The Bleak 1970s - But Not For MPs!

From the Sun, November 5, 1975. The Sun and the Mirror were respectively supporters of the Right (Conservative Party) and the Left (Labour Party) of the political spectrum. The old Liberal Party seemed nowhere as far as the tabloids or my family was concerned. "Tories in disguise!" was all my mother would say about them.

Here, the Sun was taking great pleasure from three facts:

1) The Labour Government had been informed by a treasury consultant that spending was out of control.

2) The National Union of Teachers had warned that there wasn't enough money to buy sufficient books for the nation's schoolchildren.

3) Spending was looking rather extravagant as far as our MPs were concerned.

Click on article for readable view.

Pan's People

Pan's People - did they borrow those hats from "Upstairs, Downstairs"?

"Phwoar" was the barely suppressed word on my stepfather's lips whenever Pan's People flitted across our TV screen. He never actually uttered the word because my mother's gimlet eyes would be fixed on him. Don't get me wrong, Pan's People weren't always "indecently dressed", but they were enough of the time for my mum's exclamation "Look at that! They might as well be naked!" to be etched on my memory.

Pan's People had been making men go "Phwoar!" since their Top Of The Pops debut back in the late 1960s.

When I was a little lad, they didn't interest me. But when I reached the age of ten or eleven I started feeling uncomfortable and embarrassed when they were on. I didn't want to be watching this sort of thing with my parents, and back then neither I nor anybody I knew had a telly in their bedroom. And we had to watch Top Of The Pops. It was the MTV/VH1 of its day! That half-an-hour per week was absolute required viewing.

Ah, you say, couldn't you have video recorded it for viewing at another time, when the terrible "olds" were out of the way? The short answer is "We should have been so lucky!" Although video technology had been around for yonks, home VCRs hadn't and they were wildly expensive - and those were hard times financially. As I'm always pointing out on here and on the '80s blogs, only 5% of UK households had a VCR in 1980!

The mid-'70s Pan's line-up included Dee Dee Wilde, Babs Lord, Ruth Pearson, Susan Menhenick and Cherry Gillespie. The choreographer was Flick Colby.

"It's very hard work being one of Pan's People," said Susan Menhenick in 1975. "A lot of people think we only work one night a week, when we do the TV show. This isn't so, of course.

It was reported in the 1976 Top Of The Pops annual that Pan's People worked a six day week.
The day after their onscreen performance, rehearsals began for the following week.

Babs Lord said: "Sunday is usually our only day off. Then we usually just flop down, almost dead, and try to catch up on some sleep."

The Sun, 5/11/1975 - the Pan's People "PHWOAR!" factor gets an innocent young lad into bother.

1975 Small Ads: 1950s Style Pencil Skirt? Man About The House Apron? Lock For The 'Phone?

From the Sunday People, 23 November, 1975. I love the telephone dial lock. Sadly, only one family had a phone in my street in 1975...

All That Glitters...

Said Paul Gadd, aka Gary Glitter, in 1975: "My appeal is something different. My appeal, I think, comes from the fact that I am the first of my type to hit the rock 'n' roll business for a long time. I'm not saying I'm the first ever....

"I got my new name after watching Rock Around The Clock on TV with a group of people. We were all joking around afterwards and recalling the days of rock 'n' rollers in the '50s. People like Billy Fury and Vince Eager. And we all started making up funny names. Someone suggested he'd like to be called Vicky Vomit, another Terry Tinsel. And I suddenly said I wanted to be Gary Glitter. Somehow, the name stuck more as a nickname. Then, when I wrote Rock 'n' Roll Parts One And Two, it was my manager Mike Leander's idea to actually change my stage name. And he said suddenly, 'That's it - you must keep that name, Gary Glitter. It sounds just right."

I never liked Gary Glitter, never liked all the gobby rantings of the early-to-mid-'70s "Glam" scene. Things were grim enough at home financially without glittery stage yobs rampant in the pop chart.

"That Glitter chap looks like a cross between Elvis Presley and Danny La Rue!" said a very forthright auntie of mine at the time. "The man's nothing but a pervert!"

We didn't know the half of it...

1975: Chuck Out Your Flares!

I find the way that the 1970s have been rewritten during the last ten-to-fifteen years very amusing. Many of the things we attributed to the '60s in the '70s and beyond are now celebrated as "'70s innovations" and the 1980s are also raided for pop culture and fashion to call "'70s".

Reliving the '70s through the newspapers of the decade brings back many memories of just how grim and stagnant the decade really was style-wise. Flared trousers, the hippie uniform of the late 1960s, had begun to enter the mainstream before that decade ended, but in the '70s, in the absence of new ideas, flares got rather stuck.

Even though I was only a kid, flares were a grim, militant uniform for me and my peer group and the same was true of teenagers on the council estate where I lived. You wore them or got picked on. There was nothing hippie or "loving" about the trend. And they lingered on and on.

'70s fashion designers did seek to shake off the outdated '60s fashions. They never quite managed it, but they did try. And in this article from the Sunday People, November 23, 1975, we see an attempt to call "time" on flares and revive drainpipe trousers:

FLARED - BOTTOMED

From now on, trousers are straight-legged, even drainpipe slim. If you have flared trousers too good to throw away, it's worth a try to narrow the bottoms and wear them rolled up to just below the calf.

Of course, people had neither the time or money to step out of flares immediately. But it's good to see from actual material of the time that the tide was turning. It is also highly instructive to those writers, Wikipedia types, TV people and fashion reviewers who try to pretend that the '60s happened in the '70s and that the '70s were a great era for fashion.

They were not. The advent of both flares and psychedelic clothing took place in the mid-to-late 1960s and the so-called Summer of Love was in 1967/68.

To all those who pretend otherwise - haven't you got lives? Is rewriting the past a good thing? Does it give your lives in the present day some sense of meaning? Does it make you feel good about yourselves? Don't you think it makes you look rather silly?

Because anybody who takes a few minutes to study the facts can see you're writing/talking a load of nonsense.

Take a look at some 1969 fashion stuff here.

International Women's Year - 1975

Looking back at the '70s from a 21st Century perspective, things like International Women's Year in 1975 are proclaimed "Wonderful, darling!" and much is made of the Women's Lib movement back in that decade.

The odd thing is that quite a lot of what happened seems to have been as a result of the 1960s and, as a nasty little schoolboy back in the 1970s, I don't recall much "hooraying" going on.

The Equal Pay and Sex Discrimination Bills seem to have been campaigned for and planned long before they became law, and those adults around me who could be bothered to mention the subject of sexual equality when I was a kid in the 1970s referred to the 1960s as the time of inspiration, battle and bra burning. The final implementation of the legislation seemed to pass without much thrill at all.

But surely International Women's Year really was a landmark? Surely this was a beautiful, nay glorious, moment in the history of the women's movement? I was ten at the time and, although horribly precocious, nose into everything, don't recall hearing anything about it. My wife, who was seventeen at the time, doesn't either!

My (very) youthful impressions of the time are backed up by a Sun newspaper article published on 3/12/1975...

Eleven months down and one to go. International Women's Year is all over, bar the shouting. But has it been anything but shouting?

Five of the Sun's women writers were asked their opinions of International Women's Year. None were impressed with it. Extracts from the views of three of them can be found below...

Hilary Bonner:

I wish the Women's Lib groups had taken action. Any kind of action.

Telling the woman in the street what her rights are.

Instead, I will remember an unhappy flock of Women's Lib groups standing on orange boxes and shouting at other Women's Lib groups.

Claire Rayner:

It was a dead duck the day it was hatched!

The very name International Women's Year made it do the opposite of what was so fondly planned.

Labelling anything as specifically for women is daft.

I'd like to suggest a better sort of year for 1976 - International People's Year.

The year when men and women will work together as well as love together. Will demand real equality for women by providing real equality for men.

We'll spend this International People's Year organising men's working hours so that they can get away early from work to collect the kids from school.

We'll use it to insist on paternity leave for every new dad, so that he can share the pleasure as well as the work of parenthood.

We'll use it to scotch for good the idea that men and women are different kinds of being, involved in an eternal and pointless war.

We'll discover we belong to the same species. And we'll start to enjoy it.

Phillipa Kennedy:

It was a nice idea, but it fizzled out before it ever got off the ground.

The trouble was that nobody knew what they were supposed to be doing about it.

As a milestone on the road to equality, it was fine - and 1976 will see the Sex Discrimination Bill become law.

We had our achievements of course. Like Maggie Thatcher and the Japanese housewife who climbed Everest.

What International Women's Year really needed was the services of a good public relations firm.

They could have organised eye-catching ads and printed leaflets with lists of aims and ideals...

As it was, only a small percentage of women were aware that it was going on. Even Princess Margaret hadn't heard about it until a few months ago.

Women aren't any better or worse off as a result of Women's Year. It left most people rather indifferent.

I couldn't get upset over it. Maybe, if I had, it would have meant something.

Fascinating.

So, International Women's Year - apparently rather more of a damp squib than many remember it today...

Amazing how rosy and distorted the past can become...

1975 - Dr Who: The Frail Tardis!

November 22, 1975, and Dr Who celebrated its 12th birthday, still going strong with Tom Baker at the helm. But if the show was in fine fettle for its age, the Tardis was not. Said producer Phillip Hinchcliffe: "The Tardis is supposed to disguise itself as some everyday object. This one disguised itself as a police box - and stuck like that. But blue police boxes are being got rid of. So I'm worried that some younger viewers will not know what it is supposed to be...

"Also, Tardis is getting very frail now. Whenever we take it to a new location, it falls to pieces. So we are having to decide whether to make a new one the same shape, or maybe find some reason for changing it."

Design a new Tardis! Could you invent a new time-travel machine to take over from the poor, battered old Tardis? asked the Sun in its Dr Who competition for 14s and under. Top prize was a "date with Dr Who at the BBC television studios in London" and a Dr Who board game from Denys Fisher Toys. 20 runners up were awarded board games.

The Dr Who production team, of course, decided to stick with tradition and the Tardis retained its familiar police box guise.

Quite right too!

1976: Fanny Cradock Comes Unstuck...

1975: "Fanny Cradock Cooks For Christmas" - seasonal fare for the cash-strapped 1970s.

1976: "The Big Time" - Fanny registers absolute disgust at the suggested menu of an amateur cook. Big Time? Big Mistake.

-

Fanny Cradock was a hugely influential pioneer of TV cookery shows, who began her on-screen career in the 1950s. With monocled husband Johnnie by her side, she taught the nation how to cook sophisticated things, lifting us out of the mood of post war austerity and into a glittering new era of fancy French cuisine.

French cookery was the be-all-and-end-all to Fanny, as it was to many at that time, and La Cradock was proud of having some French ancestry a little way back. Fanny seemed to believe that French and English were not simply different nationalities, but different races - particularly when it came to culinary skills!

She was posh and bossy, could wear wonderful finery whilst cooking without getting covered in flour, and was one of the most enjoyable TV personalities I have ever clapped eyes on. To watch Fanny and Johnnie, she the Iron Lady, he the silly dodderer, was to watch a wonderful double act. The entertainment value went way beyond the cooking.

Perhaps blue eggs do seem a bit weird now, but hey, this was the rock n’ rollin’ 50s and the free lovin’ 60s! Things were different!

By the time the 1970s had arrived, Fanny had been HUGE for years, and it seemed that she would go on forever. I loved watching her as a little kid, although when I was a tiny tot I had found her a little creepy. I think this was because her voice sounded quite male, and she wore loads of make-up.

In 1975, Fanny Cradock Cooks For Christmas showed that our culinary heroine had her finger firmly on the pulse of current economic trends, as she prepared meals like mincemeat pancakes for Christmas jollies and mentioned many times the appalling economic climate. With prices soaring, I recall my mother being grateful for Fanny’s cost-cutting approach back then.

Then, in 1976, Fanny disgraced herself. She poured scorn on a menu presented by an amateur cook on the BBC TV show The Big Time. So biting and condescending was Fanny that her career was permanently damaged. Neither the viewing public nor the BBC admired her approach, and Fanny rarely appeared on television again. In the 1980s, she could be glimpsed at times on chat shows and breakfast TV publicising various books she was writing, as spirited as ever, but her career as a TV cook was over.

Fanny Cradock died in 1994, and although she wasn’t the most lovable of TV personalities, she was certainly a trailblazer for TV cooks.

And enormously entertaining to watch.

Every year, just before Christmas, my wife and I settle down to watch Fanny Cradock Cooks For Christmas. It stirs memories of “making do” at Christmas in the 1970s, and Fanny never fails to delight us. When watching the shows, it is always hard to believe that the vibrant, colourful personality on screen is no more.

Some 1960s Fanny material here .