Sweet Georgie Fame

I'm quite often asked how and when I cultivated my obsession with sixties jazz. I'm equally often asked why I did, and how come nobody staged an intervention. Well, as bewildering as it might sound, it all started with an album called Music From BBC Children's Programmes.

Technically, and notably less bewilderingly, it actually started when I was trying to find a copy of that particular album. For reasons that we'll be going into over the next couple of posts - and believe me, we'll be going into them alright - I had become ever so slightly fixated on finding a copy. The only problem, albeit something of a serious one, was that this apparent Noah And Nelly In The Skylark Of The Covenant wasn't exactly easy to track down. BBC Records And Tapes had deleted it from their catalogue many years beforehand, so simply walking into a shop and buying it was out. It wasn't really the sort of thing that second hand record shops bothered touching with a bargepole at that point either, so simply walking into a second hand record shop and buying it was out as well.

The only hope, it seemed, was endless rooting around in charity shops. But these were the days before fund-raising joints wised up to the financial potential of a copy of Bringing It All Back Home with a huge coffee mug ring on the cover, and all 'Long Players' tended to be flung haphazardly into the sort of shabby corner-shoved cardboard box that required anyone who'd been within ten feet of it to be treated for trichodermic mould inhalation. And even if you had managed to circumnavigate the weird characters standing at awkward angles whilst perusing the same Decca Stereo Sampler tracklisting for hours on end and got to flip through the contents, whilst carefully avoiding the urge to punch Mario Lanza in his irritatingly recurring cardboard face, there was no guarantee that you'd actually find an album that hadn't been smeared with peanut butter and used as a makeshift trouser press by its previous one careful owner. What you did sometimes find, though, in amongst the miles upon miles of James Last, Bert Kaempfert, Ray Conniff, Johnny Mann, Nina And Frederik, Nana Mouskouri, Johnny Mathis, Manuel And His Music Of The Mountains, Mario Lanza, Mario Lanza, Mario Lanza and Mario Lanza, was an unusually high proportion of sixties jazz records. Presumably the genre afficionados hadn't quite got around to appreciating the merits of vibe-heavy breathy-lady-voiced Modern Jazz with world music inflections and touches of sitar-and-backward-tape experimentalness yet, because this stuff really did just used to sit there untouched, with the intriguing-looking tinted sleeves and elongated typefaces seeming to become more and more appealing as Barnaby's Heavy Concept Album seemed to become more and more elusive. After a while, it seemed churlish not to give a couple a try.

This was, it turned out, an entry into a very different sort of secret world to the quasi-psychedelic retro-heavy nirvana seemingly and tantalisingly promised by Music From BBC Children's Programmes. It was similar how you'd always thought jazz sounded as a youngster - albeit in the mould of those piano-syncopating characters that showed up in the middle of chat shows, rather than stripy-blazered 'ragtime' loons like those planks who did the music for Harold Lloyd's World Of Comedy and indeed exhorted us all to "laugh a while", "dig that style" and surrender to the comic value of "a pair of glasses and a smile" - but spiralling off in all manner of unexpected directions, with vibraphones and electric organs to the fore and full of smooth instrumental textures, modal chord changes and wild improvisation that evoked some lost Beatle-John-Lennon-Meets-Dalek-era world of arty sophisticates slipping into hip modernist joints serving terrifyingly strong coffee. Even beyond the expected likes of Georgie Fame, Gerry Mulligan, Johnny Dankworth And Cleo Laine and Julie Driscoll, Brian Auger And The Trinity, and half-familiar names like Mike Westbrook and Michael Garrick, there was a whole alternate musical universe of just-out-of-view sounds to explore. There was Blossom Dearie, who sounded on her That's Just The Way I Want To Be album at least like some hip Kohl-eyed psychedelian that the cover photo confirmed she was most definitely not. There was the entertainingly-named Tubby Hayes, whose frantic impressionistic 'sound pictures' seemed almost too fast for the vinyl to keep up with. There was The London Jazz Four, whose underappreciated Take A New Look At The Beatles succeeded in making even the overfamiliar likes of Michelle and I Feel Fine sound like totally fresh compositions. More exotically, there were the bossanova-toting likes of Stan Getz and Astrud Gilberto, and the deeply hallucinogenic raga experiments of Wolfgang Dauner, The Dave Pike Set and, of course, The Joe Harriott And John Mayer Double Quintet.

All very exciting, but in the words of another charity shop find from around the same time, "nice though this be, I seek yet further kicks". And where soft drugs and soft porn lead some on to harder drugs and harder porn, the hapless jazz addict will find themselves drawn towards ever lengthier and more abstract ventures until they arrive at that point of no musical return - 'free jazz'. No, this doesn't have anything to do with Jools Holland And His Boogie Woogie Big Brigade playing for the benefit of non-paying passers by. It's a style of jazz where improvisation takes precedence over melody and structure, and the players dispense with such trivialities as chord sequences and tempo and literally 'play how they feel'. It's complex, it's challenging, it's intellectual and it gives you an air of depth and sophistication. The only problem is that a good deal of it is basically an unlistenable racket. And yet even that sounds like Mantovani covering Take That's most commercial single next to the... well, you can't really call it 'music' of a certain band responsible for a certain album with a certain yellow lorry on the cover.

You may struggle to pick out a discernible tune in the wilder works of Sun Ra, Ornette Coleman and Charles Mingus, but AMM pretty much dispensed with the whole notion of a 'tune' altogether. This fluid collective were regulars on London's mid-sixties 'psychedelic underground' circuit, where they donned lab coats and turned the scoffing that free jazz was 'just noise' to their advantage, recruiting someone to 'play' the transistor radio alongside conventional instruments and doing away with anything resembling riffs or melody to concentrate on creating evocative soundscapes with names like Later During A Flaming Riviera Sunset and After Rapidly Circling The Plaza. Yes, there are moments when the screeching and scraping can all get a bit too much. Yes, there are moments when it sounds like a BBC Sound Effects One Hundred Best Parking Buses With Knackered Brakes album has been dropped on the floor and smashed and then haphazardly glued back together. And yes, there are moments that can only be described as sounding like a goose, browbeaten and exhausted by the relentless cacophony, is weakly pleading to be allowed out of the room. But if you're in the right mood, it can be quite an entertaining listen. Although it's not exactly one to break out as 'mood music' for a first date.

Free Jazz - it may be 'clever', but it's not big. And what's more, as the spectre-at-the-feast that was Derek Griffiths yelling "doo dk'n dk'n doo da dooda dadooda, do do do do do d'doooo!" kept naggingly reminding me, it was an improvisation too far from the real musical holy grail; as indeed the above overlong and overcomplex write-how-you-feel free-form shenanigans have been from the point that I'm supposed to be getting to. As Sun Ra And His Arkestra jetted off further into some kind of sax-wailing cosmos, Bod And His Friends were wandering into a horizonless green void. And I was somewhere in the middle, still rifling through those hazardous cardboard boxes in search of Music From BBC Children's Programmes.

Top Of The Box, The Complete Guide To BBC Records And Tapes Singles, is available as a paperback here or an eBook here; a sequel covering the albums is coming soon! And as a special bonus treat, here's myself and Ben Baker talking about Take A New Look At The Beatles:

Ask The Family: A Psychedelic Nightmare Introduced By ROBERT ROBINSON

Ah, good evening, and often may you say that the television shows that seem the strangest now were the ones that seemed the most mundane and quotidian at the time. No matter how good they may be, those that tried to be unusual now only really look like another era's idea of 'unusual'. Whereas those that simply existed, with their lack of audiovisual trimmings, their quaint meldings of one medium's stylistic preferences with another's format and technology, and their now almost completely unrelatable 'real time' feel, now come across like a quasi-hallucinatory vision of an alternate reality. Plus they're often quite unintentionally amusing too. One such show, if ever a show as was, was Ask The Family, which ran on BBC1 between 1967 and 1974. That much, is certain.

Ask The Family was just one of many highbrow quiz shows - including Call My Bluff, Brain Of Britain and The Book Game - hosted by critic, author, columnist and all-round polymath Robert Robinson. He had started his career as a heavyweight political pundit, and his 'descent' into quizzing ubiquity is often held up as a textbook example of 'how the mighty have fallen'; however Robinson himself claimed that he'd moved in this direction voluntarily after growing tired of the "sonorous drivel" of politicians. It was, he noted, "impossible to make the bastards reply to a straight question", and the comparative appeal of Brain Of Britain and company lay in the fact that they were "just a game". It was, in effect, a Godfrey Humphrey-style sophisticated satirical attack on the entire political establishment, and one so precision-targetedly aaaaaaahhhhhhhhh that even Tony Parsons didn't expect it. Or did expect it. Or was expecting us to expect that he wouldn't expect it. Or however that works exactly.

The basic format of Ask The Family was that two sets of smugly well-read families - often, it has to be said, displaying scant awareness of how they might look on screen - would vie to outdo each other as all-round smartarses while Robert Robinson posed cultured and literate puzzlers on science and history and the like, famously divided up into bizarre 'Father And Eldest Child Only'-type designations. Generally this would take the form of logical posers of the 'if you took off from New York and landed in Moscow with a brief stopover in Helsinki, what would the time difference be?' variety, which the audience on the whole found baffling. Its only concession to modernity and television technology came in a round where the teams would be asked to identify an object photographed in extreme close-up; usually this would conclude with some trademark Robinson haughty waffle along the lines of "a... video... recorder; a device, they tell me, that allows one to permit the recording of the output of one television channel, whilst watching the output of another... whatever will they think of next!". The Large Hadron Particle Collider, mate. That's what they thought of next.

It's often been remarked that the families being asked on Ask The Family bore absolutely no resemblance to any that you might have encountered in real life. In actual fact, they were everywhere. They were the exact same families as the ones at the end of the street where the children had SLAVE-1, Mr Frosty and Turn The Terrible Tank, but instead insisted on playing some tedious and impenetrable heraldry-related board game that went on forever and had a load of Charles I blokes on the box. Small wonder, then, that they should have been in such a clamour to compete on so polite, excitement-averse and intellectual superiority-conferring a game show. To the extent, in fact, that calling it a 'game show' looks somehow wrong. 'Game' would normally tend to suggest some element of fun might have been involved at some point.

The deeply strange thing, however, was that you would neither have known nor expected this (no, not even you, Tony Parsons) from the deeply strange opening titles. And that's opening titles plural. More than once, Ask The Family adopted visuals and indeed music that didn't just give a completely misleading idea of what was to follow, but appeared to belong to an entirely different television show from an entirely different planet.

There's modishly mind-expanding graphics and colours, there's migrane-inducing op-art monochrome refractions, and then there's the original Ask The Family opening titles. Beginning with a deck of Happy Families cards bearing illustrations apparently based on one of Bjork's nightmares, they would flip over to reveal a series of orange and purple hard-psych fractal designs of the kind that hippies were fond of using to determine your inner aura strength or whatever it was that week, finally zooming in on the one that deployed the time-honoured 'Candlestick or Two Faces?' optical illusion while the show's title appeared in a font that more rightly belonged on a birthday card sent by Yoffy from Fingerbobs to Tarot from Ace Of Wands. Looking more like you'd finally caved and allowed that weird 'mystical' girl in school to read your 'vibrations' than you were about to watch some clean-cut types vying to name the greatest number of winged insects, the overall effect was not dissimilar to one of those elaborate fold-out paper engineering-facilitated Prog Rock album sleeves where nobody bought them at the time and they're worth a small fortune undamaged now. Small wonder, then, that these visuals had music to match.

Robert Robinson's appearance being heralded by relentless sitars and a beat that would have had Zeenat Aman and company up on their feet in any given Bollywood offering might sound like something that the so-called 'satirists' might have made up as an incongruous comical wheeze, but - staggeringly - it was absolutely true. Acka Raga had originally been recorded by that famously far-out acid visionary Mr. Acker Bilk, whose version has a fantastically ludicrous 'Light Programme Goes East' vibe to it, sounding more or less equivalent to The Paul Butterfield Blues Band being produced by Norrie Paramor. The version that enlivened Ask The Family, however, was as interpreted by Brit-Jazzers Joe Harriott and John Mayer (and of course their 'Double Quintet') for their self-explanatory groundbreaking 1967 album Indo-Jazz Fusions, melding herky-jerk Prog-Jazz rhythms with traditional percussion and lashings of sitar. And, incidentally, you do have to wonder if Paul Weller had the Ask The Family opening titles in mind when he was putting together a certain pseudonymous sitar-dominated dancefloor smash...

It was, to all intents and purposes, like some sort of Chapter 24-instructed pocket nirvana tucked away at the start of an evening's entertainment on BBC1; something that was underlined by the fact that Dutch psych-rockers and Venus hitmakers Shocking Blue were sufficiently inspired by a chance sighting of Ask The Family on an early UK jaunt that they ended up putting a slightly more funked-up cover of Acka Raga on their somewhat suspiciously strewn torn card-covered LP At Home. But as the late seventies drew near, this sort of transcendental incongruity could not last. Plots to overthrow Harold Wilson were fomenting behind closed Gentlemen's Club doors with padded leather upholstery on them, the punks were waiting in the wings to shout 'BARSTARD' at Father and Youngest Child Only, and the brandy-in-decanter blokes in suits at the BBC had had quite enough of this longhaired multicoloured popular beat disobedience. It was time for change. And how.

The hippy dream had turned sour, and Ask The Family promptly defected to a neo-Illiberalist totalitarian state. Acka Raga was replaced by Sun Ride, a thoroughly inappropriately-named 'in Soviet Russia, family asks you' Cimbalom-sourced outbreak of Cold War Spy Film-hued menace provided by one John Leach. In tandem with this, the visuals were replaced by a creepy-looking rotating Edwardian family painted on the side of some weird spinning metallic fairground optical illusion thing. From the look of them, you wouldn't particularly want to ask this family anything, other than to please stop trying to steal your face.

The ramifications of this were immediate and far-reaching. Millions of children dived behind 'the sofa' whenever the continuity announcer mentioned Ask The Family. Go Video and Vipco became locked in a fierce bidding war for the rights to top Video Nasty Robert Robinson Presents The Everyman Book Of Light Verse - Live. The various rival TV 'Clowns' put aside their differences and penned an open letter objecting to this base infringement on their audience-terrifying territory. The BBC 'Top Brass' had to act, and while Sun Ride stayed, the creepy gaudy family were discarded in favour of more up to date iconography of the sort that would more normally have been found introducing a BBC2 magazine show that looked at topical issues from 'an angle'. Rumours that they had been discovered advancing on the question mark coat hanger pin man from the start of Over The Moon cannot be confirmed.

The 1980s. The microchip revolution. The dawn of Home Entertainment. A time when the likes of Equinox and Zig Zag were taking enormous leaps forwards and introducing themselves to viewers with digitally-generated neon and chrome lettering and scorching blasts of Korg. Odd, then, that Ask The Family opted not so much to move with the times as to move backwards away from them. A radical overhaul - though the show itself, of course, remained resolutely the same - brought in a polite arrangement of Scott Joplin's piano-punishing standard Maple Leaf Rag, accompanied by photo-animation of a for once perfectly normal-looking family, pulling puzzled faces around a red and white check tablecloth and an inexplicably oversized teapot. Seemingly self-destructively determined to mark itself out as an anachronism, the writing was on the wall for Ask The Family, and even someone viewing the wall in extreme close-up could see it.

But ah, the pity of it, starp and trivvock. While they still kept Maple Leaf Rag, the final series in 1984 opted for a much more hip and with-it ITV Daytime game show-style video grid showing the 'families' being jovial and light-hearted, along with a couple of frames of Robert Robinson doing likewise in a bizarre 'Smuggins goes zanes' gambit. Needless to say, it didn't work, and Ask The Family was one of the first casualties of the BBC Daytime-funding Night Of The Long Schedules that put paid to so many long-running old-favourites in the mid-eighties. Time, our old enemy, had rolled round again. It bade us goodbye, it bade us farewell, but aaaaah, tussock, flip and fourpence... not for long?

Ahhh, would that it were. Attempts to revive Ask The Family have been decidedly few, and decidedly less than successful. UK Gold had a go in the late nineties, with Alan Titchmarsh fronting a not particularly updated update that retained Sun Ride over a montage of 'highbrow' slides of microscopes and gorillas and the like, and - oddly - the original 'optical illusion' logo. Unfortunately, this proved to be even less entertaining than the drying paint at least one family was presumably called upon to identify in close-up, and nobody really noticed it happening. Not so the 2005 revival with Dick'n'Dom - theme music a hazardously Bhangra-ed up version of the original Acka Raga - which replaced all the staid 'improving' stuffiness with loud hooters and messy energetic rounds involving donkey masks for some reason, drawing the ire of many of the original's production team and even the Eeny Meeny Macka Racka Rare Are Dominacka Shickeypoppa Dickywhoppa Om Pom Stick-toting duo themselves soon identified the whole venture as a 'disaster'. Meanwhile, Acka Raga found its way back into the charts courtesy of a bizarre Şımarık-esque 'And An Extra Point For Being So Knockers' hookah-toking vocal reworking by saucy Russian Indie-Dance outfit Reflex. What would Robert Robinson have said?!

So ah, here's a thing, it only remains for me to declare Ask The Family the sort of programme that despite its opening title weirdness was defiantly and deliberately out of step with the times from the word go, and yet paradoxically exactly the sort of programme that all channels should be reclaiming that dull start-of-the-evening wasteland with now. As long as they keep all the reality and celebrity stuff as well, mind. We're not the Ask The Family families, you know.

Ten TV Opening Titles That Promised More Than They Delivered

A good set of opening titles can rope in viewers and set the mood for a TV show perfectly. That's providing, however, that they actually bear some relation to the show they're attached to. Over the years there've been many that gave a misleading impression of the contents, looked as though they belonged to something else entirely, or, in some extreme cases, made great play of something that never so much as appeared in the show itself. We're talking edgy satire introduced by some bloke carrying curry past a tramp, promises of rural backwoods horror undermined by endless scenes of attractive youngsters having 'issues', and the discovery that, at least in animated form, Oliver Hardy can fly by flapping his arms. Here are ten of the most fraudulent, ill-fitting and just plain bewildering, and that's not even getting started on the likes of Spaced and Lost that just didn't bother having one at all...


Odd One Out

Guess-centric low-level-prize Paul Daniels-fronted game show introduced by onomatopoeic Ronnie Hazlehurst theme music, not-particularly-computery 'computer' graphics, and a procession of montages of premise-explaining still photos showing the host puzzled, then halfway there, then finally identifying the odd one out. You may like the opening titles; you may like the show itself not a lot.


Pebble Mill At One

Jaw-dropping ITC-rivalling anything-can-happen-in-a-lunchtime-chat-show quick-cut montage of presenters haring around in sports cars, people jumping from windows, rollerskaters bursting through reception and Spike Milligan being 'zany', all of it set to the most inappropriately blockbusting music of all time. Except whenever you were off school, when it always seemed to be laid-back thesps plugging the latest BBC costume drama and Roger Whittaker doing New World In The Morning.


Ask The Family

Sitar-underscored psychedelic migrane-inducement with stylised fractal-design playing cards rendered against Modern Jazz raga, looking and sounding as though it should be the 'cartoon bit' in a big-screen freak-out, but actually giving way to Robert Robinson sedately quizzing 'father and youngest child only' about what the time would be if you took off in Moscow and landed in Tokyo after a brief stopover in Helsinki. And an extra point for being so weird!


The Flintstones

Prehistoric animated tweeness and cause of widespread viewer bafflement over fact that, throughout the opening AND closing credits, Fred and company are accompanied by a Dino-cahooting sabre-tooth tiger, unpreturbed by the car being upended by that giant rib but famously taking umbrage at being put out for the night. It's even namechecked in the theme song, yet rarely - if ever - sighted in the show itself.


Return Of The Saint

Secret agent revivalism heralded by a marvel of pre-CGI visual trickery, wherein Simon Templar's 'Pin Man' emblem takes on animated form in a live-action setting (complete with shadow), walloping tracksuited henchmen and jumping onto moving lorries before finally relieving some foxy chick of her feather boa. Cue mass younger viewer switchoff when it then gave way to Ian Ogilvy doing 'espionage'.


Heathcliff

Animated feline anti-socialness from perrennial second-stringers Ruby Spears, originally packaged with somewhat more ectoplasmic supporting feature Dingbat And The Creeps. The BBC purchased it in humdrum cat form only, but nobody thought to amend the end credits, leading to widespread younger viewer confusion over why that vampire dog, walking jack-o-lantern and skeleton with a sink plunger on its head never appeared in the show.


Once Upon A Time... Man

Speaker-rattling Bach overload and audacious animated gambit showing evolution of man - from creation of the universe (with baffling cameo by seventies puppet bear Barnaby) to the moment the earth went 'fut' - terrifies unsuspecting school holiday viewers out of their wits. Unasked-for something-got-lost-in-translation history lesson from meddlesome chimp/bloke with long white beard/robot calendar thing doesn't.


Stop Look Listen

Tarrant-narrated fly-on-the-wall 'look at life' schools TV double-whammy; to the accompaniment of a sub-Focus zapping synth and 'angry' flute workout, you'd get either the show logo with a strobing zoom effect straight out of late seventies disco, or a starkly-animated self-drawing face in zany rainbow shades. Neither of which quite reflected the 'social science'-tinged musings on someone who repaired telegraph poles that followed.


Brass Eye

Much-copied - usually by 'straight' news shows - satire-fanfaring assemblage of swirly current affairs graphics, clips from the show itself, and Liam Gallagher flicking a v-sign, only with a little-noticed hidden bit. Watch closely, and you'll see a hefty amount of extracts from what appears to be an unused sketch, featuring Morris bothering John Major at an anti-drugs rally, then chasing a man along a rooftop waving some 'cake' around. Whatever was going on, it was probably more exciting than that 'Drug Office' drudgery.


Play School

Pre-school Hamble-equipped opening voiceover clearly refers to 'windows one, two, three, four', visually reinforced by all known incarnations of the accompanying stylised house, but in the show itself - no matter what That Bloke In Work Who's Good At Pub Quizzes might insist - there were only ever three; Round, Arched and Square. This might well have changed with the notorious early eighties makeover, but frankly nobody could be bothered checking.