Through The Square Window: Mary Quant, Metal Mickey And The Newcomers

While the purported ‘rivalry’ between the BBC’s slick and tech-savvy live phone-in Saturday Morning show with brand new off-the-wall Hanna-Barbera animations Noel Edmonds’ Multicoloured Swap Shop and ITV’s phlan-phlinging chaotic parade of ideas literally thrown at the wall which seemed constantly at risk of either being forcibly taken off air or simply just falling off entirely of its own accord Tiswas – which sits somewhat inconveniently with the fact that most viewers in reality just switched between the two as and when the ‘boring’ bits arose – may be legendary, little ever seems to be said about the curious scheduling no-man’s land that constituted the two hours or so before the ‘proper’ Saturday Morning shows started. Filling that otherwise inconvenient gap between the ‘backroom boys’ throwing those big switches you occasionally saw in behind-the-scenes features and powering up the transmitter – if you got up early enough, you could see the IBA Colour Bars followed by a short montage of ident-strewn footage of your ITV region accompanied by dynamic fanfarey music, or indeed BBC Test Card F followed by a continuity slide with that ‘singing dogs’ record playing over it, while the first programme of the day was being cued up – it invariably played host to bulk-bought imports on film that someone had apparently washed the car windows with that were simultaneously unwatchably cheap and thrillingly outlandish and exotic and which shabbily yet gaudily assaulted your eyes and ears as if emanating from some alternate televisual universe cobbled together from celluloid scraps trawled from a broadcast junkyard filled with programmes that had voluntarily declared themselves unfit for transmission. Sometimes, as raucous and undisciplined as the actual proper Saturday morning shows themselves might well have been, they could in comparison really only feel like a jolting reality-rejoining comedown.

Although this thrillingly secretive scheduling frontier land has been oddly infrequently touched on in Looks Unfamiliar – notable exceptions including Lisa Parker and Andrew Trowbridge on Big John Little John here and Chris Shaw on Bailey’s Comets here; and yes, I am really, really looking forward to the inevitable responses from individuals who either do not understand that the above is a well-intentioned generic joke and frowningly point out that they were actually skilfully made by skilled animators actually or alternately have to clear their work schedules to scoff condescendingly that they were actually sometimes shown in the afternoons too actually – it is still true to say that perception-frazzled fragmentary memories of the early Saturday morning shows with their mysterious overstaffed hyphenated production company credits were a huge influence on the original concept for the show. By this time, however, the unexpected popularity of Looks Unfamiliar had meant that it was already moving in a wider and less personally focused direction, and in a significant attempt at broadening the structural horizons I recorded two editions ‘live’ and on ‘location’ within a single afternoon, admittedly with slightly mixed sonic results but they certainly made for thrillingly good conversations. On the other hand, however, I was still trying to figure out exactly what form the written content on this site should take – still some distance away from the eventual realisation that the best answer to this was essentially ‘whatever seems to fit at whatever particular moment’ – and how ‘interactive’ it should or should not be with the readers, which did at least give rise to one particularly interesting experiment which, crucially, still ran the risk of absolutely not working out in any way whatsoever. No, it wasn’t ‘trying a coffee from a Cafe Ritazza vending machine’, though I’m still game for giving that a try on everyone else’s behalf if you want to fund my research by buying me a coffee here. Anyway, let’s jump straight in with something that has more or less absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with anything in this introduction… but who wants to know about that?

I’m Meaner, I’m Leaner, I Ain’t No Inbetweener

Another significant influence on the earliest days of this website – and one that admittedly fell by the inspirational wayside pretty quickly once other matters took precedence – was Richard Herring’s daily blog Warming Up, and in particular the entries in which he had found himself consumed by a single random thought and wrote about it entertainingly for three or four paragraphs; in the first of several unintentional coincidences in this instalment of Through The Square Window, one particular personal favourite example of this is his rumination on the potential for romance with the woman in the Cafe Ritazza adverts, which you can find here. For reasons that I am not entirely certain of now, I had put together a short playlist of some of my favourite music tracks from 1998 – which, in another bizarre Richard Herring-skewed coincidence, opens with the theme song from This Morning With Richard Not Judy – and following something of an extended montage of downtempo existentialism courtesy of The Cardigans, Air, Belle And Sebastian and company, I deliberately elected to conclude it with Are You Jimmy Ray?, the suitably bizarre rock’n’rollin’ existential isolationist top twenty hit by fifties throwback yet also somehow simultaneously post-Spice Girls pop sensation Jimmy Ray. This led me to a few brief thoughts on Jimmy Ray’s brief and decidedly off-script moment in the spotlight and the even more off-script socio-cultural context that might well have given rise to it – and, to my surprise, one of the most popular features ever published on here, which even got the nod – well, a like on Twitter – from Jimmy Ray himself. You can find the original version of I’m Meaner, I’m Leaner, I Ain’t No Inbetweener here and a longer version in Can’t Help Thinking About Me here.

You Can’t Seem To Find How You Got There, So Just Blow Your Mind

First published in 2015, Psychedelia And Other Colours by Rob Chapman was to all intents and purposes the book I had been waiting for someone to write. It’s an in-depth cultural study of the evolution of the ‘psychedelic sixties’ on both sides of the Atlantic but, crucially, is not founded on the usual tedious narrative that it was all invented by The Beatles when they were given LSD by, erm, somebody else. Instead, written from the perspective of someone who was at school at the time and knew little of which pills made you larger but plenty about anything and everything else that was going on, tracing the almost inadvertent infiltration of the avant-garde into the mainstream courtesy of the relentlessly mundane and everyday through such unlikely routes as early sixties pop stars trying to make their records sound ‘exotic’ using only musical cliches and reverb effects, blues musicians picking up budget compilations of World Music because they happened to be on the Chess label, immersive cinema roadshows with characters wandering around in costume, Marvel Comics, Watch With Mother, the Space Race, Pirate Radio and so much more besides; most importantly – over here at least – the launch of BBC2, which brought the offbeat and the experimental into everyone’s homes every evening. Oh and The Beatles, who did obviously have a huge part to play in all of this after all, though maybe not as much more of one than The Shadows as you might have been led to believe. A staggering achievement that misses absolutely nothing out and really does leave you longing in a positive way for an era when you had to actually put some degree of effort into finding and appreciating your home entertainment, whether it was Scorpio Rising or Hugh And I, Psychedelia And Other Colours is an exceptional work and my enjoyment of and response to it was so powerful that I felt compelled to write what was more an exploration of personal thoughts on the points that it raises than any kind of an actual review per se. You can find You Can’t Seem To Find How You Got There, So Just Blow Your Mind here; I haven’t actually reused it directly in any of my anthologies but you can find much wider expansions on several aspects of the themes explored in it in Keep Left, Swipe Right here.

Looks Unfamiliar: Samira Ahmed – They All Had Hair Like Russ Tamblyn

By this stage I still probably hadn’t had proportionately nearly enough female guests on Looks Unfamiliar, which is why I was absolutely thrilled when Samira suggested that it might be fun to have a go at it, and especially once I saw her list of choices. If you’re going to be talking about Mary Quant’s feminism-inspired action doll Havoc, multicultural Children’s BBC near-future thriller The Changes and having to pretend to enjoy Nurdin & Peacock own-brand cola in lieu of the ‘proper’ Coke and Pepsi that you weren’t allowed, then the conversation is clearly going to go much deeper than you might normally expect from something ostensibly rooted in ‘nostalgia’; Samira was also very insistent that we included the decidedly dark anecdote about her piano teacher, which by all accounts had not been exactly welcomed on other attempts to introduce it into interviews. As significant as it felt to be able to divert into somewhat more serious and thoughtful areas, however, it was also important that we were equally able to balance all of that out with the sillier chat about ridiculous ITV Saturday Morning show The Saturday Banana and our experiences of schools’ television, early home computers and not quite understanding things on the news. All in all this was a tremendous chat and I went straight on to record another Looks Unfamiliar, but we’ll be coming back to that shortly. This was recorded in the café at the Curzon Soho and in my defence, there was no music playing when we started recording, and although it got progressively louder during the course of the show, we both felt that we were having such a good time that restarting the conversation elsewhere might not ‘work’ as well – and to be honest I think we did a good job of out-enunciating the background beats. You can find the full show here and the chat about Nurdin & Peacock Own Brand Cola in a collection of Looks Unfamiliar highlights here.

A Story Of A London Family Adapting To Life In A Country Town

This look at the BBC’s long-forgotten despite being a national talking point at the time mid-sixties soap opera The Newcomers was, in its own small and idiosyncratic way, a hugely significant departure yet also one that came about more or less entirely by accident. While struggling to come up with ideas for a new feature and scrolling through Radio Times listings for inspiration that resolutely refused to present itself, I suddenly had the idea of asking for suggestions of a set of random numbers that would make up a transmission date, time and channel, and then writing about whatever this led me to, with the added excitement of the fact that whatever the randomly arrived-at programme turned out to be might not even exist in any recorded form whatsoever now. Initially I was going to ask for suggestions on Twitter, but was concerned that this might well lead to followers trying to skew the results to lead me in a particular direction aligned with their own personal preferences – you might well laugh, but you would honestly be surprised at how often I am essentially asked outright to write something specific to order – or even towards something obnoxious or offensive as a sort of witty joke, so instead I asked some of my friends to pick random numbers and this led me straight to the episode of The Newcomers broadcast on 8th June 1967. Perhaps predictably, this is not one of the half dozen or so episodes of The Newcomers that do still exist, so while trying to piece together what might have gone on in it I also combined this with a look at the chronologically closest extant edition – 26th May 1967 – for what I had expected to be a minority interest ‘deep dive’ on an obscure subject but actually went down very well indeed. This was, you will doubtless be not remotely surprised to learn, an approach that I resolved to adopt a good deal more often. Well, in terms of looking at lost black and white television shows; the random number-based selection process was probably more bother than it was actually worth. You can find the original version of A Story Of A London Family Adapting To Life In A Country Town here, and you can also find a hugely expanded version also looking at what might have gone on in the massively hyped-up and then promptly erased and most likely lost for good two hundredth edition of The Newcomers in Keep Left, Swipe Right here.

Looks Unfamiliar: Steve Berry – I Survived The Great Nostalgia Wars Of 1989

One of my colleagues at TV Cream, and co-author with Phil Norman of the thoroughly tremendous The Great British Tuck Shop, Steve was someone I had known would be ideal for Looks Unfamiliar from the outset and given that we already had plans to meet up in the afternoon after recording with Samira, we both suggested more or less in the same instant that we should probably do a Looks Unfamiliar while we were at it. Once again his choices – especially the Starblazer Electronic Space Command Belt, ‘lost’ single versions of eighties hit singles, Elastoplast Heroes, school hymn book Morning Has Broken and the brilliantly where-did-that-come-from wildcard of much-banned chewing tobacco non-starter Skoal Bandits – were way off at the sort of tangent you would not necessarily get from just asking any old ‘name’ guest for the first six things they thought of and once again this stands out as a particularly brilliant edition of Looks Unfamiliar in an entire continent of particularly brilliant editions of Looks Unfamiliar. This was recorded at the Phoenix Arts Club – we’d admitted defeat with the volume of the background music at The Curzon, and in an absolute moment of you could not make it up-ness we briefly bumped into a similarly on foot Richard Herring en route – and that coffee mug you can occasionally hear clinking in the background came courtesy of comedian Sofie Hagen. Both of whom are still more than welcome on Looks Unfamiliar, hint hint. You can find the full show here and the chat about Morning Has Broken in a collection of Looks Unfamiliar highlights here. Incidentally later that evening I went to a recording of RHLSTP, and you hear me shouting ‘Battle Cat’ at the start of the interview with Trev And Simon here. Well someone had to.

The Camberwick Green Procrastination Society

There may not be very much about the sort of programmes that used to show up at the blearier-eyed end of the Saturday Morning schedules in any of the above, but there are absolutely tons of them featured in my anthology The Camberwick Green Procrastination Society, 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.