What memories do you have watching TV as a kid, of programmes that you’ve never managed to track down since?
I wrote about one of mine last year, but I have so many others. One particularly vivid one is Trev and Simon on Going Live!, and their feature “The Bottomless Bin”. As I recall, it was essentially Trev and Simon dicking around with a wheelie bin, and pulling unpleasant stuff out of it. One fateful week, they tried to go on an expedition to find the actual bottom of The Bottomless Bin… so they lowered a camera down into it. Cue the TV picture breaking up, the Going Live! breakdown slide being cut to air, audio of chaos in the studio… and one very confused me, sitting in front of the television, trying to figure out whether the show had actually fallen off air or not.
Come to think of it, maybe The Bottomless Bin is responsible for my career working in TV presentation. If any of you have a recording of this sketch, I will love you forever if you send me a copy. These memories tend to be so much more satisfying when you actually track down what the hell it is you actually watched.1
However, I do have a tale of a distant television memory which I did manage to figure out. Let me share it with you.
* * *
The memory is both sharp, yet… small. I’m in my living room. I have no real idea what age I am. 10, maybe? Younger? On television is a black and white film. A group of people are on a boat, and somebody is in some kind of experimental diving suit. He goes into the water, and air is pumped into the suit. But something is going wrong. Very wrong. There is consternation among the people on the boat.
I remember one single line of dialogue. “We are pumping far too much air into poor Puckle.”
I’m scared. I think I run off, or at least hide my face. This guy is about to blow up! There’s going to be blood everywhere! How is this being shown on TV in the afternoon? It’s outrageous!
Needless to say, I didn’t watch the rest of the film. But that one moment sticks in the memory.
* * *
That’s all I really had to go on. Occasionally I’d see if I could find anything about it; typing the one line I remembered into Google. But nothing.
Then, one day, I decide to ask Twitter.
Got an image of an old film in my head: someone in diving gear in the sea, with too much air being pumped into his diving gear. Any ideas?
— mumoss (@mumoss) August 24, 2014
There's a line something like "we are pumping far too much air into poor Puckle" – but not quite that, because searches draw a blank…
— mumoss (@mumoss) August 24, 2014
Somebody suggested 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, but I know I’ve never even seen that film. And then comes that tweet:
@mumoss The Bulldog Breed..Norman a Wisdom
— Dale Sheaf (@sheafy0) August 24, 2014
I do a quick search. The Bulldog Breed from 1960, starring Norman Wisdom, playing a hapless grocer’s assistant called… Norman Puckle. And at one point, he joins the Navy. It all seems to check out. I resolve to buy it and have a look. Finally, I can put this memory to rest.
And then I forget, because life.
* * *
Odd how, even now, the memory plays tricks. I could have sworn I was told about The Bulldog Breed just a couple of years ago. In fact, Dale’s tweet to me was a full five and a half years back, in 2014. The memory cheats at every age, seemingly.
But I’ve finally got round to watching the film, a story which starts with Puckle selling groceries, and ends with him being accidentally shot into space. I have to admit that the charms of Norman Wisdom have largely escaped me in the past, but this was a genial hour and a half of comedy; even if it did essentially consist of Wisdom acting like a dick for the entire film, and occasionally pulling puppy dog eyes at the camera.
Not that there was nothing else of interest. For instance, I was reminded that suicide used to be treated rather less seriously than it is now, as early on we get a 10 minute sequence of Puckle trying to do himself in:
As ever with films of this vintage, we also get to play spot-the-familiar-face. And The Bulldog Breed is particularly rewarding for this. So in the early cinema scene, where Puckle tries and fails to seduce the girl behind the counter, we get early appearances from Oliver Reed and Michael Caine:
Even more interestingly, Imogen Hassall – then just 18 – is an uncredited extra in the same scene. But later on, once we’re on the ship, she’s also the pin-up in Puckle’s locker. Which is a bit odd. I guess we weren’t really meant to notice her in the cinema scene, but then I’m an arsehole.2
Then there’s Mike Baldwin himself, Johnny Briggs… and as this is a British film from the 60s, guess who else shows up?
All of which is very interesting… and none of which I actually remember. In fact, I was mildly surprised at exactly how little of the film had actually stuck in my head. Thankfully, at least I hadn’t been wasting my time: the diving suit scene which was so imprinted on my memory is indeed present and correct. So here’s what caused me so many nightmares all those years ago:
I’ve got to be honest: when I sat down to rewatch this, I was expecting to think “Ha ha, what a silly idiot I was getting scared of that, stupid moron”. Instead, I can totally see why this sequence unnerved me as a kid. An alarmingly bulging diving suit still feels like the stuff of nightmare fuel to me. Or maybe I’m still a wuss.
Mind you, the animation as the suit flies off across the water is dire, and I don’t remember that bit at all. I very much suspect I had run out of the room screaming by that point.
Note, of course, that I got the one line of dialogue I remembered slightly wrong. Instead of “We are pumping far too much air into poor Puckle”, the line is simply: “We are pumping far too much air into Puckle”. Though for the record, even searching Google with the correct line yields no results, which I find rather surprising. I never would have found out what film this was without some human help.
All of which leaves me with one final task, to try and tie these threads of my memory together: figuring out the exact date I saw this fragment of terror as a child. It being on the BBC feels like a safe bet; I also think I was watching in the afternoon, although I can’t be sure. A quick search on BBC Genome provides the following transmissions:
- BBC2, Monday 17th August 1987, 18:00
- BBC1, Tuesday 18th April 1989, 14:15
- BBC2, Thursday 12th December 1991, 9:00
- BBC1, Thursday 5th August 1993, 14:15
The fact that there’s a full six year span where I think this could have occurred is a sign of how distant this memory is. My gut feeling is that we can get rid of the August ’87 showing; my Dad would surely have been watching the Six O’Clock News, and he had the monopoly on the TV by that point in the evening. The December ’91 showing also feels wrong; I think I was watching it in the afternoon rather than the morning, and besides, unless I was ill, I would have been at school. The August ’93 showing is very possible, it being in the school holidays and all, but I would have been 12 then, and it just feels a little late.
So I’m plumping for the April ’89 showing as the most likely: when I was seven years old. The date slightly worries me; surely the Easter holidays would have been over by the 18th? Either way, I have no proof this was when I saw it. But then, proving a distant memory is hard. I feel lucky just to have seen the bloody thing again.
I’ll tell you one thing, though. Norman Wisdom playing a character who is praised for being brilliant, when he’s actually a useless bumbling fucker, feels rather less funny in 2020 than it probably did in 1960.
My favourite ever example of this is podcast Jaffa Cakes for Proust finally finding out about the comedy show Nuts, which is a tale of intrigue that I can never hope to match. ↩
Well, more specifically, my girlfriend is an arsehole. ↩