1970s London | Living in London | Life before television | Report | 1975
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- Опубліковано 12 січ 2025
- Saxophonist Benny Green take a look what Londoners use to do for entertainment when money was tight and television had not invaded the living room.
These extracts are taken from a Thames TV documentary report - LONDON - NOT QUITE THE PLACE IT WAS
First shown: 09/09/1975
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Quote: VT60293
Nostalgically watching someone being nostalgic about nostalgia.
I miss the days when you could miss something on the telly without there being any danger of a second chance at missing it.
Well said
Nostalgia ain't what it used to be.
They don't make the old days like they used to...
Inception
The film segment might have been lamenting the loss of community and childhood freedom in the television age, but watching it nearly 50 years on makes me lament the decline in standards of journalism and programme-making in the present day. A beautifully-written script delivered to camera at a perfect pace. Gorgeous camerawork with each shot given the time it needs to take effect. As a whole it succeeds in conveying more in a few minutes than a contemporary programme would in an hour. The creative people involved back then understood that the right space and pacing allowed the viewer to fill in the gaps in the story and form an impression of the issues being discussed without being condescended to. It was a pleasurable thing watching this stately kind of programming; nowadays one feels like someone is force-feeding you visual and sonic confectionery until the onset of nausea.
Beautifully expressed and I couldn't agree with you more. 👍
A fantastic comment, thank you
You're right, the camera work was fantastic. How it was achieved without drones boggles my mind.
Absolutely right…I completely agree….lately I’ve discovered Ian Nairn…his touching and impassioned critiques of the town planners of the 1960s are wonderful and again, belong to that careful, articulate writing and delivery which is now sadly, so rare.
Very, very well put.
I absolutely love these old reels. Its the closest thing to a time machine we have. ❤
then watch Dr Who
Beautifully presented too.
It’s amazing that back in the 70s people were expressing concerns of London not being what it was. If those people were still alive/or are, they’d be horrified
By 1983 I VERY reluctantly moved from the heart of Inner South East London because I could see the future and 38 years later I STILL miss London every day though I only moved 10 miles right to the very edge of it...lol
When I was a child, late 60s - early 70s - the middle aged and elderly people around us had been born between roughly 1880 and 1930. They had all gone by around 2010 and they all died firm in the belief that the modern world had gone stark raving mad.
Every generation will moan about it not being what it used to be
@@levelofsnipes7378 Yet I find things better now.
For a start, the economy is so much better now. Also, Internet is available nowadays,which is a great help. People complain about having to work from home or conduct meetings on Zoom during the coronavirus pandemic, but if coronavirus had struck in the 1970's, we would have been in far bigger trouble, as the technology to work from home had not yet been invented and children who had lost so much education because of coronavirus would not have been able to get it online, because there were no desktop computers or Internet and the libraries would have been closed.
People have been saying the same thing about London for hundreds of years. London is brilliant today.
Superb - beautiful reportage and film. 'A day at the cricket is still one of the cheapest pleasures available to a Londoner' - until the moneymen came and took entertainment and sport away from the lower classes, extracting yet another freedom; local and cheap cinemas another case in point; communities, etc. Though a pleasure just to watch and listen to Benny for a few minutes - wise words at the end.
I feel so bad for kids that grow up in cities. I was born in the late 70s in a tiny village in the Scottish highlands beside the sea. We grew up playing in the hills and we learned to swim in the sea. Our mums would chuck us out in the morning and we’d only come home for lunch then we’d be out til dark. We’d swim out to the wee islands or build dens in the hills. I still live in the same village and my kids are all grown up and have left home. They grew up doing the same as we did and weren’t allowed a mobile phone or iPad until they were in high school. I’ve been to London many times and the change over the years has been insane…..not just the new buildings, but the population too. My granny was from the east end and moved up here when she married my grandad from the Isle of Skye after they met in the RAF. Any time I hear a person from the east end I can’t help but smile…..they remind me of my nanna and her wicked sense of humour.
Sounds beautiful
I enjoyed a similar childhood though I lived in a village, not out in the wilds, but childhood was magical, like you we were out playing all day in nature, I feel sorry for the kids of today who can never know such unfettered freedom and as for social media etc, well I just thank god we had no such awful stuff to contaminate our brains with.
Same here grew up in small town in Ireland always played out in fields swam in local river amused ourselves with war games hide and seek football etc ....
Came home innthe evening for Dinner , not babied by our parents when we grazed ourselves from falling climbing etc , none of the stresses I see now , seemed much simpler and less worrying
@ Highland_Moo I was born in central London but spent several years of childhood in Easter Ross, and also the largest chunk of my adulthood later, in both Wester and Easter Ross. Regarding nostalgia about voices, I heard a potentially highland voice in Lidl the other day and approached its owner; she turned out to be from Mull which I've never visited; but it cheered us both to have a wee chat! Interestingly, despite being wholly English, I probably heard "the Gaelic" in London as a tiny tot, as my first home (though beyond my memory) was in a flat(let) in a house where another flat was already the home of friends of my mother, ladies from the Isle of Lewis. We knew one of them right up to the present millennium, and despite 50-ish years in London she retained a stronger Lewis accent than most people from the island today.
As one growing up in green and mountainous New Zealand - I always thought all the old footage of london in these years always looked so bleak, grey , concrete everywhere, pies, chips and bangers and beer and nothing for kids to do - I guess they had the cinema and football but life seemed so ….. lacking in colour and when did the sun ever come out?
I was a Thames Producer in the 70's and all I could think about watching this was "How the heck did they get the bean counters to shell out for that expensive crane shot at the beginning?"
Strong writing & production for TV
If your father knew that his offspring would sell out our country, he wouldn't have gone 200 yards up that beach. Hard times create strong men, strong men create good times. Good times create weak men
@@arricammarques1955 Very, where would you find such eloquence in a short TV doc like that nowadays, if indeed any are even made?
It was a pretty amazing shot. I'm glad to hear it wasn't the norm then!
@ballinalower yea and even the dolly shot along the road. Very impressive
i was born in '72 in wirral, and we played out everyday from 8am until 6pm never came home once, had cuts bruises from climbing and fights etc...all from being a normal child, the 70's were my best years im 51 now and still reminisce.
you are still 50, very young; you don't get to say old until 120
I have to laugh born 1972 , I was born 1955 when you could wave to steam engine drivers , Technology was limited but your bain widened as a result. Happy days never to return
Err...In summer it was 8am until 11:00pm at night. We came in only to eat. We used to ride our bikes in the woods and loved scrambling. We also used turn our cow horn handle-bars upside-down and put pegs with with cardboard in the back wheel to make an engine noise.
did you know, they will take children from their parents if they find them out playing unattended? we have truly enterted the demonic age.
@@jeremysargent5037. Yeah, we did that! Best times!
So sad at the end as it was so poignant and true for today’s world.
"Once the process of demoralization is complete (state education) nothing you can say to him when he is older can convince him that he is anything but right in his opinion of the world he has grown up in, show him a black wall and he will swear it is white"
Yuri Bezmenov aka Tomas Schumann, former double agent for the K.G.B and C.I.A
@Trey Stephens Star wars went the way it was supposed to go, (unfortunately) i.e invert all the character archetypes into the polar opposite..
To A. essentially reboot the franchise but with upside down archetypes, to portay said archetypes in a upside fashion to a new generation, pop culture after all is a tool with which to indoctrinate the generation of the time.
Starwars like Trek both were essentially forced fake religion replacements from the so called 'cultural revolution' on, in reality all revolutions are staged events by the oligarchs, the 0.1% ruling elite.
@Trey Stephens I don't know the history on how much expectation of success there was back then, as ironically it was made in the year I was born..
However, since the early 2000;s where the financial return on what were once called summer blockbusters" became less important, since corporate product placement in movies circa 2002 onwards, became the de-facto funding model, leaving the corporate backers unfortunately with more of a say on how their backed Horse might reach it's audience as an analogy.
That bit of canals still lovely. That's a plus
@@leeboy2k1
That's not true.
Box office returns have never been more important to movie studios than today, thanks to COVID. If it wasn't, the new Bond film and some other ones I could name, would not have been delayed, and just released online. And advance sales to TV companies worldwide is where the studios look to recoup some easy / early money and not via product placement. That is just small potatoes.
Loved Benny Green, an intelligent an erudite man. Great Jazz aficionado too.
I was a youngster in the 70's. Playing in Adventure playgrounds (built out of wood and rope - our local one was called 'The Tarzan Park, next to the old Convoys factory). Building go-karts out of old pram wheels, bikes races with no brakes,, playing in dumps and making camps, removing led from derelict buildings and taking it down the scrap yard for cash (illegal now!), going to saturday morning cinema and spending my summer holidays down at Dymchurch. We all have our childhood memories and nostalgia. No doubt every generation will also.
i was a kid in the 70s and went to Dymchurch a lot! were you the kid who tried to scrounge 50p off me so you could go on the 'cakewalk' in Dymchurch amusement park?
That made me laugh @@tonyclifton265
Ha!, Ha!...no I am afraid not. I never knew they had a catwalk in the villages amusement park, because I would have been on a bus from Pipers or New Beach straight-away!.@@tonyclifton265
Grew up in Barnsbury in the '70's...Adventure playground ours was a real castle believe it or not! Taking pram wheels to make go carts; doing wheelies on Chopper bukes; making money with penny for the Guy; snoging the girls after School...it was all So wonderful growing up; the best!!!
@@Kenistyless Did you tongue her 😂😂👌👌
Oy gevalt !
My Dad always listened to Benny Green on Radio 2, of a Sunday afternoon.
That mild Cockney Jewish voice essaying on easy listening - boring to me at the time - is now a fond memory.
So true. And as soon as Sing Something Simple started afterwards you knew that Sunday afternoon was nearly over and school next day was fast approaching.
”Cohen!!! I knew your father!!”….😂
@@mackan-kf4tg
I wouldn’t know Cohen’s son from Adam.
@@stephennoonan8578 😂
Same here mate!
It may not have been ravaged by war like the 40"s, but the 70's was still a pretty grim decade. Very idiosyncratic and probably the worst decade in the 20th century for trains. Power cuts, high inflation, and strikes blighted the decade. Driven by high oil prices following the oil crisis of 1973.
It's hard now to believe how 'seedy' some parts of London were, how run down things were (both city centres and public services .... winter of discontent in 1978); and how there were still areas of London that were pretty much as they were in the late 40's.
I was born in this decade so I have abit of a soft spot for it, but there's no doubt it was a very odd decade - eccentric, sober, and at times apocalyptic.
But it was still a decade of great togetherness, and great moments like the Silver Jubilee in 1977.....and extremes - summer 76 and winter 78/79....and dramatic changes (Thatcher winning in 1979). There will never be a decade like it again.
The cars were a lot prettier though
Matthew Devereux (above) wants to go in a time machine back to 70's socialist Britain! As far togetherness goes sure there was but, with respect, you could say the same about Victorian music halls and huddling in an Anderson shelter.
I wouldn't know; was too busy dancing my way through too many Parties!!!
@@Kenistyless ....Update: I was wrong about there not being another decade like it! This one is shaping up to be more like the 70's than the 2010's were.
It's already been apocalyptic, disastrous, chaotic, idiosyncratic.....and that's just the first four years. God knows what the rest of the 20's will be like. We can all live in hope in suppose! ...to have a country where things work properly would be a start....🤔🤨
@@robtyman4281did you know they had the same pandimic in first part of the 20's; then the ROARING 20's HIT...get ready; good times on the way!!!
Wonderful film and evocative for me. My grandparents lived in a council house on Avondale Pk Rd, just off Holland Park, where my grandmother was a dinner lady at Holland Park Primary School. Benny Green looks and sounds like all my Dad’s relations and friends. I can remember in about 1969 when I was 6, a rag and bone man came by the house with his horse and cart. First and last time I ever saw one!
How bizarre. We had rag & bone men come roound until I was in my 20s. And that would have been the mid-1990s.
Benny Green was a lovely man. I only dealt with him when I worked in a bookshop in the West End, but he was so pleasant and polite to a nobody like me.
You're loved so you're not a nobody my friend. Have a great day.
Manners died long ago sadly
@@oldgit4260 untrue I've been around the world and nobodies as polite as the British.
1975 is an absolute vision of heaven compared to the absolutely vile state of everything in 2023.
ONE WAY TICKET PLEASE !!
Yes I agree. Every labour run shit 💩 hole has been utterly destroyed by their dream of free voters…
This country is in a terrible state..then again so is the world..shit hole
Shame we now have one country running the world it's just not healthy
Yep, our entire lineage of ancestors would be absolutely disgusted at what we've allowed
@@nonono9194 Don't worry jesus is still one of your lot!! 🤣🤣
I seriously miss the 70s, although a lot of that is probably because I was a young kid without a care in the world. Thanks mum and dad.
In case you don't know who Benny Green is. He was a British jazz saxophonist who was also known for his radio shows and books.
Thank you kindly I did not and was wondering..
@@justadirtysock7363 No problem.
I recall Benny, wrote first Liner notes on Miles Davis, album: Kind of Blue, when it was first released in UK.
Anyway, Peace to all.
@@alankirkby465 Nepotism!
Benny Green was a great story teller and a good broadcaster and musician as well
The 70s were fantastic...50 years later it's gone changed beyond all recognition...and I certainly dont mean for the better..and I'm plenty old enough now to know that even more dreadful changes are just around the corner if people don't wake up.
I thought that was Benny Green! I only know his voice from Radio 2.
What an amazing piece of television. The whole thing was slickly made, wouldn't seem out of place today. I loved the wry humour of the presenter ("Children have lost their sense of enterprise by not not trying to enter the cinema without paying").
It seemed that "the television" was considered the same destroyer of socialisation that the smartphone is today/at time of writing).
Lol your spot on. The Roman historian Livy wrote in his history of the early Republic "....children today don't respect their parents...". Probably in the year 21AD.
Haha when I was a kid one of just would pay to get into Saturday morning cinema and let our mates in through the emergency doors!!
Don’t think they’d refer to "sports heroes" as "great apes" if they made this today.
Will our socialisation become even worse when better technologies arrive by 2030-2040. Unfortunately I’m guessing so 😞
@@DavidofSteele think your correct. Computers/tablets/TV are going to be one device.
Haven't had a TV for the last 13 years such a relief to be free of it! A few good UA-cam videos like this one is enough to interest me.
I enjoyed every minute of this. As others have said, despite the passage of time many sentiments have not changed.
Changed do you
This is amazing, thank you for bringing this to our digital screens 👏
Me younger: *Benny Green banging on about the good old days again?*
Now I agree with most of what he says.. the last scene is relevant, as I watch it from a tablet!
You make a good point !
“Why not take a walk, read a book, listen to some music? Do your own thing?”
Good advice for all of us glued to our telephones, watching YT day and night 😢🚶🏻♂️
It's not quite the place it was because it has an additional 3 million people, millions of cars, and the demographic has changed from 93% White/White British to around 53% White and White British (36%). The communities we had were intentionally torn down and ripped up, eg Deptford, by the illegal and unnecessary actions of the local council that razed it to the ground under the lie of 'unsafe housing' when it was just that they received massive backhanders from building contractors. All of those people - my family included - dispersed out to other areas, breaking up the long-establlished community. TV was never the reason for the changes in London. Governments, councils, bribery, and excessive immigration that broke up the long-established (hundreds of years) communities were.
Yea my mum was from Peckham and I think after Deptford. She called it dirty Deptford. Probably all awful rented ghettos. They moved her out to Downham way. New housing estate.
Benny Green's memories of London , on TV and on his BBC Radio 2 Show, much missed. His son still works and comments on Jazz on the radio and elsewhere
Benny Green was such a knowledgeable man! His son Leo played for the Big Town Playboys in the Mean Fiddler and 100 Club to name a few. Great music!
I loved 70's London, Britain still was in the balmy days after the sixties and the mood of the people was generally happy and the man in the street was happy with his lot having a place to live, nice family, decent schools, decent hospitals and a guaranteed job then Thatcher turned everything on its head and now Britain is full of people who sneer at those with a penny less than 'em and fawn at those with a penny more and they are never happy even living in houses far too big, drive cars far too costly to run and playing juggle the credit cards every month so they can live their extravagant lives which those in 1970's would have been shocked at the level of.
I remember an uncle who always asked for "just a ha'penny more than I can spend..." and he was happy with his little house, his little British car, his twice a year holiday to the Kent coast or the New Forest and he worked all the hours he could to give the family some extras and a decent level of food on the table. See Thatcher's lot tried to turn Britain into America MK2 and its failed miserably, most the things they brought in didn't work for America and now we have a NHS in distress, awful schooling, no job security and more importantly you can end up being truly homeless and destitute incredibly quickly with levels of poverty climbing towards the levels of Victorian Britain.
The Thatcherite dictatorship was almost 100% REJECTED in Scotland. Thatcher kicked me (& thousands of others) out of my job, & cost me my home, my marriage & my kids. I had more chance of seeing Jesus than another job, so I fled to Australia, & have been here ever since. 🇭🇲
Well said👍
Thatcher saved the UK. I'm American but even I know she kept you from becoming Spain.
@@GUITARTIME2024 You know absolutely nothing my friend
@@wasitmerlin America is regulated. You have no clue.
No doubt there were problems back then,but I would trade in today's world and go back to then in a heartbeat!!
So would any sensible person
Thank you for posting this.
Wonderful documentary, love any video about 60s / 70s (and before) London
This would be a fabulous documentary to watch in its entirety.
The 1970s was the high point of TV watching. I don't know why anyone would say otherwise. TVs started to come in big in 1952/53 for the coronation and took off from there. By the end of the1970s/start of the 1980s computers and video games began to compete with TV and took off from that time.
Oh how .. its changed .... and for the better - i think not ... i love the presenter and his calm London voice
Me too, a heady mix of Londoner accent, obvious intelligence and self education.
The message is as true today as it was then.
Probably even more so, Rosemary.
Superb document , thanks for uploading.
I wish i could go back in time ,and know now what i know now..
If we knew the future we wouldn't go there.
@@tubbytown6545 true and One must could change the course of history...lol like back to fulture
To die in the year 1998 as Benny did seems like a blessing. So much he never saw that ruined London much more than the TV.
Benny Green had a show on R4 - he would take listeners through Big Band greats. I love his voice.
Tolmers Square doesn't look that way anymore. Most of the victorian housing is gone, replaced by a red-bricked council estate built on the eighties.
And is that council estate you mention looked after?
The winos used to get into the cinema and sleep there all day. There were 2 films and they repeated all day. So it was a kind of council estate then!
@@rob5944 why would they take care of it when they can get the council to do it?
In the old days the council would treated to evict you if you didn’t. Quite rightly too.
@@basilvasili1120 absolutely, I'd never buy a house on a council estate. If that offends anyone (liberals, bames, snowflakes etc) ....hard luck.
It is now 80 percent Bangladeshi or Pakistani.
70s flares......miss them😂 with Dunlop green flash trainers, splash of "Hi Karate" the ladies didn't stand a chance!!😂😂
*PROOF THAT THE WORLD* has been going downhill steadily for 2,000 years...
@Nick Lindsey I am glad you appreciate my satire - THANK YOU :-D
Yep, but much longer than that
Cultural marxism.
@Eidelmania Oh yes
@@jayrox40 But what does that mean?
I do miss the old England
Mee too .... its long dead now.
Bow down to Allah racist, the new England is here.
@@sideshow4417 Oh god, here we go again eh?
@Eidelmania oh yeah because that makes sense. Stop trying to hold modern day people accountable for things that happened centuries ago. You sound pathetic and bitter and also racist. If modern British society is so bad then people are free to leave.
Yes, when everyone had pride and the country was indeed great
Very fascinating. That's pretty much what my dad (born 1951) used to tell me about his youth. Looking back for me (born 1986) it's like the time before and after broadband internet.
We had a PC, dial up internet and satellite TV before. Which were used mostly on the evening, while it was raining or friends were on vacation.. But only as we got DSL in 2002 I realised the potential of the internet and started to use it daily. I can't remember the last day when I wasn't at least once on the internet while I stop watching TV daily years ago. How fitting that we watch this on YT over the internet now instead on the TV.
Btw. 5:10 I can't belive that pit would stay like this for another 40 years. The UCLH building which stands there now was started in 2015 and finished in 2022. But it reminds me some what on that famous theatre in Detroit they converted to a parking garage.
Ah the days before the car when the roads were the children's playground.
You came home from school had your tea, then into the road you would go to join into the games with other children in your road until one of your parents called you in for bedtime. What a lovely time it was.
Ahhh must have been awesome
I always envision a life like that
the story of many childhoods over many decades. But let's remember that we didn't know half of the stuff going on. We had absolutely no adult pressures - and the 70s were full of a lot of misery that adults had to deal with that we were clueless about.
My mom had this strange idea we couldn't see the ball in the dark 10pm and always shout me in away from the game 😅uk 🇬🇧, and remember cricket in the street, homemade bat with tennis ball and dustbin as stumps, awesome growing up from 1971 Doncaster, great days wonderful at Christmas 🎄 with SNOW ❄️ 😮
Just remember folks we are currently living in the good old days.
Benny Green was a great presenter
I used to love listening to Benny Green's Sunday afternoon radio show about the Great American Songbook and learn all about the likes of Cole Porter, George Gershwin and Irving Berlin. He was a joy to listen to because he was so erudite and witty.
We still played cricket down my street in South London in the 1960s. And, during the Wimbledon two weeks, we could still string a rope up across the road as a pretend net! 🤣
What a brilliant video!
Absolutely love the Thames television theme, brings back so many happy emotions and memories , tv just before your favourite programme came on. Free view is tumble weed or junk 'I survived evil', nauseous celebrity quizzes and endless other meaningless and depressing crap.
Yes, some very good children's programmes in the 70s.
@@patrickpaganini Probably made to distract them from all the physical and sexual abuse they were subjected to.
Its dilution of the media , its grown massively. So many ways to consume it. The same quality production and entertainment and documentarys are out there. Just in new places. Better places. And just as good as this. You just need to find it.
@@NeverRubARhubarb yeah because its all gone away now hasn't it..
@@TheFreshSpam And 'PAY FOR IT" , what used to be in the public domain and was a national treasure , and brought the country together , Cricket, football, moto gp, boxing has been stolen by the likes of Rupert Murdoch (builderberger) so he can flog it back to everyone, is bullshit crap straight out of stan's handbook of tricks and deceptions but I take your point that there is decent content out there in small pockets but no doubting the public domain is now a dumping ground of utter shite in order to drive people on to pay to watch tv, even pay twice when its a big boxing match, is called economic milking and buggery of the population, being fleeced like we are sheep, like i said its satn's empire mugging everyone off.
St Vincent’s school, Marylebone. I was a pupil there in the 1979s. I remember the roof playground well.
That is All souls school in Foley street. I was there.
The great Benny Green so knowledgeable about great American song book his Sunday radio programme was a pleasure
I grew up on TV, but when I found records that all began to change. I haven’t watched broadcast Television in more than two decades - even the sound of it now irritates me. I still play records everyday, though.
Same here! 😟👍🏽
Your wise in your generation...
@@stephensinclair3771 Well, I'm 58. LOL
I'm 48 I'm afraid 😨. We generation X should of course be banned from making any comments on any subjects.
@@stephensinclair3771 I am older still, and what you say is 100% true! Still, I think we have some kind of taste. After all, taste is all about access, and if you’ve never tasted a good steak or a good wine, how would you know what the concept of ‘good’ means? I recently heard Ray Connolly say, ‘Records cost five bob - we only bought only two or three records a year’. Wow! In 1980, I was buying an album a week! These days I have more music than I know what to do with. I have to stack up records that I haven’t heard more than once, and I am so glad that I have lived into the age of Spotify and UA-cam.
1975 - We've become a nation of solitary spectators ( Because of the television )
2024 - Strange that a decades old iconic doll, incredibly popular in the 1970s, brought people back together again.
Just wait till computers come along. We're stuffed.
I hope they don't invent them as I'm just getting used to CDs.
Whatever next?
my nextdoor neighbor mr ogu myubu said the same thing.
Have they not come to your area yet? Most of us got them decades ago 😊
Sometimes some people just don't get it huh
@@dshe8637 Whooshhhhhh
Wow, I remember the ITV Thames colour production skit before a programme started in the daytime in the early 80's when we only had 3 channels, I was really young but remember my childhood well even as I approach my mid 40's. It is so nostalgic my heart almost aches for the way of life that has changed so,so much for the worse, I used to travel all over London with a one day travelcard which was about 40p for a child, maybe 70p at the very most but still very cheap, and friends would save up for it through the week until the weekend, and then we would spend the day going anywhere we wanted. We was always doing something, whether playing football in a alley, going to the swimming bars or cinema since it was a golden age for cinema, kids think they have it better now but they really don't which is really sad and when you got to your teenage years, you would want a job because there was so much to do and not having money kept you bored. And it's programme's like this that make me think back (even though I wasn't born when this aired, it still reminds me of my earliest memories of tv). Great upload, thank you!💯👍🙏
A London thats gone forever 😢
I’m sure that canal at 6:12 has been used in many tv programs.
Was this school All soul’s primary school in foley street London W1 7JJ? This primary school has play ground on top of the building.I was there in 1985.
Dunno. It may have been St Richard of Chichester, Royal College St, NW1, which also had a roof playground.
The scene with the rooftop playground is a school that I attended during summer holidays “Playcentre”. Falconbrooke school Wye Street
It must be so dull for kids now days only having Games consoles for mental stimulation. Growing up in 1970s & 80s London I had camps, outdoor games, and I even had my own abandoned train once near Alexandra Palace that I would sit and reflect in. The world is now discussing in so many ways to grow up in. ✨🌏✨
70' kid here...our camp belive it or not was under the stairs at Kings Cross...how we managed that l scratch my head in wonder!!!
Weird comment. You seem to think you're the only people who ever discovered the great outdoors. Look up "forest schools". You may be in for a shock. The world is no worse than it was back then - in many ways, it's a billion times better. The 1970s was the era of Jimmy saville. Child abuse was rampant. I was born in the 70s. I would love to be young again , but i wouldn't ever want to go back to the 70s.
@@KenistylessChrist - what were you doing round kings cross as a child? Pretty appalling place back in those days - you're lucky you weren't abducted by a dirty old man
1975!now that was absolutely mind blowing!what a memory that that is!when it all felt so far away and magical.everything seemed monumental and unattainable!
1970s childhood was great.
Yes we had a lot of freedom, we were shielded somewhat from what our parents had to deal with and we had a nice mix of modern technology and d old school values. The 80s in my opinion was the last decade where that is true. The 90s for me was the end of ‘Britain’ and the start of globalisation and corporatism which has ruined everything entirely
Funny, on videos about the 50s, 60s, 70s, 80s and 90s you have people saying the same. It's almost like it's being young that's great, not the era you're young in. And we get increasingly starry eyed about it the older we get.
They weren't you were a child.
@@zeddekaexactly. These people are just dumb. "I had no worries" bollocks. I had umpteen days as a child up until the teen years where I dreaded most days. I won't be getting all weepy eyed for the "good old days" cos they weren't good. Ever noticed the difference between say Soviet nostalgia and our nostalgia? Ours is: "it was great growing up I had no worries and just played with my mates"
Soviet nostalgia goes like this: "it was great we all had jobs and education and plenty to eat". See the difference?
@@mogznwaz I was born in the early 90s and I agree, the 90s is when things started going downhill, in my opinion back in the 70s society was in much better shape than what we have today especially London.
First I right-clicked on Thames TV just to see what other stuff was on this channel?, "then I subscribed". Thanks for posting :) Born in Hayes near London's Heathrow airport in 1943 my parents bought their first television in 1949. So I go back quite a few years. But it wasn't until about 1956 when alone in the house I could choose whatever programs I wanted to watch for just that one evening. I had a fantastic evening but at the end was very conscious that I'd had an evening with what I call "synthetic friendship". Things are changed, there were no real people around me, that for me was the beginning of modern life, of single-serve synthetic friendship? ........... again thanks for posting. Important stuff :)
He'd be horrified if he were able to look around today
He was far too intelligent for these times.
Television; The Drug of a Nation - needs to be rewritten about Social Media. What little we knew in the ‘70s of what was to come.
Not only Londoners, the whole world became nothing but spectators. They play, we watch!
It would be nice to see the broadcast edit and original rushes too.
The title is somewhat misleading: there WAS television in the 1970's.
Yes but a majority of people may not have had a TV until about 1975.
He's talking about his youth when you could play cricket in the street and get your entertainment in the back row of the Paramount.
@@ajs41 In the UK, where this is set, just about everyone had a TV
It was strange to not have one.
Because TVs were so expensive it was normal to rent them
@@ajs41 This is rubbish. Most people in the UK had tv by the sixties (black & white). I know - I was there!
Ironically, ‘reading a book’ is even more isolating. It’s just that was something people did for centuries beforehand so it was accepted.
Anything ‘new fangled’ will always meet hostility, as folks are resistant to change.
Twenty years after this, when TV was accepted it was the computer’s turn to meet the ignorant hostiles. Then the Internet, then the smartphone, then social media…
Lovely video. Something nice about the slow and contemplative pace of these. It's funny how Benny Green recalls his own community of immigrant Londoners struggling to pronounce names of Hollywood actors, only to then see a bunch of commenters below complaining about immigrants in London today as if its a new thing. Change is the only constant blah blah.
You know full well the scale and volume are different. Gaslighting POS
Life after telivision is great. I chucked my one out 20 years ago and i've never regretted it.
London was a fab place once upon a time. Gradually, it's changed with all the original people being pushed or going white flight and then the poor and others being dumped on other places and people who don't want them there like Canterbury for example.
London now is a dying dump with the highest unemployment in the UK Thanks to Lady Covid and our post Consumer society.
Not particularly old myself
But I fondly remember leyton high road on a Sunday when a rare car would pass by unlike today
London looks more like Cairo nowadays.
Did you watch the football last night?......if you had, you would have seen the very same people you hate, helping England win.....
In what way?
@@Sundays566 He never said he hated anybody. Bit I get his point. We have abandoned homogeneity.
It has pyramids??
@@Sundays566 great analogy
Sentimentally beautiful, though ironic that I am commenting on a video that I have just watched on my laptop, wearing headphones
Just now, watching this was the most interesting, rewarding thing to do I could think of. Interesting.
Im in my 40s from Glasgow Scotland
I played football every single day from age of 5 to 16
That's how you become good at something. It's a real crime how kids don't get allowed space to mess around in the environment
Sure some things we did looking back were crazy but im still here, it was a better childhood than is allowed now😊
Wow, imagine what this man would make of modern london society. Mobile phones, on demand TV, video games, constant state propaganda and social control masquerading as public health measures. He would be horrified.
Tinfoil alert!
@@RIPAmericDuhhh Interesting name, are you filled with hate like it suggests?
@@EricBlair-jg2ux I'm more concerned that having read 1984 might of affected you too much.
I don't care what anyone thinks or says about the 70s, to me it was a 10 year party, l loved every year of it.
The demographic of those inner city London schools sure looks a hell of a lot different now!
all is lost...
No gammons left
And what?
Go to Kingston, Jamaica or Abuja, Nigeria, and say " Guys I hope you don't mind but YOUR culture s going to virtually disappear in the space of the next 55 years (like London has when I lived there from 1954-83 ) Since around 1965 it has changed from the 97% White British indigenous to only TEN percent Births in 2016 to that same group so that many of you will feel a foreigner or stranger in the same Town as Generations of your descendants lived before you and see what response you get....
you mean to say that all the cultural enrichment is so benificial we have no longer to worry about stabbings on a daily basis ,er ok
Thought provoking and really well made
The magnificent Benny Green.
That is All souls School. I was there then. The boys playground was on the roof. We played rounders there and sometimes someone would hit the ball over the fence that was over the 6’ wall. One boy would be stationed in Foley/Cleveland/riding house street to get the ball and bring it back up!
Used to go to Tolmers when it was a cinema.
I went to that school back in 1985.
It's very weird looking back on how some schools still segregated kids by their sex like that
It may have been built by the same architect who built At Richard of Chichester school, NW1, which it also closely resembles. There is or was a school in New End, Hampstead, possibly from the same architect.
@@muhammaduddin9268 what a shame
I don't know if this YT channel has footage of Canning Town and/or Rathbone Market in the 70s or 80s.
This reminds me of the Summer children's programme "Why Don't You"!
I seem to remember that being a bit near the bone, actually.
The intro song always urged you to 'Switch off your television and go and do something less boring instead'
God do I miss the old London! When the city was still owned by white, original, Londoners with the occassional though very welcome and very well integrated immigrants who gave the city it’s “flavour and color”!
And well behaved those immigrants would have been in the 1970s, unlike a lot of the younger generation with the gangs and knife crime that has emerged over the decades. Bad parenting since the 90s has done this, failing to control their kids from peer pressure and the worst influences from black neighbourhoods that were poor and crime ridden in America, where gang culture seemed to be prevalent although a lot of whites and hispanics became involved in that.
@@oddities-whatnot Strange then that crime rates in the UK (and all over the western world) are lower now when they were then. You racists always demonised every single set of immigrants who arrived on these shores.
Color? Erm, here in London it's colour. But of course you'd know that if you were around in "the old London!" Or maybe you're a lying troublemaker?
@@zivkovicableBore off
Knobhead, white original London, it’s been a multicultural city since the Roman times.
Im from Laredo,Texas border to Mexico and i find these videos of old times from other countries amazing.
0:21 Doing PE in your pants because you forgot your PE uniform omg the good old days of School lol. 😂
Yes, the bastards had so much control over kids back in the day - perhaps they had that attitude because a lot of them were old soldiers. Such an indignity would be considered outrageous nowadays, and rightly so.
@@elvisonwax Doing dance in your knickers because the teachers thought that a skirt would get in your way (and in a mixed school.) Did not think of suggesting shorts for the pupils.
@@elvisonwax Or Paedos?
@@caroline1919 yes
@@elvisonwax Well in your opinion, my old school teacher in the last of primary school was a WW2 navy veteran and he taught me a lot. Not least a bit of respect and how to knuckle down and get on with your work. We've bred a nation of snow flakes, winging about lockdown and how it affecting them. I have 'terminal' cancer and I've stayed positive despite it all, look at what our forbearers had to endure, the war and privations of Victorian life among many other things.
Sundays long ago.
Benny Green with That's Entertainment and Alan Dell with Sounds Easy.
Now it’s welcome to Britainstand.
Londanistan
That's a good video mate thanks
If he thinks the 70s were bad I'd like to hear his views on today's society or lack of any society.
As an Austin Maxi in the mid-1970s, I agree with Benny Green as he was always my favourite in Grange Hill.
Wow, London 50 years ago, when it was still English and had a working class.
Sick of hearing that lol
Not all workers work down mines or in factories mate.
@@ButherLi55ett Just what I was thinking. There’s a massive amount of working class people in London, probably more than there are middle class, many of them deprived. It’s the work that changed.
People lie to themselves when they pretend things changed for the better.
Before Maggie Thatcher started the ethnically cleansing London of the working classes. Boris as London mayor booted the rest of the working class out of their homes to allow the Russians and Chinese to build all those awful apartments worth millions.
"why have people become disassociated with one another" My god they had no idea how much this would take hold. Look at us now, just look at us.
The seventies were uniquely bad - nothing like today. "Alienation" was the word of the decade - society was crumbling and there was a real rage. Crime went through the roof (it's actually been going down since 2003). Look at punk and things like Clockwork Orange. Dystopian, angry things that reflected the rage in society. We certainly have many problems these days, but it's absolutely nowhere near as bad as it was in the 70s
Aye definitely. My comment was really a dig at the modern smartphone era and tech tsunami. Though, I do think that there are hints that society will follow similar patterns to that in the Victorian era coming through right now. Where they had workhouses to put the strays of society, we can now see arguments about where to put people and so on. The councils appear to be losing their ability to really look after people too, with many largely fending for their selves. And in the era where those without an education or ability to read or write, they struggled to survive. These days, it seems those who are not tech savvy will get left behind, as "money" gradually becomes an antiquated commodity in favor of the many other means of earning. The 70s was definitely rough, and I think a cycle is in play, manifesting with a different face each time. @@zeddeka
This film resonates as it was made in the teeth of Britain's economic and industrial decline.
When you could walk the streets of London and the everyday language spoken was English, today you feel like you're in Eastern Europe, the Middle East or parts of Asia.
This is how feel about the internet & cell phones.
Sadly they still work on the roof...
Television had very much invaded the living room by 1975 and mostly in colour by then as well.
That's a much used phrase, but how can something invade when it's picked up and carried in?