till they stopped making it in the early ’80s, including a touchpad model and an array of designer colours. However, none of these could disguise the fact that a phone that looked cutting edge in 1965 had become something of an anachronism less than 20 years later. It was outlived by its rotary dial older brother.
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Directory Enquiries
Where we now have two very dodgy-looking blokes with moustaches in running gear harassing Ray Parker Jr and urging us all to call 118 118, we used to have delightfully well-spoken ladies at the end of the number 192.
‘Hello, Directory Enquiries …’ they would respond, albeit after what could frequently be a rather long wait for an answer, but the mists of nostalgia can allow us to conveniently forget such trifles.
The system was pretty much the same as it is now: you would give a name and possibly an address and the operator would try to track down the phone number for you. It used to be a free service, and was just one of many phone services that the GPO operated in the days before privatisation and deregulation.
There was the speaking clock, of course, which still exists. It started out in 1936 and the first voice was that of Ethel Cain, a telephonist who entered a competition and won ten guineas for her trouble. There have actually been only three other permanent voices for the speaking clock, which receives over 60 million calls a year, but there have been special one-off voices, including that of Tinkerbell during a Disney promotion.
But do you remember the old service that allowed you to call in and listen to the latest music releases? Or the one with football scores on a Saturday? There was even a Santa line at Christmas.
Many of these have fallen by the wayside now that we have clever phones and internet and, well, just don’t use our landlines anywhere near as much, but the flurry of private directory enquiries numbers suggests that there is still plenty of demand for that service, at least.
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Toothpaste Tubes Made of Metal
Kids today don’t know how lucky they are. A simple push on a pump action dispenser and out spurts a minty worm of toothpaste.
Just give them a real old school tube of toothpaste, one made of metal, and let’s see how they like that.
Toothpaste tubes first started appearing towards the end of the 19th century and prevailed right up until the Second World War, when metal shortages led to experiments with a plastic/metal mix. Metal tubes weren’t finally phased out till the early 1990s.
Whatever the history, the point is that squeezing the last pea-sized bit of goo out of a metal toothpaste tube was one of the most difficult things an eight-year-old could ever be asked to do, especially if someone else has been squeezing from the middle. Woe betide the youngster who managed to split the tube while desperately squeezing, leading to tiny spurts of paste flying all over the place.
Gone, but not really missed all that much.
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Jif
Jif was the nation’s favourite cleaning fluid, available in all sorts of sizes, shapes, and applications.
In 2001, the name was changed to fit in with Unilever’s global branding for the product.
It is now called Cif.
Which is just plain silly. (See also Marathon and Opal Fruits.)
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Creamola Foam
In an attempt to broaden the international appeal of this book, here is an entry for Scottish readers.
Creamola Foam was a powder that, when mixed with water, created a sweet fizzy drink. It came in lemon, raspberry, and orange flavours, with a cola version added later on. It was made by Rowntree’s in Glasgow and, for some reason, and a bit like tablet and Edinburgh rock, never really made it down south.
Now, being from down south myself, I have never tasted the foamy delights of Creamola, so I asked my Scottish friend Kat to describe the taste for me:
‘It’s as if someone had made orangeade milkshake. Not very nice, now I think of it, but at the time, when I was seven, it was great.’
But in 1998, Nestlé (who had taken over Rowntree’s) stopped making it.
In the more than a decade since, several petitions and online campaigns have been started to try to persuade the makers to bring it back. The issue was even raised in the Scottish parliament.
Now, I don’t want to slight the nice people at Nestlé, whom I have taken the mickey out of elsewhere on these pages, but I would politely point out that no one wants a horde of angry Scotsmen chasing after them for any reason, least of all if they are demanding the reinstatement of their favourite effervescent fruit drink.
Fortunately, perhaps, for Nestlé, two Scottish companies have started making their own versions of the drink with both Kramola Fizz and Krakatoa available on shelves north of the border.
Still none down here, though.
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Milkshake Straws
You used to be able to get these from your milkman but I haven’t seen one in years. Short paper straws, sealed at each end, they would contain flavoured powder – strawberry, raspberry, banana, all the usuals. The idea was that you tore off one end and poured the contents into a glass of milk, gave it a bit of a stir, and, voilà! – a tasty milkshake.
Of course, kids being kids, more than one straw in every batch would be unloaded straight into the mouth for a kick of pure whatever it was that went into these things.
Milkshake straws probably enjoyed their peak of popularity in the days of Humphrey, the mysterious milk snatcher in the Unigate TV ads (more on him later), his trademark red and white striped straw proving easy to promote to children.
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Duo Cans
I’ll be perfectly honest, I don’t remember Duo Cans myself, but my dad suggested I put them in and, being the dutiful son, I thought it only fair and proper that I made the effort to research them.
And what a peculiar piece of ready-meal culinary genius they were too.
Basically a can of curry and rice that you opened from both ends – one end had the curry, the other had the rice. First, you had to heat it up by sticking the unopened can in boiling water. Once it was hot enough, you burnt off your fingerprints by opening this cylinder of molten metal – at both ends! – with a can opener then poured the contents onto your plate.
Hard to work out why they didn’t last, really, isn’t it?
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Black and White Television
You could be forgiven for thinking that black and white televisions were well and truly extinct, but you would be very wrong indeed.
OK, so there aren’t that many of them around, but there are still over 25,000 people in the UK who own a black and white TV licence. It costs about a third of a colour licence, which may explain the attraction.
A fair proportion of black and white owners are elderly people who own an old set and haven’t upgraded, but the old monochrome idiot’s lantern