James May, Action Man

Found this article on the Top Gear site, about the wonderful programme James May put together last Christmas: James May's Top Toys which has since been repeated at least once. Keep an eye out for a repeat this year.

"For several weeks now, I've been beavering away at my desk working on a project completely unrelated to Top Gear. I've been asked by the BBC to make Gear a one-hour Christmas special about toys, and I have to admit that I'm enjoying myself immensely. Toys are nostalgic, evocative and, above all, still great fun. Scalextric, for example, is really nothing more than an elaborate way of connecting the terminals of a 12-volt transformer to an electric motor.

If sir had pointed out that this phenomenon was the basis of all domestic motor racing, the physics lab would have been a happier place. Likewise the train set, which works in exactly the same way. I love a good train set, and a collection of Dinkies, a Mamod steam engine and a really big box of Meccano or Lego.

These things are magical and offer an immediate and welcome respite from the tedium of adulthood. The downside of all this, however, is that I'm reminded of some truly tedious toys that I'd rightly forgotten."

They call me Baby Driver ...Vroom Vroom part 2

Just found a pic of one of the cars, they were Ford Shadows, the colour on this one is close to how mine was, as I said earlier one was blue and one was red, so just visualise this one in red for the complete rose tinted picture.

Oh how I dreamed of the 6 wheeled Tyrrel, the black JPS or even the glorious red ferrari...long before the days of Schumacher and co, this was just post Graham Hill, and into the James Hunt/Nikki Lauder era. Back when Formula 1 was still a life or death game.

They call me Baby Driver ...Vroom Vroom

Every boys dream toy when I was a kid was Scalextric, slot car racing. I had this set but I cant find a picture of the cars yet. I had this one sometime around about 75-76 I think. I had one blue car and one red, as on the box. It came with this scale speed calculator thing that was my first experience of "Mind Fuck"

Anyway...with this set you could have a "figure of 8" or standard "oval" layout, complete with high speed banking which apparently made it marginally easier to keeop the cars on while going around corners. I still recall spending most of the time fetching the cars from under the sofa.

I later expanded my set by buying some extra track from Grimwades, a second hand shop in the Canton area of Cardiff. I bought extra straights, including a chicane and some barrier pieces which didn't really help keep the cars on but made the crashes a little more spectacular. After months of mindless "figure of 8ing"(funny how you could do repetitive stuff without losing your temper in those childhood days) I found that if you fixed all the straights together in one long line you could 'shoot' the cars off the end at the front room wall, the first stages of teenage rebellion??

Well the one thing that stands out the most is that the same Christmas that I got this, my sister got Simon and Garfunkels "Brudge Over Troubled Water" and I always hung around for Baby Driver to come on the Stereogram so I could wind the cars up along with the race car rev sound at the end of the track....sad???...Fuck I was only a kid!