1. Maths In A Box
Begging the question of just what enormously potent hallucinogens the BBC Schools' department had been ingesting in the early 1980s, this highly bizarre series centred around an alien who traversed the galaxy to discover our mysterious Earth concept of 'maths'. Typical - our first encounter with an intelligent life form from another planet, and they turn out to be geeks!!!

2. Picture Box
Famously introduced by eerie fairgroundesque waltz music and a monumentally fear-inducing ornate rotating gold box with red velvet lining, "Picture Box" provided even further reasons to be fearful if you could actually make it past the memorably terrifying opening credits, as it consisted of nothing more than a series of short films, the content of which veered erratically between disquieting jerky animation and incomprehensible boredom. Said films were linked by the world famous star of stage and screen, TV's That Bloke Who Played A Junkie Artist On "Brookside".

3. Walrus
The one programme that no-one's school ever actually watched, and the one you could never understand if you ever saw it by chance. The fact that it appeared to be a completely different programme each time you saw it was partly responsible for this. "Walrus" was apparrently an acronym for something to do with the correct usage of the English language, but its precise meaning remains every bit as remote and unexplained as the irrelevant photo of a group of teenagers with early 1970s haircuts that appeared on the pre-transmission caption card.

4. Scene
A long-running collection of sanitised socio-realist plays, 'starring' anyone from David Cann and Alex Langdon to Dennis Waterman (although more often than not it tended to be youngsters who you half-recognised from minor appearances on "Coronation Street"), basically a string of watered-down versions of "Up The Junction" with no swearing. Marginally more entertaining than the other shows on this list, but only just.

5. How We Used To Live
An unspeakably tedious 'historical drama' series which traced the fortunes of a British family through various eras of modern history, which reached its nadir with the endless 1930s storylines about eating fish and the Radio Times. Having been running since the era when most of Earth's rock strata was being formed, the series has had time to cover a lot of historical ground, and the most recent sighting confirmed that it has now reached the 1960s, and 'radical' son Roger has become a hippy.

6. Good Health
Rather unsurprisingly, this series offered advice on how to live healthily. The clue is indeed in the title somewhat. The main thrust of its message appeared to be that you should avoid eating liqourice allsorts by the wicker basketful, although more people tend to remember the episode that dealt with the injury-causing fashion fad 'Blok-A-Boots'. The idea that stack heels could cause slow-acting injury may have been a topical and important one back in 1973, but the episode in question was still being shown a good ten years later, when no-one in their right mind would be seen wearing them...

7. Music Time
Irritating songs linked by a ropey narrative 'thread', illustrated on screen by Jonathan Cohen and some poorly-lit 'lighting up' musical notes, and played by a vibraphone-favouring backing band who may well have been the unwitting progenitors of Acid Jazz. The high points of the series were always the puppet retellings of said ropey narrative 'threads', most memorably that of "Lieutenant Kije", which culminated in the hilariously oily Chancellor finally getting his comeuppance and being booted down the stairs by the Tsar. Come on, this was a rare treat for Schools' TV!!!

8. You And Me
Alice the Hamster and Crow the... erm... Crow were the basic numeracy and literacy espousing stars of this series for the archetypal 'under fives', which is fondly remembered even though its jangly acoustic guitar and harmony vocals theme sounded dated almost right away, and also despite the fear-inducement capabilities of Crow's loud cawing voice. Nonetheless, "You And Me" directly inspired an early Human League song. Oh yes it did.

9. Experiment
No music. No credits. No humans seen on screen. Just an abrasively noisy soundtrack, crackly overexposed film of chemicals reacting with each other, and the occasional shot of some frightening-looking apparatus. Not exactly the ideal thing to be watching if you are too young to understand it.

10. Words And Pictures
Henry Woolf and weird cartoon man Charlie used this programme, set in a library that never actually seemed to lend out any books, as an excuse to bicker incessantly over the correct usage of 'basic' words, introduced as ever by a jerky Radiophonic Workshop theme. In recent years, their place has been taken by Sophie Aldred, proving that some remakes of 'classics' can get it right after all.

11. Look And Read
Wordy, a hovering dome-shaped puppet thing covered in Scrabble letters, played the 7 Zark 7 style linking role for a string of legendary film serials with Derek Griffiths-crooned sub Scott Walker Radiophonic Workshop theme epics. Notable examples included 'The Boy From Space', in which an alien with backward writing called Peep Peep is hunted down by a frightening individual known as 'The Thin Man', and 'Sky Hunter', in which some children with flares deciphered 'coded' backwards message in an attempt to stop Geoffrey Bayldon from stealing rare birds' eggs. Also 'fondly remembered' is the tedious 'Badger Girl', much praised as an early 'green' serial, but more rightfully derided as monotonous and dull.

12. Stop! Look! Listen!
Disturbing animations of smiling traffic signs and a Focus-like theme tune introduced this series of documentaries, narrated by Chris Tarrant and shot on authentic Schools' TV standard crackly film, which urged us all to take a look at 'the world around us'. Allegedly this is still running, although chances are that they will have changed the theme tune by now. Shame really.

13. Seeing And Doing
Toni Arthur, a woman whose name is virtually inseperable from the concept of Schools' TV, presided over - yes, you guessed it - a series of films designed to stimulate knowledge and awareness of the five senses among schoolchildren. Something that XTC's 'Senses Working Overtime' did far better in the early 1980s, to be honest.

14. Maths Square
Weird trigenometry-related "Doctor Who" parodies that weren't actually parodic at all, and a theme tune 'borrowed' from George A. Romero's "Dawn Of The Dead". You can't make this stuff up.

15. Watch
Toni Arthur was once more in the hotseat for the demented benchmark of Schools' TV, each series of which adopted a different theme - variously including Evolution, Christmas and Robinson Crusoe ("all alone, all on his own, far away on an island") - and proceeded to relate it in a brain-hurtingly surreal fashion. Most notorious of these moments was when 'Siegfried Line' was performed with such adapted lyrics as "we're going to hang out the algae on the washing line". Oh, and don't forget the notorious puppet/door incompatibility interface ("there must be room!") in the Christmas special.