Happy Seventies New Year Everyone

Normal service will be resumed as soon as possible. Once I’ve finished overdosing on the Babycham, Snowballs and Cherry B.
Josie Henley-Einion, author, blogger, Legend in my own Living Room

White Christmas

Is it my imagination or were there more white Christmases in the Seventies? Let’s look at wikipedia, the fount of all knowledge. Well what a disappointment, it looks like it was my imagination after all. Apparently in Birmingham there was snow at Christmas in 1970 which I would be too young to remember, and in [...]

Fanny Cradock

It’s just not Christmas without some Fanny. I mentioned her earlier in the year when talking about Seventies food. Fanny Cradock had a cookery show which may well have been the first of the ‘performance cookery’ style shows you still see today. Every year we watch the same Christmas series of Fanny in repeats, and [...]

The Good Life

Most people who decide to go self sufficient will move to the country to live the good life on a farm. Tom and Barbara Good didn’t want to move so they converted their suburban semi into a small holding, much to the dismay of Margot and Jerry, their neighbours. This was the premise of the [...]

Trumptonshire Folk

Trumpton was the major town of Trumptonshire, in which there was also a neighbouring village of Camberwick Green.
This was the name of the stop-animation children’s program which was first produced about this fictional English county. The shows were all named after the location, so there was Trumpton, Camberwick Green and Chigley (also a village).
The characters [...]

Parkinson

‘Parky’ is the eponymous interviewer of stars. His show was one of many talk shows during the Seventies, but Michael Parkinson has outlasted and returned.
Lately it seems that he is the one everyone wants to watch and his is the show the stars want to be seen on. One of the marks of major celebrity [...]

High Street Hardship

Too much talk is going on lately about how we can’t afford to buy stuff. This is driving me bonkers. In the Seventies we had to queue up to buy bread and there was a rule of only one loaf per family. How on earth would today’s families cope with that? There’d be a public [...]

The Clangers

They were aliens for children, little pink knitted creatures with long noses that made funny noises and lived in the craters on the moon.
The Clangers used dustbin lids to cover the crater holes and wore metallic clothes that looked a bit like armour. They would make things out of scrap, a bit like The Wombles, [...]

Close Encounters

The full title of the film was Close Encounters of the Third Kind, but everyone called it Close Encounters for short. This was a modern aliens film, before which all sci-fi films had cast the aliens as hostile invaders. Though the mind control business was a bit scary, especially things like the repetitive tune (buh-buh-buh-boo-boooo) [...]

Morcambe and Wise

The Morcambe and Wise show, and especially the Christmas special, has Seventies written all over it. According to Wikipedia, families would judge the quality of their Christmas on the quality of the M&W Christmas special. What do you think of it so far? Rubbish!
The show was a basic sketch show/variety show which was common of [...]