Jossy's Giants

JOSSY'S GIANTS
Made by: BBC
Shown on: BBC
Years shown: 1984-6

Theme tune: "Swapping their homework for footwork/Kicking the ball till its dark/Here go Jossy's Giants/Football's just a branch of science/Head the ball now, Jossy calls.../Jossy's Giants!!??/Dependable, reliant/Put your faith in Jossy's Giants/Get stuck in, we're gonna win.../Jossy's Giants!!"

The shouty opening titles by Mike Arnott had a bunch of disparate, yobbish-looking kids trying to spell out ‘Jossy’s Giants’ with placards, and getting the spelling wrong countless times. This was no Enid Blyton.

Geordie darts commentator Sid Waddell got the idea for this series from spending Saturday mornings watching his son’s football team, The Churwell Lions, get repeatedly beaten by rival teams (The Churwell Lions later appeared in the series as themselves, a rival team to the stars.) Taking up his pen, he created the Glipton Grasshoppers, a useless bunch of pre-teen reprobates who acquire as a new manager, Joswell ‘Jossy’ Blair (Jim Barclay), a former brilliant child star, who received a career-wrecking injury on his full debut for Newcastle United. He took it upon himself to straighten the boys out, show them what real training and commitment was all about, and forced them to wear a black and white strip. The kids were a walk-over compared to Councillor Glenda Fletcher (Jenny McCracken), who always had some opposition to Jossy’s plans; the two revelled in their arguments with each other which, of course, meant they fancied each other rotten.

The makers of Jossy’s Giants were of the Byker Grove school of casting, and selected boys from local schools and youth clubs who could play football, believing it was easier to teach them to act rather than teach drama-school kids how to be ruffian footballers. One of the show’s stars was Mark Gillard, who played cheeky striker, Ross Nelson, and who - at the age of six - I had quite a crush on. But if the kids’ acting was suspect, they knew how to make them look good…by securing England skipper Bryan Robson, as a guest star.

SQUARE EYES RATING: 8/10

(Thanks to the BBC's comedy website for the borrowed pic)

Jonny Briggs

JONNY BRIGGS
Made by: ?
Shown on: BBC
Years shown: 1985-87

Life in a northern town, eh? Trouble up mill, and then there’s no time to eat your Hovis sandwiches and drink your warm ale. Actually, Jonny Briggs was a northern (but not Geordie, as many people seem to think) kids’ drama series that put many of its poncy southern counterparts to shame. There was that title sequence, with Jonny (Richard Holian) careering down a slide with his dog, Razzle, to the sound of some slightly fruity oompa-band music. The tyke would then chase the dog back to their modest working class home, to the bosom of his slightly dysfunctional, but loving, family.

There was Mam (Jane Lowe), who wore an apron most of the time, and sorted out all of “Our Jonny’s” woes; and Dad (Leslie Schofield), who went out to work, but did bugger-all in the home except sit in his easy chair and dispense advice. Jonny was the youngest of four kids, which accounted for eighty per cent of the wrinkles on his nine year old forehead, especially as he had to share a bedroom with his two brothers. The eldest was Rita (Sue Devaney), who was about 18, and when she wasn’t working, she was involving her timid friend Marilyn in all kinds of schemes, or going to the gym for some vigorous exercise in all the latest gear. Then there was curly-haired Humphrey, who, at sixteen, was the quiet, introspective member of the Briggs household, noted for his eyebrow-wiggling abilities and the fact that he was the only one who was actually nice to Jonny. The bane of Jonny’s young life was fourteen year old Albert (Tommy Robinson), a gangly bully-boy, who was always trying to make a fast buck, at anyone’s expense, and who would do exactly what Jonny didn’t want him to do, just for the sheer pleasure of it. You couldn’t help but feel for Jonny.

He usually had it rough at school as well. His best friend was Pam, but the two of them were constantly taunted by the class cow, Ginny, and her friends. Poor Jonny was entrusted by Miss Broom (Karen Meagher) to look after the class rabbit during the school holidays; initially, Mam was horrified, but when she did relent to it the rabbit went missing (as does Razzle, in a different episode.) Similarly, Jonny’s family ate all the biscuits that he has slaved to make for the school fete. Miss Broom was always very sympathetic, and tolerant too - she needed to be with that girl in the class who stood up and began all her sentences with “My mother, who’s a nurse…”. Mr Hobbs (Simon Chandler) was the young, well-mannered teacher who would sometimes visit Miss Broom, and would be greeted with a chorus of “Ooooooo”s from the (rightly suspicious) kids.

Jonny did have wonderful moments of triumph over his spiteful classmates, or his bullying siblings, but there were also great family incidents, which were touching without being schmaltzy, such as when the children decorate the basement in tin foil for their parents’ silver wedding anniversary.

Veteran actor Leslie Schofield had a lengthy stay in Albert Square, while the brilliant Sue Devaney had already appeared in Coronation Street, and would go on to feature in, among other things, Spatz, Casualty and dinnerladies.

SQUARE EYES RATING: 8/10

(Thanks to www.culttelly.co.uk for the borrowed pic)

John Craven's Newsround/Newsround

JOHN CRAVEN'S NEWSROUND/NEWSROUND
Made by: BBC
Shown on: BBC1
Years shown: 1972-present day

The frantic xylophone and percussion intro, like an urgent news flash, fooled you into believing that this was a serious news programme. And it was clear that John Craven wanted it to be a credible, ground-breaking programme, bringing up-to-the-minute news to children in a way that was accessible to them. But unlike most starch-shirted BBC news presenters, Craven would sit there in his thick-knit, patterned jumper, bringing us such earth-shattering news as the plight of a pair of pandas in London Zoo, or the longest domino-rally in the world, or maybe even a man who’s invented a house on wheels. Even when I was six, I knew these couldn’t be the most pressing matters of the day; they couldn’t be what the grown-ups were reading about in their big newspapers. To be fair to Newsround, they did bring us some very memorable and saddening reports about the famines in Ethiopia, but they always seemed overly-concerned about the endangered habitat of the koala, or explaining to us what CFCs stood for, for the millionth time. As we entered the mid 1980s, the title was shortened to just Newsround, and Craven was joined by future BBC sports’ presenter Helen Rollason (who sadly died of cancer in August 1999), and Roger Finn, who was quite dishy in a non-threatening way. Since then, there have been a list of mainly homogenous presenters, with an average age of 17; the promising ones go on to mainstream BBC news, and the others find jobs on Animal Hospital or somewhere not too taxing.

SQUARE EYES RATING: 5/10

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