August 2022 – Blood and Porridge

August 29, 2022September 2, 2022

Honour the Sabbath

From wikipedia.com / © Vertigo Records

I’m no fan of lengthy international sporting competitions – apart from the Rugby and Football World Cups – and I reacted with a weary shrug to the recent holding of the Commonwealth Games in the English Midlands city of Birmingham. However, I’d have willingly sat through the Games’ twelve days of sporting endeavour, bored out of my wits, just to be present at the occasion’s closing ceremony. For this offered a few minutes that, in my mind, were the musical highlight of August 2022, if not the year 2022. I’m talking about the sight of former Black Sabbath singer and famous Birmingham son Ozzy Osbourne coming up through a stage-trapdoor into a shroud of blood-red mist to sing the 1970 Sabbath classic Paranoid, with Ozzy’s old Sabbath comrade Tony Iommi thumping away on electric guitar.

Apparently, Ozzy had originally turned down an invitation to sing at the ceremony due to health issues. Quite a lot of health issues, in fact – Parkinson’s disease, neck and spine surgery, depression, blood clots, nerve pain. But at the last minute, deciding the show must go on, he jumped on a flight from Los Angeles and made a surprise appearance in his old home city. And though I was no fan of the sporting stuff, I was delighted to see him perform at this, the biggest event in Birmingham for years. Long before anyone had heard of Peaky Blinders (2013-22), Ozzy – catchphrase: “Oi’m the Prince o’ Dawkness!” – had made it cool to be a Brum.

Anyway, this has inspired me to dust down and repost the following item. It was written in 2017, just after those mighty metallers Black Sabbath had played their last-ever gig.

The third commandment tells us to keep the Sabbath holy. Well, I believe in honouring the Sabbath but I’m not talking about the seventh day of the week. I’m talking about Black Sabbath, the 49-year-old heavy metal band who played their last-ever gig two nights ago.

Fittingly, Black Sabbath’s farewell performance took place at the Genting Arena in Birmingham, the city where it all started for them. Guitarist Tony Iommi, bassist Geezer Butler, drummer Bill Ward and incomparable – many would say incorrigible – singer Ozzy Osbourne grew up in Aston, one of Birmingham’s working-class suburbs. Prior to forming the band, they did a variety of unglamorous jobs there, including delivering coal, labouring on building sites and working in a sheet metal factory, car plant and abattoir. Iommi ended his time in the steelworks with an accident that sheared off two of his fingertips and nearly ruined his budding career as a guitarist. Osbourne, meanwhile, took up housebreaking and got jailed for six weeks.

Butler told the BBC recently, “It wasn’t a great place to be at that time. We were listening to songs about San Francisco. The hippies were all peace and love and everything. There we were in Aston. Ozzy was in prison from burgling houses, me and Tony were always in fights with somebody… we had quite a rough upbringing. Our music reflected the way we felt.”

© Vertigo Records

If they felt miserable in Aston and channelled that misery into their music, I can only say the misery was worth it. The first, eponymously-named song on their first, eponymously-named album in 1970 sets the tone for Black Sabbath’s career of evil. It’s a gloriously dark and doom-laden affair, opening with rumbles of thunder, the sluicing of heavy rain and the clanging of altar bells. These give way to a funereal chug of heavy guitars and the eerie high-pitched squalls of Ozzy’s voice (“What is this that stands before me? / Figure in black which points at me-e-ee?”), which later speed up for a tumultuous but still ominous climax. I imagine that if any of those peace-and-love hippies whom Butler referred to had gone to a Sabbath gig in 1970 (having ingested some psychedelic substances beforehand) and the gig had opened with this number, they’d have probably fled from the venue screaming in terror with their hands clamped over their ears.

Iommi and Butler were horror-movie fans and their music had a horror-movie vibe. Even the band’s name came from a scary film, 1963’s Black Sabbath, directed by the legendary Mario Bava and starring the legendary Boris Karloff. Also horror-movie-esque is the cover of the first Sabbath album, showing a black-robed lady looming spectrally in the middle of a spooky autumnal landscape – the building in the background is actually Mapledurham Watermill in Oxfordshire. I find it cool that nobody knows the identity of the woman, presumably a briefly-hired model or actress, who posed for the picture. Iommi has claimed that, later, she turned up at one Sabbath concert and said hello to the band. But I like to think she’d never been at the original photo-shoot at all. Rather, she was a ghost that haunted the watermill – and when they developed the cover-photo, her wraithlike image had somehow imposed itself on it.

© Vertigo Records

Black Sabbath produced another album in 1970, Paranoid, which was choc-a-bloc with groovily heavy tunes – the famous title track, the skull-crushing Iron Man, the nihilistic War Pigs and the sublimely dreamy and trippy Planet Caravan, which has been described as ‘the ultimate coming-down song’. The following year’s Master of Reality gave us the jaunty but provocative After Forever (“Would you like to see the Pope on the end of a rope / Do you think he’s a fool?”) and the apocalyptic Children of the Grave. Other classic songs included Supernaut, which turned up on the 1972 album Vol. 4; the exhilarating title track of 1973’s Sabbath Bloody Sabbath that’s perhaps my favourite Sabbath song ever; and the similarly exhilarating Symptom of the Universe on 1974’s Sabotage, which suggests (to me, anyway) Sabbath were secret forbearers of punk rock. 1976’s Technical Ecstasy and 1978’s Never Say Die are less acclaimed and lack a truly killer track, but I’m still partial to them both.

In 1980 we got Heaven and Hell which – shock! horror! – didn’t have Ozzy Osbourne doing vocals. The singer had been sacked from the band due to his massive substance abuse and consequent massive unreliability. While Ozzy maintains that he was no worse a wreck than the other three band-members were at the time, it was surely tough working with a man prone to such misfortunes as snorting a line of ants he’d mistaken for a line of cocaine or being caught by the San Antonio police urinating over the Alamo whilst dressed in a frock. Making a Black Sabbath album without Ozzy sounds as feasible as filming The Lord of the Rings without Gandalf, but Iommi, Butler and Ward wisely recruited the late, great Ronnie James Dio as a replacement. Dio gave Black Sabbath a new lease of life. He made them sound different – his operatic voice a contrast to the wailing alienness of Ozzy’s – but I have no complaints about the resulting album, full of spiffing tracks like Children of the Sea, Neon Knights and Die Young.

© Vertigo Records

Dio sang on the next album for Black Sabbath, 1981’s Mob Rules, and returned to sing on 1992’s Dehumanizer; but they were the only Sabbath albums for a long time that were any good. During the 1980s and 1990s Iommi was the sole founding member who stuck with the band and a succession of jobbing musicians contributed to the records. Singers included Ian Gillan and Glenn Hughes, two alumni of Sabbath’s more mainstream 1970s rivals Deep Purple. Meanwhile, the band seemed to get through drummers at a rate worthy of Spinal Tap, with the ELO’s Bev Bevan, the Clash’s Terry Chimes and the ubiquitous Cozy Powell banging the skins at various times. To be honest, the band’s output during this period – 1983’s Born Again, 1986’s Seventh Star, 1987’s The Eternal Idol, 1989’s Headless Cross, 1990’s Tyr, 1994’s Cross Purposes, 1995’s Forbidden – is pretty rubbish.

Happily, the original line-up had reconciled by the late 1990s and they’ve played together sporadically since then, at least when other work commitments (like Ozzy’s solo career), illness (Iommi was diagnosed as having lymphoma in 2012) and plain old quarrelling (Bill Ward fell out with everyone else and quit in 2012) didn’t get in the way. In 2013 they even managed to produce a new album, 13, which while not quite up to their old standards got some positive reviews and produced a decent single, God is Dead? Filling in for Ward on the drums was Brad Wilk from Rage Against the Machine. I imagine for Wilk getting this job must have been a dream come true.

Well, it seems they’ve finally called it a day. Maybe that’s just as well in Ozzy’s case, since the old boy’s 67 now and surely needs to take it easy after a lifetime of drugs, alcohol, excess and idiocy. (At Christmas, after the news that George Michael and Status Quo’s Rick Parfitt had died within the space of 24 hours, a friend said to me worriedly, “At this rate Ozzy’s not going to make it to the Bells.”)

They deserve to enjoy their retirement for their legacy is huge. Their weighty fingerprints are all over musical movements like grunge and hardcore punk. And they’re clearly major influences on such metallic sub-genres as black metal, doom metal, goth metal, power metal, sludge metal, speed metal and stoner metal. Indeed, they’re responsible for more metal than the Brummie steelworks where the young Tony Iommi lost his fingertips and almost lost his future in music.

From youtube.com / © BBC

August 26, 2022August 29, 2022

What kind of asshat stabs a writer?

From wikipedia.com / © ActuaLitté

During the fortnight since August 12^th, when author Salman Rushdie was attacked and seriously injured before he was due to give a lecture in Chautaugua, New York, I’ve been trying to write something here about the incident. But to be honest, I can’t express my reaction any more succinctly than Stephen King did when he tweeted a day afterwards: “What kind of asshat stabs a writer, anyway? F*cker!”

The asshat and f*cker in question, a 24-year-old called Hadi Matar, was inspired by the fatwa issued in 1989 by Ayatollah Khomeini, then Supreme Leader of Iran, and reaffirmed in 2017 by Khomeini’s successor as Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. Rushdie, of course, received the fatwa on account of his supposedly blasphemous-against-Islam novel The Satanic Verses (1988).

I have to admit that my knowledge of The Satanic Verses is limited. When I tried reading it, I found the opening section, in which the two protagonists Farishta and Chamcha are thrown from an airplane as it explodes over the English Channel, pretentious and badly written and felt disinclined to read the rest of the book. I remember Rushdie using the phrase ‘like titbits of cigar’ to describe how the two men fell from the fragmenting fuselage, and thinking to myself what a bloody horrible simile it was.

Still, I persevered with The Satanic Verses and thought the part that came next, describing Bollywood, was quite engaging. But that dodgy opening section had fatally weakened my interest in it. I was preparing to move to another country at the time and, unfinished, the book got stashed away in a box with some things I wasn’t taking with me. Neither the box nor book have been opened since. I’ve heard that the plot later on has Farishta and Chamcha transforming into an angel and a devil, which sounds intriguing, if a tad similar to what happens in Mervyn Peake’s fantasy novel Mr Pye (1953).

Still, I read 50 pages of the book, which is probably 50 pages more than 99.99% of those clamouring for Rushdie’s execution over the years have read of it. One person I met who definitely had read The Satanic Verses was the CEO of an oil company in Tunisia whom, many years later, I was hired to give English lessons to every week. As his English was already excellent, ours was hardly a teacher-student relationship and I suspect he just wanted a regular opportunity to blether with someone in English about whatever caught his fancy. In addition to being a cerebral and erudite man, he was an observant Muslim. Our lessons took place in the middle of Friday afternoons and were sometimes delayed by 10 or 15 minutes because he was slightly late getting back from Friday prayers at his mosque.

One afternoon, he wanted to talk to me about an incident at the Printemps des Art Fair in La Marsa, a few miles along the coast from Tunis. A couple of the artworks displayed there had caused a riot by hard-line Islamic Salafists, who believed them to be ‘blasphemous’, and during the protests the venue had been looted. My student was incensed by this and particularly incensed at how the Salafists had targeted a painting by the artist Mohamed Ben Slama. This featured God’s name spelt out in configurations of tiny ants which, the Salafists claimed, sacrilegiously reduced Allah to the level of puny insects that scurried about in the dirt. But in fact, my student pointed out, the Koran depicts ants as an intelligent and noble species, even in possession of their own language, and arguably the artist was trying to glorify God through the marvellous intricacies of His creations, even the smallest ones. “Those people who attacked the painting,” he snorted, “haven’t read or understood the Koran properly.”

Then, not missing a beat, he continued, “It’s like Rushdie’s book. Those people calling for him to be killed, they don’t know what they’re talking about. They haven’t even read The Satanic Verses. I have read it and I don’t think it’s blasphemous.”

Meanwhile, depressingly but predictably, the attack on Rushdie has been hijacked by a lot of extreme right-wing, GB News-watching, Enoch Powell-worshipping morons who are trying to peddle it as yet more evidence of the need to stand up against the woke mob. Because apparently that’s what those hideous, Guardian-reading Wokerati will do if they’re not able to cancel your right to free speech – they’ll stab you instead. Oh, and of course it provides them with another excuse to bash Muslims.

Never mind the fact that Rushdie finds their right-wing views abhorrent and indeed, in The Satanic Verses, referred to their heroine Margaret Thatcher as ‘Mrs Torture’. And never mind the fact that their right-wing counterparts in the USA are currently getting onto school boards and purging the libraries and curriculums of the schools under their jurisdiction of books they don’t approve of, usually books that have non-white or gay people as characters, touch on issues such as racism and homophobia, and generally imply that life in the USA isn’t as hunky-dory as it’s supposed to be. Those right-wing gits are as twisted and blinkered as Rushdie’s would-be assassin.

One consequence of this horribleness – I’m now planning to dig out that old copy of The Satanic Verses and give it a second try. And apparently I’m not alone in my new-found desire to read it. Reports say that, in the UK alone, sales of The Satanic Verses have surged so much that Rushdie’s publisher is currently rushing out a reprint. So, Hadi Matar, not only did you fail in your attempt to kill Rushdie, but you’ve given a huge boost to the book you detest so much (though you’ve probably never read it) and more people than ever are being exposed to its blasphemous musings. Well done.

© Viking Penguin

August 17, 2022August 17, 2022

Respect South Park’s authority

© South Park Studios

I remember the moment I fell in love with Trey Parker and Matt Stone’s animated TV comedy show South Park, which first aired a quarter-century – yes, 25 years! – ago last weekend.

It was 1998 and I was watching episode twelve, entitled Mecha–Streisand, of the show’s first season. Until then, South Park had seemed amusing enough. Chronicling the adventures of four kids – ‘everyman’ Stan Marsh, sharp-tongued Jewish lad Kyle Broflovski, parka-shrouded, working-class Kenny McCormick (whose relationship with life, and death, is complicated) and the epically sociopathic Eric Cartman – in the Colorado town of the title, its low-fi animation had been enlivened by some moments of outrageous, by 1998 standards, bad taste.

But for me, with Mecha-Streisand, South Park seemed to become something altogether more audacious and surreal. The episode has Barbra Streisand transforming into a giant Godzilla-style kaiju and stomping all over the town until Robert Smith of the Cure – referred to as ‘Robert Smith of the Cure’ – arrives and transforms too. He becomes a giant moth and ejects the monster-Streisand into outer space. No wonder Kyle cries out in gratitude, “Disintegration is the best album ever!”

© South Park Studios

Since then, I’ve been a big fan of the show, though it definitely enjoyed its glory years during the noughties, when over seven or eight seasons it went into overdrive and churned out magnificent episodes on a regular basis. It’s never quite scaled the same heights afterwards. One problem is that since 2016 American politics have been so insane and, well, South Park-like, that the country has existed beyond the show’s powers to satirise it. Indeed, in a 2015 episode, while the prospect of Donald Trump becoming president still seemed a joke, the show killed off the orange-skinned tycoon. When the real Trump ended up in the White House the following year, South Park had to run an unconvincing parallel-universe storyline where the kids’ unhinged teacher Mr Garrison becomes US president and behaves like Trump for four years.

That’s not to say it isn’t good these days. Unlike other long-running cartoon shows I could mention, which have declined into weary irrelevance, the twenty-something South Park has nobly, if not always successfully, tried to experiment. It’s had full-season story arcs and, during the Covid-19 pandemic, longer-length specials satirising America’s response to the virus. It’s spent much time exploring the topic of political correctness, with surprising depth considering how crudely the show started out in 1998. In 2015, to increase its commentary on this, it introduced the character of PC Principal (“Watch your micro-aggressions, bro!”), who could have been portrayed as just a woke idiot but was rather more nuanced.

© South Park Studios

And it hasn’t been afraid to take much-loved characters off on dark tangents. Witness Stan’s dad Randy, once a gormless but lovable dolt, now a ruthless, profit-obsessed dealer in marijuana. In 2019, Randy even accepted the filthy lucre of the Disney Corporation and murdered Winne the Pooh, whose unfortunate resemblance to Xi Jinping had been holding back Disney’s fortunes in China.

Here, then, are my ten favourite episodes of South Park – though picking just ten has been an almost impossible task.

Scott Tenorman Must Die (2001)

Scott Tenorman Must Die is the first South Park episode to show the full, depraved depths of Cartman’s sociopathy. Glib older kid Scott Tenorman humiliates Cartman, who then plots his revenge. This culminates in Scott being tricked into eating the bodies of his dead parents, which Cartman has cunningly turned into chili. To make things that bit worse, Scott’s favourite band Radiohead show up just as he discovers the truth and bursts into tears. “You know, everyone has problems, but it doesn’t mean you have to be a little cry-baby about it,” snorts Thom Yorke before he and his bandmates walk off in disgust.

Casa Bonita (2003)

More top-notch Cartman sociopathy. He convinces the sweet but idiotically naïve and gullible Butters Stotch – South Park’s unofficial ‘fifth Beatle’ to Cartman, Stan, Kyle and Kenny – that a huge meteor is on a collision course with earth and hides him away in a secret bunker. To keep him hiding there, he later convinces him that the post-collision earth has been overrun by ravenous, radioactive cannibals. The reason? Butters is on the guest list for Kyle’s birthday party at the kitschy Mexican-themed restaurant Casa Bonita and Cartman isn’t. Casa Bonita is, weirdly, Cartman’s idea of heaven and he reasons his name will be added to that precious guest list if Butters disappears. Trey Parker and Matt Stone actually bought the real-life Casa Bonita in 2021.

You Got F’d in the A (2004)

This is the perfect South Park episode if you felt you were the terminally uncool kid at school, forever overshadowed by much trendier schoolmates. Stan is challenged to a ‘dance-off’ by a squad of obnoxiously hip kids from Orange County, California, and is humbled when the best he can do is shuffle his feet to Billy Ray Cyrus’s Achy Breaky Heart (1992). Urged on by his dad Randy – back then hapless but good-hearted, rather than the out-and-out arsehole he is nowadays – Stan puts together a team to represent South Park and take on the Orange County kids at an official dance competition. The team includes one of the town’s Goth Kids (catchphrase: “If you want to be one of the non-conformists, all you have to do is dress just like us and listen to the same music we do”), a dancing chicken called Jeffy, and Butters, who’s been suffering from severe PTSD since a tap-dancing routine went wrong. Therefore, hopes of success are not high. The outcome is unexpected, brutal and gratifying.

© South Park Studios

AWESOM-O (2004)

Butters receives a mysterious present, a sentient robot called AWESOM-O. It’s really Cartman in disguise, the little scumbag intent on digging up more dirt on Butters so that he can humiliate him further. What he discovers, though, is that Butters has a secret video of Cartman, showing him cross-dressing as Britney Spears. Thus, Cartman has to remain in disguise for longer than planned, until he learns the location of the incriminating video. During the episode, Butters and his new robot pal end up in LA, where AWESOM-Os remarkable artificial intelligence earns him the attention of, first, some Hollywood executives, and then the top brass in the military-industrial complex. None of the adults seem to notice that AWESOM-O is, in fact, a portly kid wearing a couple of cardboard boxes. AWESOM-O is another classic featuring the Cartman-Butters double-act. As is…

The Death of Eric Cartman (2005)

Cartman does something even more reprehensible than tricking Scott Tenorman into eating his parents – he scoffs all the delicious, crispy chicken-skins on a Kentucky Fried Chicken takeaway when the other kids aren’t looking. (Kenny is so upset when he finds out that he bursts into tears.) The kids retaliate by totally ignoring Cartman the next day. Cartman, trying to fathom why everybody appears not to see or hear him anymore, decides it must be because he died during the night. For some reason, though, his spirit remains marooned on earth just like Patrick Swayze’s was in Ghost (1990). However, the kids have forgotten to tell Butters that no one’s speaking to Cartman. When he finds himself able to communicate with Cartman as usual, the duo conclude he’s the equivalent of the medium in Ghost played by Whoopi Goldberg. Much hilarity / stupidity ensues as Butters and Cartman try to get the latter’s spirit to pass on to the great hereafter.

Erection Day (2005)

If The Death of Eric Cartman spoofs Ghost, the closing minutes of Erection Day provide a piss-take, both funny and gruelling, of the most famous scene in An Officer and a Gentleman (1982). This episode centres on Jimmy Valmer, the crutch-using, stuttering kid in class whose catchphrase is, “I’m not handicapped, I’m handi-capable!” and whose ambition is become a stand-up comedian. Obviously, Jimmy is determined to win the school’s annual talent contest – other contestants include Cartman doing an impersonation of Tony Montana from Scarface (1983) and the Goth Kids performing a synth number called Talent Shows are for Fags – but a strange affliction threatens to ruin his act. He keeps suffering sudden, unprovoked and massive erections. Some misguided advice leads him to believe that the only way to cure the affliction is to lose his virginity. Then, venturing into South Park’s red-light district, he becomes involved with a decrepit prostitute called Nutgobbler and her ultra-violent pimp.

© South Park Studios

Tsst (2006)

One reliably depressing character in South Park is Eric Cartman’s spineless mother Liane, devoted to her hideous offspring while he bullies, manipulates and torments her. In Tsst, Liane Cartman finally tries to tame her son by enlisting the help of some reality TV show hosts. She brings in Jo Frost from Supernanny (2004-08), who ends up in an asylum eating her own faeces. (“It’s from hell!”) Then she tries Cesar Millan from Dog Whisperer (2004-12). Millan’s approach, of treating Cartman like a badly-behaved canine, has better results.

Go God Go / Go God Go XII (2006)

An ambitious two-parter making fun of everything from Richard Dawkins’ book The God Delusion (2006) to hoary old sci-fi TV show Buck Rogers in the 25^th Century (1979-81), Go God Go has Cartman unable to wait a few weeks until the new Nintendo Wii console appears in the shops. Instead, he has himself cryogenically frozen until it goes on sale. Inevitably, things go wrong and he overshoots his target-date by 500 years and wakes up in a strange future world where everyone is an atheist and Richard Dawkins is hailed as a prophet, yet different factions with different interpretations of Dawkins’ pronouncements fight their own ‘holy’ wars. For funniness, though, nothing quite matches an early scene where Ms Garrison (who by this time has had a gender re-assignment) reluctantly teaches the kids the theory of evolution: “So there you go. You’re the retarded offspring of five monkeys having butt-sex with a fish-squirrel. Congratulations!”

© South Park Studios

Breast Cancer Show Ever (2008)

The finest hour of Wendy Testaburger, Stan’s prim, pink-clad but formidable girlfriend. One morning she gives a speech to her class about the threat breast cancer poses to women and gets heckled by Cartman, who’s greatly amused by her repeated use of the word ‘breast’. Enraged, she challenges him to a fight after school. Cartman agrees, then gets increasingly worried about what’s coming to him and tries increasingly desperate strategies to wheedle out of it. Breast Cancer Show Ever ends the way it should, with Wendy beating the crap out of the evil little shit.

The Ungroundable (2008)

The Ungroundable uses a common South Park trope, that of the confusion caused when the kids interpret the grown-up (or more grown-up) world according to their own juvenile and fanciful logic. Butters assumes that some older kids at the school, obsessed with Stephanie Meyer’s Twilight books and modelling themselves on vampires, really are vampires. To destroy them, he joins forces with the Goth Kids – who merely object to the Vampire Kids on the grounds of them being douchebags. Before then, Butters mistakenly believes he’s been bitten and has become a vampire himself. And whose blood must he drain? Cartman’s, of course: “…if someone must die so that I can feed… I choose thee!”

I know – all the episodes I’ve listed are more than a decade old. But give 2020s South Park a go. It’s still pretty funny. And it’s a hell of a lot funnier than The Simpsons is these days.

August 2, 2022August 18, 2022

Whatever happened to kids’ Euro-telly?

What a melancholy coincidence… A few weeks ago, for the first time in years, something got me thinking about the 1960s children’s TV show The Adventures of Robinson Crusoe and I watched part of an episode of it on YouTube. I wondered if its star, the Austrian actor Robert Hoffman, was still on the go, googled him and was pleased to find that he was. Then, the other day, I read on social media that Hoffman had just passed away.

Anyway, here’s something I originally posted in 2012, which mentions Hoffman and The Adventures of Robinson Crusoe. It’s now been updated for 2022.

Politics, the economy and, indeed, cultural attitudes in Britain in the last half-dozen years have been dominated by Brexit. This, depending on your point-of-view, has either been a joyous and much-needed liberation of Britain from the stifling bureaucracy and political interference it’d had to put up while it was a member of the European Union; or the most disastrous decision Britain has made since the 1956 Suez Crisis, one that’ll doom the country to being a parochial, xenophobic wee dump that backpedals towards the 1950s while the other European nations get on with living in the 21^st century. Anyone who regularly reads this blog will know which view I subscribe to. Namely, that if you believe there’s anything positive about Brexit, you must have one of those heads that proverbially ‘zip up the back’.

The Brexit vote in 2016 came 43 years after Britain joined the European Union, or the European Economic Community (EEC) as it was then. However, it’d be wrong to believe before 1973 Britons were wholly detached from the culture of continental Europe. Indeed, though I was a mere mite before 1973, much of my headspace had already been colonised by the continent. This was thanks to children’s television.

In the early 1970s, the BBC felt obliged not only to entertain kids after they’d arrived home from school and broadcast juvenile programmes from 4.00 to 5.45 PM, but also to broadcast such programmes during the mornings of school-holiday periods. The morning schedules of the summer holidays in particular were a challenge for the BBC to fill with kiddie-related material. As a result, the channel had to regularly raid its archives for old, dubbed children’s shows from France, Germany and elsewhere and broadcast those.

Let’s begin with my least favourite show. Growing up on a Northern Irish farm where there weren’t many neighbours to mix with, I depended for company during the summer holidays on the elderly couple who lived a few hundred yards along the road from our farmhouse. More precisely, I depended on their two granddaughters, who were around my age and usually came to spend much of the summer with them. Luckily for me, the neighbours’ granddaughters were a pair of Tomboys who were dependable for games of cops and robbers, cowboys and Indians, and other activities normally more associated with young males. However, they had one weakness, a fondness for a show called White Horses.

This was a co-production between German and Yugoslavian TV that’d been made back in 1965 but that rarely seemed to be off the BBC’s children’s holiday schedules in the early-to-mid-1970s. It followed the adventures of a girl from Belgrade, Julia, who was staying on her uncle’s horse ranch. Populating the ranch were handsome white steeds that made my two female playmates swoon with adoration.

As a boy, and not a fan of horses (white or otherwise), I thought this was the dumbest programme ever. And it constantly annoyed me that on those summer mornings the games of cops and robbers and cowboys and Indians would abruptly stop and my two playmates would run indoors to sit goggle-eyed in front of their television the moment White Horses came on. I have to say, though, that while I generally remember other kids’ TV programmes from then but not the details of individual episodes, two episodes of White Horses remain etched on my mind.

In one episode Julia found a metallic, saucer-shaped object on the grounds of the ranch and carried it to her uncle, who immediately screamed, “It’s a mine!” and flung it away as far as he could. At which point it exploded. In the other episode, the ranch’s dog was seen frothing at the mouth and in the ensuing pandemonium all the ranch-hands tore around on horseback, trying to hunt the rabid beast down. Come to think of it, for a silly girls’ show, White Horses was actually quite dark. It left me with the conviction that the European continent was a real danger zone, riddled with unexploded World War II landmines and overrun with rabid mammals. That’s a message I’m sure Brexiters like Nigel Farage and Jacob Rees-Mogg would approve of.

© Philips

One thing that really annoyed me about White Horses was the sickly theme song. This wasn’t a feature of the original German-Yugoslavian show but had been recorded by the Dublin singer Jackie Lee and stuck onto the dubbed BBC version. The lyrics went: “On my horses let me ride away, to my world of dreams so far away, let me run, to the sun, to a world my heart can understand, it’s a gentle warm and wonderland, faraway, stars away, where the clouds are made of candyfloss, as the day is born, when the stars are gone, we’ll race to meet the dawn…” Despite my intense dislike for it, however, the song is now regarded as a kitsch classic and has been covered many times, usually by ‘knowing’ indie-pop bands like Kitchens of Distinction and the Trashcan Sinatras. Even Catatonia’s Cerys Matthews has had a go at singing it. Here, if you can stomach it, is the original version.

Now if you wanted a Euro-kids’ TV show with a seriously bad-ass theme song, you didn’t have to look any further than The Flashing Blade, a historical swashbuckler made by France’s Office de Radiodiffusion Television Francaise (ORTF) in 1967. Set in the early 17^th century, during the War of Mantuan Succession between France and Spain, the show’s theme song was accompanied by footage at the start of each episode showing the principals racing manically across countryside on horseback. Their manic-ness, of course, was increased by the fact that the film was wildly speeded up. The singer implored: “You’ve got to fight for what you want, and all that you believe, it’s right to fight for what we want, to live the way we please, as long as we have done our best, then no one can do more, and life and love and happiness, are well worth fighting for.” Here’s the show’s blood-stirring opening on YouTube.

Unlike White Horses, I don’t remember much about the story of The Flashing Blade, except that to my impressionable young mind it was very like The Three Musketeers. For some reason, however, I’ve never forgotten a scene where two characters – one presumably villainous because he sported a pointed beard – were playing chess and the villain made a comment about the uselessness of pawns with regard to the outcome of the game. The other player immediately came back with an observation along the lines of: “Even the smallest pebble can shatter the most beautiful of mirrors.” As a seven-year-old, this seemed the profoundest thing I’d ever heard.

Also originating with France’s ORTF in 1967 was Les Chevaliers du Ciel, which ran on Gallic television for the next three years. By the time it turned up in anglicised form on British TV it’d been retitled The Aeronauts and given a new, hard-rockin’, by BBC standards, English-language theme song by the Canadian musician and TV presenter Rick Jones. His Aeronauts song went: “Better than best, boys, we pass every test, you’re ahead of the rest, when those crime-fighting Aeronauts are cutting those bounds, in a fury of sound, you’re a loser all round, against the crook-catching Aeronauts, so play in the wind, boys, you better give in, because your troubles begin when those two daring aeronauts fly!“ I can’t find the opening sequence for this one, only the song itself.

Incidentally, the memorably bearded, balding and intense-looking Rick Jones was no stranger to children’s TV programmes, as in 1972 he hosted Fingerbobs, which must’ve featured the cheapest and most low-fi puppets in the history of television. Over seven years he also worked on the BBC’s long-running show for pre-school kids, Play School (1964-88), a stint that ended when, to quote his Wikipedia entry, he was ‘fired by the BBC, after a fan sent him two cannabis spliffs at the corporation’s address’. Jones, alas, died in San Francisco last year.

Once again, though I remember the theme music well, I can’t recall much of what went on in The Aeronauts. Maybe that was just as well, since the show was about two hunky young guys called Ernest and Michel who were pilots in the French Air Force. As such, they might’ve spent the episodes bombing la merde out of insurgents in North Africa or Greenpeace activists in the South Pacific.

I’ve spoken ironically about the music on The Flashing Blade and The Aeronauts, but there’s no disputing the fact that the theme tune of Belle and Sebastian had a genuine haunting quality. This was the Anglicised version of Belle et Sebastien, which ran on French television from 1965 to 1970 and was based on the novel by Cecile Aubrey about a boy and his big Pyrenean mountain dog. It’s fitting that wistful Glaswegian indie-pop band Belle & Sebastian took their name from this show. And apparently its theme song was covered by New Zealand singer-songwriter Bic Runga a few years ago. Here’s the original version.

There are a number of things I remember about Belle and Sebastian, apart from its music and its obvious star, the hefty canine Belle. I remember being awed by the sheer, bleak mountain landscapes that formed its backdrop – it’d been filmed around the village of Belvedere in the Alpes-Maritimes. Indeed, years later, when I finally saw the Alps for real, the first association I made in my head was with that old French kids’ TV show.

I also remember how the voices in Belle and Sebastian puzzled me. Not being aware of dubbing procedures or the fact that the BBC employed a small group of actors to do the English dialogue for these imported shows, I couldn’t figure out at the time why the adults in Belle and Sebastian sounded exactly like the adults in White Horses. By the way, Sebastian in the show was played by Mehdi el Glaoui, who was Cecile Audrey’s son. Little Mehdi’s father was Moroccan and indeed his grandfather had been the Pasha of Marrakech.

However, musically, the best Euro-kids’ programme of all was surely The Adventures of Robinson Crusoe. Robinson Crusoe was of course a British cultural property, but this children’s drama version of the story had been made in 1964 by France’s Franco London Films (FLF) and starred Austrian actor Robert Hoffman in the title role. The BBC got its hands on it, dubbed it and broadcast it regularly during its children’s TV schedules from the mid-1960s to the late 1970s.

The BBC added a lovely, mock-classical score composed by Robert Mellin and P. Reverberi, which managed to be both stirring and slightly desolate. I’ve read somewhere that the spiralling opening chords were meant to represent the breakers striking the beach of Crusoe’s desert island. It doesn’t surprise me that when electronica band The Orbital put together 19 of their favourite tracks in 2002 for the Back to Mine compilation series, they decided to close their compilation with this tune.

To be fair to The Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, a lot more of the show has remained with me over the years than just its theme music. For a long time, Hoffman’s youthful features formed my image of how the character should look – so that when I saw other versions of the story later on, such as a 1974 BBC adaptation with Stanley Baker and a more politically correct movie adaptation called Man Friday (1975) with Peter O’Toole and Richard Roundtree, I couldn’t accept them. The series took liberties with Daniel Dafoe’s novel, though. For example, it climaxed with a shipload of pirates invading Crusoe’s island. At which point, Man Friday took off and hid in the island’s jungle, and started killing the pirates off one by one.

Finally, for pure weirdness, you couldn’t beat The Singing Ringing Tree, which had started life as a film made by an East German studio, Das Singende Klingende Baumchen. The BBC duly chopped it into TV-serial form. Even by the standards of the other Euro-kids’ shows I saw at the time, The Singing Ringing Tree was particularly venerable, dating back to 1957. It lingers in my mind because, although it was ostensibly a fairy tale, it spooked the hell out of me.

With characters including an evil dwarf, a humanoid bear creature (who was actually a prince transformed by a magic spell) and a gigantic goldfish, the series resembled a Brothers Grimm story directed by David Lynch. Reviewers, at least those who took the show seriously, noted an influence of German expressionism on how it looked and an influence of The Cabinet of Dr Caligari (1920) in particular. To my seven-year-old sensibilities, the fate suffered by the dwarf at the end was especially traumatising. He was last seen swooping around in the air and then plunging through the thin-crusted ground and vanishing in a belch of volcanic, sulphurous smoke.

If this makes me sound wimpish, I should point out that I wasn’t alone in being scared by the show. The comedian and impersonator Paul Whitehouse said of The Singing Ringing Tree that it used to make him ‘pee his pants’ when he was a kid. Perhaps as a way of exorcism, Whitehouse staged a spoof of it on his popular comedy programme The Fast Show (1994-97) called The Singing Ringing Binging Plinging Tinging Plinking Plonking Boinging Tree with, somewhat inevitably, the ubiquitous Warwick Davies in the role of the dwarf. And in 2006, the show lent its name to a ‘wind powered sound sculpture’ in the Pennines in Lancashire.

And there ends my round-up of kids’ Euro-telly. They might have been a set of old, cheap and badly-dubbed TV shows, but nonetheless they converted me into a good little European – even if at the time I still thought Brussels was something you were force-fed at Christmas, not the hub of one of the most important political and trading alliances in the world.