SOUNDPROOF by Ferrante and Teicher (ARC Records album 1958) Proudly proclaiming itself to be "The Sound of Tomorrow Today!", and wrapped in a cover painting of a flying saucer landing on a crater-festooned planet while apparently being attacked by the inner sleeve of "Dark Side of the Moon", Ferrante and Teicher's weird effort pulls out all the stops in its attempts to take us on a wholesome clean-cut All-American-Family rocketship ride to a futuristic world inhabited by bug-eyed monsters and electric harpsichords. Despite including other-worldly arrangements of such popular favourites as 'La Cuccaracha', 'Mexican Hat Dance' and 'Peg-Leg Merengue', this is not actually the sound of the future. In fact, it's the sound of nerds from 1950s High School films daydreaming in their "math" classes about martians, death rays and food in pill form. Jeepers!.

PERSONA NON GRATA (Central Office Of Information 1964) Pay attention, loyal subjects of Her Majesty! It's been brought to our attention that this film was once officially classified as 'top secret', so keep it all jolly hush, what? Now look here, it may be somewhat creaky by today's standards, but back then I'm afraid it was vital to the nation's security for us to make a film about what happened when a defence worker named Cyril Viney befriended a Russian chap named Popov, and was tricked into stealing some papers for him. It all looked a trifle sticky for a while Mr Cholmondley-Warner, but fortunately the heavily-brylcreemed boys from counter-espionage were on to old Popov, and jolly well put a stop to his plans. In fact, you could almost say that we exploited the 'defect' in them (sorry)...

WIZBIT (BBC 1986) In the early 1980s, Our Lord Paul Daniels was the subject of his very own Christmas cash-in annual, in which he detailed how he had first developed an interest in magic. This made many children wish that they could perform some magic of their own, and travel back in time to prevent him from doing so. If they had done, though, then we would never have got to see "Wizbit". With a cast that included Paul Daniels himself, his wife The Lovely Debbie "Louise Nurding" McGee, and approximately eight billion overcostumed furry things, all of whom were introduced every single week in the overlong title sequence, "Wizbit" centred around the adventures of a five-foot talking wizard's hat, whose friends included an eight-foot rabbit, a purple thing that threw a lot of gunge around, and TV's Vicky Liquorice in a sort of playing card costume. This bizarre cast of individuals lived in a magic kingdom, which lay conveniently just beyond Paul Daniels' dressing room and thus allowed him to make narratory interjections whenever he deemed it appropriate. Which was often. The theme song was provided by former Mungo Jerry mainman Ray Dorset and his Forestry Comission-protected sideburns, who really ought to have known better. This went "ha ha this-a-way, ha ha that-a-way, ha ha this-a-way, my oh my" about four hundred and fifty six times, before Mr Daniels launched into a sidesplitting 'rap' section ("once he was a little bit, little bit, little bit, a little bit of magic in his daddy's eye" - look, do you really want to know any more of it???). Very soon after the initial transmission of the whoppingly absurd series, the funding for new BBC childrens' programmes was slashed dramatically. Only the most heartless cynic would claim that there was a link.