Unlike Saturday Mornings, which saw ever more sophisticated tactics deployed in the hope of gaining the upper hand in the younger viewer ratings war, and quickly degenerated into pretty much the children's TV equivalent of the arms race only with Fangface standing in for Trident or something, Sundays found ITV more or less throwing in the towel. After all, the BBC had already hit on the perfect combination of off-the-shelf transcendental blissed-outness and genial god-bothering with added puppet fun, so it's hardly surprising that their commercial rival, who would have made precisely fuck all pounds and twenty seven pence from the ad breaks in that barely-watched timeslot anyway, opted to just fling on a couple of cheap Sabbath-appropriate schedule fillers instead of trying to mount any sort of an effective challenge. If Saturday Mornings were a battle of biblical proportions, Sunday Mornings were one that they had already lost before they even started.
Of course, moving straight on to all this means that we're skipping over TV-am's various attempts at providing subdued Sunday entertainment for the younger masses, which some would argue is no bad thing. From early flung-together animated shorts and storytelling miscellany Rub-A-Dub-Tub, to the own-answer-writing Are You Awake Yet? and its resident puppet irritant 'Terry', they generally gave the impression of nobody involved really being that bothered and viewers tended to vote with their remotes as a result, though the former does get some begrudging points for employing Ivor Cutler to read out a few stories. Overall, the supposed 'on your way now, it's time for the adults to review the papers' Hello Good Morning And Welcome elbow-asidings of Frost On Sunday and its hilariously excitement-free synth instrumental theme genuinely seemed like the preferable option to many youngsters. But we're getting a bit ahead of ourselves there...
What came after TV-am's offerings, though, tended to be ancient ropily-coloured filmed imports - more often than not Canadian-sourced - that were, in fairness, trying to make fun learning rather than make learning fun. These would generally fall into two categories - either spuriously 'narrative'-driven cinema verite documentary series like Land Of The Lapps, Struggle Beneath The Sea and Indian Legends Of Canada, or fact-flinging animations like Max The 2000-Year-Old Mouse and The Wonderful Stories Of Professor Kitzel.
Made by Canada's brilliantly named Krantz Films in 1972, The Wonderful Stories Of Professor Kitzel was introduced by the brilliantly of-its-time combination of oddly psychedelic-yet-colourless title card splurges and some UK-sourced library music, in this instance Windsor Frolic by Johnny Pearson. In between showing off his latest inevitably malfunctioning invention, such as a machine to insert 'jelly' into sandwiches, the titular eccentric would invariably find himself suitably inspired to nip off in his time machine to see how the Ancient Aztecs or whoever would have approached the problem, the very fact that he had already invented a time machine rendering his desire to invent anything else bafflingly redundant. This led into a dry retelling of some historical event or other over a procession of still pictures; subjects that the Professor covered during the course of his exploits included Charles Darwin, The Statue Of Liberty, Covered Wagons and - at least according to this possibly typo-ridden episode guide - 'Beavis'. Then there would be a bit of comedy business at the end, often involving a 'granpa' who bewilderingly appeared to be younger than him, and another blast of the theme music, and that was it. Extra School sneaked in via the back door, and nobody noticed. Mainly because nobody was actually watching.
Anyway, Sunday Morning is marching on, and while you may have managed to get a covert bit of 'approved' TV watching in, you can't dodge church forever. Because even if you manage to get out of actually physically going, it's still going to find you through the telly...
