Decades of Christmas Past: 1973

 

State of the nation circa Christmas 1973? This TV Times cover says it all...

Last time, I pushed the boundaries of memory and attempted to rediscover Christmas of 60 years ago. Memories were foggy if not non existent. But jump forward another decade and it's a different matter.

Autumn and winter of 1973 had been a period of crisis, both at home in Britain and on the global stage. A new Arab/Israeli conflict had created the so called 'oil shock' that saw the price of petrol and deisel spiralling upwards. Here in Britain, garages ran dry and there was even talk of rationing. Parallel with these developments, industrial action in the energy sector led to the notorious three-day week, power cuts and, in the coming February, the downfall of Edward Heath's Conservative government. Sid and Babs were doing their best to get festive on the cover of the TV Times, but it was hard for many people to anticipate having a merry Christmas with so much doom and gloom in the news. Enter Noddy Holder and Slade, with a seasonal singalong to lift the mood of the nation.

The preceding paragraph is, in a nutshell, Christmas 1973 as seen by today's self-appointed cultural commentators like Dominic Sandbrook (who wasn't even born at the time). It's a popular conception. But is it a misconception? I can remember enough of that winter to paint a slightly more upbeat portrait – as glimpsed from where I was standing, in middle class Midland suburbia. Power cuts never troubled us – for reasons I don't entirely understand, our street would escape being blacked out whilst the estate beyond our back garden was regularly plunged into darkness. A neighbour offered the explanation that our supply was on the same grid that served the local hospital (although it was about two miles away). I'm not saying we got off entirely, but we certainly used a lot fewer candles than other families nearby.

As festivities went, we were in a better position financially than had been the case for a couple of years, with our dad now back in regular employment running a distribution warehouse for an electrical manufacturer. My big present this year was an amplifier for my electric guitar. This would have set our dad back something in the region of £70. So I reckon I was doing all right.

On the domestic scene, our kitchen had been upgraded earlier in the year. The Hygeina units would remain in place for nearly 50 years. It wasn't the greatest ever kitchen makeover: the original 1950s tiles, in a dreary shade of creamy yellow, were left in place. But it was better than what we'd had before. In the lounge, we had a recently acquired Fidelity hi-fi system on which to play our records, and probably new wallpaper – our mum tended to paper at least one room every year. She was working too, in the canteen of a local school. Between them, our mum and dad had never had it so good. So the popular myth of the early 70s equating to penury is just that: a myth.

There was only one front on which we still lagged behind in the luxury goods arena: our television set. Colour broadcasts had been available across all three TV channels since November 1969, but we were still watching in monochrome. Our first colour set would arrive in time for Christmas the following year, but in 1973 we were stuck with black and white. On Christmas Day itself, however, we were watching in colour, on account of a minor family spat. Our household tended to decamp to our grandparents’ house for Christmas Day, and had done so every year since 1967. This didn’t sit well with other branches of the family, and I have in 1973 our dad’s sister more or less demanded to host Christmas Day round at their place. We had dinner at home – I can clearly recall watching the Christmas Top of the Pops in our front room – but went round to the relatives’ for the evening where we got to see Von Ryan’s Express on their colour television, whilst eating their nuts, Quality Street and crystallised fruit...

Von Ryan's Express was a mere eight years old, so still qualified as a Christmas night blockbuster. But what of the rest of the schedule? Last time, I had a brief trawl through the Christmas Day listings of 60 years ago, and little had changed by the time we reached 1973, where the ITV/ BBC1 schedule reads like a check-list of time-honoured traditions to be ticked off: circuses? You had a choice of two: Chipperfield’s on ITV at 1pm, and Billy Smart’s on BBC immediately after the Queen. Nicely scheduled so you could watch both if you were so inclined. We weren’t. Elsewhere in that half-a-century old line-up, we find Abbott and Costello (again!) on ITV at 11.30am, and, of course, a pantomime, Robin Hood, on BBC1 at 4.20pm. If you didn’t fancy that, you could switch over to ITV for… another panto.

The BBC’s Christmas Night With the Stars had come to an end the previous year, but ITV gamely kept up the tradition with their All Star Comedy Carnival, introduced by Jimmy Tarbuck. This offering still exists (and was released as a Network DVD a few years back). The presentation is cringe-making, but some decent sitcoms and shows were included, amongst them Dr. in Charge, Sez Les and Man About the House. Its 6.30pm slot meant that it clashed with Bruce Forsyth’s Generation Game and Mike Yarwood’s Christmas Show over on BBC1. No contest, really. BBC1’s dominance of the evening schedule was further assured by a classic Morecambe and Wise Show at 7.35. Further into the evening, viewers who didn't fancy a ride on Von Ryan's Express could join The Odd Couple (1968) on BBC1. Late evening was devoted to classical music on both channels, with BBC1 rounding off the schedule with another of their M.R. James adaptations, Lost Hearts.

Of course, by 1973 viewers now had a mind-boggling three channels to choose from, so what of BBC2’s festive fare? Play School opened the batting at 11am, following which much of the day’s schedule was given over to feature films: White Christmas (1954) at 11.35, Far From the Madding Crowd (1967) at 3.15pm, and Quatermass and the Pit (1967) at 10.30. In amongst these offerings, we find Buster Keaton revisiting his classic The General in The Railrodder at 5.55pm; a Parisian Puppet Theatre at 6.20, and even the venerable What’s My Line.

The biggest deal on television for me this Christmas was to be found on the morning of Boxing Day, in the form of the Beatles’ first feature film A Hard Day’s Night. This was in fact the third time it had been shown on the BBC, the first broadcast coming at Christmas 1970, a mere six years after the film’s release. I’d missed out on this and its subsequent repeat, but it was a case of third time lucky. I didn’t exactly need converting to the cause of The Beatles: I knew them well enough in the 1960s, and had already seen the TV premiere of Help! on its Boxing Day broadcast in 1972. But with the focus on the glam rock bands in the weekly pop charts, the fabs had fallen off my radar somewhat. 1973’s broadcast of A Hard Day’s Night would prove to be the turning point. Slade may have been at number one in the charts, but that Boxing Day broadcast of A Hard Day’s Night more or less cured me of glam rock at a stroke. Bands didn’t have to look ridiculous. The Beatles of 1964 were sharply dressed and looked cool. If was looking for role models, I’d just found them.

Until this point, we’d had no Beatle records in our household, but immediately after Christmas, my brother used a record token to buy a copy of the Hard Day’s Night album. The same post-Christmas shopping trip landed me a Beatles song music book spanning the years 1962-65. This was immediately turned to good effect in learning the songs off the Hard Day’s Night album. With my newly arrived amplifier, plus the 1960s Ludwig kit that our dad had handed down to my brother, it should come as no surprise to learn that within a matter of days, many of the fabs’ songs were being bashed out by us in the back bedroom. It sounds like the beginning of many a pop music career, but events were to pan out quite differently.

There is one other musical aspect of Christmas 1973 that has stayed with me ever since. That autumn I’d started at grammar school, and within a few weeks had been conscripted into the choir. Practise sessions took place on Monday lunchtimes, and from late September onwards, we began preparing for that year’s carol concert. Most of the programme consisted of the usual standards, but there was one song that caught my ear with its radical modality. ‘Wassail!’ (not to be confused with the traditional ‘Wassail Carol’) was almost brand new, having been published as recently as 1966. It was written by Welsh composer William Mathias, a former child prodigy who had been composing since the age of five. As soon as our music teacher, ‘Doc’ Terry began to block it out on the piano, I realised this was something a bit different. After a rousing choral introduction, the piano began to pick out an intriguing six-note phrase in the Lydian mode. Lydian mode has a flattened fifth, which lends it a slightly sour but interesting quality, the kind of musical trick one occasionally hears in pop songs. As a song for a school choir to learn, it was a challenge, and we devoted more time to it than anything else on the programme. We would go from those choir practises down to the games field (Monday afternoons meant rugby), with that song ringing in our ears – well, mine at any rate. Its modal melody became part of the zeitgeist of that first Michaelmas term at the grammar school. Came Christmas, we gave the concert. And I never heard the song again. Yet it stuck in my mind.

Someone, surely, must have made a recording of it? I’d neglected to note the name of the composer from the score, so I had nowhere to start looking. Nearly two decades later, I came across the sheet music in the local library and his identity was finally known to me. I began to search through collections of choral works for Christmas – plenty of choirs had recorded the familiar Wassail Carol but none had performed William Mathias’ radical modern composition. I even found album collections of Mathias’ choral works, but as ‘Wassail’ was a short, standalone piece of around two minutes’ duration, it had been overlooked. Every Christmas, I would scour the Radio Three listings in case anyone was planning to give a rendition. I was determined to hear it again.

In the end, it took me nearly thirty years to track down a recording of that carol. It had been included in a collection from the choir of Kings College, Cambridge. The original release was out of print, but it could be bought as a download from Amazon. Today, it can even be found on YouTube and Spotify. And if my tale has intrigued you, it can be heard here: 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8KSDI6oc9wo

From modernist choral music to glam rock via The Beatles is quite a musical journey: and it all took place in December 1973.