Tag Archives: nostalgia

Film Connections #8

Posted on by Steve Higgins

As regular readers will know, I am a great fan of classic cinema and I do love making these posts in which I try to tell a story by linking together various films, actors and directors. My last connections post ran a lateral course linking the film Pygmalion to Star Trek; The Motion Picture. This week I’ve worked out a very roundabout connection from Greta Garbo via Frederick March, James Mason, Alfred Hitchcock and Ingrid Bergman, right back to Garbo again.

At first glance, Greta Garbo and Ingrid Bergman seem to belong to different emotional climates; Garbo, distant and enigmatic, Bergman, luminous and searching, her humanity worn closer to the surface. The threads run from the migration of talent across studios and continents and in the way both women, in very different ways, redefined what it meant to be a star of the cinema.

Greta Garbo was one of the first stars of the silver screen. She was born in Stockholm, Sweden on the 18th September 1905. She is best known for her beautiful but melancholy screen persona. In 1924 she was spotted in a Swedish film by Louis B Mayer the head of MGM and the following year he brought her over to Hollywood.

Greta Garbo

In 1930 she made the successful transition from silent pictures to the ‘talkies’ with her first sound picture Anna Christie which was promoted with the phrase ‘Garbo Talks!” The film was a great success and her career in the cinema continued until her last film in 1941, Two Faced Woman. She signed for various pictures afterwards but all the projects either never came to fruition or she dropped out for one reason or another. Billy Wilder asked her to star in Sunset Boulevard in 1949 but she declined.

In one of David Niven’s books, Bring on the Empty Horses, the author relates how he asked Garbo why she stopped making films and she thought for a moment and then replied “I had made enough faces”.

In 1935 Garbo starred in the screen version of Anna Karenina directed by Clarence Brown. Among her co-stars was Fredric March.

March began his career as an extra in silent movies. He made his stage debut in 1929 and not long afterwards signed a contract with Paramount Pictures. He made numerous films but in 1937 he played the part of drunken movie star Norman Maine in the film A Star is Born. Maine helps aspiring star Esther Blodgett, played by Janet Gaynor up the ladder to movie stardom. The film was shot in Technicolor and became one of the first colour films to be nominated for an Academy Award.

A Star is Born is a film that has been remade a number of times and all the remakes have been musicals, including the most recent one produced in 2018 which starred Lady Gaga. My favourite though was the 1954 version with James Mason and Judy Garland. Judy Garland plays the part of Esther Blodgett who is heard singing by the boozy Norman Maine, this time played by Mason. He takes her along to the studios and after introducing her singing voice to the studio boss, gets her a breakthrough role in a new film.

Esther, now known as Vicki Lester, becomes a big star and of course falls for Norman Maine. The two marry but will their marriage survive Maine’s alcoholism and failing career?

James Mason was born in Huddersfield in 1909. He became a stage actor and was later hugely successful in British films. In 1949 he moved to Hollywood and after the success of his starring role in the film The Desert Fox about German General Rommell, he was given a seven-year contract with 20th Century Fox.

It was in 1954 that Mason was asked to be Judy Garland’s leading man in A Star is Born. Cary Grant had been offered the part but turned it down.

Both Cary Grant and James Mason starred in the 1959 picture North by Northwest directed by Alfred Hitchcock. Mason stars as a suave but ruthless secret agent who mistakes Roger Thornhill (Cary Grant) for a man known as George Kaplan who Mason suspects is a government agent tailing him across the USA. As the film unfolds, we see that George Kaplan is actually a fake identity created as a decoy.

After a murder in which Thornhill is wrongly supposed to be the murderer, he escapes on board a train to Chicago where he meets Eve Kendall played by Eva Marie Saint who helps him get away.

North by Northwest is one of my personal favourite films. Apparently, Hitchcock had engaged screenwriter Ernest Lehman to work on a story adaption but he couldn’t work out what to do and offered to quit. Hitchcock replied that he enjoyed working with Lehman and that the two should just work out an entirely new story. North by Northwest was the result.

Cary Grant appeared in four of Hitchcock’s films. Suspicion (1941), To Catch a Thief (1955), North by Northwest (1959) and most importantly for this post, Notorious (1946).

I’m sure I’ve seen Notorious but it’s not a film I can really remember even though when I looked it up many people say it’s one of Hitchcock’s best ever films. Cary Grant plays a government agent who is on the trail of Nazi Claude Rains. Grant enlists the help of Ingrid Bergman who plays the daughter of a war criminal. Grant and Bergman fall for each other but Ingrid Bergman’s character has to seduce Nazi Alexander Sebastian played by Rains.

Ingrid Bergman in Casablanca

Ingrid Bergman came to Hollywood in 1939. She was invited by Hollywood producer David O Selznick to star in an English language remake of one of her earlier Swedish films Intermezzo. Bergman expected to be in Hollywood for this one film and then return to Sweden but the huge success of Intermezzo made her a star and more Hollywood films followed. Her husband and daughter came to Hollywood to join her and later they both applied for American citizenship.

Ingrid made a number of classic films in Hollywood including Casablanca, Spellbound and Notorious.

In 1949 she wrote to the Italian director Roberto Rossellini telling him how much she admired his films and expressing her wish to work with him. Rossellini cast her in Stromboli and she flew to Italy to begin work. While she was there, she fell for Rossellini and began an affair with him, becoming pregnant with his child.

This caused a huge scandal back in the USA. Bergman herself thought that because she had played a nun in The Bells of St Mary and a saint in Joan of Arc these roles seemed to make what she had done appear much worse. Ingrid went through a much publicised divorce and custody battle before marrying Rossellini in 1950.

Ingrid was born in August 1915 in Stockholm which brings us back full circle to Greta Garbo who was born ten years earlier also in Stockholm. Two wonderful actresses separated by only a decade.

(All pictures reproduced via creative commons.)

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Old Friends and School Memories

Posted on by Steve Higgins

This last week I met up with two of my old friends, both of whom I haven’t really seen for perhaps thirty years. Carl (names have been changed to protect the innocent) was a lad I first met at junior school. We met through a mutual school friend called Peter as Peter and Carl lived in the same avenue.

Carl’s brother Martin and I once shared a flat together in Didsbury. It was a rather nice place as I remember. It was small and I had the best bedroom because I think it was me who had paid the deposit or at least the bulk of it and it was right in the centre of Didsbury, a stone’s throw from numerous pubs, bars and takeaways.

Martin seemed to have a lot of health problems when he was younger. Once, many years ago, I used to work nights and when I came home one morning, Martin’s three alarm clocks went off in succession, each placed further away from his bed so he would have to get up to switch them off. I went to bed and was soon asleep. I woke up at about 3pm and went into the kitchen to make a cup of tea. As I sat down in the lounge to drink it, Martin staggered in having just got out of bed. “What time is it?” he asked.

We laughed about that in the pub the other day. I and others used to pull his leg about being lazy and being a hypochondriac but as it turned out, Martin had MS; multiple sclerosis, not an easy disease to spot even now.

Carl was the best man at my wedding and I was his best man when he married. We lost regular contact over the years especially when I moved out of Manchester to Merseyside. Anyway, it was good to meet up again and after a while the three of us slipped pretty easily into the old comfortable camaraderie we used to have.

We filled each other in about marriages, divorces and new partners. About jobs and retirements as well as about old friends and acquaintances.

We talked a lot about our schooldays. We all went to the same school and way back then, my two top subjects were English language and art. In fact, now I think of it, I was the toast of the art class. People loved my paintings and drawings and I loved art. Our art teacher was a guy called Mr Markland. He wasn’t a man with a great affinity for people. In fact he was a rather cool customer but I always liked him and got on well with him. Martin though hated the guy.

Another teacher, probably the most disliked teacher in the school was Mr Ashton, the metalwork teacher. He had a rather bad habit of getting very angry at his students and throwing whatever was handy at them. As this was the metalwork class, that would be something metal and heavy. Many a time a hammer or a chunk of metal flew past my head towards some offending pupil. What would have happened had he hit someone, well I don’t know. Maybe he had a good aim and was choosing to deliberately miss students. Of course, that was an age free of the health and safety restraints that we currently endure. We all had our Mr Ashton stories to tell.

Mr Markland was a superb artist. I remember one day sketching something. I think we had to produce some kind of large human figure. I had chosen a cowboy for some reason and Mr Markland took my pencil and started to make some gentle curves on the paper. He held the pencil not like someone would hold a pencil to write but in the way someone would hold a paintbrush, holding it lightly at the top and making these confident curves on the paper.  After a few moments the shape of the cowboy became apparent; the waistcoat, the bandana tied around the neck, the gun belt at an angle, the hat and so on. I have always wished I could draw like that.

One day there came the moment when we had to choose. Choose which subjects we wanted to study and to take forward to O level or beyond. When I look back now my thinking then was just, well, bonkers!

My number one love in those days was motor racing and I harboured some kind of distant idea of working in motor sport, of perhaps even being a racing driver. Problem number 1: we had no family car and my dad couldn’t drive so any idea of doing what Jensen Button and his dad later did in Karts went out of the window. Anyway, that’s why I chose metalwork because I thought I could become a mechanic, get work with some motor sporting garage and maybe break into motorsport like that. The thing was that when we came to choose our subjects it wasn’t just ‘I want to study this’ and ‘I want to study that’, it was a case of this OR that. Chemistry or biology for instance, you couldn’t do both. I wasn’t happy and it had come to a straight choice of metalwork or art. Foolishly, metalwork won. After all, a metalwork O level would help me get a job whereas an art O level, well, what could that do for me? (What a fool I was!)

One day I met Mr Markland in the corridor and he stopped me and said “Steve, you’re going the wrong way. We’ve moved to the new art room on the first floor.”

It was then I had to tell him. “Mr Markland, I’m going to the metalwork class.”

“Metalwork?”

“Yes. I’m in the metalwork class.” Clearly, he didn’t understand. “I chose metalwork.”

Mr Markland looked as though he had been slapped in the face by a wet kipper. “You chose metalwork instead of art?”

“Yes,” I said meekly.

Mr Markland thought for a moment and then said, “I see,” and walked on. He never spoke to me again.

It would be nice to record that I excelled in metalwork, left school and became a mechanic for a formula one team. The fact is I hated metalwork although the hated Mr Ashton became a much nicer teacher now that he knew (well, thought he knew) that I actually liked his class. After many years of hard graft, I produced a metal bolt that was rather stiff. I thought I could attach it to the back door but when it was screwed to the door it proved rather difficult to open. One day my mum told my dad, “Get that bloody bolt off that door. I can’t get the door open in a morning!”

I gave up the idea of working in a formula one team. Instead, I had a new vocation. I would become a journalist. I went to my careers teacher, Mr Sherrif and told him.

“So how are you going to do that then?” he said.

Wasn’t he the one who was supposed to tell me what to do?

“I’m not sure,” I answered.

“Ever thought of going to the Manchester Evening News?”

Now, that’s more like it. “That’s a good idea,” I said.

“Only they don’t take trainees.”

“I see.”

“Anyway, I’ve got just the thing for you.”

Mr Sherrif rummaged around on his desk, produced various papers, flicked through a notebook and dialled a number. After some idle chit chat he seemed to be arranging an appointment, I could hear my name mentioned and something about ‘nine thirty’ tomorrow. Of course, he’s onto the Evening News. He’s got me a job interview and to think people say Mr Sherrif is rubbish and all he ever does is get people interviews at Barclays Bank!

“There you are,” said Mr Sherrif when he put down the phone. He scribbled something on a slip of paper.

“Tomorrow at nine thirty. You know where Barclays bank is don’t you?”

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A Trip Down Memory Lane

Posted on by Steve Higgins

I really do love it here in Lanzarote. Warm but not too hot. OK there’s a little rain but it only lasts for 5 or so minutes and then the sun is out, drying everything up. If I had the money I would be buying a place here and settling down to a life of sunbathing, swimming and dining out. I could invite all my friends over, for limited times of course. Then again, perhaps I wouldn’t. Either way, I think I’d be very happy.

Sometimes when I’ve had a swim and I’m lying on my lounger just drying off in the sun, I often think about my dad who died back in 2000. Not long ago I came across one of my brother’s photos. It was my dad in the back garden of our old house and he was dressed in a vest and shorts, reading the paper with his dog, a pedigree dachshund on his knee. He was not in a chair or a sun lounger but relaxing in a wheelbarrow, just how he did when he was at work and had finished his job.

Dad worked for Manchester Highways and his job title was, if I remember correctly, a flagger’s mate. His job was to lay pavement flags throughout Wythenshawe in south Manchester as well as to work tarmacking roads and repairing potholes. He rode to work on his bicycle every day of his working life armed only with his backpack containing his lunch; his sandwiches made by my mother and his brew can. He used to use that brewcan even when he retired. Where he got the hot water from when working on the roads I don’t know unless he either went back to the highways office or perhaps asked people where he was working to top up his brew can.

I reckon he would have loved it here in Lanzarote. Back in Manchester the Highways depot where he worked closed down years ago and now a small private housing estate occupies the spot where he used to work. Funnily enough, just next door on Fenside Road was my old school, Sharston High School. It was demolished years ago and on the spot there is now another private housing estate which is surrounded by the old iron fence that encircled our school many years ago.

Dad

My Dad, working on the road, directing traffic.

Our school gym still stands on Fenside road. It is now some sort of fitness or sports centre. Apart from those railings I mentioned it is the only surviving reminder of our old school.

The school was large and was built in a sort of ‘C’ shape. There was a north and a south side and inside the ‘C’ were the school playing fields; cricket and football for the boys and rounders for the girls.

On the north side -to be honest I’ve always got the north and south sides mixed up, but the top of the ‘C’ anyway- there now stands a nursing home and it was here that my mother spent the last years of her life suffering with dementia.

I took semi retirement from work to help look after her and my brother and I shared caring duties. We had carers coming in four times a day. Morning to help get her up and have breakfast. Another at lunchtime, one at teatime and a final visitor at night to help get mum ready for bed. The final carer was due at about nine but they started to get earlier and earlier. Once we had someone round at about 5:30 to help mum with tea and then instead of 9 the final carer turned up at about 6:30. I remonstrated with them and said no, you need to come back at 9. I guess it was the last visit and they were eager to get off early.

Believe me, it was very difficult dealing with mum back then. She would forget she had eaten and would demand more food after being fed. Getting her clothes off her to put into the washer was a nightmare and when they had been washed, she complained that the clothes were not her clothes after all but someone else’s.

Once it worked out in my brother’s favour. I used to work shifts and would arrive home about 10:30 and take over from my brother. That night he wanted to leave early at about 8pm. Could I get time off to get to mum’s earlier? As it happened I couldn’t but he and the carers put mum to bed early and when the carer had left, my brother let mum nod off and then he left too.

Some months earlier we had brought a small bed downstairs into the lounge for mum. When I got in at my usual time, mum had woken up and, thinking it was early morning, was trying to get up.

I tended to have a small supper when I got in from work so I calmed mum down, explained that it was late at night and together we had a small supper of sausage sandwiches and we watched some television. I’d recorded a documentary about the comedian Bob Monkhouse and when it finished, we chatted for a while about Bob and his rather difficult life, then we both went to bed.

The next morning when the carers arrived, she had reverted to her slightly mad self, complaining once again that her clothes weren’t her clothes and that this wasn’t her house but some other strange house and that she didn’t live here.

The conversation about Bob Monkhouse the previous night had been one of our last sensible conversations ever.

I think it was 2021 when she moved into the nursing home. She had been very poorly with a cold that had gotten worse and worse. I personally thought it was one of the first Covid cases. She went to hospital and began to recover. We went to see her on Christmas day. We brought her a Christmas present, I can’t even remember what it was but I was surprised to find the nurses in her ward had brought presents for all the patients, hers was a pair of woolly gloves. Sadly she never got to wear them.

When she began to recover her social worker moved her to a nursing home saying she only had 6 months to live although she went on to live another two and a half years. At the nursing home she recovered rapidly and even attained something almost like her normal self. When Covid and the lockdown struck we were unable to visit her. When things eased we could visit but only outside of the windows. What was mad was that Mum was profoundly deaf and without her hearing aids couldn’t communicate. I don’t know why but I just couldn’t seem to get it across to the staff how important her hearing aids were and there we were, separated by a window, mouthing and gesticulating but poor mum, without her hearing aids could only wave.

When the lockdowns ended we could finally visit mum again but sometimes her hearing aids would be lost or without batteries. I decided to take one of her aids home and just fit it when I visited so we could have something like a normal conversation.

My mother in her last years

When I visited mum I used to ask her to recite some multiplication tables in the hope it would get her to use her memory and exercise her brain waves. One day we did a simple one, the three times table. One three is three, two threes are six and so on. Round about nine she began to falter and looked suddenly distressed. ‘I can’t remember anymore’ she said sadly.

We talked about other things and then I told her it was time to leave. The disappointment of not being able to remember her times table was still evident in her face. We said our goodbyes and I went towards the door. As I turned back for a final wave goodbye, she said something and I stopped to listen.

‘Ten threes are thirty’ she said. ‘Eleven threes are thirty-three, twelve threes are thirty-six’. She looked back and smiled. She was a very determined lady.

After she died I put a picture of her on the Facebook Wythenshawe page, announcing her passing. Various people commented but one lady in particular said that she used to work at mum’s nursing home and that she counted it a pleasure and a privilege to have looked after this lovely lady.

As you can perhaps imagine, I was moved to tears.

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8 Random Films: Can you Guess the Connection?

Posted on by Steve Higgins

I’ve done a few of these posts where I connect one film to another through either the actors or directors or other random things. This week I’m going to talk about two groups of four films and see if you the reader can guess what links them together. I’m hoping this might be a bit of a challenge, even for the most ardent film fans but anyway, here we go.

Top Hat

Top Hat was a film produced in 1935 and starred Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers. It is one the great song and dance musicals of all time. The premise of the film is just Astaire following the girl of his dreams, Ginger Rogers, across Europe but the story is just background to the wonderful songs of Irving Berlin. Two stand out favourites are Cheek to Cheek and Top Hat, White Tie and Tails. The film was directed by Mike Sandrich who also directed 5 of Rogers’ and Astaire’s films.

Together Astaire and Rogers made 5 films together but the most successful was Top Hat.

Red River

One of my favourite westerns, Red River stars John Wayne and Montgomery Clift who have to drive a shed load of cattle from Texas to Missouri. There’s a great moment when Wayne says to Clift ‘Take ‘em to Missouri Matt!’ and the cattle drive begins. The film was produced and directed by Howard Hawks way back in 1948. Taking a quick look on Wikipedia, it was interesting to find that there were various versions of the film but the original theatrical cut was reassembled by Janus films in 2014 for the DVD release.

Singin’ In the Rain

This is another film classic, perhaps even the ultimate Hollywood musical. Released in 1952 it is set in the 1920s and stars Gene Kelly, Debbie Reynolds and Donald O’Connor. The film has some hugely famous scenes, like that unforgettable opening number where Gene Kelly splashes through puddles and sings the title song. It’s also got a super fun storyline about the transition from silent films to “talkies”. The film was directed and choreographed by Gene Kelly and Stanley Donan.

The Shining

This was a film directed by Stanley Kubrick based on the book by Stephen King. King apparently hated the film which is why he went on to produce another version years later. The film stars Jack Nicholson who gives an eerie performance as author Jack Torrance. The plot revolves around the Overlook Hotel which closes during the winter as the location becomes inaccessible due to heavy winter weather. Jack and family are chosen as caretakers to look after the hotel until it reopens in the spring. Throw in a child who ‘shines’, that is to say able to communicate with the spirit world and an evil spirit who apparently takes over Nicholson’s character and you have a pretty terrifying film.

The film was actually shot in the UK at Elstree studios although a second unit did some exterior shots in the USA. At Elstree huge sets were built to represent the interior and exterior of the hotel.

A famous scene involves Jack chopping through a door to reach his wife played by Shelley Duvall. The scene was originally shot with a fake door but Nicholson who was a former firefighter in the national guard chopped through it too quickly and so a thick solid door had to be used.

Kubrick demanded numerous takes of many scenes and Shelley Duvall in particular argued with Kubrick about retakes, dialogue and her acting style.

Ok that’s the first of four films I want to talk about. Any idea of the connection? Let me carry on with a second group of four films and the connection might finally become clear.

The Last Picture Show

Another modern classic. This film was directed by Peter Bogdanovich and is set in a small town in northern Texas in the early 1950s. The film has an ensemble cast but the two main characters are Sonny and Duane played by Timothy Bottoms and Jeff Bridges. The two are teenagers and old friends and various things happen to them. They fall out over a girl called Jacy played by Cybill Shepherd. Ben Johnson plays ‘Sam the Lion’ who owns the bar and cinema in the town. Sam has a mentally disabled son who Sonny has befriended. Various things happen to the pair but towards the end of the film Duane enlists in the army and is due to leave town so the pair decide to visit the town cinema for the very last picture show as the cinema is about to close after Sam’s sudden death.

Crimes and Misdemeanours

This is one of Woody Allen’s darker films. There are many interlocking stories but the central theme involves Judah Rosenthal played by Martin Landau who has an affair with a woman played by Anjelica Huston. The woman -Dolores- is threatening to confront Judah’s wife and Judah, desperate to save his marriage isn’t sure what to do. He asks his brother, a gangster and he recommends violence and even murder. Other stories include a rabbi facing blindness and on a lighter level, Woody plays a documentary film maker who falls for a woman played by Mia Farrow. She in turn is romanced by Alan Alda, playing a TV producer, who Woody’s character despises. It’s one of my favourites of Woody’s films but don’t expect too many laughs.

The Green Mile

Like The Shining, this is another film based on a book by Stephen King. Tom Hanks plays the head of a death row section of an American penitentiary. One of the inmates is John Coffey, a huge black man who appears to have healing powers. He cures Tom Hanks’ bladder infection but the mood in death row is not good after sadistic Percy Wetmore joins the team and deliberately sabotages the execution of another inmate causing the prisoner to die in terrible agony. The warden’s wife is terminally ill and Hanks and his team wonder if John Coffey could cure her.

Twister

Twister is a disaster film made in 1996 which stars Helen Hunt and Bill Paxton as storm chasers. They and their team are trying to get first hand information about tornados and cyclones. The two are separated and are about to divorce but together they are in competition with another group of storm chasers. The special effects are good and I’ve always found it to be a hugely entertaining film.

Ok. That’s my final four films. Are you any the wiser? Do you have the connection yet?

Here’s the answer, the first four films were all featured in the second four films.

In The Last Picture Show the town’s small cinema is about to close down and Duane and Sonny pay a visit to see Red River.

In Crimes and Misdemeanours, Woody Allen’s character Cliff Stern invites Helley Reed played by Mia Farrow to watch Singing in The Rain on his editing machine while they eat a take away curry.

In The Green Mile, the story is told in flashback and Tom Hank’s character Paul, who was cured of the bladder infection is now 108 years old. He watches the film Top Hat and tells the story of John Coffey to his friend Elaine.

In Twister, the team of storm chasers relax and stop at a garage area. By the garage is a drive in theatre and the team enjoy snacks and coffee while the picture is playing. A storm begins to approach and strong winds quickly develop. What film was playing? Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining. The theatre is destroyed just as Jack is chopping through the door in The Shining’s most famous scene.

They were my film connections for this week. Hope you enjoyed reading and tune in again next Saturday for another post.

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Saturday Nights

Posted on by Steve Higgins

My book, Floating in Space, is set in the Manchester of the late seventies. There were no smartphones, no internet and no wireless networks. In fact, ‘wireless’ was an old fashioned word for the radio. I’m tempted to say that things moved at a slower pace then but that’s not true. Things just moved at a different pace. In 2025 you hear a lot about pubs closing down but back in 1977, pubs were far from closing down; at the weekend they were the place to be! That was where my friends and I met up, drank beer, listened to music and chatted up the ladies. Saturdays were the focus of our week back then but these days I’m actually not that keen on going out on a Saturday. I much prefer a weekday night out; things are a little quieter and there are fewer drunken idiots.

Having said that, Liz and I went into St Annes last Saturday to see our friends, Ray and Dean, perform as the Boogie Brothers at the Pier Inn. The Pier Inn is only a few years old and it’s a rather small little pub. The night we went in it was a hot and muggy evening and even with the door open it was hot in there so we decided to take a break and pop into Wetherspoons which we expected to be much cooler and it was. It did strike me though that most of the clientele in both those pubs were pretty similar to my own age group. OK there were a few young people but most people out that night were in my particular age bracket. Where do young people go these days on a Saturday night?

Back in 1977 Saturday nights were the culmination of the weekend for my twenty-one year old self. I always preferred it to Friday nights because things were more relaxed, there was no rushing home from work, no rushing to get your tea down your neck so you can get changed, then leg it out for the bus. Saturday, you could take your time and leisurely work up to things. Sometimes I would go out shopping and buy myself something new to wear for that evening, a shirt, or perhaps even a new pair of trousers. Then later I would have a long relaxed soak in the bath and dress unhurriedly in my room to the tune of my favourite music. In 1977 my favourite album was Elton John’s ‘Goodbye Yellow Brick Road’ and as I dressed I would mimic Nigel Olsson’s measured and rhythmic drumming to ‘The Ballad of Danny Bailey’, or ‘Candle in the Wind’.

These days I just pop into the bathroom, have a shave and a shower and throw on one of a number of short sleeved shirts that I tend to favour. Still, even back in 1977 I could sometimes get bored with the usual pubs and bars in Manchester. I remember one boozy night in which my friend Chris and I decided to go out on the train somewhere. We ended up in Nantwich if I remember correctly. We took our tent and put it up somewhere in a field or a park and proceeded to spent the night drinking in a local pub.

The next morning we woke in our tent which had partially collapsed around us. We staggered up and packed everything away and thought about making our way to the railway station. As we walked into the town various people hailed us ‘Hi Steve!’ ‘Hi Chris!’

We dropped into the local pub and the barman greeted us like old friends. ‘Great night last night wasn’t it?’ he said.  I guess it must have been.

Here are a few facts about Saturday compiled after a quick search of the internet.

Saturday is named after Saturn, the Roman God of agriculture.

Saturday is the 6th day of the week in western culture although in some places the first day of the week is considered to be Sunday, making Saturday the last day of the week.

In Hinduism, Saturday is dedicated to the planet Saturn and is considered a day for spiritual cleansing and fasting. Devotees may visit temples and perform special rituals on this day, or abstain from certain foods and activities as a form of penance.

In the UK, Saturday is the busiest shopping day of the week. Many people use this day to do their weekly grocery shopping and high streets and shopping centres are often crowded with shoppers. One of my hard and fast rules is to never go shopping on a Saturday. Tuesday works better for me, it’s much quieter.

Time for a music break. I was going to go with Saturday Night’s Alright for Fighting by Elton John but to be honest, as much as I like Elton, that song really isn’t my cup of tea these days. Here’s something much more enjoyable, Saturday Night at the Movies by the Drifters.

Talking about movies, Saturday Night Fever was a film released in 1977 starring John Travolta. Travolta plays Tony, a young man who spends his weekends drinking and dancing at a local disco. I haven’t seen the film for years until I watched it recently and was surprised to be reminded that, apart from the disco dancing interludes and the music of the Bee Gees, it is actually a gritty and dark film.

Here’s what I wrote in my book Floating in Space about Saturday nights;

“There was something about Saturday nights in Manchester. Some quality of security, of expectancy, a feeling that the night and the future were going to be good. A feeling that you might just meet some gorgeous girl and that even if you didn’t, it didn’t really matter because there was always the excitement of the people, the music, the drink, and everything else that made up the evening. And then there was always the expectancy of the next night, and the next, and on and on into the future. The past building up inside you like a great data bank, reminding you, reassuring you, like a light burning in some empty room in the corner of your mind.”

The Playground as it is today

Back in the late 70s, my friends and I used to go to a bar in Manchester called the Playground. We loved it in there. Inside the Playground, flickering multi-coloured spotlights rotated across the red carpeted room which, on Fridays and Saturdays, was generally packed. It had a small dance floor sunk low like a pit where people up on the raised bar level could look down at the gyrating girls and where also, on week day lunchtimes, a topless dancer appeared at the stroke of one o’clock to translate the soul and disco music of the time into pulsating physical motion, the eyes of jaded office workers glued to her as she did so.

There was a paltry fifty pence charge to get in, the solitary bouncer was silent but not unpleasant and the DJ, who always began the night with ‘Love’s Theme’ by the Love Unlimited Orchestra, played alternate sessions of rock, disco, and chart music. We were all mad about Jenny, the barmaid. She was lovely. She had a kind of round, open face framed by thick blonde hair and her skin was a creamy white. She served us Worthington ‘E’ and we melted into the hubbub of people on their Saturday night out while the music of the seventies drifted through us.

Yes, we had a lot of fun nights in the Playground until one night we turned up and the place was closed. We went somewhere else that night and for some reason it remained closed for a long while. Perhaps the owners had gone bust or their lease had expired. Eventually it was refurbished and opened under another name but it was never the same again. Even so, every time I walk down Oxford Road, I always stop for a moment and remember those long gone nights in the Playground.

What shall I do this Saturday night? Get dressed up and go into town?

Actually, I think I might just order a takeaway and watch television!

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Fragments of a Life

Posted on by Steve Higgins

It’s sad enough to have to lose a loved one but what is sometimes even worse is dealing with the things they have left behind; their clothes, their books, their personal items. The shampoo and shower gel in the bathroom, the uneaten items in their fridge, the notes on the coffee table; the fragments of their lives.

My brother Colin died almost two months ago and even now I find it hard to believe. Going home a couple of weeks ago I picked up two pizza bases from the shops. I bought two without thinking because I’d usually make Colin and me a couple of small pizzas for when he came round for one of our regular bi-weekly chats.

One of the first things I looked at when I went into my brother’s flat was his phone. He had two phones. One was unlocked but contained little information. No banking app or email account. The other phone was locked and I tried all of what I thought would be memorable numbers for him to use as a phone password. His date of birth….. no. My birthdate…… no. I tried my mother’s and father’s birthdates but no, the phone refused to open.

Colin and I used to speak on the phone every few days. A long time ago when mobile phones first became popular, we decided that when we would speak together on the phone, we would talk in either German or east European accents. I’m not quite sure why we did it but we maintained it over a number of years, although it could be a little embarrassing if I suddenly answered the phone in a German accent in the bar or in a restaurant.

Looking on the internet I searched for what are the most used codes for unlocking a phone. The most popular was 1-2-3-4. I trolled through the list but nothing seemed to work. 2-2-2-2….. no! 6-9-6-9….. no! About halfway through the list I got to the point where the phone would lock up for a minute after each failed attempt. Finally, I tried 3-3-3-3. I was watching a TV show at the time and was about to move on to the next suggestion when as if by magic the phone opened up.

There was no banking app which was what I was looking for in order to sort out his financial affairs. Looking through his house there didn’t seem to be any particular place for important documents. I found some in the bedroom, some in the lounge and some in the kitchen. Colin wasn’t very tidy. He was also the laziest man I have ever met. His first job after leaving school was in a high-class men’s tailors in Manchester city centre. Among the clientèle were presenters from the local TV news shows Look North and Granada Reports. Colin once told me he had served the guy who played Alec Gilroy in Coronation Street. His boss was a very well to do fellow who lived in Wilmslow and every morning he picked up Colin for work at a busy junction by the Bluebell pub. He used to drive a Rolls Royce and Colin was living at home in Handforth then and you might think that with his boss picking him up in a Rolls Royce, and waiting at a very busy junction, he would be keen to get up out of bed and get ready for work.

Well, things worked out ok for a short while but as time went on, Colin realised that getting out of bed in a morning was not for him. My mother told me that she used to sometimes throw a pan of cold water in his face to get him up but even so, he began to leave his boss stranded at the Bluebell and would arrive at work round about lunchtime. Soon he was presented with his p45.

The only other job he ever had, to my knowledge anyway, was a sales job in Rome in Italy, selling timeshares or insurance or something to English speaking people in that far away city. He didn’t last long there and made his way across Europe to a place called Nijmegen in Holland. He stayed there for quite a while and he even met his first girlfriend there, a girl called Inge with whom he stayed friends for the rest of his life.

Soon his money ran out and he was repatriated back to the UK with my mother, as usual, paying for his return.

Not long after coming home he had a nervous breakdown and that began a cycle of mental health issues that plagued him for the remainder of his life. He once told me that it all stemmed from bullying at school although I have to say, I always remember him as being such a happy and cheerful youngster. Clearly, things are not always what they seem.

He had arranged a funeral plan with a company called One Life which went bust back in 2024, however, I was sure he had taken out an insurance policy with Sun Life some time ago. I called them but they had never heard of my brother. I called another company and they said the same thing. ‘Have you tried Sun Life?’ they asked. I had but they had no record of my brother. Try again, they suggested. I tried again and this time the company came up with Colin’s policy which was actually linked to a funeral company so I was able to quickly begin the funeral arrangements.

I thought his laptop would probably tell me a lot about his affairs but it too was locked. I once again tried various numbers to no avail but I noticed that his email account was on his newly unlocked mobile phone. I clicked on the ‘forgotten passcode’ button on his laptop; a new code went to his emails and soon I had access to his laptop even though I found nothing of interest there. It’s interesting though how his digital footprints leave hints about things that he did. There was an email from Netflix reminding him to finish an episode of Star Trek he had been watching. Another was from a mail order company thanking him for his recent clothing purchases and offering him discounts on his next order.

Colin lived in a council flat and I was sure they would be keen to take over the place and get new tenants in but happily, the staff I dealt with at the housing office were friendly and sympathetic and gave me time to sort things out.

I took lots of his old clothes to the recycling centre and quite a few charity shops were the beneficiaries of his numerous DVDs although I must admit, I kept quite a few for myself. Colin was an avid buyer of leather jackets and although some of his older ones went to the recycling centre, I still have about five of his newer ones.

A charity place called The Tree of Life came and took away his washing machine, fridge freezer and microwave. I took away his big television screen on which I’ll probably watch the British Grand Prix this weekend. I went to hand his keys into the council but first I thought I’d take a last look around. I checked everywhere and picked up a few last items I thought I’d keep. I had been surprised that I hadn’t found a great big box of photographs as a long time ago Colin always used to be taking pictures.

As I took a last look around, I noticed a bin bag in the corner of a cupboard just by the door. More old clothes I thought but when I picked it up it was full of photographs, the very ones I had been looking for. I was so glad I had found those pictures as there were so many taken at home when he and my mother and father were still alive.

Colin: a self portrait

I dropped off his keys and later I found myself watching one of his old DVDs, sat in a chair wearing his aftershave, sporting one of his newly purchased T-shirts and drinking one of his leftover bottles of Pepsi Max, his favourite drink. That is the thing with death, someone dies but the world does not stop or even take a breath. The buses keep on running, the sun continues to rise and the dead man’s possessions are still there, waiting to be sold or given away or distributed to others via charity shops and other outlets.

Despite never having any money Colin had an expensive TV package from Virgin Media. He loved his black and white classic films and spent a fortune on numerous leather jackets as well as going everywhere by taxi. Until our mother died, he was forever asking me to bail him out of debt but in recent years helped by a PIP claim (Personal Independence Payment) and a small inheritance from mum he finally had some money in his pocket.

He was looking forward to getting himself a free bus pass but sadly, he was taken away much too soon. He was 64 years old.

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The Curse of the Blank Page

Posted on by Steve Higgins

This week I’ve been experiencing that blank page syndrome; you know what I mean, you stare at the paper, or the empty laptop screen and nothing comes to mind, and the paper stays like that, blank. So in an effort to boost my creative powers I took a look back at some of my old blog posts.

I see that I started this blog page back in 2014 and my first post went out on the 23rd of May. It wasn’t anything exciting, in fact it was pretty much a sort of advertisement for my book Floating in Space which had just been published on Amazon to an overwhelming gush of cyberspatial silence.

Floating in Space was my first book and I put it together many years ago. At the time, I was writing lots of science fiction and espionage stories based on my love of television shows reflecting both those genres. I had begun to realise though that for fiction to be worthwhile it has to have a basis in real experience. All I knew about sci-fi and espionage was what I had read about or seen on TV so I started to write about myself. I wrote about the insurance company where I had worked and also the bus company where I worked later after a short trip to Europe that was supposed to last for a year but ended up covering about four weeks.

After I had compiled a few essays, I thought I could put them all together into a fictional story about a young man who packs in his job as an insurance clerk, goes to Europe and returns home penniless so gets himself a job as a bus conductor. Throw in some real life experiences and a healthy dose of fiction and the result was a short novel. I have to say that I love Floating in Space. Reading it today is like taking a trip back to my younger days and it brings back all sorts of memories and I do hope that I’ve managed to communicate that time in my life in the mobile phone free and non digital late 70s to my readers.

Floating In Space available now from Amazon!

There have been plenty of times when I’ve struggled to produce an essay or a post and I started one off a few years ago which began, pretty much like this one, in a sort of rambling fashion hoping that something would come to me. I ended up writing about some training which I had undertaken at the time. Here’s an excerpt:

I’ve been on a training course this week, a pretty interesting one but unfortunately not one I can talk about much as it relates to the data protection act and the computer misuse act and all sorts of legal stuff. Still, the training reminded me of a fairly funny training story that happened nearly ten years ago. It was when I had just started at the Highways Agency and in fact I was one of the first batch of operators to be recruited for the North West, a fact that I regularly bore my colleagues with.

The HA sent us to some establishment in Salford for an induction course and I have to say, as much as I like my job, that course was pretty dull! It was fun meeting some new people and doing some interesting team building exercises but after a while, they started to get a little boring and we were all thinking when will we be able to start learning the nuts and bolts of our jobs?

One of the exercises, and to this day I don’t know the point of it, was for us to split into twos and one member of the duo went into another room where they thought of a holiday story to tell, and the other was asked to completely ignore their partner when they returned and began to relate their story. In this instance my colleague was the storyteller and I was the ignorer! So she came back in and began her story. I polished my nails, yawned in her face, checked my watch, hummed a little tune to myself and so on. After a while some inner instinct made me turn to take a quick look at her, and it was lucky I did so because later on I reckoned I had been only a split second away from taking a hefty punch to the nose, however I was able to calm her down and explain it was all part of the exercise!

Just reading that brought lots of training memories back. We did lots of role playing at Highways in fact I had to do one during the interview for the job,. In that one I had to deal with a woman on the phone who supposedly was being chased by someone while on the motorway. I’m guessing the idea was to see if I could stay calm during stressful situations. Anyway, I managed to calm the lady down, told her the police were on the way after working out her exact location by careful questioning. I got the job so I must have done reasonably well.

Photo courtesy Highways Agency

Towards the end of the induction course, boredom had truly set in. I remember one hot afternoon in this stuffy office cum training room and the lecturer going on and on about the chain of command and how issues had to be escalated to one’s line manager and one’s line manager would escalate things further if need be. I feel rather embarrassed to admit this now but I nodded serenely off into a private world of slumber. Later, and whether it was minutes or even hours later I really don’t know but I was jolted sharply back to reality by the voice of our instructor calling my name. A sea of blank faces were looking at me so I tried to think back: What was the last thing we were talking about? Oh yes, I remember now:

“I’d escalate that to my team manager.”

“Escalate what to your team manager?”

“Well, er. . .”

I glanced over to my left, perhaps hoping for some help, but one of my new colleagues, actually the lady from the storytelling incident earlier, was looking at me in disgust. Over to my right two other colleagues were in a strange sort of state. One had gone almost purple in the face as he tried to hold in a tumult of suppressed laughter and another was covering his face and making strange noises as his shoulders pumped up and down hysterically.

Finally, the lecturer, looking at me with contempt, observed that it might be better for me if I paid attention more and moved on.

Not the finest training course but not my finest hour either.

My absolute favourite training time was something I wrote about a few weeks back, bus driver training.

In those days circa 1979, we trained in old back loader manual gearbox buses sat in a small cab at the front and steering with a huge steering wheel and having to double the clutch to change from first to second gear as those old gearboxes weren’t fully synchromeshed.

Vintage GM Bus flyer

The moment I climbed up into the cab I felt at home and I loved my time in the driving school. Every morning we used to check the bus over and top up the oil and water if required. Then our trainer would choose somewhere in the vast Greater Manchester operating area for breakfast. We might have a drive to perhaps Oldham garage or bus station. I’d start off and our trainer Bill sat behind me in the first seat. The window to the cab had been removed and Bill would give directions and off we would go. His main instruction particularly on narrower roads was to ‘ride the white line’ because our big bus needed the room, car drivers in smaller vehicles didn’t.

Bill knew all the canteen staff in all the canteens in Manchester. Sometimes we might just have tea and toast because on the next run Bill might designate Stockport as our next destination as the new canteen there always served up something good for lunch. To be honest though, I always preferred a breakfast. Back in those days the GM Buses canteens served a breakfast special which was egg, sausage, bacon, a slice of toast and a choice of either beans or tomatoes, all for a pound. My own breakfast favourite though was two eggs on two toast with beans and a sausage which is still a favourite today.

Well, I think that’s it for today’s blog post. I’m pretty pleased with myself. I started out without the faintest idea what to write and managed to write 1400+ words and I know I pinched a few from a couple of old posts but either way, I managed to break the curse of the blank page!

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10 Classic TV Ads

Posted on by Steve Higgins

Don’t you just hate TV adverts? I certainly do. There are those times when a TV advert comes in useful I suppose. Perhaps when you are watching a good film and you need to make a cup of tea or pop to the toilet. These days in the hi tech world of TV, most people are able to pause live TV and do those things anyway. I wouldn’t mind if the TV adverts were actually worth watching but these days of course they aren’t. Anyway, here are 6 classic TV ads of yesteryear that I think are rather good. Here we go . .

1.

This is an advert for Strongbow cider featuring Johnny Vaughn, who you might remember as fronting the Channel 4 breakfast show many years ago, and Jerry Hall. Jerry was an American model and was once upon a time involved with Bryan Ferry and then Mick Jagger. It’s a fun advert that has always made me laugh.

2.

A particular favourite of mine is the Ford Puma advert from 1997 featuring Steve McQueen. McQueen of course passed away from cancer in 1969 so how did he feature in the ad? Well, filmmakers shot footage of the Ford Puma in modern San Francisco and digitally inserted McQueen into the driving seat using footage from his 1968 film Bullitt. The result was a stylish short TV ad recreating a scene from the original feature film.

3.

An old TV advert I always used to enjoy involved an old guy trying to trace a copy of a secondhand book; Fly Fishing by J R Hartley. He eventually finds a copy and the book seller asks his name. “J R Hartley” he replies. What were they advertising? Yellow Pages! Strangely enough some bright spark – actually author Michael Russell – produced a spoof book; Fly Fishing by J R Hartley which became a best seller and prompted two additional sequels.

4.

Probably the funniest classic TV ads are the ones with Leonard Rossiter and Joan Collins which are promotions for Cinzano. They actually made 10 TV commercials between 1978 and 1983 which all ended with a glass of Cinzano getting spilled all over Joan.

Rossiter had a successful theatre career but is best remembered for his portrayal of the seedy landlord Rigsby in TV’s Rising Damp, still shown regularly on UK TV. Joan Collins has had a long career in TV and films including a spell in the USA starring in the TV series Dynasty. This year, 2025, she is due to portray Wallis Simpson in a new film production. Leonard Rossiter died in 1984 aged 57.

5.

A great advertising series were those for Boddingtons beer. I used to love a pint of ‘Boddies’ as we used to call it but then the brewery was taken over by another company (Whitbread, I think) and the Boddingtons bitter they produced was really not like the original Boddingtons at all. Anyway, back in the 1990s a series of adverts were produced starring Melanie Sykes speaking in a broad Manchester accent.

6.

My particular favourite Boddingtons ad was this one that starts off in Venice but ends up somewhere in Manchester.

7.

Bolton comedian Peter Kaye featured in a series of ads for John Smiths beer. Can’t say I was that keen, then or now, on John Smiths beer but the adverts were good.

8.

A great favourite for many people were the puppet ‘aliens’ used in an advert for Smash which was a powdered version of mashed potatoes. You just added liquid I presume but personally, I’m happy peeling and boiling my potatoes to make mash just as I have always done.

9.

In 2018 Elton John featured in a Christmas commercial for top end store John Lewis. According to Wikipedia there is a regular Christmas ad for the store every year. I’ve clearly missed the others but I always thought the Elton John one was pretty special.

10.

I’m going to finish with this one advertising another beer, this time Heineken. Bryan Pringle plays a sort of latter day Professor Higgins trying to teach a very well spoken lady, the exotically named Sylvestra le Touzel, to speak cockney. Bryan Pringle featured in a number of films and numerous sitcoms from the 70s to the 90s. He died in 2002.

What were your favourite TV ads?

Those were my 10 TV ads but just before I go to press I thought I’d add one final one. I know I said earlier that modern ads are just not as good these days but I recently spotted this one in which Meg Ryan and Billy Crystal were asked to recreate that famous scene from When Harry met Sally. (I’ll have what she’s having!)

What to do next: Here are a few options.

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Click here to visit amazon and purchase Timeline, my new anthology.

 

 

A Slice of My Life 2024

Posted on by Steve Higgins

It’s a long time since I’ve made a video for my YouTube channel and recently I’ve been trying to think about what my next project should be. When I’m stuck for a video I tend to tweak or even remake some of the short videos I use on social media to promote this page and my two books. In fact my YouTube page is made up of quite a lot of videos like that as well as numerous short video versions of my poems. Every now and again I try and put something different together. I usually make a video about our yearly trips to France in our motorhome and I’ve made a few videos about Manchester, my home town and also the place where my book Floating in Space is set.

Liz and I have just spent 5 weeks in Lanzarote and although I took my video camera over there I actually didn’t use it except to take some holiday snaps.

Last week I decided to take a little jolly out on the bus over to Stockport and see how the new bus station, currently under construction there, was coming along. Travelling to Stockport on the bus made me think about how our lives change and move on. Back in 1979 I was a coach driver for National Express but I wasn’t happy with the job. In the summer of 79 I was 22 years old and far too young and immature to do such a responsible job. Covering the long distance National Express routes wasn’t too bad but private hires were difficult as the driver had to plan his routes and to be honest I didn’t know my way about the country particularly well.

After being stuck on the same long distance bus route from Manchester to Lowestoft far too many times I packed the job in. I went to ask for my old job back at GM Buses but they gave me a big lecture about how they were fed up of training drivers only for them to resign and go driving for other companies and so I was turned away. That same afternoon I drove over to the GM Bus depot at Stockport where they were short of staff and they started me the same day. For over ten years I spent every working day in Stockport taking fares and later, driving buses. Returning in 2024 after over 30 years away was interesting, I must say.

Most of Mersey Square, the square at the very centre of Stockport, was fenced off while the builders worked on the new bus station. A huge railway viaduct spans the centre of Stockport and the bus station or bus interchange as they are now calling it is mostly on one side of the viaduct with part of it spilling over onto the other side. Someone told me it was due to open in two weeks time but looking around, that seemed to be a pretty tall order.

I shot some video in the square then walked around the construction, filming as I went. I was planning to film myself with my trusty selfie stick and chat away to the camera about my memories of Stockport but as usual, I felt a little self-conscious and just stuck to filming the new construction. I couldn’t walk through the area as of course the builders were still working so I had to walk around it.

When I got to the other side a new Stagecoach bus went past on its way into the Stagecoach garage. It was displaying the route number 192 which is a very busy bus route indeed, going down the A6 from Hazel Grove into Stockport and then on into Manchester. Back in my day there was a 192 every six minutes and each one was packed. Looking back I must have spent an awful lot of time going up and down on that bus route.

When the bus services were deregulated in 1986 the Busy Bee bus company tried to muscle in onto our route and so the service moved up to one every three minutes! Yes we would load up in Piccadilly, Manchester. An inspector would count three minutes and then you were off. Straight away there was a set of traffic lights and if you hit those on red you were in trouble as the bus behind was already following you out.

I followed the Stagecoach bus round the corner to the old GM Buses depot, now of course owned and run by Stagecoach. Inside it was full of buses and for a moment I remembered the old days when it was full of the old orange and cream of GM Buses.

I left the bus company in the early 1990s and started my own company selling motorsport memorabilia. I loved that job and spent all my day chatting to various regular people about F1 and motorsport but sadly, I didn’t make a lot of money, eventually selling all my stock to someone who had a similar business. After a failed attempt to become a TV producer I ended up short of money and went back to GM Buses. I worked for the GM coaching company known as Charterplan. After a short while there I transferred to an office job in the GM Buses control room in Ardwick, Manchester and that was the last time I set foot in Stockport, until last week.

The Comfy GillI walked round to the other side of the bus depot and there opposite, what used to be the main exit for our buses, was the Comfortable Gill. The Comfy, as we affectionately called it, was the pub where we busmen used to drink after the day’s shift was over. At one time if a driver was due to finish after last orders at 11, the landlord used to accept telephone orders for a pint so sometimes we could pull in at 11:20, park the bus in the depot and then pop over to the Comfy to find a pint waiting for us to sup while we cashed up our day’s takings. When I saw it the other day the Comfy was all closed up and looked neglected. So many of Britain’s pubs have closed down and I walked away hoping that the Comfy might be saved in the near future.

It’s always interesting to look back and have a stroll down memory lane. I can’t say working at GM Buses was a great job and looking back I wonder why I stayed so long. Of course back then I had bought a house and I had a very expensive mortgage to pay and I put in a lot of hours to pay for it. Perhaps I would have been better served by prioritising my career rather than my house. Oh well!

Liz and I went to the pictures this week. It was the first time we had visited the cinema since seeing Oppenheimer last year and although I didn’t rate it as the work of genius many people seem to think it is, Oppenheimer was certainly an excellent film and deservedly won the best picture Oscar.

The film we went to see was Wicked Little Letters set in England after the first World War. It’s about an Irish lady who comes to live in an English village. She is outspoken, very rude and swears a lot and is soon branded as the author of a very nasty series of poison pen letters. It wasn’t a bad film but what was odd was the way the 1920s were portrayed. There was a black judge, a black Asian policewoman, numerous other black people and the Irish lady was living with a black man. It was if they had substituted 1920s life with today’s multicultural society. I’m not sure why they would do that but the end result was that the entire film looked a little bit strange. Why didn’t they just set the film in the present day when different ethnic groups, as well as bad language is just the norm? Or was the director trying to make some point about society that perhaps I have missed? Wicked Little Letters isn’t a bad film in fact it’s quite amusing in a way and was actually based on a true story but that cutural shift just didn’t work for me.

Perhaps we all look back at the past in different ways.

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The TV Shows of Gerry Anderson

Posted on by Steve Higgins

Many years ago when I was still at junior school, one of my friends asked me if I had seen a new TV show about a flying car. I hadn’t but apparently it was really good and so I made a mental note to watch out for it. As a child I was pretty keen on TV. My dad used to call me ‘square eyes’ because I watched so much TV and as you might imagine I soon found the TV show my friend had told me about. It was a short puppet show about a special machine called Supercar that could not only fly but also dive under the sea. It was designed and built by Professor Popkiss and Dr Beaker and the test pilot was a guy called Mike Mercury. I loved Supercar and everything about it and even though I didn’t realise it then, I had become a huge fan of TV producer Gerry Anderson and his Century 21 Productions.

Gerry Anderson was born in 1929 and after the war earned a traineeship with the British Colonial Film Unit. Later he worked for Gainsborough Pictures and had various jobs, subsequently as a director. He and cameraman Arthur Provis formed a production company called AP Films after their two names and began producing TV shows for children. Their first project was in 1957 called The Adventures of Twizzle and was the first time Gerry worked with puppeteer Christine Glanville, musician Barry Gray and special effects supervisor Derek Meddings.

They followed up with more puppet shows, Torchy the Battery Boy and the first series I remember, Four Feather Falls, a cowboy show about a sheriff with magic guns.

Anderson married his wife Sylvia in 1960 and the two collaborated on Supercar, Gerry’s first sci-fi puppet show in 1960. The series marked the first time Gerry used the name Supermarionation to describe the process which enabled the puppet mouths to move in synchronisation with pre-recorded dialogue. All the characters in the shows had American accents so the shows could be sold to the USA and it was Sylvia who was responsible for the characters and their fashions while Gerry concentrated on other aspects of the shows.

The next series was Fireball XL5 about a spacecraft that was part of the World Space Patrol piloted by Steve Zodiac. The following show, Stingray was the first to be filmed in colour. Stingray was a submarine in the service of the WASP, the World Aquanaut Security Patrol and was piloted by Troy Tempest and his colleague ‘Phones’ who was a master at using sonar equipment. The duo discover an undersea kingdom where King Titan holds sway over his people, the Aquaphibians. Troy and Phones rescue the mute undersea girl Marina who joins them onboard Stingray. Most of the characters had sea related names like, Marina, Commander Sam Shore and his daughter, Atlanta. Atlanta was voiced by Lois Maxwell who played the original Miss Moneypenny in the James Bond films.

Stingray was probably my favourite of Anderson’s TV shows. I particularly loved the opening sequence in which Commander Shore exclaims ‘Anything can happen in the next half hour!’

Stingray was filmed in 1964 and the show fitted neatly into the expanding Anderson universe set, like all his sci-fi shows, 100 years into the future. Around this time AP Films developed a merchandising company responsible for licensing all kinds of items related to the shows, things like models and puppets and so on. I used to have a puppet of Venus, the space doctor from Fireball XL5 although I think I would have preferred a Steve Zodiac puppet. I had a Fireball XL5 rocket which could be fired into the air with a big catapult and as it came down, a parachute deployed to float it down gently. I also had quite a few Stingray models. One was a plastic kit I had to put together and another was a plastic Stingray shaped water pistol.

image courtesy flickr

There was also a comic which I absolutely loved called TV21 with comic strips of all the sci-fi Anderson shows. TV21 had a front page fashioned like a newspaper with headlines referring to the stories coming up on the inside pages.

The next project for AP Films was probably Gerry and Sylvia’s greatest success and it was called Thunderbirds. Thunderbirds was about a secret organisation called International Rescue that had a small fleet of highly advanced machines and equipment with which to perform rescue operations. Millionaire ex-astronaut Jeff Tracy was the head man and the organisation was secreted in his island home. His five sons were the Thunderbird pilots, John, Scott, Virgil, Gordon and Alan, all named after US astronauts of the 1960s. The genius behind the Thunderbird craft was Hiram Hackenbacker, known as ‘Brains’. Thunderbird’s nemesis was a secret agent known as the Hood because of his talent for disguise and in many episodes the Tracy brothers had to ask their London agent, Lady Penelope, to track him down and sort him out.

Lady Penelope Creighton-Ward lived in a huge mansion somewhere in southern England and her manservant and chauffeur was Parker, a reformed safecracker. The head of ITV Sir Lew Grade saw the first episode and was so impressed that he asked for the episodes to be extended from 30 minutes to a full hour, less TV adverts of course. Gerry wanted Fenella Fielding to voice Lady Penelope but in the end Sylvia herself took on the role.

Thunderbirds is probably my second favourite of all the Gerry Anderson series. The great thing about it and really, the secret of its success was the highly intelligent scripts which treated its audience of children not as kids but as intelligent young adults. Two scripts that spring to mind were one called The Cham Cham about a code transmitted on a musical melody and another where Parker was called upon to break into the Bank of England. Later in the episode someone is trapped inside the vault and Parker is asked to break in again to rescue the man before the air is used up in the vault. Parker though thinks that his old mate, a bank robber recently released from prison, is about to complete his life’s ambition to break into the bank and so he tries to slow down his and Penelope’s drive into London.

A successful feature film, Thunderbirds are Go, was made in 1966 and AP Films began a new life as Century 21 Productions.

The follow up TV series was called Captain Scarlet and the Mysterons. Captain Scarlet is part of an organisation called Spectrum in which all the members have code names relating to colours. The Mysterons have the power of re-animation and both Scarlet and Captain Black have been re-animated giving them powers of indestructibility. It wasn’t really my cup of tea but the puppets in the series made a step forward in having normal dimensions instead of large heads like the previous shows.

Two further puppet shows followed, Joe 90 about a young boy who becomes a secret agent by using the brain patterns of various people. His father, Professor MacLaine had designed a machine called the Big Rat (Brain Impulse Galvanoscope Record and Transfer -funny how all these old acronyms come back to me!) The Big Rat takes the brain pattern of a pilot for instance, feeds them to the professor’s young son -the Joe 90 of the title- and he is able to fly a plane.

The Secret Service was a mixed puppet/live action series about a secret agent who is shrunk down to a small size and the producers used puppets in normal sized sets. Stanley Unwin played the role of an eccentric vicar who is part of a secret organisation called BISHOP (British Intelligence Service Headquarters – Operation Priest). The series was cancelled after 13 episodes as Lew Grade didn’t think the inclusion of comedian Stanley Unwin and his gobbledegook language would work in the USA.

Gerry Anderson’s ambition was always to leave the puppet shows behind and move on to live action features and after a live action sci-fi film Doppelganger, Gerry began work on UFO. UFO was set in the 1980s and was about a secret organisation called SHADO (Supreme Headquarters Alien Defence Organisation). The Earth is under attack from UFOs and it is SHADO’s job to defend the world. The headquarters is based in the Harlington-Straker film studios with an outpost on the moon called Moonbase. Moonbase tracks the UFO’s with the help of SID (Space Intruder Detector) and launches their interceptors. Ed Bishop, previously the voice of Captain Blue in Captain Scarlet, played Ed Straker and Gabrielle Drake was the Commander of Moonbase.

I loved the series but the TV networks were unsure whether UFO was aimed at children or adults, presumably because of Gerry Anderson’s previous childrens’ shows. Anderson prepared for the second series in which the American networks had asked for more lunar based stories. Many new sets were built and then series 2 was cancelled. Gerry then offered the networks a new show, Space 1999, centred entirely on the moon.

In Space 1999, a series I never really liked, a nuclear explosion pushes the moon out of earth orbit and out into space and the series chronicled the adventures of those still living on Moonbase Alpha. Husband and wife team Martin Laudau and Barbara Bain starred in the show which ran for two seasons but during the production Sylvia and Gerry divorced.

Gerry returned to producing more TV shows for children like Terrahawks and Space Police but even though new technology and techniques helped with the puppetry and filming, without Sylvia and her characterisations, those productions were a little lame.

In the 1990s Gerry produced a new series of Captain Scarlet replacing the puppets with computer animations.

Gerry Anderson died in 2012 aged 83 while Sylvia lived to be 88. In 2015 she made a guest appearance in an episode of a new animated series of Thunderbirds are Go as Great Aunt Sylvia, a relative of Lady Penelope. She died in 2016.

The two left behind a legacy of some much-loved television shows but what was the secret of the success of Gerry and Sylvia’s original productions? Personally, I think there were a number of elements: Outstanding and intelligent scripts that treated the younger viewers as young adults. The fabulous music and theme tunes of composer Barry Gray. The wonderful characters created by Sylvia. The special effects from Derek Meddings who went on to work on the James Bond films and of course Gerry Anderson who brought all those elements together.

This year, 2023, Thunderbirds can be seen on the Talking Pictures TV channel, 58 years after it was first seen on TV.

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