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 Nostalgic Saturdays: Early morning TV and Afternoon Shopping Nowadays I crave every
extra second that I can spend in bed on a Saturday morning, so it’s hard
to believe that I used to get up at around 6.30am when I was five or six
years old. I would jump of bed and slip on my dressing gown and slippers
(or ‘sippots’ as I used to call them – answers on a postcard, please). I
can still remember my dressing gown to this day - a classy number in brown
felt-like material with orange and brown candy-stripe piping – but cannot
recall the appearance of the slippers, although from the description of my
dressing gown it’s probably just as well. I’d then hurry down stairs to
the kitchen and throw a couple of Weetabix and some milk into a bowl and
rush into the living room, switch on the telly, and proceed to gobble down
my breakfast. As it wasn’t even 7 o’clock in the morning, there was never
a huge choice of quality viewing to be had from the 3 channels that were
around at the time, but for some reason I always seemed to end up settling
with BBC2 which at that time of the morning was showing programmes from
the Open University.
The format of Saturday morning epics such as Swap Shop has changed little over the years. It seems that only the presenters’ dress sense and hairstyles have been updated, though not always for the better. In Swap Shop we had Noel Edmunds, Keith Chegwin and John Craven prancing across the screen in glorious technicolour whilst interviewing guests, playing games or showing cartoons, but I always longed for the section of the show where you could phone up and swap items with other callers.
This of course, necessitated my being dragged through acres of lingerie and other assorted items of female underwear which frightened the hell out of me at the time (some things don’t change), and as a result of my embarrassment it nearly always resulted in me detaching myself from my family at the earliest opportunity and running to the relative safety of the boys wear department. When I say safety, I actually mean that the surroundings were now at least familiar to me, and I felt relaxed in as much as if any other boy of a similar age saw me I wouldn’t want the ground to open and swallow me up. As I was not very tall at the time, it was fairly easy for me to conceal myself within the clothes racks, and this gave me valuable time to try to regain my dignity. After a few minutes, I would peep out from between a couple of pairs of brown corduroy trousers (this was 1978, after all) and see the familiar sight of my mum and my sister rushing around the shop trying to locate my whereabouts with either a shop assistant or a security guard. As this was by now a familiar and predictable pattern of events for them, I was soon found and dragged out by the ear from my hiding place. This repeated sequence of events was obviously of great annoyance to my mum – and most probably to Paula – but it seemed necessary for me to show my defiance after being made to suffer such embarrassment. I can understand now why a few years earlier my mum had put me in child reigns whilst shopping to stop me escaping (these were uncivilised times), but I was now too old for these medieval instruments of torture and so now nothing short of handcuffs would prevent me from fleeing to freedom. However, my mum being my mum always knew that I hated the Arndale Centre ritual, and so I was always given a treat to appease my misery. This usually consisted of a small item of Lego being purchased from WH Smith – usually a car or a truck of some sort – which came to the princely sum of around 60p (I had expensive taste in those days), and a milk shake from the café that we passed on the way back to the multi-storey car park. For some reason I always had strawberry flavour (does this prompt any memories for anyone of Alberto the Frog from Bod?), and I can recall sitting on the green-painted cast iron garden furniture (not that we were either in a garden or outside) and gazing in amazement at the spray from the nearby water fountain falling onto the brightly coloured mushroom-shaped lights that were below the surface of the pool underneath. As I recall this I can almost hear the droning piped music ringing through my ears, accompanied by the sound of the water fountain (which I’m sure made me rush to the gents every time) as if it were yesterday. Another image that sticks in my mind from these tortuous trips to the Arndale Centre was the miserable looking cleaners strolling round the place with those huge v-shaped mop-come-broom affairs, gathering all the debris on the floor left by the surrounding shoppers. I used to stare at these contraptions with a strange fascination, always thinking that they looked like dead pterodactyls being pushed around by the legs, eating up all the dust and litter as they went. These thoughts turned to revulsion years later when I learnt that my darling sister had apparently picked up a child’s dummy one day from amongst the rubbish on the floor and stuffed it in my mouth…… Next Episode: Nostalgic Saturdays – Tea-time and Doctor Who!
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These
programmes used to fascinate me intensely, even though I didn’t have a
clue what they were about, but I marvelled at the strange diagrams and
equations that appeared on the screen. Even more alarming were the
presenters themselves, who more often than not sported flared trousers and
a tank top of some sort, and wore thick rimmed black glasses and
Crusoesque beards. As for the male presenters, well, they were even worse.
I’m not sure how long I used to sit and stare at these strange images, but
I must assume it was an hour or so until the fabulous Swap Shop
started at around 9am on BBC1. 
I
always hoped that someone would offer tons of Lego, for which I would have
been only too happy to relinquish any of my other toys or games. This
never happened, of course, as I couldn’t have phoned up the show as we had
a phone but the line wasn’t connected. As I became bored with Swap Shop
(I could never watch it all the way to the end for some reason), I suppose
I must have got washed and dressed, but now my memory becomes slightly
fuzzy as I’m not sure what happened after that. I probably retreated to my
bedroom and got the Lego out of the cupboard. The next thing I can clearly
recall doing during the day on a Saturday is going shopping with my mum
and my sister Paula to the Arndale Shopping Centre in Wandsworth, and I
can remember the visual experience rather well. The Arndale Centre was, at
the time, a testament to 1970’s design with brown and orange tiled floors
and swathes of concrete elsewhere. I always detested going shopping; it
was one of my most hated experiences as a child, and my father not being
around forced me into having to traipse round after my mum and my sister.
If I take a typical Saturday to be in 1978 for example, it would make me
at least 6 years old and Paula at least nine-and-a-half. Thus, she was at
possibly the worst age as far as being ‘girly’ is concerned. She was
rather well developed for her age, and I can recall the seemingly endless
hours that were spent wandering round Marks & Spencer or BHS looking for
various items of underwear that she was growing out of faster than my mum
could buy replacements.