Back in the day before Jeremy Kyle and breakfast tv there were three tv channels, Sky was where the clouds lived and morning tv came in two flavours; during term time a series of "for schools and colleges" which was like the OU for Children; and holiday tv, which was less worthy but better.
Duriring my childhood I spent a lot of my holidays at my Grandparents' house in Goodwick. It's a bit quiet there.
Being always an early waker I'd be in the lounge reading, waiting for the telly to start. BBC2 would have been OU films with men in brown suits, wide ties and big hair.
ITV started at a whoppingly early 8.30am with Sesame St. Never a big fan other than The Count and the cartoon pinball machine
At 8.50 BBC 1 would start, typically with The Wombles. I was a bit fan, especially of Orinoco. After the "Rugby Incident" alluded to earlier I was nicknamed Orinoco, because he's a Womble (one ball, geddit? Technically inaccurate but at 16 who let accuracy get in the way of a good ribbing?)
What came between that and Why Don't You I don't recall. After Why Don't You was a dubbed weekly eastern European dubbed children's series. But the subject of today's tale is Why Don't You?
Here is the Title Sequence
Why Don't You was a 20 minute programme presented by regional theatre brats, some of whom have gone on to be part of Ant and Dec or Pauline Quirke.
The rest of the programme was short films of people with "interesting hobbies" such as Scottish Country Dancing, BMX, the typical stuff the BBC thought would be good. The BBC continues this tradition with Take A Bow.
In between these were activities and things to do on wet summer holidays. Things to do with paper and card, making kites, often suggested by readers (aka The Researchers)
One thing that caught my eye was a robot with flashing eyes. It was electronics, and it looked quite funky.
Robot turned out to be a bistable multivribrator. Calm down. It's just one of these
Every week there was a fact sheet, which you could get by sending an SAE and a nominal postal order. My Dad helped me get the PO and I waited for the leaflet.
Within 28 days a leaflet arrived, full of crap (along with the rules of Tower of Hanoi) but with the name of a book on Electronics. Again I dragged my Dad out to get me the book, which then meant I needed some stuff.
There was a white board full of holes which you could plug stuff in and a bunch of resistors, diodes and LEDs. So we went down the local hobby shop and got a bag of bits.
Having built the robot, and a crystal radio and all sorts of entertaining stuff, it kept me busy when I wasn't swimming, cycling or playing music.
And then I realised I could make money doing silly shit with wires and stuff. And that is why I write software.
I used to spend most school holiday mornings sat in the TV lounge of the hotel my mum worked in, hoping that the guests wouldn't want to come in and watch the cricket, in which case I would have to decamp down to the games room in the basement. I remember having to patiently wait until the time the test card finally disappeared, or on ITV until Men of Harlech stopped accompanying the teletext headlines, and then watching programmes like Why Don't you? Probably several series before you were watching it, it went on for a long long time.
ReplyDeletejust looked it up, it went on longer than I'd realised, 42 series in total, between August 1973 and April 1995. I would've been watching in the mid to late 70s
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