Web Page No 2728

 

1^st November 2020

 

1^st Picture: Cliff Michelmore

2^nd Picture: Fyfe Robertson

3rd Picture: Robin Hall and Jimmy McGregor

4^th Picture: Cy Grant

 

 

Tonight with Cliff Michelmore

 

Tonight was a mainstay current affairs television programme, which, for most of life was presented by Cliff Michelmore. It was broadcast on BBC live on weekday evenings from 18^th  February 1957 to 18^th  June 1965 and achieved an audience of seven million viewers.

Tonight was, like the Six-Five Special, created by the BBC to fill in what was known as the "Toddlers' Truce" period between 6.00pm and 7.00pm, incidently the 'Truce' was officially abolished only a few days before Tonight was first broadcast. Tonight began broadcasting from the Viking studio in Kensington, known by the BBC as "studio M". It eventually transferred to one of the main studios in Lime Grove, Shepherd's Bush.

So at 6.05pm on Monday 18th February 1957, sandwiched between all the other programmes, Grace Wyndham Goldie launched Tonight. The early evening news was still only ten minutes long and Tonight was the equivalent of a daily newspaper's middle pages. It broke the mould of the conventions of the early '50s. Tonight believed in respect for its audience; in less respect for its interviewees.

Its infuence on television since cannot be ignored

Tonight went on the air from 6:05 to 6:45 every weekday evening, with the pop programme Six Five Special filling the space on Saturdays and quickly established itself a regular audience.

The programme covered the arts and sciences as well as topical matters and current affairs. There was a mixture of incisive and light-hearted items: unscripted studio interviews by Derek Hart, Geoffrey Johnson-Smith and Cliff  Michelmore himself; and filmed reports. Reporters included Alan Whicker, Fyfe Robertson, Kenneth Allsop, Chris Brasher, Julian Pettifer, Brian Redhead and Polly Elwes. The programme received the Guild of Television Producers and Directors award for best factual programme in 1957 and 1958.

The style was informal with no attempt to hide studio equipment. Cliff Michelmore gave a very relaxed performance, sometimes perching on the edge of his desk, seemingly unfazed by the ringing of his desk telephone letting him know about technical problems. There were regular appearances by Rory McEwen, Cy Grant, singing a "topical calypso", and folk singers Robin Hall and Jimmie Macgregor. Over the years Cliff Michelmore became known for his catchphrase when closing the show, "That's all for tonight, the next 'Tonight' will be tomorrow night. Until then, good night!"

A world changing report.

It was during an edition of Tonight broadcast on the evening of Friday 22 nd November 1963 that BBC television broke the news of the assassination of John F. Kennedy, although Granada Television had already broadcast the news in its northern ITV region.

One of the highlights came in 1964, when Bob Dylan appeared on the programme and sang With God on Our Side.

Ten Years after the end of the original programme the BBC started a new programme under the same name,. This was presented by Sue Lawley, Denis Tuohy and Donald MacCormick and was launched on BBC1 in September 1975, in a late evening slot. When SueLawley left to have a baby, Valerie Singleton replaced her on the show, which continued until 1979. 

Peter

 

gsseditor@gmail.com

 

RAY DOPSON RIP

 

Ray Dopson passed away peacefully at home on Saturday 17th October, aged 90. Formerly our English Teacher and Head of Sixth Form at Manor Court School and City of Portsmouth Girls School.
Much loved and loving husband, father, grandad and friend.

 The picture below is of June and Ray on the boat on a visit to the sle of Wight about 1959-60.

 

Maureen Writes:

Liked the blog, brought back many happy memories. As a Guide we would post slips of paper through peoples doors asking for Jumble and stating we would be back on a particular day to collect. Complete with hand cart we would trundle the streets of Drayton and East Cosham and be amazed at the generosity of the locals, especially the Welsh Avenues. The traders were part of the experience and we tried to keep an eye on them. At the end of the day we would sort out anything that was really good and clean and keep it for the next sale or take it to the second hand shops, there were several in Southsea. Called 50/50 shops, they sold your unwanted items and gave you half of the profit.

 

On this day 1^st November 1960 – 1965

 

On 01/11/1960 the number one single was It's Now Or Never - Elvis Presley and the number one album was South Pacific Soundtrack. The top rated TV show was Bootsie & Snudge (Granada) and the box office smash was Psycho. A pound of today's money was worth £13.68 and Tottenham Hotspur were on the way to becoming the Season's Division 1 champions.

 

On 01/11/1961 the number one single was Walkin' Back to Happiness - Helen Shapiro and the number one album was Twenty One Today - Cliff Richard. The top rated TV show was Coronation Street (Granada) and the box office smash was One Hundred and One Dalmations. A pound of today's money was worth £13.25 and Ipswich Town were on the way to becoming the Season's Division 1 champions. The big news story of the day was Severe flooding in SE England

 

On 01/11/1962 the number one single was Telstar - The Tornadoes and the number one album was Out of the Shadows - Shadows. The top rated TV show was The Royal Variety Performance (BBC) and the box office smash was Lawrence of Arabia. A pound of today's money was worth £12.89 and Everton were on the way to becoming the Season's Division 1 champions.

 

On 01/11/1963 the number one single was You'll Never Walk Alone - Gerry & the Pacemakers and the number one album was Please Please Me - The Beatles. The top rated TV show was The Royal Variety Performance (ATV) and the box office smash was The Great Escape. A pound of today's money was worth £12.64 and Liverpool were on the way to becoming the Season's Division 1 champions. The big news story of the day was Beatles perform at Royal Variety Show.

 

On 01/11/1964 the number one single was (There's) Always Something There to Remind Me - Sandy Shaw and the number one album was A Hard Day's Night - Beatles. The top rated TV show was Coronation Street (Granada) and the box office smash was Dr Strangelove. A pound of today's money was worth £12.24 and Manchester United were on the way to becoming the Season's Division 1 champions.

 

On 01/11/1965 the number one single was Get Off Of My Cloud - Rolling Stones and the number one album was The Sound of Music Soundtrack. The top rated TV show was Coronation Street (Granada) and the box office smash was The Sound of Music. A pound of today's money was worth £11.69 and Liverpool were on the way to becoming the Season's Division 1 champions.

 

 

 

 

 

Web Page No 2726

 

24^th October 2020

 

1^st Picture: Typical Jumble Sale

2^nd Picture: Cub Pack 1969

3rd Picture: Opening new hall 1932

4^th Picture: The Troop 2016

 

 

Sales at Farlington Scout Hut

 

When I was a youngster in the 1950’s, my mother was very involved with raising money for the local scout group in Farlington, There were three main ways that this support group employed, all of which have seemed to have disappeared since the advent of car boot sales and charity shops.  These three methods were Sales of Work, Jumble Sales and Rummage Sales. The first seems to have disappeared completely and that last two eventually combined and became the same thing before disappearing. My mother was involved with all three events and so, by default, was I.

The Sales of Work were very straight forward events with the local ladies producing hand made products, for sale. These invariably included tea cosy’s, place mats, table cloths, serviettes, gloves and scarves, plus toilet roll covers, embroidered handkerchiefs and aprons. Then there were the stalls of paper goods such as celebration cards and calendars, local home-grown seedlings and plants, plus the jams, pickles, cakes and buns that all seemed to be in abundance. The Sale of Work was easy to staff but the Jumble or Rummage sale was a real nightmare. 

The sale involved at least two days work. Once all the jumble had been collected and deposited in the scout hut during the week then the real work started all the tables were set up, the items labelled and, hopefully, priced and placed on the tables ready to sell. Most of the items were handleable but the second hand clothes and shoes area always seemed to comprise of vast mountains of things to sell that reached well above where I could reach in the early days as a small child.

The sale would be advertised in small ads in The Evening News and we could always guarantee that at least half an hour before the doors were opened there would be a group of about a dozen dealers, who came up from Portsmouth by bus, forming a queue outside and eventually banging on the door to be let it, hopefully early. This never happened!

Opening time at 2.00pm was terrible, when the doors opened these dealers, all women, would rush in and start stuffing clothes and other items into the very large bags they had brought with them. Some money seemed  to change hands but I tend to think that more items were taken than were paid for. After about twenty minutes things quietened down a bit, the lady dealers that had rushed in and bought up all the quality good stuff and were, within half an hour, back on their buses returning to the centre of Portsmouth. I got the impression that these ladies would travel all over the town on a Saturday taking in two or three sales each day. To me, as a youngster, these ladies all looked the same, they all seemed to wear long overcoats, carried large bags, most of them appeared to have no teeth and they all smoked!

After these dealers had gone things then progressed quite quietly until 4.00pm when the sale closed, the money counted and the hall tidied up. Then a man would arrive with a flatbed lorry and agree a price to take away all that was left , whatever it was, and the sale was over for another year.

But these sales were gold mines for enterprising young boys as all sorts of things could be found on the white elephant or bric-a-brac stalls and often, I managed to acquire odd items for my own use. These items were many and various; for example, I remember coming away with a gas mask and a sword stick, an old naval officers’ dress sword, binoculars and all sorts of ex WW2 items. But my favourite were the old radios. I would often buy them, or remote speakers, and take them home and try to repair them, normally successfully. It must have been in the blood as my father started off life as a radio engineer doing his apprentice time in Martins the electrical and fishing shop next to Cosham crossing gates, then moving onto HMV in Newbury before joining the civil service. However, during the period that I was fiddling around with radios he was away working in Ceylon so I was entirely self-taught. The pinnacle of my radio career was when I re-built an old radiogram that only played 78’s to, a then modern, Hi-Fi system. But interest eventually waned with the introduction of the transistor, valves were fine by me but transistors were complete puzzlement.

Now all this has gone, I cannot remember the last time I saw a Jumble Sale advertised but occasionally you see that some club is running a ‘table top sale’ which, I suppose, is all that is left of the once popular Jumble Sale!

Something else I remember are the Garden Parties held by the local Conservative club and held in Mr Gammon’s  large garden at East Court on the corner of the Havant Road and Court Lane opposite The Goodwyns, much to the annoyance of his household staff. But that is another story.

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Peter

 

gsseditor@gmail.com

 

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On this day 24^th  October 1960 – 1965

 

 

On 24/10/1960 the number one single was Tell Laura I Love Her - Ricky Valance and the number one album was South Pacific Soundtrack. The top rated TV show was No Hiding Place and the box office smash was Psycho. A pound of today's money was worth £13.68 and Tottenham Hotspur were on the way to becoming the Season's Division 1 champions.

 

On 24/10/1961 the number one single was Michael - The Highwaymen and the number one album was The Shadows - Shadows. The top rated TV show was Sunday Night at the London Palladium and the box office smash was One Hundred and One Dalmations. A pound of today's money was worth £13.25.

 

On 24/10/1962 the number one single was Telstar - The Tornadoes and the number one album was Best of Ball Barber & Bilk. The top rated TV show was Coronation Street and the box office smash was Lawrence of Arabia. A pound of today's money was worth £12.89 and Everton were on the way to becoming the Season's Division 1 champions.

 

On 24/10/1963 the number one single was Do You Love Me? - Brian Poole & the Tremoloes and the number one album was Please Please Me - The Beatles. The top rated TV show was Coronation Street and the box office smash was The Great Escape. A pound of today's money was worth £12.64. Lord Home, relinquished his titles to become Sir Alec Douglas-Home, became Prime Minister following Harold Macmillans resignation

 

On 24/10/1964 the number one single was Oh Pretty Woman - Roy Orbison and the number one album was A Hard Day's Night - Beatles. The top rated TV show was Coronation Street and the box office smash was Dr Strangelove. A pound of today's money was worth £12.24 and Manchester United were on the way to becoming the Season's Division 1 champions.

 

On 24/10/1965 the number one single was Tears - Ken Dodd and the number one album was The Sound of Music Soundtrack. The top rated TV show was Coronation Street and the box office smash was The Sound of Music. A pound of today's money was worth £11.69 and Liverpool were on the way to becoming the Season's Division 1 champions.

 

 

Web Page No 2724

 

17^th October 2020

 

1^st Picture: BSM Advert.

2^nd Picture: More modern BSM advert featuring a Triumph Herald

3rd Picture: A post war driving license

4^th Picture: HM Queen driving

 

 

Driving Lessons.

 

Do you remember when you learnt to drive? It seems and age away now but next time you’re cut up by a learner driver or held up as they demonstrate - oh so slowly - how not to reverse into a parking space, try to be patient. They’re only doing what the rest of us had to do to earn our licences marking over a centenary of the first official driving lesson. It was given in 1910 near Peckham by doctor’s son Stanley Roberts. He realised that motoring was going to be big business and set up his own driving school before naming it - rather grandly - the British School of Motoring. Now known simply as BSM, it’s the biggest driving school in Britain.

 

Previously an engineer’s apprentice with Thomas Sopwith (the man who created the Sopwith Camel biplane and the Hawker Hurricane,), Roberts was a motoring fanatic and persuaded his parents to rent out their garage at 65 Peckham Rye to his fledgling business and to house his prized possession, a Dutch-built Spyker. Offering a “Popular Course of Mechanism and Driving”, Roberts’s first pupil was, tellingly, a former coachman, whom he trained to become a chauffeur.

 

Demand for tuition exploded and, as entrepreneurs launched rival driving schools, Roberts boosted his fleet with a Richard-Brazier, a Berliet, two Darracqs and a Milnes Daimler. Business was so brisk that he swiftly expanded, moving to Coventry Street in Piccadilly, later expanding countrywide.

 

Unlike today, when the Driving Standards Agency (DSA) says the average learner needs 52 hours of tuition before they’re ready to take what has become a demanding driving test, Roberts’s early driving courses lasted just four days, placing special emphasis on “correct procedure, discretion and behaviour”. The cost of a lesson then? About 10 /-_(50p) for an hour, compared to about £20-£30 an hour today.

 

Learning to drive in 1910, when cars often resembled horseless carriages, was far harder work physically than today. There was no power steering, making it essential that learners turned the wheel using the laborious “push-pull” method. Starting the engine required a combination of mechanical understanding and brute force (starting handles were the order of the day) and brakes were rod-operated, heavy and ineffective compared to the servo-assisted systems we now take for granted. But what sorted people out was changing gear. Today’s synchromesh is so good it’s hard to fumble a change but then it required skill, timing and the ability to master double-declutching. For those who couldn’t, the best option was to come to a complete halt before first gear could be re-engaged.

 

Traffic at the dawn of the motoring age was light, so learning how to negotiate the roads - which were still dominated by the horse and cart - was easy compared to today. There were only 53,196 cars on British roads then compared to 28.5 million now.

 

Early driving lessons focused on basic car control, elementary hand signals - and common sense. Reassuringly there was no such thing as a government-administered driving test; that didn’t come for another quarter of a century. Drivers simply applied for a licence and if they could prove they had undergone instruction it was issued automatically, this is how my father got his license!

 

It was the introduction of the 25-minute L-test in 1935 - five years after the 30mph speed limit was introduced for urban areas - that gave driving schools the boost they’d longed for. It included an eye test, Highway Code questions, an emergency stop, arm signals, reversing, turning in the road and “general driving”.

 

In the first year, 154,636 tests were conducted, compared to more than a million practical L-tests and 1.3 million theory tests taken each year now. The pass rate was 63 per cent, falling to 50 per cent in 1950 and 43 per cent today.

 

The first person to pass the test in 1935 was a Mr Beene, of Kensington, earning Pass Certificate 000001 following a course of BSM lessons. Those who followed in his footsteps with BSM in years to come included the Queen. Today, the test has changed beyond recognition.

 

Stanley Roberts - who died in 1957 - would be astonished at how his concept has grown; there are now about 46,600 approved driving instructors in Britain. He’d be more astonished still at advances in vehicle technology that make operating a car almost fool proof and arm signals - finally dropped from the L-test in 1975 - laughable. He’d be shocked by the current cost of the driving test. When it was introduced in 1935, Mr Beene’s examination cost 7/6d (37.5p). Today it’s £62 for a weekday practical test or £75 at weekends and £31 for the theory test, which was introduced in 1996.

 

Stay in touch

 

Peter

 

gsseditor@gmail.com

 

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On this day 17^th  October 1960 – 1965

 

 

On 17/10/1960 the number one single was Tell Laura I Love Her - Ricky Valance and the number one album was South Pacific Soundtrack. The top rated TV show was No Hiding Place (AR) and the box office smash was Psycho. A pound of today's money was worth £13.68 and Tottenham Hotspur were on the way to becoming the Season's Division 1 champions. The big news story of the week was US places embargo on goods to Cuba.

 

On 17/10/1961 the number one single was Walkin' Back to Happiness - Helen Shapiro and the number one album was The Shadows - Shadows. The top rated TV show was Sunday Night at the London Palladium (ATV) and the box office smash was One Hundred and One Dalmations. A pound of today's money was worth £13.25 and Ipswich Town were on the way to becoming the Season's Division 1 champions.

 

On 17/10/1962 the number one single was Telstar - The Tornadoes and the number one album was Best of Ball Barber & Bilk. The top rated TV show was Coronation Street (Granada) and the box office smash was Lawrence of Arabia. A pound of today's money was worth £12.89 and Everton were on the way to becoming the Season's Division 1 champions.

 

On 17/10/1963 the number one single was Do You Love Me? - Brian Poole & the Tremoloes and the number one album was Please Please Me - The Beatles. The top rated TV show was Coronation Street (Granada) and the box office smash was The Great Escape. A pound of today's money was worth £12.64 and Liverpool were on the way to becoming the Season's Division 1 champions.

 

On 17/10/1964 the number one single was Oh Pretty Woman - Roy Orbison and the number one album was A Hard Day's Night - Beatles. The top rated TV show was Coronation Street (Granada) and the box office smash was Dr Strangelove. A pound of today's money was worth £12.24 and Manchester United were on the way to becoming the Season's Division 1 champions.

 

On 17/10/1965 the number one single was Tears - Ken Dodd and the number one album was The Sound of Music Soundtrack. The top rated TV show was Coronation Street (Granada) and the box office smash was The Sound of Music. A pound of today's money was worth £11.69 and Liverpool were on the way to becoming the Season's Division 1 champions.