you're no doubt wondering, what IS the greatest? Well, that honour has to go to one of the few artists to appear on both this and the first volume - Isaac Hayes, whose brilliantly yet hilariously elongated take on The Look Of Love frankly ticks off every last item on the list of what a good 'loungecore' track should be; funky, schmaltzy, Bacharach-penned (with an extra point for having been originally penned for Casino Royale), full of extemporising flutey nonsense, virtually unrecognisable as the song it's supposed to be, positioned somewhere between Easy Listening and 'proper' music, and actually genuinely really, really good. So, um, a bit like Theme From Shaft, then.

As a whole, This Is Easy more than meets all of those criteria too. Trying to define a genuine subculture for the purposes of raking in the megabucks is a risky and rarely-attempted gambit - for a comparison, consider how nobody dared to do a Hey Hey It's Yer Grunge Rock Superpals! type compilation only a couple of years earlier - but this impressively broad and knowledgeable sweep of the sounds that were being frugged to by the big-trainered girls and boys in clubs that they thought only they knew about pulled it off in style, and there's probably some truth to the suggestion that its success led directly to the genre-led compilation market as we know it today. The compilers weren't about to start resting - or indeed lounging - on their laurels, though. There was a complete change of direction to be getting on with.

Sitting uneasily alongside the Easy Listening revival, and much more comfortably alongside the post-Tarantino hoo-ha that the original This Is Cult Fiction had sought to cash in on, was the rise of what would later come to be known as 'lad mags'. But - crucially - they weren't always known by that label. What often gets conveniently forgotten is that Loaded was founded by a former NME journalist, who in turn had wound up at the NME after publishing his own surreal and vaguely establishment-baiting fanzine, and in its earliest incarnation it had a 'mission statement' of sorts to suggest to those who enjoyed looking at Liz Hurley in her pants that they might also like classic films, classic books, indie music, Peter Cook and what have you.

This of course was hastily jettisoned when they realised they sold more copies when they had glorified porn stars on the cover, but all the same they did try it at first, and it would have all manner of unlikely and unexpected side effects. Sandwiched between Anna Friel's knockers - not literally, thankfully, as that would cause several readers (both male and female) to explode - you would often find short and impressionistic pieces on such retro ephemera nonsense as Kung Fu mania, Aztec Bars and spacehoppers, and more often than not the long-lost televisual likes of Hawaii Five-0, Tucker's Luck and Help!... It's The Hair Bear Bunch!. This was, it's fair to say, one of the key initiators of the nostalgia boom that became big cultural business later in the decade, though less happily it also gave rise to endless 'talking head' clip show appearances by Peter Kay counting off imaginary lists of things he pretended everyone else had forgotten on his fingers. There was even a post-Loaded magazine devoted to this very phenomenon, Cult TV, which strove to interest fans of Friends and The Simpsons in the likes of Babylon 5 by way of articles enthusing over episodes if Scooby Doo Where Are You? where Daphne wore a bikini. It was not exactly a roaring success.

It's hardly surprising, then, that having already covered both the Easy Listening revival and the post-Tarantino hoo-ha, the compilers of the Cult Fiction series would choose to mine this sort-of phenomenon for their next offering. Released over the summer of 1996, This Is The Return Of Cult Fiction collected a ton of outmoded TV themes, and a handful of film themes, with Glen A. Larson-esque 'car escapades' photos on the cover to match. This ended up as the closest thing possible to a musical evocation of flicking through a vintage issue of TV Times. Plus of course there were a couple of inclusions that didn't really fit this unofficial format, but more on them in due course.

The bulk of This Is The Return Of Cult Fiction leans very much in the direction of the late seventies/early eighties 8pm big budget glossy American import, and as they opted to go for the halfway decent ones rather than the likes of Hooperman, Vega$, Simon & Simon and Scarecrow & Mrs. King, this is no bad thing. Charlie's Angels, The Six Million Dollar Man, Kojak, Magnum P.I., Taxi (impressively in its original show-predating album incarnation, as opposed to the later single-length rerecording with the "Night Mr. Walters" - "Hrmph" business tacked on to the end), Wonder Woman, Hill Street Blues and Starsky And Hutch all show up in their original wah wah-tastic sax-rasping as-heard-on-TV versions (well, apart from Taxi, and the at least very close approximation of The Six Million Dollar Man), although this does have some unfortunate side effects in places; most noticeably, the relatively sluggish pace and restrained soloing of Starsky And Hutch drives home just how used we'd got to the James Taylor Quartet's version in the interim. The filthy choppy-chord duelling of both The Return Of The Saint and The Professionals - impressively, for once, the actual real original recording with the middle eight and with the electric violin actually in tune and everything - suggests that we're also going to be seeing a lot of UK-made counterparts to the above.

Which is why it's a bit of a surprise that the album immediately goes off in a very different direction, serving up a sizeable quantity of erstwhile ITV and BBC mainstays that may well have had great theme tunes and impeccable Darren-Grimley-glugging-Quatro seventies/eighties crossover retro credentials, but are about as far removed from glitzy big budget action as... well, to be honest you'd usually just name one of these actual shows anyway. Doctor Who (the contentious early eighties squealing electric guitar makeover by Peter Howell), Vision On (the skittering Parisian jazz intro music AND the vibraphone-strobing music from 'The Gallery', which at that point was still just this side of overexposure), Dave Allen At Large (the rarely heard onscreen version), Tales Of The Unexpected, Budgie (the atmospheric tone-button-fluctuating instrumental from series one rather than the Kinks number from series two), Man About The House, On The Buses, Minder, Please Sir!, Ski Sunday and, erm, World Of Sport fill out the tracklisting in fine Back In Denim-friendly style, and even The Two Ronnies get in on the act courtesy of the Moog-tastic funk-out that opened their 'Charlie Farley & Piggy Malone' running serials. And there are two real treats saved for right near the end - White Horses by Jacky, the theme from the of-the-same-name multi-million episode German children's serial that became one of the 'big five' of the BBC's imported dubbed 'Tales From Europe' alongside the uniformly equally impressively theme-tuned The Flashing Blade, The Adventures Of Robinson Crusoe, Belle And Sebastian and The Singing Ringing Tree (only one of which, outrageously, has ever found its way onto CD), and the alarming scuzzy guitar riffing, inhaled harmonica and supervision-averse barking that bookended Roobarb. Though annoyingly, if inevitably, they've added an 'And Custard' here.

Then it's back to America, only further back in time to the days when everything was black and white and everyone got a new hoover every week and Raymond Chandler continually fell face-first into a swimming pool. Like the soundtrack to some lost Adam Curtis documentary, Get Smart, Perry Mason, I Dream Of Jeannie and Bewitched add a very different kind of retro-space-age sponsor-message-festooned glamour, and taken as a whole it's refreshing to find so many contextually diverse yet strangely well-fitting approaches to the idea of 'Cult TV'. The handful of film themes that also find their way onto This Is The Return Of Cult Fiction mostly adhere to the first of these approaches, though, with the superbly schlocky Moog-and-kiai curtain-raiser for Enter The Dragon rubbing shoulders with the dark-side-of-Lorimar mirror-threatening antics of Taxi Driver, and more unexpectedly Last Tango In Paris, whose infamous Maria-Schneider-bumming sequence certainly leaves the odd flash of semi-nudity that occasionally troubled Magnum and Kojak languishing in the doldrums.

Elsewhere, the Bewitcheds and what have you found a suitably pre-Monterey Pop friend in Hitchcock's North By Northwest, though what the Incantation-evoking panpipery and apparent inspiration for the theme from Five To Eleven that made up the theme to Once Upon A Time In America is doing here is anyone's guess; it would barely even have fitted on the very first This Is Cult Fiction either thematically or musically, and here it's really just a fish out of water that does little bar drag proceedings down. Meanwhile, fitting into none of these categories whatsoever is Julie London's interpretation of Fly Me To The Moon, included here as a result of its contemporaneous use in a Ford advert, but its syncopated jazzy flourishes blend so well with everything else surrounding them that there's really no point in quibbling.

All in all, there are a whopping thirty six tracks on This Is The Return Of Cult Fiction, but there's a catch. Those thirty six tracks are on just one CD, and where This Is Easy had at least opted for tasteful detail-retaining edits of selected tracks as a way if squeezing on as many as possible, here they just fade them out hamfistedly and at a seemingly arbitrary point. Doctor Who, Vision On (both of them), Tales Of The Unexpected, World Of Sport and The Return Of The Saint all slide frustratingly out of the range of audibility before they've actually finished, sometimes with barely twenty seconds left to go, and with no real purpose either as they could easily have trimmed one of the blander or less well-fitting other inclusions. Oh alright, let's just be upfront about it, they should have ditched Once Upon A Time In America. The upshot is that this brings a jarring and unwelcome element of frustration into an otherwise excellently sequenced compilation, and causes so much point-deduction that there's no option other than to put This Is The Return Of Cult Fiction at the very bottom of the 'Best Cult Fiction' list. And that really is a shame.

Still, the most fence-falling of the Cult Fiction series is still infinitely better than the vast majority of other compilations (oh and Trackspotting), and This Is The Return Of Cult Fiction really does pull off the infamously difficult feat of taking a load of short tunes originally written to catch the ear of TV audiences rather than with anything resembling sustained listening in mind, and fashioning them together into something coherent and infectiously upbeat. This was, in many ways, the sound of This Is Easy's madcap mate who remembered the names of all the cars in Wacky Races. Cult Fiction would never be quite so frivolous again. Well, not for a volume or two.

Late in 1970, when progressive rock was still relatively new and exciting and its key practitioners weren't above having a laugh (or indeed composing something short enough to fit on a 7" single), Pink Floyd were hard at work on that most radical and indeed progressive of concepts - a song that would take up the entire side of an album and stretch the available studio technology to its limit. They had of course been building up to this for some time - from the nine minutes and forty one seconds of Syd Barrett-led space-riffing that made up Interstellar Overdrive to the previous year's side-long instrumental suite Atom Heart Mother - and indeed would go on to take the idea further and expand the 'concept' to a whole album, but the technically demanding epic that they had variously labelled 'Nothing - Parts 1- 24', 'Son Of Nothing' and 'Return Of The Son Of Nothing' marked a real turning point. Unfortunately, this turning point involved everyone else turning into a humourless cul-de-sac where 'real' musicianship was prized above all else and frivolity was to be avoided at all costs. Possibly not what they had envisaged when providing a wry commentary on some bacon frying onstage the year before.

Late in 1996, things were starting to get all serious and heavyweight and stoneyfaced yet again, with the likes of The Verve and Kula Shaker and even makeweights like Embrace reminding us all at every given opportunity that their music 'meant' something more substantial than silly frivolous Britpop, and the laugh-a-minute likes of Trainspotting and Our Friends In The North doing much the same for visual entertainment. Leading the charge were, inevitably, Oasis, though much like a certain other Knebworth-favouring outfit once upon a time, maybe that wasn't what Noel Gallagher had in mind back when he was composing witty throwaways like Married With Children. Suffice it to say that the mood suddenly became very much stop-that-laughing-at-the-back fact-times-importance-equals-news mister-carpark-has-been-kind-enough-to-come-here-this-afternoon-all-the-way-from-Nottingham, and even the most hardended disliker of Play Away-esque novelty gurners Space must have winced at the Select review dismissing their album Tin Can Alley or whatever it was called alongside a cartoon of The Bloke From Space in a Hawaiian shirt taking a photo of himself on a 'fun camera' set against giant Rushmore-esque stone faces of Richard Ashcroft and 'Thom' Yorke.

Perhaps it's no coincidence, then, that the volume of Cult Fiction that sought to take a snapshot of this era - and followed on from the infectiously light-hearted This Is The Return Of Cult Fiction - should have adopted the mantle This Is… Son Of Cult Fiction. Yes, only halfway through the entire series, the titular '...' that everyone automatically associates with Cult Fiction finally puts in an appearance. And... there's not really very much more to say about that, so let's take a look instead at the other more obvious visual reroutings. Gone are the jaunty retro flashes and judicious use of whitespace and pale colours that had defined both This Is The Return Of Cult Fiction and This Is Easy (and even arguably, to an extent, the original This Is Cult Fiction itself), replaced by moodier shades of blue with appropriately gritty decorative pattern, Action Movie-friendly fonts, and a whopping great cover illustration of a psychedelically-decorated cross between The Mystery Machine and the Fisher Price Daredevil Sports Van. Something about all this would seem to suggest that we're not exactly in for an album's worth of flute-heavy seventies sitcom themes, hamfistedly faded out or otherwise.

Yes, it's 'serious' film music for 'serious' film fans, and pretty much the same for the handful of 'allowed' TV shows, nearly all the way here, with no psychedelic spies, wide-tied crooners or surrealist animated dogs on hand to frighten people. The rough, tough outdoorsy vibe is almost overpowering, and there's very little room left for anyone who's turned up hoping for a bit more safari-jacketed fun. This is, on face value, the compilation equivalent of Paul Weller's contemporaneous bit of ridiculousness Woodcutter’s Son. But it's also a Cult Fiction compilation, so we're almost certainly in for the odd predictability-defying surprise or two.

This Is... Son Of Cult Fiction kicks off in fine style with Quadrophenia's dynamic curtain-raiser The Real Me, sounding so punchy and loud that you feel like jumping onto a scooter in front of some back-projected London streets and shouting "Bollocks! Fuck Off!" at some rockers, closely followed by the dynamic collision of Loungecore and hard rock in CCS' one-time Top Of The Pops-heralding cover of Whole Lotta Love, but it all goes very rapidly downhill from there. Well, not downhill so much as off-script. Film and TV-associated the opening tracks may well be, but they are both 'proper' songs that predated their use in a soundtrack capacity, and, well, that's what the bulk of this compilation is composed of. There are very few hard-to-find gems previously hidden away in title sequences or beneath film dialogue here, just a collection of admittedly very good pop and rock songs that happened to later show up on soundtracks that anyone could have got hold of and stuck together on a tape easily enough.

What's more, it's all very much leaning towards the bluesy stoner-friendly hard-rock gentlemen-welcome-to-the-second-base-mobile end of the scale, with the likes of All Right Now (depressingly billed as ‘From Wrigley’s Gum’), Born To Be Wild, Smoke On The Water and Be-Bop-A-Lula queueing up to give you the impression that you've inadvertently picked up one of those point-missing late seventies The Old Grey Whistle Test spin-off compilations by mistake. Throw in a Trainspotting-referencing Lust For Life and it's all starting to sound a bit like what the most boneheaded of 'New Lads' circa 1995 would put onto the student union jukebox on a loop to show them namby pamby Blur fans wots wot uh hur hur hur.

Meanwhile, the actual from-the-original-soundtrack selections start off well with the theme from The A-Team, complete with the oft-omitted Hannibal-dressed-as-a-crocodile middle eight, but quickly lose their way to the extent that it's actually a challenge to listen towards the end of the album. Echo And The Bunnymen's bafflingly overlauded banda copier facsimile of People Are Strange from The Lost Boys and Urge Overkill's still-overexposed sub-Crash Test Dummies Strepsil-averse twang through Girl, You’ll Be A Woman Soon from Pulp Fiction are skip button-friendly enough, but out in the furthest reaches of the tracklisting you'll find such endlessly listenable fare as Duelling Banjos from Deliverance, the theme from Northern Exposure – so devoid of melody that it makes the themes from The Cosby Show and St. Elsewhere look like lost Gershwin tone poems – and John Williams arpeggiating his way through Cavatina, included here on account of it’s The Deer Hunter credentials, though surely it would have been more saleable to the album's target audience on the basis of its contemporaneous adoption as the 'The Gallery' music in Take Hart. Except for the fact that around that time, there had apparently been a meeting at which it was decided that everyone would forget that it was ever used for ‘The Gallery’ and insist that they only remembered that vibraphone tune even if it had stopped being used on the show before they were actually born.

Anyway, true, the theme from M*A*S*H (as performed by, of course, 'The M*A*S*H') is on board to add an upbeat note (well, relatively speaking), but when the most musical selection in this long procession of album-closing atmospherics is that Calling You song from Bagdad Cafe, a film that more people have seen posters of than have actually seen, you know it's set to be something of a slog. In fairness this extended outbreak of introspection and melancholia just about works in the context of the compilation's 'mood', but on the other hand, the last album's sign-off was the theme from Roobarb. All of this 'serious' business can sod off and frown to itself in the corner, frankly. Fortunately - and indeed precisely why this prolonged downbeat ending works in the context of the album as a whole - there are a couple of brighter passages earlier on.

There's a refreshing run of mid-sixties sourced psych-tinged selections midway through, taking in White Rabbit, Venus In Furs, Louie Louie, Green Onions and Herbie Hancock's Deee-Lite sampled Bring Down The Birds from Blow-Up (which is a convenient point at which to mention the nameless NME hack who, while sneering at a James Taylor Quartet album in a wince-inducing 'look at me I'm controversial' fashion around this time, scoffed of their cover of the main theme from Blow-Up that "halfway through they decide to start playing Groove Is In The Heart for some reason"), though the lone unwelcome feature of the previous Cult Fiction album makes an equally unwelcome reappearance here. Presumably for space-saving reasons, the compilers have opted for the shorter edit of The Monkees' The Porpoise Song from the actual Head soundtrack album rather than the full-length single version, which is more of an audio collage than a collection of songs, meaning that we get the abrupt police siren-drenched fade in while the glorious extended coda is completely missing, and it's literally not half the song it should be. Still, it must have been worth it to get the Northern Exposure theme squeezed on there.

Meanwhile, if you've been paying attention, you'll already be aware that the greatest strength of the Cult Fiction series was that the compilers were always prepared to go just that little bit further and include rarities and obscurities that were wowing fans of the genre or scene and deserved wider exposure, and happily This Is… Son Of Cult Fiction is no exception. Not only do we get Warren Zevon's decidedly odd (though not that odd when you know about his former musical escapades as half of Lyme & Cybelle) slice of late seventies soft-rock Werewolves Of London, which like Brown-Eyed Girl, I Believe In Miracles and The Whole Of The Moon is one of those records whose enduring popularity far outstrips its actual success at the time, there's also the sexually aggressive sitar groover The Lions And The Cucumber by Vampyros Sound Inc., drawn from the soundtrack of deeply hallucinogenic early seventies Spanish horror/soft porn crossover Vampyros Lesbos, which like many films of a similar vintage, origin and persuasion had recently become a cult favourite with UK viewers on account of their Sunday night appearances in stray German satellite channels. In case you were wondering, Vampyros Lesbos is set on a party island that hides a secret society of nubile young lady vampires desperate for a bit of girl-on-girl B Negative-siphoning action. And if you're thinking that sounds like the plot of an episode of Buffy The Vampire Slayer only with more shagging, or indeed like the plot of an episode of Torchwood only with less shagging, you'd be exactly right. By the end of the year Quentin Tarantino would have reused the track in Jackie Brown, but this compilation came out nearly twelve months earlier and, in effect, the Cult Fiction compilers had outdone the very person they were originally inspired to emulate. Stitch that, 'Trackspotting'.

Yet for all of its isolated shortcomings, it has to be said that This Is… Son Of Cult Fiction hangs together incredibly well as an album. Though the preponderance of well-known rock classics makes it by far the least interesting of the series, this is actually a strength from a listening point of view, starting off as a superbly judged bit of air-punching anthemic fun before taking a turn in a weirder - and ultimately bleak and haunting - direction. Meanwhile, Pink Floyd's follow-up to the album that nearly had 'The Return Of The Son Of Nothing' on it, as the history books know only too well, built on their experiments in a direction that saw it unexpectedly become purportedly the biggest selling album of all time. The follow up to This Is… Son Of Cult Fiction, however, didn't.

What's actually quite good about when all things popular and cultural get a bit serious and stoneyfaced and stop-smiling-you're-spoiling-my-thesis is that an infectiously grinning backlash can never be far away. How they opt to show this is usually by latching on to a style of music, old or new, that flies in the face of purported 'depth' and 'meaning' by actually being quite, well, tuneful. Not, it has to be emphasised, in a Peter Hatface-esque babble of drivel about Abba, Take That and 'pure pop', but through something that consciously rejects the prevailing leaning towards worthiness and virtuosity by being fun, uncomplicated and unarguably ever so slightly good.

From Punk to Northern Soul, from Rare Groove to Alt-Hip Hop, to, well, Britpop and Loungecore, it's happened time and time again, and while many would elect to react to the Richard Ashcroft-fuelled long-facedness by embracing the Embrace-opposing dancefloor sounds of Big Beat and its more laid-back counterpart Trip-Hop, others would defiantly and two-fingeredly retreat further into the forgotten corners of popular music than even the Easy Listening boom had dared venture. And this, as you've probably already worked out, was where the next volume of Cult Fiction came in.

Even by these well-established esoteric standards, The Eurovision Song Contest may well seem like an unlikely area to have diverted into, but it's worth emphasising from the outset that, popularitywise, The Eurovision Song Contest was adrift by entire continents when this album came out. Mainstream popularity and pop chart acceptance had long since trailed off, and ironic loltastic drinking-game-friendly reacceptance was still some way away, and as a result the Contest was lumbering on like some weird anachronism that was quite possibly too out of step with time, pace and volcanic strata for anyone to even think about cancelling; it was just there because it was there, and as a consequence it would soon find some unlikely friends. Although the first stirrings space and volcanic strata for anyone to even think about cancelling; it was just there because it was there, and as a consequence it would soon find some unlikely friends.

Although the first stirrings of a resurgence in popularity were just about detectable, not least with the episodes of The High Life and Father Ted devoted to the Contest and indeed the following year's bizarre one-off special A Song For Eurotrash which saw the likes of Kenickie and Dubstar take on Eurovision-trouncing songs of yesteryear, if anything its long history of weird and wonderful pop waxings and even weirder performers was at that point finding favour with the same sort of proto-Freakzone adherents of alternative universe musical oddities as, well, the previous instalments of the Cult Fiction series. How quickly all that would change.

Meanwhile, in addition to all those fearless sonic voyagers discovering that Video Video by Brixx was really quite good after all, there was a corresponding attempt by the UK at least to take this lull in stature as an opportunity to take it more seriously as an actual contest, fielding proper songs and proper performers for the first time in many years in an attempt to finally come somewhere other than third from last. The year before This Is... Eurovision came out, Gina G had restored some much-needed credibility with Ooh Aah... Just A Little Bit, and shortly after its release Katrina & The Waves would score a landslide victory with Love Shine A Light, making it all the more bewildering that since then the UK has adhered unswervingly to the vote-oblivious format of blander than bland charisma-free nobodies casually mumbling in-one-ear-out-of-the-other witterings that sound as though someone has aspired to turn the middle eight from Taste Of Your Tears by King into an entire song. Anyway, the upshot of all of this is that while This Is... Eurovision might well seem like a bafflingly off-message choice for a fifth volume from this distance, at the time it really couldn't have made more sense.

What is surprising is that, the odd scattered compilation of recent winners and anniversary-prompted 'souvenir' album aside, this genuinely appears to have been the first ever attempt at putting together a proper Eurovision Song Contest retrospective. This does mean that there's slightly more of an imperative to chart a history than to reflect a scene, and as such, there are a disproportionate amount of 'big hitters' for a Cult Fiction compilation. The only problem with this is that far too many of these are erstwhile UK entries, and that not many of them are really all that good. Congratulations, Power To All Our Friends, Puppet On A String, Long Live Love, Let Me Be The One and Boom Bang A Bang - all of which not-so-coincidentally share the same sort of faux-'Swinging London' oompah arrangement - do not deserve to be placed up there with the best of their respective artists' non-Eurovision material (and yes that does include Cliff; and if you're going to pipe up with some nonsense about Power To All Our Friends being his 'Flower Power' phase, then I not-so-respectfully refer you to Throw Down A Line), though in fairness this sort of fare was par for the course in an era when most pop performers - including The Beatles - could envisage no greater aspiration than to be accepted as 'all-round entertainers'.

Instead - and surprisingly - you'll find more substance in the offerings from homegrown Eurovision heavyweights that aspired to nothing greater than to be accepted as 'all-round entertainers' full stop. Despite what knee-jerk memory might lead you to believe, Making Your Mind Up and Save Your Kisses For Me are actually perfectly listenable songs with surprisingly robust arrangements (and eagle-eared listeners who 'know these things' might well detect the handiwork of certain prominent session musicians), although The New Seekers' Beg, Steal Or Borrow still sounds simultaneously both twee and dreary, and its polished phased harmonies are pretty much Exhibit 'A' in The Crown Vs. The Horrible Cabareted-Up Mangling That Psychedelia Had Undergone By 1972; something that is all the more ironic when you consider that lead belt-out-ers Eve Graham and Lyn Paul had previously trod the boards with the now highly collectable The Nocturnes. Meanwhile, nobody has ever yet been able to reach a conclusion one way or the other about Lynsey De Paul and Mike Moran's wry-looks-across-opposing-pianos opus Rock Bottom.

When it comes to the non-UK Keynote Eurovisioneers, once again it's a largely positive state of affairs. Nicole's idealistic plea for world harmony A Little Peace still sounds exceptionally drippy, and indeed is impossible to hear without thinking of Syd Little in a wig singing "just like a taxi/with nowhere to park", but proves to be a good deal easier on the ear than it did back when it sat at the top of the charts for approximately three thousand years. Similarly, Celine Dion's Ne Partez Pas Sans Moi is actually quite enjoyable compared to her later overwrought helicopter-bound outpourings, and Johnny Logan's What's Another Year is bland but charmingly so; compare it to the hitting-self-with-tin-tray histrionics of his subsequent Eurovision winner Hold Me Now (also included here, worse luck), and indeed the contributions of his contemporaries Linda Martin and Paul Harrington & Charlie McGettigan, and it's easy to see exactly what went wrong in the post-Live Aid latter half of the eighties. In fact there's a lot of this sort of torch-song-goes-stadium-rock emoting on offer here, mainly because of how doggedly the UK in particular adhered to this winning formula that never actually did much winning, and if truth be told it ultimately does little bar drag proceedings down.

It's when we finally get deeper into the rest of Europe and indeed deeper into the more obscure and cult-friendly areas of the Contest's considerable back catalogue that This Is... Eurovision really starts to get interesting. There's the vaguely melancholy and existentialist singalongs exemplified by the likes of Vicky Leandros, Anne-Marie David, Massiel, Severine and Milk & Honey (whose Hallelujah scores extra points for its potential to infuriate inattentive uptight Jeff Buckley fans), the blasts of high camp from Sandra Kim, Marie Myriam, Izhar Cohen, Belle & The Devotions and Baccara, and ancient Beatle-eradicated UK-proffered contributions from Matt Monro, Kathy Kirby and Mao Zedong's favourites Pearl Carr & Teddy Johnson, all of which still prove to be surprisingly enjoyable, doubtless due to the fact that they were clearly conceived as good songs first and foremost and then punted Eurovisionwards at a later date.

Further unintentional Python evocation - who, lest we forget, were sufficiently comically infatuated with The Eurovision Song Contest to do an entire sketch based on it - comes courtesy of Clodagh Rogers' gloriously nonsensical ode to Zebedee Jack In The Box, and additional esoteric delights are to be found in Eimaer Quinn's full-on hardcore Robin-The-Hooded-Man-evoking 1996 winner The Voice, in Niamh Kavanagh's PWL-goes-schmaltz antics, and in an impressive smattering of underachieving UK entrants that takes in the pre-acting Samantha Janus, Medusa-haired Frances Ruffelle, and Cheryl Baker-essaying late seventies ad-hoc ensemble Co-Co, whose The Bad Old Days may have bombed on the actual evening but has since come to be regarded as one of the definitive Eurovision waxings. Sadly, this doesn't extend as far as including famously chart-averse 1990 teen wonder 'Emma' and her plea to Give A Little Love Back To The World, but on the other hand it does mean we get to swerve 1995's Love City Groove by Love City Groove, an outfit who apparently set out intending to copy Freakpower but somehow ended up accidentally copying Beats International instead, so it's not all bad news.

For all that it might have been mocked in Father Ted, even in the episodes that weren't about The Eurovision Song Contest, Dana’s collision of psych, folk and bit in the middle of The Two Ronnies that makes up All Kinds Of Everything is one of the best songs on this entire collection, but in all honesty it's a bit too obvious to count as one of those trademark listener-wrongfooting surprises that the compilers of Cult Fiction were wont to pull out of the bag. Instead, that honour must go to three absolute belters that you're decidedly unlikely to hear at your average cheese-and-pineapple-swamped 'ironic' Eurovision house party where everyone has to dress as a voting card or something. There's One Step Further by Bardo, a post-Dollar haziest-fringes-of- New-Romanticism boy-girl synth-pop duo that represented the UK in 1982, which failed to win but was genuinely inescapable at the time, and led Smash Hits to tip the hapless twosome for great things that never quite happened. Then there's France Gall with Poupee De Cire, Poupee De Son, the galloping sound of Serge Gainsbourg waving the less savoury aspects of the pop industry back in its own face, which had become something of a favourite on Loungecore-favouring dancefloors. And, best of all, the truly orbiting-in-its-own-universe Ding-A-Dong by Teach-In, the other side of the coin to Beg, Steal Or Borrow's sludgy post-psych glossy meanderings, whose textbook tee-hee-hee-the-foreign-contestants-don't-stand-a-chance-on-Going-For-Gold-except-when-they-always-win Eurogibberish title cunningly conceals what is quite possibly the weirdest song ever written and recorded in the name of vote-driven technically-overambitious EEC-linking displays of televisual tunesmithery. 'Nul Points' to Trackspotting, frankly.

In some respects, This Is... Eurovision is the most difficult of the Cult Fiction albums to listen to straight through in a single sitting, as there is so little musical variance and so much upbeat banality that it can become incredibly wearing incredibly quickly, like being serenaded by a relay team of John Barrowmans. As a wide-ranging overview of Eurovision as a 'genre', driven by enthusiast interest rather than statistics, however, it takes some beating. Meanwhile, The Cult Fiction series had one last bit of expectation-confounding to do.

One of the big frustrations for soundtrack collectors of yesteryear - and TV soundtrack collectors in particular - was that the commercially released versions of your top favourite theme tunes never quite matched up with what was heard on screen. The odd ill-advised funked-up aberration aside, they were by and large very close approximations, but were always sufficiently 'different' to cause the sort of frustration that could never be sensibly explained to anyone else; the guitar that came in just that bit further away from the beat, the shrill exotic wind instrument replaced with a more Pye Records-friendly session flautist, the abrupt ending jettisoned in favour of a repetitive and overlong fadeout, and so on and so on and so on and living in harmony they're the friendly enemies living in harmony they're the friendly enemies living in harmonOH JUST STOP.

In some extreme cases, like that of Randall And Hopkirk (Deceased), the hapless punters wouldn't even have got any kind of variation on the original recording at all, with the few - and even in some cases lone - commercially available versions being shunted out by the yard by one of the many and unvaried faceless big bands and orchestras that specialised in such cheap and not always especially cheerful cash-ins. One such cheap and not especially cheerful cash-in was the long-forgotten ramble through the theme from Randall And Hopkirk (Deceased) released as a latterly-dizzying-sum-fetching single by Norrie Paramor & His Orchestra. This alone was enough of a holy grail for collectors (don't bother, though, it's rubbish); the spectral harpsichord tingling of Edwin Astley's original on-screen version was so far beyond the realms of availability that people didn't even bother wishing that it would come out, and instead just contented themselves with muffled and hissy recordings they'd made from VHS tapes. Like so many other similarly great yet elusive pieces of soundtrack music, it was destined to gather dust on a shelf in some archive where nobody actually knew where it was, tantalisingly just on the edge of continuity-announcer-hijacked consciousness but seemingly destined never to find its way onto CD.

Late in 1996, however, some enterprising soundtrack collector decided they'd had quite enough of this nonsense, and wrote to 'QAnswers', Q Magazine's authoritative rock itch-scratcher extraordinaire, asking the intrepid ask-arounders if there was any way in which the original recording could ever be made commercially available. Surprisingly, the answer came back that the compilers of the Cult Fiction series were looking into whether the original Edwin Astley recording of Randall And Hopkirk (Deceased), spectral harpsichord tingling and all, could be incorporated into a collection of TV detective themes pencilled in for the New Year. Needless to say, the mere suggestion that they were looking into the possibility of licensing otherwise unavailable original original original soundtrack recordings led to all manner of excitement and speculation. By the twin laws of averages and diminishing returns any compilation series onto its sixth volume should have long since started to run the already flimsy concept into the ground - and Trackspotting of course couldn't even manage a single volume without doing so - but this news suggested that they were all set to outdo all of their previous and indeed not inconsiderable achievements. Whatever the next Cult Fiction album ended up being called, it looked likely to be the album that a great many of the series' fans had always wished existed.

When This Is... Cult Fiction Royale duly appeared late in 1997, it wasn't exactly a 'detective themes' album as such, but neither was it the throwback to now-badly-outmoded Tarantino-worship that the continentally-skewed burger-scoffing title suggested. So... what exactly was it, then? Well, the cover artwork, showing an old-skool petrol-guzzler, a foxy chick in a Paloma Faithesque wallpaper-pattern jumpsuit, and what experts believe to be Matthew McConaughey's character from Dazed And Confused as rendered by a court artist who'd just been fired for being slightly too accurate, was giving nothing away, and the tracklisting appeared, on first glance at least, to be bewilderingly all over the place. The 'theme', if there could be said to be anything resembling a tangible 'theme' at all, appeared simply to be 'being the best Cult Fiction compilation of the lot', and it's fair to say that this ambitious benchmark was one that they ended up vaulting with ease. Whether by accident or design - well, come on, it's going to be 'design' isn't it - they had managed to gather together just about everything that a Cult Fiction devotee might conceivably still want in the one place. Well, technically two places, given it was a double CD set, but you get the general idea.

In fact, This Is... Cult Fiction Royale was such a mighty collection of tracks that it was easy to miss the fact that a good thirty percent of them had already appeared on previous Cult Fiction compilations. And indeed sufficiently mighty that even when you did notice this, it hardly seemed to matter, though admittedly the fact that many were also appearing in full this time around did help a bit. Joe 90, Hill Street Blues, The Return Of The Saint, The Professionals, Man In A Suitcase, Get Carter, The Champions, Avenues And Alleyways from The Protectors, Mission Impossible, Danger Man, The Man From UNCLE, Strange Report, The New Avengers and Tales Of The Unexpected (still suffering from early-fade-out-itis) all show up for a repeat performance, but they're all such great pieces of music that you really don't mind hearing them again in a new context. On top of which, there's a couple of welcome surprises amongst their fellow returnees; the James Bond Theme is in its original Connery-era single-version guise as credited to (cough) 'Monty Norman', there's a thundering funked-up take on The Sweeney as recorded for mysteriously undiscernible purposes by library music mainstay Simon Wallace and alternative comedy's own piano-pounder Simon Brint (and yes, the alarming drumming may well be courtesy of Rowland Rivron), and as an entertaining white elephant there's the 12" extended version of a partially successful 'Big Beat' reworking of the original The Professionals theme by Blue Boy, which as you're probably suspecting was the less successful follow up to Remember Me.

And what of that much-vaunted 'new stuff' that allowed for this equally much-vaunted 'new context'? Well, the two-disc set gets off to a barnstorming start with two previously-neglected instrumentals that had then recently been dusted off for renewed advert-fuelled popularity, Lalo Schifrin's car-bigging-up main title theme from Bullitt and Jean-Jacques Perrey's Lucozade-proffering early Moog gurgle-out E.V.A., alongside - more impressively still - the single version of John Barry's oddly ill-fittingly Cold War-evoking theme from ITC's most entertainingly ludicrous series of the lot, The Persuaders!, which up until then had been eluding compilers on account of headache-inducing rights complications, with many a collection having to opt to use a dreary orchestral rendering in its stead. Lalo Schifrin also makes everyone's day with Dirty Harry's scorching opening title accompaniment, which rumbles on ominously far longer than it has any right to before losing control and going wildly overboard with the blaring brass, yodelling backing vocal ladies and wah-wah disobedience, along with the more subdued On The Way To San Mateo from further along in the Bullitt soundtrack, while John Barry performs much the same honours with his oft-overlooked recurring Bond incidental instrumental 007.

On the more obscure and televisual side, there's not only the shrill flute-driven funk workout that introduced a corduroy-clad post-Doctor Who Jon Pertwee grilling a team of b-list celebrities about an extended ripoff of Cluedo in Whodunnit?, Laurie Johnson's close-but-no-final-verse-trumpet-voluntary single-length reading of The Avengers, the surprisingly tuneful 'gritty' urban eighties orchestra-hit-driven intro from Dempsey & Makepeace, and The Les Reed Brass' top drawer cover of The Saint, there's also the Simon Park Orchestra's it's-a-lager-not-a-tune-tastic theme from Van Der Valk - probably one of the most frequently forgotten chart-toppers in Top Forty history - and even better still its even more frequently overlooked b-side; Distant Hills, better known to school-averse perusers of pre-daytime TV daytime TV schedules as the closing theme from Crown Court, and which is arguably worth the price of admission alone.

Yet amazingly, if we're extending the 'price of admission' analogy still further and indeed beyond the point where it really makes any logical or cogent sense, all of this above-alluded to musical fantasticness is really only sitting in those dusty display cases in the foyer that people just sort of wander past without taking much notice of, and what everyone really wants to see (or, erm, hear) is the main attraction; or, in less ridiculous terms, those excitement-arousing themes taken directly from the soundtracks of TV episodes. And they really are 'taken directly' - in the absence of easily sourceable master tapes, a deal was struck with the then-present rights holders of ATV/ITC's televisual output whereby they were literally dubbed from master copies from the archive, with the opening and closing themes as heard on screen bolted together into something at least approximating 'full length'. While this does mean that they're unavoidably presented here in trebly flat mono and there are some jarringly shoddy bits of editing on display - someone was clearly labouring under the misapprehension that Gerry Anderson's 'Century 21' ident was actually part of the UFO theme, whilst a butterfingered fragment of the sponsor message from the US broadcasts somehow found its way into the theme from The Baron - mere words alone cannot adequately express how much of a thrill it was to finally have high quality as-heard-on-TV copies of those two along with The Prisoner, Randall And Hopkirk (Deceased), Department S, Jason King, Stingray, Fireball XL5, Supercar, Space: 1999, Tiswas and Sapphire & Steel (or, as the back cover tracklisting has it, 'Steele'), complete with chattering teleprinters, screeching car u-turns and Patrick McGoohan thumping a desk crudely sellotaped over the top. Of course, diligent detective work has since led to a great many compilations using the original tapes of all these and many more besides and in glorious properly mastered stereo to boot (yes, alright, and mono in quite a few cases too, but you get the general idea), with the result that in retrospect they make This Is... Cult Fiction Royale feel like a bit of a disjointed listen as a whole, but at the time it was a massive step up and indeed step forwards from the home-made cassettes that hapless soundtrack fans had been trying and failing to put together to their satisfaction for far too long.

Inevitably, with a compilation and indeed an archive-scouring endeavour on this scale, there are a couple of moments where This Is... Cult Fiction Royale doesn't quite hit the Century 21 Productions target. The perfectly decent but all-too-familiar single versions of Thunderbirds and Captain Scarlet And The Mysterons show up instead of their superior on-screen readings - quite why they didn't take the opportunity to include the much-sought-after mock-bubblegum-psych oh-no-some-boxes-are-falling-quite-near-me closing song from the latter really is a mystery - although on the other hand we should be grateful they averted the weedier onscreen original of the Joe 90 theme in favour of the hefty Northern Soul-favoured single version. Presumably because the rights were then owned by the same people as the erstwhile ATV/ITC shows, we get the horrendous beefing-up of the theme from The Magic Roundabout from the now quietly forgotten Nigel Planer-narrated episodes, though the most jarring plot-straying is saved for right at the end, when listeners get to 'enjoy' all seven bastard minutes of the are-they-still-going-on-about-that-am-I-still-on-that-fecking-island moping sax main theme from the show they could never quite stop trying to convince you that you liked, Twin Peaks, and more incongruously still Vangelis' complete and unedited Blade Runner Blues, which may very well be an astonishing piece of music but is not really one that should be taking up several decades at the end of two discs' worth of walloping drums and swaggering brass. Though if you did give up halfway through, then you'll have missed the suspiciously prolonged blast of silence at the end; 'hidden tracks' at the beginning and end of CDs were all the rage back then - indeed, it's quite possible that some have still never even been stumbled across - and what better way to end this collection than with the inattentive-listener-alarming actual literal binging and indeed bonging ATV 'zoom' jingle, blaring out as if an episode of Pipkins is about to start? Actually, why wasn't the theme from Pipkins on here? The actual proper Inigo Pipkin song in its original version? Not the single version but the actual genuine onscreen one? Yes, alright, moving on...

Although whether they were actually that good at going out on a high as individual compilations is open to question, This Is... Cult Fiction Royale really did end the Cult Fiction series on a high; presumably it was a commercial rather than an artistic decision to finish the series here, but even so it drew a pretty satisfying line under two years and nine discs' worth of expertly-chosen tracks that most of the target audience had probably never even imagined that they'd get to own on CD. And that wasn't even the end of the story; in 2004, Virgin saw fit to release The Best Of Cult Fiction, which collapsed highlights from the earlier volumes (though frustratingly nothing from This Is… Eurovision) onto two discs, alongside a handful of newcomers and a couple of selections from Quentin Tarantino's more recent big-screen offerings, alongside a revised and reshuffled This Is Easy, which replaced a couple of the original compilation's more obscure selections with more widely appreciated contributions from the likes of Serge Gainsbourg and The Mike Flowers Pops (and yes, they did take the opportunity to replace those horrendous re-recorded Burt Bacharach and Sandie Shaw tracks with the original readings). There was, however, no updated Trackspotting.

So, This Was... Cult Fiction. A series of compilations that may not have had the era-defining cultural cachet of Now That's What I Call Music, the slick combination of chart hit crowd-drawing and collector-friendly obscure 12" mixes of Anthems: Electronic 80s, or the sheer FOR THE SAKE OF ALL THAT IS DECENT AND HUMANE HIT IT WITH A BIN of Summer Chart Party, but which still make for interesting and enjoyable listening all this time later, and which more importantly went very well with your Britpop, your Loungecore, your unironic love of Eurovision, your alcopops, your liking for the sort of films that the 'cineastes' seldom enthused over, your back issues of Loaded that you couldn't bear to throw away, and your falling off a chair whilst attempting to impress 'That Becky'. Significantly, the exotic jazzy stylings and tendency towards chilled-out extended album-closers also went surprisingly well with an unexpected various-reasons-prompted shift in musical mood that happened shortly after This Is... Cult Fiction Royale came out... but that's another story.

We’re All Gonna Rock To The Rules That I Make

Not so long ago, a certain prestigious gallery put on a huge exhibition entitled Glam! The Performance Of Style. Taking the satin and tat of Glam Rock as its stylistic cue - albeit leaning very much towards the artier Bowie/Roxy end of the scale rather than just having a huge screen showing Noddy Holder shouting "IT'S GRIM-LEYYYYYYYS" on a loop - this was an ambitious and well-presented collection that sought to reflect just how far Glam's influence had pervaded into the wider sphere of arts and culture, with exhibits ranging from a photo of Showaddywaddy to a small artillery of Alkasura jackets, some Richard Allen books safely secured in a glass case to prevent them from going on the rampage, and a collection of films by gender-ambiguous shock performance art troupe The Cockettes, one of which, following several minutes of provocative homoerotic male full-frontal activity, caused someone to tut and walk out when a topless lady appeared on screen.

There was, however, one figure who was perhaps even more conspicuous by his absence than he would have been by his presence. Come on, come on, you know full well who that is. Now, before we go any further, nobody is seriously suggesting for a second that there should have been huge framed photos of The Artist Formerly Known As Rubber Bucket taking up an entire wall of every single room, but the question remains of how you can stage a full and comprehensive retrospective of Glam Rock without in some way acknowledging - even if it's just via the same sort of 'cover versions by other artists' subterfuge as the compilers of the superb Glam box set Oh Yes We Can Love skilfully deployed - someone who, no matter how subsequently disgraced, was for many, many, many years seen by the general public at least as the be all and end all of all things Glam?

And the answer is that you can't. Well, not properly. If, due to the actions of a handful of genre participants (and, somewhat unfairly, a brace of untalented tosser DJs who happened to be presenting pop shows when Glam was big, as opposed to all those other years either side they were doing exactly the same that somehow don't seem to have wound up quite so tainted by association), you have to play down the fun and throwaway footstompy side of Glam - which, with its heavy slant towards provocative art, high fashion and gender politics as opposed to The Tomorrow People, Spangles and the BBC Schools Clock, Glam! The Performance Of Style seemed jarringly keen to do - then in some ways you have to start pretending that Glam Rock was something that it wasn't. Or rather something that was only half of what it was. Which is all very well and good when you're exploring the films, fashion houses and indeed art galleries that fired the imaginations of your Ferrys, Enos and Harleys, but not so much when people start trying to fill the musical void on the other side of the newly decimalised coin by roping in other more culturally acceptable yet less genre-appropriate pop favourites that simply happened to be around at the time. Look down any list of 'Glam Rock' artists these days, and it probably won't be long before you stumble across a mention of Abba, whose visual links with actual proper Glam Rock were tenuous at best, and musical links slightly less than non-existent. If wearing silly shiny clothes is all you need to qualify, then, frankly, let's have Bobby Crush on the lists too.

Just for now, though, let's take a look back at a time when lists of Glam Rock artists had actual literal Glam Rock artists on them. And were actual literal lists too. No, really. Back in 1989, probably before any of the featured artists even had a computer to take in to be fixed, K-Tel put out a rather splendid compilation entitled Glam Slam. Wrapped in a lavishly-designed memorabilia-strewn gatefold sleeve, this was quite possibly the first occasion on which anyone had attempted to put together a coherent overview of the genre, and alongside the obvious big hits and big hitters the compilers also found room to feature a couple of relative obscurities from the likes of Hello and Argent, and a mildly contentious inclusion from bill-fitters in sound only 10cc. Promoted by an inevitably Holder-shouted TV advert boasting camera flare-occasioning archive clippage of many of the featured artists, it was a foregone conclusion that any aspirant investigators of the more esoteric corners of pop and rock history would invest in Glam Slam as soon as paper round revenue permitted, and on top of that, exposure to this previously rarely discussed genre suddenly seemed to fling open a door on a lost popular cultural world every bit as remote and evocative as mid-sixties psychedelia, only with more Barnaby.

Still tucked away inside my own copy of Glam Slam is a not particularly neatly folded sheet of A4 paper, on which I attempted to scribble together a definitive list of artists connected to my then-new musical obsession. It's a list that's split into three columns, and the first - headed 'Glam' - features all of the usual suspects (and indeed suspects) with some newer and less well-known additions like Sailor, Barry Blue and The Arrows appended to the foot of the list in varying shades of biro. The second one, headed '?', catalogues the longer-careered likes of Elton John, Lou Reed, Wings and Lulu, who while never quite fully committing themselves to the Glam Rock cause certainly adopted its musical and sartorial trappings for a nicely effective while (though no Abba, oddly enough). And the third, helpfully headed '??', simply lists The Wombles and The Goodies. No, still can't figure that one out.

In addition to Glam Slam, a fair few of the names in the first column of that list were arrived at via the three volumes of Glam Rock released by Virgin Video around the same time, which featured a dazzling collection of vintage TV performances from across the globe by the familiar and the forgotten of Glam Rock (and, on the less essential third instalment, some more up-to-the-minute pop gaudiness from the likes of Sigue Sigue Sputnik, Twisted Sister and Doctor And The Medics), which in those pre-TOTP2 days was an almost unheard of feat of archival archaeology. Well, to be honest, you did occasionally get the odd clip on daytime TV shows and the then still-rare phenomenon of nostalgia shows and pop retrospectives, but you get the general idea. And, given that there's now no way that you're ever going to get a DVD release of any of them, it's time to take another look at one of those Glam Rock video compilations. Unusually, we're not going to be taking a look at the first Volume of Glam Rock here, as it's a bit too limited in terms of range of artists, and it was issued in two versions (one with Roxy Music doing Virginia Plain, one with Wizzard's Ball Park Incident instead) due to mysterious rights complications, and on top of that we'd have to deal with the thorny subject of someone going on Top Of The Pops in full Nazi uniform, and frankly we've already got enough on our plate as it is. Instead, though there'll no doubt be reference to the contents of the other two volumes en route, we'll be turning our attention to the more wide-ranging line-up - if not more widely-ranging trouser width - of Glam Rock 2.

Despite the subtle but effective attention to detail in the sleeve art, featuring both some authentic-looking star-spangled fabric and a short but enticing sleevenote about how much fun the likes of Roy Wood and Noddy Holder brought to the pop scene, Glam Rock 2 opens with - ironically - a none-more-eighties scrolling video effect showing various featured performances, including, you can't help but notice, a Slade one that doesn't actually appear on the tape. Closer examination reveals this to be a mimed Coz I Luv You, and quite how and why it ended up being trimmed from the running order will have to remain a mystery.

What's less of a mystery is the identity of the lengthy drum intro playing behind this opening sequence, and sure enough, as soon as the guitars kick in we're straight over to Suzi Quatro, thundering through Can The Can with the aid of her band of Lance from Home And Away lookalikes. Though, it has to be said, very few people will be paying much attention to them - even when there's a close-up of one of them doing the 'eagle' noise on his guitar - when there's a sparkly-eyeshadowed busty leather-catsuited frontwoman whacking her bass and yelling with full force rock fury, proving years before punk that women could do 'real' music just as well as men without having to draw attention to the fact that they were doing so, and generally showing exactly why she was such a huge star at the time. Placing this as the first song on the video also raises a couple of interesting points from the outset; firstly that this sounds very heavy indeed for something that was roundly dismissed as 'pop rubbish' at the time (leading to an infamous incident in which her producer sent a giftwrapped brain to the NME), and secondly that, at least visually, this is a very different sort of 'Glam' to either of the previously identified strains, still glittery and androgynous but with a more straightforward, rather than parodied and exaggerated, fifties-influenced look. Of course, putting it at the start also makes sense in that it's simply a great opening track with a steadily excitement-building intro, much like Rock And Roll Part 2 had been for the first volume. And moving quickly on from that...

...we come straight onto, erm, the Glittery one himself. Let's be blunt about this; the flimsy Always Yours was already one of the least remembered chart-toppers of all time even before we were all instructed to forget it by law, and, unfortunately, hearing it again after such a long interval does nothing to improve its standing. This isn't even a particularly imaginative performance either, just some straightforward camp-expressioned miming with The Glitter Band standing around doing a synchronised arm-pointing dance. Not that any of his songs included on the first volume of Glam Rock were any more imaginatively staged, but at least they were good songs. Well some of them. Anyway, that's as good a moment as any to leave Always Yours where it is.

T. Rex's Electric Warrior-era singles were all on the first volume of Glam Rock, mostly drawn from refreshingly unfamiliar-looking European pop shows, so the first glimpse we get here of Marc Bolan and company is via the original promo film for Children Of The Revolution. Not that the 'rock historians' very often deigned to lower themselves to write about Glam Rock at the time, but believe it or not, it was a widely expressed opinion back then that Children Of The Revolution marked the moment at which T. Rex 'jumped' the 'shark', largely on the basis of its purported Holidays In The Sun-esque lack of substantial discernible difference to previous offerings, and the fact that - shock horror – it only reached number two. However, one listen to the still-mighty song is enough to confirm why this daft opinion has long since been overturned, and though while admittedly the band do look a little, erm, 'tired' in this performance, there's no disputing the energy, enthusiasm and star quality that are still vividly on display. Of course, the words 'Bolan' and 'Boogie' would indeed become mutually incompatible soon enough, but thankfully we'll have to wait until Glam Rock 3 to witness any of that.

Next up is Alvin Stardust, once regarded as a derivative johnny-come-lately bandwagon-jumping Glam opportunist of the first order, but more recently belatedly promoted into the First Division for rather quite obvious reasons. Though it would have been better if the reasons had actually been to do with his music being quite good after all. And The Grimleys, obviously. He clearly wasn't quite so readily disregarded at the time, though, as this Top Of The Pops performance of My Coo Ca Choo is pretty much the most visually elaborate, if not ridiculously over the top, inclusion in this entire compilation. It starts with a Thermal Image Camera-enabled rendition of Alvin himself in profile, before he becomes a zoom-varying full size figure superimposed in front of footage of his decidedly less than Glam-looking band, with additional psychedelic multi-image effects thrown in (or should that be thrown on?) for good measure. Meanwhile, in a weird coincidence, it was around the time of the video's release that Cadbury's Picnic opted to start advertising their wares with a comedy rewrite of My Coo Ca Choo, featuring the video-manipulated Calvin The Camel singing the praises of "peanuts, raisins, whuafffer biscuits". Though as the accompanying The Chart Show-riffing data boxes informed us, he wouldn't be touring because 'he can't stand dates'. The writers of TV's Thompson were reportedly not losing sleep.

Five numbers in, we finally get to Sweet, all of whose biggest and best hits - or at least the ones that there were actually still extant TV performances of - were included on the first volume of Glam Rock. Though even then they were somewhat compromised by the use of a weirdly edited promo film for Teenage Rampage that omitted roughly seventy five percent of the actual song, and the skipping over of the oft-repeated eye-maddeningly solarised Top Of The Pops performance of Blockbuster! in favour of another lesser-seen one from another edition, in which Steve Priest's somewhat ideologically dubious choice of 'camp' stage gear caused uneasiness and indeed queasiness even at the time the video was first released. Thankfully there's nothing so troubling on offer here, though unfortunately Glam Rock 2 is left with no archival option than to delve into the somewhat less celebrated era when they started writing and producing their own material, and it doesn't always make for satisfying listening. Action, dating from the all but post-Glam year of 1975, was a reasonably enough sized hit, but it's quite clear from this performance that the band had more or less phased out the spangly business in favour of a more conventional 'rock' look and indeed sound, while the song itself comes across as a collection of decent ideas in search of a way of actually working alongside each other. Barring a lone stray late seventies hit, Action was to prove to be their last regular top twenty appearance, and those lyrics about not needing to conform to other people's commercial gameplan, and indeed that sarky cash register in the middle, must have rung a tad hollow afterwards.

Thankfully, next up comes someone who quite clearly has no qualms about being commercial and doesn't care who knows it. Despite Roy Wood seemingly being unencumbered by the need to come up with more than one tune, Wizzard nonetheless managed to score a string of surprisingly credible Phil Spector-pastiching hits featuring increasingly bizarre instruments whilst trying their absolute hardest to look as ludicrously far past the point of tinselly ridiculousness as was possible, which stand up as some of the best chart offerings of their time. Early seventies pop did not come much more fun than this, plus they get extra points for jointly kickstarting the whole craze for Christmas singles, to the chagrin of miseryguts Scrooger-than-thou types and TV's Phil Popes everywhere. Appropriately taken from the 1973 Christmas Top Of The Pops, this performance of their finest five minutes See My Baby Jive features guitar-toting gorillas, foxy handjiving backing dancers, rollerskating angels, a custard pie fight, and Roy Wood playing both a French Horn and a vacuum cleaner - the possibility that that's exactly what he was playing on the actual record cannot be discounted - and should be used as Exhibit 'A' whenever anyone tries to prove that they're better at liking music than you by showing you a clip of Thom Yorke mumbling into a microphone about a bird that fell in a bin or something. This is exactly the sort of infectious pop silliness that we're losing out on by trying to play down the fun side of Glam Rock, and nobody's any the better off for that.

More tongue-in-cheek silliness follows, though this time it's 'allowed' due to Sparks' more critic-satisfying eccentric art-school leanings. This Town Ain't Big Enough For Both Of Us scarcely needs any introduction (though you'd be surprised at how rarely heard and indeed little remembered it was back then), and this Top Of The Pops appearance was the first that the majority of the UK had seen of Ron and Russell, and never let it be forgotten that the latter's exaggerated theatrics are every bit as entertaining as the former's more celebrated toothbrush moustached glowering. For no readily obvious reason it's cut a bit short here, omitting the final verse and Russell's song-closing dramatics, but even so this is every bit as entertaining and indeed silly as the Wizzard performance, and once again this is exactly the sort of thing that will get missed out on if we start prizing 'art' above all else, however legitimate the reason. Although this wouldn't be missed out on due to it being regarded as 'art' in some quarters. Erm, as you were.

The same is less equivocally true of Suzi Quatro's Devil Gate Drive, which is a fun and rowdy enough rock'n'roll pastiche as it is, and is rendered here in a truly mind-frazzling sensory assault of dazzling multicoloured back-superimposed post-psychedelia psychedelia, which quick-cut alternates with an entire alternate performance in extreme close-up, while Suzi and the heavily-haired boys indulge in a wilfully ridiculous routine involving formation high-kicking dancing and bizarre interludes of 'worshipping' her gods-proffered bass guitar. It's in seeing footage like this (and indeed Can The Can) that you come to realise just how good a rock musician she was and just how unfairly this has been overlooked since, admittedly partly due to her later successful diversification into stage and television acting, radio presenting, all-round entertaining and presenting Central TV's Gas Street. Also, it's handy evidence to back up Noddy Holder's oft-repeated, under-appreciated assertion that Glam Rock came about because people needed a bit of fun in the face of the grim realities of the early seventies. Well that and the Carnaby Street boutiques starting selling glittery jackets, and the new studio technology that allowed for better recording of heavy drumbeats, and the influence of The Move, The Small Faces and Syd Barrett, and the general evolution of pop-art in a more minimalist and primary-coloured direction, and Dominic Sandbrook's probable conclusion that none of this happened outside of a couple of ephemeral second division pop stars who'd been palmed off on Mickie Most and/or Chinn And Chapman by their record companies in desperation, and... erm... um... c'mon boys, let's do it one more time for Suzi etc etc.

And it's a good job we've had that three-song outbreak of hilarity as - who'd ever believe it - a certain slightly less welcome party is now being wheeled onto the stage on the back of a giant tinselly revolving heart. I Love You Love Me Love was once so popular that it was included on the first ever commercially available compilation of karaoke backing tracks (1990's Karaoke Party on Trax Records - go on, look it up), but now just leaves the unwary listener with a bit of an uneasy feeling, particularly when it's staged with such adulation and reverence. You do have to feel a bit sorry for poor old Mike Leander, who wrote, produced, played on and probably even did the bulk of the singing on all of these now verboten hits, but it's a sympathy that can only extend so far and sometimes the inadvertent implications of a song and artist are just so much that you don't even feel like putting forward an argument for the music itself. Good Lord we need a good laugh at this point.

Thank fuck, then, for Alice Cooper, and the truly hilarious promo film for Elected, featuring everyone's favourite shock-rocker cruising the streets on his fictitious presidential campaign, 'meeting' the public (including one lady who appears to think he's an actual candidate) and planning his next senatorial move with the aid of a suited-up chimp. It's hard to convey in words just how expertly assembled this bit of irreverent comic nonsense is, from the moment a limo pulls up to reveal him grinning out of the window, to the madcap rally invaded by someone in a sub-Banana Splits elephant suit at the end, but if you're familiar with Elected and know how good it is, then saying that it's a perfectly judged visual accompaniment should get the manifesto across just fine. What's particularly interesting is that while this may all seem like a two-fingered response to America's political establishment in the wake of Watergate, the actual scandal was still some months away from breaking when the song was recorded and indeed released as a single, and this promo film will almost certainly have in fact been filmed while the initial attempted covering up was taking place. Nothing ever hits quite so hard as inadvertent satire slightly before the event. One of the few non-Top Of The Pops performances on the tape, T. Rex's Telegram Sam is actually taken from Music In The Round, a short-lived London Weekend Television Sunday Morning arts show in which Humphrey Burton introduced and chatted to young and up-and-coming musicians ranging from The National Youth Jazz Orchestra to early music enthusiast David Munrow as they played to a small audience at London's celebrated Cockpit Theatre. The complete T. Rex edition, showcasing songs from The Slider, has since shown up on several official collections and is well worth tracking down, though the undisputed highlight is this powerful live rendition of the then-recent chart topper which, the superbly slovenly Bolan-voiced count-in aside, manages to sound impressively close to the original studio version. Incidentally, all of Music In The Round still exists, as do plenty of other ITV music shows from the sixties and early seventies featuring all manner of arcane and fascinating Glam, Psych, Prog, Soul and even straight ahead pop acts that were bewilderingly overlooked by the producers of recent missed opportunity Pop Gold. Still, it was worth it for all those endless clips of Bros on The Roxy.

Then Alvin Stardust's back with a decidedly more visually appropriate backing band - who he's actually standing next to this time - for Jealous Mind, which was in fact a bigger hit than My Coo Ca Choo despite not being quite as good as it, and this is a much more moody performance, deliberately playing up the puzzling and quickly dropped 'Mean Man Of Glam' element to his stage persona with some halfhearted guitarist-shoving and microphone stand-twirling. Much like with Suzi Quatro, this was a very clear attempt to create a more subdued and stylised form of Glam, mining the rougher glitz and glamour of late fifties fashion rather than retina-infuriating gaudiness, and while it may have worked when he was telling errant road-crossers that they must be out of their tiny minds, pretending to be a big tough rebel telling 'the man' to stick it now doesn't seem to sit well with the context of times, and it was on becoming a more jovial and affable caricature that Mr. Stardust found his way into the public's affections and the wider world of all-round entertaining. TV-am, Hollyoaks, Godspell and I Feel Like Buddy Holly all lay ahead. Someone really ought to have put him in a sitcom, though.

A familiar - though noticeably re-recorded, presumably in accordance with those arcane Musicians' Union rules about bands having to mime to an alternate re-performance of their hit - Moog-tastic intro announces the arrival of Fox On The Run by Sweet, a superb bit of self-penned nonsense where they had the good sense to actually write and perform it in the style of their earlier production team-driven hits, meeting with massive success that unfortunately convinced them that they could do it all themselves in future. And what do you know, there's just enough of a hint of Glam still detectable in both their image and their performance to make it fit seamlessly in with the surrounding songs. Actually, on closer examination, those bizarre regulations don't seem to have been as rigorously enforced as you might expect them to have been, as surviving early seventies editions of Top Of The Pops appear to capture most of the featured acts more or less miming to the available-in-the-shops version, but as Sweet were so calamitously keen to emphasise their 'real music' credentials to all and sundry by this stage, it's hardly surprising that they should have taken the fullest possible advantage of the opportunity to impress the wider viewing public.

One widely-adopted simpler solution to this issue was to unobtrusively whack a couple of extra drumbeats or vocal ad-libs over the top of the existing recording, and that's exactly what T. Rex opt to do with Metal Guru, throwing in the odd additional double-tracked Bolan war cry so that Ben Kingsley Musician's Union would never suspect a thing. Again this is an effects-swamped performance, with multicoloured camera effects very much to the fore, and if this and other similar inclusions in the compilation prove anything, it's that the music was really only a part of the equation and indeed that Glam Rock could not thrive by sparkly eyeshadow and camp posturing alone, and needed the artifice, the spectacle and whatever visual wizardry the 'backroom boys' could throw at it to truly become otherworldly, and that this mighty combination of factors is what sets T. Rex apart from the likes of, well, Abba. Though that said, you really did need to have the music, the image and the personality as well as the TV spanglings. Otherwise you'd just be Rod, Jane And Roger.

Next up... well, it's Mr. Glitter again, and what's more he's adding insult to injury by bending the rules slightly. Performed here with an uneasy fusion of high camp and a post-Glitter Band assortment of for-the-money session musicians in dinner jackets, which it has to be said contrasts rather dramatically with the visual flair in evidence throughout most of the rest of this tape, A Little Boogie Woogie (In The Back Of My Mind) actually hails from his mildly commercially revitalising attempt to 'go' disco at the end of the seventies, and while it's certainly a fantastic song, it's not really 'Glam Rock' as such and, even allowing for the paucity of available archive material, seems a bit of an odd choice. Anyway, if you're troubled by my saying it's a fantastic song, keep in mind that in the late eighties, Shakin' Stevens - in the midst of his short-lived 'House' phase - had a huge hit with a Mike Leander-instigated overhaul as performed on TV with a quartet of dancers whose heads appeared to stay in the same place whilst their bodies moved around, and we can all enjoy that without any guilt or misgivings. Not least considering that whilst endeavouring to determine that this really was a Top Of The Pops performance and not taken from one of the German shows (which it does look and sound a bit like), YouTube provided some very unwelcome confirmation when TV's Scrawny Old Bastard showed up to back-announce it. Yeah, thanks for that.

And then, saving the most ridiculous for last, it's time for Mud doing Tiger Feet, with the aid of some blokes doing a decidedly awkward dance that looks for all the world like the 'how to play badmington' diagrams from the Fist Of Fun book. Presumably this was the much-vaunted Tiger Feet ‘dance’, though it’s impossible to find any two accounts of it that actually tally with each other. Meanwhile Mud, really, encapsulate the inherent problem with trying to play down the less heavyweight side of Glam Rock and concentrate on the more columnist-friendly take on the phenomenon; they rocked as hard as The New York Dolls and dressed as flamboyantly as David Bowie, but because they did so on lightweight Crackerjack-friendly numbers about hypnotists and partying cats they aren't ever really allowed anywhere near the too-cool-for-art-school performance-of-style side of things. Suggesting that Glam was something that it wasn't leaves no room for Les Gray singing Lonely This Christmas to a ventriloquist's dummy, and that won't do at all.

But that's not all; there's also a spot of hidden post-credits hilarity in the form of some post-credits hilarity from Top Of The Pops itself, in which the post-Tiger Feet Mud and their dancers are joined onstage by The Glitter Band, Alvin Stardust's mob, assorted Rubettes (conspicuous by their absence from all three volumes of Glam Rock, despite their solid musical and visual credentials), Carl Douglas' non- Glam Kung Fu-fighting backing dancers, and Dave Lee Travis 'playing' a Christmas Tree, for a bit of custard pie-flinging year-end fun. Yes, that's just who we needed to show up right before the last paragraph.

So, anyway, that's Glam Rock 2, and indeed that's the end of our look back at a video that for obvious reasons has long since been consigned to the dustbin of popular culture, and which perhaps wasn't the most popularity-courting outmoded artefact ever picked out for discussion here. It's quite possible that a few readers might think that it should not have ever been discussed on here at all, and some might even have taken offence at it, to which it can only be suggested that they maybe possibly actually read the whole article and pick up on certain not exactly subtle undertones contained therein before raising indignant objections. I mean seriously. There’s one in the paragraph you’ve just read. As for Glam Slam, it was quickly followed by a couple of imitators which were eagerly purchased by new converts to the tinseltastic cause; the even better yet Glam Crazee, and Wig Wam Glam, which I will one day personally destroy every copy of.

TV’s Newest Series

One thing that those big walloping housebrick-sized books about the 'end' of 'the sixties' never get round to mentioning is the decline of ITC. Once ITV's in-house powerhouse of dynamic fashion-driven action serials, when everything started sliding towards loudly patterned curtains and mirror-disc top hats and all the hippies jumped in a bin to hide from the BBC Schools Diamond or something, ITC lost their small-screen hitmaking direction in a way that their Jaguar-swerving lead characters sure would never have done.

Perhaps reflecting the more street-level politicised nature of the times, as the seventies rolled on audiences were increasingly looking for something grittier and grimier featuring detectives who wrestled with real 'issues' rather than billionaire supervillains and dangerous new inventions, which ITC seemingly took as their cue to move in completely the opposite direction. They may have seen in the decade strongly with UFO, Jason King and The Persuaders! - all of which at least technically began production in 1969 - but within a couple of years they'd moved on to such unmemorable fare as Millicent Martin-starring swinging air hostess solving crimes in her spare time effort From A Bird's Eye View, a vision of jet-setting glamour that was already jarringly several years out of step with the times, and bizarre co-production funded Gerry Anderson-helmed detective series The Protectors, which even the cast and crew later admitted that they never quite understood. They also cut the average running time of their shows from an hour to thirty minutes, presumably in pursuit of some unfathomable Stateside 'syndication' deal, which hardly even gave them the chance to develop properly as action-driven television shows, let alone catch on with audiences. All in all, ITC's single biggest success of the time was The Adventures Of Rupert Bear, a long way and yet only a few years from their triumphantly lording it over the Saturday Night schedules with Captain Scarlet And The Mysterons and The Prisoner.

Times change, though, and nowadays even the biggest and boringest of TV flops of yesteryear has a reasonably profitable degree of cult appeal. Good, bad and The Adventurer alike, you'll now find every last ITC series on DVD, on Blu-ray, and on repeat channels on an unending loop. With one very glaring exception.

First seen in 1974 (though some sources insist that the two-part pilot The Mountain Witch was shown as a one-parter in an hour-long slot in 1973), Skiboy starred seventeen year old Steve Hudis - son of Carry On films creator Norman - as Bobbie Noel, a skiing instructor who solved crimes, mounted daring rescue missions and defused wartime bombs in the Swiss Alps in his spare time. And that was literally the only skill and advantage he had at his disposal - skiing. In crimefighting terms, that makes him about as useful as Nathan Petrelli.

One area where young Bobby's quaterpiping skills should have proved an advantage, though, was in attracting viewers. At the time, fuelled by spectacular Olympic displays, glossy glamorous books like Stein Eriksen's Come Ski With Me, and World Of Sport’s need to fill fifteen billion hours every Saturday with stuff that they could actually get the rights to, skiing was seen as pretty much the high altitude of thrill-packed glamour and sophistication. Ski chases and Alpine romances were a regular feature in James Bond films, while the Milk Tray man wouldn't even have considered delivering a single Strawberry Temptation without getting in a spot of downhill carving along the way. 'Action' comics like Tiger and Hotspur were crammed with storylines about their stunt plane pilot/record-breaking sportsman characters making emergency landings in hazardous off-piste areas, and their readers also thrilled to the endless procession of ski-themed Fisher Price Adventure People playsets. Toblerone was still the classy 'expensive chocolate' gift of choice, and it was unusual to see a European-made soft porn film that didn't feature a spot of hot Ski Lodge lovin'. Erm, apparently.

There was more than enough behind the scenes ambition to pull this off too. Skiboy was masterminded by producer Derrick Sherwin, who had recently pulled off a successful full colour relaunch of the floundering Doctor Who - including casting Jon Pertwee - and cameraman Charles de Jaeger, who had worked on some of the early Quatermass serials and was also primarily responsible for the infamous Panorama Spaghetti Harvest hoax. Under the letterhead-friendly auspices of 'Skiboy Productions', they were basically handed a huge wodge of co-production cash and told to go off and make a series on location to capitalise on this most intangible of crazes; only a couple of years later, they'd doubtless have done it as a martial-arts themed show called 'Dragonboy', which just goes to show what a huge potential audience they had. And they were given all this on the basis of what Sherwin recalls as a two-paragraph pitch, and the belief that a combination of their experience and the sheer glamour and exoticness of the setting would make for a winning formula. It was like Heaven's Gate, Neither Fish Nor Flesh and The Contrabulous Fabtraption Of Professor Horatio Hufnagel all rolled into one. And about as successful as any of them too.

Is this really fair though? Does Skiboy really deserve its... well, it doesn't even really have a reputation, does it. Does Skiboy deserve its obscurity? There's only one way to find out - to do something that possibly nobody at all has done since the scattered repeats finally took an Eddie 'The Eagle' Edwards-style jump into oblivion in the late eighties, and actually watch an episode.

Written by Derrick Sherwin himself, Hot Ice opens with a pair of standard issue big-coated seventies 'heavies' more or less shouting "BLAH BLAH SECRET PLAN" as they approach the ski lodge - to the accompaniment of some fancy wah-wah guitar and electric piano - in search of someone to guide them up a nearby mountain. While they do so, Bobbie and his winsome fellow instructor stroke love interest Sadie pass by unwittingly in the background, chasing their bone-pursuing pet dog Gruff and uttering some conveniently foreshadowing dialogue about how "thieves always bury their loot". Resort head honcho Claire is reluctant to assign any of her staff to guide them up what turns out to be called Monk's Fall, pointing out that it's completely inaccessible in winter, but clearly has some suspicions about their motives for wanting to visit the 'beautiful' Chalet Blanc; and not without good reason, as once they're back outside, the flatter-nosed 'heavy' announces that he'll find someone to take them "even if I have to use some... persuasion", adding rather obvious-statingly that he'll "kill anyone who tries to stop us".

Anyone who knows their ITC will be aware that this is usually the moment when the opening titles kick in, and lo and behold we're promptly treated to some startling footage of Bobbie skidding down slopes and hurtling through the air, to the accompaniment of the truly unhinged theme song. Written by Anthony Isaac, who was not exactly noted for his subtlety and restraint in the art of small screen show-openers, this features a brass-led disco-funk combo whipping up a storm whilst a string section play as if running on an overload of adrenaline and some harmonising girls belt out "SKI-BOY! SKI-I-I-I-I-YEE-BOY" at appropriate intervals. If nothing else, the series is worth revisiting for this thrillingly alarming piece of music alone, which is uncannily close to the sound that Air would later turn into a global sensation; and as the series was actually rather popular in France, where it was broadcast as A Skis Redoubles! - a more or less untranslatable title which basically means nobody skis more than him - it's not beyond the bounds of possibility that they might have been tuning in.

The 'heavies' take their coats off menacingly and approach Peter Stringfellow-esque ski instructor Jean, who rejects their substantial offers of money and sternly informs them of the story of how Monk's Fall got its name. It's exactly how you suspect it got it. Back outside, there's some more conspicuous exposition about how they have to get there before a fellow criminal is released from prison and "we can't wait... and we won't". With a menacing growl of slap bass, this is followed by some lengthy footage of them skiing and arguing, more or less confirming the suspicion that the pair are played by stuntmen rather than full-time actors. Bobbie and Sadie, watching from the top of a nearby slope, are also suspicious of them, but for very different reasons; they've noticed the ne'er-do-wells watching them, though not closely enough to get wind of the plot to kidnap Gruff to ensure their assistance. And sure enough, once they've gone for a nice sit down in the lodge, the hapless mutt is tempted away with a rather inflexible-looking chop and bundled into the boot of a car.

Bobbie and Sadie head out to look for the errant pooch, and split up after about eight seconds, upon which Bobbie is promptly approached by the suspicious characters, who persuade him to help them in exchange for Gruff's safety in the manner of Dino and Luigi Vercotti. Early the next morning, Sadie can't find her dashing chum, and that's because he's already headed out to help guide the crooks on their treacherous journey, which takes in some genuinely hazardous-looking ice-climbing, occasioning the nervier of the 'heavies' to throw a momentary panic and refuse to move any further; "then stay there", adds his more menacing chum, "you'll either fall off, or freeze to death".

Back at the lodge, Claire, Sadie and Jean are busily comparing notes on Bobbie's disappearance, Gruff's disappearance and their encounters with the two sinister interlopers, but bewilderingly manage to conclude that none of them are in any way linked. They're in for a surprise, though, as Gruff has somehow managed to tunnel his way out of the hut where the villains had stashed him, and bounds up to them like some snow-drenched Lassie trying to alert them to the situation. It's only at this point that Claire realises that she recognises the men and that they're actually dangerous criminals who'd been up to no good in the area a couple of years previously; surely you'd actually have to make an effort not to remember that?!

A lengthy display of skiing across Monk's Fall follows before the trio arrive at the Chateau, with the bad guys electing to shoot the padlock off the door when they find it's frozen shut. "That was no hunting rifle!", exclaims Jean from some considerable distance away, informing Sadie to call the authorities as he races off in his car. After Bobbie is unconvincingly thrown to the floor, the 'heavies' start chiselling open the wall and find a cache of stolen diamonds - "the only ice on this mountain that's hot!" - but while they're babbling some rubbish about the ghosts of the old monks hiding it, Bobbie makes his escape and deftly skies not only around their gunshots but with sufficient verve to cause the snivelling smuggler to tumble down the mountainside. Every action series from around this time was required by law to have a scene featuring a helicopter, and sure enough, that's how Jean, Sadie and a snow-copper in a furry hat arrive on the scene; the less easily dissuaded bad guy tries firing on them but they zoom in close enough to make him lose his balance, upon which Bobbie races up and literally skis the gun out of his hand. You don't get that in Sons Of Anarchy.

Back at the lodge, Gruff and Bobbie are both eagerly tucking into breakfast when Claire suggests that he's likely to receive a reward; like some slalom-friendly Alberto Frog, Bobbie announces that he wants the biggest ice cream sundae Sadie's ever seen, and - in as standard issue an ITC closing gag as it's possible to get - as a special treat he's going to let her watch him eat it. Then there's some really rather thrilling closing titles, in which Bobbie races down a slope, slicing up huge clouds of snow and zigzagging through what look like real-life skiiers, before pausing, grinning at the camera in close-up, and whizzing off across the horizon into the invisible distance... and that's Skiboy.

Never exactly the star of the TV slopes - some regions would hastily shunt it into their weekday children's schedules, while all that Look-In could find to say to promote it was that it was 'TV's Newest Series' - poor old Skiboy never quite made the jump to a second series. Before long it had become TV's Forgottenest Series, to the extent that only just over a decade later, the famously exhaustive fanzine Time Screen overlooked it entirely in a massive retrospective of ITC scriptwriter Dennis Spooner's career. ITC looked as though they were finding their feet again afterwards, with Space: 1999 and Return Of The Saint, but other ITV companies had stolen their thunder with the likes of The Professionals and The Sweeney. ITC's response to this was a significant and ambitious change of direction, turning their attention towards grittier and harder-hitting feature films; a plan which was derailed by their washing their hands of the already-completed The Long Good Friday, and then sunk completely by Raise The Titanic.

Given that it's quite possibly the first thing that anyone has said about it from that day to this, the first thing to say about Skiboy is that it's not actually a bad series. In fact it's actually rather charming and enjoyable, and certainly a lot more fun than Spyder's Web or The Zoo Gang to name a couple of contemporaneous ITC offerings. True, it's hardly The Singing Detective, and the all-too-obvious desire to make it as 'family friendly' as possible leaves it feeling a bit on the lightweight side, but it looks amazing and zips along at a fair old pace, and sometimes, that's all you want from a television programme. Viewers at the time might not have wanted it, but that's not really a good enough reason to leave it languishing on the archive shelves; after all, they didn't want The Strange World Of Gurney Slade either.

Skiboy isn't just a half-decent not-even-half-remembered action series from a lost age of television, though; it's also a fascinating snapshot of that lost age of television, and indeed in some ways of the world around it. It's a textbook example of how shows were commissioned and made in the days before focus groups and tone meetings, when anyone with a proven track record could pitch a basic idea, and more than likely be handed a wodge of cash and told to go off and bring home the televisual bacon; which admittedly Skiboy didn't exactly manage to do but they were at least allowed to try before failing. It's also a vivid depiction of the last gasp of that sixties and seventies fascination with jetsetting Eurocentric glamour, before harsh economic realities and The Sex Pistols saying 'BARSTARD' at Bill Grundy moved the sociocultural goalposts and the entire world went on to washed-out 16mm ITN newsfilm. On top of all that, thanks to the combination of dazzling location footage and equally dazzling fluorescent Alpine fashions captured on garish oversaturated film stock, it doesn't even look like any other TV show of the same vintage; if anything, it looks closer to those films that you'd stumble across on SAT1 and Bravo at a million o'clock in the morning like Modesty Blaise, Vampyros Lesbos and that German one about the three girls who stole a speedboat and a cine camera and... um... sorry, you were saying?

Anyway, the cold hard fact remains that no matter how many column inches of ecstatic raving-over the latest HBO/AMC/Showtime/They're Just Making These Up Now heavyweight drama might inspire, none of them will ever be as inadvertently redolent a document of their time as Skiboy. So, there you have it. Skiboy may not be the greatest television series ever made, but nor does it deserve to be languishing at the back of a cupboard where it's been for so long that it's probably gone mad and thinks it's actually zigzagging between Melbourne House Software and Hardware lorries on the way to the nearest ski hire shop. Given that even Stainless Steel And The Star Spies has been dusted down for reassessment, it's high time that TV's Newest Series got an opportunity to be TV's Newest Old Series. Just don't ask me to reassess The Adventurer.

May We Come With You?

Chigley, the third and final instalment in Gordon Murray’s stop motion trilogy for the Watch With Mother audience, made its muted debut on 6th October 1969. It was described by its own opening caption as ‘Near Camberwick Green, Trumptonshire’, and didn’t we know it. Always overlooked, always forgotten, always the focus of accusations of having just made it up from people who insist they remember Trumpton having a train in it, poor old Chigley has always been in the shadow of its better-remembered companion pieces.

In fairness, there are a number of plausible reasons for this. Chigley came in on the back of two highly popular shows that had already been repeated a dozen or so times each, and featured prominent guest appearances by returning characters from both of them. It later disappeared from the schedules for a good while owing to tedious contractual issues. There was – surprisingly – very little merchandise released based on the series. And perhaps most significantly, it was considerably more laid-back, whimsical bordering on surrealist, and light on the sort of heavily repeated songs and footage that had dominated both Camberwick Green and Trumpton. As a result of this, there is a widespread perception that Chigley was simply treading water, offering nothing new or remarkable and all in all a poor relation of the other two shows; in perhaps the most ill-fitting analogy of all time, it was File Under Easy Listening to Camberwick Green’s Copper Blue and Trumpton’s Beaster.

Even if you have no idea what any of that might possibly mean, you’re probably one step ahead already, and waiting for me to say that this is at best unfair and at worst a load of nonsense, and that Chigley is as good as, if not better than, the other two series. Well, you’ve predicted correctly in that case. Chigley was indeed on a par with Trumpton and Camberwick Green, and although we’re talking about a very narrow margin indeed here, it might actually be my favourite of the three. An argument that it’s safe to say I will not be making for File Under Easy Listening.

A Present For Lord Belborough, the thirteenth and final episode of Chigley, first went out on BBC1 at 13:30pm on 29th December 1969. As this was not just the end of the series, but also the end of the ‘trilogy’, and indeed more or less the end of the decade – and let’s be honest about this, those three series could never really have come out of any other decade – this is the episode that we’re going be taking a look at here. And like every episode of Chigley, it opens in a decidedly understated fashion. There are no Clowns, no Music Boxes, no chiming figures on elaborately-appointed clocks, and definitely no striking melodies that could be constructively ‘borrowed’ by Pink Floyd, Tim Buckley and Jimi Hendrix (and potentially Haircut One Hundred, but that’s an argument for a whole other decade). Instead, there’s an inconclusive bit of rolling folky guitar – not one of Freddie Phillips’ more inspired moments, it has to be said – and the show’s name on one of the now-familiar ‘splodge’ title cards. Unlike Camberwick Green and Trumpton, Chigley does not so much announce its appearance as loiter nonchalantly in the general vicinity of the schedules, hoping that viewers might stumble across it.

Matters were hardly exactly helped by the fact that each episode of Chigley began not in Chigley, but in either Camberwick Green or Trumpton. This would invariably involve a familiar character being quizzed on their intended destination by Brian Cant – taking in another namecheck for the two other shows as he did so – and asked “May we come with you?” on finally confirming that they were headed for Chigley. On this occasion, proceedings open in Trumpton Town Square, where lab-coated ice cream man Mr Antonio is flogging a cornet to Mr Munnings The Printer and doling out a couple of ‘mivvis’ for Mr Troop to give to The Mayor before going about the rest of his daily business. And, what do you know, he’s off to Chigley. And yes, we may go with him.

As he drives off in his alarmingly The Prisoner-evoking luridly-decorated ice cream van, there’s an airing for Mr Antonio’s all-too-familiar-from-Trumpton chime-facilitated ode to the virtues of putting your lolly stick and wrapper in the bin before buying another one straight away, after which we learn that his main purpose for visiting Chigley is to deliver a ‘tin’ of vanilla ice cream to the sadly never-glimpsed Winkstead Hall Tea Room. On arriving at the Belborough family’s ancestral home, he bumps into the comically-bearded and indeed comically accented gardener Mr Bilton, who requests one of those ‘peppermint’ ice creams they had in the sixties, and in return gives Mr Antonio a freshly grown climbing plant. Yes, sounds like a fair exchange.

Mr Antonio takes the trouble to ask his horticulturally-inclined friend how things are going in Winkstead Hall’s impressively appointed gardens, which he no doubt immediately regrets when Mr Bilton uses the opportunity to launch straight into a lengthy complaint about his rheumatics and back twinges. This ailment is something that he blames squarely on having to cart around so many heavy loads of garden supplies by ‘that rotten old wheelbarrow’; he has asked Lord Belborough for ‘one of those motor truck things’, but has so far yet to receive one and so the back-twingeing must continue. Feeling sorry for him, Mr Antonio offers to mow the lawn while Mr Bilton sits back and enjoys his ice cream. Tom Sawyer himself could have not pulled off a better chore-averting scam.

Adding insult to his own injury, Mr Bilton takes this opportunity to launch into his own song about how “it’s a full time job to make a garden grow”, sadly presented here in its truncated version omitting the seemingly endless list of plant-troubling insects from greenfly to ‘wireworm’. Amazingly, three whole minutes in, this is the first glimpse – other than the appearance of Winkstead Hall and its infrequently-sighted gardener – that we have had of anything identifiably and definitively ‘Chigley’. Small wonder, then, that the shows seemed to blend into one another in the eyes of anyone who wasn’t mad enough to memorise the fact that Mr Bilton was also deeply concerned about blackspot, brownrot, root rot and leaf curl.

On a more identifiably and definitively ‘Chigley’ note, on returning to the entrance to Winkstead Hall, Mr Antonio chances on Lord Belborough, who is shaking his head with Ealing Comedy Toff disbelief at his apparently having hallucinated Mr Antonio mowing the lawn. Mr Antonio confirms that he isn’t actually some far out crazy acid vision after all, and reminds His Lordship about Mr Bilton’s back issues. It turns out that he’s all too keen to fork out for a motorised garden truck, but is a currently a bit strapped for cash after having just had to spend a hefty amount on repairs to the Winkstead Hall roof. If only, he muses, he could raise enough from the regular open days to afford one.

Travelling back to Trumpton to the accompaniment of an instrumental version of his song, Mr Antonio reflects on the hefty costs involved in maintaining a stately home, before deciding to call in on his friends in Deepest Chigley, beatnik-esque potter Harry Farthing and his decidedly boyish-looking daughter Winnie. While chatting with them, he learns about a surprise present that the residents of Chigley have bought for Lord Belborough to thank him for his philanthropy and hospitality – a model steam engine that Mr Rumpling the bargee found in an auction house. An actual engine, that is. There’ll be more than enough in the way of steam trains later on in the episode.

Continuing on his way back to Trumpton with yet another airing for the instrumental version of his song, Mr Antonio stops off in Camberwick Green – yes, I know – to get some petrol from Mr Crockett’s garage. While waiting for the tank to be filled, he mentions Mr Bilton’s woes and the plans to surprise Lord Belborough to Mr Crockett, upon which the action fades to black in a manner that ever so slightly suggests that a plan might be starting to formulate. Sure enough, one week later – as Brian Cant helpfully and it has to be said incongruously informs us – Mr Swallow from Treddle’s Wharf phones Winkstead Hall to inform Brackett the Butler that a large crate has arrived for Lord Belborough. Aware that His Lordship is not expecting anything, a rather puzzled Brackett sets off on his famously lengthy journey along the corridor to inform His Lordship.

This seemingly endless sequence with its alarmingly jerky nose-first walk is one of the most widely-identifiable aspects of Chigley, though there’s a bit of a difference here. Normally Brackett’s overlong stroll is played out to a strident and regal-sounding instrumental, but here we get the rarely-heard vocal version about Winkstead Hall having “bats in the belfry and beetle in the beams” and how important the revenue from open days is for ensuring its upkeep. You do get the impression that while Brackett may have fulfilled his standard promise to tell His Lordship at once, he may not actually have told him everything.

Anyone who does remember the difference between Camberwick Green, Trumpton and Chigley will already have worked out that this is the point at which Lord Belborough and Bracket put on their overalls and thunder off in their beloved steam engine ‘Bessie’, singing the celebrated Time Flies By When I’m The Driver Of A Train song as they go. Clocking in at a comparatively hefty ninety seconds, and accompanied by impressive visuals which to the untrained juvenile eye probably do actually look like clouds of steam issuing from Bessie’s funnel, The Little Steam Train as it is more properly known is rightly regarded as one of Freddie Phillips’ finest compositions, combining a strident sub-UK Psych melody, chugging percussion and alliterative lyrics with a dense arrangement of field-recorded sound effects. It’s probably the most well-remembered aspect of Chigley by some considerable distance, and deservedly so, though the problem is that most people seem to remember it as coming from Camberwick Green or Trumpton.

At Treddle’s Wharf, Mr Swallow lifts the package onto Bessie with his crane, and Lord Belborough and Bracket head off to Creswell’s Chigley Biscuits Factory where they regularly play the Dutch Organ to the workers’ Six O’Clock Dance. As the package is clearly labelled as not to be opened until the Six O’Clock Whistle is heard, there’s an extra element of excitement as the workers charge out of the building, and with Mr Antonio and Mr Bilton in attendance, the crate is opened to reveal the engine. A delighted Lord Belborough is busily thanking everyone when Mr Crockett arrives with a trailer to attach to the engine, which Mr Bilton can use as a makeshift motor truck thing. The organ is cranked up, the dancers take their places, and the episode ends as always with the Dutch Organ theme and a series of credit-bearing ‘splodge’ captions.

And that was it. Not with a bang, not with a whimper, but with some high-spirited dancing and a couple of hamfistedly cut-out caption blots, Gordon Murray’s tales of life in Trumptonshire came to their jaunty conclusion. Barring its aforementioned late seventies disappearance as a result of contractual wrangling, A Present For Lord Belborough would continue to be repeated numerous times per year right through the seventies and on into the eighties. It was last seen on BBC1 on 3rd January 1986, outlasting both Camberwick Green and Trumpton in the repeat schedules; but not once during any of those dozens upon dozens of showings did the bulk of the audience realise that it wasn’t actually either of them.

Over those last few days of 1969, and indeed the last few days of the sixties full stop, chances are that you wouldn’t have been able to move for people reminding you of the fact. Whether they were addressing you with a stern academic frown, or with a jubilant tip of the hat to The Honeycombs and Tich And Quackers, everyone wanted to wave goodbye to that remarkable decade in their own particular and very public style. Even though there were only three television channels, four radio stations and five and a half newspapers, there were no doubt enough cultural and political retrospectives to fill fifteen thousand Dominic Sandbrook books. And yet you’d be hard pushed to find a better line drawn under the whole concept of ‘The Sixties’ than Gordon Murray’s quiet television revolution bowing out with barely forty eight hours of the decade that brought us The Waltham Green East Wapping Carpet Cleaning Rodent And Boggit Extermination Association to spare. From Doctor Who spinning away into the last lingering remnants of black and white television, to King Crimson serving notice only days after Chigley’s arrival that the seventies would be the decade of hard, heavy and serious rock, there were plenty of indications around that, at least on a popular cultural level, everything was about to change.

Chigley was no such agent of change, but it’s precisely that lack of outward significance that makes the fact it was one of the last ‘new’ television programmes shown in the sixties so fitting. It was genuinely just another television show, positioned there by a coincidence of production and transmission schedules, and – although Gordon Murray’s plans for a fourth series in a seaside location never quite worked out – with the vague promise of more to come. And yet it had all started back in 1965 with a longtime BBC staff member deciding to leave and make his own programmes independently, with relatively new and in some cases pioneering production and animation techniques, and with a financially risky experiment with colour film at a time when colour television was still several years away.

It may not have been Rubber Soul, Blow-Up, That Was The Week That Was or Twiggy wearing one of those plastic flying helmet things, but in many senses Camberwick Green showed just how far and wide the artistic entrepreneurship of ‘The Sixties’ managed to spread, and just how profound an influence and sense of opportunity it afforded even to those who were about as far removed from ‘Swinging London’ as it was possible to get. Chigley making such a comparatively small impact only four years later is a better illustration of how ‘the dream faded’ than any grainy footage of hippies walking away across fields at sunset.

So, that’s Camb… Chigley. You know, the one with the train in it.

One Glorious Year

If there’s one thing that you can count on Doctor Who fans for, it’s to take the fullest possible advantage of the merest suggestion of the potential for an anniversary celebration. The 10th Anniversary, the 20th Anniversary, the 25th Anniversary, the 30th Anniversary, the 50th Anniversary, the 32nd Anniversary of the first use of Scene-Sync, National Carey Blyton Quartet Day, Bellal’s Fourteenth Tuesday After Pentecost, you name it and they’ll break out the party hats and trestle tables at a moment’s notice, regardless of whether the world in general of even just the BBC actually care enough to acknowledge it. It’s all one long party, and so long as you’ve heard of the Shrivenzale, you’re all invited.

What’s interesting me, though, is whether that very first anniversary was actually marked by the BBC in any way at all. Regular readers of my ramblings may have read a piece I wrote on how back in the sixties, when TV was still new and most shows ran all year round, such milestones and landmarks were ten a penny and rarely commented on, even by the likes of Play School, Top of the Pops or Jackanory. Doctor Who was, whether fans like it or not, just another programme back then, but could it still have been given a rousing chorus of ‘For Who’s a jolly good fellow’ on 23rd November 1964? There’s only one way to find out… by looking at what was on TV and Radio that day, and trying to work out if any of them would have seen fit to raise a glass to your favourite Time Lord Who Wasn’t Called A Time Lord Yet.

The long-awaited return of The Daleks in World’s End, the first episode of The Dalek Invasion of Earth, on Saturday 21st November did of course see the BBC go famously overboard with promotion, taking photoshoots, Radio Times covers and specially filmed trailers-a-go-go as far as the lens on a flexible shaft acting as an eye could see. At no point in any of this, however, was there even the slightest mention of Doctor Who’s successful clocking up of twelve months on air.

Perhaps this isn’t really too surprising, given that what the audience really wanted was Daleks, Daleks and more Daleks, and any mention of anything else would probably just have got in the way; though it’s also worth noting that the first episode of The Dalek Invasion of Earth wasn’t originally supposed to coincide with the anniversary. Technically, both this and the preceding story Planet of Giants were made as part of the first fifty two week ‘series’ – although Doctor Who itself was nominally ongoing at this point, it was nonetheless divided up into distinct production blocks – and they were originally intended to go out as part of that same block, with the first run ending with Susan’s departure and, conveniently, the expiration of Carole Ann Ford’s contract.

For a number of reasons, both the BBC’s schedulers and the show’s production office agreed to take a seven week break between The Reign of Terror and Planet of Giants instead. Had matters proceeded as originally planned, ‘World’s End’ would have been transmitted on 10th October. And if matters had proceeded as originally originally planned, and Planet of Giants had run to four episodes as scripted and recorded – it was drastically cut down to make a stronger single episode out of the barely transmittable third and fourth – then even with the unplanned reshunting of the inter-series break it would actually have shown up on 28th November. The fact that it ultimately ended up in ‘Anniversary’ Week was never anything more than a happy accident.

We’re clearly going to get nothing out of Doctor Who itself – so what about whatever was actually broadcast on 23rd November 1964? On Monday 23rd November, BBC1 kicked off with some schools programmes, including an edition of The Orchestra devoted to ‘Brass Horns And Tuba’ which featured future Beatle session player Alan Civil, and ‘Programme 73’ of Pure Mathematics Year II, which the listing notes was ‘first shown in November 1963’; it’s a fair bet that the continuity announcer didn’t say ‘just like Doctor Who!’, though.

Mainly because schools television and Watch With Mother were pretty much all that was on in the daytime back then, it’s not until 5.05 that we get the main channel’s best chance of a Doctor Who birthday big-up. Even allowing for Biddy Baxter’s strident archival policy, it will probably come as little surprise to learn that the edition of Blue Peter transmitted on 23rd November 1964 no longer exists, although the strong and enduring links between Doctor Who and Blue Peter have been so well documented that it shouldn’t be too difficult to pin down exactly what did or didn’t happen. It appears there was no dedicated Doctor Who item in this edition, and as the bulk of it was given over to Valerie Singleton and Christopher Trace presenting a report about The Earls Court Cycle Show and some news about Jason The Cat’s impending operation, and it’s unlikely that there was even a throwaway congratulation crowbarred in anywhere. Unless they commiserated Jason on missing out on the anniversary celebrations.

There’s a faint chance that the anniversary might have been mentioned by Cliff Michelmore in Tonight, an even more microscopically faint chance that it might have been mentioned in the main evening News bulletin, and a Voord’s chance in The Sea Of Acid that Richard Dimbleby would have seen fit to cover it in Panorama. Otherwise, the evening’s schedule on BBC1 was made up of Stateside imports Bewitched and Perry Mason, coverage of ballroom dancing from The Top Rank Suite Cardiff, and folk music show Singalong which staggeringly crammed The Seekers, Nadia Cattouse, The Corrie Folk Trio, Paddie Bell, The Settlers, The Arthur Blake Four, The Pete Kerr Trio and Martin Carthy into a mere thirty minutes. The evening ended with Professor Colin Cherry presenting a lecture on the modern approach to the transmission of information in heavyweight science show Communication, though it’s incredibly unlikely that he used Ian and Barbara to illustrate his arguments.

Still only six months old at this point, BBC2 was only broadcasting for a handful of hours a day, most of them taken up by Play School presented by Brian Cant and Marla Landi, Top of The Pops’ short-lived ‘serious’ counterpart The Beat Room with an impressive line-up of Marvin Gaye and cult UK beat group The Poets (and, erm, Peter And The Headlines), Jonathan Miller-fronted arts documentary strand Monitor accompanying the London Symphony Orchestra to Japan, and HM The Queen Still Watching The Virginian.

Right at the end of the evening came what was perhaps the most likely show out of anything on the BBC that day to have mentioned Doctor Who’s reaching fifty two weeks on air, the live open-ended arts discussion show Late Night Line-Up. For the benefit of those who’ve never heard of it, the ground-breakingly informal Late Night Line-Up generally used the week’s television and radio as the starting point for said open-ended discussions, and its sadly patchily represented archive is riddled with significant features on the likes of Monty Python’s Flying Circus, The Magic Roundabout, Not Only… But Also… and – of course – Doctor Who. It’s extremely likely that Denis Tuohy, Michael Dean, Nicholas Tresilian and Philip Jenkinson (the ‘iconoclastic’ one, who would probably have dismissed the Robomen as empty hype or something) would have given some coverage to the weekend’s blockbusting Dalek return, and anniversaries and the like were the exact sort of thing that they used to hinge their scripted introductions around, so while there’s not even any reliable production documentation to hand, let alone any remaining visual material, it’s fairly safe to make an educated guess that they would have indulged in some snazzy-tied well-wishing.

Over on what was still roundly referred to as ‘the wireless’, it’s unlikely that Doctor Who’s first birthday would have been mentioned on the Third Programme, a station so serious minded that one of its regular presenters waspishly described its latterday replacement Radio 3 as a ‘daytime music station’, and whose schedules for the day included such light-hearted bits of frippery as The Reith Lectures - The Age Of Automation by Sir Leon Bagrit Chairman of Elliott Automation Ltd, a ‘satire on modern American life’ called Still Small Soft Sell, and hour upon hour of the sort of classical music that would have the sort of person who claims to like ‘a bit of everything – even classical music!’ getting their mother to call in sick for them.

It’s much more likely, though, that the return of the Daleks might have been mentioned on Today, which occupied pretty much the same position on the Home Service as it still does on Radio 4 today, and which has never been averse to interspersing headline-scourage with jovial affectations to understand and indeed be able to correctly pronounce the latest trends and fashions. Chances are, however, that it wasn’t covered in Rev. Kenneth Slack’s Thought For The Week, or the ‘talk from Liverpool’ by Leslie Paxton Minister of Great George Street Congregational Church, and it’s not particularly likely that newsreader Frank Phillips chose I’m Gonna Spend My Christmas with a Dalek as one of his Desert Island Discs. Meanwhile, trivia fiends might like to note that Listen With Mother was ‘Michael Who Lived By The Sea by Mrs. MD Tebay, A Book At Bedtime was ‘The Shiralee’ by D’Arcy Niland as read by Gina Curtis, Afternoon Theatre presented ‘Trespass’ featuring Glyn Owen, TV’s Rohm Dutt, and that at 8.45am Derek Parker introduced A World Of Sound, a programme of recordings from the past and present and memories of scenes and events that were ‘before my time’. He’d have done well on Pointless, then.

Over on the Light Programme, there’s a reasonable chance that Paddy Feeny might have played one of the sudden Dalekmania-inspired outbreak of Doctor Who-related pop singles on the late afternoon ‘records for the young’ slot Playtime, though elsewhere it was largely musical business as usual with performances from the likes of Stanley Black and his Orchestra, Norrie Paramor and his Banjo Band, Shirley Bassey, Harry Secombe and The Dennis Wilson Quartet, who years later would go on to provide the theme music for Fawlty Towers.

Hidden amongst all the music, though, are a couple of fascinating sounding speech and variety shows, some of which turn out to have unexpected if tenuous links with Doctor Who. Lunchtime entertainment Startime (‘Time Out for comedy’) featured both sketch comedy from Jon’s cousin Bill Pertwee and music from Malcolm Lockyer, who shortly afterwards would go on to score the first of the Dalek films, and which was apparently introduced by ‘Bill Gates’. It’s probably not that one. Movie-Go-Round, which would in time feature a condensed version of the soundtrack of that selfsame first Dalek film, today turned its attention to ‘Swinging London’ drama The Comedy Man and Tony Curtis-led dog-wreaks-havoc comedy Wild And Wonderful.

On the non-Doctor Who related front there was also Five To Ten, a reflective interlude in which Andrew Cruickshank (better known to audiences as grumpy Dr Cameron in the hugely popular TV drama Dr. Finlay’s Casebook) read out some excerpts from the work of CS Lewis, and which seems to have provided the format for eighties daytime TV show Five To Eleven; offbeat comedy-drama-thriller experiment Follow That Man, which changed scriptwriter and genre every week; and wince-inducingly unfunny comedy The Clitheroe Kid. At the very end of the schedule came extended live jazz sets from The Joe Harriott Quintet (plugging their recent album of Broadway covers ‘Blithe Spirit’) and The Dudley Moore Trio, mentioned here purely in the hope that someone out there might have some off-airs, and also that Radio 2 might see fit to start closing their evenings in a similar fashion.

Yet there was one small birthday surprise for Doctor Who that hardly anyone noticed. During recording of The Dalek Invasion Of Earth, the studio was visited by The Beat Room dancer (and future Pan’s Person) Barbara ‘Babs’ Lord, posing with the stars of props of the BBC’s biggest shows for a feature commissioned for the Christmas Radio Times under the title ‘Barbara in Wonderland’. You can probably guess what the ‘storyline’ was. During this Lime Grove Odyssey she bumped into William Hartnell and two Daleks, who obligingly acted out the ‘Eat Me/Drink Me’ bit of the story, and while we may never know for certain if Dermot Tuohy and Michael Dean came to blows over the correct colour of the Spaceship Commander Dalek, we do have this one charming memento which proves beyond all doubt that while they may not quite have made a fuss over it reaching One Glorious Year, the BBC still considered Doctor Who to be something worth shouting about, alongside a hip and happening pop sexbomb and above and beyond a good ninety nine percent of the rest of their output. And a Merry Christmas to all of you at home!

The Magic Fountain

So, maybe you think you know your obscurities when it comes to children's TV. Perhaps you've cruised laughing past the assembled hordes of people congratulating themselves for remembering the names of a couple of the mice from Bagpuss, secure in the knowledge that your ability to recall Rubovia in terrifyingly intricate detail will forever win you a seat in the Remembering Things Senate (Secretary General: Andrew Collins).

And then you come across something like The Magic Fountain.

Those that do remember this animated obscurity usually do so with a shudder more worthy of the clown from Camberwick Green, and once you actually watch it, it's not difficult to see why. The Magic Fountain is ostensibly the Edward Judd-narrated story of a boy on holiday with his parents, only with hefty doses of existential European cinema-style para-reality ennui as he goes though forced jollity holiday mundanity, followed by a procession of encounters with shadowy figures, sinister artefacts and secret passages that lead him - via some burbling post-psychedelic 'underwater' sequences - to what appears to be that skeleton-strewn underground chamber from the last episode of Lost, whereupon he travels back in time to witness a monk being silenced with a ceremonial dagger. The mystery is on, and it all comes rendered in stylised graphic novel-style animation interspersed with that 'wavy indefinable shape' live action psychedelic business, and snarling Moog drones courtesy of none other than library music maestro Alan Hawkshaw. Stitch that,

'Bungle'. Quite how something that has more in common with Celine And Julie Go Boating than Gammon And Spinach found its way into a timeslot aimed at television's youngest viewers would be impossible to explain even if there was anything resembling explanation. In short, The Magic Fountain is one of the most interesting inclusions of ITV’s lunchtime shows, and definitely the oddest by some considerable distance.

Topper’s Tales

Hazy recollections might suggest that Topper's Tales involved nothing more than dull static storytelling, but the reality is a lot more peculiar than that. Apparently based on the pseudo-satirical 'Brownies' stories written and illustrated by Palmer Cox in dawn-of-the-Twentieth-Century America, which you've doubtless all got at home, Topper's Tales was written and narrated by Julian Orchard, a once-ubiquitous but now largely forgotten comic actor whose none-more-esoteric list of credits takes in prominent roles in numerous Carry On Films, Father Came Too!, The Spy With A Cold Nose, Half A Sixpence, Can Heironymous Merkin Ever Forget Mercy Humpe And Find True Happiness?, Futtocks End, The Slipper And The Rose, Adventures Of A Private Eye, The Goodies, Whacko!, Pickwick and The World Of Beachcomber. In it, he relates the, well, tales of

Topper, a sort of monocled pixie/toff hybrid thing, who lives with a small army of identical 'Brownies' and bearded wild west old timer-esque regulation-obsessed prophet of doom 'The Old One', summarily denounced in the opening narration as 'Bo-ring!'. Their collective exploits can only be described as a PG Wodehouse short story rewritten by Thijs Van Leer, with one foot in post-prog Tolkeinist tomfoolery and the other more expensively shoed one in Charleston-fuelled whimsy. A bit of genuine wit goes a long way in these sort of shows, and Topper's Tales succeeds on the sheer audacity of its absurdity, which was probably lost on the majority of its viewers at the time, but which only makes it all the more successful in latterly wrongfooting them.

Once Upon A Time

Much like how, in the days before the age of celebrity, up and coming comedians had to take all kinds of extra-curricular offers of work to make ends meet, the same was also true of actors, even when they already had a hit show or two under their belt. Peter Davison, for example, presented a number of children's shows while he was still just on the verge of the big time, one of which was long running Granada-produced storytelling slot Once Upon A Time; it's also telling that, immediately after leaving Doctor Who, his next bit of television work was the Blue Jam-style gambit of providing the voiceover for decidedly creepy puppet show Fox Tales. And yes, this is yet another storytelling slot, but it's one with an extremely welcome difference; the storytelling is interspersed with pseudo-academic reference to magnetic shapes on a tree-trunk prop, there’s a comedy interlude with some doo wop-crazed puppet parrots getting in the way of Davison's intended good sit down, and above all else there's the hugely enlivening presence of Davison himself. He approaches it with the air of someone who's realised that if he does this and does it well, he can expand his appeal and audience without having to work very hard at doing so at all; this comes across in a genuinely winning and likeable performance, and you do get the impression that he's actually enjoying himself, particularly when larking about with the puppet birds. Like Davison's stint in Doctor Who, this really is a lot better than popular reputation would have you believe, and primarily on account of the man himself. Now where's that Complete Sink Or Swim box set?

Animal Kwackers

The basic premise of Animal Kwackers is that beat combo in huge cartoony animal costumes Bongo (dog, drums), Rory (lion, guitar), Twang (chimp, bass) and Boots (tiger, guitar) arrive in a TV studio from 'Popland' via a flying saucer, sing glammed-up versions of a couple of sixties hits and nursery rhymes - incorporating in this episode a blissed-out Vanilla Fudge-style slowing down of Len Barry's 1-2-3 - and tell a far-fetched story about their exploits on 'the road', which thankfully tended to involve more in the way of helping to repair fences than dozing on top of runaway amps rolling down a hill, demanding colour co-ordinated bowls of confectionary, or videotaping Belinda Carlisle wanking. This is memory-searingly heralded by a platform boot-stomping call-to-arms imploring "Rory! Rory! Tell us a story! Rory! Rory! Tell it like it is!", which indie kids of a certain vintage will be unable to help but notice bears an uncanny resemblance to the intro of Changes by Sugar. There's little that can be said about Animal Kwackers other than that it's still jaw-droppingly belief-beggaringly mind-hurtingly peculiar for peculiarness' sake, lacking even the modicum of logic and purpose that The Banana Splits had (I did say 'modicum'), and this is all just on the basis of one episode. Ricky Gervais, of course, once opined that Animal

Kwackers was the ultimate TV moment 'from hell', making some observations that nobody asked for on the possible artistic motivations of the performers in the costumes. Yeah, whatever you say, Hervaid.

Little Blue

And from the psychotropic to the existential. Little Blue is an elephant who, as the Walker Brothers-esque opening song explains at considerable downcast length, acquired his atypical hue when he broke a fountain pen in the bath; "the ink it squirted in the water - wow!/Mummy's got a blue boy now".

And it continues: "They rubbed and scrubbed all night he cried and kicked up a din/the more they tried to wash it out the more it washed in/he cried 'Oh Mummy, now what shall I do?/I'll have to stay a Little Blue'". A mere bit of theme song whimsy to some, it spoke on another level entirely to those who had 'seen' the labels that the modern condition forces on us. The low-level psychological effects of his predicament were, you will probably be surprised to hear, actually expanded on in his adventures. Presumably, the more perplexing question of why and how an anthropomorphic elephant, blue or otherwise, was roaming freely in an otherwise entirely human society was considered a secondary matter. As hinted above, there's more than a touch of post-The Man Who Fell To Earth examination of social decay through social improvement in his lugubrious blue-tinged escapades, constantly finding himself an outcast on account of his internal malaise - although, needless to say, his elephantine status is never once remarked upon by his opposable-thumbed contemporaries at the local school - and in this episode he takes off into the cosmos in order to prove a point to a teacher who has grown weary of his astronomical obsessions. Yes, you did read that right. In the space of a mere three shows, we have gone from the laudable face of careerism to consciousness-corroding strangeness to the very depths of the modal jazz-soundtracked soul.