Life On Mars

..returns in just over a week. A great series, although I find Sam Tyler’s constant references to Bobby Charlton as a Manchester United player contrived (LoM is set in 1973, a bad year for United and the one in which Charlton retired and Denis Law left). And I just don’t believe his hero-worship of various now-dead musicians, nor in the way both Charlton and said musicians are all to be found in the same night club.

I’m just putting off the moment when I introduce today’s Youtube. This is what 1973 was really like – for Sunderland, at any rate. And it makes me think of December 31st 1979 and the way the population of the UK waited all evening for the wall to come down so that we could all flood over the border, celebrating, into the new decade. I remember the hands of Big Ben crawling up to midnight – the BBC announcer calmly saying, as if to himself, “It is now 1980”; and then the cheers rolling and echoing from house to house.

I have always had a fierce sympathy for poor John Lennon. After 1969, all he had left were the seventies. Fate can be cruel:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ESEYtwVqWV4]

1 Reply to “Life On Mars”

  1. It really does seem like a foreign country. Sunderland is it?

    Is the bloke who says, “they played like heroes” David – tonight Cat I’m going to be a Mackem – Coleman ?

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