TURN ON, TUNE IN, AND COP OUT [408]

“Turn-On” is an American TV comedy show known for having been seen by hardly anyone. Portrayed as “the first computerised TV show” as a cover for its lightning-quick pace and counter-culture subject matter, it hoped to build on the recent success of another sketch comedy show, “Rowan & Martin’s Laugh-In”, while also deliberately trying to unsettle its audience. Broadcast only once as a replacement for the soap opera “Peyton Place”, on Wednesday 5th February 1969 at 8.30pm, one ABC station in Ohio pulled it half-way through, its manager sending a telegram to the network saying, “if your naughty little boys have to write dirty words on the walls, please don't use our walls.” Other stations declined to air it later that evening, and what was to have been a sixteen-episode series was cancelled five days later, accused of being lewd, vulgar and, most interestingly, confusing and alienating.

I first heard about this show at least twenty years ago, and aside from a few still images and descriptions of what it was like, I had no idea what caused so much uproar. With Spike Milligan’s near-Dadaist show “Q5” having begun in March 1969, and “Monty Python’s Flying Circus” that October, breaking boundaries in TV comedy really was something in the air – the story goes that the Pythons were dismayed at “Q5” being the kind of show they wanted to do, until realising they could use Terry Gilliam’s animation to stitch the sketches together. All could have the American shows like the zany and quick-paced “Rowan and Martin’s Laugh-In” on BBC Two from September 1968, but there would be no way to see why “Turn-On” had been an evolutionary dead-end.

Fortunately, someone managed to turn up “Turn-On”, both the offending first episode, and a second that was completed but went un-aired. Immediately, I started watching. The past is now and, said Tim Conway, appearing as guest host in the only sop to the idea of identifying with the audience, “welcome to Peyton Re-Place”.

...and it was as disorientating and as hard to watch as I had hoped. Produced by the creators of “Rowan & Martin’s Laugh-In”, the blackout gags that peppered that show are now the main event: no sketch seems to last more than thirty seconds, and some are one-line jokes that can be missed, like “I tell you I was so damned upset when I found out my kids were popping pills, I went out and got drunk”. Sets appear and disappear from the white (and occasionally black) void in which every sketch plays, and only enough to suggest a setting. Every sketch is set against a pervading, popping synthesiser soundtrack, substituting for the laugh of a studio audience, and making things hard to hear. Cartoon people walk across the bottom of the screen while other sketches are in progress, holding placards saying, “God Save the Queens”, “Make Love Not Wine” and “Stamp Out Mass Production”. The first shot of some sketches will pull out to show four boxes, the next line appearing in the next box until your screen is filled like a comic book page. Spirograph-like animated flashes appear between sketches to underline the computer-generated motif. Production credits are peppered at random throughout the duration of the show. Some sketches are just downright strange, but disappear before you can make sense of them, like one police officer holding evidence saying to another, “would you like to take some of this pornography home tonight?”, and upon the answer “I don’t even have a pornograph”, says “pity...” and bites a page out of one magazine, eating it.

There was no way this show could possibly have worked on a mass-market TV network in 1969, no matter how much the prevailing culture would have been in their favour. The style and pace of “Rowan & Martin’s Laugh-In” would have provided an indicator for how much further you could push the idea of a TV sketch show, but “Laugh-In” was an hour-long show leavened with longer, vaudeville-like sketches, giving the audience time to breathe as well as laugh. But even at thirty minutes, and with only ad breaks and sponsorship notices to break the breakneck flow, “Turn-On” feels too long. I watched the first episode with my parents, both having grown up when “Monty Python’s Flying Circus”, telling them I gave them ten minutes before they would probably stop watching, feeling it to be a more natural running time for the show – they stopped at ten minutes and thirteen seconds.

Assuming the first episode acted as the series’ pilot, I expected the second, un-broadcast episode of “Turn-On”, this time hosted by actor Robert Culp and then-wife France Nuyen, to make some changes. One sketch was filmed on location, instead of nowhere, where a highway patrol officer’s motorcycle won’t start, leading him to cry at missing a speeding car, and the synthesiser music being reduced in the sound mix, or eliminated altogether, allowing gags to be more easily heard. However, this latter change now makes more obvious the use of a musical sting at the end of each sketch as a signifier that the sketch has ended, and this is where you now laugh, a cliché used even by Morecambe & Wise and The Two Ronnies.

Even if the show had somehow continued, and if audiences had found their peace with it, I don’t know how this format could have sustained itself for a whole series. Reportedly four further episodes were in production when “Turn-On” was cancelled, one of which guest-starred The Monkees, an appropriate fit for this kind of show, but for a show shooting dozens of sketches, each requiring their own camera set-up and rehearsal no matter how little set there is, and with multiple animated studios, special effects providers and editors working on film, all to make it look like it had been generated by a computer, this is a show that could have burned itself out. Ironically, using a computer would have made the show easier to make.

For all the avant-garde weirdness of the style used by “Turn-On”, the grammar of a standard TV show is clear to see, despite its being deployed in a different way. The use of animation throughout “Turn-On” reminded me of “Sesame Street”, which used similar stylistic motifs, and more specifically the grammar of TV advertisements, as an educational tool when it launched in November 1969. The nearest I think there has been since to the fast pace of “Turn-On” was the BBC’s “The Fast Show” from 1994, advertised as guaranteeing up to thirty sketches an episode, while also answered the aversion to punchlines in “Monty Python’s Flying Circus” by only using punchlines.

I think “Turn-On” could work now – its choppy editing style and bare sets is very easy to copy, and a modern-day analogue to its edgy counter-culture humour can be easily found, although I would put it on television later in the evening than 8.30pm. While the six-second limit to videos on the late social media service Vine (2013-17) encouraged a style like the blackout sketches on “Turn-On”, you could argue that “asdfmovie”, the YouTube-based animated show made by Thomas “TomSka” Ridgewell, is the nearest in spirit and style, but with its two-to-three-minute running time making it easier to take.

Unfortunately for “Turn-On”, the gag I found funniest was provided by its sponsor, the pharmaceutical company Bristol-Meyers, reminding its discombobulated viewers that you can buy Bufferin, their brand of aspirin.

I CUT DOWN TREES, I SKIP AND JUMP [326]

So often a shortcut definition for British humour, I needed a reminder of the revelation “Monty Python’s Flying Circus” was on first viewing. Targeting the eccentricities and authorities found in British life was not new, but it was among the first comedy shows to play to an audience that grew up with television, comfortable with its bold fragmentation and abandonment of sketches, and stretching of established TV show formats. It didn’t second-guess the intelligence of its audience: an explanation of the philosopher Immanuel Kant was not required, whether he was a real pissant or not. The show’s dynamic style and form was also among the first comedy shows its audience would have seen in colour, although the first four episodes were broadcast in black and white before BBC One switched to colour in November 1969.

Despite having seen bits of the team’s later films, I knew none of this when I first saw the first episode of “Monty Python’s Flying Circus” in July 1994, the BBC starting a repeat run to mark the show's 25^th anniversary. I was eleven years old – I had seen the first series of “The Smell of Reeves & Mortimer”, but the first episode of “The Fast Show” was still two months away. I didn’t yet realise that what I was about to watch would reflect the attitudes of its time, despite that being the show’s target in 1969. I got the interview sketch about Arthur “Two Sheds” Jackson, Terry Jones’s composer whose nickname overshadowed his work, who is kicked off the arts programme when he complains – then John Cleese’s interviewer shouts, “get your own arts programme, you fairy.”

 

My immediate deduction from this was that the character, or the writer of that line, was scared of fairies. I had never heard the word “fairy” used in this context before, and have only heard it used in other TV and radio shows of the period, into the 1970s, and on other episodes of “Flying Circus”: when a journalist is asking the opinion of the man in the street, Terry Jones appears as on a house roof, saying, “I’m not in the street, you fairy,” while a display of an army units “camp square-bashing” chants, “we all know where you’ve been, you military fairy!”

 

Even after realising it was meant as an insult to gay men, one that appeared in the UK between the world wars after being coined, to describe particularly effeminate gay men, in the Bowery section of New York as early as the 1870s, I couldn’t take offence to something that sounded so bizarre. With homosexuality only having begun to be decriminalised in the UK in 1967, it was a current subject that appeared in “Flying Circus”, other episodes in the first series featuring a writer telling his son to go back to Yorkshire over “you and your coal mining friends”, a “Panorama” parody documentary on what makes a man want to be a mouse, and a sketch where a man, having been told by a police officer they can’t help over a lost wallet, asks the officer if he wants to go back to their place – the officer says, “yes, alright”, the audience laughs, the show carries on. Times were changing. I would love to have known Graham Chapman’s thoughts as these shows were first broadcast.

Comedy ages poorly, until it doesn’t: in September 2021, the Chinese government announced that broadcasters must "resolutely put an end to sissy men and other abnormal esthetics,", as they are failing to encourage Chinese men to be more masculine. This limp step is apparently aimed at pop stars and internet celebrities but, as if to show how much times have changed, I haven’t heard the word “sissy” used in years either. The pejorative slang for effeminate men in China, as used by their government, was “niang pao” – seeing as that means “girlie guns” in English, that term is just begging for reappropriation by those who were called it, just like “fairy” and “sissy” were here.

BRING ME LAUGHTER ALL THE WHILE [257]

BBC Television Centre (2009)

If you get the chance to visit a building usually closed to the public, take it.

In 2009, I visited BBC Television Centre in Shepherd’s Bush, London, a literal television production factory: studios were set up to record episodes of “Harry Hill’s TV Burp,” “The Alan Titchmarsh Show,” “Friday Night with Jonathan Ross” (with guests including Christopher Walken and Green Day), and “Strictly Come Dancing,” for which the main doors to studio 1 were open to deliver the set. We were permitted to look down on one studio, known as TC8, filming a pilot for a quiz show featuring Rufus Hound and Sara Cox. These shows were in addition to the numerous news, sport and children’s programmes coming live from elsewhere in the complex.

During the ninety-minute tour, starting at the main entrance targeted by a Real IRA bomb in March 2001, we sat in the BBC News editorial meeting room, passed through the famous wood-panelled Stage Door entrance, the circular courtyard and gold statue of Helios, and we were locked in a dressing room to keep us from wandering about the building, which is standard procedure no matter how famous you are. I won a BBC Tours mug in a quiz identifying theme tunes, and I saw exactly two well-known people: before the tour started, I saw Simon Jack, now Economics Editor for BBC News, and I saw “Broadcasting House” presenter Paddy O’Connell after buying the DVD – both were dressed to leave on a motorcycle.

Trying to peer through the Studio 1 doors (2009)

Even though I could only see into one studio – they all had viewing galleries, but they also had people working hard to keep their shows under wraps, I am glad the one I saw was TC8, as it was the studio most associated with BBC comedy programmes. It may have been the last studio to open, in 1968, but it hosted episodes of “Monty Python’s Flying Circus,” “The Morecambe & Wise Show,” “The Two Ronnies,” “Absolutely Fabulous,” “Keeping Up Appearances,” “Not the Nine O’Clock News,” “The Fall and Rise of Reginald Perrin,” “Sykes,” “Victoria Wood As Seen on TV,” “Porridge,” “Are You Being Served,” “Open All Hours,” “One Foot in the Grave,” “French & Saunders,” “Knowing Me Knowing You with Alan Partridge,” “Up Pompeii,” “Hi-De-Hi!” and “Blankety Blank.” Of course, I knew this when I went in, that was why I was so excited. This was why I had no hesitation in buying a DVD of “Fawlty Towers” from their shop – episodes of that were made in TC8 as well.

This is all a very long time ago now: the BBC sold Television Centre to developers in 2013, and while three studios remain open, with the BBC’s commercial arm housed in the old News Centre, the rest has now been converted to expensive, but sympathetically designed, apartments – studio TC8 was demolished altogether.

You do not need a building like Television Centre to make programmes anymore: so long as you have a good camera, and you can keep outside noise away, you can make a show anywhere. But because it was the backdrop to so many shows in the last sixty years, Television Centre may be one of the most recognisable buildings in the world. I already knew so much about it that, when the tour guide mentioned the offices under the Helios statue, I already knew why they were built there: they originally housed all the then-highly expensive and precious video tape machines.

One connection remains to the old era of the BBC at Shepherd’s Bush: Alan and Mark Wogan, sons of Sir Terry - he of the chat shows, the Radio 2 breakfast show and “Blankety Blank” - have opened up a branch of their pizza restaurant chain Homeslice at Television Centre. I could go on naming programmes the BBC made there, but watching the Six O’Clock News, when it came from studio TC7, and knowing that “Multi-Coloured Swap Shop,” “Going Live,” “Live & Kicking,” “Play School” and even “Shooting Stars” used to be made there, gave me a smile.

Main Entrance / News Centre (2009)

FLASH, WHAT A PICTURE, WHAT A PHOTOGRAPH [252]

The first camera I remember using was a Kodak Disc 4000. Like most point-and-shoot cameras of the 1980s, there was little to go wrong: there was a single fixed-focus lens and an automatic flash, so all I needed to do, apart from removing the lens cover, was point and shoot.

It was our family’s camera, so I obviously will not be sharing any example pictures, but according to what I have read since, the picture quality achieved by the camera and film is supposed to be worse than I remembered.

Introduced in 1982, but not lasting much beyond the end of the decade, Disc film was Kodak’s latest attempt to package their film in a simple and fool-proof cassette, avoiding the hassle of unspooling film and winding it into your camera yourself, risking damage to the film and unwanted exposure to light if not done properly. Kodak had previously introduced the “126” and “110” film formats for their Instamatic camera ranges, encasing the usual supply and take-up film spools in a cartridge that the user could replace without ever touching the film, but replicating how the film and spools normally inside the camera made the cartridges necessarily bulky.

Disc film was completely different – encased in a flat cassette was a disc of stiff film, arranged in a circle of fifteen 10 x 8.5 mm image frames, not unlike a View-Finder toy, but not compatible with one. Simply open the back of the camera, place in the cassette, and start shooting.

The elimination of spools meant film could not be distorted or damaged by the film either being rolled up before or after taking the picture, or held down when the picture is taken. The tiny image size allows for a very short focal length of 12.5mm, and the lack of spools reduced the overall thickness of the camera: the Kodak Disc 4000 was only 3.2cm thick, which I didn’t see again until digital cameras became more popular.

Like the earlier formats, improvements in film production allowed for use of the same film in a wider range of conditions, and greater picture quality from smaller images taken - 126 film took image sizes of 26 x 26mm, and 100 film took 17 x 13mm images. However, because Disc cameras were not envisaged for anyone other than consumers wanting a simple camera, you could only buy standard Kodacolor film, so no experiments with Kodachrome, Ektachrome or black-and-white were possible.

Because the image size of Disc film was very small, the perceived lesser quality of pictures taken with a Disc camera appears to be a numbers game. They were considered of adequate quality when they were developed and printed onto 6 x 4 inch paper, but that was at a time when printing pictures was the only way most people saw their pictures, and 6 x 4 inches is often bigger than the screens on the smartphones where most pictures now taken often remain, regardless of how many megapixels were involved. However, the aspherical lenses used in both the cameras and the printing equipment, designed to make the most of the small image size, was an extra expense for developers that was often not spent, meaning many prints did not capture the quality of the original negative.

I guess our family was lucky with our prints, although the fact that Boots, the chemists that once had a network of film development centres in store, also sold Disc cameras under their own brand, probably meant they developed their prints properly. We later moved to using a regular 35mm film camera, either when cameras that automated the loading of standard film rolls became more common, or when the sealed lithium batteries inside the Disc camera ran down – like most devices now, we would have had to send it to a dealer or the manufacturer to replace them.

As if to prove that the 10 x 8.5mm Disc image does not mean you are looking at the film grain as much as the picture, there is the fact that pretty much everyone has seen motion pictures taken from an image size of just 10.26 x 7.49mm. Any time British television made a show on film, or ever filmed outside, whether it was “Doctor Who,” “Pride and Prejudice” or “Monty Python’s Flying Circus,” used 16mm film – the widescreen Super 16 format, used even today on HD-quality productions, is only 2.26mm wider. All you need to do is do your homework, use the right lenses at all times, and have the BBC insist on Kodak making progressively better film.