The Book Tower

[kasey11]

Re: The Book Tower

Since i started to collect retro tv in the early 2000s The Book Tower (along wih The Boy Who Won The Pools) has been the only thing I remembered from childhood that I can't track down. A few years back I started to licence old tv progs for limited run dvd release, and The Book Tower was on my wish list, but I hit a brick wall- even with decent contacts I struggled to find out who the rights had transferred too after the old tv companies lost their licences, let alone which archive the programmes resided in. It looks like Tom Baker's finest (children's) hour will not be seen again.

The one that really makes me keen to see the BT again is an episode where the 'filmed book' section was about a pair of glasses in a junk shop that, once put on, allowed the boy to see that the shopkeeper was actually a demon. I worked as a librarian for six years and did quite a bit of work/reading trying to find out what this book was, but have never found it. It's something i'd love to find. There arent many single episode programmes that have stuck in my mind for thirty years or so!

Can you remember the Tyke Tiler series that was included in The Book Tower in 1988?

[havasack]

Re: The Book Tower

The theme tune rings a bell but never watched it. As I hated Jackanory I probably tarred this with the same brush and switched over. Was it on ITV?

Heathen

[Retrogames]

Re: The Book Tower

Can you remember the Tyke Tiler series that was included in The Book Tower in 1988?

No, I went to a school from 85 that was ages away, I missed all kids tv after 85

[Roxxy]

Re: The Book Tower

Weird, I was only remembering The Book Tower just this morning, and here it pops up! I agree the theme music WAS creepy; it was meant to be a way of introducing kids to books and encouraging them to read, a sort of televised version of The Puffin Club. Most excerpts from books that were featured were accompanied by dramatised clips, some of them taken from old TV serials or films- I remember being terrified of one clip from the old '60s film of 'The Arabian Nights', when the Sultan is given a gift of a robot horse. You saw all his court staff putting it together, with the neck off and all the machinery inside it- that really scared me, I had a terror of lifelike androids of any description at that age.
The presenter would also at one point pour something from a teapot- the liquid varied, but it usually had some application to what was coming next.

[shikiraclare]

Re: The Book Tower

Tom Baker made it intensely exotic and perhaps because of his relentless confidence in behaving wickedly self-assurred on screen?. I was just 6 when the Book Tower series aired on BBC-can't-recall if it was 1 or 2, or in fact an entirely different channel altogether, yet don't recall the TV programme until I was approximately 8 or 9 in 82/83, and Tom Baker definitely the narrator and presenter at the time.

In one particular creepy episode, a man plastered his stately-looking room inside a mansion with a week's worth of The Times; set fire to them and slobbed out on his bed until the sudden realization set in that he was in terrible danger of becoming stir-fry - just as the flames clapped and tiddled around the ornate polymere-clayed plaster boarded King Louis-esque man cave. He then pounced up and down like a perfectly sane Jedhi Knight to temper the perfidieous strike freaks so that they would obey his distressed ambivalence - the rest I simply just can't remember, only that I was thoroughly captivated by what the Book Tower had to offer in future episodes.

Of all the cult tv shows now out on DVD, this should certainly be too. It was such an imagination-toss that all emotionally perturbed persons should induldge their own independent thinking, including myself. I truly wish to revisit my own understanding of dark realism as a child and not necessarily to make sense or use of it, yet just to carefully consider each story-telling with fresh insight.