![]() It was simply a programme I liked a lot, especially when it was on first thing on Sunday Mornings where the gentle stories, detached narration and Hammond and flute-heavy music seemed to emphasise the tranquil silence of that now-unthinkable hour on the quietest day of the week much as Sunday Morning by The Velvet Underground And Nico would come to some time later, and in fact the line about “the streets you crossed not so long ago” has always made me think of the opening of Mary, Mungo And Midge. Of course, back when I was watching Mary, Mungo And Midge in the late seventies – like many of the better-remembered Watch With Mother shows, it would remain in constant rotation for a decade or more – I had no such high-flown notions of audience profiles, cultural shifts and do-it-yourself production values. ![]() A sizeable proportion of the audience did, and for many, this was the first time that anyone had spoken to them directly. “Do you live in a town?”, asked narrator Richard Baker at the end of his opening titles monologue over depictions of bustling streets and busy roads. Complete with an appropriately Modern Jazz-tinged soundtrack, it was evidently dangerously modern for some tastes, but the seventies were on their way and there was nothing that anyone could do about it. ![]() Actually probably an hourly basis to be honest, and even that’s most likely an underestimate. Mary, Mungo And Midge was effectively an independent production for the BBC by artist and writer John Ryan (with Mary’s voice provided by his daughter Isobel), and was fairly radical to a complaint-engendering degree in that, unlike most previous fellow inhabitants of the Watch With Mother timeslot, it depicted the adventures of a relatively unsupervised child of working parents in an urban landscape as Mary and her pets made regular use of the shockingly exciting and futuristic lift in the tower block they lived in as they set out to discover how cranes worked, how letters were sorted and all manner of questions that children who weren’t exactly of the well-to-do classes might have asked on a daily basis. Within weeks, in fact, of the first showing of Chigley, the end of black and white Doctor Who, and the release of In The Court Of The Crimson King and as I can never help drawing these kinds of unlikely parallels, to me it represents just as much of an understated and unintentional line drawn under the idea of ‘the sixties’ as any of the above. The girl, dog and mouse in question were Mary, Mungo And Midge, and they first held up a card reading ‘BBC TV’ at the end of their programme late in 1969. Whenever I see, hear or possibly even in some circumstances smell the letters ‘B’, ‘B’ and ‘C’ – there’s a blissful scrupulously clean odour to those tiny down-the-line local radio studios – the first thing that comes to mind is usually a girl, a dog and a mouse.
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