The Small Silver Screen
Summer 2014 is one of those occasional moments when those who resent their licence fee being squandered on sport get rather hot under the collar. As well as the annual Wimbledon fortnight dominating schedules, we also have the World Cup, the Commonwealth Games and the Tour de France kicking-off in the unlikely environs of Leeds, guaranteeing an increase in British TV coverage. ‘But there are entire channels devoted to sport!’ they cry (sort-of). ‘Why do we have to be bombarded with it on terrestrial channels as well?’
Step back in time three or four decades, however, back before the Murdoch media launched its first satellite, back even before that foul-mouthed lefty-leaning newcomer Channel 4 gatecrashed the cartel, and we have all sporting events spread across the two BBC channels and ITV. Even the sports that pay-per-view and subscription TV have held the live rights of for so long that it’s hard to imagine them being screened on mainstream telly now – the most obvious being cricket – had to be assimilated into rather crammed schedules alongside the other events already mentioned. Makes you wonder how they managed it, but they did. And let us not forget that every Saturday, spanning the almighty broadcasting chasm from lunchtime to teatime, both BBC1 and ITV handed over roughly five hours to non-stop sport. ‘Grandstand’ and ‘World of Sport’ had complete control of that timeslot, as fixed and set in stone as the school broadcasts were on weekdays.
I wasn’t a sporty kid. I thought the wrestling was quite entertaining, but didn’t care for either incarnation of rugby or any form of motorsport or athletics; granted, the reading of the football results before ‘Doctor Who’ had a daft romanticism akin to the shipping forecast, with the Scottish clubs having especially exotically odd names – Queen of the South, Meadowbank, Partick Thistle et al – but if it was one of those drizzly, dreary afternoons that kept the bike locked in the shed, what alternative was there on the box? An afternoon institution by the name of Saturday Cinema on BBC2 – the sole alternative; if you didn’t like sport, you were provided with a glorious cinematic education.
There was a rigid rule in place up until around the middle of the 1980s that kept films with a shorter vintage than five years away from TV screens – ‘Cabaret’, for example (released: 1972), didn’t receive its British television premiere until 1978. The way that British TV dealt with this embargo was to give the kiss of life to the Golden Age of Hollywood. At a time when monochrome shows from the 60s were being junked because nobody in television believed the public, who had forked-out small fortunes for colour TV sets, would tolerate black & white broadcasts anymore, Saturday afternoons on BBC2 were a sanctuary for movies that spurned Technicolor in favour of a lush cinematography that manufactured a unique illusion of the real world in fifty shades of silver, one unlike anything on offer in the expensive disaster blockbusters at the local fleapit.
For those of us who hadn’t lived through the realities of the 30s and 40s, the interpretation of it that we garnered from Saturday Cinema was of fire escapes on the sides of buildings, hats on every head, Art Deco automobiles, raincoats, tuxedos, cigarette holders, Bourbon-on-the rocks, neon lights flashing through venetian blinds, shoeshine boys, speakeasy clubs with dancing girls, black pianists and chanteuses in sequins, streetwise dames who gave as good as they got, and fast-talking, snarling guys who spoke in a slang that had the infectious rhythm of jazz, guys who’d shoot first and ask questions later. The look was as startlingly distinctive as the dialogue, as was the music – stabbing strings that emphasised the intensity of the melodrama during the final scene; and someone always died in the final scene. These films opened with the credits and concluded with a simple ‘The End’; they rarely ran longer than ninety minutes; they lifted the young viewer out of the genuine horrors played out on TV news broadcasts and into a parallel past with comforting archetypes and clearly-defined boundaries that were easier to understand, not to mention far more seductive. The women were beautiful and the men were handsome because the cinematographers spent hours lighting the set before shooting actually began; this really was cinema as an art form, utterly separate from reality and re-imagining the world in a way that only the graphic novel is capable of doing in the 21st century.
The incredible on-screen presence of Cagney and Bogart or Crawford and Davis is a world away from the studied mumbling of contemporary movie icons. These were actors who had paid their dues on stage and always carried their voices to the back-row. They predated the Method, but the curious caricatures of real people they played seem just as authentic as the Method because they make perfect sense in the artificial construct of reality they inhabit – just as nobody in a comic book thinks it remotely odd that musclemen in tights engage in fisticuffs that leave their streets resembling war-zones. Who pays for the damage when the Incredible Hulk has a punch-up with the Thing? Who cares?
Children stumbled upon classic cinema in the 70s and 80s because there were no TV alternatives on a Saturday afternoon. Now there are, and it’d be interesting to see how many movie stars from the 30s or 40s any child today could name. If you have kids, show them some pictures. Would they recognise Edward G Robinson or Barbara Stanwyck? Would they even recognise Laurel and Hardy? Some of these old stars were still alive when I was a child – and occasionally turned-up in a toupee on ‘Parkinson’; but a lot of them were long-dead. They were before my time, but of my time as well. In a fragmented television landscape where anything other than talent contests, quiz shows, soaps and ‘maverick detectives’ hunting down serial killers have been reduced to niche interests and ghettoised via specialist channels, a child would have to seek out these movies now; I didn’t. A paucity of choice actually brought the viewer into contact with programmes only the converted would make the effort to track down today. I welcome the availability of choice in terms of channel numbers, but I’d like there to be a little more choice within the channels I can receive, not a schedule designed solely to give me more of what I’m already familiar with. Perhaps kids today depend upon the film-buff dad or uncle with the extensive DVD collection to do the job television controllers once did. I hope so. The world of ‘Double Indemnity’, ‘White Heat’, ‘The Roaring Twenties’ and ‘Mildred Pierce’ remains as entertaining an alternative to what’s outside the window as any the 20th century invented. And still a bloody good alternative to a summer of sport.
Petunia Winegum
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July 12, 2014 at 9:28 am -
One thing you miss out. In the classic films, EVERY frame was a photograph in its self.
No one appears to take notice of the photographic art in films any more. The morte explosions the better, and don’t mind if the cameraman has clipped the head of the main actor.
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July 14, 2014 at 12:37 pm -
Also the maximum length of a take was not 5 seconds. The generally cobbled together rubbish we get now is virtually unwatchable.
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July 12, 2014 at 10:14 am -
Och Aye, Petunia. Hamilton Academicals always conjured up in my juvenile mind pictures of men in gowns and mortar boards leaping around a Scottish football pitch.
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July 12, 2014 at 11:54 am -
Ha! In those days, Hamilton Academicals were those who could find their own way home from the pub.
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July 12, 2014 at 10:24 am -
I confess that I am not a sports fan and especially not a football fan. Since the World Cup kicked off, the terrestrial channels have been absolutely saturated with sport, sport and more sport. I for one am heartily sick and tired of trying to find something to watch that’s not either sport of a repeat offering filling in the gaps between the sport.
It’s time we had a freeview sports channel so that the BBC and ITV channels don’t get completely clogged up with this dross. On the other hand, as was predicted many years ago the quality of programming has greatly diminished because of the extra channels. We need more quality and less quantity IMHO…
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July 12, 2014 at 3:55 pm -
I don’t actually watch television. As some-one with experience in it, I find to-day’s equivalent quite depressing to watch (except Wimbledon, the match coverage of which is good).
What really irritates me, especially over the last few weeks with this soccer tournament, is the extent to which the output of the B.B.C. — especially Toady, P.M. & the Six-O’clock News — and what they now seem to call the B.B.C. Weld Service (I have a motor-car they should look at) is swamped with spor’. If I cut on a news programme, I want to hear of events of moment; what’s happened in a soccer game or to those involved in it (or any other game largely devoted to money-grubbing) is irrelevant and can be left to the panem-et-circenses stations.
ΠΞ
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July 12, 2014 at 10:40 am -
Great great piece of evocative writing Ms Winegum —perhaps particularly on a Saturday morning
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July 12, 2014 at 10:41 am -
Three years I had a strange relationship with a woman born ‘on the cusp of the Idiot Age’ — not to bore you with all the details of that here (an education in itself) but she went through a phase of ‘watching old black & white films’ (Casablanca etc) every night and being absolutely mesmerised by everything about them. This seemed to represent a continuous struggle between her belief that things were so much better *then* (20th Century) and the conditioning her generation underwent constantly telling them the opposite.
The evidence, of course, is overwhelming that things were so much better, but sadly for her she surrendered absolutely to idiocy and ended up talking photographs of her dinners/fingernails etc and posting them online -
July 12, 2014 at 10:41 am -
Three years ago I had a strange relationship with a woman born ‘on the cusp of the Idiot Age’ — not to bore you with all the details of that here (an education in itself) but she went through a phase of ‘watching old black & white films’ (Casablanca etc) every night and being absolutely mesmerised by everything about them. This seemed to represent a continuous struggle between her belief that things were so much better *then* (20th Century) and the conditioning her generation underwent constantly telling them the opposite.
The evidence, of course, is overwhelming that things were so much better, but sadly for her she surrendered absolutely to idiocy and ended up taking photographs of her dinners/fingernails etc and posting them online -
July 12, 2014 at 11:17 am -
What a lovely evocation of times past. I wonder you didn’t start it off by talking about a cup of tea and an almond biscuit! I have found, now I have ditched the telephone modem on my computer and bought a big HD screen, that many of these movies are still available on YouTube. I can say with utter confidence that I have, for the first time in my relatively long history, missed all of the “sporting events” currently on offer. My retinas are being treated to Bogey, Cagney, even Wilfrid Hyde-White should the occasion demand.
Mind you, going to “The Pictures” in the days of the Gaumont, Luxor and Odeon was also a treat. The Gaumont in Watford had its own tea room!
Mustn’t get too nostalgic. But thanks again for that article. -
July 12, 2014 at 11:30 am -
We went as children to the Saturday morning cinema. Can’t think how old I was as I can’t remember anything before nine! Just things in general. We watched brave white men slaughtering Indians on the American plains. Not realising what was actually happening during our grandparents lifetimes. We played cowboys and Indians in and out of school through childhood . Made ourselves bows and arrows and fired cap guns at each other. Not realising how aggressive we were being to one another….yet no one suffered as a result of these childhood fantasies. Strange that. If we did it these days we would find ourselves confronted by men in caps with big guns and given cautions and pep talks according to age. Shows how heavily the cinema influenced our childhood culture and that important activity called ‘free play’. Now free play is the PRIVILEGE of so called feral children. It is a privilege that gives stressed adults time out and the children freedom from over protective adults monitoring everything children do and over structuring kids lives. Those old films are wonders of imagery and clever deceits too. With the technology they had they produced powerful and unforgettable stars and images.
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July 12, 2014 at 2:10 pm -
I vaguely remembered one day as a child being intrigued by a black and white English film about lorry drivers. In the Internet age I was able to look up the details of Hell Drivers (1957) and found that the cast included Stanley Baker, Alfie Bass, Gordon Jackson, Sid James, Patrick McGoohan, William Hartnell, and a young fellow called Sean Connery. Blimey!
The Internet makes it possible to bring back memories that would have faded into oblivion in an earlier time. Not sure this is all good, as with the epidemic of historic sex claims, but it does have its benefits too.
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July 12, 2014 at 11:08 pm -
XX Hell Drivers (1957)XX
Was that the one were they were transporting Nitroglycerine to put out an oil well fire? Or the one about a quarrying firm and strike breakers?
If the first, the first time I ever had gas at the dentist, I remember waking up on the couch feeling like, as I know now, I had drunk two or three bottles of Lambs navy, and that was on T.V.
MUST have been a Saturday….maybe?
I was about 6 years old at the time. So 1966.
(WHAT dentist NOWDAYS would DREAM of giving gas to take out four milk teeth!!!???)
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July 13, 2014 at 11:56 am -
@Furor Teutonicus,
The film you describe could well be the excellent French language The Wages of Fear. It was directed in the 1950s by one of the many excellent French directors, Henri-Georges Clouzot and it starred Yves Montand who had a permanent fag hanging off his lower lip.
Or you may possibly have seen one of the inferior English language remakes.
@Petunia
Thanks for a very evocative and well written piece, it brought back many fond memories it did. Don’t forget that BBC2 (and C4 to a degree) also introduced many folk, including me, to some wonderful foreign films as well. From such as the above mentioned Clouzot and also the likes of Renoir, Cocteau, Tarkovsky, Kurosawa, Ozu, Truffaut, Ray, Bergman, Fellini, Eisenstein.
You are sadly right, it is impossible these days to see any decent films on telly.
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July 13, 2014 at 3:35 pm -
XX Or you may possibly have seen one of the inferior English language remakes.XX
It was “wages of fear.” It was in English and nor sub-titled, so you may be correct regarding the remake.
Did they not make a new version about five or ten years ago, as well?
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July 12, 2014 at 2:16 pm -
Yes shooting games were very popular when I was a child, and not surprising when heroes included sharpshooters like Robin Hood, William Tell, and the Lone Ranger. My mother advised me not to try to replicate Tell’s feat of shooting an apple off the head of his son with my sister. In fact she was quite adamant about it.
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July 12, 2014 at 7:52 pm -
“We went as children to the Saturday morning cinema. ” Fond memories of not having the required ‘tanner’, and trying to sneak-in when the cashier was otherwise distracted.
“Made ourselves bows and arrows and fired cap guns at each other. ….….yet no one suffered as a result of these childhood fantasies. ”
Ah, those were the days when every boy scout was expected to carry a sheath knife as part of his uniform.
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July 12, 2014 at 10:33 pm -
Now every boy’s expected to carry a sheath as part of his protection.
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July 12, 2014 at 11:55 am -
Ask anyone born after about 1990 to help you to download your favourite old movies, for viewing on your HD TV. There are torrents (sic) of them out there.
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July 12, 2014 at 12:47 pm -
But how do you know what your favourite movies are? Until you’ve watched them? Therein lies the rub. One thing the old movies did do back then was to unify the generations, however fleetingly. My dad was forever telling us kids how this or that movie was going to end. I used to think he was just “all-knowing” somehow, like Fathers were meant to be. It was only when I grew up that it dawned on me that he’d spent the early years of his working life as a cinema projectionist and so he’d “seen the movie too”….
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July 12, 2014 at 8:41 pm -
Sorry for any confusion. I was addressing the remark to the author of this piece, from whose reminiscenecs I assume is someone approaching to the silver-haired end of the age range. This would suggest both a list of favourite old films and less internet-savviness than younger generations.
As a sixty-something myself I too recall the Sunday afternoons spent at home watching b/w films on the TV while my parents excused themselves to go for for an after-lunch “lie down”. (I only realised years later what they had really been up to.)
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July 12, 2014 at 10:36 pm -
They obviously didn’t send you to Sunday School at the local church in the morning – that was simply a device to enable production of even more offspring, to continue to fill the pews and the collection-plate. Great business model.
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July 12, 2014 at 12:01 pm -
Nice, evocative, post. We didn’t have a television through most of that era. Had we, I think I might now be envying your control of the channel selector switch
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July 12, 2014 at 12:57 pm -
We were fortunate that my dad played for and coached a local amateur football club and was therefore always out on a Saturday afternoon!
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July 12, 2014 at 12:22 pm -
Not about the films I’m afraid, but this did remind me of a comment by Dickie Davis on World of Sport one Saturday. After the football results had been announced he commented that “there is only the Hamilton game to come in, but the result will be purely Academical”. Had me rolling on the floor
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July 12, 2014 at 7:55 pm -
WoS memories – Kent Walton commentating to Grapple Fans on their weekly fix of Grunt ‘n Groan.
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July 12, 2014 at 2:00 pm -
The result of the Hamilton game was probably also academical because of the other results of the day. The only reason for reading out the results of football games between obscure Scottish villages like Stranraer and Brechin City was that a certain number of games were necessary each week to form the list for the pools coupon. The greatest wins occurred when there were only eight or nine drawn games on the list and there was only one winner who took the whole pool. Probably the result of the Hamilton game was also academic because there were already plenty of draws in the results and no one was going to get rich if Hamilton was yet another.
It was interesting, of course, that the BBC provided this useful service of reading out the classified results primarily for the benefit of the pools companies, and yet the connection with the pools was very understated. As you say, a generation or two of post-war children grew up listening to the poetry of these results and to this day I am much more familiar with all the places mentioned in the classified results, and the odd names such as Tottenham Hotspur, Accrington Stanley, Sheffield Wednesday, and Plymouth Argyle, who presumably wore shirts of an Argyle pattern, and less familiar with the non-league towns and cities such as Stevenage or Sevenoaks or East Grinstead or Nelson.
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July 12, 2014 at 4:21 pm -
Tying in with our general theme here, I remember one Jim’ll Fix it where the kid got to read the football results.
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July 12, 2014 at 11:26 pm -
And didn’t the boys favourite team win 75 – 0 or something like??
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July 12, 2014 at 10:39 pm -
And I still remember that St Johnston was the only team with a letter in its name which no other then-current football club had – it’s the J.
That will come up in a pub-quiz one day – I’ve been waiting so long…….
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July 12, 2014 at 2:33 pm -
Tin hat ready, but I’ve long thought that the whole point of football is that it makes cricket seem interesting.
Sport obsessed Dad now spinning in his grave like an Iranian centrifuge.
I wonder how he’d have got on with the Pepsi 20/20s in India?
Back to the films, still a bit hooked since the routine trips to the optimistically named Savoy cinema with my Nan who looked after us in the late ’40′s. Standing in line to get in. Did we have Palm toffee? Musical interlude film of Donald Peers I think too.
Even so, I don’t think I need another go of The Maltese Falcon or Casablanca, or On the Trail of the Lonesome Pine. There’s also something that’s lost viewing on the small screen, too. I don’t know if it was the darkness, the size of the silver screen, or the presence of hundreds of people watching it, but it’s just not the same. -
July 12, 2014 at 3:19 pm -
Like Ms Mildred, I remember well those Saturday cinema programmes for children, in my case at the old Kinema in Plumstead High Street. In the thirties we used to love cartoons and the serials which ended in cliff-hanging scenes guaranteed to make you want to come back the following Saturday. I think each visit cost my parents about threepence which I imagine they thought a cheap price for a few hours of peace and quiet and I expect they would also have given me the money to buy a gobstopper and a packet of sherbert if I was lucky. Outside cinema visits, we boys did indeed make our own entertainments with cap guns, catapults, bows and arrows, and home-made vehicles constructed of planks, string and old pram wheels. If you weren’t too badly affected by the depression, that was a good time to be young and able to run around freely up on the common and in those long terraced streets where there was hardly any traffic, no parked cars and, I’m sure, very very few predatory paedophiles.
During the war, when many now classic films came out, cinema audiences were always told when an air raid alert had sounded but in my recollection very few people used to get up and leave. -
July 12, 2014 at 4:19 pm -
I sort of see the point, but don’t agree. Sports on telly were, to me, ghastly and tedious. The cricket was never-ending. The few programmes suitable for people with more imagination than those who were happy to watch balls for hours were shunted out of the way for cricket, football, golf, etc. I can remember saying as a child in some kind of discussion, there should be a special channel for sports (an implausible sounding dream then in our State-mandated 2 and a half channel media poverty).
The thing about old movies is this; you’re forgetting time. Somebody in the 1970s watching an old movie from the 1940s was watching something about thirty years old. In other words, the equivalent of somebody today watching something from the mid 1980s. Barbara Stanwyck’s movies were about 30 years old. That’s the same as watching Back To The Future now. Star Wars is the same as something from the 1930s. Lots of kids today see that.
That’s the young generation’s “classic”. And, the particular problem is that once something is classic, the 99% of rubbish of that era is forgotten, while the better stuff is remembered. People remember the Beatles. They don’t remember Ken Dodd having several number one hits. People remember “great” sitcoms like Porridge, not the rest of the dross. They remember It’s A Knockout, but not Star Games.
Like every era, the Golden Age of cinema was mostly dross. Cheap, unfunny comedies, cramped box set dramas more suitable for the stage, cheapo Westerns and so-bad-it’s-almost-good stuff like Flash Gordon (to which as a child I was subjected at the local ABC’s saturday morning cinema club, where parents sent you whether you liked it or not.
I’m a nostalgist for a time when people were more generally free in many respects (though not all), which is part of my Libertarianism. I’m a nostalgist for some aspects of the culture of the time. I’m not a nostalgist for long, tedious afternoons when it was the holidays, it was raining, there was only cricket or some old black and white movie rubbish on TV, so you were bored out of your mind. No video games, no video recorders, no computers, no internet, one record player in the living room that you couldn’t listen to because it had to be a communal decision to listen to Cum On Feel The Noize and nobody else wanted to. Anyone want a game of Monopoly then? No.
I envy kids today, in that respect at least.
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July 12, 2014 at 5:42 pm -
The world of ‘The Roaring Twenties’ may have only been 30-40 years old in the 1970s, but it was far more alien to me than ‘Back to the Future’ would seem to a kid today. Okay, so there’ll be an absence of all the technological trinkets children now take for granted in the landscape Michael J Fox wanders through, but ‘Back to the Future’ would still appear a largely recognisable world to them, whereas the B&W movies I saw on TV as a kid contained nothing that reflected life as I knew it then and that was what made them so alluring. And did you not have any imagination for indoor play as a kid if you didn’t want to watch sport or old movies on the telly?
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July 12, 2014 at 6:22 pm -
I had that feeling too, but remember that the first talking movies didn’t come in till the very end of the twenties, and then the vast majority of films were first shot out of door in California where it was generally sunny and then on studio sound stages in Hollywood or Ealing, so you had very, very little early movie making shot on location showing how things really were in the twenties or thirties.
I remember seeing the movie The Quiet Man starring John Wayne of which all of the outdoor scenes were shot on location in Ireland in Technicolor, but even then I was intensely aware of when the filming switched to the indoor scenes filmed in Hollywood, and this was an exceptional film.
Another film I became very interested in and wrote about when I lived in Bermuda in the 80′s was The Deep, a film version of Peter Benchley’s book of the same name based on an article he had earlier written about Bermuda in National Geographic, that was partially filmed on location in Bermuda. The think that I noticed was that the film failed to give much of an impression of either the geography, scenery, or life in Bermuda and for that reason did not create the tourism boost that the local authorities had hoped for, the negative impression of Bermuda and its people contained in the story line of the movie probably having the opposite effect, if anything.
The vast majority of films depicting the period between World War I and World War II were simply shot on sound stages in black and white and gave very little sense of what one might call the Agatha Christie period. Even today when the technology is so much better, very few films really give you a sense of time and place. They tend to use rather the same technique as The Quiet Man, starting with a few expensively shot location scenes to set the atmosphere, and then switching to cheaper studio scenes for the rest. You will generally do better with the original book if there is one, though in the case of The Deep most of it was still garbage, however interesting enough to me to get me to go and live in Bermuda for several years, which the film alone would never have done.
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July 12, 2014 at 7:08 pm -
I think you underestimate how alien the 1980s looks to a young child today. The fashions and technologies are totally different; video recorders and 8 bit microcomputers look like crystal set radios did to us. There are some funny videos on Youtube of modern youngsters trying to figure out how a Walkman operates. It really is alien. Whole huge areas of culture either had not been invented or were nascent (e.g. rap music). Send a modern child back to the 1970s, and even more than the 1980s they’d have trouble navigating the world. No everyday communications they understand, no internet, shops half day closing. And vastly different social rules. Corporal punishment? Communal showers? Dolly birds and slap and tickle? The very things that have utterly transmogrified since then that we discuss so much here. This was a world in which the young Delia Smith had to explain to viewers what a curry is. No pizza, let alone delivered pizza. Fast food was a Wimpy Bar. It’s much more different to today than you think, and would be as different as 1940s movies were to us.
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July 12, 2014 at 7:38 pm -
Interesting point about pizza. I know I had my first piece of pizza on a trip to Milan in the winter of 1970, and pizza was pretty much unknown in the UK at the time, but I think by the end of the 70′s it was a pretty common thing in Italian restaurants like the one on The Headrow in Leeds. I also remember a very popular takeaway hamburger place on Harehills Road in about 1975 that had several different types of topping or dressing, and a Greek takeaway just outside Sefton Park in Liverpool around the same time.
My grandmother used to make curries and rice in the early sixties, or probably in the fifties, typically served with side dishes of raisins, peanuts, and sliced bananas, and I remember having a very hot curry for lunch in a restaurant close to the Lords cricket ground in 1968.
Fast food was not a Wimpy bar, it was the fish and chips shop or the takeaway Chinese or Indian restaurant where you could get curry and chips or chapattis, or the bakery where you could pick up a pork pie hot or cold and a cup of tea. Before there were large supermarkets, there were “self-service” grocery stores where you could pick up various items and take them to the cash register, but you probably still needed a shop assistant to cut butter off the slab for you, or slice bacon, so not so much different from going to the deli counter in Walmart today.
I have spent a lot of my time in the last few years in the Dominican Republic, which in some respects reminds me of England 50 years ago, for example shops closing for 2 hours for lunch so they owner can go home and cook their lunch, and not much traffic on the roads as most people don’t own cars. However you can’t drink the tap water, which you always could in England in my lifetime, and you have to put used toilet paper in a basket and not flush it lest it block the pipes.
The difference is that now even third world countries have supermarkets, cell phones, Internet, cable, modern medications, disposable nappies, etc. if you can afford them. However people, especially children, adjust very quickly to different circumstances because of the cultural influence of people around them. You may read books or newspapers, or you may download e-books and read the news online, but reading remains the paramount skill necessary for success and the medium is incidental.
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July 12, 2014 at 7:42 pm -
Regarding pizza, we didn’t have pizza when I was young, but we did have something called Welsh rarebit, being grilled grated cheese on toast, sometimes also prepared with thin slices of grilled tomatoes or mushrooms, so just a variant on pizza, often sold under the name of “flatbreads” here in the US. I still use my Welsh rarebit skills to make various kinds of pizza.
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July 12, 2014 at 8:23 pm -
Regarding pizza, I have particular memories. The first pizza parlour (as we called them in the old days) here in Northampton was called Pinnochio’s and was quite a remarkable new thing. It was the late 70s. I particularly remember it, because first my sister worked there and then I did. She was a great success, and I was a total failure (I was too shy; you had to make pizzas in front of the customers, it was total torture for me). But pizza before that was largely unknown. We had been customers from early on (which was how my older sister got the job I think), but when a schoolfriend came to my house once for tea and we ordered pizza, he was most uncertain about it and basically hardly ate any, suspicious of this strange foreign muck.
Burgers, likewise. There was a Wimpy. The first proper burger chain in the American stylee was called Huckleberry’s (long gone now). Macdonalds opening up was a big deal (early 80s) and seemed extremely cool and modern and like Northampton had moved into modernity, kind of thing. That was before it became fashionable to hate them.
As to my earlier thing about the relative time from the 1930s to 1970s, 1970s to now, I think a child of today watching this classic KTel gizmo ad would be as temporally and culturally separated as anyone in the 1970s watching a 1930s cultural artifact-
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July 12, 2014 at 8:51 pm -
Wimpy. Ah yes. During the late 60s & early 70s a trip to Wimpy was the ‘reward’ for being dragged round interminable furniture shops by our Ma and Pa who were always on the hunt for the latest G-Plan sideboard, coffee table or hideously uncomfortable sofa.
The furniture was more my mum’s idea than my dad’s and the Wimpy was definitely more my dad’s idea than my mum’s.
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July 12, 2014 at 10:51 pm -
Ah, G Plan. My sister and I shed tears when we took mum’s G Plan bedroom suite to the tip after her death.
Back with food establishments, whatever happened to those big tanks of milk, the ones with the stirrer thing in? And does any child today know what a knickerbocker glory is?
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July 12, 2014 at 11:33 pm -
And the Hostess Trolley. That Bain-Marie on wheels that was the object of desire for every home entertaining housewife in the 1970s. Matched the G-Plan furniture. Was in a local charity shop recently and there was four of them Two of them had been sold as well!!
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July 12, 2014 at 11:50 pm -
We left our family heirloom at the end of the driveway. Was gone within an hour.
If it helps someone make a living, fine
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July 12, 2014 at 11:47 pm -
How many children today know what tinned fruit salad is?
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July 13, 2014 at 12:19 am -
If recent headlines about obesity and the national diet are to be believed, how many children today know what fruit is?
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July 13, 2014 at 12:40 am -
Fruit salad with evaporated milk. I think there was some ancient ecclesiastical rule that it had to be eaten on sundays, like fish on fridays for catholics. The evaporated milk turned into a strange claggy emulsion if you stirred it around too much.
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July 13, 2014 at 1:03 am -
Yes. All that G-plan furniture is now gone and both my parents are now dead. I minded very much when their much-loved teak bits and bobs were taken away by a man with a van – but I missed them (and still do) much more than I miss their furniture.
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July 13, 2014 at 12:25 am -
“Fast food was a Wimpy bar”
….or the British Rail pork pie. It zoomed up and down the East Coast Mainline in it’s little glass case in the restaurant carriage week in week out. Lovingly dusted once a week by the steward. God help the any poor sap daft enough to actually buy it.
It’s probably in the National Railway Museum now, enjoying a well-earned retirement.
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July 12, 2014 at 8:05 pm -
I sort of see the point, but don’t agree. Sports on telly were, to me, ghastly and tedious. The cricket was never-ending.
The thing about sports on TV is that if you are the kind of kid who fantasizes about scoring the winning goal or making a hundred for England, then these sports give you an outlet for fantasies. I still remember every goal I scored as centre forward when I was eleven years old, like the cross that hit the post and how I volleyed the rebound into the roof of the net. It was all downhill from that point onwards, but I still mentally replay that goal now and again to remind myself of what could have been.
When you are young you are watching grown adults competing and you admire them (if you are interested in sports) and would like to be like them when you grow up. Looking at it from the point of view of (very) late middle age, the perspective is rather different, because, like policemen, they all seem like kids now.
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July 12, 2014 at 8:29 pm -
One major sports TV memory for me was a family holiday where it rained a lot. The hotel had a TV room. The TV room was consistently packed with men watching the cricket. Nobody else could watch anything else. Me and my sister still occasionally joke about that.
I am not nostalgic (unlike it seems, most people) about TV from decades ago. I think the BBC was always pretty terrible, and the ridiculous paucity of TV channels was entirely the fault of the State (we would even then talk of how the Americans had so many compared to us). When it wasn’t sports, it was stagey drama and cheap rubbish like Doctor Who with wobbly sets and appalling effects that even then people joked about. There were one or two “good” things on, but it comes back to that thing people can’t grasp now about celebs like Savile; they really were huge, because there was so little other media to enjoy. Top Of The Pops was vital viewing. Radio 1 was your pop music. Old people had the Old Grey Whistle Test instead. Very old people had Radio 2. That was it.
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July 13, 2014 at 7:51 pm -
Of course it is interesting to contrast my memory of goals I scored more than 50 years ago with the memory of a woman in a recent court case, who had the exciting and surely memorable job of acting as a waitress to men and women whom she would have known from TV appearances in popular shows of the day in Cambridge, and yet could not remember which park it had occurred in or whether she was 14 or 17 at the time. Makes you wonder about the mysterious workings of memory.
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July 12, 2014 at 4:37 pm -
This takes me back. In the late 70s/early 80s, when I was kid, the telly used to pad its schedules by showing old films in the afternoon slots, as opposed to whatever they do now – rubbishy talk-shows. Stopped watching TV 17 years ago, so don’t know. I-Player will do for me, if I thinkI should check in on something.
It was GREAT. I was enchanted by what I saw, and I hope I don’t sound like a total pretentious ponce, but I was aware I was watching how a culture saw itself, which wasn’t my culture. But it could have been, had I been born 30, 40, 50 years earlier. I felt connected to it, but at the same time, I had an ironic distance on it. Have to say as well, some of the film-making – from cinematography to script – had a brilliance and edge we can’t replicate now, so I certainly wasn’t smiling and nodding in a patronising way.
Also agree with Moor Larkin. It really maintained the generational compact. Watching these films with my Gran, who saw them the first time round, was revelatory. She had her own verdict on them – what people thought who came from the generation that was the target audience originally. And an astoundingly astute and cynical generation they were. You could not pull the wool over their eyes. No media-victims there.
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July 12, 2014 at 5:53 pm -
Just reintroduced my family to the joys of old black and white movies with David Leans ‘Hobsons Choice’ starring Charles Laughton and John Mills. Colour is not necessary. Story, performance and style are.
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July 12, 2014 at 6:01 pm -
Nostalgia isn’t like it used to be!
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July 12, 2014 at 10:09 pm -
It was a less self-conscious time.
That’s the charm of these old films, quite apart from their artistic merits. And those are exemplary.
People were just beginning to try out the notion of super-stardom in this extraordinary a-temporal medium and have fun with the idea of communicating to a mass audience, who didn’t need to be present at all when the action was unfolding. Just as well: if they were in front of you, they might want to get involved and that would mean having to respond to real, live, unpredictable creatures.
100 years later, we are where we are. We will never have the same reverence for the moving image again. It’s impossible. It’s everywhere, we can all do it, just give us the right apps on the computer. It means nothing. So much for the Seventh Art.
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July 14, 2014 at 10:16 am -
They also make a nice change from all the effing and blinding and rushing around. Almost impossible to avoid now, unless you stick to costume dramas.
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July 12, 2014 at 10:43 pm -
I’ve put myself down for a copy of a film — or at least a set of computer-generated images — by the name of ‘Guardians of the Galaxy’, the principal merit of which is that it includes … a raccoon!
Likely it’ll turn out to be about a bunch of yooves north of 110th. Street, looking after an old Ford for $5 each.
ΠΞ
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July 13, 2014 at 12:22 pm -
The same goes for almost everything to do with imaging. We no longer have to wait for someone else to develope a photo or make a movie. we click and see our handiwork…not only that, we can quickly put it on utube or send to a friend or post on social media. Most social media is self mediated. I often note complaints in Racoon postings that their comments which do not fit in with a consensus opinion are eliminated and the perpetrator excluded from the website sometimes. Yet others say that the most foul porno sites should be free to display their offerings. As a member of various art clubs, we all noted that it became much more difficult to sell our humble efforts at our exhibitions once digital photography became established and very quickly displaced 35mm film, then the art clubs started to fail, as the glue that spurred us on lost its grip. It only takes an alarming 8-10 years for the next set of children to be unfamiliar with previous devices. The Walkman, as said, is now history. I keep mine 3 walkmans, as I have a box set of the Lord of the rings and Dylan Thomas and Betjeman, all on tape. My most evocative film is The Lady Killers and most evocative artist is Lowry…a quiet asexual man who cultivated young girls, then discarded them when they got boyfriends. We have journeyed a long way from those innocent days at Saturday cinema.
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July 13, 2014 at 3:50 pm -
If you want to see the inter-war period, or the 50s, watch some of the excellent DVDs of documentary films put out by tht British Film Institute. The GPO films are particularly good, and so are the transport series.
As for location shooting, some of Max Linder’s comedies, shot before WW I, are on location. If you don’t know Max, there is an excellent 3 DVD set available from Amazon.fr. (It costs twice as much from Amazon.co.uk).
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July 13, 2014 at 11:11 pm -
Yes, ….the Scottish football results. I always waited to the end to see if the tongue-twister of Fife, four; Forfar, five came up ………..
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July 14, 2014 at 1:16 am -
I’m a sucker for any Cary Grant film. Bringing Up Baby. Charade. Notorious. Mr Blandings Builds His Dream House. His Girl Friday. The Grass Is Greener (particular favourite). Penny Serenade.
I could go on. I won’t though.
All brilliant.
My luxury item on Desert Island Discs would be every Cary Grant film ever made.
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July 14, 2014 at 8:40 am -
Interesting you didn’t have any taste for the many British films shown. I liked Hollywood but the one that stick in my mind now are all Ealing (is there some gender difference there maybe? humour versus glamour? also all those British war films for a boy).
But I don’t think that even in the world of three terrestrial was still here anyone could have the same relation to the films of the 30s and 40s as our generation. They were a link to a world that never really existed which our parents had been children in and our grandparents lived though (for me anyway). The films of the 70s and 80s would be the equivalent reference for today’s generation.
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July 14, 2014 at 10:19 am -
Oh dear! Once a nerd I suppose.
While my younger brother and I went fairly regularly to the local flea pit (usually Saturday mornings) our fare was mainly cowboy films – Roy Rogers, Gene Autrey, Hopalong Cassidy, the Lone Ranger and so on – with an occasional Sci Fi thrown in: Flash Gordon, Forbidden Planet,
I spent much more time reading the likes of Biggles, Sherlock Holmes etc. and listening to the big band music of the day – Ted Heath (no the OTHER one), Johnny Dankworth, Ken Macintosh, Eric Delaney.
The big events were when these bands appeared in concerts near us as well as some of the American bands and singers – Ella Fitzgerald. Count Basie, Duke Ellington, Benny Goodman and Harry James.Happily, fine examples of all these can still be found on youtube and are almost watchable if you can find a quiet spot on the broadband spectrum locally.
I don’t begrudge the youngsters their artistic pleasures these days, although I do wish that Melody and Harmony would make a comeback. Rhythm has had too much of it’s own way recently.
Having said that, at least one of the bands I still play in has a rap number in its repertoire:-
(wait for it)
“Wrap Your Troubles in Dreams.”I’ll get me coat …
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July 14, 2014 at 10:50 am -
One way I know I’m old is that I find modern pop music barely listenable. The absence of melody and harmony and reliance on jarring rhythms leaves me entirely cold. I think this is right and proper. Old people like me (I’m 48) shouldn’t understand the kidz. We have our old people’s music like Duran Duran.
On 78s.
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July 14, 2014 at 11:36 am -
You must be one of the newer fellas.
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July 14, 2014 at 4:45 pm -
NEWBY!
Jimmy Hendrix, Bob Dylan, Jefferson airplane, Black Sabbath (bit modern for my taste, but….) Janis Joplin, Gratefull dead….-….
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July 14, 2014 at 4:58 pm -
O.K. Music.
I now work with dementia patients as my “real job.”
They are around an average 70 to 80 years old. So they were around the 20s or 30s, in the 54 to 64.
WHY(!!!) do Old fogey homes INSIST on playing them 1930s and 40s music???
O.K, Elvis, you can get away with, but most of my mob just LOVE “Woodstock” type sounds.
The boss thinks I am doing it all wrong, and Bob Reeves sort of shite is what they want to listen to.
(As a side line, we are seeing more and more in their mid to late 50s, early 60s! WHAT has changed?)
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July 14, 2014 at 6:38 pm -
F.T.
I wonder if this is about stirring memories going back to listening to the wireless and maybe the wind-up, as kids. Those were days when the family spent more time together in the same room, because that’s where the range or fire was. ‘Stopping the roar of London’s traffic’ & Henry Hall too.
So, although in the same age group as your patients (just), and well remembering all the rock & pop stuff up to about the end of the ’70′s, I still recall with some fondness Hoagy Carmichael, Inkspots, and all that Two Way Family Favourites stuff -
July 14, 2014 at 7:13 pm -
As a side line, we are seeing more and more in their mid to late 50s, early 60s! WHAT has changed?
Maybe more drug and alcohol addled brains living to an older age thanks to the NHS?
As far as I am concerned music is timeless. I enjoy the best music from the 30′s and 40′s a great deal–especially instrumental music– even though I was not born until 1951. I also enjoy music composed in earlier centuries, though obviously recorded later with modern instruments, though not as much as a like the swing-era big band stuff. I also like to sometimes hear music from Rogers and Hammerstein musicals of the 40′s, 50′s, and possibly early 60′s, plus doo-wop music from the 50′s, Tamla Motown soul from the 60′s, Beatles, Stones, and some more recent hit records.
What is more important in your old folks home is setting the atmosphere for a particular time of day or activity. For example playing some hit records from their teenage years might come before a discussion about their teens, more soporific music would be suitable in the hour before bed time, rousing music in the early morning, Christmas carols at Christmas, the Messiah at Easter, Country and Western music in a discussion about families, folk music to trigger discussions about English traditions, singalong music for singlalongs or choral activities, contemporary pop to keep them in touch with today, and so on.
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July 14, 2014 at 7:17 pm -
July 14, 2014 at 8:29 pm -
The thought just came of ‘the hot club of Paris’ with Django Reinhardt. What is there now to compare?
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July 14, 2014 at 8:43 pm -
Yes, the Hot Club were pretty good, but Reinhardt didn’t make the transition to electric guitar very well and his postwar recordings were sub par.
There is a fantastic 1981 hi-fi album called S’Wonderful by the “Giants of Swing” featuring violinis Joe Venuti, a contemporary of Stephane Grappelli and a fabulous little-known steel guitarist called Eldon Shamblin plus a mandolin and piano player playing some tunes by Ellington and Gershwin. For pure guitar Bireli Lagrene is a virtuoso gypsy guitarist who can be considered the heir to Django Reinhardt, and there is an album called Gypsy Project in a band with ace Romanian fiddle player Florin Niculescu. This has some Hot Club tunes plus some later numbers like La Mer.
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July 14, 2014 at 5:08 pm -
Duran Duran is too modern for my taste and certainly did not record on 78′s. Hi-Fi and long playing records became available around the early 1950′s and in fact many of the foremost jazz musicians and big band leaders such as Benny Goodman and Duke Ellington and Artie Shaw, were able to go into the recording studios and record extended versions of earlier rather tinny sounding 78 rpm hits, much of which forms the finest body of music ever recorded and now available on CD or digital downloads. You should listen to them. Glen Miller, of course, was shot down during World War II, so his musical legacy is rather different and consists of wartime jukebox hits.
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July 14, 2014 at 5:12 pm -
Imagine old folks homes in the coming decades… the neighbours will be banging on the walls, shouting, “Turn that bloody racket down!!”…
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July 14, 2014 at 9:07 pm -
Oh, jazz is far too old for my era. My musical experience pretty much starts with Glam Rock, moves through punk to post-punk and new wave and goth. To put things in perspective, I found most new music pretty dissatisfying by the mid 80s (all tinkly plonky DX7s) and went “retro” with “old” rock music from the Prog Rock and psychedelic eras. To me at that stage, buying a 1972 Hawkwind album felt distinctly classic and retro, thought it would be less than 15 years vintage. Jazz was something dads and grandads listened to. My dad had a collection of 78s, which seemed like something out of the Ark. He’s on one of them (euphonium). It’s wax on aluminium. Weighs a ton. Now that’s retro technology.
Which really ties in to what I said about how fast perceptions of antique move on. Kids watching Star Wars today are seeing something equivalent to me as a child watching The Maltese Falcon. And for those same kids, listening to Duran Duran would be like me listening to Jazz.
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July 14, 2014 at 10:00 pm -
Jazz is far too old for my age too. Nearly all of the great jazz tunes were hits before I was born, but it doesn’t stop me enjoying it, because music is timeless. After all it is just a harmonious arrangement of sequences of sounds and rhythms formed by various intruments operating on different frequencies and interacting with each other. Each type of music is like learning a foreign language at the start. At first it sounds like gibberish, but as you learn the idioms, it becomes more and more meaningful. The most popular instruments are always those that use similar frequencies to the male and female human voice like the guitar, clarinet, alto sax, piano, and so on.
A lot of people never progress beyond liking songs that were hits when they were growing up, because this reminds them of their first sexual experiences (or whatever), or perhaps they hate them for the same reason. The really great songs, though, transcend their time. I remember hearing a terrific Spanish version of Gloria Gaynor’s disco hit “I Will Survive” that had scores of revellers stamping their feet and punching the air not so long ago at a New Year’s Eve party and some of Bob Marley’s hits like the disco version of Could You Be Loved are still popular for dancing all over the world.
Right now I am listening a lot to Haitian Konpa music and some of it is pretty catchy. Here are some hit songs by Michel Martelly “Sweet Micky” who combines a career as a musician with acting as President of Haiti. Can Cameron do that?
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July 14, 2014 at 1:13 pm -
Ah, the wrestling on a Saturday afternoon, World of Sport…then the classified football results – and Dr Who. Memories. Here is a sad thing. I went to a local park this week to find some peace and reflect. There were some young children -say between 5 and 10 – playing, half a dozen, boys and girls. Just playing catch and chase. They seemed ecstatically happy. The first sad thing is that I felt guilty watching – would I not be condemned as some sort of pedophile?! I even had my camera with me! I don’t suppose my innocent explanation that I like to take photos of nature would be believed. SO I moved on. Second, it struck me that you don’t see that too much these days, or I don’t. Not an X box or an Iphone in sight. Happier and healthier days, in my view.
Nice piece, Petunia. -
July 15, 2014 at 12:01 am -
What a bunch of BOFs. If I thought that, just because of my age and cultural background, my sojourn in OAPland should, in the perception of others, consist of a diet of Pibroch, The White Heather Club, Kenneth McKellar and those real mods, The Corries, I’d buy my one way ticket to Switzerland now. I want Lady Gaga, The Dixie Chicks, Adele, Scissor Sisters, The Pierces, and Katy Perry, to name but a few. And if I do have to have some retro stuff, Leonard Cohen, Laura Brannigan, Led Zeppelin, Nilsson and The Eagles would do fine for a start. And to view I want Christopher Eccleston, David Tennant and Matt Smith. None of that Patrick Troughton or Jon Pertwee rubbish, thank you.
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