It's All At Your Co-op Now!

"It's all at your Co-op NOW!"

I heard that TV ad jingle (which actually began in the 1960s) so many times, it feels like part of me! This newspaper ad shows some of the brilliant bargains filling the Co-op shelves for Christmas 1973...

Things look amazingly cheap here - but don't be fooled - people earned a lot less, and decimalisation and inflation meant rapid price rises.

It really was an anxious time. My mother wore a worried frown on shopping trips, as she fumbled in her purse for enough money to cover the price increases since her last trip. With over a million unemployed, my stepfather sweated over his job security.

And belts were pulled in across the land. There were party decades and hangover decades, we were told - and, in this case, the "swinging" 60s had been the party and we were now suffering the hangover.

Good to see Ronnie Corbett in the ad here - he was my favourite of The Two Ronnies. As for the products on display, where do I begin?!

We never drank coffee. My cosmopolitan grandmother did, but my stick-in-the-mud mother didn't - she considered it "foreign" (tea isn't, of course!) and too expensive. And we were as poor as church mice, like a lot of people in the 1970s. Every penny counted.

The Sutherlands Beef Spread makes me smile. We used to have a lot of paste sandwiches when I was a kid - not Sutherlands, though - it was too "dear"!

"What's for lunch, Mum?!"

"Paste sandwiches!"

"What's for tea, Mum?!"

"Paste sandwiches!"

Remember this telly ad jingle?

"Crawfords Cheddars - round and tempting, rich and golden, cheddar cheesy, Crawfords Cheddars, more than thirty, you'll keep coming back for just one more..."

They were YUM!

Crisps were different then. Not as crisp and light, often brown or green hued, and not as delicately flavoured. And Jaffa Cakes! Right from being a tiny tot in the late 1960s, I was the Mad Jaffa Cake Eater of our household.

Funny to look back. My diet underwent a sudden change in the mid 1980s, when fancy foods and dressings suddenly loomed large at my local supermarket and there was a bit of money around, but in the 70s and early 80s we stuck to what we were used to.

And it was very nice.

Most of it.

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.

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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 .