Top Ten Sweets We Used to Buy a Quarter of in a Sweet Shop (in the Sixties and Seventies)

  1. Toffee Bonbons
  2. Pineapple Chunks
  3. Sherbet Lemons
  4. American Hard Gums
  5. Liquorice Comfits
  6. Rhubarb and Custard
  7. Coconut Mushrooms
  8. Jazzies *
  9. Pear Drops
  10. Jelly Babies

*Brown chocolate buttons, with hundreds and thousands on the raised side. The white chocolate version were called "Snowies".

 

What were your favourites?

The Top Ten Songs We Heard on Junior Choice, Saturday and Sunday mornings, back in the Seventies:

 

  1. Right Said Fred. Bernard Cribbins
  2. A Windmill in Old Amsterdam (I Saw a Mouse). 
  3. My Brother. Terry Scott
  4. Three Little Fishes. Frankie Howerd
  5. Supercalifragislisticexpialidocious. Julie Andrews and the Mary Poppins Cast.
  6. The Runaway Train. Michael Holliday
  7. The King’s New Clothes. Danny Kaye
  8. Little White Bull. Tommy Steele
  9. Hello Muddah, Hello Faddah
  10. Ernie. Benny Hill

 

 How about...

The Laughing Policeman?

Inch Worm, The Ugly Duckling?

The Road to Mandalay?

 

What was your favourite song played on Junior Choice?

 

The Top Ten Cars of the Sixties

Which of these cars have you got any memories of? Which ones were a part of your family life, or maybe even cars you aspired to owning?

1.    Mini Cooper
2.    Ford Anglia
3.    Hillman Imp
4.    Morris Minor
5.    Triumph Herald
6.    VW Beetle
7.    Austin 1100
8.    Vauxhall Viva
9.    Ford Cortina
10.    Austin Healey


Number Ten: the Austin Healey: Despite the fact that this sounds like the name of a 1950s English film and TV actor who might have appeared in I Say, You Fellow! Look Out There! Or The Jolly Funny Weekend Caper it was, in fact a car.

Number Nine: The Ford Cortina. Designed as a family saloon but because it soon began to be bought second hand, quite cheaply, by young boy racers, its reputation changed rapidly. In The Jam’s 1979 song Saturday’s Kids, Paul Weller wrote:


Saturdays kids live in council houses,
Wear v-necked shirts and baggy trousers,
Drive Cortinas, fur trimmed dash boards,
Stains on the seats - in the back of course!

Number Eight: The Vauxhall Viva. They started making these in 1963. The name was revived in 2015, but the new car didn’t look anything like the old ones.

Number Seven: Austin 1100. This was the same as the Morris 1100. Exactly the same. That's because they were both made by General Motors. 
If you thought, like me, there seemed to be a lot of these about, back in the sixties and seventies, that’s because they were Britain’s best selling car for most of the sixties (the top selling car from 1963 to 1966 and from 1968 to 1971).

Number Six: The Volkswagen Beetle. Forever associated with The Love Bug, the Walt Disney film from 1968, featuring Herbie, a VW Beetle with a mind of its own.

Number Five: Triumph Herald. A cross between a family saloon and something a bit flashier.  Driven by young bank clerks and semi-professional footballers.

Number Four: Morris Minor. A very distinctive looking car, and they seemed particularly durable judging by how many there were still around for decades afterwards; especially the wooden panelled estate version (the kind my mum always called a shooting brake), which a lot of teachers seemed to own in the eighties.

Number Three: The Hillman Imp. “A nippy little car” There were lots of small cars in the sixties and seventies which were described as “nippy” and this was one of them. It was also the type of car driven by the actor Richard Bradford (or his character, McGill) in Man In A Suitcase, a tv series screened back in the sixties. 

Number Two: The Ford Anglia. Ron Weasley’s Dad did up a Ford Anglia, of course, which meant not so much a paint job and souping up the engine, as turning it into a flying machine. JK Rowling’s inclusion of the Ford Anglia in the Harry Potter books has ensured its history as possibly nothing else could. 

Number One: Mini Cooper. The Mini was quintessentially British. It was an icon of the sixties, along with the mini skirt, the Beatles, the pill and World Cup Willie. There was no stronger advert for the Mini Cooper than the film, The Italian Job (from 1969), where the minis performed impossible feats in, across, around, below and above Turin in the process of stealing millions of pounds worth of gold bullion.  
 

Top Ten TV Comedies of the Sixties

 

  1. Dad’s Army
  2. The Likely Lads
  3. The Morecombe and Wise Show (ITV)
  4. Not Only…But Also (Peter Cook and Dudley Moore)
  5. Steptoe and Son
  6. Please Sir!
  7. The Liver Birds
  8. Monty Python’s Flying Circus
  9. Sykes (also, The Plank 1967)
  10. Doctor in the House

What was your favourite?

 

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