I’ve got a few more snippets of information regarding ‘Octopus’.
Robin Rimbaud a.k.a. electronica musician Scanner tweeted the following on 1st February 2014:
‘I know a very disheartening tale about a Nick Drake live film on a tape of a friend. SO very rare’
Did this broken or degraded tape contain a recording of Drake’s ‘Octopus’ appearance?
I’ve discovered that Mancunian hard rock band Stack Waddy appeared on ‘Octopus’. Apparently their performance in the studio was so loud and ferocious that the show’s producer was not pleased. I found this information in an article that someone posted on a Russian music forum. I suspect that the original text appeared in liner notes that accompanied the CD reissue of Stack Waddy material in the mid-1990s.
I had another look at the catalogue entries for ‘Octopus’ film inserts on ITN Source. I discovered that the title sequence for the series still exists, but is incorrectly listed as being from 1971. I’m interested in the film insert featuring 3 humourous robots (one of which blew bubbles). I think these robots were built by either Bruce Lacey or Roger Ruskin Spear.
Finally here a couple of updates to my earlier post about putting ‘Octopus’ into a wider context.
Before he presented ‘Octopus’ Andrew Fisher contributed to the 1967/68 BBC1 satirical programme ‘At the Eleventh Hour’. He co-wrote the weekly section which featured his fellow OZ magazine editor Richard Neville. I found this information in Neville’s book ‘Hippie Hippie Shake.’
Here’s some info that might back up my theory that Granada producers watched the BBC’s ‘How It Is’ programme and decided to make something similar. In his book ‘Bolan: The Rise and Fall of a 20th Century Superstar’ Mark Paytress mentions that in the Spring of 1969 Granada commissioned a pilot for a series featuring underground bands presented by John Peel (who had been one of the hosts of ‘How It Is’). The provisional title of the pilot was ‘John Peel’s In Concert’ and it featured Tyrannosaurus Rex. Peel explained in issue 60 of ‘International Times’ that the pilot was never transmitted because it was judged to have had ‘insufficient popular appeal’. Maybe the producers of ‘Octopus’ took note of the failure of the Peel pilot and concluded that underground bands and ideas could only be presented to general TV audiences within the context of a tried and tested popular format. That might explain why ‘Octopus’ turned out to be a curious hybrid of ‘How It Is’ and ‘Tomorrow’s World’.