TYNESIDE FOLK SINGER ALEX GLASGOW was the unlikely man behind this educational affair, bashed out in the white heat of progressive schools programming, where oddness and music took precedence over log tables and grammar. Hence these programmes had a weird, disorientating atmosphere which proved too much for some easily-bewildered kids, but rather that than the monumental tedium of previous watch-and-copy-this-down endeavours. This was ostensibly a “comedy adventure series” dealing with slightly more basic concepts and starring two bog-standard kids who find a mysterious “dice”, from which emerges a babbling, op-art-clothed, P’tweean alien bloke called Powkah, who despite having mastered interstellar travel and dimensional compression has trouble counting up to ten. The kids then take him all over the place (i.e. cheap locations in the south of England) via a suspiciously TARDIS-like “box” to teach all manner of basic mathematical and physical stuff. Plus there was an annoying computer (voiced by the writer) who sang songs of similar educational persuasion. Kids and Pow went in and out of the craft by grasping the old man’s “Truestock” (a sort of plastic blunt dagger with the numbers one to twenty written down the side for easy reference) and chanting “ticky-ticky-tox, out of (into) the box!” followed by a standard Rentaghost dematerialisation.