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.
On first moving to London in mid 1973 I ended up living in digs in Clapham – ie a rented room in my landlady’s house. Work was a clerical job in St Martin’s Lane that invloved a daily commute by tube to Leicester Square from Clapham Common station – where in due course I made the happy discovery that you could buy Gay News from a newsstand outside the entrance.
It took a bit of courage to buy my first copy, but the world didn’t cave in: nobody pointed, insulted me or sneered. Gay News was a pioneering publication of its day, quite unlike today’s gay glossies with their graphic ads for chatlines, escorts and porn. It was printed and presented as a serious community newspaper, and its driving philosophy was openness and visibility. A whole book will no doubt written one day on the subject of GN and its importance to the LGBT community in seventies Britain.
I took to buying it every fortnight and reading it ostentatiously on crowded tube trains on my way in to work. On one occasion I became aware of the presence behind me of a classic City Gent, as we used to call them – pinstripe, moustache, umbrella, briefcase, the works. He was obviously building up to speaking, with little harrumphing throat-clearing noises as he shifted into position to address me directly. Finally, he coughed and said, “Ahem, the fortnights just seem to fly by, don’t they?” [More]
