This look at some of ITV's seventies lunchtime shows for younger viewers was originally written as a promo piece for the excellent Look-Back On 70s Telly - Issue 1 DVD set released by Network a while back, but ended up not being used. So here it is, with the suitably esoteric reference points fully intact...
If ever there was a 'Fantasy DVD' that most readers had probably been carrying around in their head for years, it's the two 'Issues' of Look-Back recently released by Network. Raiding the surprisingly well-stocked ITV archives for deleriously obscure yet fondly remembered children's television of the seventies and eighties - though a couple of 'big hitters' are glaringly absent, reportedly for rights reasons - the contents of the discs are almost like a direct line into the hazier fringes of your subconscious, and yet, as we'll come back to, there is absolutely no tedious straight-facedness about the presentation. In fact, that's pretty much what inspired this review in the first place, as the precious few overviews that are out there are mostly full of hand-wringing O Tempora O Mores O Heggarty Haggerty nonsense about how sad it is that today's children would rather watch programmes aimed at them than forty year old shows and how 'this charming little gem ought to be revived' when some of them were barely broadcastable even at the time and something something 'Politically Correct Brigade : (' etc etc. Well, enough of that nonsense - Look-Back is presented as fun, and should be viewed for fun, and that's exactly what we'll be having here - fun.
...and if you're demanding some kind of confirmation of this contentious 'fun' angle, look no futher than the packaging, which takes the form of an absurdist parody of an issue of Look-In, and on the cover of Issue One features that famously pessimistic, misanthropic and generally proto-Thom Yorke figure of not fun, Hartley Hare from Pipkins. Inside you'll find an actual spoof issue of Look-In, packed with spurious celebrity interviews, impossible quizzes, effort-deficient spin-off comic strips, implausible pin-ups, adverts for ludicrous tie-in Dinky toy vehicles (including 'The ITC Stock Footage Jaguar'), and a barbed pastiche of the ITV regional listings grid which will have anyone who ever seethed with jealousy over viewers in the Anglia region getting off-radar repeats of Voyage To The Bottom Of The Sea chortling in recognition. And then there's the shows themselves - some familiar, some half-familiar, some forgotten even while they were being made (and in some cases clearly by the people who were actually making them too), and all of them a long overdue trip down memory lane where you can't actually really remember most of the memories. So come on, lose that long face, and let's take a platform-soled trip through a world of Spangles and Spacehoppers. Or, in 'old money', watch some old TV shows and take the piss out of them.
And after we've got past the suitably garish menu with a neat pastiche of the Ace Of Wands theme, it's time for...
And we're straight into unfamiliar territory, as this edition of Rainbow is drawn from the unsuprisingly forgotten 'original' incarnation; title graphics straight out of one of those last-minute birthday cards you have to buy from a bookshop, crash helmet-haired David Cook occupying the 'Geoffrey' role, terrifying feral-looking original Bungle costume, piss-poor sub-Dictionary Corner gag-trading hand puppets Mooney and Sunshine, film inserts that look as though they've been marinaded in dishwater rather than developed, hippy-dippy interstitials, and original singing troupe Telltale looking for all the world like they'd rather be spotting their own name in the tracklisting of Picnic - A Breath Of Fresh Air. There's a nice bit of film about children spotting shapes from a bus window complete with Cook/Bungle two-hander narration, wool-headed flare-clad prog folk-friendly stop-motion Cosgrove Hall scamps Sally And Jake put in an early appearance with accompanying drollery about the futility of their stone-collecting antics from Sly The Cat, and there's also a glimpse of the original Zippy, basically the same puppet but with a Went To School With David Cameron voice. At this stage, there's precious little indication of the mediocre student t-shirt industry that Rainbow would later evolve into, and it's a bit like starting this compilation in an alternate reality where everything's slightly different. All the same, it's interesting to see and a much better way to kick off proceedings than with the altogether more predictable choice of something from the Hayes-fronted era.
Rainbow is followed by the cover star, and indeed the show that probably most people bought this DVD for - Pipkins. But before we go any further, let's get one thing straight from the outset. The puppets were supposed to look cheap and threadbare, and the original storyline was about them being cobbled together out of discarded old bits and pieces of fabric, so pointing their raggedy appearance out as if you're the first person to notice it doesn't make you look any more of a comic genius than someone saying "Doctor Who's Tardis, why doesn't he ever change it from being a Police Box, what's that all about eh?". And now we've got that out of the way... there've been dozens of episodes of Pipkins released on DVD in recent years, most of them recovered from domestic recordings in the absence of much in the way of extant broadcast quality tapes, and every one of them is a sidesplitting blast of anarchic genius. Taken from yet another surprisingly good quality off-air, this is a new episode to DVD, and concerns an invasion of the Pipkins office by a small army of inanimate garden gnomes. And we'll just pause for a second there whilst anyone previously unfamiliar with Hartley Hare and company recovers their grasp on reality. Anyway, this episode - featuring long-serving human stooge Tom, and the 'Hartley floored by theatrical backdrops' opening titles - is something of an unexpected treat for fans of the show, as it features an equally small army of little-seen occasional characters including Octavia The Ostritch, Mooney The Badger and Hartley's Hartley-in-a-hat ruralist relative Uncle Hare, though sadly there's no sign of little-recalled Anthony Perkins-a-gram The Doctor, nor indeed for some strange reason of usual series mainstay Pig. Still, Hartley, Topov and Tortoise are all on board, and as is par for the course for Pipkins, all of the enjoyably eccentric characters get to indulge in large amounts of verbal and physical comedy. As will become all too depressingly obvious, that's something that is going to prove to be in seriously short supply as we make our way through the discs...
If Pipkins is proof positive that programmes you enjoyed in your childhood can be even better when you watch them again now, Cloppa Castle is, unfortunately, proof positive that sometimes it can be best just to leave them languishing in the collective half-memory. Concived as zany parody for the under fives of just about any political flare-up of the seventies that you might care to mention, Cloppa Castle chronicled the puppet struggles of rival factions The Bygones and The Hasbeenes - satire, there - for control of a seam of oil that neither of them particularly needed. As programmes for its target audience went, this was a fairly sophisticated format and it's hardly surprising that it became the talk of the playground. But where Pipkins traded in surrealism, sarcasm and subversion, Cloppa Castle went straight for the one-liners, in this episode sending up the whims and excesses of the fashion industry, and with the best will in the world, they're not one-liners that have stood the test of time particularly well. The script could be straight out of any fourth division early seventies British comedy film; actually, it's worse than that - the jokes are about of the same standard as those when they tried to cross fourth division early seventies British comedy film with another genre like horror or soft porn. Actually, no, it's like a summer replacement for Week Ending. OK, maybe that's going a bit far. That said, this episode isn't helped by the frankly dreadful picture and sound quality, and by the presence of frankly terrifying occasional puppet wizard Mudlyn.
Gammon And Spinach is a programme about which this writer remembers absolutely nothing at all bar the fact that it existed, that it had opening titles with a well-to-do animated frog changing into Edwardian bathing gear to the strains of an oompah version of that Frog He Would A Wooing Go song - which was presumably taken as the cue to change the channel - and that Marmalade Atkins made some kind of agreed-with derogatory remark about it during her stint hosting the CITV 'Watch It!' slot. This level of lack of knowledge is usually somewhat less than a good sign. As it turns out, however, Gammon And Spinach is an unexciting but amiable storytelling slot, featuring former Play School presenter Valerie Pitts narrating her way through a book called Garth Pig And The Ice Cream Lady, about a young porker's encounter with a wolf driving a Mr Whippy van, with the inevitable light-heartedly delivered note of caution sounded at the end. Valerie Pitts tries her best, but really at the end of the day it's not a great format and not a great story, and comes across like one of the less gripping editions of Jackanory only even less gripping. That said, the next episode - as trailered at the end of this one - looks somewhat slightly more enticing, featuring as it does a exotically 'American' storybook with what appears to be David Mitchell with a false moustache on the cover.
The early seventies saw an alarming number of failed and failing singer-songwriters jack in the trudging round the folk clubs for a stint as a Play School presenter. Those who didn't make it through the door - or, if you will, through the windows one, two, three, four - still had the option of long-running Granada-produced effort A Handful Of Songs, the format of which should scarcely require any explanation. Hippy/glam crossover eye candy Maria Morgan and the troublingly Martin Freeman-like Keith Field hover into guitar-cramped view courtesy of some wonky CSO, singing the titular Tommy Steele hit as they go, and proceed to strum their way through a series of requests and accompanying drawings sent in by viewers; these include such usual Music For Pleasure-friendly suspects as Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious, The Teddy Bears' Picnic and Humpty Dumpty, the latter amusingly accompanied by under-the-radar artistic renditions of what is clearly supposed to be a certain other suspiciously familiar Humpty. Also someone's sent in a picture of Sooty for reasons that are never quite elaborated on. You're not really going to find any lost Acid Folk gems in this kind of a setup, but on the other hand this does mean that only a complete plank could describe it as anything other than the polar opposite of so-called 'Hauntology', and that can only be a good thing. Anyway, it's a pleasant enough show if one that belongs to another age entirely, and what's more, it's sobering to think that just for a minor twist of fate, it could have been Nick Drake and Shelagh MacDonald sitting on those stools...
Paperplay is one of those shows that seems to actually be remembered by far more people than would ever be officially recognised by the Supreme Worldwide Bureau Of Nostalgia, Chair. Peter Kay (motto 'Whatwereallus Thataboutum?'). Part of the same post-hippydom tradicraft-skewed 'make your own toys and games' imperative as Fingerbobs - one of the few attempts at making learning fun ever to successfully fulfil both criteria - the long-running show saw former Magpie presenter Susan Stranks demonstrating how to self-assemble what were effectively more witty and colourful takes on the traditional Blue Peter 'make' with the aid - well, sort of - of jibbering puppet spiders Itsy and Bitsy. Oh, and cardboard tree-mounted cardboard tropical bird Kate, who is remembered by hardly anyone, presumably on account of doing very little apart from tilting back and forth. As this particular episode sees them making dangling cardboard cats with springy perpetual motion tails, they're joined on this occasion by a surprisingly well-behaved ginger kitten named Mitch, whose primary contribution to proceedings is waving the occasional puppet-spooking paw at the magic marker-wielding Itsy and Bitsy, like some kind of species-cognitive galley master 'encouraging' them to get it finished within the allotted screen time. Paperplay might well struggle to hold the attention of the average modern viewer, taking as it does the best part of fifteen minutes to convey what would take up a couple of bullet points and a handful of photos on a web page, but that said it's actually a lot of fun, especially with the mildly surrealist angle added by the puppet co-conspirators. Well, maybe not the bird one. It's not the sort of programme that anyone would really be desperate to see revived - though doubtless you wouldn't have to delve too deeply into the internet to find some berk demanding just that whilst also blowing a fuse about 'reality rubbish like Loius Walsh' or something - but it's a nice surprise to both see it on here and find it so enjoyable, and, unlike Gammon & Spinach, it does actually bode well for the less well-remembered inclusions.
We've already touched on the fact that over the course of this collection, we're going to be encountering a lot of shows that are surprisingly obscure and barely-recalled for something made in a decade that certain parties have made a comfortable living out of 'remembering'. The Tingha And Tucker Club, however, plays by an entirely different set of rules. To all intents and purposes, it belongs to another age. The 'club', such as it was, first opened its doors in 1962, and, well, closed them again in 1970, just about nudging its way into the Look-Back timeframe by the edge of its transmission spool, and even then it's still a chronologically and indeed stylistically questionable inclusion. And, at least on face value, one that you would quite reasonably expect to be the most tedious by some distance; a hangover from the days when ITV lunchtime children's shows were an altogether more formal and clunky affair, spun off from a bit of improvised continuity with some koala toys that were simply nearer to hand than anything else, and presented by a no-nonsense lady with immobile hair alongside some hopelessly archaically-named puppets. Indeed, the clip from the start of this very episode that previously appeared on early nineties VHS compilation The Best Children's TV Of The Seventies (which, coincidentally, there's a post about here), seemed to underline all of that in triplicate. But that's just the start of the episode, and once we've got past all of that all-too-familiar business with playing indecipherable tunes on a recorder for about eight million years, it turns into a very different sort of programme indeed, fitting in all manner of madcap puppet uncontrollability around the standard birthday-reading-out duties. Better still, the entire second half of the episode is given over to the first part of an alarmingly rowdy serialised puppet-fuelled retelling of The Pied Piper Of Hamelin, replete with knowingly corny puns, proto-postmodernist asides about the paucity of their production values, and ear-assaultingly high-pitched cast renditions of High Hopes and Food Glorious Food. Unfortunately, as this is apparently the only surviving edition out of probably nigh on three thousand, whatever madness the next instalment contained will have to remain a mystery. This is a shame, as despite all understandable preconceptions The Tingha And Tucker Club is actually a lot more enjoyable than several shows on here that you'd probably be expecting to enjoy more, and proof positive that you can sometimes find the best stuff in places you wouldn't neccessarily think of looking.
And speaking of stuff found in places you wouldn't think of looking, if ever there was a name that lurked troublingly on the haziest fringes of the memory of any self-respecting just-about-seventies-rememberer, and in unsteady-looking 'military' font to boot, it's Issi Noho. A semi-animated panda cast adrift in a wood, Issi was discovered by bear-befriending youngsters Andrew, Sally and the frankly terrifying Neil in a partially obscured crate where leafy infringement had rendered the legend 'THIS SIDE UP USE NO HOOKS' as, you guessed it, 'ISSI NOHO'. Though the earlier episodes had some kind of a running storyline about the trio's attempts to shelter and feed him without being discovered, taking in some youngster disgruntlement when his nomenclatural deceit was rumbled, it soon descended into his living openly with a family and creating sub-Paddington slapstick chaos wherever he went (with, scoring a full house of seventies animated bear poor-relation-ness, a smattering of sub-Teddy Edward 'angry' flute at the end of the theme music). And, unfortunately, it's the latter era that the episode included here hails from. In it, Issi infiltrates a panto for comic effect and then runs up against a real life beanstalk-topping giant, whose attempts to consume him between two large slices of bread are thwarted by some quick-talking thinking-on-his-paws. And, well, it's noticeably lacking in the sort of excitement-generating ursine subterfuge that the show tends to be associated with in most people's memories. That's not to say that it's in any way dull, and it's certainly not as if the series can be divided up into its own equivalent of pre- and post-Nat Hiken incarnations, but it probably isn't what a lot of viewers would have been hazily half-expecting so seeing it again for the first time in a frightening amount of years could easily prove to be ever so slightly on the anti-climactic side. It's a bit like, say, when they choose something from the good-but-not-AS-good era of Smith And Jones for a tribute night; you're effectively being asked to be nostalgic for something that isn't quite what you're actually feeling nostalgic for. Erm, if that makes any sense. Anyway, we'd better not be too critical for fear of upsetting Neil...
Whereas most of these shows were the work of people making programmes for children but trying to shoehorn in a bit of vaguely surreal or satirical whimsy for the benefit of the sizeable captive audience of adults, this one comes from the quite possibly unique perspective of an adult humorist (that's 'adult' as in sophisticated, rather than in the Roy 'Chubby' Brown/ironic 'blue' Nookie Bear/that Spike Milligan album with the song about rolling a joint sense of the word) tailoring his technologically cutting edge satire and indeed surrealism for a much younger audience than usual. Bentine had been combining topical swipes with elaborate model effects and studio-endangering explosions since the late fifties, mostly in fast-moving sketch shows; Michael Bentine's Potty Time on the other hand developed from an idea he had for longer vignettes involving 'Potties', featureless puppets deliberately concieved to emphasise that whatever costumes and outrageously exaggerated socio-political situations they were inserted into, they were all essentially the same underneath. Much like Cloppa Castle, it used historical situations and allusions to make subtle - though mostly not all that subtle - comments on the global goings-on of today, and this particular escapade sees Professor Bentine attempting to reason with some Empire-era British military men in a cannon-fuelled standoff with 'The Mad Mullah'. Regrettably this does involve an unfortunate smattering of Goon-typical dubious ethnic jibberings, but if you can look past that it's actually quite a thoughtful look at how strategy can sometimes get in the way of common sense. Also it's very funny indeed. Of course, this is hardly surprising, given that Michael Bentine's Potty Time has long been held up as an example of programming for the very young at its very best, and indeed has always been seen as of a piece with his more ambitious adult-aimed efforts like It's A Square World. Though really, a handy Glam Rock analogy would have been quite useful here.
Jamie And The Magic Torch is one of the ones that needs the least in the way of introduction. Jamie's pleasingly never over-whatwerethatallabouted sub-Yellow Submarine exploits in Cuckooland were shown constantly for nigh on ten years, and are about as well known as lunchtime ITV shows get. But for anyone who doesn't know: kid with natty pyjamas and chunky blow-wave has strobing tunnel-generating 'Magic Torch' that allows he and curmudgeonly woolly hat-sporting dog to visit Rowntree Mackintosh Selection Box-esque landscape of cartoony eccentrics by traversing an eye-hurting helter skelter and rebounding off a cushion with a mod target on, accompanied by Bat Out Of Hell-infringing post-prog gravel-throated rock yodelling of eminent pub-bore-gets-lyrics-wrong-ability. In this particular episode, Jamie and Wordsworth team up with 'zany pop star'-style Glam Rock-hued Capital City Goofball variant Strumpers Plunkett and uni-wheeled all-in-one mobile unit Constable Gotcha to apprehend resident accelleration-troubler The Yoohoo Bird, but find themselves caught up instead in a mystery concerning a potential local Yeti. It doesn't take a genius to work out what happens at the end of the episode, especially as the actual title more or less gives it away before the story's even started. Anyway, bearing as it does that all-important credit for maverick Mancunian animation house Cosgrove Hall, you probably won't be at all surprised to learn that Jamie And The Magic Torch stands up every bit as well as you were probably hoping, walloping a hefty dose of Glam-diluted post-psychedelia and an equally hefty dose of actual storyline into its short running time (even shorter when you count the epic length of its opening and closing titles), and that unhinged theme song is just as exciting as it was back when you were too young to work out that it was actually "life is one long glorious game". Yes the whole lot of them have been released several million times before, but Issue One of Look-Back just wouldn't have been complete without an episode of this. But where, then, is Cosgrove Hall's once equally iconic Briers-narrated take on Noddy? Rights problems, Wordsworth...
So far, every show we've covered has been at least partly remembered; even The Tingha And Tucker Club, which was the sort of thing always namechecked by elderly relatives who would insist that it was 'on' and that you knew what it was despite it having been retired for over a decade. Now, however, we're onto the first proper bona fide one that nobody upon nobody remembers, as evidenced by the fact that, while lazily searching for an off-the-shelf photo to illustrate it here, Google doesn't even clock up a single page devoted to it (and, for perspective, there's one about R.3 out there). Even dedicated researchers only know The Laughing Policeman as a puzzling corner-of-the-eye title glimpsed occasionally whilst scouring the listings in old issues of TV Times for info on more heavyweight shows. So it's a bit of a surprise, then, to find that it stars well-known TV copper Deryck Guyler as the titluar chortler out of the old Music Hall ditty, examining junk in a 'street' set whilst doling out helpful 'bobby'-standard hints and tips and introducing some of the weirdest looking puppets in history flailing about to the likes of Sweet Gingerbread Man, like some kind of glitz-deficient evolutionary ancestor of Dooby Duck's Disco Bus. The result is both eye-hurting and mind-frazzling, and yet neither interesting nor entertaining. It is, then, a suitably obscure and disorientating moment on which to conclude the first disc, and things are going to get a lot more weird and indeed a lot more boring on the second one, often at the same time...
How fickle and unfair the public consciousness can be. Time was when - Pipkins aside - the Granada-instigated Hickory House was the closest thing that Rainbow had to a rival, running for five years in the same schedules and pursuing a similarly learning-orientated puppet-houseshare agenda. Then it slipped from our screens, and indeed from people's memories, to the extent that back when TV Cream first started up, nobody could find even the most inconsequential of photos of its era-emblematic cast. One eventually did turn up, featuring the puppets 'meeting' the bigwigs at Granada, but that's another story. Quite how the 'Hickory' element came into proceedings is spectacularly unclear (though perhaps in true Pipkins fashion it was explained in the first episode, and then summarily ignored by tedious standups looking to make a joke about ha ha something or other, which would work as an observation if enough of them and enough of their audience actually remembered Hickory House for it to be viable and indeed worthwhile for them to make jokes about it in the first place, but hey ho), but the 'House' was where Amanda Barrie and Alan Rothwell jostled for sofa space with the scratchy-looking Humphrey Cushion and Dusty Mop, and habitually repeated fundamental tenets concerning shapes and colours and what have you. Though this episode sadly dates from before the production team had the bright idea of having the Granada 'G' turn into the animated house in the opening titles, the alarmingly chirpy flute-led theme is present and correct, and it's straight into an entire episode's worth of Amanda and Alan, decked out in the most retina-wallopingly seventies fashions imaginable, trading pre-school educative riffs with the aforementioned hand-operated household items; Barrie would later recount in her autobiography how ill at ease she always felt next to Humphrey's elongated nose considering certain of her, erm, 'lifestyle choices'. Sadly, one look at Hickory House is enough to explain why it never quite managed to join Rainbow in the upper echelons of the mediocre student t-shirt industry. The puppets are too polite and teacherish and utterly bereft of anarchic tendencies, the filmed inserts seem flat compared to the at least vividly directed ones found in the likes of, well, Rainbow, and there isn't really a narrative hook - they just demonstrate reading, 'riting and 'rithmetic-friendly concepts to camera and then say goodbye. In fairness it's doubtful that anyone ever remembered it as anything other than a visually arresting pre-school example of 'extra school', and much comic mileage was being made out of its improving tone and overall blandness even before anything of it turned up anywhere, and it's at least smile-occasioning to see it again.
Mister Trimble was another Rainbow rival, and this time one that for many viewers broke even beyond the Humphrey Cushion barrier of half-rememberedness to become little more than a mystifying recollection of a title in a TV Times listing with attached appropriate 'genre icon'. And again, despite being a regular fixture for much of the seventies it's not difficult to see why it retreated so far into the recesses of the collective memory. The bumbling moustachioed one-man-band-esque Dotty Professor-style Trimble - played by drama teacher Tony Boden - lives in a rather untidy-looking flat-above-a-shop-type affair with various puppet associates, notably irritating needy goldfish Glug, and a drama student-ish 'band' who live downstairs and, in this episode, sing an interminable song explaning the premise of the show to the tune of its bland fairgroundy squelchy Moog theme, provided by Library Music legend Alan Hawkshaw. There's also the requisite quota of animated interstitials - and particularly hallucinogenic and troublingly clown-heavy at that - and, of course, filmed inserts featuring well-behaved children wordlessly learning about things. In contrast to Hickory House, there is, if anything, too much going on here - a small army of presenters, puppets and guests, and features, songs and stories that whizz by in a blur, with scarcely any time for the hardly exactly Ibsen-depth characters to establish themselves. It's at moments that this that you realise that, for all its faults and its irritating lol lol lol he said a drugs remember Walls Big Feast ubiquity, Rainbow had a strong and well-defined format, with puppets that could interact with each other conversationally and individual segments presented from different sets, holding the viewer's attention by joining together defined bits and pieces rather than half-heartedly shoving them all together, like Heroes And Villains might have been if Brian Wilson had been less interested in hallucinogens and more into Bungle asking if they could sing that Pray Open Your Umbrella song again. But it's still less dull than some things still to come...
The tale of a Tim Brooke-Taylor voiced goose who used his neck as a bridge in the opening titles or something, Gideon, adapted from the original French cartoon series Gedeon (which was written and directed by the suspiciously named Michel Ocelot), was given its Goodie-retooled makoever for UK viewers by Yorkshire Television in 1979, with the portamento-crazy Korg-derived theme music (noticeably and disconcertingly edited to fit the substantially shorter end credits by somebody who has never heard of 'music') again provided by Alan Hawkshaw. What's surprising about the faded-coloured aqua-marine-themed exploits of the over-chirpy waterfowl and his woodland chums is how downbeat in tone they are; in this particular episode, they come up against a bloodthirsty ferret and a fish-hungry angler, vowing to avenge their ferreted and angled chums by coming up with a plan that, with true military ingenuity, pits the two enemies against each other and results in them sending each other packing in a painful-looking manner. This, disturbingly, is something that Gideon chooses to crow about in his episode-closing singalong recap. Gideon is one of those shows where everything that you'd forgotten about it comes tumbling back the second that you catch a glimpse of the opening frame, but also one that leaves you wondering how you managed to sit through it as a youngster without being overwhelmed by waves of existentialism of such magnitude and ferocity that the average viewer would probably end up listening to Scott 3 for light relief. Less philosophically troublingly, it's also something of a mystery why, given the general theme, they didn't turn to Tim Brooke Taylor's Super Bird Pal fellow Goodie Bill Oddie to do the voiceover honours. In short Gideon is not only one of the more watchable, interesting and stylistically evocative inclusions on Look-Back, it's also one that's haunted esrtwhile viewers' memories and turns out to have good reason to have done so. Which sets the tone... well, not exactly 'nicely'... for the next offering.
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 upper echelons of the Remembering Things Senate (Secretary General: Andrew Collins). And then you come across something like The Magic Fountain. Those that do remember this unpromisingly-named 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 an ancient-secret-possessing 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 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 here, and definitely the oddest by some considerable distance.
Another show with 'magic' in the title already? This does not bode well. You'd be forgiven for stopping watching at this point. In fact, you'd be forgiven for ejecting the disc and throwing it in a special lead-lined burning bin. But as anyone who remembers The Magic Ball will be able to tell you - and, surprisingly, that's seemingly not very many more people than remember The Magic Fountain - it's safe to come out from behind that sofa that nobody ever actually hid behind now. Produced by Granada in 1971, animated by a nascent Cosgrove-Hall, and written and narrated by the man behind The Magic Roundabout Eric Thompson, The Magic Ball was still being repeated well into the early eighties, and indeed was later revived in the mid-nineties as an insert in Katie Puckrick's overnight magazine show Pyjama Party, where it was annoyingly billed for no readily obvious reason as 'Sam's Magic Ball', leading to many a furious early hours halls of residence debate. As you may have already worked out, smartly turned-out Sam was indeed the owner of the titular Magic Ball, which he used to transport to locations connected to objects in his Aunt Mil's Mr Benn-style antique shop, where he would encounter Mr Benn-style characters having Mr Benn-style dilemmas and present them with Mr Benn-style solutions. No wonder I once mistakenly claimed it was narrated by Ray Brooks on a certain leading nostalgia website. Though it too has its fair share of wibbling electronic sound effects, The Magic Ball is thankfully about as far removed from The Magic Fountain as it's possible to get, with the distinctively rendered visuals and Thompson's famously dry wit lending it a watchability that eludes many of the other shows presented here. Though definitely not the next one...
Over the course of this look back at Look-Back, you'll doubtless have noticed an unfortunate tendency towards programmes that you remember very fondly actually turning out on a repeat viewing to be as dull as, well, using that gag about looking back at Look-Back for the eight hundred millionth time. This is why it's an absolute joy when you stumble across one that you thought that you hated, but which actually turns out to be very enjoyable indeed. Hazy recollections might well suggest that Topper's Tales involved nothing more than dull static storytelling of a slightly younger sibling vintage, and therby occupying the lowest rung imaginable on the Look-Back target audience's decidedly non-metaphor-friendly ladder (and believe me, when you've got Gammon And Spinach involved, that's a pretty long ladder, non-metaphor-friendly or otherwise), 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, Whack-o!, Pickwick and The World Of Beachcomber, and 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!'. And their collective exploits, it transpires, 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 well-appointed Charleston-fuelled whimsy. As we have seen before, 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. Plus there's a livid green tramline scratch throughout the episode. Rock'n'roll!
Some are commissioned mundane. Others achieve mundanity. Others have mundanity thrust upon them. And then there's Daisy Daisy. Hidden away at the very back of the recollective wardrobe, provoking even in the most hardened of nostalgists nothing more than a faint recollection of a title and a twee rendition of the already distinctly twee theme song, Daisy Daisy was nonetheless a near-permanent fixture in the schedules for many years, so it must have done something really bad to sink this far into obscurity. Or, worse still, done absolutely nothing at all. What you get after the lavishly animated, if bafflingly context-deficient, opening titles is sub-Rainbow - no, make that sub-Hickory House - shenanigans with a recurring Alan Rothwell and a very young Jan Harvey, and Trade Descriptions Act-troubling barely mobile 'puppets' Wriggle (worm) and Splodge (snail), as they learn about something... to do with... tidying up around the house or... something? No, nobody's sure here, either. There is a small amount of tidying-related larking about with those most iconic of late seventies/early eighties children's television break-in-the-middle-of-the-show mainstays (well, most iconic after The Dingbats), Those Puppets On A Black Background, whose appearance in this set is frankly long overdue, but, with the possible exception of Jan's quite alarming trousers, there's absolutely nothing about this that engages with the viewer in the first place, let alone sticks in the memory, so you can understand why, as TV Cream's Phil Norman once postulated, "it should have long since collapsed under the weight of its own inconsequentialness". Nice to see again, for a couple of minutes at least, but that really is about it.
Much like how, in the days before the coming of the age of celebrity, up and coming comedians had to take all kinds of interesting extra-curricular offers of work to make ends meet, the same was also true of name-making 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 (thankfully not yet included on any volume of Look-Back). 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, further post-story Puppets On A Black Background shenanigans - this time involving some doo wop-crazed parrots getting in the way of the presenter's intended good sit down - take up the second half of the show, 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?
It's fair to say that over the course of Look-Back, we've encountered more than a few shows that are here simply because they were there, which ended up becoming the stuff of nostalgia through their militarised regular-as-clockwork scheduling ubiquity rather than because they were actually anything really worth remembering. Once in a while, though, you did get a show that was so outlandish and description-averse that to this day people can still scarcely believe it actually existed, and this Glam Rock-skewed take on The Banana Splits is one that still troubles the collective subconscious and with very good eye-hurting and indeed ear-assaulting reason; although getting the name wrong, as so many are wont to do, is an offence punishable by wheelclamping. 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 one 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 tend to involve more in the way of helping to repair fences than they do 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 than 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 - for a real excursion into the darker corners of Bongo-inspired sensory deprivation hinging on insanity see John Williams' review of the entire series. 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 motivations of the performers in the costumes. Yeah, whatever you say, Hervaid.
And from the psychotropic to the existential. The slightly-more-animated-than-we've-seen-for-a-while Little Blue is an elephant and, as the Walker Brothers-esque opening song explains at considerable downcast length, he acquired his atypical hue when he broke a fountain pen in the bath, upon which "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 by default. The low-level psychological effects of his predicament were, you will probably be surprised to hear, actually expanded on within his small-screen 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. Let's hope they never get Damon Lindelof in to do a 'reboot', then. As hinted above, there's more than a touch of post-The Man Who Fell To Earth examination of the irony 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. Let's face it, then, the last show is bound to be an absolute corker...
Oh. Right you are, then. In lieu of any of the above, here's TV's Music Man Ulf Goran, of bearded incomprehensibly-accented guitar-toting fame, to sing a couple of songs for an audience of two polite, formally dressed and largely silent youngsters. The kindest thing you can say about Music Man is that it's slow. It's very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very slow. To the extent that you start wishing he'd strap a capo onto his fretboard just to add a touch of excitement. This not only makes Animal Kwackers look like The Who Live At Leeds, it makes Daisy Daisy look like Vote, Vote, Vote For Nigel Barton. Rather than ending on a high, Network have chosen to conclude Issue 1 of Look-Back with the archival children's television equivalent of blowing a raspberry, kind of like putting a jokey track at the end of a heavyweight album although sadly Ulf doesn't treat us to his rendition of Chant Of The Ever-Circling Skeletal Family. And, well, that's about it for Look-Back Issue 1, ending not with a bang, nor even a whimper, just some bloke singing about how he "comes from down your way" in a sort of high pitched sub-yodel. Ah well, it's Issue 2 - and drama - next...
Well, there never actually was a second part, but if the response to this one is positive enough, there might well be...
