In that simultaneously surprisingly stuffed yet surprisingly dusty sideboard cupboard full of board games which was invariably your eventual ‘sorry, you’ll just have to entertain yourselves’ port of call on a rain-lashed school summer holiday afternoon, wedged in between that knockoff Muppet-illustrated Hide And Seek thing where nobody could actually work out how to play it, a Spin Quiz where one single side panel of the box had faded in the sun, and the pre-word filled Scrabble For Juniors which was somehow even more complicated and challenging than actual Scrabble, there was always one board game that by sheer virtue of its tie-in branding associations managed to elevate itself above the fact that it was more or less just the same as any other thoroughly ordinary game. Usually – and you can find plenty of examples of the artform here – they were essentially little more than what could scarcely even legitimately be described as a ‘variant’ on Snakes And Ladders or Ludo, only with flashy illustrations on the board and spurious in-character cards of indeterminate purpose to denote their purported association with Mork And Mindy or Crossroads and indeed to imbue them with an equally spurious notion of the thrills and spills of whatever it was that Dan Tanna actually did. Such was very much the case with The Roobarb And Custard Chase Game, which despite immediately losing points for perpetuating the myth that the actual programme was ever called anything other than just plain Roobarb, and then losing further points for shunning dice in favour of one of those six-point spinners that never actually spun, still succeeded in evoking some of the bulgingly-animated anarchy of its small-screen inspiration by virtue of populating its gameplay with instances of Roobarb and indeed Custard indulging in standard pail of water and cardboard beak hijinks whilst admirably shamelessly brandishing ladders. All that was missing was… well, nothing really. It had the requisite green floppy hound, complete with a lone depiction with his ears in ‘that is the bit where he is a proper dog’ position, and that was all that mattered.

Quirky board games – even those that were not to any degree ‘quirky’ on anything beyond a laminated surface level – have inevitably been a popular choice for guests on Looks Unfamiliar, with notable examples of the oddly-artworked artform including Stephen O’Brien on The Morecambe And Wise Game here, Catrin Lowe on Heartthrob – The Dream Date Game here and Lydia Mizon on Party Mania here. Jacqueline Rayner’s choices included one particular game that for a long time we were absolutely certain existed but despite our best efforts were simply entirely unable to positively identify, and that was and indeed is far from the only longstanding Looks Unfamiliar mystery; even just amongst the editions revisited in this instalment of Through The Square Window you will find a moral panic over a purported ‘dangerous’ dance craze that history has failed to adequately record any details of, an errant cordial flavour and a frankly disturbing-sounding Children’s ITV drama that nobody has been able to put a name to even despite the usual quotient of correspondents vigorously asserting that it must have been Moondial. It wasn’t.

It was also around this time that I started to suspect that there were now so many editions of Looks Unfamiliar that it was probably worth putting together the occasional highlights show with new – or at least lesser-heard – additional bits and pieces appended, with the consequence that this has inadvertently turned out as something of an audio-heavy instalment of Through The Square Window although there’s still plenty of post-Fame! posing room for a look back at the very first ever – and it’s not the one you’re thinking – Now That’s What I Call Music! spinoff album. Which in and of itself is probably more musically and culturally associated with one of those bottled neon-logoed mocktails like Taboo and Biarritz than it is the very different and markedly superior strand of sophistication associated with caffeine, but if you’d like to show your appreciation for these collected efforts regardless then you are more than welcome to buy me a vastly-preferred coffee here. Anyway, let’s kick proceedings off with a frankly disturbing indication of what might actually happen if you dared to call him ‘Jack’ or ‘James’…

Looks Unfamiliar: Will Maclean – Barnaby’s Apocalypse

He may now be an award-winning cross-platform media producer and acclaimed novelist, but all award-winners have to start somewhere and in Will’s case that was editing our Doctor Who Local Group’s newsletter way back in the days when people thought they were somehow ‘helping’ the show by scoffing McCoy’s crisps by the multipack, and while I’m not sure that will ever have bagged him any awards unless someone gave him one of those invariably warped-boxed FASA Doctor Who Role Playing Game modules as one as a sort of ironic joke, it did give rise to many shared bemused reminiscences about subjects which at that point were only really a couple of years old; thinking about it now, through a roundabout route that was more than probably part of what ultimately led towards what eventually became Looks Unfamiliar. I had actually met up with Will for a coffee on my way to record with Samira Ahmed and Steve Berry, with the perhaps inevitable consequence that we ended up recording one ourselves not long afterwards. It was tremendous fun to revisit some of our longstanding obsessions like Galaxy High, Powers Of Ten and Barnaby’s baffling cameo in the opening titles of Once Upon A Time… Man, but what I particularly enjoyed was Will taking the discussion into his fragmentary memories of being alarmed by chance television moments that he understood but did not quite fully understand, in particular a panicked news report about ‘dangerous’ dance craze ‘The Snake’ and an episode of The Sooty Show in which Sweep underwent brain surgery. As it would turn out, this was far from the only episode of The Sooty Show to have freaked out an unsuspecting Looks Unfamiliar guest for no good reason. You can find the full show here and the chat about Once Upon A Time… Man in a collection of Looks Unfamiliar highlights here.

Looks Unfamiliar: Jacqueline Rayner – She Went To The Ball In A Horse-Drawn Bath

Another friend from Doctor Who Local Group days, Jac has gone on to become a prolific novelist and dramatist and historian of girls’ comics though it is more than possible that her greatest moment of international recognition came courtesy of an innocent casual tweet about Amazon trying to sell her surplus toilet seats after she had already bought one, which somehow went viral to the extent of becoming headline news on the other side of the world. I was still very aware of the balance of male to female guests on Looks Unfamiliar at this point and happily Jac went an enormous way towards redressing the balance with a fantastic chat about Barbie and Sindy’s cut-price pocket-sized rival Pippa and the mind-frazzling late seventies ITV panto Quincy’s Quest, although a lot of her choices were and indeed still are shrouded in mystery. We have only recently come across photographic proof of the existence of what turned out to be more properly named Klonks’N’Klones, haven’t found anything beyond contemporaneous image-free references to the existence of Quosh Tropical, and still have yet to put a name to the weird thirties-tinged vegetarian slash cannibal allegory Children’s ITV drama that Jac saw about thirty deeply unsettling seconds of before it was abruptly switched off. So if anyone can help with either of those, we’d still really love to know. It isn’t Moondial, though. You can find the full show here and the chat about Pippa Dolls in a collection of Looks Unfamiliar highlights here.

2 Hours Of Wicked Mixes To Keep You Moving All Night Long

Perhaps inevitably given that there are several decades and hundreds upon hundreds of titles to choose from, everyone probably has their own very firmly held ideas about when and where the ‘imperial phase’ of the Now That’s What I Call Music! compilation series begins and ends. If you are asking me, though, then it starts with the very first one and the wheels very first show small but definite signs of starting to come off circa Now That’s What I Call Music! 9 when they began to allow advert-sponsored revived ‘sophisticated’ ‘golden’ ‘oldies’ onto the tracklisting alongside the up to the minute pop hits and would-be pop hits, and even then it took a while to fully fall into more streamlined and less eccentric line and there were many more mighty volumes – not least 1990’s rave-tastic Now That’s What I Call Music! 17 – to come. Admittedly part of this ongoing affinity for the earlier volumes is down to the bizarre attempts to extend and exploit a ‘brand’ where they hadn’t even properly figured out what it represented yet, and amongst all of the mugs, ‘bugs’, t-shirts and bafflingly omnipresent CDs of Now That’s What I Call Music! ’86 the very first spinoff Now Dance – a collection of 12″ Extended Versions from before ‘dance music’ as we know it even existed – now stands out as even more bizarre than most. This salute to its sheer historical incongruity was as much an attempt to understand it as a cultural artefact in its context of wine bars and Sigue Sigue Sputnik haircuts as it was an excuse to make jokes about Kamelion from Doctor Who and the surfeit of mid-eighties soul artists called Curtis. You can find the original version of 2 Hours Of Wicked Mixes To Keep You Moving All Night Long here, and you can also find a hugely expanded version with even less about ‘Belouis’ ‘Some’ in Keep Left, Swipe Right here.

Looks Unfamiliar: Una McCormack – Revolution 9 For Descant Recorder And Woodblock

As a fan of Una’s infectiously upbeat social media presence as much as of her superb Doctor Who novels, I was thrilled when she agreed to appear on Looks Unfamiliar; what I hadn’t anticipated, however, was that we would find such entertainingly bemused common ground in our extremely similar shared semi-religious upbringing and the hysterical recollections about church gossip, purposeless holy memorabilia and the bitter rivalry between the Catholic Pictorial and Catholic Herald would give this edition a dynamic all of its own which even informed our thoroughly areligious chats about Trick Sticks, school assembly songbooks and the Melendy Family novel series. I was also extremely pleased that Una chose a little-remembered series of Jackanory stories from fairly late in the show’s existence, which gave us a chance to delve into that A-Level-era still-just-about-at-school-but-not-quite mindset that has featured surprisingly little in Looks Unfamiliar but is endlessly fascinating all the same. You can find the full show here and the chat about Screw-Top Virgin Marys in a collection of Looks Unfamiliar highlights here.

The Best Of Looks Unfamiliar: Captain Peacock Is Pompous, Move Back Three Spaces

This was, rather obviously, the very first collection of highlights from Looks Unfamiliar, featuring Stephen O’Brien on The Morecambe And Wise Game, Garreth Hirons on Food Fighters, Emma Burnell on The Patchwork Monkey, Phil Catterall on the ZX Spectrum Platoon game, Mark Thompson on Night Shift and Ben Baker on Fiendish Feet, along with an appearance I made on Georgey Spanswick’s syndicated BBC Local Radio show chatting about vintage TV and movie tie-in board games. Given how much of a turn for the at best unpleasant and at worst utterly useless social media has taken in more recent times, it’s worth mentioning that this came about largely on account of a joke I made on Twitter about Harvey Smith’s Show Jumping, and if you’d told me way back when that I would one day find myself being interviewed about War Of The Daleks by the host of TV-am’s Cue George!, I would honestly have found it difficult to credit. That’s an example of the positive power of social media, and maybe it’s something we can still reclaim from the rat bastards who have overrun it somehow. Anyway, you can find the full show, Showjumping Daleks and all, here.

Can’t Help Thinking About Me

There’s surprisingly little about board games in it – although there is a lot about Quincy’s Quest – but if you’ve enjoyed any of the above then you might enjoy rolling a six on Can’t Help Thinking About Me, a collection of columns and features with a personal twist 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.