Book Tower

Last week, we took the kids to visit Sudbury Hall - home to the Museum of Childhood. As I struggled up the grand entrance steps, wrestling with Josh's pushcair, I had a feeling of familiarity, as if I'd been here before.

 Of course I'd been here before - several times, I first came here when I was nine for a school trip back in 82, but this was something different - where had I seen that door before?

 ... and then it struck me (not the door) - it was from the Book Tower!

 For the nonplussed, The Book Tower was an ITV weekly kids' programme, aimed at getting children interested in (not surprisingly) books and reading. Sort of like BBC's Jackanory, but not so straight faced.

What most people will remember about The Book Tower is the theme music. This was a particularly creepy number (written by Sir Andrew Lloyd Webber), played on an organ, accompanied by zoom shots of a gothic house which wouldn't have looked out of place in an M R James story. You could almost imagine Vincent Price hunched over the keyboard in Dr Phibes fashion.

 As the titles finished, you were greeted, not by Vincent leering into your living room, but grinning former Time Lord, Tom Baker (a pretty close second).

 In fact there was a bit of a Dr Who feel to the whole thing, in its 10 year run there was a steady succession of eccentric presenters, including two former dads of Adrian Mole - namely Stephen Moore and Alun Armstrong, Neil Innes (Puddle Lane, The Ruttles) followed by poet and fellow GRIMMS member, Roger McGough and finally Bernard Bresslaw (I only arsked) and Timmy Mallet (look at the camera and say BLAIR!).

 Unlike Jackanory, the stories were partly dramatised, and I can recall one quite disturbing scene of an old woman drowning a cat from (I think) The Nine Lives of Montezuma by Michael Morpurgo. Another book featured was The Warlock of Firetop Mountain by Steve Jackson and Ian Livingstone from the Fighting Fantasy gamebook series, where I vaguely remember Stephen Moore and a kid dressed in sword and sorcery clobber exploring a paper mache dungeon.

 One item I didn't see, but would have liked to, was Neil Innes' interview with Lucy Boston, the children's author of the Green Knowe series. She would have been in her nineties then - quite a remarkable lady.

The Book Tower closed it's doors back in 1989. Since then ITV seems to have slowly shut up the shop on children's programmes, finding it easier just to import cheap cartoons to drain kids' brains - but that's only a bookworm's opinion.

Ah well, as Tom Baker would say, 'Goodbye until next week, ha ha.'