LET’S GO THROUGH THE SQUARE WINDOW
Hello!
We are Graham Kibble-White and Samira Ahmed and we love TV.
In the 2000s when Samira’s children were very young, her mother, a veteran TV presenter and actress, took her aside one day and told her she was concerned Samira’s children weren’t watching enough TV. This despite that fact Samira has spent her entire career working in television – mostly in news and documentaries.
“They’ll be left out in school,” she explained. It’s true that Samira’s daughter seemed to be the only girl in her Year 1 class not to have watched High School Musical on the Disney channel, but she had no regrets and said daughter quickly came to see that as something to boast about.
Samira: “I raised them watching DVDs and videos of Sooty, Bagpuss and Pipkins. Then as teenagers, as a family, the Ahmeds worked through boxsets of The Prisoner, Buffy the Vampire Slayer and classic Doctor Who – shows that I had mostly missed on original transmission.”
Graham Kibble-White and Samira met through his work as a TV magazine editor and indeed “cult TV guru” (in the words of the Liverpool Daily Post). One of the people who ran the late, lamented TV Cream website, Graham says: “I grew up in a telly-loving household. When my grandmother died, my brother and I spent our small share of the inheritance on a BSB squarial. Our dad, meanwhile, conducted experiments in recording from Ceefax with the ambition of creating a ‘TV cookbook’.”
Today, Graham is the Head of TV and Radio at The Telegraph, but while he was editing the late, lamented (yes, another) TV Years magazine, Samira wrote features for him on Space:1999, The Word and ITV children’s lunchtime shows of the 1970s (Rainbow, Hickory House, Pipkins etc).
From there, we realised we enjoyed talking about old TV together, and would meet up reasonably often to do so. Having appeared together on a Channel 5 show in which we looked back at programmes from 1975, we decided to look a little further, and in the the spirit of archaeology, we thought it would be fun to unearth real TV viewing of the past, assess it in modern sunlight, and, like the hunt for the missing link, work out the evolutionary dead ends and successes of screen viewing.
Not just nostalgia, but active thinking, in the age of streaming when Channel 5 is relaunching Play For Today, about what makes great television and its social purpose and role in our daily lives. Angels to Casualty; Shadows to Inside Number 9.
Hence we come to our podcast, titled Through The Square Window, a reference to the famous filmed segments on Play School, a show created in 1964 for the new BBC2 channel, by the brilliant television producer and writer Joy Whitby, who also created Jackanory, The Book Tower and produced Catweazle. She has become a good friend and gave her blessing to our project. Thank you, Joy.
Two things that might come up now and then. Samira’s family got a Philips home video recorder in about 1975, so there are shows she knew very well from repeated viewing in the age before VCRs became widespread a decade later, and she’s read the campaign diaries of Mary Whitehouse, who famously lobbied to clean up TV from the 1960s to the 1990s.
We really hope you’ll give Through The Square Window a go, wherever you get your podcasts, and let us know what you think.