Any Major Dude With Half A Heart

Favourite years are made of wildly different ingredients. The giddiness of falling in love or the trauma of a loved one”s death can create emotional memories so intense that a year or even an era can occupy a special place in the mind”s inventory of nostalgia. One of my very favourite years was 1972, the year I turned six, and it included a big event “” I started school “” but I recall it more fondly for how I felt: safe.

I have happy memories of watching TV shows with my mother and younger brother: Star Trek (known in Germany as Raumschiff Enterprise), the reruns of Daktari and the Australian harbour police series Riptide (known in Germany as S.O.S. Charterboat), a German show called Percy Stuart, and of course the Hitparade and Illja Richter”s Disco (“Licht aus “” womm “” Spot an”). Later that year, Channel 3 showed a few episodes of the US version of Sesame Street in the original English to test the waters “” the whole concept of edu-TV seemed to be a bit controversial at the time. I think watching Sesame Street in a language I”d not start to learn until I was ten might have spiked my interest in English. Read more…

When in the introduction for the 1970 instalment I said that I had become interested in music that year, by 1971 I was showing the first signs of the devotion to popular music which today finds expression on this blog. I attribute that to three events. Firstly, I began to catch a greater number of music programmes on TV, especially the ZDF Hitparade (about which more later) and Disco, presented by the rather absurd Illja Richter and featuring German and international acts. Secondly, for my fifth birthday in April I was presented with a portable record player (the type where the lid doubles as a speaker). Thirdly, I bought my first record. As always, inclusion of a song here does not imply my endorsement (especially not with all that Schlager dross in this lot; trust me, things will get better after 1977). Read more…