Around this time I had already been, well, thinking about putting together a new published anthology, when I unexpectedly got an email out of the blue from a very well known comedian. She had, it transpired, recently been given The Camberwick Green Procrastination Society as a birthday present and apparently enjoyed it very much but had also come away from it with a sense that I was not really doing enough to ‘sell’ myself as a writer. This was not, it has to be admitted, a groundless charge; more through a lack of interest in public attention – those who know me might beg to differ about how this manifests in private – than any specific desire to cultivate any sort of mysterious or enigmatic artistic persona, I have generally adopted the stance that what I do should to some extent speak for itself and never really made any attempt to position myself as a ‘brand’. The accompanying comment that The Camberwick Green Procrastination Society looked ‘like something you might read to look clever on the Tube’ was probably pretty much accurate but while that may well have been an aesthetic I might once have aspired towards, it did not necessarily feel like that was the case any longer. For a start, you would be more likely to find me on public transport reading a Marvel Platinum collection or one of Andrew Collins’ ‘remembering’ books rather than anything intended to dazzle fellow passengers with my aesthetic flair and intellectual depth, and in fact not long afterwards a woman on a rush hour train randomly came up and gave me a copy of Daisy Jones And The Six as she’d noticed I was always reading ‘for fun’ and had finished it herself and thought I might enjoy it. All things considered, hardly exactly Hiking With Nietzsche.

That all said, it was also the case that I had been experimenting with introducing a more personal slant into my writing where and when it felt appropriate – beginning in fact with the very first post on this website, as you can see for yourself here – and hosting Looks Unfamiliar had also thawed my general resistance towards actually presenting first person experiences and anecdotes as just that rather than couching them in vague and quasi-academic phraseology. The obvious progression from all of this from the standpoint of assembling a new collection appeared to be reframing existing columns and features with a more personal perspective, and after trying out the intended approach with a repurposed feature about rewatching This Life – which again you can find here – I found that I very much enjoyed it and rapidly accumulated enough similarly repurposed efforts along with a handful of new ones to fill a roughly housebrick-sized paperback. Intentionally modelling the structure of the contents on Caitlin Moran’s Moranthology – and to an extent the cover, for which I fought with some apprehension against a correspondingly lengthy history of camera-shyness and hired a proper photographer – I wryly titled the collection Can’t Help Thinking About Me after an early David Bowie song and released it with a vague hope that it might generate some form of ‘buzz’ as self-published collection that, give or take some more professional typesetting, could just as easily have found a place on the shelves of a major high street bookstore. What I possibly had not quite got a handle on yet was how to actually promote it with that kind of degree of exposure in mind, as perhaps might well be all too evident from this roundup of what else I was up to around the the time. So what happened next with Can’t Help Thinking About Me? Well, while you’re waiting to find out, you might want to take the opportunity to buy me a coffee here. Of course, there was at least one extremely obvious avenue for self-promotion…

Looks Unfamiliar: Tim Worthington – People Don’t Really Go On About Psychedelic Blue Peter

The twenty fifth edition of Looks Unfamiliar – and what an impossibly vast milestone that seemed at the time – was very much on the horizon by the time that Can’t Help Thinking About Me was ready to hit whatever the self-published equivalent of ‘the shelves’ are. Although despite repeated suggestions I had previously quietly disregarded the idea of appearing as the guest on the show myself, primarily out of wariness that it might come across as slightly self-indulgent, doing so to both mark the occasion – well, it was a good enough excuse for both Coronation Street and Doctor Who to make with the silver-edged lettering in the eighties – and to give Can’t Help Thinking About Me a bit of a push seemed reasonable enough. Also, there were more than a few accumulated popular cultural question marks that I otherwise did not have much of an opportunity to talk about – at least not outside of going on and on about them in everyday conversation – including a long-forgotten mini-epic Public Information Film slash psychological terror movie about boat safety, bilingual-ish French psychedelic crime caper movie The Brain, Lisa Stansfield’s thrillingly unrepresentative debut single, wretched one-time playground contraband paperback Secrets From The School Underground, Jackanory‘s live-action adaptation of Nicholas Fisk’s Starstormers which Men On Forums always seemed to go to excessive lengths to attempt to shut down and discredit my vivid recollections of, and over and above everything else the so forgotten that even people who had forgotten about it had forgotten that they had forgotten about it ‘fourth’ Trumptonshire show Rubovia, which even people I knew in real life went to excessive lengths to shut down and discredit my vivid recollections of despite the fact that I had actually tracked down actual incontrovertible proof in the form of a rather limited smattering of tie-in merchandise. As keen a follower as I might be of Me1 Vs Me2 Snooker With Richard Herring, interviewing myself about any of the above was evidently not going to work and it needed a guest host who was at least familiar enough both with my choices and the show’s format; fortunately Stephen O’Brien had not only already appeared on Looks Unfamiliar but was also the only other person I knew who remembered StarStormers on Jackanory, more or less the only person who believed me about Rubovia, and sufficiently familiar with all of the other suggestions primarily through me going on about them constantly, and did a fantastic job. As fun as turning the tables was, however, I did not see it as anything other than a one-off experiment that probably wouldn’t work a second time. Well, that would certainly change. You can find the full show here and the chat about Secrets From The School Underground in a collection of Looks Unfamiliar highlights here.

Looks Unfamiliar: Martin Belam – It’s Not Funny Having A Piano Fall On Your Head If Someone’s Just Drawn It

An early champion of Looks Unfamiliar who more than once gave it a very appreciative plug in his newsletter Friday Reading, I was very pleased when Martin agreed to appear on Looks Unfamiliar, not least because his choices were enjoyably off-script, especially witnessing New Order somehow forgetting how to play one of their songs live. It was also something of a thrill to get to talk about the Laurel And Hardy cartoon, now widely regarded as a deeply resentable act of cultural sacrilege but which an entire generation had watched on face value and probably laughed at more than they would have done about all of that business with turning round whilst carrying planks at the time, and which had long been a bewildered obsession of mine more on account of the logistical and mathematical issues that their depiction of Stan and Ollie presented than any sense that it was an affront to their comedy genius. I will admit however that I had not quite accounted for the sheer volume of indignant and agitated rejoinders that the discussion of Flash Gordon would provoke, courtesy of individuals who appeared to think that the experience of seeing a movie at a cinema as a very young child somehow negated their cast iron fact-sealed cultural ownership of a very silly film in which the villain unleashes a torrent of ‘Hot Hail’. Anyway. You can find the full show here and the chat about the Laurel And Hardy cartoon in a collection of Looks Unfamiliar highlights here.

The Best Of Looks Unfamiliar: The Real Bowie Says To The Imagined Bowie

Another Looks Unfamiliar highlights collection, this time featuring Paul Kirkley on The Kids From Fame Again, Garreth Hirons on Sweet 75, Darrell Maclaine on The Brennan JB7, James Gent on When The Wind Blows by David Bowie, Ros Ballinger on Microsoft Explorapedia and Jonny Morris on Jesta Giggle by The Barron Knights. The ‘extra’ this time was an extract from the chat with Betamax Video Club about Absolute Beginners, which we have already taken a Square Windowed look at so there is not really particularly much to say here, other than that right at the end, there’s a clip of a piece of music that I am still mischievously astonished that I managed to sneak on to the radio – and on to seriousness’ own 6Music too – which apparently even some people who only caught the end of it realised can only have been my handiwork. Anyway, you can find the full show, mystery television themes that may not in fact be quite so much of a mystery after all and all, here.

The Books I Couldn’t Help Thinking About

In a further bid to draw at least some attention towards Can’t Help Thinking About Me, I decided that it would be both a nice idea and a relatively interesting one to take a look at some of the writers and indeed the specific books that had, in their own often understated way, had the most profound and significant influence on me as a writer. I knew from the outset however that there was at least one fanzine and even one set of CD booklet sleevenotes that would more than warrant inclusion on any such list, which just goes to underline that you cannot designate or enforce what others ‘should’ or should not be reading – unless of course it’s The Camberwick Green Procrastination Society which is the essential option for looking clever on the Tube – and that everyone is free to enjoy and indeed find value and inspiration in whatever they like. Despite the heartfelt sentiments that underpinned it, I honestly regarded this as essentially little more than contrived advertising verging on filler, and chose to illustrate it with a random photo of one of my bookshelves that I had taken for an entirely different reason altogether; eagle-eyed pedants might well notice that this inadvertently includes several books and indeed writers who did not appear in the feature itself, so profound apologies are due to Louis, Andy and Charlie for that oversight. I was pleasantly surprised, then, when it appeared to strike a book-loving chord with considerably more readers than I had anticipated, and indeed when some of the featured writers got in contact to express their surprise and gratitude; there were also a good deal of comments from readers who had been inspired to track down a couple of the featured books themselves, hopefully to sit on their bookshelf next to their newly delivered copy of Can’t Help Thinking About Me. Depressingly, if predictably, there were also a fair few rejoinders objecting strenuously to the inclusion of certain writers whom I had apparently ‘betrayed’ some individuals I had never heard of by enjoying their work, and even a couple of barbed comments about it being a ‘self-indulgent’ piece of writing, as if something written for your own website about books you like with the intention of promoting one of your own books could ever honestly have been anything otherwise. I can only assume they just wanted more Looks Unfamiliar instead, doubtless with them as the guest. You can find the original version of The Books I Couldn’t Help Thinking About here and an expanded version featuring even more books and – originally intended for an abandoned follow-up feature – a look at a randomly-grabbed handful of surprisingly esoteric CDs in Keep Left, Swipe Right here.

Looks Unfamiliar: Jack Kibble-White – You’ll Never Silence Paul Coia

TV Cream, the original and frankly best nostalgia website, may now have been shelved in the archives itself but I’m still incredibly proud of what we all achieved primarily while essentially doing little more than having a bit of a laugh and approaching the pop cultural eccentricities of the past with a refusal to take any of it seriously – well, apart from that really weird A-Z listing for Fawlty Towers – and a massively self-contradictory perspective, sometimes even presenting diametrically opposed opinions within the same sentence and yet which somehow still worked. One of the longstanding editors and the originator of the recurring fixation on the seventies preponderance of ‘angry’ flutes, I was absolutely delighted to have this chat with Jack on Looks Unfamiliar as I knew he would throw in some unexpected and thrillingly mundane tangents such as people who refer to ‘the ITV’ and his thoughts on Paul Daniels’ interview technique, although looking at the list of choices now what is striking is that, Richard Digance aside, they are all on face value relatively straight-faced if not ‘serious’ so it is frankly little short of a miracle that we managed to wrangle so much hilarity out of them. You can find the full show here and the chat about the Laurel And Hardy cartoon in a collection of Looks Unfamiliar highlights here.

The Golden Age Of Children’s TV

While we’re on the subject of bookshelves and what you might want to have on them – or indeed off, because even if I say so myself this is worth reading – then you might well want to invest in a copy of The Golden Age Of Children’s TV, the story of children’s television from Pogle’s Wood and Pipkins to Pob’s Programme and Press Gang and everything inbetween, which is available in all good bookshops and from Waterstones here, Amazon here, from the Kindle Store here and directly from Black And White Publishing 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.