Age of Innocence – 1963, The Assassination of JFK

The first few years of our lives are truly the age of innocence when we have a glorious lack of awareness of the external national and global issues that are going on all around us and shaping the world and the environment to which we will one day grow up into.

For me the end of the world was the bottom of the back garden, the end of the street or the physical boundaries of play imposed by my parents.  I was blissfully unaware of what was going on outside of those boundaries and parents and schoolteachers clearly didn’t think it was necessary for me or others to have knowledge of current affairs.  There was no John Craven’s Newsround, well not until 1972, not even very much television, and no way of knowing what was going on and no real need to find out.

They say that everyone remembers where they were the day that John F Kennedy was shot and I can confirm that my very first consciousness of world news events was November 22^nd 1963, the day the President of the USA was assassinated in Dallas in Texas and even then the news itself didn’t particularly register as important but rather it was the reaction of my parents that proved to be my news awareness watershed.

It was early evening, I was at home, mum and dad were round at a neighbour’s house, and I was watching the television.  It was a Friday night so I had probably been watching Crackerjack on the BBC with Aemonn Andrews.  Crackerjack finished at a quarter to six and after that came the news programmes which held no particular interest for me and anyway it was a little too early for news of the shooting to be breaking in England.

Kennedy was shot at half past twelve Dallas time, half past six in England.  On BBC television, the six o’clock News finished at ten past six.  It had been a quiet day; there had been the results of the Dundee West by-election, the announcement of the architect appointed to design the new National Theatre and the departure from the United Kingdom of the new Miss World, Carol Crawford, who was returning to Jamaica.  Ten minutes was more than enough to report the events of a very ordinary sort of day in 1963.

At seven o’clock I would probably have been watching the game show ‘Take Your Pick’ with Michael Miles but ten minutes in, it was interrupted for ITN’s first ever newsflash.  Kennedy had been shot.  On the BBC, ‘Points of View’, presented by Robert Robinson, was interrupted at approximately the same time and having nothing to watch of any particular interest to me I turned the television off and probably looked for some sort of mischief appropriate for a nine year old boy left at home alone.

Soon after this mum and dad returned home in a bit of a fluster and I didn’t know what could be the matter.  Dad demanded to know why I had turned off the television which was a bit confusing because he didn’t really like us having it on all that much and would always turn it off the minute he thought we weren’t watching it.

He became a bit agitated as he turned the set back on and waited for it to flicker into life.  This was quite a long process in the 1960s because TVs had an antiquated system of valves, wires and resisters instead of today’s micro chips and these took some time to ‘warm up’, after a minute or so you would get sound and then after another minute or so (if you were lucky) a grainy black and white picture with flickering horizontal lines would slowly start to appear.  Most television sets needed about fifteen minutes to warm up, I seem to remember.

TV sets were always breaking down as well, half way through a programme there would be a ‘PING’ and the picture would disappear into a bright white spot in the middle of the screen like a bright star falling into a black hole and that was it until the television repair man responded to an emergency call to come by and fix it by replacing the broken tube in the back, which was a bit like replacing a broken light bulb.

After the first BBC newsflash, ‘Tonight’ came on, but it was ended early when at half past seven the programme was interrupted with the news that Kennedy had been shot in the head and his condition was critical.  A few seconds later a phone rang, the newsreader took the call in front of the viewers and finally said ‘we regret to announce that President Kennedy is dead.’

After that the BBC didn’t really have a clue what to do next and what viewers got was the BBC television continuity screen, a revolving globe, for twenty minutes or so that was punctuated by three brief bulletins read by the newsreader.  My parent’s reaction to the news took me by surprise and the event was a significant moment in my young life because subsequently I was always aware of the news after that.

This was a transitional moment when I started to leave the age of innocence behind.

Because getting transatlantic news in 1963 was still somewhat difficult (Telstar, launched in 1962 was undergoing complicated repairs and not transmitting) eventually the TV stations reverted to their scheduled programming and the BBC continued with Harry Worth and Dr Finlay’s Casebook and the ITV showed an episode of Emergency Ward 10, which was a sort of 1960’s Casualty!

It’s an interesting fact that on the following day the BBC broadcast the first ever episode of Doctor Who.  I think at the time I found that a lot more interesting than Kennedy’s assassination.

Considering the matter of news awareness has made me think about all of the newsworthy events that occurred during that first ten years of mortal existence when I was sublimely oblivious to what was happening in the world.  Lots of momentous things were going on of course it was just that they were not registering on my personal news alert sensor that was only kicked into life the day that John F Kennedy died.  That is how I started this blog!

Do you remember where you were the day that JFK was assassinated?

Scrap Book Project – Childrens’ Television

Whenever a group of fifty somethings come together it is almost inevitable that at some point the conversation will sink towards nostalgia and this in turn will at some point get around to the subject of children’s TV.

In the 1960s there wasn’t nearly as much television broadcasting time provided for kids and it was restricted to ‘Watch With Mother’, which was shown at lunch time and was aimed at the pre-school audience and then for school children there was ‘Children’s Hour’ at five o’clock or thereabouts (I say thereabouts because sometimes BBC and ITV altered the scheduling to achieve viewing numbers advantage).  This gave us enough time to walk home from school (yes, walk – shock horror), get changed and get the TV set warmed up!

Everyone remembers ‘Blue Peter’, which was transmitted twice a week on Monday and Thursday.  It was first aired on 16th October 1958 and the first two presenters were Christopher (and now for something completely different) Trace, an actor and Leila Williams, winner of Miss Great Britain in 1957.  In the 1960s of course the most memorable presenters were Valerie (here’s one I made earlier) Singleton and John (Get down Shep) Noakes.

In response to the success of Blue Peter, TV weighed in with ‘Magpie’ which had a similar format but was less bourgeois and a bit grittier.  I preferred Blue Peter but had to watch Magpie because of the teenager’s ‘pin-up’ presenter Susan Stranks.

I regret my selfishness now but one programme that I didn’t care for was ‘Vision On’ which I think was shown on a Tuesday and was designed for deaf children; selfish, because this specialist programme accounted for only 10% or so of a week’s children’s television output and disability was approached differently fifty years ago.  I didn’t watch it because it felt somehow as though it was exclusively for deaf children and that seems rather absurd now.

There were cartoons in ‘The Huckleberry Hound Show’, ‘Tom and Jerry’, ‘Deputy Dawg’ and ‘Wacky Races’; the puppet shows ‘Supercar’, ‘Fireball XL5’, ‘Stingray’ and ‘Thunderbirds; and programmes with smart alec animals like ‘Lassie’, ‘Flipper’ and ‘Skippy the Bush Kangaroo’.

There were two animal programmes that I liked, ‘Zoo Time’ with Desmond Morris which was designed to be almost completely educational and ‘Animal Magic’ which was more relaxed and both informative and entertaining and brought a bit of humour to the zoo.  I think on balance I preferred ‘Animal Magic’ which was first broadcast in 1962 and ran for twenty-one years.  The presenter was the jovial Johnny Morris.  His charismatic style and genuine fondness for animals made the show an instant success as the show combined jovial voice overs applied to various animals from Bristol Zoo.

Sometimes the Television Companies showed programmes from the continent and two of my favourites were the French film ‘Robinson Crusoe’ with its distinctive and haunting theme tune and filmed on the island of Gran Canaria by the way, and ‘The Singing Ringing Tree’ which was part of the ‘Tales From Europe’ series.

‘The Singing Ringing Tree’ was a children’s film made in East Germany in 1957 and broken down into a television series by the BBC. It was a story in the style of the Brothers Grimm and although it fascinated me, with its beautiful princess, talking animals, a giant fish flapping in a rapidly drying river, a beautiful white horse, a nasty dwarf, a bear in a cave, a girl in rags and an odd little tree with bells on it, I never understood it.  It was supposed to be a lovely old fashioned fairy tale of good triumphing over evil but I was never really able to get to the bottom of it.  It was dark, weird and spooky and I still wonder why the BBC thought that it was suitable for daytime children’s television.  Along with ‘Doctor Who’ it is the only programme that I can remember watching from behind the safety of the sofa! The comedian Paul Whitehouse once said, “The Singing Ringing Tree used to make me pee my pants when I was a kid”.

“It’s Friday, it’s five o’clock. . . It’s Crackerjack!”

This was the last children’s show of the week (excluding weekends) and‘Crackerjack’ was a sort of kid’s version of a variety show.  The shows were filmed in front of a live audience at the BBC Television Theatre and were quite manic. The format of the programme included competitive games for teams of children, a music spot, a comedy double act, and a finale in which the cast performed a short comic play, adapting popular songs of the day and incorporating them into the action. One of the most memorable games was a quiz called ‘Double or Drop’, where each contestant was given a prize to hold for each question answer correctly, but given a cabbage if they answer incorrectly. They were out of the game if they dropped any of the items they were holding or received a third cabbage. ‘’Crackerjack’ was always one of my favourites.

Children’s TV ended at around six o’clock and this was the time for the ten minute news bulletin.  Dad would be home from work by now, Mum would be putting the finishing touches to afternoon tea and we would be sent to our rooms to play so that the grown-ups could watch the TV in peace, soak up the day’s news and then watch ‘Crossroads’.

Scrap book Project – JFK and News Awareness

In his scrapbook dad kept three front page newspaper articles – The funeral of Winston Churchill, the Manchester United Munich air disaster and the assassination of JFK!

John Fitzgerald Kennedy was born on May 29th 1917, in 1961 he became the thirty-fifth President of the United States and two years later on 22nd November 1963 he was assassinated in Dallas, Texas.

They say that everyone remembers where they were the day that John F Kennedy was shot and I can confirm that my very first consciousness of world news events was my news awareness watershed.

It was early evening, I was at home, mum and dad were round at a neighbour’s house, and I was watching the television.  It was a Friday night so I had probably been watching Crackerjack on the BBC with Aemonn Andrews.  Crackerjack finished at a quarter to six and after that came the news programmes which held no particular interest for me and in any case it was a little too early for news of the shooting to be breaking in England.

Kennedy was shot at half past twelve Dallas time, which was half past six in the United Kingdom.  On BBC television, the six o’clock News finished at ten past six.  It had been a quiet day; there had been the results of the Dundee West by-election, the announcement of the architect appointed to design the new National Theatre and the departure from the United Kingdom of the new Miss World, Carol Crawford, who was returning to Jamaica.

News bulletins were different in the early 1960s and ten minutes was generally considered more than enough to report the events of a very ordinary sort of day in 1963.  It was not until 1967 that the half hour evening bulletin ‘News at Ten’ was introduced and even then some television big-wigs were sceptical.

At seven o’clock I would probably have been watching the game show ‘Take Your Pick’ with Michael Miles but ten minutes into the show, it was interrupted for ITN’s first ever newsflash.

President Kennedy had been shot.

On the BBC, ‘Points of View’, presented by Robert Robinson, was interrupted at approximately the same time and having nothing to watch of any particular interest to me I turned the television off and probably looked for some sort of mischief appropriate for a nine year old boy left at home alone like circumnavigating the living room using only the furniture and without stepping on the floor, which was always one of my favourites.

Soon after this mum and dad returned home in a bit of a fluster and I didn’t know what could be the matter.  Dad demanded to know why I had turned off the television which was a bit confusing because he didn’t really like us having it on all that much and would always turn it off the minute he thought we weren’t giving it our full attention.

After the first BBC newsflash, ‘Tonight’ came on, but it was ended early when at half past seven the programme was interrupted with the updated news that Kennedy had been shot in the head and that his condition was critical.  A few seconds later a phone rang, the newsreader took the call in front of the viewers with an appropriately solemn face and finally said “we regret to announce that President Kennedy is dead.”

After that the BBC didn’t really have a clue what to do next and what viewers got was the television continuity screen, a revolving globe, for twenty minutes or so that was punctuated by three brief bulletins read by the newsreader.  My parent’s reaction to the news took me by surprise and the event was a significant moment in my young life because subsequently I was always aware of the news after that.  This was a transitional moment when I left the age of innocence behind.

The death of Kennedy was an important event in news coverage because the World was receiving the news for the first time as it was happening.  Almost a hundred years earlier, in April 1865, Abraham Lincoln was the first United States President to be assassinated and that news would have taken weeks to reach the United Kingdom because the first successful transatlantic telephone cable wasn’t completed until July 1866.

Receiving transatlantic news in 1963 was still somewhat difficult however and Telstar, launched in 1962 was undergoing complicated repairs at the time and not transmitting so eventually the television stations reverted to their scheduled programming and the BBC continued with ‘Harry Worth’ and ‘Dr Finlay’s Casebook‘ and the ITV showed an episode of ‘Emergency Ward 10′, which was a sort of 1960’s Casualty.

Considering the matter of news awareness has made me think about all of the newsworthy events that occurred during that first few years of my life when I was sublimely oblivious to what was happening in the World.  Lots of momentous things were going on of course it was just that they were not registering on my personal news alert sensor that was only kicked into life the day that John F Kennedy died.

Children’s Television in the 1960s

Whenever a group of fifty somethings come together it is almost inevitable that at some point the conversation will sink towards nostalgia and this in turn will at some point get around to the subject of children’s TV.

In the 1960s there wasn’t nearly as much television broadcasting time provided for kids and it was restricted to ‘Watch With Mother’, which was shown at lunch time and was aimed at the pre-school audience and then for school children there was ‘Children’s Hour’ at five o’clock or thereabouts (I say thereabouts because sometimes BBC and ITV altered the scheduling to achieve viewing numbers advantage).  This gave us enough time to walk home from school (yes, walk – shock horror), get changed and get the TV set warmed up!

Everyone remembers ‘Blue Peter’, which was transmitted twice a week on Monday and Thursday.  It was first aired on 16th October 1958 and the first two presenters were Christopher (and now for something completely different) Trace, an actor and Leila Williams, winner of Miss Great Britain in 1957.  In the 1960s of course the most memorable presenters were Valerie (here’s one I made earlier) Singleton and John (Get down Shep) Noakes.

In response to the success of Blue Peter, TV weighed in with ‘Magpie’ which had a similar format but was less bourgeois and a bit grittier.  I preferred Blue Peter but had to watch Magpie because of the teenager’s ‘pin-up’ presenter Susan Stranks.

I regret my selfishness now but one programme that I didn’t care for was ‘Vision On’ which I think was shown on a Tuesday and was designed for deaf children; selfish, because this specialist programme accounted for only 10% or so of a week’s children’s television output and disability was approached differently fifty years ago.  I didn’t watch it because it felt somehow as though it was exclusively for deaf children and that seems rather absurd now.

There were cartoons in ‘The Huckleberry Hound Show’, ‘Tom and Jerry’, ‘Deputy Dawg’ and ‘Wacky Races’; the puppet shows ‘Supercar’, ‘Fireball XL5’, ‘Stingray’ and ‘Thunderbirds; and programmes with smart alec animals like ‘Lassie’, ‘Flipper’ and ‘Skippy the Bush Kangaroo’.

There were two animal programmes that I liked, ‘Zoo Time’ with Desmond Morris which was designed to be almost completely educational and ‘Animal Magic’ which was more relaxed and both informative and entertaining and brought a bit of humour to the zoo.  I think on balance I preferred ‘Animal Magic’ which was first broadcast in 1962 and ran for twenty-one years.  The presenter was the jovial Johnny Morris.  His charismatic style and genuine fondness for animals made the show an instant success as the show combined jovial voice overs applied to various animals from Bristol Zoo.

Sometimes the Television Companies showed programmes from the continent and two of my favourites were the French film ‘Robinson Crusoe’ with its distinctive and haunting theme tune and filmed on the island of Gran Canaria by the way, and ‘The Singing Ringing Tree’ which was part of the ‘Tales From Europe’ series.

‘The Singing Ringing Tree’ was a children’s film made in East Germany in 1957 and broken down into a television series by the BBC. It was a story in the style of the Brothers Grimm and although it fascinated me, with its beautiful princess, talking animals, a giant fish flapping in a rapidly drying river, a beautiful white horse, a nasty dwarf, a bear in a cave, a girl in rags and an odd little tree with bells on it, I never understood it.  It was supposed to be a lovely old fashioned fairy tale of good triumphing over evil but I was never really able to get to the bottom of it.  It was dark, weird and spooky and I still wonder why the BBC thought that it was suitable for daytime children’s television.  Along with ‘Doctor Who’ it is the only programme that I can remember watching from behind the safety of the sofa! The comedian Paul Whitehouse once said, “The Singing Ringing Tree used to make me pee my pants when I was a kid”.

“It’s Friday, it’s five o’clock. . . It’s Crackerjack!”

This was the last children’s show of the week (excluding weekends) and‘Crackerjack’ was a sort of kid’s version of a variety show.  The shows were filmed in front of a live audience at the BBC Television Theatre and were quite manic. The format of the programme included competitive games for teams of children, a music spot, a comedy double act, and a finale in which the cast performed a short comic play, adapting popular songs of the day and incorporating them into the action. One of the most memorable games was a quiz called ‘Double or Drop’, where each contestant was given a prize to hold for each question answer correctly, but given a cabbage if they answer incorrectly. They were out of the game if they dropped any of the items they were holding or received a third cabbage. ‘’Crackerjack’ was always one of my favourites.

Children’s TV ended at around six o’clock and this was the time for the ten minute news bulletin.  Dad would be home from work by now, Mum would be putting the finishing touches to afternoon tea and we would be sent to our rooms to play so that the grown-ups could watch the TV in peace, soak up the day’s news and then watch ‘Crossroads’.

Assassination and News Awareness

John Fitzgerald Kennedy was born on May 29^th 1917, in 1961 he became the 35^th President of the United States and two years later on22nd November 1963 he was assassinated in Dallas, Texas.

They say that everyone remembers where they were the day that John F Kennedy was shot and I can confirm that my very first consciousness of world news events was my news awareness watershed.

It was early evening, I was at home, mum and dad were round at a neighbour’s house, and I was watching the television.  It was a Friday night so I had probably been watching Crackerjack on the BBC with Aemonn Andrews.  Crackerjack finished at a quarter to six and after that came the news programmes which held no particular interest for me and in any case it was a little too early for news of the shooting to be breaking in England.

Kennedy was shot at half past twelve Dallas time, which was half past six in the United Kingdom.  On BBC television, the six o’clock News finished at ten past six.  It had been a quiet day; there had been the results of the Dundee West by-election, the announcement of the architect appointed to design the new National Theatre and the departure from the United Kingdom of the new Miss World, Carol Crawford, who was returning to Jamaica.  News bulletins were different in the early 1960s and ten minutes was generally considered more than enough to report the events of a very ordinary sort of day in 1963.  It was not until 1967 that the half hour evening bulletin ‘News at Ten’ was introduced and even then some television big-wigs were sceptical.

At seven o’clock I would probably have been watching the game show ‘Take Your Pick’ with Michael Miles but ten minutes into the show, it was interrupted for ITN’s first ever newsflash.  Kennedy had been shot.  On the BBC, ‘Points of View’, presented by Robert Robinson, was interrupted at approximately the same time and having nothing to watch of any particular interest to me I turned the television off and probably looked for some sort of mischief appropriate for a nine year old boy left at home alone like circumnavigating the living room using only the furniture and without stepping on the floor, which was always one of my favourites.

Soon after this mum and dad returned home in a bit of a fluster and I didn’t know what could be the matter.  Dad demanded to know why I had turned off the television which was a bit confusing because he didn’t really like us having it on all that much and would always turn it off the minute he thought we weren’t giving it our full attention.

After the first BBC newsflash, ‘Tonight’ came on, but it was ended early when at half past seven the programme was interrupted with the updated news that Kennedy had been shot in the head and that his condition was critical.  A few seconds later a phone rang, the newsreader took the call in front of the viewers with an appropriately solemn face and finally said “we regret to announce that President Kennedy is dead.”

After that the BBC didn’t really have a clue what to do next and what viewers got was the television continuity screen, a revolving globe, for twenty minutes or so that was punctuated by three brief bulletins read by the newsreader.  My parent’s reaction to the news took me by surprise and the event was a significant moment in my young life because subsequently I was always aware of the news after that.  This was a transitional moment when I left the age of innocence behind.

The death of Kennedy was an important event in news coverage because the World was receiving the news for the first time as it was happening.  Almost a hundred years earlier, in April 1865, Abraham Lincoln was the first United States President to be assassinated and that news would have taken weeks to reach the United Kingdom because the first successful transatlantic telephone cable wasn’t completed until July 1866.

Receiving transatlantic news in 1963 was still somewhat difficult however and Telstar, launched in 1962 was undergoing complicated repairs at the time and not transmitting so eventually the television stations reverted to their scheduled programming and the BBC continued with Harry Worth and Dr Finlay’s Casebook and the ITV showed an episode of Emergency Ward 10, which was a sort of 1960’s Casualty.

Considering the matter of news awareness has made me think about all of the newsworthy events that occurred during that first few years of my life when I was sublimely oblivious to what was happening in the World.  Lots of momentous things were going on of course it was just that they were not registering on my personal news alert sensor that was only kicked into life the day that John F Kennedy died.

A Life in a Year – 16th October, Children’s Television

Whenever a group of fifty somethings come together it is almost inevitable that at some point the conversation will sink towards nostalgia and this in turn will at some point get around to the subject of children’s TV.

In the 1960s there wasn’t nearly as much television broadcasting time provided for kids and it was restricted to ‘Watch With Mother’, which was shown at lunch time and was aimed at the pre-school audience and then for school children there was ‘Children’s Hour’ at five o’clock or thereabouts (I say thereabouts because sometimes BBC and ITV altered the scheduling to achieve viewing numbers advantage).  This gave us enough time to walk home from school (yes, walk – shock horror), get changed and get the TV set warmed up!

Everyone remembers ‘Blue Peter’, which was transmitted twice a week on Monday and Thursday.  It was first aired on 16th October 1958 and the first two presenters were Christopher (and now for something completely different) Trace, an actor and Leila Williams, winner of Miss Great Britain in 1957.  In the 1960s of course the most memorable presenters were Valerie (here’s one I made earlier) Singleton and John (Get down Shep) Noakes.

In response to the success of Blue Peter, TV weighed in with ‘Magpie’ which had a similar format but was less bourgeois and a bit grittier.  I preferred Blue Peter but had to watch Magpie because the presenter Susan Stranks would often appear in tight tops and without a bra!

I regret my selfishness now but one programme that I didn’t care for was ‘Vision On’ which I think was shown on a Tuesday and was designed for deaf children; selfish, because this specialist programme accounted for only 10% or so of a week’s children’s television output.  I didn’t watch it because it didn’t feel as though it was for anyone but deaf children and that seems absurd now.

There were cartoons in ‘The Huckleberry Hound Show’, ‘Tom and Jerry’, ‘Deputy Dawg’ and ‘Wacky Races’; the puppet shows ‘Supercar’, ‘Fireball XL5’, ‘Stingray’ and ‘Thunderbirds; and programmes with smart alec animals like ‘Lassie’, ‘Flipper’ and ‘Skippy the Bush Kangaroo’.

There were two animal programmes that I liked, ‘Zoo Time’ with Desmond Morris which was designed to be almost completely informative and ‘Animal Magic’ which was informative and entertaining and brought a bit of humour to the zoo.  I think on balance I preferred ‘Animal Magic’ which was first broadcast in 1962 and ran for 21 years.  The presenter was the avuncular Johnny Morris. His charismatic style and genuine fondness for animals made the show an instant success as the show combined jovial voiceovers applied to various animals from Bristol Zoo with some basic educational features.

Sometimes the Television Companies showed programmes from the continent and two of my favourites were the French film ‘Robinson Crusoe’ with its distinctive and haunting theme tune and filmed on the island of Gran Canaria by the way, and ‘The Singing Ringing Tree’ which was part of the ‘Tales From Europe’ series. 

‘The Singing Ringing Tree’ (was a children’s film made in East Germany in 1957 and shown in the form of a television series by the BBC. It was a story in the style of the Brothers Grimm and although it fascinated me, with its beautiful princess, talking animals, a giant fish flapping in a rapidly drying river, a beautiful white horse, a nasty dwarf, a bear in a cave, a girl in rags and an odd little tree with bells on it.  It was supposed to be a lovely old fashioned fairy tale of good triumphing over evil but I was never really able to get to the bottom of it.  It was dark, weird and spooky and I still wonder why the BBC thought that it was suitable for daytime children’s television.  Along with ‘Doctor Who’ it is the only programme that I can remember watching from behind the safety of the sofa! The comedian Paul Whitehouse once said, “The Singing Ringing Tree used to make me pee my pants when I was a kid” and he later made a special version for the ‘Fast Show’.

“It’s Friday, it’s five o’clock. . . It’s Crackerjack!”

This was the last children’s show of the week (excluding weekends) and ‘Crackerjack’ was a sort of kid’s version of a variety show.  The shows were filmed in front of a live audience at the BBC Television Theatre and were quite manic. The format of the programme included competitive games for teams of children, a music spot, a comedy double act, and a finale in which the cast performed a short comic play, adapting popular songs of the day and incorporating them into the action. One of the most memorable games was a quiz called ‘Double or Drop’, where each contestant was given a prize to hold for each question answer correctly, but given a cabbage if they answer incorrectly. They are out of the game if they drop any of the items they are holding or receive a third cabbage. ‘’Crackerjack’ was always one of my favourites.

Children’s TV ended at around six o’clock and this was the time for the ten minute news bulletin.  Dad would be home from work by now, Mum would be putting the finishing touched to afternoon tea and we would be sent to our rooms to play so that the grown-ups could watch the TV in peace, ,soak up the day’s news and then watch ‘Crossroads’.

A Life in a Year – 29th May, Death of a President and the Birth of a Legend

John Fitzgerald Kennedy was born on May 29^th 1917, in 1961 he became the 35^th President of the United States and two years later on22nd November 1963 he was assassinated in Dallas, Texas.

They say that everyone remembers where they were the day that John F Kennedy was shot and I can confirm that my very first consciousness of world news events was my news awareness watershed.

It was early evening, I was at home, mum and dad were round at a neighbour’s house, and I was watching the television.  It was a Friday night so I had probably been watching Crackerjack on the BBC with Aemonn Andrews.  Crackerjack finished at a quarter to six and after that came the news programmes which held no particular interest for me and in any case it was a little too early for news of the shooting to be breaking in England.

Kennedy was shot at half past twelve Dallas time, which was half past six in the United Kingdom.  On BBC television, the six o’clock News finished at ten past six.  It had been a quiet day; there had been the results of the Dundee West by-election, the announcement of the architect appointed to design the new National Theatre and the departure from the United Kingdom of the new Miss World, Carol Crawford, who was returning to Jamaica.  News bulletins were different in the early 1960s and ten minutes was generally considered more than enough to report the events of a very ordinary sort of day in 1963.  It was not until 1967 that the half hour evening bulletin ‘News at Ten’ was introduced and even then some television big-wigs were sceptical.

At seven o’clock I would probably have been watching the game show ‘Take Your Pick’ with Michael Miles but ten minutes into the show, it was interrupted for ITN’s first ever newsflash.  Kennedy had been shot.  On the BBC, ‘Points of View’, presented by Robert Robinson, was interrupted at approximately the same time and having nothing to watch of any particular interest to me I turned the television off and probably looked for some sort of mischief appropriate for a nine year old boy left at home alone like circumnavigating the living room using only the furniture and without stepping on the floor, which was always one of my favourites.

Soon after this mum and dad returned home in a bit of a fluster and I didn’t know what could be the matter.  Dad demanded to know why I had turned off the television which was a bit confusing because he didn’t really like us having it on all that much and would always turn it off the minute he thought we weren’t giving it our full attention.

After the first BBC newsflash, ‘Tonight’ came on, but it was ended early when at half past seven the programme was interrupted with the updated news that Kennedy had been shot in the head and that his condition was critical.  A few seconds later a phone rang, the newsreader took the call in front of the viewers with an appropriately solemn face and finally said “we regret to announce that President Kennedy is dead.”

After that the BBC didn’t really have a clue what to do next and what viewers got was the television continuity screen, a revolving globe, for twenty minutes or so that was punctuated by three brief bulletins read by the newsreader.  My parent’s reaction to the news took me by surprise and the event was a significant moment in my young life because subsequently I was always aware of the news after that.  This was a transitional moment when I left the age of innocence behind.

The death of Kennedy was an important event in news coverage because the World was receiving the news for the first time as it was happening.  Almost a hundred years earlier, in April 1865, Abraham Lincoln was the first United States President to be assassinated and that news would have taken weeks to reach the United Kingdom because the first successful transatlantic telephone cable wasn’t completed until July 1866.

Receiving transatlantic news in 1963 was still somewhat difficult however and Telstar, launched in 1962 was undergoing complicated repairs at the time and not transmitting so eventually the television stations reverted to their scheduled programming and the BBC continued with Harry Worth and Dr Finlay’s Casebook and the ITV showed an episode of Emergency Ward 10, which was a sort of 1960’s Casualty.

Considering the matter of news awareness has made me think about all of the newsworthy events that occurred during that first few years of my life when I was sublimely oblivious to what was happening in the World.  Lots of momentous things were going on of course it was just that they were not registering on my personal news alert sensor that was only kicked into life the day that John F Kennedy died.

The Assassination of JFK and the Age of Innocence

The first few years of our lives are truly the age of innocence when we have a glorious lack of awareness of the external national and global issues that are going on all around us and shaping the world and the environment to which we will one day grow up into.  For me the end of the world was the bottom of the back garden, the end of the street or the physical boundaries of play imposed by my parents.  I was blissfully unaware of what was going on outside of those boundaries and parents and schoolteachers clearly didn’t think it was necessary for me or others to have knowledge of current affairs.  There was no John Craven’s Newsround, well not until 1972, not even very much television, and no way of knowing what was going on and no real need to find out.

They say that everyone remembers where they were the day that John F Kennedy was shot and I can confirm that my very first consciousness of world news events was November 22^nd 1963, the day the President of the USA was assassinated in Dallas in Texas and even then the news itself didn’t particularly register as important but rather it was the reaction of my parents that proved to be my news awareness watershed.

It was early evening, I was at home, mum and dad were round at a neighbour’s house, and I was watching the television.  It was a Friday night so I had probably been watching Crackerjack on the BBC with Aemonn Andrews.  Crackerjack finished at a quarter to six and after that came the news programmes which held no particular interest for me and anyway it was a little too early for news of the shooting to be breaking in England.  Kennedy was shot at half past twelve Dallas time, half past six in England.  On BBC television, the six o’clock News finished at ten past six.  It had been a quiet day; there had been the results of the Dundee West by-election, the announcement of the architect appointed to design the new National Theatre and the departure from the United Kingdom of the new Miss World, Carol Crawford, who was returning to Jamaica.  Ten minutes was more than enough to report the events of a very ordinary sort of day in 1963.

At seven o’clock I would probably have been watching the game show ‘Take Your Pick’ with Michael Miles but ten minutes in, it was interrupted for ITN’s first ever newsflash.  Kennedy had been shot.  On the BBC, ‘Points of View’, presented by Robert Robinson, was interrupted at approximately the same time and having nothing to watch of any particular interest to me I turned the television off and probably looked for some sort of mischief appropriate for a nine year old boy left at home alone.

Soon after this mum and dad returned home in a bit of a fluster and I didn’t know what could be the matter.  Dad demanded to know why I had turned off the television which was a bit confusing because he didn’t really like us having it on all that much and would always turn it off the minute he thought we weren’t watching it.  He became a bit agitated as he turned the set back on and waited for it to flicker into life.  This was quite a long process in the 1960s because TVs had an antiquated system of valves, wires and resisters instead of today’s micro chips and these took some time to ‘warm up’, after a minute or so you would get sound and then after another minute or so (if you were lucky) a grainy black and white picture with flickering horizontal lines would slowly start to appear.  Most television sets needed about fifteen minutes to warm up, I seem to remember.

TV sets were always breaking down as well, half way through a programme there would be a ‘PING’ and the picture would disappear into a bright white spot in the middle of the screen like a star falling into a black hole and that was it until the television repair man responded to an emergency call to come by and fix it by replacing the broken tube in the back, which was a bit like replacing a broken light bulb.

After the first BBC newsflash, ‘Tonight’ came on, but it was ended early when at half past seven the programme was interrupted with the news that Kennedy had been shot in the head and his condition was critical.  A few seconds later a phone rang, the newsreader took the call in front of the viewers and finally said ‘we regret to announce that President Kennedy is dead.’

After that the BBC didn’t really have a clue what to do next and what viewers got was the BBC television continuity screen, a revolving globe, for twenty minutes or so that was punctuated by three brief bulletins read by the newsreader.  My parent’s reaction to the news took me by surprise and the event was a significant moment in my young life because subsequently I was always aware of the news after that.  This was a transitional moment when I left the age of innocence behind.

Because getting transatlantic news in 1963 was still somewhat difficult (Telstar, launched in 1962 was undergoing complicated repairs and not transmitting) eventually the TV stations reverted to their scheduled programming and the BBC continued with Harry Worth and Dr Finlay’s Casebook and the ITV showed an episode of Emergency Ward 10, which was a sort of 1960’s Casualty!

It’s an interesting fact that on the following day the BBC broadcast the first ever episode of Doctor Who.  I think at the time I found that a lot more interesting than Kennedy’s assassination.

Considering the matter of news awareness has made me think about all of the newsworthy events that occurred during that first ten years of mortal existence when I was sublimely oblivious to what was happening in the world.  Lots of momentous things were going on of course it was just that they were not registering on my personal news alert sensor that was only kicked into life the day that John F Kennedy died.

So what had been going on, what events had been taking place that would shape and have an influence on the rest of my life?  I have been giving it some thought …