For forty years, I have had very sketchy flashbacks to the early recollections of my life in the 1960s. These memories are  predominantly from specific episodes of TV shows in the late 1960s such as The Avengers, Star Trek, Mission Impossible, Department S, The Saint and The Champions.

Thanks to Wikipedia, I am now able to pinpoint times and dates of one or two of these TV programmes. As a 5 and 6 year old, I was obsessed with the suave, dapper and sartorially elegant John Steed and the sexy and athletic Emma Rigg in The Avengers and their smouldering sexual chemistry. As an adult I can totally understand why, as the cult TV show was totally surreal – a wacky, off the wall world that appeals to kids!! My earliest recollection of an episode of The Avengers was one where there was a car rally and treasure hunt, involving sabotage of competitors’ chances of winning through changing directions of signs and puncturing of tyres by scattering blocks of wood with nails in them across the road. Ultimately the “treasure” turned up in a racing car simulator.

I held this dim and distant memory of this Avengers episode for decades. Now thanks to a combination of DVD repeats and Wikipedia, I can pinpoint the date this episode “Dead Man’s Treasure” was broadcast on ITV. It was transmitted on the 21st October 1967, which was literally a couple of weeks after my younger brother was brought home from the maternity ward. This was my first vivid memory in life – peering over the side of the carry cot and remarking on how small his ears were!!

Another episode of a particular favourite TV show Mission Impossible, that has remained with me was where the characters had to steal some gold bullion from a vault and ingeniously did this by melting it and draining it through a hole in the floor of the vault, and re-casting it back into ingots. They drilled up from a cave below into the vault where the gold was being held and used a complicated device to heat the vault melting the gold and draining it through the floor, where they re-moulded it back into ingots. After all the gold is sucked from the vault, the contraption seals the hole and repaints the floor, covering all traces of the theft. Once again, thanks to Wikipedia, I now know I watched this episode “The Mercenaries” on 27th October 1968. It’s weird how you can remember something in such detail, from so long ago!!

Similarly I’ve always associated Scooby Doo with the first traumatic day at my Prep School, and sure enough according to Wikipedia, the first episode of Scooby Doo was broadcast on the 13th September 1969, which was the week I started at my new school!! I now know that the first episode of Land of the Giants that I saw, “Ghost Town”, was infact a year earlier on 29th September 1968 – it has always stuck in my mind where the principal characters were trapped in a giant’s model town.

Equally I have early recollections of pop music, but not from the radio because my parents were Radio 4 listeners. However they did buy pop singles and somewhat incongruously had a copy of the Beatles’ “Revolver” album. As a result, my earliest recall of a pop song was “Yellow Submarine” – apparently I was constantly badgering my parents to play it so I could sing  a long to it!! Although there were infinitely better tracks on the 1966 “Revolver” album, that was the track that caught and fired the imagination of the four year old, Simon Sterland. I also distinctly remember three years later in 1969 dancing around my Mum in the kitchen, singing Marmalade’s “Ob-La-Di-Ob-La-Da”, desperately trying to provoke a reaction from her, thinking I was swearing, albeit legitimately because it was a song!! You’ve got to remember that in the 1960s the worst Anglo Saxon expletive people used was “bloody”…….the “F” word was not invented until 1970!!

Which were your favourite TV shows and songs from your childhood in the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s? Let us know in the Reply Box below.

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