The Doc Wallace Medicine Show

There’s a group of like minded types to which I belong, where we have a tendency to talk about our interests and some of the more unusual trivia that interests us. Amongst that group is the excellent Snathe (https://bsky.app/profile/snathe.bsky.social), who it’s fair to say has quite the expertise around the world of the telephone network history in the UK, as chronicled via his phonecode lookup tool at https://snathe.net/phonecodes.

This lunchtime, in a group conversation where thoughts turned to famous songs revolving around such phone numbers, City Boy’s 5.7.0.5:

At the beginning is what sounds suspiciously like the tones used in a touchtone phone. So, it was asked, what would you reach at the time if you held your phone up to the speaker and let it dial? And so it began…

At this point, I’m going to summarise this as I saw it play out, as in the main it passed from pillar to post. Also in that group was The Blender (https://www.mixcloud.com/theblenderonline/stream/) – someone with a fair understanding of the ways of sound manipulation.
As a consequence, the tones were able to be isolated and made uniform in length, but still some noise is present, and they didn’t resolve to a proper DTMF setup.

To make the noise etc clearer, The Blender provided a direct comparison of the tones on the record, with genuine DTMF tones for what should be the numbers in question.

The thought occurred to me by the time I heard this, that there may be another factor at play. Since DTMF tones are a mixture of two frequencies, the deviations may well be down to a processing decision at the mastering.

To explain: pitch control or varispeeding (the act of speeding up or slowing down a music track for pitch adjustment or time compression) is something that was commonplace in record mastering to ensure sides fit correctly, while allowing space for the groove to be cut. A particularly infamous example is Billy Joel’s Cold Spring Harbor, and album where the mastering was sped up to the same level as would be used for the radio play of the released singles, leading to an album sounding too high pitched and up tempo compared to the desired mix. Here, there’s only a slight change, seemingly only a semitone higher representing a slight increase in speed after recording, but that was enough.

So, with all that effort, where do we get? The tones played out apparently translate to 241 5705 – which makes a lot of sense as a number, as local numbers of the era would work that way. Over to Snathe’s guide again, and his (slightly later 1984 edition, but still relevant) copy of the Dialing Code Decoder.

Ok… no 241 in Birmingham in 1984 (241 is now a cable number, it seems)
BUT…
Down in that there London…

So, 241 5705 is a number for Dalston, London. So, whose is it? Checking the production of the original album this came from, they did use a couple of studios in London (Wessex Sound in London N5, and Trident Studios in W1), as well as some recording in Monmouthshire, so it’s unlike it was some studio shenanigans. The question is also, did they deliberately pitch shift it to not be usable, having bottled the idea of encoding someone’s phone number in the track? I guess we’ll never know, but the journey was fun. Maybe it’s still connected somewhere, but like in 1978 there’s probably no reply…

With all credit to snathe.net – STD code search tool and The Blender’s Stream | Mixcloud for letting me write this up so the public can share the inherent joy and ridiculousness that I did today.

Recently, as part of a deep dive of Atari and Tengen internal servers, a recoverable ROM of a hitherto rumoured Sega Genesis/Mega Drive game was released, and provoked a lot of interest. To give one example, here’s a longplay video of the game, the unreleased Pit-Fighter II.

The idea of a home exclusive sequel to Atari’s Pit-Fighter had been rumoured in previews from the likes of Gamepro back in 1993:

While the images are unclear, a similar spread from Electronic Gaming Monthly shows off a little more, but I can’t embed that directly here.(https://archive.org/details/Electronic_Gaming_Monthly_49/page/n135/mode/2up)

At no point do either of these previews talk about the concept behind these titles, but looking into the development documentation for the original Pit-Fighter sheds some light.

It is undeniable that the original Pit-Fighter was a commercial success, despite some dubious home ports, sufficient demand for the Sega 16-bit version as made by Sterling Silver Software1 made Tengen keen to go back to the well. In the arcades, Atari had followed up Pit-Fighter with a scrolling beat-emu-up in the Double Dragon/Final Fight mould, originally under the working title of Warrior. A number of new characters were captured in the same manner as the Pit-Fighter cast, and developers were planning to boast CD-based sound until budgets were heavily cut in anticipation of lower sales and a desire to improve margins2.

This title would ultimately be released in mid 1992 as Guardians of the Hood, around the time that Pit-Fighter was released in the home. The USPs of Guardians over other similar arcade games were that the defeated bosses could then be selected as the player character going forward, as well as a “Winner stays, loser pays” gym fight within each level so 2 player games could not be completed on a single credit. Admittedly that pleased arcade operators rather than players, but it was still an attempt to do something different.

It was clear, however, that interest in the game wasn’t going to encourage home sales, and Tengen would much rather build on Pit-Fighter. To that end, the now newly christened Polygames were tasked again to take the Pit-Fighter code and add the new characters to that. From what we can see, this task wasn’t entirely completed, the new characters lacking some collision detection, and the difficulty still to be balanced, but as a proof of concept enough was there to generate preview interest. From the video above, music and sound is still that of the original game, with nothing reprogrammed, so the build is clearly incredibly early, with screenshots and preview material clearly planted to gauge levels of public desire. Despite this, the game, would not be released as, perhaps unsurprisingly, there was little public interest in a near identical sequel to the original, particularly given Mortal Kombat was already making impact in arcades with a markedly better aesthetic than Atari’s system could produce. A straight Guardians of the Hood port may have been more novel, but unlikely to generate massive sales.

1. Of some interest is that Sterling Silver were in the process of renaming and reincorporating as Polygames while Pit-Fighter was being released in 1992. Some owners of copies produced in later print runs will see that the Sterling Silver name has been removed from the credits, replaced with the names of developers Dennis Koble and Lee Actor, as they hadn’t yet got a new name, but the old one had ceased being used. ︎
2. It is worth noting a couple of points at this stage. A sequel to Marble Madness had gone through several iterations to produce a viable commercial project, but had not ultimately been taken forward. Additionally, the efforts in producing a CD based sound hardware system ultimately found their way into the Atari published laserdisc game COPS, where audio from an external source was a technical necessity. Looking through the development materials also shows a commando type that features in neither Pit-Fighter nor Guardians of the Hood, ultimately surfacing as the player in an into the screen gun game called Danger Express that never progressed beyond a prototype stage, possibly due to the lack of interest in further games of this nature. ︎

Whenever this comes up in some form or other on social media, I tend to mention the vestigial tail that is the Excitebike track editor, left in the cartridge version despite having no chance of working, looping forever. But I only do that because the ‘real’ answer is so far in the weeds that people would lose the will to live reading it in a thread, so instead I’m going to post it here.

Sega’s two seminal mid 90’s Track and Field alikes, Decathlete and Winter Heat had in, their arcade form, a line up of various national stereotypes to select.

DecathleteWinter HeatUSA: Rick BladeUSA: Rick BladeGermany: Karl VainGermany: Karl VainUK: Robin Banks*GBR: B.B *RUS: Alexsei RigelRUS: Alexsei RigelJPN: Joe KudouJPN: Joe KudouJAM: Femi KadienaNOR: Johann StensenFRA: Ellen ReggianiFRA: Ellen ReggianiCHN: Li HuangCHN: Li Huang

* In US Saturn releases, Robin Banks does not appear, and is renamed in other territories as discussed later. Although ‘United Kingdom’ is used as his country of origin in the game, Great Britain appears as the designation, and is used as the country name in Winter Heat.

Although the standard US, European and Asian releases use these as the canonical character names, a ‘region’ setting is available within the game code. Using this doesn’t change the operating language, but does make one key difference, it changes one of these characters to a local contender. And so, for completeness if nothing else, here is the complete list of effects for region changing for both games. No character models change, just the flag and the name. In Decathlete the audio changes, in Winter Heat these changes just turn off the announcer where used, as no new audio was recorded.

Since some regions appear in one, but not the other, where they aren’t included the segment is blank.

When Decathlete was released on the Sega Saturn, Robin Banks’ name was changed. It is unclear whether people objected to the criminal punning nature of the name being attached to a black character, or problems arose due to the DJ Christian Richardson trademarking the name as his stage persona. In any case, the release took the Jef Jansens name and sound byte instead from the Belgian mode, but the renamed Jef remained a British character. What is particularly interesting is that, in the attract mode for these console releases, he doesn’t feature, his segments replaced with the generic ‘how to play’ model. In the US version, the character is removed entirely, the reasoning unclear.

Winter Heat complicates matters further. The B.B character is essentially mute throughout, with the intention being to make their gender ambiguous during play. Upon winning however, she is revealed to be female, and simply says “Jef, it’s all done”. When playing the Japanese Saturn release, scoring sufficiently highly with any player enables a secret mode where the Robin Banks/Jef Jansens model can be used in place of B.B, but only in this version. This would suggest whatever issue there is with the character, it doesn’t affect Japan.,

A while back, I brought up my dive down the rabbit hole regarding an old news report about GYOB. Before we get to this follow up, two things.

1. It appears a few changes in BBC policy will make this kind of research a lot harder. If you’re interested in learning more, a primer explaining what exactly is happening, see https://www.illuminationsmedia.co.uk/wac-wrong-headedness/
2. I cannot stress enough how wonderful it is that there’s still a scene around a lot of the puzzle books. Christopher Wickham has been very helpful with discussions on these points, and if you haven’t read any of Ludicrously Niche, I heartily recommend it.

I hadn’t intended to go back to this, the situation seemed largely resolved, but I got a message out of the blue (sky) from Christopher, mentioning he had something of interest. A few years back, he’d reviewed a number of Kjartan Poskitt’s Killer Puzzles books (https://cwickham.blogspot.com/2020/06/the-phantom-of-ghastly-castle-and-other.html), and in the process had opened a line of communication with Kjartan over the solutions.

Following my post where I mentioned in passing that one of the pieces of GYOB paperwork mentioned Kjartan working on an unused game format for the show, emails were exchanged and so, we now have this from the man himself:

“I remember the incident with Sue Devaney quite well, I was the warm-up that day. She was in a gorilla costume* complete with big gloves and got a fleck of fur in her eye which I helped her get out, and I couldn’t help notice how stunningly pretty she was  – and I daresay still is! Although every care was taken with shows involving gunge and inflatables, slips and bangs were going to be inevitable. Unfortunately Sue was particularly unlucky, but the young medic [Dr David Bull] who was the other guest along with the in-house team immediately called a halt and got Sue off to hospital (yes, we were filming in Manc).  Every time Sue pops up on a dinnerladies repeat I think of that incident. I’m so glad it was nothing worse than a sprain, because she was really nice, and although it must have hurt like hell, she made minimum fuss.“
* The gorilla costume was a regular component of a game known as “Going Bananas”, essentially a ‘grab these things while people run around to stop you’ endeavour. What is worth noting, however, is that if Kjartan was there, it was presumably later in the run than the very first shows, as Peter Simon was acting as warm up for those first few in Manchester. Does that pin things down to later in the first week?

Regarding the warmup and the ultimate use or reuse of the format:

“I must have done about 1200 warm ups on kids shows like Swap Shop, Beat the Teacher, Chuckle Brothers, Movie Game etc… and Titus O Skinty was a kids show idea I proposed to the BBC when I was used as a consultant. I even did a theme tune for it! I expect we took elements from my proposal which ended up elsewhere, but I kept the name and shoved it in a book instead! Titus also appears in one of the Murderous Maths books “Essential Arithmetricks” (I think)”

So, we missed out on Titus O Skinty in the flesh? In my head, I see him as a more extreme version of Colin Bennett’s “Vince Purity” from You Should Be So Lucky, and I have no doubt that the target audience would have loved it.

With thanks again to Christopher Wickham for asking Kjartan about this, and forwarding this over.

Legend:

“The shows that evening were exceptionally bizarre. During the third show, just before the dinner break, someone resembling an ex-con took twenty minutes’ worth of bows. (Considering that the entire program lasted half an hour, the bowing took up a disproportionate amount of time, to say the least). It all began with his first bow. The ex-con had done a fairly good imitation of Elvis Presley. He had costumed himself in satin and rhinestones, and he had all of Presley’s extroverted physical moves down pat. He sang “Hound Dog,” ending with a groin-rending split at center stage. It was a rousing finish. Flushed with the joy of having gone all the way without being gonged, the ex-con treated himself to an exuberant bow. Our drummer, Mark Stevens, gave the man a respectful drumroll, adding a few strong whacks for good measure. The ex-con used the piercing rim shots as punctuation for deep dips and violent hip swivels. More whacks, more dips. More whacks, more swivels. It became apparent the ex-con was waiting for some sort of musical crescendo; a chord; something to signal that his act was over. Without it, he would obviously dip and swivel until the cows came home. We paused for two commercial breaks, but Mark never stopped whacking his drum. After the commercial was over, we simply rejoined the swiveling, dipping, twirling maniac who, after fourteen or fifteen minutes, was clearly staggering from exhaustion, his eyes glassy, his rhinestones drenched in sweat, his crotch undoubtedly racked with pain from the endless splits. At the twenty minute mark, he dropped. The ex-con was carried offstage to a standing ovation.“

So says Chuck Barris, in his quasi fictional autobiography Confessions of a Dangerous Mind. Given how much of that work is predicated on fictional tales of his life as a hitman, and pretty much every real name apart from his in his life has been changed, and characters basically woven from whole cloth, this just seems like an over the top parody of a Gong Show act. However, looking at the line cut archive of a particular episode of the show, this sequence seems to fit the bill. For those unfamiliar, a “Line Cut” is the version assembled as the linear run of the show from start to finish as much as possible, ultimately being cut down and finished off as the end product to fit the slot. Given the durations discussed in Chuck’s book I would note the on screen tape counter, which represents the recording time as an absolute figure (where it jumps, recording has been paused and restarted, so this sequence is clearly unedited).

Reality:

So, a different song, in one take as opposed to multiple commercial breaks, or indeed multiple splits, but the best part of 5 minutes of recording time. To the best of my knowledge, they aired nearly all of it as was, but I can’t find the episode as aired to see if they did try to cheat it with commercial breaks.

There’s a general trend in the world of children’s TV discussion to imbue it with some sort of undeserved darkness, or sinister ironic representation. From adding rude names to Captain Pugwash’s cohort, to lazy ‘LOL drugs’ gags about anything remotely colourful there’s always someone trying to tell the ‘real’ story. Some of this isn’t helped by the production staff themselves telling wildly exaggerated tales or half truths to appeal to an edgier older crowd (Marc Summers’ tales of the goings on on the US Double Dare set spring to mind, much akin to Jim Bowen’s Bullseye anecdotes where they feel too much like short stand up routines than reality). Here, I intend to take a look at one particular subset of these, and tidy them up once and for all.

The usual one of these stories that follows any kind of children’s game show is along the lines of “someone got really badly hurt/killed when they made that, and they burned the tapes. I know because my mate’s sister’s whoever was in the audience”. I’ve heard this attached specifically to three shows. Firstly, the aforementioned Double Dare, where a child with brittle bones apparently slipped and broke a limb in the middle of the finale, and his lawyer father persuaded the production company to give them the top prize in exchange for no legal action. To paraphrase one of Marc’s anecdotes, they learned a powerful lesson that day – never let the children of lawyers pass the audition. No evidence of this exists, however, and if that was the only scandal to envelop Nickelodeon in that 30 year period, they probably would have done well.

The other US example, and with a tangential connection to Double Dare via shared staff is Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego? For many years a persistent urban legend appears on message boards to this day, making reference in detail to an unaired episode featuring a contestant injuring themselves in the exact same way as above as the cameras rolled. This is not my story to tell, as Christian Carrion and Buzzerblog’s excellent podcast and blog series associated blog series go into forensic detail into providing all the detail one needs to get to the bottom of this, suffice it to say, it never happened, and they can prove it. However, on reading these, I was reminded of a UK story of a very similar nature, that at least made it to the press, and was 100% real. But no-one talks about it…

The story itself concerns Get Your Own Back, the long running CBBC show. A show that already had an interesting backstory, being devised by comedy writer Brian Marshall, who had done solid work on providing reliable sketch formats for the Krankies’ various TV endeavours such as Tony Macaroni’s Café. He had thought a ‘revenge’ show where kids could gently humiliate those in charge in good sport would have a base appeal to children. Certainly, it seemed to capture some element of the zeitgeist, with parodies predating its first appearance, and a very long shelf life, running in some form until 2004 1.

As the show progressed, like all things there had been many attempts to innovate, and a decision to create a ‘penalty’ for losing involving the simulated burning of an offered possession provoked upset, and in one case an actual accidental immolation.

Following the backlash, the effect was confessed to, and all future showings and repeats had the feature crudely removed. A cursory check of the BBC archive confirms that, although no specific reference to the incident remains, all retained copies are those with the edit in place, to ensure no future repeat is possible.

By the next series, a change in setting saw all such gimmickry removed, the funfair aesthetic replaced with a more combative ‘Shepherd’s Bush Stadium’ setting, and a Steve Brown composed soundtrack which seems to be at pains to imitate “We’ll bring the house down” by Slade and Vangelis extemporisations by equal measure. This style persisted until the series end, albeit with the music ultimately replaced by similar sounding works by Richie Webb and Matt Katz. The story I heard about and want to look into occurred in the eighth series to be broadcast recorded in October 1997 for transmission in 1998, of which the following is a typical looking episode.

Inevitably, these series begin or end with a celebrity special of some kind, as the child contestants are assigned celebrities they may have taken a dislike to real or otherwise. The video of the last episode of this series is on the Internet Archive, so let’s take a look (NOTE: This has since been taken down, but you’re not missing much in terms of content)

It’s a ‘best of’ compilation. The show never resorted to that before then, or indeed afterwards, so why now. For the answer, let’s look in the Mirror. Literally – they reported on the filming in late October of that year:

For those who can’t read the article, the relevant information is that Sue Devaney was in the middle of filming an episode of Get Your Own Back before slipping and crashing to the floor, injuring her arm to the extent filming was abandoned and an ambulance called.

Given the dates in question (the story being published on Tuesday October 21st, making reference to her commenting the previous day) this would fit with being very early on in the run of recordings for the show, which started the previous Thursday (the 16th). The story fits a lot of the same points as the Carmen Sandiego legend, contestant taking part in a stunt filled show, only to slip and potentially break a limb. Unlike that legend, there was no attempt to continue, with Sue rushed to Manchester Royal Infirmary afterwards (mercifully only a severe sprain, but enough to need a hospital visit). For me, the first question was ‘Manchester’? As the episode suggested this set was “Shepherd’s Bush Stadium” i.e. Television Centre. However, given that Sue was from Rochdale, let’s make sure that it wasn’t just that she was treated closer to home.

Like all BBC productions, paperwork exists for the series as broadcast, indicating such matters as cast and crew (and associated contracts), any commercial music used and the publishing information for royalties, and pertinent information regarding the plot, participants etc. The Series 8 paperwork naturally focuses on the episodes that ‘did’ air, as opposed to the one that didn’t, as there’s little point compiling information for something that will never be used. From it we can confirm that yes, all of Series 8 was filmed at Granada Studios, Manchester in place of TVC and for the first four aired episodes we have Peter Simon on warm-up, with occasional relief from author, comedian and maths communicator Kjartan Poskitt. It seems that programmes were transmitted as recorded, so the recorded Episode 1 was the transmitted Episode 1 and so forth, seemingly to preserve continuity for the guest host element for the main series. The first episode also includes all the information for the series regular elements, such as Dave’s contract, the game designs etc, but within the episode synopsis there is one endnote relevant to our interests2:

“Sue Devaney and Dr David Bull were also costed against this programme number but the recoding was not completed and therefore not transmitted”.3

These are very typical bookings of the time, and a relatively clever one for the audience – Sue was just approaching the end of her time playing Liz Harker, a fictional paramedic in Casualty, and Dr David Bull, long before his resurgence as a politician would lead him to (at time of writing) the Chair of Reform UK, would have been the best example of a ‘real’ medical professional for a Children’s BBC audience, thanks to his regular appearances on Newsround, and many Saturday morning CBBC programs. Two faces of the NHS on television battling it out, perfect fodder for a celebrity special. The fact that they were assigned to the Episode 1 code suggests that the intention was a New Year special, as the series started airing on January 7th 1998. It’s unlikely to have been recorded first, though. But can we work out when?

Given the time the story broke, the incident clearly occurred in that first week of recording, which appears to have yielded at least four complete episodes, with the first day (Thursday 16th October) containing two complete recordings, and the second day (Friday 17th October) only one (the example I included earlier, funnily enough). While it’s strange when a production line has been set up to then only run the one recording, there isn’t any concrete evidence to suggest the abandoned recording took place on that Friday. Certainly the newspaper article has her convalescing and discussing the incident with the press on the 20th, so presuming she wasn’t being immediately chased up the day after admission, there’s only Thursday, Friday and Saturday where filming is known to have taken place that it could occur. The thought occurs that the injury may have happened, ambulances called etc only for the production to immediately pick back up afterwards. That’s showbiz, I guess.

Another point also crops up – there were regular efforts to encourage more participation in the show, and two competitions were running ahead of the series production. One was to find child co-hosts for the show (with one being written out in a pickup for reasons unknown only to return at the very end)4, and a second to come up with games for the show to run, alongside the ones made by The Chatterbox Partnership. Of those, only one winner never saw their game air, something titled as “Pit and Pendulum”. The paperwork indicated that Kjartan had been paid a fee to help develop the idea further, but it was never used in the series5. There is a credit noted for the competition winner Anna King, but no other information is present. It’s a long shot, but if anyone does know of her and what the design was, it’d be nice to hear about it. From what we can tell, this isn’t the fateful game in question.

With thanks to Ben Baker for press clippings and support in the writing of this article, and Simon Tyers and Christopher Wickham for discussions and clarity.

1. The show had clearly been of interest to other members of the comedy writing community, as by sheer coincidence on the same day as GYOB first aired an episode of Drop The Dead Donkey aired (Series 2, Episode 1 – The Gulf Report) where Sally the news anchor promoting a book is invited onto a children’s show where she is interviewed by, and summarily dunked by, an obvious Dave Benson Philips analogue played by Fraser James. I mention this only because in making the sequence in question, the director of the episode slipped on the residual slime and broke her collarbone, which feels oddly in sync with the rest of this article I couldn’t exclude it. ︎
2. It’s worth noting that the paperwork wasn’t necessarily assembled at record time. For example, the data for episode 1 (transmitted 07/01/1998) was actually assembled three weeks after the program aired, on 28/10/1998. As a consequence, the complete series had filmed before any of this information was logged, providing a complete overview. ︎
3. Is it me, or is this a really weird way of describing this? Obviously if you didn’t finish recording this, you couldn’t transmit it. I guess it’s meant to talk about their fees being paid regardless. ︎
4. The layout for these guests hosts is strange, and clearly relates more to availability than anything else. Contemporary episode guides show 6 different guest hosts used across the 12 regular episodes, with the first 2 hosts doing 3 shows each, the next host doing 2 shows, followed by someone doing one, another person doing 2, and the aforementioned individual who disappears halfway through. Given an average of 2 shows a day, it would surely make more sense from a logistics point of view to have each host do one day? Let’s not dig any further. ︎
5. The fact that not long afterwards Kjartan’s Killer Puzzle series was extended with Titus O’Skinty’s Gruesome Game Show, in which the reader is contending with a disgusting, sadistic and borderline rigged gameshow suggests that at least some inspiration struck during this process. ︎

Be advised that the following post will discuss hidden dialogue that makes reference to several offensive and sexually charged terms. Reader discretion is advised, but the worst of this is beyond the page break.

In previous parts of this series, we discussed the embedding of a political message across two episodes of the 60’s cartoon Batfink (Part 1), and a somewhat nicer message hidden in Rainbow (Part 2). While the next candidate is less directly child focussed (or at least, we’d hope it was), the motivations here are somewhat less clear.

This selection comes some 30 years after Batfink, and a decade or so after Rainbow, as part of the Mortal Kombat arcade series. Liu Kang (in many ways the Bruce Lee to Johnny Cage’s Frank Dux) is known for his high pitched, high speed exertions in mid fight.

However, for reasons of decency, I’ll keep the analysis beyond a page break.

My original part 2 is awaiting some review of the contemporary archive, as I refuse to believe that something as widely marketed as it never had any reports at the time. For now, having been given a lead by Tilt Araiza on BlueSky (find me there as docwallace.bsky.social), I felt I had to look further into it. He mentioned that, in early episodes of the ITV children’s show Rainbow, a few Easter eggs had been hidden by the animators of the interstitial cartoons.

For those unaware of Rainbow, the lazy description is as a British, homegrown version of Sesame Street – a world where humans interact with puppets, celebrities act in sketches and tell stories and to this day remains a cult favourite. For those who are, the episode I bring up is likely to confuse, as this is from the earlier run, where David Cook hosted with Sunshine and Moony accompanying Zippy, and musical accompaniment from Telltale1, instead of Rod, Jane and assorted others. For now, let’s ignore the main show, and focus on the animation about shapes, known as Curly and Straight (152 seconds in, but the link should take you straight there).

As with Batfink before, it’s the gabbled sound effect here that is of interest, but a little bit more effort is needed. Let me present a reversed portion of the affected section:

Listen carefully to when the straight line is being drawn in the sequence. It’s clearly something played back at high speed. Here, let me slow it down by a factor of 6:

This is still not perfect, as the speed change effect alters over the course of the reversed video, so the tape slows down yet further, but you can basically make out what this is. It’s the Granadaphone answering message, taken from the raw audio tape (including countdown). This was a system that let people contact local advertisers via Granada, useful for small businesses. But why a service for people in Lancashire in a Thames show, produced in London?

The answer lies in the credits:

In 1972, Cosgrove and Hall were working as animators for hire as part of Hall’s company Stop Frame Productions. This was Manchester based, and spun out of their efforts producing graphics for Granada productions (including the self same local commercials that Granadaphone related to), which perhaps explains them having access to the tape. What better way for a Manchester company to mark their territory in London than to sneak in some Granada material under the radar?

It’s worth noting that a lot of Series 1 episodes with the Curly and Straight animations share this same clip, it looks like it became the generic sound effect used, always run in reverse, but at differing speeds to give a pitch change as necessary.

When Stop Frame closed its doors in 1976, Thames immediately approached the duo to help them set up a subsidiary animation studio for their inhouse productions, which became known as Cosgrove Hall Productions. This branched out into full form cartoons such as Dangermouse, Count Duckula etc, and the Captain Kremmen inserts for the Kenny Everett Video Show. These also featured their own hidden moments (in terms of flash frames, random segments etc), but I’d be skating on thin ice with TOS to include them here, so I’ll mention them in the publicity thread for this particular post at https://bsky.app/profile/docwallace.bsky.social/post/3l36yyph4s42a , where more examples like these are collected.

Thanks again to Tilt for not only telling me about this, but offering me a recording of the Granadaphone message to compare with the edited clip.

1. Telltale wrote the Rainbow theme as used throughout the show, and features amongst its number Hugh Fraser. If this name means anything to you, it may be through his work as Captain Hastings in the David Suchet helmed adaptations of Poirot. ︎

The idea of hiding messages in innocuous dialogue scenes is nothing new, either real (in the case of the explicit images in Who Framed Roger Rabbit and The Rescuers) or rumoured, but in this article I’d like to take some time to look into one of the more interesting, long hidden examples.

This comes from as long ago as 1966, and the extremely low budget cartoon Batfink. This is a show that seems largely forgotten (a take off on the Adam West Batman series, with Robin replaced with a character that resembles a more stereotypical Kato from The Green Hornet), made for basic syndication and to fill a hole. My introduction to the show was when, bizarrely, the whole series was repeated twice in the UK some decades later – once by TV-AM and Children’s ITV as part of their schedule in the 80s, and then 20 years later on the BBC, presumably in both cases as the cheapest 10 minute filler available.

As a typical cheap cartoon, the inevitable sound effect cliches crop up, including the ‘gabbling’ sound on the telephone, but the keen eared might hear something a little different to normal in these episodes, broadcast some distance apart (I’ve put the relevant section in the timestamp):

When slowed down, these offer a message that is the very definition of ‘of its time’

For those who aren’t aware, Walter Reuther was a union leader and civil rights activist who polarised opinions at the time, but would be dead by 1970, before this even aired in the UK. The message was clearly intended to be present, as it is split perfectly between the two shows, but to date, there is no explanation as to why this was snuck in. By the time of the BBC airing in 2007-2009, this had already been noted on Dave Mackay’s website – the BBC airings recompiled these episodes in a different broadcast order to make neat 10 minute packages. However, it seems that in the original broadcast at least, albeit months apart, the message did go out, and in order, as both were broadcast unedited, with Spin The Batfink airing four months ahead of Bride and Doom.

The question that remains unanswered is, why? Hal Seeger, the creative force behind the show doesn’t seem to have been particularly political, but animation studios have never been too keen on unionisation because of the nature of the work, and the subliminal message trend was already starting to be discredited. The audio itself, a slightly hesitant and stumbling read of what appears to be a debate speech has also not been found anywhere else to my knowledge, but as usual, if anyone has any insight, feel free to share.

The good people of TVCream have brought up something that has always been of interest, the somewhat excellent credits sequence for Bob’s Full House. I’ve spoken about the original version of these before, but the later series is something of wonder, observe:

To explain what is going on here, what we apparently see is a sequence where the credits spin in, run in a slideshow, and then the final credit spins out again, all while the lighting stays perfectly in sync.

Following some very close analysis, it looks like there’s only two ‘real’ slides in this, and we only see them in long shot – the first, and the last. The rest are digital overlays, until we get to the end where the final card starts to spin out. That final move looks in the video above to be a very subtle digital video effect to move the text to the right in sync with the motion, only to cut away before anything happens to spoil the illusion.

In terms of the actual superimposition, I think the whole credit sequence was filmed as a long wild sequence with just the background, with the text superimposed afterwards (note the slightly off centre version). This effect was later redone long after the fact for the BBC iPlayer collection curated by Richard Osman. Working in a rush to add the new credit for the format owner (as Terry Mardell sold the rights) the edit is more obvious, cutting all the subtle movements out and making it clear what they’ve done:

Of course, broken down it’s a simple effect, where just a bit of additional effort makes something look so much better. The fact that the BBC were able to make such an effort for a show like this (even if it was probably only one wild take of the background shot in a series and a routine edit) indicates a level of pride in the product, which I guess is why it appeals so much.