John Lennon

John Lennon, rhythm guitar. Tall, slim, broad-shouldered. Hair brown, eyes brown. A genuinely talented humorist who has had his written ramblings published in newspapers. He recalls singing “The Happy Wanderer” every day for a month to an English master at school — “he left, for reasons unknown”.

Later he was suspended from school for eating chocolate in class. He celebrated by going to the pictures. He says: “There nearly wasn’t a John Winston Lennon. As a kid, I was shot at once for stealing apples. Also I nearly fell off while riding on the bumpers of a Liverpool tram…”

John’s mother is dead now but she originally taught him to play banjo. He lives with “an aunt called Mimi”. He has two step-sisters, Julia and Jacqueline. And he studied art (enthusiastically) and maths and science (hopelessly) at Dovedale Primary School, Quarrybank Grammar School, then Liverpool College of Art.

He dug back into memory-land. “Once, Paul McCartney and I played Reading as the Nurk Twins. Went down a bomb, I recall. And once, Ringo and I drove his first car round together — really, with both of us at the wheel at the same time! I’m not really a good driver. And there was the time when George Harrison, who was already at another school, came along to Quarrybank for a joke and enrolled for art GCE.”

On stage, John is dominant. He stands determinedly, relaxed yet dynamic. In Glasgow, a drunken lad climbed on stage and just tottered there, watching John sing. John was unmoved….

“I suppose I always was a big spender, even before I had much money to spend,” John admits. “Clothes are my pet extravagance. I go for suede, leather, cord or denims. If I went into business one day, I think I’d set up a string of clothes shops — good ones, dealing in the best gear.

“This business lets me meet a lot of interesting people. I like that. And I go for the money, too. We’re gradually meeting all the names in the business — my own best friends are the other Beatles, Gerry Marsden and the Shadows.”

Musically, John lines up with the general Beatle tastes. He talks about Little Richard, Chuck Jackson, Chuck Berry, Mary Wells. The groups for him: the Miracles, Shirelies, Chiffons, Marvelettes, with Earl Bostic a surprisingly favourite instrumentalist.

“I’d like to write a stage musical one day—and, of course, keep on getting hit songs for us and for other groups. But the big musical: that would be a real challenge.”

To illustrate John’s style of writing, let him explain how the group got its name. “Why Beatles? Ugh, Beatles! How did the name arrive? So I will tell you. It came in a vision – a man on a flaming pie and said unto them ‘From this day you are Beatles with an “A”.’ Thank you, Mister Man, they said, thanking him.”

John is perhaps the best all-rounder in the group. He writes poetry, is a good painter, has collaborated on plays with Paul. He admits: “My main ambition is to be rich and famous. That’s all.”

He was 20 when he started in show business and is now 5 ft. 11 in. tall, weighing 11 stone 5 lb. The dark clothes he invariably wears do not really match his ever-changing personality. He admits he is not very happy with “stupid people” — meaning people who lag behind, thought-wise.

John was born on October 9, 1940.

Ringo Starr

Ringo Starr, drummer. Smallest member of the group, last to join, blue-eyed, brown-haired—and nursing an ambition to play everything on drums with either right or left hand.

Educated at Saint Silas School, Dingle Vale Secondary Modern, then Riversdale Technical, showing plenty of talent in handicrafts but little in maths or English. Recalls: “I used to get money for school meals, but used it on a loaf, fourpennyworth of chips and five Woodbines!”

The man who lays down that urgent Beatles’ beat is mad on motor-racing. “I’d love to own an Alfa-Romeo and take it up seriously. Maybe I’ll never make it.” His parents, Elsie and Harry Starkey, really wanted their son to take up ladies’ hairdressing. He says: “I’d go into that line now, if I got the money together. Or maybe I’d take up a car hire business.”

He is appreciative of all his parents did for him. “They think we are doing great,” he says. “They love watching us work. I’ll always be grateful because they bought me my first drum kit. Our success means that, at last, my mother doesn’t have to go out to work—she’s worked all her life.’

Ringo, real-name Richard, got his unusual name because of his habit of wearing at least a couple of rings on each hand. “I dig fashions,” he said. “I spend mostly on good suits, with odd styles. I also like casual corduroy — but I can’t stand baggy trousers or double-breasted suits.”

While other Beatles said they liked jelly-babies, Ringo named whisky as his favourite drink. The fans obliged with bottles of hooch. Says Ringo: “I’ve had a few marriage proposals through the post. They’re difficult to answer without being hurtful. I date when I can. My favourite girls? Ah — around 5 ft. 5 in. tall, good figure, That’s all, just as long as they’re intelligent. Yes, I’d like to try married life, but I suppose it’s difficult just to TRY it!”

Ringo drummed out an incessant rhythm with his finger-tips. “We’ve had some some old times, the Beatles,” he said. “Actually my worst moment was when we did our first stage show at the local Liverpool Empire. Back went those curtains — and there was I, still setting up my drum kit!

“Music is now my life — and I feel happier than at any time. I think John and Paul are fantastic composers — right up there in the Gerry Goffin-Carole King class. My own personal tastes go to genuine R and B or C and W….

“I collect records by stars like Chuck Jackson, Brook Benton, Della Reese, or Patsy Cline. Among the groups, the Shirelles. They have that fab feeling for their music. Really, that’s my only way of relaxing — either listening to records or watching television.”

Stardom has meant that Ringo is at last able to feel independent. “Sure the work ties us down a lot, but at least if I’m free I can go wherever I like without having to count the cost.

“I have these strange likes and dislikes. Can’t stand Donald Duck, for instance. Or onions. But fast cars, even just looking at them, I do like. And my favourite food is still steak and chips.”

Ringo was originally with the Darktown Skiffle Group, then with Rory Storm and the Hurricanes. He has experience, style and ambition.

Ringo was born on July 7, 1940.

Paul McCartney

Paul McCartney, bass guitar. Left-handed and used to find himself genuinely writing back to front. He has written more than 100 songs with John Lennon and also plays drums, piano and banjo. And he says, in all seriousness, that he would like to become “a tramp” if he couldn’t carry on in music.

He remembers going on a hitch-hiking tour with George Harrison, a school-mate in the pre-Beatle days. “We didn’t eat for 28 hours once. We used to cook tins of spaghetti on a primus stove by the road-side. We slept on the beach in Taunton and in the football ground stand in Wales.

“Success now is nice. I can buy food and clothes — spend money. Clothes is a hobby. I like high-collared shirts, tight trousers, black socks, suits in leather and suede. Can’t stand coloured socks, baggy trousers, cutaway collars.”

Paul is 5 ft. 11 in. tall, with dark brown hair and hazel eyes. He weighs 11 stone. At Liverpool Institute High School he’did well in English literature, moderately well at other things but very badly in geography and maths. His geography has improved with all the Beatle travelling.

Musically, he leans towards R and B and modern jazz. He’ll listen for hours to American artistes like Chuck Jackson, the Miracles, Little Richard, Ketty Lester, Dinah Washington and Raelets’ member Margie Hendrickson. Of music, he says: “My mum is dead now, but my father has always helped. He used to run his own jazz band, back in the 1920s, so he knows a bit about the business. Though some of our material is a bit way out for a razzamatazz chap like him.

“I enjoy writing songs and sometimes wish I had more time to give to it. Goffin and King, the Americans, are fine writers. I also like Luther Dixon and Leonard Bernstein. Song-writing AND bird-watching — they’re my fave off-duty hobbies. Oh, yes — and sleeping. We just don’t seem to get any sleep these days….”

Paul gets his fair share of fan-mail, mostly from girls, tries to answer most of them. He says of the girls he dates: “I like them to have long hair, be sensible yet have a sense of humour and, of course, it’s important that they like music. I like to go with a girl to a cinema or a theatre. Something quiet and relaxing. Yes, I think I’d like to settle down one day … buy a house and all that.

“I’m a film fan. I often think we ought to write a film for ourselves so that we could be sure that all the Beatles had a fair crack of the whip. That’s one trouble—making sure that each of us gets the same prominence as the others. We ARE a team. Each one is a quarter of the whole.”

Paul thought about the future. He would be interested in investing, one day, in his brother’s hairdressing business. But as the youngest in the group, he finds the future that bit harder to think about.

He’d like a car. “Anything in the classic mould would suit me. But anything else would be accepted with good will!” The gag is never far away when Paul chats about anything. He admits, though, that he is not a very good driver.

His best friends are the other three Beatles and Gerry Marsden, of the Pacemakers. His most off-beat musical memory is playing, with George and John, while a strip-tease girl shed her clothes in Liverpool.

Paul’s birthday is June 18.

George Harrison

George Harrison, lead guitar. Nearly six feet tall, brown-haired, browneyed. Debonair—though that’s not the word used by his teachers at Liverpool Institute High School to describe him when he set new fashions by adapting his school uniform to include skin-tight trousers, coloured waistcoat and suede shoes. “Diabolical” was THEIR word.

Said George: “We had fab end-of-term sessions at school. Paul McCartney and I, Les Chadwick of the Pacemakers, plus two of the San Remo Four. We swung … but we didn’t realise we’d all end up as professionals.”

George first met Paul on the bus home from school, some eight years ago. John Lennon was “encountered” in the fish-and-chip shop by the school. Ringo — “he looked so moody, but was quite different when I got to know him properly” — was first met in the Kaiserkeller Club in Hamburg.

At school, George was hopeless at maths and history but promising at art. He lost his interest in sports in his mid-teens but once was a useful athlete.

A family man is George — travelling permitting. His parents, Harold and Louise Harrison, encouraged him in his music simply by not complaining at the noise he made. But he had a few brushes with sister Louise and brothers Harry and Peter.

Stardom is exciting, admits George. He can indulge more in clothes and buy records when he likes. His favourites range from Little Richard to Eartha Kitt, but Chet Atkins and Duane Eddy are guitarists he admires.

“Dating? Whenever I can. I like girls but there’s nobody special. Blondes appeal to me — especially small girls who have a sense of humour and can laugh when I’m happy and be serious when I’m sad. I’ll get married one day … but right now the domestic scene doesn’t appeal.”

He gets a stack of fan-mail, often accompanied by presents of toys, or teddy bears, or jelly-babies. He reads all the letters, tries to answer each one when he can get the time.

George enjoys driving. Says he is a good driver but wonders whether other motorists would agree! He hates having his hair-cut, not so much for the waste of time but for the newly-shorn look he gets. He loves listening to well-played Spanish guitar or good Country ‘n’ Western music — “one day, I hope, I’ll design a brand-new type of guitar”, he says.

At 10 stone 4 lb., George is slender for his height. But he tucks away plenty of pork and lamb, and fresh cream and pears. He has occasional “fry-ups” at home—bacon, eggs, omelettes.

He relaxes easily, either strumming on his guitar or listening to records.

Self-taught on guitar, drums and piano, George finds music comes fairly easily to him. He’s the second youngest in the group—Paul is just four months “less aged”—and yet he commands attention when the boys talk over arrangements and ideas. Actually George started in show business at the age of 17, earlier than any of the other Beatles.

George pays high tributes to the group’s manager Brian Epstein and to recording manager George Martin. “That thrill of having our first disc a hit within two days of release,” says George, “was positively fantastic.” He shakes his head in wonderment and the hair flops forward over his forehead.

“I wanted my parents to be proud of me. I think they are, now,” he said.

George’s birthday: February 25.

The post Meet the Beatles appeared first on THIS IS ZENITH 1964 from Transdiffusion.

★

We start the day with an hour of adult education. There were no advertisements in or between these programmes, making the viewing experience something like watching BBCtv. So why did Independent Television bother? The answer is twofold. First, it was very good politically: when MPs and the great and the good stood up to decry television in general and ITV in particular, as they did with wearisome regularity, it was very helpful to point to these educational and highbrow offerings as a way of deflecting criticism of Crossroads and Double Your Money. The second reason was to do with advertisement placement on the network.

The number of minutes each hour and each day allowed for advertising was severely limited by the Postmaster General. An hour of programmes that didn’t count towards the maximum hourage of television permitted each day but did count towards the average number of hours for calculating permitted advertisement time allowed the ITV companies to sell a couple of minutes more during peak time, which more than paid for the programmes themselves.

Another reason was to do with the post-war settlement. The people behind television had been through the Second World War and had joined the rest of the country in deciding that the nation needed drastic change once the conflict was over. This came through universal free healthcare, social security, decent affordable housing, and a new view of education as something that was a right for children and a responsibility for government. The school leaving age was progressively raised, technical colleges created to ensure that future manual workers could get qualifications and a university education became something obtained through hard work and intelligence rather than access to lots of money and who your father knew.

But what about those who had already left school? And those that had slipped through the cracks in the system? The television executives thought they could do their bit by providing programmes for anybody who wanted to learn more, even as they sat at home with 45 hours of work bearing down on them from tomorrow. And they were right: millions watched, thousands learnt and hundreds went on to do night classes or even go back to education. ITV may have benefited from the reputation boost and the income from these programmes, but it’s important to remember the genuine altruism of the executives in a time of a more communal nation state.

Transport (9.55am) From the timing of this programme, you would be forgiven for thinking that it’s going to be based on the Beeching Report of 9 months earlier. While that was undoubtedly fresh in people’s minds – especially if they were about to lose their local rail service – the programme is actually more subtle than that.

What it is actually about is teaching reasoning and explaining that political and personal decisions often require a balance to be made between two competing but mutually exclusive goals – in this case, high quality services vs low fares. Both are laudable goals. But we can’t have them together. Which should we chose? Is there a balance between these two societal goods? What appears to be a programme about rail and bus journeys is, therefore, actually a complex lesson in sociology and a window into the world of high-level decision making.

Citizenship (10.15am) The 1944 Education Act, implemented by the incoming post-war Labour Government, extended free secondary education to the masses, most of whom had previously left formal education at 14. But the method it used was becoming controversial. Each child did a series of tests at age 11, which divided them into three: the ‘gold’ children, the brain boxes, who could deal with intangibles and would go on to grammar school and thus into management positions; the ‘silver’ children, who needed solid notions, who could be taught what they needed to know for their skilled and semi-skilled apprenticeships, plus enough maths to do the shopping and enough English to write a letter in secondary schools; and the ‘iron’ children, who you couldn’t educate in such a way, who would learn to do things with their hands in the technical schools, ready for their manual jobs.

It was thought that a third of all children would go into one of the three streams, and a third of the budget would follow them. In practice, 25% of children went to grammar schools and 75% went to secondary schools – the technical schools were usually simply not built. Worse, 75% of the money went to the grammar schools and 25% to the secondaries.

The result was seen to be that most middle class children got the grammar school education they’d always got, but now for free, whilst most working class children were taught the basics en masse and thrown into the job market. The upper class children continued as they had before, in private schools. This did nothing at all for Britain’s rigid class structure: at 11 years old, children were told whether they were upper, middle or working class and that was that – there was to be no movement between the three tiers.

By 1964, there was a groundswell against this system, especially (but not exclusively) in the opposition Labour Party. They had swept the municipal elections the previous year and were now pursuing a policy of ‘comprehensivisation’ in Bristol, Manchester, Liverpool and London – creating mixed schools where all pupils would go at 11, allowing for pupils to move between streams, mix with different classes, and, most importantly, benefit from 100% of the total budget.

So why this programme? It’s not really to explain all that we’ve just said, although it did do that. Like Transport before it, it was again teaching reasoning and sociology, and again showing that decision making, especially at a high level, was about balancing competing priority and social goods: in this case, teaching children according to their needs vs teaching children according to the nation’s future needs. It also served to explain how children were being educated to their parents – this period is before Parent/Teacher Nights and report cards being sent home, an age when parents sent their children to school to be educated and simply expected that to happen without much in the way of the real-time measurement and micromanagement that is now the norm.

Mesdames, Messieurs (10.40am) The programmes companies often specialised in certain types of programmes. In schools television, Rediffusion did a lot of French teaching programmes; in adult education, ATV did the same. Most interesting was Tyne Tees, which specialised in Russian. A nice touch from the TVTimes is putting the credits of Mesdames, Messieurs in French.

Closedown (12.15pm)  Everything stops for Sunday lunch, which includes television and even the transmitters: the plugs at Winter Hill and Emley Moor being pulled and the staff going off for dinner. Meanwhile at ABC in Parrs Wood Road, Didsbury, the staff would stream out across the road to the Parrs Wood pub for a carvery and a swift half.

Headway (1.10pm)  We’re back on air for more adult education. This one is disguised as a “how to write better letters” programme, but was actually more subtle than that: it was about how to write letters, full stop. Much of the pre-Butler Act population had left school at 14, as mentioned above, and, whilst not illiterate, they were awkward with writing long pieces and had poor penmanship skills.

This programme therefore taught them how to write cursive, where to put the name and address, how to start and finish – the basics that we, educated to 16 and beyond, would now take for granted. The title ‘Headway’ originally applied to all of ABC’s adult education output, and was a series of series on different subjects, including basic cooking skills with Philip Harben.

The strand had outgrown the ‘Headway’ branding and expanded in the year since networked adult education programmes began on ITV, but the name was in the titles of the original series so was kept on as they were regularly repeated – this one being almost exactly a year old having launched the Sunday Session slot.

ABC Farming Comment (1.30pm)  We think of ABC as serving the industrialised north of England and the factory lands of the west Midlands. But their VHF transmissions went much further, with Winter Hill penetrating into the north of Wales, Emley Moor covering Lincolnshire and Lichfield reaching into Herefordshire and Worcestershire.

These areas had less population than the cities ABC also covered, but were economically important. A programme of interest to farmers sold advertising either side heavily – Monsanto, the maker of DDT, was a big customer for these slots – making it a very worthwhile programme for ABC. Despite only being 10 minutes, including the advert breaks either side, it was packed with features made by the ABC Outside Broadcasting unit during the preceding week, as well as having Stuart Seaton, founding editor of the Farmers Guardian, commenting on the latest agricultural news.

Rugby League (1.40pm)  General entertainment programming on Sundays had been restricted by the Postmaster General to not starting until 3pm. This had just been loosened to “not starting until after 2.30pm”.

This ‘after’ had bothered the ITV companies, but rather than seeking clarification, they went for 2.35pm as the start of entertainment programming. That leaves ABC with just short of an hour to fill with something that must be clearly for a minority audience.

Here they fill it with Rugby League football, the northern version of the game for men with odd-shaped balls. Thus ABC wins by showing something that’s both popular in their area but a minority pursuit in the UK as a whole, neatly sidestepping the rules.

Candid Camera (3.35pm) The Independent Television Authority loathed Candid Camera from the beginning in 1960. The first two editions were presented by Bob Monkhouse who then fled, not returning for the full run starting in 1961.

It was perceived as nasty, even cruel, with the public as victims who were being laughed at, not with. The ITA hated this, and looked for reasons to ban it. There were none, besides the Authority requiring that it saw written permission from everyone who appeared in shot to prove they were happy to be seen. But by and large they were, so that didn’t work.

Nevertheless, ABC and the TVTimes work hard here to soften the programme in the description. The public aren’t victims, they’re the stars. David Nixon, always avuncular, gives the show a soft, happy narration, encouraging us to laugh with the victims, err, stars, rather than at them.

When the format was reborn in the 1980s under the eye of Jeremy Beadle at LWT, this was taken a stage further: the victim of the prank was brought into the studio, professionally made-up, given quality clothing and treated like a true star. They appeared in their finery in a box in the corner of the screen as the prank played out, laughing at themselves and the whole scene.

It made for slightly less excruciating viewing. But only slightly.

The Littlest Hobo (5.35pm) This series was based on a 1958 US film, and ran for two seasons of 61 episodes in total. It was made in Canada in colour, being broadcast in Canada and the US in 1963, so this is a pretty recent import for ABC. The programme was revived in 1979, running for 114 episodes over six seasons.

The Sunday Break (6.15pm) Barry Westwood makes his second appearance of the day on ABC. The idea for this programme was conceived of as a way of filling the previously off-air 6.15pm to 7pm period, presented to MPs and churchmen as speaking to people who weren’t going to church anyway, people who took the 45-minute closedown as an opportunity to put on Radio Luxembourg or their collection of 45s.

People who went to church would still go to church, ABC’s argument ran, so here’s a way of reaching those that didn’t, in a format that would speak to younger people in particular. This argument worked, the closedown was abolished, and The Sunday Break appeared and immediately began to undermine the purpose it was created for.

The description says it all: this isn’t religion, despite the presence of Penry Jones as the Religious Adviser, and despite there usually being a (generally young and hip) vicar present on screen. This programme is, yet again, about sociology, this time disguised as moral questions. 1964 really was a time when everybody was a budding sociologist, with big plans for the future of the nation and the world – this fed directly into the White Heat of Technology ethos that would bring Harold Wilson’s Labour party back into power after 13 years in October.

Val Parnell’s Sunday Night at the London Palladium (8.25pm) Here we are in the last few months of The Beatles still being a British phenomena, with Beatlemania in the US coming shortly but not yet sparked off. Therefore, they’re still available to appear on the Palladium show in a way they wouldn’t be in a year’s time; just a year before, they were still to be found on Granada’s local news magazine Scene at 6.30.

Meanwhile, Alma Cogan was going in the other direction: a year before she had been too big for the Palladium; a year later she’d be lucky to get on About Anglia. Although she didn’t know it – her family decided not to tell her – she was already dying of stomach cancer. It would kill her in October 1966.

ABC Armchair Theatre (9.35pm) Women had been a power in the workforce during the recent war, but when the men came home from the front, Jill was supposed to get back in her box.

And for much of the 1950s, she did. But things were changing. Single women were now an important part of working life, if only because there was a drastic labour shortage. But married women? No, they were expected to leave their jobs after the wedding and get on with being housewives.

The world in 1964 is moving on: divorce has got easier, but what about divorced women? The ex-husband was often, but by no means always, told by the court to contribute to any child’s financial wellbeing. Divorced women, however, were expected to support themselves… but how? Employers were used to women leaving upon marriage and thus had no experience of hiring people with childcare obligations, since men never had any.

Armchair Theatre had been revolutionary since it began, showing the millions of ITV viewers such issues as ‘the colour bar’, addiction, literacy, even hinting at the ‘problem’ of homosexuality. Here Donald Churchill takes this new issue in hand: what do we do about a divorced woman with childcare responsibilities who needs money and wants to work? As an aside: why, 56 years later, is this still an issue?

Faces of Power (11.10pm) Here’s a programme with three uses. First, it’s an export sale for ATV, clearly aimed at being sold to NET, the American public broadcasting network.

Secondly, it counts for the ITA as a ‘serious’ contribution by ATV, always useful for a company permanently accused of being too lightweight and entertainment-driven.

Thirdly, it’s useful for ABC, who have had 7 hours and 25 minutes on air today with programming that counts towards their 15 hour maximum for the entire weekend. With the adult education in the morning, the OB from Headingley in the afternoon and all the religion excluded, the hours of entertainment have rapidly added up. But who wants to go off air at about 11.15pm if they can help it? Certainly not ABC. A half hour of further adult education takes them much nearer to a more useful closedown time.

Epilogue (untimed) We’ve pointed this out before elsewhere, but the epilogue ran 7 nights a week in the Midlands, across both ATV and ABC. In the North, Granada had no interest in any religious programming unless they scored a Christmas Day on a weekday, and even then the reluctance was palpable.

Therefore tonight’s epilogue is one of only two seen in the North in an average week. When they came from Aston, the vicar presenting would sometimes slip up and tell viewers what he’d be talking about tomorrow, despite not appearing on Granada.

Tonight, he’s in the North, most likely in ABC’s tiny remotely operated single camera studio on the top floor of the ABC Forum cinema on Lime Street in Liverpool. He’ll need to pull a cord to switch off the lights and camera when he leaves.

The post 12 January 1964 on ABC Weekend TV appeared first on THIS IS ZENITH 1964 from Transdiffusion.

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.

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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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