The must-have novelties nobody needed

Many reviewers start work with a peek at the book’s index. Here you find Gladys Goose Lamp, Choo Choo Chain and Dynamite Candles – novelty gifts (the ‘executive toys’ of the title) that made a small fortune for their creators. You might therefore think this a very slight book – so slight that its value could be dispersed by the mildest of zephyrs. But no. With unhesitating commitment it reveals the frailty and vanity of the long-gone culture it describes. Thus, fascinating. 

Can anything better illustrate the sense of doom gathering in the 1980s than an executive toy created for bored Concorde passengers? They say an era is at its end when its illusions are exhausted: BA001 LHR-JFK, playing with a fluid puzzle after several glasses of the Chateau Palmer ’70 at Mach 2. The memory fades…

Richard Loncraine, born in 1946, is a soixante-huitard of a peculiarly English cast. He was no chucker of bricks at coppers, and his revolution was in matters of bizarre innovation. His was the era when the Mr Freedom shop sold an armchair looking like chomping dentures; a time when his friend and collaborator Peter Broxton said: ‘There were poets, pop stars and mini-skirts everywhere.’

Loncraine was – and remains – an obsessive doer, one of those people who can make unlikely things happen when elsewhere is inertia. As a schoolboy, he fashioned a hands-free telephone speaker from an army surplus Lancaster bombardier’s control panel. Creative scavenging was a major part of his repertoire: old pubs and the Portobello Road furnished him with his artist’s materials.

After the Royal College of Art, in 1969 Loncraine became a producer-director of the BBC’s Tomorrow’s World (presented by Raymond Baxter with a fruity voice) which broadcast superior intel about technology and science.