Wake Up Sunday!

This is an excerpt from “Today Is Saturday, Watch And Smile”, the chapter of The Golden Age Of Children’s TV looking at the the BBC and ITV’s various attempts at establishing long-running children’s shows on Saturday and Sunday Mornings. If you like the look of this, you can get The Golden Age Of Children’s TV from Waterstones here, Amazon here, from the Kindle Store here and directly from Black And White Publishing here, and if you’ve already read it and indeed liked it, why not leave a review to complement that one from the reader who was delighted to spot a reference to ‘what is the biggest leaf?’? You can also find a chat with Estelle Hargraves – if Saturdays were more your bag – about No. 73 on the accompanying The Golden Age Of Children’s TV podcast here.

Sundays, unlike the mayhem and excitement of Saturday mornings, were for quiet contemplation and anything but entertainment. Everybody knew it and nobody dared challenge it, and with a legal requirement to carry a specific amount of hours of religiously-inclined programming on the seventh day – the ‘God Slot’ would remain rigorously in force right through to the late nineties – television on a Sunday was devoid enough of laughs and action as it was. The early mornings, however, were more or less a biblical desert, especially for any younger viewers who had somehow been allowed to tune in. The BBC’s sole concession to any children who had very quietly got up before church was showing one of the gentler and more cerebral Watch With Mother shows like Camberwick Green or Mary, Mungo And Midge right at the start of the day, before they devoted themselves to the more important business of adult education and minority audience magazine shows. Over on ITV, most of the morning would be taken up with live broadcasts of church services in Morning Worship, with the odd crackly and washed out imported educational cartoon like The Wonderful Stories Of Professor Kitzel or Max The 2000-Year Old Mouse or ‘look at life’ documentary series like Land Of The Lapps before the more heavyweight business of rural affairs and topical discussion got underway and putting out the cutlery for Sunday roast suddenly began to look like a more entertaining use of your time after all. In a decade that saw the church under increasing pressure to wrestle with difficult social and cultural questions in rapidly changing times, at least some things about the Lord’s Day stayed the same. That was until August 1976, when BBC1 introduced younger viewers to the sparky and irreverent teenagers collectively known as The Sunday Gang (BBC, 1976-81).

With the debatable assistance of a wonky-looking tape spool-faced home-made computer and a screeching ‘Scottish’ puppet mouse called Mackintosh, The Sunday Gang met in their book and gadget-festooned clubhouse hidden away somewhere in BBC Television Centre each week to retell Bible stories in a manner that might actually conceivably entertain and hold some everyday resonance for children, not like boring old church. Fresh-faced outdoorsy go-getter type J.D. (John Dryden), gobby inquisitive loudmouth Teena (Tina Heath), hard-of-thinking but public-spirited country girl Dodo (Jill Shakespeare) and wacky cap-askew inventor Boff (Glen Stuart) were usually to be found, as the rowdy theme song had it, knocking on doors, opening windows and taking a trip through God’s creation declaring to all and sundry that they were The! Sun! Day! Gang! with a close harmony invitation to come with them today. Which may not sound like much now but in its original context, for anyone who had otherwise spent the sabbath being expected to be seen and not heard it was pretty much as revolutionary as Tiswas. Unlike Tiswas, however, The Sunday Gang was also very much seen as wholesome and improving – if cacophonous – fun, and won awards by the collection plateful, with Tina Heath eventually being nabbed as a new Blue Peter presenter; she was replaced for the final series by Alison Christie Murray as the more artily romantic Ally.

The BBC did make a couple of attempts at repeating the success of The Sunday Gang, although none of them would ever prove quite as popular as Teena’s demands to know why nobody ‘elped that poor geezer until the Samaritan come along. Presented by Dana, who had become a familiar face on the BBC’s religiously-inclined output after winning the Eurovision Song Contest aged eighteen in 1970, the appropriately titled Wake Up Sunday (BBC, 1979-82) put the singing and clapping very much to the fore, with musical assistance from chart-troubling St. Winifred’s School Choir and acoustic duo The Brown Brothers. Comic relief was provided by inserts featuring tales of stranded alien Wizzy, as written, drawn and narrated by humourist Willie Rushton, but for those who were not fully in tune with the exuberant exhortations to sing along it could prove something of an exhausting experience. Less successfully, Knock! Knock! (BBC, 1982-85) employed a rotating cast of singers and storytellers including Chris Serle, Christopher Lillicrap, Lesley Judd, Janet Ellis, Adrian Hedley David Yip to take their own individual look at ‘God’s wide world’ courtesy of a slightly too straight-faced electronic theme tune and a wall crammed with visual effects-derived doors. Perhaps reflecting the fact that times were changing even for the most sacred day of the week, Knock! Knock!’s replacement Umbrella (BBC, 1986-90) adopted a more daytime television-styled approach complete with a chirpy synth-samba theme and multi-faith umbrella-hoisting animated titles, as Bryan Murray and Susan Leong ran off-the-wall features on Sikh schoolgirl five-a-side football teams and Christian volunteer groups entertaining the crowds in in Manchester’s shopping centres.

Despite the sort of stories that Umbrella covered being more or less a staple of their early remit to represent minority audiences, Channel 4 did not really bother with Sunday – or indeed Saturday – mornings at first; in fact they would not even show anything full stop before midday on weekends until late in 1986. Fellow new kid on the television block TV-am, however, were only too keen to catch the eye of early risers, many of whom were still high on the excitement of the launch of a brand-new television service and as a consequence more or less a guaranteed captive audience. Ostensibly presented by the animated – and occasionally scattered around the set in in static plastic form – ‘Breakfast Beans’, Rub-A-Tub-Tub (ITV 1983-84) was very much aimed at much younger viewers and was made up of imported animations such as Poland’s Teddy Drop Ear and Canada’s Curious George and nature rambles with Dick King Smith linked by stories and songs provided by conveniently available TV-am presenters including Anne Diamond, Nick Owen and Lizzie Webb, as well as the more unexpected likes of humourist Ivor Cutler and disco dancing champion Downtown Julie Brown. Its chirpier replacement Are You Awake Yet? (ITV, 1983-86) took place in a corner of the regular TV-am set and paired assorted presenters with voluble red-haired ‘naughty boy’ puppet Terry and animated stories from Wimpole Village, introduced by a naggingly cloying and extremely long theme song urging viewers to ‘open up those AY-AY eyes!’. No doubt to the relief of parents who were in no mood to comply with the jauntily sung request, whether in the alternating versions performed by a female session singer or by Terry, the format was eventually reworked as Cue George! (ITV, 1986-89), with hugely likeable weather presenter Georgey Spanswick promoted to introducing stories and reading out viewers’ letters with only a short instrumental sting to leak through the walls while everyone else was still in bed.

Buy A Book!

There’s lots more about the The Sunday Gang, Wake Up Sunday!, Knock! Knock!, Umbrella, Rub-A-Dub-Tub, Are You Awake Yet? and Cue George! – along with all of the shows that were on Saturday mornings as well, most of which had exclamation marks in the title too – in The Golden Age Of Children’s TV, available in all good bookshops and from Waterstones here, Amazon here, from the Kindle Store here and directly from Black And White Publishing here.

Alternately, if you’re just feeling generous, you can buy me a coffee here. Dana gave away a coffee mug on Swap Shop once if that helps.

Further Listening

You can find a chat with Estelle Hargraves about No. 73 and the somewhat rowdier environs of Saturday mornings in in The Golden Age Of Children’s TV here.