Wasn’t kids’ TV wonderful in the 70s and the 80s? Well yes and no. Andrew Graves recalls some of the programmes that made youngsters back then want to turn off their television set and do something less boring instead!

If you’ve come across those rubbish local radio phone-ins you get, that try to get idiotic 50-year-olds to talk about Texan Bars; or those god-awful click bait listicles which specialise in lamenting the unhappy disappearance of Spangles, you’ll have surmised that there’s a hell of a lot of utter tosh talked about the past.

And if recent political machinations haven’t convinced you about our nation’s ability to falsely repaint our yesterdays as something angelically wonderful, then you only have to spend five minutes in your local pub listening to some half-wit conversation about 70s and 80s kid’s telly, to recognise how truly deluded we are about much of those not so halcyon days.

Don’t get me wrong; of course I have my favourite TV shows from that era. I was born in 1970, which meant that my childhood viewing was a heady mix of spanking new Playaway type shows, eccentric homemade puppet efforts from Oliver Postgate and co., 1930s serials and Laurel and Hardy repeats.

It was a slightly confusing, often brilliant mess of black and white fizzle and four-colour glaze, where Harold Lloyd and Flash Gordon fought for screen time between ancient episodes of equestrian Western nonsense, Champion the Wonder Horse and The Wacky Races. However, to only wax lyrical about those fantasy endless summers of Scooby Doo, The Banana Splits or The Red Hand Gang, is to willingly blank out all those occasions when we were bored shitless by meaningless eastern European stop-frame animations or those times when we would stare joylessly at yet another eternally crap edition of Play Chess purely because there was bugger all else to do.

But if the summer holidays where often tinged with disappointment, it was as nothing compared to having sit through any Sunday as a 70s/80s kid. With the exception of the Sundays which happen to fall on or around Christmas, the lord’s day for most of us back then was a turgidly bleak affair which seemed to last longer than a month, and where the idea of televisual entertainment only stretched as far as heavy political debate, farming programmes or tedious religious output. So, imagine how excited youngsters were when they found out there would be a brand new ‘fun’ Sunday morning show on BBC 1 aimed squarely at them. Now imagine their same deeply disappointed faces when they discovered that same show would be The Sunday Gang. The ‘Gang’ – think less streetwise hoods and more church youth club leaders in Playschool dungarees – originally consisted of four presenters. J.D, the-serious-eye-candy-for-dimwitted-nine-year-olds-one, Dodo, the-there-to-be-a-bit-thick-sothe-kids-don’t-feel-too-patronised-one, Tina Heath the-there-for-thebored-dad’s-one and Boff, the-kind-of-wholly unlovable-figure-that made Gyles-Brandreth-look-like-Omar-from-The Wire-one. Each episode would begin with them belting out their rancid theme tune, calling us aimless brats, too lazy to go outside or anywhere else to join in with their incessant multi-coloured God-bothering