Another legend of British children’s television has passed away: the great Tony Hart. He was the type you don’t seem to get on kid’s telly anymore, an older man who wasn’t in the slightest bit trendy but was passionate and enthusiastic about his craft. Less your best mate than a favourite teacher or uncle.

His death is particularly sad for me as an art school boy who grew up loving his shows and was inspired by his creativity. I even used to get his books out of the library and try to copy the projects in them. How many other kids are there like me out there who really got into drawing and making art because of him? How many of those eventually went to art college and had a career in the creative fields? I’m guessing a lot. It could be that humble Tony Hart was the biggest influence on British art and design in the past 40 years.

What a bummer.

Download: Art for Arts Sake – 10cc (mp3)

Cliff has very expressive hands doesn’t he?

This might be a typically-pessimistic assumption on my part but do kids still play Cowboys and Indians these days? I find it hard to believe that they do. Why would they? The Western is nearly dead as a genre in popular culture, at least it is in any form that could be watched by children. To a 21st century kid with his video games and superheroes, Cowboys and Indians must be like playing Cavaliers and Roundheads.

I also imagine that any kid who shouted “Bang! You’re dead!” at a friend in the school playground would immediately be carted off by social services for counseling.

So that means people will one day stop writing songs like this. One of the best singles of the 1970s, presented here in its album-length, widescreen Cinemascope version.

Download: Silver Star – The Four Seasons (mp3)

Even if I gave you a million tries you’d never guess what was going on in this picture. Believe it or not, the caption with it reads: “Models in bikinis deliver a letter of protest about French nuclear testing to the French Embassy in London, 1973.”

I don’t think this was some clever reference to the famous nuclear test site of Bikini Island because the French testing was going on elsewhere. No, I think it might simply be a case that in the 1970s if you wanted the newspapers to cover an event you had to involve half-naked dolly birds.

Download: How I Learned To Love The Bomb – Television Personalities (mp3)

I’m feeling a bit continental today.

With its poetry reciting and meaningful stares this clip from Jean-Luc Godard’s “Alphaville” is like a parody of pretentious European cinema. But it’s still utterly beautiful and Anna Karina is so lovely I think I could watch a film of her reading a Eurostar timetable.

As a bonus here she is again looking like every indie boys dream girlfriend in “Vivre Sa Vie”. We never had no birds like that down my local snooker club.

One of the inspirations for this blog was the book “Lost Worlds” by Michael Bywater, an eccentric and beautifully written compendium of lost things, feelings, places, attitudes and people. So I’m going to be lazy and let him do all the heavy lifting for this post. Besides, he’s a much better writer than me.

“Anyone born before 1960 will have known Aunt Joan, or a variant of her. Neat, effective, cheerful. Aunt Joan’s response to the slenderest of pleasures was: ‘How lovely!’ She lived alone in a little house on a fixed income and did wonders for charity. All her Christmas presents for the nieces and nephews and great-nieces and great-nephews were bought carefully, with thought and love, throughout the year. Aunt Joan never had to make the panic dash on Christmas Eve, nor did she ever forget a birthday. She was tiny, courteous, well groomed, well loved and lived an orderly life, never causing pain or even upset; and at the heart of this little life was an incalculable loneliness.
Aunt Joan had a secret. It was always the same secret, for all the Aunt Joans: a young man, an understanding, plans, hopes — and a war from which the young man never returned. The end. You kept going, you did your best, you looked on the bright side and remembered that there were lots and lots of people much worse off than you were. How much of what Aunt Joan was, was because of what she had lost — or had taken from her.”
Michael Bywater,
Lost Worlds (2004)

I was born in 1962 so the “Aunt Joan” in this sounds more like my Grandmother who was also tiny and cheerful (though my sailor Grandfather did come back from the war.) My aunts were more the type to just give us a 50p record token at Christmas, but it was Gran who actually took the trouble to ask us what records we wanted, which for a few years meant the poor old dear was going into her local Woolworth’s and buying Clash and Stranglers albums.

Download: If I Knew You Were Coming I’d Have Baked A Cake – Gracie Fields (mp3)