Issue No. 20: FRIDAYS

Before I was eleven, my weekend really began on Friday dinner (lunch) time, when I queued for fish and chips.

I would run out of school and meet Mam at the corner of our street and Park Avenue, and we would hurry up to the fish and chip shop. After a few years, Mam got a job packing biscuits at Wright’s Biscuit Factory across town. She would come home by bus to see to me at dinner times, before hurrying to work again. On Fridays, this meant that I would keep her place in the queue for either (the preferred) cod and chips or haddock and chips. I always feared getting to the front of this long queue and then confessing that I had no money for the order, relegating me to the back of the queue again. Luckily, Mam always arrived in the nick of time from her bus, purse at the ready. The queuing  seemed to last for ages, and I’ve no idea of how we managed to wait in line, scurry home, unpack the fish and chips from the outer wrappings of newspapers and inner wrapping of (wrongly-named) greaseproof paper, eat the large meal and then get back, respectively, to school and work.

Joe Loss

The radio was turned on at dinner times, tuned to the BBC’s ‘Light Programme’ and we chomped away, accompanied by the likes of Wilfred Pickles, hosting ‘Have a Go’, Workers’ Playtime’ or, in the pre-Radio 1 days on Fridays, the Northern Dance Orchestra or ‘The Joe Loss Pop Show’, where Joe Loss and His Orchestra and his singers would ‘cover’ the Top 10 hits. Even though there were really decent singers doing these ‘covers’, such as Ross McManus (father of Elvis Costello), the demanding public wanted to hear the real McCoy. We cruelly dubbed this last programme ‘The Dead Loss Flop Show’, in retrospect a thoroughly unfair and undeserved criticism.

Friday afternoons at school, after the big meal, were merely an irksome interlude before the weekend arrived, more so if we were given homework to complete before Monday.

I was allowed to stay up a bit later on Friday and Saturday nights, which was especially great when we eventually rented our first telly, a 12 inch, black, ‘Bakelite’ Morphy Richards, with the controls on top, inside a pop-up panel (super cool, eh?). The advent of the telly meant that by myself, throughout the week, I could now watch ‘The Lone Ranger’, ‘Champion the Wonder Horse’ and, later, other programmes, such as Richard Greene in ‘Robin Hood’, ‘William Tell’, ‘Ivanhoe’ (with Roger Moore) and a whole host of American shows, like ‘Highway Patrol’ (with Broderick Crawford), ‘Casey Jones’, ‘I Love Lucy’, ‘Popeye’, ‘The Dick Van Dyke Show’, ‘Gunsmoke’ (with James Arness), ’77 Sunset Strip’, with Effram Zimbalist Junior (a great name!) and the character ‘Kookie’...AND, later still, ‘Bonanza’, ‘Rawhide’ (with Clint Eastwood) and, my favourite, ‘The Saint’ (with Roger Moore again), on Sunday, before ‘Sunday Night at

Roger Moore as The Saint

the London Palladium’.

To be honest, staying up wasn’t a particularly big deal when, at about 10pm, both BBC and ITV shut down for the night. On the ITV channel, the local Tyne Tees Television would close the night with a religious slot, ‘The Epilogue’, which was the TV company’s way of blessing you and telling you to get to bed because you had a long day’s work ahead of you tomorrow.