Let's not forget...

But a surprising number of people do.

Saturdays with Dickie, Shirley and Mick

 

 

This was the shape of Saturdays for a big slice of my childhood. Only the pointy bit changed when ITV scrapped, U.F.O, their very cool Sci-Fi series and replaced it with their equally cool Sci-Fi series, Space 1999. And this pyramid of warm memories had been on ice until the death last week of wrestler, Mick McManus, reheated them.

I remember that as the top of the day whizzed by, the closing credits of Gerry and Silvia Anderson’s space-age epics signalled the approach of the infinite: World of Sport. It hovered over the day casting a big fat shadow that stretched from 12.30 to gone 5 and if you weren’t that interested in sports (as I wasn’t back then except the Big Occasions; the FA Cup Final; the Grand National and so on) it left you with a black hole to fill until 4pm, because that was when the curtain went up on the biggest piece of fiction of all: the wrestling.

The Partridge-esque titled, World of Sport, was fronted by Dickie Davies, a dapper chap sporting a Jason King-like moustache, bouffant ‘Mallen’-streaked hair and his signature fat-knotted kipper tie. The set was a gloriously un-PC collection of ‘dolly birds’ all tapping away at IBM Selectric typewriters, who stopped only occasionally to hand an efficiently removed piece of paper to one of the Pringle-clad blokes who always seemed to be wandering around as if looking for their car keys.

If you put a photo of him in front of me I wouldn’t be able to identify Ken Walton, but his voice is as familiar to me as my own. “Good afternoon, grapple fans.” He was the ‘voice of wrestling’: the bloke with the mic by the ropes. Even back then I had realised that wrestling was acting in trunks, but my Gran hadn't. She like many other grans took it all very seriously indeed. There were good guys and bad guys, it was both moralistic and entertaining and I think that was what she liked about it. You could take sides. Mick McManus was most definitely the bad guy and Big Daddy (the improbably named, Shirley Crabtree) was the good guy. Of course there were others, but those two, Ken Walton, her boos and hisses and the rustle of the gold paper wrappers of her Callard & Bowser butterscotch form the soundtrack to those Saturdays.

Your best memories are the things you can’t remember, until someone or something reminds you. So thanks Mick.

Wagner's rinse cycle

I always take in a big sniff when I walk by a laundry or launderette. All that starch, fabric conditioner and the minestrone of detergent whiffs; lemon, orange, jasmine and so on. They also emanate other smells like Perchloroethylene, that's dry cleaning solvent to you and me. And I'm pretty sure that the persons who spawned and sanctioned this were sniffing it in all day long. How else could you explain it?

There's an identikit picture of a laundrette: benches bolted to a Lino floor; an array of vending machines all inviting you to put money into them; and the remnants of brands long since lost in the wash, like the above.

FORCO. It's seemingly straight out of central casting, but the name is derived from the parent company, Forsyth, which was dissolved in the 60s so this sign has been here in the Barbican since this complex was opened in the late 70s.

Those vikings certainly make you feel that your smalls would safe in those machines. And I particularly like the wholly synergistic amendments made by the attendants using the medium of the Post-it Note. But, WTF? It's hard to believe that a designer or a naming consultant (mostly because they didn't exist then) went anywhere near this and Prontaprint and its ilk were yet to appear. So this is probably the devil-child of a printer. Or a mate who 'could draw'. Or someone who had access to Letraset's Action Figures and knew how to burnish them.

Time spent in these places is seemingly eternal and dead. One relies on the charity of others to leave behind entertainment for us in the shape of newspapers, mags, or graffiti if we didn't have the foresight to take our own, so there's a big opportunity here. 

At least in the Barbican they give you the horn.

JB. Jolly Bloody... good

So yesterday I'm walking past JB Sports on Ludgate Hill, which is a spit away from St. Paul's and there's the biggest and ugliest pile of crap on the pavement right outside their shop. It's a Bank Holiday and it's hot, so there's an amazing array of cans, lolly packs and salad bowls from the nearby M&S Simply Food. There's also an electrics/telecoms engineer's box there which provides a handy shelf for people to dump litter on.

For reasons we understand, namely, the IRA's activities in the good old days, there is a dearth of bins in the City and especially near landmarks like the aforementioned. But your average visitor is probably unaware of this, they probably just think us to be bad planners.

As we all know, one piece of litter attracts another and pretty soon you have a mountain of it, just siting there and primed to feature in the thousands of photographs and films being taken by the hundreds of people wandering around that part of the capital.

Being a brand-bore it matters very much to me what people think of this City and by extension our country. So I went into JB Sports and asked for a bin liner so that I could clear the mess up. Not only did, Zac, one of the young chaps serving provide me with the necessary, he also came out to help me having realised that it wasn't doing his shop any favours either. Brand awareness. Bless him.
I don't know what you're paying him JB, but it's not nearly enough. This young chap 'get's it', so he's a keeper, and feck knows you need all the help you can get.

Zac. Salute.

Was it really almost a year ago?

It's hard to believe, isn't it? It was almost a whole year ago!
And it seems that the Olympic spirit touched people in some rather unexpected ways, like this mains access in this street just south of Oxford Street.

The maintenance chaps working here obviously decided to brand their efforts in a very permanent way. (Well at least until someone digs it up again.) Those Olympic rings look suspiciously like they were made with a glass or a bottle...a beer bottle would be my guess.

It's a whole new slant on 'Olympic Legacy'.

Nevertheless, it's an impressive affort.
And to think that the pollsters were telling us that people didn't care and had very little interest in it all.
Cheers!

MACE could be ACE

Leather Lane market, Farringdon, London

I've walked by this shop hundreds of times and never given it much thought. Sure, it has always evoked memories of my childhood and I'm sure that it will for you, if you are native to the UK or Ireland. MACE. Who hasn't shopped in one at some time or other? A rare reminder of a former staple of the high street. The 'ghost' type a poignant reminder of a busier and better time. A spectre of a long-gone member of the MACE family.

Watch any outside news broadcast on the high street from the 60s and 70s, or external shoots on a British sitcom of the same time, or big-screen extensions of the same or many films from the Carry-On canon, and you'll see a MACE. The candy-stripe awnings, facias, bags and unapologetic post-modern logos. I never really appreciated how forward it was back then. And then walking through Fitzrovia last week, I saw this horror...

Fitzrovia. Under the Telecoms Tower, London.

MACE outlets are all independent traders who on joining the 'family' buy their stock from the brand owner. They also have the pleasure of paying the same for brand and marketing support. Pay...for this! Are they mad? It's a disgrace. Most kids could produce something more alluring and appropriate.

In an age when people are keen to support local traders it seems to me that Palmer & Harvey have missed a trick. The MACE of yesteryear projected all of the values that are important to today's consumer. Not for the first or indeed last time the future should be informed by the past. A neat inversion indeed. A national chain which embodies small-scale high street shop principles.

Bring back the awnings; the bags; the 3-D lettering; the optical illusionist facias and leave the perspex in the factory.

I found this fantastic site, the creator of which has a very personal link to the MACE story. Check it out.

Belt and braces

Six years is a long time to walk a circle, yet that’s how long it’s taken RCapital to walk the circle that is the girth of the Little Chef’s belly. They’ve gone all the way around it to get right back to where it started from. Of course there are a few more holes in his belt nowadays since they’ve slimmed him down in more ways than one and he’s now back on the market 117 sites lighter than he was at the 2007 weigh-in. (See my 2012 post, http://susan-turner.blogspot.co.uk/2012/01/knowing-your-arse-from-your-elbow.html.)

This team of accountants instigated the most ridiculously inappropriate and unsympathetic repositioning exercise since Consignia, namely, the grafting of Heston Blumenthal’s periodic concoctions onto an enterprise with an established heritage and clientele. An enterprise whose very ‘domesticity’ rendered it perversely ‘exotic’ in an ever increasingly ‘other’ based market.

Only it’s funny, because the “next phase”, according to the Manchester outfit they’ve briefed to rebrand the chain, seems to be the phase before RCapital got involved. It’s about getting “back to basics”. Apparently their approach will be informed by the heritage of Little Chef and what it stands for in the consumers mind. Architecture apart, that means chips, beans and fried toast and not Heston’s fabrications. You don’t say! And all of this pre-sale, which is odd really and it signals acknowledgement that their repositioning has not been as successful as they make out. Sure, they’ve made and saved money. But then they’ve got rid of more than half the chain, haven’t they. But it hasn’t worked. Has it?

It’s all a bit mad really, especially since it’s reported that Starbucks and Costa along with service station brands such as Welcome Break are interested, all of whom would draw the chain into their own brand-world to some extent, so why spend money now? It doesn’t make sense. But then none of it ever did.