Through The Square Window: Horoscopes, Sensorites And Mysterons

On 7th July 1965, in a fast-cutting trick-lens blur of ‘computer’ fonts, footage of production lines and office blocks, ‘dolly birds’ rearranging their hair in Bacofoil spacesuits, supersonic engine roars and Johnny Dankworth, the BBC’s new science and technology magazine show Tomorrow’s World made its debut sandwiched between Welsh mining community sitcom Lil and Ted Moult, Kenneth Horne and The Rt. Hon Anthony Wedgwood Benn MP eyeing up the finalists in Miss Interflora-GPO 1965. Although over-excitable predictions about the space age world we would all be living in before Yellow River by Christie had even hit record shops had calmed down moderately since the Monkey Butler-enthusing days of Arthur C. Clarke’s Profiles Of The Future – which you can hear more about here, incidentally – Tomorrow’s World was nonetheless a byproduct of that charmingly naively ambitious and aspirational Jet Age vision of an exciting new future to come that now looks vastly more archaic and outmoded than what actually did. This is why it is all the more ironically amusing to take a look back through some of the earliest posts on this website and find that in their own similarly upbeat and experimental way, there are numerous allusions to the equally ambitiously predictive atom-powered aspects of popular culture that came cable in junction with all of this; as well as some debunking of a chirpily grinning fraud who affected to be able to ‘see’ the future by drawing lines between the seventh house of mallard or whatever it is, but more about him in due course. It’s doubtful he saw any of this coming anyway. What science failed to accurately predict, however, is that if you’re enjoying any of this – whether you saw it coming or not – then you would be able to harness the futuristic power of modern technology by electronically buying me a coffee here…

Looks Unfamiliar: Ben Baker – Just A Bit Massively Stereotypical

As was mentioned when we took a look at Ben’s first appearance on Looks Unfamiliar (which you can find more about here), he kept coming up with so many interesting ideas and tangents there and then that we essentially just kept straight on recording and did a second show incorporating all of the unanticipated additional choices. Although possibly one or two of them inadvertently betray the spontaneity and lack of preparation – or at least they do to me and in retrospect; most listeners probably neither notice nor care – we really did come up with some top drawer moments with Ben’s exasperation at the ‘Racist Cluedo’ Mysteries Of Old Peking that he had gleefully played with as a child and my own equally youthful failure to comprehend the serious awareness-raising tone of the conclusion of charity fundraising effort The Crack-A-Joke-Book seeming to strike a nostalgic chord with more than a few listeners. Meanwhile, thanks to our well-meaning haziness over where and when and whether and in what context it was called The Whizzkid’s Handbook or The Whizzkid’s Guide, I got my first real taste of just how joylessly and indeed furiously pedantic people can get over Looks Unfamiliar. Anyway you can find the full show here as well as the chat about Mysteries Of Old Peking as part of a collection of Looks Unfamiliar highlights here.

Looks Unfamiliar: Jem Roberts – ET Is A Definite Thing

Speaking of which, Jem’s choice of Doop by Doop did inspire a flurry of stern reminders that it had been number one and therefore did not qualify as ‘unfamiliar’ – though I would challenge anyone doing the pointing out to identify the last time that they heard it on the radio, and in any case it did lead to a tremendous story about trying to dance to it in full Wodehousian getup as a twenties obsessed teenager in a nightclub full of unrelentingly nineties revellers. Curiously, nobody seemed quite so exercised about Nibb-It Wheelz, Dizzy or the brief but undeniable moment when Wet Wet Wet were any good, although we never did manage to identify that alien-themed powdered soft drink. Also, I’d like to point out here and now that our discussion of the advert reuniting an insurance-comparing Neil and Vyvyan from The Young Ones came some considerable length of time before that viral tweet claiming to have ‘discovered’ it. Sometimes you can bang on about this stuff for years without anyone noticing then someone else mentions it and it all goes berserk; it’s a science I’ve never really understood and one that thoroughly wish I could. You can find the full show here and the chat about that The Young Ones-updating advert as part of a collection of Looks Unfamiliar highlights here.

There’s Not An Ounce Of Curiosity In Me!

When I first launched this then-new website, I was in the bewildering position of knowing that I had to cover Doctor Who in some capacity – after all, it’s directly responsible for a significant proportion of the audience who can never quite figure out what all of that business with Strawberry Alarm Clock and Quatro is all about, as opposed to the other fifty percent or so who have never heard of Ian and Barbara or The Shrivenzale and are probably quite happy to keep it that way – but not really having the faintest idea of how or why I should be going about it. There had to be a way of looking at Doctor Who that was more or less in line with what I had in mind as the new ‘format’, but it needed to be one that was both original and individual too, and when it comes to a programme that’s been covered from so many angles and in so much depth that’s a considerably taller order than you might expect. Something I was absolutely insistent on, however, was that I would not be doing a story by story from the start rewatch slash review; which of course was exactly what I did do later on – which starts here if you’re interested – although in fairness I did at least try to find my own original and individual way of approaching it. Matters were complicated to say the least by the fact that at the time I was putting together this new website, I actually was doing a story by story from the start rewatch of Doctor Who entirely for my own entertainment and with no intention of introducing the slash reviewing aspect, and while I just about managed to resist the temptation to just start writing up my findings without any real through-line of critical thought or coherency, I was still struck by how, yet again, I found myself unable to remember which episode I was up to in The Sensorites, the real fish out of water in that first series and in the immediate throes of ‘Dalekmania’, which felt like it belonged to another age even in 1964. That then gave rise to this humorous look at my failed attempts to follow a story where I’m not entirely sure I can tell you what happens in episodes five and six without checking even now – though episode one definitely has all that stuff about Susan being behind a door which is not behind another door but is behind a different door or whatever it is – which I’m still very fond of and which did later lead to a number of other unloved Doctor Who stories receiving something at least halfway approaching a spirited defence on here. The original version of There’s Not An Ounce Of Curiosity In Me! is here and there’s a much longer version, with more on the frankly much more interesting production background to The Sensorites and the woeful underuse of Susan as a character in other surrounding stories, in Keep Left, Swipe Right here.

We Know That You Can Hear Us, Earthmen…

It was originally the surprisingly positive response to a Tweet about how much I love The Mysterons Theme, the b-side from Barry Gray’s theme single from Captain Scarlet And The Mysterons, that gave me the idea for this rumination on exactly why I love that eerie four-note signature so much, but in retrospect it is interesting to note how quickly this diverted into thoughts on the long-lost world of having no other way of finding out anything about even such prominent examples of the popular culture of the past as Gerry and Sylvia Anderson shows than through an ad-hoc combination of annuals, flimsy Look-In features, thuddingly edited compilation tapes and of course ITV’s own seemingly entirely random and erratic repeat schedules; that anecdote about retuning between ITV regions – in itself another lost world – to catch two episodes of Stingray on a Sunday morning is entirely true, incidentally. It’s a theme that I would return to many times and I really do feel like we’ve lost something in a world where you have all of the information at your fingertips with none of the compulsion to interpret, collate, contrast, cross-reference or even edit it. Mind you, I always also did enjoy a good laugh at the ridiculous end credits image of Captain Scarlet looked very mildly concerned as some boxes fall quite near him. The original version of We Know That You Can Hear Us, Earthmen… is here and If you do some hasty channel-retuning, you can find a longer version with more on the lost art of hunting for Supermarionation-related records at school fairs and the brief but fascinating career of The Spectrum – as well as what actually went on in and at the Spectrum Arena; in case you were wondering it had nothing to do with Lieutenant Green – in Keep Left, Swipe Right here.

…And Looks Into 1967

While we’re on the subject of rooting around in old publications for tantalising fragments of information, I have held little more than exasperated disdain for the vague and wishy washy exploitative obligation-averting hokey non-advice and non-promises of celebrity astrologers ever since the days of a mid-eighties Russell Grant’s slapdashedly cut out mid-seventies head apparently rolling off to towards the right of a column of essentially twelve different ways of half-interestedly saying ‘be careful with money’ in the Liverpool Echo, and as such it is hardly surprising that I developed such a powerful aversion to mid-sixties stargazer to the stars Maurice Woodruff and his relentless appearances making non-committal predictions about nothing in particular in TV Times. This eventually gave rise to the frankly irresistible idea of evaluating of his bafflingly worded and often borderline vindictive predictions for 1967 using that dreaded astrologer-offending combination of factual detail and rational logic, which I will admit I took some degree of malicious delight in although I was evidently still not above making more Fist Of Fun references than even Richard Herring would probably normally contemplate. I had actually intended to feature more thoughts spun out from magazine and newspaper clippings on here; other projects would soon take greater precedence although if you’re in the market for more ruminations along these lines, you can find a good deal of them interspersed with struggling to comprehend The Pink Panther’s attempts at topical satire on the cover of TV Comic on my Patreon here. Meanwhile, if The Moon is in the Seventh House and Jupiter is aligned with Mars, you can find the original version of …And Looks Into 1967 here and a longer version with additional further discrediting of the beaming huckster in Can’t Help Thinking About Me here.

Not On Your Telly

Meanwhile, if you’d like to read about some of the actual useful information that I stumbled across whilst trawling through ancient issues of TV Times, you can find plenty of that in Not On Your Telly – a look at some of the television which for a variety of reasons we never get to see now – 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.