It might well not be quite as flashback-inducingly mindbending as that optical illusion on the cover of Blue Peter Tenth Book wherein a varyingly-hued card-propping Val, John, Pete and Lesley disappear into the quantum realm on discovering that one pill really does make them very small indeed until they end up in a reality where the phrase ‘here’s one I made earlier’ has no rational meaning and an on-air out-of-control studio campfire finds itself menaced by some girl guides – and no, that isn’t the one with the ‘Witch Puppet’ make, but there’s more about that here – but all the same, it does feel more than slightly verging on indulgently self-reflexive for a look back at overlooked highlights from this website’s archives to be entirely composed of editions of a podcast taking a look back at overlooked highlights from popular culture of yesteryear. The reason for this Barnaby In Mobius Strip Form feedback loop of nostalgia on nostalgia, however, is that I had close to a dozen editions of Looks Unfamiliar recorded and ready to go by the time that the website was actually launched, and it made sense to release a few of them in close succession in the hope of building up something approaching an audience. This decision, it has to be said, turned out to be an unanticipated stroke of good audience-building fortune, though more about that shortly. There have been many more editions of Looks Unfamiliar since then – and if you have enjoyed any of them, you could always express your gratitude by buying me a coffee here – but for now, let’s find out what Garreth, Mark, Stephen, Ben and Emma remember that nobody else ever seems to…

Looks Unfamiliar: Garreth Hirons – Piers Morgan, I Want My Sizzlin’ Bacon Back

Garreth had been on my list of initial tone-establishing guests for Looks Unfamiliar pretty much since I had first had the idea for the show, primarily on account of the fact that two bizarre conversational incidents of his direct instigation had played no small part in giving me that idea in the first place – namechecking hi-tech ninja-themed industrial espionage ZX Spectrum game Saboteur with the result that everyone present spontaneously sang the title screen music in unison, and another mention of topically satirical wrestling tag team The Triangle Of Terror at a wedding reception at one of those exact moments where everyone else suddenly went quiet, causing four or five guests to excitedly wheel round shouting ‘I saw that!!’. Along with our ongoing obsession with Monster Munch’s long-discontinued Sizzlin’ Bacon flavour, both of these found their way into the show which you can find the full version of here as well as the chat about bizarre junk food-themed action figure range Food Fighters as part of a Looks Unfamiliar highlights show here. This was, incidentally, recorded in my front room on a bitterly freezing cold day and we both had our ‘big coats’ on throughout in full not feeling the benefit tradition.

Looks Unfamiliar: Mark Thompson – I’m Quite Happy With My Passport Colour To Be Honest

Another significant influence on what became Looks Unfamiliar was a brief but incredibly fun engagement I had as a regular ‘Cult TV’ correspondent on Mark’s local radio show – you can hear some of our conversations about Victoria Wood As Seen On TV, Bruce Forsyth’s Big Night and the ill-advised remake of The Prisoner here; incidentally if by some remote chance someone out there has our chat about The Storyteller, which neither of us can seem to find, please let me know – so he was another obvious early choice as a guest and we had a great time chatting about Hanna-Barbera’s Classic Horror-themed adventure cartoon Drak Pack, ITV’s overnight inner city roving report filler Night Shift, Crash ZX Spectrum magazine, silicon chip-fixated American action series Whiz Kids, overblown late nineties post-apocalyptic nonsense The Last Train and more. What I didn’t expect, though, was what happened next; quite how all of this came about I’m not sure but the long and short of it was that Dawn O’Porter chose this edition as part of a curated audiobook playlist for iTunes and it ended up on the front page of the service for an entire week, and almost overnight Looks Unfamiliar went from a show that more or less numbered my friends and a handful of TV Cream fans as listeners to one that pretty much eclipsed anything else I was doing. This threw something of a spanner in the works for my original intended ‘column-style post a day’ plan for the website but it’s fair to say that as spanners in works go, this was a fairly welcome one and having so many already recorded was about to unexpectedly pay off. I did actually try emailing Dawn to ask if she fancied appearing as a guest but sadly never heard anything back. Well, the invitation’s still there. You can find the full show here and the chat about Night Shift as part of a collection of Looks Unfamiliar highlights here.

Looks Unfamiliar: Stephen O’Brien – The Classic ‘Four Calculators’ Sketch

Considering that we had been having similar conversations ever since the days of trying to remember the name of that would-be eighties pop star who wore full Highland battle regalia while typing directly onto sheets of A4 paper in the school holidays way back when, Stephen was another obvious guest and I particularly liked that his choices all seemed to be things that were essentially just there – perpetual near-hit scorers Brilliant, so ahead of its time that nobody noticed it lifestyle magazine LM, imported ITV schedule filler The Beachcombers, book you always got as a present despite not having much use for or interest in You Can Do The Cube and even a certain board game that just hung around unsold in his local newsagents – although I am still a little sad that we never quite managed to provoke a resurgence of interest in Steven Moffat’s sitcom pilot The Office, which was not only long before a certain other sitcom of the same name but was also quite good and had Stefan Dennis in it. You can find the full show here and the chat about The Morecambe And Wise Game as part of a collection of Looks Unfamiliar highlights here.

Looks Unfamiliar: Ben Baker – The Famous Fourth Universal Monster

Ben was the first person after Phil who I approached about appearing on Looks Unfamiliar, although he wanted to wait and hear a couple of editions first to make sure he ‘got’ the tone correct and in retrospect I’m very glad he did as the bizarre story about keeping empty Fiendish Feet cartons lined up on the mantelpiece like family heirlooms marked the first occasion when I had to take a break from editing a show because I was laughing too much, while his recollections about sending tapes of ‘the charts’ to Colin Foley through the International Youth Service penpal scheme served early notice of just how much it was possible to get out of a highly personal and idiosyncratic choice, although it was our discussion of early Chris Evans vehicle TV Mayhem that seemed to get the most attention on social media – it really was astonishing how many people thought that only they remembered it – and it’s fair to say I was starting to get some sense of just how much creative potential there was in the format. In fact Ben understood Looks Unfamiliar so closely that he kept coming up with additional ideas mid-recording, and we actually ended up with enough material for two shows; there’ll be more about the second one in due course, but for the meantime you can find the full show here and the chat about Fiendish Feet in a collection of Looks Unfamiliar highlights here.

Looks Unfamiliar: Emma Burnell – Jessica Wakefield Is Jessica Fletcher Writ Large

Amusingly, I can remember thinking that it was going to be extremely difficult to find female guests for Looks Unfamiliar, but I was determined to try and get at least some as, frankly, nostalgia or indeed ‘anti-nostalgia’ can be a very male-dominated area and it seemed that there was so much more to talk about that fell outside of the usual parameters, added to which effectively talking about the same subject areas again and again would have got very boring very quickly. Nowadays, of course, there are so many female guests that men who are even more boring than an entirely male Looks Unfamiliar would be continually send me unsolicited messages complaining about this and generously offering their services as big manly macho guests. You can probably work out for yourself just how good their uninvited suggestions for choices generally are. Anyway, despite interruptions from a kitten determined to show off how comprehensively it had mastered the art of rolling around on its back, Emma put in a fantastic appearance as the first non-male guest, broadening the horizons by talking about Sweet Valley High novels, creepy ghost stories and arts and crafts-skewed playground crazes, as well as a slightly more disconcerting tale of renting Rutger Hauer movies from a man in ‘a van’, although I’m still not sure how universal an experience her recollections of singing along to a tape of Miners’ Strike-fundraising protest songs on family car journeys will be. You can find the full show here and the chat about The Patchwork Monkey in a collection of Looks Unfamiliar highlights here; incidentally, I suggested to Emma – who has shockingly extensive experience of live broadcasting – that the recording should be ‘around half an hour’, and it came in at thirty minutes to the second.

Fun At One

Not that any of its contents are in any way mentioned in any of the above editions of Looks Unfamiliar – well, apart from a tangential reference to Chris Evans’ original Radio 1 show Too Much Gravy – but if you enjoy Looks Unfamiliar then you might well enjoy Fun At One, the story of comedy at BBC Radio 1 from Kenny Everett to Chris Morris and beyond, which is available in paperback here or from the Kindle Store here.

Mystery Link! If you want to just go straight to a surprise page completely unrelated to any of the above, click here.

© Tim Worthington.
Please don’t copy this only with more italics and exclamation marks.