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Post a clip from a tv show you watched as a child

The Flight of the Condor. Not a children's TV programme as such, but it was the first nature programme I remember watching with my parents. I was reminded of that when I heard that my seven-year-old nephew has been enjoying David Attenborough's latest with his parents my brother and sister-in-law.
Coincidentally, I think it was around the same time that I first read the Tintin adventure Prisoners of the Sun which has long been my favourite of the series ... and not just because of the "When llama angry, he always do that!" running gag.
 
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This isn't the kind of clip most people would expect from childhood, but when most kids were watching cartoons I was watching programmes like Tomorrow's World in the 1970s when I was still in single figures in the UK, by late 1981 I watched the following episode below which was originally transmitted live. For the first time in television history they transmitted a computer program over the airways which I carefully recorded onto cassette tape. After about 30 minutes adjusting the volume and the cassette read head alignment with a screwdriver on my ZX81 cassette deck I amazingly got the very simple BASIC program to load successfully. Those days were so exciting.

Go to 1 min 30 seconds to see how they did the ZX81 and Apple II program transmission, the actual transmission starts just after 3 mins:


When I was younger still my favourite TV drama show was actually Blake's 7 which started in 1978 (the whole series is available on Youtube if you want to search for it), I still like this classic SCI-FI series now. It was ridiculously low budget and the one ship model was even made using a hairdryer, but the story and characters were incredible, hence why it still has a cult following of fans.

Okay so I'm going to have to include something a little more expected for a young child to watch as well, but for that I have to go back to when I was literally only a few years old, it's the earliest TV program I remember watching (I watched this well before people could even understand me speak as due to extremely slow language development people didn't fully understand my voice until I was around 7).


(Finger Bobs - broadcast in 1972 on BBC 1's Watch with Mother slot)
 
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Understand, I watched this show a few years before this clip was taped...back when I lived in a literal two-channel universe. Whatever was on CBC was even worse.
 
Here's a bit of trivia for you...Back in the days before rolling news coverage the programme which had the scoop on the Challenger space shuttle disaster (this side of the Atlantic, at any rate) was none other than John Craven's Newsround:
 
Aeolienne said:
Here's a bit of trivia for you...Back in the days before rolling news coverage the programme which had the scoop on the Challenger space shuttle disaster (this side of the Atlantic, at any rate) was none other than John Craven's Newsround:
Click to expand...
Thanks for the memories, I remember John Craven's Newsround well, but mainly when the news reader was in fact John Craven, I would have been a very small child when he started in 1972 in the UK, but he went on until 1989s (by then I was no longer watching it as I was a young adult). After John Craven left it became known as just Newsround.

Here is a clip from John Craven's Newsround when James Callaghan won leadership of the UK Labour Party in 1976 and because prime minister, it includes the intro. I would have been just 6 years old when this was originally broadcast, but I surprisingly do actually remember it.


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Now I never really used to like Blue Peter, but I used to still watch it simply because there was never anything else on for children when it was broadcast and I honestly think that's partly why it was so incredibly popular year after year, although it can't be the only reason as it's still going today. In the UK there was only 3 TV channels in the 1970s when I was a young child, BBC1, BBC2 and ITV, and BBC2 used to be off the air most of the time so your choice was extremely limited.

Here is a clip from Blue Peter in 1974 (originally broadcast live) that shows us around the television studio, look at the sheer size of the BBC Colour television cameras and at the now dated CRT monitors in the control room, but this was absolutely state of the art technology back then:

(Note: also catch Shep the dog walking around the studio.)

Blue Peter was first broadcast in 1958 and is the longest-running children's TV show in the world.
 
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Anyone who was around in the US in the early 90s probably remembers Lamb Chop and "the song that never ends" :)
 
It's nearly Christmas, so it's time to reminisce over The Box of Delights. The most elaborate special effects happen at 18 min 52 sec into the first episode. No sniggering at the back, please - these were state-of-the art in 1984.
Incidentally, the theme music is the second movement of the Carol Symphony by Victor Hely-Hutchinson.
 
I loved Arthur as a kid. This clip was from an episode that was a little later then when I watched, it but it's worth sharing since it was about Asperger's. The episode is called When Carl Met George if anyone wants to watch the full thing.

 
There was great children's programmes from the 9th August 1979 on ITV in the UK.......NOT! I literally had the following to watch and this message stayed on the screen until the 24th October:

The best children's TV programme in the world.

I remember watching the TV when this message suddenly came on and I sat there for ages moaning at my Mum asking her when it would come back on, little did I know it would be a very VERY long wait. I continued to hound her however, checking it and moaning every single day lol!

All that was left was BBC1 that broadcast from about 9am until about 12 midnight and BBC2 that only broadcast about 25% of the time and when it did it was Open University or extremely boring documentaries. There was barely any children's programmes in a time before anyone really had video recorders and I wasn't introduced to my special interest (computers) until later that year. For more info about the long bitter ITV industrial dispute please click here.


Okay I can't just leave you with the above, was anyone old enough to remember this?

The Banana Splits


Well even I wasn't old enough to remember it when it was first shown from 1968 to 1970, but I do remember the reruns. I never really did like the actual TV programme itself however, only the opening and ending themes.


Here is a classic 1978-1980 Japanese TV series (dubbed in English) I really used to love however:

Monkey (TV series)


I also used to love listening to the narrator too who would always be giving great words of wisdom and enlightenment, lol!

The boy priest was actually played by a women named Masako Natsume who was actually a model before the series, she even did topless pin ups for a cosmetic company in 1977. Sadly she died at the very young age of only 27 in 1985 of leukaemia.
 
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