Category: 1950-1999

Categories
1950-1999 Food & Drink

1950s American Pie

American Pie

DC Thomson, the Scottish publishing house, holds a huge amount of nostalgia value for me, The Beano being my absolute number one childhood read. I got the comic every week, collected the single character booklets, and dreamed of catapults, minxing, and big piles of mash with sausages sticking out. And I’m never getting rid of my Dennis the Menace and Gnasher fan club badges.

So the new DC Thomson book, Pass it On: Cooking Tips from the 1950s, appeals to both my real nostalgia and the kind of fantasy nostalgia I have about times which pre-date me. Can you feel proper nostalgia about things you didn’t actually live through? Reading so many old books has almost given me false memory syndrome.

The book is a guide to what home cooking used to be – a collection of recipes and tips sent in to The Sunday Post, People’s Journal and The People’s Friend by those women who cooked for their families in the face of culinary challenges we can’t quite imagine today – the food rationing of the Second World War didn’t come to an end until 1954 for some food items, including meat, cheese, butter, preserves, tea and sugar, and frugality was key.

There’s a lovely selection of original recipe pages you can look at here and I decided to have a crack at one of them. My favourite recipe genre (and the staple of recipe books up to the 1950s), invalid cookery, is here along with recipe suggestions for your Government Cheese – the nickname of the mild cheddar which was the only type available until the end of rationing. Mind you, I’m a month into a dairy-free diet on account of my new baby son and his sore bottom, and even Government Cheese is sounding wildly delicious to me at the moment.

The bread omelet sounds good, like a slightly more elaborate eggy bread.

Bread omelet

Then there’s the Carrot Mould, which lives up to the old British stereotype of cooking, boiling carrots into baby food for a whole two hours and then turning them into an unnecessary shape.

Carrot mould

The Gingerbread Upsidedown Delight is definitely one I’m making at some point, the Enid Blyton-style name adding to its appeal.

Gingerbread Upsidedown Delight

But I made the American Pie.

American Pie

There’s been more than 40 years of speculation about what Don McLean meant in his chart-topping song, but I think I can say with confidence that this wasn’t what he was singing about. This one is a bit of a mystery – I mean we know the phrase “As American as apple pie” but there’s nothing mentioned about a pile of macaroni, cold meat, tomatoes and breadcrumbs. This is obviously a way to use up the leftover meat probably from the Sunday roast. I wondered about which meat to use – it could be Spam for full retro effect, but I went for turkey and smoked ham as that sounded at least a little bit American to me.

American Pie

Despite my initial thoughts that this comes from a place where people didn’t quite get macaroni – it should be coated in a sauce surely, not used as a plain unflavoured base – it was actually quite pleasant, a smooth and creamy element to the dish. The whole thing has nothing to hold it together though, and just flops into a pile of ingredients on the plate. It would be better with an egg to hold it together and some cheese on top, but then again, that would probably be an extravagance too far in the age of rationing.

The book is available here and I think it will be going on my Christmas list.

Categories
1950-1999 Space

Doctor Who Travels in Space, 1966

Sitting here, waiting fairly impatiently for the new series of Doctor Who to start next Saturday (it’s been so long), it seems like a good time to blow the dust from this vintage book. I imagine fellow Doctor Who fans would be as keen as me to have a look inside.

I’m sorry to say goodbye to the immense talent of Peter Capaldi, who feels so new to me still – yet the Zoe Ball-hosted special announcement programme seems like an awful long time ago now. And so we’re in the speculative hinterland of who the next Doctor may be. It’s decided now, of course, and it would be marvellous if somehow the surprise remained unspoilered until the regeneration, but that’s never going to happen. My choice, for what’s it’s worth – Ben Willbond all day long or, frankly, any single one of the Horrible Histories/Yonderland troupe. I’m sure any reader of this blog will be unsurprised to learn I am a massive Horrible Histories fan.

Anyway, on a grey December day in Manchester I found one of my best ever vintage book finds – the Doctor Who Travels in Space Painting Book. A colouring book dating from 1966 and William Hartnell days, wrapped in a plastic bag stuck down with sellotape which had obviously not been removed for decades. I had to buy it just to open that seal and have a peep.

Thanks to that plastic bag it was in fabulous condition for a 50 year old colouring book, the cover still vivid, and only one page coloured in. So here it’s is, and it’s not just pictures, it’s a story.

The robot destruction scene isn’t very “New Who”, is it?

I love that it was published in Manchester too – unlike the Doctor, it never travelled far.

Categories
1950-1999 Uncategorized War

Old Fashioned Cornbread at the Whistle Stop Cafe, 1993

My momma and Aunt Idgie ran a cafe. It wasn’t nothing more than a little pine-knot affair, but I’ll tell you one thing: we always ate and so did everybody else who ever came around there asking for food….and that was black and white. I never saw Aunt Idgie turn down a soul, and she was known to give a man a little drink if he needed it….” – Stump Threadgoode from Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Cafe.

I found my way into writing my initial thoughts on Brexit through an “old-fashioned” pork pie seen at a food fair on the dream-like day of the result, and being suddenly overwhelmed with visceral anger at my country. Yesterday, while making what Fannie Flagg calls “Old Fashioned Cornbread” from her 1993 Whistle Stop Cafe Cookbook I started thinking about the tumultuous mess of Trump’s first week in office. The day which also marked Holocaust Remembrance Day (and a White House statement which managed to not mention the Jewish people by name), Trump signing an Executive Order shutting the US to all refugees for four months, and to Syrian refugees indefinitely, and pictures of Theresa May holding hands with Trump and flattering the Republican Party on their shared values with the Conservative Party. Her announcement that Trump is “100%” behind NATO looked like nothing more than Chamberlain’s “peace in our time”.

The similarities between Brexit and the rise of Trump are so parallel that it almost feels unreal, and to me as a history graduate, all I can see is a mountain of future essays tying together all the strands that brought us here. This period will become almost a cliche of essay titles, I’m sure. In a way, the events of the past year feel as if they have come out of the blue, a stone flung into a tranquil lake, but of course our progress to the point of wherever this takes us will look clearer in the history books. I’ve read enough history books to know that war is usually the conclusion of a set of circumstances like this, which feel so familiar and yet so unknown at the same time.

Trump is a schmuck – there is no better word I have come across to describe him. Part fool, part conman, and yes, the literal meaning of the word – dick – too. Especially that. A shyster involved with the Mafia, the Russian mob, fined $10 million in 2015 for money laundering, a thuggish litigation addict, fined for racist landlord discrimination, an admitted practitioner of sexual assault. A man who apparently has little concentration, cunning in spades but little intellect, and whose word means precisely nothing. Yet a man who thinks of himself as an intellectual giant, and who treats words rather as Humpty Dumpty did in Through the Looking Glass.

“When I use a word,” Humpty Dumpty said, in rather a scornful tone, “it means just what I choose it to mean – neither more nor less.”

That this can be also used to perfectly describe what will be Theresa May’s one appearance in the quoting dictionaries, “Brexit means Brexit”, is just more meat for those essays of the future. And what do we have to combat these words? A media which many are turning away from, choosing, incredibly, to believe instead that hyper-partisan news sources speak more unbiased truth. “Fake news” can be whatever disagrees with the individual’s personal stance now, and I think it’s a dangerous path indeed. Still, there’s going to be some astounding journalism on show in the years to come, and some damn good comedy too.

In such a short space of time, world events have been so interesting that the news has started to run anxiously though my head like an extra verse to Billy Joel’s We Didn’t Start the Fire:

Donald Trump, CIA, Vlad Putin, Theresa May, 

Alec Baldwin, George Orwell, John Hurt, Mike Pence

Tiny tweeting hands, tiny crowds, dancing to “My Way”,

Refugees, Mexico, #Fuckingwall, maybe a fence?

A song from 1989, also pertinent as it’s the 80s I’m thinking of just as much as the 30s. The parallels to the 30s are obvious to anyone who’s studied the period – the popular movements, the distrust of the old orders, the shutting down of opponents. But in some ways Trump is the quintessential 80s man, the personification of all that garish money-splashing and selfishness that was one side of the decade. Not least because Bret Easton Ellis presciently made Trump Patrick Bateman’s hero in American Psycho, set during the 80s Wall Street boom.

“Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Cafe”, a book and film I adore, looks at both eras, a depression-era tale told in flashback from the 80s. A tale which involves sentiment about America’s past, the Ku Klux Klan, racism, lesbianism and the strength of women. What with the Women’s March of a week ago, the largest single-day demonstration in American history, and involving nearly 5 million participants across the globe, this feels relevant. And the impossibly sad story of Emmett Till has reared its head from the history books with the revelation yesterday that the reason, small as it was, for the horrifying murder of a 14-year-old, wasn’t even true at all. And the order banning the acceptance of refugees to the US on Holocaust Remembrance Day, on the day that a Twitter account called St. Louis Manifest was tweeting the fates of all the passengers on the St Louis, the ship of German Jewish refugees turned away by the US in 1939, and who mostly perished in the Holocaust. The lessons from history hitting us in the face right now are almost unbearable.

In 1993 Fannie Flagg wrote in The Whistle Stop Cafe Cookbook,

“Which brings me to the main reason I wanted so much to write this book. Lately it seems everyone is mad at someone, with groups on every corner, on the radio, on television, screaming about something or someone or other they don’t like. And there is so much anger in the air that you almost see it like a thick fog. In times like this, I think it is particularly important to try to be as calm and as happy as possible. And I don’t know about you, but I have always been happiest where food is concerned.”

The book was inspired by Fried Green Tomatoes fans asking whether her fictional cafe was based on a real place, which it was. It was The Irondale Cafe in Irondale, Alabama, set up in the 1930s by Flagg’s aunt Bess, who ran it for 50 years. A woman who loved feeding anyone and everyone, and, from her picture in the book, appears to be Idgie Threadgoode all over. It’s still there too, in downtown Irondale, right next to the train tracks, just like the Whistlestop Cafe. The recipes in this book come from the dishes traditionally served there.

Cornbread is one of those quintessential American food traditions which I had never tasted until my year spent going to school in the American South. I lived in Kentucky over 1992 and 1993, the same year this cookbook came out. I have extremely fond memories of iced tea, pimento cheese, buttermilk biscuits (what they call biscuits coming as a big surprise to me) and big blocks of squidgy American cheese you can microwave into a sauce. Less fond memories of the jello salad, lime jelly with vegetables in it, nonsensically served as a side dish. But I’ve never known hospitality like that I experienced in Kentucky. Such kindness and community. And I gained such a sense of enormity of the country, being hundreds of miles from the coast in all directions. It’s difficult for a Brit to get your head round the sheer scale of it all, and I never knew before how attached I was to the idea of being near-ish to the sea no matter where you are in the country.

Fannie Flagg’s cornbread recipe is best done old style in a skillet in the oven. There seems to be a lot of variants on cornbread depending where you are in the country, with an interesting take on the traditions here. Mine is yellow as white cornmeal is harder to come by in the UK. It contains no sugar – the article says this is the northern tradition, with the southern version always sweetened. Which doesn’t quite fit with this definitely Southern recipe, but never mind.


Old Fashioned Cornbread

“I swear, this is the best I ever tasted.”

4 cups cornmeal

2 tsp baking soda

4 egg, beaten

4 cups buttermilk

1/2 cup bacon drippings, melted (I used butter)

Preheat oven to 450F (220C)

Combine dry ingredients and make a well in the centre.

Combine eggs, buttermilk and bacon drippings, mixing well; add to cornmeal mixture and beat until smooth.

Heat a well-greased 12-inch cast-iron skillet in the preheated oven until very hot.

Pour batter into hot skillet; bake for 35-45 minutes, or until a knife inserted in centre comes out clean and top is golden brown.

Good luck, America.

Categories
1950-1999

The Paul Daniels Magic Annual, 1982

The Paul Daniels Magic Annual, 1982

In the early 1980s there was nothing better on television, as far as I was concerned, than the Paul Daniels Magic Show. Looking it up, I’m quite surprised that it actually was still being made until 1994, but I was at university then, and I was probably pretending I wasn’t a fan of his anymore. I always liked him though, not a lot, but I liked him. I’m lying, I loved him, always. So much so that in the celebrity death carnage of the past year, Paul Daniels’ death in March 2016 is still the one I’m most affected by. It’s partly because he was such a presence online, on his blog and on Twitter, so I tangibly miss him from there. The fact that our politics were so far apart was completely irrelevant, and it’s a testament to how much I thought of him that when Hurricane Brexit hit in June 2016, I was actually sorry he wasn’t here to see it, assuming (perhaps wrongly) that he would have been a Leave voter.

I realised that I never wrote an update to my post on looking for Debbie McGee’s cookbook, Dining with Debbie, a Magical Touch. I’d seen interviews promoting the book, but the book itself was nowhere to be found. I contacted Paul on Twitter to ask about it and he told me that the planned publisher had gone under before the book could be published and so it was languishing in limbo. He did, however, offer to send me a DVD-ROM version of the book for £12, which I readily agreed to. A short email correspondence about sending the money to his paypal account (which I was slightly thrilled to see was in his real name of Newton) and asking for my address, was hugely exciting to the 8-year-old me, who never lurks too far below the surface.

I was a big magic fan as a kid. I had the magic sets with trick wands and cups and balls, I attempted unsuccessfully to unpeel a banana which was supposed to fall into slices after making small holes with a pin all the way round. And I read and re-read this book, The Paul Daniels Magic Annual, which I’m sure I got as a present for Christmas 1982. My husband bought this copy for me a few years ago, to replace the long-lost book of my childhood, and I happily remembered every page quite clearly.

The Paul Daniels Magic Annual, 1982

He talks about how he became a magician (or “funjuror”), with his discovery as an 11 year old of an Victorian book called “How to Entertain at Parties” (note: new book search initiated). He further developed his skills during his national service in Asia, taking part in Service concerts (imagining It Ain’t Half Hot, Mum here), got his big break on The Wheeltappers and Shunters Social Club TV variety show, and coming up with his catchphrase on stage when a heckler insulted his suit. “I answered him by saying “Oh, that’s a shame because I like yours. Not a lot – but I like it.” This got a big laugh so I decided to keep it in the act.”

Read below – (if you click on the images, new non-blurry pages will appear.)

A nice biography bit here about his mate, silent magician Ali Bongo. His real name, according to Paul, “is the most guarded secret of all” , although not any more. He was William Oliver Wallace and he had a truly illustrious magical career, writing many books and becoming magical advisor for programmes such as Doctor Who and Jonathan Creek (which was also inspired by him).

More tricks, and a full on 80s shot of Paul with Julio Iglesias. I tried all these tricks, with varying degrees of success (bad to terrible).

He finishes with another array of tricks to try at home. I never did the Rubik’s Cube trick which involved having to make a shell cover for it, “in cardboard or tin, if you have a friend who is a metal worker.” I did not have a friend who was a metal worker.

I recently saw an article about a an old Heineken campaign featuring Paul, which had “magically” reappeared after many years when a billboard was removed, revealing the last poster which had been pasted on the bare wall underneath. It seemed fitting that there was a kind of final “reveal” for the master magician, in his native Yorkshire as well.

Categories
1950-1999 Food & Drink

How to Slim after Christmas, 1953

Dundee Courier, 24th December 1953

Too soon to think about the post-Christmas diet?

Here’s a diet plan from 1953, taken from William Banting’s “reducing diet” from 90 years earlier. I remember people of my grandparents generation would still sometimes refer to dieting as “banting”.

Dundee Courier, 24th December 1953
Dundee Courier, 24th December 1953

It’s not far removed from current advice, being based on proteins, with little carbohydrate and mainly avoiding sugar. Pleasingly, there seems to be quite a lot of booze involved – I count that you can have up to five drinks a day. You’re allowed two or three glasses of claret, sherry or madeira at lunchtime, and another couple at supper. Maybe it is an ideal post Christmas diet, just eat the leftover turkey, drink the leftover booze and somehow avoid those tins of Roses and, in my case this year, a large batch of Nigella-recipe mince pies with large blobs of thick brandy cream on top.

Still, there’s no point thinking about this until January. As Douglas Adams partly said, time is an illusion, lunchtime doubly so, and the week in between Christmas and New Year exists in its own little bubble outside of time and space.

Categories
1950-1999 Food & Drink

Vintage Recipe – Fricassee of Chicken, 1959

My first creation from 1959’s Perfect Cooking was the mid-century, showy, dinner party-style Fricassee of Chicken.

As I mentioned in my previous post on this book, the best things in there are the delightfully literal line drawings illustrating the ingredients in the recipes (such as an actual fish put in the stocks for fish stock) but not what the actual finished dish looked like. I could have done with a guideline as to how the presentation of this was supposed to work. It’s creamed chicken, surrounded by “a border of mashed potato” and then garnished by peas and fried bread triangles. I have to admit, the double carb-loading appeal of mash and fried bread in the one meal was the main reason for making this.

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This is my serving suggestion attempt, with a piece of chicken hoving into view like a little Nessie. It brings to my mind of one of Fanny Craddock’s creations, although she would probably have dyed the mash green to match the peas. The faffing time spent on producing borders and garnishes means that the sauce had plenty of time to get to work on forming a skin before it got near a plate.

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The verdict? Well, the adults in the house thought it was delicious, but the kids had other ideas. To be fair, it does look very slightly different from the tea they’re usually presented with. The fried bread was a hit, but as far as they were concerned, the chicken could only be eaten with all the creamy sauce wiped off. The mashed potato and peas, infected as they were with the sauce, were no go areas too. I loved the sauce myself, so I have no idea what the kids tastebuds were reacting to.

In short, if you’re hosting a 1950s-themed adult-only dinner party, this is the centrepiece for you. I would make it again in a second, although minus all the faffing with the presentation. Just big dollops of creamy chicken and mash on the plate instead.

Categories
1950-1999 Food & Drink

Perfect Cooking, 1959

I’ve got a new cookery book, and it promises me “Perfect Cooking”, 1959-style.

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I love so many things about old cookbooks, particularly the craziness of the Invalid Cookery sections, but one thing bugs me – there’s no pictures of the food, most of the time. Well, there’s the occasional line drawing in some, and from the 1950s you do start to see those vivid technicolour plates for selected recipes. And, contradicting myself now, thinking about it, I do have the most beautifully illustrated promotional booklet for Lutona cocoa recipes from the 1930s. But generally, my preference is for a nice big picture of every recipe in the book, it adds to the general aesthetic enjoyment of the cooking process.

That is, until now, when I’ve discovered something I like just as much. Quirky little line drawings, depicting something ludicrously literal about the recipe title, like a Pan’s People dance routine on Top of the Pops in 1974. Some of the illustrations are a bit of a wilder riff on the theme, like when that picture of Jocky Wilson was screened behind Dexy’s Midnight Runners on Top of the Pops in 1982. Which I was interested to learn recently, was actually done on purpose, suggested Kevin Rowland for a laugh.

I love the 50s illustration style and the technicolour pics in this book are reserved for some beautiful drawings of special events throughout the year, a wonderful depiction of idealised 1950s life. The Fricassee of Chicken below I have been working on, to be presented in a future post.

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And I would kill to be at this glamorous Halloween party.

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There’s rationing-inspired recipes too, like this one for mock cream.

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Plus um…boiled cucumber?
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And the usual vintage recipes for heads of various sorts, which I’m too squeamish for.
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The line drawings though, these delight my heart, which is always looking for the silly. A rock and rolling rock bun, here – which is pretty up to the minute for 1959. Plus – Batchelors Buttons.
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Preserved ginger, here. I think this is supposed to be a “well-preserved” lady of a certain age.
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Bath buns = a bun in a bath. Obv.
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Sweet egg toasties with a sweet young lady egg in a bonnet.
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Not sure why the vanilla soufflé is a peeking lady with amazing eyes. Maybe because of soufflé being a seductively French word?
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You have to read the ingredients list for this one – the tripe and onion casserole contains dressed tripe, hence a helpfully-signposted piece of tripe in a top hat.
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Chicken croquettes, chicken playing croquet. Standard.
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Sandwiches being advertised on a sandwich board. Clever.
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Right, this has me beat, I’ve googled everything. Why is Shrimp Mousse a clown with a shrimp mousse drum? Is it the shape of the mousse mould? Is it a pun? If anyone can figure it out, please let me know in the comments!
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The best for last – my favourite of them all. An utterly masterful piece of illustration. Fish stock = a fish in the stocks.
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Categories
1950-1999 Ephemera Games

Funny Bones, 1968

For my birthday treat a few weeks ago, me and my husband went on a very rare kid-free trip to Heston Blumenthal’s Hinds Head pub to try a special menu – truffled beef stew as devised by Heston for Tim Peake on the International Space Station. The intense meaty, tarragonned stew was beautiful, of course, especially so as it was a menu only available if you wrote in to Channel 4 and were lucky enough to receive a special code after the Heston’s Dinner in Space programme a few months ago. The star of the show, however, was the Sweet Shop cocktail – a heady mix of “skittle-washed vodka”, frothed marshmallow, fruits and popping candy, with a wave of candy floss on top. It sounds far too sweet to be appealing, but it was perfect, like a kind of magical strawberry juice.

sweet shop

We stayed in Maidenhead for the night, and I fell in love with the place – not least because of the unfeasible amount of charity shops selling vintage books that we found, and the very friendly shop keepers within them. We were so keen on the fascinating stock in one shop that the lady behind the counter jokingly offered us a “lock-in”, which sounds like heaven to me. The fact that I loved Maidenhead so much funnily enough feels like a crumb of comfort to me in the current political situation – our new Prime Minister Theresa May is its MP.

We came home with heavy armfuls of new books on the train, and this game, Funny Bones, which was worth its price of £1 just to have a look inside the box at the glorious 60s graphics on the cards.

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Brought out the year after Twister, this was intended as a version of that game as played with cards and teams of two partners. The cards themselves need to be held between the two body parts shown on the cards.

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And this is how you play it:
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=ZNKqTybDCU8

I’d never heard of it, and was amused to see the none-more-60s description of where this game could be played – not only at birthday parties but also at “Adult Happenings”. “Happenings” always has an orgy vibe about it but it sounded to me like some marketing man trying to get hip with the kids.

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A few of the cards, though…..they could be interpreted with a raised eyebrow.

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And….well, it turns out that this undercurrent was actually a little more *finger bone on the nose bone* than I first thought. Marvin Glass, the creator of the game, seemed to be two parts the Willy Wonka of games, and one part Hugh Hefner. Twister was denounced by some critics of the permissive society as “sex in a box”, and it looks like Marvin Glass had at least one eye on this market too. Here an excellent blog post describes the career and inventions of the man behind an array of classic toys – including SIMON, the Evel Knievel Stunt Cycle and Mousetrap. Here’s the man himself demonstrating his new invention, the toy hypodermic needle, the Hypo-Phony:

hypo

But it was reading about his feature spread in Playboy magazine that most tickled my funny bone. Titled unambiguously “A Playboy Pad: Swinging In Suburbia”, here are the post watershed “fun and games” Marvin was working on.

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You can see why Playboy were interested, this “pad” was up to the zeitgeist in 60s party terms. He had a “walk-in wet bar”, whatever that is, hi-fi controls built into a marble table, “a grand piano and microphones….awaiting the show-business personalities that invariably attend”, Picasso and Dali pictures on the walls, and a swimming pool.

It makes me think of a Hammer Horror porn film. I have a strange feeling of unease looking at these pictures. Go up the red-lit stairs:

stairso

To the bedroom:

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And then hang out in the huge jacuzzi:

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The best thing is, it depicts people actually playing Funny Bones at this “happening”.

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I guess this was the kind of thing Monty Python was talking about – it breaks the ice at naughty parties.

In those halcyon days of early June, I suspected not that the purchase of this little game would bring me a blog post featuring the International Space Station, Theresa May, 1960s orgies and the game SIMON, but in this post-Brexit hinterland suddenly anything seems possible.

Categories
1950-1999

The Two Ronnies Annual, 1979

I’ve got a list of childhood books that I feel the need to write about, all of a sudden, in tribute to Ronnie Corbett, Paul Daniels and Victoria Wood, who have all died in such heartbreakingly quick succession.

The three books – The Two Ronnies Annual (1979), The Paul Daniels Magic Annual (1982) and Victoria Wood’s sketch book Barmy (1987) were those kind of formative books that I read and re-read until I knew every word like I know the lyrics of a favourite song. The kind of books that, like a song, you can have no contact with for years, but on finding them again you can still join in, word-perfect, remembering where you were and how you felt, overwhelmed with nostalgia.

The Two Ronnies was from 1979, but I got it a few years after that, from a charity shop, as so many of my annuals were. I barely knew the pleasure of seeing a blank crossword, pre-filled in as they always were from a previous owner. And when I bought this replacement some years ago for my long-lost original copy, so this crossword (written by Gyles Brandreth) was also completed, quite comfortingly.

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I always loved the Two Ronnies with a kind of pure love, unsullied by any other, more alternative comedy I was also developing a passion for. On the surface, they were one of those old fashioned double acts which abounded in the 70s and early 80s – except they were just so much better. The absolutely flawless sketch acting was a delight, Ronnie B’s wordplay a joy for a kid like me who collected words I liked in a little book, and the serial sketches like Village of the Smiths really quite gripping and even influential, looking back.

As well as their own performing talents, they had some of the best writers around, of course. It wasn’t everyone who had the Pythons on their writing team, and I would dearly have loved to have seen Ronnie C’s face when Ronnie B revealed that he was actually the Phantom Sketch Writer of old London Town, Gerald Wylie. But my absolute favourite bit was Ronnie C’s monologue – such a hard piece to deliver as naturally as he did, like a mini Tristram Shandy story every week, “But I am getting ahead of myself…”

Ronnie C was really my favourite, much as I loved Ronnie B too, not only because of the monologues but I was also a devotee of Sorry! with its strangely exciting opening credits. He was one of the few authors that I’ve ever felt he need to immediately write to after reading their book – “And it’s goodnight from him“, Ronnie C’s 2007 autobiography of the Two Ronnies is just so bloody lovely. He’s interesting, insightful, generous to everyone he knows and, importantly, to all the crew they worked with. I wanted to write to him and tell him just how happy that book made me, but I never did. I wish I had.

Anyway. The Annual. It’s a combination of sketches reproduced in rather exciting, dynamic comic form, games, jokes and factual depictions of what it’s like to work in telly. Like the page below. Brilliantly, these are the bits with no jokes, but they’ve become retrospectively funny because Viz magazine has taken this exact format and is still running “Behind the Scenes”-style comics strips now.

Not Viz
Not Viz

Here’s a board game on making it in the world of 70s showbiz, and which I seem to remember I utterly failed to get anyone to play with me. Moving over the “Jim’ll Fix It” reference swiftly….

Jim'll Fix has ruined everything
Jim’ll Fix It has ruined everything

Calculator games! Remember when that was the absolutely most up to the minute thing you could be doing at school? They’ve glossed over “boob” and the advanced “boobless” here though. That guess your age trick – I remember trying to get my mum to play this and she wouldn’t, for reasons that I couldn’t fathom. They were possibly connected to the fact that she told me she was 21, which I once related solemnly to a teacher, who looked slightly startled as I was 8 at the time. It was one of those times when adults are obviously (to them) amusing themselves, but kids just take that stuff as gospel.

No 8008
No 8008

Euro Christmas- this was my favourite bit of the book, and is strangely topical now, although it’s about the EEC as things were at the time. It’s a strangely frighteningly drawn cartoon, and one which I was very impressed to discover was written by Eric Idle and David Nobbs. High pedigree indeed.

By Eric Idle and David Nobbs
By Eric Idle and David Nobbs
By Eric Idle and David Nobbs
By Eric Idle and David Nobbs

This was another favourite – A consumers corner endlessly recommending  the disastrous Boffo products. Now reminding me a bit of “Reeves and Mortimer products”, too.

Boffo
Boffo
Boffo
Boffo

But now, here’s the late news…

A survey on the decline of morals in Britain reveals that in Liverpool alone on each day last week an average of 267 women made love to an unmarried man. The man is now recovering in hospital.

Next week we’ll have hints on coarse fishing…..followed by lewd hockey, suggestive cricket and obscene golf.

And it’s goodnight from me.

Categories
1900-1949 1950-1999 Future Predictions Victorian

Predictions for The Year 2000

Yorkshire Evening Post, 4th December 1936

Going to school in the 1980s, the year 2000 was a popular subject for homework on predictions about the state of the world by the turn of the new millennium. It was just far enough away to be an effective exercise, but soon enough in our lifetimes to guess at where things were heading.

I remember going on a school trip to Hastings when I was about 10, in the mid-80s, where we visited what I remember to be some kind of cave. In one of the walls there was an arrow half-buried in the stone, point-first, Excalibur-like. The guide told us that the arrow pointed to a chamber where a copy of The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle that described the death of King Harold was buried, and that this time capsule was due to be opened in the year 2000. Of course, it would have to be opened very carefully, as the delicate paper of the document could likely crumble to dust. This I found to be extremely frustrating – just open it now, while I’m here, I thought, not at some point in the distant future, when I’m the grand old age of 26! I can’t imagine that far ahead!

I’ve always remembered this trip and the desire to see exactly what was buried in the wall, and I’ve tried a number of times to search on the internet to see if it was indeed opened in 2000. Oddly, I can’t find any reference to it at all, and now I wonder if it was real at all, or just some kind of faux-tourist attraction.

Later, in 1990, my class were asked to write an essay about “The World in Ten Years Time”. I found it in an old schoolbook a few years ago and I was left slightly thunderstruck on reading it again. Alongside my predictions about the Queen Mother having died (I thought, wrongly, that was a certainty) and stamps having been abolished for some reason, I had written that Princess Diana had died in a car crash in 1997, with a mysterious unidentified car being involved in some way. Funnily enough, I remember writing the bits about the Queen Mother and the stamps, but had no memory of writing about Princess Di at all. Extremely peculiar. And now, after my parents moved house, I don’t know where that book is, so I can prove exactly nothing.

Still – predictions of the year 2000 have been going on for a long time. Here’s a handful, as they appeared in the local press over the last couple of hundred years.

I wonder when the first year 2000 prediction happened? I certainly haven’t seen one earlier than this, from the 1833 Taunton Courier, although I bet there’s loads of Age of Enlightenment philosophers that considered it.

“An Author of Romance, foreshadowing the events of the year 2000, among other wonders, predicts that pens will write of themselves; and the Patentee of the Hydraulic Pen may be said to have all but accomplished the anticipated miracle. The invention will be invaluable to book-keepers, authors, and reporters; to all, especially, who wish to keep a clean hand either in court or counting house.”

I think they mean a non-dipping pen, an alternative to the quill and inky fingers, so a successful prediction there, what with ink cartridges and biros.

The Taunton Courier, 17th July 1833
The Taunton Courier, 17th July 1833

 

The Hull Daily Mail in 1901 told a joke about the battle of the sexes in the year 2000, and the shocking notion of women wearing trousers, inspired by the Suffragette movement.

“Here,” said the husband of the New Woman, entering a tailor shop and laying a bundle on the counter, “you will have to alter these trousers. I can’t wear them as they are.”

“Really,” replied the tailor, as he opened the bundle, “you must excuse me, my dear sir, those are your wife’s.”

Women now wear trousers – correct.

Hull Daily Mail, 6th June 1901
Hull Daily Mail, 6th June 1901

 

The Yorkshire Evening Post of 1936 had a surprising article on predicted population growth by 2000. Instead of overcrowding and spiralling numbers, Dr S.K. Young of Durham thought that the birth rate would fall on account of women joining the workplace (if this is what he means by “amazons”) and what’s more, being needed in the workplace.

His calculations figured that the population of the whole of the UK in 2000 would be no more than that of 1936 London (which was around 4.3 million). This wasn’t a crazy thought – the population of London had indeed been decreasing since the turn of the century and the birth rate of the UK was about as low as it has ever been in 1936. 1920 still holds the record for the highest birth rate and it had tumbled dramatically over the next decade so it was a justifiable, if incorrect prediction – the population of London alone is now 8.5 million.  Some interesting information on the ups and downs of the UK birth rate and baby booms is here.

Yorkshire Evening Post, 4th December 1936
Yorkshire Evening Post, 4th December 1936

 

Still in The Yorkshire Evening Post, the paper published a quite detailed consideration of what 2000 might look like. It was December 1949 and the imminent new year bringing the second half of the twentieth century with it, provoked a look ahead at what this half-century would bring.

Yorkshire Post, 30th December 1949
Yorkshire Post, 30th December 1949

 

Here it is in more detail. It predicts “Extensive use of helicopters to take business men almost from doorstep to doorstep; The disappearance of trams from city roads; Segregation of different forms of traffic; A tendency for housing and industry to be concentrated in more compact areas to conserve agricultural land; In the home, television, refrigerators, washing machines and labour-saving devices as commonplace as radios; Open fireplaces replaced by cleaner and more economic forms of heating.”

Apart from the helicopters, this is pretty astute predicting. Although the death knell of most of the trams was pretty evident by then.

And finally, still from The Yorkshire Evening Post, comes a prediction from 1955. The British Newspaper Archive only goes up to the mid-50s, and I expect as the century went on, there were many more such articles.

Here, an exhibition at Olympia which envisioned a 2000-era Soho is described. It’s a very futuristic vision, “a city clothed in glass“, edging towards the kind of dystopian future seen in 1960s and 70s sci-fi. Soho is encased in a glass dome, on top of which (on top!) are 24-storey blocks of flats, made of glass in the shape of stars.  Helicopters land on the roof of those flats, and there is no traffic, people getting around by gondola on a system of canals.

“A rather soulful commentary….added a hope that man, in this new Soho environment, “might be no longer vile”. The paper concludes that while “Soho at rooftop height looked uncomfortably like Aldous Huxley’s vision in “Brave New World”, it was more interesting than some of the features seen in “the bad old one”. Although this didn’t come to pass, it was successful if boiled down to the essential fact that glass was probably the most important feature of architecture in the second half of the century.

The Yorkshire Post, 17th November 1955
The Yorkshire Post, 17th November 1955

In short – I think the transport systems of today might come as a bit of a disappointment to the people of the past. Not too many personal helicopters and gondolas.

This is an area I could research for years, really. I’m endlessly fascinated by future predictions – and I’m especially amused by the not-entirely-serious 100 years of fashion I found in an old Strand magazine here, and one of my favourite childhood books on what life would be like in 2010 here.

I’ve got a rather strange prediction for the year 2000 in a book of inventions from 1949 too, now I come to think of it. I’ll need to dig that out…..