Play School is a fondly loved TV series for many of us as it was on air for so long, starting with it’s first showing on 21st April, 1964 until it’s last episode on 11th March, 1988. It accidentally became the first ever programme to be shown on the fledgling BBC2 after a power cut halted the opening night's scheduled programming. Play School originally appeared on weekdays at 11am on BBC2 and later acquired a mid-afternoon BBC1 repeat.

Opening Sequence
There were several opening sequences to Play School, leading to much drunken debate about how the show started with both people often being right! The first one was, “A house with a door, windows 1 2 3 4, ready to knock? Turn the lock… It's Play School”

This changed in the early seventies to “A house with a door, 1 2 3 4, ready to play, what's the day? It's... Monday (or whatever day it was)”

A further change in the late seventies saw the important addition of the word, windows. So it now went, “A house with a door, windows, 1 2 3 4, ready to play, what's the day? It's... Monday (or whatever day it was)”

The final version, used from 1983 dispensed with the house, doors and windows to simply become, “Get ready - to play. What's the day? It's... Monday (or whatever day it was)”

The Toys
Remembered often better than the presenters are the supporting cast of toys, including (drum roll please)…

- Big Ted and Little Ted

- Jemima (a ragdoll with long red and white striped legs)

- Hamble, (a scruffy and ordinary plastic doll. It was one of the five original dolls, but was replaced by Poppy. Hamble was chosen as representative of a more downtrodden, humble background than the "middle-class" associations that the teddy bears had.

- Humpty ( a dark brown large egg-shaped soft toy with green trousers, to look like Humpty Dumpty from the nursery rhyme)

- Poppy (a black doll who replaced Hamble in the later years of the series in response to changing attitudes in society (the Hamble doll was also getting rather fragile at this point.))

A section of each episode was the video excursion into the outside world taken through one of three windows. The viewer was invited to guess whether the round, square, or arched window would be chosen that day. A triangular window was added in 1983. Very often the film would be of a factory producing something such as chocolate biscuits, or of a domestic industry such as refuse collection.

At the beginning of the 1983 revamp, the windows were now referred to as shapes as in let's have a look through one of the shapes... After the shapes being moved to a spinning disc, the programme went back to using windows which resembled those used in the late 70s, albeit with the addition of the triangular window.

Each episode would also include a short story read from a book, introduced by checking the time on a clock. Normally the clock would show either an hour or a half hour.

Both the clock and the three window option lives on in the children's programme Tikkabilla, which borrows much from Play School, while a similar choice of portal into a film clip was provided by the abdomen mounted video displays in the children's show Teletubbies.