Why don’t you just switch off your television set and go and do something less boring instead? This was the title of a long-running kids’ show that, through ironic inversion, showed the BBC’s self-loathing at producing content for what The Simpsons’ Sideshow Bob would later call the omnidirectional sludge pump.
Don’t tell me what to do, I told TV in 1970s. If I wanted to waste my life having my prepubescent sexuality shaped by ogling presenters such as Magpie’s Susan Stranks, Play School’s Floella Benjamin, Tiswas’s Sally James and the nameless Swedish protagonist of proto-Scandi noir Gold on Crow Mountain, that was my business. If my brother and I would solemnise our fondness for Bill and Ben by making tinfoil hats from custard tarts the better to imitate the Flower Pot Men’s preverbal “Flobba dob”, nobody could stop us.
