Right said Fred, how about a knighthood?

Amid the Palins and Twiggys, Pink Floyd's Nick Mason and TV's Chris Packham being gonged in the 2019 New Year's Honours list, there was one notable absentee who surely must be up for something sooner or later - the national treasure that is Bernard Cribbins, who turns 90 today.

For Britons of a certain age - particularly mine - Cribbins is the voice of The Wombles, or Mr Perks from The Railway Children, or an early member of the Carry On troupe, or Peter Sellers' sidekick in two of his best British comedies, Two-Way Stretch and The Wrong Arm Of The Law. More recent fans may have been acquired by Cribbins' portrayal of Wilf, Catherine Tate’s grandfather during David Tennant’s tenure as the Doctor in Doctor Who.

He is still as sharp as a button at 90 and more than willing and able to keep acting, something I'd love to see him do more of. A quick scan of his press coverage will see a recurring theme, that of everyone's favourite uncle, a persona not unsurprisingly cast while voicing The Wombles in the 1970s, and that of Great Uncle Bulgaria in particular. Like his contemporary Brian Cant narrating the Trumpton, Chigley and Camberwick Green triumvirate, Cribbins' warming voice became an integral part of childhood, but his visibility on everything from regular storytelling stints on Jackanory to the televisual parlour game that was Give Us A Clue served to cement his status as a loveable, avuncular figure. Some actors might bristle at the notion that, thanks to something they did 30, 40 or even 50 years ago they have been installed as a national treasure. but not Cribbins: "Yeah, yeah, why not?", he told The Times recently. "I mean, you as an adult may not have seen my latest whatever," he said to journalist Dominic Maxwell, "but you have a long-range memory of something pleasant. It's like remembering your first ice cream or your first banana. No, I’m happy with that."

One further abiding memory I have of Cribbins is his brief, unlikely but "delightful little interlude" as a pop star in the early 1960s, recording the novelty records The Hole In The Ground and Right Said Fred with Beatles producer George Martin. I'm, obviously too young to have heard these tunes first time around, but thanks to their regular plays on Ed 'Stewpot' Stewart's Junior Choice, I still own a copy, somewhere, of a Right Said Fred reissue from the '70s. Novelties though they may be, they are further evidence of just how loveable Cribbins was then, and still is now. No wonder he was asked to sing The Hole In The Ground at George Martin's memorial service, joke fully intended.

As fine an actor as he is - and his time in Doctor Who served as a timely reminder - I go back to the 60 episodes of The Wombles Cribbins voiced between 1973 and 1975 (and repeated long after). Cribbins breathed colourful, distinctive life into the wise old Great Uncle Bulgaria, the blunt Tobermory, lovably lazy Orinoco, Bungo, the fitness freak Tomsk, brainy Wellington, the oh-la-la Madame Cholet, and one of my favourites, the occasional visitor to Wimbledon Common, Cairngorn, the MacWomble the Terrible! Cribbins' dexterity was such that you could, believably, forget that you were watching Ivor Wood's stop-motion animation characters, and their before-their-time message about litter and recycling. "Kids love a story," he told The Times. "It can be adventure or funny or whatever, but you have got to give it 100 per cent. I've thought about characterisation, interpretation, whatever you want to call it. I’m in control."

In his recent autobiography, Bernard Who?, Cribbins wrote about his work on The Railway Children - for my money still one of the finest family films ever made - in which he plays stationmaster Albert Perks. "When I was a boy, in the early Thirties, me and my pals would run to the railway bridge near our homes and inhale the intoxicating smoke and steam as an engine whistled below. The thought still makes me smile. So when my friend Lionel Jeffries phoned me nearly 40 years later to ask me to play Albert Perks, a stationmaster, in a film he was making, he didn't have to ask twice. Cribbins had, of course, worked with Jeffries - another national treasure - in both Peter Sellers crime comedies, Two-Way Stretch and The Wrong Arm Of The Law, and knew it would be fun, even with the screen adaptation of Edith Nesbit's Victorian tale of three children and their adventures living alongside a Yorkshire railway line marking Jeffries' debut as a film director. And what a magnificent job he did of it, to the extent Cribbins still speaks fondly of the scene when Jenny Agutter's Bobbie meets her father (Iain Cuthbertson) on the station platform: "If you don't shed a tear when she shouts, 'Daddy, my daddy!' you're made of wood", Cribbins says.

Cribbins' own role in the 1970 film - of which he remains justly proud ("I’ve a lot of affection for Mr Perks, it was a lovely job and it’s had a lot of long-term applause.") probably did as much as The Wombles and Jackanory to seal his status as Britain's favourite uncle. His friend Lionel Jeffries had a particular knack for being able to reach and entertain children, and I'd argue that Cribbins - for all his acting range and parts in things for grown-ups - is the same. In an era when children are only supposed to respond to culture with 'an edge', Cribbins' mellifluous intonation, and the gentle, charming stories of both the Wimbledon Common clan as well as the cinematic adaptation of Nisbet's railway family, should be nailed to the national curriculum. Happy Birthday, Bernard. Let's hope your knighthood's in the post come the Queen's Birthday Honours in the spring.

The silencing of his master's voice

© HMV/James McCauley

What Ho!, viewers. It's been a while since I've blogged, but it's the Christmas holidays and, in a welcome break from work (coupled with food-induced imobility), I'm back in front of a steaming keyboard. What has coaxed me out of a lengthy absence from the blogosphere has been the troubling news today of HMV's second collapse in the space of six years, barely three days after gift cards (or "record tokens", in old money) would have been received by teenagers eager to get out and spend their newly acquired wealth on music, video games, DVDs (or, for the more resolution-sophisticated, a Blu-ray Disc) or any other of the home entertainment-related items HMV is still, evidently, selling via its bricks-and-mortar retail outfits. Except that they wouldn't have been. 

The HMV Group Plc, to give the chain its proper name, has become the first casualty of Christmas 2018 after poor sales and 'footfall' (i.e. the number of us walking through its doors) in the run up to the big day. Should the 97-year-old company disappear completely, it will not only wipe out 2,025 jobs but also it's status as the last remaining high street chain selling physical music and video products, unless you count Sainsbury's knocking out Ed Sheeran CDs and Davina McCall DVDs as a legitimate part of the media purchasing culture.

No one, frankly, should be surprised, as sad as this news is. HMV came close to collapse almost exactly six years ago, as the move towards online streaming led to sales diving by more than 10% and HMV calling in administrators. The company was eventually taken over be restructuring specialists Hilco who closed half the group's stores leaving 125 open, including the flagship shop on London's Oxford Street. The restructuring appeared, at least for a couple of years, to work, and in 2015 HMV even overtook Amazon as the UK's biggest phyisca-format music retailer (though that number also included HMV's online sales). Before that milestone, Hilco executive chairman Paul McGowan told The Telegraph in 2014 that the HMV business was now "very profitable" and did not have a single loss-making store left in the UK. Four years ago things did seem to be looking up: quarterly sales were improving by almost 10% and sales of albums over-the-counter were up by 12 per cent. 

The problem with this picture - and you'll understand me typing this through gritted teeth - is that while there have been improvements in the sale of vinyl records (and hats off to HMV for making vinyl gondolas the centrepieces of its stores), these have been somewhat niche sales by comparison to the relentless rise of online streaming services. Why go out and browse for new music or a DVD when it's there on your phone, iPad or PC at the click of a button? The culture I have enjoyed since my teens of curating music ownership and, later, my video library when VHS came along, has been eroded by the convenience of not having to get off the sofa to go and buy it.

I know there's not much point resisting this, Kanute-like. The inexorable growth of Netflix, Amazon Prime (even at the expense of Amazon's own retail operations), iTunes and all the rest has done for the home media library. Up to a point, of course. I can see the point of no longer buying DVDs and Blu-ray Discs: when you can rent (or 'own' them) in high, 4K quality without them taking up space in your living room shelving, it's a no-brainer. And it's not even an argument to say that there are films and box sets that you do watch again and again, because unless you are the most compulsive-obsessive about The Godfather or The Sopranos, you're not going to sit through either every day of the week.

Music, however, is different. Yes, I can listen to a Beatles playlist on Spotify (as I did, perfectly happily while wrapping my Christmas presents last week) via my iPad, but that is not the same experience. Perverse - and somewhat fetishistic - as it may be, as long as I still get a thrill from buying something new from my local record shop, getting it home, unsleeving it and either putting it on the turntable or in the CD player, I will continue to be that middle-aged bloke who readily parts company with a stupid amount of hard-earned for a 'super deluxe edition' of rare and previously unreleased Tom Petty songs. Thus, I'm quite proud to be keeping my local independent record shop, Casbah Records in Greenwich, in turnover. And, before anyone asks, I'll only order something from Amazon if Graham, Casbah's always helpful co-owner, is unlikely or unable to get it in.

At the time Hilco was claiming that HMV was on the up again, Paul McGowan said that it had strategically focused on offering something that other retailers couldn't, like in-store live performances. That, however, might only have a limited appeal, especially in generating impulse purchases. McGowan was, obviously, correct when he said that clearly Amazon or Tesco couldn't and wouldn't compete with that. But here, however, is where independents do the fan experience better. Banquet Records in Kingston-upon-Thames, annexed its main retail space to create a dedicated performance room, and has also become involved in local promotional gigs by heavyweight acts like The 1975. In a high student catchment area like Kingston, that makes eminent sense and hard to imagine HMV matching.

In 2013 retail analyst Mark Saunders told The Guardian that HMV's business model had "simply become increasingly irrelevant and unsustainable". Then music and film downloads accounted for 73.4% of media purchases. Today that ratio is higher still as Netflix, Apple, Spotify and even YouTube have eaten further into what used to be regarded as "home entertainment", but is now available digitally across everything from mobile platforms to big-screen TVs as, simply, an app. Of course, evolving consumption habits isn't the only set of nails being hammered into HMV's coffin. The British high street is currently a turbulent place to be. Hilco's McGowan said, in a statement, that "Even an exceptionally well-run and much-loved business such as HMV cannot withstand the tsunami of challenges facing UK retailers over the last 12 months on top of such a dramatic change in consumer behaviour in the entertainment market," with the chain's collapse coming on top of retailers like Poundworld, Maplin and Toys R Us entering administration, with others like Superdry, Carpetright and Card Factory issuing ominous profit warnings.

HMV's travails, however, go beyond simply being another victim of high street pressures, even if high rents and low consumer confidence have had their impact. The simple fact is that people are now going no further than an app, a mouse click or a remote control button to acquire home entertainment, even if the industry body, the Entertainment Retailers Association maintains that physical music, video and games products still represent a £2 billion market, with the likes of Sheeran and films like The Greatest Showman contributing.

The question for me is, realistically, how long this market will remain. There is a generation of teenagers which, for the most part, doesn't actually own any music or video. And they're not even paying subscription services, either: YouTube does, it would appear, constitute a large proportion of entertainment consumption for digital-native teenagers and twentysomethings. Seeing my girlfriend's 17-year-old-daughter enjoy listening to music on vinyl is one of life's genuine pleasures, but even I know that she and her friends are following a latent fashion. I, for one, will continue to buy albums, but even I've stopped buying DVDs altogether. Mind you, I very rarely have the attention span these days longer than watching a Mock The Week repeat on Dave, so perhaps I'm losing the ability to do anything more than point a remote control at a set-top box. Maybe, even, I'm the cause of HMV's collapse? I hope not. Sad as it is to see a venerable and historic name go into administration for a second time, reluctantly I've got to accept that it's just the way it is, even if with the  chain's demise disappears the emotional enjoyment of endless Saturday afternoons browsing for new music that I couldn't wait to get home, unpack and play. Forget the arguments about sound and picture quality, it's that fetishistic, tactile experience that will die when the physical media experience finally pops its clogs. Today's news about HMV doesn't half feel like that is accelerating.