THE CURATOR
Who doesn’t enjoy the quirks of an independent museum? They alone celebrate aspects of life other institutions may choose to pass over. This series asks curators of the UK’s most unusual galleries and collections to share their highlights and take you on
ALAN HICKEN, MONTACUTE TV RADIO TOY MUSEUM, SOMERSET
Chestnuts roasting on an open fire, Del Boy in superhero pose Yuletide carols being sung by a choir, Queen’s Message through a post-lunch doze Apologies, Nat King Cole. We’re only trying to help. It isn’t 1946 anymore, and if you’re singing something called ‘The Christmas Song’ without alluding to families settling down around the telly, the result is barely more credible a festive standard than Those Lazy-Hazy-Crazy Days of Summer. Seventy years on, television has developed a rosy nostalgia all of its own: partly universal, partly deeply personal. We each have our own tale to tell.
“Robin Hood is the first programme that I remember watching, around my gran’s house in front of her little telly,” says Alan Hicken. The show starred Richard Greene. “He was quite big in America. That’s him down there,” he adds, pointing to a broad expanse of mounted magazine covers.
Mr Greene is not alone. Instead, his wall of fame comprises but a fraction of a veritable labyrinth of TV- and radio-related displays. Back there is a ‘life-size’ Bully, Jim Bowen’s stripe-shirted bovine chum from Bullseye. Up ahead is Alan’s recreation of the TARDIS interior. A Billy Connolly ventriloquist dummy soberly recalls its days in a Kaliber lager commercial and a Coronation Street Seal of Authentication confirms that, yes, this ostentatiously embroidered coat once enveloped the indomitable Rita Tanner.
Alan, conducting our tour with Noddy Holder levels of Black Country bonhomie, thinks his collection may be “impossible to count”. At a conservative guess it’s in the tens of thousands, every last inch of space filled with memorabilia. He can estimate “five to six hundred televisions and radios”, though. Among them are the sets where the story of the Montacute TV Radio Toy Museum begins. Older residents of this sleepy Somerset village will recall that, where now stands the cafe and gift shop, was once the store front of Dennis Greenham’s electrical business. Here, out back, were his workshops.
“Dennis was my father-in-law,” says Alan. “There wouldn’t have been electricity in the village when he was a young lad in the 1920s. He had a butcher bike with a box on the front,
and went around the villages picking up accumulators [old-style batteries] for radios, taking them back to his workshop to charge them up. For the King’s coronation in 1937, he invented the twin turntable in the village hall. He didn’t get the credit, but it was his idea.” After wartime service with the RAF he got into TVs and rigged up an aerial on the church tower so that villagers could watch the Queen’s coronation.
Fast forward to the 1980s. Dennis is retired and having a clear-out. “He had about 30 old radio sets and asked ‘Do you want any of these?’ That’s how the museum started.” Except, says Alan, “the radios aren’t very colourful. Just browns and dark colours. So I went out collecting old annuals and things relating to television programmes from the 1950s to 1970s. It brought it more to life, and the memorabilia took over. I started getting into board games, jigsaw puzzles, figures, and now life-size figures.” That’s the key to this place. Alan isn’t a forensic archivist of TV and radio, but an irrepressible fan celebrating the medium in whatever way feels right. For every original Gladiators pugil stick there’s a homemade, bowler-hatted likeness of Patrick MacNee in The Avengers; for every stunt prop ‘wooden’ table leg from The Bill, a lovingly crafted Dr Who adversary.
Not that it isn’t crammed with authentic treasures: there are walls full of comics drawn by Walt Howarth depicting Alan’s beloved Westerns ( pages of vivid original proofs are safely stored in the house). Elsewhere, a moustachioed puppet called Hank the Cowboy was pretty much the first star of children’s broadcasting. “Not a lot of people remember him,” says Alan. Michael Aspel did, and was delighted to make his acquaintance on the Antiques Roadshow. “I was telling him about my mannequins. He said ‘ Well, when I kick the bucket, perhaps you can get me stuffed and put me in there.’ He’s a great bloke.”
As befits a walking encyclopaedia of all things television, Alan has a ready opinion on everyone we ‘meet’, from Damien Lewis – “I don’t think he’d make a James Bond. He’s a craggy-looking bloke, isn’t he?” – to Robert Powell: “A good Jesus, actually”. Despite his 007 deficiencies, Lewis is afforded his own section, including work on Homeland, Band of Brothers and – tellingly – Wolf Hall. Over Alan’s garden wall sits Montacute House, which doubled as Henry VIII’s main London seat, Greenwich Palace, in the BBC drama.
“The scriptwriter stayed with us – we do B&B as well. She brought me this candle and this script from the woman who played Anne Boleyn.” Indeed, it is the most memorable scene from the series, the chilling speech Claire Foy gave the moment before she lost her head.
“That uniform is original Dad’s Army... remember Max Headroom? There he be... here’s the Invisible Man. I couldn’t see him when he arrived...” At every turn, nostalgia rears its snuggly head. Your correspondent sees a Rolls Royce model car radio and is immediately back beneath the sheets of his boyhood bed on a Saturday morning, Tony Blackburn confirming that was Coast to Coast with ‘Do the Hucklebuck’.
Thus the core appeal. “Three generations of a family come and they all get something out of it,” says Alan. “Grandparents will be telling grandkids ‘I remember these radios’, and the grandkids will be talking about a scene from Dr
Who. I find museums like this more interesting than stuff you can’t really relate to. If it’s in your memory, it means more to you than ancient museums, people pulling a plough and all that.” montacutemuseum.co.uk
“For every original Gladiators pugil stick there’s a homemade bowler-hatted likeness of Patrick MacNee”