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ogopogo3 said:
That was Gordon Cummings. He's in one of my crime encyclopedias, but damned if I can remember which one. Google turns up very little on him. I seem to recall him being American, but I could be wrong.

From http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/2WWcrime.htm

Thank you, Ogopogo3, I've just read your reply to my question more than seven years after you wrote it.

*Bump* to an interesting thread.

Children's television in the 70s and 80s seems awfully dark to my eyes - and sometimes genuinely scary. I like the idea that Cold War fear and paranoia would trickle down into even children's entertainment.
 
Children's television in the 70s and 80s seems awfully dark to my eyes - and sometimes genuinely scary. I like the idea that the cold war fear and paranoia would filter down into children's entertainment.
Escape into Night scared the crap out of me as a kid!
 
The 70's were literally dark. Power cuts and families sitting huddled around candles. But that was a mercy really as in the 70's, there were only 3 colours - brown, cream and orange (bright brown).

70s_furniture_1.jpg


I have a dim memory that Humpty out of Playschool was green paisley but that must have been down to all the drugs they were taking.
 
jimv1 said:
But that was a mercy really as in the 70's, there were only 3 colours - brown, cream and orange (bright brown).

Where you lived. We got avocado green, brown, and harvest gold as popular decorating colors. Yuk. To this very day: Yuk.
 
But that was a mercy really as in the 70's, there were only 3 colours - brown, cream and orange (bright brown).

We had that god awful wallpaper/fablon type thing for doors that was supposed to make them look like fake wood. It looked crap. And brown. :lol:
 
OneWingedBird said:
But that was a mercy really as in the 70's, there were only 3 colours - brown, cream and orange (bright brown).

We had that god awful wallpaper/fablon type thing for doors that was supposed to make them look like fake wood. It looked crap. And brown. :lol:
Let's not forget all the various shades of oatmeal and beige. Or, the burnt umber.
 
In them days, shirts came with huge collars and only in beige with a brown motif.... something like a Model T Ford or Laurel and Hardy as a design.
If you owned a denim jacket, chances are it had some sort of embroidery on the back of it.

Coupled with your huge flared jeans held up with an ENORMOUS belt buckle, you'd set off for a night out and arrive at the pub having had your cheeks slapped and reddened by the collar flapping around your face in the wind and the rain off the wet streets soaked all the way up your jeans past your knees.
And how did we meet up? Well there were no mobiile phones so we phoned from home, at a call box or used the pub phone. The 'status' being, if your friend didn't answer, they were on the way.

But you had to be out. The Black & White Minstrel Show was still considered suitable primetime weekend TV fare.

On the plus side... although the cars were pretty crap and they didn't have all this modern technology, they still got us through the winter as well, if not better than today because people hadn't taken a stupid pill, were prepared and knew how to drive in treacherous conditions.

I don't think I've bought anything brown since the seventies. That's how bad it was.
 
jimv1 said:
But you had to be out. The Black & White Minstrel Show was still considered suitable primetime weekend TV fare.

Telly was pretty bad then, oh yeah. Mind you, the crapness of telly and no Internet meant I actually did stuff.

jimv1 said:
I don't think I've bought anything brown since the seventies. That's how bad it was.

Me neither!
 
At the start of the Seventies, two operas a day - and all the books I could read - from the public library. By the end of it, full entitlement to a University education, no fees and a grant. No loan required.

So school was a bit gothic, interiors were a bit beige and the telly was crap - but I hardly had time to notice! The future looked bright enough!
 
JamesWhitehead said:
At the start of the Seventies, two operas a day - and all the books I could read - from the public library. By the end of it, full entitlement to a University education, no fees and a grant. No loan required.

So school was a bit gothic, interiors were a bit beige and the telly was crap - but I hardly had time to notice! The future looked bright enough!
It's true. Much more optimistic times. The only reason I knew what to expect from now, was that I read a lot of New Worlds related sf and watched, British TV SF series, not only Doctor Who, but also, Doomwatch, Timeslip and even, Out of the Unknown.

All except, Timeslip, adult fare, with Out of the Unknown, being very much super-scary, late night forbidden territory for a youngster, but it was Timeslip, that seemed to ooze a real sense of future gloom and despair. Perhaps it was their projected future set in a new Ice Age?

At the time, it still seemed like the Seventies were a lot easier going and worry free than is made out here, but for those in the know, the future did not look too bright.
 
Wow, this is the thread imitating life imitating art! The 70s thread revisted! I had forgotten all about it! I originally posted on here under the name of Cat Simon in 2003! I also used to post under the name Simonito, but I can't remember if that was before or after Cat Simon! (p1, entries 5, 9 & 14, p2 entry 14, p3 entry 5, ad a reply from Zygon - whatever happened to him, he certainly knew his music!)
Anyway, I still stand by what I said 11 years ago. I was 0-10 in the 70s, and had a happy childhood, and I'm not gonna let the Yewtree accused take that away! :D
 
Pietro_Mercurios said:
but for those in the know, the future did not look too bright.

I beg to differ: the future looked all too bright.

Or did you not have what-to-do-during-a-nuclear-attack drills at school?
 
SHAYBARSABE said:
Pietro_Mercurios said:
but for those in the know, the future did not look too bright.

I beg to differ: the future looked all too bright.

Or did you not have what-to-do-during-a-nuclear-attack drills at school?
No. If the Russkies had attacked, we'd have been the first to go. :lol:

Home of Britain's nuclear deterrent, Polaris, Scotland's real first line of defence was the Bay City Rollers and Slik. :lol:
 
The first half of the 70s was an extremely dark time for me, as I hadn't been born. :p

To me the 70s means.....

Black Sabbath
Led Zeppelin
Deep Purple
The Clash
Bob Marley
David Bowie
Focus
Queen
Motorhead
Kraftwerk
Joy Division
Judas Priest
Queen
etc
etc
etc

Doesn't sound too bad to me!
 
CarlosTheDJ said:
The first half of the 70s was an extremely dark time for me, as I hadn't been born. :p

To me the 70s means.....

Black Sabbath
Led Zeppelin
Deep Purple
The Clash
Bob Marley
David Bowie
Focus
Queen
Motorhead
Kraftwerk
Joy Division
Judas Priest
Queen
etc
etc
etc

Doesn't sound too bad to me!

Good taste apart from
Joy Division
Judas Priest
and possibly some of the etcs.
 
I like Priest, but I can see how they may not appeal to everyone; Joy Division, however - I'm shocked. I was under the impression that everybody with more than a passing interest in music beyond pop liked Joy Division.
 
It's funny there are some bands that take a while to shed the baggage of memory from, before I could appreciate. For whatever reason the people who listened to Joy Division at my school were complete pseudy tosspots thus I could never bring my self to listen it them. Later when afore-mentioned tosspots were a mere whisp of memory I listened to them and thought 'crikey they are really rather good'.
 
The video for that is a gem: robbing a bank with guitars instead of guns and making off with gold records for loot.

(I am remembering the right video, aren't I?)
 
theyithian said:
The video for that is a gem: robbing a bank with guitars instead of guns and making off with gold records for loot.

(I am remembering the right video, aren't I?)

You are indeed sir
 
theyithian said:
I like Priest, but I can see how they may not appeal to everyone; Joy Division, however - I'm shocked. I was under the impression that everybody with more than a passing interest in music beyond pop liked Joy Division.

Ok, they are tolerable I guess.
 
Russ Abbott's cover of Atmosphere was a lot more fun than the original.
 
Pietro_Mercurios said:
The Seventies, trapped like a fly in amber.
Some of it escaped though. It manifests today in much diminished form as Eurovision.

Carlos' bandlist constitutes about 20% of my current day mp3 playlist. It has been a joy to become captivated by the old metal and blues rock classics as an adult. I loved AOR back in 1978 though (in lieu of anything else available to me I suppose). Long drives across the vast Australian landscape were punctuated by classic one-hit wonder Casey Kasem fare - -popular music was in some ways far more diversified. We thought it was ALL groovy until Bowie went and standardised Pop forever amen. Bastard. Sure the 70s weren't sexy, but I swear I recall that everyone was dancing!

Here's a wee taste of what I remember. Shame about the ads embedded onto the start of many of these clips, but seems the days of free to cyberair are pretty much over. (Haha already reminiscing over the good old digital days of Internet 1.0 )

Marshall & Hain ~ Dancing in the City
Cool For Cats ~ Squeeze This one is made more notable as it features the intro to one of the best teen TV series Aunty ever made - The Kenny Everett Video Show. His brilliance remains untainted by Savilism. May it long remain so.
Wuthering Heights ~ Kate Bush
Hit Me With Your Rhythm Stick ~ Ian Dury and the Blockheads
Fly Too High ~ Janis Ian
Easy ~ The Commodores Faith No More did this one justice in the 90s.
Split Enz ~ My Mistake
She's Always a Woman To Me ~ Billy Joel
Blue Bayou ~ Linda Ronstadt
Mull of Kintyre ~ Wings
I Was Made For Lovin' You ~ KISS
Fantasy ~ Earth, Wind and Fire

and

one I'll bet nobody remembers ... until you hear it: Blue Skies ~ Willie Nelson
 
CarlosTheDJ said:
Priest - you either love 'em or hate 'em I guess!

BREAKING THE LAW!
BREAKING THE LAW!

Have you seen the documentary about them? Think it was on Sky Arts.

Possibly the funniest thing we've ever seen. :lol:
 
PeniG said:
... but the 70s weren't dark. Neither were they light. They were just these years, y'know.
Right. My previous post on this topic was quite self-indulgent and off-topic but I've had a few thoughts on the subject.

That perception of darkness is not just determined by our own extremely limited subjective experience but also a Western popular media projection of a 'downtime' socially and politically in a converse way from how the '60s have been lauded as an age of enlightenment through memes like the free-loving hippy Woodstock imagery. This has been raised on the thread by others already: They were enlightening times, more or less, but so were the '70s, the 80s, 'the 90s and the noughties in their own way.

In regards to decades, it occurs to me that our Western human perception is locked into this linear progression thing and the tendency to compare this and that era, while amusing and analytical to a certain extent, is destined to become a relegated approach. It is too limiting, but is it really all we have to work with?

We on this thread share much of a Western middle-class upbringing and our primary tendency is to self-mythologise our online personalities and their histories by this sort of comparitive reminiscence in order to establish and maintain a legitimate place within this netizenship (don't we?). It's fun. Outside of our own narrow cultural framework, that time, and indeed time itself is not perceived the same way by all societies. The '70s itself is a cultural meme, not a real thing. For example, in the early '70s in the western desert of central Australia a school teacher observed Indigenous elders painting traditional motifs on the school classroom doors and decided to tell the world about it, launching a highly positive and significant revival in traditional culture and art (ever heard of 'dot' paintings? - they weren't even on the radar of art afficionados until this event), raising the consciousness of the public about their plight and their poverty and consolidating the value of those cultures in the eyes of many outside those cultures from then on. Those elders would probably measure life not primarily in terms of time, but more in terms of social progression and knowledge as an expansive, extra-concentric experience rather than just a linear one. The 'art' they were producing was of very deep cultural significance pertaining to ancient established cultural knowledge, lore and law. For many of them, that 'period' was a very positive one because it was for most of them the first time whites had viewed them positively and shared an optimism about their culture. Furthermore, those non-Indigenous participants of this and other events related to this semi-awakening of Australia's general conscience regarding their Indigenous compatriots remains a social and cultural peak, rather than a time of bleakness. The '60s in that part of the world were shite for most Aboriginals, as was their whole experience of European domination of their land and life up to that point. Aboriginal politics became strengthened and the fight for rights became part of the mainstream meme after the recognition of Aboriginals as citizens in the mid 60s referendum. The early '70s was also a time of strong optimism during the early years of the Whitlam government, at least until Gough went mad with the his social dreams and had to be escorted from the premises before the budget was shot to hell completely. One positive act of massive symbolic power during this period was the literal handing back of land to the Gurindji people by Whitlam, which is probably the moment of greatest pride I have in my nations history. Whitlam, after all the policies had been agreed to and all the papers signed, poured a handful of sand into the patient palm of Gurindji elder Vincent Lingiari, signalling the beginning of a new paradigm in Australian culture - the concept of prior ownership (and maintenance of cultural custodianship) of country.
f680-m.jpg

Image source: portrait.gov.au
There's a song about it called From Little Things Big Things Grow.

This concept of decades as having singular traits is not so much about the times, but about ourselves and our Greek addiction to defining and categorising everything (yes I know, guilty) and our fixation on linearity. Most of us adhere steadily to the cultural norms and toe the line as best we can until death ends it, as our culture teaches us is right and healthy. It ain't like that to probably half the world. Their 'right and healthy' responses to existential perception might well horrify us, just as our cultural approach has shocked and dismayed the groups our colonial forefathers forced this European paradigm onto. ... not that there's anything wrong with that ... oh hang on ...

Anyway. Were the the '70s dark times? It depends which movies you were watching I guess.
 
Because viewing culture and time as static makes sense, does it?

Just when were the Aboriginals (and the native americans for that matter) given citizenship...It was quite late, wasn't it?

Sorry to derail the thread, Ive been meaning to ask this some time.
 
escargot1 said:
CarlosTheDJ said:
Priest - you either love 'em or hate 'em I guess!

BREAKING THE LAW!
BREAKING THE LAW!

Have you seen the documentary about them? Think it was on Sky Arts.

Possibly the funniest thing we've ever seen. :lol:

No I didn't! Any idea what it was called?
 
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