Looks Unfamiliar #32: Vikki Gregorich And Jeff Lewis – No It’s Just A Radio That’s Been Left On

Looks Unfamiliar 32: Vikki Gregorich And Jeff Lewis

Looks Unfamiliar is a podcast in which writer and occasional broadcaster Tim Worthington talks to a guest about some of the things that they remember that nobody else ever seems to. Joining Tim this time are Game Developer Jeff Lewis and Board Game Collector Vikki Gregorich, who are going back three spaces in the hope of finding anyone else who remembers Animalympics, Conrad’s War, The Last American, the books of Paul Biegel, Harry Harrison’s Deathworld series and The Secret Cabaret. Along the way we’ll be evaluating the lack of viable life choices for anyone named ‘Ulysses S. Pilgrim’, debating the identity of ‘soft lad who stood on a pole’, and perusing adverts for Genuine One Hundred Percent Legal Generic Seeds.

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Looks Unfamiliar #28: Jenny Morrill - I Just Get Pictures Of Actual Boots

Looks Unfamiliar 28 - Jenny Morrill

Looks Unfamiliar is a podcast in which writer and occasional broadcaster Tim Worthington talks to a guest about some of the things that they remember that nobody else ever seems to. Joining Tim this time is writer Jenny Morrill, who’s rifling through an eighties teenager’s diary in search of any evidence of Boots Global Collection, the Just Seventeen Yearbook, a P&O Advert using La Mer, an Eastern European animation about a bird that gets turned into a bat, Melody Maker column Diary Of A Manic Street Preachers Fan, and a film her dad remembers about some sheep. Along the way we’ll also be finding out which face mask Oasis fans favoured, who ‘Andrew’ was in Rainbow, and which is the most animated out of Thom Yorke and a poster of Thom Yorke, not to mention examining the evidence of The Snowman’s sinister culture-jamming agenda.

You can get Tim's new book, Can’t Help Thinking About Me, from here.

DOWNLOAD IT HERE - SUBSCRIBE IN ITUNES - RSS

You can find more editions of Looks Unfamiliar here. 

Looks Unfamiliar is hosted by Podnose.

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Support Looks Unfamiliar by buying one of Tim's books! Can't Help Thinking About Me is brand new and features loads of brand new material, and you can get it in paperback here or from the Kindle store here.

The Great British Bake-Away

Hit BBC shows - and stars - being snatched away by commercial rivals is nothing new, and neither are indignance and outrage at it happening. Back at the very dawn of ITV, there was an episode of The Goon Show in which all of the characters defected to the flashier new advertising-funded service one by one, leaving just the ever-loyal Bluebottle to man the entire BBC by himself. In the early nineties, Chris Morris launched into a ferocious rant against his former colleagues from GLR who'd upped and offed to the newly-launched Virgin Radio the second that Ian Virgin waved a huge cheque under their noses. And it's worth stressing that it has sometimes worked in the other direction too, as anyone who has made it through an edition of H&P@BBC will tell you. If such people actually exist, that is.

So it's not really any surprise that the makers of The Great British Bake Off should have taken the bait and airlifted the entire show to Channel 4. In fairness they really had the BBC over a barrel with this one, and the extra TEN MILLION they were demanding for the right to keep hold of the rights to the show would have provoked all manner of mouth-foaming and collapsing in the gutter about RA RA LICENCE FEE, so the BBC just couldn't win. Not that we should have expected any better from the production company behind Why Don't You Speak English? but that's by the by. This is the Brave New World of broadcasting that Rupert Murdoch has been promising us in badly punctuated lower-case tweets for a while now, and with the BBC on the back foot and unable to do right for doing wrong we're probably going to be seeing a lot more of this kind of thing in the near future. In fact, the only BBC Stars we can be certain won't defect to commercial channels are TV 'Girl' and 'Clown', and that's probably just because everyone's too scared to ask them.

In amongst all the controversy and debate and GIFs of Paul Hollywood having his cake and eating it, though, there's one important detail that's been missed - it almost certainly will not work. The Great British Bake Off is a show that has caught the imagination of viewers precisely because of how it had to fit around the restrictions, resources and general 'house style' of BBC television, becoming distinctive and engaging viewing almost by accident. Over on commercial television, much like David Dickinson not so long ago, it will almost certainly get lost amongst the hours and hours and hours of similar fare, and its character - which, let's be honest about it, was what drew viewers in rather than the actual format itself - will be gone. Chances are it will fall flat on its face and they will only have their own greedy selves to blame. In the meantime, the BBC - if they have any sense - will have found a new unlikely subject area to successfully shoehorn into their schedules.

Why am I so certain of this? Because there is a long history of performers, presenters, writers, producers and even entire programmes moving from the BBC to commercial television and vice versa, seemingly unaware that their creative niche and indeed their audience had derived entirely from the structure and atmosphere that they were working in, and losing both almost before the ink had dried on the contract. But I'm not going to bore you by going on about them. At least not as part of this article. Instead, here's me on the radio a while back, talking to Mark Thompson about the notable and notorious failures (and the count-them-on-one-hand successes) of the Great TV Defections, from The World According To Smith And Jones to Bruce Forsyth's Big Night, and of course a certain Mr. Parkinson. After which I will be signing an exclusive contract with Channel 5.

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If you've enjoyed this article, you my book The Camberwick Green Procrastination Society in paperback here, on the Kindle Store here, or as a full-colour eBook here.

The Unbearable Lightness Of Boing

The Comedy Cash-In Book Book, Ben Baker's book on the history of the TV Comedy tie-in large format paperback, has recently been reissued in an expanded form with even more on the shows that shouldn't have made it into print but somehow did. You can find out more about it here. At the time of the original release, I wrote a piece to promote it about my favourite example of the genre, Zen And The Magic Of Roundabout Maintenance, which you can now read again below...

Like Tin Machine, Carry On Columbus and, well, any other early nineties wheel-reinvention of a much-loved cultural phenomenon, history tells us that Nigel Planer's redubbing of The Magic Roundabout was a best-forgotten excursion into artistic self-indulgence that nobody asked for. In fact, like Tin Machine and, well, probably not like Carry On Columbus, it was a little more complicated than that.

Co-written with his scriptwriting Not The Nine O'Clock News/Spitting Image alumnus brother Roger (who also narrated some episodes when Nigel was otherwise engaged), these new scripts never sought to replicate Eric Thompson's much-loved original loose reinterpretations of the French originals, but instead pursued their own comic agenda, mixing topical satire with hefty and often obscure swipes at the late sixties counterculture (which, of course, Nigel had originally made his name parodying) that The Magic Roundabout had more recently found itself bizarrely tied in with, courtesy of planks who insist that anything that ever showed a bit of imagination had to have been all about teh drugz. Admittedly this approach didn't come across too well when slapped over the top of actual episodes of The Magic Roundabout, especially when most viewers - and it originally went out as part of a straight-faced breakfast news show - were probably looking for a quick fix of childhood-recreating nostalgia.

Where it did work better was in two long-forgotten spinoffs; the bizarre spoof 'making of' documentary The Return Of The Magic Roundabout, which saw Nigel drawn into a Cold War-like world of backward messages, missing tapes and 'silenced' BBC employees, and the accompanying book Zen And The Magic Of Roundabout Maintenance. With a surprisingly large number of pages to fill and no particular brief, the Planers simply let their countercultural amusements run riot, telling the history of the show's characters in a wild psychedelic blur of references to celebrated drug literature, Oz magazine's unintelligible design stance, and what may or may not be a genuine photo of Dylan with The Beatles. There are also Zebedee-driven meditations on Stephen Hawking's recent theories, a map of where far-out sixties pop hits have become lost in Dylan's subconscious, and plenty of swipes at The Magic Roundabout's one-time scheduling rival Hector's House. And did the latter ever get his own peculiar obscure sixties reference-heavy spinoff book? No he didn't. Stitch that, 'Hector'.

You can also find the podcast that myself and Ben did to promote the book, featuring us talking about the best and worst examples of the genre, here. And if you want to hear more of me talking about The Magic Roundabout, then you can find that here.

ITV 59 - All Your ITV Favourites (And Roland's Countdown To Christmas): Christmas Special!

Merry Christmas! If you're a regular reader of this blog, you may well remember that, earlier in the year, we ran a special series of articles looking at ITV's inter-programme iconography of years gone by, which took in startup sequences, IDEANTS, MORE IDENATS, EVEN MORE IDENEATASF, Oracle, Children's ITV, The News, Schools And Colleges, TV-am and Channel 4, and - but of course - Continuity Slides. You may also recall that the previous year, we ran a similar series about the BBC, ending with a Christmas Special that opened with an impassioned plea to defend the BBC against the machinations of politicians and media moguls with your bare hands if you have to.

This corresponding look at ITV's old-skool festive trimmings will thus correspondingly open with an impassioned plea to, um, watch ITV every now and then when some thing that you think looks quite good from the trailer but then turns out to actually be a bit boring when you see it though it used to be good when they had Spitting Image and The Equalizer or something is on. Yes, there's not really that much shouting to do, so instead let's get straight on with the utterly respectful and thoroughly technically detailed celebrating of the golden age of TV continuity...

Needless to say, it was pretty much par for the course for the regional ITV companies to add a bit of seasonal snazz to their all-too-familiar idents (NO THIS MU ST NOT RTEMBER THE REAL REASONS WE CELEBNRATE CHRISTHMAS IT IS NOT BECAUSE NELE). Up at the top there you can see Yorkshire's bird-tastic 'Chevron' caught in a sudden downpour of snow, LWT's bing-bonging racially dubious sitcom-bookending letters caught under a deluge of, erm, snow, Granada at least having the gritty northern integrity to use a bit of frost instead of all that snow them namby pamby Southerners are all wearing now (yes, we know Yorkshire isn't in the 'South', but try telling that to a born and bred Granadalander), Central going overboard with the satin and tat and inadvertently turning their famed 'world' into something resembling a sought-after ancient artefact with mystical powers in a mid-eighties post-Indiana Jones adventure movie, and finally those inverterate scrooges at Ulster casually adorning their usual insignia with the sort of lazy colour scheme and iconography that you'd more normally find on a generic sharp-cornered Christmas Card sent to you by a local business that you'd briefly spoken to on the phone back in February but they've forgotten to put your name in it anyway. Yeah, Deck The Halls.

One peculiar offshoot of this was that the regional companies became bizarrely obsessed with using their idents (DONT FEED THE NELE DONT LET HIM KNOW ITS CHIRISMTAS TIME AGAIN) as putative wrapping paper patterns. At the top we can see a particularly HTV-obsessed Teddy, doubtless hoping that Santa has brought him a DVD of a celebrated HTV-sourced supernatural children's serial which comes with a book about all those sort of shows written by someone not a million miles from here, and below that Central breaking out the lavish opulence to suggest that all manner of lavish blockbusting high-spectacle programming was bursting to get out from beneath that paper. And exactly what lavish blockbusting high-spectacle programming did they have in store for us that Christmas...?

Oh.

If you were lucky, the continuity announcers in your region would similarly make an effort and loosen their ties by, ironically, straightening their ties a bit. Here's Granada's top levity-merchant Colin Weston bidding viewers a jolly Yuletide...

...and Charles Foster's getting nattily in on the act too...

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 fellow Granada anchor Jim 'Beardy Man' Pope doing his trademark 'refreshed' fivedollarsgedouddahere late night bit to camera, 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.

Some regions were so giddy with Advent excitement that they'd even stump up the readies for a full-on animated Christmassy trailer, which makes it all the more ironic that this particular example from TVS should be so breezily fanfaring the company that would later buy the rights to their archive then promptly trash all the paperwork so that nobody could repeat or release any of the programmes even if they could navigate all the labyrinthine rights clearances and disproportionate licensing fees surrounding forgotten videotaped studiobound nonsense from the past that only about three people on The Mausoleum Club would be interested in buying on DVD in the first place anyway. And if that bastard mouse has been anywhere near The Boy Who Won The Pools with a big magnet, it'll be Song Of The South, The Story Of Menstruation and Nazi Supermen Are Our Superiors on a loop on Christmas Day next year

Anyway, what festive delights from the TVS archive are Walt's boys currently blocking access to...?

Oh.

ITV as a whole would even sometimes fork out for its own generic one-size-fits-all Let's Get The Regions Together overarching animated promos, such as this one featuring a dilapidated Santa apparently played by a melted TV 'Ernie' (Sesame Street), and the below slightly more classy one which appears to feature the houses from the Rainbow title sequence being visited by Peter Petrelli and Sylar after they'd acquired that 'light' power that was in the Volume Three publicity material but then never featured in the show itself. Put a sock in it, 'Mohinder'.

And from three wildly disparate years (well, sort of), here are a couple of examples of how they routinely introduced their programming on the three Festive Big Guns. As you can clearly see, the ITV scheduling cards were somewhat slightly bigger on razzle-dazzle, iconographic tradition and indeed overall coherency than the equivalent offerings from the BBC.

Until, that was, the late eighties, when they suddenly got all abstract and computer graphical and subsequently never quite managed to recapture that lost impact, as can be seen above with the rather inappropriate choice of present for an ITV viewer of the BBC Globe, and the Swatch-esque counterpart to the Oh Fuck Off-era BBC2 logo. Can we move on to the next bit now? Thanks.

Those zany funsters at ITN were always first to jump on the Christmas bandwagon, as can be seen from their logo's wanderings in a giant snowflake-bedecked Winter Wonderland which perhaps didn't sit too comfortably with the latest updates about industrial unrest and hostage dramas, and from the year that one of their 'backroom boys' learned how to do a SCREEN$ on the ZX Spectrum. BONG Ninja steals computer disc from Research Centre BONG Blue Head On Legs evades Park Keepers for third day running BONG An attempt to attack Thorin with the Troll's Path is prevented by Not Being Able To Fucking Type BONG Can we stop now? BONG Alright pack it in or I'll start repeating my claim to have once finiBONGshed Bugaboo The Flea by hitting all the keys in frustration BONG right you fucker I'm BONG pulling the power supply out BONG yeah, not so Robot Voice now, are you?

Surprisingly, given how obsessed they were with the glitz and glamour (albeit glitz and glamour affixed to shoddy makeshift studio walls that fell over while someone cued up the wrong camera) all year round, TV-am were bafflingly subdued when it came to Christmastime, usually with just a tree and couple of decorations up in the studio and a couple of festively-themed items and caption card-trimmings per day. As you can see, the average late December schedule wasn't exactly overflowing with bluntly-named Holly And Ivy-evoking programme subdivisions, though hands up who initially misread that as 'Christmas Cockney'. Though of course there was the year that they put on Roland's Countdown To Christmas, a whole twenty four days' worth of Nyeh-Hehhhhh-fuelled advent calendar opening with nary a cricket bat in si*SMOOOSH*

Oh Channel 4. How well you started, with even the standard issue snow on the logo somehow managing to look arty and new and vital, but then you had to get all low-key and 'tasteful' and... well, we don't even like to think about the later years. But there's one thing we just can't help but mention...

Yes of course, it's 1987's 'Yes Of Course - Christmas On 4!' robots! Quite what possessed anyone to headlight the Festive Season with a bunch of smug trapped-finger-inviting sub-CP & Qwikstitch rickety Royal Bank Of Scotland-esque animated automatons playing a game of charades in which they were apparently required to guess the identity of specific generic times of year on overall channels rather than programme titles is anyone's guess, but they introduced those omnibus repeats of Dick Spanner like nobody's business. And let's see just what Christmassy fun Channel 4 had in store for us that year...

Oh.

Anyway, overall, this has been rather a fun trip through the outer reaches of the archives, if not quite as enjoyable nor indeed as funny as the BBC one was, and if that's not a metaphor for something very pertinent then frankly we don't know what is. And sorry about those intrusions into the text earlier. The IBA inform us that normal service has now been resumed.

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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.

ITV 59 - All Your ITV Favourites (And Eammon Holmes' Country Christmas Spectacular) Part Ten: Continuity Slides

Yes, it’s the moment you’ve all been waiting for, especially if you’ve absolutely no interest in base sarcasm with occasional factual accuracy about old-skool ITV presentation techniques but have still read nine lengthy (or, in some cases, not so lengthy) posts about it anyway – the final part of our Rifle Through ITV’s Big Bin Where They Threw All The Old Test Cards And Things Like That Once They’d Stopped Using Them. And that final bit of old-skool presentation? Why, it’s ‘continuity slides’ – in other words, those captions with a show title and accompanying photo that they used to flash up either side of ad breaks. And - as is par for the course for this sodding series, which has arguably proved for once and for all that the BBC is inherently better that its ad-laden rival - how many of the initially-thought-of list of examples do you think we actually managed to find? Clue: it’s not many…

Most of the time, you knew exactly where you were with ITV's continuity slides, and to be honest the above examples, from The Fonz to The Bloke Who Kept Impersonating The Fonz About Ten Years After Happy Days Had Finished, while certainly interesting to see, are so rational and reasonable that - you guessed it - it's not really possible to make any surrealist or sarcastic observations about them. Whatever The Crunch Bird is, though, it can fuck off.

Unlike the BBC, who would often keep using battered old continuity slides long after hosts, logos, timeslots and even entire formats had changed, ITV would regularly update their photographic placeholders and sometimes it's even possible to chart the evolution of long-running shows through their slides alone. Take, for example, Name That Tune, the seemingly erosion-defyingly enduring game show in which contestants would affect to be able to identify An American In Paris from a single piano thud; here we can see slides for the show both in its Peter Cook-presented days, and from its later rebranding as just plain Name Tune.

Sometimes, though, you do have to wonder exactly what impression of the shows they were trying to give. Witness the special edition of News At Ten On Ice, or the one for Spitting Image in the week that every public figure went on fire in the style of Bengal Matches. As for Home To Roost, presumably they just couldn't find any publicity photos in landscape format.

Sport, on the other hand, was always a bit more tricky, but luckily there was a steady supply of instantly recognisable off-the-shelf sporting iconography to reach for. Take, for example, the footballer modishly treated with a Computer-Pixel-stroke-Astro-Turf effect, Jake The Peg playing centre forward for United FC, and the edition of handily-titled Match Time coming live from the International Rubik's Clock Championship Finals 1986.

Due to their origins in another medium, lack of recognisable series iconography, and inevitable rights-hands-change-related loss of original promotional materials, films were trickier still and some ingenious solutions had to be sought. Like, for example, the bewilderingly sinister branding of whichever film they were actually showing under the umbrella banner 'Mel Brooks', the League Of Gentlemen-eulogised blanket coverage for Ghosts, Monsters And Legends-heavy oldies in a regular timeslot as 'Appointment With Fear' (though the contemporaneous 'horror film' slide featuring disparately-sized illustrations of Dracula, a mummy et al with the word 'BRRRRR' was sadly nowhere to be found), and the towel-throwing-in last resort of just showing a pile of unspooled film to denote 'movies' in general. Apparently Sitting Target is a 1972 UK crime thriller starring Oliver Reed, Ian McShane, Edward Woodward, June Brown and Tony Beckley, TV 'Harrison Chase'. Well yeah, that's obvious to the casual viewer.

There were times, of course, when for one reason or another an actual photo from the actual TV show just wouldn't do, and the tactics that were adopted to get around this often had interesting results to say the least. While World Of Sport sensibly opted for a non-canon-hued variation of the show's trademark stylised 'S' - Dickie Davis presumably having held out for a greater percentage on the rights to his face - Francis Wheen's heavyweight aahhhhh-as-you-like eight-million part history of the medium Television was rather bafflingly denoted by a cartoon bird looking through a Fox's Glacier Mint, and good ol' boy-friendly hoedown All Kinds Of Country by a Glam Rocker's discarded Rickenbacker. It's something of a relief, then, to find this perfectly sense-making example for Live From Her Majesty's, featuring regular headliners Those Musical Notes In 'Showbiz' Straw Hats. You remember them!

Needless to say, by the late eighties technology was getting ever swankier and the slides ever more swish and sophisticated, as illustrated by these tasteful and to-the-point ad-straddlers for long-running yet long-forgotten Telly Addicts For People Who Think The Doctor Whos Were In Order Jon Pertwee William Hartnell Sendhil Ramamurthy 'Belouis' Some' No Don't Argue With Me I Should Know I Used To Watch It Etc Etc We Love TV, 'light side of soccer' I-don't-know-why-you're-going-Saint-they-won't-be-picking-you-style-gag-heavy playground-imitatable pre-match punditry Saint And Greavsie, Kennedy-deliquiesced early afternoon proto-UKIPpery Daytime, and lost in the mists of time game show Concentration, as apparently presented by that bloke who's always on 8 Out Of 10 Cats.

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 that sophistication-era slide for The Bill featuring Bob Cryer in front of rolling clouds, 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.

Meanwhile, over at Channel 4, there was never any such eccentricity. They did their research, they got their proper cast-featuring still from the shows, and they promoted them without a hint of absurdity, inexplicability or just plain lack of relation to any recognisable programme contents.

And, well, that just about wraps it up for our lukewarmly recieved jaunt through ITV's non-programmey bits of days gone by, which only involved minimal borderline libel of Walt Disney. Thanks for joining us in all the ident-mocking fun, or if you will all the non-'mock'-mocking fun, which I'm sure you'll agree ha

hich is why there wasn't any room to talk about that annoying Granada thing with the window clea

y sound at all, just the still picture of The Fonz, as if to say "(.....................)amundo", and they went straight into the ad break; presumably he was too 'cool' f

NMO THIS ITV MUST STOP

SOTP

PELASE RETURN TO BULLYING SELF-PROMTOION WITH IMEMDIATE EFFECT

HELLO AEREA M AN FROM TWITER

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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.