Holy Annus Mirabilis! Bat-year 1966

Holy merchandising spin-offs: Corgi's original 1966 Batmobile, with the later Batboat and Husky editions.

It may be fifty years ago, but I venture to suggest that there was never a more exciting time to be five years old than the year 1966. Cool toys were being launched so fast you couldn’t draw breath, many of them tied in to the avalanche of cool television series debuting on what felt like a weekly basis. Thunderbirds was nearing the end of its first run when onto the scene burst a new and entirely unexpected phenomenon from the USA - Batman.

I knew nothing of comic books or superheroes and, neither, I imagine, neither did many other kids my age. American-style comic books weren’t available from our local newsagents and wouldn’t be for some time to come. Batman, therefore, came as nothing less than an epiphany. The cool costume – the even cooler car! Sound effects exploding across the screen! The ludicrous villains... the insane plot lines. Of course, being only five, I could barely follow the plot of anything on television, but what did that matter? Batman was all about the look, and even on a black and white, 405-line television, it was obvious that this was something entirely new and different. I still remember the warm Saturday evening in May when Batman and Robin first slid down the batpoles into my consciousness. It was still light outside. I’d probably been playing out in the garden. But everything stopped for Batman. And it stopped again, the following evening: same Bat-time, same Bat-channel...

Why did I watch it? I can only assume that ABC, our regional television station, had been kicking up a fuss about it over the preceding weeks. However I got to know about it, I was there, glued to the screen in anticipation on that Saturday evening. So too was a boy from two doors down the street. He was a year or two older than me, and his parents, both teachers, wouldn’t have television in the house. A few months earlier, he had come round to our house to watch the first episode – and succeeding instalments – of Thunderbirds, so a precedent had been set. Like me, he knew that Batman was coming, and he was there to witness the arrival of a pop cultural phenomenon.

Back then, merchandising of television series was a much more modest affair than it is today, although the seeds were already being sown that would eventually blossom into a multi-million dollar industry. The Daleks had proved a successful money-spinner for toy manufacturers, and Batman was quickly exploited in similar fashion. Almost coincident with the programme going on air, there were packs of bubble gum cards in the shops: not one, but four different series appeared over the coming year, one of them tied in to the feature film spin-off. And before the year was out came the inevitable Batmobile toy: one of the must-have die-cast toys of all time. It came from Corgi, naturally, who were trouncing Dinky in the cool toy stakes. Only Corgi could have produced the Batmobile. With its working missile tubes, flip-out front mounted blade and plastic tongues of flame flickering from the rocket-style exhaust, it was without doubt the most far-out die-cast car produced up to that time.

'Ooh, Robin, we've been turned into a die-cast toy' Batman appears to be saying.

I had two of them: the original model in its original packaging was still available by the end of the decade, and, with what now seems like remarkable precience, I asked my dad to buy me a new one, the first having long since lost its box, missiles, stick-on transfer and what have you. That replacement model still sits, mint in box, in my toy cabinet.

After the Batmobile, the most desirable item for any bat-fan had to be a Batman outfit. I was already well into the idea of hats and dressing up in general – mostly as a cowboy – so I absolutely had to have a batman outfit. Whether it was down to cost or availability, I don’t know, but my bat-cowl and cape were made for me by my mum. The cape was made from a handy length of black fabric, while the cowl was, rather ingeniously, adapted from an old, black cowboy hat with the brim cut off and some eye-holes added. All I needed now was a bat-pole from the bedroom to the living room...

These items aside, however, the range of bat merchandise available to young fans was, by modern standards, somewhat limited. There were, for instance, no action figures, unthinkable in this day and age, but easier to understand when you consider that Palitoy’s Action Man had only been launched a matter of weeks before Batman’s television debut. The best you could get was a small, stiff, plastic figure mounted on a bat-shaped base: no articulation, just a head and cape on a spigot, pressed into a solid plastic body.

On the publishing front, things took longer to happen: apart from a Batman colouring book, there seemed nothing available, and the character’s first appearance in a UK comic would not be for many months, in the disappointing TV Tornado which debuted in January 1967. In the meantime, Four Square/ Nel launched a series of paperback novels (which I only discovered much later), and, in time for the Christmas market, World Distributors produced a Batman Annual. It’s fair to say that this item had been more or less thrown together, comprising as it did of text stories, illustrated in the most rudimentary and slapdash manner, with no comic strips to relieve the monotony. It was a far cry from the much more ambitious publications emerging from the Century 21 stable.

Batman may have been a let down in print, but on television his adventures continued into 1967 and, still more excitingly, in the cinema, where we could see the whole camp colourful world of the caped crusader that we’d been missing on black and white television. I’d only been to the cinema once, to see a Dick Van Dyke vehicle from Disney, Lt. Robin Crusoe. Suddenly, there were two big films I had to see – Batman, and, of course, Thunderbirds Are Go.

Not that it made any impression on me, of course, but 1966 was also, lest we forget, the year in which Britain hosted, and won, the World Cup. Then, as now, I took no interest in football (I put it down to genes: my dad was the same), and I was only dimly aware of there being anything going on. When Blue Peter added the commemorative stamp to their album, that was about the extent of the World Cup coverage for me. But who needed football when you had Batman, Thunderbirds, Action Man and goodness knows how many other cool phenomena vying for your attention.

It was all happening in 1966. On the toy front, within a matter of months, we’d had James Bond’s Aston Martin, the Man from UNCLE Thrush Buster (another classic from Corgi), and the Batmobile. These toys set a precedent, and over the next few years, there would be many more imaginative offerings from both Corgi and Dinky.

And as for the other big arrival of 1966 – ‘Action Man is here!’ trumpeted the television adverts – I think the movable fighting man deserves an entry of his own.

SUNDAY IN OLD MONEY

Childhood encounters with popular culture: 1961-79

The Beatles, James Bond, Thunderbirds, Dr. Who and Batman: long-established icons of popular culture. So much so that our response to them in the twenty-first century is virtually a conditioned reflex: we already know what to think about them. It’s almost impossible, in fact, to imagine a time before they existed, or conceive of how the cultural landscape must have looked when these touchtones of mass culture were fresh, new, untested, unknown.

Who was to know whether a particular film or television series would stand the test of time? The Beatles’ songs might have been popular in their day, but would we still be listening to them ten, twenty, fifty years on? We know now, but we didn’t know back then.

What I want to do here is to try and give an idea of how it felt to encounter those icons for the first time and, in doing so, conjur up a world that’s been largely forgotten: a time when black and white television was something exciting, and music came on 7” plastic discs in colourful paper sleeves. A time, moreover, when the pace of cultural change was unprecedented: a child born in 2006 would scarcely notice any difference in the cultural landscape of today: yet in the 1960s, the changes wrought by a decade were vast, dizzying, almost too much to comprehend. I was born in 1961, and my earliest memories are of a world that, in retrospect, looked pretty much like the 1950s. Yet by 1970, everything had changed, in radical ways. People, clothes, cars, music all looked and sounded totally different. More tellingly – albeit I was unaware of this as a child – ideas had changed.

It was, quite frankly, a hell of a lot to take in.

This is, of course, a partial account. I can only write about those cultural phenomena that I experienced myself, and I am writing from memory – aided, where possible, by the diaries I kept at the time. Where I don’t have diaries (they begin in January 1971), I’ve gone back to sources such as the TV Times and Radio Times to confirm what I saw and when I saw it. But for the most part, it’s my diaries that provide the source material. That’s where I’m going to start.

Went to Lichfield – got nothing.

The diaries: 1971-1974

At christmas, 1970, I was given a diary. I’d never had a diary before and wasn’t entirely sure what I should write in it. It was a slim volume, of the kind used to keep notes of appointments. Aside from those of the dental and hairdressing variety, my appointments for the year 1971 consisted entirely of going to school, which was something I didn’t want to write about. My nine-year-old self lacked the self-awareness and observational skills that make a good diarist, and the volume might well have remained blank had it not occurred to me to keep notes of what I’d watched on television. I’m not even sure I can claim credit for that basic idea, which may well have been suggested by my parents. Either way, that’s what I ended up doing, and, on an intermittent basis, continued to do over the years that followed. Samuel Pepys of the 1970s I was not...

My abilities as a diarist may have been limited but, without realising it, I was compiling a record that, forty five years on has acquired a certain curiosity value. I rarely expressed an opinion about what I’d seen, I generally only mentioned those programmes that I liked. On rare occasions, a favourite series threw up a disappointing episode, as was the case on March 3^rd, 1971, when the diary records that: ‘Star Treck (sic) was no good.’ It doesn’t mention the episode, although a check on the BBC’s genome database reveals the offender to be ‘Mudd’s Women’ – certainly a lightweight in the Star Trek canon.

The early diaries are incomplete. I was simply too lazy to make a habit of writing something every day, and, quite frankly, by the time I got home from school I’d done quite enough handwriting for one day, without submitting to more – even the few words demanded of a diary entry. That peevish reference to Star Trek was, in fact, one of the last entries before a hiatus which lasted for much of 1971. I didn’t write in the diary again until 15^th September, when my evening’s viewing included Ace of Wands (Nightmare Gas – now a lost episode), the Sooty Show, the first episode of Jason King and ‘St Treck’ (I didn’t spell the title correctly until 1973). Two days later, in large pencil letters (later overwritten in biro), I celebrated the beginning of what was for me, the most anticipated show of the year: The Persuaders! (I actually included two exclamation marks).

In subsequent years, I did rather better, though the diaries for 1972 and 1973 both ground to a halt during the summer holidays. In fairness to my younger self, I didn’t just write about television. If I was bought a particular comic, book or toy, that usually got a mention, as did holidays or other day trips (of which there were surprisingly few).

From around the mid 1970s, I also began to keep a record of my endeavours to track down certain items that had eluded me over the years. At that point, the concept of pop culture memorabilia as we now understand it didn’t exist; but I was already aware that artefacts such as a Dr. Who annual were worth acquiring, if only because, in that pre-video age, they provided the only means of enjoying a particular TV series when it was off the air. Secondhand bookshops and jumble sales were places in which I spent rather too much of the 1970s, and the ‘junk’ I acquired from such sources has stayed with me down the years. Acquisitions, however trivial, were duly entered in the diaries (when I could be bothered to keep them up to date). Even a fruitless expedition would merit an entry, such as the terse and frankly pointless entry from a dull Saturday in 1976: ‘went to Lichfield - got nothing.’ Getting, you see, was the whole point of going. I was well on course to becoming either an out and out materialist or a hoarder or both...