All over Europe in countries such as Germany and Norway it's a Xmas tradition to watch an obscure English comedy sketch from 1963 called Dinner For One.
For the last 30 years not a Xmas has gone by without it and a whole generation has apparently grown up with this skit as part of their tradition over the festive period. Strange.
Misappropriation of words in Hymns has alway been the preserve of the school yard. But at Christmas the mischievous mind turns to Carols and here are the ones which come to mind, starting with Jingle Bells.
Jingle Bells
Batman Smells
Robin Flew Away
The Batmobile
Lost It's Wheel
On the M6 Motorway
This was, to the best of my memory, how the United Kingdom version went. The US version was somewhat different:
Jingle Bells
Batman Smell
Robin Laid An Egg
The Batmobile
Lost It's Wheel
And The Joker Got Away
I heard this courtesy of Bart Simpson during an early Christmas episode of The Simpsons. It's interesting how the two version exist but differ slighlty.
Another was a version of While Shephards Watched Their Flocks By Night.
While Shephards Washed Their Socks By Night
All Seated By The Pot
The Angel of The Lord Came Down
And Stole The Bloody Lot
Not the kind of tape you found with wrapping paper, but the magnetic kind that was an essential purchase in the build up to the 25th. Nothing said Christmas like a dancing skeleton (who looked kind of like Bob Holness).
Before the advent of Satellite TV in the UK many movies made their network premiere over Xmas. Millions of homes had ET: Extra Terrestrial on its shelves way past Boxing Day courtesy of their E180s or E240s.
During the Christmas holidays, my friend and I would take a walk up the the local library. There we would look for books on horror and the supernatural; movie anthologies, Arthur C Clarke type unexplained mysteries, that sort of thing.
It was there one Xmas that I first came across the gothic horror author M.R. James. His stories appealed to me at first because of their length - ten to twenty pages were easily enough to hold me for a while. Then I became captivated by the stories themselves. They would take me to the kind of places I'd seen in Hammer Horror films, dark antiquarian locations where time held many secrets. Secrets that were unearthed and upturned with horrifying consequences - these were often cautionary tales: beware of the past, somethings are best left alone.
Then there was the adaptations onto television. The best of these were the series of nightly readings on BBC2 by Robert Powell at Xmas 1986, "Classic Ghost Stories, by M.R. James".
(Dec 25) The Mezzotint.
(Dec 26) The Ash Tree.
(Dec 28) Wailing Well.
(Dec 29)Oh, Whistle, and I'll Come to You, My Lad.
(Dec 30)The Rose Garden.
The tradition continues today. You can find M.R. James on the BBC somewhere over the Xmas period, be it on BBC Radio 7 or sometimes on BBC Four - a few years ago we were treated to a dedicated documentary on the man himself.
Sticking with yesteryear yuletide TV, today is the 1936 Universal Films serial Flash Gordon.
Like the Laurel & Hardy shorts these seemed to be seasonally broadcast and usually fell during the Xmas school holidays. It was one of three which the studio filmed with Buster Crabbe in the lead role and splanned thirteen episodes.
Shown daily and in the morning amongst other children's TV on BBC Two, it just about filled the school holidays. I loved the set design based upon the earlier comics - stuff like ray guns and space craft which reminded me of steel sea-liners with huge, rivetted hulks.
I actually saw one of the Flash Gordon episodes at a cinema while at college. On the big screen it had a grandness and scope which the television lacks.
Laurel & Hardy. Always reminds me of Christmas somehow. Well, at least this short film of 193o Below Zero does.
It's set during what looks to be a particularly bad winter for the comedy duo in which we find them as
street buskers, down on their luck as always, trying to scrape a buck or two together. Stan plays a small keyboard (harpsichord?) and Oli plays the double bass.
It's my favourite short from them and I usually play it around Xmas time, mainly due to the winter setting and also because it also reminds me of the school holidays which usually began around the 20th or so. I can't remember the last time Laurel & Hardy was shown on BBC Two - got to be over a decade now.
When I close my eyes I can still hear the bright, monotone sound of this early 1980s handheld LCD game from CGL. Think I got one around Xmas time and it was my favourite toy for quite a while - at least until the Commodore 64 came along.
There was something captivating about playing this in the dark too, the glow from the screen filling the room like fairy-lights on a Xmas Tree.
V, the 80s mini series, has returned recently to US TV. The theme of resisting conquering forces is being played out again and recieves an update here.
Where the original included Third Reich analogies and the Holocaust, this one starts off with the threat of terrorism as we are introduced to one of the show's cast members Erica Evans who is an FBI agent currently engaged in an operation investigating a terrorist cell.
The pilot moves at a cracking rate, revealing a couple twists along the way and where the original made us wait a untill it revealed the aliens for their true reptile self, we are treated to this in the pilot but again with a twist which was really nice to see.
The acting is good as is the script for this sort of TV. Haven't heard of a British network picking it up, though I guess it's just time.
Perhaps children's TV is more policed now or kids viewing habits more understood and surveyed, but it seems that gone are the days when we were plonked in front of the goggle-box and subjected to horrifying material.
You know the culprits. Jigsaw had Nosey Bonk, who looks now like a surrealist heist movie character - or maybe there's something of the lone anarchist bomber about him. Back then he was just plain scary.
Little children with impressionable minds watched the BBC's Words & Pictures in the 70s to learn their ABCs usually on tellys at school. This featured "Wordy", a disembodied head that floated that still haunts me today.
Currently showing at the Bradford 1 Gallery is the terrific Space Age exhibition. It charts our love of space exploration expressed in children's toys and bric-a-brak from the 1950s Japanese robots to more recent electronic games like an original (playable) Space Invaders machine that occupies the entrance to the exibition.
Recently opened in Salford, Manchester is an education/leisure exhibition called Street Play. Organised by Play England, it is aimed at recreating a street scene from what looks to be the 60/70s where children were free to play out, enjoying the sunshine and scraping knees to their heart's content.
The exhibition which includes washing lines complete with real wooden clothes peggs, aims to create a throw-back to a time when British kids could play out unsupervised in the streets.
There's not a lot to lament about Macs. It even looks as though the matte screen option is back on the 15" MacBook Pros (Macrumours.com). Apart from maybe the switch away from the beautiful Apple Garamond font used in old Apple ads.
The Old Magazine adverts seemed to be more wordy too, with the text flowing around the products. Apple no longer use the font in their ads which tend to be more simplistic in design.
Apple Mac ad from 1984, complete with the now ubiquitous reflections.
The latest iMacs - with the all new Myriad typeface.
Just came across this three-piece from New York. They conjure a mixture of late 80s/early 90s shoegazing from the Creation Records label; Ride, Sweredriver and maybe Spaceman 3 thrown in too.
Taken from the August edition of OMNI magazine, the ad for CompuServe, a kind of information highway before the superhighway we are now accustomed to, is pretty impressive. It reminds me of the way computer games were advertised or indeed the box art for them which usually featured dramatic illustrations on the cover; glimpses of a possible future that we could enjoy today.
Advertising the internet today (or at least the internet providers) seems to concentrate on numbers - Mbit rates, GB download limits rather than going for the emotional response to using their product.
That's the difficulty I suppose in selling such a nebulous service as the internet as each of our experiences will differ from then next.
In anticipation of the new series of V, I have started watching the original mini series - the first time since it was originally broadcast in 1983. The thing that stands out in the re-watch is the overt analogy to the persecution of Jews in Nazi German.
Indeed the Jewish character Abraham, a survivor of the atrocities, watches the visitors arrive with the skepticism that history has tought him while others around him celebrate their arrival and some even sign up to join the "Friends of the Visitors", a sort of Nazi Youth movement.
The lizard-face reveal was just as good as watching it for the first time - it's a hugely influential scene.
The mini series was followed by V (The Final Battle) which told the story of the rise of the resistance movement and the ultimate overthrow of the Visitors.
One other thing. I always thought that V stood for Visitors, but watching the scene when Abraham catches young kids spaying graffiti on the alien recruitment posters, it clearly stands for Victory.
Nostalgia. A daydreaming drift back to yeasteryear filled with warm indulgances of crappy things. But spare a though for people growing up today. What will they have to be nostalgic about? It's always a dificult thing to predict since the act requires distance and the removal of oneself from the events but it's hard to guess what will be conscidered nostalgic in fifteen years time or so.
For me, video games from the 80s will always provide a kick or jolt of reminiscence partly due to just how different they are to today's. Forward wind fifteen years. "O man, do you remember those video games we used to play? How they were almost photo-realistic? Instead of photo-realistic?" Or perhapse websites. Can you get all nostalgic about the internet?
Perhapse Blogs will be conscidered fare game in the future too.
...And young kids growing up in the 80s needed to indulge in a safe, hierarchical battle of stats that was Top Trumps. Where else could you be introduced to the world of long-range ballistic missiles outside of the Greenham Common/CND news reports that made it to Newsround?
Popular subjects were cars - Concept Cars, Grand Prix and military vehicles - Rockets, Tanks. The packs were priced at around £1.50 so you could clock up quite a collection over time out of your weekly pocket money.
They prove popular even today. Original sets still change hands on eBay for a few pounds but the most sought after ones command greater values.
These are usually the two Horror sets published by Waddingtons. They were know by their 'trump' card which also featured as the pack's front cover, which are Dracula (Horror Rating 100) and Death (Physical Strength 99).
