Latest Blog Posts
All Playlists are hosted and streamed via Spotify
Dorrie Evans, the scatty and interfering self-appointed concierge at 96 Lindsay Street, Paddington, was the absolute queen of malapropism on the series Number 96. Proving extremely popular with the viewing audience, the wit and wisdom of Dorrie (played…
Mary Tyler Moore Show (1970) As the episode begins, Mary is talking excitedly on the phone at her office desk, planning her Christmas visit with her mother. Right afterwards, her boss Lou Grant (Ed Asner) informs her that…
Throughout its history, rock & roll has been inextricably linked with the English language – the first tongue, after all, of the nation of its birth, the United States. The great majority of internationally distributed and acclaimed rock…
Oliver Postgate – the creator and writer of some of Britain’s most popular children’s television programmes, including Bagpuss, The Pingwings, Noggin the Nog, Ivor the Engine, The Clangers and Pogles’ Wood – set up the company Smallfilms in…
Latest Television Posts
1 9 5 9 – 1 9 6 0 (UK) 33 x 6 minute episodes Foo Foo was an engaging and optimistic little tramp in a Chaplinesque bowler hat who had a middle-aged girlfriend called Mimi. He also had…
1 9 9 2 – 1 9 9 5 (UK) 102 x 120 minute episodes This Saturday morning magazine-style show for kids combined Warner Brothers cartoons, competitions, comedy sketches, live music and interviews with pop stars and TV personalities.…
1 9 7 8 (USA) 4 x 30 minute episodes The Pittsburgh Pitts, an all-female roller derby team, was owned, coached and managed by the bombastic, fast-talking and penny-pinching Don “Mitch” Mitchell (Terry Kiser). Joanna Cassidy played the team…
1 9 7 9 (UK) 7 x 30 minute episodes This 1979 Thames Television comedy series was written by Jimmy Perry without his usual writing partner David Croft. It’s probably kindest to say they obviously worked better together!…
1 9 5 7 – 1 9 6 9 (Australia) 60 minute episodes This early Australian children’s TV series from GTV-9 in Melbourne was originally titled The Happy Show and hosted by a character called Happy Hammond (Harry Hammond, who…
Latest Music Posts
1 9 8 0 – 1 9 8 1 (UK) 10 x 25 minute episodes Debuting on 29 June 1980, this short-lived youth-oriented new wave music and arts series from London Weekend Television was produced by Janet Street-Porter and…
The Detours formed in Shepherd’s Bush in 1964 as a local youth club band. Pete Townshend, Roger Daltrey and John Entwistle (who originally called himself John Allison) founded the band, and having jettisoned Colin Dawson (vocals) and Doug Sandom…
Inspired equally by show tunes, music hall and rock ‘n’ roll, the young James Paul McCartney (whose first guitar, incidentally, was a Rosetti Lucky 7 – essentially a plank of wood with strings) was The Beatles’ chief source of joyous…
Clout formed as an all-female group in Johannesburg, South Africa in 1977. Their first and biggest hit, Substitute, was a new arrangement of a Righteous Brothers song, composed by Willie Wilson. In 1978, their version reached #1 in…
Since their 1973 debut album, Queen’s ambitious template had included bombastic classical references, falsetto freak-outs, and pagan mysticism. But at the beginning of 1975, they were, to be truthful, just another heavy rock act. They were more interesting than…
Latest Movies Posts
Goodbye Pork Pie introduces us to John (Tony Barry) who lives in the north of New Zealand. At the moment we meet him, John has two problems on his mind: First, he has no job and consequently no…
In the mould of American Graffiti, Next Stop, Greenwich Village is a nostalgia flashback to one of those special times and places – in this case, Greenwich Village, New York in 1953. Larry Lapinsky (Lenny Baker), a 22-year-old Jewish…
Filmed at Pinewood Studios in England and on location in Warwickshire, Buckinghamshire and Shropshire, this live-action Disney film opens in Los Angeles where 14-year-old juvenile delinquent Casey Brown (Jodie Foster) is seen hanging out with a gang of…
John Landis grew up on the schlocky monster movies of the 1950s and paid loving tribute to them in this, his first-ever directorial effort, aged just 21. A scrappy sweetly artless horror-comedy, it was made for $60,000 in…
This 1958 film set in the Ranelagh House for Deprived Children provides a fascinating look at social work and how different things were in the 1950s and early 60s. The subjects of child neglect, domestic violence, parental (and…
Latest Pop Culture Posts
The Outspan Orange car was shaped like an orange, had orange skin-textured fibreglass bodywork, and looked like an orange but was, in fact, a Mini – albeit a highly modified Mini with a specially fabricated chassis giving a…
The rock and roll magazine Trouser Press first appeared in 1974 in New York as a mimeographed fanzine by Ira Robbins, Karen Rose and Dave Schulps under the name Trans-Oceanic Trouser Press (a reference to a song by…
This children’s comic from Fleetway was launched on 18 October 1969. It absorbed Knockout (1973), Krazy (1978) and Whoopee! (1985) before finally being merged with Buster on 27 October 1990. Whizzer and Chips was marketed as “two comics in one” (though it was produced as a single…
DC Thomson launched The Crunch in January 1979 as an attempt to compete with rival publisher IPC’s 2000AD. The lead strip was ‘Arena’ in which a corrupt 21st Century government treated those who spoke against it as criminals and sentenced them…
Nigel Molesworth is a fictional character, the supposed author of a series of books about life in an English prep school named St Custard’s. The books were written by Geoffrey Willans, with cartoon illustrations by Ronald Searle. Molesworth…
Latest Social History Posts
The recession of 1990, after the boom of the 1980s, provided a rather inauspicious beginning to the new decade. By the end of the year, unemployment was up, sales of new homes were down by a whopping 17.5…
The 1967 International and Universal Exposition – or Expo 67, as it was commonly known – was a World’s Fair held in Montreal, Quebec, Canada, from 27 April to 29 October 1967. The Expo was Canada’s main celebration during its centennial…
On Sunday 25 May 1986, Americans were asked to simultaneously hold hands across a 4,137-mile route stretching from California’s Santa Monica Pier to New York’s Battery Park in an effort to raise from $50 million to $100 million…
The first-ever Olympic Games to be held in Asia took place in Tokyo in 1964, 24 years after the Japanese wartime government had forced their Olympic Committee to resign as hosts after they had last been awarded the…
January 01 – 11 European countries replace their national currencies with the newly created ‘Euro’, a single European currency. Germany, France, Italy, Spain, Holland, Belgium, Austria, Portugal, Finland, Ireland and Luxembourg all make the switch. The actual circulation…
Latest News
9 October 2021Canadian-born Rick Jones began his TV career in Britain as part of the Play School team before starring as “Yoffy” in Fingerbobs, presenting stories featuring paper finger-puppet characters…
26 September 2021. Alan Lancaster, founding bassist of rock greats Status Quo, has died in Australia, aged 72. He had been suffering from Multiple Sclerosis for some time.
16 September 2021. Sir Clive Sinclair, the inventor and entrepreneur who was instrumental in bringing home computers to the masses, has died at the age of 81.
6 September 2021 Get Some In! star Tony Selby has died aged 83. His management, LCM Limited, shared a statement on Twitter announcing he had died in London on Sunday (5th…
29 August 2021 Seven-time Emmy-winning actor Ed Asner, who starred as tough-talking TV newsroom head Lou Grant on the long-running sitcom The Mary Tyler Moore Show and the spin-off drama…
24 August 2021 The Rolling Stones drummer Charlie Watts has died at the age of 80. It had been announced earlier this month that Watts would miss the band’s American…
21 August 2021 Don Everly (pictured above left), one half of the rock’n’roll duo the Everly Brothers, has died at his home in Nashville at the age of 84. A spokesperson…
28 July 2021 The son of comedian Eric Morecambe has found a missing episode of The Morecambe and Wise Show in the family home’s attic. While searching for paperwork in…
28 July 2021 Dusty Hill, the bass player of US blues-rock band ZZ Top, has died at the age of 72. Bandmates Billy Gibbons and Frank Beard said that Hill…
29 May 2021 Gavin MacLeod, famed as the news writer Murray Slaughter on The Mary Tyler Moore Show and Captain Merrill Stubing on The Love Boat, died on Saturday 29…
3 May 2021 A nondescript brick house at 1 Pinoak Court, Vermont South – a suburb of Melbourne, Australia – has just sold for $1.6m AUD, the first time it…
8 February 2021 Mary Wilson was born in Greenville, Mississippi, on 6 March 1944. Her parents separated when she was young and she was raised by family members until she…
Latest Aussie Posts
1 9 5 9 – 1 9 6 2 (Australia) 5 minute episodes The first regular live children’s television show from Channel Nine in Melbourne was originally broadcast as The…
1 9 5 8 – 1 9 6 3 (Australia) 30 minute episodes This weekly television panel discussion show from the Australian Broadcasting Commission (ABC) had a four-person panel chaired in…
1 9 6 9 (Australia) 26 x 30 minute episodes This Australian comedy series featured Robinson Doubleday (New Zeland-born Gerry Gallagher), the bumbling science teacher at Kannabri High School, a co-ed…
1 9 7 8 (Australia) 6 x 30 minute episodes This superior effort from the Australian Broadcasting Commission (ABC) was reminiscent of high-quality British television dramas but dealt with a fairly…
1 9 7 0 – 1 9 7 1 (Australia) 23 x 60 minute episodes Not to be confused with the glossy 1980s American soap opera, this Dynasty was an Australian series…
1 9 6 9 – 1 9 7 2 (Australia) 30 minute episodes The half-hour ABC (Australian Broadcasting Commission) show Hit Scene debuted on 10 May 1969 and was broadcast in black…
1 9 5 9 (Australia) 16 x 30 minute episodes Sponsored by BP, this early Australian half-hour drama series was produced by Melbourne’s GTV-9 from February to June 1959. Dr Geoffrey…
