Timothy Claypole was definitely my favourite. His looks, his wit, amd his antics really resonated with me. Add to that the theme song, and you had one happy young boy!
I can remember this around 83 to 85 (probably repeats by 85) and I use to love it, I was very young , talking 8 to 10 years old,..It was very off the wall and weird, but it was awesome at the same time, Mr Claypole was class and funny, I cannot honestly say I remember specific episodes, just bits and pieces, but great memories, appreciate the upload 👍👍 Great stuff.
Enjoyed that! I watched them all at the time and again recently. Still very funny. I was lucky enough to work with Hal Dyer in the 90s, and I see Jeremy Swan from time to time. Thank you 😁
Thank you so much Steve, an excellent trip down memory lane and full of information. I love your videos. Thanks for sharing my comment. Just listening to the theme tune takes me all the way back to my youth in the 70's. 👍🏻
I don't remember as far back as Mumford, but most definitely remember the Meaker era. I loved the show and remember all of the later characters, but for some reason if you asked me to tell you any story line at all I'd be at a total loss!
Just spotted this - what a lovely video, allowing the true affection for the show to shine through. I was born in 71 so am possibly the exact age to have watched the show throughout its run, and it was always a firm favourite. Mr Claypole reigns supreme, but I also really loved the Meakers and especially the perpetually baffled Mr and Mrs Perkins. Lovely performances from everybody and by playing it straight they allowed the absurdity and the humour to flow through.
I'm a '74 baby. My strongest memories are of the latter years for some reason, after Mumford left. Claypole, the stalwart, will always be my favourite though. Thanks for watching, and for the lovely comments.
I grew up watching Rentaghost. Loved it! This is the first time I have listened to the theme song since I was a child. Totally wonderful.. Where can I watch the series? Thank you. Paul (SE London)
All episodes of Rentaghost exist in the BBC Archives, the mentioned wiped ones were recovered from tapes previously sent to UK TV for airing on UK Gold.
Rentaghost and M*A*S*H were the two constants in my life when growing up, and have fond memories of them both. Rentaghost started when I was around 4 and finished when I was 12, but still had the repeats. Always loved the theme music, the characters and the situations, it was a style of programme that is often imitated but no one these days really has a clue in how to pull it off. Criminal that many have been wiped, and a shame there’s no Doctor Who type demand for restored found episodes.
Apparently since I made the video copies of the original tapes turned up and they're now available on ITVX/Britbox, but it requires a paid subscription. Good news they still exist I guess, albeit behind a paywall.
@@RetroSpectives excellent news, so a complete box set at some point possibly… It can join the M*A*S*H, Blake’s 7 and Space 1999 sets! We can indeed hope and dream 😊
I'm actually surprised they're still on CZcams. Full episodes of anything often get removed due to copyright. I suppose after discarding & disowning 6 series of the show, it's not like the BBC technically own those episodes anymore.
They were all brilliant Steve the actors 😆 lol I still remember miss Popov played by the late sue Nichols and Michael staniforth was a iconic comedian and actor may he rest in peace 😢
you'v set me off with it i'm going to watch a few episodes that are on youtube tonight i always thought dobbin meaker the horse was by far the silliest of all@@RetroSpectives
Ha ha! Cheers Steve. Naught wrong with expanding yer vocabulary. I'm no bookworm but I persevered with a James Joyce assignment for one and a half volumes. Considering the sheer, mundane slog of his prose, it's perhaps ironic that I found affirmation in a healthy disregard for formal frameworks. Alexei Sayle novels had me reaching for the dictionary at first but they now flow like a mountain spring. Bit late to the party here but I'd always intended to catch up with this retrospective. And a heartwarming one it was, too - focusing on the genuine charms of an honest and thoughtful entertainment format. A lovely tribute to those actors who have passed away. I wouldn't have expected anything less. And thanks so much for those kind words.
I was born at the the end of 1978 I remember whatcing the last couple of years on original broadcast sad the tapes got wiped 😢 I had a rent a ghost annual as a kid this would be in 1983 one year before the show finished
That annual .. I have an ebay search notification set up to get a copy of that. It's currently up there for about £15 to £20, but it has sold for as little as about £6-7, so I'm biding my time. I do have a Look-In annual on the way right now. That was under a fiver.
I don't think my opinion that the Rentaghost theme tune is, unironically, one of the greatest television themes ever will ever be changed. I was 5 when Rentaghost finished so I think my viewing must have been almost entirely repeats, but I don't remember seeing the early stuff at all. When I got hold of series 1 a number of years ago and watched it I was struck by a) how old it looked compared to the later series and, b) that there was some Mumford fella I didn't remember seeing before. It almost felt like a different programme. Fortunately, Mr Timothy Claypole was timeless and excellent.
An excellent retrospective that I enjoyed watching. As for 'Rentaghost' itself, I watched it as a child in the 70's and 80's. I remember liking it to start with, but hated the cast changes in series 5 (I never liked Hazel the McWitch or Nadia Popoff), and yet perversely I always watched it! LOL.
Based on the memories I still have, I don't think there was a character I particularly disliked. If I'm honest, it hasn't really aged well, but as someone who loved it back then, I enjoy it now on rewatching, for that reason if nothing else.
I have vague memories of it as a very young child in the 1980s. The most memorable thing was the theme tune, but I also remember Timothy Claypole and Dobbin the pantomime horse. I didn't know it suffered from the famous "BBC let us wipe the tapes syndrome" - that is very bad that practise went on in 1990s of all things. Wasn't it repeated on early morning Saturday Childrens' BBC TV?
I know it was repeated at some point (it came up in the research) but I forget now which channel, maybe UK Gold or something similar. The tapes were wiped after that. I have managed to get hold of the full set, but only through unofficial means. It's the only way it exists now, and the quality isn't brilliant.
@@RetroSpectives Okay thank you. Yeah - according to Wikipedia, it got repeated on UK Gold during the 1990s, and apparently - the whole 9 series are available on Britbox(bar a Xmas special).
Wow. Thanks for pointing that out. I looked on Britbox when I made the video and they didn't have all 9 seasons. I'll be looking into that now, cheers.
Having said that, apparently since making this video Britbox/ITVX now have every episode on their streaming service (subscription only), so there must have been some copies stored somewhere all this time.
I appreciate a heads-up about errors, but in the video I said he died between episodes that went out in 1978 and 1980. If you spot anything else out of place in any of my videos, do let me know. I try to avoid gaffes, but they can slip in when drawing info from multiple sources.
Did this show ever have an episode where there was a ghost living in a Manor House that was about to be demolished by a wrecking ball but was then saved by two kids?
With the limited memory I have, one episode rings a bell, with the rentaghost crew helping two ghost kids to evict a bunch of squatters from the house they were haunting.
I watched it from the beginning and carried on till around 1980/81, I remember in the 80s a certain newspaper made a song and dance about Michael Staniforth about being gay and on children's tv. I think the story just fizzled out as no one really cared and of course kids would not have known anything as they just enjoyed the show. I have watched it since and still prefer the earlier episodes, I think after series 5 it went a bit too much pantomime.
@@RetroSpectives Old man, look at my life I'm a lot like you were. Old man, look at my life I'm a lot like you were. Old man, look at my life, Twenty four and there's so much more Live alone in a paradise That makes me think of two.😂
What's this harsh talk of "declined to appear in future" arbitrarily with no reason ? I saw a comment, and okay I have never found a verifying source for it, that says, Jackson left because he felt the show would no longer work after Darbyshire's passing. I'm curious how much of that feeling came from the format change seen happening in Rentasanta, already while Darbyshire was still there, most of all the crap of Dobbin hated by the show's original generation. For Dobbin's first appearance was also Jackson's last.
As far as I've been able to work out, based on the limited anecdotal info available (looks like I found the same quote as you), he missed his friend and didn't feel the show would be the same without him. 40+ years later, with many passings of the actors involved, we'll probably never know exactly what happened.
I don't remember a single plot, but the characters are burned into my memory (even Dobbin and that robot Jeremy, which more than any other thing in the show dates it to the early 1980s 😁 - oh, and is also NOT A GHOST). When I saw Molly Weir in _Scrooge_ or The Bluebell's _Young at Heart_ video, I thought of her as Hazel McWitch (or, actually, Witch Hazel, though I'm not sure if that name misunderstanding was mine or my mum's, though I suspect the latter). Audrey Roberts was _always_ Miss Popov, and never Sue Nicholls, and after I first saw _Fawlty Towers_ in my late teens, that guy in the Gourmet Night episode was always Mr Perkins.
The first time Hazel the MacWitch appears she's referred to as Witch Hazel, but as far as I've seen it was always by her full name after that. I've always remembered her as Witch Hazel.
@@RetroSpectives That's interesting. I wrote that comment before I got to the point in the video you mentioned her (bad, I know, should've waited until the end 😝). When I discovered years later the name was Hazel McWitch I assumed I had been remembering wrong, and the obvious pun name had taken precedence in my mind. But when you mentioned her as Witch Hazel I realised perhaps it wasn't just my own misunderstanding.
I'm always so surprised by children's shows from the UK. All of them seem so sweet and tame compared to US kid shows. A lot of the US ones from that era would have probably been too violent for UK television. Some of them, even now, I'd swear were the result of a drug induced hallucination in the 60s and 70s and cocaine fueled fever dreams in the 80s.
Just cultural differences I guess. Having said that, some of our British shows for younger children can be a bit 'psychedelic'. If you want an example of a UK show that looks like it was the result of drug-induced hallucinations, try looking up "BoohBah". That'll freak you out.
Timothy Claypole was definitely my favourite. His looks, his wit, amd his antics really resonated with me. Add to that the theme song, and you had one happy young boy!
It wouldn't have been the show it was without him.
I can remember this around 83 to 85 (probably repeats by 85) and I use to love it, I was very young , talking 8 to 10 years old,..It was very off the wall and weird, but it was awesome at the same time, Mr Claypole was class and funny, I cannot honestly say I remember specific episodes, just bits and pieces, but great memories, appreciate the upload 👍👍 Great stuff.
I couldn't remember specific episodes either, until I looked them up for this video. Thanks for taking the time to watch.
This brings back so many memories watching this with my brother in the 80's ..My dad sometimes still refers to horses as 'Dobbin' lol
Yeah, same here - I still use "Dobbin" as a standard name for horses!
Enjoyed that! I watched them all at the time and again recently. Still very funny. I was lucky enough to work with Hal Dyer in the 90s, and I see Jeremy Swan from time to time. Thank you 😁
You're very welcome, and thanks for taking the time to watch. 🙂👍
Excellent video full of information 😊 bought back lots of memories, thank you 😊
No probs. Always a pleasure.
Thank you so much Steve, an excellent trip down memory lane and full of information. I love your videos. Thanks for sharing my comment. Just listening to the theme tune takes me all the way back to my youth in the 70's. 👍🏻
I know, right? It's timeless! 🤗
Great video, loved the show, watched it on britbox, it was cheesey, but great fun. Some characters I couldn't remember.
Same here, pretty much. Thanks for wacthing.
Again ,loved the video loved your comments i have the official DVD and all the other series on bootleg DVD still funny and so well loved.
I don't remember as far back as Mumford, but most definitely remember the Meaker era. I loved the show and remember all of the later characters, but for some reason if you asked me to tell you any story line at all I'd be at a total loss!
Haha! Yeah, it was the same for me. Before looking it up again recently I could remember a lot of the characters, but nothing of the storylines. 😆
I had a sort of memory of someone before the Meakers but was never 100% sure
Ditto.
I don't remember the earlier pop off
@@MrMann0123 Tamara Novek? I couldn't really remember her either. Popov was a better name, too.
Molly Weir was a beauty even in her 70s.
She was a icon very proud too that she was a fellow scot :)
Just spotted this - what a lovely video, allowing the true affection for the show to shine through. I was born in 71 so am possibly the exact age to have watched the show throughout its run, and it was always a firm favourite. Mr Claypole reigns supreme, but I also really loved the Meakers and especially the perpetually baffled Mr and Mrs Perkins. Lovely performances from everybody and by playing it straight they allowed the absurdity and the humour to flow through.
I'm a '74 baby. My strongest memories are of the latter years for some reason, after Mumford left. Claypole, the stalwart, will always be my favourite though. Thanks for watching, and for the lovely comments.
I grew up watching Rentaghost. Loved it! This is the first time I have listened to the theme song since I was a child. Totally wonderful.. Where can I watch the series? Thank you. Paul (SE London)
I've been told they're all currently available on ITVX/Britbox at the moment. It is a paid subscription service, though.
Great video, Steve. I remember loving this series as a child. I didn't like Dobbin the pantomime horse though! Mr Claypole was my fave! 👻
Funny how things can be perceived; Dobbin was always a favourite of ours. I guess he is a bit creepy when you think about it.
All episodes of Rentaghost exist in the BBC Archives, the mentioned wiped ones were recovered from tapes previously sent to UK TV for airing on UK Gold.
You're right. I discovered this a short while after publishing the video. It's come up a few times in the comments.
Rentaghost and M*A*S*H were the two constants in my life when growing up, and have fond memories of them both. Rentaghost started when I was around 4 and finished when I was 12, but still had the repeats.
Always loved the theme music, the characters and the situations, it was a style of programme that is often imitated but no one these days really has a clue in how to pull it off.
Criminal that many have been wiped, and a shame there’s no Doctor Who type demand for restored found episodes.
Apparently since I made the video copies of the original tapes turned up and they're now available on ITVX/Britbox, but it requires a paid subscription. Good news they still exist I guess, albeit behind a paywall.
@@RetroSpectives excellent news, so a complete box set at some point possibly…
It can join the M*A*S*H, Blake’s 7 and Space 1999 sets!
We can indeed hope and dream 😊
i loved the programme and think Michael Staniforth was a huge talent, who died far far too early.
I totally agree.
Rentaghost was my favorate as a kid. There are still various episodes on youtube but not enough in my opinion
I'm actually surprised they're still on CZcams. Full episodes of anything often get removed due to copyright. I suppose after discarding & disowning 6 series of the show, it's not like the BBC technically own those episodes anymore.
They were all brilliant Steve the actors 😆 lol I still remember miss Popov played by the late sue Nichols and Michael staniforth was a iconic comedian and actor may he rest in peace 😢
Michael Staniforth .. we lost him way too soon.
i enjoyed that took me back to my youth was so daft my dad used to hate me watching it i remember.
You're not alone in that. My memories are peppered with "you're not watching that rubbish!". It's the reason I missed out on TISWAS. 😜
you'v set me off with it i'm going to watch a few episodes that are on youtube tonight i always thought dobbin meaker the horse was by far the silliest of all@@RetroSpectives
Dobbin was funnier than I remember.
Ha ha! Cheers Steve. Naught wrong with expanding yer vocabulary. I'm no bookworm but I persevered with a James Joyce assignment for one and a half volumes. Considering the sheer, mundane slog of his prose, it's perhaps ironic that I found affirmation in a healthy disregard for formal frameworks.
Alexei Sayle novels had me reaching for the dictionary at first but they now flow like a mountain spring.
Bit late to the party here but I'd always intended to catch up with this retrospective. And a heartwarming one it was, too - focusing on the genuine charms of an honest and thoughtful entertainment format. A lovely tribute to those actors who have passed away. I wouldn't have expected anything less.
And thanks so much for those kind words.
You're welcome, and thanks for your contribution. Regarding the actors .. I was surprised at how many of them had passed.
I was born at the the end of 1978 I remember whatcing the last couple of years on original broadcast sad the tapes got wiped 😢 I had a rent a ghost annual as a kid this would be in 1983 one year before the show finished
That annual .. I have an ebay search notification set up to get a copy of that. It's currently up there for about £15 to £20, but it has sold for as little as about £6-7, so I'm biding my time. I do have a Look-In annual on the way right now. That was under a fiver.
seen a couple on youtube recently -- it still holds up great -- and full of stuff for my adult self
It's interesting how some full episodes on YT just get taken down but others are up there for years. Maybe Rentaghost is considered too obscure.
I don't think my opinion that the Rentaghost theme tune is, unironically, one of the greatest television themes ever will ever be changed. I was 5 when Rentaghost finished so I think my viewing must have been almost entirely repeats, but I don't remember seeing the early stuff at all. When I got hold of series 1 a number of years ago and watched it I was struck by a) how old it looked compared to the later series and, b) that there was some Mumford fella I didn't remember seeing before. It almost felt like a different programme. Fortunately, Mr Timothy Claypole was timeless and excellent.
I definitely agree about the theme tune. It's definitely up there.
An excellent retrospective that I enjoyed watching. As for 'Rentaghost' itself, I watched it as a child in the 70's and 80's. I remember liking it to start with, but hated the cast changes in series 5 (I never liked Hazel the McWitch or Nadia Popoff), and yet perversely I always watched it! LOL.
Based on the memories I still have, I don't think there was a character I particularly disliked. If I'm honest, it hasn't really aged well, but as someone who loved it back then, I enjoy it now on rewatching, for that reason if nothing else.
Got the whole series ON DVD
Great find. Very rare these days. I recently found out that the whole lot are now available on ITVX & Britbox!
@@RetroSpectives for now......
I have vague memories of it as a very young child in the 1980s. The most memorable thing was the theme tune, but I also remember Timothy Claypole and Dobbin the pantomime horse. I didn't know it suffered from the famous "BBC let us wipe the tapes syndrome" - that is very bad that practise went on in 1990s of all things. Wasn't it repeated on early morning Saturday Childrens' BBC TV?
I know it was repeated at some point (it came up in the research) but I forget now which channel, maybe UK Gold or something similar. The tapes were wiped after that. I have managed to get hold of the full set, but only through unofficial means. It's the only way it exists now, and the quality isn't brilliant.
@@RetroSpectives Okay thank you. Yeah - according to Wikipedia, it got repeated on UK Gold during the 1990s, and apparently - the whole 9 series are available on Britbox(bar a Xmas special).
Wow. Thanks for pointing that out. I looked on Britbox when I made the video and they didn't have all 9 seasons. I'll be looking into that now, cheers.
Cast are really ghosts now.
Sad but true. 😢
I didn't realise I only really remembered season 5 on. I probably watched it all but was too young
crazy that it should be wiped as late as the 90s. thought the bbc would have learned their lesson
Having said that, apparently since making this video Britbox/ITVX now have every episode on their streaming service (subscription only), so there must have been some copies stored somewhere all this time.
Michael Staniforth - Timothy Claypole - the star of the series.
I'm not gonna disagree with that. 👍
LOVED THE SERRIES AS A CHILD ❤❤❤❤❤❤
Michael Darbyshire died in 1979, between the Christmas episode after series 4 and series 5, not 1989 as you said.
I appreciate a heads-up about errors, but in the video I said he died between episodes that went out in 1978 and 1980. If you spot anything else out of place in any of my videos, do let me know. I try to avoid gaffes, but they can slip in when drawing info from multiple sources.
@@RetroSpectives yes you did, but during the Character Profiles you gave his date of death as 1989.
@@sjcuk7 - Ah yes, so I did. Screwed up the script. Again, thanks for the heads-up.
They are all on PB, yarrrr.
Yup. Bootleg.
Did this show ever have an episode where there was a ghost living in a Manor House that was about to be demolished by a wrecking ball but was then saved by two kids?
With the limited memory I have, one episode rings a bell, with the rentaghost crew helping two ghost kids to evict a bunch of squatters from the house they were haunting.
I watched it from the beginning and carried on till around 1980/81, I remember in the 80s a certain newspaper made a song and dance about Michael Staniforth about being gay and on children's tv. I think the story just fizzled out as no one really cared and of course kids would not have known anything as they just enjoyed the show. I have watched it since and still prefer the earlier episodes, I think after series 5 it went a bit too much pantomime.
I think from my memory I must have been watching it after the Mumford era, as it's the Dobbin/Popoff/Claypole combination I remember.
I vaguely remember this. I probably caught the tail end of this show.
Possibly on reruns. This is definitely making me feel my age. 🤣
@@RetroSpectives
Old man, look at my life
I'm a lot like you were.
Old man, look at my life
I'm a lot like you were.
Old man, look at my life,
Twenty four and there's so much more
Live alone in a paradise
That makes me think of two.😂
All series are now available on ITVX
Yeah, that's come up since I made the video. Good news, though.
What's this harsh talk of "declined to appear in future" arbitrarily with no reason ? I saw a comment, and okay I have never found a verifying source for it, that says, Jackson left because he felt the show would no longer work after Darbyshire's passing.
I'm curious how much of that feeling came from the format change seen happening in Rentasanta, already while Darbyshire was still there, most of all the crap of Dobbin hated by the show's original generation. For Dobbin's first appearance was also Jackson's last.
As far as I've been able to work out, based on the limited anecdotal info available (looks like I found the same quote as you), he missed his friend and didn't feel the show would be the same without him. 40+ years later, with many passings of the actors involved, we'll probably never know exactly what happened.
I don't remember a single plot, but the characters are burned into my memory (even Dobbin and that robot Jeremy, which more than any other thing in the show dates it to the early 1980s 😁 - oh, and is also NOT A GHOST). When I saw Molly Weir in _Scrooge_ or The Bluebell's _Young at Heart_ video, I thought of her as Hazel McWitch (or, actually, Witch Hazel, though I'm not sure if that name misunderstanding was mine or my mum's, though I suspect the latter). Audrey Roberts was _always_ Miss Popov, and never Sue Nicholls, and after I first saw _Fawlty Towers_ in my late teens, that guy in the Gourmet Night episode was always Mr Perkins.
The first time Hazel the MacWitch appears she's referred to as Witch Hazel, but as far as I've seen it was always by her full name after that. I've always remembered her as Witch Hazel.
@@RetroSpectives That's interesting. I wrote that comment before I got to the point in the video you mentioned her (bad, I know, should've waited until the end 😝). When I discovered years later the name was Hazel McWitch I assumed I had been remembering wrong, and the obvious pun name had taken precedence in my mind. But when you mentioned her as Witch Hazel I realised perhaps it wasn't just my own misunderstanding.
I'm always so surprised by children's shows from the UK. All of them seem so sweet and tame compared to US kid shows. A lot of the US ones from that era would have probably been too violent for UK television. Some of them, even now, I'd swear were the result of a drug induced hallucination in the 60s and 70s and cocaine fueled fever dreams in the 80s.
Just cultural differences I guess. Having said that, some of our British shows for younger children can be a bit 'psychedelic'. If you want an example of a UK show that looks like it was the result of drug-induced hallucinations, try looking up "BoohBah". That'll freak you out.
God, most of them are dead.
It has been a while, and I suppose some of us aren't far off it either, and we were young children when those guys were adult actors.