Carry On Bonfire Night...

Who can still sing the old advertising jingle? 'Light up the sky with Standard Fireworks.'

Way back before we had all this Halloween hoo-hah here in the UK, Bonfire Night was the biggest thing on any child’s calendar between half term and Christmas. Trick or Treat was unheard of: I first encountered it via the Peanuts cartoons of Charles Schulz, and absolutely no one, but no one went from door to door blagging sweeties from strangers (and going against everything we’d been told in all those Public Information Films). Back then, ‘Penny for the Guy’ was the thing: I can still remember the sight of these ‘Guys’ being wheeled around the streets, usually in an old pram or pushchair, by a gaggle of unwashed urchins begging money to buy bangers (in the days before the sale of fireworks to minors was banned). The Guy was generally a bundle of old clothes, stuffed and sewn together, topped off by a papier-maché face mask of the style now most closely identified with the ‘Anonymous’ group, appropriated in its turn from the film adaptation of Alan Moore and David Lloyd’s graphic novel V for Vendetta.

These masks were a common sight in branches of Woolworths’ and local newsagents, alongside the odd ghoul or Frankenstein, which was as close as you got to anything resembling Halloween merchandise. The whole black and orange/ pumpkin/ cobwebby range of iconography simply didn’t exist. Not here in Britain, at any rate.

That’s not to say that we knew nothing of Halloween, or the traditions associated with it. I remember producing drawings and friezes at school, including the above image which dates to around 1969 or 70. But as to the tradition of hollowing out pumpkins into Jack O’Lanterns, well, it just wasn’t possible: pumpkins simply weren’t available in the shops. I remember our mum trying to do the same thing with a turnip, after I’d seen a piece on Blue Peter. It wasn’t quite the same. Now, pumpkins may very well have been available to a BBC researcher who knew where to go for such rarely-seen gourds, but you couldn’t get them at the local greengrocers, and as supermarkets hadn’t yet evolved into anything like their modern form, you couldn’t pop down to Tesco for one, either. Over in the USA, of course, Linus had been sitting out in his pumpkin patch awaiting the ‘Great Pumpkin’ for over a decade, but we in Britain would have to wait a lot longer for pumpkins to appear in the frankly ludicrous quantities in which they are now sold.

Either way, the big autumnal event here in Britain in the 60s and 70s was still Bonfire Night, which meant November 5^th (not the nearest Saturday or the days either side, unless it was rained off). It meant garden fireworks, and sometimes a bonfire, that would invariably produce more smoke than fire. Those garden fireworks included long, spike-nosed Roman Candles that you stuck in the flower bed; small conical volcanoes; ‘screech owls’ (small cylindrical fireworks with a plastic wing attachment that would, once lit, take flight and, on one memorable occasion, fly in through the neighbour’s bedroom window); ‘traffic lights’ (basically a lot of multicoloured smoke); and, of course, the Catherine Wheel, guaranteed to leave scorch marks on the fence post forever after. Most of these were relatively benign, but I recall one particular example that exploded with such force that we all took shelter around the side of the house. In general, though, fireworks weren’t half as noisy as they would later become, and were more about display than making a big bang.

From around mid October, our local toy shop, and the newsagents’ down the street would display their wares temptingly inside glass cabinets: the boxed selections from Brocks, Benwell and Standard, the great names in British fireworks. I remember being mightily impressed by one notably huge firework, with a bore the size of a cardboard postage tube, and wondering what kind of incredible detonation might result once you’d lit the blue touchpaper and retired…

I was never bothered by fireworks, unlike a lad down the street – a year or so older than myself – who would watch the proceedings from the safety of a back bedroom window. I just thought he was missing out on all the fun – the whole idea of standing out in the cold, dark back garden was part of the experience... along with the nervous anticipation while your dad gingerly leaned over the next firework, attempting to light it with a gently glowing spill.

One year... 1966, if memory serves... bonfire night was a washout: the first time in my recollection that it had been rained off. But our dad came home with a cunning ‘plan B’ in the form of indoor fireworks. I was surprised a few years ago to discover that these weird chemical concoctions were still available. Unsurprisingly, they were entirely lacking in the kind of pyrotechnic glory you got from the average box of Standard Fireworks, and consisted for the most part of bizarre smouldering effects such as you might see demonstrated by a benign chemistry teacher. The only one I recall with any clarity was the ‘snake in the grass’, which, when lit, began to smoulder like a cigarette, and slowly exude a noxious turd-like coil of something horrible. It was certainly snake-like in appearance, but a substitute for a good old fashioned Roman Candle it was not…

As I got older, the appeal of lighting your own fireworks in the garden began to wear off, and we would occasionally go out to watch an organised display in some nearby farmer’s field. In place of fireworks, the big bonfire night tradition became the baked potato: as per my diary entry for November 5^th, 1975. You’ll notice something else here: ‘Watch Carry on Screaming.’ This was, indeed, the ‘legendary’ bonfire night screening on BBC1 that would later unite Mark Gatiss and co, the members of the League of Gentlemen, all of whom shared the same childhood memory of that particular broadcast.

This year – and, I believe for the first time since 1975 – it’s happening again: ITV have scheduled Carry on Screaming for 11.15 on Saturday evening: bonfire night. ‘Frying tonight’ indeed...