Here Is A Box (Set)

For a limited time, you can get four books full of stuff by me - that's Well At Least It's Free, Not On Your Telly, The Camberwick Green Procrastination Society and Tim Worthington's Bookshelf - as one huge cut-price eBook. That's nearly six hundred pages on Doctor Who, David Bowie and much more besides.

Amongst that 'much more besides', you can find the following articles that you won't find anywhere else:


Switch On The TV, We May Pick Him Up On Channel Two - a look at David Bowie's lost early television appearances

School's Out! - what would have been the accompanying booklet for the cancelled DVD release of Hardwicke House

The Best Of Times - a full history of the BBC's 'Sunday Classics' slot, masterminded by former Doctor Who production team Terrance Dicks and Barry Letts

Unwatched And Somewhat Slightly Erased - a bold attempt to find something to like in the Doctor Who story that nobody likes, The Space Pirates

Every Time The Slightest Little Thing Goes Wrong - a look at Hanna-Barbera's bizarre attempt at post-Nixon satire for adult viewers, Wait Til Your Father Gets Home

May We Come With You? - Chigley and the end of 'the sixties'


There are tons of other articles too, but you can find more details of them elsewhere on the blog. Anyway, Here Is A Box (Set) is just £3.99 and is available here as a full-colour eBook... but not for long!

E Arth Welcome... In Blue Jam

Since his last appearance on the station on Boxing Day 1994, there had been an open invitation of sorts for Chris Morris to do some more work for Radio 1.

The following two years had been taken up with work on Brass Eye, a six-part television series for Channel 4 that took his concepts of spoofing hoaxing news and current affairs to their logical conclusion, presenting a series of hard-hitting documentaries based around entirely fictitious subjects. Brass Eye was nothing if not provocative television, operating on a far more powerful level than practically any other comedy show ever transmitted, and an incident in which a hoax over the fabricated recreational drug ‘cake’ had spiralled out of control, and found itself the subject of a parliamentary discussion, caused enough concern within Channel 4 for station controller Michael Grade to postpone the series from its intended transmission while he verified whether or not it had transgressed broadcasting guidelines.

Brass Eye did indeed resurface, albeit in a substantially edited form, running from 29th January to 5th March 1997. Even in this slightly tamed incarnation the series was still strong stuff, but by this point the months of setbacks had taken their toll and Morris was thoroughly fed up with Brass Eye and keen to move on to something new. Rumours of a forthcoming new radio series had begun to circulate while Brass Eye was still airing, and over the summer of 1997 Morris recorded a pilot for Radio 1 under the working title Plankton Jam. It is perhaps telling that while the subsequent rash of inferior post-Brass Eye emulators were still little more than vague proposals, the man who inspired it all was making moves to distance himself completely from ‘news parody’.

Blue Jam, as the new Radio 1 series would eventually be renamed, did not even start out as a comedy show. Morris, who had always appreciated the woozy world of late-night radio where laid-back music tracks are linked by presenters talking in hushed tones that give a sense of the isolation of broadcasting from a largely empty building in the middle of the night, originally intended to create a more experimental take on this sort of show, a “3am lug lube” with an appropriate musical backdrop behind “first person stories that slowly went off the rails, from the point of view of the presenter”. While this would almost certainly have been diverting listening, it is interesting to ponder on whether or not they would actually have constituted ‘comedy’ as such; in effect, it would only have been a slightly exaggerated and distorted version of what could be found elsewhere on the radio dial at that time of night[1].

As work on the show progressed, sketch material began to find its way in through a somewhat roundabout route. According to Morris, the original concept of first person narratives evolved into “framing those narratives as ‘found sound’ as well, like bits of documentary actuality, and then dramatising bits of all of the scenarios”. This effectively grew out of a mocked-up ‘fly on the wall’ documentary in the pilot about a doctor who treated his patients with kisses and other displays of affection; this was considered by all who heard it to be the most effective item by far, occasioning a change of direction and a move towards outright sketch material with no DJ element. The doctor himself, caught up in increasingly bizarre scenarios but remaining unflappably by-the-book throughout, would go on to become the most heavily recurring character in the show.

Blue Jam was quite unlike anything that had been heard before in the name of radio comedy. The familiar presentational style, fabricated news stories and love of subverting pop music were all gone, replaced by a hazy montage of music over which fragments of monologue and conversation, alternately whimsical and disturbing, drifted in and out seemingly at random. The word ‘dreamlike’ has often been used to describe Blue Jam – and indeed an early pre-series trailer featured references to 'The 1FM Dreamline' – but not in the traditional sense. Instead, Blue Jam effectively evokes the disquieting, half-formed thoughts that pass through the semi-conscious mind in the early hours of the morning[2]. Although many have suggested that the nightmarish, otherworldly ambience of Blue Jam was influenced by the effects of hallucinogenic drugs, the reality of the situation is far more mundane and unpretentious. The original press release for the series included a list of the stylistic cues that had informed the show, which included Vivian Stanshall’s long-running Radio 1 tales of life at Rawlinson End, the ambient dance music act The KLF, and the effects of influenza, alongside the expected world of late-night radio; all indicative of a blurry and indistinct state, but one that is reached naturally rather than through any kind of chemical stimulation. Blue Jam was more effective in creating its own abstract ambience than any boring slab of drug-fuelled meandering could ever hope to be.

The first run of six hour-long instalments of Blue Jam went out on Radio 1 at midnight on Friday mornings, during November and December 1997. The most immediately striking feature, not to mention the most important in terms of setting the required tone, was the music. On a simplistic level, the shows could be divided down into the established ‘music show’ format, interspersing speech material with tracks played in full. However, the speech material was surrounded by looped sections of music tracks, which flowed in and out of the longer selections in one long pulsating soundtrack that ebbed and flowed with the mood of the material; so neat and seamless that it was difficult to determine where the music and comedy ended and started. This soundtrack was made up of excerpts from a selection of music tracks that were markedly diverse yet also strangely aligned, ranging from ambient dance music to spectral ballads, 1960s European pop numbers, and even a scratchy old blues record that claimed to be “dreamin’ ‘bout a reefer five feet long”. The KLF, Brigitte Bardot, Bjork, David Byrne, The Chemical Brothers, Stereolab, The Cardigans, Sly And The Family Stone, The Beach Boys, Beck and even the middle-of-the-road duo The Alessi Brothers were just a handful of the artists that found themselves absorbed into the first series of Blue Jam.

Each edition of Blue Jam opened and closed with a warped approximation of ‘beat’ poetry, conjuring up surreal juxtapositions and disturbing imagery and delivered in an obscure patois, conveying a feeling of distorted reality with a bleakly comic twist. Each edition also contained a lengthy monologue delivered by Morris, and written jointly with Robert Katz. These had their roots in ‘Temporary Open Space’, Katz’s contributions to Morris’ Greater London Radio shows (indeed, some of the monologues were adapted from earlier ‘Temporary Open Space’ pieces); these monologues probably give the clearest indication of what Morris had originally intended for Blue Jam. In the eventual transmitted shows they were surrounded by shorter sketches, written variously by Morris, Peter Baynham, David Quantick, Jane Bussmann, Graham Linehan and Arthur Matthews, and performed by a regular cast that included David Cann, Amelia Bulmore, Julia Davis, Kevin Eldon, Mark Heap, and on occasion Sally Phillips, Lewis MacLeod, Melanie Hudson and Phil Cornwell.

The sketch structure was to say the least unconventional, lacking deliberate start and end points (it was not unusual for a sketch to ‘end’ simply by fading into the distance on an echoed word), and divided between dialogue, monologue and a quasi-documentary approach. Twistedly humorous concepts introduced to listeners over the course of Blue Jam included an American couple who enter their baby in vicious fighting contests, a landlord who persuades his tenants to leave by slicing imperceptible slivers of skin from their feet as they sleep, a four year old girl with a secret double life as a ruthless gangland killer, a disease nicknamed “The Gush” that causes porn stars to literally ejaculate themselves to death, and an eyewitness account of a man who, lacking an available high window to throw himself out of, simply opted to commit suicide by repeatedly jumping from a first floor window.

While certainly highly amusing, such sketches have given rise to a belief that Blue Jam concerned itself solely with bleak humour based around shock tactic themes. This could not be further from the truth; the majority of sketches featured in the series are merely surreal, disorientating whimsy that are as light as the darker material is disturbing. Memorable examples included an angry man in search of the “owner” of the birds that annoyed him with their dawn chorus, an agency that hires out thick people to annoy customer service staff, a plot to joyride Professor Stephen Hawking around a racetrack, and David Bowie’s little-known side career as a relationship guidance counsellor. Meanwhile, Morris’ old standby of cutting and pasting of recorded speech resurfaced in a mangling of Radio 1’s Newsbeat (“police in Northumberland have sex with schoolgirls, and it’s all legal”), while an unsavoury backwards message was discovered in Elton John’s tribute to Diana, Princess Of Wales, Candle In The Wind ‘97.

The latter item, along with an interview with royal biographer Andrew Morton – quizzed on his attitude to non-existent internet-based games based on the crash, and how he would feel if a signed copy of his book was presented to Princes William and Harry by a Diana lookalike – formed part of an extraordinary run of material spread throughout the first run of Blue Jam, inspired by the outpourings of emotion that had followed Diana’s death. At no point was this material ever in any way cruel or insensitive about the situation itself, nor indeed about the people who felt affected by the tragedy; it simply reflected the feelings of someone who, like many others, had grown tired of the disproportionate public displays of grief, and the attendant media hysteria and hypocrisy, and their apparent refusal to abate even some months later. Blue Jam suffered from very little interference or censorship throughout its existence, but an item that was originally planned for the last show of the first series pushed Radio 1’s tolerance too far.

Around fifteen minutes into the original edit of show six, the following re-edit of the Archbishop Of Canterbury’s sermon from Diana’s memorial service appeared:

“We give thanks to God for those maimed through the evil of Mother Theresa, whose death we treasure. We pray for those most closely affected by her death, among them Trevor the sheep. Lord, we thank you for the precious gift of the sick, the maimed, and all whose lives are damaged, and for the strength we draw from all who are weak, poor and powerless, in this country and throughout the world. Lord, we commend to you Elizabeth, our Queen, whose death may serve the common good. We give thanks above all for her readiness to identify with God almighty, and for the way she gave sauce to so many people. Her mother, her brother, Dodi Fayed, and many, many, many more. We pray for the Royal Family as they discharge their members in Trevor Rhys Jones. Give them AIDS. Lord of landmines, hear our prayer. And now abideth faith, hope, love, these three… but the greatest of these is tortoise”

Morris was aware that this was likely to be problematic, and to that end recorded a deliberately obscene ‘Doctor’ sketch containing libel, blasphemy and an intentionally unsavoury remark about Diana, which was never seriously intended for broadcast (and not particularly funny either) and could be excised as a bargaining counter to argue for the Archbishop edit to remain uncut. Radio 1 seemed happy with this; the contentious sketch was duly removed from show four (which ran correspondingly short as result, with an extra music track added after the outro to make up the time[3]), and the full edit was cleared for broadcast as part of show six. However, when the sequence actually went to air, Radio 1’s duty manager insisted that the episode should be faded out and replaced for the rest of its duration with a repeat of show one. It is reputed that the engineer charged with the task of swapping the broadcast was a fan of the show and deliberately took his time, resulting in the offending item going out pretty much in its entirety, with only a single line of inoffensive material left unbroadcast. Quite why this came about is uncertain. Some of those who worked on the show claim that the sketch was mistaken for the excised ‘Doctor’ sketch by the inattentive duty manager, and faded out for that reason, while Radio 1 claimed at the time that they had changed their minds over the suitability of the Archbishop edit and had requested an alternate edit that never arrived[4].

Whatever the circumstances, Radio 1 subsequently became very unhappy about the item. When Morris tried to get the full version of show six broadcast, still with 45 minutes of unheard material, as part of a repeat run early in 1998, Radio 1 refused and in the absence of an alternate edit put out show one – its fourth airing in three months – in its place. Eventually, when it became clear that they were not prepared to give way, Morris relented and provided an edited version, which went out as the first of a new six-show run between March and May 1998 .

By now, Blue Jam was gaining both critical approval – it won the Sony Gold award for Best Radio Comedy for two consecutive years – and a small, but intensely loyal, audience. A third set of six shows running between January and February 1999 showed some signs of fatigue, particularly in the choices of music, but the material was generally of the same exceptionally high quality, and there could be little doubt that Blue Jam was an experiment that had succeeded beyond expectations.

[1] In fact, it may well have ended up somewhat reminiscent of Mark Radcliffe’s Radio 1 show Out On Blue Six, which achieved a similar detached ambience through judicious manipulation of the traditional music radio format with laid-back music and surreal interjections. Morris professes to have enjoyed Out On Blue Six greatly.
[2] Morris reinforced this point to me when he claimed that “the material generally came from a sense of wanting to make things hypnotic and unignorable”.
[3] This was Best Bit by Beth Orton; despite assumptions to the contrary, this actually appears on the broadcast master of the episode.
[4] More confusingly still, Radio 1 denied all knowledge of the incident to several listeners who called in during the broadcast to ask what was going on. Complicating matters still further, Radio 1’s then-Controller Matthew Bannister claimed in BBC Radio 4 Extra’s Morris retrospective Raw Meat Radio in 2014 that the entire incident had never happened and that all supposed off-air recordings were a hoax perpetrated by a fan. All I can say is that, hand on heart, my off-air recording is genuine. Numerous listeners will attest that this actually happened and it was reported on by a couple of newspapers at the time. Matthew Bannister politely declined to be interviewed for Fun At One, feeling not unreasonably that he had expressed his point of view definitively on several previous occasions.
[5] The item was first heard in full as part of a Blue Jam ‘Live’ event at the Battersea Arts Centre in 1998. A video version, prepared for the TV transfer jam but not actually used in the series, was later made available at www.bishopslips.com – this effectively comprised the 22nd track of the Blue Jam compilation CD released by Warp in 2000. It was also included on the limited edition Blue Jam Extras CD.

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This is an abridged excerpt from Fun At One - The Story Of Comedy At BBC Radio 1, which is available in paperback here or from the Kindle Store here.

BWAMmM it’s ZOKKO!

It Started With Swap Shop was the name of a light-hearted retrospective broadcast by BBC2 in 2006, ostensibly celebrating thirty years of Saturday morning television but concentrating on one particular key example of the genre; Noel Edmonds’ Multicoloured Swap Shop. Like so many other light-hearted histories of the timeslot, this made the mistake of implicitly crediting Edmonds and company with the invention of the show format and pretty much the first ever use of the timeslot full stop. There were in fact a handful of now pretty much forgotten antecedents of Swap Shop, although the reasons for their being left out of such an overview are quite understandable. Saturday Scene, dating from 1973 and effectively the first use of the now-familiar Saturday morning format, was an ITV show, while the BBC’s own previous attempts at finding something suitable for this awkward timeslot were, to be blunt, just too downright weird to revisit.

Prior to 1968, neither the BBC nor ITV had really paid much attention to Saturday mornings. Although attendances were already dwindling, there still remained a strong and long-established tradition of Saturday morning cinema clubs, which provided young audiences with several hours’ worth of cartoons, serials and onstage games and entertainment. With broadcast technology still in its infancy, there seemed little point in starting up transmission for the benefit of an audience that would mostly be otherwise engaged. Usual practice – as far as the BBC was concerned – was simply to run an old film serial or an imported cartoon series after their transmission tests early in the morning, then possibly another before Grandstand started at midday, and leave screens blank for the remainder of the morning. Early in 1968, as part of a general overhaul of their output instigated by incoming departmental head Monica Sims, the BBC Children’s Department began to look into the idea of introducing structured programming to Saturday mornings.

Between 30th March and 22nd June 1968, an experimental – in both senses – magazine show called Whoosh! was added to the Saturday morning schedules. Devised by former Play School production team Cynthia Felgate and Peter Ridsdale-Scott, Whoosh! featured Play School presenter Rick Jones, ballet dancer turned comedienne Dawn Macdonald - who got the job after sending Felgate a photo of herself pulling a ridiculous face - and former child actor Jonathan Collins in what Radio Times described as ‘a place where anything can happen’ – in other words a surreal, psychedelically-decorated studio set full of eccentric prop machinery, where they tried to solve riddles and puzzles with the occasional filmed insert cued in to show them venturing ‘outdoors’. While this was some way away from the later style of Saturday morning shows, it nonetheless anticipated their energy and interplay, and predilection for offbeat storyline-driven formats.

While Whoosh! was certainly successful, and viewers enjoyed the heavy element of write-in interactivity, Sims felt that a more loose and fast-moving format akin to a televised comic was more appropriate for Saturday mornings, and was inclined to dispense with human presenters altogether. Eventually an experimental thirteen-week slot was decided on, and Children’s Department veteran Molly Cox, who had partly devised Jackanory and acted as its first director, was asked to come up with a suitable format in collaboration with newcomer Paul Ciani. Cox and Ciani shared Sims’ feelings about the kind of material appropriate for the timeslot; Saturday cinema had been a rowdy, colourful affair with plenty of action and comedy, and as such they took advantage of the perceived lack of need for a human presenter as an opportunity to pack as much action, comedy and pop music as possible into the available timeframe. The result of this meeting of minds was Zokko!, an 'electronic comic' that would zip between short features at high speed, and sought to replicate the effect of a reader flicking through an actual comic in search of their favourite strips and features. The show would contain a combination of in-house animation, stock footage, pop music, and a small amount of specially shot light entertainment material, all cut together using ‘pop art’ editing effects and graphical design that might more normally have been found on shows like Top Of The Pops or Spike Milligan’s Q5. The overall effect of this was, needless to say, disorientating and deeply strange. Introduced by a lengthy Radio Times piece urging viewers to 'Place a regular order with your television set NOW!', accompanied by an eye-catching Roy Lichtenstein-like pop-art illustration proclaiming 'BWAMmM it’s ZOKKO!', Zokko! began its first thirteen-week run on 2nd November 1968.

‘Perplexing’ is not too strong a word to use about Zokko!, and it virtually defies description even today. In place of the rejected human presenter, the production team opted instead for a talking pinball machine. Built by BBC Visual Effects designer Mike Ellis (father of later Blue Peter presenter Janet), this was a fully functioning prop, with its electronic voice provided by Brian Hodgson of the BBC Radiophonic Workshop. This would link the entire programme by autoplaying games, with each score corresponding to a different item, which would appear ‘through’ the holes in the pinball table as the robotic voice intoned the appropriate announcement (“Zokko … Score 15 … Serial”). Some of these items were made up of handy filler material that happened to be available, such as stock footage of racing car speed tests and bulk-bought Disney extracts, but unusually for a programme of this nature the vast majority were specially made in-house. As well as basic animations telling corny jokes (many of them penned by moonlighting novelist Ted Lewis) and short silent films of surreal slapstick gags, each edition of Zokko! included a running serial, pop records, and a live variety act.

Spanning the entire run, the sci-fi adventure yarn Skayn – concerning the theft of a gravity-wave-hologram capable of causing the Earth and the Moon to collide – was told through huge blow-ups of comic strip-style panels drawn by Leslie Caswell, with a pre-recorded dialogue track provided by prolific character actors Gordon Clyde, Sheelagh McGrath and Anthony Jackson. Unconventionally presented and drenched in bleeping Radiophonics, the serial segments came across as strangely tranquil and hypnotic, contrasting effectively with the loud and frenetic style of the rest of the programme. Leaning strongly towards jazzy ‘beat’ outfits like The Alan Price Set, Georgie Fame And The Blue Flames and The New Vaudeville Band, the pop tracks were accompanied by extremely well directed shorts reflecting the lyrical themes of the chosen numbers, some of which were also used in editions of Top Of The Pops.

Meanwhile, the variety acts simply turned up and did their stage performance within the very cramped confines of the Zokko! studio, doubtless causing severe logistical problems for the numerous jugglers. Even the basic list of artistes who appeared on the show makes for fascinating reading, featuring such evocative and long-forgotten names as The Tumblairs, The Skating Meteors, and The Breathtaking Eddy Limbo and ‘Pat’. A handful of more established acts would also show up including conjuring legend Ali Bongo; veteran brother and sister acrobatic duo Johnny and Suma Lamonte; visiting American Phil Enos and his Amazing Comedy Car; and popular illusionist and judo expert Geoff Ray, who though now retired still proudly includes Zokko! on his CV. Most notorious however were Arthur Scott and his Performing Seals, who left the tiny studio reeking so strongly of fish that recording was disrupted for days afterwards.

If this all sounds like a rather mindbending assembly of entertainment, its disorientating nature was amplified to nightmarish and jaw-dropping proportions by the adoption of a deeply psychedelic ‘Swinging London’ visual style, complete with flashing designs that looked garish even in black and white, captions written in lettering that would not have appeared out of place in an advert for a Carnaby Street boutique, and crash zooms on a modishly redesigned poster of Lord Kitchener. Even by the standards of the day this was a visually arresting approach, but the target audience seem to have taken it in their stride and Zokko! proved highly popular, with so many viewers writing in about the programme that the production team eventually had to start sending out postcards ‘from’ the talking pinball machine. Indeed, Zokko! was promptly repeated in full in the regular Wednesday afternoon children’s’ schedules from 6th August 1969, and Brian Fahey’s catchy theme music was released as a single, with the Band Parade music that also featured in the show on the b-side.

While the BBC had reverted to their regular Saturday morning pattern of a lone edition of Deputy Dawg once the first run had finished, a second series of Zokko! had been planned from very early on, and indeed would follow virtually straight on from the repeat run. With the Radio Times proudly proclaiming 'All For Fun! Fun For All! Tar-rah!', Zokko! returned for another thirteen week residency on Saturday mornings, starting from 6th December 1969. Although the new series retained the same production team, some significant changes were made; the sometimes excessively psychedelic design elements were toned down slightly in favour of a stark ‘two tone’ approach, and the pinball machine device was dropped altogether. The reasons for this decision have never been disclosed, although it is rumoured the expensive prop was damaged in storage and the cost of repairs would have been beyond the means of the meagre budget allocated for the second run. Despite this, Radio Times’ introduction to the new series promised the return of 'the old favourites and some new ones', alongside 'a brand new music machine, the like of which has never been seen before'. Said device was essentially a scaled-down Top Of The Pops set with a revolving stage, festooned with flashing lights and surrounded by gigantic bubbling test tubes, and resembling an antique pipe organ rebuilt to the specifications of the set designer of Willy Wonka And The Chocolate Factory. Filmed with camera angles better suited to a raucous pop music show - and more than likely the inspiration for the remarkably similar ‘Jackie Charlton and the Tonettes’ sketch in the second series of Monty Python’s Flying Circus, recorded shortly after the second series of Zokko! had aired - the indefinable contraption would pump out excerpts from stage musicals and instrumental pop hits while punningly appropriate inanimate objects revolved in the centre.

While this occupied the linking role formerly occupied by the pinball machine, the actual contents of the show remained much the same and just as mind-frazzling as ever. The animations, pop films, awful jokes, Disney extracts, stock footage, jarring bursts of exclamation marks and electronically treated voices were all back on board. Skayn returned for a new eight-part adventure, this time sent to investigate saboteurs at large on a moon colony, and the final five shows of the run were given over to the big top crime thriller Susan Starr Of The Circus, with voices provided by Jennifer Hill, Alan Devereux and Stanley Page,. The variety acts, meanwhile, remained as deliriously esoteric as before, top acts this time including The Skating Fontaines ('Thrills at Speed'), Ronny Cool ('Fantasy in Flames'), The Tricky Terriers ('Dog-gone Fun!'), Paul Fox ('The Act That’s Full of Bounce') who amusingly shared his name with the then-controller of BBC1, and Annalou and Maria, who promised 'A Feather and Fur Fantasy' that was doubtless far more innocent than it sounds.

Zokko! was last sighted on television screens on 28th February 1970, but its brief burst of ragged psychedelic lunacy had certainly left an impression on viewers, and would prove to have a more enduring legacy. Clearly undeterred by the sheer oddness of the results, the BBC would continue to allow Ciani to carry out equally unhinged experiments at finding a suitable format for Saturday morning television. Ed And Zed, which enjoyed a brief run later in 1970, paired Radio 1 DJ Ed Stewart with a robot assistant named Zed (voiced by Anthony Jackson) for a similar menu of low-key serials and Disney excerpts, although they were allowed to have proper bands in the studio this time. That said, given said musical acts included former Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band ‘mad scientist’ Roger Ruskin-Spear and his performing robots, this may not have been as much of a concession to sensibility as it might appear. This was followed in 1973 by Outa Space!, a show ‘presented’ by a pair of disembodied alien hands at the controls of a spaceship, in which the ever-present Disney footage rubbed shoulders with a familiar diet of pop-soundtracked films, semi-educational inserts on dinosaurs, and the gripping storyboard serial Vidar And The Ice Monster.

Although it may seem something of a massive jump from these insane early efforts to the more familiar format that has pretty much defined Saturday morning television from the arrival of Saturday Scene and Multicoloured Swap Shop onwards, the truth of the matter is Zokko! and company are essentially a rough pencil sketch of the final format. This is particularly pertinent when Zokko! is compared directly to early editions of Swap Shop; the obvious difference of an avuncular unscripted presenter and live interaction with viewers aside, they have much in common, with the musical inserts simply replaced by proper bands and the Hanna Barbera and Gordon Murray animations standing in for bulk-bought Disney. Even the whimsy and corny jokes are essentially similar; all that Swap Shop really did was to give them more structure and bring in John Craven as a comedy straightman. Although Molly Cox would soon return to the relative normality of factual programming, her subsequent credits including Take Hart, Roy Castle Beats Time and Why Don’t You?, Paul Ciani would later put the lunacy he had learned on Zokko! and its follow-ons to good use. Most prominently he would serve as the longtime director and producer of Rentaghost (again featuring Anthony Jackson), The Basil Brush Show and Crackerjack!, but also helmed a number of long-forgotten yet fondly-remembered offbeat children’s comedy shows such as Hope And Keen’s Crazy House, Bonny! and Great Big Groovy Horse, as well working on many top-rated light entertainment series including The Kenny Everett Television Show, The Paul Daniels Magic Show and Top Of The Pops, where he somehow resisted the temptation to fill the stage with bubbling test tubes.

Sadly, but not entirely unpredictably, very little of Zokko! now survives in the archives. The original master tape of the final second series edition escaped wiping by pure chance, and more recently a telerecording of a compilation edition of highlights from that run was recovered from a private collector. On the plus side this does mean that both Skayn and Susan Starr have had their adventures - or at least a fragment thereof - preserved for posterity, but unfortunately, bar a couple of photographs, nothing remains of the talking pinball machine that seems to have burnt itself indelibly onto so many memories. It’s a fair bet that even the slightest thought of It Started With Zokko! would be enough to give documentary and clip show producers weeks of psychedelically-flashing radiophonically-doused nightmares, but in all fairness Zokko! really was where it all began. Well, unless you count Whoosh!.

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This is adapted from Noise! Adventure! Glitter!, an article featured in my book Well At Least It's Free. You can get Well At Least It's Free in paperback here or from the Kindle Store here.