Nationwide

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Herbie the skateboarding duck (c.1976-83) was the subject of an item first broadcast on the BBC news magazine programme Nationwide on 24 May 1978, which has become one of the most famous feature items in the history of British television.

Herbie, an Aylesbury duck, was bought by Jacky and Paddy Randall of Croydon for their children Michaela and Colin. The film, presented by reporter Alan Towes, includes footage of Herbie waddling along the street, joining the family at breakfast and attacking the Randalls' terrier. The most famous part of the film is a four-second shot of Herbie apparently skateboarding by himself on Colin's board. This image seemingly captured the public imagination, and the BBC received many requests for it to be shown again, which it frequently was.

The clip also appeared on other TV stations around the world, many of which also produced their own variations on the theme. There was also renewed interest in the clip in 1983 after the death of Herbie was announced, and it has been repeated many times since on other TV programmes.

As a result of the item's popularity, the term "skateboarding duck" has come to signify a particular sort of quirky and essentially frivolous news story, often used to fill time at the end of a broadcast.

I was only a kid when Nationwide was broadcast and looking back it epitomised a decade best forgotten. The reports it did were supposed to be of interest to the viewing public but they just gave air-time to sad characters like a bunch of middle-aged men playing war games with remote controlled model tanks, bikers who owed hundreds of pounds in unpaid fines for refusing to wear crash helmets, and people who'd decided to re-christen themselves Elvis Presley or Marlon Brando. It took trivial matters that most people weren't interested in too seriously. For a while it featured a nostalgia item called Memory Lane where it looked back to a certain year. It seemed to me in the 1970s that the BBC was always looking on the past instead of the present. I also think it should have really been called Englandwide. Items from Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland very rarely appeared in it. Michael Barratt, its anchorman in the early years, couldn't have thought too highly of Nationwide otherwise he wouldn't have agreed to do these parodies of it on The Goodies.