The Liver Birds: A 70s Conundrum

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Everyone who grew in the UK in the 70s wants to remember Twiglets, Abba and Hovis Commercials. However, despite its surprisingly ground-breaking social commentary, no one really wants to remember The Liver Birds. Set in Liverpool, The Liver Birds (pronounced "Lie-veh"), which is what all Liverpudlian girls were known as back the day, was a sitcom, set almost entirely indoors in a flat shared by two young women who not only worked, but dated, fought with their parents, and struggled to stay afloat in what was ostensibly still a neanderthal man's world. While not exactly Laverne and Shirley, the show began in 1969 and ran until 1979, with an unsuccessful revival in 1996.

It began with Dawn (Pauline Collins) and Beryl (Polly James) and ran for 5 episodes, but came back in 1970 with Sandra (Nerys Hughes) taking over for Dawn. The Sandra and Beryl days were definitely the heyday for The Liver Birds (and it's Sandra and Beryl you can see in the clip above), though I'm more familiar with later series when Carol, played by Elizabeth Estensen, took over the flat from Beryl.

As a childhood memory, The Liver Birds has all but gone. Nothing more than a group of high-pitched annoying voices and that theme song, penned by Paul McCartney's brother, that just burrows into your brain and eats away you from the inside like something from a bad Star Trek episode. Prior to starting this blog, I'd have said the best thing to come out of The Liver Birds was the Half-Man, Half Biscuit song, I Hate Nerys Hughes.

Looking back on it properly, now, though, the show was actually quite revolutionary. Showing life outside of London, with two independent women (notice in this clip Beryl is only 19 years old) negotiating life on their own in a way women hadn't really done since World War 2. They find their own way though the world of work, romance and family strife with a sense of grit and determination. They aren't tarts, or even really "Dolly Birds", though they have been described that way in many of the other entries I've seen. They paved the way for the women of the 80s and onwards, showing that men weren't necessary for survival. In fact, many of the men who appear in the show are lazy, useless, or socially awkward, especially Carol's brother, who became a show regular in later years and was obsessed with his pet rabbits.

So, try to put aside the horrible sets and lighting, and the theme tune, and some interesting opinions on Chinese food, and let the upbeat quirkiness of The Liver Birds transport you back to a time when no one would look twice at a multi-colored crotchet gilet, or an overabundance of orange floral wallpaper.

Blagged from Slashfilm: Steve Oedekerk to Write Stretch Armstrong Movie | /Film

Worst Idea Ever: Steve Oedekerk to Write Stretch Armstrong Movie | /Film




Every once in a while a new product comes along that makes you wonder, what do they expect me to do with that? Stretch Armstrong was such a product. You could pull at him every which way but loose, and his rubbery memory plastic body would slowly morph back into shape. But seriously, what kind of toy is that? It's basically a humanoid rubber band! It didn't even stick to anything!

Well, thanks to a deal with Hasbro, that threatens to bring us a Ridley Scott produced Monopoly movie, Universal has hired the writer of Bruce and Evan Almighty to bring us a Stretch Armstrong movie. Now, unlike the writer in the blog I'm lifting all this information from, I'm not going to be too dismissive about this premise. It surely can't be any worse than Paul Blart: Mall Cop, or The Pink Panther 2. And hey, maybe the toy itself will make a comeback, and a new generation will discover how utterly useless Mr Armstrong really is...

Weekly WTF

Believe it or not, this actually the opening 8 minutes to a 1975 children's TV show from the UK called Sky. We've spoken many times before about how children's TV executives back then were definitely dropping acid, but this one looks like the result of a seriously bad trip. You know the ones... Where demons appear in front of you, naked and snarling, and although their heads are upright, their bodies, instead of standing on the floor, disappear upwards into the clouds, which are crimson, and rain blood and Hersheys chocolate syrup down on you, and all you can do to make them leave is to climb a tree and cry and cry and cry.

Ahem. So, yes. Sky. He's a mostly naked albino alien child and he's hiding in the leaves in a forest near you. The obvious thing to do would be to take him into your house and make him your friend, yes?

10 Great 70s Games

Usual Made in the 70s rules apply here, folks. This is not a Top Ten List, but a generic list of fun things that affected our collective childhoods. There's plenty more where this came from, and we'd love to hear from you about toys you wish were on this list.

 

 10. Downfall

 

 

Ah... Downfall... I have 5 red discs, you have five yellow discs, and I must, by turning the cogs on my side of the wall alone, move all of mine down to the tray at the bottom before you do. But here's the catch, see! Both sides have the same cogs, but the little slots that the discs fit into are in different places, so you never know if by lining up your slots from one cog to another, you're actually helping the other player! Genius!

 

Well, maybe not genius, but it was pretty good solid fun. You could even make it even more challenging. Each disc was numbered 1 through 5, try to bring your discs down to the tray in order, and if you failed, you'd have to place your out of order pieces back in the hopper again. A task so Herculean in difficulty, you'd need the strategic mind of Anatoly Karpov to achieve it.

 

9. Master Mind 

 

 

Speaking of games of genius. I was given this at the age of 6. To this day, I have no frigging idea what the game was supposed to be. You had these colored pegs, and they had some colored pegs, and they had to guess your code based on the colored pegs you have or the other way around, and then if you got it wrong you could place either a black thin peg next to that row or a white one and... I think I just turned it into a complicated cribbage board. No wonder I'm still crap at maths. Wikipedia has the rules all written out, but I still can't get my mind around the damn thing. Anyway, on to simpler things for simpler minds...

 

8. Tin Can Alley 

 

 

Yee-haw! That's better! This one was advertised by real TV cowboy Chuck Connors. You got a plastic fence top painted to look like wood. On top of that fence you placed five fake Dr. Pepper cans, painted to look like real Dr. Pepper cans. Then you got a cowboy rifle that did that snik-snak! thing with the lever-action, which was really cool, because that's what they carried in Bonanza and High Chapparal re-runs, and you were good to go! The only thing it didn't have were bullets.

 

I guess that was the beginning of the end for fun toys, really, as someone thought it would be cool to replace a real BB gun plinking cans off a fence, with one that fired child-eye-friendly infra-red light at holes just under each can, which would then fire a spring-action lever that flicked the can off the wall. They got rid of these in the 80s, as dads across teh country got pissed off you accidentally changing the channel on the TV every time you missed.

 

 7. Crossfire

 

 

Thanks to the popularity of Tin Can Alley, Ball Bearing manufacturers were understandably quite pissed at the toy gun industry. How can they sell little metal balls to children if they won't let them buy BB guns? Enter Crossfire, a small plastic box with a cardboard base and two 'goals' in end corners. You placed a BB with tire around it in the middle, filled up a mini gun attached to the box with smaller BBs designed to exact standards of what is now today know as 'choking hazard', and shot the small ones at the big one with the tire to try to get it into the opponent's goal. The opponent, using the same technique, did the same. Imagine Air Hockey, but instead of using those paddles and your hands, you've got Uzis. A fine, fine, manic game, until all the little BBs got lost under a sofa, or your cat dies from eating the big one.

 

6. Ricochet Racers 

 

 

"What do boys like, Kowalksi?"

 

"Well, sir, boys like guns."

 

"Good, good. What else, Kowalski?"

 

"Boys like... cars, sir."

 

"So, Kowalski. Based on these two factors... What do you think should be our next line of toys for boys, Kowalski?"

 

"Uh... A gun that fires cars, sir?"

 

"More...?"

 

"A... Gun that fires glow in the dark cars across the floor, but with a minor adjustment to the safety system can be made to be fired in the air at objects such as, say, cats, sir?"

 

And that's how Ricochet Racers was born.

 

5. Rock Em Sock Em Robots

 

 

Should be filed under simple toys. Rock 'Em Sock 'Em's premise was easy. Each side had buttons and corresponding robot. You press the button, the robot punches the other robot. You hit the other robot in the right place under the chin, that robot's head pops up, you win the fight. Why did this keep us occupied for such a long time? It had no right to!

 

4. Mouse Trap 

 

 

Actually, I'm lying. This game was crap. The commercial, however, made it look like a wicked game to play. Basically, you went around the board, putting together a convoluted mouse trap in about 2 hours that took about 6 seconds to demolish itself, and 99% of the time it didn't catch the plastic mouse. Heck, it wasn't even any good at catching real mice. Heck it wasn't even any good at catching computer mice! And those didn't even move.

 

3. Buckaroo!

 

 

Buckaroo was a spring-loaded 2D plastic mule with a hair trigger, designed to flick little plastic items like ropes, pick-axes, etc., under your sofa.

 

2. TCR Total Control Racing

 

 

Unlike slot-racers like Scalextric, TCR cars could actually change lanes. It was the epitome of cool track racing. You had two cars controlled by the human players, and a third 'jam' car, which was designed to get in your way and slow you down. But, unlike Scalextric, you could actually pass the jam car if it was in your lane. And you could do bridge jumps, which was teh awesome.

 

1. Binatone TV Master 

 

 

Hey, it doesn't look like much, but it's got it where it counts, kid. Many toys claim to be the birth of console gaming, but the Binatone TV Master totally takes that title. It came with 6 games. Four of which were variations on Pong, the other two involved a light gun which looked just like a blaster from Star Wars, so you know that was getting tucked in our belts and being taken outside for playing Han Solo straight away. The great thing about it, was that plugged straight into your TV aerial socket, and the menu was on the machine itself. So you clicked a switch down to change games, and there were switches and buttons for everything else. Without this, Atari VCS, Colecovision and Intellivision would have been alien objects to our generation and we would never have mastered their strange, joysticky ways.