On 12th February 1974, a procession of sepia photographs of a shop front apparently taken once upon a time not so long ago juddered into full colour stop-motion as Bagpuss woke up and looked at this thing that Emily brought for the very first time. Nobody could honestly have imagined at that point that it would even so much as outlast such less distinguished contemporaries as In The Town and Ring-A-Ding! in the Watch With Mother schedules, let alone enjoy dozens of repeats well into the mid-eighties and even after that eventually build on its secure foothold in the collective affection to not just become arguably the most celebrated BBC children’s programme but possibly even the most celebrated children’s television programme full stop. You could of course argue against this assertion, and doubtless certain individuals determined to iterate the cause of The Wall Game with a disturbingly personal zeal are already hurtling towards their nearest chosen social media platform to do just that, but it is surely one that few would see fit to take issue with. Even Professor Yaffle would probably maintain pedantic counsel on this occasion.

Bagpuss has of course been something of a popular subject around here – most notably in a mesmerising chat with Grace Dent about her earliest hazy childhood memories of watching Charliemouse and company here – and the remarkable on account of its charming unremarkability story behind the show forms a significant part of the chapter on Smallfilms in The Golden Age Of Children’s TV, a book which may well not be on Professor Yaffle’s shelf but even so you can find more about it here. What is of particular noteworthiness here, however, is just how little promotional fanfare that first ever showing of Bagpuss attracted, in stark contrast to its latterday ubiquity. Billing the very first transmission simply with “Bagpuss, an old cloth cat, lives with his friends in the window of Emily’s shop… where anything can happen“, Radio Times did at least consider the saggy old cloth cat’s debut worthy of an accompanying in-listing illustration of a disconcertingly concerned-looking Bagpuss with a relocated but still resolutely tin-bound Gabriel The Toad whispering something evidently moderately alarming into his ear as the mice skittering past his feet at a pace and with an athleticism that were scarcely ever in evidence on screen – and there’s much more about the beautiful but ephemeral artwork that once routinely decorated the listings in the average issue of Radio Times here – but otherwise there was little to denote it as in any way any more remarkable or noteworthy than Barbara Woodhouse’s dog training tips on the edition of Pebble Mill At One that preceded it in the schedules or Who’s Minding The Cat?, the episode of Diana Rigg’s hastily cancelled self-titled NBC sitcom that followed later in the afternoon. Compare this with how often the average Looks Unfamiliar choice – say, for entirely random example, Murder In Space or Libby’s Moonshine – would find itself launched with blockbusting demands for attention and an arrogant expectation of pan-global cultural ubiquity and longevity that it became apparent were not liable to be forthcoming within about three minutes, and you will doubtless have some sort of a sense not just of how the entire concepts of marketing and branding have changed since the mice on the Mouse Organ first woke up and stretched but also of how the sudden deluge of individuals ‘remembering’ Bagpuss and other similar overly-obvious retro cultural touchpoints, especially when it came accompanied by tedious sex and drug-alleging ‘irony’, came to have a detrimental effect on the concept of nostalgia itself for a good while. In this collection of highlights from the archives, though, you can find a somewhat more considered attempt at uncovering just why Bagpuss resonated with so many and so deeply, along with a couple of editions of Looks Unfamiliar looking at a number of examples of pop cultural ephemera that it is fair to say did not enjoy the same degree of resonance, and some thoughts inspired by a book by a film critic who really wanted to be a pop star, which don’t really fit here to well thematically but much like everyone’s frustrated dreams of pop stardom you’re getting them anyway. Incidentally, if there’s a café on the way to Emily’s shop, then don’t get me a coffee from there because it’s probably a bit too ‘hipster’ but you’re welcome to try here instead. In the meantime, there’s some reading matter that Augustus Barclay Yaffle would most certainly not approve of to be getting on with…

Looks Unfamiliar: John Rain – They Probably Made Mick Fleetwood And Samantha Fox Look Like The Hitman And Her

Host of the quietly game-changing irreverently analytical James Bond podcast SMERSH Pod, John was an early supporter of Looks Unfamiliar, and looking at some of his choices – which included overhyped and underdelivering interactive dramatised mystery serial slash game show Murder In Space, Children’s ITV’s aptly named anarchic sketch show Your Mother Wouldn’t Like It, widely averted provocative BBC2 sketch show Hello Mum, widely unadopted charity fundraising event Trading Places Day and ‘E Number’-addled spurious movie tie-in biscuits E.T. Cola Creams – it possibly isn’t difficult to understand how an eighties childhood could cultivate such an astute sense of wry cynicism. John’s choice that really seemed to strike a chord, however, was Oink! comic, essentially a porcine-slanted junior counterpart to Viz full of the sort of simultaneously outrageous and outlandish comic strips that your mother really wouldn’t like, toting a blend of scatology and satire that briefly flourished – to the chagrin of Mary Lighthouse – in the late eighties. One of Oink!‘s key contributors, who perhaps tellingly was responsible for the overwhelming majority of the items that it transpired had lodged themselves in our shared recollections on account of their sheer hilarity, was an incredibly young Charlie Brooker, although our discussion of the staggering potential evident even in this extremely early work inevitably drew responses from bores keen to point out that actually he wasn’t actually that young actually because something something oh give it a rest it was a comic not an intellectual and aesthetic suit of armour that protected you from the unenlightened rest of the world or whatever it is now. I’m not sure Tom Thug would have let you get away with that unbullied for starters. Anyway you can find the full show here and the chat about Hello Mum in a collection of Looks Unfamiliar highlights here.

And You And I Would Call Them Dragonflies

Inspired both by a visit to the Smallfilms exhibition at the Museum Of Childhood and by Earth Recordings’ tremendous release of The Music From Bagpuss in its original recorded form, complete with false starts, alternate arrangements and even unused cues and dialogue – which did finally explain why Gabriel The Toad sounds different in the opening titles to how he does in the actual episodes of Bagpuss itself; and no it isn’t as interesting as you might have speculated – this started off simply as a glorified review of the album but once I began to divert into my own frustratingly unresolved attempts at tracking down any semblance of an official release for even a handful of seconds of music from Bagpuss it transformed into something else entirely. The plaintive and hypnotic ballad of the bored princess and the suitors so blinkered and lovestruck by their devotion that they instinctively obeyed her wish to leave her alone by evolving into dragonflies had always been top of the list of Emily’s Shop-adjacent numbers I had desperately hoped to stumble across under a different name on some tattily-sleeved long-unplayed John Faulkner and Sandra Kerr album, and correspondingly The Frog Princess had always been my favourite episode of Bagpuss where the vast majority of others would doubtless opt instantly for The Mouse Mill, and it not only similarly evolved into a rumination on why that particular Mouse Organ-facilitated yarn had held me so spellbound as a youngster but also a meditation on how Bagpuss itself, once it was retired by the BBC, very briefly retreated as far into ‘the past’ as those sepia photographs. Oh and then there were the two occasions on which I met the actual Bagpuss too, of course. I don’t mention that very often. You can find the original version of And You And I Would Call Them Dragonflies here and an expanded version with much more on the story behind the music from Bagpuss and how and why it took so long to surface as music in its own right in Keep Left, Swipe Right here.

Looks Unfamiliar: Mark Thompson – Libby’s Difficult Second Carton Drink

Possibly a slightly ironic title for this edition of Looks Unfamiliar as Mark – whose first appearance had of course been the first ever one ever to go ‘viral’ – had little difficulty in coming up with a second set of similarly inspired choices. The A. Mazing Monsters books had been repeatedly referenced in passing by several previous guests to the extent that it was surprising that nobody else had suggested talking about The Tricky Troggle and company before then, and while Libby’s Um Bongo is the one that always gets mentioned as an off-the-newsagents’-shelf retro reference – invariably accompanied by an unasked for reminder that they purportedly drink it in ‘the’ ‘Congo’, as usually delivered in something approaching an ‘accent’ by individuals who would otherwise very loudly consider themselves very much piously above all that – the notoriously sharper-tasting and dubiously-named hillbilly-themed in-universe follow-up fruit-based beverage Moonshine could almost be the official drink of Looks Unfamiliar, if it wasn’t for the existence of Quatro and the fact that it was a brave imbiber who made it from one end of the carton to the other. Mark is however, also very good on recapturing the fascinating indolence of lazing around flipping around the television channels and radio dial in that weird hinterland between the emergence of new analogue and cable channels and the arrival of digital broadcasting, and we got plenty of opportunity to explore that here, particularly with our shared fascination with bizarre ultra-lowbrow no-budget experiment L!ve TV and sketch show that should have been brilliant but wasn’t We Know Where You Live, and Mark’s recollections of the disorientating experience of watching television on foreign holidays which were so enjoyable that we expanded on them in their own additional mini-episode. You can find the full show – and the ‘watching TV on holiday’ extra – here and the chat about Moonshine in a collection of Looks Unfamiliar highlights here.

Looks Unfamiliar: Vikki Gregorich And Jeff Lewis – No It’s Just A Radio That’s Been Left On

As someone who spent a fair amount of time watching exactly that sort of pointless no-budget daytime and just plain weird late night television with me in a procession of suitably threadbare and dilapidated rented residences during what can only be described as an era when Channel 5 was an exciting new innovation in home entertainment, Vikki was an obvious candidate for Looks Unfamiliar but was convinced she wasn’t ‘famous’ enough, to the extent that she roped in her significant other – and incidentally legend in the console gaming world – Jeff to appear on it with her. This particular edition of Looks Unfamiliar drew a good deal of positive response from listeners who appeared to especially enjoy the group dynamic and Vikki and Jeff’s hysteria when I momentarily couldn’t remember David Blaine’s name and lapsed into my proper accent when referring to him as ‘soft lad who stood on the pole’, although it also attracted furious emails from a number of gentlemen who I would never have considered having on as guests anyway who were furious that someone else and a woman at that had chosen Animalympics, which they had unilaterally decided should be reserved as their choice and theirs alone. You really do have to wonder what goes on in people’s minds sometimes. Meanwhile, not one of these self-appointed genii noticed that due to a technical slipup, the entire show had to be pieced together from backup recordings on two separate phones. You can find the full show here and the chat about The Secret Cabaret in a collection of Looks Unfamiliar highlights here.

‘Noddy Holder Men And Motors’ Anecdote Not Included

Although Mark Kermode is considerably better known for his movie criticism than for his music – although frankly you really ought to catch The Dodge Brothers live if they’re riding through your town – this thoroughly entertaining account of his very much Slade In Flame-informed ambitions towards a parallel career all the way from home-made do-it-yourself kit electric guitars that later went missing, through ill-advised post-punk on-stage shock comedy stunts and demonstrating how to start a skiffle combo on The Wide Awake Club and all the way up to finally getting to record in Sun Studios – and turn round Bono’s photo on the wall – with The Dodge Brothers struck a not especially well formed chord with me and very much called to mind my own long abandoned musical ambitions, which as you can doubtless imagine were about as far removed from any notions of approaching it ‘properly’ as you can actually get this side of being Glasses by Chris Jarvis. I enjoyed writing this look back at those Theremin-toting days enormously and Mark generously remarked that it was ‘quite a lot of fun’ too; I also later saw his one-man show expanding on the book complete with performances of the various numbers referenced in it which I have to say was absolutely fantastic, even if certain members of the audience insisted on loudly voicing their agreement with assorted gags and observations to ensure that everyone else was aware that they ‘got’ it. The rather cryptic title, incidentally, is a reference to an anecdote that Mark was forever promising to tell on Mark Radcliffe’s late-night Radio 1 show but somehow circumstances always seemed to conspire to prevent him from doing so. You can find the original version of ‘Noddy Holder Men And Motors’ Anecdote Not Included here and an expanded version, with much more on those thankfully long forgotten self-composed songs and what they might have sounded like, in Keep Left, Swipe Right here.

Fun At One

If however you would rather read more about Mark Kermode’s adventures as a cultural commentator at large late at night on Radio 1, which often ended up even odder than the movies he were ostensibly there to talk about in ‘Cult Film Corner’, then you can find all of that and more in Fun At One, the story of comedy at BBC Radio 1, 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.