The Gunked and the Dunked

When people ask me if I had any TV shows I watched in my childhood other than Doctor Who, I can actually list a great deal once I’ve stopped spitting in their face and shouting, ‘Obviously!’

I can mention Coronation Street, Who Wants to Be a Millionaire (‘Don’t reach for the cocking cheque, you moron! He’s obviously gonna say, “But we don’t wanna give you that!” for cock’s sake!’, my mother was known to shout, years before the show even began), Robot Wars, Jonathan Creek, Father Ted, Black Books (wet myself laughing during the first episode, if memory serves). If we look at children’s programmes specifically, I could also list Blue Peter, ChuckleVision, The Demon Headmaster, Aquila, Pig Heart Boy, Home Farm Twins, The Ghost Hunter, Bodger and Badger, G-Force, Mr Wymi.

Not all of those CBBC programmes are so well-remembered now, but another that is which I loved dearly was Get Your Own Back. Why didn’t I go to see the live version a few years ago? Almost as big a regret as never going on a tour of Television Centre before it was hollowed out and ruined.

There was little on telly that felt more exciting to me, especially in its 1996-and-beyond incarnation. The colours, the noise, the obstacle courses, the gunge. It was the anarchy that anyone with taste loves regardless of age, but which TV aimed at adults has yet to capture.

Kids gunging their parents was one thing, but one of my most vivid TV memories is the first time I watched the last in the series of that year (my diligent research has not yet revealed wether this was a Christmas special). I still remember my amazement when a girl who had brought her father (?) on said to Dave Benson Phillips, ‘I don’t wanna gunge him… I wanna gunge you!’ The tables had turned. The only bigger shock I ever got from CBBC was when Grange Hill very bloodily killed a girl off, and this put significantly less of a damper on my day.

I decided unusual gungees must have become a tradition of series finales when I caught the end of another episode (I have decided this was broadcast in 1998) and saw Mr Blobby being lowered into the pool of gunk, in a bid to finally kill the monster. His distorted screams combined with the kaleidoscopic visuals of the studio to create an experience more unsettling than any nightmare. I understand they buried the still-twitching body below TV Centre that night, and his malign spirit has been used to explain why so many things have gone wrong for the BBC since (often being blamed ahead of examples of clear wrong-doing).

Unfortunately, because I drifted away from the show (perhaps I believed it would never again top ‘I wanna gunge you!’), I didn’t see any of the other celebrity Gunk Dunks that must have happened each year, and until today had no idea which surprise victims were eventually gunged. The truth of the years I didn’t see has astounded me, and it seems I missed some astonishing TV moments, all sadly absent from YouTube and therefore impossible for you to fact-check. You’ll just have to take my word for it.

• 1997: The Spice Girls. At the height of their power, it was decreed these, let’s call them what they were, modern-day Suffragettes, needed taking down a peg or two. Exposed in their true form as one five-headed and twenty-limbed entity, they were hurled screaming into the slimy abyss and immediately lost all credibility. Sure enough, their movie at the end of 1997 turned out to be quite bad, and Geri split painfully away from the main body the following year.
• 1999: Jar-Jar Binks. One of the most expensive episodes of British children’s TV ever made, as the flailing CGI buffoon slapstuck his last. In a palaver beyond the BBC’s control, the episode’s child audience was driven out of the studio by hordes of fully-grown, uncharismatic men, who whined their approval at the defeat of the creature they claimed had destroyed their childhoods, although in retrospect it would have been more accurate to say he had proved a minor irritant in their misspent adulthoods.
• 2000: Chris Tarrant. Gunged for ITV’s crime of scheduling the first win of Who Wants to Be a Millionaire against the last ever One Foot in the Grave. ‘We do wanna give you that!’ bellowed the crowd. My mother squealed with delight.
• 2001: Effigy of Osama Bin Laden. A jubilant autumn special that tapped into the same spirit that had made that year’s bonfire night such a success. Now recognised as having played its own small part in the slow cultural radicalisation that has turned so many of today’s eligible voters into white supremacists. Repeated in late 2011 on BBC4.
• 2002: Gareth Gates. A Pop Idol special in which Will Young once again triumphed over the humiliated Gates boy. As in 2000, big ITV names were chosen for the dunking as part of an ongoing campaign of revenge for the Millionaire/One Foot
• 2003: Richard Hillman. Appearing in character as the Coronation Street serial killer, actor Brian Capron was a surprisingly good sport in this edition which foreshadowed his looming drowning on the soap. The BBC viewed this subtle spoiler as the final act of revenge on ITV, and now opted for new targets.
• 2004: Tony Blair. ‘We got him, everyone,’ said a sombre Benson Phillips to the camera in the last ever episode. ‘We got him.’ Still cited by Blair’s critics as more effective retribution than the Chilcot Report 12 years later. Seen by many as a counterpoint to the 2001 special, and attracted the same questions from commentators and BBC management as to whether this was the most appropriate way to address the issues at hand.

Peter Fleming and Roald Dahl

Hi, everyone. I’m still away this week, but Peter Fleming, legend of the golden age of British children’s television, has written something in my place – for a very special occasion. Take it away, Peter!

Hello there, my little sailor friends!

I had a pleasant surprise this week when I heard that Roald Dahl Day was upon us again! 102 years since his birth, but still the best loved children’s author in the land – and, to date, the only fighter pilot to have enjoyed a successful collaboration with Quentin Blake (whose technical manuals were largely written off as impractical by the RAF).

The occasion has made me feel tremendously nostalgic, as I am fortunate enough to have enjoyed a correspondence with Roald Dahl over the years. I’ll admit it’s grown a little more distant in recent years, and since the early 1990s I’ve rarely received a reply. Yet we had a close professional relationship back in the day, in spite of our differing mediums of choice, and he often sought my advice on bits and pieces he was writing. Whether he took the advice is another matter (!), and I thought I’d share with you some of the more notable instances, if only to give you an idea of what could have been!

In 1963, Roald was working on his Charlie and the Chocolate Factory story. A great success, but I still maintain that it would have conquered even more children’s imaginations if he had listened to my suggestions and set it in a cardboard factory instead. He could have gone into fascinating detail describing the process of manufacturing cardboard items, and shown that even the most simplistic of items is alive with the romance of human ingenuity.

And if he still wanted to make it a story with moral lesson, no matter – the disorderly children could very easily be packaged into cardboard boxes and sent off to far-flung corners of the world, never to be reunited with their families. An innovative solution, I’m sure you’ll agree! And a great opportunity to explore the arguments of nature against nurture, if he had then reunited parents with their distorted offspring in an epilogue, exploring whether they could truly call each other family any more. I didn’t receive a reply to that letter, so I suspect the suggestion never reached him, alas.

He did, however, take my advice when I suggested in the early 1970s that he pen a sequel to Charlie and the Chocolate Factory! Sure enough, Charlie and the Great Glass Elevator went on to be one of his worst received books, and he held a vendetta against me for some time over the matter. (I hasten to add, the racial stereotypes were his own addition.)

Slightly before this, I’d suggested to him that the Fantastic Mr Fox book he was working on had taken entirely the wrong view, and that it was the farmers who should be the protagonists. “After all, foxes cannot really speak, can they? A silly idea, I hope you now see,” I wrote to him in 1969. What’s more, a farmer friend had spoken to me about the trials and tribulations of working under siege from the, admittedly very pretty, beasts, and I felt his plight needed putting forward to the nation. I should think even Charlie and the Cardboard Factory would have been outshone had Roald followed my suggestion and concluded his book with a heroic and bloody fox hunt. Again, I fear the draft of this chapter I posted him as an example was never received.

The last detailed discussion we had was during the late 1980s, when we corresponded over his ongoing work on Matilda. I was adamant that children simply wouldn’t sympathise with such an unruly girl, causing such disruption to school life and being so disrespectful to the authorities. Roald and I would frequently write and exchange drafts of chapters in tandem to help keep his mind fresh. We had an agreement that, should any of my ideas be used, my name would also go on the cover – ultimately none were, of course. Yet still I like to think there would have been a very enthusiastic audience for my version of the book, in which Matilda uses her telekinetic powers to help Miss Trunchbull cane the naughtier pupils, while Miss Honey is forced to resign following a scandal over finances. We will never be sure!

That was the last great collaboration we enjoyed, although in 1991 I did have an encounter with his work once again. It had struck me that his Tales of the Unexpected stories would make for a wonderful children’s programme – which I took it upon myself to produce! This was intended to be my glorious return to television, following a series of embarrassing and increasingly public mental breakdowns, but things got off to a very bumpy start when Roald’s solicitors got in touch to say that the stories were never meant for a child audience and that to proceed would be against his wishes. I tried writing to him personally for confirmation, but by then he’d stopped replying, and so on I went!

I felt very excited by the pilot recording of Lamb to the Slaughter, and felt fully my old self again once we’d made it – especially after I’d finally put the finishing touches to the extended two-hour murder scene. Sadly the project never went beyond that, as the morning after the commissioning executives had watched it, I went down to the studio only to find that the locks had been changed. Nobody was answering the intercom, and this cycle of events perpetuated for the next few days until one morning I woke up and must have just forgotten about it.

Eventually, Anglia Television took over the project, putting it out in the evenings for a grown-up audience. A great missed opportunity! And so my professional connections with Roald Dahl came to an end, but I still look back fondly over the time we spent working together. Perhaps he would do the same. After all, I’ve no doubt my advice was invaluable to him – even if, as often seemed to happen, he found it most useful in its provision of something to define himself against.

Best wishes,

Peter

Peter Fleming is appearing at the Liverpool Comedy Festival on Wednesday 19^th September.

Assorted Gaps in My Knowledge

Until last night, the only Jurassic Park film I’d seen had been the much-lamented third one, from 2001. I also had a Lost World mug, released through a cross-promotion with Tetley in 1997, which I still drink from to this day. But I’d never seen the first film – a bizarre thing for someone of my taste and sensibilities, but I’ve felt a kind of perverse amusement about it over the last 14 years. A colleague helped set me straight over the weekend, and is proud to have helped close this gap in my experience. Little did she know of the many other chasms in my knowledge, some of them much worse, a selection of which I detail below:

• I watched the Star Wars films in numerical order, not order of release, so really didn’t get the fuss about the end of The Empire Strikes Back.
• The only Friends episodes I have watched are from season 7, so from my point of view the most significant relationship in Rachel’s life is with her young assistant Tag, played by Eddie Cahill. (A hard piece of research to do, since googling the phrase “tag friends” now largely generates a list of social media sites.)
• The only pieces of Beatles music I have listened to are the closing sound loop of Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, Piggies from the White Album, plus the final third of 1970 b-side You Know My Name (Look Up the Number).
• I once channel-hopped onto Life of Brian, catching only the brief sequence in which Brian is accidentally rescued from a fall and abducted by aliens. This is the only portion of Monty Python I have seen, and I cannot understand their popularity.
• I have seen the entirety of seminal ITV soap remake Crossroads (2001-2003), up until the final ten minutes of the last episode, so currently believe the whole content of the series not to have been the daydream of a sales assistant.
• The only episodes of Doctor Who I have seen are episodes 5-8 of The Trial of a Time Lord (1986), and I now consider the show to have too complex a backstory for me to explore anything to have come before or since.
• All I have seen of Blue Peter is future BBC One controller Lorraine Heggessey’s sombre 1998 address to CBBC viewers preceding the first episode since Richard Bacon’s sacking, and various compilations of bloopers from over the decades – to this day, I have no idea why they continue to allow this programme to be made.

After last night, I fear I’ve a great deal of catching up to do.

Value for Money?

I was on my weekly trike ride round my neighbourhood yesterday, hurling empty milk bottles at cats and full milk bottles at single fathers in front of their children, that I spotted a new dark web café had opened on the high street. Here, customers can complete all their clandestine activities in full view of the public, and can be served coffees intravenously throughout their session. This particular establishment exclusively serves its own brand, Netcafé.

Logging on for the first time, I immediately clicked to “Enable Immorality and Crime”, and my eyes were opened to an exciting new world. After wiping the culture shock-induced sick from my mouth, I soon relished the grotesque well of knowledge before me. The most intriguing artefact I chanced upon was a full breakdown of how the BBC has spent its £3.7bn budget over the past year. A top secret, it was recently retrieved by hackers in Shrewsbury, and it’s no wonder the right-wing press are so up in arms about the corporation’s largesse. I’m glad now to do my bit for the British public and share some of the lowlights from this truly damning document.

• Real, functioning TARDIS, accidentally created by designer Peter Brachacki in 1963, maintained and updated throughout Doctor Who’s 54-year history. (Brachacki never designed for Doctor Who after his first episode, having been headhunted by the Pentagon) – annual cost, £1bn
• TARDIS set, built in 1963 when the cast or crew of Doctor Who were deemed dangerously unqualified to be allowed near the original. Maintained and updated throughout Doctor Who’s 54-year history – £1m
• Expenses to cover the rolling BBC News ticker, live-woven through the day by a crack team of housewives in Dundee – £32,000
• 50 gallons of hot water a day to be pumped through Andrew Neil – £8,267.40 per annum
• Round the clock childcare for BBC premises in Salford until their 18^th birthday in 2029 – £5 an hour, plus a bonus if the buildings go a night without crying
• Quarterly polishing sessions for Aidan Turner’s chest, neck and scythe – £400 an hour
• Annual surgery on the language centres of Jools Holland’s brain, to ensure his inflexion and emphasis when announcing an act is never that recognised by conventional wisdom – £25,000, plus a £10,000 touch-up for the Hootenanny
• Comprehensive archiving of the entirety of Ceefax (both as individual pages and the full daily loops from 1974-2012 with both original music and an optional new soundtrack by Brian Eno) – £12,475, plus £2,500 care for the menagerie of living and dead animals Eno insists accompany him during recording
• Soundproofing for the Greenwich warehouse where all used continuity announcements are sent at the end of each working day (a century of redundant aural information that mysteriously refuses to biodegrade) – £5,600, plus £23,450 for ongoing extensions to the building
• 40% of ITV’s output, made in secret by government order, to create the illusion of there being any creative competition – £24.50
• Chris Evans and John Humphrys – £2,600,000

​The Truth and Tragedy of John Tracy

It’s a common enough joke – not as old as Thunderbirds itself, but almost certainly as old as Anthea Turner’s Tracy Island model, 1992. Poor John Tracy, second oldest of the Tracey brothers, consigned to a lonely existence on Thunderbird 5. Spending his days in geo-stationary orbit, only contacting home when an emergency arises. Then, the microphone on Jeff’s Tracy Island desk will rise, and he will utter that beloved catchphrase, “Go away, John.” We’re told John and his youngest brother Alan have alternating six-month tours of duty. Presumably John pilots Thunderbird 3 in that time. But we seldom see John on planet Earth, and less frequently still taking part in the rescues viewers know and love. Does he really spend as much as six months with his family each year? We all know he doesn’t. But the truth of John Tracy’s miserable existence runs even deeper than this, and is immeasurably more harrowing.

Filming Thunderbirds through the mid-sixties, John was the frequent victim of bullying by his co-stars and relatives. Behind the scenes and in between takes, the other cast members would insult and belittle the man, knowing full well that he was in ear shot. Sometimes they would do it direct to his face. This was all sanctioned, and indeed facilitated, by the puppeteers at ATV productions, who devised and acted out these horrendous events during every gap in recording. Although making the programme was their job, they very much did it for the love, and would often forego lunch and tea breaks to make up episodes of their own, like children in a playground. 

After cottoning on, the crew took to leaving the cameras on in case anything of quality was improvised. It was a highly successful venture, and in fact how every episode credited to writer/director Alan Pattillo was made. To this day, any attempt to ask him about his work on the series will result in a shrieking denial that he had anything to do with Thunderbirds, as he runs at full speed in the opposite direction to where he was heading, frequently taking hours out of his day.

As a result of this ‘devised episode’ technique, around 20 full episodes of Thunderbirds remain unseen today. It was deemed that any children watching would be upset by the brutal physical mistreatment of, and foul language directed towards, the John Tracy puppet. The sight of him suspended by his own wires from trees, being blown apart and put back together in grotesque new shapes, and a 38-minute sequence featuring Lady Penelope and Parker running him over in FAB 1 over and over again are genuinely disturbing, even seen through adult eyes.

Physical torment was carried out in tandem with psychological, as puppeteers and voice artists even worked John’s denial and refusal to seek help into the programme itself. No other characters appear concerned for John’s well-being, and he never hints that there may be a problem. Viewers could be forgiven for not even noticing the abuse at all. The clearest sign we have comes at the close of Danger at Ocean Deep, where John claims to have been on around a dozen rescue missions. Anyone to have seen the programme will know this to be a brazen lie, yet that is the level of John’s delusion – the truth of his family and creators’ behaviour towards him proving too much to bear.

There was talk of a tell-all book after the series and tie-in films had been completed, but at that point, the puppeteers decided it would be best for the secret not to get out, and so John was never used or given voice again. Today, he remains inanimate, likely hidden away somewhere in a dusty attic in the South East of England, his face a rigid, bland veil that masks a world of troubled memories.

Peter Fleming in Edinburgh; Part I

Hi everyone, Tom here. I’m away in Edinburgh with my double act for August. Very busy, so I’m handing writing duties to Peter Fleming – an architect of the golden age of children’s TV in the 1960s and 1970s – for the month. His show’s one day only, so he’s a bit freer to document his experiences, having followed me here. Take it away, Peter!

Hello, everybody!

Well, well, well, how lovely to be back in the city of Edinburgh! It’s certainly a lot livelier than when we dramatised it in my 1966 historical programme, The Hills Where the Pipers Lived. I remember that one received a lot of complaints, but exclusively from viewers in Scotland, and one largely tended to ignore those back then.

I’ve come along because my young friend, archivist and carer Tom is busy performing his ‘comedy’ here every day. The morning he left, he asked me, “You won’t be lonely, will you, Peter?” to which I replied, “No!” Unfortunately, he didn’t realise I was joking, and so when he immediately ran off to catch his train, I decided to follow him up. It took several days on my tired feet – to say nothing of the various wrong turns I took to Lincoln, Peterborough and Lincoln again, before finally overshooting and finding myself in Aberdeen – but I’m finally here!

As it happens, I shall be giving a talk about my programmes one afternoon, along with my dear departed (and revived) friend Light Entertainment Larry. I’m very much looking forward to it, and I’ve already begun advertising on the streets! I went up to the High Street on the Royal Mile yesterday. Goodness, what a lot of fans of my programmes there were! I walked past a little stage at the bottom, and would you believe it, there was a group of people performing an homage to my 1968 series, The Choir Who Wouldn’t Stop Singing.

When we made the programme, we had to save on production costs, and so we only filmed the eponymous choir singing three songs, and played those over and over again. Pleasant to chance upon of a mid-afternoon on BBC1, but very frustrating to any regular viewers! And those viewers’ experience was being replicated up the whole street, because if you were to walk closer to St Giles’ Cathedral in a bid to escape, or switch over to ITV, as it were, you’d find yourself confronted with the choir-based show that they were broadcasting in the exact same timeslot, Please, For the Love of God, Stop! Heady days!

I found myself having a very amiable conversation with a gentleman here as part of a youth theatre company. He thought he was being very clever when he suggested we exchange promotional materials – little did he know that, although he will now certainly come to see me, the likelihood is I won’t have time to see his gangster-and-circus-inspired musical production of Macbeth at all! I spoke to him for several hours about my work in television, and, do you know, as the hour went on, he seemed increasingly to resemble the title character from The Disinterested Prince (1964). The magic endures!

Best wishes, and scramply-dacious regards,

Peter

Sam & Tom: Unrectifiable is on 3-27 August (not 14), 18:10, Heroes @ Dragonfly (Venue 414), £5 adv/PWYW.

Peter Fleming & Light Entertainment Larry: Haunted Videotape is on 16 August, 15:45, Heroes @ The Hive (Venue 313), £5 adv from the venue/PWYW.

The Naked Civil Servant (1975)

John Hurt’s performance as Quentin Crisp in The Naked Civil Servant (1975) feels heightened, theatrical, in its gentle refinement. When so much British drama wears its heart on its sleeve to a greater extent, especially today, this stands in stark contrast. We feel at first that we’re watching only a deliberate, projected exterior, hinting at absolutely nothing lying beneath the surface.

However, this seems further from the truth when we consider how The Naked Civil Servant reveals how much of British culture, and sexuality, is performed. Crisp’s personality is no more vacuous than everyone else’s around him – and we also see that his performance does indeed mask a greater depth.

Constant elements of ‘respectable’ British life are shown to be theatrical, key to the comedy of manners that is the spine of the film. While the British policemen of the early 20^th century are entitled to arrest for homosexual acts, they cannot bring themselves to say the word ‘homosexual’. Nor can the army officers who exempt Crisp from service on grounds of ‘sexual perversions’. Their authority is removed by their narrow-minded paralysis.

Their examination of Crisp’s naked body is handled in a farcical manner – in unison, they duck down out of the camera’s range, pause, then arise as one again. A swift, mechanical movement – deliberate and performed – exposes the absurdity of their pomposity. Imposing such a meticulous but empty procedure on Crisp, a personification of personal liberty, is one of the most absurdly comic moments of the film.

The importance of image to the film, and its ability to express character, is abundant not only in physical mannerisms like that, nor in Crisp’s life-modelling or his tap dance instructing, but in the clothes of every character we meet. Conformity makes for security, and, like the policemen who persecute Crisp, the other homosexuals he knows have a uniform of their own, dressing in the ‘respectable’ garb of the stiff, conservative establishment. They reject him for his flamboyance, keeping themselves hidden by ‘looking’ heterosexual.

It’s a lie expertly demolished as the film progresses. Not least in the scenes involving the titular civil servant with whom Crisp has a brief affair. As he dresses, we’re treated to close, lingering shots of his hands as they carefully do up his immaculate clothes, fit for Whitehall. Waistcoats buttoned up, watch chains adjusted – what might be considered an indisputable mark of heterosexual normality can just as easily be made an object of homosexual desire.

Ostensibly heterosexual, middle-class respectability is as much a performance, then, as anything Crisp makes of himself. But it takes his flamboyance to expose the fundamental deceit of what we naively consider conventional. And this demolition draws us to consider more carefully what lies within. Yet far from a vapid exterior projection, Crisp’s flamboyance is reflective of his true freedom of spirit.

We know this because we are granted one insight into his interior (a luxury not afforded to those individuals around him). The one image the real life Crisp recommended to the filmmakers as best reflecting him: his younger self, dancing before his own reflection in a darkened room. He lives to achieve once again this beauty, this personal delight, this intimate delicacy.

With the decriminalisation of homosexuality, his enduring conviction in his own character is vindicated. In spite of our prejudiced view of what at first seems an affected performance, we realise that, if we too refused to eschew our own personal joys and delights as we grow into a society that encourages it, we may find ourselves stronger individuals at the end of it all.

Children of the Stones (1977)

In January and February 1977, Children of the Stones was broadcast and imprinted itself on the minds of countless young viewers. Decades on, Stewart Lee has professed his love of the series on more than one occasion, and it continues to enrapture new viewers, myself included. Matthew (Peter Demin) and his father Adam (Gareth Thomas) move to Milbury (Avebury, Wiltshire) for the sake of Adam’s astronomical research. Something amiss is in the village. Its inhabitants are not behaving normally. The mysterious Mr Hendrick (Iain Cuthbertson) is putting a sinister plan into operation. And magic and science collide as frightening powers lurk around an ancient stone circle. Intelligent, evocative and unsettling, Children of the Stones is everything a children’s fantasy should be.

It is not possible to overstate how vital Sidney Sager’s music is to the success of the programme. Watch the opening titles above. A choir leads, discordant vocal slides offering no comfort, no certainty. Indecipherable lyrics bubble up ferociously, burst into a cry, die away. An eerie resolution comes – a false, folk docility masking the frightening pagan forces stirring within the village. There’s something very Wicker Man about all this. And the music is bound to location by the economy of the title sequence. More and more static shots of the standing stones of Avebury, as the music grows in intensity – perhaps the stones are singing to us. It feels bold in its simplicity, and it makes you pine for something so straightforward and stark in fantasy series now. Oh, for the bare confidence of a limited budget’s pragmatic necessity.

For all the simplicity of the titles, the programme as a whole is very sophisticated. As echoed by later classic The Demon Headmaster (another show about children who don’t fit in), the first sign something’s amiss comes in a school lesson. Some of the children know inexplicably more than someone of their age. This isn’t to denigrate intelligence. Matthew is very able at equations and is incredibly helpful with his father’s research. But the children in this school are machine-like in their efficiency, their lack of humour, of individuality. The children watching at home can perceive it easily: there are worse things than not conforming.

A common trait in some children’s fantasy is that our young protagonists, ignored by stubborn, unimaginative grown-ups, have to confront a problem alone. I like that Children of the Stones is one of those exceptions where parents trust and battle alongside their children, as well as having their own distinct lives. Matthew and Sandra’s (Katherine Levy) respective parents Adam and Margaret (Veronica Strong) have conversations and scenes to themselves. Scenes that help advance the plot. And they tell jokes to each – jokes that are funny!

This shouldn’t feel as refreshing as it does. That the adults in a children’s drama are not purely secondary characters, defined by their children’s adventures, but are intelligent individual agents of the story in their own right. They trust and help their children, and ask for their trust and help in return. It’s a very mature view of adults presented by a series that expects children will know and understand their customs and intentions. It’s clear in the copious amounts of whiskey we see being drunk over seven half-hours, and in the fact that Matthew almost immediately trusts Dai (Freddie Jones), a dishevelled man who up to this point has only been seen spying on him with a telescope. Very 20^th century.

In one sense, anyway, Children of the Stones a more mature approach to adults than normal. It’s similarly remarkable in the sophistication of the ideas it puts to children. It owes a lot to Nigel Kneale’s seminal Quatermass and the Pit, where an ancient threat of apparently supernatural origin is ultimately understood and defeated by scientific application. The stone circle, and the enormous flat stone at its foundation are revealed to constitute an ancient transmitter – broadcasting the mental energy of its pagan cult of followers within the village.

They gather en masse, forming the unearthly choir we hear over the opening titles, at one of the programme’s various disturbing cliffhangers. It calls to mind Kneale’s 1979 Quatermass serial, written before but made after Children of the Stones. That, more specifically, also finds a science-fiction explanation (and a very sinister one, at that) for stone circles. New-age and hippy movements, and a renewed fascination with British folklore, pervade much of the science-fiction of this era. Like the deceitfully soothing music, the brainwashed villagers’ sinister Morris dance could be something out of The Wicker Man – and actually is something out of the joint-best Doctor Who story of 1971. Jon Pertwee extravaganza The Dæmons buries an ancient alien menace within the supernatural too, and, like Children of the Stones, shows us a villain’s plan spiral out of control, with disastrous consequences for himself and his acolytes.

Where Children of the Stones diverges from these near-contemporaries is in perhaps its most sophisticated aspect, namely how it considers the concept of time. It plays a vital part in the resolution of the series, but like another great example of the genre, Alan Garner’s Red Shift (part of the BBC’s Play for Today strand in 1983, a far cry from children’s TV), Jeremy Burnham and Trevor Ray’s script gives very little exposition to clarify proceedings. All the protagonists are caught up within events, and we have to piece together for ourselves the exact nature of the story’s ending.

Time would seem to reverse at a climactic point and release our heroes, but when they meet characters again in this renewed pocket of existence, some of whom we’ve seen meet a terrible end, we cannot tell to what extent they are the same people they were before. Are they on a new path or not? We have a hint in the final scene that events are doomed to repeat themselves, and so perhaps these people we’ve grown to like are trapped in this perpetual cycle. While the series to some extent offers a resolution to the puzzle of its plot, it does not offer the same luxury to the story of its characters. Its ending is deeply ambiguous, melancholic, refusing to provide the relief we crave from this disturbing chain of events.

Here, most of all, Children of the Stones displays a bravery, maturity and sophistication that I suspect, in this more responsible age of television, might not enjoy quite the same freedom to flourish. It remains, therefore, one of the most refreshingly challenging pieces of children’s television our country has produced, and one of the finest examples of the genre we have.

Thunderbirds 1965: Introducing Thunderbirds; The Abominable Snowman; The Stately Homes Robberies

The team that brought us Filmed in Supermarionation have had a busy year. In July, a Kickstarter campaign launched to bring 1965-style visuals to three Thunderbirds adventures made for vinyl when the series was first on. Funding was achieved and the following months were taken up filming three brand new old episodes of the show. This helped celebrate the fiftieth anniversary in style, bringing the series home to Slough Trading Estate, where it was originally made (I documented an open day at these studios here). On Thursday, I came home to the DVD of the finished episodes (along with some gorgeous photo albums). At long last, we can watch three final episodes of Thunderbirds.

Something that immediately strikes is what a boon Lady Penelope and Parker obviously were to the show’s publicity at the time. These three adventures are all centred around them, although they only featured in just over half the episodes on TV. The prequel story Introducing Thunderbirds gives them some enjoyable back-and-forth as they visit Tracy Island for the first time to meet International Rescue. We get as comic a turn from Parker as you’d expect as Penelope lumbers him with all the heavy lifting. This, incidentally, is one of many places where the team have been able to give new visual life to an audio story.

Best of all in this episode, we can enjoy seeing whole new areas of Tracy Island, parts that, as kids, we only dreamed of – often balconies and roads, yes, but what exciting balconies and what thrilling roads they are. All accompanied by sumptuous lashings of the late, great Barry Gray (another welcome addition: the audios don’t have anywhere near enough music for my liking). In this way, Introducing Thunderbirds embodies perfectly what’s so special about the project. Penelope, Parker, Jeff, Tracy Island, the Thunderbird launch sequences – all these elements we love just as strongly now as we did in our childhood, surrounded by new and exciting additions to the world of the series. We end up, then, with something familiar and fresh all at once. No mean feat. It’s a joy to watch.

The Abominable Snowman is probably the best indicator of the challenges facing the crew in adapting audio to visual. Not just because there’s less spectacle written into this format, but a different episode length – 20 minutes instead of 45. The story moves faster, but there’s so much less detail compared to what we might expect. The Hood’s plan of masquerading as the abominable snowman to trap explorers and set them to work mining uranium for him, feels bonkers even by his standards. I daresay there’d be a greater fleshing out of his plot, and of the characters he’s trapped, in a normal TV episode. But the team have only the recorded dialogue to work from, leaving us with a fascinating glimpse of a Thunderbirds storyline ever so slightly closer to the more comic book world of Stingray.

But there are fun additions by the team that bring The Abominable Snowman more in line with the feel of the original series, too. Not least in the first few minutes, with an action-packed rescue now opening the episode, à la Terror in New York City. The kind of excitement you’d get from these sequences on telly would never really come across on audio, so here it’s a welcome change. It also gives the Tracy brothers some much-needed extra presence: for the most part, like the Thunderbirds themselves, they barely feature in the audios. While it’s doubtless a pain for Virgil to be called out to the Himalayas later on, only to be told to turn around once he arrives (first The Uninvited, now this), I for one was delighted at his and Thunderbird 2’s wasted trip.

I also had a thrill of realisation that, for the first time ever, we’d now see Lady Penelope meet the Hood face to face. He even uses his glowing eyes on her, the blackguard (again, the production team give the episode a new visual flourish, making up for the audio’s rather limp suggestion that Penelope’s rubbish with a gun). It’s wonderful that this deadly encounter has finally entered the canon of the show – it’s a strangely rare occurrence for the Hood to actually confront members of International Rescue directly, apart from his diabolical schemes in Desperate Intruder. That was the great tragedy of the man: eight episodes into the series, he’d already peaked. Thanks to these new episodes, a problem no longer! The Abominable Snowman gives an appropriately exciting send-off for one of the all-time great children’s villains.

Lastly, we come to probably the strongest episode of the three, The Stately Homes Robberies. It has a lot going for it – original series director David Elliott returning to the fold, Lady Penelope and Parker on their home ground, and a better developed guest character in aristocratic villain Mr Charles. Given its trappings, it’s little surprise that the episode echoes the excellent Vault of Death in mood (also directed by Elliott back in 1965). Barry Gray’s distinctive nursery rhyme-quoting score from that episode lends itself to the atmosphere well, particularly in the opening sequence.

Like The Abominable Snowman, we open with some business new to this visual adaptation: a slow-travelling POV shot through a deserted stately home by night, a clandestine burglary afoot. It sets the tone and pace for the episode perfectly – taking its time in a way that longer Thunderbirds episodes benefitted from, but that the original format for this episode didn’t allow. There’s more visual excitement to hand soon after, when the beautifully-made model of the home is blown sky-high in spectacular fashion. I suspect Derek Meddings would’ve rather enjoyed that.

There’s similar audacity on show when Thunderbird 4 sails through the Tower of London’s Traitor’s Gate – another rescue newly added, giving Gordon Tracy something more exciting to do (I was very glad of this – he remains the most underrated character in the show, and a wonderful man). But new action like this, and a climactic chase, doesn’t detract from the mood already established at the beginning. Like Vault of Death, it has a rich, murky atmosphere, helped no end by Barry Gray’s music and all the iconography of good old England. That’s no clearer than when Parker, tasked with reinstating the crown jewels, imagines himself wearing them before his loyal subjects instead. Now there’s an image that deserves to become iconic. Perhaps it will, along with Lady Penelope’s epilogue, quoting a newspaper article about herself – the late Sylvia Anderson summing up an enduring hero she helped to create.

And that, it seems, is the last, loud hurrah for the original Thunderbirds. I’ve written about the obvious dedication that’s gone into making these episodes, but seeing the finished productions really hammers it home. Sculpting, wardrobe, puppeteering, camerawork, lighting, post-production, sound restoration – everything has come together perfectly to make these a wonderful recreation of Thunderbirds in its original style. More than anything else, what these episodes really show is the love that still burns strong for the original series that inspired both them and everyone who has made them now. These three episodes from producer Stephen La Rivière and his team are something truly special – an exciting new entry into the Thunderbirds canon, and a fitting commemoration of fifty years of a wonderful programme.

Of course, they made vinyl episodes of Stingray and Captain Scarlet as well, didn’t they…?

Catweazle

I can’t remember exactly why I asked for Richard Carpenter’s beloved 1970s children’s series Catweazle for Christmas. Having now finished it, I’d be willing to believe it was divine inspiration. Immensely loveable casts guide us through the two series, under the wings of Geoffrey Bayldon and his mercurial turn in the title role. Carpenter’s writing is by turns charming and farcical, ending on an astonishingly touching reflection on farewells to youth and the seemingly endless summers of boyhood.

Catweazle, an ancient wizard fleeing Norman invaders, accidentally escapes his pursuers into 20^th-century England. Trapped in a time he cannot comprehend, he is found and befriended each series by a lone schoolboy (Robin Davies, then Gary Warren). They conceal him from oblivious adults (across the two series, Charles ‘Bud’ Tingwell and Neil McCarthy, then Moray Watson, Elspet Gray and Peter Butterworth), but Catweazle remains determined to get home.

Geoffrey Bayldon had often been cast as characters older than himself (he was a candidate for the Doctor once, later playing the part on audio). This feels in many ways his defining role, brimming with madness and magic. The spellbinding twinkle of his eyes never feels so enticing, nor so convincing. Catweazle himself is distinctly unreliable – yet while his own magic generally fails, unable to compete with the wonders of the modern age, Carrot (Davies) and Cedric (Warren) cannot bring themselves to dispense with him. And nor can we. Bayldon’s pure conviction and sincere belief in the wonders of Carpenter’s world is infectious, and it is true to us as it is to his characters. It’s the series greatest enduring strength.

The series’ characteristic tone is a great help as well, bolstered no end by Ted Dicks’s excellent score, by turns humorous, mystic and warmly sentimental. It perfectly underpins Catweazle’s responses to the modern world, be they terror and fascination at tractors and ‘electrickery’, or delight at the music trapped within ‘black wheels’. His contributions to the world are similarly enhanced by the music, darkly suspenseful as he brews potions and casts spells, light and witty when he inadvertently sabotages Paul Eddington’s magic show in a series two episode. And, like much of Ronnie Hazlehurst’s music for The Fall and Rise of Reginald Perrin (thie may just be me), the music of Catweazle seems to me distinctly of the summertime. A certain magic nostalgia runs through the series, not for the time in which it was made, but for blissful summers past, lying dormant in the minds of many a child.

There’s something special too in the bonds between the cast. Robin Davies has an immense likeability that draws us to him, certainly. His chemistry with Geoffrey Bayldon, and that with Tingwell and McCarthy, is another key ingredient to that series’ success. Much has been said of the closeness of that cast as a whole, and the joyous atmosphere during filming at Home Farm in East Clandon, Surrey. When Catweazle returns home at the end of the first series (ultimately temporarily) and Carrot must say a hurried goodbye, we feel clearly his unexpectedly profound sense of loss. He bids farewell not just to Catweazle, but to a truly special chapter of his life – in reality as well as in fiction, perhaps.

While series two gains a new location (a manor house) and a new cast, for some of whom the programme was really just another job, the same chemistry remains in places – namely with that of Bayldon and his new young co-star, Gary Warren. There feels less of a connection between Warren and the other adults in the cast, but then the second series’ focus is the relationship between boy and wizard. Catweazle is, after all, the only person at the start of this series we know. Episodes are therefore structured around his and Cedric’s respective quests for the signs of the zodiac (needed to return home) and a horde of long-lost family treasure. They share these journeys, with us as well as each other, and by the time of their culmination, we’re every bit as invested as we were in the first series. At the programme’s close, the emotional attachment is just as strong – and the farewell even more affecting. Like Carrot before him, Cedric can do little more when Catweazle departs than smiles and waves from the distance. Bidding a fond goodbye to his strange, fantastical friend – and to his and our youthful summer days, too.

Catweazle, having realised he can never return home, makes off in a hot air balloon and drifts away, with no one but his familiar, Touchwood the toad, for company. We’re happy for him as he calls out, “Everything works!” and floats into the sunset – and we have no doubt he will be safe, that “magic will lead us”. But the music, as with Carrot’s goodbye, is wistful, tenderly melancholic – has there before or since, in children’s television, ever been such a hauntingly sad goodbye? Catweazle was silly, jovial, farcical – but in its final moments, it reveals its startling capacity for emotional depth and complexity. Magic indeed.