Days of TV and Bod

(As featured on Groovy Reflections)

The school day seems like an eternity when you’re seven years old. I remember once getting into trouble with my teacher as we had taken our seats in the classroom for the first lesson of the day. Even at that age, I knew that having just arrived, it would be a very long time before I could go home again.

I sat, staring down at my Grease T-shirt, trying not to cry. Somehow, that image of Sandra Dee and Danny Zuko hitting the high school dance floor got me through the morning and I remember breathing a huge sigh of relief as I left the school gates and crossed the bridge that took me to the street where I lived.

In much the same way, the lunch hour then felt like a long weekend. My sister and I would climb onto the sofa and sit cross-legged to watch TV. We’d tuck into our favourite (favourite healthy, that is) treat – slices of cucumber (with the skin cut off) and a dollop of salad cream for dipping, accompanied by a cup of dandelion and burdock*, straight from the glass bottles that were delivered to our doorstep every week by the Alpine pop man.

And that’s when the opening credits of Bod would begin and we’d forget all about that long school day for a while as we became lost in his world. In my mind, there were about a million episodes, all with exciting and intriguing in depth storylines. Bod throws an apple into the air and it doesn’t come down – what genius! All the other characters arrived to find out what was going on (as they always did) - how a child just like us could wow those adults speechless! And who could forget the majestic Alberto Frog and his Amazing Animal Band? A frog that drank a milkshake to reward himself whenever he saved the day - and not just any milkshake but a different flavour milkshake every single time! It was too good to be true!

Many years later, of course, it transpired that actually it wasn’t about a million - only thirteen episodes were ever made and the stories always started the same and ended the same and were all, well, sort of the same.

But back then it didn’t matter – that eon of crazy tale-telling revived us - we could return to school and brave the rest of the day! Off we’d go, back over the bridge, turning to see our mother waving a towel out of the upstairs bedroom window to wish us bon voyage. And the rest of the day wouldn’t seem quite so long and even sometimes when it did, you knew that there would be a whole marathon of just as thrilling television adventures to go home to at the end of it!