Old Finances (back in the day)

Gigervamp

My dad worked in the post office and I remember going in to work with him when I was quite young and being given a roll of telegram paper to play with.

When I was in my teens, he was one of the managers at Trafalgar Square PO which was open 24 hours. I'd often pop in there to see him when I was up that way and one new years eve I needed the loo. Dad wasn't on nights, but I went in there, told them whose daughter I was and asked to use the loo! They let me and my friends in to use the loos and have a chat!

Ida_Notion

oopsadaisydoddle wrote: »

Apologies for the layout of my last post - I am too poorly to fight with my phone!!

Thanks for a great thread everyone!xx

Nowt wrong with the layout of your phone. Get better soon or Gene Hunt will be round to stamp on all your toys

Actually, that might be a good reason not to get better and just take up malingering instead :rotfl:

As you'd expect, there was a lot of practical stuff on telly in the seventies and eighties that would show you how to get the best from your pennies - Farmhouse Kitchen, the Blue Peter 'makes' etc - but TV catered for the dreamers then as well as the doers. I don't just mean with all the sun-soaked fantasy American imports like Charlie's Angels and The Love Boat that were all the rage at the time either.

If you didn't have all the latest in gadgets, furnishing and transport, then it was considered sufficiently entertaining to eyeball other people waltzing off with them on telly instead. One of my dad's favourite programmes in the seventies was The Sale Of The Century. He'd watch fascinated from the dubious comfort of the aging studio couch each week across the table-with-a-hole-in-it as people competed on our rented black and white telly for cars, barbecue and patio sets, canteens of cutlery and a whole load of other stuff.

Meanwhile, I'd be sitting there wondering what was so special about an 'occasional table', and what it was doing on the occasions that it wasn't being a table. The Sale Of The Century was followed in the mid eighties by The Price Is Right. People who think that the seventies and eighties weren't all about commercialism and consumerism have obviously never seen a studio audience erupt with joy as a sticker is peeled off to reveal the price of a hostess trolley and lava lamp combo

jackieb

Ida_Notion wrote: »

Nowt wrong with the layout of your phone. Get better soon or Gene Hunt will be round to stamp on all your toys

Actually, that might be a good reason not to get better and just take up malingering instead :rotfl:

As you'd expect, there was a lot of practical stuff on telly in the seventies and eighties that would show you how to get the best from your pennies - Farmhouse Kitchen, the Blue Peter 'makes' etc - but TV catered for the dreamers then as well as the doers. I don't just mean with all the sun-soaked fantasy American imports like Charlie's Angels and The Love Boat that were all the rage at the time either.

If you didn't have all the latest in gadgets, furnishing and transport, then it was considered sufficiently entertaining to eyeball other people waltzing off with them on telly instead. One of my dad's favourite programmes in the seventies was The Sale Of The Century. He'd watch fascinated from the dubious comfort of the aging studio couch each week across the table-with-a-hole-in-it as people competed on our rented black and white telly for cars, barbecue and patio sets, canteens of cutlery and a whole load of other stuff.

Meanwhile, I'd be sitting there wondering what was so special about an 'occasional table', and what it was doing on the occasions that it wasn't being a table. The Sale Of The Century was followed in the mid eighties by The Price Is Right. People who think that the seventies and eighties weren't all about commercialism and consumerism have obviously never seen a studio audience erupt with joy as a sticker is peeled off to reveal the price of a hostess trolley and lava lamp combo

Bullseye was great. I always wondered how the 2 pals would share their winnings if they won something like a speedboat or a trailer tent. I wonder how many arguments there were over stuff like that.

Ida_Notion

jackieb wrote: »

Bullseye was great. I always wondered how the 2 pals would share their winnings if they won something like a speedboat or a trailer tent. I wonder how many arguments there were over stuff like that.

I just used to think how lucky they were that I wasn't in there trying to aim darts at the board. There wouldn't have been arguments, just fatalities!

'Celebrity Squares' and 'Family Fortunes' were others I remember, particularly for the way Bob Monkhouse once tried to hide how nonplussed he was on realising that he'd just awarded a greenhouse to a contestant who lived halfway up a tower block

valentina

:rotfl:Bullseye - "listen to Tony"

Anyone else remember Romper Room on at teatime, also Teddy Edward?

Justamum

maganan wrote: »

Ah lovely pic, bet that could be any number of us posting here similar clothes, hair cuts, home furnishings etc

That's exactly what I thought when I saw it. Huge patterns on the wallpaper. All my photos from then have a brown 'wash' over them too - must be something to do with the developing process.

Justamum

chocolate_buttons wrote: »

At my school only the boys were allowed to take Computer Studies. :eek:

At my school you had to be good at maths to do computer studies. The computer had a room to itself and nobody else was allowed in. Only one boy in my year did computer studies.

Justamum

Gigervamp wrote: »

A bath made from a margarine tub,

I had a Pippa doll too - she would have drowned in a bath made from a marg tub :rotfl:

Did anybody else have a Tressie doll? The one where you could have the hair long or short? You pressed a button on her tummy and gently pulled out the hair, and if you wanted it short there was a special key which you used in her back to wind it back in. My sister was never very gentle with dolls and when she was brushing my doll's hair she snapped the neck. I was :mad:. I kept her for years, and when my DD1 was little I got her out. Unfortunately the hair didn't work because the elastic band which did the job inside has perished.

Justamum

maganan wrote: »

I also had an Abba tape I got too cool for :rotfl:so put tape on the top bits so I could tape the chart over it!

You can never be too cool for Abba. I love Abba. Maybe I'm just not cool :rotfl:

I had a poster of Donny Osmond on my bedroom wall when I was 9. I was a Bay City Roller fan from age 10 (Woody was my favourite!). I didn't like Punk, but luckily there was a fifties revival when I was about 15 which I loved - Shakin' Stevens was gorgeous, and I had everything he ever recorded, including his early stuff from before he was famous with his group The Sunsets. My favourite group from the age of 15 was Darts. I really fancied Bob Fish - I've always had a thing about bald men :rotfl:

GreyQueen

Love this thread.

Gigervamp, you could switch your 1970s pic with one of mine and no one would tell us apart.......:rotfl:

I have a pathological hatred of the colour orange which I attribute to having been subjected to such a lot of it in my formative years. The 1970s was a particularly orange decade and the patterns, OMG, I feel ill just thinking about the patterns.

Mum came home with a black carpet remnant with swirls of orange and lime green and insisted on putting it in my bedroom. It was vile and I didn't want it, I wanted the scraps of lino on the floor taken up and the hooked rugs left on the bare boards. Have no idea where I got such ideas from in a council estate totally devoid of lifestyle magazines but perhaps I was channelling shabby chic thru the ether or summat.

Needless to say, I had to do what I was told and was lumbered with that nylon monstrosity until I left home....

Nylon. We had a lot of that; brushed nylon nighties and the short-lived fad for nylon sheets. Can remember deliberately undressing in the dark to see the sparks of static.

Flatleys. Oh, we had one of those. Life was a perpetual stuggle to get clothes dry in a home with no heating beyond a coal fire in one room. The Flatley was an energy hog and we didn't keep it for too long. Can remember that it wasn't uncommon for Mum to have to finish drying knickers and socks in the oven in a hurry before school when we were young.:eek:

Ice cream at my Nan's was being sent out at Sunday teatime with a basin to have scoops of lovely vanilla from the little indy business which used to come around the village streets. Zero packaging waste with that method.

Anyone else recall how they used to screw-up the linkages between the telly programmes in the evening and they often ran 5-10 minutes of cartoons to fill in the gap whilst (I assume) technicians were flapping around splicing tape or whatever?

You'd been sent to bed and there'd be a sudden burst of the "Looney Tunes" theme music and we'd come rocketting downstairs again to watch Bugs Bunny or whatever it was until the tech-y problem was solved and the proper programme came on.

Anyone remember the little girl on the test card? She could've been my twin.

Tressie dolls; I wanted one but wasn't allowed to have one (we was poor, cue mournful violins please) and saw one a few years ago at a bootsale and nearly........bu no.