Son gave a look of disapproval. I had used an unacceptable word (yet again!).
Because of swollen feet, a side-effect of pills to inhibit Exon 14 tumours, it was becoming difficult to put my shoes on. I had been wearing mainly walking shoes for some months, but even these had become tight, and I had bruised the side of my ankle making it painful to walk. Shuffling awkwardly, I stepped down heavily and hurt my back. It took three inactive weeks to get better. In the meantime, I finally gave in to nagging advice from our resident family occupational therapist, and bought some wide-fitting, wide-opening Cosyfeet shoes. And cosy they are. I can walk around the village again.
“I’ve had to get some spastic shoes”, I told my son.
The thing is, “spastic” was once a perfectly acceptable word. It was not until 1994 that The Spastics Society renamed itself Scope, the charity for people with cerebral palsy. “Spastic” had become a term of abuse, and parents were being put off. Children would call each other “a daft spastic” for clumsiness or mistakes. Just as a word, it sounds effective and humorous. It actually means subject to spasms, and remains in medical use in other circumstances. “Scope” is neutral, but the Society lost public awareness.
In contrast, Mencap, the society for children and adults with learning disabilities, continues under a name with negative connotations, but everyone recognises what it is. The name went through several changes after the charity was founded in 1946 as The National Association of Parents of Backward Children. “Backward” became another term of abuse. “Are you a bit backward?” was hurled at someone slow to understand a point.
Many other terms have fallen out of use. Mongolism was the scientific name for Downs Syndrome. Cretinism was thyroid deficiency severe enough to cause confusion and physical changes. They were accepted medical and academic terms into the 1980s. I still have a small book by a professor at the university where I did my psychology degree, an internationally respected authority in learning disability, that contains a table setting out the legal and scientific uses through the years of terms used to describe ‘mental deficiency’, ‘mental retardation’ and ‘subnormality’ according to I.Q. It is interesting that ‘idiot’ denoted the lowest I.Q., with ‘imbecile’ slightly higher, and ‘feeble-minded’ and ‘moron’ above, which does not seem to be the pejorative usage today.
From Clarke, A.D.B. and Clarke, A.M. (1975): Recent Advances in the Study of Subnormality. MIND (National Association for Mental Health), London. Page 5.
Such terms were used to discriminate and exclude people from society, irrespective of ability. Until perhaps the 1960s, eugenics, sterilisation, and euthanasia, were openly discussed. Institutionalisation lasted even later, although, with support, many occupants could have lived independently. Alan and Ann Clarke did a great deal to alleviate this by showing what people could do, rather than what they could not.
Then there are the labels for nationalities, ethnicities, and race. They were not always used maliciously. When a Canadian-born great-nephew turned up on leave during the Second World War, my great-grandfather said that this “Yank” (can I still say that?) had knocked on the door. It was a description, not a judgement. The family put him up for a few days, delighted to hear about their Canadian relatives, and it seemed to relieve some of his anxiety about having to go back to the war.
Returning to the slang term for Americans, no doubt many will dislike it, and it wasn’t used accurately anyway. I dislike being called a Brit. I am British, or English, or from Yorkshire, but as Brit is now used widely in the British media, and by some British bloggers, I am not likely to win that one.
National and racial labels are often used to stir up division and hatred. There is a Monty Python sketch about a television show called Prejudice, in which viewers are invited to come up with derogatory names for various nationalities, and contains a section called “Shoot the Poof” (although even Monty Python in 1970 steered clear of race). The sketch can be found online, but some will find it so offensive I am not going to post a link. On watching again, I still find it hilarious. Michael Palin as the awful show host is brilliant, but as with the comedy series ‘Till Death Us Do Part’, not everyone sees that the laugh is at and not with the holders of these views.
I misused one of these words in frustration. If you saw my feet you would see why. I’ve got some spastic slippers as well now.
My wife was looking for a clean duster. I surprised her by producing a brand new one, forty years old. A BBC archive clip of programs I wrote for deaf children reminded me of it recently (the one-minute clip is here). Someone gave me the duster at that time.
We decided the duster was much too nice to use as a duster, so it went back in the drawer.
I never did manage to learn the sign alphabet. I can spell out my name, but little else.
Memories churned around in my head, as often happens these days, and in the middle of the night, out of nowhere, there emerged a song.
To the tune of the old British music hall song Let's All Go Down The Strand:
Let's all go through the codes (Have a banana)
Let's all go through the codes (Gertie Gitana)
A B C D / E F G
H I J K / L M N O P
Q R S / T
U V W X Y / Zee
A B C D / E F G
Let's all go through the codes.
What a great way to learn it:
He's as daft as a brush.
Right, who wants a part in The Semaphore Version of Wuthering Heights, or Julius Caesar on an Aldis Lamp?
John Going Gently recently mentioned the long-running BBC radio show “I’m Sorry I Haven’t A Clue” (ISIHAC). For those who don't know, it is a spoof panel game in which teams are asked by the chair to do silly things, very silly, very funny. It started in 1972, and has been running almost continually since: an incredible 52 years.
John included links to a couple of examples, and as he said in a comment, they should be prescribed on the NHS as treatment for depression. The one titled “The Complete Lionel Blair”, a compilation of a double-entendre gag running across a large number of shows, is almost too painful to take. You cannot believe such delightful dirty-mindedness could be broadcast on the radio.
In 1972, I was still in the shared house in Leeds, where we often audio-taped television and radio shows to hear again. We fancied ourselves as comedy script writers, but apart from a couple of snippets in the magazine Private Eye, all else was rejected.
ISIHAC was one of the series we recorded. Most of it is now gone, but I still have a tape with the very first four programmes from 1972. They were lost to the BBC for many years, and some may still be.
Humphrey Littleton was the chairman from the start, continuing until his death in 2008. Much of the success of the show was down to his deadpan delivery, as if genuinely baffled by the audience reaction to what he had to read out. Barry Cryer took over in the second and third programmes, but Humph returned for the fourth. The first panelists were Graeme Garden, Jo Kendall, Tim Brooke-Taylor and Bill Oddie, with John Cleese instead of Jo Kendall for the fourth programme. All had been in the show’s precursor, “I’m Sorry I’ll Read That Again” (ISIRTA), which we also recorded; also mostly lost.
I digitise the shows to refer to in another post. For what it’s worth, here are the four half-hour programmes again. The BBC seemed uninterested when I tried to give them back some years ago.
The production took time to settle into its established format, but many of the elements are there: one song to the tune of another; swanee whistles; late arrivals; limericks; the non-associated words game. These episodes are probably more of historical interests than classics, but they still raise a laugh: “Announcing late arrivals at the Plumbers’ Ball: Mr. and Mrs. Closet, and their son, Walter Closet.”
I used to have a book by a pair of American educationalists called Curtis Jay Bonk and Kira S. King. Students used to call it the bonking book. The surnames of the two authors were juxtaposed on the spine in such a way as to make it look as if it was a book about bonking: “a bonking good read” perhaps.
The cover shows the first author’s name in full, but in the rest of the book and on his web site he goes by the shorter Curt Bonk. Does he know how that sounds to English ears? Perhaps he does. It might be his come on line.
I’m not sure when I first encountered the word “bonk”. It wasn’t at school in Yorkshire. Bonk would then have meant hitting someone on the top of the head, or perhaps the percussive knock made by a large piece of wood. Runners and cyclists also now use it to mean running out of energy. I don’t think it emerged in the sexual sense until the nineteen-seventies. I can imagine Jo Kendall’s elegant but naughty voice saying it in “I’m Sorry I’ll Read That Again”, but perhaps she never actually did. It would have amused me if she had.
The alternatives would have been completely unacceptable on broadcast media before the -seventies, despite the efforts of Brendan Behan and Kenneth Tynan who came out with the f-word on live television in the -fifties and -sixties, or even the music hall comedian Hector Thaxter who is said to have got away with “arse” on the radio in 1936.
Most of us don’t seem to notice swearing now. It was better when it was the exception rather than the rule. It was kinder when the worst we heard was “naff off” and “bonk”.
There was a time when no self-respecting, young person’s bedsit would be complete without an iconic Athena poster. Along with the thousands of other young persons who had exactly the same one, it was a statement of your individuality. Full-blooded young males could have a sexy French lingerie model or the knickerless tennis girl absent-mindedly rubbing her naked bottom (gratuitously included here). The more emancipated might have the muscular man cradling a baby. For the rebellious it would be Jim Morrison or Jimi Hendrix surrounded by psychedelic swirls. The arty could choose a fine reproduction print, perhaps a Salvador Dali to indicate their leanings towards the avante garde. For the revolutionary Marxist it had to be Che Guevara. For those of a philosophical bent it might be seagulls in mid-flight, quoting Virgil: “They can because they think they can.”
Athena outlets sprang up in most large towns and cities, and for a couple of decades they made good profits. Not out of cheapskates like me though. My walls were adorned with a scruffy and eclectic mix of images acquired entirely free of charge. Here are some of them in my attic bedroom in our dingy shared house in Leeds in 1972, next to some colourful ink blots on blotting paper, the product of an idle, unsupervised afternoon at work.
One was a Guinness poster to show that independence and resilience were important parts of my individuality. You had to be pretty independent and resilient to drink the stuff. No one else I knew liked its burnt and heavy flavour. I’m not even sure that I did.
I had sent Guinness a sycophantic letter admiring one of their newspaper adverts: ‘How to Make Guinness’. Back came a roughly A2-sized poster in a cardboard tube.* It caricatured the process from harvesting the barley through to delivery by road tanker, and gave sound advice on how to avoid common errors such as brewing it upside down with the head underneath the body.
Then there was the Smirnoff poster: “Accountancy was my life until I discovered Smirnoff.” Well, it was true, accountancy was my life, and I dearly wished it wasn’t. Oh that something so simple as learning to handle a bottle of vodka could instantaneously transform it from the humdrum into one of glamour and excitement! But, from the other adverts in the series, I would rather have been the camel train trekker who used to take the caravan to Southend but now traversed the desert, or the mainstay of the Public Library who had escaped to carefree rural reverie, rather than the suited, cigar-smoking, nineteen-thirties City of Westminster gangster in the wide-brimmed Panama hat.
Anyone would have thought that accountancy was boring. Well, thanks to John Cleese and Monty Python, that is exactly what most of my contemporaries did think. Most damaging was the ‘Vocational Guidance Counsellor’ sketch about an insignificant little man whose careers advisor declared without doubt that the ideal job for him was chartered accountancy. “But I am a chartered accountant,” he protested. He wanted a new job, “something exciting that will let me live.” He wanted to be a lion tamer. Chartered accountancy was “dull, dull, dull ...”, a career in which it was a positive advantage to be “unimaginative, timid, lacking in initiative, spineless, easily dominated, no sense of humour, tedious company and irrepressibly drab.” The sketch ends by asking for donations to The League for Fighting Chartered Accountancy: “this terrible debilitating social disease.” I am certain it influenced my subsequent rejection of the career. So much for independence and resilience.
The senior partner where I worked found the sketch so offensive it became practically a dismissable offence to admit you watched the programme. John Cleese, however, discovered that his own accountant was not offended in any way at all. When asked why, he explained it was because the sketch was about chartered accountancy, whereas he himself was a certified accountant.
But a fervent Monty Python fan I was, one of those who could recite ‘The Piranha Brothers’ and ‘Room for an Argument’ off by heart. We even used to audio-tape and transcribe the television shows so we could act them out ourselves in our shared house. My brother used the school’s photographic equipment to make a poster from the Whizzo Quality Assortment page of Monty Python’s Big Red Book. This showed a box of chocolates containing such delights as Crunchy Frog, made using only the finest baby frogs, dew picked and flown from Iraq. “Do you take the bones out?” “No, it wouldn’t be crunchy if we did.” That poster went on my wall too.
In 1973, I went with a group of mates to the Leeds Grand Theatre and Opera House in New Briggate to see Monty Python on tour. Many of the sketches, such as ‘The Parrot Sketch’, and the animations projected on to a screen, were straight from the television series, but there was some new material too. In one sketch a group of bowler-hatted city gents were sitting on stools reading newspapers in a cocktail bar. It got its first laugh simply by using language you would not then have expected in a theatre, not even in Monty Python: “I see Nixon’s had an arsehole transplant.” The punchline brought the house down: “It says here the arsehole rejected him.”
The programme for the show was in the form of a huge poster. Many of them ended up gliding gracefully across the vast auditorium in the form of paper aeroplanes, but with my bare walls in mind, I carefully rolled mine up and took it home. Here it is, well just the lower edge of it, at the other end of my attic room above a messy desk of reel-to-reel tapes, guitar music and the camera case. I still have it today in the Guinness cardboard tube, much faded, its corners damaged by drawing-pins and blue-tack.
* With it came a smaller poster, ‘How to economise on Guinness’, which suggests mixing it half and half with champagne to make ‘black velvet’. This can be seen to the right of the ‘How to make Guinness’ poster.
I have now found a coloured copy of the ‘How to make on Guinness’ poster:
It was one of those click-bait headings I found irresistible, so I clicked.
Page 1470 of Arthur Mee’s Children’s Encyclopedia falls open automatically as soon as you pick up Volume 2, a page opened so many times fifty to sixty years ago. Opposite is a picture of how the telegram we might have handed in at the post office forty years before that would have been sent by Morse Code to a friend a hundred miles away. On the following pages are more photographs of the incredible electronic equipment of the day: Wonders of the Telegraph Office, How a Picture is Telegraphed, The Wonder Machine That Brings The News. They still captured your imagination as late as the nineteen-sixties.
But it was the table of Morse Code on page 1470 I always turned to. It shows only the letters, not the number or punctuation codes, but it was enough to get started.
Duncan lived across the road. I could see his bedroom window from my bedroom window. Equipped with flashlights, we could send each other messages at night in Morse Code, a short flash for a dot, a long one for a dash, just like the battleships in Sink the Bismark.
The problem was, of course, that it takes so long to become proficient in Morse Code we couldn’t do it. Apart from having nothing to talk about. We were never able to send messages from one end of the street to the other, or get our Cubs Signaller Badges. You have to take your hats off to the Monty Python cast learning to perform Gunfight at the O.K. Corral in Morse Code, not to mention Julius Caesar on an Aldis Lamp and Wuthering Heights in Semaphor. Kids don’t know they’re born these days with their Snapchat and Instagram.
On clicking the link I was told that Samuel Morse was born on this day (April 27th) in 1791, and that he patented his telegraph system in 1838 and worked with Alfred Vail to create the Morse Code to translate letters into long and short pulses and back again.
A visit to Leeds Grand Theatre revives memories of near disaster with sound effects fifty years ago.
Last week I was at Leeds Grand Theatre & Opera House for the first time in forty-four years. It was an evocative return. We sat in the same area of the upper balcony and saw almost the same kind of show. In 1973 it was Monty Python on Tour (remembered here). This time it was The Play That Goes Wrong.
The setting is an amateur production of a nineteen-twenties murder mystery, during which just about everything that can go wrong does go wrong. Ornaments and pictures fall off the wall; a door won’t stay shut except when needed open; a platform collapses with actors on it; members of the cast are knocked senseless and have to be replaced by stage hands reading from the script, which of course gets dropped on the floor and scrambled; a corpse has to crawl off stage unnoticed after a stretcher rips apart. The production is brilliant. It had us all giggling hysterically.
At one point the characters on stage all stop and stare towards the sound technician on the balcony who is obliviously reading a book, unaware the play has reached the point where he needs to produce twelve clock chimes. The wait is interminable. And not to disappoint, when he does become aware of the cue, he fails to count the chimes correctly.
That could have been me fifty years ago. A few friends at the youth club we went to had joined a drama group and were rehearsing George Bernard Shaw’s Pygmalion. It would have been good to have had a part, but having missed out by getting involved too late, I attached myself to the support team.
There is a moment, early in Act I, when Professor Henry Higgins calls Eliza Doolittle a liar for claiming not to have enough money for her lodgings. “You said you could change half-a-crown” he reminded her. “You ought to be stuffed with nails, you ought,” Eliza replies as she flings her flower basket at his feet. “Take the whole blooming basket for sixpence.”
Just then, a church clock strikes the second quarter, and Higgins, hearing in it the voice of God rebuking him for his lack of charity, utters the words “a reminder”, throws a handful of cash into the basket, and leaves.
I don’t know why we didn’t just clang a length of pipe for the clock sound effect. I think we took the instruction “strikes the second quarter” too literally. I offered to tape-record my dad’s heirloom grandfather clock which did the full Big Ben chimes. Later we decided that “bing-bong-bing-bong, bing-bong-bing-bong” took too long, and that we would have just a single chime. But unthinkingly, the tape-recorder mindset remained.
I sat backstage at Snaith Secondary School, tape-recorder on pause, awaiting the cue. We were presenting Act I of Pygmalion in some kind of drama competition. The cue came.
“Take the whole blooming basket for sixpence,” said Eliza.
I set the tape going.
Now I truly wish I could tell you I had put the wrong tape in the machine and that Manfred Mann’s Five-Four-Three-Two-One blared out of the sound system, exactly as happens with Duran Duran in The Play That Goes Wrong. The truth is more ordinary. I had wound the tape back a little too far, so instead of producing an immediate clock chime, I watched the reels silently turning for what seemed like an eternity, while the actors on stage paused not knowing quite what to do. It might only have been two or three seconds, but it was far too long. A scared rigid Henry Higgins must have heard far more than the voice of God during the hiatus. When the bong finally came, he hurriedly squeaked “a reminder” and seemed rather too eager to get off the stage.
It makes you appreciate just how slick the effects in The Play That Goes Wrong actually are.
The artwork for the 2017 UK tour of The Play That Goes Wrong is owned by the Mischief Theatre Company and its reproduction here is believed to be fair use, serving as a means of visual identification within this posting.
Amanda Barrie, Paul Nicholas, Bill Oddie, Lionel Blair, Dr Miriam
Stoppard, Dennis Taylor, Rustie Lee and Sheila Ferguson
Watching the second series of The Real Marigold Hotel (currently on Wednesdays on BBC1) makes me wonder what the elderly celebrities say to each other when the cameras aren’t rolling. In particular, has Bill Oddie apologised to Lionel Blair for what now seems the less than politically correct song ‘Les Girls’ he wrote to end the sketch about the Miss World contest in the ‘I’m Sorry I’ll Read That Again’ New Year Special broadcast on BBC Radio Four on the 31st December 1970.
The song later re-appeared in a 1975 episode of ‘The Goodies’ called ‘Chubby Chumps’, described on a fan site as follows:
The 'Housewife Of The Year' contest in 'Chubby Chumps' is kicked off by Bill masquerading as Lionel Bleeeah performing a very camp rendition of 'Les Girls' with the help of a troupe of pink-suited male dancers. As Bill sings "Boys, she'll really make you a man ..." one of the dancers sashays up to him and utters "Oh will she make me one too?!" and at the end of the song Lionel prances off the stage hand in hand with another of the dancers before Terry (Graeme in disguise) introduces the judges and housewives.
This, of course, is from the era of shows such as ‘Are You Being Served?’, ‘Love Thy Neighbour’ and ‘It Ain’t Half Hot Mum’, when racist and homophobic comedy was endemic. Those who weren’t around in those days look now in sheer disbelief that they were ever broadcast. And apart from all that, the ISIRTA/Goodies song was so unjust to Lionel Blair anyway. But it so happens that I recorded the ISIRTA programme, and still have it. Here is my transcript:
[spoken]
And so with a fitting climax to this annual cavalcade of beauty, let’s take one last look at this sparkling line of lovelies. Yes, here they are, Lionel Bleeagh and his boys, to sing their tribute to Les Girls.
[spoken over intro music]
Come on come on come on lads. Are you ready?
Yeah.
John! John! Straighten your tie.
Slow down I’ve got a ladder.
Let me climb up it.
Cheeky cat.
That’s enough!
It’s not enough.
Butch voices, right?
Right hard face.
One two three ...
[sung to showbizzy tune which begins a bit like ‘Back Home’ by the 1970 England World Cup squad]
Les Girls, Just show us the way to
Les Girls, Let’s do it their way.
I’m a red blooded fella with hair on my chest,
I got my hat got my cane and a pink woolly vest.
Les Girls, I'm simply astounded,
Les Girls, I'm completely surrounded
By dimple cheeks and beautiful curls.
Les Girls. Les Girls.
[spoken]
I’m as butch as the next man.
I’m the next man.
[sung]
Les Girls, Oh that’s what they call us.
Les Girls. We’re the gentlemen’s chorus.
I love the way they wiggle of their big blue eyes,
I love the low cut dresses. Oh just my size!
Les Girls, I wanna kiss them quick.
Les Girls, I think I'm going to be sick.
Big big diamonds, rubies and pearls, [and me]
Les Girls. Les Girls.
Oh you’ll do a lot of things you never knew you could do,
If you’ll only let a woman get a hold of you,
Boy she’ll make you a man.
Will she make me one too?
Les Girls. Les Girls. Les Girls.
[spoken on telephone]
All right all right! Director General Here again. We don’t want any nancy poofta nonsense on the B.B.C. Let’s have some nice seasonal entertainment. Some jolly Christmassy songs. Eh? Not too late for those.
[on to Censored Bawdy Christmas Songs sketch]
Oh dear! I’ll be carefully observing the interaction between Bill and Lionel.
Dad turns to the microphone on the mantlepiece, clears his throat and adopts a suitable air of gravitas.
“I will now read some of my favourite poems,” he says in his most dignified voice. The sound of muted giggling emanates from me and my brother sitting on the floor next to the tape recorder. “Ernest Dowson’s Vitae Summa Brevis,” he announces.
The noises in the background become audible whispers.
“What’s he on about?”
“He says Ernest Dowson had some Ryvita for his breakfast.” More snorting and sniggering. Dad continues.
“They are not long, ...”
“What aren’t? Is our Sooty’s tail not long?”
“... the weeping and the laughter, Love and desire and hate:”
The disruption intensifies as my mother bangs on the window and shouts something muffled from the yard outside. Dad struggles to keep going.
“I think they have no portion in us ...”
My mother enters the room and interrupts loudly.
“When I tell you your dinner’s ready, it’s ready, and you come straight away.”
The recording ends.
Would Dowson’s melancholy poetry and vivid phrases ever have emerged from out of his misty dream had he married and had such an unsupportive, philistine family?
Christmas 1962 – an unbelievable fifty-two years ago – was when my dad came into some money and bought a reel-to-reel tape recorder. It was really for the whole family, but as I was the only one who knew how it worked it was effectively mine, my parents being too old to understand such modern technology and my brother too young to be trusted with it. The next door neighbour was appalled at the idea of such an extravagant present for a twelve year old. Her eyebrows must have shot even further through the ceiling a month or so later when the new car arrived. As I said, my dad had inherited a useful sum of money.
The Philips EL 3541, as the YouTube video shows, was beautifully designed and built, part of the last triumphant surge of valve-based electronics before the transistor revolution. In contrasting greys and white, preceding the stark ubiquity of brushed aluminium, the case and controls had pleasantly curved profiles. The main buttons were smooth and soft, but clunked and clicked with a satisfyingly businesslike sound. The whole thing felt substantial and robust, with a reassuringly heavy-duty carrying strap. It looked a bit like a wide, trustworthy face with large eyes and beautiful white teeth.
People are beginning to re-discover that using and owning physical objects like tape machines and vinyl records can have value, a sensory quality you don’t get with digital downloads. Why did we ever throw these things away?
This particular model was a four track machine, which means it could make four separate recordings on each reel of tape, two in each direction. The machine is shown with five inch reels (13cm) which typically held nine hundred feet (270m) of tape, but it could accommodate up to seven inch reels (18cm) holding eighteen hundred feet (540m). Tapes ran at a speed of three and three quarter inches per second (9.5 cm/sec)* which means that a five inch tape ran for around forty-five minutes and a seven inch tape around ninety minutes. So using four tracks, you could record for up to three hours on a five inch tape, and six hours on a seven inch tape, although you did have to turn over and re-thread tapes manually at the end of each track. A seven inch tape could therefore hold the equivalent of eight long playing (LP) records or albums, provided they weren’t excessively long, which they weren’t before the late nineteen-sixties.
Just to complicate things a little more, these numbers are for ‘long play’ tapes. You could also get ‘double play’ (2,400 feet on a 7 inch reel) and ‘triple play’ (3,600 feet on a 7 inch reel) but these were thinner and prone to breaking or stretching, so I avoided them. There were also thicker ‘standard play’ tapes, and five and three quarter inch reels as well, but the boxes always showed the tape length so it wasn’t as confusing as it sounds. Most of my tapes were Long Play five or seven inch reels. Believe it or not, I still have them, some from 1962 and 1963.
Some of the earliest recordings picked up a high pitched whistle
through the microphone. Later I used to remove the backs from the
television and record player to connect wires to the loudspeaker
terminals. It got rid of the whistle but it could so easily have got rid
of me as well.
The earliest recording I have is still on the five inch tape that came with the machine, from the Light Programme at four o’clock on the 30th December, 1962, ‘Pick of the 1962 Pops’ – “David Jacobs plays some of the hit records from the past twelve months**.” It starts off with Frankie Vaughan’s ‘Tower of Strength’, which had been number one in December, 1961, and then runs through a further twenty-three top three singles of 1962, ending with Elvis Presley’s ‘Return to Sender’. There are plenty of solo singers but not a British pop group among them. It was only a month or two before the end of that year that I’d first heard of the Beatles when ‘Love Me Do’ came on 208 Radio Luxembourg late one night on my transistor radio underneath the bedclothes.
I recorded the corresponding shows for 1963, 1964 and 1965, and for 1966 to 1969 the ‘Top of the Pops’ year end shows from television (audio only)**. This was a period when the old guard of solo singers such as Cliff Richard, Elvis Presley and Frank Ifield appeared less and less in the charts, displaced by emerging new groups like Jerry and the Pacemakers, The Searchers and of course The Beatles and The Rolling Stones. In 1964 the top spot was almost entirely British, Roy Orbison being the only exception.
I owned only two actual LP records myself, ‘The Hits of the Animals’ (an export version bought in Belgium) and Georgie Fame’s ‘Sweet Things’, but built up a considerable collection of recordings by exchange borrowing with friends. It included Donovan, Manfred Mann, Sandie Shaw, Jim Reeves, and the early Beatles and Rolling Stones LPs, although I later erased most of them by over-recording with music borrowed from the magnificent collection at Leeds Public Library.
I began to develop an interest in classical music. A friend’s elder brother had gone off to university leaving his record collection unattended in their front room. Attracted first by the sumptuous excitement of George Gershwin’s ‘An American in Paris’ and ‘Rhapsody in Blue’, I sampled the rest of the collection, such as the Beethoven symphonies and Mozart’s ‘Eine Kleine Nachtmusik’. They all went on my tapes. I don’t think my friend’s brother ever knew. Thanks Mike!
On one tape there are early recordings of broadcast comedy shows: the
Christmas ‘I’m Sorry I’ll Read That Again’ from 1970; the first four
programmes ever of ‘I’m Sorry I Haven’t a Clue’ from 1972** which were
for many years lost to the B.B.C and possibly still are; and audio
recordings of early ‘Monty Python’s Flying Circus’ from television. By
then I was living in a shared house in Leeds where one of our favourite
diversions was transcribing the Python scripts and acting them out.
Like snowy pictures on old videotape, the sound quality has not always lasted well. Perhaps with music this doesn’t really matter as you can always replace it, digitally re-mastered with a clarity that far exceeds the original, and usually in stereo rather than the earlier mono.
But you cannot replace the evocative social and family moments that
were captured. Despite surviving in only thin and feeble form, they are
irreplaceable beyond value.
At a friend’s house a group of us believed ourselves worthy rivals to
the likes of comedians John Cleese, Tim Brooke Taylor and Bill Oddie.
We wrote and recorded our own biblically themed comedy, ‘The Old
Testacles’, most of it unrepeatable because of scurrilous allusions
to countless teachers and pupils then at school, and of course the
relentless uninhibited adolescent filth.
But the family moments remain the most poignant, like my grandma feeding my baby cousin on her knee, speaking in a village accent fashioned and formed before the First War:
“Shout o’Sooty. You shout. What does Sooty say? ’Ere y’are. He du’n’t say ’ere y’are. Who’s go’r all t’butter? Yer gre-ased up aren’t yer? Oh heck! Eat it up nice. Yes you eat that up. Yer can’t come up, me shirt buttons‘ll be runnin’ all ove’ we-re n’t the’? Deary me to dae!”
Most precious of all are my dad’s unselfconscious performances. Because his grandad had been a sea captain, he claimed an inherited, natural aptitude in the delivery and interpretation of sea shanties. He announces the well-known windlass and capstan shanty, ‘Bound for the Rio Grande’, and begins to sing:
“I’ll sing you a song of the fish of the sea...” followed by a hesitant pause, followed by complete breakdown into helpless uncontrollable laughter.
I am on these tapes too, embarrassing in my unbroken voice and long gone local accent, as my dad begins another poem:
“Miss J. Hunter Dunn. Miss J. Hunter Dunn. Furnish’d and burnish’d by Aldershot sun...”
As before, my brother and I whisper to each other in the background.
“It’s about Miss J. Hunter’s bum.”
Again we all collapse into irrepressible laughter and my dad is unable to continue further.
* In comparison, cassette tapes, which became successful from the late nineteen-sixties, ran at one and seven eighth inches per second. They had to go slower because they were so short. However, the slower the recording speed the poorer the recording quality, which meant that cassettes were prone to distortion and background noise which had to be corrected by electronic sticking plaster such as the Dolby noise reduction system. But cassettes were so compact and convenient to handle that they soon supplanted reel-to-reel and the rival but troublesome tape cartridge system which emerged around the same time as cassettes.
** It
would be a shame if these recordings were lost for ever so I
have digitised them, put them on YouTube with private access (you can
only hear them if you have the URLs) and linked them below.
I'm Sorry I'll Read That Again ( ISIRTA ) 1970 Christmas Show 30th December 1970
I'm Sorry I Haven't a Clue ( ISIHAC ) Series 1 Programme 1 11th and 13th April 1972
I'm Sorry I Haven't a Clue ( ISIHAC ) Series 1 Programme 2 18th and 20th April 1972
I'm Sorry I Haven't a Clue ( ISIHAC ) Series 1 Programme 3 25th and 27th April 1972
There are problems with the Pick/Top of the Pops programmes because nearly all the music has copyright
restrictions. In any case, many items were cut short at the time of
recording, generally not very well, and one or two were even omitted in
order to fit one hour programmes on to 45 minute tapes. The sound
quality has also not lasted well. But here is a list of what there is.
Pick of the 1962 Pops presented by David Jacobs on The Light Programme, 30th December 1962 at 4.00 p.m.
Pick of the Pops 1963 (presenter unknown but it might be Don Moss) Pick of the Pops 1964 presented by Alan Freeman on The Light Programme, 20th December 1964 at 5.00 p.m.
Pick of the Pops 1965 presented by Alan Freeman on The Light Programme, 26th December 1964 at 4.00 p.m.
Top of the Pops 1966 Part 1 BBC1 26th December 1966 at 6.15 p.m.
Top of the Pops 1966 Part 2 BBC1 27th December 1966 at 6.17 p.m.
Top of the Pops 1967 Part 1 BBC1 25th December 1967 at 2.05 p.m.
Top of the Pops 1967 Part 2 BBC1 26th December 1967 at 5.25 p.m.
Top of the Pops 1968 Part 1 BBC1 25th December 1968 at 1.25 p.m.
Top of the Pops 1968 Part 2 BBC1 26th December 1968 at 6.35 p.m.
Top of the Pops 1969 Part 1 BBC1 25th December 1969 at 2.15 p.m.
Top of the Pops 1969 Part 2 BBC1 26th December 1969 at 6.20 p.m.
