The Long, Dark Teatime of the Soul

In the halcyon days of my youth I seem to remember a reason for looking forward to coming home from school in an evening. The prospect of fish fingers and a few heady hours away from the tyranny of the classroom were enticing and all, but that wasn't quite it. Tearing up and down the road on bicycles with the local tykes was pretty good fun too, but no more than half an hour in the playground with a large stick and a good litre of orange squash in you. No, it was evening TV that really used to cut the mustard, and boy did it cut it well.

The 6 to 8pm slot on BBC2 was a veritable treasure trove of televisual joy. There was no Byker Grove or Grange Hill here, all those easily pleased plebs had switched off at 5.35 to gorge themselves on E numbers and chase each other over-enthusiastically around the garden. Those who survived the subsequent 25 minute onslaught of Ramsey Street's curiously accented and terrifyingly dressed denizens would be rewarded by quickly racing to the TV and punching the little button marked "2." A good hour of bountiful pleasures awaited the plucky viewer, all at the insubstantial cost of their undivided attention (and, as I later discovered, that tricksy thing know as a "Television Licence").

Teatime television was almost always an hour or two of programmes made by people with overactive imaginations for people with overactive imaginations. Thunderbirds, Stingray, The Avengers and The Prisoner may have all had a distinct whiff of insufferable kitsch about them, but they were beguiling damn it. Besides, this was only a warm up. As an impressionable child stumbling across Quantum Leap, who was I to resist its time-travelling charms? At its heart was a fairly saccharine moral crusade where the overambitious amnesiac Sam Beckett repainted America's wrongs with Norman Rockwell's pallette, but there was more at work for the fledgling sci-fi fan here than mere high-minded jiggery-pokery. It kept its biggest questions close to its chest, only occasionally alluding to them with an ambiguity that infuriated my little mind. How did the Quantum Leap project start? Why did Sam keep leaping and who was pulling the strings? Who on Earth allowed "Oh boy," to become the catchphrase? The list goes on and on, but it was Al, the ever charismatic sidekick, who kept me coming back week after week, punching away at his little yellow pad and mooching around like a holographic Columbo. This was what coming home from school was all about.

Not to be outdone by the scheduling might of the Beeb, Channel 4 got in on the act too and popped on some corkers to keep everyone chirpy before the 7 O'Clock News insisted on lowering the tone. To be fair, you either liked Babylon 5 or Star Trek, (it was forbidden to enjoy both for fear of being severely derided by your peers, such was the severity of sci-fi geek enmities) but the former had more explosions and better special effects, so I sold it my allegiances eagerly.

Nestled away on Ch4 in the early 90s though was one of television's best kept secrets, the mighty Eerie Indiana. Something of an X-Files warm up, this show gave my impressionable mind more feverish enthusiasm than two sherbert dips and a vigorous shake. Marshall was the kid from New Jersey whose family just wouldn't accept that their new hometown was odder than a barrel of monkeys. Together with his pal and sole confidante Simon, they confronted the usually slew of aliens, werewolves, yetis, a reanimated Boris Karloff, parallel universes, talking dogs and the secret truth of where lost socks actually got to. It was all pretty jovial stuff, but there were a couple of corkers that never left me, especially the one where Marshall slips into a parallel Eerie that's actually a TV set and everyone insists on calling him "Omri" (the name of the actor who played Marshall in the series). If that wasn't high concept for a 6.30pm slot after Mork & Mindy then there's clearly no place for you here. Go on, get.

These were programmes that made kids feel like they were watching grown-up TV and planted more ideas in young minds than a 10 year Big Brother onslaught could ever hope to achieve. Now it lies in tatters, saved only slightly by daily repeats of old Simpsons episodes. Imaginative TV has taken a knocking with programmes facing constant cancellations and, horror of horrors, being bumped to a late night slot. Then there's the 24hr repeat factory that masquerades under the moniker "Sky," where showing something regularly means, "every hour, on the hour," so by the time the kids have got back from school, the satellite channel's worked its way through the entire series during the day and has started over again. These slots need to be kept going on terrestrial TV to save us from the tyranny of makeover shows and Hollyoaks, else pod-people we shall all become, brainlessly jabbing at that red button to gain access to an exclusive live feed of one of the housemates picking their nose.
There is a silver lining though; a brief smidgen of hope that all is not necessarily lost. The utterly ace Doctor Who has proven that there's an audience champing at the bit for more of this, and it has wisely commandeered the beloved teatime slot. Is imaginative TV dead or is it undergoing one of the Doctor's regenerations? To quote the enemy, "you decide!"


Action!
Vote with your feet and complain about the forthcoming closure of the utterly ace http://www.bbc.co.uk/cult. Go on, fight the suits!