Wayne and Wanda - The Glorious Muppet Singing Duo, The Appendectomy And The Fever...

The Muppet Show! Jim Henson's lovely Muppet puppet concept had been around in one form or another since its very first manifestation in the 1950s. In 1976, this all-American phenomenon sprouted new characters and descended on a clapped-out old English music hall to become one of the fondest remembered kids' TV shows of all time - and it's still a thriving comicdom, fandom and filmdom today.

I loved the show, which ran from 1976 to 1981. Who could forget the Swedish Chef? Pigs In Space? The Great Gonzo? The horrifically scientific Dr Bunsen Honeydew? Poor, terrified Beaker? Fozzie Bear's bravery and optimism in the face of an indifferent or hostile audience? Sam the Eagle, battling (and failing) to keep things decent? The fabulous Great Gonzo? Or the strange success of Mah Na Na? This song, originally performed by the Muppets in 1969, took over UK pop culture like a rocket when it popped up on the Muppet Show a few years later. Suddenly, everybody was saying it. My cousin, opening the door to the insurance man: 'Ma nah ma nah'. Insurance man: 'Funny you should you say that - ma nah ma nah'.

Me, to a bus conductor: 'Ma nah ma nah!'

Bus conductor: 'Where do you want to go, you stupid XXXXXXX kid?'

Well, maybe not everybody.

My own personal favourite Muppet characters were Miss Piggy - that gorgeous purveyor of sweetness, glamour and violence - and the singing duo of the first series, Wayne and Wanda.

Wayne and Wanda? Yes. Kermit fired them after series one. They sang lovely old songs in Jeanette McDonald and Nelson Eddy style. But things were not nearly as good. Wanda had a terrible voice (I liked Wayne's) and the props and other things always ensured they never got very far into their act.

Wayne and Wanda struck my own personal funny bone in a sketch which featured Wayne sawing Wanda in two while she warbled You Do Something To Me. This was the famous old magician's sketch, but it ended abruptly when Wanda suddenly began shrieking. Something had gone wrong.

I was, for some reason, in stitches. My adolescent humour was aroused and I guffawed and guffawed and guffawed. And so, Wayne and Wanda became favourites.

Not long afterwards, I was literally in stitches - in hospital.

I'd been ill for a while and finally ended up fearing for my life as I experienced pain which took my breath away. This was quickly traced to my appendix - perforated - and so into hospital I was rushed and the offending part removed.

It was September 1977, I was less than a month from my 12th birthday, and I was ill. I was ill for a few days after the operation - experiencing high temperatures and delusions. Into this unhappy state came a set of brand new annuals - bought by the neighbours who had collected for the poorly lad in hospital. The annuals were The Quest (now long forgotten Western series), The Sweeney (hated it) and The Muppet Show.

I perused the annuals during lucid times. In the Muppet annual, Wayne serenaded a Spanish woman: 'Lady of Spain I adore you!' Wanda responded by kicking him off the stage: 'Make another pass at her and I'll floor you!' This interested me. After all, the concept of making a pass at somebody seemed a little adult for a kids' annual. I also looked at The Quest. In my fevered states, the two worked together to create a strange world in which Wayne and Wanda were present at my bedside and I was, at the same time, a cowboy in the desert.

'Howdy!' I drawled to a nurse at one point.

'Where's Wanda gone?' I asked at another.

It was all highly embarrassing in retrospect because the nurse reported these fascinating facts, with great amusement, to my mother.

Wayne and Wanda were kind enough to refrain from singing during their attendance at my bedside.

Anyway, I survived to see 1978 (blurgh) and Wayne and Wanda, now gone from The Muppet Show, were etched on my memory.

They returned in an episode shown in December 1979 in which they reproached Kermit the frog for firing them. Wayne was now fulfilling his 'life's ambition' as a manual labourer, and the pair were okay - thanks to help from Wanda's mother's pension money.

By then 14, I was dead chuffed to see them. Guilt-ridden Kermit rehired them, and then promptly refired them when they burst into a spirited rendition of that lovely 1930s number Sweet Mystery Of Life.

I never forgave Kermit.

Wayne and Wanda have cropped up a few times since, but there is a shocking lack of Muppet merchandise devoted to them. I want figurines of this legendary pair to pop on my mantelpiece. They will forever remind me of their out-of-this-world visit to my hospital bedside in 1977.

And I will smile.

Go to it, please, Disney.

Follyfoot and the Dreaded Sunday Afternoons...

The "Follyfoot "annual 1977. The series ended in 1973, but lived on in repeats and through the "Look-In" comic strip for some years afterwards. The cover shows Arthur English as Slugger, Christian Rodska as Stryker, Steve Hodson as Steve and Gillian Blake as Dora. A branch of the lightning tree can be seen. The tree was actually dead and planted there for effect. The cast and crew were apparently amazed when it sprouted leaves, but a gardener friend of mine tells me this is nothing unusual in a tree only recently judged to be dead and even when transplanted (legend has it the fake lightning tree was set in several tons of cement!) the 'dead' tree can go on showing signs of life for some time.

Oh crikey! I've been asked to write a blog post about Follyfoot, that much-loved TV series of the early 1970s, broadcast from 1971 to 1973 and in repeats from 1974-1975. And... oh dear... I didn't really like the show and haven't been able to face it since!

The show was repeated again about thirteen years later, but I still couldn't face it.

In the 1970s, morning children's TV in the school holidays abounded with glorious creaky old wonders like Champion The Wonder Horse and Casey Jones. They were in black and white, but that didn't matter because many of us were watching in black and white. In the 1980s, more repeats were wheeled out for morning viewing, and I was horrified when, circa 1988, I was settled in front of the box (with a throbbing hangover) one Sunday morning and the announcer told me the next programme was going to be Follyfoot.

"Not in this house it ain't!" I hissed, and switched off hastily.

What a git, you cry, Follyfoot was marvellous! It's what Sunday afternoons were made for, it's so beautiful, even in retrospect...

Well, let me rush to my own (and possibly Follyfoot's) defence.

Back in the early 1970s I was impossibly young (oh yes I was!) and it's since been widely circulated that Follyfoot was aimed at an early teens audience. Golly, Steve! Gosh, Dora! I don't recall that being widely circulated or acknowledged at the time! That case for the show's defence isn't helped by the fact that my wife, who was an early teenager at the time and adored horses, hated Follyfoot, and two girls in my class at primary school loved it. I find the "early teens" audience tag even stranger as Steve and Dora looked to be in their early twenties anyway and none of the stories seemed particularly sophisticated - or even remotely resembled teen life in my neighbourhood. 

I was a precocious child, my sharp-end, lower-working-class early '70s childhood was seeing to that, and I don't think the show ever "went over my head", but I never liked the way Dora kept crying and thought it sad and boring. And I didn't like the Lightning Tree song either. I mean "dub-a-dah, ba-dub-a-dub-a-dah"? Oh, please! And as for "down in the meadow where the wind blows free"... well, certain coarse types, like wot I was, twisted the meaning of that and guffawed loudly. And the pigging tree wasn't even in a meadow anyway.

Apparently the lightning tree was a "symbol of hope", but the atmosphere of the series seemed so miserable it thoroughly chilled me. And the tree looked so grim!

Bah, humbug!

As I mentioned at the beginning of this post, the show was featured as a comic strip for years in my favourite children's weekly comic, Look-In, but I never read that particular strip.

Having said that, I watched Follyfoot. It used to come on at Sunday teatimes and we always had the telly on then. I remember Dora and Steve and Slugger and the Colonel and Stryker and the lightening tree so well. In fact, like so many things seen in my impressionable childhood years, the show almost feels like a part of me to this day.

 The "Look-In" "Follyfoot" comic strip ran for years.

Curiously, during the mid-1970s, I read the 1963 novel Cobbler's Dream, by Monica Dickens (great-granddaughter of the great English author Charles Dickens), which inspired the Follyfoot TV series, but although Dora, Slugger, Stryker and the Colonel (then called the Captain) were all present as in a way was Steve (then called Paul), I enjoyed the book far more than I did Follyfoot. It was grittier, far less tearful and far less "arty-farty".

"Arty-farty"? Well, I think that the TV series was afflicted by a slight case of post-1960s "arty-fartiness" (as we called it round my way) - little tweaks and twiddlings - and the fanciful "symbolic" lightning tree, the name Follyfoot, the general wimpishness of Dora, and the notion that some romance might develop between her and Steve (all absent from the book) were perhaps at least partly responsible for my negative response to the show. The plot of the book which provided the inspiration was based at a rest home for horses, dealt with their often sad histories and the people who lived and worked there, but the sentimentality and what I thought of as the "girly" romantic crap of Follyfoot was missing.

The characters in Cobbler's Dream were so much more compelling. And so much less posh in some cases. Dora, for instance, was not the daughter of a bigwig ambassador, her father was a grammar school teacher, she was not the niece of the Colonel (Captain in the book) and the farm was a very poor place, founded by a horse lover years before and run by a committee. Stryker was a bit shadier than in the TV series, and his heart of gold far less evident. And Slugger was also different, and his wife a former all-in wrestler. Beats having a lightning tree around the place any day.

I thoroughly enjoyed Cobbler's Dream, finding it truly to be a dream of a read, and I've re-read it several times since and still have it. Cobbler's Dream is one of my all time favourite books in fact. Follyfoot, despite it sharing the commendable pro-animal stance of the book, I found to be cobblers in comparison. 

Having said all that, there was nothing wrong with the acting in the show. Gillian Blake was superb as Dora - her misery was so real, it reached out from the screen and added to my own.

Our memories of past pop culture are usually coloured by the situations we were in at the time, and I have to say that when Follyfoot was broadcast I was not happy. I was living on a sink estate years before the term was coined, and life was very harsh indeed. That's probably another reason why Follyfoot didn't gel with me. Although upper-middle-class Dora's misery seemed very real, I could find no sympathy for her, shedding copious tears over some horse that had been mistreated or was heading for the knacker's yard. Just getting by from day-to-day was a struggle in my little world.

And Sunday tea times were particularly horrible occasions, with school looming the next day, and family tensions at their worst, especially if my dreadful step-granny was visiting.

As I wrote earlier, the memory of Follyfoot lives within me, so one day I might revisit the lightning tree. But don't hold your breath.

The Tomorrow People

The Tomorrow People, apparently the next stage of human evolution, seen here on the front of an early '70s novel, were great heroes of mine. And Carol, the blonde girl, made my little heart beat faster when I was about seven.

The Tomorrow People had special powers - they could communicate telepathically and get from place to place simply by thinking about it - "jaunting" they called it. Special belts were used to co-ordinate "jaunts" over long distances.

Here's another TP novel -the bulby '60s lava lamp effect thingy over the Tomorrow People's heads in their secret underground lab was TIM - a "biotronic" computer.

Roger Price was the man behind the Tomorrow People, which was a tremendously enjoyable piece of sci-fi for us '70s kiddies. I loved it dearly, but it did have its faults. There were faintly priggish echoes of the Famous Five at times, especially the way the Tomorrow People used to call ordinary mortals "Saps". It was short for homo-sapiens, and was, according to Mr Price, meant to have been an affectionate nickname, but it didn't exactly come across as one.

"I've just been dealing with a Sap," the extremely homo-superior Stephen or John would say, and I wanted to punch their lights out. Mind you, we Saps were supposed to be aggressive.

Stephen in his "AE suit" - ideal for quick jaunts around hyperspace...

I well remember my own time as a Tomorrow Person back in the '70s...

It all began when Desi, a rather... well, the '70s weren't exactly PC or sensitive times so I'll call him fik, mate of mine found a plastic attachment belonging to my mother's hair drier on the kitchen worktop. "Wot's dis?" he asked.

Instinctively, I milked the situation: "Oh my God! Put it down! You weren't meant to see that!"

Desi hastily discarded it, then asked nervously: "Wot is it?"

I took a deep breath: "Desi, you weren't supposed to know this, but that is a highly sensitive piece of biotronic equipment which could blow the world to smithereens in five micro seconds. Now that you do know, I'd better tell you the rest: I am a Tomorrow Person."

Desi backed away, wide eyed: "Are yoo?"

I nodded gravely. "Yes. It must remain a secret between us two forever. If not, you'll have to be sent to the Galactic Trig."

"I won't say nothin'!" said Desi.

"Good, " I said. "You'd better not, Desi, because the Galactic Trig is not a great place for Saps."

Over the coming days, I enlisted the help of my cousin Sue - who announced to Desi that she was also a Tomorrow Person.

"Can you jaunt?" asked Desi.

"Of course," I replied, trying to sound like John, the main priggish geezer in the TV show. "But our jaunts are always accompanied by a blinding flash. It would render a Sap sightless."

Desi really was a Sap, it seemed. He fell for it, hook-line-and-sinker and over the next week or two me and my cousin Sue had great fun: Jedekiah had manifested himself in the garden shed; the Krotons had just entered our solar system; Sue had got stuck in hyperspace...

Desi appeared to believe everything we said, and our fun went on and on until finally his mother said that Desi wasn't to play with us anymore: we were giving him nightmares and he'd started wetting the bed.

From Look-In, our weekly magazine treat, which featured a Tomorrow People picture strip.

1975 - Dr Who: The Frail Tardis!

November 22, 1975, and Dr Who celebrated its 12th birthday, still going strong with Tom Baker at the helm. But if the show was in fine fettle for its age, the Tardis was not. Said producer Phillip Hinchcliffe: "The Tardis is supposed to disguise itself as some everyday object. This one disguised itself as a police box - and stuck like that. But blue police boxes are being got rid of. So I'm worried that some younger viewers will not know what it is supposed to be...

"Also, Tardis is getting very frail now. Whenever we take it to a new location, it falls to pieces. So we are having to decide whether to make a new one the same shape, or maybe find some reason for changing it."

Design a new Tardis! Could you invent a new time-travel machine to take over from the poor, battered old Tardis? asked the Sun in its Dr Who competition for 14s and under. Top prize was a "date with Dr Who at the BBC television studios in London" and a Dr Who board game from Denys Fisher Toys. 20 runners up were awarded board games.

The Dr Who production team, of course, decided to stick with tradition and the Tardis retained its familiar police box guise.

Quite right too!