Aspirations… Colour TV in Nordic Drift...

Sunday, 5t April, 1970…

Roll neck ahoy… Francis Matthews as Paul Temple.

I can still remember the first television programme I saw in colour. It was a Sunday in April 1970, and the programme was Paul Temple. Francis Durbridge’s character had been a mainstay of BBC radio since the 1930s, but his television incarnation was brand new, one of the first BBC drama series to be produced – and screened – entirely in colour. A 13-part series running from November 1969 to January 1970 was followed quickly by a second, beginning in April of the same year. The first episode went out on Sunday, April 5th… and I was watching.

We didn’t have a colour television in our house, and there was a very good reason for that: cost. A typical set in 1970 would have set you back £300 – the equivalent of around £4,500 today – and with colour broadcasts having only begun on BBC1 and ITV the previous autumn, a colour television was still an expensive luxury, unaffordable to families on an average income. On that day in 1970, we were in a household with an above average income, a good deal of which fell into the category of disposable. My aunt and uncle enjoyed the kind of lifestyle depicted in the Sunday colour supplements – G-plan furniture, groovy wallpaper, a white Jensen Interceptor (boasting the first personalised numberplate I ever saw). He was an estate agent. Clearly, this was the way to afford gracious living…

They'd started their married life in a flat, but since 1968 or 69 had been living in an extraordinary house, designed along Scandinavian lines. Although no more than a modestly-proportioned semi on an estate of identical dwellings, it was unlike any home I’d ever seen. A small side porch opened into a room of impressive proportions, boasting a full height sloping ceiling, open-tread staircase and a floor-to-ceiling window. This room served as a kind of communal central area to the house, intended for use as a dining area, with a small kitchen leading off at the front of the house. The very idea of a kitchen at the front seemed to me like an innovation.

In fact, it was hard to tell which was the front and which the back of this Scandinavian-inspired home: the frontages presented a somewhat drab appearance, lacking in what would now be called ‘kerb appeal’, with a tarmaced yard taking the place of a garden, and the overall impression was akin to that of a service area behind a row of shops. At the back, tiny lawns opened onto a tree-lined communal walkway. It was certainly different, and it was modern, two qualities I had already learned to appreciate.

Scandinavian living… from a Rightmove listing, and reversed, this interior is identical to my uncle and aunt's home of the early 1970s. The side window extended to a sloping ceiling, but all you could see through it was a car parking space and the side of the house next door.

I saw a lot more than just colour television on that bright, spring Sunday. I saw the future. This was the kind of lifestyle I could imagine for myself: the modern, clean-lined furniture, the colour telly, the Scandinavian interior (an aspiration reflected in the the tiny cul-de-sac’s name of Nordic Drift). This, I was sure, must be the shape of things to come.

Meanwhile, there was Paul Temple: I’m not sure if I’d seen this series before, but I was certainly taken with that evening’s episode, which introduced the soon-to-be regular character of Sammy Carson, a rogue with a heart of gold, memorably portrayed by George Sewell. I was also impressed by Paul Temple’s Rolls Royce – the kind of car I could imagine myself driving, as part of my imaginary Nordic/ G-Plan lifestyle. With his roll-neck sweater and slacks, Paul Temple would have felt right at home in Nordic Drift.

Over on ITV, an advert break was in progress: I was interested to see that some of the ads were in colour, while others were still in drab old black and white. In the latter category was the original, pre-robots commercial for Smash instant mashed potato, a simple idea that presented an unpeeled spud as a ‘rival’ for Smash. ‘It’ll never catch on,’ the voice-over assured us...

* * *

I’m fairly certain you can still buy Smash in any supermarket, but as for the rest of the impressions that Sunday left on my nine-year-old imagination, the future has been less than kind. Paul Temple, for instance: junked en masse by the BBC, a mere 16 out of 52 episodes survive in the archive. I’m fairly certain that the episode we would have seen on that Sunday evening is not among them. And what of that lifestyle? It’s fair to say that Nordic Drift left an indelible impression on me, and forever after I’ve been drawn to houses that are in some way quirky or unconventional. But if I imagined that the values of 1970 would survive into my own adult life, I was sadly mistaken. Like so much I saw on TV during those years, my dream of the future was an illusion. Sure, you can still buy retro-styled G-plan chairs in any branch of John Lewis, but the likes of bean bags and lava lamps have acquired a patina of ironic kitsch. Nobody bought such items ironically in 1970. 

The aspirational young people who colonised the bright, new estates of the late 1960s are now reaching the ends of their lives. They’ve moved on, and their values have become those of the so-called ‘metropolitan elite’, none of whom would be seen dead living in a 1960s semi, open tread staircase or not.

Those old estates haven’t aged well. My aunt and uncle wisely moved out in the mid ’70s, exchanging Scandinavian cool for a solid 60s detached on a highly desirable tree-lined avenue. The innovative modern dwellings of Nordic Drift and its surroundings had done their job in attracting the bright, young, Observer colour supplement crowd, but by the mid ’70s the tide of fashion was on the turn. No one wanted radical modernism any more. By 1975, Laura Ashley and Habitat were the new watchwords, and aspirational house hunters were turning their backs on homes that had been in vogue less than five years earlier. You only have to look at any mid-’70s housing development to see the change, bay windows and neo-Georgian stylings replacing the avant-garde brutalism of developments like Nordic Drift. These days, those once-cool Scandinavian houses change hands for around £125,000. In property terms, that’s peanuts: whereas the solid ’60s detached my aunt and uncle bought for £10,000 is now valued at close to a million.

Most of us have moved on. But some of us have minds like cement. My ideas of style, cool, and aspirational living were poured into a mould and set on that day in April 1970. They’ve never changed. But the world they belong to is getting harder and harder to find. I’ll have to face facts: I never will drive that Jensen Interceptor. There was one simple lesson that I failed to take away from that Sunday: if you want a flash lifestyle, get a job that will pay for it.

I should have become an estate agent...