Scott Bakula played Dr. Sam Beckett, a scientist who in the year 1999 invented the Quantum Leap accelerator, a device that allowed time travel within the lifetime of the person travelling. Faced with having his funding cut Sam tests out the machine by using it himself, and so begins his travels through time.

Trouble is, something went a little wrong (or caca as the original introduction to the programme put it) and whilst Sam does indeed travel through time, he does so by having his consciousness jump into the bodies of people from the past.

Seemingly stuck, and initially not knowing where he is due to his “swiss cheesed” memory, he soon comes to rely on his erstwhile assistant Al Calavicci (played by Dean Stockwell). Al is broadcast back through time in the form of a hologram, and tries to help Sam out in whatever predicament he finds himself in.

The pair soon come to realise that in order for Sam to leap again, he must first put something right in history that initially went wrong the first time around. Al uses Ziggy, the Quantum Leap computer, to try and discover what Sam must do, presenting possible options for Sam, each helpfully given a probability that it is the correct course of action to take.

Whilst having an obvious science fiction slant due to the presence of time travel and holograms, the show also had a far more traditional feeling about it at the same time. I suppose it was kind of Star Trek meets The Littlest Hobo in a way. The situations that Sam ended up in were usually all very human in the end, involving reuniting people, calming feuds and that kind of thing.

As viewers we always saw the person Sam had leapt into as Sam, but there was always a reveal at the beginning of each episode where Sam would look in a mirror to see who he had become. It was always a little strange when you saw that Sam had leapt into the body of a woman, as you would then usually see Scott Bakula in a dress for the rest of the episode. Sometimes this was played out for laughs at Scott Bakula’s expense, but more often than not you soon accepted the idea and didn’t even notice that you were enjoying watching a man solve problems whilst wearing a dress.

The show aired for five seasons, and has garnered itself a huge following of devoted fans over the years both from the original showings and repeats. There have also been rumours that there is currently a Quantum Leap movie in production, although it appears that Bakula and Stockwell may only feature in cameo roles, which rather questions the point of making a film in the first place.

Quantum Leap

All three Telebugs looked somewhat similar, with sleek curved bodies and a television screen for a head. They differed in size and colour. CHIP (Coordinated Hexadecimal Information Processor) was the notional leader, and was the tallest and white in colour. SAMANTHA (Solar Activated Micro Automated Non-inTerference Hearing Apparatus) was yellow and, being a girl had a red ribbon moulded to the top of her head (in so far as a robot can be called female anyway).

The smallest Telebug was called BUG (Binary Unmanned Gamma camera) and he was red in colour, and was, I suppose given his name, the cameraman of the group. He also had a pet named MIC (Mobile Independent Camera) who flew alongside him and helped in filming duties.

The Telebugs travelled around by flying. Instead of legs they had booster rockets, which enabled them to both hover in place and fly off to the rescue of some poor hapless civilian.

Professor Brainstrain was the inventor of the Telebugs, though unfortunately he had a bit of a problem pronouncing the letter R, so he referred to himself as Pwofessor Bwainstwain.

Of course, as with all good superheroes there were a number of baddies who they went up against on a regular basis, and were generally the cause of all the problems that the Telebugs had to put right. The big bad guy was called Baron Bullybyte, who owned a super computer called Angel Brain which he used to cause most of the trouble.

Bullybyte’s sister Magna was also a bit of a trouble maker, as was Zudo Bug. Zudo Bug was also invented by Professor Brainstrain, but unfortunately he ended up turning evil thanks to a bit of mis-programming caused by Brainstrain’s cat Grumble.

The cartoon was made by Telemagination and 86 episodes were made, first airing in 1986 and 1987.

As an avid goggle box guzzling Eighties child though, I think the thing that really started to indicate the coming of the Christmas season were the changes that suddenly occurred on the television. A number of changes happened, normally around the time December began, and in this post I want to discuss some of them. So, in no particular order…

The Christmas Movie and TV Specials Preview Adverts

One of the first signs that Christmas was coming was the arrival of the trailer advert that showed all the films that a channel would be boasting come Yuletide.

This was a time when we didn’t have satellite TV and therefore channels devoted to playing movies, which meant that it often took several years after their box office releases before films finally made it onto TV. Christmas was therefore a time when the TV channels had a captive audience, and so the majority of movie premiers occurred during the Yuletide break. The advert was thus always very exciting as you made a mental checklist of all the films you wanted to see.

There was also another similar trailer advert showing all the Christmas specials of various TV shows that you could look forward to watching whilst waiting for the turkey to digest.

As soon as the Christmas editions of the TV Times and Radio Times became available I would then scour the pages of them to identify all these wonderful films and shows I wanted to watch, and would note down when they were on, which channel, and how long they were, so I could also make sure I had enough video tape space to record anything I wanted to keep.

Christmas TV Idents

Not that I knew they were called Idents back then (indeed, they may well not have been called that until recently) but another change that occured to the TV was the introduction of the Christmas Idents. These are the little snippets of film or animation that TV stations play whilst the announcer tells you about the next and following TV shows.

These days the complexity of TV channel idents has become quite extreme, with Channel 4 in particular having some very impressive examples, but back in the Eighties we were just as impressed by the TV station logo just having a layer of snow across the top of it.

Christmas Product Adverts

The sorts of products that got advertised in the run up and after Christmas also changed, and as a kid one of the most notable changes was that toys suddenly started to be advertised.

Hard to believe (and it is possible my memory is wrong on this point, but I don’t think so) but toys just weren’t advertised on TV for the rest of the year. I guess TV advertising cost a whole lot more back then so advertising toys just wasn’t cost effective for manufacturers during the rest of the year, as I believe far fewer toys were bought outside of the Christmas period that are bought today.

Other products that started to be advertised before Christmas were things like fragrances and soaps (I’m thinking of the Yardley adverts in particular, but also Brut 33, Denim and Old Spice), alcohol (Harvey’s Bristol Cream with Hinge and Bracket, and QC Sherry), and sweets (Quality Street and Roses).

After Christmas you were then bombarded with all the adverts for various department store sales, which I guess we still get now, but you also quite often saw a lot of adverts for more local independent stores that wouldn’t bother to advertise on TV at any other time of year, again due to the prohibitive costs involved.

The Change To Normal Programme Schedules

Of course this still occurs today, although I think the schedules possibly return to normality a little quicker now. It also seemed more of a marked difference as the handful of channels we had back in the Eighties all changed dramatically around Christmas, whereas now a lot of the satellite and cable TV channels may only feature a temporary blip of changes before returning to their normal offerings.

I think we got a lot more better quality TV specials back then too. Most popular TV shows would be given a special edition programme, and again this happens still today, but we also seem to get a lot of what I can only call “filler” shows, such as the countless number of “Top 100 Best Sporting Mishaps” or “The Best 50 Car Chases” style compilation shows. These are far too easy to get sucked into watching, just so you can see which is the best thing, and I’m half expecting this year to see “The Top 50 Best Christmas Compilation Shows” air on Channel Five this year…

Hosted by Bruce Forsyth, the show started airing in 1980 and ran through to 1987. It was based on a US TV game show called Card Sharks, although by layering on a great many catchphrases Bruce made the show his own (quite literally, as when the show returned in the mid Nineties it became known as Bruce Forsyth’s Play Your Cards Right).

Two couples competed against each other to win the star prize of a new car, which was the defacto main prize back in the Eighties due to rules which limited the maximum value of prizes that could be given away on TV. To do this, they had to both answer questions and play a game of “higher or lower” with some playing cards.

The questions posed by Brucie all required a percentage as the answer, and were based on a survey of 100 people, normally of a particular career or persuasion, and often had a certain level of innuendo associated with them. An example would be something like “we asked 100 policemen, have you ever used your truncheon for something other than police work”. Not a real one (at least I don’t think it was as I just made it up) but you get the idea.

One couple were asked to give their answer as a numerical value, and their opponents were then allowed to say whether they thought the answer would be higher or lower than this value. The resultant winning couple then got to play with the cards.

Initially five cards were dealt out for each couple. The winning couple were allowed to change their starting card if they thought it would help them, then they had to proceed by calling out higher or lower to indicate whether they thought the next card in line would be higher or lower than the current card. If they got it right, they could continue, otherwise the other team got to have a go.

If they weren’t sure whether to go higher or lower (often the case if you had a middle card like a seven or eight) the teams could also choose to freeze, thus preventing their opponents from making any progress. Bruce used to get quite annoyed (in a playful way) when people wrongly used the term “stick” instead of “freeze”.

As already mentioned Bruce Forsyth had a barrow load of catchphrases on this show, starting with his trademark “Nice to see you, to see you, nice“, he would then go on to say “What a lovely audience! You’re so much better than last weeks!“, which was a reference to the fact that several episodes of the show were filmed in front of the same audience.

He also had a little rhyme for introducing the two female assistants who helped out by dealing the cards for each team. He used to refer to them as his “dolly dealers”, although I think come the Nineties version he had to lose the “dolly” part for political correctness reasons. The rhyme went like this:-

Here’s a little snippet of an episode from the early Eighties which features the kaleidoscopic opening sequence, which I always found fascinating for some reason. Bruce is on fine form too with a truly terrible array of gags when interviewing the contestants, and he attempts a really strange “mind reading” act at the beginning too.

Most of these cartoons had been made in the Sixties, but they were still regularly being shown on kids TV as I was growing up, such was their enduring appeal. What better then than a cartoon that brought many of these great characters together?

The result was Yogi’s Treasure Hunt, which featured Yogi, Boo Boo, Top Cat, Huckleberry Hound, Augie Doggie and Doggie Daddy, Snagglepuss and more. It also featured my favourite ever cartoon villains Dastardly and Muttley from Wacky Races and Dastardly and Muttley in Their Flying Machines (better known, albeit wrongly, as Stop the Pigeon due to the theme song).

A quick aside about Wacky Races. Dastardly and Muttley always tried to prevent the other competitors in the race from winning by planting traps on the course for them. However, given that the courses didn’t appear to be lap based in any way, this meant Dastardly and Muttley always had to get in front of the pack to set their surprises. This being the case, and if they really wanted to win, they must have had the fastest car on the track, so why bother with the traps?

Back to Yogi’s Treasure Hunt. The show revolved around Yogi and the gang sailing around the world looking for treasure (not quite sure why they were on a big old galleon type ship but there you go), after being given orders from Top Cat (who’s voice in this show was totally wrong, presumably explaining his relatively minor appearance). Dastardly and Muttley tried to stop them from reaching the treasure, which of course they never did, but quite what happened to the treasure after they’d found it I don’t know. I guess Top Cat must have pocketed it all.

Viewing it today I think I actually like it more than when I was a kid! I remember watching it, but not being that enamoured with it as a child, finding it a bit boring, but viewing a few episodes on YouTube it’s full of mostly terrible one liner gags. It’s a bit of a case of it being so bad it’s good, if you see what I mean. Here’s an example below (and then you can see what I mean about TC).

The year is 2040, and the Earth as we know it has become an uninhabitable mess through pollution, nuclear war and God knows what else. People know live in the Efficiecity, a completely enclosed environment kept safe from the ravages of the outside world. People no longer live in traditional family groups, but instead are made artificially in “batches” and are then sent to live in artificial families in homes known as Habivirons.

The show is named after the main character, a young girl, or “female diminibeing”, who gets named Luna by the other members of her forced household, although her real name is the decidedly unflattering 72-batch-19Y. The other members of the group are Gramps, who is an aging punk who still remembers what the world used to be like, Andy, the habiviron’s android, Mother, the habiviron computer, and Brat, a young boy who’s name is fittingly given to him by Gramps – though Brat doesn’t know what the word actually means!

Luna was created by ex-Monkee Mickey Dolenz (who was also behind the Metal Mickey TV series) and was written by Colin Prockter and Colin Bennett, who also played Andy (and was the Mr. Bennett from Take Hart too). Luna was played by a young Patsy Kensit in the first series, and Joanna Wyatt in the second series, whilst Brat was played by Aaron Brown, who later appeared in the BBC kids drama Seaview alongside Blue Peter presenter (and now Most Haunted star) Yvette Fielding.

Another interesting character was 80H, the sector Bureaubeing, who arrived with a fanfare wearing a big black suit of the kind that might be on sale where Darth Vader does his clothes shopping. Whilst he was all threatening monotones and voice distortion to start off with, he often ended up removing his helmet because he got too hot and broke out in a “film of exuded moisture”, revealing a moustached and spectacle wearing office worker.

The show could be a little hard to follow at times due to the amount of Technotalk, the futuristic language based on English that all the characters spoke in (with the exception of Gramps that is). The aforementioned dark streak was also quite prominent, with characters being faced with instant death for little things like losing an ID card.

A fine show, and one that has inexplicably failed to get a release on DVD yet, despite recordings of it still apparently existing in the vaults somewhere. Until it does get a much deserved re-airing then, there’s always the fan site Lunaviron to have a look at, and there’s a few bits up on YouTube, like the clip below…

As the name suggests, it was about some Raccoons! They lived in a place called the Evergreen Forest, and the show primarily followed the fun loving and mischief making (though never in a bad way) Bert Raccoon. There to keep him out of too much trouble were his good friends Ralph and Melissa (also Raccoons), who were also husband and wife.

Between them the trio ran a newspaper called The Evergreen Standard, with Ralph as editor, Bert as reporter and Melissa the photographer. The newspaper was very important to the inhabitants of the Evergreen Forest as it helped thwart the plans of the nasty Cyril Sneer.

Cyril Sneer was a tycoon who was always trying to find some way to make a profit, and this usually involved the forest being threatened as part of his schemes. Cyril was an aardvark who was pink in colour and had a nose that looked something like a water tap. He was usually seen chomping on a half smoked cigar.

Cyril also had a son named Cedric, who was quite often the voice of reason that persuaded Cyril to back down from his latest destructive scheme. Because of this, whilst Cyril and the Raccoons were, I suppose, technically enemies (though that seems a somewhat strong word to use), Cedric was in fact a good friend of the Raccoons.

The show was made entertaining due to Bert Raccoons antics, and also those of Cyril Sneer for that matter, although most episodes also had a more serious message for the viewer, be that a lesson about life or something more ecological in tone.

I should qualify that final statement. It wasn’t the quality of the voice acting in the English dub that was the problem, more the fact that as a kid watching it there seemed to be something just a little freaky about people’s mouths moving but the words you heard bearing no relation.

The story begins when Heidi is sent to live with her grandfather (who she affectionately calls Grandpapa) in the Swiss mountains. Her parents have died and she has been looked after by her Aunt Dete, who for reasons I cannot recall ends up lumping Heidi with her cantankerous grandfather, who lives in a shack up on a hillside, away from all the other people in his village.

Heidi eventually melts the old man’s heart, and she has a great time living in the mountains and playing with her friend Goat Peter, the boy who takes all the village goats onto the mountains to graze. She even manages to calm some of the bad relations between her grandfather and the villagers in the process.

Unfortunately Aunt Dete eventually returns, and takes Heidi off to Frankfurt where she goes to live with a wealthy family who have a little girl named Klara. Klara is unable to walk and spends her time in a wheelchair. Whilst Heidi enjoys being friends with Klara, she gets along less well with the strict housekeeper Fraulein Rottenmeier who doesn’t really seem to like Heidi very much.

Eventually though, Heidi starts to feel homesick, and eventually is allowed to return to her grandfather in the mountains. Klara’s doctor comes to visit her there, and thinks the change of scenery might help the weak little girl’s health too. He convinces Klara’s parents to allow her to stay with Heidi for the summer, and a lot has to be said for that fresh mountain air because before too long Klara’s strength builds and she finally starts to make her first steps away from her wheelchair.

Heidi must have been shown about a zillion times when I was growing up, or at least it seemed like it. It was played regularly on Children’s BBC in the after school line up and also during the school holidays, for which it was ideally suited as it was a very long series (26 episodes I believe).