by Kim Newman
http://us.imdb.com/title/tt0053668/
Jimmy Edwards
Moustachioed British comedian, usually seen as schoolmasters, RAF officers or other silly-ass, pompous, inept Establishment figures.
http://us.imdb.com/name/nm0250096/
The Streak
Less familiar than DC’s Batman or Marvel’s Doctor Strange, the Streak is the speedster superhero mainstay of comics published by ZC Comics, a company which features in The Quorum. My short story ‘Coastal City’ is set in the ZC Comics universe.
Denbeigh Gardens
See: ‘Where the Bodies Are Buried’
Top of the Pops
Long-running BBC1 pop music program (started 1964, still airing), roughly the equivalent of American Bandstand.
http://www.televisionheaven.co.uk/totp.htm
Softly, Softly: Task Force
A BBC-TV police series (1966-76). It spun off from Z-Cars (1962-78) and starred Stratford Johns and Frank Windsor as hard-man Superindenant Charlie Barlow and his milder sidekick Watts. Rough American equivalents would be Kojak or The Streets of San Francisco.
http://www.televisionheaven.co.uk/softly.htm
Michael Dixon, Amphlett, Martin, Skelly and Yeo
See The Quorum for another account of this period, focusing on these characters.
head
Headmaster, ie: school principal.
‘Chimp’ Quinlan
Also appears in The Quorum.
A Levels
Exams taken at seventeen or eighteen. Admission into a university (or, in the 1970s, a polytechnic) depends on grades earned in A Levels.
dap-sole
This is fairly arcane even in English English. 'Daps' is the West Country term for 'plimsolls', ie: gym shoes. The American expression 'trainers' has more or less obliterated all English terms.
graduating with a First
A first-class degree, equivalent to graduating at the top or near the top of the class. In the UK, this is considered an individual achievement, whereas American English always puts it in competitive terms.
Sindy doll
British equivalent of Barbie; in the print version of Life’s Lottery, I misspelled it Cindy — which is what you get when boys write about such things.
http://www.sindy.org/
The Glastonbury Festival
Annual event held since 1970 at Mike Eavis’s farm near the village of Pilton; ie: near but not in the town of Glastonbury.
http://www.glastonburyfestivals.co.uk/
Oxford entrance exams
A Level results aren’t enough to get into Oxford or Cambridge University; prospective students have to sit further exams set by those universities, though admission also depends on performance in interview.
General Galtieri
Argentine dictator, invader of the Falkland Islands.
Victoria Cross
Britain’s highest military decoration.
http://www.chapter-one.com/vc/
Take an early bath
A British sporting expression: in rugby or football, a player sent off the pitch by the referee after foul play is said to take an early bath because he gets to the showers before his team-mates.
Yomp
British army slang for forced march over rough terrain.
Captain Blood
Pirate hero of the novel by Rafael Sabatini; coincidentally, Dr Peter Blood is transported to the West Indies as a convict for treating men wounded in the Battle of Sedgmoor, the climax of the ill-fated Monmouth Rebellion — which took place very near the locale of this novel. Errol Flynn played him in the film.
Seaman Staines
A persistent schoolboy joke has it that the children’s TV cartoon Captain Pugwash series features characters with double entendre names like ‘Seaman Staines’, ‘Master Bates’ and ‘Roger the Cabin Boy’. This is not the case.
http://www.snopes.com/radiotv/tv/pugwash.htm
Mr Smee
Captain Hook’s mate in J.M. Barrie’s Peter Pan.
Anne Bonney
Female pirate, glamourised in the film Anne of the Indies.
http://cabinet.editthispage.com/stories/storyReader$147
Katie Reed
Katharine, Kate or Katie Reed. A character Bram Stoker intended to put in his novel Dracula, she didn’t make the final draft but I put her in my novel Anno Dracula. She takes a leading role in the follow-ups The Bloody Red Baron, Dracula Cha Cha Cha (aka Judgment of Tears) and ‘Coppola’s Dracula’ (http://www.infinityplus.co.uk//stories/coppola.htm), and also appears in the story cycle Seven Stars.
Discount Development
A major thread in the plot of my story ‘Where the Bodies Are Buried’
sarky
Sarcastic.
Sutton Mallet
You can find this on a map of Somerset. It also features, in ominous context, in my novels The Quorum and An English Ghost Story.
http://www.streetmap.co.uk/streetmap.dll?grid2map?X=337350&Y=136950&arrow=Y&zoom=5
Captain Scarlet
Captain Scarlet and the Mysterons (1967-8), the last great Gerry Anderson puppet show.
http://www.televisionheaven.co.uk/scarlet.htm
double geography
Two periods of geography.
‘Bobby Moore says “smoking is a mugs’ game”
This slogan ran in ads printed in British children’s comics. Bobby Moore was the captain of England’s World Cup-winning football team in 1966. He died of bowel cancer in his early fifties.
Jason King
A TV detective, famous for his flamboyant dress sense and moustache, Jason King was played by Peter Wyngarde; he was introduced in the series Department S (1969-70) and continued his adventures in the spin-off Jason King (1971-72). It’s possible that his clothes were influenced by the fact that colour television was just becoming popular in the UK, and his shirts were a personal challenge to any slightly-mistuned set.
http://www.hermes58.freeserve.co.uk/jason%20king2.htm
Victoria Conyer
Also appears in The Quorum.
O level
Exams taken in the 1970s by UK Grammar school-children at sixteen. Kids who went to a secondary modern took different exams called CSEs. In Comprehensive schools, there were O (Ordinary) level and CSE (Certificate of Secondary Education) streams. The inevitable effect of this is that pupils, employers and civilians looked at CSEs as lesser qualifications, though the schools insisted this wasn’t the case. A certain number of passes at O level were necessary to qualify to stay on another two years and take A (Advanced) Level exams. Now, the whole system has been amalgamated and British children all take one set of exams called GCSEs (General Certificate of Secondary Education). It is an often-heard grumble from members of Keith’s generation when new record-breaking CGSE and A Level results are announced every year that exams were more difficult back in the 1970s. Then again, the same people claim Mars bars were more chocolatey, pop songs had proper lyrics and all these computers and internet doodads will lead to no good at all.
‘the long, hot summer of 1976’
A famous sunstruck spell, leading to drought, hosepipe bans, phew-what-a-scorcher tabloid headlines and mediterranean sleeping arrangements.
Reading geography
ie: Geography is her Major
Candy Dixon
Also appears briefly in The Quorum.
Wells
A medium-sized town or small city in Somerset. It does have a cathedral, and it’s generally assumed that ownership of a cathedral is what separates a city from a town.
Rag Day
A tradition in UK colleges and universities (where it often stretches to Rag Week) in which students do strange things to collect money for charity, often as a license for larkish behaviour. Men dressing up in drag is a tiresomely common feature. A certain amount of anarchy is expected. If it sounds ridiculous and annoying, remember British educational establishments have no tradition of fraternities or sororities, hence no hazing. At
least, Rag Day — unlike Hell Night — isn’t an excuse to torture other students and contributes something to a good cause.
Penny Gaye
Also appears in The Quorum.
the assassination attempt on Governor George Wallace
This took place in 1972, and was heavily covered by UK TV news.
10cc’s ‘Rubber Bullets’
A UK Number One hit in 1973. Though a pastiche of the ‘Jailhouse Rock’/’Riot in Cell Block Number 9’-style American prison song, it have had a special resonance in Britain thanks to the controversial use of rubber bullets by the security forces in Belfast. In the song, Sergeant Baker breaks up the hop at the local county jail (http://www.davemcnally.com/lyrics/10cc/RubberBullets.asp); his line is ‘I love to hear these convicts squeal, it’s a shame these slugs ain’t real’.
The bald coon
Woody Strode as Pompey. Shamefully, this is exactly the sort of language schoolboys in Somerset used in the early 1970s; most of them had never met a black person.
Gasper
UK slang: cigarette
Fags
UK slang: cigarettes
Certificate of Secondary Education exams
Exams taken in the 1970s by UK Secondary Modern school-children at sixteen. Kids who went to Grammar Schools took different exams called O levels. In Comprehensive schools, there were O (Ordinary) level and CSE (Certificate of Secondary Education) streams. The inevitable effect of this is that pupils, employers and civilians looked at CSEs as lesser qualifications, though the schools insisted this wasn’t the case. A certain number of passes at O level were necessary to qualify to stay on another two years and take A (Advanced) Level exams. Now, the whole system has been amalgamated and British children all take one set of exams called GCSEs (General Certificate of Secondary Education). It is an often-heard grumble from members of Keith’s generation when new record-breaking CGSE and A Level results are announced every year that exams were more difficult back in the 1970s. Then again, the same people claim Mars bars were more chocolatey, pop songs had proper lyrics and all these computers and internet connections will lead to no good at all.
Brinks’ Café
Site of an important treaty in The Quorum.
Superhero panels drawn by Mickey Yeo
For more on Mickey’s comics career, see The Quorum.
Manchester Poly
Manchester Polytechnic. In the 1970s, British institutions of higher education came in several forms: universities were considered to be more airy-fairy academic in inclincation, while polytechnics were supposedly more practical but also easier to get into. At a stroke, some years later, all polytechnics were turned into universities; which is why many towns now have two universities.
The Shape
Mark’s magazine features in The Quorum.
poll-tax (riot)
The Tory government’s replacement of a local tax based on property values with the ‘community charge’ in the early 1990s was extremely unpopular, triggering a wave of unrest — including protest marches which became unruly and were inevitably tagged ‘riots’ by the press — that led eventually to Margaret Thatcher’s fall from power. The poll tax was quietly scrapped and replaced by a variation on the old rates system.
http://www.caliach.com/paulr/news/polltax/copy.html
John Major
The grey Tory Prime Minister who came after Margaret Thatcher’s downfall, scraped an election victory in 1992 and dithered through a term in office before being buried by a New Labour landslide in 1997. His administration was noted for a run of scandals involving sex and finance and increasing splits in the Conservative Party, especially over attitudes to the EU. Oddly, I wrote two alternate history stories with Major as a viewpoint character, ‘The Germans Won’ and ‘Slow News Day’ (in my collection Unforgivable Stories).
Marcos
Ferdinand Marcos, dictator. His wife Imelda was famous for the amount of money she spent on shoes.
Live Aid
Organised by rock star Bob Geldof in 1985, this was a huge concert (rather, series of concerts around the world) staged to raise money for African famine relief. It also revived the careers of some fading performers.
http://live-aid.chez.tiscali.fr/
slide-rule
A plastic calculating aide, rendered obsolete by pocket calculators.
revising
In the U.S., review. Boning up on coursework in preparation for an exam. If you didn’t do the original work, it’s called ‘cramming’
Carrie
The 1976 film was very popular with British teenagers, as much for its depiction of the alien rituals of Americans of the same age as the horror stuff.
http://us.imdb.com/title/tt0074285/
yokel burr
For a small nation, the United Kingdom has a wide variety of differing accents. In general, though not as a rule, a strong regional accent is associated with lower-income strata and misinterpreted as a sign of low intelligence. The West Country yokel stereotype dates back at least as far as the rustics in Thomas Hardy’s Wessex novels - note how films or TV adaptations of his books give the background, working-class characters strong, ‘funny’ accents but have the middle-class, educated leads talk in what is popularly known as BBC or Oxbridge English (or R.P., Received Pronounciation). Many Britons are effectively bilingual, consciously or unconsciously modifying their accent and/or vocabulary depending on whom they are talking to.
supplementary benefit
Roughly, the equivalent of welfare; now known as ‘income support’. Unemployment benefit (the dole) was available only to people who had been in work. Those who had never been employed weren’t eligible. The system has changed, and it is now much harder for a school-leaver or recent graduate to get benefits.
Easy Rider
Was reissued in the UK the mid-1970s on a double bill with Midnight Cowboy.
bunk off
US: Play truant, ie: ditch school or (archaic) play hooky.
Sweet cigarettes
US: candy cigarettes. Hard to believe, but these were a staple of sweetshops everywhere. Now, only specialist stores handle them and they’re called things like ‘sweet sticks’. I don’t know if there was any tie-up between Big Tobacco and the Confectionary firms to try to hook kids early on the idea of smoking.
approved school
Old joke: ‘the school I went to was so good that it was approved’. As much a penal as an educational institution, approved schools were for young offenders who needed straightening out. An American kid as uncontrollable as Tony Bennett might get sent to military school.
Dinner tickets
Vouchers, purchased on a weekly basis, for meals in the school cafeteria. Inevitably, also a form of currency among kids. In the 1970s, more schools provided meals than is now the case.
Neil Martin
His subsequent misfortunes are extensively covered in The Quorum.
10p
10 pence. Until 1970, the British pound was subdivided into twenty shillings (20s), with twelve pennies (12d) to the shilling. In that coinage, 10p (or, as it would have been put just after decimalisation, ten new pence) was two shillings. In current coinage, one British pound consists of 100p.
snog, snogging
serious kissing, necking, petting.
like Morticia Addams gone punk
The term ‘goth’ wasn’t in much use then; my nomination for first-ever goth is Vivian Darkbloom (Marianne Stone) from the Stanley Kubrick film of Lolita.
under-age drinking
In Britain, licensed premises are supposed not to sell alcoholic beverages to anyone under eighteen. However, UK citizens are not required to carry identity cards, driving licenses or any other form of identification listing a date of birth, so the matter of whether a drinker is of age is down to the snap judgement of the bar staff. Like the 18 certificate for films (an X certificate in the 1970s), it is generally if unofficially accepted that seventeen or even sixteen-year-olds will pass.
/> ‘Wide-Eyed and Legless’
A hit for Andy Fairweather-Low, popular with 1970s drunks.
Theme from Scooby Doo, Where Are You?
Available on: http://entertainment.teleradiostereo.com/areadownload/cartoni/usa.htm
