John Burke's Nostalgia   Radio & Television

By the time I was old enough to watch, ITV had started and people were getting used to advertisements on the "telly". However, the radio played much more of a part in my early childhood. The BBC broadcast the "Home Service" (destined to become Radio 4), the "Light Programme" (later Radio 2) and the early equivalent of Radio 3, whatever it was called... An email from my schooldays best mate, Alex: If memory serves, the name of the third radio station that you can't remember was - the Third Programme! Someone really let their imagination rip with that one.

Weekends in particular were the days that the family would sit en masse to listen to the radio - which was always called the "Wireless".

Saturday mornings had "Children's Choice" with such favourites as "The Runaway Train", "You're a Pink Toothbrush" and the wonderful "Three Little Fishes" by Frankie Howerd! Much later Ed "Stewpot" Stewart took over and we'd still hear the same records but now also "Boom Ooh Ya-ta-ta-ta" by Morecambe and Wise.

Nanna and Grandad always listened to "The Archers" on Sunday mornings. Then there would be the shout of "Wakey Wakey!" as "Billy Cotton's Band Show" came on. Then "Two-Way Family Favourites" with a link to British Servicemen in Germany or Singapore. Hearing Andre Costalanetz's version of "With A Song In My Heart" brings it all back! Then a comedy programme. My favourites were always Jimmie Clitheroe in "The Clitheroe Kid" and Kenneth Horne in "Round The Horne". Heaven only knows why I liked it as a child, I certainly wouldn't have understood it. In fact the vast majority of the country didn't understand all the homosexual innuendo that filled it... Kenneth Williams carried the show with a multitude of voices and even without understanding all the references it was hilarious. It remains so - buy one of the many CDs or tapes and have a listen!

After that the day got progressively worse until the low point was reached with "Sing Something Simple", which Grandad loved. Once we had suffered that, the television was switched on for "Sunday Night At The London Palladium". Variety shows, hosted by Bruce Forsythe or Norman Vaughn ("Swinging!" or "Dodgy!" were his catch-phrases).

Some of the earliest shows I remember were "Seeing Sport", which introduced the phrase "Spot the deliberate mistake" and the early Gerry Anderson puppet show "Four Feather Falls" which was a western. There were lots of western TV shows from America. Mainly aimed at adults were "Bronco Lane", "Cheyenne Brody", "Tenderfoot" whose theme tune confused us by singing "Sugarfoot", the American title, then for the kids, "Champion the Wonder Horse", "The Lone Ranger"... I can still remember every one of those theme tunes!

The BBC had "Blue Peter" with the original team of Christopher Trace and Valerie Singleton. ITV had "Tuesday Club" with Muriel Young and a puppet owl wearing a school cap, called Ollie Beak - er... that's the owl, not the cap...

Later came "Supercar" and "Fireball XL5" from Gerry Anderson. One of the later shows had the characters gathered round a television which was showing "Four Feather Falls"... There were quiz shows - "Criss Cross Quiz" had young contestants playing noughts and crosses, "Take Your Pick" with Michael Miles where contestants had to choose a box and then were bribed with money before finding out what they had won, "Double Your Money" with Hughie Green who would go on to host "Opportunity Knocks", a talent show responsible for the discovery of lots of talented people, some of whom were eclipsed by singing dogs and precocious kids - and don't forget the musical muscle man, Tony Holland (Come on now, you can remember the tune - "Wheels Cha-Cha" can't you?).

In 1963 we were at Grandma Burke's house for Saturday tea one week and we watched the first ever episode of "Dr Who". It was repeated the following week just before episode 2. The first story had the Doctor, his granddaughter (yes, really!) and two of her teachers going back to the Stone Age. The second story, once they had escaped from the far distant past took them to a planet called Skaro and the world was introduced to the Daleks for the first time. That clinched the show's popularity.

Well, the Daleks and the glamourous helpers - once the granddaughter was disposed of... As I got a little older I could appreciate Wendy Padbury as Zoe, Katy Manning as Jo, Lalla Ward as Romana and ooh... Nicola Bryant as Peri!!! They were all as popular as Billie Piper in their day! I've since met Katy and Nicola and they are still very glamourous today!

There's no way I can list all the programmes I loved, so let's digress a little... Having mentioned Grandma Burke's house, we used to go there for tea almost every Saturday. Long Play records had just come out - they played at 33 1/3 rpm which seemed very very slow after watching 78s whiz round. Uncle Geoffrey, Dad's brother was a hi-fi enthusiast and bought a player and an LP. Just the one. It was the ballet "La Boutique Fantasque" by Respighi and Rossini and we listened to it every Saturday. It is indelibly imprinted on my brain - I still enjoy listening to it - though these days it is a slightly better quality version - even though in those days, Dad and Uncle Geoff would listen for the triangle and triumphantly exclaim "There it is! Did you hear that!!!" It was one of the first CDs I bought...

Then as we got a little older we had Cliff Richard and the Shadows. Mum was a huge fan. We saw "Summer Holiday" twice the first week it came to Rochdale. People forget just what a huge star he was and how he was seen as a rebel in the early days. He had 22 top twenty hits by the time The Beatles appeared and his live shows were characterised by screaming girls showing the same hysteria that would later transfer to The Beatles, The Osmonds, The Bay City Rollers, Take That, McFly...

We saw him on stage quite a number of times. These were the days when stars were happy to play the end of the pier theatre! Amplification wasn't up to filling a large stadium, as The Beatles proved at Shea Stadium in America. He came to Blackpool when the ABC Theatre re-opened after a refurbishment. Dad took us to Blackpool from Rochdale. There were 7 of us in his Mark I Ford Cortina... Mum, Dad, brother Frank and myself, Uncle Geoff and Mum's brother Uncle David and Aunty Bernice. She - like Mum - was a Cliffy fanatic. They went absolutely ape when, as we came through Preston, he pulled out of a side street in a huge American Ford Thunderbird and drove alongside us for a while on a 2-lane road! "It's him, it's him, it's him!!!" A magic moment! I was 9 years old.

In 1966 at the age of 12 I started buying records for myself - the first was Manfred Mann's "Pretty Flamingo". Transistors had been invented and would start to take over from the bulky and fragile valves. For the first time portable radios could go in a pocket! They totally filled it, mind, but they were definitely much smaller than they had been! To go with the new radios were...pirate radio stations!

Everyone was tuned to Radio Caroline. The BBC wasn't allowed to play records all day - there had to be a percentage of air time taken up by speech and also live music, mostly played by guest orchestras for shows like "Listen While You Work", which seemed to be broadcast from a factory every day for some strange reason... The pirates weren't bothered by these types of rules. Besides, the BBC presenters were only allowed to announce the records. They could tell you who the artist was and what the title was but they certainly were not allowed to say that they liked it because that might influence the buying public! The pirate DJs said things like "This one is fabulous! Get down to the shops and buy a hundred copies!" They seemed much more real and everyone tuned in.

Their ships were hassled by Coastguards and even the Navy and then the BBC tried to block them by jamming the signal. I remember one day when everyone was walking about with a transistor radio held to their ears and all that came out was a high-pitched whine. But no one tuned back to the BBC just in case Caroline managed to come through!

In 1967, the year of Flower Power, the Summer of Love, something happened to the BBC. It got "groovy"! The Light and Home Services became Radio 2 and Radio 4, the Third Service became Radio 3 and a brand new service playing pop records was launched - Radio 1. Tony Blackburn was the first early morning DJ and the first record played was The Move's "Flowers In The Rain". The new station had all the best of the pirate DJs, the BBC might have been reserved but it was no fool... How can you describe the sheer joy of a Kenny Everett programme to someone who has never heard one? For weeks before the change, a jingle had been playing announcing the new station. "Radio One is wonderful!" The tune is imprinted on my brain, much as the words "For mash, get Smash" would instantly recall the jingle tune for many people.

ITV had joined the BBC on television and jingles for adverts were cluttering up the brain with catchy tunes. People of a certain age, remember these! "Keep going well, keep going Shell" or "The Esso sign means happy motoring!" How about "It's the right one, it's the bright one, it's Martini".

We had public information films about things like the perils of not drying your brakes after driving through a ford... It's getting hard to find fords these days, show a developer a ford and they'll build a bridge over it!

Going to the cinema meant Pearl & Dean adverts. Remember the one for Gordon's gin? All close up green glass, bubbles in liquid and huge dams spewing gouts of water! Kia-Ora orange had a few good adverts too.

There was almost always a supporting film - the "B" feature some of which were good and some bad. Often the studios would send round older films paired up - Uncle David took me to my first James Bond film and we saw "Dr No" and "From Russia With Love" on the same bill. Hammer Horrors also sent their films round like that after they had done the first round. Team-ups that I remember are "She" with "One Million Years BC" and "Scars of Dracula" with "The Horror of Frankenstein". As I turned 16 the age for going to see an X-rated film rose to 18. I was suitably disgusted and went to see them anyway!

This was possibly due to some of the Hammer films of the time, which were now being outdone in the gore stakes by Hollywood films such as "The Wild Bunch" and "Soldier Blue". They fought their corner by shedding clothes. We would go to see Ingrid Pitt doing strange things to Maddy Smith in the wonderful "Vampire Lovers" and Martine Beswick, exploring her "new" body as Dr Jeckyll turned into Sister Hyde. I've known these three ladies for a number of years and they are all still glamourous!

We always knew which films would have the highest flesh content because Michael Parkinson would gleefully show all those bits on the new TV show "Cinema" (1965-8). Every second week we knew we would at least see Anne Bancroft flashing her breasts at the petrified Dustin Hoffman in a clip from "The Graduate".

There were many more cinemas when I was a child, though even then they were bemoaning the fact that so many had disappeared. I remember five cinemas in Rochdale. It had once had 14 or more. Of course they all had just the one screen then, but it seemed more of an occasion really. Uniformed usherettes would walk backwards, shining a torch on the floor to guide you to your seat. Every now and then they would come out during the film and briefly play the torch over the back row seats to make sure nothing untoward was going on!

Cinema had been hit hard by television in the late 1950s and early 1960s but held some audiences due to the large screen and colour. In the 1970s as cimema audiences dwindled yet again (colour TV came out in the late 1960s), they kept the large screen just for audiences in the circle - the upstairs seats!) and sectioned off the stalls to create two small screen units so that three programmes could be offered. The multi-screen cinemas had arrived! Fran and I went to see The Who's film version of "Tommy" at the Odeon cinema in Blackpool and during the quiet bits all you could hear was the sound of sawing coming from below as it turned into a 3-screen cinema.

BBC2 joined the first two channels and with it came colour TV. On 20 July 1969, everyone was glued to the "telly", watching as Apollo 11 touched down on the moon. I remember thinking that the Americans were rubbish at designing lunar landing craft - it looked such a mess! Gerry Anderson could have done it so much better!

It was really exciting stuff - many people were convinced the three astronauts would never get back. Then when Apollo 13 went horribly wrong my brother Frank actually had a 50p bet with his schoolmates that they would all be lost in space! What a horrible child! He lost the bet too - serves him right!

I remember watching the assassination of President Kennedy and later that of Lee Harvey Oswald, shown after the warnings that "these scenes may disturb viewers of a nervous disposition"! I hadn't a clue what a "nervous disposition" was, and so watched and was disappointed at the blurry images and apparent lack of blood - it was in black and white remember! See - I was a horrible child too...! I do remember lots of people being very concerned over the assassination and what might follow it. An incredible number of people thought a nuclear war was inevitable, right up to my middle teens.