Plus... Tubular... Bells (Made From Cardboard Rolls And 'Double-Sided Sticky Tape')

So, track three of Music From BBC Children's Programmes. The Blue Peter theme. And the original orchestral pre-Mike Oldfield one at that. Much as we might prefer to avoid it, and may have spent the previous two posts trying to find ways of doing just that, it's there on the album and is a hurdle that has to be overcome if we want to get to The Electric Kool-Aid (Made By Windy Miller's Cider Press) Acid Test, so let's just get it out of the way and move on.

The Blue Peter theme, as you may already know, is a jaunty re-arrangement of Barnacle Bill, written by Ashworth Hope and definitely not to be confused with the rather off-colour traditional sea shanty of the same name. And similarly not to be confused with the closing theme Drum And Fife, which is apparently an entirely different tune despite sounding almost identical. This version, as used onscreen from 1958 to 1979, was performed by the New Century Orchestra conducted by Sidney Torch, perhaps better known as creator and mainstay of Radio 2's Friday Night Is Music Night. And, well, it sounds pretty much as you remember it, from the opening drum roll to the shrill sign-off. It's jolly but formal strings and woodwind all the way, and as it had its origins in the world of 'proper' orchestral composition, there isn't even a hastily-written weird-out 'middle bit' to enjoy. No, it's just more of the same with occasional variations in conducting emphasis, the only real 'moment' coming with an unexpected oboe 'breakdown' that sounds as if it more rightly belongs behind an early Disney character falling over.

It's nice enough as far as it goes (and later sounded great on CD, but that's another story), and it would be a brave person who suggested that it was anything less than a pleasant and jaunty light orchestral piece, but it just doesn't belong on Music From BBC Children's Programmes. Well, actually, in a literal sense it probably has more claim to be on there than any of the other inclusions. But in a more esoteric and hypothetical sense it's a real fish out of water, redolent of an earlier age of ration books and Calling All Workers and whistling postmen and, well, children's TV of the late fifties (and let's be honest, Blue Peter had done little in the way of modernising since then). Musically and indeed aesthetically it has little in common with the two preceding tracks, nor indeed what else might potentially be found later on in the tracklisting.

Crucially, had this album come out only a couple of years later, it would have featured Mike Oldfield's far more pleasing progged-up Korgtastic rendition, squealing lead guitar and all. Or if it had been Music From ITV Children's Programmes (and oh for such an album to have existed), it would have boasted The Spencer Davis Group's pseudonymous swirly-Hammond Mod-dancefloor-friendly theme song from Magpie. But no, the original Blue Peter theme it had to be, looming up like that weird post-credits zoom in on the Blue Peter boat to remind us that we couldn't have it our own way all the time, and as long as a Reithian pulse was still detectable in the BBC they'd make sure we got our healthy regular dose of improving programming to balance out all that mind-bending stuff about violin-playing robots. Still, it could have been worse. At least it wasn't the brass band rendition of On Ilkla Moor Baht 'at that bookended outward bound Blue Peter spinoff Go With Noakes.

We came looking for something akin to The Walham Green East Wapping Rodent And Boggit Extermination Association appearing on Cheggers Plays Pop. We left, as ever, under the disapproving gaze of those clean-cut youngsters who didn't like that uncouth pop and roll music but knew everything there was to know about getting up at six in the morning to do their bugle practice, recite the Kings and Queens of England in both chronological and dynastic order, and then get to work on the latest Blue Peter 'make'. The effect was somewhat like finding Edwelweiss by Vince Hill in the middle of side one of The Piper At The Gates Of Dawn (the exact opposite effect, amusingly, to finding (Bring Me) Edelweiss by Edelweiss in the middle of side one of The Piper At The Gates Of Dawn), and as we shall find out, this fading of the psychedelic dream would get worse before it would get better.

Bleu, Bleu, L'amour Est Bleu (Surtout En Regardent Pierre Bleu)

Still not convinced? Alright, let's consider this in slightly more pseudo-scientific terms. Many years ago, probably while Music From BBC Children's Programmes was on general release, the BBC used to use a caption slide in a horrid navy/mustard/white colour scheme for unveiling the day's children's TV schedules. On either side of said schedules were a set of illustrations featuring iconography from some of the more popular offerings of the day, complete with two children gazing up at them in awe. On the left were the Play School house and Zebedee from The Magic Roundabout, and on the right were Scooby Doo and - you knew it was on the horizon - the Blue Peter boat.

"So what?", you're probably thinking. "It stands to reason that they'd slap a few random representations of view-enticing shows onto an otherwise bland-looking schedule which probably had bloody God's Wonderful Railway in it on top of everything else, without even considering that in the far and distant future someone would use it as a flimsy springboard for launching into yet more unwarranted Blue Peter-bashing". And yes, in the conventional and indeed literal sense, you'd be exactly right. But consider it more in terms of the cognitive associations of this juxtaposition. The shows on the left, it has to be said, are precisely those that would appeal to the more arty and cerebral sector of the audience, that had 'seen' the jazz influences of Play Away and indulged in pre-school existential rumination on the modern condition and its relation to the pop-art ethics underpinning the Play School toys, and probably grew up to be obsessed with French cinema and lo-fi music and indeed with recapturing the lost 'white void' studio of the mind. Whereas those on the right (yes, alright, this isn't Robin Carmody's Saturday Night Takeaway you know) pointed towards more of a sense of structure and order and academic rigour, with precision and achievement and fresh-faced fun taking precedence over angst-ridden doodling intended to somehow 'take down the government'. In a sense it really is the whole 'Left Brain/Right Brain' theorem writ large, only the wrong way round, and with more Barnaby.

And so it was that if you went through childhood with the imprinted image of a Franco-English stop-motion bear lodged in your subconscious, Blue Peter was merely something that Other Children Liked. Its adherence to formality and achievement and unobtrusive modes of dress, not to mention its obsession with historical facts and figures and ever so slightly patronising exploration of 'foreign' cultures, was sometimes more than the unfocused creative mind could cope with and as such simply rejected it. Others may have had their Bring And Buy Sales and free entry to the Natural History Museum for Blue Peter badgewinners, but this was a world you could not understand and were not invited into anyway, forced instead to stand peering through the window with Mr Davenport from Rentaghost.

It's worth mentioning at this point that there is something of a misconception that those who were barred from entering the Blue Peter party automatically sought solace in Magpie, the ITV counterpart that folk legend would have you believe was something tantamount to a 'roller disco' in comparison. However, that's ignoring the fact that underneath its more modish trappings, Magpie had much the same obsessions as Blue Peter - almost as if Brotherhood Of Man had decided to go 'New Wave' - and the last thing you wanted was to replace something you didn't like with more of the same in trendier jackets. If anything, such disaffected viewers would probably have gravitated towards How!, where the presenters explained how things work but made surreal fun of them at the same time... but that's straying way too far off the central narrative thrust for now. Of course, Magpie did have one very significant thing in its favour, but we'll return to that in due course.

Suffice it to say that no matter how entertaining the archive clips routinely included as extras on 'Classic' Doctor Who DVDs may be, and no matter how legendarily entertaining the bitter rivalry between Blue Peter and Magpie presenters may have been in more recent times, and no matter how enviably classy a complete run of Blue Peter 'books' (never 'annuals'... the whole argument that's taken up two blog posts encapsulated in one word right there) may look on an erstwhile Noakes-decrier's shelves, that's all to do with how vintage Blue Peter seems now, and back when vintage Blue Peter wasn't actually vintage, it was the prim and proper diametric defuser of any theoretical Fingerbobs firework lit by Keith Chegwin. And here it was, slap bang in the middle(ish) of the first side of Music From BBC Children's Programmes, poised to do exactly the same thing again.

Here's One We Made Much More Boringly

Alright, Those Children From The Cover Of Music From BBC Children's Programmes, you can come out from behind the sofa now. Doctor Who and the 'Worlds' thereof has finished, and it's time for the theme music from exactly the sort of programme that appealed to you gentrified Shrivenzale-fearing swots. The sort of programme that has always polluted any attempt at waxing psychedelinostalgic lyrical about children's television of the past with the overwhelming odiferous strength of Pickled Onion Monster Munch. The sort of programme it was always tacitly dictated you ought to be watching, as opposed to the sort that you actually wanted to watch. The sort of programme that was, well, Blue Peter.

Let's get one thing straight from the outset. If we're plotting a star chart rendered in 'Glam Rock' graphology where the constellations form representations of Mr McHenry and Farmer Barleymow inside a larger strobing swirl of cosmic flares, then Blue Peter has no place on it. Yes, it was popular, yes, it was long-running, and yes, it may have to be grudgingly accepted that its live nature sometimes led to watchable moments of cat-goes-berzerk-and-pushes-John-Noakes-backwards-over-couch hilarity, but none of that can do anything to counter the fact that, in this context at least, Blue Peter is to all intents and purposes an Englebert Humperdinck accidentally included on the bill of a 14 Hour Technicolour Dream.

Nowadays, of course, Blue Peter enjoys a very different sort of incongruity, as one of the last remaining outposts of clean-cut improving semi-educational children's television, and is also barely recognisable in that they actually allow the presenters to have something resembling a hairstyle. Back in the era of Music From BBC Children's Programmes, however, you either loved it or hated it. And if you hated it, it was a dull teacherish Reithian exercise in instructing you in what you should be interested in, populated by over-enthusiastic presenters who lacked even the verging-on-surreal-dryness of other close contemporaries like John Craven, presented from a 'white void' studio it barely deserved, and suffering from a worryingly fanatical devotion to retelling the story of The Stone Of Scone.

No doubt many of those who loved it, and TV Cream's Steve Williams in particular, will have stopped reading by now, but please be assured this is no idle and opportunistic exercise in Blue Peter-bashing. For it was a show that had little in common - station of origin aside - with the more absurdist and chronologically adrift shows that it might have been hoped were to be found on Music From BBC Children's Programmes, and yet was always the first to get mentioned whenever anyone sought to evoke memories of children's television past, with reminiscences about 'double-sided sticky tape' and 'makes' that nobody ever made and the Time Capsule and That Sodding Elephant and when Princess Anne joined them for something or other as if anyone ever cared about that in the first place anyway just generally getting in the way of rightful Chegger-skewed revelry, leading to no end of Barnaby-fuelled resentment towards Peter Purves and company. It was probably a wrongful scapegoat, but it was a scapegoat all the same, and arms had to be taken up against it. Slim Charles from The Wire would have been proud.

And whereas Doctor Who was a welcome and musically pleasing diversion from the path to Play Away-soundtracked enlightenment, Blue Peter came equipped with formal (if jolly) stiffly orchestral theme music that belonged to another age. All of the hopes that had been pinned on Music From BBC Children's Programmes were, it seemed, rapidly fading. The Day Of Those Children From The Cover was upon us.

Gallifreyan Staser Gun (3 Blasts)

If anyone ever did actually watch Doctor Who from behind the 'sofa', then it's a fair bet that the second track of Music From BBC Children's Programmes would have similarly sent them diving for upholstered cover. For as the upbeat tones of the Play Away cast getting down home and funky about opening umbrellas indoors fades out, in comes the all-too-familiar electronic sting that had followed countless instances of Tom Baker doing his 'alarmed' face while a booming voice announced that there was nothing he could do to stop their plans now.

Yes, the second track began with the original version of the Doctor Who theme music. Although not quite the original; over the course of the programme's ten year history, The BBC Radiophonic Workshop's original arrangement had been regularly electronically rejigged as an when successive production teams opted to wield the trusty 'new broom'. It had been bolstered by new-fangled electronic 'spangles' (as the fans insist on calling them, which is especially confusing when you're in the middle of an already all-over-the-place narrative that has already made several mentions of the over-mythologised boiled sweets of the same name) and indeed the aforementioned cliffhanger-enhancing sting, it had been remixed into stereo (and, surprisingly for its vintage, real proper bona fide stereo too), and the full-length Tardis take-off effect had been pasted in halfway through. And even that's just the obvious rememberable-off-the-top-of-your-head stuff. Suffice it to say that although the same basic original recording was still there somewhere underneath it all, in many ways it was actually a different version to the simpler, sparser one that had heralded the show's black and white era. Oh yes, Patrick Troughton had to go "oh my gobby gobstoppers!" while a hissing voice announced that there was nothing he could do to stop their plans now without the aid of a fancy electronic sting, you know.

Handily, that subtle but crucial difference marked it out as hailing from the era that you're doubtless tired of hearing about Music From BBC Children's Programmes hopefully invoking (though that will become more relevant later on, honest). By the early eighties, one of said 'new brooms' had ditched the original theme altogether in favour of a new recording; something that happened twice more before the 'classic' series ended and indeed before I managed to get hold of Music From BBC Children's Programmes, with yet another reworking not too far in the distance (though where was that sixty-piece orchestra?). As a result, this slightly older arrangement positively reeked of slit-scan title sequences, seemingly endless multicoloured scarves, dodgy CSO sequences, Target Books, The Giant Robot, and hazy ancestral memories of Jon Pertwee and The Brigadier. This was, doubtless to the relief of anyone who had sat through The Trial Of A Time Lord, the sound of Doctor Who How It Used To Be.

And yet, for all that certain 'fans' might have liked to grumble about how it was better in their day when it was all photographic blow-ups of fields around here and you could get to the Blackpool Exhibition and back and still have change from half a shilling, there was a sense in which Doctor Who How It Used To Be had never really gone away. Yes, alright, so there were about three old stories out on video and you needed to take out a second mortgage to buy any of them, but outside of that there was a whole industry founded on exploiting Doctor Who's archival adventures, from books and magazines to scale model Ice Warriors and the iconically ridiculous Build The Tardis ("Your own time machine... without scissors or glue!"), and if you threw a Dapol Tetrap hard enough chances are it would hit an album that had this theme arrangement somewhere on it. Though not the original original, which got a single release back in 1964 but had since all but vanished... but that's another story.

And that's why, as fantastic a piece of music as it might be, and Music From BBC Children's Programmes wouldn't live up to its title without it, the original-but-not-the-original version of the Doctor Who theme is something of an interruption to proceedings. There's plenty that it does evoke, yes, but rather fittingly that's all for another time and another place. Of course, this isn't quite the whole story as it segues into its more nostalgia-nirvana satisfying companion piece The World Of Doctor Who, though that and indeed its place in the quest for the pop-cultural Key To Time of Music From BBC Children's Programmes has already been covered a couple of chapters back. Instead, it's time to move on to another long-running show that has enjoyed something of a close relationship with Doctor Who...

Captain Kipper's Clipper (Hypnotone Brain Machine Mix)

Play Away, the first track on Music From BBC Children's Programmes, was sadly not subtitled A Dub Symphony In Two Parts. Instead, the tracklisting revealed, it was built up in true 12" version of Tainted Love style from two shorter tracks known as 'Theme' and Superstition. The first of these, it was not unreasonable to presume, must surely have been the Play Away theme song itself; a song by then so well-known, and indeed so utterly chronologically distanced from its original intended purpose, that it had transcended its small-scale small-screen origins to become almost an alternative National Anthem of sorts. Or at least it would be in a world where Andy Pandy's Coming To Play (Tra La La La La La) had supplanted Land Of Hope And Glory.

For the benefit of those who only know the song from the strangely uniform repertoire of parents trying to sing their offspring into submission, the Play Away theme song was invariably heard at the close of the show with Jonathan Cohen pounding out a few nifty jazz piano chord rolls, and the cast struggling with oversized comedy props bearing their names. Usually Brian Cant took the vocal lead - only fitting as he was the main driving force behind the show - which is why it came as something of a surprise to discover that this earliest known reading was sung, and indeed originally written, by Lionel Morton. And that's not all - in place of the more familiar arrangement there was a looser, more improvised setting based around stand-up bass, percussion, and what appeared to be somebody twanging a ruler on the underside of a desk.

The version presented here, I would later discover, was actually rather bluntly hacked down from a much longer recording on the Bang On A Drum album, omitting numerous jazzy melodic touches and an entire middle eight; in its truncated form, however, it did have the advantage of sounding uncannily like the sort of song Oasis would start droning out a year or so later (from the point of view of this narrative rather than from when Play Away started... come on, keep up!), only with slightly more verbose lyrics and slightly more imaginative instrumentation. More significantly, it was 'retro' in a sense that the aggressively backward-looking Gallagher brothers could never hope to replicate or even appreciate... but we're getting a bit ahead of ourselves there. There's a whole second half of the track to get through first.

So, with the Play Away theme over, the stand-up bass deftly folded back on itself like the way The Stone Roses used to segue between Where Angels Play and Shoot You Down in their live shows, and led straight into Superstition, sung as a duet between Lionel and Toni Arthur, though written by Cohen cohort Peter Gosling and strangely absent presenter Carole Ward. You're probably already way ahead here and formulating your own joke about it not being a cover of Stevie Wonder's identically-titled homage to the Sportsnight theme music, but believe it or not that wouldn't actually be quite as much a joke as you might think. For this musical namesake is similarly swathed in wah wah-heavy jazz-funk inflections, and similarly lyrically concerned with debunking folklore nonsense that "may or may not happen", though Mr. Wonder's failure to include Brian Cant and Chloe Ashcroft doing some inter-verse spoken word ridiculing of never-walk-under-ladders hokum is his loss, frankly.

Due in no small part to its lack of gaudy hallucinogenic puppets, Play Away isn't quite the first show that you'd think of when attempting to break through to a pop-cultural elevated dimensional plane of seventies pre-school television esoterica, and yet just one track in to Music From BBC Children's Programmes we'd reached somewhere that, while not yet quite drifting in a space free of time (nor indeed rollerskating around a lake) somewhere between Diamonds & Pearls and Screamadelica, had succeeded in evoking it both musically and visually (after all, what are those spoken comic exchanges if not a reflection of the show itself?) in unexpectedly funk-inflected fashion. Then an all-too-familiar electronic sting blasted the whole experience into space.