141 Tomorrow's World

First  watched  :   September  1973

I  think  it  was  on  Not  The  Nine  O  Clock  News  that  someone  made  a  reference  to  this  programme  as  "that  boring  crap  that  you  only  watch  because  it's  on  before  Top  of  the  Pops"  and  I  remember  thinking  "got  it  in  one !"  With  one  exception  to  come  in  the  eighties I  don't  recall  viewing  anything  with  more  irritation  and  longing  for  the  credits  to  run. You  could  probably  count  the  number  of  full  editions - as  opposed  to  the  last  five  minutes -  I  watched  on  one  hand.  I  loathed  the  arrival  of  Eastenders  and  the  consequent  shoehorning  of  Top  of  the  Pops  but  at  least  it  meant  I'd  never  have  to  watch  this  again  and  I  didn't.

Nevertheless  its  longevity  deserves  some  respect. Born  in  the  mid-sixties  with  crusty  old  Raymond  Baxter  at  the  helm, it  rode  the  wave  of   interest  in  Wilson's  "white  heat  of  technology"  and  managed  to  sustain  itself  long  after  that  bubble  of  optimism  in  technological  benefit  had  been  pricked  by  regularly  re-vamping  itself  with  new  presenters  and  titles.  The  demonstrations  of  dodgy  new  gadgets  provided  some  amusing  moments  amid  the  drab  explanations. As  with  Dragon's  Den  ( which   owes  something  to  Tomorrow's World )  ventures  , many  of  the  inventions  were  never  heard  of  again  or  failed  spectacularly; the  Videodisc  immediately  springs  to  mind.

It  was  finally  pulled  in  2003  although  as  ever  there  is  talk  of  reviving  it.

140 Bruce Forsyth and the Generation Game

First  watched : September  1973

Come  September  1973  and  this  ratings-winner  returned  to  the   Saturday  night  schedule  for  its  third  series. The  Generation  Game   was  the  Beeb's  first  big  game  show  having  noted  ITV's  success  with  low-budget  but  extremely  popular   fare  such  as  The  Golden  Shot.  Head  of  Light  Entertainment  Bill  Cotton  picked  43  year  old  variety  artist  Bruce  Forsyth  and  immediately  struck  gold.  For  all  his  success  in  other  shows,  the  public's  love  for  old  Brucie  ultimately  derives  from  his  stint  on  this  in  the  same  way  that  Paul  Weller's  fanbase  rests  on  his  time  with  The  Jam. All  the  catchphrases  - "Cuddly  toy !" "Didn't  he  do  well ?" "Give  us  a  twirl"  etc  are  part  of  our  national  culture.

The  Generation  concept  worked  on  three  levels. The  contestants  were   four  couples. The  individuals  in  the  pairs  were  related  to  each  other  but  a  generation  apart  and  much  of  the  fun  derived  from  the  older  person's  ineptitude  at  skills  they  needed  to  master  in  about  five  minutes. Secondly  it  was  a  genuine  family  show  that  kids  could  enjoy  for  the  uncontrived  slapstick  while  their  parents  enjoyed  Bruce's  sharp  wit. And  thirdly,  it  was  soon  noted  for  its  host's  interest  in  inter-generational  sex  as  he  copped  off  with,  and  later  married, blonde  eye  candy  Anthea  Redfern  who  was  twenty  years  his  junior. I  recall  my  mum  tutting  disapprovingly  about  all  that.

My  time  with  the  show   effectively  ended in  1978  when  Brucie  accepted  the  filthy  lucre  and  went  over  to  ITV  for  his  ill-fated  Big  Night  venture. Though  we  didn't  follow  him  over  there   (  neither  did  Redfern   and  they  soon  divorced ) we  didn't  stay  with  Generation  Game  either. My  mum  was  what  would  now  be  described  as  homophobic and  Larry  Grayson  was  anathema  to  her. Nevertheless  Grayson  and  his  relatively  cerebral  co-host  Isla  St  Clair   actually  got   the  show's  highest   ratings  although  helped  by  an  ITV  strike.

By  the  turn  of  the  decade  the  show's  grip  had  started  to  loosen  as  ITV  found  a  big  Saurday  night  ratings  winner  in  Game  For  A  Laugh. Grayson  , four  years  older  than  Forsyth  decided  it  was  time  to  retire  in  1982  and  after  Jimmy  Tarbuck  declined  to  take over  , it  was  decided  to  rest  the  show. It  returned  in  1990  with  its  original  host  for  four  years  before  Jim  Davidson  took  over. His  stint  lasted  until  2002. Since  then  it  has  only  been  revived   for  one-off  specials  with  celebrity  contestants  but  there  are  still  rumours  of  yet  another  comeback.

139 Why Don't You Just Switch Off Your Television Set And Go And Do Something Less Boring Instead ?

First  watched  :  1973

A  programme  that  was  never  as  interesting  or  clever  as  its   smartarse  producer  Patrick  Dowling  intended  when  he  came  up  with  the  concept  in  1972. A  TV  show  that  told  you  not  to  watch  it  ! ; that'll  answer  all  those   fuddy-duddies  who  say  we're  turning  kids  into  couch  potatoes !  And  of  course  we  can  fill  a  gap  in  the  holiday  schedules  with  something  dirt  cheap  that  doesn't  require  any  professional  scriptwriters, presenters  etc.

"Something  Less  Boring "  usually  consisted  of  some  crafty  task  or  magic  trick  that   a   viewer  wrote  in  to  suggest  the  resident  gang  of  kids  might  like  to  do. Generally  it  would  engage    your  typical  kid  for  less  time  than  the   programme's  15  minute  running  time.

Despite  an  obvious  overlap  in  content  with  shows  such  as   Blue  Peter  and  later, Multi-Coloured  Swap  Shop , Why  Don't  You ... ( its  usual  abbreviation  )  lasted  a  staggering  42  series  before  its  termination  20  years  ago.  I  guess  the  low  budget  always  won  the  argument. It  has  some  cachet  from  once  being  produced  by  modern  day  Dr  Who  guru  Russell  Davies  and  among  its  young  presenters  was  one  Anthony  McPartlin  without  that  other  guy  glued  to  his  arse.  

138 The Kids From 47A

First  watched :  Summer   1973

I  don't  think  I  saw much  of  this;   I  seem to  recall  tuning  in  to  see  if  it  was  like  The  Tomorrow  People  when  it  could  hardly  have  been  further  removed  from  sci-fi  camp. The  Kids  From  47A  introduced  me  to  the  concept  of  "latch  key  kids"  who  didn't  have  any  parents  to  open  the  door  when  they  came  home  from  school. The  show  has  basically  the  same  premise  as  the  sixties  film  Our  Mother's  House  with  the  youngsters  trying  to  stay  together  after  widowed  mum  goes  to  hospital. By  the  start  of  the  second  series  she's  died. Oldest  sister  Jess  who's  just  started  work  has  to  balance  her  career  aspirations with  looking  after  her  younger  siblings. The  series  mixed  socially  realistic  situations with  broad  comedy  and  I  wouldn't  mind  betting  Shameless  creator  Paul  Abbott  caught  the  odd  episode,

Despite  the  writing  team  including  future  TV  gods, Phil  Redmond  and  Lynda  La  Plante, the  show  , which  ran  from  1973  to  1975  , seems  little  celebrated  today.

137 Magpie

First  watched :  Uncertain

I  caught  this  on  the  odd  occasion  when  next  door  but  have  no  recollection  of  ever  putting  it  on  by  choice. After  all, if  you  were  ambivalent  about  Blue  Peter  why  would  you  want  to  watch  a  cheap  imitation ?

136 Dad's Army

First  watched  : 30  June  1973

Repeats  of  Dad's  Army  replaced  Clunk  Click  in  the  Saturday  schedule.  It's  enduring  appeal  is  proven  by  its  continued  presence  on  a  Saturday  evening  albeit  on  BBC2. No  other  comedy  has  survived  that  long  on  prime  time.

Although  some  of  the  humour  and  material   such  as   the  class  conflict  between  Mainwaring  and  Wilson  and  the  latter's  liaison  with  Pike's  mother  went  over  my  eight  year  old  head  there  was  enough  slapstick  to  entertain  me  until  I  got  old  enough  to  appreciate  the  subtler  stuff. My  mum  and  gran  were  a  bit  ambivalent  about  it  as  my  grand-dad  had  been  in  the  Home  Guard  and  they  didn't  enjoy  seeing  it  mocked  that  much.

It  wasn't  long  before  watching  this  run  taught  me  an  important  life  lesson. Just  days  after  my first  watching  it  Don  Powell  of  Slade  ( bear  with  me )  was  involved  in  a  bad  car  smash  and  his life  hung  in  the  balance  but  he  came  round  and,  though  left  with  permanent  memory  problems,  was  soon  back  on  Top  of  the  Pops. It  seemed  a  miraculous  triumph  of  medical  science. But  just  a  fortnight  after  Powell's  crash  the  actor  Jack  Hawkins  died  after  an  operation  to  insert  an  artificial  voicebox. His  name  meant  nothing  to  me  but  I  recall  Mum  and  Gran's  harsh  moralising  that  it  was  his  own  fault  through  smoking  too  much.  Four  days  before  Hawkins  died , James  Beck   who  played  Private  Walker, the  resourceful  spiv  who  usually  helped  Mainwaring  out  of  the  soup  was  taken  into  hospital  after  falling  ill  at  a  summer  fete. A  heavy  drinker  he  was  suffering  from  pancreatitis. For  three  weeks  he  lingered  on  as  the  public  watched  and  then  died. It  was  a  profound  shock  to  me  after  Powell's  recovery  and  the  repair  to  my  own  eye  a  couple  of  years  earlier. I  knew  that  people  died  when  they  were  old  or  had  accidents  but  that  the  doctors  couldn't  fix  a  celebrity  in  their  prime  who  had  just  fallen  ill  and  gone  to  hospital  really  hit  me.

Beck's  death  was  also  a  shock  because  at  44  he  was  so  young  compared  to  the  rest  of  the  cast  ( excluding  Pike  of  course ). It  was  always  likely  that  one  of  the  cast  would  expire  during  the  series's  run  - Beck  had  been  known  to  tease  Arnold  Ridley  about  it - but  nobody  expected  it to  be  him. He  was  in  fact  the  only  member  of  the  cast  to  die  during  the  series's  run  although  Edward  Sinclair  the  bumptious  verger  died  shortly  after  the  last  episode  was  recorded  which  reinforced  the  decision  to  bring  it  to  a  close.

That  was  in  1977. Beck  was  initially  replaced  by  a  Welsh  character , Private  Cheeseman  played  by  Talfryn  Thomas  but  after  one  series  he  was  bumped  apparently  for  garnering  too  many  laughs  for  the  liking  of  certain  stalwarts. Ian  Lavender  - along  with  Frank  Williams  ( the  Vicar ) the  only  survivor - says  something  was  lost  when  Beck  died  but  I  recall  it  keeping  up  the  quality  well  enough.  The  episode  where  they  think  Fraser  is  hiding  a  fortune  on  his  premises  is  particularly  good . The  cast  just  got  too  old  to  cope; John  Le  Mesurier  in  particular  was  struggling  though  he  recovered  to  appear  in  Brideshead  Revisited  and  other  things  before  his  death  in  1983.  

135 The Tomorrow People

First  watched  :  Summer  1973

More  sci-fi  now . I'd  never  even  heard  of  The  Tomorrow People,   even though  it  was  coming  towards  the  end  of  its  first  run,  when  I  first  saw  it  next  door  but  I  liked  what  I  saw. Four  young  people  aged  between  12  and  20  hiding  their  special  powers   ( telekinesis, mind  reading, teleportation  or  "jaunting"  )  from  the  world  until  the  time  was  right  for  them  to  peacefully  take  over  the  world  from  the  hoi  polloi . They  had  a  secret  den  with  a  talking  computer  called  TIM  and  were  helped  out  by  some  rather  rum  normal-people-in-the-know.  These  were  known  as  "saps" -   homo  sapiens   as  opposed  to  our  heroes  being  "homo  superiors"  , a  term  producer  Roger  Damon  Price  admitted  to  lifting  from  Bowie's  Oh  You  Pretty  Things . 

In  the  first  series  there  were  four  of  them, a  rather  prissy  prefect  type  called  John  ( Nicholas  Young ) , a  slightly  dizzy  blonde  Carol  ( Sammy  Winmill )  , impetuous  black  adolescent  Kenny  ( Stephen  Salmon )  and  newcomer  Stephen  ( Peter  Vaughan  Clarke )  whose  "breaking  out"  set  the  first  episode  in  motion. Like  Dr  Who  each  series  comprised  a  number  of  multi-part  stories, some  of  which  were  set  on  earth  and  others  on  alien  planets.

I  watched  the  schedules  carefully  hoping  the  series  would  return. When  it  did  I  had  the  battle  royal  with  my  sister  recounted  in  the  Blue  Peter  post  but  won  out. She  quickly  got  over  it  and  developed  a  crush  on  Stephen.

 Carol  and  Kenny  were  gone. Sammy  Winmill  didn't  want  to  continue  and  Salmon  was  unceremoniously  dumped ; in  a  series  not  known  for  its  great  acting  he  stood  out  as  particularly  terrible  and  was  never  heard  from  again.  Perhaps  to  cut  costs  they  were  replaced  by  a  single  black  female  Elizabeth  ( Elizabeth  Adare )  a  student  teacher  who  breaks  out  in  the  first  episode ,  a  device  used  repeatedly  by  the  producers  as  a  handy  way  of  reiterating  the  show's  premise  to  new  viewers.    The  sap  ally,  biker  Ginge  also  disappeared  because  the  actor  Michael  Standing  came  off  his  bike  for  real  and  so  Ginge's  hitherto  unmentioned  brother  Chris,  played  by  Emmerdale's  Chris  Chitell,  was  quickly  drafted  in  to  take  over  his  lines.

Series  3  introduced  a  new  character  , gypsy  boy  Tyso  ( Dean  Lawrence)  though  he - and  Stephen -  spent  most  of  the  first  story  lying  comatose  in  their  underpants . Nice  work  if  you  can  get  it. The  cavalier  treatment  of  the  young  cast  was  illustrated  by  Lawrence's  treatment  at  the  end  of  the  run. Nobody  told  him  he  wasn't  required  for  series  4  so  he  turned  up  on  the  first  day  to  find  he  had  no  lines. He  was  - barely -written  into  a  few  scenes  but   sent  most  of  the  series  just  hanging  around  in  the  background. That  series  introduced  Mike  Holoway  , drummer  of  Flintlock  as  Mike  , a  working  class  lad  from  a  council  estate  and  that  finished  it  off  for  me. Holoway  was  in  my  sister's  teen  mags  and  it  just  seemed  too  naff  to  tie  the  programme  in  with  the  promotion  of  a  new  pop  band  who  were  in  fact, shit.
That  was  , if  you  like - my  first  peep  behind  the  curtain  as  regards  television. I  recognised  a  marketing  ploy  and  knew  it  to  be  crap. A  coming  of  age  if  you  will. I  don't  recall  my  sister  continuing  with  it  either, possibly  because  Stephen  was  dumped  along  with  the  hapless  Tyso  at  the  end  of  that  series.

Regardless  of  my  desertion  the  series  ran  until 1978. I  rather  regret  missing  Series  7  where  Elizabeth  had  to  be  temporarily  written  out  due  to  Adare's  pregnancy  and  she  was  replaced  by  a  Japanese  "actress"  who  the  rest  of  the  cast  couldn't  understand . It  also  had  a  storyline  featuring  Adolf  Hitler. Price  had  been  trying  to  end  the  show  for  the  past  couple  of  years  to  concentrate  on  his  light  entertainment  vehicles  but  was  thwarted  by  its  continuing  popularity. A  tussle  over  studio  time  , Price's  emigration  to  Canada  and  the  ITV  strike  of  1979  finally  ended  the  show. While  being  vaguely  aware  of  the  90s  revival   which  ran  from  1992  to  1995  I  never  checked  it  out  nor  the  2013  US  version  shown  on  E4.


The  appeal  of  The  Tomorrow  People  to  marginalised  kids  who  felt  their  social  exclusion  might  mean  they  were  special  was  obvious. It  has  been  suggested  however  that  the  whole  series  is  a  metaphor  for  homosexuality i.e  breaking  out  = coming  out. I've  not  found any  confirmation  that  producer  and  writer  Roger  Price  is  gay  and  I'm  normally  very  suspicious   of  such  claims  but  I  think  there's  some  evidence  that  supports  that  view. There  is  a  lot  of  young  male  flesh  on  view  throughout; many  stories  involve  barely-clad  boys  often  shot  from  the  crotch  upwards  while   Elizabeth  Adare's  striking  figure  isn't  exploited  at  all.  Many  of  the  young  actors  were  cast  despite  very  little  acting  experience  and  then  you  have  Flintlock.  It's  very  hard  to  account  for  Price's  championing  of  these  useless  Roller clones - they  appeared  in  two  other  Price  productions  Pauline's  Quirkes  and  You  Must  Be  Joking  at  the  time  -  unless  it  was  basically  sexual  with  Mike  Holoway  the  Heinz  to  Price's  Joe  Meek.  I don't  however  think  that  John's  irritatingly  mincing  voice  was part  of  the  concept; I  think  that  was  Nicholas  Young's  genuine  affliction.

Young  and  Holoway  are  the  only  one's  who've  maintained  a  career  in  performing  , the  latter  largely  in  musical  theatre. The  others  quit  acting  early  for  a  variety  of  new  careers, for  instance  Peter  Vaughan-Clarke  is  now  a  lighting  technician  while  Elizabeth  Adare  is  a  child  psychologist  in  local  government.