A Somerset Lad

Few of those I teach seem to watch traditional television channels. If television is watched at all it is Sky Sports or Netflix, otherwise time is passed on social media platforms.

It is strange to think that traditional television seems to be going the way of printed newspapers. It is suggested that linear television, where programmes are broadcast in a scheduled, published sequence, lacks a long-term future. Programmes will be made available for people to watch them on demand; the concept of everyone watching at the same time will disappear altogether.

There will never be the excitement that watching television brought fifty years ago. Children’s programmes were very limited. There were only three channels, and BBC 2 only showed programming directed at younger viewers on Saturday afternoons.

BBC 1 began with Play School, then there was Jackanory, the storytelling programme. On Mondays and Thursdays, Blue Peter was shown at five minutes to five o’clock; on  Fridays, it was Crackerjack. Somewhere in the schedule, there must have been space for other programmes, for the reflection brought memories of Casey Jones, the theme music playing and replaying itself through my mind:

Stop, look, listen ’cos you’re gonna hear
A brand new story ’bout a great engineer,
He’s the greatest of them all we claim
Number one’s his engine, Casey Jones his name.

Casey Jones a steamin’ and a rollin’,
Casey Jones you never have to guess
When you hear the tootin’ of the whistle
It’s Casey at the throttle of the Cannonball Express!

There’ll be Casey Junior and old Redrock too,
Fireman Wally and the rest of the crew.
In a thrilling adventure that’s a lot of fun
When Casey takes the throttle for another run!

Episodes of Casey Jones were watched with enthusiasm, the characters seemed to have as much flesh and blood reality as the people who appeared on the television news. It was a surprise to discover that the two series that were made of Casey Jones dated from 1957-1958.  The programmes I watched with enthusiasm were at least ten years old before they were broadcast in England between 1967 and 1975.

Watching clips from Casey Jones online, it seems unlikely that the programme would now have the power to grip the imaginations of younger people, but nor do the programmes that are being made now and nor do the social media platforms. In fifty years’ time, no-one will remember the clips from YouTube and Tik Tok and the like, in the way that Children’s Hour programmes from the 1960s are now remembered.

Harold and Glady called at the farm at Pibsbury each Sunday evening. Friends of my grandparents they would sit in the farmhouse sitting room and talk about the events and news of the week.

Glady’s name was presumably “Gladys,” but, if it was, it was never used. Names were not necessarily what you might have assumed. My grandmother was known by everyone as “Cis,” a name that apparently arose from her little brother’s inability to pronounce her name “Geraldine” (why “Cis” and not “Sis,” I never discovered). My Auntie Gus’s full name was “Augusta,” something I only discovered years after she had died. Glady’s full name might have been anything.

In memory, Glady wore a hairnet during her Sunday evening calls, but that might be a conflation of memories of Glady, Gus and Ena Sharples from Coronation Street. In memory, Glady was not very agile, but that cannot have been due to her age.

While Harold and Glady seemed very old to a small boy, they were of my grandparents’ generation, which means the Sunday evening visitors were not yet sixty, for I was twelve before my grandmother was sixty and thirteen before my grandfather reached his sixtieth birthday. It is odd to think that the couple that I now remember as elderly were younger than I am now.

Glady always liked a very firm chair upon which to sit. Perhaps she had orthopaedic problems, perhaps the desire for a hard chair was just a matter of personal preference.

Sitting upright on a firm seat could sometimes give the sitter an almost regal air. Auntie Gus would sit bolt upright in her sitting room, in the chair where she passed the days sat beside Uncle Jack. Jack had suffered severe hardship as a prisoner of war and as forced labour, in a coal mine during the First World War, and it would have been easy to have imagined reasons why he would have found a straight-backed chair to be more comfortable. It would not have been so easy to have explained why Gus chose such seating.

Perhaps straight-backs were cultural. Born before the Great War, Harold and Glady and Gus and Jack would have been shaped by the culture of their times. The body language of an upright stance suggests confidence and transparency and a willingness to conform with the rules.

Perhaps sitting straight-backed was a mark of respect to one’s host.

Perhaps Glady sat straight-backed because that was the way that chairs were.

In 1980-81, I worked as a community service volunteer at a special school at Cranleigh in Surrey. The work came with board and lodge and £10 a week pocket money.

I shared a  lodge at the school gates with two housemates who were preparing to be monks.  There was no television in the house in which we lived, no radio, and only an elderly portable record player on which to play the handful of old LPs they had.  Their conversation was often esoteric religious stuff; not much in it to interest a 20 year old with no religious background. The best moments were when they got out their Woodstock records and talked of times when it seemed that the world could have been a good place.

The pocket money didn’t go far, even in 1980, not that there was much to spend the money on. The only diversions were a pint at the local pub and occasional visits to the cinema to see things that were even half interesting.

Slowly, I began to buy odd records of my own. These were greeted with scorn and derision by my housemates, who preferred the rock music of the 1960s. I still laugh at memories of them singing their own words to Blondie’s Atomic.  They were good blokes, just from a generation before the rough edgedness of punk.

Hazel O’Connor’s Breaking Glass was among the handful of records I bought.  The album came from the film of the same name, a film that tracked the meteoric rise and fall of a fictional rock star.  The rock star’s fall comes with deep depression, and the angst and melancholy of the music express the pain of being unable to communicate from behind a wall of darkness.

The film was shown at the cinema and I bought the album at a record shop.  I played it, again and again and again.  The lyrics still come back with little attempt at recall.  Will You? a track released as a single the following year, expresses a sense of complete inability to put into words what it was you wanted to say.

Having seen the film and bought the album, I remember travelling to Brighton on a bus with my luggage in a Sainsbury’s carrier bag to see her play in Brighton a trip that must have cost at least a week of my money.

Remembering the concert being at the Brighton Conference Centre, I was surprised to discover it was at a venue called Top Rank. Furthermore, an internet search brought the suggestion that before Hazel O’Connor took to the stage that evening the support band had been the then unknown Duran Duran.

Was my memory failing? Had I imagined the large venue with tiered seating behind the large open area in front of the stage? Had I excised Duran Duran from my memory?

There was a sense of relief in finding reassurance that the my memory was not entirely faulty:

November 26, 1980 – Top Rank, Brighton, UK (cancelled)

However, of Hazel O’Connor playing at the Conference Centre, I can find no trace.