What Genius!

The 1970 World Cup in Mexico.  The finest of them all with the best team I have ever seen winning the trophy.  I had avidly watched the previous tournament in England four years before when Brazil had been favourites to win the Cup for the third time on the run. However, an ageing team had been dispatched before the Quarter Finals with Pele being ruthlessly kicked and injured by a number of opposition players.

Come 1970 and Brazil were back managed by an old team mate of Pele's, Mario Zagalo. Reportedly a calming influence on the team, Zagalo managed a side of all talents, the one perceived weak spot being Felix in goal.  Whilst he did look less than certain at times, Brazil's goalie never let them down and they won their group with England in second place. The game between the two nations was one of the best I have ever seen with Gordon Banks famous save from Pele's header being one of many memorable moments.

England of course famously went out to West Germany in the Quarter Finals, but Brazil beat Peru 4-2 and met Uruguay in the Semis.  They won 3-1 after going a goal behind, but my favourite moment of the match was the "almost" goal that Pele nearly scored.  The ball was played through by Tostao and the great man tricked the Uruguayan keeper Mazurkiewicz by going the opposite way to the ball.  He raced to the right before pivoting on his left foot and striking the ball with his right.  The ball just missed the far post...it would have been one of the greatest goals ever scored.

Brazil famously went on to beat Italy 4-1 in the Final, with their final goal being one of the greatest goals that was scored...

And so ended that wonderful tournament.  Brazil kept the Jules Rimet trophy for good and the world awaited West Germany 1974...We shall see later on how that competition unfolded, but for now let us remember such brilliant players as Jairzinho, Rivelino, Carlos Alberto, Gerson, Clodoaldo, Tostao, Everaldo, Felix, Brito, Piazza and of course the incomparable Pele.

The Eagle Has Landed

If we  travel back forty-six years to the Summer of 1969, the excitement was high as Armstrong, Aldrin and Collins headed towards their date with destiny.  As Eagle (the Lunar Module) descended to the Sea of Tranquillity on that Sunday in July after bidding farewell to Columbia (the Command and Service Modules) in orbit above them, Neil and Buzz heard alarms ringing out!  "Go" said Mission Control in Houston, so on they went.  The computer guided landing system was taking them into a "football field sized crater" so Armstrong took the controls over and landed them safely on the lunar surface.  "Tranquillity Base here...the Eagle has landed".

The two astronauts descended the ladder to the Moon's surface a few hours later and carried out various tasks and experiments while we back home looked on in wonder.  All too quickly it was over and Armstrong and Aldrin climbed back into Eagle and rested before lifting off and rejoining Michael Collins in lunar orbit.  A few days later they successfully came back down to Earth.  Still humankind's greatest achievement.

"...I am a free man!"

The greatest television series of all time featured a man who we knew only as Number Six.  Placed in "The Village" by forces unknown, he constantly railed against the system to both keep himself sane and to also find a way out.  The Prisoner was Patrick McGoohan's follow up series to Danger Man where he had played John Drake, a secret agent in the cold war.  Whether or not Number Six was John Drake has been debated by many people over the years, but whoever he was, he had had enough of his job.

 

Why though?  Number Two always wanted "information", but he never got it...well, not the information he wanted anyway.  Why had Number Six resigned?...We never really found out.  Yet would he ever escape?  Of course not, because how can you ever escape from yourself?  Number Two changed almost every episode, but Number One was only revealed right at the end.

The final episode "Fall Out" was beyond weird.  Kenneth Griffith was "The President" who decrees that Number Six had won the right to be "an individual".  Number Two (Leo McKern) and Number 48 (Alexis Kanner) are both imprisoned due to their different types of revolt.  Number Six has revolted but has shown he is a true individual and therefore deserves to be set free.  He then tries to address the assembled throng, but is consistently drowned out.

 

 Then Number Six is led to finally meet Number One...who turns out to be......himself!  Chaos then ensues with a rocket being launched, Rover (the Village guard) deflating and dying and Numbers 2, 6, 48 and the Butler breaking free in the back of a truck and being driven towards London.  Number 48 gets off before the city and hitch hikes.  The other three reach the Houses of Parliament where Number 2 goes into the House of Lords.  The Butler and Number 6 reach his flat and enter...the door having Number 1 on it.  The final scene shows Number 6 in his car driving towards us.

 

What did it all mean?  In 1977, Patrick McGoohan said:
"Number 1 was depicted as an evil, governing force in this Village. So, who is this Number 1? We just see the Number Twos, the sidekicks. Now this overriding, evil force is at its most powerful within ourselves and we have constantly to fight it, I think, and that is why I made Number 1 an image of Number 6. His other half, his alter ego".

He also stated that:
"The final scene is meant to show that freedom is a myth, and there is no final conclusion to the series because we continue to be prisoners."  

And that: 
"Each man is a prisoner unto himself".

Be seeing you.

"...Ra Boom Di Ay!"

Gosh, she was gorgeous!  Linda Thorson as Tara King came into my life in 1968, and things changed forever.  I had loved The Avengers for years, just about remembering Honor Blackman as Cathy Gale and then enjoying Diana Rigg playing Emma Peel.  Patrick Macnee was the smooth, unflappable John Steed who outwitted dastardly villains along with his various partners.

The Avengers first aired in 1961 with Ian Hendry as Dr David Keel who joined up with John Steed (apparently a somewhat mysterious figure at first) to fight crime.  This was before my adult television time, but seven years later Tara took over from Emma for Series Six.  Emma Peel (and Cathy Gale) had clearly been strong, independent women who had been more than the equal of John Steed when it came to combatting crime and evil doing, but both had come from outside the intelligence environment whereas Tara was a young, trained secret service agent who hero worshipped Steed. 

In Emma's final and Tara's first episode "The Forget-Me-Knot", the two meet briefly at the end in Steed's flat.  Emma informs Tara that Steed prefers his tea stirred anticlockwise and departs to rejoin her long lost (now recently found) husband.  Steed at one moment saddened by Mrs Peel's leaving is clearly delighted by Tara's arrival.  The final series of The Avengers was a surreal, strange and sometimes silly experience, but overall very enjoyable.  This (for me) was in no small part down to Linda Thorson's performances as the absolutely delectable Tara King.

Immortal

Lisbon, 25th May 1967. The European Cup Final.  Attack versus defence.  Inspiration versus organisation. Celtic versus Inter Milan.  

What a game it was.  Jock Stein's team all born within 30 miles of Glasgow taking on and beating the stars of the Italian league who had won the Cup in two of the previous three years.  I can remember watching it on tv and virtually praying for Celtic to score after Inter had taken the lead early on with a Sandro Mazzola penalty.

I think it was the fact that Celtic were so committed to attack whereas Inter were content to defend in (extraordinary) numbers and intensity after scoring.  Tommy Gemmell equalised and Steve Chalmers scored the winner in the second half...Justice (this time) was undoubtedly done.

Bill Shankly told Jock Stein after the match that he was "immortal now".  He always will be.

...It is now!

Almost half a century later, Kenneth Wolstenholme's famous final words on the match remain a fitting testament to England's triumph that day. Of all teams to meet in the final, it had to be West Germany. As All Our Yesterdays regularly reminded us, it was only a quarter of a century previously that the two countries had been engaged in an infinitely more tragic and lethal conflict. On a sunny 1966 Summer's day in north London, Geoff Hurst and ten other football players became national heroes and all suddenly seemed well with the world.

However, little did we know that a long, slow decline would follow this fantastic day.  Leon 1970,,,Wembley 1973...The three day week...The Winter of Discontent ...These were the signposts of the Seventies.  The true horror though came with Mrs Thatcher in the empty Eighties.  Style overtook Content...The Post War Consensus  came to an end.  "No Such Thing as Society" indeed.  

How had things come to this?  We shall see later in this tale, but for now let's remember that  wonderful day as it was:

Till Death Us Do Part

Alf Garnett...1960s working man incarnate or foul mouthed caricature?  He came onto my tv screen in the middle of the decade unlike anyone else I'd encountered in my relatively sheltered childhood.  A working class man who voted tory...even at my tender age I knew something about politics thanks to my family, so Alf definitely seemed a bit odd.  He loved Winston Churchill and the Queen and hated Harold Wilson and (especially) his son in law Mike ("that randy Scouse git").

The show's creator and writer Johnny Speight always stated that he intended Alf's views to be seen as reactionary and reprehensible, but I knew many people who agreed with Mr Garnett; perhaps a testimony to the acting skills of Warren Mitchell who at times made Alf not just a boorish and bigoted character, but someone who was all too human.  The other main characters in the programme were the aforementioned Mike played by Anthony Booth, his wife Rita (Una Stubbs) and of course Alf's wife Else (Dandy Nichols). Each of them seemed to consider Alf a pathetic, unlovable character and his raging against Mike and Rita's similarly aggressive if polar opposite views on 1960s morals and events kept the creative tension going.

However, Else was what some might term today more of a "passive aggressive" character. Some of the most poignant moments arrived after Alf and his wife had been arguing about something (him struggling to say anything towards the end apart from "listen!"). These scenes would end with Alf shouting " I'm going down the pub!".  And why not...sometimes going for a drink or three has definitely helped me to keep just about sane!

A Hard Day's Night

The film was fab...like the "four" themselves.  A comedy caper that followed the group through a day of Beatlemania from Liverpool to London by train and beyond, it featured music that was (is) pop at its very best.  The title track of the accompanying album on its own is one of the highlights of the past five decades.  "I'm Happy Just to Dance With You" features the best backing vocals I've still ever heard whilst "Tell Me Why" and "Can't Buy Me Love" both continue the upbeat mood.  The ballads "And I Love Her" and "If I Fell" slow the pace down and act as emotional balance to the rest of Side One (the movie soundtrack).

Side Two doesn't feature in the film, but the quality of the songs remains extremely high.  "When I Get Home" and "You Can't Do That" are especially top notch  However, the first track of the second side is an absolute classic.  "Any Time At All" is a great rocker that features peerless vocals from John and Paul.  Fifty-one years after its release, the A Hard Day's Night LP has more than stood the test of time, as has the film.

Death in Dealey Plaza

 I had just come home from my Primary School with my Mother where there had been a "bring and buy" event.  Soon afterwards we switched the television on...My Mother thought World War III was about to start...All I knew was that something awful had happened.  Apparently, President Kennedy had been shot and killed in Dallas, Texas.  Had the Russians done it?  Was it Fidel Castro?  Whoever it was, someone called Lee Harvey Oswald was arrested later that day, at first for shooting a cop called J D Tippit then later he was accused of also killing JFK.

Amazingly, two days later, Lee Harvey Oswald was himself shot and killed by some guy called Jack Ruby...On live TV no less!!!  What on earth was going on?  

The Warren Commision was created by President Johnson and tasked with finding out whether it really was just Lee Oswald who had shot President Kennedy.  They decided it was just the "patsy" as Oswald had referred to himself after being arrested on that day, although many people doubted this and even LBJ stated to Walter Cronkite off the record some years later that he thought other people were probably involved in the killing.

Fast forward to 1975...I was in a pub watching (I think) News at Ten when Abraham Zapruder's film of the motorcade in Dallas that fateful day was shown.  The horror of seeing JFK's head being literally blown off was matched  with a feeling of incredulity...Lee Harvey Oswald was supposed to have shot John Kennedy from the Texas Schoolbook Depository from behind,,,How could the President;s head move so violently backwards when the fatal shot hit him???

New theories followed thick and fast...a governmental committee in America concluded soon afterwards that President Kennedy had probably been killed as a result of a conspiracy.  Throughout the next 15 or so years, documentaries and the JFK film brought forward to me such people as Mary Moorman, Jean Hill and the Newman family who had all witnessed the assassination close by.   "Badgeman" and "Black dog man" also came into view who may or may not be real and may or may not have been behind the fence on the famous grassy knoll.  The BBC aired a documentary made in America on the fortieth anniversary in 2003 that seemed to point back to Lee Harvey Oswald being the lone assassin. The "magic" bullet really was magic!

By the time the fiftieth anniversary arrived in November 2013, I had been on Facebook for some time and had seen various groups dedicated to the assassination put forward so many theories including someone firing from the storm drain in front and others from the Daltex building behind.  For what it's worth, I find it almost impossible to believe that just one gunman killed President Kennedy based on evidence such as the Zapruder film.  I am beginning to doubt that the full and true story of that day in Dealey Plaza will ever be known to people at large.  R.I.P. John F Kennedy.

My First Final

One of the first big “events” that I can vaguely remember is the 1963 FA Cup Final between Manchester United and Leicester City.  I can just about recall seeing the match on t.v. and the fact that United won.  Thus began a love affair with this annual match which lasted fervently until the 1990s.  I still catch at least part of the match most years, but the"romance" of the Cup faded for me long ago.  That's part of getting older I guess.

Love Me Do

One of the first songs I can remember hearing on the radio was Beatles band's first hit way back in Autumn 1962.  It sounded (and still sounds) pretty simple and basic fare...Who then could have imagined the changes that the four "mop tops" from Liverpool would be responsible for in the next 8 years.