episodes a week. (From 1967 they got Mondays off.) With such a punishing itinerary, the scripts – production line affairs under the guidance of a supervising story editor – were of necessity thriftily furnished with off-the-peg dialogue. ‘The sheer volume,’ admitted producer Phillip Bowman, ‘precludes excellence.’137 The odd Coronation Street-style gag still managed to appear amid the expository tundra. (‘What’s that? “Goulash Budapest”? Looks like “Shepherd’s Pie Walsall East” to me.’)
Then there were the plywood sets and the under-rehearsed acting. Props were mislaid, eyelines unmet, extras (literally, on the first transmission) prodded into life with sticks. In Nancy Banks-Smith’s opinion, ‘The Acocks Green Wavy Line Drama Group could probably put on a preferable performance.’138 There was also Tony Hatch’s strange theme tune, in which an electric guitar impersonates a doorbell, accompanied by a perfectly mismatched quartet of piano, harp, oboe and drums. And there was the odd inexplicable directorial flourish, such as the decision to open episodes with a prolonged close-up of a telephone, a half-eaten cucumber sandwich, or, on one Burns Night, a huge pile of sheep offal. This jumble of eccentricity gave the constant sense of a production obliviously strutting around with its flies undone.
The torrent of critical vitriol had no effect on Crossroads’ march from regional curio to national mainstay. In 1972, the recalcitrant northern ITV regions finally took the soap. By 1974, it matched and occasionally outflanked Coronation Street in ratings terms, peaking at roughly fifteen million viewers, with the Queen Mother and Harold Wilson’s wife Mary among its noted fans. It became a truly national programme on 1 April 1975, when the assorted regional stations synchronised their transmissions. ATV made special ‘catch-up’ programmes for the likes of Granada and Thames, who’d snootily let their screenings of the soap lag by the best part of a year.
With the entire country occupying the same time-zone, Meg Richardson and Hugh Mortimer had their marriage blessed in Birmingham Cathedral. This wasn’t the normal soap wedding, with forgotten rings, catering panics and a ghost from the past interrupting the ‘speak now’s. This was a full mock ceremony, shot as an outside broadcast, not a million miles from Princess Anne’s nuptial coverage a couple of years earlier. Soap royalty ruled for a day. A TV Times commemorative wedding brochure sold half a million copies.
Merchandise multiplied. In 1976, Crossroads became the first British TV show to have its own regular magazine: Crossroads Monthly was published by Felix Dennis of OZ infamy, with star profiles, a cookery column and a gatefold pin-up of Gordon. A roaring trade was also established around reproductions of a still life that hung on the wall of Meg’s bedroom.
One spin-off had dire repercussions. Paul McCartney, another star fan, recorded a keening stadium rock version of the Tony Hatch theme. Jack Barton, then series producer, decided it was good enough to replace the original in the programme proper. Huge mistake. ‘The Crossroads theme was bright and happy,’ fumed Martyn Finch of Croydon to TV Times. ‘Now it has plunged into insignificance. The rhythm has gone and the roll of the credits no longer fits the music.’ This was perceptive; the famous crossover credit rollers did indeed come and go in reasonably good time with the old doorbell theme, and McCartney’s theme upset the balance. After a few weeks of mass grievance, Hatch’s original made a triumphant return, with Macca reserved, as Barton explained, ‘for downbeat and dramatic, cliffhanging endings. I am hoping that Paul McCartney will write us another, more up-tempo, version of the Crossroads theme,’ he added hopefully.
In 1981, the glory faded with the termination of Noele Gordon’s contract: programme controller Charles Denton found the resulting correspondence ‘ranged from abuse to lumps of foreign matter’.139 On 11 November, after narrowly escaping death (‘Oh, my God! The motel! It’s on fire!’), Meg Richardson took her final bow in the QEII’s Queen Mary suite. Fans were beside themselves: ‘The girls on the switchboard have been trying to sympathise,’ reassured an ATV representative, ‘and have been telling them not to give up hope.’140
Crossroads soldiered on for another six and a half years, but successive revamps and tinkerings with the theme tune couldn’t stop its ultimate slide to an audience of a then paltry twelve million. It inspired few words but generated huge numbers. In a time before the posh papers found they could cheaply fill space by grabbing any piece of low culture that toddled along and hugging it to death in a giant set of inverted commas, Crossroads had a tremendous reach that was all but invisible to the media at large – the media still being dedicated, in Tom Stoppard’s words, to ‘preserving the distinction between serious work and carpentry.’141 But as Stoppard would have admitted, there’ll always be a market for stools.
LE MANÈGE ENCHANTÉ (1964–1971)
THE MAGIC ROUNDABOUT (1965–1977)
ORTF/BBC One (Danot Films/BBC)
The original cult children’s programme.
ANIMATION IS THE MOST meticulously planned form of filmmaking in front of the camera. Behind the camera, it can be more chaotic than anything else. Serge Danot was a young technical assistant for French producers Cinéastes Associés, working on stop-motion animation for commercials and television effects under Leeds-born animator Ivor Wood. A keen and quick learner, Danot began regaling Wood with ideas for children’s entertainments he’d come up with. One, based around the slapstick adventures of various people and animals who lived near an enchanted merry-go-round, was deemed strong enough to go into production in 1964.
Danot and Wood made the first thirteen five-minute films in a small back room in Danot’s suburban Paris flat, which had to be periodically abandoned to allow the lighting equipment to cool off. A deal was made for French state television to broadcast them, due as much to the engaging character design and minimalist white scenery as the overt ‘Frenchness’ of the cast. Each character paid vocal homage to a different French region with the exception of Pollux – an initially incidental long-haired dog who, inspired by Wood, spoke broken French in an English accent.
Domestic success made the show a candidate for the international market, and the first thirty-nine films were bought by the BBC in 1965. Crucially, the means to translate the original dialogue from the French was not forthcoming, so it fell to Play School presenter Eric Thompson, hired to provide the English narration, to also provide the English translation. Unfortunately he hadn’t a word of French, so he watched the silent episodes reel-by-reel and started scripting from scratch. Without even a character guide to hand, Thompson looked to his family and the pupils of nearby Ardentinny primary school in Strathclyde for personality types.
Azalea the cow became Ermintrude, Ambrose the snail became Brian, Father Peony became Mr Rusty, and Pollux the dog was rechristened Dougal. Zebulon’s mystical incantation ‘Tournicoti Tounicoton!’ was now Zebedee’s thoroughly agreeable ‘Time for bed!’ Thompson’s contributions are famous for turning the original knockabout cartoon into something subtler, even – in a very broad sense of the word – subversive. This stemmed from an attitude that would logically have debarred him from working on the show. ‘I don’t actually believe children exist,’ he claimed, ‘except as part of the adult imagination. When I started to write, I wrote for people, since I think that’s what children are – people who haven’t lived very long.’142
A
