A full episode of The Basil Brush Show with Mr Derek

When Derek Fowlds was cast in Yes, Minister he was, as a secondary modern boy, apprehensive about playing a Whitehall highflyer, So he turned up for the first rehearsal with a pair of glasses and a posh accent.

"What are you doing?" asked Paul Eddington, "Just talk to me the way you used to talk to Basil Brush."

And this is how he talked to Basil Brush. Mr Derek was the best of Basil's companions, perhaps because he was stricter with him, which meant that they got through the story. There's a moral about parenting there somewhere.

This is, as far as I can recall, is a typical episode of The Basil Brush Show. It's one of several from the Mr Derek era on YouTube at the moment.

The Black Theatre of Prague was the sort of act you were supposed to like as a child, but perhaps didn't. Cheesy Peter Noone, only 24 in 1971, was already on the downward slope, having been huge in the 1960s. Jacqueline Stanbury worked throughout the 1970s in minor roles, including an uncredited one in The Day of the Jackal. She is married to a friend of this blog, David Wood.

But what made these shows special was the crosstalk and rapport between Basil and Mr Derek. Fowlds is on record as saying he signed up for a second series for the money, but somehow during the course of it the puppet came alive to him and became a real talking fox.

Here it's all very 1972. There are jokes about Jack Bodell, Fred Trueman (who had left Yorkshire by then and was turning out for Derbyshire on Sundays) and British Rail.

The scripts were clever, but what the audience of Cubs and Brownies the BBC assembled would laugh at was a lottery, judging by this episode. But I loved Basil Brush and his weekly shows were a treat.

Jack Bodell was a British boxer, perhaps the most notable of the 'horizontal heavyweights' that we went in for in those days.

When the greatest British heavyweight of the era, Henry Cooper, made a comeback to fight for the European title, an interviewer asked if he planned to fight another British boxer. He sounded doubtful: "if I beat Jack Bodell once more, they'll let me hang him over my mantlepiece."

But that didn't stop Bodell being promoted on the world scene. In 1971 he fought the leading white American heavyweight Jerry Quarry, only to be knocked out in 64 seconds.

Trying to salvage something from the wreckage, a British journalist asked if Bodell had been an awkward opponent. Quarry thought for a moment and replied: "Well he sure fell awkwardly."