Through The Square Window: Surf’s Up, Satire And Pyramint

When the presenters of BBC2’s varyingly-sized bear-assisted pre-school programme Play School announced that it was time to have a look through either the Round, Square or Arched Window – yes alright they did add a ‘triangular’ one when the show was rebooted in the eighties, but you won’t win any prizes for pointing that out and more to the point they only brought it in at the same time as they showed terrifying ugly plastic doll Hamble the knocked and locked door of the Play School House, and you really don’t want to be getting on the wrong side of her – it was generally to introduce by way of a dissolving vision mix a short filmed suitably educational mini-documentary about a factory that made orangey teddy bears, some blokes who tethered logs in rivers or indeed a foxy redhead buying last-minute Christmas presents, although you can find more about that one here. Here, though, we’re going to be taking an occasional look through the arbitrarily-appointed Square Window at some of the highlights from this website’s extensive back catalogue.

Some of these posts and podcasts were massively successful – usually to my astonishment before anyone starts – and got a belief-beggaring volume of listens and hits and indeed of people on Twitter angrily fuming that nobody ever had real Coke or Pepsi as children they all had one centilitre of Fine Fare Kool Kola diluted in a pint of tap water like them and no suggestion to the contrary can possibly be to any degree true under any circumstances. Some, especially those highlighting whatever was on television, radio, cinema or indeed stage at the time, have lost some of their original context and are probably now that small but crucial amount more difficult to just idly stumble across. Then of course there are some, naming no ruminations on bundled Nintendo NES games or little-seen Marvel teen series, that nobody really noticed that much to begin with anyway. Hopefully anyone looking in on any of the Square Window excursions will find something that they’ve not seen or heard before, or at least will enjoy seeing or hearing again, although obviously you are also free go on to social media and complain that I have already plugged the brand new Looks Unfamiliar once already and because it’s been mentioned for a second time you have had to sell your furniture coasters or something. If you’re not going to be doing that, though, and you actually want to show some degree of appreciation of some form, you could do a lot worse than buy me a coffee here. Anyway, to kick proceedings off, we’re taking a trip back to the very earliest days of this website, with a series of features on a handful of mildly obscurer aspects of sixties popular culture, some thoughts on ill-fittingly theme-tuned eighties comedy shows that should probably stay mildly obscure, and the debut of a certain podcast…

I’ve Heard Of Politics, But This Is Ridiculous

Named after a sketch on the George Martin-produced That Was The Week That Was album, this tale of how I stumbled across the book based on the BBC’s hugely controversial early sixties late-night topical satire show in a charity shop aged twelve and it changed how I thought about pretty much everything was very intentionally and deliberately written as a curtain-raiser for my brand spanking new website. It was intended as a direct attempt to reconnect myself with how I had got involved in all of this in the first place, and with a simpler time when there was more to discover and yet less to discover about any of it, and on reflection I really do think that I succeeded in that. I’m extremely fond of this feature, which you can find the original version of here though there’s also a massively overhauled version with much more about many of my other charity shop discoveries of the time – some of which are still surprisingly obscure and overlooked even now – in Keep, Left, Swipe Right here.

All Fall Down And Lost In The Mystery

More than possibly arising from the same loosely-defined creative imperative, this is a look at why I found The Beach Boys’ legendary abandoned and unfinished album SMiLE more interesting when it actually still was unfinished, only available under the counter as a handful of disconnected psychedelic fragments that didn’t seem to have any obvious start or end point, and with only scant recording date details and quietly bewildering tales of everything from burned ‘haunted’ session tapes to Paul McCartney scoffing amplified celery to try and work out how it might have all fitted together from. Whether we like it or not, the unanswered questions were part of its appeal and in a world where we now find ourselves bombarded with unnecessary and irrelevant detail even about the most tedious and perfunctory of BBC Three sitcoms it’s difficult not to feel that something has got lost along the way. In case you were wondering, the title was taken from the lyrics of Wonderful, which I will admit I had never realised actually fitted directly and indeed so brilliantly onto Song For Children and the first version of Child Is Father Of The Man, which I’m equally unsure I had figured out actually was the first version, which in fairness is at least one unarguable positive of having a fully reconstructed SMiLE. Anyway, you can find the original version of it here though there’s also a lengthier look at what it was like to scour second hand record shops for the various fragments that leaked out in various places and often make other discoveries along the way in Can’t Help Thinking About Me here, and it also led to a much more in-depth look at the SMiLE saga for a Beach Boys special of Vintage Rock Presents, which you can still get from here.

All That I Can See With My Mind’s Eye

Part of the original plan for this website was to post every day with a couple of paragraphs of thoughts extrapolated from whatever I was currently reading, watching or listening to, a little like Richard Herring’s Warming Up only with more Orbit One Zero. Inevitably this extremely rapidly fell by the wayside thanks to other more time-consuming projects including editing a certain podcast, and was also effectively rendered redundant by the fact that it became so much easier and more immediate and indeed, and regrettably, more addictive to do so through shorter form social media posts than in lengthier open-ended rambles – although, interestingly, everything appears to be swinging back in that general direction now – but this is pretty much the defining example of what I effectively had in mind. Inspired by Jon Savage’s fantastic sociocultural study 1966 – The Year The Decade Exploded, this just-about-going-psychedelic Small Faces lyric-titled feature was inspired by the questions that the book raised for me about just how difficult it is to define a year, especially one as pivotal on so many levels as 1966, simultaneously in terms of social and cultural influence and within strict chronological delineations. You can find it here, although – perhaps in a further indication of why this idea was essentially unsustainable – it would later prove difficult to the point of near impossibility to work into a published collection in any sort of meaningful sense.

Take Five Really Swings!

Possibly a mark of less complicated times, and once again the sort of observation that would later be entirely subsumed by the instantaneous interactivity of social media, my ongoing bewilderment at why so many less than outstanding examples of television comedy and advertising in the eighties reached straight for Dave Brubeck’s pioneering experiments in blending global time signatures with modern jazz made for a fun feature to write but I distinctly remember feeling like it was something of a throwaway filler effort, albeit one of significantly more substantial cultural standing than that insurance advert that used Unsquare Dance. Which is why it is all the more surprising that it became one of the most popular features on this website, still attracting small but substantial flurries of hits even now. Perhaps it somehow became an enduring target for radicalised factions of You Must Be The Husband fans but somehow I would really, really doubt that. You can find it here and there’s also a slightly, well, jazzed up version in Can’t Help Thinking About Me here.

Looks Unfamiliar: Phil Catterall – Here Is Pyramint, Buy Pyramint

By the time that I was starting to put this website together, I had been wanting to launch my own podcast for a while. I’d also become fixated on the idea of what I had elected to label ‘Anti-Nostalgia’, where rather than the sort of massed shared experiences and hoots of recognition that you might get if someone mentioned something as obsolete and forgotten as Wall’s Big Feast on Live At The Apollo, it fixated very specifically and determinedly on one individual’s personal experiences with and of something that preferably just drew confused looks whenever they mentioned it to anyone else. This seemed like the ideal juncture to give this increasingly exciting idea a try, and Phil seemed like the ideal guest, and so it was that Madballs Comic became the very first item of lost and in this case very much unwanted cultural ephemera to find itself reappraised in Looks Unfamiliar, although in that particular case I’m not sure how much it counts as an actual reappraisal. I didn’t really know what I was doing at that point – to the extent that if you listen carefully you’ll notice that I forgot to introduce myself – but I knew straight away on listening back to the finished show and the chat about extra-curricular Star Wars animated spinoff Droids and Channel 4 youth show Wise Up! that I at least had something here, although I had absolutely no conception of where it all might be headed. I should also take a moment to highlight here too just how significant it was that Phil ‘got’ the tone and approach straight away and if the first show hadn’t been this good I’m not even sure if it would have gone much further. Anyway you can hear the full show here, and the chat about the hugely inappropriate Platoon tie-in computer game as part of a Looks Unfamiliar highlights show here.

Well At Least It’s Free

If you’d like to read some of my columns and features from immediately before this website was launched collected into handy ‘book’ form, including a look at the BBC’s spooky children’s serials of the seventies and eighties and an investigation into the identity of the books on Professor Yaffle’s shelf, then you’ll enjoy Well At Least It’s Free, 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.