TV Cream Toys Lite

Chopper

Think once, think twice, think bike!

Okay, we know this book is supposed to be about toys you wanted but never got, and we’re prepared to concede that pretty much everyone owned a bike as a child. Indeed, given our obsession with catalogues, we’d put money down that plenty of ‘em were bought at a rate of a pound a week for fifty weeks from the subs lady who came round on Wednesdays. But the 1970s opened our eyes to the potential of something new–the designer bike–and, in particular, the Raleigh Chopper.1

Possibly the last bike ever to adopt that penny-farthing-inspired differently-sized wheel ratio, the Chopper was (as designer Tom Karen has gone on record saying) intended to reflect the power and style of a dragster. Those ‘apehanger’ handlebars mimicked the customised Californian motorbikes of the ’60s–think Dennis Hopper’s Harley in Easy Rider. The overlong banana seat and spring-mounted saddle conjured up the desired ‘hot rod’ image. It sounds impressive but doesn’t quite explain where the goolie-knackering crossbar-mounted gear shift was supposed to fit in. Nevertheless, about two million of the frigging things were sold (and there are two million adults with the healed-over grazes to prove it).

See also Racing Bike, Spacehopper, Peter Powell Stunter Kite

The colour of Chopper you owned would reflect your personality–if not at first, then soon enough by means of customisation with reflectors, spokey-dokeys, mirrors and lights (chunky boxes of battery-powered plastic or sleek wheel-rim-driven dynamos), bottle-carriers and panniers–and be invested with great dedication and pride (except maybe when it came to cleaning it). Mainly, though, a Chopper (like any bike) would unlock a world of adventure beyond the end of your own street; going to your mates’ houses, picking up comics from the corner shop, stickleback fishing, popping wheelies, giving backies, racing–it was all for the taking.2 Well, as long as there weren’t any hills en route. Choppers were not good with incline ratios. Your legs weren’t strong enough to pedal uphill and any pressure on the brake going downhill invariably sent you over the crossbar.

The advent of the BMX in the early ’80s put paid to the simple pleasure of owning a bulky, rusty, aggressively designed death-trap and turned the bike trade into a genuine, even respected, sporting industry As sales plummeted, the previously distinctive Raleigh brand saw out the era it helped to define making run-of-the-mill mountain bikes, city bikes and something now referred to as a hybrid, whatever that is.

1 Believe it or not, the kids’ bike industry in the Cream era was virtually a closed shop; Raleigh alone manufactured the Budgie, Tomahawk, Striker, Chipper, Chopper, Boxer and Grifter, so all that brand rivalry and envy kids wilfully engaged in was just a false war perpetuated by The Man. The likes of Elswick, Dawes and Falcon–the other independent British kids’ bike makers of the day–have since been absorbed by bigger companies or gone to the wall.

2 What do kids have now? Tom Clancy’s Splinter Cell? Shove it up your fat, sofa-bound arse. Nothing beats the thrill of riding a bike without stabilisers for the first time. For crying out loud, does anyone even bother with the cycling proficiency test any more?

Chutes Away

Discreetly named air-war leviathan

‘Chutes’ be damned! This was, to all intents and purposes, Carpet Bombing For Fun, as evinced by the explosion noises made by playing kids as they dropped the ‘chutes’ on the revolving target, curiously painted up to look like some presumably inconspicuous fictional landmass, although it did resemble a sort of pre-continental-drift Africa, now we come to think of it.1

Anyway, the stout bomber–sorry, troop carrier2–was mounted on a robust gantry and controlled by one of those initially-exciting-looking, dial-heavy flight-deck consoles that, on closer inspection, turns out to have just two actual controls (three, if you include the off switch), the rest being useless stickers.3 Ah well.

As the ground spun relentlessly beneath, you would position your plane fore and aft, look through the crosshairs, wait for a target to come into view, and then bombs–er, chutes–away! Get all ten in the waiting cups below and you win.

In a desperate attempt to reinforce the liberation-not-annihilation element, a lesser-known sequel game was eventually introduced–Night Rescue Chutes Away- although the good intentions were slightly undermined by its description as a ‘target’ game. The difference here? Your paratroopers could be dropped in the dark because there was a spotlight stuck under the plane.

In theory, this exciting development could have been a major USP, allowing as it did for the possibility of covert, post-curfew playtime. Unfortunately, the clockwork turntable that drove the thing made so much bloody noise, we might as well’ve had an actual plane in there with us.

Anyway, it was all good clean Dresden fun, brought to you by the good people of Gabriel. Gabriel?! No, us neither.

See also Vertibird, Up Periscope, Flight Deck

1 So much so that we’ll put money on it that the Chutes Away landscape is directly responsible for the look and feel of every British safari park since the 70s. Those of a more political sensitivity could also flip the card over and draw in their own Falkland Islands-themed felt-tip topography, natch.

2 A twin-prop yellow-and-white airbus that could’ve just roared out of the opening titles for Tales of the Gold Monkey.

3 One of which was a red Important! Read instructions first!’ label that might as well’ve been stuck there by your parents. Along with the ones that said ‘Don’t break it, it cost a lot of money!’ and ‘Let your brother have a go! It’s for sharing!’ Cuh! Talk about the nanny state–as if anyone reads the instructions first anyway.

Cluedo

After-dinner Agatha Christie

Cluedo seemed to appear out of nowhere as some murdery-mystery rival to Monopoly. In fact, it was devised by a solicitor’s clerk from Birmingham (the home of many unsolved crimes, we’re saying–the Bullring and Spaghetti Junction to name but two). Posh kids had it first, probably because it featured a ‘study’ and a ‘drawing room’, but it wasn’t long before the whole street was testing their detective skills with miniature tools of death and cards that you had to keep in little wallets like After Eights.

Essentially a glorified board version of 20 Questions (just keep asking until you guess whodunit, where-they-dunit and with what) but featuring murder, it stirred the nascent serial killer in many a small child. Show us a grown-up who claims they didn’t secretly want to see Mrs White bludgeoned to death with the lead pipe in the bedroom, and we’ll show you a suspiciously new-looking patio out in their back yard. (Of course, this almost-amusing observation conveniently ignores the fact that the actual murder victim–Dr Black–couldn’t simultaneously be one of the players. Neither could you record a verdict of suicide or accidental death. No wonder we grew up to be such a distrustful generation.)

See also Monopoly, Electronic Detective, Escape from Colditz

Quite where the stereotype characters were drawn from remains unexplained, although we suspect some play on words implicit in Mrs Peacock and Col. Mustard. Popular opinion had it that one of the suspects in the French version was a Welshman called Jack Hughes (j’accuse, geddit?), but sadly that’s just a grand old urban myth. 1986’s Super Cluedo Challenge did introduce three new characters–Captain Brown (just nervous, we expect), Miss Peach and Mr Slate-Grey but, like new-formula Coke, it never caught on.1.

Although it must be said that both Rev. Green and Prof. Plum weren’t exactly marketed as teen heart-throbs, Miss Scarlet stirred more than just violent urges in the fellas, appearing as she did on the cards as a bright red pawn with a mane of flowing blonde hair and a saucy-yet-sophisticated smile. Thinking about it, any game that prompted a prepubescent sexual frisson from a chess piece, or educated young Crippens as to which household items could best be used to kill, should probably have come with some form of parental advisory warning. But this was in the good old pre-PC days, so we had free rein to don our imaginary balaclavas and go a-garrotting. With the length of rope. In the kitchen.2

1 Neither did the ratings haemorrhage of a TV show that broke through on ITV primetime in the ’90s. Although they managed to churn out four series, host Chris Tarrant (later replaced by Richard Madeley) claimed it was his ‘all time low…fucking bollocks…I just hated it’.

2 Another crime is the literal bludgeoning in the past decade of the Cluedo franchise, with the original game beaten to fit into travel, card, PC, junior and Simpsons-branded versions. Hasbro has also introduced a nostalgia edition (whatever that means), which comes in a wooden box. Which is where we’d have to be before you’d find us playing the animated Cluedo DVD Game.

Commodore 64

Breadbin-shaped family computer

Often, the first computer to grace the family home would not be bought as a present for the kids but would be borrowed as another toy for a tinkering dad. Commodore Business Machines had already dangled their PET, one of the top ‘take home from work for the weekend’ computers, in front of inquisitive parents across the globe, but it was with the introduction of the VIC-20 and Commodore 64 in the very early ’80s that they cornered the younger (i.e. games-obsessed) micro market.1

More eccentrically named than their closest competitors, Commodore computers also pretty much outclassed any in their price range. As any owner wouldn’t tire of banging on about, the C64 had much better–that is to say, more arcade-like–graphics than the Spectrum, thanks to something called ‘sprites’.2 Its sound chip was also more sophisticated, leading some very zingy music to accompany the on-screen action rather than the usual bleeps and boops.

On top of that, the C64 also had a purpose-built matching cream lozenge colour-scheme tape deck or floppy disk drive, a ‘proper’ keyboard and that extra wodge of actually-not-very-important-in-the-event DRAM memory (a full 16K more than the 48K Spectrum–still some 6000 times less powerful than the average 3G mobile phone). But it did mean that a few classic programs were unique to what modern technologists would deem ‘the platform’: Dig Dug, Gilligan’s Gold and the assault-on-Hoth-apeing Attack of the Mutant Camels to name but three.3

The BBC Micro Computer programming

More than any other micro, though, the C64 was positioned as a grown-up’s office tool with all kinds of spreadsheet, word-processing and accounts applications available. All that processing power! However, once computer and accompanying colour portable telly took up residence in the spare room, so did we. Come on, it was 1982! We could close the curtains, watch the first edition of The Tube on Channel 4 and then play Defender’til bedtime. You can catalogue your record collection later, Dad.

See also ZX Spectrum, Binatone TV Master

Worthy, wealthy households instead chose to purchase the distinctly public service remit BBC Model B, which at least had a couple of Sunday-morning computer-literacy TV shows to back it up–although precious little in the way of games at first. Price wars and a failure to keep up with the increased specifications in the industry did for most of these machines in the end. Time has been kind, however, and a thriving retro scene keeps emulated versions of the C64 and all its contemporaries alive online somewhere out there on the Internet4

1 Atari and Apple were starting to enter the home-computer market in the States, but in the UK it was pretty much a straight fight between Commodore and Sinclair. Largely ignored pretenders to the throne included Oric, Dragon and Jupiter. They were right ones for making their products sound like something out of The Lord of the Rings, these computer manufacturers, eh?

2 We could come over all technical now and go on about attribute clashes and scrolling, but our workable knowledge of C64 BASIC begins and ends with the PEEK and POKE commands. To be honest, we don’t really know what they’re for either, but they sound funny.

3 In fact, rumour has it that the C64 was initially developed to serve as a simple reusable arcade cabinet engine–i.e. an upgradeable games machine–and not intended for the home market at all.

4 And in the real world. A ‘plug and play’ joystick-sized version of the C64, with thirty games included, will set you back less than £15 at Amazon. Age 5+. Bah.

Computer Battleship

Find-the-square military tactics game

Milton Bradley (which we’re still not sure wasn’t the name of that comedy alien bloke off Fast Forward) had tried before with a plastic push-peg version of the pen-and-paper grid-based classic. But it was with the addition of flashing LEDs and whistle-boom! sound effects that they hit upon the deluxe, truly sought-after edition.

For some reason as rare as hen’s teeth in your actual Christmas stocking (maybe it was overpriced–we can’t remember), Computer Battleship was memorably marketed (although we suspect that whoever it was that came up with the ‘You’ve sunk my battleship!’ dialogue for those Oxbridgean navy-ponce-themed telly ads wasn’t exactly bordering on genius), seemingly during every commercial break of our childhood.

The set-up? A plastic grid–a Siamese variation on the original analogue cases with flip-top lids–split vertically and separated into two playing areas (grid-squared maps of an unnamed ocean manufactured in the regulation James-Bond-film transparent plastic) plus assorted miniature gunships, boats, aircraft carriers, etc. Batteries, natch, were not included and at any rate would have lasted only until Boxing Day.

There were drawbacks, though. The limitations of the titular computer meant that, far from containing the imagined intricate sensors to automatically locate the position of your fleet, every single occupied square on the board had to be laboriously ‘programmed’ in before a game could start. For both players! The slide-rule-like apparatus had a tendency to be a bit glitchy, too, so unless every input coordinate was millimetre-perfect, your guess at C6 could easily register as D7, throwing your whole strategy out of whack. Plus, the reversal of the board meant that player one’s A1 position was actually player two’s K1 position, and so on, and so complicatedly forth.

See also Up Periscope, Chutes Away, Tank Command

But, for sheer literal bells and whistles, Computer Battleship couldn’t be matched. MB later rechristened the game Electronic Battleship and, later still, it was joined by the less successful refurbished version, Talking Battleship.1 Nevertheless, the original remained a popular staple of end-of-term games days–often, its owner would have to instruct potential opponents to form a queue. The enduring playability did not go unnoticed by BBC bosses, either, who adapted the game for a Richard Stilgoe-fronted children’s programme, Finders Keepers.

1 In the late 1980s, there was another variant called Blow Up Battleship. Instead of calling your guess out loud, you would use a small set of bellows to send a jet of air to your opponent’s fleet and blast away a section of ship.

Connect Four

Tic-tac-toe, four in a row

Traditionally the arena of combat wherein eldest son would beat Dad (as depicted on the front of the box) in some gaming rite of passage (‘Look Dad, diagonally!’), Connect Four was the insanely addictive board game destined to split families asunder across the globe. Originally marketed as The Captain’s Mistress on account of a rumour traditionally linking it with Captain Cook (he was playing it, not shagging it, so the story goes), the definitive 70s edition is part-owned by–and why are we not surprised by this?–David Bowie.

A fiendishly simple premise–it’s basically noughts and crosses1-you’d drop coloured counters into a vertically positioned seven by six-holed board and compete to see who would be first to get four colours in a row.2 Launched in the early 1970s by MB Games, ‘the vertical strategy’ game had an ace climax wherein upon winning the victor could shout ‘Connect Four!’ and then pull a flap out from under the board causing the stacked counters to clatter out all over the melamine surface of the kitchen table.3 Although there were other ‘vertical strategy’ games available (cf. the safe-cracking style of Downfall), Connect Four had an alluring purity to it that made it seem all the more desirable. This was a thinker’s game, frill-free.

See also Downfall, Pocketeers, Othello

Rather as in poker, you could judge the ability and personality of your opponent by the way in which they played with the ‘chips’. One who stacked their counters into a tower would most likely be loath to commit, worried that making a move might cut off other opportunities. Whereas your counter-fiddler would be more liable to drop ’em into the grid like lightning, hoping to set the pace of the game and win by forcing an error in their opponent. The Apprentice would’ve been a much shorter TV series if they’d just got all the wannabe business tycoons to play a quick game of Connect Four on day one.

Like a family-friendly bright-blue plastic backgammon or Go, Connect Four was for your chin-rubbers and that boy genius about to take Dad out diagonally. And David Bowie. It’s still heavily marketed by MB, but we’re advised that current editions are rather smaller than the mid 70s definitive set (with the exception of those annoying gigantic pub versions), taking a good few inches off all aspects of the game–and a couple of decibels off that all-important victory clatter too.

1 Some people are just never happy with three, are they eh? Although why let your ambition stop at four? Why not Connect Five or Six? Because that would be for madmen, that’s why.

2 It’s way beyond the scope of this book to calculate the statistical probability of a stalemate result within all the Connect Four outcomes, but, let’s face it, there are Nobel Prize-winning mathematical theses written on less frivolous subjects.

3 Additional strategy point of order: older brothers were wont to ‘accidentally’ knock the flap out and cause a counter cascade whenever they sensed they were within a whisker of defeat. No, actually, we won’t just call it a draw’, you cheating bastard.

Corgi 007 Lotus Esprit

Reinventing the wheel

Much has been written about the British die-cast toy industry, most of it in better-researched books than this one, but here’s a quick summary. Dinky were first to retool their WWII ordnance machinery, initially making scaled-down cars as background detail for Hornby trains (courtesy of a shared parent company in Meccano Ltd.). Lesney’s Matchbox brand hit the shops next, famous for tinderbox packaging, various classic car series and, later, the Superfast and Superking ranges. Then Corgi, setting up shop in Swansea (hence the name) and introducing separate plastic windows for their cars–an innovation that had passed the other two businesses by.

In the end, all three collapsed under pressure from a corporate US giant (Mattel and their bleedin’ Hot Wheels),1 but that’s a lesson history keeps teaching us over and over again. So much for facts. Most of the cars made by Dinky, Matchbox and Corgi have now ended up in dusty display cabinets, in museums and–the horror, the horror!–private collections. Was that really the point after half a century of miniature motoring? What happened to all the fun? Surely cars were made to be played with?

See also Tonka Trucks, Matsushiro Knight Rider Radio-Controlled Car, Hornby Railway Set

In fact, short of creating a traffic-jam on the lino by the patio doors, play scenarios were hard to come by. What really interested the Cream-era car buff–embryonic Clarksons all–was the toy that had an unexpected extra feature. Yer 70s’ Matchbox roster read like a roll-call at the Wacky Races (Blue Shark, Dodge Dragster and Turbo Fury to name but three), including dune buggies that the Monkees wouldn’t look out of place driving. Perennial favourite, the green hovercraft, remained and although Matchbox had experimented with S400 Streak Racing (plastic strips with loop-the-loops), the Adventure 2000 set was the real eye-opener. The vehicles themselves were a mishmash of sci-fi rip-offs (including Rocket Striker, which looked suspiciously like Dinky’sSHADO mobile), but you could also send off for a poster of the toys…which would come back with your name on it in big, blocky letters! Now that was impressive.2

Corgi, meanwhile, hitherto known for modern nuts-and-bolts stuff (branded articulated lorries, Routemasters, Land Rovers–especially for the Tarzan fold-out box set), aimed for a classier market with official film tie-ins. Yes, that does mean the camp Adam West Batmobile, but let’s not forget Bond. 007’s Goldfinger Aston Martin DB5 cemented Corgi’s reputation for attention to detail, with faithfully reproduced battering rams, bullet shield and that all-important ejector seat. Their Spy Who Loved Me Lotus was even better (but mainly ’cos the Esprit didn’t actually look like any car we’d ever seen before, even when it was in the film).