Peep-Peep, Pandit And Papers: Richard Carpenter's Look And Read Serials

This feature on the three memorable yet often overlooked serials written for the BBC schools programme Look And Read by Richard Carpenter - more widely recognised as the creator of Robin Of Sherwood, Catweazle and The Ghosts Of Motley Hall - was originally written for the television review site Off The Telly. Later, with a bit of reworking, it found its way into a special issue of the fanzine This Way Up devoted to Richard Carpenter, which is well worth tracking down if you can find a copy as there was a lot of very good material in it. This was basically written as a reaction to the manner in which 'genre' magazines would tend to dispense with Look And Read in little more than half a sentence when talking about his 'proper' shows; this was very much at odds with how fondly The Boy From Space in particular is remembered by those who actually watched it at school, or indeed chanced upon it as a bit of 'extra' sci-fi on a day off. You had to make your own entertainment in those days. Incidentally the title was intended to appear as Peep-Peep, Pandit And Papers, to reflect the technique used in Look And Read's animated interstitials, but nobody could ever find a way of making that work properly - including right now - so it always just looked a bit bland. Anyway, the piece itself is anything but bland, though I've had to trim it slightly to remove a couple of inaccuracies and a lot of waffle. Wordy would be proud.

What did Richard Carpenter once describe as “the most difficult thing I’ve ever written in my life”? His first ever television commission? Three series about a small cast limited to a single set? Trying to make The Adventures of Black Beauty in any way watchable?

No, it was The Boy from Space, a ten-part serial he penned for the long-running BBC Schools' programme Look And Read in 1971. Aimed at a primary school audience, Look And Read featured a combination of dramatised story segments, animated musical inserts and studio links with a presenter, and sought to reinforce reading and writing skills. A rare example of genuine 'entertainment' in education, the various Look And Read serials are inevitably fondly recalled by those who watched them at school, and many of the most well-remembered were written by Richard Carpenter.

Developing out of the similarly long-running Merry-Go-Round, Look And Read had made its debut in 1967 with the straightforward light-hearted crime caper Bob And Carol Look For Treasure. The somewhat grittier Len And The River Mob followed in 1968, which introduced the concept of the filmed drama segments being linked by one of the cast in character, in this instance George Layton as Len. Feeling that the programme needed to explore a fresh genre and direction, producer Claire Chovil then contacted a relatively new television writer to develop an idea for a science fiction-themed serial.

Previously an actor, Richard Carpenter had developed the idea for Catweazle, a comedy-drama about a medieval sorcerer who finds himself transported forward in time, in 1969. Quickly commissioned by London Weekend Television for broadcast the following year, Catweazle was an instant hit with viewers and critics alike, inspiring a best-selling tie-in novel and winning numerous industry awards. Impressed by his ability to relate advanced concepts to a younger audience through careful use of language, Chovil commissioned Carpenter to write a new serial limited to using, as he would later put it to TV Zone, "the first two hundred words of the English language, plus a few words like ‘telescope’ and ‘telephone’ and ‘television'". And unlike Catweazle, he couldn't make up his own new words and phrases to cover them either.

First transmitted in September 1971, The Boy From Space tells the story of Helen (Sylvestra Le Touzel) and Dan (Stephen Garlick), two astronimically-obsessed youngsters who come to the aid of a stranded alien boy who they nickname Peep-Peep after his garbled bleeping speech, and shield him from a sinister 'Thin Man' intent on extracting information from him. Although limited by its educative purpose and short episodic structure, The Boy From Space is more tense and enjoyable than might normally have been expected from a programme of this nature. Much of this is down to the skilful and economical direction by former BBC Radiophonic Workshop musician Maddalena Fagandini, though at its absolute foundation is Carpenter’s script, which managed to turn the small cast and equally limited number of locations to its advantage.

Although the BBC had nominally moved to colour broadcasting in 1970, some lower priority departments were still making programmes in black and white into the early seventies, and The Boy From Space was both taped and transmitted in monochrome; although the filmed segments were actually made in colour, with a view to later repeating them in 'movie' format. The serial was repeated up to the Autumn of 1973, after which the original tapes were erased. Little is known about the studio segments, other than that they were presented by actor Charles Collingwood and apparently from an observatory set, and all that remains of this original version are the standard Look And Read classroom workbook, featuring a simplified novelisation with illustrations and exercises based on the teaching segments, and an abridged version of the story soundtrack released by BBC Records And Tapes (RESR30). And the filmed inserts, of course, but more about them later.

First seen in Spring 1973, Joe And The Sheep Rustlers by Leonard Kingston was the first Look And Read serial to be made in colour, and took an entirely different direction yet again with its straightforward story of livestock pilfering. The following year, it was back to sci-fi as Richard Carpenter returned with Cloud Burst. Possibly inspired by the BBC's primetime 'sci-fact' serial Doomwatch, Cloud Burst brought the excitement thoroughly down to Earth with the tale of stolen plans for a 'Rain Gun' that could potentially eradicate drought and famine. Slightly less convincingly than their counterparts in The Boy From Space, youngsters Tim (Nigel Rathbone) and Jenny (Tina Heath) have an obsessive interest in atmospheric conditions, apparently on account of their father being a lock-keeper. This brings them into contact with scientist Ram Pandit (Renu Setna), who is developing the 'Rain Gun' in his laboratory; his twin brother Ravi is determined to steal his research and use it to make money rather than save lives, and what's more has a handy 'Gas Gun' at his disposal.

Unnervingly closer to a Cold War thriller than clean-cut childrens' adventure, and benefitting greatly from Carpenter's insistence that, with advancing technology in mind, Pandit's laboratory should have a 'home-made' feel to offset the computers looking outdated, Cloud Burst is a skilfully made serial with an unexpected 'lo-tech' twist at the climax. It also boasted an arresting opening sequence, with an ominious instrumental by the BBC Radiophonic Workshop's Roger Limb, complete with a perfectly-timed thunderclap, played out over time-lapse photography of blooming deserts. It was the first of many Look And Read serials to be re-edited in sound only for BBC Schools Radio, and to feature the celebrated 'darting eyes' opening animation, but it also brought with it a slightly more contentious innovation.

Incoming producer Sue Weeks was keen for Look And Read to introduce a regular puppet character that could interact with the human presenter, in much the same manner as other BBC Schools shows like Words And Pictures and You And Me. The result of this was Mr Watchword, or 'Wordy' as he was informally known - a huge orange electric typewriter print head with a face and arms and voiced by Charles Collingwood, who would smugly interject with know-all observations on how much better he was at using language than the rest of us 'Word-Watchers'. Wordy would remain with Look And Read until 1992, but was clearly a source of much irritation even at this early stage. The studio segments for Cloud Burst were presented by Richard Carpenter himself, in the postmodern guise of the story's writer, who would take great delight in pointing out to Wordy that he actually knew what would happen next.

Carpenter was the strictly off-screen writer of 1977's The King's Dragon, which kept up the postmodern pretence by featuring Kenneth Watson as Hasting Times editor Jack Dunbar, puzzling over how to paste up a story about the central archaeological mystery in the face of constant interruptions from Wordy. Indeed, there was a further experiment with encouraging the audience to produce their own classroom newsletter about the unfolding events, which was somewhat undermined by the relatively unspectacular nature of the serial itself.

Contrary to the sword and sorcery that the title might suggest, The King's Dragon is simply a historical artefact that has been stolen from a museum in a small Hastings village. Hot on the thieves' trail are Billy West (Sean Flanagan, also starring in Carpenter's The Ghosts Of Motley Hall at the time), a local youngster who has worked out their secret code for communicating via personal ads and newspaper headlines, and Ann Mills (Frankie Jordan), a Hastings Times reporter assigned to cover an archaeological dig. They soon find out that there are in fact two King's Dragons, and nothing about the theft is quite what it seems.

There is nothing wrong with The King's Dragon in itself - it's a taut escapade in the manner of Carpenter's more straightforward historical adventure serials such as Dick Turpin and Smuggler - but it had little to offer those who had thrilled to the decidedly atypical-for-the-classroom The Boy From Space and Cloud Burst. It inevitably came across as something of a comedown, not to mention a lot close to traditional classroom exercises, and - perhaps unfairly - it is widely regarded as the lesser of the three serials.

Unfortunately it was also Richard Carpenter's last new serial for Look And Read, although it did not actually mark his final contribution to the series. Following Leonard Kingston's Sky Hunter in 1978 - coincidentally featuring Catweazle star Geoffrey Bayldon amongst the cast - the production team were keen that their next project should be a cheaper book-balancing effort. The original filmed inserts for The Boy From Space were duly located, new animated inserts were commissioned, and studio dates were booked to tape Wordy and his technician Cosmo (Phil Cheney) aboard the space station Wordlab 1, which some may well have felt was the best place for them. However, it soon transpired that the film sequences required some restoration work and new editing, and also some new music and sound effects to bring them more in line with the current Look And Read house style. At a late stage of production, the decision was taken to film a brief new introductory sequence featuring Helen and Dan - played by the now adult Sylvestra Le Touzel and Stephen Garlick - returning to the observatory to reminisce; presumably, this was added to excuse some of the by then outmoded fashions and hairstyles on display. Needless to say, this did not exactly result in as much book-balancing as had been hoped for.

Nonetheless, this unexpected expense was arguably worth it for the BBC Radiophonic Workshop's Paddy Kingsland's musical contributions alone. Replacing the original contributions by his colleague John Baker, Kingsland added a more suitably post-Vangelis/Jean Michel Jarre style of 'space' music to the existing films and the new segments, and most memorably to the opening and closing titles. To the accompaniment of swooping portamento synth lines, Look And Read's regular singer Derek Griffiths plaintively asks "Out there in space, shall we find friends? Is there a place where the Universe Ends? When shall we find it? Never. Never. Space goes on forever...", echoing into the infinite distance as the closing credits roll. Lonely, haunting and dispassionate, it's likely that this song is what is most well remembered about The Boy From Space.

Although Cloud Burst and The King's Dragon have yet to put in an appearance, The Boy From Space is now available on DVD, complete with chapter points that make it easy to skip past the studio links when you've had quite enough of them. Space may well indeed go on forever, but thankfully Wordy does not have to.

There will be more about the BBC Records And Tapes LP version of The Boy From Space soon. In the meantime, you can get Top Of The Box - The Complete Guide To BBC Records And Tapes Singles from here.

ITV 59 - All Your ITV Favourites (And The Gingerbread Girl) Part Eight: Schools And Colleges

You'd think, what with everyone always waffling on about pylons and experimental medicines and MURDERS SCARECROWS and folky pagan synths and Hole Hearted by Extreme and all of that other 'sinister seventies' iconography like some lost episode of Series 1 of Look Around You as written and produced by someone who knows nothing about the seventies nor indeed about Look Around You, whether you ask them to or not or indeed threaten them with a mirror-disc top hat to the face if they don't shut up, that there'd be an absolute wooo scary bakery van (for some reason) load of ITV Programmes For Schools And Colleges footage out there. But there isn't, and for some odd reason it's surprisingly hard to find, at least in any form other than a stretched still image with some overloud plank prattling over the top before treating us all to fourteen minutes of a library music track called Ragtime Crow or something, so this has been a much harder instalment to put together than most. And you know why that is? IT'S BECAUSE OF THE 'THEY' WHO DONE ALL OF THE SECRET HAUNTOLOGY EXPERIMENTS ON YOU LOL THE WHOLE OF THE SEVENTIES WILL BE ARRESTED NEXT ESPECIALLY HARTLEY HARE AND SPANGL... OH THAT DOESN'T WORK SORRY

Anyway, we're here to talk about Independent Television For Schools And Colleges rather than RAGGERTY IS HIDING IN YOUR DISUSED FRIDGE, and talk about Independent Television For Schools And Colleges rather than RAGGERTY IS HIDING IN YOUR DISUSED FRIDGE we shall. Starting with...

Hmmm, well it's no BBC Schools Diamond is it? This invariably moderately wonky caption slide, surely not coincidental in its similarity to the ATV ident, would be pressed into service whenever the inadvertent gap between the haphazardly-lengthed schools programmes reached truly ridiculous proportions. Presumably it was intended to have a dual purpose and allow teachers some scope for getting the brightness and contrast set correctly before the programme started, but given that most of them had trouble even switching the TV on in the first place that really was something of a tall order.

Then, eventually, the cross-legged captive audience arrived at the radially-gradated sixty second countdown everyone remembers, rendered in Savlon-inspired Vase-Smashed-With-Hammer blue and white livery, and let's be honest about this, not a patch on the BBC Schools Dots, mainly on account of it requiring those who laboured under the misapprehension that it was the height of hilarity to pretend to 'shoot' the disappearing markings to be simultaneously infinitely more dextrous and infinitely more annoying. Seen here doing an episode of Seeing And Doing, it would also work its Dixieland-driven wonders for the fondly-remembered likes of Good Health, Middle English, Picture Box, Leapfrog, The French Programme, How We Used To Live, Experiment, Stop Look And Listen, My World and of course Jimmy Savile Presents Some Pagan Villagers Make ICI Businessman With That Greasy Side Parting And Thick Glasses Combo Take Some Dangerous Untested Drugs By A Disused Foundry That Is In The Middle Of The Countryside For Some Reason.

And to fill the often not insubstantial gaps between all those programmes, the 'backroom boys' would often deploy short but seemingly infinite loops of rotating artwork, mostly rural and/or Tudor-themed watercolours by gifted semi-professionals, but sometimes haphazard splurges of that powdered water-activated schoolroom paint sent in by the actual viewers. We've been prevented from using any of the above indicated illustrations of The Muppets on health and safety grounds, but if you're willing to take that risk with your sanity, you can see them in all their... something by clicking here. Your best is 'The Drummer'.

And showcasing some of those off-kilter timings, here's a typical schoolday's rundown, so get yourself sat down for a good morning's worth of educativ-

Oh. Good thing too really, if you ask us, as we weren't so much running out of things to say about ITV Programmes For Schools And Colleges as running out of anything to actually have things to say about in the first place. And anyway, it's time to take a look at... well, that would be telling...

Strikes! Silver Jubilees! Barnaby!

This bit of pop-cultural political posturing from back in 2007 got one of the angriest responses to anything I've ever written, leading to me quickly pulling the post and deciding there and then that I was going to pursue a less GRR GRR-friendly creative path in future ("What are they on about? You like Ugly Betty, for fuck's sake" - Ben Baker). It's sort of worked, though I do still sometimes find my name mentioned in connection with some pointless campaign to bring back 1976-standard ad break lengths while I'm walking into Starbucks listening to the Glee soundtrack. Not everyone's behind your campaigns just because they like old stuff, people. Anyway, here it is again, hopefully appearing to a more positive reception this time around...

Spangles. Bagpuss. Spacehoppers. Slade. Rainbow. That episode of Grange Hill where Tucker did something. All of these things, and so much more more besides, once seemed so nostalgically evocative, even as early as the mid-eighties (when 'nostalgia' supposedly began and ended with Jonathan Ross saying "cor them toy space rockets eh?"), but more recently have become like popular cultural Kryptonite.

On the one hand, there was the endless parade of clip show talking heads who thought that simply 'remembering' such things was enough to provoke a proustian rush of nostalgia for the days of Sam Tyler arguing with the BBC Schools Diamond, and those ringtone-toting Abba-endorsing ha-ha-Zippy-was-on-teh-drugs retrololz jerks who insist on turning everything into an unfunny 'lewd' observational joke, which was enough to make even the most tolerant and good-humoured enthusiast for all things vaguely Phantom Flan-Flinger-tinged start to think that Noddy Holder was becoming ever so slightly tedious a reference point.

But on the other hand, when some of said enthusiasts started to wave a healthily tongue-in-cheek two fingers in the direction of Space Dust and its ilk, some others took the George Best-autographed ball and ran with it, adopting a militant stance that basically dictated that nobody was allowed to show affection for anything from the past unless they had obtained written permission and had refused to watch a South Bank Show on two people that they weren't interested in discussing a subject that they didn't understand but still got angry about it anyway.

And so everything fell into a kind of limbo, with poor old Bungle going undiscussed for fear of sparking off a wave of stupidity in both directions... and it's time that we took them back. Reject those false prophets, and reject those false blokes-with-big-sunglasses-on-office-nights-out - let's put lazy uncritical nostalgia back in centre stage, and indeed 'Denim', where it belongs. Starting today, Out On Blue Six officially launches The Humphrey Cushion 'Remember Supermousse' Campaign For Being Allowed To Talk About Spangles Again - watch this space for further developments, and for celebrity endorsements by the likes of Bawrence, Darren Grimley and TV Andrew Collins!

The Seventy Eighth Annual Academy Salute To Eighty Seven Million Years Of The BBC Part 10: Continuity Slides

Yes, it’s the moment you’ve all been waiting for, especially if you’ve absolutely no interest in base sarcasm with occasional factual accuracy about old-skool BBC presentation techniques but have still read eight lengthy posts about it anyway – the final part of our Rifle Through The BBC’s Big Bin Where They Threw All The Old Test Cards And Things Like That Once They’d Stopped Using Them. And that final bit of old-skool presentation? Why, it’s ‘continuity slides’ – in other words, those captions with a show title and accompanying photo that they used to flash up while telling you what was on and when. Nowadays just about the only place you’ll see them is in extras on ‘classic’ Doctor Who DVDs, and even then they’re hidden extras half the time anyway, but some of them were gloriously bonkers and deserve another outing. And how many of the initially-thought-of list of examples do you think we actually managed to find? Clue: it’s not many…

 
In most of the other instalments, we’ve generally seen things start to get graphically more interesting (and indeed graphically more interesting) some time around 1966. Continuity slides, however, were still languishing in the doldrums of ‘get a sensible-looking publicity still and slap the show’s name on it’ even in the early seventies, as you can see from the Cambridgian post-satire double-bill above. Possibly this was some sort of quasi-magnanimous gesture related to the slow regional roll-out of colour broadcasting, as though they didn’t want those who still got a black and white signal to feel like they were missing out on the ‘fun’ (though if it was then clearly nobody was brave enough to tell ‘Girl’ and ‘Clown’ to fall into line), but it doesn’t really do us much good in terms of this here humorous overview, and worse still it means we are denied the opportunity to chortle at ludicrous-looking slides for R.3. Anyway, the times they were indeed a-changing, just a little bit later than they did for everything else on the BBC.

Once a bit of colour and flair finally did come along, standard practice for BBC1 in those post-Psychedelic days was to get a recognisable bit of iconography from the show – such as the grinning visage of lumbering detective Cannon – and spread it out across the slide in an Andy Warhol-aping arrangement of alternating hues. The existence of such slides, incidentally, made it all the more hilarious when a similar Tardis-shading gambit turned up on a Doctor Who DVD a couple of years back, and know-all fans fell over themselves in their haste to publically cry ‘FAKE!!’. Meanwhile, BBC2 had their arty and intellectual reputation to think of, and so avoided such excursions into colour-crazy hoo-hah in favour of more straightforward imagery, such as this abstract rendition of a bloke looking through a security door for a showing of George A. Romero’s big screen bio-terrorism fable The Crazies.

Indeed, BBC2 were noticeably keen to avoid doing anything so lowbrow as actually featuring a proper image from the programme itself, preferring instead to employ the services of somewhat more vague and generic iconography. Take the above slides, the first promoting literary discussion show The Book Programme, with this week’s lineup of Tommy Vance, Louis Barfe, a generic second division Britpop guitarist, Mr Davenport from Rentaghost, Nick Griffin and Russ Abbot’s C.U. Jimmy, and the second pushing weekly Jimmy Smith-heralded economic affairs hoedown The Money Programme, marking out its heavyweight status with the cunning use of exotic ‘foreign’ currency.

Sometimes, you do have to wonder exactly who these slides were aimed at. Take BBC1′s push for the 1978 Miss World contest – an event that was already on the ropes thanks to years of feminists protesting by punching that Christmas Tree Delegate out of Doctor Who And The Mission To The Unknown and shouting “I will personally spit in every fiftieth burger” at Alan Driscoll Lead Singer Of Techno Band thewomb, and frankly needed all the help it could get – which basically involved a group of artistically-rendered ‘lovelies’ of the sort that were only ever found attractive by blokes with moustaches in early seventies sitcoms who said “WOOOOARGH, EH?” a lot. Meanwhile, BBC2 clearly believed that the correct way to entice viewers towards straight-faced current affairs analysis was with a big picture of Denis Healy.

Continuity slides often had to be assembled at very short notice, especially if they were for BBC1 and even more especially if they were related to the moveable ‘feast’ that was live sports coverage. Consequently, as we’ll be seeing quite a few times in the upcoming examples, there was rarely ever enough time to make sure that the assembled image actually made any visual or indeed conceptual sense. Still, it’s handy to have such an of-its-time reminder of the 1978 World Cup, a tournament famous for the short-lived rule that all players had to use a giant ball while performing the Snoopy dance.

If you had a little more time to devote to slide-construction, the results were often markedly superior. Take for example these two Christmas-themed efforts from the late seventies, where somebody’s taken the time and trouble to do a proper and proportionally correct photographic montage. On the left we have Larry Grayson, about to get his arm trapped in the door he was always exhorting all and sundry to ‘shut’, and on the right the ascendent phenomenon of Dallas, with the cast handily positioned in front of the Stars and Stripes so you knew it was ‘American’.

And of course – as you should know already – nowhere was time, money and effort in shorter supply than in the allegorically underfunded world of BBC Schools And Colleges, where the already cheap continuity slide layout was made to look cheaper still through the continual use of the most battered, badly cropped, poorly focused and logically taxing photos that were lying nearest to hand, regardless of whether they actually hailed from the programme in question or not. This photo of Peter Combe and That Annoying Trilly Woman from Music Time, for example, has clearly been trodden on a couple of times. And why are they so keen to avoid the child on the far right of the photo? And this wasn’t even the one we wanted to use…

Hang on a minute… Parky? What’s he doing here?! Don’t start adjusting your set just yet – unfortunately, despite extensive research, it’s proved impossible to locate that generic BBC Schools slide with two cartoon birds in hats, or the one for BBC Schools show W.A.L.R.U.S. with a load of teens with seventies haircuts seemingly cut out of a larger photo with blunt scissors, or the Camberwick Green one with the puppets looming menacingly towards the screen, or the extreme close-up of The McWomble, or that poorly-cropped one of Roobarb in a pirate’s hat, or indeed most of the ones that were originally shortlisted when this piece was in the planning stages, so Mr. Parkinson has generously agreed to appear as an illustration in its place. Anyway, that’s the last we’ll be seeing of him.

Happily, something from that initial list that did turn up was a couple of examples of the short-lived rebranding of the lunchtime slot formerly known as Watch With Mother as ‘See Saw’, invariably bookended (though sadly never literally bookended by Professor Yaffle) by a slide featuring two characters from that day’s show – usually visibly cut out of an old tie-in storybook, which amusingly resulted in Gabriel The Toad from Bagpuss being featured still in his tin - balancing precariously on the world’s most geometrically improbable see-saw; unless, of course, there was no available visual reference material for the show in question – as with Chock-A-Block, Bric-A-Brac, Stop! Go! and, well, any of the ones with punctuation in the title really – when they would just use a close-up of the empty see-saw instead. It’s a shame they didn’t extend this to the rest of their output, thereby denying us the chance to see a see-saw mounted Craven and Darius Jedburgh introducing Edge Of Darkness.

Anyway, back to the often perplexing choice of slide-mounted imagery, and while we’ve said plenty about how ridiculous the ‘non-canon’ choices could sometimes be, that doesn’t mean to say that ‘on-topic’ choices were neccessarily any better. Reluctantly sidestepping the overarching question of why anyone would need to be reminded when the News is on anyway, using a still of that animated paper lantern from the News-y opening titles du jour was an utterly ridiculous and self-defeating idea, as any casual and inattentive viewer (which, let’s face it, anyone watching at midday in the days before the arrival of an actual daytime service would have been) would see it from the corner of their eye and mistakenly assume it was the actual opening titles. You didn’t get that with your two cartoon birds in hats.

So, it’s time we had a TV Burp-style face-off to decide which was the best out of the precision-targeted and woefully-vague image choice gambits, and it’s going to take place on the hallowed turf of school holidays morning schedules. In the blue corner we have improving arts and crafts education-through-the-back-door long-runner Why Don’t You…?, represented by that smartarse telly from the Janis Joplin-soundalike-era opening titles (though it wasn’t quite ‘smart’ enough to realise that it was technically actually urging viewers to switch it off and not bother watching it again… stitch that, you smug 625-Line pillock), and in the red corner, strategem-meets-surrealism daily piece-move-chronicle Play Chess, a peculiar mix of child genii, computer graphics, and confusing comic tales about The One They Called… The Bishop, signified by some, well, chess pieces. Hmmm, we’re not really anywhere nearer a resolution, are we? Oh well, Round 2…

So let’s try again… taking up the bat this time is Ron Pickering-compered school sports day writ large We Are The Champions, signposted with the Children’s BBC ‘balloon’ variant (as covered in more detail here) and some indefinably gleaming gold thingy that is presumably made up of a gaggle of overexposed trophies, and BBC2 bowling with a what-it-says-on-the-tin counterpart for the quite possibly misleadingly exciting-sounding Whicker! And… no. Still no firm conclusion. In summary then, they’re both as ‘tops’ as anything!

For no reason other than that they were both inexplicably amusing, here’s a brace of mid-eighties BBC1 comedy continuity slides. First up, The Best Of Three Of A Kind (which really must have been a short show), with a picture that in no way illustrates the alleged animosity between certain cast members nor indeed the other one attempting to cling to the coat-tails, or if you will vest-top straps (CALM DOWN WHEDON), of a slightly more Hollywood-bound colleague. This is followed – probably quite literally followed in the schedules too – by legendary culture clash-fixated urban unrest-com The Front Line, with Alan Igbon and Paul Barber poised to demonstrate the theme song’s claim that Malcolm and Sheldon do indeed fight like ‘cat’ and ‘dog’. And guess which one of them’s out on DVD…?

We’re now heading towards the timeframe in which this long-serving continuity slide layout was starting to look a little tired, as exemplified by this ludicrously outmoded bit of Eurovision-pluggage, featuring a pretty nondescript drawing of what appears to be Neil Innes’ ‘French Crooner’ character with his features shunted haphazardly around his face a la Mr. Robinson The Window Cleaner from Trumpton. And this was 1984 – they’d invented the Sinclair QL by then!!

Similar ‘could try harder’ comments could not unreasonably be scrawled in the margin of this generic ‘late film’ gambit. The tinting is presumably there to misleadingly suggest to feverish adolescents that the film they’re about to sneakily watch will be both ‘red hot’ and ‘blue’, as opposed to the reality that it was probably just The Spy With My Face yet again, which is fair enough as far as it goes but y’know… they were competing with Video Nasties here!

And to put the top hat on it (in fact, a slide for Top Hat or indeed The Top Hat Rabbits would have worked just as well here), here’s a tired old slide layout with tired old photos of the tired old adventures of a tedious dog, and a show that, while pretty good, was still being transmitted from tired old prints with whopping great subversion-removing Boss Cat-style jump cuts in them. Ring out the old, ring in the new…

And what exactly are camp daytime chefs (“I’ll just get the sage” – “oh well, you’d know all about that!!”) Hudson & Halls toasting in this brand new colourful arrangement for the brand new colourful BBC Daytime service…?

Only the arrival of the new COW-based computerised graphical design setup, that’s what! And here it is in action, proving that with a swish enough system, even dull ‘zoo vet’-based drama One By One could be made to look, well, still a bit dull and ‘zoo vet’-based really, but you get the general idea. And with the advent of this exciting new technology, and how much visual flair we’ve already credited BBC2 with, and indeed the rapidly approaching end of this series of features, you can bet they’ll have used the new system to do something really spectacular.

Oh fuck off.

Ah, the pity of it, time, our old enemy, comes round again. Bish and trivvock, this is the final part of the final edition of, if you will, our little jaunt, as ever a jaunt as was. Yes, sadly, this is the conclusion of That BBC Continuity Through The Ages Thing That There Never Did Quite Seem To Be A Suitable Title For, though in pleasingly true BBC continuity voiceover fashion, it’ll be back for a special outing later in the year. And there’ll be a new and equally ridiculous series starting here on very soon too. So, in conclusion, thank you for reading, and please be upstanding for our national anthem…

…and now, please be seated again, as it’s time for the first part in our brand new series, The Changing Face Of Michael Parkinson:

Hang on a minute… Bagpuss? What’s he doing here?!…

The Seventy Second Annual Academy Salute To Forty Three Million Years Of The BBC Part 9: Schools & Colleges

Time to wheel out that big TV with shutters on the front and endure a million tiresome ‘talking head’ clips of Peter Kay dribbling on about “when teacher said fingers on lips, what were that all about?”, as the Great Big Whistle-Stop Tour Of Stuff You Used To See On The BBC That Wasn’t Actually A Programme reaches the strange early-morning-and-mid-afternoon hinterland that played host to the BBC’s broadcasts for Schools And Colleges…!

No doubt you will all have your own favourite BBC Programme For Schools And Colleges, whether it’s Music Time, Scene, Maths In A Box or that one where Dave Benson Phillips was a sort of twenties private eye who looked for capital letters or something. This isn’t going to be about the programmes, however (or at least it won’t be until it inevitably turns into a load of surreal rambling about the programmes two thirds of the way through), but rather about what went on in between them. With schedule-adherence somewhat less pressing a concern in off-duty broadcasting hours, and indeed with hapless teachers requiring a couple of minutes to get their unruly charges sitting quietly and cross-legged on the floor, such programmes rarely ran to full length. And as any reminiscence-prone erstwhile schoolchild remembers, the resultant gaps in the schedule were duly occupied by a series of now-legendary continuity-derived countdown sequences.

 
Unfortunately, there isn’t really very much evidence out there of how they went about this countdown lark prior to the late sixties. All that’s really been uncovered to suggest how children may have spent their inter-educational-broadcast time back when Professor Quatermass was having beachfront punch-ups with the Birdseye Teddy Boys is what appears to be a ‘Telesnap’ taken in the days before John Cura realised that people didn’t actually want the off-screen image to contain the surrounding television set as well. Note also that it appears to be a ‘proper’ TV, not one of those shutter-fronted school-favoured efforts. It’s anyone’s guess as to what’s actually going on in the image itself, which seemingly depicts a blurrily-rendered ‘BBC Television For Schools’ next to what appears to be to be a partial closeup of a planet straight out of some Gerry Anderson closing credits. There was supposedly a BBC show called Space School around this time, though that may just have been Andrew Pixley playing a massive practical joke on us all. Well, for ‘all’, read ‘about three and a half people’.

There definitely was an animated countdown in existence by September 1960, though, as that was the date of the first appearance of the BBC Schools Pie Chart. Which was, well, a Pie Chart. That said BBC in the corner. Yet despite – or perhaps because of – its deceptive simplicity, this linking device would weather all of the turbulent sociocultural seismic shifts of the decade, seeing off the Profumo Affair, Swinging London and when The Rolling Stones refused to ‘revolve’ on Sunday Night At The London Palladium to last into the early seventies (though how it would have withstood The Sex Pistols calling Andrew Sachs a ‘wotter’ is another question).

And as bland as it may have looked, the Pie Chart still incorporated – not unlike, as we have already seen, various incarnations of The Test Card – those high-contrast stripe things which were prone to strobing wildly on old television sets, doubtless resulting in many a ‘bad trip’ for members of The Waltham Green East Wapping Carpet Cleaning Rodent And Boggit Extermination Association. Upping the disorientation ante even further, the sequence came accompanied by upbeat yet clinical sounding steel band music from Leonard Salzedo – better known for penning the bastard scary introductory fanfare for the Open University (which we’ll be coming round to soon) - and gradually disappeared section by section in true ‘what’s Mr Chips doing?’ style to reveal…

…this clock, which busily counted down the remaining sixty seconds until the programme started, while looking for all the world like some sort of sinister Cold War version of the Play School clock busily counting down the remaining sixty seconds until some labcoated creaky sci-fi film experiment into something involving ‘the atom’ goes rocket-threateningly wrong. Yet another example of the clown-fixated complete obliviousness of those involved in child-orientated programming in the sixties to realise that what they’d knocked together might actually scare the living daylights out of younger viewers. On the other hand, it may just have been a cynical gambit to ensure that schoolroom viewers welcomed the tedious academic programming that followed with open arms. Either way, somewhere, Leonard Salzedo and his cadre of fanatics were consolidating their power.

Although black and white television largely disappeared with Patrick Troughton spinning away into a black void shouting “stop, you’re making me giddy”, Schools (And Colleges) television was way down the budgetary chain, and as a result had to continue making and broadcasting programmes in monochrome for some time. Even when colour did start to enliven Words And Pictures and its ilk, there wasn’t enough available spare cash to replace the Pie Chart sequence, and it was September 1973 (or 1974, depending on which website you’re looking at) before a fully chrominant replacement came along. And as this possibly-Pertwee-titles-inspired gap-filling continuity slide suggests, it was well worth the wait…

The BBC Schools Diamond, a marvel of then-modern animation technology (it would take too long to explain but it involved motion-controlled plastic stencils, electronic camera recolouring trickery, and, erm, a mirror) was, possibly unintentionally, the ultimate visual evocation of the meeting point between early seventies fashion and late sixties psychedelia, and as if to underline this (MUSICOLOGISTS WITH A TENDENCY TO TAKE THINGS TOO LITERALLY – PLEASE DO NOT WRITE IN) came accompanied by two minutes’ worth of sub-Soft Machine prog jazz, which you can hear in full here (or here if you’d prefer it in glorious cwilliams1976-o-vision). Or at least it did if you were watching programmes for secondary schools; those aimed at primary age viewers had to make do with some baffling over-nostalgised sub-Music And Movement woodwind and percussion nothingness, which you can hear in full here (or here if you’d prefer a babbling Brazilian bloke to anything by cwilliams1976). Anyway, regardless of musical accompaniment, the Diamond would continallty pulsate outwards, before eventually dissolving into a psychedelic shower of smaller diamonds and then disappearing completely. The version shown above depicts the Diamond in its original colour scheme, a subtle blend of black and Sam Tyler Blue.

In 1975 it was all change (well, ‘a bit’ change) for BBC continuity – as we’ll be covering in some considerable detail later on - and the Diamond was obliged to adopt the new blue-and-yellow colour branding along with the attendant big chunky typeface, lending it a kind of ‘Glam Rock’ visual feel (MUSICOLOGISTS WITH A TENDENCY TO TAKE THINGS TOO LITERALLY - PLEASE SEE ABOVE, AND TECHNICALLY ’VISUAL’ FALLS OUTSIDE YOUR REMIT ANYWAY). And with that, everyone was happy and everything stayed pretty much in this format for the next two yea-…

WHUH?! What the fuck’s going on here? ‘FOLLOWS SHORTLY Follows Shortly’????? Why would anyone need a continuity slide of a continuity slide? Would anyone – apart from Bawrence - even have been watching? Notice, though, that this diamond a) is suspiciously slimmer than usual and b) has four layers rather than the standard three. There’s probably a very good reason for this lost in some dusty paper file somewhere, though – ident fans take note - it probably doesn’t have anything to do with Harold Wilson’s stance on the EEC.

 
Hang on a minute… Parky? What’s he doing here?! Don’t start adjusting your set just yet – unfortunately, despite extensive research, it’s proved impossible to locate that continuity slide for lord knows which programme that had two unidentified cartoon birds in hats on it, which was going to be used to illustrate how the occasionally-glimpsed continuity slides for Schools And Colleges programmes always seemed to employ imagery that had nothing remotely obvious to do with the actual programme, so Mr. Parkinson has generously agreed to appear as an illustration in its place. Anyway, that’s the last we’ll be seeing of him.

Here’s another good example, though - the one that was used for Look And Read. You know, Look And Read. The one with Wordy, Magic Pencil, lavish filmed serials like The Boy From Space, and indeed an abundance of arresting and distinctive visual iconography to choose from. So how did they elect to represent it? With a discoloured old-skool ‘radio’ concentric circles thingymajig mounted behind one of those oil lamp effects they used to slap on top of TV performances by Jefferson Airplane to make them just that little bit more ‘far out’. And this wasn’t the most puzzling example by any stretch of the imagination, but we’re straying a little too far into the extremely weird world of continuity slides, which really does deserve a seperate entry of its own. Time, then, to move on with the actual continuity countdown hoo-hah, and it’s the one you’ve all been waiting for…

Yes, it’s the celebrated BBC Schools ‘Dots’, which blinked offscreen as the seconds ticked away and tedious classroom jokers pretended to be ‘shooting’ them right through from 1977 to 1983. Of course, if said jokers had been 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 break down mid-rotation and remain stuck in a skewed position for days on end, but that was probably on too dadaist a frequency for them to interpret. The ‘dots’ would generally be accompanied by a selection of soft-rock classics, showcasing 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 well-known amongst Brit schoolchildren than American muso ‘heads’.

…and, sadly, that’s your lot. 1983 saw the introduction of both more accurately-lengthed shows and a run of the mill continuity gambit based on a cleaning-up-the-morning-after-a-house-party-yellow variant of the standard issue ‘==2==’, which it’s doubtful anyone even remembers at all, let alone remembers with fond bewilderment. However, we’re not quite done with the world of BBC-sponsored education yet, nor indeed with continuity slides… but coming up next, in a later on while, la-OW… join us again next time for the final instalment, when we’ll be looking at some of the weirdest ways of plugging programmes ever. Quite possibly incorporating no Michael Parkinson whatsoever.