It's time to play the music

Lately, I've been enjoying The Muppet Show on Disney+ - an enjoyment only slightly impaired by how annoyingly not-quite-complete their collection is. Four episodes are entirely absent, and fourteen others (helpfully chronicled by the Muppet Wiki) have bits edited out for presumably music rights reasons (although a couple might just be that someone picked up the edited US version of an episode instead of the full UK one with its extra two minutes). But still, all the missing stuff is on YouTube anyway, and it's nice to watch mostly full episodes on a real TV!

The best part is casting my mind back and remembering which particular parts of the show have been fixed in my brain ever since watching them for the first time - which I think must have been when they showed up on the BBC in 1986/7, rather than the earlier ITV showings. I certainly knew of the Muppets from the ITV days, but I was very young at the time and I don't think really paid attention to it - my dad was a big fan, though.

I've looked up on Genome exactly when the episodes were on, so I can share with the internet my own personal Muppet Show dates and times - I'm sure it's essential knowledge for anyone keeping track of my lifelong passion for the puppets...

Sat 08/02/1986 17:20 Elton John

Sat 15/02/1986 17:20 Mark Hamill

Sat 22/02/1986 17:20 Rudolf Nureyev

Sat 01/03/1986 17:20 Raquel Welch

Sat 08/03/1986 17:20 Peter Sellers

Sat 15/03/1986 17:20 John Denver

Sat 22/03/1986 17:20 Lynn Redgrave

Sat 29/03/1986

Sat 05/04/1986 17:20 Harry Belafonte

Sat 12/04/1986 17:20 Debbie Harry

Sat 19/04/1986 17:20 Rita Moreno

Sat 26/04/1986 17:20 Dom DeLuise

Sat 03/05/1986 17:20 Cleo Laine

Wed 03/09/1986 19:35 Twiggy

Wed 10/09/1986 19:35 Glenda Jackson

Wed 17/09/1986 19:35 Paul Williams

Wed 24/09/1986 19:35 Lena Horne

Wed 01/10/1986 19:35 Mummenschanz

Wed 08/10/1986 19:35 Leo Sayer

Wed 15/10/1986 19:35 Julie Andrews

Wed 22/10/1986

Wed 29/10/1986 19:35 Vincent Price

Wed 05/11/1986 19:35 Sandy Duncan

Wed 07/01/1987 19:35 Charles Aznavour

Wed 14/01/1987 19:35 Diana Ross

Wed 21/01/1987 19:35 Ethel Merman

Wed 28/01/1987 19:35 John Cleese

Wed 04/02/1987 19:35 Judy Collins

Wed 11/02/1987 19:35 Bob Hope

Wed 18/02/1987 19:35 Madeline Kahn

Sun 08/03/1987 17:05 Bernadette Peters

Sun 05/04/1987 17:15 Milton Berle

Sun 03/05/1987 16:35 Kris Kristofferson / Rita Coolidge

Sun 07/06/1987 17:00 Edgar Bergen

Sun 14/06/1987 17:15 Zero Mostel

Sun 21/06/1987

Sun 28/06/1987 17:00 Steve Martin

Sun 05/07/1987 17:00 Alice Cooper

Sun 12/07/1987

Sun 19/07/1987 17:00 Marisa Berenson

Sun 26/07/1987

Sun 02/08/1987 17:00 Helen Reddy

Sun 09/08/1987

Sun 16/08/1987 17:30 Dyan Cannon

Sun 23/08/1987 17:10 Arlo Guthrie

Sun 30/08/1987 17:15 Elke Sommer

Wed 09/09/1987 19:35 Crystal Gayle

Wed 16/09/1987 19:35 Dudley Moore

Wed 23/09/1987 19:35 Sylvester Stallone

Wed 30/09/1987 19:35 Cheryl Ladd

Wed 07/10/1987 19:35 Roy Clark

It's an interesting pattern alternating between weekend teatime and Wednesday early-evening (with quite a few weeks skipped - at least a couple of times to accommodate an extra-long episode of Dallas). I do remember watching a large number of these, and like I say, bits of them became permanent fixtures in my head - the most interesting of these has to be the Mark Hamill episode!

Because I was obviously still very into Return of the Jedi in early 1986 (though it had rather been replaced in coolness by things like Transformers by that time), and you'd think I would have remembered vividly the Star Wars scenes in that one. But no, the one bit of that episode I've always recalled was Scooter, rehearsing in his room and then performing the wonderful "Six String Orchestra"!

I've always loved Scooter. If I ever got to be on the Muppet Show, I'd insist on the two of us doing a bit together. It's just a bit surprising that all the Star Wars stuff didn't leave anywhere near as big an impression on me...

At least two of my oldest memories of Muppets come from scenes absent from Disney+ - the John Denver episode is one of the omitted ones, and that contains "The Happy Wanderer", in which three pigs climb a mountain and one by one fall down with a Valderaaaargh!

And the Bernadette Peters episode is shockingly shorn of Robin's closing number, in which he wants to do "They Call the Wind Maria" from Paint Your Wagon, but Kermit makes him do the cute little song "I'm Five" instead.

"And when I sit in my father's chair my feet can reach the floor (almost)" really made me giggle at the time, and still does now. I wonder which of the two songs has copyright issues, making Disney+ delete it?

It's an interesting episode anyway, because cutting those scenes really doesn't harm the running storyline throughout the episode of Robin feeling ignored - that's all resolved by the wonderful performance with Bernadette Peters of "Just One Person", and then the "I'm Five" section is just a coda after it. You wouldn't notice there was anything missing if you hadn't seen the full episode before.

The moral of the story is that muppets are great, and you should all rush to either Disney+ or YouTube, according to preference, to watch them right now!

A psychological boost

 I was stopped in the street today by a man who asked "Excuse me, but do you hold a world record in memory?"

It's quite a long time since I've been recognised like that - I haven't been on telly for much too long - so I was delighted to answer "Yes, I do! Um, well, I did. Long ago."

And it turns out he knew me because he's doing a degree in psychology and they're studying the science of memory (or whatever James Paterson used to call it)! I'm delighted to know that modern-day students are being taught from such outdated textbooks that they still think I'm a world record holder! AND that these textbooks include a picture of me so that people who encounter me can immediately recognise me!

(Actually, it was probably a video rather than a textbook. Modern students probably don't even use textbooks any more. I really am an old man...)

Invasion of the Hologrems

 Nowadays, the Beano is full of paid ads trying to sell things to kids. Or at least there were ads in it the last time I noticed them, which might have been quite a while ago now I come to think of it. I should probably check my facts a bit better before I start a blog post with that kind of assertion. But the point I'm leading up to here is that back in the good old 1980s, the Beano didn't contain paid ads. Mostly. But that doesn't mean the comic was entirely free of commercial interest, especially when Christmas was coming up.

Beano No. 2261, Nov. 16th, 1985, is actually selling quite a lot of things to us. The Dennis the Menace story on the front and back covers ends with Dennis urging us to buy the 1986 Beano calendar. I have a feeling I got it for Christmas that year. The Bash Street Kids story on the centre pages features a bus with a "1986 Beano Annual now on sale" poster on it. The bottom of the Pup Parade page has a little ad encouraging readers to "start your Comic Library collection now!" (which interestingly gives no hint to people who might not be a aware as to what Comic Libraries actually are). Little Plum's half-page slot is replaced by an ad for the 1986 Beano Book and Dandy Book. (Plum and Biffo the Bear had half a page each at this time, and one or the other was regularly replaced by this kind of ad).

Most interesting are a pair of adverts for other weekly comics. Is the build-up to Christmas really the best time to try to get Beano readers to start picking up another title as well? I guess at least someone thought so. The bottom quarter of Tom, Dick and Sally's page is taken up by an ad for a super free gift in this week's Twinkle!

Twinkle was 'the picture paper specially for little girls', a demographic not famous for liking the Beano. You can see why they chose this page to put the Twinkle ad - Sally is one of the few Beano characters who might even consider buying the Twinkle, and even she isn't really the bobbly-bead-necklace type.

For the record, the only other female characters in the Beano at this time (excluding all the mums, of course) were Minnie the Minx, Ivy the Terrible, Toots the Bash Street Kid and Peeps from Pup Parade - all of them tomboys who wouldn't be seen dead with a Twinkle - and Liz and Rosie from Lord Snooty (Polly has disappeared by this time, it seems). Rosie especially is more of a Twinkle reader, but maybe there wasn't space on Snooty's page.

You'd need Lord Snooty's income to buy the Twinkle regularly, anyway - 22p, at a time when the Beano was only 16p! That necklace had better be really good, is all I can say!

But most fascinating of all is the ad in the bottom quarter of Roger the Dodger, for the exciting new comic Hoot!

I definitely remember reading this comic when it first came out in 1985. Mainly because I didn't watch Minder, and had no idea what the jokes were about. So I guess it wasn't an all-time favourite Roger the Dodger for me, but at least it stuck in my memory! I didn't remember the astonishingly off-model depiction of Walter the Softy in the final panel, though, and I had no memory at all of the Hoot ad with the terrific space-age 3D hologram!

That ad must have disappeared from my memory pretty quickly, in fact, because in what was maybe 1986 or maybe 1987, on our annual summer holiday at Butlin's in Skegness, my brother and I got very into those holograms!

Every night after going to the cinema to watch the cartoons, we'd get a pack of sweet cigarettes (that wonderful gateway confectionery to a lifelong smoking habit, which they strangely don't seem to sell any more) which came with a really cool hologram alien sticker!

These packages are the subject of recent internet research - looking at them, I definitely remember the colour schemes, and think these must have been the same ones we bought, but I had no recollection of the name "Hologrems" or the Monster Pack you could send off for. The only really memorable thing was the stickers, each showing a different alien in front of a colourful 3-D landscape of smoke and volcanoes!

There were 24 different aliens, as it turns out. I didn't know that at the time, because we always seemed to get Gormsson over and over again. Isn't that always the way with these things? I got a purple box one night to see if that would make a difference, and got the awesome Jamangi, one of the four landscape-oriented stickers. My brother did the same, got Gormsson again and threw a wild tantrum about it. That's the kind of happy childhood holiday triumphant memory that everyone treasures forever, right?

Anyway, the interesting thing about that ad in the Beano is that it doesn't say "Hologrems", but uses the same font to just say "Hologram". It makes me wonder. I didn't remember the name on the candy-stick packs at all, but everything you can find about them on the internet nowadays (which isn't much) seems to suggest they were always called Hologrems. Was the "Hologram" name used with the Hoot free gift an early placeholder name from before they settled on a title? Or were they originally sold as grams instead of grems, and only got the cool new name when someone dreamed up the Log Book (which details at amazing length the personality of each monster!) in 1987?

I wish I was some kind of memory man, so I could recall whether I bought Holograms or Hologrems, and whether it was in '86 or '87. It's the kind of thing that might remain a mystery forever. Unless I come across another old Beano with an enlightening advert!

Hot Othello

 "Hot yoga" is apparently a thing where you do yoga exercises in some kind of sauna-like conditions. It's enormously well-known and popular, and has been for decades, it seems. But obviously I never know about these things until it turns out that we can use a hot yoga establishment in Swindon for this year's British Othello Championship - so that's where I'm going this weekend.

Not to do yoga. To play othello. Hot yoga is specifically not recommended for people with MS, according to the wikipedia page.

A comedy masterclass

 I've mentioned once or twice before, over the years, how much I love Order of the Stick, and today's new strip is a great example of why! The unexpected, perfect, hilarious payoff to a running joke that's been going on all through the lengthy duration of the comic!

Rich Burlew has said before that he deliberately refrains from using the running gags for a long time before they suddenly come into the plot and take everyone by surprise, and it really works in a case like this! Honestly, it's a silly webcomic about Dungeons and Dragons (a game I don't play or particularly like) and over and over again it shows how to create brilliant works of literature! Just go and read it, if I haven't convinced you yet!

Old and new

 Continuing to read through a random pile of old Beano comics, I was struck by how one issue (No. 2170 - Feb 18th, 1984) highlights the problems of making up-to-date pop culture references in comics. It's an unusually reference-heavy issue, this one, starting on the centre pages with the Bash Street Kids.

Toots opens the story by recounting the latest news from Coronation Street - "And then Albert Tatlock said..."

Albert Tatlock, the grumpy old man played by Jack Howarth, had been appearing in the soap opera ever since its first episode in December 1960, and by the 1980s he was an iconic figure and a universally recognised name in Britain. But we weren't seeing very much of him on TV lately because of Jack Howarth's declining health (apparently his speech had got so indistinct that the episodes were written to have other characters repeat back what Albert said, to help the viewers understand) and in fact by the time this comic was published Albert Tatlock had already made his final appearance on the show, on January 23rd. Jack Howarth died, aged 88, on 31st March and the Coronation Street residents and viewers heard in May that Albert had died off-screen while away visiting his daughter.

So it seems Toots isn't quite keeping up to the minute with her TV-watching. On the other hand, Grandpa seems to be more in touch with the latest buzz!

Karma Chameleon, the big hit for Culture Club and their lead singer Boy George, came out in September 1983 and had spent six weeks at number one. It wasn't topping the charts any more by the time this comic was released, but it was definitely still current - at the 1984 Brit Awards, on the 21st of February, Karma Chameleon won the Song of the Year! So, probably accidentally, this Beano is very much citing a song that was constantly on the radios of the nation at the moment it was published!

Of course, Grandpa's whole thing is that he's in touch with what the kids like. It's a bit surprising to see that the same seems to apply to Pa Bear...

(You've got to love those "French tourists" who've really gone out of their way to display every single French stereotype but still aren't carrying around a set of French windows when Ted needs them)

Pa isn't generally aware of the latest pop music - he's very much the daft dad who can embarrass Ted by not understanding modern trends - but in this one he likes "listening to the new Boy George single." Two mentions in one week for Boy George! Maybe it was a deliberate push to get the kids talking about him, although the Brit Award must have been long since decided on by this time.

And it gets better - The Three Bears is supposedly set in America, and Culture Club took a bit longer to catch on over there. Karma Chameleon didn't come out until 1984, and in fact when this issue of the Beano came out, Karma Chameleon was number one in the Billboard Hot 100! Pa Bear, uncharacteristically enough, is astonishingly up-to-the-minute in defiance of the Beano's production timescales!

So in summary, Toots the young, happening Bash Street Kid is very behind the times; Grandpa the old man who likes kid stuff is much more with-it, but stupid old Pa Bear is the one who's really got his finger on the pulse of what's hot! Who woulda thunk it?

How they make TV

 I'm reading through all my old Beanos now. And I realise that my thoughts about this one haven't really changed since Christmas 1982. Is this actually how it works?

I mean, I've been on telly quite a bit since then, but I still know very little about the actual workings of the technology. When they show a film on TV, they don't actually point a TV camera at a big cinema screen, do they? They must do it by.... some other way? Right?

I suppose nowadays they do it with... computers, or something. But in 1982? Perhaps that was what they did. I should probably learn more about this.