Giscard O'Hitler - Anagram Man and Witty Lyricist

Back in the 1970s, most beards you saw on the telly belonged mainly to hippies or long-haired pop stars like Roy Wood. They didn’t often feature on the faces of reporters on current affairs programmes. Enter Richard Stilgoe. In our household, after the early BBC news bulletin we usually watched Nationwide over tea (or dinner, if you were posh). It was about fifty minutes long, incorporating the regional news ‘opt-outs’ followed by a mix of London studio and filmed segments from across the whole country. Think Inside Out meets The One Show.

Many of these items were light in nature, which appealed to my much younger self. Reporters like Bernard Falk and Martin Young seemed to specialise in such cheery trivia, but Richard Stilgoe added an extra dimension. It wasn’t just the hairy chin, although he used it to amusing vox-pop effect in 1974, the year of the beard.  In parallel with Esther Rantzen’s Saturday night show That’s Life, to which he also contributed, the Cambridge-educated man from Camberley took on Nationwide’s  regular consumer slot which I think became known as ‘Pigeonhole’, later ‘Watchdog’.

The other major string to his bow was a talent for humorous songs, which he often used to illustrate the featured topic to great effect. His ‘Statutory Right of Entry to Your House’ ditty became the stuff of BBC legend. Apparently in the early Sixties he had been the lead singer of a Liverpool beat group, performing at the Cavern Club. In one of those weird showbiz coincidences, his band-mates included his future Nationwide colleague Bernard Falk!

Successful writer-performers of humorous songs are thin on the ground. Benny Hill, Richard Digance, Tim Minchin and Victoria Wood spring to mind, while Bill Bailey brilliantly weaves music throughout his stand-up comedy routines. However, blending funny, satirical lyrics with original music for consumer programmes was in the Seventies pretty much Stilgoe’s domain.

Yet he wasn’t only about the music. Whether at the piano, in the studio or on the road, a knowing half-smile was never far from Stilgoe’s face on screen, and yet you could trust him. In 1977 he fronted a series of short films for Nationwide about DIY called, I think, ‘Odd-Jobbing with Stilgoe’. If memory serves, they were designed to give the layman confidence to have a go at more challenging tasks around the house himself (and in those days it probably wasn’t herself). As a totally useless teenager, I was quite interested and entertained but to this day I’ve never attempted to replace a window. I have changed a plug, though.

My 1979 diary records that I watched his eponymous BBC show but I can’t honestly remember what he did in it.  I probably didn’t watch the Beeb’s breakfast election results show in the same year but it could have been simply distilled into just two minutes of our Richard’s witty ditty which he must have written that morning. It wasn’t especially political but, with the arrival of Margaret Thatcher’s right-wing government and consequent industrial meltdown, the UK was crying out for genuine satire.

I’m not sure that BBC Scotland’s A Kick Up the Eighties was it, but as a comedy sketch show it was quite entertaining. Looking back it featured an impressive line-up of young talent, including Tracey Ullman, Robbie Coltrane and Rik Mayall (as Kevin Turvey) while Richard Stilgoe contributed humorous topical links. I must admit they jarred a bit with the sketches and he was dropped from subsequent series.

Indeed I don’t recall seeing him on television again, barring the occasional guest spot. I was too old to watch his children’s game show Finders Keepers in ’84. I remember being aware of his penchant for word puzzles. I was nowhere in his league but I could appreciate his brilliance at anagrams. I think he published a book of them.

What I didn’t expect was Stilgoe’s role in the success of musical ‘Starlight Express’. As lyricist he must have hoovered up awards and royalties and Andrew Lloyd Webber eventually drafted him in for ‘Phantom of the Opera’. Charles Hart may have re-written much of the ‘book’ but these supremely profitable shows must have set him up financially for life.

However, Richard must be as nice as he looks because he gave most of his earnings to charitable foundations at home and in India. I could even forgive his presidency of the hated Surrey county cricket club for that prodigious philanthropy, and his knighthood was well deserved. He wasn’t the funniest comedian, most credible investigative journalist or the greatest musician but as a witty wordsmith and entertaining presenter in the 1970s he had no peers.

Sue Johnston - Acting Royle-ty

It might appear a tad perverse to select as a Treasure someone who has made her name in three major dramas I’ve never been inclined to watch, but Sue Johnston is so much more than the product of Corrie, Brookside or Downton Abbey. Like her Royle Family co-star Liz Smith, she was a late starter to television, not making her debut ‘til the age of 38. She appeared in the very first episode of Brookside on Channel 4’s opening night back in ’82 but it wasn’t until the next decade that I saw her on the box.

It was probably in Medics, an ITV series which ran for five years, but which didn’t keep me hooked for long. To be honest the most memorable character was played by Tom Baker who, like Brian Blessed, is never known for understated performances. Alternatively it could have been the same year as a casino owner in A Touch of Frost or in Inspector Morse, although this was only a minor part alongside the likes of Diana Quick and a very youthful Sean Bean.

Sue was on the right side of the law five years later, this time in the Beeb’s Crime Traveller. Like Medics, I don’t recall this being a long-standing regular of mine but I was prepared to give it a go. It was obviously a vehicle for Michel French, straight after his stint on Eastenders and based on the unlikely premise that he and co-star Chloe Annett could secretly use her late dad’s time machine for solving crimes. Hmm. Johnston played French’s boss who disliked his methods but presumably not his results. Despite being written by Anthony Horowitz (Poirot, Foyle’s War and novels featuring Sherlock Holmes and James Bond, though sadly not in the same story) it wasn’t recommissioned but they were fairly entertaining cop capers.

Waking The Dead lasted much longer; eleven years, in fact. Sue Johnston played Grace Foley, an experienced psychological profiler who was the calm, rational, ‘people person’ partner of more headstrong Trevor Eve’s DCI Boyd in his Cold Case team. Besides a healthy dollop of mutual respect, there was much witty banter between the two, a key factor in the show’s enduring popularity throughout the Noughties.

Whilst born in nearby Warrington, Sue Johnston was brought up on Merseyside. Her Liverpool credentials were advanced from her time on Brookside but apparently her allegiance to Liverpool FC is life-long. This informed football support earned her a few spots on Fantasy Football League in the Nineties. It may have been a comedy showpiece for Frank Skinner and David Baddiel but the guests also had the opportunity to demonstrate some genuine sporting knowledge. Back in ’94, Sue was by no means fazed by the lads or fellow guest Eddie Large, but I can’t recall, come the end of the season, how successful she was as a manager.

In 2004, I became riveted by the first series of the celebrity family history series, Who Do You Think You Are? To some extent, it has suffered through familiarity leading if not to contempt but at least to repetition. After a few years, I started to tire of the samey tales from the trenches or Caribbean slavery. Some of the best have been rooted in very ordinary social realism of nineteenth-century Britain, and Sue Johnston’s personal genealogical journey to life on the railways and slums of Carlisle was both gripping and emotional. Sadly I can’t find it on YouTube but the actress was mesmerising merely playing herself.

More recently Sue has been lured by some meaty dramatic roles. In 2018 she was in Kiri, playing star Sarah Lancashire’s elderly mum and last year was again in granny mode in Channel 4’s hard-hitting reminder of the Stafford Hospital scandal, The Cure. She portrayed Bella, whose unnecessary death sparked the campaign which resulted in the eventual expose of incompetence and shocking outcomes of spending cuts in the NHS. The mini-series also introduced me to the worrying notion of Sue Johnston as someone who was actually quite old in real life.

However, it is in comedy that she has become best known in recent decades. There was her role in Jennifer Saunders’ not terribly funny Jam and Jerusalem and with another excellent ensemble cast in the feelgood TV movie family holiday to Lapland. Co-star and fellow-Scouser Stephen Graham has said: “For me to work with Sue Johnston is like playing football with Steven Gerrard” although since then he himself  has become the Mo Salah of TV actors.

But of course I will never forget her as Barbara in The Royle Family. She didn’t always get the funniest lines but she’s utterly brilliant as the downtrodden mum being whisked along by the crazily commonplace conversations in the living room or even in the car. The scripts may have become increasingly formulaic but the characters remained true. From her spot at the end of the sofa, Sue Johnston showed time and again why she is one of the finest character actors of our time.

Homer Simpson - Dumb but Loveable

Thirty years ago, if someone had submitted to me that an animated character from Rupert Murdoch’s media empire would have entered my pantheon of TV legends I’d have laughed in their face. As the fledgling BSkyB began to take its insidious grip on the nation’s sporting rights, and satellite dishes sprouted on buildings across the land, I was willing it to fail. When ‘Do the Bartman’ topped the charts in 1991 it represented to me everything that was wrong with the world. Bart’s hit single wasn’t funny, the protagonist’s video was simply annoying and so The Simpsons simply had to be crap. Didn’t it?

Working for the BBC, I felt affronted by its very existence. My colleagues’ office discussions of how hilarious this Sky One product was smacked of treachery, a betrayal of our employers’ trust. Yet why were such intelligent young research professionals falling under its spell? There was no way on earth I would subscribe to Sky but when in 1996 the Beeb signed up old series to broadcast at 6pm on BBC2 I tentatively sneaked a look. After all, it was now on ‘my’ channel so I couldn’t consider it an act of infidelity.

It soon became obvious that The Simpsons was no longer merely an all-pervasive vehicle for a porn-peddling media mogul bent on world domination. It was bloody hilarious! It wasn’t all about an incorrigible naughty child, either. There were dozens of rounded characters, the visual and verbal gags flew thick and fast and I’d never watched anything quite like it.

Brought up on Bugs Bunny, Tom and Jerry, Wacky Races and The Pink Panther Show, cartoon comedy had been an integral part of my childhood. But The Simpsons was not a kids’ show; it looked like it, with over-sized heads and four-fingered hands, but the humour was far more grown-up. Even Mum was won over and one evening made the perceptive comment that you forgot you were watching an animation. They were all bloody yellow, for heaven’s sake, yet the family traits and relationships were all too human. This was actually one of the most sophisticated sitcoms on the box.

That’s one adjective that couldn’t be applied to patriarch Homer Simpson. While Bart is engagingly devious, Marge the sweet and naïve homemaker and Lisa by far the smartest person in Springfield, Homer is as dumb as they come. His internal conversations with what passes for a brain are legendary.  It also speaks volumes about the USA that Homer is held up as an all-American hero. Fat, lazy, addicted to Duff beer, TV and junk food, this white, working-class stereotype really shouldn’t be such a popular icon. Yet, from his early somewhat unappealing character, Homer has risen to take the world by storm. 

Much of the credit must go to the man behind the voice, Dan Castellanata. For three decades he has brilliantly imbued this boorish oaf with such humanity that we forgive Homer his selfishness and incompetence, cheering his attempts to be a better dad and husband, even if he often struggles to remember baby Maggie’s name. Castellanata voices other characters, from Krusty the Clown to the Kennedy-esque corrupt Mayor Quimby, alcoholic Barny to Grampa Abe, but Homer is his greatest achievement.

The staccato catchphrase “D’oh!” was inducted into the Oxford English Dictionary in 2001 and my personal vocabulary even earlier than that. He gets so many great lines, too. The hilarious homespun philosophy of Homer Simpson could fill volumes, although my favourites include:-

    “Kids, you tried your best and you failed miserably. The lesson is never try”;

  “For once maybe someone will call me ‘sir’ without adding ‘You're making a              scene’";

    “English? Who needs that? I’m never going to England”            

Actually Homer does get to travel overseas. Some of my favourite episodes revolve around Homer’s interaction with foreigners, especially if it’s on their own territory. These scenes invariably contain more laughs than a whole canon of Chevy Chase movies. While there may be dubious stereotyping, I feel reassured that whenever Homer is involved it’ll be Americans who come off the worst. 

In the world of animation, even one as firmly rooted in American suburbia as The Simpsons, we viewers have to expect the unexpected. In addition to the annual tradition of Halloween spook-taculars, Homer has been in space, won a Grammy, climbed a mountain single-handed and fought President Bush but so far he has never actually been elected to the White House. In this Trumpian era of celebrating ignorance, he’s way too intelligent for that!

Our favourite golden-headed father has also been responsible for all kinds of nuclear disasters. Creator Matt Groening ingeniously employed the world’s second stupidest man as a safety technician at Mr Burns’ notoriously insecure nuclear power plant. What could possibly go wrong?

Of course, things going wrong around Homer are what the programmes are about. Whether he’s losing at Monopoly, being a rubbish member of the Mob or trying to build a barbecue we just love to see him running around like a headless chicken “Doh” ing for all he’s worth. And yet such circumstances make those moments of familial bliss all the more adorable, such as at Maggie’s birth or when Homer and Marge try to get all romantic, especially in the flashback episodes.

How on earth did a dimwit like Homer ever win the heart of Marge anyway? Of course, this has been handled in many storylines over the years, not all of them obeying the laws of continuity, but basically if you love dumb animals, you gotta love Homer. He may have evolved his features and voice over the years but basically he has the personality of a puppy: all boundless optimism and energy, living for the moment and undying love for anyone who’ll supply him with food and drink. OK, so that could just as easily apply to Moe’s Tavern or the popcorn seller at the ballgame, but Homer just wants what, deep down, we all crave: love, respect and getting one over on the neighbours.

I don’t tend to see many of the new episodes but In a world of coronavirus, political shenanigans or personal emotional turmoil, The Simpsons – and Dan Castellanata’s Homer in particular – will always provide enough laugh-out-loud scenes to make the world considerably brighter. 

Gina McKee - Ice Cool on Wearside

For an actor whose performances have graced the small screen so consistently for so long, Gina McKee could be forgiven for wondering why this fan has witnessed so few of them. Guilty as charged. I feel negligent, a fraud. However, she shouldn’t be too downhearted because Ms McKee has nonetheless entered my personal pantheon of TV Treasures. She has made her name in serious drama. That elegant, ‘long’ face and cool, near-glacial expression have secured a fair few costume drama roles such as The Forsyte Saga and The Borgias but they’re simply not my cup of tea. 

Yet bizarrely it was in a comedy that Gina McKee first came to my attention. Back in 1987 The Lenny Henry Show shone the spotlight on to the comedian’s one-time sketch character Delbert Wilkins. Much of the humour was drawn from Delbert squeezing his larger-than-life personality into the confines of a small-time Brixton pirate radio station. For the six-part series, a supporting cast had to be introduced, straight men and women to Lenny’s scene-stealing star. Gina was the straightest of them all, the sole voice of sanity who started out as a café waitress before becoming the radio station’s receptionist when the ‘Brixton Broadcasting Company’ went legit.

She also dead-panned it during Channel 4’s Drop The Dead Donkey and as a regular reporter on Chris Morris’ more barmpot news satire Brass Eye. By this time McKee had taken a giant leap towards stardom thanks to her part in BBC2’s Our Friends in the North. I’ve already raved about Christopher Eccleston in this series but, as the only female lead, she was outstanding, in more ways than one. 

In the rollercoaster saga of North-Eastern politics and relationships, I remember willing Eccleston’s Nicky and McKee’s Mary to get back together at the end. Amidst the thrilling and emotional ‘Don’t Look Back in Anger’ finale it would seem that I was to get my wish, although it was to the production’s considerable credit that not all loose ends were tied up in silk red ribbons and bows. If only more drama series were brave enough to do the same.

With a death toll of around a quarter of a million, there were a lot of tragic endings following the 2004 Boxing Day tsunami. The natural disaster was still raw when HBO made its Tsunami-The Aftermath in 2006. There’d been a fair few documentaries, including tourists’ own video footage, but this was only a film ‘inspired by real-life events’. I say ‘only’ but the Thai locations lent a real authenticity to proceedings. Special effects and a top-notch cast did the rest. There was no opportunity for Gina McKee to glam up for this one; it wasn’t a role for aqua-phobes! She was excellent, of course, as a mum separated from part of her family by the devastating tidal wave but unusually she was passed over for the major awards. With the likes of Toni Collette and Chiwetel Ejiofor leading a heavyweight cast, acting accolades were distributed more widely but it was a gripping two-parter when shown on BBC2.

I have also watched Gina in programmes such as Waking The Dead and heard her narrate the football documentary series Premier Passions, focussing on the fortunes of her local club Sunderland FC but in recent times, her most memorable performance came in 2018’s Bodyguard. While Keeley Hawes and Richard Madden stole the plaudits, she provided some ballast as the anti-terrorist chief caught up in political intrigue. But would she prove to be the baddie? We had to wait for the nerve-shredding if rather incredible climax to find out!

Provided the world ever recovers from the coronavirus impact on the global economy, there is talk of her reprising her role in a follow-up. Poor Jed Mercurio will have to juggle writing duties on all his ratings blockbusters but I’m sure it will be worth waiting for.

Gina McKee isn’t the only actress from the North-East, of course. Liz Carling, Jill Halfpenny and even Donna Air and Denise Welch have kept the flag flying for the Wear, Tees and Tyne but McKee seems to have escaped the ‘Geordie’ typecasting. She’s acting royalty now, don’t y’know, pet?

Derek Martin - The London Cabbie for all ages

For many years, Derek Martin was an easily forgotten name, but the same could not be said of his face or voice. He wasn’t quite in the Ray Winstone/Alan Ford league as a Cockney ‘heavy’ but as a genuine East Londoner with a stint at Smithfield market on his CV his Cockney credentials earned him lots of TV work. So often, In Seventies cop shows I watched, like Softly Softly and Dixon of Dock Green, he’d be a common-or-garden Len, Ted or Dick. As a van, lorry or taxi driver. he possessed  the authenticity of a Londoner behind the wheel.

For me, Derek’s relative anonymity was blown apart when in his late sixties he established himself in the cast of Eastenders, but his overnight celebrity took more than four decades to happen. In the early Seventies I must have seen him in the family business drama The Brothers (as ‘van driver’, surprise surprise) and the quirky children’s sci-fi serial Man Dog. Sadly I couldn’t find a clip of the latter but it made a substantial impression on me, helped by its familiar Southampton locations.

Later in the decade he became a familiar figure in ITV crime capers, invariably on the wrong side of the law. In an episode of The Sweeney, he even managed to out-run Dennis Waterman’s Carter, but I daresay he was nicked by the closing credits. That same year, he played another villain in The Professionals, and then a ‘heavy’ up against Waterman again in Minder.

Derek Martin wasn’t always one of the bad guys. He upheld the forces of law and order, albeit under the radar, in programmes like Z Cars and even Terry and June, but it was in The Chinese Detective that he really made his mark. At that time (1981-2), this was quite a ground-breaking series, providing a rare starring role for an ‘ethnic minority’ actor. I loved David Yip in that show, portraying the mild-mannered but slightly unorthodox (is there any other kind of cop on TV?) John Ho, clashing not only with criminals but also his boss DCI Berwick, played by Derek Martin. He was old-school Londoner, and displayed the sort of casual racism that pervaded much of the police in those days. In my mind’s eye I can still see him shouting “’O, ‘O” at his sergeant! I think there grew a grudging mutual respect between the two by the end, but it ran for only two series.

In the Nineties, I watched some of ITV’s Lynda la Plante prison drama The Governor, in which Derek played Janet McTeer’s deputy but I missed out on one of his largest roles, in King and Castle. However, it is as a regular cast member of a couple of soaps that he has become part of my TV furniture.

Back in ’93, he joined the Beeb’s ill-fated foray into international drama, Eldorado. Located in an expat community on the Costa del Sol, it carried a great deal of investment, financial and professional. As a BBC employee, I fervently wished for success but it was doomed from the first creaking instalment which, somewhat improbably, I watched from a Channel ferry. In hindsight, box-ticking took priority over plotlines, and the European eye-candy failed to attract the younger audiences. A few of them could barely act. The hostile anti-Beeb press finished the job. Removing the dead wood and bringing in some sterling British character actors did help but the plug was pulled after a single year. As Alex Morris Derek Martin appeared in forty episodes, including the very last but, to be honest, all I can remember was ‘Mucky Marcus’ escaping from an exploding car. 

In comparison I have a clear memory of his arrival in Albert Square as Charlie Slater and his dysfunctional family of females. That was 2000, and in all he went on to make nearly 800 episodes of Eastenders. Apparently Derek had been considered for both Dirty Den and Frank Butcher (there’s a thought!) but as East End cabbie Charlie, he must have been a shoo-in for the casting team. At first he had some meaty storylines, even becoming involved in some fisticuffs, but it was for his verbal clashes with mother-in-law Big Mo (Laila Morse) that he is best remembered by me.

The character also brought him a few related TV roles, be they in Eastenders spin-offs or as cameos in comedies such as Little Britain. In my opinion he made a splendid straight man to Matt Lucas’ grotesque Fatfighters leader Marjory. But then that has always been Derek Martin’s strength. For fifty years he’s been one of our most dependable supporting actors on the box. I’ll never know how he might have fared battling with Angie Watts or wooing Pat Butcher wearing nowt but a rotating bow tie but, now well into his eighties, I reckon Derek Martin has done enough to enter my role call of Treasures.

John Alderton - Kng of Light Comedy

My collection of TV Treasures features several faces from Seventies situation comedy but in the first half of that decade, John Alderton was the king of the genre. Usually paired with his real-life wife Pauline Collins, he was one of the most recognisable faces on both BBC and ITV. Richard Briers, Ronnie Barker, Mollie Sugden, Diane Keen and Richard O’Sullivan were also pretty ubiquitous but I’d like to celebrate the humble man from Humberside.

My first recollection of the actor dates from my junior schooldays, Please Sir!. We didn’t watch much ITV so it’s not a giant leap of imagination to surmise why Mum and Dad shared the series with two young children.. As teachers, they probably watched with a mix of sympathy with the newly-qualified Mr Hedges, played by Alderton, and relief that their own classes could not possibly be worse than Fenn Street Secondary Modern’s 5C. However, it was hardly A Clockwork Orange. Penned by Esmonde and Larbey, who’d later create The Good Life, it was pretty tame stuff. The fact that the pupils appeared considerably older than 16 was presumably lost on me, but it did nothing to allay fears about future life in ‘Big School’!  I reckon I felt sorry for the hapless but well-intentioned classroom ingénue but, for all the pupils’ cheek, the comedy was mercifully redeemed by a measure of mutual respect; that and the classic theme tune.

After reprising his role in the inevitable cinema spin-off, Alderton left mid-term. He soon showed up again on the Beeb in My Wife Next Door. This proved extremely popular on Tuesday evenings and made the name of co-star Hannah Gordon. In fact it was she, not Alderton, who achieved the ultimate accolade of a guest role in the Morecambe and Wise Christmas show in their heyday No disrespect intended to Hannah but Alderton would have been a brilliant performer in one of the plays wot Ernie wrote. Perhaps he was considered too lightweight? Whatever, it didn’t seem to harm his own career, although My Wife…ran for only one season. It was another smoothly ‘safe’ comedy and its humour also appealed to millions of viewers when repeated in 1979.

He was back in single-series sitcom suburbia for No Honestly, this time without Hannah Gordon but in the company of real-life spouse Pauline Collins. My 1974 diary faithfully records I watched it but I have no mental recollection other than Lynsey de Paul’s hit theme tune..

They were also concurrently in harness for ITV’s Upstairs Downstairs, she as a maid, he as the chauffeur. This saga of aristocrats and their servants in early twentieth century London was a staple of our household’s weekend evening viewing for five years and even I became swept along by the storylines. It was hardly a comedy but along with Mr Hudson, Mrs Bridges, Rose et al, the characters portrayed by Alderton and Collins were extremely popular before leaving service after two series. The parent series ended in 1975, but the pair were reunited in 1978 to reprise their roles, in Thomas and Sarah. Now a sixth-former with different tastes in television, I watched with little enthusiasm. It was, after all, more to Mum’s taste than mine but I expect that the lure of John Alderton was too strong to resist.

He seemed to specialise in tall, gawky and socially awkward characters, and none fitted the blueprint better than Mr Mulliner who in various guises cropped up in many stories by PG Wodehouse broadcast on the BBC in the late 1970s. I have much fonder and clearer memories of the delightful Wodehouse Playhouse despite it inhabiting the rather twee and antiquated world of the Twenties English upper-crust. I was even moved aged 15 to describe it as “sheer brilliance”, praise indeed. The first two series also featured – surprise surprise! – Ms Collins in a variety of roles opposite the star Alderton but she had left by the ’78  season which opened with The Smile That Wins. I even tried to copy that smile. Not in any misguided hope of romantic conquest I should add. I’d have needed advice on more than how to grin.

In the Eighties and Nineties, John Alderton was mostly lost to TV, and Pauline found movie fame as Shirley Valentine. One exception was Channel 4’s Father’s Day in 1984 which for reasons long since lost in time really appealed to me. Unfortunately I can find no clips on YouTube, unlike Forever Green which I never actually saw.

Enter the new millennium and Alderton began to creep back into my consciousness, guesting in the occasional drama. He was in a 2001 Dalziel and Pascoe mystery then a few years later in the first series of Doc Martin as a silver-bearded sailor. My interest in Clunes, Catz and the Cornish scenery didn’t extend into subsequent series but it was an unexpected pleasure to see this particular TV Treasure putt-putting in a dinghy across sun-kissed waters and into the Doc’s surgery. Forty years earlier it would surely have been John Alderton in the Martin Clunes role. Time has not been kind to the former’s ‘70s comedy creations but he remains a peerless and ageless actor with an easy charm and feather-light touch.

Michael Rodd - Legend of Yesterday's World

He may not have been the Beeb’s biggest name in science-based features but for youngsters like me, Michael Rodd was definitely one of the most popular presenters during the 1970s. I’m not sure when I first saw him on the box. His two main programmes ran concurrently pretty much throughout the Seventies. However, it was probably his role as a non-science children’s TV host which first caught my attention. Particularly in the first half of that decade I was a regular viewer of the BBC’s weekday children’s output, although onerous secondary school homework assignments would intervene with increasing frequency.

From Blue Peter to drama serials, Newsround to Rentaghost, Catherine and I would lap it up. Presenters like Johnny Morris (Animal Magic), Tony Hart (Vision On), Roy Castle (Record Breakers) and Johnny Ball (Cabbages and Kings) were always welcome guests in our living room. I’ve mentioned previously that we were entertained by Bernard Cribbins’ acting game show Star Turn but for sheer longevity our fave quiz was undoubtedly Screen Test.

I’ve no idea whether or not I was present for the inaugural edition in 1970 but once I began noting my viewing in a diary from 1973, Screen Test was clearly a regular. It was an inter-town rather than schools competition, although that may have amounted to the same thing. I don’t remember Billericay being represented. Certainly nobody asked me! It wasn’t even a quiz. You didn’t need to be an expert on TV or films, just adept at observation and memory. Participants were questioned on clips from TV programmes or, as far as I can recall, Children’s Film Foundation shorts so any of us could at least join in at home. I was pretty rubbish but enjoyed the show nonetheless. Michael Rodd was a very affable, chirpy host, a million miles from the more staid Geoffrey Wheeler or Robert Robinson, and we loved him for it.

Rodd brought the same personality to his other broadcasting gig, Tomorrow’s World. He would have overlapped with my other science-focussed TV Treasure James Burke but for me it was the years with Rodd and Judith Hann I remember most fondly. Children like me could hardly engage with Fifties throwback Raymond Baxter who would introduce programmes up to 1977 while perched on a stool like some prototype member of Geriatric Westlife. However, Rodd was a master of the filmed report (like the above amusing look at a brilliant new driver’s companion – cassnav?) as well as the live studio demonstration of the latest gadgets which would surely rule our lives in the future. Some did, many didn’t, but it didn’t really matter at the time.

Back then I was unaware of Michael’s credentials as a musician. Indeed it was how he first became noticed on regional news. It explains why he didn’t flinch from any feature involving music, be it singing, playing guitar - or both. It was also Mr Rodd who brought our attention to a prototype mobile phone in 1979 and the ill-fated laser disc a year later. Whereas it had once been caught only by turning on early for Top of the Pops, Rodd-era Tomorrow’s World had become well worth watching in its entirety and on its own merit.

Michael Rodd was also on hand to present the TW spin-off The Risk Business. In the late ‘70s my A level Economics course had inspired me to read around the subject, prompting me to watch some of these late evening programmes, each of which focussed on a single topic, such as toy manufacturing or closing the skills gap. The only edition I definitely remember was the one in 1979 featuring then British Rail chairman Sir Peter Parker but then the subject was close to my heart, Still didn’t achieve an ‘A’…..

It was while at university that NASA launched its inaugural Space Shuttle flight in April 1981. With the Apollo missions a distant memory, this was a noteworthy event. However, instead of the old guard of James Burke and Patrick Moore, the Beeb’s live coverage was led in the studio by Michael Rodd, with fellow TW host Kieran Prendiville out in the States. I don’t remember seeing the rocket take off but the landing two days later was unmissable and unforgettable. Seeing that aircraft emerge from space unscathed was a genuinely moving moment for viewers like me, and it was good old Michael in charge of the coverage.

Only a few years later, Michael Rodd disappeared from national TV to focus on running his own independent production company which I believe was very successful in the field. He’s missed on screen, though. But what about his voice? Apparently Steve Coogan based the delivery and intonation of Alan Partridge on Michael, which I find hard to believe. The latter always sounded far more bright and bouncy than the over-earnest egotistical fictional creation. Don’t get me wrong; Partridge is a work of comedy genius but Michael Rodd was the real deal.