The Golden Years

INTRODUCTION TO THE GOLDEN YEARS...

Remember the days when you could go to the flicks, come home in a taxi, get a ha’penny of chips, a pint of mild and a Babycham and still have enough left from a shilling to buy a bungalow? Well, I don’t, but that’s not the point. What IS the point is that the other day my kettle boiled dry. Or rather, I switched it on and it didn’t have any water in it; it rasped for a few seconds and then I switched it off. That single action sparked a memory. Probably for the first time in decades, I remembered that you used to have to switch the kettle off BY HAND every single time you boiled it! It didn’t switch off automatically, so you had to hang around and wait; if you returned to the telly you’d forget and come back to a kitchen full of steam, the kettle boiled dry and the element burnt and flaking. That got me thinking of all the inventions, conventions and innovations that make our lives so much easier today, but we take for granted and don’t even think about them. So, that’s the kind of thing we’ll be looking at in THE GOLDEN YEARS, starting with the aforementioned:

THE (NON-AUTOMATIC) KETTLE.

Old kettles were always kettle-shaped... which is logical enough... rather than jug-shaped. They were always metal rather than plastic, but when you invested in one you knew it would one day be passed on to your children and then grandchildren. They were so solid and reliable that you could also use them to store radioactive waste, safe in the knowledge that they would never, ever leak and had a half-life of forever. The early space shuttles had old kettles attached to their hulls to protect them from heat, but this had to be abandoned as they kept boiling dry on re-entry.

Imagine today if you had to get up to physically switch the kettle off every time you brewed up! Nightmare. That welcome little click you hear from the kitchen is such a comforting sound.

So, that’s an in-depth look at non-automatic kettles. Those were dark times indeed!

A lot of things were much better in the olden days, but a lot of things were far worse. In THE GOLDEN YEARS, we remind ourselves of some of the things that have actually improved with time.

This week we take an in-depth and confectionary-eyed look at:

SIZE MATTERS: WAGON WHEELS

The biscuits were launched in 1948. The name relates to the shape of the biscuits and capitalized on the Wild West. which was popular at the time. They consist, and I quote “of two biscuits with marshmallow sandwich filling, covered in a chocolate flavoured coating”.

When I first encountered them – at school – they were the size of a 7” single and by the time you’d eaten it you didn’t need lunch. At secondary school they were often used instead of a discus, or rolled into a classroom and used for an impromptu dais for a short teacher to stand on. Everyone remembers Wagon Wheels as being HUGE, but the manufacturers deny that the product has reduced in size! They feebly argue that adults are thinking back and remembering them incorrectly and now have bigger hands and bigger… BOLLOCKS! That’s rubbish! They were called Wagon Wheels and they were like wagon wheels, ie BIG! I remember going to the tuck shop at school to spend my dinner money and the Wagon Wheels from a new box were smaller than the last ones. It wasn’t my memory, it was overnight and my hands hadn’t suddenly grown, and it wasn’t just me, there was outrage and uproar in the playground.

They still make them and they look very inadequate. They should be done under the Trade Descriptions Act (1968). If a wagon rolled into town on four of those it would be called a rollerskate. And no self-respecting cowboy would go near one. As they would be very unmanly – and a bloke wearing leather chaps and a big hat can’t afford to take any chances.

A lot of things were much better in the olden days, but a lot of things were far worse. In THE GOLDEN YEARS, we remind ourselves of some of the things that have actually improved with time.

This week we take an in-depth and vacational look at the humble:

THE BOARDING HOUSE.

For anyone UNDER a certain age, this may sound quite officious, like a place where someone who's been released on tagging may be required to stay. For anyone OVER a certain age – that's exactly what it was like. It isn’t a term we hear very often today, but a boarding house was a "type" of hotel... "Type" as in "it really wasn't at all like a hotel". The proprietors were often very quick to point out: “This isn’t a hotel, you know!” For a start, it didn’t have the facilities or luxury of a hotel; it wasn’t as relaxed as a squat, but had less privileges than most prisons.

It was more like a Bed and Breakfast establishment; you got your bed, you got your breakfast, but as this was yesteryear, things were very different from your average B&B today. There was no TV in your room; there would usually be a communal TV/sitting room downstairs. It was very annoying when you wanted to watch Doctor Who and someone had already commandeered the TV and was watching University Challenge on the other channel. There were no tea/coffee making facilities, so no late night or early morning brews. There would almost certainly be a shared bathroom down the hall; en suites were for the future. As if all these punishments weren’t enough, you had to vacate your room by a certain time and weren’t allowed back in until late afternoon. If you were staying for a week, you soon ran out of rainy day activities. (We often sat in the car outside our boarding house, just waiting for the time we could enter and claim the TV.)

The owners were usually, but not always, no nonsense, matronly ladies; they liked rules and they liked enforcing them. They didn’t always wear uniforms, but they may as well have.

So, that was a boarding house. I’m still having flashbacks about them.

A lot of things were much better in the olden days, but a lot of things were far worse. In THE GOLDEN YEARS, we remind ourselves that not everything in the past was great.

This time we take an in-depth and culinary look at:

THE CHIP PAN

We now have microwave chips and oven chips and silicon chips, but in yesteryear chips were one of your five-a-day. One of your five portions of saturated fat, that is. Saturated fat would make you grow up big and strong… just not for very long. Chips in those days were cooked in a chip pan. This was a big, purpose-built saucepan filled with lard. When it wasn’t in use it was returned to the cupboard full of white lard which set hard – plus crispy fragments of food that had been left behind. The chip pan would have dribbles of burnt lard down its sides and the other pans treated it like a pariah and were afraid of it. (Note: Potatoes were always peeled in those days, in case you caught something off the skins. Such as Vitamin C.)

Chip pans were very dangerous and there were public information films about what to do in the event of a chip pan fire, such as:

NEVER throw water onto an oil/fat fire

ALWAYS throw a wet tea towel over the pan to quell the flames.

I remember one afternoon in the summer holidays watching a film called “Death Takes a Holiday”… I’ve never seen it since… Afterwards we went to pick dad up from work. (We only had one car in those days. Only members of the Royal family and John Prescott had more than one.) We picked dad up and as we drove back into our street there were two fire engines outside our house and all the neighbours were on the pavement gawking and gossiping. My mum started laughing hysterically and cried: “I left the chip pan on!” My dad didn’t laugh: “What the hell are you laughing for, woman!” All I was concerned about was whether our cat, Tinker, was alright.

The kitchen had been almost completely destroyed. I remember the polystyrene ceiling tiles had melted and dripped onto the floor and melted the lino. It absolutely horrified me – it was like some nightmare image from a horror movie. Apart from being very smoky, the rest of the house had survived, but the kitchen had to be knocked down and rebuilt. Tinker, by the way, was fine. He used up one of his nine lives that day, but had been released by our neighbour.

I remember the next morning mum trying to force-feed me what we would now consider a delicacy: natural beech-smoked Weetabix. It was revolting and I couldn’t eat it. And all my clothes smelt of smoke for months. Anything to do with smoke or fire really frightened me for a long time afterwards.

I recall the new chip pan had new-fangled vegetable oil in it (whatever next!) which didn’t set when it was cold. A lot of older people thought this new fad was highly immoral and probably made you grow up with dubious tendencies. Then eventually the chip pan disappeared and frozen chips were spread on a baking tray and put in the oven. And the chip pan was no more, just a terrifyingly dangerous object from the past, when times were slower and simpler and highly flammable.

A lot of things were much better in the olden days, but a lot of things were far worse. In THE GOLDEN YEARS, we remind ourselves that not everything in the past was great.

This time we take an in-depth and highly recordable look at:

THE TAPE RECORDER

If you want to listen to some music now, you most probably download it, or listen to Spotify * or even, God forbid, purchase a recording via a real walk-in shop or – more likely – Amazon. +

* Other music channels are available… I assume.

+ Other on-line retailers were available… but Amazon ate them all.

When I was at school and heavily into music, no one could afford to buy records, so the next best thing was to record songs from the radio on one of those new-fangled tape recorder things. This was a real leap forward in technology – that you could have a small tape recorder at home and actually record things! It was totally impossible, it was pure science fiction, yet it was real! The only problem was, the days of having any form of radio cassette were still in the future, so your boxy tape recorder had to have a microphone stretched across the room to the speaker of a radio. This was fine, except that the mic picked up all the other noises going on in the house. So the next day when you listened back to your new recording of the Top 40, in the middle of Dexy’s Midnight Runners’ “Geno” you’d hear you mum shouting: “Your tea’s on the table. I won’t tell you again!” Or half way through the harmonic tones of the Stranglers’ “Golden Brown” the hoover would start.

To this day, a song doesn’t seem right without a load of background hiss, a cat mewing, a door slamming and someone having a conversation over it. Ah… such happy times.

In THE GOLDEN YEARS, we’re taking an old fashioned and leisurely look at all the things from the utopia of yesteryear that we may remember fondly, but were actually less than great – all the trivial, everyday things that were a daily part of our sepia-coloured lives.

Remember the days when everything was literally in black and white? A lot of things were much better in the olden days, but a lot of things were far worse. In THE GOLDEN YEARS, we remind ourselves that not everything in the past was great. This time we take an in-depth and highly educational, multi-programme look at:

THE NUMBER OF TV CHANNELS

When I was younger, so much younger than today… as they Beatles once said when they were about nineteen… there were only three TV channels. (Kids today would be purposefully overdosing on their anti-depressants and anxiety pills if they only had three channels!) But back then, in those simpler times, three was all we needed. Besides, it was far better than when there were only TWO channels, or even (brace yourselves) ONE. And three offered a considerably higher choice to the viewer than NONE – which is what there was for the majority of human existence. Much, much older people will remember these dark times, when a fireplace would be the focal point of the room – something you could stare at instead of communicating with your family.

In my youth, the day at school would be punctuated by talk of the previous night’s TV: the Six Million Dollar Man, the Bionic Woman, Day of the Triffids, Blake’s Seven… Everyone had always watched the same programmes. We no longer have that kind of conversational unity to bond us – and that’s a shame. Today you’ve more chance of winning the lottery* than finding someone who watched the same channel as you last night.

* A form of public gambling – but it’s a long way off in the future yet, dear reader. At this point in time a “double-rollover” means “It’s our wedding night and I want my money’s worth.”

What really WASN’T better in the past was when you missed a programme. Although old people loved to complain about all the repeats, the TV companies never repeated the programmes you actually wanted to watch. Many classic serials and dramas were NEVER repeated and – in the case of BBC programmes – the old master tapes were often consigned to an incinerator to cut down on storage space. The BBC higher echelons regularly get together and kick themselves at how many classic programmes and therefore how much future-revenue they ordered to go up in smoke.

In those dark, three-channel times there was no iPlayer or equivalent, no downloading, no streaming, no On Demand TV, no Catch-up, no Gold, no Dave, no video or DVD… If you missed your favourite programme it was gone… and in all likelihood you would never see it again…

Nowadays you can download a TV programme to your computer, your laptop, your phone, your iPod, your iPad and probably your electric toothbrush... though I imagine this could lead to over-brushing, so be warned.

“Communication let me down.” Spandau Ballet once said. (Mr Ballet was unavailable for comment.) This time we’re taking an old-fashioned yet seriously in-depth and communicative look at:

THE TELEPHONE

I’m sure we’ve all been let down by our phones: you’ve got no signal, you've run out of credit, your battery is running low, your phone has been stolen or lost or you’ve had to destroy it, because – despite repeated warnings – it kept pissing you off. In the olden days, of course, there were no mobile phones; the term “landline” wasn’t in common usage and if you wanted to text your friend to tell them the Clash would be on Top of the Pops tonight, you had to write to them and wait a week for a reply. This could be problematic if you just needed to say something like: “Honey, going to be late home tonight. Emergency meeting. Sorry. X”. This might result in the aforementioned, uninformed wife inserting cold, congealed food – and plate – into tardy husband. Not always orally.

Calls were murderously expensive in yesteryear, so a quick telecommunication to the wife may mean you couldn’t afford a summer holiday that year. My mum decided our phone bill was too high and it was the kids who were responsible, so she installed a little lock on the dial and only she and my dad had a key. Mysteriously the bills didn’t lessen; it was discovered it was my dad who was making overlong calls… and also stealing chocolate biscuits – which my mum stock-checked.

Phones – or “telephones” as they were quaintly called – were much larger in the days of bygone. Ours was a cream-coloured, smooth plastic dial phone, which was robust and quite heavy. Answering the phone a few times in an afternoon was the modern equivalent of a trip to the gym – not that gyms for normal people had been invented then. Also, if you were broken into you could always use the handset to bludgeon the interloper. You couldn’t screen your calls, but the phone didn’t ring that often, so when it did you wanted to answer. And it was never anyone trying to interfere with your PPI or sell you double-glazing.

Life was so much simpler then. And during the electricity strikes and the three-day weeks, though you sat in darkness with no heat and no entertainment, you could still use the phone… it’s just that you couldn’t afford to call anyone.

Nothing is more fondly remembered or more nostalgic than music. This time we’re taking an old-fashioned yet seriously in-depth yet harmonic look at:

THE RADIOGRAM

My dad’s stereo/hifi/music centre – call it what you will, was called the “radiogram”, for radio-gramaphone. At least that’s what he called it; I have never heard anyone else use that term. It was the size of a coffin and looked very similar; it was more like a sideboard than a sound system. It had a teak finish and you stored your records* inside it.

* (“Records”, AKA vinyl: Big black CDs that played on both sides. They scratched easily and often you would get an unintentional dub-mix of your favourite track if you weren’t careful.)

The radiogram was huge; it was a piece of furniture. It was kept in the dining room, so – as a house only had one telly in those days – when in the dining room you could sit and stare at the radiogram. You could admire its dove-tail joints and its well-polished finish. I don’t remember what happened to it, but I think my dad must have sold it when they downsized to a flat, because it never, ever had a fault. Unlike the countless hifis they’ve had since.

The radiogram was stereo, which meant it had two speakers – two built-in speakers. This was an upgrade from my grandma’s suitcase-like gramophone which had only one speaker.

The radiogram also had FOUR speeds for the turntable – not just 33 and 45 rpm. It was always a joy to listen to your favourite songs on the wrong speed and have two minutes of a Pinky and Perky rendition.

I didn’t have any records of my own and Dad’s were mainly middle-of-the-road/easy listening/crooners, the Carpenters and suchlike, but he did have a Beatles compilation: Oldies But Goldies, which was his most poptastic album and where I discovered the Fab Four.

My next upgrade was when I had started work and I bought a fashionable tower system that Cockney barrow-boy, one-day-to-be Sir and Lord, entrepreneur and gruff grafter, Alan Sugar kindly made for me. It was resplendent with its smoked glass door, comprising two separate speakers (revolutionary!), turntable (also revolutionary… in that it revolved), radio and TWIN, yes TWIN tape decks. Eat my tape, losers!

But nothing really beat the radiogram. Today, music just doesn’t sound the same without all the crackle and hiss… music should sound like a breakfast cereal. There is something so special about singing to your new album, watching it spin round on a turntable with a diamond-tipped needle cutting into its grooves. Songs then were written to last… as long as you didn’t listen to them too often.

This time we take an in-depth, scratchy and restrictive look at:

SHEETS AND BLANKETS

If you can’t get yourself arrested for love nor money, but want the experience of being in an A-category prison, then why not hurl out your duvet and return to sheets and blankets for a retro-feel lack of sleep that makes you feel like you’re being restrained.

When “continental quilts” – as they were originally called, duvets to you and I – first swept the nation it was odd not having the weight and restriction of tightly tucked-in blankets and hospital corners. I used to haul a piece of chipboard over me at night to weigh me down sufficiently.

My first experience of a duvet was actually a false start: my mum unveiled my new duvet cover – and it wasn’t even Christmas or a birthday, so that was quite a momentous occasion. It was absolutely hideous! It was a mess of splodgy green diamonds – I hated it and I said as much; mum wasn’t impressed. I still have the pillow cases – I can’t bear to throw them away, because my mum bought them, but I still loathe them and only use them as “under” pillow cases. Because my mum was thrifty and we lived like there was a war on, instead of an actual quilt or duvet, she put the duvet covers on opened-out sleeping bags, which didn’t work at all. It was freezing at night! It was only when I left home and bought my own that I learn how gorgeous a duvet can be.

This time we're taking an in-depth and hoovertastic look at:

THE VACUUM CLEANER

When people got tired of having filthy, stinking carpets or beating their rugs on a washing line, they would buy a modern contraption called a vacuum cleaner – commonly, but incorrectly referred to as a “hoover” – after FBI boss, J. Edgar Hoover, who invented it by accident whilst trying to create an efficient bugging device. His prototype was known as “the Watergate”.

My parents had a vacuum cleaner for the first twenty-five years of their married life. It was a large grey/brown cylinder called something catchy like a “Vacuum-o-matic”, though there was nothing “o-matic” about it, as that implies it was automatic… and it wasn’t. In fact, CarpetDuo would be a better brand name, because it was so big it took two people to negotiate it round the house, so you would have to enlist the services of a family member or neighbour. We also had to hire a garage to park it in at night. It was seemingly constructed from one of the fuel tanks from the Apollo 11 mission, but what a piece of machinery! It was really reliable, never broke down and it sucked the carpets to within an inch of their lives. Eventually, mum and dad decided – in a rare moment of giddy affluence that people still talk about – to upgrade and buy a new vacuum cleaner. Bad move! By then we lived in the disposable consumer society and they had to buy a new one very 53 weeks. They were always cheap and nasty and broke down as soon as they were out of guarantee.

Products tended to work in the golden years, though there was a downside of course. The vacuums were heavy, awkward and angular; if you accidentally had a bump while dragging your hoover between rooms you could demolish half a supporting wall. And you had to limber up before carrying the vacuum upstairs. There was no craze of going to the gym in those days – but if you’d done the hoovering you didn’t need to bother. Design was always functional; our vacuum cleaner looked like it had been built in a Russian labour camp. And one final joy – you could un-attach the hose, put it on the other end and blow dust on your friends. A cleaning implement and a weapon. Oh, those Russians!

This time we're taking an in depth and very stressful look at:

PEN AND INK

With pen and ink you can’t just delete any mistakes and move on… you have to start all over again!

In the olden days, with a typewriter you had to xxxxx cross any xxxxxxxx mistakes xxout and were left with a xxxxxxx letter which was just a xxxx mess.

Or you could use Tippex, but then you’d be left with large spaces that if you did manage to type over were practically illegible. (The original liquid paper was invented in the ‘Fifties by Mike Nesmith’s mum – he of the Monkees fame.)

Anyone that knows me, will know I’m no fan of computers – and they come with their own problems, such as predictive text, which ready ducks me offer and gets on my tips. It’s make you’ll sounds like you’re talking out of your arts. But, when they working correctly commuters are a very convent tool – and we should all be hateful for them. (Argh! I rate predeliction test!!!)

In THE GOLDEN YEARS, we’re taking an old fashioned and leisurely look at all the things from the utopia of yesteryear that we may remember fondly, but were actually less than great; all the trivial, everyday things that were a daily part of our forelock-tugging lives.

This time we’re taking a fascinating, in-depth and visual look at:

THE TELEVISION

Several people had a hand in the invention of the television, but the lion’s share of the credit goes to Scotsman, John Logie Baird in the 1920s.

I’m not a conspiracy theorist, but I believe television was invented to supplicate the proletariat and keep them too busy to revolt. You can quite believe that plans for any revolution would instantly be shelved upon hearing the tortured strains of the Coronation Street theme. When the masses started to break free from the conditioning of television, Social Media was invented to replace it.

The standard size TV in yesteryear was 22 inches. (You measure corner to corner.) The biggest was 26 inches, which at the time seemed like owning your own cinema. You just needed a friend or family member to sit behind you rustling sweet wrappers and you had the full, authentic, cinematic experience. These days, of course, a 26 inch TV is considered tiny and would only be for your caravan or your hamster.

Our family home telly was a standard 22 incher. For years we had a black and white one, then we upgraded to colour, even though many programmes were still only made in black and white at that point. The Avengers went to colour in 1966, Doctor Who in 1970, while the Archers has always been black and white… or at least it sounds it.

Despite the modest screen size back then, the actual units were the size of tenement blocks. On the plus side, they were burglar proof… no one could run off with your telly under their arm. Ours was in a wooden cabinet which had a rolling shutter, so you could hide the offending screen away if you had guests and they never needed to know your secret shame, namely that you watched telly rather than reading, going to the theatre or arguing as a family.

Old TVs then had many recurring issues, such as the vertical or horizontal hold going west, so the picture would skate across the screen from side to side or roll upwards, but if you were canny you found out where the hold knobs were - round the back - and could adjust them yourself. Sometimes one of the colours went wrong and everything went purple or yellow. Oh, I miss those times…

So, that was an in-depth look at televisions in the Golden Years. It turns out, they weren’t actually golden at all, it was just the red and green electron emitters misfiring at the screen to create a yellow hue.

This time we’re taking an in-depth and yet distant look at:

REMOTE CONTROLS.

This has got to be one of the big ones! It’s hard to imagine now that there was a time when you had to get up, cross the room and change channels on the TV. Of course prior to that you didn’t have this terrible exertion, because there was no choice of channels – and prior to that there was no television, just a space in the corner of the room that families would stare at, wishing someone would invent something to fill it.

Anyway, remote controls were invented to reduce exercise and aid clinical obesity. Before infra-red remote controls that rely on the black arts to perform their wizardry, we briefly had a simplified version on a wire. At the time they seemed like a gift from heaven, but were very quickly superseded; like the red squirrel vs the grey, wire remotes were attacked by the cordless ones and became virtually extinct. They are now a seriously endangered species, but there are still a few places where these shy creatures live in safety, changing channels at will.

This time we take an in-depth, unfashionable and slightly singed look at:

BRENTFORD NYLONS*

* Other brands of equally hideous and uncomfortable nylon products were also available. Probably.

In my childhood, we had nylon sheets, which were scratchy and cold when you got in, even in summer. My pyjamas and dressing gown were nylon as well. They were awful.

Remember Brentford Nylons, folks? A shop that specialised in, yep, nylon. # Who invented nylon, where and why? Well, after a painstaking Google search, it turns out that “Nylon” was apparently invented in the ‘Thirties. It is a “generic designation of a synthetic polymer”. I thought so.

But why, why, why would you invent it? It is so horrible! Putting on my red and blue reversible dressing gown provided no warmth or comfort at all. It was like giving yourself a rub down with a piece of cold sandpaper. And whether you sported the blue side or the red side, with its quilted-effect finish, it was still hideous.

Furthermore, nylon products were a considerable fire risk; even walking past a radiator when it was full-on had me in fear of combustion. In addition, nylon generated so much static that as soon as you went near anyone you electrocuted them… which would be fine, but you shocked yourself as well. The smell of singeing is horrible…especially when it’s coming from you. During the power cuts of the ‘Seventies we just had to connect a lamp and five-bar-fire to a recently-worn nylon dressing gown and we had power for hours.

I don’t miss nylon at all… though I do miss answering the door in my red and blue dressing gown on a Saturday morning – during Space 1999 – and inadvertently electrocuting a friend or neighbour. Happy times.

# Brentford Nylons. After writing the above blog entry I did a quick Google search for the history of nylon and came across a Brentford Nylons fan club webpage. Have a chuckle at: https://www.facebook.com/Brentford-Nylons-431505620201616/

They had an ad campaign featuring fab-tastic DJ Alan Freeman, which I don’t remember. According to a 1995 article in the Independent, Brentford Nylons was one of the “best known and least-loved” brands of the ‘Seventies. The company was sold for a “knock-down price” and the new buyers abandoned the name ASAP. You can probably buy Brentford Nylons products on eBay… but why the hell would you?