Horsing About

Whilst looking through the list of LoveFilm suggestions for the kids’ weekly film I noticed an adaptation of “Black Beauty” came up. Now, I seem to recall that this story is a bit of a weepy but I suggested it anyway. None of the children had heard of it or had any idea what it was about. This seemed rather odd to me because I recall there always being a horsey type show on Children’s TV when I was growing up. In fact, this was partly because I had two girl cousins who were horse mad (in fact, I think they still are) so, when we were round at my grandparent’s house, anything remotely horse related would be on TV. Fortunately, these never seemed to clash with Doctor Who, The Six Million Dollar Man or anything else I wanted to watch at the time: probably an advantage of there only being three TV channels back then.

I actually have rather fond memories of these programmes but I never really paid much attention to them apart from the fact that they always seemed to have the most fantastic theme music. Black Beauty was a case in point:  having just looked it up the theme was called “Galloping Home” by Denis King which won, quite deservedly, an Ivor Novello award in 1973.

Another horsey adventure series was one I couldn’t even remember the name of. I used to think it was called “The Lighting Tree” after its theme tune but also misremembered it as "Follyfoot Farm". Having just looked it up it was actually called just Follyfoot. Aside from the theme tune I also vaguely recall that it had Q from James Bond in it… and horses, of course.

Going slightly further back was a German TV series which used to be shown on the BBC called White Horses. In fact, this was a bit of a weird one as the theme tune was written especially for the UK dubbing of the series. Again, aside from the theme I could not really tell you much about this other than it involved a teenage girl and a horse.

In fact there were some horsey type TV series that I did used to watch as they were more about cowboys and the like. I suppose the one I really remember of these was Champion The Wonder Horse (with another very memorable theme)

… and there was always another series that I used to watch that appealed to my sense of the ridiculous. Mr Ed, the horse that talked.