You'd think, what with everyone always waffling on about pylons and experimental medicines and MURDERS SCARECROWS and folky pagan synths and Hole Hearted by Extreme and all of that other 'sinister seventies' iconography like some lost episode of Series 1 of Look Around You as written and produced by someone who knows nothing about the seventies nor indeed about Look Around You, whether you ask them to or not or indeed threaten them with a mirror-disc top hat to the face if they don't shut up, that there'd be an absolute wooo scary bakery van (for some reason) load of ITV Programmes For Schools And Colleges footage out there. But there isn't, and for some odd reason it's surprisingly hard to find, at least in any form other than a stretched still image with some overloud plank prattling over the top before treating us all to fourteen minutes of a library music track called Ragtime Crow or something, so this has been a much harder instalment to put together than most. And you know why that is? IT'S BECAUSE OF THE 'THEY' WHO DONE ALL OF THE SECRET HAUNTOLOGY EXPERIMENTS ON YOU LOL THE WHOLE OF THE SEVENTIES WILL BE ARRESTED NEXT ESPECIALLY HARTLEY HARE AND SPANGL... OH THAT DOESN'T WORK SORRY
Anyway, we're here to talk about Independent Television For Schools And Colleges rather than RAGGERTY IS HIDING IN YOUR DISUSED FRIDGE, and talk about Independent Television For Schools And Colleges rather than RAGGERTY IS HIDING IN YOUR DISUSED FRIDGE we shall. Starting with...
Hmmm, well it's no BBC Schools Diamond is it? This invariably moderately wonky caption slide, surely not coincidental in its similarity to the ATV ident, would be pressed into service whenever the inadvertent gap between the haphazardly-lengthed schools programmes reached truly ridiculous proportions. Presumably it was intended to have a dual purpose and allow teachers some scope for getting the brightness and contrast set correctly before the programme started, but given that most of them had trouble even switching the TV on in the first place that really was something of a tall order.
Then, eventually, the cross-legged captive audience arrived at the radially-gradated sixty second countdown everyone remembers, rendered in Savlon-inspired Vase-Smashed-With-Hammer blue and white livery, and let's be honest about this, not a patch on the BBC Schools Dots, mainly on account of it requiring those who laboured under the misapprehension that it was the height of hilarity to pretend to 'shoot' the disappearing markings to be simultaneously infinitely more dextrous and infinitely more annoying. Seen here doing an episode of Seeing And Doing, it would also work its Dixieland-driven wonders for the fondly-remembered likes of Good Health, Middle English, Picture Box, Leapfrog, The French Programme, How We Used To Live, Experiment, Stop Look And Listen, My World and of course Jimmy Savile Presents Some Pagan Villagers Make ICI Businessman With That Greasy Side Parting And Thick Glasses Combo Take Some Dangerous Untested Drugs By A Disused Foundry That Is In The Middle Of The Countryside For Some Reason.
And to fill the often not insubstantial gaps between all those programmes, the 'backroom boys' would often deploy short but seemingly infinite loops of rotating artwork, mostly rural and/or Tudor-themed watercolours by gifted semi-professionals, but sometimes haphazard splurges of that powdered water-activated schoolroom paint sent in by the actual viewers. We've been prevented from using any of the above indicated illustrations of The Muppets on health and safety grounds, but if you're willing to take that risk with your sanity, you can see them in all their... something by clicking here. Your best is 'The Drummer'.
And showcasing some of those off-kilter timings, here's a typical schoolday's rundown, so get yourself sat down for a good morning's worth of educativ-
Oh. Good thing too really, if you ask us, as we weren't so much running out of things to say about ITV Programmes For Schools And Colleges as running out of anything to actually have things to say about in the first place. And anyway, it's time to take a look at... well, that would be telling...
IT AHS COME TO OUTR ATTNETION THAT THERE HAVE BEEN TOO MANY IDENATS ON THIS BLOG LATELY
ATTENTION
THISD IS NOT AN ACCEPTBALE SDTATE OF AFFAIRS AND IF IT IS ALLWOED TO CONTINUE TOO FAR WE WILL END UP WHITH THE ELEUIDVEN O'CLOCK SHOW BACK
NO MORE IDENTSF
NO
NELE
THE HANDBAGJD AND THE GLADRAGS THAT BECAME JOHN HANNAS FAVOURITE SUPPER TIME
Well, we apologise for that short break in transmission, during which you probably had to sit through that Butterfly Ball thing again, and let's just see if we can't now return you to our regular programming. Hello, one and all, and welcome to the third and final (TAHT IS NOT SOON ENOGUH SOON) instalment of our series-within-a-series look at the various variations on regional insignias of ITV franchise holders passim, before they all got bought up by Disney and thrown in a burning bin to impress Reece Shearsmith, and indeed before the entirety of ITV itself was subsumed by the unstoppable Chewits-endangering region-scoffing rise of Carlton Television, a phenomenon which as any self-respecting MP knows is a prime example of BBC 'Bias'. Just imagine if it had been SelecTV instead, and in place of Celebrity Juice we'd have all those wall-to-wall repeats of Hadleigh. Anyway, the final leg of our tour of the regions starts by stopping off here...
Where ast tha bin since ah saw thee? In the Yorkshire TV region! Yes, it's the plain-speaking flat-capped cobble-streeted home of the makers of such televisual landmarks as Rising Damp, Emmerdale Farm, Follyfoot, Topper's Tales, Tarby's Frame Game and Matthew Corbett And Sooty "In Search Of Gulliver", which were invariably introduced by the so-called 'chevron', though many observers have noted that it actually bore a far closer resemblance to a 'bird' as seen in a chortle-free newspaper cartoon about Thatcher/Major teetering on the 'economic' edge of Beachy Head, and a five-note brass harrumph through something that sounds nothing at all even remotely like On Ilkla Moor Baht 'at. And, what with being all no-nonsense and common sense and dripping sandwiches and all that, they rarely ever messed around with said 'chevron', and while Twitter may regularly reverberate with endless live tweeting of when it twatted Dusty Bin at the start of 3-2-1, this was very much an isolated incident and you never exactly saw it, say, turning into a 'flying v' guitar at the behest of Animal Kwackers, or being called a 'barstard' by Alan B'Stard. Below are two very rare examples of promotion-orientated jiggerypokery, firstly a standard issue 'one pill makes you larger' mind expansion gambit from the late sixties, and secondly a salutation to any passing aliens that might have been looking in (so, Vrillon of Ashtar Galactic Command, then) with a somewhat overblown boast about reaching a very small percentage of the viewing audience. Meanwhile, improbably, a bewildering amount of people claim to have been somehow frightened by the 'chevron'. What did they think it was going to do?! Fly out of the TV and 'yellow' at them?
The green glowing I AM ALIEN FROM PLANET MARS-esque variant noted above would doubtless have been of great interest to the galactic emissary who allowed himself to be used as a logo for original Midlands ITV-profferer ABC.
But soon enough he headed off back into space, to warn his home planet of the Earth people and their Pathfinders To Venus, and consequently the regional franchise for the Midlands was handed over to Lord Grade's ATV and their none-more-ITV ident, featuring as it did that infamous speaker-rattling double-whammy fanfare with added binging and bonging, and 'colour'-denoting representation of what appears to be Mickey Mouse turned upside down and subjected to a chemical leakage from developing fluid, self-animatedly giving way to the emblematic Zippy/Al Jardine/Graham Taylor-head-shaped logo. And this celebratedly bombastic in-your-face bit of televisual arrestingness almost always found itself attached to equally arresting programming, from The Strange World Of Gurney Slade to Sapphire & Steel to Pipkins, and woe betide anyone who witters over a stretched still of it while pretending to introduce some woeful long-forgotten daytime talk show where the real original continuity announcers probably just shouted "PISS 2" and hoped for the best anyway.
Yikes - head for the hills, everyone! ATV handed over the Midland reins to Central in 1982, inadvertently letting slip the dogs of war and unleashing Hardwicke House on a traumatised public who are still recovering to this day. Not far behind in the viewer-spooking stakes came hard-hitting swindle exposure courtesy of The Cook Report, MURDERS PUPPETS extravaganzas Pullover and Fox Tales (and, according to some, Spitting Image when not moving), chillingly post-Cold War tug-of-rights-stricken The Little Green Man, the sweary-graffiti-shouty-theme-song end credits of Murphy's Mob, endless spooktacular contributions to Dramarama, and the general horror of those song-and-dance prone kids in Emu's Pink Windmill Show, with the result that many viewers can now no longer see their original solarized Christmas Tree bauble and corresponding synth hum without hiding behind the 'sofa' that nobody ever actually hid behind. Later in the eighties this would evolve into a paint-splattering computerised approximation of the original 'globe' - apparently referred to in official parlance as the 'cake', though anyone who has ever eaten any cake that looked even marginally like that requires immediate help - and a more assured synth fanfare that bore an uncanny resemblance to The Robinsons' doorbell on Neighbours. Also included for sheer amusement is the ludicrous 'Central Into The 90's' turn-of-the-decade variant, doubtless intended to signpost a brave new world of Press Gang and, erm, Press Gang, but these days calling to mind little other than Inspector Morse donning a hooded top and buying an Inspiral Carpets 12".
Being prominent denizens of so-called (by planks writing pretentious thinkpieces about not very much in particular) 'Granadaland', Inspiral Carpets themselves would have been otherwise engaged charting the evolution of the Anthony H. Wilson-pointing-out 'G', from its early appearances as a lone 'G'-deficent arrow (to denote 'North', of course), through a brief misguided excursion into just rendering the company's name in the same font they used for the signage on their Service Station/TV Rental Shop sideline, and into the classic Bob Greaves-era A Handful Of Songs-prefacing 'grinning face' Coronation Street-bookender and its later bevelled and Silver Plated 25th Anniversary upgrades, the latter of which is particularly noteworthy for having introduced Show They Can Never Repeat Now par excellence How To Be Cool. And what's more, it used to turn into a fucking HOUSE at the start of Hickory House. Stitch that, 'Chevron'!
And finally, it's time for Tyne Tees, and its legendary Yer Programme's On blippery synth clarion call for 'Gog' from The Paper Lads, and the root cause of a million juvenile misconceptions that 'Tees' was somehow 'North East' for telly. And with tha- oh. It's exploded. Oh well, join us again next time when we'll be taking a look at - wait for it - Oracle...!
If you've enjoyed this article, you can find lots more about stuff you just don't see on television any more in Not On Your Telly, which is available in paperback here or from the Kindle Store here.
Last year, you may remember, we ran a series looking back at the visual ephemera that used to appear between BBC programmes. This was hugely successful, but also led to accusations of bias; apparently these days you can't take a disgruntled sarcastic tongue-in-cheek pro-License Fee anti-Murdoch stance without someone thinking you've got a hidden agenda.
Anyway, to redress the supposedly unbalanced balance, and indeed to get around David Cameron's 'family friendly' filters (not to mention preventing Boris Johnson from falling off his bike in anger, Iain Duncan Smith from throwing himself into a meat grinder in anger, and some bloke in the comments box from getting an ear infection), it's time to get all upbeat and positive and bring you a new series celebrating fifty nine years of ITV - the commercially-funded market-driven BBC-rivalling enterprise that would ultimately give us TV 'Spatz'.
And what better way to kick off proceedings than by taking a stroll down memory lane with those fondly-remembered day-heralding Startup sequences...?
Normally, the first thing you would see in any ITV region would be this handy list of transmitter frequencies for your local area, just in case your reception was on the blink and you had some bolt cutters, earth-moving equipment and triangulation monitors to hand with which to correct the wobbly picture before Secret Valley came on. It's also worth noting here that some viewers claim to have found transmitter information every bit as terrifying as TV 'Clown' (Test Card), for reasons that can never be satisfactorily explained.
Most regions would then just opt for running their ident in full - most infamously the 12" Extended Remix of the Anglia Knight - but a couple of them put a bit more thought, effort and indeed money (well, about three pence) into it, occasionally giving rise to such warm-hearted welcomes as this cheery top-of-the-morning salutation from Lew Grade himself.
Even in the early eighties, ATV's regional usurpers Central were still sticking to this tried and tested format; anyone who tuned in before their daily diet of unlisted Hardwicke House showings commenced would have seen this eye-assaulting tribute to the thing at the start of Volume Three of Heroes where the world split in two because of something Peter Petrelli did wrong with 'time' but then they forgot about it and did all that nonsense about his dad trying to synthesise Gino Ginelli and Mohinder falling over or whatever it was instead. Whither the Hurley Bird?
Some of them even went to the bother of putting together a nice bit of film of local 'colour'. Take, for example, this effort from little-heard-from appropriately-named Channel Islands-servicer Channel, which presented a slow zoom in on their studio headquarters to show viewers where the action was. The 'action' in this case being, erm, um... some episodes of Highway every now and then?
Meanwhile, Yorkshire went one better and gave us a Chevron-tastic look inside the building, starting with the Yorkshire Van pulling up at Yorkshire TV (which George Osborne would probably still see as an example of 'BBC bias'), then showing some technicians hard at work wiping episodes of Animal Kwackers, and finally the handy Cold War-esque alarm light used to warn viewers that another instalment of Flambards was imminent.
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 of the Granada startup board that Julian Cope claims to have imperceptibly written 'fuck' on in the dust, 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.
Then, with all of the fanfaring introductory hoo-ha out of the way, it's straight on to a rundown of the morning's programming. Here we can see a typical example of God Slot-era Sunday Morning programming, including the notorious washed-out-film maker of learning fun Max The 2000 Year Old Mouse, but which breaks with convention by actually putting something halfway watchable on before 10pm. Surely they should have gone for The Secret Service, though?
And, finally, it's time for ITV proper to kick in, usually with a warm welcome from one of your regional in-vision continuity announcers. Here's Granada's celebrated 'Beardy Man' Jim Pope, fresh from creating an unlabelled 'mock' of a fifteen minute 'junction' into Santa Barbara. Anyway, join us again next time, when we'll be taking a look at just what that mysterious 'G' thing in the upper right hand corner actually was...
One of the big frustrations for soundtrack collectors of yore - and TV soundtrack collectors in particular - was that the commercially released versions of your top favourite theme tunes never quite matched up with what was heard on screen. The odd ill-advised funked-up abberation aside, they were by and large very close approximations, but were always sufficiently 'different' to cause the sort of frustration that could never be sensibly explained to anyone else; the guitar that came in just that bit further away from the beat, the shrill exotic wind instrument replaced with a more Pye Records-friendly session flautist, the abrupt ending jettisoned in favour of a repetitive and overlong fadeout, and so on and so on and so on and living in harmony they're the friendly enemies living in harmony they're the friendly enemies living in harmonOH JUST STOP. In some extreme cases, like that of Randall And Hopkirk (Deceased), the hapless punters wouldn't even have got any kind of variation on the original recording at all, with the few - and even in some cases lone - commercially available versions being shunted out by the yard by one of the many and unvaried faceless big bands and orchestras that specialised in such cheap and not always especially cheerful cash-ins.
One such cheap and not especially cheerful cash-in was the long-forgotten ramble through the theme from Randall And Hopkirk (Deceased) released as a latterly-dizzying-sum-fetching single by Norrie Paramor & His Orchestra. This alone was enough of a holy grail for collectors (don't bother, though, it's rubbish); the spectral harpsichord tingling of Edwin Astley's original on-screen version was so far beyond the realms of availablity that people didn't even bother wishing that it would come out, and instead just contented themselves with muffled and hissy recordings they'd made from VHS tapes. Like so many other similarly great yet elusive pieces of soundtrack music, it was destined to gather dust on a shelf in some archive where nobody actually knew where it was, tantalisingly just on the edge of continuity-announcer-hijacked consciousness but seemingly destined never to find its way onto CD.
Late in 1996, however, some enterprising soundtrack collector decided they'd had quite enough of this nonsense, and wrote to 'QAnswers', Q Magazine's authoritative rock itch-scratcher extraordinaire, asking the intrepid ask-arounders if there was any way in which the original recording could ever be made commercially available. Surprisingly, the answer came back that the compilers of the Cult Fiction series were looking into whether the original Edwin Astley recording of Randall And Hopkirk (Deceased), spectral harpsichord tingling and all, could be incorporated into a collection of TV detective themes pencilled in for the New Year. Needless to say, the mere suggestion that they were looking into the possibility of licensing otherwise unavailable original original original soundtrack recordings led to all manner of excitement and speculation. By the twin laws of averages and diminishing returns any compilation series onto its sixth volume should have long since started to run the already flimsy concept into the ground - and Trackspotting of course couldn't even manage a single volume without doing so - but this news suggested that they were all set to outdo all of their previous and indeed not inconsiderable achievements. Whatever the next Cult Fiction album ended up being called, it looked likely to be the album that a great many of the series' fans had always wished existed.
When This Is... Cult Fiction Royale duly appeared late in 1997, it wasn't exactly a 'detective themes' album as such, but neither was it the throwback to now-badly-outmoded Tarantino-worship that the continentally-skewed burger-scoffing title suggested. So... what exactly was it, then? Well, the cover artwork, showing an old-skool petrol-guzzler, a foxy chick in a Paloma Faith-esque wallpaper-pattern jumpsuit, and what experts believe to be Matthew McConaughey's character from Dazed And Confused as rendered by a court artist who'd just been fired for being slightly too accurate, was giving nothing away, and the tracklisting appeared, on first glance at least, to be bewilderingly all over the place. The 'theme', if there could be said to be anything resembling a tangible 'theme' at all, appeared simply to be 'being the best Cult Fiction compilation of the lot', and it's fair to say that this ambitious benchmark was one that they ended up vaulting with ease. Whether by accident or design - well, come on, it's going to be 'design' isn't it - they had managed to gather together just about everything that a Cult Fiction devotee might concievably still want in the one place. Well, technically two places, given it was a double CD set, but you get the general idea.
In fact, This Is... Cult Fiction Royale was such a mighty collection of tracks that it was easy to miss the fact that a good thirty percent of them had already appeared on previous Cult Fiction compilations. And indeed sufficiently mighty that even when you did notice this, it hardly seemed to matter, though admittedly the fact that many were also appearing in full this time around did help a bit. Joe 90 (with 'wow' reassuringly intact), Hill Street Blues, The Return Of The Saint, The Professionals, Man In A Suitcase, Get Carter, The Champions, Avenues And Alleyways from The Protectors, Mission Impossible, Danger Man, The Man From UNCLE, Strange Report, The New Avengers and Tales Of The Unexpected (the only one of them still to be suffering from early-fade-out-itis) all show up for a repeat performance, but they're all such great pieces of music that you really don't mind hearing them again in a new context. On top of which, there's a couple of welcome surprises amongst their fellow returnees; the James Bond Theme is in its original Connery-era single-version guise as credited to (cough) 'Monty Norman', there's a thundering funked-up take on The Sweeney as recorded for mysteriously undiscernible purposes by library music mainstay Simon Wallace and alternative comedy's own piano-pounder Simon Brint (and yes, the alarming drumming may well be courtesy of Rowland Rivron), and as an entertaining white elephant there's the 12" extended version of a partially successful 'Big Beat' reworking of the original The Professionals theme by Blue Boy, which as you're probably suspecting by was indeed the less successful follow-up to the still-fantastic earlier-in-the-year hit Remember Me.
And what of that much-vaunted 'new stuff' that allowed for this equally much-vaunted 'new context'? Well, the two-disc set gets off to a barnstorming start with two previously-neglected instrumentals that had then recently been dusted off for renewed advert-fuelled popularity, Lalo Schifrin's car-bigging-up main title theme from Bullitt and Jean-Jacques Perrey's Lucozade-proffering early Moog gurgle-out E.V.A., alongside - more impressively still - the single version of John Barry's oddly ill-fittingly Cold War-evoking theme from ITC's most entertainingly ludicrous series of the lot, The Persuaders, which up until then had been eluding compilers on account of headache-inducing rights complications, with many a collection having to opt to use a dreary orchestral rendering in its stead. Yer Schifrin also makes everyone's day with Dirty Harry's scorching opening title accompaniment, which rumbles on ominously far longer than it has any right to before losing control and going wildly overboard with the blaring brass, yodelling backing vocal ladies and wah-wah disobedience, along with the more subdued On The Way To San Mateo from further along in the Bullitt soundtrack, while John Barry performs much the same honours with his oft-overlooked recurring Bond incidental instrumental 007. On the more obscure and televisual side, there's not only the shrill flute-driven funk workout that introduced a corduroy-clad post-Doctor Who Jon Pertwee grilling a team of b-list celebrities about an extended ripoff of Cluedo in Whodunnit?, Laurie Johnson's close-but-no-final-verse-trumpet-voluntary single-length reading of The Avengers, the surprisingly tuneful 'gritty' urban eighties orchestra-hit-driven intro from Dempsey & Makepeace, and The Les Reed Brass' top drawer cover of The Saint, there's also the Simon Park Orchestra's it's-a-lager-not-a-tune-tastic theme from Van Der Valk - probably one of the most frequently forgotten chart-toppers in top forty history - and even better still its even more regularly overlooked b-side; Distant Hills, better known to school-averse perusers of pre-daytime TV daytime TV schedules as the closing theme from Crown Court, and which is arguably worth the price of admission alone.
Yet amazingly, if we're extending the 'price of admission' analogy still further and indeed beyond the point where it really makes any logical or cogent sense, all of this above-alluded to musical fantasticness is really only sitting in those dusty display cases in the foyer that people just sort of wander past without taking much notice of, and what everyone really wants to see (or, erm, hear) is the main attraction; or, in less ridiculous terms, those excitement-arousing themes taken directly from the soundtracks of TV episodes. And they really are 'taken directly' - in the absence of easily sourceable master tapes, a deal was struck with the then-present rights holders of ATV/ITC's televisual output whereby they were literally dubbed from master copies taken directly from the archive, with the opening and closing themes as heard on screen bolted together into something at least approximating 'full length'. While this does mean that they're unavoidably presented here in trebly flat mono and there are some jarringly shoddy bits of editing on display - someone was clearly labouring under the misapprehension that Gerry Anderson's 'Century 21' ident was actually part of the UFO theme, whilst a butterfingered fragment of the sponsor message from the US broadcasts somehow found its way into the theme from The Baron - mere words alone cannot adequately express how much of a thrill it was to finally have high quality as-heard-on-TV copies of those two along with The Prisoner, Randall And Hopkirk (Deceased), Department S, Jason King, Stingray, Fireball XL5, Supercar, Space: 1999, Tiswas and Sapphire & Steel (or, as the back cover tracklisting has it, 'Steele'), complete with chattering teleprinters, screeching car u-turns and Patrick McGoohan thumping a desk crudely sellotaped over the top. Of course, dilligent detective work has since led to a great many compilations using the original tapes of all these and many more besides and in glorious properly mastered stereo to boot (yes, alright, and mono in quite a few cases too, but you get the general idea), with the result that in retrospect they make This Is... Cult Fiction Royale feel like a bit of a disjointed listen as a whole, but at the time it was a massive step up and indeed step forwards from the home-made cassettes that hapless soundtrack fans had been trying and failing to put together to their satisfaction for far too long.
Inevitably, with a compilation and indeed an archive-scouring endeavour on this scale, there are a couple of moments where This Is... Cult Fiction Royale doesn't quite hit the Century 21 Productions target. The perfectly decent but all-too-familiar single versions of Thunderbirds and Captain Scarlet And The Mysterons show up instead of their superior on-screen readings - quite why they didn't take the opportunity to include the much-sought-after mock-bubblegum-psych oh-no-some-boxes-are-falling-quite-near-me closing song from the latter really is a mystery - although on the other hand we should be grateful they averted the weedier onscreen original of the Joe 90 theme in favour of the hefty Northern Soul-favoured single version, 'wow' or otherwise. Presumably because the rights were then owned by the same people as the erstwhile ATV/ITC shows, we get the horrendous beefing-up of the theme from The Magic Roundabout from the now quietly forgotten Nigel Planer-narrated episodes, though the most jarring plot-straying is saved for right at the end, when listeners get to 'enjoy' all seven bastard minutes of the the are-they-still-going-on-about-that-am-I-still-on-that-fecking-island moping-sax main theme from the show they could never quite stop trying to convince you that you liked, Twin Peaks, and more incongruously still Vangelis' complete and unedited Blade Runner Blues, which may very well be an astonishing piece of music but is not really one that should be taking up several decades at the end of two discs' worth of walloping drums and swaggering brass. Though if you did give up halfway through, then you'll have missed the suspiciously prolonged blast of silence at the end; 'hidden tracks' at the beginning and end of CDs were all the rage back then - indeed, it's quite possible that some have still never even been stumbled across - and what better way to end this collection than with the inattentive-listener-alarming actual literal binging and indeed bonging ATV 'zoom' jingle, blaring out as if an episode of Pipkins is about to start? Actually, why wasn't the theme from Pipkins on here? Yes, alright, moving on...
Although whether they were actually that good at going out on a high as individual compilations is open to question, This Is... Cult Fiction Royale really did end the Cult Fiction series on a high; presumably it was a commercial rather than artistic decision to finish the series here, but even so it drew a pretty satisfying line under two years and nine discs' worth of expertly-chosen tracks that most of the target audience had probably never even imagined they'd get to own on CD. And that wasn't even the end of the story; in 2004, Virgin saw fit to release The Best Of Cult Fiction, which collapsed highlights from the earlier volumes (though frustratingly no Eurovision stuff) onto two discs alongside a handful of newcomers and a couple of selections from Tarantino's later offerings, and a revised This Is Easy, replacing a couple of the original's more obscure selections with contributions from the likes of Serge Gainsbourg and Mike Flowers (and yes, they did take the opportunity to upgrade those horrendous re-recorded Burt Bacharach and Sandie Shaw tracks). Meanwhile, there was no updated Trackspotting.
So, This Was... Cult Fiction. A series of compilations that may not have had the era-defining cultural cachet of Now That's What I Call Music, the slick combination of chart hit crowd-drawing and collector-friendly obscure 12" mixes of Anthems: Electronic 80s, or the sheer FOR THE SAKE OF ALL THAT IS DECENT AND HUMANE HIT IT WITH A BIN of Summer Chart Party, but which still make for interesting and enjoyable listening today, and which more importantly went very well with your Britpop, your Loungecore, your unironic love of Eurovision, your alcopops, your liking for the sort of films that the 'cineastes' seldom enthused over, your back issues of Loaded that you couldn't bear to throw away, and your falling off a chair while attempting to impress 'That Becky'. Significantly, the exotic jazzy stylings and tendency towards chilled-out extended album-closers also went surprisingly well with an unexpected various-reasons-prompted shift in musical mood that happened shortly after This Is... Cult Fiction Royale came out... but that's another story.
