Yes, we loved the little ‘Ecko’ radio set that my father forked out around 25 guineas for and even the HMV record player that he played all his ‘classicals’ on, but life in the 3rd form in my personal 1964 was becoming unbearable for me as probably the only boy in class that went home to Mrs Dale’s Diary (already now changed to The Dales), rather than The Five O’clock Club and Stubby Kay, Muriel Young, Ollie Beak and Fred Barker or Eamonn Andrews and Crackerjack.

Most of my television viewing up until 1964 then was courtesy of my pals and I owe them (or at least their long suffering parents) a debt of gratitude for introducing me to Muffin the Mule (don’t, please…), The Lone Ranger, Popeye, I Love Lucy, Wagon Train, Take Your Pick and Blue Peter (there was much more of course). The gratitude extends even more to suddenly becoming aware of separate TV companies forming part of the great ITV network – or ‘the ITA’ as we called it – with their memorable jingles and animated ‘idents’ (even early Granada had an ident that silently fluttered the letters from left to right to make the word ‘Granada’ above that northward-rising pointing arrow). Those that might have read my pieces elsewhere will know that I still get embarrassingly excited over three triangles forming into one and the ching-ching-chinging letters A, B and C. Such was (and is) the world of the boomer generation.

So it was with some trepidation at the age of 12-going-on-13 that I wrote a letter to our nearest branch of Rentaset (later, part of Radio Rentals) asking for a ‘brochure’ on the latest sets they were offering. I think I signed it in my father’s name and soon, Dad was persuaded that TV was probably at last past the J L Baird 30-line stage and had more or less been ‘perfected’ and he felt able to wrench himself out of the Victorian age and embrace the new media, if only for the ‘serious’ stuff like classical drama, Shakespeare and Dickens. In truth, and with some guilty reflection in my dotage, I suspect the cost of the enterprise also had a part in the delay of television coming to the Singleton household.

So the grand day of change arrived we strained our necks as we watched the man strap the aerial – probably mistakenly – to the furthest chimney stack from the lounge window, so the co-axial cable stretched right across the roof before eventually being threaded through the drilled hole in the window frame.

When our television set arrived, there were at first, some restrictions. Sunday was supposed to be a day of rest, so it wasn’t until around tea time when the traditional ‘Dickens-or-similar’ slot aired did the TV set really get warm, although later, the parental restrictions began to be lifted as they themselves became more enthusiastic. Censorship was still enforced however at other times – Wednesday Plays particularly suffered and Till Death Us Do Part did too, (Mum: “That awful man!”).

Limited to two TV channels, it was just thirteen days after my thirteenth birthday when BBC-2 began transmissions (it was a shaky start though) in this Great Year of Change but us “oop north” had to wait until 1965 before the Winter Hill transmitter started radiating those six hundred and twenty five lines. “It’ll be just like a photograph” the Radio Rentals man announced (over-egging the reality somewhat) when he came to add the UHF tuner to the dual standard ready set we had already swapped to in the excitement of the build up to the second BBC channel as it spread rather slowly across the UK. And that unusual aerial heralded to all neighbours that we “had” BBC-2.

There was something rather avant-garde about the channel, and it made much of the “625” tag… (Jazz 625, Theatre 625) and its prime remit was to promote knowledge building and accentuate new comedy, drama and the arts. One early parentally-approved drama was The Forsyte Saga with such names as Kenneth More, Nyree Dawn Porter and Eric Porter in the main roles of Galsworthy’s Forsyte novels. It was the last major drama made by the BBC in black and white and the family became firm viewers.

So 1964 was becoming a year that changed everything in more ways than one. The reason I always get the ‘what year were the Tokyo Olympics?’ question right is because of television. The TV coverage for me was the start of something exciting because Telstar had been launched (Telstar 1 in 1963 and Telstar 2 in 1964) and this meant pictures could be beamed across the world (although it wasn’t until the Synchro 3 satellite that geo-synchronous coverage became the norm). Names such as Mary Rand, Lynn Davies, Robbie Brightwell and Ann Packer stick in my mind even today.

But there other television milestones in the year – and what a start it was when Top of The Pops first burst on to the screens. It was to continue for 42 years, along with Christmas Day specials. The show became part of British pop culture and there are still “decade” repeats, although any later ‘disgraced’ personalities are wiped from existence. For me though, Associated-Rediffusion’s more anarchic Ready, Steady, Go! already on air for four months as 1964 dawned, was much more of a turning point in pop culture as it became more established on our TV screens and reflected more the mood of the day.

The Beatles went to America and appeared on The Ed Sullivan Show (three times in fact) and took the States by storm. Ed Sullivan was a big name and his CBS show had already a 16 year history so this was something of a British coup and America became fascinated by the English music scene and what later became to be known as the British Invasion.

Granada’s socio-economic study Seven Up! was first broadcast in May in the World in Action strand and has been revisited every seven years since. I remember the first one – and I’ll be watching again with fascination in 2019 when 63 Up! airs, if only to see who’s left…

The short-lived Not So Much a Programme… More a Way of Life launched in November and Ned Sherrin continued the satirical path laid down by That Was The Week That Was, which was removed from the schedules the previous year due to the impending general election. Not as sharp as TW3, it didn’t last long and was followed in 1965 with BBC 3, hosted by Robert Robinson.

And although Granadalanders weren’t aware until later on, ATV’s Crossroads opened for business (“Crossroads Motel. Can I help you?”). Whether or not this was a highlight of 1964 is a debate but it deserves a mention – as does the dubious birth of a new newspaper, The Sun.

But 1964 wasn’t all about television. A cultural shift was in the air and at Easter, we became aware that we could twiddle our medium wave radio sets to one-nine-nine and listen to something called Radio Caroline. However, it wasn’t until Caroline North anchored itself off the Isle of Man that I really became aware of the power of change that the pirate radio stations were making. No longer were we limited to the BBC Light Programme or even Radio Luxembourg (which was subject to some dreadful reception) we were able to listen to pop music presented in a way that captured the ‘1964 shift’.

News today is fed to us round the clock – but for us early teens in 1964, we were limited to fairly short news bulletins on television. But nevertheless, some big stories of ’64 (some irrelevant, some more significant) have been retained in the hard drive of my memory – so much so, that there seems little capacity left for more recent stuff that seems to dematerialise as soon as it’s taken in.

My younger associates are sometimes amazed at the trivia I can come out with from my youth, for example that first telephone number, the Ford Classic my headmaster ran, the registration number of my friend’s dad’s Ford Popular, the cost (6d) of my weekly TV21 comic and the name of nearly every boy in my 3rd form class on those long whole-school photographs taken every year where the photographer’s camera panned from left to right and we were all told to “keep still, boy!” We had nicknames for all our ‘masters’ – Chalky, The Baz, Johnno, Nev, The Twitch and Mr Woodhouse’s moniker ‘Timbershack’. It’s all there, stored away, and occasionally gets all mixed up in my dreams into a weird video-maelstrom of past and present.

Digressing (as I do) the some news events of ’64 come to mind:

Harold Wilson’s Labour government took office following the October general election, beating the Conservatives and Sir Alex Douglas-Home’s premiership. Poor AD-H was never very good televisually – appearing like a white skull in front of the camera, and he never really warmed to television, unlike his successor at No. 10. Here was a man of no Oxbridge strain – a grammar school boy – who captured the mood of the nation with his “white heat of technology” speech at the previous year’s Labour Party Conference. I read somewhere that Harold preferred a good cigar to his pipe, but a pipe was a little more working class. Urban myth maybe, but it’s a good story.

In December, the news was that the death penalty was finally to be abolished and, as a consequence, ‘Moors Murderers’ Ian Brady and Myra Hindley escaped with life sentences where previously they would surely have been hanged. Even though capital punishment was handed out less and less over the previous few years, the last executions did take place in 1964 at Walton Gaol in Liverpool and Strangeways in Manchester.

And on the subject of criminality, the Great Train Robbers whose £2.6m haul in August of 1963 had been almost romanticised by the press, were handed out a total of 307 years in sentences at Buckinghamshire Assizes on 16 April.

Then there were the railways – Oh! Doctor Beeching – what can be said? In this year, Richard Beeching resigned as chairman of the British Railways Board and my memories of my parents bewailing the closure of many of the smaller railway lines are as clear today as they were in this year of change. After all, we weren’t a car-owning family then, so buses and trains were very important and the demise of the branch lines was something of an inconvenience.

Donald Campbell set the world water speed record on New Year’s Eve in Australia and yet the later news story of his death three years later probably meant more to me as that happened much nearer home. The Campbell story was indeed one of derring-do and ultimately, tragedy.

The Year Everything Changed… certainly for me and many of my peers, it did seem that there was change in the air, although we probably weren’t as aware of it until much later in life. We just accepted it as ‘the way things were’ at that time. In personal moments of reflection, I think of the music, the fashion, the changes that took place in broadcasting in television and radio, the changes afoot in education and science and those also within my own home and family that probably moulded me into the person I became. Every generation could probably say the same about its own ‘year of the decade’ but ‘sixty four’ is certainly up there as a milestone.

The post Milestones appeared first on THIS IS ZENITH 1964 from Transdiffusion.

One of the few Pilkington Committee recommendations that the ITA accepted was a request for ITV to switch from Outside Broadcasts being all sport – and all horse racing at that – to using the large fleets to present more live non-sport material happening around the UK. To help this, the Postmaster General increased the annual allowance for OBs from 250 hours a year to 300 in 1964. This all led to there being more innovation in OBs, something that had been in danger of dying out when the units were just seen as a sports service.

An example is the Morning Service on Sunday 6 September 1964. Instead of sending the OB unit to a cathedral or large church nearby last night’s football game, ATV’s OB crew (well, Rediffusion’s crew, paid for by ATV) head to Gilwell Park, the headquarters of the British scouting movement, in Epping Forest, with the service being held around the camp fire.

Another example on Southern is them coming on for cricket at 1.15pm. This isn’t the usual test match or international game that would be networked by one of the Big 4 companies. Instead, Southern cameras head out to Hambledon in Hampshire to watch The Lord’s Taverners take on the crew of HMS Mercury in a friendly amateur afternoon game. This is of pure regional interest, and perhaps even just local interest to people in Hampshire, and something ITV could do better in its federal system than the monolithic BBC even with 2 channels now at its disposal.

This is followed by something else that regional ITV did better than the BBC or the Big 4 ‘national’ ITV companies: microserving specific regional interests. Southern’s farming programme is one of many shown around ITV in roughly this slot in areas like Westward, Border and Anglia. There’s no equivalent in London for obvious reasons. ABC is the exception, having a farming slot, albeit firmly aimed at viewers in its fringes – Lincolnshire and Westmoreland – and in the broad swathe of agricultural land in the north Midlands and the south of the North region. Even then, ABC’s programme had more of a ‘national farming service’ feel – like the BBC’s farming programmes – and little of the deep understanding of regional agricultural issues the smaller ITV companies could bring.

ITV’s system of networking saw the Big 4 companies (Granada, ABC, Rediffusion, ATV) decide the schedules for primetime ITV between them, so the two or three companies on air at any one time largely kept the same programmes in the same slots. The smaller companies followed this, as it was easier and cheaper to take a ‘live’ feed from the network than to time shift with their own facilities. Where there were disagreements between the Big 4 and programmes going out in different slots or on different days – The Avengers on Sundays on ABC and Thursdays on Rediffusion, for instance – this allowed flexibility for the minor regions: they could choose which feed to take.

Such a difference of opinion existed between Granada and Rediffusion over Ready, Steady, Go! Rediffusion showed it at 7pm on Friday, timed to catch the older teenagers before they went out dancing at 8pm. Granada held it until after 10pm, waiting for the younger teenagers to come home.

Southern’s choice was to ignore either of these potential options and instead time shift RSG! in their own region… to 2.48pm on a Sunday afternoon. As to who that was supposed to target is now lost to us; more by coincidence than design it does directly compete with the off-shore ‘pirate’ pop stations that were springing up around the south coast of England at that time and targeting ITV’s younger viewers and hipper advertisers.

Weekends are full of sport and religion, neither of which count towards the daily maximum hours. Throw in some adult education, as ATV and ABC do in the early afternoon, and you’ve got a ten-hour broadcasting day. This allows for entertainment programmes to run from 2.30pm, catching a lucrative family audience. This was much to the chagrin of Rediffusion on weekdays, with little or no religion and sport – horse racing simply being a bloc in the afternoons – shutting them out from getting a family audience in front of the TV before dinnertime. For the smaller companies, and ATV in London, the Sunday afternoon slot created by all the uncounted hours of programming, was used to run repeats and burn off material they couldn’t find a place for – perhaps explaining why RSG! is here on Southern. For ABC, family audiences were always the goal, as they were great to sell to advertising agencies: get the kids to clamour Dad for a product, get Dad to give the money to Mum for it, send Mum off to the shops on Monday morning with the money and the product both fresh in her mind. For this reason, quality ABC programming is often seen in this period debuting on a Sunday afternoon. Networked on 6 September is Miss Adventure, a comedy drama vehicle for Hattie Jacques that would’ve worked well in the evening, but here is perfect for mopping up the entire family before dinner.

4.15pm sees Fireball XL5 hit Southern screens. Before the word “green” was in use in politics, the go-to word for a concern for the environment was “ecology”. Before that word, people talked about “the problems of pollution”. This was as close as most people got to worrying holistically about the sustainability of modern society. One of the surprising places where this concept is given voice is Fireball XL5. The series had a strong thread of compassion running through it, with Steve Zodiac, Venus and Professor Matthew Matic worrying about their impact on the universe, taking care not to disturb alien environments and always keeping one eye on pollution.

In today’s episode, a planet is found where mining operations have fundamentally undermined the whole globe. What can be done? The top bosses decide that disintegrating it will make for a safer galaxy. But the puppet stars take time to worry about the disintegration causing further pollution in space. And they take a trip to the surface to make sure that the planet is indeed uninhabited and uninhabitable. While there, they find a thriving civilisation to which the abandoned mine shafts are home – a new, liveable environment having been made out of a previously inhospitable one. The disintegration must therefore be stopped and the planet cared for: a bold deviation from the way things were done at the time.

The later reaches of Sunday afternoons were seen as a good place to put on films, with the perception that Dads would watch while the Mums were making dinner or supper, depending on when the main Sunday meal was eaten – it varied by class. Granada was delegated the job of buying in Hollywood films, probably on the back of their experience with the Granada Theatres chain in the south-east of England. But there were two other film companies involved in ITV, both of them also running huge national cinema chains. ABC was owned by the Associated British Picture Corporation, and therefore films on or offered to the network from ABC tended to be from the ABPC/Warner stable. Southern was part-owned (and controlled by) the Rank Organisation, so it offered films from Rank’s huge back catalogue. This Sunday across the network is 1955’s Track The Man Down, featuring singer Petula Clark. This one has probably come from ATV, with the film having been made by British Lion at Nettlefold Studios, which had been bought by Sapphire Films using ATV’s Incorporated Television Company subsidiary’s money.

In the 1950s, all television was banned for an hour on Sunday evenings by the Postmaster General to make sure it didn’t distract from people going to Evensong at their local church. ABC lobbied hard for this to be relaxed, suggesting instead that television should serve people who couldn’t go to church – people who were regular churchgoers would remain regular churchgoers, but the old, the disabled and people with childcare responsibilities were being denied a chance at getting some God-time in, and TV would bring it to them. The PMG saw sense in the late 1950s and allowed that hour to be used for religious and moral discussion, celebration and contemplation – and nothing else. ABC’s response was The Sunday Break, designed as a church youth club of the air.

Of the three heavier members of the Big 4, Rediffusion had become famous for its hard-hitting documentaries, whilst Granada had created a virtual monopoly on deep investigative journalism. ABC had a soft spot for looking at social issues, which would become all the more of interest to the public following the election in October returning a Labour government and the appointment in 1965 of the liberal reformer Roy Jenkins as Home Secretary, leading to the suspension of capital punishment, abortion and divorce reform, abolition of theatre censorship, a reduction in the voting age from 21 to 18 and the partial decriminalisation of male homosexuality. All of these subjects had been discussed across various ABC programmes in the 1960s, and this evening The Sunday Break, now more focussed on ‘morals’ than religion, turns its social reformist eye to ‘the colour bar’ – or racism as we now call it. At this point in time it was legal to incite racial hatred and refuse to serve, employ or house people of colour (that would also change under Labour, with the Race Relations Act 1965). Was this morally acceptable? The group of young people in the club discussed the matter and decided that no, it was not.

At 8.25pm the ITV network goes to Blackpool with ABC. This programme had its roots in a dispute between ABC and ATV. The two weekend companies had often descended to petty bickering over costs and scheduling, caused by one of the iniquities of the ITV setup. The original design of ITV was for competition to be the key in everything it did. It would compete with the BBC for audience, but also within itself for programmes. This, it was felt, would drive costs down whilst driving quality up. As usual, this didn’t work and ITV settled into a cosy duopoly with the BBC. The one part of the plan that did survive was how payments for programmes were allocated. The Big 4, making the majority of programmes, charged roughly two thirds of the cost to the other 3. For instance, a Rediffusion show made for £10,000 would be paid for by Rediffusion paying £4,000, Granada paying £4,000 and ATV Midlands paying £2,000 (reflecting its lower population size compared to the other two regions). As more ITV companies started broadcasting, that system remained, with the Big 4 selling each others’ programmes en bloc on to each company in an affiliate model and recouping some costs that way.

ABC and ATV London, however, was where this system failed. If ATV made a programme for £10,000, ABC had to pay £6,600 for it or come up with a replacement – not easy when ATV, Delfont, the two Grades and Val Parnell controlled virtually all the London talent between them. Making it worse was ABC’s suspicion that ATV were inflating the prices of each programme, to the point where ABC were paying four fifths or nine tenths of the cost while ATV pocketed the rest as profit. Howard Thomas and Lew Grade had stand-up arguments over this, with Grade waving invoices at Thomas to prove that costs were fair, whilst Thomas noted that the waving, and strategically placed thumbs and cigar ash, prevented him from double checking.

In 1963, the most popular light entertainment programme on ITV was Val Parnell’s Sunday Night at the London Palladium, made by ATV. The price per episode continued to climb across the year, until the show became uneconomic for ABC and they refused to pay until it was audited. ATV’s response was to threaten to withhold the programme from ABC, leaving them with an expensive hour to fill by themselves at the heart of primetime on lucrative Sunday nights, with ATV not paying in and it being unlikely that ABC’s small number of affiliated ITV regions would want to show the replacement nor pay for it.

But Howard Thomas decided that a line needed to be drawn, and that line was Blackpool Night Out. By using ABC’s own recently refurbished theatre in Blackpool, and drawing upon talent appearing in summer season in the northern holiday resorts, they could keep costs down and make sure that Delfont and the Grades couldn’t use their dominance over the London scene to intervene. The resulting show cost less than ABC had been paying ATV, drew the same sized audiences and kept the other ITV companies on side. ATV London had no choice but to show it, and to pay a third of the costs, the pound cost of which became the benchmark for similar programmes, and the Palladium show, in future.

Casebook at 10.35pm is unusual. This isn’t a TV series – it’s an Anglo-Amalgamated B-feature for use in cinemas, running as a short between the newsreel and the main feature in the days when cinema screenings were on a loop (you came in at any point and left when you reached the point that you’d come in at – a practice that was normal then but seems totally mad now). Anglo-Amalgamated were 50% owned and controlled by APBC, ABC’s parent, so these types of series came cheap for ITV. The cherishably named Edgar Lustgarten was not a famous criminologist. He was famous, but for his voiceover work (it’s him that Charles Gray is mimicking in The Rocky Horror Picture Show) and his crime novels, which were dramatic retellings of true crime stories. The series was known as The Scales of Justice when Associated-British Pathé sold it into syndication in the US.

With 7 hours allowed for general entertainment a day, ITV would be off by 11pm in accordance with the rules. To push things closer to a more natural bedtime, half an hour of adult education, not counted, gets inserted at the end of the day. As usual with adult education programmes shown late at night, it’s debatable as to whether tonight’s show, To Hell With Culture…?, is actually educational. From the description, it sounds like something London Weekend would be putting out at 9pm on Sundays in 1969, and indeed seems to be arguing for London Weekend’s failed policy of bringing arts and culture to the masses at peak times.

The post Sunday 6 September 1964 on Southern appeared first on THIS IS ZENITH 1964 from Transdiffusion.

Dad had been in the RAF as a wartime radar operator. When he was demobbed, he – like thousands of other men – just wanted to come home, get married, start a family and live a normal life. He saved, and by December 1958 he and my mother had the deposit to buy a house. £2,120. No, that wasn’t the deposit, that was the total price of a 3-bedroom house. Those were the days.

We moved out of our London rented flat to Rochford, a little Essex market town, just outside Southend-on-Sea. Onto a brand new estate built where previously Holt Farm has been, so our address was Holt Farm Way.

Faces of 1964

I attended the local primary school – Holt Farm School. There was a lot of farming around us. But most of the men on our estate commuted the one-hour train journey to London. Rochford became a dormitory town, and then the cattle market closed.

I remember my father coming home one evening from a Parent-Teacher Association meeting at the school: he was incensed. The chairman of the governors – a Mr Tabor, who owned and ran the local Tabor Farms – had got up in the meeting and announced that Rochford children did not need advanced education: they would find plenty of employment as farm labourers locally! The meeting erupted into riot. Those present were largely white collar workers in the City, and they weren’t having their children tilling the soil. They may have used slightly more colourful language than that.

This story serves to illustrate that, quietly at first, a social revolution was taking place in the late 1950s – heralding the Swinging Sixties.

When my sister was born in 1956, Dad bought Mum a “present” of a television set (though I reckon he benefitted from it as well). When we moved to Rochford, my schoolboy curiosity led me to switch away from Channel 1 (BBC) and Channel 9 (ITV), and, like Howard Carter breaking into Tutankhamun’s tomb, I discovered “wonderful things”!

Although I was a loyal fan of Pussycat Willum on Associated-Rediffusion (weekdays only, of course), and Robin Hood on ATV London (weekends), living in South-East Essex I found Southern Television on Channel 10, and Anglia on Channel 11. (Reception wasn’t that good, but I could guess most of it.) And every ITV station seemingly began with different start of day music. I was hooked: to this day, Richard Allinson’s Southern Rhapsody and the accompanying black and white film of views of the South and South-East of England still makes me weirdly emotional. And Handel’s Water Music will forever in my mind be associated with Anglia’s silver knight on horseback.

The programmes were almost as good! Southern Television’s Three Go Round with presenters Britt Allcroft (later to own the Thomas the Tank Engine franchise), Tony Bastable (who went on to co-present Magpie) and “the third one whose name I can never remember” saw me through my early teenage years when BBC’s Blue Peter simply wasn’t cool enough.

Switching to Channel 10 also gave me sight of TWW’s Movie Magazine, hosted by Bruce Lewis and his teenage son, Peter. Peter Lewis went on to become one of LWT’s most popular continuity announcers.

But back to 1964. With my increasing obsession with television presentation, it was no wonder that on 6 April of that year, when Associated-Rediffusion metamorphosed into Rediffusion, London, I was orgasmic in my excitement! (Not my first orgasm, but like any teenage boy, details of the others had best remain in embarrassed secrecy.) I discovered SANS SERIF typefaces! Microgramma Bold Extended – yes, yes, YES!! I found a seedy artists’ materials shop in a Southend shopping arcade, and acquired – in a paper bag – a Letraset catalogue. Whilst my contemporaries may have been salivating over Health and Efficiency magazines, I got off on pages from that catalogue… Times Roman, Helvetica, and – I’m not ashamed to admit it – the odd Grotesk.

Saturday early evening in the 1960s may have been the time for BBC Juke Box Jury, but for me A-R’s Ready, Steady, Go! was The Only Show In Town. It took some hard negotiating, and more than a few teenage tantrums, before my parents would permit us to watch RSG live on Friday evenings – “The Weekend Starts Here” – while we sat with our meal on our laps in the lounge. Presenters Keith Fordyce and Cathy McGowan dictated my music tastes: She Loves You – The Beatles; Do Wah Diddy Diddy – Manfred Mann; Glad All Over – The Dave Clark Five; Have I the Right – The Honeycombs; and (when I was feeling particularly rebellious) Little Red Rooster – Rolling Stones. Though my grandmother could never get used to “that Max Jagger”.

I had the bonus of being able to watch a repeat of RSG on Southern on a Sunday afternoon – and spotted that someone (perhaps the presentation engineer at Southern?) was substituting “The Weekend Starts Here” with “Here – Now – Here – Now – Here”. I could see through their cunning ploy.

1964 saw the premier of one of my favourite films of all time – A Hard Day’s Night, starring The Beatles. OK, John, Paul, George and Ringo were amusing enough, but it was Richard Lester’s direction and the black and white cinematography that really got to me. And the closing credits!! Oh wow! I think I might have used the word “genius” in critical acclaim for the first time then.

Wikipedia puts it very well. British critic Leslie Halliwell states the film’s influence as

“…it led directly to all the kaleidoscopic swinging London spy thrillers and comedies of the later sixties”. In particular, the visuals and storyline are credited with inspiring The Monkees’ television series. The “Can’t Buy Me Love” segment borrowed stylistically from Richard Lester’s earlier The Running Jumping & Standing Still Film, and it is this segment, in particular using the contemporary technique of cutting the images to the beat of the music, which has been cited as a precursor of modern music videos. Roger Ebert goes even further, crediting Lester for a more pervasive influence, even constructing “a new grammar”: “He influenced many other films. Today when we watch TV and see quick cutting, hand-held cameras, interviews conducted on the run with moving targets, quickly intercut snatches of dialogue, music under documentary action and all the other trademarks of the modern style, we are looking at the children of A Hard Day’s Night”.

In the past, I may have mentioned once or twice that, at the age of 60, I re-trained as a broadcast journalist. From the start of the course, I was challenged to make and edit 2- or 3-minute videos. Whilst much of the work had to be serious, objective reporting, it occurs to me now that at times I was re-making A Hard Day’s Night! My professional tutor may not have been that impressed by my hand-held shots and quick cutting, but he probably wasn’t born in 1964.

One element in the film disturbed me a bit – not Wilfrid Brambell’s portrayal of a very clean old man, but the way Alun Owen’s script, voiced by George Harrison, obviously ripped into Cathy McGowan:

Simon Marshall: Anyway, if you don’t cooperate, you won’t meet Susan.
George: And who’s this Susan when she’s at home?
Simon Marshall: Only Susan Canby, our resident teenager. You’ll have to love her, she’s your symbol.
George: Oh, you mean that posh bird who gets everything wrong?
Simon Marshall: I beg your pardon?
George: Oh, yeah. The lads frequently sit ’round the television and watch her for a giggle. In fact, once, we all sat down, wrote these letters, saying how gear she was and all that rubbish.
Simon Marshall: She’s a trendsetter. It’s her profession!
George: She’s a DRAG – a well-known drag. We turn the sound down on her and say rude things.
Simon Marshall: [horrified] Get him out of here…!
George: Have I said something amiss?
Simon Marshall: Get him out! He’s knocking the program’s image!
George: Sorry about the shirts!
Simon Marshall: [angrily] GET HIM OUT!

My style and music guru was being mocked. Maybe I shouldn’t have believed everything Cathy McGowan said, uncritically. That was a nail in the coffin of my adolescent innocence.

As a teenager, I was given a Medium Wave radio for my birthday. Not for me a portable, battery-driven set. No, as a child I’d had a battery-driven electric train set, and had not been impressed with the huge Ever Ready batteries it regularly drained. So I requested and received a little mains-driven radio (I think it even had valves).

I have to say I enjoyed several programmes on the BBC Home Service and BBC Light Programme: Two-Way Family Favourites with Jean Metcalfe, Beyond Our Ken starring Kenneth Horne, Alistair Cooke’s Letter from America and Today with Jack de Manio, who could never give an accurate time-check and was loved by (most of) the British public for his incompetence.

However, it was in the evenings that my radio really came into its own: Radio Luxembourg (“Did you know, Dad, that there is a country called Luxembourg?”) on 208 metres. It was trendy, popular and modern, but because of the way it broadcast from the Continent it had a habit of fading at the most crucial moments, which could be annoying. You could try tape-recording your favourite tunes – I had a tape-recorder, an Elizabethan reel-to-reel 3¾ inches per second, two-track machine, but I’m not one to boast – but you’d be lucky to get more than a minute of music before interference overwhelmed the tune. And, because Radio Luxembourg’s programmes were sponsored, even if the recording was successful, the music tracks were frequently faded in the studio after no more than half the song had been played. There had to be something better.

The solution came in the form of a ship’s bell. Ding-ding! Car-o-line, Car-o-li-yay-yay-ine… for the first time in centuries, the United Kingdom experienced piracy on the high seas!

I’ll let Wikipedia tell the story:

Radio Caroline is a British radio station founded by Irish musician manager and businessman Ronan O’Rahilly to circumvent the record companies’ control of popular music broadcasting in the United Kingdom, and the BBC’s radio broadcasting monopoly. Unlicensed by any government, it was a pirate radio station that never actually became illegal, although after the Marine Offences Act (1967) it became illegal for a British subject to associate with it.

O’Rahilly failed to obtain airplay on Radio Luxembourg for Georgie Fame’s records because it was committed to sponsored programmes promoting major record labels; EMI, Decca, Pye and Philips.

Encouraged by Scandinavian and Dutch pirates, in February 1964 O’Rahilly obtained the former Danish passenger ferry, Fredericia, which was converted into a radio ship at the Irish port of Greenore, owned by O’Rahilly’s father. O’Rahilly named the station after Caroline Kennedy, daughter of U.S. President John F. Kennedy.

The Fredericia was renamed MV Caroline and anchored off Felixstowe, where it began test transmissions on Friday, 27 March 1964. On Saturday, 28 March, it began regular broadcasting at noon on 197.3 metres (announced as 199 metres, rhyming with the name) with the opening conducted by Simon Dee. Radio Caroline’s first musical theme was Jimmy McGriff’s “Round Midnight”, a jazz standard co-composed by Thelonious Monk. In March 1964, The Fortunes recorded “Caroline”, which became the station’s theme. The station’s slogan was “Your all-day music station”, and it initially broadcast from 6 am to 6 pm, seven days a week.

Simon Dee’s opening theme tune – like the ITV companies’ start of day music – sent a chill down my spine: “On The Sunny Side of the Street”, by Tommy Dorsey and the Sentimentalists. (In my opinion, no other version comes close!) PA-DA-da da-da-da; PA-DA-da da-da-da… the opening bars DEMAND your attention! The notes repeat four times, and after 18 seconds, you’re begging for the main theme to begin. It’s a genius choice music track, I think, to open a radio show: Simon Dee chose it, and if I was ever given the chance I’d choose it for my show too. As playout at the end of a show, it’s not too shabby either: it has a great ending.

Round Midnight was a good choice for Radio Caroline’s close-down, though you had to sit through 30 minutes of The World Tomorrow sponsored by the Radio Church of God, featuring Garner Ted Armstrong, to actually hear the close-down. As Medium Wave radio reception began to deteriorate, once evening began, so Round Midnight would sink beneath the waves of interference and become infused with white noise: it was quite theatrical!

As a teenage adolescent aka rampant bag of hormones, I was hardly amenable to any proposal for a family day out, let alone one to the seaside. But in the summer of 1964, to my parents’ total astonishment, I readily agreed to a day trip from Rochford to Clacton! Well, I say Clacton, but – to coin a phrase – my mother had “ideas above her station” and she specified we would spend the day at the more-genteel, nearby Frinton, where motorists (to my great mirth) were instructed that there should be “No parking on the greensward”! But why would yours truly, an acne-ridden youth with a bad haircut, be excited by Frinton??

Because, just round the headland to the north, was Harwich and… Felixstowe! Remember that Radio Caroline was anchored in international waters off Felixstowe. So I happily joined the family outing, and was able to gaze out to sea, and observe the tiny blob that was corrupting teenage children’s musical tastes and infuriating the GPO and BBC. It was my pilgrimage to Decca Mecca.

Returning home, the seeds of my future (minor) broadcasting career were germinating, and in the autumn of 1964 I inflicted “radio shows” on my bemused, younger sister in the adjoining bedroom via an extension speaker. As Christmas approached, I decided we should send a Yuletide-greeting audio tape to my mother’s best friend who had emigrated with her husband and young family to Calgary in Canada. Audio tape was precious, but I was prepared to sacrifice my smallest BASF tape to the cause of promoting international understanding, specifically between Rochford and Calgary. Aged 15, I became executive producer of the recording, instructing my father, mother and little sister to make audio contributions, seated around the dining room table.

Of course, these were simply the “warm-up” acts to the main event – namely, my own contribution. This was an audio summary of Radio Caroline’s first few months of output, including the ship’s bell… I refused to cut my precious tape, so I had to stop my voice recording, wait until I could successfully record Caroline’s bell, and then continue my presentation. I concluded with a recording of The Beatles’ She Loves You in full: I mean, one had to bring some culture to the colonies, didn’t one?

It is only literally now, in 2018, some 54 years later, as I type this, that it occurs to me that my mother’s best friend and her family were Jewish. And I sent them a Christmas tape. Talk about cultural insensitivity!

The 1960s were an extraordinary era to live through – but I didn’t appreciate it at the time. Why would I? I’d never lived as a teenager at any other time. But looking back, the world was changing, and I was part of that change. By the end of the 1960s, I’d won an Open Exhibition (it’s like an Open Scholarship, but less money) to Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge. The 1960s made that possible: added to my £40 a year Exhibition, I received a maintenance grant from Essex County Council, and free tuition at one of the top universities in the world. The United Kingdom then was geared towards upward social mobility, provided one was a white male, and I grabbed the opportunity. Not bad for an Essex boy, who might otherwise have been destined to be an agricultural labourer.

I must confess, though, that an awful lot of 1964 passed me by – either I missed it, or I wasn’t sufficiently interested to take note of it:

• January 11 – United States Surgeon General Luther Terry reports that smoking may be hazardous to one’s health.
• January 18 – Plans to build the New York City World Trade Center are announced.
• February 11 – Greeks and Turks begin fighting in Limassol, Cyprus.
• April 20 – Nelson Mandela makes his “I Am Prepared to Die” speech at the opening of the Rivonia Trial, a key event for the anti-apartheid movement.
• May 1 – At 4:00 a.m., John George Kemeny and Thomas Eugene Kurtz run the first computer program written in BASIC (Beginners’ All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code), an “easy-to-learn high-level programming language” they created.
• May 28 – The Charter of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) is released by the Arab League.
• June 11 – In Cologne, West Germany, Walter Seifert attacks students and teachers in an elementary school with a flamethrower, killing 10.
• July 2 – President Lyndon Johnson signs the Civil Rights Act of 1964 into law, officially abolishing racial segregation in the United States.
• July 19 – Vietnam War: At a rally in Saigon, South Vietnamese Prime Minister Nguyễn Khánh calls for expanding the war into North Vietnam.
• August 13 – Murderers Gwynne Owen Evans and Peter Anthony Allen become the last people to be executed in the United Kingdom.
• September 11 – In Jacksonville, Florida, John Lennon announces that The Beatles will not play to a segregated audience.
• October 1 – Dr. Robert Moog demonstrates the prototype Moog synthesizer.
• October 10 (approx) – Germaine Greer becomes the first full female member of Cambridge University Footlights revue after joining in her first week at Newnham College, Cambridge.
• October 22 – A Federal Multi-Party Parliamentary Committee selects a design to become the new official Flag of Canada.
• November 10 – Australia partially reintroduces compulsory military service due to the Indonesian Confrontation.

Maybe I should have paid more attention.

Will a 15-year old in 2018 look back with awe and wonder at the events that took place this year? Will he or she vow that it really was the best time to be alive as a teenager? I somewhat doubt it, but I just hope I am still alive when that youngster achieves adulthood and is mature enough to look back.

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