It all started with Swap Shop

ON the whole the telly was seriously sh*te over the Christmas break but I did enjoy 'It all started with Swap Shop' which was on over the last couple of days a programme which we watched religiously in our house every Saturday in the 1970s.



Swap Shop is one of the programmes which gets a mention when people talk about their favourite childhood shows like Top of the Pops on a Thursday night, or Bagpuss or whatever.

I have made the mistake of talking to friends from down the country about Swap Shop only to get this puritanical mantra 'we only had RTE in our house'. Oohhh sorry.

Well in our house we did have BBC and ITV and in the early 1980s we got an RTE aerial, I think by that stage I had either stopped watching Swap Shop or it had finished.

My Daddy was the double of Swap Shop presenter Noel Edmonds and people would tell him that all the time. I remember a neighbour saying to me when I was about seven that I was very lucky to have Noel Edmonds for a Daddy and I remember thinking 'what an eejit'.



Given the splurge of kid's television, much of which is quality, it is mad to think there was a time when kids were not catered for in the way they are now.

I remember Saturday mornings (just about) before Swap Shop when the vast majority of kid's programming involved half hour dramas from Eastern Europe which were badly dubbed and involved kids going around solving mysteries and the like. Then there were the old favourites like Champion the Wonder horse or The Flashing Blade.





Course it was RTE that broadcast the magical HRPufNStuff.



So for all of you who liked Swap Shop too here are some outtakes. In fairness they aren't that hilarious, but sure.



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Talking pictures

I SAID I would be a better blogger in a previous post and I have sat here going 'hmm maybe I could write about...' 'or maybe I could write about...' - nothing has gone beyond the first sentence. Just as I was about to sign off I thought I might explain the photo I use as my icon. So here goes.



I love this picture, obviously which is why I use it (it is cropped a little). It invokes so much for me. I remember the dress I was wearing, the colours and patterns on it, I also remember I had many outfits like that. I remember the day the picture were taken, I remember the car. Does it sound ridiculous but I can see me in the capture of the child in the picture despite the fact I am four or five years old when the pic was taken. I also love the way my shoes look like they are on the wrong feet, you can't beat the 1970s with a big stick.

It was the second picture in a series of two showing me with one of my brothers in front of the car. The first picture is a typical family kid's portrait of the two of us grinning wearing mad 1970s outfits standing in front of a swanky car and the second is the one I have used to represent me in the blogosphere.

I have somehow mislaid the pics thought I know they are in this flat somewhere and I want to have them framed together - they'll look great.

The pix were taken in the lower Falls in Belfast on Cyprus Street outside my grandparent's house with St Peter's primary school in the background where my Daddy and his siblings went to school. I often remember staying overnight there and not being able to sleep because of the music coming from the teen disco they would run at weekends during the 1970s.

That street, Cyprus Street, where Gerry Conlon one of the Guildford 4 also grew up, is now gone, along with St Peter's School and most of the streets that made up the lower Falls Road.

The streetscape, and much more, of the lower Falls began to change in the 1980s; all the terrace houses built for the mill workers are mostly gone except in small pockets here and there.


Taken during the mid 1990s at Clonard, lower Falls when whole rows of terrace housing was levelled to make way for new housing

This next pic is for Tawdrey and shows another loss - the Glen Road cottages.


Knocked down in the mid 1990s

While things have certainly been gained, a lot has been lost, but sure isn't that change.

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