Great Holiday Moments

The 1970s and early 1980s were filled with high-octane family holiday fun, as this short movie clip shows. As ever, no expense has been spared in the shooting and editing of this film.

Adapted from the illustration on p.209 of Small Town England (the bit just after the chapter on 50cc motorbikes).

Language Lessons from 1978

This highly educational short film was sort-of adapted from one of the chapters in Small Town England - set in France in 1978 - which in turn was inspired by the crazy genius of Le Français d'Aujourd 'hui, the legendary text that introduced French to a generation of 70s schoolkids (and helped to get me to a D in 'O' Level French).

(original Bertillon pics © F Chalaud)

Maier, Vogts, Schwarzenbeck, Beckenbauer, Breitner, Bonhof, Hoeness, Overath, Grabowski, Müller, Hölzenbein

Maier, Vogts, Schwarzenbeck, Beckenbauer, Breitner, Bonhof, Hoeness, Overath, Grabowski, Müller, Hölzenbein

Why is it that I can remember the West German team in the 1974 World Cup Final - even though I only watched the last fifteen or twenty minutes because we were all too nervous and so instead played the final outside on the front field and in this case Scotland had got to the final to play Holland so there would be no moral losers in this parallel universe. And when we scored a goal we would do an impression of the player who scored, so Denis Law would stop to chat about his time in Italy with Turin and hanging out with Enzo Bearzot, or Peter Lorimer would mutter some garbled Yorskhire/Scottish “you knows” when faced with the invisible microphone – yet I can’t remember what happened last year, or last week? Or even yesterday? For instance, what were the names of those people I met at that party? Actually, it wasn’t a party (see, I can’t even remember that properly) it was in the school playground and they were parents of my one of my son’s friends. I instinctively said “party” because this book is probably going to end up in the memoir section of the bookshop and I’m thinking that I might need to make my life more interesting than it actually is.

Stoke Newington Literary Festival

I'm doing a spot at the Stoke Newington Literary Festival next month, talking about one of my favourite subjects...


Stoke Newington Literary Festival

3:00 What’s so great about the Great British Pub? Pete Brown, Paul Ewen and Tim Bradford
The White Hart
£4 (with free beer)

Beer Writer of the Year Pete Brown hosts an event in his local, The White Hart, getting the beers in and talking to one-man ‘Campaign for Surreal Ale’ Paul Ewen, and local writer and chronicler of small town England Tim Bradford, about what makes the pub such a unique and enduring cornerstone of British culture.

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Hope some of you can make it. The other speakers look really intresting and I would probably have been going anyway. Elsewhere there are some really good authors - see http://www.stokenewingtonliteraryfestival.com/

'Anticipation' (Delta 5) - 7 inch single

The kids dance funky style then wiggle their hips, jerking their arms about like little robots. Then when the vocals start they both look at each other with pained expressions and start laughing.

10 year old: That was good until they started singing.

7 year old: Why are they singing like that?

They continue to look troubled as the jerky chorus comes in, then start laughing again. 10 year old starts to tell me about The Little Mermaid, the Disney film, and they both start to do some sort of fishy dance. It's the two bass sound that they like, though can't quite explain it. 10 year old starts a robobtic, hippy jive but looks concerned.

"What's up?"

“It’s pretty rubbish”.

“Why are you dancing, then?”

“Because it’s funky,”

The Allan 'Sniffer' Clarke/Mark E Smith Phenomenon

England It is a truth universally acknowledged, that Allan 'Sniffer' Clarke was the only Leeds United forward of the 1970s to look like a member of The Fall. Or, more specifically, Mark E. Smith. (Scottish winger Arthur Graham did look a bit like Brix Smith. And, of course, Paul Madeley and Marc Riley look like twins)

My Legendarily Crap Bowie Trousers

In 1981 I bought these crap Bowie trousers through a mail order advert in NME. They were really bad for cycling - you had to double clip them to stop them getting caught in the bike chain. They also had strange powers. Whenever I wore them out - to a pub or a disco - certain older heavy rocker lads would become angry. I never worked out whether this was because I looked like a controversialist twat who they wanted to punch or that they thought I was compromising the memory of the Thin White Duke.

In 1982 I passed these on to my best mate to let him get hit and bought a pair of Deutsch-Amerikanische Freundschaft black leather trousers from the same mail order company. Strangely, these caused far less of a stir with the rockers, possibly because Whitesnake's David Coverdale sometimes wore leather trousers.