From Larkin to Larkins...

 

Essence of ‘71... part one

 

I have started to say

'A quarter of a century’

Or ‘thirty years back’

About my own life.

So wrote Philip Larkin in 1971, in a short poem that would not see publication until after his death. Larkin was 49 when he wrote it. I’m now sixty... and I have started to say ‘fifty years back’ about my own life...

My memories begin around the age of two... hazy from 1963 into 1964, gaining greater clarity during 1965, sharply focused by 1966-67. In 1971, I was ten, and I can remember scenes from that year as if they had taken place last week. It was half a century ago, but I can still conjur up ‘essence of 1971’ with no special effort of memory. It wasn’t a year I remember enjoying particularly, but it’s most vividly recalled through some of the artefacts, cultural and otherwise, that surfaced at the time. For some reason, the summer months are particularly sharply focused. I remember weeks of heat and sunshine during the school holidays, particularly the afternoon of the school sports day. In fact, this short heatwave was something of a blip in what was actually an unremarkable summer. Met Office records tell us that June had been unusually cool and rainy, and August was notable for its frequent thundery breakdowns. It’s July, then, that I’m remembering: the end of term shading into the beginning of the school holidays. This is the story of how it felt to live through those few weeks, such a long time ago, conjured up through the time machine of memory and association... 

 

Endless weeks at number one:

I didn’t care much for the pop music of 1971. Tony Orlando and Dawn had annexed the top of the hit parade in mid-May with the amiable, lightweight tosh of ‘Knock Three Times’. It was somewhat unusual for a single to stick so long at number one – five weeks in total – and even more remarkably, it was replaced at the top spot by yet another song destined to outstay its welcome with another five weeks at the top. I was only ten years old, but I still regarded the inane nursery rhyme twaddle of ‘Chirpy Chirpy Cheep Cheep’ as being aimed at a much younger age group. Like the unborn. Nobody liked it, which begs the question as to how it did so well, for so long. It sounds as bad today as it did fifty years ago, with its half-way-to helium vocals (the master tape was almost certainly sped up). But what it does do is kick down the door to let in a draft of memories from the same time...

The rest of the top twenty didn’t offer much in the way of improvement. Another song that feels saturated in essence of summer 71 is Blue Mink’s ‘Banner Man’. I neither knew nor cared what a ‘banner man’ might be, but this slab of pomp-pop with its ‘sing-a-long-with-the-brass-band’ production was hardly off the radio during those weeks. Hearing it today gives me an instant Proustian rush of sight, smell and taste, beginning with...

 

Refreshing Ferrero Mints:

Nowadays known as ‘Tic-Tac’, these enduringly popular mint capsules were a new arrival on the sweet counter in 1971. I remember being particularly taken with the unique packaging with its flip-up lid. They were introduced to me by a kid who lived down the street, was probably mildly autistic, and looms large in memories of the early 70s. At least they still exist, unlike other confections of the same era: and the mere act of popping one today instantly tops that ‘Blue Mink’ sugar rush of memories, bringing us to...

 

The Munch Bunch: 

Later used as the name of a brand of kids’ yoghurt, back in 1971, the ‘Munch Bunch’ were in fact a series of anthropomorphic fruit characters designed as novelty pencil toppers. My friends and myself collected them as playthings and never put them to their intended use, instead inventing games or building lego vehicles and houses for them. I was introduced to these soft plastic creations by a lad in our class at school: I think he had an ‘Oswald Orange’ (they all sported alliterative monikers). Oswald’s mates included Perry Pear, Bertie Banana and Larry Loganberry amongst others. The first one I acquired was a pineapple (Percy, presumably...) I can still vividly recall the strange sweet scent that it gave off, redolent of Macintosh’s ‘Caramac’, the mere memory of which sets us off again in the mental time machine, arriving at (or perhaps in...)

 

The school swimming pool: 

Our modest suburban primary/infants school had managed to raise sufficient funds to pay for the construction of an outdoor swimming pool, which was ready for use by the early summer of 1971. I don’t believe I’d ever been in a swimming pool before, and was accordingly reduced to bobbing around with a piece of polystyrene as I attempted, without success, to learn to swim. No amount of public information films or entreaties from Rolf Harris could convince me that I needed to be able to swim, and the situation remains the same fifty years later. In any event, I wasn’t keen on any school activity that necessitated getting undressed, so the opening of the pool held no special appeal for me. What I do remember clearly is waiting for that swimming lesson, on Wednesday afternoons, whilst listening to a tape recording of a schools radio broadcast of... 

 

Singing Together: 

This BBC series for schools had been a regular fixture on the radio since 1939, although I never experienced it until this year, and perhaps for that reason it’s Summer 1971’s line-up that remains with me. Last year, I managed to acquire a copy of the accompanying music book (shown above), with its lyrics and simple sheet music for songs including ‘Linden Lea’ and ‘Donkey Riding’. ‘Linden Lea’ in particular, despite hailing from much earlier in the century, is steeped in summer of ‘71 for me, as are several other radio series, heard at the time and barely heard from since... 

 

Many a Slip: 

Like ‘Singing Together’, this was another well-established radio favourite, that had been on air since 1964, although once again, 1971 marked the first time I’d ever heard it. This only happened because a) the BBC had just changed the broadcast time from evenings to lunchtimes at 12.30, and b) I was coming home for dinner during 1971. I think I got home about half way through a typical episode, and I never understood exactly what was going on: two teams comprising, on one side, ‘The Gentlemen’ (David Nixon and Richard Murdoch) and on the other, ‘The Ladies’ (Isobel Barnet and Eleanor Summerfield) had to spot deliberate solecisms in short passages composed for the programme by Just a Minute creator Ian Messiter. It’s actually very entertaining when you’re of an age to follow the proceedings, but back in 1971, all I noticed about it were the familiar voices of David Nixon, host Roy Plomley, and ‘Musical Mistakes Man’ Steve Race. Most vivid of all, though, was the idiosyncratic theme tune composed by John Baker of the BBC Radiophonic Workshop, using his standard technique of tape cut-ups. This was a fairly recent arrival, with earlier episodes going out sans intro or outro music, and with its burbling, synthetic soundscape, the MAS theme sounded exactly like ‘essence of early 70s’. Sadly, only a handful of episodes survive, the nearest to this era hailing from 1973. I only heard the series for this one season, and never again until a one-off repeat around 1991, when the theme song instantly transported me back to ‘that’ summer...

Those radio lunchtimes are, indeed, a particular feature of my recollection of 1971, with the schedule comprising a panel game, comedy or drama series at 12.30 followed by ‘The World at One’, presented at the time by veteran broadcaster William Hardcastle. Wednesday lunchtimes featured a programme I have never heard since and which, by extension, is almost certainly lost. Bernard Miles and Betty Marsden starred in ‘Just Perfick’, a series adapted from the popular Larkins novels of H.E. Bates. I can still hum the theme music, or most of it, but the rest is gone. Hearing it on those warm Wednesday lunchtimes was a reminder that an afternoon of Singing Together and swimming lessons lay ahead... and in retrospect, there's something very H.E. Bates about that songbook cover...

And, Larkin being where we came in, Larkins feels like an appropriate point to go out on... but we’re not done yet with 1971.. 

 

WHAT TO LOOK FOR IN SUMMER

Barlow and Watt pose on the Ripper trail for a Radio Times cover in 1973

The right programme, the right time...

It’s summer... the days are warmer and longer, there’s no excuse to be indoors staring at the television, with the curtains closed. That’s the theory, as espoused during the 1970s by our mum (and, I’m sure countless other parents). The reality was, of course, rather different. Summer holidays meant morning repeats of Stingray and The Adventures of Tintin amongst others. During the afternoons, if you picked your moment (according to which ITV region you were living in) you could spend an hour in the company of Adam Strange, Frank Marker or John Drake. But what happened in the evenings? Some of my TV memories are so specific to long summer evenings that it feels almost obligatory to watch those programmes at this time of year. I’m re-running one at the moment.

Jack the Ripper, a curious documentary-drama hybrid, presided over by the fictional characters of Detective Chief Inspector Barlow and Detective Inspector Watt (late of Softly Softly:Task Force) turned up on BBC1 during the summer of 1973, and although I wasn’t a fan of Softly Softly at the time, I was curious to find out more about this notorious episode of Victoriana. The programmes are slow, very talky, and consist in large part of actors in period costume reading archive documents aloud. They’re frankly, a bit boring. But the low budget studo-based production made for a unique atmosphere, no small part of which owed to the marvellously evocative theme tune, courtesy of Bill Southgate (who had previously arranged the title music for Softly Softly). Southgate’s darkly eerie theme for woodwind ensemble, featuring bass clarinet, instantly became my favourite aspect of the series: and when it was re-used, somewhat less appositely, for Barlow and Watt’s follow-up investigative series Second Verdict, I recorded it on a cassette. Watching Jack the Ripper again, forty-seven years later, I still feel the same way: hearing that theme playing out over a rostrum camera shot of an engraving of old London, on a summer evening, just gone twilight outside, makes for a genuinely nostalgic atmosphere. More to the point, back in 1973, it felt somehow right to be watching that series at that time of the evening, and not just because of its emphasis on darkness and dark deeds.

Watching TV back then, when there was no possibility of time-shifting, I often felt that particular programmes gained something from being seen under what might be termed the ‘right conditions’. Strange Report was best experienced on a hot, sunny afternoon in 1976 with the curtains closed, whilst The Prisoner, with its bright, mediterranean colours, struck just the right incongruous note when viewed at 11pm in the late summer of that same year. Morning viewing was the same: even today, I only ever feel the need to watch an episode of Stingray on the ‘right kind’ of summer morning: calm, bright, the air still cool but holding the promise of a sultry afternoon to come. By contrast, Stingray’s eeriest episode, Invisible Enemy, was once seen by my brother and myself on a gloomy late afternoon just ahead of a gathering thunderstorm (7 May, 1970), and was such a good fit with the brooding menace outside that we would talk forever after about the ‘Invisible Enemy Storm’.

Other series that had their moments: The Persuaders! Stumbling across a repeat episode (A Home of One’s Own) on a rainy late spring evening in 1973 felt exactly right. Once again, the episode’s atmosphere was enhanced by the rainy twilight without. Trinity Tales: this neglected but glorious Alan Plater production was given a repeat run on Wednesday evenings in June 1977. I’d seen the earlier broadcasts in late 1975, but the atmosphere properly clicked on those warm June evenings.

Moody & Pegg: ITV’s whimsical flat-sharing comedy drama turned up on the communal telly in the ‘TV lounge’ at ‘Sandilands’, a seaside guest house in Llandudno where our family went for a week in the summer of 1974, and another series was set forever in its given time and place... Murder Most English: first shown in the late spring/early summer of 1977 and repeated at about the same time the following year, these comic tales of murder and intrigue in a very English community felt to me like ideal summer evening viewing: midsummer murders, one might say... Shillingbury Tales... one of the more obvious candidates, but well placed at about 7.30 on a summer Sunday evening. I could go on. In fact, I will...

Budgie, unearthed by Channel 4 in the mid 1980s after gathering dust for over a decade, felt perfectly placed on Friday evenings during the summer, even if I mostly ended up watching them on VHS the following day. The BBC’s Star Cops, from the same era, was another example – it felt more at home on a light evening than it might have done during the autumn or winter. And don’t ask me to explain why because I can’t. In all these cases, where the programmes are still available to watch on DVD, I always favour a repeat run at the ‘right time of year.’ I’ve long maintained that, in the arena of TV and film nostalgia, you get a better ‘hit’ the more you’re able to recreate the circumstances of your original viewing experience. If you can get hold of the right chocolate bar or savoury snack, so much the better. For years, I couldn’t open a bag of Walkers’ Roast Chicken crisps without a Proustian mental image of the opening credits of Fireball XL5...

Of course, some of the strongest memories attach to those series we shall never see again. It’s a Knockout was tailor-made for long summer evenings, and as it was shown on Fridays, it meant you got to stay out longer in the garden, devising ingenious games to be played with buckets of water...

What this all means is that, for me at any rate, archive viewing is not so much a question of what one wants to watch as what it feels right to watch at a specific moment. It still applies, even today. I never watched Columbo during the 1970s, but I’ve latterly found the ideal home for it, at about 6.30-7.00pm on a Sunday evening. Equally, certain Ealing comedies play very well for me on summer evenings at around 8pm, so that they’re coming to an end just as the twilight is coming on. ‘The aesthetic fool’, you may think, and you’re probably right... now, where’s that Columbo box set?

 

 

THE FULL ENGLISH

 

 

Nostalgia, the 1990s, and the Missing Postman

‘1990s’ and ‘nostalgia’ are two terms that don’t quite go together for me, but if I had to argue a case for there being such a phenomenon, I’d look to a pair of documentary series aired on BBC2 early in the decade, which are as good a portait of the times and the prevailing zeitgeist as you’ll find anywhere. Directed by Nicholas Barker, and with a distinctive aesthetic that was much imitated at the time, Signs of the Times* (1992) and From A to B (Tales of Modern Motoring) (1994) allowed ordinary individuals to talk about their lifestyle and motoring choices without the moderating influence of a presenter or voice-over. This made for a revealing set of programmes which probably tell us as much about the inhabitants of 1990s Britain as any demographic survey, and were also highly entertaining. But they’re not the subject of this blog.

I recently revisited a BBC comedy drama hailing from later in the same decade, which is what got me thinking about the subject of 1990s nostalgia. Because despite having been filmed over the summer of 1996, on location across a broad swathe of ‘Middle England’, I’d argue that this particular artefact of the decade is actually a form of nostalgia for another era altogether. Its heart is certainly in the right place, but that place is the 1950s, or perhaps more specifically, that mythic ‘golden age’ 1950s as depicted on screen in numerous old British movies, particularly those emanating from Ealing Studios.

The Missing Postman was offered up by BBC1 as a holiday treat across two nights over the weekend of Easter 1997. I watched it at the time and found it a warm, feelgood production with strong overtones of earlier British drama/whimsy hybrids such as The Beiderbecke Affair. The resemblance is more than coincidental, as former Beiderbecke front man James Bolam stars here as a similarly low-key, undemonstrative character. In The Missing Postman, he plays Clive Peacock, a Dorset postman who, unwilling to accept early retirement, cycles across Britain, delivering the letters from his final collection to the farthest corners of the nation. En route, he meets up with a collection of mildly eccentric characters, any one of whom might have been plucked from some Ealing classic like The Titfield Thunderbolt. With its theme of the little man fighting the system, Postman is, indeed very much like Titfield...

The film takes about twenty minutes to hit its marks, and is almost derailed early on by an ill-judged, exaggerated turn from Robert Daws as Clive’s manager at the sorting depot. Once he’s off screen, however, it settles down and, barring an encounter with Roger Lloyd Pack (who seems to have driven in from an episode of The Avengers), it’s a smoother ride from thereon in. Whimsy is never far from the surface, and the preoponderance of jaunty ‘English’ incidental music occasionally lends an air of Wallace and Gromit being done with real people. Without Bolam in the title role, it may well have been too cloying a mixture, but his performance is admirably restrained throughout, in contrast to some of the comic stereotypes we find elsewhere. Jim Carter is always watchable, but the comic cop he plays in a double act with his WPC ‘oppo’ Gwynneth Strong (best known for her role as Rodney’s girlfriend Cassandra in Only Fools and Horses) is a shade too contrived for the mix, and their bumbling sub-plot is often at odds with the film’s more human, thoughtful moments.

Comic stereotypes aside, The Missing Postman is a veritable who’s who of British acting talent, with room for everyone from the likes of Alison Steadman (as Clive’s DIY-manic wife) and Stephen Moore, to Roger Sloman and Milton Johns. Barbara Dickson gives a creditable performance as an obsessively epistolary widow with whom Clive shacks up for a night or two on the Isle of Arran. There’s even a moment when the script dallies with post-modernism: taken up by a smart PR operator (Larry Lamb), Clive has his appeal explained to him over breakfast in a posh London hotel: ‘You’re the full English, red telephone boxes, Morris Minors’. Which is, of course, a neat summary of The Missing Postman itself.

The Missing Postman may have been filmed in the 1990s, but it was nostalgic for a different era. Sure there’s modern technology (it puts Clive out of a job) and even mobile phones (their use reserved for the gaggle of media types who doggedly pursue Clive in his quest), but it’s as much a portrait of the 1990s as The Titfield Thunderbolt or Genevieve were portraits of the 1950s. The Britain they all aspire to never really existed. It’s the world in which Bertie Wooster, Steed and Mrs. Peel and the old codgers from Last of the Summer Wine beetle down leafy country lanes in a glorious, endless English summer. Not a bad place to be, all things considered: and after a year under lockdown, The Missing Postman is an ideal viewing tonic for anyone sick of confinement to quarters: we get to see a broad swathe of Britain from the Solent to the Scottish islands, and very pretty it all looks. Does any of it ring true? Not really, but one could argue it isn’t supposed to, and it’s fun while it lasts. This is a little slice of Brit fantasy, an alternate reality where a runaway postman becomes a national hero and everyone lives happily ever after.

If there’s one aspect of the film that seems firmly rooted in its time and place (aside from the awful, dull-as-ditchwater 90s cars) then it’s Alison Steadman’s insane DIY makeover which forms a subplot to the main chase story: while her husband is ‘on the run’, she transforms their modest suburban home into a gothic nightmare, with wall decorations made from tagliatelli, fake cobwebs and mock baronial swags in the dining room: all of which brings us back to where we started, because her off-kilter stylistic decisions echo much of what was seen in Nicholas Barker’s Signs of the Times, where an unusual number of interviewees had adopted eccentric neo-gothic interior design schemes, and bold colours were the order of the day.

The Missing Postman evidently found favour with viewers and critics, going on to win the award for Best BBC Comedy Drama at the 1997 Comedy Awards (one might, however, wonder exactly how many comedy dramas the Corporation produced that year). It’s not the kind of film one can imagine the BBC commissioning today, although its DNA can still be found in the likes of BBC4’s Detectorists (there’s even a metal detecting scene which strongly prefigures the later series).

Television offers up a lot of what might be called comfort food for viewers, but The Missing Postman served up something a shade more substantial. A full English, indeed.

 

 [* At time of writing, Signs of the Times is available to download on the BBC iPlayer]