Politically Correct Nursery Rhymes

Baa Baa Black Sheep

Baa Baa Rainbow sheep 

Have you any fair-trade wool?
Yes person, yes person
A number of containers full 

One for the person of authority

And one for the person of nobility 

And one for the young adult
Whose address, for data protection reasons, must remain confidential.

Little Jack Horner

Vertically challenged Jack Horner
Sat in a corner eating a dessert with no direct link to any religious festival
He stuck in his thumb and pulled out a Non-Genetically Modified organic gluten-free vegan plum
And said, "What an acceptable young male with and equal opportunity to contribute to society am I"

Jack and Jill

Jack and Jill (who have a platonic relationship) 

Travelled up a topographical feature
To fetch a container of religiously-neutral liquid 

Jack fell down and suffered injuries to his head
And Jill repeated this action through pure co-incidence (it was not as an implied consequence of her gender)

Mary had a little lamb

Mary had a free-range lamb of less than average (though no less valuable) dimensions 

Its fleece was all the colours of a multi-cultural society
And everywhere that Mary went, the free-range lamb was allowed its own free will to follow her (it didn't have deep rooted dependency issues).

Old Mother Hubbard

Mrs Hubbard (a female parent of advanced age) went to the cupboard
To attain her fiscally challenged canine some tofu
But when she got there, the cupboard was devoid of contents, 

And so the canine had no tofu

Polly put the kettle on

A volunteer put the kettle on, A volunteer put the kettle on,
A volunteer put the kettle on, we'll all have tea
(Although we do have a vegan option and can cater for any other special dietary requirements)

Anyone* take it off again, 

Anyone* take it off again, 

Anyone* take it off again,
They've all gone away (with a full refund which doesn't affect their statutory rights).

(*observing our comprehensive equal opportunities policy)

Pop goes the Weasel

226.8 grams of organic rice,
226.8 grams of treacle.
That's the way the unitary currency goes,
Pop! goes the weasel.
(No weasels were harmed in the making of this nursery rhyme)

Simple Simon

Uncomplicated Simon met a pie-person going to the fair;
Said uncomplicated Simon to the pie-person 'Let me taste your ware'
Said the pie-person to uncomplicated Simon 'Unfortunately, due to high unit costs and limited tax breaks for small businesses, we do not offer free samples. However, if you are not entirely satisfied with the quality of your purchase, I would refer you to the sale of goods and services act'
Said uncomplicated Simon to the pie-person 'Person, due to the difficult economic climate I am unable to free up sufficient funds to purchase luxury items'

The North wind doth blow

The North wind doth blow and we shall have snow, 

And what will poor robin do then, poor thing? 

Attend a climate change protest or perhaps move to a warmer country whilst paying particular attention to that country's immigration and quarantine laws.

The Queen of hearts

The female monarch of Hearts, she made some conserve and pastry desserts all on a summer's day.
The Personal Assistant of Hearts he took the conserve and pastry desserts without the owner's consent and took them clean away. 

The male monarch of Hearts called for the conserve and pastry desserts and meted out punishment to the Personal Assistant whilst observing his human rights

The Personal Assistant of Hearts brought back the conserve and pastry desserts and
proclaimed that he had been fully rehabilitated and was no longer a threat to society.

There was a crooked man

There was a man with curvature of the spine and he walked an indirect mile,
He found a circuitous numismatic token to the value of two and a half new pence, upon a distorted stile.
He bought a misrepresented cat, which caught a disingenuous non-endangered species of mouse.
And they all lived together in a distorted house which was slightly less than the average size for a house in that area.

This little piggy

This diminutive porcine animal went to market, 

This diminutive porcine animal stayed at home,
This diminutive porcine animal had roast beef which conformed to the world trade organisation's ban on artificial beef hormones,
This diminutive porcine animal was gastrically disadvantaged. 

And this diminutive porcine animal had urinary incontinence all the way home though this information remained confidential because of the Hippocratic Oath taken by the porcine animal's medical practitioner.

Read more in Playground Olympics available on Amazon

The best and worst food and drink of the 80s (Part 1)

Angel Delight

If the manufacturer, Birds, asked for two words to perfectly sum up what just happened in your mouth after placing a spoonful of this weird substance into it, neither Angel nor Delight would enter your mind.  This 'instant dessert' begins its life as an innocuous powder whose horrific destiny remains cloaked in anticipation and whimsy.  However, you then have to get off your arse, go to the fridge, open the fridge, remove a bottle of milk, open the milk, add a specifically measured out quantity of milk to the powder, whisk the abominable marriage of liquid and powder that acts like it doesn't want to be in the liquid until your arm gets really tired (8 seconds) and then leave it to slowly congeal for ten minutes whilst you put the top back on the milk, put it back in the fridge and then put the empty Angel Delight packet in the bin.  Under which trades description act is this considered instant? Instant shouldn't involve all that manual labour and waiting around.  Even instant coffee requires the boiling of a kettle!! A twix is instant! Maybe they should start calling them Instant Twixes? However, I digress... Once you've managed to concoct this pink gloopy violation against nature which looks more like something that would fall out of the back of a unicorn, you can finally tuck in.  Angel Delight always reminds me of the day I discovered my gag reflex.  I'm aware that some people find this entire debacle acceptable and eat tons of the stuff but consider this: There's the pink flavour but they've also sold it in the following flavours : Black Cherry, bubblegum, popcorn and butter mint - it's as if the texture wasn't enough to send you to the bathroom to shave your tongue.

American Cream Soda

The pop man (a bloke with a drop-side flatbed pickup with various bottles of fizzy drinks on the back) came in many guises in the 1980s. There was the Villa pop man, the Corona pop man and the Armani of the fizzy drinks delivery vehicles, the BARR pop man.  They would travel around the neighbourhood hawking glass ridged bottles with metal screw caps in crates of as many litres as your sinuses could handle before you passed out from the resulting nosebleeds.  Then, the following week, you'd return your empties and receive a deposit of ten English pence as a kind of delayed discount.  Flavours were as exotic or as common as you'd like; whether you were a straight lemonade person or a dandelion and burdock person (nobody has ever seen a burdock in the wild by the way, they're a complete myth), they catered to your taste and removed your teeth by slowly dissolving them in sugary volcanic fluids over a period of weeks. The milkman tried to get in on the act towards the back end of the 80s by delivering orange juice in milk-bottles with orange foil lids but we knew better - that was healthy and we were buggered if we were putting anything other than he-man jellies, chewits and flying saucers in our mush, all washed down with non-diet extra-caffeinated double strength Panda Cola.  Then came Asda and Kwik Save with their smart price cola by the gallon and the memory of the pop man faded.  One thing that never faded however was the memory of American Cream Soda. Whether you loved or hated it, you never forgot the flavour. It was called cream soda because it was meant to taste of ice cream and some lunatics would actually put ice cream in the drink itself so that you got a lovely greasy film on the top and ruined both things at the same time. The original drink back in the 1800s was made with egg whites and flour, which the Victorians believed were the ideal ingredients for a refreshing drink. Idiots.

Arctic Roll

It's bad enough combining sponge and ice cream in the first place (or 'crossing the streams' as I call it) without choosing sponge which tastes like it's been infused with Michael Owen's personality and the ice cream equivalent of being punched in the face. The ice cream I talk of is the type you find in Screwballs; it stays frozen for about twelve seconds after taking it out of the freezer before the whole dessert collapses into a kind of vanilla sponge puree.  I think people bought them in the 80s because they were 3p each and had the word 'arctic' in it, which sounded exotic, Like Polar Bears and Eskimos. Quite who allowed them to call this a 'dessert' however, needs to be removed from the dessert naming council along with whoever allowed Macarons to exist. These people are the true enemies of society.

Babycham

There were quite a few ways to achieve underage drinking with a degree of legitimacy in the 80s.  Top Deck, Rum Raisin Chocolate, Chocolate Liqueurs at Christmas and what was advertised as 'a bit like champagne but a 'baby' version so it's alright to give to your kids on new years eve', Babycham.  It had Bambi on the front for a start and it was sweet and fizzy! In what world did they think kids wouldn't be interested? Their advertising campaign featured a bloke who looked like he could bench-press a polar bear going up to the bar, overhearing someone order a babycham only to interject, look meanly at the bar tender and say (in a voice so butch, it had it's own set of testicles) 'Hey, I'd love a babycham'.  'Wow', I thought, 'it's not just a drink for those of a feminine persuasion, even huge blokes into weightlifting and wrestling (both of which involve spandex and one of which involves sweaty men sitting on other equally sweaty men) like it'.  So, at the age of thirteen on New Year's Eve, I'd wade through four bottles of the stuff and pass out under the kitchen table with half a melted wispa stuck to my face. Good times.

Ice Pops

Ah, the days of thinking that 10ml of diluted cordial, pumped into a long thin plastic pouch which had been frozen could satisfy your every need.  When you analyse the humble icepop, it becomes apparent that, had someone charged you 5p then defrosted one and served it to you in a thimble, you'd be outraged. Yet here you were, trying to get the thing open, losing two teeth and an eye in the process, borrowing your dad's band-saw to finally get the NASA sealed polythene open then sucking all of the cordial out of the mixture, getting brain freeze three times and then tipping it upside down to drain the last droplets of overflavoured syrup into your now furry gob. And to this day, nobody knows what flavour the blue ones were.  Some will try and convince you that they were raspberry but don't believe them - raspberries are not blue. I've seen one. Ice pops of course had an evil cousin, that was the 'tip top' carton which was sold in some underground corner shops at room temperature. It masqueraded as a drink and allowed you to pop a thin red straw through its thin plastic lid to 'enjoy'.  However, proper, wholesome corner shops froze them into a fat short ice pop.  Sucking at one of these for about three days removed all of the cordial and left behind a small block of ice which was no use to anyone. Still, for 10p, it gave you something to do and you saved loads of money on actual meals. The modern equivalent of the Ice Pop and the frozen Tip Top is the Callipo - somehow managing to combine the horror of both at fifteen times the price.

Lucozade

Whenever I think about being ill in the 80s, it reminds me of two things - Heinz Tomato Soup and Lucozade.  Lucozade these days is all isotonic this and sports drink that but I remember when it came in one flavour; woodlouse.  Wikipedia describes Lucozade as a 'slightly orange-flavoured' drink. It was as slightly orange flavoured as the inside of my belly button.  It came in a horrible orangy-yellow bottle wrapped in the loudest cellophane known to mankind.  I think Lucozade might be a descendant of that 'cure all ailments' tonic that travelling salesmen would sell outside the circus in cowboy days.  It was originally called 'Glucozade' in the 20s before diabetes was invented and then marketed as an energy drink in the 30s with the slogan 'Lucozade aids recovery'.    It took Daley Thompson to convince people you could drink it if you were healthy and John Barnes to convince us that it was in balance with our body fluids. Let's just take a minute to think about John Barnes' body fluids. Done that? Good.  I was always suspicious of drinks that wouldn't tell you what flavour they were.  Tizer and Vimto were like that - they'd sneak things into your body before it was law to put the ingredients on the back and then when they were forced to by the nutrition police, they made things up like safflower and black carrot. Nobody knows what they are!  Cosmetic products these days advertise on TV with phrases like 'Now containing Splankadank bean extract and hydro-anti-firming-night-agent-ahol'.  We lap it up because we assume it must be good for us.  Not me however, I'm still suspicious of things that aren't named after their ingredients. If it's not called Lemon drops or beefy fingers, I'm not eating it.

Um Bongo

I'm not so sure the advert for this fruity drink was accurate you know. It told us that it was concocted by a Hippo, a Rhino, a Python, a marmoset and a Parrot.  The reason I don't believe this is that I don't think that lot would get on without eating each other never mind form an effective and efficient team where they respected each members choice of fruit to enter the cocktail.  Just imagine trying to make an alcoholic punch for your house party by canvassing opinion as to what should go into it, then ejecting the person who suggests putting Baileys and Tequila in it.  If it was up to me, the Python would be out of the committee because it picked the Passion Fruit which has no business here or anywhere there are civilised people.  Also, the Rhino was given exclusive naming rights probably because nobody argued when he said 'I know, we'll call it um bongo'. There's also no empirical evidence that anyone in the Congo actually drinks this stuff.

Tab Clear

I used to love it when this was available in the shops because I could do my 'packet of tabs' joke. It would probably still be funny today if it was still on sale. It was purported to be Coca Cola but clear.  I never understood what that was all about - why sell a drink that tastes exactly like another drink but change the colour? Whatever the reason, I had exactly one can of the stuff, thought it tasted like being thrown off a bus and then it disappeared from shops within the year. Most people obviously agreed!

These would be great in a zombie apocalypse or in a nuclear winter.  I think the use by dates are about fifty years in the future aren't they? Tinned pies. Who thought of putting a pie in a tin?  In fact there are worse things I've seen in tins. For beginners, tinned 'burgers' (covered in lard), which reminds me of that meat you can buy that's in the shape of a bear's face to get kids to eat it! Anyway, back to the point;  canned whole chicken(!), ox tongue(!) and prawns(??).  You. Don't. Put. Prawns. In. A. Tin. If memory serves, you don't even open the Fray Bentos tin to cook it. They always came in one of those hampers you ordered to come three weeks before Christmas which always had one of those disgusting caramel jelly puddings that would sit at the back of your cupboard until you had a new kitchen fitted twenty years later. You'd find it sitting on top of the Fray Bentos pie which was still in date and looked strangely tempting.

Orangina

The slogan for this was 'Shake it to wake it'. The last thing I want is my drink becoming sentient before I imbibe it. The selling point for this was the funky shaped bottles which masked the fact you were getting just two sips for three times the price of fifteen time the volume of comparable orangeade. It was the Perrier of fizzy orange and it had bits floating in it.  You have to shake it to fluff up the bits so they didn't all come out in a disgusting lump of orange pulp like drinking from a spittoon.  It's only weirdos who buy orange with pulp and only the really weird weirdos who pay over the odds for a barely discernible hint of fizzy orange with floating debris.

Capri-sun

Sardines. Has there ever been a product whose contents are as unworthy of the amount of effort you have to put in to open it? A tin of sardines is like one of those 'escape the room' games.  You have to locate a key, attach it to a sliver of metal which is cunningly hidden under the livery and once attached (using your degree in physics) you can begin the 'unwinding' process.  It takes at least an hour to complete, makes both of your hands spasm into a kind of claw which you're unable to move for at least another hour and creates a razor-sharp metal edge that could make light work of a coconut. Then you look inside the tin, wretch, and tip the contents into the bin and go and get an apple instead.  There were many products on sale in the 80s that were near to impossible to open, especially if you couldn't find the tin opener and found yourself stabbing at the top of a can of soup with a carving knife.  These days of course they have ring pulls and other genius solutions, however, Capri-sun continue to persist with the quasi-foil packet which is impossible to pierce.  They give you a straw and they've helpfully shaved one of the ends into a scalpel to make it 'easy' to pop into the 'entry point' which is signified by a small round silver target.  However, when you finally manage to exert enough force to penetrate this foil disc, your grip on the pouch is such, all the liquid inside comes squirting out into your eyes, disorientating you, covering the lino in slippy fruit juice and sending you to A&E via the air ambulance.  Either that or you can snip the top off with a pair of scissors; of course, you'll just need to free the scissors from the hard plastic clam-shell packaging and diamond strength twist-ties clamping the scissors together first.

The best and worst of 80's television (Part 1)

The best and worst of 80's television (Part 1)

With only three channels to choose from at the start of the decade it was very much 'you get what you’re given and like it'.  This might account for why some adverts were inexplicably popular and why everyone in the country knew who the Krankies were.  Channel 4 appeared in 1982 and brought us what we’d been waiting for since the invention of television – Countdown.  The four channels, much like the four horsemen of the apocalypse, brought much pestilence into our living rooms.  Mostly Dallas and Dynasty, but also Eastenders and Brookside so things weren’t all bad.  Growing up in the 1980s though meant cartoons, people in colourful outfits shouting at us to make things out of old fairy liquid bottles (the big white ones with the red cap) and making us listen to an old, saggy cloth cat.

Bagpuss

It took me years to work out who Kevin Day reminded me of. If you Google image him, you’ll see it’s everyone’s favourite lazy pink and white stuffed cat.  There were only 13 episodes ever made of Bagpuss, though because it was repeated ad infinitum at lunch times and I had a shocking short term memory, it felt like 113.  The shop that Bagpuss lived in didn’t sell anything; a lot like shops on the Highstreet these days! A little girl would come by every now and then to leave lost and broken things in the window so that their owners could come and collect them.  Once she left, the shop became a bit like Toy Story in that all the stuff in there came to life.  A frog with a banjo, a doll with a face like she’d just sat on a hairbrush...

...a stuffy wooden woodpecker (the irony) who spent the entire time whinging about the mice (who had creepily climbed out of the 2D pattern on the fireplace). 

Bagpuss, like any manager, sat around yawning, not doing much, barking orders at his ‘staff’ and took all the credit once the item had been fixed or whatever.  He’d then do a huge yawn, go back to sleep and send all the things that had come to life, back to being lifeless disaffected statues with no discernible purpose or personality.  The plot would have been much the same had it been set in my local branch of McDonalds.

Button Moon

A wonderful tale of irresponsible parenting this.  Mr. Spoon was so called because he had spoons for arms making my name, Mr. Arms. He had a wife and young daughter but that didn’t stop him pursuing his extremely dangerous hobby of astronavigation.  Travelling to a 2-dimensional moon made of a huge yellow button upon which various creatures made out of kitchen utensils lived. 

The suspicious thing is, it was Mrs. Spoon who made the rocket in which he travelled to the moon, out of a Heinz beans can and a funnel and then and gifted it to her husband, knowing full well he had no opposable thumbs with which to steer it. Let’s just say, I’m pretty sure she wanted him out of the way for some reason.  We never saw what was going on back on Trash planet when Mr. Spoon was fraternising with aliens.  My guess is that she was getting some stubborn stains off her wok with the ‘Scrub Buddy’ she had for hair.

Cockleshell Bay

 

Cockleshell Bay had one of the most heart-breaking theme tunes of all time.  Listen Here  Second only to the one on the end of ‘The Incredible Hulk’ TV series. Listen Here.  Either could happily be played over a montage on the news of a report on something awful.  This was meant to be an upbeat kids TV show and after listening to the theme at the end, I’d wander off back to school after my lunch, rethinking my life choices.  I was only four!

Robin and Rosie Cockle (dressed like early versions of Freddie Krueger) lived in the Bucket and Spade guest house with their parents.  Their dad, Chris Cockle bought the guest house because he didn’t want to work in a factory anymore. This is a backstory I identify with more and more in later life; completely lost on me back then.  It was the other characters that creeped me out.  First, they had a ‘Gran’ who wasn’t actually their Gran, they just called her Gran.  She helped out around the house and it wasn’t clear why – or if she got paid.  The kids had a fisherman ‘friend’ called Mr. Ship (who had sideboards like shredded wheat) who was at least in his 50s. Nothing dodgy about that in the 80s though.  Mr. McGinty was also hanging around with his face like every photofit you’ve ever seen on Crimewatch.  He owned a donkey called ‘Fury’ whose choice of name was never elaborated on although it probably had undiagnosed anger management issues and an intelligent Seagull called Ben Gunn; named after the character in Treasure Island.  I think all animals should have a first name and a surname.  In fact, I've just started calling my cat Trevor Dobson.

Rainbow

 

This was one of the most iconic kids TV shows of all time.  It was a little bit like Sesame Street with the ‘puppets interacting with humans’ theme, all of which became legendary.  The characters, who all lived in a kind of foster home together (and did nothing but argue with each other all day) included Zippy (a warning of what happens when cousins marry), George (a pink hippo with no moral fibre), Bungle (a distant relative of Chewbacca) and Geoffrey who was their legal guardian. 

Zippy’s eyes were stuck on and he couldn’t blink (or he was on something to help keep him awake); George on the other hand had blinkable eyes with long pink eyelashes.  This is probably the source of the animosity between the two.  Whenever anyone got annoyed with Zippy, they’d just zip his mouth shut.  I distinctly remember the episode where Zippy realised he could simply unzip it himself however. He then descended into a life of crime with his new life in a world without consequence. 

Bungle spent most of the time whinging about Zippy and wandering around naked. In one episode, he’d just been in the bath and entered the room with his lower half covered with a towel.  He also wore full-body pyjamas for bed.  1970s Bungle looked like it had crawled out of Wes Craven’s imagination...

"Good evening, I'm here to eat your soul"

...whilst the 1980s Bungle looked a lot friendlier and less likely to eat your children.  There were stories, arguments, whinging, arguments and Rod, Jane and Freddy who’d pop in, sing a song and pop back out again.  What fun!

The Test Card

The girl on Test Card F could see into your soul.  Staring out, sucking the very essence from you as you sat munching on your Coco Pops, waiting for that day’s television to start.  She had a distinct Mona Lisa quality to her; her enigmatic smile saying either ‘I know what you did last summer’ or ‘what do you mean, noughts and crosses is a two-player game? Creepy the clown here tells me his moves in my thoughts and I write them on the board’ followed by that weird teeth-lips thing Hannibal Lecter does after saying ‘with a nice chianti’.  Ironically, the clown looks like something the killer in Silence of the Lambs would have made as a trophy.  I realise now that these things were used for the same reason you do a ‘test print’ on your printer to make sure all the colours work whilst wasting 80% of your ink which cost £400.

The Flumps

An absolutely gorgeous children’s TV program this.  Hard to believe there were only 13 episodes ever made of this family of living pompoms.  We didn’t have any indication of their life expectancy but there were three generations in the Flump household. 

A strange race of creatures, their faces were expressionless and incapable of movement but their fingers would wiggle about excitedly, betraying their inner sentiments.  Each Flump was a stereotype, teaching kids that Father Flump (and therefore all fathers) only did DIY, Mother Flump (and therefore all mothers) just tidied up, cooked and looked after the children and Grandpa Flump spent his twilight days playing the Flumpet or sleeping in his comfy chair with the newspaper over his face. 

There were three children Flumps; Perkin, Posie and Pootle, the latter wearing a white bobble hat and skipping about the place with wide-eyed innocent abandon as he had not yet been exposed to the horrors of reality.

 The Moomins

The Moomins was an early version of Keeping up with the Kardashians.  Strange characters with large posteriors communicating in a strange language and living in a fantasy world. Characters included Moominmamma (the matriarch), Moominpappa (the patriarch) and Moomintroll (the one who bothered people on the internet).  Little My was an anarchist who sabotaged everyone’s happiness, including my own, Sniff was a Kangaroo-dog (or a dog that was bitten by a radioactive kangaroo), Snork Maiden was what you’d expect to find hiding in a wardrobe in a haunted house, Snufkin was a transient character who wandered in and out of the story as he pleased and Too-Ticky, who was the only character who didn’t hibernate. 

I thought the Moomins were Hippos but they're not; maybe they’re homeless tortoises?  The theme tune to the show was an absolute delight however listen here, a masterclass of Piccolos and Tubas. 

My enduring memory of this show was that no stories ever really came to a satisfactory conclusion during the episode you were watching, preferring to leave you hanging until the next episode when the story from the previous week was skilfully ignored.  I never did find out whether they survived that storm at sea.  Anyone?

Thundercats

Whilst the title of this show has now seeped into the unconscious of all who saw it in the 80s.  Watch the intro on YouTube here and you’ll pass out with excitement.  The cats of course were humanoid aliens with feline sensibilities.  There was Lion-O (the stuff you cover kitchen floors with), who would hold his sword aloft and watch it get exponentially larger whilst shouting ‘Thundercats – Ho’, to which Cheetara would reply, ‘I wish you’d stop calling me that’.   There was also Panthro (a panther), Tygra (a tiger), WilyKit and WilyKat (together making a chocolate covered wafer snack) and Snarf – who was adopted. 

The most glorious of all the characters though was the wonderful Mumm-ra who was a demon-priest, the ever-living source of evil with powers of sorcery and an unlimited lifespan.  He’d creep out of his coffin, incant something about the ancient spirits and then give out an angry roar through the awful strings of saliva between his lips.  His only weakness was mirrors. Seeing himself forced him to retreat into his little pyramid.  If only they’d invented snapchat filters.

Bod

Bod was a perfectly bald baby who had mastered bi-pedal movement and lived in a bleak featureless wilderness of primary colours with his vertical-eyed Auntie.  Aunt Flo’s nose looked exactly like her eyes (or she had three eyes and couldn’t smell anything), her ears were on her cheeks and her 4-strands-of-hair-fringe always faced the front whichever way she turned her head.  She also carried a small meatball on her head wherever she went.  Bod, in his yellow mini-dress, shared his realm with various municipal workers.  If you were going to think up names for characters you’ve created which include a policeman, a farmer and a postman – then spend many many months in deep thought, you'd probably give up and just use the names Farmer Barleymow, PC Copper and Frank the Postman.

At the start of the program, Bod would begin as a tiny dot in the distance and wander towards us with the creepiest look on his face you can imagine, getting closer and closer but then stopping short of actually climbing out of the TV screen like the horror movie The Ring.  PC Copper kept his helmet on by hooking the chinstrap to the underside of his moustache which would spring forward every time he spoke as if his breath could be measured on the Fujita scale.  His eyes were also vertical, suggesting the world of Bod was inhabited by lizard-creatures wearing human skin-suits to hoodwink Bod, whose eyes were made of apple pips.  I might be looking into this too much.

Bullseye

 

Bullseye was shown on a Sunday evening when everyone was in the house because there were no shops open and sitting in front of the television munching on an evening meal consisting of triangle cut ham and peas pudding sandwiches, a communal bowl of crisps, wagon wheels and/or arctic roll, Vienetta or Mr Kipling’s French Fancies. 

It was presented by the hugely underrated Jim Bowen who always looked like he didn’t know he was supposed to be hosting the program, which I’m sure was deliberate.  Darts was one of the biggest sports shown on television in the 80s and the creators of this show jumped on that to centre the entire program around throwing small missiles at round segmented targets eight feet away to win a series of amazing and terrible prizes.

Three couples competed against each other; one dart player and one non-dart player; though there seemed to be no rule against having one dart player and another dart player with decent a grasp of general knowledge.  The non-dart player was required to throw darts in later rounds and it soon turned out that their knowledge of the Boer War was usurped by their inability to throw a dart in a straight line when they failed to win any prizes. 

In the first round, contestants had to select a question category such as ‘History’ and then watch as their dart player friend missed that category on the board and instead hit ‘Astrophysics’.  In the next round, the contestants played for the amount of money equivalent to the score their dart-player friend achieved – usually around £26.  The third round presented the contestants with a prize board – eight red sections and a Bullseye where plopping your dart into the red bit could win you prizes such as a hostess trolley, rocking chair, chemistry set, a £1 carriage clock, a Yamaha keyboard with eight keys or a terrarium! 

The drama would really ramp up when, after winning two of the eight prizes which were worth a total of £4.78, the contestants were asked if they wanted to gamble those against the mystery prize or take the money they won in round two and the amazing prizes.  The contestants would often reply with ‘we’ve had a lovely day’ and then take their prizes home. 

The gamble came in the shape of a game where they only had to score 101 or more with six darts.  It can be done in two, but bearing in mind the non-dart player nearly speared Tony Green to the wall with one of their darts during the prize round, it’s not a foregone conclusion.  It always seemed that if the contestants failed, the star prize would be a new car and if they won, they’d quickly switch the prize behind the screen and wheel out a caravan or speed boat.

Mr Benn

Mr Benn was an animated middle-aged man in a suit and bowler hat who hated his real life so much, he went into a fancy dress shop, put on a costume, had a delusional episode in which he went on an adventure linked to his costume before returning the costume without paying for or hiring it then went back to his monotonous existence in which he wears a suit to make himself feel a modicum of self-worth.  The show had a lot in common with the Walter Mitty stories though Benn himself doesn’t wander around bragging about his adventures to anyone.  Saying things like ‘I’ve just been to space and had a fight with three aliens that looked like seahorses’ would probably have earned him a trip to the hospital. I’m convinced the shopkeeper was slipping Mr Benn something whenever he came into the shop.  The BBC never did broadcast the episode where Mr Benn went into the magic changing room with the sparkly thong and nipple tassels.

Chorlton and the Wheelies
 

Chorlton was a Happiness Dragon who lived in Wheelie World, a town inhabited by creatures who travelled about the place on wheels.  The world was in perpetual conflict with Fenella the witch (who was Welsh with missing teeth and a huge green face) who didn’t want anyone to enjoy themselves (she went on to write scripts for Mrs Brown’s Boys) but Chorlton (who had absolutely no idea she was evil, or knew anything about anything or how to do it) would greet her by saying ‘ey up little old lady’ and unknowingly counteract Fenella’s unhappiness spells just by being alive.  Fenella’s best friends and allies were a sentient spell book and a telescope.

One of the more surreal moments in the program occurred when Fenella’s son turned up.  He was so tall, all we ever saw was his leg.  We never saw the episode where she had to explain to him that he was adopted. 

Wizbit

I’m not afraid to admit that I loved Paul Daniels and his magic shows were a thing of wonder in the 80s.  He was also a very natural and funny quiz show host (I also like Noel Edmunds btw) but this show, as fun as it was through the eyes of a ten year old, had some themes which would have freaked John Lennon out at the time he was writing Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds. 

Wizbit was an alien trying to learn about earth but you couldn’t sympathise because he was a huge yellow hat with arms and legs and eyes that stopped you sleeping for weeks.  To top the nightmare off, his bestie was an eight foot tall rabbit with a constant pained sinister expression on his extremely wide face. 

Professor Doom was the antagonist whose evil plans would be thwarted weekly by solving some lateral thinking puzzles.  You couldn’t get in to the town of Puzzleopolis unless you solved a puzzle and just outside the town was a talking purple slimy bog.  I’m sure the program makers were trying to coin a quotable catchphrase like ‘Fandabidozi’, ‘What you talkn’ ‘bout Willis’, ‘Hey you guys’ or ‘I pity the fool’ when they made Wizbit’s magic word ‘Ostagazuzulum’.  Nobody has ever used this word in the real world with their own mouth out loud.

Chock-A-Block

 

Chock-a-block was a massive yellow computer which filled the room and had less processing power than a Nokia 3310.  It had a TV screen, microphone, tape recorder, buttons and graphics off Ceefax. Much like a Nokia 3310. The program was presented by someone dressed in white overalls, playing the part of the ‘technician’ that maintained the computer (the one who switched it off and on again when it crashed).  The best part was guessing if it would be Fred Harris or Carol Leader who rode in on the chock-a-truck (an electric car which was the precursor of the Nissan Leaf). 

 

The ‘block’ in the title was actually the mass-storage media the computer used, like a USB stick but an early 80s version which more resembled those 8-track cartridges from the 70s.  There were songs, rocking the blocks to find the rhyming pairs and stories.  After all the fun, Chocka-bloke or Chocka-girl would drive away and turn off all the lights.

Orm and Cheep

 

This was a puppet show which paired a baby bird (Cheep) and a worm (Orm), co-habiting.  Cheep’s entire focus is on learning to fly but until he grows proper feathers, he befriends the imaginatively named Snail, Mole and Mouse.  He did have some mortal enemies in Rat, Cat and Crow who all wanted to have Cheep for lunch.  As with many of the puppets in the shows I’ve mentioned so far, the creators decided to give them immovable expressions so whatever mood they were in, they’d still looked shocked or overjoyed. 

 

It reminds me of the time Eamonn Holmes tweeted out some tragic news (when he was the anchor on Sky News) and in his general profile picture, he was laughing.  In Cheep’s case, he looked like he’d just sat on something pointy and Orm (with his massive bulging eyes) looked like he’d just seen something in the woods of which he will ne’er speak again.  Although the series never ran long enough for Cheep to grow his flight feathers and turn into an adult bird, there was bound to be a moment when he turned to his worm friend and saw him as food. 

Knightmare 

This was a Kids TV program everyone who was a child in the 80s wanted to go on.  However, nobody wanted to be the one who had to wear a massive helmet on their head and be told what to do.  The helmet was to shield the dungeoneer’s sight as they were just shuffling around a blank TV studio and the graphics of the rooms in Castle Knightmare were added with computer trickery later. 

 

Four children entered the lair of a creepy man with glassy eyes and a dubious beard and one was sent out into the studio to ‘play’ the game whilst the other three watched on using a TV monitor.  There were puzzles, obstacles and characters to interact with.  Mostly, the three advisers would spend more time describing the room the dungeoneer had entered down to the minutia of the colour of the bricks on the east wall than telling their stricken colleague that there were rotating blades of death coming towards them and they should ‘take one sidestep to the left’. 

He-Man and the masters of the Universe

There wasn’t a person alive in the 80s who didn’t know who He-Man was.  Based on a range of toys, rather than trying to cash in the other way around like certain films set amongst the stars where there were some wars going on, He-Man began in 1983 and ran for two years with 130 episodes.  It’s hard to imagine that it was possible to fight Skeletor that many times, but he managed it.  He-Man’s real name was Adam and in the credits he tells us that he discovered he had magic powers the day he held aloft his sword and shouted ‘By the power of Grayskull’.  Why he did this the first time isn’t clear – it’s not like he was sitting around the palace, bored, wondering what to do next with all his money and blonde bob.  “I know”, he must have thought, “I’ll go outside, hold my sword aloft and just shout things – anything – whatever comes into my head.  That’ll pass a few hours.”  Luckily, he just happened upon those now immortal words.  Not only this, but when his body is engulfed by lightning and various other dangerous looking lasers, making his muscular structure a little bit more muscular, his clothes turn into a strappy-top and his trousers into fluffy knickers, then he points his glowing electrically charged sword at his cat! Luckily, it didn’t turn Cringer into a kebab and caused him to grow a helmet and saddle from nowhere.  Then He-man runs up to the television screen and punches it full force in the face, causing the name of the executive producer to appear.

He-Man only told a select few people about his magic sword, those being Man-at-Arms (real name Duncan) and Orko, a creepy flying dress with eyes, a scarf and a pointy hat whose magic often went wrong.  Teela wasn’t allowed to know that He-man and Adam were the same person yet an inter-dimensional idiot with blue pointy ears was? 

 

My favourite character of all however, for two reasons, is Mekaneck, who had a mechanical prosthetic telescopic neck.  Firstly, he was the tastiest of all the He-Man jellies and secondly, his son was called Philip.  Philip Mekaneck. (True story) 

Skeletor was of course the most famous of all the arch-enemies. A confusing beast until this very day.  Firstly, his voice was the least scary in all of Eternia; he sounded like a trapped Peacock with piles.  Also, he could fire magic out of his fingers but always decided on conjouring some giant beetle or monster made out of chewing gum to have a fight with He-Man instead of shooting his magic directly at He-Man’s face.  Thirdly, Skeletor’s face was a skull; his name was Skeletor (indicating his resemblance to a skeleton) but his body was rippling with muscles in his tight fitting blue spandex outfit.  For that reason, from this day on, I shall only ever call him Skullator.