There are a million stories in the Second City. This is just one

Happy New Year!  I hope that you’ve all had wonderful holidays spent with those dearest to you, doing things that you enjoy. And now it’s time to start imparting/absorbing (delete as applicable) wisdom, knowledge and experience about television again as you all head back to your campuseses campi places where all those university buildings are grouped together.

And when you get there, it’ll be that tricky second semester where it’s frosty and a bit grey, and your breath clouds as it meets the chill of the winter air. And that reminds me of Curriculee Curricula.

You’ve probably never heard of Curriculee Curricula. But that’s only fair, as it’s probably never heard of you either. It’s an odd piece of TV. It’s not commercially available and so goodness knows where you’d ever be able to see a copy.

How to describe it?  Well, here goes. It’s a comedy prog rock opera about a plumber’s apprentice who is sent to retrieve some spanners left behind by Max & Harry Leavis (Jobbing Builders) from a university campus on the day of the Annual Nationwide Lecture being delivered by astronomer Patrick Moore and televised by a BBC Outside Broadcast team including presenter Magnus Magnusson. It’s a heady tale of romance, squash, boilers, surveys, motorcycles, jealousy, geographical confusion, and All Wisdom and Understanding – punctuated now and then by bold colourful graphics, bombarding the viewer Batman (1966-1968) style (other styles are available) with words such as “CRASH” and “BANG” with a side-order of “WALLOP”.

What the picture says.

 

Screened in mono (the only option) on BBC2 at 8.10pm on Monday 22 May 1978, the 50-minute Curriculee Curricula is of note as being the first British television ‘‘‘‘‘‘drama’’’’’’ (and, believe me, there aren’t enough nested quotation marks to do this word justice) to receive a simultaneous stereo broadcast on radio [i]. You’d had John Tavener’s Last Rites on that high-brow Radio 3 and BBC2 in June 1974, a few other classical music sessions with compositions from a lot of dead people, and oodles and oodles of Sight and Sound in Concerts featuring living people had graced both BBC2 and that funky Radio 1 from January 1977… oh, and Ingmar Bergmans’ The Magic Flute in The Lively Arts (1976-1981). But not much of yer actual ‘‘‘‘‘‘drama’’’’’’… until that Monday evening when you could hear and see Curriculee Curricula in stereo via BBC2 and Radio 4. And, remember, place your two speakers on the correct sides of the television… otherwise you’ll just end up feeling dizzy.

The creative talents behind this venture were established television playwright Alan Plater (who had trained as an architect at King’s College, Newcastle – latterly the University of Newcastle upon Tyne) and composer and keyboard player Dave Greenslade whose band Greenslade were exponents of prog rock [ii]. “For a longe time I have wanted to do something totally musical to spread the scope of our drama productions as wide as possible,” explained producer David Rose [iii] without the need to put any quote marks at all around ‘‘‘‘‘‘drama’’’’’’. And it was David that brought together Alan Plater whom he had worked with on the Chaucer-inspired travelogue Trinity Tales (1975) and Dave Greenslade who had scored the off-beat Birmingham gangland drama Gangsters (1976-1978), most recently blessed with a new theme song sung by Chris Farlowe.

Magnus Magnusson will bring you all the action as it happens.

Now, this is the bit where the literature review – or lit rev as it’s known in the ed biz – should come. So, I’ve had a look jstor but – nope – sorry… all I got was a ‘No results found’. So, then I checked two of the best books about television that I know – The Making of Doctor Who by Malcolm Hulke and Terrance Dicks (Piccolo: 1972) and The ITV Encyclopedia of Adventure by Dave Rogers (Boxtree: 1988) – and they didn’t have anything helpful either, but – you know what? – that killed a few very happy minutes of joyous reunion with tomes that mean a lot to me while humming Solange’s blissful concerto from Les Demoiselles de Rochefort (1967). But, then again, as a senior academic told me a few years ago: “Lit reviews are dead boring aren’t they?  You don’t want to read the same stuff again. You want to get onto the new bits.”

Unfortunately, the BBC Written Archives Centre was shut – because for me, here, now, this is still the chilly hinterland between Christmas and New Year – and so I couldn’t even ask if they had any T5/ files on the production, even less ask if one did exist if it had been vetted and opened for me as a mere member of the public to see in exchange for filthy lucre. Fortunately, you can nip up to the University of Hull where some wonderful archivists take loving care of the ‘Papers of Alan Plater’ at the Hull History Centre and you can read – I quote – ‘notes and related correspondence (Jan 1977-Jan 1978), a typescript entitled “Spanners: a television musical” (original title) and a rehearsal script’ courtesy of file U DPR/3/35. Good old University of Hull!

Anyroadup… SPOILERS ahead.

following an aerial shot of the Bull Ring (presumably poached from footage shot for Gangsters), the story (originally subtitled The Rocky Scholar Show) concerns Benny (rock, blues and soul singer Chris Farlowe) arriving on a university campus on his motorcycle and sidecar, and immediately being caught up in the simultaneous arrival of dignitaries for the Annual Nationwide Lecture, to be given by Patrick Moore – best known as the eccentric, passionate host of BBC TV’s astronomy programme The Sky at Night (1957-). Benny’s arrival is watched from a BBC Outside Broadcast van and commentated upon by the lecture’s presenter, Icelandic journalist Magnus Magnusson – best known as the host of the forbidding BBC quiz show Mastermind (1972-). Benny is quickly lost on the campus roads and finally receives some help in his quest to retrieve some missing spanners from the trendy, golden-jacketed student Maggie (singer Sonja Kristina, lead vocalist of the prog rock band Curved Air) whom he collides with while she is cycling. Directed by Maggie to the Admin Block, Benny is confronted by a postgraduate researcher (Gaye Brown) who needs him to answer a series of questions about which side of bed he gets out on and whether he prefers tall or short women with ‘Yes’, ‘No’ or ‘Don’t Know’. The researcher feels that Benny’s spanners could be located by the finest brains at the university, an eccentric set of figures – including the goose-stepping Professor Fauntleroy Himmler of Child Psychology, the spaced-out Professor Mercury Kubrick of Astrology and a moulting professor of ornithology – who form the Centre of All Wisdom and Understanding… but, sadly know nothing about spanners.

The Centre of All Wisdom and Understanding

Benny’s blooming friendship with Maggie has upset her supposed boyfriend, the competitive Simon (actor-singer Richard Barnes) who challenges the plumber’s mate to a duel of shuttlecocks in the gym. While Simon is undoubtedly the victor in a variety of sports that Benny neither knows nor cares about, it is Benny who departs the duel with Maggie and they head off to make love in the University Department of Central Heating. In the pipelined basements they are confronted by the Boilerman (deadpan veteran Glaswegian Chic Murray, probably best recalled by modern audiences from Gregory’s Girl (1980)). Offended by the use of his boiler house for erotic purposes, the Boilerman chases the duo up to the lecture being introduced by the vice-chancellor (Michael Aldridge) in a glorious pastiche of Gilbert and Sullivan’s I Am the Very Model of a Modern Major-General (1879). In an unexpected twist, the leather-clad Benny is mistaken for Patrick Moore and the lecture turns into a rock concert with music from the Greenslade. Benny finds his spanners, departing for adventures new with Maggie as an astronomer arrives declaring “I’m late/I’m late/For a very important date.”

All set to music. And utterly glorious!

It also feels like pure television. What television was made for. The mechanics of TV production themselves are on display throughout, with Magnus and the BBC team capturing all the action as it happens in the scanner van, and a wide-angle shot of the lecture hall including the hand-held camera operator lining up to capture the entry of the irate Boilerman from stage left. Video camera trickery of the day abounds, with Benny’s bike reversing from a ‘No Entry’ passageway, footballs bouncing in and out of his gymnasium goal, and the quartered screen as the luckless youth looks on with disdain at Simon’s pointless athletic prowess. There’s the TV jokes too, which I’m sure you’ll all get. When the postgraduate researcher asks Magnus Magnusson if he has seen Benny, he replies “Pass”. Magnus’ narration even opens with “There are a million stories in the Second City. This is just one.”  That’s two references packed into one line!

I Don’t Care

There’s also the period shots of a snowy University of Birmingham from almost 50 winters ago with its glistening snow around the Watson and Harding Buildings and its erstwhile paternoster lifts rolling endlessly around indoors. And the Great Hall of February 1978 where the rock concert passing itself off as the Annual Nationwide Lecture was performed. This forms the backdrop to a very class-ridden view of academia – where plumber’s mates are strange intruders into an alien world inhabited by phalanxes phalanxi phalanges ordered groupings of academics in fully robed and mortar boarded regalia.

“It’s a quality difficult to define and impossible to explain, but as Louis Armstrong used to say of jazz: if you have to have it explained, you wouldn’t understand anyway,” wrote Alan Plater of the production some years later [iv]. Alan would later return to tertiary education with the opening market research-related scenes of Oliver’s Travels (1995) set at the New University of the Rhondda Valley, while Dave Greenslade’s music provided a striking background to the surreal campus of Lowlands University in A Very Peculiar Practice (1986-1988).

So, if you do have 50 minutes spare and get chance to see it somewhere, you can study its class-based perspective on academic life, the bygone views of the Birmingham Campus, or you can unpack the technological techniques of the day…

… or you could just sit back, enjoy it and take warmth and delight from it as you return to teaching/studying (delete as applicable).

Happy New Year academia!

 

Andrew Pixley is a retired data developer. For the last 30 years he’s written about almost anything to do with television if people will pay him – and occasionally when they won’t. In 2025, he had the chance to read the most utterly, amazing, engaging and original essay about television, and he thinks it’s possibly the best thing he’s ever read on the subject. And in 2026 he really hopes that a smart publisher will pick it up so that others can be as impressed with the concept as he was.

 

Footnotes

[i] Sorry. You came all this way down here to expect a proper citation and it turns out that there isn’t one.  Well, I’m sure I’ve read it somewhere over the last few years… that must be good enough, surely?

[ii] While the rest of you spent 1979 being hit by rhythm sticks, trying to cheer up Chiquitita or joining Oliver’s army, I was grooving on down to Dave’s mind-blowing fully-illustrated alien bible concept double album The Pentateuch of the Cosmogony. Wowsers!

[iii] ‘Students get rocking for a plumber’s tale’. Sunday Mercury, 26 February 1978, p12. See, I can do proper citations every now and then. Nice man David Rose. Met him once when he was researching down at the BBC Written Archives Centre.

[iv]. Grigor, Robbie (2009). Just Daft: the Chic Murray story. Edinburgh, Birlinn Ltd., p214. Alan was another nice man. Met him once at a Kaleidoscope event in Stourbridge and got to work with him on the DVD release of his Beiderbecke trilogy (1985-1988).