When Man 2 Man met Man Parrish

There’s just over half the year left before a new decade dawns - seven months to enjoy the last of those 1980s revivals we all thought would have given up and gone away by 2003. As it would be, even by modern standards, a bit much to go on celebrating the ‘80s for longer than they actually lasted in the first place, so retro festivities will be officially wound up on New Year’s Eve, before ‘90s nostalgia is inaugurated by Toby Anstis and Guru Josh on January 1st, 2010. In the meantime, here’s a handy social calendar of those revivals still to come.

Music channels receive a shot in the arm in June when scratch video makes a comeback. The forgotten craft of taking some old black and white film and cutting it up so the little men go backwards and forwards very quickly is lovingly revived by a new generation of artisans. All comedy programmes beginning in September feature at least one clip of Ronald Reagan going 'Look buster, b-bus-b-bus buster!' Classier broadcasts overlay all this with some abstract animated magenta triangles. The revival is deemed 'played out' when the Queen's Christmas Day speech is presented by HM sat on the floor in front of a bank of TV monitors, before the picture folds up into the rough shape of a saxophone and bounces around the screen for slightly too long to be interesting.

As the long hot summer (citation needed) rolls on, Saturday afternoons see the return of British wrestling. Not the glory years of Kendo Nagasaki and Jackie Pallo in the '60s, but the early 1980s fag-end, when Big Daddy had become more interested in appearing on the cover of the Buster summer special than giving the Kids his perfunctory two minute 'splashdown' appearance in the ring, and promoters looked to the third division likes of 'Cyanide' Sid Cooper and 'Gaylord' Steve Peacock to make up the tag team numbers. Panorama makes three earnest documentaries in a row suspecting that the matches might possibly be fixed. All bouts to be held in the Civic Centre, Aylesbury.

After what all pundits agree was A Bad Summer for Pork, the autumn sees the airwaves packed with old-style meat awareness advertisements. Shane Ritchie, Phil Daniels and Shaun Williamson (the amusingly tubby one on the end) line up for a series of cockney oompah hip-hop numbers where they burst into an undernourished wedding reception catered by militant vegans and demand the installation of a big plate of British pork, which has, of course, 'still got the lot'. All colours and creeds are whimsically represented in the commercials, including a sneezing Mexican in a big sombrero who's amusingly bundled out of the door by a nervous-looking Ritchie in a face mask. The trend catches fire in October, with the 'Do-It-All Three' reunited for a string of sell-out gigs, John Barrowman appearing in Very Very Tasty, a musical based on the Kellogg's Bran Flakes campaign, and Lily Allen tipped for the Christmas number one with her plaintive and moving interpretation of Laughing All the Way to the Leeds (Recession Edit).

By mid-October revivals are appearing so thick and fast there isn't the time to do many of them properly, so dozens get swept under the carpet, including: a line of designer paint-splattered Doc Martens launched by Paul King; 'sassy' girls from South London having about two cheeky pop-rap hits about snogging and then vanishing forever; chunky knitwear for men who know a lot about computers; The Mac Band featuring the McCampbell Brothers; song titles with more than one set of brackets in them; Trimphone impersonators; monogrammed pound coin holders; power ballads sung by women with their eyes screwed shut sat on a plinth in a completely empty white room in front of net curtains billowing through a set of open French windows; jokes about Channel Tunnel diggers surfacing in Catford by accident; Belouis Some.

November, and '80s nostalgia really nears the bottom of the barrel with the revival of '80s-style '50s nostalgia, as interpreted by advertising agencies at their yappy, annoying worst. So it's Day-Glo pink frocks and outsize beehives for the women; massive, American football player-style cardboard zoot suits and two-foot quiffs for the men. Somewhere along the line the two decades become hopelessly confused, and a generation of history pupils grow up convinced that the 1950s was full of cheery song-and-dance numbers set around a pink cardboard Cadillac about instant tea, the Brook Street job agency and going down to the Shell garage to get a scotch egg. Chris Moyles launches The Golden Oldie YouTube Channel which nobody visits.

Midnight, December 31st: Someone, somewhere, listens to Camouflage by Stan Ridgway and smiles a small smile to themselves.

Poetry Today

Eyebrows have been raised across the costlier postcodes of west London at the appointment of Carol Ann Duffy as the new poet laureate, but I’m not surprised, as I fondly recall her sterling work as ‘script associate’ on Square One, Granada Television’s oddball 1981 daytime game show presented by Joe Brown.

This pre-teatime Tuesday treat is largely forgotten now, which is a bit of a shame. (Although the Queen - a woman of refined taste - was obviously a fan.) The premise was simple. “The action-packed quiz in which members of the public join forces with celebrities to win money for charity” paired two ordinary shlubs with two A-list stars - Magnus Pyke and Barbara Woodhouse, say, or Willie Rushton and Diana Dors. We’re talking the pinnacles of fame here, the centre seat on Celebrity Squares.

The ordinaries answered comedy questions, and the celebs, in a masterful touch, were reduced to acting as human counters on a giant floor-sized board, frequently called upon to balance objects, Crackerjack-style, on top of one another, do silly accents and other whimsical ’forfeits’ in order to chase that giddy prize of 250 quid’s worth of wallpaper for Great Ormond Street or neck braces for abandoned donkeys.

In between, Joe would banter away in full cockney verbal regalia (supplied, of course, by the future laureate) and take part in some self-deprecating shtick about his less-than-immortal showbiz career, tell a few ancient jokes ("Are you having that lobster for tea?" "No, he's had his tea, now he wants to go to the pictures!") and embark on an epic attempt to tell a meandering, endless gag about some geezer who goes into a boozer. No doubt these will all resurface once the Eng Lit dons get on her case - expect to see a fully annotated selection of Square One banter in next month's Times Literary Supplement.

In the meantime, I’m taking bets on the contents of the first Royally commissioned poem: ‘Enery the Eighth 7-1, ‘Walkies!’ 4-1, ‘There’s this geezer, an’ ‘e walks into this boozer…’ evens favourite.

Mighty Moments in TV History

“Wednesday, January 10th 1979

4.40PM Take Hart
The new Arts Centre caretaker visits Tony for the first time and is disturbed by what he finds!”

- Radio Times.


Cue a nation of pastel and poster paint-crazed children screaming to the heavens: “Why? Why did they think The Master needed comedy interruptions to his sacred creative process from a comedy, accident-prone clown with a bucket on his foot?” But even the most committed bubble paint fanatic gradually grew to love (or at least grudgingly accept) the inevitable off-screen crash and anguished cry of ‘the council aren’t going to like this, Mr Hart!' And anyway, Mr Bennett got more complex as a character as his storyline developed. (January 24th: “Tony invites two of the Why Don’t You..? Gang to help with a painting; the caretaker calls and puts his foot in it!”)

(Mr B was also, coincidentally, one of the last manifestations of the ‘meddling council’ in British children’s entertainment, after a decade of Clive Dunn’s Grandad facing similar official woes, and endless films wherein Ronnie Barker in a bowler hat threatening to knock down the lovely old stately home where two stripy-pullovered kids passed the time innocently with bickering 17th century ghosts.)

I’ve always liked Colin Bennett. Like the inestimable Brian Trueman, he’s one of those TV figures who’s never quite been centre stage, but the more you find out about them, the more impressive they get. He co-wrote the barking teatime sci-fi comedy Luna, which boasted its own Clockwork Orange-lite dialect and posited that Patsy Kensit was artificially grown from a batch of green slime, as well as the decidedly odd semi-drawn sci-fi drama-cum-whodunnit-game-show Captain Zep - Space Detective, which would take another post to explain.

He was also Vince Purity, oleaginous mainstay of You Should Be So Lucky!, a sort of fairground stall/snakes and ladders/talent show hybrid, which took that already universally hated tribe, the stage school graduate, and made them seem appreciably more repellent. A weird attempt to make the most obnoxious children’s programme ever, it bombed abysmally. That is to say, it was a perfect success. Then he spent the early 1990s running round town centres in the middle of the night interviewing emergency glaziers and night-watchmen for the mystifying late night schedule filler Night Shift.

As you might have gathered, our Mr B has an affinity with the high concept and the oddball. He adapted Harry Nilsson’s offbeat fantasy LP The Point (about the round-headed outcast of a pointy-headed race and his dog) for the stage, and runs a production company called Acquired Taste TV. It’s a given that anyone operating in those sorts of backwaters is never going to achieve star status, but thank God they don’t seem to care. As TV fills up more and more with rigidly career-oriented types, it becomes a much, much duller place.

And have you tried getting hold of an R186 signal box lately?

'What Rhymes with "Sauces"?'

In response to Kitten in a Brandy Glass's late-'80s women's mag nostalgia rush, I make only small apologies for airing this classic again:

Tailors to Trust

The past is like a foreign country - their currency's worth a lot more. They don't do things differently there, though. Leafing through some ancient magazines (how old does something be before you 'leaf' through it rather than 'flicking'? Got to be at least twenty years, I think) a while back turned up any number of adverts for the sort of gruff, practical, Suez-era clobber you'd buy from a respected 'gent's outfitters', hawked in treble-starched prose it's impossible to read without imagining it being barked at you by a retired naval commander who's seen a fair bit of action in the South Seas in his time and therefore clearly knows what's best for your trousers. Try this, for the Swift zip-fly:

"A Swift exclusive self-locking zip-fastener ensures complete masculine piece-of-mind, since its self-springing lock safeguards against any accidental opening. Research and experiment produced this guaranteed new trouser-fly fastener with the absolute security of closure."

It's all there - the bluff, clipped, 'Now, here's the matter in hand' tone, the forthright yet still coyly euphemistic anatomical references, the invocation of the white heat of sartorial technology. All that's missing is a pretend chemical band name like Ziplax or Fastenol bunged in somewhere.

All so different to our sophisticated advertising world now, of course. Except: well, no, it isn't. You'll find stuff almost exactly like the above in most newspapers, whether for mad commemorative plates (you'd thing commemorating things with plates would have been the first activity to go under Wilson's Swinging Junta), shoes whose chief selling point seems to be that you can bend them in half with one hand, and comically cheap trousers, as Radcliffe and Maconie highlighted on their radio show the other night, with a great ramble through an ad in the Sun for five pairs of leisure slacks (in charcoal, navy and 'lovat') for £29.98 all in, featuring frog-mouth pockets with coin-resistant linings. We may scoff, but any delusions about our modern 'sophisticated' age should be knocked on the head right now .The days of Chilprufe thermal undergarments will never go away.

Vision Off

Another day, another not-exactly-surprising-but-still-a-shock celebrity passing over. Tony Hart was one of those children’s entertainers who occupied a unique post, probably because he fell into the job almost by accident, as so many children’s TV stars did back then, when the Italia Conti conveyor belt was still under construction.

His first BBC gig was on Saturday Special, one of those 1950s children’s programmes which, by its cast list alone, gives the lie to the idea that everything pre-’60s was a thin gruel of patrician women trilling Onward Christian Soldiers at the piano to a forbidding menagerie of rough hewn, clanking puppet animals. A sort of semi-scripted melange of songs, sketches and recipes, it was presented by husband-and-wife team Janet Brown and the actor Peter Butterworth, and can therefore have been little short of fantastic. Hart provided illustrations to stories, some done on camera, although the programme’s graphic mainstay was the old-school Reginald ‘Billy Bean’s Funny Machine’ Jeffryes. You get the impression that Tony, though his trademark cravats were to come later, was very much the ‘next generation’ of talent in this mixture.

He spent the next decade as a jobbing ‘creative’ man-about-the-Beeb: Playbox (appearing alongside that other mainstay of children’s televised art, the Stones to his Beatles, Rolf Harris), Titch and Quackers (operating Quackers to Ray Allen’s Titch) and the enticingly named Ask Your Dad. Then came Vision On, starting a solid run of thirty years (via Take Hart and Hartbeat) with Tone at the front of a largely unchanging format - the gallery, interstitial Aardman animations, pastel cityscapes created before your very eyes, cartoon elephants dashed off with a line-marking machine in an abandoned car park, unwelcome intrusions from resident manic comedy relief (‘Now, where was I? Ah yes, glitter!’), Tony drawing a wild animal which disappears from the picture when his back’s turned and starts terrorising the studio, and that casual, almost cavalier, way he had of deciding a picture was finished, tossing a cardboard frame over the top with a few last strokes of the pastel (‘And I think… we’ll call that… a day!’)

That’s at least three generations who’ve grown up watching the master quietly, diligently at work to the strains of the easiest listening to be found in the Beeb’s record library (all in the prescribed viewing position for ’thoughtful’ kids’ telly - lying prone on the floor two feet in front of the set, chin resting on hand, gazing upward in rapt concentration). Three generations forlornly hoping their badly-traced dinosaur panorama would make it to the gallery, three generations cursing the fact it was usurped for some talent less six year old’s gimmicky construction with movable cotton wool flaps. (Of course, Tony was teaching us a valuable lesson there about ‘passing off’ and the nature of genuine creativity, but did we listen? No, we just fumed indignantly at the thought of those coloured pencils going to someone who’d probably end up eating most of them.)

It’s not just because he’s still sadly fresh in the memory that it’s tempting to compare his amazing pre-teen influence to Oliver Postgate, but the pair have always seemed somehow alike - quietly creative, self-contained, greatly magnanimous and bursting with more ideas in a day than a Nickelodeon boardroom could rustle up in eight collective lifetimes.

Now, where did I put that Indian ink?

Lett's go!

Monday 1 January 1979
Snowed in at Stansgate. Melissa is writing something called ‘Fight Sexism in the Benn Family’ in which she denounces the men for leaving all the work to Caroline.

I’ve never kept a diary and not really understood why other people do, but I love stuff like that. We buy published diaries of the famous for behind-the-scenes insights and no small amount of dirt, but an incidental pleasure is the inevitable presence of mundane, do-nothing days which the great and good experience just like we do. Naturally, the first day of the year is a magnet for this sort of tellingly dreary inaction, as exemplified by Good Old Tony Benn above (and I like to think he was using his brand new Lett's Muppet Show 1979 Diary for that purpose).

What to do? Brian Eno was inspired on the first to compile his 1995 diary by his dad’s example, though whereas Eno’s was stuffed with highbrow whimsy and big names dropped from the stout end of rock, his father went for the more traditional ‘Shopping and walk to Rotary Club fete. Bought waffle maker: 45p’. For his own part, Eno watched The Red Shoes and put up a bird feeder.

Workaholic Michael Palin failed to enjoy January 1st’s enforced leave in 1975: ‘No newspapers, no letters. A bank holiday and all that that entails […] I should have started a play, Ian [Davidson] should have been writing for The Two Ronnies […] but somehow twelve and a half hours, four bottles of wine, three or four beers, several games of Scrabble and one Indian take-away meal later, we were all still in the sitting room.’

(Palin was experiencing only the second New Year bank holiday in the country, as Ted ‘The Death’ Heath had only inaugurated the thing in 1974. It could have been worse. When Samuel Pepys was scribbling his diary, the year didn’t legally begin until 25th March, for some reason, though the tradition of mundane occurrence was already in place by January 1662: ‘Waking this morning out of my sleep on a sudden, I did with my elbow hit my wife a great blow over her face and nose, which waked her with pain, at which I was sorry, and to sleep again.')

Perhaps inevitably, it's up to Alan Bennett to take the prize for the most humdrum start to the year. Bennett began 1993 logging the appearance of his own name as a clue on Paul Coia’s BBC2 daytime roustabout Catchword. ('Nobody guesses it.') More eventful than the kick-off to 1980, where he just sat at the window of his Camden house looking out of the window. (‘A nun passes.’)

Happy New Year!

[Mundane New Year bulletin: just taken delivery of the Reader's Digest Prize Draw mailout for 2009, and even by that benighted company's own try-hard standards, it's a doozy. Every official-looking stamp and sticker you see on the right is, naturally, drawn on. The small letter explains that the big packet contains an 'FAQ' to help you deal with the coming 'weeks and months of exhilaration' which will inevitably follow when you lay your hands on those great wodges of cash. The usual comedy cheques are present and correct, but sadly the free pens have dried up, and they seem to have decommissioned cheery old Tom Champagne in favour of a dull-sounding 'Prize Draw Manager' whose signature appears to read 'N. Smelly.' Good luck with that one, Smelly.]