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Chockablock

THE BEEB WERE scraping below the bottom of the barrel here, but what they found wasn’t that bad given it involved SIR FRED HARRIS. Either Chockabloke (Fred) or Chockagirl (CAROL LEADER) “checked in” via minuscule buggy to a sort of Fisher-Price Cray mainframe, which they then had to teach simple nursery-rhymes and songs by method of painful repetition. Nice Vocodery singalong theme tune, though.

8 Comments

8 Comments

  1. aimee

    July 22, 2009 at 7:02 pm

    all i can remeber about this programme was a man on a really horried buggy singing chockablock and then getting a brick shaped object off the buggy

  2. Rob Williams

    July 22, 2009 at 7:21 pm

    Huh? That man is Sir Fred Harris! What were you expecting? (Prrrffftttt!) Chocka-windows XP anyone?

  3. Ste

    September 27, 2011 at 12:47 pm

    Chocka-Bloke checking in! said Fred at the beginning.

  4. mr_john

    September 27, 2011 at 12:51 pm

    I would (literally) give my left arm for a nice copy of Chockablock on DVD. Can dload the crap version from YouTube but would love a better quality copy.

    Right I’m off to find my vocoder.

  5. Richardpd

    October 28, 2020 at 11:18 pm

    I remember the seat for Chockablock was a drawer for some reason.

    Who else wanted the buggy from this.

  6. Tom Ronson

    April 27, 2021 at 12:47 am

    Very peculiar how this felt quite hi-tech and futuristic at the time. I remember being quite surprised to discover that the BBC had wiped some of the tapes – especially as each episode only lasted about fifteen minutes anyway. The one with the manky cat puppet (and an equally shonky primitive computer graphic representation of the same animal) was on YouTube last time I looked – God knows how pre-schoolers in ’81 would have reacted to it, but it freaked me out as a nostalgic adult.

  7. Richardpd

    April 27, 2021 at 11:45 am

    I remember being fond of this in the 1980s as a pre-schooler & when catching repeats after starting school.

    Unfortunately the BBC decided to throw out a load of children’s & school shows in the 1990s when they were digitising their archive & didn’t have the budget to copy all the tapes.

    I presume they decided they were the shows least likely to get a home video release would get the chop.

    • Chris Stobart

      November 25, 2021 at 12:34 pm

      The programmes with face-to-face presenters or that didn’t chiefly involve telling a story were usually the ones deprioritised hence why Ring-a-Ding, Playboard etc all disappeared round that time.

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