Today is brought to you by the letter…L

Hello once again!

There was a technical hitch yesterday when I was supposed to do the letter L, (Internet not doing its business, plus another bout of ‘The Virus’ in the household – 7 year old’s turn again!), so here we are today with it instead. Rather aptly, as little one is off school it is actually a school’s programme from my youth I’m looking at today.

Today, L is for…

Look and Read

‘Wordy’

Well at least I thought it was for Look and Read until I realised that the programme I was remembering was Words and Pictures, but as Words and Pictures was a direct spin off from Look and Read and had some similar characters and format, you can’t blame me for getting confused!

So what was the difference? Well, apart from the fact Words and Pictures had a cool theme tune and Look and Read had no theme tune to speak of  really, Look and Read was, as I say, a school’s programme from the BBC which began airing in the 1960s and continued right up until 2004. The idea was to present stories in a fictional style drama format with real life actors to help with reading skills and teach grammar skills alongside in a separate section of the programme. I thought this was done by a ‘see-through’ character called Charlie, but it seems I remember him from Words and Pictures  as he didn’t feature  Look and Read as I thought, and this is where my confusion arose. Look and Read did have a character, but he was called Wordy and he was a large orange type ball thing with letters all over him, not an animated picture character. To my mind he was a little creepy, whereas Charlie was a little bit like an old Grandad what with his bow tie and slight comb-over!

Charlie (on the left!)

But the main difference between the two programmes was that Look and Read was aimed at slightly older primary school children (and looking back and remembering some of the down right sinister looking serials – I’m not surprised – Remember Badger Girl, Through the Dragon’s Eye, Dark Towers or The Boy from Space – creepy! )

An image from The Boy From Space (1980) in Look and Read – See? Totally creepy! 

whereas, Words and Pictures was developed for children who had just started out at primary school and had animated stories instead of real actors dramatising the story and Charlie of course! The part I always loved the most and remember most vividly about Words and Pictures though (and which wasn’t on Look and Read) was the part with the ‘magic pencil’ whereby it formed letters on a black background on the screen for you, teaching you how to write.

Behold the magic pencil!! 

I also really loved the Charlie character, though I only have vague recollections of him, as I only have vague recollections of Look and Read, because it was the type of programme you either only watched if the teachers put it on in school or if you were off school lying on the sofa ill and your mum allowed you to watch it so you didn’t ‘miss out’ on too much education! I’m guessing I remember Words and Pictures more because I might have watched that before starting school (I was nearly 5 before I started, after all – not like these days when kids are shoved into school nursery at aged 3.)

Look and Read I actually came into contact with later on in life, in my early years of teaching in actual fact. The Internet hadn’t quite reached schools in 1998/1999 (forever behind) and even DVDs weren’t that widely used. I remember using the Spywatch Look and Read materials (made in 1996) with my year 3 classes in the first few years of teaching, complete on clunky, chunky VHS video. It was still normal for us to wheel out the brown, wooden TV (yes really -as late as the year 2000 I’m talking about here!) and get the video cassette out (with teaching materials) and it was one of the ways I taught simple spelling patterns and phonics. The oa episode sticks in my mind, with a goat eating a coat on a boat with auntie Joan etc….etc…! Spywatch was the serial bit and was set during the Second World War following the story of some evacuees living on a farm. It was an excellent story, all about a spiv who the kids think is a German spy, and then a German plane crashes and they help the pilot. The spiv’s ‘girlfriend’ was played by Lesley Joseph! And the whole story was a flashback told through the eyes of Keith Baron – Norman Starkey- who is remembering his time as an evacuee. The ‘technology’ he uses in the library to do his research is hilarious, but for 1996, probably very of its time. Anyway, I didn’t find Spywatch sinister (as the earlier serials from the 70s and 80s look) but perhaps all those 7 and 8 year-olds I taught between 1998 and 2001 will now have their own memories of the weird Look and Read programme their teacher inflicted on them! Who knows?

The strange teacher character who used to appear on Keith Baron’s chunky 90’s computer screen to spell out the phonemes on the Spywatch saga of Look and Read

Today is brought to you by the letter…J

 

Hello viewers!

I hope Monday finds you well. Monday finds us at the letter J in this A-Z blog challenge for April, and with it one of the most bizarre children’s TV programmes from my own youth.

Today the letter J is for…

Jigsaw

Jigsaw is one of those programmes that if it wasn’t for the Internet I may have thought I had been on some hallucinogenic drug back when I was five years old. Also my memory seems to have been pretty much internally wiped of much which happened to me before I was six, so I always wondered if I’d dreamt it. But as with many TV programmes aimed at pre-schoolers, Jigsaw seemed as though it was on speed, rather than the viewers. However, clearly, as the Internet tells me (along with four shaky vague memories I have),  it did exist!

So what do I remember?

1. I remember the little animated jigsaw piece, Jig, who would talk to the viewers from the corner of the TV screen. He had a cute voice.
   

   Jig, in the corner! 

2. I remember having a Jigsaw annual at some stage with Jig and (a very young) Janet Ellis on the front. It was yellow, I distinctly remember that. Oooh and here it is! Good old Google! But if it was from 1984, then blimey I would have been 9! Pre-school?! I really was a backward child, late developer and all that!

3. I remember a character called Nosey Bonk. (Yes, you read that right – his name was Nosey Bonk)

I did wonder if I’d (we’d) imagined him, (and if I had have done, he would have been the stuff of nightmares! Just look how bloomin’ sinister he looks), but it seems we didn’t imagine him. Thanks to You Tube, I have discovered he did indeed exist and so Nosey Bonk really was a character who had, for whatever reason, stuck in my brain. Maybe I hated myself, I don’t know. I do recall myself and my sister jumping around the bedroom, our feet planted in pillowcases, pretending to be Nosey Bonk, but have never been able to work out why we should have done this. Until I Googled it that is, and found Nosey Bonk boinging up and down in a postal sack!  Yes, it is as bonkers as it sounds, BONKers being the operative word. How we didn’t have nightmares over this character is beyond me. Evidently kids were made of sterner stuff in the late ’70s/early ’80s, because I know if my 7 year old saw that now, he’d freak right out. Behold, dear reader if you’ve no idea about just how odd and down right weird Nosey Bonk was, click here at your peril!

4) There was an inventor with a boater hat whose name was Hector, I think!

What I don’t remember at all is what the whole point of Jigsaw was. I know I just remember it and really liked it. However, my research tells me that the basic premise of Jigsaw was that in each episode we, the viewer, would be given clues as to 6 letters of the alphabet through mime, picture clues or even Nosey Bonk giving clues, and then those 6 letters would spell out a word for that episode, such as flower. Knowing me, this type of thing probably appealed to my know-it-all, bossy-boots, teacher-to-be, five year old self. Either that or it was the early days of my obsession with detective shows!

Anyway, that was pretty much it. Adrian Hedley was the mime artist who gave clues (and played the character of Nosey Bonk) whilst Janet Ellis (later of Blue Peter fame) made things seem almost normal.

I hadn’t remembered the opening credits music until I watched it again, but instantly it sparked familiarity, as did the Nosey Bonk theme tune, so I guess was a big part of my early viewing. Definitely a great one to look back on!

Today is brought to you by the letter…H

Well, thanks to my family, who are at least reading these even if no one else is, and putting me right on any details my memory seems to be lapsing on! My memory is not great at the best of times, so add in my fuzzy virus ridden head and yes, this year’s April A-Z blog challenge may well be full of incorrect recollections!

Yesterday I had a break, so it is today, on Day 9, I bring you a TV classic from my youth with the letter H. And in true ‘I’m not a girly girl’ style, today H is for…

He-man (and The Masters of The Universe)

Let’s see how many character’s names I can remember without Google. Here goes. L-R: Beast Man, Evil Lynn, Skeletor, He Man, Man-At-Arms, Teela and Orko flying above. The woman in the Eagle costume looks like she’d be more at home in Battle of the Planets….Okay…*Googles: Oh she’s just the Sorceress of Castle Grayskull.

Is there anything, TV show wise or merchandise/toy wise which epitomises a 1980s childhood more than He Man and the Masters of The Universe, because if there is I cannot think of it. Following the adventures of Prince Adam of Eternia, (who becomes He-Man), I never really quite got what was going on, other than our ‘hero’ had to stop the evil Skeletor from seeing his evil genius plans through to fruition. He-Man resided in Castle Grayskull of course, from where all his heroing adventures were based. (Skulls seemed to be a big theme??!)

I’ve been learning a lot about He-Man and its history today doing a little memory jogging online and discovered its link to Star Wars (who knew?) and  Conan The Barbarian (again, who knew?) and how it actually started with the merchandise rather than the TV show, (again I knew this not.) I recall my brother may have had some figures (I’m sure he’ll set me straight on whether he did or not and as to which ones) though it could have been our second cousin or my mum’s friend’s kids who had them. Or all of them. I do remember rotating/twisty waists on figures though, so perhaps he did have some.

All I knew about really, anyway, going back to the TV show, was the cartoon, which first appeared on our screens in 1983 and was something my brother was far more into than the rest of us. It was probably he who started us watching it, although I used to like tuning in to see if Skeletor would actually defeat He-Man who I  found far too cheesy and irritating! I think we all wanted Skeletor to get one over on He-Man, just once. He-Man was just too…well…perfect! And no, I did not have a weird crush on He-Man like I did with Spiderman or Mark from Battle of the Planets, but probably because He-Man was flaunting everything he had on a plate. We all need a little mystery and something be left to the imagination. Even my 9 year old self seemed to realise that much!

So we always rooted for Skeletor, because let’s face it Skeletor was actually really funny. And ridiculous in the extreme.  A bluish-purple skeleton with a bright yellow skull living in a castle in a place called Snake Mountain. Just brilliant and not at all sinister. Just completely comedic. I have blogged before about my strange liking and rooting for cartoon villains here, and why I did, so I won’t go on about it so much, but seriously, He-Man really was cheesier than an episode of Wallace and Gromit set on the moon  eating every type of cheese.

This ‘cheesiness’ was especially true at the end of each episode when Prince Adam (He-Man’s alter-ego) would explain the  moral to the story in that episode, and then all the ‘goodies’ would stand around laughing ‘Hahahahahaha’. It was hilarious (though meant to be the ‘serious’ bit) and we did take the mickey out of it a bit. I know, I make us all sound as though we had no morals growing up, rooting for the evil villain – I mean just once he could have won, surely?!  But I think it may have been more to do with us rooting for the underdogs. Because we knew that’s exactly what the villains were.

I liked Evil Lynn over Teela, of course. She was Skeletor’s side kick and held her own pretty well for a cartoon female character wearing not much at all (none of them did – I can only presume it was baking hot in Eternia). Orko, the little red floaty magician thing, was completely irritating (I know, I know his lack of magical skills on Eternia were supposed to create humour – hmmmmm, no), as was silly Cringer the Cat (who turned into Battlecat – miraculously losing all his fears in one swift lightning bolt administered by his keeper, Adam of Eternia AKA He-Man)! Then there was Man-At-Arms, whose actual name was as dull and non-descript as  I found his character – Duncan. I did always used to think what a stupid name Man-at -Arms was when I was a kid, but I suppose it was intended more as a title than a name thinking about it now. Thinking back, why did I watch this programme and like it? Hahaha!

Ah yes…as with many of my favourite TV shows from my youth, I suppose it was, as ever the theme tune which hooked me in. (Who else sung along “He has the power to lift up a flower, out in the sun or the rain” over the instrumental part?!) But it wasn’t  the theme tune necessarily which grabbed me, it was overall the opening credits being quite visually spectacular for the time they were made I suppose which did it. It was all  very dramatic! “By The Power of Grayskuuuuuuuuuuullllllllllll” Prince Adam would shout before being transformed out of his pink attire into (virtually) his birthday suit and roaring “I haaaaave the poweeeeeeeeeeeeeeeerrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr”  as he held his sword aloft, sparks flying left, right and centre.

Of course, to balance it all out for girls, She Ra (Princess of Power) was released sometime later. Just as cheesy – Princess Adora is Prince Adam’s sister, but she lives, not on Eternia, but on Etheria (Star Wars‘ Luke and Leia anyone??) and turns her horse, Spirit, into Swift Wind, a flying, talking unicorn. Apparently the idea was to give something to appeal to girls along the same lines as He-Man gave to boys, (Or to make more money out of merchandise, whichever you wish to believe!), but to be honest, I was happy with the He Man programme. I had Evil Lynn to look up to, after all! 😉

 

Today is brought to you by the letter…F

Amazingly, despite the lurgy once more taking hold of me, we’ve reached day six of this year’s A-Z blog challenge without a break. (This is because there will definitely be a couple of days towards the end of the month when I have to take a break due to family stuff – including a wedding, so I need to crack on.)

So where are we today? Well, we’ve reached the letter F, and the letter F can only take us to one TV programme from my youth. Yes, today we’re down at…

Fraggle Rock

The Fraggles: L-R: Wembley, Red, Gobo, Mokey and Boober.

 

“Dance your cares away. (clap, clap!)

Worry’s for another day,

Let the music play (clap, clap!)

Down at Fraggle Rock!”

Fraggle Rock (together with The Lion The Witch and The Wardrobe) is heavily responsible for , and laid the seeds over thirty years ago, for some of the ideas I had  in 2011 when I began to write my children’s novel. More of which I’ll come to later.

For those of you who lived in a cave during the mid 1980s (or were either too young or too old to have seen it, or a Fraggle yourself), Fraggle Rock was a Jim Henson creation (he of Muppet fame) and followed the lives of three different types of muppet creatures: the Fraggles, the Doozers and the Gorgs, who all lived hidden beneath the rocks. Hence the name Fraggle Rock.

Now in Britain the rocks were under a lighthouse owned by “The Captain” played by Scottish actor Fulton MacKay  (better known in Britain for his role in the 1970s comedy Porridge as the prison officer Mr Mackay), and his puppet dog Sprocket. In The U.S The captain was an inventor and the character changed depending on which country the series was sold to.

Fulton Mackay as The Captain, together with Sprocket the dog.

The thing which stayed the same, however, were the story-lines involving the Fraggles (the main muppet characters), the giant Gorgs and the ever so cute teeny-tiny, hard working Doozers.

The Fraggles like to have fun and sing and dance. They eat radishes and often have to steal these from the Gorg’s garden. Wembley was always my favourite Fraggle. He used to do some crazy stuff with his eyes and was always the funniest.

Of the Gorgs, I loved Junior Gorg best. He had a lisp and was so cute with huge eyes and a bulbous nose. He would  capture ‘Fwaggles’ for fun, in an attempt to collect them, but they always escaped as he was a bit stupid! What I could never figure out about the Gorgs was where on Fraggle Rock they were in relation to the Lighthouse. The Fraggles and Doozers lived under the rock, that was clear, but the Gorgs lived in a complete fantasy medieval land complete with castle and the ‘Trash Heap” made from old compost and leaves, which spoke and was always very wise. Yes, it was as mad as it sounds but I loved it!

The Gorgs: Junior Gorg, Pa Gorg and Ma Gorg horrified at the theft of their radishes.

The Doozers never featured that much, but were definitely my favourite creatures because they were just too cute! Just look at them in the picture below! Even the name Doozer is cute. It wasn’t until recently I discovered what it was Doozers did from reading a book on my 7 year old’s kindle called What do Doozers Do? Just keep saying that out loud! What does a Doozer do? Doozer do?!  It’s hilarious! I always wondered what the little transparent constructions they build all around Fraggle Rock were for, and it turns out they are special crystallised sticks made from radish dust! The Fraggles actually then eat the construction sticks! Who knew? (Well apparently it is shown in some episodes, but my memory isn’t that good.)

The Doozers: Little green workaholics!

What I think attracted me to Fraggle Rock overall though, other than the great characters and the fact I loved muppets anyway, was probably the fact that it was extremely colourful (kids love colour), there was lots of music, it was happy and upbeat, but also there was the ever so important element of wit in it, largely through the character of Gobo’s Uncle Travelling Matt who would send postcards back to Fraggle Rock about his adventures in ‘Outer Space’ (basically London!) with the ‘silly creatures’ – humans.

Uncle Travelling Matt

This brings me very much to my own ideas for my novel, some of which were very conscious and others which were not, but on thinking back to Fraggle Rock, it was clear something had stuck in my psyche.

The Fraggles can access the human world via a great gaping hole in the lighthouse’s wall, and often Sprocket the dog knows there’s something not quite right and barks away at the hole. Not that The Captain ever pays him any attention, and he never sees the Fraggles. Now when we were growing up, there was a hole in the skirting board and door frame where our lounge met the pantry next door. It wasn’t a huge hole, but it was big enough that a draft would blow up from the dark, cold pantry into the lounge. (For those of you unaware of what a pantry was – the house I lived in growing up was a traditional Edwardian terraced house and back in the day, before refrigerators, food was stored in the pantry -a small storage room, which in our case was located in the hallway between the lounge and the kitchen under the stairs. There was a door on our pantry, though I remember my Grandad’s didn’t have one even though his house was built on the same layout.)

Anyway, our pantry didn’t store food as it was the ’80s and we had a fridge. Instead for many years it housed my dad’s amateur radio gear on a desk and he’d hide away in there after dinner communicating across the world with various people he’d never met. Kind of like an early version of Twitter if one thinks about it. He even had room for a chair in there. I then had this crazy idea that my parents could convert the pantry into a bedroom for me! It had a little window after all, so it could be a room surely? Having to share a bedroom with up to three siblings clearly got to me at some point and I fixated in my imagination on this idea, drawing up plans of where the bed could go and maybe a shelf or two! Honestly, Harry Potter is punished by being put to sleep under the stairs – and there was me  wanting to!  Of course it never happened, and when my third brother came along my mum and dad got an extension and myself and my sister got to have the newly converted bedroom (once the bathroom) to ourselves.

So how on earth does this link to Fraggle Rock and my idea for my novel? Well, I used to imagine that Fraggles lived under the pantry floor and that they could access our house via the hole in the door frame/skirting just as they did at the lighthouse in Fraggle Rock. I loved the idea of that and really did allow my imagination to run away with this idea.

It eventually led me to come up with the idea of a group of creatures living under our feet in a parallel world (Trelflande instead of Fraggle Rock), but with humans ( Oomans as I call them – the ‘Silly creatures’) living in The Overworld (‘Outer Space’) having no clue about what’s going on right under their very nose.  (The Captain never had a clue of course). All this I guess is where my subconscious called back to Fraggle Rock.  Children in my book would be a little like the dog Sprocket and they would find the creatures and would be able to see them, as children, unlike adults, will allow their imagination to. Sort of like us kids believing Fraggles lived under our pantry in the ’80s, or that our teddy bears and dolls were alive and had feelings and needed dressing in warmer clothes when winter came. (Yes we did that, and put on shows for them!), when my parents would know this was nonsense.

 

Another very vivid memory associated with Fraggle Rock were the songs. Aside from yet another great theme tune, there was one other one in particular which stood out. Either my sister or brother number one (can’t remember who) owned the Fraggle Rock theme tune on 7″vinyl. I had a record player that my grandad had given me and this was housed in our tip of a bedroom. (Remember there were four of us sharing it alongside the population of China in soft toys – so the room was always a complete mess.) Now of course our mum would make us tidy in up on occasion (or all the time it seemed to us ), often telling us not to show our faces until it was done. And how did we wile away the time to get this laborious job done? Well if we really wanted motivating, we’d stick on the B-side to the Fraggle Rock single, which was called Workin’ and we’d sing along and chuck everything under the beds in record speed time!

It went something like this:

Wake up in the morning

Get yourself to work

Fraggles never fool around

Fraggles never shirk

Duty’s (pronounced dooty) always waiting,

Duty must be do-uh-uh-ne

There’s ping pong games that must be played, 

And songs that must be sung.

Workin’, workin’ workin’ workin’

Motivational stuff, hey?!

Here it is in all its You tube glory! 🙂

Yes, Fraggle Rock is definitely in my top 10 children’s programmes. I’d never have guessed back in 1984 at the age of 8 or 9 I’d bring it all back and revive some of the key concepts in a book of my own thirty years later.

And the idea of the Doozer construction scenes are currently playing out in the part I’m writing right now. Unfortunately not in such a cute or friendly way! Far more sinister and dark.

Thanks as ever for reading, and hopefully I’ll find you back here tomorrow, for day 7 and the letter G, where we’ll be swinging our pants. (Some of you will get that clue, some of you won’t have a clue!)

🙂