by Steve Stack
And to think, that autographed Adam and the Ants drum skin could have been mine if it wasn’t for some bastard sending his answer in on a card shaped like a giant ant.
Dodo Rating:
Buzby
That bloody Russian meerkat wasn’t the first star of a TV commercial to become a household name and spawn a successful range of merchandise. Oh no. Thirty-five years earlier, British Telecom (or Post Office Telecommunications, as it was then known) used a yellow cartoon bird to front its ‘Make someone happy with a phone call’ campaign.
Voiced by Bernard Cribbins, who was also the narrator of popular children’s TV show The Wombles and a regular on Jackanory, Buzby became a big hit with the general public, especially kids, and you could buy books, toys, T-shirts, and badges. He even had his own comic strip.
But where is he now? Eh? Gone and pretty much forgotten, that’s where.
Aleksandr Orlov had better watch out. He may end up going the same way.
Dodo Rating:
Humphrey
‘Watch out, watch out, there’s a Humphrey about!’
It was a stroke of advertising genius. In the 1970s, Unigate Dairies launched a campaign featuring an invisible creature who stole milk from celebrities – Rod Hull, Frank Muir, Arthur Mullard, and so on – using a very long red and white straw. The subliminal message, such as it was, presumably being to encourage kids to drink up their milk before Humphrey got it.
Whether the idea of a mysterious stranger sneaking up on kids while they were tucking into a glass of milk would pass muster with today’s child safety-obsessed media is a matter for debate. At the time, everyone loved it.
There was even a range of merchandise you could purchase from your milkman, including mugs, T-shirts, hats, badges, and stickers, some of which crop up on eBay from time to time and fetch a fair few bob.
Although Humphrey himself has not been sighted for over 30 years, he was, as we have established, a master of disguise, so he could still be walking among us, for all we know.
Best keep a close eye on your pinta.
Dodo Rating:
Grandstand
Grandstand was the BBC’s flagship sports programme, and was one of the longest-running television shows in history, airing across six decades from, 1958 to 2007.
During that time, the show covered 23 summer and winter Olympic Games, 13 Commonwealth Games, broadcast the first ever live hole-in-one at a golf tournament (Tony Jacklin in the 1967 Dunlop Masters), the first televised streaker (a 1974 England rugby match), and was also live on the scene for two of British sport’s most tragic events, the Bradford City fire and the Hillsborough disaster. It also showed the 1966 World Cup Final and drew in an audience of over 27 million people.
Despite running for over 3,000 editions, Grandstand only ever had four main presenters (supplemented by many guest presenters over the years). These were David Coleman, Frank Bough, Des Lynam, and Steve Rider, with Des becoming an unlikely sex symbol during his tenure. I met Des once; he called me a scruffy bastard.
For nearly 20 years (1968 to 1985), Grandstand ran head to head against its ITV rival World of Sport but there was very little crossover, apart from a bit of horse racing and football, between the two schedules. While ITV favoured wrestling and angling, the BBC was a bit more upmarket, with skiing, horse jumping, and athletics.
In its later years Grandstand relied less on a studio presenter and more on live outside broadcasts with commentators and experts at each event. This, coupled with the decision to carve off Football Focus and Final Score into separate programmes, led to the show being cancelled, with the last episode broadcast on 27 January 2007.
Dodo Rating:
World of Sport
It’s Saturday, it’s half past twelve, and the opening bars of a familiar theme tune burst through the television speaker as a fleet of light aircraft trail three words behind them.
Those words are, of course, WORLD, OF, and SPORT.
For the rest of Saturday afternoon the show would broadcast a range of sports, from bowls to wrestling, to a grateful nation. It was ITV’s answer to BBC’s hugely popular Grandstand, and, although the two shows were in competition, they rarely clashed in terms of the sports being shown. The more prim and proper BBC was not interested in the shenanigans of Giant Haystacks and Big Daddy, or niche sports such as speedway and ten-pin bowling, and was content to let ITV dabble in such things.
The truth was, of course, that the BBC owned the rights to pretty most all the major sporting events, and ITV, through World of Sport, was forced to cover specialist interest sports around a central spine of football scores and horse racing.
To give you an idea of a typical World of Sport broadcast, here is the actual listing from 8 November 1980:
12.35 ON THE BALL
Ian St John presents a round-up of this week’s European action, where Britain’s leading clubs have been striving to achieve further success. Plus features, analysis, and news.
1.00 INTERNATIONAL SPORTS SPECIAL – 1
The Angling Times Champion of Champions
from Weirwood Reservoir, Sussex
Ace anglers compete for a £750 first prize in this first event staged for television. Weirwood Reservoir, near East Grinstead, holds large quantities of 2-lb-plus roach, so an exceptional winning weight is possible. Reporter Jonathan Webb guides you through an event which features the fastest fishermen in the business.
1.15 ITN NEWS
1.20 THE ITV SEVEN
John Oaksey at Doncaster introduces four races on this final day of the 1980 flat racing season, and Ken Butler at Windsor introduces three races ‘over the sticks’. Your card:
1.30 Doncaster – Poppy H’cap (5f.)
1.45 Windsor – Buckinghamshire H’cap Chase (2m.40yd)
2.00 Doncaster – Steel Plate Autumn Stakes (7f.)
2.15 Windsor – Launderette Fortnight Stakes (H’cap Hurdle) (2m.30yd)
2.30 Doncaster – Amoco Jockeys Trophy (7f.)
2.45 Windsor – World-Wide Assurance Novices’ Chase (2m.40yd.)
3.00 Doncaster – William Hill November H’cap (1½m.)
3.10 INTERNATIONAL SPORTS SPECIAL – 2
Karting
The Mazda Cars Race of Champions
from Hoddesdon, Herts.
Top home and overseas drivers contest the biggest and richest karting event ever staged in this country. It’s a sport that breeds Grand Prix stars – such as the current world champion, Alan Jones. Today’s main race of 25 laps is for karts of 100c.c. Without gears or clutch, they still top speeds of 75mph. In action, too, are the juniors – British schoolboys, between the ages of 13 and 16.
3.50 HALF-TIME SOCCER ROUND-UP
4.00 WRESTLING
from Lincoln
HEAVYWEIGHT: Big Pat Roach (Birmingham) v. Iron Duke (Salford)
TAG MATCH: Big Daddy and Sammy Lee v. King Kong Kirk and Sharky Ward
CATCHWEIGHT: Mick McMichael (Doncaster) v. The American Dream (Miami, Florida)
4.50 RESULTS SERVICE
* Times are subject to change.
The show was hosted from 1968, till its demise in 1985, by the Mallen-streaked Dickie Davies, Eamonn Andrews having chaired proceedings when WoS started in 1965. Fred ‘Gambit’ Dineage and ITV’s answer to Steve Ryder, Jim Rosenthal, would step in as cover when Dickie was off getting his hair done.
One of the iconic images of World of Sport was the array of typists sitting behind the presenter. Viewers, including me, assumed that these were reporters and secretaries busy collating all the latest news and results from around the world. In fact, it was all for show, they were actually admin staff for London Weekend Television working on internal memos, letters, and the like.
Perhaps the two most famous segments of the show were On the Ball and the wrestling.
On the Ball starred former footballers Ian St John and Jimmy Greaves, who would banter their way through a 30-minute show previewing the day’s football fixtures. The pairing was so pop
ular that when World of Sport ended, their slot continued as a separate programme under the name Saint & Greavsie.
The wrestling was something of an anachronism in a sports show. This staged piece of pantomime did have a huge live following around the UK, and millions of people used to tune in at 4pm to watch goodies like Dynamite Kid take on baddies such as Mark ‘Rollerball’ Rocco. The two biggest stars, quite literally, were the 26-stone Big Daddy (Cheers!) and his nemesis, the 48-stone Giant Haystacks (Boo! Hiss!). Despite its loyal audience, it struggled to survive when World of Sport was pulled and finally gave way to the more flamboyant WWF from the US.
In 1985, ITV decided to stop broadcasting the programme. They were changing the way sport was to be shown on the channel, and an entire Saturday afternoon was seen as surplus to requirements. You could argue that they have never quite managed to attain the same level of success for their sports coverage since – their on-off relationship with Premier League highlights has become something of a running joke, never being able to compete with the BBC’s Match of the Day, their brief flirtation with Formula 1 racing and the Oxford v. Cambridge boat race didn’t really amount to much either, and now, with Sky dominating in almost every other area, they are left with Champions League football on weekday evenings for part of the year.
Dodo Rating:
Massive Viewing Figures
At various points during the ’70s and ’80s you could walk into the school playground or workplace in the morning, safe in the knowledge that everyone, everywhere, would have watched the same television programme the night before.
It is an experience that is unlikely to happen again. Unless the Queen dies or England ever make it to a World Cup Final.
Cast your mind back to the days of only four television channels. Heck, let’s go back even further to the time when we only had BBC1, BBC2, and ITV. That was it. If you wanted to watch something on the telly, you had three choices.
As a result, the viewing audience would, from time to time, congregate around one televisual event: one live show, one soap episode, one sporting occasion, one sitcom. And because so many people were tuning in to the same thing, there was a shared sense of experience. When you laughed at Morecambe and Wise preparing breakfast in time to ‘The Stripper’, the whole nation was laughing with you. If you gasped at the sheer audacity of Den handing Angie the divorce papers on Christmas Day, the chances are that the rest of the people in your street were doing the same thing.
Let’s look at some numbers, but not the usual ones you always hear about. When you study the most watched broadcasts in British television history, there are some remarkable examples.
In November 1979, 23.95 million people watched the series finale of To the Manor Born.
22.22 million viewers tuned in to see an episode of This is Your Life. The subject? Lord Mountbatten. This was in 1977, Silver Jubilee year, so perhaps people were feeling particularly royalist.
• To put those two in perspective, a ‘mere’ 21.6 million turned on Dallas to find out who shot J.R.
We know that Brits watched the wedding of Charles and Diana in their droves (28.4 million, to be precise), but that number was only slightly higher than the audience for the marriage of Princess Anne to Captain Mark Phillips (27.6 million) in 1973.
Comedian Mike Yarwood is hardly held in the same sort of esteem as his contemporaries, such as Morecambe and Wise or The Two Ronnies, and yet his Christmas show in 1977 drew in 21.4 million, more than the others ever achieved.
There are other oddities. The FA Cup Final replay between Chelsea and Leeds in 1970 was watched by more people (28.49 million) than any other sporting event in history, apart from England’s World Cup Final victory in 1966 (32.3 million).
And back in the days before dedicated film channels, a big premiere on terrestrial could really pull in the punters. The first showing of Live and Let Die on ITV in 1980 saw 23.5 million people tuning it. That’s more than watched the infamous Panorama interview with Princess Diana in 1995.
These are remarkable numbers when you bear in mind that the most watched television show on Christmas Day 2010 was Eastenders, with 15.8 million viewers.
Dodo Rating:
Closedown
Twenty-four-hour television is actually quite a new phenomenon, certainly in the UK. As recently at 1997, the BBC would effectively shut down every night at about 1am, not to resurface until breakfast television started in the morning. Instead of programmes, viewers would be treated to a test card or pages from Ceefax (both accompanied by some generic muzak), although there was a time when the transmitters were completely switched off, and all you could see was static.
But the BBC being the BBC, there was a certain regimen to be followed.
BBC1 would usually run through the next day’s programmes, chuck in a quick weather report, and then play the national anthem while a clock ticked over on screen. BBC2 would sign off with the dulcet tones of the continuity announcer but, for some reason, no anthem.
With both channels, you would often get a few minutes of blank screen and then a voice would remind you: ‘Don’t forget to switch off your television set’, which, if you had nodded off in the meantime, was enough to scare the living bejesus out of you.
Various ITV networks experimented with 24-hour television, but all channels had a closedown of sorts until the mid-1980s, and it wasn’t until the introduction of satellite and cable to most homes that true 24-hour television really kicked in.
And while I, like many men, am quite happy to flick through 100 channels at two in the morning on the off-chance of a sex scene or car crash, and welcome the fact that I am able to do so, I do rather miss the polite good night that television used to offer viewers who had bothered to stay up until the early hours. I swear blind that I once heard a voice on BBC2 say something along the lines of:
‘And from all of us here at BBC2, a very good night.’
[Long pause]
‘Not that anyone is still up at this time. I am basically speaking to myself. I could pretty much say anything I wanted to. But I’d best not.’
[Another pause]
‘Sweet dreams.’
At the time of writing, I note with interest that the BBC is considering bringing back closedown in a move to save money. So, perhaps this is one dodo that is about to be resurrected, although I wonder what will actually be shown on screen during the break in programming – a test card, pages from Ceefax? Could this spark a revival of many of the items listed in this section?
Probably not.
Dodo Rating:
Advertising Slogans
Some of the dodos featured in this book are not physical objects. They are not tangible things. They are ideas, concepts, or, in this case, phrases.
Some of the most famous advertising slogans and jingles of all time are ones that haven’t actually been used for years – decades, even. Often the product they were thought up to sell doesn’t even exist any more.
And yet they linger in the mind.
Why?
Well, I would argue that, like the very best song lyrics or beautiful lines of poetry, they have the ability to lodge in your brain and stay there forever.
Consider the following examples. How many can you remember?
A finger of Fudge is just enough to give your kids a treat.
If you like a lotta chocolate on your biscuit, join our club.
A man’s gotta chew what a man’s gotta chew.
Splash it all over.
You’ll never put a better bit of butter on your knife.
For mash get Smash.
Do the Shake ’n’ Vac and put the freshness back.
It’s too orangey for crows.
Um Bongo, Um Bongo, they drink it in the Congo.
It’s frothy man.
Tell them about the honey, mummy.
So big you gotta grin to get it in.
Everyone’s a fruit and nut case.
I’m a secret lemonade drinker.
Don�
��t just book it, Thomas Cook it.
Birdseye Potato Waffles are waffly versatile.
Hands that do dishes can feel soft as your face, with mild green Fairy Liquid.
Rerecord, not fade away.
Happiness is a cigar called Hamlet.
What has a hazelnut in every bite?
Made to make your mouth water.
The Man from Del Monte, he say ‘Yes!’
All because the lady loves Milk Tray.
Only the crumbliest, flakiest chocolate.
Two all beef patties, special sauce, lettuce, cheese, pickles, onions all wrapped up in a sesame seed bun.
Hello Tosh, Gotta Toshiba?
Anytime, anyplace, anywhere. There’s a wonderful world you can share. It’s the bright one, it’s the right one, it’s Martini.
Clunk Click every trip.
Refreshes the parts other beers cannot reach.
You only get an ‘OO’ with Typhoo.
I bet he drinks Carling Black Label.
Nuts, whole hazelnuts, Cadburys take ’em and they cover them with chocolate.
Although they are no longer heard on the airwaves, lots of them will live on for many years to come. They are like echoes of a time gone by.
Dodo Rating:
B-sides
In the golden age of the single, you were, of course, getting two songs, not one, every time you purchased a 7” from your local record shop – an A-side and a B-side.
Some artists used the B-side to get rid of any old material they had lying around the recording studio, or to lazily plonk another track from the album, but for many it was an opportunity to have some fun or to do something a bit different. For others, it ended up being where they put some of their finest songs.
Gene Vincent’s very first single was a little ditty called ‘Woman Love’. You could be forgiven for not knowing that, as it was deemed too risqué for radio play so DJs instead played the B-side, a song called ‘Be-Bop-A-Lula’. The rest is rock and roll history.
‘Gloria’ by Them, ‘Rain’ by The Beatles, ‘Erotic City’ by Prince, ‘Unchained Melody’ by The Righteous Brothers, ‘How Soon Is Now’ by The Smiths, ‘Maggie May’ by Rod Stewart, even ‘I Will Survive’ by Gloria Gaynor, for goodness sake, all started out as B-sides.