1979: MILKMAN of your DREAMS | Nationwide | World of Work | BBC Archive
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- Опубліковано 5 січ 2024
- Meet the "milkman of your dreams." Not everyone is cut out to be a milkman, and in some areas of London, doorstep deliveries are vanishing. Is the era of the milk float over?
Clip taken from Nationwide, originally broadcast on BBC One, Friday 12 October, 1979.
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"Les Millen is the milkman of your dreams. Cheerful, contented and dependable"
When the BBC knew how to make a decent T.V show. I bet poor old Les is no longer with us.
@@SnookerMafia-or6nuif he is his got to be 120yrs old
@@livin90proof oh he’s definitely brown bread then.
I bet he fathered 12 kids on the round…no wonder he is always smiling
And he drove the fastest milk cart in the west 😂
Best milkman by a country mile..... Pat Mustard. Always looking for a place to put his big tool!
'I thought you were...Marilyn Monroe.'
Mrs Doyle keeping his massive tool in her box, confirms that 100% lol
Much respect to milkmen past and present. My father did two spells at the job in the 1970s. He found the early starts, 4am, very difficult.
Why didn't he just go to sleep earlier?
@@AndyD4730you sound like you struggle with simple tasks.
@@AndyD4730 it might not have been that easy. Ait more youngsters shared bedros and imagine trying to sleep from I with teem brothers using the same room. Also getting to the workplace at that time may not be so easy. Not everyone would afford to run a car.
You get used to it, I worked in retail during the 2020 pandemic. The shift was 4am-1pm. 4 mile walk to work too, up at 2am. I did it for 2 years, then they decided to change my shift. You get used to it.
My dad used to work for Unigate as their motor mechanic at one of the deliver centres and they have a skip out the back that they would throw out yoghurts, drinks, baby food etc that was close to the use by date as they could not deliver it to shops and supermarkets.
We used to go around as kids and help ourselves to what ever was thrown out as it was perfectly edible just close or on the use by date.
When we had milk given to students in Australia, the ‘milk monitors’ sometimes stashed a future stink bomb for later school terrorism.
The arms war in the playground was determined by how long you fermented the lactose grenade.
A sun bleached container produced an effective delivery system with a variety of impact possibilities.
Milk.
The Australian sun.
And bored kids.
A war crime in the making.
That stuff is generally fine so long as it's been kept properly refrigerated and doesn't smell really terrible. I've cooked with lumpy milk before and all it did was change the texture a bit - there were no ill effects and it tasted mostly fine.
In my experience a sealed yogurt is still perfectly edible a week after it's meant to expire. Might have separated slightly, but still perfectly safe to eat.
From 1982 till 87 I was a milkboy for the coop,loved it its all supermarkets now
Awe I started having a milkman again a couple of years ago. He put a leaflet through my door & I signed up with him straight away. I LOVE getting my milk on my doorstep twice a week & they've never missed a delivery day ever
Wish we could have something similar in my country - and at best fresh milk from the farm yard, because it has dozens more Nutrients than the industrial processed milk and tastes way better than it. The joke is: It doesn´t cost even more than milk from the supermarket and the struggling farmer makes way more profit. Same goes to Potatoes. 100 Kilograms are sold for 10 Euro or even lesser from the farmer to the wholesaler (sometimes the farmer has to give them away for free) , while the wholesaler wants at least 2,50 Euro for 2.5 Kilograms. He quadruples the price for virtually no benefit for the customer.
@@EgoShredder Indeed, and thats something i ask myself every time when i watch Videos about Thieves stealing packets from the doorstep, mostly from houseowners with big yards in front of them. Where is the problem to install a box (or maybe even two) with a good foundation or has weight in it to make it immovable by hand - and is kept open as long someone puts a packet or something else in; then it locks itself up when closed, like a car door - and only the owner can reopen it by a key. I mean, that Thieve problem isn´t new.
In addition: Yes, it would be a great thing if supermarkets would only sell at least non perishable goods and everything else is sold directly by the farmers. Even if it would mean to pick up the Goods by someone else who immediately sells it in a Tour, it would be still cheaper for the customer and more sustainable for the farmer. Instead, farmers often must be subsidized, so that they don't collapse - only because someone is between who wants to make maximum profit from simple food in any variation.
Even potatosticks are naturally nothing more than sliced potatos, maybe with some additional ingredients to spice it up, but does that justify costs for transportation, processing, cooling unless they´re eaten, which results in a high customers price (in comparison to the farmers price)? And: I think most of the energy problems arise from unneccesary things like these. Imagine a wholesaler sends the goods from your local farmer through half of the state (or even more) and you get it back four Weeks later in a processed and ready to use form, while you could pick it up locally in a absolutely fresh form. Its crazy, if you think at least twice about it.
@@EgoShredder Idk why my post was deleted, it didn´t contain any harmful words, but thats something we have to stick with, i suppose. One-sided democracy by an AI who doesn't deserve her name because she's totally stupid - or by intention.
@@EgoShredderI've never had a milk bottle taken yet which always surprises me. I live next to a busy A road & I get loads of people walking past including "youths" & the occasional drunk group of people walking home from the local. My milkman leaves it right in the middle of my doorstep & never had one taken lol. I think people actually just don't realise that milk men exist these days & so maybe don't consider looking for one like us kids used to back in the day. I'm sure an opportunist will take one eventually lol
My mum does also has all her life. Gets her eggs delivered by the same milkman also.
We used to get milk deliveries on our doorstep in SW London all the way till the late 80s. Always have fond memories of the gold top with loads of cream gathered at the top of it 😍
The greatest thing about the Unigate milk deliveries were the bottles that had advertising on them. I have a large collection of these in my kitchen. Theyre a wonderful snippet of our history.
I had a customer that complained that the adverts on the bottles made the milk taste funny.Didn't have the heart to tell her that the ads were on the outside of the bottle.
I remember the days fondly of the Milkman when I was growing up, I remember the birds sometimes pecked at the top of the bottles cap to have a treat of cream, how times change..😊
I still remember getting woken up by the sound of those Unigate milk floats. Our milkman was like this guy. I presume the leather satchel for their money etc was standard issue! This is pre-stubby milk bottles too.
I suppose setting aside the usual jokes about milkmen, them delivering more than dairy products 😂 but I mean it was a social service too, sometimes the only interaction an elderly person would get all day.
It’s mad really, all those enormous supermarkets we have to travel miles to now, when it all used to be brought to our door!
We still have milk delivered
I loved working as a milkman - it was a rewarding job in so many different ways
When I was 14-15 I had a paper round earning £5/6 a week. My cousin the same age helped on a milk round and was getting £25 a week, early 1990’s this was. I was well jealous but my parents wouldn’t let me get a milk round 😞
Shame on your parents!
I still remember the milk floats coming round.
When I was little and camping overnight in a friends garden we would leave a note for the neighbour’s milkman for juice, eggs, yoghurt etc then go and collect the items before the neighbours got up lol
More clarity and confidence in these answers, from all the 'streams', than you'd get from many people these days. We really have become dumbed down, at all levels.
I was born in 1999, so milkmen were a thing of the past and I wish they were still around!
with the way those women talk about him, he's probably father to half those kids
🤣🤣🤣
I don't ever recall anyone I knew getting milk delivered. We all just got it at the grocery store. I guess the UK had it a lot longer. My dad grew up on a dairy and had to get up like 4 in the morning to milk cows as a kid, and was out on the tractor in summer til 11 or midnight in the fields. It was a hard life. My grandmother said the farm and dairy saved them during the depression.
When i left the UK (2015) our house was still getting a weekly milk delivery... Dont know if the family still is though... The chocolate milkshakes were always the best!
1980. to tucson. run.
1980. to tucson. run.
They came from brown cows! (as is well known)
Happiest days of my life as a milk boy in the 60’s and 70’s !!
First started when I was 10 getting up at 4 in the morning then walking up to the dairy with the rest of the milk boys.
Happy days 👍
His name was Ernie and he drove the fastest milk cart in the west
...and ended up getting fired when supermarkets started delivering. He got depressed and started drinking, lost his marriage and his house, and did a short prison term after repeatedly breaching a restraining order. He's in supported accommodation now.
More likely to be sleeping in a tent on the boarded up high street and staggering around under the influence of some spice mixture, shouting at the pigeons about how it's all his ex-wife's fault 😂 we have no services left to support ANYONE after 15 years of the Tories. Can only see Starmer being at best, not quite so bad. There might still be a few good people left in the party behind him 🤷
From the days when our dreams were so limited as to include reliable milk deliveries
When I was still at home in the 70’s we were still getting daily milk delivered but the old man cancelled it because they kept not coming round for the money and when they did the bill was massive.
That lady liked Les too much lol
Yes I remember the milkman and the pools man , bin man , you’d tip them at Christmas and Easter , nice times
We had a bloke used to come round the estate on a bike to sharpen all the kitchen knives.Had a grindstone on his pushbike.He'd probably be arrested nowadays for being a gang member.
@@markbishop1588 To true 😂
Interesting how they’re moaning about kids these days and those kids are now moaning about the current kids these days. It has come full circle
Life is a circle - Damian Marley
Nice to see Doug Bevan. Brought back memories of when he was my boss! (Brian Pasifull)
Reminds me of the milkman we had named Jerry. That was the RACS (royal arsenal co-op society) in silver floats. Thee pints of silver top each day! So, so long ago.
I remember my mother used a milk bottle to role the pastry instead of a rolling pin way back then, it wouldn't surprise me at all if she still has the milk bottle hidden away in one of her kitchen cupboards after all those years 😀
As kids we’d get our milk from the farm. Lovely fresh unpasteurised milk. Then we moved into a big town and discovered these battery powered floats would come to you with the milk. We never got to see the milkman though. Mother would send us to school extra early on delivery days.
🤣
Why ? 😂😂
Oh my!
Please keep buying raw milk and supporting your local diary farm that supplies it.
Sounds like she had more than milk delivered ....
I haven't seen a milkman or a pint of milk outside a doorstep in almost 30 years. But as a kid in the suburbs of a small northern town we used to have the milk delivered this way.
We dropped the service due to increasing price and then occasionally the milk got nicked.
I suppose with the advent of internet home food/grocery deliveries the time of the milkman is well and truly over. Or is there someone out there in some small town or village that still has this rare service ? When I lived in central London, this was unheard of.
Used to be the blue tits that would fly around and peck at the bottle tops to get the cream from the top of the milk bottles.
Our house still had when I left the UK (2015) and it's Outer London. Not sure about now though
We have milk delivered.
@@WearertheRESISTENCE by Tesco’s,Sainsbury’s or are you posh and use Ocado or Dilveroo
I'm in central London now and when I moved here 7 years ago one could sign up to a local milk delivery service.. It was available in SE London until about 3 years ago via some independent companies but I think they struggled to get enough customers and heard they were looking at closing.
Can relate this video to poverty and the impact that had in London.
Super Les!! 👏👏👏👏👏
My husband took a job as a milkman a few years ago. I worked out his wages and they turned out to be significantly lower than the minimum wage so he asked about it and was told he was expected to receive tips at Christmas and this was to make up the shortfall. He left immediately.
You also got taxed on those tips.As a relief milkman you were never on the same round for long.As a result you didn't get to know the customers,therefore you didn't get xmas tips.Still got taxed on it though.
Sadly a lot of work has turned this way. The worst for it right now is food delivery for Uber and Just Eat.
Around £3 an hour last I checked.
@@Splozy Illegal.....
How sad to read this 😢
Nice man. I bet his milk tasted good in your tea and coffee.
top bloke Our Les! i did try getting my milk delivered about 10 years ago - alas it was usually late, and often sat in the full sun until i came home. sadly, that was that. contrast this with the reliable delivery my mum had.
I tried having a milkman when I moved back into a town about 7 years ago. I was quite happy to pay the extra for the convenience and tried to buy some of the extras to make it worth their while. But he would come between 3&4 o'clock in the morning!!! In a van. Park outside with the engine running, then rearrange everything in his vehicle and leave having woken the entire street! Half the time the order had lots missing but the computer would bill me anyway then I had to spend ages trying to get it put right. In the end I just gave it up. Such a shame as I really wanted to support the service 🤷
Drivers would Allways moan when stuck behind a float in rush hour.
This was still the norm well into the 80s and early 90s
If you got to work on a milk round instead of a paper round you where quids in at 14 but knackered for school....express dairies and a small dairy i can remember where my local ones...im just wondering if theres lots of little leslies in that area 👍🤗🤗🤗..my parents milkman would arrive even in thick snow brilliant cream on top of the milk for the few coffee drinkers and it tasted.. amazing...
That’s funny. I never saw Del Boy and Rodders with nicked milk ! 😢😂 - we had milk delivered when I was a wee lad. Funny how things change.
"cowboys" 🤣 ride 'em pardoner, moooo!
Les was no youngster but he looked in great shape.
He was twenty-five at the time of filming, but all the randy seventies housewife action put years on him.
I would like to apologize to the milkman whose milk cart we crashed in Newnham Ct, Ipswich in 78 or 79, not exactly sure. Only 6 years old at the time. I wasn’t the one driving.
Nowadays you won't find a milkman in Ipswich because he'd be too scared of being robbed and stabbed by a toddler. Very sad what became of that town.
@@halfbakedproductions7887 Thats really sad. I left Ipswich in 87 and my family moved to the States. I always remembered Ipswich as a clean and safe place to live. But then again I've been to Manchester.
It's so sad. We've lost so much
1979, when a regular working man or woman could with careful planning, afford to buy a house, run a car and raise a family, even in London. Compare that to the state of the country in 2023.
The British people have been taken for a ride, for the last 4 decades, the sad thing is, that we have let them, with barely a squeak of resistance.
Will the British ever rise up and demand justice and prosperity for all?
you're right, but would you roundhouse an ... "apron lodge bubba" or just pretend they're not important somehow? who are your fave musos? all lodge members. m3rdeka 9apua "4 decades" these people have been entertaining you for generations. james tilley matthews was trying to stop a war. instead everyone loves bs and insists on it. hell-oh from arizona now actually where pilly pill pilly them nanas are illy and the lead is l, e, a, d do you even real to real?
Did you vote in favour of Brexit?
It's a joke. I know someone in London who bought his home in 1986 on a police officer's single wage and raised his family there. He left the police in around 2005 and has been fully retired for about ten years now. The house is worth something like £900k at this point (East London).
Meanwhile his GP daughter and her solicitor husband now live in York. Those are very solid, well paid careers, yet they can't afford jack in London (their hometown, just different parts) even on their combined income with each earning more individually than her father ever did. I'm also priced out of my own hometown and it's something you don't understand until it happens to you - it's degrading, it's numbing, it makes you feel really rather lost.
Does it really matter of you own your home?Some 'assets' are simply liabilities.
@@halfbakedproductions7887
Pat Mustard was the dream milkman for a lot of housewives 😉
I think pat is my dad
@@unnamedchannel1237 Pat is everyone's dad, that was part of his problem.
1:41 someone is a bit into Les
1:42 Michael Palins Mother
I remember us getting milk deliveries as late as maybe 1996 or so. My parents sometimes gave me the task of putting the empties out on the step and I definitely remember liking those bottles, because of how sturdy they felt. The foil tops were also really satisfying to remove.
And nothing changes about those London estates. This was in an era where council estates weren't that bad, but that estate today is probably overrun with youths named "bruv" and "G" whose only prospects in life are the prison system.
My parents still get milk delivered
Loads of people get milk delivered
Cowboy milkmen...say, I just had an idea for a song ..
It all came back again with home grocery deliveries.
In the years when Amazon was delivering but supermarkets weren't, you could have a new lawn mower or ironing board delivered to your door but not milk.
Milkmen still exist.
@@notreallydavidAmazon still deliver, what are you talking about
Here for the "real worker" comments
Ironic that this was when no one was into recycling, yet here we have a system where bottles get reused again and again.
A subscription service, whereby electric vehicles are used to deliver various food products straight to your door in recyclable packaging? Besides milkmen there were also mobile greengrocers and bread deliveries.
That's the sort of thing a modern Silicon Valley tech bro would try to raise billions in VC funding as a startup. But here we were doing that in the 1970s.
The woke illiberals always denounce older generations when in fact they were the ones who made do, and made mend, grew their own vegetables, they ate homemade food and barely any takeaways and shopped locally.
WOW massive nostalgia from my early years in the 70's. Electric vehicles been around a lot longer than todays young realise.
An early casual at 40s? nice pair of Adidas for 79
Probably a younger lad. There will have been some of them, just not many.
You had money to buy Adidas in 79, it was usually Gola.
I had a cow once
watch out there is a Humphrey about😊
I wonder how many kids he’s got.
Pat mustard
Haha that woman at about 1:30 fancied him a bit lol
I really miss the milkman deliveries. And I miss the milk freezing and pushing the tops off. And I miss the many blue tits and sparrows and robins piercing the tops to nick some of the cream. We had milk deliveries in London well into the 90s, and when I moved north we had them until around 2004. One of the milk depot's was a 2 min walk from my house and it was so sad when it closed.
I really hope that I can one day move to a remote countryside village where milkman still deliver!
Aye they zoomed into her wedding ring to try reassure the viewer that Les wasn't giving her extra cream😂
I think Les is my dad
Wish I could go back to the good old days
Racism, poor health care, poverty… do I need go on?
@@protectwhatisours6895no different from today pal so what’s your point
Wonder if Les is still around.
If he is he has got to be c100+ years old.
@@Richard-fv7rq You never know.
I don’t miss the milkman…….always delivering after we had gone to work so the milk sat outside all day in the sun
Our milkman used to deliver after we'd all gone to work and school. The milk would sit on the doorstep all day so you'd either come home to frozen milk in a smashed bottle or ultra thick creamy sour milk that had baked in the sun. Yummy
Plus ca change
They lost a lot of business because they weren't cleaning the bottles. I remember my mum saying how dirty the bottles were and she stopped using them. Supermarkets have killed them off.I tried milk and more a couple of years ago and the milk was not good quality. Never had issues from supermarket milk?
Loads of milkmen still exist. Lots of farms and dairies have milk rounds
Sadly this is a bygone era and these types of men are long gone.
How come they deliver at our house then !?.
@@WearertheRESISTENCE they still had linear antennae in teh '90s it was easy to tell then
The real reason for the demise of doorstep deliveries can be seen in the Monty Python documentary which showed milkman being seduced and then trapped. It put off new recruits and the remaining milkmen eventually all succumbed.
Great sketch 👌🏻
Pat Mustard also didn't help. The idea of being sacked for sleeping with your customers must have put off a lot of the younger lads.
My thought too!
There’s no demise
My dad ALWAYS had a milko deliver his milk . He stopped when they kept changing people and when the deliveries were wrong, partial or undelivered . Worse still was when he told the milkman he was not having milk for the next 10 days as he was going away , only to come home to find a stack of bottles that had gone off in the hot weather in the porch . They STILL wanted paying for it !
I was there when he told the collector he was not getting any more milk from them . Same man called Malcolm who used to collect the money every Thursday evening for 30 years .
No apologies for the milkmens lack of service or common sense . He almost seemed begrudged that my dad was cancelling , then accused my dad of "just going over to the supermarkets" ..
That wasn't the case , he just could not put up with the unreliable service anymore .
With it being easy to get at the supermarket, it's the service that has to be good. Unlike your dad's experience
Same thing with bloody window cleaners. Terrible service and a pain in the arse.
I used to deliver papers back in 1983 and loved a free pint of gold top from someone door step 😂
YOU and people like you are the reason nobody gets milk delivered anymore. I'm glad you think theft was amusing. I just think people who steal are scum.
And of course you will still be an r.sole.
@heraldeventsandfilms5970 sorry do goodie
Mr steal yo wife
In 20 years you will be saying the same about postmen/woman
Our Milkman back in the day was Ugly , Stupid and abit rude to be honest . Just like my little brother! Oh Hey Wait a minute!
Can u imagine the youth of today getting up early to deliver milk😅
Yes I could actually, except these jobs have disappeared thanks to the older generation being lazy and replacing them with more convenient options
The youth of today are no different to the youth of 50 years ago. They serve, they volunteer in charities, and they get up early. Don't think you're special simply because you're old.
there are differences. we moved to tucson in 1980. the world has changed. facts.
i work on a golf course. but western awareness of west papua is the same.. my left eye was sliced open and a camera was removed in 2009. don't try to tell me how the world is. john quincy adams was anti m?s?n?c party. disney was not. that's something you may learn when you gain perspective. don't try to parse it all at once it leaves stretch marks. now stop assuming people think they are special because they told you something or had some fun boring post person who cannot cepstral dsp is that special?. volunteer in you.
Getting up at 4am is not my cup of tea and I'm no Youth either.
Many people back then struggled to do the Pre Dawn work.
You had to be a certain person to be up early and it never suited every one. Just certain types of breed.
There are plenty of jobs today that require you to be actually _working_ by 4am. Train drivers are one of those, as are certain types of factory and farm work.
I'm not talking about being up at 4am to head to work, you're actually _at work_ for a 4am start.
"St Reatham? It's Streatham you pillock Reg!" - Gary Sparrow
Decent England died with the demise of milkmen.
Full glass bottles delivered and empty are picked up to be washed and reused? It was more environmentally friendly than "recyclable" plastic jugs or completely unrecyclable laminated cartons.
Electric floats too... all to be replaced in the name of progress...
You clearly aren't from Europe. Laminated cartons are actually the best. First, laminated cartons are recyclable, don't know why you think they aren't. The more important factor is that they're far better sealing. This lets them do "aseptic" (sterile) packaging, when combined with UHT processing eliminates refrigeration, which consumes a huge amount of energy in transport and the market. Not only that, UHT milk keeps for half a year, which eliminates food waste. Moral of the story: don't look at the package, look at the lifecycle.
@@straightpipedieselBut UHT milk tastes like it has come out of a cow’s backside, rather than their udder.
@@straightpipediesel They are NOT recyclable here or in the overwhelming majority of countries due to being paper and plastic combined. There are NUMEROUS articles on the fact that these cannot be recycled or recycled easily and that the few plants that can handle such packaging are very few and far between, meaning these products have to be taken to a local centre, separated, and then sent on halfway across the country/world to centres that can handle them. As opposed to plastic bottles which can be recycled completely in every other town without needing to go through advanced screening and material -separating procedures. And we're not talking about long-life milk - ordinary milk to be used within a few days also comes in those cartons and some markets have switched their own brands entirely to those in a greenwashing campaign (ie Morrisons).
And sorry but who the hell wants to buy milk and keep it for six months? Cows make it every day so there's simply no need for long-life non-refridgerator milk. It doesn't eliminate food waste at all - once opened, it still goes off just as quickly as ordinary milk and it still needs to then be refridgerated.
The lifecycle for tetrapaks is far worse than for plastic milk bottles.
@@ebutuoyYTI’m not doubting the taste but that’s what you get for countries who can’t afford a cold chain, as well as all the complaints about global warming.
england used to be nice
fcukme its the west re,finery
Les Millen, the U.K.'s #1 milkmaid pimp