As the post below this one, about the peculiarities of BBC children’s continuity, has proved to be the most widely critically acclaimed Out On Blue Six rambling since that one about The Beatles thwarting plans to ‘rob’ Penny Lane, it’s well worth shamelessly capitalising on this by doing the odd occasional further diversion into the murky world of continuity (though happily free from the usual mouth-frothing about immingrants and Benny Hill and Michael Parkinson remaining ‘consumate’ after being bitten by Emu that usually seems to accompany discussion of continuity for some reason).
This time, it’s the turn of what you’ve all been waiting for… Programmes For Schools And Colleges! Illustrations as ever courtesy of the fabbo Sub-TV:
We start off right back in the mists of time, the 1950s to be precise, when ‘Telesnap’ maestro John Cura was clearly still perfecting his art as he hadn’t yet realised that we don’t actually need to see the TV around the image too. And note that it’s a ‘normal’ TV rather than one of those school-favoured ‘Big Tellies’ with shutters on the front, which probably has something to do with rationing. Anyway, this is what schoolchildren would have seen back in the days when Elvis Presley was only allowed to be seen on TV from the knees down and the Birds Eye Teddy Boys were waiting around the corner to administer a good kicking to Professor Quatermass, and it’s… well, what is it exactly? There’s the words ‘BBC Television For Schools’ and what appears to be a partial closeup of a planet, straight out of a Gerry Anderson title sequence. Lord knows what that was all about. Actually, wasn’t there a schools’ TV show around that time called Space School or something, or was that just Andrew Pixley playing a massive practical joke on us all?
Now we come to the first example of that fondly Kate Thornton-remembered cornerstone of every schoolchild’s academic career, the Animated Countdown. If this wasn’t the first one ever, then it’s certainly the first one that there’s really any evidence of – dating from the late sixties, and no doubt causing many a ‘bad trip’ for members of The Waltham Green East Wapping Carpet Cleaning Rodent And Boggit Extermination Association, this took the form of a strobing-friendly Pie Chart which segmentally flicked away as the latest edition of Do Your Blasted Maths drew ever nearer. This was generally accompanied by some upbeat - if slightly clinical sounding – steel band music, somewhat incongrously the work of one Leonard Salzedo, more notorious for penning the bastard scary stentorian intro fanfare for The Open University.
Except that bastard scariness was a key component of this schools-cueing sequence after all, as when there were but sixty seconds left to go, the Pie Chart would give way to this rather unsettling chronometer, looking for all the world like some sort of sinister Cold War version of the Play School clock and doubtless counting down the remaining time until some labcoated creaky sci-fi film experiment into something involving ‘the atom’ goes apocalyptically – or at least rocket-threateningly – wrong. Yet another example of the apparent complete obliviousness of those involved in child-skewed programming in the sixties to realise if something they’d knocked together might actually scare the living daylights out of younger viewers, though actually this may just have been a cunning gambit to ensure they welcomed the tedious academic programming that followed with open arms. Either way, somewhere, Leonard Salzedo and his cadre of fanatics were rubbing their hands in satisfaction.
Anyway, enough black and white-ness. Let us leave that behind with the image of a spinning Patrick Troughton saying “stop, you’re making me giddy”, and move on to the advent of colour and, more importantly, the advent of that icon of our times, the BBC Schools Diamond. Woah yes. Over a two-minute stretch accompanied by Soft Machine-esque prog-jazz (or for programmes aimed at secondary school pupils anyway – never mind the bloody sub-Music And Movement woodwind and percussion variant used for primary schools, which annoyingly seems to be the one that people tend to recall more fondly), the diamond would pulse outwards, then dissolve into a psychedelic shower of smaller diamonds, before disappearing completely. Here it is as presented in its original colour scheme, a subtle combination of black and Sam Tyler Blue.
A couple of years later, and to bring the BBC Schools Diamond in line with current thinking on the BBC Globe colour scheme, it’s been given a slight makeover and become a yellow-and-blue totem of Glam Rock-era graphic design with chunky lettering to boot. With the possible exception of Patrick Mower carrying one of those bags that said ‘SPORTS’ on them, you’d be hard pushed to find a more definitive visual representation of everything that was ‘the seventies’ until Johnny Rotten came along and phoned up Andrew Sachs to call him a ‘Revenge Of The Pink Panther Rotter’. Endlessly watchable (if you are certifiably insane) and usually better than the programmes that followed it, though in fairness that wasn’t exactly a difficult feat to achieve. But what of the famed ‘interactivity’ for the countdown-counting-down schoolroom viewer, of which there seems to be little in evidence here? All in good time…
WHUH?! What the fuck’s going on here? Why would anyone, anywhere ever need a continuity slide of the BBC Schools Diamond? ‘FOLLOWS SHORTLY Follows Shortly’????? At a push, it could just about theoretically have been used at the very commencement of schools’ broadcasting (because, don’t forget, they didn’t have Breakfast Television in ‘old money’, and all that you got out of hours was the Test Card, a blank screen, and the occasional bit of The Black And White Minstrel Show going backwards) to announce that, well, schools’ broadcasting was about to follow, but what would have been the point of that? Would anyone even have been watching? Well, apart from Bawrence of course. Notice also that the diamond is a) suspiciously slimmer than usual and b) has four layers rather than the usual three. There’s probably a very good reason for this, though – ident fans take note - probably not anything to do with Harold Wilson’s stance on the EEC.
And now, it’s the one you’ve all been waiting for – the celebrated ‘dots’, which blinked offscreen as the seconds ticked away and tedious classroom jokers pretending to be ’shooting’ them. Of course, if they were looking for a real laugh, then if they’d stopped their antics for a second they might have noticed that the ‘Schools And Colleges’ bit used to rotate, but would occasionally apparently break down mid-rotation and remain stuck in a skewed position for days on end. Oddly, the ‘dots’ would generally be accompanied by a selection of soft-rock classics, culled from the back catalogues of the likes of Wings, The Bee Gees and Cat Stevens’ Remember The Days Of The Old Nationwide Theme, though surely the oddest – and yet also strangely the most widely remembered – was Bart, an hilariously badly-named FM Radio-friendly guitar instrumental by obscure Creedence Clearwater Revival offshoot post-proggers Ruby. Sadly, not even Wikipedia at its most Citation Needing gives any indication of what the band might have felt about being more famous amongst Brit schoolchildren than American muso ‘heads’
…and that’s your lot. From here, sadly, it’s subtly shaded ‘==2==’ caption slides all the way.
As a sort of semi-canonical sequel to the earlier and surprisingly popular rundown of the eccentricities of BBC Regional Continuity, it’s time to peer into the long-forgotten and shabbily-cut cardboard-heavy world of pre-’Broom Cupboard’ Children’s BBC continuity, with illustrations provided (ie ‘borrowed’) from the ever-brilliant TV Ark:
One of the earliest examples to survive, at least in recorded form, and deceptively appearing on first glance to be doing little more than it says on the ‘tin’, in a world where you can buy tins with that day’s license fee-funded post-school viewing embossed on the side. But isn’t that pretty awful and off-putting colour scheme suspiciously similar to that of the BBC Globe of the day? And what about that choice of programme iconography? On the left we have one child looking up at the Play School house and Zebedee, on the right another gazing in wonder at Scooby Doo and the Blue Peter ship. Pretty much expected emblematic choices for 1978, but it’s an interesting juxtaposition nonetheless. Presumably the boy grew up to become a manic creative obsessed with French film and anything made in a ‘white void’ studio, while the girl grew up to remember Spangles.
Three years later, and we’ve gained a great deal of colour, but lost any discernible hint of anything approaching modernity. Seriously, what’s going on here? Perhaps it’s only to be expected from a BBC that still insisted on foisting ropey genteel derring-do costume dramas on youngsters who only wanted, well, Godzilla, but the whole thing reeks of a dogged insistence that the youth of today were no different to the youth of the twenties, and probably by design rather than accident to boot. Still, nice to see ‘Nice Theme Tune, Shame About The Show’ imported drama about outlawed ‘grog’ being sold to ‘Maoris’ Children Of Fire Mountain represented somewhere. And does anyone know what What’s The Idea! was??
Hold on a minute… Parky? What’s he doing here? He’s got nothing to do with children’s television! Indeed he hasn’t, but the nation’s favourite grumpy bastard is here, in the absence of any other available visuals, to represent the strange manner in which Play School and the various Watch With Mother shows were afforded their own ‘Adult TV’-style continuity slides, seemingly existing in their own universe independent of ‘proper’ children’s television. There must have been a straightforward reason for this, but… what was it??
This puzzling gambit was also deployed for the summer holiday morning schedules, as illustrated by this slide for Jackanory, which interestingly bears the show’s still-inexplicable ‘Tree’ iconography, though that’s a mystery for another time. Back to our current conundrum… perhaps it was some sort of mental height-of-the-unions demarcation issue, with ‘regular’ continuity announcers refusing to touch the special equipment wheeled out for the more regular children’s scheduling hours?
Because they had their own custom-made continuity slides, and while there’s nothing around of the ‘jigsaw piece’ era, let alone dear old Buzzfax, here for your enjoyment is how Grange Hill was heralded under the ‘balloons’ regime. Which would appear to be via a crudely cut out several years out of date cast photo.
What’s going on here then? Some sort of oddly mismatched artwork rendition of what’s on ‘Today’, only lacking any details of what’s on today. Notice too how several of the represented characters had long since sodded off from the schedules, suggesting some sort of cheapskate cut’n’shut of something that had been lying around for donkey’s years anyway.
And at the very end of the end of an era, what was once a familiar sight when the lazily-slung together slides were briefly abandoned in favour of modish (and indeed MODE 2) cutting edge ‘Computer Graphics’ created on a trusty BBC Micro. Up to the minute technology! But not technologically advanced enough to stop the intro animation from being accidentally cued up in the middle of an episode of Grange Hill when Roland was boarding a bus. From hereon in, it’s Philip Schofield and Hogan the monkey all the way…
It’s probably escaped most people’s attention, but for the past six weeks (and finishing tonight, sadly), BBC2 has been playing host to possibly the most enjoyably surreal television treat of the year. And bear in mind this is a year that has also brought the James-Bolam-shrinks-but-his-head-still-remains-defiantly-BBC-Globe-shaped lunacy of Grandpa In My Pocket.
Though the title gives little of this away, Britain’s Best Drives essentially involves Richard Wilson – very much in character for a man who will lend his name to anything from a ‘dancercise’ video to the shocking waste of paper that was Richard Wilson’s Big Book Of I Don’t Believe It – hopping in a procession of Fonz-friendly vintage automobiles to recreate what an AA Guide picked out as the most enjoyable and picturesque motoring routes of the late fifties, in honour of fifty years of something or other.
Surprisingly these must-get-home-in-time-for-Quatermass routes are more or less still intact, meaning that we are deprived of the joy of seeing him disgruntledly tearing through shopping centres at 70mph, but what’s more interesting is the places he stops off at along the way. They’re the sort of quiet, local trade-dominated villages that you’d think time had completely stood still in, yet his chats with the locals reveal that their lives have in fact changed almost immeasurably over the past fifty years, just in gradual and subtle ways that have altered or consigned to history things that barely anyone noticed in the first place. And aside from them, there’s a healthy quotient of unselfconscious eccentrics, like the man well into his seventies still operating a one-man coal mine built on what must surely be the world’s smallest seam, and the bizarre encounter with some ‘goths’ in Whitby.
As if to put the Morris Traveller icing on the whole bizarre retro-but-not-retro cake, the series has been given a light coating of period orchestral music, including – to the undoubted surprise of several viewers – that sweeping piece that briefly plays over the opening credits of Monty Python And The Holy Grail just as they starts rambling on about Olaf Prott and his Moose-handling duties, only for the hoax credits to be abruptly wound down about thirty seconds into it and thereby creating a decade-straddling musical holy grail for fans of, um, Holy Grail. All in all this is far from traditional Friday night fare, but all the better for it and quite a nice way to round off an evening’s viewing after all that ‘madcap’ comedy that isn’t actually that funny.
Here’s to a second series of Britain’s Best Drives, in which Richard Wilson recreates the classic motoring routes of the sixties, driving a psychedelically-patterned Rolls Royce to the sound of The Waltham Green East Wapping Carpet Cleaning Rodent And Boggit Extermination Association.
Well, you just can’t joke about it, can you? Satire may be the biggest weapon we have against the great and not-so-good (except when practiced by DC Follies, of course), but you can sit there for an hour trying to think up something based around Jonathan Ross and Russell Brand phoning up Nick Griffin and calling him a ‘National Front ninny’, but just feel such raw anger that you just can’t do ‘funny’. An outrageous situation borne of nothing more than apathy, stupidity and self-righteous indignation over some MPs who have never so much as said a single word out of place on contentious issues but did, oh horror of horrors, claim back thirty seven pence towards the construction of a hydro-electric plant and dam in their back garden. And the ‘joke’ is that there’s enough fucking idiots out there who believe themselves to be doing something ‘constructive’ in any direction by allowing this to happen.
Ah well, maybe this’ll prove to be the call to ideological arms that we seem to have been waiting for since the end of the eighties. And while we’re waiting, here’s some Free Stuff for you to enjoy:
- This Way Up Issue 23! Featuring Out On Blue Six’s very own take on the controversial Volume 3 of Heroes (clue: you are wrong about it), plus features on Doctor Who, Judge Dredd, Veronica Mars and weird Aztec-centric Troughton-equipped seventies children’s serial The Feathered Serpent. Download it for free from here.
- The Best Of Left And To The Back!Highlights from the extensive back catalogue of the famously eclectic archive-scouring music blog, including contributions from Boys Wonder, Lenny Henry and Marvin The Paranoid Android, along with that legendary reggae-tinged ‘Gallery Music’ from Hart Beat, and Rolf Harris’ Animals Pop Party, possibly the most insane record ever made.
- Out On Blue Six On Twitter! Never mind Stephen Fry saying “behhhhhhh I am buying some bread”, you can be kept bang up to date with cryptic in-jokey references to projects that are probably never even going to see completion by going to http://twitter.com/outonbluesix
- Out On Blue Six On Spotify! Go here and hit ‘random’ and enjoy a selection of favourites from the ever-expanding playlist. Now guaranteed free from Through A Glass Darkly!
What is the most sinister TV programme ever made? Ghostwatch? Threads? Thriller? Dramarama? When Jonathan Ross & Russell Brand phoned Arthur C. Clarke and called him a ‘Mysterious World Muppet’?
Scarily not. From all available evidence, the most sinister TV programme ever made would appear to be a long-forgotten ITV lunchtime effort named Sara & Hoppity.
Hailing from the days of crumbly flickering monochrome, this nightmarish tale of a disobedient girl and her demonic clockwork doll was the work of Roberta Leigh, better known for collaborating with Gerry Anderson on all those early shows with pierclingly-sung songs that sound like weapons-grade ‘twee’ and also the bafflingly over-lauded Anderson rival Space Patrol, and was apparently once considered suitable viewing for the impressionable young. From the look of it, it should never have been considered suitable viewing for anyone at all. Consider, if you will, the following factors:
- Sara & Hoppity themselves. Just look at them. They’re like some kind of attempt to recreate the Test Card out of sinister junk shop purchases by someone who had never paid any proper attention to it in the first place, and then had their memory wiped, but could never escape the shivering primal experience of girl-and-doll-derived terror.
- The fact that Hoppity is some kind of possessed ‘devil toy’ found inside a ‘Goblin Ring’. Two decades later, you could have got a best-selling Video Nasty out of that.
- The various reasons that the show ran into trouble, which included the characters making unsupervised use of scissors, putting spinach in their pockets, throwing spinach on the floor (make your bloody mind up!), using of the term ‘li-lo’, being frightened of the cellar, suggesting that a character was ‘gay’ for not liking trains, vomiting in a sink(!), and when a soldier swore on Threads, all of them frowned over with some intensity by ITV bigwig Joan Elman, whose near-murderous hatred of the series is truly alarming to witness.
- The quite alarming lyrics to the decidedly pre-Politically Correct Fat Boy’s Song
Hardly surprising, then, that you never seem to get anyone reminiscing over Sara & Hoppity. In fact, they’ve probably spent the intervening years trying vainly to forget.
- The Stone Roses and Turns Into Stone for at least the fifteenth time, as if there isn’t a single person in the world who doesn’t already own both of them eighteen million times over
- Blackpool Live for at least the fifteenth time, as if there is a single person in the world who ever wanted to willingly own it in the first place
- lyric booklet with lots of extraneous commas
- exclusive John Squire art print of something
- USB memory stick containing rare photos (like that one of them all crouching on a rooftop), rare videos (only ever previously available on the five hundred different Stone Roses videos and DVDs), rare screensavers, rare wallpapers, and a rare documentary featuring two hours’ worth of Noel Gallagher saying absolutely nothing worth saying about the band and their music and some ‘Madchester veteran’ music journalist you’ve never bloody heard of, but absolutely no contributions whatsoever from the band themselves
- £50 to buy the 2-Disc version of The Complete Stone Roses, featuring a disc of genuine album outtakes that have been inexplicably omitted from this box set, fromsome greedy fucker on Amazon Marketplace
- Why The Roses Were Top, Man! – an exclusive memoir by That Fat Bloke Doing An Air-Punching Dance To Waterfall That Every Indie Disco In The World Has
- Somewhere Soon by The High
- Sarah & Hoppity episode guide
- free ‘Space Spinner’
- two photos of Charlie Brooker (NYEH-HEHHHH!)
- full colour poster of Gonch, Robbie and ‘Trew’
- the baffled disdain of anyone who bought the album 1989 after being told by two major high street stores that “we don’t always stock all of the independent albums” and loved it and played it until the tape literally fell apart and they had to buy another eighteen months later and who fell in love with the excitement of this arty, intelligent band (where’s all this nonsense about them being ‘lads’ come from?) threatening to smash into the upper echelons of chart stardom and dethrone the mainstream megastars and ultimately failing but spectactularly so and in any case they paved the way for Britpop to make that a reality five years later and who can’t help but feel ever so slightly cheated by the ‘Classic Rock Radio’ fodder and mediocre student t-shirt industry they’ve since become courtesy of people who weren’t even born in 1989 but have still come up with this make believe scenario in which everything changed forever when the entire world went Stone Roses crazy as opposed to just a few of the hipper types in school and some students you knew while everyone else was too busy listening to The Chimes and saying “these bands you like, how come I’ve never heard of them in the charts?” because it wasn’t all Madchester in 1989 you know there was The Sundays and The Heartthrobs and the collapse of the Eastern Bloc and Emma Thompson’s awful sketch show these youngsters today they don’t know they’re born and I’ll tell you what I bet they never felt Alison Lee’s arse either etc etc…
And finally, we alight on 2005, when Moldova was splutter-inducingly represented by a comedy version of one of those lo-fi organ-toting European acts that John Peel was so fond of, only made up of blokes who all looked like both of The Mighty Boosh at once… Zdob Si Zdub with Boonika Bate Doba!
- criminally, Boonika Bate Doba (’Granny Beats The Drum‘) was beaten into sixth place by Romania’s Luminita Anghel & Sistem with Let Me Try, though one person who won’t have been unhappy about this was Terry Wogan, who took an inexplicable dislike to the song and spent the entire contest exasperatedly moaning “oh, not Granny!!” whenever anyone voted for it.
- the United Kingdom clocked up another spectacular fail in 2005, plummeting ridicule-wards courtesy of Javine’s Touch My Fire, inexplicably chosen above potentional contenders Lionel Morton and Katie Price, who at least might have been faintly familiar to overseas viewers. Like so many recent entries, Touch My Fire’s thoroughly deserved failure is proof positive that we’ll need way more than Andrew Lloyd Fucking Webber to rescue the UK from permanent Eurovision Doldrum occupation.
- Zdob Si Zdub’s insane career path has taken in recording an official song for the twentieth anniversary of the Chenobyl Disaster, being interviewed for Michael Palin’s New Europe, recording the theme for the Moldovan version of The Grimleys, and – fantastically – sharing the bill with Rage Against The Machine at the ‘Learn To Swim Festival II’.
- a technical fault during Zdob Si Zdub’s performance led to UK viewers seeing an obviously made-up load of old nonsense about Roland Rat, Sendhil Ramamurthy and Eve Myles Tits, which will still find its way onto Wikipedia as ‘fact’ while Citation is still Needed for the outrageous suggestion that Bing Crosby recorded a song called White Christmas. A spokesman for Funtastian Retrololz said “YAROOOOOOOOOoooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo (in space)”.
Today’s venue on our Courtesy Of The Time-Bending Exploits Of One Peter Petrelli-style whistle-stop tour through the history of Eurovision is 2000, when, in one of the great what-the-fuck? television moments of all time (you can fuck off with your ‘that song about nuclear war off Alfresco‘ nonsense) when a Britpop band from Latvia stormed the stage to audible consternation and confusion… ladies and gentlemen, Brainstorm with My Star.
- Brainstorm were, frankly, robbed when they only finished in third place, losing to Denmark’s Michael-McDonald-on-a-shoestring Olsen Brothers with Fly On The Wings Of Love. More deserved was their placing several thousand points ahead of the UK entry, the appropriately named Don’t Play That Song Again by the somewhat less appropriately named Nicki French.
- Brainstorm formed in Latvia in 1989 when they were all about twelve, the timing in relation to the collapse of the Eastern Bloc presumably being far from coincidental, and had been one of the country’s most successful alternative rock bands for nearly a decade by the time they entered Eurovision. That’s like Thousand Yard Stare representing the UK in 2000, if Thousand Yard Stare had been more successful.
- frontman Reynard Cowper, the Beck-lookalike doing that audience-scaring dancing, would later present The Eurovision Song Contest when Latvia hosted it in 2003, the year that saw the UK deservedly become a laughing stock thanks to Jemini and Cry Baby. They should have gone for Lionel Morton…
- this very nearly wasn’t the first occasion on which Britpop infiltrated The Eurovision Song Contest; in 1993, Denim were favourites to represent the UK with Here Is My Song For Europe, but were disqualified when one of their fans became a little too overenthusiastic and invaded the stage before tearing up a picture of MC Sar & The Real McCoy. This was considered too great a security risk for the actual event, and the UK was ultimately represented by Sonia with Better The Devil You Know, which finished Who The Fuck Cares?th.
Today, it’s time for 1983, an over-eulogised (by idiots moaning about Steven Frost or something) year that saw Roland Rat at the height of his fame, and the UK represented by one of a long line of ill-advised attempts to recapture the Eurovision-winning magic of Bucks Fizz by deploying a bunch of Bucks Fizz look-and-sound-alikes, Sweet Dreams, and their ill-fated entry I’m Never Giving Up.
- I’m Never Giving Up could only manage a paltry sixth place, with the top slot going to Luxembourg’s Corrinne Hermes with Si La Vie Est Cadeau (’That Just Raises Further Questions!‘). Would the UK have fared better if less successful contenders Lionel Morton, The Alfrescos, or ‘Belouis’ ‘Some’ (who was told to “come back in three years”) had represented their home nation instead?
- notoriously, the 1983 Eurovision Song Contest was subject to massive technical delays due to a subsequently abandoned experiment to relay the voting in three languages instead of the traditional two; this held up the final verdict for so long that the BBC switched to an emergency standby episode of Open All Hours before returning to the results, leading to a flood of calls from viewers concerned that the sitcom was occupying its usual role of compensating for schedule disruption by a major news event.
- one of the three co-writers of I’m Never Giving Up was Ron Roker, a highly successful songwriter whose credits include compositions for Tina Charles, Lynsey De Paul, Barry Blue and Tony Head (no, really), as well as the theme songs for The Adventures Of Rupert Bear and Pipkins. Sadly, this was one of the years when Ronnie Hazlehurst failed to pick up the conductor’s baton, having instead to urgently attend to theme-writing duties for John Sullivan’s Why Do I Keep Writing New Sitcoms That Aren’t As Good As Only Fools And Horses?.
- one of Sweet Dreams was young Carrie Gray, who would later transmogrify, courtesy of marriage, hair dye, and a hefty injection of phwoarness, into Carrie Grant off of Celebrity Fame Academy On Ice and the fantastically migrane-inducing Carrie And David’s Pop Shop. ‘David’ of course being David Grant, whose own early eighties pop career with finest purveyors of ‘Pigeon Street Soul’ Linx was chronicled in this post here.
Today, we turn our attention to perhaps the definitive Eurovision moment, Teach-In’s victorious 1975 Netherlands entry Ding-A-Dong, which boasts the perfect example of that all-important combination of ridiculous nonsense lyrics and weirdly melancholy vaguely psychedelic chord changes, and of course lots and lots of beards.
Ding-A-Dong finished just one place above that year’s UK entry, Let Me Be The One by The Shadows, who despite a late sixties flirtation with a more modishly epic sort of sound had long since vanished into the mists of TV-advertised Not The Original Recordings Greatest Hit Collections and appearances in the middle of the Russell Harty show, though they would always continue to do the most unexpected things at the most unexpected times, including recording the theme to mental BBC detective-who-everyone-thinks-is-an-actor-except-he-isn’t-(or-is-he??) drama Pulaski. Less successful prospective entrants for 1975 included Lionel Morton, Barry Blue, Glam Goose, Roger Ruskin Spear & His Giant Orchestral Wardrobe and A-AUSTR.
- cover versions of Ding-A-Dong have been surprisingly thin on the ground; it was recorded by Edwyn Collins for A Song For Eurotrash, but even more significantly, was fleetingly performed by Alan Cumming in an episode of fondly-recalled mental air stewarding sitcom The High Life based around a parody of The Eurovision Song Contest. That summarising sentence alone is funnier than anything Ricky Hervaid has ever come up with.
- Despite rumours to the contrary, Ding-A-Dong did not inspire the title of Derek Griffiths-fronted lo-fi cheapo forgotten Watch With Mother prop-improvisation extravaganza Ring-A-Ding, which actually began in 1973. There’s nothing amongst that year’s entries that sounds anything remotely like Ring-A-Ding, though whether or not Finland’s entry Tom Tom Tom inspired fellow forgotten Watch With Mother effort Thomas is open to speculation.
- Teach-In were responsible for a notorious on-air technical blunder when a performance on a long-forgotten Saturday morning ITV show presented by Roy Walker ended abruptly when their amplifiers blew the power in the studio. This led to over two minutes of a blank screen being seen across the entire network, before an episode of Fangface was cued in as an emergency replacement.
The personal sketchpad of writer and occasional broadcaster TJ Worthington, full of reviews, silliness and the odd bit of shouting. Feel free to stick around and enjoy the ramblings, but if you're going to sneer about grammar, scoff at people who enjoy popular TV drama, expound mental conspiracy theories or generally just act like a weird stalkerish freak, the rest of the internet is over there...
We start off right back in the mists of time, the 1950s to be precise, when ‘Telesnap’ maestro John Cura was clearly still perfecting his art as he hadn’t yet realised that we don’t actually need to see the TV around the image too. And note that it’s a ‘normal’ TV rather than one of those school-favoured ‘Big Tellies’ with shutters on the front, which probably has something to do with rationing. Anyway, this is what schoolchildren would have seen back in the days when Elvis Presley was only allowed to be seen on TV from the knees down and the Birds Eye Teddy Boys were waiting around the corner to administer a good kicking to Professor Quatermass, and it’s… well, what is it exactly? There’s the words ‘BBC Television For Schools’ and what appears to be a partial closeup of a planet, straight out of a Gerry Anderson title sequence. Lord knows what that was all about. Actually, wasn’t there a schools’ TV show around that time called Space School or something, or was that just Andrew Pixley playing a massive practical joke on us all?
Now we come to the first example of that fondly Kate Thornton-remembered cornerstone of every schoolchild’s academic career, the Animated Countdown. If this wasn’t the first one ever, then it’s certainly the first one that there’s really any evidence of – dating from the late sixties, and no doubt causing many a ‘bad trip’ for members of The Waltham Green East Wapping Carpet Cleaning Rodent And Boggit Extermination Association, this took the form of a strobing-friendly Pie Chart which segmentally flicked away as the latest edition of Do Your Blasted Maths drew ever nearer. This was generally accompanied by some upbeat - if slightly clinical sounding – steel band music, somewhat incongrously the work of one Leonard Salzedo, more notorious for penning the bastard scary stentorian intro fanfare for The Open University.
Except that bastard scariness was a key component of this schools-cueing sequence after all, as when there were but sixty seconds left to go, the Pie Chart would give way to this rather unsettling chronometer, looking for all the world like some sort of sinister Cold War version of the Play School clock and doubtless counting down the remaining time until some labcoated creaky sci-fi film experiment into something involving ‘the atom’ goes apocalyptically – or at least rocket-threateningly – wrong. Yet another example of the apparent complete obliviousness of those involved in child-skewed programming in the sixties to realise if something they’d knocked together might actually scare the living daylights out of younger viewers, though actually this may just have been a cunning gambit to ensure they welcomed the tedious academic programming that followed with open arms. Either way, somewhere, Leonard Salzedo and his cadre of fanatics were rubbing their hands in satisfaction.
Anyway, enough black and white-ness. Let us leave that behind with the image of a spinning Patrick Troughton saying “stop, you’re making me giddy”, and move on to the advent of colour and, more importantly, the advent of that icon of our times, the BBC Schools Diamond. Woah yes. Over a two-minute stretch accompanied by Soft Machine-esque prog-jazz (or for programmes aimed at secondary school pupils anyway – never mind the bloody sub-Music And Movement woodwind and percussion variant used for primary schools, which annoyingly seems to be the one that people tend to recall more fondly), the diamond would pulse outwards, then dissolve into a psychedelic shower of smaller diamonds, before disappearing completely. Here it is as presented in its original colour scheme, a subtle combination of black and Sam Tyler Blue.
A couple of years later, and to bring the BBC Schools Diamond in line with current thinking on the BBC Globe colour scheme, it’s been given a slight makeover and become a yellow-and-blue totem of Glam Rock-era graphic design with chunky lettering to boot. With the possible exception of Patrick Mower carrying one of those bags that said ‘SPORTS’ on them, you’d be hard pushed to find a more definitive visual representation of everything that was ‘the seventies’ until Johnny Rotten came along and phoned up Andrew Sachs to call him a ‘Revenge Of The Pink Panther Rotter’. Endlessly watchable (if you are certifiably insane) and usually better than the programmes that followed it, though in fairness that wasn’t exactly a difficult feat to achieve. But what of the famed ‘interactivity’ for the countdown-counting-down schoolroom viewer, of which there seems to be little in evidence here? All in good time…
WHUH?! What the fuck’s going on here? Why would anyone, anywhere ever need a continuity slide of the BBC Schools Diamond? ‘FOLLOWS SHORTLY Follows Shortly’????? At a push, it could just about theoretically have been used at the very commencement of schools’ broadcasting (because, don’t forget, they didn’t have Breakfast Television in ‘old money’, and all that you got out of hours was the Test Card, a blank screen, and the occasional bit of The Black And White Minstrel Show going backwards) to announce that, well, schools’ broadcasting was about to follow, but what would have been the point of that? Would anyone even have been watching? Well, apart from Bawrence of course. Notice also that the diamond is a) suspiciously slimmer than usual and b) has four layers rather than the usual three. There’s probably a very good reason for this, though – ident fans take note - probably not anything to do with Harold Wilson’s stance on the EEC.
And now, it’s the one you’ve all been waiting for – the celebrated ‘dots’, which blinked offscreen as the seconds ticked away and tedious classroom jokers pretending to be ’shooting’ them. Of course, if they were looking for a real laugh, then if they’d stopped their antics for a second they might have noticed that the ‘Schools And Colleges’ bit used to rotate, but would occasionally apparently break down mid-rotation and remain stuck in a skewed position for days on end. Oddly, the ‘dots’ would generally be accompanied by a selection of soft-rock classics, culled from the back catalogues of the likes of Wings, The Bee Gees and Cat Stevens’ Remember The Days Of The Old Nationwide Theme, though surely the oddest – and yet also strangely the most widely remembered – was Bart, an hilariously badly-named FM Radio-friendly guitar instrumental by obscure Creedence Clearwater Revival offshoot post-proggers Ruby. Sadly, not even Wikipedia at its most Citation Needing gives any indication of what the band might have felt about being more famous amongst Brit schoolchildren than American muso ‘heads’
One of the earliest examples to survive, at least in recorded form, and deceptively appearing on first glance to be doing little more than it says on the ‘tin’, in a world where you can buy tins with that day’s license fee-funded post-school viewing embossed on the side. But isn’t that pretty awful and off-putting colour scheme suspiciously similar to that of the BBC Globe of the day? And what about that choice of programme iconography? On the left we have one child looking up at the Play School house and Zebedee, on the right another gazing in wonder at Scooby Doo and the Blue Peter ship. Pretty much expected emblematic choices for 1978, but it’s an interesting juxtaposition nonetheless. Presumably the boy grew up to become a manic creative obsessed with French film and anything made in a ‘white void’ studio, while the girl grew up to remember Spangles.
Three years later, and we’ve gained a great deal of colour, but lost any discernible hint of anything approaching modernity. Seriously, what’s going on here? Perhaps it’s only to be expected from a BBC that still insisted on foisting ropey genteel derring-do costume dramas on youngsters who only wanted, well, Godzilla, but the whole thing reeks of a dogged insistence that the youth of today were no different to the youth of the twenties, and probably by design rather than accident to boot. Still, nice to see ‘Nice Theme Tune, Shame About The Show’ imported drama about outlawed ‘grog’ being sold to ‘Maoris’ Children Of Fire Mountain represented somewhere. And does anyone know what What’s The Idea! was??
Hold on a minute… Parky? What’s he doing here? He’s got nothing to do with children’s television! Indeed he hasn’t, but the nation’s favourite grumpy bastard is here, in the absence of any other available visuals, to represent the strange manner in which Play School and the various Watch With Mother shows were afforded their own ‘Adult TV’-style continuity slides, seemingly existing in their own universe independent of ‘proper’ children’s television. There must have been a straightforward reason for this, but… what was it??
This puzzling gambit was also deployed for the summer holiday morning schedules, as illustrated by this slide for Jackanory, which interestingly bears the show’s still-inexplicable ‘Tree’ iconography, though that’s a mystery for another time. Back to our current conundrum… perhaps it was some sort of mental height-of-the-unions demarcation issue, with ‘regular’ continuity announcers refusing to touch the special equipment wheeled out for the more regular children’s scheduling hours?
Because they had their own custom-made continuity slides, and while there’s nothing around of the ‘jigsaw piece’ era, let alone dear old Buzzfax, here for your enjoyment is how Grange Hill was heralded under the ‘balloons’ regime. Which would appear to be via a crudely cut out several years out of date cast photo.
What’s going on here then? Some sort of oddly mismatched artwork rendition of what’s on ‘Today’, only lacking any details of what’s on today. Notice too how several of the represented characters had long since sodded off from the schedules, suggesting some sort of cheapskate cut’n’shut of something that had been lying around for donkey’s years anyway.
And at the very end of the end of an era, what was once a familiar sight when the lazily-slung together slides were briefly abandoned in favour of modish (and indeed MODE 2) cutting edge ‘Computer Graphics’ created on a trusty BBC Micro. Up to the minute technology! But not technologically advanced enough to stop the intro animation from being accidentally cued up in the middle of an episode of Grange Hill when Roland was boarding a bus. From hereon in, it’s Philip Schofield and Hogan the monkey all the way…
- Sara & Hoppity themselves. Just look at them. They’re like some kind of attempt to recreate the Test Card out of sinister junk shop purchases by someone who had never paid any proper attention to it in the first place, and then had their memory wiped, but could never escape the shivering primal experience of girl-and-doll-derived terror.
