If anybody else is similarly hooked I can recommend Sanbrook’s book State of Emergency which covers 1970-1974 and also Andy Beckett’s book When the Lights Go Out. There is obviously an overlap in timescales and material but the two books co9mplement each other very well. Both are hefty books: the Beckett one is about 570 pages and the Sandbrook one about 750 pages. Being a bigger book about a shorter period, the Sandbrook one is more detailed and has room to cover a lot more popular culture but the Beckett one gives you a better overview of the whole decade.

So far the TV show has been about 10% politics and 90% popular culture, fashion, sociology and everything else. The book is more balanced with more politics in it. Mind you, the politics of the 70s were depressing as hell – but then that is the same of just about any time.

With YouTube, Spotify, on-demand TV and all the long tails of internet sources we can actually enjoy the bits of the 70s that we want to whenever we want to. Fancy seeing clips of Morecambe & Wise or Bowie on TOTP? Bound to be on YouTube. Want to hear the early Elton John albums? They will be online. What we don’t get is the joy we had the first time round when something great came along, because we can now limit ourselves to only the good stuff if we want to. We no longer have to eat all our vegetables to get our Angel Delight; we can just gorge ourselves on Angel Delight and its not so delightful in that context.

The ongoing BBC experiment of showing complete editions of TOTP has given us a bit of a reminder of what it was like to sit through Our Kid and Pussycat because there was the possibility of seeing Thin Lizzy later on – although the chances are you will be watching it time-shifted on V+ or Sky+ and have the temptation of the fast forward button.

Maybe episode 2 will contain more actual history than cultural history but even if it doesn’t I’m sure it will be a joy. How can it be otherwise with the decade that brought us punk, disco, glam, reggae and prog during the golden age of British TV and American movies?

Business card - probably late 80's

While I was sorting out some old books to get rid of recently (I only managed to force myself to get rid of about a dozen or so) I came across an old business card of mine that had been used as a bookmark.

To be honest, most of my business cards from that, or any other, time got used more as bookmarks than as business cards. We could only order them in boxes of 100 and before many were used either your job would change, or the company would reorganise and your division would change, or the company name would change. I think that only particularly prolific salesmen ever had to re-order.

I used to get mine with my home address and phone number on the back so at least they had some shelf-life for personal purposes.

Judging by the logo, this one was probably late 80′s or maybe early 90′s and two things stand out for me. First of all the telephone number – we still had 01 for London so it was before the changes to 071/081 and 0208 and whatever they have now up in that London. The other thing was the email address, or lack of email address.

I think we had email then, but it was internal. Even when we got internet mail addresses it took a while for people to start putting them on cards because nobody really used it. There was a Telex number on there though, and note that the fax number is on an extension.

Younger people might wonder how you could fax to an extension, but of course back then you used to talk to people before you actually sent a fax – you would have to ask them what type of fax machine they had and make sure your one was set up the same. Possibly you had to agree on a baud rate to use – all the handshaking stuff that later fax machines would do automatically.

Add those technological remininscences to the personal and career memories, there is a lot of wistful nostalgia associated with this one tatty bit of card. I think I will hang on to it and the next time I get users complaining that they found themselves unable to access email from the back seat of a taxi in Indonesia or something I shall look at it and an inner calm will descend as I remember that we would spend weeks at a time on trips overseas without any real connection back home at all.

The box design for Betta Bilda set No. 3

In one of those strange coincidences I had some thoughts about toy building blocks this morning, specifically Betta Bilda bricks, and then in the afternoon a colleague raised the topic of Lego in a conversation, giving me the opportunity to voice my recently-formed theory about Betta Bilda.During the 60s, when everybody else seemed to have Lego, I was one of the few kids in Basildon locked into the Betta Bilda standard. It was like a fore-runner of the VHS/Betamax battles in a way. I don’t know why I took the road less travelled because I am not one of those people who can remember every detail of their childhoods. Just one more reason why I would be terrible on ‘I Love 1974′.

Anyway, it might have been an my mother’s choice either for economical reasons or because of the Airfix brand name, or it might have been my choice – because of the Airfix brand name. I do remember that I was mad for Airfix model kits so it is likely. What is sure is that once you have a starter kit and a couple of packs of extra bricks you are in the realms of what the economists refer to as ‘sunk cost’ because if you decide to collect a different system of bricks you have wasted what you already have, because Lego and Betta Bilda bricks looked very similar but were not compatible at all.

Lego was the big brand. It had brighter colours, flashier boxes, and even back then it could be used to make more different types of model. Betta Bilda was a lot more austere and, dare I say, nerdier. It was great for building miniature houses, with some very specialised architectural extras allowing you to make quite accurate models, but not really suited to making aeroplanes, spaceships or lorries. Looking at the boxes for the Betta Bilda sets, they all appear to be aimed at aspiring 1960′s town planners.

Some of my schoolfriends teased me about my choice of bricks a bit. In a way I wished I had Lego so that I fitted in with everybody else and could swap bricks like the others did, but secretly I actually preferred my own set because it had things Lego didn’t – like a working drawbridge with little cotton chains to raise and lower it, as well as some other parts which were specially designed for making castles. The drawbridge was actually quite a fragile part, though as far as I recall I never did break it.

The relevence of all this? Aside from an excuse to wallow in a previously untapped well of nostalgia it reminded me a bit of my relationship with Apple products. When I got my first mp3 player it was the mighty iRiver iHP-120. It didn’t have the cool of the iPod but in my opinion although it didn’t do everything the iPod did, it did its one thing better. The only drawback to not having the market leader mp3 player is the same as it was with building bricks – compatibility. Back then it was the greater availability of Lego sets, now it is the inability to find any decent docks for an mp3 player not made by Apple.

I don’t think the analogy holds up very well, but Betta Bilda seems a bit Linux-y to me. Doing what it does well but not appealing to the masses. A bit nerdy and worthy and overwhelmed by rivals grabbing market share through making people want to conform.

Is that a bit forced? Yeah I think so too, but I didn’t realise until today how much I enjoyed playing with those Betta Bilda bricks and kind of wish I had been nerdier and tried making architecturally accurate models of my house rather than getting seduced by the curved bricks and crennelations of the castle accessories.

Midge Ure in 1980 with Ultravox!

Is it OK to admit that I not only remember Slik well from then, but quite liked them and still have a soft spot for ‘The Boogiest Band in Town’?

A restored Leyland bus and a tramocar, whatever that is.

Jayne and I went to Amberley museum for the second time in three days today.  They do a deal whereby if you keep hold of your tickets you can return for free within 5 days, so we did.  When we went on Saturday we left without seeing everything because we had to do some supermarket shopping and get home before Doctor Who the kids visited.

Really we are making the most of what may be the last time we will both be off work at the same time for a couple of days, now that Jayne has a new job that involves working at weekends.

The museum is worth a second visit anyway, and it is handy if you are close enough to do it in two halves rather than spend all day in one place.The museum is described on roadsigns and Amberley Working Museum, although in the guide book it admits that the place doesn’t have a real theme as such.  It is based around an old quarry and limeworks and features a lot of the features from that including the original engine sheds, lime kilns, workshops and so on, but has expanded to include other areas of industry in the South-East like timber working, pottery and printing and then to include displays about electricity, road-building, telecommunication and cycling.

A very uncrowded scene

The most specific they will get is that it ‘most’ of what is on display relates to the last 100 to 150 years and relates to industry but I reckon that if they got offered anything that didn’t fit in (suits of armour, a dinosaur skeleton, a Tiger tank, a Shakespeare first folio, 17-Century animal traps, a collection of early string instruments) they would somehow find a way to make it fit or use it for swapsies with another museum.

What was surprising was how quiet it all was for a bank holiday weekend.  Maybe everybody headed for the beach or something, but it there were very few visitors on both days.

In a way this was great because there were no queues for anything and you could take photographs without having to wait for people to get out of the way.

The downside was that quite a few exhibits were unmanned that would normally have demonstrations of various crafts and trades.  A lot of the old machinery is kept running by volunteers and you can see them working on restoration, demonstrating how they work and in the case of vehicles taking them for a spin.

The Fairmile Cafe - an old transport cafe from near Arundel that was relocated to the museum

That is not to say the place was dead: there were steam trains, buses and traction engines running, people showing how various printing presses work, and somebody operating the amateur radio station, but on busier days there would be lots more – people making walking sticks, potters, bodgers, blacksmiths and the rest.

The place really is an anorak’s paradise though.  It contains most of the sort of things that people get anorak-y about: loads of old buses, vans fire engines and cars, large pumps other engines and machines, steam trains and even some of the more obscure things that people get excited about – lots of vintage postboxes and telephone boxes for example.   The telecoms building even had something for those who get weak at the knees over the sight and sound of Straugers doing their thing.

As well as the original industrial buildings from the site, there are quite a few buildings rescued from elsewhere either completely or just the contents.  So there is an old transport cafe, a bus station ticket office, the interior of an old-fashioned cobblers all on site as well as some impressive switchboards and power control boards.

Mine tunnel entrance, as seen in A View To A Kill

One particular part of the site should be familiar to James Bond fans because the tunnel entrance there was used in possibly the naffest of all the James Bond films, A View To A Kill.  It was used for the exterior scenes of the mine where Max Zorin was going to set off loads of explosives to sink half of California.

In fact some of the rolling stock for the narrow gauge railway system is still painted in the Zorin Industries livery from when it was used in the film.

No matter how interested we are in how other people lived and worked in the past, I think we all also have a bit of a weakness for reminders of our own past and this museum caters for that too.

In the TV and radio shop there is an astonishing number of old equipment, including enormous old VHS machines – were they really that big?    Great to look around and recognising an old radiogram similar to one you remember your parents or an aunt having and for pondering on how much better home AV equipment is these days.

I wonder whether our children might come here in their middle age, bringing their children and showing them examples of the clunky old DVD players they used to have or the laughavly old-fashioned mp3 players.

An even better place to indulge in such nostalgia is the electricity exhibition.  There are some very old appliances there, but more than a few that I recognise from childhood: a spherical vacuum cleaner that I am sure we used to have one of for example.  They even had a boxed up Sinclair Spectrum to really get me going – although it was the pristine Morris Minor out of everything on the site that I was most keen on.

I reckon this would be a good place to take kids and elderly relatives together.  The oldies can go into fits of “Ooh I remember using one of those” and “we used to have one of those at work” while the kids can enjoy the rides on buses, pressing the buttons on the interactive displays, and so on.

Something for everybody is a bit of a cliche, but I would be surprised if anybody couldn’t find something here that interested them and, although we drove, it is easily accessible by train – the railway station and the museum share a car park.

I have decided that, like it or not, Save All Your Kisses For Me is a brilliant song and I can see why it won Eurovision – an extremely catchy song.

Even through all the musical nostalgia I found the sho to be a televisual equivalent of the palace at Versailles.  Just as the mere sight of the palace explains a lot about how and why the French revolution came about, a few minutes watching a 1976 TOTP explains a lot about why punk just had to happen.

Cutting from the Mirror 21/4/82

It was a while after I heard about Liz Taylor’s death that I remembered the time I met her and how it was splashed across the pages of the tabloids.  I’m not sure, but it might have even been on the front page of one of them.  If so it must have been a slow news day.What happened was that I was in a theatre company that was putting on A Midsummer Night’s Dream at the Old Vic and our director somehow persuaded Liz Taylor to pay us a visit.   She was in Little Foxes in the West End at the time so she didn’t actually see us perform but came along after her play finished to see us after ours finished.

I can’t really remember much about that night, possibly because I had a bloody great prosthetic ass’s head on.  No doubt somebody thought it would make a great photo opportunity.  The worrying thing is that a week or so later somebody said that they recognised me from the paper(!)

What I do remember is thinking how old she looked.  Having dug out the newspaper cuttings, which I was a little surprised to find I hadn’t chucked out in the great purge of 2010 when we moved, I looked at them and think she doesn’t look too bad at all.  Of course, at the time she was more than twice my age.  Now I’m looking at photos of somebody only a couple of years older than I am now.  It’s all a matter of perspective really.

I didn’t come out of it too well really.  While the prop might have helped make the photo more appealing to the editors of the Sun and Mirror it meant that the only time I get my photo in the national press (I hope) I am totally obscured.  You only have my word for it that it is me under those big floppy ears.  It also meant that got the rough end of the inevitable “beauty and the beast” headlines and captions.   The text wasn’t too flattering either:

From The Sun

Liz chatted to the cast of a Midsummer Night’s Dream… including an actor who made an ass of himself in the role of Bottom

The Sun also said that the theatre company was called London’s National Youth Theatre, which it wasn’t, so typical attention to detail and truth from that paper.

Anyway, a bit of a detour down memory lane this evening.  A shame it was prompted by somebody’s death.

I knew what was going on and was often active in going out to protest about it.  Protesting was fun: occupying the moral high ground, being part of a group, baiting the Tories.  Quite possibly I would not be involved in politics now if there hadn’t been quite so much to get angry about back in the 80s.

A lot of what is going on now reminds me of the 80s.  I am not surprised that this is happening,  but I’ll admit that I am surprised it has happened so quickly.Only a few months into the new government and we have more demonstrations than you can shake a stick at – though the police are doing their best to shake their sticks at as many protestors as possible.  And now we have the police going undercover to gather information.  It really is like the 80s all over again.

The biggest difference now is how easy it is to communicate.  With Facebook and Twitter  you can have an event with 1000s of people organised at a day’s notice, and get real-time information on it as half the people there have some sort of smart phone with 3G internet.

The ubiquity of these services could also mean that more people get drawn into demonstrations: those not politicallty active in the traditional sense.   In the past you may have been opposed to, say, apartheid, but to even know about anti-apartheid events you had to be involved in one of the activist groups, or some other political organisation, or subscribe to or seek out activist literature and so many of the events had the same people there.

Now it is just so easy to find that there are demonstrations planned this weekend in all the major cities targeting Vodafone, Topshop, Miss Selfridges and others.  I know from the mail I received during the election campaign that a lot of people are really angry about the injustice of tax avoidance and huge banking bonuses – and that was before public service cuts, VAT rises, tuition fee increases and the rest came along.

I don’t know of anything major in Crawley this weekend – except a protest at the youth club on Saturday morning – and don’t really feel up to a trip to Brighton or London, but who knows?  Maybe this think will grow to the extent that we do have a crowd protesting in the shops here before long.   I will keep an eye on the map here where all the planned action is displayed.  Or maybe I should just start one myself?

It makes you wonder why the police bother with all these undercover infiltrators when they could just sit at home and look on the internet.

If anybody is going along at the weekend, or is going to the next student demonstration, why not read this first?  It is full of handy tips to avoid persecution by the police.

This all comes about because when I was bowling the other night I remembered being taken bowling on holiday when I was very young.  If I remember rightly, there was no computer keeping track of your score and telling you whose turn it is next – you had to do all that yourself on a paper scorecard.  Fortunately that side of things was taken care of, probably by granddad or Uncle Peter.  On Thursday night we realised that we would have been stuffed if we had to work out the scoring ourselves.

That got me to thinking about other little things that have changed over the years and how quickly they have become routine.  Like ATMs. I can remember when the only way to get cash was to go to your bank and write out a cheque – and that was when banks were not open on Saturdays. It seems almost unthinkable now.

It was the same with stamps of course, with only the Post Office being able to sell them.

And how about television. Not only did we only have three channels, but we had to walk across the room to change from one to the other (by turning a dial).  And to find out what was on the TV more than a day in advance you had to buy two different magazines.  The TV stations owned the copyright on TV listings and guarded them jealously.

Even something as simple as getting a ticket to a concert was a rigmarole compared to now.   If I want a ticket now can usually go to the venue’s website, pay for it online and print out the ticket.  The first concert I went to, if you couldn’t physically get to the venue or a ticket agency, you had to write off.  As I was in the middle of the Essex countryside I had to write, enclosing a postal order or cheque, if I could get a parent to write one for me and then wait to see if my letter arrived before it sold out.

Just about the only thing that was easier was going to first division football, as it was called then.  You could just turn up and go in, which is virtually impossible now.

Any other little ways in which life has moved on?

One of our home-made lighting gantries at New Barn House

I have been putting off going through my photos for a while because it was a bit daunting, but now I have started and it turns out to be a much better way to pass an evening than watching TV and I have already scanned in some of my favourites from two albums which cover my last year at school and the year or so immediately afterwards.All these older pictures would have been taken with little instamatic cameras, probably with those 110 or 126 cartridges.  The nostalgia is not just in the contents but also in the very format of the prints, some of them with the rounded corners and with that peculiar 70s colour to them.  How times change.  With digital cameras now we think nothing of taking several hundred photos on a day out, but back then a 24-exposure film might last months.

Having a quick flick through the albums I came across some pictures taken in Tunisia the first time I went.  There were only 3 or 4 of them.  Last year I went for a week and took 300 or 400 in the first few days.

The picture above is of the grounds of New Barn House in Lindsell, Essex.  It was a grand but uninhabited house which we took over two years running to do Shakespeare in the open air.   We hired proper lights but built our own gantries by nailing planks of wood together.  Cables ran back across the grass to a control panel in the house and sheets of plastic were thrown over to protect them from the wet.   This was in the days before health and safety.  We are probably lucky to have survived.

Fyfield: the middle quad from above

One set of photos has a particular significance for me.   They are only tiny pictures – 35mm across I imagine because they are cut from a contact sheet.

The significance is that I developed these myself in the darkroom at school.  I didn’t take them – that was done by one of our teachers – but when he developed the film he let us do prints of them to learn how to do all the timing and everything.

I never did get into developing my own films, too much hassle finding a space and having all the chemicals, but I do appreciate having had the chance to do it.

Not looking forward to the next few albums.  I had a quick look through and they are very 80s indeed.  There are a couple where I look like I am auditioning for a Haircut 100 tribute band.