It’s the weeeeekkkkeeeeeeennnnddddd!!!!! Weekends in the 1970’s centred mainly round two key activities namely Saturday Morning Children’s TV and visiting grandparents. My mam and dad both liked a lie in, drinking coffee and smoking cigarettes like they were in some artsy French film, reading the papers and/or the latest Alistair MacLean book. That left me and my brother in control of downstairs and most importantly the TV. The “Multi-Coloured Swap-shop” with Noel Edmonds was the highlight of the week, adding a myriad of colours to the dull palette of real life with a solid three hours of mild rather than wild abandon dedicated to entertaining kids. Viewers could ring the show (the number is permanently tattooed on my brain - 01 811 8055) to swap their Beano comics for an Evil Knieval wind up motorbike toy while celebrity guests chatted about their latest record and what kind of vegetables they disliked.
On school nights kids TV was mainly between half 3 and 6pm with a lot of it quite educational unlike the pure unadulterated fun of Saturday morning TV. Animated shows like Bagpuss, Bod, Fingerbob and Trumpton featured the re-assuring voices of people with unintentionally funny names like Brian Cant. Live action dramas Heidi (dubbed for added oddness), Black Beauty (ditto) and The Little House on The Prairie lent childrens’ TV a restrained air. As time went on there were more unruly and anarchistic shows like Marmalade Atkins and Grange Hill which either reflected or triggered the beginning of the downfall of British society depending on your viewpoint. It can be further traced to the outright rebellious cheek of Tracey Beaker and that notorious rebel Peppa Pig who blatantly ridicules her elders at every opportunity.
Thursday evenings were another high point as that was when the Big Food Shop happened. Mam and dad would hit Prestos and top up the food stores with all kinds of goodies – sugary breakfast cereals, white bread, orange cordial, jam, tins of Pek & corned beef, packs of Vesta dehydrated “Meals of the world” like paella, risotto and curry, lard to fry all the aforementioned foods in, Lurpak butter you layered on bread in a thick slice as if you were laying bricks, Tudor crisps, Ski yoghurts in 2 different flavours in a pot shaped like a mountain and puddings in a tin that you boiled for 45 minutes and ate with thick yellow custard-style sauce. My favourite was Heinz lentil soup – I’m sure they’ve changed the recipe down the years because I can never quite recapture that fuzzy lentilly feeling that those tins of brown soup gave me in the 1970s.
Our 70s-built Barratts house had a hatch - a food serving window between the kitchen and the dining room – so that when we ate at the dining table we could peer through the hatch to request more bread, ketchup etc. which was very exciting. I was known in the family as a “parky” (picky) kid mainly as I took issue with those tubes you get in liver and gristle on meat both of which were regular fixtures on our Co-op dinner service (collect fifty Embassy No-1 cigarette cards and get a free dinner set). I got teased relentlessly for my (I thought) politely diplomatic but whiny catchphrase, “it’s not very tasty”. It’s no wonder I declared myself vegetarian as a teenager. Every two weeks the Alpine pop van arrived at the door with three bottles of fizzy pop - Cola, Dandelion and Burdock and American Cream Soda. One for me, one for my brother and one to share. Unfortunately for me, my brother had no desire to eke out the divine pop as designated so it was a race as to who could neck it the quickest. The fizzy pop stakes were raised even higher when my dad invested in a Sodastream. Other than food shopping at Prestos our other big treat was a trip to Woolco, an over-sized version of Woolworth and a cornucopia of retail therapy. I still get a frisson of excitement whenever I drive round the area in Killingworth where it used to be. There was a large record section where I spent my pocket money on singles like Sunday Girl, Rat Trap and The Theme from Shoestring before advancing to albums over which I would obsessively study the lyrics and photos on the inner sleeves trying to imagine I was part of the whole band-making-music experience. Woolcos had a café serving mainly brown food where we would devour plates of chips, sausage and gravy you could carve like a meat joint as if it were the very nectar of the gods. They just don't make them like that any more!
More culinary treats next time when visiting my grandparents (along with coal fires, 3-2-1 and Zoflora), a valuable antique is discovered and also a lost contact lens.
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