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The BBC's official tribute to Look and Read past, offering an excellent beginner's introduction to the series and various bits of trivia. It focuses especially on The Boy From Space (presumably because that's the one whoever wrote it saw at school!) but also mentions several of the 70s and 80s stories. There's eight RealVideo clips, from a wide selection of stories, and various pictures all over the place.
An official BBC website with educational Flash games using the Spellits characters from the various Spelling... sets of programmes of recent years. Lots of fun things to do solving the clues and very effective for its target audience.
The original, pioneer website about Look and Read, looking at loads of the stories with fondness and nostalgia, with fun descriptions and pictures, unlike the fact-based boringness that you get here on my site. Sadly hasn't been updated for a while, but I'm trying to persuade the webmaster to get the thing going again, and suggest you do too!
A full site dedicated to the early 1990s primary schools science series Thinkabout Science and Science Challenge, plus coverage of the original Thinkabout series from the 1980s. It has full episode details for all the programmes, with cast and crew information, plenty of pictures, and commentary throughout on what made the series so brilliant.
Part of a website about a DVD preservation project, this Background section contains all sorts of details about the origins, history and episodes of two particular ITV Schools programmes that originated in the early 1970s - Good Health, the fun health education series for all primary ages; and Stop, Look, Listen, the hypnotically entertaining environmental topics series for infants. The site will hopefully be developed with more background information on both series, and archive photographs, as well as long video clips to download.
Thunderbirds, the popular puppet adventure series from the 1960s, was also turned into a schools TV programme. One 50-minute episode, The Man From MI5, was edited into a ten-part serial in autumn 1992, dubbed into French by the BBC to enthuse young students of the language. In translating, the BBC changed the famous "Thunderbirds are go!" introduction into the distinctly unimpressive "ils sont partis!" ("they're off!"). The French Embassy's education department had recommended that the more enthusiastic, and more accurate, "Allez Thunderbirds!" should be used instead. Anyway, the project was extended the following term with a serialisation of the episode The Perils of Penelope in Hindi, then after that a Scottish Gaelic version, Tairnearan Tar As (Thunderbirds Are Go).
OK first of all, Ghostwriter IS a British schools programme. Or at least it's a British-stroke-American one. It was even first shown in the UK before the US. This is a useful, if straightforward episode-by-episode guide to the complete series, which ran through the early 1990s.
This is how desperate I am for sites about schools programmes. In Spring 1990, an episode of the Primary science series Search Out Science featured Doctor Who. Now, everything vaguely to do with Doctor Who must be analysed and tabulated by the fan community (this is a comment not a criticism: just look at the Schedules section on my site for an example of exactly this sort of thing) and so this programme gets mentioned on many, many Doctor Who sites. This one in particular devotes a whole page to the programme, with a scan of the Radio Times article which accompanied its first transmission.
Marvellous website for the marvellous series Look Around You, the absurdist and highly affectionate pastiche of 70s/80s schools programmes. No, it's not technically a schools TV series, but it damn well could have been.
Huge long essay thing on TV Cream about pretty much every aspect of schools TV in Britain you could think of, detailing and explaining all sorts of programmes on all sorts of subjects, broadly concentrating on the 1970s and 80s (but doesn't everything?).
The eminent TV Cream guide to pretty much every old TV programme that's worth remembering includes a lengthy entry on Look and Read. It concentrates on the mid-70s to mid-80s era (as does the whole site) going through all the stories from that time in detail with all sorts of comments and opinion-type stuff. It also has the closing theme from Badger Girl. You have to scroll down from this link, or for the proper framed version go to TV.CREAM.ORG and click 'L'.
Fun but accurate précis of fifteen classic (ie. from the 70s and 80s) schools television programmes - Look and Read comes in at number 11, listed alongside such luminaries as Scene, Watch and How We Used To Live.
A personal website covering various TV programmes and related stuff that the fellow likes. The theme tunes section includes this whole page devoted to Look and Read! It features 20 original MP3s including several themes and a load of educational songs from Dark Towers - amongst them the famous "Benjor and Nunsen" theme!
A big long reminiscence about various schools TV programmes of the 70s, 80s and 90s, going through and giving facts and nice memories about several programmes that the author watched in his youth. What's particularly good about this is that the balance between hard facts and gentle nostalgia is spot on, in contrast to my website which leans a quite heavily on the former at the expense of the latter. This site is a good, enjoyable read.
Another personal site with wide-ranging content. This particular nostalgic page details the author's personal favourite TV series, listing several Look and Read classics alongside selected all-time greats from children's television, such as The Adventure Game, The Box of Delights and (yes) Doctor Who.
This huge, encyclopaedic site gives outline coverage to all the Look and Read stories and a little more detail on The Boy From Space, Spywatch and The Legend of the Lost Keys separately. It also has details on many thousands of other TV shows in all genres.
The principal dedicated internet resource for material on UK schools TV, with a huge range of original video and music from schools TV presentation past and present, along with opening titles and details of loads of old programmes. All the video uses the most up-to-date codecs (you'll probably need to update your RealPlayer before you can view them) in nice high quality.
A big heap of pictures and videos of presentation from the BBC and ITV Schools services. All the diamonds, dots and clocks you could possibly want are here, plus video of the titles from various classic schools shows including Merry-Go-Round and Words and Pictures. Also, you can now get lovely, clear encodings of the title sequences from several Look and Read stories.
One of the original, most authoritative sources for this presentation stuff, this one has MPEGs of various bits of continuity, plus a gallery of continuity slides. Of most interest, Sub-TV stretches back beyond the recognisable 1970s presentation to much earlier devices used in the 1960s.
| THIS UNOFFICIAL WEBSITE HAS NO CONNECTION OF ANY KIND WITH LOOK AND READ OR WITH THE BBC. The Look and Read title and logo, as well as all related material, is copyright © BBC, 1967-2006. The official BBC Schools website is at www.bbc.co.uk/schools. Everything else on this website © Ben Clarke, 2000-2006. No malicious infringement of BBC copyrights is intended. Material featured at this site remains the property of the BBC or relevant copyright holders. |
