Well, let’s just skip the whimsical intro on this occasion, shall we?
I have little to add here other than that I both regret and resent that I felt the need to republish this, originally written in 2016 for very obvious reasons, a whole three years later for reasons that will become obvious in the introduction to the republished version, and continue to regret and resent that I still feel the need to link to it on an all too frequent basis now. We just seem to have learned so little. Everyone still has to be the first in and the best at shouting at each other, the first in and the best at taking outrage even on the basis of clear confection, and the first in and the best at the poor taste reaction ‘zinger’ with scant room afforded for self-reflection and it doesn’t seem to be showing any signs of stopping. What’s more, that’s just ‘our’ ‘side’ – the other lot continue to be as unrepentantly repugnant as ever. All this time later, ‘More In Common’ seems a more relevant mantra than ever. You can find Jo Cox here.
Looks Unfamiliar: Gillian Kirby – What’s Not Work Safe About Sick Worms?
The episode that got Looks Unfamiliar an enthusiastic review in Woman And Home magazine, with Gillian’s teenaged recollections of furtively staying up to read ‘naughty’ Teletext, equally furtively devouring the S.T.A.R.Z. novels and affecting ‘young adult’ sophistication by drinking Orbitz, frequenting Seattle Coffee Co., joining bolt.com and listening to Transvision Vamp evidently striking a deep resonance with the internationally recognised trusted source for beauty, home, fashion and more. We still have never managed to identify that half-remembered untitled episode of Dramarama, though, despite no little effort on my part – they’re hard to come by now and the current whereabouts of some of them in broadcast format are unknown – and the response to this was an early and salutary lesson that those who elect themselves as the one who is persistently determined to solve the mystery for you, doubtless in pursuit of ‘real boy’ status or at least an invitation to appear on Looks Unfamiliar themselves, will invariably be consistently and at times patience-testingly wide of the mark. Anyway, regardless of that, this remains one of my favourite editions and it’s always a pleasure when someone new to the show remarks that they have stumbled across it and really enjoyed it. You can find the full show here and the chat about Teletext After Hours in a collection of Looks Unfamiliar highlights here.
It’s Time For… It’s Time For… Comic Relief!
Another shamelessly exposure-courting extract from Fun At One, this time drawn from the chapter on Radio 1’s hip and ‘dangerous’ and correspondingly phenomenally popular late-night sketch slash standup show The Mary Whitehouse Experience – later overshadowed by the never quite as thrilling television transfer – concentrating on the suitably exciting and fast-moving origins of the show itself, when station controller Johnny Beerling found himself sufficiently thrilled with what was only ever intended to be a non-broadcast pilot edition that he immediately cleared a space in the schedules to tie in with that year’s Comic Relief event and more or less put it straight out on air. Given that it went out unannounced and hardly anyone actually heard it, quite what had happened was always something of a longstanding mystery that various references and accounts in cast interviews did little to clarify – especially once BBC Radio 7 threw matters further into confusion by repeating the pilot at the start of a run of episodes of The Mary Whitehouse Experience – and I was delighted to be able to solve this and numerous other The Mary Whitehouse Experience-related questions along with some about the surprising volume of spinoff shows too – and no, I still haven’t managed to track down Punt And Dennis – Follow That Star! – in Fun At One with the assistance of Steve Punt, David Baddiel and producer Bill Dare. You can find the original version of It’s Time For… It’s Time For… Comic Relief! here and the full story of the Radio 1 incarnation of The Mary Whitehouse Experience in Fun At One here.
Tape Over This And I Will Thump You
By way of total contrast, this was also a shameless attempt at courting exposure for one of my books, although in fairness on this occasion it was an extrapolation from a point raised in Can’t Help Thinking About Me rather than a direct lift from it. What’s more, it came with its own listen-along soundtrack. Inspired by a diversion in the introduction to a hugely rewritten and expanded feature on the joys of listening to sixties records in their original properly mastered mono mixes, this essentially took the form of a virtual compilation tape – nobody upon nobody called them ‘mixtapes’ at the time and don’t let anyone convince you otherwise – made up of tracks I had originally discovered courtesy of compilation tapes that other people had made for me, with track by track annotations referencing where and how I first heard them and what influence if any they had on my musical tastes. Looking back now it was probably more than a little ‘inspired’ by the compile-it-yourself curated C90 annotated tracklists that used to regularly appear in Mojo, but then again if that wasn’t discovering songs from a compilation tape through a rather more circuitous route, then I’m not sure what it was. As well as an excuse to highlight some fantastic lesser-heard tracks, it also provided a much-sought after opportunity to legitimately deploy a joke I’d been desperate to work in to something for ages – see if you can work out which one it was – and to refer to the section in the Fist Of Fun book about Rich and Stew’s record collections, which I still sometimes think may be the funniest two pages ever committed to print, although I’m not sure Plastic Bertrand would concur. The featured image, incidentally, shows some actual compilation tapes that I still have – even if I don’t have anything to play them on – and were put together for me back in the days of respooling cassettes with a biro by, clockwise from top left, Dave Bryant, Ron Bookless, Claire Dowling and Stephen O’Brien. You can find Tape Over This And I Will Thump You here.
Looks Unfamiliar: Paul Putner – There’s No Drill Version Of The Theme To Hunted
Recorded in a pub function room a short distance away from the original home of London’s legendary ‘loungecore’ night Blow-Up – after we’d accidentally walked into a different function room where about eleven people seemingly dressed as brides and grooms were recording an entirely different podcast which I still wonder about even now – this was an incredibly fun chat with Paul’s memories of Holmes And Yoyo, the Vectrex Arcade System and the Treborland advertising campaign amongst others brilliantly enlivened by his evocatively mundane recollections of his personal experiences with his choices, although I really do wish that the Gandhi cash-in disco record had been real. Let’s face it, there have been weirder tie-in singles. We also got a couple of fascinating behind the scenes anecdotes about This Morning With Richard Not Judy – in particular the story of what happened to the regular in-studio broadsides from The Ironic Review‘s controversial ‘voice of the people’ columnist Gary Putner – which appeared to go entirely unnoticed by pretty much every online comedy fan ever. After the recording, incidentally, we went on a tour of the local second hand record shops, including one which turned out to have a basement dedicated to rare archive television on DVD. You do not want to know how many discs we left with between us. You can find the full show here and the chat about Treborland in a collection of Looks Unfamiliar highlights here.
If you’re looking for something to read while sitting through Perrey And Kingsley’s singular interpretation of One Note Samba – Spanish Flea, then it would probably only be polite to invest in Can’t Help Thinking About Me, a collection of columns and features 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.
Tim Worthington 