The 9.25pm main bulletin from ITN on Sunday 22 March 1964 with Huw Thomas giving us the top stories.

Do watch until the end, where Huw makes a terrible pun: his reaction to doing so is perfect.

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Trevor Lucas takes us through an evening of ATV London programming by slowly getting closer and closer and closer to the camera. When edited together like this, the effect is really quite creepy.

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For two generations of children, Freddie Phillips is best known for the music in the Gordon Murray Trumptonshire trilogy – 1966’s Camberwick Green, 1967’s Trumpton, and 1969’s Chigley, which were on a rotational repeat pattern on BBC-1 until 1985.

In 1964, that fame lay ahead of him. But when BBCtv became BBC-1 in April 1964, it was Freddie Phillips and the BBC Radiophonic Workshop that they turned to for the daily start-up music of the relaunched flagship channel. He composed eight pieces of music – two were used on Sundays because there was a need for a more ‘solemn’ piece before the church service – and anybody who turned on the television before programmes started got to hear them. Pretty soon, people were putting the television on 5 minutes early just to hear them. Here they are.

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Here’s Cliff Michelmore hosting Tonight, speaking to a man who is (semi-seriously) organising other men for the right to have long hair – David Jones, later David Bowie.

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Two Lotteries Acts – 1934 and 1956 – had made national lottery games illegal in the UK. Small, local lotteries could be run, but under very tight rules. Successive governments disapproved of gambling, permitting it only on-course and in members clubs. The only notable exception was football.

The football pools were – and are, they still exist, although they’re no somewhat overshadowed by other forms of gambling – were felt to be harmless. The stakes were small and the payouts were generally small too – the huge wins were rare enough to be national news. The system of pools agents, collecting the coupons and dispersing the prizes, was seen as a good thing, keeping a national game local. And if the the pools didn’t exist, then there was a big possibility that the people would start betting between themselves, or with local back-street bookies, and that would be A Bad Thing.

The pools also required skill, which wasn’t necessary in straight betting on the results of a match, with the person playing using previous form to work out the likely wins, draws and losses each week. This was much more like on-course horserace betting, which suited the great and the good better than the thought of someone betting next week’s rent on a single game.

Horace Batchelor’s Infra Draw method, however, didn’t use form or or any other method of predicting outcomes. Instead, it was more like modern spread betting. People who joined would send their coupon and stake to him, and he’d fill in the coupons. His method rarely won huge payouts, but was pretty well guaranteed to result in a constant stream of small payouts – certainly enough to pay for next week’s entry.

His main outlet for advertising was Radio Luxembourg, and he recorded the advertisements himself, in the (correct) belief that presenting himself as an ordinary guy who had just happened to developed a method he wanted to share with other ordinary guys would be a good sell.

His operation was based in Keynsham, a town halfway between Bristol and Bath that nobody except its residents had heard of. It’s one of those British towns designed to confuse foreigners – the spelling and the pronunciation only having a tangential relationship with each other – joining such mouthbenders as Kirkcudbright, Leominster, Alnwick, Bicester and the kings of these towns, Shrewsbury.

Add that to Radio Luxembourg’s famous fade and the vagaries of medium wave transmission, and you’ve got to spell the town’s name out to ensure your post gets to you. With the adverts in constant rotation on Luxembourg, the line “Keynsham – K-E-Y-N-S-H-A-M – Keynsham” became famous, and people still know the joke of saying it, even though most will have no idea at all what the joke is about.

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It doesn’t look subtle to modern eyes, but there are a couple of subtle tugs built into this advert.

For a start, the housewife doesn’t look frazzled, as she would on television until introduced to the product. Instead she’s in mod clothes, with her freshly set mod hair, looking relaxed and happy as she does her chores.

The addition of the skipping girl attaches to the ‘that means germ-free!’ tag line, reminding the reader that it doesn’t do just to have everything looking clean: it must be sterilised if you have children in order to protect them.

The text subtly reminds us to buy two bottles one for the lav and one for the kitchen. Why can’t one bottle be used in both places? Well, it suits Lever Brothers better if you buy two, obviously. But also, it subtly implies, the germs are different in the kitchen and the bathroom. Don’t let the two mix. You need two bottles.

The final tug is the last image, the housewife with her bottle of Domestos, looking for all the world like she’s going to drink it. This product has a nice smell, it hints, even though it doesn’t. You’ll enjoy using it, it presents, even though you won’t. And it’s safe around children, it shows, even though it isn’t. All very subtle.

Meanwhile, a bottle is only one shilling and threepence, is glass, and you’ll get twopence back if you return the bottle to the grocer you bought if from. Since lorries arrive full from the depot at a modern supermarket and leave to return empty, one would think that this old system to reduce waste would be easier now than it was in 1964. Apparently not.

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“As free as this. People who go their own way get National. The choice of one motorist in every seven. So go all the way. Go your own way. Get National.”

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When Sir Alec Douglas Home became prime minster, he made a self-depreciating joke that he worked out the nation’s finances using matchsticks. His reputation never really recovered.

Labour, under its new, dynamic, ‘young’ leader Harold Wilson, made a big play on how the PM was out of touch. Labour, he said, wouldn’t use matchsticks: we’ll ask a scientist to use a computer for such things. The white heat of technology would sort out Britain’s problems.

The public really warmed to this idea. Technology, automation, computers – they were things of the future and they were happening now. Scientists, the guys (for it was always guys) behind these innovations, knew more and knew how to find out more stuff. Advertisers leapt on this concept.

Washing powder adverts ceased to show a man in a suit explaining the benefits of the new Whizzo brand to a frazzled housewife. Instead, the actor donned a white coat and explained that the benefits of the new Whizzo were due to science. All manner of other products donned this scientific mantle, with everything from bread (our bread is lighter due to science!) to central heating (our boilers are more efficient due to science!) getting a man in a white coat to explain how wonderfully scientific each product was.

Here, featuring the frazzled housewife, the man in a white coat and a series of scientific-looking diagrams, Gibbs uses science to explain why you should switch to their scientifically proven scientific toothpaste with the scientific addition of science-based fluoride.

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A little public information film, run during advertisement breaks on ATV Midlands and Granada in the mid-60s, reminding people to Keep Britain Tidy.

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Memory fails us: we don’t remember what the new mystery flavour turned out to be. Do you?

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Despite the official disapproval of Radio Luxembourg, government quangos had no problem placing adverts with the Grand Duchy’s international radio station. Here the Milk Marketing Board urges us to never bicker with a vicar but drinka pinta quencha thirst.

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Automatic washing machines are a new thing. Most people have a twin tub – a top-loading washing machine paired with a spin drier, which you wheeled out of storage, connected to the tap and put a bucked under the outflow to collect the dirty water. Many others were still using the technology of the Victorian era, boiling water on the stove and washing the clothes in a large bucket or tin bath, then putting them through a mangle to get the excess water out.

Therefore, rather than boasting about what Hotpoint automatic washers can do versus other brands, this advert has to tell the housewife why she should move away from the twin tub or the mangle in the first place. And explain the concept of an automatic washing machine as well.

Note that they show the top-loading automatic in a fitted kitchen, but the text refers to it being on rollers – most people do not have fitted kitchens and buyers of automatic washing machines are still unlikely to have them plumbed in – they will still be wheeled out, attached to the tap, and wheeled back out of the way when the washing is done.

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From the mid-1960s, your Saturday Night Suit is by John Collier, says Radio Luxembourg.

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What’s most notable about this advert is that it catches British Railways halfway on its journey to becoming British Rail in 1965. The trading name of the organisation is still British Railways and hasn’t been truncated yet, and the double-headed arrow hasn’t been introduced. But the Rail Alphabet typeface has arrived. It was first tested at Liverpool Street in London, and the process for changing all signage began in 1965.

However, British Rail decided that signs would only be replaced as and when they had life expired – fallen off, become illegible or as part of a bigger upgrade. The last of the British Railways ‘totem’ station signs were not replaced until the 1980s.

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A fantastic earworm for Fairy Snow from the 1960s with Craig Douglas and the Mike Sammes Singers. Unusual for having Craig Douglas narrating and breaking out into song.

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