DEAD OF NIGHT: A WOMAN SOBBING

 

More shivers from the haunted BBC back in 1972.

Perfect for Christmas!

DEAD OF NIGHT: RETURN FLIGHT

 

Old fashioned goosebumps for Boxing Day.

From the Beeb in 1972.

BBC'S LATE NIGHT HORROR SERIES REMEMBERED: the Corpse That Can't Play

A scary one for Christmas Eve, I think I remember this series shown in 1968, particularly the creepy black and white 'twisting faces' introduction.

More or less a lost TV series, this is a rare BBC episode on You Tube.

Is it one you remember?

DEAD OF NIGHT: THE EXORCISM

 

What would Christmas be without a few old school scares!

From the haunted 1970's and perfect for my birthday chills!

On the BBC 1972.

The Search for the Radio Times Lord of the Rings Art

In 1980/81 I worked and lived on an RSPB nature reserve, where in the winter evenings I listened to the BBC radio serial of Lord of the Rings in our cabin. Volunteers, hippies and punks gathered round the wireless to listen to Tolkien's tale.

It was a really wonderful production and fitted right into my Middle Earth craze at the time. I loved it.

I've loved all things Tolkien forever and remember seeing the amazing artwork connected to that BBC radio play, in particular this fantastic golden illustration on the big BBC box-set of cassette tapes that were released, one I still hope to own one day.

But here's a blog entry from Brian Sibley about searching for and eventually owning something much more unique, the actual original BBC and Radio Times artwork itself!

His story of how he tracked it down from the Radio Times is a truly fascinating tale. 

I hope you enjoy it on Brian's blog. I sure did.

https://briansibleysblog.blogspot.com/2021/02/cover-story-lord-of-rings-on-radio.html?m=1 

SKIP AND FUFFY?

I found this recently, a Skip and Fuffy jigsaw puzzle based on characters from BBC TV's multi-coloured Swap Shop in the Seventies.

I don't remember them at all. You?

KEV'S CYBERMEN GUN ON TV!

Cybermen invaded BBC Breakfast last Thursday. The one on the left is carrying a gun that I made!

This is excellent news Doctor......

Kevin D

UK

REPAIR SHOP YELLOW SUBMARINE

image: BBC

I caught on the tellybox an episode of BBC's The Repair Shop, where this Yellow Submarine was restored to what you see in the picture.

It was of great interest as I both had a Yellow Sub as a kid and I restored one myself in the 1990's, an early and very poor attempt at anything of the sort.

It was a great TV restoration and the craftspeople in the Repair Shop are so skilled it's amazing. I was intrigued as to how the restorer would do it. Bearing in mind that every part of the Yellow Submarine can be bought off the shelf as a repro part nowadays, I knew the restorer would ignore this and do everything from scratch.

Coincidentally the periscopes he made from modelling putty. Years ago when I made my own scopes I used Das Pronto. Mine were terrible. The restorer's were simply brilliant, especially once the paint lady had painted them yellow and red.

With all the mechanisms fixed, a new propeller made from plastic and the periscopes in place, the owner of the special object was thrilled to bits. It all worked and looked fab!

Interestingly the back-story was that this Corgi Submarine was given to the owner's Dad on the night of the Yellow Submarine film premier in the Sixties, whilst attending it!

Have you been given a special toy? Have you restored a die-cast, even a Yellow Sub readers?

HUMBER AND TRENTING

 The Moonbase Missus and me have just got back from an overnight stay in our new fave town, Barton Upon Humber in North Lincolnshire. An hour away from Moonbase down the M62, its old and pretty enough to keep us both happy and enough charity shops and cafes to make a sound Saturday morning.

 We also went to a Friday night gig, the main reason for going, to see one Nick Harper at the Ropery Hall.

Nick Harper is the son of folk rock legend Roy Harper, as in Hats off to .... by Led Zep. It can't have been easy forging a musical career in such a legendary shadow but Nick, who we only discovered last month, is enough of a songsmith and above all a guitar virtuoso to completely hold his own and being now 58 has done for decades.

Mind-blowingly original in both voice and guitar you can catch up with Nick Harper here. He's playing Birkenhead tonight!

Mr. Harper was ably supported by a fabulous warm-up act, Patrick Duff. Another fabulous singer-songwriter and guitarist, the small Barton crowd were definately blown away with his seasoned talent and incredible set of lungs! As a teenager he was the frontman of indie band Strangelove, compatriots of Britpop founders Suede and hailed as the next big thing before rock 'n' roll took its toll. You can read about Patrick's life here. We bought his biography for a friend.

After a decent kip overnight we hit Barton's church museum and shops this morning, fuelled by coffee and a Lincolnshire sausage butty.

St Peter's Church is a medieval structure now run as a museum by English Heritage. Full of preserved skeletons of dead residents, ample diseased bones, split skulls and burial artefacts from its hundreds of graves, its one of the most dug-up and researched places from the Middle Ages anywhere. Well worth a visit especially if you're a member of English Heritage, its a grounding pile with its many dark spaces like this, the bell tower.

The charity shops were reassuringly full of the living residents of Barton and proved bountiful too. Well at least I thought so. See what you think in the snap below.

The K-Tel 40 Supergreats double album, £1, is in near mint condition, a gift for a mate; the JLA novel collection I'd never seen before and in very good shape for £1 each too; the Dr. Who VHS tapes were a punt to be honest - being from the early 1990's they're not old enough for my own VHS collection but maybe of interest to a buyer on Ebay. £1 each, the double set £3.

There were lots more Dr. Who VHS tapes - should I have got them all? -  and a huge collection of hardback books called the History of Dr. Who, each book sealed in plastic and unopened and probably a part-work. At £3 each they were too rich for my purse. What do you think? 

I also snaffled this Dragon magazine from the hey-day of Kung Fu.

With the great Jimmy Wang Yu on the cover and also the centrefold, I so remember these mags and had them all as a youngster. I still have a quite a few now boxed up with my Inside Kung Fu pile in the attic. Did you have magazines like this as a kid?

I was also tempted by this Starline LP of TV Themes from the 1970's, which included the wonderful Catweazle [was it shown were you are?], the classic Please Sir and the Fenn Street Gang, which I think was a Please Sir spin-off, is that right?

Being by the Pandora Orchestra I didn't succumb as anything might happen once opened!

We then set off and toured down the Humber and its tributary the Trent on the eastern banks around Alkborough. Have you been there?

Alkborough Flats is an ethereal drenching of three rivers meeting in the mud. A primitive place complete with an ancient circular turf maze, Julians Bower.

The land and villages around Barton on the Humber and the Trent all seem ancient. Its like stepping back a few hundred years just being there. Flat vistas, distant rises, red brick hamlets, russet soil, wide long rivers, aged trees and empty lanes all give the area an other-worldly feel..

My final shot is a return to St. Peter's. As soon as aI saw the ladder propped up against a bare medieval wall I thought of that scene in the Stone Tape.

You know the one, where a young girl's ghost lets out a blood-curdling scream as she stands at the top of a set of stone steps next to an ancient bare wall!

BBC

Shown to a snug, festive but unwary British public on Christmas Night 1972, the BBC and Nigel Kneale created one of the scariest TV shows ever made. I had just turned 11 and it frightened the bejeebers out of me, as it did Jane Asher's character pictured below near the dreadful steps to nowhere. I hope the Beeb shows it again this Christmas, do you readers?

BBC

PRIME CUTS: THE BBC SOUND EFFECTS OF DEATH AND HORROR

As a teenager I was nuts about monsters.

Films and comics were my main course and the grislier the better, so when the BBC Radiophonics Workshop issued its first Sound Effects of Death and Horror in 1977 I was thrilled to add grisly sounds to my menu!

I was 16 when the record came out, my secondary school days nearly over but my love of monsters as strong as ever. The LP cover was a absolute cracker, as gory as anything past like those gruesome Witches Tales comics covers. To be honest I'm amazed the BBC had the courage to release it at all!

There's so much going on on the cover art, something for everyone! Back then it was always the circular wasp woman in the round window that mesmerised me, a bit like those hypnotic port-holes on the Led Zep III LP cover.

Humorously released as Volume 13, Mike Harding and those clever chaps and chappesses at the BBC Radiophonics Workshop didn't pull their punches when it came to content. I clearly remember being shocked by some of the titles, especially  number 2 'Arm Chopped Off.' and number 4 'Sawing Head Off'. I recall reading that it was actually cabbages that were being chopped in half, thank God!

My own copy of this LP was sadly lost in time but I was re-united with it about 10 years ago when my daughter got it me for Christmas, which I promptly framed and hung it on the wall pride of place over the stairwell, so I could see it every morning. My Grandson, Junior, likes it too, although I don't dally as we descend.

In 1979 the Beeb issued a second bloody helping, 'More Sound Effects of Death and Horror'. 

I never owned this second album but was lucky enough to pick up a copy at a car boot sale a few years back, along with a music cassette version of the first record, which was fun!

There was a third 'Even More ....' record in 1981 but I've only ever seen this online and by then I'd left the country and parked my monsters for a bit.

Researching for this post I've discovered that a new generation of 90's horror fans were treated to the first two BBC records on the new-fangled format of CD. Titled Essential Death and Horror, its a fair crack at the old cover art but I'm afraid I need a twelve inch square to get my blood moving.

If the CD wasn't enough bone-crunching progress, in 2016 Demon Records, in a fit of utter nostalgia, re-released the original LP, this time in blood-spattered coloured vinyl for a whole new generation of boys and ghouls! Or maybe it's just for us oldies!

Did you listen to BBC sounds effects of death and horror readers?

*

All images from Ebay and Amazon

THE LAST BBC GHOST STORIES FOR CHRISTMAS IN THE 1970's.

Our first night home after getting back from our Christmas break in Whitby was spent in front of the telly with Blue the old dog, back from his holiday at Mutlins. It's still very festive with the tree lights casting their magic so a few glasses of sherry and some cheese and crackers came out too.

The Missus caught up with an omnibus of Call The Midwife on TV and laptop-earphones at the ready I re-discovered an old Xmas gift, a boxed DVD set of BBC Ghost Stories for Christmas I got a few years ago and a real slice of vintage nostalgia from when I were a mere lad.

I decided to watch two stories I'd not seen before, both appearing at the end of the series at Christmas in the late 1970's. They were also unusual in that a new director was brought in, they were written especially for the BBC and they were not period pieces. You could also say that they were folk horror rather than ghost stories, a sign of the times back then perhaps. Don't read any further if you don't want to know what happens.

The first, Stigma, is about a menhir being moved from a garden adjacent to Avebury Stone Circle. Not something I would do. As soon as the stone is lifted by workmen the woman of the house is afflicted with bleeding from the skin. As the workmen discover an ancient skeleton riven with long daggers beneath the stone the woman's bleeding becomes fatal. Her daughter tells the workmen how witches were once killed and buried this way. The end.

Stigma reminded me of the themes found in more horror-based TV series like Beasts and folk-horror TV plays like Muren and The Photograph. Having camped in Avebury Ring in the late Seventies, when this was first shown on the telly, the film struck a real chord with me and took me right back to my new age days.

The second, the Ice House, is less straightforward I thought. It concerns a guest house run by an odd young brother and sister. A man checks in for a period of saunas, massage and general relaxation. The owners give him all their attention and show him their beloved tropical and intoxicating vine and strange ice house. He sees a face in the ice. The guest becomes obsessed with both the vine and ice and the siblings guide him steadily towards the open door of the ice house, which he willingly enters. The end.

All is not what it seems in the Ice House and I'm not sure exactly what was going on. The brother and sister appear to be extending people's lives by freezing them in the ice, from which they re-emerge somewhat colder. The vine appears to be other-worldly - alien? - and the siblings kiss beneath it. Everyone in the film talks strangely. You could say posh but that doesn't describe it. The pronoun 'one' is used constantly and does create an aura of eeriness and manipulation. I'm really not sure at all what the siblings were: witches? ancient beings? aliens?

Both TV films are available on BBC iPlayer for a while.

Have you seen either of these readers? What did you think?

VECTIS AND THE BBC WANT TO HEAR FROM TOY COLLECTORS!

Thanks Arto for the heads up. Readers, your chance to show off your collections on the BBC!

	July Auction Dates    Tuesday 13th - Specialist Sale Wednesday 14th - Specialist 1/18 Scale Collection Thursday 22nd - Tinplate & General Toy Sale Friday 23rd - Model Train Sale Thursday 29th - Matchbox Sale Friday 30th - Doll and Teddy Bear Sale
Thornaby Head Office     +44 (0) 1642 750 616    Oxford Office               +44 (0) 1993 709 424
NEW TELEVISION SERIES ABOUT TOYS TO BE FILMED AT VECTIS     Exciting news!   We're letting the cameras in to make a brand new ten-part documentary series for UKTV called Scouting for Toys.  For the next few months, a team from BBC Studios will be based here at our HQ in the northeast to explore the weird and wonderful world of toy collecting and toy auctions - and they'd love to hear from you.    So, if you're a buyer, a seller, a collector, a dealer or an expert and you have an interesting "toy story" - or you know somebody who does - please get in touch.     They are after anybody with a passion for toys, basically.  We know it won't be everybody's cup of tea but you can have a friendly chat with them before committing to anything - they don't bite! Naturally, the real stars of the show will be the toys so if you are sitting on a treasure trove of rare items, or you've just found something in the attic and you want to get an expert opinion on it, why not get in touch?    No story (or toy) is too big or small!   If you're interested in taking part or want to find out more please feel free to get in touch with the Kirk at BBC team, or talk to one of us. Email: kirk.barber@bbc.co.uk       admin@vectis.co.uk

MOLLY AND MACK'S TOY STALL

I enjoyed watching Molly and Mack on CBBC with Moonbase Junior yesterday. He liked it too.

Molly and Mack have a second hand toy stall in the Big Hub Market in Bridgetown, a fictional Scottish town. 

The children's show is all about the adventures Molly and Mack have on the stall and the things they stock. Very cute all round. 

Here's the stall. There's some interesting stuff. A few robots too. Anything you like?

Here's Molly and Mack's page on CBeebies,

https://www.bbc.co.uk/cbeebies/shows/molly-and-mack

Molly and Mack is filmed in Govan in Glasgow and North Queensferry in Fife, with the tremendous Forth Bridge used as a backdrop for the made-up Bridgetown.

Its unusual to have a vintage toy stall centre-stage in a kids show. I like it of course! It reminds me of that obscurity in the worlds of Gerry Anderson, Candy and Andy, who also helped out in a toy shop, a magic one run by bears. Just a comic though and a Dinky toy. It never made it to TV.

Here's Candy and Andy's toyshop. Anything you like?

Have you seen Molly and Mack?

Its on before Sarah and Duck.

WELSH TOY MANUFACTURING

This is an interesting 2016 BBC article about toy manufacturing in Wales and its decline.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-wales-35535265

BARNABY GOES FISHING? DO YOU REMEMBER BARNABY?

This old kid's booklet fell out of the bookcase.

Cute but I don't know the BBC's Barnaby. Do you?