A History of Television in 100 Programmes. Phil Norman
by the children of less well-off neighbours round about eleven o’clock. Camera operators, who suffered previous Watch with Mother efforts under duress, actively fought over the chance to cover Play School.133
In 1971 there came a spin-off, the altogether less restrained Play Away. Eminent Play School old boy Brian Cant, ‘merry as a stoned scoutmaster’134 in one critic’s memorable description, led cohorts including Jeremy Irons, Tony Robinson and Julie Covington through groansome puns, venerable slapstick routines and jolly songs which could, like the catalogue of gargantuan consumer goods ‘Shopaway’, become mildly satirical. This all-year panto became big enough to transfer to the Old Vic in 1976.
Play Away’s high standards drew high expectations from its audience. George Melly observed that while children never questioned the knocked-off likes of Pinky and Perky (rudimentary puppets jerking up and down to grating pitch-shifted covers of pop hits), when faced with the higher craft of Play School they ‘become almost Leavisite in the severity of their criticism’.135 The ability to spot quality among the dross was learned at an early age.
A few years in, the School started to expand. By 1970 it was playing, in recast local versions, everywhere from Switzerland to Australia, with the use of a specially assembled ‘Play School kit’. Most of the toys made the transition to other cultures more or less intact: Humpty, for instance, became ‘Testa D’Uovo’ – Egghead – in Italian. Unlike the conquering franchises of children’s television to come, Play School established more of a commonwealth than an empire, importing songs from Israel and films of Roman ice cream factories as it exported Norwegian translations of The Sun Has Got His Hat On. (The Scandinavian connection, which culminated in a joint TV special between the UK and Norwegian Play Away franchises, highlighted an interesting difference in approaches to children’s television. A 1973 Danish seminar on kids’ TV produced a twelve-point list of good practice, a copy of which was pinned up in the BBC children’s department in Television Centre’s bleak East Tower. Alongside the expected exhortations to honesty and clarity was the suggestion: ‘When you want to tell an exciting story, try to relate its conflict to the central conflict in society between labour and capital.’136 If this particular directive was acted upon at the Beeb, it was well disguised.)
Like all timeless children’s programmes, Play School became a slave to adult fashion. A much-publicised ‘moving house’ in 1983 altered the theme tune, redesigned the studio and replaced the magic windows with ‘shapes’, to the horror of many parents who’d grown up with the old show themselves. Five years after that the school was closed for good, replaced by Playbus, made by the newly independent Felgate Productions, which was ‘more attuned to the needs of today’s children’ and featured children in the studio – one of the original Play School’s prime taboos. The intuition of a handful of creative producers was replaced by a squadron of educational advisers and child psychologists. No longer would British kids have their formative years soundtracked by vintage songs such as Little Ted Bear From Nowhere in Particular and Ten Chimney Pots All In a Row (When Along Came a Fussy Old Crow). There’s progress, and there’s progress.
ITV (ATV/Central)
‘Soap’ becomes a four-letter word.
Crossroads is not a programme, it is a vacuum. A hole in the air, abhorrent to nature.
Nancy Banks-Smith, 1971
IF YOU WANT TO explore the fundamental differences between two cultures, take a look at how they handle their low entertainment. The soap opera, for instance. Its early American incarnation carried titles which were expansive, portentous, quasi-Biblical: Days of Our Lives, The Bold and the Beautiful, The Guiding Light. British afternoon serials, meanwhile, got the most humbly domestic of names: Honey Lane, Castle Haven and, most utilitarian of all, Crossroads.
An attempt by ATV to move into US-style daily serial territory, Crossroads was the culmination of Reg Watson’s quest to find a solid vehicle for his daytime star Noele Gordon. Hazel Adair and Peter Ling were hired to fashion a genteel Midlands milieu set in the fictional Warwickshire village of King’s Oak, paying special attention to the nearby Crossroads motel. Gordon was the motel’s widowed owner Meg Richardson, the head of a tiny dynasty including her son Sandy and hapless daughter Jill, and assorted managerial staff. Beneath the matinee idol leads were the Dickensian comic foils, led by line-fluffing cleaner Amy Turtle, later joined by short order cook Shughie McFee and simpleton handyman Benny Hawkins. Cast regulars and intransigent guests conspired to commit adultery, grand theft, murder, suicide – just about every misdemeanour aside from smoking, which was beyond the pale for a teatime slot.
Dispensing with ITV’s standard twice-a-week soap model, Crossroads went daily, its production team ripping through five twenty-minute episodes a week. (From 1967 they got Mondays off.) With such a punishing itinerary, the scripts – production line affairs under the guidance of a supervising story editor – were of necessity thriftily furnished with off-the-peg dialogue. ‘The sheer volume,’ admitted producer Phillip Bowman, ‘precludes excellence.’137 The odd Coronation Street-style gag still managed to appear amid the expository tundra. (‘What’s that? “Goulash Budapest”? Looks like “Shepherd’s Pie Walsall East” to me.’)
Then there were the plywood sets and the under-rehearsed acting. Props were mislaid, eyelines unmet, extras (literally, on the first transmission) prodded into life with sticks. In Nancy Banks-Smith’s opinion, ‘The Acocks Green Wavy Line Drama Group could probably put on a preferable performance.’138 There was also Tony Hatch’s strange theme tune, in which an electric guitar impersonates a doorbell, accompanied by a perfectly mismatched quartet of piano, harp, oboe and drums. And there was the odd inexplicable directorial flourish, such as the decision to open episodes with a prolonged close-up of a telephone, a half-eaten cucumber sandwich, or, on one Burns Night, a huge pile of sheep offal. This jumble of eccentricity gave the constant sense of a production obliviously strutting around with its flies undone.
The torrent of critical vitriol had no effect on Crossroads’ march from regional curio to national mainstay. In 1972, the recalcitrant northern ITV regions finally took the soap. By 1974, it matched and occasionally outflanked Coronation Street in ratings terms, peaking at roughly fifteen million viewers, with the Queen Mother and Harold Wilson’s wife Mary among its noted fans. It became a truly national programme on 1 April 1975, when the assorted regional stations synchronised their transmissions. ATV made special ‘catch-up’ programmes for the likes of Granada and Thames, who’d snootily let their screenings of the soap lag by the best part of a year.
With the entire country occupying the same time-zone, Meg Richardson and Hugh Mortimer had their marriage blessed in Birmingham Cathedral. This wasn’t the normal soap wedding, with forgotten rings, catering panics and a ghost from the past interrupting the ‘speak now’s. This was a full mock ceremony, shot as an outside broadcast, not a million miles from Princess Anne’s nuptial coverage a couple of years earlier. Soap royalty ruled for a day. A TV Times commemorative wedding brochure sold half a million copies.
Merchandise multiplied. In 1976, Crossroads became the first British TV show to have its own regular magazine: Crossroads Monthly was published by Felix Dennis of OZ infamy, with star profiles, a cookery column and a gatefold pin-up of Gordon. A roaring trade was also established around reproductions of a still life that hung on the wall of Meg’s bedroom.
One spin-off had dire repercussions. Paul McCartney, another star fan, recorded a keening stadium rock version of the Tony Hatch theme. Jack Barton, then series producer, decided it was