Martin Buckley
Backfire
To amuse myself and a few mates recently, I made a little list of customs and behaviours that seem to be dying out. The idea began to gain momentum when I saw a burly man on a pushbike – the sort of bicycle that people used to go to work on, not the kind that aggressive, selfrighteous people in Lycra use – riding along with a fag in his mouth, listening to the football on a transistor radio attached to the handlebars.
It was not a scenario that I had ever really thought about before, but the man in question had such a look of contentment that it took me back 30 or 40 years to a time when life was less demanding and people seemed a bit happier. It was an era when a bloke could wear an extravagant combover with pride: the days of white dog poo, three TV channels, party phone lines and telephone voices – remember them? – plus those cute little bottles of school milk you got every day, complete with a straw.
School milk? These days, milkmen seem to have mostly vanished, so you never see their friendly electric floats and thus entertain the ’70s notion of the blousy, négligée-wearing housewife pulling the milkman over the threshold by his necktie for nookie – something that probably only ever happened in Benny Hill’s mind anyway. Benny Hill? Blimey, he’d likely be had up in 2018 – even the concept of ‘chatting up birds’ will be consigned to history before long.
Still, thanks to the wonders of Youtube, I can once again watch trade test transmissions – no, I’m not a sad testcard enthusiast (although I do like the music); I’m talking about the old BP and Shell films showing everything from ’50s rallying to strangely fascinating mini epics about North Sea oil rigs or pipeline laying in Algeria. They transport me back to grey afternoons in Manchester and that ’70s shutdown period between Watch with Mother and Play School. I suppose we still have public information films of a sort, but I miss the high-pitched noise the TV stations used to transmit after the national anthem, and the man with a soothing voice who said: “Don’t forget to switch off your set.”
My list does not extend very far, and gets questionable on reflection:
I suspect ‘bad wigs’ and the noble art of ‘peeing in the sink’ are still with us. I don’t know why I think of the latter as a ’70s thing, but maybe it’s related to something good being on the TV and not wanting to waste time running upstairs. I thought I spotted another quirk the other day when I saw an old boy at Birmingham Airport with a cigarette tucked behind his ear – a 1950s convention of the happy chainsmoker (the cadaverous appearance of this man suggested that he we was of that ilk)
– but I was subsequently informed that people still widely do it.
This being a classic car magazine, however, I also came up with a few motoring-related conventions that I think are pretty much extinct. A good, but now redundant, winter ritual was putting newspaper over the front grille – or, if you wanted to look posh, a fitted radiator muff – to get the heater to warm up more quickly. In 2018, it feels as relevant as putting Vaseline on your battery terminals.
Talking of batteries, it always makes me smirk when I see film of London in the 1950s and ’60s, with people running around on tiny glimmering, yellowy sidelights in the pitch black, as if they don’t want to waste electricity. It may have been a hangover from the war blackout mentality, but more likely had something to do with the mediocre ability of the then near-universal dynamo-based charging system. Today this seems as pointless a practice as using hand signals or expecting people to take any notice at all of a trafficator.
I have not made an extensive investigation, but I suspect that winding down your windows and pulling up your own radio aerial have gone the way of wing mirrors on modern cars. And when was the last time you saw anyone ‘feed’ the wheel as they drove? Power steering killed off that one: I reckon it’s an anachronism that went out with burly coppers in black Wolseleys and old dears in brown Triumph Toledos, who learned to drive in ’52 and stuck religiously to what their instructors told them to do.
Similarly, the widespread popularity of automatic transmission – and better hearing aids – has consigned to history the high-street spectacle of the silver-haired octogenarian driver revving his/her engine slightly too hard (because they can’t really hear it) against a slipping clutch. That’s probably a good thing. And who would want to go back to a world where unrestrained children in cars was the norm; where seatbelt wearing generally was seen as something for sissies; and where casual drink-driving was as acceptable as washing the family saloon on a Sunday morning? Not me. I’m off to see my new pals up the road for a £10 mini-valet…
‘Gone is the ’70s notion of the blousy housewife pulling the milkman over the threshold for nookie’