‘Good Winter Telly’ – a phrase coined by Georgy Jamieson in Looks Unfamiliar here – essentially refers to that sort of light entertainment line-drawn reset you used to get on television as September arrived and the darker evenings started to draw in and everything was bombastically promoted as a ‘NEW SEASON’, but in a broader sense it also serves just as well to define the similar feeling that set in across all of society and culture as fireworks fizzed, joke shop Vampire Teeth declined to fit and furtive hopeful youngsters began scouring the Grattan catalogue with a magnifying glass to study their hoped-for pillowcase-stuffers in greater scrutiny as Christmas jingled on the horizon. This sensation was evidently very much on my mind as the website drew in towards its own first ‘Good Winter Telly’ season, as while I apparently did not feel the need to mark Ian Gunpowder Night in any way whatsoever – although there were doubtless plenty of suggestions for tying Boris Johnson to the entire contents of a Brock’s Fireworks Assortment and aiming him at the nearest ad-hoc bonfire on some rubbly abandoned bit of concrete round the back of the newsagents flying around – I intentionally wrote a Halloween-themed feature shortly before embarking on an impressively overambitious attempt at reviewing a usually not especially good Christmas Special for every day of Advent in a sort laugh-deficient Advent Calendar gambit. You can rest assured I got more laughs out of On The Buses than anyone ever actually watching it did, though. Meanwhile there were also two new editions of Looks Unfamiliar – the first ‘new’ ones recorded since the initial set I had ready to go before the original launch, and it’s interesting to see how much my confidence as a host had improved once I realised that people actually were listening and interested after all – and a review excitedly written very late at night immediately after I had arrived home from watching a documentary at the cinema; in fact as you will discover, one of the Advent Calendar entries was written on the way home from the theatre, and it is odd to look back now and realise just how much everyone took routine on-foot socialising literally in their stride before lockdown changed everything, and how difficult it really was to get back into that stride afterwards. Which does admittedly slightly contrast with how wistful Georgy and myself got about Saturday evenings spent resolutely indoors very much glued to the small screen, but there you go. If you want a proper paradox on that general theme to wrestle with, try Mark’s story about missing a very much ‘Good Winter Telly’-aligned episode of Doctor Who due to… well, just wait until you find out what that was. Meanwhile, mentioning the sitcom Advent Calendar has reminded me of just how many millennia a single episode of My Husband And I seemed to last for, so if you want to buy me a reviving coffee here that would be very much appreciated indeed. Anyway, let’s kick proceedings off with a show that was pulled from the schedules just as everyone was building their bonfires and remembering not to pick up a lit sparkler from the wrong direction late in 1996, and did not honestly constitute ‘Good Winter Telly’ in any regard whatsoever…

Executive Producer: Belinda Carlisle

It’s fair to say that I have something of a complicated relationship with Brass Eye. On its original transmission – which technically wasn’t even its original original transmission, and that last-minute postponement out of concerns that it might actually be too genuinely dangerous to broadcast only made it feel more unprecedentedly thrilling still, almost as though its promised assault on everything that was wrong with the media had compelled the media to fight back – I was left as stunned by it as anyone, with the show’s message, method and mayhem informing the way in which I thought, wrote and even spoke, although some would doubtless say tish and fipsy to that, for a long time afterwards. Then came the standalone special, about which I have little other to say than that at best it could only ever have been essentially trying to relight a firework that had not only burned out but been rained on overnight, but wound up as something that in all honesty was thoroughly misconceived and objectionable and probably should not have been made. Adding insult to poorly defined for want of a better shorthand analogy injury, there then followed a miserable time when comedy seemed to be overrun with performers who appeared to have drawn entirely the wrong message from Brass Eye and valued shock, vindictiveness, contempt for a ‘they’ who didn’t ‘get’ ‘it’ and above all devotion to the art of the prank without any underpinning gag or particular point to make over and above any other comic or artistic imperative. All things considered, this did make Brass Eye somewhat difficult to love. Then one day, original Brass Eye director Michael Cumming went on a tour of arthouse cinemas with Oxide Ghosts, a documentary about the making of the show culled from unused and behind-the-scenes footage – much of it, thrillingly, taken from battered and timecoded VHS reference copies which recalled that original sense of under-the-counter dangerousness – which could not in any legal or contractual sense be given a commercial release but could be shown on the big screen under the conditions of ‘a talk’, and something about the combination of glimpses of the disarmingly chaotic and light-hearted production style and the mismatched and haphazard manner in which it now had to all be scraped together helped me find that same rush of excitement all over again; so much so that despite not having intended to write anything about it at all, I wrote this review straight away when I rolled in way too late at night afterwards. I still don’t much care for the Special, but that’s another story. I have seen Oxide Ghosts twice, and on both occasions was surreptitiously asked if I could come prepared with an interesting or diverting query for the Q&A out of concern that Chris Morris fans might – putting it politely – have a tendency to go off at ill-advised tangents, especially if they prefaced their ramblings with the dreaded ‘it’s more of an observation than a question. really…’. On both occasions I did indeed have to step in and ‘rescue’ proceedings by lightening the mood… but I’m not going to elaborate on that for now. Anyway, you can find the original review here or if you’re interested, you can find a much longer version that might well also include some certain interesting additional details about Oxide Ghosts and its associated screenings in Keep Left, Swipe Right here.

Must Be All This Talk Of Witches…

Although my love of The Herbs is probably quite glaringly evident even from the other side of Herb Garden Gate, the motivation for a feature looking at the episode where Parsley and company encounter Belladonna The Witch was actually rather cynical – in the first of many varyingly successful attempts at cornering a fleetingly seasonal audience with a fleetingly seasonal experience, I wanted something to publish on Halloween that still fitted in with the general ‘celebrating the overlooked’ approach of the still only newly-launched website. So rather than Ghostwatch, ‘Video Nasties’ or Paul Daniels saying “now if you will watch ladies and gentlemen I am going to go inside the medieval torture device the Iron Maiden where it’s all been done up safe and we checked it earlier and it was all safe and fine so nothing can go wrong because it is very safe indeed, not that you’d know it from the gob on ‘er, so I am going to go inside it very safely now not a lot…”, I opted instead for a look at this jarringly nightmarish and sinister instalment of a series that was otherwise driven by whimsy and surrealism and which from a modern perspective does leave you wondering how it was ever considered suitable for a lunchtime pre-school audience in the first place; in truth there was a lot of this around at the time, however, and you can find some of my thoughts on the possible reasons for all of that retrospectively seemingly entirely unsuitable children’s entertainment here. It also tied in neatly with my ongoing obsession with the fact that a conspicuous amount of witches were all over pop music and children’s television in the sixties – and with the phenomenon of the strikingly good looking witch in particular, which Lucy Pope memorably called me out on in Looks Unfamiliar here – which went some way towards elevating it above the level of a straightforward episode review. You can find the original version here and a much longer reworking with much more on those pesky passion-inflaming sorceresses in Keep Left, Swipe Right here.

Looks Unfamiliar: Martin Ruddock – I Made A Plasticine Harold Macmillan

Martin is a reliably witty and perceptive contributor to many of the same magazines as myself, and this gave rise to one of the few moments that actually dates an edition of Looks Unfamiliar courtesy of a reference that is now worthy of Looks Unfamiliar in and of itself – we opened the show by referring to the then-current controversy surrounding the identity of Doctor Who Magazine columnist ‘The Watcher’, which I’m not sure even ‘The Watcher’ themselves, whoever he or she may be, will even remember now. It wasn’t either of us, though. Anyway, I really liked how Martin’s choices gave a vivid sense of trying to find ways to entertain yourself during a wet school holiday afternoon when there was literally nothing else to do, and especially pleased that he chose sterling examples of shows you possibly only enjoyed because there was next to no alternative in The Legend Of Tim Tyler and The Baker Street Boys as well as finally confirming a longstanding rumour about third wave Britpop outfit Thurman. There was unfortunately some minor fuming from a number of correspondents who felt that we had remembered Doomlord ‘wrong’ and without their written permission, including some who went off complaining to some of the original writers and artists, and I can only apologise to them for the fact that neither of us thought to check we were enjoying it correctly while reading a weekly comic several decades ago. You can find the full show here and the chat about Doomlord – yes alright – in a collection of Looks Unfamiliar highlights here.

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

He may have gone on to become an award-winning children’s author and playwright, but my association with Mark goes right back to the dawn of the internet and the inky fading away of photocopied fanzines – in fact he actually occasionally contributed to my own badly stapled effort Paintbox – so the co-writer of BBC Radio Wales’ The Basement was another early name on the list of earmarked Looks Unfamiliar guests. Unfortunately due to circumstances beyond our control the resultant sound quality left a little bit to be desired but it was a fantastic show as it stood so I did my absolute best to wrestle a decent level of listenability out of it and released it regardless, prompting an almost immediate complaint from someone scoffing that ‘it sounds like your guest is underwater!’. Well, if you didn’t make the effort to listen, then you missed out on one of the first great laterally thought ideas for a Looks Unfamiliar choice with the rather abstract concept of missing a television show simply because you were out of the house and then just assuming you’d never get to see it, as well as amusing tales of an inebriated Charles Hawtrey on Runaround, a ‘lost’ Frankie Goes To Hollywood song, making your own audio plays on tape with the aid of BBC Records And Tapes’ Off Beat Sound Effects and, well, witnessing rather more than you bargained for on an edition of Kilroy. You can find the full version here as well as the chat about that rather unfortunate Kilroy incident in a collection of Looks Unfamiliar highlights here.

Festive Episodes Of All Your Comedy Favourites!

Sometimes – and it happens more often than you’d think – it’s like an idea is just handed to you like, well, a Christmas present. Without any workable ideas for a Looks Unfamiliar Christmas Special and looking for something roughly along the lines of the feature on The Herbs to act as a suitably seasonal surprise on or around Christmas Eve, I was rooting around for my Roobarb DVD – incidentally, the episode When It Wasn’t Christmas essentially turned out to be basically just that – when I stumbled across an entirely different DVD that I’d been given as a birthday present at – with brilliant and intentional comic timing – the height of summer. As the title implies – so very much unlike When It Wasn’t Christmas, then – Classic ITV Christmas Comedy is a collection of twenty ITV sitcom Christmas specials stretching from the late fifties up to the very late eighties indeed, and what’s more, it is absolutely no collection of ‘comedy classics’. Which makes something of a mess of my assertion that the contents are what the title implies but bear with me. Culled from existing full series DVD releases by the much-missed Network, many of which can surely only have found release as some sort of job lot shovelware-type arrangement, the featured shows are almost exclusively either big in their day but now long forgotten or quite simply detested in their day and rightly so, and the temptation to review them all one by one as a sort of de facto Advent Calendar was frankly too enticing to pass up. Admittedly there were only twenty, but I thought this would probably leave me with enough spare pre-Christmas capacity to think up and record a Looks Unfamiliar special. It did not. Anyway, despite the frankly alarming schedule and turnaround time I had rather typically set for myself, I really enjoyed writing about all of these otherwise rarely remarked on shows – in several cases enjoying writing about them far more than I did actually watching them – and trying to figure out what made them work, or in all honesty more likely didn’t. I set myself a goal of trying to come up with a succinct description, contextualisation and critical evaluation while still having a bemused laugh both at their comic shortcomings and woefully out of touch attitudes within three brief paragraphs and I really do think that I managed to pull this off. I was pleasantly surprised to discover that I actually quite liked some of them including Two’s Company, Bless Me, Father, George And The Dragon and Home To Roost, that All This – And Christmas Too! actually made something approaching a stand against some of the more reactionary attitudes of the era and that Watching was a lot more enjoyable and less irritating than I had remembered it being, and it was fascinating to see a conspicuously polite takedown of the television industry from what felt like another age in Stanley Baxter’s Christmas Box, although the one that seemed to go down the best even surprisingly with people who actually like it – yes, there are some – was my exasperated lashing out at On The Buses, a show that I genuinely believe has no redeeming features whatsoever and for which I will make no historical or contextual excuses. It may have proved exhausting but I only have fond memories of the entire venture, from excitedly writing one of the entries on the bus home after an evening at the theatre to the small but encouraging gaggle of Twitter users trying to guess what each day’s show would be – my first real sense of the possibilities of that kind of interactivity – and it concluded on 20th December with some thoughts on why we don’t really seem to see this sort of primetime sitcom any more and whether we could do with them back, and the satisfaction of a project well accomplished. Upon which I promptly watched Doctor Who And The Christmas Invasion. You can find the original unexpurgated ‘Advent Calendar’ version here, but there’s also an accompanying feature on a genuine ITV comedy classic that wasn’t included on the box set for rights reasons – the Rising Damp Christmas Special For The Man Who Has Everything – in Can’t Help Thinking About Christmas here, and an enormously expanded version with tons more on what else was going on elsewhere on television and in the wider world back when these Christmas Specials originally aired in Keep Left, Swipe Right here.

Higher Than The Sun

It has very little to do with any of the above other than a vague general background ‘seventies’ retro vibe, but if you’re interested in reading the story of Loveless by My Bloody Valentine, Screamadelica by Primal Scream, Bandwagonesque by Teenage Fanclub and Foxbase Alpha by Saint Etienne and how, long before Britpop, Creation Records took on the world and very nearly won, then you can find it in Higher Than The Sun, 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.