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.
What a treat on BBC Four television this weekend when Keith Richards’ “pirate broadcast” took over the channel from dusk to dawn for three nights, replacing the usual schedule with his own selection from the past, such as Tony Hancock’s Twelve Angry Men, Captain Pugwash, and Hitchcock’s 1935 version of The Thirty Nine Steps, all billed as Keith Richards’ Lost Weekend. I didn’t stay up all night with Keef but the bits I did see were great.
One particular clip had me in hysterics: Spike Milligan’s Raspberry Song from 1977. I’d never
seen it before.* I squirmed in agony until my family decided it had to
be switched off – “before he wets himself” was the phrase used.
They turned over to the other channel for Would I Lie To You in which two teams of metropolitan smart alecs compete to make viewers feel witty
and sophisticated. Next to Milligan they are no different from any of those pompous,
pedestrian panellists of the past, like
Frank Muir, Robert Robertson and Robin Ray. Raspberries to them all.
It’s like something out of That’s Life – a 1973-1994 BBC Television magazine-style consumer affairs and entertainment programme presented by Esther Rantzen and a panel of male co-presenters. During its Sunday evening run in the mid nineteen-seventies it made for a relaxing and usually mindless end to the weekend. Among the serious and often worthwhile consumer rights campaigns, the show contained numerous items that were just plain silly: there were “Odd Odes”; stooges would burst into song in supermarkets; there was a dog that could growl the word “sausages”; and viewers would send in unusually shaped vegetables such as intertwined carrots, teddy-bear shaped potatoes and parsnips that looked like legs with male genitalia.
Well here Esther, around forty years too late, is my contribution – a courgette that looks like a duck. Pareidolia.
It was hiding in the vegetable patch. It must have twisted round to grow against its stalk. Concealed beneath the leaves at the back of the plant, it surreptitiously became this three and three-quarter pound (1700g) monster.
All the palaver of pre-digital photography: it seems as much of the past as typewriters and tape recorders – the business of loading the camera, rewinding, posting off the film, waiting for the prints or slides to come back hoping they will ‘come out’ all right, rationing your few remaining shots to avoid having to buy a new film, ordering extra copies for Grandma, and cluttering up drawers with boxes of colour slides, photograph albums and packets of negatives, and lofts with the slide projector, carousels and the glass-beaded screen.
And then there were those of us who took things a stage further: home processing. For that you needed another whole cupboard-full of esoteric paraphernalia.
It was Terry Hardy across the road who got me started. His dad developed his own photographs and had given him a packet of out of date contact papers. They darkened in light, so objects such as leaves or your fingers would leave a white silhouette. You could even print crude photographs from negatives in the same way. The problem was that the contact papers would continue to darken until they were completely black all over. Your silhouette or image lasted only five minutes at most.
Well, one thing led to another, and before long I was making proper prints from negatives. I turned the yellow shed into a dark room, got a device a bit like a flatbed scanner for exposing photographic paper and negatives to light for just a few seconds, and began to spend my pocket money at the local chemists on packets of contact papers and bottles of photographic chemicals: developer to bring out the images and fixer to make the prints light-proof.
With the idea of taking photographs of London, we went down on the train
to stay with Terry’s grandma in Hounslow for a few days, where
turboprop aeroplanes rumbled low overhead smelling of paraffin, and we
had to be up early so her night-shift lodger could use the same bed. We
freely roamed the Underground on our Rail Rovers (would you let two fourteen year-olds do this now?), went to the Science Museum,
saw the Houses of Parliament and The Monument, howled with laughter at The Road to Hong Kong
in which Bob Hope and Bing Crosby get fired into space in a capsule
designed for monkeys, and got free tickets for the live Friday lunchtime
broadcast of The Joe Loss Pop Show with guests The
Barron Knights and regular singer Ross McManus – Elvis
Costello’s dad. Actually it was a bit disappointing to find the guests
were only The Barron Knights whose act basically consisted of making fun
of other groups. A few weeks earlier they’d had The Rolling
Stones and The Searchers.
London Airport, 1964 (renamed Heathrow in 1966)
I took my new Kodak Brownie Starmite camera (12 images of 4x4 cm on rolls of 46mm 127 sized film), but none of the photographs were any good except for one of London Airport (not yet called Heathrow): the last frame on a colour film left over from our family holidays.
I used the Brownie camera for the next ten years but always with black and white film because colour was so expensive. I could occasionally afford the flash bulbs though: disposable one-use plastic coated bulbs filled with magnesium and oxygen, sparked off by a battery. They melted when fired, leaving ash-filled knobbly glass inside the protective plastic coating.
Black and white film was easy to develop at home if you had a
light-proof
developing tank, and one conveniently materialised at Christmas. The most
difficult
part was getting the film into the tank. You had to separate it from its
light-proof backing paper and feed it into a plastic spiral which went
inside the tank, but you had to do it completely in the dark. The
yellow shed was just about dark enough for contact printing – you could
do that in the dim orange glow from the contact printer – but film was ultra-sensitive and had to
be handled in pitch-black. You had to wait for night time, and then found yourself with head and arms beneath
thick bedclothes, trying not to breathe on the film, getting hotter and
hotter and gasping for oxygen. You really had to get a move on.
Once the film was safely in the tank the lid stayed on and you could work in daylight. It was essentially the same process as developing contact prints. You filled the tank with Johnson Universal Developer for a fixed amount of time, emptied it and replaced the developer with Johnson Acid Hypo Fixer for around a further thirty minutes, rinsed everything thoroughly with lukewarm water, took the film out of the tank and just like in Blow Up hung it to dry weighted by a bulldog clip to prevent curling. After that the negative images on the developed film could be contact printed.
It was always exciting to take the shimmering wet film out of the tank to see the dark negatives for the first time and try to make sense of what they were. You could easily have forgotten because the earlier images on the film would often be several months old. When you then printed the photographs it was fascinating to watch the images emerge under the surface of the developing fluid, trying in the dim light to judge when they were ready.
I was never more than an occasional snapshot photographer, but my uncle gave me his old enlarger for making prints bigger than the negatives and I avidly watched the BBC series Better Photography on Saturday mornings through the autumn of 1965. The Brownie Starmite was superseded by a Zenith E, a fairly basic Russian-made 35mm single lens reflex camera for which I bought extra lenses, an electronic flash gun and extension tubes for close-ups. I later tried the much more complex process of colour developing and
printing but tended to have difficulty with the colour balance (see Colours I see with). Eventually I moved on to colour slides, and home processing came to an end.
Now, of course, everything is digital and so another of those experiential manual skills has been lost to the electronic world: the exercise of judgement, the physical manipulation of the materials, the strange saliva-inducing smell of the chemicals, the satisfying darkroom perfectionism ... all gone! Instead we compile our digital albums, Photoshop our images, blog about what fun things used to be and exercise our vainglorious self-expression in all kinds of other undemanding, pretentious, posey ways.
- Maurice Fisher’s web site Photographic Memorabilia is a real treasure trove of images and information about photographic film processing and equipment.
- The images of the Kodak Brownie Starmite camera and AG1 flash bulb are by Adamantios and Gotanero on Wikimedia Creative Commons. The image of the Paterson contact printer is in the Paterson developing tank instruction booklet. Inclusion of the cover of Better Photography is believed to be fair use. The other images are my own. - My developing tank was a Paterson Major II but strangely, as shown in the photograph, the instruction booklet supplied was for the earlier Universal II model. The difference was not significant.
Now there’s a title to increase the hit rate! I had better say up front that this is about ‘X’ certificate films I saw before I was eighteen. Apologies if you were searching for something else, but please stay: at least then you won’t be looking at things you shouldn’t – unlike I thought I was when I saw What’s New Pussycat?, Alfie and Here We Go Round The Mulberry Bush.
It would once have impressed my son:
“Did you see any ‘X’ films before you were eighteen?”
“Yeah, loads!”
“Can I go see one?”
In fact, if my memory is correct, I saw just these three ‘X’ films while still at school. It was a big deal: a coming of age thing; something to brag about. It is interesting to look back to see what all the fuss was about. Not much is the short answer.
It would have been late 1965 or early 1966 when, barely sixteen, and propped up by the company of four or five mates, I plucked up the courage to go up to the box-office to buy a ticket for What’s New Pussycat? The fact it was ‘X’ rated was more important than the actual film. One of us was not even sure what we had paid to see. He thought we were there for Tom Jones who of course sang the theme tune. We laughed at that more than the interminably dull and irrelevant film.
It is said that Woody Allen’s original script was hijacked by Peter Sellers for his own glorification with the result that even Peter O’Toole and a cast of delectable actresses were unable to redeem things. If you are amused by characters with silly names and the occasional weak joke (e.g. the Goon Show past its heyday), then you might find it funny. None of us did.
“Lascivious adulterer,” accuses the wife of demented psychoanalyst Dr. Fritz Fassbender.
“Don’t call me that until I’ve looked it up,” replies Peter Sellers, overdoing the mock Austrian accent.
Why it was given an ‘X’ certificate is hard to see. I suppose that as a farce laced with with sexual innuendo (“Satire, slapstick and sex ... swinging sixties style!”) it had to be, but it was very tame by today’s standards, and more ‘beatnik fifties’ than ‘swinging sixties’. Even the word ‘square’ was square to us.
Some months later we went to see Alfie, a classier film with a deeper philosophy, fascinating to watch again now, but just as hard to like as it was then. I suspect we found Michael Caine’s philandering and thoroughly objectionable character, Alfie Elkins, too self-assured and sophisticated to relate to. He wore smart suits, blazers, shirts and ties, and inhabited a world where people were bus conductors, chauffeurs, lorry drivers and brewery workers: not the kind of life we aspired to. I remember Alfie’s monologues to camera, and the stylish background jazz track, but not too much of the plot or other characters.
Were we supposed to cultivate his misogynistic attitude in ourselves?
I find I'm quite willing to overlook the odd blemish in a woman, provided she’s got something to make up for it. Well, that’s what we’re all here for, innit - to help each other out in this life.
Alfie’s ‘X’ certificate was undoubtedly justified due to scenes of extra-marital sex and abortion, even though they were implied rather than explicit. Again, the period was pre-Beatles, early nineteen-sixties. Not what we wanted to see.
It almost put me off the cinema completely until around another year passed and along came an ‘X’ rated film that was actually enjoyable. In Here We Go Round The Mulberry Bush, Barry Evans played a likeable sixth former unable to concentrate on his ‘A’ Levels in face of distractions from some of Britain’s trendiest and most fanciable young actresses. Now that was more like it: the permissive Sixties. At last a film about us, or at least how we liked to think of ourselves.
Evans, with his good-looking boyish face, infectious smile and just the right degree of gullible innocence, was perfect in the leading role, but there was scant storyline and some awful fantasy sequences. Watching again now, I persevered to the end (admittedly in chunks), and the longer you watch, the more you want to travel back in time to re-experience the joy and optimism of the nineteen-sixties: at least for a brief visit. It is reassuring that a writer of Hunter Davies’s calibre can be responsible for such mindless claptrap. Maybe the book, set in Carlisle, is better than the film made in Stevenage.
I can see why we thought it the height of groovy at the time. It was exactly how we imagined the swinging sixties to be, even though it took another decade for our small Yorkshire town to catch up. The music track, mainly from Traffic and the Spencer Davis Group, was spot on. The ‘X’ certificate seems to be down to what was then considered strong language (Denholme Elliott gets “pissed”), the focus on sex with suggestions of promiscuity, and outrageous nudity when Barry Evans goes skinny dipping with lovely Judy Geeson.
Only a couple of things stayed with me from the film. One is when Barry Evans toasts the Queen with a cup of eye lotion. The other is the film’s most profound philosophical reflection:
The ones you fancy don’t fancy you, and the ones that fancy you, you don’t fancy.
I wish though that I had paid more attention to the ending: that despite all the parties and revelling, these sixth formers still did enough work to get into Manchester University.
After Mulberry Bush, most of the cast became film and television regulars (e.g. Diane Keen, Adrienne Posta, Christopher Timothy, Nicky Henson, George Layton). Many of them turned up in one rôle or another in the Doctor series based loosely on Richard Gordon’s books. Barry Evans became the callow medical student Michael Upton in Doctor In The House, then a newly qualified doctor in Doctor at Large and later an evening class tutor in Mind Your Language. Sadly, he died in mysterious circumstances in 1997 at the early age of 53.
I could watch episode after episode of the Doctor series, most of which are on YouTube.The five programmes from the 1971 series of Doctor at Large written by Graeme Garden and Bill Oddie are hilarious. They feature Arthur Lowe as Dr. Maxwell, the drop-dead-gorgeous Madeline Smith as his daughter and a set of patients played by an accomplished troupe of British character actors. I was helpless with laughter at the idiotically surreal episode Congratulations it's a Toad, which harks back to the days when toads were used in pregnancy testing. The ‘Tadpoles in the Ice Cubes’ sequence (from 19:15 for approx. 5 minutes) is a master class in comedy acting from Arthur Lowe and Fulton Mackay.
Two similar ‘X’ films I might have liked around this time were Georgie Girl and Blowup. I saw neither until much later.
What’s New Pussycat, Alfie and Here We Go Round The Mulberry Bush are now all ‘15’ certificates on DVD. But in finding this I also realise that their certificates have hardly changed from when I first saw them myself. I am dismayed to discover that until 1970 it was perfectly legal to watch ‘X’ certificate films at the age of sixteen. In other words I did not see any ‘X’ films under age at all. Just don’t tell my son.
The inclusion above of the promotional poster images is understood to be fair use. The links to the trailers for What’s New Pussycat and Alfie, and to the whole of Here We Go Round The Mulberry Bush and the Doctor at Large episode on YouTube may not work indefinitely if the copyright owners block them. At the time of writing you can also find the whole of Alfie on YouTube in several parts.
When my son was about eight, he wanted to know what was the scariest film I had ever seen.
“Well,” I said, “there are quite a few, but one of them is so scary that even its name is too frightening to say.”
No eight year-old would let me off that easily, and when it became obvious he was not going to give up I said that I would only tell him when he was eighteen. For now, all I was prepared to say was that it began with an ‘e’. “The rest is too terrifying to think about,” I repeated.
“Excalibur” he said without hesitation, trying to guess.
“I don’t think there is such a ....”
“Yes there is,” he said, “what about The Executioner?”
“Even if it was I wouldn’t tell you,” I said after again having been corrected about the existence of such a film.
“Excrement,” he guessed. I really doubted that one, but not wanting to risk being found ignorant a third time I simply repeated what I’d said already.
This continued on and off for the next few weeks, with him trying out the names of various films, or anything he imagined might be the name of a film, beginning with ‘e’, and me continuing to repeat I was not going to tell him until he was eighteen.
“Ectoplasm?”
“I’m not saying.”
“The Epidermis?”
“I’m not saying.”
“Endoscopy?”
Wherever did he learn these words?
“The Exorcist,” he said one day, eyes bright in triumph.
“Look, I’ve already said, I’m not going to ...”
“Oh! For goodness’ sake,” my wife said, “just tell him and then we can put an end to this stupid game. Otherwise we’ll have all gone mad long before he’s eighteen, assuming we’ve not strangled you first.”
“It’s too frightening to think about,” I persisted lamely, “even the title.”
It must have been around April, 1974, that I first saw ‘The Exorcist’ at the ABC Cinema in Leeds, soon after its U.K. release. Masses wanted to see the most talked about film of the year, and Leeds audiences were swelled by swarms of Bradfordians whose local council had banned it.* Three of us from the rented house we shared, myself, Nick and Brendan, joined the queue that stretched along Vicar Lane, creeping slowly forwards. A clergyman and a couple of helpers walked up and down handing out leaflets, trying to persuade us that the film was the work of the devil. I saw no one leave the queue. Upon reaching the door we were told “Sorry there’s only one seat left, and it’s the last one”. Nick and Brendan pushed me forward and went off to the pub trying to hide their relief. I nervously went inside to see the film on my own.
I have never been so petrified in all my life. I sat in the dark clutching the arm rests, flesh creeping, my face twisted into a rictus grimace, involuntary tears streaming from my eyes. It is the quality of the sound as much as the images that makes cinema so powerful, and they had the volume right up, especially as the nauseating voice of the ancient demon Pazuzu rasped from the throat of Regan, the twelve year old girl possessed by his spirit.
Nick and Brendan saw it fairly soon afterwards, and a few weeks later we decided to see it again. The second time the cinema was three quarters empty. A few rows in front of us, on her own, was an old witch of a woman rustling a big bag of popcorn, cackling loudly at just about everything she saw and heard.
“Whoa! What a shot!” she shrieked as Regan’s vomit blasted Father Damien Karras, the exorcist, in the face, lodging behind his spectacles like a clump of green pus. “Bet you can’t go round again,” she squealed after Regan’s head had spun full circle, cracking and crunching the neck. And she just snorted hysterically when the demon told Karras how his mother spent her time in hell.
It put the film in an entirely different light. For the next few weeks our house grated to the sound of Exorcist impersonations. Loud rasping shouts of “Karras, Karras,” scraped like sandpaper from room to room as Brendan raucously yelled “your mother cooks socks in hell” all the way down the stairs from his attic bedroom. It is a good job the walls of our terraced house were thick enough to avoid disturbing the neighbours. It was very rare to hear any sound from them at all.
It truly was a shocking film, but it also has hilarious aspects some will always refuse to acknowledge. In Miami, Father Mark Karras, an Orthodox priest who had conducted exorcisms for real, sued the creators of the book and film, alleging they had based the story on him, having fictionalised his name, personality and professional life. He claimed that some characteristics of the film were so offensive he had been exposed to public humiliation, embarrassment, scorn and obloquy. William Peter Blatty, the book’s author, was forced to testify that he had never previously met nor heard of him.**
And then there were the town councillors and eccentric individuals who wanted the film banned, such as the outspoken Dr. Rhodes Boyson, a Conservative Member of Parliament with unruly mutton-chops and a pantomime Lancashire accent (all Lancashire accents are pantomime to Yorkshire ears), who had previously been a headmaster. Indeed, in a large number of towns, including Bradford, the film was banned, resulting in ‘Exorcist Bus Trips’ taking groups of people to neighbouring towns where it was showing. Later, the video version was not officially cleared for sale in the U.K. until 1999.
But my favourite proscriber has to be the Tunisian government who banned the film on the ground that it presented “unjustified” propaganda in favour of Christianity.*** I wonder what their idea of anti-Christian propaganda might be.
***
In the end I did hold out without revealing the film’s name until my son was eighteen, in spite of his repeated assertion “It’s The Exorcist, isn’t it?” and my refusal either to confirm or deny it.
“Only someone with an autistic spectrum disorder could be so obstinate,” my wife kept complaining. I know they secretly think I’ve got Asperger’s Syndrome, and I also know they must be wrong, because if I did have Asperger’s Syndrome, I would find it difficult to empathise with people, and I wouldn’t know what they were thinking, would I?
Shortly after conceding that my son had been right all along, the film was shown very late one night on television, and I videotaped it.
“Don’t you dare watch that while I’m in the house,” my wife said. I doubted I dared watch it while she wasn’t. Eventually, one morning when alone, I found the courage to put it on. I could only bear it for ten minutes before I had to turn it off due to boredom.
* It was rather inconsistent of the two city councils because two years earlier we had to go to the Bradford Odeon to see ‘A Clockwork Orange’ which had been banned in Leeds.
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.
