Inside: Swap Shop Book Four

Noel Edmonds pulls out a LOT of content from up his sleeve

“It started” they say about Saturday morning children’s television “with Swap Shop” but all good proper telly nerds know this isn’t strictly true. Programmes such as Whoosh! and Zokko! went out on Saturdays in the 1960s, albeit in a lunchtime slot and running to a significantly shorter length.

But Swap Shop, or Multi-Coloured Swap Shop as it was originally known, was certainly the first to go out live nationwide - Tiswas predated it by two years, but was only available in the ATV region until 1977 and Saturday Scene only ran for two hours on ITV with a heavy music bias - for three hours with a true variety format. So, yeah, I guess it did start with Swap Shop, but it’s always good to include caveats online in order to circumnavigate curiously angry rants.

Swap Shop was phenomenally successful and ran for six series until the final episode on 27th March 1982. There wasn’t, over the course of these six years, much in the way of merchandise produced in association with the programme - although there was an intriguing looking board game - but as with all good children’s programmes, a series of tie-in books were released.

Four of these were released between 1978 - 1981 and, luckily, someone recently got in touch with me to say they were happy to donate their copy of the fourth book to Curious British Telly. And, today, I’m going to flick through a few of the pages with you lucky, lucky people.