Brian J. Robb looks back at the long-running BBC children’s show Record Breakers, fronted by genuine nice guy Roy Castle and featuring the freaky McWhirter twins.

The late, great Roy Castle; with Peter Cushing in Dr Who and the Daleks (1965); Roy relaxes with Alan Freeman on the set of Dr Terror’s House of Horrors (1965)

As those who grew up in the 1970s know, ‘Dedication is all you need. If you wanna be the best and you wanna beat the rest, then dedication’s what you need. That is, if you wanna be a Record Breaker!’

That’s according to the lyrics of the closing theme tune to the BBC show Record Breakers, sung by the show’s long-term original presenter Roy Castle. If you haven’t thought about it in a while, no doubt reading those lines has brought the tune right back into your head.

It’s little remembered today that Record Breakers originated as a spin-off from longrunning BBC children’s magazine programme Blue Peter. The spot on Blue Peter had been inspired by The Guinness Book of Records, first published in 1955, and co-founded and edited by twin brothers Norris and Ross McWhirter. The McWhirter brothers turned up on Blue Peter regularly to supervise record breaking attempts when hopeful chancers put themselves up against standing records—often for all sorts of weird achievements—listed in the annually up-dated book [see Box Out]. Producer Alan Russell was tasked in 1972 with the job of spinning off this segment into a brand new series.

Popular variety entertainer Roy Castle was chosen to front the new show, titled The Record Breakers (the show dropped the definite article at the end of 1982). Born in Holmfirth, Yorkshire, Castle took up tap dancing at an early age, starting his career as an all-round entertainer in clubs in the Blackpool area in the 1950s. He quickly became well-known, appearing in the Royal Variety Show in 1958, and even releasing a saccharine Christmas novelty record, ‘Little White Berry’, in 1960 which reached a high point of 40 in the pop charts.

Castle pursued a side-line as an actor in the 1960s, appearing opposite Peter Cushing in both Dr. Who and the Daleks (1965, based on the BBC TV series), as companion Ian, and in that same year’s Dr. Terror’s House of Horrors, as a jazz musician. He turned up in Carry on Up the Khyber in 1968 and was in the BBC musical Pickwick (based upon Charles Dickens’ The Pickwick Papers) in 1969, opposite Harry Secombe.