One of the small discomforts of being a Gen Xer is that so many of our childhood TV gods turned out to be bastards or wankers. Some of these men (they are all men) were semi-evident bastards at the time: you can’t throw a stone in Waitrose these days without hitting someone who always thought Jimmy Savile was a creep. In the early 1980s my friend Debbie was at secondary school in Walton on Thames, where the hottest ticket in town was ‘the Walton Hop’, a monthly alcohol-free disco for teens hosted by TV superstar and (later) convicted paedophile Jonathan King. She says all the canny kids avoided him; and anyway, they were too busy fingering each other in the car park to hang around with old men. I was a distinctly non-canny teen, and the story still makes me shiver.
In — and I want to make this extremely clear — an entirely different bucket, we had the childhood gods who, in the glaring light of adulthood, just appear tacky and tarnished. People whose desperation for the spotlight was so glistening and unctuous that, watching them now, you want to scrub them off with Swarfega. Which brings us to Noel Edmonds.
He’s not an evil man, of course; he bears no comparison to Savile or King or Gary Glitter or Stuart Hall or Rolf Harris or Christ on a bike, what was happening in BBC Light Ent in the 1970s? But as the years have gone by, the evidence has grown that Edmonds is just kinda… Brexity. He’s the sort of man who asks for ‘a pint of your finest ale, barkeep!’; the sort of man who is jonesing for a ticket for the VIP enclosure at Cowes; the sort of man who brandishes a helicopter pilot’s licence as a way to get hot chicks. There are worse things in the world, of course. But in terms of the non-criminal survivors of Gen X’s childhood TV, there’s Derek Griffiths on the one hand, and there’s Noel Edmonds on the other. The two genders.
The mildly horrific thing about Edmonds’s roaring success in adult light entertainment during the ‘90s — the pounding, lurching, nausea-inducing nightmare of Mr Blobby, ‘Crinkley Bottom’, gurning pranks and gunge tanks — was that it revealed that so many adult Britons were gurgling twats. Just as you reached your 20s and were ready to take on the world, you were faced with the hard truth that half of your fellow citizens could be captivated for hours by the TV equivalent of a string of bright lights in a cock-and-balls arrangement. And once you know that, how the fuck are you supposed to live a meaningful life?
Perhaps Edmonds’s adult form wasn’t so upsetting for Tiswas kids; perhaps they didn’t feel so personally implicated. Because that was how it was when we were little: you were a Tiswas kid, or you were a Multicoloured Swap Shop kid. Tiswas pre-dated Swap Shop by a couple of years — it was first broadcast in 1974, while Swap Shop didn’t appear until 1976 — but at first it wasn’t available nationwide because of ITV’s regional structure. Noting its popularity and its innovative format — an hours-long Saturday morning magazine show for kids, not something that had been tried before — Auntie Beeb hurriedly stepped in with a spoiler that it had thrown together from some ordinary household items: a Radio 1 DJ (Edmonds), a sternly sexy catalogue model already known to viewers of Children’s BBC (John Craven), and an out-of-work 19-year-old Liverpudlian actor (Keith Chegwin). (Maggie Philbin was added a couple of years later, when someone in the production office remembered that women exist.)
From the toes of my wide-fitting school shoes to the roots of my frizzy long hair, I was a Swap Shop kid. During its interminable mini-documentaries focusing on stuff I absolutely didn’t care about (horses, sports, large infrastructure projects) I would flick over to Tiswas, but this served only to confirm that it was a feral landscape of bullies and scoundrels. There was so much yelling on Tiswas, so much genuine chaos, so much behaviour that would have seen my mother giving us a hard stare and an early bedtime. Children need to know that somebody is in charge, and on Tiswas, nobody was. I loathed it then and, honestly, watching the clips now, I loathe it still.
Swap Shop, in contrast, was immensely wholesome, and that was the way I liked it. It was based around the quintessentially Biddy Baxter concept of swapping unwanted possessions. The swapping was the brainchild of producer Rosemary Gill, who had (of course) previously worked on Blue Peter, and it was so BBC-coded that when you stop to think about it an orchestra appears behind you and starts playing Sailing By.
It was also a magnificent rejoinder to the commercial breaks that interrupted Tiswas. Swap Shop could never have been shown on ITV, because the advertisers wouldn’t have stood for it; the list of swaps offered up by the nation’s children functioned as a giant focus group revealing the consumer items that kids didn’t bloody want. Board games featured heavily.
The specificity of the swaps made them entirely irrelevant to most viewers (‘Mark Goodwill offers a 6ft wigwam, and wants a football game’); but for me, a child for whom stationery loomed very large, the real lure was the sight of Noel noting down swaps on an orange notepad using a chunky coloured ballpoint. I wanted that orange pad badly. Even more than that, I yearned for a job — a real-life occupation, not a game of make-believe — that required me to urgently jot things down on an orange pad while holding a trimfone to my ear. Adult life has not yet came good in this respect, but there’s still time.
I didn’t know the word ‘curation’ when I watched Swap Shop, but looking back now it is an incredibly clear example of the care and thoughtfulness with which the BBC approached children’s programming. John Craven and his news bulletins were included throughout, for additional roughage. The filmed mini-documentaries about horses and bridges, much as they bored me rigid, were full of information for kids who were that way inclined. At one point Barry Took popped up and sang ‘Sh-Boom (Life Could Be A Dream)’ very badly, accompanied by a pianist, and if you have to ask ‘Why?’ you don’t understand the BBC at all. Keith Chegwin’s ‘Swaporamas’ were BBC outside broadcasts at their finest, safely wrangling thousands of kids carrying pristine copies of Connect Four and swinging old scooters above their heads; imagine the risk assessment.
To quote the writer of a blog about growing up in this era, Swap Shop was ‘like a three-hour child safeguarding exercise’. But if we’ve learned nothing else in the intervening 50 years, we’ve learned that child safeguarding is a critical part of a civilised society. And this is where Edmonds, for all his Brexity wankerishness, came into his own, because this was a man who could be trusted to sodding well behave himself around kids. He played pranks — this is Edmonds, after all — but only ever on other adults; unlike Tiswas, Swap Shop had no studio audience of willing stooges who were desperate to please. In hundreds of phone-ins (another Swap Shop innovation) with vulnerable little humans, he was reliably good humoured and quick-thinking, and yet never patronising or dishonest. He wasn’t trying to be anyone’s friend, and he wasn’t engaging in a charisma competition with kids either; he was man enough to know that that was beneath him. If a kid said something dumb, as kids tend to do, he neither bullied them nor pretended that it hadn’t happened. He just named it, dealt with it and moved on. He was a safe, well-boundaried adult. He was exactly the person you want fronting a programme like this; an experienced presenter who could enliven scripts with tiny drops of piss-taking and subversion without ever kicking over the safety barriers.
My oddest Swap Shop memory, and the one I’ll probably remember until I’m gaga in a nursing home, involves Edmonds’s ‘pyjama patrol’. This was a regular part of Swap Shop banter: the joke was that Edmonds thought nobody should be turning on the TV in the morning until they’d bloody well got dressed. Every week he’d read out letters or take phone calls in which viewers dobbed in their mums, dads or siblings for watching Swap Shop in their pyjamas or nightdresses.
One morning my brother and I were watching along when Noel read out a letter from Mr Davies in London, who wanted Noel to know that his kids Matthew and Rowan always watched Swap Shop in their nightclothes. We ran yelling to the living room door and called for our dad, who appeared looking alarmed. ‘YOU TOLD NOEL ABOUT OUR PYJAMAS’, we screamed. My dad looked utterly baffled; he said he had done no such thing. At the time, we thought he was playing along with the joke. My dad worked at the BBC in London, and it was perfectly plausible that he had wandered over to the Swap Shop production office and ask them to read out a message on air. But I have returned to this question regularly over the decades, and he has never wavered from his basic position that he doesn’t know what the fuck I am talking about. And my dad is not a good liar; I think he’s telling the truth.
All I can think is that for my brother and I, this new form of programming induced something like a collective hallucination. For the first time we were watching something that was live, that featured our heroes having conversations with us, and that required no intervention from parents. For the first time our TVs were treating us as individuals, interacting directly with us, recognising our wants and needs not as babies and toddlers, but as autonomous individuals. In this sense, Swap Shop ‘saw’ us. Nothing like it had ever happened to us before; perhaps the experience was so powerful that it induced a dreamlike state in which fantasies felt true.
And presiding over it all, like a groovy psychopomp, was Noel Edmonds. Thank God for that: it could have been so much worse.
Subsequent generations of Radio 1 DJs were less avuncular:
John Peel has no idea what e-mail is
The writer Stefan Zweig experienced far too many cataclysmic historical events. Born in 1881 to a Jewish family in Vienna, he lived through the First World War, the collapse of the ancient Habsburg Empire, the rise of fascism, the annexation of his homeland by Nazi Germany, the beginnings of the Holocaust, and the start of the Second World War.