Back In Time For The Weekend

Mum and me at my dad's company sports day, 1974.
Dressed by Cloth-Kits, by the looks of things.

It's another series of flashbacks to my childhood. This time Giles Coren takes a family (the Ashby-Hawkins) back to the leisure activities of bygone decades. It's exactly the same format as Back In Time For Dinner, only with less food, and less likable kids. I'm finding them too posh and privileged and full of themselves, and too likely to take the piss out of their parents for the slightest misdemeanour. Typical teenagers, you might argue, but they're annoying.

The kids are from a generation that spend their lives staring at screens. They would rather sit at home and Skype their friends than go out and see them in the flesh.

But in the 1970s and 80s, they can't do that. So it's off to the park to climb on splintered wood and steel scaffolding screwed into concrete, before lacerating their hands on a zipwire. Never did us any harm. My brother, who split his head open in our local adventure playground when he ran into a concrete tube and forgot to duck, may disagree.

Never did us any harm

But we were left to roam, to ride our bikes around the streets and chase each other through the alleyways. Children can't do that any more. There are too many cars on the road. Too many perverts. (Though I am sure, as the Savile Report testifies, there were plenty of those in the 1970s too.) Nowadays, two thirds of kids have never been to the park on their own.

The family finds the 1970s fun. There are spirographs and slinkies, and selfies with the camera. (Except that selfies were not a "thing" when I was little.) There is a lot of dancing. There wasn't much dancing in our house. As a university lecturer once said to me, "Some of us listen to opera, some of us listen to Boney M." In our house, it was opera. No rollerdiscos for us.

Opera in the lounge

And it's fun despite the fact for a lot of the time, there's no electricity, no petrol and for the summer of 1976, no water either.

Me in my home-made 1976 desert

And it's fun despite the fact that the kids are left outside pubs, sat in the car with a packet of crisps. The car is a Renault 5, given to the family by Angela Rippon, the original presenter of Top Gear. Take that, Clarkson. She has so much more style than you.

The 70s sunlounger

And I had my own

But at least there was a summer, and snow in winter. We had a sun lounger just like the one in the Ashby Hawkins' garden. And my dad got to use it.(See above.) Because it was sunny. The family go on holiday - a camping trip in the great outdoors, which is a lot less fun in the 2015 weather. No pop-up tents - it takes Mum and Dad a good few hours to erect the poles, while the kids whine in the Renault 5. But there's much to tell their friends in a slideshow when they get home, a tradition which my parents maintained well into the 1990s.

Proper snow in winter, even Down South

The 70s is a decade when people start to buy rather than rent their home. (The Ashby-Hawkins talk the bank manager into lending them a £5,000 mortgage.) This begins a trend for DIY. (Do I really have a memory of my dad on the roof, wrestling with a central heating flue?) The Ashby Hawkins install a corkboard wall, so Eric Bristow can teach them to play darts. (There seems to have been a lot of retired darts players on television recently.)

Yes, I really do

There's home brew, and the arrival of a colour telly, which greatly improves the family's enjoyment of Pot Black. We had to make do with black and white until at least 1984. Which is how we got to know our new next-door neighbour in 1981, because he invited us round to watch Charles and Di get married in colour.

Rob actually saw Charles and Di get married in the flesh, so to speak, since he and his mother camped outside St Paul's Cathedral for five nights in July 1981. If you look carefully, you can see their tiny heads on the television footage, which Rob is now watching for the very first time, at a retro red white & blue (indoors) street party.

In the 1980s, the house turns into a cluttered jumble of chintz and technology. They stencil the walls and scent the lounge with pot pourri. Son Seth is excited by the technology - a home computer that has to be programmed every Basic line of the way. This means he no longer goes out into the garden to enjoy their Flymo manicured lawns and hedge-trimmer strimmed privet. (It's possibly safer that way. I have an uncle who lost a toe to a Flymo.)

I was dragged out into the garden to show off my Brownie uniform.
Brother with chair.

When Seth isn't on the computer, he's watching videos on the new VCR, which only he can work. He does at least have to go outside to rent the videos from the local Blockbuster. No online streaming here. But on the high street, the cinemas are closing down. As are the youth clubs, so prevalent in the 1970s. Kids are going to play video games in arcades instead.

Whereas we went to National Trust properties

The family have become spendaholics. There's a second car to the Vauxhall Cavalier - the Ford Fiesta. If Mrs Ashby Hawkins had had her way there'd be a Sinclair C5 on the drive as well. There's another telly in the kitchen, on the breakfast bar. From 1983, there's Breakfast TV to watch on it too. There's a phone they can walk around with (even if it's still on a wire) rather than having to stay sat on the stairs. There's a Walkman to jog with. There are British Gas shares to make them rich. (But there's Live Aid to make them feel guilty.) Everyone wants to be as American as Ronald Reagan, with Dallas shoulder pads, Miami Vice jackets, and a fear of nuclear Armageddon. The look is all highlights, perms and big glasses, with a touch of Madonna thrown in. And Nick Kamen boxer shorts and Levi 501s for the boys. It's the end of the Y front.

Who is paying for it all? Why Access, our flexible friend.

Daughter Daisy goes looking for a rave, but she definitely needs to work on her acid house moves. She wasn't much good at breakdancing either. Probably safer to stay home and tape the Top 40. Her mum, having finished her Jane Fonda workout, is out at a new "ladies friendly" wine bar. The dad seems content to be at home, (finally) doing a small share of the chores and indulging in a secret passion for 80s television. He rustles up some Del Boy style cocktails at a party to celebrate the end of the decade.

In the 1980s, work starts to intrude on family life. Not just because the mother is out at work to help pay for all their spending. It's mainly because we are now contactable 24/7, thanks to the rise of pager systems. Pagers will of course will turn into mobile phones, and then into mobile internet and wifi and remote logins for e-mail access - all of which mean that we will never truly be able to switch off from our jobs again, or have leisure time which is just about us, leaving the day-to-day grind behind.

The Battle For Britain's Breakfast

I watched this on a bit of a whim, but it turned out to be surprisingly interesting. It’s hard to believe that there was once no such thing as breakfast television. Once upon a time, the only TV before lunchtime was Open University lectures or that test card of a girl playing noughts and crosses with a scary clown. She was a big part of my youth, that girl. My mum couldn’t shove us in front of CBeebies all day long, but she could let us loose on the test card. I am sure that clown had a lot to do with a childhood phobia of the circus.

This documentary detailed the ratings war between ITV and the BBC after the government gave permission for channels to start broadcasting in the early morning. The ITV franchise was awarded to TV-am, and the cheeky BBC decided to launch a rival show two weeks before it went on the air. The first Breakfast Time on BBC1 in 1983 was a big event in our house. (We plainly had no life.) We were always very much a BBC rather than an ITV family, though me and my brother were allowed to watch Rainbow at lunchtime so that my mum could then tune into The Sullivans. So Frank “combover” Bough and Selina “Clothes Show” Scott were regulars in our house, and we only saw Good Morning Britain when we went to visit my nanna in the Lake District. So I was quite surprised to learn that people that I had remembered being on ITV, like Russell Grant and the Green Goddess, were actually on BBC Breakfast Time. Or I guess these were assumptions rather than memories. But that is what the whole ratings war was about – the BBC's breakfast show, with its jumpers and sofas, was trying to be like ITV, whereas the TV-am broadcasts, with David Frost, Parky, Angela Rippon, Anna Ford and a serious news content, were trying to be like the BBC. It didn’t work out for anybody, although the BBC was winning the ratings war. Behind the scenes at TV-am there was a lot of treachery. Famous people got sacked. Jonathan Aitken was a baddie even then (he got wine thrown over him by Anna Ford - you go, girl!). TV-am went virtually bankrupt and could barely pay for enough electricity to keep broadcasting. Greg Dyke, now chancellor of my alma mater, The University of York, brought in a rat puppet called Roland to save the day. 

Eventually things came full circle. The BBC relaunched Breakfast with people in suits behind desks (to make people want to go out to work), and ITV became increasingly tabloid-influenced and sofa-based (to encourage stay-at-home couch potatoes). And since then everything has more or less remained as you might expect.

My grandfather was once on Breakfast Time, when he became the first person to climb all the mountains in England, Scotland and Wales over 2,000 feet high. However, he was filmed on location, asleep in the back of his Volvo, and hiking up his final hill, rather than being allowed on a sofa. Those who knew him would probably agree that my grandfather didn’t look comfortable on a sofa.

It’s sadly ironic that The Battle For Britain’s Breakfast was broadcast the day after the death of Peaches Geldof. Her parents were, of course, very involved with Channel 4’s own early morning programme, The Big Breakfast, which (since it didn't air until nearly a decade later) played no part in this documentary. I once walked past the house where The Big Breakfast was filmed. It was next to a grotty canal towpath that was on the Capital Ring, a 78 mile walk around the edge of London which my husband and I completed one summer. The walk is split into several easy sections, the beginning and end of which are all accessible by public transport, usually from stations in zone 4. I wrote of the Capital Ring in 2006:

“Like all of London, the Capital Ring embraces contrasts. You see some of the most opulent (Richmond) and some of the most squalid (Hackney Wick) parts of the city suburbs. There are palaces (Syon House, Eltham) and sewers (the Greenway). There are streams, canals and rivers, forests, woods, parks and open meadows. There is the world’s ugliest hospital (Ealing). There is a windmill (Wimbledon). There are cranes, swans, ducks, coots, squirrels, rats, voles, mice, woodpeckers, jays and rutting deer. There is dog shit (Crouch End’s Parkland Walk). Some areas are undergoing rapid change and construction, such as the Docklands and 2012 Olympic Park to be. Some are undergoing painfully slow change and construction (Wembley stadium and, if I think about it, the 2012 Olympic Park to be).”

Anyway, if you live in London, I wholeheartedly recommend that you give the Capital Ring a go. We loved it and were very proud of ourselves when we got all the way round. We embarked on the walk's bigger brother, the London Loop, but sadly didn't get to complete this before we had to move away.

I was surprised to read that the Big Breakfast house is still standing now, since it was right in the area where the Olympic Park was going to be built. Apparently it fell under a compulsory purchase order but didn’t in the end need to be demolished.

The first subtitling company I worked for had two contracts to subtitle the news segments on breakfast television, one for Channel 4's Big Breakfast, and one for GMTV, TV-am's successor. Being fresh out of university, I hadn’t had any experience of serious early rising, so never volunteered to cover these shifts myself. Now, with a young child and never getting to sleep beyond six in the morning, I’d be signing up for them like a shot, as you got a taxi ride into work (the Tube not being properly up and running at that time of day), paid extra, and could slope off home after lunch. (Though to be honest, given the cuts to subtitling budgets over the years, I doubt these terms and conditions would still apply.) Subtitling for GMTV was done at their studios on the South Bank and there was also a rumour that if you popped out to make yourself a coffee at the right time, you could also get yourself on television, as some interviews were filmed outside the subtitle transmission room. Our involvement in these breakfast shows' production was hardly as cut-throat as the world portrayed in the Battle For Britain's Breakfast, but the subsequent loss of the GMTV contract was definitely the start of our own company's demise.