Many thanks to Dave and John.
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MUNGUIN'S NEW REPUBLIC 
A nice mix today. Some things you don’t want to remember or can’t, and some things you do.
Wham, Ronson shavers and Charlie fucking Drake in the former group.
Picture the scene, a young hirsute boy on his sixteenth birthday, a battery powered razor with no batteries, a hunt around the house, plundering siblings electronic equipment. At last, four batteries. Applies razor to eyebrow-like excrescence upon upper lip. Scream of agony as underpowered motor gets entwined in, for want of a better word, moustache.
The trauma of reliving that experience will now force me to watch Gordon Kaye in his so-bad-it’s-good “comedy” ‘Allo ‘Allo and his unlikely bevy of beautiful – no, who am I kidding – Vicki Michelle. Dressed as a French maid.
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That TV programme was a send up of BBC series, The Secret Army. I didn’t watch it as behind the humour were very brave people who risked their lives to send Allied airman and soldier down an escape line to Spain. Many helpers were shot.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comet_line
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Yes, there were, just as there were very brave and dedicated people in the Home Guard.
To be fair to the Allo Allo writers they laughed at everyone, pretty much equally.
The French, Italians, Germans and English… and even in the last show, Americans.
No one was treated any differently from the others.
In Dad’s Army they were the same, from the wide boys to the doddering old Godfrey, the pompous Mainwaring, the stupid boy and his aristocratic “uncle”. Everyone was laughed at.
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Was told some time ago that Allo Allo was very popular in France and more recently that the Croatians love it.
Was talking to an ex army medic a couple of years ago who told me that the bag that army medics carry is known as a ‘Godfrey Bag’ which is a nice tribute. Arnold Ridley who played the part was himself badly injured in WW1. If you haven’t seen it, watch the episode where the rest of the unit discover that Godfrey was a conscientious objector. It would bring a tear to a glass eye.
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Yes, I’ve seen that episode. It is touching. And it carries a message. Don’t judge till you know the facts… not a motto by which Capt Mainwaring lived!
Like many comedies Dad’s Army and All Allo based on each character having something daft that they say.
In some it became tiring … Keeping Up Appearances, for example.
But, I thought that these two were really funny and “Listen very carefully, I shall say this only once” and “You stupid woman” lasted well…
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Awww, I love ‘Allo Allo’.
Herr Flick and Helga are my favourites.
Charlie Drake seems to have been as funny as a cold.
I think you might have been well advised to grow a beard at 16!!! 🙂
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How Spira chocolate bars were made:
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Ah… Marcia, our resident chocolatière! 🙂
Amazing to see that there were a load of ‘people’ involved. I suspect that today there wouldn’t be a human in sight.
I don’t remember Spiras, but I suspect that there was nothing to them but a normal chocolate bar in a funny pattern, with less chocolate for your 20p than you’d get in a normal bar.
I don’t eat chocolate these days. Can anyone tell me if it’s true that since Cadbury’s was bought over, they changed the recipe for their chocolate and it now tastes disgusting?
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The Trim Phone.
Still have mine up in the loft, a lovely blue one, made a change from the, you can only get one colour, black, the Ford marketing technique.
About the only thing I can remember about Charlie Drake was that he always got a smile because he broke up smiling and you couldn’t help yourself. Think he hurt himself on tv and lost the series, money for old rope my Dad used to say about him, he didn’t stay on his programme very long, and that’s when I was the remote control. Get that on the other channel, we only had the choice of Two, now you can watch all the OLD stuff again and again on 300 channels of Digital ‘ I can’t get anything to watch TV’
I did away with the tv but get an hour when I visit my brother, he watches GOLD, repeats of 1970’s programmes, not worth paying the license tax, I tell him he’s already paid for these progammes that the EBC say are LIVE broadcasting.
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Like you, I sometimes watch tv when I’m visiting relatives (my mother), and mainly it’s reruns of Midsommer Murders, Lewis, Vera or last night, As Time Goes By. And you are bang on. You’ve already paid for these programmes and you pay again by sitting through 15 minutes of advertising on each hour of programming.
Netflicks is probably the answer if you like tv. But honestly, I don’t like that much and box sets are available at reasonable prices… and no ads!
Ha ha… the good old days when children served as channel changers!
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Yes, a Trimphone! Ours is somewhere in the house. If memory serves, I think it was the first alternative design that the Post Office (which ran the telephone service then) actually brought out. Until then we all had the standard big black, clunky handset on a truncated pyramid cradle. Some people, I think got white ones.
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I think there were green and red ones too.
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Marcia, good wholesome food!!!!!
I remember visiting the Cadbury factory in Birmingham years ago, in August, They Were turning out Easter Eggs for the following year.
Had to be August because we were at the AUstin Seven Rally and the visit included the Cadbury Village, wooden houses of Canadian design for some workers. Still there.
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It is Kyleakin, dating from the 1950s, when the ferry crossing to Kyle of Lochalsh was still operational and the bridge was about 40 years away.
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Must have been a very short ferry ride, John.
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Now that you’ve told me it’s Kyleakin, it’s so obvious. The picture must have been taken above the Obbe
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Charlie Drake was as humorous and charismatic as Teresa May’s husband.
I wonder what that village is by the sea. Is it in Argyll?
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Pic from John… Need to wait for him to answer, I’m afraid!
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Kyleakin? Is that Shirley Bassey, with the hands up?
When trim phones were vogue there was a starling around the farm that did a good impression of that phone. He/she was a spring visitor for three years.
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Starlings are amazing mimics. They also great at warning other birds when there is danger around, like cats for example!
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Oh yeah, sorry, I forgot. It is indeed Shirley Bassey. I’m given to believe that she is a most unpleasant person, a bit overly self-important.
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I remember Matt Lucas’s impression of Shirley Bassey on early Little Britain. She seems to have been a monster.
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So I heard
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A very quick scroll down through them –
#1 First widescale (there were others) BT phone for “consumers” which didn’t have a mechanical bell. A schoolfriend could imitate the prrrrp-prrrrp noise perfectly. The “bell wire” continues to affect people to this day as it can slow down your broadband;
Wham, Gordon Kaye – who also played a “bad guy” (really badly 🙂 ) on The Sweeney & my initial reaction to #17 was Kyleakin but something doesn’t look right. Not sure what.
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Yep, all good. We must wait for John to tell us what the village is.
I don’t know!
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It’s Kyleakin. Incidentally, I once shot a trimphone with a twelve bore.
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Its an odd view if it is, can’t work out where its taken from.
Not doubting you as I thought the same but….
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The trimphone was actually a really big deal as it saved BT (GPO as was) a lot of money. The “electronic ringer” used a fraction of the current required to ring the mechanical bell.
Your phoneline will have 50Vdc on it to this day* and that was originally used to power/ring the bell.
*probably gone by 2025
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Was it the trimphone that had the luminous/ radioactive dial?
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Yeah,not VERY radio active… Not Chernobyl.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trimphone
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Will we need phones by then?
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The plan is that you won’t be having a telephone service delivered the way it is now.
It’ll be VoIP (already is if you’re with Sky/TalkTalk/BT Retail & a load of others) but the difference is that if its still on a metallic line there will be no power applied to that line from the exchange (E-Side cabling). The equipment will be powered from the customer-side.
The main thing to note here is that it will become the customers responsibility to provide a backup power source so that emergency calls can be made from a wired handset when local mains power is lost. In principle that’s a very minor (and sensible) change but in practice it’ll probably turn out to be another screwup.
tl;dr during power cuts you won’t be able to plug in a wired handset and expect it to work as it does now.
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Jeez. You’ll get less for more… How unusual.
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To be fair the only reason power was there in the first place was to ring the mechanical bell/power the earpiece 🙂
Ultimately the vast majority of people will end up on fibre-optic connections and there’s no power on those. The original Openreach ONT box has/had a battery but new ones don’t.
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Still written on it somewhere, REN, how many phones that could be rung from the exchange on your line.
Used by the engineers to see if you had an extra extension that wasn’t being paid for.
The worrying thing with the new systems is that in a power cut the Phone system, which used to be powered from the exchange, will stop working.
Like, how will you get fuel from a filling station?, food from a supermarket?, contact with emergency services?, air traffic control will be without communications.
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Hmmm, but someone somewhere will be saving money, Dave, and making bigger profits.
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Thank you…
And, erm… why?
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I replied in the wrong place earlier, but it is Kyleakin.
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In the late 1960’s/70’s I worked for the old Post Office Telephone Engineering Dept and one of my jobs was to try to get supplies of telephones including the ‘new’ Trimphones to local supply depots for the engineers to fit. Those were the days when there actually were local telephone engineers. The new phones were in great demand not only because of the ‘modern’ look and the colours available but because more and more folk wanted to be ‘on the phone’. Being Britain, of course, they were constantly in short supply and there were always waiting lists! Great days.
The suave man in pic ?14 is dance band leader Victor Silvester who was on radio a lot from the 1940’s – 1970’s. I do remember him well, and I could be wrong but the Scottish scene must be Kyleakin, I think, because the large white building on the opposite shore looks like the Kyle of Lochalsh Hotel which is by the pier.
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Typical Britain. The coo’s tail. Victor it is!
Likewise Kyleakin!
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