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...