Growing up in New Cross nu 6 .................. Muffin the Mule, Sunday Night at the Palladium and a telly with doors

Now I belong to that first telly generation which means I can remember a time when there were only two television channels which shut down by 10.30 and offered up a mix of quiz programmes,  home grown drama and variety shows and lots of American imports.

Added to which there were those frequent “breaks in transmission” filled by the potter’s wheel or the London to Brighton train ride in under four minutes.

Of course we knew nothing better and it was still a novelty to watch moving pictures in your own home with just your family for company and not to have to suffer the man with smelly habits or the lady eating her way through three bags of crisps at the cinema.

I remember our first telly which did look like a piece of furniture, did have those slightly curved doors and after it had been on for a while gave off a faint smell of warm dust and valves.

It also seemed to break down a lot, although that might just be a false memory.  After all when you are nine even one short break can seem an eternity.


But it was and remains magic, and now over fifty years on it is still a pretty neat place to call up a range s of entertainment.

But for all that the telly was beginning to dominate our home there was still the wireless which until the mid 60s meant the Home or Light Service with its mix of serious and happy programmes of which my favourites were and have remained the comedies from ITMA, the Goons and the Navy Lark to Hancock and much later I’m Sorry I Haven’t a Clue.

Now that means that I straddled the two and I have never lost the joy of listening rather than watching.  So while we have a wireless in the kitchen the tellys are all elsewhere, after all if you are slicing the carrots it’s best to watch what you are doing.

And yet I am part of that telly generation and also of the generation that grew up with an explosion of consumerism which with the help of rising wages and HP meant that a telly, a fridge, the washing machine and a hoover were all to enter our house during the course of the 1950s.

In this we were not alone and while some a decade later began to sneer at consumerism it is well to remember that my parents and grand parents who went out and got these items were the same people who had lived through world wars, a trade depression and mass unemployment.

The spectre of the Mean Test Inspector was just twenty years in the immediate past while the memories of the workhouse and of being ill without the National Health Service walked in the memory of many people.

So looking back it is easy to scorn at the amateurishness of much of what we watched, smile at the size of the TV screen and deride the idea that some people tried to hide it behind cabinet doors, but the presence of the television in Lausanne Road marked an important moment in the story of our house.

Pictures; television and washing machine, 1952  and TV  Guide from  Sunday in 1964 from the collection of Graham Gill