Laramie ws an American Western television series by NBC that was shown on BBC TV from 1959 to 1963. It originally starred John Smith as Slim Sherman, Robert Fuller as Jess Harper, Hoagy Carmichael as Jonesy and Robert Crawford, Jr. as Andy Sherman. YouTube shows the credits here in colour, though of course we only ever saw them in blurry black and white…
Although Hoagy Carmichael was dropped after the first series, I never forgot having first seen him on telly as the raddled-looking Jonesy. It was astonishing to later learn that he’d been a glamorous composer earlier in the century, responsible for hits like “Stardust”, “Two Sleepy People” and in particular the superb “Georgia On My Mind”.
Starring Ty Hardin, Bronco was a US import to the BBC in the laste 50s/early 60s and had one of the more memorable theme songs of the era with its chorus about “tearing across the Texas plain”…
Unfortunately at that time the UK also had a brand of hard glossy lavatory paper with the same name. As a result, my chums and I used to think it was terribly funny to change the words of the chorus to: “Bronco… Bronco… Tearing down the dotted line”. My, how we laughed.
Bronco toilet paper – and the rival brand Izal usually found school lavatories – were f**king awful to wipe your arse with. Whoever dreamed up the idea of selling us non-absorbant toilet paper that was hard and shiny on one side – and fibrous and rough on the other- deserved to go out of business. Oh, hold on – they did.
Harry Worth’s shop window routine – from the opening credits of his TV series “Here’s Harry” – was justly famous and of course we all tried it for ourselves at the time. The uncredited theme music was Comedy Hour by Ivor Slaney. Until searching for him on YouTube this morning I’d forgotten how genuinely likeable he was. But this clip advertising a compilation DVD of his later work brought it all back…
In black and white, just like we used to watch it in 1960 – the instantly memorable Top Cat credits. In the UK the name was already being used by a popular pet food brand, so inRadio Times (and a special still placed at the end of these credits) the BBC billed this series as “The Boss Cat” in order to avoid endorsing a commercial company. Perish the thought. ..
Centre Point is another iconic London landmark and was the subject of a long-running property scandal in the the mid-1960s.
According to Wikipedia London County Council bent its own rules to allow a developer called Harry Hyams to build this unusually tall office block (32 floors) in the heart of the West End. In return Hyams agreed to provide a new road junction underneath it, which the council itself couldn’t afford to build.
With property prices rising Hyams made so much profit from it simply standing empty that he had no need to let it out as office space – and for many years the vacant building towered over the skyline as a symbol of capitalist greed. Perhaps it’s appropriate that when he did finally allow the building to be used in 1980, it became the headquarters of the Confederation Of British Industry.
For almost 20 years the building formerly known as The Post Office Tower was the tallest building not only in London but in the entire UK. It was officially opened by Prime Minister Harold Wilson in 1965 and symbolised an era when our country briefly believed its future really would be forged in “the white heat of the technological revolution”. It was also famous for its revolving restaurant, and I was surprised to learn from Wikipedia this was run by the holiday camp tycoon Billy Butlin:
“The Post Office Tower was opened to the public on 16 May 1966 by Tony Benn and Billy Butlin. As well as the communications equipment there was a rotating restaurant on the 34th floor: the “Top of the Tower” operated by Butlins. It made one revolution every 22 minutes. A Provisional IRA bomb exploded in the roof of the men’s toilets on 31 October 1971. The restaurant was closed to the public for security reasons in 1980 and public access to the building ceased in 1981.”
Back in the days when TV was young – say around 1960 – the good news was that on Saturdays the BBC started broadcasting earlier – around lunchtime.
And the bad news ? The programme they transmitted was the interminable, incomprehensible Grandstand. At age 10 I knew nothing and cared less about sport. An afternoon of horse racing in blurry black and white folllowed by endless match results and league tables was paralysingly dull.
And yet – since it was thge only thing on – I used to watch it: as the old song says, there was fuck-all else to do. The theme music brings all this grisly tedium back in an instant.
It’s called “News Scoop”, was composed by Len Stevens and used by the BBC from the show’s launch in 1958 until the early seventies.
From Dad’s diary, 31 January 1960 We now have our first television set. It cost the tremendous sum of £5 and is a second-hand Bush with a twelve inch screen. Our neighbour Mr Clitheroe, who has a radio shop, supplied it and I expect the aerial to cost as much as the set.
The thing works very well, apart from a high pitched whistle which I’m told not everyone hears – being above their audible frequencies – and which is inherent in all television sets. This last assertion of Mr Clitheroe’s I rather doubt.
Second hand sets are so cheap because in our Never-Had-It-So-Good society the latest and biggest television set is a status symbol. Also, our set does not receive the commercial programmes – and was rejected by its’ last owner on that account…
The model Dad bought was a TV24, introduced by Bush in 1953 before ITV had even been dreamed of. So it only had the one (BBC) channel in blurry low-res black and white – to see what was “on telly” you just turned it on and waited for it to warm up.
During the day they broadcast the test card (above) to help installation engineers adjust aerials and picture settings. Actual programmes only started in the afternoons – while at the end of the evening everything stopped and the screen just went dead with a whistle to remind you to turn off the set.
This photo is by Mike Bennett and comes, with grateful acknowledgement, from his TV museum website at oldtechnology.net
Bought Dr John’s debut album Gris-Gris at great expense after hearing John Peel play Walk On Gilded Splinters on the radio. Could have sworn it was late at night on his pirate radio show The Perfumed Garden, but that ended in the summer of 1967 a year before Gris-Gris was released. So much for memory.
It was impossible to make out more than a few of the lyrics amid Dr Rebennack’s lazy Southern drawl, and hard to make sense of even those. Thanks to the miracles of the internet, it’s now possible to find those lyrics in full. But even with them typed out on the page, the song’s not much easier to understand 44 years later…
“Vulgar” was Dad’s favourite adjective to describe everything he disliked about popular culture. The only music heard in our home during the first five years of my life came from Bach, nursery rhymes, or The Scottish Students Song Book (of which more another time).
Then in 1955 Dad’s fastidious cultural regime was shattered by the brash and unashamed vulgarity of Bill Haley’s Rock Around The Clock – brought into the house on a 78rpm disc by my my older brother. It stuck up two fingers at everything that Dad held dear and was followed in due course by the likes of Tommy Steele and Dave Brubeck in his son’s record collection.
But for vulgarity nothing could beat the Paddy Robberts album “Strictly For Grown-Ups” – which my brother bought as printed sheet music and quickly mastered at the piano. These were satrical folk song parodies of one kind or another. The Ballad Of Bethnal Green made fun of both contemporary youth culture and the working classes – and won an Ivor Novello Award as Best Novelty Song Of The Year. The shortest song in the album was also the nastiest:
Now when she was young she was pretty And nobody called her a cow Her face was just like a lily Take a look at the bloody thing now (“A Short Song” by Paddy Roberts)
Although Roberts later released a barrel-scraping album of playground standards called “Songs For Gay Dogs” the word was meant in the earlier sense of “fast” or “risqué”. There was nothing gay in the modern sense about Paddy – his song Lavender Cowboy poked gentle fun at both macho Western movies and effeminate gay men:
He’d round up the cattle a-ridin’ side-saddle
Because he preferred it that way… (“Lavender Cowboy” by Paddy Roberts)
I have to admit the whole family, me included, found it hilarious at the time. More about Paddy Roberts
The BBC television series Dixon Of Dock Green was adapted from an low-budget 1949 UK crime film called The Blue Lamp. The TV series was written by Ted Willis and ran from 1955 to 1976. Like the original film, it starred Jack Warner in the role of George Dixon.
As Susan Sydney-Smith writes on ScreenOnline: “Warner portrayed Dixon as the archetypal British bobby, tackling ordinary, everyday, rather than serious crime. He patrolled a world in which victims of petty theft and larceny were treated to a nice cup of tea and a ‘talk’; viewers were addressed at the beginning of each episode with his best remembered phrase, ‘Evenin’ all’, and wished farewell in homilies to camera concerning the episode just gone.”
“The fact that Warner was near retirement age in 1955 added to the sense that this series was about nostalgia rather than real life. For the next 21 years, despite the arrival of (more realistic police dramas such as) Z Cars in 1962, Dixon of Dock Green attracted audiences of over 14 million in its heyday. By the time Warner finally retired in 1976, he was over 80 years old… At his funeral in 1981 officers from paddington Green Police Station carried his coffin.”
The earliest episodes of the series apparently had a whistled version of “Maybe It’s Because I’m A Londoner” but it was quickly replaced by its own iconic tune composed by Jeff Darnell and performed by the Canadian harmonica star Tommy Reilly.
Given the show’s popularity at the time, this theme music was surprisingly hard to find online. There’s a God-awful ‘modernised’ version on YouTube dating from 1970s episodes of the programme. Worse still, Warner murdered the tune with a later cash-in single called “An Ordinary Copper” – which featured George Warner’s own toe-curling homespun lyrics.
But here’s a downloadable version of the original short TV version of the theme used in the show’s heyday:
On a train to Clapham Junction, glimpsed this view across the rooftops of Battersea that must be more or less unchanged since my childhood in the 50s and 60s. Classic British films back then such as The Lavender Hill Mob and Up The Junction made the area seem impossibly far removed from our lives in a sleepy East Anglian market town.
Z Cars was so modern and cutting edge when it started in 1963 – a stark contrast to the cosy old London bobbies in Dixon Of Dock Green. Policemen who were less than saints, had Northern accents and drove around in modern Ford Zodiacs. In many ways it was the start of TV police dramas in the UK as we know them today.
The theme music was arranged (according to Wikipedia) by Fritz Spiegl as a military march, from the traditional Liverpool folk song “Johnny Todd”. It spread across the nation like a cultural virus. Everyone could whistle it – we even sang our own stupid songs to the tune with cod-Scouse lyrics.
The names of the key actors became almost as well-known as those of their characters: Stratford Johns (Inspector Barlow), Frank Windsor (Det.Sgt Watt) plus James Ellis as Bert Lynch and Jeremy Kemp as his hatchet-faced partner in crime car Z Victor 2. What’s I’d completely fogotten though was that Fancy Smith in Z Victor 1 was played by a youthful Brian Blessed.
Pop songs from the 60s can still stir powerful nostalgia, but with most hits of the day the effect has been diluted by their long afterlife on stations like Capital Gold and Radio 2. But old TV themes have the power to take those of us who lived through the era back there in a heartbeat.
Peter was a bit of a role model for me at school around 1964-5. A couple of forms above me he had a thatch of blond hair, chelsea boots, and sang lead vocals in the school band. He was the epitome of cool.
His group stayed together after leaving school and did a mean line in James Brown, Muddy Waters and Howlin Wolf covers. I remember one packed Saturday night dance at at the local Parish Rooms when they jammed a sweaty killer version of Green Onions that lasted a good ten minutes and – in my teenage memory at least – was absolutely rivettingly brilliant.
He married his Scandinavian girlfriend in 1971 and – earlier this year – they sent me an invitation to a 60s style party celebrating their 40th wedding anniversary. I put off replying, being in two minds about a party in 1960s style for people who were actually in their own sixties. On the other hand it was deeply flattering being invited by Peter, and quite tempting to go. And then, shamefully, I forgot all about it and ended up not replying at all.
There was a curt message from Peter on the answering machine the other night asking me to call him back. When I guiltily did so he gave me the news that his wife had suffered a massive seizure at an airport and died almost instantly, just a few days short of the party. It’s a shock, a terrible shock.
It’s also a reminder that we’re at an age where this kind of stuff can happen at any time, even to our role models. And if that you don’t take the opportunity to party while you can, you may not get a second chance.
From a stunning series of black-and-white photos posted on August 14th by Voices Of East Anglia and originating from the HMV_GetCloser account on Flickr. As for Voices Of East Anglia, it’s such a perfect blog for anoyone feeling their age, it’s going to need a whole post of its own to explain why… watch this space
