The 70s were cool thanks to cigarettes

When you were a kid, what did you want to be when you grew up? I vacillated between the noble aspirations of stuntman, cartoonist and actor (ideally with permed hair); but the only constant dream that I nursed was to be a smoker.  I would have written to Jim’ll Fix It to ask for his help, but the renowned altruist had ignored my other pleas to play for Liverpool and with Adam and the Ants, so I thought bollocks to him. (Dodged a bullet there). Besides, I had easy access to cigarettes. It was ‘Fags  R Us’ at our house.  The lounge was like a Victorian pea-souper.  We collected Embassy vouchers, we had hundreds, but fuck knows what we ever traded these in for, more packets of Embassy I suspect.  And we had ash-trays everywhere, ash-trays bought as presents, ash-trays nicked from restaurants and pubs and places we visited and those posh ash-trays on stands with sliding panels.

And this is because in the 70s cigarettes were GREAT!  They came in different coloured boxes with cool designs,  not like today when they’re all in the same dark green packet with photos of diseased bodily organs on them.  How can you tell which is which? Does Embassy even exist anymore? Oh, it’s the one with the mouth close up on it, the black-gummed, tombstone teethed health warning photo that no one believes because you never see anyone with a gob like that; because actually you’d have to smoke 300 a day to look that bad and no one has been able to afford 300 fags a day since the 70s when they were sensibly priced, and not much more than sweet cigarettes in those days in fact.

But I’ve read that these days it takes just one packet to make your teeth fall out and your gums look like toes on a tramp with trenchfoot.  This is because they put all kinds of shit in modern cigarettes - rat poison, anthrax, talcum powder, toe-nails, pig’s eye lashes, paving stones, garlic, maybe even Pot Noodle powder. Back in the 70s, it was good old fashioned tobacco, tar and some pleasantly addictive chemicals. And you could tell the difference between fags as well.  Silk Cut (Slut) were your starter pack - pretty bland and innocuous, like plain crisps.  Then you might move onto Benson and Hedges, medium tar, bit more of a scratchy feel at the back of your throat, like Monster Munch.  From there, you might go Rothmans, but that was like inhaling razor blades and you couldn’t regress back down to Embassy, because your mum smoked them and they were too short; so you’d go a bit exotic and plum for Camel with their mild dung flavouring.

Don’t get me wrong, my parents never encouraged me to smoke. Each time I went to shop to buy their  fags for them, I knew I’d get into massive trouble if I smoked one on the way home.  So, I had to make do with lighting their dog ends, fresh from the ash-tray, when they were out of the room.  They’d never notice.  It’s not like I’d smell any more like cigarettes, after all.

But adults were role models and back then there were some clear cultural norms in relation to how men and women should hold their cigarettes.  Women had to gently pinch a cigarette between the tips of their elongated fingers and hold their hands up so that the fag was at head height, swaying in time with the rhythm of their speech. Men shoved the cigarette down low in the fingers, near the knuckle, hand half clenched, ideally holding something manly like a pint, a tool or their penis.  And when you needed two hands to manipulate any one of those things, you’d let the fag hang limply from your lips, eyes half closed to look cool, whereas in fact you’d be squinting in response to feeling like you were having a napalm eye-bath.

And what was lovely about smoking, was that no one gave a shit about you doing it.  Nowadays, you could take a dump on someone’s lap on a train and everyone would look away too polite to comment; but light up a cigarette in a carriage and you’d get a chorus of excuse mes and do you minds.  Remember how before the mid 80s you’d NEVER see anyone smoking on a train?  That’s because there was so much smoke you’d never see anything. A tube would pull into a station with smoking and non-smoking carriages and it was the latter that had all the available seats, because most people were crammed somewhere inside the smog of the smoking ones.  In a token effort to cater for the sensibilities of ‘non-smokers’ (or poofters as they were sometimes known in those politically indifferent days) buses and aeroplanes sectioned off areas where you weren’t allowed to smoke.  They overlooked the fact that smoke tends to travel and often it only had to travel a few inches to expose the whole absurdity of non-smoking sections.

For the record, my first cigarette was when I was about 8 or 9, sat on a garage roof with my mate Brett (hard bastard, made his Dad blind by throwing sand in his eye), sharing a pack of John Player No. 6.  Then at school in science we’d roll a piece of paper, set it on fire from the Bunsen burner, blow it out and quickly inhale through the tube the little bit of smoke smouldering from the end.  After that, it was as I said, the final vestiges of a discarded dog end when your mum punctuated her own smoking with a quick pop to the lav.

Like I always say, the 70s were a better time. A time when culture demanded that we share cigarettes (you never saw anyone open a packet and not make an offer to others, helped by the fact that the cost didnt work out as 50p a fag); a time when people didn’t get their knickers in a twist over the fact that you were making their clothes smell or giving them lung cancer just by smoking in a confined space with them; a time when non-smokers had to fuck off outside a building and stand in the cold to indulge in their minority habit.

And best of all, cigarettes make you look cool. Much much cooler than a battery operated metal toy that emits clouds of strawberry smelling vapour, anyway.

All in the mind, somewhere

I’ve done some reading about how the mind works and discovered the difference between the subconscious and the unconscious, but I haven’t been able to apply this new knowledge to the curious phenomena that is best described as ‘starting to shit as soon as you know you’re on the way to the toilet.’

This sense of wonder emerged once again recently as I was walking home from the station after a day’s work needing a poo. (Perhaps I should have restructured that sentence so that you don’t think my job is to need a poo.) It’s a 23 minute walk. I’d wanted a poo since leaving work, a 30 minute train journey and 15 minute walk the other end previous to this walk. So you can imagine how long it was patiently resting in the tube.  However, once I started towards home from St Albans station, the unconscious or subconscious part of my mind - I’m desperate to know which - sent a message to my bum to the effect that a visit to the toilet was imminent. It wasn’t. It was still at least 20 minutes away; but, you know, the tug of war team starting pulling too early, the eager athlete was out of the blocks before the gun, the tortoise stuck his head out before hibernation was up, the guests arrived for the party before the dips were on the table.  It kind of slowed me down clenching that in as I walked.

This sub or un conscious part of the brain has always fascinated me, ever since I was old enough to get blind drunk and discover that it was possible to find your way home no matter how dysfunctional your conscious mind was.  It’s not completely fool-proof though.  The subliminal message that jerks your drunken body into action as you approach your stop on the night bus or late train home is pretty reliable except perhaps when you’ve just moved house. This happened on my first night out in London after moving to Borehamwood, when I was completely let down by a uselessly dormant (or maybe, more kindly, untrained) subconsciousness, and I woke up in Bedford, no return train due and only one mini cab outside, which charged me £40 (a ransom in 1997) to which I very consciously responded with an indignant ‘fuck off’ before apologising and accepting the offer, only semi-consciously aware of some poor sod from my carriage who had suffered the same misfortune and who I should have shared the cab with.  My brain let us both down there.

I’m assuming the conscious feeds information into the unconscious and the subconscious retrieves it when it feels like it’s needed. For instance, my conscious mind has decided that people who barge in front of others to get on a train deserve some kind of retribution or at least a message to the effect that they are being selfish and impolite.  So every time it happens, my foot automatically flicks out to kick or trip the perpetrator, dangerously just before my conscious mind has had a chance to ascertain my chances of avoiding physical harm in the event of a violent response from the aforementioned rude bastard.  I’ve no idea how I’ve escaped ever being punched.

This intriguing part of the brain might be linked to intuition, but my intuition isn’t particularly useful. Now that I reflect on it, I can only think of two things that I ever have a strong premonition about.  Playing darts, I know as each dart leaves my hand whether it’s going where I want it to or not. That’s one example of successful intuition. The other is when I fart and think to myself, ‘that’s going to smell’ or not. (Though to be fair, a hot sensation between the cheeks usually gives it away.)

Anyway, I’m not sure I’ve provided the sort of intellectual and comprehensive psychological analysis  that Freud did in his lifetime, but perhaps he would have been even more useful if, rather than pervily banging on about how sex unconsciously impacts on all our conscious thoughts, he provided a solution to that more pertinent question of why a poo starts coming out when you know you’re not far from a toilet.

Reality TV did exist in the 70s

In my admittedly unreliable and predictably rose (or perhaps beige) tinted memory of the 1970s, there was only one TV programme that purported to be ‘reality TV’ and this was ‘The Family’.  The premise was no more complicated than a fly-on-the-wall documentary about a family from Reading.  Later, I lived in Reading as a student and coincidentally we also had numerous flies on our walls (and once I even had some Walls on my flies - that was when I dropped an ice-cream onto my lap.).  There was no angle to this programme.  This was years before Channel 4 existed and the family in question were not fat or gypsies or fat gypsies; they weren’t first dateable or undateable; they weren’t filthy rich and fucking stupid, nor were they piss poor and fucking stupid; and they weren’t all doing an everyday job that involved dealing with members of the public that other members of the public find entertaining to watch.  Channel 4 wouldn’t have touched them.

On reflection, when you’re a kid in the 70s then EVERYTHING is ‘reality TV’, because everything on TV was REAL.  Take Rainbow. That’s your nuclear family unit, that is. A mixed-species homosexual couple who’d fostered two one-armed children with learning difficulties. (Channel 4 would certainly have touched THAT family).  Wrestling on World of Sport.  Every male in the 70s stripped down to their y-fronts for a wrestle with another male on an almost daily basis, that’s what you do when you don’t have computer games.  (I still do it now if my phone battery runs down).  And  most realistic of all was the documentary about life in a department store, Are you Being Served? Anyone going into a John Lewis or C&A or somewhere similar would have noted the superfluous over-staffing (5 shop assistants for one customer every half hour); and John Inman was a real gay man playing a gay man. Arguably he was only implicitly homosexual, but up until then films and TV had been full of gay men playing straight men and straight men playing gay men - and Millenials think that THEY invented the concept of being sexually non-binary. No more so than they invented ‘gender fluid’ (as we know, that was Les Dawson and Roy Barraclough.)

There is an argument against all this, though.  In contrast to the above, programmes that claimed to have some kind of gritty authenticity actually proved to be far from realistic. Grange Hill started before I went to secondary school, so I was duped into believing that I was on the verge of experiencing similar escapades to those of Tucker, Benny, Trisha and co.  Two years later I’m in secondary school and wondering why the pupils in Grange Hill didn’t use tits and willies and poo as the fulcrum around which ALL their humour was centred.  And The Sweeney showed coppers beating up criminals, using politically incorrect terminology, drinking scotch for breakfast and  tellling women to put their knickers on and make the tea - but my Dad was a copper in the 70s and he had Frosties for breakfast, so that’s at least one thing that wasn’t quite authentic.

But on the whole, 70s TV was far more authentic than reality TV these days, which presents to us people who are not representative of the population, but instead come from the narrower demographic of vain exhibitionists desperate for attention (or, in fewer cases, vulnerable people who find it hard to fit in). These unremarkable but irritating non-entities who saturate our screens are worthy not of  TV celebrity status, but instead a Sweeney-style whack.