butiamthedoctor

Constantly getting mixed up with Words and Pictures, Look and Read was for Junior school age (7- 11) children. The programmes consisted of an episodic drama, split by a section on English grammar. In 1976, the serial 'Cloudburst' by Richard Carpenter, introduced the character of Wordy, who came out of Richard Carpenter's golfball typewriter. Richard Carpenter appeared as presenter, who along with Wordy, would demonstrate how a word could change it's tense and meaning with simple changes, additions of a single or two letters. The second serial for 1976-77 was The King's Demons, again scripted by Richard Carpenter, this time the educational part was set in the editor's office of the newspaper featured in the serial and was hosted by the newspaper editor, played by Kenneth Watson, with Wordy appearing, coming out of the typewriter, while the editor was out of his office, then going back in before he could be seen. The most remembered serial was The Boy from Space, originally made in 1969, it's original broadcast was in black and white, although the serial was shot on colour film. The original 1969 series, which had it's own educational section, pre-Wordy, was unfortunately wiped during the film and tape purge of the 1970s. The serial was reused, in colour, with new educational sections recorded featuring Wordy on a space station. Other serials included Sky Hunter, Sky Hunter II and Geordie Racer.

The title sequence for this series stuck in my mind from when it was originally broadcast. This is a very creepy series, with the main theme being human paranoia and all the stories have been extremely well written. It's just a shame that current British television no longer sees anthology series as financially viable, even though they're a good training ground to find new writing talent. New television writers are now 'trained' by writing for the soaps. The story lines are varied and covered various forms of paranoia, with psychological threats, rather than the supernatural, though it does have the feel of Rod Serling's Night Gallery to it. Thankfully, as it was made in 1971-3, it's not destroyed by extremely loud and constant incidental music, most have none and only a couple have a few moments with it, with library pieces. Unusually though, a single episode was broadcast in 1970, then there was a run of 9 episodes in 1971, followed by another single episode in 1973. The complete series is now on DVD, but as was common back then, there is no copyright/production date at the end of the closing credits on any of them, so it's hard to know if they were all made in 1970 and just spread out, or if they were made in the year of broadcast. There is very little information online about this series' production, or why there was a 1 year gap between the first episode's broadcast and the run of 9 and the 2 year gap between the 10th and 11th episodes.

This series was shown by the BBC apparently, ahead of the US, as we got it around May/June 1976. I got the recent region 2 DVD release by Fabulous and did expect it to be extremely cheesy seen again today, but it's not as bad as all that. The only really bad aspect of the series was it was made on video, but then transferred to film. No idea though if it was copied after it was transferred from NTSC to PAL to film, or if it was copied direct to film from NTSC video and then transferred to tape again, then converted to PAL for the UK, it could even have been just badly telecined to film. Apart from the visual look, which a lot of people don't really notice anyway, it's still enjoyable. Some of it though, as it was made in the mid-70s, can come across as very un-PC and a lot of the story lines are just plain ridiculous too.