ids’ telly on the BBC can be divided into two distinct time periods: pre- and post-broom cupboard. It is 35 years to the day since Phillip Schofield launched the all-new Children’s BBC from his cramped control booth at Television Centre and ushered in a fresh, more inclusive approach to continuity announcing. For the first time, viewers at home felt part of the fun, thanks to the introduction of this specially roped-off section of the weekday schedule that lasted from 3.50pm to 5.35pm (although you would have been out of your mind if you turned off at 5.35pm, when the repeat showing of Neighbours began). Needless to say, the programmes that were shown are indelibly inked into the memories of those who came of age in this period. But how many of the following do you remember? ‘My mum – who’s a nurse’ For children of the 80s, this is a phrase as evocative as “Rock on, Tommy” or “Why are 5 Star so crap?” It was spoken by Pam, classmate of Jonny Briggs, the titular lead character in a kitchen-sink-for-kids series about a young boy who had inexplicably named his pet dog Razzle after a porn mag. Being slightly too young for Corrie, it was also the first time I had heard my flat northern vowels echoed back at me on television. An added thrill came from seeing the doomed Star Wars Death Star officer Leslie Schofield resurface as Jonny’s dad. Willy Fog song-sheets English-language versions of international cartoons were a staple, the best known being two long-running series (and we’re a talking a patience-testing length of time here) featuring anthropomorphised animals. The first, Dogtanian and the Three Muskehounds, was an adaptation of Alexandre Dumas’s Musketeers swashbuckler. The second was Around the World with Willy Fog, an animated take on Jules Verne’s globe-trotting adventure featuring Phileas Fogg. Such was the sweep of the latter’s intro that then-broom cupboard compere Andy Crane ended up issuing song lyrics. Someone somewhere is probably still celebrating National Willy Fog day each 28 April – a date that Crane decreed should be a celebration of all things Willy. Zammo’s arcade heroin reveal Oh, the shiver down the spine when I think of that camera zooming choppily in on Zammo McGuire’s vacant eyes as he sat slumped in the corner of the back room at Roland’s arcade. “Not Zammo!” pleaded Roly as his boss branded the formerly happy-go-lucky schoolboy a junkie. But there was no denying it: Zammo was addicted to heroin, and Grange Hill was going all-out to ensure that we didn’t go down the same path. That same spaced-out face stared back at me from the sleeve of the Just Say No 7in single I bought subsequently. And the cast even went to Washington DC to spread their message. Rumours that some of the child actors took drugs at Ronald Reagan’s White House have since been denied. Tim Tyler loses his laugh I can only put CBBC’s acquisition of this belief-beggaring German drama down to the fact that it had a lot of scheduling hours to fill. Even when it was first shown in 1988, it was almost a decade old – and yet the dubbing appeared to have been done at the last minute by someone on a delayed satellite linkup. The setup may have been intriguing (in a Faustian pact, a cheery boy unwisely gives his ability to chuckle to a morose baddie named the Baron), but the fact that dialogue was delivered two seconds after lips had stopped flapping robbed The Legend of Tim Tyler of its impact. Even turgid perennial six-week-summer-holiday filler Silas felt superior. Running Scared Running Scared was a too-edgy-for-its-timeslot crime thriller first broadcast in 1986 about a poor teenage girl called Paula being hunted down by a menacing east London gangster (played by a pre-Burnside Christopher Ellison) and his leather-clad, motorbike-riding femme fatale sidekick. As I recall, the tension felt almost unbearable, a sense heightened only by the heartbeat-throb of Kate Bush’s Running Up That Hill being used as the opening theme. The writer, Bernard Ashley, appears to specialise in turning underdogs into against-the-odds heroes, what with him also having created the Sean Maguire-starring Dodgem. Teenage Mutant Ninja … Sorry, Hero Turtles Eyebrows were raised up to the hairline when the BBC bought in Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles for the pleasure of an impressionable UK crowd. Rocky and Bullwinkle this most certainly wasn’t, hence the sewer-dwelling fighting quartet being renamed “Hero” rather than “Ninja” Turtles. Out too went Michelangelo’s nunchaku, thanks to them being a weapon banned from screen by the BBFC’s James Ferman. In a pre-internet age, most fans were probably unaware of the changes, though side-by-side comparisons of the UK and US versions do now exist online, so we can see for ourselves the kind of irresponsible, corrupting violence we missed out on while young. Rik Reads Roald This was the decade that saw Rik Mayall revolutionise the landscape of the post-watershed sitcom, but he still found time to lob an incendiary into the world of cosy Jackanory. The comedian’s anarchic reading of Roald Dahl’s George’s Marvellous Medicine in 1986 found him on wild-eyed form and had me longing to be allowed to stay up to watch his turn as Lord Flashheart in the first episode of Blackadder II. Despite kids lapping up the anarchy, it was ITV that went on to book Mayall’s services for 1989’s Grim Tales. Quick, switch over to CITV! Not all Children’s BBC shows were to be savoured. In fact, a few must surely have had the audience changing channels at the speed of Cheetara from Thundercats. Two words for you: Treasure Houses. Don’t remember it? That’s probably because you had switched over to Emu’s World on CITV. Those who did endure Mark Curry visiting stately homes for BBC One felt as if they were enduring the school trip from hell. Who wanted to know about Churchill at Chartwell on our own time? It was a series that had me begging to see Curry get back to Blue Peter where he could do some more damage to Lego heads. Before Horrible Histories, there was … … Maid Marian and Her Merry Men, which was coming up with parody songs back in 1989, many of them sung by Rasta balladeer Barrington (Danny John-Jules). During its four-series run, this Sherwood-set series that put Marian as the outlaws’ leader was one of the smartest comedies on TV and gave kids a taste of Blackadder-style sensibilities (thanks to some uncredited script editing by Richard Curtis). Pretty soon, it had bagged well-deserved Bafta and Royal Television Society awards. PJ’s paintball peril Many first-generation broom cupboard-dwellers had graduated to Def II by the end of the 80s, but there were a few reasons for teens to keep watching BBC One at teatime. The main one being Ant-and-Dec career-launchpad Byker Grove, the often-controversial youth club drama set in Newcastle upon Tyne. And I think we all know what remains most notorious about the series, right? No, not Donna Air’s girl band Byker Grooove. (What do you mean you never bought Love Your Sexy?) I do, of course, refer to an end-of-season cliffhanger that is still likely to trigger night terrors. Never mind, “Who shot JR?”, some of us are still traumatised by “Who paintballed PJ?” (It was Debbie and Amanda, in case you don’t remember).