Looks Unfamiliar #10: Mark Griffiths – It Was Definitely An Audience Member, If You'll Pardon The Pun

Looks Unfamiliar 10 - Mark Griffiths

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 does. Joining Tim this time is writer Mark Griffiths, who shares his all too vivid recollections of Five Minutes by Mainframe, The Bloke Who Pulled His Pants Down On Kilroy, Disneyland by Frankie Goes To Hollywood, Charles Hawtrey as a vampire on Runaround, BBC Records And Tapes' Off Beat Sound Effects, and missing the first episode of a new series of Doctor Who because you were at the Doctor Who exhibition in Blackpool. Along the way we’ll be speculating on how Robert Kilroy-Silk's personal archives are organised, what 'Door Creak With Eno' might sound like, and how to respond to a Doctor Who-themed Sophie's Choice.

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Support Looks Unfamiliar by buying one of Tim's books! Top Of The Box - The Story Behind Every BBC Records And Tapes Single is available in paperback here or from the Kindle Store here. And there's several other books to choose from here...

Fun At One - The Shows I Couldn't Find...

If you've been reading Fun At One, you'll know that there's a lot of fascinating stuff in Radio 1's Comedy Back Catalogue. A lot of it was available during research, some - notably Chris Morris' 1990 debut on the station - was smoked out as a result of the book being published, and some... well it's just as elusive as ever. Here are ten shows that could do with turning up - some of which aren't even in the BBC Sound Archive - so if you know where to get hold of any of them, please give me a shout...


The Baron

Other than a very brief clip of him startling commuters with a portable record player, absolutely nothing has turned up of Radio 1's original camera-shy anarchist of the airwaves.


Star Special - Michael Palin

In the late seventies and early eighties, Radio 1 gave over the post-Top Forty slot on Sunday evenings to celebrities acting as DJs, including David Bowie, Frank Zappa, Neil Innes, Billy Connolly, Clare Grogan, Jasper Carrott, Sparks, Mickey Dolenz, Ian Dury, Debbie Harry, Chas & Dave and countless others. Most of them are out there, but not the appearance by a Ripping Yarns/Life Of Brian-era Palin. You might also want to keep an eye out for him talking about Monty Python: The Case Against on a certain magazine show we'll be hearing quite a lot about in the next couple of entries...


Marvin The Paranoid Android on Studio B15

As part of promotion for The Hitch-Hiker's Guide To The Galaxy, Marvin The Paranoid Android took part in a phone-in on Radio 1's magazine show Studio B15, with his responses written by Douglas Adams - who also later appeared on Studio B15's& successor Saturday Live to give a similarly elusive plug for The Meaning Of Liff. And that's not the last we'll be hearing about Studio B15...


Beatnews

Long before hitting the big time, Stephen Fry contributed a regular parody of Radio 1's Newsbeat to Studio B15, which came to an abrupt end when he turned in a parody of jingoistic Falklands War coverage. BBC Bias in action, there. Though even that wasn't his first appearance - Studio B15 also ran a feature on Fry and Laurie around the time of The Cellar Tapes.


Not The Nuptials

More than likely the least reverential part of the BBC's Royal Wedding coverage - a one-off Radio 1 special by the Not The Nine O'Clock News gang. They also showed up loads of times in various combinations on Roundtable and especially on Studio B15, notably reading out Griff and Pam's 'Valentine Poems' and a behind-the-scenes feature on the making of Series Three. Surprisingly for a show with such an enduringly obsessive fanbase, none of this seems to be out there.


'neil'

The most media-friendly of The Young Ones was all over the BBC at the height of the show's popularity, most notably guesting on Lenny Henry's Radio 1 show, where he attempted to persuade the host to play an Incredible String Band record. neil was also a guest on countless editions of Roundtable and Saturday Live, showing up on the latter on one occasion with 'Mike' in tow; possibly the only in-character promotional appearance Christopher Ryan ever did. Incidentally, Dawn French and Ade Edmondson, amongst others, also showed up on Lenny's show.


Punt And Dennis - Follow That Star!

When The Mary Whitehouse Experience became a hit, there were numerous attempts to get the cast involved in the more general day to day happenings on Radio 1, including this serialised retelling of the Nativity for Simon Mayo's Breakfast Show in 1989. Unlike just about everything else under the Mary Whitehouse Experience banner, this has never resurfaced anywhere.


The Borderline

A one-off 1991 pilot for a Friday Night variety show recorded at the venue of the same name, hosted by Lenny Henry and with material written by a very young Graham Linehan and Arthur Mathews; so obscure that the writers didn't even know it had gone out. Then there's also the dance music shows guest-hosted by Delbert Wilkins, which few heard due to them going out over New Year. And Tracey Ullman briefly had a show too, which there's scant evidence of out there.


Manchester - So Much To Answer For

Not quite his Radio 1 debut - he'd produced and presented Saturday Live for a spell - but Mark Radcliffe's association with the station really began with this idiosyncratic 1990 documentary about the 'Madchester' music scene. Also rather difficult to find is Lard's 1993 series Glitter And Twisted, a comic Glam Rock retrospective presented by Noddy Holder, as indeed is anything of the variously Mark Radcliffe/Mark Kermode-hosted arts show The Guest List.


Radio Fab FM

A couple of hours before The End Of An Era went out on BBC1, Mike Smash and Dave Nice took over Radio 1 for the afternoon. No prizes for guessing what got played.

So if you know where to get hold of any of the above, please get in touch. Or indeed if you know where to get hold of Jake Thackray presenting My Kind Of Folk, or all three of The Goodies on Roundtable, or Spinal Tap on Saturday Live, or Andy Partridge's 'Agony Andy' segments for Janice Long's show, or the Cult Film Corner on Holiday On The Buses, or complete editions of Walters' Weekly, or Radio 1's 'Easy Night' with Kevin Greening, Jo Whiley and Graham Norton, or...

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Fun At One - The Story Of Comedy At BBC Radio 1 is available in paperback here or from the Kindle Store here.

Unfinished Radiophonic Business

Yes, it's a great big post about the BBC Radiophonic Workshop! Sort of. One of the problems with taking a short break from this blogging malarkey - which I have done recently, in order to give you all a chance to read The Very Best Of Paintbox, The Big Book Of TATP and Super Expanded Deluxe Edition (there'll be a test later) - is that you invariably end up leaving a post that you thought was going to turn into another chart-topper half-finished, and then when you eventually come back to it you just can't work out what you would have been driving towards.

One such yanked-from-the-archives half-finished chart-topper-that-never-was began with this promising-sounding bit of history about the BBC Radiophonic Workshop...

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If you own the excellent career-spanning 2CD compilation BBC Radiophonic Workshop - A Retrospective, chances are that you may not have listened to the second disc very much. In fact, you may not even have sat through it in full at all.

Stretching from 1981 to 1997, it captures the Workshop's composers, musicians, and providers of burbling scraping noises in the years after computerised sound manipulation - or, if you will, samplers, sequencers and software - had revolutionised their whole approach to making music. In the exciting new World Of Tomorrow of MIDI and the Fairlight CMI and what have you, it was now possible for those with the technological knowhow to create the kind of full-sounding ultra-realistic soundtracks that TV producers had always wanted almost at the touch of a button, though arguably at the expense of the sonic invention, make-do-and-mend electronic creativity, and, well, ridiculous noises that had characterised the Workshop's earlier output. And it's hard to argue with the idea that, as a consequence, while their compositions and arrangements became infinitely more sophisticated and suited to their intended purpose, this was somewhat at the expense of actual standalone listenability. While that second disc does indeed do a sterling job of representing the breadth and variety of their output during those years, and there are a couple of brighter moments such as Paddy Kingsland's tracks from The Hitchhikers Guide To The Galaxy (which are much more listenable than they have any right or reason to be), Peter Howell's decidedly odd 'escaping fish' rendition of Saint-Saens' Aquarium, stray bits of backing atmospherics from the likes of Captain Zep - Space Detective and Ghost In The Water, the unexpected familiarity of opening theme from late eighties Children's BBC technologically risible 'computer hacking' thriller Dead Entry, and the fact that something called Slambash Wangs Of A Compo Gormer was actually broadcast, taken as a whole it's a bit of a musical endurance test and perhaps it's hardly surprising that so many should choose to give it a wide berth.

What this has also meant though, unfortunately, is that another chapter of the Workshop's history has been given almost as wide a berth by association. Perhaps understandably, a widespread belief seems to have taken hold that the only 'true' incarnation of the Radiophonic Workshop was when the likes of Delia Derbyshire, John Baker and David Cain were chopping up bits of backward tape with school geometry sets before whizzing off to the Roundhouse to listen to AMM melting a bin. There is certainly some mileage in this in theory, but in practice it just ends up excluding the second wave of prog-rock one-man-bands that took up residence in the mid-seventies with their Micro Moogs, vocoders and funny two-guitars-stuck-together things in the early seventies; the aforementioned likes of Paddy Kingsland, Roger Limb and Peter Howell, who were collectively responsible for all that stuff that sounded like Henry VIII playing with a pocket calculator that you used to get backing film of Russian Space Station experiments.

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A pretty strong starting point, but where was it all leading? Well, that's as big a mystery as The Chem Lab Mystery (Maddalena Fagandini, 1963).