The first series of Graham's Gang was shown during November-December 1977. Please join me as I rank the series from worst to best...
Graham's Gang didn't get a massive amount of publicity, but as it was going out in a Monday 4:40pm slot before Blue Peter, the cast went on Blue Peter the Thursday before the start of the series to plug the show.
The cast seemed very grounded and cordial on Blue Peter, and gave small details about their past. Mark Francis (gang leader Graham) made it clear he didn't go to drama school and instead just went to a normal comprehensive, and had no professional acting experience. His performance in Graham's Gang is naturally quite amateurish (what with him being an amateur), but he was a decent-looking kid with some charisma, and he went on to work in television for a number of years under his full name of Marcus. This included shows like Noah's Castle (1980), Going Out (1981), and his final credited appearance as a member of Rodney's rock band in a 1985 episode of Only Fools and Horses.....
One of the two cast members with prior TV acting experience was Melanie Gibson, who played Mildred, Graham's next door neighbour who always wants to join his all-boy gang. A member of the Phildene Stage School at the time, she was in the same class as Todd Carty, and went on to have a part in a 1983 episode of Carty's Tucker's Luck. She also had several other roles, before and since the show, and her last acting credit, if the IMDb can be fully trusted, was in 1990.
Lastly, there's the non-posh member of the group, full cockney Tommy Pender. Pender's role as gang member "Robert" isn't one of the most striking characters, but he stands out because, despite being only 13 when filming began in August 1977, he's got such a deep voice it sounds like he's been smoking 50 woodbines a day. Maybe he had? Anna Sher was a teacher at his old school, so he got to go on to attend her theatre school when she moved on to establish it. Pender was most famous for filming The Water Babies (which came out after Graham's Gang) and went on to appear as himself in kid's comedy sketch show You Can't Be Serious (1978). His career would appear to have fizzled out after the 1970s, with opportunities for child actors quite limited.
So, back to Blue Peter. As clips from every episode from the first series were shown, then most of the screenshots on this page come from that edition. It's also very apt for this go-karting episode, as one of the go-karts appears on Blue Peter with Shep sitting in it.
And, with this, it's confession time. The reason why Cameraderie is ranked last isn't because it's bad, it's because.... I don't have a copy of it. I do have a copy of all four episodes ranked above it (some in terrible quality, which is why I needed to screenshot from Blue Peter), but episodes of Graham's Gang are like sieving for gold.
Much begging and borrowing (but no stealing) has taken place to get to this point, which, considering I've been planning to cover Graham's Gang for at least eight years, shows how hard it is to get hold of copies. It was never commercially released, and aired just before widespread usage of home video recorders, so it's exceptionally difficult to get hold of.
I hope you'll find the article interesting despite this one omission... as should be clear, I've done a fair bit of research for it, with many of the details here coming from a thorough search through archive newspapers. The title of this episode isn't a typo, incidentally, they really did spell camaraderie like that, because even without a copy of the episode, we can see it spelt the same way in the book. Of which more in a second...
It's not known exactly how many people were watching Graham's Gang, but we can assume it was reasonably popular. In 1978 the series was repeated in a Thursday 4:45pm timeslot, while BBC publishing released a novelisation that covered all five episodes. In 1979 a second series was shown on the BBC (and if you have a copy of the series two episode Remember Remember please get in touch) and it too had a repeat run.
In terms of the dynamics of the show, then the two main characters jostling for position are Mildred and William. Mildred because she's not really part of the gang but always tries to force herself into their adventures, and William because he's the only one who tries to contest Graham as "leader".
In the novelisation Graham is said to "sometimes have doubts about William, but there was never anything actually said - just a look from time to time, or something in the tone of voice." (It's a fine novelisation, incidentally, and can still be bought online via Amazon.)
There's not much of their rivalry here, as the group are sympathetic towards William after he's been continually getting into trouble at school. Events contrive around a pageant and William, as pictured, accidentally ends up on a horse. It does feel a little too stagey at times, but maybe it's just that the school setting doesn't really work with the freefalling "adventure gang" style of the show. It's the least of the episodes here, but it's watchable enough.
Neill Lillywhite played William Edwards, and in April 1977 was singled out in The Guardian for his work with the Young Vic Theatre, noted for a "superb natural sense of timing and gesture". His pre-Gang acting had seen him already appear once on Blue Peter before the rest of the cast, but post-Gang he doesn't appear to have carried on acting, certainly not on television.
One of the cast members who is almost impossible to track down is Lloyd Mahoney, who played Keith. The name is relatively common, meaning specific results are hard to come by, and Graham's Gang would appear to be his only acting credit. In August 1986 an actor of the same name was playing in a National Student Theatre Company production, "Buskers", but there's not concrete evidence it was the same guy.
Sadly, the character of Keith Potter is also arguably the least distinct of the "gang". It can be hard to distinguish them at times, as they often tend to fall into the same rhythm of line delivery, but Keith is the character who isn't the leader, isn't the leader's main rival, isn't a girl, isn't the comedy "thick" one with glasses who's a foot taller than the rest of the cast, and isn't the one who sounds like he drinks a bottle of whiskey a night.
Keith is the central focus of this one, as he's snatched off the street by two kidnappers (one played by Michael Troughton) due to a case of mistaken identity. The gang getting involved with adult criminals happens a fair amount of times, and you have to use your suspension of disbelief accordingly. There's no scene of horrified parents receiving an ear in the post, or Graham getting headbutted in the face when they all decide to physically tackle the kidnapper... it's a kid's show, existing in its own universe.
Talking about it being in its own world, then the gang are all off to watch a match with a team called "City" and are wearing red and white scarves. Only four football teams in 1977 wore these colours and had "City" in their name: Bristol, Exeter, Lincoln and Stoke. The series was filmed in Havant, Hampshire, but that doesn't necessarily mean that the show was set there. This is further complicated by the novelisation, which reveals that the kidnappers were brother and sister, and changes the football team to "United".
Graham's Gang did get a review in "The Stage", which was published three days after this particular episode aired. Hazel Holt (15th December 1977) regarded the show as an updated and downmarket take on Just William, a "condescending" show where the adult characters are caricatures and the children "lack character or originality". It's harsh but maybe not completely unfair. Writer John Challen has the characters talk in a very antiquated way, with William describing the kidnappers as "fiends" at one point, as if they're all living in the 1930s.
Graham's Gang, largely forgotten today, isn't some reclaimed classic. If you consider that this aired in the same year as kids' shows like Children of the Stones, King of the Castle and Raven - even The Tomorrow People - then it does seem incredibly old-fashioned, and probably did at the time, too. But personally I was just four years old when this episode aired, and the ideal age to see it and be absorbed into its world and characters. And, as I'm now clearly so ancient, I'm not the age to rewatch it... a bit like Hazel, who was 49 when she wrote her scathing review.
To end on a trivia point from the aforementioned Blue Peter episode, then the "ice cream" that gets shoved in Keith's face was really artificial cream, and the sequence required ten takes. Oh, and look out for Mildred's flares in this episode, as pictured above - they're massive.
Graham and his friends try and have a weekend camping, with disastrous results. With this edition we get to the last of the regulars: Lux.
In the 1970s the stereotype about people with glasses being intelligent hadn't really reached sitcoms, and instead many of the spectacle-wearing characters had minds as dulled as their vision. Two of the gang in Citizen Smith wore specs, while Olive from On The Buses was another... even into the '80s, then "Sp*z" in The Young Ones' Grange Hill parody was the glasses-wearer.
So, we have the absurdly tall Lux and his dark specs and blonde hair, the most distinct of the group. He's slower than the others, that's about all there is to the joke, but as said, I was four when this was first shown and it was hilarious to a four-year-old.
Lux was played by Alan Corbett, and it's here where our research gets lost. While he'd appeared in an episode of Headmaster (also written by Graham's Gang creator John Challen), he doesn't appear to have continued with acting. Or started, if you want to be cruel.
However, there was a highly commended psychologist with the same name, who was born around the same time as the rest of the cast (1963) and sadly died in 2016. In audio interviews he sounds very similar to Lux, and facial comparison tech has the adult psychologist as having a 78% match with the face of the teenage actor playing him.
So, is it the same person? maybe. It's highly probable. But I've looked through all the books he'd written about things like therapy for depression and neurological disorders, and surprisingly there wasn't a single chapter dedicated to how he acted in a 1970s kid's sitcom. So, with this one, at least for now, we have to hold our hands up and say that, while it does appear to be the same person, we don't have 100% proof.
Talking of mysteries, then the big mystery of this episode comes with a group of three yobs (including a young Jessie Birdsall) who want to bully the gang. At one stage they're kicking a ball at their tent and guessing that it'll hit "William". Yet the gang are complete strangers to them, so how did they know William's name? This oddity is repeated in the novelisation with the same lack of explanation.
While this episode is pretty childish stuff in many ways - the yobs end up dressed as ghosts, while guest star George A. Cooper falls in a puddle - there are some attempts to flesh out the characters and add a bit of semi-profundity.
William notes of Graham that he "isn't so much bothered about using things, as actually having them", while Graham finally explains to Mildred why she's not part of the gang. After expressing surprise that she really doesn't know the reason, Mildred exclaims "Men - I don't understand them!", with Graham replying: "Got it in one, Mildred. Got it in one."
We've looked at the cast, so who was writer John Challen? Reportedly he was a schoolteacher who sent an unsolicited play to the BBC, which got made into a 1974 Play For Today episode, Headmaster. This was spun off into its own series in 1977, the same year as Graham's Gang. (Although this article is here to praise Graham's Gang, it doesn't really showcase Challen's worth as a writer as much as Headmaster does.)
He supposedly carried on teaching, the TV writing more of a "side gig", and continued writing into the mid-1980s, usually for children, but also getting scripts onto Radio 4. His last credit was for the 1985 schools programme Timmy and Vicki, which looked at a teenage relationship from both sides. Challen's biggest post-Gang/Headmaster project was probably Wuffer, a kid's show from 1983 about a dog handler, based on an idea by Julie Hodson. (No, I don't remember it, either.)
One thing about Graham's Gang and the world John Challen created is that it wasn't typical BBC fare for children's television at the time. Whereas most kids on BBC TV were middle class charmers, the "Gang" lived in very working class dwellings on typical working class streets. They were instantly relatable to a wider audience, even if most of the actors involved were still pretty posh. Scrapping and brawling, running through regular town centres, this predated Grange Hill in its depiction of the class divide.
One thing that's really good about the show is that it's all on film. It does look a bit bleached out now, but it still lends it a bit of prestige it perhaps doesn't really deserve. Yet the "eternal summer" depicted onscreen wasn't rewarded by the broadcast dates, which had its world of t-shirts and ice creams wrapping up just before Christmas. At least the repeat run got to go out in a much more apt August.
But while the gang's rough housing and deriding of Mildred are "of the time", it's a little hard to take an episode where one of them is tasked with minding their baby brother's pram and decides to use it as cricket stumps, before leaving it behind in a park to get an ice cream. Said pram gets mixed up with a jewellery thief's pram, and it's left to Arthur Perkins from Rentaghost as a policeman to sort things out.
The reason why this one comes top of this ranking isn't because of the appalling main plot - the baby is actually in the pram when they're using it as cricket stumps - but simply because it sets things up, and introduces all of the characters and their motivations. It's not that Graham's Gang is a complex, multi-faceted show, but it's nice to know how they all fit in.
One thing featured in the novelisation but not touched upon in the episode is that Graham has a new digital watch he shows off to impress the others, insecure of his position as leader. In fact, for a series named after him, Graham doesn't really feature all that much in this first one, he's pushed back in the ensemble.
This opening episode was reviewed and slated in The Daily Telegraph the following day by Sylvia Clayton. Sylvia wasn’t the only person to compare it to ITV's Just William, and claimed: "It seems to me a pity that on both channels the assumption is that children's comedy is a matter of exaggeration. Adults have hysterics, children shout and every comic effect is heavily overplayed. This is especially damaging to "Graham's Gang," which is set in the present. It has some talented players, among them Melanie Gibson, cast as Mildred, but the first episode was stiffly contrived and short of the natural give-and-take to be found on a recreation ground." Sylvia was 51 at the time, so, like the aforementioned Hazel Holt, wasn't really the show's target audience.
As this look at Graham's Gang has been surprisingly more fact-based than expected, then let's end with another one: the theme tune. It was stock library music called "On The Slide" by Richard Toeman. It sounds quite old-fashioned for such a such a show, though may not have at the time, and was catchy enough to be used in an episode of Spongebob Square Pants. Graham's Gang wasn't the only UK kid's show that aired during the '70s to use library music as its theme tune... it joined a long line, including Catweazle, Grange Hill, Animal Magic and Picture Box.
If you'd like to treat me to a coffee for this look at Graham's Gang, then the button is below. But if you don't, that's fine too, and I hope you've enjoyed the article.