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).

For part of the decade we only had three channels to choose from, and as kids we had to share these channels with all the other programmes intended for every other possible age group and interest. During term time this meant a couple of programmes for the very young around lunch time, and then a block of a couple of hours in the mid to late afternoon.

In the school holidays however, we considered ourselves lucky as both BBC1 and ITV would devote the entire morning to kids TV from around 9am onwards. This was a time when we would be treated to reruns of old cartoons, long running serials and the odd new show if we were really lucky.

Today then, I present to you my memories of watching TV in the mornings during the school holidays. Think of it as a very out of date page of the Radio Times or TV Times from the late Seventies and early Eighties.

9:00 TV-am: Roland Rat would start my day. Yeeeaaahhh!

9:30 BBC: An old black and white serial – I’m thinking of something like the old Buster Crabbe Flash Gordon or Buck Rogers serials, or the equally cool King of the Rocketmen! If it was Champion the Wonder Horse though I would perhaps watch whatever ITV might have on instead though.

10:00 ITV: Normally a cartoon show of some sort, maybe the Smurfs or Wacky Races or something of that ilk.

10:30 BBC: Back to the Beeb for Why Don’t You. A great little show with kids as the presenters. Something for everyone – jokes, recipes, things to make and those reports on other kids hobbies.

11:00 BBC or ITV: Really depended what was on. Normally this would be around the time that the BBC would air one of those long running live action serials. The classic example here would be Heidi, but there was also Silas and Robinson Crusoe. If I didn’t fancy that then ITV might have something good on, but if ITV failed to intrigue then the TV would probably go off now.

11:30 Sorry, couldn’t tell you. The TV had usually gone off in the previous half hour so I really can’t remember what sort of shows would have been on here. There might have been a cartoon but I have a feeling things started to revert back to normal lunchtime/early afternoon TV fodder.

Cast your minds back to when Channel 4 first started airing (if you can remember that far back of course). When it first started it only aired from around 4pm in the afternoon, which meant it didn’t do a whole lot of children’s programming to start off with. At the weekends however Channel 4 was on during the day, so this is when it’s kids shows were shown.

Aside from Pob’s Programme, the only other Channel 4 kids programme I have any memories of was Chip’s Comic. It was a programme for younger kids which was about a computer, named Chip, that put together a weekly comic book with the aid of a couple of human assistants (Wayne Jackman, one of the old Play School presenters, and Elsa O’Toole) and a dog named Rover (who was actually Sir Harry Secombe’s son Andrew in a dog suit).

The show consisted of the Chip’s Comic gang putting together the latest issue of the comic, with a few madcap japes thrown in for good measure.

To be honest I remember little of the main programme itself other than the “Rover’s Roving Report” section, which saw Rover set off (on a quad bike no less, the obvious transport choice for dogs) and go and investigate how some everyday task was carried out. I seem to recall one which I found quite interesting at the time about how the mail got from post box to letter box.

Once all the articles for the comic had been put together they were fed into Chip who then proceeded to print the comic book itself, which you, the viewer could actually go to the newsagents and buy for real.

The fact you could buy the actual comic put together on screen seemed quite magical at the time, but probably explains why the show didn’t last all that long (I think it probably only lasted one series, possibly two, but I may be wrong on that) since producing a real comic book each week and a TV programme was probably a bit of a tall order to keep on doing.

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.

The programme first aired in 1985 and ran for nine series, coming to an end in 1992. Each series had it’s own unique title, such as T-Bag Strikes Back or T-Bag and the Revenge of the T-Set. In fact the only series that didn’t feature the name T-Bag somewhere in it was the first series, which was simply called Wonders in Letterland.

Each series followed a similar structure though. A young heroine would have to pass through many different fantasy or story book settings in order to track down a number of special artifacts of some kind (silver numbers perhaps, or pearls of wisdom) in order to put a stop to some diabolical scheme cooked up by the evil T-Bag.

T-Bag, or more correctly Tallulah Bag, was played by Elizabeth Estensen in a very pantomime villain style. By drinking tea from the High T-Plant she gained magic powers such as being able to teleport herself or other objects, and by pouring some of the tea into a saucer she could view what other people were up to, a bit like a crystal ball.

In 1990 Elizabeth Estensen stepped down as T-Bag, and her character was killed off, only to be replaced by her sister, Tabatha Bag (thus enabling the show to keep the T-Bag name) who was played by Georgina Hale. I have to say I much preferred the original T-Bag over her replacement, but I suspect it’s probably one of those things where whichever incarnation you saw first as a child would remain your favourite no matter what.

Both T-Bag’s were not that great at brewing tea though, so they relied heavily on their much put upon boy assistant, T-Shirt (Thomas Shirt). T-Shirt was played throughout the entire run of the show by John Hasler, who first appeared as a small child, but ended up being a much taller teenager by the time the programme came to an end. T-Shirt was really quite a nice lad though, and often helped out the heroine of the piece behind T-Bag’s back.

The heroines changed far more though. The first three series featured Debbie Carter (played by Jennie Stallwood) who it has to be said was a dead ringer for little orphan Annie. She was followed by a succession of four more female child actors, all playing different characters but basically fulfilling the same role. Probably the best known of the heroines would be Kelly Bright, who went on to appear in the highly popular sitcom The Upper Hand, and has also been in women’s prison drama Bad Girls and was “Me Julie” in the film Ali G Indahouse.

If you don’t remember the show, fear not, take a look at the clip below which is promoting the DVD release of the first series.

The show was aired from 1982 to 1984 and as the name suggests, had a jungle and wild animals theme. It was hosted by Christopher Biggins (ironically later to become King of the Jungle on I’m a Celebrity…) who was assisted by the husky voiced future EastEnder Gillian Taylforth, who kept track of the scores.

Three (later two) teams comprising a child and one of their parents would compete against each other in the games, often involving the kids doing some task involving some kind of skill (e.g. throwing balls through holes in cardboard animals or making a jigsaw puzzle) whilst the adults did the more active part, which usually involved them getting dirty or wet in the process.

Biggins, looking surprisingly dapper in his Safari suit, and brandishing a cane to give him an air of authority, was actually a great choice of host for the show. At the time he was known to kids for appearing in Rentaghost, and he always had a massive grin on his face no matter what he was doing. Like all good game show hosts he even had a catchphrase, which involved him shouting the word “Safari” and the audience shouting back “Sagoody” (i.e. “Safari’s A Goody”).

On Safari wasn’t the first show of this kind (Chegger’s Plays Pop is a good example of a similar style of show pre-dating On Safari) but I certainly remember watching it as a kid and finding it entertaining.

If it’s all sounding familiar than check out the video clip below, which is from a Christmas Special edition which featured celebrity parents with their kids. I’m not quite sure who the woman is (Shirley Ann someone?) but Melvyn Hayes is brilliant as usual… Oh, and Biggins has swapped his usual safari suit for a glittery red Father Christmas costume.

Cockleshell Bay was one such example of Cosgrove Hall bringing a more sedate and calm experience. The show was made using the stop frame animation technique, and was about the adventures of Robin and Rosie Cockle, two young twins who lived in a little seaside guest house called The Bucket and Spade, which was run by their parents.

Robin and Rosie lived an idyllic life, and I was even a little envious of them as I would have loved to have lived by the seaside when I was their age. Unlike a lot of today’s children’s entertainment, they spent their time doing normal things, like walking along the beach, playing hide and seek or just chatting with their friendly neighbours, until it was time for tea, which if I remember correctly was how the series brought most of their adventures to an end, by being called in for their evening meal.

The Bucket and Spade was owned by their parents Christopher and Helen, who had moved to the coast to escape the more madcap pace of town life. They were more than ably assisted by Gran Routy, who wasn’t actually Robin and Rosie’s grandmother, but became a sort of surrogate granny to the children.

One of their neighbours and best friends was Mr. Ship, an old retired sailor who was really Mr. Shipham, but the twins preferred Mr. Ship. They used to play in and around his old shed, and in his garden he looked after a donkey named Fury, who was actually owned by Paddy Fingle (again not his actual name, he was really Mr. Fingham). Fury used to give kids donkey rides on the beach, another aspect of seaside life which is sadly disappearing from the UK.

In all over 100 episodes of Cockleshell Bay were made, but before they were made the characters first appeared as a segment of the classic kid’s show Rainbow. These segments were narrated by Geoffrey, and were introduced as “Robin and Rosie from Cockleshell Bay”, and were obviously popular, hence why Cockleshell Bay eventually got its own series.

I’ll leave you with a video clip of the intro to the series, which perfectly sums up the laid back, restful feel of the programme.

In 1983 things changed, and we were treated to breakfast TV. First the BBC started with Breakfast Time, and soon after ITV followed suit with TV-am. The BBC took the lions share of the viewers, and poor old TV-am limped along, ratings dropping lower each day. What could save them?

A puppet Rat perhaps? Nah, surely not. Well, yes it did. Roland Rat Superstar was initially created to introduce some cartoons for the kids during the normal running of the TV-am programming, but in Summer 1983, with just a pink Ford Anglia and a meagre budget, Roland became a bit of a legend. During the summer holidays Roland and his gerbil chum Kevin were given half an hour to entertain the kiddies, and in so doing stopped TV-am from going under.

History lesson out of the way then, I’m pleased to announce that Rat On The Road, that first true slice of Roland at his best, is to be released on DVD on November 15th 2010, and I’ve had the pleasure of taking a sneak look at the disc before release. The memories came flooding back!

The main part of the disc is a condensed version of those first Rat On The Road shows. The original format was that Roland and Kevin travelled to different parts of the country every week, exploring different aspects of the chosen city each day. This disc takes some of the highlights of the series, and splices them together with Roland, Kevin and Errol the Welsh hamster (who ironically doesn’t get to visit Cardiff at the beginning of the series), reading extracts from Roland’s diary of the trip.

One thing that did surprise me a little on watching this disc was how my memories of Roland and Kevin were a little wrong. I always remembered Roland being a bit stupid really, and Kevin being the clever one, but on rewatching it seems that Roland was cleverer than I gave him credit for, and Kevin was rather more foolish than the sensible fellow I remembered him being.

The disc also has a bunch of extra features which are worth a mention. There’s a commentary, initially given by David Claridge, creator, writer and performer of Roland and his friends. This section of the commentary is actually quite interesting, fleshing out the story of how Roland came to be and how he became TV-am’s saviour. Later, David is booted off by Roland, and he, Kevin and Errol proceed to reminisce (if a puppet is able to do that) about their adventures.

Also on the disc is a video of Kevin singing Summer Holiday (why no Rat Rapping, especially since the music is used elsewhere on the disc), a stills gallery, which given it has a commentary is actually worth watching, and a rather nice making of documentary, which takes great pride in pointing out that everything it shows you is stuff you’ve seen a million times before on other making of documentaries!

The disc is being released for a shade under a tenner, so with Christmas round the corner it might make a nice little stocking filler for an old rat fan. Alternatively, keep your eyes peeled on this very site, as we’ll be running a competition to win a copy very soon!