Wake Up And Look At This Thing That I Bring...

A look through Emily's shop window at a couple of things you might have missed if you haven't been following my main site (which you can find here)...


And You And I Would Call Them Dragonflies

The story of my long search for the original recordings of the music from Bagpuss, with all manner of diversions about 'Acid Folk' and making tapes from off-air VHS recordings of Cable TV repeats, and a look at the new Bagpuss soundtrack CD. Which is handy. You can read it here.


Shindig! Issue #85

I've got a feature in the latest issue of Shindig! about the hidden beat, psych and folk highlights in the BBC Records And Tapes catalogue, featuring everyone from the BBC Radiophonic Workshop to the Play Away team, and even TV 'Girl' and 'Clown' (Test Card). Find out more about it here.


I've Heard Of Politics, But This Is Ridiculous

Now that charity shops are better organised and make more money for charity with sensible prices, it's a lot less fun rooting through them. Although they do smell slightly less of damp cardboard.
Back in the days when everything was stacked together in haphazard piles without any thought for genre, media or even size, though, you could chance upon something that literally changed the way you thought about everything. Well, that or fifteen copies of that The Adriatic Formula book.
This is the story of how I found an early sixties book based on a then long-forgotten television satire show, and how that changed everything for me. Read all about it here.

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You can find more tales of record collecting in dingy charity shops and hunting for obscure television soundtrack music in my book Can’t Help Thinking About Me, available in paperback here or from the Kindle Store here.

Tim Worthington Presents... Some Stuff About Jazz, Folk, The BBC Radiophonic Workshop And Play Away

Here's a collection of recent highlights from my new website; because if you're reading this, you're probably not reading that. And missing out on the likes of...

All Its Wonder To Know - a look at where the original version of I Was Made To Love Magic by Nick Drake has disappeared to, and why it deserves to come back.

Opening Theme, Two Bands Of Incidental Music And Closing Theme - the history of the soundtrack to mid-seventies Children's BBC near-future thriller The Changes. You can also hear me chatting to Samira Ahmed about The Changes here.

If You're Feeling Happy, Tap Your Feet - there are tons of officially released versions of the theme from Play Away, and none of them quite match up to what you would have heard on screen. This is a ridiculously comprehensive guide to all of them. And don't forget that Top Of The Box, my book about every single released by BBC Records And Tapes (which also looks at The Changes) is still available from here.

Listen Here - Martin Freeman and Eddie Piller's compilation Jazz On The Corner is one of the best compilations I've heard in a long time and is full of exciting stuff from all genres and definitions of 'jazz'. I have a go at explaning why.


And don't forget to have a look around at the rest of the site while you're there - there's plenty of other new articles you might have missed, and more editions of Looks Unfamiliar. And more coming soon! Including lots of extraneous uses of the word 'and'!

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Top Of The Box - The Story Behind Every BBC Records And Tapes Single is available in paperback here or from the Kindle Store here. And there's several other books to choose from here...

BEEB's Greatest Hits

Launched by BBC Records And Tapes in 1974, the Beeb imprint was intended as a more focused and coherent outlet for some of the more commercially viable material from BBC shows, particularly session tracks from Radio 1 and Radio 2 broadcasts. It was hoped that the sub-label would be able to make better use of the talents of the more able and chart-savvy in-house composers and technical staff, but unfortunately, while this did result in some strong releases, they found themselves hampered by the parent label’s lack of experience and apparently interest in properly promoting their output. The singles released by Beeb enjoyed much greater success in Europe, where they were licensed to proper record labels and a series of successful ‘hits’ compilations followed, but none of them ever even came close to charting in the UK. While perhaps not as esoteric or evocative a collection of releases as the RESL series, the Beeb singles often had even more unusual and interesting stories behind them, and here are a couple of the most unusual and interesting.


BEEB001 Roll Over Beethoven/Say Mama/Be Bop A Lula - Gene Vincent (September 1974)

The Beeb series of singles began with this offering from veteran rock’n’roller Gene Vincent; in 1971, Vincent had been in the UK to promote his latest album The Day The World Turned Blue, and was determined to pursue his chances of a comeback with an energy quite at odds with his failing health. One of his final recordings was a strong session of rock’n’roll standards for Radio 1’s Johnny Walker Show – recorded only days before his death – from which this release was eventually drawn in response to public demand.


BEEB009 Duck'n'Roll/Sammy's Cha Cha - Sammy Duck (July 1975)

This unusual novelty single, featuring a pair of rock’n’roll numbers performed in an actionable approximation of Donald Duck’s voice, had been a sizeable hit in Europe earlier in 1975. Following airplay on a number of radio shows, notably Radio 1’s Junior Choice, it was licensed for UK release by Beeb, but perhaps deservedly failed to chart.


BEEB010 On The Move/Easy To Love You - The Dooleys (September 1975)

Broadcast on BBC1 on Sunday afternoons between 1975 and 1976 in a bid to promote adult literacy, the award-winning On The Move was a series of short comedy vignettes written by Barry Took and featuring Bob Hoskins as a delivery driver who had difficulty with reading and writing. Composed by prolific session musician Alan Hawkshaw, the catchy upbeat theme song was performed by The Dooleys, an unusually credible family rock band who, though virtually forgotten now, were top ten regulars in the late seventies. Despite its obscure origins, this remains one of the best loved BBC themes of all time, and in retrospect it is staggering that this was not a big a hit as the rest of The Dooleys’ output. On The Move was later included on REB236 Angels And 15 Other Original BBC-TV Themes.


BEEB019 Come Together/Dear Prudence – Graffiti (December 1976)

Graffiti were essentially a vehicle for up and coming singer-songwriter Phil Bates, and these two highly individual takes on Beatles numbers were released by Beeb in anticipation of a mooted BBC2 series in which the manufactured band would take part in a mixture of comedy, music and documentary segments, effectively a reworking of The Monkees for progressive rock fans. However, presumably due in no small part to this single’s lack of success, and more than likely to the emergence of several similar shows on the BBC, the planned series was ultimately shelved before production commenced.


BEEB021 Ten Years After/All Time Needletime Loser - Radio Active (September 1977)

Written and recorded by a band of BBC studio staff – including Radio 1 producers Malcolm Brown on guitar, BBC Records And Tapes' Mike Harding on keyboards, Paddy Kingsland of the BBC Radiophonic Workshop on bass, and Radio 1’s assistant controller Bryant Marriott on drums – this quirky pop-rock number was put together as a celebration of ten years of Radio 1 and released to tie in with the anniversary. Although the nominal a-side would ultimately attract little attention, the b-side proved far more popular; thrown together quickly and intended as a parody of punk rock, it amusingly ended up appealing to genuine fans of the movement, including John Peel who gave it a considerable amount of airtime on his Radio 1 show. Needless to say this single is now in high demand amongst those who grew up listening to Peel’s show.


BEEB026 New Wave Band/Theme From The Film Of The Same Name - Jock Swon And The Metres (November 1978)

In the Autumn of 1978, the BBC changed the frequencies of its four national radio stations in order to give them a greater national reach; while the more highbrow end of the audience were advised of this by a startling chorale from The King’s Singers (released by EMI as Some Enchanted Wavelengths), Radio 1 sought to announce the change with a topically punningly-entitled number pseudonymously provided by Glam Rock rock’n’roll revivalists Showaddywaddy with the ‘assistance’ of some of the station’s wackier DJs. It is not unreasonable to suggest that it might have left some listeners wanting to get the wrong frequency on purpose.


BEEB027 Blake's 7 Disco/Disco Jimmy – Federation (March 1979)

Terry Nation's much-loved 'space opera' has latterly acquired an unfair reputation as a poor relation of Doctor Who, although admittedly it was hardly helped by ridiculous ventures such as this; a weak attempt at producing a danceable version of the theme music in an equally weak attempt to cash in on the chart success of Mankind’s disco version of the Doctor Who theme. The unrelated b-side defies description. A measure of its ‘quality’ is that despite not being easy to find, the single is hardly sought after even by Blake’s 7’s intensely devoted fans.

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Top of The Box - The Story Behind Every BBC Records And Tapes Single, which covers all of the Beeb releases and more, is available in paperback here, or from the Kindle Store here.

Captain Kipper's Clipper (Hypnotone Brain Machine Mix)

So, what exactly was I hoping that Music From BBC Children's Programmes would prove to be? A sudden shift from the here and now into the more kaleidoscopic hues of all those gaudy seventies-forged programmes lurking tantalisingly on the fringes of the memory. An hallucinogenic vista wherein musical innovation was Freddie Phillips bashing out a scary disjointed chord, cultural context was the BBC not being able to afford anything more than lone presenters in 'white void' studios, and the nearest thing to eroticism was thigh-length-boot-favouring Play School/Play Away folkie Toni Arthur. Something, essentially, of the same impact, magnitude and transcendental capacity as that moment in old films when they suddenly switch from black and white into colour.

Or, if you want to be figurative about it, a sonic evocation of the moment when Black And White Andy Pandy turned into Colour Andy Pandy. Metaphorically and literally. For while it wasn't actually represented on Music From BBC Children's Programmes, the colour remake of Andy Pandy that hovered around the Watch With Mother schedules in the mid-seventies was a defining representation of the esoteric televisual sub-universe that I was hoping that this album would somehow break through to. Made on ropey oversaturated film stock, and with a disconcertingly 'different' Teddy to boot, it had been an all-too-familiar sight on the small screen for a number of years but now was almost completely forgotten, to the point where people actually accused me - and in fact sometimes still do - of having just made it up. In the days before clip shows and the like, nostalgia for the television of the seventies in particular was almost like nostalgia for something that never actually happened. But it did happen, and like Lee Mavers and his legendary belief that somewhere out there was an antiquated console with real sixties dust on it that could make the umpteenth re-recording of Doledrum match the sounds that he was hearing in his head, I was convinced that this album with real seventies Space Dust on it was the key to the sounds I was still hearing in my head.

True, a note of alarm had been sounded by the sight of those genteel youngsters on the cover, and true, some half-expected inclusions appeared to be missing while other less palatable-looking offerings took their place, but if we were ever going to reach this apparent higher plane of consciousness wherein all was bliss and enlightenment and psychedelic waves emenated from that opening titles drawing of Barnaby standing next to a gramophone, it might be an idea to actually listen to the album first and find out. Before we do, though, there's a couple of details worth establishing about its contents. Firstly, the tracks were almost entirely drawn from existing BBC Records And Tapes releases, many of them devoted to individual shows. Yes, there really was a full length Crackerjack (no, don't) album and you'll be hearing all about that in due course. The second point is that said highlights have been arranged into a series of cut-and-shut medleys combining several individual tracks - or even in some cases truncated edits thereof - into one long prog rock-esque suite; sometimes this works, and at other times it makes absolutely no sense at all.

If you want a clearer explanation of the whole perplexing process, then look no further than the first track on side one. Play Away was a programme that came about almost by accident, when the BBC found themselves making more money from their overseas sales of long-running pre-school programme Play School - of which more later, though in the meantime you can find my big massive expanded history of it in Not On Your Telly - in 'kit' form (i.e. foreign broadcasters would recieve scripts, films, and a duplicate Humpty decked out in 'poison' colour scheme) than they knew what to do with. Enough spare money, in fact, to pay for a whole new programme, and the resultant stroke of genius was to give the Play School presenters - most of whom were failed or failing singer-songwriters and stand-up comedians - a timeslot aimed at a slightly older audience where they could dole out puns, whimsy, improvisation, mild satire, custard pies and singer-songwritten songs to their heart's content, under the leadership of the seemingly indefatigable Brian Cant and accompanied by a bunch of equally career-diverted jazzmen led by the piano-pounding Jonathan Cohen. It was, if you will, the 'free jazz' of the BBC's children's output, though thankfully when they got to record an album - the first of four, in fact - in 1973, they left the AMM-style scraping cellos at home.

Instead, what they came up with was a combination of extended comedy sketches, improvised one-liners, party game-friendly instrumental hi-jinks, and a selection of musical solo showcases, ranging from nonsense songs to - naming no decidedly out-of-place covers of If I Had A Hammer - traditional numbers that somewhat gave away the frustrated folky ambitions of certain presenters. Thus it was that two tracks from the first Play Away album ended up bolted together as a curtain-raiser to Music From BBC Children's Programmes. And it was two of said frustrated folky presenters, promisingly, that were taking the helm for main vocal duties here - Lionel Morton, the elaborately-coiffured former lead vocalist of The Four Pennies who had come to Play School and Play Away fresh from a less than chart-troubling attempt to reposition himself as a post-Penny Lane 'Carnaby Street' popster, and Toni Arthur, moderately successful setter of geniune witchy runes to music who claims to have been earmarked for presenting duties when a male producer spotted her performing in glittery purple hotpants. A claim that, judging from the cover of the Play Away album, may well have had basis in fact.

As much as I may have been hoping for the album to have much the same reality-blurring effect as Screamadelica, Play Away, the first track on Music From BBC Children's Programmes, was sadly not subtitled A Dub Symphony In Two Parts. Instead it was built up from two shorter tracks known as 'Theme' and Superstition. The first of these, obviously, is the Play Away theme song itself; invariably heard at the close of the show with Jonathan Cohen pounding out a few nifty chord rolls while the cast struggled with oversized comedy props bearing their names. Although Brian Cant usually took the lead vocal in the show, Lionel Morton does so here, which is perhaps only fitting as he actually wrote it. And that's not the only difference - in place of the more familiar arrangement is a looser, more improvised setting based around stand-up bass, percussion, and what appears to be somebody twanging a ruler on a desk. What's more, the the version presented here, as I would later discover, was actually rather bluntly hacked down from a much longer recording on the Bang On A Drum - Songs From Play School And Play Away album, and not actually from the original Play Away album itself. This omits numerous jazzy melodic touches and an entire middle eight, ending up sounding weirdly like a lost Oasis song, only with slightly more verbose lyrics and indeed slightly more imaginative instrumentation. Incidentally there were numerous re-recordings of the Play Away theme on the various albums that followed - and a truly awful AOR-ed up arrangement for single release, which you can read more about in Top Of The Box (you probably won't want to hear it though) - but they never bettered this inaugural reading. Even in this heavily truncated form, it's still the best by some considerable distance.

The second half of the track is taken up by a complete and unedited Superstition, this time actually drawn from the Play Away album, and sung as a duet between Lionel Morton and Toni Arthur, with comedy spoken interjections from Brian Cant and Chloe Ashcroft; it was, however, written by strangely absent co-presenter Carole Ward. No doubt you're already formulating your own wisecrack involving Stevie Wonder's similarly-titled (and indeed recorded the same year) ode to the joys of not walking under ladders, so you'll probably be surprised to find that this isn't quite so much of a joke as you might think. This Superstition is similarly drenched in wah wah-heavy jazz-funk inflections, and indeed similarly lyrically concerned with debunking folklore nonsense that "may or may not happen", though Mr. Wonder's failure to include Brian and Chloe doing some inter-verse ridiculing of adherents of such hokum is his loss, frankly. You'd be forgiven for thinking that the above is in some way exaggerated for comic effect, but in all honesty it isn't; whether by accident or design, Superstition is a startling example of early seventies Rare Groove-esque funk and one that is highlighted as a hidden treat by numerous 'break'-crazy Blaxploitation-skewed websites. And that's not the only time this will be happening as we make our way through the album. Anyway, as sentient leakages from lost televisual and musical universes go, this is a fairly good start and bodes well for what lies beyond. And, simultaneously, before and right here and right now. Hedge And Mo existed before 'mindfulness', you know.

Due in no small part to its lack of gaudy hallucinogenic puppets, Play Away isn't quite the first show that you'd think of when attempting to break through to a pop-cultural elevated dimensional plane of seventies pre-school television esoterica through the sheer will of force of remembering old children's programmes alone. Yet just one track into Music From BBC Children's Programmes, we're already forcing open that Barnaby-shaped breach in hyppereality like a rubbish Torchwood villain. And it's a neat coincidence that Torchwood should get a mention right there, as the very next track opens with an all-too-familiar electronic sting...

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Top Of The Box, The Complete Guide To BBC Records And Tapes Singles, is available as a paperback here or from the Kindle Store here; a sequel covering the albums is coming soon!

Listen With TV 'Girl' (Test Card)

Between 1969 and 1973, BBC Records And Tapes released a couple of dozen LPs on their short-lived 'Roundabout' imprint. Specifically aimed towards younger listeners, and presumably named in honour of a certain animated show that would have been very much on their radar at the time, the Roundabout series of albums started out strange and got even stranger, with a short and unwarranted outburst of sensibility in the middle. Here, then, is a guide to what you might expect to find if you chance upon one of these decidedly odd records lurking at the back of the 'Soundtracks' section in one of the larger charity shops...


RBT1 Fun At The Zoo

Leading naturalist Eric Simms invites us along on an All Back To Mine-style rifle through his personal collection of sound captures from zoos in That London. All immaculately recorded and sounding nice and nice and punchy in that mono field recording kind of a way, but it's debatable how much 'fun' this actually is for the young listeners, let alone the poor old elephants and tigers. You had to be there, I guess. Paul Simon's views on the album are not on record.


RBT2 Come To A Party

Perhaps indicating that they weren't quite ready to fork out for any actual actors or presenters to do the roundabouting duties just yet, BBC Radio producer Gordon Snell takes the frightfully well-spoken lead for a series of party games and songs, including quick Radiophonic Workshop-assisted rounds of Musical Bumps, Guess The Noise, O'Grady Says..., Polly Put The Kettle On, Oranges and Lemons, and, erm, 'Islands, Balloon and Parcel'. No, us neither. He also gets to read out one of his self-penned nonsense stories, 'How The Plonks Got Their Hair'. It's even weirder than you're thinking.


RBT3 Listen With Mother

Only three whole releases in, they've finally opted to put one out based on an actual recognisable children's programme, with the cast of long-running stories, songs and percussion radio hoedown Listen With Mother ushered into a recording booth to re-interpret some of their greatest hits for the listening masses. So basically the tambourine-thumped expected likes of Ring A Ring O' Roses, Little Bo Peep, This Is The Way The Ladies Ride and The Grand Old Duke Of York, alongside such slightly more esoteric fare as A Fishing Rod For Carlos, A Pig With A Wig, From The Cabbage Patch To Australia and, erm, Gay Go Up And Gay Go Down. Moving hastily on...


RBT4 Animal Magic

Still persisting with that off-putting generic front cover branding, but at least they've wheeled out a potentially interest-attracting big name this time around, in the form of veteran anthropomorphist and Public Enemy Number Fifty Three Million Johnny Morris, indulging in much the same sort of skidding-penguin-saying-"look-out-below-fellars!" antics as on the televisual version of Animal Magic, only this time without the televisuals. And what do you know, it works pretty much just as well. Plus, thankfully, he doesn't start warbling on about Gemini The Sealion here either.


RBT5 Jackanory

The BBC's kaleidoscope-fronted storytelling slot makes a hazardous book-TV-vinyl triple-jump with a quartet of readings of traditional folk tales - one each from England, Ireland, Scotland and Wales - culled from the show itself, complete with that never-explained 'hallucinogenic tree' iconography on the back cover. One-woman vaudeville act and pre-war TV mainstay Maureen Potter, Dempsey And Makepeace-botherer Ray Smith, Jackanory Week One helmsman Lee Montague, and Magnus Magnusson - with nary a 'started so I'll finish' gag in sight - do the royalty-free reading out honours. Distinctly short on grooves.


RBT6 Party Time

Gordon Snell's back, and this time he's armed with tongue-twisters, games of I-Spy and, well, more or less exactly the same as before, basically. The only real difference being that the generic cover art has undergone a less-than-subtle overhaul that might lead more suspicious minds to question exactly what refreshments were on offer at said party. Tizer, Caramac and blackcurrant jelly, obviously.


RBT7 The Wizard Of Oz

The optical cause for concern may well continue, but here for the first time ever the cover-mounted roundabout gets ditched in favour of some of the Hilary-Hayton-meets-Jelly-Tots interpretations of the lead characters from Jackanory's celebrated 1970 reading of Frank L. Baum's film-inspiring fantasy novel, as narrated (and indeed re-narrated for this release) by Bernard Cribbins with bits and pieces of hamfisted sound effects and loungey keyboard music. Nobody has tried syncing this up with The Dark Side Of The Moon as far as anyone knows.


RBT8 Magic Roundabout

Eric Thompson, the theme music, and straight-ahead no-nonsense re-recordings of ten original nonsense-crammed stories complete with obscure characters, incessantly-volumed boings, and Dylan and Brian apparently trying to play Rainy Day Women #12 And 35. Do you need any more qualification? Oh you do? Right, well, maybe somebody's been going on about The Magic Roundabout quite a bit recently...


RBT9 Listen With Mother No.2

The cover art experiments continue and everything's gone a bit E Arth Welcome, suggesting that we're about to be treated to a downbeat spoken word version of There's A Hole In My Bucket over a looped bit of Etienne de Crecy. Sadly, though, it's just a bunch of typical Listen With Mother stories with names like Mrs. Moppingdust And The Lettuce Thief and The Six Thin Brothers, though you do have to wonder if Thom Yorke was listening in for The Unhappy Computer.


RBT10 Play School

As the back cover photos which make the presenters look like they've just spilled out of a 'psychedelic' nightclub in a late sixties British spy thriller suggest, you'll find a far more far-out calibre of stories on here, including bleepy retro sci-fi tone poem The Moon Rocket, freestyle-inviting break-heavy animals-go-prog jolliness Fearless Fred's Amazing Animal Band, and the Radiophonic Workshop-assisted tale of everyday existentialism amongst the Splodges. Sampled by more than one dance artist, despite being a spoken word record. Stitch that, Gordon Snell!

It seems that there never was an RBT11, so instead it's straight on to... 


RBT12 The Adventures Of Sir Prancelot 

John Ryan's oft-forgotten post-Mary, Mungo And Midge middle ages tomfoolery steps into stereo for this epic-length crusade to the Holy Land, which would make this one of the highlights of the catalogue if it wasn't for one major drawback - while the sleeve makes a big deal of the inclusion of the bonkers electric sitar-led Jester-mimed what's-that-got-to-do-with-medieval theme music, it's actually only in heavily edited form and in one speaker. Tell those moogs funks breaks merchants on eBay where they can moog funk break it.


RBT13 Camberwick Green

A straight reissue of 1966's Welcome To Camberwick Green, giving listeners another chance to enjoy Peter Hazel and Windy Miller wandering aimlessly about in a flimsy pretext to cram in crisp clean mono versions of pretty much all of the songs from the show, some of them in vocal AND instrumental versions to boot. It's OK, you can come back now. 'The Clown' isn't on the cover.


RBT14 Music Time

In its original black and white 'Pie Chart'-heralded incarnation, Music Time was a very different show, and leaned very much towards the the Corn Riggs Are Bonnie end of the musical scale. Here letter-e-deficient duo Mari Griffith and Ian Humpris take us through some stark acoustic renditions of folk songs from around the world, including Deaf Woman's Courtship, Goodbye Old Paint, O Waly Waly and the ever so slightly dubious Man In The Wood. Cadet Rousselle was not available for comment. Other than to confirm that he has houses three.


RBT15 Bedtime Stories

Johnny Morris rattles through a selection of self-penned yawn-friendly yarns, apparently derived from 'The Post Office Dial-A-Bedtime-Story Service', and introducting us to the likes of Snapper The Crocodile, Snowdrop The Polar Bear, Tubthump The Gorilla (who presumably gets knocked down, but he gets up again), and... well, you get the picture. He doesn't tell one about that lamp, though.


RBT16 Mary, Mungo And Midge

TV's premier Girl/Dog/Mouse ensemble make it to vinyl with a handful of 'your favourite stories from BBCTV' (which doesn't include the one about the clock so that's false advertising for starters), which might lose something with the absence of the minimalist cardboard cutout animation but at least you get lovely medium-fi versions of the opening narration and closing music. There's also reputedly a 'break' hidden away on there somewhere, but even Spindarella hasn't been able to locate it.


RBT17 Bang On A Drum - Songs From Play School And Play Away

Oh yes, this is everything that cover promises. And so much more. Ridiculous Pickettywitch-meets-Mike-Westbrook Pop/Acid Folk/Brit-Jazz hybrid musical mismatch very much to the fore as various frustrated singer-songwriters who'd been reduced to presenting Play School to make ends meet get the opportunity to rework some of their back catalogue flops for younger listeners, going absolutely musically overboard on the way. Rammed from start to finish with hidden delights like Early In The Morning, Sunbeams Play, The Israeli Boat Song, I Like Peace I Like Quiet, and of course the much-sampled Bang On A Drum itself. Notice also how Hamble appears to just be attacking the air with her fists. Just adds to the mounting evidence, frankly.


RBT18 Adventures Of Parsley

Ten retold tales from the post-The Herbs excursion into free-form scattershot five-minute surrealism, with Parsley and Dill (who - controversially - 'narrates' a handful of them) joined by a procession of Guest Herbs and that Farfisa-blinking-in-and-out-of-dimensional-plane theme music in all of its bass speaker-blowing glory. Wonder if that geezer who was always looking for 'THE HERBS LP' in the Record Collector 'Wanted' listings ever found a copy?


RBT19 Play Away

A pretty good attempt at doing a full edition of Play Away in sound only, meaning that there's sketches, gags, poems and free-form parlour games in between all of the music. Famed combination of Blaxploitation funk and Dawkins-esque rationalism Superstition is the obvious standout, though the likes of The Party Is About To Begin, Words Words Words, Umbababarumba and an energetic rattle through If I Had A Hammer are also ever so slightly good, and then on the non-musical side there's the word-walloping playlet Captain Kipper's Clipper. Note also the use of Toni Arthur's arse as a selling point.

As there was no RBT20, let's give thanks to The Lord for...


RBT21 Songs Of Praise For Young Folk

They're all we need to lift our lift our lift our lift our hearts. BBC Records And Tapes' early output was full of these Pete Seeger-inspired 'making worship fun' efforts performed in cahoots with then-struggling now-collectable Acid Folkies - previous offerings had involved the likes of Heather Jones, Dana Stirk and The Crown Folk - and this collaboration between a load of caterwauling kids and the label's in-house psych-heads Trane was no exception, treating listeners to renditions of such oddly-titled God-botherings as There Is A God, O Ru-Ru-Ru, Fisherman Peter and, erm, Love Came A-Tricklin' Down. But while it may be talked about in hushed tones by pillocks with wonky hats nowadays, was it a turntable favourite with youngsters back then? More than likely not.


RBT101 Bobby Lamb And The Keymen

What happened to RBT's 22 to 100 is something we may never know, and sadly listeners would be denied the chance to hear albums based on On The Farm and Mandog, as we leap straight on to... um... Radio 2 favourites Bobby Lamb and his Hammond-hammering wah wah-peddling backing ensemble taking a psych-lounge stroll through a handful of recent top pop disc hits. From a modern day Exotica fan's point of view there's no arguing with the escalating mayhem of their take on The Fool On The Hill, or the slow-burning funk of Harlem Nocturne and Cinnamon And Cloves, and it's rounds of applause all round when Paddy Kingsland of the BBC Radiophonic Workshop shows up to splatter some elastic Moog all over Aquarius, but you really do have to feel for any child who might have been inadvertently bought this when they were hoping for a selection of songs from Hope And Keen's Crazy Bus or something.


RBT102 The Many Voices Of Peter Ustinov

Explorer! Fitness Instructor! Croupier! Lord Mayor's Croupier! It seems we're straying a bit from the original Roundabout brief here, as rather than showing off his best Frank Spencer, TV's That Bloke Where You Were Never Quite Sure Exactly What He Did spends an entire two sides of vinyl deep in 'After Supper Conversation' with those teen sensations all the kids were going crazy for, Cliff Michelmore, Kenneth Allsop and Derek Hart. The latter clearly having left The Bishop Of Woolwich and a Nude Man at home on this occasion.


RBT103 Girl On the Test Card 

Pete Winslow and his not-particularly-onomatopaeic 'King Size Brass' tootle their way through a selection of commercially-available renditions of the non-commercially-available instrumentals regularly heard behind BBC Test Card F; the sleeve notes suggest that this was due to overwhelming viewer interest, though it's more than possible that TV's Scariest Bastards simply marched on BBC Records And Tapes and demanded the release themselves. To be honest, from Take Your Time to Menorcan Mardi Gras, it's all rather jolly, perky and ultimately 'beat'-free fare - even the misleadingly promisingly-titled Six Two Five 405 - but hidden away right at the end you'll find the nigh-on seven minute intergalactic groove of Space Chariots. How come it suddenly gets so interesting? You are not entitled to ask.


RBT104 S'Wonderful

You must remember that huge seventies craze for big band swing, when all the kids downed spacehoppers in favour of dusty old wax cylinders of The Edison Concert Band? No? Well it clearly happened, as here's BBC Records And Tapes' attempt to cash in on the phenomenon with a handful of lively toe-tappers cobbled together from other previous non-Roundabout releases and a distinctly un-childfriendly cover. Either that, or 'Girl' and 'Clown' really did manage to get their feet under the musical table - indeed, as if to underline this, there's a track from Girl On The Test Card included here - and this change of direction was taken merely in the desperate hope of keeping them happy. In which case we would like to categorically state that this is all jolly good, and well done everyone involved, and now please move on as there is nothing more to see here.


RBT106 Jumping To Fame - The Story Of Showjumping Today

At least some semblance of an acknowledgement of what young people like here - well, a certain percentage of them won't shut up about wanting to own a horse - with a cut-down version of a Radio 4 series featuring Jeanine McMullen chatting to equestrians great and small about their Square Oxer shenanigans. It also clearly jumped RBT105 too, as there's no record of that ever having been released.


RBT 107 With Brass And Strings 

Another collection of stuff culled from other extant Big Band-friendly releases, including renditions of the themes from those top children's favourites Softly Softly, Owen M.D., Van Der Valk and the Shipping Forecast (and another tip of the blue triangular hat to TV 'Clown' and 'Girl'). And with that, the Roundabout experiment was quietly retired. Or, if you will, stopped rotating. Sorry.

Top Of The Box, the story behind every single released by BBC Records And Tapes (including more from 'Girl' and 'Clown', but don't let that scare you away), is available here.