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Coming up with a joke about or a reimagining of old kids TV shows for every Newsround might become a bit of a chore, but so far I've managed to come up with over 100 of them. My favourites are the ones that unite two very obscure ideas meaning they are likely only to be understood by a handful of my fairly small audience.
Today it struck me how weird that Noel Edmond's Saturday morning show as called The Multicoloured Swap Shop. It was hardly any of those things. It was a TV show where people could swap things (though that was quite a small part of the programme) but it was not a shop and it was not any more multi-coloured than anything on TV.
The shop part maybe is excused by the fact that swap and shop rhyme. But why multicoloured? Colour TV had been available for a while by 1976, though perhaps it was around this time that it became more popular. I think we got our first colour TV in about 73. I remember it arriving and dad turning it on with the colour turned down to make us think it was black and white and then turned the knob to add colour (I don't think I was fooled - I'd noticed the symbol on the cabinet with three circles of colour).
Was it some nod to Joseph and his Amazing Technicolour Dreamcoat?
Or did they just think it needed another description to attract an audience?
You didn't need this shit. Tiswas barely ever mentioned why it was called that (This is Saturday, watch and smile) because it had the self-confidence to know that it was good enough without having to pretend it was something that it wasn't.
I was very much a Tiswas fan, though I did watch Swap Shop sometimes and was forced to when we moved to Cheddar as they didn't have Tiswas on TSW for years. I remembered recently that I wrote to Swap Shop complaining that they put pop music on the show. I told them that some kids did not like music and would prefer more comedy. I wonder if that letter is somewhere in a filing cabinet somewhere. Along with the even more embarrassing one I sent to Wogan when I'd left school, complaining how hard it was to get a job these days and suggesting I do a feature about unemployment on his show (which I think was only interview based). Imagine an 18 year old from Somerset talking to the nation about how difficult he was finding it getting employment in his year off.
People would have loved it.
Anyway, I came up with the idea that the Swap Shop had been running since the 60s where it would have been the black and white Swap Shop, where kids were only allowed to swap things in those particular hues.
Not wanting to miss an opportunity to pile in as many references as possible I decided that that show should be presented by the cast of the Black and White Minstrels. Which might sound like an idea made up by me for the continuity announcer, but was a genuine prime time entertainment show, where white people employed black face to sing Minstrel songs to the nation (Tiswas' Lenny Henry did join the Minstrels as their only actual black member, something that he was reluctant to do, but it was early in his career and his arm was being twisted and he deeply regrets it).
Incredibly the Black and White Minstrels were on TV until 1978 and continued touring Butlins until 1989, doubtless with gammons of the time saying that it was ridiculous that this fine tradition couldn't carry on.
And according to Wikipedia "A charity group that "replicated" the TV show, the Angus Black and White Minstrels, conducted a stage show in Arbroath, Scotland, authorised by the The Black and White Minstrel Show's producers, beginning in 1960 and only discontinued blackface in 2005; it ceased operations in 2019."
It hung around almost long enough to join the ironic post-modern uses of black face of the noughties.
Vote Reform if you miss this kind of stuff. Though I don't think even the most hardened believer in the wonders of 20th Century England is really calling for this.
If you want to see how people in the 70s spent their evenings (and I strongly advise you not to)
here is an episode. It’s super offensive to modern eyes (why not to ancient eyes?), but if you ignore that it is still deeply weird and archaic and fucked up. This is the world I grew up in. No wonder my generation is confused.
Anyway, more Traitors theories and chat and jealousy with Ally Sloper and the new SPC-mandated co-host
in today's Newsround.
I can’t imagine anyone looking back at this in 50 years and finding it offensive and inappropriate.
