The Spacehopper - 1960s Pop Culture First & Foremost... - UPDATED

The famous Mettoy space hopper first bounced into the UK in 1968...

Many thanks to Mark for this interesting e-mail:

I don't remember the 70s, but the Beeb made a groovy job of them in "The I Love 70s" progs. I'm surprised by things I read on here and on your Spacehopper blog that the spacehopper wasn't released in the 70s. You have a feature on "The Perishers" on Spacehopper and I have some old books of them with Baby Grumpling having a spacehopper around 1973.

I agree with you, Mark - the BBC DID make a groovy job of the 1970s - the only trouble was, a lot of it wasn't accurate.

The space hopper newspaper ad from 1969 on the "Space hopper" blog, and its labelling as a "Trend", indicates that the hopper was up and bouncing in Britain well before the end of the 1960s. We've since found many newspaper ads from April 1968 onwards, revealing that the space hopper was available and articles about spacehopper races from 1968 onwards - including one in Hyde Park, London, in 1968 as part of a huge charity effort.

1969 - space hopper races had been all the rage since 1968.

The BBC's I Love... series had a little tag in the opening titles informing the world that the hopper was released in 1968. But the I Love website states that the first hoppers arrived here in 1971 - or at least it did the last time I looked!

Check the date - May 1968!

The Toy Retailers Association (formerly the British Association of Toy Retailers) was listing Clackers as the "overwhelming toy mania of 1971" - until the I Love 1970s series, when the association joined the merry chorus, labelling the hopper a new arrival and "Craze of the Year" for 1971. This was done recently. The BATR had no "Craze of the Year" award in 1971. Nor any other year.

And as for Baby Grumpling - true he did get a hopper c. 1972 or 73, but Perishers writer Maurice Dodd wrote in the introduction to Omnibus No 3:

Some little time ago I introduced a space hopper, which is an inflatable toy, into the strip. That toy had been hopping around my house for about five years until, when my children had outgrown it, I gave it to my Godson. It was only when I saw him enjoying it I recognised it as a potential runner in the giggle stakes and gave one to Baby Grumpling.

So, the space hopper had been around Mr Dodd's house for about five years when he introduced one into The Perishers strip in 1972/3. Work it out.

An acquaintance of mine contributed some items to the I Love 1970s series. He was astounded that most of the researchers were too young to remember much, if any of the 70s, and suggested that, anyway, the 60s would be a better decade for the series. He was informed by one young researcher that they were too far back, and nobody remembered them!

So, instead, the researchers transplanted 60s pop culture into the 70s as new fads.

My acquaintance advised about an item lined up for the I Love The 1970s series:

"Er, I think you'll find that's 1980s pop culture. It was released in 1980."

"Too late now, it's scheduled," he was told.

So some 1980s pop culture tumbled into the 1970s black hole too. I think this had something to do with many BBC researchers' political stance. The organisation recruits largely in The Guardian newspaper, and is rather anti-80s - being the decade of Reagan and Thatcher. I'm a lefty myself, but I still have fond memories of the 1980s, an amazingly polarised time, and shifting likeable pop culture from that decade into the 1970s is simply childish and nonsensical.

I hope an image of the real 70s will emerge here on this blog, and space hoppers may well be part of it as they continued to be popular after the 60s, but the craze was really very much in its heyday from 1968 to about 1970 and the type of thing purveyed by the BBC or Toy Retailers Association about it is not accurate. As this blog is based on actual material from the 70s, the BBC stuff has no place here.

Having said that, Mark, you might find other reasons to love the 70s, not based on BBC fantasy! I hope that doesn't sound patronising. It's not meant to be.

I'm absolutely fascinated, as I wade through a mountain of magazines, newspapers and other bits and bobs, to recall my 70s childhood and to see a wider picture of the decade beginning to emerge.

Nostalgia based on accurate info is illuminating and fun!

I hope that you will enjoy the true picture.

Back In Time For The Weekend With The Ashby Hawkins - History Without Tears - Stretching A Concept...

The Ashby Hawkins family travel back to the 1970s (that looks like our lounge in the late 1960s - it's fabulous!), and do things like playing golf by candle light to show what fun power cuts were. We didn't. Nobody we knew did. This is sick! The BBC and Ma and Pa Ashby Hawkins want to hector us about how nasty modern gadgetry is when it comes to being together as a family. And, once again, the real 1970s vanishes into fiction. Heavens, isn't that Clint Eastwood in his heyday being macho man in the photograph there? Oh, no, sorry - it's only Giles Coren - old Mr "I Love Myself, Who Do You Love?" as we used to say about people like him back in the 1970s. All is well then. The show must be perfectly accurate. NOT. As we said in the 1980s. And what is that woman doing stood there with the hoover? It's the old, old story of playing the old soldier - 'POOR WOMEN!' Doesn't wash, luv. Don't tell me you didn't spend most weekday afternoons with your feet up watching 'Marked Personal'.

Back In Time For Dinner was something we enjoyed. Back In Time For Christmas was... well... OK... but Back In Time For The Weekend is stretching a thin concept until it snaps.

A middle class London family, the Ashby Hawkins, have just spent their fake 1970s doing things that nobody in my neighbourhood ever did - going camping, playing golf indoors in a power cut, having space hopper races (from 1968 onwards in reality)... um, just how prevalent were these things to your average family? And what seems "such fun" in the hi-tec 21st Century often seemed very naff and a way of simply being less bored even back in the 1970s.

1969 - space hopper races were all the rage from just after their release in early 1968. There was even a huge charity event in Hyde Park, London, featuring a children's space hopper race that year. But 'Back In Time' shifted the hopper forward in time to its fake 1970s. We realise controversies can rage (usually driven by obsessive 1970s revisionists), but this is straightforward - check any UK newspaper archive.

Roller discos? They were a 1980s UK fad, dearies. They didn't even peak in their native America until the early 1980s.

And where was the misery of rampant inflation, spiralling unemployment and industrial strife? The IRA threat, increasing hooliganism and the continuing Cold War threat?

Apparently, the programme makers gave them "such enjoyable" things to do. But that's not to say real people were doing those things - or if they were, in any great numbers - back then. It's all out of context. You cannot judge a decade on a series of bits and bobs fished up by 21st Century TV luvvies.

And all "underpinned" by some survey or other from way back.

There are lies, damned lies, and statistics.

Rob Ashby Hawkins states that many surveys have proved that the 1970s were the best time to live in. Really, Rob? Various surveys say various things, and who was answering those surveys? People who were there in the 1970s, or people brought up on early 21st Century skewed 1970s "nostalgia"? And where are those surveys?

Personally, I wouldn't swap my sh*t rough 1970s childhood and early teens for anything. But that's because they taught me what it's like to live through hard times and to appreciate the good.

And prevented me from being smug and totally 21st Century - like the Ashby Hawkins tribe.

After all, we don't even have a car or a washing machine, let alone an ipod or ipad. And because we were short on so much in the 1970s, we don't miss 'em.

Sorry, Back In Time For The Weekend, but "what a load of rubbish!" - as we so often chorused in my 1970s school playground. Next week, we get the Cold War threat with the 1980s, apparently. The decade when the Cold War ice melted good and proper. Whatever happened to the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962?

Why is the 1980s the only decade to feature news-related fears?

As for us in the 1970s, my own (thoroughly working class) family that is - do you know what our main shared activity was during that decade?

Watching the telly. In  fact, my grandmother and many older people I knew back in the 1970s said that television had killed family life, "we used to make our own amusement," they said.

But me, my parents and siblings and our friends and neighbours still spent most of our leisure hours in front of the "goggle box". When there wasn't a power cut.

And then my parents lit candles and sat and smoked fags and moaned ("I'm missing Crossroads!", etc, etc) and I sat and read. Of course, Mr and Mrs Ashby Hawkins would never light up a ciggie. Back in the real 1970s, many kids as young as ten or eleven were doing it. A taste of the real 1970s for little Ms and Master Ashby Hawkins? My goodness, what an awful thought.

However, the Ashby Hawkins apparently think the 1970s lovely.

So, send 'em back. Let 'em experience the real thing.

If only we could.

But back to telly: the theme tune to Crossroads is etched on my mind forever thanks to my childhood and early teens.

As are so many other naff TV theme tunes and advert jingles.

Thank you, 1970s.