Scan and pan: Remember this golden classic?

It all started when, for some inexplicable reason, I remembered a 1960s Saturday matinee serial I used to love, called The Flashing Blade. It was a French historical drama that might these days be called a bodice-ripper if it hadn’t been made for a junior audience. I hadn’t thought about this show for a decade or so, and the last time I did a web search for it was in the pre-Google internet dark ages.

I remembered being besotted with the female lead of this serial, but all I could recall about her was long brunette hair and a kind of Mediterranean look. But when I finally found a website that referred to The Flashing Blade, I was surprised to discover that the subject of my pre-teen lust exists apparently only in my mind. The heroine of the series was a blonde. Memories are not only selective, they’re idealised.

The Little Gems website contains this touchingly familiar description of the Flashing Blade experience:

Remember in the early 70s coming downstairs on a Saturday morning and switching on the television set (then waiting an age for it to come on). Tuning in (with those huge chunky buttons) to the BBC’s morning children’s selection would often result in this classic programme being in front of you. The music and lyrics will start to drive you mad though as it is one of those pieces that you cannot get out of your head. The Flashing Blade — who in the right mind thought this would be of interest to children on a Saturday morning. Well whoever you were, you deserve a gold medal as it worked for me and my sister. Both of us were glued to the box watching this dubbed French epic drama (although I fully admit that neither of use really knew much about what was going on — still it had cannon, castles, horses, swords, fights and of course heroes). Strange to some extent since around this time the BBC had a programme which was trying to get us all to switch off the television set and go and do something less boring instead (glad that programme never worked for me). The Flashing Blade was in some respects similar to Belle and Sebastien in that I never ever got to see the last episode as some Aunt or Great Granny would appear and whisk my sister and I off to some holiday destination for the day (even now, that bugs the hell out of me). Originally broadcast in 1969 (Episode 6 was shown on Monday 1st May 1969 at 17:20-17:44 on BBC1), The Flashing Blade was shown well into the 1970s and was a different but nevertheless superb show to be screened on a Saturday morning (certainly beats the rubbish today’s children have to put up with on a Saturday morning).

Well done, John Archbold at Little Gems. Those are my approximate memories of The Flashing Blade, as well. Apart from the mysterious brunette, that is. Perhaps she was in Belle and Sebastien instead. Or maybe my unrequited love was a blonde, after all. Anyway, the show was dubbed into English and the French original, made in 1967, was apparently called Le Chevalier Tempete.

As I dallied at Little Gems, fragments of Michael Bond’s The Herbs resurfaced. In primary school I used to try drawing the characters, especially Parsley the Lion. My lack of artistic skill predated Mr Bean’s. My sister, four years younger than me, liked Lizzie Dripping. I also remember Bleep and Booster, about Booster, the Space Boy, and his robot friend Bleep. This segment originally ran as a regular feature of Blue Peter. Made using black and white stills, it incorporated such space-age special effects as zooming in and out, and panning across the screen. Heady stuff.

I haven’t thought about any of those shows for the better part of 30 years.

Orlando was a 1965-1968 series that starred Sam Kydd. My memories of this show are extremely sketchy, but then I was only eight when it finished. Wikipedia refers to it as a “comic thriller series aimed at young adults”. For some reason, I thought Kydd’s character Orlando was a lighthouseman or a sailor, and that he wore what these days would be called a beanie (back then, a plain old woolly hat), although in the only photograph I could find of him, at Television Heaven, he’s wearing one of those little Moroccan numbers popular with hookah smokers and 1990s fashion designers. And a less likely children’s show hero you couldn’t hope to find. Apparently Kydd first played the Orlando character, a beachcomber, in the series Crane, which also sounds vaguely familiar.

My girlfriend recently reminded me about Follyfoot, set on a farm with a “Lightning Tree” (it was remembering the theme tune of that name, performed by UK folk act the Settlers, that got her thinking about it), and which I recall for a character who rode a motorbike and who was rather like Shaggy on Scooby Doo, as well as another old bloke with a woolly cap, played by Arthur English. What was it about old blokes in woolly caps in vintage kids TV shows? Hardly hero material, after all.

I couldn’t find out much about a truly spooky, mystical series called The Owl Service, based on Alan Garner’s prize-winning young adults’ book, other than here, where I was reminded that it starred Raymond Llewellyn. I think it was set Wales, where I grew up, although further south. As with many of the other shows mentioned here, it might have been the theme music that made it stick in my mind over the years, but I couldn’t hum it to you.

Does anybody other than me remember Pogle’s Wood, The Moomins, HR Pufnstuff, Chigley or The Clangers (a frequent, brief set-piece when TVs are shown in 1970s period movies)? Remind yourself here, a site that resurrects memories of a variety of old kids’ TV classics. What about Joe on Watch With Mother? Or The Magic Boomerang, which was definitely ahead of its time?

Another favourite of mine, and apparently many other people, was The Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, which was made in black and white. I have to admit that hearing the surging strings of its theme tune again after so many years brought a tear to my eye.

Later, there was Jack The Ripper, six 50-minute episodes shown in 1973 when I was 13. This early drama documentary (as I think you’d call it) starred Stratford Johns as Detective Chief Superintendent Barlow and Frank Windsor as Detective Chief Superintendent Watt, characters created for Z Cars and Softly Softly, in which Barlow was promoted to the rank of chief inspector. Barlow and Watt retrospectively investigated the Victorian Ripper murders, in character. Again, this series had a haunting theme tune, and it utterly encapsulated the atmosphere of East London in 1888, thanks to a jaunty hurdy-gurdy feel with a reedy oboe playing the melody — if I remember correctly, which likely I don’t. It was probably a blonde on the bassoon. The Ripper series was followed by one called Second Verdict, on which Barlow and Watt investigated other famous crimes like the Lizzie Borden axe murders. I hope UKTV buys the Ripper series and re-screens it. To a 13-year-old in the pre-punk 1970s it seemed like groundbreaking television. I wonder what I’d make of it now. However badly it’s aged, it has to be better than The Bill.

Of course, if you grew up in New Zealand, these series may mean absolutely nothing to you. But if any NZBC readers can remember the name of an early-1970s young adult suspense series set in the Australian outback with a supernatural tinge and a really scary didgeridoo theme tune, leave a comment here or drop the Director General an email. I’m off to listen to that Crusoe music again.