Heads And Tails, Here We Hoo-ba-doo-ba-de-ba-doo-ba-do-ba-be-do-doodah-doodah-doodah-doodah-do-mmmmm-mmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm!

Teddy Edward - who, incidentally, now resides in a Japanese toy museum, having been sold in the nineties for a frankly ridiculous amount of money, despite one of the original Camberwick Green soldier boys failing to sell at all around the same time (and you probably wouldn't get twenty seven pence for Uncle Casserole... but we're getting a bit ahead of ourselves there) - may well have been a prolific chronicler of his equally prolific overseas travel, but he clearly did all of his pointing-out-on-the-map-all-the-places-he-had-been in big writing on the back of postcards rather than in Eric Newby-troubling weighty journals. In fact, there wasn't even enough in the way of photographic stills and sub-Whicker's World narration stroke annotation to fill a full fifteen-minute Watch With Mother slot, and his photographically-illustrated cultural wanderings were related in mere five minute instalments.

This scheduling shortfall was duly made up by Ring-A-Ding, a videotaped studiobound ten minute effort in which Derek Griffiths improvised in front of some big pieces of coloured card. And there, ladies and gentlemen, you have the entire ethos of mid-seventies children's television distilled into its purest scientific form. In the kingdom of presenters being expected to think on their feet in a 'white void' set, Derek Griffiths was king, and when you're faced with such pretenders to the throne as Brian Cant, Johnny Ball, Fred Harris and Floella Benjamin - some of whom we'll be meeting again later on - that's no mean feat. Formerly a would-be jazz-folker given to vocal yodelling in the style of Tim Buckley, by the early seventies Griffiths, like many of his peers (including the earlier-mentioned Toni Arthur and Lionel Morton), had fallen into children's television presenting almost by accident, and proceeded to spend the remainder of the decade doing his rubber-limbed thang across just about any BBC children's programme you care to mention, not to mention indulging in such extra-curricular 'is it canon?' activities as presenting Public Information Films about bike theft and (in animated form) the ridiculous 'Splink' campaign, and lending his contortive qualities to hazily-recalled Twister-infringing board game Bent Outta Shape.

Needless to say, his vocal talents and indeed songwriting abilities were often called into service for his TV 'gigs', and most viewers of a certain age will be familiar with his off-the-wall 'in-character' animal songs for Heads & Tails, and indeed his even-more off-the-wall-still wordless yodelling for Bod, previously likened within this convoluted stream-of-consciousness storyline to the output of sixties cello-sawing types AMM. Despite its minimalist approach, Ring-A-Ding clearly made maximum use of his musical resources, as on Music From BBC Children's Programmes we get - bolted together, as you may be expecting by now, into a single track - both the theme and a song used within an actual episode. The former runs to a mere twenty four seconds, though it's those mere twenty four seconds that have had many a collector clamouring for a copy of this album (and that's enough uses of the word 'mere' for this post). As again you might well be expecting, it's twenty four seconds' worth of Griffiths-strummed acoustic guitar, with doorknocker-thrapping, whistling, and short but to the point lyrics about how he's, well, going to tell us a story.

The story in this case - and the proto-postmodernist first verse amusingly outlines yet again that this is a story that Derek Griffiths is going to tell - is that of a boy named Ricky, who built an aeroplane to the bemused chagrin of his peers, which nonetheless ultimately 'flew' with the aid of his going, erm, "brum brum". Though this pleasantly early-seventies-chart-pop-like ditty was indeed used in Ring-A-Ding, this particular recording of it is in fact rather confusingly lifted - like some other track selections we've yet to encounter - from fellow BBC Records And Tapes release Sing A Song Of Play School, its inter-show use presumably the result of them temporarily sharing multi-talented producer Michael Cole, whose pronounced interest in Zen Buddhism presumably accounted for the 'less is more' stylistic approach of Ring-A-Ding. And the 'less' that we get here has certainly left one or two listeners wanting 'more', the undue prominence of this obscure entry on Music From BBC Children's Programmes leading to occasional speculation that there might well be a full-length Ring-A-Ding album out there somewhere. Sadly, if there is, then it's still gathering dust in the BBC Worldwide tape archive, with not even a test pressing ever having emerged. Though it has to be admitted that there's not exactly legions of collectors looking for one.

If you're looking for obscure 'lost world' children's television - and, lest we forget (though there's been so much rambling along the way that you probably have forgotten), that's what we came here looking for - then you'd be hard pushed to find a better example than Ring-A-Ding. Once shown in constant rotation and so well-known that it found its way onto this album, it's since fallen into almost complete cultural oblivion, and yet all of the pieces that it slots together are so familiar that you can almost feel what it must have looked like even if you've never seen it. Added to that, its apparent leanings towards spiritual philosophy (well, in the form of Derek Griffiths and some card, at any rate) only serve to intensify the feeling that we are on the verge of a breakthrough to that higher plane of consciousness where Barnaby is dispensing wisdom about how cultural obscurity will ultimately reach a critical mass which will then resolve itself into a clip appearing on Charlie Brooker's Screen Wipe. And, by the sound of it, there's a fire engine bell echoing from somewhere in the Barnaby-planed distance...

Killing Me Softly With His Moogs Funks Breaks

The point of all that background detail on If It's Wednesday, It Must Be... was to bring us - in a very roundabout way - to the somewhat inappropriately named fifth track of Music From BBC Children's Programmes. And as the two posts building up to this have been the least popular entries in the whole saga of The Golden Road To Unlimited Barnaby thus far, it had better be worth it. Still, that's what happens when you spend far too long wittering on about one of the least popular aspects of the already fairly unopular medium of radio. Wonder if it would have fared any better with a mention of une emission du service des sports presente par Jacques Vendou?

Anyway, one of Kenny Everett's regular inserts in If It's Wednesday, It Must Be... was Rock Salmon - Private Investigator, a madcap spoof of old radio detective serials which started off with something resembling a proper storyline about Edward Heath being stolen, and degenerated into little more than weekly insulting of Mary Whitehouse. After the demise of If It's Wednesday, It Must Be..., Radio 4 were keen to retain Everett's services in a child-entertaining capacity, and duly installed him in a Saturday afternoon show, 4th Dimension. This had much the same format as If It's Wednesday, It Must Be..., albeit with a less belief-beggaring line-up, other contributors including broadcaster Phil Drabble, astronomer Patrick Moore, purveyor of finest 'improving' tedium about ballet-loving youngsters sent to live with stern maiden aunts Noel Streatfeild (yes, that's how it's spelt[CITATION NEEDED]), and impenetrable literary schoolboy 'Jennings'. If you could make it through all that without switching off in boredom - or indeed without stopping reading this blog in boredom, which is what all the 'cool kids' seem to be doing - there were also the exploits of Everett's great forgotten post-Rock Salmon pre-Captain Kremmen Wireless Workshop-derived hero, Captain Rex Radio, who sought to thwart the supervillainous schemes of mad scientist Ernst Krakov with the assistance of hippy cat Passionflower.

And the above is an even more roundabout way of getting to the point that track five was - yes, you guessed it - the theme from 4th Dimension. This was by Paddy Kingsland of the BBC Radiophonic Workshop, one of the 'second wave' of Workshop composers who had been brought in largely because he had a rock music background and knew how to work those new-fangled 'Moog' things, and someone we'll be meeting a few times during this album. In 1973, EMI asked him to record an extra-curricular 'Synths Play The Top Pops'-style album for their famed Studio 2 Stereo imprint, much as some previous Workshop occupants had ended up recording a prog album for Island... but that's another story. The result was Supercharged!, where bonkers Kingsland originals like The Earthmen rubbed shoulders with Mooged-up renditions of the likes of Killing Me Softly With His Song, Cecilia and, erm, The Wombling Song. Sensing an opportunity, BBC Records And Tapes duly arranged for him to produce a similar album with his various TV and radio themes rearranged in a pop style. Unfortunately this was never really going to set the charts alight, containing as it did the themes from such iconic well-remembered shows as Scene & Heard, The Space Between and Just Love, and best known track Reg (the theme music for the BBC's African Service) is arguably only well known because it later ended up on the flipside of the Doctor Who theme... but that's another another story.

Anyway, it was from there that the 4th Dimension theme was extracted for Music From BBC Children's Programmes, its twangy electronic burblings presumably constituting a considerable portion of the 'moogs funks breaks' that get eBay sellers so financially unrealistically hot under the collar. It sounds, as all Paddy Kingsland's efforts from this time tend to, as though a failing Acid Folkie had tried to write a hit pop song, but had their idea stolen by a robot who then hid at the bottom of a very large well packed with echo units. This, in case you hadn't realised, is a very good thing, though let's save the discussions about rural-pluralism for another time please. It's a prime example of that odd period when electronics first discovered pop music, and as such very much sonically evocative of that all-important sub-psychotropic Barnaby-buys-a-Casio-VL-Tone era, and all the more effective for someone who had owned a 4th Dimension annual during that same timeframe without ever quite understanding what it actually was. Meanwhile, the 4th Dimension theme would surely have been a prime contender for the planned synth-showcasing original version of The Sound Gallery 2 before Funtastian Retrololz and his pals got their grubby terylene-shirted hands on the 'Loungecore' scene... but that's another another another story.

And if you are one of the readers that's loyally stayed with this perhaps rather taxing narrative lurch, which for some must have been as appropriately impenetrable as, well, an old Radio Times radio listing, then thank you very much indeed. And if you're one of the ones that hasn't, then come back! There's some Derek Griffiths in a minute...

In The Realm Of Nothing Whatever

The problem with this jazzy boulevard that I'd found myself diverted along was that it was addictive. If a theoretical boulevard can be addictive as such. Where soft drugs and soft porn lead some on to harder drugs and harder porn, the hapless jazz addict will find themselves drawn towards ever lengthier and more abstract ventures, albeit more healthily and indeed 'healthily', until they arrive at that point of no musical return - 'free jazz'.

No, this doesn't have anything to do with Jools Holland And His Boogie Woogie Big Brigade playing for the benefit of non-paying passers by. It's a style of jazz where improvisation takes precedence over melody and structure, and the players dispense with such trivialities as chord sequences and tempo and literally 'play how they feel'. It's complex, it's challenging, it's intellectual and it gives you an air of depth and sophistication. The only problem is that a good deal of it is basically an unlistenable racket. Sun Ra, Ornette Coleman, Charles Mingus... these are all incredibly hip names to drop, and yes some of their work is indeed rewarding if demanding listening. But that's when it works. Most of the time, it doesn't, and you'd be hard pushed to find anyone who listens to the bulk of 'free jazz' for pleasure.

Personally speaking, there's only three examples of the genre that I'd ever listen to for anything resembling 'pleasure', and none of them are exactly textbook examples. First, and laugh if you must, there's the music from Zen-inflected BBC Watch With Mother effort Bod. The short tunes that heralded each character were composed in advance by well-versed scat-yodeller Derek Griffiths, and improvised around by a set of players who might well be playing how they 'feel' (notably the violinist, who appears to be aiming for some kind of world title in Most Number Of Notes Played in a minute) but who never lose sight of the tune (admittedly, not hard to do when said tunes run to an average of eight seconds). Secondly, at the other extreme, there's AMM, who dispensed with the whole notion of a 'tune' altogether. This fluid collective of hardcore beardy jazzers were regulars on London's mid-sixties 'psychedelic underground' circuit, where they donned lab coats and turned the scoffing that free jazz was 'just noise' to their advantage, recruiting someone to 'play' the transistor radio alongside conventional instruments and doing away with anything resembling riffs or melody to concentrate on creating evocative soundscapes with names like Later During A Flaming Riviera Sunset and After Rapidly Circling The Plaza. Yes, there are moments when the screeching and scraping can all get a bit too much, yes, there are moments when it sounds like the 'bonus track' from The Stone Roses' Second Coming has been dropped on the floor and smashed and then haphazardly glued back together, and yes, there are moments that can only be described as sounding like a goose, browbeaten and exhausted by the relentless cacophony, is weakly pleading to be allowed out of the room. But if you're in the right mood, it can be quite an entertaining listen. And then there's Starsailor by Tim Buckley.

Initially one of about two hundred and thirty three million 'folk troubadors' Dylan-aping their way around Greenwich Village in the early sixties, Buckley was marked out from the crowd by the advantageous possession of both an ability to write his own songs and a searing multi-octave vocal range, and was quickly signed to the ultra-hip Elektra label, where he recorded two strong but rather undistinguished albums. By the time of third offering Happy Sad, however, he'd started to move towards jazz, embellishing his songs with vibes, standup bass, congas, impressionistic lead guitar and startling vocal gymnastics, as most celebratedly showcased on the superb Buzzin' Fly. Critical and commercial success followed, but Buckley was also doing some following of his own, delving deeper into the possibilities of the jazz idiom. The slightly more loose-ended Blue Afternoon (containing Happy Time, which even if proved otherwise this writer will still continue to believe 'borrowed' its arrangement from the end theme of Camberwick Green) gave way to a brace of albums that were almost entirely free-form in approach, which went right over the heads of the 'heads' and more or less finished off his spell as a chart hopeful. With his career and personal life in freefall, Buckley spent some time working as as chauffeur before remerging with a radically reinvented funk sound and borderline explicit lyrics, which was just starting to pay dividends when, having become increasingly fond of hard partying, he died following the entirely accidental mistaking of one 'substance' for another; something given added poignancy by the later equally young and accidental death of his son, Jeff Buckley, with only one critically acclaimed album to his name. Starsailor, in case you hadn't worked it out already, dates from slap bang in the middle of his 'difficult' period, and while it can seem a difficult listen at first, with lots of juddering noises and vocal lines seeming to break through at random, perseverance pays off and you come to really appreciate the lovelorn aching of Song To The Siren, the propulsive riffing of Monterey, and the carefree and schmaltzy Moulin Rouge, the closest the album ever comes to a conventional song (something that is leapt on by a trumpeter who is audibly overjoyed to be playing something that makes sense to his ears at last).

So, free jazz - it may be 'clever', but it's not big. And what's more, as the spectre-at-the-feast that was Derek Griffiths yelling "doo dk'n dk'n doo da dooda dadooda, do do do do do d'doooo!" kept naggingly reminding me, it was an improvisation too far from the real musical holy grail - as indeed the above overlong and overcomplex write-how-you-feel free-form shenanigans have been from the main narrative thrust - Music From BBC Children's Programmes. As Sun Ra & His Arkestra jetted off further into some kind of sax-wailing cosmos, Bod And His Friends were wandering into a horizonless green void. And I was somewhere in the middle, still rifling through those hazardous cardboard boxes.