Ten Years in Old Money

14 June 2026, appropriately enough, is a Sunday. Because today marks the 10th anniversary of this blog. In that time, I’ve posted more than 250 different essays, all sharing a common theme of nostalgia and memory, and amassed 1.47Gb of material in the folder I’ve set aside for this project. My first post was subtitled ‘childhood encounters with popular culture, 1961-79’, but over the years, I’ve occasionally drifted away from that original intention. I began writing this blog for myself, preserving memories while they’re still accessible. In doing so, I discovered that the most potent form of nostalgia comes from contextualisation. Mention of an old comic, piece of music or television series in isolation is all well and good, but when it’s placed within the wider cultural landscape in which it emerged, one gets a much keener appreciation of how it felt to be around during those times.

Beginning with my own diaries, I’ve drawn on sources including TV listings, pop charts and even weather records in an effort to recapture specific moments in time. In doing so, I’ve unearthed memories that I’d actually forgotten, and this is where context becomes critical. Hearing an old record may give you a hit of nostalgia, but when you hear an entire chart from say fifty years ago you begin to sense other things – like where you were and what you were doing, even what the weather was like (which is why I so often refer back to Met Office records). Place that pop chart alongside the TV listings for the same week, and still more memories begin to emerge by association. It’s the nostalgia equivalent of placing two pieces of plutonium next to one another – a chain reaction of memory. Probably the bext example of this can be found in my entry from March 2017, “Daydream – a Time Detective Story” wherein I described how I’d taken a random memory and found a precise date for it. In the course of writing the item, I went from a vague memory of a random moment in time to a much clearer picture of an entire Saturday back in April 1970. If you didn’t read it at the time, you can find it here:

https://sundayinoldmoney.blogspot.com/2017/03/daydream-time-detective-story.html

There may come a time when my own memory begins to fade, so having all this written down is something I’m doing for my own benefit (I’m compiling a document of similar recollections which currently stands at nearly 50,000 words over 110 pages). By the same token, perhaps as memory begins to break down, these distant moments will come into sharper focus and clarity. Maybe that’s already happening. There’s no way of knowing. Sunday in Old Money is, in this respect, a kind of fall-out shelter of memory, a place where moments like this can be preserved. It will almost certainly outlast me, and if it serves any purpose at all outside of being a repository of my own personal recollections, then it might, in future, be the equivalent of a researcher stumbling across a vintage diary. Never mind those TV nostalgia programmes – this is how it really felt to be around in the 1960s and 70s.

I’ve never set out to be an ‘influencer’ (however one even achieves such a thing), but I did wonder a few months back whether this blog might have played a small part in the BBC’s resurrection of their Laurel and Hardy Omnibus documentary of 1974, which I’d mentioned in a posting at Christmas last year, drawing attention to the fact that it had remained unshown since 1976. Just a couple of months later, it turned up, to mark the 60 anniversary of Stan Laurel’s passing. Coincidence or not? It doesn’t matter, as long as items like this aren’t left to gather dust in the archives forever.

When I first set up the blog, I must have checked a box requiring moderation, ie. approval of any comments, purely as a means to weed out the bots and spammers that I’ve seen populating other blogs. Originally, blogger would send emails notifying me if anyone had posted a comment, but in recent years this has stopped happening, for reasons unknown. Recently, in response to a reader who’d been trying to post a comment without it appearing, I had a look at the dashboard and realised that there was a folder in the sidebar containing a collection of comments pending approval. Astonishingly, these went back as far as 2017. There weren’t many – perhaps less than twenty in all – but they were all useful, well-meant, appreciative and relevant: not a spammer amongst them. In several cases, I would like to have been able to reply at the time the comments appeared, and I apologise to anyone who has posted here in hope of a reply and felt they’d been ignored. This was certainly never the intention, and comments are always welcome.

Over the years, I’ve been aware of maybe a handful of regular readers, some of whom I know personally, but the blog’s dashboard tells a slightly different story. Most entries are read maybe twenty or thirty times, but that figure spikes noticeably wherever I’ve written about archive television of a certain stripe – namely, the action/adventure series of ITC and any kind of Gerry Anderson content. The post that attracted the most comments was ‘The Afterlife of ITC’, originally posted on Friday 2 July 2021, following the announcement of the death of The Champions star Stuart Damon. These, along with all the other comments in the ‘pending’ file, are now available to read. Looking at the global map that Blogger provides, I see a surprising amount of engagement from the far east, all of which I presume to be bots and other content scrapers. The next highest readership is from the USA, which is also suspect, as the content I write about is, for the most part, very British. Taking account of all this spurious engagement, I’d estimate the number of genuine readers to be around a hundred. A recent post (which was shared on a number of online forums) clocked up 73 views in its first few days online, while the blog itself supposedly was viewed 1000 times during the same period, with bots most likely accounting for the bulk of those. Even so, it’s reaching a few more people than I originally envisaged.

I started Sunday in Old Money essentially as an attempt to set down how it felt to have encountered some of the icons of popular culture before they’d acquired their iconic status, and the very first post looked back at ‘Bat-Year 1966’, a veritable annual mirabilis of pop culture that brought us the Batman TV series, a second crop of Thunderbirds, Action Man, and a lot more besides. My recollection of that year is as clear now as it was when I wrote the blog, but it’s staggering to realise that those memories have now receded another decade into history. I also hoped that the blog would reach readers of a similar age and demographic who would recognise or relate to some of the subject matter. I know that one or two readers have helped to promote Sunday in Old Money online – my thanks if you’re one of them, and either way, please feel at liberty to post links to any of my posts wherever you think they may find kindred spirits.

When I started this blog, I was writing it in my spare time between holding down a full-time job (albeit one in which I worked from home 100% of the time). You can see from the right hand column those years when I had more to do and less time to devote to blogging – 2019 and 2022 were, for whatever reason, particularly busy times. On the other hand, since my job came to an end, writing these entries has often been the only thing I’ve had to do on a given day, and their number has shot up (2024’s tally of 60 having been ‘artificially’ increased by a ‘twelve days of Christmas’ series). As long as I can find subjects to write about, I will continue to do so. If it provides interest or entertainment to anyone else, that’s a bonus. 

Thanks for reading!

Back Home

 

Even for someone with no interest in football, it could be hard to ignore the World Cup whenever it rolled around on its four year cycle. Somehow, I’d managed to avoid it in 1966. Our dad never followed football, so it was simply never talked about in our house. I’d started school that same year, but the final was played on 30 July, after we’d have broken up for the school holidays, so I couldn’t even pick up on the excitement of England’s win from playground chatter. I have only the dimmest recollections of the tournament: seeing the Blue Peter presenters adding the commemorative stamps to their album, and a few glimpses of England mascot ‘World Cup Willie’ who appeared on keyrings and other promotional items.

It was quite different in 1970. This time, with England as the reigning world champions, there was a palpable buzz in the media. By now, I was nine years old, and had been playing football at school (admittedly with no real enthusiasm) since the previous autumn. I’d chosen my blue jersey because it looked like the one worn by Mr. Spock in Star Trek, so you can see where I was coming from. My school friends thought the blue top meant I supported Everton, but I’d never heard of such a place...

In fact, it was my brother, two years younger than myself, who began to take an interest in soccer, and (he’ll probably correct me here) I’m sure that the 1970 World Cup had a lot to do with it. He had, in fact, been collecting stickers of UK team players issued by Panini the previous year, and now a new set appeared featuring all the teams in the international tournament. As collectable items, I took a passing interest in these, but was never quite won over. I was too busy trying to complete my set of Star Trek bubble gum cards…

Other collectables quickly began to appear. Esso petrol stations got in early with their set of commemorative coins. Around the size of a shilling piece, these featured portraits of the England squad, and a single coin (wrapped in paper) was given away with every four gallons of petrol. The promotion was already well advanced by early May, when press advertisements advised collectors that they still had time to complete their sets of coins. Coins could be mounted in a display card, which looked suitably impressive once completed. I’m fairly sure that my brother completed a full set of thirty coins, and with the average price of a gallon of petrol being around 32.5p, that meant spending in excess of £39 on 120 gallons of four star. With our dad’s Singer Gazelle averaging around 30mpg, the full set of Esso coins would have equated to around 3,600 miles of motoring – still more if you allow for the number of duplicate coins (Peter Bonetti was ubiquitous, as you can see below).

Also well ahead of the curve were the players themselves who, for the first time, were persuaded to record a celebratory pop record ahead of the World Cup. This, of course, turned out to be an act of the utmost hubris. The right time for a commemorative World Cup song was after the win in 1966. ‘Back Home’ was written by the Eurovision-winning team of Bill Martin and Phil Coulter, whose track record included ‘Puppet on a String’ and ‘Congratulations’. Who better to pen a song in anticipation of England emerging victorious once again? In fairness to the song, the lyrics don’t mention the possibility of winning – it’s a song of hope: ‘Back home, though they think we’re the greatest that’s what we’ve got to prove’. It was also extremely catchy, and tapping into the mood of the nation as the tournament approached, it did in the pop charts what the team were hoping for on the soccer pitch, making it all the way to number one, where it resided for three weeks from the 10th to the 30th of May. On the day that the World Cup kicked off, May 31st, the squad were deposed at the top of the charts by Christie’s ‘Yellow River’, which looks in retrospect like a bad omen. A win might well have propelled the song back to the top, but by the time the squad went out 3-2 to West Germany on 14th June, the song had dropped to number 9. It would linger around the lower reaches of the chart until the beginning of August.

‘Back Home’ is probably my clearest memory of that 1970 World Cup. You couldn’t turn on the radio or TV without hearing it, and my brother had the Pye records single (with its football centre label). The only match I can remember seeing was on 14th June where England went out to West Germany. Conspiracy theories weren’t really a thing back then, but there must have been many who wondered at the food poisoning that forced star goalkeeper Gordon Banks to miss the match. 

The evening’s game was broadcast on both BBC1 and ITV – I suspect we watched the latter, where comment and analysis were provided by ‘ITV’s soccer experts’ Pat Crerand, Derek Dougan and Malcolm Allison, presided over by Billies Wright and Bremner. Over on BBC1, David Coleman and Frank Bough did the honours in the Mexico and London studios.

England’s failure at the 1970 World Cup – especially after all the promotional build-up – probably helped to put me off football forever. If I was left in any doubt, the final coffin nails were supplied by a sadistic games teacher who started taking us for football practise in the autumn. By the time the tournament was over, my only enduring interest in the game lay in following the cartoon strip ‘Billy’s Boots’ drawn by Tom Kerr in the recently launched football comic ‘Scorcher’, which was being bought for my brother every week.

England didn’t even qualify for either of the next two World Cups, and 1978 brought yet another example of pop song hubris, this time from Scottish comedian Andy Cameron whose ‘Ally’s Tartan Army’ was even more gung ho than ‘Back Home’, promising that ‘we’ll really shake them up when we win the World Cup.’ It didn’t even have an original melody. If there’s anything guaranteed to ensure failure in a World Cup tournament, it’s celebrating your win prematurely in song…

Sunday in Old Macca

It’s rare for me to go out and buy a contemporary pop album. Rarer still to do so within days of its release. Granted, one can’t technically describe Paul McCartney as ‘contemporary’, but he’s still writing and recording, and outclassing artists a third of his age.

Last time, I described how his recent single ‘Home to Us’ had strayed inadvertently into melodic territory formerly explored by Clive Dunn. To me, this didn’t bode well for the upcoming album, and I wasn’t overly impressed by the street sign sleeve design (hardly an original idea). Then I saw a social media ‘reel’ where he demonstrated a perverse dischord that he’s used to open the album and thought 'Uh-oh...'

Then the reviews started coming in. Four and five star. I don’t usually take much notice of what rock critics think, but my interest was piqued. I played some snatches of the album on Amazon music and liked it enough that I went right out the next day and bought it – from a proper record shop, not an online retailer (take that, Bezos!) The following week, it was number one on the chart: and it's probably the very last time that I'll have this week's number one album in my possession...

I hadn’t bought a McCartney album for forty four years. 1982’s Tug of War was my last purchase, and was hailed at the time as a return to form: much the same reception that’s been accorded to The Boys of Dungeon Lane. So maybe it was time to cut the Mac some slack. Thirteen pounds and ninety nine pence of my savings are now winging their way to the coffers of MPL communications, less percentages of course. Was it money well spent?

The simple answer is yes. Macca may be 83 but he’s sounding as good as he’s done since the breakup of the Beatles. The voice is, of course, older and huskier, but it’s aged well. The production is solid – ‘classic’ without sounding contrived, contemporary without being embarrassing. There’s a wide range of textures and styles, and the sleeve credits McCartney himself with an impressive array of instrumentation, not just bass and guitars but more keyboards than Rick Wakeman can fit on a stage, and drums too. The man does everything – although he is assisted by a number of collaborators including a certain Richard Starkey esquire, who drums on ‘Home to Us’.

For me, what elevates this album above all of his post Band on the Run efforts is the sheer melodic quality of the material. There have been times over the decades when Macca has sounded like he was repeating himself, going over old ground, particularly when he tried to bring a Beatles sensibility to his work. Now, he sounds like he’s tapped into a new lode: there are some genuinely surprising melodic ideas here. Lyrically, many of the songs look back on his life before the Beatles, but not in a sentimental manner. He is, after all, most likely into his last decade. He’s entitled to reflect on his life and times. It would be surprising if he didn’t, and it’s a mark of artistic integrity that he has chosen to do so.

Dungeon Lane is his first album in six years, the first work of his eighth decade. There’s no reason to suspect it will be his last – but one never knows. Personally, I suspect that, however upbeat he may come across in his promotional work, Macca must realise that anything he releases from now on may end up as his epitaph, his final artistic statement, intentional or otherwise. Is that why it’s so good? Has he been saving some of his best work for his back pages?

McCartney was always the most pragmatic of the Beatles. If it had been suggested to him, at the height of their fame, that he would still be writing and releasing music in sixty years’ time, he’d most likely have laughed off the idea. Queried about his future plans back in 1963, he foresaw himself and John retreating into songwriting rather than performing. And yet here he is, still touring the world, and still making music that ranks alongside his best post-Beatle output. 

These days, old white men are an easy target for snide media commentators. They – we – are somehow responsible for most of what’s wrong with the world today, and with the likes of Trump and Farage in the news so much, it’s easy to see why. Paul McCartney should be hailed as an ambassador for the rest of us old geezers, living proof that, over sixty, not all white guys become demented, self-aggrandising delusional egomaniacs. Granted, we’re not all on a level with Macca, but neither are we all past it. Here’s the proof that it’s still possible to be cool, relevant and original well into your eighth decade.

The Grandad Trap

 

Novelty records seem to have been with us forever. The 60s and 70s were particularly prone to this form of chart entertainment, and produced a crop of singles from artists whose more usual stamping grounds were the worlds of comedy and light entertainment. In 1970, it was the turn of Clive Dunn, famous for the old buffer act he’d been doing since ITV’s Bootsie and Snudge in 1960, recently reinvented with a slew of catchphrases and mannerisms supplied by Jimmy Perry and David Croft, to delight audiences as Lance Corporal Jones in Dad’s Army. 

In 1970, at a showbiz party, Dunn chanced to meet musician Herbie Flowers, who would later provide the rock world with one of the best bass lines of all time, the intro to Lou Reed’s ‘Walk on the Wild Side’. It was something rather less wild that Dunn had in mind: could Flowers write a pop song for him to deliver as his old man character? Flowers accepted the challenge, and after consulting an ‘easy primer book on composing’ was well under way. There was one stumbling block, though: he couldn’t find a hook for the tune. A quick call to his friend Kenny Pickett (late of psychedelic scenesters The Creation) provided the answer. When Pickett rang Flowers’ doorbell, the two-note chime gave them the simple melodic device they were looking for.

Everyone knows the sound of a typical two-note door chime: in musical terms, it’s a falling major third. The same two-note phrase is also the call of the cuckoo. It can be heard in songs like ‘Somewhere Over the Rainbow’ (‘Some day I’ll wish upon a star’) and, most famously, in Laurel and Hardy’s iconic signature tune. Trite and obvious, it's hardly the rocket science end of songwriting. Flowers and Pickett’s composition ‘Grandad’ is full of it: the falling third occurs in the chorus (‘Grandad/Grandad’) and occurs again half a bar later on the word ‘lovely’. The verse swings along in pure rocking chair fashion, and again, it’s made up of three ‘cuckoo calls’, B flat to G, expressed as a dotted quaver and semiquaver, as can be seen in the sheet music. After a dotted minim on B flat, the melody peaks on a sixth, C, falling a fourth to G. Below this, the chords perform a minor fall from E flat major to C minor, getting there by way of G minor with a D in the bass.

You may well wonder where all this is going. Well, that ‘cuckoo call’ melody in ‘Grandad’ is a bear trap that all songwriters should beware if they don’t want to end up sounding like Clive Dunn. Major thirds occur all the time in popular songs, but they don’t always repeat incessantly like the melody in Flowers and Pickett’s composition, and, crucially, they don’t often jump to the sixth note in the scale over a descending chord sequence. Once you’ve got all those elements in place, you’re in the bear trap. You've accidentally re-written 'Grandad'.

If it hadn’t been set in stone as a cheesy kiddie’s classic, there would be nothing inherently wrong with that particular melodic progression, apart from its being rather annoying. There’s something about that two-note chime that demands attention, which is probably why it’s so commonly used for doorbells. It’s also a bit dumb, as composer Marvin Hatley realised when he wrote the Laurel and Hardy theme. Songwriters go there at their peril. ‘Cuckoo’ was once a common term of derision to describe someone not quite in possession of a full deck.

It’s ironic that Herbie Flowers went on to work with Paul McCartney and Ringo Starr, because Macca is, unfortunately, the most recent victim of what I’m going to call ‘The Grandad Trap’ if he did but know it, and Ringo is his partner in crime. Macca's just released single ‘Home to Us’ has a melody that goes ‘cuckoo’ fully eight times, then jumps to a sixth, before dropping a fourth. The minute I heard it, I thought: ‘that’s Grandad!’

He’s not the first. Back in the 1990s, the band Spiritualised (who coincidentally got a namecheck in my last posting) fell into the trap with the title track of their album ‘Ladies and Gentlemen we are Floating in Space’, whose melody again does that ‘Grandad’ thing across its first four bars. A few people, mostly snarky journalists, noticed the similarity at the time, but it didn’t stop the album from reaching number 4 in the UK charts and being acclaimed as one of the best of the decade. It just accidentally quoted the melody from one of the cheesiest pop singles of all time.

I suppose, being a grandad himself, it’s appropriate for Macca to quote from Clive Dunn’s kiddies’ classic, though I’m sure he did it unawares. The original was no slouch, reaching number one in the charts in January 1971, coincident with Dunn’s 51st birthday. But a lot of other horrible songs have made number one… In fairness, it took more than a trite melody to make 'Grandad' such a horror... the very idea of Corporal Jones making a pop record was bad enough, and then they gave us a kiddie chorus for good measure. Then again, even John Lennon had a kiddie chorus on 'Happy Xmas War is Over'. And lest we should forget, Macca did also give humanity 'The Frog Chorus'...

It may seem unfair to call out a legend like Paul McCartney for accidentally reproducing one of the cheesiest pop song melodies of all time, but no one can deny the similarity. Especially not now that I’ve pointed it out. My advice to him if he should happen to realise (or less likely, read this blog)?

“Don’t panic!”

A Very Peculiar Story

 

It’s rare for any television series to go unrepeated for thirty eight years, unless it was a victim of the BBC’s mass junking policy. Andrew Davies’ satirical campus comedy drama A Very Peculiar Practice arrived in the mid 1980s, in an era when TV archiving had come of age and drama series were retained as a matter of course. The series turns forty later this month, and to mark the occasion, BBC4 will, I understand, be repeating all fourteen episodes, including the seven-episode series two – which has not been seen on terrestrial television since its original broadcast in 1988.

I came somewhat late to the series, and didn’t pick up on A Very Peculiar Practice until a repeat run of the first series on BBC1 in November 1988. (The series had its first broadcast two years earlier, placed in a 9.25pm Wednesday night slot on BBC2, where it ran from 21 May until 2 July.) I don’t know what made me tune in, or even have a VHS tape at the ready, but I did. My laconic diary entry proclaimed it to be good. By week three (Wives of Great Men) my estimation had risen to ‘v. good – v. funny’ (this is one of the series’ outstanding episodes featuring a brilliant guest appearance from Timothy West as a hyper-manic academic). Week four (Black Bob’s Hamburger Suit) was ‘V.G!’ Bob Buzzard, memorably portrayed by David Troughton, was by now my favourite character in the series – utterly unprincipled, snide, untrustworthy, and forever reliant on his ‘rinky-dink computer’.

Bob (‘do you think you can manage Robert?’) is one of the doctors in the university medical centre where nervous young medic Stephen Daker finds himself, alone, newly divorced, and friendless. As he drives into the campus, baffling signs warn him ominously of 'altered priorities ahead'. Daker (Peter Davison) comes with a less than impressive CV (‘Birmingham, Birmingham, Birmingham, Walsall’) but a dedication to his chosen career that sharply contrasts the self-interested motives of his colleagues. Decrepit Jock McCannon (Graham Crowden) is head of the pratice; never far from a bottle of Glenfyddych, and often to be found dictating the latest chapter of his masterwork ‘The Sick University’, he treats all ailments as manifestations of psycho-sexual anxiety. Daker’s other colleague, Rose-Marie (Barbara Flynn), proves to be a tricky and manipulative uber-feminist. With each of his fellow medics pursuing their own conflicting and self-serving agendas, it’s left to Dr. Daker to find a path of least resistance that will enable him to do his job with empathy and understanding. But Daker has problems of his own, entering into an unusual relationship with mature student Lyn Turtle (Amanda Hillwood) that becomes a form of therapy.

This was more than just another campus comedy with a medical slant: this was dark satire, the blackest of black comedy, with an uncompromising message about the state of further education in Thatcher’s Britain. It was knowing, sly and even self-referential: in episode seven, Dr. Daker encounters a writer in residence who’s trying to write a drama set on a university campus but finds that real life keeps second guessing his outrageous plot ideas.

Misleadingly, the Coronet books paperback of series one gave the impression that A Very Peculiar Practice had been a novel before it became a TV series...

The BBC1 repeat run ended on 19 December 1988, and when another series of repeats was scheduled in April 1990, I expected this would comprise the second series: but instead we got a third outing for series one. Surely series two would follow on? ‘Not a chance, buddy’ (as Bob would have said). What had happened to it? In the end, I had to borrow some VHS tapes from a friend who had recorded series two on its one and only BBC broadcast. They were a bit fuzzy, having been recorded using the ‘Long Play’ format, but it was better than nothing. Watching them, I discovered that series two was even more on the edge than series one: the satire was now vicious where it had formerly been wry, and the outlook for the university was bleak, as an American Vice Chancellor arrived and channelled funding into secret defence projects, guarded by a sinister security force.

Series two received its only repeat broadcast on UK Gold in the late 1990s, where it was shown in edited form (the episodes in their original form frequently ran over the usual fifty-minute slot). In 1992, a film sequel, A Very Polish Practice picked up the characters of Daker, his new wife Grete and Bob Buzzard, transplanting them to a chaotic post-Communist Poland. Like series two, this also went unrepeated. At Christmas 2003, series one got a further repeat run on the new BBC4 channel, but once again, series two failed to materialise? Why was this?

A few years earlier, I asked Andrew Davies himself, when I had the chance of a brief conversation following a lecture he delivered at a literary festival. He admitted he knew of no reason why the BBC should have failed to repeat the second series, and no conspiracy or legal wrangle that might have kept it off air. Series one had been refused permission to film on the University of East Anglia campus, who were somewhat sensitive in the aftermath of the controversial 1981 adaptation of Malcolm Bradbury’s The History Man, which was filmed at UEA. Davies’ fictional ‘Lowlands University’ was clearly UEA in all but name, but in the end, location filming was done at Birmingham and Keele Universities. To the best of my knowledge, Birmingham University wasn’t entirely happy with series one and refused permission for any further filming (series two lacks the brutalist concrete exteriors of the first and as a result looks quite different). If series one had ruffled academic feathers, series two was even more potentially controversial. Or maybe its non-appearance was simply down to the impracticality of scheduling a series where six of its episodes are 55 minutes long, and the seventh even longer.

The mystery of series two continued to rankle, not only with myself but my friend Tim Beddows, who was also a fan. In the end, it seemed that the only way we would get to see it was by releasing the whole thing on DVD, and this, ultimately, is what happened – although it took a long time to bring the plan to fruition. Network released series one in 2004, but it wasn’t until 2011 that a complete series DVD appeared, comprising both series and the spin-off film. I got to do the sleeve, and composed a desktop scene bringing together various elements from the series including Jock’s dictation machine, a glass of scotch, and a packet of the ‘Confidan’ drug that figured in the plot of Black Bob’s Hamburger Suit (it looks as if it were all photographed in situ, but the elements were, in fact, assembled in Photoshop). I don’t know if anyone got it, but the sleeve text was laid out in the manner of a piece of pharmaceutical packaging, an idea I ‘borrowed’ from the band Spiritualised’s album Ladies and Gentlemen we are Floating in Space.

To date, the DVD has been the only place where fans could legitimately watch both series (although, inevitably, there have been illegal online uploads), all of which makes the upcoming run on BBC4 something of a watershed. According to the iPlayer listings, episodes from series two ‘will be available soon’. So watch this space…

A Very Peculiar Practice begins on Wednesday 20 May at 22.15 on BBC4

https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p032kkxy

More Sweets You Can Still Eat..

 

(and a few you can't)

So... how many of the above can you expect to find in any half decent sweet shop today? The spread comes from Robert Opie’s excellent (and highly recommended) ‘70s Scrapbook’, collected from his museum of packaging and other ephemera. There are a fair few in that line-up that have made it into the twenty-first century, most of them still recognisable, if occasionally somewhat diminished in size...

One thing the survivors have in common is that, from my perspective, they’ve mostly been around for a lot longer than I have. Curiously, though, a lot of the chocolate bars launched during my lifetime have been less enduring. Bar Six, introduced by Cadbury’s in the mid 1960s, was a six-segmented chocolate-covered wafer bar. At our grammar school, we had a wall-mounted dispenser which would disgorge Bars Six in exchange for a 5p piece. We couldn’t get enough of them. But Bar Six vanished some time in the 1980s. I once unwrapped a bar to find it was solid chocolate – someone had forgotten to add the wafers to the production line that day, and it wasn’t the only time it happened. Today, it would probably go viral...

Even shorter-lived was the Aztec bar introduced by Cadburys in 1967 as a kind of rival to the Mars bar. On the outside, it looked just the same as a Mars, but beneath the thick chocolate were three separate layers: soft caramel on top, brown, Mars-style nougat below and white nougat on the bottom layer.* I found it very chewy – much more so than a Mars bar – and probably ate less than half a dozen of them (not all at the same time). Some time in the 1970s, I realised Aztec had quietly been dropped. Cadbury’s briefly revived it in 1999 (above left), but deserve a wooden spoon for their efforts, as what they came up with was simply a Mars bar, without the three-layer appearance of the original Aztec. Did nobody bother to do any research? All they had to do was look at the 1960s commercial where the bar's layers can be seen quite clearly:

A 1967 commercial introducing Aztec: I've heard it claimed that the bar contained raisins: it absolutely did not.

Others ‘missing in action’ brands include Cadbury’s Ice Breaker (chocolate bar with mint pieces) and Milk Tray bar (selection of Milk Tray chocolates fused together into a chocolate bar). Topic is a recent loss to sweet addicts, having been discontinued in 2021, with the last shelf stock selling out around 2023. Shame, as its white nougat centre made it quite unlike any other chocolate bar, but it seems that declining sales led to its demise. Introduced in 1962, it was famously promoted for many years with the slogan ‘a hazelnut in every bite'. Bill Oddie provides the voice of Toby alongside (I think) Jon Pertwee in this mid 70s TV spot:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lsLceXcFd6I

So much for the history books, but we’re concerned here with the sweets you can still eat… so let’s have a few more...

I was going to add Old Jamaica to the casualty list until I discovered it had been relaunched six years ago as a sub-brand of Bournville dark chocolate and is still available at time of writing, although reviews online suggest it’s ‘not the same as it used to be’ (is anything?) This rum and raisin flavoured bar first hit the shelves back in the 1970s and was promoted with a ‘Treasure Island’ styled ad campaign in which a whiskery old pirate advised his young shipmate ‘don’t ee knock it all back at once.’ 

Curlywurly, introduced by Cadbury’s in the early 70s, and promoted on television by comedian Terry Scott, is also still very much alive, and appears unchanged from its original appearance. This, again, has traditionally been aimed at children, but that didn’t stop me from checking out an example just recently. It is still very chewy, although the toffee centre is slightly smoother than it used to be, and the chocolate still falls to bits when you eat it. Perhaps they should have tied their advertising in with Persil...

Toffee Crisp arrived in the early 60s, with a launch campaign on television that emphasised the huge crunch produced when you bit into one, which was exaggerated in the advert to seismic proportions. The bar was derived from a chocolate and rice krispies cake made by the wife of John Henderson, great-nephew of Mackintosh’s founder John Mackintosh. Today’s version is more or less indistinguishable from the original, and the orange/yellow packaging has evolved from an earlier orange and white version. As you can see in the Robert Opie spread, a plain chocolate version was also available for a while during the 1970s.

Also still present and correct on the shelves of any self-respecting sweet shop is the ages old favourite Bounty, introduced by Mars in 1951, and more recently developed into an ice cream equivalent (in my opinion one of the more successful ‘choc bar to ice cream’ transitions). Originally sold as individual bars, a two-pack Milky Way-style package eventually became the default, with a cardboard slide insert that has disappeared over the years. Like Charlie Brown, I used to hate any chocolate that contained coconut, and was a late adopter of Bounty: I doubt I ate it at all prior to the 1980s. Today, it is unchanged as far as I can tell, and the chocolate retains its distinctive thickness. Bounty's advertising played off the exotic associations of coconut, and featured a group of ‘Bounty hunters’ on a tropical island whence they had come ‘in search of paradise.’ Our dad always used to add: ‘and all they found was chocolate bars’.

The plain chocolate Bounty in its red variant wrapper was always far harder to find, and as of 2023 is reported to be extinct. A garage just up the road from where I live was certainly still selling them in relatively recent years, so news of its demise may yet prove to be premature.

Picnic, still with us, is a bar of Australian origin, created in 1950 by the MacRobertson confectionery company, which was acquired by Cadbury’s in 1967. I can’t find any confirmation of this, but I’m certain that Picnic originally did not contain peanuts, and that the ‘Peanut Picnic’ was a new variety introduced a few years later. Does anyone know for sure? In my recollection, ‘original’ Picnic was rather like a Lion bar.

Other favourites still available at your local sweetshop include Starbar (which disappeared for a time, after being rebranded as a variant of Boost but has made a return in recent years), Wispa (famously advertised on television by various comedy double acts), Aero (with us in one form or another since 1935), Boost (launched in 1985) and of course the ever popular Cadbury’s bars: Dairy Milk, (1905-present), Fruit and Nut (1926 - ), Wholenut (1930 - ), and Bournville (1908 - ) The latter has been ‘retooled’ in the past year, and is now moulded in larger segments which are much harder to eat. In the late 60s and early 70s, Bournville was promoted on television with an ‘X certificate’ campaign, emphasising that it was a chocolate for adults: I couldn’t fault their reasoning, and was never that big a fan of dark chocolate, except when it came on biscuits…

Cadbury’s Creme Egg is happily unaffected by shrinkflation – you can’t change the shape of an egg after all (although Cadbury’s have recently changed the shape of their large Easter Eggs, giving them a flat base, so they’re not egg-shaped all round. You know where to write and complain…) Creme Eggs were introduced in Britain in 1963, and I can still remember eating one for the first time, half expecting the ‘yolk and white’ fondant to taste like a real egg. Originally sold under the Fry’s brand name, they were brought under the Cadbury’s banner in 1971. During the 1970s, Cadbury’s also sold ‘Border Creme Eggs’ in tartan wrappers, with toffee fondant centres. There’s nothing like them around today, although the ‘Caramel Creme Egg’ comes close, and there have been any number of variant editions over the years. This year, by accident, I bought a pack of white chocolate creme eggs, which look disconcertingly like real eggs and taste very, very sickly. Not recommended...

Back in 1967, Cadbury’s started selling its famous Mini Eggs, which I believe were originally intended as cake decorations. In later years they were promoted by ‘Mr. Cadbury’s parrot.’ Recent reports suggest that, unlike Creme Eggs, these candy-coated chocolates are showing disturbing signs of shrinkage… the eggs remain the same size as ever, but there are fewer in a packet, down from 80g to 74g, whilst the price is now upwards of £2.15. Rising costs of cocoa and dairy products have been blamed – and as ever, the cost is absorbed by the consumer instead of eating into the manufacturer’s profit margins… plus ça change: people have always complained about Easter eggs being bad value for money, traditionally pointing to the excessive packaging and the meagre amount of sweets you find inside them.

Today, the chocolate I buy more often than any other is Cadbury’s Caramel. At time of writing the large bar tends to retail for around £2.75, but I recently spotted them on sale in a local Tesco for just £2. Bargain! Launched in 1976 with an advertising campaign featuring a seductive bunny rabbit that’s remembered to this day, it was later brought under the ‘Dairy Milk’ branding. And the human owner of that slinkily seductive bunny voice? Miriam Margolyes.

What, if anything have we learned from all this? Well, if you like continuity in your chocolate, then be wary of fickle Cadbury's, as their brands seem more prone to discontinuation than those of other manufacturers – just consider the list of casualties above, and you'll see they're mostly Cadbury's. Mars products seem to stick around for longer, as do those of Nestlé. Perhaps it's more the case that Cadbury's like to experiment more than other makers, and experiments don't always work: in their defence, they have occasionally reintroduced items in response to popular demand. I'd really like to see them bring back Aztec, and to do it right this time... they might even make it better than the original. But on the whole, we don't do too badly for sweets here in Britain – at least we get proper chocolate unlike what passes for it in the United States, and notwithstanding shrinkflation, I think it's safe to assume that most of our long standing chocolate brands will be with us for a while yet.

Think of it as edible nostalgia...

Sweets You Can Still Eat

 

...with or without ruining your appetite!

Vintage confectionery has long been a potent subject for nostalgia: Robert Opie’s excellent books are full of spreads of chocolate bars you’ll never see or consume again, and you can barely turn on Channel 5 without stumbling across yet another retrospective of sweets and chocolates we’ve ‘loved and lost’. But what of the nostalgic sweets that are still with us? Those chocolate bars that, like certain members of the acting profession, have continued into their nineties – and in some cases, beyond? There is still a surprising number of confectionery items available today whose pedigree goes back a hundred years and more. So let’s hear it for the sweets you can still eat (with or without ruining your appetite)...

Mars has been with us since 1932, when Forrest Mars Snr. began manufacturing the iconic bar in the United Kingdom. It had, in fact, been introduced by his father, Frank Mars in 1923, in the United States where it was known (confusingly to us Brits) as Milky Way (and is still sold there under that name today). Like many of the long lasting chocolate bars, Mars has changed little in appearance over the years. Its black, red and gold packaging is still recognisably similar to the bars I first unwrapped back in the 1960s, and the bar itself, whilst having suffered to some extent from ‘shrinkflation’, is the same creation of nougat and caramel, coated in milk chocolate. As can be seen in this vintage TV ad https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JOJZoDZpVmQ  the bar was originally deeper and less elongated than today’s iteration. The chocolate was also a good deal thicker: commercials frequently reminded us that ‘there’s glucose, sugar and thick, thick chocolate in a Mars.’ The well-remembered slogan ‘a Mars a day helps you work, rest and play’, though essentially meaningless, appeared throughout the 60s and 70s and was even printed on the wrappers. Jasper Carrott famously equated consumption of Mars bars with overnight acne: ‘eat a Mars bar, next day, bloody great zit’ ('zit' being a Carrottism for an eruption of acne which he tried to popularise in the 1970s). 

Unlike Mars, which was aimed at a wider demographic, Milky Way has always been promoted as a bar for children, with the oft-repeated claim that it was ‘the sweet you can eat between meals without ruining your appetite.’ This debatable claim hails from the era when advertisers could make grandiose claims for their products (eg ‘Mackeson does you a power of good’) without any supporting evidence. How does one measure ruined appetite, anyway? Did Mars test Milky Way on groups of children in between meals, with a control group given other sweeties, then measure how much of their dinners they were able to eat?

Milky Way is, essentially, a Mars bar with less chocolate, no caramel and a lighter, fluffier centre. Curiously, in light of the encouragement to be consumed between meals, they’re often sold in double packs, with two bars originally presented on a kind of cardboard slide. The packaging was always blue with a white logo surrounded by stars, and hasn’t changed much to this day. The bar itself still has the same sculpted chocolate exterior but the fluffy filling is now a light creamy colour as opposed to the original brown. Today’s Milky Way is a shadow of its former self: I’d estimate it to be less than ¾ of its original width. It still comes in packs of two, while the individual bar must rate as one of Britain’s cheapest chocolates, priced at less than 50p in the convenience store I visited today. The double pack was a pocket money-friendly 89p, so you can guess which one I went for…

The same store provided me with an example of a chocolate bar I’d previously thought defunct, Nestlé’s Crunch (formerly known as ‘Dairy Crunch’). This chocolate and crisped rice confection first hit sweetshops back in 1938, but didn’t make it to the UK until the mid 1960s, and was one of the first ‘new’ chocolate bars I remember seeing advertised on television. The blue white and red colour scheme of its packaging remains the same today, as you can see. In the 1990s, the bar’s name was shortened to simply ‘Crunch’. Today's bars are somewhat slimmer than they used to be but otherwise unaltered. 

Another ‘newcomer’ as far as I was concerned was Marathon, known to the rest of the world as ‘Snickers’ since its inception in 1930 – the name came from a horse owned by the Mars family. This side of the pond, we didn’t get to try Snickers until 1968 when it was belatedly introduced to Britain and Ireland under its new name – allegedly chosen because the American name sounded too much like ‘knickers’. Marathon advertising always emphasised how it was ‘packed with peanuts’ – rather too many for my liking, and even today I find one bar goes a long way, which probably bears out Mars’ claim that ‘it’s so satisfying’ .Above left is a wrapper I preserved back in 1995 just before the name change.

The internet is full of misleading rubbish. Google Quality Street and its AI overview will try to convince you the brand was ‘created by Nestlé in 1936.’ Cobblers. It was Halifax sweet manufacturers Mackintosh’s who introduced Quality Street, and Nestlé didn’t have any association with the name until 1988 when they bought Rowntree Mackintosh. Today’s tins (or, rather, plastic boxes) still contain many of the familiar or seemingly familiar varieties from the original, but appearances can be deceptive. The so-called ‘purple one’ which formerly contained a brazil nut has been downgraded to a hazelnut. I’ve not looked inside a packet for some time, so I’ve no idea whether the truly horrible toffee brittle is still part of the line-up. These were always the last to go from our family tins at Christmas, along with the opal-fruit shaped toffee and the famously sticky toffee penny. I’m fairly sure that the ‘Chocolate ABC logo’ is still in there: a green-foil wrapped triangle which, when unwrapped, presented as a chocolate version of the logo that used to appear on ABC cinemas and their television channel; whether by intent or design I have no idea. Quality Street tins were originally adorned with romanticised artwork of a soldier in dress uniform and an elegant lady. I still have a small example in my garage (of the tin, not the elegant lady).

Vintage 1lb tin of Quality Street, circa early 60s. The tin is small, just 5" diameter.

Fry’s Turkish Delight was a sweet I avoided during childhood, probably scared away by an early encounter with the fragrant, chocolate-coated jelly which bears only a passing resemblance to genuine Turkish Delight. The adverts were all over television at one time, and featured an Omar Sharif type, in a tent in a desert, with a harem of belly dancers, accompanied by some eastern-sounding music and a voice-over declaring the chocolate to be ‘full of eastern promise’ whatever that was supposed to mean. The ‘Fry’s’ name is deceptive, as the bar has been manufactured by Cadburys since 1919, when they acquired Bristol confectioners J.S. Fry & Sons. Today, it’s still sold in more or less the same form as I remember from the 1960s, a flat slab in a magenta foil wrapper, with a logo that has hardly changed if at all. I do occasionally partake of the odd Turkish Delight bar – they’re sold in supermarket multipacks – and of all the surviving sweets of earlier eras, it’s probably seen the fewest changes. The chocolate coating seems thinner than it used to be, but that’s about it.

Also bearing the Fry’s brandname, and of an even older vintage – dating back 150 years, no less – is the famous Chocolate Cream, still available and still more or less the same product that was once humped around in crates by future James Bond George Lazenby in a series of mid-60s TV commercials. I’ve recently consumed a 2026 Chocolate Cream (purely for research purposes, you understand), and can offer the following observations (based on the supermarket multipack version): the bar’s dimensions are somewhat reduced; you can no longer break the segments apart without shattering the bar; the chocolate is a shade thinner, and the fondant filling slightly smoother. Otherwise, it’s business as usual. I never cared much for Chocolate Cream as a child, finding the combination of dark chocolate and sweet fondant rather too rich for my taste. There was once a companion bar, ‘Fry’s Five Centres’, which contained separate segments of orange, raspberry, lime, strawberry and pineapple fondant. I never ate one, and don’t even remember seeing it on sale, although it was apparently available until 1992.

No roundup of chocolate favourites would be complete without Kit-Kat, arguably one of the most famous chocolate bars in Britain. It’s been around since 1935, which probably explains its ‘jazz era’ nomenclature – there were plenty of ‘Kit Kat Clubs’ around in the 1930s. Kit-Kat was created by Rowntrees and originally sold under the prosaic name of ‘Chocolate Crisp’, with the more familiar brand name arriving in 1937, a year after the ‘two finger’ Kit-Kat was introduced. The packaging has always been red and white except during 1945, when a blue variant appeared (illustrated as a 1995 reissue). I believe the blue wrapper indicated a temporary change from milk to dark chocolate, although the 1990s version contained a normal Kit Kat. Television advertising for the brand arrived in 1958, with the famous slogan ‘have a break… have a Kit-Kat.’ In 1980s America, this was coarsened somewhat to ‘gimme a break.’ Typical…

Numerous Kit-Kat variations have appeared over the years, including the tooth-loosening chunky version; but the original is still popular and, I’m sure most would agree, the best. Last time I looked it was also still recognisably the same dimensions it’s always been, so hats off to Nestlé for not going down the road to shrinkflation.

Also still with is is Nestlé’s Milkybar, famously promoted on television by a speccy kid in a cowboy outfit. The commercials, which began in 1961, have been running with variations ever since, originally accompanied by a song extolling ‘the goodness that’s in Milkybar.’ That’s goodness as in a load of sugar, and the slogan was, unsurprisingly, revised in later years. Those old adverts also remind us of an era when nobody in Britain understood French pronunciation, and ‘Nestlé’ was always pronounced as if it were the English word ‘nestle.’ 

White chocolate tastes sweeter than milk or dark chocolate on account of its lack of cocoa solids, and the sickly sweet taste is probably why Milkybar’s advertising has always been aimed at kids; although this particular kid was immune. Even as a child, I hated Milkybar – a Milkybar egg filled with Milkybar buttons was one of the worst things you get given for Easter. Outside of the UK, Milkybar is known by the meaningless name Galak.

Other sweet ‘chocolate’ bars I couldn’t abide included the short-lived Pink Panther bar of the 1970s (which was, of course, Pink, and a sickly strawberry flavour), and Caramac, which was made using similar ingredients to vanilla fudge, but was far too sweet for my palate. Never mind the taste, I didn’t even like the smell of it! Caramac was introduced in the UK in 1959 and was only discontinued as recently as 2023 , although it reportedly enjoyed a short-lived revival in July 2024. Its modern equivalent is Cadbury’s Caramilk, which I have yet to experience...

One facet of these vintage chocolates that’s interesting to observe is how little the packaging has changed across the decades, with only minimal design tweaks, and iconic colour schemes enduring over generations. A very good example of this is Cadbury’s Flake, which has been sold in a yellow wrapper as far back as I can remember and possibly for a lot longer. The bar was developed in 1920 when a Cadbury’s employee observed how the chocolate run-off from moulds set into a distinctive flaky pattern. It became equally famous in its ice-cream incarnation, instantly transforming any ‘ordinary’ cornet into a ‘99’. Why ‘99’? Nobody seems to know for sure, and various theories have been put forward. More famous still was the series of TV commercials from the 1960s onwards with a decidedly adult theme, suggestive of… well, I’m sure you know. One of them featured actress Dolorez Mantez, taking a furlough from working on the moon for Ed Straker’s SHADO organisation. The ad’s famous song was composed by top jingle writer Ronnie Bond (not the identically-named drummer from the Troggs).

Six of the best again for Wikipedia who insist that the ‘dipped flake’ variant (a standard Flake bar covered in chocolate so as to offset the messy process of eating one) was launched in 2003. Once again, cobblers. I had them bought for me as early as 1972 and they almost certainly existed before this time. What actually happened is that the original bar disappeared in the wake of the very similar ‘Twirl’ and was relaunched in 2003. All Wikipedia employees will write out one hundred times: ‘I will not publish inaccurate information about chocolate bars.’

We're not done yet... next time, we'll look at a few more 'still with us today' items. and one or two we've lost along the way.