Watching QI yesterday with my son, one of the panel was introduced as having been born ‘before there was television.’ I was born before there was television too… OK, television existed before I was born, but there really was no television – generally available – until I was, what, 5 or 6? The first time I aw a TV, and watched it, was HM’s coronation in 1953. We went across the road – St Andrews’ Road in Deal – to a neighbour’s house, along with 20, maybe, other neighbours to crowd into their tiny ‘front room,’ around a huge cabinet with a tiny screen, all of us dressed in our Sunday Best for the occasion, men in suits and ties and ladies in posh frocks.
One of my earliest memories is of waiting at a tram stop in Forest Gate in London when I was two +/-. There was what I now know to be a bombsite behind the stop which had become water-filled where there were always what I called ducks, which were probably seagulls, but to me, it wasn’t a bombsite, it was a magic place 🙂
I’d be interested to know what other charioteers earliest memories are?
Boadicea's Chariot 
I never saw TV until I was 18 at University! My father made us live without a television, telephone or car in the middle of nowhere. He did this quite deliberately so they could not get hold of him at the height of the Cold War. When they wanted him they sent a police car to collect him and either drove him to London or delivered him to the railway station according to the magnitude of the ‘Flap’. It was such a bother to get him they tried anybody else first. I’ve always reckoned that this accounts for my somewhat individualistic and totally self sufficient attitudes and opinions. (Sometimes to my own detriment!)
Earliest memory- My brother used to shut me in a small cupboard regularly, he hated me because I was clever and he wasn’t and the parents stupidly rammed it down his throat. So he took it out on me for roughly 15 years. Developed a great sense of phlegmatic self preservation, I never let him know that it troubled me, never have to this day, wouldn’t give him the satisfaction or any subsequent arseholes that thought they could get away with anything. To this day I am claustrophobic and never close doors in my home. One of the biggest reasons I hate travelling, trapped in an aerial cigar tube! I have to have a couple of brandies before I can even get on the thing. I have to have a good book and never look out of the window.
I like your magical bombsite, I have always envied those that can see magic in the prosaic. Not part of my nature. I suppose I create similar with gardening, especially my jungle winter greenhouses.
Note to self- must look for Tarzan!
I have to admit to an annual act of self amusing spite towards said brother. He never sends me a Christmas card so every year I purchase a box of ultra religious Christmas cards full of Christian forgiving sentiments and send him one as if it is a normal relationship. I even write a polite little personal letter I gather from my sister that this annoys him enormously and has said that he wishes I would stop. (Certainly not, far too much fun and worth every penny for 50 years of entertainment!)
More ways of skinning a cat than beating it to death with a brick!
Evenin’ Bravo. Surprisingly, it was standing up in my cot first thing in the morning and shaking the wooden bars while howling for food. I must have been only about one year old and must have driven my parents to distraction. A year or so later it was listening on the wireless to ‘Listen with Mother’ with mother.
The first telly was a box of polished wood veneer with a 12″ screen aided by a huge magnifying glass that hung over the screen on a pair of braces looped at the back of the set under the bulge of the tube. Andy Pandy or The Woodentops anyone? By the way, Muffin the Mule is still an offence.
OZ
Television… The fall of the Berlin Wall.
My life was a complete blank until I was about four, I remember my kid brother (then 2) was sick and my older sister (then 6) told me he was going to die, I’m still waiting. My life was then again a complete blank until I was about five when I remember starting at infants school.
When I left home to go to university (1963) my parents had not yet acquired a television, but my dad had a pretty good library, I still have his complete Shakespeare and Dickens.
Turning four; my sister and I played with new shiny combs and dolls. We didn’t watch much telly, since my dad had to fiddle with a coat hanger on the stairs to get a picture, but I do remember being ill, lying on the sofa and watching a cartoon about an orange egg in a tree.
Hi Bravo, Fry’s QI does have its moments.
The purchasing of televisions does have some great memories for me. In 1978, just before the Argentina football (stuff your rugger 🙂 ) World Cup, we got our first colour telly. Ya-hey. Amazing to watch the different coloured strips as against what we previously watched. Look how blue that blue is. Wow, that’s what you call red. This was cutting edge technology in its day. Stuff FEEG’s HD 🙂
As for my earliest memory, I’ll need to get back to you on that one. Half the time I can’t remember what I did last week.
I remember a street party which I now know was for VJ Day in August 1945, when I was 2.5 years of age. Otherwise nothing comes to mind until age 4 – cracking my shin on a kerb playing football, a near miss with a car while chasing the ball, being shown my new-born brother though a french window during the ’47 white winter.
First tv memory? Yes, Oz, it was Muffin on Grandpa’s tiny telly.
My earliest memories of which I can be confident about are as a two year old, enjoying the winter sun in Rhodesia. My earliest TV memory is a program called Sergeant Preston. It involved a Canadian Mountie and his dog King and horse Rex. We did not have TV, my parents disapproved of it, so we watched at our neighbours from time to time. I must have been about 5 or 6. I remember my father asking me what colour it was,clearly dismissive of the black and white technology. he and his friend laughed heartily at my response that it was ‘dark white’.
Despite our not having a TV of our own and only being allowed to watch an hour a week at our friends, I can recall the names and theme tunes and/or catch phrases of hundreds of shows. (Ok, hundreds is an exaggeration, but many, many shows.) I cant help feeling that children’s TV was a whole lot better in those days.
The Buccaneers (Let’s go a roving)
Cisco Kid (Ah Pancho, ah Cisco)
Robin Hood (starring Richard Green who was in the army with my Dad)
Ivanhoe
Richard The Lion Heart
The Forest Rangers
The Terrible Ten (Oz)
Fury (Oz)
My Friend Flicker
National Velvet
Two Gun Tex of Texas/Four Feather Falls
Super Car
Gumby
Torchy
Thunderbirds
Captain Scarlet
Roy Rogers
Lone Ranger
Sir Francis Drake
Bronco
Laramie
The Big Valley
Bonanza
77 Sunset Strip
Maverick
Rawhide
Twizzle
Watch Mr Wizard (We used to giggle at his American terminology. ‘Paper sacks and glass toobs’)
etc
Sipu, who says modern kids are over-exposed to screens? 🙂
Bravo, like you I remember watching the Coronation on a tiny TV screen in a neighbour’s house, with all the best china out and the seat of honour for my grandmother, the oldest person present.
One early memory is of leaving my mother shopping in Dumfries and walking home on my own aged about three. I remember crossing a busy street with a group of people, none of whom seemed bothered about me. When I got home, grandmother grabbed me by the hand and raced out of the house in apron and slippers to try to find my frantic mother. No idea why I did it.
I have a very clear memory of sitting on grass looking at a lake with boats. My mother told me that was somewhere they took me before I was two – we moved shortly after that.
Memories from four years of age are very clear- boarded up bomb sites where I lived at the back of the Oval Cricket ground and where no trees grew and the fun of of crunching through autumn leaves walking from Shortlands station in Kent to my boarding school. That was ‘real’ country to me. I left that school when I was six… There are so many memories from that time that I could almost write a book!
We had a television long before the Coronation – and that really was a small screen. I think it was 9 inches. The second TV, bought especially for the Coronation was actually quite big!
Hi Janus, we really did not have TV as children and only got to watch a couple of hours a week. I just happen to remember the shows that I saw during the 60s. I suppose they add up over 10 years.When we were children, my mother read to us most evenings during the term. We were taught at home until the age of 10, after which we went to boarding school.
Some of the books she read were:
Charles Dickens
G A Henty
Captain Marryat
R D Blackmoore
R L Stevenson
Lewis Carrol
R M Ballantyne
Fritz Muhlenweg
J R R Tolkein
Frances Burnett
John Masefield
Wilkie Collins
Philippa Pearce
John Buchan
Jack London
Rider Haggard
Ernest Thompson Seton
She was also an excellent story teller.
During the holidays we played games such as Whist, Bridge, Racing Demon, Canasta, Mahjong, Chess, Charades, etc.
My first memory was being carried down the steps to my Grandfather’s workshop in the basement, by my Grandmother. My mother’s younger brother, my uncle who still lived at home, was using a plane. My earliest TV memory was, like many others, the Coronation, and TR, I watched England thrashing New Zealand at Twickenham (Men and women) .in glorious HD. So much better when you can see all the blood and bruises 🙂
Sipu, I can remember the theme tunes to many of those shows 🙂 We all also read the classics as have my children, and I have just bought my grandchildren a set which contains many of the books in your list. Another seminal moment for me was Peter Jackson’s try against Australia one wet afternoon in 1958 to win a Test match against Australia. I had just started secondary school, at Kirkham Grammar school in Lancashire and was just being introduced to Rugby. This inspired my lifelong love of the game. (The first of the three.)
I also remember the other two. I met Andy Hancock’s daughter in Hong Kong in 1992, just before I left the Army. She was married to a soldier who was a guest in our Company Bar – a grizzled, hairy-arsed WO1 reduced to simpering by a bright young thing because of who her old man was and the memory of another wet and miserable afternoon in 1965 🙂
Bravo, never a player but I was brought up with Coventry ‘rugger’ as it was known. Peter Jackson was a phenomenon in the ’50s, as was David Duckham in the ’60s/’70s. My grammar school ‘produced’ DD and later Peter Preece and Peter Rossborough. Cov also provided the England front row for a while with Judd, Maclean and Godwin, in the amateur days when training was topped up in the club bar. I sometimes wonder which of the above would thrive in today’s game – including Richard Sharp.