Advent Sunday in Old Money: Day 24

 

Christmas '74

Christmas 1974 – I can remember it in some detail. Not like it happened yesterday, but with reasonable clarity considering it was fifty years ago. Strange how the memory works – I can picture us driving out to see our relatives on the afternoon of Christmas Eve; I can even remember the kind of day it was, the sky typical for the time of year, partly blue, partly cloudy. We were passing Hams Hall Power Station on our way to see a couple of aunts and uncles who lived in that general direction, and the radio was playing in our dad’s Austin 2200. I can even tell you the record that was playing: Gloria Gaynor singing Never Can Say Goodbye, number 25 in that week’s top fifty. Why this particular moment should have become lodged in the memory I have no idea, as the rest of the afternoon is a blank...

Reconstructing the past is always easier if you have a diary to refer to. My ‘Letts’ Schoolboys’ Diary’ of that year is small, and short on detail, except for when it comes to television, but there’s just enough there for me to piece together a run-down of the days leading up to Christmas 1974. On Thursday 12 December, I went to a Christmas concert at my old junior school. On the following day, we put up our Christmas tree – for more on that see day 2 in this advent calendar. On the evening of Saturday 14 December, we put up paper chains, during Bruce Forsyth’s Generation Game – and I can still picture us doing it. In fact, decorating the tree during the Generation Game would become a bit of a tradition in our house during the mid-70s.

Christmas week 1974, as recorded in my Letts' Schoolboys' Diary

The following day saw me back on my comic creating activities, which I’ve written about recently, breaking off only when an old school friend came round to play guitar. On Monday night, I watched that year’s edition of Carry On Christmas, ITV’s annual festive version of the famous film series. Four decades later, I designed a sleeve for the DVD release. Wednesday’s big event was the coming of that year’s Christmas TV and Radio Times, the latter featuring Frank Spencer on a decidedly austere and mostly un-festive cover. Tommy Steele was on the TV Times, an issue sadly missing from my collection of pdfs. If I could spare the £54.99 the seller is asking for, I could have got the same ATV Midland edition off eBay in time for Christmas… albeit fifty years too late.

The following evening was the night of our school carol concert, and I was in the choir so attendance was inevitable. It’s solely on account of rehearsals for said concert that I know how to pronounce the word ‘excelsis’ which appears in the lyric of Ding-Dong Merrily On High. Back in primary school, we’d sung it the way it looks – ‘ex-sell-sis’ when in fact it should be pronounced ‘ex-chel-sis’as any Latin scholar would tell you, and our music master insisted. That’s very Boris Johnson of me, I know...

The following day, Thursday 19 December, we broke up for the holidays, giving us almost a whole free week to get ready for the big day. On the Friday evening, we got a repeat showing of last year’s Goodies and the Beanstalk, which was very welcome. On Saturday, I bought my mum’s Christmas present, seemingly from a discount warehouse called ‘Big D’ – the diary does not record what it was, but in the words of Bob Ferris from that year’s Likely Lads, it was almost certainly ‘something for the house’. I also got the Christmas edition of The Dandy, which you can share by scrolling down.

On Sunday, as I’ve mentioned previously, the evening’s must-see television event was the BBC’s Omnibus profile of the careers of Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy, a film that would be well worth resurrecting. On Monday 23rd, the BBC gave us another excellent documentary in the form of Horizon: How on Earth Did They Do That? (9.05pm, BBC2) a film that went behind the scenes of the movie special effects industry and included rare clips of scenes censored from King Kong, as well as a tantalising first glimpse of Gerry Anderson’s Space:1999. As if that wasn’t enough, by turning back to BBC1, if you could endure The Spinners at Christmas, you’d have been rewarded with the first broadcast of what was arguably the best of the BBC’s Ghost Stories for Christmas – The Treasure of Abbot Thomas (11.35pm, BBC1).

Christmas Eve was a Tuesday – then as now – which meant a new Top 20 at lunchtime. Following this, we went out for the afternoon, which is where I started this reminiscence. We were back home in time to see another festive first, the ‘Special Edition for Christmas’ of Whatever Happened to the Likely Lads. I’ve seen it so many times over the years, it's hard now to imagine it as a brand new programme. It will, unfortunately, never be broadcast in its original form again, the BBC having excised a line in which Bob namechecks the dread bearded antipodean entertainer. The episode ended with the characters having a ‘Christmas drink’ and I did the same thing myself as soon as the programme was over. Mine was a scotch and dry ginger, which was something of a watershed moment, as I believe it was one of the very first times that I drank spirits (I was just thirteen). These days, I’d pass on the dry ginger. With this in hand and a bowl of nuts on the table, I sat down to enjoy the evening’s big film, Ice Station Zebra.

Christmas Day brought a visit from our Grandparents – from 1967 until 1972 we’d been to their house at Christmas, which meant leaving all our new toys behind for the day when we’d only just opened them. A falling out between relatives had brought this to an end in 1973, and this year the roles were reversed. As to this year’s ‘toys’, for me, that meant a lot of LPs – three Beatle albums, a James Bond Collection, Eric Clapton’s recent 461 Ocean Boulevard, 10cc’s Sheet Music, an EMI Dracula album and, incongruously, an LP by the year’s chart-topping band Paper Lace. The latter is possibly on course for some kind of record, as it has never seen turntable action from that day to this. On top of all this, I got a Polaroid Camera – why I didn’t ask for a proper camera, I’ll never know. I think I liked the idea of getting instant results, but I was several decades too early for a smartphone...

Boxing Day meant a Beatles film, and as we’ve previously seen, this year’s offering was a second outing for Help! It may have been in colour, but it looked like an artefact from another time, for all that it was a mere nine years old… a few months older than the album Rubber Soul (originally released just in time for Christmas 1965), which I played for the first time that same afternoon. It was darkly overcast outside, and like that Christmas Eve car ride, I can still replay the scene in my mind’s eye. Hearing Rubber Soul was little short of a revelatory moment. I already knew the Beatles were good, but I didn’t know they’d ever done anything this good. The progress they’d made in the few months between this and Help! was phenomenal. It was the best LP I’d ever heard. It still is.

By 1974, Christmas on BBC1 meant a complete Dr. Who adventure, and this year’s offering was Planet of the Spiders, nicely edited down from the unweildy 6-episode original to fill an hour and forty five minutes on the afternoon of 27 December. Planet of the Spiders was the first regeneration I’d ever witnessed in Dr. Who, so it felt a bit special. The scheduling was deliberate, for the following day would see Tom Baker make his debut in the role.

The rest of the festive season was spent drawing nonsensical cartoons, playing games we’d been bought at Christmas (‘Spy Trap’ [above]– a kind of tiddlywinks with attitude) and playing with toys. I know – I was thirteen, surely I’d grown out of Lego by this time, but no. I may have been still of an age to play with toys, but I was old enough by now to be allowed to stay up and see in the New Year. This was no big deal in our house – our Dad was always out on a gig on New Year’s Eve, traditionally the best paying night of the year for any musician, so we didn’t do anything special. Instead, we saw a bit of The Old Grey Whistle Test, now well on its way to becoming a New Year tradition. New Year’s Day, a bank holiday for only the second time, brought a random repeat of a UFO episode (The Psychobombs), more Lego fun and a visit to our grandparents. There were still six more days remaining of the school holidays, which came to an end in style with a visit to the cinema on Monday 6 January to see a James Bond double bill – Live and Let Die and the nicely festive On Her Majesty’s Secret Service.

And with that, we were done. Whatever you’re up to fifty years later, have a very happy and peaceful Christmas and I hope you’ve enjoyed this nostalgic trip down an artificial snow-lined memory lane. Sunday – in even older money – will resume normal service in the year 2025. Which I think should be the cue to end on a song…

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=izQB2-Kmiic

And here's that Christmas Dandy – in full – click on each image for a larger version.

Advent Sunday in Old Money: Day 23

 

Holiday Star Trek

Monday, December 23rd 1974. We had the television on early – it was the Christmas holidays, and there were programmes on in the morning. This was a relatively recent development, and the coming years would see an interesting mix of nostalgic programming occupying the post-meridian slots on BBC and ITV. On this particular morning, we were tuned in to see Top Cat at 9.55am on BBC1. And when I say Top Cat, I mean Boss Cat – the BBC had coyly rebranded the series back in the 1960s to avoid giving free publicity to a brand of tinned cat meat. This retitling merely consisted of a new caption card, jaggedly cut into the original opening titles. How I wish they’d got someone to sing ‘Boss Cat’ over the title song, but it was not to be. I mean, ‘close friends get to call him BC’? 

Top Cat was all very well, but this morning’s schedule included a first for British television – an episode of Star Trek broadcast during the day as opposed to in the evening. It felt a bit special: I mean, it was Christmas, and Star Trek was on in the morning. Moreover, it was on again tomorrow, Christmas Eve – and again on Boxing Day. This wouldn’t seem in any way remarkable to modern viewers but back in 1974 it was a broadcasting first: four Star Trek episodes in the space of a week. How special can you get? The BBC obviously felt that way because the Radio Times billing gave the title as ‘Holiday Star Trek’, which still gives me a warm glow of nostalgia. Those broadcasts were special for me in another way, as they was the first episodes I ever got to see in colour (we’d got our first colour TV set back in November). 

There was nothing different about the presentation, although it’s quite possible that the continuity announcer would have added a festive note or two – unlike Top/Boss Cat, we didn’t get the word ‘Holiday’ superimposed over the opening titles. Although I rather wish we had…

One aspect of the BBC’s presentation of Star Trek that would surprise modern audiences was the decision to relocate the opening titles to the beginning of each episode. The BBC didn’t go a bundle on the kind of ‘cold opening’ favoured by American series, and wouldn’t do it on any of their own productions until Doomwatch in 1970. Having the main titles up front allowed the programme presentation technicians to crossfade from the rotating BBC world to the star field that opened each episode. I don’t know if they did it from day one, but it became a kind of stock in trade. I may even have some examples preserved on VHS tape somewhere. 

Another BBC tradition around this time was the addition of festive trappings to the rotating globe logo. I’m not sure exactly when this got started, but my diary entry for December 24 1977 begins with the observation ‘BBC world is a Christmas pud.’ So that may have been the first year. Unfortunately, ‘Holiday Star Trek’ was over and done with by then – indeed, the original series didn’t get a solitary airing during 1977. So the prospect of seeing a spaceborne Christmas pudding accompanying William Shatner’s magisterial ‘space, the final frontier’ must remain an unfulfilled fantasy.

‘Holiday Star Trek’ would run for only two festive seasons, in 1974 and 1975. Its first year comprised eight episodes from the show’s first two seasons – although, by the BBC’s reckoning these were all ‘second series’ episodes, the corporation having mixed up episodes from the three original US seasons to create four British series. The festive missions of the starship Enterprise kicked off with one of my personal favourites, The Enemy Within. I know I watched this, because the entry is there in my diary. Christmas Eve’s episode was Court Martial, but Christmas Day was a Trek-free zone. Boxing Day saw the Halloween episode Catspaw beamed into our living rooms, then Kirk and co were off air from Friday 27 December through Sunday 29th , returning on Monday where viewers could have seen a pre-Starsky and Hutch David Soul with an iffy hairdo in The Apple. New Year’s Eve brought Metamorphosis, while 1975 kicked off to the accompaniment of Wolf in the Fold at 10.55am. The Changeling followed on Thursday 2 January before The Trouble With Tribbles brought the short season to an end on Friday 3^rd.

The BBC weren’t just showing any old episodes at random – not yet anyway. Aside from transposing the first two episodes, this short run preserved the broadcast order adopted by the corporation for their ‘second series’ of Star Trekback in April 1970. A run of ‘first series’ repeats had come to an end on Wednesday 28 August 1974 with The Galileo Seven, and the festive season simply picked up where the evening repeats had left off.

When Star Trek was restored to its rightful place in the evening schedule – on Monday 19 May 1975 – the episodes were again following the BBC ‘second series’ broadcast order. It didn’t last long – Monday 9 June saw a leap forward with Return to Tomorrow (ironic titling if you like), before doubing back the following week with I, Mudd. By 21 July, the run of repeats had reached the BBC’s ‘third series’ (originally aired from October 1970 to February 1971), but conked out with The Gamesters of Triskelion (18 August).

In September, the cartoon series took over (on Saturday mornings), with ‘Holiday Star Trek’ returning for a second run on Saturday 20 December with an episode I had never previously seen – Wink of an Eye. I was tuned in again the following day for Let That be Your Last Battlefield, but with Amok Time on Monday 22 December, the BBC broadcast order went out of the window. The next day saw viewers beamed all the way back to series one for the episode Dagger of the Mind, while Christmas Eve brought Operation – Annihilate, a first season episode that the BBC had held back until its own third series (originally airing on 9 December 1970). Boxing Day saw The Paradise Syndrome scheduled at 10.05am immediately before a screening of the Beatles’ film Let It Be, following which Trek took a day off on the 27th before resuming on the 28th with The Cloud Minders – another first run for me. The last three days of 1975 saw Requiem for Methuselah, All Our Yesterdays and Day of the Dove, while two further episodes snuck in under the radar of 1976: Spectre of the Gun on Thursday 1 January and The Way to Eden on Friday 2nd. And with that, we were done. Star Trek went back to being an evening programme and would remain that way until a repeat run on Sunday mornings in October 1995, by which time the series had transitioned to BBC2.

These days, time-shifting, physical media and the plethora of digital channels mean that no programme seems particularly wedded to a specific time of day, so the ‘special’ quality of those festive Star Trek broadcasts may be hard for modern viewers to grasp. But at the age of thirteen, when one of your favourite TV series turns up at Christmas, in the morning as opposed to the evening, and you’re able to watch it in colour for the first time... you bet it was special.

Advent Sunday in Old Money: Day 22

 

Lighting the Streets

Back in the 1960s, I remember our dad driving the family into Birmingham on an evening close to Christmas. We weren’t going shopping – late night shopping hadn’t got started back then – and I don’t think we were visiting relatives. The purpose of the journey was simply to look at the Christmas lights, strung up along New Street and Corporation Street. I wouldn’t have realised it aged four or five, but this was a tradition that had only been going for around a decade.

According to a recent Channel 5 programme, it all started back in 1954 when the retailers on London’s Regent Street got together to put on a festive display. It must still have been considered a novelty six years later, because Kenneth Horne makes specific reference to the 'pretty lights on Regent Street' in that year's Christmas edition of Beyond Our Ken. Other streets weren't far behind, and Oxford Street soon got in on the act, with the trend quickly spreading to the provinces. A lot depended on the generosity of the local authority, with some areas getting very little besides the odd Christmas tree in the middle of a roundabout. But Birmingham was putting on large displays by the early 60s, and it was enough of an attraction to tempt families like us to make a special trip to see them. 

Aside from a few years during the energy crisis of the early 1970s, the tradition has continued, with ever more sophisticated and imaginative designs. In London, Oxford and Regent Streets vie with each other to put on the biggest display and attract the biggest celebrity names to push the button at the big switch-on event. Things began to get a little out of hand when lasers entered the arena, with no one considering the potential hazard they posed, but a low point was reached when Oxford Street's Christmas lights were sponsored by the soft drink Tango, who turned the street into an all-orange advertising display with lights spelling out the not particularly festive message 'Tis the Season to be Tangoed.' A line had been crossed, and such blatant commercialisation never happened again.

Today, almost every town has a Christmas lights switch-on event around the end of November, even if (as here in Burton) the lights themselves aren’t anything special. Judging from the firework display that accompanied this year’s event, I reckon more was spent on the pyrotechnics.

Early displays were static, with sequenced, flashing lights only appearing much later. Unlike today’s LED arrays, the original lighting rigs employed bulbs or fluorescent tubes, and the more ambitious displays incorporated decorative elements such as these giant crackers suspended along New Street in Birmingham in the 1960s:

These Christmas decorations, dating to the 1960s, made use of the suspension street lighting system that was common on many city streets during the era.

Such displays were, of course, limited to Christmas unless you lived in a town like Blackpool, that went in for illuminations during the autumn, or Walsall, whose Arboretum was always decked out in lighting arrays some of which were clearly of considerable vintage. In the same town, one particular street had a kind of permanent display of what had presumably originally been Christmas lights – large plastic oranges attached to the tops of the street lighting columns. I never saw them illuminated and of course, they’re long gone, but they were a source of fascination every time we visited.

Birmingham’s Christmas lights are preserved on a couple of YouTube videos – the quality is very poor, but there's just enough detail to get an idea of how the city streets looked in 1962 and 1964. Interestingly, whoever took the film also aimed their 8mm camera at a permanent advertising display promoting Schweppes drinks, which was attached to the side of a large office block that formed part of the Bull Ring redevelopment of the early 60s and remained in situ for over twenty years. The neon sign, far more sophisticated than the static festive displays, incorporated elements that turned on and off, causing the large letter ‘S’ to ‘fill up’ with light, as is well demonstrated by the YouTube video:

Schweppervescence

On our Christmas drive through the streets in 1965 or 66, I was particularly impressed by a similar advertisement for Robertson’s jam, featuring the famous Golly character. This was another permanent fixture, and the animated elements were probably what caught my eye. Both of these are now, of course, long gone, the buildings which played home to them having been demolished, and New Street has long since been pedestrianised, so our car journey of the 1960s would be impossible today.

Back then, elaborate displays of festive lighting were the preserve of local councils and traders’ associations, but in the last few decades, householders have often outdone the city streets with increasingly ambitious Christmas lights. I’m not sure when this modern tradition really got started, or went further than a few strings of lights wound around a conifer in the front garden, but around twenty years ago I visited the small town of Clowne in Derbyshire, where the residents of several streets had collaborated on their own display of Christmas lights, and this was the first time I’d seen anything organised on this kind of scale. Mince pies and mulled wine were on sale, and the whole event was being run as a charity fundraiser. Here in Burton, where the town’s lights are few and austere in appearance, residents regularly put on better displays in their own gardens: I have only to go a few yards down the road to see a couple of gardens done out as veritable winter wonderlands.

How you decorate your home is a matter of personal taste: I've never liked the trend of recent years for inflatables, and some displays simply go too far, when a simple statement can be much more effective. Of course, if you don't happen to go in for that kind of thing, and all your neighbours do, you can run the risk of looking like the neighbourhood Scrooge. Last year, I went humbug with nothing in my front windows, but this year the blue and white flashing lights are back – and that's more than enough, I reckon...

Advent Sunday in Old Money: Day 21

 

Cards of Christmas Past

Of all the Christmas traditions I’ve touched on in this advent blog, the sending of cards is one of the oldest of all. The first known example was received by James I of England back in 1611, but it took over two centuries before the idea became commercialised. The first commercially available card was commissioned by civil servant and inventor Sir Henry Cole who had two years previously been involved in establishing the Penny Post service. It’s easy to see why he came up with the idea of sending cards at Christmas. Cole’s first card was designed by genre and historical painter John Callcott Horsley and sold for a shilling. Over 2,000 cards were sold in the first year. Despite the festive image, there’s a decided lack of Christmas iconography – no snow, robins, evergreens or Santa Claus – and early Christmas cards tended to focus on decorative designs with no thematic connection to the festive season.

Today’s cards can be loosely grouped under three headings: sentimental, artistic and humorous. Every year seems to bring new variations, and for a time I was interested to see some cards featuring designs that were more wintry or autumnal than full-on Christmassy. Around ten years ago, I chose a design showing green winter fields, which I thought was a more accurate reflection of a real British Christmas; but I may have been in a minority, as 2024’s crop have been heavy on sentimentality and traditional imagery whilst the humour genre has provided some especially crude examples.

In a typical year, the hallway of our family home was liberally decorated with cards, some hanging on coloured string, others taped to the doors and staircase. When going through the contents of my parents’ house, I came across a suitcase containing some family Christmas cards that had survived for thirty or forty years. Many of them bear the imprint of the Hallmark brand, a family-owned American manufacturer founded in 1910 as Hall Brothers, with the Hallmark name emerging in 1928. Initially specialising in the market for Christmas cards (and inventing modern wrapping paper en route), the company later diversified into general greetings cards and is still going today. Our dad always gave large, colourful, sentimental cards to our mum at Christmas, and this Hallmark branded example probably dates to the early 80s although it looks rather older.

Hallmark were also responsible for the hugely successful range of cards featuring Charles Schulz’s Peanuts characters: I first saw these on shelves in the mid 70s, and this example dates from around a decade later. I’m interested to note the reference to ‘snow angels’, a tradition I only became aware of relatively recently (but which has origins that go back at least to 1970):   

In the humour category, we find this Gray Joliffe example, also dating to circa the late 1980s, which I sent to our dad, whilst the next card, from around the same era, was an example of a passing fad that appears to have died out – cards that played a piece of music when you opened them.  Although the card has survived, the music has not...

If you’d known me in the 1980s or 90s, there’s a chance that you might have received a hand-made Christmas card. There was a time when I did original hand-drawn cards for every occasion, but these days I don’t seem to have the time. From as far back as the mid-70s, I did a hand drawn Christmas card for my brother every year, usually based on some currently popular TV programme or other cultural artefact. One year (1988), I imitated the art of subversive cartoonist Gilbert Shelton to create a card based on his Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers – you couldn’t get anything like that in the shops. Another year it was the turn of the TV series Bottom, which probably places this particular card somewhere in the early 1990s.

Sometimes I drew original cartoons, such as this example showing Santa filling up his Reindeer at a petrol station. The reference to unleaded fuel, introduced in Britain in 1986, probably places it around the end of that decade, when it had become a popular media talking point. I'll leave you with another original which I created way back in 1989. The gag was my own, although I'm sure someone else has probably come up with it since...

Advent Sunday in Old Money: Day 20

 

Flash… ah-ah...

Nostalgia wasn’t really a thing with our parents’ generation, at least not if my own parents were anything to go by. Our dad’s tastes in music certainly harked back to the era when jazz and big band swing had, all too briefly, been the ‘popular music’ of their day, and he had a small collection of records reflecting this interest: but he hadn’t kept any books, toys or ephemera from his childhood – more’s the pity, as my brother and I would have got a kick out of seeing them.

One thing I do remember him reminiscing about was Saturday morning pictures at the cinema: the line-up of cartoons and serials that were regularly screened to entertain a pre-television generation of children. In the mid 60s, when Batman came to television, our dad remembered seeing the old cinema serial version in the 1940s. But the serial he remembered best of all was Flash Gordon. I entertained no expectation of seeing it myself, as it was far too old, and the BBC didn’t go in for that kind of thing – vintage Laurel and Hardy, certainly, but never any of the old cinema serials. Then came Christmas 1976...

By this time, we’d come to expect a few choice repeats from the television networks during the school holidays: for the past two years, BBC1 had shown episodes of Star Trek at Christmas; but this year, the corporation offered up the entire, unabridged Flash Gordon serial, which was celebrating its fortieth anniversary. The serial had been shown in a 2-part abridgement earlier in the year, which may have prompted this full-length festive broadcast, its first complete screening on any UK television network.

Buster Crabbe had first donned the mantle of Alex Raymond’s comic strip hero back in 1936, and returned again in Flash Gordon’s Trip to Mars (1938). Between this and the final entry in the series, Crabbe briefly switched comic book roles to portray Buck Rogers. The serials were all produced by Universal Pictures, and anyone with an ear for soundtracks might have recognised music cues from some of their horror pictures, most notably Bride of Frankenstein (1935), Werewolf of London (1935) and The Invisible Man (1933).

The original comic strip had been running for a shade over two years when Universal’s serialisation first hit the big screen, so this was bang up-to-the-minute stuff. Accounts differ as to the budget for the serial, with claims that it was in excess of a million dollars, but this seems unlikely given the amount of material reycled from earlier movies, both in the form of sets and previously shot footage. Nevertheless, the production design stuck closely to Alex Raymond’s original, and the characters would have been instantly recognisable to readers of the comic strip. Universal had an instant hit on their hands – the film was their second-highest grossing title of 1936, so sequels were inevitable.

Science fiction wasn’t new to cinema – Georges Méliès had wowed audiences as far back as 1902 with his fantasy A Trip to the Moon, but Flash Gordon was the first sci-fi serial for the screen, and its success heralded a wave of futuristic adventures. Not that Flash Gordon is heavy on the space hardware: in fact, it looks rather more like a medieval adventure with a few Roman centurions thrown into the mix. There were lots of fights – around one per episode, with Flash taking on all comers – Ming's soldiers, an 'Octosac' and a thing called an Orangopoid which looks suspiciously like Ethel the chimp from the 1930 Laurel and Hardy short...

Watching from a distance of forty years, one couldn’t help but smile at some of the special effects on show. The whole business of practical effects in movies and television had improved out of all recognition in the intervening years, but I still enjoyed seeing Dr. Zarkov’s rocket ship propelled through the strangely misty void of interplanetary space by means of a couple of sparklers. The sound effects were idiosyncratic too – rocket ships crackled and popped like a backfiring old banger when taking off, and in flight sounded more like an electrical generator than the smooth whooshing sounds we’d grown accustomed to in the Gerry Anderson productions.

The acting was, of course, corny and melodramatic, with the latter quality best exemplified by Charles Middleton’s unforgettable performance as Emperor Ming. He was a regular movie baddie, and had already menaced Laurel and Hardy in a couple of their films. Buster Crabbe was perfectly cast as Flash, and the trio of Earth explorers was completed by Jean Rogers as Dale Arden and Frank Shannon as Dr. Zarkov.

The serial kicked off forty-eight years ago today on 20 December 1976, with two episodes together, followed by another double-up on Tuesday 21st. The serial ran all the way through Christmas, pausing only for Christmas Day itself, with the concluding part shown on New Year’s Eve. Happily, our dad was off work for Christmas week and was able to sit in with us for some of the episodes, reliving a part of his childhood he’d never expected to see again.

We didn’t have to wait a year for the next serial, because in June 1977, the BBC rolled out the 15-part Flash Gordon’s Trip to Mars on Saturday mornings. I was a convert by now, and made sure to be tuned in. Christmas 1977 brought the final serial, Flash Gordon Conquers the Universe, generally regarded as the weakest of the three, before Christmas 1978 brought the 1939 Buck Rogers serial; and with that, the brief run of Saturday morning cinema classics came to an end. They were all repeated over the coming years before disappearing sometime in the early 90s. These days, your best bet is to go to YouTube, where the original serial can be found in its entirety:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jrdrha6AX3w 

In two years, that old Flash Gordon serial will be ninety. I doubt it will ever see action again on the BBC,  yet even as I speak, retro TV channel Rewind are mid way through a screening of Flash Gordon Conquers the Universe.

I’ll leave you with this sobering thought: back in 1976, the original Flash Gordon serial was, as I mentioned earlier, forty years old. Today, the 1980 colour remake directed by Dino De Laurentis is even older than that – forty four, to be precise. But I doubt it looks as old to modern eyes as the original Flash Gordon did to us back in 1976.

Advent Sunday in Old Money: Day 19

 

You'll Go Down in History...

I couldn’t tell you when I first heard Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer. As a child, the song seemed always to have existed, and I’d never have given a thought as to its origins or who actually wrote it. A random social media posting a few days ago revealed the interesting story behind this seasonal ditty, accompanied by some original sketches.

Rudolph was the creation of Robert L May, a struggling writer who wrote advertising copy for the Montgomery Ward department store in Chicago. The store had previously given away colouring books to children at Christmas time, but for the 1939 season decided to produce a story book. May was tasked with creating a cheerful, appealing character in the Walt Disney mould, and chose a reindeer for its associations with Christmas. The commission came at a tough time for May: he was heavily in debt and his wife Evelyn was dying of cancer. She would not survive to see the story completed, but their daughter and her grandparents were immediately won over by May’s tale when it was completed in late August. 

A page from the original rough layout from 1939. Note the very modern use of 'er...' 

At this point, Rudolph’s story was told in verse, rather than the song by which it has become universally known. The resulting softback book was an immediate hit with shoppers at Montgomery Ward, with 2.4 million copies given away. Wartime restrictions on paper precluded a reprint before 1946 when its success exceeded the first year of publication.

May was approached by the RCA Victor company who wished to do a recording of the poem, but the copyright resided with his employers, Montgomery Ward. In an astonishingly generous gesture, Ward made over the full copyright to May effective from 1 January 1947. The following year, May, who had remarried, enlisted his brother-in-law Johnny Marks to turn the poem into a song. Recording artists of the day were initially reluctant, but finally, a 1949 recording by ‘singing cowboy’ Gene Autry topped the Billboard charts, selling 1.75 million copies on its first release:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xjLTDaCUYuQ

Totting up its many cover versions, the song has shifted 150 million copies over the years and lies second only to Bing Crosby’s White Christmas in all time sales. Crosby had passed on Rudolph when the song was first offered to him, but Autry’s success clearly changed his mind, and in 1950 he committed his own version to shellac.

Once enshrined in song, there was no stopping Rudolph. Within a year he was already recognised as a new cultural icon, with the Chicago Tribune describing him as ‘the first new and accepted Christmas legend since Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol.’ With the benefit of hindight, they might have added ‘the first of many’ – but few have had the staying power of that shiny-nosed reindeer.

For many Americans, Rudolph’s apotheosis came in 1964 with the production of an animated TV special first shown on December 6 of that year, and recently repeated by NBC on its sixtieth anniversary. Here in Britain, ITV initially held the rights to the special, which was shown the following year on the afternoon of Christmas Day. The BBC came rather late to the party – thirty years late, in fact, with their first screening coming on Boxing Day 1994. Is a sixtieth anniversary repeat too much to hope for here in Britain?

I like a bizarre fact to end on, so here it comes – when searching for a name for his cute creation, Bob May very nearly settled on Reginald… wouldn’t have been quite the same, would it? 

The 1964 stop-motion animation, beloved of Americans but less well known in Britain

Advent Sunday in Old Money: Day 18

 

Coathangers for Christmas

Everyone of a certain age remembers it – Blue Peter’s ‘Advent Crown’, a concoction of coat hangers, tinsel and fork handles – sorry, four candles – that the programme’s presenters made every year in the run up to Christmas. You can see Christopher Trace showing how it’s done in this clip from 1965, the second year in which the festive decoration was featured: Here's one I made much earlier

Trace would be gone from the programme within a couple of years, but his Advent Crown lingered on.... and on. In 1967 it was the turn of John Noakes to have a go, and his efforts provided a photo-feature for that year’s Blue Peter Book, ably assisted by Patch the dog.

Even in the 1960s, health and safety was a consideration, with Chris Trace urging viewers to use flameproof tinsel – I wonder how many accidents it took before they added that particular caveat? Even then, those candles didn’t look exactly secure and could easily have dropped off.

He seems less concerned with the idea of youngsters chopping the ends off wire coathangers, leaving some nasty sharp edges to cut little fingers. And exactly how many viewers had access to ‘ordinary 14 gauge galvanised wire’ or even knew what it was? I’d struggle with that even today: do they sell it in B&Q?

The Advent Crown was to Blue Peter what the Daleks are to Dr. Who – presenters came and went yet still the old bit of festive tat was brought out year after year. I suspect they may have stopped doing it some time ago, which is hardly surprising. One forum discussion suggests that the tradtion had lapsed for a while before returning in 2014, but since then, who knows? I’m quite sure that the BBC’s H&S Police impounded the last Advent Crown long ago.

For all the years that Blue Peter trotted out this seasonal tradition, I wonder exactly how many viewers went to the trouble of making their own Advent Crowns? We certainly didn’t, and I can imagine the reaction if I’d suggested it. The problem with so many of those Blue Peter craft efforts was that you needed to plan ages in advance. Valerie Singleton made no end of stuff using old lollipop sticks, but to amass enough to build something like a bunk bed for your ‘soldier doll’ (we can’t call him Action Man, this is the BBC), or worse still, a log cabin, you’d have needed to consume a lolly a day all summer for about two years. It’s the same problem here: your mum probably needed all those old wire coat hangers, and who would happen to have four old lids from jars of mayonnaise or salad cream just lying around conveniently waiting to be turned into candle holders? I’ve searched online and I’ve found only two examples of home made Advent Crowns done by a couple of bloggers. Of course, to use the old adage (that I just made up), no Google hits does not equal zero, I dare say there may have been some enterprising Blue Peter viewers who made their own Advent Crowns (or got their parents to do it for them) without a) photographing the results or b) sharing them on social media five decades later. 

There’s one final consideration to be borne in mind: if you buy a Christmas decoration and it burns the house down, you’d probably be able to sue the manufacturer. If you make your own and a conflagration results, don’t expect Lloyds of London to cough up.

Light the blue touchpaper and retire to a safe distance... John Noakes plays with fire, circa 1967

Advent Sunday in Old Money: Day 17

Presents from the Past

Back in my childhood, there always seemed to be a ‘must-have’ toy every Christmas. One year it was Corgi Toys’ famous model of Chitty-Chitty Bang Bang: I wanted this more than I wanted to see the film (which, in fact, I didn’t). In 1967 it was a thing called ‘Johnny Astro’ which was essentially a fan and a balloon masquerading as an outer space lunar landing toy. In 1965 it was anything to do with the Daleks, or Thunderbirds. History repeated itself in the early 90s when the ‘Thunderbirds Tracy Island’ became the most coveted toy at Christmas 1992, to such an extent that Blue Peter presenter Anthea Turner showed young viewers how to make one of their own using household junk. Long after I’d ceased to take an interest in contemporary toys, I was still aware of the frenzy that could ensue when the year’s most popular toys fell victim to demand outstripping supply – during the 1980s and 90s, you could depend on seeing a new example every year: Transformers’ Optimus Prime – Cabbage Patch Dolls – Tamagotchis. I’m not sure I’ve seen any examples of this trend in recent years, but you can bet it hasn’t gone away.

Toy manufacturers didn’t mess about when it came to promoting their products: back in the 60s and 70s, any new toy for Christmas would be relentlessly plugged during the advert breaks in children’s television. Somewhere, I have an off-air recording of a commercial break from the weeks leading up to Christmas 1967, and the aforementioned Johnny Astro is up there vying with adverts for Meccano and a thing called the ‘Chad Valley Close and Play’, a simplified record player aimed at children. The BBC were even guilty of this, in examples of ‘product placement’ that wouldn’t be permitted today. Blue Peter often ran features on the season’s most innovative toys – I can remember seeing Corgi’s James Bond Aston Martin given a plug when it first appeared, and they were always adding new rolling stock to their model railway. Another year, the presenters demonstrated a new toy called ‘Computacar’, which drove itself along in response to a die-cut card that manipulated the wheels from below – a ‘self driving car’ decades before they arrived in the real world. Of course, the manufacturers were never given a namecheck, but once you’d seen the toy, you knew exactly what to ask for from Father Christmas: job done.

I still have my original Computacar from all the way back in 1969: in fact I’ve got two, because my brother and myself were bought one each. These presents from the past have survived along with a surprising amount of other toys from Christmases gone by. A lot of them were accessories and equipment for Palitoy’s famous Action Man – a space capsule dating to 1967 or thereabouts, and two vehicles from around the same time; and of course there were any number of board games. Of the latter, one that stands out in my recollection is a thing from around 1971 called ‘Haunted House’, a game that involved various practical tricks and hazards in a similar vein to the perennially popular ‘Mouse Trap’ (which is still going strong after more than sixty years in production). Christmas 1973’s big new board game was ‘Escape From Colditz’, cashing in on the BBC’s immensely popular POW drama. The game, devised in part by former Colditz inmate Pat Reid, was so realistic it could conceivably have lasted as long as the war itself. You started on Boxing Day and would be lucky to have finished a single game by New Year.

Back in 1965, one of the big toys for Christmas was a superior form of bagatelle game, ‘Three Keys to Treasure’, from American manufacturer Louis Marx and Company. It was designed in the manner of a full-sized pinball machine, and compared to the other bagatelle toys I owned was much bigger and more impressive. It even stood on legs. The object of the game was to succeed in placing balls into three special pockets which enabled the unlocking of a plastic mechanism. Once all three ‘keys’ were unlocked, one was able to access a rotating prize wheel mounted at the top of the table, within which were various tiny trinkets of the type usually found on charm bracelets.

‘Three Keys to Treasure’ survives to this day, although the plastic mechanisms have long since ceased to function, and the whole spring-loaded firing mechanism is broken. A few years ago, I decided to try and find a fully functioning example, and was able to source one on eBay (above) for not too much money. Having found it, surely I could consign the old broken one to the bin? Well, not really. It may be broken, but it’s the actual one I was bought for Christmas fifty-nine years ago…

Not all toys survived after being rendered useless. Another Christmas present from that same year was a bowling alley set called ‘Bowl-a-Strike’, produced by British toy manufacturer Chad Valley. You fired a wooden ball at a series of tenpins suspended on metal rods. As each pin was hit, it flipped upward. Literally minutes of fun guaranteed. Despite being a relatively robust item made principally from wood and metal, this got disposed of a long time ago, but should I wish to own another, they turn up fairly frequently on eBay, which is where I found the below image.

I’d like to be able to identify the oldest toy I had bought for me at Christmas, but while I still own some staggeringly ancient examples including a wooden abacus, a plastic baby’s rattle and a tin drum, they could have been bought for me at any time, and might even have been ‘hand-me-downs’ as some of them look old enough to be from before the war. One toy that survived for decades until finally being disposed of during clearance of my parents’ house was a plush rocking horse which I believe went all the way back to Christmas 1963 or 64. Along with it, I was bought a cowboy outfit, elements of which are still around somewhere.

Our dad was unstinting in his generosity come Christmas: in addition to his day job, he worked as a semi-pro musician, an activity which he referred to as ‘earning pennies for toys’ which is a pretty accurate description. It also kept him away from home on some evenings in the week, often as many as four or five nights, so the toys we were showered with every Christmas were in part by way of atonement.

Every year brought a ‘main present’, something substantial and quite expensive. One year it was a pedal car, another year a bicycle, or a guitar, or a deluxe set of Lego. In addition to this, we got all manner of smaller presents, many of them (like the Computacar) duplicated so that my brother and I could have one each (avoiding potential arguments). I can still point to many of these old toys and say, to within a year or so, when they arrived.

Around fifteen years ago, I photographed collections of presents from Christmas past as an advent project for Facebook. Scroll down and you can see the entire gallery:

1965/ 1966

1967 (albeit Action Man is a modern reproduction)

1968 – not sure on the Zeroids, they may be from a year or so later

1969

1970 (Star Trek is actually from 1969)

1971