Thursday 10 January 2019

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...

9 comments:

  1. Fascinating look at TV in your part of the world. By 1975, the town I grew up in (South Bend, Indiana) had four local television stations, each affiliated with one of the networks (NBC, CBS, ABC, and PBS, the first three being commercial and the last being nonprofit). Each station went on the air at 5 or 6 am, and stayed on until 1 or 2 am. There were news and children's shows in the morning, game shows and cheap dramas all day, news in the afternoon/early evening, network dramas and comedies all evening, then local news and "the late shows" which could have been talk shows or movies.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Ha that sounds a world away from Northern Ireland in 1975! - which it was, I suppose. I dont think the UK got ‘breakfast tv’ until some time in the mid ‘80s. Nowadays we’ve satellite, some cities have Cable, we all have NetFlix and a hundred channels of crap. Actually not all crap - some show re-runs of classic tv shows like Kojak. I watched a bit of one episode over Christmas- I loved it! Those big iconic American cars slip-sliding all over the place. And everyone smokes - everywhere!

      Delete
  2. As I've said before, you're lucky to have so many photos of your youth. My family didn't make many photos after I reached a certain age.
    The Island of Newfoundland (where I'm from originally) officially joined Canada in 1949 after being a colony of Britain and then a dominion for a while. But I think Newfoundland didn't really become part of Canada/North America until sometime in the late seventies. When I was a small boy we had CBC and the awful NTV and that was about it. The CBC showed lots of programmes from Granada and Thames Television and there was even nudity in the daytime! In the mid to late 70s we got cable television and lots of programmes from mainland Canada the U.S. There was a worry for a while that the violent and depressing news from places like Detroit would have a bad effect on Newfoundland society. I don't remember news from Detroit, but I remember a colourful weatherman from Bangor Maine who had an over-the-top dialect that was quite amusing. I suspect the dialect was over-the-top even for people from Maine. Anyway, Newfoundland culture changed from that time. Only in my grandparents' house would I be offered 'chips' and a 'tin of drink'. Most places now had french fries and cans of Coke.
    Anyway, great photo! I always look forward to your posts.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Thanks Marcus, I do think I’m fortunate - not only for taking so many photographs back then but also for the fact that my mother didn’t throw out the negatives in the intervening years! Mind you, she’s not one for throwing anything out - she still has the same wallpaper you can see in this shot.

      That’s an interesting short history of Newfoundland - all news to me, of course. Nudity in daytime tv sounds great - for teenage boys at least!! We still have our ‘chips’ here of course :) I remember going to visit my great grandmother in the early ‘70s and we’d be offered a ‘mineral water’ - a bottle of fizzy pop, basically. I love hearing about these old words&phrases that have died out, or are dying out. TV I’m sure has had a major influence in changing cultural norms all over the world. I totally get how some countries resent the ‘Westernisation’ of their culture.

      Delete
  3. OK, so here's what TV was like in Norway in the 70's: Pretty simple to explain actually. One channel only, the NRK channel (more or less some sort of BBC1 light, I guess) and that's it. A few norwegians living very close to the swedish border would be able to also look at their channels, and yes they had two of them! So basically 98% of all norwegians only had one channel to chose from (and there was a monopoly, so no other channels was allowed) up until they finally decided that this was a very outdated way to do things and they let other companies make TV as well.
    Talking about TV in Norway I also have to say a few words about colour TV, as that is a chapter well worth mentioning. We did not get colours until 1971, and it was a big discussion going on all the way to the top of the government if we really needed to upgrade the TV system to colours.
    The decision was made to go for it, eventually... and then oil money started pouring in and nobody seemed to bother anymore about the few NOK's of tax money spent on colour TV system. But I remember very well the official opening of colour TV, when a couple of well known TV comedians was doing their show, and everything switched to colours in the middle of some pretended fighting on the stage. Or, it should have switched to colours should I say... we did not get a colour TV until 1976. I remember that as well, as it was just in time for the winter olympics in Insbrück.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. It's strange looking back on it now how something like colour TV could take up such a Big Discussion. But the great tech revolution hadn't started then and there wasn't much content to show, so it wasn't really the no-brainer like it seems now.

      Delete
  4. Imagine just having one, text-only website run by the government on the Internet. That might be all right, come to think of it. I would waste less time . . . .

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. That's for sure, Marcus! All this freedom of speech and thought and what do we do with it, eh? For too many it seems to be watching Reality TV shows and caring too much about what 'celebrity' is doing what, and to whom...

      Delete
    2. Possibly you know that the inventor of television Philo Farnsworth wouldn't allow a television in his house because he thought all the content was a waste of time.

      Delete