BBC OR ITV

I notice that CITV finally leaves its 20s this weekend., this was rather a like a slap in the face with the old stick. This got me to musing on my youth as seen through the square eyed boy that I was. There is a common myth that when growing up you were either a BBC kid or a (C)ITV kid, this is as false as my wife’s continued assumption that my parents banned me from watching ITV kids programmes. For the record, they didn’t, how could they, they were at work, I remember with great fondness letting myself in from school and climbing up onto the kitchen surface to help myself to a packet of Skydivers and a Cherry Coke then settling down to watch Sons and Daughters in one of our totally cool egg shaped swivel chairs.

It was basically this but with a heady whiff
of 70s channelled through the eye scorchingly
palette of orange.

 

There are some hard and fast facts about the eclectic diet of children’s TV that are universal. Grab hold of any child in their late thirties, apply a Chinese burn or a chicken scratch and they will confess to the following:

Blue Peter

Blue Peter was never good. It does not have a hold on our childhood hearts one little bit. Sure there was the occasional moment when children’s presenter maverick Simon Groom cracked a funny, or they tried to burn some Cubs with a camp fire or Sarah Greene looked slightly hot. And yes I did enter a design competition for a new Peter Duncan suit – but here is the rub – there was nothing else on in this time slot! In the early days I am pretty sure BBC2 was all Ceefax or test card, ITV had gone to the news prematurely and that was it. We were not watching it out of choice; we were watching it because well-meaning parents up and down the country were using it as a televisual Ritalin to calm us before tea. They never watched it with us because the producers were wise to the fact that if parents saw how trite the programme was they would worry for our collective sanity, so every week ‘Mums and Aunts or Dads and Uncles and Grandparents’ were ‘sent out of the room’ so that we could make stuff for them. Total genius smokescreen, but it was the children who suffered. How many house fires were started by candles attached to wire coat hangers shrouded in highly flammable tinsel? The fact it is still going is one of life's great secrets.

This was not a phone-in. This was three presenters calling their
agents. I like these three despite everything else though.

The Smurfs and Super Gran

The Smurfs was the only child friendly bit of TV immediately after Sunday Lunch. This was designed to make youths up and down our  Sceptred Isle wash up the carnage of the roast in double quick time. In our house we would do this – my sister and I – arguing about who would wash and who would dry. Soaking never seemed to be an option as this would look as though we hadn’t completed the job – so the loser would always wash and boil their little hands in the volcanic temperature of the water. The hairs never grew back on my hands. Still The Smurfs were OK. I would credit them as highly as a diversion, there was singing, bright colours and terrible stories in a kind of Snow White/Hobbit mash-up with blue food dye kind of way. It served a purpose. Later that Sunday, after everyone had been napping, homework had been grudgingly done (for grudgingly please read ‘half-arsed attempt’) came Super Gran. I hated this programme. It personified cheap and British patronising TV dreamed up in such a way that a foetus would feel intellectually superior. The scripts were so poor it made Worzel Gummidge look like Pushkin. Anybody who tells you that this truly bizarre Tam o'Shanter wearing aggressive octogenarian was a force for good is not of sane mind. She should have known better! Taking her grandson into battle with local organised crime is punishable by prison these days. It was an on screen migraine of accents and plot lines (this coming from a once resident of Caledonia) so the people who awarded it an Emmy simply must have been on acid during the voting period. It had so many big names attached to it from Billy Connolly’s theme tune to Spike Milligan and George Best I just cannot fathom how it ended up so awful.

Really? I mean REALLY George?!

 

ThunderCats

One word, GENIUS. ‘Got to reach sword of omens’, ‘ThunderCats Ho!’. The creators’ clever use of cat breed as a racial signifier to suggest to all children that we can co-exist in harmony was ground-breaking.  It also taught us that Mummies were a little bit iffy. I have yet to see the current re-boot of the franchise, I am sure it doesn’t hold a candle to the feline original, but I am sure it is still pretty cracking. Thursdays I believe, just before we went swimming, followed by a giant cookie from Waitrose.

The eternal question, 'What kind of pet would a cat have?'
was finally answered.

 

The Pink Panther and Snoopy

Unusual bedfellows I hear you say. But not really. Apart from the regular slot on a Saturday after that bizarre football scores programme front by David Icke, the Pink Panther went onto a random scheduling life much the same as Snoopy. These cartoons were a bit like Easter, you knew it was coming, you knew you would get and egg of some sort but when it was handed to you the joy of feeling its weight, filled with Smarties was almost overwhelming. And that is the thing with these cartoons, you knew a cartoon was coming but when you heard it was one of these you had a full-fat cartoon, a cartoon with add-ons, in the Panther show you got not just one Panther but sometimes two, a dragonfly or an aardvark and perhaps a French detective. In the Schultz corner, pretty much always a double hitter, some comedy mime where a dog and bird pretend to be fighter pilots, a miskicked football and some wisdom. These were rare and treasured times. The Pink Panther once made me cry when he was homeless on Christmas Eve and it started to snow. Charlie Brown also managed this with A Charlie Brown Christmas. We have never had a shit Christmas Tree as a result of this. These would be weekday during a holiday period, mid-afternoon, accompanied by some sort of luxury snack, macadamias perhaps or even a stolen liqueur.

Christmas seems to linger like a bad fart in a lift.
You can take your decorations down now everyone.

 

Dramarama

I pretended to like this. All my friends pretended to like this. Most people still probably pretend to have liked it.  It was in fact a child star vehicle filled with bumptious people being squeezed out of the unholy child acting sausage factories that are Sylvia Young, Italia Conti and Arts Ed. Watched on a Wednesday, I would normally be unwashed from ‘Games’ and possibly eating a sneaky cheese sandwich ahead of my Mum getting back from work and making tea. OK, do you know what, it wasn’t that bad. It was no Jossy’s Giants but should be filed under missable but watch it if you are in.

80s graphics. Love em.

 

Saturday Morning TV

Tiswas was great, it can’t be denied. I attached myself briefly to the tail end of this anarchy. I had no idea what I was watching. Multi-Coloured Swap Shop, the tantalising thought that the really crap birthday or Christmas present was one phone call away from being swapped for something you actually needed was almost toxic. This early version of children only EBay was something to be marvelled at. To this day I know the phone number off by heart 01 811 8055 the same way that I know the old post code too, W12 8QT. I am not sure how I reconciled riding the streets on my Grifter with watching this programme – I clearly managed it somehow. I left Saturday morning TV only to return twice more, Going Live as it was a diversion from proper secondary school homework and What’s Up Doc on ITV as it coincided with University and the omnipresent Saturday morning hangover.

The finest day was when a child successfully swapped their parents
for a slinky.

The Cult Programme

There are many other shows on both sides of the TV divide that we love and/or hate;  Super Ted, Bananaman, Count Duckula, Orm and Cheap, Wizbit, Willow the Wisp, Pipkins, the Flumps, Pinky and the Brain, Battle of the Planets, Top Cat (Boss Cat), Captain Caveman, The Box of Delights, Rentaghost, The Children of Greene Knowe, The Fraggles, Press Gang, Chocky’s Children, Rugrats, Newsround (John Craven’s and otherwise) but there is one programme universally devoured by us kids and that is the story of the city dwelling gay civil servant, who, at the weekends loved nothing more that stepping out of the closet and indulging in any number of fantasies. Mr Benn. What child didn’t want to live in Festive Road where the kids run feral, where, even in the early 70s, a man is not outed in a local tabloid or driven from his home by an angry mob for the crime of living a singular life shrouded in weekend mystery. There are only 14 episodes, yet everyone seems as if new as a shiny pin every time it is viewed. So crammed with detail from games of the kids on Festive Road through the camp shopkeeper’s shop to the tiny trinkets Benn brings home, I continue to spot something new even 39 years later. The true heart of Mr Benn lies in the soothing narration by the velvet tonsils of Ray Brooks, listening to him tell the story was like having your eardrums massaged (in a good way – am not sure if there is a bad way – but even if there was – this is the good way – not the bad). I watched this the lunchtime that I went home and ate an entire family sized tin of rhubarb and rather unsurprisingly threw it all up again in Mrs Bhatt’s poetry class in year two of the juniors. Subsequent episodes were usually accompanied by eating a Trio.

Off to G-A-Y again.

 

So there it is. A rambling mismatch of some of the great and poor progs from our youth. I appreciate I have left out some TV gold, Why Don’t You for example, a kids show wrapped so tightly in its own irony is eventually asphyxiated itself. Play Away, the training boards for one our greatest thesps who then went on to make films as closely linked as Deadringers, Damage and Lolita. Or perhaps least memorably Rude Dog and the Dweebs aka cartoon faecal matter. I don't hold to this era too tightly, I have no intention of being the kind of Dad that moans about the quality of the contemporary as you just get a blank stare back, as I received during Back to the Future where I had to describe what things were in the current as well as the past. The fact that the Future young Michael J Fox yearns for so longingly is actually a pre-birth past of some 27 years for my daughters hit me like a fast moving continent. Enough of this I have to go and watch X-Men.