Jim'll Fix It

JIM'LL FIX IT
Made by: BBC
Shown on: BBC
Years shown: 1973-89

Theme tune: “If you want to sit in the Mastermind chair/Or stand on an aeroplane’s wing in the air/If you want to play the slide-trombone/Or operate a telephone/If you want to read the classified scores/Or if you want to take the floor/Jim’ll fix it!”

AND “Your letter was only the start of it/One letter and now you’re a part of it/Now you’ve done it/Jim has fixed it for you/There must be something that you always want to do/The one thing that you always wanted/Now you’ve done it/Jim has fixed it for you, and you and you, and ba-ba-baaaaa…”

Now then, now then children, what have we told you about talking to strange men? And, let’s face it, they didn’t come much stranger than Sir Jimmy Saville, ex-popular music disc-jockey and London Marathon enthusiast. In his pastel shell-suits and gold jewellery, he looked like some kind of pimp, or at least an aged Scouser thinking about stealing your hub-caps.

Every week, nineteen million people would watch Sir Jim read letters from members of the public, usually children, which began, “Dear Jim, please will you fix it for me to…” There were about 350,000 letters annually, and the requests ranged from the sublime to the ridiculous, and you had to worry about some of the kids; playing football with Kevin Keegan is fair enough, and meeting The Bay City Rollers is almost forgivable, but what about the boy who wanted to visit a Toby jug factory? He had obviously got the wrong show, and his letter should have gone to The Antiques Roadshow.

Nobody can easily forget the boy scout troop who wanted to eat lunch on a roller-coaster at Blackpool Pleasure Beach - what were they thinking? Or maybe it was the evil scheming of a very sadistic scout-master. Anyway, needless to say they ended up with face-masks of strawberry milkshake, and half-eaten hamburgers splattered all over their laps. Other noteworthy fix-its were the blowing up of a cooling tower, a kid who wanted to burn £1 million (was it one of The KLF while still in short trousers?), and someone who wanted to meet Manuel from Fawlty Towers. I, personally, never wrote to Jim, but someone I know wrote in begging to meet Nick Kamen, the model from the Levis laundrette advert - and Jim cruelly did not grant her wish.

At the end of the segment, after we’d seen the child having their dream fulfilled (often using the so-called magic of the blue-screen effect, which was a complete cop-out), they would return to the studio, dressed in their Sunday best and accompanied by whoever had helped them to achieve the fix-it eg. Kevin Keegan, Les McKeown, or a foreman from the Toby jug factory. Jim would be reclining in his fix-it throne, and would begin with, “Now then, Mr Keegan, sir, did little Johnny behave himself at your football ground?” When the adult responded in the positive, Jim would then invite them to present the child with the coveted, shiny Jim’ll Fix It medal. It was all a bit like speech day at a private school, or the Queen presenting the New Year’s Honours.

SQUARE EYES RATING: 7/10

(Thanks to www.raf.mod.uk for the borrowed pic)

Jimbo and the Jet Set

JIMBO AND THE JET SET
Made by: Peter Maddocks
Shown on: BBC
Years shown: mid-80s

When a factory got the dimensions of an order wrong, and mistook inches for centimetres, the result was Jimbo, a mini red and yellow aeroplane with serious ‘cute’ factor. This was the premise behind press cartoonist Maddocks’ creation, who lived at an airport run by the ginger, moustachioed Chief Controller (the aeroplane, not Maddocks, obviously.) Jimbo was actually a living, breathing piece of air transportation, a bit like Thomas the Tank Engine with lower production values, and he had other, similar friends to help him out: Tommy Towtruck, Sammy Steps and the comely Amanda Baggage, with enormous red lips. Jimbo was always raising the Chief Controller’s blood pressure with his antics, (remember the opening titles with the sheep singing a high-pitched “Jimbooooo!”?), but he always saved the day in the end, of course. When I was five this was my absolute favourite cartoon, and people used to whizz around the playground pretending to be Jimbo, but we weren’t the only ones who thought it was a good idea: I wonder where the Duchess of York got her idea for Budgie the Little Helicopter…?

SQUARE EYES RATING: 4/10

(Thanks to www.entertainmentrights.com for the borrowed pic)

Jem

JEM
Made by: D.I.C.
Shown on: ITV
Years shown: 1985 onwards

Here are some things about the 1980s: political correctness was born, women became more prominent in the workplace, and pop groups had big hair and appalling clothes. Somehow, this American cartoon thought they could capitalise all of this. Jerrica, in her late teens, was the pretty leader of the all-girl pop group, The Holograms, along with Aja, Kimber (who played one of those keyboard-guitars, which dates the programme if nothing else did), Shana and Raya. She presided over the orphanage run by her late father, but he also left another legacy; he invented a kind of computerised holograph thing, which Jenna wore in her earrings, and which allowed her to become Jem. Now Jem was “truly outrageous!”, or so the theme song claimed, but all I can remember was that she was slightly more glamorous and less girl-next-door than Jenna, and that she wore even worse clothes. She had a boyfriend of course, called Rio - also the band's manager (how unprofessional) - who was Ken to her Barbie, but he didn’t know about her transformations. Like all good cartoons, there were bad guys or, in this case, girls - the rival pop group, The Misfits, made up of Pizzazz, Roxy, Stormer and Jetta. They all looked like they might be a bit ‘easy’. There was absolutely no point to Jem, except for a lot of moralising, and the opportunity for a lot of twangy computer-pop, but it was very popular. It was shown as part of the Wide Awake Club, and was a competition where kids as young as four or five would send in photos of themselves and their friends dressed as Jem and her band, often including some extremely reluctant brother/cousin/boy from off the street, who would be forced to don a white suit and bow-tie and pose as Rio. And parents were up in arms when young girls wanted to be the Spice Girls…

SQUARE EYES RATING: 2/10

(Thanks to the Universal Appeal Jem website for the borrowed pic)