There's So Much More In TV Times Part 5: Tea Time Is Butter Time

Commercial Television - it might well not be 'biased' against whoever's decided the BBC is 'biased' against them this week, but it sure never stops trying to flog you junk food. Whether it's some girl in a bath trying to go down on a Flake while a lizard looks on askance for some reason, a swanky sophisticate in a Little Black Dress reclining on a leather sofa to the sound of Rhapsody In Blue in the hope of flogging Suchard Moments, a grand piano full of talking hamburgers proclaiming Ronald McDonald to be 'the bun clown', children who should have their chirpily requested 'Sunny D' thrown into their faces with extreme force, or the sheer bafflement of Pyramint, you can't so much as sit through an episode of Stuff The Week without being coerced into wanting upwards of five fat-and-sugar-heavy 'treats'.

Needless to say, TV Times took to the associated advertising revenue with great enthusiasm. Crisps, sweets, fizzy drinks, biscuits, chocolates and 'adult' beverages took up such a large percentage of the available page space that you half expected Pig to somehow emerge from the listing for Pipkins and scoff the whole magazine in one go. Or indeed that elsewhere in the issue, you'd find Bruce Forsyth in an oversized comedy chef's hat making a meal from sweetshop-skewed 'leftovers'. And here are just some of the delights on the menu...

Years before the not even remotely racist or sexist advert stressing that you can stand it with Bandit (which, crucially, was "as big as jail door"), everyone's favourite trapezoid wafer bar opted for a much simpler telling-it-like-it-is approach, with particular emphasis given to the all-important flavour-enhancing hue of the wrapper. It's certainly putting a smile on the face of that Millicent Martin-a-gram, at any rate. Note also that it was still being made at that point by original manufacturers Macdonalds, before they joined forces with McVitie's and Crawfords to form the gigantic Doctor Who Christmas Special-esque supermarket aisle straddling behemoth United Biscuits.

Quite how 'marvellous' Mars really is when it's making Bob Monkhouse adopt a frenzied expression and go totally off-the-scale alliteration-crazy is open to question. Note also how the tagline seems more like a threat than an enticement.

Huntley & Palmers Ltd, esteemed manufacturers of the Lemon Puff, The Butter Shortie, and the satire-inviting 'Butter Osborne', here risk the wrath of the Advertising Standards Authority, not with any false promises about their wares but with the idea that anyone in their right mind could consider this a 'lovable' clown. Even in a decade when TV was absolutely awash with the fuckers, it still stands out as a particularly evil-looking example of the genre and it's likely that even punters with two appropriate biscuit wrappers to spare politely declined the offer.

Advertisers were quick to capitalise on the newly-minted purchasing power of the 'teenager', though some were quicker than others. Here Corn Flakes make a half-hearted I Have A Horsey Neigh Neigh-level attempt to counter Rice Krispies' phenomenally successful deployment of a blistering Rolling Stones jingle by attempting to convince parents that what their check-shirted daughter really wants while listening to her decade-old record player and swooning over discarded photos of generic 'dreamboats' is to wolf down a load of dry Corn Flakes straight from the packet. They've even included a special song she can sing while doing so, daddy-o! Hang on, what do you mean, 'they were both made by Kellogg's'?

Now then. Here's the ever-exotic Fry's inviting purchasers of the 'Big Fry' range - Crunchie, Picnic, Chocolate Cream and Turkish Delight - to win either an Austin Mini or a 'magnificent' record player, simply by stating the order in which they would play certain records if they were a bona fide Disc Jockey. Given that even the Light Programme would probably have baulked at placing The Beatles and The Rolling Stones alongside Marcello Minerva and, erm, Glenn Miller by the mid-sixties, this must have taken some doing. Note also that the competition rules stress the need to behave like a real life DJ and put together a 'truly balanced family programme'. Moving rapidly on...

Not to be outdone, 'froth'-fixated polar bear 'Cresta' is moving with the format-upgrading times and offering a free cassette recorder on the condition that you can reassemble the lyrics of his signature song into the correct order. And of course purchase at least two bottles of a drink of such water pollution-threatening viscocity that they turned it into a key advertising point. Sorry, did we not mention that?

Yes, you heard. Whether you're settling down for The Generation Game, Parkinson and Match Of The Day, or Credo, Highway and Seal Morning, grab yourself a great big slab of butter and get scoffing. It's the law.

I have no idea what these two have been surprised in the middle of, but I suspect that it's best left that way.

Anyway, let's stop avoiding the elephant in the sweetshop. Surely there was a time before Nestle became enthusiastic sponsors of global evil and the focus of a billion Mark Thomas rants and dystopian rap songs and overall the sort of foodstuff manufacturer Skeletor might approve of, and were content to simply plug their taste-tastic wares in a nice, polite and wholly inoffensive way?

Yeah, good luck with that. Nice to see The Queen asked for her eyes to be blocked out to prevent identification, though.

For no reason other than a bit of a distraction from all that unpleasantness, here's a rare colour photo of Julian Chagrin and 'E.R.I.C', the man and the computer from, erm, TV's A Man And A Dog. Anyway, this is all just the tip of the Toblerone, so join us again next time for a second helping of glutinous sugary muck...

There's So Much More In TV Times Part 4: Honey Misses A Good Natter

Back in the sixties, Radio Times was hardly exactly Spare Rib, but it did at least have some semblance of a sense that the gender balance was changing rapidly and for the better. You were as likely to see a sympathetic feature on a female academic, politician or industrialist - particularly once BBC2 had started up - as you were one of Top Of The Pops' resident dancers The Go-Jos complaining that they couldn't have their miniskirts as mini as they would have liked them. It wasn't always perfect, but it was a start, and you have to start somewhere.

And it definitely, definitely wasn't starting over at TV Times. Very occasionally they might have had to lower themselves to give up valuable column inches to some feminist firebrand who had found herself the focus of World In Action or a mouthy folk singer that those blasted youngsters had demanded appear on Ready Steady Go!, but nine times out of ten it was doubtful that they'd ever even heard of the mere word 'liberation'. Much as they were when doling out 'points' on flagship game shows, women were there to be decorative and to speak as little as possible. After all, we didn't want the readership catching 'opinions' as lord knows what might happen then. They were never quite told to get back in the kitchen - after all, that's where you'd find Brucie in a comedy oversized chef's hat making something out of 'leftovers' - but here are some of the more jaw-dropping examples to disgrace the listings pages back in the decade when Carnaby Street swung like a pendulum do or something...

1965 was the year when The Ipcress File broke significant ground by featuring Michael Caine as a Swinging London secret agent who read for pleasure, took pride in his culinary expertise, and enjoyed a casual and mutually convenient relationship with an independent career woman whom he treated with respect and credited with intelligence. Perhaps alarmed by this, 1965 was also the year when TV Times conducted a survey which concluded that the overwhelming majority of unmarried men would tie the knot as a way of actually getting some laundry done and food cooked, except that in return their wives would probably spend all their money on nothing and prevent them from being able to buy The World's Best Car. And what's more, people were always trying to sneakily fix them up with a smashing gold-digging young lady in a nice frock to boot. Rumours that Cathy McGowan promptly invented the theoretical coding framework for Tinder specifically so she could delete her account cannot be confirmed.

Ann 'Honey' Lantree, the hard-walloping drummer with Have I The Right? hitmakers The Honeycombs, was and is an unsung pioneer and a landmark figure in rock music. Perfectly content to be seen as a musician rather than eye candy, she insisted on taking her turn driving the tour van and swearing at other motorists, snogged the odd male groupie as and when she felt like it, and wasn't afraid to stand up to the band's notoriously temperamental producer Joe Meek. She also, by stamping her foot on a wooden staircase to give the drums some extra punch, created one of the most iconic sounds in sixties pop. But what did TV Times want to know? When she was going to "settle down and become a housewife and mum". It's no wonder Huggybear bit that cameraman.

Seriously, even if you were just looking to see what time Send For Dithers was on, you couldn't move for photographs of assembled bikinied lovelies in sixties issues of TV Times. Above you can see a teenage-boy-misuse-friendly full-colour shot of the Blackpool Night Out dancers apparently lying in wait for the undisputed grand master of the game Lionel Blair, and below that short-lived chart star Eden Kane lassoing a big load of swimsuited hotties and dragging them away for some unspecified purpose. It might of course be innocent and might well say so the article itself, but frankly there are so many dubious opinions espoused therein that it's not worth quoting any of it. Well I Ask You was Eden Kane's big hit, but it's likely any self-respecting young lady would have preferred its little-remembered follow-up, Get Lost.

Women's Football had an early and formidable detractor in Professor John Cohen, from the Department of Psychology at the University of Manchester, who remarked with an apparently straight face that men have sporting prowess in their genes whereas if women - who have been "designed to bear children" - tried to kick a ball their tits might make them fall over or something. And that's not an exaggeration for comic effect - he almost literally word for word says that. They did make sure to get a nice photo of some footballing lady sticking her shorts-clad arse out to illustrate his point, though. Later on he does go in to some bizarre eulogistic celebration of the ball, that estimable sphere that so inflatedly facilitates our sporting enjoyment, but the rest is sufficiently repulsive to make it hard even to get many laughs out of that. Anyone else think a girl might have snuck a couple of goals past him at some point?

Still, the odd Women's Lib crank did occasionally somehow manage to get through, and here's (Mrs.) Doris Chandler flying the flag for the right to female-friendly sex and violence on TV once the kids have fucked off to bed where they belong, and never mind the poor manbabies being deprived of their football and their Eden Kane. You can be fairly sure that she wasn't amongst the callers who complained about Big Breadwinner Hog.

Anyway, to balance things out, let's have a man making a complete prat of himself and insisting on talking even when he has absolutely nothing to say. Thomas Scott of Leeds has a nonsensical observation based on absolutely nothing outside of a bewildering insistence on paying attention to the studio scenery rather than Bernard Levin's incisive political debate, and a complete and profound lack of understanding of how the pop charts, music itself and even the basic rudiments of language work, but he's sharing it with us regardless. Take that, something! Anyway, join us again next time, when we'll be taking a look at how Independent Television almost literally rammed junk food down our throats...

There's So Much More In TV Times Part 2: Blind Faith Protected Hitler

Suppose you'd had enough of those lefty liberal do-gooders telling you what you can and can't say. Suppose you think political correctness really has gone mad and you've had it up to here with those immigrants coming over here taking our jobs and those trendy intellectuals mocking us with their plays and books. And suppose you've decided that enough's enough and it's down to you to do something about it before it's too late. Where's the first place you should think of for making your voice heard?

Yes, that's right, TV Times. Admittedly it's calmed down a good deal since then, not least when the publishers realised that all their readers wanted was Bruce Forsyth in a comedy oversized chef's hat making something out of 'leftovers', but back in the sixties, Independent Television's premier listings magazine was no friend of the Permissive Society. The letters page was regularly filled with mouth-frothing rants against nothing in particular that put the average Daily Mail correspondent to shame, and quite often their celebrity contributors weren't much better. Here are a couple of... well, they're not exactly 'highlights', are they?

Young Keith R. Warren was doubtless aaaaaahhhhing away with self-satisfied pride when his declaration of how much cleverer he was than every single other television viewer made it into print. Don't be a miserable minnie and object when you find something substandard or offensive, he suggests, read a book or spend time with your children instead, or even knuckle down and do an honest day's work! So committed is he to this cause that he even gets a dig at the BBC in, though thankfully he stops short of saying that he doesn't want to go to Callaghan's promised land which much surely rank as the most abhorrent and miserable land that has ever been promised to the people of a nation state. Anyway, we can but hope that all readers took heed of his advice. Or alternatively told him to fuck off and behave like an actual sixteen year old and generally mind his own fucking business. Whichever works best for you.

Continuing on one of Keith's themes, Michael A. Considine of Fulwood, Lancashire, clearly a man who has had enough of experts, writes to inform us all that his opinions on the BBC are more valid and worth heeding than those of the Postmaster General. There is, he believes, no longer any need for the BBC to exist, not least because nobody is watching it, and as such it should be immediately decommissioned and all broadcast frequencies should be handed to the commercial channels. He even has some not at all vague ideas of how these channels could be funded in future, involving a series of regional taxes. Though at no point does he state that it's not a rule and not one that has to be complied with.

Of course, ITV itself was never above criticism, and its loyal adherents were always quick to write in and point out when this free service that they did not pay for had failed to comply directly and unswervingly with their own personal socio-political standpoint. Here (Mrs) Shirley Foster tuts loudly at the mere idea that the police force might ever be portrayed in a manner that facilitates comedy or indeed actual proper drama with a storyline that lasts longer than three and a half minutes, while (Mr) H. Bennett gets all red in the face about those young upstart satirists having the temerity to poke fun at a distinguished statesman whose only crime was to take near-dictatorial measures to preserve white minority rule in an African territory. And if you think Joe Public was bad, have a look at some of Independent Television's stars...

Here, in a typical example, 'Geraldo' - the host of Gerry's Inn and leader of the 'Gaucho Tango Orchestra' - furrows his brow over the skiffle boom, which he summarily denounces as 'piffle'. Geddit?! Popular music is being 'murdered' by Tommy Steele and company, he believes, though in a classic 'make your mind up, mate' manoeuvre he also believes that 'most' people have rejected rock'n'roll. This sort of controversial outburst probably kept him in shirts with Toplinised collars for a while, but the cold hard fact of the matter is that now you can't move for BBC4 and Radio 2 documentaries about Lonnie Donegan, but nobody even seems to remember poor old Geraldo Bright. And he wasn't the worst musical offender by any means...

Now come, on, we all know about Eric Clapton's infamous 'Enoch Was Right' outburst, but this is ridiculous. Especially as they can't even have been more than about two years old at the time. And speaking of everyone's favourite exponent of speeches that go up 'fizz' like a rocket...

Here's the original swivel-eyed loon himself back in 1964, explaining rather confusingly why he believes that politicians should ignore the base distraction of television debate and discussion and get on with the serious business of politics, upon which the public will just fall into line or something and certainly not base anything on whatever they see or hear in the media, a tradition currently being grandly upheld by celebrated doer of wheelies on his BMX, Jeremy Corbyn. Small wonder, then, that the odious quavery-voiced old creep didn't invite any television crews along to the Rivers Of Blood speech, and spent all of his time thereafter claiming that anyone waving transcripts of his own words at him could not possibly claim to understand the subtleties of a speech they were not witness to. When he wasn't blabbering on about an unknown biblical source named Q and something about it not being an elephant, that was.

There was, of course, only one solution to this, as 'The Editor' makes clear - close down the BBC. After all, he (come on, it was probably a 'he') points out, it's old and it costs money that doesn't go into the pocket of the businessman in his suit and tie, and anyway someone said once they liked it better than ITV which isn't fair. Plus with their main rival out of the way, they'd be free to make even more episodes of World In Action and Credo, honest.

Still, never let it be said that they weren't prepared to give space to opposing views, and here's Michael Foot MP explaining his entirely logically-founded and thoroughly thought-through view that there should be no censorship of television under any circumstances ever. Sadly, his views on Big Breadwinner Hog are not on record.

Well, we need a bit of a change of pace after all of that, frankly, so here's Ronnie Barker talking about his worryingly obsessive Rod Hull/Jelly-like interest in 'postcards'. But only 13,000 of them. The others he doesn't care about. Anyway, join us again the time after next time for some of the most hideous sexism ever to appear in the name of television listings. Next time itself, though, there's something more terrifying still...

There's So Much More In TV Times Part 1: Have You Entered Miss TV Times?

Poor old TV Times. Always the cheap and nasty downmarket relation to the aesthete's choice Radio Times, and never held in as high regard, nor indeed any regard at all. It might have told you what time Skiboy was on, but it did so surrounded by acres of lightweight tabloidy frivolity, assembled on the assumption that viewers would be less interested in how a programme was made than what Bruce Forsyth might be able to throw together with some 'leftovers' and a comedy oversized chef's hat.

Celebrated neither in its time nor in retrospect, the Second Division status of TV Times is evidenced by the fact that while every last vaguest mention of Doctor Who in Radio Times has long since been collated, anthologised and scrutinised in forensic detail, its commercial counterpart could concievably have published an article in which Patrick Macnee and Patrick McGoohan explained how to turn base metals into gold using just some 'leftovers' and a comedy oversized chef's hat and nobody would ever even have noticed. In fact, we can't be entirely sure that they didn't.

What we can be sure of, though, is that - especially during the sixties and seventies - TV Times frequently ran items that did it absolutely no favours whatsoever. Rampant sexism, rabid right-wing pontificating, racially offensive adverts, retrospectively ill-advised billings for certain celebrities, they could all be found within its pages and over the next couple of instalments we're going to be taking a look at what horrors you might well stumble across when trying to work out which came first out of City Beneath The Sea and Secret Beneath The Sea. Please leave all notions of Safe Spaces, No-Platforming and Trigger Warnings at the door. You have been warned...

Although it was certainly ITV who kept the ghastly, patronising, insulting, pervgusting and above all not in any way 'sexy' spectre of Miss World haunting our televisions into the late eighties and well past the point where anyone with a shred of decency had started to decry it as outmoded sexist claptrap, we have to be fair here and point out that it was actually the politically correct lefty biased BBC who started the whole depressing business, probably as part of a plot to misrepresent Jeremy Corbyn, and continued to show it up until the late seventies, even after 1970 host Bob Hope had been attacked with flourbombs by people shouting about it really being called Dalek Cutaway or something. Throughout that time, however, ITV weren't content to be left standing outside the party, and attempted to get in on the action by launching their own annual - and, it must be said, slightly less glamorous - Miss TV Times award.

In a typical scenario, here's 1964 winner Valerie Martin of Lancashire, hoisting her crown aloft in honour of her £100 prize plus free clothes and a 'TV Test', which doesn't seem to have netted her any actual roles, even in TV's Turn Out The Lights. Valerie would probably be smiling a good deal less if she knew that this photo was being used not just to launch the search for her successor, but to announce that they would walk away with almost five times her winnings. She must have been absolutely delighted. Still, send that swimsuit pic in NOW and you too could pocket a crisp tenner!!

Just in case Valerie's putative successors were worrying their pretty little heads about it, the rules were spelt out in no uncertain terms on the following page. Just so it was all nice and legal and above board, entrants had to be between seventeen and a half and twenty five, prepared to wear evening or cocktail wear and a swimsuit, and content to be judged on beauty, face, hair, teeth, figure and deportment. All that they had to do in return was declare that they were neither an employee of the magazine or related to Ian TV Times himself, consent to waiving all rights over use of their image, and agree to abide by the rules set down by Mecca Ltd, who in somewhat shadowy fashion are only just entering into proceedings now. So what are you waiting for? Tell the world your name, address, age, occupation and bust and hip size, and you too could get to the regional finals without making a personal appearance! Meanwhile, what happened to all those photos afterwards is something we're best not speculating on...

Still, we shouldn't be too judgemental. Although we can clearly see such contests for what they are now, back then they were largely considered to be harmless fun family entertainment, and here's a reminder for any stray hopefuls to get their entry in while there's still time, underneath a headline that in no way looks unfortunate or ill-advised in retrospect. And if you're wondering what that 'Bedtime Story' was all about, I've read the whole thing and have no idea either.

As a bit of a change of pace, taken from comic strip-fulled close relation TV Comic rather than from TV Times itself, here's TV Favourites Eccles and Bluebottle from The Telegoons urging readers to 'Send 9/11'. And if you think that's in slightly dubious taste, you haven't seen what else was lurking in TV Times at the height of the Swinging Sixties...