Obiter Dicta

Wednesday, February 29^th.

This week, I have been writing much that reminds me of my past again. Chasing a reference  took me to a nostalgia spot on the web for 1950s TV. I almost wept with the sense of being back there. I share these reminiscences with you.

Our first TV set was a massive and cumbersome strong-box with a screen the size of an envelope. It took longer to heat up than an 8lb turkey and, when it did, the images looked like they were being projected through pea soup. There were two huge knobs on the front of it, one for changing channel and one for adjusting the brightness. The latter was a sophisticated calibration which meant that one turn to the left from the central position meant that all the action took place as in a coal-bunker at midnight, where one turn to the right from it meant that the picture looked like it had been shot at the North Pole.

            There were two stations, BBC on Channel 3 and STV on Channel 10. To change from one to the other meant Dad turning the other huge knob by hand, and it clunked ponderously through the Big Bang hiss of the empty airwaves on all the other numbers until he got what he wanted – usually, the news with Michael O’Halloran, who wore a flower the size of a savoy cabbage in his buttonhole. No zapping from one channel to another with an insouciant flick of the remote control in those days.

At first, being young, I watched Watch with Mother on the BBC.

              Picture Book on Mondays was a middle-class mish-mash. Making paper lanterns; guessing which one of a series of objects had been removed from a tray (“Are you closing your eyes, children?”); and wee moralising cartoons that told kids how to behave. It was presented by a dame with a cut-glass accent. If she’d ever taken the bool out of her mooth, I’d have realised, even at the age of 5, how patronising she was.

            Tuesday – I quite liked Andy Pandy. For one thing, I looked like him at that age. I had the same expressionless and slightly gormless look about me. Andy spent a lot of time hurling his girlfriend, Looby-Loo, around in a cart. But then there was Teddy. It was always Teddy who broke the swing, lost the ball or ruined the game. I wanted to wring the little bastard’s neck - no doubt, the intended reaction. Remember, children: selfishness is bad.

             Thursdays brought the bizarre menage-a-trois of Rag, Tag and Bobtail. They were just dull. But it was Wednesdays and Fridays – The Flowerpot Men and The Woodentops – that were the highlights of this wean’s week. Cue another bint with a haw-haw accent:

            “Once upon a time, there was a little house. (Tring! Pling!) And all around the house was a beautiful gah-den. (Pom! Tiddley-pom! Tiddley-pom!)” Bill and Ben only appeared when “the man who worked in the gah-den had gone into the house for his dee-nah.” It wasn’t Daddy who did the gardening, but a hired man. In the middle of the day, “in the warm sunshine”, he had dinner. Not lunch, but dinner. The man was obviously working-class. It’s a wonder Mummy allowed him into the house. (Well, maybe not.) The Woodentops, country folk, had a daily woman, Mrs. Scrubbit, and the orra-man Sam. Mummy Woodentop was kept busy with the housework and the twins, Willie and Jenny. Daddy and Sam did manly things like shaw neeps and fork dung.

            Another world than this. It was really Home Counties TV for Home Counties weans, although I didn’t know it at the time. I never, ever made paper lanterns. I didn’t know anybody who had a daily char, a gardener or an odd-job man. I never even had the biggest spotty dog you ever did see. But my brother and I squatted like gnomes in front of it every day .

            Being a cowboy myself (Santa had brought me the suit, hat and guns), I loved the cowboy series and watched all of them mounted up on the brown moquette arm of the settee, which I rode into the sunset along with my heroes. I knew all the theme tunes, too. Champion the Wonder horse – ‘like a streak of lightnin’ flashin’ ‘cross the sky; like the swiftest arrow whizzin’ from a bow’. Davy Crockett, king of the wild frontier, who ‘killt him a bar when he was only three’. The bad little bastard. And, best of all, the Lone Ranger. The stirring music of the William Tell overture, the way the Lone Ranger galloped Silver up a hill to cliff, made him rear up and then rode him down again (pretty futile riding I think now, but I loved it at the time), the bold block lettering of the title that, for some reason, always made me think of biscuits, and the dogged loyalty of the faithful Tonto to Kemo Sabe – I was mesmerised.

“A fiery horse with the speed of light, a cloud of dust and a hearty "Hiyo Silver!" The Lone Ranger. "Hiyo Silver, away!" With his faithful Indian companion Tonto, the daring and resourceful masked rider of the plains, led the fight for law and order in the early west. Return with us now to those thrilling days of yesteryear. The Lone Ranger rides again…”

The next day I was The Lone Ranger, or Hopalong Cassidy (‘clippity-clippity-clop’), riding my two-legged steed around the prairies of Marchwood in my endless quest for justice and freedom.

            Entirely new to me, and introduced through this new magical medium, were swashbucklers. There was a clutch of these programmes that I instantly loved as well: The Buccanneers with Robert Shaw as Dan Tempest (‘Let’s go a-roving and join the buccaneers’); and William Tell, with Conrad Phillips as the eponymous hero (‘for we’ll escape from the jaws of hell for TELL and Switzerland’).

            But best of all was Richard Greene as Robin Hood, Alan Wheatley as his arch-enemy, the Sheriff of Nottingham; and Archie Duncan as the only Scottish Little John ever to travesty the legend. I loved it, from the opening credits where Robin’s arrow fizzed through the air to bury itself deep in a tree trunk, the title “The Adventures of Robin Hood” spun in a whizzing circle before righting itself dramatically, and the catchy theme tune – “Robin Hood, Robin Hood, riding through the glen” – set our little hearts aglow. Not too many glens in Merrie Englande, I fancy, but then we didn’t know any better (‘Robin Hood, Robin Hood, riding through the glen; Robin Hood, Robin Hood, with his band of men. Feared by the  bad, loved by the good, Robin Hood, Robin Hood, Robin Hood.”)

            A year or two later, and I was hugely diverted by this parody of the theme song, as invented by one of the bad lads from Belvedere.

Robin Hood met a nude, riding through the glen.

Friar Tuck ran like fuck to tell the Merry Men.

When they got there, Robin was bare,

Robin Hood wae a nude, in the wood.

There are some interesting psycho-sexual assumptions in there. A nude, invariably pronounced ‘nood’ to rhyme exactly with ‘Hood’, was a naked woman, a woman whose nakedness was her identifying quality, as a nun’s was piety and a nurse’s dedication. Further, to meet a nude, in a wooded glen especially, was instantly to be consumed with the desire to be like her and to experience the overwhelming urge to cast off one’s garments. And once that happened, as is proved by the ineffectual arrival of the Merrie Men, one was lost; beyond all reclamation. A nood was evidently as deadly an adversary as a gorgon or a fury. However, quite why Robin was moved to be bare, along with the nude he met in the wood, or what he intended to do once he was unclothed, never crossed my mind. I was innocent enough of that taint – for the time being, at least.