The Toys That Made Christmas

It's Christmas morning. Your parents are still fast asleep.

Why won't they wake up?

It's a quarter past four.

You get out of bed, creep towards the curtains.

Has it snowed?

No, it hasn't.

But who cares?

Today's not about what's out there.

It's about what's in here.

Today, it's all about...the toys.

Every year since Christmas began, way back in the early...1950s,

the toys have been different,

but the result has been exactly the same.

There are toys you'll love for ever

and the ones you'll forget about in seconds.

Toys you'll swap for football cards

and the ones you'll defend with your life.

This is the story of some of the best-loved toys of all time,

and some of the worst, some of the strangest

and some that'll make you say, "Oh, I had one of those. Yeah."

Toys, as a whole, are just brilliant connections to the past.

Just like a piece of music or a smell,

the touch of your teddy takes you back through the decades.

-Boys used to make little tanks out of wooden bobbins.

-That's right.

Cut edges on, with a candle and an elastic band and it would actually

shoot matchsticks. Roll along the floor and shoot matchsticks.

-That elastic band became a catapult as well.

-Yes.

There was one toy

I got, and I must have been about three or four years old,

and it was a circus -

a circus with a train to carry all the animals in.

And it was so brightly coloured and big to me, as a child.

And it was kept at my grandmother's house, cos I'd go there regularly

and play with it every single time I went there.

And I found it again, aged about 15-16, and it seemed so small.

But it really made me smile. It makes me want to cry now!

Cos it's all wrapped up

with memories of my nan and my grandad.

Yeah, that was a lovely present.

I have to say,

one of the greatest, magical moments of my Christmas was -

I think I was aged, it was either five or six -

I woke up, Father Christmas had been and there was a brand-new bike.

It was like seeing paradise or heaven,

Shangri-La, Nirvana - there it was, it was a Grifter bike.

It's freedom. It's the first sense of freedom.

It's your own wheels. It is like having a car as an adult.

Early '80s, I think,

was the highlights of my Christmas career.

There was always some bit of plastic tat

that you were desperate for!

I had two My Little Ponys and there was something

just really special about them. They were very compact.

They had names. I had a horse when I was little, so most of the things

that I liked were connected with horses, so it tapped into something

that I was really excited about.

I used to collect those Britain's Farmhorses.

They were more precious to me then than life itself!

It also chimed with the fact that, when I was aged between about

8 and 13, I actually wanted to BE a horse.

I did spend quite a lot of time as a horse.

I would go along the street, as if I was simultaneously horse and rider,

occasionally slapping my own leg to make me go a bit quicker.

As I say, I had a very troubled childhood!

But I'm very fond of them. I wouldn't part with them

and I'm happy to say I am no longer a horse.

Those little plastic things, it's actually quite strange

how attached to those you could be.

I've still got - it's in my handbag now -

a Care Bear that I carry around with me, that I've always,

since I was a child, carried around. Shall I show you?

There. Good Luck Bear.

Toys that you touch and you look at. The ones you remember,

the ones that are locked away somewhere in this memory bank

and you can bring it back. When I see a Dinky or a Meccano set,

it brings... It evokes those wonderful memories.

I think they have a massive impression that they can leave,

the best toys.

This is from my day,

actually!

This is Sooty!

Sooty is very, very popular, but there are so many of them

and they made a lot,

he's going to be £40-£50, something like that.

Really?

Yes, OK. No, he says he's worth more.

It's the first thing you do on Christmas Day -

open your stocking,

because you don't even have to get out of bed.

The tradition of Christmas stockings goes back to Norse times,

when children would fill their clogs with carrots and straw

for Odin's horse, Sleipnir.

Nowadays, things are a lot more sophisticated.

Odin has become Father Christmas and he gets

sherry, mince pies, maybe a little brandy,

chocolates, tot of whisky, slice of cake, maybe some Grappa.

Basically, he gets plastered.

And Rudolph still gets a carrot.

Cheers(!)

Most important of all, the clog has become a giant sock,

into which you can stuff far more tat.

The Christmas stocking of the '50s contained simple fare - nuts,

fruit, maybe a skipping rope or, if you were really lucky,

it might have an actual car.

Neeeoowww! Vvvvroomm! Brrrrooowwwww!

You look a lot less mad if you do that with one of these in your hand.

If you're a kid, full-size cars represent everything that is awful -

incarceration, tedium and something your dad spends hours polishing,

when he should be building you a treehouse.

But reduce the scale of a car about 500 times and it was brilliant.

It didn't matter if it was an Aston Martin or a Volvo estate -

it was small, shiny

and the perfect size to drive over your sister's face.

Vrrooommm!

A car is a very beautiful machine, especially when you are a little boy.

Sometimes you could get in them and they allow you to pretend to be...

anybody.

TYRES SCREECH

ENGINE REVS

We had a bit of ground you could go on, which was beaten earth, really,

and we used to tow cars around on a string.

The first contact I had was with a toy car, I suppose.

With cars, well, first of all, you all want to be men

and men drive cars. I don't know why we think that! Women drive cars.

But as a boy, you kind of think dads drive cars.

I had masses and masses and masses of cars.

I loved cars. I started with Matchbox,

cos they were cheapest. I got a little one every week,

instead of pocket money.

Lesney's,

after World War II,

hit on this thing - reducing a life-sized car,

taking out the elements and selling it for one and six,

a pocket money price. You'd have to save up for three weeks

in order to be able to buy your next Matchbox car.

And you'd keep it in your pocket.

Lesney Products started as a die casters.

They made commercial die castings for the electrical industry -

aerial sockets, pieces for record players, that sort of thing.

But the way the tax laws worked then, if you had too much stock

at the end of the year, you were taxed on it,

so companies used to stop placing orders

three months from their year end.

So there was a commercial die caster thinking, "What am I doing

"between October and December? I've got no orders."

So there's Christmas. "Let's make some toys."

It started in '51, in the cellar of a disused pub in Edmonton.

It was in the cellar because it was the only part that had a roof.

The rest of it had just been blown up, in the war.

If you look at the first Matchbox toys made,

they were all commercial vehicles.

They were toys that a child would see rebuilding London,

so there was a road roller, a cement mixer, a dump truck.

It's things they saw every day and could identify with.

It was really an idea of my father's partner, Jack.

His daughter had come home and said,

"I've got to take something to school that can only fit in my hand."

He had been playing around with the idea of making small cars

and he'd made a mould of one, gave it to her and said,

"It will fit in your hand. Take it."

You could stop these vehicles with your little finger.

They are Matchbox cars -

two-inch replicas of their expensive big brothers.

Current models or vintage cars.

Collectors as well as children buy these toys,

so the designer has to make sure the details have that authentic touch.

With the Matchbox toys, it gave children a sense of ownership.

It was small enough to be theirs.

They were sold in the 1950s for one and sixpence - 7.5 pence.

It was within the pocket money price for virtually everybody.

The child could go into a shop with the week's or the month's pocket money and buy a car.

In the early '60s, they built their biggest factory in the UK,

which was about 250,000 square feet of production space,

employed just over 1,500 people and at its top rate

could produce something like a million toys per day.

-NEWSREEL:

-'Today, the entire miniature car industry in Britain

'turns out 500 million models a year.

'In fact, it's growing more rapidly than any other side of the world's toy production

'and this company leads the world.

'Not surprisingly, they've just received their second Queen's Award to Industry -

'not bad for a firm that started in such a small way.'

The Queen came to visit one year with Prince Philip.

I have to say, it was the cleanest I think my father had ever seen the factories.

Everybody was dressed up to the nines for her visit

and she stayed about three hours, walking around,

and went away with some toys for the boys, so everybody had a good day.

My father lived and breathed Matchbox toys.

He would always tell you

that the best model they ever made was the London bus,

because everyone knew what a London bus looked like,

whether they lived in London, New York, Sydney or Moscow,

they all knew that London buses were red,

so as long as he had a London bus in the range, he was happy.

I think having a little toy car

was one step towards driving one yourself.

You could really sort of take it anywhere

and do anything with it,

it could jump over the sofa or whatever you wanted it to do,

so it was a real sort of toy that you could seriously control.

# Drivin' home for Christmas

# Oh, I can't wait to see those faces... #

I couldn't be a racing driver in a real car

but I could have a Dinky and I could pretend I was a racing driver.

This is a genuine Dinky Alfa Romeo,

made in England, Meccano, number 232.

Iconic of the time. I can be the driver.

We used to race these down slopes and by golly could they go.

This particular model will beat my grandson's Hot Wheels

every single time and it's still usable after 50-plus years.

When I was growing up, there were gimmicky cars,

so not only would you have, say, a car,

but it was a car that turned into a submarine.

It looks just like a normal car, doesn't it? Obviously.

And there were also missiles in the top and you would do that

and what I remember about that primarily is my mum had cats,

and one of the greatest things we'd do is I'd put missiles in there,

little red missiles, and I'd just go behind the cat

and I would just go like that and it would fire one.

They were really good, you could hit the cat at the back end

and it would run off and so, you know, what more could you want?

OK.

Ooh! HE LAUGHS

Oh! Oh!

Well, well, well, well, well!

My dreams have come true!

I've had to wait all these years and here it is.

Lots of children around me

were getting Scalextrics, which I never had.

It was a racing game and you think of the great racing names,

Stirling Moss.

These cars, when they came out, were full of imaginative possibilities.

You've got figure-of-eights and it goes through tunnels

and chicanes and valleys, over hills, all that kind of thing.

# I'm travelling at the speed of light

# I wanna make a supersonic man out of you... #

It was great when you could control the car enough for it

to go around the track very gently and you could sit there for hours

and it would continue to go round,

but the best thing about a Scalextric was making it do

what it wasn't designed to do -

basically, turning the track into a ramp

to see how far you could fly your car

and see how much you could knock off the shelf, you know?

Get it into the bird cage.

# Don't stop me now If you wanna have a good time... #

I wanted to create a whole country,

take a whole room and just turn it into one huge set.

That's what I wanted.

Up until the 1960s, Christmas shopping was a tranquil delight.

You walked to the high street, which was lightly dusted in snow

and bought a single present from the toy shop, usually a bicycle.

This would then be delivered by a ruddy-cheeked lad on another bicycle

to whom you would throw a shiny penny - job done.

Another lad on another bicycle would bring a goose and a truckle of voles' hearts

and that was your Christmas shopping taken care of - lovely!

Now Christmas shopping is officially designated by the UN as a form of war,

albeit one that is exempt from the Geneva Convention.

Like most other forms of modern warfare,

it is mainly carried out via computers

situated hundreds of miles from the combat zone,

which is a warehouse the size of Lincolnshire, in Lincolnshire.

CASH REGISTER RINGS

-What do you want for Christmas?

-A new bike and a pencil sharpener.

-Chocolate train?

-Yes, please.

-A sewing set.

-Tell me, what is it you want?

-A gun.

# It's beginning to look a lot like Christmas

# Toys in every store... #

Going to a toy shop was like a dream come true.

It was an incredible adventure.

There would be emporiums in the city centre of Manchester

we'd be taken to, like Aladdin's cave. It was like heaven,

but you wouldn't expect to come away with something, necessarily..

The idea of the child going wild

with excitement, with a massive list

of things that they want really starts to take off

in the mid to late '60s. By that stage, a new consumer revolution

has really bit into British life.

The kind of bold new era of the big, expensive toy is emerging.

I grew up in the purple patch for modern toys, which was the 1970s.

It was the crossover, really,

people were dumping those hapless old pick-up sticks, toy soldiers.

In were coming the first electronic games, pneumatic games, racing games

that you could pump up, all sorts of things were happening in the '70s.

I've seen this massive evolution towards saying,

"This is a big market the business needs to go for,"

and I suspect that's been helped through the media,

through the accessibility to those children. I wasn't sold to as a child

in the same way that children are sold to now.

I can safely say, as a father-of-two myself,

the amount of adverts for toys on TV

during the kids' programming is horrendous.

Every single advert, my eldest boy, Tommy, goes, "Can I have that?

"Can I have that? Can I have that? Can I have that?"

And we've given up trying to say, "No, Tommy."

Now we just go, "Yep. Yep. Yep."

Children are very aware that if they want it badly enough

and they keep going on about it,

then that is a very powerful tool to get the thing that they want.

But who cares about Christmas shopping? That's what the staff are for - Mum, Dad, grandparents.

What counts is that everything is downstairs now,

waiting for your attention.

The humble tree has borne fruit

and dropped its magnificent harvest of presents.

Hey, kids, look at that little lot.

We all remember that feeling of staring at the vast heap of presents and thinking,

"Two or three of those are mine."

Dolls were invented so little girls could carry their baby brother or sister around

without the screaming and the awkward visits from the social services when they dropped them.

At first, they were innocent and charming,

but then something happened.

Dolls started to grow up from babies to toddlers, to children.

Soon they were older than the little girls who were playing with them

and when they hit puberty, all bets were off.

They quickly developed a fashion sense,

a love for accessories, boyfriends and cars.

And who had to buy it for them? You did, of course, to show you love them.

You do love your doll, don't you?

Then why haven't you bought her a new bag, a new dog, a new boat, a new house?

One, two, three.

Early dolls were made really as more as fashion items than as toys.

They wouldn't have been particularly play items,

at least up until the 19th century.

A lot of dolls were actually quite difficult to play with.

They were quite delicate, you had to be careful with them.

# Got myself a crying, talking Sleeping, walking, living doll... #

This was my first real doll.

It was very special. I can remember reaching down, feeling and thinking,

"Oh, gosh, it is a doll." When I opened it and its eyes opened and closed, that was wonderful.

Because they were made of pottery, any bump or bang

chipped a little piece off. This one has a piece out of her head.

So, really, you treated them very gently, there was no swinging them round by their arms.

It wasn't until the introduction of plastic

that dolls just became more and more realistic.

# ..Got myself a crying, talking Sleeping, walking, living doll... #

Tiny Tears was the first one that grabbed the public's imagination.

The name as well, it was a very clever name.

Tiny Tears was a favourite. Her arms used to come off

and clearly she used to wee everywhere because that was her great attraction,

so once you had Tiny Tears,

she had to be left in the bathroom,

otherwise, she'd just leak from limbs all over the place.

The fashion dolls of the 1960s are something everybody knows about now.

The best-known fashion doll, of course, is Barbie.

The main attraction, I suppose,

if you can call it that, of having a teenage doll was that

she did have a bust, she had a bosom of sorts. She did.

When you're 10 or 11,

you want to look, like everybody, a young teenager yourself,

and so it was a sort of aspirational thing to have a doll like that.

The dolls are always an extension of your own personality.

They tap into something in little girls, particularly, and in boys as well,

about that need to dress up and to customise yourself.

# Every girl dreams of being a star

# No matter how young or old they are

# Of having a garden to make things grow

# Sindy is every girl's dream. #

Sindy's whole world was skewed

to what was happening with the girl next door,

or maybe the aspirational girl next door.

There were things like horses, ponies, stables.

A reflection in miniature of what is happening in the world outside.

We used to make a lot of things for her -

little room sets, that kind of thing.

One of my first makes was a four-poster bed,

which was a triumph of cereal boxes and frills.

I think she was special

because you could invest some of your grown-up emotion into her.

She was like an older version of you.

One year I got the Sindy house, which is a three-storey house.

My parents had to install it and put this thing up

and apparently they were still putting it up at one o'clock in the morning

when they had to ring for help. They'd had a bit of wine by then,

so it was a difficult task, but there was nothing more over-joying

than seeing that wrapped up on Christmas Day.

There were a lot of other British fashion dolls

that came out following Sindy and one of these was Daisy.

I wanted to do a doll that was fashionable

in the way my clothes were fashionable.

We had these very...11-inch dolls, like the same size as Sindy,

and we made all the clothes to go for it,

which were much like our collection.

We would show the clothes to the press

on real models, the best models,

which we gave them hair so they looked like Daisy the doll,

and the clothes were kind of full-scale,

and that was a wow! It was King's Road absolutely all over again.

Boys wouldn't have said,

"I'm playing with a doll," but it was a doll for boys.

Action Man was a soldier.

There was nothing girlie about Action Man. He had guns.

Anybody who has as fond memories of Action Man as I do

will remember, and they'll know what I am doing,

is that Action Man, you'd put your hand to the back of action man's head

and just do that with a little button. His eagle eyes.

I didn't want anything too rugged to put my Action Man in.

I wanted the amazing uniform from the Charge of the Light Brigade,

so my Action Man was the only Action Man that had thigh boots.

My Action Man never played with other Action Men.

If friends of mine came round,

my Action Man was very aloof and snooty,

but he looked sensational. By thunder, he looked good.

Toys have been around as long as children,

who have been around nearly as long as adults.

As soon as the first child spun a stick or threw a pebble at a sabre-tooth tiger,

toys were in the world.

The very first top-ten lists in the year's most wanted toys included

the hoop, the ball, the piece of wood and, the runaway bestseller

for 700 years, the pig's bladder on a stick.

In the years after World War II,

rationing led to a national shortage of pigs' bladders.

As the shortage bit and the children of Britain turned instead

to unexploded bombs as playthings,

toy manufacturers were forced to come up with safer alternatives.

For kids, the great advances in technology in the 20th century

suddenly had a purpose - toys.

A toy to me is anything that a child plays with.

You can't define it.

It's all play and they're all toys.

All children play with toys,

it's just what you count as a toy, isn't it? A stick is a toy,

a bit of mud in the backyard is a toy.

You don't have to have money to be playing with toys.

In some ways the simpler stuff's great because it helps you

develop your imagination more.

-Would you like some cake?

-Yes.

I guess the history of toys is the history of the human race

in small form and it's the history of industrialisation and consumerism,

and gender history and it is social history in a tiny nutshell.

You can see, for example, when Princess Victoria was growing up

in a very controlled, princess-like environment,

she didn't get to have much fun but one of the fun things that

she did get to do was to dress up all of her little peg dollies with her governess.

She had 150 of them, she made their own little costumes for them

and she invented these crazy back stories, they all had scandalous lives,

they were duchesses, they were having lovers, going off and doing this, that and the other.

It's great that she had something outside her immediate environment to engage her imagination.

Playing with toys is role-play, really.

Playing with other children with your toys, you're communicating,

you're learning how to get on together.

You make real-life situations within a play set-up.

It is how we work out the world,

how we understand the world and everybody's got to play.

Your toys and you had an equal relationship,

so when you are playing with them and with other people,

because my sister and I were passionate about playing with the small dolls together,

you invented a world and it was a world that you understood because you had made it yourself,

and although there was jeopardy in it - the doll that survives the fall from the windowsill -

it's still jeopardy that you've imposed,

so the psychological thing is that you are creating order.

I think that toys can give you an entirely different

and an utterly controllable narrative.

It's a trigger, or a key, to enter into a mysterious world.

I think the kind of things that a child plays with

and continues to play with,

very often influence their careers

and what they do and what they choose to do.

It's bound to make a big difference,

what you play with when you're a kid.

You could say which comes first, are you that sort of person

so those are the toys you'd enjoy, or is it that you enjoy those toys

and it makes you into a different person? I don't know,

but there's no doubt, almost everything I remember enjoying

as a kid has got some sort of echo in my later life.

There's one toy that changed my life

and it wasn't mine, it was my sister's.

Somebody bought my sister a little record player

and it was a portable... This was quite a desirable toy.

A portable record player, where you put the vinyl on

and you put the needle on the record

and it goes round like it should.

And I think it was battery operated and it would play tunes

out of a very bad speaker system, but we could hear it.

She got that, I remember, one Christmas,

and I got The Jackson Five's Greatest Hits.

So it was a marriage made in heaven.

Me and my sister became very close for about a year.

I'd put the album on on her record player and we'd dance to it.

The only record we had for about a year and we played it every day.

And I fell so much in love with The Jackson Five

that I just fell into music massively

and I started getting obsessed and buying records

with all my dinner money, my bus fare and I still have

thousands of records to this day! Mainly because of that toy.

In the '50s, the universe was still a place of mystery and wonder.

Space was still the final frontier, not a CGI backdrop.

No-one looked up at the stars and thought,

"Actually, that looked better on Battlestar Galactica."

Space represented the outer limits of the human imagination

and wherever the human imagination went, toys soon followed.

July 1st marked the beginning of one of the great

scientific adventures of our time.

# This is ground control to Major Tom

# You've really made the grade... #

Three, two, one, zero.

All engines running.

The '60s, it was all about the Space Race.

Lift-off, we have lift-off. 22 minutes past the hour,

lift-off on Apollo 11.

Toys were actually very important in reflecting what goes on

in real life.

# I'm stepping through the door... #

I'm at the foot of the ladder. Time to step on to land now.

It's one small step for man,

one giant leap for mankind.

We were obsessed - a man had walked on the moon

and all our toys reflected that paraphernalia.

My best Christmas morning, there was a toy called Johnny Astro.

It was like a balloon that attached to legs.

It was like a joystick that moved this articulated fan.

You had a throttle to get the power

and you could actually ride the balloon on this jet of air

and steer it around the room. It was brilliant.

I remember once, I'd just got it and the budgie took it down.

It was like Black Hawk Down. Pop! That was my Johnny Astro.

People were hooked into this idea of other worlds.

It took over people's imagination and the toy manufacturers

were very quick to spot this and, er,

created all sorts of weird and wonderful

science fiction characters.

I remember seeing the big package and thinking,

"Oh, my God, is that the Millennium Falcon? Please let it be the Millennium Falcon."

And even when you start to see a bit of the picture of it on it

you think, "But what if I'm wrong?

"What if it's a Millennium Falcon duvet set?"

Or, "What if it's Millennium Falcon pyjamas?

"I'll never forgive her, but I've got to smile."

And you rip a bit more and you think, "It looks really like it is,"

and when you realise it is, oh, you just...

I thought I'd died and gone to heaven when I got the Millennium Falcon.

The unlikely centre of every little boy's space age universe

is the Palitoy factory at Coalville in Leicestershire.

Here, the women are riveted to one of the busiest

production lines in the trade.

The staff here has just about doubled to meet demand.

There were always toys - Action Men, we all had Action Men -

but, suddenly, you'd see something at the cinema, then there'd be

the toy that went with it, you would have to have it.

I think the Star Wars phenomenon is the most

explosive thing that's happened in the last century.

Brilliant. Absolutely brilliant.

The whole idea of these really frightening faces,

if you can call them faces, and they're all very aggressive.

This is a big version.

They have different sizes. This would have been,

probably, quite an expensive version. With the original box for this one,

it's very nice to have it.

They make good money, you know. We're talking about hundreds,

but they've got to have the original boxes.

Not quite as chewed as this one.

All the boys would have the figures,

but you were really considered... better if you had one of the ships.

This is the toy.

It's the Star Wars Millennium Falcon.

It makes noises.

You can take the back off.

They can play their space chess.

-HE MIMICS SHOOTING

-I do still very much love this toy

and I am a little bit nervous about giving it to my two kids,

but I have promised, when I get home, that I am giving this to the boys.

So...goodbye. Goodbye, old girl.

All over the universe, wars were erupting.

Well, they weren't. We made them up

because there wasn't enough war here on Earth.

Well, there was, but it wasn't fun war.

That didn't worry the toy industry, though.

While feminists were fretting about the effect Barbie and her friends

were having on little girls, no-one was watching the boys.

Over in the blue corner, things were going absolutely haywire.

I loved guns.

Guns, for me, were fab. I had every sort of gun.

I was a one-boy armoury.

GUNSHOT

We spent a lot of time playing war games. We'd have our

stick guns and we'd be crawling through the bushes and, essentially,

killing each other. War and play, they're all part of culture,

they're all part of life

and as much as we like to think that society will be eternally peaceful,

there'll always be some kind of disruption

and this is often going to be reflected in toys

and in how children relate.

HE WAILS

We used to have gunfights which were good.

We'd try and work out who was the fastest on the draw.

GUNSHOTS

You'd meet your friends in the park and we'd count to three

and then you'd reach for your revolver.

I used to pretend to have a horse, which was quite good.

Sometimes you just had a stick, or whatever it was,

and you'd gallop along. I suppose it looked rather strange.

Every country, somehow, has to reproduce its armies.

What happened in Germany, once Hitler came to power, was that

a lot of German toy companies

had to produce figures of the entire Third Reich.

They are quite chilling when you see miniature Stalins

and miniature Hitlers, but here,

companies like Britains were doing the same.

And kids were playing it out because it was part of their environment at the time.

If you talk to people born during the war,

they, quite often, played on bombsites.

And there could be nothing more exciting than playing on a bombsite.

You improvised in those days.

You were going out, running around,

pretending you were being chased by Japanese soldiers

or Germans or whatever.

It was ten years after the war, so very much still in memory.

World War II was still very fresh in people's minds.

We used to talk about going up to play on the bomby

and it was this area of land where a land mine had dropped up the street,

where incendiaries had dropped. Some front doors hadn't been repaired,

but it basically was bombed buildings.

So that was part of play.

Those kids who played on those bombsites,

that was the beginning of the adventure playground movement.

That's where that idea came from because playgrounds were

very prescriptive, but if you could actually transpose in a safe environment

that sense of adventure, of going into the unexplored

and away from the adults, that was amazing.

It's 11 o'clock and everyone is in the kitchen.

It's Christmas, why are they in there?

Are they nuts? Yes, they are.

They're making Christmas dinner, they're swearing

and drinking and crying and it's like a Mike Leigh film

with bread sauce. I'd get out before you get dragged into it.

You see that present? The ball-shaped one?

It's a ball.

Grab it and run.

We used to use a tennis ball to play football.

Replica footballs weren't really available.

It would be something special to get what we would call a Casey,

which was like a leather football with a bladder inside

and some stitching. And if you headed that, it would knock your head back,

particularly if it was wet.

Historically, the key toys have been the ball,

something that spins, something to wrap up and cuddle,

something on wheels to pull.

Different things come in, new materials and everything.

But a ball is still a ball, and something so simple in design

which has such huge ramifications, for catching,

for kicking, and supports a huge industry, the football industry.

Where would it be without the ball?

Here we are at the Subbuteo Stadium. Here come the teams.

It's England versus Brazil. England kick off. A beautiful ball.

And there's a quick breakaway.

Oh, good play! England shoot.

What a save! And it's a corner.

Subbuteo was the traditional football game.

So it's 1-0 to England.

The pitch, from what I remember, was a cloth.

The players were like little Weebles, little weighted, round things.

And the player would be on this.

And so it would wobble, but it wouldn't quite fall down.

You get the goal, you could even get a crowd on the really special

Subbuteo sets, and you really feel wow.

You line your teams up, you get a ball,

and basically you flick the base of the player and it kicks the ball.

It was just post-war.

There was actually a game on the market called New Footie.

My father saw this and he suddenly had an idea

that he could improve on it.

He put an advert in a boys' magazine at the time.

It was called Boy's Own magazine.

He went away. I think he was in America on holiday.

He got a telegram from his mum, saying,

"I've had loads and loads of replies to this advert,

"and people are actually sending in their postal orders."

And he said, "We've got a bit of a problem.

"People are sending in their money wanting a game

"and there is no game to go out."

So it was all hands to the pump to get a basic game up and running.

And as it was post-war, he had a problem with getting the actual playing pitch.

So what he did to get round that, he enclosed a piece of chalk

in the game, and there were lots of old army blankets lying around,

people had them at home. And with the instructions in the first sets,

it said, "Here's a piece of chalk,

"mark out your own pitch on an old army blanket."

And that's really how it started.

Subbuteo was the ultimate game you wanted as a boy.

I remember getting our first set. The little men, it was brilliant.

I remember them in their package

with the goalie with the long green thing.

And I had a Chelsea one and my brother got the Spurs one.

I think the magic of it was

that little boys, or even the dads, used to play.

I think it's being able to recreate real football matches in miniature.

We're human. We build. We can't help ourselves.

Ever since Neanderthal man took two bits of wood

and joined them together with dried animal gut,

we've made things with no discernible purpose.

For some, this instinct led to such wonders as the pyramids,

Stonehenge, the ships that conquered the seas,

the cities that reached for the skies.

Anyway, good luck to them. For the rest of us,

it meant a wonky crane with the rope all twisted,

or a Wellington bomber with one of the engines glued on back-to-front.

Construction toys are there to make our inner idiot

feel like a Nobel Prize-winning engineer.

I believe some products that really engage the child

have a timeless appeal.

You ask anyone that ever played with it, they LOVED their Meccano.

Meccano - you were there, you were involved, you were an engineer,

even at the age of seven, making little things.

They are miniatures of real life, aren't they?

And you've got your own world to set about and have as you want it.

I'd build cranes, I'd lift things up, I'd build windmills.

I even built my own pinball machine out of cardboard with flippers.

I used bits of inner tube around the Meccano flippers.

-Yeah.

-It didn't spring, you just had to wind it.

I could play with steel ball bearings.

I still think Meccano was the great toy of...

well, of my lifetime, really.

These lovely surprise boxes used to arrive.

My father used to bring them back from the factory.

It was so fascinating, the way it was presented and boxed

and so attractively painted.

I've got here this box of Meccano

which I think is probably late 1940s, which I bought

in a closing-down sale in a shop for 60p about 30 years ago.

Every set of Meccano had a handbook of what you could do,

what you could make with that set.

They originally called it Mechanics Made Easy.

And then it was a bit of a long sentence

so they just thought up Meccano,

and it seemed absolutely right, didn't it? It still does, actually.

Frank Hornby, who designed Meccano, is the most fascinating character.

I remember him very well, although I was only seven.

He always smoked gorgeous Corona cigars,

so you knew when he was around.

He had a lovely waxed moustache, wore very nice suits,

and had a silver-topped cane.

He actually was what I suppose you'd call a great Victorian.

Frank Hornby was a businessman, a bit of an inventor.

He was looking for something for his sons to play with, something new.

And, of course, they would build things out of construction sets,

but in those days, they would be made of stone bricks

or possibly wooden bricks and things like that.

He had this idea to use strips of metal, nuts and bolts.

You know, you got your little screwdriver and spanner

and things like that.

He created these designs that could make all sorts of different

things out of this core kit.

I think he was very interested in everything to do with windmills

and natural energy and water mills and everything that worked naturally.

And he thought that everything that was built was beautiful,

and he wanted children to be able to reproduce them.

He believed passionately - he was a man of his time -

that boys should learn about mechanics and engineering.

One of Frank Hornby's ideas was that he wanted boys in particular

to think about what they were doing,

and plan and follow probably quite a detailed plan.

Architects and engineers, you still hear them saying

on the radio or on television,

"We built it first with a Meccano set."

This painting is of Winston Churchill and his nephews

helping him to build a Meccano set.

Apparently Winston Churchill was going through a difficult time

and needed something to perk him up, and it helped a lot.

It's made of acrylonitrile butadiene styrene.

It's exactly 8mm by 9.6mm with a 5mm diameter raised circle.

It is, of course, a Lego brick, and it's been that way

since exactly 1:58pm on the 28th January 1958.

Any brick manufactured from that moment onwards

will fit into a brand-new Lego brick with the same satisfying...

CLICK

Isn't that lovely?

The plastic generation started after the Second World War.

The introduction of durable plastic

is a significant turning point in toy production.

Everybody started making all sorts of toys.

Toys that were produced cheaply, all sorts of different colours.

You could make anything out of plastic.

A Danish chap called Christiansen

thought this would be the thing to make bricks out of.

I was probably one the first children in the country to get Lego

and it was all, in those days, red and white.

Either what we called eights or fours, like this.

One of the things about Lego - and it was designed this way -

is that every piece of Lego can be used with every other piece of Lego

that's ever invented.

It has such versatility.

Essentially, it's a brick but then, from that brick,

you can make what you like.

The great thing about it was you could build anything you wanted.

It was a way of exploring your imagination, of creating another world.

What Lego have done so brilliantly, they found a way to evolve

the core principle of a building brick in a range of other areas.

They did a brilliant commercial which captured this.

That commercial, for me, is the best toy commercial ever.

TOMMY COOPER: You see, I was standing outside my mouse-hole the other day

when all of a sudden, along comes this cat.

So, quick as a flash, I turned into a dog. A-ruff-ruff!

But the cat turned into a dragon, so I turned into a fire engine.

How's that?

And then he turned into a submarine.

So I became a submarine-eating kipper.

I said a kipper, not a slipper. Thank you very much!

But he turned into an anti-kipper ballistic missile

so I turned into a missile cruncher. Crunch, crunch, crunch!

Just in time to see him change into a very big elephant.

So do you know what I did then?

I turned back into a mouse and I gave him the fright of his life.

Just like that! Ha-ha-ha-ha!

The secret to the most timeless toys and the best toys,

is that, actually, they're not the end product.

They allow you to play in different ways.

So Meccano and Lego and Action Man and Barbie

aren't really about what's produced by the manufacturer.

They're about everything that's around it that's created

by the person playing with it.

Lego is just a brick but then, when you build it up,

it becomes a fire engine, a monster or a spaceship.

The thing about enduring toys,

you can add to them and it's what you invest in them.

When you invest your imagination in them, that's what makes them endure.

Remember Gonks?

Neither does anyone else.

Not every toy can be Meccano or Lego,

still as popular now as the day it was launched.

Some burn brightly for a year or two,

before crashing to Earth in charity shops, car-boot sales and toy museums.

These are the crazes.

Whatever that year's craze was, if you didn't have one,

you might as well have gone to school dressed as one of the Von Trapps.

They were must-have items - Hula Hoops, roller skates,

Deely-boppers, Clackers, BMX bikes - and, in 1987,

four little turtles named after Italian Renaissance artists.

Weird!

Every year, the media would be full of horror stories about that year's craze -

they were dangerous, antisocial, non-educational...

But everyone knew what these stories really meant - they were brilliant.

Crazes come and go and I can't fathom why.

I built the whole Troll village in the garden.

They were just great.

# Grab it to the east Grab it to the west

# Grab it any place you like it best... #

Cabbage Patch dolls.

I mean, for goodness' sake, what was all that about?

But you had to have them because, already in the States,

every child had to have one, well, of course we've all got to have them.

ARCHIVE: It's caused angry scenes

and injuries inside stores as customers join in buying stampedes.

Hold it! Hold it!

What do we tell our little girl on Christmas morning?

What are we supposed to say? You've been good, but Santa ran short?

They marketed it brilliantly.

They'd have the little doll heads surrounded by a cabbage leaf

and, to a kid, it looked like a child was growing in a field.

Toys being successful is all about the right time,

the right place, the right moment and the right mood.

And sometimes a lovely toy can come out

but it just doesn't quite hook into the feeling of the moment.

It'll sit there for years

and then suddenly someone will spot it again and say,

"That's absolutely brilliant."

It's almost like they can sit there dormant for a while

and then the world around them makes them relevant

and everyone goes, "Oh, there it is again."

ARCHIVE: Remember the yo-yo?

It certainly made a comeback at the Yo-yo World Championships recently in Mexico City.

The yo-yo has a very long history.

There are pictures of the yo-yo on ancient Greek vases, for instance.

It actually becomes very popular in the 18th century,

in France in particular,

in the aristocratic level of society, including royalty.

And when a lot of people had to leave France during the French Revolution and came to England,

they brought the yo-yo with them.

It also found its way down to the Philippines

where a variant of it was used as a weapon.

But people were also playing with it and an American chap called Duncan

saw this and he thought it looked quite fun.

So he actually brought it back to the States.

The thing about the yo-yo in general is it's such a simple toy.

Basically, it's some wood and string.

It's very easy. You could even make your own.

Solve the cube.

It was the ultimate puzzle game.

I got so frustrated that I was one of those kids that peeled all

the stickers off and then put them

back on in the order they should have been instead of trying

to fiddle around with it and wasting my time doing this stupid thing.

Crazes like that have a certain uniqueness about them

and there is something that just catches the imagination.

Just before going on air I set Hugh Scully problem,

a problem tackled by millions of people every day

with varying degrees of success.

I was given one of these puzzles for Christmas

and it has been driving me absolutely mad.

Brainchild of Hungarian Professor Erno Rubik, it is rapidly assuming

the status of a world cult.

Rubik invented the cube to help his students at Budapest University

to think in three dimensions.

It is a very basic form, a very basic problem.

I probably could still do it now if you gave it to me.

I wasn't quick but I learned how to do it

because I wasn't going to be beaten by it.

25 seconds gone.

Think about how many hours of fun you have with a cube.

If someone tossed a cube at you and said, "Work that out, mate,"

days, weeks, you were sitting there going...

This book has been one of the publishing sensations of the year.

It is called You Can Do The Cube

and has just become an American bestseller,

number one, in fact.

I thought it might sell 10,000 copies.

But it's sold over a million, which came as a shock.

One night I got a phone call, they said, "Congratulations."

Just when you are about to finally crack the Rubik's Cube,

well, you have done half of one side, nearly half, two squares,

something terrible happens -

you have to stop playing with your presents and eat lunch.

Nothing wrong with that idea in principle.

Shove a bit of fuel in the tank. Keep you going for another 18 hours.

But it is not just any lunch. It's the biggest lunch in the world.

-# Do the turkey hop

-Do the turkey hop

-# When you start

-You don't want to stop

-# If you want to be slick

-You'd better grab a chick

-# Then do the turkey hop

-And never stop. #

What is it all about?

The average person eats 6,000 calories

on Christmas Day. Three days' allocation of food in one day.

What?!

Christmas dinner - I must have been three and a half stone in weight

but I sat there until I could not move.

I would eat everything.

Overcooked dry turkey, loads of roast potatoes,

parsnips, cauliflower, cabbage, sausages in bacon,

and loads of stuffing.

Christmas pudding that nobody really likes. It is always the same.

And then a great big hunk of bird carcass

that you have to pick at for the next two days.

Nothing has changed at all.

People have always saved their money for the best

they could possibly get at Christmas.

Certain foods become associated with that very early on,

largely due to price.

If you were to look in a medieval kitchen at Christmas

they would be using the raisins, dates, figs, spices,

which we still use as Christmas food.

All that mince pie, Christmas pudding sort of flavours.

Mince pies are a superb invention.

Probably one of the West's greatest inventions since the motor car.

You have got light, buttery, flaky pastry and sweet mincemeat inside.

What is not to like?

It is in a handy, one-size mouthful if you are so inclined,

but at the most two or three.

You can go in the kitchen, nick one and no-one will ever know.

My mother used to make everything herself. Christmas pudding,

Christmas cake, and a thing peculiar in Scotland called a black bun.

I remember my mother doing absolutely everything.

Laying the table, doing all the preparation,

and I'm afraid doing the clearing up with very little help.

We used to have a big joint of ham, this is really weird, for breakfast.

And pickles.

Then at lunch we would have the full-monty blowout.

Lovely turkey which my mum would always slightly overcook.

That's how we like our food - slightly overcooked.

My mother put the turkey on at nine o'clock the night before.

Can you believe that? What was she trying to do? Make a pair of shoes?

# Jingle, jingle, jingle, jingle. #

Doing a Christmas lunch

for many more people than you would normally cook for is really hard.

You try plating up 8, 10, 12, 14 dishes.

You're not caterers.

You're people at home.

You're not supposed to be able to do this. It's stressful.

You want everybody to have a good time,

but the person not having a good time is you.

When I had my family coming round, I'd opened all the presents,

I thought, "Give me a tin of Quality Street,

"stick some James Bond on, I want to lay on the sofa." No.

It's this mammoth cooking task. My mother's in the kitchen,

along with my father,

all these pots and pans are going, and then you sit down as a family,

and you have your Christmas dinner.

One Christmas, I remember my dad

wanting everybody to sit around the same table.

So what he did was he knocked down the wall

that divided the living room and the dining room,

and then put one huge table through the middle of the wall, you know,

so we could all sit together.

It was wonderful, it was one of the best Christmases we had.

And after Christmas he bricked up the wall again!

-And Christmas crackers.

-Oh, yeah.

-That was sometimes the best thing about Christmas dinner.

-Yeah.

The hats were annoying, they were always too big for me.

I was eating my dinner, and it was slipping down my face.

Sticking a fork through a paper hat - it doesn't work!

# Christmas pudding Listen to the sleigh bells ring

# Christmas pudding Surely is the thing... #

Always a Christmas pudding

with a sixpence inside, that someone was going to get,

and with three children, there was always a fight

who was going to get the sixpence.

Anybody at Christmas going for a slice of cake and a cup of tea

is a wuss - by tea-time, you should be on the hard spirits.

As I've got older, I have got into all the things you're supposed to

like about Christmas - long walks, furry jumpers,

baked potatoes, small glasses of Aberlour.

-Asti Spumante!

-Asti Spumante!

It was brilliant! "Would you like a little bit, son?" "Oh, yes, please."

And what was great, there was always little bits left, so I'd go,

"I'll clear the table." On the way to the kitchen, I'd be...

Just out of badness! It was great.

# Have a holly, jolly Christmas... #

We did look forward to all these meals.

You were very, very stuffed by the end of the week.

It stretched over to New Year's Day,

and then, boom, life became grey again, but for just that week,

it was very red and very rosy.

# Oh, by golly Have a holly jolly Christmas

# This year! #

Finally, six hours later, lunch is over.

The survivors are carried out on makeshift stretchers

and given emergency resus. For the children of Britain,

it's time to gather round the TV and shout, "I want one of those!"

Television introduced different things to children

that they wouldn't have seen if they didn't go in the shops.

Sooty and Muffin, they were marketed for children -

that's perhaps the first consumer thing I remember.

Muffin was from the early days of television.

There weren't that many programmes, full stop, but there weren't

that many programmes for children on television,

so when Muffin was on, the younger children really loved him.

And, of course, then they started producing the toys.

You get the character merchandise bit starting up.

A company called Moko made the very famous metal Muffin puppet,

that children could play with themselves.

That's one thing I did want, this metal Muffin the Mule,

with the strings that made it dance, just like on television.

Television was a massive influence.

My goodness me, there's Father Christmas himself,

with his red cloak and his white beard, riding on a sleigh!

Oh, Muffin, of course, it's Muffin the Mule...!

Muffin the Mule is probably the first star of children's television.

He appeared in a programme along with Annette Mills,

who was a singer-actress.

This is Muffin's Christmas party, you know.

Muffin, I just wiped it! Come along...

We all called her Annie.

She was always the star of television to me.

She was a sort of fairytale character -

beautiful dresses, rustle of silk,

gorgeous big collars and petticoats.

She was around and about,

but I was too tiny to really take notice.

I remember a pretty lady sitting at the piano, playing the tunes

from the Muffin the Mule show,

and her petticoats rustled!

# We want Muffin Muffin the Mule... #

# We want Muffin, Muffin the Mule

# Dear old Muffin Playing the fool... #

There was none of this, hide the strings and pretend.

She sat there on the chair and the strings went down,

and Muffin would go clickety-clacking along.

Muffin!

I've got an attic full of fan letters from people asking Muffin

to solve their problems, and who absolutely loved him

and wondered what he got up to when he wasn't dancing on the piano.

-NEWSREEL:

-'This television star was made of plywood and felt,

'and through him, Annette Mills reached the hearts

'of countless children and grown-ups.'

The advent of television

changed absolutely everything,

because it was the beginning of the consumer age.

Television made toys much more glamorous than they actually were.

It built a story, very professionally, around the toy.

It made the thing itself much more exciting.

You all had to have the Steve Austin Six Million Dollar Man doll,

which, you looked through his eye, and he had an arm...

You pressed his back, and because he was strong, he would do that,

and lift it up, and that was the height of cool, we had to have one.

It was getting a toy of something that was a cartoon series,

like Transformers.

You saw them as cartoons,

so to actually be able to touch and handle them was great!

Wait, Dad's saying something. He's had what?

An idea? Oh, this always ends badly.

And today he's had his Christmas idea -

he wants to go for a walk.

No-o-o...!

ICY WIND BLOWS

After an hour or so of this foolishness, Dad is satisfied,

and you're allowed back indoors - once your hands have thawed,

you can play with some of the things that come in boxes.

My mother was brought up during the roaring '20s in the States.

She still danced the Charleston till the day she died.

She smoked, when women just didn't smoke.

She was a game gal!

Her parents sent her over to Paris to study art.

She ended up as a graphic designer, which stood her in good stead

in designing Fuzzy Felt.

My parents came back to live in Farnham Common,

where my parents bought a house.

My father went off to war, and my mother was left with a large garden

that had a lot of outbuildings,

and she decided to do something for the war effort.

She approached Coopers Mechanical Joints in Slough,

and started making gaskets.

She employed the local women to come in and help her.

The women, by and large, had young children,

so my mother set up a creche.

She found out that cut, felt shapes stuck to the back of a table mat

would keep the children amused - and out came Fuzzy Felt.

I grew up in the '40s and '50s,

and I think toys that took a long time to create

were really important, because there was a lot of time to fill,

because you didn't have a lot of things.

My mother designed everything, all the way down to the lettering.

She was very, very particular in having things absolutely just right.

She wouldn't bring a product to market unless she was happy

that the child could make a really good number of pictures

without running out of ideas.

I loved toys where you could build from nothing into something.

On a plain board, you could build a garden full of colour.

And then you could actually build a little girl or a little boy.

We had the most magical working relationship.

I ran the factory, she did the designing.

I had to call her by her Christian name from an early age.

At trade shows, you can't really say, "Mummy, what do you think of this?"

So I called her by her name, Lois.

The only time I really used the word Mummy was at Christmas,

on a present or something.

Spirograph was the hallucinogenics for the under-10s.

While our parents were getting battered on sherry and port,

we were getting high as kites making these endless swirly patterns -

round and round and round and round and round and round

and round and round and round and round.

HE MOUTHS

And round and round...

and round and round and round and round.

Spirograph was

an invention by my father that enabled children

to draw patterns

that had a wonderful symmetry, texture and colour

very simply, just by using a pen, and a cog round a wheel.

At first, you just do a pattern

but then you realise you can go outside the big circle

and build up matrixes of stuff.

You could make thousands of different types of patterns

so I'd spend hours doing these then I'd plaster them over the walls.

-ARCHIVE:

-Perhaps this new toy is one of the few completely original toys of the century.

It was designed by an engineer, not a toy manufacturer.

With these wheels, a child may teach himself more economically

the real meaning of mathematical relationships.

These patterns can give an insight into the orbits of space capsules or satellites.

In the 1960s, so many things seemed to be going on,

all the boundaries seemed to be coming down,

politically, economically or whatever.

In effect, if you had an idea, you could run with it.

Dennis Fisher studied the design of a pound note.

He thought its intricate patterns were made by a simple gearing mechanism

There and then, he decided to make a pattern-drawing toy

based on that principle.

His problem - how to translate algebraic formulae into shapes.

My father had always been fascinated

throughout his life with mathematics.

He enjoyed the magic of numbers.

Music was an integral element within his creative process.

He was very knowledgeable about the engineering of plastic

so he was involved in the first prototype.

Then he had to go out and sell the idea.

Everything was staked on it. His Rollei camera was sold.

My mother sold her jewellery.

His dark room was dismantled and that equipment sold off.

My first job ever was, at the age of 15, to demonstrate Spirograph,

Christmas 1965 at Matthias Robinson department store in Leeds.

I wasn't too far away from Santa's grotto.

I had a table and I'd be busy drawing away

and feeling alternately chuffed with what I was achieving

and a bit embarrassed if the pattern didn't go exactly as I'd wanted.

A lot of children over the world

have had a great deal of pleasure from using Spirograph.

For some of them,

it may have been a springboard to develop an artistic career

or a mathematical career or maybe an engineering career.

I brought down the first production set ever made of Spirograph

and on the back there is a little message I'd like to read, if I may.

It says, "The first set to be presented in the world

"to my very dearest wife, fellow director and friend Betty.

"Dennis, 1964, Christmas morning."

If you're lucky, Santa's brought you a new board game.

Look at it - a promise of hours of laughter, thrills and entertainment.

You unfold the board,

get all the little pieces out of their plastic bags,

shuffle the cards

and then, there it is.

The rule book.

It lands with an audible thud and you feel the icy hand of reality gripping your shoulder.

Maybe it's in 16 languages? Nope - just English.

This is going to be about as much light-hearted fun as trying to land a 747 on one engine.

On a motorway. In thick fog.

But you're not going to back down now,

not in front of the whole family.

You're going to enjoy the next five hours if it kills you.

Right - roll a double six to start.

What kind of sadistic mind made that the very first rule?

Damn you, Waddingtons!

40 minutes later, someone rolls a double six...and we're off.

Parlour games are really good at emphasising two things -

family togetherness but, at the same time,

that slightly what we might think of

as a safe way of letting out dangerous passions.

The youngest can be more powerful than the eldest.

Christmas, particularly, was spent playing board games.

We actually didn't have a television for a long, long time

so it was, "Bring out the games."

Lots of laughter, lots of buzziness and maybe lots of fights as well.

# So you win again

# You win again... #

I always played to win.

If I thought I wasn't going to win,

I could turn into the most negative of players.

I'm ashamed of myself. Arlene, you're a bad board-game player.

For most of us, it's an escape into a dream world of property deals,

big business and takeover bids.

The most popular board game in the world - Monopoly.

MUSIC: "Money" by Pink Floyd

Monopoly, to me, was the big-time.

I'd never been to Bond Street. I didn't know where Mayfair was.

I knew Fleet Street was where they printed newspapers.

For me, it was like a big adventure.

Monopoly is actually a really geeky,

odd thing for children to like and they can't possibly understand it.

I realise now I used to play it without understanding any of it.

"Annuity matures" and things like that on the chance cards.

At the start of the game, you'd get a certain amount of money,

which, obviously, I didn't have when I was a kid, so I had money in my hand.

I could choose to buy what I wanted to. I had choice, I had freedom.

I was a businessman.

I took it so seriously.

The worst thing you could ever say to me was, "I give up."

No, I wanted you out of your house.

The history of Monopoly goes back to the early 20th century.

It's based on a game called the Landlord's Game,

which was conceived by a lady called Lizzie Magie, who was a Quaker.

At that time in America,

there was a movement to create a new tax for landowners

because it was seen that a lot of people who rented land were losing out

and the landowners were just getting rich and fat.

Charles Darrow, who's the man credited with inventing Monopoly,

came across a version of this game and created his own version.

His board used the streets in Atlantic City

where he used to go on holiday.

Monopoly now - he who wins everything, wins the game.

That wasn't the original idea at all.

We bought a new Monopoly set last Christmas

but it's one of those where there's no money any more.

You get a credit card and the banker has a card reader

and he swipes your card.

-"Pass go, collect £200."

-Does he?!

-Yeah, we've got it at home.

It's exactly the same but it has moved with the times a little bit.

Oh! It's nearly over.

Tomorrow is Boxing Day, the worst day of the year.

364 days till Christmas.

Let's finish with some excitement - go out with a bang.

The Gilbert U-238 Atomic Energy Lab -

the one with little samples of actual uranium in it.

Yeah - let's play with that(!)

You just fire up the reactor and hope for the best.

If all that seems a bit brutal,

maybe you just need something to cuddle.

In Victorian Britain, cuddling was simply not done.

Anyone caught having a cuddle

would immediately be transported to Australia, on the orders of Queen Victoria.

But as soon as the old misery died in 1901,

cuddling came out of the closet.

We weren't quite ready to cuddle each other -

that sort of thing didn't happen till the '60s -

so we turned for the answer to the cuddliest nation on Earth - Germany.

The first teddy bear was made by Steiff

and named after President Teddy Roosevelt, who had refused to shoot one on a hunting trip.

History does not record whether or not he cuddled it.

But cuddling was on - and a whole new world of toys was born.

Post war, when things were hard to come by, people made do

and these toys - this was mine, this was my brother Peter's -

were made from the same raincoat.

The elephant was made from the outside, the gabardine part,

and my teddy was made from the lining.

Put together specially for me, he's unique.

I wouldn't have another teddy with lots of fur or anything.

I think he's perfect. Absolutely perfect.

The teddy bear as a toy was first produced in Germany.

The famous Steiff company, which was started by Margaret Steiff in the 19th century.

But it wasn't called a teddy bear at that time.

In 1904, Theodore Roosevelt,

the President of the United States, went out shooting for bears.

The story goes that Roosevelt - he was known as Teddy -

couldn't find any bears so some people captured a little bear cub

and brought it to him and said, "Here's a bear cub you can shoot."

He looked at it and said, "I'm not going to shoot that."

This little bear cub was then featured in a cartoon

and from then on became associated with Teddy Roosevelt.

At that stage, there was a toy buyer from one of the big stores in New York

who went to the Leipzig Fair in Germany,

which was the big toy fair.

On the Steiff stand was a bear, a soft toy bear.

He bought 500.

Then the association between the soft toy bear and the real bear and the name Teddy came about

and gradually people started calling it teddy bear.

The teddy bear has definitely become one of the most popular

and iconic toys of childhood.

There's that instant love of something soft and cuddly.

You could hug it and it became your friend.

This is Robert. Or Bob the Bear, we used to call him.

Look at him - he's patched up, really solid, not cosy at all.

But, being a lonely kid,

I used to have to have a mate and he was my mate.

I did have a bit of a collection

but there was always one bear that was slightly more in my favour.

We used to have arguments.

He was quite an aggressive little bear.

But, anyway, we're friends now.

Finally, you've hit the wall. It's bedtime.

Naturally, you take your absolutely favourite toy of the day to bed with you.