Ghosts, Monsters And Legends (And Tennis Prodigies)

One of the big pre-Christmas TV treats of years gone by were the vaguely seasonal children's drama serials that the BBC would put out during those Advent Calendar-accompanied weeks, with the last episode usually going out as close to Christmas eve as schedually possible. Heavy on the child actors, usually adapted from a novel that quickly acquired a cash-in friendly BBC books makeover, invariably CSO-saturated and generally enhanced by the mercifully unique musical stylings of Roger Limb, they were very much of their time but are fondly remembered by those who watched them through a haze of waiting for school to break up and throwing dislodged Christmas tree decorations at your siblings. Here's what you would have been watching instead of Torchwood repeats in days gone by...


1976: "Some Indian Things..."

The first such example came along in the form of an adaptation of E. Nesbit's tale of Edwardian youngsters having spiffing bird-and-rug-instigated adventures in time and space (well, bits of the British Empire) The Phoenix And The Carpet, famously starring future Rateometer-toting Doctor Who uberfan turned uberspinoffproducer Gary Russell alongside a jerkily Yafflesque Clash Of The Titans-predicting puppet Phoenix with a very obvious join in its neck. There's not much in it to do with Christmas per se, but in the genteel setting, mundane cliffhangers, disjointed psuedo-classical theme tune ending on disconcerting 'melting' tones and the heaps of shakily realised CSO sequences, you can see the template for the next decade and beyond arrive entirely fully formed. Also on this year, and adhering to much the same production style and indeed production values, was a feature-length one-off rendition of Roald Dahl's James And The Giant Peach, noted for its decidedly unsubtle blend of human-sized insect costumes, CSO-derived 'peach interior' sets, balloon-derived 'peach exterior' sets, and soundtrack of hammy panto-esque song and dance numbers.


1977: "Leave It!"

Definitely the odd one out on this list, King Cinder dispensed with the tendency towards polite Edwardiana in favour of a speedway-riding Peter Duncan taking on local protection racketeers in a hail of car chases and 'villain's drinkers'. Stunts abounded and shouting reverberated in a serial that seemed closer to Quadrophenia than the usual Blytonesque twitterings, and those in search of more festive fare, not to mention less sub-Sweeney soundtracks, were effectively left with the televisual equivalent of a sack of ashes - or, if you will, cinders - this year. Doubtless inspired a wave of dubious bicycle antics come Christmas Day, though.


1978 : "Wheeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee!"

As if to make up for the previous year's paucity, this time there were two textbook serials running pretty much concurrently. The Moon Stallion starred a pre-Nyssa Sarah Sutton in a beautifully rendered but virtually impenetrable tale of something to do with a blind girl, the XTC-friendly chalk horse of Uffington, and a real horse locked in a battle of wits with some bloke who blames it for his family's misfortune. Erm, somehow. Added to this there's something about an ancient Pagan deity issuing a warning about Skylab being a tool of the forces of evil. Much raved over by some but remembered with bewildered puzzlement by so many others. Meanwhile, also knocking about the schedules was a word that even today still causes a shudder - Pinocchio. There's little to say about this darkly-hued nightmarish art deco formally-theme-tuned puppet-meets-real-actors reimagining with added overlong shrieky bits par excellence other than that we've yet to meet anyone who carried on watching it past the still-terrifying Land Of Toys sequence.

1979: "It Must Be... Magic!"

Time for a spot of shark-jumping that was even less impressively rendered than Pinocchio's dalliance with a cardboard whale the previous year (itself repeated in omnibus form this year, presumably to a viewing figure of zero), with the Children's BBC bigwigs deciding that as people had liked The Phoenix And The Carpet, they'd probably like The Enchanted Castle too. Fat chance. The same basic lineup of posh children from The Past are put through similar paces, only without a gimmicky puppet to guide them and with the added turnoff of an obvious moral at the end of each wish-fulfilment adventure. The only bits that anyone remembers are some statues coming rather cumbersomely to life, and the celebrated 'Ugly-Wuglies', little more than scary cardboard faces attached to the end of brooms and no more sinister than the average Halloween-themed Blue Peter make.


1980: "Pa-P-Parrrrrrr!"

LT Meade's A Little Silver Trumpet would probably have done nothing bar gather cloth-bound dust on the shelves of second hand bookshops were it not for a viewer who, having enjoyed (and presumably understood) The Moon Stallion, wrote in to suggest that this forgotten children's novel was ideal source material for a run-up-to-Christmas adaptation. No trace in this straightforward Social-Status-Swap melodrama of the huge splurges of olde-worlde-psychedelic fantasy that had dominated other recent offerings, and the discovery of a fifty pound note somewhat implausibly stitched inside a dress was about as dramatic as it got, but they still won tons of awards and got a 'lost' book spruced up and reissued into the bargain, so they must have been doing something right. Also on offer over this Christmas was The Bells Of Astercote, a plague-haunting superstition-debunking yarn that was the first entry in the Children's Department's sadly short-lived attempt at emulating A Ghost Story For Christmas.


1981: "You Are A Dirty, Messy, Stupid, Lying Clown!"

Despensing with the traditional vague sense of olde worlde Winter in favour of an altogether different form of chilliness, Adric-riffing Cold War thriller Codename: Icarus concerned itself with a shadowy British military installation covertly recruiting child genii to assist in the development of futuristic weapons for the purposes of Commie-obliteration. With its Nazi allegories, impressive military action sequences and ambitious wrestling with the concept of scientific progress versus the nature of good and evil, this was high-reaching stuff, but writer Richard Cooper was really only warming up for the infinitely more bonkers Knights Of God a couple of years later. If all this Red Menace stuff wasn't quite your 'bag', there was always the first and best Grange Hill Christmas Special, in which Tucker and Doyle united to fight a bigger foe (and stop him from stealing the school's, erm, 'disco equipment'), penned by Professor Phil via some suggestions made by a Blue Peter competition entrant.


1982: "I'm Just As Good As You, 'Beetle'!"

Back to reality for the sport-centric culture clash of Break Point, effectively Billy Elliot two decades ahead of its time, only with fairly realistic tennis taking the place of fairly unrealistic ballet dancing (and indeed real Eighties fashions taking the place of "ha ha, that's how people used to dress back then!" Eighties fashions). Famously, the cast were selected on the basis of playing a few sets against the producer rather than reading out any of the script, and in a real case of life mirroring art, Jane 'Beetle' Pearson went on to become a real life tennis champ. All very well and good for its undoubted feelgood factor, but those in search of the more usual fare had to content themselves with feature length Radiophonic Workshop-submerged spectral possession chiller Ghost In The Water.


1983: "Walk On The Drugget, Children!"

For some reason there was no new Festive fare this year, and instead viewers had to content themselves with a repeat of the decade-old evacuees'n'cursed skellington serialisation of Nina Bawden's much-favoured by older sisters novel Carrie's War, which to be fair was pretty much in line with what had been occupying the same slot in more recent times. Unusually, but thankfully, ITV chose this exact moment to step into the breach with the far more satisfying The Witches And The Grinnygog, light-heartedly charting the attempts of a pair of Rod & Todd Flanders-esque brothers to retrieve a mislaid stone gargoyle thing off their local church wall from a landscape gardening-fixated parishioner. And which, thanks to the rights-buying documentation-trashing hijinks of Disney, is now contractually unavailable to anyone anywhere. Yeah, thanks for that, 'Mickey'.


1984: "Have You Got Any Cheese For Me?"

What is there to say about The Box Of Delights that hasn't been said a million times already? From the first glimpse of that creepy title sequence (especially the flash of lightning across Abner Brown's face) to the very last Roger Limb-boosted orchestral swell, and through every last second of Patrick Troughton's performance, the effects may have aged yet it remains as spellblindingly Christmassy as television is ever likely to get. Plus you can laugh at Nick Berry playing a rat. Pretty much the centrepiece of the BBC's then much-trumpeted 'Autumn Season', something that approximately fourteen million million Radio Times covers and Blue Peter features were there to provide handy reminders of, but it would be churlish not to mention the supporting feature par excellence - the thirteen weeks' worth of shakily-acted flight through non-alien occupied wastelands that was The Tripods.


1985: "........................................"

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 an image for 1985 for reasons that will soon become obvious, 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.

This was the year of big BBC cutbacks to fund the imminent launch of daytime television, which spelt bad news for fans of Pop Quiz, Crackerjack, Juliet Bravo, and of the children's schedules containing anything other than Fame!, The Flintstones and 'Friday Film Special' (which itself scarcely ever seemed to contain anything other than endless showings of Ricky Simmonds' third finest hour, Pop Pirates). Oh, and apparently they cancelled some children's programme this year too. Needless to say there was precious little money to hand to mount any kind of ambitious Christmas-leaning serial, especially one maintaining the high standard of the previous year, and the nearest that the audience got was that decidedly odd Grange Hill For Christmas based around some kind of slapstick shenanigans involving Imelda Davies and a donkey. Yet all was not lost, and the new year would herald the return of Children's BBC drama with a vengance, in the form of Kate Bush-themed search for errant 'bins' Running Scared.

1986: "It's Alexander's Flute!"

Quite unlike what was regrettably unfolding in Doctor Who world at the same time, the eighteen month 'hiatus' had clearly done the world of good for the Yuletide yarns, as this year brought arguably the very finest of the lot - The Children Of Green Knowe. On face value the ageing novel-derived tale of a Fifties public schoolboy spending Christmas with an elderly relative in the family's ancestral home, and meeting some of his Charles II-era ancestors along the way, wouldn't appear to have much going for it, but rarely has such a gentle story been so beautifully and atmospherically realised (well, apart from the rather naff 'walking statue' sequence right at the end, but we'll overlook that for now), and with a misleadingly eerie title sequence and theme tune thrown in for good measure. And pity any of your classmates who had the misfortune to closely resemble Alex 'Tolly' Christie. A textbook offering from the real 'Golden Age' of television, and this might be seen as heresy by some, but we're seriously suggesting that this might even be better than The Box Of Delights (welcomely repeated in fifty-minute chunks over this Christmas). Meanwhile, ITV threw in some welcome Sunday-before-Christmas distraction in the form of an hour-long special of James Galway-heralded Liliputian comedy-drama, Return Of The Antelope.

1987: "Solita?" - "Nah Mate, It's Kim Wilde!"

And we could so easily have gone for "...and Young Ladies shouldn't daub themselves with Gro-Bust!". Yes, it's superior sci-fi thriller Aliens In The Family, in which an alien-in-training bumped into a trio of squabbling step-children (See? They were 'aliens' too!) whilst trying to avoid the marauding 'Wirdegens', a Flying Pickets-in-cowls-resembling bunch headed by Granville Saxton from TV's Hardwicke House. Unlike most of the above, this was set squarely in the here and now, and how - practically every five seconds there's a reference to Phillip Schofield, Morten Harket or that Ben Volpeliere-Pierrot character. No Phil Cool drinking Citrus Spring though.


1988: "Oh Aslan, You're Not Dead!"

Blimey, where to start!?? The main draw was obviously The Lion, The Witch And The Wardrobe, the first instalment of the over-acclaimed The Chronicles Of Narnia, which even made the front page of the Radio Times. All very well made and that, but were its 'Five Go Mad On Turkish Delight' stylings and endless wittering about fauns really suitable for audiences that had become more used to the thrills of Kaye Harker, Bond & Solita and 'Green Noah, demon tree, evil fingers, can't catch me!'? Well they'd been catered for too, in the form of oft-forgotten adolescent-angst-meets-ghosts-of-old-seadogs lighthouse-based spookfest The Watch House, and the inevitable repeats of The Children Of Green Knowe, not to mention the seriously unhinged one-off Billy's Christmas Angels, which had something nonsensical to do with Nabil Shaban, Will from The Tripods, a pawn shop-bound guitar, and mid-eighties variety show mainstays The Mint Juleps doing acapella versions of Bruce Springsteen songs. On top of all this, ITV scored a rare pre-Christmas victory with an impressive Saturday afternoon double bill; visually arresting but impenetrably storylined frost-festooned Welsh folk tale The Snow Spider, and the totally off-the-sensibility-scale How To Be Cool, an explicability-defying The Prisoner/A Clockwork Orange-inspired effort about the attempts of 'The Mighty Gobbo' and his Beastie Boys-attired pals to overthrow sinister fashion-controlling 'Cool Board' mastermind Mr Cashman, starring Roger Daltrey, Tricia Penrose, Freddie Jones and a very young Perry Fenwick as a football-obsessed sub-Droog henchman. And, unfortunately, Gary Glitter, which means it'll never be repeated now.

1989: "Howay Mon Winston Mon Yeen Canna Do That!"

Odd that 1988 should have been such a bumper year, but also quite fitting, as within twelve months the faint odour of Caspar Berry was drifting across the horizon. Yes, Byker Grove was here to block-book those vital few weeks in November and December into perpetuity, and things were never quite the same again...

You can find an in-depth history of all of these shows and more in my book Well At Least It's Free - get it in paperback here or as an eBook here.

Derek (And Me)

Ricky Gervais' sitcom Derek is about to begin its second series on Channel 4, and no doubt there will once again be people challenging me over the fact that I'm not watching it and insisting that I cannot possibly know whether I'll like it or not without trying at least three episodes et cetera et cetera.

This was originally going to be a long post detailing my equally long history of loathing for Ricky Gervais and his having-his-cake-and-eating-it-too brand of unconvincingly dressing mean-spirited bigotry up as 'irony' in the name of humour, setting diversity and equality back decades in the process, and how this meant that no, I wouldn't be watching Derek, no matter how many times how many people might try and convince me that it's actually well intentioned and I should give him another chance and so on. Or, if raining, just tell me to pipe down because we've heard it all before and I'm becoming like a broken record and can't I just go back to making jokes about the BBC Schools Clock etc etc.

This was going to take the form of a look back at his early pre-'big time' material, much of which remains suspiciously hidden from view and conspicuously un-sought after by his otherwise obsessive fans, and how despite his protestations that it was all 'in character' and he now wishes he'd performed it under an assumed name like 'Billy Bigot', it's actually virtually identical to what he still peddles now, especially via his Twitter account. In particular, it was going to focus on the original appearance of 'Derek' in his 2001 Edinburgh show Rubbernecker, in which the character was unquestionably a parody, rather than a sympathetic portrayal, of the mentally disabled, leading Channel 4 to handily demand the removal of some uploaded Rubbernecker material from YouTube (which had been there for five years) when last year's Derek pilot was in the offing. Annoyingly, it's still absent, but if you look hard enough on Google, you can find a Rubbernecker promo interview in which he and Stephen Merchant snigger about having to pretend Derek isn't intended to be offensive in order to, quote, 'toe the party line'.

Anyway, it didn't really work, and having to write about a boring man and his boring material got very boring very quickly indeed, but here's what did get finished, some of which you may find a bit eye-opening:

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Believe it or not, when I first saw Ricky Gervais, I thought he was quite good.

No, really. This was 1999, and for some reason I still can't fathom I was an avid viewer of Channel 4's long-running series of pilot tryouts Comedy Lab, starting place of the likes of Trigger Happy TV and That Peter Kay Thing, and non-starting place of the likes of Homie & Away, Pam Ann's Mile High Club, Things To Do In Hoxton When You're Dead and the barely broadcastable Shoreditch Tw*t. Gervais' contribution was Golden Years, a mock fly-on-the-wall documentary about an obsessive David Bowie fan and his attempts to convert his workmates to the cause.

Far from being offensive or provocative or 'challenging' or whatever you want to call it, this was actually a likeable and good-natured bit of fun about someone who simply wanted to spread the joy to people who unfortunately saw him as a bit of a one-note bore; something that I'd wager a fair few readers of this blog can sympathise with. That it was the work of someone whose name I recognised as the 'Music Consultant' from This Life - a job that seemed to involve nothing more strenuous than denoting that Miles liked 'jazz' by buying the most recent Corduroy album and cueing it in track by track throughout the series - only made it all the more impressive. I did see Golden Years again when Channel 4 repeated it recently, and while it didn't seem quite as funny as it once had, it remained fundamentally likeable and well-intentioned.

Unfortunately, my next encounter with Gervais' comedy stylings wasn't nearly so pleasant. This was a couple of months later, when he turned up doing 'roving reporter' inserts for Radio 1's Mary Ann Hobbs-fronted late-night dance music and miscellany hoo-hah The Breezeblock, which involved such witticisms as asking the residents of a retirement home if they knew what fairly unimaginative dirty words meant, coming across as a pale imitation of the vox pop stuff from The Chris Morris Music Show, only lacking both in imagination and in any awareness that the 'joke' in Morris' material was that people will say anything they're asked to if they are offered a chance to get their face on television (or indeed voice on radio), rather than holding them themselves up to ridicule.

Then, shortly after that, he showed up on a programme whose entire raison d'etre was holding innocent people up to ridicule - Channel 4's The 11 O'Clock Show. My loathing for that vile, spiteful and above all lazy dribble of pointlessness and inexplicable launchpad for dozens of undeserved careers is both well known and widely documented, and I don't think I can put it better than I did for TV analysis site Off The Telly back in 2002. Well, I'd probably use better and more coherent English these days, and less quotation marks, and throw in a couple of jokes too, and in any case it's not a patch on Justin Lewis' sadly no longer online 'vessel of rot' rant (though you can hear Justin likening remembering the list of writers on The 11 O'Clock Show to hunting Nazi war criminals in this brilliant chat about the joys of scouring closing credits), but you get the point. I was once startled to see this quoted pretty much in full in a hagiographic Gervais biography in The Works, and even more startled to find that the author felt they 'could only agree' with my assessment of the programme:

"September 1998 saw the launch of The 11 O’Clock Show, a thrice-weekly 'news alternative' that was written and recorded on the day of transmission to ensure maximum topicality. Fronted by Fred Macauley and Brendon Burns, the largely unremarkable and inoffensive test run gave worrying hints of the severe limitations of the format, seemingly struggling to find enough decent material to fill each half-hour edition. When the second series arrived early in 1999, Macauley and Burns were gone, replaced by Iain Lee and Daisy Donovan, and the worst comedy show ever seen on Channel 4 was well underway.

Any pretence of relevance to the week’s news seemingly flew out of the window, replaced by a nasty and sneering brand of humour that took aim at such thoroughly undeserving targets as disability, homosexuality, anorexia and even, in one particularly shameful moment, the death of Cilla Black’s husband – all in one long parade of shameful shock-tactic attention-seeking by writers and performers who were only in it to get their name noticed. Ideas were blatantly 'borrowed' from Chris Morris, Armando Iannucci, Lee and Herring, Victor Lewis-Smith, Candid Camera, Clive James and countless others, seemingly without any understanding of what had driven the original comic invention, and infused with a casual and pointless cruelty that none of the above would ever have employed.

Momentary relief was provided by the spoof interviews by Sacha Baron-Cohen in the guise of Ali G, but even these soon became tiresome and repetitive, concentrating on the idea of getting the audience to laugh at 'uncool' people in suits or those who were passionate about genuine causes. The team were soon joined by Ricky Gervais, who brought with him a routine based on 'offensive' material that was both tedious because the audience were expecting him to say something 'shocking', and unconvincing as Donovan and Lee were forced to momentarily drop their own 'nasty' personas to fit in with the idea of making Gervais look unpleasant and reprehensible. Amazingly, the series actually got worse as it progressed, reaching a nadir when Donovan saw out 1999 with a particularly nasty joke at the expense of Dudley Moore’s brave public admission that he was suffering from an incurable brain disease.

An attempt was made in 2000 to dig The 11 O’Clock Show out of the hole that it so thoroughly deserved to be in - by this time, even the comissioning editor who invented it was complaining that he'd wanted a UK equivalent to The Daily Show but had ended up with 'people who were more interested in talking about masturbation' - roping in Jon Holmes and Sarah Alexander as new presenters and bringing in a new team of writers that were urged to avoid the unpleasant excesses of earlier series. The basic fundamental flaws of the format, however, still proved insurmountable and by the end of 2000 The 11 O’Clock Show was mercifully gone for good"

Gone from television for good, maybe, but not from the CVs of those who made their names on it, something that has frustratingly led to the show coming to be regarded as some kind of mythical vibrant hothouse for burgeoning talent to rank with That Was The Week That Was or Saturday Live. What they all seem less keen on, however, is the idea of anyone actually seeing any of it, with repeats, DVD releases and even clips of their 'groundbreaking' early appearances being suspiciously thin on the ground, and having worked on a TV documentary about the history of satire that was expressly forbidden from using any footage from The 11 O'Clock Show, I can say with some confidence that it does seem that somebody somewhere is intentionally blocking it.

By the time that The 11 O'Clock Show bit the dust, Gervais was already showing up as a regular in Channel 4's various 'list' shows despite not apparently having much to say about any of the subjects - his interminable waffle about the artistic integrity of the performers in Animal Kwackers in particular was widely derided as a waste of everyone's time - and in September they installed him in his own chat show. Meet Ricky Gervais wasn't that bad, as it happens, but it wasn't anything remarkable either, and the tendency now to label it as some sort of 'lost classic' that was 'buried' by Channel 4 is somewhat galling considering it was a heavily-pushed show in a good timeslot - certainly a better one than The 11 O'Clock Show - which just didn't catch on; if fate was conspiring against it, how did Graham Norton's late-night weeknight chat show make such an impressive debut only a matter of weeks later? Incidentally, the first ever guest on Meet Ricky Gervais was Jimmy Savile, and after his death Gervais tweeted about how proud he was to have had him on the show. Interestingly, this is one of the few contentious tweets he hasn't subsequently deleted.

We could at this point start ranting about The Office, Flanimals, Flanimals Of The Deep, Gervais appearing on Jonathan Ross' radio show to plug the fact he'd be appearing on Parkinson, spurious stories on The Six O'Clock News about 'office life' ending with a plug for series two of The Office, Merchant and Gervais complaining about how the BBC 'kept moving The Office around in the schedules' when in fact it had the same slot throughout and even had continuity announcers introducing it with "...it's true to life, and that's why it's so funny" and "remember where you were when you saw it first", the bullshit stories about how the producers of Arrested Development/Family Guy/Borgen/Help I'm A Prisoner In A Toothpaste Factory are 'begging' him to make a guest appearance but he's 'too busy', the whole 'mong-gate' business and how it somehow caused me to end up sending transmission details for R.3 to over nine hundred furious Ricky Gervais fans fuming "you're the mong here, pal"... but that's getting a bit ahead of ourselves there. Instead, what about the project that passed quietly by while series one of The Office was airing - his 2001 Edinburgh Festival show, Rubbernecker?

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Yes, what about it? Well, thanks to the panic-measure history rewriting that preceded the Derek pilot, there's very little evidence online to actually back up any arguments, so it's probably a good job it ended there anyway. But at the end of the day, suffice it to say that it's the work of someone who, despite protests to the contrary by both him and his fans, doesn't seem to have learned anything or have moved on at all between calling striking nurses 'fucking pigs' in front of a cackling audience and encouraging his Twitter followers to post themselves pulling 'mong faces', so no, I won't be giving Derek the benefit of the doubt. Maybe he has changed. Maybe it is positive and sympathetic. But he's done enough damage over the years for people to feel they're quite entitled to either judge it without seeing it or just ignore it, without having to put up with patronising finger-wagging as a consequence.

Now please don't ask me again.

Don't Take A Look At Him Then

Every so often, you'll find a newspaper or magazine feature charting the Mojo-approved Official History Of The Pop VideoTM. With a bit of variance to allow for frowning over the record sales of whoever's proving quite popular at the moment, it normally runs somewhere along these lines: the pop video was invented by The Beatles when they started doing music that was too complicated to perform live, and then invented again by Queen in 1974, and then it took off but also declined with the arrival of MTV. With the exception of one wildcard entry by an 'influential' indie band, the accompanying lists of Best Ever Pop Videos are essentially always more or less the same, although none of the corresponding lists of Worst Ever Pop Videos ever point out that the actual literal worst pop video of all time is November Rain by Guns'n'Roses, a parade of pomposity, pretentiousness and heavy-handed 'symbolism' so mind-numbingly interminable that Slash actually GOES FOR A WALK in the middle of it, and which ends with Axl Rose springing back and forth in what can only be a tribute to that animated rabbit trying to pull a carrot out of the ground in Rainbow.

One thing that they can all agree on, however, is that the eighties was the evolutionary high watermark of the pop video, when everyone blew vast amounts of money on exhiliarating big budget high concept mini-movies that epitomised the perfection of mid-eighties pop except that they also epitomised the imperfection of mid-eighties pop, and that The Smiths reacted against this by refusing to make any pop videos ever apart from all the ones that they actually did. And once they get onto that subject, the same old examples get trotted out again and again and again. There's The Wild Boys, Duran Duran's homage to Channel 4's Ghosts In The Machine, in which a robot head of Lloyd from Byker Grove headbutts a computer or something while Simon Le Bon goes round on a big water wheel. There's Peter Gabriel's Sledgehammer, a song-ruining parade of animated click-ting stamps literalism tailor made for clip show representation of a year that everyone knows should only be signposted by Phil Cool drinking Citrus Spring. There's Reet Petite, the Claymated springboard for an unexpected three-hit Jackie Wilson mini-revival, which causes clip show talking heads to perform an elaborate retronostalgic variation on the Charleston when they chuckle that they found it funny, then frown that they also found it offensively caricatured, then chuckle that they found it funny again, all the while utterly oblivious that it was first made as an interstitial for the BBC arts show Arena. And then there's Thriller, in which Michael Jackson effects a terrifying transformation into Barry Grant from Brookside.

What you will never find in any of these articles, however, is the cold harsh truth that the most hilariously awful videos of the eighties were a combination of attempts by visually unarresting mainstream artists to look 'stylish', and clip-interpolating rock ballad big budget film themes. And the most hilariously awful of all were those that were a literal combination of the two. If you want evidence of this, look no futher than Phil Collins' Against All Odds (Take A Look At Me Now).



Like all big hit movie themes of the eighties, Against All Odds (Take A Look At Me Now) was the credit-propping pop ditty from a film that nobody seems to have seen despite latterday ubiquity in the hallowed everyone-else-in-school-was-allowed-to-stay-up-but-you timeslot. As far as anyone can make out it's got something to do with a love triangle and Jeff Bridges being framed for a crime he didn't commit except he did or whatever it is; frankly, as it was a contemporary of Spies Like Us, nobody should even be in the least bit interested.

As you can imagine, the accompanying video features an endless parade of clips from the overlong popcorn-challenger, most of them seeming to involve little more than people turning their heads slowly sideways. As you can also imagine, these are interspersed with Phil Collins doing some piano-free power ballad miming to camera. What elevates this above the competition, though - and even above Peter Cetera looking askance at some clips from The Karate Kid Part II through sliding doors, which takes some elevating above - is how they introduce the nation's favourite Mel Smith/Eddy Shah/Bob Hoskins-alike into proceedings; the camera zooms in on some sort of Aztec mask featured in the movie, which promptly starts miming his part. No, really.

We then get a dissolve into his face as he stands in front of a luminescent waterfall, which gradually changes colour from red to green to blue, presumably as some sort of love triangle-evoking symbolism, and leaving him looking like Max Headroom as reimagined by whoever designed the wrapper for Terry's Bitz. The mask sporadically recurs but fails to do any more miming - so you could be forgiven for thinking you'd imagined it - Phil slides in and out of frame like a 'comedy' Roland Rat-plugging TV-am ad break card, and a procession of thuds and wallops from the film accompany the inter-verse drum thudding.

But that's not all. For the finally overwrought chorus repetition, Phil changes location to what appears to be the actual literal studio floor from BBC Daytime quiz show Turnabout, which then in turn appears to threaten to turn into the opening titles of The Tripods. All you really need is a cameo from 'Belouis' 'Some' and that'd be the entire eighties right there.

What any of this has to do with any of the film is something of a mystery, and judging from the look of the clips included here, a mystery it can frankly remain. What it does tell us, though, is that if you want a real flavour of an art form, even something as trivial and ephemeral as the pop video, you have to look slightly further afield than the usual accepted facts and figures. You'll find the most ludicrous of stuff in the most unlikely of places, like in bafflingly thrown-together film advertising thinly disguised as chart fodder, and we haven't even started on movie-plugging promo antics by Starship, Chesney Hawkes or 'Dinners' yet.

And anyway, this is the best pop video ever made...