The new BBC-2 was slow to spread across the country, and people were slower still to buy the new 625-line sets and put up the new UHF aerials required to receive it.

Even if you were in a good reception area for your standard VHF television pictures, the results on BBC-2 were often disappointing; on top of that, early adopters of monochrome 625-line sets soon found themselves with redundant technology when colour programmes started being transmitted by the new channel.

Finally, just to really stink the viewers off, BBC-1 endlessly promoted what was on BBC-2 that evening, next week or now, giving us glimpses of the occasional brilliant show that we couldn’t receive even if we wanted to.

BBC-2, all in all, was not a popular innovation.

And then, in 1967, came The Forsyte Saga. A lavish production, adapted from five pieces of early 20th century writing by John Galsworthy into 26 parts shown every Saturday evening for six months, the last black and white drama serial to be made by the BBC.

Suddenly, everybody wanted – needed – BBC-2. People who already had 625-line sets could profitably invite others without to watch with wine and nibbles, oiling the social wheels. Television rental shops found that – at last! – people were seeking to upgrade to 625-line after years of resistance. The public view of BBC-2 turned from an annoyance to an accepted part of the British media landscape.

And then the series got a repeat on BBC-1, this time on Sunday evenings and now to a mass audience. And 18 million of us tuned in to follow the ups and downs of the upper middle classes either side of the first world war.

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In our modern, foodie world where there are several television networks devoted to cooking and the most watched non-soap on regular television is a baking competition, it’s easy to laugh at Dream Topping.

But in the 1960s, many of us didn’t have a fridge, so keeping cream cold – and therefore not allowing it to go off – was difficult. Fresh cream was expensive – most dairy products, other than heavily subsidised milk, were expensive before we joined the EEC – and even middle class families couldn’t justify the spend on something so ephemeral. And whipping cream, although it existed, was a nightmare to use as mother had to either spend ages beating it to get it to rise or put it in the Kenwood Chef, where a moment’s inattention meant you suddenly had expensive sweet butter.

Bird’s Dream Topping took all these problems away. Being shelf-stable, it could sit in the larder or pantry effectively for ever, pulled out to add a bit of excitement to tinned peaches or a fruit salad. It was cheap, compared to fresh cream, so middle class households could have it always available and poorer households had it within reach for birthdays and special occasions. And it didn’t take all that much whisking – still a chore, but much less than with whipping cream and much easier to shove in the Kenwood and get on with opening the tinned fruit.

So don’t laugh at Dream Topping: it served an important purpose!

The post Dream Topping appeared first on THIS IS MY 1960s from Transdiffusion.

In the 1960s, we all went out and got colour television sets.

Except, of course, we didn’t. Colour sets were expensive, and until midway through November 1969, the only colour programmes were on BBC-2 and they were mostly very dull, if you could get BBC-2 where you were – something by no means guaranteed.

Even BBC-2 had only slowly been introducing colour, with a full-colour service not appearing until December 1967, well over a year since the first programmes began to be marked “COLOUR” in the Radio Times.

In November 1969, colour came to Thames/LWT, ATV, Granada and Yorkshire, plus BBC-1 in those regions. It would slowly spread across the country, with the Channel Islands being the last to get colour in 1976 and the old VHF 405-line black and white service not being switched off until 1983.

Sales of colour licences – double the cost of a black and white licence at first – didn’t overtake black and white licences nationally until 1977.

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Throughout the 1950s and 1960s, the British adored variety programmes. And the top variety programme was Val Parnell’s Sunday Night at the London Palladium. It was also probably one of the longest titles in British television.

The Palladium show’s presenters – Tommy Trinder, Bruce Forsyth, Norman Vaughan, Jimmy Tarbuck – became fully fledged stars for compering the programme, with its mix of showbiz acts, audience participation games, popular music and leggy dancers. The queue to guest-star on the show was long, with ATV having the pick of the world’s top talent to choose from every week.

It helped that ATV itself was showbusiness, thanks to businesses its management came from. Val Parnell, the titular head of the Palladium show, was ATV’s managing director and was also in charge of the Moss Empires music halls, theatres and variety circuit. He knew the management of everybody who was anybody. If there was any manager he didn’t know, Bernard Delfont knew them. Delfont’s brother was Lew Grade, deputy managing director (until promotion in 1962) at ATV, and a theatrical agent: he was the management of everybody who was anybody. If he didn’t manage a star, his other brother Leslie did. Even the music at ATV (and today’s Sony-ATV Music is the last gasp of the old ATV empire) was under the management of Val Parnell’s nephew Jack, who also knew everybody in the business.

An appearance on the Palladium was a guarantee of further bookings and a rise up the billing on the circuit. If a “nobody” appeared, they were likely to be signed up by The Grade Organisation and become a “somebody” in pretty quick time. Such was the size of the of this almost incestuous system – ATV, ITC, Moss Empires, Grade Organisation, Delfont Organisation, later even EMI – that the people involved had trouble keeping up.

A, possibly apocryphal, story attaches to Lew Grade. Watching an unknown act on stage, he decided that while they weren’t top-flight, they were not untalented and with the right promotion could go places. When the act ended, he rushed round to meet them. “Your act! It’s great! I’d like to represent you – your current agent is wasting you in a theatre like this!”. “Thanks! We agree,” replied the talent, “and we’re looking to change to someone better!”. “Great!”, said Grade, “I’ll sign you up now and sort your agent out with a finder’s fee. Who is he?”. The act beamed back at him: “Lew Grade!”.

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1960s parents had lived through World War II, rationing and austerity. They didn’t like waste, they didn’t like things to be disposable rather than reusable, and they knew the difference between “empty calories” and “growth foods” – as shown in the heavy, stodgy meals they served and ate.

Convenience foods started to arrive in the 1960s and, as housewives got busier they started to become more attractive. But the rationing mentality still held. The food might be convenient, but if it doesn’t help you grow, if it doesn’t leave you feeling full, then it’s a waste of money.

The advertising agencies pushing convenience foods like packet soups, Vesta curries and frozen burgers decided to stress in their advertising just how nourishing the food was. How full of goodness. How filling or warming or cooling or good for you. No food advert for anything we would now think of as fatty or junk food was complete without at least one keyword making sure that the housewife felt less guilty for just adding hot water.

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Barbara Castle was Harold Wilson’s Minister of Transport and was one of the most effective people to ever hold that position. She wrote off British Rail’s huge debt, sent Dr Beeching packing back to ICI, introduced procedures to make another Beeching Report almost impossible, and established the first Passenger Transport Executives, lowering the cost of travel for millions of working people in the main cities.

She also introduced the Road Traffic Act 1967 that made being drunk in charge of a vehicle not only a crime but also, as time passed, a social issue, where offenders found themselves ostracised by friends and fired by their bosses for such disgusting behaviour.

But at the time the breathalyser was introduced, Castle became a hate figure. She didn’t drive, not unusual for women at the time, but that was seen as a reason she should keep her nose out of the affairs of drivers. Her response was quick and obvious: she was a pedestrian and thus far more likely to be killed by a drunk driver than the driver himself was. Hit by a car, she would die. He would most likely walk away with a ‘slap on the wrist’ conviction for dangerous driving – a small fine, a few penalty points, the trouble of having to buy a new car.

Behind this anti-Castle attitude from drivers was another thing: she was a woman. How dare a woman tell men what to do? How dare she have an opinion on a mostly-male pursuit? Had she even asked her husband for his opinion? Shouldn’t he tell her not to be so stupid, to sit down and shut up?

Barbara Castle was many things, and “unintimidatable” is probably at the top of the list. Because of her work here, over 35,000 have not died in car accidents since 1967. Because of her work, perhaps over a million people have avoided life-changing injuries at the hands – wheels – of a drunk driver. Today you’re more likely than ever to arrive alive, and it’s thanks to Barbara Castle.

Archive source: http://ads.retropia.co.uk/

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The first packages were coach tours, pioneered by Arrowsmith Holidays of Liverpool in the late 1940s. You would make your own way to a central point in a city, board a coach and be driven to a ferry, cross to Ireland or to Ostend, stay for the weekend in a modest hotel, get picked up by the coach, driven back to the ferry, cross the sea and find yourself back at the central point, ready to make your own way home.

For thousands of people, this was the first taste of travel abroad. What Harry Bowden-Smith of Arrowsmith (the name is a pun) thought was that he could replace the coach and ferry part with an aeroplane trip of about the same length – and for about the same price. That way he could take people further, to Spain and Portugal, for instance, where even then there was a surfeit of cheap hotels.

He aimed this squarely at northerners, whose only experience of going abroad had been on his coaches to Ireland and Belgium or, more likely, fighting in North Africa and across France and Germany in the 1940s. He advertised to families who usually went to Blackpool or Morecambe for a week in August with an offer of a trip that took about the same time as the coach or the train and cost about the same price as a refined guesthouse in Cleveleys.

Crucially, he made the decision easier for these new international travellers by importing food vans to the Costas his clients were staying in, ensuring that the British terror of “foreign food” like rice and spices was placated by a ready and permanent supply of egg, chips and ice cream.

Thus the standard British holiday was changed forever, mostly by staying the same.

Archive source: http://fly.retropia.co.uk/

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Television plays had first appeared with television itself in the 1930s. At first they were stagey, hammy farces and drawing room comedies, designed to appeal to the middle classes that made up the audience for the new medium. When ITV started in 1955, not much had changed – plays for television were multi-camera, studio-bound and had small casts. In 1956, the new ITV company for the midlands and north on weekends, ABC, had started a strand it called Armchair Theatre. The plays were still small cast, studio-bound and usually adaptations of relatively conservative stage plays.

But the management at ABC spotted something: when they showed a play that was a bit more avant garde or intended to challenge the viewer’s opinions or lifestyle, viewing figures went up. Against the conventional wisdom, it seemed that people in the late 1950s liked having television that took them on full in the face.

Armchair Theatre was soon switched from being a family affair into being a contemporary discussion of modern life. New plays were commissioned and a vogue for “kitchen sink drama”, families falling apart or failing at what was expected of them, children breaking out of society’s straitjacket, women refusing to take the word of men as the word of law, gripped the nation.

The trend spread to other ITV companies – Granada and Rediffusion both putting out plays by new writers – and eventually to the BBC. With a popular clamour for one-off plays on television, these programmes weren’t confined to the off-hours or, from 1964, the new BBC-2. They were put in peak viewing time on the popular channels – ABC’s Armchair Theatre on Saturday evenings on ITV, The Wednesday Play and its successor Play for Today also at around 9pm on weekdays on BBC-1.

The plays started to push subject matter further as the 1960s progressed. Abortion (Up The Junction, BBC-1, 1965), sexual assault (A Night Out, ABC, 1960), sex (The Lover, Associated-Rediffusion, 1963), the casting couch (Afternoon of a Nymph, ABC, 1962), capital punishment (3 Clear Sundays, BBC-1, 1965) and “the colour problem” (Fable, BBC-1, 1965) all appeared to challenge the views of the viewers – often heralding real change in their attitudes and opinions.

Into this mix came Cathy Come Home. For its time, the structure of the play is very unusual. It is shot by Ken Loach more like a Panorama or World in Action feature than a play, blurring the lines between documentary and drama. While tightly written and not improvised, Carol White and Ray Brooks play their parts with a startling naivety, looking and sounding for all the world like real people in a real situation. Additionally, the play was shot on film and so covered a longer period of time than usual studio plays, and gained a realism that video (or, ironically, live performance) didn’t quite provide.

The 1960s were a time when television was seen as disposable. For most of its history, it hadn’t been possible to record television’s output. When it did become possible, the cost of the tapes were so high that reuse was the only way to keep within a budget. For film, and when the cost of tapes fell, storage was an issue. Why keep something that most people had seen when doing so cost money and the audience preferred a poorer new production to a brilliant one they had seen before?

Cathy Come Home, however, was kept. Not only kept, but repeated by the BBC several times. In the Radio Times clipping above, the play is getting its first run out since its début and warrants a mention on the magazine cover as well as most of an inside page – most unusual.

But then the effect of the play was unusual too. A fortnight after it first aired, and largely by coincidence, the homelessness charity Shelter was launched – a very successful launch with the play still burnt into the minds of its 12 million viewers. A year later, and entirely because of Cathy Come Home‘s effect, the charity Crisis launched, again with a mandate to fight homelessness. The problem of homelessness came very much to the fore of British society’s conscience in the years after Cathy, with the launch of a further housing charity, Centrepoint, and the 1974 two-day takeover of the similarly named (and long empty) office building Centre Point in central London by the capital’s homeless.

The government of the day also reacted to Cathy, first with the ill-fated 1967 Housing Subsidies Act then the 1969 Housing Act – both heavily influenced by the play. At the same time, the policy of splitting families apart – wives from husbands, parents from children – when people became homeless was stopped: the play highlighted that this was more an act of punishment similar to the hated pre-welfare state workhouses than an attempt to help those without a home, and the public swung against such barbaric practices.

Much of the work done in the aftermath of Cathy Come Home was undone by the free market policies of the 1980s and by society forgetting the impact of the play and turning back to blaming the homeless for their plight. Homelessness for families and individuals is again a big problem in the United Kingdom and we face a housing shortage not seen since Cathy Come Home convinced a government that building more houses – quickly and for a low price – was something that a civilised society needed.

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Probably the most popular hobby of the 1950s, stamp collecting was still a huge pastime for children and young adults of the 1960s, helped by the wave of former colonies gaining independence and starting to issue new ranges of stamps in new currencies under new names.

A popular sub-hobby was collecting First Day Covers, envelopes with brand new stamps that had been postmarked on the day of issue – so popular in fact that the market to this day remains flooded with them: people rediscover a 1960s First Day Cover the collected 50 years ago and assume it is valuable. It almost never is.

Source: http://stamps.retropia.co.uk/

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For the department of “forgotten products”: Rowntree’s Tokens. They were launched amidst a big fanfare in 1963 and disappeared off shelves in 1964 – a lifetime of under a year. Clearly the idea of a wealth of centres – 14! – but advertising them as all being just chocolatey with little differentiation wasn’t enough to drag people away from Cadbury’s Roses or Rowntree’s own Dairy Box.

Clip source: http://ads.retropia.co.uk/

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