Tim Worthington’s Colour Supplement

Despite what I may have once had to defiantly say about the value, thrills, joys and underappreciated positive aspects of social media, well, it’s all got into a bit of a state recently, hasn’t it? The world’s most powerful communications tool reduced to an unbidden stream of ‘takes’ from self-appointed commentators who value the ability to say something over the need to actually have anything worth saying punctuated with enticing links proffered by women with no clothes on that you frankly wish would put some on where even the usernames look like some weird cryptocurrency code, courtesy of a surprisingly thick tech ‘genius’ who looks like a cross between Murun Buchstansangur and a wrong aspect ratio rendition of Michael Jackson circa Liberian Girl who appears to be motivated by an ongoing desire for ‘revenge’ over a court case that he actually won and who equally apparently considers philosophical enlightenment to constitute commenting ‘food for thought?’ with an upside down frowny face emoji in response to outright batshit racism. The putative alternatives variously alert you to people’s birthdays twelve days after they happened while favouring suggestions to join ‘groups’ devoted to subjects that you have never uttered a single world that might even vaguely suggest an interest in or endorsement of, require a geometry set to operate and then only win you an upbraiding for not adhering to i before e while making a joke about Ryan Paris, engender quoted responses from individuals telling you that you are actually quite wrong to have enjoyed She-Hulk Attorney At Law actually while tumbleweeds canter merrily past, or give the general air of a massive party that everyone else is throwing with all the celebs and their photos of plates with a spiral of sauce on them while you are staring through the window wondering why nobody is bothering with your witticisms about Mint Aero. It’s all a long way from sending a letter to Lenny Henry’s ‘Big Mouth’ in Eagle.

So what if this means you are now missing, or indeed missing, all of my short-form abstract topical gags about Stingray and observations about Kind Of Blue that apparently if expressed more than once in different wording are a source of deep personal inconvenience to more sensitive souls? Well, fortunately for all of you, I have a long-established but little-mentioned Patreon full of content that certainly gives being consistently told off for referring to Top Cat as Boss Cat by random users with no profile photo a run for its money. You can find it here, but if you want to some idea of what a subscription might ‘bag’ you…

Light Programme

This is the basic tier and if you join at this level, you’ll get regular updates including reviews of albums and movies, extended thoughts on baffling old magazine adverts, little-seen obscurities from the archives with new annotations – and frequent bafflement at what exactly I was on about – and much more besides. Here are a handful of examples of what you can expect…

Hours Of Fun And Lots Of Tasty Tudor Crisps

Based in Sunderland and with advertising campaigns based around impenetrably-accented youths offering to do each other’s manly manual chores in exchange for a ‘canny’ bag of their potato snacks, Tudor Crisps really did fancy themselves as the hard-as-nails crunch of choice of, well, Jimmy Nail, with a very definite sense that they expected their Beef And Onion-gobbling clientele to pick up a pack on their way to prowl the terraces, presumably then deploying their inflated empty bags for an extra ‘bursting’ flourish at the climax of that ‘thk-thk-thkthkthk-thkthk-thk-thk-FOOT-BALL!’ thing. Essentially an ancestral precursor to Nobby’s Nuts, only less namby pamby.

It was little wonder, then, that when the 1970 ‘World Cup Soccer Series’ rolled around, Tudor rolled out a series of tie-in bigger bags with a sort of ballet dancing centre-forward suedehead on them, doubtless to be deployed in the event that Peter Bonetti and company took it into extra time for the folks back home. To tie in with the Salt’n’Lineker-anticipating overload of their crispest-crunchiest snack, Tudor also gave away badges featuring get-with-the-footballing-times-grandad 1966 mascot World Cup Willie, while Willie also adorned the lost age-redolently comic and cheerful box art for the Tudor World Cup Football Game, as apparently played in a series of accompanying adverts by Bobby Charlton and Jim Baxter, which must have felt about as 1970 as it got during the commercial breaks in Father Dear Father. Whether it really did recreate ‘all the thrills and excitement of a real soccer game’ is sadly difficult to determine as the game is now so elusive that there isn’t even an entry for it on BoardGameGeek. We can probably safely assume in that case that it was one of those cardboard-on-cardboard efforts with a cardboard spinner that had disassociated itself into constituent cardboard elements before the 1970 World Cup was even over. Meanwhile, just in case your own personal ‘all the family’ included someone who didn’t like football, there was also a chance to win a jet liner trip to Tabarja Beach, a Lebanese resort briefly fashionable with flash and ostentatious package holiday types before regional events saw to it that it suddenly wasn’t. Not that it probably deterred the NAILS lads from the Tudor adverts, mind.

England would, of course, crash out of the 1970 World Cup in the Quarter finals, following an especially humiliating defeat by West Germany. They probably should have spent less time playing the Tudor World Cup Football Game.

The Satirical Panther, Part 7

In 1982, Steven Spielberg’s heart-wrenching tale of a rubbery-necked alien who wanted to phone home at the same time as promising to be ‘right here’ E.T. The Extra Terrestrial broke box office records and set audiences blubbing as he kissed Drew Barrymore, inspired a generation of children to try ‘flying’ on their bikes by performing a partial wheelie whilst standing entirely still, and left video shop-dwelling miscreants leaving literally empty-handed when they realised they’d got it out instead of E.T.N The Extra-Terrestrial Nastie by mistake. It was also the year when TV Comic attempted to contrive a one-sided rivalry between E.T. and the obvious side-shunted candidate for being swindled out of space-adulation honours, The Pink Panther.

Now showing at the ‘Regal’ cinema – presumably one that had somehow survived after the chain went into receivership in the early seventies – and not his usual haunt in the company of The Inspector and that boy pulling up in Francoise Hardy’s car Grauman’s Chinese Theatre, E.T. The Extra Terrestrial seems to have provoked a disproportionate degree of disconcertion with The Pink Panther, with his primary objection over the accompanying hype and media saturation being that he’s ‘not even pink’. Even aside from the fact that more humanlike skin tones would have made it easier for the massive-eyed red pointy finger character to avert the attentions of those blokes in hazmat suits who ran a string through Elliot’s house connected to a record player or something, it also suggests the existence of a strata of success where the mere involvement of the word ‘pink’ can automatically confer global and indeed intergalactic popularity. 1982 was, of course, also the year of Trail Of The Pink Panther.

Elsewhere in less rueful areas of the issue, you could also find a ‘Star Line’ with ‘James Bond’ – presumably a fudge to skirt around any potential Never Say Never Again-occasioned confusion – and that all important ‘Four Extra Plus Pages’. Doubtless covering the Yahoo Serious Festival.

Random Album Recommendations: More Of The Monkees by The Monkees (Colgems, 1967)

What Is It?: Literally ‘more’ of The Monkees, released less than three months after their debut and assembled without the band’s input or consent from a stockpile of more than thirty tracks recorded for the television series. There’s striking while the iron’s hot, and there’s hitting at thin air while a frowning bloke is still trying to heat the iron.

What’s On The Cover?: A parkland-bound Mike, Micky, Davy and Peter doing their best ‘We Are Not Copying Rubber Soul Honest’ faces. Luckily there’s a gold border so nobody would ever suspect a thing.

What’s On It?: The Monkees themselves were famously critical of the contents of this album, which was perhaps more motivated by behind the scenes politics than the actual quality of the music. Admittedly Laugh and When Love Comes Knockin’ (At Your Door) veer lightly in the direction of filler, and may have worked just fine backing speeded-up footage of Davy being assailed by a toy chimp but don’t really work quite so well on a straightforward listening level, and The Day We Fall In Love is a lost fight against Walter The Softy waiting to happen, elsewhere it’s wall to wall belters. Not only do you get (I’m Not Your) Steppin’ Stone and I’m A Believer, there’s also a brace of aspirant garage-psych freakouts in She and Mary, Mary, abstract comedy drone-rocker Your Auntie Grizelda featuring a rare Peter lead vocal, dreamy psychedelic ramble Some Time In The Morning, catchy tale of being caught cheating Look Out (Here Comes Tomorrow) and tons more that didn’t exactly represent the desperate scraping of those thirty odd tracks. They even get a few songwriter credits.

What’s Not On It?: Most of those by then slightly less than thirty odd tracks would find their way onto subsequent albums and singles, but notably there’s the withdrawn single All Of Your Toys, written by a band associate and performed by The Monkees themselves with the assistance of a lone session bassist, which was pulled after someone in management threw a hissy fit. The earlier and notably rougher version of Valleri that you’ll hear in the television shows was also knocking around at this point too.

Home Service

On this tier you get all of the Light Programme posts plus regular audio and occasional video exclusives. In addition early access to new editions of Looks Unfamiliar, there’s also radio and podcast guest appearances and other elusive audio oddities from the archives and listen-along commentaries on the likes of Mary Mungo And Midge, Trumpton, The Magic Roundabout and more.

Third Programme

This is the highest tier but you get access to everything under Home Service and Light Programme and downloads of all of my self-published books plus the occasional exclusive extra. If you like PDFs with additional facts about REC307 Through A Glass Darkly by Peter Howell And The BBC Radiophonic Workshop, then this is the one for you!

Anyway, that’s my Patreon – which I still can’t quite decide on a snappy enough name for – and I hope to see you there! Unless you’re going to tell me off for calling it Boss Cat, of course.