YOU’RE A GENUINE PONY! [532]

Some things insist on being written about.

On Christmas Day 1975, BBC Two broadcast a studio-based rock musical retelling the Trojan Wars headlined by the great Bernard Cribbins, alongside former Manfred Mann singer Paul Jones, and with a pre-“Evita” Julie Covington among the cast. The name of the show would be “Great Big Groovy Horse”.

Starring a young adult cast, with the then 46-year-old Cribbins in the nominal role as both teacher, narrator and Agamemnon, the breaking up an argument between two men over a girlfriend in a community club becomes a metaphor for confrontation between the Achaeans and the city of Troy, with Paul Jones plays Meneleaus, whose wife Helen (Patricia Hodge) was taken by Paris (Nigel Williams).

Man, you had to be there… literally, for apart from a repeat showing on BBC One two Christmases later, I don’t think it has been since, save for a viewer with the foresight and money to own an early video recorder.

The songs are catchy, acting as points to highlight emotion amongst Cribbins’s narrative, although the lyrics are very Seventies, and very Musical: “Paris, you’re a rat, you’re a mean cat”, and “Heed my word if you wanna get wiser, it’s the saddest little story that you’ve ever heard, everybody better heed my word”. You will also see people getting to belt out the line “you’re a genuine pony!” after describing the Trojan horse as a “tourist attraction”. The main point is to get across the outline of the story in as entertaining a way as possible, and it achieves that, but just don’t give yourself a test on what information it told you, as you realise you went with the flow of the songs.

You must use your imagination: the performers, singing into microphones with trailing wires, largely wear their own clothes, while the set is made of functional scaffolding, incorporating stairs, gantry and double doors, set on a floor marked out in black and white zones, marking out Troy by writing on the floor in purple. The bare studio walls are also seen occasionally. The Trojan horse itself, nearly twenty feet high and mounted on bicycle wheels, appears to be made of coloured blocks, like a computer game that couldn’t have been made yet.

Like “Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat” was originally written to perform in schools, Elmgrove Junior School in Harrow originated “Great Big Groovy Horse”, the musical’s writers Simone Bloom & Arnold Shaw being friends of the school’s music teacher. Some BBC staff must have had children who attended there too, for the corporation bought the broadcast rights, recording its fifty-minute production at studio 1 of Television Centre in April 1975. I have seen later evidence from a local newspaper that the stage version was performed in High Wycombe as late as 1979. The producer of the TV version was Paul Ciani, who continued his career with Basil Brush, “Crackerjack!”, The Krankies and Keith Harris, later graduating to producing shows later in the evening like “The Kenny Everett Television Show”, “Call My Bluff” and “Top of the Pops”.

This production of “Great Big Groovy Horse” looked and felt like an upscaled version of “Play Away”, the children’s musical series that Julie Covington appeared in at the time alongside future star Jeremy Irons. Jonathan Cohen, musical director of “Play Away” and of incidental music for “Jackanory” and “Rentaghost”, co-adapted and arranged this production, and performer Kim Goody would later appear in “Play Away” and “Number 73”, alongside her work as a composer for shows like “Playdays” and “Mike & Angelo”. Meanwhile, both Paul Jones and Cribbins had stints reading stories on “Jackanory”, Cribbins in particular having appeared in everything from “The Railway Children” to “The Wombles”, alongside his own musical career with songs like “Right Said Fred”, “Hole in the Ground”, “Gossip Calypso” and a very affecting version of “I’ve Grown Accustomed to Her Face” from “My Fair Lady”.

If you can find “Great Big Groovy Horse”, give it a try, for it is a great time capsule for what British children’s TV could produce in 1975. I wonder how many watched at the time, seeing as its competition on BBC One that Christmas Day was “The Morecambe & Wise Show” with Diana Rigg.

BLINDED BY THE LIGHT [531]

Ten years and counting...

I remember writing “16/02/2016” on the box of a spare lightbulb, having just screwed the other two into the light fixture in my bedroom. 

These were the first “energy-saving” bulbs I had bought, having decided that even their cost, at £15 for three, will be cheaper in the long run, over incandescent bulbs that wouldn’t survive the year. I was also making the switch from “warm white” to “cool white” light bulbs, reasoning that simulated daylight has its benefits – I don’t have any form of seasonal affective disorder, as far as I know, but I am not comfortable in gloominess or darkness either.

I figured these will last for a few years – they were rated to last for sixteen thousand hours, or 1.8 continuous years, so figured that, when I need to replace them, bulbs like them will be easier to find than ordering them online. Having now entered March 2026, I am still waiting for both moments come to pass.

What I bought were “corn cob” bulbs, cylinders lined with white LEDs in their most common form, squares of yellow phosphor covering a blue diode. They remain surprisingly effective, a level of light that makes people wonder if I ever sleep – they are not dimmable, but each bulb uses only twelve watts of power per hour – but I always thought warm white was too akin to candlelight, and what I wanted was brightness. 

Admittedly, the bulbs are bright enough that I only need to use two of the fittings in my light fixture, but that level of cool white light, and the fixture’s ability to swivel around, act as an effective fill light when I have made videos for YouTube. Later, a petrol station nearby would replace their sign displaying their prices with one using the same LEDs, legible from a great distance, but I remain undeterred.

I have again started to think about getting replacement light bulbs, but only because I have entered uncharted territory – after ten years, they really could stop working at any time, and I know having only one working bulb does not produce enough light for the room, and produces too many shadows, so I need to be ready. I have considered buying smart bulbs, using an app on my phone to select warm white light if I wish, or other colours entirely, but they do not produce enough overall light – I would need at least three of them, each one costing as much as the original pack of three bulbs did. Supermarkets, the place most people would buy their bulbs, also sell only the most popular bulbs, i.e. warm white only, but even DIY stores don’t routinely sell cool white bulbs that produce enough light for me – it makes me wonder if my long-lasting bulbs are illegal in some way.

So, what I need is a plan: do I find a like-for-like replacement for my long-lasting bulbs, or do I find other ways of solving the same problems they solved? Shall I get separate key and fill lights for when I return to making videos, and get less powerful bulbs for the room? Any which way, I won’t be living in darkness.

DON’T TELL ME IT’S NOT WORTH TRYING FOR [530]

I had been waiting to see the Looney Tunes film “The Day The Earth Blew Up” for longer than I realised, so I was surprised to find my local cinema had already been showing it for a week.

The Looney Tunes characters have become to Warner Bros. what the Muppets are to Disney: a well-loved and historic franchise subjected to multiple reboots in search of nostalgia, relevance or both, before ultimately finding success by just letting it do what it does. The revival of “The Muppet Show” on Disney+, a one-off special with the possibility of further episodes, proved the formula still works if given a confident script and the right special guests, while the latest “Looney Tunes Cartoons”, running on HBO Max from 2020-24 and headed by Pete Browngardt, returned their characters to the hellzapoppin’ era of the 1930s and 40s, inspired by director Bob Clampett. “The Day the Earth Blew Up”, directed by Browngardt, extends this series from 3 to 10-minute shorts to feature length, and proves that all you need to do is let the characters breathe.

Originally conceived for a release to Cartoon Network and HBO Max in 2022, “The Day the Earth Blew Up” instead received a theatrical premiere in June 2024, and has slowly been released around the world since then. Distributed by Vertigo Releasing in the UK, with little or no advertising, I am watching a film that has already received a home video release in other countries.

“The Day the Earth Blew Up” begins with both an asteroid and a UFO hovering into view, the latter crashing through the roof of the film’s stars Porky Pig and Duck (both voiced by Eric Bauza). They were adopted as babies by the Mufasa-like “Farmer Jim”, who instils them with the belief that, so long as they stick together, they will be responsible. However, with their house now in peril, they need to find work for the first time, inexperience and irresponsibility limiting them to push-button work at their town’s bubble gum factory. Porky and Daffy encounter Petunia Pig, (Candi Mylo), an eccentric scientist at the factory in search of the perfect flavour, and whose initiative is needed when Daffy discovers that goo from the UFO has been dumped into a gum that is being relaunched, putting consumers under the control of The Invader (Peter MacNicol), who wants a bubble blown around the world.

The one thing I loved about the new “Looney Tunes Cartoons” was the return of Daffy Duck to his original characterisation. Instead of being a scheming foil for Bugs Bunny, Daffy is instead unpredictable and uncontrollable, to his and others’ detriment. Porky Pig, instead of being a foil to Daffy, is now the nominally responsible one, the Hardy to Daffy’s Laurel, acting as the conscience for the pair. With Porky’s attention swayed by Petunia, and with Daffy destroying her more practical plan for defeating The Invader, both friction and literal tears will come before Porky and Daffy realise how they can complement each other, and save the world together.

The twist that The Invader is also trying to save Earth – the bubble gum was meant to bounce the oncoming asteroid away from harm – was a good idea, although I did find it a little forced that The Invader didn’t make his intention known earlier in the story, unless you reason that the bizarre scheme of blowing a bubble around Earth could only be done by force, let alone an alien travelling across galaxies to drink Boba tea.

The “Looney Tunes” characters already work across a feature-length running time, as proved so many times, but I don’t know if “The Day the Earth Blew Up” will herald more. There was meant to have been “Bye Bye Bunny”, a Bugs Bunny musical film, but this had been cancelled, with Eric Bauza having recorded dialogue and songs for it. Notoriously, “Coyote vs. Acme”, a live-action and animation hybrid to be released in August 2026, was shelved three years earlier for Warner Bros. to obtain a tax write-off, before allowing its producers, Warner Bros. Animation, to find another distributor for the film, much as it has done with “The Day the Earth Blew Up”. 

Perhaps the prospect of more Looney Tunes output in 2027, including a revived “Bye Bye Bunny”, should be taken as recognition by Warner Bros. of the true value of their franchise. Of all their characters, only Porky, Daffy and Petunia appear in “The Day the Earth Blew Up”, so there should be plenty of opportunity for other characters to get their own spotlight.

WHAT A WONDERFUL WORLD THIS WILL BE [529]

With so many visions of the future in narrative fiction having proved to be incorrect, mostly because they were written to comment on the present at the time of their creation, it does not mean that I should subsequently be nostalgic for visions of the future that, for all the longing and hope they generate, did not come to pass.

That said, I wouldn’t mind seeing “The Jetsons” again. As of February 2026, the HBO Max streaming service is weeks away from launching in the UK and, while its US version has a spotty record of maintaining access to animated shows, regardless of how recent they are – so much for the Internet being permanent, I suppose – this may not be true elsewhere in the world.

More than Hanna-Barbera Productions flipping its successful show “The Flintstones” from the Stone Age to the Space Age, “The Jetsons” is about a family living in a utopian society one hundred years in the future, where people live above the clouds, work only a couple of hours a week, and need only exercise their fingers.

However, because it was first broadcast in 1962, the family is still a two-plus-two unit – father George, mother Jane, children Judy and Elroy, with pet (talking) dog Astro, and their robot maid Rosey. This makes it a standard family sitcom, but one where the family is the only familiar feature. 

Whereas “The Flintsones” is more like the “present day”, but with a Stone Age sheen – any device can be opened to find to being worked by an animal, saying “it’s a living!” – “The Jetsons” will have a little more ingenuity to its jokes, like George being caught in a traffic jam of flying cars, until a message appears to fly to a different place, but all the others do so as well, or a robot having a malfunctioning voice that requires it to knock itself to work properly, like a human would do to an old TV. The future has arrived, but it isn’t perfect.

Everything from buildings to cars in “The Jetsons” are in the space-age Googie style, prevalent from the end of the Second World War, but the show appeared just as ostentatious fins and rocket motifs started to disappear from American cars, replaced by cleaner Modernist lines. Predictions of flat TV screens, videophones and flying cars were also tempered by then-current understanding of how technology worked: a device that could 3D-print your dinner was programmed by inserting the right punched card into a slot, instead of selecting from a screen.

It is interesting to compare “The Jetsons” with “Futurama”, a similarly future-based animated show that has been revived more than once over the years. “Futurama” has a more cynical, ironic edge, and its world is more identifiably our own – one in which you can imagine yourself living, despite being set a thousand years into the future – than the utopia of “The Jetsons”, without sliding into dystopia. This familiarity has meant “Futurama” hasn’t needed to retrofit its idea of the future as the decades have progressed – rather than just being the style of the show, the buildings in “The Jetsons” are on poles to lift them above the pollution on the ground, an addition made with “Jetsons: The Movie” in 1990.

It appears I am not the only one done with “The Jetsons”, as talks were reported in October 2025 for a live-action version of the show, starring Jim Carrey and with Colin Trevorrow directing. With no-one having any comment on this report, least of all Warner Bros. as the owner of the property, we have nothing to go on about what the vision of the future in this version, apart from Trevorrow’s extensive background in science fiction films, from “Star Wars” to “Jurassic World”. So long as it looks forward, and not down, I’ll be happy.

THEY SYE THAT TIME ‘EALS ALL THINGS [528]

When I started my current administration job in 2012, “Typist” was a title still held by some people, literally typing up instructions and details received from businesses via fax machine, to be manipulated in a database later. This harked back to when typing was a specialised role that involved training for speed and accuracy.

Typing is not a lost skill, but is lost as a role, for everyone now types, as much a part of everyday life as typewriters once were, and computers now are.

I hope this trajectory eventually happens to artificial intelligence, at least in the way we currently use it – once its introductory period is over, and once tech companies are done foisting it on us, it will recede into the background. The useful tools of A.I. will remain, like accelerating scientific discoveries or managing your calendar, and the more frivolous and novel uses will fall away, like generating a picture of yourself sat on a horse, or asking a chatbot what you should do next with your life.

It would be a lovely future, one I am hopeful for, because it means we will have stopped talking about A.I., some consensus having been reached on ethical and moral boundaries, from the use of the technology to the collection of the data, from how to power data centres to where to place them, and from who can access the technology to who is allowed to control it, and just who and how is all this meant to be paid for. Yes, it would be a lovely future.

As much as I do not use A.I. by choice – I can write, manipulate pictures, make videos and find answers well enough for my own purposes, thank you – generative A.I. systems now form, or are additions to, programs I encounter every day, and that is not by choice. I am my generation’s equivalent of someone who doesn’t, or won’t have the internet at home, or a computer, just as the generation before them had to contend with whether they let a television into their house, or electricity.

My refusenik nature with A.I. is also informed by the daily view count of this website. I have seen it grow exponentially during 2025, with thousands of views a day, but a nagging thought tells me that many of these are not from people. As much as I can prevent my work from being skimmed, I am left to contemplate whether this action should be taken as a complement, when it really shouldn’t be.

Copyright infringement and data harvesting are still areas waiting on government legislation, but plagiarism, impersonation and fraud are existing problems, and once more people acknowledge that generating funny pictures and videos involve this in ways they don’t see, they may reconsider using it.

What I need to do now is enjoy the freedoms of not using A.I.: I know what I want to do or make, so I should be able to do that without fear of what will happen to it, or without having to acknowledge the slop that it can compete with. The only reason “slop” has arrived so quickly as a name for mechanically recovered content is because it is too obviously so – for as much as you can rail against people for consuming slop, they most often know it is slop, and know not to substitute it for what is real. You can denigrate the tools, you can overestimate the provider, but the biggest trick to making a good piece of media is not to underestimate you audience.

In short, I am bored of talking about A.I., for my refusal to use it willingly means I have already taken a stand against it.

IT’S TIME SOMEONE PROGRAMMED YOU [527]

The Russian "Aidol" robot collapsing at its unveiling, November 2025

When I ask “what comes after A.I.?”, what I mean is I need to know the ultimate outcome of the upheaval caused by the application of artificial intelligence into everyday life, especially as someone that has, as far as they are concerned, done their best to avoid it so far.

Am I thinking about a “post-A.I.” world, one where the technology has essentially become an endemic, integral part of how life is lived, or a world where people got bored of waiting for the future it promised, too conscious of the monetary and environmental costs of maintaining mainframes and data centres? Or am I thinking of a future beyond both these options, one mapped out by the machines that outstripped ourselves? This was science fiction once.

Right now, the A.I. programs we use remain “mechanical”, weighing user prompts against available data to generate the next outcome. This step went wrong when I asked Microsoft Copilot to explain “prompt engineering” in the style of Jack Kerouac, but because there was no actual thinking involved, that was to be expected. Already able to write confidently, draw with some ability, and manipulate photographs on a computer exactly how I need, I really have no use for the way A.I. is being pushed right now - I write this after the week Apple added generative text, equation and image functions to its Pages, Numbers and Keynote productivity apps, so long as you take out an “Apple Creator Studio” subscription to avoid missing out.

In February 2023, I wrote that I had already concluded I would not have a use for any creative generative A.I. program: “[If] you want help, or you simply want to cheat time and process, then you have now created a marketplace, and the producers want paying. Not only is it more rewarding to write that essay yourself, but it is also cheaper.” Three years of using A.I. programs have since followed, a wealth of data collected from users and subscribers, who consented to their collection of that data by their using them. It is not enough data to replace the plagiarism of copyrighted material, but enough data for me to consider whether the addition of A.I. functions to every program imaginable means tech companies will soon have “enough” data for whatever their next step turns out to be.

“Artificial general intelligence” is what I understand to be the current goal, going beyond mechanical prompts to match the human ability to think, well, intelligently. Could this then develop into an artificial general superintelligence, extending beyond the capacity of human thought? If we achieve that, we need to think now about legislation against equipping it with arms and legs.

It appears I am thinking about what comes after A.I. because there needs to be a world that still needs us. The current implementation of artificial intelligence relies on being told what is good for us in the long run, as if anything that doesn’t involve it is a backwards step, but a lot of the possibilities don’t appear to involve us. My job is in administration, but for how long will that job last? What kind of world would we have if A.I. stops being foisted on us, and just becomes a tool, just as the computer itself became?

Yes, this was an article about finding the right question. Next time, I will try to answer it.

 

THEY CALL ME BABY DRIVER [526]

Every so often, I will see a quadricycle parked around town. It is a Citroën Ami, a tiny two-person electric car sold by the French carmaker since 2020, the latest in a line of tiny French cars that its citizens can drive, on a moped licence, from 14 years of age – if they were born before 1988, they don’t even need the licence. To me, it looks like an idea of what future cars could have been, until it was not.

In the UK, the Ami meets the limits allowed under the AM category moped licence: it weighs 425kg before the battery is installed, and its tiny 5.5kW electric motor produces only eight brake horsepower and a top speed of 28mph. No petrol option exists, which would have been restricted to a maximum capacity of 49cc. Presumably, leaving town involves driving the Ami to the nearest bus or train station first.

Similar cars have been available in the UK. Famously, the Reliant Robin, the three-wheeled fiberglass-bodied car that weighed not much more than the Ami, can still be driven under a category A motorcycle licence, often a major selling point. Scutum Logistic’s Silence S04 Nanocar is sold through Nissan in the UK, including a more powerful version that requires at least a full motorcycle licence, while the French tradition of “voitures sans permis” continues under the Aixan brand, and even via the Renault Mobilize Duo and the Twizy, which had no doors. To avoid confusion, the “Invacar”, an infamous 1970s single-seater car leased to disabled drivers through the UK government until 2003, had a similar engine and power to a Reliant Robin, but requires a full category B car driving licence due to its weight.

Meanwhile, the driver’s door of the also-fibreglass Ami – all models are left-hand drive – is a “suicide door”, hinged at the back, making it interchangeable with the front-hinged passenger door – windows flap open, instead of us. To avoid installing any navigation and media controls that could become obsolete over time, you instead dock your smartphone in the middle of the dashboard to use the My Citroën app instead, with an activation button on the steering wheel.

The current price for an Ami in the UK is £7,695. On Citroën's UK website, it says the Ami “epitomises Citroën's legacy of pioneering automotive innovation. Much like the iconic 2CV revolutionised transportation, Ami introduces affordable quadricycle mobility to today's world, making it ideal for modern urban journeys.” However, any model of Citroën 2CV, which was still a regular car, and legislated, insured and taxed as such, will outrun an Ami – even the initial 1948 model could reach 40 mph, but not much further.

It would be simple to bundle the Ami with previous “microcars” like the Messerschmitt, Bond Bug, Peel P50 and Isetta, the latter famously licensed by BMW, but the introductions of those cars were motivated by post-war demands for a personal transport more substantial than a motorcycle, and threats on fuel supply, which subsided with the likes of “superminis” like the Citroën 2CV, Renault 4 and the Mini.

Aside from the Ami being a perfect first car for someone, albeit one to graduate from if you want to safely travel long distance – the range of its battery is only forty-seven miles –  looking at it gives me a feeling of what a car of a far-off future could have been, like a personal transportation module that would then attach to a guiding rail – this would have been after the introduction of the People Mover at Walt Disney World, but before the realities of trying to make a self-driving car on a regular road.

For me, the Ami is still too much like a car for me to consider, as I can’t drive a car – I could get a moped licence, but being forced away from the sides of the road, into the way of cars, isn’t desirable. If it was more like a cycle, and I could drive it on a cycle track, then perhaps I would be happier.