Colm O'Regan: Anyone remember the Extra Programme? I miss that 

Colm O'Regan

Do you know what I miss? The Extra Programme.

Like power cuts, hitchhiking and warning hitchhikers that ‘that car window didn’t close properly so don’t open it, like a good man’, the Extra Programme was a feature of life thirty years ago, that we accepted as normal. I never quite understood where the Extra Programme came from. 

It wasn’t regularly scheduled and rarely advertised. It was as if the RTÉ scheduler checked the sums and realised that The Sullivans was ending ten minutes earlier than they’d thought, so someone had better go root randomly in the Extra Programme drawer because the News wasn’t ready yet.

Either way, when the announcer said “and now for our younger viewers, an extra programme” there was a certain tension in their voice. Like a waiter saying ‘And now sir, you ordered the Chef’s special?’, wondering how a Beef Man would react to the seafood, still-wriggling under the domed lid.

The programmes were supposed to be for children but my initial memory is that they often felt like the tortured imaginings of a subversive anti-authoritarian artist, smuggled out of an Eastern Bloc country under the spare wheel in a Trabant.

If I interrogate my memory a bit more though, three main stand-ins stand out. The first was Hamilton the Music Elephant. 

Hamilton could play jazz trumpet with his trunk and this led to conflict with a greedy and exploitative circus ringmaster. Hamilton, tired of being abused ends up dancing with a penniless organ-grinder instead, glad of the simple life away from the spotlight, just enjoying the music. 

The tune he played (DOO doo doo-doo di-do-di DOO dooo) is still in my brain. Like the monster on Monster Munch packets, there was only one Hamilton cartoon. And they showed it a lot.

The second regular memory was of a cartoonist struggling for inspiration to draw a cartoon character who then comes to life. The soundtrack was Autobahn by German electronic Kraftwerk.

The final classic was a dystopian warning. Nominated for an Oscar in 1964, it was about a scientist who wanted to use technology to feed our love of cars so that he produced cars that cars started making other cars. Soon the world was hundreds of feet deep in cars. Eventually they reached the scientist’s white tower, broke in through the window of the scientist’s lab and ate him through the bonnet.

Hope you enjoyed that, kids. Now it’s time for the Angelus. Is it any wonder we’re the generation best equipped for the pandemic? The coping classes reared on a diet of Extra Programmes featuring dystopian visions of the future and psychedelically imagined German Electronica, followed by compulsory prayers?

All of these cartoons were made by Halas and Batchelor. The renowned animation company that also made Animal Farm, inadvertently as it turned out, for the CIA.

Here comes the inevitable, largely incorrect conclusion that it is compulsory to jump to at my age. Young People These Days – they don’t know they’re born. My children are fed on a diet of emotionally balanced, beautiful animation that allows them to learn in an atmosphere free from fear. Pathos and Bathos wrapped up in Bluey, exquisitely painted landscapes and gentle Chris O’Dowd voiceover on Puffin Rock. 

There are no Extra Programmes apart from the ads for Grammarly in the middle of Numberblocks. Where are the lessons in existential dread going to come from? Or should they enjoy their childhoods before climate change bites.

When they’re old a little older we’ll get them onto Wolf Walkers just so they can get a dose of Cromwell and Deforestation into them, a spoon of cod liver oil to toughen them up.

But for now, I’ll start gently. I can hear a musical elephant warming up.