21st Century Dodos: A Collection of Endangered Objects (and Other Stuff) (17 page)

Bulldog

That’s what we used to call it, anyway. It is also known as British Bulldog, Bullrush, or numerous variations thereof. It is a school playground game that has been banned (or, at least, frowned on) by many head teachers because of risk of injury
^*
.

Here are the rules, such as they were:

• A bunch of kids, the more the merrier, stand at one end of the playground.
  
• One child is elected to be the Bulldog. He or she stands in the middle of the playground.
  
• On the cry of ‘Go’, the mass of kids have to run from one side of the playground to the other, avoiding the Bulldog.
  
• The Bulldog has to catch one or more of the players as they rush by.
  
• A simple tag will not suffice; they actually have to wrestle their opponent to the ground or otherwise incapacitate them.
  
• Once captured, a player becomes a Bulldog and stays in the centre.
  
• When a ‘run’ has been completed – i.e. all the players have reached the other side – the whole thing starts again with players running back the other way.
  
• Repeat until there is only one player left, the rest being Bulldogs.
  
• Then, commence the Glory Run.
  

The Glory Run was the stuff of legends. Only one player remained standing at the end of the playground. Facing them were 10, 20, 30,
or more Bulldogs, all scenting blood. Everyone knew that the last man standing had no hope; it simply wasn’t possible to get past that many Bulldogs.

But that didn’t stop you trying. For a few fleeting seconds you thought you could do it, become the first person to survive the Glory Run. You had already won the game, now was the time for immortality.

You took a deep breath.

Glanced around quickly, desperately looking for a gap.

And legged it as fast as you could.

Chances are you came to, a few minutes later, at the bottom of a pile of Bulldogs. Defeated, but proud.

Of course, this was a full-contact sport and lots of people got hurt. Some of you reading this will have bad memories of Bulldog, and perhaps rightly so. It was dangerous. It was foolhardy. It was irresponsible and a bit silly.

But that was sort of the point.

Dodo Rating:

Schools’ Programmes Countdown Clock

Before the days of video recorders and DVDs, the BBC and ITV used to show a range of educational programmes for schools in the late morning and early afternoon. These would cover all manner of topics from maths to English, science to computing, foreign languages to history.

If you were a school with only one television set, your teacher would lead you from your classroom to the hall, where you would sit down on the floor, or on benches, waiting for your programme to start.

Some of these programmes are well remembered to this day, such as
Look and Read
with Wordy, the disembodied head who would educate us through songs and short animations, or
How We Used To Live
, a dramatic account of the olden days. Others have faded away to be forgotten forever.

But the thing that no one will forget is the countdown clock. The schools programmes usually had a 5-to 10-minute gap between shows, presumably to allow schools to get shot of one class and bring another in, and that space was filled with an analogue clock counting down to the start of the next programme.

With two or three minutes to go, the benches would be a flurry of shuffling, pinching, punching, and kicking, as kids jostled for the best place – ideally out of sight of the teacher and not behind the kid with the massive afro.

With one minute to go, the teacher would inevitably yell at everyone to sit still.

And with ten seconds to go, the whole class would shout out the countdown.

10 … 9 … 8 … 7 … 6 … 5 … 4 … 3 … 2 … 1!

In the 1970s, that was about as exciting as school got, I can assure you.

As the 1980s dragged on, the afternoons became a time for more traditional programming, and schools programmes started to be shifted to the evening or early morning, with schools being encouraged to record them on video to show during the day. In fact, a wide range of such shows is still aired in the early hours on the BBC, and are well worth viewing if you want to brush up on your Spanish or square roots!

Dodo Rating:

ON TELEVISION AND RADIO

That we wasted hours in front of …

Answers on a Postcard

No children’s show of the ’70s, ’80s, or even ’90s, would have been complete without a competition to which the only way to enter would be to write an answer on a postcard and send it in to the studio.

Nowadays, of course, the BBC doesn’t run competitions anymore after a series of ‘scandals’ revealed that some of them were rigged, and commercial channels have expensive phone and text quiz questions that are so mind-numbingly easy that it is an insult to the intelligence to actually pick up a phone and answer them. Here is an actual question that I saw on a TV show recently:

What nationality is the actor Tom Hanks?

a) Irish

b) Russian

c) American

d) French

There then follows about five paragraphs of small print along the lines of:

Calls will cost £1.50 from a landline but calls from a mobile will cost so much more that you will have to go without
Heat
magazine and fake tan for a month when your bill comes through and you realise how much you have pissed away on a stupid quiz that you stand little to no chance of winning. Lines close at 3pm but we’ll still leave the lines open so we can fleece you for more money and, let’s face it, if you do call after, then you deserve to be robbed. If anyone phones in and answers A, B, or D, then we will immediately send social services round to your house and remove your children. Judges’ decision is final. Now, quick, put the phone down and start watching again; we have an item about a girl who crocheted a life-size model of her father in the hope that it would bring her parents back together.

See? It’s all a bit shit, really, isn’t it?

I much preferred the transparent bin stuffed full of postcards from which Alvin Stardust or Zammo from
Grange Hill
would select the winner of a signed Five Star 12” single. Simpler times, but not without their own controversy. Some people would send in ridiculous oversized postcards in the hope that they would stand out, others went for bright colours or other blatantly cheating tactics, but OfCom never called for an inquiry when one of these were pulled out, did they? Oh no.

And to think, that autographed Adam and the Ants drum skin could have been mine if it wasn’t for some bastard sending his answer in on a card shaped like a giant ant.

Dodo Rating:

Buzby

That bloody Russian meerkat wasn’t the first star of a TV commercial to become a household name and spawn a successful range of merchandise. Oh no. Thirty-five years earlier, British Telecom (or Post Office Telecommunications, as it was then known) used a yellow cartoon bird to front its ‘Make someone happy with a phone call’ campaign.

Voiced by Bernard Cribbins, who was also the narrator of popular children’s TV show
The Wombles
and a regular on
Jackanory
, Buzby became a big hit with the general public, especially kids, and you could buy books, toys, T-shirts, and badges. He even had his own comic strip.

But where is he now? Eh? Gone and pretty much forgotten, that’s where.

Aleksandr Orlov had better watch out. He may end up going the same way.

Dodo Rating:

Humphrey

‘Watch out, watch out, there’s a Humphrey about!’

It was a stroke of advertising genius. In the 1970s, Unigate Dairies launched a campaign featuring an invisible creature who stole milk from celebrities – Rod Hull, Frank Muir, Arthur Mullard, and so on – using a very long red and white straw. The subliminal message, such as it was, presumably being to encourage kids to drink up their milk before Humphrey got it.