I confess that before Blockbusters came along I don’t think I had ever heard of Bob Holness, but both him and the show for which he is best known soon became firm favourites in our household, with everybody in the family joining in with the quiz whilst we were having our evening meal.

Whilst Bob Holness was probably best known to many for TV quiz shows, being the host on Blockbusters, a revival of the word panel game Call My Bluff and indeed his first appearance on British TV on the show Take A Letter (don’t worry if you’ve not heard of this one, it was on in the early Sixties) his career spanned almost 60 years with the main stay of his career being in radio presenting.

Holness was born in South Africa in 1928, although his family moved to the UK when he was a child and this is where he was educated. In the Fifties he returned to South Africa and in 1955 became a radio presenter. In 1956 he became the second actor to ever portray James Bond when he recorded a radio version of Moonraker, voicing the secret agent.

Bob was also the subject of an urban myth that claimed he had played the saxophone on Gerry Rafferty’s hit Baker Street. Not one to disappoint Bob used to play along with this myth and also embellish it, as he would also lay claim to being the lead guitarist on a song called Layla by Derek and the Dominoes.

If you ever enjoyed watching Chorlton and the Wheelies, Jamie and the Magic Torch, Count Duckula, Alias the Jester, Cockleshell Bay and of course, DangerMouse, then you have seen some of the output from Cosgrove Hall, the company formed by Mark Hall and Brian Cosgrove.

Mark Hall and Brian Cosgrove first joined forces in 1969 to create the company Stop Frame Productions, but when this company failed Cosgrove Hall was born from its ashes, with their first big hit programme being Chorlton and the Wheelies, one of my personal all time favourite shows from when I was very little.

Whilst they certainly enjoyed success with many of their early kids shows, arguably the most popular character they created was DangerMouse. The “greatest secret agent in the world” was an instant hint with kids and adults alike, and the cartoon has now been shown in more than 80 different countries, which must give a certain other famous cartoon mouse a good run for his money.

Sadly Cosgrove Hall went into liquidation in 2009, after the company had ended up becoming a part of ITV, who basically had very little interest in keeping the company alive it would seem. However, the company name doesn’t quite end there, as Mark and Brian recently joined forces with Francis Fitzpatrick, the creator of a more recent childrens TV hit called Jakers, to form Cosgrove Hall Fitzpatrick, who are in the process of creating new kids TV shows called Pip! and The Herogliffix.

Both Mark Hall and Brian Cosgrove have more than made their mark in the world of animation, and their names more than deserve to be up there with the likes of Walt Disney, William Hanna and Joseph Barbera.

James Wilson Vincent Savile was born in Leeds in 1926 and very nearly died from pneumonia at just 5 months old. As a teenager he worked in a coal mine and we were nearly robbed of him again, as an explosion in the mine left him with spinal injuries so great that he was told he would never walk again.

In the early 1940’s Jimmy started working in dance halls, playing records and, self proclaiming himself the world’s first disc jockey, as he used a twin record deck and microphone set up to entertain the attendant dancers.

He then did a stint as a professional sportsman, competing as a cyclist in the Tour of Britain and also becoming a wrestler! Yes, it’s true!

In the late 1950’s he finally moved into radio, first at Radio Luxembourg and then at Radio 1, and in the early 1960’s entered the world of television. In 1964 he was the first ever presenter of Top of the Pops, and he also had the honour of being the very last presenter of this show too, when it finally came to a close in 2006.

This brings us to the 1970’s which brought the TV show that I will always immediately think of when I hear his name – Jim’ll Fix It. This show ran for two decades and for many was essential viewing to start off your Saturday night entertainment. He was also the face of British Rail TV ads and the Clunk Click road safety films.

Jim was also well known as a prolific fund raiser, and spent a great deal of effort raising money. It is thought he raised more than £40 million pounds for causes such as Stoke Mandeville Hospital Spinal Injuries unit (where he also worked as a hospital porter) and the charity Phab, for which he was the honorary president for many years.

In 1971 he was awarded the OBE, and in 1990 was knighted by the Queen to become Sir Jim. Also in that year he was awarded a papal knighthood from the Vatican, which is where the KCSG comes in (Knight Commander of Saint Gregory the Great).

Sir Jim died in his home on 29th October 2011, two days before his 85th birthday, having spent some time in hospital earlier for pneumonia.

Sadly, Roy Skelton has passed away. He suffered a stroke and died at his home in Brighton on June 8th 2011.

Whilst best known for being Zippy and George, a fact which boggles me given the arguments these two puppets sometimes had with each other, and Roy did it all in one go, switching between the voices as necessary, he was also a big contributor to Doctor Who, providing voices for the Daleks, Cybermen and (if you’re a real Doctor Who fan) the Krotons (nope, my Who knowledge isn’t sufficient for them either, you need to go back to Patrick Troughton for them).

I’ll leave you with a little video clip which shows what might have happened had Roy Skelton left the house one morning with his Rainbow hat on, but was actually off to provide voices for Doctor Who…

If you’ve never heard of Saturday Banana then I will forgive you. It was aired at the same time as Tiswas, and which ITV region you lived in dictated whether you got to see Tiswas or Banana. I lived in the Southern television reason (as it was back then) so we got Saturday Banana and initially missed out on Tiswas.

Anyway, that explanation out of the way, on to Metal Mickey himself. Mickey was a robot, based on that iconic design from the 1950’s of what a robot should look like, which was basically a big silver humanoid decked out with flashing lights. In real life he was little more than a radio controlled thing whose mouth would move when his creator, Johnny Edward, spoke into a microphone to provide Mickey’s voice.

On TV though, Mickey was the kind of characters most kids loved to watch. Cool to look at, and a bit cheeky with some of the things he would say to other people. Aside from Saturday Banana, Metal Mickey was often seen on other TV shows as a special guest, and it was his appearance on an episode of Jim’ll Fix It that eventually led to him getting his own TV show.

The first series of the Metal Mickey show was aired in 1980, and the storyline was that Mickey had been invented by the youngest member of an otherwise fairly typical suburban family. Mickey had been invented to help out with household chores, though more often than not he did more mucking about than tidying up. Mickey had nicknames for most of the family, with the funniest being reserved for the always moaning father, who he called Bootface.

Whilst most of the cast were relatively unknown both then and now, there was one very well known member of the cast. Irene Handl played the grandmother of the family, and was probably the biggest bad influence on Metal Mickey. He called her “his little fruitbat” whilst her pet name for Mickey was “fluffy”, presumably due to the shock of curly metal hair he sported on his domed head.

Of the rest of the cast, Lola Young, who played friend of the family Janey, is now dubbed Baroness Young of Hornsea for her work in culture and the arts. Behind the scenes a notable name was Micky Dolenz, formerly of TV pop group The Monkees, who was producer and director of the show.

So popular was Metal Mickey that his on screen treat of choice, a sweet known as an Atomic Thunderbuster, actually got turned into a real sweet, which was a very fizzy type of boiled sweet that often found its way into the selection of Penny Sweets available in your local sweet shop or newsagent. I remember being quite partial to them, but they were a bit like sherbet lemons in that they could make the top of your mouth feel a bit sore if you sucked too many of them in a short space of time.

The TV show lasted until 1983 and notched up three series, which are available on DVD now. Metal Mickey pretty much disappeared from our screens after this, but it is now possible to hire him to come to your special event and entertain the guests, and work is under way to recreate him using computer graphics as an animated character.

But true it sadly is. One of Doctor Who’s best loved assistants (perhaps even the best loved), when Elisabeth Sladen reprised her role as Sarah Jane Smith in the rebooted Doctor Who it was almost as if she had just travelled forward in time in the TARDIS herself. She looked almost exactly how you remembered her looking back in the late Seventies and early Eighties, and certainly not like a woman in her Sixties!

Elisabeth first appeared as Sarah Jane in 1973, alongside Jon Pertwee’s Doctor, when previous assistant Jo Grant (Katy Manning) decided to leave the series. Sarah Jane Smith was an uncompromising journalist who gave the Doctor a good run for his money, putting him in his place on occasion.

Amazingly she was only on Doctor Who for three years, leaving in 1976 with Tom Baker now playing the timelord. This apparently made front page news, something which was usual reserved for the regenerating Doctor. I guess it feels like she was on the show for so much longer partly because they made a lot more episodes per season back then, but also because she was such a good assistant.

Whilst the Sarah Jane Adventures may be doing incredibly well now, it is not the first show devoted to Sarah Jane. That honour goes to the perhaps best forgotten K9 and Company made in 1981, which saw Sarah Jane, back on Earth after her travels with the Doctor, finding a package addressed to her containing the inimitable robot dog. Still, it’s good that this programme got made, as it gave a perfect excuse for them to allow K9 to return alongside Sarah Jane in more recent times.

One further surprise I got whilst reading up about Elisabeth Sladen’s other work outside of Doctor Who is that she also did a stint as a presenter on a kids TV show called Stepping Stones. This is a programme that I’ve been meaning to write about on this site for a while, but since I remembered very little about it except the title music I’ve never quite got around to it. Looks like perhaps I should now.

Rest in peace Ms. Sladen. Modern Kids TV has just lost one of its better TV shows, and at least two generations of Doctor Who fans will be in mourning.

This led to Basil getting his own show in 1968, unsurprisingly titled The Basil Brush Show, which ran for 12 years until 1980. This show saw Basil joined by a number of different actors who played the straight role, and who Basil always referred to by putting Mister before their first name. The first of these was Mr. Rodney, who was Rodney Bewes, one of the Likely Lads from the BBC sitcom. He was followed by Derek Fowlds (more recently to be seen in Heartbeat) then Roy North, Howard Williams and finally Billy Boyle.

Personally I only have vague memories of the Basil Brush show now, though I definitely remember watching it and trying to impersonate his incredibly long laughs, which usually followed Basil saying something derogatory to his human stooge.

The first part of the Eighties saw Basil Brush become teacher, when he appeared on the ITV schools programme Let’s Read with Basil Brush. If I was ever off ill from school I would tend to lie on the sofa watching these programmes, and used to particularly enjoy watching Basil, even though I had already got passed the reading level that the programme was aimed at.

Basil also spent some of the Eighties appearing on Crackerjack as a special guest. For a while it seemed Crackerjack’s special guest simply alternated between Basil and The Krankies. He also had a mid-Eighties show called Basil’s Joke Machine, but I can’t say I remember this one very well, and with it Basil Brush disappeared from our screens.

The Nineties was pretty much a Basil-free decade, but in 2002 The Basil Brush Show made a return to our screens. The new show had more of a sitcom type feel to it, and the Basil puppet received a bit of a make over too. Luckily nothing too drastic was done, and the new puppet was still easily identified as Basil. His voice, originally provided by Ivan Owen, who had died in 2000, was also fairly similar sounding despite being provided by a different voice actor.

This new show lasted for six series, and came to an end in 2007, but during this time Basil also made a few other appearances on other TV shows, most notably perhaps being his winning an episode of The Weakest Link.

Basil is not currently on our screens, but here’s hoping it’s only a matter of time before he’s Boom Booming again once more.

Appearing in most of the television adverts for his company during the Eighties, Bernard Matthews was a bit of icon for the decade, appearing normally in a tweed jacket and always uttering his much repeated catchphrase, Bootiful. He has been credited with making turkey a more affordable meat for the average family, both in terms of whole frozen turkeys and in processed forms such as Turkey Burgers, Drummers and the dreaded (by Jamie Oliver at least) Turkey Twizzler.

The seeds of his turkey empire were sown back in the late 1940s, when he bought an incubator and some turkey eggs and set about trying to start a turkey farm in his mother-in-laws garden. Ultimately this failed, but in 1950 he tried again in his spare time, whilst working as an insurance clerk. This time things went better, and he soon bought the run down Great Witchingham Hall, and used most of the rooms of the great house to raise (and slaughter) the turkeys!

Whilst Bernard may not have appeared in his companies TV adverts for many years now, somehow you still expect to turn on the TV and see him grinning back at you. One thing is for sure though, I think it’s unlikely that the word “Bootiful” will be getting removed from the packaging for some time to come.