THE GOLD RUSH
It’s 1963, I am 15. It is also Christmas Eve. Up till now our entertainment has been from a Murphy U144 radio made in 1950 - actually a classic ‘moderne’ design in white Bakelite shown at the Festival of Britain. We listen to the News; Mrs Dale’s Diary (‘I’m worried about Jim’); and Children’s Hour (with Uncles Mac and David) on the Home Service, but not the Archers (father switches it off to prevent mother from listening to it); and on the Light Programme Two Way Family Favourites; the Billy Cotton Band Show; Hancock’s Half Hour; The Goon Show; Round The Horne; Ray’s a Laugh; the Navy Lark; Life with the Lions, and other ‘Light Entertainment’ offerings. We do not listen to classical music on the Third Programme! I could never understand or see what people saw in ‘The Goon Show’ (I still don’t); and I was so frightened by the cliff hanger ending of the first episode of ‘Journey into Space’ that I was never allowed to listen to the rest of it!
It must have been able to receive Radio Luxembourg, because that is where I heard of President Kennedy’s assassination in November 1963. By that time most of my classmates parents had televisions and I was increasingly not able to take part in “what we saw last night” discussions.
However, mother’s friend Len Earle had a spare television, a portable Bush 14” TV80 - black and white, 405 lines, two channel of course; which he lent us for Christmas. It was rather curious, a 14” screen with four preset channel ‘piano key’ selectors below it, with the case made of some cloth textured basically cardboard composition material bent round into a sort of rectangular tube with rounded edges, and a handle on top. There was actually a machine stitched hem at the back joining onto the rear panel of a similar material. It was quite heavy, and described as ‘transportable’, it was as much as I could carry as a 15 year old any distance - I would say ‘luggable’. The cardboard case was presumably for lightness. So on Christmas Eve we settled down to watch our first television programme, which turned out to be Charley Chaplin’s ‘The Gold Rush’ (the re-edited version with music and a narration by Chaplin). The whole thing was magical – it is difficult to convey the sense of, yes, wonder and excitement, never to be recaptured. Of course we had seen television before, but this was our own, we could watch what we liked. I occasionally re-watch ‘The Gold Rush’ on a streaming service to try vainly to recapture that first moment. Strangely Len Earle never asked for the television back, and it became ours.
I got the ‘Radio Times’ and the ‘TV Times’, and drew up a chart showing timelines for each programme, so you could tell what was on at any time (an idea that ‘Time Out’ had to fight a long legal battle to publish 15 years? later), and choose what to watch. I am afraid our tastes lent more to the BBC than ITV. There was the problem of my homework of course. I removed the cardboard case and examined the (valve) electronics. The loudspeaker was connected by a long flexible twisted pair, it was a simple matter to solder into this a 3.5mm jack plug socket, which would divert the signal from the speaker to an ear phone. Fortunately there was a handy hole of exactly the right size in the back panel. I equipped mother with an earphone on the end of a six foot lead, and she could happily sit watching TV whilst I beavered away at my homework for three hours a night in silence. I didn’t them realise quite how high a voltage was used in the video circuit!
I watched ‘Top of the Pops’ with Pan’s People every Thursday evening while mother went to Puddephat’s evening class on History of Art in Stratford upon Avon; and we watched ‘Play for Today’ - Denis Potter and Harold Pinter; the moon landings; world heavyweight boxing - Cassius Clay dancing like a butterfly and stinging like a bee; ‘Steptoe and Son’; the Boat Race; Cenotaph; Wimbledon; the State opening of Parliament; Trooping the Colour and of course, religiously, the Nine O’Clock News (I still do, only it’s ten o’clock).
Eventually, when I was working and had accumulated enough money, I bought her a Ferguson Movie Star 3755 14” colour television in 1980 and had it delivered by the shop in Stratford as a surprise. I am not sure if she had had another black and white television in the meantime. One day a bloke knocked on her door and said he was an engineer diagnosing a fault in a neighbour’s television, and could he borrow her television to enable him to do it? “Oh no!”, she cried, “My television was given me by my son, I can’t let you do that!”. It was a scam of course.