I Must Be Dreaming

TV and Cinema in the 1970s

I Must Be Dreaming

Up until the baking summer of 1976, my exposure to cinema had been very narrow. Trips to 'the pictures' in nearby Stevenage were a rare treat. Television was another matter. ‘The box,’ as my father derided it, was a brain-melting distraction from proper play or wholesome educational activity. Despite the fact there were only three terrestrial channels, my brother James and I watched an industrial quantity of television in the 1970s. When we returned from school, we would often lie tranced on the scatter cushions and imbibe the whole three-hour stretch of kids’ TV.  Play School and Jackanory, Hong Kong Phooey and the Wacky Races, Rentaghost and Blue Peter, all the way to the cartoon that always ended the session. For many years, this was The Magic Roundabout, whose surreal, acid-bright playground and carousel housed its immortal stop-motion animated characters, Dougal and Zebedee. Or there was Paddington, with Michael Hordern’s grumpy voiceover. Our favourite was Rhubarb and Custard, with its distorted animated cat whose appearance was congruent with the insanely overdriven guitars of the theme song. We would often put in three solid hours of goggle-eyed escapism before the tired routine of tea, bathtime and bed.

            It strikes me we were allowed to indulge ourselves so much because of the disintegration of our parents’ marriage. Where was our mother when we were gorging ourselves on Bagpuss, Take Hart and Crackerjack? Most days, our future stepfather, Keith, would be in the house, downstairs with our mother in the kitchen; his booming Yorkshire voice reaching us through the floorboards. At weekends, he would disappear and our father would return from working in Paris. While our dad busied himself with the allotment, or solitary tasks which kept him out of my mother’s orbit, we would sit for hours in front of Saturday morning TV, flicking between the dull, vaguely patronising Multi-Coloured Swap Shop to see what was happening on the berserk Tiswas over on ITV. At midday, Grandstand took over, with its deadly afternoon of sport. Finally, there was Why Don’t You...?, an arts-and-crafts activities show whose theme song urged: Why don’t you just switch off your television set and go and do something less boring instead? Often, we did just that, leaving the house unchaperoned to play in the lane and the woods beyond, dazed from the indolence of so much Box.

            There was one Saturday show we instinctively disliked almost as much as Swap Shop. Aired in the prime early-evening slot after The Dukes of Hazard – a kind of Texan Starsky and Hutch with added eye candy in denim shorts – Jim’ll Fix It was nigh on unwatchable. Beginning in 1975, it squatted on British culture for years, with its crass rewards and abundantly grateful kids. Even then, we knew the show to be boring, vulgar, embarrassing. The core of our revulsion – though we never spoke about it openly – was Jimmy Savile himself. A galloping, oleaginous Yorkshireman, Savile, to our eyes was very similar in character to a man who had entered our lives the year before: Keith Graves. There was something about Savile’s air of subdued menace, his won’t-take-no-for-an-answer coercive certainty, that reminded us of Keith and put us on edge. Like Keith, Savile had an air of faux plausibility, with his chuckling ‘Now-then, now-then’ catchphrase. But beneath this, there were all manner of discordant notes being sounded. The high-roller’s cigar. The wacky glasses. The sheeny tracksuit. The legs-splayed stance in his stupid throne-like armchair. The way he held the kids too close, petting them, ruffling their hair, dragging them onto his lap. It was all wrong, somehow. Adults in the seventies always seemed to hold children too close, neglecting the boundaries we take for granted now. But something about Savile’s huge legitimacy was quietly terrifying. He had access, it seemed, to everything. His superpower was that he could get things done; could make your childish dreams come true, like some pound-shop minor deity from Burley. Maybe it’s easy to make these observations in hindsight with the knowledge that Savile was a monster – one of the UK’s most prolific sex offenders, and one who operated in plain sight. But the undercurrents were all there if you looked for them. For us, watching Jim’ll Fix It was like getting a double dose of Keith Graves, a man who was fast becoming ubiquitous in our house, and who also styled himself as someone who got things done: a fixer.

            In the week, we were allowed to watch a fair amount of grown-up TV, too, though the 9pm watershed was always enforced. While we never encountered an episode of The Sweeney (beyond its bleak opening credits of crashing Cortinas and handcuffed crims), we saw a fair bit of Starsky and Hutch. There was something impossibly glamorous and dangerous about New York in its frenetic opening credits. Perhaps because they were a duo like me and James, its buddy cops – with their sleek red Ford Gran Torino they were always leaping out of – were masculine role models we could aspire to. I wanted to be Hutch when I grew up. For me, David Soul’s shit-eating grin and chocolate-brown, dagger-collared leather jacket will always encapsulate the 1970s. That, and the wah-wah guitar on the theme to The Professionals, Britain’s creaky homemade answer to the show.

            When our father had been a more regular presence in the house, the only programme he insisted on watching was Monty Python’s Flying Circus. A little too surreal and incomprehensible for us, we favoured The Goodies, and their slapstick antics. We also loved The Six Million Dollar Man, with its opening credits of an air crash and the voiceover which promised they could ‘rebuild’ astronaut Steve Austin with bionic implants, giving him superhuman strength. We adored its spin-off, The Bionic Woman, with its heroine Jamie Sommers and her bionic right ear which gave her dog-hearing, and her superhero legs whose speed we tried to imitate on the school playing fields. Both of these shows offered the hope that the world held endless possibilities of rejuvenation. Years later, when my childhood friend Mike emailed to update me on his treatment for the bowel cancer which would end his life at the abysmally young age of 49, he signed off: We can rebuild him. We have the technology... No further elaboration was required.

            Films, on the other hand, were rarely aired at appropriate times. If we did start a movie in the evening, we weren’t allowed to finish it. Films were for rainy Sunday afternoons. They were usually potboilers like Paint Your Wagon, or stuff we’d grown out of, such as Mary Poppins. The exciting movies, those with plenty of violence or car chases – films such as Where Eagles Dare or Bullitt – we were forbidden to watch. Up until that point, our visits to the cinema hadn’t run into double figures. Snow White and the Seven Dwarves, Bedknobs and Broomsticks (the farcically bad follow-up to Mary Poppins), Herbie Rides Again, and The Jungle Book was the sum of it. In Tarantino’s memoir Cinema Speculation, the hyperactive auteur recounts how his single mother and her successive boyfriends took him to the legendary LA picture houses to watch films he definitely wasn’t old enough for. By the time he was ten, he’d been exposed to Easy Rider, The Godfather, Dirty Harry, The French Connection, M*A*S*H, and many other schlocky, violent B-pictures that were to inspire his future movies. On these trips, he realised he was ‘able to observe grown-ups in their natural habitat… This is what adults did when they weren’t around children’. He also caught a glimpse of the New Hollywood that would revolutionise American cinema in the 1970s. While he admits much of the sexual humour went over his head, the shocking explicitness of these films had a profound effect on him. He notes that his mother’s generation was raised on the tame fare of the 50s and early 60s: ‘Before 1964, in Goldfinger, Honor Blackman’s character name Pussy Galore would be the most explicit sex joke ever uttered in a big commercial film’.

            It would be Goldfinger that provided my first experience of James Bond.

            Premiered on ITV on November 3^rd 1976, at 8pm in the evening, it’s almost certain I wasn’t allowed to see all of it. My memories of Goldfinger are hazy, but the name Pussy Galore certainly sailed over my head, striking me as merely an exotic handle for a female villain. John Brosnan, writing Pooterishly in James Bond in the Cinema, states: ‘Goldfinger is my favourite James Bond film. To me it represents the peak of the series, the most perfectly realised of all the films with hardly a wrong step made throughout its length. It moves at a fast and furious pace but the plot holds together logically enough (more logically than the book) and is the perfect blend of the real and the ridiculous’. The real and the ridiculous. Brosnan goes on to separate and weigh up these qualities, warning us that the latter was about to overtake the former as the Bond films progressed. One of the reasons I loved Brosnan’s book as a child was that every chapter was devoted to a single Bond movie. In each, he ploddingly recounts every beat of the story, including spoilers, all the way to the end credits. In those pre-internet days, when access to anything 007-related was severely limited, reading Brosnan was like watching the films over and over again in my mind. Simon Winder, in The Man Who Saved Britain, adopts a more sophisticated and amusing approach, putting Bond, and Goldfinger in particular, into the narrative of Britain’s rapid post-war decline, and the identity crisis it suffered as its empire crumbled. In the 50s and 60s, life for Brits was ‘unbelievably depressing’, he suggests, while America represented a ‘delirious, explosive vision of the future’. He singles out Goldfinger’s post-credits’ sequence, where Bond flies into Miami to be greeted by a blaze of sunshine, pools and daring bathing suits, as representative of this contrast. There’s our hero, tucking into caviar, swigging Bollinger straight from the ice-bucket, tooling around the States and the Swiss Alps in a shiny Aston Martin DB5 as he tries to thwart an evil genius intent on rendering Fort Knox radioactive.  All of this was impossibly glamorous, he argues, to an audience with ‘uncontrollable flashbacks to the Burmese jungle', shivering in an austere and conservative backwater of Europe.

            When it came to the first hour of Goldfinger, watched with my mother and brother on that chilly November evening in 1976, I didn’t have any way to situate Bond culturally. Instead, I reacted with pure excitement and amazement. From the moment the silhouette of a man appeared in a strange whirling vortex (which I later learnt was supposed to be the interior of a gun barrel), soundtracked by discordant, insistent music, I was smitten. Unexpectedly, the man spins on his heel and shoots me, a veil of blood descending before my eyes. He’s taken me by surprise. As the film advances, a pattern of wrong-footing the audience becomes its defining characteristic. At first, all we see is a duck on dark water, which then rises revealing it’s attached to the top of Bond’s wetsuit. When Bond strips from the wetsuit after setting explosives in the villain’s refinery, he’s revealed to be wearing an immaculate white tuxedo, in whose buttonhole he threads a single crimson carnation (we don’t ask where he got this from). In the following scene, after the explosives have detonated, Bond walks nonchalantly from a bar as chaos erupts around him. Moments later, when we feel all is lost as a henchman points Bond’s own gun at him from a bathful of water, 007 hurls an electric fan into the tub, electrocuting his would-be assassin. ‘Shocking,’ he mutters. ‘Positively shocking.’ The scene also includes perhaps the best gag of the entire Bond series (which also went over my head). When Bond’s squeeze asks him why he wears a shoulder holster containing a Walther PPK, he deadpans: ‘I have a slight inferiority complex.’

            Later, when Bond sleeps with Goldfinger’s accomplice, played by Shirley Eaton, he’s knocked unconscious by an unseen assailant only to awake and find her painted entirely gold, mummified on the crisp bed linen; the whole room suffused with an aureate glow, like the inside of a bullion vault. This is perhaps the most famous cinematic image of the Bond films, and one which struck me as inordinately unsettling at the time. Was she dead or just sleeping? She was unnervingly still and beautiful; a morbid museum exhibit whose spine Bond touches gingerly; a measure of the forces he’s up against. Later still, when our hero (and he’d become my hero by this point in the film) plays golf with Goldfinger, he switches the balls causing his nemesis to lose. The authentically scary henchman Oddjob then crushes the offending Slazenger 7 in his fist. Moments later, he takes off his bowler and decapitates a statue. Another unexpected moment. And so on. In screenwriting terms, the film is full of delicious reversals; micro-beats that have little to do with the plot, but which we remember over anything else after the end credits roll. This principle of the unexpected was one on which the best Bond movies worked. Indeed, an early 007 cinema trailer contained the deathless tagline: The Unexpected. Often.

            In this way, the Bond films reveal themselves as perfect for children – and it was always a criticism of the franchise that they’d taken Fleming’s urbane, risky, adult spy novels and turned them into crass kids’ fodder. Children always want to know what happens next and are thrilled when it’s not what they’re expecting. This quality of the unexpected was mesmerising to the eight-year-old me (and my twin, sitting dumbfounded next to me as Goldfinger unfolded). Moreover, the Bond films are all about surface: about gloss, glam, bling. Children love the simple look of things: they haven’t yet learnt to look deeper, to analyse or contextualise. Goldfinger is composed with a gloriously rich palette, partly due to Ted Moore’s cinematography, but also because of Ken Adam’s unsettling, futuristic sets and their idiosyncratic lighting. Brosnan observes that ‘gold seems to pervade every scene’. There were familiar elements to the film, of course – America, which we knew from US TV serials – but also the baffling, the exotic, the enticingly strange. Goldfinger forced us to willingly suspend disbelief. As a child, I didn’t question whether Bond’s car could house machine guns in its headlights or an ejector seat that propelled a villain out of its roof during a tense chase. By the time a drugged Bond comes around, face to face with a gun-toting Pussy Galore, and says, ‘I must be dreaming’ when she reveals her name (causing my mother to laugh inexplicably) my head was whirling with Bond and his world.

At this point, the TV was brutally switched off and we were told in no uncertain terms that it was way past our bedtime. We were ordered to go upstairs at once if we valued our pocket money. We didn’t get to see Bond’s roll in the hay with Pussy Galore (which still makes for uncomfortable viewing today) where he forces her into submission. Perhaps my mother had seen the film before and knew what was coming next. Whatever the reason, from that moment onwards it was all over for us. We were Bond obsessives. A life sentence had happily begun.