The Box

The evolution of the television has happened almost entirely in this lifetime. Not completely in my lifetime but people only a little older than me will tell you they grew up without one. My parents used to tell stories about the Queen’s coronation in 1953. Hardly anyone had a TV until then and whole streets crowded into one person’s front room to watch it.

The telly became important during my childhood. We rented ours from Rediffusion. It was a huge box that took up the whole corner of the room. At first, we couldn’t afford to rent a colour set and watching snooker in black and white was one of my favourite challenges (I wouldn’t watch snooker now because what’s the point if you can see all the colours?). The Rediffusion shop was the place to go if you wanted to see a programme in colour. You could press your nose against the shop window, which contained a bank of boxes showing all three channels. My friend Tim had a colour set and sometimes I would go round and watch Blue Peter just to find out what colour sticky back plastic Lesley Judd had used to make her pencil pots.

There were traditions around the TV that involved the whole family. One of my earliest memories is watching Magic Roundabout with my parents. When it finished it was time for me to go to bed (or maybe have a bath - the phrase, “bath, bottle and bed,” has just popped into my head) and the News at Six would start. The theme song made Tess, our dog, go crazy. She would run in circles; spinning and falling over things; running between my dad and the door. The Six O’Clock News was walk time.
Sunday afternoons were spent in front of a black and white film with a bar of Dairy Milk while the parents slept off the Sunday lunch wine. You knew what day it was by what was on. Monday night: Cold meat and chips and Panorama. Thursday: Top of the Pops. Friday: Magical World of Disney.
Dad would come home from work and ask, “What’s on the box?”
Because we knew that he knew we would joke, “The flowerpot!”

By the time my children were born, programmes were on all the time. You could, if you wanted, use cartoons to babysit your children 24 hours a day. There were dedicated Children’s channels and programmes got better and better. TV screens got larger but their cases shrunk. You couldn’t balance a plant pot on the top any more. The quality of the sound and picture improved. Even Channel 5 stopped being fuzzy. You could watch TV at breakfast and a rat called Roland, with an Estuary accent joined you.

Before Coronavirus, TV was beginning to change. It was no longer a social event. Every person in the family watched their own personal screen. YouTube, TikTok and Instagram Stories gave platforms for lay people to make their own programmes and they started to get good at it. Traditional TV struggled to compete but still made excellent high quality drama and showed programmes of people watching the telly.

It is difficult to make good quality drama if you have to be socially distanced. In fact it seems to be difficult to make any good quality TV. Suddenly, we realise how good the YouTubers are. At the weekend Dermot O’Dreary,  Claudia Fringeman and someone else that I hadn’t heard of hosted a concert. They broadcast from a studio that seemed to have been transported back in time, complete with wobbly walls. They showed depressing clips in between to make us feel sad about how awful the world is now. A death toll ran across the bottom of the screen (it probably didn’t but it might as well have done). Performers played from their bedrooms. These performances had heavy post editing but they still weren’t as good as many YouTube channels. On Thursday, they intend to do something similar with comedy.

I think they’ve missed a trick. We don’t want to watch the programmes they are showing. Last night, Holby City was cancelled and the choice was a programme about people giving birth, a home decorating show (when DIY stores are closed), Celebrity Bake Off (no eggs or flour in shops and too much talk of death and cancer) and a documentary about living in lockdown.
“Is it me, or has telly got shit?” I texted a friend.
“Worse than Christmas,” she replied.

What we need now, is a routine of nice things. We are depressed already. Watching Matt Hancock well up in the Daily Briefing is quite enough. There must be enough old content to give us something to look forward to.

This current crisis could be the final nail in the coffin of television if they don’t step up. The Thursday night depress you with comedy thing is already doomed to failure because we are all going outside to clap for a bit and then doing Jay’s Quiz on YouTube.

Bat Out of Hell

At University I had a one-eighth share in a car.  It was a beige Morris 1800 with a dodgy petrol gauge.  It was a great tank of a car with a tiny horn that said, "Parp, parp, excuse me!" I would like to tell you that it had a beast of a name and drove like furious bat out of hell but it was a very sensible car for some very sensible students.  We called it The Fifty-One Mobile, after the corridor of the hall we lived in and we had a little book to fill in to calculate petrol and mileage, so that everything was fair. Whoever drove the car would take their own music, which was a refreshing change from Kate Bush on repeat that I had to listen to in Halls.

One day we were going out somewhere. It was during the day, so it might have been to the Wicked Woman, with the crooked chimney in the village with the stupidly long name for Sunday lunch or it might have just been a shopping trip to Woolco. I can't remember who was driving but it might have been the boy with the collection of cardigans that I coveted, who was never short of a girlfriend or two.  Whoever it was I know I thought they were cool and would have expected them to have good taste in music.  I was sitting in the back and I know that my friend with the long copper hair and button nose, who sparkled like pennies that boys wanted to collect was also in the car.  The music coming from the tape player was soothing and I slumped against the side of the car, singing along. 

The 51-Mobile looked a bit like this

"Oh will you hold me so close my knees go weak," I sang. "Oh, it must have been while you were kissing me."

The track changed.

"I got a taste of paradise........"

I was surprised.

"Have you got a love songs tape?" I asked.

My friend wrinkled her pretty little nose and laughed, her laugh that sounded like tinkling glass, "What?"

"Love songs?" He asked, "What makes you think I'd have love songs?"

I hesitated.....

"The words?" 

"No. It's Meatloaf!"

"Yeah, it's Bat out of Hell!"

"They're still love songs," I persisted, despite the laughter, "I mean it sounds like a musical.  There's all this unrequited love and angst."

"Oh Julia, you are so funny!"

Maybe I was funny, or just ahead of my time.

Yesterday, we saw the long awaited Bat the Musical.  Jim Steinman wrote the songs for Meatloaf and the album was released 1977.  I was completely out of touch with the kind of music that went on Top of the Pops as I went to music school on a Thursday night from 1974 until I went to university.  The composer worked on Sunset Boulevard/Whistle Down the Wind* with Andrew Lloyd Webber  and had wanted to turn make his own musical of Bat Out of Hell ever since.

Jim Steinman wrote everything for this musical and I think that might have been the mistake.  The story was confused and to understand what was going on you had to have read all the words being projected at the back of the stage before the show started.  It was a love story, though. Not that a lack of story mattered to most of the audience. 

The audience were absolutely the best thing about this musical. It was a delight to watch the London Coliseum packed full of people over 50, rocking it out and dancing in the aisles.  You might imagine that I didn't like the musical if I thought the audience were the best part but it's just that they were so entertaining.  

We were up on the back row, which was probably too far away to properly appreciate everything but the music was amazing.  It was an outstanding performance by Andrew Polec and the set design and choreography were something else.

It only runs until Tuesday, so unless you can get to Toronto you will have to get a move on if you are over 50 and fancy a spot of nostalgia and rocking in the aisles.

(*I just looked up which one it was and it turns out that Jim Steinman was already writing for musicals when he auditioned Meatloaf and then decided to write an album for him - it was a musical - I was right, even then!)

Tommy

It's not Christmas without the annual youth orchestra Christmas party.  The first one was seventeen years ago. In those days we were in a dusty Quaker Hall, with the handful of children that were members then. The losing quiz team (there were only two) were just as happy with their bag of lemons as the winners were with their sweets. Some things never change: even if there are more teams there is still as much competition for the lemons. Other things do change, though: we get older. Thinking about the seventeen Christmas parties has made me feel a little old, sad and nostalgic.

This was the first Christmas party my dad has missed. When we started, he was the musical director, happily in the limelight, being sparkling and scintillating. He was fun and energetic. I had a small baby and was knackered, happy to be in the background, doing paperwork, writing quizzes, buying lemons. Then time passed and our roles reversed. I had more energy than he did and although I'm more reserved than he is it was time to step out from the shadows. After a while the paperwork became became too much. It was time for him to take another retirement. Luckily, the members we had fifteen years ago are grown up and have formed a team with some current parents to take on these roles. Dad is still on the team, coming to rehearsals when he can. These wonderful people keep me sane. Friday evenings wouldn't be the same without them.

Now we have grown, we hire a room in a local pub for the party and have food, drink and lots of games, as well as the quiz (which is now written by a guy with a PhD). There is still one tradition that is as important as the bag of lemons: Tommy. It wouldn't be a youth orchestra party unless it ended with a game of Tommy.

"I've got the sweets for Tommy but I'm not really sure how it works," said the guy with the PhD. He played the game for ten years but the rules still seem weird and mysterious.

It's a very simple game. All the participants form a large circle and five sweets are placed in the middle. A little time is given for everyone to look,longingly at the sweets, then someone is chosen to leave the room. While they are gone the others choose which sweet is called Tommy. If they have been clever they will have seen which one the person drooled over the most. When they return the room goes silent as they pick sweets, one by one. As soon as they touch Tommy everyone shouts as loudly as they can. "TOMMMMMYYYYYYY!" This makes the person jump and they can't have any more sweets. This is repeated until everyone has had a go, the party is over or everyone is bored.

"Where does it come from then?" asked Dr Who of History.
"It's a really old children's party game," I told him.
"Oh, because I was thinking your Dad just made it up."
"No. We played it at our birthday parties."
Then I began to doubt myself. Had I played it at anyone else's party? I couldn't remember. I remembered pass the parcel, musical bumps, the memory game, guess who I am but not Tommy.
Could it have been a game invented by my grandparents in a party version of 'pinch pudding day'?
Pinch pudding day was a method my grandmother used to make a six person apple pie feed nine. She knew that there wasn't enough to go around, so made a game of it. If you had finished yours then you could steal from someone else's plate unless (and here's the good bit) they had their little finger on the edge. Tommy is a bit like that. It makes you think you are going to get five sweets but you could end up with none. In those poorer than church mice, post war years no child would have ever dared to suggest, "it's not fair."

It might have fallen out of favour now that every child has to win a prize. The way we play it is brutal. The only reference to the game I could find on the Internet was a description on a Mumsnet party forum. It suggested that you put some coloured smarties on a plate (a plate? We put wrapped sweets on the floor. How can you lunge for them on a plate?) and named one Tommy Smartie. If a child chose that one the other children were to say, politely, "No, no, don't eat Tommy Smartie." You can imagine them putting their little hands to their mouth, smoothing down their velvet party frock and giggling guiltily.

This is not a game for nice middle class mum's in their Joules gilet and nautical top. No. In fact it always goes best when it's delivered by a man who played pinch pudding day and understands the rules of survival in a large pack of children. Someone who can prance around in a tutu or silly red braces getting people excited about the prospect of getting more than one sweet from the Quality street tin and changing the rules at a whim, so that all the sweets are suddenly called Tommy, or none are.

"They're all Tommy, aren't they?"