Spirit of '76

Wings at the Speed of Sound... the sleeve was inescapable in record shops during 1976, and he album yielded the best song of the summer...

For those of a certain age, the current heatwave must be rekindling memories of the last time the UK enjoyed such a prolonged spell of hot, sunny weather. The heatwave of 1976 followed an unusually dry winter and spring, and a drought was soon declared, with the public urged to save water and the eventual appointment of a ‘Minister for Drought’, Dennis Howell (Wikipedia’s entry on Howell claims, risibly, that he was ‘ordered’ by Number 10 to perform a rain dance on behalf of the nation).

May 1976 saw mostly dry weather extending from the Midlands southwards, but it wasn’t until the end of June that the heatwave began in earnest. Even then, it wasn’t unbroken sunshine for the whole of the UK: my diary reports that it rained heavily in west Wales (where we were holidaying) on 19 July, and there were scattered thunderstorms around mid-month. But these events were mere blips in the long-term weather pattern, which remained hot and sunny until the very end of August.

Music always has the power to evoke memories of a particular moment in time, and there were plenty of chart hits that summer that would go on to become recognised pop classics: Abba’s Dancing Queen, Thin Lizzie’s The Boys Are Back in Town, Bryan Ferry’s Let’s Stick Together and, with an unbroken six weeks at number one, Elton John and Kiki Dee’s Don’t Go Breaking My Heart, which attained the top spot on 3 July. Yet for me, none of those singles truly evokes the spirit of the summer of ’76; they’ve lost their power of association through endless replay on daytime radio, compilations, and so forth. I’m more interested in those tracks that can instantly conjur up the memory of blisteringly hot days, parched lawns, curtains closed against the extreme heat and light...

Two of the first songs that lodged in my mind as being inextricably linked to that summer are Peter Frampton’s Show Me The Way and Wings’ Silly Love Songs, both of which were in the charts at the end of June when the heatwave got started. Another single from that same moment in time, then on its way down the charts, was Robin Sarstedt’s nostalgic cover version of Hoagy Carmichael’s My Resistance is Low. What’s notable about this track, if not the other pair, is its rarity as an item on radio playlists down the decades. The less one hears a particular track, the more it retains its original association with the moment in time at which it was first encountered. This phenomenon is especially true of one of the songs that, even at the time, seemed to embody the very essence of the long, hot summer of 1976: The Starland Vocal Band (whoever they may have been), making their sole incursion on the UK charts with the decidedly suggestive Afternoon Delight. The track didn’t do notably well on the charts, reaching a top position of just 18, but it clung on tenaciously to the lower reaches of the 20 and 30. I can’t have heard it that many times while it was out – I dimly recollect a solitary appearance (via film) on Top of the Pops – and when it finally exited the chart in mid October, it vanished into an airplay oblivion that would last for decades. The song was featured on the early 2000s themed compilation Guilty Pleasures, and if ever there was a musical guilty pleasure then Afternoon Delight was it (to say nothing of the guilty pleasure to which the lyrics referred).

This long absence goes some way to account for the reason why I associate the song with that long, hot summer, but it’s not the entire explanation. Even while it was still in the charts, Afternoon Delight felt somehow like part of the zeitgeist. The lush harmonies, 12-string guitar and synth washes just seemed like the way summer ’76 ought to sound. Aged 15, I didn’t fully appreciate how risqué the lyrics were; the title (derived from a restaurant menu) subequently passed into the language as shorthand for daytime sex, but the expression had never been used in that sense prior to the record’s release: had it been as familiar a term as it is now, the BBC might have found grounds to take offence...

The time it takes to record and release a single tends to mitigate against topical cash-ins, and although one might expect the charts of a long, hot summer to be packed with songs about heatwaves, love in the sun, or whatever, this was largely not the case. In fact, there appears to have been only one blatant musical attempt to cash in on the 1976 heatwave, and it came in the form of Cockney Rebel’s hastily-released cover version of The Beatles’ Here Comes The Sun, which entered the charts at the end of July, just in time to take advantage of the last few weeks of warm, sunny weather. For me, though, it was a failed attempt. I remember the track, but it seemed too calculated a move, and although it still retains some dimly nostalgic associations, its power is greatly diminished when compared with the other songs I’ve mentioned here.

The Isley Brothers were far removed from the effects of the British heatwave, yet their late summer single Harvest for the World (its release clearly timed with the season in mind) feels much more a product of the ‘76 summer than Steve Harley’s cash-in. It’s arguably a better song in any case (I’ve never been a huge fan of Here Comes The Sun, even in its original incarnation), and it slotted neatly into the zeitgeist in much the same way that Afternoon Delight had done – albeit with considerably greater chart success.

As previously mentioned, the number one slot was effectively annexed for the summer of ’76 by the pairing of Elton John and Kiki Dee with Don’t Go Breaking My Heart, a song whose Philly soul aspirations somehow left me cold (and not in the welcome way that a summer breeze or an ice cream might have done). In fact, I soon tired of hearing it, and its mooring at number one began to feel as relentless as the heat baking the British landscape. It’s never been far from the average oldies playlist ever since, and, accordingly, any nostalgic power it might have evoked merely by association has long since dwindled to naught for me. In fact, it was the song kept off the top spot by Elton and Kiki’s endeavours that then, as now, felt to me like the absolute essence of that memorable hot summer.

The first piano chord is enough to evoke that Pavlovian response: a warm, B flat major seventh that feels like the door opening on a sun-soaked landscape. Not so much Let’Em In as let ’em out into the sunshine... It was, of course, Macca’s big single of the summer, following hard on the heels of the aforementioned Silly Love Songs, both tracks culled from the album Wings at the Speed of Sound, which had been released in March of the same year.

Macca had managed the same summer association thing (for me, at any rate), the previous year, when the single Listen to What the Man Said coincided with a long spell of hot weather that would probably have lingered in the popular imagination had it not been eclipsed by the heatwave of ’76. But Let’Em In, with its lazy, somnolent rhythm, somehow felt like the musical equivalent of the heady summer weather, the production conjuring up images of a small marching band flagging as it parades down a blindingly bright street in the relentless heat. Let’Em In charted on 7 August, reached number 2 on the 28^th (where it remained for three weeks), and finally slipped out of the top 40 in October. If I had to pick one single to stand for the summer of 1976, this would be the one. I’d venture to suggest it’s not Paul McCartney’s greatest ever composition, an opinion which I sure few would disagree with, although it does manage to embody a uniquely soulful sound which Macca would never recapture, and it was hugely popular at the time, on both sides of the Atlantic. I’ve no idea whether anyone else felt the same way about it as I did, but after weeks of relentless heat, a slow, plodding tune like this just seemed to fit.

Sadly, the same will not be true of the summer of 2018, whether or not it eventually takes its place in the record books. Pop music, as I’ve stated elsewhere (and will go on stating) has been a spent cultural force for nigh on two decades now. There’s nowhere left to go that hasn’t already been thoroughly explored by earlier and more talent-led endeavours, no seam of undiscovered gold waiting to be mined. Who can remember the charts of a decade ago? Not me, that’s for sure. When did you last see a retrospective of the 2000s pop scene on TV? Maybe, for those still coming to the ruins of pop music for the first time, there are singles amongst today’s crop of dross that will lodge in their memories the way the music of the 60s and 70s has lodged in those of my generation. But frankly, I think the memory of a ginger semi-bearded prat playing crap ballads on a rubbish toy guitar is one that will be best, and ultimately, forgotten. History will eclipse his like, for the greats of the past will continue to cast their shadow over all who follow in their footsteps. Did you ever hear of a kid who was mad about the mammalian life of the Pleistocene period? Thought not. But all kids love dinosaurs, ensuring that dinosaurs will be popular forever. And, like the dinosaurs (very much like them in some cases), the artists and songs that emerged in the first few decades of pop music continue to loom larger in the memory than anything that came after.

Those of us who remember the summer of 1976 will most likely not be around when the next long, hot summer rolls into view, such events tending to occur only once every forty or fifty years. But I can say without fear of contradiction that, however distant in time that next peerless summer might be, it’ll be the hits of 1976 that people look back to, and not the dismal efforts of 2018.

Listening to the Television

Open reels and Mini-Albums: the pre-video era

Some of the Thunderbirds soundtrack EPs, advertised in the pages of TV Century 21, 1967

There are by now whole generations to whom the idea of not being able to watch their favourite film or TV series whenever the fancy takes them would be inconceivable, generations who grew up in the era of VHS and latterly, DVD (to say nothing of copyright-pirates YouTube – so we won’t). Imagine not being able to Google-search any given TV series or film and either buy it via Amazon or watch an illegally-uploaded copy on your phone. Did such a state of affairs ever exist? It most certainly did.

Home taping was once seen as the scourge of the music industry, with cassette copies depriving poor, starving artists like Elton John or the Rolling Stones of a few quid in royalties. There was rather less consternation when the means arrived to make private copies of anything shown on the television. One or two spurious stories circulated in the media, alerting the unwary to the fact that taping last night’s Terry and June was technically illegal, but only if you invited your friends round to watch it and charged them an admission fee (and you’d soon run out of friends if you did). Nobody paid any attention to such alarmist tosh, and in the fullness of time, the entertainment industry was forced to acknowledge that people would keep copies of their favourite shows and films and there was nothing that could be done to prevent it. In some cases, those copies would go on to take the place of official archives when the original tapes (or live transmissions) were not preserved for posterity...

By the mid 1980s, video cassette recorders were finding their way into the homes and hearts of the nation. Never again would we have to miss programmes that were shown during the daytime when we were at work, or at school. And for the first time since the invention of the medium, viewers could watch complete, colour copies of anything broadcast on the television, at a time to suit them. VHS (and its less successful rivals) provided liberation from the tyranny of the programme schedules, and a means to repeat your favourite shows ad infinitum (or until the tape wore out, which in the case of the Scotch brand’s advertising claims, would never happen anyway...)

But before this happy state of affairs was reached, what was the average viewer to do if they fancied reliving some treasured televisual moment? Those in possession of sufficient funds could equip themselves with cine projectors, in which format a small number of television titles were made available during the 1960s and 70s. The minefield of copyright clearance ensured that only a very few television series made it onto the home movie format of 8mm film, and of those that did, the majority were heavily edited, or available only in black and white, or as silent movies with subtitles... For the really well-off, domestic video tape recorders started to become available in the mid 1960s. One of the first such machines was the VKR 500, a device which used huge spools of tape (cassettes, even of the audio variety not yet having been invented). Two of these devices, remarkable for their time, were given away as prizes in a TVTimes competition in 1964, although their operation would most likely have been beyond the capabilities of the average reader.

For those not in possession of such equipment, there was still hope. It was only relatively recently that television had supplanted the radio in popularity, and shows like Hancock’s Half Hour had started life in sound. Many TV scripts were still essentially wordy, and could be followed easily enough without the accompanying images. Thus, some of television’s earliest hits began to find their way onto vinyl, in the format of LPs and EPs. Hancock episodes were available to buy on LP from as early as 1960 when two examples from the radio series made it onto disc. A further two stories from the television series followed in 1961, including the episode by which Hancock is still best remembered: The Blood Donor. The LP release almost certainly explains why this episode became so firmly embedded in the national psyche (it was far from being Hancock’s best performance, being marred by his obvious use of the teleprompter).

LPs like this Hancock example represented some of the first commercial releases of television soundtracks

Galton and Simpson’s Steptoe and Son soon followed Hancock onto the LP format, but aside from these two examples, there seems to have been little appetite amongst television producers to exploit series in this fashion, and aside from occasional releases of favourite TV themes, the ‘TV show on a record’ format remained for the most part an undeveloped idea. One of the least likely contenders for record release – given that its titular character was never heard to speak – was Harry Corbett's Sooty. Yet several Sooty records were released, in EP format, each presenting a couple of typical storylines that most likely originated as episodes of the BBC television series. Suffice to say, the experience of listening to Harry Corbett talking to an inaudible Sooty is somewhat surreal, and the one example I've heard consists mostly of Harry's reactions to the numerous indignities heaped upon him by the mischevious bear: ‘look at my suit, in rags and tatters!’ All of which was somewhat perverse, to say the least...

The most significant contribution to the development of TV soundtracks as commercially available home entertainment came from Gerry Anderson’s Century 21 merchandising division which, in 1965, launched a small series of so-called ‘Mini-Albums.’ These 7” EPs played at 33rpm, giving a running time across both sides equal to approximately a single side of a 12” record. ‘21 Minutes of Adventure’, promised the sleeves. With the running time of a typical Gerry Anderson episode coming in at around the 25-minute mark, it would have been a fairly simple task to edit the soundtracks of selected episodes into a format suitable for vinyl, but for these first releases, the company largely used all-new audio, with adventures written specially for the format, recorded by such of the original voice artistes as were available. A Trip to Marineville and Marina Speaks were brand-new stories, written to avoid the kind of visual excitement for which the series itself was known. Accordingly, they made for fairly dull listening. The companion EP, Into Action With Troy Tempest adopted what we’d nowaways call an interactive approach, with listeners invited, by the growly tones of Commander Shore, to supply their own imitations of Troy Tempest and Phones, in dialogue sequences lifted directly from the master tapes of various episode soundtracks. 

Listening to these records, one was struck almost at once by the subtle difference in quality of the characters’ voices: with less dynamic range and more compression applied to the television soundtracks, the voices acquired a certain sharp, snappy quality. On vinyl, a more nuanced performance could be appreciated, with smoother, more textured tones than could be perceived through the average TV speaker. The new format also allowed listeners a sneak preview of the brand new Anderson series, in the form of the EP Introducing Thunderbirds. I had this item bought for me almost as soon as it became available, although I’m fairly certain that this did not pre-date the series actually airing on television, and the characters and settings were already familiar by the time I got to hear it.

Listening to a record was, of course, never going to be a proper subsitute for actually watching an episode on television, but if you wanted a fix of Stingray or Thunderbirds at anything other than the scheduled date and time, then these EPs were for you. They didn’t quite capture the atmosphere of the original series, being largely devoid of Barry Gray’s music (probably on copyright grounds), but better efforts were on the way.

In the wake of Thunderbirds’ success on television, a raft of EP adaptations of episodes was launched, beginning in early 1967 and running well into the following year. In total, 17 Thunderbirds Mini-Albums were made available, all but two of them adapted from television soundtracks. The format for these releases involved a linking narration delivered by one of the series characters, to which end, voice artistes Shane Rimmer, Christine Finn, David Graham and Sylvia Anderson recorded specially-written material. These releases were far superior to the early Stingray EPs, and even the specially-written material such as the ‘Abominable Snowman’ story featured on the Lady Penelope EP was of superior quality than had been heard before.

When Captain Scarlet came to television in 1967, he was accompanied by five new mini-albums, released together in the autumn of the same year. With one exception, these new EPs abandoned the successful Thunderbirds formula of adapting episodes, and instead featured newly-written stories, performed by members of the original voice cast. The scripts, by Angus P. Allen and Richard O’Neill (neither of whom had contributed to the series) were of variable quality, with only Allen’s efforts coming close to the spirit of the television episodes. Richard O’Neill turned in two decidedly eccentric offerings of which the worst was Captain Scarlet Versus Captain Black, an endeavour which, with its guest cast of Cornish-accented characters, sounded like nothing less than Captain Scarlet meets the Pogles, and was woefully at odds with the dark, harder-edged vibe of the series. To make matters worse, a technical error at the pressing stage caused the audio to slow down progressively towards the end of the EP’s second side, an error which has been explained away (on the basis of pure conjecture rather than actual evidence) as an attempt to push the story’s short running time up to the required 21 minutes (even though none of the Captain Scarlet eps ever claimed to run to this length).

Magical Mysteron Tour? The notorious (and frankly awful) Captain Scarlet Versus Captain Black EP, released November 1967

I’d missed most of the Thunderbirds releases, and frankly, 17 records was more than the entire stock of vinyl in our household at that time, but my brother and myself were duly bought all five of the Captain Scarlet records. Apart from the first, Introducing Captain Scarlet, which employed soundtrack clips from the first episode, I didn’t think very much of them. There wasn’t enough music, sound effects were either missing or wrong, or hopelessly overdone, and the vocal performances sounded slightly different from what we’d come to expect on TV. A couple of them were so poor they seldom got played, and overall, they were a pretty poor substitute for the original programmes.

Outside of the commercial arena, viewers were keeping their own audio copies of programmes from both radio and television, a practise which seems to have been well-established by the end of the 1950s, and which would preserve many otherwise lost artefacts for posterity. We did it ourselves, on a few occasions, adopting the technique of placing a microphone in front of the television speaker (direct audio outputs not being a feature of the average television set until much later). In this manner, a partial Thunderbirds soundtrack was preserved from an original 1966 broadcast, as was a later episode of Captain Scarlet (complete with commercial break). During the 1970s, a Basil Brush Show (possibly now missing from the BBC archive) and an episode from the Dr. Who serial The Time Monster were recorded, along with numerous episodes of Stingray. As I got to know other like-minded individuals, I realised the extent to which this practise was going on. One TV fan played me some audio clips from Danger Man episodes he’d recorded off-air during afternoon repeats in the early 70s, which had been completely ruined by the addition of his own audio descriptions of the action. This seems to have been an exception, and others tended to follow our own example of recording only the actual programme content.

During the 1970s, a few more TV soundtracks were commercially issued as gramophone records, with BBC Enterprises realising the potential of favourites like Porridge and Fawlty Towers, both of which saw LP release. But it was a case of too little, too late, and the writing was on the wall for these TV-as-LP endeavours even before they hit the shops. A new generation of domestic video recording was about to dawn, with early contenders like the bulky Philips U-Matic format soon supplanted by the more compact VHS and Betamax machines.

Our household acquired its first VHS machine in 1980, and from that moment onwards, the whole idea of listening to television soundtracks would slowly fade into obscurity, reserved for only rarities like Fireball XL5 and Supercar, both of which, would in time be released commercially on video tape and DVD. Unlike those whose audio efforts ended up preserving lost episodes of Dr. Who and others, we had no such treasures in our own archive, unless you counted a few toy commercials that had aired during Captain Scarlet. 

Primitve though it seems in an era of downloads and DVD, the idea of being able to revisit your favourite TV series in sound only was surprisingly popular for a good many years, and even today, it remains the only way for fans to experience dozens of missing Dr. Who episodes. The Thunderbirds Mini-Albums, some of which seem to have had only limited release, have now become valuable collectors’ items. And those of us who grew up capturing the soundtracks of television series on reel-to-reel tape would come to form a lucrative market when mass commercial release of television series finally became a reality on VHS and DVD. Some, indeed, would go on to become exploiters of that marketplace. Yet on reflection, the idea of the obsessive fan crouched in his bedroom over a portable tape recorder listening to the soundtrack of some televisual rarity seems as quaint an image today as Nipper the dog captivated by the sound of His Master’s Voice...

'It is time for your appointment with The Wicker Man...'

The beginnings of horror... and the end. Part Three

 

'Summer is icumen in...'

By 1979, films from earlier in the same decade were beginning to filter through to the late night horror line-up on television, and in January of that year, ATV embarked on a themed season of Friday night horrors starring Christopher Lee. Some of the titles were relatively recent, and appearing for the first time on television. Thus it was that, without any foreknowledge of what to expect, on Friday 16^th March, 1979, at 10.30pm, I sat down to watch The Wicker Man.

These days, mere mention of the title is enough to get a response from anyone with even the most rudimentary knowledge of 1970s British cinema. But back in 1979, The Wicker Man was an unknown quantity, barely six years on from its low-key release in cinemas, where it had made little or no impression. Adding interest to the film was the presence of Callan star Edward Woodward, who seemed to be getting the (British) lion’s share of the screen time, and for the first half hour or so I began to wonder when we were going to see the master of terror himself. When he finally emerged from behind a wing chair (his first scene in this, the original theatrical cut), it came as something of a surprise to see Chrstopher Lee sporting fashionably long hair (a wig, as was the hair he wore in all his films, disguising a naturally bald pate). Still more surprising was his performance; for once, not a monster, but the outwardly charming Lord and master of a small Scottish island.

By this point in the film, I had already begun to form an opinion of The Wicker Man. I still wasn’t exactly sure whether I entirely liked it, but it was clearly something different, and its location work set it apart from many other entries in the genre. If nothing else, it was an intriguing oddity, with its folk song soundtrack and soft porn scenes (a distinct embarrassment to sit through with my mother watching). It certainly didn’t look much like a typical horror film, with its brilliant palette of early 70s fashions, and bright springlike weather that betrayed not a hint of the late autumn shooting dates. This, of course, was all part of the film’s genius.

All the way through, I reckoned I knew what was going on and how the film would end: Woodward’s good ‘Christian copper’ would find the girl and crack the pagan murder plot. So the denouement, when it came, was as much of a shock to me as it was to Sgt. Neil Howie, as he is marched off to his ‘appointment with the Wicker Man’. I couldn’t quite believe it. Surely our hero was going to escape, somehow?

The climactic scene at least solved a mystery that had puzzled me all the way through the film: why was it called The Wicker Man? Anyone who had seen the film during its brief cinema release might have taken a hint from the poster, which depicted the gaunt, wickerwork giant, but the TVTimes offered no such visual clues; and when the towering monstrosity finally appeared on screen, it did so with the maximum of impact. 

I think it’s fair to say that the ending left me somewhat stunned. I was still going over it in my mind twenty four hours later. I’d never seen a film quite like it. Probably because there never had been, nor ever has been another movie remotely comparable. A horror-musical with folk songs and pagan ritual that ends with the murder of the hero character? It’s the kind of thing that can really only be done once (and yes, I know there’s been a remake, an utterly pointless exercise, which, like 99% of all movie remakes, can safely be ignored).

For me, The Wicker Man passed into history, an intriguing and memorable movie that could only pull off its surprise storyline once. I missed a second ITV screening (not to mention a chance to capture the film on video), and didn’t give it much thought for a good many years. It wasn’t until 1988 with its appearance in Alex Cox’s BBC2 Moviedrome season that I got any hint of the controversy surrounding the film. Now I learned, for the first time, of the missing scenes, several of which were restored for this broadcast (albeit in a quality noticeably inferior from the rest of the film), and the checkered history of The Wicker Man. All of this is now, of course, common knowledge, and the complete ‘director’s cut’ has been available to buy for many years. In a sense, the elevation of The Wicker Man to the status of a cult felt like a form of vindication. I’d been impressed by the movie the first time I saw it, but I was left with the vague impression that it wasn’t the kind of film one should admit to liking, an almost guilty pleasure. It was a bit rude; certainly it was morally suspect. Now here it was being acknowledged as a modern classic: like so many other dodgy films and TV series that I’d grown up with.

Now, in addition, we had even more of The Wicker Man to pore over. Only one key scene was restored for the 1988 Moviedrome broadcast, and we were left to speculate as to the other footage that was, at the time, believed lost. Quite some time later, I was shown a bootleg DVD of an even longer cut, and eventually this ‘complete’ version was made available to buy as a legitimate release.

Interesting though it may be, this longer edit of The Wicker Man just doesn’t do it for me. The theatrical version feels tight and spare, even if it does introduce some oddities into the chronology of the film’s events (by placing the bedroom scene with Willow and Howie much earlier than originally intended). By contrast, the director’s cut contains a long and ill-judged scene on the mainland introducing and, to some extent, ridiculing Edward Woodward’s character. None of this is necessary, and the background detail is conveyed far more succinctly in the version that was eventually seen in cinemas. The cut sequences are interesting to see out of context, but re-inserted into the film, they spoil the pacing and, worse still, erode the audience’s sympathies with the character of Sgt. Howie.

Missing scenes are always intriguing, but they don’t always add to the films or TV series from which they have been excised. With both long and short versions of The Wicker Man now available to view, it’s always the shorter version that I choose. Even so, nothing can ever recapture the mood of seeing the film for the first time, with the impact of that breathtaking climax, which has few if any equals in the history of cinema. 

Critically, when I first saw The Wicker Man, it was a forgotten film, a 6-year-old B movie that had quickly found its way onto television. It’s almost impossible for anyone to come to that film today without even a passing knowledge of the reputation which sails before it, so in a sense, my experience of encountering it for the first time was unique and unrepeatable.

Cults are always best encountered before you realise they’re a cult – a sentiment with which I doubt Sergeant Howie would entirely sympathise. And shocks are so much better absorbed with the knees bent...

'It's only a dog running up the side of the house...'

... the beginnings of horror. Part Two

Denis Gifford’s was a name I encountered many times during my teens, a man whose enthusiasms for comics, horror and science-fiction films mirrored my own. He was the author of numerous books that I quickly came to regard as definitive texts, including Happy Days: A Century of Comics and a publication that found its way into my hands early in 1974, A Pictorial History of Horror Movies. This book became my guide to the genre, its limits and scope coming in time to define the extent of my own interest in horror films. At the time of its publication in 1973, Gifford’s guide, essentially an illustrated companion to the whole horror genre, covered pretty well every significant title ever committed to celluloid in the name of scaring the moviegoing public of Britain and America. It had little or nothing to say on examples from other countries, and this omission goes a long way to explain why, to this day, I have never taken an interest in European horror films.

In actual fact, the years of my serious interest in horror films were essentially the decade of the 1970s. By its end, my attention was beginning to waver, and I took no interest in the increasingly violent and erotic offerings that were arriving in cinemas with depressing regularity. Frankly, I drew the line at Dracula AD 1972. I still do.

Denis Gifford’s book included dozens of stills, posters and lobby cards, some depicting films I have yet to see forty-four years later, others serving as an indication that it probably wasn’t worth bothering with them. As is always the case when selecting a single image to stand for a whole movie, many of the pictures were misleading, or misleadingly labelled. A particular favourite was the small black and white still from Fiend Without a Face (1958), which purported to show a woman having her brain ‘sucked out by materialised thought.’ In fact, she was being attacked by a flying brain and spinal column with antennae: possibly the most ludicrous monster ever conceived for a horror picture (the genre not being noted for its adherence to plausibility, it must be said). That small still, however, was enough to convince me to add Fiend Without a Face to my ever-growing list of horror movies that I must somehow endeavour to watch (invariably, although not always, on television). In fact, it would take over forty years before I finally got to see the movie (on a film print in a privately-owned screening facility) and I recognised it at once for a prime, oven-ready turkey. A bum steer if ever there was one: thanks, Denis...

Good, bad or bloody terrible, the films covered in Denis Gifford’s weighty tome supplied me with a bucket list of horror pictures to be investigated as and when they turned up on television. It also set a limit on the extent of my interest in the genre, and to this day, there are few horror films post-dating that book that I’d willingly sit down to watch. Once it was relatively easy to find such old movies on television, although these days one struggles to find anything pre-dating the last turn of the century... back in the 70s and 80s, it was a different matter entirely, and horror films lay thick on the ground, classics, obscurities, the whole gamut, stretching back to the 1930s. 

ITV’s late-night Friday horrors of the 70s formed part of the subject of my last blog post, and the slot, starting life under the bland umbrella title of ‘The Late Film’, soon became enshrined under the far more evocative appellation, ‘Appointment With Fear’. These were the days of the in-vision continuity announcer, one of whom, Peter Tomlinson, became inextricably associated with those late-night terrors. He appeared one week accompanied by a knitted panda, which a thoughtful viewer had sent in as company to sit with him through the scary pictures. One thing led to another, and before too long, Tomlinson would turn up on screen surrounded by a veritable menagerie of cuddly toys (didn’t he do well?) I had the pleasure of lunching with Mr. Tomlinson last year, and can report that he still holds fond memories of ‘Panda’ and those late-night broadcasts...

Frankly, this was the only way to watch horror movies. Forget the cinema or today’s shiny new blu-ray remasters: nothing quite recaptures the experience of watching a splicy, scratchy old film being shown late at night, sometimes with the threat of a thunderstorm rumbling away in the near distance. The defining example of this experience occurred on Spring Bank Holiday Monday May 28^th, 1973, and while the film in question wasn’t exactly to my taste (the 1943, musical version of The Phantom of the Opera, starring Claude Rains), the ensuing night more than made up for the movie’s lack of terrors. By the time the movie ended at a quarter past midnight, there were some curious, distant bumping sounds coming from somewhere outside. It sounded, implausibly enough, like someone moving furniture out of a van a few yards down the street. It was not, as suggested by our mum, a ‘dog running up the side of the house’, which was possibly the scariest of the infinitely possible alternative explanations. In fact, it was the distant, continuous roar of a gigantic thunderstorm, of Hollywood biblical epic proportions, which, when it finally arrived, would rage far into the small hours, utterly obliterating the memory of Claude Rains and his facial scars.

Thunderstorms are, of course, a staple of the gothic/horror genre, and there are many classic examples in the history of horror films, none more so than the storm that forms the centrepiece of Bride of Frankenstein (no matter that it was all achieved by studio artifice). Even if there wasn’t a storm in a particular picture, the creaky old prints being pressed into service by ITV and BBC during the the 1970s often had such rumbly soundtracks that it was hard to tell whether or not some distant thunderstorm might be lurking just over the horizon, either in the movie or, more worryingly, in real life. The effect was most noticeable during quieter passages, and once again it fell to our mum to provide an explanation for this phenomenon: it was, she told us, just the film ‘rolling on’. Highly technical, I know, but this shorthand explanation was seized on by my brother and myself whenever we encountered a particularly rumbly soundtrack on one of these late night horrors (curiously, the phenomenon never seemed to afflict other movies shown on TV).

Appointment With Fear and its associated seasons (such as ‘The Monster Movie’) dominated Friday late night television for a good many years, and through the good offices of ATV, I got to see a lot of horror movies from the 1930s through to the 1970s, amongst them Taste the Blood of Dracula, Tarantula!, The Blood Beast Terror, The Fly (and its disappointing sequels), The Hound of the Baskervilles, It Came From Beneath the Sea, The Mummy’s Shroud, Twenty Million Miles to Earth, The Sorcerers, and Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man.

But inevitably, enough is as good as a feast, and after a few years I was pretty well done with horror movies, to the extent that, when the BBC instigated a late-night horror double bill in the 1980s, I rarely made the effort to tune in, unless the Radio Times guide assured me of catching something special (such as Night of the Demon, broadcast on 2nd January 1991). It’s also telling to look back and realise how many of those films I’ve never seen again.

Of the films released after the Gifford book came out, pretty well the only horror movie I’d single out as a go-to title for me would be Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining, which with its famous quotation from The Three Little Pigs, brings us neatly back to where we began...

One of the last of the ITV horror seasons that I made a special effort to watch went out in early 1979 under the umbrella title ‘Christopher Lee, Prince of Terror’, and in the last part of this series, I’ll look back at the most significant film of that season...

'There's a wolf and a monkey upstairs'...

... the beginnings of horror. Part One.

I know the exact date of my first exposure to the horror movie genre: ominously enough, it was Friday 13^th (the date, not the actual film, which would not be made for another nine years). It was 1971, and the month was August, right in the middle of the school summer holiday, which meant that staying up late to watch something on TV was, for once, an option. The film in question was ten years old and making what was probably its first appearance on British television: The Curse of the Werewolf, starring Oliver Reed.

When it appeared in cinemas, The Curse of the Werewolf was the latest in a run of pictures from the now legendary Hammer studio, which effectively updated most of the iconic horrors of the 1930s, in colour, for modern audiences. Colour meant blood, of course, although I was watching in black and white. Exactly why I was watching is what this blog aims to find out. How, where and when had I discovered the horror film genre and what had piqued my interest to such an extent?

I knew next to nothing about horror films at this time, and unlike today when information is freely available online, the process by which one discovered such artefacts could be long, tenuous, and spun out over many years. I’d heard the names Frankenstein and Dracula bandied about in the playground for quite some time, without knowing exactly what or whom they were referring to. The first depictions of horror movie characters I saw on TV were probably those featured in Hanna-Barbera’s Scooby-Doo, Where Are You? which had debuted on BBC1 in September 1970. Episode 24 featured a werewolf story, and assuming the BBC showed the episodes in their original order, I would have seen this instalment on 25 February 1971. Although it’s not mentioned in my diary, I was almost certainly watching on that date, as the alternative on ITV was Magpie, a series we always ignored in our house. Either way, I doubt it was Scooby-Doo that piqued my interest in horror films, and I’m fairly sure I know when I first came across a depiction of a werewolf.

As a child, I found the mere idea of a wolf a scary proposition. My brother and I would dare one another to go upstairs in the dark, attesting to the presence up there of a ‘wolf and a monkey’. I’d learned to fear wolves as the bad guys in countless fairy tales, and I’d seen some particularly creepy illustrations in a storybook from the iconic ‘Little Golden Books’ series. Three Bedtime Stories was illustrated by Garth Williams, whose stylised but detailed drawings, with every piece of fur painted in, could make even the Three Little Kittens into the stuff of nightmares. His depiction of the Big, Bad Wolf in the story of the Three Little Pigs looked next to nothing like a real wolf, but it was certainly scary: especially when reduced to a single, menacing eyeball peering through the wooden door of the home built by the second little pig...

The scariest illustration ever: Garth Williams' painting for The Three Little Pigs (Golden Press, 1958)

So why should the mythical wolf upstairs have been accompanied by a monkey? Simple. Or, perhaps not quite. I have a memory of seeing one of what might be termed the ‘big monkey movies’ on a Sunday afternoon on television in 1965 or 66. It was almost certainly not King Kong, whose iconic status ensured it would not be released to television until the 1970s. Which leaves us with Mighty Joe Young, the Kong-lite fantasy released by RKO pictures in 1949, and produced by the same creative team responsible for the genre-defining original. Mighty Joe Young is, of course, a more sympathetic and less destructive creation than Kong, but the sight of an oversized gorilla attacking a bunch of cowboys must have impressed itself on my consciousness. Allied to this, somewhat ludicrously, was a cuddly monkey which was kept in a box at the local hairdressing salon, as part of a batch of toys intended to keep children quiet while their mothers had a shampoo and set. The cuddly toy had a fur body and a plastic face and hands. It was without a doubt, one of the scariest things I’d seen at that age. So, a cuddly toy and a vintage movie equated to a fear of monkeys. I have to admit, I still don’t go a bundle on our simian relatives...

I don’t class Mighty Joe Young as a horror film, though. Its Sunday afternoon slot (and a subsequent Saturday evening showing in 1967) was indicative of its suitabilty for family viewing. Which leaves Oliver Reed’s werewolf unchallenged as the first bona fide horror movie I sat down to watch. But why did I do so?

I’m fairly sure the answer to this question lies in the range of horror movie monster kits produced by the now legendary Aurora company during the 1960s and 70s. Later revised into the well-remembered ‘Glows in the Dark’ editions, which incorporated luminous plastic parts, these kits were originally offered in normal (one might say boring), non-glowing plastic, and it was a display of these original versions that I encountered during a trip to one of Birmingham’s department stores in the winter of 1970. The painting on the box (illustrated at the top of this post) was an extremely atmospheric depiction of the Oliver Reed wolf man (identifiable as such by his red cummerbund, although the kit itself was clearly based on Lon Chaney Jnr’s portrayal in the Universal original), and it was that image, allied to the entirely new (and extremely scary) idea of a hybrid creature, part human and part wolf, that set my imagination running. That's a scary picture, no doubt about it. See the house in the background, with the lit windows? That's your house, kid, and that tree he's hiding behind is just at the bottom of your garden... the Wolf Man is out there in the darkness, and he's coming to get you... tonight!

We didn’t buy the kit, but I couldn’t get that painting out of my mind. After the Garth Williams illustration, it was the single most disturbing image I'd seen up to that time. Wolves again... race memory or fear learned in childhood? Who can tell. Without realising that I was employing basic psychology, I decided that the best way to deal with this new-found fear was to confront it head-on. Or maybe my dad did, I don’t remember. Either way, seeing that box and its artwork – and a few months later encountering the ‘Glows in the Dark’ series of monster kits – would lead directly to my watching the ITV broadcast of The Curse of the Werewolf on Friday 13^th August, 1971.

I don’t have the Midland edition of TVTimes for the week in question, so I can’t say whether the broadcast went out as part of a specific, branded horror film season. A few weeks later, The Terror of the Tongs was shown under the banner of ‘The Late Movie’, a strand which was still running in early 1972, when, on Friday 14^th January, I caught the classic Universal horror Werewolf of London. Despite its 1930s origins, I found Werewolf of London decidedly superior to The Curse of the Werewolf, and had been tipped off by the TVTimes film reviewer to watch out for the innovative ‘tranformation scene’ wherein the stricken Dr. Glendon passes behind a series of pillars, emerging a little more hairy each time. This was, for me, the key scene in the whole film, but there was plenty to enjoy elsewhere, with a memorable musical score and creepy, ‘fake London’ atmosphere, all stagey studio sets and noirish lighting. My diary notes this screening, and even mentions the fact that it was ‘a Universal picture’, the rotating globe logo somehow adding to the overall atmosphere of this black and white classic. I actually missed the first ten minutes of the film, which explained how Dr. Glendon became afflicted with Lycanthropy. The reason for this? It clashed with a re-run of The Goodies, over on BBC2. Never mind silver bullets, Cricklewood’s finest could see off any werewolf...

The next horror mentioned in my diary was Hammer’s production of The Mummy on Friday 17^th March 1972. The Friday late night slot at this time included numerous other titles, such as City of the Dead, but I only tuned in to see the iconic monsters, the next of which was Hammer’s Dracula on Friday 9^th June, 1972. Anything that had figured as a plastic kit from Aurora was fair game, and by Christmas of 1971, a fair few of these had found their way into our house. From being scared by the box artwork, I'd gone as far as inviting it into the family home... some therapy!

Summer of 1971 had seen our family holidaying in Brixham where my dad, recently laid off from his day job, had accepted a summer season playing drums as part of a trio at the nearby Pontins holiday camp. The band members shared a flat above a shop in the high street, and two doors down was a model shop whose window was fairly crammed with Aurora kits. The first of these I remember acquiring was the Seaview from Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea, but I also saw the ‘Glows in the Dark’ monsters which were to become an obsession over the coming months. During that holiday, my brother and I were bought two kits from this range: King Kong and Godzilla. King Kong I knew well enough, despite not having seen it (ironically, ITV had showed it on a Sunday night on one of the weekends when we were away), but Godzilla was an entirely new discovery. Frankly, I didn’t really care what Godzilla was or where he’d come from at that stage: it was enough to know that he was a huge monster, glowing with radioactivity (literally, in the case of those luminous plastic parts) and depicted in the act of trashing a city.

Aurora's kits of Godzilla and King Kong: what 1970s kid could not want to own these?

Normally, when confronted with an unfamiliar item of pop culture, I’d turned to my parents to ask if they knew anything about it, but neither my dad nor any of his fellow musicians was able to supply much if anything by way of background on Godzilla, which is hardly surprising, given that the original film was sixteen years old, and its sequels had tended to be relegated to Saturday morning kids’ programmes on the rare occasions when they even made it into British cinemas. Indeed, it was at just such a matinee performance (complete with cartoons and a live comedy compere) that I saw my first Godzilla picture, the serio-comic Son of Godzilla, on Saturday 18^th May, 1974.

Returning to 1971, the experience of seeing all those horror movie monsters depicted in artwork form on the many Aurora boxes in that Brixham model shop was clearly a major influence in my taking the plunge into the murky depths of horror movies... where lurked such bizarre creations as the Creature from the Black Lagoon (another Aurora model: I would have to wait another four years to see the somewhat disapppointing film). The kits acted as a de facto trainspotter’s guide to horror films: clearly, the featured monsters were the most important examples of the genre, and thus, ignoring pretty well anything else, I set out to see them all in their movie incarnations. One or two were, it transpired, the manufacturer’s own creations: ‘The Forgotten Prisoner of Castel-Mare’ was just a chained skeleton in rags, but the title suggested a movie, for which I searched the TV schedules in vain. I had more luck with the likes of Frankenstein, Dracula et al, and was immediately impressed by Christopher Lee’s depiction of the latter. Brides of Dracula was shown by ATV on the week immediately following The Curse of the Werewolf, but I don’t know if I caught this screening. I do know that, of all the classic bogeymen of horror films, Dracula stood head, shoulders, cape and fangs above the lot...

Aurora's plastic kits had provided me with a useful introduction to some of the iconic movies of the horror genre, but as yet, I still didn’t know much about the wider world of horror movies. That situation was soon to change with the acquisition of a certain publication...

Morning and afternoon delights...

Nothing to do all day? Now you can just watch the telly... ITV announces the commencement of daytime programming, October 1972.

The beginnings of daytime television...

This morning, at about 9.25am, I sat down to watch an episode of Gerry Anderson’s Stingray – on DVD, of course – it’s a very long time since Stingray last featured in the television schedules (fourteen years and four months to be exact). This always happens around this time of year on any notably sunny morning, the fine weather serving to rekindle memories of summer holiday repeats in the early 1970s. For several years, Stingray was a staple of these early morning schedules, with episodes appearing in 1973, ’74 and ’76, then again in 1982 and 1987. Although other Gerry Anderson titles were shown in similar slots (including Captain Scarlet and Fireball XL5), it’s Stingray that I’ve always associated most strongly with these daytime broadcasts. Despite its underwater setting, Stingray episodes often had a bright, sunlit appearance (exemplified by the generic shots of Marineville, which was almost always depicted against a blue, summery sky). I think the association was in place for me as early as 1965 when, during a period of notably fine weather that lasted into the early autumn, I remember being bought a wooden jigsaw depicting Stingray’s Marineville headquarters. The blue sky may have been a painted backdrop, but to me it might as well have been the real thing. Stingray, and summer skies... a lifelong, pavlovian association was beginning to form...

1976 was a memorably fine summer and once again, our local ITV station ATV chose to schedule morning repeats of Stingray, beginning, somewhat frustratingly, about two weeks prior to the end of term. Unlike earlier repeat runs, where two episodes had been shown per week, the 1976 repeats were limited to a single broadcast, on Thursday mornings, typically at around 11am. Naturally, my brother and myself made sure to watch every episode, preserving audio recordings of their soundtracks (the audio also preserved the temporary breakdown of the episode Set Sail For Adventure which ground to a halt during the opening titles, forcing continuity announcer Simon Bates [yes, that Simon Bates] to extemporise pointlessly for about twenty seconds while the fault was fixed).

* * *

The whole phenomenon of watching old television during the summer holidays is familiar to many, especially anyone of the right age during the 1970s, which is when the whole thing got started. It was ITV who took the initiative, when in October 1972, after five years of unsuccessful representations to various governments, the network finally got its way, and a new schedule of daytime programmes was introduced. For those like me who remembered the classics of the 1960s, this provided the opportunity to miss countless episodes of Danger Man, Strange Report and so on, which were broadcast on weekday afternoons when I was at school. During term time, the morning schedules were set aside for educational broadcasts, but when these ended for the holidays, a new slot became vacant, and it was here, in the ATV region, that repeats of Stingray and Captain Scarlet began to figure from July 1973.

The BBC had made some attempts to do likewise in 1972, with the classic serial The Flashing Blade featuring on school holiday mornings, but the schedule was piecemeal, and aside from sports coverage, the service tended to close down again at around 11am. A similar situation prevailed in 1973, with daily episodes of The Adventures of Tintin, followed by a factual half hour item and closedown at 11am. A similar line-up would continue through the 1970s, with incremental increases in the amount of children’s programming being broadcast, although the mid-morning closedown remained a staple (most likely retained as a scheduled maintenance block for transmitter engineers). By this time, ITV was running a complete daytime schedule, the likes of which would not be seen on the rival station for several years.

Of course, the extended broadcasting hours were more than a mere excuse to show afternoon repeats, and ITV threw a not inconsiderable budget into providing new series, tailor-made for the daytime audience, which a TVTimes article identified as ‘the housewife, the child, the shiftworker, the pensioner, the sick or disabled.’ New soaps were commissioned, including the perennial Emmerdale Farm, alongside now forgotten offerings like Harriet’s Back in Town, a story centered on a recently-divorced woman played by Pauline Yates (perhaps best known for her role as the wife of Reginald Perrin). There were new quiz programmes including Mr. and Mrs. and, a few years later, television’s first serious delve into its own archives with the nostalgia gameshow Those Wonderful TV Times. There was a much-trumpeted lunchtime news bulletin, pitched as a daytime equivalent of New at Ten; and there were brand new programmes for the very young, an audience whom ITV had traditionally left in the capable hands of their rival’s Watch With Mother. Both Pipkins and Rainbow made their debut during ITV’s first week of daytime television in October 1972, and would remain staples of the lunchtime schedule for the forseeable future. 

The arrival of a full daytime programme schedule, as opposed to the earlier model of schools, sport and closedowns was indeed a watershed moment in British television, the first paviour on the way towards today’s style of broadcasting. Daytime programming has long been taken as read, across all networks, and broadcasters now largely continue to show programmes through the night. Children now have their own dedicated channels, leaving the main networks clear to show cookery and DIY programmes in their morning and afternoon schedules where once old series and films held sway. Such vintage items have, however, recently found a new home in the form of vintage TV and film channel Talking Pictures TV, whose archaic nomenclature belies the fact that its programme schedule is comprised largely of items from the 1950s to the 1980s.

The surfeit of television channels is a situation that is unlikely to endure. With downloads fast becoming the preferred form of delivery for television programming, the traditional schedule is likely to disappear within the next decade, leaving viewers to browse menus of material available on demand at any time. The most hopeful outcome of this will be to drive out today’s plethora of largely superfluous channels broadcasting low-quality cheaply acquired material to notional audiences who probably aren’t even watching. The present broadcasting model needs slimming down: less than one hundred specialist channels would suffice to cater for the majority of viewers, and the instant availability of downloads obviates the need for so many different iterations of Sky Movies, to take just one example. Shopping channels will struggle to survive – indeed, it’s a wonder that in the age of online shopping any still exist.

Twenty years from now, the very idea of a programme schedule will seem as quaint as the 1950s Interlude does to modern viewers; and those summer broadcasts of the 1970s, when daytime television was strange and new will be almost unimaginable. Like summers themselves, their time was fleeting, but the memory – and their legacy – endures.

Nostalgia and reality

Now: lovely, quaint nostalgia. Then: dull bloody normality. (Phyllis Nicklin collection)

Imagine you had a time machine, and could select any era to visit. Top of the list would surely be the sixties. Who wouldn’t want to witness first-hand the decade that produced the Beatles, and so many other pop cultural icons, not only in the arena of music, but in film, television, art, literature, you name it. Quite apart from being witness to such epoch-making endeavours would be the ineffably strange experience of witnessing life on the streets as it was lived: the cars, the clothes, the sights long since vanished from the urban landscape. How cool is that? Very. But only to the modern observer. 

Living in the 1960s, or for that matter, the 70s was, in many important respects, cooler than inhabiting the modern world. People were less selfish, not as rude, in less of a hurry, less obsessed with possessions (materialism was certainly a fact of life, but in a form so scaled-back as to be almost unrecognisable by contemporary standards). But here comes the point: back then, it didn’t feel cool to be surrounded by so much good design. It just felt like the norm. Exactly like now, in other words.

Check out any old newsreel film of the 60s, and you’ll see exactly what life was like. But at the same time, you won’t. Because you’re viewing it through the filter of intervening years, coloured by the knowledge of what’s changed, and how modern life is different. Those lovely old cars didn’t look lovely to us at the time: they were just the unremarkable baseline of what everyday life looked like.

I didn’t think very much of British cars during the 1960s. Many of them epitomised a kind of dreary suburbanism, class-conscious in their use of design features, many of which had been scaled-down from more expensive, desirable models, American cars even. The humble Ford Anglia, in its circa 1960 incarnation, took its inward-raking rear window from the far more stylish American Lincoln Continental. But as cars went, the Anglia was stuffily middle-class, a real middle-management machine. Back in the days when Anglias were pretty well ubiquitous on Britain’s roads, I hardly gave them a second look. My perceptions had been skewed by the knowledge that far cooler cars were available, mostly from toy shops, but also via the medium of television.

For Anglia, 1959-68 model. Typical suburban car, typical suburban driveway. Not cool, just very, very ordinary.

Most of my toy cars were American models, like the Ford Thunderbird or Cadillac Eldorado. Some of these late 50s and early 60s American models took their atom-age styling cues from outer space, but in Britain, car makers knew that the nation’s motorists weren’t that adventurous. In any event, the average American saloon was far too big for British roads. Instead, we got scaled-down, ‘suburbanised’ versions of American styles where chrome and fins were certainly present, but in a much more restrained manner. Although I was entirely unaware of the thinking behind the look of a car like Ford’s Zephyr or Zodiac, I found them more aesthetically pleasing than, say, the pipe-and-slippers styling of the Morris Minor, which in its ‘half-timbered’ estate form vaguely resembled a typical mock-tudor suburban villa. To me, the ‘Moggie Minor’ was a ludicrous car, the kind of car your elderly relatives might drive. Equally unsatisfactory was the Austin/Morris 1100, whose styling straddled a deeply uncomfortable line between tradition and modernity. I still hate it, yet at the time it felt so typically British in appearance that its silhouette became the standard shape used to represent cars on the new generation of roadsigns, phased in from the mid-60 onwards (and still in use today).

Old film of Britain’s roads looks to us today like a cavalcade of motoring nostalgia. Back then, it was mere traffic. Noisy, dirty, mostly unlovely, something you wouldn’t take a second look at, unless an E-Type Jag happened by. That’s the difference between how things were and how they seem in retrospect. Nostagia makes us see what was once dreary normality as though it were the creation of some retro-stylist production designer on a period movie. And what holds good for cars also holds good for clothes: even more so, in fact.

Modern Britain is, without doubt, the worst-dressed nation on earth. The day sportswear began to be adopted for everyday use (shopping, going to the pub, etc) was the beginning of the end for anything approaching sartorial elegance in this country, and the average Brit of 2018, regardless of age, gender or social standing is in general, a badly-dressed scruffbag. Baggy, ill-fitting rubbish abounds. Trainers, once the preserve of athletes only, are ubiquitous. And anyone donning a baseball cap without intent to step out onto the diamond in the shoes of Joe DiMaggio should be offered counselling.

As a nation, we were better tailored in the 1960s. Men, on the whole, wore a suit and tie, whether going to work or for a drink down the local. Your typical casual top (weekends in the garden or on the golf course) was either a roll-neck or a Fred Perry-style shirt with three buttons at the neck. Jeans were for students, beatniks and wannabe Rolling Stones. Nobody else would think twice of donning a pair, even as workwear. Women wore skirts, dresses, sometimes slacks (trouser suits had yet to put in an appearance). Children, meanwhile, had the choice of dressing like either a Tiny Tears doll or Just William.

People just wearing whatever they put on this morning: Birmingham street scene, circa 1959 (Phyllis Nicklin collection)

Yet I would argue that, to live for a day or two as an average citizen of 1960s Britain, unburdened by modern perceptions of retro and cool, would be a mostly dismal experience, asethetically speaking. We were, then as now, generally badly-dressed. Suits rarely fitted well, and were mostly cut from cheap, unattractive cloth. Forget about what Roger Moore is wearing in your average Saint episode: the typical bloke on the street got his clothes off the peg. Having said which, made-to-measure wasn’t the exotic rarity it’s become today; but even a good quality, tailored Hepworth’s suit wasn’t likely to get you nominated as Britain’s best-dressed man. Women’s fashions were just as bad, in their own way. Again, the high-fashion styles sported by characters in film and television were a world away from the dowdy floral prints worn by your auntie or the lady next door. Cheap clothes have always looked cheap, and in an era when most people’s idea of style meant simply trying to look ‘smart’ (however that might be achieved), the net effect was, on the whole, drearily conformist. Of course to modern eyes it all looks quaint and appealingly retro, but back then, it was, once again, the norm, the baseline, something nobody noticed.

Our homes were pretty much the same. Mid-century furnishings continue to have considerable appeal, and many modern items look back to the era of Eames and Ercol, when ergonomics and stylistic restraint began to replace the excesses and fancies of earlier eras. But aside from the super-rich, very few could afford to completely restyle their homes in one fell swoop. A scenario: your typical middle-income family decides to replace their three-piece suite, circa 1965. There are bold, modern styles available, in bright colours like orange, mauve and teal green. The bold, modern suite is duly ordered and takes its place alongside a gate-leg table from the 1930s, a sideboard of similar vintage, floral curtains and carpets of a decade earlier, and a clutter of assorted table lamps, nick-nacks and God-knows-what-else, inherited or acquired over the years with no consideration of style, colour scheme, etc. The net effect is a random patchwork of decades, and this is how pretty well all ‘normal’ homes looked like for a very long time. Many still do.

Living rooms really did look like this in the 1960s... but only in furniture catalogues.

Confusing the issue still further was the fact that not all new furniture sold during the 1960s epitomised what we’d now think of as ‘classic’ mid-century styling, and traditional items still held sway. Even today, a browse around any typical furniture showroom will reveal the stolidly old-fashioned alongside the determinedly retro-futuristic.

Thus were our homes furnished in the 50s, 60s, 70s... it’s a nuance that mostly escapes the attention of production designers in film and television who tend to adhere slavishly to one-decade styling when called upon to dress a set for, say, a 1960s lounge-dining room.

My point is this: the notion of being able to live again in the 1960s or 70s may seem like an appealing nostalgia trip, but to have been there at the time was to have no perception of how aesthetically pleasing life actually was. Despite what you see online and in magazines, the tide of fashion tends to move pretty slowly, so that it takes many years for a new look to establish itself as the ‘norm.’ Seen in purely stylistic terms, the 1960s seems, in retrospect, to be an evolution destined to reach its purest form of expression in the following decade. There was, of course, no pivotal moment when, to the average observer, the sixties looked like the sixties and nothing else, much as that may appear in retrospect to have been the case. Cars from the 1950s and even earlier were still to be found on Britain’s roads, and only celebrities or the very wealthy could afford to stay abreast of ‘the latest fads and trends’, assuming they even chose to do so.

We can’t see what’s around us when we’re part of it. None of history makes any sense until it is actually history. Only then do the forms, the themes, the shifting tectonic plates of fate, coincidence and collective experience acquire meaning. Only then do we truly appreciate nostalgia for what it is... or rather, what it was.