Jaws

I wasn’t allowed to watch Jaws as it was too scary. In fact I don’t like to watch it now for the same reason. Yes I’m a wimp, I’m scared of Scooby Doo. The thing about Jaws was that it stopped you wanting to swim in the sea, which we often did when on holiday in North Wales. (God forbid I would ever swim up there now, I think that I must have been immune to the cold as a child.) Even the posters and trailers for Jaws had me quaking.

I have watched the film several times in the last decade, since it’s been on the TV quite a bit. I’m interested in the cinematography and I like Richard Dreyfuss as an actor (loved him in Close Encounters which I’m sure I’ll be discussing it here at some point). However I do have to admit that although I know the narrative very well there are certain scenes that are more fuzzy in my memory due to my face being in a cushion at the time that they’re shown. There is the bit where the man is in the cage underwater and the other bit on the boat where someone has his leg bitten off.

Jaws is a great film for Film Studies students as it marks a transition in cinematography and special effects. I am especially interested in the way tension is built up and the music. Though it might be seen as quite clunky now with our cgi stuff that we have, the use of the mechanical shark was cutting edge in the Seventies. And the actors had to actually act to make it all believable. I think that’s why it’s such a good film compared to some of the action films you get today, and so popular still.

We used to play Jaws in the playground at school, which consisted of holding your hand above your head to represent the fin and imitating the music. The unmusical among us would do this by going ‘duh-duh… duh-duh… de-de-de-de-de-de-de-de-DUH-DUH!!!’ And then you would run around after other children trying to catch them.

In 2005, the Jaws 30th Anniversary DVD was released. Apparently Jaws 2 was really crap. I shouldn’t imagine there’ll be a 30th Anniversary edition of that this year.

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Josie Henley-Einion, author, blogger, Legend in my own Living Room

The Kinks

The Kinks had hits through the Sixties and Seventies and into the Eighties and are apparently preparing now for a comeback. Some of their major hits are still played on ‘classic’ radio and have been covered by other artists, for instance You Really Got Me Going, Sunny Afternoon, Waterloo Sunset. My favourite song of theirs was Lola.

As a child I knew that The Kinks had their name because they were supposed to be kinky. Though I didn’t know exactly what ‘kinky’ was supposed to mean, I knew it was something a bit naughty and worth a giggle. So although to say you liked The Kinks wasn’t quite as shocking as saying you liked the Sex Pistols, it still got a raised eyebrow.

My mum had an album with the ‘Greatest Hits’ of the Sixties and Seventies on it which I used to play a lot as a child. I’m sure that this was in the Seventies, which is ironic but not unusual. Lola was one of the songs on this album. I played it over and again trying to work out the lyrics.

It seemed to me to be a story about a man who went to a bar and danced with someone who he thought was a woman but who turned out to be a man dressed as a woman. Pretty shocking for 1970, though it seems quite tame today. Robbie Williams has covered the song for a special BBC thing, and I’m sure that’s actually a woman in the video snogging him.

I changed the lyrics slightly in my head to make it about a woman dressed as a man, as I usually did. But my favourite bit wasn’t the insinuation of kinky sex, but the mention of cherry cola which I loved but which wasn’t readily available then.

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Josie Henley-Einion, author, blogger, Legend in my own Living Room

Dallas

Dallas is a place in Texas, this we know. I didn’t, actually, until I was eight and watching JR Ewing strut around in his cowboy hat on the TV in 1978. I thought that Dallas was the name of one of the characters until I was corrected that it was in fact the setting, and then thought that everyone who lived in America was rich like that.

We are at the thirty year anniversary of the TV miniseries Dallas being aired in the UK, according to breakfast news the other day. According to Wikipedia the writer of Dallas had the initial idea for Knots Landing but that he was told to write something glitzy so wrote the improbable plotlines for an oil baron family, which when it was a success had Knots Landing as a spin-off series.

What did I take from Dallas? It could be similar to what I took from The Waltons, that all Americans are completely mad and have ridiculous sounding names, that people in America wake up with perfect hair and full makeup, even the alcoholics, and that everyone lives in large houses surrounded by open space. Having travelled in Americia, I know this to not be a true representation, however, this is the image that is sent out to the world through shows such as Dallas. The best clip I have found so far is the Kenny Everett spoof. Hilarious.

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Josie Henley-Einion, author, blogger, Legend in my own Living Room

The Seventies Economy

There is much discussion in the press lately that our stuck economy is ‘as bad as the Seventies’. When the drop in interest rates was announced last week, it was said that it was the biggest drop since 1981. This prompted me to wonder about the Seventies economy. As I wasn’t old enough then to know about economy, recession or any of those things, I thought back on the things that I was aware of.

Food was a main concern for me throughout my childhood. I noticed the lack of bread in the shops and when the milk wasn’t being delivered. This was around the time that everyone was going on strike like it was a fashion. I also remember not going to school because teachers were on strike. The strikes and the economy are intricately linked because inflation was causing prices to go up which meant that people were demanding more pay and when they didn’t get more pay because the bosses were also being hit by recession the workers went on strikes. That’s how I understand it anyway, though I’m no economist. A very simplistic view is that the strikes were caused by the economic downturn and they then contributed to it, like a negative feedback loop (yes I’m more of a biologist than an economist!)

The problem with the economy that we see today, again as I understand it, is that people have been borrowing more and more without planning for how they are going to pay it back. Many people are working and earning but then spending far above their incomes, this is especially so in terms of house purchases because of the improbable rise in house prices, and increased expectations such as an annual holiday abroad and a house full of technology. Then what happens (and has happened to me until I got to the point where I cut up my credit cards) is that you borrow more to pay back what you’ve borrowed. Because it has been so easy to borrow money, we are now in a situation of massive personal debt. This is very different to the Seventies as back then people wanted to earn more so they could afford to feed their children. Was there massive personal borrowing in the Sixties that led to this, or massive spending sprees? Perhaps there was, but no-one is talking about that.

It may well be that all this comparison with the Seventies is press scaremongering and pointing the finger at a Labour government (conveniently forgetting that the people who have done most of this personal borrowing were the Thatcher’s children generation with the have-it-all, me-me-me attitude, yup, me again). And when you get into looking at cumulative inflation charts, you can see that things have been getting steadily worse through the whole period from the Seventies until now.

However, a recession is a recession, and whichever way we got to where we are, it does feel like the ground is slipping. One thing I’ve noticed which I haven’t seen since I was a child is that when I go shopping there are gaps between the food on the shelves. Empty shelves in a shop is not a good sign. I noticed recently that Delia Smith’s Frugal Food, which was first published in the Seventies, has been reprinted with the byline ‘now more relevant than ever’. Clever marketing, but also sound advice. Grow your own and cheaper cuts it is for us all.

I try to be light-hearted here, but sorry if I’m sometimes a bit too serious. It gets scary sometimes to be able to understand all these statistics and still go completely mad when I have a credit card. Next post will be good ole non-cynical me again, promise.

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Josie Henley-Einion, author, blogger, Legend in my own Living Room

The Beatles Legacy

The Beatles broke up in 1970 (announced according to Wikipedia in April 1970 by Paul McCartney). So technically you could say, if you were going to be really pedantic about it, that I shouldn’t discuss them on a Seventies nostalgia blog.

However, considering my mum was a great Beatles fan and for the first ten years of my life I hadn’t even realised they’d actually disbanded before I was born, I think that I’m entitled to discuss the band. They had such a huge impact on the music scene that they did not cease to exist as an entity merely upon disbanding.

So their legacy runs through music and into popular culture, including attitudes to drug taking, psychedelic uniforms, groups of boys with matching haircuts, all sorts of things. What mystified me about them (apart from how on earth could my mother think they were cool) was the duration of their popularity. Their music stayed in the charts throughout the Seventies and Eighties and continues today in cover versions. As solo artists, each one of The Beatles had a successful career and some still do.

There were many boy bands before The Beatles, but they seem to be the ones who are remembered for making the format and achieved worldwide recognition for it.

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Josie Henley-Einion, author, blogger, Legend in my own Living Room

Crossroads

My Gran used to watch Crossroads. We weren’t allowed to watch ITV at home because of the adverts. But when we went to my Gran’s house, there would be Crossroads on the telly as well as other things that my mum disapproved of.

I remember the bingly-bongly theme music as the credits criss-crossed in a feat of modern technology and the ATV logo like an eye at the end. I also remember the Brummie accents which were so rarely heard on the telly back then. My favourite character was Benny – according to Wikipedia most people’s favourite character. And I didn’t like Eddie Large of Little and Large for his impressions of Benny. The character was, as we used to put it, ‘simple’, yet when you saw the actor in real life he showed no sign of intellectual impairment (nor was he wearing the Benny hat).

Crossroads plots were criticised for being simple and the acting poor, yet the soap did tackle some issues that other dramas skirted around. They had disabled characters for example, Benny for one, and also a character in a wheelchair. Many of the fans were Midlanders and would say that the reason the programme came under fire and was derided so often was due to the low opinion the rest of the UK have of Brummies.

When compared to other country’s soap offerings such as Sons and Daughters or All My Children, Crossroads is my preference. The show proved to be an embarrassment to TV bosses who were sensitive to the ‘tacky’ criticism. Eventually it was axed, regardless of the legions of fans and viewing figures in the millions. Very sad. However clips can still be seen on YouTube and there is a thriving online fan club.

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Josie Henley-Einion, author, blogger, Legend in my own Living Room

Reliant Robin

One of my favourite cars as a child, due to its surprising visual appeal was a Robin Reliant. I loved them with their funny little shape and bright colours, they looked like toys.

It wasn’t until years later that I learned this car was actually called a Reliant Robin, and calling it a Robin Reliant was incorrect on the same level as calling a Ford Escort an Escort Ford. This mistake was also exacerbated by the fact that Reliant only made the one model of car. (Although according to Wikipedia there were another 13 different models, the Robin is the only one anyone has ever heard of.) However, I grew up a few miles from the Reliant factory and it was a quite common car in our area, and everyone used the term Robin Reliant and Reliant Robin interchangeably.

They were also called Plastic Pigs as the body of the car was made of fibreglass not metal, and the shape of the front resembled a pig’s snout. Also Tamworth is famous for its pigs, and there are many other references to pigs in that area, for instance the Pretty Pigs pub. Though very common in our area, the Reliant was still the butt of many jokes.

The main reason for it seeming funny was being small and easily overturned, and the type of people who would drive it. The lightweight body meant that it was highly economical on fuel and easily repaired. You could drive a three-wheeler on a bike licence and pay much lower tax. As such, the Robin Reliant could be said to be one of the world’s first eco-cars. And herein lies the hilarity: being eco-friendly in the Seventies was weird.

If you were trying to save money on petrol for instance, you were considered to be mean, if you weren’t bothered by people laughing at the way the car looked then you were an anorak. At last this is not such a problem any more, now we have many eco-cars available. Unfortunately for the Robin, it also had a problem of overturning due to the lightweight design and they are no longer manufactured so they pose no threat to the Smart car.

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Josie Henley-Einion, author, blogger, Legend in my own Living Room

A Seventies Halloween

Yes, the time has come again for my customary gripe about how children nowadays have a much better deal of it than I did but how ironically this means that their lives are actually impoverished. I could give it a miss and you could take it as read, but no I’m not going to. Cue the violins.

We didn’t have sweets at Halloween. We didn’t have plastic skeletons and light-up witches and spend our evening going door to door begging in our supermarket dress-up costumes. Oh no. We had apple bobbing, homemade costumes which then got recycled for the guy a few days later, and baked potatoes on the bonfire.

We didn’t do pumpkins, we hollowed out swedes. These took hours as the flesh is so hard, but they were more substantial. We would put a candle inside and they smelled fabulous as they slowly cooked.

I first heard of trick or treating when I was about nine, and it was introduced by the TV news as a form of neighbourhood annoyance. Apparently this awful behaviour had been introduced from America (the shock) and involved youths demanding money with menaces. If you didn’t pay them then they’d smash your windows or set fire to your bins. Needless to say I was horrified years later when I met people who encouraged their children to indulge in this criminality.

Watching ET when I was twelve was quite confusing, as I had no idea why there were children and adults dressing up and wandering around the town carrying sweets. I thought it must be some sort of street party.

It absolutely amazes me that in the age we live, some people still encourage their children to go knocking on strangers’ doors asking for treats. It also disgusts me that there is no space for childhood imagination and inventiveness in the racks of bought costumes and pumpkin buckets.

I suppose the main reason I get so hacked off by all of this is a similar reason that Christians are fed up with the commercialisation of Christmas. Samhain is my main religious festival and as such it is sacred to me. I can give a bit of leeway and I have a sense of humour but there’s only so far that I can be pushed.

Okay, rant over. Normal service will be resumed next week.

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Josie Henley-Einion, author, blogger, Legend in my own Living Room

Zed Cars

Z-Cars or Zed Cars (yes, definitely Zed and not Zee) was a police drama which ran through the Sixties and Seventies. It was based in the gritty North of England and was the first hard-hitting realistic drama, as opposed to fantasy land ‘it’s a fair cop guv’ sort of drama.

Z-car was also the police codename for a police car (see Panda Cars), the name of the drama being given for the car.

I wasn’t allowed to watch Zed Cars because it was on too late at night and it was considered ‘unsuitable’. Though seeing clips of it now, the violence and menace seem to be mild compared to what you see today, and the bad language laughable.

Although I never watched it, I knew all about it because there were some children in my school who talked about it and played Zed Cars in the playground. That mainly involved running around pretending to be driving a car, saying nee-nar or singing the theme tune. As well as the usual cops’n’robbers style of playground bullying.

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Josie Henley-Einion, author, blogger, Legend in my own Living Room

Elkie Brooks

Elkie was a singer with a crooning husky voice, most famous or at least most remembered for Pearl’s A Singer from an album in 1977. Elkie sang Nights in White Satin in 1982. Originally recorded by The Moody Blues, another great band. I remember this as the Seventies, but have been corrected by Wikipedia.

I’m sure I remember the video for Nights in White Satin featuring a herd of white horses galloping in slow motion. Or that might have been something else. Anyway, I mistakenly believed this song to be about knights who wore white satin suits. I imagined these knights in shining armour on white horses galloping to the rescue of Elkie dressed as a princess in distress and letting down her long hair for them to climb up. I was only a child. And obviously very influenced by Disneyfied fairytales.

Years later, I saw the name of the song written down and realised she was singing about sleeping on satin sheets. Ooooh! Right. Now I get it.

Elkie is still doing the circuit as I found out last week when a colleague mentioned that her husband was going to a concert. Apparently she is still amazing.

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Josie Henley-Einion, author, blogger, Legend in my own Living Room