A reminder of what Craig Brown wrote last week ...

JUST how good were the good old days?

Given the choice, would you prefer to be living back in 1962?

In his short book On The Cusp: Days Of ’62, David Kynaston offers a snapshot of Britain in the summer and autumn of 1962, a time when the nation was, as the title has it, on the cusp, ‘a country where doors and windows were about to be pushed open a little wider’.

Old ways were set to be pushed aside to make way for a more egalitarian, more mechanised, less traditional society. With his eagle eye, Kynaston selects details and incidents that serve as emblems of larger shifts in the zeitgeist.

He starts by listing the goings-on in a single week in June 1962. England were in the

World Cup quarter-final against Brazil, but there was no coverage of the match on either of the two television channels: instead, the

BBC showed hymns from the Tabernacle

Welsh Presbyterian Church in Bangor, followed by Wagon Train and then a Swedish circus.

In Brighton, hooliganism was out in force, with leather-jacketed motorcyclists ripping apart boats in order to light bonfires on the beach.

At the Alcan aluminium works in Banbury, members of the National Union of General and Municipal Workers held a secret ballot to answer the question ‘Should coloured workers be admitted to the factory?’ – 205 answered yes, and 591 answered no.

On the Thursday, the comic actor Kenneth Williams was horrified by the licentious goingson he witnessed in Hyde Park. ‘Full of girls who sit up, bending over their male companions who are lying down, receiving their kissings and caressings. It is disgusting to watch.’

A fledgling group from Liverpool, The Beatles, made their second radio appearance, on a programme called Teenager’s Turn –

Here We Go.

At his progressive boarding school, the 14-year-old Gyles Brandreth noted in his diary that the school doctor was ‘old and grumpy… The girls say that he takes his time putting his stethoscope across their chests and is quite creepy!’

More reassuringly, on Coronation Street, dull and dogged Ken Barlow could be seen talking a suicidal girl out of throwing herself off a factory roof.