Here’s a question for those of you old enough to remember 1980s television: did we realise at the time how crap it was, or did we simply not know any better?
I’ve been struggling with my own answer to this, ever since watching Danny Baker’s World Cup Brush Up on BBC4 the other night. Yet again the fabulous Baker boy proved that the ‘clip show’ doesn’t have to be an insult. Among the many choice morsels was an early-80s side-splitter from Blue Peter, in which Kevin Keegan was shown a 3D model of himself made by artist Silvia Gardner. (That’s a guessed spelling by the way – inexplicably Google doesn’t seem to have heard of her.) The presenter Simon Groom explains that Gardner has constructed Keegan by ‘working out things from old tights and bits of foam rubber’. If that sounds alarming, wait till you see the result (see above).
Had the props guy on The Exorcist gone to William Friedkin with this creation for the scene in which Regan’s head spins round, the director would have rejected it as too frightening.
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