In the 2000s when my children were very young, my mother, a veteran TV presenter and actress, took me aside one day and told me she was concerned my children weren’t watching ENOUGH television. “They’ll be left out in school,” she explained. It’s true that my daughter seemed to be the only girl in her Year 1 class not to have watched High School Musical on the Disney Plus channel, but I have no regrets and she quickly came to see that as something to boast about.
I raised them watching DVDS and videos of Sooty, Bagpuss and Pipkins. Then as teenagers, as a family, we worked through boxsets of The Prisoner, Buffy the Vampire Slayer and classic Doctor Who – shows that I had mostly missed on original transmission.
Graham’s feature in the Daily Telegraph (May 2025)
Graham Kibble-White and I met through his work as a renowned TV magazine editor and indeed “cult TV guru” (in the words of the Liverpool Daily Post). He’s the head of TV and Radio at The Telegraph. I wrote features for him on Space:1999, The Word and ITV children’s lunchtime shows of the 70s (Rainbow, Hickory House, Pipkins etc). But I’d also spent my entire career working on TV – mostly in news and documentaries. We started to bump into eachother as cultural commentators booked for vintage TV shows and Graham wrote a terrific piece about the experience of looking back this way.
In the spirit of archaeology, Graham and I thought it would be fun to unearth real tv viewing of the past, assess it in modern sunlight, and like the hunt for the missing link, work out the evolutionary dead ends and successes of screen viewing. Not just nostalgia, but active thinking, in the age of streaming, when Channel 5 is re-launching Play For Today, about what makes great television and its social purpose and role in our daily lives. Angels to Casualty; Shadows to Inside Number 9 etc.
With JoyWhitby (2022)
The title of our podcast Through The Square Window, is course a reference to the famous filmed segments of Play School, created in 1964 for the news BBC2 channel, by the brilliant television producer and writer Joy Whitby, who also created Jackanory, The Book Tower and produced Catweazle. She has become a good friend and gave her blessing to our project. Thank you, Joy.
Two things that might come up now and then My family got a Philips home video recorder in about 1975, so there are shows I knew very well from repeated viewing in the age before VCRs became widespread a decade later, and I’ve read the campaign diaries of Mary Whitehouse, who famously lobbied to clean up TV from the 60s to the 90s.
We really hope you’ll give Through The Square Window a go, wherever you get your podcasts, and let us know what you think.
