I was recently thrilled to be invited to the brilliant Dead Ink Books in Liverpool – an independent bookshop and publishing house whose titles include the recent Nero Book Awards winner Lost In The Garden by Adam S. Leslie, which incidentally you can find me and and Adam chatting about here – for a chat with Andy Miller, host of the excellent Backlisted podcast, about The Golden Age Of Children’s TV. As well as discussing the book itself and what you can find in it and indeed what you can’t, the conversation inevitably diverted into such such esoteric questions as how BBC Test Card F managed to stay upright, whether there were Multiversal variants of Why Don’t You…? and if they were any more interesting than the one we got, why Thunderbirds is less interesting when Thunderbird 5 isn’t in it, if ‘cool’ bands became even more ‘cool’ by going on to Swap Shop and being ‘uncool’ about it being ‘uncool’, how Timmy Mallett contributed to the collapse of the Apartheid regime, who was the best knock-off Indiana Jones out of Paul Jones and Keith Allen and why The Golden Age Of Children’s TV could have done with more pigs singing Beatles songs. There’s also tons about Tiswas, Dramarama, Clangers, The Book Tower, Here Come The Double Deckers! and much more besides, and you can listen to it either on YouTube or Spotify here.

You can find out more about The Golden Age Of Children’s TV here and get it directly from Dead Ink Books online here or from their fantastic bookshop – and they may even have some signed copies in stock – here. You can also find Andy’s similarly fantastic podcast Backlisted here.

© Tim Worthington.
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