Behind the Scenes Shot: The Alphabet Game

A few years ago, I wrote about the launch of The Children's Channel in 1984. Available only on cable television at the time, it was Britain's first channel dedicated to children's television. While it featured numerous American imports, it also contained plenty of homegrown programming.One of these programmes was The Alphabet Game, produced by Thames Television, who also contributed Funfit and Bits and Pieces for the channel. It ran for 30 episodes from the launch of the channel and was hosted by John Piper. Footage of the programme, like most of The Children's Channel's early days, is hard to come by online. Luckily, the BFI hold at least 10 of the episodes. The Thames archive from the mid-1980s also isn't badly affected by missing materials, so the whole series could still be up on a dusty shelf somewhere.But we can take a very brief look at The Alphabet Game today. Today, John Piper's daughter got in touch with me to say she had a behind the scenes shot of the series, so here it…