1975

This photograph holds a lot of memories for me.  Centre-stage of course is The Brother.  When I looked at the negative, I thought he was doing his homework at the family table.  But as you can see, he is engaged in something altogether more exciting - cleaning a camera:

The Brother, sometime early 70s, on Adox MCC Fibre paper

Hard to tell which camera but I've a suspicion it's a Yashica TL Electro X.  After that he graduated to one of the most iconic cameras of the late 70s, the Contax RTS.

Although the shirt - and those collars! - are a dead giveaway to the era, I can tell it's 1975 as its our old, original television that is behind him.  And that's a home-made Birthday card for Yours Truly on the top, so it must have been summer.  We acquired our first colour TV a year later in the summer of '76, around the time of Wimbledon - I can remember being amazed that the grass courts were such a vibrant green!

But this old B&W set was pretty awful, truth be told.  It had a rocker switch at the bottom to change frequencies, from memory something like 475/625Hz.  It never seemed to make the snowy pictures any better, mind you.  No, we were stuck with BBC1 and BBC2 on a good day (evening, there was no daytime TV in those days other than 'Watch with Mother' which we'd outgrown by 1975).  The TV was hardly ever on - the reception was so bad that it was pretty pointless.  The set (or our aerial, or both) couldn't get any of the independent stations - Yorkshire TV or Granada, or Tyne Tees or even the national ITV station.  Now that was a serious thing, because ITV had shows like Thunderbirds and Batman and such, so I grew up completely ignorant of these.  At school I had no idea what the other kids were talking about - Virgil this and Scott that and 'Brains'.  I did feel like I was missing out, as these seemed to be all 10 year old boys ever talked about - well, that and football and I wasn't into that either.  I read comics - strictly The Beano and Dandy only - and books, by the bucketload.  Initially stuff like Enid Blighton's Famous Five and then as I got older, the Narnia books.  Any 'Biggles' was well received as well as Hal and David in their series of Global Adventures (South Sea Adventure was one I remember).  After that it was authors like Hammond Innes and Alistair McLean - Ice Station Zebra and Fear is the Key and so on. Pure escapism and great for the imagination.

After the colour TV came along in '76 I was too old to be interested in Thunderbirds or any cartoon/puppet shows.  There were only two programmes a week that I watched.  One was Star Trek, from 8.10-9 on a Monday evening.  Bed was straight after. The other was Top of The Pops - 7.25-8pm on Thursdays.   Funny the things you remember but the days and times of these two programmes were hardwired into my brain, such was their importance to me.

And that, folks, was a glimpse into what television was like in the 70s in this part of the world. And I almost got through this post without once saying ‘And sure it never did me any harm’. Almost...