There's So Much More In TV Times Part 7: A Fifth Beatle? No, It's Tivvy

If there was one thing that TV Times liked to promote even more than the current hot stars of ITV, it was TV Times itself. A bit like one of those annoying people that keeps on plugging their own book full of features about old ITV shows done in pastiche TV Times page layouts, they never wasted a single opportunity to put themselves front and centre, whether it was via a feature, a competition, a promotion, an interview, or Bruce Forsyth in a comedy oversized chef's hat making something that spelt out the name of the magazine out of 'leftovers'.

Most of the time, those bold red letters were seen as branding enough in themselves. Sometimes, however, they felt the need to try and create a TV Times 'mascot'. And to keep on pushing and pushing and pushing them, in the face of overwhelming public indifference. Here are just a few of their spectacularly unsuccessful yet spectacularly sustained attempts at creating a loveable cuddly public face of knowing what day and time No Hiding Place was on...

Bizarrely kitted out in a manner that suggested he was 'flashing' passers-by with Echo Four Two transmission dates, cylindrical annoyance 'The TV Times Man' was an early attempt at encouraging brand identification, popping up between adverts to remind you that a handy magazine was available to tell you when the programme you were already watching was on. Needless to say, this was way too involved a concept for the average Criss Cross Quiz afficionado to grasp, and so TV Times opted instead to concentrate on dazzling impressionable younger viewers with zany character fun.

He isn't very big. He gets into some awful scrapes at times. He'll be on your television screens very soon. And he bears an uncanny resemblance to Rage Against The Machine frontman Zack De La Rocha. Meet Tivvy, the loveable novelty gonk-derived TV Times mascot, introduced to readers and indeed viewers here with a frankly preposterous neo-Geppetto account of his purported origins. Tivvy was the star of his own unbilled 'Extra TV' animated interstitials, but his primary deployment was within the pages of his home magazine. And didn't we know it.

Tivvy began his ascent to global indifference in a calculatedly understated manner, limiting his appearances to comic strips based around laboured and overtold postmodern gags, accompanied by incessant cameos within the TV Times 'Junior' pages. This included a 'Make A Tivvy' competition, where the prizes seem to have been awarded to contestants who elected to make A Frank The Postman Playing Guitar and A Tharil From Doctor Who And The Warriors' Gate instead. Notice, however, that at no point is there any indication that anyone actually liked him. But that was not going to stop the Tivvy bandwagon from rolling relentlessly on...

Determined to perpetuate the illusion that Tivvy was more popular and well-liked than he actually was, the editors took to shoving him in front of the big ITV stars wherever possible. Above you can see him being jabbed with Tickling Sticks by Ken Dodd and a somewhat less than enthusiastic-looking 'Diddy' David Hamilton, ostensibly to promote Doddy's Music Box, a short-lived point-evading rival to Top Of The Pops which, as you can find out here, was scheduled directly against Doctor Who for a while; we can only hope that the inter-song gags on offer were better than Doddy's inevitable witticism about looking a bit like Tivvy. The hazily-defined 'Tivvy Club' page regularly roped in small-screen celebs for a spot of tenuous cross-promotion, including this photograph of him posing with a suitably disdainful-looking Scott Tracy and Lady Penelope beneath a self-evidently bollocks headline about how he was 'nearly' 'go'. And finally, it's time for the ultimate in early sixties celebrity endorsements, as Tivvy takes to the stage to join John, Paul, George and Ringo for a quick rendition of Bombtrack.

Needless to say, it wasn't long before you could take your pick from a slew of Tivvy-inspired merchandise that nobody either wanted or needed. Replica Tivvys in, erm, 'fur and leather', and a worrying variety of sizes. A Christmas Special packed with page upon page of stiltedly-delivered illustrated zingers. And finally some genuine bona fide 9 Carat Tivvy Bling, taking its unlikely place alongside the Rovers Return crest from Coronation Street and, erm, 'Box 13' from Take Your Pick. The Underwater Goat With Snorkel And Flippers charm had unfortunately already sold out.

The inevitable then followed, and 'Tivvy' was ushered into a recording studio to commit his very own tepid 'break'-free marching tune to disc. Backed by 'The Clubmates', a bunch of ardent Tivvy cheerleaders who conveniently all happened to come from Hurst Primary School in Twyford, the resultant single featured both the dreary Tivvy's Tune and Tivvy's World Of Colour, which outlined how nice it was to live in in so-called 'Tivvyland' where everything was bright and vibrantly shaded, which must have felt like a slap in the face to all those viewers who were used to seeing him in black and white. His gameplan for this single was, apparently, to get into the Top Twenty, 'win' a 'golden disc', and have lots of girls scream at him while topping the bill at The Palladium. Perhaps if they'd employed the services of someone with more knowledge of what pop music actually involved, this may have stood more chance of occurring. Possibly.

Eventually, the backlash came. Viewers sent letters to TV Times in their single figures, pouring scorn on the over-exposed magazine-plugging soft furnishing, and the 'nut-cases' who liked him. This prompted one such 'nut-case' to write in and say that it was wrong to attack Tivvy because they had a toy of him or something, although there is precious little evidence to support the argument about needing a 'sense of humour' to appreciate him. Meanwhile, you do have to feel for the University Challenge team who wrote a plaintive 'where were the scouts?'-style missive to bemoan the loss of their lucky stuffed mascot, only to find themselves joined against their will by a massive life-size Tivvy. This may have been the day that Bamber Gascoine finally ran out of chummy puns and snapped.

Eventually, TV Times threw in the novelty tie-in official Tivvy towel, and were so keen to distance themselves from his dreary antics that they allowed precious advertising space to be given over to BBC2's inaugural mascot, Hullaballo and/or Custard. Of course, what the kids really wanted back in the sixties was Beatles, Beatles and more Beatles. And if you join us for the next part, that's exactly what they'll get. And more.

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.

From The Edge Of Mystery

Back when I first started using the Internet, one of the first websites I discovered was www.aceofwands.net, Simon Coward's now sadly defunct site devoted to ITV's early seventies children's drama series Ace Of Wands. If you've never seen Ace Of Wands, it is probably best described as a deeply stylised post-psychedelic pre-Glam action series about a stage magician who solves unusual - and frequently apparently supernatural - crimes in his spare time. Massive in its day, and then completely forgotten about, it had started to be rediscovered more or less by word of mouth but there'll be more about that later. Actually I found the website so long ago that at that point it was still hosted on Simon's Freeserve pages, which in itself amusingly now seems more archaic than any television show where the lead character goes about in a snakeskin jacket and Jim Morrison hair.

I'd been obsessed with Ace Of Wands - 'obsessed' is a bit of an understatement to be honest - ever since catching an episode by chance at an archive TV event. Even more than the actual show itself, it was the animated psychedelic opening titles with their self-drawing pentagrams and mystic hand-based imagery, and the accompanying progtastic yet naggingly catchy theme song with bafflingly indecipherable lyrics, that really caught my attention. Over the next couple of years, I would put more time and energy than is probably considered healthy into finding out whatever I could about Ace Of Wands, which in those days wasn't as easy as you might think. Searching for features and interviews in old issues of TV Times and Look-In was challenging and time-consuming enough, but it was tracking down that elusive theme single - more properly known as Tarot by Andrew Bown, with incidental music track Lulli Rides Again on the b-side - that really took dedication. I spent so long flicking through boxes in charity shops in the hope of spotting a casually discarded copy that the catalogue number is indelibly burned into my memory; Parlophone R5856. So much so in fact that I nearly referenced it in a wedding speech once, but that's another story.

As it transpired, there were quite a few other Ace Of Wands enthusiasts out there. The series was starting to get a good deal of coverage in the more esoteric archive TV fanzines, notably Andrew Pixley's early venture Time Screen, and increasingly in glossy genre magazines, which invariably referred to it as having 'returned for a stylish new season' featuring 'Tarot's sometimes sinister foes'. It was courtesy of said increasing coverage that I learned the sad fact that the first two series of the show - which, I was reliably informed, was when it was best - had long since been wiped; all that was left was Series Three, not all of it even in broadcast quality, and a handful of almost unintelligibly poor quality audio recordings of a couple of second series episodes made by holding a tape recorder up to a television speaker. Amusingly, I'd made my own equally poor audio recording of a third series episode in more or less exactly the same way during another archive TV event, back when the possibility of actually owning any of Ace Of Wands on video seemed so remote as to be laughable.

Needless to say, there was tremendous excitement when clips turned up on Telly Addicts and TV Weekly, and later on the sell-through video compilation The Best Children's TV Of The Decade - The Seventies. There were a handful of millionth generation VHS bootleg copies floating around, if you knew where to look for them, but otherwise that really did seem like the best that we were likely to get. So that's why Simon's website, packed with what were entirely 'new' facts, cuttings, trivia and images, seemed so thrilling and felt like everything I'd hoped for from this new fangled World Wide Web that they had now. One of the most intriguing of these 'new' facts was the suggestion of several correspondents that the first two series had used an entirely different set of opening title graphics, now entirely lost to history and with only literally sketchy artistic impressions to go on.

Or at least that's what we all thought until the DVD came out. While sadly nothing had been found from either of the missing series, the producers did manage to turn up a fair few of the actual scripts as extras, and a couple of them were marked with an image showing Tarot's face in stark photographic profile and the series title in an unfamiliar font. This matched the hazy descriptions of the lost opening titles almost exactly, and was the cause of much low-key excitement on various archive TV forums. Eventually it was confirmed as the genuine article by someone with a long memory, and one bright spark went one better and cobbled together this pretty good approximation of what viewers had presumably seen before Tarot, Sam and Lulli took on deranged chessmasters, delinquency-promoting ventriloquist dummies, and whatever in the name of sanity Senor Zandar and Fat Boy actually were. So, we're as close as we're currently likely to get to actually seeing the lost opening titles?

Well, this is where it gets interesting. In 2008, Castle Music released Real Life Permanent Dreams, a four-disc box set collecting what the subtitle described as 'A Cornucopia Of British Psychedelia 1965-70'. For the benefit of those who are familiar with all of the above words but not necessarily in that order, this basically means ninety nine tracks' worth of overlooked and ignored pop records from the days of paisley shirts and trying to be far-out on black and white TV; the lightweights, the part-timers, the stars-in-waiting, the fading beat boom-era stars who covered The Move in desperation and what have you. If you still need a couple of reference points to make any sense of that, essentially you get the likes of The Kinks and Marmalade messing around with sitars and mellotrons alongside more well-psychedelically-versed cult favourites like The Smoke and Winston's Fumbs, Screaming Lord Sutch and The Tornados making ill-advised yet accidentally fantastic attempts to jump on the bandwagon, Marc Bolan and Status Quo trying to figure out exactly what their hit sound should be, and The Sun Dragon actually appearing somewhere they can be heard and listened to rather than fired directly into the nearest bin. It's every bit as interesting and listenable a collection as that might sound (well, apart from The Sun Dragon), and many of the more familiar tracks are presented as alternate takes or BBC session recordings, meaning that there's something 'new' in there for everyone.

Tarot is represented by what the sleevenotes describe as a previously unreleased alternate take, which given that it features more prominent overdriven bass guitar, different sound effects and harmonies, a slightly different lead vocal and an altogether more fluid feel to the performance, is probably a fair description. Whether it had never been heard in public before, though, is another question. They are way too muffled and crumbly to say for certain, but it really does sound as though this is the version being used, presumably in conjunction with the original title graphics, on the surviving off-air audios of Series Two. It was of course fairly standard practice around then for television theme tunes to be recorded in two different versions - a more dynamic and punchier one for on-screen, and a more conventionally structured 'pop' take for single release. It would also be entirely feasible that the new production team taking over for Series Three and putting together new titles either preferred the single version, or simply didn't realise that it was any different. This is all just conjecture though... unless anyone reading knows any different? [Update! Simon himself has been in touch to say that, after consulting better quality copies, he can confirm that the Series Two audios almost certainly use the single version of Tarot]

And it doesn't end there either. Some sources, including esteemed seventies-rememberer Jon Peake, have indicated that the first series of Ace Of Wands may have had completely different opening titles again, possibly featuring stills of Tarot performing his stage act. To be honest, it's difficult even to speculate one way or the other about this. It's entirely possible, but it's also equally plausible that it may have just been a special one-off set of opening titles to introduce the first episode - not unknown for Thames Television productions, including Ace Of Wands' direct successor The Tomorrow People - or even just an illustrative sequence in an individual episode. It's been mentioned too many times for the answer to be 'none of the above', though.

Whether any of the lost episodes of Ace Of Wands are sitting gathering dust on some archive shelf somewhere is anyone's guess, frankly. In terms of knowing what might have happened in them, we're now a lot further forward than we were even when Simon's website was at its most active, but those lost opening titles - indeed, possibly even opening titles plural - remain as difficult to pin down as ever. We're really just putting one and one and one together and making four here, and if you actually got that joke, then you'll have some idea of how difficult it's proving to come up with a halfway decent ending for this article. So if you can shed any more light on what might or might not have been seen or heard at the start of those lost episodes, please do get in touch. Actually, I should have called this Now You See It, Now You Don't, shouldn't I?

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You can find more detective work about long-wiped television in Not On Your Telly, available in paperback here or from the Kindle Store here.