The Haunted Highways

 

Before the internet, before Google, before Wikipedia, we used an earlier method of obtaining information on items of interest: ‘ask your dad’. Our dad would usually be able to provide an answer to anything we needed to know, and if he didn’t know himself, he probably knew which books to look in. At a very early age, I’d become curiously fascinated by street lamps and wondered why certain of them were orange whilst others gave off a greenish-white light. Our dad’s explanation, delivered from the driving seat of our Hillman Minx saloon, was that the orange lamps (such as the one outside our house) were ‘sodium discharge’ whilst the greenish type we passed on the way to our grandparents were ‘mercury vapour.’ It wasn’t necessary for me to understand those terms or the technicalities involved. I just needed to put names to them.

Whilst sodium lighting can still be seen in urban areas and even some motorways, it is gradually being phased out in favour of LCD lighting arrays, which give off a brighter, white light with a normal colour spectrum: sodium was well known for its monochromatic effect. Mercury vapour lamps, on the other hand, have disappeared completely, at least here in the UK. A Google image search reveals that these lights with their ghostly greenish hue are still in use in some parts of the USA, and probably elsewhere in the world. When first introduced in the early 1930s, mercury discharge lighting soon earned itself a morbid nickname: people referred to them as ‘cadaver lamps’ for the effect they had on the human complexion: the absence of red from the lamps’ spectrum lent faces the appearance of bloodless corpses. Any busy city street seen under mercury lighting would have given the appearance of a zombie apoaclypse in progress as all passers by had their complexions drained of colour. Various attempts were made to correct this, by coating the bulbs with flourescent powder, but these reduced the lamps’ efficiency, and on main roads at least, the old style ‘cadaver lamps’ persisted until the 1960s or even the early 70s.

Our street in Sutton Coldfield was lit by mercury lamps, which had been there since the 1950s. These were probably of the modified variety, as I don’t remember the ‘corpsing’ effect being noticeable. You can see the greenish glow around the lantern in the top picture which I took using a self-timer in the early 80s. As a contrast, the orange hue of the high pressure sodium lamps on the adjoining main road can be seen through the trees in the background.

Mercury streetlamps were already on the way out by the 1960s, with the adoption of the new, high-pressure sodium units on all major roads and motorways. I began to notice their disappearance in the 1970s, with the loss of that strange, haunted atmosphere that had pervaded Britain’s highways since the 1930s. The bottom image, sourced off Wikipedia, shows mercury lighting in use somewhere in the USA, and gives an accurate impression of how many of our major roads once looked after dark.

Today’s replacement units may give better light, but their installations lack the style and grace of earlier lighting columns, as functionality (and cost) wins out over form. And they don’t turn people into zombies either… which means that any you happen to encounter on the street will almost certainly be the real thing.

An Evening Spent in 1974

 

I’ve spent a lot of time in this blog trying to give an impression of how it felt to watch television in the 1960s and 70s. So when the BBC offers up a whole two hours of Saturday night viewing from fifty years ago, you can be sure I’ll be tuned in. Thus it was that, last night, I saw Abba win the Eurovision Song Contest, fifty years and one day on from the original broadcast.

My 1974 Letts’ Schoolboys’ Diary makes no mention of it, but I certainly sat and watched that evening’s broadcast live from the Dome in Brighton. Our television was still a black and white set, so this time around I had the added bonus of colour. Which, on the whole, didn’t add a great deal to the proceedings.

Compared to the garish spectacles we see today, the 1974 contest was comparatively austere in its staging, although it looked pretty swish to us at the time. The actual presentation, however, was mired in 1950s technology: the broadcast kicked off with a creaky rostrum camera montage of historic images of Brighton, with some perfunctory CSI captions overlaid. Across this we heard the voice of sports commentator David Vine giving us some historical and cultural context. Vine, unseen, would provide similar introductions to each of the acts, who had been pre-filmed on 16mm and caught on VT during rehearsals. Vine’s role would later, and more memorably, be filled by Terry Wogan.

The contest itself was presented by Katie Boyle, clocking up her third appearance as hostess of the event. With so much experience under her belt, one might have expected a slicker presentation, but she was quite hesitant and fumbling at times, as though overwhelmed by the knowledge that this live broadcast was being watched by a sizeable chunk of the planet. Even Koreans were tuned in, as David Vine assured us.

There was minimal ballyhoo: each act was briefly introduced by the aforementioned film clips, with a few of them making feeble attempts to look wacky. This year’s line-up included several groups, where former years had been dominated by solo performers or duos. Once the artistes had all performed their songs – accompanied, in most cases, by Ronnie Hazelhurst’s orchestra – the brief interregnum before the voting was filled, somewhat bizzarely, by a montage of songs by The Wombles. That’s a montage as in two songs. No Wombles band appeared: instead, viewers were shown a tatty looking 16mm film clip showing the costumed characters larking around in Brighton. At the end of this tawdry item, a sole costumed Womble wandered onto the stage with a placard urging viewers to vote for the Wombles. Was this really the best home-grown entertainment that Britain could offer up? Admittedly, the pop charts were a little odd during 1974, with Glam Rock not quite dead in the water, and nothing else ready to take its place. But really, the Wombles? If anything, this left me realising how much I hated the ‘band’, if you can dignify a bunch of session musicians in furry suits with such a title.

How about the songs themselves? On the whole, they were of a far superior standard to the formulaic computerised tosh that’s churned out today, although that’s not to say they weren’t without their own moments of cliché. Over the past couple of decades, the focus has shifted away from the craft of songwriting and onto performance, which has entirely defeated the original objective of the contest. Back in 1974, songwriting was still the order of the day, and while there were a few risible outfits on display (Yugoslavia’s ‘Korni Grupa’ in shiny coloured trousers), the emphasis was on putting across the song. The Netherlands’ act included a couple of puppet characters in a kind of musical box, which certainly set them apart, but on the whole, the artistes’ appearance hardly screamed out 1970s. Abba, of course, had their platform boots and glittery costumes which were about two years out of date over here, and visually stood out amongst a rather lacklustre bunch. Wooden spoon for the least sartorial effort went to Israel’s ‘Poogy’ group, who appeared in sleeveless charity shop style pullovers. Their song, a dismal piece of watered-down folk-rock was also instantly forgettable.

Ah yes, the songs. That was the whole point, wasn’t it. On the whole, there was nothing particularly offensive on offer, aside from a tendency towards the clichéd ‘oompah’ stylings that had come to dominate Euro pop since Sandie Shaw’s ‘Puppet on a String’. Britain’s entry was no exception. ‘Long Live Love’ even appropriated the title of a completely different Sandie Shaw hit, but wedded it to a dreary plodder with an inevitable ‘oompah’ chorus. Olivia Newton John did the honours, managing a surprising fourth place with this lacklustre effort. And what of our fellow nations?

Finland’s Carita performed ‘Keep Me Warm’ in English, an ambitious song, over orchestrated, that might have been a demo for a Bond movie. Spain offered a flamenco-style song, performed by a kind of Tom Adams lookalike, sounding like the soundtrack to a Costa Brava package tour. Norway’s effort sounded suspiciously like Stevie Wonder’s ‘For Once in My Life’, and was again delivered in English. Greece gave us a ‘la-la-la’ intro, one of several this evening, and a bouzouki player straight from the nearest cheese shop. The song was generic and bland. Israel’s Poogy had the aforementioned pullovers and a British Baldwin 12-string guitar. There were five vocalists, none of whom appeared to be more important than the others. Unlike almost every other entrant, they performed without the orchestral assistance of Mr. Hazelhurst et al.

Yugoslavia had a Matt Berry lookalike handling lead vocals at the head of a bunch who resembled Open University presenters. Theirs was definitely not a crowd pleaser, and stylistically all over the place, drawing one of the most muted responses of the evening from the audience.

As for Sweden, it’s hard to view Abba’s performance without the benefit of hindsight, but even ignoring what we now know, theirs was clearly the outstanding entry of the year. ‘Waterloo’ was a properly crafted pop song with hooks and a singalong melody that managed to avoid the cliché traps that caught out lesser performers. I remembered their conductor coming on dressed as Napoleon, a gimmick that was entirely unnecessary. Back in 1974, with no idea of who Abba might be, their entry stood out as one of the only memorable numbers in the whole contest, and on the night, I was unable to decide between this and the Netherlands’ entry ‘I See a Star’, which was memorable but fell into the ‘oompah chorus’ elephant trap.

For Luxembourg, former Joe Meek and Barry Gray collaborator Charles Blackwell conducted Anglo-German singer Ireen Sheer who delivered a semi-uptempo ballad with (sigh) yet another oompah chorus. Better dig that trap a bit deeper…

Monaco gave us an Englebert by numbers effort, delivered by a chap in a glittery jacket. A clichéd ballad with French lyrics. Belgium trotted out more of the same, an unmemorable ballad with pop overtones and a clumsy arrangement. Singer Jaques Hustin had the widest shirt collars of the evening. He was followed by the Netherlands’ effort ‘I See a Star’, delivered by ‘Mouth and MacNeal’, an established act who had scored minor hits in America. ‘Mouth’, a chunky beardy guy in sunglasses, tried a little too hard to be wacky, and there were of course, the aforementioned puppets. There’s no denying that this song was one of the major ‘earworms’ of the evening, possibly even outshining Abba in that respect, but the ‘oompah’ chorus probably counted against it. The contest was clearly a shoot-out between these guys and Abba as far as I could see, although it was ultimately Italy who came closest to unseating the Swedes. M&M came a creditable third, and the song gave them a hit in several European territories including Britain where it reached number eight in the charts. Even before last night’s repeat, I could still remember it after fifty years.

Ireland were not on great form: Tina Reynolds looked rather dowdy and old fashioned in spite of her daring ‘cross your heart’ outfit, styled to reflect the song’s title. The lyrics, however, were the worst of the evening, including the line ‘cross your heart and hope to die.’ Given the then current situation in Ireland, this was not, perhaps, the greatest sentiment to have put across.

Germany’s Cindy and Bert performed a drearily unimaginative ballad that sounded like two songs stuck together, and not very well at that. The judges evidently thought so too, with the song finishing in equal last place alongside Norway, Portugal and Switzerland. The Swiss also opted for a dull ballad, following the clichéd formula of minor key verse building to a big major key chorus, but the melody didn’t linger. Singer Piera Martell at least had a decent voice.

Portgual gave us an uptempo ballad in a kind of Julio Iglesias style, but the singer looked like he’d come to audit the books. This was the kind of song that Tom Jones would have rejected.

Finishing off the evening (there was no French entry this year), we had Italy, whose entry ‘Si’ came hotly tipped by David Vine, possibly on account of singer Gigliola Cinquetti being one of the most photogenic performers of the evening. The song itself, though popular with the judges, struck me as being over complicated, with too many changes of mood, and the singer’s voice struggled to cut through in some of the quieter passages.

And with that, we were done. Once the Wombles had embarrassed the entire British music industry, it was time for the voting. Technically, this was the least impressive part of the evening, with Katie Boyle looking nervous and making a few flubs as she attempted to make contact with the various juries. This entire section was marred by cross talk from another station, with a foreign announcer’s voice interjecting and making it hard to hear what Katie was saying. This was either a technical error on the night, or the surviving video tape has been compiled from two different sources.

Abba led from the start, and only Italy came close to knocking them off the top spot. There was an error at one point when the scoreboard showed Ireland with 20 points against Sweden’s 19, but someone had slotted in the wrong digit and their actual score was just 10. The board was of the most rudimentary design, with numbers clearly being pushed into the slots by hand, not unlike the kind of thing one might see at a cricket pitch. In the end, the top three places were taken by Abba, of course, Italy and The Netherlands.

On the night, I’m not sure if I was patriotically rooting for the UK, but I remember being sure that the two best efforts had come from Sweden and the Netherlands. The big question, in retrospect, is what might have become of Abba if they hadn’t won? A second place would almost certainly have guaranteed them a chart release in most of the participating countries, and the group had the songwriting talent to consolidate on this unexpected success. As a comparison, consider the Netherlands, whose entry did well on several European charts, following which no more was heard from them. Might this have been the fate of Abba in an alternate scenario?

It’s rare to see such a piece of archival television offered up wholesale as opposed to being reduced to a clipshow, and as an example of BBC television staging and technique, it makes for interesting viewing, whatever you might think of the contest itself. Obviously, it was chosen for repeat on account of Abba, but if the BBC still hold tape copies, I’d happily sit through a few more examples from the same era, in preference to the tat-fest we’ll be served up in a few weeks.

Oh… and I still can’t get ‘I See a Star’ out of my head… 

Easter Sunday in Old Money

 

‘It’s Sunday. I’ve had a rotten dinner. It’s raining. And I’ve got nothing to do.’ 

So said Anthony Aloysius St. John Hancock in an episode of his radio series that acquired instant classic status when it was first broadcast in the late 1950s. The boredom of a typical British Sunday in the suburbs was something that everyone could relate to. Nowhere to go. Shops all shut. No television until 4pm when the Flowerpot Men came on. And you’ve seen all the films at the local cinema. No, there literally wasn’t anything better to do on a Sunday afternoon than try and spot faces in the wallpaper, or fill in all the ‘O’s and the ‘P’s and the ‘Q’s and the ‘D’s in the newspaper using a biro. Anyone under thirty reading this won’t have a clue what I’m on about. The clue is in the title of this blog itself.

‘Sunday in Old Money’ derives from a simple idea, that seemed to sum up what I’ve neen trying to capture in this series of conversational essays. Sunday, like nostalgia in the oft-quoted aphorism, isn’t what it was. This blog set out to give a first-hand account of how it felt to grow up in the 1960s and 70s, considering how the pop cultural and sociological landscape has changed in the past sixty years. In it, I’ve looked back at television, comics, toys, all manner of pop cultural icons and ideas, and tried to give an impression of how it felt to encounter them before they had acquired what one might term the patina of iconography. More to the point, the ways in which we, the audience, interacted with those phenomena were fundamentally different from how we do so today, and it is those differences that I’ve been trying to preserve in these posts.

But what of Sunday itself? As time draws on, there will be fewer and fewer of us left who can remember the sabbaths of old, those dreamlike empty days that came once every week. In the immortal words of Sid James: ‘there’s one a week, there always has been, and there’s nothing we can do about it.’ Sid, speaking in 1958 in that same edition of Hancock’s Half Hour, was wrong. There was something we could do about it: but it would take another thirty-five years for the change to come about.

Prior to 1994, Sunday as a socio-cultural phenomenon, was fundamentally unchanged in living memory. The aforementioned Hancock episode still felt entirely relevant when I first heard it sometime in the mid-1970s. Sunday had always felt a bit weird to me. Empty and strange. Everywhere closed, shop fronts shuttered, the roads and town centres quiet. I didn’t entirely like it, either. As a child, I favoured Saturday over Sunday if only because the shops were open which meant you were more likely to have a toy car bought for you (such was our dad’s generosity). You will gather from this that we were not religious in our household, despite our mum’s Catholic upbringing. My earliest recollections of Sundays in the mid sixties are characterised by teas with our grandparents – salads, tinned salmon, trifle and cakes of varying kinds (including the late, lamented ‘Kunzle Showboats’ – Google them for more on that story). Even the television was different. ITV came from a different operator, which meant different continuity announcers, and programmes you never saw on any other day of the week.

To find any shop open on a Sunday had a kind of unreal, miraculous quality. Despite the laws on Sunday trading, one or two outlets were permitted to open, including newsagents, essential for the supply of Sunday reading matter. But even this seemed a bit unusual. There was a newsagent-cum-post office a few minutes walk from where we lived in Lichfield, and this shop, uniquely, was open on Sundays (though not, of course, the post office counter). From here, sometime in 1966 or early 67, I remember getting a pack of Batman bubble gum cards. It felt pleasantly unusual to have anything like that bought for you on a Sunday. My first ever encounter with a shop that opened on a Sunday came even earlier than this, in maybe 1964 or 65, when our grandmother took me round to another newsagent, near their home, one Sunday afternoon, from where I was bought a small Matchbox model of a Bedford tipper truck. I still own it. This model always stood apart for me because it was the first time I’d been in a shop on a Sunday and had a toy bought for me. A small, indistinct line in the sand had been crossed.

Traders, of course, had been lobbying for a relaxation in the Sunday trading laws even then, but for the forseeable future, only a few outlets – including petrol stations and off-licenses – were legally permitted to open. A somewhat different situation held sway at the coast, where more shops seemed to be open on Sundays to cater to the tourist trade: yet even here, the majority of retail outlets remained closed.

This all changed in 1994, with the arrival of the Sunday Trading Act. Its terms allowed for large shops – ie. retailers with a ‘relevant floor area’ in excess of 280m² – to open for six hours on Sundays between the hours of 10am and 6pm. Smaller retailers were at liberty to set their own trading hours. Christmas Day and Easter Sunday were excluded as trading days. This situation prevails to the present time, with supermarkets typically opening at 9.30 or 10am and closing at 4pm, along with most high street outlets.

At first, it was hard to notice much of a difference. The supermarkets were the big deal as far as I was concerned, and it took a while for other retailers to follow their example, there being issues regarding staff working hours and union objections to be factored in. There was resistance from various quarters, notably the lobby group calling itself Keep Sunday Special, whose objections were wholly on religious grounds. That didn’t make any difference to me, but as time wore on, I began to miss those strange empty Sunday afternoons, when you could stroll around the town unencumbered by the world, his wife and kids. Car parks were empty, and for the most part, toll free. 

As with Sundays, so too with Bank Holidays. The typical Bank Holiday Monday used to feel like having two Sundays in the same week, but today, you’ll find an increasing number of retailers open for business.

On Easter Sunday this year, driving down through the town where I live, it felt odd to see the supermarket car parks deserted, and the roads devoid of the usual Sunday queues, and it struck me that Easter Sunday is the last gasp of those ‘old money’ Sundays I remember from childhood. Of course, the same applies on Christmas Day, but Christmas doesn’t necessarily fall on a Sunday.

In August, it will be thirty years since the Sunday Trading Act came into force. There are generations alive now who never knew those ‘Old Money Sundays’ bemoaned by Hancock and co but which were so much a part of my childhood. And don’t get me onto the subject of ‘Early Closing Day’, that quaint provincial phenomenon that seems now to belong to the era of HG Wells’ History of Mr. Polly. One thing remains certain: if you hanker after the vibe of those Sundays of yore, there will always be one day every year when you can recapture it.

Happy Easter!

The Collector: 2 – The Name's Bond, Brooke Bond

 

During the 1960s and 70s, there was only one brand of tea drunk in our household. Twinings, Tetley or Ty-Phoo didn’t get a look in. We were a PG Tips family. And we had no truck with those new-fangled teabags either. We bought our tea in packets. Our mum made it in a teapot, and each cup was poured through a strainer. Teabags didn’t make significant inroads into our household until the late 1980s.

One reason I can be sure of this – and, also of the sheer volume of tea we drank – is my collection of Brooke Bond picture cards. One card was given away free in every packet of tea: indeed, according to the legend on the rear cover of the 1965 collectors’ album of British Birds, ‘picture cards are given with Brooke Bond Tea, Brooke Bond Pure & French Coffees [and] Crown Cup Instant Coffee’. But tea was, I’m sure, by far the most popular source of supply for these small collectables (as a matter of interest, ‘tea bags’ were not mentioned specifically on the albums until the following year’s Transport Through the Ages).

The cards followed a format that had long since been popularised by cigarette manufacturers, sized roughly 2¾ x 1½inches. The front faces featured colour paintings, usually by noted wildlife artists such as C.F. Tunnicliffe and Sir Peter Scott, although the very first set, issued in 1954, had been photographic. On the reverse, printed in a distinctive blue ink, was an informative description of the subject. Albums, priced sixpence, were available from grocers’ shops, providing spaces to mount each card, alongside additional information and line drawings explaining aspects of the chosen subject in more detail. For the first eleven years, the series focused exclusively on natural history subjects such as birds, flowers and butterflies, and a solitary journey Out into Space, issued in 1956.

The first of these albums to find its way into our house was for the series Tropical Birds, issued in the autumn of 1961, when I was just six months old. I must have spent a lot of time leafing through the accompanying album, for it soon lost its covers and four pages, in which state it has survived, somewhat remarkably, to the present day. I can’t overstate how important this album seems to me now. Its glorious paintings of colourful, exotic birds were some of the first images that ever passed into my consciousness and to look at them today is to take a mind trip back to the age of six months. I would continue to gaze at these paintings – lovingly depicted by the aforementioned Mr. Tunnicliffe – for the forseeable future, and sometime in the 1970s was very happy to be able to buy a reprint of the album and a full set of cards. As a child, I had every expectation of seeing the likes of Bluebirds in our back garden, but global warming notwithstanding, I doubt this is ever likely to happen.

After Tropical Birds, we had a lull in collecting. I remember a lad down the street whose father had diligently compiled the sets of British Butterflies, Wild Flowers and Wild Birds in Britain as they appeared in the early 1960s, but we didn’t begin collecting again in our house until 1966. This year saw a minor sea change in the world of Brooke Bond cards. Transport Through the Ages was the first card issue not to feature a natural history subject, but its collector album, featuring exciting painted images of a space rocket, steam loco and cargo ship certainly appealed to my five-year-old sensibilities. Rather remarkably, we managed to collect the entire set of 50 cards. Given that the series ran for around six months, and the likelihood of duplicates, I have to conclude that we drank a lot of tea (much of it consumed by our Dad).

From here onwards, we followed every new series as it came out, although we never again repeated the full set feat of 1966. Transport Through the Ages was followed by Trees in Britain which, after Tropical Birds, remains my favourite set. Trees held a particular fascination for me, and even now my ‘mind’s eye image’ of most species is still the archetype depicted on the Brooke Bond  cards. Each tree was shown in full leaf and blossom in one card, with the following card depicting leaves, fruit and seed heads in close up. Illustrations and descriptions were provided by Michael Youens, who would go on to provide the pictures for the the British Costume series two years later. I was much less taken with British Costume than I had been with the earlier issues, and the album was never completed. By 1968, Brooke Bond seemed to have abandoned wildlife subjects for good, with the years to 1971 covering subjects as diverse as heraldry (Flags and Emblems of the World, 1967), motoring history (1968), Famous People (1969), nautical history (1970) and the space race (1971). Collectors could send away for any cards they had failed to collect by the end of each series, and I clearly remember doing this to complete our set of Trees in Britain, but receiving back only one of the two or three cards we were missing. I wouldn’t get to see a completed album until I found one at a collector’s fair a couple of decades later.

1971 saw a return to natural history, with a series almost guaranteed to appeal to me – Prehistoric Animals. For the first time, though, I felt there was something lacking. I’d already seen some of the very fine dinosaur art produced by Rudolph Zalinger, the world-leading specialist in the subject, and by comparison, the Brooke Bond artwork wasn’t as characterful or appealing. The cards were well painted, but the album cover was a total let-down, with artwork that looked like a designer’s rough. It was an early sign of things to come.

1972’s set History of Aviation was in part revisiting familiar territory, as aspects of the subject had been covered in Transport Through the Ages. I was bought the album, and collected a fair few of the cards, but my heart was no longer in it. The following year brought Adventurers and Explorers and The Sea – Our Other World, a nicely-painted set focusing on the kind of territory being explored on television by Jaques Cousteau.

If I’d sensed the series were running out of steam, the next set confirmed it for me, with 1975’s Inventors and Inventions reaching an all-time low for Brooke Bond. This time, it was the cards themselves that disappointed, with artwork hastily rendered in a scamp-style line and ink wash technique. You could see bubbles where the ink had dried. It was all a far cry from the thoughful illustrations of artists like C.F. Tunnicliffe, who had a passion for their subject. Inventors was clearly the work of a journeyman ‘commercial artist’ who apparently invested none of the time or interest in his subject that had made the sets of Tunnicliffe, Youens and others so appealing. I hated Inventors... on sight, and on revisiting it ahead of this article, found my opinion unchanged. The only interesting visual came in the form of the album cover, which featured a photograph of some model caricatures of inventors from history, that looks suspiciously like the work of Spitting Image creators Fluck and Law.

Sadly, there was worse to come. Following a temporary return to form with Wonders of Wildlife, 1976 brought Play Better Soccer. Horrors! What on earth were Brooke Bond thinking of? Some of the earlier series may have erred a little on the side of academia, but the subjects were always of universal interest, and could be categorised under the heading ‘general knowledge’. Now, here was a set aimed only at football fans. It was a misjudgement, and the artwork struggled to improve on the low benchmark set by Inventors… 

Declining standards: the artwork on these 1970s sets was well below the quality seen in earlier series.
 L-R: Inventors and Inventions, Play Better Soccer, Police File (which came with an album introduced by Shaw Taylor)

If I’d been losing interest before, I was almost done by this time. Disappointed at the contemporary series, I turned to collecting some of the sets I'd missed back in the 1960s, with reprints including Wild Birds in Britain, African Wildlife and Freshwater Fish. Curiously, not all sets were available this way. Meanwhile, 1977 brought Police File, and another series of cards painted in a slick, modern style: fine for film posters or the covers of cheap novels, but it wasn’t what I wanted to see on Brooke Bond cards. Vanishing Wildlife (1978) was an improvement, but the paintings were still a long way below the high watermark of the early 60s, and the subject had already been covered, definitively, by the respected naturalist Sir Peter Scott back in 1963. 1979 brought Olympic Greats, and a return to photographic images, not seen on Brooke Bond cards since 1954. Woodland Wildlife was similarly photographic, but we’d stopped drinking Brooke Bond tea by this time, and the only examples of these later sets in my collection come from a job lot I acquired somewhere down the line. 

The glory days of Brooke Bond card collecting were well and truly over by the mid 80s, with series now including the likes of Chimp Stickers (1986), Teenage Mutant Hero Turtles (1991) and The Secret Diary of Kevin Tipps (1995). The appearance of the famous chimp characters on the collectable cards marked a new nadir for the series which had always steered well clear of making any connection with the PG Tips TV commercials. Clearly, lesser minds were now in charge of marketing at Brooke Bond, and it’s hard to think of a worse example of ‘dumbing down’. The number of cards in each set had gone down from 50 to 40 by the late 70s, and was now reduced even further, with the very last ‘collectable’ set (1998’s International Soccer Stars) comprising a mere twenty cards. What had started out as a laudable exercise ‘offered in the interests of education’, had become a dreary commercial endeavour, dragged down by inane subject matter and repetition.

I still own pretty well all of the collectable era of Brooke Bond albums, many of them complete. In addition, I have many loose cards, and recently decided to sort them into sets. In doing so, I noticed the tendency for certain cards to appear in clusters, whilst others were absent altogether. In a typical set, one might find as many as six examples of one card, and this was from a randomly collected pile of cards going back through the decades. There’s only one explanation for this ‘clustering’. Clearly, someone in the production line was pulling out certain cards so as to restrict their numbers, whilst other cards had their print runs extended. This explains why our missing Trees in Britain cards could not be supplied when we sent off for them in 1967: the print run on those cards had fallen short. It was a win/win situation for Brooke Bond: hold back cards to keep customers buying more tea, then charge them again to complete their sets.

Brooke Bond albums were issued in their thousands and accordingly don’t have huge value today. Even early sets like Bird Portraits (1957) can be had for just 99p if you’re prepared to shop around on ebay. There are, of course, sellers who hope for as much as £50 for the same set, but they’ll be relisting for a long time to come.

Whilst certain sets have dated quite badly – Famous People, History of the Motorcar and The Race Into Space (which envisaged a manned landing on Mars by the mid-80s), the wildlife subjects continue to be as relevant as ever, if not more so, and represent some of the very best of their kind. I’m sure they will continue to be collected long after the aberrations of the 80s and 90s have been long forgotten.

And now, after all that, I think it’s time for a cup of the tea you can really taste…

How to Live Forever (according to ITC)

Going through some very old cassette tapes in my garage, I turned up a minor piece of history reminding me of my long standing friendship with the late Tim Beddows, creator of the Network DVD label. In 1977, our family holiday took us to a rented cottage on the mid Wales coast. The views and the scenery were all very well, but being in Wales for a week had the added advantage of being able to watch an episode of The Saint. It hadn’t been on in our home region (ATV Midlands) for some five years. Forewarned of this possibility, Tim gave me his tiny open-reel tape recorder with a request to record the programme's beginning and end titles, simply so that he could have a copy of the music.

The tape I discovered today was a dupe from Tim’s tiny three inch spool, itself a pretty ropey recording to begin with. But it’s evidence of a kind, a link back to the past and a late, lamented friend. It’s somewhat ironic, in retrospect, to reflect that the episode broadcast that week on HTV was The Man Who Gambled With Life, number 18 in the last series of The Saint, and first broadcast in January 1969. Make a note of that date, as it’s relevant to what follows. The story, written by series script editor Harry W. Junkin, concerned the efforts of wealthy industrialist Keith Longman (Clifford Evans) to keep himself alive when faced with a deteriorating heart condition. Cryogenics was a recently arrived fad over in the USA, and Junkin, a Canadian, would have been well aware of the trend. His script feels rather more like an outing for The Avengers (and even namechecks Emma Peel as if in acknowledgement of the fact), but it still provided a reasonably entertaining fifty minutes, somewhat off the usual Saintly beaten path.

Fast forward now to January 1970 and an episode of Department S: Spencer Bodily is Sixty Years Old. Once again, the theme is longevity, and this time the premise involves participants in a long term experiment who have been using a drug known as BHT (or Butylated Hydroxytoluene) in order to slow down the ageing process. I didn’t get to see this episode until last year, but when I did, I immediately spotted a connection back to the aforementioned episode of The Saint. When Templar is first approached by Longman’s team, he is given a box containing a white mouse. Longman’s daughter explains that the animal’s life span has been significantly extended by injections of... Butylated Hydroxytoluene. The two episodes were the work of the same writer, Harry W. Junkin. So was he merely rehashing an old idea or was there something more to all this? I decided to find out…

First off, I wanted to know about Butylated Hydroxytoluene. It sounded plausible enough, but it could simply have been a scriptwriter’s invention. A quick Google search confirmed that it was real enough. BHT (as it is correctly referred to in Department S) is a known antioxidant, widely used in food preservation, and a key ingredient in various cosmetics. Its effect, is simply, to delay the onset of rancidity. In chemical terms, it inhibits the process of oxidation caused by free radicals. So far, so good. And looking into the matter a little further, there is plenty of literature about the reputed benefits of antioxidants in their natural state – foods including blueberries, dark chocolate, beetroot and broccoli are all natural antioxidants. But wasn’t Mr. Junkin delving into the realms of fantasy with his scripts? Not as far as you might think.

In June 1968, an article entitled ‘Biochemistry: The Elixir of Youth’ appeared in Time magazine. The piece described research into ageing being conducted by Biochemist Denham Harman of the University of Nebraska medical school. The article includes the following statement:

“Now researchers are beginning to wonder if the preservative [BHT] cannot also be used to prolong the life of man [...] With regular feedings of BHT, [Harman] was able to lengthen the life span of a strain of laboratory mice by 50%. “In human terms,” says Harman, "this is equivalent to increasing life expectancy from 70 years to 105 years.”

Here, without a doubt, is Harry W. Junkin’s original source material. In light of the fact that he turned in two scripts with a longevity theme within the space of a few months, can we presume that Mr. Junkin was intrigued by the possibility of extending his own life span? Unfortunately, if he took any steps in this direction, they were unsuccessful, as he was to live for only another ten years, dying in 1978 at the age of only 62. But hang on a minute: if that research was published back in 1968, how come we’re not all now living to 105?

What holds good for laboratory mice does not necessarily hold good for human beings, and no one was about to start adding another chemical to the human food chain without rigorous testing… and we all know, don’t we, that flouridation was nothing more than a communist plot to contaminate our precious bodily essences…

The sobering fact is that the elixir of life dream of Denham Harman, Harry Junkin and many others remains just that: a dream. BHT is still regularly added to many foodstuffs, but has been linked in various studies with forms of cancer (although ongoing research has more or less ruled this out), which may explain why some manufacturers are now voluntarily removing it from their products. Exactly how much you’d have to take to live to 105 isn’t stated in the Time magazine article, but you’d have thought that, if it were possible, some kind of Seven Seas style capsule might have been made available by now. In the absence of any such wonder drug, then, is there anything we can take away from all this?

Antioxidants are the subject of fierce debate in the scientific community. Taken as a whole, there seems to be no persuasive argument in favour of their efficacy, but neither have they been shown to have no beneficial effects at all. The best one can hope for is to ‘suck it and see’ as the saying goes. Over the past few months, I’ve upped my intake of blueberries from, well, zero, to a punnet every couple of weeks. Do I feel any better for it? I don’t think so. On the other hand, if I live to 105, you probably won’t be around to hear about it, and equally if it doesn’t work, I won’t be around to report on that either.

As to cryogenics (or, more accurately, cryonics), there’s still a glimmer of hope, but you’ll need something like $200,000 if you want to join the small, select band of 250 or so frozen individuals following the Saintly path of Harry Junkin’s script. Alan Whicker reported on the state of the industry in the early 1970s, but sadly for those pioneers, eternal life was only as good as the company running the freezer, and all but one of the early cryonics ventures failed: with terminal results for their clients. It’s often stated that Walt Disney has been cryonically preserved, but that’s an urban myth. Although I wouldn’t put it past him to re-emerge in the future as some kind of clone/AI hybrid...

There’s one final aspect of all this that we need to consider. Let’s imagine that Denham Harman really had cracked the secret of longevity back in the mid 60s. Did any government want its citizens living to advanced old age? Even without an elixir of life drug, we can already see the problems of an ageing population as the average lifespan gets longer. If there is some secret wonder drug out there, you’re never going to find it on the shelves at Holland and Barrett: but you can bet that both of this year’s presidential candidates have been shovelling it down on a daily basis. Which might explain a great deal...

Meantime, it's back to the blueberries. The second part of this article will appear in March 2066...

Many a Slip

 

Panel games have always been a regular feature of BBC radio. Growing up, I heard many of these lightweight, humorous shows without really understanding much of what was going on. Just a Minute was easy enough to follow, even without an appreciation of the panellists’ erudition (or lack thereof), but shows like My Word, My Music or Does the Team Think were aimed at a mature, intelligent and well educated audience. Nevertheless, I got to hear all of these and many others through the simple fact of our having the radio turned on at lunchtime. During the 60s and 70s, and indeed for decades afterwards, the 12.25pm slot on Radio Four (formerly The Home Service) was a natural home for light comedy and panel games. Even when I was going to school, I got to hear many of these programmes, as for many years I came home for dinner rather than risking the school canteen with its inevitable cheese flans and semolina.

In April 1971, I encountered a panel show that was new to me and, I assumed, newly arrived on the airwaves. In fact, it had been running since 1964. Many a Slip was created by Ian Messiter, whose other contributions to broadcasting included women’s forum Petticoat Line and, more famously, Just a Minute. The format was simple: playing the game was anything but. Show host Roy Plomley would read out short and often humorous pieces of prose containing deliberate solecisms. The two teams would buzz in every time they spotted a mistake, with points awarded or deducted according to whether the mistake was intentional, unintentional or not a mistake at all. Midway through each episode, a round of ‘musical mistakes’ would be presided over by genial Steve Race, who would intentionally mix up melodies and lyrics from popular songs – which is to say, songs that had been popular thirty or forty years previously.

Two teams competed regularly across the series, and when I first heard the show, these comprised the ladies – Eleanor Summerfield and Isobel Barnet – and the gentlemen, David Nixon and Richard Murdoch. Unlike today’s panel shows, the team members remained the same week after week, with only minor changes between series as various players moved on. This was, in fact, the ‘classic’ line-up, enduring over nine series from 1966 to 1974. Murdoch departed in ‘74 and Barnet the following year. The choice of players harked back to the early days of television panel games, with both Nixon and Barnet having been regulars on What’s My Line. Many a Slip was itself trialled briefly on television during the autumn of 1965, when a run of just ten episodes appeared on the recently arrived BBC2 channel. But the show, with its emphasis on listening, was more at home on the radio.

I’m not entirely sure why I’d not been aware of Many a Slip prior to 1971, but I suspect that music may have had something to do with it. In its early years, the show had no opening or closing theme, and was simply introduced by Plomley (as a sole surviving episode from 1967 makes clear). Somewhere further down the line, the show was outfitted with a quirky little melody from BBC Radiophonic Workshop contributor John Baker. Constructed in his customary manner from sounds generated by blowing across bottles and cut into notational lengths, the tune was instantly recognisable, and certainly caught my ear in the spring of 1971. Baker had provided a very similar linking piece for the radio comedy Doctor in the House, which debuted in 1968, and his themes were in regular use on both TV and radio going into the new decade. I must have heard Many a Slip prior to 1971, so this makes me wonder whether this was the first year for the music.

Either way, that odd little bit of music became, for me, part of the fabric of the summer of 1971, and is wedded forever in memory with the opening of the school swimming pool, and other radio items from the same era, including a lost adaptation of H.E. Bates’ Larkins stories (Just Perfick), and the schools programme Singing Together. Indeed, although Many a Slip would continue, complete with the same theme music, until 1979, I never heard it again after that summer, which explains its potent associations.

That’s not strictly true, though. A recently discovered diary entry for Monday 2 February 1976 reminded me that I heard that evening’s broadcast at 6.15pm on Radio Four. Our television had temporarily packed in, and in its place, we left the radio on. This, though, would be my last encounter with the programme until a one-off edition, broadcast in a radio retrospective series nineteen years later.

Many a Slip returned to BBC Radio in the digital era, with episodes resurfacing on BBC7 in 2003. I couldn’t receive digital radio at the time, and so it wasn’t until 2018, when the show returned to the renamed Radio Four Extra that I finally got to hear a run of episodes. For a series that was broadcast regularly over fifteen years, averaging two seasons per year, Many a Slip’s archive status is extremely disappointing. Only a handful of episodes survives, with just two hailing from the era of the ‘classic’ team line-up, and the majority dating to 1978. No complete series survives.

At time of writing, MAS is due for a return next week on Radio Four Extra, with a run of episodes that appears to be omitting two orphaned examples from 1967 and 1973. It’s too much to hope that any more survivors will have been unearthed since the show’s last outing two years ago, but with so many broadcasts from the past, there’s still the chance that home tapes may come to light: the show was reputedly popular with teachers, who sometimes wrote in asking for copies of Messiter’s word games, and must surely have recorded the odd episode off air.

I couldn’t appreciate Many a Slip at the age of ten, but at 63 it’s a different matter. It may be slightly old hat and exceedingly upper middle class, but hey, if that’s not my demographic, I don’t know what is. If you’ve never heard it, and want to expose yourself to thirty minutes of archival erudition – you’ll get the added bonus of hearing a clearly drunk Eleanor Summerfield in some of the surviving editions – then tune in from next week on Radio Four Extra.

One of the rounds in Many a Slip had the teams listening to a short prose essay, which was repeated, with alterations, later in the programme, points being earned for every alteration the players picked up. So, for anyone who can be bothered, you can play the game right now, because I’m going to repost this entire entry with some of the facts and phrases altered. Award yourself a point for each ‘error’ you spot… (there are fifty five ‘intentional’ errors or alterations… bonus points if you spot any I didn’t intend).

Take Two:

Panel games have never been a regular feature of BBC radio. Growing up, I heard many of these heavyweight, humourless shows without really understanding much of what was going on. Just a Minute was easy enough to follow, even without an appreciation of the panellists’ erudition (or lack thereof), but shows like My Word, My Music or Twenty Questions were aimed at a mature, intelligent and well educated audience. Nevertheless, I got to hear all of these and many others through the simple fact of our having the radio turned on at teatime. During the 50s and 60s, and indeed for decades afterwards, the 6.15pm slot on Radio Two (formerly The Third Programme) was a natural home for light comedy and panel games. Even when I was going to school, I got to hear many of these programmes, as for many years I came home for dinner rather than risking the school canteen with its inevitable liver and onions.

In April 1975, I encountered a panel show that was new to me and, I assumed, newly arrived on the airwaves. In fact, it had been running since 1954. Many a Slip was created by Ian Messiter, whose other contributions to broadcasting included women’s forum Petticoat Line and, more famously, What’s My Line. The format was simple: playing the game was anything but. Show host Steve Race would read out short and often humorous pieces of prose containing unintentional solecisms. The three teams would buzz in every time they spotted an error, with points awarded or deducted according to whether the mistake was intentional, unintentional or not a mistake at all. At the end of each episode, a round of ‘musical mistakes’ would be presided over by genial Steve Wright, who would intentionally mix up melodies and lyrics from popular songs – which is to say, songs that had been popular fifty or sixty years previously.

Two teams competed regularly across the series, and when I first heard the show, these comprised the ladies – Eleanor Bron and Isobel Barnet – and the gentlemen, Richard Nixon and Stinker Murdoch. Unlike today’s panel shows, the team members remained the same month after month, with only minor changes between series as various players moved on. This was, in fact, the ‘classic’ line-up, enduring over nineteen series from 1966 to 1974. Murdoch departed in ‘74 and Barnet the following year. The choice of players harked back to the early days of television panel games, with both Nixon and Barnet having been regulars on The Brains Trust. Many a Slip was itself trialled briefly on the small screen during the autumn of 1965, when a run of just ten episodes appeared on the recently arrived ABC channel. But the show, with its emphasis on listening, was more at home on the radio.

I’m not entirely sure why I’d not been aware of Many a Slip prior to 1971, but I suspect that music may have had nothing to do with it. In its early years, the show had no opening theme, and was simply introduced by Plomley (as a sole surviving episode from 1967 makes clear). Somewhere further down the line, the show was outfitted with a quirky little melody from BBC Radiophonic Workshop contributor Richard Baker. Constructed in his customary manner from sounds generated by blowing across jam jars and cut into notational lengths, the tune was instantly recognisable, and certainly caught my ear in the spring of 1971. Baker had provided a very similar linking piece for the radio comedy Doctor at Sea, which debuted in 1968, and his themes were in regular use on both TV and radio going into the new decade. I must have heard Many a Slip prior to 1971, so this makes me wonder whether this was the first year for the music.

Either way, that odd little bit of music became, for me, part of the fabric of the winter of 1971, and is wedded forever in memory with the opening of the school science block, and other radio items from the same era, including a lost adaptation of Philip Larkin stories (Just Perfick), and the schools programme Singing Together. Indeed, although Many a Slip would continue, complete with the same theme music, until 1989, I never heard it again after that summer, which explains its potent associations.

That’s not entirely true, though. A recently discovered diary entry for Monday 2 February 1976 reminded me that I heard that evening’s broadcast at 6.15pm on Radio Four. Our television had temporarily packed in, and in its place, we left the radio on. This, though, would be my last encounter with the programme until a one-off edition, broadcast in a radio retrospective series fifty years later.

Many a Slip returned to BBC Radio in the digital era, with episodes resurfacing on BBC3 in 2007. I couldn’t receive digital radio at the time, and so it wasn’t until 2018, when the show returned to the renamed Radio Five Live that I finally got to hear a run of episodes. For a series that was broadcast regularly over fifty years, averaging two seasons per year, Many a Slip’s archive status is extremely encouraging. Only a handful of episodes survives, with just two hailing from the era of the ‘classic’ team line-up, and the majority dating to 1978. One complete series survives.

At time of writing, MAS is due for a return last week on Radio Four, with a run of episodes that appears to be omitting two orphaned examples from 1967 and 1973. It’s too much to hope that any more survivors will have been dug up since the show’s last outing five years ago, but with so few broadcasts from the past, there’s still the chance that home tapes may come to light: the show was reputedly popular with lawyers, who sometimes wrote in asking for copies of Messiter’s word games, and must surely have recorded the odd episode off air.

I could appreciate Many a Slip at the age of ten, but at 63 it’s a different matter. It may be slightly archaic and exceedingly upper middle class, but hey, if that’s not my demographic, I don’t know what is. If you’ve never heard it, and want to expose yourself to sixty minutes of archival erudition – you’ll get the added bonus of hearing a clearly drunk Eleanor Summerfield in some of the surviving editions – then tune in from next week on Radio Four Extra.

One of the rounds in Many a Slip had the teams listening to a long prose essay, which was repeated, with aberrations, later in the programme, points being earned for every alteration the players picked up. So, for anyone who can’t be bothered, you can play the game right now, because I’m going to repost this entire entry with one of the facts and phrases altered. Award yourself a point for each ‘error’ you spot… 

The Collector: 1 – The Curse of the Corgi Technocrats

 

I grew up with Corgi Toys. Having emerged in the 1950s as a rival to die-cast kings Dinky, the brand was well established by the time I began to have toys bought for me. Realism was the key to Corgi’s success: their models came with plastic windows – which Dinky, at the time, did not – and would go on to feature refinments like spring suspension, opening doors, bonnets and boots, spare wheels and even ‘Trans-o-lite’ headlamps (a small prism in the back window created the illusion of the lights being lit). Dinky played catch-up all the way to the 1970s, but I always had a preference for Corgi. Dinky’s castings seemed somehow less refined, and even when coated in enamellised paint, felt different in the hand than Corgis. I also preferred Corgi’s packaging (an early indicator, perhaps, of my future career). By the early 60s, Dinky Toys came in yellow boxes with red lettering, whereas Corgi opted for a pleasant, complementary colour scheme of yellow and sky blue. To this day, I still prefer those 1960s Corgi boxes over any other style of toy packaging.

It couldn’t last, of course. The quest for realism coupled with some highly imaginative designs and a popular range of licenced character cars kept Corgi sales bouyant through the 1960s. But over in America, a new brand was ringing the changes. Mattel’s Hot Wheels, though smaller than Corgi toys, made use of innovative new ‘frictionless’ wheels, giving much faster running than had previously been possible with die-cast toys. These new wheels, coupled with plastic race tracks, enabled the tiny cars to perform stunts such as looping the loop and leaping across canyons.

Hot Wheels were huge in America and soon found their way to our shores. I never cared for them: their designs were based on muscle cars and pimped-up dragsters before pimping was even a word in the automotive world. Like Lesney’s more prosaic (and realistic) Matchbox series, the interlopers were scaled at 1:64, as opposed to the larger 1:48 scale favoured by Corgi and Dinky. Corgi’s response was immediate. Commencing in the autumn of 1969 – just in time to catch the all important Christmas market – a brand new range of 1:64 scale Corgi Toys was unveiled under the banner ‘Corgi Rockets’. Hot rods were the order of the day, although the range did feature some real road-going cars. The new toys came with the added gimmick of having a removable chassis that could be unlocked from the vehicle by using a special golden ‘tune-up’ key supplied with every model. Quite what this added in terms of play value I can’t imagine, but it was a cool gimmick for a while. The cars were intended to run on flexible plastic track, an innovation that was soon taken up by Matchbox.

By 1970, frictionless-wheeled 1:64 scale cars racing on plastic tracks was the new, must-have way of playing with toy cars. No more trundling them slowly across the living room carpet whilst vocalising unconvincing engine noises. My brother and myself were bought both Corgi Rockets and Matchbox ‘Superfast’ tracks; and whilst we enjoyed racing the tiny vehicles and watching them loop the loop, I was already feeling pangs of nostalgia for the way things used to be. Suddenly, every model in the Corgi, Dinky and Matchbox catalogues was retro-fitted with the new frictionless wheels. I knew a line had been crossed the day I was bought a Matchbox Dustcart, with ‘Superfast’ wheels. This was all wrong!

Over at Corgi HQ, things weren’t any better. Suddenly, in addition to the fast-running ‘whizzwheels’, cars began to acquire lurid paint jobs: metallic purple, bronze, dayglo pink. For me, this change, more than almost anything else, epitomised the fact that we were now living in the 1970s. By the time of Corgi’s 1971 catalogue, only two of their ‘cars about town’ still had the old-style wheels, a bubble car and a mini. They were also still sold in the old blue and yellow boxes, which had otherwise been displaced by a new era of ‘window’ boxes.

This style of packaging, which allowed you to see the model in the box before you bought it, had been introduced by Tri-Ang’s Spot-On diecast range in the mid-60s. Dinky soon adopted its own version, presenting their ‘prestige’ models on small sections of cardboard roadway, enclosed in rigid plastic casing, and around 1967, Corgi followed suit.

I didn’t go much for competition cars or dragsters – I liked my model cars sedate and realistic (although I made exceptions for the likes of Batman and Basil Brush). I liked the old, ‘real world’ colour schemes, and the old-style wheels. Corgi wheels had been changed once before, when the original unrealistic flat hubs of the 1950s were replaced with so-called ‘spun hubs’. Flat hubs went out before my time, but were still depicted on the box illustrations, and I liked the way they looked. You just couldn’t get them any more. So, in a sense, I was nostalgic for something that hadn’t even been around in my lifetime! But huge change was on the horizon.

Corgi’s marketing department were determined to push us into the glitzy, dayglo, whizzwheeled 70s whether we liked it or not. Around 1971, the company’s advertising and packaging began to feature a group of comic character heads named The Corgi Technocrats. Originally comprising ‘H.W’, a balding boffin, Whizz, a geeky specky kid and ‘Zak’, a Milk Tray Man type hunk, the three ‘Technocrats’ were soon joined by a girl, ‘Penny’ whose mission was to tell them about ‘what girls like in toys’. Hmmm: if you’d asked me that in 1971, I’d have said ‘Tiny Tears’…

I didn’t care for these characters or the new, ‘down with the kids’ Corgi that they represented. It didn’t matter very much in the long run, as 1972 was the last year in which I was bought toy cars, but if anything, the new lurid, fast-running Corgi toys probably hastened my decline in interest. The same thing was happening over at Matchbox, whose output was, by 1971, ridiculously skewed in favour of implausible hot-rods in unlikely colours. Needless to say, I hated them. Corgi Rockets, meanwhile, fell foul of a lawsuit brought by Mattel, which found in the American company’s favour. The 1:48 scale Corgis continued well into the 70s, with the company recording its largest ever profits in 1978. Parent company Mettoy then invested in an expensive project to develop a new computer system for younger users, a development which ultimately put a drain on resources and led to the company having to call in the Official Receiver in 1983. By this time, Corgi was the last man standing in the British diecast toy market, with both Dinky and Lesney (owners of Matchbox) having failed during the preceding three years.

Looking back, I’m glad to have lived through the high watermark of British diecast toy making, with all three major brands reaching a peak of quality and innovation in the mid-60s. I pity anyone who grew up with the toys of the late 70s or 80s. They were, in a word, horrible.

Unthinakably for purists like me, the original Corgi brand ended its days having been bought out by Mattel, the company who’d first stirred up the diecast market back in the mid-60s. But before the original company folded up, a Corgi Toy appeared including elements that I’d designed myself, a replica of the ‘Timesaver’ buses operated by West Midlands Travel, aimed at specialist collectors. Mattel lost ownership of the brand following a management buyout in 1995, and in 2008, Corgi was acquired by the famous Hornby group. Models continue to be produced to this day, sold online and replicating vintage editions from the 1960s. Interestingly, all the models I’ve seen feature the old blue and yellow boxes, with no sign as yet of the dreaded Technocrats. I’m not one to say I was right all along, but clearly I was not the only fan of the old, pre-whizzwheels Corgis. For anyone else who wishes to indulge in die-cast nostalgia, scans of the original Corgi catalogues can be found here: https://www.corgi-toys.net/lists/1958.html