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.