Rick Jones - Cameraman/ Seen All Her Faces

Yoffy off "Fingerbobs" with melancholy folk single

Label: Fontana

Year of Release: 1967

A lot of cliched nonsense has been written about British seventies children's television by people determined to hear lewd, suggestive or druggy lines in the scripts of innocent shows. Most of these accusations come from people who see bright, colourful and imaginative programmes and assume they're the product of dopeheads who have munched through a buffet of spacecakes, rather than made by educators and producers who just happen to know what small children want to watch and how they best learn. The fact that you enjoy the Teletubbies or In The Night Garden while stoned out of your mind doesn't actually mean to say the creators are (or were) in a state of constant delirium too.

All rules have exceptions, though, and Rick Jones was the black sheep of children's TV. He claimed to have been high on hash on the set of Play School, adding to a journalist that marijuana "was like cornflakes" at the Beeb. Besides his work on that show, he is perhaps most famed for the low budget oddity "Fingerbobs" (a huge favourite of mine as a child) though his career stalled after a "fan" sent him two spliffs to the BBC's address and the package was intercepted. He subsequently returned to the world of music from where he first emerged, and this 45 gives you an idea of what he was up to before fingermice and fingerbirds entered his beardy life.

"Cameraman" is an orchestrated folk ditty which suits Jones' deep, sleepy vocals very well, rolling you around in its deep melancholy. He's not quite Leonard Cohen, but his performance is that of a sleepless, lovelorn lump abandoned unexpectedly, and damn convincing it is too (no doubt aided by some herbal cigarettes). 

 "Seen All Her Faces" is essentially more of the same, although Jones kicks some life into it, and the swelling jazzy arrangement gives it a bit of swing and optimism the A side doesn't have.

His early records didn't sell well which indirectly led to his career as an on-screen children's entertainer, but after he was shown the door at the Beeb he joined country rock band Meal Ticket who signed to Logo Records, reigniting a career a world away from puppetry for pre-schoolers. 

Sadly, he passed away last year, leaving a bizarre and fascinating legacy behind. 

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