The Double Deckers

This programme may mean nothing to you. But if you were around in the early seventies, and aged anything from 6 to about 14 at the time, it could well have left its mark. The Double Deckers was a vibrant children's show, screened in 1971 in the UK. The energy factor of its content was huge, demonstrated perfectly in the above clip. And the thing I have carried around all these years was the very last piece of each show - ''See you next weeeeeeeeeeeek !! '' It was a catchphrase that I have not forgotten ever since. DD was, simply, a great show.


Alas, it has not become a legend of children's TV culture, in part due to the fact that it consisted of just 17 episodes. It was however a much repeated show, especially during school holidays. Originally broadcast on Fridays, in the Crackerjack spot around 5 o'clock, I actually remember it more from Saturday mornings, which were presumably repeats. The Double Deckers stories were highly inventive, adventurous, funny, happy and cheerful. They contained lots of slapstick. But above all it was the camaraderie of it's characters that made it a winner. Set in a junk yard, the programme follows the exploits of seven children,whose den is a London double deck bus. There was plenty of resource from within the yard for them to use and the fast moving plots involved robots, goblins, ghosts and martians, as well as go-karts and a hovercraft on one occasion. The children were all shapes and sizes with varying talents and it was very easy to be envious of them. We all wanted to be a double decker and join them in their scrapes and tangles.

The characters were as follows : Scooper ( leader of the gang and played by Peter Firth), Brains ( Michael Audreson), Billie ( Gillian Bailey), Sticks (Bruce Clark), Doughnut ( Douglas Simmonds), Tiger ( the youngest child who also had a cuddly toy Tiger and was played by Debbie Russ ), and Spring ( Brinsley Forde). The only regular adult was Albert, a street cleaner ( Melvyn Hayes). I will not attempt to go into detail as to the part they each played. If you do not remember the show it will mean little to you. Watch the clip though and it could trigger happy memories. I must say there is a fantastic Double Deckers web site at http://www.thedoubledeckers.com/ which is an absolute credit to the people behind it.

One other great part of the show was it's music and dance pieces, which were crucial to the overall sunshine feeling of the programme. And many of the seventeen episodes featured some great comedy players of the day : Julian Orchard, Norman Vaughan, Bob Todd, Clive Dunn, Pat Coombs, Hugh Paddick, Frank Thornton, Sam Kydd and Jack Haig. Pretty impressive I should say. One episode also featured a very young Jane Seymour.

It is always interesting with child stars to see where they finished up. Peter Firth went on to be a film and stage actor (Pearl Harbor, Shadowlands, The Hunt For Red October, Letter To Brezhnev). Michael Audreson was in Young Winston playing the great Briton himself aged 13. Brinsley Forde is of course Brinsley Forde, lead singer of Aswad. And the lovely Gillian Bailey was in Follyfoot and the dramatic masterpiece Poldark (where she played the devoted and hard working Jinny Carter). Melvyn Hayes was the marvellous Bombardier 'Gloria' Beaumont in It Aint Half Hot Mum.

The Double Deckers was a fantastic little programme. It enjoyed success both here and in America. Although essentially British in spirit and filmed in and around Borehamwood, it was in fact a co production between the BBC and ABC (in America it had the slightly different title of Here Come The Double Deckers) and so is as much loved over the Atlantic as it is here. The gang also featured in a comic strip in Whizzer and Chips in 1971-1972 and an album of music from the series was also released. Blogging about The Double Deckers and researching for it has been a joy.

I can end in only one way : '' See you next weeeeeeeeeeeek''.

My First Car

I learnt recently of the death of Jack Odell. I must immediately admit that I had never heard of this man but when I read his story I realised I must acknowledge the influence he had on my childhood.

Jack Odell was partly responsible for the greatest of all toys..................the 'Matchbox'. And I had a bucket full of them, mainly cars, and played with them for thousands of hours. Strangely I have no recollection of having them bought for me, though I must assume I received some as Christmas or birthday presents. I think they were more likely given to me by someone who had grown out of playing with them. I kept them in a metal kitchen bin. I would tip them out onto the floor and 'drive' them to all corners of the room, and indeed all around the house. They were battered and scratched and some had various parts missing. But oh how I loved them. I had some favourites............I particularly remember the Coca Cola lorry with its carefully stacked crates. And a little brown/maroon coloured van, which has left me with some vague re-collection that it had an advert for cocoa on the side. I used to push them from the top of the stairs, the winner being the one that got closest to the bottom. On other days it was a knock-out competition - the one closest to the top being eliminated, culminating some hours later in a 'grand final'. I also remember Matchbox producing a folding cardboard race track, complete with hairpin bends and a pit lane. I would painstakingly push my cars and trucks around the circuit, sometimes for hours on end. I have no idea what force actually determined the winner, it was probably quite simply whichever one I felt worthy of the trophy on the day! It was fantastic witnessing the snazzy sports car being out manoeuvred on the final bend by the excavator. It was to be my own version of Wacky Races. I don't know exactly what happened to them nor the bucket. I did pass them down to my nephew and I seem to remember they were often buried in the back garden and dug up again a few days later. I would love to have them now, not that they would have any particular value given the condition they were in.

Jack Odell was 87 when he died. He was an engineer by trade who, after World War Two, joined a business owned by Leslie Smith and Rodney Smith. The company was called Lesney Products ( taking the first three letters of one of the Smiths' christian names and the second three from the other) and they made parts for real cars. In 1952, Odell made a red and green steam roller for his daughter. She wanted to take it to school but to do so it had to be small enough to fit into a matchbox. Her schoolfriends thought the toy was marvellous and soon Odell was knocking out more steam rollers. Lesney thereby decided to market these finely detailed toys, and soon added a Land Rover, London bus ( I had one of them), bulldozer and a fire engine (had one of them too). In 1954 Matchbox produced their first car - the MG TD Roadster. By 1962 they were making a million cars a week. They were affordable to buy and kids collected them with great passion and enthusiasm. They were popular all around the world and there was never any let up in the attention to detail in order to get as close to the real thing as possible.Lesney eventually hit bad times and went into receivership in 1982. The Matchbox brand has continued since, albeit it the hands of various other companies.

Thirty Minute Magic........Sunday 7.30

I became a teenager in 1972. It is hard to remember that in those days, whilst just about everyone in the world I lived in had a television set , few had the privilege of colour. And to boot , there were only three channels , BBC 1 , BBC 2 , and ITV to choose from. Programmes did not start until around 4 o'clock and there was a complete shutdown at around midnight when the national anthem was played and those so inclined stood up in respect. No satellite channels 24/7 .No specialised channels. Daytime was for work not watching telly. Oh, and no video recorders. Least not in my house.If you missed an episode, tough.And it was often quite a while before it was repeated. So, if you are younger than me , try to imagine for one moment just how narrow programming was. There was an incredible symmetry to the watching week. Schedulers had fewer slots to fill. And my memory is that there were three key times in the week for comedy...........Sunday evening 7.30 , Monday night at 8 , both ITV , and for BBC Thursday 8 o'clock.

That is not to say there was no comedy at any other time. I don't think the TV watershed existed as such but even in the early 70's certain sitcoms or comedy programmes would only be shown later (after the news very often which meant 9.30 onwards for the Beeb and 10.30 or later for ITV). But as a 12/14 year old it was those three ,thirty minute slots that fed both my comedy diet and the hunger of millions of others. Because alternatives were limited , you had a good idea as you were watching that most people you knew would be watching too. No wonder that over 30 years later so many productions from this period are regarded as national treasures.Many millions of people watching week in week out. Following the plots. Talking about it together the next day. Not just comedy but drama also. There was limited live sport ( Grandstand on BBC and World of Sport on ITV both on Saturday afternoon and the legendary Sportsnight with Coleman on Wednesday at 9.30 ). Reality TV had not been invented. Nor viewer telephone voting. None of us had telephones where I lived.

My memory, and I stand to be corrected, of Sunday 7.30 was On The Buses and Please Sir! Both of these series were , in their day , hugely popular with the British public. And for many a young lad , titillating, in the absence many other places to get your titters ! The general premise of On The Buses was two old men , one a bus driver , the other his conductor , pulling 'birds' left right and centre. The series first reached our screens at the very end of the swinging sixties in 1969 and in the next four years an incredible 74 episodes were produced. It felt like it was never off our television screens. There were some other great characters in this sitcom apart from Stan and Jack and many of the best laughs were provided by occasions when they were not chasing the clippies (female conductors ! ) or the bored housewives on their route. Stan's Mum, his sister Olive and her husband Arthur will go down in history as one of the funniest sitcom families of all time. And the stand out character, the one everyone impersonated in the playground the next day was Blakey , the Hitleresque inspector with his catchphrase ' I 'ate you, Butler'. There was nothing complex about the humour in OTB, much of it was the saucy humour found on seaside postcards. But the country loved it, as it prepared for the start of a new working week.

Please Sir ! was a shorter series of 55 episodes and centred on Mr Hedges, a young teacher and new to his vocation, who is handed the class from hell , 5 C . The screening of Please Sir ! coincided with my own school days of course and how marvellously rowdy and riotous was Fenn Street compared to my school. As with OTB , the characterisation was superb , both with the 'kids' , who were meant to be 15 - 16 year olds but actually played by actors slightly older , and the 'staff ' , highlight of whom was Potter the caretaker. I remember an episode involving Potter and a ten bob note ( or maybe something more valuable ) on a piece of string which he pulled when somebody tried to pick it up. It was of course a comic type joke , found weekly in the Beano and Dandy , but inspired for a week or two a new playground joke at my school. The sexual innuendo in Please Sir ! was always simmering just below the surface. I guess it had to be because these grown up actors were meant to be kids ( unlike On The Buses where they were definitely very old men in my young eyes). I had a strange unease with the ongoing story lines of Maureen, the dreamy girl pupil who was hopelessly in love with Sir. It was the only pathos in the programme .The Please Sir ! half hour was greatly entertaining in a mad , fraught kind of way. It is no longer screened on British TV and we are all left wondering if it is in any way funny today.

For many years after ,this time slot continued to be used as the comedy half hour by both ITV and BBC until to a large degree the soaps stole it. But the sitcoms that followed gradually became more mainstream and safe, never again getting close to the risque adventures of On The Buses and Please Sir !