There was a time when I used to enthusiastically squeeze every last drop out of the Christmas holiday and insisted on maintaining the festive spirit until the sixth of January. It would piss me off to see shops totally stripped of any trace of Christmas and not a mince pie in sight. We would watch Christmas films every night while eating a fresh table full of assorted treats, and when people asked me if I'd had a nice Christmas I would point out that I didn't know because it wasn't over yet. As I am not all that Christmassy anymore though, I no longer have any Christmas left in me on the 27th and today, the last day of Christmas, I looked around town and saw some shop windows still displaying trees and houses still lit up, and Christmas seemed such a long time ago to me that I couldn't quite believe the borderline obsessive Christmas monster I once was. Ordinarily we would have taken the decorations down today and afterwards we would have said a final goodbye to the season by watching one more Christmas film while eating the remaining food, topped off with a Christmas pudding. I had made a heroic effort to eat most of the surplus buffet food on Monday as it was a Bank Holiday and of course I watched Mary Poppins. There wasn't a Christmas film this year, we did however eat Christmas pudding and custard while watching BBC4. To maintain the one final tradition of the sixth, Mandi actually bought Christmas pudding for the occasion.
We had wanted to watch Top of the Pops: The Story of 1983 and Top of the Pops: 1983 - Big Hits, and of course I wanted to watch The Good Old Days, which wasn't brilliant to be honest. The channel slips in ten minutes of sixties pop under a Sounds of the Sixties banner and something struck me. I have written before about how the lack of television exposure for live performance means that future BBC4 retrospectives are knackered. Aside from Top of the Pops and 6-5 Special, pop groups used to appear on childrens' television. The shows were better then of course, but they used to shove bands on any programme they could. Crackerjack (crack-er-jack) used to have musical interludes but apart from that I don't remember any other show (apart from music shows of course). On 1960s television there was a programme called Pops and Lenny, which was basically a ventriloquist act with a cuddly lion who used to introduce bands. Looking at it with sophisticated 21st century eyes the show looks terrible but I don't doubt that this was a major ratings puller. I of course got to thinking about what happened to the puppet after the death of Terry Hall, did it stay in the family or get donated to a museum? Perhaps it was thrown on a skip.
Picture from BBC
All I could think of was trying to incorporate a puppet (the actual Lenny the Lion if possible - is it still in copyright or was it ever registered?) into hosting gigs or filming The Random Sessions.
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