Butter Wouldn’t Melt

I can’t profess to ever having been a huge fan of punk, preferring myself the hippy undertones of Kate Bush or the soft pop synth sound of New Wave but I knew who John Lydon was and held a grudging respect – even amusement – for the man and his outrageous anarchist antics.

I still have fond memories of him flicking his V’s at the camera nearly a decade later on Saturday Superstore or Going Live or whatever woolly-jumpered guff the BBC was putting out on a Saturday morning back then. Cue pouts of outrage from Mike Read and Sarah Greene – how dare he besmirch our jolly kid’s show with his dirty punk fingers!

Meanwhile my sister and I were laughing ourselves silly like a couple of drains. It was almost as good as the legendary Five Star phone-in where an enterprising little potty mouth managed to slip through the BBC’s “real teen” censors and introduced kid’s telly to some rather choice four letter words. It was a remarkably succinct music review that has never ever been bettered in my opinion.

But I digress. John Lydon / Johnny Rotten was a somebody. He stood for something. He was spiky, dangerous and uncompromising. Values held in high esteem by any burgeoning teen / young adult.

So it’s depressing to note then that dear ol’ John has sold his anti-establishment ethos down the river in order to endorse / sell / promote Country Life Butter on our televisions. John loves Country Life Butter, you see, because “it’s British”. Cue clips of red buses, Morris Dancers and John himself in a nice tweed jacket sinking a large brandy in an old fart’s gentleman’s club. For a minute I thought I was watching the trailer for the next Austin Powers movie (John Lydon as Austin Powers: now there’s an interesting concept).

I realize Country Life are hoping to get themselves a bit of an edge by employing our John to hawk their wares in the Corrie ad breaks but to my mind it doesn’t really work. It doesn’t make me want to go out and buy a slab of Country Life Butter. It makes me want to hurl abuse at the TV screen. It makes me want to flick my V’s right into John Lydon’s pasty lily-white face.

John what the hell are you doing? Surely your mortgage is paid by now? Why?

It’s one thing to be a national character...

Quite another thing entirely to be a national caricature.

The Bedtime Hour

CBeebies has suddenly established a toe-hold in our house.

Tom – just a month a way from his first birthday – has developed an attention span which now makes it worthwhile to allow him a little bit of kid’s telly each day. Hence 6pm to 7pm is now officially The Bedtime Hour.

At this time we all gather round the telly and whilst simultaneously feeding Tom his tea we watch Chris Jarvis and Pui Fan Lee talk joyously about big pink milkshakes, throbbing moon rockets and furry teddy bears without a single trace of irony or even the smallest of smirks. Kid’s telly is a very serious business indeed.

Of course it is a well known fact that grown-ups have children solely to be able to watch kid’s telly without feeling embarrassed about it. Kid’s telly is feel-good safe telly and it puts everyone in a good mood regardless of their age. If I was being charitable I’d say that this effect was achieved simply by the fact that the stories and jolly cartoons carry us back to an age of unsullied innocence where worries about rising mortgages, soaring food prices and the police finding that body under the patio were things totally inconceivable to our young unformed minds... but the reality is that we enjoy watching kid’s telly just so we can take the P out of the hapless presenters as they caper about pretending to ride invisible mopeds or have fairy cake tea parties with an assortment of plastic charity shop toys. Oh how their mates must rip the hell out of them in the pub later...

Of course the fact these people are on about 35K a year means that they have the last laugh but as they are endlessly chuckling and laughing anyway who’s ever going to tell the difference?

One of the best things about kid’s telly though is the occasional celeb they draft in to read the stories or narrate the animations. I’m currently marvelling at the theatrical gravitas that Derek Jacobi manages to bring to his voice-over work on In The Night Garden... phrases like “Here comes the nankynonk” and “Oh no, Iggle-piggle has spilt his nonky-juice” (I kid you not) are delivered with such earnest aplomb they could have been written by Shakespeare. Or “Shacker-nacker” as he would undoubtedly be called in the show.

Best of all though is that this week Keeley Hawes is reading the bedtime story.

Ah. Keeley. Keeley. Keeley.

I feel a shiver of excitement run up my... er... back every time she turns her liquid eyes to the camera and croons “And now it’s time to go to bed...”

My jim-jams positively jump with delight.

Jewel

Interestingly, despite my last post being about “I’m A Celebrity Get Me Out Of Here” the comments to it digressed into a discussion about the BBC’s new period drama, Cranford and, more specifically, about England’s finest actress (in my opinion), Julia Sawalha... which just goes to show that when faced with a mountain of crap most people determinedly turn their backs on it and reach for something excellent instead.

Good on you, people.

Ever eager to capitalize on whatever topic of interest floats my reader’s boats I thought I might compose a small paean to Julia as I’ve been a huge fan of hers since her Press Gang days.

Press Gang, for those of you who don’t know, was mislabelled a kid’s programme back in the late eighties / nineties and was broadcast on ITV during their after school tea-time slot and was probably the finest scripted programme on television at the time. It was where Doctor Who / Jekyll writer Steven Moffat first cut his television writer’s teeth and certainly the scripts abound with enthusiasm, energy and movement. Which is not to say they ever descend into cheap candyfloss frippery and “zany” kid-world fantasy.

The scripts were cutting, sharp, breath-takingly funny and sometimes surprisingly harrowing in the choice of subjects covered. It was the one kid’s programme that refused to patronize its viewers and as a consequence is still head and shoulders above much of the TV guff that is thrown at children even today.

Julia played the formidable Lynda Day and for her first big TV role put in a performance so confident and self-assured it had Jennifer Saunders and Andrew Davies, to name but two, knocking her door down to offer her parts in projects they themselves were working on. I’m glossing over a huge swathe of biographical detail here but you get the picture. I believe the expression is: a star was born.

Since then Julia has appeared in dozens of period dramas – a period drama is now no longer believable unless Julia appears in it – Jonathan Creek, Faith In The Future and provided voice overs for plasticine chickens in Nick Park’s Chicken Run... and loads more besides.

You’ll notice I am staunchly refusing to make jokes about stuffing birds, or asking if anyone would care for a leg or a breast. I am above such things.

Anyway, despite a career spanning a good 20 years Julia has always retained a freshness and vitality that positively shines out of her whenever she appears on TV. She’s a class actress and it’s a real delight to see her in Cranford (and back being a brunette – I never cared for the blonde look she adopted in Jonathan Creek) though as TimeWarden pointed out in his comments to the previous post, she is now alas “looking older”... but is that necessarily a bad thing? She looks good, she looks natural and she is (according to the Radio Times) no longer living in the smoke and druggery of London but is immersing herself in the wilds of Somerset – immersing herself in a greener and healthier lifestyle, growing veggies and taking an English degree.

Exactly like me in fact. Except I’m not growing veggies, or living in Somerset, am not female and am not a class actress. And I can’t fill out a corset half as well as she can.

But I am a brunette. Totally natural, you know.

Enough! God bless you Julia! You’re great, you are.

Right. Gushing over. What can I moan and snipe miserably about now...?

Hamble Is Evil

I got onto this subject by a rather weird route. Catching an episode of 10 Years Younger last night Karen and I commented on the weirdness of the weird presenter’s name – Nicky Hambleton-Jones. Not Hamilton as you’d expect but Hambleton. Odd. Well. Maybe not that odd when there’s a kid at my boy’s school called Denim (I kid you not) but I was sufficiently bored with the show to drift off in my head and from Hambleton I inexplicably ended up at Hamble and, by association, Playschool.

One of my earliest TV memories is of watching Playschool and being rather puzzled as to why a grown up presenter was playing with the soft toys and dolls. Even at that early age it struck me as incongruous and “not really quite right”.

But that is beside the point. The important thing to acknowledge is this: the Playschool toys were scary. Damn scary.

I never felt any warmth or friendliness toward or more importantly from them. They exuded mute evil and maliciousness in tones that reflected their outward appearances. They’d just sit there in the background while Brian Cant mimed eating a bowl of porridge and hurl the evil-eye at the TV screen. They never moved but you just knew their thoughts were full of death and the desire for human destruction.

The Teds looked like a furry version of the Krays – or worse, the Krankies. They’d rob you at knife point and stab you just to see the pretty strawberry pattern it made on your bib. Humpty looked like a fat, sweating pimp with horrible bacon rind lips and a lascivious smile that never ever disappeared. He personified unwholesome appetites and unnatural desires taken to bad extremes. Jemima... now Jemima you just knew was a snooty cow. A real little madam. On her own she had no real malice or ability to instil fear in anyone – not with those bandy legs. I mean she couldn’t even stand up on her own let alone run after you with a flick-knife. Somehow I suspect she was only allowed to join the Playschool toy gang because she was loaded. She had a mega rich daddy, sugar or otherwise. The rich bitch of the Playschool toys. But I bet she was viciously cruel. She’d be the one egging the others on with snide whispers.... “Go on, Big Ted, cut ‘im, cut his ear off... do it nice and slowly so’s I can see the blood... hey, do you know what they call a Big Mac in France?” A real nasty piece of work. A real bullet-maker.

But worst of all though was Hamble. The doll that looked like Elizabeth Taylor on crack cocaine. Just look at her face in the photo above. Evil. Pure unadulterated evil. Forget the polka dot print dress. She’s wearing a studded leather body-boot underneath with 9 inch heels. She’s got a bag of oranges in her satchel. She’s the ring leader. She’s the boss. And she hates children. Especially little boys. God, you can see it in her eyes. She wants to kill. She wants to maim. She wants to have endless children’s tea parties with imaginary Darjeeling and invisible cake, the sick torturing dirty bitch!

And this show was on 5 days a week for God’s sake!

Is it any wonder I was such a disturbed child?

Think Of A Number

Quite why Johnny Ball is leaping about my subconscious this morning I don’t know – but he is and he’s waving his arms about manically and spouting lots of amazing stuff about numbers, equations and surface areas and doing his damnedest to make it all sound jolly and fun.

And it works.

I hated Maths at school. Absolutely loathed it. And I hated Physics even more. Our Physics teacher, Mr Prior, resembled a leather jumpsuit wearing troglodyte with a beard bushy enough to lose Ray Mears in and who demonstrably had a pathological hatred of all secondary school pupils. Especially wimpy secondary school pupils who had utterly no grasp of the manly science of Physics. What can I say? Mr Prior rode a huge eff-off motorbike to school everyday and regularly flirted with the svelte, cool-eyed French teacher (whose name escapes me but who looked like a female version of the keyboard player from Duran Duran) while I was a weedy bespectacled nerd who found numbers and pulleys and electrons all rather boring.

And yet I was totally addicted to Johnny Ball’s Maths/Physics based educational programmes.

The man was mesmeric. A little bit insane yes but he managed to make Maths exciting and even appealing. His enthusiasm was infectious. Even a numberphobe like me found himself swept along by Johnny’s unbounded zeal for number patterns and intricate gear systems. I think Johnny’s trick was not his intelligence in his chosen subject – formidable though it was – but his ability to communicate and transfer his own passion for the subject into the hearts and minds of his viewers.

If Johnny Ball had been my teacher at school I’d be an award winning physicist by now or even better I’d have had my cherry taken by the unnamed French teacher above. Instead I’m a disgruntled civil servant who writes novels and poetry in his spare time and whose cherry wasn’t offloaded until he was nearly 30.

I kid you not.

Hmm. But maybe that’s sharing a little bit too much information?

I’m sure Johnny Ball would be able to plot an entertaining graph mapping out my divergence from manly science stuff and my headlong dive into the world of literature and not pulling anything but a cracker for three whole decades... but as he isn’t here you’ll have to make do with this 'ere blog.

In the meantime my unanswered question is this: whatever happened to Johnny Ball?

TISWAS

I met up with my good mate, Tris, last night for a gentlemanly catch-up of personal news and life happenings over a couple of bottles of red wine in Leamington’s coolest uptown joint, Wilde’s wine bar. And as we sat handsomely in the darkest corner we could find we discussed all the important world issues that have currently been keeping us awake at night and preoccupying our waking minds…

…like the undoubted superiority of TISWAS over Swap Shop.

It’s an unarguable fact that TISWAS was leagues ahead. There was and still is utterly no contest.

I mean just compare the two shows yourself:

Swap Shop had Noel Edmonds, Keith Chegwin and Maggie Philbin – three presenters who in themselves were enough to give any TV studio sick building syndrome and cause kids to vomit up a week’s supply of penny chews on the spot – but dress them in awful chunky knit pullovers and novelty 80’s jumpers and suddenly you have a recipe for turning kids into dysfunctional psychotic misfits who develop a pathological counter-fashion need to wear lycra and purple shell suits. Take a look out your window right now for evidence that this country has been completely destroyed by the Swap Shop generation…

TISWAS however had Sally James whose major contribution, as Tris rightly pointed out, was a pair of amazing tits struggling to burst out of a tiny waistcoat. For a teenage boy that ticks every boob-shaped box in the book. Anything else is a bonus.

Much as Maggie Philbin was an intrinsically likeable person there was nevertheless something ineffably asexual about her. She was like a school lab technician. Kind of there but invisible. Or should that be visible but not exactly there? It’s very common to develop a crush on a teacher at school but unheard of for anyone to fancy a lab technician. It’s just not possible. It’s like they’re not real people. They’re clones. Or synthetic people. As well fancy a Barbie doll (albeit a very speccy mousy one with sensible shoes and a clipboard).

Sally James, however, oozed earthy, filthy, rock-chick sex appeal from every pore and hair flick. And she got splattered with custard pies and various cream toppings every week.

I leave it up to you to draw your own analogy…