Nostalgia ain't what it used to be

[Clitheroekid]

I came across a fascinating website recently containing old copies of TV Times from the 1960's.

I was having a look at the issue for this week in November 1965 and it brought back a lot of memories of childhood TV - http://issuu.com/radiosoundsfamiliar/do ... 01/1466006

There was The Avengers with the gorgeous Diana Rigg, Danger Man, my favourite (I was only a child!) Thunderbirds and Ready Steady Go with Cathy McGowan. And although we didn't watch it Coronation Street was there with a familiar name in the cast list - Kenneth Barlow played by William Roache - plus ca change

The adverts are also fascinating, and it's surprising how relatively expensive some items like white goods were in relation to wages in those days. 20 Park Drive were just 4/2 (that's 21p to younger readers!) and the advert on page 12 is so redolent of the 60's - pictured at the presumably glamorous venue of Lydd Airport with a Ford Cortina being loaded on to a plane in one of the photos (though it's hard to imagine that a humble Cortina driver could have afforded to fly it anywhere).

An excellent exercise in nostalgia, and a very effective way of wasting time (as if I didn't have enough already!)

[bungeejumper]

The adverts are also fascinating, and it's surprising how relatively expensive some items like white goods were in relation to wages in those days. 20 Park Drive were just 4/2 (that's 21p to younger readers!)

Blimey, you've made me feel old. I packed in the Benson & Hedges when they hit three shillings and tenpence. That was 1975, I think.

You're right, white goods were pricey in real terms - a colour television or a washing machine was two months' wages for a junior teacher struggling on £2,000 a year. (Some sobering comparisons here; http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/econ ... s-ago.html)

But aaah, the small ads. Bile beans. Ex-Lax. Coal Tar soap. Air rifles (for boys). Lucky Cornish piskies. Hypnotism for fun and profit. Army surplus flame throwers (for weeding the garden, fnarrr fnarr.) Kicking sand into bullies' faces, and all thanks to Charles Atlas. Paint your own car with Hammerite so that the neighbours would think you'd bought a new one.

Thanks for the memory.

BJ

[panamagold]

The adverts are also fascinating, and it's surprising how relatively expensive some items like white goods were in relation to wages in those days.

But then along came this guy . Not for very long though although he did change the public perception towards consumerism. Cyber Monday anyone?

http://boards.fool.co.uk/hi-cf-mr-omalley-quot-another-well-known-7262423.aspx

Note the information source. Still as good today as it always was.

panamagold

[bungeejumper]

Blimey, you've made me feel old. I packed in the Benson & Hedges when they hit three shillings and tenpence. That was 1975, I think.

Curses, I'm wrong, so correcting myself. It was 37p. Duhh, there were no shillings and no pence in 1975 anyway. Proof positive that I ought to start looking for those Astounding Memory pills. I'm sure I saw I left them somewhere.

BJ

[Alaric]

Curses, I'm wrong, so correcting myself. It was 37p. Duhh, there were no shillings and no pence in 1975 anyway.

Before EEC standardisation, cigarettes were priced in the UK according to size. The immediate pre-decimal prices per pack of 20 ran from something like 3s/3d to 5s/9d. By comparison, the price of a pint would be between 1s/6d and 2s/9d.

Imagining the price in shillings as a price in pounds (20 times multiplier in other words) can sometimes give a perspective to sixties prices. With decimalisation coming shortly before the rampant inflation of the 1970s, those old prices are permanently locked, for those of us who were there of course.

[redsturgeon]

Did someone mention Bile Beans?

I used to live about 50 yards from the famous sign on the side of a house in York, shown here:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bile_Beans

Didn't realise they were still available in 1965, let alone in the 1980s when they were finally withdrawn!

I was reading somewhere yesterday about the slowing down of the pace of change and it seems apparent, despite all the changes, that life in 1965 was still pretty recognisable to those around today even though it was 51 years ago. In the charts: The Beatles, Help; The Stones, I Can't Get No Satisfaction and The Byrds, Mr Tambourine Man, TVs, Ford Cortinas and Minis, Boeing 737s.

Compare that with someone in 1965 looking back 51 years to 1914...the start of WW1, Delius, Satie, Debussy (some would argue we went backwards from there), no real public radio broadcasting let alone TV, the model T had been in production for just 6 years and powered flight a decade old.

It seems that in some ways the pace of change is slowing down, although in other ways it seems faster than ever.

Thanks for the link, CK.

John

[AleisterCrowley]

1965 - vintage year. I don't recall much about the first half....I wasn't born until July. The Farley's rusks were nice

[UncleEbenezer]

Re: white goods. Within living memory they were luxuries of the rich. I have an idea it was in the 1960s that the number of households with a fridge reached 50%. Washing machines were also rising, while freezers and microwaves came later.

I was born in the early '60s. My family had a fridge and washing machine for as long as I can remember, but it was much later we got some of the other luxuries: it wasn't until I was away at university the family got a telly. Like most people at the time, we had no car, and a trip on the bus was a rare thing (I won't call it a treat, 'cos they were filthy and stank).

[edit] p.s. Googling finds a Telegraph article that says the number of households with a fridge reached 58% in 1970, having started the decade around 13%.

[AleisterCrowley]

We had a B&W TV , manual tune. Can't remember when we got the first colour one - about 1980? I know our first VCR was in time for Live Aid, so 1985

[Slarti]

Re: white goods. Within living memory they were luxuries of the rich. I have an idea it was in the 1960s that the number of households with a fridge reached 50%. Washing machines were also rising, while freezers and microwaves came later.

I was born in the early '60s. My family had a fridge and washing machine for as long as I can remember, but it was much later we got some of the other luxuries: it wasn't until I was away at university the family got a telly. Like most people at the time, we had no car, and a trip on the bus was a rare thing (I won't call it a treat, 'cos they were filthy and stank).

[edit] p.s. Googling finds a Telegraph article that says the number of households with a fridge reached 58% in 1970, having started the decade around 13%.

Well I was born early 50s and we certainly had a washing machine for as long as I could remember, though at first they were top loaders with an attached mangle.

Don't remember when we first got a fridge, but when we moved south, in 66, one of the first things my parents bought was a fridge/freezer. We already had moved to a front loader washing machine while still in the Midlands, after having had a twin tub for a while.

Our first TV was B&W while we were still in Newcastle and at first there was only the one channel - BBC!
Although ITV was launched in 1956 (so wiki tells me) I don't think that we had a TV that could get it until a couple of years later.
We got colour in 1966 when we moved to Essex as we had to get a new TV to receive the new fangled 625 lines and as they were so expensive, we rented.

For travel, I think that my Dad bought his first car in 1957, a Ford Popular, almost certainly 2nd hand, but I remember many bus trips with my Mam from Benton, where we lived, either out to Westerhope to see one set of grandparents (2 buses) or across the Tyne to Gateshead to see the other set of grandparents (3 buses, or train and a bus for a treat, train being more expensive).
The only trips in the car that stick in my mind are out to the beaches at the weekend to have a swim in the North Sea. That was almost every weekend that it didn't rain. We must have been tough.
Thinking about it, when we moved to the Midlands, we lived on one side of town and my junior school was on the other, so getting the bus was a regular occurrence. Unless I chose to walk and pocket the fare.

Cheers
Slarti

[brightncheerful]

Mars bar 6d. I got my first Green Shield stamp for that.

Fell out with the sweetshop owner near where I lived. Wanted to buy an aniseed ball for a farthing (which is what they were priced at) but he wouldn't give me change of 1d, insisted I had to buy 4.

---

My mother was the first of her friends to get a freezer. It was a second-hand chest freezer which in its previous life had been owned by a shop for keeping ice-cream in.

[bungeejumper]

Mars bar 6d. I got my first Green Shield stamp for that.

Fell out with the sweetshop owner near where I lived. Wanted to buy an aniseed ball for a farthing (which is what they were priced at) but he wouldn't give me change of 1d, insisted I had to buy 4.

Yep, and I'll raise you the yellow paper sherbet fountains, the dayglow-pink American bubble gum, the Black Jacks, and the Wagon Wheels that were big enough to last you the whole morning. (And no, that wasn't just because our faces were smaller in those days.) Then there were the old-style Spangles (made with wartime sweetener rather than sugar until the 1960s, I believe? We preferred the old ones to the new ones.) And Pez, which you can still get apparently.

I mentioned airguns for boys in a previous post. On a less offensive level, we small kids had spud guns, catapults and peashooters, which had not yet been outlawed by the red-top newspapers. My one and only peashooter lasted me for only one morning, before it was confiscated at the insistence of the passers-by who I had been ambushing from under the hedge with both precision and perseverance. Dennis the Menace had a lot to answer for.

BJ

[AleisterCrowley]

the dayglow-pink American bubble gum
"Bazooka Joe's" I think. Available from vending machines outside shops. As were packs of 10 Woodbines/Embassy !

[Grumpi]

I remember in the earlier 50's awaiting call-up for National Service I joined a firm of accountants as an articles clerk for which I received 10 shillings a week. When I complained that it was very much I was told I was lucky as it had not been that long ago when I would have had to have paid them for the privilege.
The daily commute into Bradford centre on the bus surrounded by men who's idea of breakfast was a cough, a spit and a Woodbine was not one of my more pleasant memories. The nicotine clouds condensed out as a dark brown liquid staining and threatening to drip down off the ceiling of the upper deck was a sight to behold.

[brightncheerful]

On a less offensive level, we small kids had spud guns, catapults and peashooters, which had not yet been outlawed by the red-top newspapers. My one and only peashooter lasted me for only one morning, before it was confiscated at the insistence of the passers-by who I had been ambushing from under the hedge with both precision and perseverance. Dennis the Menace had a lot to answer for. BJ

By the same token, with some American friends, we used to play baseball on the common (public open space). Allowing ourselves plenty of room, one of the boundaries was a separate part of the common on the other side of London's North Circular Road. When our parents heard that we were hitting balls over passing vehicles, we were given an ultimatum. I contented myself by throwing an iron bar up into horse chestnut trees on the common to get conkers down, sometimes I got lucky, other times the bar sailed through the tree and crashed onto the road nearby. From that I graduated to using a tennis racquet to hit small apples from an apple tree in my parents' garden over the roof of the house onto the street.

During the several admonishments, I was told to grow up and stop acting like a child. I do not think I am any taller now than then but what I do know is that I could've stopped acting like a child had the admonishers suggested an alternative.

[DiamondEcho]

Re: white goods. Within living memory they were luxuries of the rich. I have an idea it was in the 1960s that the number of households with a fridge reached 50%. Washing machines were also rising, while freezers and microwaves came later.

My parents married in '57, and couldn't afford to buy a fridge until 3 years later.

We had a B&W TV , manual tune. Can't remember when we got the first colour one - about 1980? I know our first VCR was in time for Live Aid, so 1985

I just about recall the Apollo missions c69-72? We had a B+W set then, and it had the tuning knob as you describe. Around '76/7 we upgraded to a then dazzling colour set but even then it was rented from Radio-Rentals because they were very expensive to buy outright, a preserve of the very well off.

[Rhyd6]

One of my best LBYM tricks has been to convert new money into old. Many a time it's stopped me making rash purchases, it even applies to small things, I used to buy scones in work at 50p each until I thought 10bob - 10 bob for a scone - no way.

My mother had her first washing machine when I was 13, until then we'd only had electric light apparently the supply wouldn't support anything else. That machine was a Vactric a huge machine with a mangle on the top. The machine is 61 years old and is still being used. It went from my mother to me, I used it for dog and cat blankets, then it went to a friends for her husbands mucky overalls etc. He ran a haulage business. When he retired it came back to us and is now in the old wash house together with a spin dryer and it's being used for dog and cat blankets again. OH gave it a service, fitted new brushes to the motor and away to go. I'm lucky to get 3 years out of the machines they make today.

R6

[LadyGagarin]

I'd heard of Bile Beans but unsure of their nature, I looked them up.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bile_Beans
Plus ca change, plus c'est la meme chose...

[LadyGagarin]

We got our first VCR in about 1990, I think. One of the last of my class to have one. Dad the TV repairman didn't like new technology when at home - we were also among the last to abandon B&W TV. I remember sitting in front of The Wizard of Oz just as entranced as the original 1939 cinemagoers, which he thought was ridiculous since you didn't walk around staring at real life in a state of perpetual wonderment, just because it was in 'glorious technicolour'.

[panamagold]

With all these references to b/w tv it reminds me of the Ted Lowe snooker commentary quote I read about, obviously during the transitional period, which was something along the lines of "for those of you watching in black and white, the pink is next to the green." Classic.

panamagold